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Slime Dynamics: Generation, Mutation, and the Creep of Life

Ben Woodard

3.33 · Rating details · 108 ratings · 17 reviews

Despite humanity s gradual ascent from clustered pools of it, slime is more often than not relegated to a mere residue the trail of a verminous life form, the trace of decomposition, or an entertaining synthetic material thereby leaving its generative and mutative associations with life neatly removed from the human sphere of thought and existence. Arguing that slime is a ...more

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Paperback, 77 pages

Published September 16th 2012 by Zero Books

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Apr 23, 2019 0 rated it it was ok

Shelves: contemporary-continental-phil, ecology-environment-nature, phenomenology

With a lack of punctuation and formatting, a prevalence of run-on sentences, sentence fragments, and technical terms, and references and quotations without contextualization or interpretation, the book reads like slam poetry, but I managed to understand about half of it. I feel like the author finished typing up the first draft a few minutes before it was due and submitted it without reading it? And no one else read it before it was published?

An outgrowth of the "dark" "speculative realism" thin With a lack of punctuation and formatting, a prevalence of run-on sentences, sentence fragments, and technical terms, and references and quotations without contextualization or interpretation, the book reads like slam poetry, but I managed to understand about half of it. I feel like the author finished typing up the first draft a few minutes before it was due and submitted it without reading it? And no one else read it before it was published?

An outgrowth of the "dark" "speculative realism" thing, so expect lovecraft, ligotti, thacker, negarestani, harman, grant, brassier, schelling, deleuze, bergson, merleau-ponty, etc

The general thesis seems to be that the "slimy" forms of life--molds, fungi, viruses, bacteria, and amoeba--are archetypes of a form of capital-l Life that lacks thought, and thus poses a challenge to the correlation of thought and being that is central to post-kantian metaphysics. Slimy life is alien, impersonal, amorphous, multiple, and primordial--and these characteristics evoke in us humans an existential horror, because they reveal Life (and by extension, our own lives) to be guided by blind and unconscious biological drives, rather than by lofty ethical or philosophical ideals. The concluding chapter suggests that conceptualizing Life as a function of entropy, and conceptualizing entropy as equivalent to a cosmological death drive, allows for a psychoanalysis of Nature. In more concrete terms, woodward is proposing that history is an ongoing process of decay that emanates from an originary unity that was the universe prior to the big bang. From this nucleic zero-point, time and space bloom outward in a constantly accelerating explosion. If the expansion of the universe can be said to be its life drive, we can also say that its accelerating expansion outward is also its death drive, since the universe will eventually rip itself apart in heat death. Following this, Woodward cautions us against nihilism, that equates life's sliminess with meaningless, since doing so opens the doors to fascism and biopolitics. Instead, Woodward suggests that life is "not even meaningless"--in the face of thought's supersession by slime, nihilism itself becomes a meaningless position.

But so what? Life might be slimy in many aspects, but life is also fuzzy and scaly and feathered. Life's diversity precludes its reduction to slime. Slime can only ever be a metonym for Life. Life contains slimy elements, and these are worth analyzing, but that doesn't negate the analysis of its more solid and ornate organs, which constitute another level of meaning that deserve their own analysis. It's important to ground phenomenology in natural history (because nature cannot be reduced to our image of it), but human consciousness and "Nature" remain irreducible to each other, precisely because "nature" is such a vague and all-encompassing word that elides the diversity of living and non-living things. ...more

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Jul 27, 2019 Alex Obrigewitsch rated it it was ok

I would love to give this work a higher rating, but its flaws fault the thought far too much, as I shall elaborate below. First of all, I must say that Woodard has put in the thought and work, and the fundamental theme of a base and degraded, yet monstrous, material reality qua Urschleim which ruptures and rends open temporality beyond any anthrotopic time-scale is facinating and benefitial for inhumanist thought. Unfortunately, this work suffers from a number of faults which mar not only the ex I would love to give this work a higher rating, but its flaws fault the thought far too much, as I shall elaborate below. First of all, I must say that Woodard has put in the thought and work, and the fundamental theme of a base and degraded, yet monstrous, material reality qua Urschleim which ruptures and rends open temporality beyond any anthrotopic time-scale is facinating and benefitial for inhumanist thought. Unfortunately, this work suffers from a number of faults which mar not only the expression, but the thought itself.

The first of these is the means of conveying the thought. At its filthy roots, this work is an amalgamation of Grant's work on Schelling cobbled together with the infectious dustism of Negarestani's Cyclonopedia (though shorn of its Middle Eastern, heretical Druj-element which perverts and corrupts not only the divine, but everything that takes up its vacant space in our secular world) and an unhealthy number of references to horror genre media. This would be much more valuable if Woodard spent more time elaborating on the thought conveyed by these elements, and how he weaves them into the mutational slime of his topic. Instead, Woodard tends to favor large block quotations with little to no elaboration upon why they are being excised from their origins and grafted onto this little monster of a text. A rookie writing error, which I certainly hope Woodard has overcome in the intervening years and with the publication of his dissertation on Schelling.

The other major fault of this work lies in the writing itself. This book is littered with typographical and grammatical errors, missing words and incomplete thoughts that seem to have been changed mid-sentence, still bearing the trace of this altered expression. Early on this made reading rather irksome, but it quickly makes for a distraction that fatally taints the experience of reading and thinking. I am surprised that Zero books would publish such an obviously unedited piece of work (it is blatantly clear that not a single pair of eyes glanced at the manuscript before sending it to the printer). Were I Woodard, I would return to correct such a public stain upon my name - is it carelessness, or has the morass of time rendered the point moot for the man? Or maybe it plays right in to his morbid fascination with being "dark" and "grotesque." While Negarestani made such a move seem less immature and vain, Woodard only comes off as an angsty grad student who finally found someone to take his Lovecraftian obsession seriously in the Speculative Realist movement or moment. Again, hopefully he has outgrown this neurosis (coming from one who is haunted by reflections on death and absence).

If you are interested in the topic I would look to Cyclonopedia, as well as Grant's book on Schelling and his essay "Being and Slime" (which alleviates Woodard's book of its apparent originality in subject matter). ...more

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Sep 28, 2017 Ştefan Tiron rated it really liked it

Shelves: biology, theory-philosophy-fabulation, aesthetics, affect-theory, chronocalypse, chemistry, favorites, geophilosophy, horrorism-weird, hyperdensity

[[Was not able to jot down my thoughts on it, but that time has finally come. If I am to agree with other reviewers, I would have to keep a blind eye to my own abysmal editing of Temporal Divergence and Cosmic Drift. So no complaints about typos. Good that I cannot or will not review my own book. I am all for systematicity, since my own instincts struggle with it and yet most of the time trying to find a clear path among the ferocious brambles of speculative theory fiction/SF fabulation defeats ...more

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Mar 19, 2013 Aaron Zimmerman rated it it was amazing

Slime Dynamic is a fun little meditation on the ontological, epistemological, biological and metaphysical roots of slime. Whether it be the microbial, the viral, the fungal, or the horror of the unknowable extraterrestrial, Woodard illustrates the notion of slime as the prima materia through which all life perpetually oozes in a pathological, random and meaningless flow trapped in the unendurable prison of the accident of consciousness and the spatio-temporality it misguidedly constructs meaning Slime Dynamic is a fun little meditation on the ontological, epistemological, biological and metaphysical roots of slime. Whether it be the microbial, the viral, the fungal, or the horror of the unknowable extraterrestrial, Woodard illustrates the notion of slime as the prima materia through which all life perpetually oozes in a pathological, random and meaningless flow trapped in the unendurable prison of the accident of consciousness and the spatio-temporality it misguidedly constructs meaning around.

Using a mash up of hard science, philosophy, science and horror fiction to illustrate his points, Woodard's perspective is wickedly savage in it's debunking of the anthropocentrism so commonly used to justify mankind's flawed view of itself in the universe. Quoting sources as varied as F.W.J. von Schelling, Slavoj Zizek, Freud, H.P. Lovecraft, and drawing on films like Alien, Outbreak, and Resident Evil, Woodard steps outside the ordinary confines of academic writing to deliver a tome as culturally saavy as it is scholarly and as humorously enlightened as it is sardonically nihilistic.

You will giggle with malicious glee if you delight as much as I do in the grotesque, anti-everything perspective Woodard lays bare in the pages of 'Slime Dynamics'.

Also of note is the value of publisher Zero Books who support perspectives as wonderfully outside the mainstream as Woodard's. From their mission statement: "Contemporary culture has eliminated the concept and public figure of the intellectual. A cretinous anti-intellectualism presides, cheered by hacks in the pay of multinational corporations who reassure their bored readers that there is no need to rouse themselves from their stupor. Zer0 Books knows that another kind of discourse - intellectual without being academic, popular without being populist - is not only possible: it is already flourishing. Zer0 is convinced that in the unthinking, blandly consensual culture in which we live, critical and engaged theoretical reflection is more important than ever before." ...more

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Jul 31, 2016 Alexander rated it liked it

Shelves: abyss-gazes-back, ecognosis, mind-games, ribofunk, zero-books

I admire what Woodard was aiming for here, but the stodgy exposition and wearying gluts of jargon fail to deliver the payload as explosively as this essay could and should have – i.e. Spinoza’s Ethics by way of John Carpenter’s The Thing.

As for the atrocious copyediting of the print edition, I’ll give Zero Books the benefit of the doubt and assume it was a spoofy meta-trope – the ur-grammatical undulations of slime squeezing through the pores of the galley-proofs to enmold and putrefy Woodard’s ...more

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Jan 10, 2019 vi macdonald rated it it was ok

A few interesting ideas expressed poorly.

In many ways I am reminded of some of the worst passages of my own writings. Luckily, nobody published any of my garbage so I've been saved the embarrassment that poor Woodard has landed himself with here. It's quite clear that this wasn't the primary project was working on at the time, with this reading like a brief exploration of some ideas that didn't make the cut while he was working on his PhD thesis. ...more

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May 09, 2020 Sam added it

Whose mans is this? Someone proofread their mans.

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Jul 02, 2017 Leftjab rated it liked it

My bathroom tub/shower grows mold. I've bleached, cleaned, pretty much whatever I can do to try to combat the mold, but no matter what it will still continue to grow - maybe it's the chemicals in the water or the chemicals in the soaps - the residue left after showering. No matter what, in the grout, in the caulk around the tub, over time, eventually, mold will begin. I've found great new ways to clean the caulk - bleach mixed with baking soda makes it look as good as new - but in the end, the m My bathroom tub/shower grows mold. I've bleached, cleaned, pretty much whatever I can do to try to combat the mold, but no matter what it will still continue to grow - maybe it's the chemicals in the water or the chemicals in the soaps - the residue left after showering. No matter what, in the grout, in the caulk around the tub, over time, eventually, mold will begin. I've found great new ways to clean the caulk - bleach mixed with baking soda makes it look as good as new - but in the end, the mold triumphs.

I mention this because the gist of the book could be summed up in that we all come from slime, so slime it what we are. Thinking slime. The oldest forms of life on earth - variations of bacteria - are forms of slime. I guess the author is trying to say - don't look at slime as gross because that's what you are. Sure, he dresses it up with some thinkers on the modern end of things - Deleuze, etc. - and then this also falls into the Lovecraft being recognized as not just a horror prose stylist but also having some philosophical implications in his creatures and things that cannot be imagined. I'm not slagging on Lovecraft because, hey, I read Slime Dynamics and In the Dust of This World and I like his fiction - I'm just saying he's fallen into vogue among the thinkers, and maybe the vogue is making more of what he was saying than what he was actually saying.

Maybe it's just me. I do recognize that when there is talk of life on Europa or the remnants of life on Mars - all based around water and our idea of carbon based life forms - what these things are are basically microbial bacteria type life forms - slime essentially. So yes, Woodard is right - maybe we shouldn't see slime as gross and in recognizing that we are all slime, then, I don't know, maybe we can see that our differences are inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Slime is what we were, and as we die and decay, slime is what we become. And Lovecraft's focusing on the viscousness of things - many of his creatures come bathed in slime - shows that he was unafraid to face those aspects of existence that are universal to life. Though he was afraid of lots of other things...

Once the author starts getting into Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty and Reza Negarestani (whose Cyclonopedia is one of the strangest, most difficult works of "fiction" or whatever it is I have ever attempted to read) my bachelor's degree in film finds itself out of its depth. But then again, sometimes those writers seem to be writing for the sake of writing, rather than really illuminating anything substantial. But then again, I'm out of my depth. ...more

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Nov 13, 2016 6655321 rated it it was ok

Shelves: environment-and-other-sads, literature-and-other-delusions-of-g, psychoanalysis-and-other-dead-ends, science

I can't tell if Ben Woodard suffers from not being able to develop ideas or poorly understanding how to communicate them. His introductions are always somewhat gripping and then they lead to the disappointment of his chapters. Often he just does things that are usually corrected out of writers in their later college experience, if not graduate school or the writers market. This includes: an over-reliance on citation (assuming that a quote simply *TELLS* the reader all they need to know rather th ...more

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Sep 22, 2020 Willy Boy rated it liked it

Good Luck With This - you are probably more intelligent than me and so will get more out of it, me, it went right over my head. I was disappointed, I have to say. Just an unfortunate mismatch - a cerebral creature of brilliant light bumping into a hairy smelly ape.

What I really wanted was a Social History Of Slime, with reference to popular culture, the great slime year of '88, when Madballs vomitted gouts of luminous gunk, when He-Man was held prone while a bird-like or dinosaur skull similarl ...more

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Jun 03, 2018 Brian_roesler rated it liked it

In the continuing tradition of pop-philosophy that has been deeply influenced by horror fiction maestros Ligotti and Lovecraft, Slime Dynamics (poor editing aside) is a breezy, light read that exemplifies in some fashion, Zero Books capacity as a publishing house. Where else could someone get away with talking about Dead Space, Parasite Eve, and other associated media in a relatively serious philosophical effort?

The core thesis of Slime Dyanmics, centered around breaking down and developing the ...more

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May 08, 2021 Riar rated it liked it

Rather meandering with many references that I find unnecessary (there is a part where all of sudden one of the worst archeological horror film The Ruins is mentioned for only one sentence) and as many have pointed out; hard to read due to the lack of editing. Would love to read more of speculative naturphilosophie as an external rendition of the mind rather than further engaging interiority through psychoanalysis. However, I like the idea of thinking ethic as an inhuman form—an ethic that comes ...more

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Aug 28, 2021 NN rated it it was ok

Shelves: 2021

As many reviewers have commented already, very fertile subject matter that is occasionally brought to fruition by Woodard, but overall gets sucked into the muck by absolutely atrocious structuring and editing.

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Mar 29, 2016 Aksel Dadswell rated it liked it

I feel like I got a lot out of this work in retrospect and have many questions and avenues of inquiry, but I’m also incredibly frustrated. There are some great points and interesting ideas in here but they’re generally buried under that obfuscating style that seems to be the go-to for some (annoyingly, most) academic writers, and an absolutely infuriating lack of editing or proof-reading. The number of errors and clunky sentences made my brain bleed and coupled with the author’s propensity for d ...more

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Apr 12, 2016 R Montague rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction

Straightforward language, makes for a fairly easy read. More of the recent trend in philosophy aimed at overcoming the Kantian impasse through explorations of horror. Ben Woodard takes his starting place with the beginnings of life: In slime.

By looking at the ways in which the virus, the fugus, and the swarm all contribute to inspire acute bodily horror, and the ways in which Woodard thinks that will help us see our “selves” as bodies, rather than immaterial subject.

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Dec 01, 2016 Jorge Villarruel rated it liked it

No me queda claro si he leído un libro de ciencia o de filosofía. Lo que me queda claro es que el tema de la sustancia mucilaginosa que es la base de la vida, es interesantísimo.

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