Co-evolve

"I believe we are entering a time when our diverse civilizations can, more than ever, coevolve together in a generative way, inventing novel cultural forms at the interfaces among us, diversifying our ways to be human."


"My most recent book, Reinventing the Sacred, struggles to show that science is powerful but that the evolutionary becoming of the biosphere, human economy, and culture is partially beyond the "Galilean Spell", the belief that all that unfolds in the universe is describable by natural law. This almost 400 year old belief is, I am quite sure, false. We live in a partially un-prestatable, evolving, creative universe where not only do we not know what WILL happen, we often do not know what CAN happen. Then reason, the highest human virtue of our beloved Enlightenment, is an inadequate guide to living our lives forward into mystery. We need reason, emotion, intuition, imagination, all we have evolved to be. We need to rethink profoundly our entire humanity. We need a new enlightenment. But if this is true, then the barriers between science, the arts, and our historicity, start to crumble. If we live in a creative universe, we can try to reinvent a sharable sense of the sacred based on that very creativity to span the globe, find an ethic to undergird a coevolving ecology of our civilizations, find our way to a sustainable planet. My hope is that WE can jointly participate in an emerging conversation that will be generative, confused, creative, unprestatable, and help shape how the hinge swings."
Stuart Kauffman

Entering A New Time For Our Co-Evolving Civilizations

Delanda's Ontology

"Manuel De Landa. Metaphysics As Ontology: Aristotle and Deleuze's Realism. 2011"

What is Real?

"So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new."


Philip K. Dick (1978) How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later

The Politics of Affect

Recent events both in Greece and all over the world signal the need to rethink politics. Solidarity, resistance, change notions and concepts heavily chraged from another era, from a completely different world, seem inadequate to provide a way to open up new domains of political intervention and collective action. The immence interest on the work of Deleuze and to certain extend of Spinoza brings me to think affect and radical empiriscism as practices that could frame a new productive model of politcs capable of opening up new possibilities. The following extracts are from Susan Ruddick's paper "The Politics of Affect: Spinoza in the work of Negri and Deleuze" that best describe and frame my thinking on politics   


Ruddick poses a very interesting and up to date question: "How do we fashion a new political imaginary from fragmentary, diffuse and often antagonistic subjects who may be united in principle against the exigencies of capitalism but diverge in practice, in terms of the sites, strategies and specific natures of their own opression?"


"How we might engage difference and alterity wihtin our own political projects, our collective creations[?]"


Her work focuses on how Spinoza and his 'affect and be affected' approach to Nature has been assimilated by thinkers like Negri and Deleuze. 


"The coherent sense of self is literally ungrounded in the first encounter with the wave, but later replaced by a new social body: swimmer/surfer/wave, the combination and enhancement of active powers." and as Ruddick will point out further at her notes "the simplicity of this example also allows us to think about a potentially limitless array in combinatorials in a social body of both human and non-human dimension."


Deleuze and Guattari would ask: Why the masses "chose to fight for their servitude as if it was their freedom"? They give a possible answer in Anti-Oedipus: "No, the masses were no innocent dupes; at a certain point, under certain circumstances, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of desire for the masses that needs to be accounted for."... "the social field is immediately invested with desire"

Deleuze vs Hegel

"This is where Deleuze does break decisively with an 'Hegelian'
mindset. It is not the dialectic of confronting the other that
determines my boundaries and brings me (us) into being. There is
something prior to that operation, which for Deleuze is secondary.
It is not the opposition of the other that marks my difference.
Difference is primary, originary, self-differentiating. Or to
translate this back into mass movement politics -- it is not the
large-scale formation of political majorities that determines
the small-scale adherence of particular constituences to those
majorities. It is the other way around. It is out of the self-
organising activities of the molecular politics of difference that
the possibilities of majoritarian politics for a mass movement
arises in the first place." 

Rethinking Social Democracy  by McKenzie Wark