<nettime> THE LABORATORY PLANET N°2

[Ewen Chardronnet <ewen@no-log.org>]

LA PLANETE LABORATOIRE / THE LABORATORY PLANET

The Laboratory Planet is a periodic journal of philosophy of science and 
critics of technics, published in two versions, english and french, and 
distributed by a network of reader-distributors. The editors are Bureau 
d'études and Ewen Chardronnet.

Since the Second World War, the world has been progressively transformed 
into a full scale laboratory. 1 The model of a "laboratory world" has 
been added to the model of a "factory world". This developing 
laboratory-world promotes the manipulation of the living according to 
the doctrine of “acceptable risk”. The radicalisation of competition and 
the “short-falls” in planned investments result in tests in "real-life 
conditions". The journal explores the apocalyptic scenarios prophesising 
justifying the demiurgic experimentation of a world that has become a 
laboratory. The Laboratory Planet wants to devellop the consciousness of 
its readers that the rational organisation of this laboratory-world has 
become an irrational organisation threatening those who have created it.

http://www.laboratoryplanet.org

The Laboratory Planet N°2 is out !

"Hope is not needed to act."

"Nothing is true, everything is permitted." This slogan, which did so 
much harm during the twentieth century, reinforces our conviction that 
the most forceful ideas are not necessarily the truest or the best but 
are those that can imposer leur monde. Among them are the ideas that 
frighten people today. They form what we might call a cognitive 
concentration camp, a camp whose depth, diversity and size are far from 
having been completely explored.
This kind of concentration camp is generated by all political technology 
that promotes, induces, manufactures or develops the anthropological 
type whose existence is indispensable to its working and its 
reproduction. The power of institutions in techno-scientific societies 
resides in their capacity to create and name social reality, which is 
forged by their experts in order to control, and then to impose on all 
this tissue of fictive entities – these weapons of mass distraction, 
while consigning to oblivion the fact they have been produced. To these 
techniques of cognitive capture is today added a range of knowledge and 
of means making it possible to intensify the reflex-behaviours that 
promote the 'good' functioning of the administrated societies, to 
project a psycho-civilized society and to dream of a remote-controlled 
population.
Human beings, having reached the limits of their biotope, the 'exterior' 
colonisation being for the moment at an end, the planet having shrunk 
away, the colonisation of inner life is today undergoing a new phase of 
expansion.
The biometric control of the population through the mass distribution of 
legal and illegal drugs, the creation of consensual hallucinations by 
the skilful management of information and its cognitive reception, and 
the daily psychotronic conditioning by the constant growth of the 
electromagnetic environment, make of city-dwellers individuals 
possessed, subjected to a psycho-power armed with psycho-technologies.
In this concentration camp environment, what is the place of freedom of 
thought? Is it just a fossilised residue of bourgeois society? A special 
version of the cognitive concentration camp? But can we speak without 
presupposing it, at least theoretically? In its most radical form, 
freedom of thought needs its own theory of knowledge. Because if the 
theory of knowledge can imposer un monde, a cognitive concentration 
camp, it can also knock down the fences, at the risk of summoning up a 
chaos that cancels out the very possibility of having a world, and 
produces the most effective cognitive straitjacket ever known.

This is why all theory of knowledge also presupposes a capacity to sail 
through troubled waters. This capacity ne renvoie pas strictly speaking 
to a metacartography, since it ne retourne pas d'une cognition. It is 
more an ethical and, we could say, a spiritual aptitude, calling on 
imagination, inspiration and intuition to uncover possible future ways 
to break down the walls of a world that has closed in on itself like a 
tomb.

Texts by Bureau d'études, Brian Holmes, Konrd Becker, Ewen Chardronnet, 
Michel Tibon-Cornillot, Yves Edel, Nicolas Bonnet, Lionel Sayag.


If you want to receive the journal or become distributor, please contact 
us :
ewen@no-log.org
bureaudetudes@gmail.com


23/09/08 : the issue 3 of the journal will question the emergence of a 
new polar geopolitics, the spectre of the exploitation of the polar 
natural ressources, geo-engineering being commonplace in the name of the 
fight against the greenhouse effect (experiments modifying the climate 
on a very large scale, transforming the chemistry of the oceans, 
creating rivers, emptying lakes, etc.), experimentations in the 
ionosphere in the context of plasma research, the planetary nuclear 
destruction grid, etc.


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