!publish!

content/reflection/shardslist.md

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 title = "List of shards"
 has_shards = ["aggregation.md", "custodians.md",
 "custodianshipinrelationalpractices.md", "effectivealtruism.md",
-"latentimage.md", "longextinction.md", "maintenance.md",
+"latentimage.md", "longextinction.md", "library.md", "theimaginary.md", "existentialism.md", "maintenance.md",
 "neoliberallibrary.md", "processnotplace.md", "protocols.md",
 "senseofimagination.md", "thegap.md", "toolsinrelationalpractices.md",
 "tiers.md", "migrationregime.md", "crisis.md"]

content/shard/existentialism.md

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+title = "The Imaginary in the Long Extinction"
+glassblowers = ["olgagoriunova.md"]
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+
+Existentialism here is a marriage between some literary and philosophical positions.
+
+In literature, Varlam Shalamov wrote about his life in the camp versus how Solzhenitsyn wrote about his. When the latter talked about certain redemption, a rediscovery of humanity and in that, a certain good that the camp showed, Shalamov wrote that a camp is something that should not have happened. This is not something humans should ever experience; such experience has no redeeming qualities. His is a position of contemplating pain (Simone Weil’s malheur?) that arrests in the tracks and that refuses such spiritual and rational solutions as redemption and (logical) causality.
+
+In philosophy, it is about being driven beyond the limits of rationally comprehensible.
+
+“Contrary to the rationalist program of Descartes, Kant, and Husserl, existential philosophy shows that the horrors of existence, the paradoxes and contradictions of human life cannot be grasped through “clear and distinct ideas” but are only given through extreme emotional states such as anxiety and despair—through passion.”
+
+Excerpt From: Benjamin Fondane. “Existential Monday.” iBooks. Also “the impossibility of knowledge by ‘clear and distinct ideas.’” What is worth emphasising here is not anxiety or personal pain, but that apart or on top of “universal truths” and solutions, one needs a “personal solution”, valid for them alone. (Even if it can be useful locally or collectively).
+
+
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+Benjamin Fondane, Existential Monday
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+Dostoevsky
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+Shalamov
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+

content/shard/library.md

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+title = "The Imaginary in the Long Extinction"
+glassblowers = ["olgagoriunova.md"]
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+
+Library supports the functions of the imaginary, both repressive and emancipatory.

content/shard/longextinction.md

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 +++
-title = "The Imaginary in the Long Extinction"
+title = "Long Extinction"
 glassblowers = ["olgagoriunova.md"]
 +++
 
-How not to become paralysed when faced with catastrophic problems of such scale as climate change and mass extinction intertwined as they are with a system of such flexibility and domination as capitalism? Thinking about such future 25 years down the line, the question is not one of depression or weakness, but one that relates to how Varlam Shalamov wrote about his life in the camp versus how Solzhenitsyn wrote about his. When the latter talked about certain redemption, a rediscovery of humanity and in that, a certain good that the camp showed, Shalamov wrote that a camp is something that should not have happened. This is not something humans should ever experience; such experience has no redeeming qualities. His is a position of contemplating pain (Simone Weil’s malheur?) that arrests in the tracks and that refuses such spiritual and rational solutions as redemption and (logical) causality.
+For many peoples, the apocalypse has already occurred. For many, it lies ahead. We are in the long extinction, a process underway. A long duration extending forward, in which we will spend our lives. Framing extinction away from a figure of something contained in the future, a singular event of extermination, and into a process that we have to deal with daily, and increasingly, is important.
 
-To go from here to the long extinction, to live and act is first of all to be able to carve the space for the imaginary. The imaginary of the world that is not linear, deterministic and unavoidable. This is not the imaginary as a dominant practice, a collective ‘figuring out’ based on a certain consensus or a symbolic foundation of a society. This is the imaginary that is composed of multiple threads of possibility, some realised in the past - some ongoing, some private - some public, some local and atomistic - some large-scale. Such imaginary is supported by the project of the library.
+A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None

content/shard/theimaginary.md

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+title = "The Imaginary in the Long Extinction"
+glassblowers = ["olgagoriunova.md"]
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+
+The imaginary is not imagination, because it is not personal and not located in the mind. (Verran, p.37) It is not something a person calls upon by creative cognitive capacity. The imaginary rather refers to a collective process of “figuring” the world.
+
+Verran specifically talks about the modern figuring of the world, where a “figure” can be, for instance, a “feature of the physical matter”. Such a figure has become a foundational unit of universal western epistemology. Verran shows how we parse all modes of abstraction or scientific logic we encounter with this figure, thus remaking them in the image of the western episteme. We can easily add here the figuring of the world in terms of time, money, liberty, autonomy, agency, etc.
+
+This shows that it is not very easy to alter / change or expand the imaginary. It is not just a matter of putting a bit of extra effort into fantasy. It is about a profound remaking of the foundational beliefs, principles and practices that formulate the world in ways in which we are used to encountering it, physically, abstractly, emotionally and in myriad other ways. That is why our imaginary is rooted in the past both conceptually and practically and shapes the future.
+
+
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+Extra reading:
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+- Helen Verran, Science and an African Logic
+- To an extent, Cornelius Castoriadis’s use of the imaginary
+- But not “logic of civilisation” or any essentialist feature of any given society