#geophilosophy

[iamthepulta]

Here's the thing about geology as a science: 90% of what you learn in school is vocabulary. You aren't learning about things. Chemistry and physics and mathematics theoretically taught you The Tools and how to use them.

Geology is about being able to describe the world around you in shorthand. Chemists look at CuFeS2 and say "copper-iron (III) sulfide" and they'd be correct. I look at CuFeS2 and say Chalcopyrite because "copper-iron (III) sulfide" is a lot to say; but more importantly, Chalcopyrite can also be a copper-iron (II) sulfide. Bornite (Cu5FeS4) is also a "copper-iron (III) sulfide".

However, when you look at Chalcopyrite (Cpy) and Bornite (Bn) in the ground, they look very different and they behave differently too when you try to get the copper out. So geology shorthands their chemical formulas to names.

I really love this cuneiform diagram because it illustrates the fundamental need of geology: that back in 2000BC the Babylonians and Dilmuni had the same challenge creating words that described ore (desired rock coming out of the ground), copper (the element), and copper minerals (what would produce copper).

(Metallurgy in Antiquity, Forbes, 1950)

The same thing happens in structural geology and geomorphology. You can say, for example, that a "fault zone" is where the earth has fractured, but you immediately want to know how. "Normal fault" or "Thrust fault" can describe the direction of movement and relative angle into the earth. But if you say "Graben" to a geologist, they immediately know sense of shear, angle into the earth, and location you're referring to in that system.

[slaaneshfic]

[Proposal] Deep Time

[Image: Hilma Af Klimt]

Title: Cilia, Blinking Cilia

My practice is concerned with the content of kind of horror text as play, and the potential of this play to challenge majoritarian systems. I specify play here as “freely chosen, personally directed and intrinsically motivated”, which already puts it in contrast with social/ethical/political systems which privilege work, or accumulation or the status quo. This messy mass is forever in the process of being redefined, but throughout this document I refer to it as “horror/play” or “h/p”. I engage the subjects of horror narratives, waste and a dispersed shared culture to play with power and difference. My output is texts and images, always online sometimes performed in person, in the form of fan fiction, science fiction, role playing games, essays, diagrams, videos, computer games, performances.

Deep time is of great importance to feminist materialist philosophy, posthumanism, and post-structuralism, as can be be seen explicitly in the Donna J Haraway’s 2016 book “Staying With The Trouble, Making Kin in the Chthulucene” (Haraway, 2016) and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s “A Thousand Plateaus” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). The horror/play of time beyond human scale as a consideration of feminist practice and a means therefor to think beyond patriarchal authority is taken up by two texts which inform this project.

The texts are “Lovecraft’s Cosmic Ethics” by Patricia MacCormack (MacCormack, 2016) and “Of Bugs and Women: Irigaray and Deleuze on the Becoming-Woman” by Rosi Braidotti (Braidotti, 1994). Both essays engage with the work of feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray through literature, abjection and the encounter between human and non-human scale of time and cognition. In both of these texts the Irigirayian project of escaping “phallogocentricism”(Irigaray, 1993) is aligned with with the loss of subjectivity with which horror threatens us, and the abandonment of anthropocentrism which cannot separate “human” from “white, able, cisgendered, heterosexual, capitalist, man”. Consideration of deep time as witnessed by the non human; and the power of those witnesses, are running through these texts.

I proposal to utilise the unique nested geological/biological/social/historical sites of Timespan, Helmsdale and Sutherland; in parallel with the above two texts in order to create a new piece of writing.

This writing will approach h/p through horror narratives including

the collision of far pasts at Stac Fada,

the vast networks of lichens and horsetail spores,

the description of power and challenges to power left in land,

the trajectory toward the future diagrammed now.

I want to join the community of the residency to share and discuss such ideas and ask questions:

How does phallogocentrism survive a deep time that has no respect for biological life?

How can the encounter with deep time destroy both meaning and the authority of men to claim ownership of meaning?

Does such an encounter show the position of deep time within the eternal present?

How does deep time turn the stasis of bogs and petrified matter into a violent swirl of forces?

How do prehistoric bryophytes turn that speed back to near zero?

How do such living cybernetics join the far past to the far future?

How does this site inform a Lovecraftian posthuman feminism?

Bibliography:

Braidotti, R. (1994). Of Bugs and Women: Irigaray and Deleuze on the Becoming-Woman. In C. Burke, N. Shor, & M. Whitford (Eds.), Engaging with Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy and Modern European Thought. New York: Columbia University Press, New York.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Dely, C. (2007). Jacques Derrida : the ‘perchance’ of a coming of the otherwoman. Sens Public. Retrieved from http://www.sens-public.org/article312.html

Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.

Irigaray, L. (1993). An ethics of sexual difference. Cornell University Press.

Lispector, C. (1988). The passion according to G.H. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

MacCormack, P. (2016). LOVECRAFT’S COSMIC ETHICS. In R. Campbell (Ed.), The Age of Lovecraft (pp. 199–214). University of Minnesota Press. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt1b9x1f3.15

[spaceintruderdetector]

https://archive.org/details/7aa9a630-c5e0-42e8-825c-c854dfbffb56

For too long, the Earth has been used to ground thought instead of bending it; such grounding leaves the planet as nothing but a stage for phenomenology, deconstruction, or other forms of anthropocentric philosophy. In far too much continental philosophy, the Earth is a cold, dead place enlivened only by human thought—either as a thing to be exploited, or as an object of nostalgia. Geophilosophy seeks instead to question the ground of thinking itself, the relation of the inorganic to the capacities and limits of thought. This book constructs an eclectic variant of geophilosophy through engagements with digging machines, nuclear waste, cyclones and volcanoes, giant worms, secret vessels, decay, subterranean cities, hell, demon souls, black suns, and xenoarcheaology, via continental theory (Nietzsche, Schelling, Deleuze, et alia) and various cultural objects such as horror films, videogames, and weird Lovecraftian fictions, with special attention to Speculative Realism and the work of Reza Negarestani. In a time where the earth as a whole is threatened by ecological collapse, On an Ungrounded Earth generates a perversely realist account of the earth as a dynamic engine materially invading and upsetting our attempts to reduce it to merely the ground beneath our feet.

[theradical-outlook]

Towards the End of the Global Capitalism

Towards the End of the Global Capitalism

Deutsche Stimme interviewed prominent Russian Philosopher Alexander Dugin In the following interview with the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin on 2 January 2021, conducted for the German magazine Deutsche Stimme (‘German voice’), we were discussing the new globalist strategy called “the Great Reset.” Since it is embedded in the political framework of liberalism, we also discussed its…

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[sterwood]

In far too much continental philosophy, the Earth is a cold dead place enlivened only by human thought—either as a thing to be exploited, or as an object of nostalgia. This split is endemic to philosophies of nature on the whole, a split diagnosed by Pierre Hadot as the divide between the Promethean and Orphic tendencies in viewing nature. Furthermore, this divide not only presents a false choice between exploitative capitalist Cartesianism and neo-pagan Spinozism, but also wrongfully presupposes that nature is a thing ontologically separate from humanity. That is, both the Promethean and the Orphic tendencies assume that human beings are a priori set apart from nature, either due to divine entities (God, Soul, etc.) or to our purportedly unique cognitive abilities.

Ben Woodard - On an Ungrounded Earth: Towards a New Geophilosophy

[territorealities]

The Dark Enlightenment

by Nick Land Part 1: Neo-reactionaries head for the exit

more in The Dark Enlightenment site

[blockreview]

[W]e can construct the virtual Idea of water. Among its dimensions would be that which governs the hydrological cycle: linked rates of change of difference-driven intensive processes of evaporation, precipitation, runoff with singularities marking phase transitions as events: from solid to liquid to gas. At all its points of transition, we see the ‘becoming’ of water, its affects we can name: ‘to flow, to become denser, to expand while freezing, to float as ice, to boil, rain, snow, sleet,’ and so on.      These physical affects are mostly of interest to us as they enter into bio-assemblages. Thus we have to see how water is ‘perplicated’ with Ideas of other natural cycles, involving all the ‘spheres’ that contemporary geographers talk about: hydrosphere of course, but also lithosphere, atmosphere and biosphere. But as Deleuze and Guattari delight in saying after explaining some very complex point, ‘this is much too simple.’ The spheres are de jure distinct, but de facto mixed. Not only are they composed of immensely complex nested sets of coupled cycles at many scales, but their intersection zones—their ‘zones of indiscernability’—are intermixed. For instance, the atmosphere is not a collection of gases, but is better thought of as ‘air,’ and air has plenty of organisms [spores, microbes], minerals [dust] and water in it. Similarly, the hydrosphere is not just chemically pure H2O but is ‘water,’ which has plenty of organisms, air, and minerals in it. The lithosphere in turn is not just minerals, but its top layer is ‘soil,’ which has plenty of air, water, and organisms. Finally, the biosphere's organisms are made of water and minerals and cycle air through them. In Louisiana, I can testify, the air you're breathing is an unholy mixture of soil, water, and organisms, the vaporized bayou wafting into your lungs: sometimes you just don't know if you're breathing, drinking or chewing.

John Protevi, “Water.”

[durianaclimate-blog]

The President of Duriana Izzet Bangbang addresses the United Nations Climate Summit as the second week of the 20th Conference of Parties kicks off in Lima, Peru