… in January 2020 Greta Thunberg went as far as to specify just eight years [to avert a global castrophe].
Just a few months later, the president of the UN’s General Assembly gave us 11 years to avert a complete social collapse whereupon the planet will be simultaneously burning (unquenchable summer-long fires) and inundated with water (via a rapid sea-level rise). But, nihil novi sub sole: in 1989, another high UN official said that “governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control,” which means that by now we must be quite beyond the beyond …
Such predictably repetitive prophecies (however well-meant and however passionately presented) do not offer any practical advice about the deployment of the best possible technical solutions, about the most effective ways of legally binding global cooperation, or about tackling the difficult challenge of convincing populations of the need for significant expenditures [the] benefits [of which] will not be seen for decades to come. …
Why should we fear anything–be it environmental, social, or economic threats–when by 2045, or perhaps even by 2030, our understanding (or rather the intelligence unleashed by the machines we will have created) will know no bounds and hence any problem will become immeasurably less than trivial? Compared to this promise, any other recent specific and intemperate claim–from salvation through nanotechnology to fashioning new synthetic forms of life–appears trite. What will happen? An imminent near-infernal perdition, or speed-of-light godlike impotence?
Based on the revealed delusions of past prophecies, neither. We do not have a civilization envisioned in the early 1970–one of worsening planetary hunger or one energized by cost-free nuclear fission–and a generation from now we will not be either at the end of our evolutionary path or have a civilization transformed by Singularity.
–Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future, 2022, pp. 212-213
… Baba Yaga is also the name used by an Ukrainian aerial reconnaissance unit under the command of Ruslan Mazovetsky, known as “Barmaley.”
At the end of Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma two things happen. Dederer admits to her own monstrosity. She’s a drunk. The other thing is less predictable, Mark Fisher. Fisher lets her off the hook because it’s the system to blame for making us think our ethical decisions–who is deserving of cultural approbation and who of opprobrium and cancellation–are important.
The system makes us individual consumers, us consumers individuals. We are individuated as nothing other. And so the system elevates our individual choices to the level of ethical decisions. It makes them mean something but all the system is really doing by making whether we can stand to watch a Polanski film knowing what he did seem important is reinforcing the only choices it allows us, to consume or not.
Whether yes or no, our vote is for the system. Saying we have ethical responsibility as consumers limits ethical responsibility to consumption. Nothing more.
Cancellation is another spin. It doesn’t remove Woody Allen from the mix. The only freedom is to consume
,
still, what does this say about the freedom we afford the art monsters with whom most of Dederer’s book is consumed?
What has this to do, rather than with its cancellation, with the creation of culture?
— Dora Maar, Portrait d’Ubu, 1936
“Allow me to mention here that a stupid girl, one who spends the whole day picking her nose and lazing on the stove, and eventually becomes a princess or a queen, is completely unthinkable in fairytales! The imagination of folktale-tellers created an equivalent of male heroism in the characters of Slavic Amazons (the Russian Sineglazka or the ‘Giant Girls’, Div-devojke, in Serbian folksongs), but grubby, idle, and stupid girls are usually punished with death. Wealth, a throne and love are only conceivable as rewards for grubby, idle, stupid guys!” ― Dubravka Ugrešić, Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, trans. MS Ellen Elias-Bursac, 2011
I was so struck by this photo of Fritz Haber, I have done a … that thing where a lecturer or speaker shows a slide and then simply says, This is … in this case Fritz Haber. In the case I’m thinking of, it was Martin Heidegger which, in that case was a redundancy. The audience already knew it was … and met the announcement with gales of laughter. In the case of Fritz Haber I doubt that they would do the same or know him from his photo. This is Fritz Haber.
He is the first figure in Benjamín Labatut’s literary project exploring the crack in human experience, between science and literature, the void and singularity, the shifting imperceptible boundary between madness and creation, destruction and reason. Paul Barach (here, whence also the photo) describes Haber, after a note warning, graphic descriptions of war, on the German front in 1915, spring,
“Small, bald, and potbellied, … Wrapped in a fur coat against the chill of the late April evening, the German-Jewish chemist … In front of him were 6,000 metal tanks … At six in the evening, the wind was just right to put his plan into action. With his typical Virginian cigar hanging below his trimmed mustache, he gave the signal. …
“168 tons of chlorine gas was released into the world.”
The father of chemical warfare–without whom there would be no Zyklon-B–Faber won the Nobel Prize in 1918 for chemistry, the same year Max Planck won for physics. The prize was awarded for his discovery of a method of fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere, the single most important contributor to human population growth. Without the Faber-Bosch method, and the production of artificial fertilizer, only half the current world population is sustainable.
What I admire most about science is that it is completely unwilling to accept the many mysteries that surround us: it is stubborn, and wonderfully so. When it comes face to face with the unknown, it whips out a particle accelerator, a telescope, a microscope, and smashes reality to bits, because it wants–Because it needs!–to know. Literature is similar, in some respects: it is born from an impossible wish, the desire to bind this world with words. In that, it is as ambitious as science. Because for us human beings, it is never enough to know god: we have to eat him. That’s what literature is for me: putting the world in your mouth.
My lack of roots has certainly affected my literature. Though I’m Chilean, and can’t deny it (well, I can, actually, and do so frequently, mostly to mess with my compatriots), I don’t feel identification with my country, or its literature, or nationality. But I don’t feel Dutch either. Argentine, even less so, though many people believe I am when they meet me for the first time, because I share their typical character flaws. I’d love to say (like Bolaño did) that I feel Latin American, but that too would be untrue.
I feel like Pinocchio. Not the dictator
—I feel like the wooden doll: someone unsure of who he is, but diametrically certain of what he wants to become.
–dir. Matteo Garrone, 2019
What do you want to become?
I won’t tell you. Not because I don’t know, but because I’m a superstitious man. People should not know who you are, at least not really. And more importantly, they should never know what you want. Life is at stake in desire.
I write in English and Spanish. It depends on the project. And my fancy. But if I had to choose between the two, I’d take English.
Betrayal is important for writing. For life too. One must always betray something. And since I’m unwilling to betray my parents, my friends, or my country, I prefer to betray my tongue.
I don’t think anyone, anywhere, writes like Sebald. I reread his books every year. His melancholy and humor, the density of information that they hold, the beauty of his prose—which has a deeply strange effect, somniferous and hallucinogenic, that prevents you from remembering everything you’ve read, no matter how much you try—make him a complete exception. His oeuvre is an unreachable monolith, a summit that exits our world.
Sebald’s books (about which I can say nothing negative) all have the same absolutely characteristic narrator, who is very present: though he’s talking about real events, his gaze, and a horrifyingly lucid and beautifully melancholy perspective, drenches everything he narrates. In my book, that’s almost entirely absent. I try to avoid appearing in what I write.
… with Calasso: his books are a path to enlightenment and an aesthetic pleasure all at once, but they can also be rather boring, overly cerebral, dry, and theoretical. Erudition is like that, because it doesn’t regard entertainment as the only measure of value.
I’m surprised how “entertaining” Borges is. Such a lucid, winged intelligence that extends toward transparency.
A similar thing happens with Bolaño: he never says anything clever, in the sense that he isn’t crafting a literature of ideas. And yet, one feels the talent and the genius behind every feint.
What I dislike about poetry is the author’s voice, which is usually far too present. That exhausts me. I’m attracted by the impersonal. I prefer the rare beauty one can find in a good Wikipedia entry to the cries and cackles of a poet who feels like they must always relay what lies deep in their heart.
Sebald, Borges, Chatwin, Bolaño, Burroughs: they’re all deeply Romantic writers. I dare say your work is, too…
I don’t feel like a Romantic. Nor have I ever thought about what Romanticism might represent for me. Those ideas and debates that look to categorize a writer or aesthetic movement don’t interest me in the slightest.
What I’m fascinated by is delirium, by reason’s mad dreams and the excesses of thought. I feel called toward the contradictions that at once torture and enlighten us. I’m interested in chaos, senselessness, irrationality, randomness, and infinity. If that makes me part of a 19th-century movement, well, there’s not much I can do about it. I’ll never willingly include myself into any group. Unless aliens arrive.
your literature in relation to “the contemporary” in some way, … ?
I’m interested in the past and the future. There’s almost nothing contemporary that fascinates me. The best literature anticipates what is coming or rescues some treasure from the hands of oblivion.
There are better idioms for the contemporary than the literary. Especially now, when we’re so immersed in and invaded by the present. We have to resist that. Think of other times, other ways of being human.
The past and the future are far wider than the present. Comparatively, the present moment is impoverished, practically doesn’t exist. But we’re ailing with the present, and with a present that is particularly miserable. That the contemporary doesn’t seduce me is not strange: this is my time, …
I’m emailing you today from Tāmaki Makaurau where I’ve been visiting violence prevention organisations, and I can tell you that the momentum is growing. I’m invigorated by the aroha of people up and down Aotearoa, some who’ve never voted, or never voted Green before, or people who have been with us through many elections. …
wrote Marama Davidson,
then asked for money
signing off,
Mauri ora.
Ngā mihi nui ki a koe,
Marama Davidson Green Party Co-leader
I replied,
No, Marama.
Give up on carbon credits and marketisation of the ongoing disaster of market capitalism.
Use and endorse in party policy the power of the legislature to create a legal framework restricting carbon emissions at the point of their emission. Fining emitters use business to adapt to the legal framework.
UBI should be policy.
You join the ranks of the enablers if you do anything less.
Best,
Simon Taylor, PhD.
…
Kia ora Simon,
This is it. This is our time. The time is now for the Greens to change the shape and direction of the next government.
Today Luxon is backpedalling trying to rationalise how he’ll work with NZ First and ACT. But truth be told, he’s desperate to get into power – and he’ll do anything, work withanyone, to get it. Even if it means putting our country at risk.
which as a sideline is interesting, sad and ironic: the Greens and the Left by extension (see below) appealing to conservative valuesand risk-aversion, when taking a risk is what is needed
James Shaw signed off,
I’ve never felt more hopeful about the future of our country.
Ngā mihi nui,
James Shaw
Green Party Co-leader
…
which, receiving an automated reply, I answered,
I would vote for you if you dumped the whole idea of a carbon market.
What is the purpose of the legislature?
Introduce a legal framework restricting the level of emissions--at their points of emission.
Fewer planes, fewer trucks, fewer carbon burning factories, in fact none.
Use business and the market to adapt to the legal framework. This is the only place where a market is of any positive use.
Best,
Simon Taylor, PhD.
the Right Honourable Chris Hipkins vs Leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition of New Zealand (wiki) Christopher Luxon played on the television last night, the first of the leaders’ debates for this year’s election, 14 October 2023.
Jack Tame conducted what was risibly called (at the link above) analysis after the debate. Jack greeted Jessica with the embarrassing stupidity that, neither Chris nor Christopher, as they were interchangeably referred to throughout her moderation, but she had been the ‘winner.’ The analysis that followed featured an unbroken string of sports metaphors and was equally embarrassing for all involved, whoever they were.
…but who were Chris and Christopher? (one seemed always to be bigger in the shot, as if he had been eating) … the question was not really gratified with an answer. The sole gratification to come from the debate was its signalling of the end of adversarial politics in New Zealand. The contestants felt no need to distinguish themselves. And didn’t, either personally or professionally, either with their political or personal acuity, and neither were the policies of the parties they represent distinguished nor was any effort felt needed to do so.
Chris L, the Meataxe of the title, best described the differences in the party-line each was there to push (or pull) as their having the same aims but getting there different ways. He said this several times. It was odd. And, when it came to cogovernance, sort of like the guards and kapo getting together in front of the ovens … and exactly like that when it came to climate change.
… but then there they all are, including the Greens and Te Pāti Māori, Act and TOP and NZ Fi(r)st, the Meataxe and the Mouse’s parties, warming their hands …
No. They’re not warming their hands. They’re melting their crayons. It’s a colouring in competition. It’s all the colours of the rainbow. It’s paint by numbers but all the numbers are called Chris and…
It’s the political future of New Zealand Aotearoa and were it in the slightest involving it would be a nightmare or a gameshow if you felt the contestants were in the least engaged… but they are not. They are absent. They are Chris.
… and I had thought of illustrating this post with with a song from Aldous Harding’s Warm Chris album… or this,
… but it’s too familiar and filled … with actual meanings … or this, its meanings are more of the moment,
I’ve been reading Catherine Keller’s Face of the Deep: a theology of becoming. I came to it through Clayton Crockett’s Energy and Change (a little about which here). I went to some trouble to get the Keller. It was expensive and appears not to have had a reprint since the original imprint by Routledge in 2003.
And it was worth it. Crockett called it poetic, a poetic work of tehomic theology, introducing me to this word and concept that appears in the left index here in Hebrew, תְּהוֹם. Tehom has been a useful concept in the work I’ve been doing on cinematic time (here, here and here).
I’m currently working on the fourth section, “Theory of the Moving Image.” It’s the longest so far. It is for the reason that the theory gets interrupted by a detour that takes me around the planet and into space. You’ll see what I mean when I post it here.
Poetic. Crockett’s use of this epithet is in context reductive. It reduces Keller’s use of metaphoric association to ornamentation when the metaphors go down deep. I know, it need not. In another reading of poetic, as ποιεῖν, it would be flattering… then, it’s not a creative work, Face of the Deep but a work on creation, in the King James version, In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
Here‘s a nice comparison table for the Hebrew text, including תְה֑וֹם, with the transliteration ṯə·hō·wm, and terms that appear frequently throughout Keller’s book, elohim – אֱלֹהִ֔ים, which might actually be plural, מְרַחֶ֖פֶת – translated in the King James as “moved upon,” when it might actually mean that the spirit or breath hovered, shivered or stirred the surface of the deep, the deep – tehom; and תֹ֙הוּ֙ וָבֹ֔הוּ, that Keller transliterates as tohu-vabohu, formless and void but that might actually be chaos and chaos not lacking form but in motion, moving there, before the stirring on the face of the deep of ruach, וְר֣וּחַ, breath, spirit. I think here of Ruark Lewis, a friend although I haven’t seen him for years; an article about him here. Now, Ruark is a poet completely nonreductively,
I’m more interested in breaking language in an abject sense, so that the voice is produced between sound and noise to form a dissident and abstract outcome. Perhaps the shock of disabling something as primary as the tool of communication interests me more than some logical conceptual form. — source
I have to include this because it’s such a great photo. Ruark Lewis performing Banalities / Banalitäten at Theater am Halleschen Ufer, Berlin, 2003 according to the caption. Photo courtesy of Tanzcompagnie Rubato Berlin:
Tohu-vabohu – תהו ובהו
… might mean formless and void … might mean void and waste … is a play on words making use of Hebrew’s ability to express absence without negation … so, not lacking form, not formless as anything lacking … literally, desert without water (?) and so goes from waterlessness to waterful, with the deep of the ancient sea, tehom … might mean waste and emptiness … can mean bewildered and astonished …
…then, might mean chaos not as the absence of order or form or nothing (Keller’s book is an extended argument against the notion of creation ex nihilo) but on the way, in motion, as chaos tends to be… : Keller’s endnote ::: cites Norbert Samuelson, Judaism and the Doctrine of Creation, “Finding in contemporary astrophysics a more radical notion of creation from nothing than in “the Jewish dogma of creation,” he suggests that while there is extensive congruence between the classic Jewish teaching and physics, the latter “fails to capture the sense in which this nothing is a motion towards something” … (282)
… energy itself seems to be an ordering principle …
…
… to electrify the boundary between eternity and time …
Keller:
Centering time in Christ, the time-line at once lurches forward toward the end–and is pulled back by the power of the origin itself. “The creation” now serves less to open up a universe than to limit its significance to the timeless logos, or rather the dehistoricized past tense, the Christ event.
Creation itself, with its nonhuman multiples and materialities, continued to lose whatever intrinsic value it might have been granted, had the Church retained a greater sense of cosmological and hermeneutical diversity. Another quite formidable tendency takes over. Whatever dualism was overcome within the discourse of eternity–by eliminating any preexistent matter or chaotic Other–returns to electrify the boundary between eternity and time. The uncriticized binary of eternal being vs. spatio-temporal becoming now gets dramatized in the dominion of the purely eternal and unchanging Creator over and above the perishable world He created. But this world-stuff, as it turns out, is terribly unstable. It is constantly dissolving back into the nothing from which it came. (58-59)
…
Keller: … the neo-imperial orders of late capitalism foment a consuming hysteria, a greed, which indeed never rests … (79)
…
Keller: … the suffering of colonization and exile drove P to write a new beginning for the people … (160) [ie out of Babylon]
…
Keller:
As the third Christian millennium slouches forward, religious terror and counter-terror on the rise, all the avant-garde apocalypses, with their unveilings of God’s and other ends, posture rather quaintly. They repeat the supersessionism they mean to supersede. (229-30)
… recalls, all the lousy little poets going around trying to sound like Charlie Manson, of Leonard Cohen.
…
Keller: … differences are intensified precisely by being brought into relation. (232)
… are they? … and look at the placement of, precisely. Precisely shares a root word with scissors, as Keller elsewhere points out in regard to decision. It makes a cut.
And this is precisely the reason I’ve adopted from Keller the tehom concept.
… but, isn’t the cut suppressed in or subsumed or sutured by the relation of differences? for the sake of intensification? Isn’t the cut itself sufficiently intense? Is it not deep enough?
Or being deep is it hidden? Or being deep, and from the deep, tehomic, is it as Keller all over the Face of the Deep says genetically lost? I mean in the tehomophobia she locates as operative from the 5th century of the ex nihilo interpretation of creation.
This interpretation grew, she says it did, out of an heresiology, the discourse of and condemning heresy.
Tehomic thinking can be heretical for presuming a material (mater-nal) antecedence to a dominological creation ex nihilo.
I like this word Keller uses too, dominology. Better than dominant or dominating discourse. It means the imposition of an interpretation exclusive of all others, in order to dominate and impose a dominant theology. Albeit one based in heresiology, of which Keller makes good use.
… and on this point of discursivity, I read that Jenni Hermoso did not consent to Spanish football federation president Luis Rubiales’s kiss. He kissed her on the lips during the ceremony awarding the Spanish team the World Cup.
He kissed the whole team, I think. Hermoso rejects any suggestion of the kiss being consensual.
You could say the kiss plays over sexual difference, intensifying differences in an unsolicited, unwanted and nonconsensual relation.
… so the relation between differences … it could be one of force, one of fact, of an act and outside of discursivity, not within the consensus of relations and transactions that makes up the language or cultural semiotic. The relation in this kiss breaks with that consensus.
… but then it does so discursively.
… and nondiscursively.
What rules is it breaking?
Those of discourse that apply to nondiscursive acts.
… looking at it, it’s as if you can see the intensification. So that the image plays a discursive role in the moral discourse of nonconsensual physical relations … and of course there’s the dominological import of Luis Rubiales’s presidentship of the Spanish football federation. His (mis | ab)use of power.
Should Hermoso have come back at him? … should it have been plastered all over the press? … are the two things linked? Like a bad syllogism. Coming back at him > being plastered all over the press > …
Thinking these things I read these lines. A Fifa investigation was initiated. Rubiales responded with a meandering speech that railed against “false feminism” and the “social assassination” of his character (here).
And I find him fully responsible, both for his physical assault and for Hermoso’s press-powered coming back at him, because he ought simply have deferred to her.
I find him responsible because of his entry into public discourse as if it was a conversation, as if there are two sides to the conversation. When there is only one. It’s called discourse.
It’s a one-way street. Unfortunately despite all the talk about inclusion and diversity this is no assurance that it goes in the direction of moral improvement.
Claire Dederer has a good word for it. Static.
one-way static … in her Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, 2023–about which a little here.
Static calls to mind Giorgio Agamben’s statement of its provenance in στάσις, meaning a period of civil war in the polis, the Greek city state (same root). Stasis places citizens in opposition who are fighting about either the political or economic constitution of the state. The same could be said of discursive opposition and of the constitution of discourse in general, in public and at the level of the global reach of discursive media.
…
Keller’s final several chapters palled on me. And then a chill ran through me at her final metaphor. The metaphor arises from a close reading of Iyyun Circle, the thirteenth century Sefer Bahir, or Book of Illumination,
The grammar of command and obedience has been replaced by an almost cinematographic montage of metamorphosis. … Its theological saturation depicts no self-sufficient and discarnate transcendence but a radical incompletion, a streaming infinity. ([my emphasis] 238)
Claire Dederer raises this prospect, a moral calculator, online. The user would enter the name of an artist [for instance, Roman Polanski], whereupon the calculator would assess the heinousness of the crime versus the greatness of the art and spit out a verdict: you could or could not consume the work of this artist.
A calculator is laughable, unthinkable, she writes. But is it?
I’ve been doing some work on computus. As everyone knows computus is the calculation of Easter. When should it fall? Justin Smith-Ruiu, whose book I talked about here, generalises it to include the calculation of all significant dates (elsewhere than there, here). It entails the calculation of cultural significance, which as Smith-Ruiu points out is religious to start with, and deals with what appointments on a cosmic scale should be kept.
Computus evokes the history of computation. Every society that has had the means of mathematical calculation has used it to set the dates that ought ritually to be observed, days of festival and sacrifice, dates that summon people to activities as ordinary as the working day and as extraordinary as their entry into the transcendental realm, days to procreate, days not to, days to fast and the dates that are most propitious for either birth or death.
The implication is that this is the first role of mathematics, that before it came into the service of reason it was in the service of what reason calls the irrational, superstition and religion. Astronomy in this view comes from astrology as attempt to hold this or that social setup in harmony with the stars. Calculation has a moral role from the start.
Doing moral calculations of the sort that Dederer describes is behind all forms of calculation, from that by human reason to that assisted by computation from data sets, to that by the large language models of AI. What is calculated is primarily not what does come around again and again but what ought to, again and again. In the words of the song,
Harmony and understanding
Golden living dreams of visions Mystic crystal revelation And the mind’s true liberation
— Galt MacDermot / Gerome Ragni / James Rado
— an interesting online calculation of moral relativities, courtesy of youtube
we are all lightning I read the title on a bookcover
but we are all darkning
I’m reading Catherine Keller’s The Face of the Deep. I’ve reached the chapter in which she is talking about apophatic and negative (the two are not to be confused, whereas apophatic is more about the discourse, λόγος, negative applies more to the θεός) theology.
Writing in the fourth century Gregory of Nyssa has Moses enter the darkness and find God in it.
Keller cites this beautiful phrase, λαµπρός γνόφος, lamprós gnóphos, the luminous darkness that the apostle John is said to have penetrated. This source translates λαµπρός as bright, shining, splendid, as in splendid raiment, and γνόφος simply as darkness, such as of a storm on a volcano (at Hebrews 12:18).
… François Laruelle writes:
Black prior to light is the substance of the Universe, what escaped from the World before the World was born into the World.
Noir d’avant la lumière est la substance de l’Univers, ce qui s’est échappé du Monde avant que le Monde ne vienne au Monde.
Black is the without-Ground which fixes light in the remote where man observes it. Here lies the crazy and catatonic light of the World.
Noir est le sans-Fond qui fixe la lumière dans le lointain où l’homme l’observe. Ci-gît la lumière folle et catatonique du Monde.
… &
The Universe is deaf and blind, we can only love it and assist it. Man is the being who assists the Universe.
L’Univers est sourd et aveugle, nous ne pouvons que l’aimer et l’assister. L’homme est l’être qui assiste l’Univers.
Only with eyes closed can we unfold the future, and with eyes opened can we conceive to enter it.
Nous ne pouvons déployer le futur que les yeux fermés et croire y entrer que les yeux ouverts.
The global challenges we face today provide an unprecedented invitation for collective transformation. There is an opportunity to remember how to listen, see, and sense clearly from the heart. There are hidden powers within us that we have forgotten that await us in the presence of darkness. True vision is received through learning to see in the dark. I believe that …
