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yellow-yarrow · 20 days ago

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Plain text version of this post about Russian cosmism and Disco Elysium's lore:

[Image description of the linked post: a collection of various quotes from the game, the book, and from cosmist texts or writings about cosmism. The text that is displayed is the following:]

Cosmist connections in Elysium’s lore

Cosmism emerged in Russia before the October Revolution and developed through the 1920s and 1930s; like Marxism and the European avant-garde, two other movements that shared this intellectual moment, Russian Cosmism rejected the contemplative for the transformative, aiming to create not merely new art or philosophy but a new world. Cosmism went the furthest in its visions of transformation, calling for the end of death, the resuscitation of the dead, and free movement in cosmic space. […] Cosmism was developed by the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov in the late nineteenth century [..] Cosmist ideas inspired visual artists, poets, filmmakers, theater directors, novelists (Tolstoy and Dostoevsky read Fedorov's writings), architects, and composers, and influenced Soviet politics and technology. [1]

From the Disco Elysium artbook:

Hegel says there is a World Spirit. It is on the march toward Absolute Knowledge. As Soviet artists – perhaps the last Soviet artists – it was our duty to add to the relay. To keep history moving. Onward to the outer cosmos and the stars. Now, imagine you really believe this to be your duty. Something you have to do, or you’ve failed as a person. The Soviet project was always about messianistic salvation. Soviet artists took on the insane responsibilities: to fight against Heat Death, or to build a new God. The horizon was always millions of years in the future.

In a sense, Fedorov developed his project of the resurrection of past generations as an attempt to “materialize” Hegelian philosophy. Hegel understood the historical process as a work of negation: we should negate the past and present to let the historical new emerge. According to Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit, the goal of history consists, however, in the spiritual reconstruction of all its past epochs. Thus, Hegel believed that through his Phenomenology he had achieved the ultimate reconciliation and even synthesis between past and future. [1]

Creative labor, in our understanding, is a cosmic category, and the goal of all labor is to overcome time. We need to stop hoping for a ready-made eternity and start producing time. Blind, irrational time is already in its death throes. Beyond it lies the new, more perfect and rational time-a creation of the future global culture. —V. Muraviev [2]

ENCYCLOPEDIA - There is a name for this ideology: Entropolism. A faith in and desire to accelerate the spread of pale across the world, until humanity has reached what its adherents call the 'rest state' of humanity, the final reconciliation of past, present, and future in timeless spirit…

EGG HEAD - "THE PAST IS THE FUTURE, BUT THE FUTURE IS DEAD!"

According to Muravyov, under capitalism there is planned development (the first derivative of time). Communism involves the acceleration of planned development (the second derivative of time). Muravyov’s cosmist project depicted the prospect of further acceleration, potentially up to the limit of our universe (the third and further derivatives of time). To achieve this goal, Muravyov insisted on the final quantification of the world and the development of a “universal productive mathematics” that would be used to manage it. [3]

ENCYCLOPEDIA - An innocence is infallible. The decisions made by one are not decisions. They are inevitabilities -- what would have happened anyway, only accelerated, packed into decades instead of centuries. An Innocence is a continuous, compressed event, a sacred human being.

ENCYCLOPEDIA - The highest category of historic individual -- an embodiment of the World Spirit.

Evald Ilyenkov’s “Cosmology of the Spirit” was written in the 1950s (..) Addressing the physicist idea of the “thermal death of the universe,” and creating an original combination of the Hegelian dialectics and Spinoza’s notion of the attribute, Ilyenkov claims that thought (and the seemingly contingent emergence of “thinking life”) is a necessary attribute of matter, as it is able to prevent the terminal entropic collapse.

“Thought is undoubtedly the highest product of universal development, is the highest stage of organizing interactions.”

“Just as there is no thought without matter, so there is no matter without thought.”

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - But one subject [Ignus Nilsen] returned to time and time again was the fundamental relationship between thoughts and matter… "We may yet discover," he wrote in his notebooks, "that under certain, exceptional circumstances, the proletariat's embrace of historical materialism may be so fervent that their beliefs take form in the world of matter as a kind of revolutionary 'plasm'."

“Does not the development of productive power of humankind remove the danger of perishing from cosmic freezing, from the cold of intergalactic space?”

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM- During his final years in exile, he produced, among other things, […] plans for a universal pictographic language […]

Many [cosmists] were publicly supportive of Leon Trotsky

Our goal is a common written language, common for all the nations of the third satellite of the Sun, to construct written signs, comprehensible and acceptable for the whole star that is settled by humanity, lost in the world. —Velimir Khlebnikov, The Artists of the World, 1919

“Humankind […] at some, very high, point of its development— at the point acquired when matter, of more or less vast cosmic spaces within which humankind exists, starts to cool and is close to the condition of so-called thermal death; in this fateful point for matter and in which in some way or other […] consciously facilitates the start of the reverse (in comparison with dispersed motion) process, a process transforming the dying, freezing worlds into the fiery- incandescent hurricane of emerging nebula.”

PROJECT DREAD BOARD- A pinned postcard reads: 'The heat death scenario -- a desperate fight for geothermal energy engulfs the world as Wirrâl becomes untethered from its sun, drifting through the Universe.'

“Our Earth must become a spaceship steered by the wise will of the Biocosmist. It is a horrifying fact that from time immemorial the Earth has orbited the Sun, like a goat tethered to its shepherd.” [1]

“Without it, there is nothing.” “Nothing. It was a blizzard, but it was bright, it was morning. Communism is white, it sparkles! Communism is the morning, it is a jubilation!” The pale begins to recede dangerously around the entroponaut. The world turns white; beams of light seep from Ignus’ chest into the dim spruce trees. The falling snow sparkles in the beams like silver confetti, the colour creeping into the world like a threat. Zygismunt stomps his foot. He covers his ears with his hands and shouts, “Enough! Stop!” -Sacred And Terrible Air

Indeed, if one assumes that the thinking spirit is born somewhere on the periphery of universal matter only in order for it soon to vanish fruit lessly and without a trace [..] then one ends up with a very strange notion of “attribute.” Indeed in this case thought turns out to be something like mould on a cooling planet, something like the senile disease of matter, and certainly not the highest flower of creation, not the highest product of universalworld development. [4]

The pale is approaching—an avalanche of the world’s memories—and burying matter greedily.

History swallows the present; the world of matter disappears,

when the pale is only a few days away, it’s always signalled by the same beautiful event. Fruits go mouldy. It grows vigorously on them.

SOONA, THE PROGRAMMER- "A theory of the pale where instead of an outer ocean it metastasises -- like a cancer or a mould -- erupting in points inside the world."

The scientists here claim: once the earth was covered with the geosphere, then with the biosphere; now is the time of the noosphere. A mind covers the earth, and Noo’s skyscrapers are the throne of that network. The throne of the mind.

In the theory of the cosmist Vernadsky: The noosphere is the third in a succession of phases of development of the Earth, after the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life). Just as the emergence of life fundamentally transformed the geosphere, the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere. [5]

Sources:

Various quotes from the following writings:

Russian Cosmism edited by Boris Groys

Timeline of Russian Cosmism by Anastasia Gacheva, Arseny Zhilyaev, and Anton Vidokle, e-flux journal

Optimists of the Future Past Perfect by Arseny Zhilyaev, e-flux journal

Cosmology of the Spirit by Evald Ilyenkov from Statis journal and an abridged version of the text

Noosphere wikipedia page

Disco Elysium, Sacred and Terrible Air by Robert Kurvitz, Disco Elysium artbook

#long post /

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yellow-yarrow · 17 days ago

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Plain text version of this post about Russian cosmism and Disco Elysium's lore part 2 :

Cosmist connections in Elysium’s lore Part 2 - Music and mathematics

From Sacred and Terrible Air:

He is an aristocrat, the comte de Pérouse and the comte de Mittrecie; but his hatred of the bourgeoisie, which have usurped the upper classes, makes him a proletarian and therefore a revolutionary. In the course of his life, Émile has also come to think of himself as a composer. He has a morbid thirst for fame, but he’s determined to win the hearts of the people with his dodecaphonic works. The comte’s sound is based on a strikingly modern geometric-symbolist system of harmonies that has nothing to do with the music of the rest of the civilised world. To the human ear, it sounds like unacceptable screeching. Émile considers the tonal, traditional sonority to be womb-shaped. A soul-soporific babble. The music of amoebas.

Millions and billions, hundreds of thousands of billions of young girls in love, they love me and my twelve-tone melody!

The twelve-tone technique, also known as the “twelve-tone technique organized in a series in which each note is related only to the next,” was Schoenberg’s revolutionary innovation that expanded the boundaries of musical composition. This method sought to create equal emphasis on all twelve pitches within an octave, eliminating any sense of hierarchy or tonal center. [1]

Nonetheless, much of his work was not well received. […]his work is usually defended rather than listened to, and that it is difficult to experience it apart from the ideology that surrounds it. [2]

Independently of his influential contemporary Arnold Schoenberg, Scriabin developed a much more dissonant musical language that had transcended usual tonality but was not atonal, which accorded with his personal brand of metaphysics. [3]

Alexander Scriabin, who was inspired by the Russian Cosmist ideas of his day, sought to unite humanity for a common task much like Fyodorov. He can be regarded as the most representative member of the artistic branch of Russian Cosmism. Scriabin's vision was to use artistic means to achieve Cosmist ends. His artistic vision, which was grounded in philosophy and spirituality, can be most clearly observed in his project Mysterium. [3]

'A seven-day tumult of light and sound, perfumes and pyrotechnics'

Scriabin’s work was Mysterium – a medieval miracle play raised to the point of cosmic transfiguration. A tumult of light and sound, perfumes and pyrotechnics, it would last seven whole days. And it would climax – its composer believed – with the end of the world as we know it and the birth of a new, ‘nobler’ human race.

At the end of the Prefatory Action’s libretto, he wrote ‘We will all dissolve in the ethereal whirlwind We will be born in the whirlwind! And in the splendid luster Of the final flourish Appearing to each other In the exposed beauty Of sparkling souls We will disappear... Dissolve...’

“From the end, there, through the polar night, that music will resound. It will play on future phonographs. On magnets! Yet—it does not come from there. You’ll be famous, Monsieur Mittrecie, your music will reach us from the true end, even further beyond there, where all matter is but memory. So sounds the white light that shines into every darkroom, turning all revelations into nothingness.” He rises up on tiptoe, under the critic’s nose. “All revelations—I said—turn to naught!”

The little man finishes and bows to the comte. “Every single part was absolute, mathematical perfection.”

“Oh no, I’m not a critic,” the man replies, his eyes sparklin with admiration. “I’m a maths teacher.”

Joyce -"The further into pale you travel, the steeper the degree of suspension. Right down to the mathematical -- numbers stop working. No one has yet passed the number barrier. It may be impossible."

Abandoned Lorry - It looks like an article ripped out from a radio-enthusiast magazine. Complex mathematical equations explain the basics of something called 'the ULAN frequency system'.

"A pale latitude compressor is used to sort of… make the pale more manageable. With a lot of these, you can force a radio signal grid on the pale -- literally crunch the distance across it." (..) It's meant for forcing dimensions on something that doesn't have them. Needless to say, the frequencies used are… out of this world. "At the upper limit is the large prime number generator station. It's used specifically for pale latitude compression. That's why you may be hearing some numbers.

“It’s maths, right?” Jesper is sitting with his hands under his head. “Some mathematical rule explains this [the killer wave]?” (..) “but the same non-linear effect also explains the pale. They use it in entroponetics. This is how the pale behaves when it sweeps over the world.”

“That’s right, [Ulv] talks with the dead. They’ll come if he plays them some Van Eyck and old Rietveld.” (…) “He communicates with the pale.”

Soona, the Programmer - "It was mathematical information -- from the anomaly -- presented as a waveform. That's what it was technically -- theoretically…"

Endurance - The abstract shapes swelling in the foreground have done so in vain. This is a core matter. The answer, in the double-kick that moves the millilitres through your mind. The dark thud is the source of all rhythm, the inspiration behind mathematics… Endurance - The hard core.

“In any case, the secret of expanding our power over nature obviously lies in extending this method to the entire environment. The idea of a universal mathematics was prefigured in many ancient theories that shaped the science of numbers. Since the most ancient times, we find traces of this science among the Chaldeans and Babylonians, […] and, partly, the Gnostics, this research in numerical symbolism was transmitted to medieval philosophy, ”

“ In the nineteenth century, mathematics enjoyed an unprecedented heyday: in its countless applications, it became the basis of all modern technology and man’s real power over nature. Its meaning was the same as in the ancient teachings about numbers: the desire to express all things by means of numbers and the conviction that knowing the formula of a process or thing gave us the power to change and guide the process and thus create the thing. ”

the most perfect species of thought is thought encapsulated in numbers, the project and all its departments and units must consist of a system of formulas or numbers, each providing a key to a process performed by action. […] science in general must provide the formula of any and all possible actions in its theoretical and practical modes. […] However, numbers can be replaced with similarly effective signs or names, whose knowledge gives us dominion over nature. All these tasks clearly involve transforming nature, altering and improving what was heretofore produced by the spontaneous actions of its powers.

The quotes are from the following writings:

Unveiling the musical revolution: Schoenberg’s atonality and the innovation of twelve-tone system by giuseppe.bonaccorso

Arnold Schoenberg wikipedia page

Alexander Scriabin wikipedia page

Temples, incense, giant bells hanging from the clouds: the wild world of Scriabin's Mysterium BBC music magazine

A Universal Productive Mathematics by Valerian Muravyev from Russian Cosmism edited by Boris Groys

Disco Elysium, Sacred and Terrible Air by Robert Kurvitz

bonus: more about the Mysterium

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