Collapse VI: Geo/Philosophy

COLLAPSE VI
First published in 2010 in an edition of 1000
comprising numbered copies 1-950

and 50 hors-commerce copies
Reissued Edition 2012
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COLLAPSE
Philosophical Research and Development
VOLUME VI
Edited by
Robin Mackay
URBANOMIC
FALMOUTI-I
COLLAPSE VI
January 2010
EDI TOR: Robin Mackay
ROBIN MACKAY
Editorial Introduction.......................................................... 3
NICOLA MAscIANDARO
Becoming Spice: Commentary as Geophilosophy............20
IAIN HAMILTON GRANT
Introduction to Schelling's On the World Soul.. ............... 58
F. W.J. SCHELLING
On the World Soul............................................................ 66
STEPHEN EMMOTT, GREG MclNERNY, DREW PuRVES,
RICH WILLIAMS
New Ecologies (Interview) ................................................96
TIMOTHY MORTON
Thinking Ecology: The Mesh, the Strange Stranger and
the Beautiful Soul 195
.............................................................
FIELDCLUB
How Many Slugs Maketh the Man? ...............................224
OWEN IIA'IHERLEY
Fossils of Tnne Future: Bunkers and Buildings from the
Atlantic Wall to the South Bank..................................234
EYAL WEIZMAN
Political Plastic (Interview) ...............................................257
ANGELA DETANICO AND RAFAEL LAIN
A Given Tnne I A Given Place.........................................304
MANABRATA GUHA
Introduction to SIMADology:
ltJ!emos in the 21st Century...............................................323
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COLLAPSE VI
REZA NEGARESTANI
Undercover Softness: An Introduction to the Architecture
and Politics of Decay ........................................................ 379
ROBIN MACKAY
Philosophers' Islands .............. . . . . . ................................... .431
CHARLES AVERY
The Islanders: Epilogue................................................... 458
GILLES GRELET
Theory is Waiting ........................................................... 477
RENEE GREEN
Endless Dreams and Waters Between .................................. 484
Notes on Contributors and Acknowledgements ............. 525
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COLLAPSE VI
Editorial Introduction
As far as we know, philosophy, indeed thinking as such,

happens only on one planet. In our previous volume, we
examined the ways in which philosophical and scientific
thought pursued a liberation from the local conditions of
'earthly thought', counteracting the limitations imposed by
our terrestrial locale and the biological heredity that binds
our cognition to it. In this volume, we tum our gaze back
towards our home planet to ask how, as products of the
Earth, philosophers, scientists and artists have attempted
to encompass it in thought; and how the philosophical
enterprise of thinking 'the whole' has been, and continues
to be, determined by our belonging to the Earth.
There is a timely aspect to this inquiry: W hereas the
optimism of the late twentieth century saw 'globalisation'
become a byword for limitless expansion, our image of the
global in the first decade of the twenty-first century was
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COLLAPSE VI
characterised instead by contraction, by a forced recognition

that the increasing technological interconnection and ever
intensifying exploitation of the Earth by humans was
exposing finite limits, economic and ecological, of the
planet upon which their world-systems are imposed.
Much of the response to the ensuing crises has remained
entrenched within nostalgic regret, emotional imprecation
and moral imperative. In this volume we attempt to forego
this panic response and instead to present a diverse selection
of contributions which demonstrate that philosophy, science
and contemporary art continue to address the condition of
thinking on and of Earth in original and engaging manners.
We know that thinkers have long used the surface of
the Earth as a rich source of metaphor: in so far as it seeks
for secure 'ground' on which to place thought, geographic
cartographic and geological metaphors are endemic to
philosophy. But beyond this metaphorics, as NICOLA
MAscIANDARO argues in his 'Becoming Spice: Commentary
as Geophilosophy', the practice of philosophy itself can be
seen as a continual process of 'worlding'.
Beginning with the failure of the 'philosophical flight'
from the earthbound in Dante, Masciandaro argues that
philosophy belongs not to the 'folly' of a vertically-oriented
'straight path' but to a 'circular and endless' movement on
the surface of the earth. And for Masciandaro, who directs
the project Glossator, 1 dedicated to a contemporary revivi
fication of the practice of commentary, it is the latter that
provides the key to understanding this endless movement:
commentary as the continual production of knowledge,
a practice that 'proceeds by staying'. Philosophy's aim 'to
1. See http://www.glossator.org/.
4
render actual its absoluteness', to enter into self-immanence

- the 'Copernican' impulse to absolutise - only proceeds,
according to Masciandaro, through commentary's
continual 'dwelling on the problem'. He further sees this
role of commentary as being encoded in spice, as a global
commodity whose currency and commercial movement
figures the production of understanding through continual
differentiation and distribution. Thus, commentary is not a
mere 'condiment', but figures a peripatetic wandering and
returning that draws forth the immanence of what is, only
by adding to it, by 'spicing' it and thereby 'bringing out'
the mode in which it is more than it is. For Masciandaro,
therefore, 'the telos of commentary, its far-off end, is tellus,
what bears us'; thinking brings us back to a continually
differentiated Earth.
One significant modem attempt to create a philosophy
that addresses the Earth system as an 'All' is F. W. J.
ScHELLING's .Naturphzlosophie, which sought to encompass
within a single set of philosophical principles the production
of nature and thought; of thought out of and as a part of
nature. In Schelling's 1798 work, previously unavailable in
translation, the philosopher revendicates the ancient theory
of the 'World-Soul', entirely reconstructing it through the
contemporary science of his time, which he supplements
with the necessary speculative basis that will allow him to
effect his grand synthesis. As IAIN HAMILTON GRANT tells
us in his introduction to his new translation, Schelling's
book must be understood as a bold experiment in system
atically thinking 'the All': Not content with providing a
transcendental account of thought's a priori determination
of its object, Schelling attempts to ground this determina
tion in a Nature conceived as a prius, the polarisation of
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COLLAPSE VI
whose primitive forces can be traced through all of natural

organisation, conditioning even the consciousness through
which they become manifest as concept.
The contemporary ecological crisis demands a
(somewhat more modest) reframing of the task of
conceiving systematically the 'All' of nature - the biosphere
within which human beings are increasingly aware of their
implication. We are all well acquainted with the dread
auguries emerging from what the media generically refer to
as 'scientists'; but this reception reveals little as to the diffi
culties that beset those tasked with making such projections.
Our interviews with STEPHEN EMMOTT , DREW PuRVES,
RICH WILLIAMS and GREG MCINERNY, scientists working
in Computational Ecology and Environmental Science at
Microsoft's Research Laboratory in Cambridge, England,
offer some insight into the contemporary stakes of
ecological thought, revealing ecology as a science in a state
of flux and renegotiation.
They describe how, combining empirical knowledge of
the mechanisms of growth, evolution and competition with
an arsenal of statistical and computational techniques, their
virtual 'in-silico' world-systems - Purves talks of them as
involving a selection from a 'universe of universes' - aim
to refine hypotheses and constrain predictions regarding
the effects of climate change. As the interviewees reveal,
the challenges they face make necessary a 'new kind of
science' in which the barriers between disciplines are being
broken down, and the order of scientific research disrupted
or reversed. Negotiating the fearsome task of creating, in
Emmott's words, 'a precise, predictive science of complex
natural systems' calls for a meticulous questioning of
received truths, and a triage between abstraction, accuracy,
6
and uncertainty, in a quest for a 'simplicity on the other

side of complexity'. As Purves suggests, it is ecologists who
are above all properly placed to give a 'high-level view' ;
but as we see in Mcinerny' s description of his work, the
indications of such a high-level view depend crucially on
the selection of theoretical frameworks and on our under
standing of low-level biological and genetic factors, shifts in
the understanding of which can have radical consequences
for prediction. In incorporating them into new computa
tional models, Purves, Mcinerny and Williams have shown
that the presence and interaction of these additional factors
can crucially alter our understanding of global processes.
As well as exploring the details of the research underway,

it was also important in these conversations to reflect on the
predicament of the scientist called on to estimate the fate
of the planet; a specialist whose area of research has been
reinvigorated by the ecological crisis, but who must remain
vigilant against overconfidence and oversimplification.
Despite their optimism, the unanimous conclusion of our
interviewees is that ecology remains a 'young science': a
science already capable of providing an adumbration of the
future of the biosphere, but which still faces a great many
'unknown unknowns'.
In addition, it emerges that this work is constrained on
all sides by the contingencies of its history: dependent on
legacy data and the choices made by those who preceded
them, ecologists are involved in a continual reevaluation
of their scientific and theoretical inheritance. Perhaps the
most serious constraint, however, lies in the additional
task of presenting their results to a concerned public.
Struggling to be heard clearly amidst political manoeuvring,
economic exigencies, and the evangelising of activists and
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COLLAPSE VI
conservationists, as Emmott remarks, ecology today must

concern itself not only with theorisation and analysis,
but also with clear communication of its point of view as
a science.
As Mcinerny points out, 'activism' often reflects the
uninterrogated prejudices and desires of those involved
more than the state of scientific knowledge. TIMOTHY
MoRTON' s work in ecocriticism dissects the ways in which
the narratives and aesthetics of 'environmentalism' remain
captive to such unavowed assumptions. Morton' s &ology
Witlwut .Nature,2 which argued that the idea of 'Nature' is
only ever an obstruction to ecological thinking, opened by
making a heartfelt case for the importance of philosophical
thinking and the creation of new concepts in order to prevent
our sense of ecological emergency from precipitating a
retreat into nostalgia and the safety of thinking 'Nature'
as 'something over there'. In his article for COLLAPSE,
'Thinking Ecology' - a preview of his forthcoming book
The &ological Tlwught3 - Morton proceeds to pick apart the
ideological attitudes, still in thrall to the Romantic view of
'Nature', that allow environmentalism, under cover of a naive
sincerity, to avoid thinking ecological interdependence.
As he argues, the latter thought is not to be attained through
blithely asserting our 'community' with the denizens of
nature. Simple denial of our own gaze, and the 'framing'
it imposes on nature, is not an option: it amounts, as he
argues, to the perpetuation of a 'beautiful soul syndrome'.
Instead Morton invites us to experience the 'humiliation' of
recognising our disturbing collective intimacy with 'life' as a
2. Ecology Witlumt Naiure: &thinking F.rwi:ron:mental AeJthet:ics (Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 2007)
3. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, forthcoming 2010.
8
'strange stranger', drawing us into a 'dark ecology' in which

awareness, rather than implying a contemplative 'letting
be' of 'Nature', delivers a melancholy, ironic recognition
that our very rendering of the 'crime scene' implies our
necessary and constitutive implication in the crime.
This critique of the ideology of environmentalism
is extended and dramatised by UK artist collective
F I E L D c L u B. Their work explores the humour that
emerges in actually following self-sufficiency edicts 'on
the ground' ; and the irony that comes from raising
the principles of ecology to the most general context
imaginable. Underpinned by a theoretical position drawing
on the long-forgotten neo-Gnostic lore of 'agrosophy',4
F I E L D c L u B remove ecology and the 'anthropic tech
nosphere' from the parochial domain of environmental
politics and replace it within the framework of a Bataillean
'solar economy'.
Their irony is not the cynical resignation of the city
dweller; for their work documents a continuing attempt to
live 'off-grid', disconnected from public utilities and drawing
as little on outside resources as possible. Much of the collec
tive' s work draws wryly on incidents in the day-to-day
course of this experiment in living, small occurrences that
never fail to blacken the name of Eden. This intimate
engagement allows them to challenge the credo according
to which just a little goodwill and a little less technology
could enable humans to temper their depredations in favour
of a more gentle and wholesome coexistence with nature.
FIELD c Lu s' s concern with this uneasy 'complicity'
with other living beings leads precisely into what can be
4. See http://www.fieldclub.eo.uk/texts.php
9
COLLAPSE VI
seen as assays into Morton's 'dark ecology'. To become

close to nature, they demonstrate, is at the very least to
repudiate the notion that the Earth is something unreserv
edly worthy of our admiration, and from which we can
draw comforting meaning. The series of devices exhibited
in FIELD c Lu B's contribution to this volume intimate
that man's relation to the soil, no matter how 'traditional'
or 'simple', strips us of our 'beautiful soul' credentials and
reminds us we must 'kill to live'; at the same time, they
lampoon the efforts made through technological mediation
to flee the 'scene of the crime'.
Evidently, any examination of the relation of thought
to the Earth must address the way in which we dwell
upon, thus transforming, its surface. OWEN IIATHERLEY's
project to rescue architectural modernism from the 'Ikea
modernism' of 'light and airy' interior design belonging
to the vacuous economic optimism of the late twentieth
century5 leads him to the contention that, in restoring the
links of modernism with its less palatable predecessors -
such as the proto-brutalism of Hitler's Atlantic Wall - we
reawaken a suppressed, but rich and provocative, historical
lineage. Hatherley's analysis is inspired by Ballard's
discovery of a 'warped modernism' in the structures of
the Atlantic Wall. And as Hatherley's discussion implies, if
we are to consider Ballard as a precursor to 'psychogeog
raphy', the latter must be understood in terms of regressian,
so that, as in Ballard's novels, in the contemplation of these
(non) structures we experience an 'end-point of architecture':
The enterprise of design and construction degenerates into
an atavism where 'primal impulses and prehistoric building
forms recur', but which paradoxically (as evidenced by
Virilio's adaptation of this aesthetic for his brutalist church)
5. See Hatherley's Militant Modernism (London: ZerO Books, 2009)
10
also communicates with an impulse to the sacred. These

'instant ruins' thus tap into an architectural phylum which,
actualised by a military 'science of compaction and impact',
marries emergency with eternity.
Hatherley traces the few instances in which this rich
seam resurfaces in architecture, but as he observes, in an
increasingly hygienically-conservative architectural climate,
it now belongs more to speculative thinking and to the
work of artists such as Nicholas Moulin. The suggestion
that with more attention, it might fuel an 'apocalyptic pulp
of our own time' brings to mind the fact that, of course,
Ballard's apocalyptic Drowned World must be considered
the first science-fictional treatment of climate change. From
Ballard's reflections on these forgotten structures, Hatherley
thus draws out a as-yet unrealised 'earth-philosophy' as
remote from tree-hugging as Ikea is from the Atlantic Wall;
one that, via the exigencies of total war, sets the chthonic
forces of the inner earth flowing through the Apollonian
veins of modernism.
Architect and theorist EYAL WEIZMAN transports
this immanence with the 'chthonic' into architectural
practice: His project Decolonizing Architecture seeks to apply
an 'ungrounding' process to spaces previously invested
with colonialism, practicing 'design by destruction'.
DA has evolved from Weizman' s examination of the role
that architecture has played in the Israeli occupation of
Palestine; in our interview, he describes the way in which
he sees architecture per se as interacting with the 'political
architecture' of this occupation, and how the structure
of the latter has entered into conceptual commerce with
theory. Weizman's conception of 'forensic architecture', in
seeking to read the nature of historical events through their
material traces, implies a new articulation of 'forces and
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COLLAPSE VI
forms', wherein forms not only register the multiplicity of

forces that bear upon them, but in tum become actors in this
political 'forcefield'. We discuss the way in which this mate
rialist-pluralist conception of politics demands a rethinking
of the notions of responsibility, ideology, and resistance,
and how DA's processes of 'design by destruction' and
'ungrounding' seek to disrupt the temporalities according
to which the very question of a 'solution' to the problem of
occupation has been posed.
Discussing the in some cases hostile reception to this
work, Weizman also describes how it has led him to
reconsider the very function of theory in the context of
global politics: The theoretical enterprise can only operate,
he argues, through an engagement with actual protagonists,
whose functional roles within twenty-first century conflict
bring to light the new conceptual frameworks within
which that conflict is being conducted. Thus, concepts are
not 'in the head' but 'in the world', and only by affirming
this embeddedness of theory - by forensically examining
the material traces of specific sites, and by joumalistically
naming names - can theory become a weapon of resistance.
Weizman's examination of the bonds between archi
tecture and the martial recoding and territorialization of
the Earth is further developed in MANABRATA GuHA' s
'Introduction to SIMADology'. Surveying today's 'global
security ecology' Guha suggests that its regime of thinking
the relation of war to the Earth - inherited, as he suggests,
from the 'father' of the theory of warfare, Clausewitz
- fails to register the radical difference that terror
operations impose upon the martial landscape. W hat Guha
calls the SIMAD - Singularly Intensive Mobile Agencity
of Decay - disrupts the Clausewitzian paradigm, drawing
12
war-machines into a 'chthonic battlespace' which they are

constitutively incapable of navigating. Even within the new
paradigms of warfare which seek to confront changing
conditions through 'network' or 'swarm' paradigms,
the weapons of 'surprise' and 'terror' are read in the
terms of a political and martial imaginary whose inap
propriate causal and economic principles doom them
to become, ultimately, a component of the threat they
aim to neutralise. Extending Reza Negarestani's analysis
of 'hypercamouflage', 6 and through a critique of the
conclusions of prominent contemporary theorists of war,
Guha depicts terror-operations as effecting a transformation
on the instrumentalised war-machine of the state, causing
it to proliferate and morph uncontrollably as it confronts
the chthonic forces against which it attempts to differentiate
itself - forces that owe nothing to tellurian structures, and
whose eruption can only be registered as having already
taken place. In attempting to 'seal off the tellurian surface'
from these terror-Events, Guha suggests, war-machines
operating on the Clausewitzian model merely generate self
deceiving fictions - bringing about a 'process of ontological
decay' whose nature is opaque to strategic thinking.
Maintaining the state at a 'tipping point [...] between self
destruction and absolute consolidation', the SIMAD thus
becomes the co-ordinator of 'global security governance'
and the 'biopolitical model of the post-modem state'.
Confronting this 'complicity of visions' and drawing
on REZA NEGARESTANI's contribution to COLLAPSE IV,7
6. R. Negarestani, 'The Militarization of Peace: Absence of Terror or Terror of

Absence?', COLI.APSE I, 53-9 1 .
7. R . Negarestani, 'The Corpse Bride: Thinkin g with Nigredo', COLLAPSE IV,

129-6 1 .
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COLLAPSE VI
Guha in closing declares that '[w]e are that which decays

and the agents of decay. We are expressions of the terrifying
envoiding chemistry of decay'. Negarestani's contribu
tion to the present volume expands this theme into the
analytic description of an 'architecture and politics of
decay'. Excavating some of the more bizarre preoccupa
tions of mediaeval thought, and tracing their influence on
early-modem mathematics, Negarestani suggests that they
offer us the formal basis for an 'architecture, mathesis and
politics of decay'.
This mathesis, of which Negarestani finds 'the most
refined expression' in politics, sees the interior ideal of
a form not as an origin, but as emerging processually
through its decay, in tandem with a production of exteri
orised derivatives. Distancing his thesis from any nostalgic
fetishising of ruins and insisting that it not only applies to
superficially 'decayed' states but must be thought of as a
general principle, Negarestani notes that a 'politics of decay'
is disturbing precisely because - like Guha's SIMAD - it
invokes a universal dynamic principle that undermines any
claims to wholeness and wholesomeness.
Notably, Negarestani's argument also contains a
confrontation with the nihilism expounded by Ray Brassier
in his .Nihil Unbound:8 Science's evacuation of the realm of
organic interiority into the exteriority of space, Negarestani
suggests, does not take place without a 'twisting' in time
and in space. His suggestion of a calculus of decay as
'mathematics with a chemical disposition or chemical
revolution via mathematical distributions' problematises
any straightforward vector of exteriorization, both in the
8. R. Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2007) .
14
realm of in/organic matter and in the history of thought, by

locating both within a humw whose vermicular twisting can
never fully be 'worked out'. In a parallel to his remarkable
book Cydonopedia, where the molten core of the Earth attests
to its immanence with the sun - and again, recalling Guha's
SIMAD - for Negarestani exteriority is already a chthonic
'insider'.
In his precise definition of this positive process of
'decay as a building process', Negarestani in fact provides
the abstract key to the strange confluences not only in
Hatherley, Weizman and Guha's analyses, but also in
Masciandaro's account of the continual self-differentiation
of knowledge. AB Masciandaro reminds us, commen
tary's addressing of the earthly condition constitutes, not
a resignation to the inescapable finitude of the text, but
philosophy's very 'boldness', its 'monstrous' aspiration to
continually deform, denature and multiply what it attends
to, in a twisting wherein the poetic impulse rejoins with the
philosophical imperative, the wandering on the Earth with
the will to flight. Negarestani's tum towards those incor
rigible commentators, the Scholastics, elicits the formal
identity of his vermicular chemico-mathematics with this
process of exegetical 'twisting'. Perhaps then Negarestani
not only succeeds Schelling as 'the philosopher of the new
chemistry' - albeit, as Iain Hamilton Grant has suggested,
a 'chemistry of darkness' - but also presents us with a
'chemistry of (the history of) philosophy'.
Needless to say, the Earth, in our dealings with it
and our navigations on it, exists for us not in 'immediate
experience', but in coded form. The work of artists ANGELA
DETANICO AND RAFAEL LAIN examines the many ways in
which the surface of the planet is coded, and their playful
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COLLAPSE VI
constructions explore the peculiar gramm atologies that

emerge once this stenography between the geographical
and the symbolic is in place; its disorientations highlighting
the faith we place in our mediated figure of the world, often
mistaking the map for the territory.
CHARLES AVERY's work returns to what has long been a
favourite geographical trope for philosophy. At a certain point
in his practice, Avery decided to locate all of his future work
within an imaginary I sland, whose locations, inhabitants
and culture he continues to render beautifully in a variety
of media - including text, as in the enigmatic travelogue
The Islanders: An Introduction,9 an 'epilogue' to which Avery
contributes to this volume. In COLLAPSE V one of Avery's
maps accompanied cosmologist Milan CirkoviC's discussion
of the 'archipelago of habitability'.10 Setting out from this
pairing, ROBIN MAcKAY's prefatory essay to our presenta
tion of Avery's work seeks to locate the latter as a possible
contemporary successor to a rich history of 'Philosophers'
Islands'. As Mackay remarks, the nature of Avery's project
demands that 'the work' and its significance be sought, not
in any one of the exquisite pieces exhibited by Avery, but
in the Island 'itselr - the (unfinished) structural whole that
will bind them together.
Our volume closes with two contributions that in
very different ways address this philosophical obsession
with the island and with the ocean that surrounds it.
GILLES GRELET presents us with a manifesto of refusal:
the task of philosophy as conceived by Althusser and
systematically diagnosed by Fran\:ois Laruelle's 'non-
9. C. Avery, The Islmulers: An Introduction (London: Parasol Unit/Koenig, 2008).
10. M. Cirkovic, 'Sailing the Archipelago', COLLAPSE V, 292-329.
16
philosophy' - as a series of 'decisions' producing trenchant

lines of demarcation that partition the ground of thought
- is rejected. 'Ungrounding' himself by taking to the other,
predominating element of the planet, with a boat as his
'theory-body', Grelet extols theory as 'world-less', indeed
as 'a full-on attack on the world', an angelic thought whose
'crossings' operate without the territorial imperatives of the
'worldly'.
RENEE GREEN's film 'Endless Dreams and Water
Between', originally shown in 2009 as part of an instal
lation at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich,
uses the island and its surroundings as the setting for an
interrogation into the making of thought in-between four
protagonists. Inconclusive, dreamlike and - recalling
Masciandaro's opening contribution - both referential and
peripatetic, Green's film the script of which is presented
,
here, concerns itself with the geophilosophical precipitation

of thought, as four women driven by a curiosity about their
own location and inclinations move toward a speculative
coherence that the work preserves in a state of 'clear-obscu
rity'. The island, a 'non-location' which serves as a naviga
tional point of reference, also allows its inhabitants those
uninterrupted vistas for the imagination that have provided
writers with (sometimes, as in the case of George Sands,
ultimately disappointed) dreams of freedom. As suggested
by Masciandaro, it is by 'staying', by contemplating their
island locations, that Green's protagonists move towards
a collective thinking that expands into the realms of the
abstract only on the basis of their localisation and the
contingency of their respective interests and circumstances.
Like Avery's, Green's work highlights shifting relations
between fiction and fact, physical geography and imaginary
geography, that govern our thinking of the Earth and the
17
COLLAPSE VI
worlds we build upon it. They join the other contributions

to this volume in demonstrating that 'Planet Earth' qua
terrestrial entity or biosphere is but one among those many
inextricable 'wholes'. Even new efforts at reconstructing it
in scientific models are never entirely free from evolutions
and selections of their own, from the contingencies of
history, and from the legacy of its duality in thought as
'object and omnipresence'.
The bringing together of apparently divergent perspec
tives within this volume is, we must as ever insist, not
merely whimsical. It aims to bring into view avenues of
thought which run between them and which may lead to
new spaces outside the rigid boundaries of disciplinarity.
In our introduction, as in previous volumes, we hope to
have indicated some of these; others it will be the reader's
business (and, we hope, pleasure) to trace.
It seems appropriate in closing to reflect briefly on the
coherence, not only of this particular volume, but of the
project as a whole; a coherence which, as is appropriate
for a journal of 'research and development', has slowly
come to light only in the process of working on the series.
Through the creation of these volumes, from the beginning
deliberately and sincerely billed as an 'experiment', has
emerged a curatorial model in which, rather than all of
the contributions to a publication falling within a circum
scribed discipline or subject, a broad theme allows contri
butions from diverse practitioners to form an overlapping
chain or (adopting Tnnothy Morton's term) mesh, whose
intermediate links span otherwise disparate elements.
The hope is that this connectivity should reproduce itself
in the broad audience that COLLAPSE assembles; that the
'forced collaboration' operated within these pages should
18
find its counterpart in a strange collectivity of readers

who, drawn in by one or two contributions appropriate
to their interests, find themselves unexpectedly befriended
by writers and thinkers from entirely different 'mindsets'.
This in tum suggests a model of the concept according to
which the latter resides, not in an hierarchical structure of
progressive generalisation (a structure which reproduces
and is reproduced in institutional specialisation) , but in
transversal connections discovered, or produced, 'in the
making'. Thanks to a growing network of contributors and
readers, each volume brings with it such discoveries, so that
its finished state bears but a faint resemblance to the terms
of its initial conception.
If, in search of this conceptual consistency, we have
traversed the abstractions of mathematics (Volume I ) ,
the emerging paradigms of Speculative Realism (Volumes
II and III) , the legacy ofDeleuze (Volume III) , the horrors
of thought and the thinking of horror (Volume IV) and
the Copernican Tum in its many guises (Volume V) ,
only to come back 'down to Earth', it is an Earth which
we no longer fully recognise, and which continues to offer
numerous challenges - by turns urgent, melancholy, and
twisted - to the thought it has given birth to.
We would like to conclude by thanking all of our
contributors for their work and their patience in collabo
rating on this volume, and to our readers for their continued
enthusiasm for this process of 'research and development'.
Robin Mackay,
Falmouth,January 2 010.
19
ig. I. Martin Behaim's Erdapfel
COLLAPSE VI
Becoming Spice:
Commentary as Geophilosophy
Nicola Masciandaro
The overnum is the meaning ef the earth [...] Once the sacrilege again.st
God was the greoiest sacrilege, but God died, and then all, these desecraJors
died. .Now to desecroie the earth is the most terrible thing, and to esteem
the bowels ef the uefatlwmahk higher than the meaning ef the earth.
Friedrich Nietzsche'
I don't !mow ff you were fiighJened, but I aJ any role was faghtened
when I saw pictures crmzingftrmz the moon to the earth. [...] Only a god
can sa:ve us.
Martin Heidegger2
.No knower ne<:essarily stands so dose to the verge eferror aJ every mmnent
as the one who philosophizes.
Martin Heidegger3
1. F. Nietzsche, Thus Spol<e Zarathmtra, trans. A. Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2006) , 'Zarathustra's Prologue,' 6.
2. M. Heidegger, "'Only a God Can Save Us": Der Spiegefs Interview with Martin
Heidegger (1966) ,' trans . M. P. Alter andJ D. Caputo, in The Heideggr;r Cuntrouersy: A
Critical Reader, ed. R. Wolin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993 ) . 105-7.
3 . M. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts efMetaplrysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans.
W. McNeill and N. Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995) , 19.
21
COLLAPSE VI
Manki:ruis movement through deep space placed a uni,q_ue stamp on

religi,on dunng the one hundred and ten centuries that preceded the
Butlerian Jihad. [ . . .J Immediately space gave a djfferentflavor and sense
to ideas ef Creation [ . ..J All through relig;Wn, the.feeling ef the sacred was
touched by anarchyftom the outer dark.
Frank Herbert4
Perhaps only a language in which the pure prose efphilosophy would

intervene at a certain point to break apart the verse efthe poetic word, and
in which the verse efpoetry would intervene to bend the prose efphilosophy
into a nng, would be the true human language.
Giorgio Agamben 5
T# are allured by thefragrance ef it.

Nicholas of Prato, letter to Nicholas Trevet, praismg his
commentary on Boethius's Gmsolation efPhilosophy6
T# are the heretics, apostates,false messiahs, deserters, non-believers, and

nihilists, who immediately realise lye outside the law on the body ef the
earth.
Benjainin Noys7
They took the body ef]esus, and bound it in linen doths with the spices.
John 19:40
4. F. Herbert, Dune (New York: Ace Books, 198), 501.
5. G. Agamben, Language and Death, trans. K. E. Pinkhaus with M. Hardt

(Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 78
6. 'Huius rei odore sumus allecti,' cited from R. J. Dean, 'Cultural Relations in the
Middle Ages: Nicholas Trevet and Nicholas of Prato,' Studies in Philology 45 (1 948) ,
550n16.
7. B. Noys, 'Anarchy-Without-Anarchism', at http://www.sans-philosophie.net.
22
Masciandaro - Becoming-Spice
I. PREAMBLE
The twenty-sixth canto of Dante's lefemo voyages via

the figure of Ulysses into the folly of philosophical flight.
'e volta nostra poppa nel mattino, I de' remi facemmo
ali al folle volo' (26.124-5) [and turning our stem to the
morning, we made our oars wings for the mad Hight].8
The deeper sense of the image is that oars are not wings,
that such epistemological search, for what Ulysses calls
'l'esperienza [...] del mondo sanza gente' (26.116-7) , is
fatally, merely earthbound. Ulysses's pursuit of 'virtute
e canoscenza' (26.120) [virtue and knowledge] beyond
the Pillars of Hercules ends in shipwreck within sight of
the mountain Dante passes on his way beyond the stars:
'de la terra nova un turbo nacque I e percosse del legno il
primo canto' (26.137-8) [from the new land a whirlwind
8. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Cmnedy, ed. C. S. Singleton (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1973) .
23
COLLAPSE VI
rose and struck the forepart of the ship]. As accentuated by

canto (prow) , homonym with Dante's song-meaning word
for the units of his poem, what is crucially at stake here
is the boundary between philosophic and poetic modes
of knowledge, the very boundary Dante's visionary text
would overcome.9 Ulysses's fate, recalled at the end of
Purgatorio ' s first canto ('Venimmo poi in sul lito deserto, I
che mai non vide navicar sue acque I omo, che di tornar sia
poscia esperto' (130-2) [we came on to the desert shore, that
never saw any man navigate its waters who afterwards had
experience of return]) , also mirrors the opening impasse of
the Commedia, whereDante is turned back from direct ascent
of 'il dilettoso monte I ch'e principio e cagion di tutta gioia'
(Ieferno 1.77-8) [the delectable mountain, the source and
cause of every happiness]. As commentators have noted,
Ulysses's unidirectional demise refracts the abandoned
prosimetric project of Dante's Convivio, which sets sail
under the Aristotelian banner of knowledge=happiness.10
The so-brief rejoicing of Ulysses and his men thus figures
the impermanence and impropriety of such an easy
equation, the impossibility of realising its truth by any
straight path. The way to real knowledge passes through
9. 'convicn saltar lo sacrato poema, I come chi trova suo cammin riciso [ ... ]. non e
pareggio da picciola barca I quel che fendendo va l'ardita prora, I ne da nocchier ch' a
se medesimo parca' (Paradiso 23.62-9) [the sacred poem must needs make a leap, even
as one who finds his way cut off [ . . . ]. It is no voyage for a little bark, this which my
daring prow cleaves as it goes, nor for a pilot who would spare himself].
10. The Omvivio opens: 'As the Philosopher says at the beginning of the Finl Philosophy,
all men by nature desire to know. The reason for this can be and is that each thing,
impelled by a force provided by its own nature, inclines towards its own perfection.
Since knowledge is the ultimate perfection of our soul, in which resides our ultimate
happiness, we are all therefore by nature subject to a desire for it' (Dante Alighieri,
The Convivio, trans. R. Lansing [New York: Garland, 1 990] , Ll).
24
the undeiworld.11 'Ate convien tenere altro vfaggio' (Jefemo

1.91) [It behooves you to go by another way] . This way
pursues a path that returns, one that begins by entering
the earth.
The geophilosophical significance of Ulysses falle volo,
newly seen from the sphere of the fixed stars with cartographic
clarity as 'ii varco I folle d'Ulisse' (Paradiso 27.82-3) [the mad
track of Ulysses] , lies in its contrast to the chthonic-celes
tial journey that surpasses it. Fleeing the place of human
habitation, Ulysses remains ironically fixed to the earth's
surface. Entering this place, Dante paradoxically reveals the
heavenly beyond within the planet. The former movement
is geometrically linear and terminal, the proper projection
of the hero's finite concept of life as 'questa tanto picciola
vigilia I d'i nostri sensi' (Iefemo 26.114-5) [this so brief vigil
of our senses] . The latter movement is geometrically circular
and endless, the mode of the poet's impossible, always
already entering into eternity.12 The former is terrestrial
and territorializing.13 The latter is spherical and peripatetic.
1 1 . 'The distance that separates Ulysses' point of shipwreck from the pilgrim's
survival, or, for that matter, the Convivio from the Purgatono, is measured by the
descent into hell. This is literally true, according to the geography of the poem, and
figuratively true as well, as the descent into the self, intra nas, is the prerequisite for the
kind of transcendent knowledge that all men desire' a. Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of
Conversian [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1 988], 146) .
12. 'A l'alta fantasia qui manco possa; I ma gia volgeva ii mio disio e 'l velle, I si come
rota ch'igualmente e mossa, / l'amor che move ii sole e l'altre Stelle' (Paradiso 3 3 . 1 42-
5) [Here power failed the lofty phantasy; but already my desire and my will were
revolved, like a wheel that is evenly moved, by the Love which moves the sun and
the other stars].
13. As indicated by the opening of Canto 26 of Inferno, which prefigures the terms
of Ulysses's flight: 'Godi, Fiorenza, poi che se' si grande I che per mare e per terra
batti l'ali, I e per lo 'nferno tuo nome si spande! (1-3) [Rejoice, 0 F1orence, since you
are so great that over sea and land you beat your wings, and your name is spread
through Hell!]
25
COLLAPSE VI
Yet there is continuity between the two, an umbral link that

repeatedly foregrounds the latter as the realisation of the
former.14 Shadowing himself with Ulysses, Dante illuminates
the geophilosophical trajectory of his journey. In particular,
he uses Ulysses to reflect upon the coming-to-be of the
CommedW out of and after the unfinished auto-commen
tarial project that precedes it. Dante's epic originates at the
crossing of a threshold or crux defined by the intersection
of the boundaries between poetry and philosophy, text
and commentary, authorship and exegesis. These are the
generic 'Pillars of Hercules' he crosses to become the 'first
modem author' and anomalous object of an immediate
commentary tradition.15 The ongoing moment or engine
of this becoming, the Ulysses-passing 'navicella del mio
ingegno' (Purgatono 1.2) Oittle bark of my genius] whereby
Dante overleaps his own autoexegetical impasse, is the
CommedW's originary digression within the dark wood,16 the
pilgrim's turning back from direct philosophic ascent and
admission into a subterranean path.
14. As Singleton explains in his commentary on Paradiso 27.823, the poet's

recollections of Ulysses coincide with threshold moments : 'the wayfaring Dante and
the souls of those who pass Purgatory both complete successfully a fording which is
denied Ulysses. And now, as the pilgrim is about to cross over from "the human to
the divine, from time to eternity" (Par. XXXI , 378) , his last glance earthwards takes
in the "mad crossing" of Ulysses : again he stands on a "shore" that will forever be
denied to the ancient hero.'
15. See D. Parker, 'Interpreting the Commentary Tradition to the Comedy,' in Dante:
Contemporary Perspectives, ed. A A Iannucci (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1997) ,
240-58; A R. Ascoli, 'Auto-commentary: Dividing Dante,' chapter 4 of Dante and the
Making'![A Modern Author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) , 175 226.
16. 'Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita I mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, I che
la diritta via era smarrita' (Infmw 1 . 1 3) [Midway in the journey of our life I found
myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost] .
26
I take this moment, which corresponds more precisely

to the duration between the pilgrim's being turned back
by the l011:l.a (panther or leopard) and his meeting with his
poet-guide Virgil (Ieferrw 1.31-60) , as an invitation to think
commentary's geophilosophical dimension, its constituting
the Jann of philosophy's belonging to the earth. The
question of this form is not only a problem of style and
representation. The problem, as Dante's dramatisation of
it reveals, concerns the very how of thought as a necessary
relation between its content and its experience.17 To succeed
philosophically, to indeed arrive at and produce its truth,
thought must realise or render actual its own absoluteness,
the 'identity of identity and difference' with respect to itself.
T hought must become the body it belongs to, a self-moving
vehicle that carries its subject with it.18 This imperative
is beautifully presented in the problemic movement of the
Dantean pilgrim who neither ascends above nor enters
the earth, whose lower foot is always the firmer ("l pie
fermo sempre era 'l piu basso; 1.30) , and who is repeatedly
turned back ('i' fui per ritornar piu volte volto; 1.36) .
17. A problem to which commentary in particular speaks : 'Western culture could

be characterized as being irreparably driven between Halacha and Aggada, between
shari'at and haqiqa between subject matter and truth content. Any healing between
these terms has become impossible (this, incidentally, is evident in the loss of the
commentary and the gloss as creative forms) - at least since the demise of the
medieval theory of the four meanings of writing. (Ibis theory has nothing to do
with the gratuitous exercise of four successive and distinct interpretations of a text;
rather, it takes place among them, in the living relations/Up between subject matter and
truth content' (G. Agamben, Infancy aru1 History: The Destruction ef &perience , trans.
L. Heron (London: Verso, 1993] , 160, my emphasis) .
1 8. Cf. Augustine's description of the way of arrival as what joins seeing and
dwelling: 'discernerem atque distinguerem, quid interesset [ . . . ] inter videntes, quo
eundum sit, nee videntes, qua, et viam ducentem ad beatificam patriam, non tantum
cernendam sed habitandam' (Cotfossions [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1950], 7.20) [I could discern and distinguish what difference there was between [. . . ]
those seeing where to go but not seeing how, and those seeing the way leading to the
blessed homeland, which is not only to be discerned, but dwelt in] .
27
COLLAPSE VI
Such a turning and circling motion which passes inside

and across the philosophy/poetry boundary is exemplary
of the commentarial impulse, an impulse which paradoxi
cally proceeds by staying. Understood in these terms, the
pilgrim's impasse, whereby he is caught in a motion that
keeps him to the earth, is not simply the problem which
the salvific production of the Cmnmedia resolves, but its
very labour.19 Staying with the earth is the means of not
remaining stuck on it, just as a boulderer proceeds by
tenaciously experiencing the problem, staying within the
encounter of the crux and passing through its difficulty
(ex-per-ientia, 'coming out of and going through') . On this
model, the geophilosopher is one who philosophicall y
experiences rather than flees the earth, who passes through
by remaining with it. Geophilosophical experience entails
facing, more and more deeply, the fact of earth as the place
of philosophy, and more profoundly, experiencing earth as
facticity itself, the site of thought's passage to the absolute.20
Commentary, the space of deictic and anagogic under
standing, encodes this experience in the form of spice. As
spice is a foundational term of terrestrial exp loration, so
commentary is the form of our geophilosophical becoming
spice, the practice whereby thought enters the earth and
makes itself aromatic, that is, achieves the nature of a
1 9 . The circular form of this productive impasse is elaborated in the pilgrim's later
disclosure of the cord with he had hoped to capture the /mza: 'Io avea una corda
intorno cinta, I e con essa pensai alcuna volta prender la lonza a la pelle dipinta' (Inferrw
16.106-8) [I had a cord girt round me, and with it I once thought to take the gay
skinned leopard]. The cord is figurally associated with dialectic. See F. Masciandaro,
'La corda di Gerione e la cintura-scrpente della Dialecttica,' La cmwscenza viva: Letture
fi:nomenowgi.che da Danie a Machiavelli (Ravenna: Longo, 1 998) , 45-54.
20. 'We now know the location of the narrow passage through which thought is able
to exit from itself - it is through facticity, and through facticity alone, that we are able
to make our way towards the absolute' (Q Meillassoux, A.fier Finitude: An EsJay on the
NeceJJity ofConlingency, trans. R. Brassier [London: Continuum, 2008], 63) .
28
panther: 'Tiiis is an animal that is said to be parti-coloured,

indeed colourful, and is extremely beautiful [speczOstSsz1num]
and gentle. [. . . ] W hen it eats and is thus satiated, it hides in
its cave and sleeps. But after three days it rises from sleep,
and emits a great roar, and from its mouth comes forth a
very sweet odour like all spices.' 21
A more literal image of geophilosophic implication
between commentary and spice is provided by Martin
Behaim's annotated globe (Fig. 1) , made in 1492 on the
eve of the great European voyages of discovery. The
globe presents the superimposition of two geometries:
one, of commentary, a global ancient genre, as a kind of
writing that in its very form seeks to sphericise a text, to
surround it on all sides; the other, of spice, the original
global commodity, as a kind of writing on the earth, a
movement that marks and remarks relational networks.
Next to the Spice Islands, Behaim provides a lengthy gloss
detailing how 'spices pass through several hands in the
islands of oriental India before they reach our country' that
concludes as follows: 'Twelfthly, those who use the spices
buy them of the retail dealers, and let the high customs
duties profits be borne in mind which are levied twelve
2 1 . W. B. Clark, A Medieval Book efBeasts: The Second-Family BeJtiary: Commentary, Art,

Text and Tramlation (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2006) , 123. Given Dante's
emphasis on the beauty of the loma, this is very likely the animal he has in mind,
although the determination of its species 'seems next to impossible' (R. T. Holbrook,
D011le and the Animal Kingdom [New York: Columbia University Press, 1 902], 95) and is
'another of the Comecly's little mysteries likely to remain unsolved' (Robert Hollander,
commentary on Iefmw 1 .32-54, Dartmouth Dante Project <http://dante.dartmouth.
edu>) . More importantly, Dante's /mu.a is thus itself both figure and instance of the
production of commentary's perfect object, something that generates unending
commentary via the fact that it cannot be said or explained, only shown or indicated.
Fulfilling the relation to Jpice, such an object is Jpeciol: 'The JpecieJ of each thing is its
visibility, that is, its pure intelligibility. A being is special it if coincides with its own
becoming visible, with its own revelation' (G. Agarnben, Profamtiun.s, trans. ]. Fort
[New York: lime, 2007] , 57) .
29
COLLAPSE VI
times upon the spices, the former amounting on each

occasion to one pound out of every ten. From this it is to
be understood that very great quantities must grow in the
East and it need not be wondered that they are worth with
us as much as gold.'22 As the product of these geometries,
the comment demonstrates interpretation as commerce, a
laborious extraction of significance across time and space
whose very process generates the value it apparently only
translates, and exposes the inescapable spatiality and
topology of understanding, the matrices of distance and
desire that make for the pro-duction of meaning, its being
brought into presence. It brings to mind the enigmatic
lines, interpreted by Francis Bacon as prophesying the
age of discovery and made to comment on the image of
a ship passing the Pill ars of Hercules in the frontispiece to
his Novum Organum (1620) : 'But you, Daniel, shut up the
words, and seal the book, until the time of the end. Many
shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase' (Daniel
12:4) .23 These may be read, phenomenologically rather
than factually, as figuring exactly the earthly restlessness of
understanding, its interpretive movement around that draws
forth from what cannot be penetrated. Between the sealing
of the text and the increase of knowledge is established the
22. Cited from L. Jardine, W(Jl"/dly Goods: A .New History of the Renaissam:e (London:
Macmillan, 1997) , 296-8. On Martin Behaim's understanding of the spice trade, see
P. Freedman, Out of the East: spices and the Medieval hnagina!Wn (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2008) . 14 1-2.
23. 'And this proficience in navigation and discoveries may plant also an expectation
of the further proficience and augmc.ntation of all sciences; because it may seem they
are ordained by God to be coevals, that is, to meet in one age. For so the prophet
Daniel speaking of the latter times fortelleth, "Plurimi pertransibunt, et multiplex
erit scientia' : as if the openness and through passage of the world and the increase of
knowledge were appointed to be in the same ages' (Francis Bacon, The Advancement
ofLearning, 2. 10, cited from Francis Bacon: The Major Ufirks, ed. B. Vickers [Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002], 1 84) .
30
sur:fa,ce over which understanding moves, a surface that is

planetary, in the sense of enclosing what it contains. 1bis is
in an essential way the movement of philosophy, or rather
philosophy itself as movement, 'the urge; in Novalis's
optimal topological definition, 'to be at home everywhere.' 24
For the practice of this restless urge also moves as over the
surface of a whole, as if movement itse!f would be relocaied and
made the omnipresent term of equation between anywhere
and everywhere. Such an equation is present in Heidegger's
call to 'practice planetary thinking along a stretch of the
road, be it ever so short; which locates the global in a
local path, the universality of thinking in the grounded
practice (figural and/or literal) of walking where one is.25
The movement of philosophy is thus not the means to, but
precisely a freedom from destination, a peri-patos or around
walking that realises itself as processual and gerundive.
'Philosophy is philosophizing.' 2 6
Tracing the movement of philosophy in these terms,
as grounded in a movement of being that is unmistakably
earthly and planetary, intersects with two essential features
of commentary and geophilosophy that my exploration
will pay particular attention to: digression and immanence,
respectively.Digression belongs to commentary with respect
to its 'go-and-stop' structure, its pausing of the text so as to
24. Novalis, Philosophical mitings, trans. M. M. Stoljar (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1997) , 45.
25. M. Heidegger, The O!feJl:Um <f Being, trans. J. T. Wtlde and W. Kluback (New
Haven: College & University Press, 1 958) , 107. On walking and philosophy, see D.
Macauley, 'Walking the Elemental Earth: Phenomenological and Literary Footnotes,'
in Pa.sJiom <f the F.arth in Human F.xi.<tence, Creativity and Literature, Analecta HUJJerliana
71, ed. A.T. Tymieniecka (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 200 1 ) , 15-3 1 ; and
R. Solnit, 'The Mind at Three Miles an Hour,' Chapter 2 of Wander/mt: A Hi.<tory <f
Walking (New York: Penguin, 200 1 ) , 14-29.
26. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts <fMetaphyJic.s, 4.
31
COLLAPSE VI
move tangentially from it in any direction, but never so far

or long as to prevent or forget returning.27 The place of
digression is the margin, the space into which commentary
moves simultaneously away from, toward, more deeply
into, and far beyond its text. The digression of commentary
is not aimless or arbitrary, not merely wayward or adjacent.
It is rather a wandering at once in and against the gravity of
its return, like hunting or gathering alongthe way. Immanence
belongs to geophilosophy, in all of its permutations and
senses, as philosophy oriented to Earth, this earth, as the
here-and-now place of its origin and space of its truth or
realisation. Geophilosophy, above all via Nietzsche and
Deleuze and Guattari, who established the term in the
former ('Nietszche founded geophilosophy') , embraces the
experiential, phenomenological fact of the absence of a tran
scendental outside and the rootedness of thinking in earth.
'There is no outside! ' says Zarathustra, and the animals
reply, 'In every Instant being begins; round every Here
rolls the ball. There. The middle is everywhere. Crooked
is the path of eternity!28 'Thinking is neither a line drawn
between subject and object nor a revolving of one around
27. 'Between the seemingly unavoidable and somehow joyful drive of commentary
toward copia and commentators' obligations to show that their work is task oriented
[ . . . ] between an aesthetics of exuberance and an aesthetics of streamlined reader
functionality, commentators tend to develop a specific rhythm that one could
perhaps characterize as "go-and-stop". On the one hand, they certainly want the user
to appreciate the copia of the knowledge offered, but on the other hand, they hardly
ever forget to insist on the rigorous functionality of their commentary, as if they
anticipated protests of readers who would get lost in the meandering cross-references
of the text on the margin.' (H. U Gumbrecht, The Fbwers of Philolorg: Dynamics of
Textual Scholarship [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003], 45) .
28. Nietzsche, Thus spoke ,Za:rathustra, 'The Convalescent', 175. Cf. 'Nietzsche
performs on the metaphorical level what Hegel attempts on the systematic one: the
centralization of the earth, its relocation in the middle of the universe making the
sun a satellite of our planet, the final withdrawal of the Copernican Revolution' (S.
Giinzel, 'Nietzsche's Geophilosophy,' Journal ofNietzsche Studies 25 [2003] : 82) .
32
the other. Rather, thinking takes place in the relationship

of territory and earth,' say Deleuze and Guattari.29 Or, as
Diane Chisholm explicates, 'The prefix geo does not signify
a specialized branch of philosophy; it signals, rather, the
topos, or the rww here, of philosophical inquiry in place of a
transcendental metaphysics that believes itself above being
placeable, abstractly nowhere and universally everywhere.'30
Geophilosophy's characteristic discursive ambivalence or
confusion regarding the distinction between the literal earth
and earth-as-metaphor, encap sulated in its Nietzschean
phrasal cornerstone 'the meaning of the earth' [Sinn der
Erde] and erroneously dissected by academic commentary,
is part and parcel of its investment in immanence. The
earth is the present object par excellence that can never
be approached from distinctions between metaphorical
and literal, figure and ground. Earth is so deeply present
that its meaning is always falling back into earth 'itself.'
Earth is 'too much with us,' as Wordsworth says of 'the
world,' the sa.eculum of human work and worry, longing for
a proportional belonging to the earth that world occludes.
But it is exactly the combination of the earth's phenomenal
unboundedness as object and omnipresence as fact that
constitutes its inevitable diurnal occlusion, its constantly
being forgotten via its very presence. So Heidegger grasps
earth by defining it as dosed and dosing on itself: 'The earth
appears openly cleared as itself only when it is perceived
and preserved as that which is by nature undisdosable, that
which shrinks from every disclosure and constantly keeps
itself dosed up [ . . . ] The earth is essentially self-secluding.
29. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, What is Phz1osophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and G.
Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) , 85.
30. D. Chisholm, 'Rhizome, Ecology, Geophilosophy (A Map to this Issue) ,' Rhi:J.omes
1 5 (2007) : 4, at http://www.rhizomes.net/issuel5/chisholm.html.
33
COLLAPSE VI
To set forth the earth means to bring it into the Open as

the self-secluding.'31 Earthly immanence (from n manere, to
remain within) is the remaining- within-itself whereby earth
always remains within, is immanent to, world, the mode of
its being that makes it always here. Earthly immanence is
thus the counterpart of the presence of space, as that which
everything always remains within. Earth is proportional to
space, the chthonic to the khoral, which always remains
without: 'And there is a third nature, which is space [chOra]
and is eternal, and admits not of destruction and provides
a home for all created things, and is apprehended when
all sense is absent, by a kind of spurious reason, and is
hardly real - which we, beholding as in a dream, say of
all existence that it must of necessity be in some place and
occupy a space.'32 In short, space is to the sky as earth is
to the ground. Earth and space are the twin dimensions
where the boundary between the topological and the spatial
totally breaks down. In one direction, space, embodied in
the sky, gives way to absolute place, Plato's imperceptible
container where everything must be. In another direction,
place, embodied in the ground, gives way to absolute space,
the abyss whose bowels Nietzsche esteems. I n the neigh
bourhood of their mutual extremity, each becomes the
other. And in the region of their most proximate differen
tiation, there is world (ground-sky) , the mutually disclosing
relation of earth and space that Heidegger calls the Open
and feared technology to be closing.33
3 1 . M. Heidegger, 'The Origin of the Work of Art,' in RJetry, Language, Thought, trans.
A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971 ) , 47.
32. The Collected Dialogues of Plato, eds. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1 963) , Timm:u.s 52b, 1 178-9 .
33. Keith Tester comments on Heidegger's fear upon seeing photos from the moon:
'The photographs implied a containment of the meanings of the earth even as
they also implied a freedom of humanity [ ... ] from their natural home. But in that
34
Commentary is geophilosophical in the sense of being

a movement that produces the immanence of the earth
both formally and actually. Formally, commentary makes
of a text, its earth, an arbis, a round world, by bringing text
into the space around it. A dwelling in and on the text,
commentary accords with Heidegger's explication of work
as a dialectic of earth and world: 'Upon the earth and in it,
historical man grounds his dwelling in the world. In setting
up a world, the work sets forth the earth [... ]. The work
moves the earth itself into the Open of a world and keeps
it there. The work lets the earth be an earth}34 Commentary
likewise does not break its text, but preserves its integrity,
shaping itself to it even in the midst of digging through it
interlinearly and dwarfing, dominating it circumferentially.
Something of the phenomenal earthiness of this complex
relation is captured by our tendency to speak both of
footnotes as mines and of mnz"ng footnotes. Commentary
lets the text be a text and furthermore brings it into the
open as self-secluding in the sense of presenting itself, not as
some transparent medium for seeing behind or underneath
it, but as farther text. 'What [...] hermeneutic topologies
of the below and the behind share,' says Gumbrecht, 'is a
categorical - not to say dramatic - distinction between a
level of primary perception and an always 'hidden' level of
meaning and intentionality [...] In contrast, commentaries
do not aim at a level 'below,' 'behind,' or even 'beyond' the
textual surface, but commentators nevertheless do not see
texts 'from above' or from that famous 'distance' that we so
contaillment, the photographs also made the earth a problem to be dealt with; an
opportunity to be exploited, a standing reserve waiting for animation by the designs
and desires of humanity through technology' (The Inhuman Condition [London:
Routledge, 1995], 3 ) .
3 4 . Heidegger, 'The Origin o f the Work o f Art ,' 46.
35
COLLAPSE VI
readily associate with objectivity. We expect commentaries

[. . . ] rather to be " lateral" in relation to their texts of reference,
and we want commentators to position themselves in
" contiguity" not so much with an author but with the text
in question. It is this contiguity between the commentator's
text and the text on which to comment that explains why
the material form of the commentary depends on and has
to adapt to the material form of the commented-on text.'35
Yet, it is absolutely necessary to add (else the deep dialectUa/,
relation between text and commentary might be lost) , that
commentary's topological contiguity with its text does not
delimit its interpretive, archaeological function, but rather
institutes it as realised and to-be-realised in the text itself
and our being before it. In other words, commentary is an
immanent geo-graphy, an inscriptional earth-writing that
continuously asserts by its very movement that its truth
belongs here in the most palpable and factical sense, that it
is written into the place of reader and text, as exemplified by
the formal continuities between glossing and graffiti. This
more complex relation between commentary and text,
the movement, neither orthodox nor subversive, whereby
commentary keeps to and maintains the surface of its text
by perforating it, is present within Reza Negarestani's
concept of Hidden Writings: 'Hidden Writing produces [. . . ]
positive disintegration, or more accurately collectivization
of one author (voice) or an authorial elite, and its trans
formation to an untraceable shady collective of writers, a
crowd [. . . ] So-called hermeneutic rigor follows the logic of
textual stratification, and can be achieved by hermeneutical
tools corresponding to the layering order of its text. But the
subsurface life of Hidden Writing is not the object of layers
35. Gumbrecht, The !Vwers ofPhilology, 43-4.
36
and interpretation; it can only be exhumed by distorting

the structure of the book or the surface plot [. . . ] To interact
with Hidden Writings, one must persistently continue
and contribute to the writing process of the book.'3 6
Commentary constitutes a structure of understanding and
experience, i. e. consciousness, that opens world to earth. It
is writing' s way of staying original, in ever-new nearness to
its earthly origins, in productive proximity to the fact that
all writing is only on the earth. The telos of commentary, its
far-off end, is tellus, what bears us. 'Turn it and turn it again
for everything is in it; and contemplate it and grow gray
and old over it and stir not from it' (Aboth 5 . 22) . W hat the
Talmudic commentator here says of the Torah is sayable of
the earth.37
Understanding commentary as geophilosophy, then, will
involve understanding the relation between digression and
immanence, as when two people, walking in conversation,
stop walking and face each other. Or as when the Phoenix,
in order to re-become itself, departs from her home, the
blissful enclosure of Paradise, and seeks 'hunc orbem, mors
ubi regna tenet' [this circular world where death rules].3 8
36. R. Negarestani, Cyclurwpedia: Complicity with Ananyrrwu.s Materials (Melbourne:

Re.Press, 2008) , 62.
37. Richard A. Cohen similarly identifies the 'concrete and productive integrity of
spirit and matter' as a chief characteristic of (Levinasian) exegesis : 'Letters give rise
to spirit, call for commentary, and spirit is rooted in letters, in a textual richness that
is one of the marks of sacred literature, or literature taken in a sacred sense [ . . . ). To fly
with a text, to be inspired by it and discover its inspiration, requires not that one have
wings, that one hover above it. Rather, it requires that one's feet be firmly planted on
the earth, in touch with the concrete, never losing sight of a properly human dignity'
(Ethics, Exegesis and Philosapky: lnierpretatUm 4fter Levinas [West Nyack, NY: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), 247) .
38. Lactantius, De Ave Phoenice, ed. M. C. FitzPatrick. (Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvania, 1933) , line 64.
37
COLLAPSE VI
Here she encloses herself in a nest of spices, bums in her

own flame, and is reborn. On the way back home, she
carries in her claws the remains of her own body, mixed
with balsam, myrrh, and Sabean frankincense, which she
'in formam conglobat ore pio' [forms with loving mouth
into a globe) .39
II. THE SPICE MUST FLOW
That spice has in fact been used to conceptualise

commentary exemplifies one of its essential functions:
to confound distinctions between utility and pleasure,
necessity and luxury, food and flavor, literal and figural.
In the Talmudic tractacte Masekhet Sefen1n, which deals
with regulations concerning the preparation and study
of the holy books, it is stated, 'The Torah is like salt,
the Mishnah like pepper, the Gemara like spices.
39. Lactantius, De Ave Phoe11ice, line 120.
38
Masciandaro - Becoming-Sp ice
The world cannot exist without salt, without pepp er, or

without spices. So also the world cannot exist without the
Scriptures, and the Mishna, and the Gemara' (15.8) . The
evident purpose of the comparison is to articulate simul
taneously the shared absolute necessity of all three texts
and the sup erior value of the commentaries, in keeping
with a reverence expressed more extremely elsewhere in
the Talmud: 'He who only occupies himself with the study
of the Torah is as if he had no God' ('Abodah Zarah 17 b) .
Logically, the comparison produces a kind of ambivalence
without-ambivalence with regard to their relative values, so
that the Gemara (commentaries on the Mishna, the written
oral Law which, by a p roportional logic, both exp ounds
and is esteemed as equiprimordial with the Torah) , are
identified as more valuable than the value that grounds
them. Commentary-as-spice is not merely an authorita
tive supp lement to revealed scripture, not a condiment,
but something that actually holds the essence of revelation
as living process. Or as Gershom Scholem exp lains, in
fortuitously tellurian terms: 'The Biblical scholar perceives
revelation not as a unique and clearly delineated occurrence,
but rather as a p henomenon of eternal fruitfulness to be
unearthed and examined [...] Out of the religious tradition
they bring forth something entirely new, something that
itself commands religious dignity: commentary.'40 This
is commentary's ex-uberance, the way it bears forth a
text's unending abundance, the durable newness of its
sempiternal self-difference, the perfect plenitude of its
unfinishing futility, in other words, a text's continuing being,
its staying itself by always being other and more than itself.
40. G. G. Scholem, 'Tradition and Commentary as Religious Categories inJudaism;

in Understmuling Jewirh Theology: Cifl5sical Issues and Modern Perspectives, ed. ]. Neusncr
(New York: Ktav Publishing, 1973 ) , 46-7.
39
COLLAPSE VI
"'Futility." [saysDr. Yueh to LadyJessica] He glanced at her.

"Can you remember your first taste of spice?" "It tasted
like cinnamon." "But never the twice the same," he said.
"It's like life -it presents a different face each time you
take it. [. . . ] And, like life, never to be truly synthesized.'"41
Commentary-as-spice thus upholds commentary as more
text than the text it comments on, in a mysterious manner
than both destroys and leaves intact the commentary/text
distinction. Or, commentary embodies, not simply the
relation of reader to text, but the relation whereby the text
is itself. It is an externalisation of the existential medium
whereby it is what it is, its essence or being. This accords
with a proportional Talmudic passage which makes the
ambivalence-without-ambivalence logic explicit: 'They
who occupy themselves with the Bible [alone] are but of
indifferent merit; with Mishnah, are indeed meritorious,
and are rewarded for it; with Gemara - there can be
nothing more meritorious; yet run always to the Mishnah
more than to the Gemara' (Baba Mezia 33a) . In other
words, commentary materialises the movement, the flow
of the text that makes it more than itself. And this more,
this thing that is not a thing that makes all the difference,
is spice. Commentary belongs to its text paradoxically as
a property at once incommensurable and identical with its
substance. In the graded terms of the comparison, such
paradox is held within the aspecificity of the category of
spice, the way it is both genus and species, such that spice
simultaneously includes, exceeds, and is one of several
among salt and pepper. With regard to spice's mixed
resonances with the dimensions of pleasure and value, the
metaphor may be understood as signaling that commentary
is luxury as the perfection of necessity, the fruition of an
4 1 . Frank Herbert, Dune, 64.
40
essential textual value, or that commentary embodies

the value of the value of the text, the earthly sublime or
beyond within the text that makes it meaningful in the first
place. Accordingly, talmudist Rabbi Hanina claimed that
'were the Torah, God forbid, to be forgotten in Israel, I
would restore it by means of my dialectical arguments
fpilpulz] ' (Baha Metzia, 8 5 b) .42 Wondrously, pilpul registers
at once with round movement, hermeneutic dialectics,
and spice. Jeffrey Rubenstein explains: 'Although literally
meaning " tum from side to side", hence " search, examine,
investigate", pilpul was derived by the Bavli from " pepper"
(pilpel) and refers to intellectual sharpness and acumen.
The term seems to be applied to a range of activity, including
reasoning, interpreting and discussion, and need not always
refer to sharpness in dialectics per se.'43 Pilpu glossed by
Daniel Boyarin as the dialectical 'logic of commentary,' thus
denotes the very rrwvement of commentary's becoming, the
roundabout way it enters into vital relation with the text as
its own event.44 'Suspending time and space,' says Sander
Gilman, ' fpilpu confronts the opinions of all authority,
seeking the moment of resolution hidden within seemingly
contradictory positions.'45
The place of commentary is the space of spice. The
sense of this is fulfill ed by understanding spice as flow,
42. Cited from Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, The Culture ofthe Babylonian Talmud (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 48.
43. Rubenstein, The Culture ofthe Babylonian Talmud, 48. Similarly, Gematria (fr. Greek
geomctria) , the numerological interpretation of Hebrew words, is called the 'spice of
Torah.' See Gutman G. Locks, The Spice of Torah - Gematria (New York:Judaica Press,
1 985).
44. Daniel Boyarin, 'Pilpul: The Logic of Commentary,' Dor le-dor 3 ( 1986) , 25.
45. Sander L. Gilman, Jewish &I/Hatred: Anii-&mitism and the Hidden Language of the
Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1 986) , 90
41
COLLAPSE VI
currency, a travelling thing that does not leave its site of

origin, something whose aromatic ability to permeate what
is proximate to it, to have always already permeated it,
marks it as not a thing at all, something not bounded by time
and space. Spice as the figure of commentary's hermeneutic
location of meaning as a center, the turning movement that
reveals and re-reveals a text's heart, also coordinates with
the identification of spices with Eden as the mythic, lost,
metaphysical center of the world. As Milton writes of
Satan's approach to Eden, 'now gentle gales I Fanning their
odiferous wings dispense I Native perfumes, and whisper
whence they stole I Those balmy spoils' (Parrulise Lost,
4. 15 6-9) . Just as the alar movement of these lines destroys
the distinction between breeze and scent, so not only spice's
aroma but spice itself is what it is ef. Spice is the substance
of the topologUal fillin g of space, a fundamentally spherical
phenomenon whose pluridimensionality defines it as the
olfactory analogue to the ancient definition of God as a
sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference
nowhere. Accordingly, when a thirteenth-century Beguine
named Sybil sought to demonstrate to her community
the fact of her conversations with angels, she strewed, or
more properly glossed, her house with spices.46 And in the
,(ohar, the height of mystical vision, which intersects with
the cabalist's intercourse with his wife on the midnight of
the Sabbath, 'the point in time outside of time when God,
attracted by their devotion, likes to visit them,' happens
through the saturating medium of spice: 'These souls are
there bathed in the spices of Paradise, and behold all that is
within their capacity to behold.'47
46. See Freedman, Out ofthe East, 84ff.
47. P. Beitchman, Alchemy ofthe Word: Cabala ofthe Renaissance (Albany: State University
42
Commentary-as-spice shows commentary as the savour

of the significance of text, the actual phenomenal third thing
between reader and text, subject and object, that exceeds
both in a manner correlative to Aristotle's definition of
tragedy as mimesis in 'spiced language' [hedusmen8i logoz]
(Poetics, 1449b25) - a definition which follows not condi
ment-logic but the ancient understanding of spice as the
very potential of the edible: 'For when salts and seasonings
[hedusmata] generally are combined with a food; says
Alexander of Aphrodisias in his commentary on Aristotle's
Meteorology, 'out of both a single thing is created (apoteleitaz} ,
when the food takes on an edible character from the
seasonings.'48 The sense of this notion becomes especially
palpable in the context of commentary on the Song efSongs,
not coincidentally at once the most spiced and the most
of New York Press, 1998), 33; The .<:_ohar, ed. ]. Abelson, trans. M. Simon and H.
Sperling (with P. Levertoff, vols. 3 & 4) , 5 vols. (London and New York: Socino Press,
1 933), III.389. Here citing the latter from the former.
48. Alexander of Aphrodisias, On Aristotle s Meteorology 4, trans. E. Lewis (Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 1 996) , 89. Clarifies : 'hedusmata, which is a metaphor from
cooking (sweeteners, condiments, aromatic herbs, spices) , are usually taken [by
modem commentators] to be non-essential additives to food, while it is precisely
these additives which characterize the art of cooking [. . . ] it is the interpreters of the
Poeti.cs rather than Aristotle who underestimate the importance of condiments to
cooking as much as the significance of music for tragedy [ . . . ]. The proper use of
hedusmata is identified, not only with the art of cooking, but with the civilized way of
eating: without seasoning, foodstuffs like meat and fish arc undesirable and almost as
if they would be eaten raw. This is at least what Hegesandros claims, an author of the
second century BC, who 'in his Commentaries (FHG iv 4 18) says that everybody
is fond of hedusmata, not of meats or fish; and if they are not available nobody is
happy to offer the meat or the fish (alone), nor docs anyone desire the raw and the
unseasoned' (G. M. Sifakis, Aristotle ()ll the Fimction ef Tragic Fbetry [Herakleion: Crete
University Press, 200 1 ] , 56-70) - a human logic that is followed even (and perhaps
especially) when the human is the meal : 'When police searched the kitchen of the
late twentieth-century cannibalJeffrey Dahmer, so the story goes, they found nothing
but the refrigerated flesh of his victims and [ . . . ] condiments; no fruit, vegetables,
cereals or dessert' (T. Morton, The Fbetic; of Spice: Romantic Consumeri;m and the Exotic
[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000] , 3 1 , Morton's ellipsis) .
43
COLLAPSE VI
commented-upon of biblical books . Here, elaborating

upon more universal links between odour and divine
presence, the work of interpreting what spice is becomes
spicy itself, the contemplative activity of commentary a
becoming-spice. Spice, like a textual aroma of the Paradise
which both is and is to come, signifies for the commentator
the highest sense of Scripture, the 'anagoge, foretaste of
heavenly things .'49 The possibility for such loving collusion
between embodied imagination and intellectual experience,
for the interpretation of spice to become a kind of tran
scendental tautology, is captured in Bernard of Clairvaux' s
generous exegetical invitation in a sermon on the Song
of Songs : 'Every person [ . . . ] is free to pursue the thought
and experiences, however sublime and exquisite, that are
his by special insight, on the meaning of the Bridegroom's
ointments .'50 Alan of Lille, remembering the Song of Songs,
defines cinnamon and its theological meaning in one breath:
'Cinnamomum est species aromatica, intema contemplatio'
[cinnamon is an aromatic spice, inward contemplation] .51
That species here still holds a semantic relation to appearance
underscores the overlap. Commentarial contempla
tion, like those pleasurable sensations that happen to us
near other substances, is an aromatic phenomenon. This
phenomenon is realised in the mind's own becoming-spice
or attaining of a quality that is open, expansive, permeating.
49. R. F. Littledale, A Commeniary on the &mg efSongs,fiom Ancient and Medieval Sources
(London: Josesph Masters, 1 869) , 379. 'The spices are anagogical interpretation,
the foretaste of heavenly things' (&mg efSongs, trans. and commentary M. H. Pope,
Anchor Bible, Vol. 7c [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1 977] , 697) .
50. Bernard of Clairvaux, On the &mg ef Songs, trans. K. Walsh, 4 vols (Kalamazoo,
MI: Cistercian Publications, 1983), 22.2.4, vol.2, 16.
51. Alan of Lille, Liher in dist:indionibus dictionum theologicolium, s.v. 'cinnamomum,'

Patrologia Latina, 201 :74 1 , http://pld.chadwyck.com/.
44
AB Hugh of St. Victor explains , whereas meditation is an

'assiduous and shrewd drawing back of thought [ . . . ] [that]
is always about things hidden from our understanding;
contemplation is 'a keen and free observation of the mind
expanding everywhere to look into things [ . . . ] [and] is about
things as mani.fist.'52
Spice is not a figure, but a generational integrity of spirit
and letter, matter and desire, a sensuous reality whose
structure takes the mind that absorbs it beyond itself, a
hermeneutic psychedelic. Commentary, whose etymology
(via commini.sd, to devise, invent) indicates the creativity of
thinking with something, is the inverted, external projection
or manifestation of spice as such an integrity, the material
ization of thinking as a condensation and spreading over a
surface ; or as Deleuze and Guattari say in their chapter on
geophilosophy: 'thinking consists in stretching out a plane
of immanence that absorbs the earth (or rather, 'a.dsorbi
it) .'53 Susan &hbrook Harvey perceives this in commenting
on Gregory of Nyssa's Cornmentary on the Song <f Smigs:
'Gregory's olfactory imagery highlights the limits of noetic
experience [ . . . ] In such instances he seems to rely on what
the body can know through smell in order to capture what
eludes the mind in understanding.'54 And Arthur Green
52. 'Meditatio est assidua et sagax retractatio cogitationis, aliquid, vel involutum
explicare nitens, vel scrutans penetrare occultum. Contemplatio est perspicax, et
liber animi contuitus in res perspiciendas usquequaque diffusus. Inter meditationem
et contemplationem hoc interesse videtur. Qyod meditatio semper est de rebus
ab intelligentia nostra occultis. Contemplatio vero de rebus, vel secundum suam
naturam, vel secundum capacitatem nostram manifestis' (Jn Salorrumis &clesio.sten
Homilia XIX, Palrologia Latina, 175 : 1 1 6-7) .
53. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philo.soph:y, 88, my emphasis.
54. Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Scenting Savlatiun: Ancient Christianity and the O!fa.ctory
Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006) , 1 75. See also Rachel
Fulton, "Taste and see that the Lord is sweet' (Ps. 33 :9) : The Flavor of God in
45
COLLAPSE VI
feels this when saying 'The canticle itself, we might say,

became the "locked garden" of which it speaks, opening
itself to those whose hearts longed to dwell by its streams
and to be intoxicated by the spices of its perfumed gardens .'55
Although my body, in the lightness of its earthly gravity,
as the very space of odour, of what is neither/both subject
and object, needs desperately to delete their critically-safe
correlationism (Susan's seems and Arthur's we might say) or
at minimum, strike: it throngh. How else will we ever taste
the joy Bernard testifies to : 'Happy the mind that has been
wise enough to enrich and adorn itself with an assortment
of spices such as these' ?56 And not simply to adorn, but to
become, following spice as the potentiality of a non-consum
erist relation to world: 'In eating the world, boundaries
between subject and object are broken down and in another
way rigidly maintained. In the poetics of spice, however, a
utopian space is imaginable in which boundaries between
subject and object evaporate, as they are not predicated on
a dialectic of consumer and consumed.'57 Where else will we
dine on texts in this way, the way late mediaeval bibliomane
Richard de Bury asks us to, like panthers: 'You must first eat
the volume with Ezekiel, that the stomach of your memory
may be internally sweetened; and thus after the manner of
the perfumed panther (to the breath of which men, beasts,
the Monastic West,' Journal ef Religion 86 (2006) : 1 69-202. Cf. 'By smelling things,
we absorb them directly into our bodies, and consequently they provide what
Kant otherwise only attributes to God : umnediaied knowledge of the thing in itself'
(A. Jaspar and N. Wagner, 'Notes on Scent, Cabinet Magazine 32 [2009] : 37) .
55. Arthur Green, 'Intradivine Romance: The Song of Songs in the Zahar,' in Scrolls ef
Uiue: Ruth and the Song ofSongs, ed. Peter S. Hawkins and Lcsleigh Cushing Stahlberg
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2006) , 215.
56. Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song efSongs, 12. 1 . 1 , vol. 1 , p. 77.
57. Morton, The Poetics efSpice, 229.
46
and cattle draw near that they may inhale it) , the sweet
odour of your aromatic conceptions [ concept<ff'll'm aromatum
odor suavis] will be externally redolent' ?58
More discursively, commentary-as-spice embodies the
risky work of philosophy, understood by Levinas as the
'adventure' of producing 'the truth of what does not enter
into a theme' via the reduction of the said to the saying,
a reduction which is 'both an affirmation and a retraction
of the said' and which operates as a continual interruption
<f essence: 'The reduction could not be effected simply
by parentheses which, on the contrary, are an effect of
writing. It is the ethical interruption <f essence that energizes
the reduction.'59 This is philosophy not, of course, as a
discipline among several, but as the spice of disciplines,
what makes all disciplines 'ways and kinds of philoso
phizing,' part of the movement Heidegger calls the attack
[Angri.ff] that 'the Da-sein in mmi launches [ . . .] upon man,' driving
us 'out of everydayness and [ . . . ] back in to the ground of
things .'60 Like pilpu the movement of philosophical truth
production, says Levinas, is round and multitemporal: 'it is
produced out of time or in two times without entering into
either of them, as an endless critique, or skepticism, which
in a spiralling movement makes possible the boldness of
philosophy, destroying the conjunction into which its
saying and its said continually enter. The said, contesting
the abdication of the saying that everywhere occurs in this
said, thus maintains the diachrony in which, holding its
58. Richard de Bury, Philobiblon, trans. John Bellingham Inglis (New York: Meyer
Brothers, 1899), ch.4.
59. E. Levinas, Otherwise 7fum Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1981), 44, my emphasis.
60. Heidegger, 7'he Fundamental Umcep/J efMetaphysics, 32, 2 1 , respectively.
47
COLLAPSE VI
breath, the spirit hears the echo of the otherwise.'61 And, it is

a movement that originates in proximity: 'Saying states and
thematises the said, but signifies to the other, a neighbor,
with a signification that has to be distinguished from that
home by words in the said. The signification to the other
occurs in proximity.'62 So commentary, which happens in
proximity to and not (as in the case of its bastard offspring
the annotated critical edition) in parenthesis from the text,
which moves from this proximity as the very ground of
its truth, and which is saturated with its own event in the
form of the extra or outside presence of its essentially deictic
gesture, may be called the sa:voury arculation efthe interruption
efour exposure to the otherwise. 63
This essentially philosophical othering function of
commentary, its diachronic expansion of the saying within
the said, or holding open of the event of the text via the
very procedure of encircling and enclosing it on all sides,
like an unending erection of fortifications each inviting
further and new forms of attack, is analogous to the
apophatic function of the monstrous as explicated by David
Williams : 'In the aesthetic production of the Middle Ages
a favoured way of achieving [the progressive negation of
logical affirmations about the world and the real] was to
deform the representation of the thing described in such a
6 1 . Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 44.
62. Ibid., 46.
63. Cf. 'Citation and commentary open up the non-compelling obligation in reading
- without abandoning discourse (and which only the most recalcitrant of readers
can doubt reflects yet again on how we are reading and commenting, reading these
others and writing for still other others - here, 'at this moment itself' that is also not
now. I read and write commentary here to hold open for others, to call for other
books to read. This text is a reading text, reading in the ethical exigency to call to
other readers) ' (R Gibbs, Why Ethics?: Signs of &sprmsibilities [Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2000] , 1 13).
48
way as to call into question the adequacy of the intellectual

concept of the thing in relation to is ontological reality.' 64
Or as Carl Pyrdum writes, saying more than he thinks ,
'Nothing spices up the margins of your boring old psalter
like a picture of a cute monkey doing something really odd,
like riding a stork who has a demon's head for a butt.' 65 Just
as spice also deforms and distorts the material to which it
is applied through a kind of reverse denaturation that turns
the merely ingestible into the truly edible, so commentary
is a fundamentally monstrous discourse directed toward
the denaturing of the text into the earthy, ontic immanence
of what it represents. Mazy, decentring, gargantuan,
discombobulating, rhizomatic - the formal structure of
commentary, geometrically proportional to the character
istic conceptual density and difficulty of philosophical and
theoretical language that digressively makes one stop and
think, is essential to its quote-unquote-meaning, its desire
to multiply explanation and representation fractally, to
generate more and more perceptual enclosures, spaces
within which the unrepresentable is brought into presence.
Commentary thus exemplifies a more universal interven
tional tendency within human thinking that can be called
the inevitahle intrusion efthefictive, our irreplaceable and indi
viduating poetic compulsion to deform the object of under
standing precisely so as to understand it, as the only way it
can actually be understood. 66
64. D. Williams, De.formed Discourse: The FUnction efthe Monster in Mediaeval Thought aml
Literature (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Qyeen's University Press, 1996), 5.
65. http ://gotrnedieval.blogspot.com/2008/03/welcome-boingboingers-here-have

monkey.html. My emphasis.
66. Cf. 'But since there is some comparison between eating and learning, it may be
noted that on account of the fastidiousness of many even that food without which
life is impossible must be seasoned' (Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D.W.
Roberston,JR. [New York: Macmillan, 1 958], 4 . 1 1 .26) .
49
COLLAPSE VI
Yet another way of saying this : commentary twists

its text spatially, that is, the geo-metry ef commentary is spU:y,
following Timothy Morton's ingenious modeling of the
word-concept of spice: 'The poetics of spice is a Mobius
strip upon which an object appears to behave like a subject,
until we have followed this behaviour right round to the
"other" side, upon which a subject appears to behave like
an object. The distinction, however, between subject and
object is not collapsed, and they remain in tension [ . . .] .
Species, sperious and specie suggest that spice belongs to a set of
words that denote the non-universal, particular, contingent
realm of appearance. But when we look 'behind' spice
to find some general or universal category that might
substantiate its meaning or fix its place, we find none. We
simply re-encounter spice. It is as if the universal were on
the side of the particular itself: 6 7 Spice is a pure immanence
or double one-sidedness whose structure is only intelligible
in the form of sphetical movement, movement that reaches
the other side by staying on this one and in so doing simul
taneously destroys and realises the distinction between the
two. Explorer or exegete, spice is what gets you around
earthily, what manifests the universal as the particular itself,
in the place where you stand. Via spice, one goes through
an impenetrable surface by going over it, by staying with it.
So the impulse not to escape, not to flee, to stay, to
remain, not in stillness, but in the movement that one
already is, in the more restful motion that dwells in the
space of the ontological ambivalence of statements like
I am walking, that knows it will arrive on the other side
only as this one, resonates seismically with both geophi
losophical immanence and the work of commentary.
67. Morton, Th.e FbetU:s ofSpice, 33-5.
50
The project of Nietzsche's tradition-dislocating and tradi

tion-deepening call to 'remain faithful to the earth' and dwell
in the 'new gravity' of the eternal recurrence of the same,
a call that emanates with the earth itself, in the moment
of Nietzsche's stopping before and being stopped by 'a
powerful pyramidal rock nor far from Surlei,' is ordered
towards immanence not as the negation or opposite of tran
scendence, but more truly as its Jvrgetting, the experience
of which he finds in sound: 'There is no outside! But we
forget this with all sounds ; how lovely it is that we forget!' 6 8
Sonically forgetting that there is no outside is not negation,
much less some enchanting illusion that there is an outside,
but more purely the post-cephalic letting go of the burden of
consciousness that there is no outside, the apophatic negation
of the negation of an outside that opens into full experience
of the becoming of the this. ' [N]o longer bury your head
in the sand of heavenly things, but bear it freely instead,
an earthly head that creates a meaning for the earth!' 6 9
Commentary is a homologous a'!rWrJati that stays with its
text gravitationally, remains faithful to it as what remains, as
what it cannot depart from. 'The womb of the inexhaustible
earth ceaselessly gives birth to what is new; and each one
is subject to death [ . . .] Man should not cast aside from him
the fear of the earthly; in his fear of death he should - stay.
He should stay. He should therefore do nothing other than
what he already wants : to stay.'7 Commentary stays with its
68. Qyoting, respectively: Nietzsche, Thus spoke Zarathustra, 'Zarathustra's Prologue,'

6; 'The Recurrence of the Same,' notebook entry from August 1 8 8 1 , cited from Tims
Spoke Zarathustra, trans. G. Parkes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) , xxii; and
Th1Lr Spoke Zarathustra, 'The Convalescent,' 175.
69. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathwtra, 'On the Hinterworldy,' 2 1 .
70. F. Rosenzweig, The Star ofRedemption, trans. B . E. Galli (Madison: University of

Wisconsin Press, 2005) , 9- 10.
51
COLLAPSE VI
text, commits wholly to it, both in the quantitative sense of

promising to produce commentary across its continuity and in
the qualitative sense of promising to extrad significance from
each of its moments as a plenitude. In the words of fifteenth
century Talmudic scholar Isaac hen Jacob Campanton,
'Always strive to show the necessity of all the words of the
commentator or author, and for every utterance, why did
he say? [ ...] And you shall take care to compress (Itsamtsem)
his language and to squeeze out the intention, in order than
not one word shall remain superfluous.'71 In other words,
commentary stays with its text as a sphere, as an object
whose every point, via structural identity with every other,
is both infinite and infinitesimal. Commentary's durational
staying with its text equals its self-acceptance as labour, as
sustaining and unfinishing diurnal production-towards
death. Commentary thus means praxis, not without, but
freeing itself from results, from anxious care about what
does not belong to us. Accomplishing nothing, commentary
becomes capable of everything and so constitutes the
potentiality of a hermeneutic whose teleology and instru
mentality fundamentally differ from, but do not necessarily
contradict, the dominant thesistic standards of academic
discourse. Commentary is knowledge-production as
immanent to its labour, whether of writer or reader (which
goes to explain the genre's superior survival in law, religion,
philosophy, pedagogy) .
Why not therefore also make in this place a hermeneutic
bridge between commentary and the sound which
Nietzsche indicates as the vehicle of immanence, of what
cannot, if it is to really be itself, have a vehicle? Again,
spice provides the link, the material to build across space.
71. Cited from Boyarin, 'Pilpul: The Logic of Commentary,' 6.
52
'The verb (verbum) ; says Isidore of Seville , is so called

because it resounds by means of reverberation ( verberaJus)
in the air! And: 'Spices [ . . .] seem to have gotten the name
"spice" (aroma) either because they are proper for putting
on altars (ara) for invocations to the gods or because they
are known to blend and mingle themselves with air (air) .
Indeed what is scent if not air that has been tinctured with
something?'72 Ergo, the spiciness of commentary similarly
consists in its being textual sound, semantic aroma, the
re-verberation, to play Isidore's etymology backwards, of
the word it comments on.
Like word, like spice, commentary is space-filling.
Whence Gumbrecht's suggestion of an imminent return
to commentary in the context of our being haunted by
new technic vistas of emptiness : 'The vision of the empty
chip constitutes a threat, a veritable !um-or vacui not only
for the electronic media industry but also, I suppose, for
our intellectual and cultural self-appreciation. It might
promote, once again, a reappreciation of the principle and
substance of copia. And it might bring about a situation
in which we will no longer be embarrassed to admit that
filling up margins is what commentaries mostly do - and
what they do best!73 Yet commentary does not simply fill
space the way all writing toles up space. Rather, it fills space
only in the sense that it also .folds space, produces moments
of identity across it, across the impassible, intimate distance
that commentary auto-institutes as the text/commentary
distinction. This distinction is simultaneously the inviolable,
irreducible space of writing itself (the dimension of the
72. Isidore of Seville, Etmologies, trans. Stephen A Barney (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2006) , 1 . 9 . 1 , 17.8. 1 , respectively.
73. Gumbrecht, The Fbwers '![Philology, 53.
53
COLLAPSE VI
page that cannot be filled in order for writing to ex-sist)

and the crease through which commentary folds this space.
Accordingly, commentary works to hold forever open and
totally fill writing's space, as if to absolutely disclose the
place of writing, which means to realise it as curoed spaa, the
immanent space-becoming-place through which everything
leads back to itself. This spatial curving that commentary
realises is visible materially as the becoming-round of the
text/commentary border and conceptually as the turning
motion commentarial reading and writing take : away from
the text, turning back towards it, repeat [ . . .] Commentary
rotationally transforms the spaa of writing into an earthly
p!a,ce. Simple textual space-filling discloses the space of
writing as writing's potentiality, the page, by enclosing and
surrounding itftom the inside. Commentary, whose meaning
is founded upon proximate separation from its text,
continues the enclosureftom within the outside and thus holds
open the space of writing by bounding it, pushes writing
to the limit where the space of writing intersects with what
it already is, the real space of the world. In other words,
commentary does not merely take up room, but uses room to
make itself the world, to bring its text back to earth. Infinite
commentary on an infinitesimal text is commentary's ideal,
not actually, but only as an unimaginable concept reasserting
its deep desire, namely, to spatially achieve the ontological
breaking-point of the text, the situation where there is neither
anything outside the text nor nothing outside the text. Commentary
seeks not to end, but to un-end writing, to arrive at
writing's plenitude and ouroboric starting/stopping point,
the saturated phenomenon of its perfection, as grasped
by Agamben while contemplating the completion of the
unfinished last work of Damascius, and final scholarch of
the School of Athens and so-called last of the Neoplatonists,
54
On First Priruipl.es (!) : 'The uttermost limit thought can reach

is not a being, not a place or thing, no matter how free of
any quality, but rather, its own absolute potentiality, the
pure potentiality of representation itself: the writing tablet!
[ ... ] This was why he was unable to carry his work through
to completion: what could not cease from writing itself
was the image of what never ceased from not writing itself
[ ...] [E]verything was finally clear: now he could break the
tablet, stop writing. Or rather, now he could truly begin!74
This point is not being finished with writing, but writing's
becoming an unending beginning, the sphericization of the
space of writing or our finding of the page as unhounded
finitude, a surface for limitless writing whose every mark
is first and last. Commentary's filling of the margins is an
exercise in intentional, exuberant futility directed toward
an ultimate forgetting of the outside, toward continual
writing of the omnipresent impossibility of separateness,
the always-never asymptotic union of text and world.
All of above goes to explain why, in the appendix of
Frank Herbert's Dune, we read that 'the O.C. [Orange
Catholic] Bible and the Commentaries,' a product of
humanity's encounter with the outer dark via space travel
and the textual analogue of the orange spice gas used by
Guild Navigators to fold space, 'permeated the religious
universe!75
74. G. Agamben, The Idea efProse, trans. M. Sullivan and S. Whitsitt (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1995), 34.
75. Herbert, Dune, 506.
55
COLLAPSE VI
III. DIGRESSION AND IMMANENCE
Dune. Dir. David Lynch. 1984.
56
0 It
b e t e l t f e e f t,
in e
b e .G a ! ! g e m e i n e tt O r g tt i e m u e.
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<fnicf(ung ber trlttn @;runl>ia'Qe ber m(lturp6ifojop6ie an
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!8. o n
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& e 9 a r i e b r t d) . e r t e .i.
1 so9.
COLLAPSE VI
I ntrod u cti on to Schel l i n g 's

On the World Soul
EDITIONS
The first edition (1798) of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph
Schelling's On the ITT!rld Soul. An Hypothesis ef Higher Phy.sirs
for Explaining Universal Organism was published by Perthes
in Hamburg, as was the second, revised edition (1809) to
which a new Foreword and Essay 'On the Relation between
the Real and the Ideal in Nature, or the Development of
the Basic Propositions of the Philosophy of Nature from
the Principles of Gravity and Light' were added. The third
edition (1809) , also published by Perthes, slightly revised
the second edition, but added no new material.
The edition from which the present translation is
taken is that found in vol. II of K.F.A. Schelling's edition
of Schellings siimmtliche Werke (SW) , XIV vols (Stuttgart and
Augsburg: J.G. Cotta'scher Verlag, 1856-6 1), reprinted in
59
COLLAPSE VI
a new order, ed. Manfred Schroter (Munch: Beck, 1927) ,

and the numbers in the margin refer to this edition. It is
based on the 1809 edition of Schelling's text, and supplies
the changes from the first edition in footnotes.
The text is found in vol. I, 6 of the new Historisch-Kri
tische Ausgabe (HKA) of Schelling's works, which provides a
concordance with SW, but does not contain the 1806 essay,
despite retaining the second edition's Foreword, which serves
principally to introduce the accompanying essay, along
with Schelling's revisions to the main text (in footnotes) .
The HKA edition is a work of considerable scholarship,
with some one hundred and fifty pages of explanatory
notes (some translated here) , and was used as the source
for Stephane Schmitt's translation De l'ame du monde (Paris :
Editions Rue d'Ulm, 2007) , which I have also consulted.
Also consulted is the magnificent HKA Ergiimungsband zu
Werke Band 5 bis 9, which contains a wealth of material on
the scientific background against which Schelling produced
his naturephilosophical writings up to 1800. Since the HKA
remains incomplete yet infuriatingly references Schelling's
works, where these have appeared in the HKA, only in that
edition's pagination, I have maintained the SW pagination,
since it remains the only complete referenceable edition of
Schelling's works as a whole.
The section translated here includes the first edition
preface (SWII, 347-51) , which contains the nearest thing to
an overview provided for this work, and the initial setting
out of the 'primary force in nature' (SW II, 381-97) . The
footnotes are in part my own, in part K.F.A. Schelling's
notes to SW II, and in part Jorg Jantzen and Thomas
Kisser's, from HKA 1,6, and their provenance is noted in
the text.
60
Grant - Introduction to Schelling
INTRODUCTION
This is the second of Schelling's three major, early
naturephilosophical books, published in 1798 between
the Id.ear/or a Philosophy <fNature (1797; SW II, 1-343) and
the First Outline <f a System <f Naiurephilosophy (1799; SW
III, 1-268) . The other key naturephilosophical works of
this period are the Introduction to the Outline (1799; SW III,
269-326) the Universal Deduction <fthe Dynamic Pro<:ess (SWIY,
1-78) , which Schelling published in his Journal <fSpeculative
Physics vol. 1, no. 2 (1800) . Across these works, Schelling
had demonstrated an extraordinary capacity for synthe
sising the results, procedures and hypotheses that were
leading the field in each of the sciences . As a result, the
WCltseele is a systematic yet experimental, or 'constructive'
work in the sense Schelling gave this term, pursuing the
'decomposition' of the All by chemical, electrical, meteoro
logical and vital means across the entirety of the 240 pages
of the SW it takes up.
It is often claimed that Schelling merely pursues the goals
established by Kant's transcendental philosophy - namely,
to suspend ontology in the interests of rational certitude,
and therefore to place the ethical at the head of philosophy.
Yet whereas analysis and synthesis were powers of the
understanding for Kant, for Schelling, they are powers
of nature; not content with chemical analogies, Schelling
pursues a chemical philosophy, a distinction recognised by
Novalis when he called Schelling 'the philosopher of the
new chemistry, the absolute oxygenist'. 1
Accordingly, On the World Soul presents a single,
consistent 'decomposition' or analysis of nature into its
primitive forces . Indeed, 'primitive force' is precisely the
1. Novalis, Die Christenheit oder Europa und aiulere phi!.osophische Schrifien (Kiiln.:
Kiinnemann, 1996), 300.
61
COLLAPSE VI
ol?Ject of a 'higher science of nature', i.e., that at which

this science aims . The work therefore pursues this
object through the media of light, heat, gases, electricity,
magnetism, meteorology, until it arrives at a determination
of the concept of polarity, which became something of the
cliche of Idealist philosophy of nature. At the core of this
concept, however, is the 'dualism' or real opposition of forces2
that animate all natural phenomena. Therefore, upon
making the transition from 'anorgic' to organic nature, On
the UfJrld Soul demonstrates a continuity of analysis in the
twofold sense that primitive forces are thereby exhibited
as the common medium of all phenomena, and that there
is therefore no specffo;ally vital matter or vital force. Rather

than seek a substance dualism dividing the natural world,
Schelling pursues that immanent duel of forces throughout
it, by which nature is organised. So just as the concept of
polarity is misunderstood if considered purely conceptual
rather than actual, so too the oft-touted 'organicism'
of romantic naturephilosophy ignores the true focus of
Schelling's work: the origins and conditions of natural
organisation, of which minerals, animals, weather systems
and chemicals are merely regional expressions.3
2. See the third thesis with which the present translation concludes : 'real antithesis
is possible only between things of one kind and common origin' (SW II, 397) .
Note the chosi.ste difference Schelling here introduces with respect to Kant's account
of real antithesis in 'Attempt to introduce the concept of negative magnitudes into
philosophy' (Ale II, 1 67-204) , tr. David Walford in The Cambridge Editian of the Ufirk.s
ofImma:nuel Kani. Theoretical Philosophy 1 755-1 770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992) , 207-4 1 .
3. There has been a lively debate on Schelling and self-organisation, beginning

with Marie-Luise Heuser-Kessler, Die Produktivitiil der Nalur. Schellingr Naiurphikisophie
und da.1 neue Para.digma der Selbstorgani.satian der Naiurwi.ssenschaflen (Berlin: Duncker
und Rumbolt, 1 986) . Bernd-Olaf Kiippers' Natur als Organi.smus. Schellings faihe
Nalurphilosophie und ihre Bedeutungfar die moderne Biologie (Frankfurt: Klostermann,
1992) is a critical response to the thesis that there is a parallel between the modem
natural scientific conception of self-organisation and Schelling's conception of the
62
What Schelling may here be said to retain from Kant is

therefore twofold: (1) the conclusions of the latter's study
of real (or actual, wirkliche) opposition; (2) that because the
primitive conflict of forces is the of?jed of the philosophy
of nature, such forces are never (by 1 , above) 'transcend
ently' available, i.e., uninvolved in actual oppositions, on
the one hand, or something 'in themselves', on the other.
In other words, the analysis of forces results necessarily in
actual individuation. Rather therefore than the structure of
consciousness furnishing phenomena and their conceptual
forms, nature is its own analyst. 1bis point is clearly made
by Karl August Eschenmayer,4 whose Propositi011S .from the
Metaphysics <f Nature Schelling excitedly noted towards the
end of his Ideas for a Philosophy <f Nature of the same year.
same, and the debate is critically presented by Camilla Warnke, 'Schellings Idee
und Theorie des Organismus und der Paradigmawechsel der Biologie um die
Wende zum 19. Jahrhundert', Jahrbuchfar Geschichte und 1Morie der Biologic 5 (1 998) :
1 87-234. See also SelbstorganisaJ:iun. Jakrbuch far Kmnplexitat in dm Natur-, Soziol- und
Geisteswis.senscluifien 5: Sclwllingund die Selbstorganisai:iun (1 994) , ed. Marie-Luise Heuser
Kessler and Wtlhehn G. Jacobs.
4. Karl August Eschenmayer ( 1768-1852), medical doctor (1797) and chief medical
officer (1800- 1 8 1 1 ) in Kirchheim an der Teck, Wiirttemburg, before becoming
professor of medicine and philosophy in the University of Tlibingen. After two
excellent critiques of Schelling's philosophy of nature, the first, 'Spontaneitiit =
Weltseele', published in Schelling's own Journal ef 8peculative Physics vol. 2, issue
1 ( 1 8 0 1 ) , and the second, anonymously, as ' Uber Schelling: Erster Entwurf und
Einleitung' in the Erlanger Literatuneitung no.67 for July 4, 1 80 1 . In Propositionsfann
the Metaphysics ef Nature applied to Chemical and Medical OijectJ (8ahe au.s der Natur
Metophysik auf chemische und medizische Gegenstii1ule angewandt. Tubingen:Jacob Friedrich
Heerbrandt, 1797 : 8), from which Schelling quotes at the end of the Ideas .for a
Philosophy '![Nature (SWII, 3 13-14n; tr. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988: 249), Eschenmayer writes: 'There is no absolute
freedom or bondage of the forces in matter. - For the concept of matter would be
eliminated thereby. In absolute freedom the forces would be independent of one
another, and an infinitely larger or smaller degree of matter, that is, no degree at all,
would be existent. Absolutely bound, the gradation would be equally eliminated and
sensibility = O.' Jorg jantzen gives an excellent account of Eschenmayer's work in
Thomas Bach and Olaf Breidbach, eds., Naturphilo.sophie nach Schelling (Stuttgart-Bad
Canstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2005) , 153-79.
63
COLLAPSE VI
In deciding whether naturephilosophy extends Kant's

transcendental philosophy or inverts it, such passages are
crucial:
[I]t is only from the standpoint adopted by the metaphysician
of nature that the necessary assumption of these forces can be
proven and the duplicity of matters and forces which so many
have introduced into natural science to explain the phenomena,
justified. The theoretical dualism for natural science is actually
postulated by dynamics, but we do not commonly observe
its lineage. T hus we set acids and alkalis in opposition to one
another, two electrical and two magnetic materials ; hence Gren
assumes a gravitational and an expansive force [ . . ] . Ultimately
.
such a dualism is deduced from the necessity of the original

positing and oppositing, which are the conditions under which
even the possibility of our consciousness stands.5
If the dualism in question amounts to the actual
opposition of forces - in a later passage from the same
work, 6 Eschenmayer argues that even Kant proves their
existence, rather than demonstrates their transcendental
necessity - and conditions 'even the possibility of our con
sciousness', it is clear that the 'positing' at issue is primitive,
issuing in rather than.from consciousness. It is precisely this
inversion that On the World Soul pursues. Of course, that the
ensuing 'constructions' thereby lose any purely epistemic
guarantee follows from this ; and here we note, albeit tel
egraphically, a central difference between Schellingian and
Hegelian speculation: if the latter aims at the identity of
identity and difference, the former differentiates the identity
of the dualism that forms it.
5. Eschenrnayer, Propositionsjiwn the Metaphysics ofNature, 3.
6. Ibid, 60.
64
Finally, then, what sort of a theory of nature is

the higher one from which this hypothesis concerning
'universal organism' derives? It shares with Kant's Transition
between Metaphysics a:nd Physics (opus Postumum) , 7 and with a
great many contemporaneous natural scientists, the aether
hypothesis. While the beginning of the twentieth century
marked the end of the hypothesis concerning such a
substance, its real import is that it is an attempt at a physical
field theory. As such, the problem it poses concerns
whether this 'universal medium' is a substance separable
from the forces it vehiculates, or whether it is nothing other
than the totality of such forces in actual oppositions. If this
seems a merely historical point now, consider the extent to
which powers ontologists from Bruno to our contemporar
ies, consider forces not as primitive, but as properties - the
question 'what of?' still remains .8
In consequence, the animating 'soul of the world' that
is the object of the work translated below is no indicator
of a substance dualism, and instead assumes the character
of a properly dynamic, field-theoretical theory of nature
within which alone a dualism not of substances, but of forces
accounts for individuation and organisation.
7. Schelling supplies this as the title of what is published as the Gpus Ristumum in his
obituary for Kant (SW VI, 8).
8. On contemporary powers ontology, see G. Molnar, Riwers (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1 993) and S. Mumford, 'The Ungrounded Argument', Synthese 149
(1 996) : 471-89. On Bruno, see G. Harman, 'On the Undermining of Objects : Grant,
Bruno, and Radical Philosophy', in L. Bryant, N. Smicek, and G. Harman, eds,
The Speculative Turn (Melbourne: Re.Press, forthcoming) , my response to it, 'Mining
Conditions' and my 'Does Nature Stay What-it-is?', in ibid.
65
On the World-Soul
An Hypothesis of Higher Physics
for Explaining
Universal Organism
to which is adjoined a
Treatise
on
The Relation between the Real and the

Ideal in Nature
or
The Development of the first Principle of

Naturephilosophy in the Principles of
Gravity and Light
F.W.J. Schelling
1798
2nd edition 1806 . 3rd edition 1809
[SW II , 345-583; HKA 1,6]

COLLAPSE VI
O n the Wo rl d - So u l
FOREWORD ro 1HE FIRST EnmoN 34
The reader, provided only that he has sufficient desire

or curiosity, will become acquainted with what the goal of
this treatise might be, and why it bears this inscription at
its head.
The author first finds it necessary to explain himself on
two points, so that no prejudices are assumed with regard
to this inquiry.
The first is that no artificial unity of principles is sought
or intended in this work. Consideration of the universal
metamorphoses of nature as well as the state and progress
of the organic world certainly conducts the natural scientist
to a common pnnciple in which, fluctuating between inorganic
and organic nature, is contained the first cause of all change
in the former and the final ground of all activity in the latter.
Because this principle is everywhere present, it is rwwhere; and
because it is everything, it cannot be anything determinate or
particular, language has no appropriate term for it, and the
earliest philosophies (to which, after having completed its
cycle, ours is gradually returning) have handed down to us
an idea of it only in a figurative guise.
67
COLLAPSE VI
But a unity of principles is unsatisfactory if it does

not return to itself through an infinite series of individual
:48 effects. I hate nothing more that the mindless striving
to eliminate the multiplicity of natural causes through
fictitious identities. I observe that nature is satisfied only by
the greatest dominion of forms, and (according to the claim
of a great poet) 1 that it delights in arbiiran'ness in the deathly
management of decomposition. The law of gravitation
alone, to which even the most mysterious of cosmic
phenomena are finally reduced, does not only permit, but
even causes the heavenly bodies to be disturbed in their
course, so that in the most perfect of cosmic orders there
reigns the greatest possible disorder. Thus has nature cir
cumscribed the vastness of space, which it has sealed within
eternal and unchanging laws, widely enough in order
within it to delight the human mind with the appearance of
lawlessness.
Just as soon as our consideration of the idea of nature
as a whole arises, the antithesis between mechanism and
organism, which has held up the advance of natural science
for long enough, and that may be as contrary to our inquiry
as to many others, disappears.
It is an old illusion that organisation and life cannot be
explained from natural principles. - Ifit were thus to be said:
the first origins of organic nature are physically inscrutable,
then this unproven assertion serves only to discourage inves
tigators. It is of course permissible to oppose one audacious
assertion to another equally audacious one, and so science
advances not a single step. Yet at least one step towards this
explanation would be taken were we able to show that the
graduated series of every organic being is formed from a
1. Schelling is referring to Schiller's Dmn Karlos, act 3, from which he borrows his
language.
68
Schelling - On the World-Soul
gradual evolution of one and the same organisation.

That our experience has known no reorganization of
nature, no transition of one form or type into the other
(although the metamorphoses of many insects and, if
every bud is a new individual, also the metamorphoses of
plants could at least be adduced as analogical phenomena)
is no proof against this possibility; for, were a defendant
to answer it, the changes to which organic as much as 34
anorgic [anorgirche] nature is subjected, could (until a
universal stagnation of the organic world comes about) ,
have happened over ever longer periods, for which our
small periods (which are determined by the cycles of the
earth round the sun) provide no measure, and are so large
that until now there has been no experience of the course
of a single one. Fine. Let us abandon these possibilities
and see what then is true and what is false in the antithesis
between mechanism and organism, so as to determine with
as much certainty as possible the limits within which our
understanding of nature must remain.
What then is that mechanism which frightens you as
would a ghost? Is mechanism something that persists in
itself, or is it not instead simply the negative of the organic?
Must not the organic precede the mechanical, the positive
precede the negative? Now if in general the negative
presupposes the positive (as darkness does light, as cold
does heat) and not vice-versa, then our philosophy must
not begin with mechanism (as the negative) , but rather
with the organic (as the positive) , and therefore of course
the former is not so much to be explained by the latter,
but rather only can be explained by it. Not where there is
no mechanism, no organism, but rather conversely, where
there is no organism, there is no mechanism.
69
COLLAPSE VI
To me, organisation in general is nothing other than an

arrested stream of causes and effects . Only where nature
has not inhibited this stream, does it Hy forward (in a
straight line) . Where it inhibits it, it turns back on itself (in
a circular line) . Therefore, the concept of organism does
not rule out all succession of causes and effects ; rather, this
concept indicates only a succession that enclosed within certain
limits, Hows back on itself.
Now, that the original limit of mechanism cannot be
explained empirically, but must instead be postulated, I
myself will show (by induction) in what follows ; it remains
sohowever to be proven philosophically. For since the world is
only infinite in its finitude, and an unrestricted mechanism
would destroy itself, then universal mechanism must be
restricted to i1!:finity, and there will be as many individual,
particular worlds as there are spheres within which universal
mechanism revolves in itself, so that, in the end, the world
is an organisation, and a universal organism is itself the conditi,on
(and to that extent, the positive) of mechanism.
Viewed from this height, the particular successions of
causes and effects (that delude us with the appearance of
mechanism) disappear as infinitely small straight lines in
the universal curvature of the organism in which the world
itself persists.
Now what philosophy has long taught me, that the
positive principles of organism and mechanism are the
same, I have sought to prove in the following work from
experience, in that the universal changes in nature (on
which even the existence of the organic world depends) ,
lead us at last to the same first hypothesis on which the
universal assumption of natural scientists has long since
made the explanation of organic nature dependent.
70
The following treatise therefore falls into two sections, the

first of which treats of the force of nature that is manifest
in the universal changes, while the other undertakes to
search for the positive principle of organisation and life.
The common result of these is that one and the same principle
bi,nds anorgi and organic naiure.
The incompleteness of our knowledge of first causes
(such as electricity) , the atomistic concepts that lay here and
there in my way (e.g. in the theory of heat) , and finally
the impoverishment of the dominant modes of thought
regarding many objects of physics (e.g. meteorological
phenomena) , soon required that I be early led in the first
section to make many special explanations - explanations
that scatter the light, that I would wish to cast on the whole
amongst particular objects, so indeed, that at the end they 35
can be collected again in a common focus.
The wider the sphere of inquiry is drawn, the more
clearly one sees the deficiency and impoverishment of the
experiments that up to now fall within its circumference,
and thus few will feel the incompleteness of this attempt
more deeply or vividly than he who conducts it.
* *
Note. This work is not to be viewed as a continuation

of my Ideas for a Philosophy ef Naiure. I will not continue it
before I find myself in a position to conclude the whole
with a scientjfic physiology, that alone can round off the whole.
First I hold it as a duty not merely to venture something
in this science, the errors of which at least the perspicac
ity of others will effect the discovery and refutation.
71
COLLAPSE VI
I must nevertheless wish that the reader and critic of this

treatise be familiar with the ideas presented in that work.
The authority for assuming all positive natural principles
as homogeneous, is only to be gained philosophically.
Without this postu1.ate (I presuppose that one knows what a
postu/,ate with a view to a possible c011Struction is) ,2 it is impossible
to construct the first concepts of physics, for example, the
theory of heat. Idealism, which philosophy is gradually
introducing into all the sciences (it has long since become
dominant in mathematics, especially since Leibniz and
Newton) , still seems to be little understood. The concept of
action at a distance, for example, against which some still beat
their heads, rests entirely on the idealist notion of space:
for according to this notion, two bodies at the greatest
possible distance from each other can be represented as in
contact with one another, and contrariwise, bodies which
(in accordance with the common conception) are in actual
contact, as acting on one another at a distance. It is quite
true that a body only acts where it is, but it is equally true
that it only is where it acts, and with this single proposition
the last piece of armour of the atomistic philosophy is
overcome. I must abstain here from offering still further
examples.
2. Schelling's theory of the postulate is given in 'On Postulates in Philosophy", the

appendix to the 'Explanatory Essays on the Science of Knowledge' (1797) , where
Schelling writes, 'the expression "postulate" is borrowed from mathematics. In
geometry, the origind construction is not derrumstrated, but postulated. This original
(the simplest) crmstruction in space is the moving point, or the line' (SW I, 444) .
Adopting this as the principle of a constructive philosophy, Schelling advocates
a philosophy concerned 'only with original consuuctions', which does not 'consider
any existential proposition andy!U:ally, but synihetically (as arising in synthesis) '
(SW!, 447) .
72
pART I: ON TIIE FIRST FORCE OF NATURE 37
Venient tempus, quo ista, quae nunc latent, in lucem dies

extrahat et longioris aevi diligentia. Ad inquisitionem tantorum
una aetas non sufficit. - ltaque per successiones ista longas
explicabuntur. Vienet tempus, quo posteri tam aperta nos
nesciisse mirentur.
[Grant him time and ljfeWng; diligence to bnng to light what is hidden .
Ljfe is not s1fificientfor so many inquiries together. - Therefore kt him
make far-reaching advances in exp!mtation. In time to come, we must
wvnder to whom so much will Uder be ckar.]
Seneca3
Every motion that returns to itself presupposes, as the 38

condition of its possibility, a positive force that (as impulse)
initiates motion (turning the starting point, as it were, into
a line) , and a negahve force, that (as attraction) , draws the
movement back into itself (or prevents it from flattening out
into a straight line) .
In nature everything strives continuously forwards ; we
must seek the ground as to why this is so in a principle
that, as an inexhaustible source of the positive force, always
reinitiates movement in the world and uninterruptedly
maintains it. This positive principle is thefirstforce efnature.
But an invisible power draws all the world's phenomena
into an endless circuit. We must seek the ultimate ground
as to why this is so in a negative force that, in that it continu
ously limits the effects of the positive principle, conducts
motion in general back to its source. This negative principle
is the seamd force of nature.
3. Seneca, Natura/is Q.uaeslitJnes, VII, 25, 4-5.
73
COLLAPSE VI
These two conflicting forces conceived at the same time

in conflict and unity, lead to the idea of an organizingprinap!c,
forming the world into a system. Perhaps the ancients
wished to intimate this with the world-soul.
If the originally positive force were infinite, it would lie
entirely beyond the limits of all possib!c perception. Restricted
by the opposing force, it becomes a finite magnitude - it
begins to be an object of perception, or manifests itself in
phenomena.
The one immediate object of intuition is the positive in every
phenomenon. We can only iefer the negative (as the cause of
the merely expetiencerl) .
82 The immediate of?ject of the higher theory efnature is therefore
only the positive principle of all motion, or the firstfarce ef
nature.
The first force of nature conceals itself behind the individual
phenomena in which it is revealed to the desirous eye. In irzdi
viduated matter it breaks out throughout the entire cosmos.
To grasp this Proteus efnature that recurs again and again
in ever changing forms and in numberless phenomena, we
must cast the net more widely. Our progress will be slow,
but all the more certain.
The matter that in every system radiates from the
centre to the periphery - light - moves with such force and
velocity that some have even doubted its materiality, since
it lacks the universal characteristic of matter, inertia. But to
all appearances, we know light only in its propagation; most
probably it is only in this state of original motion capable of
reaching our eyes as light. Now every propagation and every
becoming is accompanied by a particular and appropriate
motion, however. If a very much higher yet nonetheless
74
finite degree of elasticity were instantaneously to arise, there

will also arise a matter of the highest degree of elasticity
that, since the essence of elasticity is the expansive force,
will expand into a space in proportion to the degree of this
force. This will now give the appearance of matter in free
motion, as if, so to speak, exempted from the universal laws
of inertia, it held in itself the cause of its own movement.
Now this movement, however great or fast we may
assume it to be, differentiates itself from every other, so
that an equilibrium of the forces arises in any given matter,
only according to degree. For let that elastic matter, without 3E
any resistance that a body of lesser elasticity could set
against it by its impenetrability or by the attractive force of
its dissemination, spread out in a completely empty space,
then since the degree of its elasticity is of course finite, and
the elasticity of every matter decreases in proportion as
the space in which it expands is increased, by which its
gradually lowering elasticity reaches an equilibrium of
forces relative to its degree of expansion, and thus makes
rest, that is, a permanent state of matter, possible.
Therefore light, although it moves with wonderful
speed, is nevertheless for that very reason neither more
nor less inert than any other matter whose movement is no
object of perception. For, to state it at the outset, absolute rest
in the world is not anything, all rest in the world is merely
apparent, and properly only a minus, but in no way a
complete absence, of motion (= 0) . The movement of light
is therefore an original movement of which every matter as
such has its share, except that, no sooner has matter reached a
permanent state, with the minimum speed that light would
equally have attained, than its original forces will have
reached a common moment.
75
COLLAPSE VI
Since every matter fills its particular space only

through the reciprocity of opposing forces, that it therefore
permanently fills that same space, i.e. that the body persists in
its condition, canno t be explained without accepting that
these forces are equally CLCtive, whereby then the non-thing
of absolute rest disappears of itself.
All rest and all persistence of a body is simply relati,ve.
The body rests in relation to a detenninate state of matter; as
long as this state continues (as long, e.g., as the body is
solid or fluid) , the moving forces will fill space with equal
quantity, i.e. they will fill the same space, and to that extent the
:84 body will appear to rest, although that this space is continu
ously filled can only be explained by a continuous motion.
That therefore light expands on all sides in rays, must
be explicated by conceiving it as in constant propaga!Wn and
as orignally expansive. That light also reaches relative rest
we can directly infer from this, that the motion of light from
an unending mass of stars is not transmitted to us.
It is not in the interest ofnatural science to admit anything
unlimited, nor any absolute force, but rather to consider
each of these always and only as the negative ef its opposite.
Now we too may, of whichever of the forces we wish, let it
grow to the highest degree thinkable, but we will never be
able to bring it to the absolute negation of its opposite. Hence
the striving of those who derive universal gravitation from
the impact of some unknown matter that forces bodies
against one another, is entirely idle ; for since this matter
creates gravity, without itself being heavy, we must conceive
it as an absolute negation of the attractive force; but as such
it would cease to be an object of possible construction and
would as it were disappear into the universal repulsive
force, leaving no material principle to explain universal
76
gravitation, but only the obscure idea of a farce, which is

precisely what this hypothesis sought to avoid.
What keeps light within material limits, what finally
turns its motion into an object of perception, is the force of
attraction.4 If some natural scientist assumes light itself or
a part thereof as imponderalJle, all they thereby state is that a
great force of expansion (which, as an original force, leaves
all our explanations at a standstill) is active. Since however 38
this force of expansion never exceeds the limits of matter,
i.e. can never become absolute, so gra:viiy can certainly be
considered as collapsing into a matter, as into light, but never
as completely negated.
To that extent, it is not absurd to assert a negative
gra:viiy of light;5 for since this expression, borrowed from
mathematics, always indicates not a mere negation, but rather
an a.ctual opposition, 6 so negaitve attmction is in fact nothing more
4. 1st ed. : 'its ponderability'. [K.F.A. Schelling] .
5. The concept of 'negative gravity' was applied by Friedrich Albert Carl Gren,
amongst others, although he later modified it, in his Systematic Ham/book ef General.
Chemistry, 4 vols (2nd edition, Berlin and Halle: Waisenhaus 1794-6) , vol. l , 136:
'The gravitational being of particles of free caloric cannot consist in their rectilinear
radiation. Hence it may already be demonstrated a priori that caloric is not subject
to gravity, and nor can it be proven to be gravitational by any number of a posteriori
experiments. Caloric is therefore an imponderable elastic fluid.' [editors' note, HKA
1,6: 288] .
6 . See Kant, 'Attempt to introduce the concept of negative magnitudes into philosophy',
Konts Werke (Berlin: Kiinigliche preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 190lff)
Ak . . II, 1 65-204, tr. David Walford and Ralf Meerbote in Tlu!oretical Philosophy 1755-
1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 992, 202-4 1 ; here Ak. II, 1 93 ;
1992 : 230-3 1 : ' S o far I have merely considered the grounds of real opposition, i n s o
far a s they actually posit i n one and the same thing determinations, o f which one is
the opposite of the other. A case in point would be the motive forces of one and the
same body which tend in exactly the opposite direction; and here the grounds cancel
their reciprocal consequences, namely the motions. For this reason, I shall [ . . . ] call
this opposition actual opposi1iun ( oppositio actualis) .'
77
COLLAPSE VI
nor less than real repulsion,7 so that this term states nothing
more than what we have long known, that a repulsive force
is active in light. Should this however suggest some cause
by which the absolute (not the specific) 8 gravity of the body
may be reduced, the concept of such a cause has long since
been banished into the realm of fantasy.
If accordingly no degree of elasticity can be thought
as the highest possible, so that above this there are still
higher degrees, and between these given degrees and the

complete negation of all degree innumerable intermediary
degrees can be thought, so too can each elastic material
can be considered as the mean proportion of a higher and
a lower degree, that is, as composite. If we have the means to
decompose such a matter chemically, we never arrive at
it; it is enough that such a decomposition is possible, and
that nature has the means to effect it. Therefore (even if the
colours of a body do not indicate a decomposition of light) ,
we will consider light not as a simple element, but rather as
the product of two matters, 9 one of which, as elastic as light,
7. Kant Ak. II, 179-80; 1992: 2 1 8 : 'Now if you call attraction a cause, of any kind you
please, in virtue of which one body constrains other bodies to press upon the space
which it itself occupies or to set in motion (though here it is sufficient simply to think
of this attraction) , then impenetrability is a negative attraction. This serves to show that
impenetrability is as much a positive ground as any other motive force in nature. And
since negative attraction is really true repulsion, it follows that the forces with which
the elements are invested and in virtue of which these latter occupy a space, albeit in
such a way that they impose limitations even on space itself by means of the conflict
of the two forces which are opposed to each other - it follows, I say, that these forces
will give rise to the elucidation of many phenomena.'
8. 'With the term "specific gravity" is designated the relations of the weight of a body
to the space it occupies. A body is called specifically more {!7avitational or heavier, than
another when it weighs more, specjfical/:y lighier when it weighs less than the other, when
they occupy the same space.' J. S. T. Gehler, Physikalisches Wdrterbuch, 6 parts (Leipzig:
Schwickert, 1787-1796) , part 3, 902 [editors' note HKA I,6 : 291].
9. 1st ed. : 'two matters' [K.F.A. Schelling] .
78
can be called the positi.ve matter of light (the flu,idum deferens

according to de Luc) , and the other, less elastic by nature,
the negative (ponderable) matter of light.
The positive matter of light is, in relation to light, the
ultimate ground of its susceptibility to expansion and to that
extent, absolutely elastic, although we cannot at all think it 38
as matter without considering even its elasticity in tum as
finite, that is, as itself composite. It is the first principle of
natural science that no principle be considered absolute,
and that a material principle be assumed as a vehicle of
every force in nature. Natural science has, as if by some
happy instinct, steadfastly pursued this maxim, and would
sooner always hypothesise unknown matters to explain
natural phenomena than resort to absolute forces.
Hence the advantage of the concept of the migi:no1fon:es,
which dynamic philosophy has introduced into natural
science, 10 is now strikingly evident. Namely, they do not
in any way serve as explanohon.s, but rather only as limit
concepts for empirical natural science, by means of which the
freedom of the latter is not only unthreatened, but is rather
secured, because the concept of forces, since each of these
admits an infinity of possible degrees, none of which is an
absolute (the absolutely highest, or the absolutely lowest) ,
opens for it an infinite scope within which it can explain all
phenomena empirically, that is, from the redprocity ef diverse
moJters.
10. The background of the 'dynamic philosophy' to which Schelling here refers
is provided by Kant's Metapkysical Fmmdolions ef Noiural Science, but also by his own
Ideas for a Philosopky ef Noiure, which draws also on Eschenrnayer's PropasitUms .fivm
the Metopkysics efNoiure (cf. n.4 in my introduction above, and George di Giovanni,
'Kant's Metaphysics of Nature and Schelling's Ideasfor a Philosopky efNoiure, Jou:mol ef
the Histary efPhilmopky vol.17 (1 979) : 1 97-295.
79
COLLAPSE VI
Indeed, natural science has from the very first helped

itself to this freedom in explanation, albeit indeed without
being able to protect itself against the charge of arbitrariness
which from this point on becomes invalid, since according
to the principles of a dynamic philosophy outside the
sphere of known matters there yet remains a broader one
for unknown, other matters that yet we cannot pass off as
invented, as soon as the degree of their energy is assumed
to be proportional to actually observed phenomena.
So much for the rectification of common notions.
When I assert the maieriality of light, I do not thereby
exclude the opposite view, namely, that light is the motion
of a moved medium. In the Ideas far a Philosophy ef.Naiure,
I posed the question: Must not the light from the sun
propagate to us by decomposition? At issue was whether
187 we might not unify the .Newtonian and Eulerian theory
of light. What exactly do Newton's supporters want?
A matter that has its own, proper relations to bodies, that
is, that is capable of its own effects.11 And what, by contrast,
does Euler, and those who agree with him, want? That light
is the mere phenomenon of a moving, vibrating medium.
Yet must the vibration be necessarily mechanUal, as Euler
thinks? Who can prove that, between earth and sun, a
matter does not fill it that is decomposed by the effect of
the sun; and could not this decomposition propagate even
into our atmosphere, since in precisely this there is a source
of light?
1 1 . 'Aether, celestial air, thefine matter efthe universe, materia subtilis, elementumprimum Cartesii.
Names that the natural scientist applies to the finest and most elastic fluid matter that
is spread throughout the entire universe and penetrates the interstices of all bodies.
Everything that can be said about these objects is hypothetical and acknowledged only
to explain certain appearances ; direct and clear experimentation on the existence
and properties of the aether are entirely lacking.' Gehler, op. cit., part 1 : 82 [editors'
note HKA I,6 : 294-5] .
80
In this way, we would have what Newton wants : a

particular light-matter that is equally capable of chemical
relations ; and what Euler wants : a propagation of light by
simple vibration of a decomposable medium.
AB far as I know, both .Newton's and Euler's supporters
admit that each of these theories have their own difficul
ties, which elude those of the opposing theory. Would it
not therefore be better, instead of setting these views in
opposition one to the other as has until now been done, to
consider them as reciprocally supplementing one other, so as to
combine the advantages of both into one hypothesis?
One important argument for this new theory is that
all the light we know is indeed only the phenmnenon ef a
propagation. For
1) Assuming too, that the light that now reaches us is
the same light that less that around eight minutes before
radiated from the sun, then as has already been shown,
we cannot explain the diffusion of light in all directions
without assuming that this motion is original. But there is
original motion in a matter only for so long as it has not
yet reached a dynamic equilibn'um, that is, for as long as it
is still conceived as becoming.12 Therefore all light that is in
12. Compare Eschenmayer, Prof-Ositions, 22ff: 'According to dynamical concepts, an

equilibrium arises when two opposing degrees of reality act against one another. Herc,
however, we are only discussing a relative equilibrium, in which the effects of the two
forces are thought not as cancelled by, but rather only as equal to, one another. An
absolute equilibrium exists where two forces completely cancel each others' effects
so that they are no longer an object either for mathematical construction or for the
analysis of experience. We may think of an absolute equilibrium symbolically by way
of the lever. As long as force and weight are distributed over the arms of a lever in
some manner, then a calculation of the magnitude of motion also takes place, just as
when I think of the force and weight as combined in the hypomochlion (fulcrum) ,
the magnitude of motion is = 0. This is absolute mechanical equilibrinm which,
for mathematicians, is no longer an object. We can indicate a dynamic absolute
equilibrium with the example of plus and minus electricity. As long as each works
81
COLLAPSE VI
contact with our organ is indeed such as remains in a state

of propagation.
2) That the light from the sun is actually merely the phenomenon
88 efa constani decomposition efits atmosphere has been carried to a
high degree of probability by Hersch.el (Philosophical Transac
tionsfor the Year 1 795, vol. 1) . 13 According to the simplicity of
means that we apply to the greatest and most widespread
effects of nature, we may all the more extend this conjecture
to all self-illuminating bodies in the cosmos, as many
phenomena of its light seem to confirm such an origin; of
which more below.
Since I have seen Mr Hersch.el himself, to make his
hypothesis of the origin of sunlight more probable,
appealing to the propagation ef light in our terrestrial atmosphere
(the Northern Lights, that are frequently so large and
luminous, that they can probably be seen from the moon;
the light that often in clear, moonlit nights, covers the sky) ,
I am all the more strengthened in the conjecture that indeed
all light is propagated by the vibration of an easily decom
posable medium (see Ideasfar a Philosophy efNature, S.36) .
on the other at a distance, we have the sensation of electricity, but as soon as the one
passes over into the other, every expression of this fluid vanishes and becomes = 0
for experience.' [Editors' note HKA I,6: 297]
13. William Herschel, 'On the nature and construction of the Sun and the fixed
stars', Philosophical Transactions ef the Royal Society ef London far the Year 1795, part 1 ,
46-72 : 'That the sun has a very extensive atmosphere cannot b e doubted; and that
this atmosphere consists of various elastic fluids, that are more or less lucid and
transparent, and of which the lucid one is that which furnishes us with light, seems
also to be fully established by all the phaenomena of its spots, of the facolae, and of
the lucid surface itself.' [Editors' note HKA I,6: 297-8]
82
Since then, I have read Lichtenberg's MeteorologjcalFanlasies 14

from the opportunity afforded by Herschel's hypothesis, and
from this too it seems to me that the hypothesis is more
confirmed than refuted.
3) It is now agreed that the light that arises in the combustion
of bodies, is propagated from the environing air, and
indeed from those parts of it that, from their efficacy in
the advancement of vital functions, 15 have acquired the
name vital air ( aer vitalis) . Already from the outset it may
be conjectured that indeed all the light that we are in a
position to create, takes its origin from the vital air.
In the work referred to, I have maintained that the
new system of chemistry, as soon as it has acquired its due
extent, could indeed develop into a universal system of
nature. The present work should provide the test for such
an extended employment of it. The discoveries concerning
the properties of the gaz oxygene should long ago have made
it dear that oxygen, if it is what it is currently taken to be, 3 8
will indeed be much more than just that. We have even
begun to ascribe to the ponderable basic matter of the vital
air the most extraordinary effects in nature. Against this,
one remark, that strikes me as very true, will be made,
that it is absurd to accord an in itself inert body of the sort
that so-called oxygen is, such power. (See, for example,
14. Gorg Christoph Lichtenberg, 'Geologisch-Meteorologische Phantasien', in

GOttinger Taschen Calender. Fiir do.s Jahr 1798: 83-120. HKA 1,6: 298-9 cites Lichtenberg's
discussions of the conditions under which variations are observed in the quantity of
light from the fixed stars.
15. Christoph Girtanner, AefangJgriiruJe der 111/JijJhlogistischen Chemie, second edition

(Berlin: Unger, 1795) , 6 1 : ' Gnnbu.stiun consists in the decomposition of oxygen gas
by a body with which oxygen has a greater affinity than with caloric. Burnable or
C(Jl1lbu.stihle bodieJ are such as have a great affinity to oxygen. During combustion oxygen
is combined with the combustible body and acidifies it. The caloric previously bound
to oxygen becomes free and bonds with the adjacent bodies; hence light and heat'
83
COLLAPSE VI
what Brandis says in Essay on the Vztal Force, p. 1 18 . ) 1 6 Most

important in this chemical discovery is the constant coexistence
ef this basic matter with the energetic molter manifest in light, so
that until now one had at least every right to consider it as
genuinely that matter to which nature opposes the constant
effects of an ethereal, universally distributedfluid.
Since the vital air is a composite matter, and since all
expansible fluids must be considered as composed of an
original elastic fluid and a ponderable matter, we may here,
since we find ourselves in the domain of a higher science,
abandon the metaphorical language of chemistry and
conceive the so-called acid-matter [ Sauerstef!J or oxygen17
as the negative matter ef the vital air that in combustion is
combined with the body, while the positive goes under the
form of light. For brevity's sake we will designate light by
+O, but oxygen itself by 0 (provided that we do not
-
thereby think of +E and -E) .

If accordingly the vital air is the source of light, and
-0 is the ponderable matter whereby afteely circulating, highly
elastic fluid, surrounding the planet, limited in its motion and
as it were fastened to gravitating bodies, then the old theory ef
Descartes, Huygens and Euler ceases, at leastpartly, to be hypotheti
cal, and perhaps, as Newton himself dared only conjecture, at
the end of his Optics, 18 will be proven.
16.J. D. Brandis, Versuch iiber den Lebemkra:ft (Hannover: Hahn, 1795).
17. A Lavoisier, 'Freier Auszug aus dem Taite elementaire de Chimie a Par. 1789 mil
Anmerkungen', in Physi!udisch-chemische Schrjflen. Aus dem Fraw.osischen gesammelt und
iibersetzt, vol. 5 (Greifswald: Anton Ferdinand Rose, 1794) , 1 6 1 : ' Vital Air. Like all
gaseous matters, the breathable part of our atmosphere contains caloric, to which
something must be added to manifest this kind of gas. We may most appropriately
call this acid-matter (oxygen, from oxus and geinomia) , because through its bonding
with most substances it produces acid; hence the vital air is acidmatter gas (oxygen
gas).'
18. Isaac Newton, Optics, Qyery 22, in Andrew Janiak, ed., Newton. Philosophical
T#itings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) : 138-9. 'May not planets
84
What we call light is now itself the phenomenon of a

higher matter capable of many more and other combina- 39
tions, and with each new combination takes on yet another
mode of activity. Although it seems to be the most simple
element, an original dupliciJ:y must nevertheless be assumed
in light, or at least the light from the sun seems to be the
sole cause that sparks and maintains all duplicity amongst
the earths.
In light, as it radiates from the sun, only one force
seems to govern, but doubtless as it approaches the Earth,
another, antithetical matter enters with it and thus, since
it is itself capable of bifurcation, forms together with that
matter thefirst principle efthe universal, dudism efnature.
Such a dualism must however be assumed, because
without opposing forces, no motion is possible. Real
opposition is only thinkable, however, between magnitudes
efthe same kind. The original forces (to which in the end all
explanations revert) would not be opposed to one another
were they not originally one and the same (positive) force,
which only acts in opposite directions. For this very reason it
and cornets, and all gross bodies, perform their motions more freely, and with less
resistance in this actherial medium than in any fluid, which fills all space adequately
without leaving any pores, and by consequence is much denser than quick-silver or
gold? And may not its resistance be so small as to be inconsiderable? For instance;
if this &ther (for so I will call it) should be supposed 700,000 times more Elastick
than our air, and above 700,000 times more rare; its resistance would be above
600,000,000 times less than that of water. And so small a resistance would scarce
make any sensible alteration in the motions of the planets in ten thousand years.
If any one would ask how a medium can be so rare, let him tell me how the air,
in the upper parts of the atmosphere, can be above an hundred thousand times
rarer than gold. Let him also tell me, how an Electrick body can by friction emit
an exhalation so rare and subtle, and yet so potent, as by its emission to cause no
sensible diminution of the weight of the electrick body; and to be expanded through
a sphere, whose diameter is above two feet, and yet to be able to agitate and carry up
leaf-copper, or leaf-gold, at the distance of above a foot from the electrick body? And
how the effluvia of a magnet can be so rare and subtile, as to pass through a plate of
glass without any resistance or diminution of their force, and yet so potent as to tum
a magnetick needle beyond the glass?'
85
COLLAPSE VI
is necessary to think all matter as originally honwgeneous, for

only insofar as it is h011Wgeneous with itse!f is it capable of a
bfforcahon, that is, of real opposition. But every actuality already
presupposes a bifurcation.
Where there are appearances, there are already
opposing forces .19 .Natural science therefore presupposes as
its immediate principle a universal heterogeneity, and to be
able to explain this, a universal homogeneity of matter. Neither
the principle of absolute homogeneity nor that of absolute
heterogeneity is the true one; the truth lies in the union ef
the two.
91 Without original heterogeneity no partial motion would
be possible in the earth. For the opposing forces possess a
necessary striving to equilibriate, that is, to set themselves
into a relation of minimal reriprocity; consequently, were the
forces not unequally distributed throughout the universe,
or were the equilibrium not constantly destruyed, all partial
motion would ultimately vanish from planets, and only a
universal motion would persist, until perhaps finally even
the inert, lifeless masses of the planets would collapse into
a single heap, and the entire world sink into inactivity.
19. Kant, Critique efPure RelL<an (A265/B3 2 1 ) 'We are acquainted with substance in
space only through forces which arc active in this and that space, either bringing
objects to it (attraction) or preventing them penetrating into it (repulsion and
impenetrability) . We are not acquainted with any other properties constituting the
concept of the substance which appears in space and which we call matter.' See
also Eschenmayer, op. cit. , 5-7: 'Matter is conceivable only by assuming two basic
forces, and matter fills a space not through its mere existence, but by forces. Now
since the empirical filling of space is given as endless difference in our intuition, but
the multiplicity of a force can only consist in degrees, we may also consider these
differences as degrees. Qyalities are therefore degrees, and a degree of matter is any
magnitude of proportion in which the attractive and repulsive forces stand one to
the other. It is in this way that the dynamic is distinguished from the mechanical
philosophy of nature.'
86
In order that the forces be unequally distributed

throughout the universe [ mlt], an original heterogeneity
of the planets in each system must be postulated. There
must be a principle that not only incites, but also, by
continuous influence, sustains the conflict of particular
matters on subordinate planets. Were this principle
uniformly distributed throughout the universe, then it
would soon find itself in equilibrium with opposing forces.
It must therefore flow from somewhere else than, and from
outside, the individual planets ; in each system there must
be only one body that always generates this principle anew,
and dispatches it to all the others.
There is therefore no doubt that the self-illuminating
bodies of the solar system owe this property to a quality
that is properly their own, and which they obtain from the
very beginning through a universal precipitation from the
common solvent medium that precedes the formation of
worlds.
To this extent, the view that the light from suns is
generated from their own laps, still has a great deal going
for it. Or should suns only be light magnets20 for the universe,
and all the light that nature generates from throughout
all space be collected in them? Must there be, apart from
planets and suns, a third class of bodies that are expressly
determined to those processes by which nature generates
ever new light matter (perhaps comets) ? If for a moment we 3 !
2 0 . Peter Joseph Macquer, ChymischeJ Wdrterbuch oder Allgemeine Begriffe dT Chymie

nach a!phabetischer Ordmmg. AUJ dT R-a:n'lihischen nach dT iweyten AUJgabe uberseht und mit
Anmerkungen und .<:ft.slih.en vermehrt von Johmm Gat!fried Leonhordi, 2ru1 edition, 7 parts
(Leipzig: Weidmann, 1788-179 1 ) , part 4, 577: light magnet is the 'Proper name for
Balduinic Phosphorous. This is nothing other than a combination of chalk with nitric
acid. [ . . . ] This phosphorous (which some . . . call light magnetJ, because it only lights
once exposed to light at a distance) [ . . . ] '. [Editors' note HKA 1,6: 303.]
87
COLLAPSE VI
think the world as finite, we must believe that from that point
where the common centre falls, there emanates a constantly
renewed and inexhaustible stream of positive matter.
Is Lamhert's argument that the planets that cycle within
the centre of the solar system must be dark, convincing?21
The star that in the sixteenth century suddenly appeared
in Cassiopeia shone for one month more brightly than
Sirius, and once it had arisen, as if from the void, gradually
reduced in brightness, manifesting always weaker colours
before finally disappearing completely; or was the star that
Kepler saw at the start of the following century near the heel
of the Ophiuchus, which demonstrated a constant change
of colour (running through almost all the colours of the
rainbow) , but was as a whole white - according to Kepler's
statements the brightest phenomenon in the heaven of fixed
stars - perhaps, as Kant suggested, extinct suns reviving
from their ashes, or were they the stage for another great
process, by which nature generated light in the depths of
the universe?
At least if, following Herschel,22 the propagation of
light in the sun is only an atmospheric process, then there must
2 1 . See ]. H. Lambert, Casmological Letters on the Ammgemeni of the Warltl Edifice

(Augsburg: Klett, 176 1 ) , tr. S. L. Jaki (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1 976) :
'Should I, however, out in the common centre of the fixed stars, which together
constitute a system, a body toward which they all gravitate, then I must give that
body an enormous size and I must enhance its mass so much that even the most
distant stars of the system would have considerable gravity toward it, because this
is always proportional to the mass. Were I here to write a novel, I would then state
that this body has either no proper light or only a very weak one. I would so arrange
the world that the smaller dark bodies, like, for instance, the planets, would move
around bright suns, but these again would orbit around dark bodies. For the suns
would need no other light because they themselves possess so great a brightness,
while the dark body can still sufficiently be illuminated by the suns which move
closest around it.' [Editors' note HKA I,6: 303.]
22. See note 13, above.
88
be a reason why at all solar atmospheres erupt into light

propagations . Must we assume that originally some elastic
essence from which nature propagates light, accumulates
around the solar body, and that the existence of this matter
in the atmospheres of subordinate astronomical bodies is
due to the long influence of the sun alone? At the very
least, the source of light in our atmosphere is not purdy and
unmi.xedl,y to hand.
Who knows if suns are not surrounded by a completely
pure air,23 while a principle proper to planetary atmospheres
prevents the outbreak of the propagation of light? There,
in the sun's vicinity would shine an unchangingly pure
light, unmenaced by any hostile principle. If it developed
from the constant decomposition of a gaseous essence, we 3 S
would have t o think this as provided with an extraordi
narily high degree of elasticity, since as the largest masses
of every system, suns, through the original transition from
a fluid to a solid state, emit the largest quantity of elastic
matters . To this, of course, is to be added the effect of
gravity, which maintains the sun's atmospheric cover by
intense compression, increasing its original elasticity to an
extraordinarily high degree.
It is known that the intensity of light in its propagation
is proportional to the degree of elasticity of the air from
which it propagates . We experience this in great cold, when
all fire burns brighter, sparks spread more quickly, electric
light arises from the least friction, and even the earth's
atmosphere at the poles radiates in electrical rays .
23. Gehler, PhysikalischeJ Wdrkrbuch part 2, 371 : ' Gas, dephlogisticated, dephlogisticated air,
non-cmnbwtible air, pure air {Bergman), Fire air (Scheele), artificial pure air {Keir), vital air
{lngenho=), bnpyreal air, Gas dephlogisticatum, aer dephlogisticatu.s, Aer puri.uimus, aer VeruJ
factitiu.r, aer vitalis, go.s ou air dephlogistiqui: That component of the atmospheric air that
makes it suited to sustaining fire and the breathing of animals.' [Editors' note HKA
1 , 6 : 304.]
89
COLLAPSE VI
If then around the central body a gaseous essence

emanates of so high a degree of elasticity that light
propagation erupts unprovoked of itself, then continuous
rays of light from these would spread in all directions and
an ethereal sea would fill the empty spaces of the entire
system whose midpoint they occupy, then indeed even
spread into the spaces of more distant systems. For if the
light developed never comes to rest until the gradually
decreasing elasticity of its mass attains equilibrium, then
the space it occupies at rest becomes proportional to
its elasticity. But the degree of elasticity can increase to
infinity, and be assumed to be as great as the explanation
of appearances requires . Therefore the elastic matter that is
propagated from the circumference of our sun can spread
in a steady, unbroken stream to our atmosphere. The daily
revolution of the earth will necessarily create the change of
day to night, but not prevent the light from other, far distant
suns from maintaining the continuum of their atmosphere
with ours. Just as the hemisphere that we inhabit turns
94 towards our sun, so too will larger light rays penetrate it,
and effect the phenomenon of day. A common medium fills
our entire solar system; every individual planetary body
will acquire as much light from the commonality as is
possible in accordance with the quality of its materials, but
nowhere in the whole planetary system is there a hiatus , or
a space that is not filled by the common atmosphere of all.
If finally the fixed stars too yet belong to a higher
system, governed from a common central body, then the
atmosphere of this system will also be common. Thus the
atmosphere of each sun is in contact with the atmosphere of
a higher system, and all the light that is spread throughout
the world is the common light of one universal atmosphere.
90
If meanwhile an original diversity amongst the planetary

bodies exists, then the universal light cannot be uniformly
distributed, but must radiate from all spaces of the world to
the suns, and only from these to the planets.
Doubtless, however, it is not only individual, divergent
rays that come to us from the sun, it is the decomposed solar
atmosphere24 itself that, as a constant whole, reaches even to
us. The phenomenon of day is inconceivable as an acciden
tally diffused light. Since a source of light was formed in
the vicinity of dark bodies , would this not at the same time
have to be set in motion by the influence of the sun? The
conflict of elastic matters in our atmosphere can only arise
when our globe is transformed into a self-lighting body by
an alien influence, becoming sun andplanet at the same time,
and thus combining heterogeneous properties in itself.
It is not enough, however, that the positive principle is
only non-uniformly distributed throughout particular solar
systems. If it radiates uniformly to a subordinate planetary
body, a universal uniformity would soon arise upon it, that
would ultimately terminate in a universal decomposition.
Light could not act upon the subordinate planetary
bodies unless a force were extended over them that,
excitable by light, must be primitively affinate to it. That
however no enduring excess of this force of nature arises
through the influence of the sun's light, is ensured by the
world's very structure, by the change of day and of night, of
the seasons, even by the form of the planets, since, to judge
analogically in accordance with the form of our earth,
without doubt wherever light rays strike most vertically
(towards the equator) , the greatest mass is accumulated;
while where they more obliquely hit (towards the pole) ,
they gradually flatten off.
24. See note 13, above.

91
COLLAPSE VI
195 The positive cause of all motion is the force that fills
space. If motion is to be maintained, then this force must
arise. The phenomenon of every force is therefore a maiter.
The first phenomenon of the universal force of nature,
through which motion is sparked and maintained, is
light. What radiates to us from the sun (since it maintains
motion) appears to us as the positive; what our earth (as
mere reagent) opposes to that force, appears to us as the
negative. Without any doubt, what bears the aspect of the
positive is a constituent of light, with it, we simultaneously
acquire the positive elements of electricity and magnetism.
The positive in itself is absolutely-one, therefore the primitive
idea of an inexhaustible primal maiter (of aether) , which, as if
broken down in an infinite prism, extends into innumerable
matters (as individual rays) . All multiplicity in the world
arises only by the various limits within which the positive
acts . The factors of universal motion on the earth are
positive, which radiates to us from outside, but the negative
is what belongs to our earth. The latter, evolved from a
positive force, is capable of an infinite multiplicity. Where
a force of nature encounters resistance, it forms its own
sphere, the product of its own intensity and that of the
resistance it encounters .
: 96 The negative force is aroused only by the positive.
Therefore in all nature, neither of these forces exists
without the other. In our experience, as many individual
things (particular spheres, as it were, of the universal
forces of nature) arise as there are different degrees in the
reaction of the negative force. Everything terrestrial has this
property in common: that it is opposed to the positive force
that radiates to us from the sun. In this original antithesis
lies the seed of a universal world organisation.
92
This antithesis is postulated ahsolutely by natural

science. It is not susceptible to an empirical, but only to
a transcendental deduction. Its origin is to be sought in
the original duplicity of our mind, which only constructs
a finite product from opposing activities .25 Those who
adhere to experimentation know nothing of this antithesis,
although they could not deny that their constructions of
natural phenomena (for example, combustion) are wholly
and utterly incomprehensible without such a necessarily
postulated, if not empirically demonstrable, conflict. Those
who simply propound this antithesis (for example, in the
theory of combustion) , expose themselves to the reproach
that they invent hypothetical elements where they ought
to experiment. This contradiction can only be settled by a
philosophy of nature.
Experimental physicists are right to adhere to the
positive, for this alone is directly intuitable and cognizable.
Those capable of the larger view of nature must not be
afraid to confess that they have ieferred the negative; it is not
for that reason any less real than the positive. For where the
positive exists, the negative exists - and precisely because
of it. Neither the latter nor the former exists ahsolutely and in
itse!f Both maintain a single, isolated existence only in the
25. See Eschenmayer, Propositions, 3 : 'A remark is to be made here that it is only from
the standpoint adopted by the metaphysician of nature that the necessary assumption
of these forces can be proven and the duplicity of matters and forces which so many
have introduced into natural science to explain the phenomena, justified. The
theoretical dualism for natural science is actually postulated by dynamics, but we do
not commonly obseITe its lineage. Thus we set acids and alkalis opposite one another,
two electrical and two magnetic materials; hence Gren assumes a gravitational and
an expansive force [ . . . ]. If we understand ourselves properly, then it is only in name
that these materials differ, but are one in concept, and the assumption of such a
dualism becomes necessary as soon as we analyse the concept of matter in regard to
the category of quality [ . . . ] Ultimately such a dualism is deduced from the necessity
of the original positing and oppositing, which are the conditions under which even
the possibility of our consciousness stands.' [Editors' note, HKA I,6: 3 06]
93
COLLAPSE VI
moment of conflict; where this breaks off, the two disappear

into one another. Nor is the positive perceptible without
contradiction; and when they boast of a direct intuition of
the positive, they themselves presuppose the negative.
This is what Newton found. As he established the force
17 of attraction as the negative principle of universal planetary
motion, he does not deny, but rather affirms, that it is an
ieferred principle. He does not attempt to present a direct
intuition of it, but rather postulates it, since not even the
directly-intuited positive would be possible without it. He
even acknowledges that if this principle were intuitable,
merely apparent, then rather than being the actual force
of attraction, it would have to be simply the illusion of a
jostling, gravity-producing matter. That is, he shows that
the demand to know something positive concerning the
force of attraction is vain, and is based on inconsistent
concepts .26
26. See Newton, Opti.cs Qyery 3 1 : 'Have not the small particles of bodies certain
powers, virtues or forces, by which they act at a distance, not only upon the rays
of light for reflecting, refracting aud inflecting them, but also upon one another, for
producing a great part of the phaenomena of Nature? For it is well known that bodies
act one upon another by the attractions of gravity, magnetism aud electricity; aud
these instances shew the tenor aud course of Nature, aud make it not improbable, but
that there may be more attractive powers than theses. For Nature is very consonant
aud conformable to herself. How these attractions may be performed, I do not here
consider. What I call attraction, may be performed by Impulse, or by some other
meaus unknown to me. I use that word here to signify only in general auy force
by which bodies tend towards one another, whatsoever be the cause. For we must
learn, from the phaenomena of Naturc, what bodies attract one another, and what
are the laws aud properties of attraction, before we inquire the cause by which the
attraction is performed.' Eschenmayer, Propositiom, 60f: 'I conclude with the remark
that Kant, in the proof of the existence of au attractive force aud the explication
of its properties, has gifted us the key with which in the future the majority of the
burdensome problems of nature may be resolved, and even the windows that were
opened by the immortal Newton, when he accepted the attractive force as valid
but not a priori provable presupposition for discovering the laws of gravitation, is
satisfied by the proof of their existence that Kant presented.'
94
Let us from the first solemnly renounce a physical

explication of that universal conflict of the negative with the
positive principles, from which alone the system of nature
develops harmoniously. And in order that our philosophy
does not, by reason of its assertions, take second place to
experimental physics, let us demonstrate, by a complete
induction, embracing all phenomena, that its one-sided
explanatory method actually comes to nothing without
inner contradiction (the source of all life) , and makes any
construction of the first phenomena of nature impossible.
We will consider it proven:
1) That light is thefirst and positi.ve cause efuniversal polarity;
2) that polarity can creaie no principle without having an
original duplUity in itse!fj
3) finally, that real antithesis is possible only between things ef
one kind and common origi,n.
95
g 1. Meadow network from Yosemite National Park. Each node (ball) is a meadow.
o diameter is proportional to area. Each link is a possible connection between
teadows, where link strength is proportional to meadow size and inversely proportional
id distance between meadows and links below some threshold strength are omitted.
he network is viewed looking to the north and looking down; the x, y location of each
)de is the meadow's geographic location and height is the meadow's connectivity
mmber of links attached to the meadow) . Node colour is proportional to elevation
id link colour is proportional to distance between
)des. Data courtesy of Eric Berlow.
COLLAPSE VI
New Ecologies
The many dire environmental warnings to which we have became

accustmned all have their basis in predictive models devised by
scientists. But what degree efconfidence can we place in such models,
and on what basis are they constructed? Scientists in the Compu
tational Ecology and Environmental Science Group at Microsefi's
Computational Science Lab, based in Cambridge, England are
working at the cutting edge ef environmental science, devising new
methods to computationally model climate change and its effects.
This work involves adapting statistical methods to reflect the particu
larities efthe extremely complex and interconnected ol?Jects ef biology
and ecology.
In COLLAPSE 's interoiew with four ef the scientists working at the
Lab, we discuss the new impetus that environmental concerns have
imparted to ecology as a science, demandng a re-examination ef
its oijects and its aims. They describe the delicate compromises that
must be made between tractability, complexity, and the urgenq efthe
problems which they are addressing, and the necessary conftonta
tions with the historical scientjfic legary involved in rethinkng the
biosphere. In this process, new models efscientific thought andpractice
are emerging.
97
COLLAPSE VI
STEPHEN EMMarf (HEAD OF COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCE)
COLLAPSE: Some may be surprised to see Microsoft

involved in scientific research of this kind ; could you
explain the aims of, and the thinking behind, your team's
work?
STEPHEN EMMarr : When Microsoft asked me to join the

company, science certainly wasn't natural territory for the
organisation. That Microsoft is doing science - and in
particular natural science - is the result of my convincing
the people who run the organisation that science is set to
become increasingly important to Microsoft, that Microsoft
has the potential to make a significant contribution to the
future of science, and that there are many potential benefits
to Microsoft actually doing (in addition to just funding)
science. The case I set out was as follows : Firstly, that there
is every reason to believe that science (in particular natural
science - or more accurately, a precise science of complex
natural systems) is set to be the single most important driver
of our times (especially in relation to environment, health,
medicine, energy and the future of computing) , the impact
of which in the twenty-first century, from a societal and
economic perspective, is likely to dwarf that of 'IT era' of
the twentieth century. Secondly, that new kinds of software
will power this science - enabling the realisation of unprec
edented ability for predictive multi-scale models that permit
'Grand Challenges' in science to be tackled, large scale
'in-silico' experiments (e.g. , future climate) , highly novel
data acquisition, analysis and visualisation techniques,
and enhancing creative imagination in scientific discovery
(interestingly, much in line with what Alan Kay originally
98
Ennnott et al - New Ecologies
envisioned in the 1 970s as the potential of computing) .

1birdly, that science is where numerous developments
have come from that have shaped the company's business
and technical strategy: the World Wide Web, the Browser,
Object Oriented Progrannning, Search - and science is
likely to be where future such developments emerge from.
C: You have spoken of pursuing a 'new kind of science' -

could you elaborate on what you mean by this, and how
your vision of it relates to that of Stephen Wolfram?1
SE: The last century saw an increasing fractioning of

science, and 'natural science' has suffered most severely as
a consequence of this . Biology, for example, is a discipline
that has become divided into (to name but a few) cell
biology, developmental biology, genetics , genomics ,
metabolomics, proteomics , structural biology, microbiology,
epidemiology, 'systems' biology, mathematical biology,
theoretical biology, cancer biology, population biology,
stem cell biology, evolutionary biology, plant biology,
ecology, neuroscience and now even 'ageing science'. This
has in part been an expected consequence of the increasing
specialisation of each of these various branches of biology,
but it has been at some cost, and may well be looked upon
by future generations of scientists as highly deleterious .
I think this century will demand a significant (re)unification
of science if we have any hope of making the kinds of
advances that are now urgently required and that will
fundamentally shape our society and our future. This will
require radically new thinking, radically new ideas and
1. S. Wolfram. A New Kind 9fScimce (Champaign, IL: Wolfram Media, 2002) .
99
COLLAPSE VI
radically new approaches in science in order to overcome

existing barriers to fundamental advances in natural science
- and it is precisely this radically new thinking and these
new approaches in science that my Lab is focused on.
As for Wolfram, when his book A New Ki'nd <f Science
was published, both it and he were roundly criticised
- unfairly in my view. I think this was because many
focused on the narrow 'example' he focused on of Cellular
Automata. I wouldn' t call CAs a 'New Kind' of science,
but Wolfram was actually making a much more important
argument: that nature may not obey or be explained by
existing mathematics - the 'rules' that have been (arguably)
successfully applied to physical systems, most notably
calculus and in particular Ordinary Differential Equations ;
and that therefore there is a strong case to be made that
we need a new kind of science that is based on new kinds
of thinking and a new kind of computational 'language'
or approach that is likely to be fundamentally, radically,
different to that of the 'first' (so-called) Scientific Revolution
of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, which
continues to dominate science today.
C : In our interviews we have spoken with those in your

team who are working on ecology and climate modelling.
Why can the kind of approach you have described make
a difference specifically in the area of ecology? And what
other areas is the lab working in?
SE: Rather than ecology being a priority, it's more accurate

to say that the priority is to accelerate a precise, predictive
science of complex natural systems - a new natural science
- spanning biochemistry to the biosphere. The focus is
100
Emmott et al - New Ecologies
on both developing new theory about complex living

systems as information processing systems (e.g., cells
as information processing devices and biochemistry as
information processing machinery) , and on novel compu
tational approaches that allow the testing of such novel
theory - including a scientific, computational and software
framework to enable 'impossible' ('in-silico') experiments
to be conducted (especially about the interactions between
climate and ecosystems, where such an approach is really
the only way to conduct experiments, other than the biggest
experiment on earth - the one anthropogenic activity is
currently conducting) . Drew, Rich and Greg eloquently
expand in different ways upon why our approach might
make a fundamental difference in this area so I shall not
attempt to do so here.
C : You have attended global summits on climate change

to present this work. What is your impression of what
happens when science meets politics ?
SE: Well, we've seen recently all too clearly what can
happen - with the fiasco of the COP15 outcome, the stolen
emails from UEA CRU, the (thankfully unrealised to
date) HlNl flu pandemic issue. The list is a long one -
I highlight just a few. My first quarter of a century in science
has led towards the increasing impression that politicians of
all persuasions are to a great extent guilty of using science
(or the statistical summaries of science) much as a drunk
uses a lamp-post - for support rather than illumination.
On the other hand, one can't really blame politicians for
doing so, since scientists are, on the whole, dreadfully poor
at communicating science and its implications clearly and
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simply. Scientists need to do a much better job of informing

the policy debate on just about every issue imaginable.
* * *
DREW PuRVES (RESEARCH SCIENTIST)
COLLAPSE: It may be that some of the questions we are
going to ask will seem naive to a scientist . . .
DREW PuRVES: This makes me think of Stephen Pacala

from Princeton, from whom I learned a lot of science, but
who also shaped my thinking about how to be a scientist
these days. And he's someone who's always had a lookout
for things that other people weren't doing, or which were
said to be impossible, and he would just stick his neck
out - which is part of his natural character, he's a very
confident kind of character. He would just go in with the
default assumption that "my naive thought might just be
relevant - let's see". And on several occasions, in the end
he's been really listened to. Have you come across this
'wedges' approach to global climate change? It's the one
where you say, over a given period of time, here's what
we would emit if we were to carry on as we are, and here's
what we can allow ourselves to emit if we want to avoid
dangerous climate change. Then we look at the graph,
and between the two there's this triangular difference.
The area under that triangle is the total amount of carbon
that we need to avert - the amount that we need to not emit.
At the time, I think it turned out to be seven gigatons
in total. So Pacala said, "well, let's visualise these seven
102
units as seven wedges that add up to that big triangle, and

then let's look at technologies and see how many wedges
different technologies can give us !' So, you know, more
efficient cars gives us two wedges, and so on. And it turns
out we've got fourteen wedges of technology right now.
If we didn't invent anything else, we've already got fourteen
wedges, and we only need seven. So we've got twice the
capacity to offset climate change up to 2050. Then it gets
harder, because the what-we-would-have-done is getting
ever bigger, whereas the what-we-can-do stays still, if you
see what I mean. After 2050, he says, you might need some
more radical technologies, but even so, to be honest, you
still have the other seven left - maybe that will get you
another twenty-five years ! So you are saying there might
be seventy-five years worth of technology in place to solve
climate change right now. So he just wrote that down and
he gave it to me and said, "what do you think ?" I said,
"Well, okay, I guess . . . " And it is now a standard thing
in policy - people talk in terms of wedges , and it featured
in David Attenborough's TV show - it had Pacala in it
and his graphic with the wedges . It just shows you, to my
mind, that a lot of the challenges we are facing are sort of
'nobody's business'. Everyone always thinks it's someone
else's business , everyone always thinks that someone
else is an expert on it. The fact is, no-one's an expert on
climate change, or on solving global resource problems .
The economists think "we can't do it because we don't know
anything about biology or conservation or agriculture",
but the ecologists think "we don't know anything about
economics", and so on. So actually, a naive approach, firstly,
is valuable, and secondly, might not be as naive as you
think . When you ask these questions, they are probably
the same questions that everyone is asking in that field.
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C : And so what do you think of as being, on the broadest

level, your contribution to understanding the problems - if
not solving them?
DP: There are two sides to it, you see. Going back to the
'wedges' idea for climate change, we firstly need to predict
how big the problems are going to be under different kinds
of actions of humans , one of which is 'business as usual',
where we don't think about it and just carry on; and then,
knowing how bad the problems actually are, we need to
find out, if we want to cap the problem at a certain level
then how much do we need to do? So you are setting the
size of the problem.
For instance, in climate change, what you want to know
is, what is the relationship between the co2 emissions and
climate change. You know, the way it is described in books
sometimes makes it sound like a pretty simple process : you
pour co2 into the atmosphere, and it's like thickening the
glass, it warms up the earth. There is some of that, but in
fact half of the co2 we put in the atmosphere goes into
either forests or oceans straight away, so only half of what
you put in even stays up there. But because oceans and
forests are highly responsive to climate, as we change the
climate the oceans and forests themselves change - they
might suck up either more or less carbon. So actually, at the
moment we don't know what the relationship is between
the co2 that we put in the air and the co 2 that stays in
the air. We don't even know the relationship between C0 2
emissions and atmospheric COr At first glance this seems
almost ridiculous - surely you j ust put it in the air and it
stays there ; but it doesn't. Secondly, we don't know what
the relationship is between whatever co2 stays up there
104
and the climate. That's where a lot of my work comes in,

because the largest uncertainty at the moment is the forests .
C : Before we discuss your work, by now, readers may well

already be wondering how it is that we are assaulted by
terrifying predictions about climate change and by directives
as to what we must do, if we haven't even determined these
simple causal relationships.
DP: People are talking more and more about this now -
that it is really hard to convey uncertainty to the public.
Up until recently people have been very wary of even
admitting there is any uncertainty because it was in the
balance, you know: Are international governments going
to believe or not believe there's going to be a problem?
Whereas I think that's done now, and we can be a bit more
honest about the uncertainty. So, for example, in principle
it would be just about possible to put more co2 into the
atmosphere and for the global system to react in such a way
that the end result of that was lower atmospheric C02 But
frankly, that's extremely unlikely, it would be like a strange
over-compensating mechanism. In reality, you can be sure
about certain things : you can basically be sure that if you
put more co2 into the atmosphere the atmospheric co2 is
going to go up, even though it is not a one-to-one relationship.
It is also very hard to imagine that the atmospheric C02
could go up without warming up the planet. So basically,
you know that if we keep emitting C02 , then atmospheric
co2 will keep going up, and the planet will warm, and
there will be other climate effects . The uncertainty is about
how much the climate will change, and how quickly. But
even the minimal predictions are still slightly worrying
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- the minimal ones say maybe it will only be one or two

degrees - but one degree, two degrees could be a big deal.
So if you think about the spread of uncertainty it is really
tricky, because if you just pay attention to the outer bounds
of it, that could be really misleading. If you have a certain
range, most of the predictions are going to say that it is
somewhere between two and four, but some of the models
will give you one and some of the models will give you six.
It's quite hard to convey that sort of uncertainty. There are
qualitative things we don't know about the subsystems, but
I still think there are certain qualitative things that we do
know, as near as you can know anything. It's very hard to
imagine that the earth would overcompensate in some way.
The other debate that I think is really funny - I've had
this debate with a relative who's really sceptical, and it's
been really interesting bouncing things off him, and he
said, "you know the atmospheric co2 is going up ; how
do you know this is caused by humans ?" So, if you do an
inventory of how much co2 humans are putting into the
atmosphere and then how much the atmospheric CO 2 is
going up, that's pretty suggestive; it's going up by less, not
more, than it should, based on what we're emitting - that
is , we are putting in more than enough in for it to be going
up by the amount it goes up. So, imagine that it's not due
to us : you would somehow have to imagine that all of our
emissions are being perfectly soaked up by something, and
then some other process is responsible . . .
C : A very circuitous explanation !
106
DP: Exactly. So, I do almost have to have two heads when

I think about it: If you blur your eyes to the system, it
doesn't look all that complicated really - I mean, you've
got the atmosphere, you put co2 into it, there's not that
much to it. But in going from that to any more quantitative
predictions, suddenly there's a massive break in the amount
of complexity that you need to think about.
C : If that 'blurred', high-level view already tells us that we

have to reduce co2 , what is the argument for even striving
for a really detailed understanding of it? So that we can
determine what's the least possible we need to do ... ?
DP: The truth is that yes, that's been the argument. And I
worry about this kind of stuff - about the role of this kind
of science plays in the climate change debate - for those
reasons. I think for a long time, essentially, you just had to
persuade governments to worry and take it seriously. Now
that job's done. If we could say, here is the exact response
of the Earth's systems to different levels of C02 , that would
be fantastic. I guess that's what we are heading towards, but
we are a long way from it now. And yet the policy that's
really going to matter is being set right now. So there is this
question in my mind: you could say - if you ascribe this
type of rationality to global government - "I'm spending
a bit too much every month, I want to get back to balance,
I've got to cut down ten percent, I'm going to stop buying
wine." And it's just like that: "you've got to reduce co2 by
this much" ; "Okay, we'll do it, thanks. We'll work out how
to do it." Like they are completely rational and in control
of everything, right. But in fact, is that the amount of C02
that they're going to reduce by, or will the reductions be set
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entirely by political and economic agendas ? They may just

want to do it as fast as they can, but 'as fast as they can' is
determined by democracy and global economies, and all
that kind of stuff. And if that's the case, I mean, look at the
UK saying they want a ninety-percent reduction by 2050
and that we're going to carbon-neutral as fast as we can.
If that's the situation, then where does the climate
modelling prediction come in? Obviously, there'd be a
kind of reactive role for it: You could say, let's assume then
that the world does do a ninety-percent reduction by 2050.
Putting that into the model, let's see how much climate
change, and where, and what should we be worried about.
Look, there's a good chance that a chunk of Africa that
is currently productive for agriculture would become a
desert ... In which case it's just giving us warnings of things
to come, if you like. Not the old kind of warnings which
were meant to shake someone by the shoulders and say
"you have to worry;' but actually saying, "no, really, this is
exactly what's going to happen, so we better plan for this ."
So it's giving a different kind of message, I guess .
C : And d o you believe your work will contribute m

the future to specific warnings, and thus legislation, of
this kind?
DP: I would be very much hope so. I would almost say

that if it didn't, I'd have failed. I used to think that the main
role of my kind of work would be providing predictions of
things that policy-makers care about, and how they would
respond to different kinds oflegislation. For example, if! ban
GM crops , what does that do to agricultural productivity?
108
But more recently, I've come to realise that ecologists

in particular have a big role to play in looking at global
questions in a joined-up way, looking at all parts at once
and what that means. For example, you encourage biofuel
demand to offset fossil fuel emissions, but this increases
the price of biofuels, which encourages Amazon deforesta
tion in order to grow more biofuels, and that deforestation
actually emits co2 . That kind of tracing of effects , comes
naturally to ecologists , but not to many policy-makers, I
now realise. Of course, building models of these problems
serves a dual purpose - it provides predictions, but also, in
describing the model, you describe the problem in way that
can really help policy-makers .
But there i s another part o f me, when I think about
myself longer term, and what I want to do with the
sort of science I study - the science of complex reactive
organisms, especially plants . It says, maybe we just move
on to a different kind of scientific problem, like improving
agriculture, where you are thinking about plants and their
relationship to the environment. And whether we could
have much more productive crops , in particular crops that
use less inputs - so, even if they are not more productive,
they use less water and less fertilizer and things like that.
As well as larger questions, sometimes I see things about
poverty and I think, "Blimey, maybe I should get on board
on that one." It's not like I come in every day and think,
''Am I doing the right thing?" like some people do. I've got
a lot of momentum. But I do worry sometimes about those

things, and keep in mind that the science I'm doing has
potential for those other problems too.
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C: Returning to your current research, you said that the

greatest uncertainty in modelling and prediction concerns
the forests, and this is where your work is focussed.
DP: Most of my work at the moment is on forests, which

dominate the global terrestrial carbon cycle. There are
two projects, and they differ quite significantly in their
complexity. One of them concerns the fact that, if you look
at the carbon stock that is held in living trees, essentially,
as the trees grow, they swell up and that carbon stock
increases ; what stops it increasing infinitely is that the trees
die. So they die, fall over, and then it rots back into the
soil and is emitted back out into the atmosphere. So let's
consider the rate of tree death - or, to see it inversely, tree
lifespans . Now, all the models assume that that lifespan is
the same everywhere - that trees basically die one percent
per year everywhere. Whereas if you take any kind of
more detailed look at this, it will tell you quite the opposite.
So, existing models have quite a nuanced approach to how
growth depends on temperatures, and the same for rainfall,
but the mortality is actually very fixed.
I've got a student at Leeds University who's been
trying to get all these forest inventory datasets that have
been taken for forestry purposes all over the world, knit
them together in a database, and just basically observe the
different rates of tree death in different climates, so as to
replace that one constant with a function of climate and
soil. By doing this we can genuinely help to constrain the
future of the global carbon cycle.
1 10
C: What explanation can be given for the omission of that

factor in the existing models? Is it simply a reflection of
the history of scientific disciplines, what ecologists have
been interested in ife rather than death) ? Or did someone
simply make that assumption at a given point and it was
never questioned . . . ?
DP: One of the things I have really tried to do is to look

at all the parts that are involved in answering one of these
questions to do with climate change. Traditionally what
we've been taught in science - and to a certain extent
it's become the natural tendency - is to do a jump from
something that's already been done. So scientists build on
each other's work, which of course is good sometimes ; but
sometimes it just misses an entire area, because you are
only ever writing on something that's already been done.
So you end up with more and more people studying the
physiology of tree growth, and nobody doing death.
This was one of the big benefits to me of the global
climate models. Because I was really sceptical about them,
like a lot of ecologists still are - "oh, come on, it's too
complicated, we're not ready". And it is kind of boring to
put them together, because one hundred people have to
work together, and it slows you down - I prefer me and a
blackboard and a bit of paper - and we know the predictions
aren't going to be reliable for a really long time, so you ask
whether it's worth the effort . . . but, as I say, one thing that
it really has done is that it's made us question what ecology
is about. Well, it's about understanding the biosphere - and
these big global modelling efforts have really given a shape
to that problem. And there are now entire groups of people
doing research and publishing papers on systems that by
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themselves just look so boring that no one wanted to know

before. So people would go to the tropics and it was all
the epiphytes, or the intricate relationships between ants
and plants, and whatever else, whereas more often than
not, they didn't measure the heights of the trees . And now
we're doing climate change research, that really matters . In
a lot of this work you are just hoping to have a balanced
approach that in the future might help us to understand the
whole thing. But along the way it opens up many new and
very specific avenues of research.
C: A lot of the data that you have to work with was not
gathered for the purposes for which you are modelling,
which introduces a measure of historical dependence in
the selection of the parameters and the setting up of the
scientific problem. Consequently, as you're saying, this
emphasises the need not to accept the legacy, but to reassess
it at each stage.
DP: Yes, but we are just getting there. And in truth, it is

partly a matter of time : You produce a lot of data for one
purpose, and a bunch of other people say, "Hey, it's good
for this different purpose." So there's a natural time-lag that
operates through a sort of feedback. Another aspect of this
is to do with different communities of people: By and large,
NASA just loves putting satellites up, because they love
building lasers and they love tracking satellites and doing
new exciting things . So there's been a disconnect between
the data-gathering and the use of the data; but I think now
it is linking up a little bit more. I get the impression that
NASA would realise now that they need to make some
kind of rational argument - to President Obama, say -
1 12
for putting up a satellite to measure sea surface heights or

something, and not just because, "Hey, we can do that, isn't
it cool" - that actually it matters in some way to people. Still,
in the majority of cases, even when people do their own
experiments they typically end up analysing the model and
asking questions they didn't anticipate when they designed
their own experiment, so it even happens on a micro level.
Stephen [Emmott] talks about a 'new kind of science',
and we're trying to find the broadest way in which to
describe this. But I think some of the activities that make it
different - the more day-to-day aspects - include a kind of
turning of the scientific process on its head: Traditionally,
we start with simple observations, move on to some sort
of quantitative measures, and at some point we assemble it
into a model and then we make some kind of prediction.
Whereas we're now thinking that if you look into a problem
for the first time, you might want to start by building a
model, and then do virtual experiments on the model. We
do statistics on the results of those virtual experiments,
and then we ask at the end how well we did that virtual
experiment. Then, we go and alter our virtual experiment
- remember, at this point we are still not going into reality!
- for example, we say, let's fertilise the plants halfway
through the experiment, does that give me an increased
ability to tell my hypotheses apart or not? If so, I'll retain
that change to my virtual experiment. So there is this loop,
an optimisation loop, and all I'm doing is optimising the
design of an experiment, and it is only qfter all of that, that I
actually go and do my experiment in reality. Whereas at the
moment, even the people that do quite cutting-edge compu
tational science in ecology still design their experiments
based on 'gut instinct' ; at the end of it they come in with
all sort of bells and whistles, computational analysis, but
1 13
COLLAPSE VI
typically they end up thinking, "I wish I had fertilised the

plants half way through" ! We're now calling this - thanks
to Greg [Mclnemy] - joined-up ecology', the idea being
that we join up all stages of the scientific process and move
up and down it seamlessly. Going back to your question, it
means we'd never again gather data without having at least
one model ready to use that data.
C : In the case of planetary ecology, how is such a 'virtual

world' designed to start with?
DP: On a grand scale, what we should be doing with Earth

system models is to make them take in the entire Earth
system - so that running the model simulates everything.
We don't know how the real Earth system is built, but we
have a sort of virtual Earth, which we build with our best
guesses, to be realistic. Then we add a virtual sampling
system, with virtual satellites and so on. We put that into
the virtual model of the virtual earth and we ask, "How
well does the virtual sampling scheme observe what we
know to be true, within the virtual Earth?" We don't cheat -
we don't tell the virtual sampling scheme anything about
the virtual Earth, even though we know everything about
it because we created it ourselves . Everything it knows has
to come through the virtual data from the virtual sensors .
Next, we can feed that data into a second virtual Earth
model. Now we can ask how well the second model
reproduces the behaviour of the first. Finally, we can alter
the number of satellites and what they're measuring in a
way that gives the second virtual Earth the greatest fidelity
to the first virtual Earth, and then this is the plan of satellites
that NASA needs to build. The point being that this whole
1 14
(virtual) process is analogous to what we're trying to do in

reality. We're trying to gather data, to make a virtual Earth
that behaves like the real Earth.
C: People have a naive idea that what scientists do is go

out into the world measuring everything and then go home
and write it all down and that's where they start. Whereas a
scientific experiment is always constraining: you are always
placing a frame over something and it can only tell you
what you ask it. But to a certain extent you're saying that
the naive view has been true in the past - that there has
been this process of sending satellites up, collecting data
and not really knowing what's going to be useful.
DP: That's right, just as people would think . Then you

look at all this data and you're trying to figure out what's
gomg on.
I guess this is related to the use of Bayesian statistical
methods : I pretty much just use Bayesian as a tool, but in
ecology the philosophical implications have been much
discussed. It's really a simple way to visualise the way
science works : it's quite useful that you've got your current
system of belief, and that really it is a sort of probability
attached to any universe. So you can imagine a universe
where tree death doesn't depend on temperature, but here
there's a universe where it does, and here there's another
universe where it depends even more on temperature. So
you have all these different universes and each one's got a
probability - how much do I believe that we're in universe a
rather than universe b ? Once you bring in your data it helps
you make that decision about which universe you're in:
1 15
COLLAPSE VI
When I plot tree death against temperature I get this great

big steep line, so I'm now really quite sure that I'm not living
in tree-death-doesn't-depend-on-temperature universe. So
you are continually updating where you think you are. If
you knew it perfectly in the end you could say for sure
exactly which universe you are in and then simulate your
own universe perfectly. And that Bayesian process describes
fairly well what scientists do.
C: Using that framework, then, what does your work tell

us about the universe we are in that we didn't know before?
DP: The work that I've done that I'm proudest of is that
I worked on a model of a forest that let you scale up from
the rules that govern the growth and death of individuals
to the long-term development of the forest itself - it was
a scale-transition problem model. So the question is then
examining that and finding a kind of model that works .
That involved saying "I'm in the universe where that
kind of model works against a real forest" - it was quite
carefully tested to see whether it would actually work in a
real forest. I've worked with a colleague at the University
of Toronto on forestry, and he's looking at the problem
of how you optimise any factor in a forest - whether it's
yield, conservation value, carbon storing, biodiversity, or
whatever. And we've looked at how the trees break up
space in the canopy; whether you can understand how
the trees' growth and mortality depend on the amount of
canopy space that they capture and their size and age and
so on. And so we found a lot of things out there : You get
this U-shaped mortality rate where trees die quickly when
they are young and old, but they die slowly when they are
116
middle-aged, which of course is kind of like what humans

do. And we worked out that the reason that the mortality
comes down when they are young is that they are moving
up the light gradient, so the environment is getting better,
whereas when they are old it is worsening. And it turns
out that if you double the canopy area you don't double
the growth rate for an individual tree, so you discover new
relationships like that, which seem to be common across
all forests.
All of that does in fact constrain the universe of possi
bilities, because we didn't know it was going to be like that.
And I think that once you know that you can really say a
lot more about how forests work in general and how best
to manage them.
But the mortality thing I'm really excited about. Again,
we really don't know the relationship between mortality
and climate; once we've done this work I think we will
approximately know what it is and we really will have
taken what Bayesians call a 'flat prior' - we really had no
prior belief about temperature and drought and their effects
on mortality - and created a much more concentrated
posterior - we now think that trees die in this way in
response to climate change. That posterior then becomes
the prior for the next piece of work. So the next piece of
work starts off thinking we're probably in this one of the
many possible universes.
C : Such Hat priors correspond perhaps to the type of 'naive

questions' we were discussing - they are factors that we
have no beliefs about, because they have not been thought
of as significant in the past. As such, considering them
introduces new variegations and differentiations in the
domain of 'possible universes'.
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COLLAP S E VI
DP: Actually, I do have some beliefs - which if they're

confirmed show how this work on mortality is crucially
important in climate change : If you take a gradient across
the Earth from a load of places where it is wet, the real
difference between wet, say, in the tropics, to wet up north,
say the redwoods or somewhere like that, is the length
of the growing season. So you've got a twelve-month
growing season in the tropics and it gets shorter and
shorter as you go up. But it seems that trees die primarily
in the on-season. So in the winter, it's almost like pausing
a videotape: All the inputs through growth stop, but all
the outputs through mortality stop as well. If most of the
mortality occurs through pathogens and so on, this makes
sense - it gets freezing cold so the trees can't grow but the
fungi can't attack them either, so everything just stops. So I
actually think that in wet places tree mortality is relatively
unresponsive to temperature as opposed to somewhere a
little drier, where similar kinds of patterns suggest to me
that when you reduce the productivity through drought
you actually increase mortality. And that makes sense
again: they literally die from the drought. Things like
that, just knowing if that is true, could change our prior
assumptions about the way that water and temperature
interact, and give entirely different predictions . And that
immediately impacts the understanding of biomass over the
globe: It says that if you reduce productivity by cooling a
place down, it doesn't really have much effect because the
gains and losses balance each other out; but if you reduce
productivity through drying it out, it really changes things
as such - the gains come down but the losses actually go
up. So you've got this completely different effect.
118
And that affects predictions, so that, under a given

scenario, like 'business as usual, anthropogenic emissions',
I've got a prediction for global temperature and one for
rainfall - and knowing these things could change that
distribution. So, depending on which universe you believe
you are in here, now, you get a different trajectory in the
future, and if we can constrain which universe we are in,
then hopefully that prediction will be constrained and that's
what makes it more useful for forecasting climate change.
C: Understanding science 'idealistically' for a moment as

being interested in the world for its own sake, it sounds
like the advent of our understanding of climate change
has opened up a whole new set of problems and questions
which, as you were saying, were 'flat priors', which people
didn't even think were particularly important questions, or
which hadn't even been framed before. So has it opened
up a lot of opportunities for studying what we didn't even
know we didn't understand before?
DP: Yes, absolutely. You must have heard Donald

Rumsfeld's phrase . . .
C : The unknown unknowns !
DP: I've been surprised how many emails I've had relating
that to ecology, you know. People laughed at it at first, then
they've started quoting it, thinking, "well actually . . . ".
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C : It's quite a profound statement, politicians have said far

stupider things !
DP: Yeah, I think that's true. One of the things is that

. . . I don't know, maybe there is a residual feeling of guilt
amongst ecologists, because the truth is that there are plenty
of ecologists out there whose immediate emotional reaction
to the issue of climate change has been "Great! Because I
happen to be the kind of person who likes to study the sorts
of thing that feed into our understanding of climate change,
and who can take the kind of approach that is valuable!'
You know, I'm a bit like that myself, because no matter
how much I try, I can't get that much into the individual
biology of species and things like that. Somehow, I can't
get into the details - I'm a systematiser, I always want to
look at eco-systems as systems, I'm willing to make simple
hypotheses and go out there and test roughly whether they
are right or wrong. A lot of people don't like that kind of
work, because they would say, for example, "how can you
say tree mortality has a relation to temperature? Malaysia
is roughly the same temperature as Brazil, but Malaysia has
got dipterocarps and Brazil doesn't - that doesn't make any
sense!" And I say, "well, so Malaysia has got dipterocarps
. . . we'll just have to find out if that matters at a later date."
So for me, there is a slightly guilty feeling of luck, in
that my way of thinking is in many ways what is needed
for tackling these issues ; I think it's great to have a problem
to go after, and then you can say, what do we need to
do to answer that problem . . . ? You know, we've got this
'shape' for our science, and the 'unknown unknowns', and
of course those unknowns are really sort of low-hanging
fruit: If you are the first person to take them seriously, then
120
you can do something, you can feel good about it because

its important, it feeds into this big issue. And I think that's
why its important to have that 'other voice', like I said
before, actually saying "erm . . . no". It's relatively easy to
convince yourself that anything you do on this 'map' of
what's important to do for climate change scientifically,
is really achieving something that's great for mankind.
But there is another voice that says, actually, where is the
debate right now with climate change - what matters ?
Is the climate debate finished, because the world has signed
up to doing something about it? - Job done, move onto
something else like food security or the global economy,
poverty and inequality or some other kind of complex
problem. Or do we need to do a different kind of science
- rather than a science that feeds into the understanding
of climate change, or reinforces the warnings that there is
trouble coming, do we need to ask different questions : How
are we going to cope with climate change? Which regions
are going to go through a qualitative change, meaning that
we have to start thinking about human migration . . . ?
So I'm sure I'm not the only one who is on the one
hand essentially worried about climate change and thinks
it would be great if we averted it; and on the other hand
thinks it's exciting because it's given us a great thorny
problem. I guess cancer biologists probably feel the same
way, sometimes they probably get excited about under
standing cancer then feel guilty because actually it's such a
horrible thing!
C : As we understand it, the latest models produced have

made the problem seem worse than it had previously
thought to have been - by building in all these interactions
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within the biosphere, the predictions for temperature rise

look worse than in the simpler models.
DP: Yeah, that's right. With the forest ones, there was this
famous result, it was one of the first Earth systems models
to include truly reactive vegetation - before, they basically
had the vegetation as a fixed thing. [Peter] Cox's team were
the first people to say "hey, trees grow and die, and they
might be taken over by grasses;' and so on; and they put
that into the model and warmed up their virtual world. And
everything was fine for about fifty years (fifty years into the
future, that is) and then something switched in the Amazon
and suddenly it very quickly turned into a savannah, and
all of the carbon that was in this great big forest suddenly
went up into the atmosphere - so it acts as this great big
turbo-charge, and in the model it released the equivalent
of about sixty years worth of anthropogenic emissions in
about ten or twenty years . So this was almost like a 'top-up',
you know: we put it in, and the forest will match our co 2 "
And that's the top line, if you look at the spread of the
predictions which were in the IPCC report five or six years
ago, their top line is exactly that, it's the Amazon collapse.
But then there is another model, to be honest equally
believable, where as things warm up and the co2 increases,
the Amazon trees just grow ever faster and store up ever
more carbon.
Now, what I think is that, as we have added in these
extra biotic feedbacks, there has been more freedom in the
model - more things can happen, and one of those things
is that there can more disastrous results . And that has been
an important warning, I think , not to treat the system like
a bath where you pour carbon in here and it comes out
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there. Actually, it's this non-linear thing, much more unpre

dictable. So that's been an important general message. But
the question now is whether it's possible to constrain these
feedbacks sufficiently to get back to a decent prediction! Or
whether the only contribution from that work is a really
general "hey, this is dangerous, you'd better . . . ". Are these
feedbacks simple enough that we can understand them
sufficiently well to say, "right, now here is the prediction,
and sure, it's different to one that we had before, but this
one is right", or is the general message that Earth's systems
are so complicated that we should simply not expect to be
able to predict them? That's the other conclusion isn't it?
Because there are always more feedbacks we could put in.
C: To have a complex enough model we would have to

build another Earth.
DP: Exactly! If we could build another Earth that we could

run much faster than the real Earth, it would be a useful
tool !
C: Firstly, there is a problem of abstraction - to know

which parameters need not be considered within a model.
But, given the interconnected nature of the biosphere, in
doing so one always risks neglecting feedback effects, and
therefore leaving 'unknown unknowns' out of the picture.
W hat you were describing before, with the virtual worlds,
seems to be an iterated methodology designed to avoid that.
DP: It's interesting to hear you take that very abstract,

general view - talking about the Earth model like it's any
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other complex system. I think that is actually very helpful

when we're thinking how best to improve these models.
Like you say, we can use general principles to help us .
Sometimes, being deliberately blind to the reality, and the
details, can be really helpful.
To be honest my instincts are : Yes, the feedbacks are
there, but it shouldn't be that hard. We just need to do them
correctly. There will be this initial chunk of effort, and we
will bring the uncertainty down by about ninety percent,
and then yes, you could spend the rest of your life doing the
other ten percent. But I feel like, if we could approximately
know the things that we need to know . . .
There is a project now for instance, AMAZONICA,2 which
is a bunch of people, some of whom I know, who are all just
focused on that one issue of ' will the Amazon collapse into a
savannah or not under climate change?' If they answer that
question, they will have taken the single biggest uncertainty
out of the Earth system models overnight, really. And,
you know, that's maybe a big fifty percent, and if you do
fifty percent of what's left with a similar-sized project, you
might get there. But then at the same time someone might
say "hey, you haven't put in the boreal permafrost lichen
feedback in there" . . . So, while someone is constraining the
Amazon, someone else might be increasing the uncertainty
somewhere else!
C: All this might lead someone not conversant in the field

to ask what kind of 'certainty' we are talking about here.
It seems difficult to accept that we could ever reach the
point of having any degree of confidence.
2. See http ://www.geog.leeds.ac. uk/projects/ amazonica/.
124
DP: And we won't know for sure until it's either happened
or not. People have said similar things elsewhere in the
history of science, you know, 'why the guess ?' 'why the
prediction?'. And to be honest, I don't really believe it. I
couldn't exactly prove it.
C: But to remain a scientist, you have to retain some faith

in the predictability of nature!
DP: Exactly. So, here is an interesting example : there is

a diagram that people often see. It's this chart that has
temperature horizontally, rainfall vertically, and it's got
zones drawn on it, and each zone corresponds to a different
kind of vegetation. Now that basically applies all over the
globe. So if you know the average temperature and the
average precipitation, you can essentially say what kind of
vegetation will live there : grassland, savannah, evergreen
forest, deciduous forest, and so on. And that happens in
South America, North America, Africa, Malaysia. By and
large, all these different places have different plants that
have evolved separately, but the relationship between
climate and vegetation is the same.
Another example I really like which I find incredibly
compelling is this weird kind of shrub : It's a bit like an aloe,
and what it does is die off every year and the new vegetation
grows back on top the old and it ends up looking like a
great palm tree kind of thing about twelve feet tall. You find
them in the high tropical Andes - cold, but on the equator.
These are unusual places, they have huge diurnal swings
of temperature. Now, if you go over to Mount Kilimanjaro,
which is also a tropical, high mountain, you find shrubs
that look exactly the same but they have no evolutionary
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history in common at all. Another example is succulents

like cacti: you've got old and new world cacti, they look
really similar, they do similar things, they have evolved
similar tricks to do with water. You find them where you
have two wet seasons a year, that's the rule. Wet-dry-wet
dry, every year. Not wet-dry once a year - that gives you
something else, maybe grassland.
So the new world and old world cacti look really similar,
but have no common evolutionary history. What this tells
you is that there is predictability out there in ecology. For
me, I see a lot of signs of determinism - if you know a
you can predict b. Even if prediction does not work, we
can simple observe that a and b are highly correlated in
effect, so the shrubs are highly correlated with high tropical
environments and so on. So for me, it s ays that nature isn't
this unpredictable, wacky thing. And if that's true in this
context, why shouldn't I be able to take something like a
tropical forest and warm it up and dry it out, why shouldn't
that be predictable too? So that's essentially what we are
looking at when we look at these diagrams .
HI didn't see that kind of predictability in nature, I think
I would be having major thoughts about being in ecology.
You know, even if it was predictable on some micro level . . .
You must have thought about this whole Creationism/
Darwinism thing, where a lot of people say Darwinism
isn't scientific because its not predictive, all it ever does is
explain things after the fact. Whether or not that's true,
I think that if there wasn't this sign of predictability in
ecology that would be all that we were doing, we would
be saying, well, we've got coalescent shrubs in the high
tropical Andes, they are the only place on earth I'd find
them, I'd like to find out why, and somehow with enough
effort I would be able to unravel the fact that there was an
126
original aloe that didn't have a stem, and then one evolved
that grew up on a stem, and so on. But to what end? That's
literally just uncovering a story, a kind of archaeology, if
you like, rather than ecology. Whereas to actually say there
is this determinism, there is this pattern, a leads to b here,
a leads to b here, so why is it in general that a leads to b?
That's much more scientifically interesting.
C : If we simply deal with correlations, we ignore a large

part of what is important for the operation of biological
systems - which includes contingent things like contiguity,
the fact that a certain species is separated from a habitable
region by an ocean, and so on; but here you seem to be
saying that it is valuable sometimes to abstract from the
actual contingent conditions of the Earth, and look at the
hard-and-fast rules in nature quite apart from the way in
which they have, in evolutionary history, played out . . .
DP: Sometimes, yes . More generally, I'd say it's a case of

working out for which processes knowing the history helps
you to predict the future, and for which processes working
out the history is just a waste of effort.
C : You said that you can't get interested in biology on the

level of species. But the relation of your work to biology
seems an important question. What status does a thinking
of these questions on a global scale have in relation to
biology? Is it a kind of 'ecological physics' which abstracts
entirely from biological knowledge?
Although your work combines high-level modelling and
'on-the-ground' research, because ecologists have to think
on a global scale, it must be difficult to connect that back
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to any of the things that we know deterministically on the

biological scale: it's almost like there is a disconnect between
the two things, that you are talking a different language.
DP: I think to some extent that is true. I think if you pushed

most ecologists they would say the same thing, that's its
really all about taking what we know about individuals
and maybe less than that, like physiology, scaling up from
there and working out what gives you these patterns.
There are two ways that people talk about ecology : It's
either the study of the interactions among organisms and
their environment, or it's the study of the distribution and
abundance of organisms. You really need both to define
ecology, because what it should be doing is explaining and
predicting the abundance and distribution of organismsftom
their interactions with each other or their environments,
that's what it's about really.
I think that's what we want. I see the patterns at large
scale and you are right, with some of the things that we do,
like this work on mortality, we just find a pattern in mortality
against climate, and use that pattern in a model. Everything
in there happens from this kind of large-scale 'blur our eyes'
standpoint. But really, more exciting for science is to ask,
how do we get to this pattern from what we know about the
way things interact? So, as I've explained, we would look
at trees and how they interact with different species, how
they put carbon into trunks and roots, and how from that
we can explain why trees die more slowly when it's cold ...
C : As you've said, before the modelling process begins,

before you do these global-scale models, you already have
some intuitions of what might be the case and what is
128
important to look at, and those come from thinking about

actual trees, individual trees, and their interactions .
DP: Yes . That's exactly right, you come from both

directions really. Sometimes you'll look at the pattern and
you will instantly have a little guess about what it is about
the interactions that is causing that pattern, or sometimes
the other way around, you know about the interactions and
you have a guess as to the pattern. 'Ibis comes back to
joined-up science' again.
I'm working with Greg on this whole modelling effort
looking into the distributions of organisms, which are
highly correlated with the environment - it's another
sign of determinism. So it implies that if you change the
climate, this distribution is going to change. If you always
find beeches when the annual temperature is between a and
b, and, owing to climate change, that annual temperature
band moves across the map, you'd expect the beeches to
move, right? But a lot of the models people have used to
predict that movement are simply incompatible with any of
what we know about how organisms interact, and that just
seems, to Greg and I, the wrong way to do the model.
Their models, for instance, say that if you removed all
the tree species on earth except beech, the beech trees would
just stay where they were. And any forest ecologist will tell
you that no, of course if you remove all the other trees
on earth, the beech trees will just spread into the vacated
zones . They'd be pushed back through competition. And
if your model doesn't do that, if it doesn't show that if you
remove species then the remaining species move into the
remaining space, then there is something wrong.
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So, Greg thinks a lot about these sorts of things, more

deeply than I do, I tend to rush in and say 'let's see what
we can do'. He really wants to get a set of models that
are consistent with the theories about the way organisms
interact or the theories about what really causes the
distribution of particular species ; he wants to work that
kind of theory into this applied modelling which describes
how they are going to respond to climate change.
So, firstly, I think there is a disconnect; but secondly, it's
all about removing that disconnect . . . as much as possible.
C: Do you sometimes have moments when you are

absorbed in work, in the technical work of building these
models, and suddenly have a flash of realisation that it is
actually this planet, and all of our lives, that your work is
talking about - or does the reality of what you're trying to
model disappear beneath the process of doing the work?
One would suppose that it would have to, otherwise your
job would be extremely stressful !
DP: Yes , I very much do have those moments . It's been

over ten years since I started my PhD, and in that period
I've learned a bit about plant ecology, done a very few bits
of new work, and have maybe sharpened my plans about
what to do next. In the meantime CO 2 has risen a lot, there
have been wars, people have starved to death, and a species
of dolphin has gone extinct. We'll never get it back. So yes,
it's a good job that most of the time, I'm lost in a much
more abstract world.
130
C : Finally, if we were to run a model where humans actually

achieve the ideal and become 'carbon neutral', do we know
what ramifications that (unlikely) scenario would have?
DP: We have a range of emission 'scenarios', some of which

are very optimistic. I'm not sure whether there is one where
we achieve the ideal - but there should be. You would
think of course that the result would be that on that great
day when we stop emitting, everything stops changing.
But there's no way that would happen. The Earth system is
so complex, has all these time-lagged effects, that it would
keep changing for centuries anyway. And that's before we
consider the many other kinds of impacts human have on
the Earth system, quite apart from carbon emissions . It
really is, unfortunately, very very scary when you think
about the next thousand years of the unremitting effects of
humans . We're going to be staving off one disaster after the
next - hopefully.
* * *
GREG MclNERNY (POST-DOCTORAL RESEARCHER)
COLLAPSE: Could you tell us what is involved in the work

you are currently doing?
GREG MCINERNY: At the moment I'm working with what

are called Species Distribution Models (also known as
Bioclimate Models, Climate Envelope models or Niche
Models) . Basically, this involves trying to produce a
13 1
COLLAPSE VI
description of why populations occur where they do rather

than elsewhere. For instance, an organism has tolerance
limits for temperature, so we may be able to describe
those in a model. The organisms may also have tolerance
limits for light levels , so we can include that extra gradient
in the model. And so on, with factors such as rainfall, the
occurrence of frosts .
Because there is variation in the environment across
the Earth (for example in temperature and availability
of light) we can begin to get an approximation of where
things can live across the globe. These are the basics of
a Species Distribution Model - a mapping of a species'
'success' across variables that can describe its geographical
distribution.
These are quantitative models developed from data
using statistics, so there are lots of considerations with
regard to how the statistical assumptions match up with
the biological assumptions . The hope is that if you get
the quantitative description right, you can use that model
to make predictions - for instance, in relation to climate
changes . If the spatial distribution of temperatures is going
to change, we can make basic predictions about where
organisms will be in the future. Will Britain have a Spanish
Flora in a hundred years' time?
Up until now most of the models have been merely
statistical descriptions, usually based on correlative rela
tionships between observed presences and absences of a
species, and the 'climate' variables that have been measured
as part of that. However, when such models are used to
make projections for climate change or for a different area
of the earth, the results don't necessarily hold much weight.
132
This is because the assumptions of the statistics aren't

explicitly biological, and in fact implicitly ignore most of
our ecological understanding. So Drew and I are trying to
create 'next-generation' Species Distribution Models where
a bit more biological and ecological understanding goes
in at the beginning - for instance, competition between
species. The factors determining where species can occur
include both abiotic and biotic factors.
I really got interested in climate change during my PhD
because I was investigating what the important factors were
for climate change responses and how those factors might
interact. The simple conclusion was that more processes
are important to describing climate change responses than
we actually study now. And, importantly, that the novel
interaction between these processes can lead us to new
understanding. Climate changes have occurred in the past
and these events could have had a large influence on why
we have the biodiversity that we do today, and what we
will have in the future. Once you accept the importance
of these interactions between processes during climate
changes, then you need to study things in a different way.
A mechanistic way.
In the simplest sense, a statistical model just draws
information from the raw data. So if you've got x variables
and your observation data, you choose the ones that you
are interested in and then you do some kind of regression
looking for correlations between the variables and the
observations. In that way, you discover a fact about the
correlation between variables, but there is no causal
information whatsoever in there. What we want is to
include the causes - the important processes . Then the
models will be valuable to the research community to
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COLLAPS E VI
develop the knowledge and understanding that can really

inform policy.
C: So, with a statistical model in physics, say - where the

fundamental causal mechanisms are known - the predictions
need to be supplemented with that knowledge in order to
give a full understanding; but what has been lacking so far
in biological computational models is knowledge of those
causal mechanisms . Furthermore, one would assume that
in the biological realm, such mechanisms may not scale
smoothly, and may be subject to unexpected discontinuities
under certain conditions - and indeed this is precisely what
we need to know in order for the models to be useful : In
effect, we need to define a kind of behavioural landscape
that tells us where statistical correlations between variables
remain constant, and where they break down and in what
way. And that's precisely the task of 'eco-logy' here -
supplying a logic of the living environment to supplement
this raw data-processing.
GM: In principle yes, understanding the mechanism is the

key to developing the most useful statistics . In ecology we
know an incredible amount about the mechanisms but we
don't necessarily go about developing models in the best
way, based on this knowledge. We are a relatively young
science compared to physics ! We do know a lot but don't
necessarily implement all of it.
But also we are very different from physics - dealing
with units that are highly variable, that can change (through
plasticity or evolution) to new forms, and that live within
an environment that varies through space and time. That
makes it far more interesting than physics !
134
If we could develop the 'behavioural landscape', that

would be a good proximate solution to modelling. We would
be able to make predictions based on those correlations .
But that model may in tum be specific to correlations that
occur in a certain set of conditions . If we change the climate
then during climate change new processes may become
more important in describing a new set of correlations . So a
purely correlative model becomes a second choice.
That is where the methodology of Species Distribution
Modelling begins to break down, because it was descnptive,
and we need something that is actually predictive. And yes,
that is exactly where the ecology should come in.
C: The model needs to account, not only for all of those

different variables and their correlation, but for the causal
interaction between variables as well.
GM: Yes - if you strictly follow a principle of parsimony

when you are building your models, you would go for the
simplest explanation. But there are a variety of ways in
which you can judge that 'simplicity' : Is it purely statistical
simplicity, or simplicity with regard to the topic being
studied?
Ockham's razor would need to be used in a different
way if you are to build a model that is applicable to a
different set of conditions as well. So in the case of Species
Distribution Models the data you have is from a 'stable'
climate, but from that you want to build a model that is
applicable in a changing climate. You have to begin with
a set of requirements that are known to be important
before you approach a problem - for instance a set of
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important processes and their relationship to climate -

rather than being a bad statistician and just looking for
statistical interactions . If we take the challenge on appropri
ately and in a biologically-meaningful way then we could
have a model that can cope better with situations such as
climate change.
C: Is there a conflict between this attempt to build in all

the complexity of the empirical biological world, and the
need to build a model that is actually tractable, from which
are going to be able to extract something of use? Is there a
trade-off there?
GM: Totally. This generates conflict between what we

might think occurs and what is actually tractable in a model
in a rigorous way. We need models that are rigorous so that
we can inform, but also tractable so that we can progress .
Th e trade-off comes in many forms . Firstly i t is
important to bear in mind that the set of requirements
will depend on what the question is . At the moment the
set of requirements is very large with respect to climate
change prediction, because we haven't been able properly
to explore what is actually important as we don't yet have
the models. Once we have those models there may be some
approximations or simplifications that can be made.
But if we were only interested in 'stable' climates then
we could be less explicit about some processes . These are
trade-offs involved in making models that are as simple as
possible but as relevant as possible.
We also have to make models that are implementable
and within which the statistics can actually work.
136
For instance, for each part of the model we are going to

have parameters that control the strength of effects of
different processes within a model. The more complicated
the model, the more parameters we need to evaluate and
the more combinations of parameters can potentially exist.
Parameters can trade off against each other, so a high
value in one can compensate for a low value in another
and vice versa, so the interpretation of the theory has to
acknowledge the statistical methods .
Also, the more complicated models get, the more difficult
it becomes to analyse models so as to attribute cause and
effect. We also have trade-offs defined by the amount of
data we have : With low levels of data, as is generally the
case in ecology, we are restricted in what we can actually
parameterise.
A good way of exploring the challenges of model building
is the generality/precision/reality trade-off described by
Richard Levins .3 A general model would apply to many
species but would as a result be less realistic for specific
species or situations . We could make highly precise models
but that may come at the cost of generality as it becomes
so specific. To build a realistic model might reduce your
ability to be precise as we lack appropriate data for the
realistic mechanisms and have to draw out information in a
less precise way. This is one of the reasons why ecological
science always challenges you and requires a bit of a philo
sophical bent.
One of the components of our Next Generation
Species Distribution Models is investigating how you could
incorporate competition into a model and make it tractable.
3. R. Levins, 'The Strategy of Model Building in Population Biology', in American

Scientist .54 (1966), 42 1-3 1 .
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C: Competition for resources between species?
GM: Yes - So, say you have six species of grass, which
are using reasonably similar sets of resources, then in your
model you could have a matrix which statistically describes
how strong the interaction between species A and species
B is, between A and C, and so on until you have the full
matrix. For all the species described, you will have a value
for each of those pairwise interactions .
That can make considering large communities of
species difficult because the matrix grows non-linearly. If
I have two species the matrix would have two parameters,
the effect of A on B and B on A . If I have three species
we need the effect of A on B, A on C, B on A , B on C,
C on A and finally C on B. That's six parameters . If it
was describing interactions between ten species, the matrix
would have to contain ninety parameters. You can see that
the parameters don't scale linearly with number of species
that you consider, as you would like them to.
What we've done is to use ecological theory to make
that relationship between number of species and number
of parameters linear. One way is to describe interactions in
terms of effects and responses, so A has an effect on other
species and a response to other species . Field experiments
have shown that this can be a useful way of describing
the competition and allows us to make the model more
tractable.
We can add more detail by describing in the model
species traits that define competition - for instance, a plant's
rooting depth or its height might define competition for
water or light. Then we can describe competition in terms
138
of the difference between traits . This is similar to an effect

and response model, but the model includes description
(and so assumptions) at a greater level of detail. We can go
on to further levels of detail but we might need more data
to do so.
In this case we find that ecological theory actually makes
that model more tractable than the statistical interpretation
of the problem. Our parameters scale.
The ecological theory reduces, not the amount of data,
but the complexity of the model that you produce : To make
it tractable, the amount of parameters in that model has to
be as small as possible, really. So on the one side you've got
knowledge of what you should be putting into the model,
all of which you need; and on the other side you've got
the practical nature of actually modelling so it has to be as
small as possible; and this produces an appropriate solution
for the task.
C : So, not only is the theoretical framework crucial to

building models that answer to the complexity of the
domain, but it can actually reduce complexity as compared
to a purely statistical model. One could expect this, since
the very notion of looking for statistical correlations
involves a deliberately 'blind' approach to the data. Is this a
novel approach because modellers have been unsure about
the ecological theory they should employ? One could
understand such a reticence, since ultimately the accuracy
and the usefulness of a model would depend on the ecolog
ical-theoretical framework that you use.
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GM: Yes, theory is crucial. Theory deconstructs the world

into useful abstractions, general models of mechanism.
Then, given the p arameters that are realistic, we can make a
prediction of the outcome. If we were only able to interpret
the world in a correlative way humans wouldn't be able to
accomplish all the amazing tasks that they do.
It's basically the power of explanation: We can say
that lots of factors are important to an event, and give a
precise answer that relies on complicated interdependence
between the factors, or we can describe how those factors
are mechanistically related to each other, in which case the
interdependence may actually be smaller. We are reducing
the problem through theory.
But explanation can be complicated, so some non
mechanistic correlations are very useful and may provide
a simpler solution. The trade-offs in model building return
and then we have to think about task-orientated solutions
to the problems rather than an omnipotent model that
reconstructs the entire world.
As to the second part of your question, about the
selection of which theory to use, this is more about the
human condition: Theory is sometime caricatured as the
domain of the 'thinkers' - mathematicians, physicists -
rather than the 'doers' - the people who apply models to
practical situations. There is an incredible amount of theory
out there but isn't necessarily applicable in practice. So we
need to think in a joined-up way and develop ecological
theory within the context of statistics, and statistics in
the context of theory. This can be an unenviable task
sometimes, as you may be less productive in doing so, and
you may need to invest much more initial effort in being
technically and conceptually literate in more techniques,
ideas, skills, and so on.
140
Also, the theoretical and statistical communities can be

separated socially - even at conferences theory sessions
may be specialised and populated by theoreticians . We
need more democratically-selected theory and we need to
increase the interactions between increasingly specialised
communities . So the short answer is that this reticence can
exist because it is hard to mix theory and stats ; but it should
be recognised that we can shift the culture of our science to
make it easier. We are all theoreticians whether we like it or
not, so we need to increase the dialogue.
C : We're talking, then, about the effect of a contingent insti

tutional history concerning the disconnect between compu
tational science and ecological theory?
GM: From the more institutional and historical points

of view there are choices that are made during science's
development that are driven by the personality of
individuals and groups and the natural growth of scientific
communities . You only have to look at the names of models,
theories and philosophies to see that individuals have had
a large influence on a 'punctuated' development of science.
1bis is especially so where a new scientific revolution
occurs, such as that around computers, and when new sub
disciplines emerge. Personality can play a large part in how
new groups engage with each other. There is some trade-off
between establishing a new approach and not getting
swamped by previous approaches, whilst also maintaining
a useful dialogue.
But it is a 'disconnect' found more widely across
ecology: Field ecologists use theory in a very direct way
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COLLAPSE VI
but don't always recognise it as theory. There is a lot to

be gained by extending our joined-up view of ecology, as
it informs the generation of good experiments, which in
turn inform better theory. In many cases, theoreticians
are the most computer-literate and appreciate the value of
this interaction. So the real challenge is to enable a larger
dialogue with the broader community.
C : With this in mind, and to start again at the beginning,

maybe you could explain what you understand by
'ecological theory'?
GM: Theory is a simplification of the world that allows its

prediction, i.e. an explanation. This is a very broad interpre
tation and takes in mathematical or syntactic formulations,
but also verbal and visual formulations.
'Life' is a complicated multi-scale system, so theory
requires useful abstractions. For instance 'population
growth rate' has got ecology a long way so far, but is an
abstraction that takes in survival, growth and fecundity of a
population. These abstractions may be useful in some cases
but, again, more detail may be useful elsewhere. In this case
a joined-up approach would consist of theory that is based
in abstractions that are measurable in field or laboratory
experiments, or that are retrievable from data.
Ecology doesn't really have laws like physics does in its
construction of theory, so it's an understanding of the actual
mechanics of how ecological interactions would work. You
could go on all day and all night describing the processes of
life in lots of detail. But there are certain things which field,
laboratory, simulation and mathematical experiments have
142
shown to be useful simplifications of models, showing what

is best left out.
C : So any applied ecological theory is essentially rwt a

complete account of causal interaction in the domain, but
involves primarily a principle of abstraction.
GM: Definitely, this is where the boundaries of scientific

disciplines are usually formed. And in some cases these
boundaries are useful - but in others we need to make
cross-cutting abstractions. Population Ecology generally
considers the world from the organism above. This
obviously leaves out most of biology. Theory is a question
of understanding the system in the appropriate way.
C : And you suggested that the level and nature of this

abstraction is determined by experimentation - so experi
mentation on the ground sets the parameters for modelling?
GM: Yes and no. Not all experimentation is going to be

directly applied in a quantitative model. It may highlight
new facts, mechanisms, and so on. It is more about
exploration. This might set the parameters and formulation
of modelling, but modelling might reveal that more useful
model formulations are available for that same process,
and then experiments may need to address different
questions and field observations may be ideally made in a
different way. Then there needs to be feedback with
experimentation.
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COLLAPSE VI
It's just how science progresses, but we need to recognise

that the feedback between the theory and experimentation
comes from an appropriate dialogue between sub-disci
plines. For instance the statistics used by an experimenter
may not be useful to a theoretician, and the abstractions
used by a theoretician may be useless to an experimenter.
1bis is of course a caricature but the principle holds true.
C : 1bis suggests that, short of a purely statistical approach,

you can't have a mathematical model that doesn't somehow
rely on some theory-based filtering of what goes into it,
this filtering itself perhaps having been influenced by
previous empirical experimentation . . . A prior selection,
an abstraction, always sets the scene for any scientific
work - Philosophers will recall Immanuel Kant's famous
comments about Galileo's 'inclined plane' experiment:
'reason has insight only into that which it produces after a
plan of its own, and [ . . . ] it must not allow itself to be kept
[ . . . ] in nature's leading-strings'.4
GM: The way I always think about it is with reference to

'population thinking'. Ernst Mayr said that an overlooked
'benefit' of Darwin's theory to science was the abstractions
he made in thinking about the system. Darwin saw
variation within populations and put that into his verbal
model of how the populations worked and then ran his
thought experiments.
Some variations could be more successful than others
in surviving or reproducing, and so give rise to natural
selection, a natural process. So Darwin showed that once
4. Critique ofPure Reruon, Bxiii
144
you've thought about the right sort of 'population' of

variation, in this case very literally variation in a population,
then the dynamics can come out of that system. In his case
natural selection could occur, whereas it could not occur
in previous models because the variation is abstracted out.
A lot depends on abstractions .
'Population thinking' gives clarity about what you
want to include in your model. A lot of the time it has
a single form that you'd actually go for because you are
interested in a certain kind of dynamics . For instance you
might need to acknowledge that there is variation in ages
within a population and so abstractions on age need to
be assessed. The variation doesn't need to be heritable,
you just need to get the correct units . For instance, using
numbers of individuals within a population can give very
different results to using numbers of individuals of certain
age classes within a population.
In the case of natural selection, evolution wasn't
possible theoretically until Darwin got the abstractions
correct. Darwin's great innovation was to give importance
to variation within the species. For instance, if there is
variation in different grasses then the small ones might get
selected in certain environments and the big ones might get
selected in other environments, but if there is no variation,
that population's going to have no change in its average
no matter what environment you put it into. Now, you
could easily think that some other trait was important in
your model - it doesn't necessarily have to be variation
- but, say, if you are creating a model of a species' whole
geographic distribution, it isn't going to move through space
in response to climate change unless there are parts of the
model which actually incorporate movement or dispersal
of organisms in some way. It's that basic and fundamental.
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COLLAPSE VI
C : Obviously, there is a 'selection' at work within scientific

ideas themselves, according to the insights they yield.
GM: That's the progress of science! But it is important

to recognise the correct form of selection. One of the best
ways of putting it, I heard from Rich Williams : The ideas
have to be agile.
C : So, the aim of Species Distribution Modelling is to try

to understand why species end up in one place rather than
another; and that's going to be important to understand
species' reaction to climate change.
GM: Yes, indirectly - it is understanding abundance and

distribution that is of fundamental importance: If you
reduce down all ecological questions they would come
down to 'why is what where' : Why things occur where
they do and in what amounts - which obviously requires
understanding why they don't occur where they don't as
well. If you can predict abundance of a species, then you're
doing pretty well - and, as ecologists, we can't yet do that.
In that sense Species Distribution Modelling encapsulates
all of ecology. But, as we've discussed, the current models
do not - because ecology is also fundamentally a science
of interactions.
From the point of view of climate change, having
appropriate Species Distribution Models would enable
you to actually make predictions about what areas are
important for future biodiversity: Living in the world
where we live now, we need some sort of protected areas,
but where would it be best to put those protected areas in
146
order to conserve everything that we've got now; how can

we develop a network of protected areas that can safeguard
the future of that biodiversity?
If we caricature climate change as an increase
in temperatures across the globe and consider that
populations have limits as to where they can live defined
by temperature, we would expect geographic range shifts in
those populations . At the hot end of their range populations
will become less successful as the temperature warms, and
so they will reduce in number; but at the cold end of their
limits populations will become more successful as the
local temperatures move towards the organism's optimum
temperature. As populations colonise locations that were
previously uninhabitable, a geographic range shift can be
induced by climate change.
Now, one of the properties of a range shift is that there
will be lags in the rate at which locations become available
and the rate at which populations colonise these areas.
Things aren't in all places all of the time selecting where to
live, they are born in places and might seek new places from
there, with a limited ability to move. It is through these lags
that the shape of a population through space is generated.
If you think about the shape of a drop of water on a
flat surface, that's a bit like the shape of a population along
a gradient. Now if you tilt that surface, the water droplet
changes shape. It becomes more like a teardrop. That's a
reasonable analogy for the change in the spatial structure of
populations under climate change.
A recent piece of theoretical work I did5 looked
at how that change in structure affects evolution.
5. G. J. Mclnemy, J. R. G. Turner, H. Y. Wong, ]. M. J. Travis and T. G. Benton,
'How range shifts induced by climate change affect neutral evolution', Proceedings ofthe
Royal Society B. doi : 10.1098/rspb.2008. 1567.
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COLLAPSE VI
What this highlights is that, as soon as you start thinking

about climate change, you are actually thinking about a
whole new, different but predictable, part of ecology and
biology. The lags create a new quasi-equilibrium with the
environment during climate change. This alters who is most
successful in a population through space and in relation to
the environmental conditions they experience. Because the
individuals colonising new habitats contribute far more
to the next generation, whilst those at the rear of a range
shift are contributing less to the next generation than they
would have done without climate change. This means that
a genetic revolution in a population could happen far more
quickly during a range shift induced by climate change.
The suggestion is that genetic changes and evolution could
happen more rapidly during climate change. This might be
very important to our understanding of how biodiversity is
maintained and generated. Whilst the great focus has been
on the extinction of species that couldn't survive, because
of the way this frees up resources for other species, these
spatial processes have been overlooked.
So we have the genetic changes occurring in a population;
but also, populations are exposed to environmental
conditions - such as temperature - in a different way. This
alters how natural selection will act within populations :
Individuals may be exposed to 'novel' temperatures. It's a
new area of ecology and evolution really.
C : So this could alter significantly the type of issues we

think are involved with climate change, and their impact
on biodiversity.
148
GM: It' s certainly interesting from the point of view of

how we manage biodiversity in the future, but it also makes
you think about how those processes have generated the
biodiversity we see today. These processes are a bit like
a phase transition from one form of dynamics in stable
climates to another form of dynamics in a changing climate.
The suggestion is that the forces change populations more
quickly during climate change, and it takes a while to 'relax'
after a range shift. So we might be able to understand how
species are packed together through space - what are their
niches, why are they a certain size - through this better
understanding of climate change responses.
C: So attacking the specific problems of climate change

uncovers new insights into the general problem of species
distribution, the very framework in which that problem is
posed.
GM: Yes, this could give us some insights into why there
are the number of species there are, rather than ten times
more or ten times less. Niche is the key term, because if you
could model the niche more appropriately than you could
have better Species Distribution Models; but then people
get scared of saying that they are doing niche modelling,
because the niche is a nightmare !
C : How has the niche been understood in ecology generally;

and in your work how do you maihematiadly define it - what
kind of space does it exist in?
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COLLAPSE VI
GM: It's difficult, because different people use the word

'niche' for vastly different things. It started out as a
description of where a species is likely to be found - a
correlative description. The simple explanation of the niche
is the set of conditions in which a species can survive. For
instance the ranges of temperature, light, water availability,
pH, and so on. [G.E.] Hutchinson defined the niche as an
n-dimensional hyper-volume.
C : With, in each dimension, limits of tolerance?
GM: Yes, within this hyper-volume, everything's going to

have some sort of limited range where its births and deaths
are equal, another range where births are more, and so on.
So long as deaths aren't greater than births, then the species
can survive.
It gets a little bit more complicated, because species

might also augment the environmental variables, for instance
light may be reduced by a tree. If you think about these
variables being used as resources, you get a different
formulation of the niche than if you think of variables as
merely defining tolerance. Light is directional, so if I'm a
tree in an area with my favourite light level I might thrive.
But through my growth, anything below me in height gets
less light. So I've engineered my environment a little bit -
it doesn't just affect me, it affects everyone else. And my
presence affects my offspring as well, if they can't get far
enough away from me.
From the resources that come in, you've altered the
niche and created something else. So if a second species is
present, it might do better in that altered light environment
150
if it prefers shade. Or it might do worse if it needs higher

light levels than are possible with the presence of the tree.
C : If one species disappears from an environment, the

niche 'landscapes' of other species change. Which is a
crucial consideration in trying to predict species which are
at risk of extinction.
GM: Totally. This is where facilitation and competition

come into it. We generally conceptualise the niche in the
absence of other species as the 'fundamental niche' and
that in the presence of other species as the 'realised niche'.
And another species may in fact be a specific requirement of
the fundamental niche, as a resource. Another species can
make the realised niche bigger than the fundamental niche,
through facilitation.
Of course, the realised niche is what we are generally
able to observe in the real world. But the realised niche
is context-dependent - that is, it might depend on what
combination of species are present. There are in principle
an infinite number of realisations of the niche possible
based on species interactions alone. There are many other
factors that determine the realised niche, such as the spatial
arrangement of a variable and so how populations interact
through immigration and emigration.
C : Not to get too caught up in voluntaristic language, but

could we say that any species 'tries' to expand its niche,
to simplify the world according to what is important to its
survival, so that the environment is a kind of 'interference
pattern' of each species' monocultural 'ideal world'
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COLLAPSE VI
(a kind of organic niche-fundamentalism) ? So the problems

of biodiversity aren't limited to preservation - they also
involve a consideration of how the evacuation of one niche
will alter another, will allow another species to expand
perhaps dangerously - in a 'cascade' effect.
GM: It is probably best to first consider why a species has a

limited range in the first place - why it has a niche and why
that niche is defined the way it is .
Everything has ranges, so there must be some trade-offs
in the physiological engineering of life that means being
good at something makes you less good at something else.
Some species are more generalist than others, so there
are differences between trade-offs at different points of a
gradient, or different ways of doing that engineering that
can overcome obstacles .
But there can also be barriers created by the structure of
genes and their inter-relationships. Linkage between genes
may mean that a change in one gene affects other genes, so
evolution can be constrained if the other genes are affected
negatively. This is an engineering problem as well. (Of
course it is important to remember that this engineering
is done in a passive way: Life doesn't see a problem and
try to surmount it. It is done, beautifully, through natural
selection.)
Then we can ask why niches are fairly stable and why
they occur where they do in a space. For instance, if you
think of a tree line on a mountain: Why hasn't the tree
evolved to be a bit more tolerant of cold? Why don't things
evolve a little bit more to be more 'successful' ? Why can't
species live at one degree more or one degree less than their
152
I i
\ \
Fig 2: The effect of competition between species. These are the results of competition between a group of species in a computer simulation.
There are two abstract environmental 'gradients'; e.g., gradient A=temperature and gradient B =rainfall. The species have restricted niches
along these gradients (x and y axes). The black lines show the outline of the fundamental niche defined by the abundance of each species (the
z axis). The grey surface shows the realised niche after competition between species has occurred. Species may not live everywhere they can
because other species out-compete them. In the top left panel the species has been severely restricted by competition. Note that correlation
between its realised niche and the gradients would tell us very little about where the species can actually live. The other species show varying
levels of inequality between fundamental and realised niches, demonstrating that a 'correlative model' between the environmental conditions
and abundance would give results erroneous to some degree depending on the species.
COLLAPSE VI
actual tolerance level is now? I see this as being one of the

most interesting things that we don't actually know about
- why aren't things more abundant, why don't they have
wider distributions, what processes keep populations in
check? Some of it is bound to be competition, but that's not
all that is at work. Part of the answer must be in the physi
ological engineering. However some answers lie elsewhere
and require an understanding of population dynamics and
gene flow - an understanding of the system.
Sexual populations exchange genes during reproduction,
so even if a new gene arose that could be more successful
than everything that came before it, it could be swamped
out of a population by all the rest of the genes that are
floating around the gene pool. The probability of passing
on a successful rare gene could be less than the probability
of passing on a very common but potentially less successful
gene. Genes have to invtzde a population. If a gene cannot
invade because of the larger number of resident genes, this
is called ' gene swamping'. The same thing can also happen
across space, as immigration can swamp the gene pool with
genes which were selected for in a different set of conditions .
This is a really intriguing idea that is increasingly attracting
interest.
A gene may also arise that the 'wrong' place in a
population. For instance, the gene that gives greater success
in a cold environment may have natural selection acting
upon it in a warm environment, where that gene produces
an unsuccessful individual. Also, the probability of that
gene occurring will be linked to the variation in all genes
within a population. At the edge of a population, where the
gene could experience the conditions in which it would be
selected for, population sizes may be low and so the genetic
154
vanat1on is also low. This means that the probability of

even getting a more successful gene is small . . . You can see
that there is a lot to consider here !
So the removal of one species could directly affect the
realised niche of one species through competition - their
fundamental niches overlap and so the remaining species
would directly occupy a larger realised niche. This could
happen quickly. But if those fundamental niches don't
overlap then there isn't going to be any certainty that the
now-vacant niche is going to become occupied any time
soon. It will rely on evolution occurring, and there are lots
of barriers to that potential evolutionary trajectory.
C : What this seems to emphasise is that whilst we can

understand how an indi,vidual of the species interacts
biologically with its environment, and what its tolerances
are, we don't yet fully understand the tolerances of
populations - why in certain cases a population may not
be able to tolerate an environment which you would
expect it to.
GM: Yes - to put it in the perfect context, if you did an

experiment where you put lots of individuals in lots of
different temperatures on their own and studied which
ones survived, that wouldn't tell you anything about
whether a population would be able to sustain itself at that
temperature or not. Similarly if you had lots of populations
evolving at lots of temperatures but all isolated from each
other - without gene flow - then that wouldn't mean
that was the possible niche of a population that wasn't
isolated and which was actually exchanging individuals .
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COLLAPSE VI
Some populations could supplement other populations that

could not survive otherwise, through immigration. These
are three ways to consider a fundamental niche - individual
context, population context and spatial population context.
Because we have great variety between species, trying
to generate laws that describe the processes that determine
the size of niches and the conservation of those niches is
very difficult. There is a large amount of contingency in
any answer you get, because of the variety of life and the
variety of circumstances in which that life finds itself.
C: So in that sense, that theoretical breakthrough of

population thinking which you were talking about has yet
to unfold all of its consequences for the way we understand
the biological world; and it has massive importance for
understanding changing conditions on the planet.
GM: An appreciation of how biological dynamics are

played out when we accept all sources of variation across
scales is in all likelihood not achievable. But I think we
will start at least to appreciate how different sources of
biological variation interact. New sub-disciplines pop up
all
the time. Each sub-discipline - based on understanding
and not necessarily method - acknowledges that a different
combination of variation is important in describing the
world. For instance molecular ecology, population genetics,
eco-physiology . . . But these in tum are saentific niches - there
are limits to where they can expand due to the trade-offs
in model building and the fundamental engineering of
personality and capability in humans .
156
When you have so many things that could be

important, where do you start to build a model? It may not
be at an objective place. You will start from the small set of
personal knowledge developed during your education and
experience. What units people start with depends on that.
Classically, ecology was about individuals as units . But
now we know that it matters how you make abstractions
about the different ages and different sizes between
individuals. So we have changed the units. And then, we
know that different genetics respond in different ways, so we
have different units again. Then, we know that history has
an effect - so even if you were the same age and genetics, it
matters what you parents did. For example, s ay I was born
from a really fat, well-resourced mother, she might have
had lots of spare energy that she could use to provision for
my egg; she might have looked after me in a different way
because she had this relative extra energy, This might affect
my success in the end and how 'fat' I was when I became a
mother myself. This might mean that I would provision for
my eggs in a different way from someone of the same age
with similar genetics . This can drive different population
dynamics .
C : Do you build in these trans-generational dynamic traits

in your models?
GM: No, this kind of detail is only known about a tiny

minority of all species and populations of those species . In
my PhD I did some experiments in this area.
All of this isn't yet taking into account the effects of other
species, spatial dynamics within ecological communities,
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COLLAPSE VI
behavioural effects, genetic and evolutionary changes .

There are so many ways to conceive a set of dynamics
and the units of study, it is interesting to wonder how
development of the details in these different sub-disciplines
affects the prospect of a more holistic understanding. There
are fundamental differences between the way our flagship
ecological systems have been measured and studied,
producing different messages for our science.
C : With these extremely complex problems you've been

discussing, how in practice do you work towards an
experimental outcome that's going to be useful towards
addressing a particular problem? Or are you more interested
in contributing to the general understanding?
GM: I think I used to be much more interested m
contributing to a general understanding, and always used

to feel a bit more comfortable when people would call it
'blue skies thinking' and to see that they attribute value to
that; but I've now begun to feel a bit more confident that
the general understanding should and could be formalised
in a way that's a useful contribution.
Whilst we can stroke our beards over a cup of chamomile
tea and wonder about the complexity of it all , there are
some very straightforward things that would be immensely
important contributions . Species Distribution Modelling is
one instance : If we can do that better, we may be able to make
better predictions for adaptive management in relation to
climate change and habitat destruction. But also, we will have
made a better job of quantifying the fundamental unit of the
sciences of biogeography and macro-ecology. This would
enable a whole set of new questions and understanding.
158
I think better Species Distribution Models could be an

achievable and significant contribution.
Where I am now is much more about wanting to make
a contribution that has potential practical application quite
quickly, but I think what you find is that making something
useful always implies making a contribution to the scientific
understanding, so the two things aren't exclusive. I think
it's a frequent mistake in the conservation world that
people say, "we care about it, we are doing this", but if it
isn't based on some kind of understanding of the system,
you are merely doing what you fie! is good . . . in a lot of
other things that's probably the right way to go, but not in
science!
C: And do you feel that we are capable of bringing about

that understanding in time to do anything about climate
change?
GM: One constraint is obviously financial support, which is

a political and social constraint. Even if we knew and could
model all these things and could provide great advice, we'd
still face the total nightmare of the inertia of human action.
On the other hand, one of the key scientific constraints is
poor data: For instance with Species Distribution Modelling,
the data is usually quite poor resolution - you can't see
abundance clearly, you've just got sightings marked down
on maps, grids, so then you are kind of working with the
conventions of cartography that people chose to use, for
entirely other reasons - ten kilometre by ten kilometre
squares, or whatever. A lot of data we will end up using
has not been collected with the express purpose of Species
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COLLAPSE VI
Distribution Modelling in mind, or at least the specific kind

of modelling that we are doing; and also there's just not
enough data about distributions . We don't have data on
every species, we don't even know every species that exists .
We are working within constraints that are really skewed
by the way humans have previously acted and the way in
which generally they make decisions . These actions and
decisions have shaped the exploration of the world, and to
some degree, how we will be able to explore the world in
the future.
C : This adds another dimension to the fact of working with

a scientific legacy that determines how you abstract the
empirical data: You are also working with a 'data legacy'
that lags behind the kind of processing you would like to do
with that information, and the resolution that processing
demands . Each generation of ecologists works with the
data of a previous generation, gathered according to other
presuppositions as to what's important . . .
GM: That's a really interesting thing about science. It's

kind of a modern thing since the 1950s to actually rely
on statistics, and before that, good statistics didn't really
exist. A lot of scientific knowledge could be based on very
different statistics than we use now.
People use very complex routines now; we know that
in the seventies they might not have done, but we still use
their findings . So our knowledge is contingent on whether
they were right or not. When a new statistical method
comes out or is popularised we don't go over every past
experiment and see if that changes things !
160
Then there are various fads as to what people study

- so, in ecology, people love to study mammals, birds,
and butterflies and suchlike. Then your understanding
of ecology comes from those taxa, an understanding
based on human interest for a small part of biodiversity.
The revolution in microbiology is fascinating from that
standpoint - we get to see how ecology transfers to a signif
icantly different type of organism in quite some detail. It
already puts into question how we conceive species as a
unit of study.
I guess when the first biologist went out they were just
like, "Cool new species, cool new species," and that was
what drove them. Finding a new Orchid would have been
far more exciting than a new moss . Nowadays , people are
probably getting more pragmatic because of the environ
mental problems that society faces, and when they collect
data, they realise that it has wider consequences . If everyone
in the world had a good knowledge of what the organisms
are that live in their proximity, and every time they walked
to work they wrote down something and shared it, then we
might have a lot less trouble with data!
C: So then everyone would be a spy for you !
GM: But people used to know so much more about their

local environments in the past - I'm sure if you asked a
hunter-gatherer what's in his area and where it is he'd have
been able to tell you. People depended on that knowledge.
But there's a disconnect between nature and modem life,
so then it is a scientific enterprise - ideally being some kind
of data forager rather than people who navigate the wild !
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COLLAPSE VI
It is a serious point though, and there is great interest

in 'citizen science' as a means to collect data and reconnect
people with nature. The greatest hurdle is to engage those
who are entirely disengaged: The more socially deprived
aren't going to be as likely to carry around iPhones for
which they could download applications that allow
them to recognise leaf patterns or upload photographs
of plants with location data. It isn't going to happen. We
need to think about science education mediated through
large-scale science. Collecting data on a tree can be part
of a lesson about ecology and how trees work. But that
data can actually support the harder research end of the
science and so get people involved with science at multiple
levels . Computation is inevitably the link between the data
gatherer and the application of science. It obviously needs
more research into how it could work!
C: You said before that many people involved in climate

'activism' seem to be doing what makes them feel good,
with little regard to understanding the reality of what's
going on; and a part of that emotional commitment is the
idea that if we just 'let it be', things would be okay. But the
very idea that we could 'let nature be' just seems to be a
complete fallacy. Human beings , like every other species,
have never just let nature be - we are part of nature in the
sense that our technologically-augmented niche overhangs
and affects the niches of all these other creatures . So what's
the position of the human in all of this, once the data is 'in' ?
Is it non-intervention or intervention that's important? Is it
going to be the case that we need to intervene in order to
actively engineer population distribution?
1 62
GM: From the point of view of letting things be, that isn't
really an option. Our (human) influence is global, so even
areas that are very far away from direct human activity
are going to be affected by climate changes . The option
of having nature reserves where biodiversity occurs now
is maybe past. But at the very least we should aim for is
protecting those places.
It would be great to think that we could reduce our
human niche's influence and have the choice ofletting things
be. Humans are a nightmare for everything else. Our niche
is tapped into a vast set of resources, we use resources that
most life couldn't even contemplate, such as oil. Humans
have developed an immense niche that had never existed
before and that no other species had experienced in their
evolutionary history. And just to note, that's an important
thing about niches - they don't exist until something makes
them exist because that thing exists . There wasn't a niche
for dinosaurs until the dinosaurs actually made it.
C : And as a creature evolves its niche evolves along with it.
GM: Yes, because a creature defines its niche. There is

a common misunderstanding here: Say I killed off the
primrose - totally wiped it out - that doesn't mean that
'its' niche would be available for something else to come
along and 'evolve into'. It just means that the resources it
was using are available and the primrose isn't using them
or affecting other species that lived around it. The niche is
a description of the primrose. Something else can use those
resources in a different way and that something else may
require a different description for its niche. If something
1 63
COLLAPSE VI
else evolved that used all of those resources that are now
available, it doesn't mean that it would become another
pnmrose.
So, when humans came along they didn't fill some
niche that was there before. Niches aren't necessarily
always in existence, although there may be a similarity in
the niches between species. The niches of different species
are different. That is part of why they are species .
The niche of humans has evolved into something
incredibly novel and complex. It affects so many other
things through its by-products and through the direct
action of humans . From fishing and habitat destruction
to pollution and eutrophication, to the creation of novel
habitats and the movement of species around the world, we
have quite an influence on biodiversity.
Another thing I should bring up is density dependence.
As a population gets bigger, it can't go on growing forever.
As populations get bigger and bigger there's going to be
some constraint on resources that will develop and alter
growth and survival of individuals ; or maybe diseases and
parasites become more easily passed between individuals
when a population is dense and so diseases can become
more prevalent at higher population densities .
At some stage a population will encounter population
regulation, through density dependence, so the numbers of
births and deaths will start evening out and that population
will achieve an equilibrium of sorts . The entities you will
compete against are most likely to be things that are very
similar to yourself - organisms which require the same
resources as you. This is more likely to be your brothers
and sisters and the rest of your species. Populations have
to be regulated in our finite world - you can't just go on
and on.
1 64
But humankind aims to work in a derisity-independcnt

way: technological innovation allows us to exploit
resources in a new way and become more efficient in
exploiting them. Or technology allows new resources to
be exploited. Tills allows new population growth and new
lifestyles. Our lifestyles are probably incredibly different
when an innovation is first employed, compared to the
later part of an innovation's history, when the population
size that innovation supports has increased and approaches
equilibrium. As we approach equilibrium there would be
a different sharing of the resources that technology yields .
C: Are you saying that no matter how much we've

augmented our niche, it still retains the tendency to return
to a natural equilibrium?
GM: In some serise it should do, but equilibrium is a tricky

concept!
However if we as a society understood derisity
dependence a bit better, and (in some weird parallel
universe) if we were actually willing to act upon it and
manage ourselves based on that understanding, then we
would probably be doing better. But we don't, and each

innovation changes the rules of the game.
Technology also changes how the population would
actually be regulated : Say you had two populatioris that
had exactly the same amount of agricultural fields as each
other and those fields were of the same quality, but one
population had 'normal' crops and the other one had GM
crops which produced more food. Then the GM crops
would probably be able to sustain a larger population for
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COLLAPSE VI
the same unit area. In that kind of way, technology separates

and changes the rules of the game of nature. Having more
people means you produce more waste, you are also
putting more pressure on the land and other resources such
as water. That population is regulated very differently.
Once you up the stakes and develop technology that's
better at acquiring resources, you will change where
density-dependence kicks in. In effect, technology keeps on
changing the nature of the actual processes that define the
human 's niche.
In our hypothetical case of populations with GM crops,
a population may be now constrained by water, or by their
higher population density engendering conflict. Whilst in
the populations with normal crops, they will be regulated
by the actual productivity of the crops, because no other
resource is being pushed to its limit.
In some ways humans have had an amazing run of it
really: Each time natural constraints bring the population to
equilibrium or breaking-point, actually to the point where
regulation takes hold, further innovations have been made
- necessity is the mother of invention - so technology has
augmented the niche further. Presently we humans have
taken this so far that everything we do affects the rest of the
world and other species, and we are pushing its limits as a
sustainable, self regulating system.
I don't usually engage in these kind of dialogues much
though, and some of these arguments are a crude driver of
anti-capitalist politics, which I'm not a part of. But if you
treat the dialogue properly then there are some suggestions
that the ecology of everything can inform a reasonable kind
of capitalism and usage of the earth.
166
C: 'Reasonable capitalism' - a contradiction in terms? Is

it possible for us to moderate that tendency to create new
problems and new solutions that create new problems ?
GM: To me it seems that in some way the human race

thrives upon and celebrates itself for this activity. We
love the history of our own development and labelling
societies with technological descriptions . In some ways it
is an enjoyable part of the ride of being human. It's that
interest in problem-solving. It would be quite an innovation
that could quell problem innovations ! We are on a super
innovation snowball, especially with the 'birth' of modem
biology. We are innovating technologies to tackle problems
generated by our previous innovations . It doesn't seem like
we are in balance does it?
C: If we make this assumption that the augmented human

niche has this massive effect on all these other niches, and
that this is not suddenly going to stop, then we have to
confront the difficult questions of biodiversity: Are all
species sacred qua life-forms, so that they must be kept
alive ; is it that we are looking to keep the species we know
to be important for our survival ; or is it that we need to
understand all the interactions between them so can know
which ones we can let go and which ones not? What is the
question of biodiversity?
GM: Everyone will tell you something different. It is an

incredibly hard question and depends on how you define
biodiversity and how you value biodiversity. My own
personal take on it is that the population is no good if it
can't reproduce enough to sustain itself.
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C : Even if it's the fault of humans ? . . . was the Dodo's

population 'no good' ?!
GM: What I really mean is that the point of populations is

that they produce new generations . That's nature's take on
it as well. If you don't, you don't survive.
How far are we willing to take the conservation and
management of biodiversity if we produce a world in which
a natural population can't maintain itself? That is, how far
are we willing to change the earth and create the situation
where there are value judgements to be made?
Making value judgements on species is an interesting
exercise, but the point is that we shouldn't be addressing
the symptoms . It is a deeper-level change in global society
that is needed, then we wouldn't need to think about
those judgments as much! There are root causes, and
conservation doesn't always tackle them appropriately. It is
beyond the conservation remit.
And in a similar way, biodiversity needs to be in a
good condition itself - it needs enough components of
biodiversity for it to maintain itself. From a few billion
years ago until now, biodiversity has been pretty good at
breeding more biodiversity. Despite an immense meteor
strike that killed off vast quantities of species, we have still
ended up with a lot of biological variation. What happens
if we change all that? What if we reduce the system that
produces biodiversity too much?
I think things do have a sacred intrinsic value, that they
are totally amazing phenomena of the universe, which we
should be custodians of; but then it's intensely difficult
to know how to actually do it when our own human
168
population grows, spews and expands . I think the most

operational thing we can do is to assign value, then you can
relate it to policy and then it becomes something functional.
The level of our effects will have to equilibrate with the
levels that biodiversity can withstand.
C: You mean that, whatever our feelings about preserving

the great spectacle of life on earth, in pragmatic terms -
convincing government leaders to take action, and so on
- we have to take on this task of assigning differential value
to lifeforms . Once again, the question is whether ultimately
we do so in terms of their value to the thriving of humans ?
GM: I think the 'sacred nature' line is useless in a pragmatic

situation. Of course, I get a spiritual benefit, if you want to
put it in those terms . But if you can quantify a harder value
for things it makes it a lot easier, rather than setting rules
that rely on people's respect for sacred things, rules which
people aren't very good at observing. I can't see the earth
being 'managed' well unless it is hardwired into society
that activities that exploit the earth badly are of less value
than those that exploit wisely. Humans respond to hard
currency.
These days people have to make decisions like, we've
got x amount of resources so what are we really going to
save. It sounds harsh to say that it's a mistake, but with the
panda, for instance, it's become this feeble mammal that
can't manage for itself apart from in this weird old people's
home for species, where it's nursed and they help it
reproduce. They do some phenomenally ridiculous things
to help it reproduce, like the males produce better quality
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COLLAPSE VI
ejaculate by having a degree of anal stimulation. So they do

it! And then you are 'saving the species' ! At that point, it
all becomes quite comical. Is that a good population? Do
we want that principle to be our flagship of conservation?
C: And why this particular species ? Because it's cute ! We

wouldn't put that much effort into saving a tapeworm.
GM: Yeah, completely. [Laughs] We should be thinking

about what components of diversity we want to save and
the ability of those species to save themselves . We only
have limited resources for conservation and we need to
do a good job of developing an education that produces a
society that understands nature and its management. Not
saying, 'we're saving this weird bear thing in China that
can't do anything for itself, but look at its cute face . . . '
C: It's somewhat contradictory anyway, because there's no

link to biodiversity there if the species has already been
removed from its environment and is being kept alive in
an artificially-augmented technological environment that is
really an outgrowth of the human niche. It's already extinct
as far as the biosphere is concerned, isn't it?
GM: That's a really good way of putting it. If you start

drawing lines around everything in the form of nature
reserves, then you make certain populations extinct to
other populoiions. The interactions across space are hugely
important.
170
It all comes down to a bit of gardening. That's a bit of

a caricature maybe, but if during climate change organisms
can't actually reach the places that would permit their
persistence, then you have to kind of pick and choose who
you want to survive : Do you do assisted migration, where
you would take things to new areas? This is potentially
very large-scale gardening. What's natural about it?
C: From the point of view of nature being intrinsically

worthy, and its having to be treated with respect and
saved, the criticism against your work - quantification and
computation - would be that you are merely participating
in the technological manipulation and management of
the world. Therefore ecology just becomes an extension
of human's despoiling of nature. Is that necessarily where
your work is going to lead - more manipulation?
GM: I don't necessarily agree. You can see what has

resulted without the science : Precisely the uniform despoiling
of nature. It's better to think about it as the technological
manipulation and management of the choices humans
make. It's providing the information for choices , and
ecology's suggestions are always bound to lie on the less
destructive side of what would otherwise happen without
ecology.
We don't really have the luxury of doing manipula
tions for the sake of understanding at the largest scales. We
are living in the one biodiversity experiment we know of.
We can't really manipulate the system to find out what will
happen, and then inform ourselves that it wasn't a good
idea. We have one set of experimental material and we don't
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COLLAPS E VI
want to do an experiment that loses all that experimental

material. There is one Earth, one instance of an experiment
- no repetition possible, no replications . So you are set apart
from your system differently than in other areas of science.
This means you have different ethics about it.
People can find a way of abusing the information that
they find out, but if we can act on that information and
monitor the situation then we can become better managers .
Again, can people be trusted to let things be?
C: But, again, what would be the ultimate outcome in

terms of policy change or actual action in the environment
of what you are doing? Will it take the form of further
manipulation of the environment?
GM: The worst thing that could happen if we had a perfect

model is that we could just give a really good description of
when everything is going to die off. And that in itself would
just end up being some sort of political tool.
You can step back at this stage and say, "Can we do
some sort of management associated with those models?"
But it becomes quite tricky because are you assisting
in migrations, are you moving things around, you are
deciding, "no, the bears are far too abundant in our model
at the moment so there should be ten less this year." Do we
start killing stuff off?
C: Exactly, because the one rigid ecological law of life on

Earth is that there are limited resources, so if you are talking
about that kind of manipulation then one population has to
be thinned down for another population to get to a size
where it is going to be viable for the next generation.
172
GM: And that will always come back to some sort of value
judgement. I'm interested in assisted migration, and the fact
that it has evolutionary consequences. You might take away
some kind of bird and populate Scotland with it because
you think the climate there is going to become more and
more to its liking, and the population isn't going to get there
by itself. But then you have essentially created an invasion.
There were a whole set of reasons why that environment
didn't have them in the first place, and so all the other
species which are there weren't exposed to that species.
Most experiments of that kind show that it actually has
a negative effect. About two years ago everyone thought
it was a great idea and now everyone's come back to a
more cautionary principle in the literature: "We don't know
what's going to happen so we can't do it!' So you are caught
between the best of our ecological knowledge - well, a
certain portion of our ecological knowledge - that might
say that assisted migration is the best thing to do, and the
fact that we just don't know.
C : This seems to echo the basic problem, where environ

mental action is caught in the same potential technological
positive-feedback loop of capitalism that we discussed
earlier. We know humans have intervened in harmful
ways, but the only way we can do anything about it is by
intervening more. And that presents the risk of creating
even more problems.
GM: Totally. People got quite into the idea of 'wilding',

making areas wild, so for a lot of situations you can see that
that's a good thing, but then people will also say we want
wilding but we want to return it to a pre-human natural state.
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COLLAPSE VI
So then they're saying we want a wild area, in a wild

state, through human management. Are these areas really
big enough for the large wild mammals they might have
supported?
C : And again, it's essentially the concept of the reserve - a

walled-off space.
GM: And people don't necessarily want to live alongside

biodiversity. I would say that biodiversity isn't appreciated
enough really. It's only when it's too late. People don't
appreciate its importance until they exactly know its value.
Like all the fuss over the declines in pollinators - the declines
in bees , and flies, and whatnot - is only put in context once
they realise that x million pounds of crops aren't going to
be fertilised and produce the grain. Then the pollinators'
services have value and their decline becomes a 'problem'
to society.
C: Again the same paradox: The earth has to become

entirely capitalised and technicised in order that it become
desirable to preserve it as 'natural'.
GM: We are going to end up with a world where the most

'natural' of populations are found in the most inhospitable
places . I daresay the inhabitants of deep-sea vents are
probably going to be fine for quite some time. Well, until
people start tapping that energy source and so destroying
those habitats .
174
To be honest, conservation is slightly removed from

what I do, generally. I am an ecologist but I have my
opinions. Saving the planet is a big job and it isn't going
to be solved solely by the science. It's not like I'm actually
here to save the planet !
C : We didn't mean to imply that it was your responsibility

to save the world . . . !
GM: I know, but a lot of my friends and family assume

that is what I do and why I do it. The word 'ecology' is
used in many ways and people are frequently more likely
to associate it with recycling plastic bottles and providing
compost heaps than they are to associate ecology with the
science. People expect me to be a tree hugger, and wear
tie-dye.
What you have been saying ultimately points to two
(caricatured) options : You could maintain the Earth as
some sacred place - get on spaceships, go somewhere else.
We could take some species and samples, creating synthetic
natural communities which provide resources and can
support our lives, but lives not on Earth. Then everyone sits
on their new planets and looks back at the earth thinking,
"that's very natural, you know".
Or, as looks most likely, humans can be part of nature,
understand it, and be managers rather than custodians .
Human influence on the Earth has already had its effects .
So either we leave now and manage nature on our space
colonies . Or we stay and manage nature on our Earth. I
think we are in the position that we don't have any choice.
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COLLAPSE VI
RICH WILLIAMS (HEAD OF THE COMPUTATIONAL ECOLOGY

AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE GROUP)
COLLAPSE: In the discourse on the environment and

climate change, we often hear invoked the complexity,
interconnectedness and diversity of the 'web of life' ; but
your work seeks to determine quantitatively the degree to
which these factors affect the sensitivity or robustness of
species considered in their interrelation with others . Thus
we would be able to understand how the depletion or
extinction of one species might have further ramifications
or lead to 'extinction crises'.
Aside from the difficulties involved in decision-making
and the triage involved with 'promoting biodiversity' -
Can we even define biodiversity (and the related terms
'stability', 'richness') in a way that is not determined by
human interests ?
RICH WILLIAMS: I think we probably can . I don't think

the traditional species definition is particularly oriented
towards human interests, so a measure of biodiversity that
is simply a count of the number of species isn't particularly
'about' human interests . I don't think the issue is whether
defining biodiversity involves human interests or not,
but whether constructing an argument for conserving or
protecting biodiversity involves human interests .
C: Okay, so does the prmrwtion of biodiversity merely index

value for humans, or is it to be regarded as something
valuable in itself - so that a more biodiverse area should
attract investment regardless of how its thriving affects us ?
176
RW: Firstly, to question the question, why use the word

'merely' ? And what does 'valuable in itself' mean? Isn't
valuable always qualified (even if not explicitly) with 'to
whom or what' ?
Biodiversity is an interesting concept to me. Consider
the species richness, for example, in a tropical rainforest
as compared to a temperate deciduous forest : The tropical
forest is far more biodiverse. If you decide that species
richness is a useful measure of biodiversity and that
biodiversity is important to conserve, this points towards
deciding that it is more important to conserve the tropical
forest than the temperate one. I don't want to be the one
making that argument !
Th e history o f biodiversity a s a n idea needs t o be
looked at closely. It entered the literature and the public
discourse quite recently - during the 1 980s - and while
always defined more broadly, has tended to focus on the
existence of species. It seems to have been a concept put
forward to argue for habitat conservation because it is
easy to grasp and has strong emotional appeal. Ever since
its introduction, scientists have been trying to rigorously
define the term and develop a strong scientific justification
for its conservation.
C: Interesting that it should exist as a 'marketing term' in

advance of its scientific definition . . .
RW: I wouldn't say that the term preceded its scientific

definition, more that it preceded a clear scientific argument
for the importance of its preservation. (Ibis is not to say that
there are not very good non-scientific arguments that have
been made) . In ecology, the debate has shifted over time,
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COLLAPSE VI
from a concern with the role of biodiversity in the stability

and robustness of ecosystems to a more recent framework
that tries to link biodiversity with ecosystem function and
argues that we need to preserve the function of ecosystems,
which in tum justifies preserving biodiversity. Even more
recently, particularly in the policy arena, biodiversity
is linked, through ecosystem functioning, to ecosystem
services, an attempt to define the goods or services that
societies gain from ecosystems, thereby connecting the
science to economics .
You can see the difficulties by returning to my earlier
example and asking: Does a unit of area of tropical
rainforest provide more or less ecosystem services than the
same area of temperate deciduous forest? This is obviously
a very difficult question to try to answer, and one that is
likely to depend heavily on the perspective of the person
trying to answer the question. But I think we can put
aside a lot of these difficult and value-laden questions and
realize that we - individuals and societies - are dependent
on other living things for a wide range of both physically
necessary and psychologically desirable things and that we
are all active participants in ecosystems . It is also clear that
human activities around the planet have drastically altered
ecosystems, particularly in the last century as the number
of people has expanded so rapidly and technology has
greatly increased our ability to affect natural systems, and
these alterations have often had negative effects on human
well-being or are stop-gap measures that are not sustainable.
Finally, our understanding of the ecosystems we all depend
on is limited, as is our understanding of the ecological
consequences of our actions . Putting all of this together,
it seems sensible to develop a deeper understanding of
178
how ecosystems function so that our interactions within

them can be better informed. I don't think you need to
be a conservationist to think that it is sensible to want to
better understand, predict and perhaps eventually manage
ecosystems .
C : Admitting, then, that it should be the focus of this search

for a deeper understanding, it seems that up until recently,
this complex interconnectedness, although acknowledged,
has been bracketed as being topologically intractable. But
you suggest that we may be able to discover a 'simplicity
on the other side of complexity' (in the words of Oliver
Wendell Holmes which serve as an epigram for one of your
recent papers) . 6 Specifically, you argue that the catastrophic
'web collapse' that may result from one species' extinction
may be amenable to prediction.
Could you tell us a little about the fundamental
theoretical model you are using here - that is, what kind of
'ethological ontology' are you working with?
RW: When I or most other people look at the natural world,

we see a large number of separate interacting organisms . This
is probably one of the most basic simplifying abstractions
most humans apply to the world. It is, however, just that -
a human-created simplifying abstraction - and like all such
abstractions, it persists because of its utility, not its truth.
To further organize the natural world, scientists have grouped
individual organisms together in various ways . One of the
more common ways of grouping organisms, and the one
6. E. L. Berlow, J. A. Dunne, N. D. Martinez, P. B. Stark, R. J. Williams and U.

Brose, 'Simple prediction of interaction strengths in complex food webs', l+oceedingJ ef
the Natiuna! Acodemy ef SciemeJ, 106 : 1 ITanuary 6, 2009) , 187-9 1 .
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COLLAPSE VI
we use in our models, is to group organisms into species,

isolated breeding groups. With this assumption, we collapse
any notion of space. Instead of a lot of individual organisms
living on a landscape, we average across the landscape to
get a much smaller number of species with abundances .
The network i s another basic abstraction we use -
we look at how different species interact and construct a
network of interactions . There are many ways in which
species interact, and we choose to consider only one, one
that we believe to be quite fundamental to the functioning
of ecosystems . Looking at ecosystems as thermodynamic
systems, we track energy flow - its capture by plants, its
dissipation in all living organisms through metabolic
processes and its transfer from one organism to another,
in our case abstracted to its transfer from one species to
another, through the consumption of one organism by
another. In summary, it is an energetic null model, one that
supposes that energy availability and energy transfer are
the processes constraining the functioning of the system.
C: What justification is there for this contention that the

idea of individual organisms is just a pragmatic fiction or a
simplifying abstraction? This has obviously been a topic of
hot debate in evolutionary theory, and begs the question,
fundamental to biology since the collapse of the Aristotelian
taxonomical model, of the independent existence (beyond
our convenient categorizations) of biological entities. One
can easily accept that models that have their origin in our
own evolutionary utility have 'leaked' into the concepts of
science ; however are you suggesting that there could be
ways to finally surmount this obstacle - for example, as you
suggest, by abstracting over space and using a stochastic
180
model - and that we thereby get closer to the real 'essence'

of what is life on earth is (an essence which most people
would find hard to accept) ? Or is it simply an alternative
abstraction which highlights different properties ?
RW: Are you an individual organism? I think it depends

on the question you're trying to answer. For some questions,
you're best viewed as a member of a population, for other
questions you're an individual organism, for others you're
a community of organisms (there are after all far more
bacterial cells on and in you than there are cells in your
body, and so on) . I'm much too pragmatic to be going after
the 'real essence of life on earth' - I don't think I know what
that means . Any scientific model involves abstractions - we
need to find both abstractions and a model using those
abstractions that gives useful predictions of the much more
complex underlying system for particular questions, which
usually means for phenomena occurring in a constrained
range of temporal and spatial scales .
C: Your preliminary hypothesis 'that most aspects of

structural integrity in the face of species loss of webs with
niche structure generally increases with [species richness] ' 7
seems t o confirm the widely-held but vague sense of inter
connectedness we mentioned earlier. What additional force
does the computational model lend to this intuition?
7. J. A. Dunne and R. J. Williams, 'Cascading extinctions and connnunity collapse

in model food webs', Philo.s<>jJhir.al Transact:imiJ ef the Ruyal Society B. doi: 10.1098/
rstb.2008.02 1 9
181
COLLAPSE VI
RW: Decades ago, some highly influential work in

mathematical ecology chall enged the widely-held idea that
increased diversity generally led to some kind of increased
stability or robustness. Rather than being a general result,
our new results are in part a consequence of constraints on
the system's topology and the thermodynamic constraint
imposed by larger organisms consuming smaller ones. The
idea that complex ecosystems develop robust regularities
in their behaviour as a consequence of their complexity is
in fact borne out by these models, which are constrained
to have ecologically plausible structure. These results give
me hope that a more general theory and increased predict
ability of responses is possible. Like complexity theorists, I
think about the possibility of a kind of statistical mechanics
of complex systems composed of many interacting entities,
a theory where the details of the complex behaviour of
each entity are blurred by the abundance and multiplicity
of their interactions, and this in tum leads to the occurrence
of predictable system-level behaviours.
C: You are discussing models taken from statistical or

stochastic physics and thermodynamics; does your work
always 'borrow' models from elsewhere?
RW: I wouldn't say I always take models from elsewhere,

but when useful ideas have been developed elsewhere,
I look to them rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.
Even with the simplification of aggregating individuals
into species or other functional groups, the interaction
networks, commonly referred to as 'food webs', are quite
complex. Despite the apparent complexity, modelling and
analysis of the empirical data has revealed regularities in
182
the structure of empirically-observed food webs. One of

the important regularities is that feeding relationships are
lumped into quite constrained niches. The original writing
on niches conceived of an n-dimensional space, where a
species' niche occupied an n-dimensional hypervolume
of that space (here I'm using an idea from ecology . . )
. .
There's lots more to the niche idea, but in the spirit of
simplicity, my and other's work on food webs has shown,
quite remarkably, that these complex networks can often
approximately be collapsed onto a single dimension, a line,
with a diet niche being a finite section of the niche line.
A large fraction of the connections in many of the
observed food webs can be predicted with a model that
assumes that all species lie on a single axis, each species'
diet being a nearly-contiguous interval on that axis;
species tending to fall below their consumer's position
on the axis. This then opens up the question as to what
that axis means, whether it is correlated with ecological or
evolutionary traits of the organisms. In many systems, the
leading candidate for a trait which explains the ordering
of the species is body size - simply stated, organisms tend
to eat things from a constrained range of sizes, and those
things tend to be smaller than the consumer. It is surprising
to many ecologists that diet choices could be explained so
simply, and of course it is not always that simple. Some of
the success of these simple models of food web structure
could be due to limitations in the data. For example, the
available data sets typically don't include parasites, and
when parasites are included, the one-dimensional models
don't work very well - but at least in a few cases I've looked
at recently, adding a second dimension greatly improves the
performance of the model (which then of course raises the
183
COLLAPSE VI
question of what is the biological meaning of that second

dimension) . But even with this , it is remarkable that much
of the structure of many food webs can be explained so
easily.
C: What shortcomings in previous models are you seeking

to correct?
RW: Previous models of multi-species interactions have

typically exhibited one of two drastic simplifications : If the
behaviour of the species was at all complex, the network the
species interacted on was drastically simple, often consisting
of a two or three species food chain; If the model contained
a large number of interacting species, their behaviour
was drastically simplified and the topology of the multi
species network was usually also highly unrealistic. Our
models have some greater level of ecological realism in
the way species are allowed to interact (though they still
leave out many potentially important biological processes) ;
the models also contain more species, though certainly
not as many as in most ecosystems, and the interaction
network topology is generated by a model that captures
many, though certainly not all, features seen in empirical
networks .
C : How would these shortcomings of previous models have

affected our current view as to the dynamics of anthropo
genic species loss and climate change?
184
RW: The ecology included in climate change models is

very simple - we are just beginning to develop models with
somewhat realistic numbers of tree species in the forests.
Explicit representation of animals, so obviously vital to
many processes in plant communities - controlling seed
dispersal, browsing and consuming seeds and so limiting
establishment of new plants and growth of both juveniles
and adults, diseases and pests affecting mortality rates to
name a few important processes - is entirely absent.
Similarly, our ability to model the ecosystem effects
of anthropogenic disturbances is very limited. There are
well-established empirically-derived species area rules, so
that if you chop a chunk of habitat in half, we can estimate
what fraction of species is likely to die out. Predicting whuh
species will die out is another matter. Another common
human disturbance, the introduction of species from one
ecosystem to another as our high mobility leads us to
unintentionally homogenize life on the planet, leads to the
problem of predicting whether a species will be invasive.
Again the science cannot usefully predict invasiveness.
This is a long way of saying that ecology is a young
science, dealing with enormously complex problems and
systems. We are developing the science that in the future
will lead to better-informed answers to these pressing
policy questions, but I think that an honest assessment of
the science is that reliable predictions of many important
policy-relevant questions are still far away.
C : What is the wise path in terms of policy now, while this

work is pending, if there is a gap between the perceived
urgency of the problem and the youth of ecology as a
science?
185
COLLAP S E VI
RW: I don't know what the wise path is, though like many
other I have my opinions . One thing I do see going on is
that while some people feel that this is an urgent problem,
the resources put into the science are actually quite small.
Perhaps this is because the problem is often so disconnected
from individuals' lives , given that it is distributed across the
globe and occurring on relatively long time scales . Some
amount of caution in activities which have large effects
on the natural environment would seem wise, but history
doesn't offer much hope of wise decisions being made.
C: And what could the consequences of your own work

be for our understanding of these issues and the future
direction of research?
RW: My work develops basic theory about complex

ecological networks . I hope this theory will one day lead to
better decision making, but recognize that this is probably
fairly far off. I see much ecological decision-making today
as being done with a triage mentality: A severe problem
is addressed with the best current knowledge, but the
underlying science is often quite weak, extrapolated from a
small body of empirical data with little underpinning general
theory. Despite the urgency of many ecological problems,
I think taking a more long-range approach to the science
is an important contribution. I hope that by working to
develop more general theory, the science will in the future
be able to provide more robust advice when presented with
the latest crisis , and perhaps also be convincing enough to
allow policies to be put in place so we aren't constantly
lurching from crisis to crisis .
186
That said, there is a very long way to go - the models

we're using are certainly more sophisticated than past
models but still contain huge numbers of simplifications
and approximations . This is not a bad thing - scientific
understanding comes from simplifying and approxi
mating, from distilling the essential processes that capture
a large fraction of a system's behaviour. The problem is
that, unlike models of physical systems, ecological models
are not constructed by simplifying and approximating
an exact model. Instead, they are built by making an
assumption about what processes the scientist thinks are
important, building a model that captures those processes
and then seeing how that model behaves . Then typically
more pieces are added to try and make the model capture
more of perceived biological reality and therefore perform
better. There is typically a lack of a rigorous sensitivity
analysis of the model, either to alterations in its constituent
components or to the addition of other components . If it all
sounds rather ad hoc, that's because it is .
Steps are being taken to build a more general theory and
to understand the basic constraints imposed on ecosystems
by thermodynamics (energy How and non-equilibrium
entropy dynamics) , stoichiometry (nutrient dynamics) and
information theory (genetics and evolution) . There's a lot
to do, no shortage of things to think about!
C: Can ecology ever aspire to the status of a mathematical

science, or is the gap between the low-level (genetics) and
high-level (ecosystems) too prohibitive?
187
COLLAPSE VI
RW: I don't think anyone would argue that the goal is

for the biological sciences to be mathematical sciences .
Like any science, the goal is to better understand the
processes occurring and develop models to better predict
the behaviour of the system. Ecology has been compart
mentalized, with behavioural, population, community
and ecosystem ecology being the main, quite separate
subdisciplines . As the science develops, I think it will be
re-integrated, so that we will better understand how the
behaviours exhibited by individual organisms affect the
overall functioning of the ecosystem. Behaviours of course
have a strong genetic component, and so it seems inevitable
that integrating across scales and connecting traditionally
separate ideas, from DNA to ecosystems, is going to be part
of a predictive ecological science of the future.
C: How is it possible to evaluate mathematical models'

adequacy to a complex biological reality? 1bis seems to be
an important issue with such predictions : Not only for the
general public, who in order to remain in denial often like
to invoke the radical uncertainty and underdetermination
of scientific models ; but also at the level of governmental
agencies who are called to act upon models which, as you
have readily admitted, involve a choice of 'simplifications',
and whose experimental confirmation is impossible or (at
least!) unethical. There seems no apparent way to close
this gap so as to deny governmental agencies any 'get-out
clause' and ensure action. What is your experience of this
phenomena of 'cognitive dissonance' and how do scientists
such as yourselves think about and deal with the margin of
uncertainty involved in these matters ?
188
RW: A thorny issue indeed ! On a technical level, there

has been an awareness of the need to have tools for
dealing with uncertainty, whether stochastic or intrinsic to
the system's dynamics, for a long time. Dealing with the
huge mismatch between the kinds of answers the science
currently provides and the kinds of answers policy-makers
and the general public want is much more tricky. Even
today, the way that uncertainty in climate change models
is dealt with in the public debate is incredibly primitive. In
ecology and biodiversity science, we are decades behind
climate change science in the kinds of predictions of system
response to anthropogenic disturbance we can provide,
and so the uncertainties are correspondingly larger.
(Ibis with the disclaimer that uncertainties in modelling
the biosphere drive a huge amount of the uncertainty
in the current Earth system models, but this is in the
realm of unknown uncertainty in those models) . With
such uncertainty an inevitable part of the science for the
foreseeable future, the science will be able to provide
guidance and suggest future scenarios but ultimately deci
sion-making must be based on more than science.
The cognitive dissonance you mention is related to more
than the uncertainty in the prediction the science can make.
It is also strongly tied up in the very different timescales
of the processes involved - you mention the impossibility
of experimental confirmation - this is sometimes true, but
sometimes just not possible on a typical human timescale.
C: Are you concerned with the problem, endemic to

scientific ecology, of 'formalization indeterminacy' - that is
to say, the problem of multiple possible formalisations for
one informal theory?
189
COLLAPSE VI
RW: Definitely, and with a host of other problems related

to both how one creates a useful abstraction of the system
of interest, how one goes about testing the model based
on that abstraction against the often sparse data, and how
one goes about specifying observational and experimental
programmes that are driven by the data requirements of
the emerging theory. In general, I find informal theory
very frustrating. When you dig into problems of formali
sation indeterminacy, you often find multiple meanings
for the terms used in describing an informal theory, and
these multiple meanings drive the multiple formalisations.
Terms like 'stability' or 'interaction strength', widely used
in community ecology, suffer greatly from this. This can
be a great source of argument in the literature, but the
arguments often hinge on semantics rather than significant
scientific points .
C: Have any unanticipated conclusions been revealed by

the dynamics yielded by your model, and if so how are
these being pursued?
RW: I think all our conclusions were unanticipated. We

really didn't work in a traditional 'formulate a hypothesis
and test it' mode. I actually don't think much science does
- papers get written as if that were the process, but in fact it
is usually far more flexible and exploratory.
Our approach was really driven by the fact that Eric
Berlow was a traditionally trained ecologist with a strong
background in field experimentation. He approached
the computational system as he would a field system,
performed manipulations similar to those performed
in the field and analysed the data like he would analyse
190
manipulative experimental data. (With the advantage that

the experimental manipulations were easy to perform so
we could perform a lot of experiments and collect a lot of
data!) One of the interesting findings is that the models
could do a good job of predicting the results of the field
experiments when it was clear that the interactions in those
experiments were dominated by predator-prey interactions ;
but when there were obvious non-trophic (energy How)
interactions in the field system, the model, which only
models energy How, failed to predict the field system's
response. This points to the importance of expanding these
models to include more biological/ecological processes and
interactions than the simple consumption interactions they
are currently based on.
C: If your work confirms the assumption that diversity is

positively correlated with stability, does that necessarily
mean that the preservation or promotion of biodiversity
is a suitable principle upon which to make environmental
decisions? Is stability the goal of policy?
RW: As far as I can tell, policies don't have such abstract

goals . They often don't seem to have a single, well-defined
goal. Even if policies were set using some more abstract
and scientifically defined goals, I don't think stability
would be an appropriate goal, particularly given the envi
ronmental stresses on ecosystems. Given the importance
of functioning ecosystems for so many of our material and
psychological needs, preserving or maintaining ecosystem
function seems to make sense as a policy goal, but this
whole discussion quickly gets pretty far from science and
into personal and societal values .
191
COLLAPSE VI
C: Your models suggest that 'increased robustness and

decreased levels of web collapse are associated with
increased diversity'.8 Can one make a comparison in terms
of food web stability between a cyclical biotic system of
complex ecological communities that produce sufficient
overall abundance to support human life without putting the
integrity of the system in jeopardy, and the (comparatively
less diverse) system of modern agriculture that produces
output as a result of reliance on extracted mineral deposits
from the Carboniferous Period? In other words, can the
practice of industrial agriculture be called a food web at
all? Or more generally, what is the status of anthropogenic
systems within the biosphere - could they in principle be
modelled in the same way as 'natural' systems ?
RW: In principle, yes, modelling agricultural and 'natural'

systems might be similar. In both systems there will be
commonalities such as constraints due to limited amounts
of energy, nutrients and water. When you build a model,
you make assumptions (hopefully based on things that have
been observed about the system of interest but sometimes
based on convenience or your conceptual biases) about the
processes that are important in the system and therefore
need to be represented in the model. I suspect that the
processes constraining industrial agricultural systems are so
different than in 'natural' systems that the basic modelling
framework would end up looking quite different.
C: Finally, is it a condition of 'ecological thought' that

we reject anthropocentrism? The very idea of humans'
'destroying the planet' is an artefact of the limitations
8. Dunne and Williams, 'Cascading extinctions'.

192
innate to human thinking (inability to think in terms of

larger time-spans) . From a truly non-anthropocentric
perspective, there is little possibility of such an anthropo
genic apocalypse - biological life will re-emerge in one form
or another, after humans disappear; on the other hand, on
a larger timescale, the extinction of the sun will take all life
with it ! Is 'non-anthropocentric thinking' a chimerical goal?
RW: I'm sceptical that humans can be 'non-anthropocen

tric', and not even sure what it would mean; and from what
I do understand of the idea I'm not sure that it's particularly
desirable. When people try to develop ideas that are 'non
anthropocentric', for me it often ends up being either selfish
or misanthropic. It's obvious and not very interesting that
sooner than later humans will go extinct, that life will
continue to evolve, that the earth will support life for a very
long time after humans have disappeared. More interesting
and I think more important, are the shorter-term questions
about how to maintain not just livability but quality of
life for the eventual nine billion and more people on the
planet, all of whom are active participants in the biosphere,
continuously interacting with a myriad of other organisms .
Understanding how ecosystems function is just one of the
many areas of human knowledge that must develop signifi
cantly if we are to succeed in this .
193
COLLAPSE VI
Th i n ki n g Ecology:
The M esh , The Strange Stranger, and
the Beautifu l Sou l
I shall investigate what ecological interdependence

means, philosophically and theoretically. We may then
specify the beings with whom we are interdependent.
As we proceed, we shall descend from seeming logical
abstraction, through deconstruction, into an unbearable
intimacy with others. Ecological thinking - what I call the
ecologjcal thought - is precisely this 'humiliating' descent,
towards what is rather abstractly called 'the Earth'.
Ecology is the latest in a series of great humiliations of
the human, humiliations that might even constitute the
human as such (in its humility, at least, if any) . From
Copernicus through Marx, Darwin and Freud, we
learn we are decentred beings, inhabiting a Universe of
processes that happen whether we are aware of them
or not, whether we name those processes 'astrophysics',
195
COLLAPSE VI
'economic relations', 'the unconscious' or 'evolution'.

The correct but surprising conclusion to draw from
ecological humiliation, however, is not some form of
nominalism or nihilism, but a politicised intimacy with
other beings.
What is interdependence? Let's imagine a theorem
called the Interdependence Theorem. It contains two
simple axioms :
Axiom (1) : Va: 3a: a = - ( - a)

Axiom (2) : Va: 3a: a ::::i - a
Axiom 1 states that for every a, the existence of a is

such that a consists of things that are not not a. Thus a is
made of not-a's, so the only way to define it is negatively and
differentially. Thus a is a because it isn't not-a, while not-a
is only not-a because it is not a - a and not-a are mutually
determining. Axiom 1 states that things are only what
they are in relation to other things.
Axiom 2 states that things derive from other things.
While Axiom 1 is concerned with how things are (syn
chronically) , Axiom 2 talks about origins (diachrony) . In
every case, things like a only exist such that a not-a exists.
Nothing exists by itself and nothing comes from nothing.
Axioms 1 and 2 define interdependence across a range
of phenomena. They summarise structural linguistics, for
instance, because structuralism models signs as completely
interdependent. The Interdependence Theorem also
describes life forms . Diachronically, no life form exists
that didn't arise from another one. And synchronically, life
forms are different from each other in arbitrarily negative
ways : there's no human-flavoured DNA as opposed to
daffodil-flavoured DNA, for instance (the human genome
196
Morton - Thinking Ecology
is 35 percent daffodil). Since life forms are expressions of

DNA, they differ from each other negatively rather than
positively, since DNA is a language.
Since life forms depend upon each other the way
signs depend upon each other, the system of life forms is
isomorphic with the system of language. Since language
is subject to deconstruction, the system of life forms must
also be subject to deconstruction. What happens when we
subject the system of life forms to deconstruction?
Derrida describes deconstruction as thinking 'the
structurality of structure'. What type of structure?
It's open ended: it has no centre and no edge. Because
language is an arbitrary system of negative difference,
there is no sign that stands somehow outside the system
to guarantee the meaning and stability of the other signs.
This means language is infinite, in the strong sense that
we can never fully account for its meanings or effects. It
also means that meaning depends upon meaninglessness.
And that language as a system is not a thing, not an object,
but a strange infinite network without inside or outside.
The process that makes signs manifest as appearance and
meaning is differana:: the process of difference (synchronic)
and deferment (diachronic). The meaning of a word is
another word, and strings of signs only gain significance
retroactively. The meaning of a sentence is a moving
target. You will never be able to know exactly when the
end of this sentence is until after you've read it elephant.
Coherence, in order to be coherence, must contain some
incoherence.
The same view applies to the system of life forms. They
are made up of other life forms (the theory of symbiosis).
And life forms derive from other life forms (evolution).
197
COLLAPSE VI
Because of the ecological emergency we have entered, we

are now compelled to take account of this mind-changing
view.
The implications of a deconstructive view of life forms
are manifold:
(1) Life forms constitute a mesh that is infinite and beyond
concept - unthinkable as such.
(2) Tracing the origins of life to a moment prior to life will
result in paradoxes.
(3) Drawing distinctions between life and non-life is strictly
impossible, yet unavoidable.
(4) Differentiating between one species and another is
never absolute.
(5) There is no 'outside' of the system of life forms.
(6) The Interdependence Theorem is part of the system of
interdependence and thus subject to deconstruction!
(7) Since we cannot know in advance what the effects of
the system will be, all life forms are theorisable as strange
strangers.
Let's sift through these implications.
(1) Lifefarms constitute a mesh that is irifi,nite and beyond concept
- unthinkable as such. This is not just because the mesh is
too 'large' but also because it is also 'infinitesimally small.
Differentiation goes down to the genomic level. There is
no human-flavoured DNA, no daffodil-flavoured DNA.
Most of the terms I considered were compromised by
references to the Internet - 'network', for example. Either
that, or they were compromised by vitalism, the belief in
a living substance. Web is a little bit too vitalist, and a
little bit Internet-ish, so I guess it loses on both counts.
198
'Mesh' can mean both the holes in a network, and the

threading between them. It suggests both hardness
and delicacy. It has uses in biology, mathematics and
engineering, and in weaving and computing - think
stockings and graphic design, metals and fabrics. It has
antecedents in mask and mass, suggesting both density and
deception.' By extension, 'mesh' can mean 'a complex
situation or series of events in which a person is entangled;
a concatenation of constraining or restricting forces or cir
cumstances; a snare'.2 In other words, it's perfect.
If everything is interconnected, then there is no
definite background and therefore no definite foreground.
Charles Darwin sensed it in thinking through the implica
tions of the theory of natural selection. His amazement is
palpable:
It is a truly wonderful fact - the wonder of which we are
apt to overlook through familiarity - that all animals and
all plants throughout all time and space should be related
to each other in group subordinate to group, in the manner
which we everywhere behold - namely, varieties of the same
species most closely related together, species of the same genus
less closely and unequally related together, forming sections
and sub-genera, species of distinct genera much less closely
related, and genera related in different degrees, forming sub
families, families, orders, sub-classes, and classes. The several
subordinate groups in any class cannot be ranked in a single
file, but seem rather to be clustered round points, and these
round other points, and so on in almost endless cycles.3
I. O:eford English Dictionary, 'mesh', n.lkc.
2. Oxfard English Dictionary, 'mesh', n.2.
3. C. Darwin, The Origin ef Specie.<, ed. G. Beer (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 1996), 105-6.
199
COLLAPSE VI
Every single life form is literally familiar, in that we

are genetically descended from them. Darwin imagines
an endlessly branching tree; 'mesh' doesn't suggest a clear
starting point, and those 'clusters' of 'subordinate groups'
in the quotation above are far from linear (they 'cannot
be ranked in a single file'). Each point of the mesh is both
the centre and edge of a system of points, so there is no
absolute centre or edge. Still, the tree image marvellously
closes out Darwin's chapter on natural selection, with its
evocation of 'the Great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead
and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers
the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifica
tions'. 4 A 'ramification' is a branch and an implication, a
branching thought.
(2) Tracing the origins ef life to a moment prior to life will
result in paradoxes. Sol Spiegelman's discoveries concerning
RNA show how you can't draw a rigid narrow boundary
between 'life' and 'non-life'. In order for life forms to begin,
there had to be a strange, paradoxical 'pre-living life' made
of RNA and self-replicating crystals such as a silicate
(strange that silicon may be the element in question).
'RNA World' abolishes the idea of a palpable, fetishised
life substance, the sort Naturephilosophy imagines as
Urschleim, a sentient gel. 5 Curiously, the fantasy thing of
idealist biology turns out to be this existential substance, as
if idealism depended for its coherence on some metaphysi
cal materiality. RNA World, by contrast, is structured like
a language. At bottom, it is a set of empty formal relation
ships. This is the basis of a genuinely materialist biology.
4. Darwin, Origin, 107.

5. See I. H. Grant, 'Being and Slime: The Mathematics of Protoplasm in Lorenz
Oken's "Physio-Philosophy" ',COLLAPSE V, 287-321.
200
Morton - 1binking Ecology
Do you think a virus is alive? A virus is a macromo

lecular crystal that contains some RNA code. It doesn't
reproduce as such, it only tells your cells to make copies
of it. The cold virus is a huge twenty-sided crystal. If you
think the rhinovirus is alive, then you probably should
admit that a computer virus is also alive, to all intents and
purposes. A computer virus also tells other pieces of code
to make copies of itself. The life-non-life boundary is not
thin and it is not rigid.
(3) Drawng disti.nctWns between life and rwn-lffe is strictly
mpossble,yetunavodable. This brings us to our third paradox.
If 'pre-living life' is necessary for imagining the origins of
life, then it is also the case that in the present moment, the
moment of 'life' as such, the life-non-life distinction is also
untenable. When we start to think about life, we worry
away at the distinction between nature and artifice. Only
consider the beings called viroids: Ten times smaller than
virus, they are little circles of RNA code (Figure 1). They
invade the transcription, rather than translation, parts
of the host's reproductive machinery. Viroids are very
ancient beings, dating back to RNA World.
CGGAACUAAA CUCGUGGUUC CUGUGGUUCA CACCUGACCU CCUGAGCAGA AAAGAAAAAA
61 GAAGGCGGCU CGGAGGAGCG CUUCAGGGAU CCCCGGGGAA ACCUGGAGCG AACUGGCAAA
121 AAAGGACGGU GGGGAGUGCC CAGCGGCCGA CAGGAGUAAU UCCCGCCGAA ACAGGGUUUU
181 CACCCUUCCU UUCUUCGGGU GUCCUUCCUC GCGCCCGCAG GACCACCCCU CGCCCCCUUU
241 GCGCUGUCGC UUCGGCUACU ACCCGGUGGA AACAACUGAA GCUCCCGAGA ACCGCUUUUU
301 CUCUAUCUUA CUUGCUUCGG GGCGAGGGUG UUUAGCCCUU GGAACCGCAG UUGGUUCCU
Figure 1: Genome of PSTV (Potato Spindle Tuber Viroid)
(4) Djfferenti.atng between on,e sped.es and another is never

absolute. This is the lesson of Darwinism. 'Species' is a label
that must be applied retroactively to life forms. There are
201
COLLAPSE VI
no species as such, no species-to-be, no point in evolution

ary history to which we can point and say, 'Here is the
origin of (say) Homo Sapiens'. The Origi,n ef Species has a
cheeky title, for it's one of the least teleological books ever
written. Darwin demonstrates that all the categories of the
life sciences - species, variation, monstrosity - collapse
into one another.
(5) There is no 'outside' efthe system ef liftfarms. Once life
'begins' - and thinking this origin is practically impossible
- everything else becomes linked with it. This is what
most of us mean when we think ecologically: Everything
is connected to everything else. There are strong meta
physical versions of this consequence (such as Gaian
holism), and weak reductionist ones. I'm on the weak
reductionist side.
This implication profoundly implies that there is no
environment as such. Your DNA doesn't stop expressing
itself at the ends of your fingers. A beaver's DNA doesn't
stop at the ends of its whiskers, but at the end of its dam. 6 A
spider's DNA is expressed in its web. From the perspective
of the life sciences, the environment is nothing but the phe
notypical expression of DNA code. This includes oxygen
(anaerobic bacterial excrement). And it includes iron ore
(a byproduct of archaic metabolic processes). You drive
and fly using crushed liquefied dinosaur bones. You are
walking on top of hills and mountains of fossilised animal
bits. Most of your house dust is your skin. The environment
looks like not a very successful upgrade of the old
fashioned term nature.
6. See R. Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reah ofthe Gene (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 1999) .
202
Morton - Thinkillg Ecology
(6) The Interdependence Theorem is part qfthe system qfinter

dependence and thus suliject to deconstruction! Since the Interde
pendence Theorem is only possible to state in language,
and since it describes language itself, the Theorem
recursively falls prey to its own premises.
The First Axiom states, 'Things are made of other
things'. The Second Axiom states that 'Things come
from other things'. Implication 4 asserts that we cannot
rigorously differentiate between one species and another.
Yet in order for Axiom Two to be valid, we must be able to
distinguish one species from another! Since 'Things come
from other things', there must be a distinction between one
thing and another thing. Yet if we draw this distinction - if
we think the word 'distinction' means something - there
is no way one species can arise from another species. A
dinosaur, a bird: there are continuities between them. And
yet a dinosaur is not a bird. This is Zeno's paradox.
Axiom 2 is in still more trouble. Consider a candle and
its flame. If there were no difference between the candle
and its flame, then the flame could not arise, distinct from
the candle. But if the candle is indeed different from the
flame, then there is no way the flame can arise from itF
Thus 'different from' and 'comes from' are now reduced
to something meagre. The very terms of Axiom 2 have
shrunk. They are themselves subject to Axiom 2!
Now consider Axiom 1, 'Things are made up of
other things'. Think of a car: it's made of wheels, chassis,
steering wheel, windows, and so on. Where is the car-ness
in these components? Nowhere. Yet we can't say that just
7. I am adapting a Buddhist argument about emptiness. Nagarjuna, The Fundamenial

Wrnwm of the Middle Tlizy, tr. and commentary]. L. Garfield (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 199.5), 4, 44, 1 10- 1 1 , 160- 1 , 177, 1 90-1, 23 1-44.
203
COLLAP SE VI
any old thing will do to put a car together: a car is made

of just these components, not other ones. We have reduced
Axiom 1 to bareness, by using Axiom 1 itself!
Human beings are made up of arms, legs, heads,
brains, and so on. So are birds, duck-billed platypuses,
and sharks. These organs are made up of cells. So are
plants, fungi, amoebae and bacteria. These cells contain
organelles. These organelles are modified bacteria such as
mitochondria and chloroplasts. They themselves contain
DNA. This DNA is a hybrid fusion of bacterial DNA and
viral insertions. DNA has no species flavour; moreover it
has no intrinsic flavour at all. At the DNA level it becomes
impossible to decide which sequence is a 'genuine' one and
which is a viral insertion. In bacteria there exist plasmids
that are like pieces of viral code. Plasmids resemble
parasites within the bacterial host, but at this level, the
host-parasite duality becomes impracticable. It becomes
impossible to tell which being is a parasite, and which a
host.8 We have discovered components without a device of
which they are the components - organs without bodies.9
Indeed, the human genome contains endogenous retro
virus-derived sequences, and one of these, ERV-3, may
confer immunosuppressive properties to the placenta, thus
allowing embryos to coexist with the mother's body. You
may only be reading this because a virus in your mum's
DNA prevented her from spontaneously aborting you.10
8. Dawkins, Extended Phenotype, 200-23, 226.
9. I am inverting Deleuze and Guattari's phrase 'the body without organs'. See
S. Zizek, Orgam withaut &dieJ: Deleuie o:nd C1J11SequenceJ (New York and London:
Routledge, 2003) .
10. M. T. Boyd, C. M. R. Bax, B. E. Bax, D. L. Bloxam, and R. A. Weiss, 'The

Human Endogenous Retrovirus ERV-3 is Upregulated in Differentiating Placental
Trophoblast Cells', V11Vlogy 196 (1993) , 905-9.
204
At the DNA level, the whole biosphere is highly permeable

and boundariless. There is less substance: 'Organisms
and genomes may [. . . ] be regarded as compartments of
the biosphere through which genes in general circulate.' 11
How do we know we haven't learnt how to sneeze because
rhinoviral DNA codes directly for sneezing as a means
to propagate itself? Yet we have bodies with arms, legs,
and so on, and we see all kinds of life forms floating and
scuttling around, as if they were independent. It isn't an
undifferentiated goo.
(7) Since we cannot know in advance what the effects qfthe system
will be, all lffe farms are theorisable as 'strange strangers'. The
Interdependence Theorem does not reduce everything
to sameness. The way things appear is like an illusion or
magical display. They exist, but not that much.
I use the phrase 'strange stranger' because Derrida's
notion of the arrivant is the closest we have as yet to a
theory of how the mesh appears up close and personal.12
The arrivant is a being whose being we can't predict,
whose arrival is utterly unexpected and unexpectedly
unexpected to boot. The strange stranger is not only
strange, but strangely so. They could be us. They are us.
STRANGE STRANGERS
Our encounter with other beings - and with our being
as other - is strange strangeness. And with this we should
drop the disastrous term animal. Haeckel's drawings of
1 1 . K.W.Jeon andJ.F. Danielli, 'Micrurgical Studies with Large FreeLiving Amebas,'

International Reviews of Cytology, 30 (1971) , 49-89, quoted in Dawkins, Extended
Pherwtype, 160.
12. ]. Derrida, 'Hostipitality', Acts <if Religion, ed., tr. G. Anidjar (London and New
York: Routledge, 2002) , 356-420.
205
lgure 2: Ernst Haeckel, Phaeodaria, from Kunstforen der Natur (1904)
radiolarians show beings that look like geometrical plots

rather than squishy organisms (Figure 2) . That's because
they are. The trouble with animals is that on some level
they're vegetables, beings that just grow - isn't this the
governing theme of many a horror story? And the trouble
with vegetables is that they're algorithms. Consider The
Algorithmic Beauty ef Plants, a beautifully illustrated text
readily available online.13 Instead of illustrating plants,
you can generate algorithms that plot them. Plant
scientists now model plant growth using software like
this. If an algorithm can plot a rose, surely the thing itself
is a map of its genome, a three-dimensional expression
of the algorithm's unfolding? I can only conclude that
I, a supposedly sentient life form, am also subject to
these rules.
Strange strangers are uncanny in the precise Freudian
sense that they are familiar and strange simultaneously.
Indeed, their familiarity is strange, and their strangeness
is familiar. Strange strangers are unique, utterly singular.
They cannot be thought as part of a series (such as
species or genus) without violence. Yet their uniqueness
is not such that they are utterly independent. They are
composites of other strange strangers. We share their
DNA, their cell structure, subroutines in the software of
their brains. They are absolutely unique and so capable of
forming a collective of life forms, rather than a community.
Community is a holistic concept that is greater than the sum
of its parts. Since the Interdependence Theorem implies
that there is no whole (such as 'animals', Nature and so
on), community can only ever be a conceptual construct.
13. P. Prusinkicwicz and A. Lindenrnayer, The Algorithmic Beauty

of Planl>, with J. S. Hanan, F. D. Fracchia, D. Fowler, M. J. M. de
Boer, and L. Mercer (Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, 2004) ; available at
http ://algorithmicbotany. org/papers/.
207
COLLAPS E VI
By contrast, collectivity signifies the conscious choosing of a

coexistence that already exists whether we think it or not.
Yet because of strange strangeness, this choosing cannot
be a totalising grip, or final pinning-down. Collectivity is
'to come', in the sense that it addresses the arrivant, who is
necessarily to come, evanescent and melting to the exact
same extent as she, he or it (how can we tell for sure?) is
disturbingly 'there'.
These are the precise coordinates of the global
warming crisis. We are faced with the ability to choose
our coexistence with other life forms and accept respon
sibility for global warming; or reactively to wait for 'the
market' to sort it out. (Funny how we can imagine the
end of the world as we know it, but not so well the end of
capitalism.) The discourse of community cannot help us
to jump across this open historical moment into the future,
because it is intrinsically conservative, if not reactionary,
if not, at times, fascist. Community implies a boundary
between inside and outside, which implies inclusion and
exclusion: scapegoating. The antagonistic energy of the
community is pasted onto the scapegoat, who is then sent
outside the community to purge it of its contradictions.
Collectivity posits that the antagonisms are directly a
feature of coexistence as such. Thus these antagonisms
have to do with an inadequate politics of collectivity itself,
which must henceforth be revised to address them. The
two models are deeply asymmetrical. It is not that collec
tivity embraces more life forms: it is not just a bigger, 'new
and improved' community.
If we are to achieve a radical ecological politics, then
we must acknowledge the difficulty of the strange stranger.
We are faced with an apparent paradox: materialism and
what mistakenly goes under the sign of 'mysticism' are
208
inextricably interlinked. Our ecological existence is

'nearer than breathing, closer than hands and feet'.14
We've got others - rather, others have got us - literally
under our skin.
FUIITHER IMPLICATIONS
W hat conclusions can we draw?
There is no noiure, never was, never will be. There is
therefore no 'world' as such. Indeed, there is no ontology
- no ontology is possible without a violent forgetting of
the intrinsically incomplete, 'less than' level we have been
describing. Thus no phenomenology is truly grounded in
reality. Ecophenomenology therefore contains an internal
limit caused by the humiliating paucity of the 'incomplete'
ontic level.
Science and capitalism have ensured that we are
now directly responsible for what we used to see outside
ourselves as Nature, if only in the negative. It is now the
task of philosophy and politics to catch up with, and I hope
surpass, this state of affairs. W hat has been called Nature (I
capitalise it precisely to 'denature' it) is now on 'this' side of
history and politics. That's the difference between weoiher,
which just happens to us, and dimate. We can't see climate
directly, but we can take direct responsibility for it, bring it
on 'this' side of history. Walter Benjamin asserts that when
weather becomes a topic for collective action (as now), it
stops being that thing 'over yonder' called the weather. It
'stand[s] in the cycle of the eternally selfsame, until the
collective seizes upon [it] in politics and history emerges'.15
14. George Morrison, The Uf!aving efG!ory (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications,
1994) , 106.
15. I develop this in Ecology withoutNaiure: RethinhngEn:oi:ronmental Aesthetics (Cambridge,

Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2007) , 1 60-9.
209
COLLAPSE VI
The same goes for the strange stranger as opposed to

'the animal'. We shall soon regard the phrase 'the animal
question' with as much queasy horror as 'the Jewish
question' - and for the same reasons.
'Let it be' is over. Heideggerian environmentalism fails at
a fundamental level. Since being itself is in question, there
is not much to 'let be' in the first place. We are faced with
a Romantic irony in which we cannot rid ourselves of our
conscious implication in the interconnected Universe. Our
minds, in short, are part of the interdependence. There is
no 'reality' in which we are 'embedded' separate from our
awareness of this reality. And yet, and at the very same
time, there is not nothing at all. The Interdependence
Theorem is not nominalism, let alone nihilism.
For Heidegger, Being lets things be. Poetry gives us
unique access to this letting-be quality of Being. Cue a
thousand environmental maxims, poems, attitudes. But
what do we let be? W hen letting-be becomes a political
question, the Being really hits the fan. Do we let Exxon
be? Do we let global warming be? Do we let the Sixth
Mass Extinction Event (for which we ourselves are
responsible) be? The Interdependence Theorem means
that Nature becomes historical, and therefore political.
Letting be therefore becomes a tacit choice to maintain
the status quo.
There are Heideggerians who seriously suggest this.
Interventions into the substance of reality are seen as
inevitably failed attempts to not let be. The ideological
language of immersion in the lifeworld - profoundly
environmentalist language, derived from Heidegger - is
complicit with current social and ecological conditions.
This sounds counterintuitive, but it's no different than
210
driving past what looks like two separate buildings that

turn out to be part of the same structure, a type of parallax.
Insisting on our embeddedness (like Iraq War reporters)
in the 'world' is - shocking thought - part of the problem.
In particular, this is because ideas come bundled with
attitudes. While the language of embeddedness insists that
we are up close and personal with reality, the attitude it
codes for is cosy, vicarious, aesthetic distance.
'Leave no trace' was a slogan from an environmentalist
movement about picking up after yourself when you
go hiking. 'Leave no trace' is a translation of 'Let it be'.
Imagine Heidegger in a hide: the stupefied, plangent hush
of his prose tells of a huntsman waiting for Being, with
a gun or binoculars - even if the gun is only the gun of
the fascinated gaze. "Be vewy vewy quiet," as Elmer Fudd
says, on the hunt for Bugs Bunny.16 Letting-be conjures
the 'meditative' quiet of the forest. Here is a Buddhist
lama writing what I hold to be the definitive passage on
the affinity between contemplativeness and violence. The
lama is recounting the words of a visitor from the city of
Birmingham to his monastery in southern Scotland. The
visitor was a little hesitant to do any actual meditation:
Well, it's nice you people are meditating, but I feel much better
if I walk out in the woods with my gun and shoot animals.
I feel very meditative walking through the woods and listening
to the sharp, subtle sounds of animals jumping forth, and I
can shoot at them. I feel I am doing something worthwhile at
the same time. I can bring back venison, cook it, and feed my
family. I feel good about that. 17
16. See E. Levinas, Otherwise than Being: Or Beyond Essenff, tr. A Lingis (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1 998) , 182.
17. Chiigyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, Training the Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness
(Boston: Shambhala, 1993), 35-6.
211
COLLAPSE VI
Let it be! Pull! Bang! What a fantastic sight! Shhh, quiet,

I'm trying to kill this rabbit. Quietly, meditatively, I insert
my knife gently and smoothly into its neck, mindfully and
meditatively I slit its throat ... In the rabbit's blood I can
smell the quiet of the fields, the 'toilsome tread' of the paws
on their daily round, the search for something to nibble ...
this rabbit corpse is a moving environmental poem, like a
pair of old shoes in a Van Gogh painting ... mmm ...
From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the
toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffiy rugged
heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of
her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform
furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie
the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides
the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes
vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening
grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of
the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplain
ing anxiety as to the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of
having once more withstood want, the trembling before the
impending childbed and shivering at the surrounding menace
of death.18
I have recently been accused of not knowing what

Nature is because I have never killed an animal that I've
subsequently eaten. This is a criterion that I am happy not
to have fulfilled. Heideggerianism, the quintessence of the
contemplative ecophenomenological mode in which a lot
of Nature-speak now addresses us, is marked by a trace of
violence, an unspeakable violence towards the world it so
lovingly appears to reveal to us. The very worn insides
18. M. Heidegger, 'The Origin of the Work of Art', in lbetry, Language, Thoughl. Trans.
A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1 971) 15-87 (33-4) .
2 12
of the peasant shoes about which Heidegger rhapsodises

so beautifully in his essay on the origin of the work of art
are made from leather, which is animal skin. A certain
kind of intellectuality revels in the anti-intellectualism
afforded by Heidegger's language, which demands a
passive submission almost taboo elsewhere in the modern
Humanities. This passivity finds its virtual analogue in the
happy, servile authenticity of the peasant woman, which
Heidegger deduces from Van Gogh's shoes. Contempla
tion here appears deep but not genuinely disturbing: it is
a superficial vicarious experience of an imaginary other's
suffering. Substitute a gas chamber or Hiroshima human
shadow, or a simple pair of Nikes, for the shoes, and this
supposed contemplativeness becomes unnerving. You can
imagine committing a murder in a beautiful, mindful,
Heideggerian way. Aesthetically powerful descriptions of
the natural world, then, are not only a waste of time, but
might unwittingly aid the 'other side' of the contemporary
coin, which sees the world as an exploitable resource or as
objects of instrumental reason (the difference between a
cow and beef would be the application of this instrumen
tality) .
Heidegger's contemplative language is so seductive
that in countless ecocritical and ecotheoretical texts, he is
often the sole representative of a noninstrumental point of
view. We cannot ignore this rhetorical mode, and not just
because there are many adaptations of it. The Heidegger
meme is seductive because it speaks to something
profound, something often called spiritual. In order to get
over Heidegger, we have to go underneath him.
Ecology is about intimacy. Instead of insisting on being
part of something bigger, ecological thinking leads
213
COLLAPSE VI
to a different framework: intimacy, not holism. Thus

organicism is no longer a workable mode of aesthetics
and politics. Organicism believes that form can fit content
like an invisible glove, leaving no trace. Organic form is
greater than the sum of its parts. Most environmental
isms - including systems theories - are organicist. World
fits mind and mind fits world, as William Wordsworth
asserted. In the margins of his copy of the poem where
Wordsworth laid this out, William Blake wrote: 'You shall
not bring me down to believe such fitting & fitted . . . &
please your lordship'.19
Desire is inescapable in ecological coexistence. Yet
environmentalism as currently formulated tries to
transcend the contingency of desire, claiming that its
desires if any are natural. Organicism partakes of envi
ronmentalist chastity. 'Nature loving' is supposedly chaste
(impossible formula! like courtly love, or Neoplatonic
love), and is thus slave to masculine heteronormativity, a
performance that erases the trace of performance.20 'Leave
no trace'. If you look like you are 'acting' masculine, you
aren't. Masculine is Natural. Natural is masculine.
Organicism is a performance of no-performance. It is
'un-perversion', with all the ambiguity a double negative
can muster, a desire that erases its trace as soon as it
appears. Organicism articulates desire as erasure, erasure
desire. The curtain rises on a pregiven holistic world. But
interdependence is not organic: it's differential. Things
only look like they fit, because we don't perceive them
on an evolutionary or geological time scale. Sphex wasps
19. W. Blake, The Complete Rletry am1 Prose ef William Blalw, ed. D.V. Erdman (New
York: Doubleday, 1988) , 667.
20. See T. Morton, 'Qyeer Ecology,' (PMLA, forthcoming).
214
paralyse crickets to feed to their young. If you move a

paralysed cricket away from in front of the burrow that
the Sphex wasp who paralysed her is inspecting (for
the presence of grubs), the wasp will repeat the same
behaviour, moving the cricket back meaninglessly to the
entrance of the hole, without dragging her in.21 'Nature'
dissolves when we look directly at it, into assemblages of
behaviours, congeries of organs without bodies. Nature
looks natural because it keeps going, and going, and going
... like the undead. And because we keep on looking away,
keeping our distance, framing it, sizing it up.
Blake heard the voice of authority in organicism.
Authoritarian organicism gains its power by naturalis
ing difference. Nature is unmarked ('leave no trace' ) .
I t i s established by exclusion, and then by the exclusion
of exclusion. We must rediscover what has been excluded
from the book of Nature. Ecology must unthink ecologo
centrism. I mean precisely a version of what Derrida calls
logocentrism, the creation of a metaphysical scheme that
sets up a sign as a Master signifier that magically stands
outside the system of meaning, and guarantees the
meaning and coherence of all the other signs. 22 Once this
is established, we know what's in and what's out, what's up
and what's down, what's marked and what's unmarked.
The Interdependence Theorem does not allow this
knowledge to congeal.
Perhaps we could give ecologocentrism the slip by
saying that Nature is beyond concept. Beyond concept,
Nature is, a Nature for which there are no words. But we
21. Hofstadter, Glide/, Escher, Bah, 360-1, 613-14.
22. For further discussion see T. Morton, 'Ecologocentrism: Unworking Animals',

SubStance 37.3 (2008) , 37 -61.
215
COLLAPSE VI
are already using words to describe this wordless Nature.

Thus a negative theology of the environment must fall
prey to the deadly logos it wishes to transcend.23 Thinking
you can escape metaphysics by outlining a hyperessential
being beyond being only repeats the problem. 24 'Nature is
not unnatural.' A negative theology of the environment
is the ultimate chastity - it refuses even to name the
non-name, refuses even to non-name it.
No MORE BEAUTIFUL SOUL

Intimacy means we are caught in desire.Hegel held that
philosophy wasn't just about ideas, it was about attitudes
towards ideas. These attitudes were as yet unthought
ideas, ideas that hadn't yet been realised consciously.
If, as Donald Rumsfeld has claimed, there are known
knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns,
there are also, as Zizek adds, unknown knowns - things
that we know, but we don't know that we know them: the
unconscious, if you like psychoanalysis. Once you realise
what your attitude towards an idea is, that attitude itself
becomes an idea, towards which you have yet another
attitude, which you'll need to figure out - and so on in a
progression that Hegel calls the phenomenology of spirit.
Like a vanishing point in a perspective picture, ideas
select for certain ways of being understood. Some call this
strange feature ideology. Ideology is not well understood,
because we think it means belief, which we think means an
idea you are holding onto tightly - these two assumptions
23. See K. Rigby, 'Earth, World, Text: On the (Im)possibility of Ecopoiesis,' New
Literary History 35.3 (2004) : 427-42.
24.J. Derrida, 'How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,' in H. Coward and T. Foshay (eds.),
Derrida a:ndNegative Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992) , 74.
216
are themselves ideological, and obscure what ideology is.

Attitudes are automated features of ideas - they just pop
up when you have them. They aren't subjective states
independent of ideas. That's why attitudes are hard to get
rid of: they're hardwired into 'that' side of reality, rather
than 'this' one. If it were just a matter of prejudice, we'd
all have grown up long ago. But as Marx saw, the attitude
that sees attitude as prejudice (we call it the Enlighten
ment) suffers from its own blind spots, having do with
illusions of freedom and autonomy.
Nature seems incontestably 'there' - as many have
reminded me, because what I need, as a theory guy, is a
good strong dose of it to set me straight. In Environmental
Literary Criticism, Karl Kroeber says that what 'postmodern
theorists' need is a night out in a Midwestern thunder
storm, a ritual hazing that now sounds horribly like water
boarding. 25 But is the 'thereness' - more like the 'over
thereness' - of nature a lie in the form of the truth? What
attitude is this truth enabling?
Hegel gave the attitude a name: the Beautiful Soul, which
he found typified in Romanticism.26 The Beautiful Soul
suffers from seeing reality as an evil thing 'over yonder'.
Is this not precisely the attitude of many forms of envi
ronmentalism? Ironically, the attitude that nature enables
is the dreaded dualism, Cartesian and otherwise, from
which nature-speak from Romanticism to environmental
ism has sought to extricate itself. Nature is 'over yonder';
the subject is 'over here'. Nature is separated from us by an
25. K. Kroeber, Ecologi,cal Literary Cn"ticism : Ramantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 42.
26. G. W F. Hegel, Hegel's Pherwmerwlogy of spirit, trans. A.V Miller (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 197 7 ) , 383-409.
217
COLLAPSE VI
unbridgeable ontological wall, like a plate glass window -

plate glass was the Romantic-period invention that enabled
shops to display their wares as if they were in a picture
frame, and therefore belonged to another order of reality.
Plate glass is a physical byproduct of a quintessentially
Romantic production, the consumerist. Not the consumer,
but the consumerist: someone who's aware that she is a
consumer, someone for whom the object of consumption
defines her identity, along the lines of that great Romantic
phrase, invented once by the gourmand Brillat-Savarin
and once again by Feuerbach: 'You are what you eat'.27
This phrase implies that the subject is caught in a
dialectic of desire with an object with which it is never
fully identical, just as Wile E. Coyote never catches up
with Roadrunner in the cartoon. If Wile E. Coyote ever
did catch Roadrunner, he would eat Roadrunner, at which
point Roadrunner would cease to be Roadrunner and
would become Wile E. Coyote. There is in effect a radical
separation between subject and object. Yet consumerism
implies an identity that can be collapsed into its object,
so we can talk of vegetarians, hip-hop fans, opium eaters,
and so on.
One style stands out, a meta-style that Campbell
calls bohemianism and I call Romantic consumerism.28
27. L. Feuerbach, Gessamc/te Werke II, Kleinere Shrijien, ed. W. Schuffenhauer (Berlin:
Akademie-Verlag, 1972) , 4.27; J.-A. BrillatSavarin, The P!rysiology ef Taste, trans. A.
Drayton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 13.
28. C. Campbell, The Rmnantic Ethic and the Spirit efModern Consumerism (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1987) ; 'Understanding Traditional and Modem Patterns of Consumption
in Eighteenth-Century England: A Character-Action Approach,' in]. Brewer and R.
Porter (eds .), Consumption and the l#Jrld ef Goods (London and New York: Routledge,
1993), 40-57. T. Morton, The RJetics ef Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000) , 5, 9, 50-1, 57, 107-
8; 'Consumption as Performance: The Emergence of the Consumer in the Romantic
218
This type of consumerism is at one remove from regular

consumerism. It is 'consumerism-ism', the realisation
that the true object of desire is desire as such. Romantic
consumerism is window-shopping, enabled by plate glass,
and now by browsing online, not consuming anything
but wondering what we would be like if we did. In the
Romantic period, reflexive consumerism was limited to a
few avant-garde types: the Romantics themselves. To this
extent Wordsworth and De Qyincey are only superficial
ly different. Wordsworth figured out that he could stroll
forever in the mountains; De Qyincey figured out that
you didn't need mountains, if you could consume a drug
that gave you the feeling of strolling in the mountains
(sublime contemplative calm, and so on) . Nowadays we
are all De Qyinceys, flaneurs in the shopping mall of life.
This performance is ever more pervasive: we haven't
really exited the Romantic period.
Romantic consumerism can go one step higher than the
Kantian aesthetic purposelessness of window-shopping,
when it decides to refrain from consumerism as such. This
is the attitude of the boycotter, who emerges as a type in
the proto-feminism of the Bluestocking circle in the 1780s
and 1790s, an attitude which Percy and Mary Shelley, and
many others, practiced. The product boycotted was sugar,
which was sentimentally described as the crystallised blood
of slaves. The boycotter transmuted objects of pleasure into
objects of disgust. To display good taste, you have to know
how to feel appropriate disgust, how to turn your nose
up at something. The zero degree performance of taste
would be spitting out something disgusting, or vomiting.
Period,' in T. Morton (ed.) , Cultures ef 10.<te I Theories ef Appetite: E:atitzg Romanticism

(New York and London: Palgrave, 2004) , 1-17.
219
COLLAPSE VI
The height of good taste is abstaining from sugar, and

spice if you are one of the Shelleys, who held correctly that
spice was a product of colonialism.
The attitude of the boycotter is that she has exited
consumerism, but this attitude is itself a form of
consumerism. It's a performance of a certain style of
aesthetic judgment. Believing you've exited consumerism
might be the most quintessentially consumerist attitude of
all. In large part this is because you see that the world of
consumerism is an evil world. 'Over yonder' is the evil
object, which you shun or seek to eliminate. 'Over here'
is the good subject, who feels good precisely insofar as she
has separated from the evil world.
Hegel's Beautiful Soul claims precisely to have exited
the evil world. Hegel doesn't claim that the world may
or may not be evil - what is wrong with the Beautiful
Soul is not that it's prejudiced and rigid. The world is not
some object about which we can have different opinions.
The problem is far subtler than that. It's that the gaze that
constitutes the world as a thing 'over yonder' is evil as
such. The environmental fundamentalism that sees the
world as an essential, living Earth that must be saved from
evil, viral humans is the very type of the Beautiful Soul's
evil gaze. Ironically then, this environmentalism is not
spiritual, if by spiritual we mean transcending the material
world, but deeply committed to a materialistic view that
sees evil as a concrete thing that must be eliminated.
This environmentalism is a form of anti-consumerism,
which puts it at the summit of consumerism, not beyond
it. It is the most rarefied and pure form of consumerism.
Beautiful Soul Syndrome (BS) plagues it, because it sees
consumer objects, and consumerisms (the various styles),
220
as so many reified things 'over yonder', from which it

distances itself with disdain. How do we truly exit from the
Beautiful Soul? By taking responsibility for our attitude,
for our gaze. On the ground this looks like forgiveness.
We are fully responsible for the present environmental
catastrophe, simply because we are aware of it. No further
evidence, such as a causal link that says humans brought it
about, should be required. Looking for a causal link only
impedes us from assuming the direct responsibility that is
the only sane, ethical response to global warming and the
Sixth Mass Extinction Event. It's worse than a waste of
time to keep trying to convince people that environmen
talism is a right way of thinking - a right attitude. The
current ecological emergency should have proved to us
that the environmentalist attitude - that there is a 'world'
that is separate from me, that nature exists apart from
human society - is not only wrong, but also dangerously
part of the problem, if only because it provides a good
alibi while impeding us from doing anything about our
dilemma. The message of ecological awareness should
not be 'We Are the World' (that awful charity song) but
rather, 'We Aren't the World'. And never were: letting go
of a fantasy is even harder than letting go of a reality.
Beautiful Soul Syndrome wants to induce the correct
aesthetic appreciation of the world. But this aesthetic attitude
can never truly become an ethical one. Kierkegaard terri
fyingly showed how insidious Beautiful Soul Syndrome is,
in his narrative of the seducer in Either/Or.29 Aestheticisa
tion is synonymous with evil because it holds the world
at a distance from which to size it up. Thus the attitude
29. S. Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragnumi ef Life, tr. and intro. A. Hannay

(Harmondsworth: Pengnin, 1992) , 243-376.
221
COLLAPSE VI
that says, 'We need more evidence on global warming

before we act' ironically joins the attitude that says, 'If
only you could experience nature in the raw, you wouldn't
have these evil beliefs about destroying it.' In both cases,
violence hides beneath projections of innocence. Both
statements come bundled with attitudes of awaiting some
compelling, unmediated aesthetic experience issuing from
beyond the subject. They are both examples of Beautiful
Soul Syndrome: both require a certain aesthetic distance,
an evaluative, pseudo-contemplative, 'meditative' stance.
If you beat up the Beautiful Soul, however, and
leave it bleeding to death in the street, aren't you also
a victim of Beautiful Soul Syndrome? However much
you try to slough off the aesthetic dimension, doesn't it
stick to you ever more tightly? At a certain limit, tran
scending Beautiful Soul Syndrome means forgiving the
Beautiful Soul, recognising that we are responsible for this
Syndrome, whether we picture ourselves that way or not.
The only way out of the problem is further in: jumping
into our hypocrisy rather than pretending to be disillu
sioned and beyond ideology, without attitudes. This is a
test case for our ability to progress in social collectivity. It
means dropping various supporting concepts that provide
the background against which regular thinking takes
place: nature, environment, world, lye. We can't have our cake
and eat it too: that's consumerism, which is Beautiful Soul
Syndrome. The only way out is in and down, which is
why I call my approach dark ecology.
Dark ecology realises that we are hopelessly entangled
in the mesh. Dark ecology finds itself fully responsible for
all life forms: like a detective in a noir movie, it discovers
it's complicit in the crime. Dark ecology is melancholic:
222
melancholy is the Earth humour, and the residuum of our

unbreakable psychic connection to our mother's body,
which stands metonymically for our connection with all
life forms. The irony of dark ecology is like being caught in
your own shadow. Hegel disliked Romantic art because its
ironies reminded him of the Beautiful Soul. He describes
it in hauntingly environmental terms in his lectures on
aesthetics.30 Environmental awareness is, finally, a sense
of irony, because it is through irony that we realise that
we might be wrong, that identity might not be as solid as
we think, that our own gaze might be the evil that we see.
30. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetic>: Lectures on Fine Art, tr. T.M. Knox,

2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) , vol. 1, 527.
223
COLLAPSE VI
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The 'Odeon' on Alderney, part of the Atlantic Wall.
Photograph Howard Stanbury 2006
COLLAPSE VI
Fossils of Time Future:

Bunkers and Buildings from the
Atlantic Wall to the South Bank
HOMELAND PROTECTION STYLE

A couple of years before his death,]. G. Ballard wrote
an essay for the Guardian on Modern architecture, as
part of a tie-in with the highly successful Modernism -
Designing a .New World exhibition at the Victoria and Albert

Museum. This exhibition can be seen as the moment
where the British middle class fully reclaimed modern
architecture and design, after an interregnum of post
modernist eclecticism - but, in much the same way that
a Labour government was no longer meaningfully a
Labour government, this was not the same modernism.
Accordingly, a line was established where modernism,
as a purist, clean and hygienic aesthetic developed in the
1920s, leapt over the dissonant, mutated, megastructural,
'Brutalist' modernism of council housing and 'comprehen
sive redevelopment' that occurred after 1945, picking up
235
COLLAPSE VI
the thread again in the 1990s, with the Blairite tasteful

style of architects like Allies and Morrison or property
developers such as Urban Splash, with (this time a more
brightly coloured) minimalism once again the reigning
aesthetic. Of the many articles in the press celebrating the
V&A exhibition, a Modernism that didn't fit the rubric
of 'sweetness and light' was explained away briefly as a
perversion, a parody, of the original idea. In the process,
Modernism was denuded too of its attachment to left-wing
politics, and of its close relation to the technological
acceleration enabled by total war.
In contrast, Ballard concentrated on a warped
Modernism, one that can barely even be described as
architecture - the Atlantic Wall that was designed to
protect against the inevitable 'second front' in the Second
World War, a gigantic construction project designed by
the Organisation Todt, the Nazi engineering force that
had been responsible for the Autobahn network, and built
by thousands of slave labourers. There has long been an
urge to find the totalitarian smoking gun in discussions of
Modernism, the missing link that connects unfashionable
aesthetics and unpleasant politics. So, while the official
architecture of Nazism eschewed Modernism for a mixture
of monumental classicism and the Teutonic vernacular
they called the Heimatschutzstil ('homeland protection style') ,
the suppressed aesthetics of expressionism and function
alism broke out in 1942, in the form of these completely
utilitarian structures for the protection of the doomed thou
sand-year Reich. Built by slave labourers from reinforced
concrete and placed along the French coast, these bunkers,
blockhouses, observation posts, submarine bases and
gun placements were largely forgotten by the 1960s.
236
Hatherley - Fossils of Tune Future
It was at this point that Ballard became obsessed with

them. He writes, retrospectively:
Walking along the beach some years ago, I noticed a dark
structure emerging from the mist ahead of me. Three storeys
high, and larger than a parish church, it was one of the huge
blockhouses that formed Hitler's Atlantic wall, the chain of
fortifications that ran from the French coast all the way to
Denmark and Norway. This blockhouse, as indifferent to time
as the pyramids, was a mass of black concrete once poured by
the slave labourers of the Todt Organisation, pockmarked by
the shellfire of the attacking allied warships.
Rather than eliciting a feeling of relief that the
blockhouses were an unoccupied remnant of a finished
conflict, they seem instead to be 'waiting for the next war',
and appear moreover to have developed outgrowths into
the rebuilt British cities, those that were in some cases
destroyed by V2s shot from these very bunkers :
The scattered rubbish and tang of urine made me think of
structures closer to home in England - run-down tower blocks
and motorway exit ramps, pedestrian underpasses sprung
from the drawing boards of enlightened planners who would
never have to live in or near them, and who were careful never
to stray too far from their Georgian squares in the heart of
heritage London[...] W henever I came across these grim for
tifications along France's Channel coast and German border,
I realised I was exploring a set of concrete tombs whose dark
ghosts haunted the brutalist architecture so popular in Britain
in the 1950s. Out of favour now, modernism survives in every
high-rise sink estate of the time, in the Barbican development
and the Hayward Gallery in London, in new towns such
as Cumbernauld and the ziggurat residential blocks at the
University of East Anglia.
237
COLLAPSE VI
This list was an roll-call of what Modernism had

come to after World War Two, seeing as its 'heroic' era
had allegedly died when the Atlantic Wall was built -
and more convincingly, when the possibility of a belief
in progress had been irrevocably shaken, after the white
walled, antiseptic aesthetics of the 1920s had failed to
prevent the atavism and brutality of the 1940s - an 'archi
tecture of death', where thin, smooth rendered walls were
replaced by thickly abrasive concrete surfaces. Ballard
writes regretfully, almost as an admission of defeat, that
this project for the transformation of life was finally
capable only of erecting funerary structures, as the trans
formation in life that it aimed for was not achieved. Seeing
as Ballard is on record as loathing postmodernist architec
ture and the fantasies of old England embodied in Barratt
Homes and Poundbury, we should read the following as
the lament of someone disappointed in our failure to live
up to the modernist ideal:
I have always admired modernism and wish the whole of
London could be rebuilt in the style of Michael Manser's
brilliant Heathrow Hilton. But I know that most people,
myself included, find it difficult to be clear-eyed at all times
and rise to the demands of a pure and unadorned geometry.
Architecture supplies us with camouflage, and I regret that no
one could fall in love inside the Heathrow Hilton. By contrast,
people are forever falling in love inside the Louvre and the
National Gallery.
This rather peculiar essay ruminates inconclusively,

but it pulls together all the elements of modernism which
are most uncomfortable to the shiny Ikea Modernism
of riverside luxury flats and glass trading floors. In the
process it reminds us of the atavism in modernism itself,
238
Hatherley - Fossils of Tnne Future
the places where, at the fringes of the modern movement,

primal impulses and prehistoric building forms recur. The
Atlantic Wall is a project as ancient as it is modern, whose
forms evoke pyramids, hill forts, and, like Denys Lasdun's
Halls of Residence for UEA, where the concrete has a
similarly verdant, semi-rural setting, 'ziggurats'. This is an
hieratic architecture, one where rationalism is forced into
the service of the irrational. Ballard first traversed this
landscape fictionally in the mid-1960s, in the short story
The Terminal Beach. Although the landscape of bunkers and
beaches is here rescheduled to the aftermath of a Third
World War, Ballard's descriptions are clearly informed
by his exploration of the Atlantic Wall. The Terminal Beach
is what happened when, after lying in wait, the bunkers
regained their functions, with the later forms of Cape
Kennedy or Eniwetok transplanted onto the Normandy
coast. The protagonist, Traven, treats the post-catastrophe
landscape as a kind of mental experiment, as if researching
the psychic processes that led to the apocalypse, only to
find the structures taking him back far further:
The desolation and emptiness of the island, and the absence
of any local fauna, were emphasised by the huge sculptural
forms of the target basins set into its surface [ . . . ] roadways,
camera towers and isolated blockhouses, together forming
a continuous concrete cap upon the island, a functional,
megalithic architecture as grey and minatory (and apparently
as ancient, in its projection into, and from, time future) as any
of Assyria and Babylon[ . . . ] Here, the key to the present lay in
the future. This island was a fossil of time future, its bunkers
and blockhouses illustrating the principle that the fossil record
of life was one of armour and the exoskeleton.
239
COLLAPSE VI
The bunkers recur in the psychic landscapes of

The Atrocity Exhibition a few years later, where a similar
protagonist fuses them with advertising hoardings,
television, skyscrapers, the interiors of laboratories, and
the prospect of 'sodomising the Festival Hall'. The Atlantic
Wall becomes a pop landscape, another part of the media
storm that the novel's researcher subjects himself to:
Partly concealed by the sunlight, the camouflage patterns
across the complex of towers and bunkers four hundred yards
away revealed half-familiar contours - the model of a face, a
posture, a neural interval. A unique event would take place
here. Without thinking, Travis murmured 'Elizabeth Taylor'.
Abruptly there was a blare of sound above the trees.
BUNKERS AS ALTARS
It's difficult to establish direct links between the
Atlantic Wall and the Modern architecture that followed
the Second World War, but there is one example where the
influence was clear and publicly stated. Ballard's notion
of the Atlantic Wall as an ancient formation, something
primitive and monumental, was paralleled at exactly the
same point by the researches of the (then) young architect
Paul Virilio. In 1958, Virilio began a project to collate and
catalogue the structures which would be pulled together
into the 1975 book and exhibition Bunker Archaeology. This
book was the first outside the field of military history to
give these extraordinary places an extended, historical
examination, in a mix of philosophical meditation
on their 'meaning' and political investigation of their
purpose. Virilio's account was divided under headings
in which expected subjects such as 'Military Space' or
'The Fortress' were interspersed with a chapter on the
240
Hatherley - Fossils of Tnne Future
notion of 'The Monument', in which he managed to find

an almost spiritual element to this architecture of death,
claiming that it could fulfil the 'monumental function that
modernist architecture deliberately refused (but which the
monumental classicism of the Third Reich had no qualms
about)'. Elsewhere, he has as an epigraph to a chapter of
his haunting, gorgeous photographs of these structures,
a quote from Holderlin much beloved of phenomenolo
gists and sentimentalists, here making rather more sense
in the context of military architecture: 'but where danger
is found, there rises also that which saves'. This takes
on a double-meaning, in that these seemingly monstrous,
ferocious objects are formally dictated mostly by the need
for protection, in their attempt to 'save' those inside; but
Virilio takes it literally, in that the Atlantic Wall becomes
a model for a new religious architecture.
In this he was preceded, perhaps, by Le Corbusier,
whose post-war buildings for the Catholic Church - the
chapel at Ronchamp, La Tourette monastery - use a bare,
shuttered, 'crumbly' and searingly tactile concrete which
has more in common with the material of these Nazi
bunkers than that which he rendered and smoothed-over
into the streamlined perfection of his 1920s 'Purist Villas'.
This was little more than coincidence, spurred by Le
Corbusier's accidental 'discovery' of beton brut after budget
cuts in the Marseilles Unite d'Habitation, inadvertently
creating 'Brutalism'. Virilio traces from this an elective
affinity, bringing the latent connections to the surface,
heightening their apparently religious aura and their
extreme modernity, particularly in the case of bunkers
surviving in small towns, which unlike the 'wall' on the
beach, could gradually become accepted, quotidian:
241
Virilio's 'Bunker Church'. Photograph Jorge Ayala.
. .. the sky playing between the embrasure and the entrance,

as if each vast casemate were a little ark, or an empty temple
minus the cult [ . . . ] these concrete altars built to face the void
of the oceanic horizon [ . . . ] these solid masses in the hollows
of urban spaces, next to the local schoolhouse or bar, shed
new light on what 'contemporary' has come to mean. W hy
continue to be surprised at Le Corbusier's forms of modern
architecture? W hy speak of 'Brutalism'?
Unlike the post-war rebuilding of blitzed cities along

rationalist lines, the Atlantic Wall provided an architec
tural model for a shattered, traumatised world, and for
Virilio at least, a possible model for salvation from this
fragmentation and psychosis.
Their very method of construction, to the design
of engineers such as Fritz Todt or Ulrich Finsterwal
der, suggested the modernity of total war, a science of
compaction and impact, where the concrete structure is not
a frame, not built from the ground up, but a poured mound,
where 'the centre of gravity replaces the foundation'. It is
the manner in which the bunker is tailored to protect the
human being against modem arms that is the source of
its appropriateness for modem design. Far from being
an aggressive architecture, for Virilio it is defensive: 'the
imposing forms are the consequence of the adversaries'
arms, of the fire power of those who rescued us, of our own
armies.' The photographs show an architecture which,
owing in part to the exigencies of camouflage, manages
to be alternately extremely jarring and, in conservative
architectural parlance, 'contextual'. While some of the
structures seem to be a grotesque metamorphosis of the
architecture of the twenties - especially the work of Erich
Mendelsohn, with the expressionist curves recalling his
243
COLLAPSE VI
Einstein Tower and the gun emplacements an accidental

parody of the ribbon windows of his department stores
- others are more archaic. One bunker is disguised as a
chapel, another insinuates itself into a barrow, evoking
the ceremonial burial grounds of Mycenaean Greece; 'the
continuance of the site', notes Virilio, 'conflates funerary
architecture with military architecture.' Finally, in 'The
Aesthetics of Disappearance', Virilio's photographs show
the bunkers overcome by nature, sinking into the beach,
overgrown with grass and lichen, gradually becoming
earthworks.
The atavism of the Wall is most obviously associated
with its part in the Nazi project, with its use of advanced
technology in the service of the primal lunacy of blood
and soil - but Virilio would adopt its forms for an atavism
even more ancient than that of the thousand-year Reich.
These bunkers became the model for the best-known of
Virilio's architectural works with Claude Parent, in the
firm Architecture Principe: the church of Saint Bernadette
du Banlay. Make no mistake, this was a direct imitation
of the forms of the Atlantic Wall, specifically of the curved
observation posts which were some of the most striking
of those documented in Bunker Archa.eology. Designed in
1964, it's an incredibly puritan structure for the Catholic
Church, with its bare concrete walls and an unreadable
military exterior; but the interior makes Virilio's point
about the spiritualisation of the bunker, in that the thin
slivers of light which once came through the observation
strips, originally just narrow enough to fit the tip of a
machine gun, this time illuminate the church in appro
priately pathetic fashion, with strips of what becomes in
the crepuscular context an especially vivid light, offsetting
244
Hatherley - Fossils of Time Future
a concrete which is left without detailing, without any

obvious kind of architectural treatment. This church
marks the culmination of a bizarre metamorphosis : From
a utilitarian, instant architecture designed for emergency
into something still, ponderous and seemingly eternal.
It is especially extraordinary, then, that another more
famous example of the Atlantic Wall making its way
into mainstream architecture took place at the hands of
architects best known for changeability, in-built obsoles
cence and bright, jolly optimism - the Archigram group.
MOUND AND GROUND

Archigram was a journal that ran from the early 60s to
the 70s, written and edited by a group of architects, many
of whom practised for the Greater London Council, and
some of whom later went on to design wilfully spectacular
'blobitecture' in the OOs : Warren Chalk, Dennis Crompton,
Peter Cook, David Greene, Ron Herron and Mike Webb.
Archigram is usually described in terms of what Sam
Jacob derisively calls '1960s grooviness : loon pants, lava
lamps, men with moustaches and birds in miniskirts'.
The journal, and the increasingly megalomaniacal
projects featured inside it, are the antithesis of sober, sombre
Brutalism - a cornucopia of bright colours and whimsical
hypertechnology. The Plug-In City, The Instant City, the
Walking City, the Bottery and the Electric Tomato - all
of them imagining an architecture of inbuilt obsolescence,
where buildings could be used and then discarded like
any other consumer good, but where new networks and
frameworks could provide a new mobility free from the
earthbound mundanities of serious architecture. Now that
we are secure in the knowledge that cities will not walk or
245
COLLAPSE VI
float (something by no means certain in the late 1960s),

Archigram are indulged and enjoyed as sixties 'icons' -
The architectural equivalent of Terry Gilliam's animations
for Monty Python or (former architectural student) Nick
Mason's cover for Pink Floyd's Relics, their work (in the
words of Sam Jacob) 'beautiful and meaningless like
fantasy art. It combined traditional Victorian engineering
and Heath Robinson mechanics with a naive trust in
megastructures ... Architects look at this frightening
vision, smile and think "how crazy, how fun! "'. The
possibility that Archigram might have anything to do with
something as menacing and unnerving as Nazi defensive
structures would seem inconceivable.
Their built work as a collective never extended further
than a playground in Milton Keynes and a swimming pool
for Rod Stewart (neither of which are extant) . However,
in the early 1960s half of the group were the principal
designers of the South Bank Complex, the Brutalist riposte
to the bright, optimistic modernism of the Royal Festival
Hall and the remains of the 1951 Festival of Britain. The
original festival showed a celebratory, instant modernism
which would seem to be a precursor to the seaside jollity of
many Archigram projects ; yet when the Festival site was
prepared for new buildings, the plans were very different.
Ron Herron, Warren Chalk and Dennis Crompton,
along with John Attenborough, for group leader Norman
Engleback, were the 'hairiest' of the many design groups
of the Greater London Council. Their South Bank scheme,
largely designed in 1960 but worked on until 1967-8, was
a combination of the interest in pedestrian circulation and
a certain 'anti-architectural' approach - both taken from
the 'New Brutalism' of Alison and Peter Smithson - along
246
Hatherley - Fossils of Trme Future
with a windowless harshness which appears to owe a great

deal to the Atlantic Wall. Brutalism was an idea developed
in the 1950s by British architects and theorists which
involved overturning the purist, rationalist aesthetics that
informed post-war rebuilding in favour of a fragmented,
impacted approach to building and planning. At first,
the material with which it would become synonymous
- reinforced concrete - was irrelevant, and its earliest
instance, the Smithdon School in Hunstanton, was a
work of steel and glass. Brutalism made an architectural
fetish of services (water towers, pipes, etc) , structural
'honesty' and stark, immediately memorable images
- and, in planning, a focus not on towers in parkland,
but on walkways, multiple levels, the famous 'streets
in the sky' that ran through Brutalist housing schemes.
It was an architecture based on a contradiction between
designing for people, for sociability and interaction, and
a stylishness based on the photogenic, imposing image.
The South Bank development certainly featured plenty of
walkways and public spaces - the undercroft now used
by skateboarders, the many levels now partly closed to
the public - but it took the image-making tendency to
an extremely stark level: A dissonant, mute form where
functions were unreadable from the exterior, without light
or the intimation of (internal) human activity. The plan,
cutely dubbed 'crumbly', actually involved exploding the
usual building form, leaving it as a series of broken shards
linked together by the pedestrian spaces - the 'crumbliness'
seemed to refer more to the porous, tactile surfaces.
The head of the GLC architects' department, Hubert
Bennett, was aghast at the Centre's extremism and added
a grid of precast concrete panels in a desperate attempt to
247
COLLAPSE VI
give the buildings a 'face' of some sort, leading to Herron,

Chalk, Crompton and Attenborough's resignation
(they were reinstated after a Guardian campaign) .
On completion the militaristic metaphors of the concrete
Ille South Bank Centre, London. Photograph Anne Ward.
forms (not to mention the glass spikes atop the Hayward

Gallery) were immediately noted - the review in Casabella
lamented 'the idea is as exquisite as the deck of a battleship
[ . . . ] but on closer inspection, it turns out to be rather a
sad collection of Second World War bunkers'. Even its
defenders have managed to find the structure threatening
and redolent of the emergency architecture of the Second
World War: Simon Sadler in Archigram - Architecture
248
Hatherley - Fossils of Time Future
Without Architecture compares the glinting window of the

Hayward Gallery to the slit of a 'pillbox', but claims 'the
aggressive imagery of a gun emplacement is tempered by
reminiscences of dinosaur movies and comic books'.
The latter observation brings us closer to exactly why
the Art Galleries and Concert Halls of London's South
Bank have such a formal kinship with the Atlantic Wall.
Certainly the 'pillbox' gun emplacements constructed in
1940 in Britain lacked the strangeness and complexity
of the Nazi structures, so they seem a less likely source.
Archigram had always been based on a 'toys for boys'
aesthetic of fabulous machines, terrible monsters and
available women, one where the science fiction comics
they excerpted and reproduced in the Archigram journal
could easily be of a piece with World War Two adventures,
their horror dissipated by time and commercialism.
Nazism might have been just another source of fantastic,
malevolent machines to add to the walking cities and
mobile homes. There was undeniably an influence from
military technology at work in Archigram's imaginary
architecture. In Archigram 6, a special issue on the 1940s,
an editorial by South Bank architect Warren Chalk noted:
The first half of the forties saw a great inventive leap made
out of necessity for survival, advancing technology and mass
production techniques and demonstrating man's ingenuity,
courage and investment under the stress and pressure of war.
Out of this period came a strange social idealism. The idealism
was to fade, but not the technology . . .
The technology Chalk was referring to was largely

'dry' types of building technique, the easily assembled
'Meccano' architecture which they were trying to
continue in the '60s : 'prefabricated housing types [ ...) part
249
COLLAPSE VI
of the 'clip-on/plug-in' heritage'. But what he says could

equally be applied to the messier, 'wet' technologies of
poured concrete, the heaping of which - whether by slave
labourers or contractors - was the common factor in the
Atlantic Wall and the South Bank Centre.
Visited today, the South Bank Centre looks distinctly
odd in the context of a largely 'regenerated' riverfront.
The Royal Festival Hall, into which reaches one of Chalk/
Crompton/Herron/Attenborough's walkways, has been
given an expensive facelift; the National Theatre which
followed the SBC was cleaned up, making its relative
classicism all the more clear; and a glass pavilion has been
added to the Hayward Gallery. The buildings themselves
are as rough as they ever were, however - the precast
panels imposed on the complex appear to be rotting, and
stalactites hang from the canopies and jutting extrusions ;
compared with the light modernism of the surrounding
area, and the new buildings by Allies and Morrison, it
appears ever more strange and ferocious, even down to
the heavy, sculpted and weirdly organic metal doors,
seemingly escaped from HR Geiger's work for Alien. It is
in its desuetude that the anti-architectural, extremist ambi
tiousness of the South Bank complex truly reveals itself.
The main reference to the complex in Archigram's written
work is in their 1972 Archigram Annual, where it is included
in a section entitled 'Mound, Ground, and Hidden
Delights'. Here the inspiration for the scheme is claimed
to be the 'Mappin Terraces', the artificial mountains of
London Zoo. Rather than 'buildings', what we have here
is a mound, a geological formation rather than a discrete
work of architectural design - 'the aggregation of the
unlike to the unlike in some amorphous, polyglot organism
250
that is beyond single buildings, the notion of place and

ground and artefacts as transient plantings'. The implosive
concrete mound of the South Bank Centre seems designed
not so much to be clipped on or clipped off, plugged in or
unplugged, as to be abandoned to the mercies of nature,
to be left as a series of crags which, as in Ballard or
Virilio's descriptions of the Atlantic Wall, are ancient and
primal expressions of advanced military technology. The
similarity between this and Archigram's more famous
projects is that they both represent an end-point of archi
tecture. Here it secedes not to mobility or expendability,
but instead to geological formations which hardly seem to
have been 'designed' as such. Rather than the Instant City,
this is the Instant Ruin.
DESIGN BY DESTRUCTION
The resuscitated Modernism of the last fifteen
years, though it has a certain amount in common with
Archigram's positivistic, high-tech side, excises along with
their utopian politics the more troubling elements of their
thought. Concrete mounds become the 'sustainable design'
of green roofs, walking cities are grounded, becoming
PFI hospitals, and the pulp modernism of science fiction
and war comics becomes an object for distant nostalgia
rather than a similar attention to the apocalyptic pulp
of our own time. And although it too may be an object
for nostalgia, a complex such as the South Bank, with
its series of fragments linked by walkways and cast in a
concussive, tactile concrete, is all but unimaginable - in a
building with no front or back, where would the tourists
point their cameras ? Accordingly, the chain of associa
tions which links Nazi fortifications, avant-garde Catholic
251
COLLAPSE VI
churches and 1960s arts centres has not continued into

contemporary architecture. The fortified landscapes of
the 1940s have an obvious commonality with the urban
environment created by the War on Terror, whether the
buffers in front of the Houses of Parliament, the concrete
walls and watchtowers that divide Shia and Sunni areas of
Baghdad, or the bunkers and emplacements of the Israeli
Defence Force. But little of this spills over into archi
tecture, and finds its continuation more in artistic and
political speculation than in buildings.
A particularly troubling example of the former is the
work of Nicholas Moulin, who creates exhilarating aes
theticisations of blasted, apocalyptic landscapes. Moulin's
images of paranoid cities and impossible industrial
252
structures are a kind of hard surrealism, a singularly

unnerving re-imagining of urban space. In 2009 an
exhibition of his work in Sheffield showed the inspiration
of that city's Brutalist buildings, removed from their
historical context and fused together, so that a windowless,
militaristic structure such as the city's Electricity
Substation is smashed together into the utopian socialist
architecture of the Park Hill flats. Three photomontages
were produced from components taken from local archi
tecture, under the title Wenluderwind. Brutalist architecture
was essentially optimistic, an attempt to create an open,
socialist city. Yet the only other buildings in Britain to
have ever employed so much reinforced concrete were
pillboxes and bunkers. In Moulin's images, the difference
Nicolas Moulin, Wenluderwind 2, digital print, 2009. Courtesy the artist.
253
COLLAPSE VI
between these two kinds of concrete structure disappears,

and the end result is a horrifying but thrilling unarchi
tecture made up of non-functional, barely even structural
planes and fragments, thrown together to create aggressive
agglomerations. W hile the open walkways and pedestrian
levels of Brutalist buildings tried to engender community
and solidarity, Moulin presents a city without people.
The architectural site-spotter might recognise individual
components of these compacted forms - the 'free and
anonymous' planes of Victor Pasmore's Apollo Pavilion,
the 'acoustic mirrors' of World War One, the walkways
of Park Hill, the cast concrete patterns of Sheffield's
underpasses, the obligatory bunkers - but they become
irrelevant in these ferocious landscapes. Here, walkways
go nowhere, blocks of flats transform into sheer, faceless
walls, formerly functional components become hieratic
monuments, girders are topped with spikes, objects are
buried in the concrete while weeds crack the surface.
For those of us who admire the spirit of Brutalist
architecture, there's something unnerving in the
conflation of its pedestrian spaces with the bunkers of the
Organisation Todt. The concrete of social-democratic
city planning is here part of the same horrifying rubble
as Nazi bunkers, or today's concrete security walls.
Yet another of Moulin's works, used as the promotional
photo for the exhibition, suggests why the utopian and
dystopian elements in modernism can be so easily fused.
This is an unaltered image of Park Hill, once one of
Europe's most famous public housing estates. In the midst
of a gentrification project to make it as shiny and unthreat
ening as any other piece of regeneration architecture,
one wing of the complex has been stripped bare, leaving
254
nothing but the concrete frame, and something intended

to be teeming with life now appears to have been the
victim of a bombing raid. Denuded of its function and its
people, this very real structure suddenly looks like one of
Moulin's paranoid fictions.
W hile Moulin presents an amoral view of a modern
city become atavistic, there are some architects who have
tried to imagine a re-use of military architecture for ends
other than awed aesthetic appreciation. For instance, the
project Decolonising Architecture, by Alessandro Petti, Sandi
Hilal and Eyal Weizman, envisages the transformation of
Israeli military buildings in occupied Palestine (mostly,
the abandoned Oush Grab complex near Bethlehem)
into a variety of different forms. A bunker becomes a
bingo centre, with a watchtower used as the till, severely
confusing the IDF patrol. In another proposal, the bunkers
are allowed, as with Archigram's mounds and the disap
pearing, reclaimed bunkers documented by Virilio, to be
taken over by nature. This is done for specific political
reasons, in order to prevent the re-use of the structures
by the Israeli army or by settlers. One idea entails part
burying them in rubble, another advocates puncturing the
bunkers with holes so that they can be used for roosting
by the migratory birds that converge on the hilltops. The
architects call this 'design by destruction.'
255
COLLAPSE VI
Pol itical Plastic
In 2 003, architect Eyal Weiz.man co-curoJed the exhibition

A Civilian Occupation1 in which work by photographers.
journalists and architects was c_ombined to present a revealing account
<fthe role efarchitecture in the Israeli occupation <fPalestine. Censored
by the Association ef Israeli Architects, the exhibition demonstroJed
the potential ef this provocative new perspective for shf!Hng deboJe
on the occupation ftom interminable moral polarisation to forensic
examination.
Cutting through the endemic euphemisms and evasions surrounding
the debate on Israel/Palestine with a carefUlly-calibrated assemblage
ef theoretical analysis, interdisaplinary research and reportage,
Weiz.man s book Hollow Land2 expands this prqject, traversing
moJerial and historical cross-sections efthe occupation and its territo
rialitU:s to reveal how the governarue efspace meshes with disturbing
new modes efpolitical and military power.
Weiz.man s architecturalpractice with Sandi Hila! and Allesandro
Petti, Decolonizing Architecture, now proposes direct interven
tions into fmmerly colonized spaces with a view to defasing their
political charge.
In our interview with Weiz.man we discuss Hollow Land,
Decolonizing Architecture and his recent work whuh extends and
develops forensic architecture the evolving theoretical.framework thoJ
has emerged.from his research and practice.
1 . See R. Segal and E. Weizman (eds.) A Civilian Occupation: The Rilitics qf Israeli
Architecture (London: Verso, 2003) .
2. E. Weizman Hollow La:nd: Israel's Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007) .
257
COLLAPSE VI
COLLAPSE: In Hollow Land you speak of two distinct senses

of the word 'architecture' : Firstly you demonstrate that a
reading of even the apparently mundane details of archi
tectural projects under the Israeli occupation, reveals
political investments, and the use of architecture as part
of an extra-military arsenal. But this materiality of archi
tectural structures per se embodies, develops and sustains
the novel political structures which give the second sense
of 'architecture' : that of the architecture of the occupation
itself, the political process seen as an enterprise of
architecture - the construction, partition and organisation
of (geographical, municipal, domestic . . . ) volumes.
We have long known that in being attentive to the
practices of architecture and the way that they construct
space, we can shed light on aspects of political life; how
would you define your distinctive theoretical approach to
this problem?
EYAL WEIZMAN : In terms of the second sense, perhaps - in

a rather abstract way - it is probably best to think about
this question as bearing on the relation between farces and
forms. The assumption is that - although in a nondirect and
complicated manner - historical events are registered in
material organisation. Therefore we might be able to glean
from a forensic investigation of material spaces and traces
the history that produced them, that is folded into them. The
question is : How are histories inscribed in spatial products?
And how can we make the object 'speak' them? So this
meaning of architecture is a tuning in to the complicated
reciprocal relationship between forces and forms.
The term farensirs is really important here: Forensics,
from the latin source, means nftont ef the forum: it is the
258
Weizman - Political Plastic
art and skill of speaking on behalf of objects - narrating

convincing histories from objects, convincing enough to
become what we call evidence - to a forum of citizens or
judges. Forensics is one of the methods that allows objects
(or things) to speak, or a way of listening to them. So there
are in this sense two interrelated sets of spatial relations
folded into the term 'forensics' : one is the relation between
an event (or histories) and the spaces in which it is registered,
and the other is the relation between the spatial representa
tion of history and the forums within which it resonates or
which it creates. 1bis forensic dimension of architecture
can be understood as an act both of claim-making and
forum-building.
And it is the methods for exposing this that I was
concerned with in HL: A process of 'forensic architecture'
that is different from but analogous to, say, 'forensic
archaeology', where one engages in a reading of how
historical processes become form, and how, therefore,
forms or material organisations are diagrams of the spatial,
political and military relationships within them.
'Forensic architecture' thus aspires to reconstruct
and narrate undecided or controversial events through a
close study of the material properties of the spatial/urban
realities in which these events are registered; to turn
mute spatial products into active material witnesses that
can be interrogated (and cross-examined) . In this sense,
the 'architecture' in 'forensic architecture' designates, not

the product of building design, but an expanded field of
spatial investigation and enquiry. On the other hand, the
adjective 'forensic' can be understood as the very condition
that enables architecture to become a diagnostic technique,
whereby immaterial forces are made manifest and thus
proclaim themselves.
259
COLLAPSE VI
But this process is elusive and contingent. Rather than

assuming any straightforward mechanical materialisation
of time, or a conclusive, transparent, objective apparatus
of truth claims, its reading is inclined towards complex,
sometimes unstable, even contradictory, accounts of events.
It's more like the murky ground of a 'fuzzy' forensics of
probabilities, possibilities and interpretations.
Nevertheless, there is a very simple mechanical way to
imagine this relation - and I think that the Wall is a good
example, because it could be read as one of the clearest
mechanical manifestations of the relation of forces to form.
C : This is the Separation Wall, which serves as an emblem

for one of the fundamental contentions of HL: that
frontiers and borders can no longer be understood as rigid
cartographical boundaries separating territories in two
dimensions, but must be understood in three dimensions
and as elastic and dynamic. Following Danny Trrza, you
describe the Wall as a 'political seismograph gone mad',
registering not only state and international intervention,
but also micropolitical actions.
EW: Yes, you have a construction line of fortification that

is elastic, and you have the politics of the Israeli-Palestinian
international political system, on the micro and macro
levels : The international community, Palestinian resistance
actions, and to some degree the residents of the Wall lime
- Palestinians, represented by human rights lawyers - are
all constantly pushing and pulling at the path of this line
as it is being built, routing and rerouting it. So that when it
'dries out' - which is the term human rights lawyers give to
its state after all conflicts have been registered in its layout
260
- when it 'solidifies', you can see in every twist, tum and

detail of the route itself the material imprint of forces, as
they are applied within a particular human and topograph
ical terrain. Now, that's a rather clear way of imagining
the relation between forms and forces, but there are many
other different ways in which forces are mediated into
form, in what is always a complex process, that I hope also
to capture or at least to note. Whether or not it achieves it
in finished form, the book sets itself the task of thinking this
materialisation of time, and it sees matter not only as an
imprint of relations, but as itself an agent within the conflict.
The wall is initially a media space. Walls really do not
stop flows. They modulate flows across them - differenti
ating them: money, people, electricity, sewage, water ... it's
a system of filters and modulations. And the act of crossing
is also always registration, recording, etc. IBtimately, if you
want to cross the wall, if you're determined to cross it, you
can; there may be a delay but it can be crossed. If not I
wouldn't be able to go to work, which is on the Palestinian
controlled side of the wall. So its path is seismograph of
political forces, and also it registers all things that pass it.
C : An actor as well as a register.
EW: Yes, the Wall is an archive in these two senses of the

term: it's an archive of all movements or flows across it, and
its own movement (its constant transforming path) is an
archive of the formative force fields surrounding it. Because
the Wall is one of the objects that registers its environment,
environmental forcefield - political environment - it can
read this in a forensic sense.
261
COLLAPSE VI
So, you can see the politics in things, politics as it is

articulated in the relationship between processes, agents,
etc. across the territory. Consequently, if we dare to
look at politics as a material politics, then architectural
methodology is useful to analyse it. Politics can't, of course,
simply be reduced to it; but it is incredibly useful to take it
seriously, in terms of that kind of forensic relation.
C : IT we refrain from saying that this second sense of

'architecture' is 'more profound' it is because of your
refusal to treat 'empirical' architectural details as semiotic
epiphenomena, mere representations or signs of supposedly
'deeper' infrastructural determinants. This seems to
provide the key to your conception of the relation between
the material practices of architecture and the idea of an
'architecture of the political'. You write of the wall that
'The logic of the late occupation is not represented by but
embedded and saturaied within these structures. The Wall
itself reiteraJes some of these built physiognomies.' 3 The two
senses of architecture, therefore, are intertwined in a variety
of ways, through the multiple examples of embedding,
saturation, reiteration, that HL exposes.
EW: Each material, in each example I'm writing of, has

its own characteristics with regard to the way in which
it invites politics to participate in it. So on one hand you
could say the Wall is equivalent to a sensitive photographic
film. But not in the sense that it is a representation. Things
are printed, not on it (in a symbolic politics of graffiti) but
in it; its form is a snapshot of certain changing relations.
3. HL 153, our emphasis.
262
But this has to do with the way it is constructed: the

modular units which allow certain kinds of transformation,
the way in which some material characteristics determine
how it sits on the topography itself. So there are so many
features through which politics traverses an object. Some of
them are underground in the porosity of rock, the flow of
water, in what kinds of plants grow on western side slopes,
because the rain clouds come from the west, and drain back
to the west. Ultimately, what goes into that kind of layout
are so many natural, political, artificial, micropolitical
forcefields, influences in which the Wall itself participates
as an agent, in this kind of complex ecology of things.
We must find the language to open up political process to
these fields of knowledge. I find that otherwise politics is too
often reduced to a kind of intentionality - you always need
a culprit . . . in whose mind an 'evil scheme' is emerging.
C : Then the heroic task of resistance becomes that of

unveiling the ultimate centre, the face of power behind the
complexity . . .
EW: Yes, so a lot of the time accounts of the wall are just
boringly simple - Ariel Sharon drawing a line, Israel wants

to do this, and so on . . . but they leave out everything to
do with material characteristics. Also the problem of the
path of the Wall has to do with the negotiation between
security and agriculture: Agriculture is what forms the
basis of the Israeli High Court of Justice's calculations
of proportionality, i.e. the amount of wheat or olives
that can acceptably be traded for security. This kind of
negotiation is interesting politically, because it means that
the Israeli structures are designed not according to their
263
COLLAPSE VI
explicit political rhetoric, but through actual self-imposed

moderations that are the only way they can achieve
success. The moderation process of the occupation is more
interesting than its naked application of power, because it
is in this moderation that calculati.ons take place: life versus
security, water versus control, and, beyond these simple
binaries, a whole field of calculations through which the
occupation takes shape. This disturbs the simple logic of
security, which is very politically determined. The minute
this logic is enacted, it becomes a matter of counterbalances
- all sorts of other agencies come into the picture: farmers,
but also underground water, land consistency, real estate
interests, community leaders, topography, environment
and environmentalists, latitude, height, old graves - all
these things, all these agents.
C : This vision of the multiple agencies involved seems to

minimise the role of the state: its agency need no longer
be central to understanding the process of colonization.
Nevertheless isn't the rhetoric of naturalisation - the notion
that the process is in some sense the natural outcome of
multiple intersecting forces - precisely that invoked by the
State to dissimulate its power behind an 'appearance of
disappearance'?
EW: Yes I agree, but it's not a case of disappearance,

it's more a case of the straiegi.c withdrawal of the state: it
appears and disappears. There's a real strong state form,
constantly balancing these forces, and then acting visibly
and declaring their suspension. Gaza is evacuated - we
could say, it's worse, it's still occupied. Nevertheless,
something has been done - Israeli settlers, by an act of
264
state, inunediately lost the right to live there, their lease on

the ground was tenninated. So, the power of the state is that
it is withdrawn and than reappears. the interplay between
chaos and order is extremely useful to it. This might be
a particular feature of this colonization: the withdrawal
of the state, the appearance of a 'weak state', the creation
of a degree of chaos, are necessary means for having acts
done outside and despite the law (international law and
Israel's own) and outside state agreements and obligations.
The complexity of multiple agents and the chaos of the
frontier is very much manipulated by this state power. The
paradox is that the state must suspend its own laws and
rules so as to expand the territory, to land grab and kill,
in order to create what it calls 'pacification', upon which
its laws can again be applied. That is, the law has to be
disregarded (not suspended) to be later enacted only when
the frontier is pacified. Think about the American frontier
with its genocides - which make way for the 'normal'
rules of democracy to apply. This is the reciprocal relation
between the frontier and the centre: the centre provides the
means, the infrastructure, and when necessary the military
support, and the groups are allowed to operate outside state
purview.
But the frontier also demands things of the centre -
politics as material reality is undertaken in the frontier. The
state, which likes to think it's in control of this process, is also
more or less dragged behind these processes. It imagines it
can control these forces, and sometimes it can, but often the
facts on the ground completely steer and shape its politics.
So this poses an historiographical problem: whether the
settlement geography was planned or whether it emerged
out of this interaction, without any kind of top-down
planning and clear political will . This historiographical
265
COLLAPSE VI
problem is similar to that of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine

in '47-8. How did it happen that at the end of the war there
were 750,000 Palestinians outside of state borders - by
design or through a collection of contingent singularities?
These debates mirror the hi.storikerstreit - the 'battle of
historians' - over the Jewish genocide in Europe: To what
extent was Hitler a weak dictator - Kershaw' s thesis - and
the beginning of extermination a process of cumulative
radicalisation born out of chaos? Mommsen Bozart and
Kershaw's model is that, although we imagine the Nazi
state as very organised, bureaucratic, and so on, what
happened was born out of bureaucratic and operational
chaos : partly through the fact that that the people who
could manage state affairs - the Prussian state's highly
trained bureaucrats - were replaced by the Nazis, who had
no experience of government, and who started competing
for the attention of Hitler; and partly through the nature of
Nazi organization, which was kept deliberately overlapping,
with internal conflicts and lack of clarity so that each will
have a clear relation only to the top rather than laterally.
According to this model, when the killings start in 1940
in Poland, there is a level of ambiguity in the orders to the
killing groups, the Einsatzgruppe: Each one takes initiatives,
tries to outflank the other, tries to out-radicalise to get the
attention of the Nazi commanders, and from within this
chaos a project starts emerging, before it is fully theorised.
And the same discussion happens around the afore
mentioned problem of 1948 : There is no question that
the Zionists pushed the Palestinians, the Arabs, out of the
country; the question is how this reality was created. And
military historians such as Benny Morris say, in fact it starts
with the battle over the roads - certain tactical necessities,
266
some commanders needed to secure roads and didn't want

people and houses by the side of the road, and they start
expelling some and later they realise that people leave
easily, and that they can make them leave . . . and then
slowly that tactic is mimicked by others, until it emerges
as a state project of ethnic cleansing and expulsion. On
the other hand there are people like Ilan Pappe, who looks
for the decision and the organisation in all this, arguing
that from 1919 on there was a planned Zionist project of
expulsion that was prepared in advance and carried out
under orders, from the top down.
Now, the 'cumulative radicalisation' theory is nourished
by functionalist approaches to history. And although I
do not fully subscribe to that approach, I can see how it
might be useful in describing the emergence of the elastic
and ever-changing forms of the occupation. This is not
to exonerate Zionism - to say that it's a kind of 'natural
process' of expulsion. On the contrary. It dijfoses respon
sibility, meaning that every unit or cell in the military
knows exactly what to do - without an ()Tder, it internalises
ideology, allowing every single soldier or commander to
know what is expected of him without getting the order, or
every member of settlement youth to know what to do. So
that in fact, if you want to discuss it in terms of responsi
bility, of liability, it creates a wide diffusion. It's not a matter
of separating decisions and their executors - the politics
runs through the body of every soldier on the ground, the
decision runs through them. So ultimately, we can think
through functional analysis without making this very easy
correlation between naturalisation and exoneration. When
ideology operates thus, there's no need for speech. But
it's not ideology in the modernist sense that we usually
understand . . .
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COLLAPSE VI
C : And, to go back to HL, what part does architecture (in

the 'first sense') play in this ideological diffusion?
EW: In the organisation of space that we discussed: how

does space emerge, how are the networks of settlements
formed, what dictates the path of the wall . . . ?
Space is not a representation of a politics that would
already otherwise exist in the abstract. Politics operates
and flows through and in spatial practice. The architects
are only part of a widely-diffused set of spatial practitio
ners, but without the architectural discourse and practice
that was developed around the problem of building in
mountain terrain, without the development of serial modes
of construction, and without the complex principles that
I describe in the book as 'optical urbanism', much of the
aggregation of construction would not have been able to
take place as it has .
C: There are however also rather straightforward

examples of the ideological (in the usual sense) charge
held by architecture - for instance the question of the use
of nativism as an aesthetics in settlement architecture.
In HL you describe the construction of dwellings that
sustain 'national narratives of belonging',4 with the
cladding of Israeli dwellings with '.Jerusalem Stone' and the
omnipresent red roofs. This indicates how strongly such
imaginary 'authenticity' can (at least for those who have
an investment in it) outweigh historical and geographical
fact, thus allowing an architectural cosmetics to speed along
the process of naturalising occupation. You emphasise the
4. HL, 26.
268
way in which, with the reducing thickness of the 'facing'

required, this became increasingly admission that this was
cosmetic signifier that bolstered the 'sacred identity' of
'Israeliness', retrospectively creating historical authentica
tion and a biblically-supported sense of permanence.5 - this
being one way in which political exigencies influenced and
promoted debates within Israeli architecture. Another aspect
of this which you discuss is the merging of archaeology into
architecture, with new buildings being supposedly only
renewed expressions of a rootedness in the earth, and thus
guaranteeing the discovery of a 'meaning of the earth'. 6
EW: In the latter case there is a kind of literalness in which

what is archaeologically preserved is extruded into a volume,
and that is very much to do with a directly Heideggerian
influence, or variations on Heideggerian theory, which
become apparent in architectural discourse throughout the
seventies and eighties; and if you think of it, it makes a lot
of sense. Dwelling replaces living . . . meaning is brought
back into the anonymous environments of modernism,
national causes of 'solutions' replace housing solutions.
Here a variation of this discourse comes to resolve the
embarrassing paradox of Zionism: In a sense, what could
be more unrooted than the early architecture of Zionism,
the white boxes, the international (often mistakenly called
Bauhaus) style, the kibbutz - whose construction on
ubiquitous pilotis seem to hover over the surface. So much
of the architecture of the colonies around Jerusalem is one
of the earliest playgrounds of postmodernism worldwide.
5. HL, 28-37.
6. HL, 4 1-5.
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COLLAPSE VI
Which is what brought to Palestine such luminaries as

Louis Kahn and Isaiah Berlin. But I don't know if now the
answer to that is a return to abstract modernism . . .
C : As we have discussed, you see the occupation developing

less as the carrying out of a top-down Zionist state project,
which would organise space according to a set of pre-given
principles, and more through a selective 'laissez-faire' policy,
exploiting the 'structural advantages' that chaos presents,
that has allowed a multiplicity of agencies - commercial,
religious, communicational, infrastructural, economic, pres
sure-group, legal, etc. - to produce a complex interaction,
enacted in part through the organization of space, that
tends to justify the processes of occupation.
Much of what you do in HL is to try to balance the
description of the Occupied Territories as a sort of 'political
plastic' which does not respond to a 'single source of power'
with simultaneously trying not to yield to the temptation
to vindicate this strategy of naturalisation. Can we detect
here an isomorphism with Capitalism, which, as we have
repeatedly seen, can hardly be combated through a head-on
refusal or attack on any set of hardwired ideological
principles, but employs and absorbs whatever is available,
through a similar sort of 'structured chaos', until it seems
there is no alternative to its 'second nature'?
EW: I would say yes - I think that, let's say, postmodern

capitalism and the postmodern occupation are close
relatives. We just need to historicise this : It is significant
that the occupation occurs in '67 - which Chris Marker
called 'the real '68' - a time of antistatism, political
270
complexification and fragmentation, and of the introduction

of new modes of technological and organisational networks .
That mode of capitalism and this mode of occupation are
both historical products, and being historical products,
are prone to transformation. There is no eternity in any
of them. There is a way in which the hysteria of the loss
of any ideological alternative articulated by political power
has led to this vision of capitalism as eternity - i.e. as
nature, outside of history. But I don't see how this idea may
survives five seconds of thinking.
C : Isn't the problem vis-a-vis capitalism rather how to

overcome its apparent natural status and the resignation that
it invites?
EW: 'Natural' is being outside history, in a way that came

from nowhere, goes nowhere, will remain the same. I think
that what we perceive now is a very distinct stage in the
history of articulated class, labour relations, trade relations,
that articulated this period in that way. There is no historical
necessity in that historical product; it is political practice
that can make it transform or do away with it.
C: Very well, but another aspect of this isomorphism might

be as follows : You have spoken of 1967-8 as a turning point
for an understanding of the occupation. How would the
shifts happening in this time tie together the emergence of
what we might broadly call 'postmodern' philosophy, and
the movements that you track in HL?
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EW: As I said, I agree with Chris Marker on one thing: that

'67 is the real '68 - he wasn't referring to the occupation,
of course, but it's true, one bleeds into the other, in all
sorts of military practices and architectural styles. Part of
the settlement project is initiated by Jewish communities
from the States that come with a strong tradition of civil
disobedience, of protest movements ; and they protest
against the state, they fight against this ossified labour-run
state, their ideal is to break the state apart, and they do it
with the zeal and some of the style of the sixties generation.
Sharon is a state agent who breaks the state - the frontier
man who despises state order and replaces it with action
that legislates in retrospect. Sharon appears as, and behaves
like, a 68er - with his raids, his kind of trip is going on
unauthorised attacks to the desert, shutting off communi
cation, killing, moving, swimming in the sea, you know,
whatever, killing hostages, he's in this wild violent orgy.
That's the violent face of the antistatism of the sixties and
seventies.
C: He inhabits 'smooth space' . . . !
EW: He's one of the embodiments of '68. So again, it's

not like a secondary manifestation of '68, like maybe '68
wouldn't have happened without this world . . . The other
project that exists is third-worldism, which is broken in
'67. So okay, I don't want to put Israel at the centre of
everything - yes, it's Prague, we saw the tanks coming, we
understood the Soviets weren't so good . . . but the other
project - tiemwndism, that is broken. So, you become NGOs,
you become Green, this or that. But this is a moment where
those histories are like engines moving each other.
272
You can't see that kind of face of capitalism as if it's the

'background' to the occupation, or the years of Israel of
very significant prosperity at the end of the sixties, which is
actually partly the motor of the transformation of the left.
I'm going back to what we said at the beginning : It's not
something on which it's registered, it's part of it, it's creating
that. What collapses in '67 is not the West Bank, that's a
minor story. Pan-arabism collapse with '67, and this is the
loss, Nasser goes - his project is dead, America enters the
Middle East and there is huge capitalization - an immediate
undoing of political relations in a way that creates a hugely
complex market. So again, it's not only what happened
in the West Bank - the whole Middle East transformed
in '67. Pan-arabism, the utopian social semi-communist
nationalism that Nasser invented, was replaced with
what only now becomes apparent as liberal pan-arabism,
on other kinds of networks. So in effect it's a moment of
cultural, economic, technological transformation, and we
absolutely have to see the occupation as happening in that
moment.
C : Further considering your 'forensic' approach, I wonder

whether we ought to try to distinguish it from something
like an imagined 'geo-psychoanalysis', aiming to excavate
the unconscious material forces at work behind symptoms
such as "'separation walls", "barriers", "blockades",
"closures", "road blocks", "checkpoints", "sterile areas",
"special security zones", "closed military areas" and "killing
zones"'.7 Chiefly because the latter might begin to sound
like a species of 'psychogeography'. And indeed you begin
Hollow Land with a quote from Patrick Keiller' s London,
7. HL, 6.
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a film dear to that group of writers that developed this

now-popular set of ideas and practices concerning the
relation of thought to place. However, the account given in
HL seems to tell in very important ways against the tenets
of this literary creed. Psychogeography often seems to
suggest that merely by reconceptualising the spaces around
us, by (in the words of your Keiller epigraph) 'revealing
the molecular basis of [ . . . ] events', we can effect some
sort of transformation - and to this extent is essentially a
form of magical thinking. But even if understanding the
past can help us to 'see into the future', no such kind of
interpretive magic is going to transform the circumstances
of the Palestinian people. "What is the key to preventing
psychogeographical insights from descending into a kind
of literary indulgence, and transforming the results of
research such as yours into pointers for concrete action in
the present?
EW: Yes, I think the book is written very much as a polemic

against this and Lefebvrian theory, which situationists and
psychogeographers refer to, and which really dominates
very much critical spatial and geographical discourse on
Palestine. For me, the really big problem with this type of
literature is that it perceives space as simultaneously too
soft and too hard. It is too hard in the sense that the built
realities - the work of planners and architects and builders
- is solid, fixed and unchangeable. It is too soft because
often it sees the possibility of agency existing in the mere
literal subversion of the existing, like a de Certeau kind of
walking-is-reading-is-writing . . .
So you have the domain of planners, those evil guys
who designed Paris top-down. Paris is always the conceptual
274
framework with which this discourse works, and in the

West Bank this makes no sense! A hard city, with planners
who make straight lines, Paris as a material/political reality
has dominated critical post structural discourse, but in
applying the spatial theory of Paris to a dynamic frontier
you miss its essence of interplay and a certain levelling
of agency that operates within it. You cannot solve the
problems of Paris on the hills of Palestine ! ... And then you
have the domain of subversion and resistance, where what
is left for our citizens to do is to reimagine, to exist in a
playful manner, to walk different paths, and so on. For me
this is too soft, and the perception of the planners is too
hard. What you do by melting them into each other, by
seeing a kind of continuity, an elastic space, you basically
put all action on the same level. This levelling is something
very important: The Palestinian resistant, the militant, the
Israeli planner, the human rights activist, the corporation
- the interaction between them is very multivalented, very
complex - call it a forcefield, but it is also an interactfrm that
produces and reproduces space, and for this you need the
constant presence of all these actors. Basically, you have to
imagine a different consistency of space: rather than space
that is paradoxically too hard and too soft - which can only
mean resistance that ends up soft and oppression that is
too hard - you need to imagine a common plane, gelatine
like, on which those forces are simultaneously existing and
interacting.
Of course, this raises another problem, which we
have to acknowledge, a political question: how to think
resistance when it becomes one of many formative
forces of the making of the spaces of the occupation,
playing in this arena and according to these parameters.
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Are oppositionary actions merely another formative force

in the making of the realities of the occupation, and if
so, how can we differentiate between this and effective,
meaningful resistance?
I will give you an example of weak oppositionary action
that ends up reproducing the spaces of occupation. Recently
I went to meet a representative of the Qyartet in Palestine.
You know, the U S decided it doesn't have enough power to
influence Israel, so they joined with the EU, the UN and
the Russians - they formed the Qyartet. These are four
powers that could destroy Earth four times over; and they
have put Tony Blair at the head of this joint organisation.
And this guy is Tony Blair's representative - he is based
in the American Colony Hotel of Jerusalem, has a entire
floor there. So he invited my partner and I, and we start
drawing up visions, and I talk and talk, and at some point
I realize that he is somewhere else - he's saying, this is all
good and fine but actually . . . listen, what we can do now is
to propose architectural plans to improve the checkpoints,
to make them more comfortable. This is what he wanted
to talk to us about.
C: The problem is posed exclusively m terms of

amelioration.
EW: Exactly, so where is the moment of transformation?

The other day the former Israeli Chief of Staff said something
really derogatory about Zionist leftwing organisations and
human rights groups, said they are traitors or something
similar, and the current Chief of Staff said no, without these
organisations there would be complete chaos ! Which we
276
can understand as meaning that the occupied areas would
be ungovernable; and that therefore these groups are also

part of the government of the occupation, these organisa-
tions are most important for the Israeli project . . . so at this
point you just send back your membership card . . . !
C : So once you've conceptualised these agencies as

interacting on the same plane, how can you define resistance
exa:pt as participation in the same game?
EW: If resistance is not complete withdrawal, if it is

articulated through some form of action, the question is
whether there is a mode of action that might contain the
possibility of a break rather than the constant elasticity
of material organisation and political evolutions. This
becomes a philosophical question which I can only attempt
tentatively to deal with. We must think of it in terms of the
question of the Lesser Evil, which is the subject of my new
book. 8 I here try to engage in philosophical and theological
concepts, but only insofar as they emerge spontaneously
from the problem of how this interaction on the same plane
can actually create a new plane, can lead to a transforma
tion, or a phase transition - that is, something beyond the

rules of the game that already exists.
C: The problem recalls the polarisation on the question of

the 'event' that we find between Badiou and Deleuze: Very
schematically, Badiou excludes the possibility of novelty
emerging from the actualised 'situation' or state of things,
8. II male mziwre (Rome: Edizioni Nottetempo, 2009) ; The Lesser Evil (London: Verso,
forthcoming 2010).
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COLLAPSE VI
since the event is precisely something that cannot be read

in any of the terms of the situation, and which is drawn
out through a suijective fidelity to a universal truth that
cannot but be seen as 'impossible' in those terms. Whereas
Deleuze seems to suggest that an effort made against our
spontaneous acceptance of the terms of representation or
actuality (the 'image of thought') , might enable one to read
the 'landscape' of virtuality itself, and prospect within the
infinite resource of the virtual for intense singular points or
'lines of flight' that can be actualised.
Of course, the charges which advocates of these
positions make against each other are respectively, that of
waiting, militating, for nothing less than a decisive miracle;
and that of resigning oneself to a piecemeal re-engineering,
re-formation, of the existing world.
EW: 1bis bears a lot on the problem; if one is limited to

either of these respective 'camps', it is rather clear where it
places me, as it seems to me that the necessary transforma
tive event could only emerge out of our political practice.
There is thus a double problem, one of waiting for the
arrival of a new political field, as the condition of a new life,
the other that everything one might do would be already in
the name of the occupation, because it is carried out under
the occupation, in its endlessness . So we need to wait, or to
pray, maybe a god can save us . . .
I guess one of the ways to complicate this further is
to think of the idea of political action in relation to the
end, which is embodied in the term that everybody uses,
that of the solution - the two-state 'solution', the one-state
'solution'. Yes, in fact, these days the politics of Palestine -
or the politics on Palestine - is indeed locked between two
278
positions - end versus endlessness - one demanding the

'end of occupation' and the other claiming that no end is
in sight and that there is a certain endlessness of conflict.
This latter point of view is not about what solution to take
- 'this one is good and this one is not good,' or the details of
a solution, but rather about the idea of whether or not a
solution is possible at all.
If a solution is not possible, this position goes, we
are trapped in an 'endless present', a historical process
without culmination. And without a solution we have to
be able constantly to manage the conflict. The question
then becomes that of finding means <f government and the
technology - much of it spatial technology - with which to
manage this 'endless present' . . .
But we should make it clear that the search for the end
was itself always part of the mechanism of the occupation.
Every form that the occupation has taken since 1967
has been presented as an attempt to end the occupation.
Perhaps the only constant thing about the occupation is
that there are always attempts to end it. The geography of
the occupation is thus physically shaped by the attempts
to end the occupation, or to put it differently, to give
shape - territorially, economically, and politically - to its
never-ending end. We are constantly on the brink of having
the occupation finished (another small push, another
initiative . . . ) and all actions on the ground (building
settlements/evacuating settlements in Gaza, building
outposts/removing the outposts, erecting the Wall/changing
the path of the Wall) are undertaken in relation to this
impending end ('why don't they let us end it?'). Each of the
specific constructs that HL unpacks could be understood in
relation to the concept of the politics of the (impending) end.
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When discussing the end and looking at the ground, we

tend to see yet another layer of physical apparati added to
the growing piles of destruction. The occupation is finally
nothing but its constant end . . . Therefore we need be
suspicious of anyone that runs under the slogan 'end the
occupation' - they must have yet another spatial apparatus
in mind.
So this is how I would approach your question:
It is by changing the frames of this 'end', this 'solution',
replacing its terms with others, that we can give rise to
another political reality and physical reality. And so, in the
context of the research office I co-direct with Sandi Hilal
and Alessandro Petti, what we have done is to replace that
word 'solution' with a slightly old-fashioned, very banal
word, but one we think is right: decolonizatWn. 9 Which in fact
refers to principles, to values, to a process rather than to
an end-state. Decolonization doesn't mean people need to
be moved from one place to another, but it rather means a
system of inequalities must be undone, and the rest follows.
The system in question is related to the land, to the law, to
the military, to anything that's structured by colonialism.
In Hollow Lund I presented Decoloni:a"ng Architecture as a
chapter that deals with a project for the Palestinian ministry.
Prior to the evacuation of the ground settlements in Gaza in
2005 I was part of a team speculating on different uses for
these colonies/suburbs when in Palestinian hands. Issues of
architecture were then at the centre of geopolitical debate,
with the main question being how to understand and reuse
the single family suburban home. The Americans saw its
subjectivation potential, with Condoleeza Rice suggesting
that its being inhabited as a suburban home by Palestinians
9. See the Decolun&.ing Architecture project, at http://www.decolonizing.ps/.
280
would befit an American agenda that seeks to civilize Gaza

by creating a broad-based middle class . In the end, the
Israelis opted for destruction, part of the reason being the
wish to deny an image of Palestinians living in homes ofjews
(demonstrating a certain reversal and thus reversibility of a
Zionist project otherwise typified by the opposite) . In 2007,
I joined together with Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal,
with a grant from the Hodenschild Foundation, to form
a new version of the project, this time on the West Bank.
We decided we did not want to work with the Palestinian
ministry, which since 2006 is no longer an elected body. So
we formed our own organization, which is independent,
and we have an office in a house in Beit Sahour, a little town
just east of Bethlehem, on the edge of the desert. Initially,
we had to change the way that architectural practice works
- we turned the office into a residency. There are many
volunteers : architects from Palestine, and internationals.
And we run it also as an seminar, with readings and lectures.
We hope that, and in some cases see how, our designs start
to help in setting the stakes : Politicians or NGOs are using
it to claim for land or to make a legal suit for various things .
Architecture can become a tool in the political process .
To explain the thinkin g behind this project, let's look
at 'decolonization', and the other concept that might start
to guide an egalitarian future in the context of Palestine:
'return' (of refugees) . Every 'return' of refugees from where
they have been expelled is already a return to the (over)
built, a displacement from the rural that will seek a return
to the urban; there is no longer a virgin landscape to return
to, or else the search for the original landscape will entail
horrific violence. Like 'decolonization', 'return' suggests a
relation of deactivation and reversal, a relation to the past
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COLLAPSE VI
and the future simultaneouly; but there is no return to

what has been lost, there is only a return to the built, and
this return has also an explosive potential to articulate
egalitarianism when one thinks about the transformation
of realities on the ground.
Therefore, by articulating our political action vis-a-vis
that kind of principle, the principle of equality between
Israelis and Palestinians across this area, I think this is a
much better frame than talking about this state, that state,
four states, or whatever. IBtimately that's not what is
important. And therefore we think that there are moments
of possibility in the present where one can start articulating
the idea of equality, seeking to open another trajectory. And
these are those moments of the real transformation of the
structure of the system itself. But one needs not wait for a
miracle to start acting. You show that a relatively small part
of the system - say a settlement - can be liberated, even as
part of a compromised political process in relation to the
politics of the present; when such a colony is unplugged
from the political forces that charge it - one may say that
it becomes a banal suburb . . . whereas right now such a
suburb or colony is charged with the people who live in it,
travel to it, come on the roads to it, the soldiers around it,
electronics, and so on. It had power - does the power that
exists in the architecture of colonial exclusion remain in it
like a residue, when it is unplugged? The problem is also
how to use it in a way that does not reproduce, that really
breaks, this relationship of power and form. So: articulated
differently, inhabited differently. Not in a kind of soft way
'let's imagine we're in a different world' - but 'how do you
build something else from it that is real?'.
282
1bis action could be accused of being part of the

contemporary politics of oppression, but the question is
whether there could be something in excess of this order;
what is this excess? What other trajectory is it possible to
open by refashioning the colonies, and why is it important?
We maintain that by operating with the term 'decoloniza
tion', by demonstrating the possible other life that could
exist within these moments of liberation, one might open
a way to operate in the present in relation to a future that
is much further away than the one-state/two-state thing. So
it's both immediate and very far.
C : So the spaces despoiled by power represent an

opportunity in so far as they become depotentiated in terms
of the existing politics, and operate within this new political
temporality. But does your speaking of 'excess' reflect a
kind of materialist principle of hope (immanent, and set
against both the hopelessness of the endless present and the
redemptive hope of a solution) : That (geographical, archi
tectural) matter is ultimately innocent, that matter, at some
level, can be decoupled from power? Isn't that a dangerous
assumption? Is matter ever possessed of that kind of divine
neutrality, beyond temporal political power?
EW: I like your suggestion of a materialist notion of hope.

The issue is of course about the residue that is left after
this unplugging. 1bis lingering residue is different in each
case, with each building and/or military base. The task is to
identify this power that remains, this charge, and to attempt
to reorient it.
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C : The occupation seems to have continually identified

geographical and topological contingencies, accentuating
amplifying and exploiting them through architectural
intervention. DA employs similar tactics, but in order to
defuse colonial power.
EW: Again, I think you can say that our aim throughout
the project is not to simply undo the power and techniques
of the occupation but to reorient them.
For instance, we have permission from the Mayor of
Beit Sahour to redesign a military base that was evacuated
two years ago. 1 0 It is a beautiful area overlooking the town
(obviously) and the desert - horrible but also beautiful.
It's like a big fortress where soldiers piled earth continuously
into ramparts until the top of the hill started looking like
the crater of a volcano. And in there, in this place, by some
I0. http://www.dccolonizing.ps/site/?page_id=2 l0
284
fluke of nature - you know migrating birds travel through

Palestine on the way from Siberia to Africa, because they
all travel through what is called the Syrian African crack;
it's a kind of navigation and migration route for them.
And every year they return to specific hilltops. 1bis is a
fantastic spectacle of nature, where for several weeks in fall
and spring you have tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of
birds circulating in swarms in the air, and somehow landing
on those points. One of them is this military base - the
Palestinians joke that the Israelis abandoned it because of
a kind of 'Hitchcock effect'! And in a sense our claim, the
legal issue that we participate in because we designed that
site, is not on behalf of people but on behalf of nature. We
almost want to say, human rights, its claims and its regime
is ridiculous here, it's too late, and anyway it's become
part of the language of the occupation itself. So we use
birds as the subject of rights in court, something that has
rather confused the Israeli authorities. But as you know,
this refers to the courts in mediaeval times where animals
were standing trial. Our articulation of the idea of return
here was a 'return to nature.'
C : An example of real naturalization . . . !
EW: Or rather, using nature politically ... We're claiming it

back for nature, and designing it simply to be abandoned
and used by birds. We design not for a construction but for
the controlled disintegration of the building, we accelerate
or intervene in the process of its disintegration: Decay as a
process of form-making in architecture.
My partner Alessandro Petti is a student and a friend of
Giorgio Agamben, and the later is sometimes involved in
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COLLAPSE VI
our discussions . He introduced his concept of 'profanation'

as a way of thinking the deactivation of the spatial apparatus
of exclusion. Sacralisation follows the spatial logic of the

separation of the sacred, when a system of exclusion simply
moves down from the order of the divine. If the sacred,
as a spatial practice, separates and secludes things out of
common use, profanation is the undoing of this process.

The dismantling of the power that exists. 'To profane'
signified a restoration of things to the common use. For
example, one of the main interventions was in the grounds
of the settlement P'sagot, where our intervention sought to

transform parts of this suburban colony into a nucleus of
public institutions.
We think that at present, our task as architects must
be that of transformation of the existing; and in relation
to the ground, it must be articulated in relation to the
question of ung;rounding, a form of construction that creates a
different gestalt, a different figure-ground relation, between
construction and the landscape.
The question of ungrounding is really that the ground is
a certain code, both at the operational and symbolic levels :
the code of the city - its operational logic and its ideology
is in the first fifteen centimetres. We are not concerned with
the changing of the buildings themselves . Architecture has
dealt successfully with the problem of this transformation -
we know since the sixties that every structure is adaptable
to any use - the question that remains, however, is that
of the surface itself. It is a 'thick surface' in which occurs
the designation of private and public, walk/drive/no walk,
the relation between figure and ground, between the object
and the surface on which it relies. So that is the challenge
architecture is facing. And this is where DA intervenes .
286
C : When you come to rebuild these first five centimeters,

what models do you rely on to avoid simply creating new
problems by unilaterally imposing a new 'plan' ? Which
agencies would be involved in the re-territorialisation?
EW: In some parts of the areas we deal with, the regrounding

is undertaken in a way that allows for multiple uses. We
called it - with situ studio in New York - a 'smart surface' -
a single ground surface area that could be used for driving,
walking, growing. 1bis is achieved by a variable density of
paving elements produced from rubble.
C: 1bis is interesting in relation to the philosophical

discourse on the search for grounds, the Kantian task of
properly grounding philosophy, followed by Nietzsche
and others' repudiation of this architectonic ambition.
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Reversing Kant's use of ground as a metaphor for philo

sophical security, could we could say that it is in fact, this
very concrete sense, the ground - the 'first five centimetres' -
that furnishes us with certain - political, social - certainties?
EW: Yes, .as I mentioned before, the city is not spatially

governed so much by its structures and buildings but rather
by the way it organises and divides the surface. This is
why is it essential to seek transformation not only in the
buildings but rather in the ground itself; ungrounding is
a certain 'liberation', we feel, from the prescribed order of
planning - at least part of it . . .
C : A key to the nature of the strategy of the occupation

is given in one of the epigraphs to HL, where Mourid
Barghouti speaks of 'the duality of intelligence and
stupidity'. This is a proposition with a double-sense, it
describes a double obfuscation: You note throughout HL
that the use of sophisticated theory has been a camouflage
acting to evade responsibility for what are, at base, brutal
and murderous processes - so that complexity provides
cover for stupidity; at the same time, a wilful strategic
stupidity and slowness in reacting has also proved useful for
allowing irreversible processes to become 'locked-in' which
then must be retrospectively recognised (naturalisation).
These things take place through very complex processes
but, as you show, these processes are quite amenable to
a theoretical analysis: so here again, the status of theory
is ambivalent - the insufficiency of thought is professed
at in order to resist a theoretical purchase on the complex
reality of the situation, but theory is used where convenient
to provide a sophisticated fas:ade for brutal actions on the
288
ground. Was the application of 'postmodern theory' by the

Israeli military ever more than an alibi?
EW: I don't think this question of theory is particular to

the military. The people who most often apply theory, at
least around me, are artists and architects. And I think
sometimes theory does open up new sensibilities, without
being translated literally. But theory, in the context of your
question, belongs to a shift in sensibility; and military
practice and theory produce, they go on producing - in
an oblique way, they move in relation to each other. Along
with the technological possibilities that were opening up,
and the organisational innovations, there were philosoph
ical innovations coming from other sources - early network
culture for example. So they find echoes in each other, one
language gives rise to a term that starts reorganising things
in another system, but usually according to the latter's
inner necessities and dynamics. So I think the answer is
not to say, this or that manoeuvre is 'rhizomatic' - and
that because military academies read about 'smooth space',
they started walking through walls - but rather that the
necessity to walk though walls , arriving out of military
developments, finds the language with which it can be
articulated, explained, and thus extended.
Incidentally, I thought I had found the first manuscript
about walking through walls in a nineteenth-century
military manual of counter-revolutionary practices, but a
colleague showed me recently that in Roman siege manuals,
this system already existed - In fact, it's a natural thing to
do if you're a solider and you're moving through the city.
But obviously, what I think happened in this case is, the
question was how you co-ordinate thousands of people that
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COLLAPSE VI
are walking through the solid bulk of the city. To do this

you need technology, not just theory; but to mogne that
possibility is a leap.
On the other hand, I write in HL that the language of
theory was not necessarily used against the Palestinians,
but was used in the internal conflicts of the military itself
- that some groups within the military created a language
that helped them to define a common interest group
within the military hierarchy, which then moved into a
prominent position, with its disciples being promoted and
gaining power; and then fell - just like in academia: It's an
organisation - an organisation that kills ; but with a similar
'sociology' to any other organisation.
C : Nevertheless, theory was used to sanitise, to bolster the

illusion of precision and sophistication.
EW: Of course. In a sense what is otherwise a brutal

act against indefensible people, part of the mechanism of
oppression, becomes a 'sexy', cool thing. But this is not all
that is at stake. I did not appreciate to what degree that article
would have an effect in Israel. The officer - Aviv Kokhavi
- who was talking about 'the room is your interpretation' 1 1
threatened to sue myself and the journal that was to publish
a translation of this chapter. He cited three alleged mistakes
in the article, he took on the biggest law firm in Israel -
the one the deals with libel issues for the Haaretz Daily
- that the military could afford him, asking that we remove
his name from the article. I really wanted to go to court,
because I would have liked to have 'interviewed' him again
1 1 .See HL, Chapter 7.
290
in this context, on issues - the events of that morning -

whose exposure might contribute to a better understanding
of the history of the occupation. So I wanted to go ahead,
but he finally backed off.
Now, his demand was that I take his name out, and the
editor of the journal - a very important journal in Israel,
Theory and Criticism - who wanted to publish the piece
suggested we might take the name out, and even that
it would be better for the critique if the name were not
mentioned. But here we realised something very important:
although there's an existing group of very good academics
and writers, a structural analysis, or a post-humanistic
attitude still prevails, where individuals and individual
responsibility don't matter, where names are not mentioned.
So that in fact you can say practically anything 'radical'
in academic organs without censorship, but the problem
starts when you marry a kind of investigatory journalism
with theory. You can find many theoretical writings on the
occupation that mention hardly any names ! My work, I
think, has these two machines in them, journalism and
theory, and I name names .
So this started a whole debate about how to write
theory into a political event, as a resistance. When one
writes into the event and when one investigates a particular
scenario, one must write about people that are still acting,
about a crime at the moment it is undertaken, exposing
and analysing simultaneously. In this sense, libel suits are
in fact the indication as to the effect that this writing is
having - nobody cares when you write against 'Zionism'
in general, but naming names and places and units and
actions intervenes within the system itself.
291
COLLAPSE VI
However, whereas newspapers, obviously, have the

means to defend against libel suits, academic journals do
not. So we must find new platforms and new ways of writing
or ways to secure the legal backing to allow us to write the
way that is necessary ; otherwise we'd always be put off by
the threat of libel. We need to change the way of writing
criticism into the event, and for that you need to combine a
certain journalistic forensics with theory ; to do it differently,
you need a different technology of writing opposition.
There needs to be an invention of a different way of doing
things. Who needs this journal, if they can't take the risk, if
they back down at any threat.
C : There's perhaps the illusion that theory can 'intervene'

without taking any of the risk that's involved.
EW: Yes, speaking to other academics we are rather

immune. We must face the risks, and this involves all sorts
of state retaliation and also of course the financial risk of
libel. At first, I was willing to go and represent myself, but
the journal said, we are also cited on the legal suit, so we
have a lot to lose. It's the journalism plus the theoretical
frame that did it, it was the journalism in the theory, and
this is what I think is important, that there is something that
moves the theory along with it, and it does two different
kinds of work simultaneously.
C : In order to be effective and transformative theory needs

to rethink the relation between the abstract and the singular
- actually-existing objects and people - it's not enough to
position 'theory' on a higher plane, leaving it to 'the reader'
to apply it themselves.
292
EW: Yes, it leaves open questions - critical work sometimes

tends to assume another convinced agency that will be
called to action, rather than taking the action itself.
C : You suggest that even if Israel/Palestine presents us

with 'a unique type of political space', 1 2 nevertheless
' [t]he architecture of lsraeli occupation could [ ...] be seen as
an accelerator and an acceleration of other global political
processes, a worst-case scenario of capitalist globalization
and its spatial fall-out'. 1 3 As you write: 'Exported globally
[ ...] Israeli practices and technologies have connected
the uniqueness of the conflict with worldwide predilec
tions to address security anxieties through "circulation
management" ' 1 4 Not forgetting, of course, that the situation
in Israel/Palestine has had a premier role in stimulating
the events at created this climate of fear in the first place.
Could you pick apart for us these two terms - accelerator
and acceleration: In what ways can the occupation be
read as an augury for our future, and in what ways has it
materially contributed to actually effecting and accelerating
that future?
EW: It's now an established dogma to say that Israel/

Palestine is a laboratory for weapons, technologies
of population control, software wars, and so on.
But the question is how does it proliferate: How is it that
we've seen bits that look like the Wall in Iraq - exactly
the same section - and similarly with checkpoints, etc.
12. HL, 15.
13. HL, 9-10.
14. HL, 1.54.
293
COLLAPSE VI
Does a company go out there and sell it? Not always, or not
exactly. Sometimes there is a direct transfer, a corporate or
military transfer. But most often, actors in distinct places all
draw from asinglepool ofimages thatexist through themedia.
Israel/Palestine is, in bytes per square metre or words
per square meter, one of the densest places in the world.
It has become a formation of the global consciousness . And
very often, security officers and resistance borrow through
mimicry - it's not necessarily that he was trained by an
Israeli, he just exists in the same culture of which those
images are part, and which they form. And then again there
are other institutional ecologies, in which various levels of
relations and ideas are exchanged; ecologies in which the
Israeli military is only one of the nodes .
Now what I realised recently, in the next piece that I
wrote, 'Legislative Attack', 1 5 is that the important laboratory
here is not necessarily the technological development
of weapons, how to kill , how to attack. There's a much
more important front where intervention is meaningful
and influential. And that is intervention on the level that
affects our perception ef what is tolemble, what is acceptable.
And I think from one conflict to another, we push it, it's an
elastic line. There is an elastic line that is constantly being
drawn with every action undertaken, the line between what
is and is not tolerable, what we will tolerate being done to
other people. The momentary state of (also elastic) Inter
national Law is a diagram of the tolerable in this context.
I feel that the Gaza attack is now redefining these limits.
And the question is really how Israeli attacks themselves
legislate laws in space. In a sense violence directed at a gray
area of the law shifts the elastic limits of the law, so violence
15. At http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/legislative-attack.
294
itself legislates. Given an undecided legal issue, if it can be

attacked with enough guns, you produce a precedent that
might shift the terms of the law. So the violence is directed
simultaneously against the Palestinians and against the law.
And I think that this is the most significant aspect of the
'laboratory'. People now can tolerate a situation where one
state puts barbed wire around a million and a half people
and counts the calories in food trucks as they enter and
exit, arguing about how many calories a Palestinian man
needs and therefore how much potatoes, rice, milk they
should let in - basing this on the very minimum that would
account for them staying alive. So this is the laboratory.
It's like the Milgram experiment, where they asked people
to send an electric shock - How much pain do you allow
yourself to inflict? How much will be still tolerable - not
by the victims, of course, but by others who are watching.
C: The law conceived as a drawing of the line gives way

to something more like the Wall; International Law can be
pushed and pulled by the same forces and events that shape
the Wall.
EW: Yes, it belongs to the same elasticity that is the

hallmark of this occupation.
C : And you take up this question of the 'tolerable' in The

Lesser Evil, where you discuss the transformation of political
questions into matters of accounting in which the justifi
cation offered for actions is not intrinsic, but appeals to
a 'calculus of harm' in which, a quantitative line having
been drawn as to what is 'unacceptable', anything one
295
COLLAPS E VI
notch below this (which you satirically symbolize with the

number '665', just one short of 666 . . . ) becomes, given
the supposed constraints of the situation, unquestioningly
accepted.
EW: In LE, I'm much more interested in the very

techniques of forensics itself. Here, the relationship between
space and law - what constitutes an evidence, how in the
last few years a transformation has occurred by which
evidence takes a central place, turning into what might be
called a material witness - will be unpacked through very
detailed and intense case studies. And all this around the
background discussion of the moderation of harm.
Addressing the notion and dilemmas of the Lesser Evil
emerges out of a set of problems encountered in HL. As we
discussed at the start of our conversation, HL developed
a distinct spatial imaginary in which, via the category of
elasticity, space is understood as a 'political plastic' - the
sum total of forces that operate on and within it - which
forces could thus, to some extent, be read by examining
it. But within these fields of conflicts, there grew another
powerful agency. Besides the military and other state
agencies, the wider field of contemporary conflicts includes
corporations, the media and, significantly, independent
organisations and humanitarian and human rights NGOs.
So the immediate question is: What is their role in the
production and maintenance of the spaces of colonisation
and their mechanisms of control? Furthermore, this was
a personal question, since my own work was produced
through interaction with various agents within this conflict,
including an (already rather cautious) engagement with the
human rights organization B'tselem. So a discussion about
296
the notion of the moderation of harm, through the culture

of human rights and humanitarianism, was in place. Some
theoretical propositions on this issue that were only outlined
in Hollow Land, and some relatively marginal characters in
the spatial drama it unpacked, have been expanded in LE.
These issues and characters have stepped forward to take
centre stage. It is as if the footnotes of a previous work have
climbed above the line, to make a new book.
This idiom of the Lesser Evil captures much that goes
beyond the issue of human rights and humanitarianism;
but for them the idiom functions as a sort of vernacular.
It seemed to me that, as a form of political expression, the
Lesser Evil has become so deeply naturalised in political
speech and culture that it seems to occupy the place
previously reserved for the term 'good'. The problem of
the Lesser Evil is famously concerned with a necessity for
a choice of action in situations where the available options
are or seem to be limited. The condition by which this choice
is articulated affirms an economic model embedded at the
heart of ethics - one according to which various form of
misfortune can be calculated as if they were mathematical
algorithms, evaluated, and acted upon. The problem of
the Lesser Evil presents a closed economy, in which one
cannot question the system that produces and distributed
its evils - it's a system that presents itself as one with no
outside. Under its aegis, politics appears as a mathematical
minimum problem: how to reduce to minimum the 'evils'
generated as the collateral effect of 'necessary' actions.
Of course, the problem of the Lesser Evil has its origin
in the classical philosophy of ethics and in early Christian
theology. In the latter the problem was articulated through
the concept of the 'tolerated sin'. But the question still casts
297
COLLAPSE VI
a long shadow on the politics of the present. Recently, it

has been continually invoked in the state's effort to govern
the economics of violence in the context of the 'War on
Terror', and in private organisations' attempt to manouevre
through the paradoxes and complicities of opposition action
and humanitarian aid.
C : How do these developments relate back to the spatial

and architectural concerns of HL?
EW: Within these fields, the politics and culture of the

Lesser Evil has engendered its own technologies. These
'technologies of lesser evil' are technologies with a distinct
spatial dimension, an 'architecture' - that is articulated in
the mobilisation and production of new types of spaces,
spatial apparatuses and means of spatial analysis.
C: And how has your methodology developed from HL

to LE?
EW: In LE I seek to investigate the politics, ideology and

culture of the Lesser Evil, both theoretically and empirically,
through micro-scale intense forensic probes of three contro
versies, each of which is also a spatial controversy. Each is
concerned with a specific spatial apparatus, technique, or a
set of spatial problems, where humanitarian and military
logics intersect; and each is narrated through a protagonist
(the relief camp as a media space in 'Arendt in Ethiopia',
the topographical model as an architectural/legal represen
tation through which a certain legal/spatial interaction takes
place in 'Best of all Possible Walls', and the question of the
298
forensics of rubble in 'Only The Criminal can Solve the

Crime') .
C : These 'protagonists' recall what you were saying about

the importance of the embeddedness of journalism within
theory, and the importance of 'naming names'. The use of
'protagonists' seems to take this a step further; the purchase
of theoretical concepts on the real is secured by their
demonstrable 'incorporation' into actual people.
EW: Yes, the new work takes the idea of embodied theory
further I hope : three controversies that are each a moment
of changing practices around the problems of the Lesser
Evil. Perhaps the most interesting one concerns Marc
Garlasco, who is Human Rights Watch's 'Expert on Battle
Damage Assessment' - their forensic analyst.
His work demonstrates a certain transformation of the
methodologies of Human Rights thinking: A shift from a
close reliance on survivors to material forensics, a shift from
empathy to science. As you know, empathy or testimony
were the main trademarks of HR work as this suited an
ideology that sought to position individual versus state.
What Garlasco does is to try and read a certain system
or order in the chaos of destruction. He is looking at ruins,
discussed their form, looking at ways of destruction; he
tries to differentiate between bulldozer destruction and
controlled blast by engineers, aerial attack, tank fire. He
says "I needed to paste together the battle story . . . to
recreate the chaos of 'battle' minute by minute ... .
"
Now, Garlasco mentioned to me, in full frankness, that

"when hiring me in 2003 [HRW] must have known that I
299
COLLAPSE VI
was already involved in the killing of about 250 civilians

in Iraq." Because before joining HRW as military analyst,
Garlasco worked for seven years at the Pentagon. During
the Iraq War in 2003 he became 'Chief of High-Value
Targeting', which essentially meant he was a military target
assassin - for instance, in charge of killing Saddam Hussein
and his leadership ! A central part of planning these missions
was to do with a calculus known as 'Collateral Damage
Estimate', which establishes the 'right balance of civilian
casualties in relations to the military value of a mission'.
"The magic number was thirty,'' Garlasco explained to me
when I met him . "That means that if the computer came
up with thirty anticipated civilians killed, the air-strike had
to go to Rumsfeld or Bush personally to sign off. Anything
less than thirty could simply go ahead." This estimation of
civilian deaths was done using software called Bug Sploi,
that synthesised environmental factors such as the size of
the building, its construction materials and techniques, the
percentage of steel and glass in its envelope, the population
density within and around it (varying according to the
time of day) , weather condition, and so on. These were
calculated against factors such as the size and type of the
bomb, its fuse and the direction of the attack. So, Garlasco
had to study architecture, structural-engineering, and
urbanism; the killings he planned were to be undertaken
in people's homes. If the aim is to use the minimum sized
bomb to achieve the required effect, designing a bombing
mission resembles a mathematical minimum problem. Such
calculations are part of the very logic of this weapon - a
weapon that hits and legitimises, a weapon that kills legally.
Garlasco stayed in the war although he didn't agree
with it: "Whether you agree with the aim of war or not it is
300
going to happen," he said, "so I wanted to do it in the best

way I could . . . I had a responsibility to the pilots and the
civilians." Responsibility towards the dvilians! "I didn't try to kill
civilians," he continues, "I focused on military targets and
tried my very best every day to minimise civilian casualties
- as required by the Geneva Convention." The question is,
of course: Minimised in relation to what? Reduced from
what number?
After Baghdad fell, Garlasco left the Pentagon to take
the job with HRW HRW was the organisation that sent
him to Iraq for the first time. He had previously only seen
the place on military screens . Garlasco's credibility as a
former Pentagon expert was used extensively in its press
releases and the media, where he was often referred to as
'former Pentagon officer'. And he has become the celebrity
HR analyst. He has also been an extremely effective one:
in Iraq, on torture, he helped McCain on the anti-torture
regulations ; he was in Lebanon during Israel's attack, in
Georgia during the Russian one, in Afghanistan again and
again; his work lead to UN to ratify the agreement on
cluster bomb ban.
Now, paradoxically or not, it was his military past that
gained him the visibility and credibility he enjoyed as a HR
analyst. The Washington Post called him 'the man on both
sides of the air war debate' and he was often asked about
'crossing the lines'. But did Garlasco really cross any lines? This
metaphor might be misleading. Although Garlasco's move
from the Pentagon to a human rights organisation was
understood by many according to the popular narrative
models of a 'redemption story' - like a St. Paul whose
sainthood is only as great as his sin - this misses the extent
to which, at present, humanitarians and militaries are
intertwined in their methods and aims .
301
COLLAPSE VI
Perhaps a better model to consider is the detective

genre: like Professor Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes or Dr.
Hannibal Lecter - the psychotic killer in whose mind lies
the clue to solving and stopping ruthless murders. A genre
in which a crime can only be solved by those that can think
like criminals, by those that have been criminals.
1bis was reflected also in his forensic works : the collapse
of buildings was the method by which he planned the assas
sination of the Iraqi leadership, and buildings rubble was
also the means by which he would reconstruct the story of
an attack for HRW. As he said to me, "my forensics is a
reverse engineering of the process of military destruction".
C: With this example of 'embodied theory' it seems we are

close to the state of affairs Deleuze described in suggesting
that a book of philosophy should be 'like a detective
story' (perhaps, in view of your forensic approach, CSL
Jerosalem.0 ; and that your protagonists are something
like the 'conceptual personae' who, he insisted, inhabit
the 'theatre of philosophy' and are necessary to the very
functioning of conceptual thought. Only in the theatre of
twenty-first century warfare, the dramatis personae are
real people who are the avatars of stranger conceptual
formations than could be invented by any philosopher, and
who reveal the sometimes grotesque structural assumptions
within which this warfare is carried out.
EW: But wait, there is more to the story . . . Finally, although

his work has really transformed the capabilities ofHRW, on
September 15 2009, the very same day of the release of the
Goldstone report, HRW announced Garlasco's suspension.
A few days earlier some pro-Israel blogs publicised that
302
Garlasco collected Nazi-era memorabilia, and accused him

of fetishism. Garlasco explained amongst other things that
his geeky fascination with militaria (his fetish) only substan
tiates the fact he is a good forensic analyst. And I think he
is right - that forensics is itself a kind of fetish - Fetish not
in a Marxist or psychoanalytical sense, but in the sense that
reading the event from an object always involves the excess
that is within the object. The personal story of Garlasco
stands behind the power of his forensics . . .
C: Finally, in the postscript to HL, you ask how

architecture as a professional practice can be expected to
'learn from' Israel/Palestine. Do you see any indications
that architecture, in general, is beginning to take its political
responsibility seriously - everywhere, not just in highly
heated zones such as Israel/Palestine?
EW: This is an architectural reference, of course - Leaming

ftom Las Ti?gas. So it's this moment of postmodernism where
architecture needs to break the disciplinary barriers and
learn from other things. But yes : I don't say it's because of
this book, but there is increased involvement of architects
in territorial-political issues, yes. I don't know if that's a
good thing yet . . .
C: If Las Vegas (as well as being the original location for

CSI) is the theme park of late capitalism, is Israel/Palestine
the darkside Las Vegas . . . ?
EW: Interesting, Maybe the light side ! The new Las

Vegas . . .
303
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COLLAPSE VI
A G iven Time I A G iven Place
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COLLAPSE VI
Introduction to SI MADology:
Po/emos in the 2 1 st Century
. . . afine enough mesh, at some epsilon, can catch anything . . .

Martin Libicki, The Mesh and the Net 1
War is not a theatre, you infidels . . .

Abdu-Salam Faraj , Jihad: The Absent Obligation 2
. . . Terror is not a means efimposing deci.sWri upon the enemy; it is the

decision we wish to impose upon him . . .
Brig. S . K. Malik, The O:!Jranic Concept ef War (1979) 3
INrnODUCTION
Clausewitz is accorded the honour of being the
pre-eminent theorist of war for, with him, the project of
theorising war was so comprehensively enframed that what
has since followed have been mere footnotes - the addition
of details - that only serve to fill in the gaps that Clause
witz's theory did not address. But this reification of the
paradigmatic Clausewitzian theory of war also carries with
it the implication that the regime of thought that guides
1. M. Libicki, The Mesh and the Net: Speculations an Anned Conflict in a Iimc ofFree Silicon
(Washington, D C : National Defence University) , 30-1.
2. A.-S. Faraj, Jihtul: The Absent Obligahan. Qyoted in Reza Negarcstani's 'The
Militarization of Peace: Absence of Terror or Terror of Absence?', COLLAPSE I, 53-
9 1 : 60.
3. Brig. S. K. Malik, The QyranU: Omapt <f War (Dehra Dun: Natraj Publishers, 1999) , 59.
323
COLLAPSE VI
our current theorisations on and of war is an archaic one.

It is archaic not because one can trace its genealogy to at
least the Age of Enlightenment, but because, in effect, its
evolution had already come to an end with Clausewitz'
pioneering theorisation of war.4 In more recent times, this
state of affairs has been reiterated in a positive light, with
the assertion that, while the character of war may change
over time, the principles of war are eternal.
Thus, when questions are posed such as : Are develop
ments in the emerging fields of Information and Commu
nication Technologies and the 'new sciences' rendering
the Clausewitzian regime of thought irrelevant? Are the
growing experiences in the emerging net-centric battlespace
rendering the Clausewitzian depictions of war and
combat unrecognisable? Has the so-called Global War on
Terror(ism) (GWOT) fractured, irreparably, the Clause
witzian paradigm of war?, more often than not, they are
dismissed without a second thought.5 The principal reason
for such a summary dismissal is that, for the most part,
they are regarded as fanciful speculations that not only run
against the grain of the study of war and its conduct, but
also against the fundamental principles that underwrite
our conceptualisation and understanding of Interna
tional Relations and of what it means 'to be political'.
But there is no avoiding the fact that such questions
4. See M. Guha, Re-Imagining War in the 21st Century: From Clausewitz to Network-centric
War (London: Routledge, forthcoming 2010) .
5. See, fo r example, C. Gray, Modern Strate (Oxford: OUP, 1999) and Another
Bloody Century: Future War (London: Wcidenfeld & Nicholson, 2005), who suggests
that nothing like this is likely to occur; C. Coker, Future ef War (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, 2004) and R. Leonard, Ftinciples ef War in the Informati.on Age (New York,
NY: Presido Press, 1998) , who implicitly and, at other times, explicitly question the
continuing relevance of the Clausewitzian paradigm.
324
Guha - SIMADology
are being asked and such doubts are being expressed.

These are indicative of the growing uneasiness in some
quarters that the integrity of the Clausewitzian theory
of war may be increasingly becoming suspect not simply
because the character of war has changed, but because,
increasingly, our understanding of war, indeed our very
imagination of war, is being shaken to its core, and is falling
short of our experiences of war.6
Our cue for this essay is taken from a recent assertion
made in the context of 'surprise and terrorism', which
states that ' [s]urprise is only one tactical principle of
the terrorist operation but it is nonetheless an essential
one. Without it, terrorism would not only be foolishly
impractical as a method, but virtually inconceivable as
a strategy'. 7 This is an example of how the insistence on
employing the well-worn analytical framework of the
Clausewitzian martial architectonic to enframe the so-called
'problem of terrorism' leads to a tragic misreading of the
emerging turbulent martial landscape. Our central concern
in this essay is with the revitalised, and in many ways
' (re)new (ed) ', emergence of the 'terror-operation' which, to
put the matter plainly, has not only cast a corrosive shadow
over the Clausewitzian theory of war, but has also allowed
us a rare glimpse into a very strange and little-understood
battlespace. In keeping with this, given that the current
and emergent global security ecology is being increasingly
enframed within the context of the GWOT and/or in terms
of hyper-violent planetary-scale insurgencies, the Jm"naple
6. See, for example, Arquilla and Ronfeldt, In Athena 's Camp: Iteparing.for C(f/lflict in the
Informa.ti(f/l Age (Santa Monica: RAND, National Defence Research Institute, 1997) .
See also Leonard, Princip!.es of War in the Informa.ti(fll Age.
7. Morris, 'Surprise and Terror: A Conceptual Framework', in The Journal ofStrategi.c

Studies, Vol. 32, No. 1 , 1-27, February 2009, 6.
325
COLLAPSE VI
of operations that are invoked to address the problematic

of the 'terror-operation', particularly in the wake of the
events of 9/1 1 , is called into question. In this way, we draw
attention to how the regime of thought that governs the
understanding and imagination of war bequeathed to us by
Clausewitz - that of a collection of battles tethered within a
'political space' - may be seen to have reached its ideational
limit.
As an alternative, it is suggested that if we can indeed
continue to talk about war and its conduct in the twenty
first century, then perhaps the discussion should be recon
structed in tenns of a pol.enws - organised around four
protocols - which manifests itself as a violent and searing
rash of virally-proliferating clusters of intensive eruptions,
ruptures and lesions that irreparably wreck the dominant
spatio-temporal and ideational paradigms within which the
State's monopoly over the exercise of organised violence
has traditionally found its subjective affirmation. This
emergent condition, which necessitates a different regime
of thought when thinking 'war', we further argue, entails
thinking of - and in tenns of - alternate modes of martial
operabilities - pure tacticities - which are mechano-in
organic insinuations of terror, surprise and havoc which,
while seemingly event-specific, remain indifferent to, but
complicit with/in, the very medium in which they are
actuated. 8 The emergent embodiment of such insinuations
is the SIMAD - a Singularly Intensive Mobile Agencity
of Decay - whose primary counter-tactical principle of
operation is 'hypercamoufiage'.9 We will have occasion to
8. Thanks to Reza Negarestani for first suggesting the 'mechano-in-organic'

formulation (email exchange) .
9. For a detailed account of 'hypercamouflage' see Negarestani, 'Militarization of

Peace'. The acronym SIMAD appears in the work of the futurologist Jerome Glenn.
326
Guha - SIMADology
discuss the outlines of this counter-tactical principle and

the implications that its operationalisation has for our state
centric war-machines .
A s we will see, the encounter with the S I MAD takes
place in an intermezw - a counter-intuitive and unfamiliar
battlespace wherein the standard geo-political map is
contorted out of recognition by an always emergent geo
philosophical diagram which, by being radically open to
the attractive and densifying magneto-gravitational forces
of the Earth, does not adhere to Nietzsche's weightless
affirmation of 'being true to the Earth'. 10 Contrarily, such a
geo-philosophical diagram plunges headlong into the flows
and counter-flows of the earth's forces, thereby stretching
them to the edges of their conceptual envelope by 'sounding'
the depths of the Earth's surface on which fragile onto
political structures - geophysical and geopolitical edifices
- rest. In this sense, the emerging battlespace - the intemzezzo
where/in we make contact with the SIMAD - is a locale in
which an ungrounding of the Earth is in process and, as
such, is a vertiginous soft spot on the surface of the Earth.
In this battlespace, onto-privileges that sustain the traditional
geopolitical difference-engines 1 1 through the logic of their
presence corrode, decay and collapse, leading to terrifying
For Glenn, the acronym stands for Single Individual Massively Destructive. See
J. C. Glenn and T. Gordon, 2007: The Staie q{the Future (NY: World Federation of
UN Associations, 2007) , 80.
10. lntennezw means an 'in-between'. In music, particularly in operatic music, it is a

'filler' that fills the space between two acts. In chess, 'intermezzo' is better knoVVI1 by
the German word, 'zwischenzug', which is translated as an 'intermediate n1ovc' that
a player makes in lieu of an expected move, after playing which the expected move is
made. This generally results in disorienting the opponent, and is geared to create the
conditions for dominating the board.
1 1 . State Actors, Non-State Actions, Actor-Networks, friends, enemies, allies and

levels of analysis are illustrative examples of what I refer to as 'traditional geopolitical
difference-engines'.
327
COLLAPSE VI
'envoidings' that fracture, weaken, and tum into sludge the

material consistency of the conventional battlespace.
Of course, the 'canon' of military thought asserts that
there exists an inextricable relation between thinking (stra
tegically qn war) and the earth (or alternatively, the coding
of territory) ; this is a central, indeed defining, feature of
the Clausewitzian theory of war, say, since the seventeenth
century. We will see how the SIMAD distorts, twists
and undoes this specific relation between thinking and
earth/coding in geo-logical terms . In such cases, even the
Deleuze-Guattarian 'nomadic war-machine' fails to gain
traction. 'Territory' and the earth become 'slime', which
defies the efforts of the post-modem military - a rabidly
becoming-out-of-control war-machine that was originally
captured and re-deployed as a pliable instrument of the
State - to cast its striating and strategising net-centric grids
in a bid to establish an era of 'terrifying peace'. This calls
for a different way to think about war, thereby signalling
the advent of the SIMAD's po!.emos.
I. FRACTURED FRAMEWORKS/ DISTORTED ANALYSES

lNsmEIOVTsIDE THE Cu usEWrf<JAN LEcAcr
When Clausewitz wrote his magrmm opus, he openly
registered his desire to write a treatise on war that would
serve a dual purpose. Firstly, he wanted to establish a
theoretical ground for the study and analysis of war which
would 'not be forgotten after two or three years, and that
possibly might be picked up more than once by those who
are interested in the subject' ; 12 and secondly, he wanted to
'bring about a revolution in the theory of war'. 13 It is worth
12. Clausewitz, On War, Ed. & Trans. M. Howard and P. Paret (Princeton, NJ. ;
Princeton University Press, 1 984) , 58, 63.
13. Ibid., 70.

328
Guha - SIMADology
noting that on both these counts Clausewitz was largely

successful. But the import of Clausewitz's efforts, while long
recognised and much appreciated, remains undervalued.
This is principally because we fail fully to appreciate what
the Clausewitzian theory of war aims to defend and instead
focus on that which it tries to explicaie. In other words, to
fully register the import of Clausewitz's theoretical efforts,
it is necessary to recognise that Clausewitz, quite early
in his theoretical exercise, was fully cognisant with the
disjunction of thought when considered in the context of
war, which he identified as 'chaos on the battlefield'. It is
for this reason that we are led to suggest that Clausewitz's
principal theoretical and philosophical effort to create and
sustain a 'theory of war' was a defensive gesture against
this state of affairs . To appreciate this, however, we need to
re-visit the Clausewitzian category of Absolute War.
As is well known, Clausewitz discussed war in two
guises - Absolute and Real War. Early in On War, he
presented the 'essence of war [ . . . ] as an eruption of force
and violence', 14 which he understood as 'true war, or
olJsolute wat'. 15 For Clausewitz, this 'true war, or absolute
war' was nothing but 'a struggle for life and death -
a struggle, that is , in which at least one of the parties is
determined to gain a decision.' 1 6 The implicit annihilation
that awaited the participants of Absolute War - abiding by
its logic of strikes and counter-strikes - was a fact that was
not underestimated by Clausewitz. Indeed, he frequently
cited the example of the campaigns of Napoleon as being
14. A. Gat, A History '![Military Thought - From the F.nlight.enmeni to the Cold War (Oxford,
UK: Oxford University Press, 200 1 ) , 225.
15. Clausewitz, On War, 488-9.
16. Ibid., 488.
329
COLLAPSE VI
a proximal condition of Absolute War in Real terms . In

other words, for Clausewitz, Absolute War - presuming
no external influence - was the maximum effort, applied
repeatedly, at a decisive point, for a decisive decision, with a
single logical ol?Ject: Absolute defeat of an enemy. This 'logic',
was in Clausewitz's words , war's ' . . . naiural teruknq [ . . . ]
in its philosophical and strict logical sense alone and does not refer
to the tendendes ef theforces [ . . . ] including [ . . . ] the morale and
emotions ef the combatants.'17 Clausewitz further asserted that
this logic remained true regardless of whether war was
a duel between two contestants, or a hostile engagement
between coalitions of nations. Based on the above, it could
then be said that Absolute War displays two characteristics :
(1) by virtue of being, at the least, co-constituted by 'blind
natural force', it is , to some measure, independent of the
political because as a pure expression of blind natural force,
the 'succession of blows and counter-blows' need have no
basis in the political. (2) When this blind natural force does
manifest itself within the political, it can potentially 'usurp
the place of policy the moment policy had brought it into
being; it would then drive policy out of office and rule by the
laws efits own naiure.'18
Thus , we find Clausewitz insisting that 'in the field
of abstract thought [ . . . ] it [i.e., war] reaches the extreme,
for here it is dealing with an extreme : a clash efforces ftee!y
operating and obedient to no law but their own [ . . . ] an alJrWst invisible
sequence ef logical subtleties.'19 Clausewitz absolutely insists
17. Ibid., 89 (All emphasis mine) Note that Clausewitz. elsewhere in On T#zr. insists
that 'war has no logic, it only has a grammar'. This is, to say the least, a most curious
statement for Clausewitz is claiming that a 'grammar' is bereft of logic.
18. Ibid., 87 (My emphasis).
19. Ibid., 78 (My emphasis) .
330
Guha - SIMADology
that this 'logic' of war that determines the 'succession of

blows and counter-blows' is not simply an in-human logic,
but also a non-human one. It is equally critical that we
recognise Clausewitz's subtle but simultaneous assignment
of two versions of Absolute War - as the 'logic of war'
independent of the political and as 'the logic of war' at the
disposal/service of the political. But Clausewitz's initial
assessment of the dangers posed by Absolute War 'in the
field of abstract thought' - that is, regardless of whether
or not it is subject to the political - remained unchanged.
He contended that the logic of war, in the Absolute sense
- devoid of emotion, morale and feelings - was marked
by its desire for the annihilation or absolute defeat of the
enemy and thus was dangerous and destructive.20 Indeed,
he also added the corollary that in its 'true' state, this
logic - even when manifested within the political - was
equally (and more to the point, materially) destructive
and, therefore, dangerous - as, Clausewitz claimed, it was
in the hands of Napoleon.2 1 Thus, it is not surprising to
find Clausewitz insisting that any theory of war must make
room for Absolute War. Indeed, according to Clausewitz,
Absolute War must be the principle that is invoked to 'form
a general point of reference, so that he who wants to learn
from theory becomes accustomed to keeping that in view
constantly, to measuring all his hopes and fears by it, and to
approximating it when he can or when he must.'22
Clausewitz' recogrnt1on of Absolute War as a
non-human/inhuman condition also brought in its wake
20. Nb. Clausewitz, as this study suggests, implies a non-humau conception of the
'logic of war'. In this sense, it is outside the framework of Reason. But, as we will see,
this is also strictly not the case.
2 1 . Clausewitz, On WaT, 529-30.
22. Ibid., 5 8 1 (Emphasis in original) .
33 1
COLLAPSE VI
the discomforting knowledge that, in war, the strategic

ensemble that thought or thinking forms breaks down
into fragments, thereby shattering the logic of sense and
sensibility that lends consistency to thinking as a strategic
act. Hence the fact - in Field Marshall Moltke' s words - that
'no plan survives contact'. This was obvious to Clausewitz
as he sifted through history, both ancient and contempo
rary to him. In other words, Clausewitz realised that while
the Realness of Absolute War could not be wished away,
Real War was merely a partial manifestation of Absolute
War within a geopolitical space, and always prone to
morph into Absolute War, especially when in the hands
of a 'genius'. Not only did this realisation prove sobering
for Clausewitz's theoretical ambitions, it also posed a
fundamental problem of ontological proportions : If, as
Clausewitz discovered, war is essentially violent, chaotic,
an instance where the logic of Reason potentially comes
to a standstill, and which is only marginally subject to
the space of the political as an instrument, then it remains
essentially outside the field of circumscription laid down
by Reason. It is at this point that Clausewitz displays his
Kantian roots and opts to strategise war itself - a martial
version of the Kantian manoeuvre to strategise Reason.
To this end, Clausewitz presented Absolute War as a tran
scendental category grounded, not only on three critical
a prioris - blind passion, hatred, and being amenable to
control by Reason in the form of the State - but also on one
categorical imperative : '{a}ct only {lCCordi.ng to that maxm whereby
you can at the same time will that it shou!d become a universal law.' 23
These allowed Clausewitz to develop an innovative theory
of war which, while remaining true to the surface of the
23. I. Kant, Grounding/or the Metaphysics efMorals [1785], 3rd ed., trans.]. W. Ellington,
(London: Hackett, 1 993) , 30.
332
Guha - S IMADology
earth (for Clausewitzian war does play itself out on the

surface of the earth) , remained outside the specificity of any
geospatial territory.
Thus, by positing an ex-terra space inhabited by universal
laws , Clausewitz made the operative concept of war, while
terrestrially linked, extra-terrestrial. In this way, he was
able to strategise the phenomenon of war using universal
laws that, while grounded in the concept of Absolute War,
prioritised the historical and real-time experience of Real War
- that is to say, war as experienced by privileged ontological
objects like the human, the state, the citizen, and the subject.
But Clausewitz remained aware of the potency of Absolute
War and cautioned his readers that Absolute War was the
'absolute' and 'real' referent when thinking about war, and
that Real War was a fragile construct easily disturbed by
the intensity of Absolute War. Thus, for Clausewitz, the
key strategic question was : How to keep the disturbances
caused by the intensity of Absolute War at bay? Clausewitz's
little-mentioned ontological question, of course, remained:
How to think when thinking is chaotic at its core?
Following Clausewitz's lead, we have, particularly since
the seventeenth century, studied war and its conduct as a
command and control problem - both at the geo-politico
strategic level and at the operational and tactical levels .
The ground on which these levels stand is the earth, or
more precisely, the surface crust of the Earth - the base
geophysical material on which Real War is actualised and
experienced. Thus , while the uneven surface of the earth
may throw up from time to time shadows that interrupt,
subvert and dislocate the transcendental logic of Clausewitz's
theory of war, the rationally-designed, technologically
enhanced and constantly transforming command and
333
COLLAPSE VI
control assemblages that confront such chaoplexic

conditions are - especially in the Information Age - well
equipped to penetrate these shadows and hidden spaces
and bring 'war to Reason'. Thus , we find that in the context
of the emerging theories and doctrines of Network-centric
Warfare (NCW) (and their attendant technical modes of
being martial) and of the GWOT, especially in the post
9/1 1 timeframe, we still tend to explain the experience of
Real War (unexpected 'terror-attacks' as signatures of plan
etary-scale insurgencies) in command and control terms.
In other words , the most recent 'revolution in military
affairs' - which, arguably, is increasingly transforming
how combat operations are conceptualised and executed
- while introducing us to the haptically-diverse experience
of war, nevertheless, has not abandoned its Clausewitzian
roots, which lie not on or in the Earth but at some distance
from it, but which effectively dominate the surface-area
of the earth without accessing its depths. This is most
evident when we consider how terror-operations (as the
emerging signature of war) are conceptually enframed by
mainstream military theorists and strategy thinkers in the
twenty-first century.
TERROR-OPERATIONS THROUGH A CLA USEWITZIAN LENS

In a recent essay, 'Surprise and Terrorism:
A Conceptual Framework', Morris advises us that ' [i] n
the domain of war, adversaries have sought to capitalise
on the enemy's surprise and fear since time immemorial.'24
He further suggests that the element of 'surprise', which
he distinguishes from the 'strategic and tactical surprise'
that occupies so central a position in State-centric models
24. Morris, 'Surprise and Terror', 2.
334
Guha - SIMADology
------------ --- -------
of war, is the critical tactical enabler of terrorist operations

which, when coupled with 'fear', occupies a 'central place
in the tactical and strategic repertoire of the terrorist.'25
Further, Morris asserts, 'terrorists use the gun and the bomb
as delivery systems for the real coercive instruments in their
arsenal: surprise and shock. Used in this way, surprise itself
becomes a potent weapon.' Thus , he claims that:
[i]t[surprise] has enabled relatively small groups of sub-state
actors to compel entire governments to action and ultimately
change the course of history. Whether terrorists have been
strategically successful in this regard is debatable, especially if
we define success narrowly as the full realisation of professed
political aims. However, their ability to alter the landscape of
our security environment and change the way people think
and behave is undeniable. 2 6
While one cannot fault the operative logic that drives
these observations, it is, however, obvious that Morris's
effort is geared to render the act of the 'terrorist' into terms
that would be recognisable, and ultimately combatable, by
State-centric forces . But this is a counterproductive gesture
for, while in the first instance it restricts us to thinking about
war and 'acts of terror' within the dominant Clausewitzian
framework, ultimately it only serves to distract us from the
potency and essential indifference of the forces embodied in
the 'terrorist'. Before we proceed to direct our attention to
these anomalous 'terroristic' forces and the means by which
they establish their counter-flows, it is necessary carefully
to extract the finer implications of Morris's suggestions .
Not only will this help us to establish the limits of the martial
imagination within which, we suggest, Morris and much of
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
335
COLLAPSE VI
the strategy and policy-making community is being held

captive; it will also help set the stage to discuss the key
elements of what we contend is the emergent condition of
the SIMAD's pokmos.
What is immediately evident from Morris's analysis is
that, though he professes to lay a great deal of importance
on the element of surprise and valorises it - albeit for
analytical purposes - to the point of asserting its central
importance as a key weapon of choice in the terrorist's
arsenal, he also remains curiously ambivalent about the
sustainability of this 'weapon'. This should not be surprising
because the regime of thought from within which Morris
discusses 'surprise as a weapon' is constrained to consider
'surprise' as a singular instantiation of a 'terrible', or more
prosaically, of a 'dramatic' Event, which is engineered to
create a temporary condition of strategic, operational
and tactical asymmetry between opposing forces thereby
conferring the advantage of an operational initiative on the
side that 'creates' the element of surprise. In other words,
surprise, which is a function of 'time' or, more precisely,
of 'timing', is taken to be an extremely fluid and vicarious
element which, by definition, remains only transiently
viable as an instrument of war.
While in passing we note that this, curiously, applies as
much to the dynamics of the conventional battlefield as it
does to terroristic operations, 27 the major problem in the
27. Thus, for example, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union was a 'surprise' -
tactically and strategically - though as Morris suggests the 'strategic surprise' was
more a function of Stalin's unwillingness to consider intelligence inputs from various
sources - most famously from Richard Sorge - seriously. More pertinent is the
'tactical surprise' that the Wehrmacht achieved at various points (but not at every
point) along the invasion front. See, for example, Paul Carel!, Hitler Moves East (New
Delhi: Natraj Publishers, 2008) .
336
Guha - SIMADology
consideration of 'surprise' as a 'weapon' is that if we (here

following the thread of Morris's argument) are cognisant
with the unreliability - in terms of its sustainability - of
such an instrument, then surely those who launch and
conduct terror-operations would also be aware of such
a limitation of this 'key weapon'. And, if this is so, then
would it not make sense to ask if our (and, according to
Morris, the 'terrorist's') strategy of considering 'surprise'
as a weapon - in however transient a form - is indeed
valid? In other words, would the 'terrorist', who appreciates
(according to Morris) the key tactically-enabling properties
of surprise as a weapon - as much as we do - not be aware
of the implicit limitations of this 'weapon' ? Would not the
'terrorist' also recognise the 'use it an.d lose it' character
istic of 'surprise' as a tactical enabler? And if so, then why
would the 'terrorist' consider 'surprise' as a key weapon in
his or her arsenal in the first place? Thus, despite Morris's
exegesis, this assertion - that surprise is a critically coercive
weapon of terror - remains unconvincing. But this is not
because Morris's insight about the criticality of surprise is
flawed: indeed, as an insight into terror-operations in the
twenty-first century it is of great value. Yet the framework
within which he chooses (or is compelled) to discuss it
detracts from its merits.
While we should avoid falling into the conceptual
restrictions within which Morris's exegesis is trapped,
we should also not be too hasty to dismiss outright his
insight into the role and importance of 'surprise' in the
context of terror-operations, especially when referring
to the emergent martial landscape. Indeed, if we leave
aside the constricted conceptual space from within which
Morris conducts his discussion, his identification of the
337
COLLAPSE VI
element of 'surprise' should be applauded, for, among

other things, it allows us to highlight an alternative version
(and consequent implications) of 'surprise', whose vector
runs along a completely different path than that which Morris
places as a central feature of his 'conceptual framework'.
As we will see, there are other ways to think about
'surprise' in the context of terror-operations that - while
refusing to be subsumed under the notion of 'surprise'
that Morris draws on and which is grounded, for the most
part, within our traditional martial imagination - provide
a sustainable substrate from which the four protocols of
the SIMAD's polemos draw their materiality. As we shall
see, it is only when considered in this way that 'surprise'
truly becomes a lethal weapon, or more precisely, achieves
a lethal state of latent weaponization which not only is
sustainable, but also forms the kernel of a radically counter
tactical 'concept of operations' for the battlefields of the
twenty-first century.
Further, it also appears that Morris remains ambivalent
about how to define 'success' in the context of terror
operations . Predictably, Morris seeks to understand
'success' in state-centric terms, which leads him to offer, in
this instance, a 'narrow' understanding of the word in terms
of the realisation of professed political aims. Inexplicably,
however, Morris fails to consider seriously the epigraph
- that which opens both his essay and the present one -
taken from Brig. Malik' s rendition of the ()yranic Concept ef
War, which states that ' [t] error is not a means efimposing decision
upon the enemy; it is the decision we wish to impose upon him'.
It is precisely here not only that the weakness of Morris's
'conceptual framework' is exposed; but also that terror
operations - especially in the twenty-first century - pose
two insuperable challenges to the Clausewitzian paradigm
338
Guha - SIMADology
of thought under which Morris labours and which he

leaves unaccounted for.
First, the primacy given to the achievement of political
aims and objectives, which drives the teleological engine
of the Clausewitzian theoretical framework - the coordina
tion and deployment of a variety of (often state-mandated
violent) means towards the achievement of specific political
ends - is markedly absent, at least in what Malik has to say
about the Qyranic Concept of War. Of course, it may be
argued that 'terrorist' entities - Al Qaida being one of the
recent and foremost examples - have a number of identifi
able and specific geo-political objectives such as the ousting
of foreign (primarily American) troops from the land of
Mecca and Medina; the establishment of Sharia (possibly
on a global scale) ; the establishment of a Caliphate-mode
of Islamic governance; addressing of the Palestinian,
Kashmiri and other such-like questions - which resonate,
albeit tangentially, with state-centric geopolitical aims and
objectives .28 But the suggestion to take these overt 'political
announcements' as central defining features that render
and explain - particularly in terms of their operational
signatures - entities and agencies such as Al Qaida and
their more local and particularised affiliates, is not simply
misleading, but also dangerous. It is misleading because it is
grounded on the premise that the use of terror-operations
is the means by which such ends may be achieved.
In other words, among other things, the implicit suggestion
28. Kilcullen discusses these and other political considerations in his four models
of enframing the 2 lst Century Security environment - Globalisation Backlash,
Globalised Insurgency, Islamic Civil War, Asymmetric Warfare. The alleged political
goals of what is termed as Islamofascistic terrorism fall primarily within the first
three models. See D. Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerilla: Fighting Small TRzrs in the Midst of
a Big One (London: Hurst and Company, 2009) , 7-28.
339
COLLAPSE VI
is that once such goals and objectives are achieved, such

entities and agencies would (or may be expected to) call
a halt to their operations . Malik, of course, disabuses us
of such fantasies by clearly identifying the 'objective' of
terror-operations : ' [o]nce a condition ef terror inio the opponent's
heart is obtained, hardl,y (JJ1,ything is to be achieved '. From
this it should be evident that terror-operations, which
may either masquerade or be misconstrued as essentially
an extreme form of political action, are in reality, or nwre
precisely, in the reality efthe terror-operatives, outside the context
of the political. Thus, while overtly political objectives
may be identified and advertised in the context of terror
operations, the primal motive for such operations is not
held hostage by and to any kind of political framework.29
To us, operating from within a patently sub-political
Clausewitzian framework, such a posture is bound to seem
either incomprehensible or, at best, a lethal manifestation
of an irrational, 'other-worldly', anarcho-nihilistic, hyper
violent militant nwde ef operability which breaks the link
between 'cause' and 'effect', thereby defying any reason
and logic that we may be familiar with. In the face of such
a 'reality' our traditional acts of strategising deconstruct,
often violently.
Additionally, 'strategic thinking' of the kind indulged
in by Morris is also dangerous because to attempt to
construe (post) modern terror-operations as being politically
motivated (which, by extension, implies that they may be
addressed by conventional military means and/or by dialogue
or diplomacy) fosters the illusion that 'terror-operations'
are necessarily organised around an exploitative principle
which, given its shock-value, offers the greatest return at a
29. We can see one potent example of this in Faraj's text.
340
Guha - SIMADology
minimal cost. H we continue to think along these lines we

remain susceptible to believing that, when considered in
military terms, neutralising the element of surprise would
effectively stunt the proliferation of terror-operations,
which is effectively what Morris implicitly suggests. Thus,
our exegetical and analytical exercises - such as the one
authored by Morris - in remaining within the confines
of the Clausewitzian universe, tend to ignore the stark
warning that Malik issues to us - for, in that one sentence,
he disabuses us of our propensity to read terror-operations
from within the Clausewitzian regime of thought. It is not
surprising, therefore, as Negarestani points out, that Faraj
would thunder at us : ' war is twt a theatre, you in.fide& !
Secondly, we should not hesitate to recognise that
'surprise' in the context of the terror-operations of the
twenty-first century refuses to be separated either from
'terror' or from 'fear'. Morris implicitly avoids addressing
this when he suggests that the 'shock' element of a 'surprise'
is the prime generator of the conditions of 'terror' and
'fear', thereby drawing a distinction between 'surprise' as a
'means', and 'terror' and 'fear' as a transient stage, towards
the attainment of identifiable political ends .30 What Morris
seems to be suggesting is that 'surprise' is one of the key,
indeed indispensable, 'tactical enablers' that allows the
condition of 'terror' and 'fear' to be imposed on the enemy
for the purpose of some political gain. To support this,
Morris quotes from Abu Sa'd al-Amili's work, 'Learning
Lessons from the Raids on New York and Washington',
wherein the latter suggests that ' (t]he blow came as a
surprise to everyone. This is the essence of the Prophet's
wisdom and the soundest application of his advice:
30. Morris, 'Surprise and Terror', 5-10.
341
COLLAPSE VI
" l#ir is dea:ption".'31 Further, Morris quotes from Ayman

al-Zawahiri's text 'Knights under the Prophet's Banner',
wherein al-Zawahiri explains that ' [t]he targets as well as
the type and method of weapons used must be chosen
to have an impact on the structure of the enemy . . . '32
From examples like these, Morris draws the question
able conclusion that ' . . . the manner in which the enemy is
attacked is important in itself . . '. 33 Yet it is curious that
.
he does not recognise or acknowledge that by suggesting

this, he blurs the very distinction that he draws between
the 'strategic and tactical surprise' that is often effected on
the conventional battlefield and the element of 'surprise'
involved in the Al da attacks on 9/1 1 .
Morris's distinction between 'surprise on the battlefield'
and 'surprise' as employed by 'terror-operators' pivots
around the fact that on the conventional battlefield,
'surprise' is a means of throwing an enemy off balance,
whereas in the context of terrorist activities, it is a weapon
of choice, with which to conduct 'psychological warfare'.
But this distinction is at best dubious for if, as Clausewitz
noted, 'surprise' is ' . . . not only the means to the attainment
of numerical superiority; but it is also to be regarded as a
substantive prituipl.e i:n itself, on ClCcount efits moral effed [ . . . ] [and]
when it is successful in a high degree, confusion and broken
courage in the enemy's ranks are the consequences . . ',34 .
then the difference between the 'surprise' that Clausewitz

refers to and that engineered by Al Qaida on 9/1 1 is
3 1 . Ibid., 15. See also al-Amili, Abu Sa'd, 'Learning Lessons from the Raids on New
York and Washington', in Essays on the September 11th Razd (orig. pub. in Arabic by
Majallat al-Ansar, English trans. Provided by OSC, 2002) . My emphasis.
32. See Morris, 'Surprise and Terror', 16.
33. Ibid. Emphasis in original.
34. Clausewitz, On War, 269. My emphasis.
342
Guha - SIMADology
minimal or non-existent: Both point to the same object -

creating a debilitating psychological impact on the enemy.
Thus we could say that 'surprise' is as much of a 'tactical
enabler' for Clausewitz as it is for terror-operators like
Al Qaida. But if we say this, then we would be in danger of
misunderstanding not only the grounds from which terror
operations, particularly in the twenty-first century, operate,
but also the existential grounds or condition that they seek
to establish.
II. THE SIMAD's PoLEMos: A BRIEF OVERVIEW

Accounts that purport to depict the evolution of warfare
- from the seventeenth century onwards - generally do so
by identifying various 'generations' of warfare. Thus, the
First Generation was characterised by static or positional
warfare; the Second Generation, also known as 'firepower/
attrition warfare', was characterised by an hierarchical
command and control system wherein decision-making
was centralised and bureaucratised; the Third Generation,
known as 'manoeuvre warfare', was characterised by an
increasing de-centralisation of command and control -
the principle of Aefisragtaktik or 'mission command' is the
key defining feature of this 'generation' of warfare, which
was raised to an operational art-form in the Second World
War by the armoured formations of the Wehrmacht;
finally, the Fourth Generation of warfare is character
ised by an increasing and intense focus on the chaos
and complexity of the battlespace. In Fourth-Genera
tion Warfare, the operative 'concept of operations' is
organised around the exploitation of the 'fog of war'.
The most visible emergent manifestation of this is highlighted
in the theories of network-centric warfare (NCW) and in
343
COLLAPSE VI
the associated doctrines of 'swanning on the battlefield'.35

A more recent, and in many ways innovative, account
describes the evolution of warfare - within the same
timeframe - by organising itself around the metaphors of
the clock, the steam-engine, the computer and the network,
thereby speaking of the evolution of war as transiting
through the mechanistic, thermodynamic, cybernetic and
chaoplexic stages .36 Yet both these accounts remain firmly
within the circumscription of the political. In other words,
regardless of how descriptive and innovative these accounts
are with regard to the history of the evolution of warfare,
they do not deviate from the core Clausewitzian principle
which instrumentalises war as a tool of politics and a means
by which political objectives, in extreme circumstances,
may be achieved.
35. W. S. Lind, The FiJur GeneratUms ef Waif=, at http://lewrockwell.com/lind/

lind26.html. Accessed on July 23, 2009. Apparently, there is now some talk of a
Fifth Generation of Warfare that works around the following concepts : close
coupled systems, self-organisation, emergent properties (particularly 'intelligence'),
stigmergy, and the concept of complexity arising from simple processes. See J.
Robb, Brave New War: The Next Sto,gc ef 1rrorism and the End ef Globaliwii<m (John
Wiley: Hoboken, New Jersey, 2007) . Of course, the same problem that affiicts the
previous accounts of the evolution of war reappears here, albeit in different terms.
Regardless of how the 'solution' is framed, Robb's account remains enmeshed with
the classical Clausewitzian framework, which subordinates war to the political. It
seems that Robb's account is focused on the problems associated with 'globalisation'
and sources the 'threat' to global malcontents (mis)using the benefits of globalisation.
Thus he recommends the withdrawal of the nation-state from 'national security'
activities and letting private individuals and corporations take over that function.
Robb apparently does not see the paradox implicit in his recommendations - for
all that he is doing is to replace the nation-state system with a corporatism of sorts,
which would function in place of the nation-state. It is a classic case of replacing one
institution with another, albeit more flexible, institution.
36. See A. Bousquet, The &ientific Wtry ef Waifare: Order and Cluws on the Battlefields ef
Modernity (London: Hurst, 2009).
344
Guha - SIMADology
It is perhaps the allegiance to this foundational principle

of modem International Relations, indeed of the concept
of the political, which blinds Morris and other like-minded
analysts to the existential threat that the nation-state system
faces from the terror-operations that we are increasingly
becoming familiar with today. In other words, while terror
operations, as Morris suggests, do and have changed the
security environment in the twenty-first century, they
have also done much more. They have terminally infected
the fabric of the nation-state system and, in tum, are
compelling nation-states themselves to morph in strange
and unexpected ways . While such a change is underway,
it should be appreciated that the means by which this
change is taking place are not at all revolutionary. In fact,
terror-operations in the twenty-first century do not have
'revolution' as an objective, which is also what sets them
apart from the traditional and historical theorists and prac
titioners of anarcho-terrorism.37 Additionally, this change
is imperceptibly gradual and is not, as is commonly (mis)
understood, an intervention from an 'outside'. Rather, it
is a productive, indeed creative, albeit intensive, operation
whereby the very fabric of the modem Western industr
ialised and informationalised state and society (and that
of its clones outside the geo-territorial western world)
is gradually becoming un-done. As such, therefore, this
emergent battlespace is radically different from that which
is showcased by the Clausewitzian sub-political category
of Real War from which we have thus far derived the
analytical and operational principles and tools by which we
attempt to understand and contend with terror-operations .
37. Some of the more prominent practitioners were Frarn;ois-Claudius Ravachol,

Auguste Vaillant, Emile Henry, who, among others, were inspired by the
revolutionary and counter-revolutionary theories and doctrines of the Kropotkin/
Malatesta/Nechayev/Bakunin-inspired school of anarchism.
345
COLLAPSE VI
PRECURSOR 10 THE SIMAD: THE .NOMADIC WAR-MACHINE

In the context of mainstream International Relations,
'threats' to the nation-state are generally alleged to originate
from two distinct locales : (1) from outside the State, and (2)
from within it. From the 'outside', 'threats' to the nation
state are either posed by other nation-states or by non-State
actors, while in the latter case, the threats are local, that is
to say, they are systemic in origin. Yet to say that threats
to the nation-state originate from the 'outside' would be a
misnomer, for the perception and consequent contextuali
sation of the threat takes place from within the confines
of the nation-state, thereby establishing the originary limits
of the threat. This is reflected in the Clausewitzian consid
eration of war as an instrument of politics, which is also
how 'Absolute War' is brought to Reason. By contrast, the
original Deleuze-Guattarian formulation of the nomadic
war-machine, which they placed at a locale external to the
State, allows us to (re)consider war from a non-Clausewit
zian point of view. In other words , it allows us to engage
with war from a site outside the circumscription of the
nation-state and its transcendentally-generated geo-terri
torial map of materiality. In this exteriority, the Deleuze
Guattarian war-machine is 'irreducible to the State [ . . . ]
outside its sovereignty [ . . . ] prior to its law: it comes from
elsewhere.'38 As such, therefore, the Deleuze-Guattarian
war-machine is ' . . . of another species, of another nature,
of another origin'.39
The key to understanding the Deleuze-Guattarian
formulation of the war-machine is to understand its
38. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Nomadology: The Ttfzr Machim, tr. Brian Massumi
(New York: Semiotext(e) , 1986) , 2.
39. Ibid., 3.
346
Guha - SIMADology
'nomadic' nature while at the same time keeping in mind

that 'war' (political war) , for the nomadic war-machine, is
only of secondary importance. To draw our attention to
the 'exteriority' of the nomadic war-machine, Deleuze
Guattari insist that we pay close attention to the 'nomad',
who, they assert, has 'a territory'. In other words, we
are meant to recognise that the nomad traverses 'paths'
which are defined by points or nodes - watering holes,
dwelling points, and points of dispersal. These points and
nodes are mere transit points which are temporary locales
of assembly and dispersion for the nomad. The nomad,
unlike other sedentary or even migratory entities, is not
attracted permanently to such points or nodes . As Deleuze
Guattari put it, 'the life of a nomad is intermezzo'.40 In this
way, Deleuze-Guattari distinguish the nomad not only
from the sedentary, but also from the migrant: Unlike the
nomad, the migrant, who is also a 'mover', travels along
a path determined between two points . In the migrant's
case, however, the points determine the path and the points
are the telos of the movement that the migrant undertakes .
This is contra the nomad, whose movement is in itself the
telos, with the points or nodes being transient points of rest
and refreshment. The paradox that the nomad presents,
however, is that - according to Deleuze-Guattari - although
the defining nature of the nomad may seem to be movement,
as Toynbee points out, the nomad actually does not move.
Rather, Deleuze-Guattari say, the nomad occupies 'space'.41
Thus, in Deleuze-Guattari's words, 'the nomad is one who
does not depart, does not want to depart, who clings to
smooth space left by the receding forest, where the steppe
40. Ibid., 50.
41. lbid., 5 1 .
347
COLLAPSE VI
or the desert advance . . . '.42 In Toynbee's words, nomads

Hing ' . . . themselves upon the Steppe, not to escape beyond
its bounds but to make themselves at home on it.'43
Deleuze-Guattari's theorisation of the nomad and of
the nomadic war-machine is, of course, more complex and
extensive than the above may suggest. However, for our
purposes , it is only necessary to recognise that the Deleuze
Guattarian model of 'nomadology' brings into sharp relief
the functioning of nomadic war-machines and the nature of
their relationship with the nation-state and its instruments
of war. In summary, the diagram that they draw of this rela
tionship may be sketched out in the following way: (1) War
machines (which are nomadic assemblages) are external to
the State ; (2) Since the nomad, essentially, occupies 'space',
it is the State which intrudes into this 'space' of the nomad,
which is where and how the State comes into conflict with
the nomadic war-machine ; (3) Thus, under specific circum
stances, the State is able to 'capture' such war-machines
and internalise them. In other words, the State is able to
ins trumentalise these nomadic war-machines and use them
for its imperial purposes ; (4) As such, therefore, the State
is always predisposed to assume a pre-emptively offensive
stance to seek the 'unknown unknowns', for the latter pose
the greatest threat to the systemic health of the State ; (5)
However, in the process of doing so, the State also runs the
risk ofbeing enveloped by the war-machine, in which case the
State ends up being a mere assemblage of the war-machine.
In this form, the war-machine assumes global proportions
and is able to create a condition of terrifying peace;
42. lbid.
43. A Toynbee, A Study ef History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1 947) ,
Abridged by D.C. Somerville, 168.
348
Guha - SIMADology
(6) 1bis peace is a function of the constabulary role that the

global war-machine plays by integrating within itself what
were originally the policing and juridical functions of the
State into a panoptical device of control and discipline; (7)
The principal concern of such a worldwide war-machine
is to exercise systemic control of, among other things, the
State. In other words, the worldwide war-machine looks to
identify any sign or activity that may disturb the systemic
balance of the State/war-machine. In Bousquet's terms, the
worldwide war-machine seeks to contain, but also to sustain,
a chaoplexic condition that carefully calibrates the degree
of turbulence allowable within the system. In this way, the
worldwide war-machine is able to maintain the productive
health of the system by monitoring the productivity (and,
one could also add, the vitality) of the constituents of the
system. 1bis Deleuze-Guattarian model of the nomadic
war-machine which, when captured and re-deployed by
the State, assumes the terrifying model of a worldwide
war-machine that has run amok, is not merely a piece of
speculative theory. In the context of the emerging theories
and doctrines of network-centric warfare, their model of
the instrumentalised war-machine has taken on a very real
materiality. Thus, for example, we can find an uncanny
resemblance between the doctrine of battleswarms and the
Deleuze-Guattarian model of the worldwide war-machine,
both of which - at least in theory - are envisioned not
simply in global terms, but on a planetary scale.
In the context of twenty-first-century terror-operations,
therefore, if the terror-operator is assumed to be a 'nomadic
war-machine', then the State's counter-terror (and counter
insurgency) doctrines are signatures of the domestication
349
COLLAPSE VI
of the nomadic war-machine.44 Of course, there is a viable

case to be made that post-modern terror-operators like Al
Qaida are not nomadic war-machines. Yet, their operational
signatures lead us to suggest that, at the least, they simulate
the operational modes of nomadic war-machines. However,
this does not negate the State's ability to capture this
extra-State war, which it makes its own. Given this, the
following question arises : Is there 'a war' that remains outside
the ability of the State to make its own - thereby precluding
its ability to bring war to a 'reason' comprehensible by
the State?
SIMADowcr
Given that most discussions on terror-operations -
within the current geo-politico-philosophical regime of
thought with all its attendant anthropocentric socio-polit
ical and psychological biases - sink steadily into the morass
of an anthropocentric notion of 'terrorism', our intention,
as we clarified at the outset of this essay, was to explore
the possibility of an alternative regime of thought within
which we contend that the SIMAD's poknws is gradually
unfolding. But to do this, merely asserting the emergence
of this polemical condition is not enough. We cannot begin
to speak of the SIMAD's polemos without explicating the
vicious circle that binds the diachronic relationship between
44. One example of the State's capture of the war-machine and its redeployment
in the service of the State and its subsequent running amok is the U.S. support for
the Afghan Mujaheddin to fight the Soviet Occupation of Afghanistan. After the
defeat and withdrawal of the Soviets, these same Mujaheddin engineered a machinic
assemblage which turned upon their erstwhile benefactors and locked them into a
battle that rages on to this day. See M. Kakar, Afghanistan: The Soviet Invaswn and the
Aji;lum Response, 1979-1982 (London: Univ. of California Press, 1 997) . See also Steve
Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History ef the CIA, A.fi;hanistan, and Bin Laden,ftorn the Soviet
Invasirm to September 10, 2 001 (London: Penguin Press, 2004) .
350
Guha - SIMADology
the Terror-Operator, and its anterior/prospective actions,

which are only retrospectively recognisable as the Event
Terror. Thus, in the context of the SIMAD's po!emos, we
begin by positing nothing less than an absolute annihila
tion of any residual interstices that may have kept apart the
Terror-Operator and the Event-Terror - thereby collapsing
them into and onto each other. This, in tum, requires us
to direct our attention to an alternate martial space - let us
refer to this as a 'chthonic battlespace'.45
Engaging with the chthonic battlespace - which is
marked by a tension characterised by flows and counter
flows of forces of intensification and torsional disintensi
fication (envoiding)46 - is but the first step in articulating
an alternate regime of thought wherein the Clausewitzian
paradigm of War loses its subjective anchor and objective
reality. When considered in the context of the chthonic
battlespace, the Clausewitzian 'concept' of Absolute War
breaks free from its ideational limits (imposed on it by the
experience of Real War) and freely colludes with any and
all counter-resistant media to creatively produce a differen
tial calculus of itself, which infects and re-infects not only
the resisting medium, but all machinic assemblages that
(per)form with/in that medium, while at the same time -
with clinical and excessive precision - virally proliferating
itself, thereby creatively generating 'milieus of terror' far in
45. The word 'chthonic' is derived from the Greek x06VLO - chtlwnios, 'in, under, or
beneath the earth', and from xBwv - chthon 'earth'; pertaining to the Earth; earthy;
subterranean. Further, the Greek word khthon is one of several words for 'earth'
which, typically, refers to the 'interior of the soil', rather than 'the living surface' of
the land (as Gaia or Ge docs) ; or the 'land as territory' (as kh.ora [XWQa] does) . Our
use of the word 'chthonic' invokes the reference to the 'interior of the soil' that the
word kht!wn involves.
46. Thanks to Reza Negarestani who formulated this excellent phrase (email
exchange, July 18, 2009) .
351
COLLAPSE VI
excess of any geopolitical sources and levels of terror that

we may be familiar with. In this way, the SIMAD's polemos
assumes a chasmic47 pertinence, which is both endemic to
the regime of thought that generates it, and which is, more
terrifyingly, in excess of it.
In the context of this essay, therefore, the SIMAD's
polemos is an un-grounding that destabilises any and all
territorial limits, including those 'territories' inhabited by
the Deleuze-Guattarian 'nomad'. By positing this, we are
also suggesting that the SIMAD's polemos is 'the ripping of
the ultimate horizon of materiality which poses a posterior
disjunction to thought and enacts the anterior submission
of originary ontological difference to the non-belonging
47. In this context, the urge to use the word 'cosmos' or 'cosmic', was very
compelling. However, etymologically, it would have been impossible to support. In
Ancient Greek, the word 'kosmos' refers to an 'orderly arrangement' (cf. Homeric
'kosmeo', used of 'the act of marshaling troops') , with au importaut secondary sense
of 'ornament, decoration, dress'. Pythagoras is said to have been the first to apply
this word to 'the universe', perhaps originally meaning 'the starry firmament', but
later it was extended to the whole physical world, including the earth (see http://
www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=cosmos&searchmode=none) . In this essay,
the use of the word 'chasmic' is made keeping in mind the following: (1) It is a
derivative of 'chaos', which is itself derived from the Gk. khaos 'abyss, that which
gapes wide open, is vast aud empty,' from *khnwos, from PIE base *gheu-, *gh(e)
i- 'to gape' (cf. Gk khaino 'I yawn,' O.E. giniau, O.N. ginnunga-gap; (2) Hesiod
('Theogony') , describes 'khaos' as the primeval emptiness of the Universe, begetter
of Erebus aud Nyx ('Night') , which is much closer to what we intend to convey in
this essay, as opposed to, say, how Ovid (Metamorphoses) - who opposes Khaos to
Kosmos, 'the ordered Universe' - uses the word. Further, the Greek word 'tarakhe'
stauds for disorder, which may be posited as the opposite of the word 'kosmos'. We
have chosen to use the word 'chasmic' derived from Hesiod's use of the word 'khaos',
rather than from Ovid because (1) the latter's use of the word pits it directly against
'kosmos' aud thus may be considered to be closer to 'tarakhe' or 'disorder', aud (2)
when derived from Hesiod, the word conveys a more open-ended sense. Of course,
we also contend, contra Hesiod that chaos is not a signature of 'pure emptiness of the
Universe, rather that it is a 'force-plane' that is anterior to even matter, which is also
our provisional explanation of Hesiod's assertion regarding the 'primeval emptiness
of the Universe' as the begetter of Erebus aud Nyx. (see http://www.etymonline.com/
index. php?search=chaos) .
352
Guha - SIMADology
principle of the void!48 It is in this sense that the S IMAD's

pokmos is the signature of an ultimate dissolution of
materiality. Chasmic Terror, in the context of the S IMAD's
pokmos, then, is in the first instance the disjunction of
thought - for in such a theatre of dissolution, thought loses
its traction. Thought, in these conditions, is wrecked by
a torsional movement that not only contorts it beyond
recognition, but also, more importantly, first disinters and
then dissolves it, thereby bringing into sharp relief the
possibility of a chasmic immaterialisation with its attendant
annulment of all ontological privileges.
Given this, the SIMAD is therefore the point or locus
where this ripping of the ultimate horizon of materiality is
tangibly 'visible' ; for it is at that site and in that instant that
the curvature of a radically open-ended exteriority - the
chasmic - exhibits itself while simultaneously generating
an anomalous field or milieu wherein the vastness of the
chasmic non-belonging exteriority is expressed by means
of a distinct tellurian-originated difference. This expression
of tellurian difference is nothing but the signature of an
ill-fated, that is to say tragic, complicity of interiorised
tellurian energetico-structures - that produces, by means
of difference-engines, a spatio-temporal materiality - with
chasmic non-belonging exteriority. It is critical to note that
this complicity, though tellurian in origin, is absymally
virulent - indeed this is what makes the S IMAD and
its ensuing pokmos so hard to pin down, yet so very real.
The S IMAD is a passage, a traversing, an emergence,
an eruption, which involves - indeed, compels - a tragic
but essentially indifferent complicity between tellurian
structures and chasmic dissolutions, resulting in the
48. Reza Negarestani (email exchange,Jun 23, 2009) .
353
COLLAPSE VI
disintegration of all ontological privileges. It is for this

reason that even when we speak of 'acts of terrorism',
which are instances of tellurian 'terror-events', we cannot
do so without reference to breakage, dismemberment,
dissolution, incomprehension, stunning affectivity, and
ultimately, to death. But, lurking behind our tellurian
specific explanations, what we are actually referring to is this
breakdown and dissolution of patently tellurian ontological
privileges, caused by seemingly abrupt interventions and of
their scattering into the darkest recesses of a chasmic void
of non-belonging-ness.
The question that begs our attention at this point
concerns the implicit difference that emerges as a
consequence of our reference to the telluritm and chthonic.
Etymologically, the tellurian refers to surfaces that presume
a terra firma. It is a material surface, albeit without any
depth and, interestingly, it is the implicit plane on which,
it is theorised, advanced war machines, such as those
proposed by Deleuze-Guattari, express their so-called
rhizomatic martial tendencies. But it is important to note
that the mobile assembling and dis-assembling that the
Deleuze-Guattarian war machines revel in, while seemingly
liquid in their movements, are nevertheless restricted to
the 'matter' of the tellurian surface; for the 'firmd, in the
tellurian context, guarantees the ontological structural
integrity of 'matter', which blocks off access to 'depth', that
is to say, to the Abyss of non-belonging-ness, and which,
while being 'smooth', also retains the potential of 'striation'.
The chthonic, on the other hand, is the substrate of the
tellurian. It is a liquidly intensive and interiorised chasmic
force-plane, which is smooth, free-fl.owing and open-ended.
The chthonic plane is thus an interiorised chasmic
354
Guha - SIMADology
horizon - an 'inscape' of chasmic non-belonging-ness .

I n this sense, i t i s anterior to matter itself (and thus to all
ontological attributes that lend structural integrity) and
therefore precludes the possibility of any kind of striation.
On this plane, which is seething with unrestrained forces,
transitorial assemblages such as Deleuze-Guattarian war
machines are irrelevant. They gain no traction. They are
unable to maintain their integrity of assembly, however
fleetingly. Thus , the Deleuze-Guattarian concept of rhizomes,
presuming that it is a prelude to the formation of difference
engines, is effectively only possible on these chthonic planes,
for the latter allow for a free play not simply on surfaces,
but also in terms of a chasmic depth. Given this, therefore,
it can be said that tellurian surfaces and structures have
as their conditions of possibility the chthonic, but chthonic
planes remain without any such preconditions . Indeed, the
chthonic chasmic forces, while instrumental in creating
the conditions of possibility of matter (and the consequent
ontological privileges) , are also always-already dissolving
such conditions on the tellurian non-planar surface. In other
words, the chthonic chasmic forces are always subversive
forces which, while engendering differential engines that
populate the tellurian surfaces, also continually spike them.
Now, these terrifying chasmic interventions , which
in the tellurian context are akin to 'emptions', cannot be
plotted against and within a tellurian matrix, because
they are the unfolding of always-already interiorisations
of a chasmic exteriority that lurks as a substrate to the
tellurian surface and that takes place along and across
the continuum of tellurian space-time. Thus, to say that
the S IMAD 'intervenes' is not to suggest that it is an
invasion from an 'outside' ; rather, it is to suggest that the
355
COLLAPSE VI
rupture of the tellurian space-time continuum is akin to a

cross-sectional cut which, while slicing through the
non-planar tellurian surface of exteriority, nevertheless
envelopes the tellurian exterior, thereby interiorising it
within the chasmic exteriority. There is something very
excessive and disturbing about this, for the buckling and
contortion that takes place in this envelopment results in
a compression and an ultimate collapse of the tellurian
space-time continuum into a site and locale of immeasur
able density; while equally, and more importantly, it is
also a shattering and a scattering of all energetico-struc
tures beyond all tellurian confines. This is the site of the
SIMAD's battlespace - the martial intermezzo in which
strategy decomposes into pure tacticities and where
combat has less to do with destruction, and more to do
with the alchemy of decay. Thus, it becomes impossible
to capture - let alone domesticate - the SIMAD. It is only
possible to be complicit with/in it - but on the non-negoti
able condition that we also share its non-linear and cross
register movements, which spiral away chaotically beyond
any tellurian boundaries into a chasm of non-belonging
ness. The paradox is that while we are swept up and along
by this terrible intervention, equally, we cannot help but
contribute to it: in the process, we - as tellurian-specific
energetico-structures - become un-done!
When considered from the perspective of the tellurian
non-planar surface, the 'intervention' that we have just
described is indeed paradoxical: For it is inconceivable that
we are both the site wherein the affectivity of the SIMAD
is exhibited and a co-constitutive element of the SIMAD
itself. However, the paradox becomes, literally, immaterial
if we posit that what is played out on this chthonic surface
356
Guha - SIMADology
is the liquidity of the SIMAD's polenws on and in which

we are no longer discrete and resistant energetico-structures
negotiating the Hows of the molten surface of the chthonic
plane, fighting the insinuations of havoc that the SIMAD
brings with it. Rather, we are discontinuous ensembles
drawing our localised tactical consistencies from the very
medium that constitutes the chthonic planar surface. In
this way, while we are consumed by the SIMAD's polenws,
we co-constitute it as well. It also follows, then, that when
considered in the context of such chthonic planar surfaces,
there are no discrete interstices wherein the politics
normatively attributed to terrorism can be played out.
Of course, this does not mean that the politics of terror
are absent. They are certainly present, but only on the
tellurian non-planar site to which we, operating on and
within the liquid chthonic plane, are indifferent. But if this
is so, then how can we account for the difference between
the non-planar tellurian surface and the chthonic planar
substrate? Is there not a sharp and distinctive originary
difference between them?
To presume a difference between the tellurian and the
chthonic is to reinscribe the presence and uninterrupted
operation of a difference-engine which produces difference
qua matter in the first instance. We have already suggested
that such difference-engines only exist on the tellurian
surface, which provides them with enough traction to
be able to produce and proliferate difference qua matter.
But equally, chasmic interventions subvert the output of
these tellurian difference-engines (difference qua difference
and, by implication, difference qua matter) . Thus, while in
the tellurian context, matter is indestructible, or irreducible,
in the chthonic context, its (that is to say, matter/difference's)
357
COLLAPSE VI
production is always-already a signature of its dissolution.

As a pertinent aside, it is this force, on whose vector the
dissolution of matter/difference is contingent, that Ferenczi
indicates when he speaks of 'the complete dissolution of
connexions and a terrible vertigo' in the context of the
Ego.49
This vertigo, which is one of the signatures of an
asymmetric dismantling of difference-engines, is a
terrifying indicator of the SIMAD's passage involving
chthonically interiorised chasmic forces through and
beyond tellurian surfaces (and the implicit exposure of the
interiorised chasmic horizon of a non-belonging exteriority,
or that which we have referred to as the 'inscape' in the
chthonic context) carrying along with them shattered
tellurian energetico-structures (difference-engines) , which
rapidly decompose into ever receding fragments and
grains within the chasmic void of non-belonging-ness. As a
consequence, these interventions, by spiking the tellurian
specific difference-engines, bring about an ungrounding of
the non-planar tellurian surface while remaining faithful
to the creation of a 'new earth'. This is the passage of
the SIMAD.
Considered in this way, then, it is tempting to
understand the SIMAD as a very distinct and specific kind
of a difference-engine - one that, while traversing along
and across the tellurian surface, only plays the role of
dis-integrating it. In light of our discussion thus far, it would
appear that the SIMAD is a difference-engine engineered
and empowered by chthonically-interiorised chasmic forces
that arrive from unidentifiable locales of non-belonging
and transit through to other such locales of non-belonging.
49. S. Ferenczi, Final contributions to the problems and methods ef psychoanalysi.s [1930]
(London: Karnac Books, 1 994) , 222-3.
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Guha - SIMADology
This would also account for our inability positively and

effectively to enframe the SIMAD within a matrix of
comprehensibility and would confirm the essential indistin
guishability that we have previously attributed to it. If we
give in to this temptation, however, we would be grossly
misunderstanding the SIMAD.
The SIMAD is not a difference-engine, though it can
masquerade as one when in hypercamouflage mode.
Instead, the SIMAD is an intensive mechano-in-organic insznuation
(pre-shock and efier-shock) efthepassage efchasmicforces that riddles
any battlespace constructed on the tellurian suiface with 'hotspots ' -
sites or locales ef eruption and escape (Levz"nas would undoubtedly
refer to these as sites and znstarzces ef'excendence' ) .50 It is intensive
because, while on the tellurian surface, it appears as a pure
and transparent spatio-temporal dynamism originating
from within the enveloped void hidden within the surface
of the earth. It is mechano-zn-organic because, identified in the
tellurian context as a fleeting agenticity originating from a
locale of non-belonging-ness, it is primordially machinic
but also takes on a progressively solid and organic form
as its evolutionary cycle cuts through the tellurian surface.
It is an z"nsznuation because, on the tellurian surface, it leaves
nothing more than an aftershock as traces of its terrifying
passage. As such, therefore, the SIMAD brings into sharp
relief the post-vital, that is to say the post-Evental, status of
tellurian battlespaces.
Now, the theory of NCW which, when considered in its
abstract - albeit perversely grotesque - form closely approx
imates the Deleuze-Guattarian conception of a 'worldwide
war machine that has run amok', posits that the key to its
50. Acknowledgment to Reza Negarestani for the phrase 'mechanorganic insinuations

of sheer havoc', which I have slightly modified to read 'mechano-in-organic" (email
exchange,Jun 23, 2009) .
359
COLLAPSE VI
efficient operability is its ability to 'sense and respond'.

1bis it proposes to do by progressively collapsing the links
between the 'sensor' and the 'shooter'. The ideal condition,
implicit in the theory of battleswarms, is the meshing of the
'sensor' and the 'shooter', which allows for the prosecution
of what is termed Just-in-Trme {)TI) Warfare. Indeed,
it is precisely this lack of distance between the general's
map-table (screen) and the battle that, in the first instance,
allows Just-in-Trme War to be imagined. In other words,
the viability of the JIT concept of operations rests on the
ability to operate in Real Trme. But, as we have seen, when
played out on a tellurian surface, the map-table is a 'map'
that plots the Event-Terror '!:fter its instantiation - that is
to say, retrospectively. In other words, what is reflected
on the general's map-table is a trace (or alternatively, an
after-shock) of the Event-Terror - it is, in this sense, behind
Real Trme.
The strategic ensemble that the theory of NCW
assembles is the most recent - that is to say, a postmodern
- difference-engine that has emerged on the tellurian
surface. Little wonder, therefore, that some of the leading
theorists of NCW who lay a great deal of emphasis
on the theory and emerging doctrine of 'battleswarms '
would choose to understand the doctrine in terms of a
'seemingly amorphous, but [ . . . ] deliberately structured,
coordinated, strategic way to strike from all directions,
by means of a sustainable pulsing of force.'51 There are two
implicit assumptions underwriting this emergent 'concept
of operations' : Firstly, that battleswarms - comprised of
myriads of small, dispersed, networked and highly lethal
5 1 . Arquilla and Ronfeldt, Swarming and the FUture ef Caef/,ict, (Santa Monica:
RAND Corporation) , (PDF version available at http://rand.org/pubs/
documentedbriefings/2005/RAND_DB3 1 1 .pdf), vii ,
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Guha - SIMADology
mobile units - would disintegrate in battle; but also that they

should be able to speedily reform to co-constitute a fresh
battleswarm to deal with a 'new' threat. And, secondly, that
under ideal conditions, the 'seemingly amorphous , but delib
erately structured' form is held together by a 'sustainable
pulsing of force'. The latter assumption is an interesting one,
for it in tum presumes that these post-modem theorists of
war have not only recognised the high intensity and multi
varied forces that their technophilic battleswarms would
have to contend with - that which we have previously
identified as chthonically interiorised chasmic forces - but
also that, eventually, there would arise the possibility to
halt and effectively combat these 'unknown' forces .52 The
reference to the 'sustainable pulsing of force' is even more
interesting, as it points to the implicit difference-engine that
is operative within this net-centric 'concept of operations',
which is designed (or perhaps destined) to function as the
organising principle of battleswarms . This latter aspiration,
we should not fail to recognise, is in keeping with the
Clausewitzian tradition. Whereas Clausewitz attempted
to contend with chaos and uncertainty in the context of
war, and particularly on the battlefield, by instrumental
ising (or alternatively, strategising) the genius , chance and
uncertainty, and by theorising the very concept of war in a
very specific way, his post-modem disciples, it would seem,
are opting for a more technologically-grounded method to
achieve the same end. In the latter case, the only way this
can be achieved is if they somehow succeed in effectively
sealing off the tellurian surface from the terrifying chasmic

forces, which would entail a scenario that eerily echoes the
52. The most recent attempt to articulate this has been Bousquet's Tiu: Scientific W"1
ef War, wherein he used the term 'chaoplexic' to highlight the emerging model that
such efforts of containment would deploy.
361
COLLAPSE VI
Deleuze-Guattarian vision of a 'worldwide war machine,

which [ . . . ] refonns smooth space [and] [ . . . ] claims to
control, to surround the entire earth.'53
What remains unaccounted for by and in this
post-modern battlespace, which is possible to construct
only on tellurian surfaces and which maintains its ideal
objective in tenns of spanning the entire tellurian surface,
is the subversiveness of the chasmic forces - represented
by the SIMAD - that confront it. This subversion - the
dissolution of the materiality of the tellurian surface and of
all associated energetico-structures - then, is the counter
tactical 'concept of operations', which is fleetingly instan
tiated by and as the SIMAD. Recognising this, albeit
perhaps not in these specific tenns, the tellurian-specific
project of net-centric militarization attempts to 'humanise'
the SIMAD (as a 'terrorist' or a 'terror-operator') thereby
creating a distance (difference) between 'it' and the Event
Terror such that, to paraphrase Libicki, 'a fine enough mesh
can be cast to catch "it", or indeed, anything'. The failure
to do so, as is evident from our more recent experience

of war in the twenty-first century, is becoming increas
ingly terrifying and, as such, it heralds the polemological
condition that the SIMAD brings in its wake.
III. THE FouR PRorocoLS OF S IMADoLOGY

Based on the above, we are now in a position to
articulate a rudimentary set of protocols by which the
SIMAD operates :
53. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Tlwwand l'tateaus: Capitalism and &hiwphrenia,
Trans. Brian Massumi, (London: Continuum, 2003) , 42 1 .
362
Guha - SIMADology
First Protocol: The oiject ef the SIMAD's polemos lies not in the
perpetuaiion ef war, but in the instantiation ef a creaiive chemistry
ifdecay.
Under the Clausewitzian model, war - which has been
the exclusive preserve of the nation-state - has two critical
centres of gravity: a geo-spatial locale and a psycho-social
locale. Thus, Clausewitz was able to say that if either of
these two centres of gravity of an enemy is dislocated, it
is possible to impose our 'will' onto the enemy. Counter
intuitively and paradoxically, SIMADs work to sustain
and decay both the geo-spatial and psycho-social centres of
gravity of their targets of interest. Indeed, the continued
presence and maintenance of such centres of gravity is
critical for the SIMAD for, paradoxically, they are the very
sources of nourishment of the 'agenticities' of the SIMAD.
The first principle of SIMADology, therefore, suggests that
the most conducive environment for the efficient conduct
of operations is a state or condition of an 'uneasy' peace,
which can be calibrated by the SIMAD between greater or
lesser degrees of fear, surprise and terror which involves a
weaponization of the chemistry of decay and dissolution. In
this way, SIMADs seek to retain the ability to calibrate the
condition of peace, thereby keeping the target's systemic
health in a state of perpetual decay and consequent
perturbation.
Second Protocol: SIMADology eschews the 'theory ' ifstrategy and
wholly.focuses on pure tacticity.
SIMADs refuse to engage in operations that are stra
tegically constructed and developed. Rather, they seek
micro-local and vermicular opportunities wherein they
exhibit their purely tactical stance. This suggests that there
is a very high degree of contingency in the SIMAD's polemos
363
COLLAPSE VI
and that the ecology within which S IMADs operate is a

critical co-constituting element that determines the nature
of operations that are engaged in. Thus, all attempts to
strategise the SIMAD's polemm are always externally imposed
onto the 'agenticity' of the SIMAD. In other words, while
the agenticies of the SIMAD do not strategise, the resistant
environment that they operate in seeks to strategise their
actions - generally, by attempting to 'profile' such activities .
It is interesting to note that this foundational principle in
itself plays a key role in dislocating our attempts to deal
with the polemological condition that the SIMAD creates .
In other words, while we, from the outside, may strategise
the SIMAD's actions, SIMADs themselves are astrategic.
Thus, whatever strategic pattern-creating tools we use, the
'maps' they generate are always 'fictions ' for they are only
artificial overlays that we create over patterns that we draw,
which are always post-Evental. AB a consequence, they
lend us no further insight into how and in what manner
the SIMAD's polemm unfolds . The occasional successes we
may enjoy serve only to further delude us into believing the
'full-ness' of what is, in reality, our own vacuous construct.
Third Protocol: All damage, however small and seemingly iruignjfi
mnt, is considered primary damage.
In the context of the SIMAD's polemm, all damage is
primary and no damage is collateral. This implies that the
operating environment of the SIMAD is an omni-dimen
sional field of targets and that all shapes, forms, structures,
ideas and matter that constitute that environment, regardless
of their normatively assigned value, are targets of equal
value for the SIMAD. Thus, there is no distinction made
between a 'higher value' target and a 'lower value' target.
When considered in the context of geo-spatial targets and
364
Guha - SIMADology
psycho-social targets, therefore, everything is 'fair game'.

Targets are identified not in terms of 'value' but in terms
of their ability to generate 'fear', 'terror' and 'surprise' that
can sustain and prolong the chemistry of decay that the
SIMAD fosters. Moreover, the operations that rely on such
a targeting principle are not graded in greater or lesser
degrees ; nor do they necessarily have to be violent, though
they always exhibit a latency of violence.
Fourth Protocol: SIMADs don 't iriflict (damage), they irifect.
SIMADs infect systems and structures rather than
inflicting damage on them. As noted above, chasmic
chthonic forces - embodied as the SIMAD - work
to dis-inter the materiality of the tellurian surfaces by
continually spiking the difference-engines that populate the
tellurian surface. This spiking of difference-engines by the
SIMAD, however, is rarely, if ever, revolutionary. Rather,
it is evolutionary. This is primarily because SIMADs insist
on reducing the 'matter' of tellurian-based structures by
deploying a 'decaying' mechanism - a kind of necrosis that
brings to mind the Aristotelian description of the torture
methods employed by the Etruscan pirates, which involved
tying up an offender to a rotting and blackening corpse.
What followed such a practice was an almost philosoph
ical chemistry of decay by which a living body was turned
inside/out at a verrnicular, albeit infinitesimal, level.54 The
reported outcome of such a procedure involved the living
body becoming progressively blackened, or negrified, and
rotten, to the point where both 'bodies' were eventually
reduced to a dark mass of slime. This , as Negarestani puts it,
'signaled an ontological exposition of the decaying process
54. Reza Negarestani, 'The Corpse Bride: Thinking with Nigredo', COLLAPSE IV 129-
60: 13 1 ; See also Negarestani's 'Undercover Softness', present volume.
365
COLLAPSE VI
which had already started within.'55 In a startlingly similar

fashion, the SIMAD is a signature of the ontological decay
of the tellurian surface for the SIMAD performs an almost
vennicular function as it rends the tellurian landscape.
The slow and imperceptible reworking of the ontological
chemistry of the tellurian surface by the SIMAD thus
spreads like a rash or a lesion which slowly tears away
at, or more precisely, de-materialises, the fabric of the
tellurian surface thus exposing the liquid-like substrate of
the chasmic chthonic forces on which the tellurian surface
rests. In this way, the SIMAD - by invoking the principle of
decay - undermines the tellurian surface and all structures
and difference-engines that exist and operate on it. If, as we
contend, this is the nature of the emerging polemos of the
SIMAD, then the problems associated with developing a
counter-terror strategy and doctrine for the State (which,
we should not forget, is a patently tellurian structure)
increase exponentially for the problem associated with the
fourth protocol of the SIMADology is nothing less than
the following - how to contain (and reverse) a process of
ontological decay?
55. Ibid., 169.
366
Guha - SIMADology
Iv. THE SIMAD's CoUNTER-TACTics OF HYPERCAMOUFLAGE56

Morris is right on the mark when he points out that
despite his implicit doubts about the sustainability of the
'weapon of surprise', the security landscape has changed,
thereby leading him to assert that there has been a
concomitant change in the way how people think and
behave.57 Yet, based on how Morris sets up the space of
confrontation - sub-state actors versus 'entire governments'
- in this 'changed' security landscape, his 'conceptual
framework' does not convey the radical changes that have
taken place in the global security environment.58 Thus, it
remains for us to ask: how and in what way has the security
landscape so radically changed and, more importantly,
what are the counter-tactical principles that the SIMAD
brings to the foreground?
56. The term 'hypercamouflage", to the best of my knowledge, was first coined by
Reza Negarestani in his essay, 'Militarization of Peace' in COLLAPSE I. It should be
noted, however, that the Soviets did have an operational principle that they termed
'maskirovka' (literally: camouflage, concealment) , which was most effectively used
at the Battle of Kursk against the Wehrmacht in July-August, 1943. It is also alleged
that the principle of 'maskirovka' was used, under Russian guidance, to conceal
Saddam Hussein's air-defence system in and around the Baghdad area. Of course,
there have been other famous instances of the use of the principle of 'deception' and
'concealment' in warfare. The Allied deception of the full extent and deployment
plans during the Normandy landings in 1944 is a case in point.
57. Morris, 'Surprise and Terror', 2.
58. If we follow Kilcullcn's analysis of the accidental guerrilla, we find that one of
the key issues at stake, which make the prosecution of the GWOT a problem is that
nation-states find themselves in confrontation with groups and actors who reside
within nation-states that are allies and friends. In some cases, this hosting of such
groups is fully supported by the State in which they reside. The prime example in
this instance is the case of Pakistan, which is both an ally to the United States, but
has also - via its intelligence agencies (the ISI) - supported, funded and facilitated
various groups that have carried out terror-operations directly and indirectly against
American interests within and outside the American 'homeland'. Sec Kilcullen, The
Accidental Guerilla.
367
COLLAPSE VI
Reza Negarestani's reading of Faraj's polemical

terroristic text, Jihad: The Absent Obligation, provides us with
a valuable insight into a radically post-modem counter
tactical principle of martial operability - 'hypercarnouflage'
- which, we contend, is the key defining feature of the
martial operability that the SIMAD exhibits.59 Negarestani
suggests that Faraj' s notion of Ta,qfin:ism - set in the context of
a version of militant and subversive Islamism, which counts
among its proponents Sa'id Qytb, the Egyptian theorist of
Islamic Revivalism - is supplemented by the doctrine of
Ta,qiyya, which is contorted out of 'its [ . . . ] defensive and
devout function in the dawn of Islam [ . . . ) [which originally
was) a justified concealment of true beliefs in situations
where harm or death will definitely be encountered if true
beliefs are declared (the wider meaning of Ta,qiyya being "to
avoid or shun any kind of danger") .'6 Faraj's militant and
subversive bent, in Negarestani's reading, takes this notion
of Ta,qiyya, weaponizes it, and recommends its deployment
as a supplementary mode of operability to the already
militant terroristic Takfiti system. The consequence of this

exercise is the emergence of the 'shadow terrorist', whose
principle weapon of choice then would be a latent state of
weaponization, but which would remain indiscernible to
the keenest of eyes. Thus, as Negarestani puts it:
. . . the cover of camouflage can never be penetrated or
disrupted, and ... [t]he Takfiri's favoured mode of warfare is to
program a new type of tactical line which totally blends with
the enemy's lines in such a configuration that it introduces
radical instability and eventually violent fissions into the
system from within.'61
59. See Negarestani, 'The Militarization of Peace'.
60. Negarestani, 'Militarization of Peace', 57-8.
6 1 . Ibid., 55.
368
Guha - SIMADology
It will be evident at once that this vision of a battlespace,

or in our context, of war, is radically different from the
one that draws its inspiration from Clausewitz. There
are a number of inferences that we can draw from this
description of the battlespace of war. Firstly, the act of
disappearing into the enemy is not a strategic act, rather it
is pure tactical. It is eminently evasive and it is geared to
meld (melt + weld) with the systemic elements of the enemy.
This melding, ideally, is so refined that it becomes difficult,
indeed impossible, to extricate the entities that have so
fully merged within the system of the enemy. Secondly,
as a consequence of this, the tactical principle of 'surprise',
which plays such a critical role in Morris's 'conceptual
framework', transforms itself into a systemic principle,
which draws its sustenance from the very system within
which the entities merge. Third, 'surprise' then is not an
intervention from the 'outside'. Rather, it is, as Negarestani
puts it, more akin to 'violent fissions into the system from
within'. What ensues, therefore, is a radical destabilisation
of the system, whose structural disabling is calibrated not
by those elements legitimated to control the system, but by
these mysterious entities that have disappeared within the
system. The outcome of this, of course, is that the tactical
initiative shifts from the system and its controllers (those
who regulate and monitor the system's stability) towards
the invisible malcontents that have infected the system.
This calibration does not necessarily have to take the shape
and form of 'visible' and 'public' Event-Terrors such as 9/1 1 ,
the bombings in Khobar, Bali, London and Madrid, o r the
most recent indiscriminate shootings in Mumbai; it can
even take place by mere insinuations . Thus, the deliberate
leaking of (false) information pertaining to possible terror
strikes, the deliberate and calculated betrayal of the
369
COLLAPSE VI
foot-soldiers - the raw recruits - to the keepers of the

system, are all methods by which the calibration of the
system takes place. Moreover, as a consequence of this,
when the system attempts to correct itself, more often than
not, by overcalibrating itself - the shooting of the Brazilian
national in London is a stark example of this - it only
serves to create further fertile conditions for the anomalous
infectious agents to virally proliferate their infection of the
system.
The policing of such an infected system, therefore,
becomes a problem of gigantic proportions, for the key
question that the policing agencies have to ask themselves
is not simply: Who is the agent that is infecting the system?,
but also: What does this agent look like? And, since the
question is posed in this way, the technophilic response of
the system is to reduce its constituents - individuals - to
a computable and calculable entity, as is gradually being
achieved by means of biometric identification cards, chips
and passports . The objective of the system, therefore, is to
create periodic pan-sensorial 'snapshots' of itself, by means
of increasingly intricately-linked biometric databases,
such that the health of the system may be monitored, and
'infections' that can or may destabilise the system contained,
isolated and/or destroyed. Further, although the point is not
central to our concern in this essay, it is worth pointing out
that the key flaw in such an approach to security is that its
operative assumption is that the infectious entities within
the system have as their objective the collapse of the system.
This is a tragic misreading of this security problematic
given that for the infectious agents, the objective is to keep
the system at a very precise tipping point which hovers
between self-destruction and absolute consolidation -
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Guha - SIMADology
a 'chaoplexic' condition - which is paralysing and terrifying.

It is precisely in this way that 'surprise' and 'terror' come
not only to be weaponized within the system, rather than at
a locale outside it, but also to form the substrate on which
the biopolitical model of the post-modern state manages
itself. In other words, 'surprise', 'fear' and 'terror' become
hypercamouflaged by being indiscernable elements of the
system.
As discussed above, the passage of the SIMAD from
among and between us is a process by which the dismantling
of ontological privileges takes place. This dismantling
and disintegrating of ontological privileges may seem
paradoxical since the SIMAD, as an insinuation of havoc
and disaster, tears down such privileges and throws 'matter'
into the darkest recesses of the chasmic void, but at the same
time engenders difference-engines on the tellurian surface.
But we should be careful to recognise that this paradox is
only apparent, because we, as tellurian-specific energetico
structures, are only able to discern (or, more commonly,
insist on discerning) the passage of the SIMAD from within
a tellurian-specific perspective, while not recognising and
realising our essential complicity with and as the SIMAD.
And, it is precisely in this way that the SIMAD executes its
counter-tactical principle of 'hypercamouflage'. For it - that
is to say, the SIMAD - rests within the tellurian difference
engines and energetico-structures. In other words, SIMADs, in
thefirst instance, reside in us. Thus, to appropriate the Deleuze
Guattarian phraseology, the more arborescent the tellurian
structures, the greater is the degree or revolutionary impact
of the violence that the passage of the SIMAD entails, while
by the same token, the more flattened or rhizomatic and
assemblage-like the tellurian structures, the more evolu
tionary and less violent is their fate.
371
COLLAPSE VI
In the context of our discussion of the SIMAD and the

chthonic battlefield, then, these mysterious 'agencities ' are
signatures of the passage of chasmic forces that relentlessly
tear apart the tellurian structures with which we are more
familiar and which, tragically, determine the mode and
manner of how our state-centric counter-terror operational
plans are conceived and deployed. In light of our discussion
thus far, it will be evident that our attempts to deal with
this emergent situation are worse than inadequate. Even
the principles and doctrines of NCW which - despite
Peter Singer's contention that they miss the point of 'future
war'62 - constitute perhaps the most advanced theory
of war and combat that has seen the light of day since
Clausewitz, suddenly finds itself unable to come to grips
with the SIMAD and the pokmos that it brings in its wake.
Ultimately, however, this failure is one of imagination rather
than of our capabilities . In other words, not only does our
current imagination of war fall short; we repeatedly fail to
comprehend the existential threats that our more familiar
tellurian structures - the nation-state being the most visible
example - are increasingly beginning to contend with.
CONCLUSION
AB can be expected, insinuations such as these reside
outside the pale of the martial imaginations that are
deployed on tellurian battlespaces, which is also why we
have yet to find an effective counter-tactic to the S IMAD.
Instead, and at the cost of repeating ourselves, what we
have proceeded to do is to step up the production and
proliferation of difference-engines, thereby developing a
model of global security governance by which means we
62. P. Singer, Wzred For War (London: Penguin Books, 2009) .
372
Guha - SIMADology
strive to harden the tellurian battlespace to a degree that we

assume can withstand such chasmic interventions.
In a recent study of the 'accidental guerilla', David
Kilcullen marks precisely such an effort. While the ethno
graphic descriptions in Kilcullen's study are interesting
enough, nevertheless, when he begins by seeking to
understand the GWOT as 'a form of globalised insurgency,
with a vanguard of hypermodem, internationally oriented
terrorists [ . . . ] making use of all the tools of globalisation
[while at the same time seeking] [ . . . ] to organise, aggregate,
and exploit the local, particular, long-standing grievances of
diverse [ ... ] social groups',63 we already know (1) the nature
of the terrain on which he is seeking to operate and (2) the
strategic remedies that he will eventually offer at the end
of his study. It is clear what Kilcullen is attempting. Firstly,
he is intent on establishing a global tellurian battlespace,
which is the space in which the GWOT is fought. Therein
he proposes to establish smaller discrete battlespaces which,
when considered in net-centric terms, are high-resolution
magnifications of sections of the much larger and wider
global battlespace. Following this, Kilcullen, taking cover
behind the subjectivity implicit in traditional ethnographic
studies, proposes to construct another battlespace with an
even finer resolution, such as Libicki's original formulation
of 'the Mesh and the Net', imagined as being fine enough
to catch anything may be realised. In the process, however,
Kilcullen is unable to provide us with a single clue as to
how to halt the slow but steady seepage of terror, fear
and surprise that oozes from the chthonic battlespace
and wreaks havoc onto and into the tellurian one - for,
despite the identification of such 'accidental' guerrillas,
63. Kilcullen, Accidental Guerilla, xiv.
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COLLAPSE VI
the bombings continue, the tellurian battlespace keeps

getting ripped apart and the energetico-structures that are
the 'matter' of Kilcullen's study keep getting infected with
the non-belongingness of the void.
Studies and policy recommendations such as Morris's
and Kilcullen's thus fail to recognise that the tellurian logic
that drives a statement such as the following: ' [t]he dynamic
interaction between the modern international system of
nation-states [ . . . ] and [the] two discrete but often intercon
nected and loosely cooperating classes of nonstate opponent
- terrorist and guerrilla, postmodern and premodern,
nihilist and traditionalist, deliberate and accidental - may
be part of what gives today's "hybrid wars" much of their
savagery and complexity', 64 is an essentially flawed one.
Flawed not simply because of the manner in which the
groups that such studies and analyses identify and differ
entiate as postmodern and premodern are falsifiable, but
because they fail to recognise that embedded within these
very groups is a kernel of the chasmic void and that the
resistance that they offer on the tellurian battlespace (which
is all that Kilkullen can recognise) is itself a signature of the
passage of the S IMAD.
Thus, Morris's, Kilcullen's and other suchlike analytical
studies, whilst otherwise engaging accounts of 'post-modern
terrorism' and of 'the accidental guerrilla', betray a fealty to a
patently Clausewitzian imagination ofwar and consequently,
when considered in the context of the chthonic battlespace,
remain insufficient in their imagination to contend with
the SIMAD and the virulent polemos that it beings in its
wake. It is, therefore, little wonder that Kilcullen (whose
analysis and 'recommendations' may be proposed as being
64. Ibid., xv.
374
Guha - SIMADology
representative of the state-centric response to the terror

operations in the twenty-first century) would close his
account of the 'accidental guerrilla' by enumerating a
number of interesting conclusions and recommendations,
which he contends would aid us in combating terror-oper
ations, or what he refers to as 'hybrid wars' in the twenty
first century:
1 . This will be a protracted conflict.

2. We need to take a measured approach to national mobi
lisation.
3. We need to disaggregate and distinguish between
enerrnes.
4. We need to use military force extremely sparingly.
5. The role of government agencies needs to be limited.
6. Non-military means need to receive greater emphasis in
national security.
7. We need to emphasise the primacy of virtue, moral
authority, and credibility.
8. We need to rebalance capabilities.
9. We need to rein in unsustainable spending and consoli
date-65
Some of these recommendations leap out at us for what
they imply in the context of our discussion: Firstly, there
is the overall and implicit edge of palpable paranoia
in these recommendations . Does this betray a fear of
the envoiding that we have suggested lies within the
energetico-structures that populate the battlespace
that Kilcullen is familiar with? Secondly, there is
the recognition that this 'battle' will be protracted -
amazingly, Kilcullen suggests a 50-100 year timeframe !
Whether the structural foundations of the nation-state,
65. Ibid., 284-7.
375
COLLAPSE VI
which are being constantly eroded and/or morphed by

the chasmic forces that we have referred to, in addition
to information and communication technologies, will be
able to retain their integrity over such a period remains
surprisingly unquestioned. Indeed, it remains an a priori
assumption that the nation-state will be able to retain
its current form and structure, albeit with a few minor
adjustments. This is reflected in a number of Kilcullen's
recommendations, such as the need to consolidate; the need
to conserve resources ; the need to rebalance capabilities, etc.
Further, Kilcullen sets out the basal features of the nation
state - moral certitude, virtue and credibility. By positing
this, as is perhaps evident, Kilcullen attempts a reinscrip
tion of the subjectivity of the nation-state, thereby making a
valiant effort at reinforcing the tellurian non-planar surface
on which energetico-structures such as nation-states thrive.
Most interestingly, Kilcullen also makes a direct reference
to the production of difference-engines whereby a disag
gregation and distinguishing of 'enemies' can take place.
In the context of our discussion, and when considered in
light of the post-9/1 1 global security scenario, this should
not be surprising for, if our thesis that difference-engines
are continually spiked by the SIMAD's insinuation of a
chasmic envoiding holds true, then this recommendation
of 'disaggregation and distinguishing' - at least in the sense
in which Kilcullen means it - is stillborn. Thus, only when
we begin to recognise and appreciate the ensuing implica
tions of this radically different notion of the poltmws that
the SIMAD brings in its wake, will we be able to account
for the gradual and imperceptible morphing of what today
passes as the post-modem face of the global insurgency that
seems to have gripped the world of nation-states.
376
Guha - SIMADology
And finally, to appreciate the passage of the SIMAD,

we need to break the transcendental logic of the Clausewit
zian architectonic of war within which theorists and practi
tioners of war like Morris and Kilcullen offer their analyses .
As we have seen, the tellurian battlespace is one which is
artificially constructed by the Clausewitzian theory of war
in a bid to keep the terrifyingly Real prospects of Absolute
War at bay. As a consequence, in order to avoid chthonic
magneto-dynamic attractors - the SIMADic insinuations
of disruption, wreckage and distortion - the transcendental
logic of the Clausewitzian architectonic of war expresses
a false fealty to the earth, for it hovers like an 'ultimate
horizon' that attempts to enwrap and smother the earth
within its tenuously constructed net-centric war-machines
whose generative principle is engineered by the production
and sustenance of difference-engines . These Clausewitzian
war-machines do not originate from the earth; instead they
arrive from a transcendental plane virally proliferating on
and across the tellurian battlespace. Bringing with them a
strategy of stratification, these tellurian war-machines have
as their first order of business the object of establishing a
plane of logistics across the tellurian non-planar surface.
The ambition is stark: To Determine the Future of a New
Earth. However, the mysterious liquidly molten chthonic
plane, while not overtly spiking this surface ambition of
tellurian-specific war-machines, churns the tellurian surface
by means of an infinitesimal vermicular process, breaking
apart the plane of logistics on which the Clausewitzian
theory of war is grounded. Thus, the SIMAD, riding
the anomalous vectors of chthonic magneto-dynamic
flows, ungrounds the tellurian surface. Consequently, the
Clausewitzian plane of logistics contorts into a cesspool
of constantly wrecking difference-engines , resulting in the
377
COLLAPSE VI
fragmentation of associated energetico-structures, which

are hurled into the deepest recesses of a terrifying chasmic
void. To presume that these fragments are pushed into a
space exterior to the earth would be a tragic misunder
standing of the advent of Absolute War. On the contrary,
the void is chasmically in-depth with the earth - that is to
say, it is in complicity with the chasmic Abyss that Nietzsche
steeled himself to stare back at when it glared balefully at
him . This glaring back and forth is not a 'confrontation'
or a combative stance between us and the SIMAD. On
the contrary, it is the signature of a sub-surface movement
- a complicity of visions between the chasmic void of
non-belonging-ness and ourselves , where we are nothing
but chasmic envoidings in deep cover or in a mode of
hypercamouflage as tellurian-specific difference-engines
and energetico-structures . In other words, in the Age of
Simadology, we are the SIMADs. We are that which decays
and the agents of decay. We are expressions of the terrifying
envoiding chemistry of decay.
378
COLLAPSE VI
U ndercover Softness : An I ntrod uction to

the Arch itecture and Politics of Decay 1
Amongst philosophers and theologians of the Middle

Ages, few did not make at least a tangential remark on
a particular or general aspect of decay and putrefaction.
Whether in the context of theological quandaries
concerning the world of beings or in the context of
philosophy and the science of the age, mediaeval thinkers
touched on putrefaction as a problem too intimate with
the world of beings or the explicatio of the universe to be
brushed aside on emotional or rational grounds . Yet even
among this rot-frenzy of the Middle Ages, there are only a
handful of passages that directly focus on the implications
of omnipresent problems which decay and putrefaction
give birth to. One such passage can be found among the
pile of proto-scientific works on impetus theory ascribed
to the German theologian and mathematician Henry of
Langenstein, also known as Henry of Hesse the Elder.
1. This essay was extensively developed from a seminar originally given at The
Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London, in May 2007. Whilst
the arguments and analyses arc different, the fundaments are still the same. I could
not have written this essay without engaging commentaries provided by Robin
Mackay, Ray Brassier, Eugene Thacker, Nick Land, Mark Fisher, Eyal Weizman,
Susan Schuppli, and Luciana Parisi, who chaired the seminar.
379
COLLAPSE VI
Henry poses a ludicrously bizarre yet metaphysi

cally troubling question regarding the possibility of the
generation of one species from the putrefying corpse of
another species : that of whether a fox can spontaneously
be generated from a dog's carcass . Even more grotesquely
unsettling is Henry's strong suspicion that 'it is not clear
whether all men are of the same species or not, and so too
with dogs and horses ; [since] corpses which had been of
the same species when living might differ in species from
one another when corrupted.'2 For Henry of Langenstein,
putrefaction creates a differential productive field in
which natural evolution is transmogrified into a sinisterly
putrid inter-species production line. The so-called beloved
creatures of God, in this corrupt scenario, are so unfortunate
that they might be the festering fruits of rotten dead worlds
and corpses . It is not only that forms of different species
can overlap in decay, but that, according to Henry of Hesse,
following the scholastic polymath Nicole Oresme and his
theory of qualities or accidental forms, in putrefaction one
species can uniformly or difformly deform in such a way
that it gradually assumes the latitude of forms associated
with other species. These deformities can progress to such
an extent that one species might engender an entirely new
species, an unheard-of thing, a universe whose reality can
only be speculated upon. The gradational movements of
decay - its vermicular liquidation across all latitudes and
longitudes - thus create fields of differential deformity
wherein the rotting corpse of one species or formal category
interpolates between all other known species . In other
words, gradients of decay or the blurring movements of rot
2. L. Thorndike, A History ef Magic and F.xperimento1 &ience, Vol III (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1934) , 485.
380
Negarestani - Undercover Softness
calculate latitudes and longitudes peculiar to other species

by interpolating other forms between them. These inter
polated forms are in fact derivatives of the initial form of
the decaying species, putrid or thawing forms which are
derived as the process of decay differentiates or gradually
subtracts from a formation or structural framework. This is
suggestive of an affect without the positivity of affirmation
- a becoming devoid of desire but driven forward solely by
the creeping power of thawing forms and their differentia
tion across the latitudes of forms already taken by other
bodies and entities. In this sense, we mn say that in putrefa.ction
the universe is calculated; yet even more importantly, the universe that
is sensed or speculated, whether as an idea or a maieriali:z.edfarm, is
the calculus <fan infmite rot - this is the belated epigraph from
which we shall begin our investigation into the architecture,
mathesis and politics of decay:
The world has its origin in putrefaction.3
THE CORPSE OF WoRLD PoLmcs
The whole world is full of corpses.4
If political systems are constituted of formations - both

in the realm of ideas and in concrete structures - then,
like living species, they also are subject to the troubling
deformities brought about by the process of decay. In fact,
Henry of Langenstein's formula of decay as a weird inter
polating or extrapolating differential dynamism calculating
3. This remark is associated with the Friulian miller Domenico Scandella, also known
as Menocchio, who was declared a heresiarch by the Inquisition and burnt at the
stake. See C. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos efa Sixteenth-Cenlury Miller
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1980), xi.
4. From Sweet Movie (1 974) written and directed by Dusan Makavejev.
381
COLLAPSE VI
the entire universe through the putrefying gradations of a

corpse finds its most refined expression in politics and on
socio-political grounds . The power of differential interpola
tion or weird affective dynamism lends the idea of localized
or isolated decay a universal twist. What is rotting is indis
tinguishable from the wholesome remainder: not only
can the decaying part generate the healthy parts through
differentiating into their forms and ideas, the healthy parts
themselves may indeed be the gradients of a decaying part.
That is to say, in decay the origin qua the ideal shrinks more
and more toward nothing and becomes unrecognisable,
whilst the idea is spewed forth from the differential
subtraction of the ideal. To put it differently, in putrefac
tion, it is not the decaying formation that is derived from
an idea, but the idea that is differentially or gradationally
formed through putrefaction. The idea, accordingly, is a
deteriorating husk belatedly formed over an infinitely
shrunken ideal. It is in this sense that the most proper form
of a political formation - its idea - can be the product of
a process of decay feeding simultaneously on the uniden

tifiable corpse of the ideals of that system along with the
putridly amalgamated forms of other decaying systems.
The process of decay constructs the idea only as a
byproduct of the differential regurgitation of a shriveling
body which is in the process of becoming less and less,
without ever finding the relief of complete annihila
tion. This is to say, once again, that the troubling aspect
of decay has to do more with its dynamism or gradation
than with its inherently defiling nature : The most
proper form of a formation such as a political system
is not enveloped, as an origin or a priori ideal core;
it is rather unfolded as a form which is differentiated
382
a posteriori from the putrefaction of that formation or

political system. The ideas of the wholesomeness and
decaying (whether in regard to design, function, economy
or ideas) of socio-political formations, accordingly, are
posited as the latter products of a putrefying system. Yet
this is not where the scenario of rot ends. Decay does not
result in an equivocation between putrid and wholesome;
it rather constructs both ideas as its gradationally proper
forms, so that what is considered wholesome can in fact
be seen as a rotten derivative of an initial construction that
has limitropically diminished. The reverse of this scenario
is not only possible but is even more prevalent: through
putrefaction, the system or construction can assume forms
and ideas associated with those systems or constructions
which have - whether rightly or wrongly - been assumed
wholesome.
The obvious, yet gullible, objection is that such an
investigation of the politics of decay is not a universally
or globally-relevant political issue or project, because a
discussion of political rot is supposedly relevant only once
one makes assumptions about the Middle East or the
Balkans. In other words, in order to speak of political decay
and its mechanisms, one has to provide an example such
as Dubai or Bucharest - otherwise the problem of decay
is not that relevant. If this is not a blind and oversimpli
fied identification of world politics, it at least indicates a
failure to understand the mechanisms at work in decay.
Not only because a rotting political formation can germinate
other forms which might overlap revolutionary, emancipa
tory and civilised political formations, but also because
Western political formations and civilisations might
indeed be the degenerate forms of an already rotten and
383
COLLAPSE VI
limitropically decomposed Middle-Eastern or Balkanese

socio-political formation. In this sense of putrefaction and
rot as persisting and creeping, political decay casts a morbid
shadow on the question of relevancy (or irrelevancy) and
swiftly neutralises the idea of a 'localized rot'. There is no
decay whose swollen and slimy nodules of rot - its differ
entiated forms - have not already interpolated themselves
between all known and unknown forms in the softest
and smoothest way possible so as to disguise the deterio
ration or putrefaction of the whole. These are just a few
of the numerous conclusions to be drawn from a politics
of decay; conclusions that hardly any political system or
agency - despite testifying to the current fetid atmosphere
of world politics - is ready to admit. The reason for this
ironically passive stance, frequently espoused by both the
right and the left, is that such conclusions overthrow certain
presumptions about the fundaments, ideas and concrete
formations of socio-political systems and agencies . What
putrefaction changes, mimics and hollows out is not only
the surface of a system but also its essential interiority, all
the way down to its inner ideals, fundaments, axioms and
so-called necessities . It is this spontaneous threat against the
interiority of the system or formation from within that no
political system or agency is willing to acknowledge, for
it is exactly the admission of such a resident threat - the
chemical evil of decay - that casts doubts on one's political
agenda or the legitimacy of an emancipatory socio-political
formation. In short, to profoundly doubt the interiority of
one's politics or political agency can hardly be anything
other than a real politicalfaux pas.
384
World politics and its systems - whether erected on the

side of outright repression or on the side of emancipation -
have every reason to be wary of a politics of decay, because
the ultimate truth of decay is that it is a building process
that builds a nested maze of interiorities whereby all interi
orized horizons or formations are exteriorized in unimag
inably twisted ways . To put it simply, decay is a process
that exteriorizes all interiorities via their own formal or
ideal resources (capital?) ; and in doing so, its politics
and schemes of complicity operate not on behalf of the
interiority of the horizon (of any kind) but rather on behalf
of the exteriority which demands their inflection to the
outside. For this reason, we shall simultaneously explicate
the weirdly-resident, or undercover, exteriorization of
decay in regard to space and time so as to subsequently
draw out a formalism of decay's dynamic process wherein
the abstract matheme of decay gains a chemical disposition,
and the chemistry of putrefaction is distributed in a math
ematical space. The embracing of a politics of decay as
a building process toward exteriority, and the possibility
of political intervention against decaying formations,
both demand a systematic investigation that criss-crosses
territories associated with chemistry, mathematics, biology,
geophilosophy and ontology. Without such a preparatory
investigation, one risks either over-aestheticising decay
as the fetish of the age, or falling into a moral credulous
ness that sooner or later will host a political parasite which
cannot tolerate any doubt regarding the wholesome
ness of its interiority. As a mere overture to the politics
of decay, this essay, accordingly, proceeds to expound on
the calculus of putrefaction - together with the reason as
to why we associate decay with calculus - with respect
to its conceptions of space, time, form and dynamism.
385
COLLAPSE VI
Since decay is the intensive destiny of terrestrial life and

ecology, tellurian formations and earthly thought, a geophi
losophy or tellurian politics that does not inflect upon its
intensive destiny has its head - speaking entirely non
metaphorically - in the clouds.
DECAY AS A BUILDING PROCESS, OR EXTERIORIZATION VIA

NESTED INTERIORITIES
The first axiom of this essay is that decay is a building
process ; it has a chemical slant and a differential (hence
open to mathematical formalisation) dynamic distribution.
The process of decay builds new states of ex.tensity, affect,
magnitude and even integrity from and out of a system or
formation without nullifying or reforming it. The decaying
formation is dispossessed of its chances to die or to live
wholesomely, to be abolished, reformed or delivered to
its origin. For this reason, decay is an irresolute process of
building that potentiates architectures which, whilst infinitely
open to new syntheses and transformations , cannot undergo
complete annulment or return to their original form.
One of the basic questions regarding decay as a building
process is , thus far, the question of its vectorial alignment:
Is decay a positive or a negative building process ? The
answer is that the building process of decay is subtractive,
which is to say, it is concurrently intensively negative
and extensively positive. Just as the vector of perpetual
subtraction adds to the subtracted amount by deducting
from what is subtracted, the process of decay generates
differential forms by limitropically subtracting from the
rotten object. This process is manifested vividly in a rotting
fruit as it generates gradients of decay and differentiates
into close and distant derivatives, whilst at the same time
386
progressively shrivelling. The differential or germinal

derivatives of the rotting fruit - its rancid smell, maggots,
colour changes, secreted enzymes, etc. - constitute the
positive building vector of decay which extends outwardly.
Yet the shriveling body of the fruit as it continuously
shrinks forms the negative building vector of decay. As
long as the fruit shrivels, it gives rise to its derivatives or
gradations of decay. In fact, the longer and more the object
shrivels, the more remote and distant - hence weirder
- its putrid derivatives and differential forms become.
The process of decay, therefore, exacerbates the blackening
indeterminacy already entrenched at the heart of subtractive
cosmogenesis : It is no longer possible to determine how
much one can lose or shrink before it becomes void and
zero or how much one can spew forth and generate before
it becomes nature or God.
Confronting the problem of the iefinitesirnal persistena: of
the decaying object, it becomes increasingly difficult to say
when the process of decay ceases to exist and is supplanted
by complete ontological annulment or extinction. However,
the problem of infinitesimal persistence (becoming infinitely
close to zero but never effectively becoming zero) poses yet
another perplexing quandary in regard to the process of
decay, a problem which can be summarized as follows : If
the decaying object never completely disappears, and, in
so far as it continues to become less, generates derivatives
and maintains a germinal capacity, then does this mean
that death never occurs and the minimally surviving
object can never be fully exteriorized? An affirmative
answer to this question surely risks advocating a form
of vitalism that is ultimately unable to think exteriority.
An outright negative answer can also lead to a form of
387
COLLAPSE VI
utopian naivety for which the outside - viz. inflection upon

death and binding exteriority - is always available and
at hand. In order to examine the process of decay whilst
avoiding such tortuous traps, we propose that decay as a
building process renegotiates - or simply twists the loci for
-
the effectuation of architecture, exteriorization and binding

death. In brief, the process of decay finds and develops
a different site for the unilateral power of negativity.
The infinitesimal persistence of the decaying object - in
other words, its limitropic convergence upon zero - and
correspondingly, its unceasing germinal power in decay,
should not be examined in an isolated manner. In decay,
the infinitesimal persistence of the decaying object marks a
limitropic line of transition along which the interiority of one
decaying object falls back onto the interiority of its consti
tutive ideas, and those ideas in tum are undone to other
fundamental interiorities whose intrinsic nature is exterior
to the decaying object. AB the ideas break into their more
fundamental but minimal ideas, the infinitesimal persistence
of the object becomes asymptotic to the extinction of the
object. Correspondingly, if in the subtractive logic of decay,
remaining (viz. residing within the interiority of what is left)
means remoini:ng less (viz. moving in the direction of more
fundamental interiorities which constituted the horizon of
what had previously remained) , then to remain indefinitely
means to limitropically converge upon zero. Therefore,
although the inward and depthwise movement toward the
constitutive ideas or the ideal substratum which manifests
itself as 'remaining less' happens only within the confines
of different horizons of interiority, its dynamism limitropi
cally embraces the zero efideas. In doing so, the interiorized
movement becomes asymptotic to a line of exteriorization
upon which death is inflected, and objectal persistence in
388
decay becomes an asymptotic expression of loosening into

the abyss.
In order to simplify the above argument, we shall
develop a spatial model for decay whereby both the infini
tesimal persistence of the decaying object (i.e. a horizon
of interiority) and its outward differential productivity
become the essential vectors of a process of exteriorization
- a comtpt method of binding exteriority. The reason why,
in decay, binding exteriority occurs in such a twisted way,
comes down to the following: living things undergo decay,
not so much because decay and life come hand-in-hand, as
because the living - whether living on a biological level or
not - secures a horizon of interiority whose envelopment
must be exteriorized according to the differential rates or
gradients that bind the horizon to that which is exterior
to it. In other words, if decay is most frequently associated
with life, it is because the manifestations of life are all
founded on horizons of interiority. All that is interiorized
decays.
If the process of building is not exclusive to architec
ture and if, wherever building as a process is actualised,
architecture too is potentiated, then the locus of architec
ture can also be renegotiated. Architecture and its socio
political aspects can be approached in territories where
they are least expected. We call this architecture with an
anomalous locus, ex situ architecture. The process of decay
as a building process, as we will elaborate in what follows,
generates an ex situ architecture where what is built cannot
not be dwelled or grounded in any possible way. Because
what is in the process of being built, in this case, is a nested
exteriority wherein one interiorized horizon (such as the
organism) falls back upon its precursor exteriority, which
389
COLLAPSE VI
itself is another interiorized horizon built upon an exterior

horizon which is in the process of loosening into its abyssal
backdrop. Just as the lines of envelopment and growth for
any horizon of interiority (whether the organism, earth,
sun, or matter on the cosmic level) are convoluted and
circuitous paths ( umwege) toward the precursor exteriority,
the line of exteriorization is also a circuitous path drawn
along and through the horizons of interiority which fall
back, decompose and loosen into each other.
Consider an elucidating - albeit reductive - example:
Terrestrial organisms mark the organic interiority
enveloped against the inorganic materials which under
hospitable conditions can envelope the potencies of life. As
both the vessel and the medium of complicity for inorganic
materials, Earth is yet another interiorized horizon which
is set against its immediate source of energy, the Sun.
However, the solar empire is, in the same vein, an interiority
enveloped and determined against its exterior cosmic
backdrop. This nested continuum of interiorities goes on
to the material substratum of all horizons. Yet even matter
as the fundamental requirement for embodiment and
materialisation is an enveloped horizon whose interiority

and supposed necessity is a roundabout expression of a
refractory indifferent universe in which even matter is an
interiorized - hence idealised - contingency. Accordingly,
what decay or putrefaction draws is a line of exteriorization
toward the precursor exteriority. The organism decomposes
into its inorganic terrestrial environment, the tellurian
bedrock is in turn decaying into the solar horizon as the
Sun's thermonuclear decay dissipates the star into its cosmic
backdrop, whose material veneer, in turn, is peeling away.
Decay draws a line of exteriorization which traverses
390
---- ------ ---
the nested interiorities in order to asymptotically bind

exteriority. Therefore its dynamism is subjected to differ
ential bonds which connect and nest these interiorities
within each other. For this reason, such a differential line of
exteriorization or dissolution into conceptless exteriority is
neither manifestly a return to an ideal origin nor a decontrac
tion back into the originary exteriority where even matter
enjoys no privilege of any kind. This is because decay's
line of exteriorization builds a space of complicity between
horizons of interiority wherein the unilateral power of exte
riorization is mathematically and chemically contorted.
This contortion or twist happens in a specific fashion:
That which is exteriorized or dissolved into its precursor
exteriority becomes a differential interpolation of a nested
series of interiorities whose limitropic convergence upon
zero (i.e. inflection upon death) has a weirdly chemical
- thus contingent and productive - disposition which
simultaneously forecloses the idea of return to the ideal
origin and differentially convolutes the path of decontrac
tion to the originary flatline of death. Let us recapitulate
the reasons why the process of decay does not abide by
the laws of return to the ideal origin and the energetico
dynamic principles of decontraction:
The site where decay's process of exteriorization is
effectuated is the interiority of the horizon. Therefore,
the course of exteriorization conforms to the differen
tial fields enveloped inside or extended from the inte
riorized horizon. Decay loosens up the interiority of
the horizon, firstly through exploiting the horizon's
own differential links between its actualities and
potencies ; secondly by conforming to the differen
tial bonds between the interiority of the horizon and
391
COLLAPSE VI
its precursor exteriority. Yet precursor extenonty

(whether as the material, systematic, formal or ideal
fundament, as in the case of inorganic materials and
the organic horizon) is itself an interiorized horizon
determined by its inner and outer differential bonds .
This nestedness of interiorities wherein every idea
or form differentially - and in this case regressively
- inflects the next idea or form keeps decay's line of
exteriority in confonnity with the differential bonds
and the increasing inflections of the nested horizons of
interiority. Therefore, decay's process of exterioriza
tion does not bind the outside from without so much
as it binds the exteriority from within nested horizons
of interiority. This binding of exteriority, however, is
in confonnity with differential fields inherent to each
horizon of interiority as well as inter-connective differ
ential bonds between these nested horizons . Conse
quently, the course of decay's process of exteriorization
is conducted in accordance with spatial involutions,
differential rates and modes of distribution immanent
to nested interiorities . Since courses of exteriorization
are subjected to differential peculiarities and twists of
the nested space of interiorities , effects of exterioriza
tion - that is to say, the effects of binding exteriority
and inflecting upon death on interiorized horizons and
formations - are also expressed in different ways. For
this reason, the persistent involvement of nested inte
riorities undoubtedly complicates the philosophical,
political and social implications of binding exteriority,
inflecting upon death and extinction, for all formations
and systems (from basic terrestrial formations to
social networks, political systems and the horizon of
thought) . In decay, what is considered as the bedrock
392
of the originary turns into a slimy swamp of nested

interiorities where the bottom is always too soft and
unsolid to hold or ground anything. The sinking is
neither swift nor clean.
The differential and regressive movement through
nested horizons of interiority which the process of
decay undertakes is not unidirectional and simplex,
since, as argued above, this process conforms to the
space of interiorities, which are nested within each
other, not according to a one-to-one line of correspon
dence but according to a differential and multiplex
nested structure. For example, in decay an idea qua an
index of interiority is not merely differentially founded
on one precursory idea but on a multitude of other
fundamental and constitutive ideas which themselves
are also inflected within different ideas. The image
that the nested space of interiorities - as the site of
decay - calls to mind is not a unidirectional tunnel of
connected niches whose size and qualities are uniformly
changing, but rather a rabbit warren or a worm-ridden
cheese where every niche or hole opens into numerous
smaller or larger interconnected caverns and holes. As
the liquid that enters the first niche seeps into all such
connected caverns, the gradationally rotting object,
idea or formation also oozes, or more accurately, is
exteriorized into the multitude of interiorities inside
which it is nested. The model of exteriorization, in
this sense, follows (1) the instantaneous rate of change
between the decaying interiorized horizon and those
non-uniformly nested interiorities into which it is being
exteriorized, and (2) the instantaneous rate of change
between the inter-connected multitude of interiorities
393
COLLAPSE VI
which are differentially exterior to the decaying horizon

of interiority. The idea X is inflected back upon its
nested fundamental ideas which are themselves differ
entially interconnected (X inflects back to X I ' Y, Z, D,
F, X2Z3, X3Z2Yl' D2, Y2D3, ) . The process of decay,

accordingly, traverses multiple ever-changing ideas

or variables (as indexes of interiority) . Therefore, in
order to differentially exteriorize or putrefy an object,
the process of decay must operate according to the
instantaneous rate of change not only between the
decaying object (the variable X) and nested interi
orities gradationally exterior to it, but also between
those interiorities I variables into which X is limitropi
cally diminishing. The instantaneous rate of change,
accordingly, is calculated between X and X , Y, Z, D,
1
F, X2Z3, as well as between X I ' Y, Z, D, F, X2Z3,
. . . themselves. The interconnected and nested space

.
of interiorities, for this reason, requires that decay

operate as an instantaneous rate of change between
different horizons of interiority or points of inflection.
It is this ability to exteriorize a horizon of interiority
via the relation - viz. nested interconnections - between
exterior horizons which themselves are being exterior
ized - and thus changing - that posits the process of
decay as the blackening counterpart of the differen
tial calculus . This is because differential calculus is a
technique to determine and calculate the instantaneous
rate of change between different uniformly or difformly
changing variables . Just as Leibniz's solution for
calculating the instantaneous rate of change between
different changing variables involved the concept of
infinitesimals, decay exteriorizes an object into its
exterior backdrop through the limitropic shrinking of
394
the object. For a decaying object, what is considered

the exterior backdrop - as argued earlier - is a nested
space of interiorities whose complicities do not allow
the process of exteriorization to be vectorially unidirec
tional, structurally uncomplicated or, as a consequence,
unproblematic. Tiu: complicity between interioriiU:s cannot be
undone IJT decontmcted in a simple fashion, far such complicity
engenders differentialfields which can only be exteriari:J.ed by the
subtractive logic, chemical techniques and mathematical dynamism
ef decay as a building process and a model ef complicity. The
political implications of decay as a model of complicity
corresponding to the original ideas buried in differen
tial calculus call for a thoroughgoing investigation into
the calculus of decay.
The differentially regressive plunge of decay into the

depth of nested interiorities always finds an extensive
echo in the form of differential reverberations of rot.
There is no depthwise putrefaction or nigredo without
the wriggling of worms on the surface and the mephitic
extension of the rotting object into the air. Decay's
intensive exteriorization of nested interiorities has an
outward productive expression which is subtractively
correlated to the blackening line that traverses the
confines of nested interiorities . The more enveloped
and interiorized the horizon, the more chemically
productive its extension to the outside. It is as if the
degree of interiorization - that is to say, the spatial
confinement of the horizon and the amount of capital
enveloped for sustenance and development - is directly
proportional to the chemical fertility of the horizon
when it begins to extend outside of its confines .
Here, the degree o f interiorization does not become
395
COLLAPSE VI
an impeding factor for the extensive loosening of the

horizon, but contributes to the differential extension
of the horizon to the outside as well as the chemical
- hence contingently dynamic - productivity of the
horizon during decay. Tbis illogical proportionality
between the insistence on remaining interiorized and
the spontaneous chemical loosening into the outside
shares more with the laws of the grave than with the
laws of nature - the putridly productive amalgamation
of the restrictions of rwmos and the confines of taphos.
We argued that decay is neither wholly negative nor
wholly positive; it is rather subtractive. The subtractive
logic of decay suggests that decay does not merely
build the nested horizons of interiorities as an intensive
limitropic vector toward zero but that it also builds via
extensive deployment of interiorities so as to create a
dynamically contingent universe. Leibniz - following
the proto-scientific ideas in the Middle Ages - frequently
uses as an example the model of a rotting body (usually
cheese) whose remaining perforated body suggests an
intensive limitropic convergence upon zero. Yet this
intensive movement in the interiority of the object,
manifested as shrinkage, cannot exist without another
opposite movement which extends the body into the
outside in the form of contingently differentiated
ideas or smaller bodies . At the same time as the apple
shrivels, it spews forth worms as extensively deployed
and hence dynamically contingent interiorities . These
worms or derivatives in tum envelop smaller worms
and further derivatives which contain yet smaller
bodies ad irifinilum . . . all ready to heave forth and be
extensively deployed in the most contingent manners .
Tbis applied dynamics of contingency marks the rise
396
of chemistry as a process commencing from within.

The subtractive movement of decay's blackening
line of exteriorization through nested horizons of
interiority produces two functions: firstly, a limitropic
convergence upon zero dubbed complicatio and formally
expressed as progressive shrinkage; secondly, a differ
ential extension or divergence from the object, called
explicatio and expressed in the form of a dynamic and
contingent process of productivity. Comp!Ua,tio and
explicatio are subtractively correlated, in such a way
that the intensive interiority of comp!Ua,tio contributes
to the extensive deployment of interiorities in exp!Ua,tio.
The decaying idea, in this sense, not only undergoes
a nested twist as it limitropically approaches the zero ef
ideas, but also a productive twist as it is subtracted to the
outside. For this reason, decay's process of exterioriza
tion is in complicity with interiorities and their differ
ential fields on two levels: (1) the intensively enveloped
- hence nested - interiority of the decaying idea or
rotting object; (2) the extensively developed interiori
ties which are differentiated from the rotting object and
whose contingent world points to a dynamic chemistry
which enforces the irruptive contingencies of time
mobilized through the involutions of space. To sum up,
decay's line of exteriorization has, weirdly, a productive
disposition which generates extensively and contin
gently distributed differential fields (or sites of chemical
activity). The eruption of these explicated differential
fields reinforces the necessity for a complicity between
the process of exteriorization (viz. binding exteriority
and inflection upon death) and horizons of interiority,
whether as fundamental terrestrial formations or socio
political grounds and networks.
397
COLLAPSE VI
The three reasons enumerated above briefly explain the

complications that the process of decay brings about for
the idea of return to the origin, and for a philosophy based
on the implications of binding extinction and decontrac
tion into originary death. Yet they also diagram the spatial
model in which the process of decay operates. In order
to present a formalism of decay which provides us with
a mathematical model for decay's dynamism, we must, in
addition to decay's conception of space, examine decay's
conception of time. For this reason, we shall inquire into
decay's conception of time and how it is expressed by the
spatial involutions generated by decay's line of exterioriza
tion as it traverses nested interiorities.
MEMENTO T ABERE: THE TERNARY CONCEPTION OF TIME,

OR THE MISSING LINK OF CHEMISTRY
The process of decay has a spatial model comprised
of intensive envelopment and extensive development, and
whose subtractive correlation creates differential fields
which are sites for the generation of abstract twists and
deformities. In other words, these sites spatially narrate
chemical activities potentiated by time's contingencies;
activities whose irruption endows the spatial plot with
a holey and porous underside. Chemistry, therefore,
as applied dynamics wherein contingencies of time are
extensively enforced by the involutions of space, requires
a third conception of time whereby absolute contingencies
of time can operate from within the interiority of a horizon.
If putrefaction marks the beginning of chemistry, its
subtractively-productive process needs such a conception
of time so as to mobilise the contingencies of time as
the chemical traces of those spatial involutions and
398
-------- ---------------
envelopments which are asymptotic with the conceptless

exteriority of space. This brings us to more fundamental
questions concerning the role of time in any politics or
philosophy incorporating decay as the building process
of its formations or ideas : What is the relation of decay
or putrefaction to time? Is decay a narrative conception
of time's indifference to ontic differences , or is it the
experience of time as presence which - in a Heideggerian
fashion - turns death into an infinitely-deferred occurrence
through Dasein's already-dying? What exactly is the role of
time in decay, and does this role reinscribe the correlationist
appropriation of time through experience and presence, or
amount to an idealism which favours and privileges time
over space? And finally, if time is imbued with radical
contingencies which suspend all affects and relationships
through the indifference of time as an impenetrable alterity,
then how can decay as a building process bring about the
opportunities of complicity between the involutions of
space and contingencies of time? It is evident that decay's
conception of time, which emphasizes the role of time in the
chemistry of decay, is so pivotal that it determines different
conceptions of decay and putrefaction. Decay as a roman
ticized concept, decay as a necrocratic fetish, decay as a
differential form of emptiness, decay as an umwege (maze)
toward base-matter and decay as an ontological fate, are all
decided by different conceptions of time, in itself and in its
relation to space.
The chemical potency of putrefaction (tabes) which
decomposes the object into other horizons of interiori
ties across infinite latitudes of forms, attests to the fact
that there is a complicity between irruptive contingen
cies of time and spatial folds and inflections of space.
399
COLLAPSE VI
11rrough such complicity, the diachronicity of time and the

exteriority of space are evinced by each other: Whilst space
is perforated by time's emptiness or fundamental indiffer
ence, time's contingency is formally expressed by space's
unbound ferocity for the assimilation of any ground of indi
viduation. It is this collective fold of complicity - neither
demanding a commonality between the parties involved
nor the substitution of either of them by the other - that
makes decay an unwholesome participation between the
most abominable aspects of time (non-belonging and pure
contingency) and the most degenerate aspects of space
(space's tendency for infinite involutions which undermine
any potential ground for the emergence of discrete entities) .
It is the complicity between the worst nightmares of space
and time that brings about the possibility of putrefaction
(even an infinite decay) as a differential form of irresolvable
emptiness disguised as ideal objectivity with a generative
twist. To think of this impregnable hollowness endowed
with a generative proclivity, one can envisage an infinitely
porous abomination, an obscene hollowness, folded and
mobilised in such a way that it has an objectal grimace:
The mediaeval dame mtteabre depiction of the Tree of Rot -
a 'difformly difformly difformly difform'5 (Nicole Oresme)
tree trunk which spews forth a cosmic range of both
familiar and nameless creatures as a differential extension
of its arborescent emptiness.
The complicity between space and time - that is, between
the dynamism of inflections and the irruption of contingen
cies - brings forth the possibility of chemistry as the concom
itantly softening and loosening dynamism of putrefaction.
5. See L. Thorndike, 'An Anonymous Treatise in Six Books on Metaphysics and

Natural Philosophy', The Philosophical Review 40, no. 4, 1 93 1 : 3 17-40.
400
As the chemical space of decay, putrefaction exposes

the object to the contingencies of time so as to thaw the
object's ideal integrity and initiate its loosening into the
conceptless involutions of space. In order to explicate the
nature of this complicity as an intrinsic act for the chemical
dynamism of putrefaction, first we must clarify the modes
of complicity at work here. If time belongs to no one and is
absolutely indifferent to ontic differences, then how can its
worst nightmares participate with space? And if, notwith
standing such irresolvable incommensurability, time and
space can indeed participate with each other, then how
can this participation be conceived outside of the correla
tionist ambit? Our conjectural solution for these problems
concerning a blackening complicity between space and
time consists of two stages: In the first stage, our solution
entails the implementation of two conceptions of time.
On the basis of these two conceptions, we seek to bridge
the exteriority or diachronicity of absolute time and the
exteriority of space. 1bis means that in addition to the
absolute conception of time, an intermediary conception
is also required. The intermediating time must be inter
connected with the absolute conception of time (i.e. time
as an indifferently impenetrable alterity that belongs to
nothing and no one) as a manifestation of the latter's pure
contingency. In other words, the intermediating conception
of time should itself be a production of absolute time's pure
contingency which suspends all natural laws, obstructs
the operation of belonging and nullifies ontic differences.
To put it differently, the intermediary conception of time
should itself be a symptomatic production of absolute time's
pure contingency. Accordingly, the intermediating time does not
suggest a dichotomous scission in tz'me, but a temporal and contzngent
conception efits absoluteform. Only the vital temporality of this
401
COLLAPSE VI
intermediating time can bring about the possibility of

ontological difference in relation to appropriated regions
(scales) of space.
Space-time syntheses - necessary to support ontological
determination - require the bifurcation of Time into two
different but interconnected conceptions. Without such a
bifurcation, absolute time and thanatropic space remain
inherently exterior to each other and cannot ground the
conditions for ontological determination on any level. It was
the Stoics who for the first time fully realised the necessity
of having different conceptions of time with the aim of
explaining the vital syntheses of time and space. In order
to explain the intensive vitality of determination qua differ
ence-in-itself, Deleuze adapts and ingeniously modifies the
Stoic model so as to develop and employ two conceptions
of time, the time of a.ion and the time of chronos. 6 Since the
indefinite non-pulsed time of a.ion is inherently closed to vital
bodies, there must be another conception of time capable
of synthesizing with the scales of space and supporting
vital vibrations. This second conception of time is the
pulse-time of chronos, which supports organic vitalities and
provides time with qualities compatible with the structure
of corporeal beings. Accordingly, the first already-estahlished
stage of our solution requires the bifurcation of Time into
two different but interconnected times. Following Deleuze,
but in contrast to his quasi-Heideggerian reading of time,
these two conceptions are reabsorbed in this fashion:
6. See John Sellars, 'Aion and Chronos: Deleuze and the Stoic Theory of Time',
COLLAPSE 111, 177-205.
402
1. The ungraspable and cosmic time which belongs

to nothing and no one. It is the absolute time of pure
contingencies or cosmic climates which unilaterally
suspends all laws and eliminates all necessities.
2. The temporal conception of time, which is time
insofar as we experience it and which, therefore,
is characterised by the access to its presence rather
than its quiddity per se. Yet, even more importantly,
the temporal conception of time supports the
temporality of beings by providing the conditions
for their ontological determination and emergence.
These conditions are nothing but the contingen
cies of the cosmic and absolute time. The temporal
conception of time, accordingly, envelops and
foregrounds contingencies of absolute time in the
form of conditions for the emergence of life (or the
subject of temporality) . Therefore, the temporal
conception of time is an interiorized or bounded
form of absolute time, a temporal set wherein contin
gencies are taken as conditions for the determination
and the continuation qua temporality of existence.
In other words, temporal time posits the contingen
cies of absolute time as the ground for the determi
nation of difference and ontic emergence, through
a bracketing and interiorizing of those pure contin
gencies. We call this temporal conception of time,
vital time or the time of determinations and making
differences. Constitutive to the ground of life, vital
time is accentuated in the organic realm through
the compatibility of its interiorized and sequential
structure with the sequential growth or the rhythmic
difference of organic interiority. In other words,
403
COLLAPSE VI
the interiorized contingencies of vital time become

structurally compatible with the involutions or
interiorized horizons of space. Without such basic
structural compatibility between space and time
- albeit at the cost of their envelopment and inte
riorization - ontological determination and the
emergence of ontic differences which are tied to
space-time syntheses are impossible.
Vital time - the intermediary conception of time -

emerges from the cosmic time of pure contingencies as
'an interiorized set of contingencies'. As a temporal set,
vital time interiorizes contingencies as its elements. Since
the function of the set is interiorization, it can intensively
determine the contingencies of absolute time as conditions
for the emergence of life, or as necessities for making
difference. In the process of interiorizing contingencies and
realizing them as concomitantly temporal and necessary
conditions, vital time appropriates the exteriority of cosmic
time and turns it into an interiorized conception of time
accessible by life and its manifestations. Yet the cosmic time
of non-belonging and pure contingencies can never be fully
appropriated or assimilated (interiorized) by vital time and
its temporal conception. This is because vital time is itself
contingent upon cosmic time as a temporal cmulition for the
interiorization and bracketing of absolute time's contin
gencies and their realisation as the conditions required for
the emergence of life. This means that since vital time is
itself a temporal condition qua contingenq of cosmic time,
it cannot fully interiorize the exteriority of absolute time
qua pure contingencies. Vital time suggests only one of the
infinite pure contingencies of absolute time; its fundamental
404
functions are simultaneously supported and derailed by

other contingencies. For this reason, contingencies of
cosmic time are never fully reintegrated and absorbed
within the manifestations of life (viz. realised horizons of
interiority) conditioned by vital time. To put it differently,
vital time can be interiorized by beings as the necessary
condition for their emergence because it is itself an inte
riorized conception of cosmic time's pure contingency.
This brings us to another problem which constitutes the
second stage of our conjectural solution to the problem
of complicity between space and time necessary for the
chemical dynamism of putrefaction.
If cosmic time can never fully be appropriated by and
within vital time, then the horizons of interiority inherent to
manifestations of life or ontic differences cannot assimilate
and appropriate the contingencies of cosmic time either.
Consequently, the interiority of life is a host or a niche for
the inassimilable contingencies of cosmic time - contingen
cies that never completely turned into temporal conditions
within vital time but remained part of the unilateral ecology
of the cosmic abyss within vital time's temporal set. Briefly,
vital time interiorizes contingencies of the cosmic abyss
in order to form its temporality; however, there are still
contingencies of cosmic time which, despite being interior
ized, defy assimilation by the laws of the temporal set that
turns contingencies into vital conditions. These interiorized
yet inassimilable contingencies, consequently, implement
the unilateral ecology of the cosmic abyss from within vital
time and consequently, from within an interiorized horizon
such as the organism or the planet. In conditioning the
emergence of life, vital time introduces the nightmares of
cosmic time into the phenomena of life. The horizon of
405
COLLAPSE VI
interiority inherent to the manifestations of life becomes

an incubating chamber for the pure contingencies and
non-belonging of cosmic time. It is this non-belonging qua
principle of negativity that is mobilized by the dynamism
intrinsic to involutions of space. The subtractive process of
decay is the outcome of such spatial mobilisation whereby
the unilaterality of cosmic time underpinned by its irruptive
contingencies gains a subtractive - that is, extensively
positive and intensively negative - momentum through
inflections of space. As an outcome of its complicity
with space, time's unilateral negativity is imposed on the
horizon of interiority in a way that forces the horizon to be
concurrently swept away along the extensity of space and
intensively shattered on zero qua the eternal.
Thus cosmic time is deployed inside vital time and,
correspondingly, inside the life or the horizon of interiority
that is conditioned by vital time. This remobilisation of
cosmic time's exteriority and redeployment of its contingen
cies within vital time and manifestations of life posits a third
conception of time which constitutes the second stage of our
conjectural solution. The blackening complicity between
space and time can only be fully explained via recourse
to a third conception of time which is always implicit - as
an internal tension - to the dyadic conception of time. We
call the third conception of time, the insider amaption efcosmic
time. It is conceived of as a treacherous insider insofar as
it internalizes the complicity between time's diachronicity
and the exteriority of space within the manifestations of life
and the horizons of interiority. The conception of cosmic
time as the insider redefines the intermediary conception of
vital time as a 'temporal agent' that brings with it into life's
horizons of interiority the contingencies and non-belonging
406
of cosmic time. In other words, the insider conception of

cosmic time interiorizes and cultivates the incommensu
rable tensions between cosmic contingencies within life
and its manifestations - thereby giving cosmic ecology an
eruptive (i.e. volcanically extrusive) expression rather than
an intrusive insinuation.
In the wake of the insider conception of time, the
termination of life does not exclusively mark the temporality
of life qua its contingency, because the very interiority of
life (its difference and internal vitality) can unfold as the
abyssal infinity of material and ontological contingencies
whose irruption is equal to death. This unfolding of cosmic
time's pure contingency through life and by life is expressed
by decay as a dysteleological process. In this sense, life's
interiority is a medium for the cultivation of incommen
surable tensions between the contingencies of cosmic
time. And decay is the germinally-cultivated expression
of these incommensurable tensions or contingencies along
infinite involutions of space - a complicity between time's
subtractive enmity to belonging and the enthusiasm of
space for dissolution of any ground for individuation, a
participation between cosmic time's pure contingency and
the infinite involutions of space from whose traps nothing
can escape.
T he process of putrefaction or decay accentuates the
compulsion to return toward pure contingencies of cosmic
time through the third conception of time (i.e. cosmic time
as insider time). This so-called 'compulsion to return'
instigated by the insider conception of time becomes a
source of tension between the principles of cosmic time
(i.e. contingency and non-belonging) and the temporal
conditions or necessities of vital time. These contingent
407
COLLAPSE VI
and subtractive tensions are narrated by the degenerate

qualities of space through the process of decay in the form
of a progressive softening of forms and loosening of the
horizon. We can say that in decay space is perforated by
time: Although time hollows out space, it is space that gives
time a twist that abnegates the privilege of time over space
and expresses the irrepressible contingencies of absolute
time through dynamic and formal means. This in-Hective
mobilisation of cosmic time's radical contingencies heralds
the birth of chemistry as the blackening complicity between
time and space. It is chemistry that endows the subtractive
process of decay with a putridly productive nature.
FIGURING OUT 1HE FACE OF ROT, OR IDENTITY AND 1HE

FORMS OF BEING LESS THAN A THING, MORE THAN
N01HING
The subtractive dynamism of decay is generated on
the basis of a complicity between space and time which
allows for the chemical loosening of the horizon of
interiority along nested inflections that are simultaneously
extensive and intensive to the horizon. The dynamism of
decay utilizes the complicity between space and time as
the principle for an unconstrained deformability where
loosening and softening - the lytic functions of chemistry
and the smoothing functions of differential calculus, i.e.
mathesis - are intertwined and unbound. Yet such uncon
strained deformability is translated, as elaborated above,
into the intensive complicity of nested interiorities as
well as the complicity of interiorities in their extensive
deployment. Through these intensive and extensive planes
of complicity, interiorized horizons asymptotically bind
the exteriority of space and the diachronicity of time.
408
T he asymptotic binding of exteriority requires an inter

polating dynamism capable of traversing all interiorities
complicit in the process of exteriorization as changing
variables whose ratio must be calculated. To put it
differently, since interiorities are always in complicity with
each other, the process of exteriorization must find a way,
firstly, to grasp interiorities in terms of their complicities;
and secondly, to conduct exteriorization based on the
dynamic factors, elements and variables brought about by
such complicities. Exteriorization is not possible without
factoring in and acting upon the complicities between
interiorized horizons. Yet acting upon such complici
ties - characterized by dynamic relationships and rates of
change between horizons of interiority - requires a solution
reminiscent of differential calculus, a solution capable
of calculating the instantaneous rate of change between
changing variables.
The solution of decay's process of exteriorization
for the problem of changing and complicit interiorities/
variables is the limitropic decomposition of the object
or formation. Only though the limitropic movement
of the object or formation toward zero (whether as the
conceptless exteriority of space or the diachronic etemality
of time), can the process of exteriorization cut through
the complicity between interiorities which is too differ
entially convoluted to be disentangled or decontracted
through regressive thanatropic movement. The limitropic
wasting or subtraction of the object (or formation) along
its extensive and intensive vectors does not allow for the
complete eradication of the object's ontological registers,
structural fundaments or operating axioms. The effect of
such limitropic wastage, in which the formation is loosened
409
COLLAPSE VI
and softened to no end yet leaves traces which linger as the

agents and particles of complicity, has a strong socio-polit
ical undertone. Even after a political formation turns into
an unrecognizable corpse, where all of its structural and
operative influences have presumably vanished, there still
remain active structural fundaments and functional axioms
from that formation without whose complicity the political
calculus of world politics cannot possibly be formed. For,
once again, in decay the relationship or change between
horizons of interiorities (as entities intrinsically susceptible
to decay) is possible only through limitropic deterioration
toward a zero efinteriurity. The limitropic deterioration brings
about the possibility of the differential interpolation of the
decaying horizon between other interiorized horizons and,
as a result, instigates the construction of a universal calculus
of putrefaction. It is this limitropic deterioration that
introduces the lingering and persistent axiomatic remnants
of the decaying formation to an unsuspecting uni-versa/,
calculus, as minute but ineradicable agents of complicity.
Neither fully negating the system by overthrowing
it nor reaffirming it through reformation, the process of
decay imposes a perpetual deformability on the formation
without completely erasing its ontological registers and
functional axioms. In short, decay extracts infinite deform
ability from an interiorized horizon without eventuating
in radical erasure or complete transformation. Such
perpetual deformability is supported by the intensive and
extensive complicity of horizons of interiorities in the form
of an unbreakable continuity in which every horizon of
interiority either inflects the next or is nested within yet
another horizon. Accordingly, it is the ceaseless continuity
- in the sense of intensive and extensive inflections of
forms and interiorities - that imparts a fluid continuity to
410
the rotting object without essentially turning it into fluid.

Each form is only gradoiionolly preceded and succeeded by
other forms in such a way that transition along latitudes
(of forms) is always blurred. The gradients of deformities
are differentially smooth, to the extent that the formal
dynamism of rot appears to be that of sludge or oozing
flesh. In decay, the solid undergoes a flowing series of
deformations without becoming liquid, or in other words,
without losing its basic principles of solidity. T he wholeness
or coherency of the solid is derailed within the fundamental
principles of solidity. In a similar fashion, in putrefaction
the liquid's degeneration vacillates between solid and gas,
slime or miasma, but in either case it remains fundamen
tally - albeit mi.nllnally - liquid. This minimum body of
the element, horizon, formation or object, in fact suggests
its concomitant asymptotic exteriorization and limitropic
diminution. Recall Bishop Berkeley's sneering deprecation
of infinitesimal calculus as dealing with the 'ghosts of
departed quantities';7 the decaying object, indeed, is an
evanescent yet lingering ontological register that is less than
a thing but more than nothing.
Supported by the complicity of interiorities, the
continuity of forms or the gradients of deformability ensure
that the interiorized horizon is always formalized as a fluxion
of contingent and even inconsistent forms. It is actually in
decay that inconsistent forms are smoothly connected to
each other so as to form a congruous plane of deformability
in which becoming does not essentially follow the logic of
the affect but rather the logic of putrefaction and its method
of exteriorization. Victor Hugo concisely epitomizes this
fluxional connection of inconsistent forms, ideas and
7. G. Berkeley, The tma/yJt; or, A discourJe addreJJed to an infidel mathmatician (1754), 59.
411
COLLAPSE VI
entities in putrefaction in us MisirolJ!.es: 'In a pit of slime

[...) the dying man does not know whether he has become
a ghost or a toad}8 It is only in putrefaction that death is
essentially and weirdly non-hauntological: one becomes a
toad rather than a poltergeist annoyingly clamouring for
appropriate mourning, for a proper judgment or a spectral
solution. Whilst in putrefaction the human might end up
as a toad, the toad itself grows a tail. T he tail, in this case,
speaks to the differential idea or latitudes of form between

a toad and a tadpole, the mathemathico-chemical affect
between them, the ratio of putrefaction: the longer the tail,
the fouler the putrefaction:
It was observed in the great plague of the last year, that there
were seen, in divers ditches and low grounds about London,
many toads that had tails two or three inches long at the least;
whereas toads (usually) have no tails at all. W hich argueth a
great disposition to putrefaction in the soil and air. It is reported
likewise, that roots (such as carrots and parsnips) are more
sweet and luscious in infectious years than in other years. [...]
So the parts of beasts putrefied (as castoreum and musk, which
extreme subtile parts,) are to be placed amongst them. We see
also that putrefactions of plants (as agaric and Jew's-ear) are
of greatest virtue. The cause is, for that putrefaction is the
subtilest of all motions in the parts of bodies; and since we
cannot take down the lives of living creatures, (which some
of the Paracelsians say, if they could be taken down, would
make us immortal,) the next is for subtilty of operation, to take
bodies putrefied; such as may be safely taken.9
Putrefaction is comprised of these extremely subtle

motions - infinitesimal fields of differentiation - according
8. V. Hugo, Les Miserables (London: Penguin, 1982), 1087.
9. F. Bacon, The Works efLord Bacon (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854) , 159.
412
to which various and outlandishly incongruous forms can

smoothly blend. T he idea of the human becomes a smooth
gradient of different worms, flies, wasps, plants and fungi.
The toad, the miasma, the sludge and the human all become
part of a differential field wherein each entity can gradually
unfold into another regardless of the congruity of their
traits, environments and habits. These subtle, fiuxional or
infinitesimal movements point to the gradational continuity
of deformities in decay whose basal continuity is maintained
by the dynamism of complicity as a form of participa
tion in which, instead of commonality and replacement,
inflection and nestedness - that is to say, the mathesis of
the insider - are the guarantors of the collective action.
To this extent, a politics of decay as building process fully
employs the mathesis of the insider as the prerequisite for
the dynamism of collectivity: In the calculus of decay, it no
longer matters if there is a commonality or even a minimal
agreement between conjoined or discrete elements; putre
faction causes the decaying or infected parts or elements to
interpolate themselves between other healthy elements and
parts in such a way that everything is collectively mobilised
by and toward putrefaction.
T he fiuxional continuity of decay gradients smoothly,
or more accurately, differentially connects incongruous
forms. The act of figuration, in terms of decay, is equal to
smoothing what is already out of place; everything must
be con-figured again according to the smooth gradients
of decay whose basal continuity lies in the complicity of
horizons of interiority. To putrefy means to 'parabolify
the straight line' (to use Boscovich's term) ,10 then to twist
10.J. F. Scott, 'Boscovich's Mathematics' in Roger Joseph Boscovich, S.J., F.R.S., 1711-
1787: Studies ofHis Life and Uf!rk on the 250th Anniversary ofHis Birth (London: George
Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1 961 ) , 183-92.
413
COLLAPSE VI
the curve and eventually to convolute the already twisted

curve. In other words, in order to approximate forms, the
line of figuration must pass through points of inflections or
latitudes of a given form. In this sense, figuration becomes
more accurate as it passes more points of inflection or
traverses more latitudes; yet to encompass more points
means that the line of figuration cannot remain a straight
line but must become an increasingly convoluted curve.
The painter Francis Bacon presents such a model of
smooth figuration in which a form is limitropically approxi
mated through ever swirling and twisting curves. Bacon's
method of figuration becomes a function of approximation
rather than reproduction and for this reason, it acquires
a configuring mechanism that corresponds intimately to
that of decay and its smooth gradients: How many points
can a line encompass, how many latitudes can be traversed
by a differential function, before the line turns into a
coiling abomination or the differential function becomes
'difformly difformly . . . difformly difform'? The thawing
meat of Francis Bacon's figures, the oozing colour gradients
of his landscapes and the heads whose figural approxima
tions are bundles of coiling tails all suggest a differential
function which indexes instant and remote derivatives of a
given form in the smoothest fluxional manner.
In decay, the act of figuration corresponds to the act of
curve fitting in interpolation. Between two forms, two entities
or two horizons, one can only make a continuously smooth
connection by encompassing the derivatives which remotely
connect these forms or entities together. The remoter and
further apart the derivatives of these forms and entities, the
smoother and more congruously they can be connected to
each other. As the forms or given variables increase, the
differential function also becomes more complex and the
414
curve for smoothly connecting these variables or given data

points becomes increasingly more convoluted. A curious
literal depiction of these seething differential curves which
connect putrefying forms together in the slimiest and most
twisted ways possible can be found in Laurence Housman's
intricate art nouveau drawings. Cauchemar (which originally
appeared in The Dimu:, published by Unicom Press [1899])
is a nightmare of a slimy nature lost and perplexed in the
putrid mazes of its evanescent forms and their derivatives.
It depicts a man being consumed by trees, becoming a tree,
415
COLLAPSE VI
yet this concomitant change of identity and forms leaves

behind it a slimy trace, demonstrated by a pandemonium
of twirling curves which connect the horizon of man to that
of trees.
The universal calculus of decay does not tolerate an
abrupt mutation from human to tree, as Hieronymus
Bosch's tree-man might imply. In decay as a process of
cosmogenesis, the tree and human are not two entelechies
or perfected bodies of actuality which can be connected
together via a straight line. Both 'being a tree' and 'being a
man' are changing variables - rates of change between their
respective actualities and potencies on the one hand and
between their interiorities and the exteriority on the other.
Therefore, the most veritable line of transition that can be
drawn between a human and a tree is not a line connecting
their fixed actualities or traits but a line that encompasses
their existing actualities (given points) as well as their
potentials and derivatives (even the remotest ones). The
tree is itself a differential field of ideas - or in a Leibnizian
sense a generative reservoir of smaller bodies - which
themselves are changing and have their own derivatives;
the same profusion with subtle bodies and movements is
also applicable to man, its idea and its form. Therefore,
in order for the line of putrefaction to draw gradients of
decay between the man and the tree, it must encompass
such ever-increasing (both in quantity and distance from
their original ideas or formations as a whole) emerging
bodies, ideas or derivatives. In interpolating between
all these points and emerging values, the slimy line of
rot becomes an ever-convoluting curve. For this reason,
the nightmarish plunge of the human into the verdant
inferno of growth is accentuated when the line between
the human and the tree becomes infinitely convoluted,
416
encompassing a cosmic array of beings which only differ

entially - that is to say, very remotely - connect to either
the tree or the human. In other words, in decay, the object
travels across a world of familiar and alien beings which
may or may not have any immediate relationship or affinity
with the decay ing object. This also means that the most
accurate line of transition between a human and a tree is
a line that progressively encompasses not only the tree
and the human but also their remotest derivatives and the
least actual potencies. This is the taphonomic logic behind
the slimy forms of putrefaction and the ever-shrinking
bodies of decomposition (as in ruins) where the complicity
between parts and derivatives becomes a subtractive
and hence sy nergistic counterpart to the limitropically
shrinking remnants of the thing's former self. In becoming
a vividly accurate (i.e. nightmarish) transition between the
human and the tree, the connecting line encompasses more
beings and consequently becomes more convoluted. Decay
corresponds to such an approximation of the distance or
relationship between two given entities as continuously
changing variables. The minimum possible number of
curves for passing through the maximum number of points
or entities - this Hawed but concise formula defines the
nightmare of decay as an abominable curve that extracts
values and beings from all that it encompasses, building
worlds and corpses more efficiently than God. The effect
of decay 's cosmogenesis for any horizon of interiority is
a weird amalgamation of vitalistic trust in one's survival
and susceptibility to a unilateral terror from the inside -
the treachery of the former and the non-negotiability of the
latter. This is not just because decay draws its lurid forms
upon the complicity of contingencies of an indifferent time
with the conceptless exteriority of space, but because it
417
COLLAPSE VI
mobilises the exteriorizing terror of such complicity right

from the inside of the interiorized horizon and through its
locus of persistence and its definition of survival.
BUILDING WORLDS AND CORPSES, OR THE QyESTION OF

MA1HEMATICO-CHEMICAL DYNAMISM
I observe in advance that numerically the same change may

be the generation of one being and the alteration of another:
for example, since we know that putrefaction consists in little
worms invisible to the naked eye, any putrid infection is an
alteration of man, a generation of the worm.11
It was argued that decay effectuates a perpetual

deformation which does not dismantle the primal formation
by erasing its fundamental ontological registers or minimal
formal traits, but rather ceaselessly pushes the formation
to new levels of degeneration by infinitely building over
and through it. For this reason, decay can extract softness
from solidity (if solidity is inextricable from its stable, molar
and rigid qualities as well as its manifest wholeness) and its
socio-political abstractions, deducing political tenacity and
persistence from the degeneration of power formations.
This is the arcane tTWdus vivendi of certain political systems
whose decay or corruption does not lead to their demise
and destruction but rather endows them with the gift of a
camouflaged existence - a simultaneous unrecognizability
ensued by thawing forms and an axiomatic or fundamental
persistence as the result of their limitropic dissolution.
Once the state embraces decay as a form of camouflage
and persistence, it turns into a site of complicity between
1 1 . G. W. Leibniz, Philosaphical Papers and Letters (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic

Publishers, 1 989) , 96.
418
all decaying elements or splinters of rot in its vicinity, in

the manner of an interpolating differential function. The
nebulous term 'rouge state' outlines some of the charac
teristics of a state which has deliberately bound decay as
the building process of its formation. It is in this sense, that
the degeneration of the solid and its abstractions does not
essentially entail its dissolution into liquid or the fluid state
where the solid loses its minimal traits through fundamental
transformation, but the differential deformity of the solid to
such an extent that the idea and formal integrity of solidity
are chemically pulverised by the inner potencies of the solid
itself. The solid gains a corrupting mobility - or a differen
tial power of interpolation - at the cost of losing its integrity
and established forms. The impaired integrity of the solid
formation allows for the eruption of potencies whose actu
alisation would otherwise have been subjected to the pre
established laws and climates of solidity (viz. its coherence,
formal rigidity, stability, etc.)
The forms of rot, as discussed in the previous section,
are in direct correspondence with the dynamism of decay
or its differentially corruptive mobility. Since the complicity
of time and space in their contingency and exteriority
bring about the possibility of this peculiar dynamism, the
dynamism of decay is characterized by a chemical disposition
with a calculative mode of distribution. Whereas its chemical
disposition is associated with the spatially enveloped and
mobilised contingencies of time, its calculative mode of
distribution is the result of its asymptotic approach to the
exteriority of space according to which every interiority
inflects yet another interiority, whether in the direction
of the precursor exteriority (complicatio) or the extensively
dissipated interiorities (explicatio). This chemically-charged
419
COLLAP SE VI
and calculative dynamism, accordingly, operates as a

bidirectional building process: it intensively builds the
abstract by positively binding a limitropic conception of
zero (the body of the minimum) and extensively builds the
concrete by extensively giving rise to derivatives or differ
entiated horizons of interiority (worms, animalcules, antic
differences). In order to formalise the dynamism of decay
as a building process, a reductionist mathematical formula
of decay can be constructed so as to demonstrate, capture
and ultimately diagram decay as a building process. 1bis
reductionist formal model incorporates three basic inter
connected aspects of decay's dynamism:
(1) Perpetual inclusion - inflection and nestedness:
The line of decay or the differential function of
putrefaction must cover and encompass all given
values - given points, forms and traits of the inte
riorized horizon as well as its emerging derivatives,
actualities and gradationally emerging potencies.
Perpetual inclusion ensures that all emerging
potencies be indexed and encompassed by the
differential function of decay. Any change - whether
extensive or intensive, outward or inward - in the
decaying object should be included by the process
of decay. The possibility of including and encom
passing both intensive and extensive changes attests
to the imperfectibility of being and the inherent
susceptibility of the interiorized horizon to exteri
orization. Since perpetual inclusion means that both
extensive and intensive changes are encompassed
concurrently and since these changes are subtrac
tively correlated to each, the perpetual inclusion is
essentially the ratio of changes which registers itself
420
as a slope - the rate of ex-plicatio (unfolding) to com

plicatio (folding), extensive motions to intensive
. L\y
motions, -
L\x
(2) The law of basal continuity, or the persistent
continuity between limitropically vanishing values
and emerging values: In a decaying object, no
matter how significant the change or how unrecog
nizable the deformity is, it cannot depart from the
ever-shrinking fundaments, axioms or basic registers
of the object or formation. In other words, as the
formation undergoes new extremes of deformity
or the object rots to new levels, the fundaments of
the formation or the basic ontological registers of
the object also become more emphatic - that is to
say, truer to their ideal. The law of basal continuity
in decay holds that emerging values or changes
must be continuous to fixed or established values,
fundaments and basic axioms of the formation
regardless of their distance and difference. Here
continuity can be formalised as follows: Suppose X
is a fundament or an axiomatic value of a decaying
system and Y is a deformation, a change or an
emerging value, and the function f stands for the
putrefying line of decay that encompasses X and Y.
Now, f is continuous at x for some x EX if for any
neighborhood Wofj(x), there is a neighbourhood
Z of x such that f(ZJ W; meaning that, irrespec
tive of how small Wbecomes, a Z containing x that
will map inside it can be found. Hf is continuous at
every x EX, then/is continuous.
42 1
COLLAPSE VI
(3) Differentiable smoothness: Following and in

accordance with the first two principles, the encom
passing process of decay as an interpolant should be
as smooth as possible, or more precisely, infinitely
differentiable so as to support both the perpetual
inclusion of all extensive and intensive changes and
the basal continuity between persistent remnants
and emerging forms and values.
In decay what is firstly enacted is the subtractive
power of putrefaction whereby extensive and intensive
changes are simultaneously included. Subtractive
binding of changes ensures that vectorially opposite
changes can be included in regard to each other in
such a way that every extensive change inflects an
intensive change and vice versa. For this reason,
the law of basal continuity which emphasises the
continuity between ever-shrinking fundaments and
the emerging changes cannot be maintained except
through the subtractive power of decay, or more
accurately, decay's perpetual inclusion of changes
and deformities. Therefore, perpetual inclusion
enacted by the subtractive logic of decay precedes
the continuity between the intensive ideals of the
formation and its extensive ideas which are in the
process of unfolding. In this sense, continuity C is
built upon the output of inclusion I (i.e. inclusion
of both intensive and extensive changes) . Inclusion
alone, however, does not support the continuity of
what is included either in terms of 'the continuity
between those changes which will be included
and those which have already been included' (the
intensively enveloped fundaments) or in terms of
422
'the ceaseless differentiability of the process'. For this

reason, the input of continuity should be the output
of inclusion, which is the sum of the actualities of the
interiorized horizon and its gradient of potencies,
the extensive development and the intensive
x y
Diagram 1. Basal continuity between the limitropically shrinking object

(persistence) and its putrid deformity (change)
envelopment of the formation. Here, if I is the

perpetual inclusion and C the basal continuity, then
their relation can be formalized as:
C0J or x1--+C(I(x))
Perpetual inclusion I, basal continuity C and differenti
able smoothness constitute the main principles of decay's
dynamism D in regard to any interiorized horizon Hand
in relation to time t. These three principles give decay the
power to mobilise and unleash the irruptive contingencies
of time from within and through the interiorized horizon.
423
COLLAPSE VI
Putrid deformities or smooth gradients of decay are

forcefully yet nonviolently extracted from the ostensibly
secured interiority of the horizon by the combined function
of the aforementioned principles. Accordingly, for an inte
riorized horizon demarcated by the ratio of its actualities
(a) and potencies (p), decay can be reductively sy mbolized
as: 12
D J\ (C(l(x))Y I
H
/i
t
dt
The Leibnizian notation for the differentiation
(C(J(x))) " would be d" (C(J (x))) expressed as a

dx"
rate of differentiation within itself - a differential curve
within a curve. To put it differently, in the above formalised
model of decay' s dynamism, the process of decay D evolves
not only as a curve generated by the complicity of time and
space but also as a curve that differentially encompasses
the potencies and actualities of a horizon. Decay, in this
sense, is a curve in the perpetual act of curving. The act of
perpetual curving whereby for every twist another twist is
reinvented (ryma reversa ) presents (reductively) a model of
decay as a building process that delivers the interiorized
horizon to its heretical wastelands. In line with Leibniz' s
remarks cited at the beginning of this section regarding
12. The vertical bars here signify the absolute value of decay's dynamism D, both
in its negative and positive orientations. Schematically, by positive decay we mean
the extensive vector of decay which takes the idea toward its concrete chemical
manifestations and unfolds the forms or derivatives which are enveloped by the
interiorized horizon. By negative decay, on the other hand, we point to the intensive
vector of decay which limitropically abstracts and shrinks the idea toward the zero of
ideas and inflects the interiorized horizon toward the precursor exteriority.
424
the dy namics of infinitesimal vermiculation of the body in

putrefaction, the process of decay returns every outward
twist developed from the interiorized horizon with an inner
twist within the horizon itself and vice versa. The reason
(ratio) according to which the horizon of interiority works
and strives for its ideal status takes a vermiculate tum once
it is bent from both ends by the twists (abstract worms)
which force it to veer in unforeseeable directions. Once
a rectifying ratio between the ideal and the idea (both in
its intensive envelopment and extensive development) is
established, reason becomes a worm that bores through the
horizon so as to prepare it for that which can easily creep in
or ooze out. By differentially corrupting the ratio between
the idea and its ideal and the ratio between actualities and
potencies of an object, decay reinvents the interiorized
horizon on the heretical side of itself. It is the pragmatic
artistry of decay to harvest limitless potentialities from the
subversive logic of interiority on behalf of an exteriority in
whose term every horizon must be deserted according to a
reason (raiio) which is crooked at both ends.
Nowhere has the curving function of decay been more
explored than in scholasticism - in particular in the theories
developed at Merton College, Oxford and the University
of Paris, which constitute some of the germinal ideas of
mathematics and chemistry. In scholasticism, mortffo:oioi ,
nigredo and putrefClCtio all point to the overlapping regions
between chemistry and mathematics through proto-scien
tific ideas germinated in theology, natural philosophy,
medicine and the culinary arts. The corpse, as the
epitome of putrefaction, demarcates the transition from
the complicatio of a body to its explicato. Such transition
essentially takes place as a slope, 'the rise of potentialities
in the form of actualities' in respect to 'the varying flux of
425
COLLAPSE VI
potentialities'. These are the slopes of body qua complexus

that provide the process of decay with fields of gradation
whose dynamism can only be differentially grasped. Unlike
the complicatio of God, the complicaiio of body qua complexus
is under the influence of its actualities whose distribu
tion is extensively toward the outer world or the world of
multitudes. In other words, since the actualities of the body
are not perfect (immutable), nor are its potencies fixed, the
complexus of the body is determined by the ratio of complicatio
(envelopment of potencies) and explicatio (the development
of potencies as actualities) in regard to each other
(). For God, there is no rate of change (slope) between
possibilities and actualities, since God is the complete
actuation of its complete potencies or Possest (Nicholas of
Gusa). Accordingly, if there is no rate of change between
possibilities (fip) and actualities (fia) in God, or in other
words, if God is not ontologically differentiable within itself,

then !!.a cannot have a rate of change or slope, i.e. !!. a must
be a vertical line (illustrated by the vertical fold ap in diagram
2) . It is the verticality of God in the scholastic threefold
of existence that precludes deviation, the emergence of
gradients and consequently, the curving dynamism of rot
- God is the one without slopes. Hence the saying, God is
too stiff to rot.
Actuabty
l (esr)
!'ossest / Unit Capacity

(God)
Diagram 2. The scholastic threefold of existence (posse, est and God qua possest)
426
For the scholastic marriage of mathematics and

chemistry through natural philosophy, the camplicatio
of body is full of deviations, rates of changes between
actualities and possibilities, little slopes everywhere
swerving from the vertical positioning of possest. Twisting
in and out, wiggling in all directions, slopes are bodies,
disturbances in existence for which infinite differentiation
is assured. Scholastic bodies are slopes or rates of change
between the rise of actualities and potencies capable of
being actualized (a,pJ Despite their tangency to God,
they possess the power of infinite differentiability, the
power of prolonging the slope process - dragging the rate
of progression and change between potency and actuality
forever. But at any given time, for scholastic bodies,
!!..p >- !!.. a and !!..p . !!..a otherwise the body is supplanted by
the full body of entelechies whose possibilities have all been
actualised. That is to say, if actualities become equal to
possibilities or possibilities (all variations of posse) become
exhausted by being actualised, then the scholastic body
becomes a rival for the Divine or is posed as a blasphemous
threat to its possest where a=p. The perfection of God is
assured by uniting (or completely overlapping) the latitude
of both potencies and actualities with the distance or the
longitude between them. The impermeable infinity of God
cannot express the world outside of itself; because outside
of it is the field of slopes which expresses everything in
the language of complicities, differentiations and ratios,
rises over runs, the worlds produced by the undulations of
imperfectibility - the cosmogenesis of decay. For scholastic
bodies whose potentialities are infinite, their actualities can
be neither infinite (as opposed to the infinite entelechia of
God) nor equal to possibilities/potencies as in the case of
the possest of God (i.e. !!..p >- !!.. a, a oo, a p) . Consequently,
427
COLLAP SE VI
in this case, as actualities are fulfilled, their number in

respect to potencies (possibilities) starts to decrease.
In other words, the increase in fulfillment of actualities or
perfections is equal to the decrease in actualities' capacity
for differentiability. Therefore, for scholastic bodies, which
are tangential to God's possest (rFp) , being is Jim lip that
MO /)..a
-
is, an open quandary in regard to infinity. 1 3 However, even

if the potentialities/possibilities of being are not limitless
(as some scholastic theologians like Anselm of Canterbury
might object), the scholastic body is still an anomalous
tangency to the Divine that instigates an 'infinitesimal
. ' agamst
subversion . God : 11m lip c
. There10re, . e1"ther
in
M -O /)..a
-
case, bodies of scholasticism are insurgencies or insistent

perversions mobilized by slopes. In taking all beings as
tangential to the possest of God, being can only be conceived
in tenns of rates of differentiation. The consequence of the
onto-theological marginalisation of scholastic bodies via
the privileging of God's possest is that the exclusive power
and use of slopes is inadvertently dedicated to beings ; this
power is the power of extracting worlds through differen
tiation, or unearthing schemas of subversions through the
limits of ratios. Everything other than God is the explicatio
of slopes (Athanasius Kircher's abstract wonns) ; this is far
too cosmically revolutionary to be fathomed. Such is the
revolution of scholasticism, flourishing in the mediaeval
orgy of scholastic theology, natural philosophy and science.
13. The anachronistic use of the limit function here is solely for a succinct exposition
of the quandaries spontaneously generated in scholasticism as the result of
marginalising the explicatio of beings. These quandaries or ideas, as implied in this
essay, began to haunt mediaeval philosophy, and initiated a series of philosophical
and scientific problems heralding and eventually leading to the rise of Renaissance
philosophy and science.
428
Corresponding to the subtractive logic of decay, the

ratios or slopes of putrefaction ramify the mathematico
chemical vectors of decay in two directions. This results
in the architecture of decay being posited as a turning
point (inflection) at which the concrete manifestation of the
process of decay is chemically invested as the product of its
abstract process, and the abstraction of decay mathemati
cally returns to its concrete investment. The double-dealing
attitude of decay in regard to the concepts of the abstract
and the concrete contributes to the twist of decay as a
building process: That which is palpably rotting develops
out of that which is progressively becoming abstract.
To put it succinctly, the process of decay is progressively
concrete and retrogressively abstract. This return between
the abstract and the concrete is especially evident in ruins,
where the abstract is inextricable from the concrete;
to privilege one over another is either a necromantic fallacy
or a necrocratic policy.
Mathematics with a chemical disposition or chemical
revolution via mathematical distributions, decay captures
both within its act of building. It is only in the light of
the mathematical and chemical complications of decay
as a building process that the melancholic admiration for
decay and fetid entities, along with the ostracization and
dismissal of socio-political decay, can be dissected without
blind romanticism, moral opprobrium or crude judgment.
It is not that earthly thought is the site of decay from which
we must ascend to the fresh air, but that the calculus of
decay constitutes the ecology of our interiorized worlds -
whether built on the desolate surface of the earth or in the
fresh air of a beyond. The calculus of decay has its own
problems, ideas and solutions; to politicise, philosophise,
429
COLLAPSE VI
scheme or take action without such calculus is tantamount

to calculating out of this world - an outside that does not
suggest the great abyssal outdoors but the sealed enclosures
of pure entelechy whose immutable horizon does not
welcome ecological changes in any direction whatsoever.
43 0
COLLAPSE VI
P h i losophers ' l slands1
Theoretical physics and cosmology over the last half

century has provided a new context in which some of the
most fundamental questions of philosophy find a new life
and a new sense. In this new context, we find the recurrence
of an image that spans the history of Western philosophy:
that of the island.
If we think of the fundamental parameters that
govern the laws of physics as the axes of a topographical
space, a landscape of possible universes, then to our best
knowledge, only a very small area of it is 'habitable' by life:
We live on an island - or rather, life as we know it is itself
an island. Of course this does not mean that the universe
was 'designed for us' : Rather, it opens up the question of
whether there might be other 'islands' in this space, other
1. Text of a public lecture given inJanuary 2009 at the Scottish National Gallery of
Modern Art to accompany Charles Avery's exhibition The Islanders: An lntroduct:Wn.
43 1
COLLAPSE VI
possible universes in which radically different forms of

life could emerge. Milan Cirkovic, posing this question of
'astrobiology', insists that we ought not to let the confined
shores of our island existence mislead us into thinking that
this is the only 'habitable zone' in the sea of possibilities.
Instead, he hypothesises, there may be an 'archipelago of
habitability', a system of islands whose pattern might even
be mathematically discoverable. Artist Charles Avery' s
'Sketch for an Archipelago', with its spiral structure,
illustrates the hypothesis perfectly. 2
1bis notion of the tiny habitable island in a vast sea of
possible universes belongs to a novel philosophical discourse
subtended by contemporary physical and mathematical
concepts. But it attests to the fact that certain enduring
images continue to constitute something like pieces of a re
usable theatrical stage-set for philosophical thinking. The
image of the island is one of these, and is as old as Western
philosophy itself. Charles Avery, like many before him, has
taken up this concept of the 'philosophical island' and made
it his own. In order to understand Avery' s contribution to
this history, we shall take a historical tour - inevitably very
selective - through the various ages of the philosophical
island. 1bis subject, and its history, are so rich in particular
because philosophy shares the 'geophilosophical concept'
of the island with literature. In fact, the island has always
defined an important relationship between the two: The
island is a kind of conceptual laboratory for transplanting
stories into ideas, for imbuing narratives with concepts, for
bringing ideas alive through myths.
2. See Milan Cirkovic, 'Sailing the Archipelago', COLLAPSE V, 292-329.
43 2
Mackay - Philosophers' Islands
The island first appears when Western philosophy, at its

birth, is still negotiating its divorce from its other: namely,
myth. In Plato's Timaeus the fable of the island of Atlantis
occurs within a discussion of the rational principles of a
perfect society. Socrates complains that, whilst he understands
the conclusions arrived at, he would 'compare [him]self to a
person who, on beholding beautiful animals either created
by the painter's art, or, better still, alive but at rest, is seized
with a desire of seeing them in motion or engaged in some
struggle or conflict to which their forms are suited'.3
This demand of Socrates sets in motion the history of
the philosophers' island. The demand for something to bn"ng
a1ve ideas; to quicken the still body of rational discussion,
finds satisfaction in the story of Atlantis, the lost island.
As we know, Plato's dialogues often comprise
secondhand reports, but the Tzmaeus ramifies further this
strategy of framing, as the story of Atlantis is reported
by Socrates' friends as an ancient story heard from a
grandfather, who in tum heard it from a friend of his great
grandfather, Solon, who received it from an Egyptian priest.
Through this relay of memory, Plato establishes Atlantis
at an immemorial distance from his audience, endowing it
with a properly mythical status.
The priest's story is of a war waged by the island
kingdom of Atlantis against the city of Athens - but this is
an Athens separated from Plato's contemporary Athens by
an impassable gulf of forgetting. For the flooding of the nile,
as the priest tells Solon, has on many occasions saved the
Egyptians, and their knowledge, from great catastrophes
3. 'Iimacu.s 1 9b.
43 3
COLLAPSE VI
periodically visited on the Earth and which have wiped

out many other peoples including the Greeks. In this way
Plato gives his audience to understand that they belong to
a shallo w memory cut off from the deep past in which the
story takes place. Hence the priest' s gnomic declaration:
"You Hellenes will never be anything but children".
At the climax of the war both (the immemorial) Athens
and Atlantis were inundated by a great flood, and their
people, Plato tells us, 'disappeared in the depths of the sea'.
The island of Atlantis never reappeared, but Athens rose
again from the waters. Reborn into an immature state,
stripped of its former glory, the 'infant' Athens would have
to learn once again to be the perfect republic.
This unveils the original function of the philosophers'
island as being connected with a mythical conception of
time, with forgetting and memory, with re-beginning
and with founding; It sets up a theme of utter oblivion
and forgetting only so as to pose the question of the new
foundation - no island, therefore, without the flood.
How does this myth transform the philosophical
discussion of Socrates and his friends? 'The city and
citizens, which you yesterday described to us in fiction,
we [ . . . ] now transfer to the world of reality'. Paradoxically,
fiction imparts reality to the philosophical discussion. For
the ideal city they had discussed now becomes the city of
their own lost ancestors. Where there was the mere idea of
a city run on rational grounds, now there is the prospect of
a repetition, the fulfilment of a cycle. The island myth, of
course, dramatises the notion of anamnesis, or unforgetllng'.
Rational insight comes not from our experience of this
world, but from a remembering of an other world, the
434
recovery of a pure knowledge that was lost when we were

incarnated.
Plato's Atlantean myth rises again as the perfect narrative
form for the ideals of the humanist Renaissance - naturally,
considering that it precisely concerns a 'rebirth'. In Francis
Bacon's 1623 .New Atlantis, for example, all the important
elements are reworked: A crew lost in a 'part of the South
Sea [ . . . ] utterly unknown', cut adrift 'in the midst of the
greatest wilderness of waters in the world', discover the
island of Bensalem, whose perfectly-calibrated civilisation,
with its gentle, humanistic, scientifically-advanced
government, embodies all of Bacon's aspirations for the
improvement of human society. The people of Bensalem,
it transpires, whilst their existence is perfectly unknown
to the rest of the world, have an astonishingly complete
knowledge of the whole globe, and their civilisation has
endured from time immemorial, from before the 'universal
flood'. Of the people of this island, too, one could well say:
'you Europeans will never be anything but children'. Again,
Bacon's advanced ideas on society and science, in the
mouths of these fictional, antediluvian islanders, become
an invitation to repeat: Not only does his 'New Atlantis'
repeat Plato's, it also calls his contemporaries to repeat the
example of the people of Bensalem.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves: For we should
remember the extent to which, before the Renaissance, It
was Arabic philosophers and commentators who nurtured
and developed philosophical thought. And the concept of
the philosophical island is no exception. One remarkable
text by a Spanish muslim philosopher could, without much
exaggeration, be described as being halfway between
435
COLLAPSE VI
Aristotle and Robinsan Crusoe. This is Ibn Tufayl's book

'Hayy ibn Yaqzan', a twelfth-century arabic text translated
into English in 1708 as 'The Improvement of Human
Reason', known in Latin as 'Philosophus Autodidactus' ('the
self-taught philosopher') . This is a text known to have been
influential for some of our most enduring modem myths:
The Jungle Book, Robinsan Crusoe, Tan.an to name but a few.
Tufayl's narrative tells the story of a child named Hayy ibn
Yaqzan, who is cast away on an unpopulated island, and
raised by gazelles. The narrative follows the development
of this castaway's philosophical meditations as he grows
up and discovers the world, in isolation from all human
contact.
Tufayl's book is essentially a philosophical treatise,
speaking of all things from biology to planetary motions.
But its form is that of a progressive narrative, recounting
how these philosophical reflections emerge in a man
reduced to his 'natural state', removed from all cultural
influence: We see Yaqzan growing up among animals, first
lamenting his own weakness and vulnerability relative
to them, then discovering the uses of his hands, making
clothes, devising tools and weapons. He discovers fire and
cooked food, thus awakening his human difference from
the animals. But his philosophical development really
begins in earnest when his gazelle-foster-mother dies. T his
precipitates a reflection upon what is alive in an animal
being, with Yaqzan concluding that the body is 'a very
inconsiderable thing', and beginning to foster a conception
of the soul. Thence to the questions of how the soul is
conjoined with the body, with the conclusion that the soul
is akin to fire, a kind of warm vapour. The individuality of
43 6
each being must then consist in this 'vapour'; and Yaqzan

conceives an analogy between his own use of various
tools, and this vapourous spirit's use of the various animal
bodies for different purposes. With lengthy meditations
on unity and plurality, individuals and species, the self
taught philosopher rediscovers the principles of Aristotelian
taxonomy, and proceeds to classify the entire animal and
vegetable kingdom, finally considering inanimate objects,
and coming to the conclusion that 'all these things [are] in
reality one, though multiplied and diversified accidentally
as the plants and animals [are]'. But what then is the nature
of this unified substance that underlies all these various
things in the world? . . . With further meditations reaching
ever more abstract questions and lofty conclusions, the
feral child Yaqzan achieves philosophical enlightenment as
an adult.
In fact Yaqzan does make contact with civilisation again,
through the medium of a holy man who comes to the island
to meditate ; however, after having returned to his fellow
humans, he finds them so unwilling to consider the way of
wisdom that he returns to his island.
1bis remarkable story is the first fully philosophical use
of the island. Recounting the genesis of philosophical
thought as a natural development, it serves to ratify a
body of doctrine as belonging to the natural progression of
reason, untainted by outside influences. And the function
of philosophical islands continues to be involved with
this desire for purity - with philosophy 's impatience with
dogmatism or received wisdom, its compulsion to begin
from nothing, to re-begin with no presuppositions, to faund
itself. For the philosopher, the island is a chance to begin
437
COLLAPSE VI
over again, giving us the possibility of re-founding our

knowledge on the basis of an imaginary innocence.
Returning to the Renaissance and to its utopias - those
New Atlantises reflecting the optimistic spirit of the age
- the most important is probably Thomas More' s 15 16
fictional crescent-shaped Atlantic Island Utopia, a name
which of course harbours an etymological ambiguity: 'no
place' and 'good-place'. It' s precisely an ideal which cannot
be fully realised but which might serve as an orientation,
a navigation point: More' s discussion of the ills of society,
the vanity of people, the belligerence of leaders, gives us an
enduring model of sociological and philosophical reflection
that is very much alive two hundred years later - in more
satirical form - in Gulliver's Tra:oelr, which however teaches
through a mocking reductio o.d absurdum, not by example,
and is all the more entertaining for it.
Where Ibn Tufayl' s account of the gazelle-child Hayy
ibn Yaqzfui contained both an treatise of philosophy and
a philosophical thesis on the genesis of thought in one
isolated individual, these political fables use the island as
a controlled setting for thought-experiments concerning
the foundations of the social. A great seminal moment in
philosophical island literature occurs, however, when these
two aspects - the innocent indi:mduol finding enlightenment
in the seclusion of an island, and the ideal island society
prompting reflection on our own - are brought together.
This is Defoe' s 1719 Robinson Crusoe.
In Robinson Crusoe all the essential problems of the
philosophical island are brought together beautifully . We
have Crusoe as Christian autodidact, discovering true faith
through his own solitary meditations. But it is not only
438
God that Crusoe discovers : he also enacts the origins of

sedentary human society : The need to settle and defend,
the planting of crops and building up of stores, the need
to domesticate wild animals, even the development of
hierarchy and the legitimacy of servitude . . . But Crusoe is
also the point at which the philosophical island comes into
disrepute, when we begin to harbour suspicions about the
supposed innocence of the protagonist. Readers excited by
the idea of the shipwrecked mariner exploring the virgin isle,
surviving on his wits, cannot but be somewhat disappointed
when Crusoe spends his first two weeks rowing back and
forth to the shipwreck to bring out everything he needs
to set up home, from gunpowder to tunics, from oatcakes
to a complete set of carpentry tools; cannot help feeling a
little cheated when he takes his smug walks to his 'country
house' with his four guns slung around him, or when by
'chance' he discovers some ears of wheat and prudently
sews and stores his harvests for three years . . .
At a century' s distance Marx sums it up drily in the first
volume of Das Kapital: 'having saved a watch, ledger, ink
and pen from the shipwreck, he soon begins, like a good
Englishman, to keep a set of books'.4 For Marx, Crusoe
represented 'a totally illusory foundation for economics,
that of the independent, non-social being'. The story was
an ideological sham, serving to naturalise the system
of bourgeois capitalism, its function to justify a system
through a bogus mythical 'proof of its spontaneous nature.
In short, the island is 'a false "origin"'.
In his 1946 essay 'Causes and Reasons of Desert Islands',
Gilles Deleuze, whilst affirming the philosophical power of
4. K Marx, Capital, vol I, tr. B. Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1 992) , 170 .
439
COLLAPSE VI
the island myth, seconds Marx's suspicions. The problem

with Robinson Crusoe, he writes, is that Defoe's narrative
fails the profound sense of the reinvention of mythology
that characterises the philosophical island: In Crusoe 'The
mythical recreation of the world from the deserted island',
Deleuze says, 'gives way to the reconstitution of everyday
bourgeois life from a reserve of capital. [ ... ] Robinson's
vision of the world resides exclusively in property. Nothing
is invented.' He continues, somewhat harshly: 'One can
hardly imagine a more boring novel, and it is sad to see
children still reading it today [...] Any healthy reader would
dream of seeing [Friday] eat Robinson.'5
Despite these cavils, the structure of Robinson Crusoe so
perfectly distils the island concept that it has proved robust
enough to be critically rewritten, not only in countless
inferior and derivative novels, but also in many inventive
and subversive ways: For example in the wonderfully
philosophically-rich 1972 novel Friday, or the Limbo efthe Pa.cffic
by Deleuze's friend Michel Tournier. Tournier's Robinson,
on the island he names 'Speranza', is depicted in the light
of a philosophical and psychoanalytical melange combining
Freud,Jung, existentialism and structuralism. For Tournier,
the story becomes that of Robinson discovering that what
made him human was his interaction with others. Alone on
the island, he begins to succumb to depersonalisation, sinking
into a delirium where he identifies himself increasingly with
the island. The very delirium against which Defoe's Crusoe
had defended himself implacably with all the salvaged
accoutrements of civilisation becomes, for Tournier, the
5. G. Deleuze, Desert Elmuls tmd other 1xt.s, tr. M. Taormina (Cambridge, Mas s .: MIT
Press, 2003), 12.
440
truth of the island adventure as philosophical, psychotropic

journey. As he struggles to 'humanise' the island, Robinson
becomes dehumanised, becomes the island: 'So Robinson
is Speranza. He only has a consciousness of himself by way
of the fronds of myrtle, through which the sun launches its
arrows of light, he only knows himself in the foam of the
wave washing across the white sand'.
The influence of Tournier's novel can be read in J.G.
Ballard's short 1973 novel Cmu:rete Island, in which - with
typical mordant wit - a businessman finds himself car
wrecked on a traffic island. Unable to escape, this hapless

protagonist also undergoes a kind of psychogeographical
trial, repeating, at the height of his ordeal, the phrase of
Tournier's Robinson: 'I am the island'.
Between Crusoe's island and the Concrete Island, we
must also note a great effiorescence of what can only be
called island narratives without islands: The social contract
theorists. The thought-experiments of Hobbes, Locke and
Rousseau, imagining how society might develop from a
'state of nature', are the great speculative works of modem
political philosophy. These theorists rightly saw that the
island-principle corresponded to an important truth: The
real - even the reality of society - can be profoundly
explored only through an ideal scenario, a controlled
experiment, that steps beyond the bounds of that reality.
In the twentieth century,John Rawls re-imagines the social
contract experiment using imagery that corresponds to
that of isolated islands such as Bensalem, with the 'veil
of ignorance' an impenetrable bank of fog around the
philosophical island. To make his argument, however,
Rawls for the first time posits the 'original position' of the
441
COLLAPSE VI
philosopher outside the island, meditating on the possibilities

of what it might hold and planning his disembarcation.
Even if social contract theory represented in certain
respects the consummation of the political employment of
the philosophical island, in a new modem conception of the
'grounding' or re-foundation of the social on the model of a
civil contract, from the nineteenth century onward its works
were liable to come under suspicion, and to be dismissed
as 'robinsonades' : post-Robinson Crusoe any supposedly
'innocent' deployment of the island as a speculative device
would be subject to great critical scrutiny.
In marking out Reason' s legitimate from its illegitimate
uses, Kant' s Critique ifPure Reason aims to provide the map
for a domain of well-founded, systematic knowledge, and
secure it against the flights of fancy and the speculative
excesses to which Kant considered earlier philosophers had
all-too-easily abandoned themselves. And yet to promote
this somewhat gruelling task Kant employs the image of
the island eftruth, in this famous passage from the Critique ef
Pure Reason:
We have now not merely explored the territory of pure
understanding, and carefully surveyed every part of it, but
have also measured its extent, and assigned to everything its
rightful place. Tb.is domain is an island, enclosed by nature
itself within unalterable limits . It is the land of truth - seductive
name! - surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the native
home of illusion, where many a fog bank and many a swiftly
melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther
shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer ever anew with
empty hopes, and engaging him in enterprises which he can
never abandon and yet is unable to carry to completion. Before
442
we venture on this sea, to explore it in all directions [ . . . ] it will

be as well to begin by casting a glance on the map of the island
which we are about to leave, and to enquire, first, whether
we cannot in any case be satisfied with what it contains - are
not, indeed, under compulsion to be satisfied, inasmuch as
there may be no other territory upon which we can settle; and,
secondly, by what title we possess even this domain, and can
consider ourselves as secured against all opposing claims.
As Michele le Doeuff remarks in her The Philosophical

Imagnary, Kant uses the image of the island to defend
his sober 'critical philosophy' against the more colourful
and grandiose promises of speculative metaphysics : The
'critical' island is certainly not a paradise - but it is infinitely
preferable to the frustrations and dangers of the boundless
ocean, upon which metaphysical speculation recklessly sets
out. If he claims to re-place our knowledge on its proper
ground, Kant is most circumspect about what sort of
territory philosophy can promise to secure for us.
Notably, as le Doeuff remarks, elsewhere Kant warns
against another island: the paradisiac island of the South
Seas. The yearning for its easier climes and for its innocence
is a snare, Kant suggests: they represent a pernicious,
imaginary utopia. Thus Kant sets the seduction of the
southern isle against the foggy northern isle which, whilst
somewhat bleak, is true and solid. As Deleuze says in his
book on Kant, this is the element in which Kant' s thought is
at home: 'the fog of the North'. When Kant trills 'the island
of truth - seductive name!', this is nothing but sarcasm: the
serious philosopher has no business with seductive, pretty
islands where he can lounge about all day under palm trees.
443
COLLAPSE VI
So Kant reinvents the philosophical island as a duality:

There is the southern isle, with its dangerously desirable
holiday-brochure illusion of luxury and leisure; and the
northern isle, safe, secured, and systematic, if a bit grey.
In short, the island of truth is a dreich isle, but it's all we've
got. But even Kant's carefully-delimited and hard-won
piece of solid territory doesn't last long in the history of
the philosopher's island, as Nietzsche, in his 1882 The Gay
Sciena, announces the crisis of late modernity - not only
have we left Kant's island of stability, our own critical self
consciousness has destroyed it:
In the horizon of the infinite.- We have left the land and have
embarked! We have burned our bridges behind us-indeed, we
have gone further and destroyed the land behind us ! Now, little
ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not
always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold
and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you
will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more
awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now
strikes the walls of this cage! Woe, when you feel homesick
for the land as if it had offered more freedom-and there is no
longer any 'land' !
In the epoch that this declaration announces, the

problem is no longer that of founding or re-founding.
Instead it is the crisis of the fruits of enlightenment turning
bad, of science and critical thought having gnawed away the
very foundations of human existence. But even Nietzsche's
declaration that there is 'no longer any "land"' cannot
prevent literature from re-engineering the island for this
age, and according to its dreams and fears. From the end
of the nineteenth century, the philosophical island becomes
a dystopia where the most extreme possibilities, doubts,
444
and horrors of Western civilisation are given free (if safely

sequestered) rein. This tradition begins with H.G. Wells'
(1871) Island ef Dr Moreau. Rather than the island being a
metaphorical setting for a philosophical thought-experiment,
instead we find ourselves on an island where actual
(scientific) experiments are underway and running out of
control. The island becomes a warning, concentrating the
most threatening aspects of contemporary reality into their
confined space.
Instead of accommodating an ideal society whose
principles instruct our own, then, the twentieth-century
island - in which we can include, of course, many of
science-fiction's alien planets and stranded space-stations
- is more likely to amplify developments of real society,
concentrating them into an imagined future that is all
too-near. The power of ideas, rather than being owned
and judiciously employed by philosophy, is now a power
effectively at work in the world, embodied in technology,
uncontrolled or controlled by megalomaniacs and evil
geniuses, perplexing and injuring humanity. This, in short,
is the philosopher's island resounding with the aftershock
of World Wars; and the island rifier Marx rifier Freud, rifier
Darwin.6 And after the twentieth-century revolution in
physics: it is the Island of the fateful experiment - the Bikini
Atoll - and its aftermath (Lord ef the Flies, and countless
other post-apocalyptic fantasies) .
6. Incidentally, we should remark that we owe the whole elaboration of evolutionary

theory from Darwin onward, to an island voyage - Darwin's journey, onboard the
Beagle, to the Galapagos, islands whose slow geological drift apart had effectively
isolated the different species of finches, which thus provided a living stop-motion
image of the process of natural selection. Note, however, that in his new book biologist
SteveJones argues that despite their mythical importance in the popular imagination,
in actual fact the most important island for Darwin's work was England. S. Jones,
Da1Win 's Island: The Galapagos in the Ga:rden ofEngland (London: Little, Brown, 2009) .
445
COLLAP SE VI
In his last novel, entitled imply Islarzd (1962), Aldous

Huxley seems to reverse the trend: He turns the island
once more into a utopia contrasting with the dystopia of
reality. Imagining science being harnessed only for the use
of man, rather than overpowering him, Huxley's 'Pala' is an
imaginary island of sanity in a mad world, where Eastern
wisdom and Western science comet together in the persons
of a shipwrecked scientist and an indigeneous quasi
buddhist order, giving birth to a society stable and free
from madness and venality. Like the autodidact Yaqzan,
everyone on the island is in a state of enlightenment,
nirvana even. And through the great slogan of this modem
Utopia still echoes the voice of Platonic anamnesis: 'Nobody
needs to go anywhere else. We are all, if we only knew it,
already there'. If only we knew it, we could repeat, return
to where we really are. Ultimately, however, the final twist
in Huxley's tale shows that he was himself no longer
convinced of the possibility of such a 'sane society', such a
return to the source. 7
Let's now ask whether we can make out the shape of
a new, twenty-first century philosophical island? Previous
models still haunt us: Just as, in the sixties, Lost in Space
reworked The Swiss Family Robinson for the space age,
Koushun Takami's (1999) comic book Battle Royale and its
(200 1, 2003) film adaptations unfolded as an ultraviolent
revisiting of Lord <fthe Flies; and the TV series Lost (2004-5),
with its plane-crash and its characters named Locke and
7. In a typically cynical rcappropriation of Huxley's combination of science and

religion, Michel Houellebecq's (2005) The Fbssibilily ef an Island returns it to reality.
Houellebecq envisions an island run by a 'cloning cult', based on the actual cult
'Radians' - a real world example of the terrifying combination of genetic engineering,
nanotechnology and religious messianism.
446
Rousseau, remixes a bygone era of island thinking. At

the end of the second episode of Lost, entitled 'Tabula
Rasa', one of the characters declares : "This is a chance for
everyone to start again, regardless of what they were before
the crash". Utopia endures in Hollywood, even if the tale
of Lost becomes darker and more twisted (fatiguingly so) as
the episodes progress.
Perhaps ours is more properly the age of the house
island, isolated but visible by millions, and manipulated
by an unseen controller. Big Brother and its various reality
TV imitators (several of which take up the island theme
very literally, with woeful results) , although they harbour
no illusions of a tahula rasa or a complete new beginning,
are perhaps still rather tied to antiquated forms, their social
engineering redolent of The Tempest, where the audience
delights in Prospero's behind-the-scenes manipulation
of the hapless groups shipwrecked on his enchanted isle.
Ours is also the age of the geoplastic megalomania of
Dubai's man-made archipelagos, where millions of tonnes
of sand is dredged up from the bottom of the sea to create
new islands full ofluxury villas. (Have their architects never
heard the phrase 'built on sand' ... ?) Since every modem
convenience has already been imported, however, the rich
man's island is never interesting, it's never a desert island.
None of these constitute a philosophers' island for today.
The philosophical references of Charles Avery's work
set the conditions for one possibility of what such an island
might be. And his project itself responds to them. It's
a project which resides as much in his book, 8 at once an
8. C. Avery, Tiu: Islanders: An Introductian (London: Parasol Unit/Koenig, 2008) .
447
island travelogue and an enigmatic work of philosophy, as

in the catalogue of drawings and exquisitely-crafted objects
in different media which make up his oeuvre.
At first, Avery's island seems to represent the landscape
ef philosophy, rather than being a vehicle for any particular
philosophical thesis. Looking at the names on his maps, it
seems Avery wishes to make the landscape of his island
and the world surrounding it describe the whole history of
philosophy. In this, his closest reference is Borges' (1940)
story Tian, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, which tells of a researcher's
discovery of a land - possibly real, possibly conspiratorially
fabricated by scholars - whose regions can be differentiated
according to their inhabitants' subscription to different
philosophical theories of meaning. But if we read Avery's
island as some sort of grand allegory, we soon find out that
there is no straightforward 'mapping'. Far from simplifying
the world of ideas by mapping it out, Avery adds to it
and twists it with his strange cartographies. The relation
between metaphor and what is metaphorised is always
slipping and sliding, and everything refuses to fit together
neatly.
There are however some privileged philosophical
references. They belong to the development of the
philosophy of logic and mathematics at the beginning of the
twentieth century, the story of the search for a theory that
would provide a systematic foundation for all logical and
mathematical thought. One of the few actual philosophers
to appear in Avery's drawings, Bertrand Russell, has the
great distinction of having ruined this idea forever, in his
polite letter to his colleague Gottlob Frege. The simple but
powerful paradox discovered by Russell, and which bears
449
COLLAPSE VI
his name, resonates throughout Avery's work: Take the set

of all sets which are not members of themselves : if it does
belong to itself, then it doesn't - And vice versa . . . Take
the barber of the regiment, defined as the man who shaves
everyone who doesn't shave themselves . . . does he shave
himself or not?? (You'll find Avery's own answer to that
particular riddle in his book.) Russell's paradox seems to be
the engine of all the dualities in Avery's work. His islanders
love to cut everything in the universe in two. In fact, the
apotheosis of the islanders' creed might be the old joke
that 'there are only two types of people ; those who divide
people into two types and those who don't'. But the island
is also prowled by anomalous animals that don't seem
to obey these distinctions : The Elusive Noumenon; The
If'en, whose 'defining characteristic [ . . . ] is that they lack
a defining characteristic' ;9 The Essential Mr Impossible . . .
one suspects these are the animating principles of the island,
paradoxes that not only accompany the sharp distinctions
the islanders like to make, but might even sustain them,
as the hope of snaring the Noumenon sustains the hunter.
The disorienting effect of all these paradoxes is already

a little like stepping into Avery's 'Eternity Chamber'. But
there is more. Russell had shown that the most powerful
foundational logical theory was punctured by paradoxes .
But by the 1930s, Godel had proved his incompleteness
theorem, demonstrating that any logical system powerful
enough to provide a foundation for simple arithmetic will
contain at least one proposition whose truth is undecidable.
This shatters philosophers' dreams . Avery's work registers
both the gravity and the humour of these developments.
9. Avery, The Islanders, 47.
450
COLLAPSE VI
No foundations : does this mean no islands? 'In the horizon

of the infinite', neither philosophy nor art can rise above
or systematise the All, or provide it with a foundation.
philosophy and art are themselves situations within the
world, and all situations are incomplete. Avery's work
constantly presents us with this 'punctured' and incomplete
state of knowledge.
In this respect, one might relate Avery's work to that of an
apparently very different artist, Keith Tyson. In fact Tyson
shares similar formal concerns, since his work wrestles with
the idea of systems that strive to encompass and tabulate.
In Large Field Array Tyson tries to create a modular 'system
of everything' - scientific theories, his childhood memories,
images from TY, abstract concepts - and systematically
connect it all together. But he is inevitably faced with
having to rescind this work's claim to be comprehensive
or to systematically represent the world. Of this 'failure'
Tyson says that we must accept that it's impossible for the
artist to create, in a work of art, a model of the universe
that doesn't participate in that universe; works are models
in the universe, not models ef the universe. In an image
very apt for the present discussion, he says that they are
'like a postcard on the beach'. 10 Avery's work is something
like this : a map of the space of thought we inhabit, but
continually folding back upon that space, so that the map
can never be completed, but continually complexifies what
it's mapping.
G. K. Chesterton, in a witty piece entitled 'The
Philosophy of lslands' (1903) , remarks on the very human
need to identify things, and sees at the root of this a wish
10. Keith Tyson, Studio W<zll Drawings 1997-2007 (London: Haunch of Venison,
2007) , 2Z
452
to isolate. It is to this desire that he links both what he calls

the 'perennial poetry of islands' and 'the perennial poetry
of ships':
A ship like the Argo or the Fram is valued by the mind because
it is an island, because, that is, it carries with it, floating loose
on the desolate elements, the resources, and rules and trades,
and treasuries of a nation, because it has ranks and shops and
streets, and the whole clinging like a few limpets to a lost spar.
An island like Ithaca or England is valued by the mind because
it is ship, because it can find itself alone and self-dependent
in a waste of water, because its orchards and forests can be
numbered like bales of merchandise, because its com can be
counted like gold, because the starriest and dreamiest snows
upon its most forsaken peaks are silver flags flown from
familiar masts, because its dimmest and most inhuman mines
of coal or lead below the roots of things are definite chattels
stored awkwardly in the lowest locker of the hold.
T his explains why earlier philosophers' islands now

appear to us to be typical 'philosophers examples' -
they are commodious to the mind only because of their
oversimplicity. The contemporary island can no longer
pander to the desire for isolation, because we know our
world is complex, interconnected, and uprooted: T here are
no more desert islands. Nicholas Bourriaud calls Avery's
island a 'heterotopia' rather than a 'utopia': it's neither 'no
place' nor 'the best place', but an 'otherplace', a 'manyplace',
a multiplicity that is already 'out there'. It is the multiverse
as refracted in Avery's mind. His question, though, is how
to create 'one' out of this dazzling multiplicity. This is
precisely the task Avery set himself when, in the inaugural
gesture of his mammoth project, he declared that from now
453
COLLAPSE VI
on all of his work would find a place in this island kingdom

(so that the 'work' consists not in any one of the objects
created, but in the structural consistency of the whole) .
In regard of the need to isolate things, Chesterton
speaks also of the fear of infinity: for 'to be infinite is to be
shapeless', he says. However, as Alain Badiou has argued,
it is the finite that is the exception: infinity is normal.
Every thing, every situation, can be seen from infinitely
many perspectives, dissected in infinitely many ways ; so
that things are never one in themselves, they are always
multiple, infinitely multiple: To 'count-as-one' a situation
or a thing is always to intervene in it, to creatively shape it.
Cantor's transfinite mathematics, which Badiou
suggests we take as one of the conditions for contemporary
philosophy, is the third of Avery's philosophical sources to
which we should draw attention: Cantor's proof that there
are different .sizes of infinity, which secularises the concept
of infinity and introduces some exquisite paradoxes into
thought. For on Avery's island we meet the strange, ramified
quasi-elephantine creatures the Alephs, believed by some to
be 'descendent[s] of the Noumenon', of which we are told:
'upon the discovery that Aleph Null was not unique, the
ideas accounting for the species were modified'.11
And infinite variety is certainly reflected in Avery's
island - it may be a 'northern isle', but it is not ordered
and bleak like Kant's 'island of truth'. It's an island of gods
and pickled eggs, of bagatelle and pyramids, of seagulls and
alephs. All these things, belonging to very different registers
of reality, co-exist on the island, depicted through Avery's
work through a constantly-evolving palette of techniques
1 1 . Avery, The hlomkrJ, 50.
454
and media. Thus the aforementioned structural principle

of Avery's project is a way for the artist to 'count himself as
one', to bring together all the different situations of which
he is an intersection: philosophical ideas, places, concepts,
people he's seen or known, historical figures, imaginary
situations from books - without suppressing their
multiplicity. The idea of the 'whole project' always goes
before him as a task that will never be finally completed.
There is always more for him to discover on this island,
now that he's decided that the island is where everything
will be.
He therefore suggests a contemporary role for the
philosophical island, for individual and society alike:
stifled by a wealth of multiple possibilities, we lack any
immemorial, mythical example to repeat; there is no deep
past, no 'before the flood', that unifies us ; We can't appeal
to memory anymore for political strength, to tradition for
identity, or to ideal models for simplicity. It is therefore
no longer a question offaundng ourselves on the basis of
mythical islands. Rather, given this multifarious reality, the
problem is to find ourselves in it - or to hunt ourselves in it,
in the process adding to the territory with yet more maps.
Finally, Avery's story is also about the practice of
philosophy itself. His protagonist comes to the island
with a view to being its discoverer - he craves the glory
of discovering something new.12 But he immediately finds
he's not alone. The fantasy of the Victorian explorer
is already dispelled on page one of Avery's travelogue.
This in itself is the condition of doing philosophy in
the present day: a sometimes disheartening process of
12. Avery, The ls/muierJ, 9.
455
COLLAP SE VI
discovering who has already had your thoughts before

you. You're exploring a land that seems, to you, to come
directly from the deepest part of yourself and to contain
the strangest, most intangible thoughts; But you constantly
have to accept others have been there before you, already
mapped, charted, and named these zones of thought,
just like the names on Avery 's map: Descartes ' axiom, The
plzenomenon efsense; The procession efthe Greeks (an archipelago
which includes the island of Tllllaeus). To think today, is
to negotiate an historical constellation of thought-positions;
anomnesis become historical. It is the problem, not of how
to begin from nothing, but of how to synthesise existing,
multiple lines of thought into something new. This
quandary, this weight of history, was the same in which
Avery found himself with respect to an overly historically
conscious discourse of art. The island, the construction of
this island that belongs only to Charles Avery, more than
the sum of its parts, more than any one narrative, is his
response.
According to Avery, if one can't be a discoverer, the
only thing to do is to reinvent oneself as a hunter, trying
to locate the island's greatest treasures, those that have
eluded everyone so far. If Avery says that this characterises
the figure of the artist, one would be inclined to say it
corresponds also to the figure of the philosopher: 'an
eternally hopeful and eternally hopeless individual.
Even though history and reason tell him otherwise he
continues to believe he will prevail'. 1 3 As we have seen, the
history of philosophers' islands is a moving image of this
eternal hope.
13. Avery, The lslmufers, 23.
456
WE DON'T
STAY HERE
BECAUSE
OF GRAVITY
WE STAY
BECAUSE
WE LIKE IT.
COLLAPSE VI
The Islanders : Epilogue1
This is the plain where Rocco once found a dead

monster.
Within its thinness I am profoundly lost.
Multitudes of round white flowers vanish into the
endless ring of light on the horizon, and there is little else,
other than the wind, which ruffies the meadows.
Every so often I think I see, at the edge of my vision,
some small animal flitting, but I cannot say that any of these
sightings are conclusive.
I resolve to fix my eyes downwards and comb the
ground in search of any sign of diversity.
A little flat stone . . . the remains of a small and long-dead
creature . . . possibly . . . strange S-shaped lines in the dust. . .
some foamy substance on a stalk . . . another stone ... an
old bottle !
When turned upside down and shaken, it yields a few
drops of rusty red liquid which disappear into the ground.
1 . Text originally commissioned by 10 Hell with Journals and published as 'The Fancy
of the Hunter', in issue d (Nov. 2009) , eds C. Arsene-Hcnry and H. U. Obrist.
..
459
COLLAPSE VI
Many have ventured to the remotest part of this far off

isle. Some return to tell the story. Those who do say they
came in search of something new, for it is the fancy of the
hunter that, in this reified atmosphere, a beast called the
Noumenon may reside. The existence of this creature has
never been proven, yet there is a deep conviction that it
must indeed be, and do so here, in the wilderness, for the
rest of the Island is well charted.
Some come alone so as not to alarm the creature, but
hope to enchant it - yet any sighting reported by such
solitaries is dismissed as the altitude induced hallucination
of the wishful, or the fabrication of the charlatan. Others
come in pairs so as to have somebody to corroborate
their testimonies, but none have been successful. It seems
'Three's a crowd' as far as the Noumenon is concerned.
Then there have been great enterprises where hundreds
have come up here, with dogs and nets, and all manner
of contraptions, and have sought to encircle the creature,
fruitlessly.
This is clearly a being of infinite finesse. Its existence is
sustained by faith alone, or, as The Urbane Wit commented:
"It's behind you!"
Nevertheless there is an ocean of amnesia that new
generations must cross to come to the island; and as they
pull their barques ashore and savour the moist air, each
expedition with its newest equipment, a picture of jovial
young women and men on the beach, full of optimism as
they head for the darkness.
I too was drawn up here by the scent of this enigmatic
cat, and am all regret. I would gladly settle for the impression
of its droppings if I could be delivered from this situation.
460
Avery - The Islanders
I am disgusted with my weakness of character, for I

must admit that a sickening loneliness has come upon me
more quickly and profoundly than I imagined it could.
I yearn to be planted back in the marginally less lonely
situation of the cafe in the outpost of Onomatopy, where
I first conceived this misguided expedition. Where a rude
waiter dumped my coffee in front of me, spilling a good deal
in the saucer, conducted exclusive banter with the barmen
and made lewd comments about inaccessible females (to
him through coarseness, to me through shyness) who
walked past the window. Where two huge men in tall hats
sat strikingly by a mirror on the wall, engrossed in conver
sation. A mendicant wandered into the cafe and mumbled
something to me in dialect, about milk for his baby (absent)
- from which I understood that he wished to indent me
for currency - and stood around for several seconds after
my refusal, allowing me to inhale his hum. I thought, drat,
why don't the waiters intervene and remove this loon from
the premises. To my discomfort he then took a place at
the bar, where he appeared to be on first name terms with
the staff, and proceeded to imbibe a coffee, served to him
immaculately, apparently on the house, exchanging friendly
salutations with the giants in the corner as he did so.
But I am far from Onomatopy, and I do not know my
way back, indeed death is closer than town.
Yesterday I saw that pretentious hare, at a distance. It
stopped a moment and looked in my direction, I thought in
pity. I hoped it might point the direction home, but instead
it just flashed its rings at me, and passed on. As an after
thought I fumbled a couple of cartridges into my gun but
the hare was long-gone.
46 1
COLLAPSE VI
Another hunter once told me that all you really amount to

out here is the contents of your bag, the contents of your
self, and your gun. You have to concentrate to remember
what you are, which is why I have started to write, to help
me remember. It's no good just thinking: you have to think
"I am thinking!"
Each day - a subtle event at these latitudes - I make
an inventory to keep me together, or rather to keep myself
apart from things :
Self: I am called Only Macphew (really!). My best friend
is a girl - I call her Miss Miss. I am in love with her but
she has no idea, or pretends not to notice. I am a man.
Bag: Two Pencils. One Notebook. One jar. A knife,
naturally, with which to skin that blasted hare when it
gets too bold. Half a bag of dried banana slices. One
one-armed snake. I'll put it with the other one I have
at home, if I ever make it back. I'll mount them on
L-shaped bits of wood and have them as bookends.
That's a cheering thought.
One hole-punch, the cherished possession of Miss Miss
which she lent to me a while ago (a burdensome piece
of equipment and utterly useless in my current circum
stances) . I have it with me because I forgot to take it out
of my bag before I left, and did not notice the weight
due to my jaunty attitude at the outset of the expedition,
My thoughts wander to an erotic meditation on Miss
Miss.
I know I must be high up the world, for the flowers
are vivid against the dark grey sky, and I hear the noises
without causes, tiny musical explosions in the air - a
phenomenon that must be perceived to be believed, like
462
\
'
I
Avery - The Islanders
flying fish, of which I have heard sailors speak (and whom

I don't believe) .
I feel as though I am walking sideways through time,
my past to the left of me, my future to the right.
I cannot carry on this way. I must make a choice
but won't, for fear of it being the wrong one. I am just
continuing, putting one foot in front of the other, hoping
for a sign to direct me.
Meanwhile, worst of all , I have started to doubt. I
seriously doubt the Noumenon, and wonder if I have
jeopardised my life, sacrificed my bones to the anonymous
dust of the plain, all for the sake of a chimera. (I imagine
that hare will gingerly approach my corpse when it is sure
I am dead beyond the possibility of resurrection, and when
the flesh has rotted on my fingers, it will take my garnet
ring for its collection.)
I doubt the affections of Miss Miss, or that her fatalist
self will view my demise as anything other than the course
of events. Certain other things have also begun to disturb
me: sometimes the flowers don't quite align with their
stalks. Why have I never seen the bottom of a mountain?
Despite my patient efforts in studying the If'enish language,
I have acquired no more than a few words - leaving me
to suspect that this argot amounts to little more than gob
bledygook improvised for the consumption of the tourists.
And finally I have started to wonder if, beyond the
shops and bars and lights of Onomatopoeia, beyond the
plane of the gods, where the defunct machines and litter are
strewn, underneath the Mountains, and the flowers, and
the dust and the bones of the hunters, there is an Island
at all?
465
... '.
,
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,,.
f -,- __

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)

,-
'
..; .
,)
f

r
,.
-
-

r
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:.. i ,,,
,,, '
1
""'-
-J4111,. . ' --

.I
''
I
...

'
- ......
r ""'
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-
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t I

fl
.. . .
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;
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I
.:,

........- ....
... .. 4lrt ., 49;
---- .
. .

-
COLLAPSE VI
Theory is Waiti n g
477
1
La thorie est attente, tablissement de l'homme
- du rel sans chair, sans phrase, sans monde -
dans la condition de lattente
II
Le corps de la thorie
- criture formulaire, enthousiasme asctique, surrection populaire ordonne, coque
passant bien dans la lame, voile vibrant dans la brise, montant l'assaut du vent -
est institution de l'attente
m
Cette institution - cet acte - est attentat au plein du monde, la
suffisance des mondains, la morgue des vivants ; attentat par
le vide, la distance prise, la parole laconique, dfaite, tire du
silence ; attentat anglique, de l'ange qu'est le je sans moi, le
corps sans chair, l'acte sans pratique, la formule sans discours
IV
Austre et thtral, l'acte de la thorie traverse la prati'l!le, ne s'y englue pas:
ne fait pas monde. Tranchant de laile, du tract p!ll', du trmt
incendiaire, de la joie marine traversant la mlancolie sans bornes
V
Attente institue, attentat formel, en forme de traverse,
de discernement, d'ordre tranchant, svre, ardent.
Attentat du je traversant le moi
(criture en-je destituant les bavardages du moi).
Thorie aigu, arme.
Thorie-bateau
VI
l.ftl mondains, qui ne savent que les (HDpn1mi11 j1NJ(i1!11)eurs de la terre et du dd, parlent d'une mauvai blague, d'une blague qui ne fait rire personne
VII
'l'honnm d' A11achan1is:
IL Y A LES VIVANTS, LES MORTS,

ET CEUX QUI VONT SUR LA MER
Gillc11 Gnlet
Celui Pour Qui Le '\fonde Est lir1 Bonld Uont La Pr-o1tique
Est La Putain 1<;1 La Philo,:;ophie Lu Grande \1uqucn:llc
,,..u..,....
I
Theory is waiting, it establishes man
-the flesh-less, phrase-less, world-less real
in the condition of waiting
II
The hody of theory
.
-formulaic writing, ascetic enthusias , ordered popular uprising, hull cuttin
truly through the waves, sail fluttering in the breeze, taking on the wind
is the institution of waiting
III
This institution -this act- is a full-on attack on the world,
on the vanity of the worldly, on the morg ue of the living;
an attack via the void, the distance taken, via the word that iE
terse, distraught, dragged from silence; an angelic attack,
from the angel that is the I without me, the body without flesh,
the act without practice, the formula without discourse
IV
Austere and theatrical, the act of theory crosses practice without getting boggecl
down in it; it does not become worldly. Jncisiveness of the wing, of the purifiecl
tract, of the incendiary treatise, of maritime joy crossing boundless melanchol}
v
An instituted waiting, a formal attack, in the shape of a crossing,
a discernment, an order that is cutting, severe, and ardent.
The attack of the I crossing the ego
(the writing in I dismissing the chatterings of the ego).
Armed theory, extreme theory.
Boat-theory
VI
The worldly, who only kuow of pleMant com11romi between Heavtn and Earth, 8jKk of a had joke, a joke nobody lindij fonny
VII
Theore111 of A11aehar:<is:
THERE ARE THE LIVING, THE DEAD,

AND THOSE WHO GO TO SEA
I It: hlr \\ hom Tlw World b ,\ Brothd Wlwr Pradicc
Is Tiu- \\ lmn Arni Pl1ilosopl1 Tlw Cnat \lailam
COLLAPSE VI
Endless Dreams
and Water Between
481
COLLAPSE VI
Aria: '!/someone were to tell me I had twenty years U;fl, and ask me
how I'd like to spend them, I'd reply: Give me two hours a day ef
activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams ... provwd I
can remember them.'
*******
'[T]he mind is bombarded by a veritabl.e barrage efdreams that seem

to burst upon it like waves. Billions ef images surge up eadz night,
then diss olve al1TWSt immediately, enveloping the earth in a blanket ef
lost dreams. Absolutely everything has been imagined during one night
or another by one mind or another, and then forgotten.'
Luis Buiiuel
484
Green - Endless Dreams
Aria: 'This is to state once again that the essence <f the deserted
island is imaginary and not a.dual, mythologiml and not geographical

[ . . . ] m have to get back to the movement <f the imagination that
makes the deserted island a model, a prototype <f the collective soul.
F irst, it is true that .from the deserted island it is not creation but
re-creation, not the beginn ing but a re-begnm'ng that takes place [ ... ]
It is not enough that everythz'ng begin, everythz'ng must begin agam
once the gcle <fpossible combinations has come to completion.'
Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands
Raya: 'Islands may no longer be the material prizes they once
were, but islands <fthe mind contnue to be extraordinarily valuable

symbolic resources, a treasure trove <fimages through which the Ufst
understands itse!f and its relations with the larger worl.d. Like all
master metaphors, the island is capable <f representt'ng a multitude
<fthz'ngs.'
John R. Gillis, Islands <fthe Mind
485
COLLAPSE VI
Aria: W hat is this need to travel? W hy are we haunted by

it? According to George Sand,
The fact is that nowhere, these days, is anyone genuinely

happy, and that of the countless faces assumed by the Ideal
- or, if you dislike the word, the concept of something
better - travel is one of the most engaging and most
deceitful. All is rotten in public affairs: those who deny
this truth feel it even more deeply and bitterly than those
who assert it. Nevertheless, divine Hope still pursues her
way, assuaging our tormented hearts with the constant
whisper: 'There is something better - namely, your ideal!'
(George Sand, Winter i:n Maforca)
Mar: In Randa at approximately thirty years of age in 1263,

after a dissolute life up until that point, Ramon Llull had a
vision of crucified Christ that he took as a sign to dedicate
his life to his service. The form of service took three forms:
To missionize at the cost of martyrdom. To write a book,
the best in the world against the errors of the unbelievers.
And to go to the Pope, to kings, and to Christian princes to
incite them to create language monasteries for missionaries.
Thus he had to travel.
Lyn: On a late summer's day in the year 1608, a gentleman

of London made his way across that city. He was a man of
ambition, intellect, arrogance, and drive - in short, a man of his
age. Like our own, his was an era of expanding horizons and
a rapidly shrinking world, in which the pursuit of individual
dreams led to new discoveries, which in tum led to newer and
bigger dreams.
This man, a ship's captain, was named Henry Hudson.
486
Aria: From the Convent of Palma in Mallorca, Fray

Junipero Serra struggled with his dreams:
I have had no other motive but to revive in my soul those

intense longings which I have had since my novitiate when I
read the lives of saints. These longings have become somewhat
deadened because of the preoccupation I had with studies.
To recapture the intensity he ventured to the New World to

perform an act of self-sacrifice, emulating his predecessors.
In 1749 he left Mallorca never to return.
Long before his decision to venture out, there were
others familiar with legends of gold. In one romance with
the theme of attacks by 'pagan forces on the mediaeval
Christians occupying Constantinople', during the battle the
pagans were aided by Calafia, a warrior queen who came
from a place
at the right hand of the Indies, an island named California,

very close to that part of the Terrestrial Paradise which is
inhabited by black women, without a single man among them,
who live in the manner of Amazons[ ... ) There weapons were
all made of gold. The island abounds with gold and precious
stones, and upon it no other metal is found.
Also upon this island 'there are many griffins. In no other

part of the world can they be found.' From Biscay to Cadiz,
"'California;' the lilting name for Q!ieen Calafia's land, was
on everyone's mind.'
487
COLLAPSE VI
Dear Friends,
Raya ( Raya L. Carlton), Lyn (Sandlyn Ryder Hoving),
Mar ( Maryse-Franc;:oise d'Ile),
It was a dream that stirred me to action.
I dreamt that I lived on a precipice by the sea. T he house
was made of stone and had spacious terraces surrounding
it. Beyond that a garden and beyond that, rows of olive
trees in red earth. In my dream I had awakened to find
that everything that had previously been troubling me was
a dream and that I was free to create and use my time as
I wished. I had no financial worries and I could sponsor
events to invite esteemed thinkers and creators for one
month each year. During these days we would meet for
a few hours of conversation, go for a swim, and have
wonderful dinners on the terrace at night. Only guests who
really wanted to be there would attend. They would be
few in number. The rest of the year would be devoted to
making beautiful, precise publications and productions.
488
There would be enough time to realise them without stress.

1bis dream affected me so viscerally that I perceived
it as a signal and began writing this letter to you. Please
excuse the group message, but this is a way to begin a
conversation by writing to each other. I thought about
myself and others I knew. Very skilled and intelligent
people, yet not really creating as they could be for various
reasons. It was around then that I was reading an odd little
book called A Pn'merfor the Gmdua/, Understrmdng ef Gertrude
Stein, in which I read her words: 'Anythng you create you want
to exist, and ts means ef existence is n beng prinied.' I adapted
that sentence to the present, as also meaning 'diffused via
an interface', and I read on:
After all, my only thought is a complicated simplicity. I like

a thing simple, but it must be simple through complication.
Everything must come into your scheme: otherwise you
cannot achieve real simplicity.
I wondered, "Was Gertrude Stein a Buddhist? " I
continued to read:
A great deal of this I owe to a great teacher, William James. He

said, 'Never reject anything. Nothing has been proved. If you
reject anything, that is the beginning of the end as an intellec
tual.' He was my big influence when I was at college. He was
a man who always said, 'Complicate your life as much as you
please, it has got to simplify.'
Ideally I would like us to explore writing letters.
This is something that has become nearly extinct and
I'd like to attempt reviving the art of writing actual
letters, as I've been reading examples of correspondence
from the past. In these letters we can tell each other our
thoughts and feelings in more than a few choppy words.
489
COLLAPSE VI
These letters can be sent via e-mail, although I'd like to

experiment with sending them by post, so that it is possible
to have something tangible we have touched. Actual matter.
Let's see if that has any altering effect on our approach to
being in contact. One thing is certain, it will require slowing
down occasionally to reflect.
I wanted to remind you that each of us live in island
locations. Much water is between us, but we can remain
close, as I feel we are. Mar and I live on the same island,
but in different parts and rarely see each other. I think there
is something affecting about this island-dwelling condition
and I'd like to think more with each of you about it.
My suggestion is to focus more specifically on where we
are. I think we are each trying to do this in our own ways.
Yet, perhaps we can also be conscious of how the physical
location and history of the places we inhabit affect how
we currently perceive and engage living in the world, in
conjunction with how we can have an exchange between
each other. We're not going to live forever. To be blunt, I'd
like to think about our lives and I'd like to do this together.
We are each unmistakably independent, but now I think
it's a good time to use our energies in conjunction for our
benefit. W hy not? This may sound old-fashioned, but I
thought it might be interesting to write about what we read.
Remember, reading? As I know you are each readers as well
as writers, perhaps this can be fun? Do you ever feel as if
you haven't anyone to discuss much with? This is a way to
alleviate that feeling. I've been reading George Sand. Does
that seem odd? Check out her Winter in Mallorca, edited by
Robert Graves, when you get a chance. I'd be interested in
getting your feedback. Although I'd never previously read
George Sand, as I follow her trail I find many fascinating
490
--- ------ ---
constellations to ponder. 'Constellations' is my current

keyword.
I'm curious to know what you think about these
suggestions. I'd also like your agreement that we will
continue to keep up a regular correspondence. You must
pledge like in the Three Musketeers: "All for one and one
for all." In addition, I invite you to convene in September
with me in Mallorca. Please save up and clear some time.
We always plan to get together, but life's many accidents
seem to usually get in the way, so let's really make an effort.
Perhaps we can develop interesting ways to think and create
together. I have in mind a form of gathering and publishing
that differs from what I've previously been involved with,
and I'd like your help to think with me, as well as to enjoy
being together.
That's all for now. I hope you are each very well and I
look forward to our being in ongoing contact.
Yours,
Aria
Aria Phoenix, in case you've forgotten which Aria, as
we've been so out of touch!

P.S. Lyn you are an Oulipian, Mar, you are an Eulipion.
And Raya, you flow like the tides.
Take care!
491
COLLAPSE VI
Aria is again an editor and now a publisher. She thinks

in terms of all that literature has been and can be.
She grew up reading continually and often saw herself
in relation to both the characters she read about and
the authors she read. Identification of this sort became a
concern for her after she'd learned in college that it indicated
a naive relationship to the text and its production. After
that she resolved to thoroughly understand this process.
She attended Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Course, then
still in Cambridge, and immediately began working for a
respected publishing house that had been founded, as their
colophon depicting a flaming torch noted, in 1817. Thus
began her years in book and magazine publishing. She also
wrote.
For a time she worked in academia, where she'd landed
by chance, via her abilities as an adept editor and manager,
with insight regarding intellectual trends.
492
As a creative contributor she wanted to avoid becoming

embedded in the drudgery of administrating. She didn't
want her life to be perceived by herself or by others as a
path to avoid - the way she'd sometimes thought about
her predecessors whom she'd studied and tried to use as
models or guides. Often, there were aspects of their lives
she'd like to avoid experiencing. She didn't want the same
to be observed about herself, so she shifted.
She experienced a moment of conversion and revelation,
realizing what she did want to do. That was the beginning
of the September Institute. In her travels she met many
people, some of whom became friends with whom she has
overlapping interests. She decided to write to these three
friends and to suggest they begin a project that involved an
examination of what they most enjoyed, as well as things
they've been curious about. They would write actual letters
to each other from their various locations to describe their
interests.
Aria reads many languages and is fluent in a few. She
prefers to be based in one location, yet she likes to spend
time in places to which she feels connected for reasons of
friendship, links to her life, and because she eajoys the ways
she can feel in these environments. She has an encyclopae
dic relation to life. It is important to her that she participate
in the relay between what has passed and what is present.
493
COLLAPSE VI
Lyn's been a wanderer. What she enjoys increasingly is

gaining deep understanding about where she is and where
she's been. She returns to places. For her watching films is
also a return to sensations she enjoys. Mental links can be
made to other experiences. She imagines these moments
of fixed concentration as something akin to pausing at
the stations of a pilgrimage to remember. The notion of a
pilgrimage appeals to her and she's become curious about
the enactments and motivations behind such endeavours.
Her own travels mirror these. She is very linked to her
island, and its many quirks. More than one lifetime would
be needed to begin to sound all that resides there.
Even though she'd been away many years, she decided
that this location is her home, even though so much had
changed and so many people she'd known no longer lived
there or were alive. There she felt closer to the fullness of
her life, which now interested her much differently than
494
when she'd lived on this island as a youth. She felt as if

she now could discover where she could be and where she
enjoyed being, without pretence or shame. With so many
people gone she felt able to have a different relation to her
life and to the island. Her focus includes the long past and
the nature of the island.
She continues to work independently, sometimes as a
designer. Occasionally, if a book of interest is proposed, she
will index it, as this way of creating links is akin to the ways
she enjoys probing and thinking about material.
Now she lives near the Cloisters, which seems somehow
appropriate for this phase in her life. Her interest regarding
the Middle Ages has grown. Yet she thinks about that time
in relation to different bodies of water, such as the Indian
Ocean. For years she'd been interested in the life and
writings of Ramon Llull. She felt she could now go further
into her interests.
495
COLLAPSE VI
Mar adapts easily to different environments. She likes

to appear to blend into local settings, even places where
she isn't fluent with the language. She doesn't like to be a
foreigner, even though she can admit her lack of knowledge
about the specificity of a place, she compensates by being
very curious and receptive to local habits and idioms, as
her sense of observation is acute. She learns rapidly, has
the humility to accept correction, and others sense her
respect for their customs. She is engaged in a lifelong study
of herbs and of plants. As these represent knowledge that
has been culled over centuries from around the world, her
gift of grasping languages and her interest in etymology are
put to use in relation to exploring the plant world past and
present.
She is independent and used to being on her own
since an early age. Travel is common for her, a way of life.
Migration of plants is of particular interest to her, as well
496
as the movement of people. Her parents were agronomists.

In a way, she continues some of what they did. That
recognition accompanies her and comforts her as they are
gone. Her focus is on plant life, their properties and their
beauty, that can be observed as well as represented.
She's comfortable in crowds, in markets, in rural and
urban settings, and especially by the sea. Her preference is
for a base near the water in a modest house in nature. For
this reason she's deeply inspired by Lester Rowntree's way
of life, based on what she's read about her in her book,
Hardy Californians. In particular, she often thinks of this
phrase of Rowntree's self-description in relation to how she
sees herself: 'A wayfarer urged by coryectural curiosity.'
497
COLLAPSE VI
Raya is extremely intelligent, yet often perplexed

by what people say and mean. T he differences between
what people say and what they mean confuse her, as she
imagines these to be synchronous acts, yet via experience
she's learned otherwise. She is attracted to organisms in
nature, particularly water varieties of fauna and flora. T hey
can have surprising traits. Appearance and encounter can
contradict. This contact allows her to form analogies to

life situations, growing out of her increasing knowledge of
underwater habitats and creatures.
Born inland near a Great Lake, she had an early desire
to be near water. She won a scholarship to study at an
institute for oceanography on the Pacific coast. Many years
have passed and she continues to observe and investigate
the waters and the shores.
She prefers being with one person she feel close to. She
avoids crowds. She also feels good in small gatherings of
498
people she knows she can trust and whom she feels close
to in some way. Sometimes a person will make a statement
that she will ponder for years. Her mind works to attempt
to search in the world for evidence of what was mentioned,
so that she can mull over and decide what she thinks about
what was posited. The statement is usually a casual one,
yet for Raya it may loom large with potential content, a
sort of key that may open an aspect to living that seems
distant to her.
She is quite at ease on her own, walking along the shore,
or wading in tide pools.
499
COLLAPSE VI
Aria: 'In every country the Moon keeps ever the rule efallimzce with
the Sea wkich it oru:efor all has agreed upon.'
The Venerable Bede
Aria: 'Continental islands are accidental, derived islands. They

are separated }Wm a continent, born ef disarticuiatWn, erosion,
ftacture; they survive the absorptWn ef what oru:e contained them.
Oceanic islands are origi,nary, essential isl.a:nds . Some are fanned
}Wm coral, reefj and display a genuine organism. Others emerge}Wm
underwater erup!Wns, bring to the light efday a movementftom the
lowest depths[ ...] Continental islands serve as a reminder that the sea
is on top efthe earth, taking ad:oanto,ge efthe slightest sagging in the
highest structures; oceanic islands, that the earth is stili there, under
the sea, gathering its strength to punch through to the surface. 1# can
assume that these elements are in constant st:rifl, displaying a repulsion
for one another. In this wefind nothing to reassure us [ . . . ] In one way
or another, the very existence efislands is the nega!Wn efthis poini ef
vi.cw, efthis effort, this conviction.'
500
Dear All,
1bis is an immediate follow-up. I realize you haven't
had a chance to respond yet, but I wanted to send this off
to you as I'm eager to read your initial thoughts.
The basis for the ideas of what I'm calling the
September Institute is in a separate description that you'll
soon receive. I'm thinking about a project that can rely on
our various strengths, or as I've heard stated recently, 'skill
sets'. The focus continues to be on locations we inhabit, yet
that seem exotic for those who aren't familiar. AB a future
long term project, I propose creating an Island Eruydopa.edia.
1bis is an impetus to shift our thought into different
kinds of associations, for example, beyond the assumed
acceptance of continents or nations. These concepts are up
for questioning in any case. We've talked about some of
these things before, so why not enact them? First of course,
we have to get the letter exchange going. Please excuse my
enthusiasm, but I feel as if a weight has been lifted from me
since I had a kind of 'conversion' experience. I promise not
to attempt to convert any of you. I already like you. But we
are all seekers.
To follow up an earlier wish, has anyone yet read
George Sand? Winter in Mallorca? Please do! I'm beginning
to read her Story efMy li.fe (Histoire de ma vie), a very unusual
approach, as she begins the story at least forty years before
she's born, which I like. There are many biographies, most
of them are annoying, but some are interesting. I come
across all sorts of curious descriptions of writing women
when I read Sand-related books. It's still fascinating to
me that Sand was penalised for what were considered
her excesses. Here's one instance, from Belinda Jack's A
Womans Life Writ Large:
501
COLLAPSE VI
For Nietzsche, Sand was a prolific, ink-yielding cow, an example

of 'lactea ubertas: Her overflowing, undisciplined writing
was evidence of her incapacity to reason logically [ . . . ] [H]e
likened her to Wagner. What disconcerted both Baudelaire
and Nietzsche above all, beyond or beneath their more rational
objections, was Sand's passion, her energy, and her capacity
to respond with enormous courage to conviction. These same
attributes account for her enormous popularity.
I'm also reading her Lettres d'un voyageur, which provide

another perspective. Sand's correspondence is impressive.
It is still being edited. There are twenty volumes to date.
She was a precursor to the open letter, in writing letters to
be read publicly. AB she said, 'I falt I had many things to say
and thoi I wanied to say them to myse!fand others.' Take this as
an encouragement. AB Henry James put it - interesting
how this is the second mention of one the James family -
George Sand 'is open to everything: her discourse might be
' amatory, religWus, political, aesthetic, pictorial, musical, theatrical,
historical.' It might also be, as we see in Lettres d'un voyageur,
botanical, astronomical, mythological. In fact, about almost
anything that seized her interest and imagination she was
remarkably knowledgeable.
Alright friends, I'll leave it there. AB always, looking
forward to hearing from you.
Yours,
Aria
502
'[H}umans can live onan island only byforgetting what an island

represents.
Islands are either ftom before or far rifler humanldnd.'
' The meaning efa name is more than the meaning efwords
composing it.'
George R. Stewart, Names efthe Land
503
COLLAPSE VI
Dear Aria,
cc: Raya, Mar
I like your idea very much. Count me m. I pledge
allegiance to the experiment.
Shall I begin now?
I do feel as if I have been saving many words. I don't
really talk with many people, beyond those I encounter
while doing errands or in a professional capacity. Not
speaking hasn't bothered me, as I write, but since you
mentioned it, yes, there are few people now here to speak
with about what means something to me, beyond politics
and the economy. Is it generational? So many people are
gone even though we're not what I used to imagine as
old. We were described by the media as Generation X,
remember? It figures: no name, just a letter. In the 1920s
some advertising type coined the phrase 'lost generation'
504
and later during 1970s punk times, 'blank generation.' It's

kind of ridiculous to even consider being branded by a time
period, don't you think? Now there is a 'Gen X' President
elected in the US, and youth have hope. Really? Yes, let's
write about our lives and about where we are.
To begin, here's a dream I'd written down many years
ago, before I'd been anywhere farther from this island and
this country than Mexico:
This is the second time in a row that I have dreamt about
water. Two nights ago I dreamt about the Mediterranean Sea
and a Greek island named Pesta. The dream was related to
Atlantis, the city that sunk into the ocean. Last night I dreamt
about travelling outside of one's body. I dreamt of the Bronte
children dying, but not really being dead. A small boy suddenly
died, but his corpse was not buried. W ithin a few days it did
not rot. I saw him breathing as if asleep. He opened his eyes
and sat up. Said he had been on a voyage beneath the sea.
Many of my friends were disappearing and I could not
find them. They returned telling me that they were in another
dimension, beneath the sea. Several of them said that suddenly
they were able to go to a place in the depths of the ocean. They
were going to have a party there and asked if I would come.
I wanted to know the secret of how they were able to go to
this deep place. One gave me a very tiny submarine, smaller
than my smallest finger, and told me to climb in. I just held
it, not knowing how to use this submarine. I looked out of a
window, which came to the water's edge. I wondered what
would happen ifl were to jump in. Would I develop fins on my
neck for breathing the farther I sank? Would I find this secret
buried place?
When I had been on the road the first time, years

ago, I'd gotten physically familiar with different places.
505
COLLAPSE VI
By foot I walked in Oklahoma, past an Indian reservation

along with an occasional lone Indian, who didn't even try
to hitch a ride. For three days I waited at a truck stop for a
lift East. I never got it.
Walking became a mode of transportation then.
Although my friend Voy's scam got me on a plane and out
of there.
Since then I've become familiar with places by walking
in them, learning them by foot. Figuring out routes I prefer
based on invented reasons of taste. Not enough trees on
this street. Depressing buildings on that street. The grade of
this hill is more gradual. In many cities, towns and villages,
in different countries, I've walked. Walked and worked.
And also just walked, watched, listened.
Eventually I lived in a place by the water. It had seven
hills and I walked each of them and stared at the water
when I'd reach the top. I took ferries across the water and
continued to walk. Sometimes I rode buses to the beach
and walked the long shore.
Now islands. I never really thought of myself as being
particularly fond of islands. But you're right, I do live on
one. It had even been called, as well as thought of itself
as, 'the island in the centre of the world' - how about that
for megalomania? It does seem to be a tendency that has
affected different locations at various times in history. Since
I've been back I've become quite interested in finding
out more about this island and its past. I've also become
very interested in studying the Middle Ages. Maybe these
interests are strangely related. In part they derive from the
fact that I now live on the only part of the island that has
areas with its earlier vegetation and rock formations, and
this location is near that odd importation of the European
506
past, the Cloisters. In addition, I've been trying to enter

the thoughts of a mediaeval mystic and philosopher from
Mallorca, Ramon Llull. Perhaps you can help me from
your location? T he island I inhabit is indeed a mysterious
island, but all of our locations involve combinations. I've
been thinking about Llull's Ars cornhinatoria, in relation to
living. Perhaps it gives some indications of value in the
present, even if it's challenging to decipher thoughts from
a medieval Christian mindset. But certain ways of working
with permutations are related to computer science. He is
also considered by Oulipians as what they call an anticipa
tory plagiarist.
I think one of the attractions to me of the Middle Ages
is that it was necessary for some to keep ancient knowledge
alive. The primary protectors of received knowledge at that
time were Islamic. This, I'm sure, resonates with your own
interests in your Mallorcan island, as there are many traces
in place names and in surviving structures of an Islamic
past.
Al-Mayurka, is this the correct name? W hat was
Mallorca before? And what was Manhattan before, during
those earlier times? Before maps and fixed boundaries?
Before passports?
This island region had a confederacy called Iroquois, that
dated back at least nine thousand years. It was a complex
of islands. Algonquins were called 'The First Peoples' of
North America and had at one time covered a third of the
continent. Most of the peoples that passed through the
area were related to the Lenape, described as 'an ancient
riverine people of Algonquin stock.' They can be perceived
as comprising hoops or circles within circles of other related
peoples. Munsee people were the last to predominate.
507
COLLAPSE VI
T he Mohican descendents of Algonquins are more well

known, but they were also called 'People of the River.' I
read that there are 18,000 skeletons of Native Americans
hidden in museum storage, of different museums like the
Peabody Museum, for example.
Menatay means island to the Unami Delaware.
Mahatuouh, 'place for gathering bow wood' to the Munsee.
Manhattan or Manahatta, 'rocky island', add the 'ten' and
that means habitation in Munsee. So Manhattan is the
Munsee name.
I'll stop now and see if I have any messages or post from
any of you. I picture messages in bottles moving through
the sea. We could start a blog, but that would defeat the
purpose of intimacy and depth, I think, at least at this phase.
Looking forward to continuing.
Yours,
Lyn
508
Dear Aria,
cc: Lyn, Raya
Thank you for your letter and invitation. Maybe we'll
be in touch differently. Yes, I will participate in a correspon
dence. It has been a long time since I've written the kind of
letter you describe.
While thinking about your proposition I came across
a letter in a novel I'm reading. The letter is meant to have
been written by a priest and it launches the novel Tlte
Dolls' Room, by Llorens: Villalonga. It is set in a fictional
Mallorcan town called Bearn, which is also the name of
the founding family that is dying out. The letter is dated
1890, but the book was published in 1956. I'm reading the
English translation, which didn't appear until 1988, after
the author's death. He was born in Palma.
509
COLLAPSE VI
This may interest you. In a way it relates to the issue of

generations that Lyn mentioned and change to which you
allude. I quote:
The question is not a simple one, and I feel the need to start
from the very beginning. Giving you all the details of that life I
loved so deeply, despite its grave errors, has provided a solace
for me in my solitude. I must admit that the motive of my
story, written in the course of these endless nights, may not be
solely the scruples of my conscience, but rather the pleasure of
reviving the familiar venerated figure I have just lost. With him
an entire world has disappeared, beginning with these lands
that have seen my birth and that will have to be auctioned
off because the creditors have already notified us that they
do not wish to wait any longer. The Senyor's nephews and
niece neither have enough money to pay off the mortgages
nor feel any love for Beam, being used to city life as they are.
There might be one last source of hope: they say a relative of
the Senyors has arrived from America after having become
a millionaire selling cardboard boxes. It seems unbelievable
that anyone should become an important personality selling
little boxes, but he has introduced himself with much pomp,
laden with gold and determined to dazzle all of Mallorca
with an electric automobile that has already killed two sheep.
On his calling card, below his name, are the words Cardboard
Containers, which no one quite understood until they realised
it referred to those famous boxes.
I'll skip ahead, the quote continues:

To me, halfway down the path of my life, this Cardboard
Container Beam would be nothing but an intruder. Yet there
is no question but that a new generation is emerging, which
is willing to associate these old lands with the personality of
an outsider and will experience the same feelings towards the
union of senyor and lands, which it will believe to be deeply
rooted, that I felt towards Don Toni as a child.
510
For some reason, after reading this I thought about

Robert Graves and Deia, all the changes in that area. I have
also been reading George Sand's Wznter in Mallorca and I took
notice of the many footnotes, written by Graves, contesting
nearly everything she wrote. It was quite remarkable.
I was somehow reminded of Kinbote's role in Nabokov's
Pale F ire. We've had some laughs over that. Some of these
notes extend for pages on their own, as if he's taking over
her book. It's quite weird. I realise I wasn't born on this
island, although now I feel as if I had been, since I've been
'adopted' by a very kind family. I have become familiar
with the vegetation and landscape over these years and I
must say that Graves seemed rather harsh on Sand. That
made me wonder what had been his experiences? He gives
the appearance of being omniscient regarding anything
Mallorcan and it seemed as if he'd perhaps had his own
story with another woman who was also a writer. Through
reading, I found this was the case. Two poets together. He
lived in Deia with the writer Laura Riding. T hey had even
founded a press together. Isn't that interesting? Of course
you probably know all about this. There are even books in
English on their years together, which were 1926 to 1940.
Strange, isn't it, what become the remnants of a life and
what people who have the possibility to publish choose to
remember? Concerning both Robert Graves and Frederic
Chopin in Mallorca, we didn't yet discuss how Graves
seems to identify with the male artist, composer and pianist
Frederic Chopin, who spent the winter in Mallorca with
Sand - according to her, in a sickly state. Graves and Chopin
are considered cultural monuments, whereas Riding and
Sand are not. I haven't yet found statues of either of them.
They're seen more as extreme, crazy and witchlike, from
what I've gathered in conversation and through books.
511
COLLAPSE VI
T he photos of Laura in Deia are particularly unflattering.

In the early days she was considered to be as beautiful as
a movie star. Of course, I prefer to read what she wrote
rather than focus on the personal drama. But yes, thanks
also for the Polti suggestion. I'll check out the thirty-six
dramatic situations.
I have been enjoying reading Winter in Mal/area. It's
pretty easy to find here in many languages. As it's such
a tourism product I'd never felt compelled to read it until
you suggested it. Sand describes a challenging situation
in an unfamiliar place known prior to her journey only
through painted images and travelogues. In some cases I
disagree with Sand and Graves. But it is an interesting read.
It makes me more curious about aspects I've been investi
gating concerning the Islamic past, via botany, gardens and
architecture. It's been an extreme pleasure to encounter the
small painted illustrations in the old herbal botanicals. Even
though the classification systems have been contested, there
is much to be found there. That's a possible direction I'd be
interested in developing.
In terms of my research I have found sources focusing
on the Balaeric Islands. This has something to do with your
request that we think more about where we are. One of
the particular aspects we face as islanders concerns scale.
There are rare species of flowers here, but they may grow
only in a small area. T hey may be the only examples of
their sort in the world. There is no elsewhere beyond these
island locations for certain plants. They are not endlessly
replenished. I've read that 'the near-disappearance of
Minorca's Vzca bjfoliolata can be blamed on collectors of rare
plants.' Luckily with photography plants can be 'collected'
in photos, rather than killed.
512
So I've been busily engaged. I'm curious to read more

from each of us. The letter exchange is a good idea. Aria,
it would be wonderful to see you sometime, even before
September. Let's visit? To Lyn and Raya, I look forward to
being in contact via post and hope to see you soon.
That's it for now.
Yours,
Mar
513
COLLAPSE VI
Dear Aria,
cc: Lyn and Mar
It's great to receive a letter from you. I'm glad to resume
contact and I look forward to participating in the corre
spondence with you, Lyn and Mar. 1binking from the
islands we inhabit is an interesting way to begin locating
our various intersections and yes, thinking of constellations
can be a stimulus. It's been ages since I've written an actual
letter to anyone, especially as nearly everyone I know com

municates very succinctly via e-mail and in code.
To begin, I want to use words that I like. T hey remind
me of your invitation:
I want you to hear these words. Now I am speaking to you
about our lives.
That is the way we begin speeches in Cherokee, and
then we say what we would like to see happen, with a simple
statement that begins with "I want," as in " I want us to go
514
to Washington and tell them just what's going on down

here:' The way white people exhort in their speeches - such
as "we should . . . " or "we must . . . " - sounds to us not only
arrogant but devious. Is this guy trying to hide from us his own
thoughts? Then why speak? (They often do speak only for the
purpose of hiding their thoughts. )
This was from Those Dead Guysfor a Hwzdred Years byJimmie

Durham. I've liked those words for a long time and it's
great to be able to share them.
I'm surrounded by water, which I enjoy, and I spend
most of my time moving through or around water and
shores checking the habitats and studying different aspects
of what supports life. As I drive to work I see water and
other islands, as San Francisco is technically a peninsula,
although it feels like an island as it is an archipelagic region
and there are, I believe, forty-one islands in the vicinity of
the San Francisco Bay, leading out to the Pacific Ocean.
I, like Lyn, imagine what existed before. I think about
long spans of time, millions of years, and what was here
before and before and before, as I keep finding traces of the
past when I walk along the shore. The life forms are also
ancient. They survived all kinds of turbulence and adapted
to the changes. In this region there is much awareness of
the intensity of the earth, as we're on an earthquake fault.
The San Andreas Fault, which is actually a network of
faults, that converge near where I spend a lot of time,
around Bolinas Lagoon. All of the faults have shown
tectonic activity, meaning that the North American and the
Pacific Plates shift. One of the things I find so fascinating
about the area is that two distinct provinces from different
geological time periods are now juxtaposed because of the
movement of earth. One observer described the aerial view:
515
COLLAPSE VI
Looked at from the air, the Point Reyes Peninsula seems about
as disjunct from the rest of California as Saudi Arabia is from
Africa, and for the same reason: a boundary of lithospheric
plates.
Witnessing the strength of the sea and the changing

climates is unavoidable here. Watching the waves I often
think of the distances they travel. For example, seismic
waves, called tsunamis. It's impossible not to think of
islands in relation to these. Unlike larger landmasses
islands, as Rachel Carson tells us,
are the result of the violent, explosive, earth-shaking eruptions
of submarine volcanoes, working perhaps for millions of years
to achieve their end.
As she notes:
It is one of the paradoxes in the ways of earth and sea that a
process seemingly so destructive, so catastrophic in nature, can
result in an act of creation.
Forces that occur in the depths of the ocean are fascinating

and these processes continue, as they have for millennia.
Yet there are moments of human intervention. One
island I see often is Alcatraz. I found a book called Akairaz
is rwt an Island, published in 1972. I quote:
Alcatraz was born a mountain, surrounded by the waters of a
great salt sea. [ ... ]We send out our voices to that desolate rock,
and are gifted with echoes which resound our strength.
It was reclaimed by Indians of All Tribes in 1971, but it

was taken away again by the invaders, yet it's a strong
symbol for me. I remember everyday. The Spanish named
it Alcatraz as it was once inhabited by many pelicans.
It remains a wish to see the prison concrete and steel
removed and a regeneration of long gone pelicans,
vegetation and wild flowers.
516
From this island area in this state that was once perceived
to be an island, how do I inhabit this place? It's been
interesting to begin reading George Sand and to attempt
understanding her context. Wars were quite constant in
Europe before her birth and through her life. I think about
that here, as this nation is still at war. The rift between
the rich and the poor is wider than it was before 1981.
Prison expansion as a private industry has been growing
and California is notorious for its number of prisons and
number of incarcerated people. I think about these things
here, as there continue to be reminders, like Alcatraz. To
balance that, there is the sea and the long histories.
I do experience more dreamy states of mind while
reading and drifting. Wet sounds of steadily falling rain and
of spinning car wheels. These are common during winter
in northern California. This was what I heard as I began
reading letters written by George Sand to someone named
Marcie.
Writing is a bit like dreaming. Thoughts and memories
swirl in and out of my mind, like a fog that I can see from
a distance and watch gradually swirl in, engulf me and my
surroundings, then shift again and go elsewhere. What
one tries to put into words can seem dense and difficult
to grasp, and like fog it's full of tiny drops of water-like
thought, sometimes feeling colder depending on its density,
yet it reflects many degrees of light.
Looking forward to continuing. I'm sure more words
will come.
Yours,
Raya
517
Dear Lyn, Mar and Raya,

Thank you so much for your positive responses to my
wish. It makes me very glad that we are all in this new form
of contact.
Did I mention to you when I was last at the Big
Book Sale in San Francisco I found books by women on
writing from the early 1980s and early 1990s? It was like
discovering items from a time capsule, as they seemed to
exist in a very distant past.
Now that we've begun our correspondence I have many
things I'd like to respond to regarding what you've already
written and in tum, write more ideas that your words have
stimulated. There never seems to be enough time. So let's
begin planning to convene.
I'd like to mention more on Georges Polti, regarding
the Middle Ages, as well as think through William Morris
with you. There are interesting possibilities brewing for
developing the Island Enryclopedia. Also there's more to
follow up concerning Laura Riding and her renunciation of
poetry, and her quest for linguistic truth. It will take years
for us to read George Sands's oeuvre, which I continue to
do. I'm reminded of a story by Hollis Frampton. It described
a person who'd been filmed from birth and had to watch
all of the films until death. I know I've misdescribed this,
but the point is that to read what Sand wrote could take a
lifetime. Could that be a reason why her works have been
dismissed? A resentment at its sheer enormity, that can be
presented as excess? Anyway, there are pearls there.
Here are some initial thoughts I've written regarding the
September Institute. These are up for discussion, so I look
forward to your feedback.
519
COLLAPSE VI
I listed four mottos:

1. m still own our words and w,n produa: th.em.
2. Anythingyou create you want to exist, and ils means efexistena:
is in being printed.
3. Sending transmissionsftom dispersed islands, linking worlds,
time and spaa:.
4. T1f: continue the ongoing 1TWVemenl efcombination people.
September Institute compiles and regenerates material
from abandoned collections and publications, providing
indexical access and linked research tools, that enable
circulation within the depths of significant ideas, operations,
and productions of those who may have been forcefully
forgotten. S.I. publishes out-of-print books to give them
new life.
September Institute is not a utopian community,
but rather a momentary nexus. It exists in contrast to
previous idealist attempts to address shifting contempo
rary moments. Acknowledging the predilections of the
past ( idealist, romantic, utopian, and modernist aims), S.I.
embraces the present, however it is calibrated, in relation to
time, with a consciousness of time's expanse.
Beautiful and odd remnants from the expanse of time
are excavated, represented and re-thought. These include
books, ephemera, notebooks, photos, and out-of-date
time-based formats, i.e. pre-digital. T hey are evidence of
encounters, a trace of experience. S.I. produces books of
collected data. Online versions also exist.
Please let's continue thinking and exchanging.
I love words. Etymologically, texturally. It's possible
to enter words on one's own. As each of us can enter the
520
letters we've exchanged on our own. Examining each

other's thoughts separately. 1bis process of exchanging and
learning about each other's thoughts through letters is a bit
like learning about words. Becoming familiar with the vast
range of nuances possible, of words and thoughts, is like
entering a secret or monastic order. Very few people care
about words or thoughts in this way. It's the way things are.
I find comfort in this exploration though, perhaps because
it's specialised rather than standardised knowledge, which
is so abundant. Writing letters to each of you is different
than writing for a blog, in the sense that this is a specific
activity between four people, even though I do like the
Disgrasian blog, but this is different. How to translate
past feelings, times, and histories into meaningful compre
hension that can provide fuel amidst present feelings of lack
and absence? Was it always this way? I wonder about life
before our presumed extreme technological connectivity
and presumed availability. I wonder how you feel and how
others have felt. Probing these things has motivated this
correspondence. The wish for something else that might
be possible. More profound understanding, for example.
Other kinds of meaning. I do care about depth and varieties
of meanings, as I care about combinations and permuta
tions, as we've discussed.
Autodidacticism can be extremely fulfilling, especially
when so much can appear to be a wasteland. 1bis
doesn't mean that I'm interested in retreating, but rather
I feel my senses available to engage are sharpened
as I can choose a more exact way of articulating or
conveying them, in words, images, sounds, etc. I respect
and admire each of you for also sharing these interests.
521
COLLAPSE VI
Since so many specialised skills, things, and people are

slipping into oblivion, my interest is more and more in
what is specific and perhaps thought of as esoteric. W hat
is determinedly unfashionable. This interests me. Maybe
some things are too difficult to reproduce, because there
is no facility, concentration, or interest that enables easy
reproduction. I'm not endorsing 'craft,' as it's recently been
labelled. This is not my interest. I'm also not suggesting
difficulty for the sake of difficulty, nor am I assuming that
specialty can be equated with superiority, yet still, I wish to
probe life's complexity.
And I'm glad that each of you is also willing to do this.
I'll conclude my letter with something to ponder, as it
relates to what I've written. We can wonder with Henri
Bergson and Gilles Deleuze:
[W]hy something rather than nothing, but why this rather
than something else? W hy this tension of duration? W hy
this speed rather than another? W hy this proportion? And
why will a perception evoke a given memory, or pick up
certain frequencies rather than others? In other words, being
is difference and not the immovable or the undifferentiated,
nor is it contradiction, which is merely false movement. Being
is the difference itself of the thing, what Bergson often calls
the nuance.
I'll leave you with those words until the next time. From
each of our islands let's stare at the moon.
Yours,
Aria
522
COLLAPSE VI
Notes on Contributors
and Acknowledgements
CHARLES AVERY is an artist who works with a range of

media. Born in 1973 in Mull, Scotland, Avery now lives
and works in London. He has exhibited internation
ally, with recent solo exhibitions in London, Edinburgh,
Geneva and Turin, and was featured in the 2009 Tate
Triennial Altermodem. Avery is represented by doggerfisher,
Edinburgh and Pilar Corrias, London.
ANGELA DETANICO AND RAFAEL LAIN are artists living in

Paris and Sao Paulo. Their practice investigates possible
new configurations within pre-existent systems, such as
cartography and written language, in different media as
typography, video, sound and installation. Their work has
been exhibited internationally, and in 2007 they represented
Brazil in the 52nd Venice Biennial. They are represented
by Galeria Vermelho in Sao Paulo and Martine Aboucaya
in Paris.
STEPHEN EMMOTT is Head of Microsoft's Computational

Science Research, leading an international, multi-disciplin
ary research effort focused on accelerating fundamental
advances in science in areas of societal importance, but
where current scientific approaches continue to pose
barriers to such advances. A neuroscientist, Emmott's
scientific career spans research positions at The Centre for
Computational and Cognitive Neuroscience, University of
525
COLLAPSE VI
Stirling; AT &T Bell Laboratories; chief scientist of NCR's

advanced research; and University College London. He
is also Professor of Computational Science at Oxford
University.
F I E L D c L u B was initiated in 2004 as a live research

project based on a four-acre field in Southwest England.
T he project collaborators seek to deconstruct and
re-codify the post-modern notion of 'self-sufficiency'
through interdisciplinary art practice and direct interaction
with the land. Inquiries include: T he nature of progress as
contingency, origins and expansion of the human niche,
Biospheric/Technospheric interrelations, land as capital,
and the indexing of sentimentality and function.
IAIN llAMIL'ION GRANT is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy

at the University of the West of England. He is the author
of Philosophies efNaiure efier &helling (Continuum, 2006) and
of numerous articles on Kant and post-Kantian Idealism,
philosophy of nature, philosophy of science and technology,
and contemporary philosophy. He is currently working on
a book entitled Grounds and RJwers.
RENEE GREEN is an artist, filmmaker and writer. Via films,

essays and writings, installations, digital media, architec
ture, sound-related works, film series and events her work
engages with investigations into circuits of relation and
exchange over time, the gaps and shifts in what survives
in public and private memories as well as what has been
imagined and invented. She also focuses on the effects of
a changing transcultural sphere on what can now be made
and thought. Her exhibitions, videos and films have been
526
seen throughout the world in museums, biennales and

festivals. A retrospective exhibition of her work, Ongoing
Becamings 1989-2009, is currently on view at the Musee
Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne.
GILLES GRELET is director of the series .Nous, !es sans-philoso

phie (Paris: L'Harmattan) and author of around thirty pub
lications, articles, films and papers in France and abroad.
Most recently he published Citations pour le president Sarko7:J
(with Juan Perez Agirregoikoa; Paris: Editions Matiere,
2009) .
MANABRATA GuHA is Assistant Professor at the National

Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) , Bangalore, India.
His research work focuses on 'future war', network-centric
warfare, and counter-strategic theories of war and combat.
He is the author of &-Imagining l#zr zn the 21st Century: Fram
Clausewitz to .Network-centric l#ziflzre (London: Routledge,
forthcoming 2010) .
OWEN IIATHERLEY is a freelance writer, working mainly

for Building Design, Icon and .New Statesman. He is researching
a thesis at Birkbeck College, London on the political
aesthetics of Americanism, and is the author of Militant
Modernism (.Zero, 2009) .
NICOLA MAscIANDARO is Associate Professor of English

at Brooklyn College, CUNY and a specialist in mediaeval
literature. He is the founder of the journal Glossator: Practia:
and Theory ef Cammentary and the author of works on labour,
the animal/human boundary, the hand, individuation,
527
COLLAPSE VI
deixis, Aesop, sorrow, mysticism, Dante, decapitation,

and metal. Current projects include: Tiu: Sorrow ef Being
(monograph) , two co-edited essay volumes (commentary,
speculative medievalism) , dESIRE Gloss (a collaborative
commentary on Kristen Alvanson's dESIRE project) , and
Hideous Gnosis: Bla,ck Metal Theory Sympo.ium.
GREG MCINERNY is a post-doctoral researcher at Microsoft

Research, Cambridge, in the Computational Ecology
and Environmental Science group. He is an ecologist
researching the ecological responses of natural populations
to global change and the necessary predictive tools. His
research has yielded novel insights into the interactions
between ecology and evolution during climate induced
range shifts. Greg has also explored some of his interests
in the interactions between science, culture and history
in the '(En) tangled Word Bank' project which visually
documented textual selection through six editions of
the Orign ef Species. Born in the UK, Greg holds a PhD
in Ecology and Evolution from the University of Leeds.
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/gregmci/.
TIMOTIIY MORTON is Professor of Literature and the

Environment at the University of California, Davis. He is
the author of The &ological Thought (Harvard, 2010) , &ology
without Nature (Harvard, 2007) , seven other books and over
sixty essays on literature, ecology, philosophy, and food.
REZA NEGARESTANI is an Iranian philosopher. He is the

author of Cyclonopedia: Complidty with Anonymous Materials
(Melbourne: re.press, 2008) .
528
DREW PuRVES is is a permanent research scientist in the

Computational Ecology and Environmental Science
Group, a part of the Computational Science Lab at
Microsoft Research Cambridge. He studied ecology at
Cambridge University, did a PhD in ecological modelling
at the University of York, and spent nearly six years as
a postdoc in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Department at Princeton University (working under Prof.
Stephen Pacala) , before joining MSR Cambridge in 2007.
His research, which focuses on the dynamics of populations
and communities of plants, especially forests, has led to
around 20 publications in peer-reviewed journals including
Sderu:e, P.NAS, Proc Roy Soc B, Global Change Biology, Ecology,
Ecologiml Monographs and Ecology Letters.
EYAL WEIZMAN is an architect based in London. He studied

at the Architectural Association in London and completed
his PhD at the London Consortium, Birkbeck College. He
is the director of the Centre for Research Architecture at
Goldsmiths College. Since 2007 he has been a member of
the architectural collective Decolonizing Architecture in Beit
Sahour/Palestine. Since 2008 he has been a member of
the board of directors of B'Tselem. Weizman has taught,
lectured, curated and organised conferences in many insti
tutions worldwide, and is the recipient of theJames Stirling
Memorial Lecture Prize for 2006-7.
RICH WILLIAMS is is the head of the computational ecology

and environmental science group at Microsoft Research,
Cambridge. Rich was educated as an engineer and physical
scientist, and has a PhD in physical oceanography. Before
coming to Microsoft Research in 2006, Rich worked as
529
COLLAPSE VI
a freelance software developer and scientist. His research

focuses on understanding ecosystems as complex networks
and on the robustness of the dynamical systems supported
by those networks.
Key To Charles Avery 's works: p448 Dha; p451 The Eternily
Chamber; p457 Noti.ce .from Heidless Ma,cGregor's Bar; p458
World View {Globe}; p463 Miss Miss; p464 The Female Hunter;
p466- 7 World View {Flat Map}; p468-9 Onomaiopoei.a seen
.from the Sea; p470 Bar i:n Onomatopoeia; p471 Detail .from the
Bar ef the One-Armed Snake; p472 The Three Trees; p473 One
Armed-Snake; p474-5 The Eternal Forest; p476 Hunter with Dog;
Insert: The Plane efthe Gods.
Spia photographs i:n .!Vu:ola Mascio:ndro 's contributWn by
Kruten Alvanson.
Interviews with Greg Mclnerny and Drew Purves conducted at
Micros<fi, Cambridge, and via email by Robin Mackay.
,
Interviews with Stephen Emmott and Rich Wzlliams conducted via

email by Robin Mackay.
Interview with Eyal Web.man conducted in L<mdon, and via email ,
by Robin Mackay.
Thanks to Stephen Emmottforfaditati:ng interviews at Micros<fi.
Thanks to Site Gallery for their assistance with .!Vu:holas Mouli:n 's
work.
Thanks to Eliana Fi:nkelstei:n at Galeria Vermelhofor her assistance
with contacting Detamico and Lain.
Thanks to Paul Chaney and Kenna Hernly far their editorial
assistance, transcnp!Wn marathons, and general moral support.
And special thanks to Louise.
530

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COLLAPSE VI

First published in 2010 in an edition of 1000

comprising numbered copies 1-950

Reissued Edition 2012

All text remains copyright of the respective authors.

As far as we know, philosophy, indeed thinking as such,

characterised instead by contraction, by a forced recognition

render actual its absoluteness', to enter into self-immanence

whose primitive forces can be traced through all of natural

and uncertainty, in a quest for a 'simplicity on the other

As well as exploring the details of the research underway,

conservationists, as Emmott remarks, ecology today must

2. Ecology Witlumt Naiure: &thinking F.rwi:ron:mental AeJthet:ics (Cambridge, Mass.:

3. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, forthcoming 2010.

'strange stranger', drawing us into a 'dark ecology' in which

seen as assays into Morton's 'dark ecology'. To become

5. See Hatherley's Militant Modernism (London: ZerO Books, 2009)

also communicates with an impulse to the sacred. These

forms', wherein forms not only register the multiplicity of

war-machines into a 'chthonic battlespace' which they are

6. R. Negarestani, 'The Militarization of Peace: Absence of Terror or Terror of

7. R . Negarestani, 'The Corpse Bride: Thinkin g with Nigredo', COLLAPSE IV,

Guha in closing declares that '[w]e are that which decays

8. R. Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Basingstoke: Palgrave

realm of in/organic matter and in the history of thought, by

constructions explore the peculiar gramm atologies that

9. C. Avery, The Islmulers: An Introduction (London: Parasol Unit/Koenig, 2008).

10. M. Cirkovic, 'Sailing the Archipelago', COLLAPSE V, 292-329.

philosophy' - as a series of 'decisions' producing trenchant

here, concerns itself with the geophilosophical precipitation

worlds we build upon it. They join the other contributions

find its counterpart in a strange collectivity of readers

1. F. Nietzsche, Thus Spol<e Zarathmtra, trans. A. Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge

Manki:ruis movement through deep space placed a uni,q_ue stamp on

Perhaps only a language in which the pure prose efphilosophy would

T# are allured by thefragrance ef it.

T# are the heretics, apostates,false messiahs, deserters, non-believers, and

4. F. Herbert, Dune (New York: Ace Books, 198), 501.

5. G. Agamben, Language and Death, trans. K. E. Pinkhaus with M. Hardt

7. B. Noys, 'Anarchy-Without-Anarchism', at http://www.sans-philosophie.net.

The twenty-sixth canto of Dante's lefemo voyages via

8. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Cmnedy, ed. C. S. Singleton (Princeton: Princeton

rose and struck the forepart of the ship]. As accentuated by

the undeiworld.11 'Ate convien tenere altro vfaggio' (Jefemo

Yet there is continuity between the two, an umbral link that

14. As Singleton explains in his commentary on Paradiso 27.823, the poet's

I take this moment, which corresponds more precisely

17. A problem to which commentary in particular speaks : 'Western culture could

Such a turning and circling motion which passes inside

panther: 'Tiiis is an animal that is said to be parti-coloured,

2 1 . W. B. Clark, A Medieval Book efBeasts: The Second-Family BeJtiary: Commentary, Art,

times upon the spices, the former amounting on each

sur:fa,ce over which understanding moves, a surface that is

26. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts <fMetaphyJic.s, 4.

move tangentially from it in any direction, but never so far

the other. Rather, thinking takes place in the relationship

To set forth the earth means to bring it into the Open as

Commentary is geophilosophical in the sense of being

3 4 . Heidegger, 'The Origin o f the Work o f Art ,' 46.

readily associate with objectivity. We expect commentaries