I love to send them. I've signed over 300 by now...just email me (tbm2@rice.edu) with proof of purchase and an address.
Monday, December 23, 2024
Sunday, December 22, 2024
Friday, December 20, 2024
Hideous Gnosis Unbound: The Apotheosis of Speculative Realism
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back” (John Maynard Keynes)
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| Dungeon Mastery or, Here We Go Again |
At school, I once was part of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign where we had been sent to an alternative dimension in which it very slowly (over the course of a year) crept up on us that a nightmare being from the “Cthulhu Mythos,” scourge of freaked-out parents in the early 1980s, was In Charge at the bottom of the ocean.
We didn't stick around to find out who. Much to the annoyance of the Dungeon Master, who was we believed looking forward to having us exterminated, we used a Limited Wish scroll in our possession to get us the fuck out of there.
And then I found myself, for a second time, in Trumpworld. When something has happened twice, you've definitely been sent to an alternative dimension and you will definitely need powerful magick to get back.
John Maynard Keynes once said that a man of action is someone possessed by thought, in a form that gives the lie to thinking as such (HT Andy Wilson). The mind is a terrible thing, wasted or no, and it's not idealism to say that “All of the buildings, all of the cars / Were once just a dream / In somebody's head” (Peter Gabriel).
It's taken me way too long to see it, but I realize this week--synchronistically with a Facebook post on it only half-ironic by Steven Shaviro--that, down to the internet-ness of it all, we are now living inside a really daft and aggressive realization of some of the worst tendencies of the Speculative Realism movement.
There's nothing more anti-intellectual than a normalized intellectual. And there's nothing more ironic than a normalized intellectual thinking they are outside of academia. Terry Eagleton, the ultimate Oxford don (I know, I was his student) was of this mind, and so were many who latched onto the movement named Speculative Realism after a conference run by Ray Brassier and Graham Harman at Goldsmith's University of London.
Craving for a real world beyond thought, fantasizing that it destroy thought, was always dangerous and never to do with liberation. Fascism was always a kind of para-academia, and with a couple of tweaks Nietzsche (always into mastery, if not the six pack abs of the Ultimate Man) could easily inspire the peusdo-intellectual machismo of the Nazis. Likewise the tentacled darkness of the dankly masculine world of online philosophy blogging around 2010 gave way to what only appeared to be nothing to do with it, incels, 4Chan and Trump's image of the 300-pound young man in his mother's basement pumping out fascist memes, Kekistan and chaotic neutral Slaad-like beings (I know my D&D; so does Musk; Graham was a dungeon master of note too).
If the philosophy blogosphere thus gave way to the fantasies of “beta males” about alphas, much as Nietzsche summoned the superman, this world of abject Jabbas gave way to the manosphere, with Trump as its monstrous point de capiton. From this temporal distance, the absolute break between realities—Obama time and Trump time, to put it another way—now seems smoothed over, and the rough beast slouching towards the White House to be born started its shambling mound journey around 2010 in the form of the philosophy blogosphere which I had suddenly become aware of, thanks to a post by Levi Bryant that equated my “strange stranger” with the OOO object. I never had to sign a loyalty oath against theory, so this fusion of Derrida and OOO always seemed plausible to me. But I can totally understand why to many it wasn't on the cards.
Somewhere in the middle (2015 to 2018) I wrote hyposubjects with Dominic Boyer. We D&D fans got Cthulhu into the book and talked some about the fascism latent in the SR view…but now it’s metastasized in ways we predicted.
It's been creeping up on me for weeks, then I read about the tech broligarchs' “dark” this and “dark” that, Yarvin and the “exterminists” and all that. And it all came flooding back. All the feelings, the frustration, the why-don't-you-see, the outrage, the being ridiculed for going slightly off message for a white guy...
The slimy void SR despised OOO, the overlap was Lovecraft, but Graham Harman's Lovecraft was very different from the Alien: Resurrection-like obsession with Cthulhu. I was mad later at Donna naming her book The Cthulucene, it seemed tone deaf. But on reflection there was a knowing irony to her title with which I concur. Only a white man would welcome extermination.
I got screamed at for saying it by an accelerationist in Amsterdam. OOO was vilified for its alliance with Jane Bennett's quasi-animism. My Haitian French translator loved Realist Magic for this very reason. Meillassoux-style SR-ers despised it for that reason.
For going off message concerning the supremacy of (white) (male) (human) thought, four white boys (Graham, Levi, Ian and me) got into a lot of trouble. It didn't hurt that we were white boys. And that, giddily pugnacious, we channeled Lennon with our "We're more popular than Deleuze now" vibe, earning ourselves many a symbolic book-burning from anti-human anthropocentric fundamentalists.
But that “mad black Deleuzianism” has now fully objectively arrived in the form of tech bro, STEM-y fantasists who never had to take a theory class and thus overlapped in another way with the anti-"linguistic turn"-ism of that moment. Having taken many a theory class and counting myself a Derridean I saw the risks of this aspect quite clearly. On the Marxist side of things (Fisher for instance) it led to a workerism that didn't understand race or gender at all, bombing communist theory back to before the stoned age.
Kanye West, future visitor to the Trump White House, sported a leather jacket with IN THE DUST OF THIS PLANET emblazoned on the back. That was a tell, in hindsight.
The “hideous gnosis” of “there's only a material world and your tame ideas about it, even forms of materialism, are as nothing compared to its omnipotent reality” mapped perfectly onto a know-it-all techie elitism and supremacy that had always lurked in the machine code of agrilogistical society, based as it is on farming, an algorithmic practice that is implicitly conservative, as all recipes are, guidelines based on past success. "It worked last year so we'll do it again this year" is how an innocent desire to increase happiness by storing grain became fossil fuel emissions and imminent planet death, via the seeming tameness of smoothly cycling “nature.”
The absolute division between the latent and manifest image, the real and reality, always a cool kid version of the same old same old of matter versus mind, maps nicely, upside-down (ideology is a camera obscura, says Marx) onto the fake binary of class and identity politics, and the fascist fantasy of tech bros and their slaves.
It was Cartesian dualism, disguised as Deleuze and weaponized. Matter, and the white male minds that understood it best, versus everything else.
For Marxist SR this meant that Kant's noumenal world was that of incomprehensible and all-powerful matter, a perfect camera obscura image of the fascist dictator. Or the long arms of Cthulhu, the very sight of whom, like a Trump tweet, would inevitably drive you insane.
A white guy who came up with “dark ecology” way back in 2005 before the online Schellingian abyss had even opened up, is now wincing at how the tech bros stole the darkness, because the way SR stole the darkness had already flattened the noir-ish irony inherent in my usage of it in an isometric way. “Dark Enlightenment”? The Enlightenment was already dark insofar as the concept Man obscured whiteness behind a veil of transparency, providing cover for colonialism and imperialism. Tech bro darkness is more of the same, returning in a farcically horrific form.
Marx said history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. He forgot to add: then as oh-so-ironic Grand Guignol and nightmare audience-participation-time fascism.
Locke may have supplanted Habbakuk to strip the mystical Puritanism from the concepts of freedom and justice, giving rise to Sam the American Eagle's rectitude and politeness (just don't mention how enslaved people built the capitol).
But then Nick Land supplanted Locke and all that was solid and had melted into air returned as slimy death for all the “NPCs” of this world, humans and anonymous materials alike, all in the service of transhumanist eternity and Google-eyed omniscience.
And wave upon wave of demented avengers, a whole zombie army of cheerful white people with Twitter handles, marched out of obscurity into the dream to just follow orders by just hitting retweet.
How do I feel? Mostly I'm pissed. I'm pissed about it. And resolute. We did three OOO seminars in those years, and it's time for a fourth, I dare say, where I get the band back together with a host of others, at my place (Rice University); and we say fuck you to this whole vibe. Being despised for allowing daffodils to not-access the thing in itself just as not-great as humans can't, and for holding that maybe trees were also people and chairs were alive, has been beaten into the threat of my wife being rounded up and deported.
"Culture" vs "Class" Is a Fake Binary
Media is full of it now. And it's BS. It's designed to divide us, and we need solidarity like never before. It's an easy "elite" versus "popular," mapped onto "middle class" versus "working" class, mapped yet more sinisterly onto "Black" versus "white." As if anti-racism were expendable in an emergency.
The immaturity of some leftists in the USA as they eagerly contribute to this "debate" is staggering.
So here's Timothy Snyder laying it down very very nicely for you:
Wednesday, December 18, 2024
All-New American Edition of Being Ecological Coming Soon
Watch this space for launch event announcements!
Isn't the new cover just great? I mean, really great?
That's Julian of Norwich's hazelnut. I got fed up of the Blue Marble and Earthrise. In fact I spoke to NASA on the subject with Pharrell Williams in 2016. If you ask me, that Blue Marble (and furthermore that Pale Blue Dot) are sadistic images, conjuring an evil gaze from the viewpoint of a total vacuum, indifferent to or oblivious of or contemptuous of terrestrial affairs. The point is the "universe of harmony" (Shelley), a common trope in the literature of the radical Enlightenment that boosted the white supremacist concept "Man."
Much better is Julian's vision, in which God placed in her hand a hazelnut, telling her it was everything that ever was, is or could be. Has a sense of humor for a kickoff. Just look at this lovely new cover. It's much more multidimensional than that Blue Marble. And there's a necessary spiritual or even mystical element in there.
The book contains all new material for us poor Americans. It was supposed to be for us, but I got so busy when the book came out, mostly with two hyperobjects exhibitions, I didn't have time to promote it right. So I'm incredibly grateful to Beth Clevenger and the MIT team for redoing it with me.
Monday, December 16, 2024
America: Get Ready to Filter or Boil All Your Water
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| The Cuyahoga River (Ohio) caught fire at least 12 times before 1969 |
I once lived in Chelsea, London, where the bath was supplied by a water tank on the roof. One bath--emerging from it covered in sores--was enough to convince me not to use water contaminated with bird shit.
If they do away with the Environmental Protection Agency or ignore it the clean-ish water (some) Americans have enjoyed since 1974 will be a thing of the past. All the babies who died under George W Bush because of shitty water on the spinach will be nothing. Nothing. Nothing in comparison to this.
Water filter guy is coming around the new house today to get me set up. You're really going to want to go with reverse osmosis or good old fashioned boiling or distillation.
You voted for this. Or you not-voted for this. This is on you.
Sunday, December 15, 2024
World Mental Health: Social Psychology at Planet Scale
The country, nay the world, are the grip of a highly contagious personality disorder that spreads from anti-charismatic leaders such as Donald Trump and affects how we think, how we behave, even if and when we are thinking and behaving in a way to oppose the guy. Think of how the mainstream media has totally failed us. Think of the narcissistic self-attack on the left.
Bandy Lee, fired by Yale for speaking out about Donald Trump--silenced also by the mainstream media but enjoying a massive resurgence thanks to Anthony Davis and the Meidas crew (more of whom in the next post), is someone you should pay attention to.
Not just for understanding and defeating Trump, but for a vision aligned with mine on how to live the hyperobject: how to manage in a world of politics and culture at planet scale.
She's made not many, but enough, posts on her own site since the election, and this is a really good one that she's just released. She's been talking about the danger of Trump to our individual and collective psyches for years, and has had brilliant ideas for how to cope and deal with and confront the difficulties.
How come? She's a psychiatrist who deals with manipulative psychopaths of Rikers Island. If you can do that, you can See Things. Watch it, most definitely:
Living the Hyperobject: Structures of Feeling as COVID and Black Lives Matter
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| Mercy-wear: “I won't hurt you,” an orientation to the future |
In Hell I argue that COVID and Black Lives Matter (simultaneous!) are (not just were) planet-scale political awareness being born. Living the hyperobject. Elad Nehorai has written something very important about this.
I feel them. You feel them. Others feel them but they might not know. The might not grok the magnitude. “Structure of feeling” is an under-theorized Marxist concept in the work of Raymond Williams which I have sharpened in my recent work to mean proto-ideology, ideology (how we live our world) from the future. Black Lives Matter and the concurrent COVID vibes were and are structures of feeling that literally shaped or structured how people voted. Around the world, people threw out existing governments in the wake of COVID.
This essay, recommended by erstwhile NAACP LDF director Sherilyn Ifill, really really gets to this. Ifill has penned the most significant essays on why Kamala lost of all, so if she's recommending something, it's good. Period.
Read this and then watch what I also take to be a related and very important approach, that of Bandy Lee and her World Mental Health Coalition, which I'll embed next.
Here are links to my reading of Ifill's brilliant essays:
I thank my friend Andy Wilson for helping me think about this these last couple of days.
Saturday, December 14, 2024
Support The Texas Observer
Two days before Thanksgiving, Texas Governor Greg Abbott jetted around deep South Texas to brag about his border security bonanza and pose for pictures with soon-to-be federal deportation czar Tom Homan, as the two served National Guard members and state troopers turkey, bread rolls, and cranberry sauce out of cafeteria-style containers. For the agencies of the soldiers and police, this was the fourth Thanksgiving of Abbott’s Operation Lone Star.
Before the grub, Abbott and Homan served up a generous helping of anti-immigrant bravado inside an Edinburg aircraft hangar.
“This is an unprecedented attack on our country,” Abbott said, misleadingly portraying immigrants as criminal invaders. “There’s help on the way, help unlike what any of y’all have ever, ever seen before,” he said, as Homan stood behind him, dressed in an olive-green windbreaker decorated with a Punisher skull patch bearing his surname. “The cavalry is here.”
As this so-called cavalry—the massive immigration crackdown pledged by President-elect Donald Trump—arrives, a question has emerged for Texas taxpayers. For the last decade, state Republicans have flooded the Texas-Mexico divide with border security spending, but could the financial tide finally turn under Trump 2.0?
With the help of his soon-to-be advisors and cabinet members, including Homan and U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner nominee Rodney Scott, Trump has promised to shut the border to immigration and deport millions of undocumented U.S. residents, which will likely terrorize communities well into the country’s interior, separate families, and devastate critical sectors of the economy like construction and agriculture.
Abbott has signaled willingness, once the incoming administration ramps up its own border militarization, to cut security expenditures under Operation Lone Star, the governor’s $11 billion multi-agency border scheme. At a press conference last month, he told reporters that Trump will provide Texas the opportunity to redirect funds: “It could be for education, it could be for property tax cuts and sending it back to the people in the state of Texas,” Abbott said, as reported by the Dallas Morning News.
Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick echoed the same sentiment in a WFAA-TV interview last month. “We’re going to be able to take a lot of that money now and put it back to our taxpayers, for roads, for water, for education, for health care,” he said.
But some doubt that will happen, or hope it won’t. Operation Lone Star has boosted the budgets of local law enforcement agencies, and it has proved especially popular with leaders in smaller, rural counties, where cops have to serve communities across large swaths of land, police budgets are more modest, and local governments have more difficulty bringing in revenue.
Roy Boyd, the sheriff of Goliad County, which sits about halfway between Laredo and Houston, is one such leader who opposes cuts to border security spending. He has his eyes set on policing projects beyond the borderlands.
“If we secure the borders and fail to secure the interior, we will have wasted our time and treasure,” Boyd told the Texas Observer.
Boyd, a Republican, is the chair of a multi-county drug interdiction task force named after and funded by Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, which now foots some of Goliad’s bill for major expenses like personnel costs. Using border security funds, Boyd said his office employs five deputies who largely focus on “investigative services specifically directed at transnational criminal organization activities.” His deputies do this work not only in Goliad, Boyd told the Observer, but for any of the 52 member agencies of the Operation Lone Star Task Force when asked. Not only does Operation Lone Star fund personnel, but it has paid for surveillance tech too: Last year, Boyd’s department acquired a software that can track cell phone locations without a warrant, which he said the department uses for drug and human trafficking investigations.
Some Democratic sheriffs feel the same, in part because their departments also benefit from the influx of border cash. Maverick County Sheriff Tom Schmerber, whose jurisdiction has been the crown jewel of Operation Lone Star and been thrust into the international spotlight over the growing militarization of Eagle Pass, does not want to see changes to Operation Lone Star funding. If Texas cuts border security spending, Schmerber said, “It’s not very good news for me.”
Some opponents of Texas’ ballooning border security industrial complex would support a spending decrease—but they’re skeptical. Agency appropriations requests and bills filed ahead of the 2025 legislative session, two experts told the Observer, suggest Texas is unlikely to actually slow down.
“Judging from the bills filed as is, we’re going to spend an enormous amount of money on so-called ‘border security’ efforts,” said Jaime Puente, director of economic opportunity at the progressive think tank Every Texan.
The governor is asking lawmakers for roughly $3 billion for Operation Lone Star over the next biennium, mostly for building border barriers and migrant busing operations, according to his office’s legislative appropriations request. “Until the border is secured by the federal government, the Office of the Governor believes that overall funding for border security should not be decreased,” his office wrote in the request. “During the 89th Legislative Session, the Office looks forward to the Legislature weighing in during robust conversations on how to best keep Texans safe as we work together to determine the necessary funding to achieve this paramount mission.”
The Department of Public Safety (DPS) and the Texas Military Department (TMD) are the two main agencies at the forefront of Operation Lone Star. In its current appropriation request, DPS is asking for around $1.5 billion for “OLS and Trooper Deployment” and “Border Transportation.” TMD is requesting about $2.3 billion for “State Active Duty – Disaster,” which is the funding source used for Operation Lone Star. TMD did not respond to an Observer request for comment.
Altogether, these requests would amount to a similar or greater level of border security spending than what legislators budgeted in the previous biennium.
Abbott’s GOP allies have also pre-filed bills for big-dollar border-related initiatives, including creating a database of undocumented children and a new state police unit dedicated to patrolling the border.
Plus, significantly cutting spending wouldn’t make sense for Republicans’ goals, Puente said: Texas has already built up a massive infrastructure for border policing and mass deportations. “For the time being, at least in this upcoming legislative session, I do not expect the governor or members of the House Appropriations or Senate Finance [committees], budget writers, to back off at all on what they have already planned, what they’ve already been doing for so-called border security,” Puente said.
Abbott’s Operation Lone Star came on the heels of other border security spending spikes in Texas. Over roughly the last decade, these outlays increased ninefold. And, over the course of the first Trump administration, this spending only increased.
“Operation Lone Star has always been about politics for Gov. Abbott, not about solutions. The project has been a billion-dollar strain on our state for years with few verifiable results,” state representative Armando Walle, a Democrat from Houston, told the Observer in a written statement.
“I’m not optimistic about the future of border spending under another Trump Presidency, but I hope that next session appropriators and legislators in the state Legislature are able to work on common sense solutions and provide resources to the local governments and community organizations in our border counties.”
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Thursday, December 12, 2024
Wednesday, December 11, 2024
Tuesday, December 10, 2024
Ontological Politics
...It's not just the perfect storm of rich and famous and chip on shoulder. It's not just the pathology that resembles a corporation's psychopathic narcissistic nastiness.
It's the fact that T came out of the TV like a demon in Twin Peaks.
The only real opponent strong enough to beat him would be a cartoon character like Bugs Bunny.
If we could get Bugs Bunny out of the tv and into this world he would have a chance. "He don't know me vewy well" ZONK BANG BONK CLAMP
A character from African legend mediated by American cartoon world would do it
Trump is cartoon like, like the Thing. He can reconstitute ...
No one should ever feel bad they or someone they supported didn't succeed in defeating him.
I was confused for a while. (Talking pure aesthetics here, the nonsense level, not policies etc: whoever controls the nonsense controls the world.) Kamala clearly came out of the disco and that first meme of her as Eowen ("I am no man") convinced me. Disco could beat tv.
Attention America: New Edition of Being Ecological On the Way!
...with a new preface by me that talks about where the book has come and what it's all about. I'm so honored MIT press is doing this with me.
Sunday, December 8, 2024
Gerard Manley Hopkins Was My Second Cousin 3x Removed
!!! Thank you to Lexi, the family genealogist. And in celebration of that fact, here's friend Seamus Perry in conversation with Mark Ford about his work.
So much to say. I teach him all the time. “Horrible to say, in a manner I am a Communist.” For a Jesuit this is not bad at all: “it is a dreadful thing for the greatest and most necessary part of a very rich nation to live a hard life without dignity, knowledge, comforts, delight, or hopes in the midst of plenty—which plenty they make...”
Friday, December 6, 2024
Great Post on X by FrameLab
It's very much worth reading. If you don't know the work of George Lakoff you should.
Thursday, December 5, 2024
I Loved Teaching This Term
And my next 101 class (What Is a Fact?) now has 48 students in it! I'm so pleased.
This term it was my how to read literature class (Prosody Narrative Drama) and an undergraduate ecology and culture class. Next term will be the graduate version!