Omnipedia #39: the Eros of Macron, Chinese deconstruction, cyborgs/assholes/jesters, & more
Including: Scottish economic power, how SF changes the world, Cornel West's Edinburgh blues
OK, these ones clogged the strainer this week - hope they’re interesting wriggly specimens. It takes the usual omni-labours to put Omnipedia together, so your monetary support is always deeply appreciated. Hit the button below, if you are so inclined, and I’ll see you at the end, PK x
OCCASIONALLY, I stop careening around in my nihilist handcart, and listen to Emmanuel Macron do his “Jupiterian” statesman bit, for some heavy relief.
This interview with the Economist is mostly a roll-out of grim, despair-inducing, nuclear-missile-brandishing statecraft (there’s a bit of European industrial corporatism too, but it’s mostly about “geopolitics taking over from geo-economics”).
However, I’m usually reading for the tinpot Greek god’s intellectual citations, and there’s a beauty here:
The Economist: How exactly can you stop nationalists?
Emmanuel Macron: By being bold enough not to think that their rise is inevitable. What kills me, in France as in Europe, is the spirit of defeat. The spirit of defeat means two things: you get used to it and you stop fighting.
Politics is Eros versus Thanatos. That’s politics. If Thanatos is hungrier, death wins. If Europeans are on the side of Eros, it’s the only way to manage. Don’t be afraid, be bold. Look, there are great things to be done…
And when I tell you that it’s the question of Eros, that’s really what it’s all about. If you tell people it’s over, it’s already over. They’ve already lost.
Dust off your Freud and Marcuse, oh happy Euro-warriors. Or even your coffee-cup Goethe slogans: “Whatever you dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.” Continental air-punch!
Slight twist here, in that Macron’s agenda of “fearless boldness” (fuelled by Erotic Power) partly involves the strengthening of the European military-industrial complex…whose very deterrence is rooted in the active possibility of mass death.
And must we be trapped by this leaderly joy in jousting with Putin? Is there no discourse or insight available, sociological or attitudinal, that accurately shows how shallow (or deep) his legitimacy is among the Russian people? If you have examples, I’d really appreciate them (comments below).
THOSE of you interested in and observant of Scottish politics will have been watching coalition/majority morphings between the SNP and the Greens in recent weeks, with First-Ministerial consequences. But the real politics is at the following level, as evidenced by this piece from Future Economy Scotland’s Laurie MacFarlane:
It is certainly true that many vital economic levers – including macroeconomic policy, employment law, energy policy, migration policy and more – remain reserved to Westminster, and this significantly limits the scope for transformative policy.
But there are many powers that the Scottish Government has control of today that ScotGov’s 10 Year Strategy for Economic Transformation has chosen to overlook or ignore. Tax policy, for example, is not mentioned once in the whole report, despite the Scottish Parliament now having control over a number of key taxes.
There are only fleeting references to planning and land ownership and use, despite these being key to unlocking economic potential across the country. The Scottish National Investment Bank gets a passing reference, but only to acknowledge what it is already doing.
If the Scottish Government wants to convince people that Scotland would be better off as an independent country, it should start by demonstrating that it is willing to use the powers it already has. Transformative rhetoric may sound impressive, but actions speak louder than words.
Jamie Wheal is something of a guilty pleasure for me, held over from an encounter I had with him at an Aegean Turkish techno-sangha (I shit you not). He’s essentially a spiritual consigliere/Lear’s Fool to US techbros.
But Wheal intriguingly laces his bromides with informed historical gloom about the falling of civilisations, as well as with lashings of crossover between biology, neurology, physiology, pharmacology. A young Tom Wolfe would hunger to render him (but try this attempt to do so).
His Substack, Homegrown Humans, is a lush platform for all this serious play. Recently Wheal produced this matrix:
It’s a map for the characters around him, in his highly-potentialising life. But for us muggles, these roles are like iridescent reality tv. Imagine having the luxury to play like this!
“The vertical axis is Truth (in its varying degrees of intensity). The horizontal axis as Vulnerabilty, or our openness to the experience of said Truths.” This generates four personae: Basket Case, Asshole, Cyborg, Jester.
Basket Cases, lower left, are highly vulnerable, but live in “regular old waking reality”. Holding down job, rent and relationships is tough enough for them.
Assholes, in the lower right, are invulnerable normies, concerned with “getting laid or getting paid, seeking pleasure and avoiding pain”.
Above the midline, upper right quadrant, there are Cyborgs. They see a bigger reality, but in a cold and digital way—they’re all about the cool calculations of odds and probability, Singularity or otherwise.
And the upper left has the Jesters - the Syd Barratt types, who’ve “ripped off the monkey suit of cultural conditioning and spend the rest of their lives streaking around in their birthday suits… Poking fun at the Kings of Consensus, amusing themselves, and risking their necks.”
What should we (or Jamie’s clients) aim for? The dead centre of the map, called Anthropos, splayed out and ready for anything like a Vitruvian human (or an integrated techbro). “If we deny the sacred, the mundane will crush us. If we deny the mundane, the sacred will burn us.”
It’s all great, autotelic fun, but I’m currently having difficulty applying it to the Ferry Road…
AFTER that, some more polarities to toy with. Here’s US-OZ trans writer McKenzie Wark writing on the philosophical eminence presiding over this year’s Edinburgh International Festival, the German-Chinese thinker Byung-Chul Han [which I covered for the National here].
Wark outlines what Han calls “Chinese deconstruction”. Feels also like a civilisational primer:
There is the western metaphysic of being, essence, discontinuity of events and discrete change. Then there is the Chinese metaphysic of inconstancy, decreation, absence and discreet change. Heidegger’s (western) thought is about deepening paths, versus the Chinese view of continuously variable paths.
The bifurcation continues: truth is adaptability to change (east) rather than an absolute (west). The east is about tendencies of movement rather than the west’s obsession with laws of nature.
Consequently, there are concepts of power as situation (east) versus power as sovereign (west). There’s the origin or original in the west versus the east’s continuous creation, where the origin can be decided retrospectively.
In the west, Plato banished the poets. Mimesis is a bad thing in western philosophy but especially when it is not a faithful copy of an origin or original. The image lacks being in the western imagination. For Adorno, the field around an artwork shapes it but it still has an inner depth of truth. To be an artist is to be an originator of a true and unique style. It’s a culture of exclusion and transcendence (west) versus a culture of inclusion and immanence (east).
In the east, it’s about continuous change without a privileged origin and original. Han’s example is Chinese painting, where collectors add their marks and calligraphy. In the west, the work is solitary, unitary and distinct. In the east, the work is social, malleable and continuous. In the west, the best painting has a soul, and reflects the viewer. In the east, the best painting aspires to emptiness, and the viewer is lost in it.
THE always-concise Nautilus asks some SF heads about the power of their fictions to change reality. It’s a rich cake, as you can see from this choice excerpt with the speculative magii Doctorow and Stross:
What do you think when you hear Musk, Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg talk about being influenced by science fiction?
Cory Doctorow: Sometimes I listen to these guys talk and I think, “I don’t know what science fiction you read because it doesn’t sound like any science fiction I read or write.” Which is weird because I think that the first positive review Bezos ever left on Amazon was for my first novel. There’s a scene in A Fish Called Wanda where Kevin Kline’s character keeps misquoting philosophy to his girlfriend, Jamie Lee Curtis, and eventually she turns to him and says, “The central message of Buddhism is not ‘every man for himself.’” These people are saying “we finally created the utopia of Neuromancer.” And I look at them and I go, “I don’t think you read Neuromancer. Maybe you just played Cyberpunk 2077.”
Charles Stross: The thing is, billionaires are not critical readers. They don’t seem to have noticed the subtext of the science fiction they read as kids, much less noticed where there’s a worrying absence of subtext.
Noteworthy exception: Steve Jobs. He’s dead now so we can’t ask him, but I suspect his vision for the future of computing was, “I want to build the black monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey.” I can just see teenage Steve getting stoned or dropping acid and seeing 2001 in the cinema and being struck by the vision of a plain back featureless thing that reaches inside the ape-men’s brains and makes them fundamentally smarter.
Every device he produced, from the Macintosh onward, had some aspect of the Monolith to it. The only problem is, Jobs’ implementation of the Monolith seems to principally be used to make us angry and stupid, instead of spreading enlightenment.
OUTRAGED at my lack of nous, failing to detect that Cornel West, the bluesman of philosophy and independent candidate for American president, was delivering the Gifford Lectures this week (and next) in Edinburgh. Embedded above is his thunderous opening from 6th May, and below are links to you to see the rest (either live or on catch-up YouTube):
Tuesday 7 May, 5pm-7pm, Lecture 2 - Metaphilosophic Andante
Thursday 9 May, 5pm-7pm, Lecture 3 - Folly Presto
Monday 13 May, 5pm-7pm, Lecture 4 - History Adagio
Tuesday 14 May, 5pm-7pm, Lecture 5 - America Allegro Molto Vivace
Thursday 16 May, 5pm-7pm, Lecture 6 - A Love Supreme (A Way Through)
My idea of a perfect holiday is a lofty Caprisian apartment (maybe Gorky’s), listening carefully to Cornel and Roberto Unger in socratic dialogue together at Harvard, chilled white at hand…
That’s it, another half-smeeked veer away from the Precipice… I hope you can support this trends-letter financially, every bit does help and is deeply appreciated, the button is below. Ad astra, later, PK x
Man that Jamie Wheal profile was something
. I can’t tell if I want to read recapture the rapture now. I started it and it’s very pseudo… something. Thoughts?
As usual one of my favourite substacks to check in on, thanks Pat!
Byung-Chul Han is KOREAN!