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A short text – a pealed layer of skin from the surface of the magazine – is presented below
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The text below, first presented at the New Models 0.5 Decade Brain event in Berlin where the magazine Crude Futures was launched, and written manically in the hours before, is a montage (or is it more like a piece of reconstructed meat?) of the magazine’s themes: planets slipping out from underneath worlds, bodies slipping under wheels, supply chains slipping like a dislocated shoulder blade, complexity slipping through institutional cracks, sensation slipping beyond diagrammatic capture, futures slipping from hands, hornets from regulation, fiction from numbness.
August 2020, a signal image of contemporary collapse: an obliterating pulsation in Beirut rips open the harbour, crumples buildings, kills hundreds. The struggling health system buckles, escalating medical heroics hit a wall, and what looks for a moment like the constitutive impossibility of the Lebanese settlement threatens to break out into open conflict once more. How to make sense of this shockwave of an image emerging in stunned brilliance from covid’s first summer, even 3 years later, without feeling like we are little more than the antibodies of sensemaking rushing prematurely into just one of the wounds of the century of the Lebanese crisis? 4k video makes explanation feel complete, the forensic transmission of detail strips fantasy from bones of the real, and the endlessly rerun sensemaking simulations perfect their models, or at least until someone seizes the stacked GPU clusters that condition this most contemporary ‘writing of the disaster’, or the electricity is rationed, or the crisis lurches into another order, and our image of the whole goes dark again.
Even in this image, whose drama offers an immediacy of reading that obscures its real stakes, the ambivalence of thinking contemporary collapse emerges. How to understand such sudden devastating events? Are they the predictable consequences of a wider collapse process? Cause or superficial effect? How do ready-made explanations for crises, which rush into the emergency, obstruct the slower process of deeper understanding? How is crisis weaponised, or made into a spur for further liberation? Is anything usefully said about the collapse process in Lebanon, which seemingly continues to this day, without encompassing the whole, right back into the country’s colonial past and before, exhaustive accounting of all the material flows in and out? What compressions should a collapsology afford and what forms of openness to an indeterminate totality should it leave frayed? What weapons will we need for a collapsology that sustains us — us here, through the rest of our lives in decay, living and critical? And can there be enough time?
May 2021 sees the end of the occupation of Afghanistan and a rapid return to its previous state, which is to say occupation, in what we might imagine optimistically to be the final act in the Cold War. Less than a year later, the Ukraine war extends the reach of that thrashing tail still further.
And then May 2022, Sri Lanka implodes -- more figuratively -- and the images this time are funnier: people swimming free as birds in the presidential pool, images of glory, absolute expenditure and the sweetness of life as revenge, a scab on the repression of the Tamils ripped off to reveal another scab, deeper, more opaque. This time, theories of collapse play their own role, mediated through the financial markets which suddenly evacuate the air from the country’s coffers, deploying a theory that without money it will collapse, a theory shared among many, and thus bootstrapped into reality.
On the ground, collapse erupts as an overspilling of productive gullies, a sudden complexity excess, a crisis of deindexing as the institutions we’ve assembled to make of our lives an endlessly diversifying composition of failure zones and control lose their grip. What might fall apart this century is almost limitless. Food systems, supply chains, cultural and financial institutions, planetary systems, the capacity to treat other people as people, complexity itself — these all might yet find new forms of failure and ungovernability.
Even when supply chains function “correctly” they smuggle in threats. Invasive murder hornets are shuttled across the planet, putting bees and crop-pollinating insects, whose numbers were already dwindling, at risk of wipeout. This is the power and dynamism of our present society: to make a virtue of failure, to make our sadism abstract. Failure leads to cheapening — a way of making fear flow in the institutional ecology — and the hiding of whatever unfinishable list of things sustains us. In collapse, as well as the drama of the overwhelmed river banks, something silently comes to a stop, a just refusal beneath the social surface. Is it too early to speak of redemption?
Without a vision of the future towards which we can orient ourselves, our relation to the present changes. So much of politics is the back projection of the future. What if the future is blacked out, no longer casting light?
Might Francis Bacon’s famous book of mouth diseases — his work a meditation on the lustre of disgust — be instructive for pursuing an anatomy of the present, in which old diseases creep out from under the permafrost? Or what other atavistic forms of disaster might return? Until 1753, when a surgeon discovered it could be treated with citrus fruit, scurvy would regularly lay waste to half the sailors on a major trip. First, they would become weak, then breathless. Then, slowly and in great pain, their bodies would start to disintegrate. Old scars, long healed, would reopen. Scarred skin is different forever, no matter how much it may resemble its unscathed surface around. Collagen degradation happens there faster: under conditions of ‘scorbutic deficiency’, every old wound reopens. Bodies would curdle, a repulsive confusion of flesh and blood brought about by easy bruising, the collapse from the inside of the body’s structural cohesion. The traumatic history of the body is replayed at hundreds of times its original speed. Blood pours out and infections in. Are we living in an outbreak of social scurvy? And what’s our vitamin C?
Or is our society more like a plane, pinging its location back to ground with a packet of conceptual knowledge, gaining a clearer and clearer sense of its own location until suddenly it isn’t, until it spews its black box and it goes bouncing into a gigantic watery crash site never to be found again? Collapse as a catastrophic loss of altitude, or the ripping of a gully formation, the bursting of the banks of a river of complexity whose finely sculpted sides are made of the recomposed materials of skulls, crushed fine, one entrail-composition leading into another, a morass of gristle or sinew or a dumping ground whose function like a reed-bed is to recompose the big big world into a user interface whose buttons reek of displaced horror, suspended payment from the societies we have collapsed around the globe to get here. Is it cringe to speak of redemption?
We are wholly unprepared, holy openness hold us, whatever composes the ‘we’ of the gully we’ve woken up to, middle-class wankers, hippy dickheads or Taliban, is composed as a mutual crash-site, as a fleshly vulnerability, is part of this composition of disaster to remain and disaster to go, a planetary crisis of breathing of eating of saying who our world is for, of the emptying out the preconditions, outwith our bubble and our cradle, transcendental time crush take us, give us all a crude future, or one of many.