[-empyre-] Mushrooms and Ruins

Thu Jun 14 05:11:30 AEST 2018

Translation of Frederic's quote (found in an online book):

"There are two kinds of ruins: the one, the work of time, the other, of
men. There is nothing disagreeable in the former, because nature works with
the years. If they produce rubbish, she sows it with flowers; if they open
a tomb, she places a dove's nest in it. Ceaselessly occupied in
reproducing, she surrounds death with the sweetest illusions of life. The
second kind are devastations rather than ruins; they offer only the image
of nothingness without a reparative power. The work of misfortune and not
of the years, they resemble white hairs on the head of youth. The
destructions of man, moreover, are more violent and complete than those of
the ages. The latter undermine; the former overthrow. When, for causes
unknown to us, God desires to hasten the ruins of the world, He orders Time
to lend man his sickle, and with terror Time sees us ravage in the
twinkling of an eye what it has taken him centuries to destroy."

Chateaubriand, whose name is also a steak and whose book is about
Christianity, seems to have had a premonition of the Anthropocene, aka
overbearing human power at world scale.

I would be tempted to rewrite the last bit: "When, for reasons we know all
too well, Capitalism desires to hasten the ruin of the ecosystem..."
However, just blaming it on capitalism still begs the question of how to
repair the consequences of the overbearing power.

All humans extract energy from the environment, and one theory says our
brains grew so large because the technology of fire allowed for the faster
digestion of more meat. That idea helped shift how I think about everything
because I realized that at one level, climate change is a species problem.
We're in this together as an overpopulating species (the most invasive of
all?) and yet we have to start separating out the worst aspects of the
corporate military industrial realm, without thinking it would be possible
to just get rid of the corporates or the milicos or the Nazis or whomsoever
- even though there are lots of stubborn ill-intentioned individuals and
actual battles are inevitable. The dominant form of organization is
suicidal, and its world-scale functions have to be changed one by one,
detail by detail (energy production, food production, tool production,
shelter production, the use of all those things, and so on). At the same
time, in parallel, we need to work on shifting the very culture of
domination, because its many strands and flavors orient people even before
they enter the organizational structure.

John, I am disagreeing with you a bit here, but I think your decision not
to fly anymore had the greatest influence on me. After the abysmal COP 13 I
decided to quit playing the fool in the palace, look for a more stable life
and get into a somewhat more healthy pattern, thanks for that and
everything else.

thoughtfully, Brian

On Tue, Jun 12, 2018 at 1:43 PM, Frederic Neyrat <fneyrat at gmail.com> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Dear John Jordan,
>
> Thanks for having clearly formulated the alternative that we need to
> confront.
>
> To your last sentence, I would add:
> are we condemned to live in the ruins of capitalism? Another
> mushroom(-at-the-end-of-the-world) question actually.
>
> Concerning ruins and mushrooms, this quotation (I need to find the
> English translation) that a friend of mine sent to me:
>
> "Il y a deux sortes de ruines : l’une, ouvrage du temps ; l’autre, ouvrage
> des hommes. Les premières n’ont rien de désagréable, parce que la nature
> travaille auprès des ans. Font-ils des décombres, elle y sème des fleurs ;
> entrouvrent-ils un tombeau, elle y place le nid d’une colombe : sans cesse
> occupée à reproduire, elle environne la mort des plus douces illusions de
> la vie. Les secondes ruines sont plutôt des dévastations que des ruines ;
> elles n’offrent que l’image du néant, sans une puissance réparatrice. […]
> Quand Dieu, pour des raisons qui nous sont inconnues, veut hâter les ruines
> du monde, il ordonne au Temps de prêter sa faux à l’homme, et le temps nous
> voit avec épouvante ravager dans un clin d’oeil ce qu’il eût mis des
> siècles à détruire."
> -Chateaubriand, *Génie du christianisme*
>
> Best,
>
> FN
>
> On Tue, Jun 12, 2018 at 12:15 PM, John Jordan <artactivism at gn.apc.org>
> wrote:
>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> Thank you for your honest and fascinating story /// Makes me think a lot
>> about the fabulous chapter on cybernetics and management in the Invisible
>> Comitee’s TO OUR FRIENDS
>> <https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-invisible-committe-to-our-friends.pdf>
>>
>> This of course brings up for me the central questions …
>>
>> How do we create forms of life that no longer reproduce the machines of
>> capital. How do we desert the system that has no outside. How do we refuse
>> to become the fools in the palace, providing the progressive masks to the
>> institutions whose very life blood is in the corporate military industrial
>> realm…
>>
>> How do we not separate our ethics and aesthetics ( as wittgenstein urged
>> us not to do )
>>
>> Do we refuse to collaborates ?
>>
>> Can we hack from the inside ?
>>
>> Do we desert and build counter powers ?
>>
>> Or do we just cook up the poison mushrooms and feed them to those making
>> money from death ?
>>
>>
>> yours JJ
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On 12 Jun 2018, at 15:37, Ricardo Rene Dominguez <rrd54 at cornell.edu>
>> wrote:
>>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>
>> Hola Tod at xs,
>>
>>
>> I have been learning a great deal from the gestures and conversations
>> this month. And thanks Shulea for inviting me to participate.
>>
>>
>> Rehearsing Networks of E-contagion (the Shrooms Next Door), or from Cold
>> War Universities to War on Terror Universities
>>
>>
>> rehearse (v.)
>> c. 1300, "to give an account of," from Anglo-French rehearser, Old French
>> rehercier (12c.) "to go over again, repeat," literally "to rake over, turn
>> over" (soil, ground), from re- "again" (see re-
>> <https://www.etymonline.com/word/re-?ref=etymonline_crossreference>) +
>> hercier "to drag, trail (on the ground), be dragged along the ground; rake,
>> harrow (land); rip, tear, wound; repeat, rehearse;" from herse "a harrow"
>> (see hearse
>> <https://www.etymonline.com/word/hearse?ref=etymonline_crossreference> (n.)).
>> Meaning "to say over again, repeat what has already been said or written"
>> is from mid-14c. in English; sense of "practice a play, part, etc." is from
>> 1570s. Related: Rehearsed; rehearsing.
>>
>>
>> #Repeat #ToKnow
>>
>>
>> Electronic Disturbance Theater has always already been rehearsing the
>> re-harrowing of the digital grounds towards a practice of coming to know.
>> Then repeat. This process is one of networks being on repeat cycles that
>> are unbound and rebound to networks that prepare the soil and wounds for
>> something that will always be a rehearsal. A post-mycelium production that
>> is never fully known and can never be fully staged and presented.
>>
>>
>> Rehearsals build on rehearsals that are not strategic (the gaining of
>> fully structured performances that no longer need rehearsing) vs. tactical
>> gestures that seed networks for more rehearsals to come without any final
>> performance on the horizon.
>>
>>
>> #ReCycling
>>
>>
>> About a month ago I was invited to do a “Tactical Poetics” workshop for a
>> wide area academic and research communities at Cornell University, where I
>> am a Society for the Humanities fellow this year and the theme for the
>> groups general research was on “corruption.” In order to prepare for the
>> workshop I sent out email asking those who would attending what were the
>> current concerns they would like to focus on? The majority sent back notes
>> saying they wanted to consider what could be done to stop networks like
>> Facebook and Cambridge Analytica from data scrapping and using the data for
>> the micro-management of elections and its use of emotion contagion or
>> affective political channeling.
>>
>>
>> As I started to think about what tactical gestures could be staged or
>> what past tactical actions could be touched on to help the gathered
>> communities rehearse the question, “What is to be done or could be done to
>> counter these data-capturing networks” After a bit of counter-toiling the
>> question. I did some ungrounding the local soil and to find the wounds at
>> home.
>>
>>
>> The concerns of those network-things beyond was residing and were being
>> rehearsed right at here at home. Cornell was part of the DOD (Department of
>> Defense) research trajectory named Minerva since 2009 that used Facebook as
>> a testing ground and collected the data:
>>
>>
>> “The DoD’s initiative is currently funding another study at Cornell,
>> called Tracking Critical-Mass Outbreaks in Social Contagions. This study
>> will examine the “tipping point” in social media conversations surrounding
>> four recent global events — the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, the 2011 Russian
>> Duma elections, the 2012 Nigerian fuel subsidy crisis and the 2013 Gazi
>> park protests.
>>
>>
>> Cornell’s role in the 2012 mood manipulation study is still unclear,
>> though a statement released by the University Monday said neither Hancock
>> nor then-university affiliated researcher Jamie Guillory, who was involved
>> in the study, had direct access to the collection of private data.” (Or did
>> they?)
>>
>>
>> https://ithacavoice.com/2014/07/new-questions-answers-cornel
>> ls-facebook-experiment/
>>
>>
>> https://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2014/jul/
>> 01/facebook-cornell-study-emotional-contagion-ethics-breach
>>
>>
>> Cornell stated in 2014 that because of ethical breaches the studies would
>> stop and so would the DOD funding. But of course it has not. Minerva is
>> still listed here:
>>
>>
>> Research - Cornell University <http://sdl.soc.cornell.edu/research.php>
>>
>>
>> sdl.soc.cornell.edu
>>
>>
>> We study the interplay between network topology and the dynamics of
>> social interaction, using computational models, data from on-line networks,
>> and laboratory experiments with human participants.
>>
>>
>> Rehearsing networks of e-contagion marks a shift in the networks of
>> knowledge production from Cold War Universities to War on Terror
>> Universities. Just as the Cold War university was constructed in what was
>> named a ‘strategic alliance’ between scientists and the military after
>> World War Two, today universities are being re-militarized and
>> re-integrated into the national security state in order to serve the US
>> government’s perpetual and unbounded ‘War on Terror.’ The War on Terror
>> university is characterized by military and defense-contractor funding of
>> research, the orientation of research and teaching to serving military,
>> intelligence agency, and corporate goals surveillance of faculty and
>> students, and repressive policing of campuses:
>>
>>
>> “The problem, then, was not whether some sub agent of massive government
>> funding espoused problematic political designs. The danger lay in the
>> monolithic source of funding — always federal, despite its different
>> channels. The autonomy of science hinged upon the existence of multiple
>> non-governmental funders and sponsors. Academia, much like the mythical
>> market place, thrived when guided by an invisible hand.”
>>
>>
>> From the “Minerva Controversy”:
>> http://essays.ssrc.org/minerva/2008/12/11/robin/
>>
>>
>> Multiple networks are always being rehearsed and it is always good to not
>> only eat local but see what poison shrooms are also being grown next door.
>>
>>
>> Next rehearsal network MAVEN.
>>
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------
>> *From:* empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <empyre-bou
>> nces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> on behalf of Aviva Rahmani <
>> ghostnets at ghostnets.com>
>> *Sent:* Tuesday, June 12, 2018 8:53:14 AM
>> *To:* soft_skinned_space; shu lea cheang
>> *Subject:* Re: [-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 2]
>>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>>
>>
>> ________________________________
>>
>> ZAD FOR EVER <https://zadforever.blog/> a new blog in english,
>> dispatches from the liberated territory where we now live.
>>
>> <https://labofii.wordpress.com/>The Laboratory of Insurrectionary
>> <https://labofii.wordpress.com/>Imagination
>> Laboratoire d'Imagination Insurrectionnelle
>> Mailing list <https://lists.riseup.net/www/subscribe/labofii>
>> <https://www.facebook.com/groups/58916936705/?fref=ts>
>> <https://www.facebook.com/groups/58916936705/?fref=ts>FB
>> <https://www.facebook.com/groups/58916936705/?fref=ts> group
>> twitter:  @labofii
>> mobile:+33 (0) 6 80 85 71 88
>>
>> Notre livre-film "Les Sentiers de L'utopie" (Editions Zones/La Découverte
>> 2011)
>> twitter: @nowtopia.
>>
>> www.labofii.net
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20180613/acf3ba5a/attachment.html>