Rite and Ground

“A discussion of Interinterсosmism brings forth two interrelated questions:”

“what is the cosmos of Cosmism, or, more specifically, how is it produced?”

“what is to be found in the interstices (and the interstices in the interstices) of such a cosmos?”

“I will turn to the thematization of rite and ground in the texts of Nikolai Fedorov—the father of ideas that have undergone a radical transformation in the hands of the “sons,” and above all in the anarchic Biocosmism of Aleksandr Svyatogor”

“It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the works of Fedorov and Svyatogor embody the two poles of the Cosmist imagination”

“I will attempt to trace between these poles a trajectory of “rooting” in the soil-without-blood”

“The cosmos of Cosmism is nothing other than recosmization, and, in this sense, “what (is cosmos)” coincides with “how (it is produced).””

“such a cosmos is never given—and has never been given; it is, rather, systematically reaffirmed through rite”

“Thus, at the heart of the common task lies the recursive operation, i.e., the return, which acts as both a means and an end”

“Fedorov says that the funeral rite was originally aimed at revival and therefore represented a tool of resurrection, and it is precisely this function that must be restored”

“if the earth is a cemetery (or, ultimately, a substance), then the rite is a technique, “a means of gathering”: a key component of the common task”

“the temple is turned inside out into the world, and the latter is thus transformed into the resurrected ancestral temple that maintains a special relation to the rural imagination—that is, ultimately, to the ground”

“if husbandry is “a prototype,” it does not follow at all that a transition to reality is tantamount to the rejection of the rite; quite the contrary: it is necessary to interiorize rural paganism as ground, reconcile imagination with reason in a materialist synthesis of animism and Orthodoxy—a performative synthesis”

“the earth is not merely a cemetery—it is, in effect, the intensive conditions of the common “tasbandry.””

“the rural circle dance or sun-path treated as (proto)regulation, becomes the ground for the transformation of animism into a materialist project”

“The gap between thought and action is eliminated in the museum as a ritual megamachine”

“the de-cosmizing rift between thought and deed is eliminated by means of a weird grounding of thought, which is literally re-animated through the restoration of its connection to the animating forces of the rural imagination”

“in the interstices of the cosmos, in its pores, the earthly past persists, germinating into the future. Agrofuturism”

“the project of the common task draws a line of materialism in which matter is not opposed to spirit, while the spirit not only generates the technics of recosmization, but is inseparable from it”

“Despite the fact that Fedorov (unlike Heidegger) does not subordinate technics to the work of thought, taking it beyond techno-logos to the “work of deed,” this taking-beyond stops halfway—in the end we have not an “ignition” but a regulated eternal flame”

“the forces of the earthly past are translated into faces; i.e., the overcoming of localism is carried out through localization, the enclosure of ashes in a given form”

“the museum uninterruptedly reproduces faces; hence, despite Fedorov’s distaste for the soulless, modernist mechanicism”

“In Svyatogor’s hands, the cosmos of Cosmism becomes cosmetics: technology turns ruddy, while rite converts into shapeshifting”

“In Biocosmism, “even the earth is not equal to itself,” for it “stirs and vulcanates”; i.e., the earth is thought here as intensively-bestial: it shape-shifts too—ultimately, turning from the “ball of the Earth” that is “small” and “much too narrow” into a (bio)cosmic spaceship”

“Biocosmism paves the way of deterri(-)zation, where terra ceases to be firma, in order to tread new paths through the cosmos, which, however, never existed”

“Svyatogor’s thought resonates with Fedorov’s: the cosmos is being made, for “were our world to be harmoniously complete and finished, there would be no room for our individual actions or those of others.””

“if in the case of Fedorov we have an “astronomical” factory for the reproduction of forms, then in the case of Svyatogor we deal with an “exuberant” revo-life where forms can barely hang on.”

“In her essay “Ancestors Forever!” Elizabeth Povinelli, polemicizing with cosmism, cuts immortality into two semantic vectors: the stars and the ground”

“Once upright, man can never again take his eyes off the stars. Hence the need to overcome localism upward”

“Svyatogor, in turn, reworks and complicates this model, asserting an “explosive movement in all directions.””

“immortality is nothing other than a (re)generative cycle that involves not only fathers, sons, and the volcano-giants, but also the whole more-than-human world”

“Between faces and magma, between over and under, that is, in the middle, or in-between, where the inhabited cosmos is continually reborn—and reborn not in a machinic logic of connection, but through entanglement”

“while the course of the common task is distinctly somatic, the volcano-revolution is rather from-under-ground”

“only discrete components, already separated from the environment, can be jointed, hence an inhabited cosmos cannot be purely machinic”

“in order for this cosmos not to be a desert, it needs an inoculation of mycosmism”

“Thus, neither a vertical astronomy-and-architecture, nor an omnidirectional freedom of connection and disconnection, but the responsive threads of mycelium, weaving into the textures of the ground, (from/to) which return not only fathers and machines”