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ERRARE HUMANUM EST: The pursuit of error

01/01/2010 - 31/12/2010 (tz: Europe/Amsterdam)
vivre-sa-vie
vivre-sa-vie

The pursuit of truth seems to have been pretty much a constant in the official history of all human endeavor: science, ethics, politics, education, even aesthetics and romance all take their bearings from the implicit and apparently self-evident horizon of Truth. Even liars adhere to the supremacy of the truth they strive to travesty or conceal. Yet, ensconced as it may be in common sense, that apparent self-evidence is somewhat troubling. For the paradox, of course, is that if we need truth as our guiding beacon then it can only be because we are errant bodies in a world replete with error. And being in denial about that paradox has led our verists to some massive hypocrisy and not much verism of any substance at all. But what if it were the other way round? What if truth was not an earthly principle at all? Where would that leave us?

Not in the hands of the relativists, to be sure, because they too have their shifting horizon of explanatory truth, which they call relativism. What if the ordering principle of reality were error itself? What would that mean? How could we face up responsibly and honestly to something so apparently irresponsible? By denying it even as errors continue to accumulate daily? Or playing with it, to tease out… not its truth but its potential?

Errorism, in both theory and practice, is based on the manifestly warped idea that error is the ordering principle of reality. In other words, errorism is, philosophically speaking, a self-consciously erroneous position. (Whereas other philosophical positions may have the dubious epistemological privilege of being unselfconsciously erroneous.) This raises some abyssal conceptual quandaries… International Errorism is also a worldwide – indeed universal! – movement, started in Buenos Aires, international capital of error, in 2006, or thereabouts, which has done much to promote understanding and acceptance of errorism. Only error keeps mankind alive!

Though this may be a thorough error in judgment, this forum will consist of posting a number of theoretical and philosophical and political texts – Errorist Manifestos, videos and images and odd and sundry, and then engaging a conversation in no particular direction with everyone and all error involved. The Forum is thus a place to concoct, theorize on, commit, and to contaminate the world with error. Error is its constituent principle. This online forum paves the way for next year’s International Congress of Error and Errorism to be held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on the occasion of the bicentennial of South American independence – or two hundred years of error in Latin America. The point is to deepen our level of error in anticipation of the Congress. It is not clear to the organizers who in their right mind yet, with enough money to fund such an endeavor, would agree to part with it for such a carnival of gleeful and erroneous folly! But be that as it may, International Errorists shall convene in Buenos Aires in early 2010 to consider the abyssal philosophical subtleties, political substance, scientific ramifications and aesthetic emancipatory potential of the idea according to which errare humanum est and above all that somos todos erroristas. So to get the ball rolling (in the wrong direction of course, and with as many balls as required) let this online forum acknowledge that it has already begun.

 

In reply to your introduction to error

Dear Stephen Wright,

I read your introduction to Error(ism) and
I was struck strange enough by this one line:

"...and then engaging a conversation in no particular direction with everyone and all error involved...."

In no praticular direction?
What do you actually mean by this?
Wouldn't you run into the risk of making unforgivable "errors" if you start to wonder around with/in no particular direction?

Waiting for you reply,

Best regards,

FA Vedett

 

FA Vedett, Most of the more

FA Vedett,

Most of the more "unforgivable" errors I've made -- and a number of them have been described to me just that way -- were committed while heading in very particular directions. I may be making yet another error, but the conclusion I've drawn from that is that taking particular directions is no warrant against error. Of course the point of this forum is not to avoid errors but to embrace them as a regulatory and universal principle -- and to see if we can't do something with this experimental (and goofy) methodology.

Like what, you may ask?

Like pointing up all the truly unforgivable errors made by the expert culture that informs the powers-that-be, typically under the double guise of truthfulness and inevitability. Expert culture is premised on truth, both in the conception and execution of its designs. Hydro Québec builds a mega-dam, inundating the largest tract of land ever flooded by human initiative, because it is a true expression of what needs to be done for society's betterment: the water floods in every direction to the detriment of whatever life forms happens to be living there but the project's direction-pointer was clearly calibrated on truth, and what's worse is that critics of such undertakings are obliged to share that basic truth criteria if they are to be heard (and are still rarely heard, error being pretty much universal). Everywhere borders are being produced, certain voices are being heard as discourse and others written off as mere noise -- all in the name of arguments that run in one direction: to the horizonline of truth, expert culture's "true north."

Error seems to be an appropriate tactic for an operation such as ours, seeking to undermine the verists' whole modus operandi rather than the mere content of one of their projects (challenging expert culture on a case by case basis is not enough, because it accepts their hegemonic that they are worthy of discussion). I can't quite imagine that our errorist epistemology can be taken seriously because coming from far left field, it really side-swipes their most basic tenet. We're not saying, "You're in error, we know the truth"; but rather, "You're in error, join the errorists -- all you have to do is take off your stuffed shirt and admit that your guidebook, The Protocols of Verism, or whatever you call it, is complete counterfeit!"

Errorism is of a kind with what The Yesmen, in reference to their pranks, call "identity correction". Think of it as a form of self-medication for the cosmological errors we've convinced ourselves are true. Poking fun - and sometimes a sharp stick - at the metaphysics of truth that are all around, in every direction.

 

Dear Stephen Wright .....

In response to your previous reply....

Stephen Wright says:

Hydro Québec builds a mega-dam, inundating the largest tract of land ever flooded by human initiative, because it is a true expression of what needs to be done for society's betterment: the water floods in every direction to the detriment of whatever life forms happens to be living there but the project's direction-pointer was clearly calibrated on truth, and what's worse is that critics of such undertakings are obliged to share that basic truth criteria if they are to be heard (and are still rarely heard, error being pretty much universal).

My Answer:

it's very interesting what you say about this dam and the effects on nature caused "by human-constructions/destruction"?
I have made friends with a young guy that from Bangladesh emigrated to Europe (Italy), thanks to the various human-traffickers that he met along the way.
He told me this story that all of Bangldeshees know and that causes immense damages to nature and human life once or twice a year.
He told me that the Indian government, whenever they think it is needed, opens up the dikes of a certain river and regularly inundates a vast area of poor flat-land Bangladesh. Causing the most horrible damages to the little agriculture that they are able to set up at specific time of the year and along with it the destruction on houses and shelters that the Bangladeshees manage to build in periods of dryness.

The all action seems to be justified by the Indian Govt. as a cleansing procedure of that part of land or other, to me, ununderstood reasons.
Still the thing is that this inundation takes place again and again with very much anger and sorrow of the poor Bangladeshees.
Is it possible to consider this one an "error" or can we call it a necessity?

Hear from you soon.

Cheers,

FA Vedett

vedettt@gmail.com

 

Nice idea!!!!This is totally

Nice idea!!!!
This is totally awesome. Thanks!!!!

 

Errorism and The Creative Act

Dear Stephen,

I wholly agree that Verism (as you refer to it) is
fundementally flawed from the outset although it does
strike me that the verification of error does seem to
disclose congruency - if not truth claims.

I was just wondering to what extent you feel that an
artistic perception of Duchamp's co-efficient as something
to engage with might go some way to altering conditions
which otherwise lead creative people down increasingly
contradictory structural routes.

I am a student of John Roberts and excited that his next
book will focus on this. You're approach to the increased
invisibility of artists and views on performing the
document are entirely in line with my research interests
for phD.

To these ends and if your schedule permits I do hope we
can discuss things further at some stage. (I'm interested
how this all might intersect with Virilio in some way.)

best wishes,

Mat

 

The need for an international Errorist Movement

Sorry, you need to install flash to see this content.

The need for an international Errorist Movement

Hello! Here some lines by Etcetera… from Argentina.

We are excited by the debate that Stephen brings to the table and the commentaries by Mat and FA Vedett. We see this Forum as a possible way to continue developing and researching around the “Errorism”.

This issue is one of the concerns of our actions/experiences of our artistic/political life because since some years ago we are involved in the errorism and the variables of interpretation, actions and debates around the error.

Today the errors are present more than ever in all aspects of life.

Some examples about how the “error” is use to justified some non-error plans:

The case of Charles de Menezes in 2005 when he was shot in the head seven times at close range by Metropolitan Police officers who misidentified him as a suicide bomber about to explode a device on the London Underground. Within hours police discovered that he was not involved in any terrorist act, but was actually an innocent victim. They justified that act as an “error”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Charles_de_Menezes

Or recently, the “error” was accepted one time more:

The idea of a "war on terror" is a "mistake", putting too much emphasis on military force,
Foreign Secretary David Miliband has said. Thursday, 15 January 2009
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/7829946.stm

…and not only about the logic of Terror/Error , in terms of Contemporary Economy

IMF, World Bank Warn Global Cooperation Could Falter
Saturday, 03 October 2009
http://www.independent-bangladesh.com/2009100211377/business/imf-world-b...

"There will be a natural tendency to return to business as usual, and it will become harder to convince countries to cooperate in order to address many of the problems that led to this crisis, that put millions of livelihoods of people at risk."

IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, speaking as top financial officials from across the globe arrived in Istanbul for semiannual IMF and World Bank meetings, also used the word "complacency" in describing the risk of policy errors. He said governments might be tempted too early to unwind expensive rescue measures for their economies, such as fiscal stimulus programmes and injections of huge amounts of money into their banking systems.

"My worry is governments say, 'That's it, we're out of the crisis, it's time to go back to normal' -- that would be the real error and it's one of the risks we must be sure to ward off."

And the health:

“Swine Flu May Be Human Error; WHO Investigates Claim”
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=afrdATVXPEAk

For that: NOT EVERY ERROR IS ERRORIST

“Errorist Error” is the “error” that interlaces the error into the same errorist in the “game of errors”. The Errorists are “conscious about the unconsciousness of erring” and act, live from that point on.

Extracts of the declaration of 2005:

1. We are all Errorists.

2. The basis of Errorist action is Error.

3. Errorism is a mistaken philosophical position.
Ritual of negation. Disorganized organization.

4. Errorism’s field of action includes all practices tending toward the LIBERATION of human beings and of language.

5. Failure as perfection, error as triumph.

7. Errorism: It Isn’t, and it Is. It gets nearer, it slips away. Self-creates and self-destroys.
Lives up to its old and new forms.
(sometimes without explanations, and who knows, maybe it’s totally banal).

For an International Errorist movement

Historically, there have been numerous instances of movements that later, under the yoke of postmodern thought, would be reduced to tendencies. The historical movements have almost become myths. This strategy, woven from academic thought, is meant to frustrate any chance of taking over or rethinking the sense of the collective in philosophy and art , and uniting the same context with each and every juncture.

Despite the distance between generations, we were profoundly touched by the idea of being part of the engine for change not only in culture and language, but also in society as a whole.
We found that the mistakes acted as lubricant for the idea of a movement that proposed changing life.

Is time to find the groups and individual peoples that would try to be part of a movement of errors. Since we started with our “disorganization” we had to fight on two fronts: against the widespread feeling that nothing could be changed and against the notion that this was the only possible economic and social model. The past years the idea of globalization was expanding, and it donned a cloak of jokes and ironies when confronted with any proposed politicized cultural movement. The “end of history” and the “death of ideology” brought on a widespread skepticism that was cleverly packaged in mega cultural events, large concerts, festivals, exhibitions.

The idea of cultural consumption culture as a basic value of the business field, “sponsorship” was apparently the only possible factor in the field of art and culture. So the field of culture came to occupy the place of the sensible and to produce human subjectivity. It was transformed into the “washing machine" of transnational capital.

But now we are entering a new historic moment where once again the relationship of art and society will turn. It seems that each time this turn takes the elements of cultural representation that are presented by the lived socioeconomic model. The brand functions aesthetically as a good guide to the paths of subjective social life at all times and places. Clashes of trends and movements, however contradictory, are indispensable to the survival of a renewal in the arts and thought. They are the raw material of all intellectual production.

The search for new systems of representation and the formation of movements are challenges for any society that needs to remake its values. Participation in this process is an essential gesture for the times through which we are living. An experience of social and spiritual renewal, in which the bonds of the social will be reclaimed, awaits us in the midst of the contemporary life’s endless contradictions. We will take part in the construction of this movement through trial and error. We will revive the “isms” taking these mistakes as something positive for our future as a society. We will install them subtly criticized in everyday language, turning terms into actions and actions into situations. By expanding these errors, we will make a contribution and make the movement we are building together more dynamic.

With the “Errorism” as a keyword , now is necessary go more and more deep , for that reason the First International Congress of Error and Errorism will be an important moment to meet the comrades around the globe , to write a collective declaration and think about the upcoming actions. For this we call to all who feel represent to be involve in the next error together.
At the moment in Latin America (in our case, Argentina) the errorism is essential and we would like to make a big encounter with other errorists.

The times of the perfection are over!
Is time to recover the real sense of the error.

In the next post we will invite other errorists to the debate and the support of the movement.

Finally we invite to see this action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1nYWjXrGWM

Urban Errorist Cartography

carried out by the people and collectives supporting errorism in Argentina, took place in Buenos Aires, there is the only urban zone in the world where (the streets) Palestine and Israel intersect on a map.

Etcetera...

 

the Rekombinant Error

The sentence that better captures the methodology of Marxian philosophy, is the well know eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”
This sentence may be understood in two different ways: the philosopher must understand the world, interpret it, because this is the only way to change. But also: the philosopher must take part in the process of changing the world because this is the only to really understand it.
Let’s hypothesize that our understanding leads us to the conclusion that to change the world is impossible, because of its complexity and of the irreversibility of the prevailing trends. In this case the error would be the only way to act.

In July 2009 we decided to end the Rekombinant project, started in 2000.
The project Rekombinant, a weblog connecting almost two thousands persons all over Europe – large part of them Italian researchers working abroad – was based on the idea that the actual process of intellectual labor may become an autonomous process of self organization of knowledge, technology and social production.
At the end of the XX century the digitalization of global production materialized the Marxian concept of general intellect.
Assuming that social emancipation and autonomy of knowledge and technology tend to coincide in the sphere of the general intellect, Rekombinant was intended to give the cognitive labor a platform for sharing social consciousness and techno-scientific knowledge.

But the history of the zero decade began with a dark reversal: identitarian fanaticism and economic dogmatism took the lead in the West and elsewhere. The shattering of the general intellect was the prevailing trend of the past decade: war, militarization of knowledge, precarization of labor, and fragmentation of the cognitive process.
Industrial labor has been under attack during the last thirty years. The effects of this attack are now crystal clear: a huge increase in productivity, and a parallel decrease in the average salary worldwide. The total amount of necessary labor time is falling, and is destined to fall more and more, as a consequence of two factors: the application of intelligent technology and the flexible organization of labor subsuming every cell of social life in a flow of time at disposal of capital. The working hours per person are not decreasing, but increasing, and this is generating unemployment, underemployment and marginalization. The mother of all the bubbles, the labor bubble is growing and growing.
The only way to counteract this tendency would be a cut in working hours per person. But the workers movement did not understand the crucial importance of reducing the individual amount of working time. So the work bubble has grown and grown, and the paradox of jobless expansion has become the norm.

Economic globalization and cultural identitarianism, in their contradictory convergence, have destroyed the consciousness of the common interest of workers, while the precarization of cognitive labor and the depletion of the cognitive workers have weakened the possibility of worker’s autonomy. Today at the beginning of the second decade, we cannot predict any process of recomposition of social labor, and we cannot predict any process of self organization of the cognitariat. Instead we are facing a simultaneous increase in unemployment and in exploitation, impoverishment of daily life of the population, collapse of the social infrastructures, identitarian violence, and a general decay of the modern social civilization. Global capitalism has divorced from Modernity, and in the span of three decades the legacy of Humanism, Democracy and Social Welfare has been squandered. Now de-civilization is on its way, and no conscious collective resistance is in sight.

So, what is the point of radical thought, what’s the point of critique engagement, if no conscious collective subjectivation is possible, and no way is left for hijacking the criminal train of capitalism?
What possibility is supporting hope and dissidence and revolt?
The only possibility is in the limits of our knowledge and understanding.
Tertulliano said “Credo quia absurdum” (I believe because it is absurd) in order to establish his faith in God. I’m not speaking of faith, here. I’m rather speaking of the contrary, the obstinate refusal of believing in the reality of our daily experience.
The only possibility of reinventing a future is based on the assumption that we are in error.
To err means exactly this: to wander in the infinite sphere of the excess of possibilities that our present stance makes invisible. To roam in the infinite sphere of excess that is irreducible to knowledge and predictability.

My knowledge and my understanding show no room for solidarity in the coming time, given the present conditions techno-totalitarianism. But the catastrophe is exactly (etymology: kata and strophein) the point where a new landscape is going to be revealed.
I do not see that landscape because my knowledge and my understanding are limited, and the limits of my language are the limits of my world.
My knowledge and understanding are missing the event, the singularity.
So I must act “as if”. As if the forces of labor and knowledge may overcome the forces of greed and of proprietary obsession. As if the cognitive workers may overcome the fractalization of their life and intelligence, and give birth to a process of self-organization of collective knowledge. I must resist simply because I cannot know what is happening after the future, and I must preserve the consciousness and sensibility of social solidarity, of human empathy, of gratuitous activity, of freedom, equality and fraternity. Just in case, right?
Just because we don’t know what is going to happening next, in the empty space that comes after the future of modernity. I must resist because this is the only way to be in peace with my self. In the name of self-love, we must resist. And self-love is the basic ethic rule that an anarchist prizes.

The present ignorance has to be seen as a space of possibility. Error is action in this space of ignorance. We have to start from the error of the general intellect.
The force of the collective intelligence is boundless. Theoretically. But it lacks any consciousness of itself. Intelligence without self-consciousness.
I am talking of the self-consciousness of the general intellect, millions and millions of people worldwide producing the info-flow that makes the planet go round.
Creating a form of self-consciousness of the general intellect is the political task of the future. And it is not only political, but philosophical, epistemological, and in the end therapeutic.
Why the cognitarians are weak, and disunited, and unable to assert their right as laborers, and their knowledge as researchers? Because they live in a dimidiated form, because their brain is detached from their body, because their communication is less and less communicating, more and more freezing sensitive life.
The new space of activism is here, in the connection of poetry and therapy and paradigmatic creation. The error is the gate to this space.
Poetry and therapy (thera-poetry) will be the forces leading to the creation of a cognitarian self-consciousness: not a political party, no organization of interests, but the reactivation of the cognitarian sensibility.
The error of the general intellect is the starting point, after the future.

 

3 new GARDENING SONGS

Deploying Gardening as a metaphor with which to arrive at a proposal for principles for the management of systems of systems. please hear 3 fresh drafts on

http://www.myspace.com/TheErrorists

I would appreciate comments to
the.errorists@googlemail.com

lots of love,

Hilary

 

FAITH IN INFRASTRUCTURE an Errorist Manifesto 2008

Faith in Infrastructure Hilary Koob-Sassen
An Errorist Manifesto

Presented at the Serpentine Gallery
London, October 18, 2008

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am an Errorist.
I announce my error. In exchange I ask for liberty- to practice being in time.
Being-in-time-terror has a suitably slow-rolling and tepid name:
Global Warming, Finance Crisis.
Such tepid names are dangerous, but us Errorists, we are Syntactical Elaborationists
here to give it a new name.

Durability is traction on change.
Durability is a measure of how closely the momentum of a structure’s change navigates the actual contours of reality as they unfold- in the ever-passing-mo- A genome undergoing natural selection is like a phrase constantly trying to name reality more accurately. ‘Adaptation’ is the successful inclusion of experiences into that range of reality to which a lineage of creatures can respond.

With the accumulation of shit, the artificial residues of life create evolutionary feedback ¹, favoring the development of a materialism. Materialism’s creature builds structures, and then adapts to them. Eventually the creature comes to fit so perfectly to the built structure, that its success relies less upon the genetic evolution of its own body than upon the material elaboration of these built external organs.

Elaboration moves along when structures subside from direct experience to a position of foundational relevance. The aqueducts have disappeared- we have faith in subterranean pipes. Upon this faith we buy a house. Upon this faith we live in New Orleans. An evil experience is the same for the living and the built: the floods were outside of that range of reality to which the structure could respond. The levee breaks and no hidden capacity reveals itself: no preternatural burst of adrenaline allows the slipping deer to spring to a foothold, no particularly well-fashioned piece of levee exceeds its nominal strength and endures. No response. These two syntaxes- genetic and materialist- must name reality faster than it changes. Otherwise, reality deletes them.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

The Elaborative Trajectory from economies to organs is Paracultural- it advances across the lifetimes of many cultures, in the same way that evolution advances across the lifetimes of many creatures. Life builds and climbs its paracultural ladder up and out, Life seeks a divinely realistic structural solution to the constraints inherent in this scale of reality. Life seeks the exit of the cave- to pierce the scalar pellicle and deposit itself outside- naked and quivering and blind and alone- on a new landscape of possible formations.

These attempts are almost certain to fail. And yet, the five instances of success- the five instances of a culture of one scale successfully attaining the next- these are the 5 major punctuations of biological history. In the original big mineral mud puddle (between the mountains) a culture of replicating molecules arranged itself into the first virus. The rampant protein trading of a virus culture finally formalized its capital city into the first ever bacteria and today virus can’t really live outside a city. Amidst the heightened diverse exertions of a culture of bacteria- orgiastically plunging in and out of each other- the origination of single cells with organelles. After not so many millennia of refining and specializing economy in a place, a culture of single-cells managed to carve their place into a body and become the first multi-cellular organism. Each of these opened up a new terrain for life, a new scale of biological complexity.

Cultures of all scales follow a historical template to a predictable outcome. Once a foundational traction on time is established, Life scrambles to pile up an ascent to traction on scale. Life tries to leap from the pile- before the changes brought about by the pile-up conspire to bring the pile down. The further the elaborating culture structure or evolving body cantilevers-out from a foundational capacity, the more susceptible to foundational change it becomes. The power of high elaboration lies in its ability to abstract- in its capacity to attend to non-foundational things, precisely because it has placed so much faith in its foundation. For a highly elaborated culture structure there are only three responses to a collapsing faith in foundation: anticipatory reversion to rudimentary form, death in abstract splendor – or - an attempt to exit the cave and be the birth of the next scale. To hold that fruiting endpoint present to the mind. Present to the highest abstract power of culture. Present perhaps, to the arts.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Before “Organific Economics 101” and “How to be Paracultural”, It is extremely important / for me to refresh / my errorist credential/ and for you to sharpen your criticality to an axe-murdering edge. I long for that chop, for I am in no way convinced of what I propose, tho very committed to proposing it.
For- Proposal is to culture what mutation is to creature: Often dull, rarely harmful, and every now and then it is just what we need: The fancy curved beak to suck the nectar… out of the flower…better.
So, how do we become Paracultural?
How do we take on the trajectory of life, consciously as our own?

I propose an exit from the Latin mass of biology. I propose this curvaceously updated old god Life. We need a new word game and a direct relationship with the godmaths.

We must not confuse development and origination. To say a nation develops is to imply that a highly perfected map of a final fruiting structure exists within that nation- that it merely awaits the set of experiences- a mother- which would allow it to unfurl its perfection.

In actual fact, the main work at hand is to find out what- if anything- could be astutely considered analogous to DNA- to its syntactical structure and to its meaning.
I will tell you what I think- almost definitely wrong:
No structure song is complex enough to be sung into world body, except,
that standard human system of organs. In that garden 4 billion cells sing in schizophrenic unity- a single human consciousness. That system is the only song complex enough for us each to sing it together. The translational diversity of our minds. The universal sameness of our bodies.
Maybe.
But definitely and for sure embryonic development is not evolution. It is a highly refined process-product of evolution. And again, no guide to where we stand. Furthermore, evolution is over- its time frame is so slow that it is no use to us. We are agents of extinction, but not of evolution. Far beyond all else, we are agents of elaboration. We are practicing and building a world body around ourselves. The first body of that scale. We are a scalar leap in complexity from the cell culture that built the first body. And yet, that is our closest analogy.

We must embrace the messy process of becoming, of first origination! and forget all ideas that the world is a fully evolved thing in some stage of embryonic development.
Instead let us say, “The nation state system is like a proto-organ in so far as it is a universally inclusive structure. As the organs of a body are universal to its cells.”
We must be rigorous in our science and also in our poetry.
We must be pious and poetic scientists, performing exegesis on the analogy map of the experiences of other scales of culture. We must seek to be like the five cultures that pushed their art across the threshold between the built and the alive.

Humanity stands inside a framework of its own creation. We have sung this paracultural ladder into existence. From a spore: from a way to navigate reality and endure; planting, irrigation, harvest unchanging. To a bridge: a materialism, which supports the procession of humanity forward through time and changing hegemonic formulations. And now we have come to a more open place where things shake and start to break. We put our faith in multiplication of a new kind of structure: the web, the market and the bubbles. The bubbles, which are like an unsatisfied hunger. The bubbles, which long to be cathedrals- to be proper investment vehicles. In elaborating global economies, we evoke world organs. How do we sing them into structure?

Bailing-out banks, sandbagging levees and subsidising ethanol must be characterized as “thrashing about”- an attempt to surmount an evil experience by rampantly generating small proposals- in the hopes of developing a response. We must move from pushing sugar into over-loaded liver and set out to formalize some lovely kidneys- solar seas and roiling greens. We must be Organific Economists- seeking-out new systems in the Pattern of the Plans; advancing the trajectory onward from economies into organs.
For example, the web is a global- but not universal- economy of information. It evokes a world organ of meaning: the super-nucleus of a rampant design democracy. A spherical digital google cathedral earth map mosaic- flipped outside-in. Inside, 8 billion humans' incarnations are surveying the entirety of what could be. The overlapped transparencies of all humanity’s dreams. So difference is detectable, tho majority creates a denser line. Our syntax octopus of proposals and our pattern of the plans replaces the lack of plan plan and the invisible hand. With a higher resolution name. High resolution in the sense of high informational density, and in the sense of inspiring resolve to act. That is the organ / which our unfinished web economy/ seeks to be. It is natural, but not inevitable.

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Organific Economics Equation 101 allows us to assess the GLD:
The durability of a creature or a culture—or indeed the durability of all of Life itself––the horsepower of its traction on change—the speed with which it advances into future experience—Life’s durability is a function of the efficiency of its experiential metabolism and the domain of its activity.

Life’s metabolism: Its capacity to translate an experience into a foundation for further experience. How quickly and how absorbently- to how many of its constituents. To how much of itself can Life present the opportunity to know an experience, develop a structural response, and then move that structure on down into the faith zone.
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
X Times X –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Life’s Domain: The breadth and depth of matter to which and with which Life can develop a response. How realistic is Life’s picture of reality and how realistic is its materialism. Can we sculpt atoms, molecules, life forms, planets….just about. Our over-cantilevered bridge cannot support a response to the warming waters below. It cannot frame the sky as organs. It suffers an unjustified faith in infrastructure.

We must hope that we cannot design the world organs themselves- we must pray that they will be too complex. We can only build a structure to support them, and leave the sky open, for their growth-explosion. We can transform our bridge into a trellis- a Rankgitter- a growth grid. We can switch from procession through TIME to an inhabitation of the M.T.I.E. The economies of preparation for the next scale. The Multiple Transnational Infrastructure Economies. We can cease to progress, and shift to preparation for ascent.

With our ancient extracted, refined and recombined modernista materialismus we can build the structures that will support the new materialism. The materialism of a garden of organs on earth, which will be lush if we provide it good handholds for ascent. We must be furious builders of structures, which scream NO to progress as such. That are steady machinegun perfection tempered steel bridges that are forever, that Life can get to know like bones and grow around. Life seeks to mount the built trellis, to climb up and out into the cosmos. It seeks to climb the square god of culture and manifest the next round god of life.

Life seeks to bring all of itself into itself--into its experiential metabolism. Life seeks the Mental Jordan genius who is starving in a desert. Life screams for her to help it explosively reorganize the moon. The moon- that ancient image of the exit of the cave. Life longs to devastate its simplicity with rampant green complexity. To unleash its viral hordes onto the helpless dust of Venus. To suck the iron out of Saturn. If we are to be Paracultural, that is the holy war we must take up. Sneaky Life launched its attack in a province of the cosmos. Sneakily it worked a space between the atoms and the planets. And now through We- so super fancy- a frilly life fractal complexity- We must dance out on the palate of the desert, We must dance the lack of life into complexity. We must finally conquer this damned shifting stone, which threatens to chuck life off like a clinging skin, to rub it off on the sun. We must conquer the world for life and claim its next domain!

Hilary Koob-Sassen, 2008

hksassen@hotmail.com

Notes : ¹ F. John Odling-Smee, Laland, Feldman; “Niche Construction”, Princeton University Press, 2003

 

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ABOUT ERRORIST.COM

errorist defines itself through the contradiction of the established! It wants to cultivate fallibility and make it its normative principle.

errorist believes that you are right if you are wrong: as an art project, it uses this antinomy to reproduce itself. As a political instrument, errorist scans the constitutive contradictions of social systems in order to illuminate their organizing principles via internal disruption.

Errorist operates interdisciplinary between art, technology, fashion and politics and defines itself as a workshop for political art-ivity. For errorism the word art refers to that social freespace where it is possible to develop different viewpoints about society and social processes.

www.errorist.com is the platform, in which the potential of actors can be channeled.

Are you an errorist already? Send your project ideas to:
art(at)errorist.com

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Food For Thought

mince-mind.preview
Food for thought

Found this food for thought in Istanbul, thought you might enjoy...

 

Errorism isn't what I would call it

Errorism is a word that suggests that there is a difference between intent and effect. Well then why not just say so? There is a difference, a dynamic principle.

I'm looking to flesh out this idea on my blog: antivigilante.livejournal.com.

I'll give you something to play with:

Reality is fundamentally discrete. A video camera cannot capture itself.

Reality is fundamentally static. Actions are the result of provable active elements.

Reality is fundamentally dynamic. All actions are the result of a potential difference.

Reality is fundamentally entropic. All activity is oriented toward static elements of higher organization.

Reality is fundamentally accountable. Change in the static is bound to change in the dynamic.

Reality is fundamentally balanced. Change preserves identity.

Reality is fundamentally fractal. It is possible to nearly infinitely disect without losing identity.

All error is in calling for equality instead of humility. Or rather treating various options as equal or irrelevant.

Error is a matter of omission at one step or another. In the case of Bangladeshees being flooded that means the actors have omitted reality itself and are oblivious. The behaviour of the Indian authorities is precisely aimless institutionalism.

I should have something later today on this.

 

STEPHEN..We need you for

STEPHEN..We need you for 30anniv. FUSION reunion.
Dave tgfond@yahoo.ca

 

Re: ERRARE HUMANUM EST: The pursuit of error

The Errorist Schoolmaster One Lesson in Intellectual Emancipation Written by: Jacques Ranciere The Errorist International Remixed by: Anonymous Stateless Immigrants This is what everything is in everything means: the tautology of power. All the power of language is in the totality of a book. All knowledge of oneself as an intelligence is in the mastery of a book, a chapter, a sentence, a word - errorism. Everything is in everything and everthing is in errorism, scoff the critics, and, to catch the errorist off guard, they asked, “is everything also in the errorist manifesto? And in it’s first word? Is mathematics in errorism?” And the errorist felt the ground slip from under him and called on the spirits of surrealism and dadaism for help: what should the errorist answer, to these petit bourgeois who understand nothing of errorism, of surrealism and of dadaism, and of the nature of human existence? The errorist answered that he believed all human works (of art, literature, poetry, mathematics, philosophy and so on) to be in the word errorism, since this word is a work of human intelligence. He, who calculated fractions and mathematics, losing the fear of being wrong, impels a surpassing of limits and a creative potential that was latent, but inhibited by the moral structures that determine social values and behaviours under the traditional educational system, is the same intellectual being as he who conceived of the concept to err. The errorist knew the language and grammar of nature; he chose a word that meant “liberation” and “de-education,” suggesting that the permanent presence of error in reality liberates, educating people through a process of de-education. Error is like death in relation to life: it (error) will always be present, including here and now as you are reading this text. The errorist resembled the one who imagined the ways of writing the word we’re talking about – error. He resembled the one who made the paper on which we write, the one who uses pens to the same purpose, the one who sharpens the pens with a penknife, the one who made the penknife out of iron, the one who procured the iron, the one who made the ink, the one who printed the word errorism, the one who made the printing machine, the one who took the steps necessary to alter the dynamics of history by dicovering new materials and relations, languages, theories, lands, even stars – through error. All sciences, all art, anatomy, and so on, are the fruits of the same intelligence of he who first conceived of the word errorism. Here is everything that is in errorism: the power of intelligence that is in any human manifestation. The same intelligence makes nouns and mathematical signs. What’s more, it (error) emancipates by conditioning the reasoning in which progress takes form. There aren’t two sorts of minds. There is inequality in the manifestations of intelligence, according to the greater or lesser energy communicated to the intelligence by the will for discovering and combining new relations; but there is no hierarchy of intellectual capacity. Emancipation through error is about becoming conscious of this equality of nature. Errorism is what opens the way to all the marvelous adventures in the land of knowledge. It is a matter of daring to err, and not whether one learns more or less well or more or less quickly or correctly. In fact, however, it is much faster to start with errorism than with the A,B,C’s, but the speed won is only an effect of intellectual emancipation, a consequence of the emancipatory possibilities of errorism. The Old Master begins with letters because he directs his students according to the principle of intellectual inequality, and especially the intellectual inferiority of children. He believes that letters are easier to distinguish than error; this is wrong, but this is what he thinks. Spelling is an act of contrition before being a way of learning. One learns sentences and more sentences; one discovers facts, that is, relations between things, and still other relations that are all of the same nature; one learns to combine letters into words and words into sentences, in short, one learns to be interpellated into the controlling and imperialist ideology of The Old Master. The Errorist Master calls for the urgent necessity of a general de-education. A sum of collective projects and experiences in the transmission and exchange of knowledge and practices, a self-formation of individuals and collective subjects that take life itself as their object of study and not the A,B,C’s. In this intellectual order, one can do what any other person can do. The Old Master doesn’t stultify his students by making them spell; he stultifies by telling them that they can’t spell by themsevles. Making them read by words won’t emancipate them; it will deaden them because he will be very careful to tell them that their young intelligence can’t do without the explications he pulls out of his aged brain. It is thus not the procedure, the course, the manner, which emancipates or stultifies; it is the principle. The principle of inequality, the old principle, stultifies no matter what one does, the principle of equality, the errorist principle, emancipates no matter what procedure, book, or facts it is applied to. The errorist felt a sense of relief come over him. He no longer felt as if the ground was slipping beneath him, and instead felt inspired seeing that the critics were now beginning to understand errorism. To err is to think and to err is the path to liberated forms of kowledge and intelligence. “Viva Errorism! Viva Errorism!” the critics began to chant. And this is the story of one lesson in intellectual emancipation.