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| humankind_notes [2017-09-18 10:03] – nik | humankind_notes [2017-09-18 10:10] – nik |
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| | ====Things in Common: An Introduction==== |
| ====Introduction==== | |
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| <blockquote>In symbiosis, it’s unclear which is the top symbiont, and the relationship between the beings is jagged, incomplete.</blockquote> | <blockquote>In symbiosis, it’s unclear which is the top symbiont, and the relationship between the beings is jagged, incomplete.</blockquote> |
| <blockquote>We require another holism if we are going to think at a planetary scale without just upgrading or retweeting the basic agricultural theological meme</blockquote> | <blockquote>We require another holism if we are going to think at a planetary scale without just upgrading or retweeting the basic agricultural theological meme</blockquote> |
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| <blockquote></blockquote> | |
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| <blockquote>The symbiotic real is necessarily ragged and pockmarked.</blockquote> | <blockquote>The symbiotic real is necessarily ragged and pockmarked.</blockquote> |
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| ===Chapter 1=== | ====1. Life==== |
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| <blockquote>actual “life” as opposed to Life with a capital L inhabits this excluded middle zone. What is called “life” is a hesitancy between two different kinds of death: blind machination and total nonexistence.</blockquote> | <blockquote>actual “life” as opposed to Life with a capital L inhabits this excluded middle zone. What is called “life” is a hesitancy between two different kinds of death: blind machination and total nonexistence.</blockquote> |
| <blockquote>A shimmering, undead, spectral being—an electron, a mouse, a skyscraper, a social movement—is an X-being, intrinsically endowed with superpowers. We can comprehend this precisely through the X that Kant himself uses to describe the one thing he allows to be withdrawn: transcendental synthetic judgments a priori. He calls them the “Unknown = X.”</blockquote> | <blockquote>A shimmering, undead, spectral being—an electron, a mouse, a skyscraper, a social movement—is an X-being, intrinsically endowed with superpowers. We can comprehend this precisely through the X that Kant himself uses to describe the one thing he allows to be withdrawn: transcendental synthetic judgments a priori. He calls them the “Unknown = X.”</blockquote> |
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| <blockquote>"Yes, the whole world is haunted! Only is haunted? Nay, it itself “walks,” it is uncanny through and through, it is the wandering seeming-body of a spirit, it is a spook.</blockquote> | ====2. Spectres==== |
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| <blockquote>—Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own"</blockquote> | <blockquote>"Yes, the whole world is haunted! Only is haunted? Nay, it itself “walks,” it is uncanny through and through, it is the wandering seeming-body of a spirit, it is a spook. —Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own"</blockquote> |
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| <blockquote>I’m out of the loop! I’m out of the loop! I’m out of the loop!</blockquote> | <blockquote>I’m out of the loop! I’m out of the loop! I’m out of the loop!</blockquote> |
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| <blockquote>Humankind is humankind, not some abstract being but a very specific one. Yet this doesn’t mean we can point to it directly. Humankind is specific and spectral. The quality of humankindness floats spectrally like a halo around humans, precisely because of the specificity.</blockquote> | <blockquote>Humankind is humankind, not some abstract being but a very specific one. Yet this doesn’t mean we can point to it directly. Humankind is specific and spectral. The quality of humankindness floats spectrally like a halo around humans, precisely because of the specificity.</blockquote> |
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| | ====3. Subscendence==== |
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| <blockquote>‘‘The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.’’ This truism is one of the most profound inhibitors of world sharing.</blockquote> | <blockquote>‘‘The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.’’ This truism is one of the most profound inhibitors of world sharing.</blockquote> |
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| <blockquote>In a solar economy, the economic whole will subscend the parts. In an oil economy, oil subsumes everything in its explosive-holistic wake. In a solar economy, the question of who siphons and sells the solar power is a different type of question than the question of who owns the oil. In many more senses than we can now enact, humankind will have seized the productive forces, which is different from saying that nonhuman lifeforms will continue to be exploited. This is because humankind is a fuzzy, subscendent whole that includes and implies other lifeforms</blockquote> | <blockquote>In a solar economy, the economic whole will subscend the parts. In an oil economy, oil subsumes everything in its explosive-holistic wake. In a solar economy, the question of who siphons and sells the solar power is a different type of question than the question of who owns the oil. In many more senses than we can now enact, humankind will have seized the productive forces, which is different from saying that nonhuman lifeforms will continue to be exploited. This is because humankind is a fuzzy, subscendent whole that includes and implies other lifeforms</blockquote> |
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| | ====4. Species==== |
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| <blockquote>Utilitarian holism sets up a zero-sum game between the actually existing lifeform and the population. One consequence is the trolley problem: it is better to kill one person tied to the tracks by diverting the trolley than it is to kill hundreds of people on the trolley who will go off a cliff if we don’t divert the trolley. There’s the left-wing variant: talk of wholes is necessarily violent (racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic and so on) because what exists are highly differentiated beings that are radically incommensurable. In this leftist thought mode, there’s as little chance of imagining you’re a member of a group as in neoliberal ideology!</blockquote> | <blockquote>Utilitarian holism sets up a zero-sum game between the actually existing lifeform and the population. One consequence is the trolley problem: it is better to kill one person tied to the tracks by diverting the trolley than it is to kill hundreds of people on the trolley who will go off a cliff if we don’t divert the trolley. There’s the left-wing variant: talk of wholes is necessarily violent (racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic and so on) because what exists are highly differentiated beings that are radically incommensurable. In this leftist thought mode, there’s as little chance of imagining you’re a member of a group as in neoliberal ideology!</blockquote> |
| <blockquote>Which comes first, racism or anti-environmentalism? This has to do with a deep philosophical issue: which subtends the other, racism or speciesism? Does racism exist because we discriminate between humans and every other lifeform? Or does speciesism exist because we hold racist beliefs about people who don’t look exactly like us?</blockquote> | <blockquote>Which comes first, racism or anti-environmentalism? This has to do with a deep philosophical issue: which subtends the other, racism or speciesism? Does racism exist because we discriminate between humans and every other lifeform? Or does speciesism exist because we hold racist beliefs about people who don’t look exactly like us?</blockquote> |
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nik