Solstice and (Capitalism's) Wheel of Rebirth
2020 has been a year of death. The “excess mortality” soared near wartime levels at some places, while the shutting out of public life in lockdowns created a ghostly sense of “death” all around: the world that we knew for years, supposedly eternal and unchangeable, was halted at instant. Lockdowns induced a strangely derealized and darkened state where physical reality mingled with dream, as if a liminal state after death, between two lives.
Figuratively speaking, the year 2020 that is now ending (and whose train of events accompanies us into 2021) was in many ways like bardo. In theories set…
The strange autumn and winter of the end of the last year (and decade) felt in many ways like an end of the world, with riots across all continents, when “the logic of capital [became] visible in its catastrophic autumn.” As the Italian post-marxian theorist and media activist Franco 'Bifo' Berardi put it in his lockdown diaries, that Autumn,
the planetary body has experienced some sort of spasm. A convulsion from Hong Kong to Barcelona, Santiago, Quito, Beirut — riots everywhere. The rebellion had no unifiable objectives, and the different riots did not converge towards any common goal. …
Landing on Earth in 2020
The composition of Ambient 4: On Land by the synth wizard Brian Eno develops in a rather spectral fashion; it induces more than little existential dread. Despite its profoundly ecological motif and haunting beauty, the album is anything but soothing or comforting. Yes, we do arrive on land, within the bio-sphere. Yet this realm that we merge into is anything but simply a light and benevolent, harmonious embrace of Mother Nature. The geo-cosmic time and groundless space that open up threaten to swallow any little islands of cultural and civilized human certainties, temporarily built on the thin crust of the…
Félix Guattari on Virtual Animism
“We cannot conceive of solutions to the poisoning of the atmosphere and to global warming due to the greenhouse effect, or to the problem of population control, without a mutation of mentality, without promoting a new art of living in society.”
Félix Guattari was a radical French psychotherapist, philosopher and political activist, a prominent thinker of modernity’s schizophrenia, famous for his collaboration with Gilles Deleuze. Before his death in the early 1990s and in his solo work, he came to grips with the environmental crisis threatening to destroy all biosphere. …
renversement.
Philo-fictions, animistic cosmologies, non-politics, percussive music.
