Issue #48 January 2022

Introduction

The horizon, depending on your purposes, is either a clean, geometrical line, or thick and messy plenum. It’s either irreducibly singular, with mere shifting contents, or it’s endlessly multiplied, a bifurcating garden of horizons. There is undoubtedly a neat mathematical description of the inevitability of a horizon, most probably inked in some yellowed manuscript concerning the nature of light, line, and perspective. No matter how infinitesimal the inclination, the lack of an indifferent parallel will produce an obstinate and insurmountable horizon somewhere, and insofar as we stand on a ground and not in it, that ground will always triangulate beneath and ahead of us somewhere.

For the idea of a new horizon to not be trivial, we need to also accept the notion of the old horizon stretching back behind us infinitely. In fact, the disc like nature of the horizontal closure between the heavens and earth, the mind and the body, utopia and the gutter, the call and the called, means that the horizon destabilizes time – a new one ahead of us, sure, just as much as the old one behind us, when we’re taking a walk, but in every direction, just so long as we are not in the ground, a horizon will be found, no matter where we are striving – the future rotating into the past by degrees. A manifold of temporalities.

Or, perhaps, we should take a new horizon in a different sense – as a radical transposition into a different way of seeing, where the subtle inclination that would obstinately produce all of our old horizons is now supplanted by an entirely novel reality, substance, or way of looking. These two senses intersect at a satisfying tangent (perhaps producing their own horizon when seen from their origins): to fully venture forth into such a radical new machinery of seeing, we’d do well to just check the road behind us, the old horizon, and see how it grounds the new torn edges of the maps we hope to write.

#48

January 2022

Introduction

The Near and Far Out: Virtuality, Extended Minds, and Reality+

John C. Brady and Timofei Gerber in conversation with David Chalmers

Is a Better World Possible? – John Stuart Mill, Manatees, and the Social Utopia

by Florian Maiwald

The Sign and the Symbolique: Participative Epistemologies from Bergson to Schwaller de Lubicz

by Nathan Deitcher

Spinoza's "The Ethics (Book III)"

Video