November 7th, 2009 | researchmaterial
I told you. I told you all. The Dog is the Enemy of the Human. But you wouldn’t believe me. Now look.
…dogs have a greater eco-footprint than gas-guzzling SUVs.
See? SEE?
WARREN ELLIS
John Robb - 25 Nov 09
For small groups of guerrillas, the shift in method towards the disruption of critical infrastructure has been fairly spectacular.* Not only have the physical results of this methodology been noteworthy, its also been able to generate social and economic rewards of a similar magnitude.
For example, Nigeria's MEND (coordinated by innovator, and global guerrillas reader, Henry Okah) was able to disrupt the production of 1 million barrels a day of oil for years with relatively few attacks. Given that this production was light sweet crude and the tightness of the global oil markets (little slack), it's very likely that this disruption played a huge part in the rise of oil to $150 a barrel, which in turn forced the collapse of our fragile (akin to a termite, aka parasite, ridden structure) financial system in 2008. This success has forced the Nigerian government to capitulate and negotiate with the group. Another example has been the rise of India's Naxalites, who through physical systems disruption (a process of innovative disconnection called Bandhs) has been able to exert economic and social control over nearly a quarter of India.
However, once you get over the mental leap required to adopt physical systems disruption, it's fairly straight forward. From selection of targets (systempunkts) to the methodology of attack, the process is relatively scientific/tangible (although the results can be goosed with creativity/art). This isn't the case with the disruption of social systems/networks. The process required to successfully disrupt social networks is very murky -- so much so that attempting it is often akin to playing horseshoes with live hand grenades.
Classically, attempts at social system disruption are what we term terrorism. Terrorist methodology typically falls into following two categories (you can split the hair to get more, but why?):
Due to gross imprecision, both techniques have historically been very, very weak in terms of measurable returns on effort and improvements in that attacking groups freedom of action/movement. In short, they are more likely to fail than succeed in achieving the disruption desired (usually via overreaction). The question is (for those interested in military and warfare theory): has, or will, an alternative methods emerge? I think so, and if so, they will crowd out ineffective competitors and inevitably become the dominant strategies for small groups via darwinian pressure.
Alternative Approaches to Social Systems Disruption
The alternatives to classic methods for social systems disruption become viable once you shift from intangible goals (we want change or an expression of discontent) to a tangible goals: an effort to weaken or hollow out a nation-state or relatively diminish the strength/viability of a target organization. Within this framework, the following strategies become the dominant path (with further exploration, all of these old techniques can be updated to become much more effective):
NOTE: All of these methods are indirect. They use organic growth instead of direct confrontation. IF you have improvements on the above, feedback is appreciated.
* Curmudgeons (aka inflexible brains) will argue that systems disruption is merely sabotage, and therefore isn't new or worthy of consideration. My reply (to the extent I even bother to argue it, since it's an awful waste of time to educate people caught in the riptide of history): of course systems disruption is sabotage. However, while sabotage has been around forever, the complexity of modern infrastructure and the ability to regularly/easily generate huge returns on effort from cascading failures is very new. In short: An inability to recognize what's different in the current context from the previous is a hallmark of failure.
John Robb - 25 Nov 09
Some random items of interest:
Pulphope - 25 Nov 09
Kieron Gillen - 25 Nov 09
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Ta-dah! No reviews yet, but there’s a five page preview for you to digest. In short - Ares takes his team off on their first mission. Hi-jinks and adventures ensue!
It’s not the full total of comics pages appearing this week. The final issue of JMS’ Thor run comes out - THOR: GIANT SIZE FINALE. It’s apparently got a six page preview of the first issue of my run in it, which hits next week. 604 apparently has an enormous gatefold sleeve, which looks pretty damn nifty actually.
Oh - as a break from the war and chaos, I direct you at a friends of mine’s parents Sri Lankan humanitarian work, which could do with your support. Go nose.
Kung Fu Monkey - 24 Nov 09
Steven Shaviro - 24 Nov 09
Nathan of An Un-canny Ontology, responding to the same posts by Levi Bryant that I cited in my Tumblr workblog, asks the question: “What exactly happens during translation? What is translation? And why do some things get translated and others do not?” After mulling over this question for some time, Nathan concludes “that objects predict, expect, or anticipate other objects – they recognize potential.”
Now, I am not sure that this is the right answer — or, at the very least, I would argue that it isn’t all of the answer. Nathan makes this claim because, for instance, “for leafs [sic] to translate photons of light into complex sugars, they must recognize the photons of light as photons of light.” I suppose this is true in a sense: leaves will not — cannot — translate just anything into complex sugars. But I don’t see why “recognition” has to be the precondition. If anything, I’d say that the leaf’s “recognition” of the photon is a consequence of, rather than a precondition for, its “translation” of light into sugar. Re-cognition, and indeed any form of cognition, always comes afterwards; it is the error of cogntivists (which we human beings, unavoidably misunderstanding ourselves, tend to be much of the time) to think that cognition is a ground of action, when actually it is a result of action.
I think that the source of this problem, in Nathan’s account, is the following. He says that ” objects first and foremost recognize each other,” precisely because — here paraphrasing Levi, and also to an extent Graham Harman — “objects translate each other, they change each other without encountering each other directly.” But as I’ve said before, my biggest disagreement with both Levi and Graham is that, for me, objects do encounter each other directly. (Whitehead’s actual entities are a bit like Leibniz’s monads, but actual entities touch each other directly, as monads do not. Cf. also Gabriel Tarde, who posits monads that — unlike Leibniz’s — interact with one another directly).
Levi puts it this way:
One of Harman?s core claims is that objects withdraw from one another or never directly encounter one another. This is the Kantian moment in Harman?s ontology. Where Kant holds that we never have direct access to the thing-in-itself, emphasizing the relationship between mind and thing-in-itself, Harman generalizes this thesis to all relations between things, regardless of whether or not humans are involved. This is precisely why Harman?s ontology, despite being an ontological realism is also an epistemological anti-realism. In my own ontology, I refer to this general feature of things with the concept of ?translation?. As Gadamer (and Quine) taught us, every translation is a transformation. (from this post)
I largely agree with this (as I’ve said before, here and here). I think that it is precisely right to generalize what Kant says about the mind’s encounter with external reality to all interactions between/among objects. However: unlike Levi, I am unwilling to equate Kant’s argument for the cognitive inaccessibility to the thing-in-itself with the thesis that “objects never directly encounter one another.” This is because contact or encounter cannot be reduced to cognitive access. In Kant’s account, we are affected by things-in-themselves, even though we can never know them. This is indeed the source of one of the most-remarked problems with Kant’s thought: he seems to be saying that, in some sense, things-in-themselves cause our perceptions of them, even though he explicitly says that causality is merely phenomenal (i.e. merely produced by the way our minds organize our sensations). There are two ways to resolve this dilemma. One is Hegel’s and Zizek’s way, which absolutizes Mind or Spirit or Subject, by saying that even the inaccessibility of things-in-themselves is in fact posited by the Mind in the first place. Obviously, I find this undesirable. The other alternative — or, more precisely, the move in the opposite direction — consists in distinguishing the way things affect other things from “causality” understood as a Transcendental Category (i.e. roughly, as a form of cognition). Causality, as a cognitive category, isn’t adequate to describe the way that the mind is non-cognitively affected by things-in-themselves. Or — to make the speculative realist generalization — causality, as a cognitive category, isn’t adequate to describe the way that an object affects, or is affected by, another object.This is one way of describing Whitehead’s distinction between “causal efficacy” (what I am calling non-cognitive affectivity) and “presentational immediacy” (which, for Whitehead, means the type of causal connection discussed by Hume and by Kant).
So I agree with Levi and Graham that an object never cognitively grasps any other object in its entirety. (This is what Levi calls epistemological anti-realism). But I disagree with their move of equating this cognitive inaccessibility with the claim that objects never directly encounter one another. My non-vicarious version of ontological realism consists in claiming that objects do directly encounter (or affect) one another — only they do so non-cognitively. This is precisely why our ontology can be realist, even when our epistemology is confessedly anti-realist. The translation that happens in every encounter between objects — i.e. when, in Whitehead’s terms, one object prehends another object — is a direct, but non-cognitive, encounter (in Whitehead’s terms, it is a process of feeling, in which an “actual entity” determines itself by making a “decision” about how it will feel that which moves it to feel. An object functions for another object, Whitehead says, as a “lure for feeling”).
[I know that Levi and Graham won't agree with my account here, and probably Nathan won't either. But none of this would have come clear to me -- to the extent that it has come clear -- if not for my puzzling over what they wrote].
Kieron Gillen - 24 Nov 09
I had a few people asking when I had grown a sexy fringe in the backmatter to PG2.5. I hadn’t, alas. The days of fringes are long behind me. It was my good friend, the splendid uberlady Jill Stafford, as pictured here. Due to me being momentarily shit, we didn’t caption her up. Man! What were we thinking(Answer: LET’S GET THIS TO THE PRINTERS ASAP). Pah! Anyway - our model was Jill Stafford, who was wearing the still-available-photo-T-shirt and does art like this…
Coilhouse - 24 Nov 09
Polish artist Szymon Klimek creates startlingly small models out of paper thin sheets of brass, which he displays in glass goblets. Even more astounding are his lilliputian, moving engines powered by the rays of the sun with the use of tiny solar panels. I have a raging nerd-on for work like this. I spent much of my youth attempting to hastily construct various types of models and miniatures. My lack of patience was a considerable hindrance, meaning that I left a long trail of shoddily painted plastic and wood behind me; amorphous piles of acrylic, enamel, and glue that in no way resembled the images that adorned their respective packages. One really must enjoy the process in order to construct magnificent pieces like Klimek’s and I, like many, am much more interested in the destination than the journey. I suppose that’s why they invented money.
via The Automata
Post tags: Art, Industrial, Sculpture
Girl Farts - 24 Nov 09
please tell me that cats are even worse so we can get rid of those flea bags
See? This is why I have cats.
Yes, yes, dog’s are the devil’s whores, but cows do more to kill the planet and it’s inhabitants than dogs do. Their meat poisons us and their flatulence poisons the air! Do you eat the meat of the cow, Warren??? DO YOU????? Ellis, thy name is hypocrite! Just kidding. Have a drunk day!
Further in the article it states that they aren’t counting the emissions of either dogs or SUVs. This is not, how do you say…. ’science’.
But it IS… how you say… MAD.
Yeah. We domesticated them, so…
That’s an argument to be had if this article was, in any way, not a piece of fluffy, reactionary crap.
bwahahahahaha! this bit’s so funny: ‘As the New Scientist notes, “cat excrement is particularly toxic” and has been known to cause brain disease in sea otters off the California coast.’ bwarharharharhar! *can’tstoplaughing*
That’s it, I’m getting my ELECTRIC ANIMAL right now. I knew Phil K. Dick was right when he introduced those awesome electro-pets in “DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?”