This is an attempt to map an unfolding of the Moebius manifold that constitutes life. As such, it is fragmented and flattened in some aspects, to render it perceivable.
Drawing the manifold
The emergence of life is the disappearance of in and out by the creation of the boundary, which bears permeability qualities. The boundary is the space where beings interact with their milieu, where they enter into contact with their Umwelt. The boundary situates the being in space and time.
Unlike rocks, living beings are not eroded by the environment but influenced, contaminated, and invaded by it. Living beings, due to the permeability of their boundary, are akin topologically to a Moebius strip. The boundary of the Moebius strip is a single circle. What was perceived as inside has merged with the outside, leaving only one side.
Emergence requires both complexity and randomness to appear. Complexity constitutes itself as a terrain, a milieu. It is a space.
For randomness to appear there is a need for repetition, "une ritournelle". Randomness is inherently linked to time.
Homo Sapiens, perceiving time as a resource, actively aims at reducing randomness while increasing complexity. This is an aim present in all of life from its appearance. Perception of time lies in our ability to recollect memories. Memory is key to acknowledging the displacement of our cognition along the arrow of time.
Any complex cognitive system is bound to an attraction toward the unavailable parts of the cosmos. Through bifurcation, selection, and evolution, what was once unavailable has now been ingested by the species.
Enaction depends on two elements, the loop and the coupling. Coupling can be perfect or imperfect. The veiling of the artificial complexification induced by the layer of language and culture makes for an imperfect coupling.
Homo Sapiens, through processes of extraction, amalgamation, computation, and concentration, attempts to organize and stabilize both itself as a specie but also its environment.
All this compartmentation and rigidification clutters the boundary and threatens the fluidity of the ecotone.
From the furrow to techno
Cultivation of the soil binds Homo Sapiens to a space. While the nomadic shepherd follows his herd across the endless plains, the one who cultivates the land is rooted in it.
It is thanks to agriculture that technology was able to flourish.
From working the land emerges our desire for control over our environment, and it is through agriculture that technology imposes itself on man as an environment. Following agriculture, comes architecture, the organization of man within the city, the system.
The expansion of the space occupied by Homo Sapiens gradually transforms the entire natural environment into a productivist, concentrationary, and impoverished ecotone.
The cultivation of the land is a labor of life, an insemination. It is about inserting our culture - the cybernetic system composed of our concepts and tools - within nature itself. A technology of organic matter, agriculture is subject to a form of slowness and unavailability that we seek to eradicate in industry, the technology of the inorganic. It inevitably suffers from extreme weather-induced damage, despite all the care taken to detach it from its material conditions. It is a continuous, analogous, and indiscreet process. It is both being in immediacy, since it is a process of action, of touch, but also in contact with the various cycles of Gaia and circadian.
Hands in the soil, the peasant dreams the dark of the seed's becoming, the body-without-organs par excellence. For this to happen, he must be able to remain anchored to the territory he has chosen to trace his furrows, not to be chased away by war and modernity, not to undergo the incessant uprooting inherent in human obsolescence.
Cultivation of the soil as a praxis of inversion paradoxically takes the form of an abandonment of the logic of growth. It is rather a matter of resonance, a form of continuity.
We trace the furrow, and, while waiting for it to grow, we tell ourselves tales.
Insemination and translative touch
"Another essential moment is that of the advent of capital where discontinuity is amplified with the development of concepts of space and time completely replacing extent and duration, at the same time, the exit from eternity is amplified, with the loss of continuity, concreteness, and immediacy." Jacques Camatte, "Inversion or Extinction".
It is from the loss of contact with immediacy that enmity arises. As we face our inability to make the world available, points of aggression develop due to our desire to know. Faced with the renewed threat of extinction, it becomes crucial for the continuity of the Homo genus to operate the inversion described by Camatte. If there is no verticality in a hierarchy, then love can be inseminated into the systems of oppression.
Insemination, rather than toxicity, offers a path to end enmity, emphasizing love and connectivity.
Everything on Earth is affected by gravity. Gravity is the force of touch and contact. Through translative touch, everything is in contact with everything. It offers opportunities for the insemination of the idea of inversion into various systems and spaces, akin to the growth of rhizomes.
The relationship that organisms engage with their environment through enaction entails a loop of both feedback and feedforward, with the presence of a filter, constituted by the embodiment.
Utopia is a contradiction in essence. To be, it must not be. As soon as it begins to exist, it ceases to be a utopia. It has its source in the difference with what is. It is formed from the injustices of the present and its realization depends on the possibilities of achieving justice. Utopia can therefore only emerge from material conditions and situations. Utopia takes root in materiality.
Abstraction manipulates the material world. Data compression is carried out not only quantitatively but qualitatively. There is a back-and-forth phenomenon (feedback and feedforward) between abstraction and data. It is the oscillation between the yogi and the commissioner, between the dream state and the waking state, and between the creation of utopia and the implementation of reality. Utopia can be found in this oscillation between reality and model, data and concept.
As an attempt to escape from universalism and machinic, reductive, and dangerous abstraction and to integrate the localism of particularities and embodied differences, we will develop a utopia in the form of a Fuzzy abstraction. It integrates randomness and deviation from the norm. A utopia of local and embodied noise.
Let us list all the things we are in contact with. Here are all the places we can inseminate with inversion.