The main principle of materialism—and both cosmism and socialism are deeply materialist ways of thinking—is that everything is matter and all phenomena are a result of material interactions, be it interactions of atoms or neurons or pixels or numbers, etc. It’s a kind of a monism (and in keeping with the rest of this conversation, naturally the main philosophical book by Bogdanov is titled Empiriomonism—which Lenin attacked in his Materialism and Empiro-criticism), which is why I think that a lot of contemporary post-humanists and all these people hoping for some form of digital immortality are probably as off track as the Catholic Church was in the sense that they think they can separate consciousness from the body and transfer it into a different machine. Perhaps this is not very different from believing that the soul goes to heaven after death. […]
I also feel that maybe the reason why both the left and the right have sort of accepted killing as part of human nature has something to do with how powerful the death drive is. Our bodies are programmed to die on a genetic level, as is almost all other living matter on this planet. Unlike other living matter, humans are capable of a certain type of reflection, and yet we are for the most part resigned to death. We do not question it. We are like farm animals: we are okay with being slaughtered as long as we get some time to live, feed, play a little, feel affection, reproduce, etc. What were the most popular song lyrics with teenagers you found—“hell,” “fuck,” “die”? We see others being slaughtered but rationalize this as something natural because it seems unavoidable and because nobody escapes it in the end. I think if one is resigned to the inevitability of death, killing can be accepted as just another part of the package—painful and tragic, but somehow natural.
There needs to be a rebellion against death. This cannot be done by force, but though education, through ideas, through conversation, through literature, cinema, art.
So maybe the first step has to be a movement towards a worldview within which death is not natural, where it is an enemy that has to be resisted and fought collectively. There needs to be a rebellion against death. This cannot be done by force, but though education, through ideas, through conversation, through literature, cinema, art, and so forth—in other words, by cultural means. I guess this is what I am working on.
It takes a really long time to change people’s views of the world, but I think it is not entirely hopeless. Humans largely overcame slavery, even if this took many thousands of years. Gender and racial rights are gradually moving towards equality, even if this movement is more a zigzag then a straight line. The idea of representative politics has more or less become the norm in most places, even if it is imperfect and is being challenged and subverted by the elites, by the oligarchs, by fascists. I think it is possible that our views on death will change and that the right to rejuvenation, immortality, and resurrection will one day be recognized as an inherent right of all living beings and everyone who came before them. Biocosmists wanted to inscribe this into the Soviet constitution. They did not succeed at that time but this does not mean that this will not succeed eventually. For many centuries the notion of democracy existed solely as passages in obscure manuscripts preserved in monasteries, and it was inconceivable as a viable political system. Then suddenly it comes out from the pages of old books and is embraced as the dominant model of social organization. It is very strange how certain ideas play out over time. […]
The Accursed Share—Bataille’s last book where he speaks about surplus energy, the sun, death, and so forth—is one of my favorite books of his.
It’s the one where he comes very close to the worldview of cosmists in the sense that life on Earth is very much shaped and controlled to some extent by celestial, cosmic forces, specifically the effect of the sun on our planet. The sun is super generous in the sense that it gives Earth an incredible abundance of energy, more than we can actually use safely. Energy in the form of sunlight is converted to plant life, animal life, and, through the death of all this living substance, into coal, oil, gas—all these fossil fuels, which are essentially sunlight trapped below Earth’s surface. The surplus of this energy needs to be spent through extravagant activities that require expenditures of huge amounts of energy: violence, war, sexuality, and so forth. Bataille sees art as one of the ways to expend this surplus energy non-violently.
Cosmism is biopolitics because it is concerned with the administration of life, rejuvenation, and even resurrection.
Fedorov’s conception is similar and slightly different: he sees the entire surface of our planet, the biosphere in which we live and the planet’s organic layer, the soil, as a kind of enormous cemetery where everything is made up of the remains of people, animals, plants—all the living matter that has died. We live in these remains, we literally eat, drink, breathe our ancestors, we are completely surrounded and entrapped in death and the remains it leaves behind. It is a horrific vision. So for Fedorov, the fight against death is a fight to liberate ourselves from the cycle of consuming the dead and being consumed ourselves, from being stuck in this swamp of dead bodies and misery. […]
Death is capital quite literally, because everything we accumulate—food, energy, raw material, etc.—these are all products of death. But there is something else which seems to be fully in the realm of the living—labor, reason, love. I think maybe if the digital disruption you mention could be directed to amplify the latter and reduce dependence on the former, then this could be a step in the right direction. One of the scientists in the cosmist movement was Vladimir Vernadski, a geologist who developed the notion of the noosphere during the middle of the Second World War. It’s a profoundly optimistic theory of how life on the planet will be transformed by an emerging sphere of reason and communication whose relationship to life will be similar to the relationship that the biosphere has to the geosphere.
Arseny [Zhilyaev] says that noospheric theory is like an optimistic version of Anthropocene theory. […]
Cosmism is biopolitics because it is concerned with the administration of life, rejuvenation, and even resurrection. Furthermore, it is a radicalized form of biopolitics because its goals are ahead of the current normative expectations and extend even to the deceased. It is a commonly acknowledged view that political power makes a biopolitical turn from simply exercising the sovereign right to kill its subjects without being responsible for their health or life, to governments accepting the obligation to care for the health and welfare of their citizens, to extend their life by administering health services and medical care, securing food supplies, maintaining clean water and air, and so forth. This has been an enormous shift—from the administration of punishment and death to the administration of biological life, upon which the consent to be governed is founded. The next logical step would appear to be for society to guarantee perpetual life for its members and then to extend this to the dead: parents and grandparents and so forth—basically everyone.
One way to prevent hunger is to produce a lot of food, but another way is to adapt the body to not require food, to be self-feeding somehow.
The technological development necessary to accomplish all these goals may have less to do with the industrial production of devices, machines, and all sorts of stuff that is reliant on the exploitation of raw materials, carbon energy, and so forth, and more to do with certain modifications of our biological bodies. One way to prevent hunger is to produce a lot of food, but another way is to adapt the body to not require food, to be self-feeding somehow. Similarly, one way to solve housing shortages is to build a lot of housing, but a more advanced way is to make the body stronger in such a way that it does not require shelter at all—like most other animals. I do not mean some type of a Terminator-type armored body, but the biological organic body we already have, only made better and stronger. Other life-forms on our planet suggest interesting possibilities in this respect. There are organisms that simply don’t die—like the immortal jelly fish that reverses its life cycle perpetually, or those minuscule water bears who apparently are able to live even in outer space on the surfaces of satellites and other orbiting space craft. Or even common houseplants that are able to derive energy from photosynthesis. We share some of the genetic code with all this life and I do not think it is completely impossible to adopt some of their amazing abilities to our basic biology. I realize all this sounds like sci-fi, but our capacity for thought enables a lot of possibilities. […]
Anton Vidokle
© 2017 e-flux and the author
Excerpts from a conversation between Anton Vidokle and Hito Steyerl, e-flux journal #82, May 2017, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/82/134989/cosmic-catwalk-and-the-production-of-time/ (May 25, 2021).
