It is even hard – even in my family, coming from an east-bloc intelligentsia background (father sculptor, mother soprano), the word “gypsy” had its usual racist connotations, but it was used more in the sense of ‘underdeveloped’ or rather a slightly colonialist ‘uncivilized’ which of course completely ignored the ways Romani were supposed to be still nomads that need to become sedentary. But the pressure to ‘urbanize’, to build and produce socialism was particularly harsh on women and minorities. In my family the phrase “You were born on the ‘French Street'” (Te-ai născut pe Franceza) was a euphemism for the Romani street in the village of my mother’s side grandpa (a worker welder). They were constantly joking and accusing each other of being born there which was supposedly a way to put you down the social ladder. The interesting thing is the way the French were supposedly synonymous with ‘high culture’ in Romania (in the Interwar period as well as during Communism). So calling the Romani village street ‘French’ was supposed to be an outrage, was meant to be initially off-putting, but also, underneath, to admit that mixed couples were happening and that everyone could have Romani ancestors. A was an admission that a clear dividing line did not exist, and also a play or satire on high/low culture ideals (or this is how I understand it).
They were slaves in Romania for hundreds of years, longer than slaves existed in the US. In Bulgaria, the situation was somewhat similar from what I understand and Romani escaped to the Ottoman Empire before where they could be free.
Keep thinking of this document, where 27 Roma families, that is 117 human beings in total, adults and children, were sold between two wealthy individuals in mid-19th century Moldavia, for the price of about a head of cattle each.
Here is a very important documentary that I truly recommend and that has been long unavailable or only reluctantly so it seems (in Germany). It is not only a movie about the plight of the Romani victims of the Holocaust (together with Jewish, queer/lesbian, as well as Communists and Anarchists), but also an indictment of the autonomy of the arts and the doctrine that artists are ‘Gods’, existing above politics, above accountability, above historical events, basically outside of history. This pernicious view is popular in Germany and elsewhere, while things changed, it is still part of an official cult of artistic ‘geniuses’ and cultural elites that tries to keep “Kultur” untarnished by its miserable associations, and one that continues to whitewash and justify many abuses. There’s a direct line that leads from the authenticity and separation of fhe artist from everything else and fascism. While artists have been hunger artists, or even thrown out of the polis (Plato), or declared degenerated and pathologized (Max Nordau), there’s something very wrong with upholding the unicity of the artist – that in the end acts like mercenary at the disposal of different regimes and powerful protectors.
It is the story of the Romani survivors of concentration camps in Nazi Germany and how Tante “Leni” Riefenstahl, well known Nazi propagandist filmmaker director, producer, screenwriter, editor, and photographer used them as extras in one of her wartime movies (Tiefland) before they were sent to the extermination camps. Don’t mean to be disprespectful to the survivors, but I could not help myself thinking ‘Tante’ Leni making Dune instead of Villeneuve, and using Romani extras as Fremen (maybe this does not forbode well for the next Dune installment).
This week’s podcast is “Objects and Values of Labor in Socialist Hungary,” the second in REEES Fall Series Socialism: Past, Present, and Future.
Guest:
Martha Lampland is a Professor of Sociology and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She’s the author of two books The Object of Labor. Commodification in Socialist Hungary and The Value of Labor. The Science of Commodification in Hungary, 1920-1956 both published by the University of Chicago Press.
In short, i found extremely valuable this granular analysis of ways to calculate, measure and valorize labor in Hungary, altough I do not agree on all accounts, I consider this anthropological study of longue duree agrarian trends very enlightening. Thanks to the anonymous suggestion of DS for their generous link sharing. Beside her field work in and around the transitional period towards market economy from planned economy in Hungary, her emphasis on the processual as different from merely historical approach I found fundamental. Answering the Why by How and finding out not just how things come to pass, but how things transform into something else. She links two very different transition points – the move towards Stalinism in late 40s Hungary and the transition towards market economy after 1989. None where quick, none where clean brakes and she makes them part of a larger modernist project of rationalization and efficiency that crosses ideological barriers or theories of labour. She traces such increasing commodification to the early big landowners, their increasing entry into world markets where they had to start measuring closer and closer how could be optimized in order to stay competitive. These developments get hauled during collectivization and scientific management technics that ironically are easier to study in the former East than West. Socialism is still an integral part of the modernist project. She also talks about ‘caloric money’, or food intake that is payed during the war in relation to the calculated amount of labour. The factories dossiers in Chicago or Detroit are much harder to research since they are private institutions, so the way scientific management was implemented remains opaque.
Value and labour theory of value (Marxist ltv) are separate things that I am wrapping my head around. Value theory or importance is central to William James, as well as Whitehead if I get that, although they have a different, more naturalistic, situational (with cosmological implications) understanding of value that does not get resumed under human economic systems. Yet value inside the organismic thought is deeply relational, is a result of webs of interactions happening in time like in Marxism (what Marx called socially necessary labor time). The two cultural and social necessary labor time should be separated and usually social turns out to be cultural on certain accounts. The radical empiricism of James, his contribution to philosophy entails a very different value theory, a non-calculative value, where entire organisms (think of leaves, flowers etc) are expressions of valuation or expressions of processes of valorization, of what is of importance for that plant, mushroom, bug, of what is important for that particular organism at that particular moment in time, without necessarily accounting or closing in on it. In fact Whitehead’s theory of value (he as a professional mathematician) is situational it depends and is part and partial to the concreteness of an unfolding situation. In his metaphysics value occupies a central place – both in ethics and aesthetics (of which ethics is just a small subset). For him ‘intensity’ is most probably the only one variable that we can gauge experience with.
Martha Lampland also mentions a book – about labor value in different European schools of thought (see below). In fact she traces the genealogy of LTV to a specific German strain and further to Betriebswissenschaftlehre a particular culturally defined way in which labour was valorized in German speaking countries as opposed to the English or American school of commodifying or measuring labour. In fact this cultural analysis of conceptual context traces Marx’s understanding to the German way of understanding or measuring labour in terms of energy, of thermodynamics which brings me to the Natural Philosophers and the way dynamic powers are foregrounded. Inversely in other traditions of valorizing labor such as the Anglo-American, labour is a product, it is focused on the finite product, the finite objects. Even if they had the same technologies or competed in the same markets, these two departures show how important various (national) cultural context are in shaping economic concepts or the very categories of economic life.
“How to Disappear” is an anti-war movie in the true sense of the word, searching for possibilities for peace in the most unlikely place of an online war game. It’s a tribute to disobedience and desertion – in both digital and physical-real warfare.
About Total Refusal
Total Refusal is an open artists’ collective which criticizes and artistically appropriates contemporary video games. However, as most mainstream game narratives employ the same infinite loops of reactionary tropes, the genre largely fails to challenge the values of their players and instead affirms hegemonial moral concepts. Acknowledging that this media is currently not realizing its cultural potential, we aim to appropriate digital game spaces and put them to new use. Moving within games but casting aside the intended gameplay, we rededicate these resources to new activities and narratives, looking to create “public” spaces with a critical potential.
I got a free copy of this book for an honest review. I already had the occasion to read a few related articles and essays by Thomas Moynihan in sumrevija.si and Palladium Mag. This review expands on those early first observations. Only later have I found out how they fit into a book of a much grander scope.
Its purpose is none other than redefining modernity and even reason as reason to ensure that thinking will not cease to exist in the future. All this in the light of something that has never before dawned on human minds: that the universe can well do without those very minds. One risks being overlooked when arriving on the crest of such an expanding body of collapse studies or end of the world as “growth industry”(Claire Colebrook), with scientists moving the Doomsday Clock closer to Midnight and ongoing “slow violence”(Rob Nixon) of 6th mass extinction blending into nearly omnipresent barrage of media apocalypticism. Yet, I believe X-Risk cuts like no other trough all of the recent secular/post-secular eschatological confusions, separating the threat of exterminism from prepper talk. Once and for all witnessing the end of one’s (or another’s) world is not the same as experiencing extinction nor is it establishing a presumptive final date of expiration. Thomas Moynihan’s book should be able to dispel all the lingering hesitation about what Big Filters to chose from (take ur pick from gray goo nano planetary meltdown to superintelligent AIs using our entire biomass as computronium fodder) by inviting us to step down from the giants upon whose shoulders we supposedly stand, and get a frisson as they succumb to ‘infinitarian paralysis’ (Nick Bostrom quoted by TM) and kamikaze theories about biospheres and entire worlds that keep on bursting like soda bubbles.
“The 1755 Lisbon Earthquake. Engraving by James Macaulay, 1880”
Clearly this book was written by someone who enjoys collecting all these ruinous and delightfully abhorrent mental cataclysms, a necessary feat at the very moment when we might desperately cling to old certitudes in the throes of apocalyptic theology, in spite of the daily facts that remind us that we’ve jumped off the cliff a while ago. Here comes a 21st c historical perspective on the long XX century of dreaming up wild galactic-scale visions about the present via the far future and across cosmic silences, not ignoring both the divergences and the ongoing dialogue btw Mutually Assured Destructive partners, a worthwhile recuperative effort especially in light of recent New Cold War fears.
“Design for a space habitat by Tsiolkosky”
With a strong impetus from the cosmist undercurrent (what Zizek used to call the “biocosmist heresy”) the Former East or ex-Soviet Bloc futurological contributions from ‘actually existing socialism’ that previously got short writ, astronomers Nikolai Kardashev and Iosif Shklovsky finally get their due. I don’t want to give the false impression this book is just a collection of daring visions and whimsical cosmological fallacies – it accomplishes the prodigious feat of channeling all these disparate resources about endangered futures trough the lens of rapidly expanding (since ~mid 90s explosion) astrobiological (or xenobiological as it was called) exoplanetary knowledge. The conceptual break criss-crossing a historical (diachronic) backdrop rich in brazen technological solutions and initial responses to ever more darkly looming existential threats – takes us to precedents and first inklings of the idea that there might be something deeply wrong with entrusting the universe the mission to bring us back once we disappear. While examplflifying this novelty, X-Risk nevertheless eagerly recognizes the pioneering work of Milan M. Ćirković, Toby Ord, Anders Sandberg, Nick Bostrom and Sir Martin Rees that contributed to the establishment of a new academic discipline. At the same time, there is so much more to be said about a wider search of Non-Western forecasting institutions and X-Risks mediation with examples from the Global South let’s say, or Chinese Society for Futures Studies (CSFS)established in 1979 China with the role of “to serve the long-term planning and the modernization construction of the country, and to serve the progress of mankind.” or 1970s Romania’s Laboratory for Prospective Research (later CIMSVD Institute) and their Tofflerian romances.
Numerous mini chapters with memorable titles like “Bubbles of Cosmic Nonchalance”, “Eternalism and Its Discontents”, “Worst of All Possible Worlds”, “Tadpole Hedonists and Fatal Flower-Arrangers”, “Shitting on the Morning Star or the Uses and Abuses of History” remind me that we should cherish all the thinkers that know how to tickle the hyper-modulated nerve of maximally distracted 21st reading. Clearly one of the best ways to do it – is to zoom-in on hopelessly (till now) and shamefully lost metaphysical constructions (Stanislaw Lem once called upon the singular powers of Sci-Fi to peddle such disreputable – but oh so intriguing metaphysical beasts). X-Risk is full with the decadent splendor of abstruse, smothered in their cradle natural philosophies, full of enormities with blusterous cosmic (and comic) reach.
“Henry de la Beche’s lampooning of Lyell’s resurrecting necrofauna, entitled ‘Awful Changes’, drawn in 1830”
Adjoining are excellent B&W images peppering the text from a draft of dela Beche ‘Awful Changes’ with Professor Icthyosaurus lecturing the necrofauna, woodcuts of Tambora’s eruption provoking the Year Without a Summer and unwittingly creating the perfect conditions for Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus at Diodati Villa on the shores of Lake Geneva, including some well-chosen portraits of Eduard von Hartmann (“looking omnicidal”) and F.W.J. Schelling (“in his old age and cosmic wisdom”) or biologist Oka Asajirō (“considering omnicidal degeneration, decadence, and debauchery”).
“Bernard de Fontenelle’s cosmic theatre of throning plenitudes, 1686”
Whatever we might still think about giants of Continental philosophy (with either waning extinctionist credentials or pretty shaky perennialist positions), their Appetite For Destruction seems to have been fed by a very tenacious metaphysical Principle – the undead Principle of Plenitude. Years ago i read a fresh Romanian translation of The Great Chain of Being: Study of an Idea (1936) by Arthur Oncken Lovejoy, where the Principle of Plenitude gets ample exposition.
1579 drawing of the Great Chain of Being from Didacus Valades, Rhetorica Christiana
This and Alexandre Koyre’s From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (1957) potentially changed our understanding of how such cosmic modelling and reordering got us to where we are now. The Great Chain of Being is one of those books that will never let any figureheads of Scientific, Literary and Philosophical canon rest in peace. It unwinds the living history of Scala Naturae, patiently uncovering the seams that bound innumerable taxonomical schemes almost till Linnaeus or Darwin & Wallace, the glue that kept everything in place in grand preordained hierarchies.
“Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906), looking omnicidal”
X-Risk newness consist in striking a definitive last blow at this chain constricting the way Life on Earth and the supralunar realms were imagined under the grip of Plenitude, finally to be ruined after the idea of extinction had sunk in. X-Risk widens the non sequiturs and gaps of the eternalist principle of Plentitude, or the endurance of value in a universe that appeared biased in our favor (take ur pick: Weak or Strong Anthropic Principle) as much part of philosophical and theological clusters as for Leibniz’s theodicy, under-girding his whole “best of the best worlds” on the same inherent overestimation and smugness about ultimate default safety nets. One may wonder if – Schumpeter’s gale –schöpferische Zerstörung or creative destruction that animates capitalism blows hard on the same wind of teleologic justification for destruction and ensuing cosmic renewal that made J. G. Fichte remark “All death in nature is birth, and precisely in dying does the augmentation of life visibly appear”(The Vocation of Man – quoted by T Moynihan).
“F. W. J. Schelling, in his old age and cosmic wisdom”
While Whitehead is not present in any visible way, I somehow felt his mathematical approach to philosophical aporias useful in this altogether different context. In the unsuspecting way he discovers an age-old problem while rotating certitudes around almost like a Rubik cube, unceremoniously fitting parts that have been kept apart since ages, lightly addressing hampering axioms that constrain all subsequent chains of reasoning or their given solutions, restricting all flights of speculative endeavor. He does not try to eliminate or weed out the audacious brambles and thickets of reason. X-Risk also finds immense scope in detailing and following up on all the consequences of setting these finitudes free, in order to establishing what grounding beliefs subtend and unite all thinkers, no matter their school, language, methods or their particular apocalyptic flavor. What Thomas Moynihan in both rich detail and systematic search brings forth example after illuminating and frankly hilarious example from the most quirky, whimsical to the brightest of feverish minds – is their nearly complete naivete in regard to humanity’s cosmic no-rerun show. Up to a certain point, nobody seems to get that once they are out they are out. It is really gloriously and darkly funny to try and go back to the Encyclopedistes, or to the most pre-critical Philosophers as well as later SETI searches for humanoid aliens and see why so much of this intellectual bravado went so wonderfully askew. Only Marquis de Sade stands apace – but here he is on its own in many ways as he actively promotes extinction. This might also partially explain why reactions to the actual disappearance of the Dodo species (and others) in Mauritius or why Dodo-populated planets seemed possible to Bernard de Fontenelle (in retrospect), or why the dramatic realization of ultimate extinction came so late (possible clue: the Plurality of World aka Multiverse – Many Worlds theory sadly also fails the sensitivity-to-extinction litmus test).
“William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse, engraving of the Orion Nebula, as described by De Quincey. You can almost make out the skull De Quincey imagined the nebula forming. From An Account of the Obesrvations of the Great Nebula in Orion, Made at Birr Castle, with the 3-Feet and 6-Feet Telescopes, between 1848 and 1867, WIth a Drawing of the Nebula, 1868.”
This brings me to a possible consequence of this book imho – the way it counters the sort of abundance craze – Plenitude – as an expression of ontological excess, an ontology that seems to stumble on examples of non-experience or absence, or tends to avoid what might be called the wasteland of missing ‘windows of opportunity’ or singular encounters. An unrecognized dearth that might isolate such abundance on ‘lucky’ rafts drifting the void of space or forever lost in the gulfs between ‘island universes’. In some way Plenitude tangles as well with Cornucopian versions of ecological or eco-critical thinking. A cornucopian might have the same obliviousness to man-made disasters or to how everything runs its course if left alone (ex: neo-Malthusian COVID herd immunity or man-made conflicts that seem to help nature replenish itself). Thus, the faltering and lazy logic of non-interventionism runs amok and abstains specifically when worst comes to worst. What seems to be an increasingly growing problem of our times, not only disarray and suspicion about what is to be done, is a retreat from directed collective action coupled with nonchalant stand-back attitude. One cannot fully abandon excess – since austerity seems to be allied with the worst of capitalism nowadays, imposing all manners of punishing restrictions and well-targeted scarcity on those who anyway feel the brunt of a very bad deal. Technological post-scaricity Pays de Cockaygne’s is far indeed almost because it felt possible to the most prosperous and wasteful boomer generation, children of plenty and man-made extinction (mostly atomic) fears. It is easy to trumpet austerity on a planet where waste-disposal is being rerouted to second or third world and efficiency has become ever pressing and depressing. Before recognizing extinction as a fact of history and evolution, past or future, as this baroque abundance of literary, scientific and philosophical examples makes clear, it became a sheer impossibility to see something else besides basically bursting, agglomerated, populous celestial spheres.
Emblem XLII by Michael Maier woodcut from Atalanta Fugiens, Frankfurt 1618.
If this cornucopian view of ‘nature’ (here terrestrial thus inclusive of humans) where all new continents and all worlds & all planets are as full as the old rivers, fields or standing forests becomes a thing of the past, even at fault for being completely exploitative, genocidal and predatory, what lies at the other end? Future Orchidelirium might not be such a bad habit after all, only and only if it does not become a botanical hunter’s dream bioprospecting after the rare and valued. Otherwise ‘Herschel’s Garden’ might resemble the good old lawns. Embracing full artificiality and artistry we might still learn from pop cultural ET galactic horticulturalists as Ralo Mayer already explored in his E.T.E. Extra-Terrestrial Ecologies performance lecture. With the waning of plentiful plenitude and strategically retreating from it, even if unaffected by extinction ideas and the radical realization of irreversible disappearance – extreme environments and desert communities where the anorganic was abundant (sun and sand in the excess) also birthed say Dune’s Fremen, the Albertian Order of St. Leibowitz, crypto-communist Essenes or mothers of the desert or fathers of the wasteland in the Eastern cenobitic tradition (with whom at least presumably we could exchange apocalyptic or messianic pleasantries) could help along by entertaining ideas of infertility, of absence, of no return and a growing emptiness that resonates far better with the vast expanse of suddenly available exoplanetary (external ‘nature’ unaffected by humans) desolation.
A clearly applied and directed Pessimism is essential nowadays for any collective, distributed & planned action to take place. Scientifically grounded 21st c Pessimism has somehow remade itself and at the same time remade the entire cannon of Western thought by emboldening us to abandon all complacent thoughts about unswerving teleology insuring reserved-seats for the human species in this universe, while never abandoning the need to secure its further existence. The mind- argument, the rarity and preservation of so-called “sophonts”, of reason endowed entities as threatened species in a mindless (or valueless) universe is one of the strongest arguments of why we should try and change course and think about securing the chance of future generations to exist and prosper (X-Risk being a staunch supporter of Enlightenment values and universality if fragility of reason). Panpsychism or cosmopsychism etc as understood and popularized noways (by Philip Goff for one in his Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousnesses 2019) elaborates on a parallel history of “what matter is in contrast to what it does” – an alternative entertained by Bertrand Russell and Arthur Eddington, arriving at quite opposite conclusions to extinction thinking from what I gather. I am on very thin ice here – but I wonder how consciousnesses and experience as the medium of reality itself squares out with extinctionism at this very precise historical juncture. As such, any extended, immanent non-human consciousnesses inherent at completely different scales (gradients, levels, degrees, substrates of organization etc) – might be also confronted with this ultimate task i.e. having to probe its foreseeable disappearance and thinning out further ahead.
After reading X-Risk, one may finally breathe again relieved because one is not left to suck in another of the private an frankly boring musings and philanthropic escape plans of company founders attending to their favorite Sci-Fi fears (Superintelligences transforming everyone into Paperclips etc), that seem to ignore and completely circumvent the bountiful historical examples of past and present – of extinctions that go on without a bang, of non-spectacular threats no less important to human and more-than-human existence here on planet Earth (divestment from fossil fuels or the present retreat from long-term planning in spite of Green New Deal and Extinction Rebellion).
timespace coordinates: 2001 till about 2017 in the city of Datong bordering with Inner Mongolia, an old mining city that now has become poor since the price of coal dropped and then in the province of Hubei in central China where the city of Wuhan lies.
“It was selected to compete for the Palme d’Or at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. The story is loosely based on the leader of a gang from Jia Zhangke’s childhood, whom he had admired as a role model.”(wiki)
“A story of violent love within a time frame spanning from 2001 to 2017.”(imdb)
TimeSpace Warps 