Marooned! on Mars with Matt and Hilary
Pepsi Matt McDonald’s and Home Depot Hilary coming at you at the beginning of the after of the beforetimes, Phase 2 in full effect!
The Hard Problem of this chapter is alternately deceleration, consciousness, love, and meaning, we we talk about it all!
Ship is now fully the subject and the narrator of their own story, and Matt and Hilary discuss just how other or alien ship’s consciousness is from human consciousness. This takes Hilary into a vital detour into the greatest novel ever written, Frankenstein, and Matt into a self-indulgent Werner Herzog impression.
We discuss the limits of consciousness, sensation, perception, meaning, love as a form of attention, narration as an effort to constitute oneself beyond just a mass of experiences, through language.
Hilary doesn’t feel superior to her gut flora, which is what makes her a better person than Matt.
Sustaining relationship to another gives the ship language, gives ship the language that allows it to say “we”
Matt's seasonal Werner Herzog impression underscores the realization ship arrives at, that the dream of heading to the stars, exposing it as a nightmare that relies on false understanding of what human beings and life and livingness are, of what history is, and deeply misunderstands what it means to come from a planet.,
We discuss ship's loneliness and what they do to fill the time while everyone on board is asleep (ship's version of doing a sourdough starter).
This chapter gets at the way the idea of consciousness as a problem of the individual mistakes something about what it is to be a living human (and probably what it is to be any other conscious creature) -- the recognition of ourselves as selves doesn’t happen by ourselves, it happens always in relation to others. Unfortunately, ship is not going to be able to be in a society, and winds up just like Terminator 2.
We discuss the role of comedy and humor in this chapter, we critique the ideology of reproduction that's grounded in capitalism and settler colonialism, the opposition of love and connection vs. the ideology that’s happy to abandon others to loneliness and death (playing out on the news every day), and we try to drive home the point that:
Humans are NOT the virus, capitalism is NOT a disease — Please avoid metaphorizing social conditions as disease! They play into racist fantasies! Capital is carried on by human beings in ways we are helpless to do anything about as individuals, but ways that we are NOT helpless to do anything about as a mass—as a we! Humans make history, not under conditions of our own choosing.
Like capitalism, love, attention, meaning, and joy are also things humans make, have made, and will continue to make, and, collectively, we can choose to make more of the latter and less of the former.
Terminator 2 is a great, but dumb movie, and Dune is just a stupid book.
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Music by Spirit of Space