COLLAPSE VI
Editorial Introduction
As far as we know, philosophy, indeed thinking as such,
happens only on one planet. In our previous volume, we
examined the ways in which philosophical and scientific
thought pursued a liberation from the local conditions of
'earthly thought', counteracting the limitations imposed by
our terrestrial locale and the biological heredity that binds
our cognition to it. In this volume, we tum our gaze back
towards our home planet to ask how, as products of the
Earth, philosophers, scientists and artists have attempted
to encompass it in thought; and how the philosophical
enterprise of thinking 'the whole' has been, and continues
to be, determined by our belonging to the Earth.
There is a timely aspect to this inquiry: W hereas the
optimism of the late twentieth century saw 'globalisation'
become a byword for limitless expansion, our image of the
global in the first decade of the twenty-first century was
3
COLLAPSE VI
characterised instead by contraction, by a forced recognition
that the increasing technological interconnection and ever
intensifying exploitation of the Earth by humans was
exposing finite limits, economic and ecological, of the
planet upon which their world-systems are imposed.
Much of the response to the ensuing crises has remained
entrenched within nostalgic regret, emotional imprecation
and moral imperative. In this volume we attempt to forego
this panic response and instead to present a diverse selection
of contributions which demonstrate that philosophy, science
and contemporary art continue to address the condition of
thinking on and of Earth in original and engaging manners.
We know that thinkers have long used the surface of
the Earth as a rich source of metaphor: in so far as it seeks
for secure 'ground' on which to place thought, geographic
cartographic and geological metaphors are endemic to
philosophy. But beyond this metaphorics, as NICOLA
MAscIANDARO argues in his 'Becoming Spice: Commentary
as Geophilosophy', the practice of philosophy itself can be
seen as a continual process of 'worlding'.
Beginning with the failure of the 'philosophical flight'
from the earthbound in Dante, Masciandaro argues that
philosophy belongs not to the 'folly' of a vertically-oriented
'straight path' but to a 'circular and endless' movement on
the surface of the earth. And for Masciandaro, who directs
the project Glossator, 1 dedicated to a contemporary revivi
fication of the practice of commentary, it is the latter that
provides the key to understanding this endless movement:
commentary as the continual production of knowledge,
a practice that 'proceeds by staying'. Philosophy's aim 'to
1. See http://www.glossator.org/.
4
Editorial Introduction
render actual its absoluteness', to enter into self-immanence
- the 'Copernican' impulse to absolutise - only proceeds,
according
to Masciandaro,
through
commentary's
continual 'dwelling on the problem'. He further sees this
role of commentary as being encoded in spice, as a global
commodity whose currency and commercial movement
figures the production of understanding through continual
differentiation and distribution. Thus, commentary is not a
mere 'condiment', but figures a peripatetic wandering and
returning that draws forth the immanence of what is, only
by adding to it, by 'spicing' it and thereby 'bringing out'
the mode in which it is more than it is. For Masciandaro,
therefore, 'the telos of commentary, its far-off end, is tellus,
what bears us'; thinking brings us back to a continually
differentiated Earth.
One significant modem attempt to create a philosophy
that addresses the Earth system as an 'All' is F. W. J.
ScHELLING's .Naturphzlosophie, which sought to encompass
within a single set of philosophical principles the production
of nature and thought; of thought out of and as a part of
nature. In Schelling's 1798 work, previously unavailable in
translation, the philosopher revendicates the ancient theory
of the 'World-Soul', entirely reconstructing it through the
contemporary science of his time, which he supplements
with the necessary speculative basis that will allow him to
effect his grand synthesis. As IAIN HAMILTON GRANT tells
us in his introduction to his new translation, Schelling's
book must be understood as a bold experiment in system
atically thinking 'the All': Not content with providing a
transcendental account of thought's a priori determination
of its object, Schelling attempts to ground this determina
tion in a Nature conceived as a prius, the polarisation of
5
COLLAPSE VI
whose primitive forces can be traced through all of natural
organisation, conditioning even the consciousness through
which they become manifest as concept.
The contemporary ecological crisis demands a
(somewhat more modest) reframing of the task of
conceiving systematically the 'All' of nature - the biosphere
within which human beings are increasingly aware of their
implication. We are all well acquainted with the dread
auguries emerging from what the media generically refer to
as 'scientists'; but this reception reveals little as to the diffi
culties that beset those tasked with making such projections.
Our interviews with STEPHEN EMMOTT , DREW PuRVES,
RICH WILLIAMS and GREG MCINERNY, scientists working
in Computational Ecology and Environmental Science at
Microsoft's Research Laboratory in Cambridge, England,
offer some insight into the contemporary stakes of
ecological thought, revealing ecology as a science in a state
of flux and renegotiation.
They describe how, combining empirical knowledge of
the mechanisms of growth, evolution and competition with
an arsenal of statistical and computational techniques, their
virtual 'in-silico' world-systems - Purves talks of them as
involving a selection from a 'universe of universes' - aim
to refine hypotheses and constrain predictions regarding
the effects of climate change. As the interviewees reveal,
the challenges they face make necessary a 'new kind of
science' in which the barriers between disciplines are being
broken down, and the order of scientific research disrupted
or reversed. Negotiating the fearsome task of creating, in
Emmott's words, 'a precise, predictive science of complex
natural systems' calls for a meticulous questioning of
received truths, and a triage between abstraction, accuracy,
6
Editorial Introduction
and uncertainty, in a quest for a 'simplicity on the other
side of complexity'. As Purves suggests, it is ecologists who
are above all properly placed to give a 'high-level view' ;
but as we see in Mcinerny' s description of his work, the
indications of such a high-level view depend crucially on
the selection of theoretical frameworks and on our under
standing of low-level biological and genetic factors, shifts in
the understanding of which can have radical consequences
for prediction. In incorporating them into new computa
tional models, Purves, Mcinerny and Williams have shown
that the presence and interaction of these additional factors
can crucially alter our understanding of global processes.
As well as exploring the details of the research underway,
it was also important in these conversations to reflect on the
predicament of the scientist called on to estimate the fate
of the planet; a specialist whose area of research has been
reinvigorated by the ecological crisis, but who must remain
vigilant against overconfidence and oversimplification.
Despite their optimism, the unanimous conclusion of our
interviewees is that ecology remains a 'young science': a
science already capable of providing an adumbration of the
future of the biosphere, but which still faces a great many
'unknown unknowns'.
In addition, it emerges that this work is constrained on
all sides by the contingencies of its history: dependent on
legacy data and the choices made by those who preceded
them, ecologists are involved in a continual reevaluation
of their scientific and theoretical inheritance. Perhaps the
most serious constraint, however, lies in the additional
task of presenting their results to a concerned public.
Struggling to be heard clearly amidst political manoeuvring,
economic exigencies, and the evangelising of activists and
7
COLLAPSE VI
conservationists, as Emmott remarks, ecology today must
concern itself not only with theorisation and analysis,
but also with clear communication of its point of view as
a science.
As Mcinerny points out, 'activism' often reflects the
uninterrogated prejudices and desires of those involved
more
than the state of scientific knowledge. TIMOTHY
MoRTON' s work in ecocriticism dissects the ways in which
the narratives and aesthetics of 'environmentalism' remain
captive to such unavowed assumptions. Morton' s &ology
Witlwut .Nature,2 which argued that the idea of 'Nature' is
only ever an obstruction to ecological thinking, opened by
making a heartfelt case for the importance of philosophical
thinking and the creation of new concepts in order to prevent
our sense of ecological emergency from precipitating a
retreat into nostalgia and the safety of thinking 'Nature'
as
'something over there'.
In his article for COLLAPSE,
'Thinking Ecology' - a preview of his forthcoming book
The &ological Tlwught3
-
Morton proceeds to pick apart the
ideological attitudes, still in thrall to the Romantic view of
'Nature', that allow environmentalism, under cover of a naive
sincerity, to avoid thinking ecological interdependence.
As he argues, the latter thought is not to be attained through
blithely asserting our 'community' with the denizens of
nature. Simple denial of our own gaze, and the 'framing'
it imposes on nature, is not an option: it amounts, as he
argues, to the perpetuation of a 'beautiful soul syndrome'.
Instead Morton invites us to experience the 'humiliation' of
recognising our disturbing collective intimacy with 'life' as a
2. Ecology Witlumt Naiure: &thinking F.rwi:ron:mental AeJthet:ics (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2007)
3. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, forthcoming 2010.
8
Editorial Introduction
'strange stranger', drawing us into a 'dark ecology' in which
awareness, rather than implying a contemplative 'letting
be' of 'Nature', delivers a melancholy, ironic recognition
that our very rendering of the 'crime scene' implies our
necessary and constitutive implication in the crime.
This critique of the ideology of environmentalism
is extended and dramatised by UK artist collective
F I E L D c L u B. Their work explores the humour that
emerges in actually following self-sufficiency edicts 'on
the ground' ; and the irony that comes from raising
the principles of ecology to the most general context
imaginable. Underpinned by a theoretical position drawing
on the long-forgotten neo-Gnostic lore of 'agrosophy',4
F I E L D c L u B remove ecology and the 'anthropic tech
nosphere' from the parochial domain of environmental
politics and replace it within the framework of a Bataillean
'solar economy'.
Their irony is not the cynical resignation of the city
dweller; for their work documents a continuing attempt to
live 'off-grid', disconnected from public utilities and drawing
as little on outside resources as possible. Much of the collec
tive' s work draws wryly on incidents in the day-to-day
course of this experiment in living, small occurrences that
never fail to blacken the name of Eden. This intimate
engagement allows them to challenge the credo according
to which just a little goodwill and a little less technology
could enable humans to temper their depredations in favour
of a more gentle and wholesome coexistence with nature.
FIELD c Lu s' s concern with this uneasy 'complicity'
with other living beings leads precisely into what can be
4. See http://www.fieldclub.eo.uk/texts.php
9
COLLAPSE VI
seen as assays into Morton's 'dark ecology'. To become
close to nature, they demonstrate, is at the very least to
repudiate the notion that the Earth is something unreserv
edly worthy of our admiration, and from which we can
draw comforting meaning. The series of devices exhibited
in FIELD c Lu B's contribution to this volume intimate
that man's relation to the soil, no matter how 'traditional'
or 'simple', strips us of our 'beautiful soul' credentials and
reminds us we must 'kill to live'; at the same time, they
lampoon the efforts made through technological mediation
to flee the 'scene of the crime'.
Evidently, any examination of the relation of thought
to the Earth must address the way in which we dwell
upon, thus transforming, its surface. OWEN IIATHERLEY's
project to rescue architectural modernism from the 'Ikea
modernism' of 'light and airy' interior design belonging
to the vacuous economic optimism of the late twentieth
century5 leads him to the contention that, in restoring the
links of modernism with its less palatable predecessors such as the proto-brutalism of Hitler's Atlantic Wall - we
reawaken a suppressed, but rich and provocative, historical
lineage.
Hatherley's
analysis
is
inspired
by
Ballard's
discovery of a 'warped modernism' in the structures of
the Atlantic Wall. And as Hatherley's discussion implies, if
we are to consider Ballard as a precursor to 'psychogeog
raphy', the latter must be understood in terms of regressian,
so that, as in Ballard's novels, in the contemplation of these
(non) structures we experience an 'end-point of architecture':
The enterprise of design and construction degenerates into
an atavism where 'primal impulses and prehistoric building
forms recur', but which paradoxically (as evidenced by
Virilio's adaptation of this aesthetic for his brutalist church)
5. See Hatherley's Militant Modernism (London: ZerO Books, 2009)
10
Editorial Introduction
also communicates with an impulse to the sacred. These
'instant ruins' thus tap into an architectural phylum which,
actualised by a military 'science of compaction and impact',
marries emergency with eternity.
Hatherley traces the few instances in which this rich
seam resurfaces in architecture, but as he observes, in an
increasingly hygienically-conservative architectural climate,
it now belongs more to speculative thinking and to the
work of artists such as Nicholas Moulin. The suggestion
that with more attention, it might fuel an 'apocalyptic pulp
of our own time' brings to mind the fact that, of course,
Ballard's apocalyptic Drowned World must be considered
the first science-fictional treatment of climate change. From
Ballard's reflections on these forgotten structures, Hatherley
thus draws out a as-yet unrealised 'earth-philosophy' as
remote from tree-hugging as Ikea is from the Atlantic Wall;
one that, via the exigencies of total war, sets the chthonic
forces of the inner earth flowing through the Apollonian
veins of modernism.
Architect and
theorist
EYAL WEIZMAN
transports
this immanence with the 'chthonic' into architectural
practice: His project Decolonizing Architecture seeks to apply
an 'ungrounding' process to spaces previously invested
with
colonialism,
practicing
'design
by
destruction'.
DA has evolved from Weizman' s examination of the role
that architecture has played in the Israeli occupation of
Palestine; in our interview, he describes the way in which
he sees architecture per se as interacting with the 'political
architecture' of this occupation, and how the structure
of the latter has entered into conceptual commerce with
theory. Weizman's conception of 'forensic architecture', in
seeking to read the nature of historical events through their
material traces, implies a new articulation of 'forces and
11
COLLAPSE VI
forms', wherein forms not only register the multiplicity of
forces that bear upon them, but in tum become actors in this
political 'forcefield'. We discuss the way in which this mate
rialist-pluralist conception of politics demands a rethinking
of the notions of responsibility, ideology, and resistance,
and how DA's processes of 'design by destruction' and
'ungrounding' seek to disrupt the temporalities according
to which the very question of a 'solution' to the problem of
occupation has been posed.
Discussing the in some cases hostile reception to this
work, Weizman also describes how it has led him to
reconsider the very function of theory in the context of
global politics: The theoretical enterprise can only operate,
he argues, through an engagement with actual protagonists,
whose functional roles within twenty-first century conflict
bring to light the new conceptual frameworks within
which that conflict is being conducted. Thus, concepts are
not 'in the head' but 'in the world', and only by affirming
this embeddedness of theory - by forensically examining
the material traces of specific sites, and by joumalistically
naming names - can theory become a weapon of resistance.
Weizman's examination of the bonds between archi
tecture and the martial recoding and territorialization of
the Earth is further developed in MANABRATA
GuHA' s
'Introduction to SIMADology'. Surveying today's 'global
security ecology' Guha suggests that its regime of thinking
the relation of war to the Earth - inherited, as he suggests,
from the 'father' of the theory of warfare, Clausewitz
-
fails to register
the
radical difference that terror
operations impose upon the martial landscape. W hat Guha
calls the SIMAD - Singularly Intensive Mobile Agencity
of Decay - disrupts the Clausewitzian paradigm, drawing
12
Editorial Introduction
war-machines into a 'chthonic battlespace' which they are
constitutively incapable of navigating. Even within the new
paradigms of warfare which seek to confront changing
conditions through 'network' or 'swarm' paradigms,
the weapons of 'surprise' and 'terror' are read in the
terms of a political and martial imaginary whose inap
propriate causal and economic principles doom them
to become, ultimately, a component of the threat they
aim to neutralise. Extending Reza Negarestani's analysis
of 'hypercamouflage', 6 and through a critique of the
conclusions of prominent contemporary theorists of war,
Guha depicts terror-operations as effecting a transformation
on the instrumentalised war-machine of the state, causing
it to proliferate and morph uncontrollably as it confronts
the chthonic forces against which it attempts to differentiate
itself - forces that owe nothing to tellurian structures, and
whose eruption can only be registered as having already
taken place. In attempting to 'seal off the tellurian surface'
from these terror-Events, Guha suggests, war-machines
operating on the Clausewitzian model merely generate self
deceiving fictions - bringing about a 'process of ontological
decay' whose nature is opaque to strategic thinking.
Maintaining the state at a 'tipping point [...] between self
destruction and absolute consolidation', the SIMAD thus
becomes the co-ordinator of 'global security governance'
and the 'biopolitical model of the post-modem state'.
Confronting this 'complicity of visions' and drawing
on REZA NEGARESTANI's contribution to COLLAPSE IV,7
6. R. Negarestani, 'The Militarization of Peace: Absence of Terror or Terror of
Absence?', COLI.APSE I, 53-9 1 .
7. R . Negarestani, 'The Corpse Bride: Thinkin g with Nigredo', COLLAPSE IV,
129-6 1 .
13
COLLAPSE VI
Guha in closing declares that '[w]e are that which decays
and the agents of decay. We are expressions of the terrifying
envoiding chemistry of decay'. Negarestani's contribu
tion to the present volume expands this theme into the
analytic description of an 'architecture and politics of
decay'. Excavating some of the more bizarre preoccupa
tions of mediaeval thought, and tracing their influence on
early-modem mathematics, Negarestani suggests that they
offer us the formal basis for an 'architecture, mathesis and
politics of decay'.
This mathesis, of which Negarestani finds 'the most
refined expression' in politics, sees the interior ideal of
a form not as an origin, but as emerging processually
through its decay, in tandem with a production of exteri
orised derivatives. Distancing his thesis from any nostalgic
fetishising of ruins and insisting that it not only applies to
superficially 'decayed' states but must be thought of as a
general principle, Negarestani notes that a 'politics of decay'
is disturbing precisely because - like Guha's SIMAD - it
invokes a universal dynamic principle that undermines any
claims to wholeness and wholesomeness.
Notably,
Negarestani's
argument
also
contains
a
confrontation with the nihilism expounded by Ray Brassier
in his .Nihil Unbound:8 Science's evacuation of the realm of
organic interiority into the exteriority of space, Negarestani
suggests, does not take place without a 'twisting' in time
and in space. His suggestion of a calculus of decay as
'mathematics with a chemical disposition or chemical
revolution via mathematical distributions' problematises
any straightforward vector of exteriorization, both in the
8. R. Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007) .
14
Editorial Introduction
realm of in/organic matter and in the history of thought, by
locating both within a humw whose vermicular twisting can
never fully be 'worked out'. In a parallel to his remarkable
book Cydonopedia, where the molten core of the Earth attests
to its immanence with the sun - and again, recalling Guha's
SIMAD - for Negarestani exteriority is already a chthonic
'insider'.
In his precise definition of this positive process of
'decay as a building process', Negarestani in fact provides
the abstract key to the strange confluences not only in
Hatherley, Weizman and Guha's analyses, but also
in
Masciandaro's account of the continual self-differentiation
of knowledge.
AB Masciandaro reminds us,
commen
tary's addressing of the earthly condition constitutes, not
a resignation to the inescapable finitude of the text, but
philosophy's very 'boldness', its 'monstrous' aspiration to
continually deform, denature and multiply what it attends
to, in a twisting wherein the poetic impulse rejoins with the
philosophical imperative, the wandering on the Earth with
the will to flight. Negarestani's tum towards those incor
rigible commentators, the Scholastics, elicits the formal
identity of his vermicular chemico-mathematics with this
process of exegetical 'twisting'. Perhaps then Negarestani
not only succeeds Schelling as 'the philosopher of the new
chemistry' - albeit, as Iain Hamilton Grant has suggested,
a 'chemistry of darkness' - but also presents us with a
'chemistry of (the history of) philosophy'.
Needless to say, the Earth, in our dealings with it
and our navigations on it, exists for us not in 'immediate
experience', but in coded form. The work of artists ANGELA
DETANICO AND RAFAEL LAIN examines the many ways in
which the surface of the planet is coded, and their playful
15
COLLAPSE VI
constructions explore the peculiar gramm atologies that
emerge once this stenography between the geographical
and the symbolic is in place; its disorientations highlighting
the faith we place in our mediated figure of the world, often
mistaking the map for the territory.
CHARLES AVERY's work returns to what has long been a
favourite geographical trope for philosophy. At a certain point
in his practice, Avery decided to locate all of his future work
within an imaginary I sland, whose locations, inhabitants
and culture he continues to render beautifully in a variety
of media - including text, as in the enigmatic travelogue
The Islanders: An Introduction,9 an 'epilogue' to which Avery
contributes to this volume. In COLLAPSE V one of Avery's
maps accompanied cosmologist Milan CirkoviC's discussion
of the 'archipelago of habitability'.10 Setting out from this
pairing, ROBIN MAcKAY's prefatory essay to our presenta
tion of Avery's work seeks to locate the latter as a possible
contemporary successor to a rich history of 'Philosophers'
Islands'. As Mackay remarks, the nature of Avery's project
demands that 'the work' and its significance be sought, not
in any one of the exquisite pieces exhibited by Avery, but
in the Island 'itselr - the (unfinished) structural whole that
will bind them together.
Our volume closes with two contributions that in
very different ways address this philosophical obsession
with the island and with the ocean that surrounds it.
GILLES GRELET presents us with a manifesto of refusal:
the task of philosophy as conceived by Althusser and
systematically diagnosed by Fran\:ois Laruelle's 'non9. C. Avery, The Islmulers: An Introduction (London: Parasol Unit/Koenig, 2008).
10. M. Cirkovic, 'Sailing the Archipelago', COLLAPSE V, 292-329.
16
Editorial Introduction
philosophy' - as a series of 'decisions' producing trenchant
lines of demarcation that partition the ground of thought
- is rejected. 'Ungrounding' himself by taking to the other,
predominating element of the planet, with a boat as his
'theory-body', Grelet extols theory as 'world-less', indeed
as 'a full-on attack on the world', an angelic thought whose
'crossings' operate without the territorial imperatives of the
'worldly'.
RENEE GREEN's film
'Endless Dreams and Water
Between', originally shown in 2 0 0 9 as part of an instal
lation at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich,
uses the island and its surroundings as the setting for an
interrogation into the making of thought in-between four
protagonists. Inconclusive,
dreamlike and
-
recalling
Masciandaro's opening contribution - both referential and
peripatetic, Green's film the script of which is presented
,
here, concerns itself with the geophilosophical precipitation
of thought, as four women driven by a curiosity about their
own location and inclinations move toward a speculative
coherence that the work preserves in a state of 'clear-obscu
rity'. The island, a 'non-location' which serves as a naviga
tional point of reference, also allows its inhabitants those
uninterrupted vistas for the imagination that have provided
writers with (sometimes, as in the case of George Sands,
ultimately disappointed) dreams of freedom. As suggested
by Masciandaro, it is by 'staying', by contemplating their
island locations, that Green's protagonists move towards
a collective thinking that expands into the realms of the
abstract only on the basis of their localisation and the
contingency of their respective interests and circumstances.
Like Avery's, Green's work highlights shifting relations
between fiction and fact, physical geography and imaginary
geography, that govern our thinking of the Earth and the
17
COLLAPSE VI
worlds we build upon it. They join the other contributions
to this volume in demonstrating that 'Planet Earth' qua
terrestrial entity or biosphere is but one among those many
inextricable 'wholes'. Even new efforts at reconstructing it
in scientific models are never entirely free from evolutions
and selections of their own, from the contingencies of
history, and from the legacy of its duality in thought as
'object and omnipresence'.
The bringing together of apparently divergent perspec
tives within this volume is, we must as ever insist, not
merely whimsical. It aims to bring into view avenues of
thought which run between them and which may lead to
new spaces outside the rigid boundaries of disciplinarity.
In our introduction, as in previous volumes, we hope to
have indicated some of these; others it will be the reader's
business (and, we hope, pleasure) to trace.
It seems appropriate in closing to reflect briefly on the
coherence, not only of this particular volume, but of the
project as a whole; a coherence which, as is appropriate
for a journal of 'research and development', has slowly
come to light only in the process of working on the series.
Through the creation of these volumes, from the beginning
deliberately and sincerely billed as an 'experiment', has
emerged a curatorial model in which, rather than all of
the contributions to a publication falling within a circum
scribed discipline or subject, a broad theme allows contri
butions from diverse practitioners to form an overlapping
chain or (adopting Tnnothy Morton's term) mesh, whose
intermediate links span otherwise disparate elements.
The hope is that this connectivity should reproduce itself
in the broad audience that COLLAPSE assembles; that the
'forced collaboration' operated within these pages should
18
Editorial Introduction
find its counterpart in a strange collectivity of readers
who, drawn in by one or two contributions appropriate
to their interests, find themselves unexpectedly befriended
by writers and thinkers from entirely different 'mindsets'.
This in tum suggests a model of the concept according to
which the latter resides, not in an hierarchical structure of
progressive generalisation (a structure which reproduces
and is reproduced in institutional specialisation) , but in
transversal connections discovered, or produced, 'in the
making'. Thanks to a growing network of contributors and
readers, each volume brings with it such discoveries, so that
its finished state bears but a faint resemblance to the terms
of its initial conception.
If, in search of this conceptual consistency, we have
traversed the abstractions of mathematics (Volume I ) ,
the emerging paradigms of Speculative Realism (Volumes
II and III) , the legacy ofDeleuze (Volume III) , the horrors
of thought and the thinking of horror (Volume IV) and
the Copernican Tum in its many guises (Volume V) ,
only to come back 'down to Earth', it is an Earth which
we no longer fully recognise, and which continues to offer
numerous challenges - by turns urgent, melancholy, and
twisted - to the thought it has given birth to.
We would like to conclude by thanking all of our
contributors for their work and their patience in collabo
rating on this volume, and to our readers for their continued
enthusiasm for this process of 'research and development'.
Robin Mackay,
Falmouth,January 2 010.
19