User:Ssstephen/Reading/the world the flesh and the Devil

Introduction by McKenzie Wark

Bernal was what we would now call an accelerationist. He was an Irish landowner and had a "precocious identification with the cause of Sinn Fein"

Bernal broached the question of what it meant to be a citizen of science and a citizen as a scientist.

for Bernal, utopian thought ought to replace religion as a way of feeling out the relation of present to future. In place of heaven or apocalypse, he offered a kind of writing that finds the conditions of the possible in language itself.

evolutiona matter of perversion and a perversion of matter... Nature itself is perverse or in today's language—queer

desire itself has to evolve. Bernal is not a rationalist

The idea of evolving from personal to social desires sounds so potentially dangerous, religious, repressive.

how can the unconscious also become productive?

Eww no fuck off my conscious is already too productive leave me alone.

perhaps the true society will grow tired of development and, out or of freedom, leave possibilities unused, instead of storming under a confused compulsion to the conquest of strange stars.

Adorno, Minima Moralia. I don't know if I can imagine doing this as an individual but I see why it's appealling.

Further reading: paol Corno, a grammar of the multitude. Theodore Adorno, the culture industry, Bernal the social function of science.

perhaps social struggles cannot be effectively fight by politics, philosophy, social science and the arts without attention to their scientific and technical components.

man will not untimely be content to be parasitic on the stars but will invade them and organise them for his own purposes.

Bernal says we should form "small" communities of 20–30,000 people inside man made exoplanets. "There would probably be no more need for government than in a modern hotel" and "the inhabitants can be divided into the personnel or crew, and the citizens or passengers. With the first ... we need not be concerned" 😬 what about a movie where there is a revolution in one of these globes, also the movie could just be called revolution? Do these globes spin maybe not.

Hes kind of right the way he says parasitic in a negative way though, would it be better to be less vampiric. More symbiotic. More in tune with the oneness of the universe.