Introduction
1 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (London: Continuum, 1988), 105–6.
2 Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, “#ACCELERATE: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics,” Critical Legal Thinking, May 14, 2013, criticallegalthinking.com.
3 “The Earliest Systematic Programme of German Idealism,” in The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1996), 5.
4 Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle, “Closing Editorial,” Super-community (online platform), e-flux, September 4, 2015, supercommunity.e-flux.com.
5 Matteo Pasquinelli, “On Solar Databases and the Exogenesis of Light,” 178, in this volume.
6 Susanne von Falkenhausen, “Self-Identity is a Bad Visual System,” Supercommunity (online platform), e-flux, August 21, 2015, supercommunity.e-flux.com.
7 Mohammad Salemy, “Art after the Machines,” 187, in this volume.
8 Boris Groys, Introductory Editorial to Part Eight: Cosmos, 385, in this volume.
9 Alexander Bogdanov, “Immortality Day,” trans. Anastasiya Osipova, Super-community (online platform), e-flux, June 17, 2015, supercommunity.e-flux.com; originally published as “Immortal Fride: A. Bogdanov’s Fantastic Narrative,” in Awakening—St. Petersburg 16, (1912): 497–505.
10 Rory Rowan, “Extinction as Usual?: Geo-Social Futures and Left Optimism,” Supercommunity (online platform), e-flux, July 31, 2015, supercommunity.e-flux.com.
Men of Bronze, Homes of Concrete
1 Badr Shakir al-Sayyab,”Myths,” trans. Mohammad Mahmud Ahmad, [1950]2013.
2 Madhloom to Le Corbusier, Collection Fondation Le Corbusier, FLC P4.2.22.
3 President of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation José de Azeredo Perdigão to the Portuguese ambassador in England and a trustee of the FCG Pedro TeotÓnio Pereira, May 1958, Nuno Grande, “Gulbenkian vs. Le Corbusier,” Jornal Arquitectos 250, 2014, 414–17.
4 Mina Marefat, “Mise au Point for Le Corbusier’s Baghdad Stadium,” Docomomo 41, 2009, 30.
5 Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, “Death and the River,” in Badr Shakir al-Sayyab: Selected Poems, trans. Nadia Bishai (Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organization, 2001), 33–6.
6 “Rivers and Drainage in Iraq,” in Iraq: A Country Study, United States Library of Congress Country Studies, 1990.
7 al-Sayyab, “Myths.”
8 P. Roulier and G. M. Presente to the Ministry of Public Works and Housing, Baghdad, April 2, 1963, Collection Fondation Le Corbusier, FLC P4.7.
9 Feature Iraqi Films, “The Searchers,” published by the Iraqi Department of Cinema and Theatre, 1980s, 97.
10 A. R. al-Saidi to P. Roulier, November 7, 1973, Collection Fondation Le Corbusier, FLC P4.013.
11 Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, “For I Am a Stranger,” in An Anthology of Modern Arabic Poetry, trans. Mounah A. Khouri and Hamid Algar (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974).
12 Michael L. Galaty and Charles Watkinson, Archeology Under Dictatorship (New York: Springer, 2004), 203.
13 Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, “Day Has Gone,” Banipal 5, trans. Adnan Haydar and Michael Beard, [1962]1999.
14 Hulagu Khan to Baghdad’s last Abbasid Caliph, 1258, in Arthur Goldschmidt Jr. and Aomar Boum, A Concise History of the Middle East (New York: Avalon, 2015), 89.
15 Hassanin Mubarak to the US President, Readers’ Letters and Contributions, Al-Jazeerah Blog, June 18, 2003, al-jazeerah.info.
Arsenic Dreams
1 Björn Brembs, “Watching a Paradigm Shift in Neuroscience,” Björn Brembs Blog, March 26, 2015, bjoern.brembs.net.
2 Joan Slonczewski, Brain Plague (New York: Tor, 2000).
TBH IDK FTW
1 See “Taishō period,” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org.
After Nihilism, after Technic: Sketches for a New Philosophical Architecture
1 Emanuele Severino, Téchne: Le radici della violenza (Milano: Rusconi, 1979).
2 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol. 1 (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1932).
3 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Collins, [1954]1977).
The Extraordinary Adventures of Guy Fawkes
1 See Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France, trans. Richard A. Lebrun (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1797]1994).
2 See President Putin’s latest bid to shut down “undesirable” foreign and international organizations: Alec Luhn, “Russia bans ‘undesirable’ international organisations ahead of 2016 elections,” Guardian, May 19, 2015, theguardian.com.
3 “Putin announces the beginning of the struggle against the ‘color revolution’ in Russia” [in Russian], Medialeaks, November 20, 2014, medialeaks.ru.
4 Rosie Waites, “V for Vendetta masks: Who’s behind them?,” BBC News Magazine, October 20, 2011, bbc.com.
5 For example, see David Walsh, “Confused, not thought through: V for Vendetta,” World Socialist Web Site, March 27, 2006, wsws.org.
6 Stanislav Tutukin, ed., The First Russian Revolution: View Over the Century [in Russian] (Moscow: Politizdat, 2005), 173.
7 Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1932).
8 Louis Althusser, Contradiction and Overdetermination (New York: Penguin Press, 1962).
Empire and Its Double: The Many Pavilions of the Islamic State
1 Rick Gladstone, “Behind a Veil of Anonymity, Online Vigilantes Battle the Islamic State,” New York Times, March 24, 2015, nytimes.com.
2 See Jonas Staal, “To Make a World, Part III: Stateless Democracy,” e-flux journal, 2015.
3 “Turkey’s role has been different but no less significant than Saudi Arabia’s in aiding ISIS and other jihadi groups. Its most important action has been to keep open its 560-mile border with Syria. This gave ISIS, al-Nusra, and other opposition groups a safe rear base from which to bring in men and weapons … Most foreign jihadis have crossed Turkey on their way to Syria and Iraq … Turkey … see[s] the advantages of ISIS weakening Assad and the Syrian Kurds.” Patrick Cockburn, The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution (London and New York: Verso, 2015), 36–7.
4 The coalition of #OpFrance consisted of Mauritania Attacker, Virusa worm, Dr. SAMIM, Man Rezpector, AnonxoxTn, V0RT3X, Mr. Domoz, HusseiN98D, Mauriitania K!ll3r, CoderSec, Mrlele, Don Maverick RevCrew, Extazy007, Black Cracker, hAxOr tr0jAn, Mr.Ajword, X-Wanted, BillGate, M-c0d3r, noname-haxor, rummykhan, Donnazmi, Th3_r3b0rn, Psyco_hacker, TIto Sfaxieno, Stingerbyte, Ghostralia, and Red Hell Sofyan.
5 “Islamic hackers damage thousands of French domains in opFrance,” Cyberwarzone, January 18, 2015, cyberwarzone.com.
6 Manuel Beltrán, personal correspondence.
7 The propagandistic nature of this campaign was effectively described by French philosopher Alain Badiou: “The confusion reached its climax when we saw the state calling on people to come and demonstrate—in true authoritarian style. Here in the land of ‘freedom of expression,’ we have a demo at the state’s command! We might even wonder if Valls thought about imprisoning the people who didn’t show up for it. Here and there people were punished for not going along with the one minute’s silence.” Alain Badiou, “The Red Flag and the Tricolore by Alain Badiou,” Verso Blog, February 3, 2015, versobooks.com.
8 Angelique Chrisafis and Samuel Gibbs, “French media groups to hold emergency meeting after Isis cyber-attack,” Guardian, April 9, 2015, theguardian.com.
9 Inevitably, this brings to mind the reflections of historian Boris Groys on that other historical black square, by Supremacist Kazimir Malevich: “Malevich’s Black Square was the most radical gesture of this acceptance. It announced the death of any cultural nostalgia, of any sentimental attachment to the culture of the past. Black Square was like an open window through which the revolutionary spirits of radical destruction could enter the space of culture and reduce it to ashes … Malevich shows us what it means to be a revolutionary artist. It means joining the universal material flow that destroys all temporary political and aesthetic orders. Here, the goal is not change—understood as change from an existing, ‘bad’ order to a new, ‘good’ order. Rather, revolutionary art abandons all goals—and enters the non-teleological, potentially infinite process which the artist cannot and does not want to bring to an end.” Boris Groys, “Becoming Revolutionary: On Kazimir Malevich,” e-flux journal 47, 2013.
10 Kareem Shaheen, “Isis fighters destroy ancient artefacts at Mosul museum,” Guardian, February 26, 2015, theguardian.com.
11 Justin Huggler, “Statues destroyed by Islamic State in Mosul ‘were fakes with originals safely in Baghdad,’” Telegraph, March 15, 2015, telegraph.co.uk.
12 “ISIL Destroyed Original Artifacts, Not Copies—Iraqi Culture Minister,” Sputnik International, March 12, 2015, sputniknews.com.
13 Sarbaz Yusuf, “ISIS transferred original monuments abroad, destroyed fake ones in Mosul video,” ARA News, March 4, 2015, aranews.net; Martin Chulov, “A sledgehammer to civilisation: Islamic State’s war on culture,” Guardian, April 7, 2015, theguardian. com.
14 Rory McCarthy and Maev Kennedy, “Babylon wrecked by war,” Guardian, January 15, 2005, theguardian.com; Marjoleine de Vos, “Archief in scherven,” NRC Handelsblad, April 4–5, 2015, nrc.nl.
15 Center for Environmental Management of Military Lands, “The Impact of War on Iraq’s Cultural Heritage: Operation Iraqi Freedom,” Cultural Property Training Resource, cemml.colostate.edu.
16 “ISIS to Exhibit Floating Pavilion of Art Destruction at Venice Biennale,” Hyperallergic, April 1, 2015, hyperallergic.com.
17 See Jonas Staal, Ideological Guide to the Venice Biennale (2013), venicebiennale2013.ideologicalguide.com.
18 Rijin Sahakian, “On the Closing of Sada for Iraqi Art,” Warscapes, April 6, 2015, warscapes.com.
A Knot Untied in Two Parts
1 Karl Marx, “The Role of Credit in Capitalist Production,” in Das Kapital, vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1894), 440.
2 FMS Publication for Collectivities, Reflections On Marx’s Critique of Political Economy (1997).
3 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2014), trans. Arthur Goldhammer.
4 All quotes from Marx, “The Role of Credit in Capitalist Production,” 436–7.
5 Ram Sagar, as quoted in Sher Singh and Shveta Sarda, “Of Work Riots, Political Prisoners, and Workers Refusing to Leave the Factory,” 112, in this volume.
6 Slavoj Žižek, “The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie,” London Review of Books 34:2, 2012.
7 Marx, “The Role of Credit in Capitalist Production,” 438.
8 Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (London and New York: Verso, 2015).
Botched Enlightenment: A Conversation
1 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, vol. 2, trans. Monique Layton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 42.
2 Mahendranath Gupta, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, trans. Swami Nikhilananda (New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1942).
3 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Thomas Common (Germany, 1891).
4 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Dionysus,” in The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 531.
Theorizing Deposition: Transitional Stratigraphy, Disruptive Layers, and the Future
1 F. A. Khan, “Excavations at Kot Diji,” Pakistan Archaeology 2, 1965, 11–85.
2 Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, “Changing Perspectives of the Indus Civilization: New Discoveries and Challenges,” Purattva 41, 2011, 1–18.
3 Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1996 [1993]), 1.
Of Work Riots, Political Prisoners, and Workers Refusing to Leave the Factory—Translated Through the Pages of Faridabad Workers News (2005–2015)
1 “Workers’ Placards in Delhi,” Faridabad Workers’ News, October 2005. All the issues of Faridabad Workers’ News, and occasional translations into English, can be accessed on the newspaper’s website, faridabadmajdoorsamachar.blogspot.com. Published since 1982, this monthly newspaper is written and distributed by a dispersed and expanding formation, in the industrial zones of more than 3 million factory workers. Each month 13,000 copies are printed, which travel in the National Capital Region of Delhi—Okhla, Faridabad, Gurgaon, Manesar, Bahadurgarh, Gaziabad, Sonepat, and NOIDA.
2 “Courtroom, Alias House of Betrayals,” Faridabad Workers’ News, October 2005.
3 “From Gurgaon,” Faridabad Workers’ News, September 2007.
4 “Wobbly, Shaky Honda,” Faridabad Workers’ News, January 2011; Harsoria Healthcare Pvt. Ltd. worker, Gurgaon, “Harsoria Healthcare,” Faridabad Workers’ News, May 2011; “From Honda to Maruti Suzuki: The Ways of Companies Today,” Faridabad Workers’ News, July 2011; “The Joy of Living Experience With Workers of Maruti–Suzuki,” Faridabad Workers’ News, September 2011.
5 “Suzuki Manesar Diary,” Faridabad Workers’ News, October 2011; “With Calculations, Without Calculations,” Faridabad Workers’ News, September 2012; “Towards a Conversation With Students: Rethinking the Figure of the Worker,” Faridabad Workers’ News Blog, June 9, 2014, faridabadmajdoorsamachar.blogspot.in.
6 “Life Scripting New Time” and “Workers in Delhi–Gurgaon–Faridabad,” Faridabad Workers’ News, November 2011.
7 “Everyone is Active—Everyone Must Act—And Let Others Know Too,” Faridabad Workers’ News, April 2012.
8 “With Calculations, Without Calculations”; “The Actions of Workers of Maruti–Suzuki Manesar From 4 June 2011 to 18 July 2012 and Beyond,” Faridabad Workers’ News, February 2013; “Astonishments That Destabilize Consensus,” Faridabad Workers’ News, December 2013.
9 “It’s Important to Search for New Ways,” Faridabad Workers’ News, July 2012; “A Look Inside Factories,” Faridabad Workers’ News, August 2012; “Inside Factories and Workplaces,” Faridabad Workers’ News, December 2012.
10 “20–21 February in Okhla Industrial Area: 4,000 Factories, 5,000,000 Workers,” Faridabad Workers’ News, March 2013.
11 “A Look Inside Factories,” Faridabad Workers’ News, May 2013; “A Look Inside Factories,” Faridabad Workers’ News, September 2013; “G4 Security Workers,” Faridabad Workers’ News, November 2013; “A Glimpse of Cracks and Leakages Inside Factories,” Faridabad Workers’ News, November 2013; “Groups of Workers Went From Factory to Factory,” Faridabad Workers’ News, February 2014.
12 “Laughing, Dancing, Singing on the Assembly Line,” Faridabad Workers’ News, February 2014; “No One’s Coming to the Table,” Faridabad Workers’ News, March 2014; “Saudi Arabia: The Third Wave,” Faridabad Workers’ News, June 2014.
13 “A Conversation With Temporary Workers,” Faridabad Workers’ News, April 2015.
Sharing Instinct: An Annotation of the Social Contract Through Shadow Libraries
1 All excerpts from The Social Contract are from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract: And, The First and Second Discourses, ed. Susan Dunn and Gita May (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002).
Blackout City
1 City lights have of course been turned out in the past (and in the recent past as well) to prevent nighttime bombing squadrons from being able to orient themselves and identify their squadrons by sight.
2 Noah Rayman, “See the Eiffel Tower Go Dark in Honor of Paris Attack Victims,” Time, January 8, 2015, time.com.
3 “Cologne Cathedral to Switch Off Lights in Protest at Anti-Muslim March,” Guardian, January 2, 2015, theguardian.com.
4 “Good” here may also refer to the relevance of a certain tidiness of public lighting installations: “The aesthetic value of a lighting installation is an important consideration as the daytime street scene suffers greatly if fittings, materials, or paint finishes are of lesser quality. The shabby appearance of lighting street furniture can send the wrong signals to the community and contribute to a cycle of grime, crime and decline.” From “Lighting Against Crime: A Guide for Crime Reduction Professionals,” Secured by Design, securedbydesign.com.
5 Thanks to Brian Kuan Wood for most of this paragraph’s thoughts and formulations.
6 See Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
7 “Millions Unite to Light the Way Toward Climate Action,” WWF Earth Hour, March 29, 2015, earthhour.org.
8 Shannon Palus, “New York Turns Out the Lights,” Audubon Society, April 30, 2015, audubon.org.
9 Ibid.
10 “Case Study: Advanced Lighting Attracts Tourism and Commerce to Ancient Skopje,” Philips Outdoor Lighting, 2014, lighting.philips.com.
11 Dave Kendricken, “Why Hollywood Will Never Look the Same Again on Film: LEDs Hit the Streets of LA & NY,” No Film School, February 1, 2014, nofilmschool.com; Geoff Manaugh, “How LED Streetlights Will Change Cinema (And Make Cities Look Awesome),” Gizmodo, February 3, 2014, gizmodo.com; Ellie Violet Bramley, “Street Lights, Camera, Action: How LEDs Are Changing the Look of Films,” Guardian, October 24, 2014, theguardian.com.
12 Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne: re.press, 2008).
13 Eugene Thacker, “Darklife: Negation, Nothingness, and the Will-to-Life in Schopenhauer,” Parrhesia 12, 2011, 12–27.
14 Eugene Thacker, Starry Speculative Corpse: Horror of Philosophy (Hampshire, UK: John Hunt Publishing, 2015).
15 Quoted in Julian Elias Bronner, “Anish Kapoor: 500 Words,” Artforum, April 3, 2015, artforum.com. Thanks to Ben Thorp Brown for making me aware of Kapoor’s use of Vantablack.
16 Amy Stewart, “The Work of Black,” Drain 10:1, 2013.
17 Ibid.
18 Esther Leslie, Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (London: Reaktion, 2005), 46.
19 T. J. Clark, “World of Faces,” London Review of Books 36:23, 2014, 16–18.
20 Alexander R. Galloway, “What Is a Hermeneutic Light?” in Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium, ed. Ed Keller, Nicola Masciandaro, and Eugene Thacker (New York: Punctum, 2012), 170.
Do You See It? Well, It Doesn’t See You!
1 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 96.
2 Ibid., 97.
3 Ibid., 96, emphasis and commentary added.
4 Ibid., 97.
Plastic Shine: From Prosaic Miracle to Retrograde Sublime
1 “Plastics: A Way to a Better More Carefree Life,” House Beautiful, October 1947, 141.
2 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 98.
3 Ibid.
4 Thelma R. Newman, Plastics as an Art Form (New York: Chilton Book Company, 1964), 30.
5 Of course plastics were developed in Europe and in other countries. This essay focuses only on the development of plastics in the United States in the twentieth century.
6 Newman, Plastics as an Art Form, 1.
7 See Judith Brown’s Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).
8 Susan Freinkel, “Our ‘Toxic’ Love-Hate Relationship With Plastics,” Fresh Air, National Public Radio, April 19, 2011.
9 See Jeffrey Meikle, American Plastic: A Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995).
10 Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Bantam, 1969), 292.
11 “How Your World Will Change,” New York Times, May 26, 1968.
12 Freinkel, “Our ‘Toxic’ Love-Hate Relationship.”
13 Forbon is a vulcanized and foldable paperlike plastic fiber created in the early 1900s by the NVF Company, later used in things like guitar strings.
14 Newman, Plastics as an Art Form, 196. Bridget Riley’s Current (1964), for instance, as featured on the cover of the 1965 Responsive Eye exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, captures the new, clean precision of plastic acrylics in two-dimensional form.
15 This machine aesthetic is also reflected in certain titles, like Dick Artschwager’s Dresser F45 (circa 1960), which emulates the serial logic of the assembly line.
16 It is remarkable how closely these works resemble the current fashion for 3-D printing, merely an updated and more automated version of these techniques. Newman, Plastics as an Art Form, 89, 20.
17 Hilton Kramer, “Plastic Toys and Ersatz Monuments,” New York Times, December 25, 1966.
18 The MoCC was at the time still located in New York.
19 But again, this has always been the case. Even with the pencil or pen, one shares creativity with the technology of writing. Hilton Kramer, “Plastic as Plastic: Divided Loyalties, Paradoxical Ambitions,” New York Times, December 1, 1968.
20 Freinkel, “Our ‘Toxic’ Love-Hate Relationship.”
21 Jeffrey L. Meikle, “Material Doubts: The Consequences of Plastic,” Environmental History 2:3, 1997, 291.
22 Freinkel, “Our ‘Toxic’ Love-Hate Relationship.”
23 The scene (not included in the book) was inspired by Buck Henry’s recollection of a lecture at Dartmouth College in the 1950s when he heard philosophy professor Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy refer to plastic as “a civilization that abandons its values.” Jay Boyar, “When ‘Plastics’ Became a Bad Word,” Washington Post, August 30, 1992.
24 Another problem is that, when it was first administered in 1976, the TSCA grand-fathered in all existing chemicals as “safe for use.”
25 S. L. Wright, R. C. Thompson, and T. S. Galloway, “The Physical Impacts of Microplastics on Marine Organisms: A Review,” Environmental Pollution 178, 2013, 483–92.
26 Ellen Gamerman, “An Inconvenient Bag,” Wall Street Journal, September 26, 2008.
27 Murray Gregory, “Environmental Implications of Plastic Debris in Marine Settings—Entanglement, Ingestion, Smothering, Hangers-on, Hitchhiking and Alien Invasions,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 364, 2009, 2013–25; Martin Wagner, Magnus Engwall, and Henner Hollert, “(Micro) Plastics and the Environment,” Environmental Sciences Europe 26, 2014, 16.
28 Chris Jordan, Midway: Message from the Gyre, 2011, chrisjordan.com.
29 László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago: Paul Theobald & Co., 1947).
Heart of Brightness
1 In 1984 Rockwell International bought the rights to use Ansel Adams’s photographs as advertisements. These images are usually presented in art school as examples of the sublime—however, the creative manager of Rockwell International detected a paradigmatic shift in the character and location of the sublime. Namely: that within the cultural imaginary, the sublime now also, or even more appropriately, accounted for the destruction produced by nuclear fusion weapons, the very same reaction taking place in the core of the sun. As a result Rockwell International began to mix the sublime of nature (and Yosemite in particular) with the sublime of technology (and tactical nuclear weapons in particular)—while describing both, perhaps in order to ease the shift, as “national resources.” Such a shift in the character of the sublime can be read as a symptom of the Christian God, and of the Trinity’s mutation into a hydrogen bomb, as a new mutant object of faith and the exact image of our own becoming.
2 This initial demotion of the natural sun also set the foundation for its subsequent reverse-engineering—where science would eventually define the sun as functionally the same as thermonuclear weapons technology. What such a counterintuitive inversion implies (intuition would have culture/science follow nature, the sun’s power preceding the bomb and not the anthropocentric vice versa) is that the sun is not unique—and that given sufficient resources mankind could, by way of nuclear fusion, produce its own sun. Should we care to, of course!—and then we could do away with the sun 1.0—Matrix style. We can see symptoms of this hubris in the various trends that set out to resist it: the raw food diet celebrates the sun as the sole means of preparing food, while computer apps adjust the screen’s brightness to mimic shifts in daylight, and the Paleolithic diet has given way to a Paleo lifestyle where people wake and work in sync with the sun while using stone tools. What each of these trends reveals is a certain anxiety over the resilience of the natural sun, when posed against the possibility of technological, man-made yet enlightened variants—although what these trends and their romantic embracers don’t recognize, just like the self-styled solar insurrectionaries, is that the sun was technological from the get-go—already usurped, and always already a priest-slave to technology.
3 For example: Linkin Park named their album A Thousand Suns, like the rather perverse coffee table book of mushroom cloud images, and Otolith Group named their Fukushima film The Radiant.
4 The very profitable ubiquity of this now Westernized, neoliberalized, Lululemon version of sun salutations, a once traditional Hindu religious practice, is a clear symptom and consequence of Vishnu’s mutation into a nuclear weapon. When we perform our sun salutations on a sprung wooden floor in a Williamsburg yoga studio we no longer worship the natural sun, and we certainly don’t have Vishnu, Shiva, or Krishna in mind as we move competitively from downward dog to cobra in our oil-based Lycra.
Surface Encounters
1 Titus Lucretius Carus, On the Nature of the Universe, trans. Ronald Melville (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1997), 102–3.
2 For an extended treatment of this subject, see Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
On Solar Databases and the Exogenesis of Light
1 Michel Serres, “L’information et la pensée,” keynote lecture, Philosophy After Nature conference, Utrecht, September 3, 2014.
2 Jules Verne, “The Star of the South,” in Works of Jules Verne, vol. 13, ed. and trans. Charles Horne (New York: Tyler Daniels, 1911), 276–7.
3 See his earlier work on Lucretius’s atomism: Michel Serres, La naissance de a physique dans le texte de Lucrèce (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1977). Translated by Jack Hawkes as The Birth of Physics (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000).
4 On the role of the “third messenger” in Serres’s epistemology see Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science and Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).
5 Konrad Zuse, Rechnender Raum (Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg & Sohn, 1969). Translated as Calculating Space (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1970).
6 See Zuse’s painting, Calculating Space (n.d.)
7 Serres, “L’information et la pensée.”
8 Contra Bataille, apparently the cult of the sun god in ancient Egypt was born after the introduction of the calendar. The abstraction of space (geometry) was introduced to govern the agricultural fields on the Nile delta. The abstraction of time (the calendar) was introduced to govern and organize agricultural seasons. The cult of the sun emerged then not because of a metabolic worship.
9 The expression “data bank” was used in Romance languages more often than in English. It suggests a relation between data and capital that disappears in the term “database.”
10 See Matteo Pasquinelli, “Italian Operaismo and the Information Machine,” Theory, Culture & Society 32:3, 2015, 49–68.
11 Michel Serres, Le Parasite (Paris: Grasset, 1980). English translation: The Parasite (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 173.
12 For a critique of “heliocentric slavery” see also Reza Negarestani, “Solar Inferno and The Earthbound Abyss,” in Our Sun, ed. Pamela Rosenkranz (Rome: Istituto Svizzero, 2010).
13 See Benjamin H. Bratton, “The Black Stack,” e-flux journal 53, 2014.
14 Paul Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010).
15 Technically, solar databases provide measurements of sunlight exposure for almost any area of the world. See the Open Solar Database, opensolardb.org.
16 See Natalie Wolchover, “A New Physics Theory of Life,” Quanta Magazine, January 22, 2014. The idea of dissipative structure was originally suggested by the Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigogine in Self-Organization in Non-Equilibrium Systems (New York: Wiley, 1977).
On the Documentary
1 As reported by Antje Ehmann, Farocki wanted to begin this text, which seemed too prosaic to him, “with a documentary observational furor.” We follow Antje’s suggestion of preceding it with an entry from Farocki’s diary.—Trans.
2 Cameraman Ingo Kratisch explains that this is a Panasonic AG-HPX 250, which was first used to shoot Farocki’s Sauerbruch Hutton Architects (2013).—Trans.
3 Farocki’s formulation is somewhat unclear. To clarify, one could say that the camera continuously films and stores up to three seconds of HD video while in standby mode. These short cycles of footage are replaced by newly generated pre-recorded footage and are only saved if a shot is recorded.—Trans.
Provincialism Perfected: Global Contemporary Art and Uneven Development
1 Terry Smith, “The Provincialism Problem,” Journal of Art Historiography 4, 2011, 3.
2 Ibid., 9.
3 Ibid., 5.
4 Miwon Kwon, “Response to ‘Questionnaire on The Contemporary,’” October 130, 2009, 13–15; Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London and New York: Verso, 2014), 15–22.
5 James Elkins, “Response to ‘Questionnaire on The Contemporary,’” October 130, 2009, 12.
6 For a strong critique of this idea, see Suhail Malik and Andrea Phillips, “The Wrong of Contemporary Art: Aesthetics and Political Indeterminacy,” in Reading Rancière: Critical Dissensus, ed. Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (London: Continuum, 2011), 111–28.
7 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1989).
8 See Okwui Enwezor, “Mega-Exhibitions and the Antinomies of a Transnational Global Forum,” The Biennial Reader, ed. Marieke van Hal, Solveig Ovstebo, Elena Filipovic (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2010), 426–45; Caroline A. Jones, “Biennial Culture: A Longer History,” The Biennial Reader, 66–87.
9 On the contradictory status of “individual freedom” within neoliberal politics, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 41–3.
10 For Marx’s critique of meritocracy, see Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 2nd ed., ed. David McLellan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Thinking About Art Thinking
1 Angela Vettese, “Introduction” in “Art as a Way of Thinking,” in Art as a Thinking Process: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production, ed. Mara Ambrozic and Angela Vettesse (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013), 13.
2 Saul Ostrow, Facebook post, January 26, 2015.
3 José Ortega y Gasset, Man and People (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 242. Cited by A. L. Becker in “A Short Essay on Languaging,” in Research and Reflexivity, ed. Frederick Steier (New York: Sage Publications, 1992), 228.
4 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (London: Continuum, 2004), 219.
Laboring One to Seven (Island of Terror)
1 Karl Marx, Capital Vol. I (London: Penguin, [1867]1990), 128.
2 Ibid., 388.
3 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (London: Routledge, 1994), 4.
4 Ibid. It’s a noun that repays the kind of attention Derrida gives it, principally for conjuring the future tense and a coming community.
5 Ibid., 6–7.
6 Marx, Capital Vol. I, 163.
7 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 150.
8 Bruno Latour, quoted in Graham Harman, Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political (London: Pluto, 2014), 111.
9 Ethics statement, HLG Contracting, hlgroup.com.
10 Federal Law No. 8 for 1980, quoted in “Migrant Workers’ Rights on Saadiyat Island in the UAE, Progress Report,” Human Rights Watch, 2015, 25.
11 PwC November 2014 report, TDIC, Worker Values, tdic.ae.
12 “Gulf Labor’s Observations and Recommendations after Visiting Saadiyat Island and Related Sites (March 14–21, 2014),” Gulf Labor Artist Coalition, 2014, 9, gulflabor.org.
13 Marx, Capital Vol. I, 390.
14 Ibid.
15 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Penguin, [1848]1979), 78.
16 Ibid., 97.
17 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 174.
Corruption: Three Bodies, and Ungovernable Subjects
1 Charles W. Mills, “Body Politic, Bodies Impolitic,” Social Research 78:2, 2011, 583–606.
2 I am referencing this key concept as described in Ernst H. Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
3 See Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand (Bronx: Fordham University Press, 2008), 5–8.
4 Dante, The Inferno of Dante Alighieri, trans. Seth Zimmerman (Bloomington: iUniverse, 2003), 224–7.
5 He began: “You want me to return to a despair / So painful that even before I relate the deed / Its remembrance is more than my heart can bear.” Ibid., Canto XXXIII.
6 Wallace Fowlie, A Reading of Dante’s Inferno (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
7 Terry Eagleton, On Evil (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 2–6.
8 Bruce Buchan and Lisa Hill, An Intellectual History of Political Corruption (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 2–9.
9 Jan Verwoert, “Torn Together,” 278, in this volume.
10 Buchan and Hill, An Intellectual History of Political Corruption, 2–9.
11 James Goodwin, Eisenstein, Cinema and History (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 199–205.
12 “Robot kills worker at Volkswagen plant in Germany,” Guardian, July 1, 2015, theguardian.com.
13 See Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide (London and New York: Verso, 2015).
14 Buchan and Hill, An Intellectual History of Political Corruption, 7–8.
15 Alain Badiou, “Democracy and Corruption: A Philosophy of Equality,” Verso Blog, February 14, 2014, versobooks.com.
The Fruitarian Dilemma: A Dialogue about Kissing Ass, Corruption, and Compromise
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, see goodreads.com.
2 John 8:7.
3 See Ondrej Brody and Kristofer Paetau, Licking Curators Ass, 2005, paetau.com.
4 Osho and Deva Padma, Osho Zen Tarot: The Transcendental Game Of Zen (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 149.
5 Election, dir. Alexander Payne (Los Angeles: MTV Films, 1999).
Torn Together
1 John 4:36.
Soaking in the Daily Curses: A Conversation
1 Hassan Khan, “The First Lesson I Remember Learning is that Humiliation Exists,” Index 2, 2011.
2 Hassan Khan, “In Defense of the Corrupt Intellectual,” e-flux journal 18, 2010.
3 See Hassan Khan, “Archetypal Intellectuals, Devastated Revolutionaries, Kitsch Mythologies, and a Writer Who Dared to Look at Herself,” Bidoun 9, 2006.
4 Hassan Khan, “A Monster Was Born: Notes on the Rebirth of the ‘Corrupt Intellectual,’” e-flux journal 57 (September 2014).
Traitors, a Mutable Lexicon
1 Humayun Ahmed, Bohubrihi [Multiple dimensions], BTV, 1988.
2 Enayetullah Khan, “Sixty-Five Million Collaborators,” The Weekly Holiday, February 6, 1972.
3 Ekatturer Ghatak o Dalalra Ke Kothay? [Where are the killers and stooges of 1971?], ed. Ahmad Sharif, Quazi Nur-Ujjaman, and Shahriar Kabir (Dhaka: Muktijuddha Chetona Bikash Kendra, 1987), 6–7.
4 Khan, “Sixty-Five Million Collaborators.”
5 Quoted in Sharif et al., Ekatturer Ghatak o Dalalra Ke Kothay?, 142–4.
6 Ibid., 157.
7 Philip Watts, Allegories of the Purge (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
8 The title is an homage to Pasternak’s poem. For analysis of this novel, see Shabnam Nadiya, “Jibon Amar Bon,” Translation Review 80:1, 2010, 134–5.
9 Taslima Nasreen, Jabo Na Keno? Jabo [Why won’t I go? I will go] (Dhaka: Kakali Prakashani, 1992).
Windjarrameru, the Stealing C*nts
1 Michael Taussig, Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
2 Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, unabridged (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 224.
3 Hoyt N. Duggan, Ralph Hanna, and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds., Piers Plowman, Oxford Manuscript, 88-9v, piers.chass.ncsu.edu.
4 Vanessa Agard-Jones, “Spray,” in Somatosphere, May 27, 2014, somatosphere.net.
Why We Look at Plants, in a Corrupted World
1 A literal translation of the Chinese zhíwùrén, referring to someone in a vegetative state. —Trans.
2 The “involuntary nervous system” is also known in Chinese as the zhíwù shénjīng, or vegetative nervous system. —Trans.
3 The “voluntary” nervous system is also known in Chinese as the dòngwù shénjīng, or animal nervous system. —Trans.
The Corruption of the Eye: On Photogenesis and Self-Growing Images
1 Original quote in German: “[Ich] sehe mit fühlendem Aug, fühle mit sehender Hand,” translation by the author. Unpublished during Goethe’s life, this quote was first published only in 1914. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethes Römische Elegien [Roman Elegies] (Munich: Verlag Dokumentation, 1974).
2 Ashley Montagu, Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 3.
3 Plant photosynthesis is probably the most abused metaphor and analogy of life, widely quoted across a diverse spectrum of schools of thought to justify naturalist ideologies. It is believed that photosynthesis is behind a process of energy accumulation central to natural equilibrium and the food chain. However, there are various ways the process of light metabolism could be understood. It could also be understood as a process towards cosmic corruption and fermentation, or as a process towards more “complex architectures of light,” as discussed in Matteo Pasquinelli, “On Solar Databases and the Exogenesis of Light,” 178, in this volume.
4 See the insightful account of Runge’s work in Esther Leslie, Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (London: Reaktion Books, 2006).
5 Ibid., 58.
6 Ibid., 49. In another essay Runge “reflected on the harmony of animal life, and here he envisaged every organ as an animal in an animal, which grows with its mouth on the anus of another and uses its excretions as nourishment and produces excreta for another in similar fashion.” Ibid, 50.
7 Ibid., as excerpt.
8 Ibid.
You Can’t Ask Everyone to Behave Ethically Just Like That
1 Marquis de Sade, Juliette, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 981.
2 Michel Foucault, “Maurice Blanchot: The Thought From Outside,” in Foucault/ Blanchot, trans. Brian Massumi (New York: Zone Books, 1987), 33.
3 The Great McGinty, dir. Preston Sturges (Los Angeles: Paramount, 1940).
Supercritical Decay
1 Clarice Lispector, Água Viva, trans. Stefan Tobler (New York: New Directions, [1973]2012), 34–5.
2 E. D. Davis, C. R. Gould, and E. I. Sharapov, “Oklo reactors and implications for nuclear science,” International Journal of Modern Physics 23:4, 2014.
3 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010), 10.
4 COVRA 2012 Annual Report, covra.nl; Hans Codée and Ewoud Verhoef, “What’s the story?: Using art, stories and cultural heritage to preserve knowledge and memory,” Constructing Memory conference, Verdun, France, September 15–17, 2014.
5 Cori Vanchieri, “Radiation Therapy Pursuit Leads to Unearthing of ‘Hot Bones,’” Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 82:21, 1990, 1667; “Death Stirs Action On Radium ‘Cures,’” New York Times, April 2, 1932; Robley D. Evans, “Radium Poisoning: A Review of Present Knowledge,” American Journal of Public Health and the Nation’s Health 23:10, 1933; C. Prentiss Orr, “Eben M. Byers: The Effect of Gamma Rays on Amateur Golf, Modern Medicine and the FDA,” Allegheny Cemetery Heritage, Fall 2004; Ron Winslow, “The Radium Water Worked Fine until His Jaw Came Off,” Wall Street Journal, August 1, 1990; R. M. Macklis, “Radithor and the Era of Mild Radium Therapy,” Journal of the American Medical Association 264:5, 1990, 614–18.
6 Keith A. Hobson, “Applying Isotopic Methods to Tracking Animal Movements,” Tracking Animal Migration with Stable Isotopes, ed. K. A. Hobson and L. I. Wassenaar (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2008), 45–78; Terence McKenna, “New details revealed about the poisioning of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko,” The National, CBC Television, April 6, 2015; Luke Harding, “Alexander Litvinenko inquiry: five more things we’ve learned,” Guardian, February 27, 2015; Ambassador Craig Stapleton, “US Embassy Cable: A/S FRIED AND FRENCH NSA-EQUIVALENT,” December 12, 2006, reprinted in Guardian, December 1, 2010; Roland E. Langford, Introduction to Weapons of Mass Destruction: Radiological, Chemical, and Biological (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2004), 84.
7 Georges Bataille, “Van Gogh as Prometheus” (1937), October 36, 1986, 59.
8 “Medical X-ray Imaging,” US Food & Drug Administration, fda.gov; “Radioisotopes in Medicine,” World Nuclear Association, world-nuclear.org; “Chalk River makes 1st isotopes in 15 months,” CBC News, August 18, 2010.
9 Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, [1954]1977), 311–12.
10 Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene,” Nature 519, 2015, 174; Corbin Allardice and Edward R. Trapnell, “The First Pile” (1946), International Atomic Energy Agency Bulletin 4:0, 1962; Elizabeth DeLoughrey, “Heliotropes: Solar Ecologies and Pacific Radiations,” in Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, ed. Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Turk, Toaster, Task Rabbit
1 See “Amazon Mechanical Turk,” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org.
2 Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” Mute 1:3, 1995.
3 The header read: “We’re facing twenty-five years of prosperity, freedom, and a better environment for the whole world. You got a problem with that?” Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden, “The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980–2020,” Wired, July 1, 1997.
4 Social theorist Jaron Lanier points to the case of Instagram, sold for a billion dollars but employing only thirteen people, as an example of how the internet is shrinking the economy—clearly, Instagram’s “users” are the ones producing its value, yet their work is not formally rewarded.
5 From an unpublished text.
6 When physical states attempt to map themselves in this territory, the failure of this attempt at representation becomes apparent. In March 2014, the Danish Ministry of the Environment released a one-to-one topographical map of the entire country of Denmark in Minecraft, only to have it attacked by American hackers within two weeks. The hackers smuggled game “dynamite” into the map, planted American flags, and razed entire cities.
7 It is no accident that this is the name for it, and a sandbox is where children play.
8 Lacan argues that since babies cannot conceptualize ambivalence, they split the image of the mother into the “good” nurturing mother and the “bad” absent mother.
9 “In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.” Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” Los Anales de Buenos Aires 1:3, 1946.
10 Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991).
11 Quoted in “The Futures That Have Already Happened,” Economist, December 2003.
12 Barbrook and Cameron, “The Californian Ideology.”
13 In Baotou, Mongolia, the byproduct of rare earth mineral mining has created a vast toxic lake that spans several kilometers. Baotou’s main exports are neodymium—used to produce lightweight magnets for in-ear headphones, cell phone microphones, and computer hard drives—and cerium oxide, mostly used to polish touchscreens on smartphones and tablets. One Kindle consumes the resources of four dozen books and has the carbon footprint of a hundred.
14 General Motors and John Deere have argued that copyright law cannot conflate ownership of a vehicle with ownership of the underlying computer software. In response, lawmakers in Minnesota and New York have introduced “Fair Repair” legislation that asserts an owner’s right to repair electronic equipment they’ve purchased.
15 The UAE has deemed that there is no righteous reason for humans to travel to Mars; were Muslims to perish attempting the trip, their death would be considered akin to suicide. Reportedly, around 500 Saudis and other Arabs applied online for the Mars One mission (the first prospective Martian colony, the brainchild of a Dutch company).
16 See Tony Wood, “Reserve Armies of the Imagination,” New Left Review 82, 2013.
17 To paraphrase Kerstin Stakemeier, “Lunch Bytes: On Art and Digital Media” conference, March 2015, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.
18 As suggested by Philipp Ekardt, “Lunch Bytes” conference.
19 Emily Apter, “On Oneworldedness: Or Paranoia as a World System,” American Literary History, vol. 18, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 365–89.
20 “Lunch Bytes” conference.
The Alchemic Digital, the Planetary Elemental
1 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (London: Continuum, 2004), 454.
2 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Techniques of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomiselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 61.
3 Arduino Production Factory Tour, YouTube, March 20, 2014, youtube.com.
4 Thank you to Ryan Bishop for reminding me about the mythological connotations of the medieval alchemic elements.
5 Tom Holert, Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle, Introductory Editorial to Part Three: Politics of Shine, 127, in this volume.
6 Paul-Jacques R. Malouin, “Alchemy,” The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert: Collaborative Translation Project, trans. Lauren Yoder (Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2003); “Alchimie,” Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 1 (Paris, 1751). For an alternative take on alchemy and digital practices, see Denisa Kera, “Conflict-Free Minerals and Open Source Hardware: Homunculus or Minerals Baby?” “The Media of the Earth” panel, transmediale festival, February 1, 2015, Berlin, available on YouTube, youtube.com.
7 Abelardo Gil-Fournier, Mineral Vision, 2015, abelardogfournier.org.
8 Roger Caillois, The Writing of Stones, trans. Barbara Bray (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985).
9 Hannah Devlin, “Gold in faeces ‘is worth millions and could save the environment,’” Guardian, March 23, 2015, theguardian.com.
10 Erin Griffth and Dan Primack, “The Age of Unicorns,” Fortune, January 22, 2015. Thanks to Geraldine Juarez for the heads-up on this theme. On money’s mythic contexts in relation to figures such as the Trickster, the Devil, and the Fool, see Angus Cameron, “Money’s unholy trinity: Devil, trickster, fool,” Culture and Organization 22:1, 2016.
11 “Magic,” The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert: Collaborative Translation Project, trans. Steve Harris (Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2010). “Magie,” Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 9, Paris, 1765.
12 Unknown Fields, Rare Earthenware, 2014, unknownfieldsdivision.com.
13 Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “On ‘Sourcery,’ or, Code as Fetish,” Configurations 16:3, 2008, 299–324.
14 See Benedict Singleton, “The Maximum Jailbreak,” e-flux journal 46, 2013.
15 “Magic,” The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert.
16 Ned Rossiter, “Materialities of software: logistics, labour, infrastructure,” in Advancing Digital Humanities: Research, Methods, Theories, ed. P. L. Arthur and K. Bode (New York: Springer, 2014), 221–40.
17 R. C. Kedzie, “Alchemy,” Science, 18:447, 1891, 116.
18 See Manuel DeLanda, Deleuze: History and Science (New York: Atropos, 2010), 86–7.
19 Kedzie, “Alchemy.”
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 Benjamin Bratton, “Chemistry and Urbanism,” Fulcrum 84, 2014.
Mercury Retrograde
1 Robert Hand, “Mercury, the Modulator,” in Essays on Astrology (Atglen, PA: Schiffer, 1982).
2 Rob Horning, “The Accidental Bricoleurs,” n+1, June 3, 2011, nplusonemag.com.
3 Even in terms of price: buying a dress on Kim Kardashian Hollywood costs the same as buying one at Forever 21, and is much more efficient; you don’t have to go through the trouble of buying it, putting it on your body, photographing yourself in it, and putting it on Instagram—it’s already inside your phone.
4 Hand, “Mercury, the Modulator.”
5 Gilles Lipovetsky, Empire of Fashion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
6 Sam Levinson, “Astrologer Says Mercury Retrograde Is Going To Mess Up Your New iPhone,” Elite Daily, October 8, 2014, elitedaily.com.
7 Hand, “Mercury, the Modulator.”
ARGUS-IS: An Almost Cock-and-Bull Story
1 Rise of the Drones, PBS Video, January 23, 2013, video.pbs.org.
2 Jay Stanley, “Drone ‘Nightmare Scenario’ Now Has a Name: ARGUS,” ACLU, February 21, 2013, aclu.org.
3 “The head of Argus (as with Stars the Skies) / Was compass’d round, and wore an hundred eyes. / But two by turns their lids in slumber steep; / The rest on duty still their station keep.” Ovid, The Metamorphoses, Book 1, trans. Sir Samuel Garth, John Dryden, et al. (1717).
4 Ned Smith, “Solar-powered UAV Can Stay Aloft 5 Years,” NBC News, September 22, 2010, nbcnews.com.
5 Paul Baran, “On distributed Communications: I. Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks,” Memorandum RM-3420-PR, prepared for the United States Air Force Project RAND (Santa Monica: The RAND Corporation, 1964).
6 “An Evening with Paul Baran, in Conversation with Henry Lowood,” YouTube video, December 20, 2011, youtube.com.
7 David C. Mowery and Timothy Simcoe, “Is the Internet a U.S. Invention? – An Economic and Technological History of Computer Networking,” Research Policy 31:8–9, 2002, 1369–87.
8 Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt (W. W. Norton & Company, 2014).
9 Jerry Adler, “Raging Bulls: How Wall Street Got Addicted to High-speed Trading,” Wired, March 8, 2012, wired.com.
10 See internet.org/about.
11 Ibid.
12 Quentin Hardy, “A Talk With Simon Head, Author of ‘Mindless: Smarter Machines Are Making Dumber Humans,’” New York Times Bits blog, April 12, 2014, bits.blogs.nytimes.com.
13 Zeynep Tufekci, “The Machines are Coming,” New York Times, April 18, 2015, nytimes.com.
14 Slava Gerovitch, “InterNyet: Why the Soviet Union did not build a nationwide computer network,” History and Technology 24:4, December 2008.
15 Ibid.
16 Anatolii I. Kitov, “Chelovek, kotoryi vynes kibernetiku iz sekretnoi biblioteki,” Komp’iuterra 43, 1996.
17 Gerovitch, “InterNyet.”
18 Slava Gerovitch, “The Cybernetics Scare and the Origins of the Internet,” Baltic Worlds II:1, 2009.
Eating Glass: The New Propaganda
1 Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (New York: Vintage, 1965).
2 George Soros, “A Partnership with China to Avoid World War,” New York Review of Books, July 9, 2015, nybooks.com.
3 Pankaj Mishra, “How to think about Islamic State,” Guardian, July 24, 2015, theguardian.com.
4 In multilateral technocracy, the unelected finance expert has emerged as an ideal-type politician, binding each and every part of the system—including fiscal and monetary governance—to strictly obeyed standards and rules. Technocratic governance, as a political model, can only with great difficulty hold out against the Schmittian lure of the friend–enemy construction exploited by the right-wing populists. Worse, it can, as the Greece–Germany example demonstrates, itself become the vehicle of such a dynamic: financial rules and regulations are then used to “mentally waterboard” (Guardian) the disobedient country, crossing a line from conditions to sanctions. For all its obsession with protocol, technocratic governance can’t offer its members a spiritual and ideological unity which binds them to unwritten rules of mutual ethics, care, and loyalty. In the end, technocracy is a dream world without anything to dream of.
5 Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s former finance minister, reported his confrontations with the Eurogroup that was handling the Greek loans. When Varoufakis tried to present his and Greece’s ideas about austerity and debt restructuring, he was “faced with blank stares. It is as if you haven’t spoken. What you say is independent of what they say. You might as well have sung the Swedish national anthem.” Harry Lambert, “Yanis Varoufakis full transcript: our battle to save Greece,” New Statesman, July 13, 2015, newstatesman.com.
6 A set of counterfeit documents, purportedly belonging to the government of Niger, were key. These documents, which suggested that Saddam Hussein was buying uranium in the African country, were faked so badly that CNN said about them that they could not have been produced by a Western intelligence agency.
7 Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty, and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” New York Times, October 17, 2004, nytimes.com.
8 James Der Derian, “The (s)pace of international relations: Simulation, surveillance, and speed,” International Studies Quarterly 34:3, 1990.
9 Concurrently the US and Israel created an advanced digital weapon against Iran that did the exact opposite of “civil society activism.” Stuxnet traversed the web from a set of spoof football domains, delivering its lethal piece of code to the computers controlling Iran’s Natanz nuclear reactor (which was, thankfully, protected by anti-aircraft guns). The last leg of Stuxnet’s journey from the web to the reactor’s control panel was by USB key.
10 Planetary-scale computation does not discriminate according to intent or content. Its usage does not reveal anything of the like. This lack of discrimination is emphasized in digital tools like Dark Wallet, an anonymized and encrypted “wallet” for the Bitcoin crypto-currency. Dark Wallet takes encryption and privacy as the default zero-point of online and offline existence. Inventions like Dark Wallet, and the even more ambitious system Ethereum, draw on a rigorously objectivized idea of technology as embodied in the block chain, a transaction registry central to Bitcoin which eliminates intermediaries like banks. This disrupts further claims of nation-states, or geopolitics, on the ultimate objective or aim of technology. Dark Wallet’s Amir Taaki defended this principle convincingly, after Dark Wallet became flagged in an ISIS-related blog as a potential instrument for the terrorist caliphate to hide its finances. Taaki explained that, though he didn’t like ISIS, the technology is for everyone.
11 Lina Attalah, e-mail to the authors, March 8, 2015.
12 See “Putin answering Peter Lavelle,” RT excerpt, Youtube, youtube.com.
13 The OneState is a fictional sovereign entity in Evgeny Zamyatin’s 1928 science fiction novel, We (New York: Avon, 1924). It is an all-knowing authoritarian government led by an all-seeing “Benefactor.”
14 See Jill Dougherty, “Everybody Lies: The Ukraine Conflict and Russia’s Media Transformation,” Harvard Shorenstein Center Discussion Paper Series, July 2014, shorensteincenter.org.
15 Nadeshda Tolokonnikova, Comradely Greetings: The Prison Letters of Nadya and Slavoj (London and New York: Verso, 2014), 40.
16 Nikolai Berdyaev, Truth and Revelation: Prolegomena to the Critique of Revelation (Istina i otkrovenie. Prolegomeny k kritike otkroveniya), trans. R. M. French (New York: Harper and Bros., 1953), 14.
Cosmic Anxiety: The Russian Case
1 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, vol. 1 (New York: Zone Books, 1988).
2 Victory over the Sun, ed. Patricia Railing, trans. Evgeny Steiner, 2 vols. (London: Artists.Bookworks, 2009).
3 George M. Young, The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
4 See Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978 (New York: Picador, 2009).
5 Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov, What Was Man Created For? The Philosophy of the Common Task (London: Honeyglen Publishing/L’Âge d’Homme, 1990).
Second Advents: On the Issue of Planning in Contemporary Art
1 Kazimir Malevich, “Suprematizm. 34 risunka” in Dmitrii Sarabianov, Kazimir Malevich and His Art, 1900–1930 (Vitebsk: Unovis, 1920), trans. Dr. John F. Bowlt in Malevich, catalog for exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1989.
2 Kasimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World: The Manifesto of Suprematism (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003).
3 See Boris Groys, “Cosmic Anxiety: The Russian Case,” 387–91, in this volume; Boris Groys, “Immortal Bodies,” in Going Public (Berlin: Sternberg Press, e-flux journal, 2010), 152–68.
Why Preserve the Name “Human”?
1 This direction of research is developed in actor-network theory, cyberfeminism, and geophysical theories of the Anthropocene.
2 Evald Ilyenkov, “Kosmologija dukha” [Cosmology of mind], in Filosofija i Kultura [Philosophy and Culture] (Moscow: Izdatelstvo Politicheskoy Literaturi, 1991), 415–37.
3 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (London: Continuum, 2009).
4 Ilyenkov, “Kosmologija dukha,” 421.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., 435.
Look Above, the Sky is Falling: Humanity before and after the End of the World
1 This is a belief that can also be found in other geographical regions, for example among the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea. See Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Is There Any World to Come?,” 455–61, in this volume, for a compilation of and extrapolation on many similar cosmogonies.
2 Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, who hold positions in climatology and global change science in the geography department at University College of London, have recently proposed 1610 as the beginning of the Anthropocene. See Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene,” Nature 519, 2015, 171–80.
3 Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010).
4 Ibid.
5 See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Jealous Potter (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988).
6 See Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics, vols. 1 and 2, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010/2011); these volumes might well serve as a guide to understanding, and hopefully avoiding, this thorny path.
7 See Abu Bakr Naji, The Management of Savagery: The Most Critical Stage Through Which the Umma Must Pass, trans. William McCants (Harvard: John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at the Harvard University, 2006).
8 Alongside Stengers’s Cosmopolitics series, Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture may very well be the first book of cosmopolitical historiography, at least in the moments in which, in order to think such ontological evolution, it appears to bridge anthropology with historiography.
Uncommoning Nature
1 I will use examples of events and conditions of life in Latin America because it is the space that I am familiar with. However, the anthropo-not-seen is an event throughout the planet.
2 Karolina Sobecka, “Last Clouds,” in Art in the Anthropocene, ed. Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015), 215.
3 Dorion Sagan, “The Human Is More than Human: Interspecies Communities and the New ‘Facts of Life,’” Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology website, April 24, 2011, culanth.org.
4 Donna Haraway, “The Promise of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 314; Marilyn Strathern and Carol MacCormack, eds., Nature, Culture, and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
5 Divergence is a notion I borrow from Isabelle Stengers. It refers to the constitutive difference that makes practices what they are as they connect across difference, even ontological difference. See Isabelle Stengers and Philippe Pignarre, Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell, trans. Andrew Goffey (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011).
6 “Vaca Muerta, Una Situación Urgente Que No da Para Más,” Argenpress, October 7, 2014, argenpress.info; and “Un Viaje a las Entrañas de Vaca Muerta, el Futuro Energético del País,” Misiones Online, March 7, 2015, misionesonline.net. “Ixofijmogen” is the Mapuche concept of “biodiversity.”
7 Jacques Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics,” Theory and Event 5:3, 2001.
8 I have explained this in other works. Dwelling across more than one and less than many worlds, practices may enact not-only entities: other-than-human beings emerge not only as such, but also as nature and humans. See Marisol de la Cadena, “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes,” Cultural Anthropology 25:2, May 2010; and Marisol de la Cadena, Earth Beings (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).
9 Marisol de la Cadena, “Runa: Human But Not Only,” Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4:2, 2014.
10 Gilles Deleuze, “Bartleby, ou la Formule,” in Critique et Clinique (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1993), 89–114.
11 Another example of a similar relational materiality: peasants in the Isthmus of Juchitán (Oaxaca, Mexico) have rejected the installation of windmills which would transform the relationship between air, birds, ocean water, fish, and people. See Cymene Howe, “Anthropocenic Ecoauthority: The Winds of Oaxaca,” Anthropological Quarterly 87:2, 2014.
12 Annemarie Mol and John Law, “Complexities: An Introduction,” Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices, ed. Annemarie Mol and John Law (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
The Changing of the Gods of Reason: Cecil John Rhodes, Karoo Fracking, and the Decolonizing of the Anthropocene
1 Michael Marshall, “The history of ice on the Earth,” New Scientist, May 24, 2010, newscientist.com.
2 See “Climate Science of Methane,” Methane UK, Environmental Change Institute, 2009, eci.ox.ac.uk.
3 “Plate Tectonics,” “Pangaea,” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org.
4 “Karoo Fossils,” National Museum of Bloemfontein, nasmus.co.za.
5 Hillel J. Hoffman, “The Permian Extinction—When Life Nearly Came to an End,” National Geographic, ngm.nationalgeographic.com. G. Philip Rightmire, “Homo erectus,” Encyclopedia Britannica, britannica.com.
6 Shula E. Marks, “Southern Africa,” Encyclopedia Britannica, britannica.com.
7 Robert Turrell, Capital and Labour on the Kimberley Diamond Fields, 1871–1890 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
8 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15:1, 2003.
9 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 42.
10 David Johnson, “Rhodes said he would build UCT ‘Out of the Kafirs’ stomach,’” Varsity, August 30, 1967; Anne Harries, “Poo is appropriate choice of ammunition for Cecil Rhodes statue in South Africa,” Guardian, April 14, 2015, theguardian.com.
11 Connor Joseph Cavanagh and David Himmelfarb, “Much in Blood and Money: Necropolitical Ecology on the Margins of the Uganda Protectorate,” Antipode 47:1, 2014.
12 Cecil Rhodes obituary, Guardian, March 27, 1902.
13 Aimé Césaire, A Tempest, trans. Richard Miller (New York: TCG Translations, 2002).
14 Bruno Latour, “The Recall of Modernity: Anthropological Approaches,” trans. Stephen Muecke, Cultural Studies Review 13:1, 2007.
15 Nathan Honey and Isa Marques, Subterrafuge, 2014, subterrafuge.co.za.
16 AfrikaBurn, modeled on the Burning Man festival in Nevada, attempts to offer participants the experience of a gift economy for a week.
17 Latour, “The Recall of Modernity.”
18 François Jullien, The Propensity of Things (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 1999). See Lesley and David Green, Knowing the Day, Knowing the World (Tucson: Arizona University Press, 2014); Christopher Mabeza, “The Marriage of Water and Soil: Adaptation to climate by a smallholder farmer in Zvishavane, Zimbabwe,” PhD dissertation, School of African and Gender Studies, University of Cape Town, 2015.
Nomos and Cosmos
1 “It is important to note that cartographers such as d’Anville significantly reduced not only the amount of speculative topography on the map, but also ethnographic information with which earlier mapmakers had filled Africa’s interior spaces, such as the names of tribal groups. The map that attracts the young Marlow is the product of this epistemological shift: purged of hypothesis and tentative accounts of population, it leaves inviting and evident gaps in the knowledge of South America, Africa, and Australia.” Alfred Hiatt, “The Blank Spaces of the Earth,” Yale Journal of Criticism 15:2, 2002, 223–50.
2 Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene,” Nature 519, 2015.
3 See Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (New York: Vintage Books, 2006); William M. Denevan, The Native Population of the Americas in 1492 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992).
4 In fact, only months earlier, in January 2015, another scientific paper converged on a related conclusion, but starting with a very different premise. While examining lake sediment in Peru and Bolivia, scientists discovered deposits of metals consistent with chemicals used in the industrialization of mining. Recall that it was from here, in the depths of the Cerro Rico de Potosí mine, that a river of silver ran all the way to Spain. See Chiara Uglietti et al., “Widespread pollution of the South American atmosphere predates the industrial revolution by 240 y.,” PNAS 112, 2015.
5 Simon Hales et al., “Quantitative Risk Assessment of the effects of climate change on selected causes of death, 2030s and 2050s,” World Health Organization, 2014.
6 Only fifteen months earlier, in July 2008, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno Ocampo, had made a similar claim, albeit in a more familiar direction, when he issued an arrest warrant for the Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for his role in the violence in Darfur. Some sections of the media tried to deny Di-Aping’s legitimacy as a spokesperson by virtue of his Sudanese heritage—and yet, is it not possible that it was precisely his intimate knowledge of events in a part of the world so affected by colonialism and its environmental legacies that lent his claim not only legitimacy but a visceral charge of reality?
7 See J. M. Prospero et al., “The Atmospheric Aerosol System: An Overview,” Review of Geophysics and Space Physics 21:7, 1983; S. K. Satheesh and K. Kirshna Moorthy, “Radiative effects of natural aerosols: A Review,” Atmospheric Environment 39, 2005.
8 Michela Biasutti and Alessandra Giannini, “Robust Sahel drying in response to late 20th century forcings,” Geophysical Research Letters 33, 2006. For an overview see Alessandra Giannini et al., “A global perspective on African climate,” Climatic Change 90, 2008; Alessandra Giannini et al., “A unifying view of climate change in the Sahel linking intra-seasonal, interannual and longer time scales,” Environmental Research Letters 8, 2013.
9 Leon D. Rotstayn and Ulrike Lohmann, “Tropical Rainfall Trends and the Indirect Aerosol Effect,” Journal of Climate 15, 2002.
10 C. S. Zerefos et al., “Atmospheric effects of volcanic eruptions as seen by famous artists and depicted in their paintings,” Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 7, 2007.
11 See Adrian Lahoud, “Floating Bodies,” in Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, ed. Eyal Weizman and Anselm Franke (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014).
12 Richard Washington and Martin C. Todd, “Atmospheric controls on mineral dust emission from the Bodélé Depression, Chad: The role of the low level jet,” Geophysical Research Letters 32:17, 2005. See also I. Tegen et al., “Modelling soil dust aerosol in the Bodélé depression during the BoDEx campaign,” Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions 6, 2006; Y. Ben Ami et al., “Transport of North African Dust from the Bodélé Depression to the Amazon Basin: A Case Study,” Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions 10, 2011; C. S. Bristow et al., “Fertilizing the Amazon and equatorial Atlantic with West African dust,” Geophysical Research Letters 37:14, 2010.
13 See Adrian Lahoud, “The Bodélé Declaration,” in Textures of the Anthropocene, 3 vols, ed. Katrin Klingan et al. (Berlin: Revolver Publishing, 2014; Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2015).
ISIS and the CIA Vie for the Claim to Divinity
1 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), 3.
2 The Stoning of Suraya M., dir. Cyrus Nowrasteh (Los Angeles: Mpower Pictures, 2008).
Is There Any World to Come?
1 See Quentin Meillassoux, Après la finitude. Essai sur la nécessité de la contingence (Paris: Seuil, 2006).
2 Miguel Carid, “Yawanawa: da Guerra à Festa,” MA dissertation, PPGAS/UFSC, 1999, 166, quoted in Oscar Calavia, “El Rastro de los Pecaríes. Variaciones Míticas, Variaciones Cosmológicas e Identidades Étnicas en la Etnología Pano,” Journal de la Société des Américanistes 87, 161–76.
3 Orlando Calheiros, “Aikewara: Esboços de uma Sociocosmologia Tupi-Guarani,” PhD Thesis, PPGAS/Museu Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, 2014, 41.
4 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “The Crystal Forest: Notes on the Ontology of Amazonian Spirits,” Inner Asia 9:2, 2007, 153–72.
5 With some improvement in the moral field, literal cannibalism, for instance, becomes objectively unnecessary, since, with the advent of the cosmological era, animals and plants adequate for human nourishment appear.
6 See Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, La chute du ciel: Paroles d’un chaman Yanomami (Paris: Plon, 2010); Bruce Albert, “Temps du Sang, Temps des Cendres: Représentation de la Maladie, Système Rituel et Espace Politique chez les Yanomami du Sud-Est (Amazonie Brésilienne),” PhD thesis, Université de Paris X (Nanterre), 1985.
7 Gerald Weiss, “Campa Cosmology,” Ethnology 9:2, 1972, 169–70. “Many if not all of the categories”—compare this to the Aikewara exception concerning tortoises in the characterization of the pan-human state of pre-cosmological reality. These provisions are important because they highlight an essential dimension of Amerindian mythocosmologies: such expressions as “nothing,” “everything,” or “all” function as qualifiers (not to say “quasifiers”) more than as quantifiers. We cannot delve deeper into this discussion here, but it carries obvious implications as to the adequate comprehension of the indigenous concepts of cosmos and reality. Everything, including “the Everything,” is only imperfectly totalizable: the exception, the remainder, and the lacuna are (almost always) the rule.
8 Claude Lévi-Strauss, La Potière jalouse (Paris: Plon, 1985), 190–2.
9 Edward Schieffelin, The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976), 94.
10 That statement requires nuancing and differentiating in regard to several Amerindian cosmologies, not to mention the occasional exception to it. There is an ongoing debate on the extension and comprehension of this mythophilosopheme regarding a primordial or infrastructural humankind in indigenous America, a debate that is tied with another one around the concepts of “animism” and “perspectivism,” which we will not explore here.
11 See Günther Anders, Le temps de la fin (Paris: L’Herne, 2007), 75: “the pre-human region whence we came is that of total animality.”
12 “Ethnographic present” is what anthropologists call, nowadays almost always with a critical intention (although Hastrup has raised an important objection to that), the discipline’s classic narrative style, which situates monographic descriptions in a timeless present more or less coetaneous with the observer’s fieldwork. This style pretends to ignore the historical changes (colonialism, etc.) that allowed precisely for ethnographic observation. We shall use the expression, however, in a sense doubly opposed to that, so as to designate the attitude of “societies against the state” in regard to historicity. The ethnographic present is therefore the time of Lévi-Strauss’s “cold societies,” societies against accelerationism, or slow societies (as one speaks of slow food or slow science—see Isabelle Stengers), for whom all cosmopolitical changes necessary for human existence have already taken place, and the task of ethnos is to secure and reproduce this “always already.” See Kirsten Hastrup, “The Ethnographic Present: A Reinvention,” Cultural Anthropology 5:1, 45–61; Isabelle Stengers, Une autre science est possible! Manifeste pour un ralentissement des sciences (Paris: La Découverte, 2013).
13 An Amazonian metaphysician could call this the argument of “human ancestrality” or “the evidence of the anthropofossil.”
14 Those beings in indigenous cosmologies that we classify under the heteroclitic category of “spirits” generally tend to be entities that have preserved the ontological lability of the originary people, and which, for that reason, characteristically oscillate between human, animal, vegetable, etc.
15 “Os pronomes cosmológicos e o perspectivismo ameríndio,” Mana 2:2, 1996, 115–44.
16 The difference between animism and totemism is, in this regard, pace Philippe Descola and with Marshall Sahlins, not very clear and possibly not very meaningful. See Descola, Par-delà nature et culture (Paris: Gallimard, 2005); Sahlins, “On the Ontological Scheme of Beyond Nature and Culture,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4:1, 2014, 281–90.