In order to build The Stack-to-come, we have to first imagine it in ruins and work backward from this as both a conclusion and a starting point. History (that is, the coevolution of carboniferous and noncarboniferous phyla) is already topological whether we speak of it that way or not, and this is especially true at the local level of animals and their machines. They build worlds and cities that are variously hard and soft, at least to their Users, and it is in relation to this stratigraphic variation that some choose to intuit differences between what we call hardware and software (and between mechanical and informational machines, even when those differences are only conventions). The Stack-to-come (in ruins) is both hard and soft, shifting its textural profile according to how we compare it to the rest of the physical world, warm or cold, wet or dry, inside out or outside in. We see this in how the clinamen, as a primordial vision of universal computation, can accommodate a positive figure-ground image of bits calculating-in-flight through a void (of computation in the world), but just as well, the inverse negative image of the world unfolding through calculative subtraction from a universally “ full ” totality (of the world as the shadow of computation). Quentin Meillassoux calls this an “ ‘ inverse Epicureanism ’ , not one of real atoms displacing each other in a hazardous fashion … in an infinite void, but one of ‘ atoms of void ’ displacing each other in a hazardous fashion within the infinite plenitude of fluxes. It must therefore be that disconnection itself is ultimately reduced to the plenitude of heterogeneous flux. ” <sup>16</sup>
The Black Stack
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