This Christmas I received a copy of Manuel DeLanda’s recent book, Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason. It’s a fascinating book, for two reasons: it puts forth a quite different ontological position from any that I’ve encountered, and it does so by exploring phenomena at all scales, and the patterns and phase spaces that they seem to share.

It’s a demanding read, not because the philosophical or the scientific or the mathematical concepts are particularly difficult, but because there’s an awful lot of them, and if you’re unfamiliar with them as they arise you may be best off ducking off to Wikipedia and looking them up before proceeding, as they will come up again and again. (In particular, make sure you at least have a passing familiarity with finite state automata, neural nets, fitness landscapes and genetic algorithms).

DeLanda begins with some fairly simple definitions; an individual (we’ll come back to that term, it’s philosophically important here) possesses properties, tendencies and capacities. These are very distinct terms. DeLanda uses the example of a knife to illustrate. Sharpness is a property, as it describes a spatiotemporal phenomena, such as the arrangement of metal molecules so as to make an edge, and different arrangements make the edge wider or narrower. It is a tendency of the knife to be solid; given sufficient heat, the tendency of the knife to becomes liquid will become actualized (there’s another philosophical term to watch out for). The tendency for the knife to become a gas is still a virtual tendency, here. And finally, a knife’s capacity to cut implies a relationship to another individual that is capable of being cut. Since this is a relation, it can only be spoken of with regards to another individual, and the phase space for the knife’s capacities is theoretically infinite.

Why the term individual? Well, this is roughly how DeLanda defines entities that the OOO crowd (folks like Kris Coffield, Timothy Morton, Ian Bogost, Levi Bryant and Graham Harman) would call objects, but with some key differences. An individual is shorthand for an individual singularity, a type of assemblage (see DeLanda’s earlier book, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory & Social Complexity, for more on that) that is irreducible and decomposible. The irreducible part is how DeLanda gets away with talking about emergence. A convection cell isn’t emergent because it magically adds something to the base phenomena, but it’s emergent because it’s only visible from a certain spatiotemporal scale. If you look at the constituent atoms, you won’t find the convection cell anywhere. Decomposibility means that emergent phenomena are just looking for materials to fit a certain structure. Cells split and die, but I am still an individual. Presidents take and leave office, but the government still exists, new electrons are constantly taking the place of old but the current is the same.

More importantly, an individual isn’t defined by arbitrarily drawing a bounds (Which I still see as a distinctly anthropocentric activity, although Kris Coffield argues otherwise. I still can’t tell if the problem is me or him. My money’s on me.), but by describing the history of its construction. In this sense, DeLanda marries the entity-driven descriptions of object-oriented ontology with a sort of contingent process philosophy.

The properties of individual singularities have material presence in spacetime; they are composed of matter and energy, and to this degree are compatible with general observation, most science, and naïve realism. In addition, however, the individual singularity describes the phase space for its tendencies and capacities; a space that is infinite without possessing all possibilities, and where probability clusters shape the phase space to form attractors.

An explanation for what properties, tendencies and capacities of individual singularities are actualized is necessary, as is an explanation for the evolution of their phase spaces. Universal singularities are just such an explanation, existing as mechanism-independent topologies that individual singularities map to, completely or incompletely. Individual and universal singularities are what DeLanda demands an ontological commitment to, not merely the spacetime matter-energy subset. Indeed, our entire universe may merely be the actualization of a much large singularity that describes a phase space for universes, virtual and actual.

As an aside, while DeLanda never uses the term, this appears to be the exact same ontology described by Amanda Gefter in her answer to this year’s Edge question as Structural Realism.

Throughout the rest of the book, then, DeLanda explores the plausibility of this premise by attempting to map rough estimates of certain phase spaces via simulations and seeing whether the attractors that arise correlate to what we know of the history of the universe, chemistry, life and sociology. The simulations necessarily become more simplistic as the scale and complexity increases, but DeLanda is not looking to prove the thesis as much as show that it is plausible and not grossly contradicted, and in this he succeeds.

However, there are two important things he missed, that I think would actually strengthen his case should he include them. The first is that, in a work so replete with cutting-edge algorithms, the absence of the Price equation is frankly, stunning. Every simulation DeLanda describes operates at one scale, abstracting the scales below it. What the Price equation does is allow for variable-selection across scales. This is not important in a majority of the cases, but the minorities can be game-changers (think of the higher-order effects of one cancer cell, or one person like Napolean or Gandhi). Any discussion of simulations as a way of exploring phase spaces should, in my opinion, at least take a serious look at what the consequences are of blindly abstracting lower-order phenomena.

Secondly, while DeLanda didn’t omit the subject, I don’t think he spent enough time explaining and exploring the relationship of emergent phenomena and available gradients, particularly as they relate to entropy. Gradients are [paraphrasing DeLanda here] “intensive differences that act so as to store and release energy”. These could be the presence or absence of a valence electron, or the fact that all of your relatives signed up for Facebook (something which fits nicely into what Levi Bryant has been exploring as “regimes of attraction”). As John Tooby explains in his answer to 2012’s Edge question:

The world given to us by physics is unrelievedly bleak. It blasts us when it is not burning us or invisibly grinding our cells and macromolecules until we are dead. It wipes out planets, habitats, labors, those we love, ourselves. Gamma ray bursts wipe out entire galactic regions; supernovae, asteroid impacts, supervolcanos, and ice ages devastate ecosystems and end species. Epidemics, strokes, blunt force trauma, oxidative damage, protein cross-linking, thermal noise-scrambled DNA—all are random movements away from the narrowly organized set of states that we value, into increasing disorder or greater entropy. The second law of thermodynamics is the recognition that physical systems tend to move toward more probable states, and in so doing, they tend to move away from less probable states (organization) on their blind toboggan ride toward maximum disorder.

Entropy, then, poses the problem: How are living things at all compatible with a physical world governed by entropy, and, given entropy, how can natural selection lead over the long run to the increasing accumulation of functional organization in living things? Living things stand out as an extraordinary departure from the physically normal (e.g., the earth’s metal core, lunar craters, or the solar wind). What sets all organisms—from blackthorn and alder to egrets and otters—apart from everything else in the universe is that woven though their designs are staggeringly unlikely arrays of highly tuned interrelationships—a high order that is highly functional. Yet as highly ordered physical systems, organisms should tend to slide rapidly back toward a state of maximum disorder or maximum probability. As the physicist Erwin Schrödinger put it, “It is by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert state that an organism appears so enigmatic.”

The quick answer normally palmed off on creationists is true as far as it goes, but it is far from complete: The earth is not a closed system; organisms are not closed systems, so entropy still increases globally (consistent with the second law of thermodynamics) while (sometimes) decreasing locally in organisms. This permits but does not explain the high levels of organization found in life. Natural selection, however, can (correctly) be invoked to explain order in organisms, including the entropy-delaying adaptations that keep us from oxidizing immediately into a puff of ash.

Natural selection is the only known counterweight to the tendency of physical systems to lose rather than grow functional organization—the only natural physical process that pushes populations of organisms uphill (sometimes) into higher degrees of functional order. But how could this work, exactly?

It is here that, along with entropy and natural selection, the third of our trio of truly elegant scientific ideas can be adapted to the problem: Galileo’s brilliant concept of frames of reference, which he used to clarify the physics of motion.

The concept of entropy was originally developed for the study of heat and energy, and if the only kind of real entropy (order/disorder) was the thermodynamic entropy of energy dispersal then we (life) wouldn’t be possible. But with Galileo’s contribution one can consider multiple kinds of order (improbable physical arrangements), each being defined with respect to a distinct frame of reference.

There can be as many kinds of entropy (order/disorder) as there are meaningful frames of reference. Organisms are defined as self-replicating physical systems. This creates a frame of reference that defines its kind of order in terms of causal interrelationships that promote the replication of the system (replicative rather than thermodynamic order). Indeed, organisms must be physically designed to capture undispersed energy, and like hydroelectric dams using waterfalls to drive turbines, they use this thermodynamic entropic flow to fuel their replication, spreading multiple copies of themselves across the landscape.

Entropy sometimes introduces copying errors into replication, but injected disorder in replicative systems is self-correcting. By definition the less well-organized are worse at replicating themselves, and so are removed from the population. In contrast, copying errors that increase functional order (replicative ability) become more common. This inevitable ratchet effect in replicators is natural selection.

Organisms exploit the trick of deploying different entropic frames of reference in many diverse and subtle ways, but the underlying point is that what is naturally increasing disorder (moving toward maximally probable states) for one frame of reference inside one physical domain can be harnessed to decrease disorder with respect to another frame of reference. Natural selection picks out and links different entropic domains (e.g., cells, organs, membranes) that each impose their own proprietary entropic frames of reference locally.

When the right ones are associated with each other, they do replicative work through harnessing various types of increasing entropy to decrease other kinds of entropy in ways that are useful for the organism. For example: oxygen diffusion from the lungs to the blood stream to the cells is the entropy of chemical mixing—falling toward more probable high entropy states, but increasing order from the perspective of replication-promotion.

Entropy makes things fall, but life ingeniously rigs the game so that when they do they often fall into place.

In short, entropy does not preclude phase spaces in which the attractors lead to complex phenomena, particularly when the frame of reference one is using includes a gradient that makes a relatively closed system open.

I very much enjoyed this book, although I grew a little weary of the detailed discussion of simulation limitations in the last two chapters. For a broader exploration of what this means for human social systems, politics and economics, I highly recommend DeLanda’s earlier work, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History.

I hope these ideas are seriously engaged with by the philosophic and scientific communities.

This review was originally posted as a G+ post

This week the three major political parties in Minnesota will be having their caucuses (I’d sneak in to one but I’m double-booked playing chess with a gentleman in his 90’s that I’m loathe to stand up). The conversations are about America and meaning; the meaning of the nation and of the individuals who all draw from this source of identity. But the world is not so easily ordered.

Nation-states are a historically contingent phenomena, and trends seem to imply that they are an evolutionary stepping-stone to a plurality of descendents of all scales. Some descendents are super-states, proto-empires - over the coming decades, China looks as though it may return to its earlier role. Others are meshworks, like the old Ottoman trade networks, but modernized and, as Nils Gilman pointed out, potentially deviant. The FARC/Nigeria/Al Qaeda Mahgreb network example is one. Speaking of deviant globalization, some states may collapse entirely, only to be held upright like posed corpses for the parasitic entities underneath; the Zetas in Mexico and similar organizations in Central and South America could qualify. Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZs) such as the Occupy Wall Street (and all it’s brethren, spawning and disappearing from the city ecologies like fungi) and Tahrir have proven themselves, and are likely to appear, and reappear; political flash mobs. And none of this is even addressing the metastasizing of corporations into meta-states.

Which perhaps explains somewhat why I find liberal Americans so schizophrenic in their characterizations of their country. Their ideals do not map to the nation-state easily or appropriately. Their local concerns are very local; regional at most, with their broader concerns towards human rights, environmental degradation and the like paying no attention to the border. The height of this disconnect for me was viewing the protestors of the XL Pipeline being arrested. The XL Pipeline isn’t the problem, really; they are concerned about the Albertan tar sands. So why weren’t they protesting those? The XL Pipeline wasn’t an endgame, if it simply meant that Canada built a pipe west to the Pacific to ship to China. It seems that liberal Americans have been caught in a trap of their own making. In measuring their progress against the consistently receding marker of the American right, they’ve failed to notice their own stagnance and lack of vision.

The problem liberals have with a multipolar world is that it will make all things more complicated; not the least of all praise/blame. Economic decisions may find easy consensus, while ethical problems are intractable; or vice versa. The intuitions aren’t present. There is a tendency to view American exceptionalism in the negative, to “blame America”, treat American racism as somehow superior to the racism of the Japanese towards the Koreans (or the Indians towards the Philipinos, or the Gulf Arabs towards everyone), and conversely, to see American restraint or intervention as an automatic solution.

The next decades will require a massive mental shift as we transition from a state-to-state interaction model, to a more abstract entity-to-entity model. Prepare for a citizen’s collective with a diplomat to Wells Fargo, G.E., the Zetas and Paraguay. INTERPOL proceedings against Lulzsec even while the State Department coordinates with Anonymous.

The inability to blame the U.S., and the incapacity for an entity like the U.N. to “make the hard choices” will result in a stunningly broad consortium of entities; governments, affinity groups, corporations, gangs, etc; only a subset of which will matter in any given decision, but it’ll be different subsets for different decisions, and none will play by the same rules.

Do we have any roadmaps for this? Not much, but I stumbled across something today that began to ask the correct questions. In the highlight report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in Canada, the recommendation was given to recognize federal, provincial/territorial and Aboriginal governance as discrete and all collected within Canadian sovereignty. Where it gets interesting is in the sections where it discussed the necessity of addressing rule of law for large groups of Aboriginals living in cities such as Winnipeg. This was described as a community of interest government, as opposed to a public government (where an Aboriginal majority controlled territory with non-Aboriginal residents) and a nation government.

That’s a beginning, but I think we need to be broader, and look at governance as not merely something tied to local, but as something married to a shared vision.

It comes in the forms of blog posts about laughing cats that eviscerate security contracting companies, or in the guise of a swarm of autonomous drones building an art exhibit. It comes as news stories, with headlines too absurd to be believed. Avian flu has been mixed with the common cold in a lab, and a new form of tuberculosis resists everything doctors have attempted to treat it with. Methane plumes pepper the Russian north coast and mines scar the Canadian prairies. A circus of candidates are jockeying to oppose the liberal/moderate/socialist [do words still mean things?] incumbent, who has won a Nobel Peace Prize while sending human or robotic troops into 7 countries in his first term. Temporary autonomous zones popped up in city centers across the United States for months, and financial sector technocrats have taken over two European states amidst large-scale protests. Drug cartels have their own makeshift submarines and tanks, and one in particular is doing a good side business selling black market oil it steals from the state that can’t seem to snuff it out. The leader of the Maoist opposition in India dies, in an event and a war that has perhaps never seen the evening news in the West.

It feels as if world history has taken a hit of a potent accelerant. Understandably, most people just find the whole situation too knotted, obtuse and frightening to warrant unravelling. Occasionally someone comes by with an ideological cleaver and attempt to sort the Gordian knot of present history once and for all, but the optimism fades after repeated unsuccessful hacks.

But the fears are still there, and the fear that is most present to us is that of losing control. Just one step removed from death anxiety, the constant flux of the world in 2012 brings events and change agents into our lives at faster-than-human speeds. Our filters fail, and we respond reflexively, or by retreating into isolationism. In 1848 Karl Marx wrote:

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

A better posthuman manifesto could not be written. When the terrible wrath of Texan wildfires and Japanese tsunamis draw forth our awe and mass die-offs of bats and bees generate tingling sensations down our spines, our simple worldviews and heuristics fail to find referents, and we are presented with an opportunity to truly examine ourselves. To contemplate the human condition, and your very limited place within it. To acknowledge its limitations and revel in its freedoms.

Originally, this post was to be about something else entirely, but this message decided it needed to be spoken, first. I’ll follow up next week with some thoughts on human autonomy.

My first real articulation of doubt occurred in eighth grade. I have no recollection of what prompted it, but I remember finding adequate resolution to my questions in the pages of C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity. Well over a decade later, I’ve moved on to other thinkers, other ideas, other arguments. What I remembered of Lewis’ argumentation hadn’t aged well. But when Dave Burkum, pastor of the church I am a part of, put forth the challenge of reading Mere Christianity together as a congregation, I decided to pick it up again, and see how it held up.

Originally produced as a radio series during World War II in England, Lewis, a veteran of World War I, gave a simple and clear articulation of what he described as “mere” Christianity—that shared core of assumptions, beliefs and orientations that have inspired and provoked Christ-followers over the ages, in all limbs of the (lower-case c) catholic church.

Since this month’s discussion only focuses on Books I and II, that is all I’ll cover this month. I’ll follow up with Book II in a week or two, and then with Book III and Book IV in February and March, respectively.

Section 1.1 of Book I begins with a heap of generalizations. Lewis appeals to a universal sense of reciprocity, which he later acknowledges is graded [in 1.2 he claims a line exists that separates the “Law of Human Nature” (an absolute) with “Rules for Decent Behavior” (socially constructed), but with no explanation of where that line lies, or how one might discover one from the other], with the possibility open of some people genuinely not knowing this “law of human nature”. A straw man is constructed that “does not believe in right or wrong”, but is cast aside before much damage is done. The chapter ends with Lewis’ axioms:

1. Right and Wrong are real.
2. None of us keep to the right.

If you followed Luke Muehlhauser and Alonzo Fyfe’s podcast on morality at all, you’ll notice right away the fuzzy language. What does it mean that Right is real? Euthryphro’s dilemma is casually tossed aside, and what it means for morality to even be “real” in any sense beyond is unexplained. What is clear in this prose is that right and wrong is not merely subjective to human experience, but somehow rests above it. Unfortunately, that’s simply not sufficient for moral argumentation.

In Section 1.2, Lewis proactively addresses some potential objects to his argument; couldn’t this all be herd instinct or social convention? He attempts to ward of these encroachments with an appeal to conscience as a meta-instinct; since we require cues for whether our instincts are helpful or harmful, our conscience provides the judgement to sort our possible responses. It’s a little unclear which direction Lewis is going; it could be as simple as describing cognition itself, absent from any spiritual component, but it reads more along the lines of a sensus divinitas. He also insists, here and later in the book, on paralleling morality with mathematics. I’m not sure that’s the secure foundation he thinks it is, particularly after mathematicians such as Kurt Gödel and Gregory Chaitin have shaken the absolutist foundations of that discipline.

Towards the end of the section, Lewis makes an astute observation; that it’s not an impressive feat of morality to no longer burn witches once we no longer believe in them. This principle extends to the domain of desires, I believe. If I, having no desire to have sex with children, avoid pedophilia; what of it? That’s not particularly morally praiseworthy. Someone who has that desire and withstands temptation and instead seeks help, is morally praiseworthy in a way that I am not, even though in both cases, no children were molested. In the same sense, Lewis is on to something, and I think this is a type of thinking that pervades thoughts about the “Other”. As with desires, so with beliefs. Richard Beck wrote (in a blog post I can no longer find) about a similar dilemma between so-called “liberal” vs. “conservative” believers; the former, not considering the literal texts of the bible as binding, are much more able to adapt and adopt to shifts in cultural mores. The same effect exists in international politics, particularly between secular, European and American democracy activists and their Muslim counterparts, a phenomenon well discussed at The Immanent Frame.

Section 1.3-1.5 makes a series of assertions that range from problematic to flat-out wrong. Lewis says we ought to be unselfish because it’s good for society. Well, that’s all well and good, but it simply pushes the problem upward. Why is unselfishness good for society? An answer that is currently being floated is that unselfishness developed as a function of social bonding, longevity and through the benefits of mutual exchange and support. Even then, it’s relative, and the effect weakens with one’s degree of relationship. An innate propensity for sin layered over an original, uncorrupted creation doesn’t explain this gradation of selfishness as well as the evolution of human social relations does. (Plus, society rewards certain kinds of selfishness as “good”; what did Lewis make of that, I wonder?)

Conscience, Lewis also claims, implies a universal consciousness. I have no idea how this leap was made, nor whether there are any justifications for it. This, like the statement about our consciences being unobservable, strikes me as sheer assertion.

More interestingly, Lewis explains that conscience does not track with convenience, and can sometimes be quite inconvenient. He looks at the psychological and sociological reasons, and then jumps to a higher plane of argumentation, but I think moral questions simply fall into a sort of 47-body problem; theoretically solvable, but practically impossible to solve, therefore justifying the need to use heuristics instead.

Lewis closes with two evidences:

1. The universe implies an artist.
2. Our conscience implies a moral law.

Strangely, the first comes from nowhere, having been pulled from a back room at the last minute, and looking a bit disheveled. The second suffers from the problems discussed above, compounded by the caveat that according to Lewis, Christianity assumes you understand the moral law exists which you are guilty of; an assumption which, when coupled with his earlier admission that some people may not have the moral equipment with which to understand moral law, makes from some odd results when you argue that all people are culpable for their sins.

It’s a daring book but it feels as if Lewis, rather than grasping the doubts and concerns of the age and pushing through the terrors towards new answers, instead retreated gracefully and barred the windows, reinforced the doors. His epigram towards the end of Section 1.6 should be meditated on by the readers of this work:

If you look for truth, you may find comfort – if you look for comfort, you will find neither.

Specifically, on Santorum’s campaign website he cites his belief in American exceptionalism at the international level and “traditional” (read: Christian, heterosexual couples with children) families at the domestic level as the foundations for his policy positions; positions that include an orientation towards war (with Iran) and capitulation to corporatism (through reduced regulations). Embedded beneath these position statements are axioms about the world, axioms which assume a societal ordering that is grounded in a divine plan, an eternal structure, a “natural order”.

With that in mind, let’s turn our attentions to philosopher and former psychoanalyst Levi Bryant. In his recent blog posts on object-oriented ontology and politics (Part I, II) examined the differences between Lucretius and Aristotle’s attitudes about the nature of the social order. Whereas Plato and Aristotle saw a sort of natural sense to the social order—women being inferior to men, the necessity of a philosopher-king (read, technocrat), etc—Lucretius held that:

Whatever exists you will always find connected to these two things, or as by-products of them; connected meaning that the quality can never be subtracted from its object no more than weight from stone, or heat from fire, wetness from water. On the other hand, slavery, riches, freedom, poverty, war, peace, and so on, transitory things whose comings and goings do not alter substance– these, and quite properly, we call by-products.

(De Rerum Natura, Humphries translation, 33)

Lucretius was on to something. As the years have wound on all that was solid has melted into air: we have learned of our evolved origins and shared ancestors, found seemingly immutable laws to be probabilistic, debilitated the hopes of hobgoblins for consistency in mathematics, begun deconstructing anthropomorphism (with bees, dolphins, octopi and other animals), and are gradually deflating our beliefs in morality and ethics, free will, God and even our own rationality. Even our rigid notions of the universe are at risk, first with the relativity of space and time, and now with talk of parallel universes with alternate physics, and the contingency of elementary particles and mirror images of the Big Bang. I hope to unpack each of these in future posts.

The common thread here is what philosopher Quentin Meillassoux calls ”the necessity of contingency”. Whether or not Meillassoux’s thesis is entirely correct, he’s on the right track; time after time after time, the “natural order” of things turns out to be surprisingly…contingent. This is troubling news, particularly for those who, having been fortunate to enough to benefit from contingent events of history, hold power and maintain it by insisting upon a fictitious natural order. It makes little difference whether these are kings hypothesizing a god-granted throne, environmentalists yearning for a return to Eden, or hedge-fund managers lobbying against government regulations against finance; the implicit assumptions are the same.

This is why there can be such a deviation between the policies and the politics one supports. For example, the ideas Ron Paul expresses on this video about foreign policy resonate well with me, but I am far from a libertarian. Libertarianism, like humanism and many other ideologies, is founded upon assumptions of the natural order; the basic rights of man, property rights, and others. Much Enlightenment thinking was grounded in similar assumptions whose hegemony has been and is being contested by the landless, the proletariat, the queer, the female, the young, the indigenous, the non-citizen, the ecological and the non-human.

And much of what passes for politics on the left (whatever that is) is equally guilty. Whether in the name of the environment, or of human rights, or of tolerance or what-have-you, the well-meaning have tossed aside the strange liberties that a full reckoning of the world provides. Bryant describes the tension between the “natural order” and the “necessity of contingency” as the difference between internal relations within a consilient “object” (using the onticological term) and external relations between different objects. Quoting Bryant:

Lucretius articulates the thesis that has been common to all leftist thought for the last two thousand years: relations are external to their terms. […] And in demonstrating the contingency of these sorting and structuring mechanisms, what thinkers such as Foucault, Butler, and Marx above all show is the possibility of other ways of relating. Their point is never to say that we are ineluctably trapped in these relations– though it can be damned hard to escape them –but that these relations aren’t “natural”, they aren’t internal, they don’t have to be this way.

Thus, where Burke attempts to situate politics in a stable universe and a natural mode of governance and economics, Marx instead argues for communism on the basis of a contingent history of capitalism.

This does not make the ideas of leftist politics necessarily better, by any metric. They may be worse, even far worse, but what they never are is natural. When they go wrong, they can and ought to be changed, and that change, that difference, makes all the difference.

So when I hear Rick Santorum extol the American nation or the American family or heterosexuality as normative and natural and right and good, I hear the worst of Aristotle’s apologetics for the perverse contingencies of power, and my imagination is piqued and my anger aroused, because another world is possible.

Justine, Claire and Claire’s son sit in a makeshift tipi, bracing for the impending impact of a foreign planet, and the destruction of all life. Tengo, Aomame and the little one inside her climb, freezing, up emergency ladders and scuttle over catwalks to reach a parallel world, and consign the one they have been living in to memory and oblivion. And January 1st, 2012, is a threshold crossed that, while possessing none of the gravitas with which the apocalyptic have attempted to endow it, is subtle and transformative personally, in its own way. A world has died, and a new world has been born, and this inaugural post is the birth certificate.

My wife and I brought in the new year quietly; apple cider, a couple rounds of Blockus (the triangle edition, which is, in my opinion, vastly superior to the rectangular) and a late-night showing of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia in our living room. The “science-fiction plot as poetry in film” echoed many of the traits I appreciated most of Darren Aronofsky’s earlier graphic novel and film The Fountain. The change in registers between the profoundly personal stories (a disaster of a wedding, coping with the depression of a sibling) and cosmic disaster (in the form planetary collision) is jarring; mixing but never being mixed, a streak of oil across a plot of water. This resonated.

John Caputo, lecturing on the future of continental philosophy, gives a synopsis of Ray Brassier’s book, Nihil Unbound. It is not enough to reckon with the death of meanings that occur when philosophy is uncoupled from anthropocentrism; one must stare into the void and reckon with the heat death of the universe itself. Peter Rollins spoke in an interview about a kind of belief in God that lies hidden within atheism, a belief-on-our-behalf that is a comfort for atheists who are able to claim the intellectual high ground of denouncing theological answers, but who draw comfort from the belief of their parents, their children, or their culture. Brassier pushes towards a more devastating philosophy, one that pulls the roots out of every safe place.

But, strangely, that is not yet the end. That there is a philosophy at all, after the end of the world, is a curious, miraculous thing. Haruki Murakami explores this notion almost incidentally in his novel, 1Q84. The characters are dropped into a world that is a shadow of the world that they knew, and as situations evolve beyond their control, their options constrict until it seems that only death or self-imposed exile remain. But Murakami, like an accomplished illusionist, reveals a hope that escapes the pull of the world of 1Q84. Like the little one growing inside of Aomame (presumably woven from strands plucked from the air by mysterious hands) a new philosophy is pulled from the void, and strand intersects with strand until, with a trying journey fueled by a shared love and a hope without ground, a new world is entered into.

I’m skeptical of Murakami’s sleight-of-hand, and of the notion that a simple vector of escape will present itself, to draw us out of this world and its historically-contingent constraints. But I am open to constructing my own air chrysalis, pulling thoughts from the air and working them into words.

I hope to present my weavings in this venue over the coming year. You are welcome here.