the viscous Before you start to read this book, take this moment to think about making a donation to punctum books, an independent non-profit press, @ https://punctumbooks.com/support/ If you’re reading the e-book, you can click on the image below to go directly to our donations site. Any amount, no matter the size, is appreciated and will help us to keep our ship of fools afloat. Contri- butions from dedicated readers will also help us to keep our commons open and to cultivate new work that can’t find a welcoming port elsewhere. Our ad- venture is not possible without your support. Vive la Open Access. Fig. 1. Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1490–1500) the viscous: slime, stickiness, fondling, mixtures. Copyright © 2020 by Freddie Mason. This work carries a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 Interna- tional license, which means that you are free to copy and redistribute the mate- rial in any medium or format, and you may also remix, transform and build upon the material, as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors (but not in a way that suggests the authors or punctum books endorses you and your work), you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that for any remixing and transformation, you distribute your rebuild under the same license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ First published in 2020 by punctum books, Earth, Milky Way. https://punctumbooks.com ISBN-13: 978-1-950192-86-1 (print) ISBN-13: 978-1-950192-87-8 (ePDF) doi: 10.21983/P3.0292.1.00 lccn: 2020938074 Library of Congress Cataloging Data is available from the Library of Congress Book design: Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei Cover image: Ania Mokrzycka, Touching Lamella, 2015 Freddie Mason The Viscous Slime Stickiness Fondling Mixtures Contents Introduction 15 Galaxies · Birds · The World · Beyond Flow · Containers · Life · Technology · A Glass Eye Of Slime and the City 43 place: Boston, USA, 1919 Flood · Describing a Dream · Re-enactment · A City Bursts · Slow Beginnings · “The City” Churns · Stoned in Marseilles · Spectacles of Indifference · Ecstatic Specificity · Worming through the Aperture · “Friendly” Spaces · Primordial Flamboyance Sticky Worlds/Sticky Words 93 place: Baku, Azerbaijan, 2017 The Hagverdiyev Lineage · Lake · Eras of Ooze · Mere Adhesion · Sticky Fire · Phlegmatics · Asphalt Cut with Menstrual Blood · Zombie Rivers · Pipelines and Immunity · Atmospheres/Never Leaving · Attunement Interlude: Experiments in Kneading Dough and Asemic Writing Simultaneously 143 Smear Screens and Fondled Things 153 place: Here and now, wherever and whenever that might be Cleaning · Writing and Kneading · Digital Goo · Looking for Ways to Live in Things · The Ideal Firmness of Meat · Virtual Putrescence · Insurrection and Invasion · Jellied Ghosts · ASMR · Fondling Slime Online · Techniques of Domination · The Silent Zone · Low-Key Euphoria · Intimacy Colloidal Thinking/Colloidal Feeling 203 place: My kitchen, London, 2018 Dispersals · Anti-Gravity Salad · Almost Everything · Coagulated Brains · Lube Itself · Milk Says No, Saying Yes · Aeronautics Conclusion 247 Hair at Birth, I Suspect · Hagfish · Gooey Worlding · Bounce out the Window Bibliography 255 Acknowledgments Everyone has something to say about the viscous. More often than not, the writing contained here found its inspiration in the spontaneous, profound, mostly involuntary, observations made by the numerous friends, teachers, relatives, and acquaintances I engaged in conversation with over the issue of sliminess. These invisible guidances, pretty much impossible to reference, are the bedrock for the semi-solid growths herein. I’d like to thank, in no particular order: Christopher Morris, Brian Dillon, Steven Connor, Oscar Hudson, Francesca Alderuccio, India Harvey, Yasmine Seal, Jeremy Millar, Tomas Weber, Matt Phillips, Xa- vier Buxton, Nadja Voorham, Elizabeth Atkinson, Isabelle Held, Nathanial Kochen, Lise Thiollier, Biu Rainey, Philippa Scoones, Georgia Mason, Toby Buxton, Hatty Nestor, Merlin Sheldrake, John Dewitt, Leila Arenou, Julieta Garcia-Vazquez, Tom Gra- ham, Aliya Ram, Oona Brown, Chantal Faust, Ella Fleck, Bry- ony James, Camille Yvert, Royal Aghamirzada, Yvo Fitzherbert, Butuney Hagverdiyev, Rebecca Maybury, Catherine Malabou, Esther Leslie, Alexander Hawthorne, Oscar Oldershaw, Laura Dee Milnes, Frances Morgan, Victoria Kaldan, Sarah Kelly, Tamu Nkiwane, Rebecca Salvadori, George Fitzherbert. A spe- cial thank you goes to Jazbo Gross, a true psychologist of semi- states and to Petra Casale for whom nothing will ever be gooey enough. Thank you also to Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy and Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei for bringing this work to the light of day. xi In memory of M.M., who, thank god, would not have approved Introduction Galaxies In June 2018, the news from astronomers we had all been wait- ing for hit the press. It was not the huge subterranean lake of water they found on Mars. That, in any case, was found a month later in July. It was not the conditions for the possibility for ex- tra-terrestrial life this water offered. No, it was something much more subtly transformative, a seemingly negligible alteration in the cosmological layout of things that was, like all of the most important upheavals, curiously astounding and then almost im- mediately unremarkable. Here is that landmark moment, using all the typographic emphases at my disposal to facilitate full ab- sorption: outer space is full of grease.1 “Yeah, so?” a friend of mine said when I excitedly messaged her the headline. “It’s massive, the universe, I’m not surprised, I’m 1 This discovery was widely reported in the mainstream press. The official article is, however, B. Güway et al., “Aliphatic Hydrocarbon Content of Interstellar Dust,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 479, no. 4 (October 1, 2018): 4336–44. 15 THE VISCOUS sure there’s lots of stuff up there.” True, the universe is massive: the 10 billion trillion trillion tonnes of gloop, enough for 40 tril- lion trillion trillion packs of butter, they claim to be dispersed until now imperceptibly through the voidish space really is just another day in those innumerable light years of the Milky Way. Future space ships traveling through interstellar space should expect to return lightly coated in hydrogen bound up with car- bon in a grease-like form, a kind of naphthalene. I can almost see before me now the alien smear marks wiped off the sur- face of a large, smooth intergalactic phallus, squeezed out of a sponge into a plastic tub full of warm soapy water. Space grease: so what? Like me, Hegel thought the stars were boring. They meant much less to him than a rash on a body, or an ant colony for that matter, which exhibits “intelligence and necessity.” They are much less interesting than animality, even if that animality pre- sents “nothing but jelly.” The host of stars is an abstraction, this jelly is concrete, something we would be wrong to see as inferior to the heavens above. The passage from liquidity to sliminess was, for Hegel, a passage from the abstract to the concrete. The earth excretes the “abstractness of its fresh water,” which hurries forth towards “concrete animation” in the sea. As the sea blooms in the summer months, it becomes turbid and slimy, yet full of a “multitude of vegetable points, threads and surfaces.” This ge- latinous slime takes on more determinate formations, “fusorial animalcula, transparent molusca,” and contains a tendency to break out in “vast expanses of phosphorescent light.” This mo- mentary gelatinous existence cannot hold light, Hegel imagines, in the form of selfhood, so identity instead breaks out if itself as physical light, “densely crowded into galaxies.”2 An organic, jel- lied, submarine cosmos, smelly yet glistening — this is more real to Hegel than the stars. In more recent times, it is extremely common, though some- how forgettably so, for us to imagine the starlight excreting 2 G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature Vol. III, trans. and ed. M.J. Petry (London: Allen and Unwin, 2013), 36–38. 16 INTRODUCTION some goo-like substance. The popular imaginary of extra-ter- restrial encounter is almost always an encounter with a being of, if not total blobbiness, a corporeality of considerably intensified tremulousness.3 With a few exceptions, opening a can of baked beans has more in common with how people tend, or tended, to imagine a meeting with the third kind than what scientists might be able to predict. The life forms on Earth chosen by the popular imagination as most likely to have come from the celes- tial are generally the jellied ones. This is perhaps because these creatures form bioluminescent aggregates that seem to mimic the cosmos. But also because jelly is a substance that while being most undoubtedly and cloyingly there, is something that speaks of the beyond, its texture is the texture of the “other.” Which is, as much psychoanalysis teaches us, also the texture of our interior. Stuff worming through the starlight is an intimation of the gruesome core of our supposedly most transcendent moments. In the 1955 horror B-movie The Blob, the kiss that initiates the film’s love story is not seen on screen. Instead we have the cliché of the camera giving the lovers some privacy, turning its view gently towards the stars. The one shooting star we witness as a symbol of the kindling love, is also, as we find out soon, the coming to Earth of this viscous mass, the blob. What might we find in this monstrous starlight? The story is an old one — the struggle between spiritual love and carnal lust; what might feel like a celestial explosion of love in a man’s heart is just his need to ejaculate. This we may know already. But now we have learnt that the cosmos is actually full of grease, does anything change? It is not monstrous, not transcendent, not recognizably intel- ligent, not “other,” just ever so slightly buttery.