“Vibrant Actants” Vol. 1 No. 8

Sine Zine

© 2014, collaborators: Clodie Morena Kyrie, MM Shull // // published and directed by “dogspeed you” E..K.M.

Knapp // cover image, “no zero” by Friends of the Pleistocene, FOP 2011 // William Blake prints,

“Resurrection” / “Pestilence” // centerfold line drawing of Van Gogh, from gutenburg project// “Hiroshima

shuffle” collage by MM Shull, 2013 /// screenshot from “Upstream Color” film by Shane Carruth / “tree of life”

by melwilyn, deviantart / image above from Mitch Epstein, “Amos Coal Power Plant” 2004 /// /

no price /// free to use but please cite sources ///.

Special thanks to EMU BIRE especially Christian Early, Peter, Ted, Nancy and Linford.

Send complaints, letters or submissions to:

Complaints and Submissions Department, Sine Zine

Box 425, Eastern Mennonite University

Harrisonburg VA, 22802

theSineZine.blogspot.com Vol. 1 No. 8 Vibrant Actants

S ine Zine

the

© 2014, collaborators: Clodie Morena Kyrie, MM Shull // // published and directed by “dogspeed you” E..K.M.

Knapp // cover image, “no zero” by Friends of the Pleistocene, FOP 2011 // William Blake prints,

“Resurrection” / “Pestilence” // centerfold line drawing of Van Gogh, from gutenburg project// “Hiroshima

shuffle” collage by MM Shull, 2013 /// screenshot from “Upstream Color” film by Shane Carruth / “tree of life”

by melwilyn, deviantart / image above from Mitch Epstein, “Amos Coal Power Plant” 2004 /// /

no price /// free to use but please cite sources ///.

Special thanks to EMU BIRE especially Christian Early, Peter, Ted, Nancy and Linford.

Send complaints, letters or submissions to:

Complaints and Submissions Department, Sine Zine

Box 425, Eastern Mennonite University

Harrisonburg VA, 22802

theSineZine.blogspot.com

It’s alive! These words of Dr. Frankenstein’s ring with the startling realization

that his creation had crossed a threshold between the inani-

mate world of dead material and the animate world of living

creatures. But… what if the scream “It’s alive!” really meant

something altogether different? Something at once deeper

and even more sinister: “I’ve been outdone, Igor; my creation

was already alive (in a different way), and furthermore it

turns out that all I, the good Doctor can do is to participate

in the forms of life by which I find myself surrounded! I can

change little things of the nature — but not the fact — of

life!”

S o what does it mean that biological life is an emergent

property of matter? What is this vibrancy, and is my for-

mulated self a (false) affect in the face of the life everlasting?

Is the living God also an affect? For who, or what, can stand

up to the power of such life?

A LL matter fluctuates, vibrates with a kind of categorical

life. With the gravity waves that have been rippling

across space-time since shortly after the big bang. With the

phenomenon that Hegel calls Spirit, that activeness of Becoming

-other. With the image of God in which we were created. This

issue of Sine Zine elaborates a modality of vibrancy, a multiplic-

ity of relationality – the unqualified Riemann space for you

math geeks — where there is an innumerable plurality of iden-

tities and a richness of expression beyond reckoning. Leave

behind the thirsty deserts of modernity, where matter is inert

and “God is too dead” – come, and rediscover your multiplied-

self in the fecund jungle of Sine Zine’s words!

T he projects of humanity, such as the city and the state,

and including all man’s metaphysical aspirations, are a de-

nial – not a denial of death, as Ernst Becker says in his book

of the same name, but the inverse: the projects of humanity

are a denial of the immutable, teeming life that ever emerges

from the cradle of time and space as the natural expression

of some deeper principle of emergent self-organization at

work in things.

T he finest and most dastardly achievements of the human

race are one and the same, from the perspective of life

itself. To spite science, life on earth (not to mention the

possibilities of life outside earth) can be neither artificially

created nor completely obliterated, even by the smartest biol-

ogists and the biggest nuclear bombs. For all the effort giv-

en to manipulating the myriad forms of life — in medicine

and microbiology, for instance — not a single organism has

been manipulated into being from scratch, and not a single

organism will be spared biological death in the end.

E ven if humanity succeeds in its idiotic quest to annihilate

itself, detonating a thousand megatons of plutonium and

burning away the entire atmosphere – life will endure beyond

man. It will persist, in the thermal vents in the deepest oce-

anic trenches, and in other places. In nooks and crannies

life waits patiently for the means of its expression to emerge,

biding its time in the certainty of its purpose. Humans can

only fool ourselves with the pretensions of our invention,

death.

I s man’s angst regarding death not due precisely to the

unbearable notion that life will go on without him? Is not

thanatos, man’s death-drive, a petty kind of revenge against

the abundance of life which is independent from and outside

of man? Are not all of man’s socio-cultural constructs an

infantile lashing-out, not at the particularity of death, rather

instead against the universality of life? How can my life

mean anything against the fact that life is continually abun-

dant, brimming with a blessed fecundity?

W hat modern man calls death is a human invention,

borne from the limited perspective of ego. Plato’s

Socrates expounds the nature of death as inextricably-linked

to life in ways beyond individual understanding, chiding his

friends for their irrational fears, and insisting on not seeing

death as something to be avoided. Modern conservative

Christianity wrongly tries to negate notions of death, ultimate-

ly reinforcing them. Witness the right-wing Christian hatred

for Nietzsche, based solely on his penning of the sublime

line, “God is dead.” Philosophy on the other hand, has the

right idea in dis-solving the notional problem of death: to

anyone with the intellectual inclination, the saying “God is

dead” is at least readable as a commentary on Death, and

not as a commentary on the current facebook status of God.

O ne favorite theme of conservative Christianity comes

from a gospels saying: “the wages of sin is death.”

What does this mean to a fundamentalist? Is there a gi-

ant company — Sin, Incorporated; CEO: God — that pays

its employees with death? Let us propose an alternative

to this understanding: that sin, properly understood, is the

misperception of death, and therefore also of life, itself.

When Jesus teaches, in the gospel of John for instance,

about believing and eternal life, he is in effect saying,

“you will die because of your mistaken belief in death.

Believe in me (the eternal principle of emergent life) and

you won’t die.” This is only tangentially and inversely re-

lated to the purity ethic traditions, those better-than-thou

fundamentalist bastards who use their virginity and inexpe-

rience with alcohol, drugs and culture as a soap-box on

which to stand and condemn life; the idols they worship,

among them the fantasy of the big lunch buffet in the sky,

prevent them from engaging the truth (and the life!) of life.

The conservative evangelical obsession with stamping out

all forms of desire and establishing an artifice of control

and authority blinds these fundies from the nature of sin,

and then compels them into believing in an angry, mecha-

nistic God. When Jesus tells people that they will surely

die unless they repent and believe, he is speaking through

history to the idol-worshipping conservatives who keep re-

peating the mantra of wages and death. Jesus is in effect

saying, “Woe to you, bible-thumpers, stop convincing my

sheep that they are wolves! Sin is the belief in death,

and your one-dimensional denial of death is the only real

type of sin!”

T he first real death, in an existential sense, was the death of Abel. With Cain’s sociopathic lack of imagi-

nation and trust comes also the first act of deliberate de-

nial of life, and this changes the way that humans relate

to life and death forever. Jesus’ pseudo-death is a

demonstration to man by God, and it is aimed at decon-

structing the notion of life. The resurrection of Christ is a

loving and non-violent lesson in the nature of life, and a

tutorial for those traumatized by death. “Who are you

looking for, Mary?” might as well be saying, “you people

don’t know what it means to live.” This is also how we

can make the claim that “God is Dead,” and be right —

only we simply cannot fit our understanding of identity in-

to the false sociopathic framework of death.

~~

The Inertia of Food-matter; the Idiocy of War on Terror

By Clodie Morena Kyrie

T he refrigerator is perhaps one place where Americans

enact a certain notional inert lifelessness, both in

their conceptualizations of sustenance and in their practic-

es of consumption.

T o Americans, the modernist ideal still very much ap-

plies to what we put in our stomachs: food is dead

stuff, raw (so to speak) matter which, after ingestion is

assimilated into the material assemblage we think of as

our bodies. True, some seepage of essence is still ac-

cepted in the idolatry of food (mostly by yuppie mystics

and vegan anarchists); if I eat fatty foods I expect to be

fatter, for instance. But for the most part American

food culture is a practice in reductionism. Pork

is a meat, quite different from the lovable and

cute pig car- toons on the television set;

moreover pork or ham (name it what you

will) is dis- tinct and separate from other

kinds of pig- related food like

hotdog meat or imitation calamari (made from the rectal

sphincter of the pig.) This demonstrates the fact that, in

our minds, our food is quite its own existential entity. We

define food more by properties of taste and consistency

as we do by where it came from, how it is processed, and

what it is actually made of.

P erhaps the biggest conceptual problem in American

food culture is that problem of the lifelessness of

food. Once it is killed, we expect food to be sanitized

and vacuum-sealed, with convenient date labels denoting

an exact time after which it resurrects in impure form,

crossing the line from dead (inert and essentially neutral)

to alive – which is to say, rotten, teeming with microorgan-

isms which we have been culturally trained to hate. Amer-

ican refrigerators exist like the Department of Homeland

Security, to quite literally make the substrata on which

otherness is predicated inhospitable.

I n an ominous parallel to the modal consumption of

food in the US, our idiotic Global War on Terror, can

make an apt comparison. As we pretend to fight an invis-

ible, extremist enemy lurking in the public library and the

aisle seat of the flight, we come to see that this kind of

struggle is about as effective as over-cooking the steak on

a public grill at the campground. This is a salient com-

parison for several reasons: first, the intent is the same.

That is to say, we are out to preserve our essential purity,

damn those icky green germs, those burka-wearing free-

dom haters. Secondly, the end result is pretty much the

same: a crusty, carbonized and relatively tasteless social

dialogue with outsiders devoid of any degree of real fla-

vor; until we can accept the teeming life of otherness and

our own place in the biosphere, the danger of otherness

itself remains unchallenged.

E ven meat cooked in extremely sterile conditions by ex-

pert microbiologists would still carry millions of living

organisms by the time it could be digested. (The digestive

tract itself relies on these same microorganisms, without

which we would surely

die!) For a variety of

reasons, the Timothy

McVeigh’s and Anders

Breivik’s of western cul-

ture will survive cultural

forces designed to

“cook out” foreign ex-

tremists and exotic for-

eigners, precisely be-

cause those forces can-

not act on “insiders”

who fit the cultural mi-

lieu and fail to make

the bovine white people

in the neighborhood

suspicious. (Similar al-

so to the metaphor of

digestive symbiosis, our

capitalist economy must

rely on the cheap labor

of expendables some-

where below the belly

button of the earth.)

M odernism and

the power of

globalization are occa-

sionally mutually exclu-

sive in these kinds of situations: quality control implementa-

tion of food products and scientific valuations of inert food

-matter seek to minimize the standard deviation and varia-

tion inherent in the process of production. But because of

I contemplate a tree.

I can accept it as a picture: a rigid pillar in a flood of light, or splashes of green traversed by the gentleness of the blue silver ground.

I can feel it as movement: the flowing veins around the sturdy, striving core, the sucking of the roots, the breathing of the leaves, the infi-nite commerce with earth and air--and the growing itself in its darkness.

I can assign it to a species and observe it as an instance, with an eye to its construction and its way of life.

I can overcome its uniqueness and form so rigorously that I recognize it only as an ex-pression of the law--those laws according to which a constant opposition of forces is contin-ually adjusted, or those laws according to which the elements mix and separate.

I can dissolve it into a number, into a pure rela-tion between numbers, and eternalize it.

Throughout all of this the tree remains my object and has its place and its time span, its kind and condition.

But it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It. The power of exclusiveness has seized me. ~Martin Buber, I and Thou, 1923

the vibrancy of matter — because of the very re-animate

nature of all things, this dream of sanitization is impossible

on any scale, whether in the refrigerator or on the urban

battlefield. The FDA standards which the marketing gurus

go to great lengths to

hide from the public

mind would make most

people sick. (For, in-

stance there are as

many as 15 fly eggs

and one live maggot in

every 100g of tomato

sauce.

P erhaps we can

draw another les-

son from this. Perhaps

it is not in cultural

pluralism (or the FDA)

that we should place

our hope. Indeed, it is

on an even deeper lev-

el than this where the

power of heterogeneity

to resist globalized Em-

pire lies. (Also,

strong immune sys-

tems.) The very lunch

meat in your backpack

– yea though it be lit-

tle more than heavily-

processed emulsifica-

tion shrink wrapped in

plastic – this too cries out to the God of Life for justice!

This is the liberatory power of vibrancy. Embrace it, or die

in denial! — CMK

Pew-Pew!

I was built in 1984. As a thermonuclear armament, my yield is relatively low: about 500 kilotons or 30 Hiroshima bombs.

I’m not one of those 20 megaton beauties, but nobody’s per-fect. (Each of them would be more powerful than all the ex-plosives ever used in the history of the world previously.)

I sit atop the “Minuteman III” launch vehicle, deep under-ground, somewhere in what used to be Montana, back when

places had names. My little prison holds two other multiple re-entry vehicles (MIRVs) just like me, and each is just as powerful as I am. Between the three of us, we pack the equivalent of 1.5 megatons of TNT! Somewhere in what used to be the “United States” there are 300 of my siblings, all sit-ting uselessly, rotting in silos like me. Or at least there used to be.

B ack when life was good, people polished my casing every week, and I was always ready to go at the push of a few

buttons. Then one day I heard someone say, “The govern-ment is trying to cut back” – as if nukes were like a bad habit or something. Can you believe the nerve of those guys!

W hen I was younger, about 5,000 years ago that is, the on-ly threat to my existence was hippies and catholic nuns.

I expected to be “around” for a very, very long time, sitting in my silo temple, being worshipped by my handlers as the “strategic deterrent” keeping them and their families safe. Then the earth began to get warmer, and very quickly the

Lament of the Hydrogen Bomb by M.M. Shull

Pew-Pew!

chief priests – Captains and Colonels they were called – start-ed to disappear. They would complain about budgets and something called “human security” and so on. Then one day I was sitting there waiting, I hadn’t been polished in a very long time, it seemed. It was then that I noticed a rusty spot.

“H ow long has it been since the humans worshipped me?” I thought. I suddenly realized that the humans had

not been around for quite some time. Had they forgotten about me? Are there even humans out there anymore? Will anyone ever notice me again? At this point, all my metal and plastic casing has long since deteriorated … but I am still the same old me, radioactive to a fault you might say!

M y existence began with a paradox: I was built to be so destructive and deadly that “the enemy” would be dis-

suaded from attacking. But, as long as I remained only a de-terrent; my intended role – my true, self-actualization as weapon – could not be realized, and I am condemned to sit in my silo until my radioactive core decays – in several thousand more years.

O h to be capable of moving, to feel the air scream around my metal casing, to feel the throbbing pulse of imminent

det- onation, a multiple orgasm of explosions, enough to light whole mountain ranges instantly on fire! A few of those could have turned earth’s entire at-

mosphere to a soupy carbon mush. Oh, I may be old

and decrepit, but a girl can always dream, I say.

—MMS

Sin

e Zine

Vibr

ant Actants