Surveying is a collective and cooperative reading method. If interest is made manifest (through responses to this post), I propose we organize a preliminary meeting in December 2021, and begin surveying texts of interest in 2022.
In short: we choose a text that is a priori complex and we share it among the participants. Everyone reads their part, then we meet to discuss it collectively, share, criticize, open the reading to our own experiences.
The key point is that each participant reads a different section of the text, so that the meeting (ideally) ends with each person present having an individual and collective sense of the whole text.
Stemming from French working-class culture at the end of the 19th century, land surveying was put into practice by resistance fighters during the Second World War, then disseminated more widely by various popular education movements until today. The survey is not just a summary or an analysis; it also makes the link between theory and practice, between reading and experience.
It therefore stimulates cooperation but also the highlighting of differences in interpretation, and encourages participants to reflect on a subject beyond merely reading out of interest in the subject itself. Beyond its analytical interest, surveying is also a dynamic and proactive working method, far from the analyzes of classic texts and their preconceived criteria.
Collectively as individuals we’re growing sicker and sicker of theory, so for next week we’ll be reading Junji Ito’s version of No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai. It’s a longer book so just read what you can/want and come chat about it :)
I’ll upload a cbz of it later on, but it’s readily available for pirating. Yeah
This is a talk about devotional witchcraft that was presented by Peter Grey, co-founder of the occult publisher Scarlet Imprint, at the Trans-States conference in 2017.
From the conference proceedings: “The transformation of the male erotic landscape through magical and witchcraft practices as constellated about the female mysteries of Babalon. Special attention is given to the pact of transformative blood rituals: menstruation, modification, ordeal and the meaning of animal sacrifice. An account of ongoing magical work by a modern practitioner following the skein of menstrual magic anticipated in such partnerships as Marjorie Cameron and Jack Parsons, Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove.”
Add-on: so far as I can tell, Grey is most widely known in anarchist circles for an essay from 2014, “Rewilding Witchcraft”, a polemic assertion that witchcraft is “quintessentially wild, ambivalent, ambiguous, queer. ” That pamphlet is available here:
– Audio: https://immediatism.com/archives/607
– Text: https://scarletimprint.com/essays/rewilding-witchcraft
– Also in The Brazen Vessel (linked above), and via littleblackcart.
For this week we've decided to give our minds and hearts a little break, by reading some short stories by Jorge Luis Borges.
Borges and I – only 1 page (really an introduction)
The Circular Ruins – 3 pages
The Lottery in Babylon – 4 pages. from wikipedia: “The story is about the role that chance plays in life, whether occurrences are genuinely deserved or whether all of life is merely based on luck or loss. The story references Zeno's paradox by using the lottery as a metaphor for all the possible random occurrences that could occur between any two points in time.” we are enacting the phenomena and it us!
In an effort to decenter the so-called human, we’re confronting Karen Barad’s framework of agential realism. They propose a performative understanding of matter. The author is a theoretical particle physicist playing with time and space to propose the inseperability of ‘intra-acting agencies’. For Barad, all phenomena emerge through intra-action. Their coming-into-relation is a condition for their existence.
Barad’s wider project is concerned with the legacies of Niels Bohr, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Ian Hacking, Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, and others. By Barad’s account, entanglements breed responsibilities, and acknowledging that one is a part of reality demands a response in turn. Avowedly concerned with power, which they describe as an immanent set of force relations. Starting from the basic propositions of quantum physics, Barad troubles any categorical faith in the stability of things, or faith in their representations. All is intra-acting, moving, shifting.
“We are responsible for the world in which we live, not because it is an arbitrary construction of our choosing, but because it is sedimented out of particular practices that we have a role in shaping.”
Since the de Castro text was so dense we have allotted time for continuing its discussion in this upcoming session.
As well, we will be doing some meta chatting about the future direction of the ni.hil.ist reading group, both for scheduling stuff and content-wise [either continuing the human/anti-/non-/trans-human question, and/or what direction to take it (anti-blackness/afropessimism being an earlier proposed avenue).] If you've got thoughts then bring em!
For next week we will be reading The Past Is Yet to Come by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Déborah Danowski. Email bugs @ ni.hil.ist for the jitsi link (due to technical problems we switched jitsi servers so if you previously had joined you may still need to ask for the new link).
Cronos and the Tyranny of the Clock is the next piece in our reading series on anti-humanism. It has a picture of Saturn devouring a child, so it's gonna be a good one I'm sure!
See you at 11 pm UTC on jit.si. Email bugs at ni.hil.ist for the link.
Following along with the theme of anti-humanism, we will explore the piece The Nihilist as Not-Man by Stefan Bolea. Through the works of three different authors, one familiar to this group, and two less so, Bolea presents an idea of the nihilist subject as something certainly not-human, which is in contrast to Nietzsche's ubermensch. The writer of this post will be curious to hear which take each attendant of #nrg finds resonant.
at 11 UTC on jitsi! You can email bugs for the link
Following a 1 week break, to begin our series addressing the topic of anti-humanism, we will discuss Absolute Typhos by Alejandro de Acosta. What is a real human? What is real humanity, with real human relations? From the perspectives of the Greek Cynics, Stirner's Unique, and Situationist International, A de A explores these questions, and how mediation informs the human.
