zero sum

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<div> <video autoplay muted loop id="zoe"> <source src = "videos/zoe2.mp4" type="video/mp4"> </video> <div id="J"> <p> Dear J, When I think of you, I think of chess. I think of binary opposition and I think of ‘zero sum’. The concept of zero sum arose from game theory, describing a game in which no additional wealth is created or destroyed and therefore the winnings of one player must result from the equal and opposite losses of another. In this instance, while chess or poker do pose a familiar example, when talking about ‘games’, what is meant is any situation in which the decisions of one actor can influence the outcomes for another. Popular examples might include financial instruments such as futures or options. The Game of Ur could also be considered zero sum, as well as similar original boardgames like Mancala. It is also important to note that zero sum can occur in economics and game theory terms, as I have noted, but it can also occur as a physchological phenomenon, which is often overstated. There is much that could be said. Namely, how strange it is to render something which feels as unquantifiable as human relation in mathematical structures. To define emotion and intention by decisions and outcomes. How ruthless and spare to imagine that we live in these operas, shift in and out of each other’s acts and make no more a difference than a shadow passing over the doorway on a given afternoon. ‘Zero sum thinking’ is deceptively easy to fall into. The tendency is to equivocate this all or nothing logic with many a phenomenon of experience, particularly to understand an interaction as absolute, necessitating the success of one at the expense of another. My thoughts have been colluding around the issue of power, and the mechanisms of its distributive inequality for some time now. It began with troubling the surface of those regimes of visibility. How there is violence and power in both obfuscation and transparency. Without realising it, these ruminations had followed me to the corrida. Everything I thought about the bullfight was based on a misconception. Before I had seen it, I pictured it as unruly, dangerous and wild. Despite this contradiction I felt drawn to the bullfight with a certain amount of morbid intrigue and moral outrage. I did not want my own reservations to reflect too harshly on the people who culture this annual ritual was embedded in, so I watched from my ramshackle room on the mountain which was soaked in jasmine and her perfume on those heady days in August; the air too sweet and doing nothing to disguise the anticipated tang of hot blood which I would want to say spilled thick around me. The reality was disarming. What is most evident at the corrida, as an outsider and a novice to the experience, is the discrepancy between what one expects of a bullfight and the opera of its actuality. It is not, in fact, a fight at all but theatre. The moves are highly choreographed. The animal’s fate predetermined. When the toreadors command the attention of the crowd, their own role is mostly established as the Hero, sent to slay the magnificent beast which charges the space, at first seeming proud and aggressive. The illusion is as flimsy as the tin walls of its architectural container. All are aware of how the act will progress. All are aware that the bull’s motions are already stinted by strategic, almost clinical wounds deployed to incapacitate it. The tradition of performing the bullfight in an arena with a sandy base lingers from the Roman era. The sand used in this traditional site of sport and spectacle was special, finer than regular sand, referred to as ‘harena’ which is where we have pulled the word ‘arena’ from. Morbidly, this kind of particular sand was useful because its increased surface area made it more absorbent, to better soak up the blood. The toreador struts across the space, 'dancing' with the bull, enticing it to charge the capeo (the red cape) and commanding its attention, and ours. All this misdirection amounts to a series of calculated moves based entirely on the construction of bovine vision and its limitations. The traditional misconception on the part of the observer is that the colour red angers the bull and incites it to charge. Bulls cannot in fact, perceive this colour as distinct from other warm colours such as orange, yellow, or pink. Nor has there been any evidence for the idea that it is somehow more emotive to the animal than any other colour. Rather than the aesthetic quality of the capeo, it is the movement with which the matador manipulates it that incites the bull to charge. This too is carefully planned. <a target="popup" onclick="window.open('https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0042698900001139-gr2.jpg','','width=300,height=300')">Bovine vision</a> is constructed such that two areas exist at the central poles of the animal's body where it is unable to see, both directly before and behind it. The matador tries, when dancing with the bull, to position himself at one of these points. This allows him to hide in the <a target="popup" onclick="window.open('https://animalhandling101.fandom.com/wiki/Cattle_field_of_vision_and_flight_zones?file=Screen_Shot_2014-10-06_at_7.39.15_pm.png','','width=300,height=300')">area of immunity,</a> while the cape flickers in and out of the bull's eyeline. As such, in these moments the bull is attending to, not the person nor the redness of the capeo, but its frenetic motion as it swings enticingly side to side. It is the confusion of this motion that moves the bull. A. L. Kennedy explains as much, far more eloquently in their book 'On Bullfighting'. I have included an extract for you [[in reference.]] When the fight ends, the illusion is well and truly quenched. After the sword, the bull slumps quite suddenly, its weight suddenly unhindered. Everyone waits a moment - out of respect perhaps, or to let the life leave its body before clipping the ear, clipping the bull to the horses, clipped short of the thing that once qualified it as living and dragging it out, before bringing in the next one as surely as night follows day. In truth, I was not repulsed as Hemingway warned I might be. In truth, I was nothing other than what I had been before. Perhaps this is worse. To be unchanged by such a thing, the immanence of death to life, all its language, its ritual, its magnetism converging at the centre of the space, unfailingly full, unbelievably flimsy - all temporary iron, aluminium, tin flats, sand swept squatting in the car park for ten days in August. Having long been attending to the technologies of visibility and perception, you can, I'm sure, imagine that this facet of information which draws out the difference between the spectacle and its software captured my attention as if it were my own kind of capeo. But the bullfight then <a target="popup" onclick="window.open('https://www.math.u-bordeaux.fr/~abachelo/Schedel.jpg','','width=400,height=400')">moved me beyond this surface,</a> to consider the behavioural and cultural structures of the space. The phenomenon of competition, and its prevalence as an organising principle under market capitalism. The logic of competition moves through our collective imaginary, diaphanous and persuasive. It attends to the preservation of the individual, and necessitates at least some measure of zero sum thinking. The bullfight is almost always zero-sum. I am writing this horror for you by way of explanation. Perhaps some of this may resonate with you, perhaps you might be able to see something of ourselves in it. The bullfight seems to embody in a cultural artefact, a complex set of processes which coalesce to form logical assumptions I would use to understand certain fallacies about the worlds, and how we move within and between them. It is that thing which retreats from me as I move closer to it. I will not try to pin it down any further, but will offer it to you in note form, and perhaps you will write me back. The story of the bullfight is Heroic, in a Homeric sense. If we are to follow Ursula, then this is an ill of narrative convention which overstates the heroic individual, who sets out in the world to conquer, to kill, to achieve glory. It's spectre has been stalking for some time now: from the first tauroctony of Gilgamesh, <a target="popup" onclick="window.open('https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/london-mithraeum-03.jpg','','width=400,height=400')">to the cult of Mithra,</a> the Minotaur, the bull fight, <a target="popup" onclick="window.open('https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charging_Bull','','width=400,height=400')">the stock market...</a> The dominance of the Hero in the killing story is often achieved by triumph over other actors, after a struggle for power. This is competition. The Hero story positions competition as the natural state of the world order, and excuses its violences by this naturalisation. Consequently, co-operation is often positioned as antithetical to competition. This often seems to slip readily into zero sum thinking - whereby you can have one or the other: compete or cooperate, but not both. On the reverse, zero sum thinking is built on the perceived necessity of competition due in part to scarce resources and eclipses social relationships with this antagonism. What troubles me is that our economic and social realities seem to be superseded by this logic of competition. Competition, in economic terms, can be said to be hegemonic: the mode of relation that establishes market capitalism as 'common sense' - the only way. But is it positioned as such because the basic assumptions of economic theory on which the market is based are that people are primarily selfish, that they will act rationally and in their own interest? The internal logic of capitalism, since it is based on continual 'growth' and 'freedom of choice', then posits competition as the lifeblood of economic prosperity, as the engine for innovation and wealth creation. This is not to say that competition itself is an evil, nor zero sum thinking when it is warranted, rather, I am trying to express that when these notions coalesce, they seem to make us <a target="popup" onclick="window.open('https://ncase.me/trust/','','width=600,height=600')">trustless,</a> cold to one another. To a certain extent, all that these fragments have in common is a reaction to <a target="popup" onclick="window.open('http://www.schemasofuncertainty.com','','width=500,height=600')">uncertainty.</a> Behaviours produced in reaction to the unkown, hinged additionally against that notion of survival, the preservation of the individual life. The market is fundamentally uncertain, and fuelled by speculation and competition between financial actors of their predictive prowess in reaction to it. So much of the technology work being done now to think through alternative arrangements of economic being are built around the mitigation of trust. A necessity, you can see, when one is inclined to cooperate, while someone else honours the Hero story. As I understand it, this poses a significant barrier to the sustainability of a commons. I have no answers to all this. I can barely even make sense of it. All my conjecture amounts to a bag of fragments. Again I return to Ursula, since she expressed it so well: //'One relationship among elements in the novel may well be that of conflict, but the reduction of narrative to conflict is absurd. (I have read a how-to-write manual that said, “A story should be seen as a battle,” and went on about strategies, attacks, victory, etc.) Conflict, competition, stress, struggle, etc., within the narrative conceived as carrier bag/belly/box/house/medicine bundle, may be seen as necessary elements of a whole which itself cannot be characterized either as conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process... this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story. In it, as in all fiction, there is room enough to keep even Man where he belongs, in his place in the scheme of things; there is time enough to gather plenty of wild oats and sow them too, and sing to little Oom, and listen to Ool’s joke, and watch newts, and still the story isn’t over. Still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars.'// My words are clumsy and I have nowhere to put all this yet, so I am putting it in this email for you. Best always. </p> </div> </div>

<div> <video autoplay muted loop id="pot"> <source src = "videos/pot.mp4" type="video/mp4"> </video> </div> <div id="M"><p> Dear M, I have always been awake to the quiet disturbances of order and their intimacies as they appear to us in stories, in superstition, conspiracy, belief, and religion. I was written in religion. Even myself and my sisters’ names testify to the strength of our familial belief, my own taken from the Hebrew bible — wife of Isaac and mother of Jacob. My family are Catholic and closed off to the inconsistencies of this as we all often are when the belief we hold is sure and is handed down to us by global institutions that have weathered, violently, long and fraught histories.<a target="popup" onclick="window.open('https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwtdhWltSIg','','width=500,height=400')">I do not think of it often,</a> I try not to, even though it is a world which holds little gravity for me now. It is hard to leave the conditions of quiet contemplation about the machinations of the universe behind when it has drawn the bounds of your childhood. I still retain this habit of looking for god in all things though, for pattern languages in complexity, for the narrative in that which would otherwise be too painful to bear. We know the shape of this longing well. We have always been this way. Perhaps it is because of my trepidation, the thing I carry around with me always that makes me fearful, timid, that I approach the world this way. Telling myself stories to make sense of the bad. We really do need stories in order to live. I was caught in the glut of this particular trapping of the human condition that summer in Spain. Although I don’t have to tell you that… you saw me, sticky with it - a fly caught in the honey trap - and you read it in my obsession with fragments, with seeking sense, with tarot. The night I was leaving, you helped me find a place to abandon the grocery bag of two months worth of ceramic fragments I’d collected throughout my stay. It doesn’t matter where they came from, or how they came by me. You could see that I was lost with them, wavering in sodium light with something like uncertainty. We were too tired to make the trip up the mountain and left them in Casa Jazmin for the next resident to find and discard, or keep. Anxious collecting is a habit I am yet to shake. Presently, as I write you this, I have 137 tabs open on my browser. My computer is lagging, that fly again, with the weight of them. I know that I will never return to many of them and yet I can’t seem to bring myself to close them. I know that I will never return to that mountain in the south of Spain, and yet I can’t seem to bring myself to leave it behind. So the tradition goes that we hunted witches, and bulls, and boar, and gods in order to chase them away from our fires at night, where we sat to keep warm and contemplate our miraculous existence. I’m so tired of all these odysseys. That <a target="popup" onclick="window.open('https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ursula-k-le-guin-the-carrier-bag-theory-of-fiction','','width=400,height=800')">‘killing story’</a> of Ursula’s that we spoke about. The Hero Story and how it keeps company with all those other schisms — a fundamentally divisive, cutting, regime. I suppose that the point is: if fragmentation is inevitable, then what matters is not preserving the whole, but how we can live in the wake of its particulates. I am beginning to think this is a conspiracy of my own making, that I have been sharing a bed with for the last two years now. But when I think back on it and stutter on fragments and their prevalence at that time (and even more so now) it is hard to ignore, ironically, the continuities I find. We shared Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red — Do you remember? I was obsessed with red even before then. At the root of the world, Carson slipped her fingers under the lip of Stesichoros’ tomb, unlatched his resting place and shook loose all those questions I had about sense and power and knowledge in the form of fragments. I am remembering it now, and it is looking back at me from across a great distance in time: To where it finds me, a different person than I was when I knew you and yet still bound with these lost things found. The fragments. They come back to me as such: //‘What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning “placed on top”, “added”, “appended”, “imported”, “foreign”. Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.’// I know you will appreciate the relation this bears to the hypertext protocol. (I hope that you still remember me well enough to know where my mind went with that). I will elaborate a little just in case. The hypertext protocol establishes the mode of relation on which the web as we know it, or have known it, is based. They are ‘those imported mechanisms’ responsible for ‘attaching everything in the world [or a world, the web, or a web in this case] to its place in particularity…’. As such, if something so simple can be said to be so powerful, the hyperlink sets the architectural basis for information and its arrangement (can we call this knowledge?) in the world wide web. The composition of these arrangements of fragments and the order in which we encounter them additively composes our perspectives too. Like the fragments, perspectives are not static objects, but respond as they accumulate in and through our bodies. They are distributed, dusty, across space and time—dispersing wildly along the synapses, the snap of light. Since this encounter, many other things have been benchmarked against the perspective fallacy, were gently pinned to my <a target="popup" onclick="window.open('https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/596f80ed52713302bfba078113594ca419e520a4/0_0_1024_614/master/1024.jpg?width=620&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=3f6cc96be73e6c1a98074cb46a0df57f','','width=400,height=400')">web of thought.</a> The order of things as I have perceived them. On the subject of power as a system of relations, Elizabeth Povinelli suggests that Foucault’s three formations of power [the biopolitical, the sovereign, and the disciplinary] are ‘always co-present, although how they are arranged and expressed relative to each other vary across social time and space’. I bring this to your attention in order to highlight the idea that power is not 'stable or static', not <a target="popup" onclick="window.open('https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_monolith','','width=500,height=500')">monolithic</a> but dispersed and ubiquitous. Like power relations, and like the hypertext protocol, adjectives too are prone to rearrangement. Their specificity of meaning does not translate so well (literally). We spoke on this too — you feeding me snippets from your mother tongue and both of us trying to meet somewhere equidistant in Spanish. [[Carson continues...]] I hope you think about that bag still too. A flimsy plastic filled with sharp things from the field, crusted in dirt and lost to their origins and histories. We don’t need them anymore, so they tell us. With twin heads, fragmentation deconstructs itself both in the detritus of ‘postmodernity’ and of capital. On the underbelly of this assertion, perhaps the abandonment of these roots is not so freeing as often suggested. I find sense in writing these connections for you - between fragments, writing, economy and organisations of knowledge - after all 'Bureaucracy begot writing' <a target="popup" onclick="window.open('https://www.are.na/block/4909876','','width=400,height=600')">Shannon Mattern</a> attests. I liked that Stesichoros didn’t write about Herakles the Hero, but about his monster, Geryon. Geryon was bound to be a monster in the same way that the bull is bound to death in the arena. There was such a tenderness to the way Stesichoros eulogised Geryon, a sympathy for the hand he was dealt. To borrow from <a target="popup" onclick="window.open('https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/10/ocean-vuongs-life-sentences','','width=400,height=600')">Ocean Vuong,</a> the etymology of the word monster really means to be 'an animal of myriad origins' and this continues to resonate with me, with the hypertextual form - which I would like to rephrase here as a <a target="popup" onclick="window.open('https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patchwork_Girl_(hypertext)','','width=400,height=400')">monstrous</a> exquisite corpse, a tissue text. This talk of fragments and adjectives and pots and pools and stories and architectures concerns the container, its attendances outlined by Ursula, the nourishment afforded by a thing that can hold other things. I see this in relation to knowledge practices and their organisation in digital space, how we can use them to withdraw care from the figure of the Hero. I still believe that hypertext protocols recalibrated to a decentralised, digital commons present a useful strategy if they can be underpinned by values which also evidence an antagonism to the supposed inevitability of the Hero. That is, which refute the claim that one will always act in self interest, that choice is always free, that one will always be rational, and that competition is zero sum. Let's shake this bag of fragments a little more. Curiously, the only part of those two heat-sick months in Spain where I have no memory of you at all, though I know you were still there, is during the fiesta de San Roque - during the bullfights. In my minds’ eye I watch them alone from the tear-down window of Casa Jazmin. Where did you go then? Why do you cease to exist in my memory during that episode? Even afterwards, when I stumbled into the first of many despondent depressive episodes and shut myself away unwashed in my apartment for ten days, you cracked the chassis of my grief, knocked on my door and intruded into the space I had constructed just to check I was still there at all. I wonder if you would ask me in return where I went at that time? Or if some version of me still persisted in the periphery of your thought? Did I stop existing for you then too? Best always. </p> </div>

<div> <video autoplay muted loop id="redin"> <source src = "videos/redin.mp4" type="video/mp4"> </video> </div> <div id="D"> <p> Dear M, Increasingly I find them tearing along the glittering strip of the day, disrupted by these stress fractures- some slipping away behind an armoire where I go to pull out my coats, and wear them heavy into the sun. I wish I could account for it by the ambience of being in connection with everything, that at some point becomes loss in the trips and undertow of noise taken out of context Stories are containers, like hypertext is the fragmented pot put back together again, permeable, distributed, an architecture of the bleeding commons. Against the notion of the individual Against knowledges as monoliths, as divided totalities cut by the cloth of Western epistemes Against rationality defined by these totalities, accepting only that which falls within their frame Against the selfishness of the Hero Against competition as the only path Against the desert as a dead space and dropped about my ears, rhythmically generating the landscape, the texture of a world. Flies, droning, waiting to inherit the earth. Drowned out by the sound of the dam, and pressed into hydrocarbon deposits by the weight of a fraught history and the many wretched gods. They sway so close, loom so large. These arid things - history, religion, agriculture, are tidal here, lunar, where smaller celestial bodies cannot help but sway into their space and follow their strange, irregular rhythms. Water is scarce. Much of its supply from the river siphoned up to keep the monocultures of citrus fruits alive, or slopped up into <a target="popup" onclick="window.open('http://archive.pov.org/thirst/holy-water/','','width=600,height=600')">pools</a> where the lemons fall and rot. Drink. Such yellow overabundance controverts a reality of low river, no rain for weeks where the dust sticks to the inside of your cheeks, cleaves to the moisture inside of you, and valves are wiched, pumped, cauterised, diverging a single water supply throughout a whole town - like the ventricles and blood flow of one great bull sleeping under the mountain. Zero sum everything. That's the way life is lived down in the belly of Spain. This was supposed to explain something. Best always. </p> </div>

<img src="images/testsitebg.png" id="tsbg"/> <div id="S"> <p> Dear S, Since we last spoke, I have been thinking a lot about your comments on history and continuity. I appreciate the things you said about trying to establish connections without assuming absolute meaning, or supposing to map ideas in the way that I myself understood to be totalising. It has very much influenced the way I understand 'history' and all those other partitions of the Western formulation of 'knowledge'. Since then, I have been trying hard to question the supposed neutrality of these perspectives, of course, Donna Haraway enlightened this for me greatly as you suggested. I have also been attempting to understand how this mapping happens in digital spaces, how these are also not neutral but imposed upon by the same hierarchies of knowledge and value and power and violence as those other things. However, I have also been trying to consider how it might still be possible to utilise these tools, and I do still believe there are viable routes. It seems most important that the connections made are useful so long as they do not overconnect. This seems easier in any case when mapping is localised, decentralised, but still held in context with other mapping projects further afield. There, contradictions can disrupt, overlap, or reshape their topologies. In response, I would like to offer some reflections on what I believe to be a fairly cogent parable for our conversation. Please find it below. <a target="popup" onclick="window.open('https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevada_Test_Site','','width=800,height=800')">The Nevada Test Site</a> occurs on the desert in Nye County, sixty five miles North West of Las Vegas, as some sprawling notebook of geological error: Craters excavated in the dust and the dust and the dust, <a target="popup" onclick="window.open('https://www.artnews.com/gallery/art-in-america/aia-photos/emmet-gowin-pace-nuclear-photographs-1202677084/130157_gowin_v01/','','width=400,height=400')">rupturing the land.</a> Writing you, I see the test site’s guttered corridors bathed in evening light, lonely shuttles forking their way through indeterminable cities of dust, trundling back and forth between the site and any elsewhere, any other place. The heft and hush of sand, arid mud-rock split by weeds making their way in hard ground, blown to yet more dust, by the inexorable eruptions. It looms in my mind as a relic of itself - this ‘dusty motion between past and future’ already ending itself, iteratively, by virtue of its own ouroboros, its auto-cannibalistic objective. The promise of destruction lies heavy on the tongue: ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds’, said Oppenheimer. Well… At the height of its activity, the site flushed surrounding towns with nuclear particulates, fallout from the toxic proceedings settling over neighbourhoods forgotten by the imaginary of the State while its attention was otherwise enraptured by the great, mushrooming plumes, pushed eastward by the winds of the Cold War. In keeping with this consumption, the clouds eventually became tourist attractions for some of the downtown hotels in Las Vegas, while the site itself has become a visitable attraction. During his year long respite from Harvard University, Fred Moten occupied a janitorial position at the site, which he described as <a target="popup" onclick="window.open('https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2018/01/fred-moten-black-and-blur','','width=600,height=600')">‘...the last resort for a lot of people…’.</a> He read voraciously in between working and in particular has mentioned <a target="popup" onclick="window.open('https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land','','width=600,height=600')">T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land</a> as constituting a formative experience in the development of his perspective on writing. Moten has said he regarded The Waste Land as possessing of a certain ‘critical and philosophical sensibility’ a kind of ‘scholarly apparatus’ which seems to transpose and reflect a love of reading, and ‘to be involved in reading’ that Moten and Eliot alike may foster. For Moten, ‘writing is a part of what it is to be involved in reading’. It seems that for many, including you and I, The Waste Land represents a literary emancipation, an ‘unlatching’ of the interconnected and generative possibilities of text. These discursive practices are geologic, epochal, tectonic. At this point I felt the need to include a brief interjection with a timely quote from Brian Dillon's 'Essayism', in which he refers to his own experience of The Waste Land: //‘…except that disaster has multiplied, the state of emergency become the norm. But unlike me you have properly heard ‘shored’ not as the erection of a barricade but as a shoring up, propping up, support: as if your first impulse is to learn to live with fragments, with ruins, with the aggregate, particulate, dusty motion between past and future.’// There is a hapticity, an intimacy to these acts of reading and writing and their co-production of each other which is keenly felt in Eliot’s poetry. Not afraid to trespass the conventions and infrastructures of poetic formalism, it has to do more with representing the mechanics of relation and how these mechanics may excavate, preserve, or disrupt landscapes of power through their practice. And through their practice, collude around the latent assumptions of knowledge which emerge from and co-create complex and lively interactions beyond and between these computations we call Life. (The assumptions I refer to in particular here are epistemic norms I am still trying to come to terms with and understand myself. I apologise if these thoughts are confused or underdeveloped. I will try to write you more on this soon.) But the first of these assumptions that I became aware of is the pervasiveness of linear perspective, and the role it has played in the formation of Western modernity. I remember encountering this first through an article by <a target="popup" onclick="window.open('https://www.e-flux.com/journal/24/67860/in-free-fall-a-thought-experiment-on-vertical-perspective/','','width=400,height=600')">Hito Steyerl</a> a few years ago. She outlined the art historical convention of mathematically mapping space and perspective, which gave rise to the tradition of utilising linear perspective in artworks, which places the viewer outside, beyond the limits of the world they are observing. This tradition developed in the Quattrocento, she wrote, around the same time as the first European colonisers were due to invade America. Her argument establishes that these concurrent events, along with other developments in Western science and culture at the time premised an equally calculative and objective approach to the world, embodied in the figure of the coloniser; the explorer, the pioneer. This figure sees the world as entirely knowable, calculable, conquerable. He would attempt to map its entirety in order to assert some kind of dominance over it. In many respects, he is a re-rendering of the Hero. In collusion with this, knowledge is seen as a monolith - objective, fixed, stable, and valued by its use. Understanding knowledge as such identifies a second issue relating to the way in which divisions within this monolith define 'disciplines', binaries, oppositions, absolute cuts between one thing and another. I have found this particularly troubling in my experience of economic study, where models often seem to extract and isolate economic phenomena rather than taking a more integrated approach to behaviour and the constituents that contribute to it. Not only this, but these models and assumptions are so often based invariably on the basis of liberal ideology, where economic actors are free, rational individuals who will act in self-interest. That our global economy, that the economic life of almost all people living in society today is based on this particular assumption - which is so particular to white, Western forms of being and society - seems both incredibly myopic and lacking in nuance. This ideology also pulls us further into the rhetoric of competition, the logic of which requires the precedent set out by the rational, free individual acting in self interest in order to command any economic credence. Of course, the basis of this rhetoric is already flawed, because liberal ideology is flawed, by dint of assuming that everyone is free to choose, to act rationally, and to act in self interest on an equal basis. The model figure of the Hero has cut the shape of this ideal and supposedly universal economic actor and fallen to the cutting room floor are all those others who do not or cannot satisfy that criteria. Competition, informed by this badly laid foundation, is then prescribed as the lifeblood of the market economy. (Again, this negates that the market itself is arguably based on the skewed logic of capital growth - false difference, extraction, post-Fordist fragmentation, inequality posing as freedom). At this moment, competition is posited as an absolute driving force. But we know this to be overamplified too. What would competition be without co-operation, without collaboration? What would economy be with out all those little unvalued transactions, those small gifts (and the big ones too) that we afford one another. We certainly wouldn't have made it this far. If we were to unwrite the myth of the individual, because no one can exist in a vaccum, how would the shape of this system mutate? What would be its principle of organisation? Extending this logic of binaries further, and returning to the test site, the wasteland, the desert; under the shadow of this knowledge-monolith, life and death too are seen as absolute states, the former as the pinnacle of existence, the latter regarded with trepidation or fear. Again, the myth of the individual casts a a cold shade. For life and death, under this rubric, are most clearly conceived of in individual terms of survival, or im/mortality: great themes of the Hero story. But as Elizabeth Povinelli summarises, many indigenous people regard these ways of being not as states but as processes. Not as fixed, but as fluid. The desert too, is expressed to be not a barren waste land, but '...is where a series of entities have [[withdrawn care for the kinds of entities humans are]] and thus has made humans into another form of existence: bone, mummy, ash, soil.' The land that the Nevada Test site was built on was, of course, stolen by the US Military from the Indigenous group who lived there prior: <a target="popup" onclick="window.open('https://www.temoaktribe.com','','width=600,height=600')">the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone.</a> I am still struck by Fred Moten's articulation that 'writing is a part of what it is to be involved in reading', and further, his later expression in which he defines writing as 'a continual disruption of the means of semantic production.' Such a perspective seems to align with another of his and Stefano Harney's ideas expressed in the Undercommons (to do with the 'preservation of upheaval'). It highlights writing and reading as decisions of attention, and even value, which represent and re/produce the cultural and social conditions through which certain identities, ideologies, and conditions for collective organisation are given precedent. In the broadest sense, they posess a political dimension. Following Derrida, ‘it is the moment at which we must decide whether we will engrave what we hear. And whether that engraving preserves or betrays speech.’ This disruptive force of the modes and possibilities of articulating meaning aligns somewhat with a Gramscian understanding of politics as a ‘war of position’. Perhaps it also speaks to the nature of the hypertext form. Octavia Butler considered authorial practice as a kind of <a target="popup" onclick="window.open('http://web.mit.edu/m-i-t/science_fiction/transcripts/butler_delany_index.html','','width=500,height=500')">‘primitive hypertext’.</a> Understanding the process of writing as such positions the technological hypertextual form as a mode of knowledge representation which codifies cognitive aggregation, making the distribution of this cognitive process explicit. Primitive hypertext delivers an interpretation of writing practice that undermines the presumption of the singular perspective, or any stable ground from which to base this, predicated instead on the emergence of writing from the articulatory promise, the moment of difference and expression, wrapped around the interpretive act. The hyper textual form of traditional web architecture depends on the shifting and contingent interdependence of associative links, which can be continually rethought and revised. For those early pioneers of the hypertext information model, such as Ted Nelson working on Xanadu, inspiration was derived from <a target="popup" onclick="window.open('https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/','','width=500,height=700')">Vannevar Bush</a> proclaiming with his conception of the differential analyser that ‘wholly new forms of encyclopaedias will appear, readymade with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.’ The structure of this architecture interprets and codifies the non-linear, but totalising tendency of the human cognition to map and concretise information, to seek patterns and ways of making sense of incomprehensible complexity. Another intention hoped to flush the cheeks of those science fiction writers who dreamed of a global memory, a hive mind of information that could be accessed by anyone, from anywhere - the destination of 'man’s' great cognitive feats - one small stutter into the digital ether for man, one giant, malleable informational library for mankind… As this network topology has flourished, it has greatly surpassed the myopia of mapping or extending this cognition, but the hypertext principle still informs much of the <a target="popup" onclick="window.open('http://www--arc.com','','width=400,height=600')">architectural basis</a> of mobility and connection when navigating the web. Unfortunately, it has also become increasingly enclosed by the market and surveillance states, slowly centralising it's architecture and processing it's vast quantities of data. It is through the non-directional spatial transposition of these links, which are created, reorganised, destroyed as a largely disorganised common project, that meaning can be divined. While the shifting and contingency of these ‘associative trails’ undermines the pre-eminence or stability of any meaning found. Back to my original point: Perhaps hypertext performs a technological rendition of Moten’s understanding of writing as a ‘constant disruption of the means of semantic production.’ A kind of jazz, or live composition. Meaning through hypertext is constituted as well as navigated by way of these associations, by virtue of bodies of text aggregated from other texts. With this, our localised maps of thought, our digital commons, might offer a modest and still imperfect route away from the knowledge <a target="popup" onclick="window.open('https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oU4Rk0NATNs','','width=500,height=300')">monolith.</a> This web was a <a target="popup" onclick="window.open('https://textz.com','','width=400,height=600')">library</a> before anything else. Best Always. </p></div>

<div id="lib"> Stories and Stories and Stories - A collection of books on bullfights, fragments, and relations. Autobiography of Red - Anne Carson The Book of Sand - Jorge Luis Borges On Bullfighting - A. L. Kennedy Essayism - Brian Dillon Braided Sweetgrass - Robin Wall Kimmerer The Rings of Saturn - W. G. Sebald Like a Woman - Quinn Latimer The Epic of Gilgamesh The White Album - Joan Didion One Minus One - Colm Toibin Musings on Politics, Society and Economics - Essays and Books <a href="https://langurbansociology.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/gibson-graham-the-end-of-capitalism.pdf">The End of Capitalism</a> <a href="https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/31476/627770.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y">Alternative Economies and Spaces</a> <a href="https://www.hse.ru/data/2016/03/15/1127638366/Henry%20Jenkins%20Convergence%20culture%20where%20old%20and%20new%20media%20collide%20%202006.pdf">Henry Jenkins: Convergence Culture</a> <a href="https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/227575524.pdf">The Organisation of Balance and Equilibrium in Gramsci’s Hegemony</a> <a href="https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/digital-commons-our-shared-right-to-knowledge-and-culture/">Digital Commons: Our Shared Right to Knowledge and Culture</a> <a href="https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/21602/1/tzk93-malik-FINAL.pdf">Suhail Malik The Value of Everything</a> <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/engine-not-camera">An Engine Not A Camera</a> Contingency, Hegemony, Universality — Butler, Zizek and Laclau Economies of Abandonment — Elizabeth Povinelli <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-0-8223-6233-3_601.pdf">Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism - Elizabeth Povinelli</a> The Great Transformation — Karl Polanyi The Undercommons — Fred Moten and Stefano Harney <a href="http://bnarchives.yorku.ca">Capital As Power — Nitzan and Bichler</a> <a href="https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/shiftingstates/paper/40053">The conspiracy theory meme as a tool of cultural hegemony - Ed Rankin</a> <a href="https://shifter-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/jameson-cognitive-mapping.pdf">Cognitive Mapping - Frederic Jameson</a> <a href="https://parsejournal.com/journal/">Parse Journal</a> Recursive Libraries <a href="https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1IqCAg0tdgS2bcWaA6nvCoJJaPCoJwwnJ">My little Queer Library</a> <a href="https://theanarchistlibrary.org/special/index">The Anarchist Library</a> <a href="https://textz.com">textz.com</a> <a href="https://tinytools.directory">Everest Pipkin's Tiny Tools Roundup</a> <a href="https://library.trust.support">Cybernetics Library</a> <a href="http://criticaltheoryindex.org">Critical Theory Index</a> <a href="https://aparrish.neocities.org">Allison Parrish's Neocities Syllabi</a> </div>

<div> <video autoplay muted loop id="cape"> <source src = "videos/cape4.mp4" type="video/mp4"> </video> <div id="kennedy"> <p> From A. L. Kennedy's 'On Bullfighting': 'In my First Year Physics class we had to dissect bull's (or more probably cow's) eyes in an effort to understand lenses... The eyes were, of course, beautiful. Once the choroid and sclerotic coats had been cut through and the translucent, vitreous and aqueous humours removed, the back of the retina was revealed: iridescent and magical. The knowledge that I was seeing something which was made for seeing, and which was itself secretly lovely, hypnotised me... But the lesson of the bull's eye was misleading...although the points of difference are of little interest to the general public, they are of central importance to the corrida and the matador on the toro's third bad day - the one that ends with the ring and the bull's virtually assured destruction. First, if you ever get the chance, examine a cow's eye. It will be just as honey brown and benevolent as you'd expect, but look closer and you'll see that it's pupil forms a long, thin, horizontal slit. The grain of the eye, the small drifts and flecks of colour, seem to disappear into this dark line, almost as if it were an opened flaw in a thick liquid. And, of course, the bovine eyes, in situ, are placed at the side of the head. Both these facts mean that, although a cow or a bull will turn its head inquisitively to face a movement, it doesn't actually see that movement in anything like the way we do. As far as research and observation can tell, any bovine, including the toro de lidia, will perceive anything more than roughly ten feet away rather poorly. The left and right fields of vision do not integrate, and so don't produce the kind of stereoscopic vision that humans or primates have. This leads many theorists to agree that toros have a large blind area or 'anticone of [matador] immunity', directly to the front of their heads. Research seems to show that animals without binocular vision are less stimulated by movements which run towards their temples. This makes a lot of sense. A toro, for example, pushing its head forwards, eyes largely passive, will see most of the world head towards it as a unified movement towards the back of its head - the things which stand out - like the flick of a cape - are the things which move out of this mass drift. This may actually begin to explain why toros charge at threats - running forwards tones down the visual input from the background and heightens their perception of the errant target. It would also explain why a man standing still, unless he's directly in the bull's path, can be safe - he'll simply fit in with the general, less stimulating, drift of the landscape. And if you consider that movements going towards the nose of the bull - against the usual flow - are something immensely stimulating, it suddenly makes sense that the pase natural, a cape pass which moves the cloth across the toro's leading eye in a noseward direction, is regarded as the pass upon which all toreo is founded and is the pass which always lures the bull forward for the final sword thrust... The matador's experiential knowledge of how to play the toro, the aficionado's rules and regulations for who should stand where to get what result, are all based on simple anatomy. Or to put it another way, the acres of poetic theorising and the yards of geometrical and technical theorising by observers of the corrida all come down to the simplicity of two different species responding to each other as best they can, the simplicity of a man trying to keep himself alive by thinking and feeling beyond the speed of his own and the bull's reflexes. The bull is also, of course, colour blind. So the red rag to the bull doesn't have to be red - although the magenta, yellow and red used in the toreros' capes all have long wavelengths are are easy for the bull to see. Naturally the presumed 'blind spot' or 'cone of immunity' or 'anticone of immunity' to the front of the toro's head is also utilised by the matador - it certainly helps to make sense of the bull's inability to tell the cape from the man and its desire to pursue the movements of the cloth... Equally, certain manoeuvres performed in front of the bull (without touching it) may not be as risky as they look, because the bull may be only very vaguely aware of them, while standing side-on to the bull, directly in one of its fields of vision, may look cowardly, but be decidedly dangerous.' </p> </div> </div>

<img src="images/mist.png" id="mist"/> <div id="carson"> <p> ‘Of course there are several different ways to be, in the world of the Homeric epic, for example, being is stable and particularity is set fast in tradition. When Homer mentions blood, blood is black. When women appear, women are neat-ankled or glancing. Poseidon always has the blue eyebrows of Poseidon. Gods’ laughter is unquenchable. Human knees are quick. The sea is unwearying. Death is bad. Cowards’ livers are white. Homer’s epithets are a fixed diction with which Homer fastens every substance in the world to its aptest attribute and holds them in place for epic consumption. There is a passion in it but what kind of passion? “consumption is not a passion for substances but a passion for the code”, says Baudrillard. So into the still surface of this code Stesichoros was born. And Stesichoros was studying the surface restlessly. It leaned away from him. He went closer. It stopped. “Passion for substances” seems a good description of that moment. For no reason that anyone can name, Stesichoros began to undo the latches. Stesichoros released being. All the substances in the world went floating up. Suddenly there was nothing to interfere with horses being hollow hooved. Or a river being root silver. Or a child bruiseless. Or hell as deep as the sun is high. Or Herakles ordeal strong. Or a planet being middle night stuck. Or an insomniac outside the joy. Or killings cream black. Some substances proved more complex. To Helen of Troy, for example, was attached an adjectival tradition of whoredom already old by the time Homer used it. When Stesichoros unlatched her epithet from Helen there flowed out such a light as may have blinded him for a moment… A more tractable example is Geryon. Geryon is the name of a character in ancient Greek myth about whom Stesichoros wrote a very long lyric poem in dactylo-epitrite meter and triadic structure. Some eighty-four papyrus fragments and a half-dozen citations survive which go by the name Geryoneis (“The Geryon Matter”) in standard editions. They tell of a strange winged red monster who lived on an island called Erytheia (which is an adjective meaning simply “The Red Place”) quietly tending a herd of magical red cattle, until one day the hero Herakles came across the sea and killed him to get the cattle. There were many different ways to tell a story like this. Herakles was an important Greek hero and the elimination of Geryon constituted one of His celebrated Labors. If Stesichoros had been a more conventional poet he might have taken the point of view of Herakles and framed a thrilling account of the victory of culture over monstrosity. But instead the extant fragments of Stesichoros’ poem offer a tantalising cross section of scenes, both proud and pitiful, from Geryon’s own experience. We see his red boy’s life and his little dog. A scene of wild appeal from his mother, which breaks off. Interspersed shots of Herakles approaching over the sea. A flash of the gods in heaven pointing to Geryon’s doom. The battle itself. The moment when everything goes suddenly slow and Herakles’ arrow divides Geryon’s skull. We see Herakles kill the little dog with His famous club. But that is enough premium. You can answer for yourself the question “What difference did Stesichoros make?” by considering his masterpiece. Some of its principal fragments are below. If you find the text difficult, you are not alone. Time has dealt harshly with Stesichoros. No passage longer than thirty lines is quoted from him and papyrus scraps (still being found: the most recent fragments were recovered from cartonnage in Egypt in 1977) withhold as much as they tell. The whole corpus of the fragments of Stesichoros in the original Greek has been published thirteen times so far by different editors, beginning with Bergk in 1882. No edition is exactly the same as any other in its contents or its ordering of the contents. Bergk says the history of a text is like a long caress. However that may be, the fragments of the Geryoneis itself read as if Stesichoros had composed a substantial narrative poem then ripped it to pieces and buried the pieces in a box with some song lyrics and lecture notes and scraps of meat. The fragment numbers tell you roughly how the pieces fell out of the box. You can of course keep shaking the box. “Believe me for meat and for myself”, as Gertrude Stein says. Here. Shake.’ </p> </div>

<img src="images/testsitebg.png" id="tsbg"/> <div id="kind"> <p> This is where the <a target="popup" onclick="window.open('https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YMCWR8jzpU','','width=600,height=600')">desert</a> takes the form of an unbroken plane. A horizon of dust that stretches beyond the limits of the imagination. It seems that if you were to walk, and to keep walking, the desert would <a target="popup" onclick="window.open('https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkL94nKSd2M','','width=400,height=400')">generate itself around you</a> - each crack in the ground, each hard stone, each kindling weed recalled from the engine's memory - an asset library of dead things, organised with just enough randomness that their repetition is almost inperceptible. This fallacy of <a target="popup" onclick="window.open('https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4236-elizabeth-povinelli-when-the-rocks-turn-their-backs-on-us','','width=600,height=600')">perceived dead space</a> has become synonymous with fixations on life and death, fixations that are looming ever larger on the horizon. I was struck by the phrasing Povinelli used; that the earth is not dying, just 'withdrawing care for certain kinds of entities'. Leaving behind the perspective of the difference between life and non-life as an impermeable border, we might better cultivate expansive understandings of being that foster ways of living with fragments, with consequences to our actions, beyond the scale of the individual, the immediacy of the present. </p></div>