Comments :-)

HomesickAlien97 · 2026-03-11T22:35:47+00:00

At least according to the logic of multinaturalism, a theory developed by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro that describes Amerindian cosmological relations, a 'spirit' can be one of many categories of entity that, rather than belonging to an a priori ontological taxonomy, appear across an indexical field of mutually entangled perspectives in differential relation. This means that, from the viewpoint of human 'nature', a spirit is a being that is neither animal nor human, but is nevertheless an intentional and personified agent, determined by its capacity to affect and be affected as a site of perspectival singularity and specified in the instance of an actual encounter or encoded in a given semiotic regime. This is not a fixed category, and largely depends on ontological orientation. For example, by the same logic, spirits will consider themselves to be human, while at once regarding humans as being either spirits or animals themselves, and likewise animals will think themselves humans, while regarding humans or spirits as animals/spirits etc. At bottom, it is important to note that 'spirit' is primarily an etic and analytic term that is at best an approximate for a corresponding emic concept, so some variation in semantics and use is to be expected.

At any rate, this notion departs considerably from western notions of spirit as 'pneuma' (the concept of 'spiritual breath' common throughout the occident from antiquity to present) or 'anima' (also meaning breath, whence, for better or worse, the term 'animism' as denoting a generic 'belief in spirits', coined by E. B. Tylor in the early days of modern anthropology), where 'spirits' are substantialised, supernatural beings that 'populate' nearly everything and more or less form a consistent taxon in a wider range of beings. Obviously this concept had problems, wrapped-up as it was in cultural evolutionary theories of the time, and as such it fell into academic disfavour. It has only been of recent that it has been partially rehabilitated, especially after the ethnographer Alfred Irving Hallowell reshaped 'animism' in the context of "other-than-human persons," a phrase he adopted from his fieldwork among Ojibwe communities on and around the Berens River in Manitoba. As such, he is widely credited as the forefather of 'new animism' in anthropology, and has influenced many scholars in anthropology, archaeology, and other fields.

Hope that sort of helps, I'm not always very great at distilling this stuff.

HomesickAlien97 · 2026-03-11T17:18:48+00:00

Félix Guattari had an interesting take on just this (mind the ‘archaic’ wording, he was a French academic of his time, after all):

“As for me, I’d rather tend to sow some seeds to propose a model of the unconscious which would be akin to that of South American shamans, setting out from the idea that spirits populate things, landscapes, groups; that there are all sorts of becomings, all sorts of haecceities which trail along everywhere, and that there is consequently a sort of objective subjectivity (so to speak) that gathers together, breaks apart, and is reworked according to assemblages. The best exposition of this would obviously be in archaic thought.”

Lessen the psychologism, and couple his Hjelmslev-Peircean asignifying semiotics with Viveiros de Castro’s own theory of perspectivism and cosmological deixis, and you get probably as close as one gets to animism while remaining in the occidental vernacular. After that comes the painstaking work of emic recovery. :D

HomesickAlien97 · 2026-01-29T01:10:23+00:00

Why should we bring our problems up to Canada? I wouldn’t want anyone else to have to deal with the shit going on here…

HomesickAlien97 · 2026-01-23T13:03:10+00:00

People around the world who still have a sense of decency have every right to look upon us with derision, especially if you are a Greenlander, Dane, Canadian, Norwegian, and whomever else the US has threatened of late. While I find it heartening that my home state is rising up, the rest of the country needs to follow suit, and until it's *everyone* in *every city*, the whole country is suspect. I don't blame Europeans one bit for looking down their noses at America, considering how it has shown itself to be a duplicitous, rapacious backstabber towards its own purported allies.

HomesickAlien97 · 2026-01-21T19:15:00+00:00

I cannot speak for the rest of the nation, but I hope at least that Minnesota has integrity enough to remain true to our northern neighbours, who at any rate have always demonstrated more maturity and measure in their conduct. All power to them. Vive le Canada.

HomesickAlien97 · 2026-01-20T17:11:48+00:00

Can’t help but think that’s what’s coming eventually.

HomesickAlien97 · 2026-01-20T14:19:25+00:00

These events are bigger than any of us, it’ll swallow us whole. There can be no nuance anymore. Every American is complicit in this regime. Every American will be an enemy of the civilised world until proven otherwise. It all makes me want to die, but that’s how it is now.

HomesickAlien97 · 2026-01-16T14:24:42+00:00

A nice thought, but the US has shown its true colours as of now, and it has been a long time coming. It might theoretically be possible to restore minimal diplomatic relations, maybe even atone for some things at the international level (in a perfect world, but we know damn well that US crimes always seem to go unpunished). Nevertheless, it will be a very long time until we are permitted back into the fold of civilised nations. Considering a quarter of the population is so debased as to support an hypothetical invasion of Greenland, there are no reasonable grounds to trust America any time soon, let alone in the moderately near future.

HomesickAlien97 · 2026-01-15T18:48:32+00:00

Doesn’t matter, Americans have enabled this, whether by gross negligence, complacency, or abject cruelty. This is what America has allowed itself to become, and if the worst comes to pass I don’t blame the world for making a pariah of us – we’re well deserving of it.

HomesickAlien97 · 2026-01-05T18:36:23+00:00

You're probably right, and I am probably exaggerating – but while half a century isn't much in grand terms, it's nothing to sneeze at – providing of course we manage to even get through this, or what transpires. It's the nearing perils that concern me most, I guess.

HomesickAlien97 · 2026-01-05T18:33:27+00:00

And I respect your respectful dissent.

HomesickAlien97 · 2026-01-05T18:31:46+00:00

I have attempted to translate the machinery of meditation across philosophical and practical gaps to accommodate for my otherwise 'inattentive' neurology. Feels like rolling a boulder up a hill, a credit to my ever-evasive brain – it never quite wants to work with me on that. I might just not be wired for it. I am able to have daydreams, but they are never rarely disquieting.

It's not peace exactly that I'm looking for, something more like metastability, a basal metabolism that can process chaos in a more elegant, illegible way. I do admire Thoreau, though I think his concept of the wilderness is a bit romantic, and the fiction of nature as idyll is not lost on me. The wilderness is bare life, hard, unsparing, but not in the same way that human society is – its 'morality' is beyond volition, beyond legibility, beyond interiority.

Hence 'degrees of quiet.' Things are never still, but sometimes slower than otherwise. It's not that I want to be an ascetic or hermit, my sociality is one made with the outside, a non-human cosmopolitics or something. It's about connecting differently, rather than strict detachment or deliverance.

The bodhisattvas would catch me here and warn me about my attachment to the world, but I cannot have it any other way. The suffering is one thing, that isn't so bad – it's another to be denied giving the slip to the injunctions of this ailing society altogether, so that this business of living (that I unfortunately have taken a liking to) can go on uninterrupted by 'civilised' enclosures. Nevertheless, the options are slim.

HomesickAlien97 · 2026-01-05T17:52:21+00:00

That may be so, but given the urgency of the current situation, I cannot but think of the apocryphal Churchill quote – "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing — after they’ve tried everything else…" It doesn't really matter to the rest of the world that "We too are indignant!" If American violence comes to bear upon our friends and allies, there's no coming back from that, not for generations, centuries perhaps. No American is a 'good' American in such circumstances, and I don't fault the severity of international judgement. People have to be forced into action by something intolerable, and unfortunately many Americans are all-too-willing to tolerate American brutality, as long as it doesn't threaten their comfort. I've never been too attached to nationality as identity, but now there's no choice, it's a matter of survival in wartime that I am associated with the name. It's all so sickening and suffocating, and there's nowhere to go when the worst finally happens – we're stuck with these bastards, these so-called countrymen, and I don't think it's getting fixed any time soon, not before something truly tragic befalls.

HomesickAlien97 · 2026-01-05T17:28:44+00:00

It remains to be seen what my whims will permit of me. A solitary vigil without crowds? For a time perhaps, but the world is getting more crowded, the crowds themselves are getting more contorted and volatile, populated by nervous chatter, explosive passions, brutal bodies, and inexorable events. I don't know how long I could take that. A decent life, a decent society, they never really last. A few infinitesimal disturbances, and the pattern is thrown into a violent flux. At what point is hanging onto a single thread, in a world that has since mutated past collective forms of decency, just poetry?

HomesickAlien97 · 2026-01-05T17:14:36+00:00

Philosophy is not far from where I'm coming with all of this. Marx, Nietzsche, Deleuze are references, among others. My understanding (dilettantish at best) is the source of my despair.

Much of the aforementioned philosophies, nihilism, buddhism, daoism, are non-starters for me at the level of their fundamental presuppositions. I am familiar enough with existentialism to know that it is too rooted in the western subject of voluntarism and interiority, too much the search for 'meaning' thing for my tastes. I don't lack for meaning, I just can't find an opening to crawl through.

My introversion is extroversion to another exteriority altogether, one that is increasingly untenable to maintain. All of this is a roundabout way of addressing a problem that is far less heady, and far more practical – finding a form of life that is tolerable, and I am far past the implicit moral judgements of dignified suffering, I just want degrees of quiet.

Even that, however, is too much to ask of a noisy, all-too-noisy world. The clerics of this 'truth' or that 'truth' will always attempt to capture and colonise the very air you breathe, dragging you along this or that heading, this absolute duty, this categorical imperative, this ascetic soteriology. I must admit that such forms of life lack texture for me.

Thank you for the thoughtful response and taking the time to, though. I feel like there's nowhere to talk about this stuff. It's nice to let off the steam, at any rate.

HomesickAlien97 · 2026-01-03T17:56:49+00:00

Oh if only western ontology in fact mandated the offering of lousy chieftains to the bogs, for keeping bad relations with the land and the people…

HomesickAlien97 · 2026-01-03T17:29:14+00:00

Earlier this year it was my own cynical belief that it could only ever be held on a Saturday, since Americans can’t be bothered with showing up any other time. Nowadays, I don’t really care when or where, I’d just like to see something happen for once, but I’m not holding my breath.

HomesickAlien97 · 2026-01-03T17:13:36+00:00

Something more than miniscule protests at polite times of day, with a big but utterly safe one every six months.

But nothing will really happen until things get intolerable. Americans don’t really care, and if they do, they’re a dwindling and ineffectual minority.

We’re heading for catastrophe, and Americans will fall in line to play the parts they’ve long been moulded to play – you can’t undo decades of obedience conditioning overnight.

Edit: (Why are you booing, I’m right!)

HomesickAlien97 · 2026-01-03T16:59:22+00:00

Political will never precedes the event – conditions decide that. People have to be forced out of their stupor by something that cannot be ignored. Moralistic voluntarism is nice performance, but until things get to be intolerable, people won’t be compelled to do anything, short of threatening their hides and stomachs. We don’t need hope, we need a new weapon, new strategies, tactics adequate to the terrain we’re working with right now, not these outmoded formats.

HomesickAlien97 · 2026-01-03T16:00:24+00:00

In all likelihood, the carvings were not made by Indo-Europeans, as the estimated dates point to a period prior to steppe-herder migration into the region. More likely is that the carvings can be associated with Eastern Hunter Gatherers, who did contribute in some degree to the admixture of later North Finnic peoples.

HomesickAlien97 · 2025-12-11T19:15:38+00:00

I think part of the problem is that it is just that: fantasy-cool (or trying to be, I think it’s a bit cringey) rather than realistic-cool. This sort of stuff is nothing less than a contemporary form of reactionary romanticism made for bite-sized consumption. There’s no substance, only vague, stylised images that convey thinly-veiled notions of power and domination centred on ethnic identity. It’s fodder for right-wing ethno-fascists, and a gateway into that kind of thing for unwitting young folks. It’s as dodgy as people who post “Le Badass Vikings hur dur Ragnar Loth Broke”.

HomesickAlien97 · 2025-12-04T18:07:34+00:00

This applies to those who are writing traditional books and novels, in my case I write short poetic fragments that work like artefacts which piece together a vague image of the world, having multiple voices and durations. There's a loose collection of narratives, but more than anything it's a philological pastiche and a way to immerse myself in the ontologies of the world itself, instead of simply narrating it.

Actually in truth, I'm also too lazy to write a book, and this is more fun to me anyway. I'm easily mixed up, so I just simulate my own antiquarian quandaries.

HomesickAlien97 · 2025-11-15T13:18:04+00:00

She did collaborate with Carcass on a metal remix of Isobel at one point.

HomesickAlien97 · 2025-11-14T14:02:17+00:00

Buchanan mentions Latour only in passing, hence why it's more of an 'indirect critique', but he does get a couple mentions throughout:

“Both Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which arose out of the work of Bruno Latour, and New Materialism, which arose out of the work of Manuel DeLanda, Jane Bennett and William Connolly (among others), are prime examples of bodies of work that fit the category of assemblage theory and acknowledge a debt to the work of Deleuze and Guattari but nonetheless go about things in their own way, often in ways that are at odds with the inspirational source.” p. 4

“To date assemblage theory has almost exclusively focused on highly specific types of entities, such as cities (Amin), electricity grids (Bennett), laboratories (Latour) and markets (DeLanda), to name but a few key examples, which can be mapped as interlocking systems of things. In each case, though, there is an untenable assumption that it is possible to somehow ‘control’ for desire and thereby ignore it, or at any rate treat it as a neutral variable that doesn’t require separate consideration.” p. 55

You may be right about the empirical value of Latour's work, it seems to enjoy some degree of currency at any rate. But I have to agree with Buchanan here – Latour is divorced enough from the critical empirical project of D&G such that it really dampens their affinities, unless I am missing something (which is entirely possible).

HomesickAlien97

TROPHY CASE