John Steppling

Game (Theory) of Life

August 10, 2020

Mircea Suciu

“For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I.”
Romans 7:15 “I wish it were possible… to invent a method of embalming drowned persons, in such a manner that they might be recalled to life at any period, however distant; for having a very ardent desire to see and observe the state of America a hundred years hence.”
Benjamin Franklin (Letter to M. Dubourg, 1792)
“Kissing the picture of one’s beloved. That is obviously not based on the belief that it will have some specific effect on the object which the picture represents. It aims at satisfaction and achieves it. Or rather: it aims at nothing at all; we just behave this way and then we feel satisfied.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (Philosophical Occasions)
“Social atomism strikes us as scientific.”
Mary Midgley (The Myths We Live By)
“Men are reduced to walk-on parts in a monster documentary film which has no spectators, since the least of them has his bit to do on the screen.”
Theodor Adorno (Minima Moralia)
I remember sometime in my senior year of high school getting invited to a party at Cal Tech. I was going out with an Asian girl (Chinese/Korean) and she had been accepted there. She was a math genius of sorts. Anyway the party was as strange as anything I have been to before or since. These were Cal Tech science guys, the great minds who decided not to go to MIT. And what I found was a group of mostly white guys (quite a few Asians) who were totally de socialized and awkward. And all of them, as I recall, were politically conservative. Not just conservative but fringe super reactionary Birchers and what not. This is 1969 mind you and most people I knew were anti-war. Not in this party. Now I relate this tale because of the reverence America has for science. And I think how these geeks became renowned researchers, physicists, and doctors of various disciplines and specialties. I did not think of them then, or now, as great minds.
https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/exclusive-mount-sinai-doc-accused-ejaculating-patient-article-1.2496055
But think Nazi experiments on children, and others, by *doctors*, think Harold Shipman, think Farid Fata, think Walter Jackson Freeman, or just all the doctors and nurses who carried out, and advocated for, forced sterilization during the first half of the 20th century. Dr Mengele and Dr Aspberger. Or William Shockley and James Watson. Hell, Shockley went to MIT *and* Cal Tech. You get the idea. Or the doctors who worked for colonial authorities in Africa and India. Or Thalidimide. Or Dr. Graeme Reeves, or James Burt of Ohio. I mean one could go on and on. The point is that scientists in any field can be great tools for science while often, perhaps very often, being regressive socially and politically. Or just psychotic.
The term transhumanism keeps cropping up in media. It started as a fringe term, one found in academic journals both of a philosophical variety, and also a tech variety — it was a part of the new vocabulary for geek futurists. Now it seems to have migrated to social media, to critics and supporters of green capitalism and the great *reset*, and is often accompanied by terms like *Fourth Industrial Revolution*. The actual term was coined by Julian Huxley (founder of the World Wildlife Fund).
The problem, as with Game Theory (which actually at the least has a mathematics grounding) is the vague definition accorded Transhumanism, one riddled with contradiction, but also with a troubling fascist core. The most obvious link is with eugenics. But it intersects with eugenics in a sideways manner. The early 20th century saw a number of novels depicting dystopian futures, ones with so-called model societies achieved via technology or drugs or just some vague Nietzschian dream of human hierarchies. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984, and before that at the end of the 19th century, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (more a cautionary tale about medicine and science). And then an entire tsunami of science fiction writing over the last eighty years in particular. And the engine behind all of this was the Enlightenment. A dream that ‘science’ (rather than, really, rationality, and always singular not plural) would both *save* mankind but also provide the means to an infinite continuum of progress. A dream that is always, in the end, ahistorical and that is always tied in with domination.

Julia Fish

“In the early decades of the 20th century, not only racists and right‐wing ideologues but also a number of left‐leaning social progressives became concerned about the effects of medicine and social safety nets on the quality of the human gene pool. They believed that modern society enabled many “unfit” individuals to survive—individuals who would in earlier ages have perished—and they worried that this would lead to a deterioration of the human stock. As a result, many countries (including the USA, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Switzerland) implemented state‐sponsored eugenics programs, which infringed in various degree on individual rights. In the United States, between 1907 and 1963 some 64,000 individuals were forcibly sterilized under eugenics laws. The principal victims of the American program were the mentally disabled, but the deaf, the blind,the epileptic,the physically deformed, orphans, and the homeless were also sometimes targeted. But even such widespread compulsory sterilization pales in comparison with the German eugenics program, which resulted in the systematic murder of millions of people regarded as “inferior” by the Nazis.”
Nick Bostrom (A History of Transhumanist Thought)
Now one should note that during the height of eugenics the countries most enthusiastically embracing it were the whitest countries. This might suggest a secondary connection between white supremacism (of which eugenics is the rational {sic} expression) and transhumanism. But I will get back to that, because, firstly, I think its dangerous to traffic in such broad terms. The above quote is by Nick Bostrom, himself a leading figure in transhumanism.

Victor Brauner. (Portrait of Hitler, 1934)

The broad history of what is being called Transhumanism includes a fair number of fringe crackpot DIY disciplines (cryonics for one) but also more well funded technologies like in vitro fertilization, nanotechnology, virtual reality; genetic engineering etc. But there needs to be a distinction made, it seems, between nanotech and gene splicing and stuff like cryonics. One is corporate funded and has clear business uses and significant implications for all manner of automation and medicine. The other is science fiction fantasy that includes a lot of rather obvious denial of death projects, and invariably, it seems, white supremacism. Immortality is a big engine for, actually, all of this. But the stuff that is considered serious also shares a lot of peculiar beliefs. At least in the early phases of transhumanism. One branch that was centered in Academia was bio ethics. This revolved around gene splicing, and assisted reproduction. But others have written extensively on this history and that isn’t what interests me anyway. What *does* interest me, now in the shadow of the Covid19 event, is the tacit appeal to the authority of specialist sciences and to wealth. Trust the science is a recurring call generated by State marketing. But its the reflexive submission to the very rich that is most disturbing and it seems to run throughout the Covid hysteria. Wealth is associated with technological prowess, progress, and with *solutions* (This is also reflective of the rampant infantilism in western society today). Also,one runs into this, of course, in any climate discourse. But the pandemic has temporarily replaced the so called climate emergency with a contagion emergency. Now, there are two strands in this association of wealth and solution; the first is the default trust most westerners have for science (any kind of science). The second is the more hidden, the stealth terrors of survival, for self, family, and society. A terror of death. There is also the seductive quality of the *new* — that transhumanism feels new, like the cutting edge of human potential. The *new* automatically pushes death back a few yards.
I keep coupling transhumanism and game theory because regardless of the comparative value or not of each, they are being employed for the purposes of mystification.

Kon Trubkovich

There is a palpable sense of influence, in both really, that includes Ayn Rand, Hayak, and Nietzsche and the early medieval Alchemists. One sees the obvious branches of thought and culture that sampled some or many parts of a belief in immortality, of man transforming himself materially and spiritually, and of course, domination. This is built around and finds excuses for embracing repression, denial of pleasure and hedonism. The precursors to transhumanism are all puritanical and sex negative.
And while Christianity was always ambivalent about immortal life, or short cuts to finding it, there is a distinct christian quality to the discourse. Today I find two kinds of people writing about transhumanism. One is sort of de-mystifying and warning, usually couched in Marxist analysis (class analysis) and is anti imperialist, and critical of corporate and big media power. And the other is one who also warns of corporate takeover, imperialism, and Capitalism, but who’s warning is not de-mystifying and rarely class based, but instead is fearful of the power of this idea and practice because they grant it a certain legitimacy.
But everything is, additionally, linked to an intoxication with technology, with gadgets, with a Jetson’s vision of the future.

Joseph Albers

“Therapeutic human cloning, stem cell therapies, synthetic organs, molecular nanotechnology, and the digital-cerebral interface may allow us to achieve immortality in this century. But keeping bionic transhumans alive until immortalilty is achieved may prove very expensive. And not everyone will want it.”
Ray Kurzweill (The Transhuman Singularity, 2001)
I’m gonna call bullshit on this one. But its equivalent of the earth is doomed in 12 years. But here is another quote…“Infinitesimally tiny nanotechnological robots (nanobots) may some day circulate throughout our brains, systematically creating a digital record of the position of each molecule, providing a backup copy of our memories.” And yet this guy is a respected speaker and public intellectual. Go figure. But go ahead and check out some Youtube talks by the, I guess, leading transhumanists (Kurzweil, Aubrey de Grey, Vernor Vinge, Max Moore, David Pearce, Bostrom, et al). Its pretty stunning how silly this stuff is. So, why is it being promoted by Bill Gates and Elon Musk and all the other high net worth guys?

Johann-Georg-Gichtel-Theosophia-Practica, 1723

And small props to Noam Chomsky who said its all just fantasy. And indeed it is. And there is a side bar warranted here. The sci fi community attracts a very specific sort of person. Overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly white. But its something else, too. Its even their appearance. I fear I would descend into totally snarkification if I continued along this track. So back to our regular programming… “The words ‘science’ and ‘scientific’ have acquired a peculiar cachet in modern times. If someone accuses you of behaving ‘unscientifically’, they are almost certainly criticizing you. Scientific conduct is “sensible, rational, and praiseworthy; unscientific conduct is foolish, irrational, and worthy of contempt. It is difficult to know why the label ‘scientific’ should have acquired these connotations, but it is probably something to do with the high status in which science is held in modern society ( ) In the West at least, scientists are viewed much as religious leaders used to be: possessors of specialized knowledge that is inaccessible to the laity.”
Samir Okasha (Philosophy of Science, A Very Brief Introduction)
Here from the Einstein Institute of Mathematics …without accreditation of authorship….but no matter…are some observations on game theory (from an article titled What is Game Theory).
“Descriptively speaking, then, we can expect our disciplines only sometimes to explain or provide insights into ‘‘real’’ phenomena. We cannot expect them always to do so, because they are admittedly incomplete. We cannot even say beforehand when we expect them to do so, because we do not yet know how to integrate rational sciences like game theory and economics with non-rational sciences like psychology and sociology to yield accurate predictions.”
I will return to game theory below (worth noting that something like ten Nobel Prizes have been awarded to economists for their work on game theory).

Pierette Bloch

But there is a serious issue beneath all the silliness of transhumanists and Elon goes to the Mars, etc. And the issue has to do with how science shapes not just our perception of verification and proof, but how it shapes our cultural consciousness, too. How the idea of proof itself evolved, and the links with optical instruments, with technology, and what was lost in the process.
“As you say, I think we can distinguish three levels of hostility in Wittgenstein’s remarks about science and scientism. There is hostility to the scientism that treats science as the only respectable form of enquiry and ignores the value of other kinds of investigation. There is hostility to the spirit in which contemporary science is conducted, which Wittgenstein thinks is the spirit that informs western civilization as a whole. And, occasionally, there are signs of an attitude that goes further than the anti-scientism expressed in these first two forms of hostility: hostility to science itself. “
Bill Child (Interview on Wittgenstein, Social Science Collective, 2018)
Wittgenstein’s basic criticism of science revolved around the emphasis science placed on causality. And that often the resulting discourse was too general.
“…philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, “
Ludwig Wittgenstein (Blue Book)

Vilhelm Hammershoi. 1899.

It is obvious, I think anyway, that there is a lot of junk science out there. And some of this has to do with simply creating attention for some idea, creating clickbait if nothing else. Other parts of it are more institutionalized. That the academy manufactures a fair amount of junk science is pretty clear, too. And probably for the same reasons. Science is used as a tool of propaganda and for most Westerners the authority of science is indisputable. But I think there is more elusive question involved in thinking about science. And this is the historical implications and influence of the ‘scientific revolution’, the influence of Newton and the Enlightenment. And while I have discussed this before, I wanted to approach it from another direction. A direction that tries to suggest what the structure of existence has taken from science. Newton’s laws were to be an antidote or corrective to the Church and to the hierarchical system of Church dogma. Its interesting to look at popular articles on Newton and the scientific revolution because what you find is usually a justification for Capitalism and western democratic (sic) politics. And behind this is an idea that what Newton provided was an example of rationality. This was *reason* and everyone was free to ‘see’ the Newtonian universe themselves. And these sorts of articles (and this is what high school textbooks provide, too) are a form of just profound simplification and are reductive in the extreme. They are also something like collective dreams.
The U.S. is facing an election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Obviously the triumph of reason and rationality over superstition.
“On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability.”
Horkheimer and Adorno (Dialectic of Enlightenment)

Wilhelm Sasnal

Now Horkheimer and Adorno saw bourgeois society ruled by equivalence. The comparing of things was in the service of finding what was alike about them. And essentially, if you could not measure it, could not calculate its properties, it was illusion (or worse, poetry). But as Horkheimer and Adorno noted; “…the myths which fell victim to the Enlightenment were themselves its products.” Myth was the product of observation, too, and to narrate and report, and eventually to collect these observations as ritual. And it was Wittgenstein who said (I paraphrase…) that man is perhaps a ceremonial animal. In the desire to control or master nature, the myth and the Newtonian mind are alike.
“We are accustomed to think of myths as the opposite of science. But in fact they are a central part of it: the part that decides its significance in our lives.”
Mary Midgley (The Myths We Live By)
Midgley notes the persistent imagery of the machine (genetic engineering, etc). And she makes a perceptive point about the importance of the microscope. I have written of this before, of course. Its invention coincided with psychoanalysis and detective fiction. The unseen world offered clues to understanding. Now the microscope was invented earlier, in fact, but it became much more sophisticated at the end of the 19th century. And again, this reflects the belief in breaking down large things into their smallest parts. And at the end of that search is what is on the microscopic slide.
Today physicists continue to postulate ever tinier particles. And in the digital universe the idea of size itself has become passe. On the level of parable the writing of code is the ultimate practice of erasing size, and the finding of clues is only decoding. Today’s detective, in a futurists universe, would only scan code as it scrolls past his or her gaze. Most of the planet is increasingly proletarianized. And while automation has replaced tens of millions of jobs, the idea of robots overrunning the palace gates (figuratively speaking) is absurd. The ruling class finds this fantasy useful, however. Together we must ensure rational robots. We must create a more securitized environment, lest the marauding android hordes come and destroy us.

Emma Kunz

“However, throughout the twentieth century, scientistic prophets repeatedly told a bewildered public that policies that in fact had little to do with science must be accepted because experts had shown that they were scientific and objective. A central case of this is the behaviourist doctrine that psychology, in order to be scientific, must deal only with people’s outward behaviour, ignoring motives and emotions and regarding them, not just as unknowable but as trivial and causally ineffective. This led to many bizarre practical policies, such as the advice that J. B. Watson and B. F. Skinner gave to parents that they should not hug or kiss their children but should treat them in a detached and distant manner ‘like young adults’. This treatment (they said) was necessary because it was scientific and objective.”
Mary Midgley (ibid)
And Wittgenstein is perhaps the most cogent critic of science, of how it has changed language and the ideas of analyzing and reflecting on our life. Science is at its core a practice of distance. The scientific method is a profound tool, and the achievements of science are obvious. And yet, I personally cannot shake this unsettling but elusive feeling I have regards science; that everything has been deformed by the irrational aspects therein and that the shaping of dreams and satisifaction have been derailed in a sense.

Kassian Cephas (Java, 1880)

“Mathematical theorems are tautologies. They cannot be false because they do not say anything substantive. They merely spell out the implications of how things have been defined. The basic propositions of game theory have precisely the same character.”
Kenneth Binmore (Game Theory and the Social Contract)
“Game theory is an axiomatic-mathematical theory that presents a set of axioms that people have to ‘satisfy’ by definition to count as ‘rational.’ This makes for ‘rigorous’ and ‘precise’ conclusions – but never about the real world. ( ) Game theory is, like mainstream economics, model-oriented. There are many reasons for this – the history of the discipline, having ideals coming from the natural sciences (especially physics), the search for universality (explaining as much as possible with as little as possible),
rigour, precision, etc. “
Lars Pålsson Syll (Real-World Economics Review, issue no. 83)
Game theory posits rational actors. A specifically instrumental rationality.
“The weaknesses of social-scientific normativism are obvious. The basic assumptions refer to idealized action under pure maxims; no empirically substantive law-like hypotheses can be derived from them. Either it is a question of analytic statements recast in deductive form or the conditions under which the hypotheses derived could be definitively falsified are excluded under ceteris paribus stipulations. Despite their reference to reality, the laws stated by pure economics have little, if any, information content. To the extent that theories of rational choice lay claim to empirical-analytic knowledge, they are open to the charge of Platonism (Modellplatonismus). Hans Albert has summarized these arguments: The central point is the confusion of logical presuppositions with empirical conditions. The maxims of action introduced are treated not as verifiable hypotheses but as assumptions about actions by economic subjects that are in principle possible. The theorist limits himself to formal deductions of implications in the unfounded expectation that he will nevertheless arrive at propositions with empirical content.”
Jurgen Habermas (On the Logic of the Social Sciences)

James Rodriguez, photography.

“So – again – why assume individuals are ‘rational’? Mostly because game theorists want to be able to make behaviour predictable.”
Lars Pålsson Syll (ibid) It should be noted that game theory and nearly all climate predictions employ models. And that leads to an enormous discussion that exceeds the goals of this posting. (assuming I have *goals*). But in one sense this should be obvious. Game Theory isn’t about anything except itself. It is, itself, a game. But then bourgeois economics itself is already a total mystification. The real question is why it has exhibited such a strong pull on the western mind. Now, let me go back to Wittgenstein for a moment. Annalisa Coliva, in an essay on Wittgenstein’s ‘remarks on Fraziers Golden Bough’ writes in her introduction…
“At bottom, these themes are unified by a deep form of anti-scientism and by an underlying yet sustained criticism of key elements of Western culture. These elements are, first, the idea that science provides the uniquely correct method of explanation of all kinds of phenomena – physical as well as cultural. Second, the idea that just like science aims at identifying the causes of physical phenomena by subsuming them under theories, also philosophy and, relatedly, social ‘sciences’ like anthropology should follow suit and build theories that, when correct, would explain the causes of the phenomena they scrutinise. Third, that there is cultural progress to be measured by the degree of similarity between a given society and Western cultures, where science plays such a fundamental role.”
Annalisa Coliva (Rituals, Philosophy, Science and Progress: Wittgenstein on Frazer)

Andrzej Wróblewski

“The nonsense here is that Frazer represents these people as if they had a completely false (even insane) idea of nature, whereas they only possess a peculiar interpretation of the phenomena. That is, if they were to write it down, their knowledge of nature would not differ fundamentally from ours. Only their magic is different.”
Wittgenstein (On Frazer’s Golden Bough)
A book everyone should read is Guy Robinson’s Philosophy and Mystification. It addresses much of what is being trotted out today as reliable science. But more, Robinson is a Marxist and he asks the questions that should be asked, are clearly in need of being asked, but which are increasingly rarely asked today. What Wittgenstein concludes in his remarks on Frazer is, essentially, we should not think of all descriptions and all explanations (if explanations are indeed mandatory) on the model of scientific description and explanation. One sees this in climate discourse, in game theory, and in the laughable realm of transhumanism.
“The suspicion is not long dawning that it is because the problems of machine intelligence and artificial intelligence have not only conceptual roots, but ideological ones as well. That is, they are grounded in and express not a scientific view or theory, but a view that stands outside and looks over the sciences as a whole, taking them to be the only comprehensive and legitimate form of understanding and explanation.”
Guy Robinson (Philosophy and Mystification)
Now the whole idea of Artificial Intelligence has become something more than its declared goal. It is now a psychological expression, even an allegory, of western capitalism. There is a both a projection going on, something in how men want to be robotic (See Terminator 2), want those hot sex androids so popular in sci fi novels, and want the triumph of machine over man, and this is, partly I believe, because they feel helpless in face of a decaying bourgeois class that has no purpose, no job, and no meaning.
Intelligence is very hard to define. I used to own a Czèch german shepherd. She was bred to work as a police or military dog. And so one had to work her, to train her often, or she would get, lets say, restless. She was never happier than when out doing tracking exercises. During the long ago writers strike in LA, I had a temp job as a dog trainer. What was interesting was that all of us on the staff knew which breeds to avoid. Some just seemed dense (Irish Setters, due to overbreeding) while others, like Golden Retrievers were very easy to train. But Chows presented the biggest problem. Chows, everyone agreed, were very smart. VERY smart. But they literally could not be trained. They were more like cats in that respect. But they simply saw no point in the undignified activity of heeling or sitting or whatever. The punch line, though, was Chows didn’t really need to be trained. They didn’t run into traffic, didn’t jump up on guests, or chew up your new couch. They were mostly indifferent to anyone but their owner. And that was that. I bring this up because, as I say, Chows were regarded as very smart. One might ask how that was determined. The answer is both subtle and complex at once.

Toba Khedoori

They gave off an aura of intelligence. They also didn’t do dumb shit. It was clear they understood commands, but also clear they were not going to follow those commands. Was that smart of them? This is where one can leap off into a discussion of AI. It is often stated that adaptation is a sign of intelligence. I don’t quite buy that, though it *is* in certain situation. But refusal to go along is a sign of intelligence too. Chows as the Che Guevara of dog breeds. The field of AI, the people making it, and studying it, are overwhelmingly white and male. Its interesting I think that doctoral degrees in Philosophy are also overwhelmingly male and white (Hispanic students did however double in size over the last twenty years). I mean not many people period actually study philosophy. A great many study computer science and robotics and AI. “…we need to identify and characterize a visionary use of the sciences that has been with us almost as long as the sciences themselves. “Scientism” is a convenient label for this programmatic and visionary science-based religion. It is a complex syndrome of ideas and attitudes whose chief marks are reductionism, determinism, a kind of “theologizing” of science and a tendency, even a necessity, to talk about “science” rather than “the sciences,” by the introduction of absolute notions, and the deification of Nature (capital”N,” please, to signal its transcendent nature), as well as a general “mechanization of the world-picture.””
Guy Robinson (ibid)

Malcolm Liepke

The entire AI project, from its inception, has felt very much a reflection of the neurotic solipsistic obsessional character of like under Capital. So what is the appeal? One can tick off a dozen films with AI themes (most of the borrowing from Kubrick and HAL). Make that several dozen. And TV too. I see growing numbers of AI themed TV series from Europe, from Russia, from Asia. The reactionary and confused adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, into Blade Runner and into a cult classic and a wildly popular film, and a template (as much as the Kubrick) for the popular conception of AI. But let us allow for this being the kitsch end of AI, the pop version of a *serious* discipline. AI has entered the cultural landscape, it is part of the vocabulary of western society. Hence, I think, there is something beyond just economic reward that is driving this fascination, for the lay person and for the scientists involved.
First of all, I find a lot of surveillance stuff just doesn’t work. https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-gorillas-photo-recognition-algorithm-ai
Most people I know will argue this with me. Even far left thinkers who may despise the growing police state of west, but they fear the technology. I fear the police. The technology doesn’t have to work for the same results to be achieved. But I digress. AI and its wide appeal is often explained by the practitioners having a *god complex*. I think the opposite is more likely. I feel the pull is the desire FOR having robot overlords. I think there is a great self loathing in all this, and while it is mixed in with some narcissistic qualities, the real allure is masochistic almost. It is a submission to an ultimate authority. It is some weird version of Stockholm Syndrome. As people have become less and less in touch with their inner lives, with their feelings, the more they come to admire the android idea, to admire machines. This is also reification of a sort. As Paul Krasner once said…reification is where you treat your appliances like friends and your friends like appliances.

Shi Guorui, photography (Hong Kong seen from Kowloon).

Do androids have an unconscious? “There is a vast difference, for instance, between thinking of an ego, on one hand, and of accepting “I” as the consummate, complex, nonlinear, multidimensional subject, on the other-or between using the construct of the id as opposed to Lacan’s (1966) “Other,” which I sometimes render as the “second self” or “alter ego” or the “ineffable subject of the unconscious.” When the ineffable subject of the unconscious finds an external other who happens to be a psychoanalyst, then the two together constitute what the Greeks called the psychopomp, the conductor to the realm of lost souls.”
James S. Grotstein (Who is the Dreamer Dreaming the Dream)
Well, if they dream of electric sheep, then presumably they do. This is the beginning of why AI is such a fantasy. And yes, robotics have become stunningly good at a variety of service jobs, they are everywhere in production and packaging and processing. The issue is this idea that artificial intelligence is actually possible. That a singularity (sic) is in our future. For consciousness (and the unconscious) are an eternal mystery, are the source of all art and culture, and are the reality of humanness. The mind is not discoverable by nanobots tracing the biological processes in my brain.

Abdulnasser Gharem

Freud saw the unconscious as being made up of instinctual representations, ones that tend toward or try to discharge their cathexes — they are partly wish impulses and partly something ineffable. Grotstein relates a story about an epiphanic dream he experienced and how an old professor in Jerusalem said for ancient Assyrians the dream was the conversation of Gods. That Gods conversed via human dreams. Which is why we forget them. We were not allowed to be privy to the secret communication of deities. Technology is in the service of the ruling class. From the defense industry and their ever more sophisticated weaponry, to the massive digital platforms on the internet, to social media for that matter, to super-intelligent computers that can process gigantic amounts of data in micro seconds, the role is always to buttress the class hierarchies of the elite billionaires. This so called 1% who even as we speak are accumulating ever more wealth, are in fact essentially taking possession of the planet. Meanwhile people occupy themselves with idiotic science fiction novelties like AI. Computers cannot and will not ever *think*. They will not decide important geo political policy. The ruling class will use the data they digest and analyse, but that is far from a machine thinking.
http://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2020/04/15/vaccination-most-deceptive-tool-of-imperialism/
“Scientistic imperialism has been closely connected with the attempt to reduce all the various sciences to a single model, as is clear from the way in which the Unity of Science Movement in the United States has devoted itself to asserting omnicompetence. Both errors,in fact, spring equally from an unduly narrow,monopolistic concept of rationality, a concept which we still draw essentially from seventeenth-century philosophers such as Descartes. (This is just one more case where people who refuse to have anything to do with philosophy have become enslaved to outdated forms of it.)”
Mary Midgley (ibid)

The Great Historical Clock of America. 1870s.

The desire for solution, for completion, for explanation, is the outline for instrumental thinking. It is a hallmark of western thinking the last hundred (or two) years. There is nothing wrong with any of those things. But they tend toward obsessional. They take on an almost sexual and religious mania, and not everything has an solution. Not everything is complete. But in a society in which incompletion is also normalized via popular media, and with a cheapened idea of solution, the tendency for junk science is likely to grow. Junk science is one register of the new magical thinking. But it is a denuded magic, a pseudo science akin to astrology. An alienated bodiless abstraction. Disciplines that are only onanistic games. “Magic like science is concerned with ends, but it pursues them through mimesis, not through an increasing distance from the object. It certainly is not founded on the “omnipotence of thought,” which the primitive is supposed to impute to himself like the neurotic;” there can be no “over-valuation of psychical acts” in relation to reality where thought and reality are not radically distinguished. The “unshakable confidence in the possibility of controlling the world'”? which Freud anachronistically attributes to magic applies only to the more realistic form of world domination achieved by the greater astuteness of science. The autonomy of thought in relation to objects, as manifested in the reality-adequacy of the Ego, was a prerequisite for the replacement of the localized practices of the medicine man by all-embracing industrial technology.”
Horkheimer and Adorno (ibid)

© 2015 John Steppling. All Rights Reserved.

Aug

15

Charles Baudelaire, Hymne à la beauté

John COLTRANE (par Guy LE QUERREC)

Depuis quelques jours, écoute en boucle d’« Olé », 18 minutes (environ) de bonheur composées et interprétées le 25 mai 1961 par John Coltrane, accompagné d’Eric Dolphy, Freddie Hubbard, McCoy Tyner, Reggie Workman, Art Davis et Elvin Jones… Dans un entretien de 1970, Coltrane explique : « Je pars d’un point et je vais le plus loin possible… » Donc, partant d’un point, ici et maintenant, aller le plus loin possible, en s’efforçant toujours de se perdre. Sinon, la certitude de la répétition se substitue à l’inquiétude de la découverte. Ainsi dit Jorge Semprun : « l’écriture, si elle prétend être davantage qu’un jeu, ou un enjeu, n’est qu’un long, interminable travail d’ascèse, une façon de se déprendre de soi en prenant sur soi : en devenant soi-même parce qu’on aura reconnu, mis au monde l’autre qu’on est toujours. » (L’écriture ou la vie, 1994) Je me souviendrai : l’inquiétude est la condition du mouvement, le voyage est d’intranquillité. Pour nous accompagner aujourd’hui, la parole de Charles Baudelaire : « Nous nous embarquerons sur la mer des Ténèbres / Avec le cœur joyeux d'un jeune passager. / Entendez-vous ces voix, charmantes et funèbres, / Qui chantent : « Par ici ! vous qui voulez manger // Le Lotus parfumé ! c'est ici qu'on vendange / Les fruits miraculeux dont votre cœur a faim ; / Venez vous enivrer de la douceur étrange / De cette après-midi qui n'a jamais de fin ? »

Charles BAUDELAIRE - Jeanne DUVAL (par NADAR)

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Hymne à la beauté
Viens-tu du ciel profond ou sors-tu de l'abîme,
Ô Beauté ! ton regard, infernal et divin,
Verse confusément le bienfait et le crime,
Et l'on peut pour cela te comparer au vin.

Tu contiens dans ton œil le couchant et l'aurore ;
Tu répands des parfums comme un soir orageux ;
Tes baisers sont un philtre et ta bouche une amphore
Qui font le héros lâche et l'enfant courageux.

Sors-tu du gouffre noir ou descends-tu des astres ?
Le Destin charmé suit tes jupons comme un chien ;
Tu sèmes au hasard la joie et les désastres,
Et tu gouvernes tout et ne réponds de rien.

Tu marches sur des morts, Beauté, dont tu te moques ;
De tes bijoux l'Horreur n'est pas le moins charmant,
Et le Meurtre, parmi tes plus chères breloques,
Sur ton ventre orgueilleux danse amoureusement.

L'éphémère ébloui vole vers toi, chandelle,
Crépite, flambe et dit : Bénissons ce flambeau !
L'amoureux pantelant incliné sur sa belle
A l'air d'un moribond caressant son tombeau.

Que tu viennes du ciel ou de l'enfer, qu'importe,
Ô Beauté ! monstre énorme, effrayant, ingénu !
Si ton œil, ton souris, ton pied, m'ouvrent la porte
D'un Infini que j'aime et n'ai jamais connu ?

De Satan ou de Dieu, qu'importe ? Ange ou Sirène,
Qu'importe, si tu rends, - fée aux yeux de velours,
Rythme, parfum, lueur, ô mon unique reine ! -
L'univers moins hideux et les instants moins lourds ?
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Les ténèbres Dans les caveaux d'insondable tristesse
Où le Destin m'a déjà relégué ;
Où jamais n'entre un rayon rose et gai ;
Où, seul avec la Nuit, maussade hôtesse,

Je suis comme un peintre qu'un Dieu moqueur
Condamne à peindre, hélas ! sur les ténèbres ;
Où, cuisinier aux appétits funèbres,
Je fais bouillir et je mange mon cœur,

Par instants brille, et s'allonge, et s'étale
Un spectre fait de grâce et de splendeur.
A sa rêveuse allure orientale,

Quand il atteint sa totale grandeur,
Je reconnais ma belle visiteuse :
C'est Elle ! noire et pourtant lumineuse.
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L’aube spirituelle
Quand chez les débauchés l'aube blanche et vermeille
Entre en société de l'Idéal rongeur,
Par l'opération d'un mystère vengeur
Dans la brute assoupie un ange se réveille.

Des Cieux Spirituels l'inaccessible azur,
Pour l'homme terrassé qui rêve encore et souffre,
S'ouvre et s'enfonce avec l'attirance du gouffre.
Ainsi, chère Déesse, Être lucide et pur,

Sur les débris fumeux des stupides orgies
Ton souvenir plus clair, plus rose, plus charmant,
A mes yeux agrandis voltige incessamment.

Le soleil a noirci la flamme des bougies ;
Ainsi, toujours vainqueur, ton fantôme est pareil,
Âme resplendissante, à l'immortel soleil !
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Le voyage               À Maxime Du Camp.

I.
Pour l'enfant, amoureux de cartes et d'estampes,
L'univers est égal à son vaste appétit.
Ah ! que le monde est grand à la clarté des lampes !
Aux yeux du souvenir que le monde est petit !

Un matin nous partons, le cerveau plein de flamme,
Le cœur gros de rancune et de désirs amers,
Et nous allons, suivant le rythme de la lame,
Berçant notre infini sur le fini des mers :

Les uns, joyeux de fuir une patrie infâme ;
D'autres, l'horreur de leurs berceaux, et quelques-uns,
Astrologues noyés dans les yeux d'une femme,
La Circé tyrannique aux dangereux parfums.

Pour n'être pas changés en bêtes, ils s'enivrent
D'espace et de lumière et de cieux embrasés ;
La glace qui les mord, les soleils qui les cuivrent,
Effacent lentement la marque des baisers.

Mais les vrais voyageurs sont ceux-là seuls qui partent
Pour partir, cœurs légers, semblables aux ballons,
De leur fatalité jamais ils ne s'écartent,
Et, sans savoir pourquoi, disent toujours : Allons !

Ceux-là dont les désirs ont la forme des nues,
Et qui rêvent, ainsi qu'un conscrit le canon,
De vastes voluptés, changeantes, inconnues,
Et dont l'esprit humain n'a jamais su le nom !

II.
Nous imitons, horreur ! la toupie et la boule
Dans leur valse et leurs bonds ; même dans nos sommeils
La Curiosité nous tourmente et nous roule,
Comme un Ange cruel qui fouette des soleils.

Singulière fortune où le but se déplace,
Et, n'étant nulle part, peut être n'importe où !
Où l'homme, dont jamais l'espérance n'est lasse,
Pour trouver le repos court toujours comme un fou !

Notre âme est un trois-mâts cherchant son Icarie ;
Une voix retentit sur le pont : « Ouvre l'œil ! »
Une voix de la hune, ardente et folle, crie :
« Amour... gloire... bonheur ! » Enfer ! c'est un écueil !

Chaque îlot signalé par l'homme de vigie
Est un Eldorado promis par le Destin ;
L'Imagination qui dresse son orgie
Ne trouve qu'un récif aux clartés du matin.

Ô le Pauvre amoureux des pays chimériques !
Faut-il le mettre aux fers, le jeter à la mer,
Ce matelot ivrogne, inventeur d'Amériques
Dont le mirage rend le gouffre plus amer ?

Tel le vieux vagabond, piétinant dans la boue,
Rêve, le nez en l'air, de brillants paradis ;
Son œil ensorcelé découvre une Capoue
Partout où la chandelle illumine un taudis.

III.
Étonnants voyageurs ! quelles nobles histoires
Nous lisons dans vos yeux profonds comme les mers !
Montrez-nous les écrins de vos riches mémoires,
Ces bijoux merveilleux, faits d'astres et d'éthers.

Nous voulons voyager sans vapeur et sans voile !
Faites, pour égayer l'ennui de nos prisons,
Passer sur nos esprits, tendus comme une toile,
Vos souvenirs avec leurs cadres d'horizons.

Dites, qu'avez-vous vu ?

IV.
« Nous avons vu des astres
Et des flots ; nous avons vu des sables aussi ;
Et, malgré bien des chocs et d'imprévus désastres,
Nous nous sommes souvent ennuyés, comme ici.

La gloire du soleil sur la mer violette,
La gloire des cités dans le soleil couchant,
Allumaient dans nos cœurs une ardeur inquiète
De plonger dans un ciel au reflet alléchant.

Les plus riches cités, les plus grands paysages,
Jamais ne contenaient l'attrait mystérieux
De ceux que le hasard fait avec les nuages.
Et toujours le désir nous rendait soucieux !

– La jouissance ajoute au désir de la force.
Désir, vieil arbre à qui le plaisir sert d'engrais,
Cependant que grossit et durcit ton écorce,
Tes branches veulent voir le soleil de plus près !

Grandiras-tu toujours, grand arbre plus vivace
Que le cyprès ? – Pourtant nous avons, avec soin,
Cueilli quelques croquis pour votre album vorace,
Frères qui trouvez beau tout ce qui vient de loin !

Nous avons salué des idoles à trompe ;
Des trônes constellés de joyaux lumineux ;
Des palais ouvragés dont la féerique pompe
Serait pour vos banquiers un rêve ruineux ;

« Des costumes qui sont pour les yeux une ivresse ;
Des femmes dont les dents et les ongles sont teints,
Et des jongleurs savants que le serpent caresse. »

V.
Et puis, et puis encore ?

VI.
« Ô cerveaux enfantins !
Pour ne pas oublier la chose capitale,
Nous avons vu partout, et sans l'avoir cherché,
Du haut jusques en bas de l'échelle fatale,
Le spectacle ennuyeux de l'immortel péché

La femme, esclave vile, orgueilleuse et stupide,
Sans rire s'adorant et s'aimant sans dégoût ;
L'homme, tyran goulu, paillard, dur et cupide,
Esclave de l'esclave et ruisseau dans l'égout ;

Le bourreau qui jouit, le martyr qui sanglote ;
La fête qu'assaisonne et parfume le sang ;
Le poison du pouvoir énervant le despote,
Et le peuple amoureux du fouet abrutissant ;

Plusieurs religions semblables à la nôtre,
Toutes escaladant le ciel ; la Sainteté,
Comme en un lit de plume un délicat se vautre,
Dans les clous et le crin cherchant la volupté ;

L'Humanité bavarde, ivre de son génie,
Et, folle maintenant comme elle était jadis,
Criant à Dieu, dans sa furibonde agonie :
« Ô mon semblable, ô mon maître, je te maudis ! »

Et les moins sots, hardis amants de la Démence,
Fuyant le grand troupeau parqué par le Destin,
Et se réfugiant dans l'opium immense !
– Tel est du globe entier l'éternel bulletin. »

VII.
Amer savoir, celui qu'on tire du voyage !
Le monde, monotone et petit, aujourd'hui,
Hier, demain, toujours, nous fait voir notre image
Une oasis d'horreur dans un désert d'ennui !

Faut-il partir ? rester ? Si tu peux rester, reste ;
Pars, s'il le faut. L'un court, et l'autre se tapit
Pour tromper l'ennemi vigilant et funeste,
Le Temps ! Il est, hélas ! des coureurs sans répit,

Comme le Juif errant et comme les apôtres,
A qui rien ne suffit, ni wagon ni vaisseau,
Pour fuir ce rétiaire infâme : il en est d'autres
Qui savent le tuer sans quitter leur berceau.

Lorsque enfin il mettra le pied sur notre échine,
Nous pourrons espérer et crier : En avant !
De même qu'autrefois nous partions pour la Chine,
Les yeux fixés au large et les cheveux au vent,

Nous nous embarquerons sur la mer des Ténèbres
Avec le cœur joyeux d'un jeune passager.
Entendez-vous ces voix, charmantes et funèbres,
Qui chantent : « Par ici ! vous qui voulez manger

Le Lotus parfumé ! c'est ici qu'on vendange
Les fruits miraculeux dont votre cœur a faim ;
Venez vous enivrer de la douceur étrange
De cette après-midi qui n'a jamais de fin ? »

A l'accent familier nous devinons le spectre ;
Nos Pylades là-bas tendent leurs bras vers nous.
« Pour rafraîchir ton cœur nage vers ton Electre ! »
Dit celle dont jadis nous baisions les genoux.

VIII.
Ô Mort, vieux capitaine, il est temps ! levons l'ancre !
Ce pays nous ennuie, ô Mort ! Appareillons !
Si le ciel et la mer sont noirs comme de l'encre,
Nos cœurs que tu connais sont remplis de rayons !

Verse-nous ton poison pour qu'il nous réconforte !
Nous voulons, tant ce feu nous brûle le cerveau,
Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu'importe ?
Au fond de l'Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau !

(Charles Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal)

  

 

plr

FRACAS DU MONDE

Manifeste du parti communiste, Slavoj Žižek

L’Actualité du Manifeste du parti communiste, Slavoj Žižek (par Gilles Banderier)

  12.05.20 

L’Actualité du Manifeste du parti communiste, Slavoj Žižek, Fayard, octobre 2018, 92 pages, 12 €

À moins d’être un marxiste endurci, voire obsessionnel, le Manifeste du parti communiste n’est pas un livre qu’on éprouve le besoin de relire tous les mois, ni même tous les ans. En général, et à condition de le juger indispensable, on estime qu’une seule lecture (souvent menée quand on étudie la philosophie en classe) suffit au cours d’une existence et que, de toute manière, l’effondrement du communisme à la fin du XX^e siècle (n’en demeurent que ces peu reluisants vestiges que sont Cuba, le Laos, la Corée du Nord et surtout la Chine – quatre pays dont personne ne pense qu’ils sont là pour indiquer à l’humanité la voie afin d’atteindre au bonheur radieux ici-bas) a globalement invalidé les thèses de Marx. Slavoj Žižek veut persuader le lecteur du contraire et sans doute a-t-il raison.

À force d’employer le mot d’actualité sans arrêt, on a fini par perdre de vue une partie de ses significations : ce qui est actuel n’est pas seulement ce qui existe au moment présent, mais aussi ce qui est réel, effectif, en acte (actuel s’oppose à virtuel). Que veut-on dire si l’on suggère que le Manifeste du parti communiste est un texte en acte ?

Un livre digne de ce nom évolue avec le temps. D’une part, avec le temps du lecteur : une tragédie de Racine, un poème de Baudelaire, n’éveillent pas les mêmes sentiments selon qu’on les lise au collège ou à cinquante ans (comme le disait déjà saint Grégoire le Grand, « Scriptura crescit cum legente » (L’Écriture croît avec celui qui la lit). D’autre part, avec le temps de l’Histoire, qui dépasse (tout en le subsumant) le temps individuel du lecteur. Or, quand le Manifeste du parti communiste sortit des presses, en 1848, une page comme celle-ci était incompréhensible : « La bourgeoisie ne peut exister sans révolutionner constamment les instruments de production, ce qui veut dire les rapports de production, c’est-à-dire l’ensemble des rapports sociaux. Le maintien sans changement de l’ancien mode de production était, au contraire, pour toutes les classes industrielles antérieures, la condition première de leur existence. Ce bouleversement continuel de la production, ce constant ébranlement de tout le système social, cette agitation et cette insécurité perpétuelles distinguent l’époque bourgeoise de toutes les précédentes. […] Par l’exploitation du marché mondial, la bourgeoisie donne un caractère cosmopolite à la production et à la consommation de tous les pays. Au grand désespoir des réactionnaires, elle a enlevé à l’industrie sa base nationale. Les vieilles industries nationales ont été détruites et le sont encore chaque jour. Elles sont supplantées par de nouvelles industries, dont l’adoption devient une question de vie ou de mort pour toutes les nations civilisées, industries qui n’emploient plus des matières premières indigènes, mais des matières premières venues des régions les plus lointaines, et dont les produits se consomment non seulement dans le pays même, mais dans toutes les parties du globe ».

De Flaubert à Jacques Brel en passant par les excités de mai 1968 et les adolescents en mal de révolte, la bourgeoisie est considérée comme le bastion du conservatisme le plus borné et le plus stupide. Seul Marx avait compris le caractère authentiquement révolutionnaire de la bourgeoisie et du capitalisme. On l’a souvent dit : Marx fut moins un économiste qu’un prophète (comme Victor Hugo à pareille époque, les photographies que nous possédons de lui trahissent une identification, sans doute délibérée, à l’iconographie des Prophètes de l’Ancien Testament), annonçant – à l’extérieur – la mondialisation (qu’on nous présente comme un historicisme, c’est-à-dire un phénomène irréversible et indépendant de la volonté humaine – le fameux TINA de Madame Thatcher) et – à l’intérieur – le dynamitage méthodique des structures familiales et corporatives, des solidarités anciennes, des rapports de filiation, et la marchandisation de la seule chose dont disposent les plus pauvres : leur corps.

En quoi le Manifeste du parti communiste est-il un texte en acte ? C’est à présent que la vision prophétique de Marx s’est réalisée, est devenue actuelle, qu’il faut le relire. Mais il est possible que les enseignements à en tirer ne soient pas du goût de tout le monde, alors que des partis et syndicats de gauche donnent la main au patronat pour faire entrer le plus possible de « migrants » (le choix du terme est en lui-même révélateur – qui voudrait empêcher les oiseaux de migrer ?), celui-ci pour abaisser le coût de la main-d’œuvre en faisant baisser les salaires et créer une pression, une insécurité permanentes sur les travailleurs, tout en déplorant que des emplois de plus en plus nombreux (à la fois pénibles et mal payés) ne soient plus pourvus ; ceux-là par xénophilie (ou oïkophobie). Il est possible que l’idée du revenu universel ne soit pas aussi progressiste qu’elle paraisse, n’étant qu’une version remise à jour « du pain et des jeux » (« le RSA et Hanouna »). Il est possible que la seule alternative valable à la mondialisation folle soit ce vieil État-nation tant décrié (Carlos Ghosn, symbole du capitalisme apatride le plus arrogant, semble avoir redécouvert les vertus des frontières), lequel n’est pas là seulement pour sauver les banques que leurs sottises et leur hybris ont acculées à la faillite et pour adoucir, par la distribution d’aides sociales, les conséquences des délocalisations (bien que n’ayant à vendre que sa force de travail, le prolétaire, selon la définition marxiste, n’est pas délocalisable, car les êtres humains ne sont pas du bétail interchangeable au gré des multinationales) ; il est possible que la seule alternative soit la redécouverte des vertus de l’État-nation et du régalien, alors qu’une entreprise comme Facebook a atteint les dimensions d’un État et tente de s’en attribuer les prérogatives. Échappant, au début du moins, à tous les syndicats et partis, les « gilets jaunes » furent un mouvement pour la dignité du travail et contre l’assistanat. Ce que Marx n’avait pas anticipé, c’était, d’une part, le ralliement massif au libéralisme économique, faisant que plus aucune force politique en mesure de remporter une élection au suffrage universel ne s’opposerait au nivellement du monde et à l’extension planétaire de la sphère techno-marchande ; d’autre part, que la bourgeoisie irait jusqu’à bouleverser (PMA, GPA, …) ce qui pouvait à bon droit paraître immuable : la biologie humaine.

Gilles Banderier

Né en Slovénie (1949), Slavoj Žižek est l’auteur d’une œuvre qui fait de lui un des philosophes marxistes les plus importants de sa génération.

Gilles Banderier

Lire tous les articles de Gilles Banderier

Docteur ès-lettres, coéditeur de La Lyre jésuite. Anthologie de poèmes latins (préface de Marc Fumaroli, de l’Académie française), Gilles Banderier s’intéresse aux rapports entre littérature, théologie et histoire des idées. Dernier ouvrage publié : Les Vampires. Aux origines du mythe (2015).

Copyright © 2011 La Cause Littéraire.

Corn Maze That Looks Like a Microscopic 'Water Bear'

Get Lost in a Corn Maze That Looks Like a Microscopic 'Water Bear'

by Jessica Leigh Hester August 12, 2020

When Angie Treinen first learned about tardigrades a few years ago, at a family-friendly science event at the University of Wisconsin, she couldn’t believe it. She loved their squashed little faces and their wonderfully rotund bodies, which look like a puffy stack of partly melted marshmallows. “I just stood there the whole time like, ‘Are you kidding me?’” Treinen says.

Treinen studied zoology and worked as a veterinarian, but had never encountered teeny tiny tardigrades, which are variously known as moss piglets and water bears. Immediately, they captivated her. Typically less than a millimeter long, tardigrades thrive in both mundane and extreme conditions, including bone-rattling icy landscapes, oceans, and ultra-hot environments. (They’re probably flourishing near your house, too, and it’s easy to meet them.) Internet audiences love them because they’re endearingly goofy, like claymation creatures loping around on impossibly spiky claws. Researchers, meanwhile, are fascinated by their ability to stay alive: Tardigrades persist in the face of pressure changes, temperature fluctuations, and vanishing water and oxygen.

So when Treinen sat down to plan out the annual corn maze for the eponymous farm she owns with her husband in Lodi, Wisconsin, it seemed obvious. 2020, a year of disease, economic recession, and crushing ennui, would be the year of the tardigrade. Treinen talked to Atlas Obscura about designing, planting, sculpting, and welcoming visitors to the 15-acre corn maze, which is open at Treinen Farm through November 8, 2020.

Corn mazes are popular autumnal activities in the Midwest and beyond—but they’re typically not tardigrades. Bruce Guenter/CC by 2.0

What makes for a good maize maze?

We have a lot of parameters. It typically needs to be a story, or something really intriguing—we’ve done Aesop’s fables and some Greek myths, like Icarus. It has to be a recognizable figure: When the picture of the maze is online, I don’t want people to be confused, like “What is that?” But I try to do a completely different art style each year. We did a Picasso-sketch style one year, and Art Nouveau another. Sometimes it looks like stained glass; sometimes it looks like folk art. I don’t want my mazes to all look exactly the same. I’m also aware of what is challenging for visitors to navigate in the maze. I want people to get lost, and I want there to be a lot of challenge—but not so much that people are like, “I’m outta here and I’m never coming back.”

How do you design them?

I fill up my Pinterest page with interesting things, and then I start sketching by hand—just rough, rough sketches so that I have an idea what the main figure and layout might be. Then I do almost all of it in Illustrator. My ultimate product is a black-and-white line drawing.

How does maze design affect the planting?

My husband plants the field in vertical and horizontal rows, which is not how you normally grow corn. But he does this so there’s literally a grid growing right into the field, with each row about 30 inches from the next, so it becomes a dense field. When I am done with the design, I put a grid on a layer in the Illustrator, which matches the grid he’s planted in the field.

The design typically takes me about 10 days. I start in June, on the day that the corn goes in. Ten days is the time between when you plant the corn and the time it’s going to be up in visible rows—and if the weather’s warm, it comes up even faster. You have to cut the corn while you can still see what the rows are. Once it gets to be about knee-high, the leaves of the corn are starting to overreach, and you can’t distinguish the rows anymore. So that’s the deadline. One year it came up in six days, and my husband was like, “The corn is up. I need the design.” I need that pressure.

A tardigrade, not made of corn. Epipelagic/CC by 2.5

How do crews go in and make the maze?

I print the plans out and give them to the maze-cutting crew. They’re able to find a point on my plan and then, by counting rows, they put stakes and flags out and find the corresponding parts in the field. They paint where the trails need to be, and they mow them first before tilling the fields [and ripping up the roots]. We have a commercial mower about five feet wide. If there’s a mistake when you mow the corn, it’ll grow right back (and I can usually alter the map to match the mistake). It takes about 120 to 150 person hours to cut the maze. Periodically, I take my drone up to verify things are looking ok.

The maze crew loves it when there’s a lot of circles or parts of circles, because circles are easy to cut. I can mark on the design the center of the circle and the radius. Somebody stands at the center, takes a measuring tape, pulls it out to the radius, and then just walks around in a circle. Anything geometric is also easy for them to cut, because of the clear angles. Art Deco borders, or specific flourishes which need to be precise, they get a little complain-y about those things. But they always do it just fine. This year, the maze is more organic. All of those paths are not set in stone.

What’s the experience like for a visitor? Will they have any sense that they’re exploring a tardigrade?

The corn is about 10 feet tall now. The only way you can see the tardigrade is to be up in the air. We have a tower that you can walk up and overlook the maze, but you can’t really see the design—just some of the swirls. You have to be up in an airplane or use a drone to really see it. What the visitors are seeing is corridors of corn that all look the same, basically.

Past mazes at Treinen Farm include this massive trilobite. Courtesy Treinen Farm

You’ve done other science mazes in the past, such a trilobite, Wisconsin’s state fossil, in 2017. What appealed to you this year about tardigrades?

This year, when I was designing the maze, I was anxious, as everybody else probably was, too. I didn’t know what the future was going to be. I didn’t even know for sure if we were going to be able to open our business at all. But my husband said, “You know what, we’re going to put all the pumpkins in, we’re going to put the maze in. We can’t do it if we don’t have those things.” I was thinking how resilient water bears are. I mean, come on. That has to be the 2020 corn maze. A lot of people said to me, “Oh, why don’t you do a virus?” I’d like to be a place where people don’t have to think about it for two hours. But I did want to acknowledge that it’s really hard right now.

How does a maze made of living corn change over the course of its run?

Right now, the corn is as tall as it’s going to be. But even after it stops growing vertically, it grows these tassels, which hold pollen. Then the pollen falls where the ears are going to be, and then the ears grow. The most important thing is that the corn stalks be really strong and that the leaves stay green for as long as possible, because when they dry, they get brittle and kind of break, and then your maze looks really sparse. Ours will get killed by the frost around the beginning of October. By the end of the season, it’s brown. Eventually, we harvest it and sell it [typically for animal feed].

This year’s maze recently opened to the public. How have visitors reacted so far?

One of the first people who came in had a tardigrade tattoo. That is honestly one of the most amazing things I’ve seen in a really long time. The visitors we’ve had so far really want to talk about tardigrades; they’ve gone to our website and clicked on all the links and learned about them. Somebody said they had found tardigrades and had a microscope and were taking care of them. I thought, “Wow, okay, I think I probably need to do that.”

 atlasobscura.com

The Mesmerizing Geometry of Malaysia’s Most Complex Cakes

Bold colors and designs set kek lapis Sarawak apart.

by Samantha Chong August 10, 2020

The Mesmerizing Geometry of Malaysia's Most Complex Cakes

Slicing into these cakes reveals their geometric interiors. Karen Chai/Kitchen Confidante

On a 2019 episode of The Great British Baking Show, judge Paul Hollywood looks like he’s choosing his words very carefully when he speaks. “I think this is one of the hardest cake designs to make,” he says, referring to the gauntlet the judges have just thrown down for the contestants: to bake kek lapis Sarawak. “There’s nowhere to hide. We will see the problems.”

Lapis means “layers” in Bahasa Malaysia, Malaysia’s national language, and Sarawak is a state located on the northwestern coast of Borneo. The kek (cake) is aptly named. Slice off a piece and you’ll find a kaleidoscope of colorful layers, meticulously arranged in distinct geometric patterns. Making it is a long, grueling process that tests even the most seasoned of Sarawak’s bakers.

But for Sarawakian Jennifer Chen, making the layered dessert is a piece of cake. “To me, it’s easy,” she says nonchalantly. However, Chen, who picked up the recipe from a childhood friend, acknowledges that she has been perfecting her technique since the 1980s. “For a learner,” she muses, “I don’t think they can pick it up so soon. It’s very confusing.”

Kek lapis Sarawak is a relatively new dessert. It originated in the 1970s and 1980s, when the Betawi people from Indonesia introduced Sarawakians to kek lapis Betawi, or lapis legit, a localized version of the spit cakes that Dutch colonists used to enjoy. Lapis legit incorporates spices such as cinnamon, cardamom, clove, and star anise into a fluffy batter of butter, flour, and eggs, which bakers cook in multiple brown and beige layers.

Sarawak’s version of kek lapis, however, is much more colorful and complicated, with its inner layers made vibrant with food coloring and natural extracts. Bakers in Sarawak also added their own spin on the cake’s flavors, resulting in concoctions such as kek lapis Cadbury and kek lapis Oreo. Building these cakes requires a vivid imagination, an almost mathematical mind for detail, and perhaps most importantly, a steady hand.

Making one cake can take anywhere from four to eight hours, depending on the complexity of the design. It’s a process that could go wrong at any point in time: Bakers first must cook up cakes in deep pans, carefully adding even stripes of colorful batter with 10 minutes in the oven between each layer.

But making the cake is only half the battle. Kek lapis Sarawak is unique because bakers must carefully cut up the cooled cakes and reassemble them using jam or condensed milk as glue. The end result is a complex, vibrant pattern that appears when the cake is sliced.

“You need to think about the pattern,” Iban home baker Olivia anak Edward stresses, noting that each cake’s pattern and flavoring requires bakers to consider how any added ingredients would affect the design. “Let’s say you want to make kek lapis Cadbury. You need to know how to put the chocolate Cadbury in the middle,” she explains, “so that the cake doesn’t break.” Taking a deep breath, she adds, “It’s very challenging. Once you make a mistake, it won’t turn out beautifully.”

Chen uses diagrams to both plan her cake designs and record them for further use. Kenneth Chai

Chen, on the other hand, has developed a habit of drawing diagrams to plan her cakes. She acknowledges that things can always go awry, but even a cake sliced off-center can be salvaged. “You cut it wrongly, and then you try to redo it, make it into a new pattern,” she says.

Kek lapis Sarawak can be expensive, with prices sometimes reaching up to RM250 (approximately $59 US dollars) for a whole cake. Chen points to the high cost of butter—a crucial ingredient in ensuring the cake’s elusive silkiness—but also the intensive labor and time that goes into each one. “We have to do it ourselves and it’s very slow,” Chen says. “It’s hand-worked. We cannot do a lot.”

Kek lapis Sarawak was once only baked for holidays such as Gawai Dayak or Hari Raya, but today, it’s increasingly sold year-round for birthdays and weddings as well. In 2010, the Sarawak government designated it as a “protected geographical indicator,” decreeing that true kek lapis Sarawak can only be made within state borders.

Yet these vibrant cakes are rapidly making inroads outside Sarawak. Chen has now teamed up with her daughter to sell kek lapis Sarawak on social media, with her cakes racking up acclaim both locally and overseas. And though Edward admits that making even one cake is tiring, their show-stopping effect means that bakers are more than willing to take up the challenge. “So for us, as long as the people are happy to eat,” she says, “we are happy to do it.”

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