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“The liberal euphemism for the tension between actuality and potentiality is "rising expectations." What this sociological phrase fails to reveal is that these "expectations"will continue to "rise" until Utopia itself is achieved. And for good reason. What goads the "expectations" into "rising"—indeed, into escalating with each "right" that is gained—is the utter irrationality of the capitalist system itself. When cybernated and automatic machinery can reduce toil to the near vanishing point, nothing is more meaningless to young people than a lifetime of toil. When modern industry can provide abundance for all, nothing is more vicious to poor people than a lifetime of poverty.When all the resources exist to promote social equality,nothing is more criminal to ethnic minorities, women and homosexuals than subjugation. These contrasts could be extended indefinitely, covering all the issues that have produced the social agony of our era.”

#post-scarcity anarchism

“Carl Schmitt famously characterized liberalism as replacing politics with ethics and economics. Correlatively, we should note the displacement of politics specific to neoliberalism. There is individualized self-cultivation, self-management, self-reliance, self-absorption, and—at the same time—impersonal determining processes, circuits, and systems. We have responsible individuals, individuals who are responsibilized, treated as loci of autonomous choices and decisions, and we have individuals encountering situations that are utterly determined and outside their control. Instead of ethics and economics, neoliberalism’s displacement of politics manifests in the opposition between survivors and systems. The former struggle to persist in conditions of unlivability rather than to seize and transform these conditions. The latter are systems and “hyperobjects” determining us, often aesthetic objects or objects of a future aesthetics, something to view and diagram and predict and perhaps even mourn, but not to affect”

“It may be objected to this book that both animals and men are represented in it under too favourable an aspect; that their sociable qualities are insisted upon, while their anti-social and self-asserting instincts are hardly touched upon. This was, however, unavoidable. We have heard so much lately of the “harsh, pitiless struggle for life,” which was said to be carried on by every animal against all other animals, every “savage” against all other “savages,” and every civilized man against all his co-citizens – and these assertions have so much become an article of faith – that it was necessary, first of all, to oppose to them a wide series of facts showing animal and human life under a quite different aspect. It was necessary to indicate the overwhelming importance which sociable habits play in Nature and in the progressive evolution of both the animal species and human beings: to prove that they secure to animals a better protection from their enemies, very often facilities for getting food and (winter provisions, migrations, etc.), longevity, therefore a greater facility for the development of intellectual faculties; and that they have given to men, in addition to the same advantages, the possibility of working out those institutions which have enabled mankind to survive in its hard struggle against Nature, and to progress, notwithstanding all the vicissitudes of its history. It is a book on the law of Mutual Aid, viewed at as one of the chief factors of evolution – not on all factors of evolution and their respective values; and this first book had to be written, before the latter could become possible.”

#mutual aid #kropotkin

“While he himself was chiefly using the term in its narrow sense for his own special purpose, he warned his followers against committing the error (which he seems once to have committed himself) of overrating its narrow meaning. In The Descent of Manhe gave some powerful pages to illustrate its proper, wide sense. He pointed out how, in numberless animal societies, the struggle between separate individuals for the means of existence disappears, how struggle is replaced by co-operation, and how that substitution results in the development of intellectual and moral faculties which secure to the species the best conditions for survival. He intimated that in such cases the fittest are not the physically strongest, nor the cunningest, but those who learn to combine so as mutually to support each other, strong and weak alike, for the welfare of the community. "Those communities," he wrote, "which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring" (2nd edit., p. 163). The term, which originated from the narrow Malthusian conception of competition between each and all, thus lost its narrowness in the mind of one who knew Nature.”

#mutual aid #kropotkin

“As soon as we study animals – not in laboratories and museums only, but in the forest and the prairie, in the steppe and the mountains – we at once perceive that though there is an immense amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various species, and especially amidst various classes of animals, there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defence amidst animals belonging to the same species or, at least, to the same society. Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle. Of course it would be extremely difficult to estimate, however roughly, the relative numerical importance of both these series of facts. But if we resort to an indirect test, and ask Nature: "Who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?" we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more chances to survive, and they attain, in their respective classes, the highest development of intelligence and bodily organization. If the numberless facts which can be brought forward to support this view are taken into account, we may safely say that mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle, but that, as a factor of evolution, it most probably has a far greater importance, inasmuch as it favours the development of such habits and characters as insure the maintenance and further development of the species, together with the greatest amount of welfare and enjoyment of life for the individual, with the least waste of energy.”

#mutual aid #kropotkin

“It will probably be remarked that mutual aid, even though it may represent one of the factors of evolution, covers nevertheless one aspect only of human relations; that by the side of this current powerful thought it may be, there is, and always has been, the other current -- the self-assertion of the individual, not only in its efforts to attain personal or caste superiority, economical, political and spiritual, but also in its much more important although less evident function of breaking through the bonds, always prone to become crystallized, which the tribe, the village community, the city, and the State impose upon the individual. In other words, there is the self-assertion of the individual taken as a progressive element”

#mutual aid

“As I sit in Baretto Point Park, I know that a colony of microorganisms is hard at work digesting the city’s waste a few blocks away. The tank’s surface bubbles and churns, oxygen forced into water to feed the foamy gray colony of microscopic creatures floating on its surface. Anaerobic bacteria, nematodes, rotifers, and ciliate protozoa are eating, swimming; when they reproduce, they split apart. I imagine the tank as a sort of aggregate stomach: microorganisms culled from the city’s waste digest food to keep the system going. I think of feminist theorist Karen Barad, who argues in Meeting the Universe Halfway for a theory of materiality in which objects and bodies do not preexist others, but are co-produced with them. She writes, “matter is produced and productive, generated and generative. Matter is agentive, not a fixed essence or property of things”“

noosphe-re

Rogue waves are an open water phenomenon, in which winds, currents, non-linear phenomena such as solitons, and other circumstances cause a wave to briefly form that is far larger than the “average” large occurring wave (the significant wave height or ‘SWH’) of that time and place. The basic underlying physics that makes phenomena such as rogue waves possible is that different waves can travel at different speeds, and so they can “pile up” in certain circumstances – known as “constructive interference”. (In deep ocean the speed of a gravity wave is proportional to the square root of its wavelength—the distance peak-to-peak.) However other situations can also give rise to rogue waves, particularly situations where non-linear effects or instability effects can cause energy to move between waves and be concentrated in one or very few extremely large waves before returning to “normal” conditions.

Wikipedia (via inthenoosphere)

“In a very real sense, reality is a single matter-energy undergoing phase transitions of various kinds, with each new layer of accumulated “stuff” simply enriching the resevoir of nonlinear dynamics and nonlinear combinatorics available for the generation of novel structures and processes. Racks and winds, germs and words, are all different manifestations of this dynamic material reality, or, in other words, they all represent the different ways in which this single matter-energy expresses itself. Thus, what follows will not be a chronicle of “man” and “his” historical achievements, but a philosophical meditation on the history of matter-energy in its different forms and of the multiple coexistences and interactions of these forms. Geological, organic, and linguistic materials will be allowed to “have their say” in the form that this book takes, and the resulting chorus of material voices will, i hope, give us a fresh perspective on the events and processes that have shaped the history of this millennium”

#manuel delanda

“...The point of the matter is we are much more primitive than we think we are, much more material. This translates immediately to the fact that, for all the virtual stuff that happens on the Internet, all the web pages and links and so on, there is still all the hardware that forms the basis of it, all of which runs on electricity. In other words, there is this material basis that is so humble that we take it for granted, because it is not the exciting part. The exciting part is the virtual level. But we shouldn’t take it for grant because if our philosophy tomorrow is to get it right, we need to always acknowledge this material basis on which we operate.

The token material entity of current textual theory—just to back track a bit—the ‘60’s in France was the great period of virtualization. Everything became text. Kristeva and Derrida and so on we just talking about intertextuality. Even the weather doesn’t exist, it is what we make of it, what we interpret of it. Everything became virtual in a way. Baudrillard say that everything is just simulacra, just layers of neon signs on top of layers of television images on top of layers of film images and more and more virtual stuff. The computer games and simulations. We need an antidote to that. We need to acknowledge that we’ve built these layers of virtuality and that they are real, they are real virtual. They might not be actual but they are real still but that all of them are running on top of a material basis that ultimately informs the source of power and the basis of society.”

“Similarly, our individual bodies and minds are mere coagulations or decelerations in the flows of biomass, genes, memes and norms. Here too we would be defined both by the materials we are temporarily binding or chaining into our organic bodies and cultural minds, as well as by the time scale of the binding operation. Given long enough time scales, it is the flow of biomass through food webs that matters, as well as the flow of genes through generations, and not the bodies and species that emerge in these flows. Given long enough time scales, our languages are also momentary slowing-downs or thickenings in a flow of norms that can give rise to a multitude of different structures. The overall world-view that this "geological philosophy" generates may be put into a nut shell by introducing some special technical terminology.”

“The second characteristic mentioned by Varela and Maturana, growth by drift, may be explained as follows. In the simplest autocalytic loops there are only two reactions, each producing a catalyst for the other. But once this basic two-node network establishes itself, new nodes may insert themselves into the mesh as long as they do not jeopardize its internal consistency. Thus, a new chemical reaction may appear (using previously neglected raw materials or even waste products from the original loop) which catalyses one of the original ones and is catalyzed by the other, so that the loop now becomes a three-node network. The meshwork has now grown but in a direction which is, for all practical purposes, "unplanned". A new node (which just happens to satisfy some internal consistency requirements) is added and the loop complexifies, yet precisely because the only constraints were internal, the complexification does not take place in order for the loop as a whole to meet some external demand (such as adapting to a specific situation). The surrounding environment, as source of raw materials, certainly constraints the growth of the meshwork but more in a proscriptive way (what not to do) than in a prescriptive one (what to do).”

"Networking across different organisms for different ends and needs is related to the common theme in Tsing’s book of the concept of patches or patchiness. Patchiness in Tsing’s work is associated with unpredictability, heterogeneity, and entanglement. It is the mosaic-quality of a world with many worlds inside it. A mycelium network can emerge from a tiny spore transported by chance to grow until it stretches across large miles-wide tracts of subterranean earth. Patchiness also occurs to me as an organizing principle that describes the way disparate people, organisms, and collectives may find mutuality through unexpected encounters, collaborations, and cross-contamination. Similarly to how Deleuze and Guattari suggest the rhizome as an image of multiplicity and non-hierarchical growth in cultural formations, mycelium growth and fungal patches model the ways in which seemingly unconnected events on the local level form a globally networked consciousness and proliferate into liberatory moments. The patches through which mushrooms develop are models of inter-dependency and indeterminacy. They cannot grow without a great deal of chance and not without becoming completely entangled with organisms living and dead in their surroundings. Just like we as humans rely on each other and are inextricably linked, in the bonded fungal colonies of lichen or in the mycelium structures that suture to tree roots, it can be difficult to parse one species from another, yet the ecosystem only thrives because there is difference."

“America is a giant hologram, in the sense that information concerning the whole is contained in each of its elements. Take the tiniest little place in the desert, any old street in a Mid-West town, a parking lot, a Californian house, a Burger King or a Studebaker, and you have the whole of the US - South, North, East, or West.Holographic also in that it has the coherent light of the laser, the homogeneity of the single elements scanned by the same beams. From the visual and plastic viewpoints too: things seem to be made of a more unreal substance; they seem to turn and move in a void as if by a special lighting effect, a fine membrane you pass through without noticing it. This is obviously true of the desert. It is also the case with Las Vegas and advertising, and even the activities of the people, public relations, and everyday electronics all stand out with the plasticity and simplicity of a beam of light. The hologram is akin to the world of phantasy. It is a three-dimensional dream and you can enter it as you would a dream. Everything depends on the existence of the ray of light bearing the objects. If it is interrupted, all the effects are dispersed, and reality along with it. You do indeed get the impression that America is made up of a fantastic switching between similar elements, and that everything is only held together by a thread of light, a laser beam, scanning out American reality before our eyes. In America the spectral does not refer to phantoms or to dancing ghosts, but to the spectrum into which light disperses.”

#Baudrillard

“But in certain cases there is a beauty proper to technical objects. This beauty appears when these objects become integrated within a world, whether it be geographical or human: aesthetic feeling is then relative to this integration; it is like a gesture. The sails of a ship are not beautiful when they are at rest, but when the wind billows and inclines the entire mast, carrying the ship on the sea; it is the sail in the wind and on the sea that is beautiful, like the statue on the promontory. The lighthouse by the reef dominating the sea is beautiful, because it is integrated as a key-point of the geographical and human world. A line of pylons supporting the cables that traverse a valley is beautiful, whereas the pylons, seen on the trucks that bring them, or the cables, on the big rolls that serve to transport them, are neutral. A tractor, in a garage, is merely a technical object; however, when it is at work plowing, leaning into the furrow while the soil is turned over, it can be perceived as beautiful. Any technical object, mobile or fixed, can have its aesthetic epiphany, insofar as it extends the world and becomes integrated into it. But it is not only the technical object that is beautiful: it is the singular point of the world that the technical object concretizes. It is not only the line of pylons that is beautiful, it is the coupling of the lines, the rocks, and the valley, it is the tension and flexion of the cables: herein resides a mute, silent and ever continued operation of technicity applying itself to the world.”

#Simondon

“You know -- technology wasn't invented by us humans. Rather the other way around. As anthropologists and biologists admit, even the simplest life forms, infusoria (tiny algae synthesized by light at the edges of tide pools a few million years ago) are already technical devices. Any material system is technological if it filters information useful to its survival, if it memorizes and processes that information and makes inferences based on the regulating effect of behavior, that is, if it intervenes on and impacts its environment so as to assure its perpetuation at least. A human being isn't different in nature from an object of this type. Its equipment for absorbing data isn't exceptional compared to other living things. What's true is that this human being is omnivorous when dealing with information because it has a regulating system (codes and rules for processing) that's more differentiated and a storage capacity for its memory that’s greater than those of other living things. Most of all: it's equipped with a symbolic system that's both arbitrary (in semantics and syntax), letting it be less dependent on an immediate environment, and also 'recursive' (Hofstadter). allowing it to take into account (above and beyond raw data) the way it has of processing such data. That is, itself. Hence, of processing as information its own rules in turn and inferring other ways of processing information. A human, in short, is a living organization that is not only complex, but, so to speak, replex. It can grasp itself as a medium (as in medicine) or as an organ (as in goal-directed activity) or as an object (as in thought -- I mean aesthetic as well as speculative thought). It can even abstract itself from itself and take into account only its rules of processing, as in logic and mathematics. The opposite limit of this symbolic recursiveness resides in the necessity by which it is bound (whatever its meta-level of operation) at the same time to maintain regulations that guarantee its survival in any environment whatsoever. Isn't that exactly what constitutes the basis of your transcendence in immanence? Now, until the present time, this environment has been terrestrial. The survival of a thinking-organization requires exchanges with that environment such that the human body can perpetuate itself there. This is equally true of the quintessential meta-function -- philosophical thought. To think, at the very least you have to breathe, eat, etc. You are still under an obligation to 'earn a living'.”

“Primitive magical unity is the relation of the vital connection between man and the world, defining a universe that is at once subjective and objective prior to any distinction between the object and the subject, and consequently prior to any appearance of the separate object. One can conceive of the primitive mode of man’s relation to the world as prior not only to the objectivation of the world, but even to the segregation of objective units in the field that will be the objective field. Man finds himself linked to a universe experienced as a milieu. The emergence of the object only occurs through the isolation and fragmentation of the mediation between man and the world; and, according to the posited principle, this objectivation of a mediation must have as correlative, with respect to the primitive neutral center, the subjectivation of a mediation; the mediation between man and the world is objectivized as technical object just as it is subjectivized as religious mediator; but this objectivation and subjectivation, which are opposition and complementarity, are preceded by an initial relation to the world, the magical stage, in which the mediation is not yet either subjectivized or objectivized, nor fragmented or universalized, and is only the simplest and most fundamental of structurations of the milieu of a living being: the birth of a network of privileged points of exchange between the being and the milieu.”

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