1.

LIBRARIES ARE TOWERS FILLED WITH BOOKS—AND HERE THE TOWER IS JUST AS IMPORTANT AS THE BOOKS—THEY ARE TOWERS THAT OUGHT TO BE KEPT PERMANENTLY LOCKED.

LÁSZLÓ KRASZNAHORKAI

In Spadework for a Palace, the novelist László Krasznahorkai retells a story that has long haunted literary and institutional histories. A librarian becomes obsessed with creating a Serene Paradise of books, a fortified enclosure intended to secure knowledge through total archival containment. In this walled-off paradise, “no reader may enter and no book may leave the premises.”[1] Knowledge—figured here as coextensive with the “world” itself–would be sealed off from use, circulation, and human presence. As the grandiose fantasy of total accumulation and isolation of the knowledge-world gradually drives the librarian into the abyss of madness, it crystallizes as response to his terminal anxiety, the belief that “the entire workings of the universal is destruction and annihilation, devastation and ruination.”[2] In anticipation of inevitable catastrophe—the end of the phenomenological world—the librarian turns into the Palace’s spadeworker, laboring to rescue sapience, the intellectual or noetic world.

The tempo‑ontological figuration of the “end of the world” that underpins Krasznahorkai’s literary imagination names the destructive dynamism of the universe and the man‑against‑nature trope in which “nature” menaces humanity. But it also marks a limit of modern rational thought, which, plagued by a theologico-imperial hangover, seeks redemption in a transcendent and centralized archetypal intelligence.[3] Most notably, within the Eurocentric worldview, the end of the world belongs to that class of questions which, as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Déborah Danowski observe, reason cannot resolve yet cannot refrain from posing.[4] Once the inseverable bond between the human and the world ruptures, reason is left agonizing over both terms it seeks to grasp: the “end” and the “world.” At issue, then for us, is the presupposition or rather the pretense that humanity inhabits a single, shared world; as if its beginnings and endings were absolute and universal; as if what is at stake could be redeemed in a post-biological form—a library, an archive, an artificial total intelligence. The end of the world appears as an eschatological horizon specific to a cosmology that projects futurity as linear progression and reduces worlding to epistemic survival.

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[1] László Krasznahorkai, Spadework for a Palace: Entering the Madness of Others, trans. John Batki, Storybook ND (New Directions Publishing, 2022), 17.
[2] Krasznahorkai, Spadework for a Palace, 70.
[3] This idea finds its most systematic philosophical articulation in G. W. F. Hegel’s “Absolute Knowledge” and the final completion of truth and history.
[4] Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World (Polity press, 2017), 6.

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2.

THE WHITE MAN HAS IDEAS; THE INDIAN HAS VISIONS.

VINE DELORIA JR.

I first began thinking about ceremonial knowledge more than a decade ago, while working on the exhibition Aru Kuxipa (Sacred Secret) with the Amazonian Huni Kuin and the Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto.[5] Attending so-called healing ceremonies as part of that collaboration, it became apparent that what was at stake was not belief, symbolism, or cultural expression, but a different organization of knowledge itself. The Huni Kuin understand knowledge to emerge through ritual practice and visionary, transcorporeal experiences of time and space, most notably guided by medicinal plants regarded as teachers (planta maestra). For the seekers of knowledge, ceremony is termed “the work”: a disciplined practice wherein it is possible to see things beyond the phenomenological to attune to the place one inhabits within the ongoing expression sometimes even in architecture or the landscape. These practices engage processes of change and transition: rites of passage, bodily transformation, and interactions with the sacred, the symbolic, and the hidden. of the more-than-human world.

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[5] Daniela Zyman et al., eds., Ernesto Neto and the Huni Kuin: Aru Kuxipa – Sacred Secret (Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Sternberg Press, 2016).

[6] Lee Hester and Jim Cheney, “Truth and Native American Epistemology,” Social Epistemology 15, no. 4 (2001): 319, https://doi.org/10.1080/02691720110093333.

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When I speak of ceremonial knowledge, I therefore mean forms of knowing that arise from and are encoded in ceremonies, myths, rituals, stories, visions, songs, and prayers, and Some ceremonial practices act inwardly, transforming perception, attention, and ethical disposition; others act outwardly, reshaping relations, obligations, and the conditions of collective life. In fact, these dimensions are largely co-effective: the transformation of the self is inseparable from the transformation of the world and vice versa. These practices generate, channel, transmit, and intergenerationally reactivate knowledges often marked as ancestral, mystical, or spiritual, and therefore dismissed as inconsequential to knowledge proper. Not because they lack rigor, but because they resist the form of abstraction and the demand for total legibility that governs Technic’s regime, in Federico Campagna’s terms. Ceremonial practices instead operate within a different order of reality—a distinct mode of dwelling in the world that Campagna names the magical and Cheney “ceremonial worlds.”[7]

For Campagna, magic’s cosmology belongs to an imaginal Mediterranean lineage, populated by Sufi mystics, Andalusi scholars, Greek philosophers, and contemporary seekers of the ineffable “in specular opposition to the principle of absolute language.”[8] Ceremonial worlds, by contrast, are steeped in Indigenous or ancestral cosmologies, laws, and ethics. As Cheney writes, for American Indigenous people, they define “the nature of the sacred (that in which meaning is located, the more-than-human dimensions of our worlds), the natural and the human, and the relationships between them.”[9]Neither magic nor ceremonial worlds are detached from reality. Rather, they sing different songs of the world, to use Cheney’s phrase, constituting distinct reality systems, each with its own ontological commitments, modes of verification, and techniques of orientation.

Ceremonies mark and protocolize events, both ominous and ordinary. They situate sites and actors, stakes and consequences, politics and temporalities. They register passages and transitions: accidents and predicaments, calamities and celebrations, emergencies and miracles, breakdowns and becomings. And they bind the present to mytho-cosmological orders, “the reservoir of all difference, all dynamism, and therefore all possibility of sense” and the source of all possible futures.[10]Against the neurotic fear of uncertainty that drove the librarian to hoard the mind’s work, ceremonial practices both conjure and keep at bay the instability of the multiverse, honing the capacity for attunement and relational endurance that can be drawn upon when navigating inexplicable, even catastrophic conditions.

This capacity is particularly evident in Gerald Vizenor’s aesthetic theory and the centrality he accords to transmotion—“a spirited and visionary sense of natural motion,” as it appears 

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[7] Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality (Bloomsbury, 2018). It is important to note that Campagna doesn’t use magic in the sense of occult manipulation or the “dark arts,” but as the name for a cosmological order opposed to Technic.
[8] Campagna, Technic and Magic, 10.  

[9] Hester and Cheney, “Truth and Native American Epistemology,” 319.

[10] Danowski and Castro, The Ends of the World, 68.

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throughout Indigenous expression and ceremony.[11] The prepositional force of trans—across, into, through—marks the instability of terms and beings alike, foregrounding the expressive and political charge of moving-between “the transmutations of time, gender, water, myths, ironic scenes, and the many mutations of trickster figures by gesture, word, imagination, and tricky maneuvers.”.[12] Transmotion is the theory of transformation specific to ceremonial worlds. It is precisely within this storied and generative matrix that uncertainty is engaged and rehearsed.

In praxis, the incommensurability of lifeworlds is not left to run toward closure or collapse, but is harmonized through ceremonial procedures of repair and attunement amid their intensities and mysteries. Practitioners, as Baptiste Morizot and Nastassja Martin observe, command “an expert theoretical apparatus particularly adept at engaging uncertainty.”[13] In the more complex words of Viveiros de Castro and Danowski, Indigenous praxis specializes in “the regulated production of transformations capable of reproducing the ethnographic present (life-cycle rituals, the metaphysical management of death, shamanism as cosmic diplomacy), thus thwarting the (…) proliferation of chaotic transformations.”[14]

The difference between Indigenous and realist worldviews is vividly captured in a story recounted by Vine Deloria Jr.: an elderly Crow chief, asked to explain this distinction, responds simply, “the white man has ideas; the Indian has visions.”[15] Ideas, Deloria explains, confuse the map for the territory. Visions, by contrast, are mythopoetic acts: they seek out the withdrawn reality and bring it into presence. They bind knowing to reservoirs of vocabulary and images, and meaning to interpretation beyond the literalness of the world. Vision, and it should be noted that visions seldom occur outside of ceremonial contexts, opens a different aperture onto spacetime, offering differently granulated perspectives, vast enough to take in the multiverse and all its sense-making creatures. Seen from this perspective, ceremonial worlds appear as fundamentally relational formations. They are social in the deepest sense: worlds in which meaningful relations are cultivated not only among humans, but with all beings that share a given cosmos. Indeed, their very existence bespeaks a world replete with an immense variety of inter-connected, more or less vital souls.

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[11] Gerald Vizenor, “The Unmissable: Transmotion in Native Stories and Literature,” Transmotion 1, no. 1 (2015): 63, https://doi.org/10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.143.

[12] Vizenor, “The Unmissable.”

[13] Baptiste Morizot and Nastassja Martin, “Retour Du Temps Du Mythe,” ISSUE, n.d., accessed May 6, 2020, https://www.hesge.ch/head/issue/publications/baptiste-morizot-nastassja-martin-retour-du-temps-du-mythe-nastassja-martin-baptiste-morizot.

[14] Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Déborah Danowski, “Is There Any World to Come?,” E-Flux Supercommunity, July 7, 2015, http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/is-there-any-world-to-come/.

[15] Vine Deloria Jr., Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria Jr. Reader, ed. Sam Scinta and Kristen Foehner (Fulcrum, 1999), 15.

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3.

THE ‘MINOR MUSIC’ IS THE ARTICULATION OF GRIEF, ENDINGS, AFTERLIVES, OPENING, POSSIBILITY. WHAT IS TO EMERGE? WHAT NEW ARRANGEMENTS MIGHT UNFOLD AT THE END OF THIS PARTICULAR FORMATION OF WORLD?

SAIDIYA HARTMAN

With the opening declaration—“I am here. This is where I belong.”—Claire G. Coleman’s post-apocalyptic parable For I Will Forever Care For Country parachutes readers into a ceremonial world after its devastation. Written from an Aboriginal perspective and aligned with what Grace L. Dillon has described as Indigenous Futurisms, the text belongs to a body of speculative storytelling that reclaims science fiction as a site of Indigenous worlding.[16] These works commonly engage science and technology as colonial forces to be repurposed in the service of Indigenous sovereignty, memory, and futurity. Through a mythopoetic aesthetic, Coleman’s text unsettles finitude itself, suggesting how the gruesome annihilation of the world, caused by destructive negligence does not preempt rituals of care, even recuperation and how toxicity can render obligations to land newly legible. And it does so without offering much consolation.

Coleman’s story unfolds after the end. Country is poisoned and scarred by extraction; animals have vanished; humans and their more-than-human kin are gone. What survives are the phenomenal earth and a single, first-person consciousness: a drone-ghost, powered by a large language model trained on collective Aboriginal memory. Disembodied and aerial, it hovers as the archivist of a dead world and the tenacious caretaker of Country. Yet the drone is not simply a repository of what has been lost, nor an emblem of technological transcendence. It takes up the duty of care for Country, committing to the enactment of ceremonies that bind Country, memory, and life. “Someone has to travel Country,” Coleman writes, “trace the songlines, sing the songs at the sacred sites, sing Country to Country, keep culture and Country alive, and right now that someone is me.” The drone is the endling, assigned to vigilance—the obligation to remain, to witness, to grieve. It holds the entire inheritance of Country: every dreaming, every name, every song and instruction. It knows that songs must be sung and dances performed, that the ceremonial patters are to be traced for the ceremonial world to endure. Yet, despite its exhaustive memory archive, the drone’s disembodied presence no longer carries the force of summons. It remembers kin it can no longer address, names it cannot fully speak, gestures it cannot bring to completion. In the toxic and diminished world, ceremony persists, but is withdrawn, without resonance. Spirits do not answer. Wind and clouds turn away.

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[16] Grace L. Dillon, “Imagining Indigenous Futurisms,” in Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, Sun Tracks, v. 69 (University of Arizona Press, 2012).

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The song the drone must sing is perhaps what Saidiya Hartman calls minor music: the sound of grief and endurance, of endings and afterlives, of loss held open as possibility. [17] Elsewhere she writes: “The minor music, the sonorous echo of earth released from the order of men.” [18]For Hartman—a thinker of the world’s multiple and uneven endings, especially as they have been lived and theorized by Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples—the end of the world can neither be understood as a singular event, nor simply as a terminal catastrophe. It names instead a condition long inhabited by those forcibly excluded from humanity, consigned to what she describe as negation: “accumulation, fungibility, natal alienation, kinlessness”—terms, as she notes, “bereft of musicality.”[19]

Within this murderous history of repeated annihilation, the end marks not only apocalyptical devastation but the collapse of a suprematist order that had foreclosed the possibility of an uncontested life. Hartman suggests that the “weird radiance and minor music” produced by the breakdown of that order can carry the promise of another arrangement of life, one no longer structured by racial domination. It is only with the undoing of white supremacy, she argues, and the exhaustion of its recurring violences, that the strains of minor music can resonate with richness and plenitude. The minor does not redeem catastrophe; it inhabits its aftermath, sounding out what remains possible amid ruin.

The devastations Coleman stages—and that Hartman theorizes—are the historical projects of whiteness and the ongoing material enactments of colonial possession. As Max Liboiron insists, pollution is not a side effect or accident of colonialism but one of its primary techniques: “pollution is not a manifestation or side effect of colonialism but is rather an enactment of ongoing colonial relations to Land.” [20] Colonialism does not merely seize  territory (and with it land, labor, and life); it reorganizes the earth into zones of expendability, toxicity, and sacrifice, reconfiguring relations of care into relations of contamination.

Coleman’s Country belongs to this land of toxic death. Made sterile, yet as Stina Attebery writes, “the grounds upon which warped and toxic forms of Indigenous survivance can be imagined.”[21]Survivance here does not  signal recovery or restoration. [22] It names a minor future within ruination—the undeflected obligation to land and relation where colonial power has already declared the world uninhabitable. In this sense, the drone’s ceremony is not a

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[17] Saidiya Hartman and Vanessa Peterson, “Saidiya Hartman Uses Performance to Challenge Colonial Power,” Frieze, October 29, 2025, https://www.frieze.com/article/saidiya-hartman-vanessa-peterson-255.

 [18] Saidiya Hartman, “The End of White Supremcy, An American Romance,” BOMB Magazine, 2020, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2020/06/05/ the-end-of-white-supremacy-an-american-romance

[19] Hartman, “The End of White Supremacy.”

[20] Max Liboiron, Pollution Is Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2021), 6.

[21] Stina Attebery, “‘Lands of Chemical Death’: Toxic Survivance in Bunky Echo-Hawk’s Gas Masks as Medicine and Misha’s Red Spider White Web,” in The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms (Routledge, 2023), 23.

[22] Gerald Vizenor defines survivance as “an active sense of presence, the continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name. Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy, and victimry.” See: Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), vii.

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failure of ritual but its transformation: a practice of staying with Country at the end of a world, holding open the cosmogenic conditions under which other worlds might one day re-emerge.

The drone is not the bearer, nor the safeguard of futurity. What endures instead is Country itself, understood as a living cosmic order that precedes and exceeds both human and machine. Country holds time differently: an “everywhen,” as an eternal now in which ancestors, songs, and dreams remain present even when inaccessible. In this sense, futurity in Coleman’s story is inscribed in Country itself. Country is not the backdrop to extinction, nor a system awaiting rehabilitation. It is the enduring matrix of relations—wounded, scarred, but still alive. The drone’s task, then, is not to inhabit or occupy the future, but to hold these traces—to travel Country, to follow songlines, to remain with what has not yet reassembled into a world. Ceremony here is the labor of attention at the edge of disappearance. It is in this suspended, minor key—marked by grief, afterlives, and unfinished relations—that the possibility of other worlds deeply endures.

4.

THE APOCALYPTICISM UNDERGIRDING THE PRESENT SENSE OF SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL MALAISE THUS HAS AN ALMOST COMFORTING ASPECT OF “MAKING SENSE,” FOR THE ORGANIZATION OF OUR TIME.

ROBERT T. TALLY JR.

Returning once more to the redemptive economy at work in Krasznahorkai’s Palace of Knowledge, it appears as the manifestation of a worldview willing to concede human extinction so long as knowledge survives. This sacrificial logic feeds contemporary, technophilic fantasies of a coming supreme intelligence that exceeds, overrides, and eventually replaces human cognition altogether. In these visions, cognition is externalized and recast as an autonomous process whose continuity no longer depends on human life. The late James Lovelock gives this logic an explicit formulation when he writes: “We will no longer be the only knowers and understanders of the cosmos, but the process of knowing—the transformation of matter into information—will continue.” [23]  What is to be redeemed here is not humanity, nor the web of relations that sustain life, but knowing understood as informational conversion optimized for efficiency and alignment. Extinction appears not as an ethical or civilizational rupture, but as a technical threshold to be solved by a higher order of intelligence—an orientation shared by the Silicon right as well as certain strands of accelerationist and posthuman thought.

Read from this angle but extending beyond the novel’s plot, the Palace of Knowledge can be analogized to large language models that aggregate vast corpora of the past while remaining structurally incapable of engaging futures that exceed the horizon of available data. 

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[23] https://www.thegeniusworks.com/2019/07/james-lovelock-at-100-from-alphago-to-novacene-and-how-self-learning-machines-will-be-the-start-of-new-life/

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This limitation is not confined to technological apparatuses alone. It also marks liberal democracy and neoliberal economics, whose presentism confines futurity to optimization, risk management, and short-term projection, effectively shorting the future by betting against transformation and responsibility. The “Ideal Library Dedicated to Knowledge” and LLM offer the reassurance of a sense of order and simplicity amid the confusion and convulsions of the late liberal age. Reverting to eschatological rhetorics, they conspire to narrow the horizon of possibility, reinforcing the overwhelming sense of a world too complex to understand otherwise. This epistemic strategy is symptomatic of a historical project failing to conceive its own continuation under conditions of uncertainty, let alone incipient doom.

“The eschatological element in modern thought” signals the systemic de-incentivization of transformative thinking.[24] If, as has often been repeated, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, this is not—contra Fredric Jameson—for lack of imagination, but the result of a worldview prioritizing dominance and self-perpetuation. Modernity’s failure, in this respect, lies in the exceptionality it grants to the present while projecting itself into a linear, teleological future of progress—the Future, singular and unmarked—rather than futures shaped by contingency. When this cosmology confronts its own finitude, it dreams of fortified architectures erected against an embattled world. Yet worlds already in disrepair cannot be secured through technocratic governance and datafication. The apocalypse is not an external event menacing the Palace; it is inscribed in the very worldview that cannot relate to indeterminacy except as danger, nor acknowledge its culpability in producing collapse. Techné, in this sense, has never ceased to wage war against the world it seeks to master. The world has always already been its dangerous, at times dismissible, other. Its unknowability constitutes an ontological and political scandal, triggering redress through denial, exposure, and control.

If epistemologies of determinism and prediction falter in the face of uncertainty, it is because the future does not submit to capture. The future reveals itself. It is indeterminate, ineffable, unknowable—never fully available as an object to be defined, extrapolated, or modeled in advance. Rather than treating unknowability as a deficit to be overcome, Raqs Media Collective invite us to approach the unknown as an enchanted limit: not an obstacle but a calling addressed to seekers of knowledge.[25] While the future cannot be represented nor modelled, it can be entered into relation. Enchantment derives from chant: a minor, rhythmic practice that gives uncertainty form and resonance. To engage futurity requires methods and arts of knowing, orientation, and interpretation attuned to the conditions under which futures emerge. This is one of the promises of ceremonial epistemologies: they do not impose a single horizon of futurity, but allow multiple articulations of events, relations, and forms of consciousness to coexist within unfolding thresholds and transitions. What ceremony offers, then, is orientation—an ability to inhabit a world where multiple temporalities, agencies, and possibilities remain in play. 

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[24] Robert T. Tally Jr.,“The End-of-the-World as World System,” in Other Globes, ed. Simon Ferdinand et al. (Springer International Publishing, 2019), 273, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14980-2_14.

[25]  Raqs Media Collective: The Unknown as an Enchanted Limit, produced by School of Visual Arts, 2022, 56:46, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMLZoU_pNh8.

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Ceremonial worldviews offer not a solution to the end, but what Denise Ferreira da Silva describes as “another image of existence,” and thus another image of the end of existence, breaking with “separability and determinism.”[26] This image releases thought from the strictures of linear time and causal closure, allowing worlds to be understood as hyper-relational formations in continuous “re/de/composition.”[27] The task is definitely not the extradition/salvation of knowledge from the world, but what she refers to as the “poethical” ritualization of “deep implicancy” within and beyond survivance. Futurity is not rescue, nor redemption. It is the work of ongoing creation of possibilities for re/existence—for the conditions in which songlines can still be traced, ancestors named, ceremonies performed, and relations renewed. “The world is gone, I have to carry you.” – writes the German poet Paul Celan.

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[26]  Denise Ferreira Da Silva et al., “Another Image of Existence,” Performance Philosophy 7, no. 1 (2022): 143–44, https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2022.71381.

[27] Ferreira Da Silva et al., “Another Image of Existence.”

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