timespace coordinates: Thailand, India, Singapore, Switzerland, France, Afghanistan, Nepal 1963-1976.
“The Serpent is a British crime drama serial developed by Mammoth Screen and commissioned by the BBC. The eight-part limited series is a co-production between BBC One and Netflix. It is based on the crimes of serial killer Charles Sobhraj, who murdered young tourists from 1975 to 1976. The series stars Tahar Rahim in the lead role as Sobhraj.”(wiki)
I wanted to post this 1970s exploitation style limited series – since it offers a particular sinister spin on the whole European or let’s say Euroamerican attraction towards the ‘fabled’ East. The East has been both admired and vilified (as exemplified in the previous podcast). The fabled and most of the time ‘rich’ (ik resource and labour force) lands of the Orient were coveted by colonial masters, each imperial power carving their own dominion and competing with each other with great brutality. The fabled East was pitilessly plundered (read about the original corporate raiders) and watched from afar with greedy, coveting eyes by the Western/Euroatlantic world entrepreneurs since Cristóbal Colón (who let us not forget tried to forge an alternative route to the ‘Indies’, and thus brake Portuguese spice monopoly). Since the hippie Flower Power revolution and anti-colonial liberation movements, various Western seekers started pouring in to Asia from the Beetles to Hollywood adepts of Maharishi Osho. It is important to realize that the 1960s where a backdrop for the ramping up and brutal US intervention in the Vietnam War, the vortex of Maoist Cultural Revolution as well as the 1968 student revolts. The 1970s saw the start of neoliberalism, the Oil Crisis and wage stagnation in the previously prosperous North, as well as start of a long Soviet-Afghan War (where the US started supplying weapons in its support of its anti communist Mujahideen factions). It was also the start of a very gradual liberalization of China under Deng Xiaoping that escaped the ‘shock doctrine’ that would hit Russia smd much of the Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union. South Asia, Nepal, Afghanistan and Southeast Asia were crisscrossed by a multitude of rag-tag seekers. What they did not not expect is a serial killer.
Jenna Coleman as Marie-Andrée Leclerc
There is a connection btw the maligned horror sub-genre of slasher movies and the high-class serial killer genre (all the subsequent ones starting with Silence of the Lambs), continuities that have been remarked upon by movie critics (Natural Born Celebrities: the Serial Killer in American Cultureby David Schmid). The Serpent does not seem to follow either, and his outlier position as an international tourist hunter on routes of the Orient also marks him as peculiar. He does not fit easily with the usual US celebrity killer either.
French actor Tahar Rahim as Charles Sobhraj
Sobhraj is good looking playboy of mixed French, Indian and Vietnamese origin. He is surrounded by beauty and gems. He is constantly code-switching and socially mobile. He moves from the rich aristocratic Paris jewel buyers to the gutter life of heroin addicts. He never makes a secret of his own felt entitlement for his crimes as a price for suffering racist abuse as a half-caste during his childhood and so seems to avoid any culpability.
There is this constant combination of jet set glam, trash and stylishness – all the trappings of an exaggerated Playboy 1970s lifestyle. Almost every scene is full of it, from cocktails to vomiting afterwards. Disaster befalls all the seekers and tourists that fall for the Sobhraj scam. And his scam appears chintzy has a fake gold glitter, yet always seems to work. Poisoning is the preferred method – and there’s an almost predictable nauseating unwinding of tourists victims first enjoying, their new-found paradise to end up fucked up with horrific physical consequences after that. Such collapse is in total contrast with their purported aim – seeking spirituality and escape from Western commercialism and consumerism. There is a very dark and sarcastic turn of events to this series – where free hippies, young adventurers and hapless pleasure seekers rub elbows. All manners of seekers fall prey to Sobhraj (played excellently by French actor Tahar Rahim), again and again. They do not even manage to start their journey for Enlightenment because there is Sobhraj introducing them to an ugly very physical bodily reality, making them puke their souls out. I know it sounds kinda vicious and I tell ya it very much is.
Maybe it is just me or somehow I find completely ridiculous all the Wuhan Chinese COVID conspiracies – while none actually find a target in the actual global jet-set. In our pandemic imaginary – there is nor dark bio weapon conspiracy nor ablame to be attributed to the global tourists flying first class and cheap flights well before COVID became a thing. A group that most probably became the first super spreader wave, but also most likely contributed to the huge yearly carbon costs of the global flight fleets. There is a definite link between an increasingly connected world and a tourist infrastructure that somehow permits such easy transport. Mutating viruses find it easy to hop on the world tour, with lifestyles & vacation choices unwittingly facilitating such zoonotic spill-overs from their point of origin whether we like it or not.
The Serpent series encapsulates this double-edged reality of tourism – as a permanent tourist trap victim and also ubiquitous hard currency provider for the local neo-colonial economies that became dependent on such hard cash revenues. This is maybe the most disturbing 1970s legacy – a touristic avalanche that has continued to flow towards cheaper & less and less ‘secure’ territories.
The horror that awaits is dressed up enticingly, it has a TV familiarity, or Vogue cover style and grows on a hedonist-narcissist substrate that belies all those spiritualistic quests for the mysterious Orient. There is apparently no overarching ideology behind these heinous crimes and tourist assassinations (no terrorism, no religious fanaticism, no patriotic or nationalistic dogma). In the end, one can say it is just about money, hard cash in an economy that will soon be ruled by plastic money (credit cards). Sobhraj is also a new type of entrepreneur – a sociopath happy to show off and at the same time live at the margins, between identities. He’s living off the dreams and dissatisfaction of tourist, stealing foreigner (mostly Westerners) identities and switching between Paris and Bangkok centers with great ease.
One can offer retrospective rationalization or even attribute a thin veneer of justice or an overall vague anti-Western sentiment, yet at the same time, these poisonings happen just because it is possible, just because people with money actually seek out cheap thrills and an escape from Western mainstream culture conformism. He (the Serpent) poisons his victims with dysentery drugs (in one eps) and then offers to help them, to them even more sick and eventually get rid of them when they are of no use to him. There is of course also a detective story or a Dutch journalist that nobody wants to listen to initially and slow dawning of the fact that he might have a point about all the disappearing tourists. There’s also this greater neglect and actual disdain for the victims by the very governments and countries they fome from. All in all it is an incredible fusion of glam trash, geopolitics, sexyness, tourist haterizm and new age 1970s hell.
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.
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 Warps 