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Sine Zine Volume 1, Number 8. Published April 2013, "Vibrant Actants" distributed at Eastern Mennonite University, and in central Virginia.
Citation preview
“Vibrant Actants” Vol. 1 No. 8
Sine Zine
© 2014, collaborators: Clodie Morena Kyrie, MM Shull // // published and directed by “dogspeed you” E..K.M.
Knapp // cover image, “no zero” by Friends of the Pleistocene, FOP 2011 // William Blake prints,
“Resurrection” / “Pestilence” // centerfold line drawing of Van Gogh, from gutenburg project// “Hiroshima
shuffle” collage by MM Shull, 2013 /// screenshot from “Upstream Color” film by Shane Carruth / “tree of life”
by melwilyn, deviantart / image above from Mitch Epstein, “Amos Coal Power Plant” 2004 /// /
no price /// free to use but please cite sources ///.
Special thanks to EMU BIRE especially Christian Early, Peter, Ted, Nancy and Linford.
Send complaints, letters or submissions to:
Complaints and Submissions Department, Sine Zine
Box 425, Eastern Mennonite University
Harrisonburg VA, 22802
theSineZine.blogspot.com Vol. 1 No. 8 Vibrant Actants
S ine Zine
the
© 2014, collaborators: Clodie Morena Kyrie, MM Shull // // published and directed by “dogspeed you” E..K.M.
Knapp // cover image, “no zero” by Friends of the Pleistocene, FOP 2011 // William Blake prints,
“Resurrection” / “Pestilence” // centerfold line drawing of Van Gogh, from gutenburg project// “Hiroshima
shuffle” collage by MM Shull, 2013 /// screenshot from “Upstream Color” film by Shane Carruth / “tree of life”
by melwilyn, deviantart / image above from Mitch Epstein, “Amos Coal Power Plant” 2004 /// /
no price /// free to use but please cite sources ///.
Special thanks to EMU BIRE especially Christian Early, Peter, Ted, Nancy and Linford.
Send complaints, letters or submissions to:
Complaints and Submissions Department, Sine Zine
Box 425, Eastern Mennonite University
Harrisonburg VA, 22802
theSineZine.blogspot.com
It’s alive! These words of Dr. Frankenstein’s ring with the startling realization
that his creation had crossed a threshold between the inani-
mate world of dead material and the animate world of living
creatures. But… what if the scream “It’s alive!” really meant
something altogether different? Something at once deeper
and even more sinister: “I’ve been outdone, Igor; my creation
was already alive (in a different way), and furthermore it
turns out that all I, the good Doctor can do is to participate
in the forms of life by which I find myself surrounded! I can
change little things of the nature — but not the fact — of
life!”
S o what does it mean that biological life is an emergent
property of matter? What is this vibrancy, and is my for-
mulated self a (false) affect in the face of the life everlasting?
Is the living God also an affect? For who, or what, can stand
up to the power of such life?
A LL matter fluctuates, vibrates with a kind of categorical
life. With the gravity waves that have been rippling
across space-time since shortly after the big bang. With the
phenomenon that Hegel calls Spirit, that activeness of Becoming
-other. With the image of God in which we were created. This
issue of Sine Zine elaborates a modality of vibrancy, a multiplic-
ity of relationality – the unqualified Riemann space for you
math geeks — where there is an innumerable plurality of iden-
tities and a richness of expression beyond reckoning. Leave
behind the thirsty deserts of modernity, where matter is inert
and “God is too dead” – come, and rediscover your multiplied-
self in the fecund jungle of Sine Zine’s words!
T he projects of humanity, such as the city and the state,
and including all man’s metaphysical aspirations, are a de-
nial – not a denial of death, as Ernst Becker says in his book
of the same name, but the inverse: the projects of humanity
are a denial of the immutable, teeming life that ever emerges
from the cradle of time and space as the natural expression
of some deeper principle of emergent self-organization at
work in things.
T he finest and most dastardly achievements of the human
race are one and the same, from the perspective of life
itself. To spite science, life on earth (not to mention the
possibilities of life outside earth) can be neither artificially
created nor completely obliterated, even by the smartest biol-
ogists and the biggest nuclear bombs. For all the effort giv-
en to manipulating the myriad forms of life — in medicine
and microbiology, for instance — not a single organism has
been manipulated into being from scratch, and not a single
organism will be spared biological death in the end.
E ven if humanity succeeds in its idiotic quest to annihilate
itself, detonating a thousand megatons of plutonium and
burning away the entire atmosphere – life will endure beyond
man. It will persist, in the thermal vents in the deepest oce-
anic trenches, and in other places. In nooks and crannies
life waits patiently for the means of its expression to emerge,
biding its time in the certainty of its purpose. Humans can
only fool ourselves with the pretensions of our invention,
death.
I s man’s angst regarding death not due precisely to the
unbearable notion that life will go on without him? Is not
thanatos, man’s death-drive, a petty kind of revenge against
the abundance of life which is independent from and outside
of man? Are not all of man’s socio-cultural constructs an
infantile lashing-out, not at the particularity of death, rather
instead against the universality of life? How can my life
mean anything against the fact that life is continually abun-
dant, brimming with a blessed fecundity?
W hat modern man calls death is a human invention,
borne from the limited perspective of ego. Plato’s
Socrates expounds the nature of death as inextricably-linked
to life in ways beyond individual understanding, chiding his
friends for their irrational fears, and insisting on not seeing
death as something to be avoided. Modern conservative
Christianity wrongly tries to negate notions of death, ultimate-
ly reinforcing them. Witness the right-wing Christian hatred
for Nietzsche, based solely on his penning of the sublime
line, “God is dead.” Philosophy on the other hand, has the
right idea in dis-solving the notional problem of death: to
anyone with the intellectual inclination, the saying “God is
dead” is at least readable as a commentary on Death, and
not as a commentary on the current facebook status of God.
O ne favorite theme of conservative Christianity comes
from a gospels saying: “the wages of sin is death.”
What does this mean to a fundamentalist? Is there a gi-
ant company — Sin, Incorporated; CEO: God — that pays
its employees with death? Let us propose an alternative
to this understanding: that sin, properly understood, is the
misperception of death, and therefore also of life, itself.
When Jesus teaches, in the gospel of John for instance,
about believing and eternal life, he is in effect saying,
“you will die because of your mistaken belief in death.
Believe in me (the eternal principle of emergent life) and
you won’t die.” This is only tangentially and inversely re-
lated to the purity ethic traditions, those better-than-thou
fundamentalist bastards who use their virginity and inexpe-
rience with alcohol, drugs and culture as a soap-box on
which to stand and condemn life; the idols they worship,
among them the fantasy of the big lunch buffet in the sky,
prevent them from engaging the truth (and the life!) of life.
The conservative evangelical obsession with stamping out
all forms of desire and establishing an artifice of control
and authority blinds these fundies from the nature of sin,
and then compels them into believing in an angry, mecha-
nistic God. When Jesus tells people that they will surely
die unless they repent and believe, he is speaking through
history to the idol-worshipping conservatives who keep re-
peating the mantra of wages and death. Jesus is in effect
saying, “Woe to you, bible-thumpers, stop convincing my
sheep that they are wolves! Sin is the belief in death,
and your one-dimensional denial of death is the only real
type of sin!”
T he first real death, in an existential sense, was the death of Abel. With Cain’s sociopathic lack of imagi-
nation and trust comes also the first act of deliberate de-
nial of life, and this changes the way that humans relate
to life and death forever. Jesus’ pseudo-death is a
demonstration to man by God, and it is aimed at decon-
structing the notion of life. The resurrection of Christ is a
loving and non-violent lesson in the nature of life, and a
tutorial for those traumatized by death. “Who are you
looking for, Mary?” might as well be saying, “you people
don’t know what it means to live.” This is also how we
can make the claim that “God is Dead,” and be right —
only we simply cannot fit our understanding of identity in-
to the false sociopathic framework of death.
~~
The Inertia of Food-matter; the Idiocy of War on Terror
By Clodie Morena Kyrie
T he refrigerator is perhaps one place where Americans
enact a certain notional inert lifelessness, both in
their conceptualizations of sustenance and in their practic-
es of consumption.
T o Americans, the modernist ideal still very much ap-
plies to what we put in our stomachs: food is dead
stuff, raw (so to speak) matter which, after ingestion is
assimilated into the material assemblage we think of as
our bodies. True, some seepage of essence is still ac-
cepted in the idolatry of food (mostly by yuppie mystics
and vegan anarchists); if I eat fatty foods I expect to be
fatter, for instance. But for the most part American
food culture is a practice in reductionism. Pork
is a meat, quite different from the lovable and
cute pig car- toons on the television set;
moreover pork or ham (name it what you
will) is dis- tinct and separate from other
kinds of pig- related food like
hotdog meat or imitation calamari (made from the rectal
sphincter of the pig.) This demonstrates the fact that, in
our minds, our food is quite its own existential entity. We
define food more by properties of taste and consistency
as we do by where it came from, how it is processed, and
what it is actually made of.
P erhaps the biggest conceptual problem in American
food culture is that problem of the lifelessness of
food. Once it is killed, we expect food to be sanitized
and vacuum-sealed, with convenient date labels denoting
an exact time after which it resurrects in impure form,
crossing the line from dead (inert and essentially neutral)
to alive – which is to say, rotten, teeming with microorgan-
isms which we have been culturally trained to hate. Amer-
ican refrigerators exist like the Department of Homeland
Security, to quite literally make the substrata on which
otherness is predicated inhospitable.
I n an ominous parallel to the modal consumption of
food in the US, our idiotic Global War on Terror, can
make an apt comparison. As we pretend to fight an invis-
ible, extremist enemy lurking in the public library and the
aisle seat of the flight, we come to see that this kind of
struggle is about as effective as over-cooking the steak on
a public grill at the campground. This is a salient com-
parison for several reasons: first, the intent is the same.
That is to say, we are out to preserve our essential purity,
damn those icky green germs, those burka-wearing free-
dom haters. Secondly, the end result is pretty much the
same: a crusty, carbonized and relatively tasteless social
dialogue with outsiders devoid of any degree of real fla-
vor; until we can accept the teeming life of otherness and
our own place in the biosphere, the danger of otherness
itself remains unchallenged.
E ven meat cooked in extremely sterile conditions by ex-
pert microbiologists would still carry millions of living
organisms by the time it could be digested. (The digestive
tract itself relies on these same microorganisms, without
which we would surely
die!) For a variety of
reasons, the Timothy
McVeigh’s and Anders
Breivik’s of western cul-
ture will survive cultural
forces designed to
“cook out” foreign ex-
tremists and exotic for-
eigners, precisely be-
cause those forces can-
not act on “insiders”
who fit the cultural mi-
lieu and fail to make
the bovine white people
in the neighborhood
suspicious. (Similar al-
so to the metaphor of
digestive symbiosis, our
capitalist economy must
rely on the cheap labor
of expendables some-
where below the belly
button of the earth.)
M odernism and
the power of
globalization are occa-
sionally mutually exclu-
sive in these kinds of situations: quality control implementa-
tion of food products and scientific valuations of inert food
-matter seek to minimize the standard deviation and varia-
tion inherent in the process of production. But because of
I contemplate a tree.
I can accept it as a picture: a rigid pillar in a flood of light, or splashes of green traversed by the gentleness of the blue silver ground.
I can feel it as movement: the flowing veins around the sturdy, striving core, the sucking of the roots, the breathing of the leaves, the infi-nite commerce with earth and air--and the growing itself in its darkness.
I can assign it to a species and observe it as an instance, with an eye to its construction and its way of life.
I can overcome its uniqueness and form so rigorously that I recognize it only as an ex-pression of the law--those laws according to which a constant opposition of forces is contin-ually adjusted, or those laws according to which the elements mix and separate.
I can dissolve it into a number, into a pure rela-tion between numbers, and eternalize it.
Throughout all of this the tree remains my object and has its place and its time span, its kind and condition.
But it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It. The power of exclusiveness has seized me. ~Martin Buber, I and Thou, 1923
the vibrancy of matter — because of the very re-animate
nature of all things, this dream of sanitization is impossible
on any scale, whether in the refrigerator or on the urban
battlefield. The FDA standards which the marketing gurus
go to great lengths to
hide from the public
mind would make most
people sick. (For, in-
stance there are as
many as 15 fly eggs
and one live maggot in
every 100g of tomato
sauce.
P erhaps we can
draw another les-
son from this. Perhaps
it is not in cultural
pluralism (or the FDA)
that we should place
our hope. Indeed, it is
on an even deeper lev-
el than this where the
power of heterogeneity
to resist globalized Em-
pire lies. (Also,
strong immune sys-
tems.) The very lunch
meat in your backpack
– yea though it be lit-
tle more than heavily-
processed emulsifica-
tion shrink wrapped in
plastic – this too cries out to the God of Life for justice!
This is the liberatory power of vibrancy. Embrace it, or die
in denial! — CMK
Pew-Pew!
I was built in 1984. As a thermonuclear armament, my yield is relatively low: about 500 kilotons or 30 Hiroshima bombs.
I’m not one of those 20 megaton beauties, but nobody’s per-fect. (Each of them would be more powerful than all the ex-plosives ever used in the history of the world previously.)
I sit atop the “Minuteman III” launch vehicle, deep under-ground, somewhere in what used to be Montana, back when
places had names. My little prison holds two other multiple re-entry vehicles (MIRVs) just like me, and each is just as powerful as I am. Between the three of us, we pack the equivalent of 1.5 megatons of TNT! Somewhere in what used to be the “United States” there are 300 of my siblings, all sit-ting uselessly, rotting in silos like me. Or at least there used to be.
B ack when life was good, people polished my casing every week, and I was always ready to go at the push of a few
buttons. Then one day I heard someone say, “The govern-ment is trying to cut back” – as if nukes were like a bad habit or something. Can you believe the nerve of those guys!
W hen I was younger, about 5,000 years ago that is, the on-ly threat to my existence was hippies and catholic nuns.
I expected to be “around” for a very, very long time, sitting in my silo temple, being worshipped by my handlers as the “strategic deterrent” keeping them and their families safe. Then the earth began to get warmer, and very quickly the
Lament of the Hydrogen Bomb by M.M. Shull
Pew-Pew!
chief priests – Captains and Colonels they were called – start-ed to disappear. They would complain about budgets and something called “human security” and so on. Then one day I was sitting there waiting, I hadn’t been polished in a very long time, it seemed. It was then that I noticed a rusty spot.
“H ow long has it been since the humans worshipped me?” I thought. I suddenly realized that the humans had
not been around for quite some time. Had they forgotten about me? Are there even humans out there anymore? Will anyone ever notice me again? At this point, all my metal and plastic casing has long since deteriorated … but I am still the same old me, radioactive to a fault you might say!
M y existence began with a paradox: I was built to be so destructive and deadly that “the enemy” would be dis-
suaded from attacking. But, as long as I remained only a de-terrent; my intended role – my true, self-actualization as weapon – could not be realized, and I am condemned to sit in my silo until my radioactive core decays – in several thousand more years.
O h to be capable of moving, to feel the air scream around my metal casing, to feel the throbbing pulse of imminent
det- onation, a multiple orgasm of explosions, enough to light whole mountain ranges instantly on fire! A few of those could have turned earth’s entire at-
mosphere to a soupy carbon mush. Oh, I may be old
and decrepit, but a girl can always dream, I say.
—MMS
Sin
e Zine
Vibr
ant Actants