“Adam and Will are joined by Professor Steven Shaviro to discuss his work on the philosophy of science fiction, developing on themes from recent texts such as Extreme Fabulations and 2016’s Discognition out on Repeater Books. We asked Steven about the various techniques that writers such as Frank Herbert, Adrian Tchaikovsky, and China Mieville to unearth possible futures in the present; and how they extrapolate from, speculate upon, and generate fables about dominant tendencies of our political and technological situation. We also touched upon philosophies of time and narrative such as Bergson, Deleuze, Whitehead, Foucault, Marshall McLuhan, and Darko Suvin.”
Here’s an incredibly – well invaluable resource (for me as a non-professional interested in philosophy and its twists & turns) that I recently discovered. It is a collaboration of researchers from two institutions: King’s College London and Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich.
I suggest starting with the episodes on the Indian influence on Islamic and European thought as an introduction to this entire section and I will detail below why I think one should start here at the end rather than at the beginning. Even if one does not have any interests in philosophy or any prior knowledge in the Western tradition of philosophical thought – from this eps one can at least gather how stunted this reception of Indian philosophy was (and partially still is) in the West.
For good or for worse (Theofil Simenschy, M Eliade) Romanian intelligentsia has shown along the years a certain appetite for Indian philosophy, so there is a lot of various translations – even pulp and trashy ones, adapted versions and pocket versions. All this is proof of a widespread interest in extra European philosophical traditions and a diversified pop cultural exchange btw India & Romania. At the same time one should not profess any innocence in regards to this Indophilia, and regard with a certain suspicion all claims about a Romanian-Indian continuum, especially in view of the usual right-wing nativist or aryanist tendencies. That said, before 1989 and after as well, so-called anti-sectarian perspectives where banishes, a position maintained by the majority Romanian orthodox church. This is a tendency to discredit evert hing associated with Indian practices or yogic knowledge. Gurus or anything close to New Age religions is regarded as potentially harmful or condemned as ‘perversions’. Not saying there are no exceptions to the rule, yet suffice to say, nodaways in Romania (as elsewhere) – there is a thoroughly hyper-commercialized mindfulness industry catering to the needsof those afflicted by generalized burnout under capitalism. I consider quite fruitful thw para-academic come & go tracing such pop cultural influences and there’s much interest in exploring weird deviations & non orthodox practices. My bes example is Bogdan Lyphkhanu – poet friend and also a consummate collector and investigator of such spiritual Romanian- Indian (and also Spiritualist, Taoist, Tantric, Occult, including unclassifiable etc) hybrids.
For various reasons, I abstain from discussing Islamicate – Indian philosophy relations. Many Islamic authors, since the very beginning, have drawn parallels btw Sufi Islamic mystical traditions and Indian philosophical schools. Importantly, many Western impressions on Indian philosophy are much indebted to previous Persian or Arab translations (listen to this podcast).
I am ignoring this at the moment to focus on the plethora of sometimes very specialized knowledge and updates commentaries on Indian (or specifically Buddhist/Jainist sources here), sources relevant to the current debates animating much of today’s mind philosophy (mind body dualism/hard problem of consciousness, panpsychism/pancosmism, eliminativism etc).
These podcasts are definite proof that we have moved away from the various misinterpretations. A that seem in retrospect quite rudimentary, completely biased and misinformed, never able to grasp the diversity of Indian philosophical schools or engage with the conclusions of their main representatives (their historical debates, the diversity of their examples, multiplicity of perspectives, a rich and evolving conceptual vocabulary and most of all their sheer diversity). The Western reception is biased from the beginning. No matter where it hails from, we get the sense we’re being served an impoverished and caricatural version of it. Beyond the mind philosophy relevance discussed above – there is also a new interest for the idealist resources of Indian philosophy as today’s idealist philosophy gathers pace or even with those attempts to seek out a bridge between the continental and the analytic Western philosophy. There are countless other aspects including those offering a new appreciation of Indian epistemology (in the Buddhist philosophy) and so on.
With the possible exception of Gottfried W. Leibniz, almost all mentioned in this podcast (Hume, Hegel, Schopenhauer, etc) show a combination of either uncritical admiration or outright disdain for Indian philosophy (particularly its cosmology or cosmogony as in the example with the elephant sitting on top of the turtle). If they were very attentive in their analysis of ultimate questions about experience, perception, truth and limits of knowledge, or avidly debating current scientific worldviews, western philosophers were less careful about other traditions, throwing around careless generalizations. Sadly they almos constantly ignore actually existing ‘Indian philosophy’, and make their statements based on hearsay or by taking Indian philosophy as a unified stock, a single corpus, a monolithic non differentiated block. One should first recognize if possible these initial widespread positions held by practitioners of Western philosophy, so that one can appreciate its further refinement or even complete revision of what we thought we knew about Indian philosophy.
That being said – this is just just an entry point, so pls consider listening the whole section from 43 Buddhist and Jains (or earlier) to 62 Kit Patrick. Each eps has short and up-to-date Bibliography on the subjects being discussed for those interested.
there is actually slime mold linking, growing and tracing the title of this book
I think Steven Shaviro should be something like one of the patron saints of timespacewarps and I will briefly state why here. Happy to be able to introduce him together with Darko Suvin over here.
I think, of all the various cultural theorists, whatever-hip-thinkers or walking talking encyclopedic humans out there – he is one of our most important purveyors relating to lived time, of how feeling relates to time, and is almost a creature (entity – to put in ANW terms) of time flow. He is a weird processualist, a tireless sci-fi enthusiast/reviewer and proponent of his own brand of speculative realism, a supporter of relational-panpsychist (or pan-experientalism), a critic and theoretician of music videos and post-cinematic affect and one of the most intellectually generous people I know of on the whole of Internet (most of his stuff is found for free online under digital form or on his blog). He interests go far afield, from the extremity of Maurice Blanchot, Kathy Acker, William Burroughs to third kind philosophical encounters btw Deleuze, Kant and Whitehead. He might be (in his own words) a “misanthrope”, “highly dissociative”, an unapologetic “kitsch Marxist”, living in ‘Motor City’ Detroit and teaching at Wayne State University, yet he is to be found on both E-flux discussing Accelerationist Aesthetics: Necessary Inefficiency in Times of Real Subsumption (2013) or Extrapolation, fabulation and speculation (as of October 2021) at Russian Moscow online courses. His numerous books have been instrumental imho in moving continental philosophy away from postmodernist/linguistic turn or deconstruction/ text-centered hermeneutic models towards the ontological or the very nature of reality, thus allowing for a widening reception of the so-called ‘speculative turn’. His huge and always nourishing reading list is open for everyone.
Hard to write a review on this one – because it is such a favorite. While I have just started reading his new 2021 Extreme Fabulations: Science Fictions of Life I realised I had to pay my due to this one. Here are a number of things that might make Discognition unavoidable reading for our times. Of course, you could just read Steven Shaviro’s short dense book as a direct shortcut to key ‘thought experiments’ in mind philosophy (hard problem of consciousness, Mary’s room or the knowledge argument, cognitive eliminativism etc) and the various philosophical responses to them (Churchland, Nagel, Churchland, Dennett, Brandom, Brembs, etc.) as well as Shaviro’s own. If you are interested in the original volume with a lot of the original essays that he uses as source materials feel free to check There’s Something about Mary: Essays on Phenomenal Consciousness and Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument. What makes Discognition completely different from most cognitive science & countless mind philosophy books is that he will make us enjoy mind philosophy as an exercise in science fiction (or paraliterature as Samuel “Chip” Delany calls it). And if we manage that, we will rather sooner (than later) realize that mind philosophers can hardly keep up with speculative fiction’s proclivity and SF’s daring adventures in matters of cognition, consciousness, affect, physicalism, subjectivity, reason, responsiveness, sentience etc. in imaginatively devising thought experiments that would be practically impossible as a program for cognitive sciences or within the preserve of cognitivist paradigm. Steven Shaviro makes no secret about his own pan-psychist leanings, or rather his pan-experientialism orientation (in line with both William James pragmatism or what Alfred North Whitehead metaphysics tried to probe), yet this position comes forth after giving due attention to many other perspectives or philosophical currents. Speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, as in his previous books The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism, remains a point of reference. The title “DISCOGNITION” is a great way by Steven Shaviro to try bend our cerebrated (yet dualist and disembodied) and vaunted capacities further and further, to be able to try and circumvent the heavy toll of constraining cognition as well as to switch tables on our faltering human exceptionalism. Cognitivism has been listing a growing list of human biases and fallacies, confirmed by research – all largely expanding on critical philosophy’s founding gestures: Kant’s categories and forms of thought. Yet the fundamental tenants of cognitivism (u could also call them metaphysical presuppositions) get more entrenched than ever. As ‘neurobullocks‘ has been infusing much of neuro pop from TV series to criminal psychology – or be it advertising and neuro -marketing, nowadays only neurodivergence manages to question the neuropolitical underpinnings of neuronormativity.
In the end, we have nothing to lose (he seems to tell us with every chapter) – but our embittered speciesism, a narrowing cognitivism-only path that allows only brains, higher functions of the human mind or consciousness to act like proper scientific models, exquisite literary presences or proper philosophic objects – at the dispense of everything else, with the risk of ignoring various instantiations of “what would be thinking like”: a machine, an artificial intelligence, a computer, a murderer, a slime mold, an alien etc. (a list that could be potentially endless). We are bound to central nervous systems, and yes, sapience is a wonderfully rare thing, yet this comes at a heavy price of ignoring the largest majority of our experience as well as other (for us largely speculative) modes of thought. Recent SF, carefully chosen examples by S. Shaviro – put consciousness in proportion and show how human thinking processes might be themselves just a narrow sliver – a wonderful but limited and limiting way to even define experience as such. He brings all these examples to roost and many others – including Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects or Peter Watts Blindsight or R Scott Bakker’s Neuropath. To his merit, Shaviro always emphasizes that he is neither a philosopher nor a science fiction writer – though to my knowledge, he is uniquely poised to enjoy doing what he does and never make the authors and thinkers he reads cry (as Deleuze said). He is one of those very rare raconteurs that never disparages his material, offering an attentive mind and affective stance that takes science fiction and philosophical speculative bets very seriously, pushing them to their ultimate ends. He is never tone-deaf, never forcing himself on the medium but letting it speak loudly and clearly. His close-reading discipline works almost as a direct how-to example in helping delineate difficult questions posed by the authors themselves. He redefines and refines complex relations and attempts making difficult distinctions by contrasting philosophy with science fiction or with science proper. There are always differences as well as deep resonances here, and there is always the potentiality of mutual learning from each other:
Fictions and fabulations are often contrasted, or opposed, to scientific methods of understanding the world. But in fact, there are powerful resonances between them; they are both processes of speculative extrapolation. In other words, constructing and testing scientific hypotheses is not entirely different from constructing fictions and fabulations, and then testing to see whether they work or not, and what consequences follow from them. For science is far more than just a passive process of discovery, or a compiling of facts that are simply “out there.” Rather, science must actively approach things and processes in the world. This is the reason for making hypotheses. Science needs to solicit and elicit phenomena that would not disclose themselves to us otherwise. It must somehow compel these phenomena to respond to our questions, by giving us full and consistent answers. All this is necessary, precisely because things in the world are not cut to our measure. They have no reason to conform to our presuppositions, or to fit into any categories that we seek to impose.
1. Do you think that imagining the future could be the first step to contribute in manifesting it?
First, let’s not limit the power of imagination, this “capacity” to imagine to just our common use of it as only pertaining to humans, a unique human faculty or a particular ability. Just a capacity of the capacious. A fantabulous happy extension of an evolved cognition, the marked and significant difference of lionized primates, such as humans used to feel as their branch diverged from other related species.
Let’s imagine that imagination is certainly more widely found and more basic than expected – a precondition to all the other “higher” faculties regarded by many as superior or distinctive.
For me and for others it feels more and more important to be able to accept and speak for example about bacteria or non-sapient blue-green algae in these nearly frivolous, imaginative terms. There is a comics from 1979 based on ideas by Dr Timothy Leary, a Neurocomics that treats the primordial soup as an irreverent cocktail of excitable ingredients, utterly promiscuous, and imaginatively spilling over (pls check the digital version here https://timespacewarps.wordpress.com/2021/01/27/1760/ ).
Let us see how we can question our own favorite evolutionary just-so stories, stories that get constantly remade. What about a story that shows how our particular transformation was achieved historically from distantly related, non-neuronal, brainless beginnings? Let us understand, with our current brains the way of being in the world of organisms that enjoy their lives without a central nervous system.
What do you do with this “imagination” that presupposes a complete lack of imagination around itself?
It would be worthwhile investigating how we can recognize or include the manifestation of an imagination that is clearly phylogenetically and epigenetically overflowing, one that complicates the arbitrary borderlines of a standard neuro- intelligence model. A more gradual and universal one. One that would put to shame our supposed neurotypical preferences. And even as this model gets more and more untenable, it tends to slide, captivated and kidnapped, lured by the supposedly lower ‘concrescent’ reality of the world.
With this background of unequal distribution hovering around us – a (preposterous) scarcity of imagination in the history of biological life that became the main tale told by the life sciences, we have arrived at a moment of crossroads. I considered my contact with STS (Science and Technology Studies) and history of science important because it made me question the very restricted and canonical histories told by the life sciences about themselves or as transmitted by generations and generations of biology manuals.
Otherwise, we keep risking remaining conceptually blocked in our physio-chemical understanding, blindfolded by the dominance of one domain, resisting all those ideas arising out of various domains of the evolving life sciences, losing our chance to keep up with all the new discoveries being made all the time.
Some call it a “Crisis of the Imagination”. I do not know if it is a crisis or not, but it would be a mistake to attribute it by default to the human, or Germaine to the fine arts, therefore entirely and exclusively human or humanistic. A crisis is only one if it keeps mired in just coffee talk about quantum physics and string theory while forgetting about various levels of symbiosis levels, of the role played by extremophile Archeobacterial lifeforms living in impossible (for us) conditions, or about the iconic role played by Tardigrades, seen everywhere online and offline, seemingly the perfect pre-adapted for life in outer space and pop SF series such as Star Trek.
It is important to see how we get socially constrained and so strict when and if we imagine a future, a common future imagined not just by some bipedal apes. Imagination is somewhere else then, especially if it does not help us imagine another world. Imagination is an agential and tangentially unpredictable mode, actively and reactively involved in emanating, speculating, fabulating, emitting “other kinds” of worlds.
If we refer strictly to the patriarchal and systemically racist capitalism we currently participate in, one that has subjugated and exploited billions and billions of species on this planet crushing this world in its grasp, it feels more impossible or unachievable than ever to exercise our imagination. It becomes very easy to imagine why we live materially in our very own flesh and bodies the closing in of a creaking opportunity window without being able to do something about it.
Our current worldview, where other worlds have been condemned to stand on the losing side of the equation, prefers the word “unfit” – a term that puts all in the same box as maladaptive, improbable, wasteful or impossible. This strictly Adaptationist worldview is more and more maladaptive itself, and I mean here that is presupposes this fitting in as essential and unavoidable. To fit is to have to practically accept all injustices. This view justifies and rationalizes all economic and energophage inequalities, and is more and more evident and obscene by the day.
What do stromatolites dream of? What do stromatolites imagine while belching gases, not as individual cells, but as planet-wide biomass, on a grand scale collectively, contributing to a world of tomorrow under oxygenation/oxidation just a few billions of years away?
Can you identify in these bubbles of inklings of an imagination floating during a period almost impossible to imagine in human cortical terms, that made possible our ‘humaness’ that is still narrowly defined as western and whose understanding limits itself to a rusty technoscientific imaginary.
A lack of imagination that can barely communicate the vastness and scaling necessary to assess the cumulative effects of millions of exhausts pipes and changes that do not take place during millions but decades (our own lifetimes)?
Technoscience stimulated by imagination for profit is making itself responsible for the unfair mass extermination of countless species. On the other hand, it is a science that has offered as an unprecedented and vertiginous look into “deep time” and has tried to familiarize us with the hidden contribution of unknown ones. Of course, there is countless other non-modern of pre-modern examples from non-Eurocentric societies from all around the world that cherished and acknowledged this overwhelming contribution by other creatures, beings, entities, spirits.
Science is only now finally recognizing the collective work of inhuman, non- more than human (more than fungus, more than plant etc) ones, a work that produced this outer protective layer calle atmosphere. A layer where we started walking and became conscientious of late, without therefore asking ourselves who made this protecting shield that has protected us and other creatures from most of the cosmic rays or UV radiation during millions of years.
This atmospheric or climatic imagination implies the apparition of a future where free-floating cells dividing continuously got stuck to each other, never alone anymore and only sporadically and dangerously autonomous inside their larger organismic units (see for ex our current understanding of the evolution of cancer cells).
These cells, meanwhile, started showing behaviors of a vaguely coordinated organized kind, a quorum-sensing that took life to another level than mere individualities, making waving coordination into a “ciliary collective walk”.
The very first levels of organization that enabled early movements appear as a disequilibrium of hundreds of microscopic ciliated cells in a gradient field – as the movements made today by multicelullar model organism Trichoplax adhaerens, considered one of the most basal metazoans.
Our extremely complicated brains are now unable to grasp why there is no need for brains to obtain the first cellular coordination of millions of cells, yet today we definitely struggle to obtain large scale coordination in a Ministry for the Future (as per Kim Stanley Robinson), so that we can preempt a nearly inevitable situation: the climate crisis. Difficult to perceive, to conceive and start imagine this very basic advancement of tissues or differentiated cellular lines as they search their spatial-temporal momentum…
2. Does a critical-analytical perspective of the past have a constructive role in modeling the future in your view?
I am agreeing with those that say we should try to circumscribe the finitude of such a total future – a totalizing future such as the one promoted by a series like Star Trek let’s say (even if I continue watching and enjoying it!). The series was bold enough to include gigantic tardigrade-like extraterrestrial beings navigating a mycelial network that holds the galaxies together, or a character called Stamets based on actual mycologist and mushroom enthusiast Paul Stamets. On the other hand, one should embrace the possibility that one is always partial, in the sense of being part and partial whenever exploring such present possibilities and future impossibilities.
Let us keep a big warning about a future that imposes one single unchanging version of the future upon all other species and the rest of humanity.
Let say a unique future based on just such a “warp drive” invention, i.e. the impact of one invention that pushes inevitably everything into the Faster Than Light era. Yes, it is an imaginary invention, but one that directs exclusively towards a total future. This is something if not entirely problematic, then full of lacunae that are not immediately noticeable, especially when that totalization is made around a technologically privileged group or one single invention.
Maybe a philosopher would say that such an analytic or critical perspective is a direct follow-up to the post-Kantian heritage that has divided western philosophy into suburbia of the mind with separated continental traditions and analytical ones.
I am not a philosopher so I will not go into detail. I will ask those interested to ask themselves in what why does any type of future depend on something more humble than what we have taken into account, even given our lofty evolutionary position, a minor something that does not even get mentioned in those version of a totalizing future.
Here is this simple observation by Charles Mudede, writing on the Seatle Slog, about the absence of green plants on the spaceships of the United Federation of Planets (the main supranational stellar union mentioned in the ST universe). Plants, as the primary providers of energy on the planet, or at least on this planet, are completely circumvented, ignored, overlooked, etc.
One of the most symptomatic under-currents of SF was cyberpunk sub genre that gets crystallized in the 1980s during the ballistic missile race btw the East and West blocks and during the first massive wave of neoliberal restructuring. As a genre it appears at a precise place – the city of Vancouver, Canada. It is a future placed in a city where the past is not perceived as surpassed, unreachable, deleted and where layers of time coexist, where you have to make use and make do with what has existed or will exist, old or new, low tech or high tech (here taking my cues from C. Mudede).
At the same time we are now in a better position to see why the Silicon Valley Californian future is not at all somber and opaque, oppressively corporate-like in the classical cyberpunk narratives, but more like a transparently corporate habitat, inexhaustible exhausting wellness and profoundly libertarian and anti-syndicalist mood more akin to The Circle movie from 2017.
Nevertheless, the cyberpunk inheritance makes it clear why we are not just neighbors to our actual neighbors or our actual flights of imagination, but neighbors to all the crazy rich and all the business park dreams on the whole planet.
It is important to understand that this cyberpunk, initially Canadian, does not repudiate temporal layering and temporal intermingling. It does permit the persistence of a constantly perishing present, temporal complicity towards futuralism, especially when PKD’s obsolescent androids and exclusive premium robotic sheep coexist.
3 How do you see the role of contemporary culture in relation with the future?
I think I partially answered this above.
Contemporary culture is too much “culture” and this search for the eco-critical dimensions that includes laboratory cultures (as in tissue cultures or yogurt cultures) comes with very meager offerings and maybe overly defined by Danone possibilities and lack of funds for blue-sky research, with a preponderance of big tech lobbies.
From Raymond Williams we have learned how difficult it is to define culture, risking to leave out somebody, abusing and emptying this word while at the same time diminishing conflicts or inherent transformations.
It is important to see how – the future is totally decoupled from the new or the truly new, in total divergence from that future promised in genre movies, in the sense that every new thing ‘is more of the same’. This monetized future is already portioned, auctioned, packaged and sold using cryptocurrencies and complex financial instruments (the so-called fintech), some of which are actually called futures. Crypto currencies belie their underlying materiality and so manage to escape our attention because we tend to forget that they run on physical infrastructure, on computers that are sometimes fueled by leftover fossil fuel somewhere at the Polar or Arctic North like in one Canadian advert trying to attract new investments.
Even if we feel placed at the bottom end of financialization, we can take this recent campaign by the BRD bank “You are the Future” and see in what way the pressures of contemporary culture (represented by financial institutions) amplify the surrounding climatic and ecological pressures on individuals, on personal payment plans, etc. and especially on this recurrent YOU – as unitary, ethnopolitical, indebted or having to pay rate till forever.
Everything is still sadly transposed in terms of you or him, or her.
It remains to be seen how much is this going against a situation that is in no way easy to isolate, locally or individually, or how slow and after how much struggle some populations and expressions, ecologies, bodies, genders, multiplicities etc. will carve themselves a space in contemporary consciousness and attention.
I think that SF in the sense of speculating and fabulating, or as speculative fiction, fantastic or scientific speculation has this role of culturally translating for both interlocutors, exactly like a device from the SF movies that can deliver meanings almost involuntarily from one extraterrestrial language into another. No unadulterated transmission, but a transmission with twists and modifications – creatively and imperfectly translating realities that necessarily surpass the individual level, the human limits of perception, especially if dealing with social, scientific and technical transformations that are impossible to calibrate.
4. Do you think that the study of the future will have a constructive impact if it would get included in the educational curriculum?
I would definitely prefer to alternate this impeding hype, the pressing and oppressing futurological drive with other things.
Maybe it is high time to include in the school curriculum something about speculative fiction instead, going back to your first question.
Embracing futurology has to be nuanced, especially if one refers to a type of future forecasting typical of the banking sector, or the start-up kind. We should have the utmost care and reservations here, taking into account the fact that everything that has to do with prognosis and forecasting from is completely engaged in ensuring the impossibility of a common future.
Futurology as packaged by tech pundits and tech gurus is easy to find, because the world seems to be full of quite myopic visionaries, even dangerous ones, in the sense that uncertainties are nowadays packaged as manageable risks and externalized on others. We do not need more singularity salesmen, or agents of a more or less conscious optimization that touches upon everything but does not change anything fundamentally.
We should always be wary and vigilant about this futurology frustrated by the borders of this world and in search of tax evasions, off-shore futurology of neglect that has become a sort of scourge, an exercise in externalizing risks on the backs of others, offering cheap predictions on demand (*or expensive one if one takes into account the habitats and lives lost in exchange): a simple business deal dressed up as a very rudimentary SF.
First, education itself is left without a future.
All those with a degree end up without a viable future, jobless, without any pension plans and ready to fall trough the gaps of a system that prepares highly qualified people for bullshit jobs. I refer directly to those jobs discussed by the late David Graeber in his book and familiar to most of us today. Even if I don’t have such a job at the moment, the clock is ticking, and I will sure join in, because there is nothing else for me.
You do not have a future, because this is the future of work, of the learned skills turned worthless in today’s terms, of careers based on educational systems have become all a subject of speculative investments and divestment. Today at the stock exchange one can bet on the lack of future of certain careers and what one is learning and hoping to graduate in. All the unprofitable lessons, the obsolete school manuals they are based on, the slowness of re-qualification or costliness of retraining get correlated by algorithms to academic disciplines and careers with loosing odds.
At the same time, the educational systems have dealt only very late with the neurodivergent, the non-neurotypical, with minds that do not obey or coincide with what was considered standard everywhere in the past. Also, very, very late we are finally starting to see jobs that take into account the autism spectrum disorders or an educational curriculum that is more inclusive in this sense.
The way our studies are being sponsored and financed always in regard to a certain future income, of either being coupled with future “liquidity” or not, gets everyone reduced to constant payment status or the incapacity to be such a source of regular payments. It gets tied down to the incapacity to reimburse in time the debt accrued during your education years.
Not only is risk calculated so that investors or shareholders would be repaid – only then you are ‘worth it’, or incentivized, only then you become part of the “meritocratic” scheme, only and only if your future career can be monetized so that you can enjoy today a scholarship or be worth all those tuition borrowings.
Betting is not just the usual corner shop betting joint, that one is just a small picturesque neighborhood get-together. We have a much more insidious betting on the potential lack of future of a large majority of school students or of students whose education was devalued from the start, or that becomes just a reason for upping the bets.
It is easier and easier to bet on the certainty of educational failure, on the loosership of certain disciplines or the obsolescence of pedagogic systems that have spent money and time to train us humans in the past and the present. Let’s just think about such classical domains as the natural sciences, or the dwindling number of field scientists, the disenfranchised humanist or liberal arts, as well as all the vocational schools of the socialist times.
We also have today this creative sector – already the main betting horse of the new economy, on one side completely fragilized and highly dependent on applications and all manner of extra financial supplements and on the other – the poster independent sector of new, so-called smart cities. All these shrinking and polluted cities that need to reinvent themselves constantly in order to attract investors and clean their image (what happens in Timisoara “and soon in the whole country!” to rhyme in with the Revolution 1989 slogan).
Sometimes the students who can afford the costs of high theory of highly-rated teachers and interesting courses – are already from the privileged classes, those that come from rich milieus from the very start (I am saying this because of acquaintances that do this kind of teaching in Germany, so it is not just an Eastern European thing).
On the other hand, there is so much educational material online, so many videos, tutorials, fabulous YT channels – be it philosophy, transgender studies, dialectics, history of science, technology, political economy etc cultural studies, biohacking etc.
Yet it is true that one gets to them when already exhausted, bored and disillusioned.
If you do not represent an investment, a vested interest, you are suffering all sorts of consequences, mental and bodily ones.
On the other side the paradox is that nobody dictates your curriculum any longer, you can choose what and how to built up your ‘looser’ educative kit, for the very fact that such courses do not represent an investment, no winning bet, and you can maybe use this false freedom to combine the most unwieldy materials and contradictory things. For example let us imagine a course based on SF speculations about education from the future and immediate examples about educational betting or critical theory and afro pessimist thinkers.
I can tell you I am working on something that I hope will never end.
Because you specifically called it project – I will pick up on this complete mess of a word, on the fact that we already describe this way our work or this type of structure where we find ourselves no matter what.
When you say ‘project based’ you are employing the neoliberal newspeak – trying to dissimulate this type of nomadism from project to project for what it is – a complete disaster, a way to embellish and make it sound cool, while it is actually a common disease and a currently incurable one.
And I want to include here that blind tech-nomadism, of carrying your workspace, working from a distant beach, no matter if you work for NATO, for humanitarian purposes, or for the election campaign in another country, using your skills no matter what the requirements, exactly the way Cambridge Analytica did it (just one infamous case among many I guess).
Why are these things valued in this way on the job market? Why are such beach remote working positions made possible etc promoted in adverts with the promise of a fat paycheck that helps you jump planes like a DJ from country to country? Well, this is sure one of the most toxic and polluting things existing on the planet today.
I am also migrating from Bucharest to Berlin and back and have tried to keep this come n go at a minimum. Very few can afford a fixed place. Very few are employable in anything but on a project base, where and when the project season is on. These projects are a euphemism for free-lancing, a reality that hides a cynical mercenary lifestyle without illusions and without much future talk. You are good for everything and good for nothing.
This sez a lot about the type of obsolescence that these projects imposed because whenever finished or evaluated, they get sent away and behind there is not much left. Eventually, just online crumbs that you can barely match or explain or replicate.
It is a research literature that is cherishing a variety of ideas and authors, a SF that has become truly global (what did we know about Indian, Arab, Korean, pan-African SF 50 odd years ago, or even about a wider understanding of Easter European SF?).
Partly vaccinated in this way we can dive into deeper waters, catch hold of mutations, frog leaps and qualitative jumps and acknowledge their relevance for now as well as for the future.
In its short version, I spontaneously caught it on TV, during one of the Minderiads (mineriade in RO) from Bucharest in the 1990s. From the streets we received our daily screen portions of televised audio-visual TV realism. On one of those Mineriads that remain in the collective memory as brutal and violent, from a group of miners brought from the Vale Jiului coal mining towns, one turns around towards the camera and is asked by the TV crew what are his demands.
I kid you not! I want to take this minor anecdote and make into something quite serious and fundamental. In my regard – this TV fragment does not just reflect the cheesy, dunk humor and naivete of those years.
For me this quite provocative response from a young miner arriving in the Romanian capital city from the mining towns that would soon be ruined and shut down, give us a first tectonic sign that something is massively changing behind the scenes – that behind these televised events there is the transition from one industry to the next.
How does a miner from Valea Jiului, from the core fossil fuel extractive industries, from the soon to be dis-empowered miner syndicates – become a fan?
How does the fan get born from the settled soot of the working class? A fan, let us not forget, that is engrossed by a US-Canadian series about biodroids, immortalist bosses, digitization, experiments gone rogue, abandoned cities, lots of rusty iron, intelligent machines and the first decent 3D effects meant to give body to a vision of dystopic dimensions of a specific nature. A no-future, post-industrial landscape for people that had to deal not only with the post-human but also with a world of post-work. Where does the factory move, how does one consume, relax and gets fascinated by the history of one’s own disintegration, of “restructuring” and its own crumbling representation?
More importantly maybe, what does it mean to loose a world? What does it mean to live trough the disappearance of your world, and what does it mean to not find a place any longer in it?
From a working-class hero he becomes on TV a villain while watching it live on premium hour. We notice this shift, from a representative of those fundamental means of production, from a worker from a glorified industrialism branded almost overnight as polluting and unwanted but which gave him a collective bargaining power when confronting the dehumanizing mechanisms and pressures of capital, a shift that places him not in the back seat – but in front seat of an unwanted future.
How does this fan almost instantly become jobless, media literate and tele-visually integrated at the same time entangled in a cinematic or computational mode of production (to use the Jonathan Beller’s terms). He transforms and is transformed in his own main opponent, in the class enemy of the newly green-washed electronic industries that evangelize their zero emission goals.
At the same time, he is becoming a prosumer fan with a Netflix subscription plan, a fanatic of online streamed series. He is ready to binge-watch, netflix & chill and eager to influence the production of his favorite series and shape his favorite titles, ready to feel entitled, even ready to start planning and organizing the next Comicon together with Kaufland in Bucharest. This puzzle I feel I am involved in since a few years, if not from the moment I have seen this fragment on TV during the 90s immediately after the Revolution, a fragment one should revisit and think with even now.
6. How do you see your profession/your projects in the future?
I think we can regroup all these together with the above question.
As mentioned I suffer from a constant de-professionalization, I forget what I use to do or am supposed to do, and have gotten to the situation where it is very hard to explain or to justify myself in front of those that ask me what are you working on actually, how much is your salary, where do you get your income? What did you work on? What do you want to do now, or want to do in the future?
I get the feeling that I refused or allowed myself to refuse too many jobs whenever I was offered them during the heyday of easy offerings, refusing this enviable possibility to settle in a particular institution. This has eloped me, so I cannot pretend I have an overview on my own doings and goings.
Most of the people I know already have their .com or .ro or have built more or less assiduously a career, a trajectory, a fixed base, more or less engaged in the management of the self-image. What I see with me is a cemetery of projects, shipwrecked blogs etc.
One important thing is when your friends drag on you, and I start to appreciate this more and more, even as you did it now with this interview. I think this has been one of your favorite methodologies all along, even if not systematically pursued. I appreciate it when somebody tries to involve, question me without a particular end-result, because I’ve become more and more skeptical about all these self-evaluations. I am talking about the flighty untimely moment when somebody comes and tells you to come and join in, let’s meet, let’s think about it together. Even when ghostwriting, mind you, or pretending to be an AI!
This while each is streamlining and bulldozing his yellow brick road towards solitude. If everyone tries to actualize – in the current default talk, you completely start feeling incapable of ever doing something together with others, and I also include myself in this bizarre situation.
I had the luck and joy to collaborate interuptedly with you, with Sebastian Big, with Declan Clarke, with Bogdan Otaku Gorganeanu, Alexandra Croitoru, Vasile Leac, Milos Jovanovic, the early trio Nanca/Cosm/Gontz as I knew them once, Mimi Salajean, Mihai Lukasz, Sara Lehn, Nita Mocanu, Candidatura la Presedentie, Lucas Cantori, Ovek Finn, Dyslex, Philou from Come N Go (or this is his core band for me), Mabento Makunouchi, Claudiu Cobilanschi, Anca Benera, Biroul Melodramatic, Valentina Desideri, Bezna, Kavdanska & Dilmana, Manuel & Brynjar, Mircea Nicolae & Victor Plastic (as I met them), Nicu Ilfoveanu, with Alt Art, Protocol Cluj, Tamtam, ODD, Mes 56, with Mort “braindead” la Creier, Ion Dumitrescu, Alienocen Outernational, Würtembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, Nae Timotei Drob, Nicolae Comanescu, Clubul Convivialis, Cristian Darstar, Utopiana, Szilard Miklos, Florentin Tudor from Rusu & Flore, Fundatia Tranzit Sibiu si Bucuresti, Colectia Energii Regenerabile de la Fractalia and much more in what reads like some bizarre automatic writing… many more that should have probably get mentioned here.
With many more I did not collaborate directly but had the pleasure to meet, contact and enjoy their company. I cherish the rare moments I tried to curate something in the past.
I enjoyed when Mihaela Dragan invited me to talk about the Romacene and SF. I was glad that the Arhiva de Sunet came over in Drumul Taberei hood to talk about sounds from Timisoara. I enjoyed talking with students about indie horror movies, starting from the Bodrog the movie experience. I regret not organizing a cozzzmonautica at the Cuca Festival (which I still hope I will). I truly enjoyed writing about the composer Octavian Nemescu for muzica imaginara, just before he departed this world.
I felt very good being invited by Gabi P.N.E.A. to contribute to his blog Timespacewarps as a place of churning and collating and trying out ideas, sounds, perceptual trajectories & apperceptual notions, all these un-hoped for splashes in growing data pools.
More and more difficult as this conviviality becomes – this communal labor is quite improbable, as an occasion to socialize outside the social platforms towards a common task as per Feodorov dwindle down. I really enjoy this co-opting, and try not to count them or to do any rankings – always glad to return the favor, whenever I get the nerve to involve others in return.
7. What is your relation with Artificial Intelligence, or with robots?
I think I just wrote something towards this end on the blog I am contributing to with Gabi. It is a discussion starting from the recent movie by the French video clip director Seth Ickerman, a sort of age-restricted musical video clip, mostly a retro SF biopunk full of sex magick and synthwave sounds by Carpenter Brut https://timespacewarps.wordpress.com/2021/08/24/1930-blood-machines-mini-series-2019
I even have a few quite amateurish recordings uploaded on a soundclound account, a sort of plunderphonics using some linux audio software from years back https://soundcloud.com/earth-evacuation-plan/data-recovery-foundation-tapes-i-choam-corporationplanet-kaitain I think that you can hear there how my relation with what we call today AIs or robots or entities has developed, since it takes into account not only the cinematic or gaming industry examples but all the imaginary spillover all around us.
We have somehow these retrograde AIs, stuck in their virtual asistant roles that hear you, peeping on you whenever you least expect it, although under surveillance capitalism you should expect it all the time. We worry about who or what is influencing us, but we never seem to worry how we influence AIs instead, in regard of the fact that they carry a lot more agency and decisive power nowadays, deciding over the chances of many other humans, because they integrate human cultural biases almost without regulation or filtering etc. although things started changing.
For those interested, I urge them to listen these recordings on earphones and try to imagine them as part of a memory implant, residual coaching of future employees from various fictional inter-planetary corporations. More than 6 years have passed since I made this sound collage with the track name – CHOAM Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles – exactly the corporation from Frank Herbert’s Dune that takes care of mining the spice.
So you see I am interested more about these secondary aspects, those that fall off the main equation, the way in which the very attention and buzz around “Intelligence Explosion” or the “Super Intelligence X-Risk” tends to monopolize informal meetings at the Davos conferences from Switzerland (a few years ago). I am interested in the way a paradox or mere speculation about AIs feeds into the fears of certain high-ranking, ultra rational communities characterized by efficiency and singularity search. How curious that their attention is being disturbed, grabbed or invaded by a future AI hyperstition like Rocco the Basilisk?!
You said how do you relate – I am interested in the relational at in its most fragile and remote, this delicate relationality, easy to break, the way these feeble connections are sometimes the most important ones, not the stronger and stable ones.
In the theory of networks – these wispy links would be the most important ones, NOT the verified and tested ones, those links for example that bind members of a conspirative group, members of clan, a family, of a mafia, of a political class, of a clique etc but those that can literally hang almost on one single strand of hair.
Another weak strong inter-relation that suddenly came to the foreground is the non-intelligent nature, a non-intelligence, a non- smartness that is very basic and gets upcycled by capitalism and especially by this growing traveling jet set.
I refer to the simple fact that COVID virus reached out so much of the planet using previous cheap flight networks, touristic routes, carried and pulled in this race that is extremely lopsided and with differing speeds of vaccination and mutation that gave rise to resistant strains that you could never call intelligent.
8. How do you see the relation between technology and nature in the future?
I think I got a problem with this relation that gets chocked by a tunnel vision of one single technology – let say lets say the choke-hold on our imagination that some historical technologies have got on our explanatory power.
The way our descriptions have helped in mistreating or exploiting the various sub-divisions of life, or the way such technologies have been used as misguided metaphors or as outdated models that got reified and retained with quite damaging material results.
There is this insidious feeling that I can let myself being carried along by a certain easiness or frivolity following in the steps of the ex-mathematician A N Whitehead and the many that have taken his hints in various directions – such as Isabelle Stengers or Steven Shaviro among others – maybe I can even call my friend Ion Dumitrescu one of those. Of Whitehead’s lack of contempt towards the role of feelings and generosity towards the new, inherent in his thinking. I am not carried by his very elaborate “scheme”, but taken on board by his very encouraging tone that tries to think against the grain, or in spite of all the dead weight of all those philosophical orthodoxies.
There is a new appetite, towards a certain new kind of realism – a realism that is measured and balanced by debates about the world in all its aspects. It is a new courage of being part of a tangible reality not completely dissociated from the absolutely intangible and bizarre universe described by the physical sciences.
Maybe this is one of the few available ways of avoiding the strictures of replication or testability typical for scientific positivism as well as a way to get ahead of the game that has chained theoretical physics to biases and aesthetic presuppositions (like those highlighted by Sabine Hossenfelder in her provocative Lost in Math: How Beautry Leads Phyisics Astray 2018).
As an example SF should not be regarded just as a metaphor, or just exclusively a literary genre, but something direct, inevitably shared all around us, with utmost concreteness. At the same time SF offers a insistent yet vague affective palette, a literal sensor or a tool kit that can help us learn and unlearn to live with technologies, in order to multiply the experiences of another cosmotechnology.
An example would be Jeff Vandermeer (Southern Reach trilogy, or the Borne cycle). Vandermeer, just to take this well-knowns example, a relative fresh one at that – that somehow mediates and stimulates the need for an environmental posthumanism, one that has not nostalgia towards anthropocentrism, free of the residues of human exceptionalism. And this, importantly, without being misanthropic or an adorer of Gaia theory that risks falling prey to green-brown eco-fascisms as many do indeed.
His proposal – if I can call it that is to be completely immersed, co-dependent and transformational, but not in the sense of current workplace flexploitation, and at the opposite pole of domineering suprematist transhumanism that is somehow ultra-humanist and exclusivist.
I see in Vandermeer’s offer a certain critical posthumanism, pessimist and mature at the same time, but also with a lot of trust in utopian promiscuity, enriched by ambiental transhumanism and multi-species perspectives that once theorized feel more sterile and sparse than what he and others manage in their books.
Borne is for example a living weapon – biotechnology that went rogue, a feral experiment conceived as a very complex weapon that starts growing and blooming, and that seems to have a very imprecise teleology or final purpose.
Nobody knows how it got here, or nobody can trace all the necessary gene manipulations that made it possible or those pathways that stimulated its evo-development. Even its metabolism is unclear. All that does not matter because you can never take back things, at a moment when you have to learn to share the world with so many orphaned creatures, so many orphaned biotechnologies, so many banished organisms. Banished by their supposed creators or patent owners, that have long since expired and disappeared or become extinct and unrecognizable.
We have to welcome and learn to accept new refugee ecologies – that have been weaned from the measurements and quantification of the human or their initial laboratory tests (even if there they had their petri dish cradle phase), because the lab itself does not exist any longer or has fused with the entire world.
The world of Jeff Vandermeer from Borne is a world full of beings that have sprung out of the Linnean taxonomy or have left the Natural History museum behind. They are unclassified beasts of an unnatural world, exuberantly dangerous, killing you softly, tearing you to pieces gently, forlorn artificial entities. They are in search for a den wherever they can. Borne is such a found bud, one that is incredibly and attractively full of hidden fangs, a budding poisonous something that is morphing and shapeshifting when you do not look at it.
It is important to understand that it can be incredibly dangerous and at the same time very friendly and cuddly in a terrible, very unfriendly world. Arriving with tendencies and desires in tow that cannot be confused with those of the people around it, no matter how much they wish to see themselves as adoptive parents.
It is an unrecognizable world, where we cannot impose our old pastoral values of forest brotherhood as in the Romanian saying and untouched wilderness sold as România Neîmblânzită (title of a recent Romanian documentary about the supposed wilderness of Romania). Borne is the exact opposite, a preparation for an overly domesticated world that is unbound and that is transforming us almost as quick as we transform it.
We have to let go of the Greek myth that tells us about the damaging things that escaped from Pandora’s Box, because it is senseless to let ourselves be oriented by recurrent mythopoetics and vintage cosmotechnics. We should maybe follow in the lead of what Yuk Hui mentioned in his extended essay, because it is high time to cultivate and learn new things, even from the Chinese technological accounts that seem strange and unusual to many.
We have to understand what to do with such inherited myths of Western progress. What is going on with all these escaped things, with all these unfruitful things, the denied, the disavowed ones, those that left us and got dispersed around the world.
Here I refer to inventions that were never fully ours or technologies invented by others, things that where never owned even by their inventors, brought far from their point of origin, inventions that became so universal and generalized that they entered some vast general intelligence or public domain of unknown and innumerable applications. Like the Chinese magnetic compass, this magnetism is at the core of magnetic resonance visualization technologies or part of the maglev (magnetic levitation) trains such as the Shanghai Transrapid, currently the oldest such commercial maglev tech still in operation.
9. What project are you dreaming about?
Common let us try and avoid the “project” dream – because of them we cannot dream any longer, they do drag on us. Let us rather search for new modes of conviviality – new ways of living co-dependently and not dependent, traveling around ourselves with our attention ecology widening, one gracious step to be able to parse time and space together, with modes of thinking and feeling, shared passions and also a shared disappearance.
Do not overshare – but try to join with unknown friends (or well-known ones) an unknown dusk, not a well-known rising of the sun. I am reading for a few years Dhalgren by Samuel R Delaney. It is a fabulous way to get lost in the thickets of that book, providing dense vertigo, stylistically flawless, written in 1975 one year before I was born. A shelter of a book for difficult and demanding times, an amorphous bloom that is nearly impossible to keep hold on to and that nevertheless offers numerous stepping stones towards a misaligned friendship and a living in between the cracks of this world.
TimeSpace Warps 
