1st/15th

from Dustin for Kuhns, inc.

american nihilism 2: crusty greasepaint, infinite regress

...These ever-tightening circuits are understood as proof that the system is functioning rather than failing. Like the epicycles of a pre-Copernican astronomer, these “circuits” are not shortening around immutable physical principles. We would like to think that the laws of frictionless, accelerating market exchange were derived from the elegant motion of the planetary bodies themselves, but they are illusory schemes like astrology in a Ptolemaic universe. The more we refer back to this paradigm of exchange to explain anomalous phenomena, the more epicycles we inscribe in a quickly fracturing system of political economy. Now, our inherited political economy, like a poltergeist, has gained substantial enough mass to serve as a metaphysical substrate for illuminating the motion of all human bodies’ exchange and interaction....

...In lieu of the feasibility of new, simple political or social systems which open or set trajectories toward justice, the left persists by creating more and more complex epicycles to jerry rig an equitable system around one failing to accomplish the same declared ends. It attempts this primarily through the accumulation of virtual political will. Whereas “truth” used to be theorized as coherence within a conceptual system or correspondence to a stable metaphysics, ideas and facts now gain value primarily by accumulation within and across networks of exchange....

Read more.

FORWARD, xoxo.

quote bin
N. Katherine Hayles Unthought

In one of Hayles most recent books titled Unthought: The Power of Cognitive Nonconscious, she opens up human cognition and conscious processes and explores how they are related to and modeled in the increasingly advanced systems that surround us. How then, do we better relate ourselves to these systems? (If you're interested in both this and my article above, I have include brief notes to Hayles throughout the linked essay)