Gargantuan whales and hefty cephalopods are typically thought of as the classic marine mammoths, but they might have to make way for the mighty microbes, which constitute 50 to 90 percent of the oceans’ total biomass, according to newly released data.

These tiny creatures can join together to create some of the largest masses of life on the planet, and researchers working on the decade-long Census of Marine Life project found one such seafloor mat off the Pacific coast of South America that is roughly the size of Greece.

by Marcos Novak

To inscribe is to write in, to place the mark of one thing within the fabric of another. Carving is the prototypical kind of inscription, though every other kind of writing partakes in this modification of one substance by another: the particles of ink lodge themselves within the roughness of the paper and will not leave without a trace. Even invisible ink enters the pores of the paper upon which secrets are trusted. Visibility itself is not a measure of inscription, modification of the substratum is.

Digital writing celebrates the loss of inscription by removing the trace from acts of erasure. What is undone is as if not ever done. Thus digital inscription is of another order than any previous inscription, closer to speaking to another without the presence of a third as witness, than, even, to the passing of a ciphered note.

The position of human beings in relation to this techno-cultural un-conscious cannot, therefore, be that of the analyst (or theorist) who, standing outside this space, presumes to know or control it.It must in-stead be a relation of connection to, of interaction with, that which has been seen as “other,” including the unsettling processes oftechno-culture itself. To accept this relation is to let go of part ofwhat it has meant to be human,to be a human subject,and to allow ourselves to change,to mutate, to become alien, cyborg, posthuman. This mutant, posthuman status is not a matter of armoring the body, adding robotic prostheses, or technologically transferring consciousness from the body; it is not, in other words, a matter of fortifying the boundaries of the subject, of securing identity as a fixed entity. It is rather a matter of unsecuring the subject, of acknowledging the relations and mutational processes that constitute it. A posthuman subject position would, in other words, acknowledge the otherness that is part of us. It would involve opening the boundaries of individual and collective identity, changing the relations that have distinguished between subject and object, self and other, us and them.

Extract from 'Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes', page 46

Adam Crowe

via: www.philipkdick.com/new_letters-laddcompany.html