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[<h3>An introduction</h3>
<p>Our autonomous reading group is a collective formed around a question and towards unknowing. We came together at the beginning of the summer, asking one other: “What is the self at the End of the World ?” Fruitfully, the question has led less to answers, and more to further questions, modes of inquiry, and pathways into fresh ideas and practices. It created a space to sit with destruction, newness, and the beyond. After all, what even are the Self , the End , and the World ?
</p>
<p> We gathered weekly at a local anarchist library to explore texts and other media on radical ecology, Afropessimism, queer negativity, phenomenology, critical art history, political theory, and more. We ventured outside the limits of liberal humanist understandings of selfhood, towards a multidisciplinary understanding of what it is to “be” at the End of the World — understood broadly as the End of the Anthropocene, bordered nations, individual consciousness, and as perhaps the beginning of the Weirdness, the Real, transc End ence, continuity, and revolution. </p>
<p> What follows is an essay, a poem, an archive, and also an experience. It is a synthesis of theory, practice, and experimentation, and a means of sharing what we have found to be generative (or not) during this hot summer. Our intention is to continue asking questions we still haven’t answered and to encourage you to join us in doing so. We want to craft string figures through conversation, to cast a non-linear web of research, and to illustrate the dialogue between knowledges that we have been entangled by and in. Let’s open openings – portals – into inquest and wade through unknowingness at the End -of-times together. </p>
<h4>What is the [[Self]] at the [[End]] of the [[World]]?</h4>
//[[More information about this project->temp-about]]//
//[[References->references]]//
//[[Reading list->reading list]]//
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<h3> a summer solstice celebration </h3>
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<p> In the month of June, we held a solstice dinner to celebrate plenty, beauty, aliveness, growth, but also rot, destruction, flux, swerve, the Real, and whatever is left over after all of that. Neither a formal reading circle nor an unrelated party. We wanted to bring theory into practice, creating something full, intentional, and named, and then sipping, and chomping, and tearing it into nonexistence.</p>
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//[[Back->about]]//
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<h3>assemble string figures</h3>
(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[(text-style:"expand")[“Assemblages are performances of livability.”]
- Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, //The Mushroom at the End of the World// ^^1^^]
(text-style:"sway")[(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[┏(-_-)┛┗(-_- )┓┏(-_-)┛┗(-_- )┓┏(-_-)┛┗(-_- )┓┏(-_-)┛┗(-_- )┓]]
<p>Jane Bennett observes, “...the modern Self feels increasingly entangled.” ^^2^^ Indeed, that is the |tooltip>[tentacularity<span class="tooltiptext">“Tentacularity is about life lived along lines—and such a wealth of lines—not at points, not in spheres. ‘The inhabitants of the World, creatures of all kinds, human and non-human, are wayfarers’; generations are like ‘a series of interlaced trails.’ String figures all.” (Haraway, //Staying with the Trouble//, 32)</span>] that accompanies a more-than-human existence. Surviving the ruins might involve finding friendship in |tooltip>[companion species<span class="tooltiptext">In Donna Haraway’s //Companion Species Manifesto// (2003), she declares a companion species to be a mutual relationship between at least two organic beings, rooted in biology, care, and power. Anna Tsing also suggests humanity cannot survive without companion species, like fungi.
Haraway more recently writes, “Companion species are relentlessly becoming-with. The category companion species helps me refuse human exceptionalism without invoking posthumanism. Companion species play string figure games where who is/are to be in/of the World is constituted in intra-and inter- action.” (//Staying with the Trouble//, 13) </span>]^^3^^ and embracing the earth as a |tooltip>[sympoietic<span class="tooltiptext">Donna Haraway refers to M. Beth Dempster’s Master of Environmental Studies thesis (1998), in which she suggested the term sympoiesis for “collectively-producing systems that do not have self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries. Information and control are distributed among components. The systems are evolutionary and have the potential for surprising change.” Sympoeisis is the opposite of autopoiesis, “self-producing, autonomous units.” (Haraway, //Staying with the Trouble//, 33) </span>] system.^^4^^ Making-with and becoming-with is a multispecies affair. </p>
<p>(align:"<==")+(box:"===XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX==")[(t8n:"dissolve")+(link:"Caution...")[//We should be cautious when conversations about tentacularity teeter into claiming kin. As best put by Max Liboiron on selective kinship: “There are multiple levels of rude happening here: choosing your kin instead of being invited in and chosen by kin (which is a sign of Whiteness according to Aileen Moreton-Robinson and Darryl Leroux), excluding undesirable kin while simultaneously extending the definition of kin, [and] using Indigenous (most often Cree and Métis) concepts of kin without citation (see Todd)...” ^^5^^//]]</P>
<p>Bennett claims that anthropomorphizing non-human matter is the best way our narcissistic kind can make sense of vibrancy and vitality outside of the (text-style:"expand")[subject/object], (text-style:"expand")[human/non-human] divide.^^6^^ Animacy is a slippery concept and linguists tend to privilege human-centric interpretations, erroneously indicating hierarchies of matter based on their proximity to humanlike aliveness.^^7^^ But the anthropo- in |tooltip>[Anthropocene<span class="tooltiptext">The current geological epoch, characterized by the impact human activity has on the planet. (But really, which humans?)</span>] “blocks attention to patchy landscapes, multiple temporalities, and shifting assemblages of humans and nonhumans: the very stuff of collaborative survival.” ^^8^^ </p>
(t8n:"dissolve")+(link:"The composite Self ...")[<p>Our bodies are (text-style:"expand")[porous]. We are constantly (text-style:"fade-in-out")[entering] and (text-style:"fade-in-out")[leaving] assemblages.^^9^^ Making the Worlds we know and operate within.
Those assemblages are never complete. Anything that appears leftover, in the void outside of the assemblage, is not missing – it is essential.^^10^^</p>]
(t8n:"dissolve")+(link:"...can it survive the End?")[<p>Rather than succumbing to “game-over” cynicism, “|tooltip>[staying with the trouble<span class="tooltiptext">“I want to stay with the trouble, and the only way I know to do that is in generative joy, terror, and collective thinking.” (Haraway, //Staying with the Trouble//, 31)</span>] is both more serious and more lively.” ^^11 ^^ Let us be messy and sit with the discomfort of (text-style:"expand")[expansion].
|tooltip>[Worlding<span class="tooltiptext">Haraway makes it clear that Worlding is an active, ontological process because she applies the gerund throughout //Staying with the Trouble// (2016). And, she reminds us, “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties.” (Haraway, //Staying with the Trouble//, 12)</span>] is an active process that involves respecting the string figures that (t8n:"blur")+(link:"connect")[reveal] our assemblages. Let us use this recognition to “reshape the Self and its interests,” ^^12^^ to promote greater empathy with who/what is in the void Out-side, and foster more responsible transformations as we shift through assemblages. This can be applied to the ecological crisis and socio-political rupture we might face.</P>]
<p>//
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[[walk outside->trash1]]
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(if:(history: where its name contains "walk")'s length >= 1)[[[enter the void->portal1]]]
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^^1^^ Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, //The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins// (Princeton Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2021). 157-158.
^^2^^ Jane Bennett, //Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things //(`Durham: Duke University Press`, 2010). 115.
^^3^^ Anna Tsing, “Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species,” //Environmental Humanities 1//, no. 1 (May 1, 2012): 141–54, https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3610012; Donna Jeanne Haraway, //The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness// (`Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press`, 2003).
^^4^^ Donna Jeanne Haraway, //Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene // (`Durham: Duke University Press`, 2016).
^^5^^ Max Liboiron, //Pollution Is Colonialism //(`Durham: Duke University Press`, 2021). 106.
^^6^^ Bennett, //Vibrant Matter//.
^^7^^ Mel Y. Chen, //Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect // (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
^^8^^ Tsing, //The Mushroom at the End of the World//, 20.
^^9^^ Bennett, //Vibrant Matter//.
^^10^^ Rumen Rachev, “Assemblages: Assembling the Unassembled,” New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on 'How matter comes to matter,' November 23, 2016, https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/a/assemblages.html.
^^11^^ Haraway, //Staying with the Trouble//, 4.
^^12^^ Bennett, //Vibrant Matter//, 122.
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<p>“String figures… propose and enact patterns for participants to inhabit, somehow, on a vulnerable and wounded earth… String figures require holding still in order to receive and pass on. String figures can be played by many, on all sorts of limbs, as long as the rhythm of accepting and giving is sustained.”
- Donna Haraway, //Staying with the Trouble//</P>
<p> //[[let's play->strings2]]//</P>
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<h3> a performance and workshop at an anarchist bookfair </h3>
(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[<img src="https://i.imgur.com/z9ubDAX.jpg" alt="polaroid picture of an altar on grass with candles, wine bottle, books, broken mirror, and a painting" style="width:50%;height:50%;">]
(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[<iframe src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1a-yTTPCEmI_rSICwa1XmgHq8_qekgH9k/preview" width="380" height="100" allow="autoplay"></iframe>]
<p> The aftermath of asking, “What is left of the Self at the End of the World?” at the Salon du Livre Anarchiste Montréal.
Crafting string figures through conversation, carving out curiosities and concerns, smashing reflections of/on Self and Things, illuminating strategies and temporalities, composting in/through/with corridors of (un)knowing. Open(ing) an(d) alter(ing).
Primary texts discussed:
* David Calnitsky, “The Policy Road to Socialism” (2022)
* Jane Bennett, //Vibrant Matter// (2009)
* CrimethInc, //Terror Incognita// (2012)
* Avgi Saketopoulou, “Risking sexuality beyond consent: overwhelm and traumatisms that incite” (2020)
* adrienne maree brown, //Emergent Strategy// (2017)
* Donna Haraway, //Staying with the Trouble// (2016) </P>
(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[<img src="https://i.imgur.com/5ZeJQA6.jpg" alt="polaroid picture of chairs on grass tied together with string" style="width:50%;height:50%;">]
//[[Back->about]]//
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(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[<h3>All remains as is</h3>]
As forewarned, keeping it means that all will remain as is. In order to free it, to break the cycle, to exit this World of suffering, to born a World anew, you must be willing to risk going beyond, to risk towards the limit of your Self .
So, will you…
(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[[[//Get out//->End]]
Go [[//Beyond Consent//->Beyond Consent]]]
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<h2>Notes from a Reading Group at the End of the World</h2>
<p>(text-style:"sway")[[[Enter->Intro]]</p>
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<p>//This publication is best viewed on a desktop browser.//<p>
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<h3>About this project</h3>
<p>{''Notes from a Reading Group at the End of the World'' was created by Oriana Confente, Sofia Di Gironimo, Thai Hwang-Judiesch, Désirée Nore, and Hannah Silver. Together, we form an autonomous research group based in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang (Montréal, Québec, Canada).}
{Over the summer of 2022, we held a [[celebration of the summer solstice->solstice]], participated in a communal clean-up of the garden behind the library that hosted us, and delivered a [[performance at the Montréal Anarchist Bookfair->bookfair]]. We now present this Twine-based interactive work.}
To get in touch, reach us at: ''<a href="mailto:EndoftheWorld @riseup.net">endoftheworld @riseup.net</a>'' or ''<a href="https://endoftheworldresearch.noblogs.org/">endoftheworldresearch.noblogs.org</a>''
</P>
<p>
(b4r:"solid","none","none")+(b4r-size:0.7,1,1)+(b4r-colour:white)[<h4>Where we are</h4>
<p>Our weekly meetings took place at Bibliothèque DIRA, Montréal's anarchist library, and we thank them for their openness to hosting our group. We also recognise that the DIRA, as is the whole city of Montréal, is located on unceded land. We recognise the historical communities of, and the forcible removal of those peoples from the lands on which we live.
The Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabeg peoples have long ties to what is now the Island of Montréal. Kawenote Teiontiakon is a documented Kanien’kéha name for the Island of Montréal. The City of Montréal is known as Tiohtià:ke in Kanien’kéha, and Mooniyang in Anishinaabemowin.
Additionally, we recognize that the online space that hosts this project is not a rootless ether, but rather relies on servers and media infrastructure all around the World, on lands with their own rich histories rife with injustice and harm, but also meeting and creation. We acknowledge that this online space relies on energies and materials extracted from the earth, often against the wills and interests of those who live on the land.
Anti-colonial practice neither starts nor ends with the acknowledgement of territory. We encourage readers to research the historical communities of the land on which they live, but also to support land defence movements in their areas, and to think about the cultivation of personal and collective relationships to land as part of their practice.</P>
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(b4r:"solid","none","none")+(b4r-size:0.7,1,1)+(b4r-colour:white)[<h4>Who we are</h4>
<p>''Oriana Confente'' is a writer, film photographer, and maker-of-things based in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang (Montréal, Canada). Confente completed a Master of Arts in Rhetoric and Communication Design at the University of Waterloo in 2020, where they began developing research-creation projects. Their practice continues to be research-based and explores concepts connected to posthumanism(ish), sustainability, and digital media. </P>
<p>''Sofia Di Gironimo'' is a student living in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang (Montréal, Canada). They are interested in revolution, psychoanalysis, and the pursuit of a life of leisure. They are currently pursuing a Master of Arts in Communications at McGill University, where they focus on Queer Negativity, Sadomasochism, and Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Negotiating the intersections of theory and personal/political life practices, they explore the boundaries of Self-and-beyond, meaning-and-nonmeaning, everything-and-the-big-Nothing-at-the-centre-of-it-all. </p>
<p> ''Thai Hwang-Judiesch'' is a Korean-Canadian writer, poet. Her work focuses on possibility, transformation, and love at the End of the World. As we witness the decay and foreclosure of possibility in capitalist ruins, Endings are the conditions of living and dying at this point in time. Her works interweave Endings with her specific experience and perspective of loss and diaspora, the temporality of colonization, the strange World of the internet, Korean shamanic mysticism, magic, liminal spaces, and portals. Her undergraduate thesis was on Lagging: Diasporic Remembering on the Internet, focusing on memory work and diasporic loss onlines with her specific theorization of “lagging” as a racialized temporal orientation to the internet. She has a personal newsletter (Notes on Here and Elsewhere) hosted on substack and is the co-host of the podcast Before We End. </P>
<p> ''Désirée Nore'' is a community organizer, a researcher and a troublemaker. They obtained a Master’s in Sociology, writing on oral histories of the anti-Austerity movement in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal) under the Canadian Research Chair of the Sociology of Social Conflicts in 2022. Involved in different collectives and affinity groups, their research plays around contemporary social theories, queer and peagan praxis, and post-situationnist disturbances of the quotidien. Nore is currently researching on the barriers resulting from transmisogyny through the lenses of the Politics of the Commons, with Quebec’s Sexual Diversity and Gender Plurality Chair. They are also researching the history of french-canadian queer folklore music and the concept of disappearance through the Laurentides history, in rural Quebec. </p>
<p> ''Hannah Silver ''hopes to be many things. For now, they are a student and researcher situated in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal, Canada). They are finishing their Bachelor’s degree at McGill University in Political Science and Gender, Sexuality, Feminism, and Social Justice Studies. In addition, Hannah is writing about identity-mainstreaming, annotating for a misogyny bot, and reading a lot. </p>
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<h3> References </h3>
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<p> //Ideas aren’t formed in a vacuum. All the thoughts each member presented, and the ones we’ve formed as a collective, are the result of countless impressions, dialogues, and other lived experiences that don’t fit into a prescribed reference style. Our research is a composite of citable and uncitable moments. For a better understanding of some concepts that influenced us, and by extension, this project://
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artificial intelligence
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Afropessimism
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anti-authoritarian movement
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Antonio Gramsci
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community discussions
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conversations with friends
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decolonial theorists
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despair
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do-it-yourself/do-it-together strategies
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harsh editors
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Julia Kristeva
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Karl Marx
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ketamine
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Luce Irigaray
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magic and witch traditions (chaos magik and green witcheries)
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Max Hardcore
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memes
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misogyny
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the ocean/the trees
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(para)academia
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Queerness
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Queer negativity
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Reddit
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transfeminism
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Twitter
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sadomasochism
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</p>
<p> ''//A complete list of works that fit into a prescribed reference style and appear in this work:// ''
Al-Saji, Alia. “Too Late: Fanon, the Dismembered Past, and a Phenomenology of Racialized Time.” In //Fanon, Phenomenology, and Psychology//, edited by Leswin Laubscher, Derek Hook, Miraj Desai, 177–93. New York/London: Routledge, Taylor et Francis, 2022.
Ahmed, Sara. “The politics of fear in the making of worlds“,// International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education //16, nᵒ 3 (1 mai 2003): 377‑98.
———. "The Organisation of Hate ", //Law and Critique// 12, nᵒ 3 (1 octobre 2001): 345‑65, https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1013728103073.
Bennett, Jane. “Powers of the Hoard: Artistry and Agency in a World of Vibrant Matter.” The New School, Sept. 27, 2011. Video of lecture, 1:14:44. https://youtu.be/q607Ni23QjA.
———. //Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things.// Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
brown, adrienne maree //Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, Illustrated édition.// Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017).
Calnitsky, David. “The Policy Road to Socialism.” //Critical Sociology// 48, no. 3 (May 2022): 397–422. https://doi.org/10.1177/08969205211031624.
Chen, Mel Y. //Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect.// Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.
CrimethInc. //Terror Incognita//, 2012.
Dery, Mark. //Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture//, Illustrated édition. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 1994.
Des Ruines. //Numéro 2 – Automne 2015 | Des Ruines – Revue anarchiste apériodique.// Accessed October 27, 2022. https://desruines.noblogs.org/post/2015/11/24/numero-2-automne-2015/.
Fast, Heidi, Taru Leppänen, and Milla Tiainen. “Vibration.” New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on 'How matter comes to matter.’, March 30, 2018. https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/v/vibration.html.
Fians, Guilherme. “Prefigurative Politics.” //Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology//, March 18, 2022. https://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/prefigurative-politics.
Fink, Bruce. //The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance.// Revised ed. edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Freud, Sigmund. //New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis//. Oxford, England: Norton and Co, 1933).
Garcia, Renaud. " Nature humaine et anarchie : la pensée de Pierre Kropotkine", Ecole normale supérieure de lyon, 2012, https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00776417.
Gordon, Avery. //Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. //Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Haraway, Donna Jeanne. //Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.// Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
———. //The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. // Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.
Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” //Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism// 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14.
———. //Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals.// New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019.
Heidegger, Martin. //The Origin of the Work of Art//, Cambridge University Press,1950, 10.
Hine, Phil and Carroll, Peter J. //Condensed Chaos: An Introduction to Chaos Magic//, UK ed. édition. The Original Falcon Press, 2009.
Jeffrey, Craig and Dyson, Jane. "Geographies of the Future: Prefigurative Politics", //Progress in Human Geography// 45, nᵒ 4 (august 1st, 2021). 641‑58, https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132520926569.
Kim, Jinah. //Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas. //Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
Kropotkin, Peter. //Mutual Aid,// 1902. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-mutual-aid-a-factor-of-evolution.
Lacan, Jacques. //Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X. //Translated by A. R. Price. 1st edition. Cambridge: Polity, 2016.
———. //Ecrits: The First Complete Edition In English.// Translated by Bruce Fink. 1st edition. New York, NY: WW Norton, 2006.
Leyden, Dara. "Globalization’s Corroding Edifice - The Bullet", //Socialist Project//, october 13, 2019. https://socialistproject.ca/2019/10/globalizations-corroding-edifice/.
Liboiron, Max. //Pollution Is Colonialism.// Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. //The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge//, First edition. Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 1984).
———. //The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. // Trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988 [Le Différend. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1983].
Pack, Justin. "Academics No Longer Think: How the Neoliberalization of Academia Leads to Thoughtlessness", 23 février 2016, https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/19727.
Rachev, Rumen. “Assemblages: Assembling the Unassembled.” New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on 'How matter comes to matter.’, November 23, 2016. https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/a/assemblages.html.
Ricco, John Paul. “Mourning, Melancholia, Moonlight.” //CR: The New Centennial Review// 19, no. 2 (2019): 21–46.
Saketopoulou, Avgi. “Risking Sexuality beyond Consent: Overwhelm and Traumatisms That Incite.” //The Psychoanalytic Quarterly// 89, no. 4 (October 1, 2020): 771–811. https://doi.org/10.1080/00332828.2020.1807268.
Schürmann, Reiner. //Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy//, Reprint édition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “Walter Benjamin,” October 14, 2020. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/benjamin/#ImaHisCul.
Tsing, Anna. “Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species.” //Environmental Humanities// 1, no. 1 (May 1, 2012): 141–54. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3610012.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. //The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.// Princeton Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2021.
Walcott, Rinaldo. “The End of Diversity.” //Public Culture// 31, no. 2 (May 1, 2019): 393–408. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-7286885.
Whitehead, Joshua, ed. “Introduction.” In //Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit & Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction.// Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020.
</p>
//''Images, audio, and more''//
<p>We are thankful for the assistance of artificial intelligences, like Otter.ai which did its best to transcribe our conversations for us, as well as DALL-E and Craiyon (formerly DALL·E mini), which generated images based on phrases we imagined.
Other photos, videos, and sounds incorporated into this work were recorded by group members or located through open source websites.
ASCII art that was sourced online has been credited below:
Bake, Donovan. "Mushroom." ASCII Art Archive. Accessed September 13, 2022. https://www.asciiart.eu/plants/mushroom.
Douthwaite, Colin. “CIRCLE - ASCII ART.” ASCII. Accessed September 5, 2022. https://ascii.co.uk/art/circle.
ejm. "Doors." ASCII Art Archive. Accessed November 9, 2022.
https://ascii.co.uk/art/doors
ejm. "Fairy." ASCII Art Archive. Accessed November 1, 2022.
https://www.asciiart.eu/mythology/fairies
"Explosives". ASCII Art Archive. Acessed October 25, 2022. https://www.asciiart.eu/weapons/explosives
hjw. "Wavy." ASCII Art Archive. Acessed October 25, 2022. https://www.asciiart.eu/art-and-design/borders
jpg. "Earth." ASCII Art Archive. Acessed November 1, 2022. https://www.asciiart.eu/space/planets
"Tornado." ASCII Art Archive. Acessed October 25, 2022.
https://www.asciiart.eu/nature/tornado
</p>
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[<h3> Reading list </h3>
{<p>Scan to access our reading list //(open a portal into our digital library)//:</p>
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/6WVZxOs.png" alt="QR code" style="width:50%;height:50%;">}
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//[[Back->Intro]] //](text-size:0.78)[
(link:"What is the Self?")
[//''What is the Self?''//
Maybe the Self is constructed in and through language. It is always incomplete and always seeking completion through its cycles of Desire. The Self always contains a remainder of what never was nor could be spoken, a trace left by the [[inception of the Self -> Self is a rupture]] from the continuity that was before.
]
(link:"What is the Self?")
[//''What is the Self?''//
Maybe the Self is in an assemblage of things. Or, maybe the Self is the assemblage of things. Our bodies are porous; [[“I” is a composite of “its.”->composite]]
]
(link:"What is the Self?")
[//''What is the Self?''//
Maybe the Self is the phenomenological [[experience->Destroying the self/ves over the World ]] of a specific intentional nowness, which is pulled in different directions by some unconscious, non-conscious and collective streams. Self would behere describe in the tentions of its intentionality, its will, and its own senses, memory caracter, fears and emotions. ]
(link:"What is the Self?")
[//''What is the Self?''//
Maybe the Self is one enmeshed in and informed by historical, temporal, and spatial [[timelines->Situated]]. It is constituted across identities-formations, dialectics, multilogues, power dynamics, and the conceivable.
]
]
(text-size:0.78)[
(link:"What is the End?")
[//''What is the End?''//
Maybe the End is [[a moment of opening for possibilities->Radical change - c]], where the different realms of consciousness and reality get closer than ever:
dreams, nightmares and reality become one.
Liminal spaces become the one making the other spaces possible.]
(link:"What is the End?")
[//''What is the End?''//
Maybe the End is a beginning. It is [[an explosion of the Self to the beyond->A World beyond]], it is the construction of a new World around whatever comes out on the other End. The End is a radical or ontological transformation which leaves nothing of the old World behind, but stretches out anew and into the unknown.
]
(link:"What is the End?")
[//''What is the End?''//
Maybe the End has happened, is happening, and will happen. It is not as much a moment as it is the continuation of a banal, brutal, and [[violent oppressive order->order]] that is closing in on itself. Though crisis and exploitation are hegemonic, transformative alternatives are emerging, resisting, and countering to build anew.
]
(link:"What is the End?")
[//''What is the End?''//
Maybe the End is the space where something becomes something else. The process of transformation, the portal, the space in between living [[and->Where from here?]] dying.
]
(link:"What is the End?")
[//''What is the End?''//
Maybe the End isn’t the End at all; it’s a transformation. Maybe it’s the shift when we enter and leave [[assemblages of things->composite]] - all (text-style:"fidget")[things], material and immaterial.
]
](text-size:0.78)[
(link:"What is the World?")
[//''What is the World?''//
Maybe it is not //the World// (noun), but //to World// (verb); an active, ontological process and a multispecies affair. [[Maybe to World is to craft the pattern of strings and assemblages of things you’re connected to.->composite]]]
(link:"What is the World?")
[//''What is the World?''//
Maybe there is a difference between [[Worlding->Polyphonic rhythms]] and the capital W World. The World holds an illusory sense of wholeness. It is a bounded container in which the project of Colonization and Capitalism have generated a unified story we tell about life on this planet.]
(link:"What is the World?")
[//''What is the World?''//
Maybe the [[World->Aiming toward Radical changes]] is not only what is outside of the Self, but the Self itself and the multitude of Selfs appearing in a finite or infinite space. The World is where the Selves, things and stuffs live and is the relation built between them.]
(link:"What is the World?")
[//''What is the World?''//
Maybe the [[World->When the self enters the World ]] is coterminous with the Self. The World is everything that the Self is and is not, all that is and will be named, and all that will forever be unnamed. As Self is constructed, so too is World, around and with the particularities, the particular relation to meanings, objects, attachments, that the Self might have.]
](align:"<==")+(box:"=XXX=")[=
<pre style="line-height: 1em;">
ooo OOO OOO ooo
oOO OOo
oOO OOo
oOO OOo
oOO OOo
oOO OOo
oOO OOo
oOO OOo
oOO [[Congratulations!->portal2]] OOo
oOO [[You've reached->portal2]] OOo
oOO [[a digital->portal2]] OOo
oOO [[corridor!->portal2]] OOo
oOO OOo
oOO OOo
oOO OOo
oOO OOo
oOO OOo
oO OOo
oOO OOo
oOO OOo
ooo OOO OOO ooo
</pre>
(align:"<==")+(box:"=XX=")[=
<pre style="line-height: 1em;">
. -- ~~~ -- .
.-~ ~-.
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/ corridor `\`
| if not a |
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| [[to->portal3]] |
\ [[somewhere->portal3]] /
\ [[else->portal3]] /
`-. [[?->portal3]] .-'
~- . ___ . -~
</pre>(align:"<==")+(box:"=XXX=")[=
<pre style="line-height: 1em;">
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[(text-rotate-z:15)[[[the only way out is through->portal4]]] ]
</pre>(align:"<==")+(box:"=XXX=")[=
<pre style="line-height: 1em;">
`*** ### ### ***`
*## ##*
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*## Where will ##*
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</pre>(text-size:0.78)
[<h3> "I" is a composite of "its"</h3>
<p> (if:(history: where its name contains "composite")'s length >= 1)[You've been here before. (link-goto: "Go somewhere else?", (either: "Situated"," Self is a rupture", "Destroying the self/ves over the World ", "Where from here?", "END"))]</p>
<p>I am an |tooltip>[assemblage<span class="tooltiptext">Jane Bennet borrowed this term from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Bodies can be affected by encounters with other bodies; a site to manifest the non-hierarchical power of related matter; “living, throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within" (//Vibrant Matter//, 21-24)</span>] of (text-style:"fidget")[things]. There are plastics in my blood. Metals and minerals, too. There are microbugs fucking on my face and in my gut. There are diets and grand ideologies that I squeeze into and away from. All of these (text-style:"fidget")[things] are (text-style:"fidget")[things] and have (text-style:"fidget")[thing]-power. I have (text-style:"fidget")[thing]-power. I have other types of power, too; and so do the other (text-style:"fidget")[things] that (de)compose my Self. If I am afforded agency, so should all the (text-style:"fidget")[things] that make me. </p>
<p>I am porous, |tooltip>[vibrant^^1^^ matter<span class="tooltiptext">//Matter//, as in any animal, vegetable, mineral, or more. //Vibrant//, as in vibrating frequency, animate/enhance the capacity for liveliness, activeness of matter, even if initiated by humans. See the definition of //vibration// by Fast et. al (2018) for more. </span>], and so is everything in this World. Humans, animals, (text-style:"fidget")[things] outside and in between. </p>
<p>Vibrant matter does not dissolve at the End of the World. It transforms. </p>
=|=
[[<p>//walk outside//->trash1]]</p>
=|=
[[<p>//assemble string figures//->strings]]</p>
|==|
]
(b4r:"solid","none","none")+(b4r-size:0.3,1,1)+(b4r-colour:white)[=
(text-size:0.5)[
^^1^^ Heidi Fast, Taru Leppänen, and Milla Tiainen, “Vibration,” New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on 'How matter comes to matter’, March 30, 2018, https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/v/vibration.html.
](text-size:0.78)[
<h3>an activity</h3>
<p>Jane Bennett details the (cycling-link:"garbage","glove","pollen","rat","cap","stick","things") she sees atop a storm drain near her home in Baltimore. Next time you’re out, look for a pile of trash-(text-style:"fidget")[things] that call to you. Record what the trash pile is composed of as a list. </p>
<p>Translate the (text-style:"fidget")[thing]-power of the trash. Create a narrative of its Self, map its assemblages, speculate its agency at the End of the World – whatever that means. </p>]
<pre style="line-height: 1em;">
________________________________________________\|/__________\\;_\\//___\|/_____________
</pre>
(text-size:0.78) [
[[assemble string figures->strings]]
]
(text-size:0.78)[
<h3> a walk outside </h3>
(link-reveal:"Is the thing a Self? Is the Self a thing?")[
(t8n:"slide-down")+(t8n-time:1s)+(link-reveal:"Once, on a walk through my neighbourhood, I encountered:")[
(text-style:"fidget")[
(t8n:"fade-down")+(link:"thing")[>One fresh mask tangled in dandelion weeds]
(t8n:"fade-down")+(link:"thing")[>One sports drink bottle, intact with its cap, contents empty]
(t8n:"fade-down")+(link:"thing")[>Another sports drink bottle, crushed and without its cap, but also empty]
(t8n:"fade-down")+(link:"thing")[>One bright orange traffic cone, nose-diving into the gutter]
(t8n:"fade-down")+(link:"thing")[>One credit card receipt, tumbling down the street]]
]
<p>In Jane Bennett’s //Vibrant Matter//, she describes a moment she surveyed items collected on a storm drain while on a (t8n:"slide-down")+(t8n-time:1s)+(link-reveal:"similar walk:")[
(text-style:"fidget")[(t8n:"fade-down")+(link:"thing")[glove]
(t8n:"fade-down")+(link:"thing")[pollen]
(t8n:"fade-down")+(link:"thing")[rat]
(t8n:"fade-down")+(link:"thing")[cap]
(t8n:"fade-down")+(link:"thing")[stick]]</P>
]
<p>Items that relate to human activity, but are also vibrant in their own right.^^1^^ Bennett said, “...(text-style:"fidget")[thing]-power rose from a pile of trash. Not Flower Power, or Black Power, or Girl Power, but (text-style:"fidget")[Thing]-Power: the curious ability of inanimate (text-style:"fidget")[things] to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle.”^^2^^</P>
<p>(text-style:"fidget")[Thing]-power arises from something we understand as the Weirdness, or maybe Theodor Adorno’s negativity. (text-style:"fidget")[Thing]-power demonstrates independence and aliveness outside of human experience, a cornerstone of |tooltip>[vital materialism<span class="tooltiptext"> A political/philosophical field dealing with the posthuman (matter) and its vitality (aliveness, animacy, agency).</span>]. At the same time, “we are vital materiality and we are surrounded by it, though we do not always see it that way.”^^3^^ ]</P>
<p>Bennett seeks to dissolve the (text-style:"fidget")[subject/object], (text-style:"fidget")[human/thing] divide. ]</P>
(text-size:0.78)[
//
=|=
[[continue...->trash3]]
=|=
(if:(history: where its name contains "walk")'s length >=1)[[[I'm tired of being->END]]]
|==|
//
]
(b4r:"solid","none","none")+(b4r-size:0.3,1,1)+(b4r-colour:white)[=
(text-size:0.5)[
^^1^^ Jane Bennett, //Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things //`(Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).`
^^2^^ Bennett, //Vibrant Matter//, 6.
^^3 ^^ Bennett, //Vibrant Matter//, 14.](text-size:0.78)[
<p>Hyperconsumption and |tooltip>[planned obsolescence <span class="tooltiptext"> The disposability of consumer goods (both materially and psychologically) is an intentional strategy exploited by mass-manufacturers to sell more products. Giles Slade’s //Made to Break// (2006) analyzes this topic in depth.</span>] make it easier to disregard the vibrancy of (text-style:"fidget")[things] so we can throw away matter.^^4^^ At the same time, objects of consumption are sometimes afforded more |tooltip>[animacy <span class="tooltiptext"> A slippery term, explored by Mel Y. Chen in //Animacies// (2012). Linguists often privilege a human-centric interpretation, erroneously indicating hierarchies of matter based on proximity to humanlike aliveness.</span>] than the humans who manufacture them.^^5 ^^
(align:"<==")+(box:"===XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX==")[“Both objectification and dehumanization are central notions within critical theory; in my view, these terms cannot operate without close attention to animacy.” ^^6^^]
Why not other types of power as well as (text-style:"fidget")[thing]-power? Why stop there? Black power, girl power, and more are tied to (text-style:"fidget")[thing]-power. Consider the gendered and racialized labour behind who often makes (text-style:"fidget")[things] and where (text-style:"fidget")[things] go when they have been discarded.^^7^^ </p>
<p>What if we unified powers to allow for a more complete understanding of agency and what it means to be Out-side – as in human and non-human matter that are considered disposable under a capitalist society on the verge (or past the point) of political and ecological collapse.</p>
//
=|=
[[an outside activity->an activity]]
=|=
[[assemble string figures->strings]]
=|=
(if:(history: where its name contains "strings")'s length >= 1)[[[what if we...->End]]]
|==|
//
]
(b4r:"solid","none","none")+(b4r-size:0.3,1,1)+(b4r-colour:white)[=
(text-size:0.5)[
^^4^^ Jane Bennett, “Powers of the Hoard: Artistry and Agency in a World of Vibrant Matter,” The New School, September 27, 2011, video of lecture, 1:14:44, https://youtu.be/q607Ni23QjA.
^^5^^ Mel Y. Chen, //Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect// (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
^^6^^ Chen, //Animacies//, 30-31.
^^7 ^^Chen.]
(text-size:0.78)[
<p>This page has been temporarily disabled because it contains identifying information about the authors.
Normally, you can navigate here to read more about who we are (our bios), where we are located (land acknowledgements, both physical and virtual), and what we have done together. </P>
//[[Back->Intro]]//
](text-size:0.78)[
(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[=
<p>“String figures… propose and enact patterns for participants to inhabit, somehow, on a vulnerable and wounded earth… String figures require holding still in order to receive and pass on. String figures can be played by many, on all sorts of limbs, as long as the rhythm of accepting and giving is sustained.”
- Donna Haraway, //Staying with the Trouble//</P>
<p> //[[let's play->strings2]]//</P>
]
(align:"<==")[
{<p>(text-size:0.50)[footage taken in Tiohtià:ke - Mooniyang - Montréal, Québec]</p>}]{
|space>[
|earth>[a]
|moon>[[[.->Desire]]]
]
}
(text-size:0.78)[
[<h3> (align:"=><=")+(box:"===XXXXXXXXXXXXXX===")[The Self ]</h3>]
(align:"=><=")+(box:"===XXXXXXXXXXXXXX===")[<img src="https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/22/cabinet_022_wertheim_christine_020.jpg" alt="an image of two sets of sinthomes, or the ring holding together Lacan's Borromean Knots. The left side shows the knot tangled up by its sinthome, and the left shows the knot untangled from its sinthome." style="width:100%;height:100%;">]
<p>The Self is a |tooltip>[rupture<span class="tooltiptext">A breakage, a splitting, an outpouring, a separation, a wound, a transgression of bounds.</span>]. It is a persistent cycle of desire, orbiting around an object that can never exist. The Self is constituted through a |tooltip>[fundamental trauma<span class="tooltiptext">Whether through the always-premature realisation that you are not a part of your mother, or through the all-too-abrupt naming of the ‘I’ from the ‘not-I’, the constitution of the Self is the first trauma of subjecthood.</span>] to which the whatever-was-before could not consent. </p>
(align:"=><=")+(box:"===XXXXXXXXXXXXXX===")[(text-style:"blink")[[[Click!->When the self enters the World ]]]
<p>to see what happens when
the Self enters the World </p>
<p> (if:(history: where its name contains "Self is a rupture")'s length >= 1)[You've been here before. (link-goto: "Go somewhere else?", (either: "Situated","composite", "Destroying the self/ves over the World ", "Where from here?", "END"))]</p>
]
]
(b4r:"solid","none","none")+(b4r-size:0.3,1,1)+(b4r-colour:white)[=
(text-size:0.5)[
Image Credit: Christine Wertheim, “To Be or Knot to Be.”Cabinet, 2006. https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/22/wertheim2.php.
][(text-size:0.78)[
Selfhood originates from the individuation of an
(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[(text-style:"blink")[‘I’ ]]
from the unnamed and undifferentiated(text-style:"blur")[ blur ]that was before. The Self as such enters the World of named and differentiated things, it joins to the Symbolic.
<p>This is what psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan names ‘the Mirror stage’, the moment in which an infant first identifies itself, finding the ‘I’ in its reflection. This ‘I’ is alway a misidentified ‘I’: the mirror stage “turns out fantasies that proceed from a fragmented image of the body.”^^1^^ The Self is misidentified as whole and distinct, where it had been porous and continuous. The body is named, it is “written or overwritten with signifiers”^^2^^, it becomes subject to the social order.
The Self, then, does not ‘enter’ the World, as it cannot pre-exist its own inauguration through the World. </p>
<pre style="line-height: 1em;">
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</pre>
<span style='font-family: Georgia'>
(text-size:0.78)+
(link:"The Self constructs itself around what it it is not:")[
<p>The Self constructs itself around what it it is not:</p>
<p>“I am not my Mother” … “I am not the floor”</p>
(link:"then, referentially, around what it is like and not-like:")[
<p>then, referentially, around what it is like and not-like:</p>
<p>“I am like my Mother” … “I am not-like my Father”</p>
(link:"and around the structures that organise selfhood on an interpersonal and global scale:")[
<p>and around the structures that organise selfhood on an interpersonal and global scale:</p>
<p>“I am a girl” … “I am a citizen”</p>
(link:"...")[
<p>This naming, this World-entering, this subject-formation--
it always occurs beyond the bounds of what was before,
it expands the subject’s lexicon, providing it new places
of attachment beyond its old imaginaries.
Not just a period of learning, this is a process of bringing into being.
It forms selfhood,often around the violent categories that
meaning-making brings into the World:
human/nonhuman, colonizer/colonized, natural/unnatural.
It is always more or too much;
it is always traumatic;
it is always</p>
(align:"=><=")[[[Beyond Consent->Beyond Consent]]]]
</span>
]]]]]
]
(b4r:"solid","none","none")+(b4r-size:0.3,1,1)+(b4r-colour:white)[=
(text-size:0.5)[
^^1^^ Jacques Lacan,// Ecrits: The First Complete Edition In English//, trans. Bruce Fink, 1st edition (New York, NY: WW Norton, 2006), 97.
^^2^^ Bruce Fink, //The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance//, Revised ed. edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 24.
](text-size:0.78)[
(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[<h3>Beyond Consent</h3>
]
[<img src="https://i.imgur.com/77yWUzN.jpg" alt="Diagram of three types of palate abnormalities in children. These depict the three mouths open as if crying." style="width:100%;height:100%;">]
<p>Avgi Saketopoulou’s “Risking Sexuality Beyond Consent: Overwhelm and Traumatisms that Incite” works through the psychoanalytic views of infancy developed by Piera Aulagnier and Jean Laplanche, in order to explain the traumatism of early subject development, and to explore the radical possibilities of revisiting that trauma.</p>
<p>Saketopoulou explains the concept of primary violence, or the limitations placed on an infant in the process of meaning-making. The very construction of a self is a limitation, bringing something into existence which will forever seek to complete itself but is doomed to fail.</p>
<p>Primary violence works by bringing representations, (if:(history: where its name contains "Keep it" or "Become it")'s length >= 1)[[[concepts,->Scrap everything]]] self-identifications, into the horizon of an infant, over which it never can never exert control. The infant could not agree to these new terms in advance, it could not motion for its own selfhood to be set into existence. What Saketopoulou finds interesting in this is that despite the infant’s subjection and assimilation to representations outside of its prior conceptual space, this is experienced as a pleasurable process. The generative newness of creation is fundamentally non-consensual, or beyond the limits of consent, and we //like it//. ^^1^^</p>
<p>Why would we want to argue against consent? Haven’t feminists, sex educators, and survivors been championing for a consent politics that is informed, intersubjective, and enthusiastic?</p>
<p>Let us continue onwards, exploring a World beyond affirmative consent and into the pleasures and possibilities outside the limits of our imaginations.</p>
(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[[[Show Me a World Beyond->A World beyond]]]
<p> (if:(history: where its name contains "Beyond Consent")'s length >= 1)[You've been here before. (link-goto: "Go somewhere else?", (either: "Situated","composite", "Destroying the self/ves over the World ", "Where from here?", "END"))]</p>
]
(b4r:"solid","none","none")+(b4r-size:0.3,1,1)+(b4r-colour:white)[=
(text-size:0.5)[
^^1^^ Avgi Saketopoulou. “Risking Sexuality beyond Consent: Overwhelm and Traumatisms That Incite.”// The Psychoanalytic Quarterly //89, no. 4 (October 1, 2020): 776.
Image Credit: Stock photo from an American text-book of the diseases of children]
<audio src="https://bigsoundbank.com/UPLOAD/mp3/0233.mp3" autoplay>(text-size:0.78)[
(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[<h3>A World Beyond</h3>]
(align:"=><=")+(box:"=XXX=")[<pre style="line-height: 1em;">
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</pre>]
<p> (if:(history: where its name contains "A World beyond")'s length >= 1)[You've been here before. (link-goto: "Go somewhere else?", (either: "Situated","composite", "Destroying the self/ves over the World ", "Where from here?", "END"))]</p>
<p>In order to understand the relevance of a politics that moves beyond affirmative consent, we should return to those representations which are first--nonconsensually or extraconsensually--written upon us at the genesis of Self. Human, woman, citizen, white, legal, landowning, singular, discontinuous, etc, etc, etc. One might see, here, where and how we are formed around the World, its structures of in/exclusion, its boundaries, its notions of what it is to ‘be’. </p>
If one is invested in the disembowelment of the current state of World affairs, or at least mildly concerned about the necropolitical-ethnonationalist-extractionist-exclusionary order of global, racial, anthropocentric capitalism, it might become useful to think about one’s own Self, its own attachments to those formative representations, which were in their own rite formed around this World with which our politic is at odds.</p>
<p>In their 2012 zine //Terror Incognita//, CrimethInc discusses the limits of liberal consent, making a motion towards a politics of seduction^^1^^. This new politics is necessary, they say, as the End point of the liberal model of consent, or the idea that consensus must be reached among all members of a group before action can be taken, is an impediment to the carrying-out of radical political action^^2^^. They speak to the classes which, by their nature, cannot consent to the new World we are seeking to build. Landlords, cops, bosses, UN delegates, land developers, white nationalists, left-liberals, managers, homeowners, people with academic degrees, the able-bodied, cis people, the people who are the right-kind-of-gay, people with addictions to the right-kinds-of-things, married people, people who own at least one pair of shoes… the list could go on. We all have something to lose.</p>
<p>For some of us, that ‘something’ is bigger than others, and that ‘something’ allows us to resist the whatever-comes-next with the gusto of a `$700B` army budget. For some of us, the ‘something’ is a little smaller. Much of my generation can’t even dream of ever buying a home, and despite having a number of shoes greater than zero, does not have much to lose. Material attachments aside, we all have our attachments to the World of representations that the what-is-now affords: many of us have names written on birth certificates and passports, nodes to live and die on in a family tree, the feeling of being inside of a body, a notion of wholeness, a Self.</p>
<p>The radical imperative to go beyond consent brings us to the border-point, at which all of these attachments, even the most basic, become unstable, threatened, destroyed. What happens next we could never know in advance. We cannot consent to the whatever-comes-next because it is outside of our present field of vision, it stretches out further than even the most radical subjectivity, out beyond the Self.</p>
=|=
(text-style:"sway")[What will(text-style:"fade-in-out")[ it ]look like? ]
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|==|
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(text-style:"buoy")[Where will(text-style:"fade-in-out")[ it ]take us? ]
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|==|
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(text-style:"sway")[Is(text-style:"fade-in-out")[ it ]coming soon? ]
|==|
(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[Is(text-style:"fade-in-out")[ [[it->POEM : is it you?]] ] you?]
]
(b4r:"solid","none","none")+(b4r-size:0.3,1,1)+(b4r-colour:white)[=
(text-size:0.5)[
^^1^^ CrimethInc, “Terror Incognita”, 2012. The group provides an explanation of this “politics of seduction: “Ultimately, the politics of seduction don’t rely on rational argumentation to influence people. These are passionist politis: we dive headlong into the terrifying fires of transformation, allowing stange passions to seize us. It’s not that these desires are “ours”; rather, we are theirs. We become lightning rods that crackle with flows of charged desire.”
^^2^^ "Terror Incognita"
](text-colour:white)[(text-size:0.78)[
<p>its hands and knees crawl up the just-scrubbed stairs to meet you
it genuflects to each cardinal point
its prolapsed anus blinking unseeingly to the South, West, North, and East
it asks you where it came from, what it is</p>
<p>“is it you?”</p>
<p>its first dream had it held hanging in place by the groin, as in a baby swing
it is carried mechanically around a doughnut factory, filled again and again with sticky pink jelly
its memories since then remain foggy
it has been searching, since then, for the empty-fullness</p>
<p>“can it come inside?”</p>
<p>its always-gaping mouth does not succeed in bringing sunlight to its inside-organs
it thinks one day they might all spill out into the brightness outside
its desires remain only in the negative
it demands that you do to it only that which it does not want to have done</p>
<p>“how can it serve you?”</p>
<p>“will you keep it?”
will you keep it?</p>
<p>“what will be left of it when everything is over?”
what was left of it before?</p>
<p>if you keep it, and treat it well, all will remain as is</p>
<p>if you keep it, and treat it badly, all will remain as is</p>
<p>if you punt it back down the stairs, you, by giving it what it does not want, are giving it what it wants, and all will remain as is.</p>
=|=
(text-style:"buoy")[[[Keep it->Keep it]]]
=|=
(text-style:"buoy")[[[Punt it->Punt it]]]
=|=
(text-style:"buoy")[[[Become it->Become it]]]
|==|
]
]
(align:"<==")[
{<p>(text-size:0.50)[footage taken in The Naiad Autonomous Zone, a TNO (non-organised territory) adjacent to the Papineau-Labelle Wildlife Reserve, in the Omàmìwininìwag (Algonquin unceded territory).]</p>}]
<audio src="https://static.wixstatic.com/mp3/8b8d6b_b3fa0af339fc491f927224d5f7cfac43.mp3"autoplay loop>
(text-size:0.78)[
(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[<h3>All remains as is</h3>]
<p>As forewarned, keeping it means that all will remain as is. In order to free it, to break the cycle, to exit this World of suffering, to born a World anew, you must be willing to risk going beyond, to risk towards the limit of your Self.</p>
So, will you…
(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[[[//Get out//->End]]
Go [[//Beyond Consent//->POEM : is it you?]]]
]
(align:"==>")+(box:"===XXXXXXX")[
{<p>(text-size:0.50)[Image taken in Lund, Sweden</p>}](text-size:0.78)[
(text-colour:white)[(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[<h3>All remains as is</h3>]]
(text-colour:white)[
As forewarned, punting it means that all will remain as is. In order to free it, to break the cycle, to exit this World of suffering, to born a World anew, you must be willing to risk going beyond, to risk towards the limit of your Self.
So, will you…]]
(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[[[//Get out//->End]]
(text-colour:black)[Go] [[//beyond consent//->POEM : is it you?]]]
(align:"==>")+(box:"===XXXXXXX")[
{<p>(text-size:0.50)[Image taken in Tiohtià:ke - Mooniyang - Montréal, Québec]</p>}](text-size:0.78)[
(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[<h3>(text-style:"blink")[Congratulations!]</h3>]
<p>You no longer exist. Or rather, by choosing to become //it//, you have entered a period of flux, during which your old attachments dissolve into the big Nothing, where the Self has met and exceeded its limit. What comes next? That’s been our question this whole time.</p>
(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[What is the Self at the End of the World?]
<p>In the whatever-is-here, in the big Nothing, do we see the possibilities unfold, the white-hot stellar nursery of the whatever-comes-next?</p>
<p>We will leave it at that, never having answered our question but always leaving room for more exploration into its depths.</p>
(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[[[Go ahead, get out of here!->END]]
]
]
(align:"==>")+(box:"===XXXXXXX")[
{<p>(text-size:0.50)[footage taken in Tiohtià:ke - Mooniyang - Montréal, Québec]</p>}]
<audio src="https://static.wixstatic.com/mp3/8b8d6b_d348e07e50ad47879cf3b282e54e5c34.mp3" autoplay loop>
(text-size:0.78)[
<p> (if:(history: where its name contains "Destroying the self/ves over the World ")'s length >= 1)[You've been here before. (link-goto: "Go somewhere else?", (either: "Situated"," Self is a rupture", "composite", "Where from here?", "END"))]</p>
(text-colour:black)[We tend to think of the Self has an entity who has power over the World. This power would start with control over itself. This idea of the Self's domination of itself and of the World is a foundation of the ideologies developped through centuries of cisheteropatriarcal, colonial, and racist domination.
This myth is deeply inscribed in the sciences, from physics to |tooltip>[//modern psychology// <span class="tooltiptext"> A good example is how Freud has defined the Self in his first topic. On the one hand, the Self has for him an exclusive relationship with the perceptual system and therefore with the outside World, or //real life//. On the other hand, the Self enters into a relationship with the //Id// with the aim of dominating it. Freud's theory of the Self explains why the aim of psychoanalysis is to release repressed emotions and experiences: to make the unconscious conscious. The Self that Freud describes is neither ahistorical nor universal.].
</span>].
Modern sciences split, break, dissect.|tooltip>[Evolutionary biology <span class="tooltiptext"> Evolutionary biology is the biology that studies the processes of the evolution of species. </span>] can be seen as an other of modern sciences: we study species in relationship with their ancestors, litteraly what has caused them, but never their relatives. With its roots in white academia, common evolutionary biology struggles deeply to explain cooperation, or co-evolution, as it occurs on an ecological systems level, has sociobiologists brought to light since Darwin.
Sciences, in its way toward specializations and precises knowledge, made a World of separations. We categorize emotions, political actions, and identities like we do plants, mushrooms, birds, and sicknesses. What about the common ground we share, the cooperation between species, beings and non-beings?
Our era has brought a seemingly infinite amount of knowledges. The ever-growing body of knowledge is so large that it could never be internalized by one individual. In this World, what we see, are, and do, becomes ever more complex, and more and more difficult to even grasp individually.
With the rise of right-wing populism, far-right and the loss of power from Sciences in the public narratives, we might have to say that this era is coming to an End, as will everything in time. Ruling classes do not feel affraid to be nurturing masses of uneducated and illiterate. We can see why studying |tooltip>[//affects// <span class="tooltiptext"> Between many other, Sarah Ahmed worked on many interesting relationship of emotions. In between others, she show how hate works with racism, shame and white supremacy.] </span> does indeed makes senses in these time and ages.
Aiming for positive and new dispositions might feel impossible with the End as a catastrophe becoming [[inevitable-> End of history]]. We might feel that we have no power to save even ourselves and our loved ones from the End of the World.
From the calm era of modernity, we got into the (text-style: "rumble")[disturbing post-modernity].
We might want to change the World ... but where to aim this change? It feels more than silly to burn some car and provoque l'Émeute générale, who has had give so little freedom to the left. Blocking trains and Land back is maybe some way forward, but the Liberty trucks and the Capitol insurgency shows that far right agenda has right now to step ahead of anarchist, communist and decolonial dreams.
(text-colour:black)+(bg:white) [[Aiming toward (some impossible ) Radical change of the World ->Aiming toward Radical changes]]
(text-colour:black)+(bg:white)[[Aiming toward Radical change of the self -> Self is a rupture]]
]
(text-size:0.50)[Photo taken on a small lake near La Minerve on Anishinabeg territories](text-size:0.78)[
Let's play...
In a very fictional (text-style: "blurrier")[ non-fictional ] way...
Thousands of catastrophes are on their way. You must try to stop them.
<p> (if:(history: where its name contains "Radical change - c")'s length >= 1)[You've been here before. (link-goto: "Too scared to play again?", (either: "Situated","composite", " Self is a rupture", "Where from here?", " End "))]</p>
]
(align:"<==")+(box:"=XXX=")[=
<pre style="line-height: 1em;">
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</pre>(text-size:0.78)[
Some forces have sabotaged your plan, maintaining the course of history to its apparent End.]
(align:"<==")+(box:"=XXX=")[=
<pre style="line-height: 1em;">
[[
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->Radical change - c]]
</pre>(text-size:0.78)[[[You lost->Radical change - D]]
<p> (if:(history: where its name contains "try anew")'s length >= 1)[Use your (link-goto: "SPECIAL FORCE", ("portal1")) to save the World]</p>]
(align:"<==")+(box:"=XXX=")[=
<pre style="line-height: 1em;">
[[
..-^~~~^-..
.~ ~.
(;: :;)
(: :)
':._ _.:'
| |
(=====)
| |
| |
| |
((/ \))]
] (text-size:0.78)[The objectification of the Self, of the World, and of the End has been seen elsewhere.
We will try to think of another way.
(opacity: 0.50)[What is this violent act that happened at the beginning of Western philosophy? ]]
(align:"<==")+(box:"=XXX=")[=
<pre style="line-height: 1em;">
[[
(\{\
{ \ ,~,
{ { \))) *
{ { ((( /
{/{/; ,\/
(( '
\` \
(/ \
`) `\
->Heidegger]](text-size:0.78)[
Maybe it’s time to stop trying to conceptualize and compartmentalize. How then can we continue to move in direction towards goals, objectives, the End(s) without creating definitive knowledge? It’s time to organize a different act.
Instead of organizing the chaos around us, we will try to see what would happen to the Self at the End of the World. Let's imagine something like a chaos that has been curated, tilted: the chaos that can and will bring the necessary new World after the End.
Can we imagine different acts toward the World? Without a doubt, capitalism is driving us to the edge of ecological collapse. How can we get to be:
* ^^Ready^^ for change ?
* ^^Grounded^^ within ourselves ?
* ^^Part^^ of that necessary change?
(text-style:"sway")[Our fears might be rising. ]
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/f47Fj4y.jpg" alt="A wooden sign hand-written : "take care" on a tree" style="width:50%;height:50%;">
(text-size:0.5)[Image taken on Naiads autonomous zone on Algonquin territories.]
First, we would let go (cycling-link:"of the analytical categories of the Self.","the idea of an impossible salvation."," and heal from freeze mode we are inhabiting.","our fears of making errors.","the fake control over everything in our surrounding.","our self-righteousness.","of the division of sane and insane in our head.","etc.")
Luckily, we don’t have to start from zero!
We will follow the path of the distinct traditions that escape from science but keep experimenting, moving, learning, bringing to fruition. Following the premise that the End is not a unique moment that can be predicted [[(like a portal)->The End is a portal]], we will make our way…
Let's try to [[make anew.->whereandnowhere]]]
(text-size:0.78)[
<p> (if:(history: where its name contains "Situated")'s length >= 1)[You've been here before. (link-goto: "Go somewhere else?", (either: "composite"," Self is a rupture", "Destroying the self/ves over the World ", "Where from here?", " End "))]</p>
<p>Our reading group is bound by a shared sense that we are living in the days preceding an End. Though there is comfort in conversation, we spoke of realities and mourned futures inextricable from ecological disaster, a global pandemic, the rise of facist terrorism, and mounting chaos. These dire circumstances have long-been known(text-style:"fidget")[(text-colour:#1098ad)[(link:".")[(open-url: 'https://twitter.com/KaiHeron/status/1570103229232607232')]]]
They are among the intensifying and disproportionate symptoms inflicted by a globalized oppressive [[order]] that has attempted and exacted many genocidal Endings before — on communities, on structures, and on ways of being. The now may not be an End, so much as it is a [[dystopian present]].</P>]
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</pre>
(text-size:0.78)[
<p> In the introduction to //Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction//, Joshua Whitehead, a Two-Spirit, Oji-nêhiyaw member of Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1) notes his political shift in thinking about the temporalities of Two-Spirited, queer, trans, and non-binary ways of being. Moving from dystopia to utopia, he writes to his fellow indiqueers, “For, as we know, we have already survived the apocalypse -- this, right here, right now, is a dystopian present.”^^1^^
</p>
(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[(text-style:"blink")[[[Switch Temporalities->there have been many]] ]]
]
(b4r:"solid","none","none")+(b4r-size:0.3,1,1)+(b4r-colour:white)[=
(text-size:0.5)[
^^1^^Joshua Whitehead, ed., "Introduction," in //Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit & Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction//`(Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020).`
]
(text-size:0.78)[
<p>Upon the conclusion of the cold war, the End was declared as a new ideological victor was crowned, the neoliberal democratic state. The Self is objectified as and disciplined to be a consuming, working, assimilated, rights-based citizen. There may now be a mainstreaming of urgency and anguish, but the powers that be still firmly grasp onto this dying hegemony. We are commanded to vote and to thank politicians for incremental reform. We are told to glorify billionaires vying for space travel and reconstructing cruelty via algorithms and the metasphere as the World burns. We are shown images of the girl boss and rainbow capitalist as violence against queer people remain quotidian, and told that this means that things are [[improving]]. These are among the myths of (text-colour:#1098ad)[(link: "progress neoliberalism")[(open-url: "https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/progressive-neoliberalism-reactionary-populism-nancy-fraser")]]. The rhetoric and ethos of diversity and social justice are a sanitized product of the radical insights and demands of leftist (text-colour:#1098ad)[(link: "identity-based movements")[(open-url: "https://bostonreview.net/articles/olufemi-o-taiwo-identity-politics-and-elite-capture/")]].
[(t8n-time:1s)+(link-reveal:"As Rinaldo Walcott, Canadian writer and academic, explains:")
[
"The hard truth of the matter is that the governing and administrative apparatus of whiteness is prepared to appropriate any discourse, any politics, any ideas and ideals that retain the post-Columbus compact—a compact in which Europe and its derivative nations and their peoples now marked as white continue to be given privileged status across the globe. To maintain such status, nation-states like Canada (re)produce themselves and appropriate ideas like diversity, equity, indigenizing, and decolonizing while keeping in place all the institutions that flow from the initial and ongoing colonial condition and context. To claim that we can diversify, achieve equity, indigenize, or decolonize without taking on the social, cultural, political, and economic arrangements of whiteness is to enter into the terrain of lies.”^^1^^
]]]
</p>
(b4r:"solid","none","none")+(b4r-size:0.3,1,1)+(b4r-colour:white)[=
(text-size:0.5)[
^^1^^Rinaldo Walcott, "The End of Diversity," //Public Culture// 31, no 2 (May 1, 2019): 398.]
(bg:#C4A484)[(text-size:0.78)[<p>These crises will not cease, and as things worsen, there is a reverberating echo of social justice, decolonial, and anti-oppressive moments and scholars, who exemplify and practice counters with care, with loss, with negativity, with the otherworldly. Those who have been and still are struggling and screaming out that what is next will always be outside of the oppressive state apparatus and the planetary life forms as we know it. </p>]]
(bg:#C4A484)[(text-size:0.78)[<p>Whether viewed as a cycle or progression, the old World Ends with the old Self, and beginning alternatives are intertwined, emerging, and manifesting to recraft our [[timelines]].</p>]]
(align:"=><=")[(bg:#C4A484)[(text-size:0.78)[<p> [What is your Self [[doing ->emergent strategies]]?]</P>]]]
(text-colour:black)[(text-size:0.5)[this image was created by Craiyon (formerly DALL-E Mini)]]
(text-size:0.78)[
<p>What is the Self at the End of the World...
[(t8n:"fade-down")+(link:"when")[when the next is viewed along the progression of the End of history?]
(t8n:"fade-down")+(link:"when")[when the apocalypse is happening, but cruel optimism still defines the mainstream subjectivity of the free, good life[(link: "?")[(open-url: "https://news.uchicago.edu/podcasts/big-brains/why-chasing-good-life-holding-us-back-lauren-berlant")]]]
(t8n:"fade-down")+(link:"when")[when social changes are bound within neoliberal, rights-based forms of justice?]
More Questions:
[(t8n:"fade-down")+(link:"what")[what can be transformative?]
(t8n:"fade-down")+(link:"what")[what can be revolutionary?]
(t8n:"fade-down")+(link:"what")[what are the means for a counter hegemony with queer normativities, alternative timelines, and radical epistmologies?]
</p>
[(t8n-time:1s)+(link-reveal:"✯✯✯✯")
[
=|=
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| __ __()|\ (text-style:"sway")[[[walk away->END]]]
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|__________|
=|=
/|
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| __ __()|\ (text-style:"sway")[[[wander further->End]]]
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| |__||__| |
|__________|
|==|
]]
]]]
(text-size:0.78)[
{There have been many Ends.
This is just one of them.
|space>[
|earth>[?]
|moon>[[[TRY AGAIN->sew]]]
]
}
]
(text-size:0.78)[
[<h3>(align:"=><=")+(box:"======XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX=========")[Desire]</h3>]
Desire, that loops around and never touches the will-never-be, and longs back for the what-never-was. It chases after the remainder which escaped when the Self became (text-style:"buoy")[whole], which leaves it forever unsatisfied and yet always seeking, seeking, seeking. Desire is structuring, formative. It is also a reminder of what eludes structure, the formless. We might pay attention here, this might be useful for what is to come. Attuning oneself to the void, the gaping (text-style:"buoy")[hole] at the center of Desire, may prove useful for our project if we seek to go beyond the Self.
(align:"=><=")+(box:"======XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX=========")[[[Back to the Self -> Self is a rupture]]]]
(b4r:"solid","none","none")+(b4r-size:0.3,1,1)+(b4r-colour:white)[=
(text-size:0.5)[
^^1^^ Jacques Lacan, //Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X//, trans. A. R. Price, 1st edition `(Cambridge: Polity, 2016)`, 27.
](text-size:0.78)[
<p> (if:(history: where its name contains "The End is a portal")'s length >= 2)[You've been here before. (link-goto: "Go somewhere else?", (either: "Situated","Self is a rupture", "Destroying the self/ves over the World", "composite", "END"))]</p>
(align:"<==")+(box:"=XX=")[''THE END OF THE WORLD IS A PORTAL'' ]
(align:"<==")+(box:"=XX=")[click to [[enter->connector]]]
]
(text-size:0.5)[this gif was taken in the mediterranean sea in Marseille, France.](text-size:0.78)[
<p> (if:(history: where its name contains "Where from here?")'s length >= 1)[(text-colour:black)[You've been here before.] (link-goto: "Go somewhere else?", (either: "Situated"," Self is a rupture", "composite", "Destroying the self/ves over the World ", "END"))]</p>
]
[''WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? WHERE IS HERE?'']
[''HERE'', there have already been many] [[Ends-of-the-World->there have been many]].
[''HERE'', there are layered temporalities of ][[world-making->Polyphonic rhythms]].
{(text-size:0.50)[video taken off the coast of Lake Ontario on the land of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation]}(text-size:0.78)[
''THERE HAVE BEEN MANY ENDS OF THE WORLD''
<p>Many Ends have already been experienced by human and nonhuman beings alike. In fact, in the creation of this capital W World, here, that drums the unified-progress rhythms of Capitalism-Colonialism, many worldmaking projects were violently corroded, cut off and severed. That loss cannot be overstated, and those multitudes of worlds and all that they could-have-been-but-never-were continue to haunt and press up against the boundaries of this one.<p>
<p>Alia Al-Saji in "Too Late: Fanon the Dismembered Past and a Phenomenology of Racialized Times," articulates that during colonization “what were coexistent cultures, and simultaneous temporalities (...) become temporally distributed as successive moments along a linear civilizational time.” The pre-colonial past is thus ruptured; a time before civilization itself. Colonized subjects in the process of racialization are oriented and tied to a past that has flattened rich and diverse cultures to “stereotyped remnants, isolated fragments, and violent distortions.”^^1^^ This past is not the past that flows into the present, nor the future, but rather it is closed off. Racialized peoples are not agents in history but are “swept up in it without contributing to it” and are cut off “from the linear civilizational (white) time that is supposed to flow into the living present and have a future.”^^2^^ We mourn not only the disruption of the possibilities for the future, but the loss of the past that continues to be erased, distorted, and fragmented.<p>
<p>//No past/no future//.<p>
<img src="https://static.wixstatic.com/media/4cb8e9_58be7f5882594388a9067487bd31ffd2~mv2.png" width="600px" height="600px" alt=" page from a journal that reads there have been many ends of the world. It has always been the end, or never the end, or maybe sometimes the end, it's hard to tell.">
(text-size:0.5)[image taken from the journals of Thai Hwang-Judiesch]
<p>To reform within this World is to still adhere to the same temporal possibilities it offers. If there is no way back to the past and a foreclosure of possibilities for the future, perhaps, perhaps, there are other ways of moving through time. <p>
<p>Perhaps, we can attune ourselves to the multiple temporal possibilities outside of the [[World...->Polyphonic rhythms]]
<p>Perhaps, all temporalities are resurfacing at the End of the [[World...->The End is a portal]]<p>
]
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^^1^^ Alia Al-Saji, "Too Late: Fanon, the Dismembered Past, and a Phenomenology of Racialized Time," Fanon, Phenomenology, and Psychology, no. 1 (2022), 182.
^^2^^Al-Saji, "Too Late," 185
]
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The End of the World is a portal.
Between(text-style:"fade-in-out")[ here] [[and->here and elsewhere]] (text-style:"fade-in-out")[elsewhere]
Between (text-style:"fade-in-out")[living] [[and ->haunting]](text-style:"fade-in-out")[dying]
]
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''THE END OF THE WORLD IS A PORTAL''
<p>The End of the World is a liminal space, the in-between. A space where the boundaries are thin, where ghosts of the past and lost futures can finally be heard. A space where timelines that have been lost, abandoned, or forgotten, emerge at once to be witnessed, processed, and negotiated in the present. The space of im/possibility. Where the impossibility of foreclosure at the End emerges as a possibility within itself.<p>
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<p>The End of the World is a void space. A space in which all possibility has been excavated. When everything has reached impossibility. <p>
<p>Yet, nothing and everything are two sides of the same coin. From nothing, from impossibility, everything emerges as a possibility.<p>
<p>We live in a World of steadily foreclosing possibilities as we enter the nothingness that is the End of the World.<p>
<p>Here, in the portal, we live in the [[decay->haunting]] of capitalist ruins where the erosion of death is where we can negotiate emergence into … something else.<p>
]]
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<p>In //Ghostly Matters//, Avery Gordon articulates that “haunting is a constituent element of modern social life (...); it is a generalizable social phenomenon of great import.”^^1^^ If you're looking for them hauntings emerge everywhere: in the silence of grandparents, in lost ancestral histories, in the fragments of the archive, in the ghostliness of Slavery, Colonization, displacement and all the rest of our |tooltip>[contaminated histories <span class="tooltiptext"> Tsing, in// The Mushroom in the End of the World//, expresses "The evolution of our “selves” is already polluted by histories of encounter; we are mixed up with others before we even begin any new collaboration. Worse yet, we are mixed up in the projects that do us the most harm. The diversity that allows us to enter collaborations emerges from histories of extermination, imperialism, and all the rest. "^^3^^</span>] that put us here in this time and space. It is not just the loss of the past, but also the loss of what could have been. In a powerful beginning to //Post-Colonial Grief//, Jinah Kim begins, “this book explores moments when the present is so bloated with dead bodies demanding mourning, they threaten to overtake life.”^^2^^ Ghosts operate as loss that has been refused mourning, and yet, refuses to be forgotten. Holding those that live within the loss that ingaurates their existence simultaneously in stasis, caught at the point of loss even as they carry on with the momentum of life.<p>
--------------------
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--------------------
<p>What emerges are spectres that ask us to read between the lines. There are no recovering fractured pasts, no way of returning back. But here in the portal, the boundaries between timelines are thinner. Loss demands to be felt. |tooltip>[Critical Fabulation <span class="tooltiptext"> A method created by Saidiya Hartman to work against the grain of the archive. The archive is filled with absence or at times over exposure to Black folks, queer folks and overall to those most marginalized in this World. In //Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments//, Hartman explains how she "pressed at the limits of the case file and the document, speculated about what might have been, imagined the things whispered in dark bedrooms, and amplified moments of withholding, escape and possibility, moments when the vision and dreams of the wayward seemed possible."^^3^^ Critical fabulation is about bringing life to those lost and violated by the archive. " </span>] and reading against the grain of the archive that is at best partial and at worst violent become methods for challenging absence. Where possibilities of lives that lived in the fullness of humanity and freedom were foreclosed, but can now years later be opened up again. Locating those colonized and racialized peoples that are not considered agents in history, but merely objects swept up in white time. Not World makers in themselves, but objects in progress’s temporal narrative.
To enter the cemetery, [[click here->cemetery]].] </p>
(enchant:?Link, (hover-style:(text-style:'italic')))
]
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^^1^^ Avery Gordon, //Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination // `(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997),`7.
^^2^^ Jinah Kim, //Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas//`(Durham: Duke University Press, 2019),`2.
^^3^^Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, //The Mushroom at the End of the World // `(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021),`29.
]
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''COMPOSTCOMPOSTCOMPOSTCOMPOSTCOMPOST''
//Here, in capitalist ruins.//
<p>Compost does not dream of starting the World anew. Rather in the decay and mess of troubled Worlds it creates possibilities for transformation and alchemization. To generate possibilities for life in the degeneration of death. Compost itself is a portal. The portal isn’t a complete break from the past, it acknowledges the impossibility of a return while utilizing the decay as building blocks for other possibilities.<p>
<p>Donna Haraway, in //Staying with the Trouble//, returns again and again to compost, not humanism, but compostism. This concept generates as much as it degenerates (from the latin “degenratus,” no longer of its kind) in compost, to which we will all return, we slip away from what kind we were, (Self, human) into something far messier, more liminal and incomplete. ''We have never been human'', but we will always be [[compost->compost intro]].<p>
]
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<p>The word apocalypse originates from Greek apo (un) kaluptein (cover): to uncover or to reveal. The End is an uncovering process where the absence of loss becomes louder than ever. As neo-liberalism demands we must “move on” from the past to progress into the future, the ghosts of the past refuse to be moved on from. The End marks a transformation, but also an uncovering as the reality of violent systems and “forgotten histories” rise to the surface in this space between living and dying.<p>
<p>The ghosts of the past are emerging, but be cautioned...<p>
<p>There is no way to return to the possibilities of the past: back to an imagined wholeness before the violence of colonization and capitalism. No way to make all the loss and suffering okay, even as we pay witness and mourn the loss. We cannot return to it. <p>
<p>And yet, yet, it too is an illusion to dream of starting from scratch: creating new Worlds by starting over again. We are already all muddled up here in our messy histories that have |tooltip>[polluted <span class="tooltiptext"> Tsing articulates that we and are "contaminated by our encounters."^^1^^ Moreover, "the evolution of our “selves” is already polluted by histories of encounter. (...) Worse yet, we are mixed up in the projects that do us the most harm. The diversity that allows us to enter collaborations emerges from histories of extermination, imperialism, and all the rest"^^2^^] and transformed us. The [[portal->here and elsewhere]] is not about purification, but instead the transformation that exists within the mess of living and dying in capitalist ruins.<p>
]
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/qK4cn8V.jpeg" alt=... width="500px" height="700px">
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You have found a refuge, a place to think about the muddling at the End.
Will you enter?
[[Yes->compost]]
[[No ->End]]
]
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^^1^^Tsing, //The Mushroom at the End of the World //, 27.
^^2^^Tsing, //The Mushroom at the End of the World //, 29.
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The End of the World is a portal to elsewhere…
That elsewhere is yet to be determined and is being aimed and shaped within the portal of apocalypse.
How do we aim the portal?
First ask, ''what World am I embodying? ''
How do we aim the portal?
First ask, ''who am I being at the End? ''
''[[ITMATTERSWHOYOUAREBEINGATTHEENDITMATTERSWHOYOUAREBEINGATTHEEND ->embodiment]]''
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<p>Viewed linearly—from conquest to neoliberal hegemony—the dominating historical narratives present and justify the violence of colonialism and capitalism as objective progress.^^1^^ What is the Self at the End of the World to those whose timeline accords to the [[ End of history]]? </p>
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(text-style:"smear")[This question only begets more [[questions]]]
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]
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^^1^^ "Walter Benjamin," Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, October 14, 2020, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/benjamin/#ImaHisCul.
]
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<p>Recognition and inclusion within the cis-hetero-patriarchical, colonial, carceral surveillance state is not emancipatory, but rather exemplifies the adaptability of the problem and the limits of current organizing. As David Calnitsky describes, capitalism is an ecology, as it can “absorb different, seemingly contradictory parts; and it can even adjust to those parts over time.”^^1^^ Furthermore, in his empirical analysis of wealthy capitalist democracies in the 21st century, he predicts that progressive politics and social expenditures are more likely to increase, as this will always remain more preferable, profitable, and comfortable than revolution to the politician, capitalist, and worker alike. However, these rose-colored glasses are cracking by both the rise of extremism and scarcity as well as the alluring possibilities of the something and somewheres ahead. The fracturing and splintering reveal violent alternatives, loving alternatives, violent to loving [[alternatives]].</P>
]
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^^1^^David Calnitsky, "The Policy Road to Socialism" //Critical Sociology// 48, no 3 (May 2022): 9.
]
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(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[(text-style:"expand")[“The crisis is everywhere, massive massive massive. And we are small. But emergence notices the way small actions and connections create complex systems, patterns that become ecosystems and societies.
Emergence is our inheritance as a part of this universe; it is how we change. Emergent strategy is how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated Worlds we long for.”]
- adrienne maree brown, //Emergent Strategies// ]
Seizable and linear, our intentions and actions built through unicity are constantly overtaken by capitalistic forces.
The idea here is to make emergence of practices, actions, and beings //possible//. Instead of control, we should give space to the unknown, the unforeseen, give ressources to those who have been excluded from politics for long enough.
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/2bkHSNs.jpg" alt="some lines made by ants on a wood piece" style="width:40%;height:30%;" data-raw="">
(text-size:0.5)[Bark engraved by ants taken on Naiads autonomous zone on Algonquin territories.]
Rooted in |tooltip>[//Afrofuturism// <span class="tooltiptext"> Coined in 1994 by Mark Dery, has long been a part of Black popular culture. Blending the African Diaspora with science, technology, and philosophy, Afrofuturism is a way for Black people to see and expand on new ideas and shape a future of our own. (Scott, 2020). ]
</span> and anti-racist practices, adrienne maree brown's work goes beyond "pockets" of |tooltip>[//prefigurative politics// <span class="tooltiptext"> Until the mid-2010s, prefigurative theorists and practionners claimed to prefigure the World they hoped to live in. A prefiguration would have been a small version of the World with an alternate set of politics, fundamentally different from the World's politics, where hierarchy and domination would still hold.].
</span>Emergent strategies always emerge from one place and then disperse, affecting relations as they move along. But emergent strategies work from the principle of the fractal, where our intentions become part of something larger, and do not stay confined to ourselves. Our actions must lead to new ways of relating with people, things and the World.
We do not change the World so much as the World changes along with us.
The End of the World is also our End.
We build and organize knowing that our plans will change, that others will play their own role in a process that doesn't stop at us. We will build a World where we can hold generative spaces, where we are free to create, free to build, free to care, free.
[[Let's try something like that->Aiming toward Radical changes]]
]
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(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")+(text-style:"expand")[“Unlike the variety of magical systems which are all based in some mythical or historically-derived past (such as Atlantis, Lemuria, Albion, etc.), Chaos Magic borrows freely from Science Fiction, Quantum Physics, and anything else its practitioners choose. Rather than trying to recover and maintain a tradition that links back to the past (and former glories), Chaos Magic is an approach that enables the individual to use anything that s/he thinks is suitable as a temporary belief or symbol system. What matters is the results you get, not the ‘authenticity’ of the system used. ”
- Phil Hine, //Condensed Chaos: An Introduction to Chaos Magic Paperback//]
Alliances and solidarities with other mammals, animals, mushrooms, things, water and dust must be concretized. A step further here is alliance-making with //intentional// beings. The (text-style:"shadow")[power of the unknown], the sacred and suprabeings, forces, goddesses and gods, hiding in the interstices of Realities, are to be summoned in order to stop the spell of capitalism.
In the last few decades, Chaos magic has brought together a new experimental theory in Western magic, and is an example of the current of |tooltip>[//magics // <span class="tooltiptext"> People of various background find their way back to different personal and cultural traditions of witcheries. This exploration does not stop at "Where is it from?" but rather asks "How does it work? How can I build powers with ancestors?". It remains critical of narrow conceptions of ancestry. </span>]rooted in anti-oppressives actions and power-building. Continuing its descent into the arcane of reality, it moves away from the spectacle of archaic patriarchal practices and from the conservatism of many traditional magic practices. Chaos magic, in parallel with surrealism, lettrism, and situationism, the last of the avant-gardes, was brought in the 60s as a new anti-ontology to action.
Chaos magic is far from being the only magic practice presently making a comeback. We might want to look further into our own assemblages of [//self and lineages //] to find old or new spiritualities.
Some ways forward might be (cycling-link:"multiplying the alliances.","destroying the colonial state."," creating new radical forms of worship.","giving back to the sacred, the Real.","working towards Indigenous sovereignty.") Different branches of neo-paganists, anarchists, and communists are slowly organizing in the shadows of cities and forests. Witches of the World, we need a call to action and solidarity.
[ (align:"=><=")+(box:"X")+(text-style:"expand")[we must be prepared to learn some day, from the students of microscopical pond-life, facts of unconscious mutual support, even from the life of micro-organisms.’’]
- Peter Kropotkin, // Mutual Aid // , 1902.
Some contemporary research in microbiology has shown that organisms who would benefit for competition prefer, in some non-extreme conditions, to support each other. Following in that direction, we might start [[making kin->compost]] with compost and mushrooms, but also elves, trolls, demons, and god(desses).
We must create new power(s) and autonomy. We must create power-with and power-within, we need to create processes, workshops, rituals, actions, monstrosities, and post-materialist reconnections with the World.
But this World of power must include all beings and non-beings in order to create new paths toward mutual solidarity]
[[Let's try something like that->Aiming toward Radical changes]]
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<p>We live in a reality of shadows and mirrors. Like everything else, we shape the World just as it shapes us. Reality transforms in relation to the timelines we are embodying and, just as importantly, the timelines that we are not embodying. In the portal, everything is emerging and being uncovered as we are asked to reckon with all that is, has been, and will never be.
<p>''Who are you being at the End?''
<img src="https://static.wixstatic.com/media/4cb8e9_577843faf4fd4635b8c960d319aa8d7e~mv2.png" alt=.... width="300px" height="400px">
(text-size:0.5)[this image was taken in the Parque Natural Sierra María-Los Vélez, Andalucía, Spain]
<p>It is who we are being personally and interpersonally. In aiming the portal, perhaps it is not about moving towards one new World. Perhaps, there is room for the inherent multiplicity and possibilities of Worl ing—of the capacity to learn from the unique and distinct varied rhythms of nature.
<p>There are some losses that cannot be undone. There are some losses that are forever severing, cultures that can never be recovered, species that will be gone forever, histories of slavery that can never be made better. This World holds so much impossible loss that we can never return to.
<p>Yet, there are other Worlds, other promises we can yearn for.
<p>''Who are you being at the End? ''
<img src="https://static.wixstatic.com/media/4cb8e9_5b065f65242440b59098f2be1e3da036~mv2.jpg" alt... width="300px" height="400px">
(text-size:0.5)[this image was taken in Aquehonga Manacknong the unceded terrioty of the Lenape, or Staten Island.]
<p>This question demands you to negotiate the timelines you are embodying in there here and now. Revolution and the End of the World is not a utopian future fantasy. It is here and now. It is not just about what we are doing, but also who we are being. How we are being as if we are already living in the new Worlds we want to be a part of. How we are building community, establishing mutual aid, showing up in love and negotiating the immensity of sorrow and mourning, celebrating our joy and pleasure. How we are learning and getting curious about the non-humans that we share this earth with, living as if these new Worlds are already here, as much as they are elsewhere. Because they are.
[[take me to the here->END]]
[[take me elsewhere->portal1]]
](text-size:0.78)[ (bg:(hsl:0,0,0.5333,0.3))[But you are lucky, this is not your World.
Yet.]
(bg:(hsl:0,0,0.5333,0.3))[The repetition of the Left’s failures are so common that new strategies became almost futile. Maybe it’s time to move away from the Party, the Union, and even the Movement, and the patriarchal concept of "strategies" all together. Maybe these are not even |tooltip>[points of interest. <span class="tooltiptext"> Without going into details, it might be worth mentioning the different attempts to think and organize political theory in the last 20 years regarding the state of the Left. From prefigurative theories to post-structuralists attempts, it is now difficult to see how the different paradigms of the 2000s have any grasp on the present reality of political (in)action. ]
(bg:(hsl:0,0,0.5333,0.3))[</span>] Following his experience with the Marxist magazine //Socialisme ou Barbarie//, Lyotard gained the understanding that a Leftist revolution is not doomed due to bad intentions, but rather due to the lack of a language, a |tooltip>[//differend //. <span class="tooltiptext"> “ The differ End is the unstable state and the moment of language wherein something which must be put into sentences cannot yet be. This state includes silence, which is a negative phrase, but it also calls upon phrases which are in principle possible. This state is expressed in ordinarily calls a feeling: ‘One cannot put into words’. ”
Lyotard, //The differend //, p.xi.
</span>] The //differend // between oneself and the other cannot be named and therefore cannot be discussed and aimed collectively.
With post-modernity comes the great transformations of science and technology. Lyotard diagnoses in our period a crisis of legitimacy. How, then, can we maintain a unified narrative to guide collective actions? Neither class nor species consciousness seemed to hold together in the age of global climate catastrophe. The eco-anxieties of our day and age seem like an incurable disease. ]
(bg:(hsl:0,0,0.5333,0.3))[
Do you want to try again?
[[Try again->Aiming toward Radical changes]]
[[I won't go back to that stupid Earth on my screen->Scrap everything]]
]]
(text-size:0.50)[ Photo taken in Tio'tià:ke - Mooniyang - Montréal by a gay cruising spot](text-size:0.78)[
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<p>“The ordinary concept of 'thing' ... captures the thing but does not seize it as it unfolds its
essence. It assaults it. Can such an assault perhaps be avoided, and how? This would
probably succeed only if we grant the thing an open field, as it were, so that it may show
its thing-like character immediately. Any conception and enunciation of the thing,
which t End to place themselves between the thing and us, must first be removed.”
- Heidegger //The Origin of the Work of Art// 87</P>
<p> //[[What does all of this mean?->The meaning of the assault]]//</P>
<p> //[[Enough boring philosophy->try anew]]//</P>
]
(text-size:0.94)[ (text-style:"expand")[''//In the hottest days of Summer 2022 ... some bookclub girls talk about Debord and Heidegger in a really frivolous manner.//'']]
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(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[Would you want to hear us 'like' and 'um' our way through this conversation?
(text-style:"blink")[(link:"Click here to hear the bookclub")[
<audio src="https://static.wixstatic.com/mp3/8b8d6b_1d01373c4e1a4462a6feef0809fd349f.mp3" autoplay>]]
Or continue reading...
]
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D: In our last conversation we were trying to get the //Thing//. But then the //Thing// moved. What we were saying in //resumé// is that the //Thing// is never really seizable because there's always something left. We don't capture it, really, per se : (link:"we assault it.")
[we assault it.
S: Cause seizing would be this movement (movement with hands to reach)
D: From Heidegger, we will see what is a concept, what it is to //begrifft//, to get the //Thing// too. The conceptual act, a movement, an objectification as one, which is in itself impossible, and constitutes an assault.
(...)
The ordinary concept of the thing captures a //Thing//, but doesn't seize it. Uh, as it unfolds, to try to seize the thing is already an assault.
How can we avoid that? We can see how, with this idea, we read Heidegger as someone anti-modernist. It would be interesting to argue after him to just (link:"leave the thing be, whatever that means.") [leave the thing be, whatever that means.
I: Then, yeah, it's understandable why the Weberian and Heideggerian approaches to science and our civilization are in opposition. (...) For Weber, the disenchantment of the World is this idea that the modern individual is in a sort of perpetual state of conquest where we will eventually conquer the entire World through logical thought. That is, the modern individual is already disenchanted with the World because, in a teleological sense, we've already conquered it. Like we're already there.
D: And For Weber, this is in a positive way, because you are making …
I: Science! But it depends what, which, and when you're reading. Science is a vocation, it's presented as a positive thing, but there's also a reason why it's called disenchantment and that's like a kind of a pejorative term. So he's kind of ambiguous…
S: But disenchantment happens knowing that whatever we're doing, this is already inevitable…
I: Yes! And it’s gonna end well for Weber: the courage of the modern individual is that they go on living and go on, and on, in (link:"this quest or this March despite disenchantment...") [this quest or this March despite disenchantment...
Even tho, this is sort of the inevitable nature of it.
S: How are we positioning that against Heidegger?
I: well, Heidegger wants to get out of this movement
S. Which is also not a completed movement. Like technology is just like building on top of this abyss actually of having named things, and grasping them.
I: the scientific method generates a very curated sort of creativity that remains within the confines of this inevitable March forward. Well, curated creativity, technology, technological development and such.
[[...->try anew]]
]
]
]
]
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{<p>(text-size:0.50)[footage taken in Tiohtià:ke - Mooniyang - Montréal, Québec]</p>}](align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[[[►►►->trash2]]]
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{<p>(text-size:0.50)[footage taken in Tiohtià:ke - Mooniyang - Montréal, Québec]</p>}] (align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[[[►►►->trash4]]]
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{<p>(text-size:0.50)[footage taken in Tiohtià:ke - Mooniyang - Montréal, Québec]</p>}](align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[[[►►►->vortex1]]]
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{<p>(text-size:0.50)[footage taken in Tiohtià:ke - Mooniyang - Montréal, Québec]</p>}]
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<p>It is hard to speak about the World and worlding without speaking about how we find ourselves in relation to time. Although worlding shapes space, it is carried and constructed through temporal rhythms. In The //Mushroom at the End of the World//, Anna Tsing reminds us that “making worlds is not limited to humans.”^^1^^ Human and non-human alike engage in world-building, shaping the environments around them to suit their specific and collective needs. Each world-building project and the beings that construct them do so with varied and specific temporal rhythms—different plants grow at different times, mayflies live their adult lives for only a day, shaping and transforming the World around them briefly, while rivers shape and transform the land over decades.<p>
<p>Anna Tsing continues, “when I first learned polyphony, it was a revelation in listening; I was forced to pick out separate, simultaneous melodies and to listen for the moments of harmony and dissonance they created together." ^^2^^ These multiple temporal rhythms overlap each other, layer over each other, move into connection and harmony and at times conflict and dissonance.<p>
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/w1mwSVd.png" width="400px" height="300px" alt" a ladder going up into a forest that exists beyond the hole in the ceiling">
(text-size:0.5)[this image was generated with DALL-E]
<p>There is worlding, then there is the capital W World. The World that claims a unified singularity. A singular progress rhythm: “a unified coordination of time.”^^3^^ It sweeps everything into the Capitalist-Colonial temporal process. It is an orientation towards an exponentially progressing future, and infinite accumulation on a finite planet. Although other world-makings have always resisted, the World has disrupted and eroded many alternative world-making [[possibilities->there have been many]]. <p>
]
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^^1^^ Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, //The Mushroom at the End of the World // `(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021),`22.
^^2^^Tsing, //The Mushroom at the End of the World //, 24.
^^3^^Tsing, //The Mushroom at the End of the World //, 23.
]
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(align:"<==")+(box:"=XX=")[ here lies:
(text-style:"sway") [what-could-have-been-but-never-was]]]
<pre style="line-height: 1em;">
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</pre>
</p>
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[[click here->apocalypse]] to unleash the ghosts]
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<p> //From a speculative fabulation from Donna Haraway about a not so distant future where the communties of compost urged humans to genetically mix with animals//.<p>
<p>//“The communities of compost worked and played hard to understand how to inherit the layers upon layers of living and dying that infuse every place and every corridor. Unlike inhabitants in many other utopian movements, stories or literatures in the history of the earth, the Children of Compost knew they could not deceive themselves that they could start from scratch. Precisely the opposite insight moved them; they asked and responded to the question of how to live in the ruins that were still inhabited, with [[ghosts->haunting]] and the living too”//^^1^^<p>
<p>//“Compostists eagerly found out everything they could about experimental, intentional, utopian, dystopian and revolutionary communities and movements across time and places. One of their greatest disappointments in these accounts was that so many started from the premise of starting over and beginning anew, instead of learning to inherit without denial and stay with the trouble of damaged Worlds.”//^^2^^ <p>
<img src="https://static.wixstatic.com/media/4cb8e9_d21ea505ff8b4675a29cab04d6441cd8~mv2.png" width="600px" height="600px" alt=" page from a journal that marks the point where contradicting concepts come together such as impossibility and possibility, here and elsewhere, self and other, decay and emergence. These are examples of both portals and compost.">
(text-size:0.5)[image taken from the journals of Thai Hwang-Judiesch]
<p>Compost does not buy into the illusion that transformation can ever emerge from scratch. Rather that decay, ruins, and Endings are fruitful places for the reemergence of life.<p>
<p>Like portals, compost is a liminal space. One that exists between living and dying. Human and not-human. self and other. In compost, to which we all return, the boundaries of ourselves seem to dissolve.<p>
<p>In capitalist ruins, precarity and foreclosure of possibilities previously imagined and even promised are the conditions of existence. Where to go from here? The impossibility is an opening in itself. There is nowhere else to go in this World, but there are other worlds. Where are we [[aiming->breakingopen]]?</p>
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^^1^^ Donna Haraway, //Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene// `(Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 138.`
^^2^^ Donna Haraway, //Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene// `(Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 150.`
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(align:"<==")+(box:"=========XXXXXXXXXX===")[[[ >>>->compost1]]]
(text-size:0.5)[this image was taken in the Parque Natural Sierra María-Los Vélez, Andalucía, Spain]
(align:"<==")+(box:"=========XXXXXXXXXX===")[[[ >>>->aiming portal]]]
(text-size:0.5)[this gif was taken in the Mediterranean sea in Marseille, France.](text-size:0.78)[
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(text-style:"sway")[a hoarder’s paradise, ]
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(text-style:"buoy")[a collaboration of nature and commerce, ]
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(text-style:"sway")[a potentially primordial swirl full of forgotten things ]
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(text-colour:white)[(align:"==>")+(box:"=======XXX")[[[►►►->hoarder]]]]
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{<p>(text-size:0.50)[footage taken on the unceded and traditional territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) Nation, and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nation, also known as Stanley Park in Vancouver, British Columbia]</p>}]
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<p>Capitalism denies (text-style:"fidget")[thing]-power by bloating us through consumerism. [[Picture the great pacific vortex...->vortex]]</p>
](text-size:0.78) [<h3>Introduction</h3>
<p>Our autonomous reading group is a collective formed around a question and towards unknowing. We came together at the beginning of the summer, asking one other: “What is the Self at the End of the World?” Fruitfully, the question has led less to answers, and more to further questions, modes of inquiry, and pathways into fresh ideas and practices. It created a space to sit with destruction, newness, and the beyond. After all, what even are the Self, the End, and the World?
</p>
<p> We gathered weekly at a local anarchist library to explore texts and other media on radical ecology, Afropessimism, Queer negativity, phenomenology, critical art history, political theory, and more. We ventured outside the limits of liberal humanist understandings of selfhood, towards a multidisciplinary understanding of what it is to “be” at the End of the World — understood broadly as the End of the Anthropocene, bordered nations, individual consciousness, and as perhaps the beginning of the Weirdness, the Real, transcendence, continuity, and revolution. </p>
<p> What follows is an essay, a poem, an archive, and a choose-your-own-adventure experience. It is a synthesis of theory, practice, and experimentation, and a means of sharing what we have found to be generative (or not) during this hot summer. Our intention is to continue asking questions we still haven’t answered and to encourage you to join us in doing so. We want to craft string figures through conversation, to cast a non-linear web of research, and to illustrate the dialogue between knowledges that we have been entangled by and in. Let’s open openings – portals – into inquest and wade through unknowingness at the End-of-times together.</p>
<h4>What is the [[Self]] at the [[End]] of the [[World]]?</h4>
//[[More information about this project->about]]//
//[[References->references]]//
//[[Reading list->reading list]]// ](align:"=><=")+(box:"X")+(text-size:1.25)[
What is the [[Self]] at the [[End]] of the [[World]]?
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(text-size:0.78)[ What do you want to do to be part of the End?]
<img src="https://media2.giphy.com/media/Ju1TMiSIwnSZqMtMzL/giphy.gif" alt="Module moving in a forest, made out of forest items, things, plants and trees" style="width:50%;height:50%;">
(text-size:0.5)[Footage taken in the Naiad autonomous zone on Algonquin territory.]
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[[Create powers with emergent strategies ->emergent strategies]]
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[[Create powers with other beings and with magic ->chaos]]
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(align:"<==")+(box:"=========XXXXXXXXXX===")[[[ ꩜꩜꩜-> Self is a rupture]]]
(text-size:0.5)[footage taken in Tiohtià:ke - Mooniyang - Montréal, Québec]