The second installment of our interview with synthetic zero‘s Arran James and Michael Pyska. This time around, we talk about post-nihilism as political therapeutics, Stoicism and what we would do on the eve of human extinction.
Download and Notes: Mindful Cyborgs: Post Nihilistic Whispers Part 2
You can find part one here.
First of all, starting this week Mindful Cyborgs has a new regular co-host: Sara M. Watson. This episode, she, Chris Dancy and I interviewed Arran James and Michael Pyska of the “post-nihilist” website Synthetic Zero. We talked about Neitzsch, nihilism, post-nihilism, and Buddhism.
Tune in next week for the second half!
Just finished recording an episode of Mindful Cyborgs with Arran James and Michael Pyska of the “post-nihilist” website Syntheticzero.
It was a great episode, and I can’t wait for it to be online, but it’s left me in a weirder than usual headspace.
So what is post-nihilism? I should probably tell you to wait til the podcast is out. But in the meantime, here’s a bit from an article Arran and Michael wrote in the Occupied Times:
After nihilism, then, are embodied realisations of and exposures to vibrant ecologies of being offering an ultimately untameable wilderness which we participate in on an equal footing with all other bodies, even if we have an unequal ecological effect. In order to cope-with and cope-within the wilderness of being we must abandon the charnel-house of meaning and its theological tyrannies once and for all. As coping-beings we must leave our reifications behind in order to engage in post-nihilist praxis: an ecologistics of tracing these rhythms and activities, their multiple couplings and decouplings, and taking responsibility for our way of cohabiting in, with and alongside other bodies.
Finally getting around to playing A Dark Room, a text-based game I’ve mentioned before. It’s like Oregon Trail meets The Road. Dark stuff indeed.
I’ve been listening to David Bowie’s Outside a lot this week. It was the first Bowie album I ever heard, back when I was a teenage rivethead, but I hadn’t listened to it in a good 14 years. Back then I knew it was supposed to be a concept album, and that Bowie had worked with Brian Eno on it, but that was about it. From Wikipedia:
Bowie and Eno visited the Gugging psychiatric hospital near Vienna, Austria in early 1994 and interviewed and photographed its patients who were famous for their “Outsider Art.”[1] Bowie and Eno brought some of that art back with them into the studio[1] as they worked together in March 1994, coming up with a three-hour piece that was mostly dialog. Late in 1994, Q magazine asked Bowie to write a diary for 10 days (to later be published in the magazine), but Bowie, fearful his diary would be boring (“…going to a studio, coming home and going to bed”), instead wrote a diary for one of the fictional characters (Nathan Adler) from his earlier improvisation with Eno. Bowie said “Rather than 10 days, it became 15 years in his life!” This became the basis for the story of Outside.
I was never able to follow the narrative of Outside, but this page tries to unpack the songs and stitch the story together.
BTW, there were also some fantastic moments on the Outside tour, like Bowie singing “Scary Monsters,” “Reptile” and “Hurt” and others with Nine Inch Nails.
Arran James follows up a previous post about extinction:
It is the palliative care of the human that we should really consider. We open with a discussion of the dying Earth because it is this dying that is killing us: a vicarious species-suicide? These are dark thoughts that imply a loathing so great in our species that we’d take out everything else just to slit our own throats once and for all. But we’re not that grand, we’re all too limited, all too human still. Like smokers in the 1950s we didn’t know what we were doing, then we did and did nothing about it, then everyone said it was too late. We’re not quite sure of the periodicity. We don’t know if it is too late. What we do know is that we’ve had a mass terminal diagnosis and there is no consensus on the prognosis. What are we dying of then, if not some anthropathology [3]?
Full Story: synthetic_zero: Beyond palliative care
See also:
“Destructive artist” Otto Muehl’s ferociously nihilistic manifesto ZOCK, originally published in 1967 and translated in the most recent Exquisite Corpse, is one of the most disturbing things I’ve read in a long time. It calls for the complete destruction of pretty much everything. However, one idea in it blew my mind: “ZOCK will eliminate the race problem in a very simple way: 1. A general ban on sexual intercourse between people with the same skin color.”
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