#vibrant materialism

[noosphe-re]

Some stones are so porous and pitted that they invite the curious eye to wander deep into their secret spaces. For below their outer crusts you will find an elaborate network of mines and crypts with worn and wasted bedrock riddled with holes and strewn with scaffoldings of rock. Runnels furrow through their seams and ferry silt back through their channels. Here is a place of slow tunnel-building akin to neural network growth: a brain-like subterrain of branching chutes and boreholes. Here are the truncated synapses of the earth's own cortex lacing through the sediments of deep time. Channels chisel thoughts and then smooth them into memories. And, here and there, the ducts link limbs to form larger chambers within the stony matrix. Uncertain tunnels weave past vaults, past chimneys, past domes and past concavities crammed with towers scratched with touchstone signs. Water writes its paean to gravity as it finds its new affinities. So, scored within this rock, we have another proof of Newton's inverse. Another computation worked within the rock, another winding sum of liquid flow, and another fluid thread to guide the eyeless. We float beyond these flooded channels, past barques and caravels of ghosts, and past chambers clogged with bones and piled with feathers.

Paul Prudence, Figured Stones: Exploring the Lithic Imaginary

[crionic-soc]

THE USES AND ABUSES OF OBJECT-ORIENTED ONTOLOGY AND SPECULATIVE REALISM Andrew Cole

A BRICK HOUSE CRUMBLES in the village of Veselovka, Russia, just a few miles from Kaliningrad. It’s said that Immanuel Kant had something to

OVER THE PAST TEN YEARS, people in all manner of disciplines have turned to things: to matter, stuff, obdurate objects. Often loosely grouped under the rubric “new materialisms,” these strains of thought have captured the imagination of artists and critics alike. The art world just can’t quit them, apparently—a perverse situation, since art and art history have, of course, already devoted hundreds of years to thinking precisely about objects as objects. But are things really as they seem? In the following pages, scholar ANDREW COLE takes the measure of the two new-materialist philosophies that have come to dominate the art-world conversation, arguing that object-oriented ontology and speculative realism are beset by contradictions, misguided assumptions, and outright fallacies.

[...]

AT THIS STAGE, you could throw up your hands and just admit that Kant was right: There are object relations, yes, but we can’t really know or describe them in detail, only allude to them in our inevitably human way. Or you could press on, chalking up these considerable difficulties in naming to the problem of language and solving them by taking a page from Heidegger, who uses neologisms to refresh the addled language of philosophy—though who really wants to hear more jargon? You could also consult your local analytic philosopher, who will tell you that metaphysical mistakes are mistakes in natural language: Artificial languages, anyone? In any event, object-oriented ontology may, as a philosophy, want to decenter the human, but as a language—and perforce as a way of thinking—it expands the human into all relations, raising serious political and ethical questions along the way, but never answering them.

Ours is a time when schools of interpretation ask us to personify and caricature objects as autonomous and alive—whether they are the objects who “speak” in the new so-called vibrant materialism, or objects who fuss and act up in actor-network theory, or objects with “primitive psyches” in object-oriented ontology. Is this really the way to think at this moment? For Marx, at least, this way of thinking about objects is what keeps capitalism ticking. To adopt such a philosophy, no questions asked, is fantasy—commodity fetishism in academic form. To identify such philosophy as the metaphysics of capitalism is theory, ever attentive to history’s impress on our imaginations, whatever we may dream.

[athousandgateaux]

Abruptly, a need to testify to the recognition not only of beings but of objects, to a stone because it is a stone...How alive everything becomes! As if for eternity. Suddenly, nonexistence seems inconceivable. That such impulses appear, can appear, shows that the last word may not reside in Negation.

E.M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered, pg. 108

[noosphe-re]

Figured stones are portals to the molten mantles of the psyche and all its dreamt-up denizens. And, best of all, these visions are suggested to us by nature — our imaginations' natural and most honest collaborator.

Paul Prudence, Figured Stones: Exploring the Lithic Imaginary

[noosphe-re]

The undulating forms in stone can convey the laws of fluid flow and encode the unseen trends of liquid motion. The hydrologic cycle has found a means to record in rock its moods and to concatenate them all into a single totem. Taihu rocks record the swells, the eddies and all the rarest ripples (with the delicacy of any sense organ). They chronicle the currents that move across the surface and return the motions of unseen tides that sculpt below. Their fluid shapes are clear transcriptions of a blind intent made visible for human eyes to see. Rheology has impressed its character in a summed articulation of every seiche and bathymetric spiral, of every ebb and flow. Water is a living manifold whose calculations are fated to be resolved in stone.

Paul Prudence, Figured Stones: Exploring the Lithic Imaginary

[noosphe-re]

In recounting dreams, we reformulate their narratives and shape them into their most honest and truest form. Dream re-visioning can be seen as a geological process where indistinct images are weathered into fixity by rational attrition. Dreams find their narrative equilibrium first through their remembering and then by their recounting to oneself. This unravelling of narrative is a process of form-finding, like a river finding a shortest path or a rock being worn smooth by flowing water. It is like the gradual shaping and refinement of a tale to fit the requirements of a myth that it encodes. The shifting collage of dream imagery – a visage of an intense, decalcomanic complexity – becomes anchored by the cues of the rational mind (like the fixing of a photographic image where vague shrouds slowly reveal sharper edges). This anchoring of the dream image is like a vision crystallising from the texture of a stone.

Paul Prudence, Figured Stones: Exploring the Lithic Imaginary

[noosphe-re]

Introduction to 'Figured Stones' by Paul Prudence

All over the world are scattered stones that contain tiny kingdoms of petrified forests and model mountains. These stones, with their imagined societies of people, their animals and mythical creatures, await to do trade and form alliances. In each rock you may find exotic gardens, encrusted cliffs and the wrecks of ruined palaces. And every space is overrun by lichens, vines and exotic herbs. That ‘figured stones’ have been prized for their mimicry of miniature topographies of Lilliputian beauty is well attested by the great collections as far back as the T’ang dynasty. But even before that era of great adoration, these rocks had already weathered their apparitions into the human imagination. The pre T’ang literature tells of strange rocks in wild places that took the form of dragons, saints and even monsters. And the metaphysics of the microcosm found an early apogee in the emperor’s magic monuments made entirely from these stones.

Erosion, whose secrets are occluded only by time itself, has been busy; slowly dissolving rough rock into miniature worlds. The flow of water – that fertile archetype of time itself – has worn tiny rivers and valleys into stone, copying those processes of the greater world. Time flows through water and time flows through rocks, transforming them into mirror-worlds by attrition. And with more time these tiny streams in stone are turned into caves and tunnels which burrow down into the foundations of our own subconscious worlds. These sunless chambers form the perfect refuges for the dreamt-up denizens of our inflamed imaginations.

Nature has summoned its blind forces to create a fractal dimension, for each rock is a replica that exposes all the processes by which the world fully reveals – and comprehends – itself. As diminished echoes of the earth’s own features, figured stones offer us foci for studying a sense of planetary introspection. In depicting the greater essences of its smaller self, nature’s trick becomes a form of self-awareness – nature’s ‘that I am’ is cast into solid conscious form as the geological recollections of a former world are made manifest. The ghosts of stratified histories cascade through time and leave their marks in rock as totems or as scripts, or as tiny worlds, complete.

—Paul Prudence, Figured Stones: Exploring the Lithic Imaginary

[thegreatunconformity-blog]

The Gordon River is the major river of the South-West. With a few notable exceptions, such as the Davey and King Rivers, all the mighty rivers of this area are tributaries of the Gordon. The river rises at Lake Richmond, high upon the King William Range. It flows south for the first 60 kilometres, through the extensive plains of the Vale of Rasselas, before turning west at the Great Bend and hurtling through the cataract known as the Gordon Gorge. It continues west picking up (in the time previous to Lake Gordon) the waters of the Wedge, Boyd, Holley and Pokana Rivers and further downstream a small stream, the Serpentine, that rose at Lake Pedder. By this stage the Gordon is a large and powerful river, its waters stained dark from the button-grass plains and the many creeks, streams and rivers that swell the Gordon. Rather than flowing along and around the massive mountain ranges that block its path to the ocean, the river tears a path through the mountains, literally splitting them apart and creaking the remarkable and appropriately titled Splits. From the Splits onwards the river is flanked by South-West rainforest: gnarled moss-covered myrtles, the beautiful straight celery-top pine, the pungent sassafras and the riverine Huon pines, weeping like the most delicately tinted willows into their reflections in the waters of the Gordon. More tributaries enter the Gordon: the Denison, the Olga, the Rocky Sprent and greatest of all, the Franklin River. By the time the river reaches the sea at Macquarie Harbour it has drained an area of 5000 kilometres, with a higher catchment yield than any other Tasmanian river. Within the wild country that the Gordon river system encompasses are found some of the noblest features of Tasmania: Frenchman's Cap, Lake Pedder and the Irenabyss gorge to name but a few.

Richard Flanagan, A Terrible Beauty: History of the Gordon River Country, 2-3