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It's an amplification, for me, of the conversations I've had with my mum for years. I just can't sit around lecturing and writing books and essays, and that's it. I need to talk with more people more of the time.
The latest post is about the Russia situation.
Columbia University Press are the greatest. I've known that since they worked with me on publishing the Wellek Lectures (Dark Ecology). Their enthusiasm for the new project is infectious and the assiduity of my editor, Wendy Lochner, is astounding. I'm truly grateful to them.
The book is now called
HELL: IN SEARCH OF A CHRISTIAN ECOLOGY
...It's called The Stuff of Life and it's an OOO memoir about me in relation with a number of "objects" such as antidepressants, sound files and grief.
I for one am very grateful to Treena and Carol Balds for having turned me on to MSNBC, which if you haven't watched in a while, is now terribly important. My old friend Eddie Glaude from Princeton is on Morning Joe! This is a really really important segment that aired just now. We are dealing with incipient fascism here. Get it straight.
Well this most assuredly is my favorite one.
Lisa is a good friend and a great philosopher and I'm looking forward to her new book about extinction.
Just this, totally stark and lapidary. Monolithic.
Well Colombia have agreed to publish a second dark, dark, intense book. Clearly they couldn't get enough of Dark Ecology, the Wellek Lectures that I gave in the lineage of Cixous and Balibar, and now they're going to work with me to get this one out for Earth Day 2024.
It's a book about slavery, racism, capitalism, AI, ecology, despair, religion and mysticism. It's freaking AWESOME. I wasn't quite ready to say stuff like that out loud when I last worked for Columbia.
Because Columbia have done this, I'm now committing to them. I've been living my life waiting for approval and love in so many ways and I am DONE. Love is a thing you DO not a thing you wait for. That phenomenology cashes out to being a theater critic and in the end, all the plays are bad. Because you're waiting for them to be bad. I got really good at getting up and leaving the theater no matter where the play was at: I could see the writing on the wall. So at least there's that. But that is still...that.
So this is my proclamation to the world. I'm with Columbia now. Like how my best buddy Jeff Kripal (the X Men actors have to read his work when they're on set) is with Chicago. It's a great thing. I kept thinking when I found that out, he must have a lot of space in his soul to think, he doesn't have to keep waiting for people to say yes like me, who acts like they're a character in a Jane Austen novel.
That never occurred to me until this week, when Columbia accepted Hell. But it had occurred to me in my personal life, in part because my mum's family traces their lineage back to the lower gentry in the later eighteenth century. And that's a horrible precarious place to be. My grandmother to cap it all was Welsh lower gentry. Imagine Sense and Sensibility, but set in Wales. Just horrible ancient colonial vibes. You're dead unless Mister Right sweeps you off your feet. So you have to sit around ever so politely waiting for Mister Right, not putting a foot wrong, including doing a single day of work, and you can't access your own money until said Mister Right shows up.
This was me and book contracts. I thought it was great, a kind of naive drifting that meant I wasn't pushy and manipulative, and I'm not. But this is better. I'm not Elinor Dashwood. That energy crippled my family. Austen novels are about the terrible pain of a precarious class, women in the lower gentry during a time of enclosure and transition from primitive accumulation to automated capitalism.
Hell is about masters and slaves. Hell is about the Devil. Hell is about the biosphere as the Devil and ideas about the Devil as the Devil that's burning the biosphere.
Hell is also about AI. ery directly, because it’s totally relevant. I think the real driver here is the master slave template that drives everything else (subject versus object, male versus female, active versus passive…). We need to abolish that template. The idea of creating the perfect slave that is then the perfect master is basically every story about selling one’s soul to Satan.
Treating the biosphere like that, because treating each other like that, is why AI people are blundering into this and why that feeling of “the search for AI is like an unstoppable AI” keeps happening…
...and was nearly dying with anxiety by the time it came to me, mostly because I hadn't won a thing as an adult before, and the ceremony regressed me to the age of 15!
But here is a very nice video Rice made about it all and you can see me bowing nicely at the beginning as I walk up, right at the end, to receive the award.
Turns out this is an actual scientific fact. OOO theory of beauty getting louder and louder.
Did you know that Salman Rushdie's most famous text was for the Milk Marketing Board of the UK?
"Fresh cream. Naughty, but nice."
You must've heard that if you're a certain age and lived in the UK.
Allow my guru to explain:
From Hell: How to Dance with the Devil on Your Back
Like Satan, an algorithm is a servant that carries out your commands...perfectly (be careful what you wish for). Think about plantations. They're attempts to force human beings to carry out other human beings' commands perfectly. A silicon wafer is a plantation for electrons.
So many other links but that's one huge main one.
...I used to live in Davis, CA. It was a gigantic factory, made of columns and rows and columns and rows of fruit trees and almond trees and etc, stretching as far as the eye could see. Machine-like in its precision. The Great Central Valley is so flat you can see it from space, and they use lasers to guide the irrigation channels. Workers and enslaved people also treated with this kind of profit maximizing precision aka violence.
Next step: all the dualisms that plague us, subject-object, human-animal, person-machine, masculine-feminine...are possible because of the master-slave template of Mesopotamian-style societies with a certain agricultural logistics running in the background.
The fantasy of AI is that its personhood will be "greater than the hum of its parts" (as Daniel Dennett put it).
This is precisely the problem. We are inventing the wheel of the master-slave duality, and hardwiring it into powerful machines made of silicon and plastics and metals, and robot dogs. Dogs have always been trained as slaves.
What fun. Let's all have a jolly old flirt with fascism shall we? Italy, Israel, USA, UK, Russia. Anyone else want to join in?
This is how we turn Earth into lone and level sands stretching far away. Literally.
A thousand Ozymandias statues, proclaiming how "great" they made their nation.
The only thing we can logically do is COOPERATE. We are facing a planet-scale problem. You think global warming gives a shit about your precvious national boundaries?
It used to be obvious with pollution. I remember Chernobyl. "Radiation doesn't care about national b boundaries" was how ecocriticism said it at the time.
But ecocriticism wasn't loud enough. And ecocriticism was subtweeting "theory" aka flirting with symbolic fascism lite by using words like "dwell." And ecocriticism was positioning itself as "ecology is neither left nor right."
So ecocriticism was about as useful as a chocolate teapot for addressing the real issue at hand, which we all knew about since the mid-1950s (and before if we'd really been paying attention): global warming.
Time to stop kicking this fascist ball around and do what you were always going to have to do anyway: COOPERATE.
This is where Shelley, who stood up to the institutional bullying at Eton at age thirteen aka nailed it young and was ridiculously brave to the point of foolhardy, really really comes in handy:
My Jamaican stepdad Maurice was a reason why the 1990s did not cause implode. So was a little tablet called MDMA. What's good enough for PTSD soldiers in the US army is good enough for me, says I.
1983. I'm painting in the art room at school. My paintings have DO NOT DISTURB scrawled on the back in deliberately insane looking script.
1983. So George Michael returned from DJ Alfredo's Amnesnia in Ibiza and wrote this perfect ad for MDMA.
Club Tropicana drinks are frEeeeeeeeeee....
First rule of advertising: you sell the user to the product. Never say "MDMA is great." Pump that shit through something familiar.
Michael had an almost frightening genius for writing lyrics that were perfectly ordinary sentences:
Club Tropicana, drinks are free, fun and sunshine, there's enough for everyone. All that's missing is the sea, but don't worry: you can suntan.
All that's missing is the sea: this is an artificial paradise, not just an inland club, but something you swallow. Pack your bags...don't miss the flight: swallow the capsule. The birds and crickets on a loop at the start...the crescendo like coming up on E.
"Let me take you to the place ... where strangers take you by the hand," says MDMA, destroying two decades of Roger Waters-induced Meddle misery ("Strangers passing in the street...Do I take you by the hand...")
But don't worry, you'll feel like your birthright as a lifeform is being given the best massage. The birds and crickets on a loop at the start...
Let me take you to the place / Where membership's a smiling face / Brush shoulders with the stars. Yeah, those stars.
The song has a perfect surface of "Rapper's Delight" fused with tropical Latinx-ness multiplied by the four to the floor of techno hidden beneatrh the Ibizan jollity. And ends with the mystic cool of Yoruba philosophy that every American has deliberately or accidentally downloaded.
Freakin love this tune.
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