2063 – La nuit des rois/Night of the Kings (2020 movie)

Posted on 16 Mar 2022 by materievie

timespace coordinates: Ivory Coast, Western Africa early 21st century

“Night of the Kings (French: La Nuit des rois) is a feature drama/fantasy film directed by Philippe Lacôte (a film director from Côte d’Ivoire). Announced in 2017 under the working title Zama King, the film premiered at the 77th Venice International Film Festival, with a follow-up screening at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival where it won the Amplify Voices Award. The film was one of two films featured in the Spotlight section of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. It won the Black Film Critics Circle Award for Best International Film, the African American Film Critics Association Award for Best Foreign Film and the NAACP Image Awards 2021 for Outstanding International Motion Picture.”(wiki)

I do not pretend I can go into the subtilities or cultural specificities of this movie, but I consider it one of the best movies I have seen lately. There has been a lot of talk about what is cinema and what is not cinema in the age of streaming services and “devaluing of content”, with famous Hollywood directors and then critics jumping in.

Night of the Kings shows how shallow is such talk is or how it is mainly framed or defined inside a very limited arena – ignoring both non-European/Euroamerican cinema or how it tends to ignore the arrival of the post-cinematic. It’s eminently easy to trash most of Western Hollywood blockbuster cinema – as repetitive drivel (which it is) or a heteronormative sequel-autophagia and shameless fanservicing. It’s perfectly OK to blame the sequel industry or the Netflix production money machine. Yet there’s is also something affirmative to new non-Euroamerican movies (or say fictions in general) – that goes beyond mere questions of taste or basic film critique – showing us the current blindspots and unspoken presuppositions and expectations of such a ‘constructed’ public.

Movies like The Night of the Kings point towards what lies outside of that limited horizon. We’re all restricted by our local comfort or supposedly global netizen status. We do this only by sticking with what is shoveled at us and ignoring all those movies out there. This is a direct example that we’re never done with ‘provincializing Europe’ (or the Global North) in Dipesh Chakrabarty‘s immortal phrase. The question is not about expecting the unexpected but attending to and allowing these other lives and other perspectives to breakthrough. The movie’s setting is inside the fictionalized MACA (infamous) prison a Royaume (realm) that is a world within a world, with to the central role of storytelling and narrative framing by the West African prisoner griot that embodies this rich oral storytelling tradition.

Global SF authors like Benjanun Sriduangkaew (Machine Mandate universe) and Tade Thompson (Wormwood cycle) writing in English – have been pointing out how annoying and puzzling it might feel to a diasporic non-Western writer to explain to a so-called ‘typical’ audience that their world-building is inspired by actual events or living cultures or that even SF editors might consider their worlds as inconceivable or improbable inventions. That is – these properly ‘SF’ aspects of their fictions, terminologies or traditions are not exactly fictions since they are closely inspired by a reality that appears completely ‘unreal’ (or automatically SF) to the average Western/Global North commercial public (also a construct of audience polls, micro-targeting & marketing ploys), or one that lies completely outside the experiential or multicultural knowledge bounds of a white Eurocentric/US audience. Explanations feel empty if the model public is centered only around a Western sensorium and reception that remains aloof and for the most part an isolated, posh, and prosperous cultural backwater juggling the same tired references and the same dusty canon on displays over and over again.

Even with Black or Asian actors starring in successful Hollywood movies – there is sadly rarely a radical change in the overall worldview of those Western-inflected perspectives represented.

I am not trying to essentialize non-Western differences – just trying to trace how difficult it is to make room for such movies as The Night of the Kings that have a 99% African crew or that actually play on the welcome absence of the usual metropoles of the cinematically overfamiliar Global North (Tokyo, Paris, New York, Berlin, London, Los Angeles etc.) that serve as a backdrop to imagining our contemporary 21st c world. They also refer to world events that nearly nobody remembers (such as the first Ivorian civil war 2002-2004 or the 2010 second Ivorian civil war) or that have this rapidly effacing “‘half-life’ of a disaster ” under disaster capitalism. We’re reminded that the contemporary world happens mostly elsewhere than the Eroatlantic! Also, there is (happily!) less need for the usual business center-skyline as a silver lining for superheroes jumping, saving or destroying the world. None of these typical Marvel Universe – highrise shots marking the Western pop imaginary.

We see the Lawless Quarter slum of Abidjan from the perspective of the locals combined with the usual drone perspective – a bird’s eye view perspective that we got used to from countless movies. At the same time recent history tells us a parallel history of the drone in Africa. African civilians have been more and more at risk from drone strikes since the US/CIA has stepped up its drone warfare capabilities. This movie does not touch upon such an ominous military presence in the life of civilians but nevertheless, it’s hard to decouple such existing technologies and realities influencing the lives of so many people.

There is a series of stories within stories – there is the larger frame of Blackbeard (Steve Tientcheu) as the fallen Dangôro, the sick king and the god of La MACA prison that anoints a new young and hapless inmate (Bakary Koné) as the new Roman – playing both sacrificial lamb and storyteller in what seems like a violent transition of power. The various factions and form an inmate group that starts to sing (like an antique choire), dance and accompany the story of Roman -. of his former boss and urban legend Zama King that was recently killed. He has to hold up their attention in order to survive the Red Moon Night. Zama King – is a historical figure, one of “the handyman for the new leaders of the country,” in the words of Roman, one like many other young men that become a temporary hero of the northern rebel leaders. Zama King was only one of those young men with political backing that felt emboldened to turn chance to their advantage.

The story of the impromptu griot – also includes a coastal African kingdom and what appears to be an episode completely different historical era, one that nevertheless is intertwined with current events. It is a history of love, deceit and sorcery. The life of the local legendary trickster Zama King of the Microbe gang member of slum dwellers intertwines and follows the same route or ordeals as those of other times and remote events. His childhood, subsequent adoption – are all open to invention & revision. Visually we are presented with so much detail that it hard to focus or take in all at once. There are also different kinds of temporality and intentionality going on exemplified in different versions of the same story. Different retellings of the same history differ. Place mutates and alters the linear time flow of the MACA. Its power is more ominous – than what seems initially as a self-contained prison world. Besides the inmate audience, there are also the guardians hiding – and surveilling and having a stake in the unwinding story.

Structural racism under capitalism always incarcerates black bodies – the US has one of the biggest inmate populations in the words. In very different place (but related in terms of both racism, colonalism & slave trade), MACA feels distant from outside events, yet within the walls of its carnivalesque experience there is an ominous invisible presence of former colonial masters – the French troops that have kept a hold on Abidjan. These are the strengths of such a movie, one that does not follow the usual Enlightenment tropes carried along by the Western linear timeline of ultimate progress and totalizing framework. There is not so much a blurring of fiction and reality – but a heightening of the survival value of fiction. The ceremonial role of West African griot storytelling does not stay purely ceremonial or static but is involved in all the making and remaking of power, its vaccilations, reconstructions, modulations and interruptions. Fiction takes on this important role of continuous reworking histories, of improvising (out of need or under pain of death), of a general way in which speculative fiction (contemporary or traditional) is supposed to convey a sense of intensified realism in extreme situations. Nothing is neutral – and the storyteller is never sure of himself or of his own spinning. Roman is revising on the go and continuing interrupted stories he can only abandon with his life forefeited. Ending a story means death in a literal sense. The death of the story, its proper ending is not only the end of the movie (like in 1001 Night Islamic Arab cycle of famous stories) but the uncertain continuation under uncertain times. The audience is emprisoned by the story, not just because one is desperate to hear the end, but because it is already taken hostage, it cannot abstract, it cannot run away but is forced to find a way, to intervene, to shape the story with the means available.

Death is never far – and never just about sequels – it may be a play yet is is a play that keeps death at bay, that invents unexpected twists so that the knot of life can keep tight. In a sense we are prisoners of our time and space, of our culture and mores, of our biases and we can never completely escape them. Nothing can be totalized into a single univocal whole, and what exists or gets perceived is shaped by what lies to these situated and per-force limited perspectives (also explored by the paradoxo-metaphysic account of indexicalism in the recent book by Hilan Bensusan). Reality is not primarily substantive but first defined by a here and a there according to the speculative realism of Hilan Bensusan. There is much to say about how a non-traditional Western African griot time travels and even how the film director is a kind of contemporary griot.

There is much to say about many things – including the easy way VFX combine with the overall beauty (and brutality) of the movie. How the battles are happening on many levels. Imaginary creatures, local heroines or invisible forces play an important part in The Night of the Kings, including the fact that it is always a plural as in Kings not A King (not Lord of the Rings). It is overall a magnificent movie. Please take my word on it and watch it asap!

2032 – The Green Planet BBC (documentary 2022)

Posted on 26 Jan 2022 by materievie

timespace coordinates: I feel like we can speak as of 2022 about multi-temporal documentary making, especially regarding the lives of plants. Basically a camera shot that can fly in and out at many different temporal scales, induces the feeling of moving around microscopic objects and records microscopic movements imperceptible (to humans) at 3 years intervals (the saguaro cactus ridges extending during eet seasons for example).

Nature documentaries have been transforming and evolving their own technologies in order to track a changing evolving world – engaging and mediating the width and thickness of NOW. These documentaries are not just simply recordings of what’s out there – of some external reality. New visualization technologies, rigs and post production is developed in conjunction with gene editing (CRISPR) so that we can watch under UV light how a transgenic tobacco flares up, becoming “aware” (in the words of D. Attenborough) of an outside attack simulated by a pair of scissors ‘nibbling’ on its leaves. We can see it how a plant ‘anticipates’ or speculates about – further attacks and warns other distant parts indirectly affected. Because such newly mastered gene splitting technologies acquired from bacteria/bacteriophage co-evolution, one can insert genes from a distantly related phylum, a bioluminescent animal – a jellyfish probably into a plant. We can trace out a distress signal circulating inside the leaves of the plant in a laboratory setting. Such fluorescence markers dramatize how similar nerve endings and nervous systems are to vascular plant systems and how a signal can be carried and used as an early warning system in case of predator attack (caterpillar). The inner lives of plants are made visible akin to brain scan imagery – we don’t know what it is like to be a tobacco under attack, or how it prepares a chemical protection strategy, but we can watch and imagine life in a multi-processual way, a life not defined just by nervous systems.

It is only recently that one could track an interior activity that is completly below our radar – even if most of our ‘normal’ experience of breathing, walking, car driving lies at the same threshold of un-cognized activity. This is not just capturing the vector movement of a single plant or vine climbing, a plant activity noted by many observant naturalists in nature or a subject of process philosophy (Bergson, Whitehead), but a bundling of vectorial movements, of tropisms.

Take the example of plants moving and growing in the search of light(phototropism). We do not have here just the level of the leaf or vine, but of the parts inside the single cell (Chroloplasts) of one such leaf. There’s constant molecular activity, all under quantum mechanics rules – that powers up the cell during photosynthesis. This is mostly invisible activity. Most such energy harvesting by Chroloplasts is invisible, imperceptible. Such technologically mediated perception of invisible vector activities and micro-‘societies’ all happening simultaneously inside a plant is portrayed as a grandiose unseen choreography, jumping from level to level or switching scales.

The Green Planet encourages us to be a witness from our couch of the synchronous bloom (filmed with a drone) not only of two-winged flying seeds of gigantic Dipterocarpacae trees in Malayan archipelago (forests with the tallest angiosperms in the world), but also follow the migration of tiny Chloroplasts herds inside a single plant cell towards the light source. This involves making visible the cellular movements typical of daily photosynthesi, hidden movements that subtend all other movements (animal metabolism) and permit most primary biomass to multiply and replicate on Earth. It is important and a bit scary to imagine this biomass (80%) as active, sentient and not indifferent to what is happening all around and even chemically and termodynamically involved. This invisible world also includes the movement of life-sustaining gases and humidity that pass trough invisible mouth-like structures, the result of an invisible “breathing process”, of countless closing and opening stomata on a single leaf surface, on every leaf, all over the world each day.

For this to be possible, there is a combination of live field recordings (from the Pantanal – the world’s largest tropical wetland area) and filming inside a careful reconstruction of the Pantanal watery ecosystem. This reconstructed ecosystem (a large aquarium basically) in a small corner of Devon UK is place where the largest water lily Victoria amazonica traveled from the Kew Gardens in the hope it would play its part. That is why you have to watch at the end of every eps of The Green Planet HOW it was done. Lots of things came together from new lenses to skills aquired during competition drone piloting (First Person View drones, also called Stunt or Racing Drones). This does not dispell the magic of the series – but makes it even more graspable and adds matter to our imagination, fills in the gaps with the missing time that got edited out and that joint effort that went into it.

What a monstrous and prickly lilypad – to emerge and spring out of this Devon garage pool under the lense of photographer Tim Shepherd wading the depths of his small hot spring!

More horrific in its way than all the natural horror movies – because its claims of staunch evolutionary storytelling of a “Tyrant” takes shape front of you. But hey, let’s not forget that it is also about sensitivity of such a huge aquatic plant that needs all extra care, the perfect conditions, artificial warmth and nurture – in order to perform. To see it in action, one needs the helping hand of many and lots and lots of kg of compost to be drowned regularly in order to match all the fertilizers of a South American river.

The water lily is a “Tyrant” only under these specific and unstable temporary conditions. So this is what it takes to be able to entice it to grow, emerge and rotate like a lasso under the eye of the cameras. It is also a fairly (pardon the pun) willful plant with a mind-of-its-own, that is never there for us or to satisfies our curiosity or the calibrated expection of the camera eye. It goes down into its depth and only unfurls at its own pace.

remote controlled filming and swooping along branches and rainforest terrain like never before

Also (for me) there is this important idea that the water lily only takes over at the end of a temporal-seasonal sequence. It closes down an ecological cycle of sorts, but is not at all there from the very start. There is a before and after. It needs particular conditions and before these conditions are met, there are other goings on happening. Some ‘winner’ plant is never there from the beginning or center of attention, and it might feel like it is always there. There is a set of events and various actors. This ecological succesion becomes visible in the Green Planet documentary because we can follow various species each having their own moment and strange mobility techniques, each its (Andy Warholas) ‘5 minutes’ of glory, each (buyoant water hyacinth and others) having a go at the sun rays in a situation of almost preemptive growth and resplandance as if anticipanting the coming of the waterlily giant.

The universe felt like a small and unchanging place even a few generations ago. There was only the Milky Way (still a huge place) rotating above, but no myriad galaxies in an ever-more rapidly expanding, all part of red-shifting spacetime continuum. On Earth there are all these unseen movments and animated sequences – all dramatized and as much part of what Deborah Levitt calls The Animatic Apparatus. We have to see these documentaries as part of a bigger continuum that comprises post-continuity cinema as well as a specific time of the 3D CGi effects world where one can watch rivers of leaves cut by leaf-cutter ants or think about the deep time history of patch of seagrass, that is basically one organism derived from a 80.000-200.000 year old clone.

What seemed like the domain of science fiction and materialist aesthetics – is now a living example of the history of science visualisation: a move away from the stained tissues, ‘dead’ 19th century outlook of wet collections, taxidermy and type specimens towards a dynamic and dramatized feature of life under various modified lenses, microcinematography, time-lapse camera, Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) – under diverse set of laboratory and field conditions. This animating and dynamic recording characterizes what Hannah Landecker has termed the new “molecular vitalism”. This vitalism is not concerned with identifying the old Bergsonian élan vital, the vain search for an invisible lifeforce or one single majestic structure but with tracing, tracking with the aid of moving, living images the very activities that have escaped us. This time-based medium went from recording the machinations of the gene replicators but finished registering the protean proteinic 3D movability of these microscopic happenings, a window into their (ceasless) molecular activities.

All this existed till now, including the Scanning Electron Microscopy – yet it was still too static, too one-dimensional and static. This is why in 2022 and for The Green Planet BBC has hired an expert (Stefan Diller) that used a custom-made 8-axes electron microscope to ‘fly trough’ like a drone in a shot that can track around a mushroom spore, one thirtieth the width of a human hair. New light microsocopy techniques subtend this ‘indepedent’ imaginary flight around such plant microscopic worlds – with impossible clarity and depth by “holding focus all the way while also moving around the subject. “

electron microscope with 8 axes to be able to fly around tiny subjects

There has been a constant effort to make visibile the hidden life of plants available to the human sensorium. Plants are the most obvious yet the most ellusive of beings (of course if we ignore mushrooms). With their slow movements and apparent immobility, plants have been tricking us. It is as if they played dead-alive all this time, fooling us with their organic-anorganic liminal positions, mimicking their surrounding so well that so as not to attract undue attention. Plants do remember our touch and communicate with pheromones or using the mushroom enabled wood wide web. This is all very late observation, since they existed well before human minds or cameras eyes started following their secretive lives. They are waving in the wind or in the water following currents we have never been adapt at following. Already Charles Darwin become intersted in the way plants move, or how to record the speed of transformations that do not happen at human scale. The “view from nowhere” – or that unwated scientific attention made it certain that so much espaced our attention and perception. There is this entire realm of happenings and performativity of (especially) plant behaviour that makes them agents, forces and powers on their own terms. Darwin’s empirical experiments concering the movement and behaviour of carnivorous plants or the steady growth of humus via accumulated worm casting investigated such changes.

This apparent stillness and passivity (in comparision with animals) is something that David Attenborough BBC documentaries strived to demistfy or debunk since 1995’s The Private Life of Plants. The private life is not private at all, and has become very public. This new dynamism of the botanical world has since become public knowledge. Therefore during COVID years we the social animals are staying cooped up in our private homes, more immobile than usual, and more boring than usual while plants are being plants – taking animatedness and mobility as their own. Flights are going down and so they should in an era that realized how much global tourism is adding to the overall pollution. If you get bored with animal docus – you always have plants (said one commenter on YT). So The Green Planet is (also) about facilitating an impossible flying perspective, something typical to digital CGI effects to enliven, intensify a more and more (bored) ‘vegetating’ animal life with shorter attention spans. While the temporality of climate change is non-linear we still continue to hang onto a linear clock-time of calender COP26 deadlines. It is instructive to see this in contrast with the dramatized heightened attention and sensitivity necessary in order to percieve and experience such larger webs of invisible interaction and interdepedence.

1863 – Slime Dynamics: Generation, Mutation, and the Creep of Life (book by Ben Woodard, 2012)

Posted on 20 May 2021 by materievie

[[Was not able to jot down my thoughts on it, but that time has finally come. If I am to agree with other reviewers, I would have to keep a blind eye to my own abysmal editing of Temporal Divergence and Cosmic Drift. So no complaints about typos. Good that I cannot or will not review my own book. I am all for systematicity, since my own instincts struggle with it and yet most of the time trying to find a clear path among the ferocious brambles of speculative theory fiction/SF fabulation defeats the purpose. I enjoyed the lacunae as well as the conceptual splits, nor was I deranged by an overwrought style, with my own checkered past and unnecessary terminological excess in mind.]]

So, “Slime Dynamics: Generation, Mutation and the Creep of Life”, a slim 80+ page volume, is worthwhile reading. More of an extended essay, and even out of Corona context, it’s a welcome mindfuck. It arrived in 2012, Ben Woodard’s tome is an early ZerO Books snapshot, born in the throes of new materialism, OOO, the ontological turn, a new appetite for metaphysics, speculative realism & horror of philosophy (one has to dig deeper into Jane Bennett, Meillasoux, Negarestani, Hamilton Grant, Ray Brassier, Eugene Thacker, Nicola Masciandaro, Steven Shaviro and others). It is prescient in its embrace of the putrescent & contagious and all things ‘biological’ that came to rule our quarantined days. It is biophilosophical as such and not just a tract on the philosophy of biological. Coming out of the various strains of non-correlationist thinking, it is an early, formative publication by a contemporary thinker whose involvement with natural history keeps on tracking conceptual clusters & updating a philosophy that kept itself too long at bay from evolving biological ideas. B Woodard’s texts are unavoidable for anybody interested even rhe slightest in these things. It makes a good untimely visit (or revisit) now, especially after the hype over ‘speculative realism’ is generally over.

On two accounts I consider Ben Woodard’s work important. First, from the standpoint of his familiarity and embrace of a whole plethora of weird and new weird literature, his unapologetic and almost relentlessly geeky – sticky ontological (?!) attitude towards all sorts of dirty media, no matter how remote trashy, be it over -theorized or not expunged from the canon. Secondly, these dumpster ‘horrorisms’ (from gaming, horror B movies fare, comics etc) are being stalked in a shambling lock-step by a whole gamut of Continental philosophy and Naturphilosophie + (more recently) ungainly(for me) and undigestible oddities such as the British Idealists. This includes a monography (which does not seem to be out yet, although finished) situating Francis Herbert Bradley at the very origins of that primordial split of Analytic vs Continental schools via monism & pluralism.

The Creep of Life – takes a cue both from Negarestani as well as Stephen J Gould.
I must say I never read Cyclonopedia by Negarestani, although his influence has been nearly ubiquitous in many quarters & given the proper treatment elsewhere, while for me S J Gould has been important on a personal level. He’s a truly formative influence on some of my earliest biological and natural history musings, so I’m always curious about any potential Gouldian cross overs. I was keen on a work that promises to juxtapose these incompatible, maybe even incompossible forces.
Woodard’s ‘Dark Vitalism’ – is a child of both lovecraftian radical openness (in fact he makes Lovecraft feel quite coy) toward unbearable outside dimensions (apud Negarestani). A radical opening that invites invasiveness, quartering, fostering and hosting the alien – as well as taking full advantage of how systematically Darwinism dispels any trace of human excepționalism & sense of purpose. Even a radical contingency as that of Meillasoux, the non-teleological keeps a lingering anthropocentrism, so Woodard makes sure any taxonomic superiority and upper level inevitability has to go. Evolutionary replays will not end up with the same or any kind of intelligence valorizing biped, math or no math. Against any vertebrate-centric or multicellular-centric view, S Gould, a Marxist paleontologist & naturalist, kept encouraging these views from the below – always disdainful & ridiculing our airs of superiority in regard to ‘humble’ Monera. This ‘low’ bacterial dimension, a planetary microbiome that extends in all directions, became protoplasmic base reality (something else than just the impeding doom of pathogenicity) -moving slowly into quorum sensing limelight, one that Gould would have undoubtedly recognized.

For Woodard the critical distance from strict adaptionism, Panglossian radical selectionism & selfish genocentrism peddled by the neo-Darwinian apostles (prominently Richard Dawkins), germinates what S J Gould seeded, stemming from a vast, historically grounded encyclopedic knowledge of evolutionary ideas, humanism & many byways of natural history amd geology + making sure many racist pseudo-sciences & faulty methodologies don’t get a second chance (phrenology, IQ testing etc that informed eugenic immigration policies in the US etc). This prepares one for tackling any socio biological vagaries, whatever one-sided Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge epistemic fraternization might promise us, or whatever circular ‘just so’ stories of the day might become institutionalized as evolutionary psychology trivia.

Slime Dynamics does not trace all this, and maybe better so, since it is tracking some more rare, viscous and opaque protoplasm – the one that tends to be avoided even by the best of biologically- literate philosophers (the usual French suspects: Bergson, Merleau-Ponty or Deleuze). It is as if thinking about living thought gets obscured, killed at birth, muddled whenever brought down in the mud it came from, just the minute it gets reminded where its mindfulness oozes from.

In a time of lacking transparency, of dodgy accountability, when black-boxed (and quite racistic) AIs become existential threats and discrimination machines, this ‘darkness’ might seem completely out of tune. Corona Pandemics, fake news, and G Agamben letters of biopolitical conservatism, ‘dark vitalism’ itself feels somewhat unnecessary, an exaggerated – Lebensphilosophical – mystification. Yet ‘darkness’ – does not equal obscurantist add-ons to obfuscate even more & multiply misunderstandings, or inflame anti-scientific pathos with more or less misplaced mistrust in sometimes imperfect yet badly needed biomedical advances.
First things first, Slime Dynamics is steeped in the purposelessness of evolutionary drift, it is abiogenesis – friendly even when discussing outrageous panspermia, and it is clearly familiar with experiments/scientific theories or the historical significance of discovering deep time. This possibility to think beyond the biotic dimension & into unthinking anorganic origins of life keeps on overflowing, forever unsettling our relation to pure data & mere science reports. Slime Dynamics always enjoys using biologically informed horror in order to both update & degrade philosophy and dissolve the anti-biology inhibitors that have plagued phenomenology and Continental or Critical thought in general. It ultimately takes the obscene results and cool research data of science to their ultimate, unflattering devastating conclusions. In order to dispel this ‘darkness’ of the dark I am quoting the threefold aspects that Ben Woodard attributes to this new (deep time inflected) mostly unwanted vitalism:

“1. It is dark because it is obscured both by nature (who is to say that we can divine and comprehend the details of the universe from our limited brains) and by time (we are at a temporal disadvantage in trying to discern the creation of all things) since the cause of most of the nature we know has fallen back into the deep past.

2. It is dark because it spells bad news for the human race in terms of our origins (we are just clever monkeys that emerged as a result of a series of biological and cosmological lucky breaks), our meaning (we are just meat puppets based on our construction), and our ultimate fate (Earth will die and we will probably perish if not with it then eventually with the universe).

3. It is dark on an aesthetic and experiential level our psychosocial and phenomenological existence is darkened and less friendly to us, and our perceptions, given the destructiveness of time and space.”BW

Viruses and epidemiology play an important place in Slime Dynamics and spell out some of the most unsettling truths we have since come to loath, but can never ever again ignore (with the inception/global expanse of the Corona Pandemic). It is almost too close to home now that a very simple event of disease spillover, of outside contagion teaches us something the hard way about either complexity or basic simplicity – that medical under-development and patent trolling brings under capitalism.

Mushrooms and the fungoid also play an important role in Slime Dynamics, and I might say this is my favorite part since most of the newer The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins valuable additions tend to skip the central disgust associated with the undergrowth, the eminently -putrescient- slithering of hyphae or even the unavoidable weird (speculative lit) aspects that subtend it. In particular, space-time for Woodard is always warped along fungal apparitions – contrasting it with the networked contagion (“time overcoming space), the amorphousness and formlessness of fungal life is that of “the spatial overcoming time”, dragging life below ground, making it reliant upon down-trodden, plentiful disaggregation, dependent on the inorganic.

Slime Dynamics comes as good critical reminder of classical (altough contemporary xenobiology seems to have evolved) teleological attachments, its unimaginative program of ‘intelligent’ contact out there, its ignorance of the extremophilic non sapient possibilities out here. Slime Dynamics makes a fungus thriving inside a Chernobyl sarcophagus a much better candidate for sentient alien contact at home as well as outside of the bounds of our evolutionary bland & stationary ‘pinnacle’ position.
I think Naturphilosophie has waited much too long for a comeback, and that J G Fichte and F W J Schelling in their liminal situation btw Kant and Hegel may act like a philosophic slime-mold, a composite multi-phase creature or answer to the Kantian-Blumenbachian program that can be many things at once, or one unified thing at different times.
Slime Dynamics takes an important cue from H Grant making Nature After F W J Schelling as contemporary a thing as any nowadays, not just by mere retro recovery but by extending & activating ‘power metaphysics’ overall. Ben Woodard is well able to critically siphon out any romantic excess of Schelling – without jettisoning the precedence Schelling gave to base nature over thinking, as well as him being well aware of how intelligence (or better sapience) has been preserved apart from an inescapable basic materiality that keeps clinging to our angel wings. A clinging hodologic mucus not be confused with a pre-packaged and regurgitated as fixed ‘human nature’.
A neo-Schellingian vibe lures our attention towards the net forces operating on environments, bodies and especially on thought as explored by another relatively forgotten German Naturphilosoph – Kielmeyer. Schelling is critical of vitalism because of his aesthetic romantic leanings, because ‘vitalism’ per se seems to entail something contradictory to him, almost feet in the sky, unopposed by any equal force, just forever exhaustive matter. Schelling thus appears to have been priming us for ‘dissipative structures’ – for riding vortices as the Russian-Belgian physical chemist Ilya Prigogine thaught us. Maybe we have here the same ‘aesthetic’ engagement that seriously considered totality as a conjunction of opposing forces, of intensities & contrasts also vital in – A N Whitehead’s cosmological scheme, as he also came to appreciate the Romantics, beside his interest in metaphysics & history of science. To me, although Whitehead never mentions any specific German Naturphilosoph but only their British poet- adepts, he seems to qualify ‘eternal darkness’ in manner quite close to Schelling as “an environment of vagueness stretching into the darkness of what is merely beyond”.

What i miss from Woodard’s examples are maybe hints of an eastern ex Socialist SF slime – as the DDR movie Der Schweigende Stern 1960 loosely based on Stanislaw Lem’s The Astronauts. During the the shoots it apparently used up the whole country’s whole supply of glue. These tons of glue were used to simulate a post apocalyptic Venusian surface. This civilizational residue of muck overflows everything, a preview warning of the ultimate no-return extinction, if we would choose to follow the same path of megadeath militarism & weaponized science.

But let’s see how Woodard keeps on smearing ardently cleaned paths from this history of philosophy with a necessary creepiness that is of great benefit, so I better leave him the last word:

“The material being of humans, and of all life is a slimy one. Slime is the smudge of reality, the remainder and reminder of the fact that things fall apart. The shining path of humanity is only ever the verminous – like the trail of our own oozing across time and space – the trace and proof of our complete sliminess trough and trough.”BW

Swarming , extra-dimensional or extra-galactic organicisms and entities mentioned by Ben Woodards in his book Slime Dynamics: