UTOPIAN CONSIDERATIONS (2) : the Biocosmist "We"
Happy Birthday Octavia Butler, your light shines, always.
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How’re you ? I don’t know who follows this newsletter so I can’t tell if you’re non-black people I should pester into giving money, attention and energy to the movement against white supremacy happening right now in america in particular and against police brutality in the world in general. If you’re reading this it’s highly unlikely you’re not aware of it.
This is not a propaganda outlet, as much as I lament the current state of things and long for something more, and I understand that I don’t know you, even those of you who’ve sent me e-mails. I have no way of knowing what’s going to convince the people still hesitant to do anything (can they be convinced by talk, even ?).
To my people : Take care of your selves, stay sane.
Here’s a funny word : “We”.
You might find it while reading any thinkpiece, op-ed or polemicist rant. I try to be more cognizent about my words but I’m guilty of it too.
It’s so wide and far-reaching. It’s a ridiculous word, really.
Segmented by space and time : I don’t live in the same body as the people I would count in my We if we’re talking about family, friends and kins. I don’t live in the same appartment as all the people I’d count in my We if we’re talking about political affinity or social work, etc. That’s not to say that it’s an empty word, just that it’s more complex than basic unmoving unity. A lot of the time it’s thought of as a communion : The notion of We is the notion of a shared commonality, of a community, of an assumed togetherness, in responsibility, in duty, in fault, in potential, in preoccupations. That’s the condition of We.
As a linguistic convention, the royal We feels even stranger, like kings and queens somehow feel themselves as plural, until you see the hobbesian leviathan, the classic image of what The State wants you to see it as, within the bounds of the “social contract” that is society, then all becomes clear :
(dunno if you can see it but this is a picture of a very large dude composed of very small people, the man is crowned, has a sword and a scepter and towers above the Land.)
Basically, the State “sees” itself as the overarching presence, the thing that unites every people of a particular nation and that nation to its territory as property, the King is the face of the state and therefore he presents himself as We.
The State-Royalty figures itself as the brain, or at least “the noble organ”, of the social body. The point of a State is social cohesion, binding people together into something that can be put to use and expand its capacities.
It’s a paradoxical and in fact constrained bodily autonomy where each person’s own freedom is bound so as to allow The State to gather agency and capacity by orienting the flow of its human stock.
THE ONLY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A WALL AND A HAND IS THE SHAPE OF THE FLOW
(I know Cyborghood is a difficult subject with regards to disability/disagency, I’m not looking at what’s a true or false cyborg here, this is more about the moment when the body reveals itself as capable of integrating tool-use rather than just picking up tools and using them.)
It seems that the cyborg emerges at the period when tribeship is being displaced and replaced by micro-state formations as the dominant social form, the time when experts and artisans have emerged and slowly (we’re talking decades-to-century here) but surely changed the way work is done. This is a period when architecture already has more than a few centuries behind it in numerous regions. In those areas where expansive States start to form, displacing nomadic tribes, you find the “expertisation” of knowledge where certain people start to be the designated knowers of certain fields such as war, shamanism or artisanry, it’s no longer the function of the group to conceive and build but of one or a few people within the group to do so.
Cyborgs and architecture develop around the body and in conjunction because they’re both about the adaptation of the human body to the world and the adaptation of the world to human sociality. The central conceit of both is how do you bring human and world together, often in ways that may expand certain realms of possibilities but also foreclose others : if cars as commodities are an expansion of our capacities, they’re also part of the terraforming apparatus that will inevitably change the way ecologies function and interlock, the way Earth is lived.
In this transitional human group, the intellectual labor of the prosthetics/architecture is concentrated in specific human units, “individuals”, rather than distributed to the whole of the group like agriculture and carework was for tribes.
Obviously these people might sometimes work with others, and they need to teach other “individuals” what needs to be taught in order for their knowledge to not be lost.
The point here is that the collective intellect, that of the crowd, of the people, of the mass, of the collectivity ; is distributed differently. Specialisation concentrates knowledge in certain particular human compartments, from the level of individuals to the level of institutions.
“People are dumb panicky dangerous animals and you know it.“
Contrarily to what’s implied in the extract above, it’s not that people in groups are evil, rather people in groups are more gullible and less likely to stop and reflect on what they’re doing in the moment. They’re no longer “individuals in a group”, instead they become extensions of a will they don’t oppose, as long as they see themselves as part of that group.
Herd mentality is real. I’ve been in places where people got panicky and unreasonable, I’ve been at times when people almost trampled others to death trying to escape from a burning building when a coordinated and ordered movement would have helped everybody get out safely. We do tend to react without thinking when we’re in an excited crowd whose organising principle seems to be “to each their own and fuck the rest”. The mass, the crowd, the herd is not a disorganised whole of stupid sheep, it’s an organised whole of stupid sheep who don’t have a clue what’s leading them and towards what, only that others are walking so they might as well follow.
I’ve seen herd mentality happen for demonstrably positive things too : people in the subway who felt pressured into wearing a mask because everybody else did, people trying to stop bloody fights in countless occasions, random people helping to distribute ressources during a protest or public event, because they saw that the few folks doing the work weren’t enough for the crowd, etc. The kinds of things you do because you feel it’s the right thing, the kind of feel you get because others are doing it, yes it’s brainless but is it bad ?
Herd-mentality is the moment when the mass of a crowd catalyses the behavior of its human-units, it’s the flowstate extended to large gatherings.
Depending on the composition of a crowd you may get complementary relations or purely dysfunctional ones after all, peer pressure is only bad if you value your personal “individual” autonomy over “the mass”. It’s true that crowds can make people dumb, but dumb is not always harmful. Sometimes you shouldn’t overthink shit and just do. And when the crowd has been designed in advance, when it’s been organised according to principles you agree to then maybe you can trust into a plan and just lose yourself in the dumb joy of being in a movement.
Lenting your brain to someone demands some trust, obviously.
It’d be easy for a minoritarian leadership to take a hold of the crowd and orient its behavior, at least for the short time the crowd has formed itself. It’s rare people just give their brains to someone and let them lead the collective body, generally people want receipts after a while, if nothing useful has happened.
That minoritarian leadership doesn’t necessarily appear as the Face of the crowd during and after the crowd-state means that it’s also quite easy for these runaway leaders or influencers to escape accountability.
Then again, there are crowds that don’t have faces, that might be a plus in some situations. Nobody said the social body had to look (or feel) human.
Have you ever wondered what it’d feel like to be in a sea of more than you ? Not just feeling your subjectivity interacting with a collective of sensers but feeling a potential collective subjectivity ?
Maybe there’d too much, right ? It’s already hard enough keeping up with everybody’s opinions, formulated thoughts, books, ideas, movements, also being able to feel other’s (as individuals and collectives) sensations would be maddening, an excess too much for any individual mind.
That said, excess is nothing but the misplacement of ressources, where there is excess there’s also scarcity hiding itself. There’s never too much, only too much here and there and not enough around. We’re not poor because it’s the law of nature, we’re poor because motherfuckers have taken what we need and made it their property.
And even if it was a law of nature, what’s preventing us from changing Nature ?
PROMETHEANISTS, IMMORTALISTS, GODBUILDERS
The eschatological and apocalyptic are so widespread they feel dated these days, I don’t feel like I need to spell out why, do I ? Just this ongoing feeling shit is going faster, pressure building up but never releasing, just displacing itself, or there’s eruptions over here and over there but never in a way that’s expected. Nothing feels coherent except in retrospect, something that feels pretty close to the art experience in a way ; you can only understand a work, a story, an experience once you’ve been through it in its entirety.
There’s the certitude that all of it has a reason, once it’s been lived. In that, prophecy and projection can be very much about collecting hope :
Marxist (as opposed to Marxian) eschatology mirrors tech-singularitarianism in its hope and longing after revolution/revelation, all of the historical process, wether a dialectical relation between two opposed class or the unceasing march of progress, all of this time and ressources spent and chaos and conflict and building up, according to these two seemingly opposed frameworks all of it has a purpose and definite function : inevitable, maybe even “worth it” to these strands of thoughts.
These two frameworks see a general process unfolding, maybe impacted by direct human intervention, maybe one that simply feeds off human laborpower but a process that has an inevitable outcome ; either salvation or damnation.
Religion and Politics are cousins after all : completely concerned with the movement of humanity, and what meaning can be made off it.
“Our body must be our work” - Nikolai Fyodorov
Nikolai Fyodorov appears in the 19th century, an ascetic figure of the russian librarian scene, he doesn’t get to live the russian revolution as he dies in 1903 but his work lives on as disciples and fans publish parts of his writings in 1906. Documents which will lead to people in the seventies associating him to other figures in a retroactively created movement they’ll call Cosmism.
Russian cosmists have wildly different models and ideas from one another but all talk about similar notions and problems : the problem of time, the problem of history, the problem of death, of brotherhood, of defect, of destruction.
For exemple, Fyodorov’s main thesis lays down a plan : bringing about the work of God the father onto the world through science rather than wait for it through patient prayer, he advocates for ressurecting the dead like Christ would, healing everyone of disease and need, making the world into a material sanctum.
Another figure is Tsiolkovsky who believes Man’s destiny is in the stars and therefore there’s a need to make people apt at existing in the cosmic void and also to extract as much ressources as possible from the world to fulfill the cosmic destiny.
Many more people from different fields of knowledge-production are grouped under this wide vanguard and in the decades that follow their influence seems more pressing than ever in the USSR :
The Biocosmists-Immortalists appear in 1921 with a journal and a manifesto ; through these they declare the rights to immortality and space travel as inalienable Human rights. Some uphold the bizarro-heretical-christian-orthodoxy of Fyodorov, others just ignore it and focus on the horizon it draws out. The ones who look at godliness and religiosity directly don’t want to pray for a god but to build it for everyone, a god for all those who’ve been made immortal and all those who’ve been resurrected through the grace of Science.
Godly museum curation, the resurrected and immortalised become art objects that need to be cared for, respected as relics rather than commodities or mere workers.
It’s a restrictive and expansive utopia in that sense : it aims at organising the world very differently, bringing back the past and integrating it to the present so as to eliminate Time as the slow march of death before expanding the boundaries of this new world to space.
The christian temporality of golden age => fall => suffering => rapture is reorganised into golden age => fall => suffering => work towards rapture. The passive contemplation of the world is brushed aside in favor of the “Common Task” of saving the world for and through itself.
It’s restrictive because it converts and constrains, not in the sense of a conversion of energy to a state of matter, but conversion to a faith, complexity and variety are erased under the influence of the Church. Things don’t exist in interdependence to each others through variety, difference and exchange, rather they’re material that has not yet been salvaged and integrated into the Common Task. People haven’t heard the good news yet.
In that, most of the original thinkers of (bio)Cosmism don’t think organically or pluralistically.
Where Fyodorovian cosmism explicitly wants to bring about the christian kingdom of God onto earth, biocosmists want to build God itself out of the earth.
After reading up on it and talking to some people about it, the point of biocosmism seems to be to go beyond left and right, in a way centrism never could, as it ascend and descends and expands, absorbing boundaries in its corrosive wake.
Its framework goes beyond the rift between Social Anarchists and Individual Anarchists by refusing to acknowledge a possible individuality in either “the mass” or “human units”, nothing can be divided in any way that matters, there’s only the body not yet organised, ordained. The slime that hasn’t coalesced yet.
There’s nothing but us and We doesn’t end at the disappearance of an individual cell or part, it keeps going.
That gotta sound cool to people who like being alive.
The fear of the death-state certainly has a fascistic potential: death as complete nihil is the end of everything fascism runs towards : activity, intensity, tension. This death is the end of desire, the end of possibility
Death is the big sleep. (Or slip, if you’re religious.)
The immortalists who wanted to make the world a museum of curated beings of art, of scintillating ever existing parts that never disappear could be said to have feared death, to have feared change the absolute killer that pushes things out of their thingness into other forms. The old guard of cosmism let its ideas of Life as a force and society as a process be driven by scientism and a colonial understanding of the world. They could not see the already existing systems as organised, only as a chaotic nature that demanded taming.
But the dead body in the ground feeds worms who’ll shit out perfect fertilizer for the plant who becomes wood for the fireplace, its death fueling another body’s life in a cycle of energy conversion. Then the current day immortalists’ task could be either to stop this movement, freeze it so as to stop degradation, erosion, entropy, or it could be to make this movement seemless, push it towards unceasing, unobstructed intensity ; to prevent destruction either by making everybody resistant to it or by simply killing death itself.
Here the question is not “are they earnest”, the question is “how are they gonna go about doing this without slipping into full fascism”.
Especially when you know the museum institution itself is a project of colonial domination.
Which is why biocosmists aren’t curators or conservationists, they’re reaching out through the body, rather than trying to force the world into a body.
They want to embody the totality rather than try and enclose it, be the body, not the fascia. That’s the rift between thinkers of this past and brainworm victims of today. Tsiolkovsky, applied a specifically ableist, scientism-driven, lens to the cosmic body of the universe, his idea being that it was a body full of errors who needed rectification and perfection, he saw dirt where there was inscrutable complexity and wanted the elimination of what he considered “defectiveness” or too much, or unclean things. An anti-ecological outlook that ignores the function of complexity and variety within ecologies.
He didn’t want to do it for punishment but for advancement mind you, he had simply identified specific parts of the universe as being cancerous and needing removal.
Tsiolkovsky was concerned with a deathless future while Fyodorov looked at the ancestors and the elimination of the past as a purgatory for the victims of history, both had death as a pivot to their thinking one way or another : Fyodorov rejected continuous historical progression in favor of a singulariarian moment when the whole of history would be brought together in a total universal brotherhood. All are saved, all is solved, everything is ok.
Nobody could escape the kindness of the father, whether they wanted it or not.
ALL ABOARD
I don’t know that I can speak to egodeath in any way that matters or explain(?) what it is and does better than the thousands of voices that have come before me. Just read up on it I guess.
if you kill the white supremacist in your head you inevitably kill the capitalist, the sexist, the racist, the transphobia, the individualism
you trade i for we
What I do find funny is the idea of ego-death on a planetary scale.
If you view your bodymind as some sort of channel or space for material flows, then the ego is, to some extent, what encloses how some of those flows pass through you, it’s a state to the nation of your body, in that it’s a construct rooted in material reality that affects it too, and it can be destroyed, it can be weakened, it can be severed, its dissolution is supposed to be the realisation that you’re not apart from the world but a part of it.
Maybe mass egodeath would mean the collective realisation of our shared material condition as cells of the same cosmic body, voyaging towards death at ever increasing speed. The realisation that there is no intrinsic difference between people, people itself disappearing as a meaningful category, with only the movement of quantities as the one perceivable metric.
Now this is super improbable ; there’s no reason to assume that every single person on the earth is gonna have an epiphany at the exact same time leading all of us to suddenly join hands and sing songs of love and happiness and the people who parrot the view that all you need in your life is a change of perspective are either trying to scam you or convince themselves.
Spontaneity is an illusion, if something happens without a visible cause that’s more of an indication of our lack of perception than an absence of influence.
Chaos is order that can’t be understood and order is chaos repeating itself.
Where does that leaves us ?
The old biocosmists were in the midst of a revolutionary project, by the 1920s things had already moved quite a bit in Russia.
Now is… Uprisings, chaos, brittle destruction, void, fascism. And building, healing in motion. Apocalypse is supposed to come from the term “revelation” and sure enough we see a lot of things unfolding, I guess things still feel pre-apocalyptic to those who haven’t been swept yet because they still refuse to look directly at what’s hurting them repeatedly.
I’ve talked to some folks about all this, godbuilding, superhumans, cyborgs, “The godslime”, instrumentality project, worldly slime-ocean, anarchist space programs.
It’s all comic book names now, do they disguise a sinister totalitarian project or Hippie fascist agenda ? Hard to tell, the rare biocosmists I talk to strike me as decent folk who enjoy talking seriously about light matters and lightly about serious matter.
They don’t seek conversion or disintegration, mostly the downfall of Empire America and creation of new ways of being. Fun stuff.
“utopia is a model. The old cosmism just put forth the godbuilding model in the hard steel-mill ideology of the time. They ascribed to thoughts and hopes the material functionality of machine parts, and their models mirror this. Their failures to heed the friction and harmonic vibrations of tiny people in the large machine, their lack of understanding of systemic evolution, of systems that can keep their definition through multiple states, their weird patriarchy too.“
This strain of Biocosmism is not about binding humanity in a tight fascia but rather about coalescing as a slime. Herdmentality made clear and complementary. The general intellect flowing through a bodymind that can organise itself without the need for a State.
“The godslime/anarchistspaceprogram shtuff is two different ways of propagating the Common Task, in a way that shows that “human rights” is a task not a right.
And we adjust our utopias to produce results, use them as navigation tools.
Like how you describe death, the Task is not a finishable thing, the worm becomes the bird becomes the shit becomes the human becomes a different worm.”
And we talk more and sure enough, the slime has no illusion that it can bind the world to its will, its goal is not to turn the world into a weapon against itself and the [Outside of itself]. It could work as a parasite if you misunderstood interdependence. After all, parasitism is simply consentless and unsustainable symbiosis.
The endgame pushes beyond certainty and uncertainty into an ambiguous realm where everything could very well dissolve into the totality,
I can’t see myself either refusing or advocating for the dissolution of everything that lives into itself , in that I am an agnostic on the question of biocosmism.
Don’t send me anything, there’s so many people out there more in the need than me.
Ospare@protonmail.com - Ospare@substack.com