Transcribed sheet for the public lecture The Grid Destroyer, held on the 24th of April at the University of Arts Berlin

DUMBER THAN A ROCK BUT SMARTER THEN A DIAMOND

The rock starts to talk. It says: Jimmi Durham says: It is extremely difficult for an object to lie. Often someone makes an object dishonestly, and presents it as something that it is not. People are deceived for a while, then upon discovery of the deception discard the object. At that moment grace descends, (or perhaps ‘ascends’ is more appropriate). The object itself never lied. As we now see it in the vacant lot or garbage dump, its brave, confessional honesty shines. ‘Yes, I am plastic and glue and impermanent paint’, it proclaims with humble courage. As an act of saintly generosity it further explains, ‘Don’t worry, I’m completely useless.’ So, Most of us are disguised – me too, - acting as something which I am not. I wear a second coat, which humans have laid on top. It makes me what I am, in this case an ordinary rock. Philosophers also call this coat “second nature” - this second nature coat was invented, I’d say, in order to make the relationship between us non-humans and modern man possible, it is a sort of communication enhancer implanted by humans. No conversation possible between you and me without this layer. It’s kind of like a language filter to make us talk with you the way you need us to talk. This was mainly done to overcome the problem of modern man being unwilling or unable to see the primary nature of a thing - to see what we really are… slipping through your finger as “just stuff”. Though as Durham and many others have already said, this second nature coat is always kind of transparent as objects have a hard time to lie about what they really are…they always seem to kind of leak through the fabric of the coat. The inner gut of a mineral for instance… is known through science by someone, though (as always), known by one that knows more then me about myself - Namely its Valerie Allen and she claims that there are three features noted In geological terms,. First, minerals have a uniform chemical structure. Common stones picked up from the ground (just like me) are more likely to be rock, which conglomerates different minerals in proportions that vary from one sample to another. Second, minerals are elemental, comprising either a single element (like gold, sulphur, or diamond, which is pure carbon) or a compound of elements (for example silicone dioxide, which combines oxygen and silicone atoms to form quartz). Indeed, the most common minerals are such combinations of silicon and oxygen, and include some of the most familiar precious and semiprecious stones. Third, a mineral is inorganic, quite lifeless, a definition that excludes pearl, coral, amber, and fossil fuels like coal because all are formed from once-living matter. Of course, once again, for some a mineral is more and for some its less. Some people, especially kids, tend to see us as just stuff on the ground – but this is rare - we are stuff so seldom and more often we are things which mean ideas. Diamonds…are great ideas. And they even get greater. They become something more. Something different than just a mineral transformed for the industry of aesthetics. I was reading that The diamond, as we know it, is a unique example of

marketing and monetization of a geological resource. Through careful supply-control, advertising, and cultural massaging, the industry has managed to mythologize a geological material in cultures around the world. Throughout the 20th century, rituals, expectation, and meaning have been intentionally crafted around the diamond through tales of rarity and carat-value. A complete mythology, ranging from sparkling wedding rings to shady deals and overworked mines, surrounds each of these stones and furthers the mystery as well as desire. As a counterpoint to this aesthetic industry, a new functional aspect is emerging as diamonds are grown in the lab with ever increasing control and huge promises for technological applications. The unique properties of diamond as a super-material open up potentially revolutionary breakthroughs in fields as varied as quantum computing, electronics, biosensors, and clean energy. As lab-grown diamonds become more recognized and enable further progress, will they also achieve a new cultural status? Until now, the aesthetic and the technological are carefully kept separate to preserve market value and cultural narratives. We can easily imagine that gemstone dealers have no interest in promoting the fact that chemically perfect diamonds are now routinely grown in laboratories. Synthetic diamonds have become recognized for enabling further technological advances and while doing so achieve a new cultural status to rival their natural counterparts, As synthetics become more important and celebrated as agents of our technological progress, how will this impact their place in society? A rival ! an artificial grown diamond that can complicate the situation for the real diamond. Indeed, the artificial gem easily out smarts the real gem with its actual artifice – it seems way more sure about its character then the role that the unreal 2nd layer diamond has to play. It’s a real fake! Whereas the natural diamond is forced to lie, its rival’s job is just to lie, bluntly in your face, no blushing, it is expected to lie, it can only lie, its value is the lie!. Don’t get me wrong I mean lying as a virtue, a healthy way of fantasizing…. Indeed the artificial diamond has to lie to become truthful. In playing this opposite nature it makes me wonder if the real fake can help the actual natural diamond to be discarded all the way as something real again, taking away its layer and with it all its humanized features– no more needed as a prototype of beauty – but relaxing with its other friends in a murky trash bin - lost value that gained its actual matter again ….. if humans can master to create real fakes on every terrestrial inch, we might be obsolete, reborn as the first native useless. Coming back to myself. I’m a true stone, for you… I stay true as long as I’m an inactive pebble on the road, not so much if I lighten up your cities as copper wire. Right now I’m talking from inside of me, as a human stone, which makes me quite a dull character, a walking stone is amusing, especially as I’m usually synonymous with non-consciousness. To say that so-and-so has “a heart of stone” or is “dumber than a box of rocks” or “born under a stone” is to give insult by degrading the dynamic into the inert. In such comparisons, me the rock, contaminates the human to the extent that the latter is drained of all sensation and vitality. Which brings me to you! Born under a rock, made of the same elements as me. Redistributions of “oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, sulfur, phosphorous, and other elements of Earth’s crust transformed into a two-legged, upright form.” A walking talking material. This potency derived from me – to you, by delivering a mineral bony creature., is despite all my dumbness, in the end a reassertion of myself. This is not an ecological harmonious fantasm it’s a tale of kinship backed up by your science. Simple of course, and nothing new either, its all through and through with us. I’m sitting inside of you just as you do inside of me.

(A THIRD LAYER, introduction into three concepts of material bodies)

The Human starts to talk. It says: Good evening ladies and gentlemen, Tonight we would like to talk about the materials that make up our terrestrial world, and about the new age, which reorganizes these so called materials. In order to do so, we need to highlight three different conceptual principles of organization. They are as follows: The first is of a philosophical nature and is the idea we call “thing power”. the second concept, is titled as the “grid” concept. This represents the current dominant construction of perception in which we live in right now. The 3rd is the geological concept and recent neologism called Anthropocene. The former and the latter act in combination as the main destructive force against the grid. Since the inception of the anthropocene, The grid has become stuck between the two concepts, which acts as a dual frontier surrounding it. The following destructive narrative, assumes, that the most recent concept of the anthropocene, enables or rather forces an updated, reinforced version of the first concept, the idea of thing power, and with it renders the concept of the grid inevitably as useless. The first layer is the concept of thing power. 1. Thing power, termed by Jane Bennett, was derived from the concepts formed by the likes of Spinoza, Deleuze, Guattari, and others. It urges to think beyond the dominant organizational principle of subject and object matter (which describes the grid concept). A world where human and non-humans are understood equals: both as material bodies. They are assemblages of materials – equalized, interlocked actors - which perform various dynamic flows and are able to join forces, collaborate or push towards and against each other. Each agent in the universe is constantly communicating with another one, never acting as a single entity. In the world of thing power, there exists a mix of powerful matter activities, which come into play on micro and macro scales, simply working through space as a collaboration of stuffs. – for instance, this very sentence which is being read right now, emerged from a massive set of actors. At the time it was written it engaged memory, blood sugar, the plastic computer key board, the air in the room, the sound of the heater, to name just a few…[PAUSE] right now, in this room, this sentence is being spoken out loud, its sonic waves are traveling through the room, bumping into other agencies… merging with the room temperature, the sound and light of the projector and the heavy particulate air…traveling… it hits your ear, digested and mixed with your blood sugar, coffee mouth, contact lenses and the warm vibrating cell phone in your pocket… this room, as every other environment, is a setting of human and non human materials that work in a constant flux of interconnectivity. We shall keep this limitless material constellation in mind, and render it as fundamental for the time being Let us move to the second concept: The Grid 2. this concept represents the seemingly stable world in which we live in right now, It follows the dominant praxis of ordering things hierarchically according to humans. In contrast to the first layer, this layer insinuates the well known divide between objects and subjects. In the world of the grid,

A thing, no matter if it is natural or artificial, is always a humanized object, as it is always socially constructed. It remains as an “it”, or “other” which is covered with mélange of political, social, linguistic or scientific codes. As opposed to humans, it is believed to rarely act on its own behalf or have its own intentions, it is, in a way, disabled. In the gridded world, all things possess a human projected identity. Only through an unexpected and involuntary shift in perception can we perhaps be momentary freed from its narrative. For instance, we rationalize that a piece of plastic found on the ground or in the streets is trash. Not only is it not human but also without any worth. But the grid is not infallible and does crack to reveal its uncertainty. You look a second time and the piece of plastic is your credit card, that dropped out of your pocket when you initially walked in the other direction. You are thankful that you with your second glance noticed the true value of this object. But still, at first glance the card was plastic, and its hierarchical position within the grid was illegible to you. The momentary disintegration of the grid system might be either understood as a weakness, openness, or a schizophrenic mood set in the grid. In the end it reveals that the gridded world in which we live in stands on unstable ground where objects float in an in-between state of attachment and encapsulation to the grid. We would like to go on to outline, the very recent proposal for a third layer, titled anthropocene. This concept is the most interesting of the three as it is the most open for discussion, it simply hasn’t happened yet, it did not quite manage to enter the human imagination on a broad scale. Here the object - or non- human, is possibly very soon or already experiencing a heavy transformation away from the grid where the order of human and non-human is urging for a revision towards their equality. The “Anthropocene” is the new geological “age of mankind” as has been proposed by the departments of Earth sciences. It’s basis considers that the historically accumulated, planetary environmental effects of an expanding human population, technological innovation, and economic development have become inseparable from the Earth’s geo-processes. Through the impact of humans, the Earth has endured changes sufficient to leave a global stratigraphic signature distinct from that of the Holocene, including interglacial phases, encompassing novel biotic, sedimentary, and geochemical change. The dominant force behind some of these geological processes is then no longer nature as we know it but a combination of man and other forces; in which case nature is being humanized, and humans are becoming reconnected to nature. No longer is it a force separate from and ambivalent to human activity, It is a unit combined with humanity which is measurable within a recent geological record. When natural matter behaves as what we understand as human, with intention –the human then begins to lose its opposing identity, and with it its humanity. The natural becomes less of an object and more of a hybrid of object and subject – whereas the human is also rendered as something else, neither object nor subject. This implies a similarity towards the 1st layer concept of thing power and its equality of matter. BUT! The anthropocene concept is born of an actual, measurable indication of human within terrestrial matter and this is how it fundamentally differs from the perceptive or ideological concept of thing power and the grid concept. However! , Let us consider... If we are to admit that a humanity exists within things, we will thereby

lose control over the old order of things as objects and perhaps our idea of ourselves. The order of things is deemed highly sacred for our current grid society, which for instance, depends greatly on the accumulation, trade and value of resources. If non-human objects are to align forces with humans, and metaphorically bleed human blood, live with soul and purpose, it would significantly complicate our exploitation of these so called objects –Partly human, they would also need to inherit partlyhuman rights – hybrid rights. Which would then be of-course need to be applied to the human, who is now a part non-human. Would we be better off? An Accidental Whole (Globe) The new abstract machine of the anthropocene is visually apparent in a number of environmental occurrences. The most obvious and powerful displays of change are the latest increase of severe catastrophes. Events that gained widespread media attention, such as the BP oil spill in the gulf of Mexico in 2010 or the 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan are fundamental in beginning to crystallize a public sensibility towards the collective forces of human and non human materials, which Wolfgang Sachs calls a “massive accidental internationalization”, where the emerging “global nature” and its subjective complement, “humanity”, are the entangled outcomes of a dystopian future...The potential of total disaster and subsequent impossibility for human life on the planet forcefully unites us. These events flood the mapped boundaries of our collective terrestrial imagination, and redistribute the man-made Apollo 11 image of the Earth as a common, “one globe”. But today it feels as if these disasters have only triggered new branches for prioritizing and ensuring the human project of growth instead of creating a new global morality. An economy is evolving that is solely dedicated to transforming the potential accident into businesses of “sustainable developments”. Calculations, based on studies of probabilities attempt to balance the risks and safetycosts of interventions in order to continue on the road-map of developmental-logic. Each disaster is used as a guinea pig for the world of risk assessment businesses worldwide. With every new event, maps, models and calculations are updated in anticipation for the next big boom. This approach reinforces the concept that nature stands as something against us: it struggles to superficially flatten the uneven power which it perceives nature to hold. It is a system of studying short term cause and effect chains, instead of working towards a perception of global collective matter. The anthropocene proposes two solutions for the human species. The fist would try to uphold our economic growth and with it the hierarchy of the grid, superficially monetize the ecological crisis as a set of manageable risks which can be altered and defeated. And to live in an anthropocentric geology that would continue to exclude nature objects from the bounds of language and politics. The second is a radical transformation of the grid concept - One where the man-made planet and the ultimate accumulation of all objects, would cause a collective moral warrant. A new hybrid material composed human and non-human, object and non-object. One which would force a paradigm shift, merging and morphing the trusted systems of science, law, politics and even speech into new forms, creating reborn hybrid societies that are composed of new hybrid non-species. #