One index of human impact is the extinction of species, now estimated to be at about the same rate as it was 65 million years ago when an asteroid hit the Earth. That is the presumed cause for the ending of the age of the dinosaurs, which opened the way for small mammals to proliferate, and ultimately modern humans. Today, it is humans who are the asteroid, condemning much of life to extinction. — In These Times
Probably one of the most prompt and tell it the way it is style of Noam Chomsky, 'where we are going account' of recent history and our as a matter of factly demise depicted. Enjoy your last milleniums.., humans!
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I'm not disputing Chomsky's take on things, but could we not go back in time and find hundreds of writings over the ages saying we are on the brink of collapse?
oh well. it's been a good run. let's make the most of the millennia we have left
on a side note, is that true about rotting grain? i googled it, but didn't see much in the way of an actual problem being reported by real, unbiased people. it sounds like propaganda to build support for the keystone pipeline.
@curt - actual problem, but it may or may not be due to the oil industry.
Donna, of course. Though, this time the context is in scales that has never seen before. We are (humans) living in populations never seen before and reproducing in folds, producing and consuming in giant quantities, wasting more than ever, polluting with chemicals that were not even known before and the list goes on to other ares like mass destructive weapons, global corporate greed, and destruction on dimensions world has not experienced ever before with the exception of sizable asteroid hitting the planet. With the monitoring technologies this is very real and recorded. The impact is very visible as well. We are very destructive creatures.
So far, not so good.
As per curt, everything is being played all the time.
Centralized production creates logistical problems (among others).
Btw, that painting of a photograph in the article is what captivated me the most.
for example, this is the newest recording on polar melt.
I do understand that global climate change is a threat we've never faced before, and it's appalling how it is not being taken seriously by so many. And our population is out of control and damaging to sustainability.
But I also think "the end is near!" is an easy theme.
when I first read the title, I thought it referred to the neo-liberal Fukuyama thesis which spoke of a death of politics and ideology. From article:
"In the post-historical period," Fukuyama continues, "there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed." Doesn't this vision seem exactly right? We appear to be losing a clear sense of both our history and our future, living in a perpetual present in which we have forgotten that things were different in the past and that there are, therefore, alternatives. (A parallel can perhaps be drawn with pop: we are in the post-postmodern age of the retro-authentic mashup. Contemporary songs - by Adele, Lady Gaga, La Roux - are simulacra of those produced in the 60s, 70s and 80s.)
I don't accord with that. He was writing centered within his own blind spot - neo-liberalism has proven to be a politics and an ideology. Its denial of ideology (and by extension of being ideological) is merely a feature and a tool of its ideology. And that quote above is not convincing at all.
However, I was wrong. This is about a literal end. Armageddon. Therefore we are also talking about a culture of the end, a culture of modern eschatology: writings and films focused on the end of the world, how its going to be like, what will you be doing if it were the end of the world... a culture examining its own end. I think secular modern eschatologyies can be categorized mainly into environmental eschatology, astronomical eschatology and nuclear/military eschatology. What others are there?
In the article, the reference on Himalayas is multi functional. The piece for me will be one of the memorable ones which is a great milage for a 1000'er full of images.
Not leaving much for the next generations is something we don't even talk much in the light of all the severe stuff going on.
In the near future there will be no need to exaggerate, hyper image or embellish the dire situations because they will start to forcefully be part of people's daily lives and quite dramatically. If you recall Koyaanisqatsi was safely distanced and entertaining, this will be up close and personal. That much we know.
These are the fast ticking times when the window of opportunity to make things better is getting smaller and smaller. People, individually and in mass, are getting more and more not liking each other to help each other. We are even negotiating with our conscience if we should feel empathetic to children blown up in wars. Innocence of human heart is dissolving into a poisonous murk. We can produce but we can't manage the speed and the physical and mental pollutants we leave behind as species... And the fascination of it all.
Horror films and stories are a great subliminized archaeology of eschatologies that remarkable unite the fear, worries and apprehensions of the individual with those of the society/concurrent culture.
A virus that takes holds of us and renders us into mindless animals, the precarious state of sanity and the eventual collapse of civilization.
A nuclear war that wipes us out, kills most of us instantly and generates cancers in the rest of us.
Environmental disasters of all sorts, nature thrown out of balance (and not just life) creating monstrosities that come for us to eat us up or transform us into mindless zombies.
Space invasion, the fear of the unknown. A planet smashing into us. The precarious state of order, planetary and otherwise.
And of course, God and the Devil or whatever.
Always, our astute awareness of our always precarious state
The very thought that slitting a wrist, such a simple and easy gesture, could finish one off, exterminate her or him. Our awareness makes of us more fragile things, in this case, is it the epistemological that precedes the ontological?
Epistemology is in the hands of middleman and is 'for profit.' Knowledge is highly marketable making it selfish and invasive. Much research is conducted for product development. In my opinion the philosophy will concern itself with survival of itself using any means possible.
I like some of the entertainment too. But it is more like this.
@tammuz: Virtual Eschatology: the disappearance into wish-fulfillment cyberspace, at the expense of any upkeep or attention applied to the outside world ...
But...doesn`t the metabolic, within a finite context, capitulate to its own increasing imbalances? And, from our eschatologically tempered perspective, isn`t destruction, out of the metabolic binarity, really the one most likely to win out?
There would be a contradiction, while entertaining the above point,in envisaging a thereafter, osmotic or electro-magnetic (the latter I have yet to understand; is there an example?). Unless it is the osmosis of the debris of forthcoming catastrophes. Electro-magnetic in the sense of reaching the conclusion of our de-corporalisation, the physical dissipating into information-recording/replicating frequencies, all that is solid melts into sound and light? Kind of Back to Back in the Future?
Back to the Future
Quondam,
I understand that you've described different stages/types of imaginations, a reference being here. I was trying to delve into it and perhaps understand it for myself. I also find it interesting material to think about.
Just a few points:
1- While understanding the above, would not the resultant outcomes of these imaginations not demonstrate the nature of the imagination construing them and really the premise behind this imagination (a chicken and egg kind of order; after all the imagination must be based upon some connection to a concurrent reality and vice versa) ? Furthermore, you speak of osmotic/assimilating/etc imaginations and, separately, osmotic/assimilating/etc architectures. Therefore, in a way of responding to my own question...having started reading Monoe's writing on Stirling in the Theoretical anxiety book, one could say that Moneo is describing what could amount to a prodigiously assimilative imagination that has produced different architectures, at different phases, many of which were not, in themselves as architecture, assimilative.
Therefore, perhaps you end up with a theory of an imagination and another one altogether of the product of the imagination.
2- Seperately, since you propose an electromagnetic imagination as a forthcoming phase - en lieu of an around-the-corner finality- I was wondering whether an electro-magnetic imagination would be based on actuality of tending towards the electromagnetic - ie. our reality, technologies and so on- which implies -as an outcome- a virtual decorporalisation since the denominator here -even by figurative association- is the magnetic field generated, the charge of electrons and so on. Movement dictated by the nature of poles -not things- and relational pull on the basis of differential charge(Lit.)= Associations (Imagination) that transcend embodied presence to fluctuate, in a virtual air, between -perhaps- poles of previous imagination (Fig.), operating within an archive of everything that has ever been, knowledge-wise, maybe?
I can see how to approach osmotic, metabolic and assimilating; their modi operandi are somewhat eponymous, even if by way of figurative language. But electro-magenetic still puzzles me.
3- Also, I guess thirdly, another question: While I understand that you propose these as different types of imaginations that rein over different stages of human history (correct me if I'm wrong), is it not possible to use these as atemporal tools by which to cognize the different natures of past and present historical occurences and movements - in the vein of, for example, describing a baroque moment, be it in a pre- or post- baroque era?
You already hint at it here:
The Pyramids, Stonehenge, St. Peter's (Vatican), Bilbao(?) -- extreme, extreme architectures.
The Pantheon, Hall of Mirrors, Versailles, entry sequence of Schinkel's Altes Museum, Kimball Art Gallery -- examples of the best osmotic architecture there is.
Classical Greek and Roman Architecture -- pure architecture of fertility.
The Hindu Temple -- the ultimate transcendence from an architeture of fertility to an architecture of pregnancy, whereas the Gothic Cathedral is an architecture of pregnancy, albeit virginal.
All of 20th century Berlin -- the metabolic (create and destroy and create and destroy and ...)
To understand architecture of assimilation, look at the Renaissance, but also look to early 20th century Purism to understand assimilation in the extreme, ie, purge.
Today's architectures are by and large assimilating and/or metabolic (contextual and/or 'deconstructivist'?).
You're very lucky if you ever see pure examples of electromagnetic or frequency architectures today because they are almost entirely architectures of the far off future.
There are many more examples to offer, but that's all for now. In general, I see all architectures as reenactionary (as opposed to reactionary).
Architecture reenacts human imagination, and human imagination reenacts the way the human body is and operates. The human body and the design thereof is THE enactment. The human imagination then reenacts corporal morphology and physiology, and architecture then reenacts our reenacting imaginations.
But interestingly, I again find this chasm between the description of an imagination and that of the architecture. Unless I have misunderstood. Do you mean that the design implication/intention/allusion of the Schinkel Altes Museum points to the osmotic (I could interpret that in conceiving of the façade as being rendered a permeable one, for instance) or that the imagination that bore it submitted itself to a process of osmosis from other sources? This comes back to item 1. The difference I'm imagining, would that be valid?
Thanks for your reply Quondam. Yes, I believe they are useful tools; they can describe tendencies within the architectural imagination, national or ethnic imagination, ideological...etc. You once mentioned, if I recall correctly, how Israel was created/ proceeding in a metabolic manner...on the basis of destroying another in order to found itself. So, I was thinking, for instance, to what degree early Christianity -with Saint Helena- was assimilative or metabolic. She, in her designation of sites - for instance the Stations of the Cross, the Via Dolorosa and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher- assimilated previously significant sites - both to incorporate their importance within Christianity, to realize a mytho-religious reincarnation of biblical landscape as well as channel pagans towards Christianity and, therefore, to really destroy and abolish "paganism" and spread, in its place, this new state religion. (By the way, I'm linking this tool you provide with what Bassem Raad states in his Hidden Histories: Palestine And The Eastern Mediterranean)
Therefore, one can say, perhaps, that this displays both, metabolic aspects and assimilative aspects. Destroying physical structures and memory and, yet, assimilating the physical demarcation of spirituality (the virtuality of physical space) and its anterior reserve of spirituality (virtuality of spiritual memory) and reverence albeit under a new name. Therefore, on the level of religion (rather than necessarily, particular history of persecution as we see it today), after an assimilation followed metabolism and this was later, to use another of your words, reenacted successively in this most holy of land.
Jerusalem specifically and Palestine generally is perhaps the world capital of monotheistic religious metabolism and assimilation wherein each of these monotheistic religions are certainly to a large extent assimilative of each other, sharing prophets, histories, some base concepts,etc.
So, in this case, both tools may allow a description of tendencies.
Anyway, I don't mean to drag you more into this, I'm just musing. Again thanks for the reply and I hope all goes well.
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