Articles Available Online

‘I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living’ Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol 5 (1974)   HOSTILE, ALIEN, ALIENATED FROM LIFE   I’m not sure I would make a good collectivist I’m the kind of girl who, when asked by a neighbour to help weed my building’s shared garden, would look up from where I was sun-tanning and say I was too pretty to work (OK – I helped anyway) If dinnertime conversation drifts to utopia, a friend will concede that I can have ‘my own personal corner’ in the commune It’s embarrassing to admit, but I’m not all too gifted at living with other people, even if I romanticise it by dreaming of the ‘hot girl singularity’ that will merge my consciousness with that of my best friends The tendency worries me, given the state of the world Consider that:   The word for world is forest1 The word for world is mother2 The world is made, and remade, through ‘worlding,’3 ‘worldmaking,’4 or ‘worldbuilding’5 The world is rendered by empire, destroyed, and remade forever after The world is a model, a simulation, an ‘infinite game’ that is open all the way up to its borders The world is autonomous and alive It teems with life and voices Some voices are hallucinations, resounding across dimensions Some worlds are hallucinations, hewn in great detail from the base material of the void The world is meant to go on, and on, and on, with or without you The world is defined by its boundlessness in time, dis- and reassembling infinitely Yet the world can only be engineered through the finitude of rules, borders, and forces The world isn’t just an impression, smeared together with other impressions; it needs physics, mechanics, and designers to work Because the world labours to understand its own origins, and constantly re-plots the coordinates of where it might like to end up, the world depends on momentum It requires collective desire Without these things – without a tight relation between