[...]here; addictive, artificial, and beside oneself; [genuinely clean or drug free ~=? being exposed to existence, placing one's body in the grips of a temporality that pains]; phantasm of lack in abstinence; (like drugs they are) linked to *a mode of departing*, to desocialization, (like the activity of writing) nonproductive and somehow irresponsible, being-in-drugs (being-in-Facebook) supposedly resists the production of real value (incapable of stabilizing the truth of a real world); figure of drifter/dissident: obsessed and entranced, narcissistic, private, unable to achieve transference; movement of the simulacrum without address;
speed: going nowhere fast

...................................

[Campbell] on marketing theory

bacteria: entities that threaten our secluded sovereign cleanliness

our ideas of bacteria are shaped through the filter of advertisements for antibacterial products


[*]climate change: “[t]he moment I turn the engine of a car and ignite the 165 million-year-old microscopic fossil faunae, connecting me to the 35 billion ancient barrels that are drilled, fracked, refined, and transported every single year. Climate change is in the 100 trillion objects that are in, that are the Earth, traversing the stomach lining of the Burmese python and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which churns a quarter of the planet’s heat flux. Climate change is the daily operations of simplification, extraction, purification, replication, and acceleration--all of which are needed to create the philosophy of ‘progress’ that is embodied by nearly every human in this world.” -Campbell
= *a context which will last for thousands of years and will be the fundamental starting point of every action, every thought, every expression of organization*
==> irreversible *death of difference* (biodiversity), end of “human project” (--✕--> despondency دلسردى)

creative foreclosure of the old World
preparing for an end without apocalypse @Jassem
(we need to) experiment with (organizational forms of) justice, ethics, politics, reason**

Holocene ==> fundamental modes through which we organize still today:
•births of language and religion
•concept of resources and exchange
•invention of all known technology
•development of agriculture
•development of domestication
•development of urbanization


Campbell's posthuman
•computation of life
•laboratorization of life (simple categories of liveness and deadness over the last 30 years)
•miniturization of life
•complexification of life
•automation of life


relation: smallest possible unit of analysis, extremely prosaic and mundane ==> world
theorizing in the way of relation (as in feminist science, actor-network theory, or nonrepresentational theory) ==Haraway==> engendering a more humble, more modest attitude in the human observer --✕--> Meillassoux's non-relational theory

(since Kand) western philosophy has been epistemological [~ investigating human relationship to things =/= ontological]
--> correlations (between thinking and being), we turn things into affordances when we think about them --> correlationism: we only have access to the correlation between thinking (thing-for-us) and being (thing-in-itself) ==> ‘all knowledge is relative’ [=/= realism]

Meillassoux's absolutes:
•there might be something outside thought

lack of a necessary ultimate cause or meaning (facticity) --Meillassoux--> fundarnental source of being (ontological contingency ~ “facticity itself is necessary”) : no ‘higher’ or ‘supreme’ force or reason (metaphysical, physical, spiritual) is guiding it [~ total ontological absence of a necessity] ==> *contingency* is absolutely necessary in the universe

“Everything in the universe is without reason and is therefore capable of becorning otherwise without reason.” --> this has happened already at least 3 times (where new sets of laws enlerge from nowhere):
•Big Bang
•life from non-life (==> new laws of biological life)
•thought


absolute is wider

“two billiard balls strike into each other, resulting in both balls flying off into the air, or fusing together, or turning into two immaculate but rather grumpy mares, or into two maroon but rather affable lilies”


(@apass)
every research agonizes about:
•the ontological status of their ‘objects’ (of enquiry)
•the epistemological status of their knowledge claims

--Campbell--> we need to “go ontological” about consumption, global warming, (hyperobjects)
hyperobjects:
•viscous (literally real, and you cannot throw it away)
•non-local
•larger on the inside than they are on the outside
•they call for forms ofjustice, ethics, politics and reason that are beyond humanist economies of identification and representation

social constructivism ==> everyone's interpretation of the real is legitimate [equal status of interpretation] =/= (Meillassoux's) speculative realism


understand the world at the level of the hyperobject <== we are creating (consumer) objects that are massive in scale and temporality

inter-generational justice (imagining till your grandchildren)


service-dominant logic (of consumer research) =/= object oriented (more than humanist/naturalist trophies)
service: that intangible value extracted from stuff by humans --to--> the increasing ability to separate, transport, and exchange information, apart from embodiment in goods and people

Meillassoux's arche fossil ~=? jinn
witnesses of the universe before humans

objects  withdraw  infinitely  from  humans
universal quality of all objects: *reserve*
==> (narcissistic) philosophy of a uniquely lonely human fate [--> popular contemporary depiction of human with one foot in animality and the other in consciousness]
----> then how *withdrawal* (should) play out in social theory?

Lingis's ‘imperative’: worlds are filled up with imperatives (human and nonhuman) that summon us --> enmeshed pre-cognitive, atavistic, technological, embodied modes in which we respond to the world --> how this does not get recuperated into the existing models of sociology

[flipside of withdrawal:] to think of capital: an  extraordinarily force overthrowing any imagination of an alternative --> there is no possibility of ‘intervention' in Capital ==> ‘accelerationism’: an inside-out radicalism, believing in unleashing productive forces of human wrought to continue its dynamism : “the only way out is to plunge further in”

Campbell: ‘withdrawal from capital' = passing through the eye of the needle

[that which is expressed in philosophy, political economy, science and science fiction, and in transhumanist, lifehacker, accelerationist movements:] *flight from consumption*
}--✕--> Campbell's *speculative consumption*
what if consumption has something relational about it?
(we must become interested in consumption @apass, Pierre, Foad, constantvzw)
*non-correlationist marketing theory* [=/= correlationism: humans doing things in the world to inanimate objects to make immaterial effects happen ~-> access]

interobjective consumption

...................................

ask anyone to give a definition of ‘food’ --> ‘a source of fuel or energy for the body’ --> most people will give you the engineer's perspective of the world when they are asked =/= the marketers know that everything we buy has a deeper, emotional motivation behind it
innocuous purchase:
•pleasure-seeking
•status seeking
•identity-building benefit
•

ask anyone to give a definition of ‘clothes’ --> ‘textile materials that we use on our skin to provide protection from heat and cold’ =/= marketer will tell you that clothes are portals to different realities

*we don't buy bread --> we buy sustenance for the soul
*we don't buy lightbulbs --> we buy illumination
*we don't buy lipstick --> we buy dreams

****food is not fuel, but fashion****
that means:
•food is a psycho-social comfort blanket
•we use it to compete for status
•we use it to define boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’


obesogenic
obesity


‘superwicked’ problem (in social policy):
-those who are causing the problem are attempting to solve it [for example food marketing's power trying to solve obesity (~= putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank)]
-time is running out

(this is absolute bullshit -->) “we simply need more education to finally understand that X (for example junk food) is bad for us”


(Campbell:) fashion brands (with their 400% growth in the last 20 years) have intensified their campaign to change the perception of clothing: from a functional investment in practical shelter to a vital projection, extension and affirmation of one's very identity

(shift in manufacturing and delivering) *fast fashion* (spearheaded by the Italian design house Benetton, but perfected by fashion brands Zara, H&M and Forever 21) mimics luxury fashion trends at very low costs

increasing efficiencies in production ==> increasing inefficiencies in consumption

*psychological dissonance*: the uneasy feeling that your laptop, car, trainers or coffee machine is no longer ‘right’ [stimulated in two principal ways in marketing:]
-1- physical obsolescence (<== down-grading the quality of product)
-2- psychological obsolescence (<== acceleration of the ‘fashion cycle’: the social phenomenon whereby a design moves through bleeding edge to mainstream to despised mainstream)
-3- ***to make clothing (or any product) a vital prop that is needed to create authentic sense of who we are*** (<== protagonist: Chanel-clad Parisian on the rain-soaked cobbles of a Montmartre morning, the sweat-soaked Nikes of a determined athlete in an empty basketball court in the Bronx, etc. disseminated through Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr. [--> this works together but in reverse in film industry the protagonists wearings and style are used to sell that specific identity who wears them])
}==> *every single person cares about the clothes they wear*
-4- *to re-categorize clothing* (perceptual categories are critical to marketers, for example tourism brands worked hard for decades to change the idea of a holiday abroad from the category of luxury to that of necessity, clothes have moved to the status of a coffee to grab and go) <== equivalencing: degraded quality of the garment allows a decrease in the price [==> powerful psychological effect compounded by the retailscape: shoes in are sold on rails like packets of sweets, T-shirts offered in basins at the check-out, etc.]

***advertising (images) = secular magic***
==inducing==> a powerful desire to indulge in the fantasy of being:
•a solitary and steely-gazed athlete
•a sophisticated and urbane Parisian girl
•

Campbell: “The moment that I say that fashion brands do not affect me is the very moment that they have”

pleasurable daydreaming innate to us all

marketing is often a practice of *breaking taboos* ==guarantees==> brand success

detergent, apparel, car or cosmetics brands ==produce==> the monolithic, repetitive idea of ‘clean flawlessness’ that infiltrates our value systems

clothes = portals to different realities

*enclothed cognition*: the influential way clothes change psychological mood, the way clothes allow us to take up certain social roles more authentically

Alessi: fashion is social (its Latin root ‘factio’: a group of people acting together) =/= Campbell: i use clothes (fashion) as a social grammar to communicate with these others

universal clothing in sci-fi is such a lie, because that would remove one of the primary ways in our culture that we have for expressing ourselves


we need to change the manifestation rather than deny the yearning }--> Campbell proposes: slow fashion, re-categorization of clothing back to investment in long-term, high-quality items

...................................

[title]
nonhuman rationality

(Meillassoux's) speculative realism ==> climate change = a new world (for which we do not have categories)

Meillassoux's concepts { nonhuman + rational --Campbell--> ontologically think about climate change =/= (despondency & passivity) equivocal status of climate change }==> bleak optimism: climate change has already happened + human civilization must learn how to die in a way that is a *creative and just foreclosure of the earth's organizational forms*


organization: an environment-making process
--> drawing of ‘general lines’ in the fabric of the whole ==constitute==> most basic mode of existence
--> making of some sort of cut in the universe to simultaneously create & order an inside from an outside [~ *bracket ‘a’ reality out from an undifferentiated plasmic whole* ~= framing]
==produce==> elements of a reality that can be controlled by human intervention

*how we frame climate change will determine the future of life on earth*
[--Sina--> that is why we need more curatorial skills: variational + organizational]


frame: strategic device, a mode of coping with the hugeness of reality (framing moves:)
1- bounding --> defining, separating, assimilating
2- stabilizing --> fixing, delimiting, controlling
3- bring into view --> empirical, technologies of representation, controlling

frame:
•useful models for viewing reality
•recursive lenses through which that phenomenon is measured and acted upon

climate change and new frames emerge side-by-side:
climate change as:
•externality
•superwicked problem
•anthropocene


**what if climate change is unframeable?** [<-- art is good at dealing with this]
climate change qualities:
•unboundedness: hard to separate what is climate change and what is not
•incalculability: intotalizable effects ==> emergencies and materialities that are beyond known forms of planning and organizing
•unthinkability: it escapes each time we try to capture it empirically, organizationally, psychologically

}--> *questions that have no logical or empirical answer ==> ontological* (they concern its ontology) ~ we do not see its fundamental being

end of empirical/logical = beginning of ontological (secular)
                                           =/=
end of empirical/logical =? beginning of eschatological (nonsecular)


}--Campbell--> **ontologization of climate change**
*climate change = the world we live in =/= a problem within the world*

[*]climate change: the absolute context that determines what is possible + what has replaced a previous world
(i find Meillassoux + Campbell argumentation more convincing than Morton's hyperobject)


climate change as “problem” (that can be framed), “thing”, “within the world” [=/= the world: generative context from where problems emerge ==> forms of organization without precedent] ==problem==>
1. epistemological assumptions (+ expectations + responses)
2. unable to encompass (the qualities of climate change)
3. misrecognition of climate change


speculative realist idea of world

[*]speculative realism: a strategy for thinking, organizing, solving at the *widest rational angle: a form of thinking and acting that is concerned with the fundamental structure of reality in its absolute and unconditioned form (=/= manifestations of phenomena) ==> to deliver metaphysical truths unto the world without deforming them with the forceps انبر جراحى of one's own epistemic apparatus
(as) ontological threat ==Campbell==> escalation and absolutization of ethics (*that is necessary to aithentically occupy it*)
@apass: constant investigation of one's epistemology (=/= ontology) in artistic research
--Sina--> the danger of ontologization...

**massively expansive vista of rationality** =/= disavowing rationality

(the old philosophical idea of) the absolute =/= equivocal status

bleak optimism: organizing without hope <== climate change has already happened
--> how to die : a creative form of foreclosure that unlocks a justice that cannot exist without realizing the ontological dimensions of climate change


frame: general organizing device ==>
•define problems
•diagnose causes
•suggest solutions
(their) argumentative strength ==influence==> organization

frame --> define climate change ==> produce climate change --through--> (the work of:)
•problem-identification
•claim-making
•attribution-laying
•boundary delineation
•counter-framing
•bridgi[...]