— by Juan Toro
HUMAN BETWEEN CHAOS & COSMOS
„To suppose that such an imaginative radical humanism rooted in art, science fiction, and esoteric spiritualism formed the basis for the project of scientific socialism might come across today as a wild thought“ - Boris Groys in Supercommunity.
“It is now common to find geo-social futures evoked within the horizon of extinction”1. Since we landed on "planetary management" start talking about the concept of Antropocene. “The so-called geological age of man, has become pervasive in recent years, marking one of those rare instances when an idea from the natural sciences gains wider purchase on the popular imagination, as evolution, thermodynamics, and Gaia have before it. Scholars have discussed the Anthropocene as a transformation of humanity into a geological force capable of affecting, and possibly destroying, what we currently know as the world”2. What it claims is the end of anthropocentrism and but also to the end of “posthumanist or inhumanist condition is actually a Nietzschean over humanism whose present interpretations and developments are found in contemporary manifestos of accelerationism and speculative realism”. It seems that everything depends on the generations and what they believe 3.
The Anthropocene is the manifestation of a geo-social power, related to the cosmic. But before we talk about it we must say that, on the one hand what is at issue is the idea of man as the center of the universe, as in the techniques of political representation an initial ratio of the idea of man with the idea of Cosmos was established .
Since the question of the Greeks on the role of "man" in the "cosmos", the idea of "man" is defined in a "Pythagorean mess" and an encyclopedic chaos. Because the idea of human is presupposed before the human himself exist. It is the idea with which explains everything. That was the first steps in technological fundamentalism we have today.
This idea of human is the foundation of "human rights", Which is the only official universal law above of the international and natural law. In his name the death penalty is requested and vice versa, to disagree among themselves. But today we know that the idea of "human" is rooted in a tradition of mythological character, a anthropomorphism, if not, with the story of Adam and Eve. The story of the first parents of all, namely, the idea that we are all brothers, a solidarity that would even in the microcosm and even with the "meta-cosmos" where angels live supposedly arises. It is a distinction between a biological cosmic world and another meta-cosmic deified. Even Immanuel Kant proposed in the "Critique of Pure Reason", the thesis where he assumed the existence of alien beings, where Jesus Christ, posed as "human", have gone to all the planets habited. And as the main dogma of the church is the incarnation of Jesus in man, it means that human is God and God is human. Furthermore, God is everywhere. This is what is preceding the NASA policy and geo-social future today, As previously it preceded the policy of the Soviet Union. This is the "New Human", which has to leave the galactic space.
In pre-revolutionary years and epochs of Russian Cosmism there is a way to will generate the Russian scientific revolution. Based on the proposed of Nikolai Fyoderov outside of classical Marxism called “The Philosophy of the Common Task”, to establish„the immortality of the individual and its life in the cosmos“. This is actually a response to an initial questioning of the radical atheism of Friedrich Nietzsche, that just as the post-humanists, “the aspects of the sublime that are simultaneously human and inhuman in German idealism are nevertheless considered to be alien”.
Nietzsche described the material world - of which the human being is only a part-, as the site of an eternal struggle between the Apollonian and Dionysian. Chaos and cosmos, they would be in a constant confrontation. this offered “a weak consolation to a humankind gripped by cosmic anxiety”. Because “only different ways of reacting to the battle between cosmos and chaos are possible: the ecstatic embracing of chaos or an attempt to control the cosmos and secure its victory over chaos.” Invoking the coming of chaos proposes its domestication. Is the quote of Boris Groys on the opera “Victory over the sunny”, The opera celebrated the extinction of the sun and the descent of cosmos into chaos.
Although “The Russian Cosmists inherited and radicalized this Marxist shift from divine grace to secular technology”, however, the Marxist project differs from Cosmista project, which is more related to Feuerbach’s ideas that Marxism does not pose the problem of immortality. “Man was persuaded to accept his finiteness, mortality, and incapacity to control his own fate. Marx was also an atheist, but he did not want to reject the Christian promise. Rather, he wanted to realize this promise by means of the communist society that would be able to take the fate of Earth in its hands instead of relying on divine grace. The Christian promise is reinterpreted here as a promise of the victory of the communist cosmos over capitalist chaos achieved by means of secular politics and technology. (...) In this sense the classical Marxist version of communism fits into the framework of biopolitical power as described by Michel Foucault”4. It is the same policy of the modern state which guarantees the preservation of "human" species, but “the survival of the individual remains, of course, not guaranteed5”. “The Christian immortality of the soul is replaced here by the immortality of things” of art. “The “natural” death of any given individual is passively accepted by the state as an unavoidable event and is thus treated as a private matter for this individual. The death of an individual is thus the insurmountable limit of modern biopower” which it is now administered. “And this limit is accepted by a modern state that respects the private sphere of natural death. This limit was, by the way, not even questioned by Foucault himself6”.
In that sense implicit classical Marxism, defined as the Matemorfosis of Christianity, is when Adam and Eve out of paradise and have to work. This is the idea of the Alienation from Marx and Engels, is based on the scholastic idea borrowed from St. Augustine. They did not raise another notion of humanity. The argument was over whether Jesus lived in Kashmir and the dogmas of the Russian Orthodox Church, faced with Gnosticism. Even the inclination of the Soviets by the aliens, of beings who are alienated in galaxies, is a way of "alienation". They spent millions of rubles on research they considered plant, which resumed after the North Americans. In fact today with the technology to make a 3D printing with DNA as a new revolution, it is implicit the idea of The Second Advent of Christ. The Christ is resurrected from the DNA of his descendants or his “historical” characteristics. We see the adjoining interests of biopower and the transhumanist reconfiguration, that is actually a secular cynicism, a mechanism of illusion of the image. The power of the idea of the beautiful sunshine as capital, could be really the image policy agendas for climate conservation and therefore, we can say that "planetary management" it is also an ideological transformation to geo-social future. Since photons and nanotechnology to femtotechnology, the Physik is intertwined with politics, economics, ecology, psychology and religion, it is being constituted in the fundamentalism of technocracy. We are facing a kind of apocalyptic psychological reductionism that tries to explain the entire universe and the "mind". Thus confronted with an Gnosticism.
Like that phrase from William Gibson, “We Have Seen What We Can Do, and It’s Awesome”. Originated by what the great totalizing organizations, power agencies, empires, etc., where the human being is a hollow and generic concept, the human being is only an interface like any other software that the laws of physics must be installed.
“Speculative realist, accelerationist, and object-oriented theories dispense with this double-bind construction - the inhumanness within humanness (the fake “beyond” within the human mind) - merely by rejecting the fact that the human mind has any capacity to grasp what is alien: matter, reality or the real, the cosmological ancestrality of Earth, the cosmological dimension. Such a condition could be related to the way emancipatory politics is understood in accelerationist theories, where the political change or emancipatory shift is achieved by overiding alienation, which implies accepting its conditions. And the human mind is exactly the tool for extending oneself to such uncomfortable, alienated otherness—as was the core issue of philosophy from Kant to Adorno7”. In fact the Acellerationism which initially is raised as an economic theory to accelerate the capital to make it explode, as in all science, accurate of a speculation and spontaneity "controlled", which would be more related to the Romantic intuition, tech by the state.
We think in this exhibition, as a critical "radical" humanistic project, this exhibition based on the simple idea that we are "a group of friends who want to do something together", rather than any "agreement" or contract, the ubiquity is no longer the necessary and sufficient condition Ghost Rousseau. The possibility of producing a super structural change would be underpinned in the confrontation with this specific proposed, within the framework of the paradoxes of globalization theme. For though the work is done in a "global city" it does not seek institutionalized as part of a peripheral or central art. For input that we are not committed to a conservatorship linked to an operation of generating national capital. That is, as it is not seeking to enter the high command of the art world, therefore, we need not and we aren´t subject to justify. More than artists, it is not within the hint of an extension of the multidimensionality. An international super aesthetic community is coming and that´s capacity for collective resistance through art, rewriting the "social contract" of Rousseau. That in extending elements for aesthetic discussion between us, is being created now, conditions for the release of a "last International ". This points to a change in infrastructure and decolonization when one is not "forced to be free8".
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Bibliography
George M. Young, The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Brandon Carter. anthropic principle in cosmology. Contribution to Colloquium “Cosmology: Facts and problems“. (Coll`ege de France, June 2004). http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0606117v1
Victory over the Sun, ed. Patricia Railing, trans. Evgeny Steiner. 2 vols. (London: Artists.Bookworks, 2009).
Ilyenkov, Evald V. “Kosmologiya duha”. Vasiljevich. “Filosofia i kultura”. Moscow, 1994
Textures of the Anthropocene: Grain Vapor Ray. Katrin Klingan, Ashkan Sepahvand, Christoph Rosol, Bernd M. Scherer). Revolver Publishing, Berlin. October 2014.
After Zero . Katalog. Geographies of Collaborations. Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Berlin, 2014.
Ape Cultur . Katalog. Geographies of Collaborations. Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Berlin, 2014.
Roy Scranton, “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene,” New York Times, November 10, 2013.
Gustavo Bueno. El hombre y el cosmos. Summer courses. Universidad de la Rioja, Spain. July 2015.
Erle Ellis, “Stop Trying to Save the Planet,” Wired, May 6, 2009; Erle Ellis, “Forget Mother Nature: This is a World of our Making,” New Scientist, June 14, 2011.
Superconversations Day 63: Philip Conway responds to Rory Rowan, “Extinction as Usual? Geo-social Futures and Left Optimism” http://conversations.e-flux.com/t/superconversations-day-63
#1Jean Renoir - Parle De Son Art. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2n1up1
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1. Rory Rowan ,Extinction as Usual?: Geo-Social Futures and Left Optimism. Apocalypsis, July 31st 2015. Day 63 . http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/
2. Ibid.
3. In June 2015 the “new environmentalist” think tank The Breakthrough Institute hosted a three-day conference on the theme of “The Good Anthropocene” at its headquarters in Oakland, California.
4. Boris Groys. Cosmic Anxiety: The Russian Case. Cosmos, May 9th 2015-day 4. http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/
5. Keti Chukhrov. Why Preserve the Name “Human”?. Cosmos, July 10th 2015. Day 48, http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/
6. Ibid. Boris Groys.
7. Ibid. Keti Chukhrov.
8. The Social Commons: Citizens in the Shade, Aliens in the Sun. With Raqs Media Collective. http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/topics/the-social-commons/