Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History

[Anonymous No.15200290]

What the fuck is it about and should I buy it?

[Anonymous No.15200296]

>>15200290
Libgen my bro. One of the only useful things I've ever learned here. I downloaded a pdf of that just a couple of days ago

[Anonymous No.15200348]

>>15200290
Basically, if you like JG Ballard (The Atrocity Exhibition or Empire of the Sun in particular), it should appeal to you. It's essentially the elaboration of strange and largely unrecognised pseudo-scientific ideas about evolution that can be defined as recapitulation theory, but expanded to a cosmological scale: a good summation is the quote "A nervous system is how a universe feels pain". Take Schopenhauer's idea that reality is nothing more than "nervous s(t)imulation", extend that upwards into the sphere of mind (an even more precise model of the world), couple it with the freudian death drive and you get Spinal Catastrophism; or, the innate tendency for inorganic matter to increase its sensitivity to suffering in order to force the organism to return into the inorganic exteriority from whence it came.

If that sounds like balls-to-the-wall batshit nonsense to you, then it isn't worth your time. But I thought it was a pretty fun romp, personally.

[Anonymous No.15200362]

>>15200348
innate tendency for organic* matter, sorry

[Anonymous No.15200365]

>>15200296
>It worked
Thanks now I only need to figure out what the fuck I'm reading.

[Anonymous No.15200403]

>>15200348
Did you find value in reading it? What do you recommend as a warm-up? Honestly it sounds like some crazy but interesting shit.

[Anonymous No.15200459]

>>15200403
Like I said, if you've read The Atrocity Exhibition and thought to yourself, "this is cool and all, but what in the name of fuck is going on here?" it offers a decent take on the ideas of that book without taking into account the biography of Ballard himself (as most interpretations of TAE are wont to do). But definitely read that, Empire of the Sun, maybe The Drowned World... Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, some D&G too.

There's a shitload of research drawn from scientific, pseudo-scientific and philosophical materials, so it certainly "feels" like a schizo conspiratorial mess of ideas, but its all in service of an analogy for the history of western thought that doesn't take itself too seriously.

[Anonymous No.15200493]

>>15200459
Thanks. If this book is a meme, then I have fallen for it.

[Anonymous No.15200494]

>>15200459
Cyclonopedia is similiar

[Anonymous No.15200532]

>>15200494
Yeah, absolutely. If you're looking to read something from the urbanomic clique, you should know to expect a pretty bizarre melding of fact and fiction. Anyone who's only take away from it is "pretentious pseud nonsense" is taking it far too seriously. it's meant to be a bit silly, its part of the fun

[Anonymous No.15200563]

>>15200532
So at best you've learnt some nice little tid-bits of theory and at worst you've read an odd piece of fiction?

[Anonymous No.15200606]

>>15200348
Sounds fun. It is heartening to know Western philosophy is in a death spiral. The cult of reason and the reign of quantity will end soon.

[Anonymous No.15200614]

also read it
best book I read this year (not that hard considering I have have had to read fuckloads of non-fiction for school, but still)

it's just a lot of fun, and not in the reductive sense, if you like reading bizarre tomes and esoteric science history shit its a fantastic compilation and synthesis of a bunch of stuff. both entertaining and challenging, but ultimately not hard theory but in the end that doesn't really matter

after writing all this i dont think im selling it... but yeah, relly liked it would recomend

[Anonymous No.15200619]

>>15200563
Yeah. I mean, even bad ideas can provide springboards for discussion, right? That's why he takes the time to consider even some of the more discredited scientific theories of history. Though, unlike cyclonopedia, it isn't really written in a fictional style with a narrative as such. It's still an "academic" book, even if the subject matter isn't.

[Anonymous No.15200624]

>>15200348
This, but its more like The drowned world

[Anonymous No.15200649]

>>15200606
So we get to be sincere after this, haha right guys?

[Anonymous No.15200662]

>>15200619
Reminds me of Nietzsche a bit actually, making poetry, writing songs while having a seemingly incoherent philosophy

[Anonymous No.15200680]

>>15200649
Nope. Nothing that isn't Nietzschean LARPing makes it out of the future. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

[Anonymous No.15200696]

I read this, finished it. The vocabulary was kinda cringe and unnecessarily obscure, but I guess that's an Urbanomic staple.
But overall based book.
I especially liked the part about how intelligence is limited in nervous systems and cannot achieve escape velocity. (Coccygeal Postscriptum)

[Anonymous No.15200704]

>>15200696
>cringe and unnecessarily obscure
Maybe you are just dumb m8

[Anonymous No.15200741]

I'm gonna go to bed guys, thanks for all the advice. Hopefully these books will mould me into enough of a schizo so I can shoehorn my way into a comfortable academic niche later on in life. Until then, good night.

[Anonymous No.15200774]

>>15200365
Yes fellow anon.

I too would like to figure out how to learn about this incredibly complex an interesting theory of Spinal Catastrophism.

Would any other Urbanomic books help me to get started fellow anons?

[Anonymous No.15200844]

>>15200704
nigger, I'm not going to consider myself dumb for not knowing: palimpsest, assiduity, ensconcement, tautegory and etc.

[Anonymous No.15201104]

I also found this recently on amazon and I'm interested but I haven't read a lot of books. Is it pleb-friendly?

[Anonymous No.15201138]

>>15201104
kek fuck off you faggots

[Anonymous No.15201142]

>>15201104
No. It is torturously obtuse in many places. Would not recommend unless you have a pretty strong grounding in philosophy and the history of ideas more generally.

[Anonymous No.15201163]

>>15201142
>Would not recommend

[Anonymous No.15201180]

Reminder that all urbanomic threads are shill threads. No one actually reads this meme garbage.

[Anonymous No.15201188]

>>15201180
take your meds

[Anonymous No.15201193]

>>15200348
holy shit someone finally summarized the book

[Anonymous No.15201204]

>9 posters

[Anonymous No.15201215]

>>15201180
absolutely disgusting

[Anonymous No.15201900]

>>15200493
you have

[Anonymous No.15201958]

It always seems like there’s such a concerted effort to stop any discussion about this book or any of their other releases. I’ve seen quite a few threads follow this exact pattern- there’s a bit of discussion and interest, and then maybe three posters come in screaming “SHILL” and shut down all discussion. Putting aside the fact that urbanomic definitely do make shill threads here, is it really so unbelievable that a small percentage of posters (myself included) on here do read their books? Why is there so much resistance to or flat-out denial that anyone on a literature board might be (god forbid) interested in books?

[Anonymous No.15202002]

>>15201958
Well, either it's a marketing meme or /lit/ is a secret occult order disseminating their rootbeer tapping directives to their operatives through schizo posts in /acc and guenon threads.

[Anonymous No.15202034]

How about this

[Anonymous No.15202060]

>>15202002
i mean that would explain why so much spam is left up

[Anonymous No.15202469]

>>15201958
>obviously they're shilling
>let's join in

[Anonymous No.15202487]

>>15201142
thanks, will make sure to read more

[Anonymous No.15202521]

You can send poems and works to /lit/ Discord with this code: uUwxBUk
We are making a collection of original works

[Anonymous No.15202758]

>>15200348
holy shit a post that actually sums the book up well and has a sincere opinion? am i posting on opposite /lit/?

[Urbanomic's Jannie No.15202789]

FUN FUN FUN FUN FUN FUN FUN FUN

[Anonymous No.15202839]

>>15201180
i just read it

[Anonymous No.15202936]

HAHAH I'm SUCH A LITTLE SCHIZO BITCH XD
CAN'T WAIT TO READ THIS AND PLAGIARIZE IT ON TWITTER, MAKING INCOHERENT TWEETS ON PURPOSE TO GET SCHIZO POINTS WITH MY FELLOW SCHIZOS XD
OH my GOOOOD IM GONNA- IM GONNA- IM DETTERITORIALIIIIIING AAAAAA (SCHIZO-TIME) !

[Anonymous No.15202980]

>>15200348

This description is making me sweat.

[Anonymous No.15203002]

>From psychoanalysis and myth to geology and neuroanatomy, from bioanalysis to chronopathy, from spinal colonies of proto-minds to the retroparasitism of the CNS, from “railway spine” to Elizabeth Taylor's lost gill-slits, this extravagantly comprehensive philosophical adventure uses the spinal cord as a guiding thread to rediscover forgotten pathways in modern thought.

Tell me more about these "gill-slits."