#cosmism

[renegade-hierophant]

by Mac Baconai

[la-cosmonauta-extraterrestre]

Definitely didn't lie awake in bed last night because of this.

Had plans to write an alt-hist about this at some point, but it gets too complicated with everything in the timeline that (potentially) would change.

[diemelusine]

"Billie sings. Billie loves. Billie is happy" (2011) by Lola Lonli.

[antonia-gergely]

COSMISM!

Anton Vidolke and the Institute of the Cosmos. Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh. 1st July - 28th October.

Anton Vidolke is a founder of e-flux journal.

Some time around 1882, God was pronounced dead. For certain Russian thinkers of the era, this loss provided an opportunity: where the place of one god closes, space for another one opens. Unlike most established schools of thought, Russian cosmism does not present a consistent epistemology, or a unified theory. On the contrary: the ideas of its nineteenth- to early-twentieth-century protagonists are often so divergent and contradictory that they appear paradoxical, or delirious.

Russian cosmism’s known scientists, philosophers, and writers include figures ranging from Nikolai Fedorov (known as a founding thinker) the nineteenth-century librarian who aimed to resurrect all living and dead ancestors into an eternal church-museum focused on the revolutionary tenet of brotherhood; Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Fedorov’s library pupil who went on to formulate mathematical equations used for spaceflight; Alexander Bogdanov, who cofounded the Bolshevik party with Lenin and experimented with blood transfusions to rejuvenate one and all; and Alexander Chizhevsky, the “heliobiologist” who discovered and mapped connections between sunspots and human political behavior, and then created lamps to harness solar energy to restore fellow prisoners in labor camps. (He concluded that a liberal change in the english government correlated directly to the sun having more than 93 sunspots at the time. Very goofy and fun, but it's the kind of 'science' that makes me laugh and then makes me serious. The entire foundation of cosmism is corollary and sometimes seems far fetched, but any corollary is based in a previous truth, so it's fun to entertain as possible.)

Similarly to Marxism, which sees labor as the engine of the emancipation of the proletariat, cosmism sees laboring towards resurrection by means of science, art, technology, and social organization as a way of collaborating with God, a collaboration that will result in the active evolution of humanity and the universe towards becoming a single interconnected, sapient organism, immortal and infinite like God. So it's like space-communism.

Biela's Comet and its incorrectly calculated trajectory into earth led to a lot of publications centred on the concept of cosmism, and these really exemplify the hopes of the cosmists.

Originally published in fragments between 1835 and 1840, The Year 4338 describes a futuristic society in the year before a comet emerges from the depths of cosmic space to destroy earth. The protagonist of the novel, a young man from Beijing, travels to St. Petersburg to meet with scientists who he thinks can prevent this impending cataclysm before doomsday in 4339. He travels on a high-speed electrical train under the Caspian Sea, through a futuristic Russia where all households are connected by telegraphs, and where people read newspapers made of liquid-crystal screens, have personal flying devices in the form of hot air balloons, eat synthetic foods, inhale special gas for recreation, and wear electric clothes that change colors and patterns. A moneyless economy has also been achieved. The few published fragments as well as the ideas behind this unfinished novel were almost certainly familiar to Nikolai Fedorov, who most experts credit with being the founder of cosmism. Fedorov worked at the very same library in Moscow as Prince Odoevsky.

While a prolific writer, Fedorov did not publish during his lifetime, partly due to his modest character but also possibly because he suspected his radical ideas could lead to excommunication from the Orthodox Church, of which he was a devout follower. After his death, a volume of Fedorov’s writings was published in Almaty, Kazakhstan, under the title The Philosophy of the Common Task. This first publication did not circulate commercially. In brief, the common task is no less than a project of human immortality achieved by technological means. It involves materially resurrecting all human ancestors (starting with Adam and Eve), controlling all the destructive forces of nature (including death), and exploring and colonizing all the stars and planets in the cosmos. An intergalactic educational project whose aim is to turn the universe into a unified feeling and thinking organism, immortal, infinite, and selfsame with God, its creator. In other words, the horizon of the common task is the construction of God by scientific, technological, and artistic means.

Despite rarely seeing publication, these revolutionary ideas influenced numerous key figures in the Russian intelligentsia, including such writers as Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, religious philosophers such as Solovyev and Florensky, among many others. These ideas also influenced many in the Russian visual arts, and are partially responsible for the fascination with zero gravity, flight, and the cosmos that we can clearly observe in numerous artworks, from Malevich’s Black Square to Tatlin’s Letatlin. In a more subtle way, the influence of cosmism can be felt in the sensibility behind constructivism and productivism, which treat a work of art not as a mere fetish of sublimated sexuality in a consumer economy, but as a microcosm of world-building and God-building. Faced today with ambivalent liberal platitudes of resistance or the disposable instrumentality of “disruptive tech,” we might wonder more generally how artistic and creative thought could have been so heretical to Marxist-materialist and religious orthodoxies alike, while simultaneously believing so completely in their unified capacity for advancing human civilization.

While it never became a part of official Soviet doctrine, much of cosmism dovetails with the ethos of early postrevolutionary utopian socialism in its drive towards a classless, egalitarian society completely dedicated to the emancipation and self-transformation of humanity, and to the construction of a man-made paradise on earth. The first postrevolutionary decade saw an explosion of cosmist ideas and their application in very diverse areas of life, from art and science to the practical organization of labor, time management, and the health system.

- e-flux journal no. 88

Speaking to my friend during the three films (we were the only ones there so it was non-disruptive), we got talking about immortality through technicalities. Our energy might not travel into space as particles, but it does, say, enter the soil when we die, and nourish a plant, potentially one that bears fruit. I'm not a holistic or deeply spiritual person, but from a logical standpoint, that makes sense. I know my soul doesn't go into the fruit.. but I say that without knowing if or what the soul even is. So I don't really know.

What I do know is that the energy, the chemicals, the carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen that makes me up can enrich soil, and that very same atoms that lived in me can become building blocks in a hypothetical fruit that grows out of my grave. Maybe the DNA of the fruit contains me, in some shape or form.

My friend also mentioned Ted Lasso and the desire of a character to have a fruit tree planted on their grave when they died, to be nourished by their body and fed to their loved ones. It was funny, sure, but it got me thinking. It's another element of the consumption and interrelationships I am currently focused on researching. If I am a fruit borne from my own grave and you eat me, I then become part of you forever. My chemicals build your cells. I can become engrained into the very fibres of your being. And it cycles.

Everything eats and is eaten, as Adrianne Lenker says.

[tenth-sentence]

In a response to Mr Maezawa's announcement that he would be taking a BFR of artists round the Moon, the architect Daniel Liebeskind imagined a vast application of soot precisely tailored to produce, as seen from the Earth, a plain black square inscribed within the circle of the full Moon – a cosmic realisation of Malevich's blending of modernism and cosmism, the shared Anthropocene of Moon and Earth made matte-black flesh.

"The Moon: A History for the Future" - Oliver Morton

[la-cosmonauta-extraterrestre]

This quote feels very "cosmism".

[la-cosmonauta-extraterrestre]

What are "you" really?

The atoms that make up your body are constantly entering and leaving. Some of the atoms in you were once part of a worm and some of the atoms in you will be a worm in the future. (Adding another perspective on 'would you still love me if I was a worm?')

98% of the atoms in your body are replaced every year. In a real sense, you are not the person you were a few years ago. There is some comfort to this, in being able to make a break with the past. But it feels like there is continuity between the 'you' of today and the 'you' of a few years ago, so that can't be right.

There is no consensus on what the definition of life is, but some think that it has to do with the flow of matter and energy. Maybe what makes any organism what they are is the way that the atoms change over, just as what makes a river a river is that the waters change ("one can never enter the same river twice").

[la-cosmonauta-extraterrestre]

Мрамрорне гнузно.....интересно

on the bachelor and resurrection

Thinking about how the concept of resurrection is touched upon in Daniil’s routes, and how the Marble Nest makes something of a mockery of it, casting him into the role of both resurrectionist and the resurrected. The man with an affinity for the living trapped in a cycle of communing with the dead..

+ the reminders that neither remaining nor returning shall constitute anything akin to a victory for him—just a trick mirror and, if you'll forgive the pun, a dead end

(p.s. the original marble nest line is a bit clearer in this connection, where the word for Sunday can also mean resurrection)

[yellow-yarrow]

real inframaterialist hours !! who up reading incomprehensible texts!

Man is the mirror of the world or whatever the fuck Mazov said

[chicago-geniza]

Have a very long list of "online discursive phenomena that come from the same psychological place as Anne Rice when she wrote Lestat's internal monologue in Tale of the Body Thief" and as I mentioned on that reblog one of them is Alexandria's Genesis but another, much worse one is "the strawman figure of the nonbinary twentysomething with a restrictive eating disorder who fearmongers about testosterone on social media because they can't bear the thought of transitioning into anything but a hairless emaciated twink"

Anyway I think about Anne Rice's insane gender shit and absolute revulsion for the (postpubescent) human body a lot

[tenth-sentence]

Cosmism as capitalist self-improvement.

"The Moon: A History for the Future" - Oliver Morton

[la-cosmonauta-extraterrestre]

Is this really sputnik cosplay, or is it just an avante-garde outfit?

[gdvcamera]

Back to BIONET

[grandhotelabyss]

Yeah I agree, I rather go with the russian cosmism myth of reviving the dead of all times, especially when its basically my christian religious beliefs already, than going back to some lame pagan tree worshiping, especially when the latter transparently just serves cynical interest, I mean techno optimis does to, but it atleast can have positve side effects, unlike going back to pre-civilazation dieing because I can't get my heart medicine anymore lol

I should learn more about Russian Cosmism. (I've read some Platonov, if he counts as part of the movement's literary wing.) Some, including both his critics and supporters, see Elon's worldview, thus in part the current U.S. government worldview, as reflecting a Cosmist influence.

[la-cosmonauta-extraterrestre]

This post is confirming for me the similarities I see between Russian Cosmism and the kafkaesque that I sometimes think I only see because of the books that have had the most profound impact on my psyche.

i waffled

[gaterrecha]

sorry for the rapid barrage of disco elysium content across your dash on behalf of my ever-recurring brainworms. my condolences to those affected i will go back to normal posting as soon as this bout of pale affliction ceases (never) (it will happen again)