by François Laruelle In order to determine the characteristics of non-philosophy, we frame it in opposition to an image of an established paradigm: Deconstruction (as suggested by Jean-Luc Nancy in La deconstruction du christianisme).1 We comment on this image, we add to it, we transform it. It is a simple image of Deconstruction, one that speaks for itself independently of all textual techniques or mechanisms, yet it allows for an easy comparison with non-philosophy: it allows us to identify clearly their different objectives and respective methods. In the text below, the first number refers to the various themes of Deconstruction and non-philosophy that are compared; the second, which is always binary, refers first to Deconstruction (1), and then to non-philosophy (2). 2 1.1 Deconstruction gives itself a notion and its context, a text and its corpus, a set of doctrinal beliefs (Christianity, for example), in such a way that these givens spontaneously present themselves as “philosophical” assumptions. Deconstruction is thus auto-donational. It supplies both the material to be deconstructed and the method of deconstruction, the latter of which is derived from this material and therefore affected by a symptom of otherness that has yet to be determined. These givens, or assumptions, are examined from both the exterior and the interior.3 They are subjected to a partial authority, examined like an objective topology or mechanism that is spontaneously given or assumed. The subject is himself or herself a constitutive component of the system under investigation, albeit only partially. In order for something like philosophy to appear, exteriority or meta-language—two concepts that are themselves philosophical, through and through—are the necessary conditions. 1.2 The non-philosophical subject gives itself, or rather lets itself be given, a notion and its context, a system. It is a radically immanent donation. If, therefore, a meta-language is still necessary, it should not be considered to be constitutive of this immanence (but rather as, for example, a hallucinatory authority), without running the risk of it taking the form of the operations that the subject itself carries out on the given.4 Deconstruction is not the only way that exterior and interior are able to organize themselves. 2.1 We consider deconstruction as a composition of terms or parts that mutually hold themselves together like a tightly knit system, but without any apparent or explicit play between the parts. This system ensures an a priori principle of “logocentric” enclosing or foreclosing. 2.2 First of all, the given to be examined is not a textual constitution that supplies its own principle of enclosure, which is in itself textual. It is not to be examined from the outside or from above with authority as though it were an organization of parts assumed to be self-sufficient or given in and for themselves. The system to be examined is indeed constituted, but it is not just any textual system. Rather, it is philosophy as a system of thought, specifically as a principle of enclosure that cannot in any way be reduced to its texts. Above all, the system is a material constitution, for it is immanently given prima facie or a priori (in the vision-in-One). Because of its theoretical or phenomenal status, the constitution is both a material and a symptom. It is not an essential or fundamental point of departure that has authority over itself, nor is it an assumed and self-legislating symptom that needs to be deconstructed. The primary and immanent exclusion of all authority (not only “objectifying” authority but authority in the form of “actualization” or “realization,” or a “doubly objectifying” authority that posits the thing itself as independent or as being [étant]) amounts to the impossibility of a transcendental or metalinguistic account of radical immanence (which is nevertheless capable of thinking [itself] axiomatically or without reflexivity). This is the vision-in-One. The system’s a priori condition of being-given [être-donné] is the Whole that—even if it is indeterminate, imaginary, or illusorily self-sufficient—is identified as philosophizable. The philosophizable does not appear out of nowhere, since it comes in and as the form of a unilateral Outside specific to immanence. 3.1 A system that is subjected to the partial authority of a subject, for which meta-language has at least some constitutive effect, is predisposed to dis-assembly en pointillé—that is, to a rightful, proper disassembly—if it is not already disassembled. The text already includes within itself a first deconstruction, a deconstruction that has taken place prior to the intervention of any subject, which only needs to be resumed or revived by an additional act of otherness, by a supplementary work of writing. Greek otherness—the otherness of an opposite, an antonym, black vs. white—cannot exist without the need for a Judaic otherness5—the otherness of an alien script, or an infinite God compared to its finite creation. Judaic otherness is the eternal supplement to the Greek. Finally one last variation: Deconstruction as “Christian” (Nancy),6 a blend of Greek and Judaic alterity. 3.2 What is primary is not the spontaneously given text with its spontaneous self-deconstruction, but rather its being-given a priori as material reduced in its philosophical sufficiency by the vision-in-One. The given to be re-deconstructed is not the self-deconstructive spontaneity of a system but the phenomenon of (the system of) philosophy itself, a system that exists prior to all implied deconstruction or the possibility of a textual deconstruction. The basis of non-philosophy is neither Greek nor Judaic, nor is it the exaggerated and excessive conjugation of the two. It is pre-eminently “Christian,”7 a Christianity that is not simply the blend of its Greek and Jewish precursors, and therefore non-Christian in the non-philosophical sense of “non-,” which consumes Christianity.8 4.1 The system subjected to Deconstruction is rendered possible to the point of its own suspension or impossibilization. The system’s deconstruction is a way of showing what it truly was, a way of making its fundamental principles and presuppositions appear. The system’s deconstruction balances the possibility and the impossibility of the text, which are the same. This sameness is nevertheless unbalanced. It is an unbalanced balance that is always refined and adjusted by equilibrium. 4.2 Acting as an a priori, the vision-in-One is another combination of the possibility and the impossibility of philosophy. Its impossibility is immanent or radical, its possibility—or its a priori givenness as phenomenon—is unilatness as phenomenon—is unilateral and therefore a complete Stranger to auto-donational philosophy. The Stranger remains immanent. The balance between possibility and impossibility in the vision-in-One is an immanent equilibrium, which is not evened out by equilibrium. It is the Grand Midi of Man. The vision-in-One acts according to a radical unbalance, one without return, and it never ceases to come as Stranger or Messiah, as a permanent struggle against the philosophical spontaneity of the world. Thus we uphold and maintain that philosophy is given to subjects as the object of their struggle. We avoid the spontaneous and empirical self-donation of philosophy as a signifier to which access is only granted and assured by Writings and Texts—that also is to say by religion and perhaps religious sophism—because subjects have a rightful and legitimate access to philosophy as the object of their struggle. They have this access even without taking into account the aporias of entry, exit, and return. 5.1 Deconstruction consists in establishing play “between” the parts, in making them move in relation to each other. This relation between parts is absolute because of the supplement of an absolute Other. Deconstruction consists in undoing the enclosure or the foreclosure of a system without breaking it, in unbinding the organization of the set, in weakening the disposition [systase] of the system (Heidegger), in making disseminated strangeness appear. 5.2 Non-philosophy does not emphasize otherness or differences; it does not compound them through différance, and does not content itself with establishing play while conserving the deconstructionist’s ex machina authority (which amounts to the same thing as enclosure). It does not add to nor subtract from the immanent deconstruction of the thing (of texts); rather, it substitutes unilateralism for difference (différance), the structure of the immanent existingStranger for differing, and it breaks the enclosure, at least for the Real. If in the best of philosophical cases there is pure difference—a signifier in contrast to nothing, not even another signifier nor one that is absolutely removed from the chain, a “Greco-Judaic” signifier we could say—then there is a pure otherness that delimits, not in opposition to immanence (which has no limit), but a One-limitation that is opposed to the system as its possibilizing impossibility. 6.1 Since it does not come from any identifiable space, the play of distances in a deconstructed system cannot be attributed to any particular or unique part that would constitute an origin; such a part is precisely the point of effervescence or condensation of play, not a source. Difference (différance) appears to emerge from the core of the deconstructed system, as an unlocatable, at once internal and external to the system, but finally external a second time, as an exaggerated otherness, a relative-absolute Greco-Judaic alterity, which is therefore twice external. Deconstruction is a supplement to Greek logic. It initiates the dominance of metalinguistic exteriority and logocentric enclosure relative to philosophical phenomena, but continues to situate itself in the last instance to this dominance. 6.2 Unilateralism has another structure than the one provided by an exaggerated and doubled otherness. It is indeed otherness, but in a unique sense. It is a unidirectional otherness. It is immanent without being relative to immanence. It is the “vision” in the vision-in-One, a unique intentionality driven by a single impulse, like a drive that renders philosophy impossible precisely because it expresses philosophy as the philosophy [“la” philosophie]. Unilateralism acts as a radically immanent One-Stranger that does not itself come from the system, nor from its immediate exterior like an enclosure beyond an enclosure, nor even from further afar like an otherness with Judaic emphasis. It comes from Nowhere and has No Time, the One-Stranger is utopic and uchronic, that is to say it is celestial (and not extra-terrestrial) and eternal (and not outside of time). It consists of an operation that is not internal/external but immanent in itself and therefore heteronomous for philosophy. This Outside is an immanent a priori, which makes an a priori understanding of the philosophizable unknown to and impossible for philosophy. 7.1 Duality, because there always is one, takes the form of a Judaic supplement of otherness graphed to and integrated in a Greek or weak otherness. It is a duality that begins in anonymity and transcendence, one that never ceases to be anonymous except as Judaic excess, except as its characterization as “Autre homme” (Levinas), or as “epekeina” [beyond]. 7.2 It is philosophy that is dualyzed, not the Real itself. Duality belongs to the Real, which is immediately non-anonymous because it is Man, and it belongs to the transcendental subject. Man is a unilateral duality, without a divided One, whether in its capacity as Real or as subject. We cannot say that the subject is a supplement to Man’s Real. The subject is Real via the cloning of its essence, and the Real is subject when it is occasionally solicited by sufficient or non-reduced philosophy. The dyad undoes the system-form in two unilateral temporalities. The philosophy-form is not a simple effect, as deconstruction would have it; it is, on the contrary, divided (transcendental-real and transcendental-empirical). Therefore there are two phases to the dualysis of philosophy: 1) Unilateral identity suspends, a priori, its sufficient form, or neutralizes it. This is the effect of the Real’s impasse toward philosophical material; 2) This non-operation that results from the suspension of philosophical sufficiency is then treated as the condition that prepares the ground upon which dualysis disassembles, takes apart, or decomposes, this time strata by strata, the very structure of the philosophical system. This system has never been an indeterminate nor simply textual assembly, but rather a complex or transcendental structure (in order to call upon a “transcendental signified” to be deconstructed, the structure of the transcendental must be known). We therefore distinguish between the suspension that gives rise to the hallucination of philosophy and its deconstruction, and a new type of deconstruction or disassembly that acts not on the parts of the system but on the system’s subjective or transcendental structure. Philosophy, a structure larger than logocentrism and larger than the text, is suspended a first time by the Real that gives it its a priori unilateral character and heightens its sufficiency. Philosophy is then suspended a second time by the strata-by-strata dismemberment of the very structure that was committed to the system. The operation of the dyad is purely oriented toward the structure of philosophy’s transcendental system (and toward each of its parts as they express or condense the structure of which they are a part), but only as an operation that is materially given a priori as an intuition or as an immanent Outside. For the system or for its parts, the operation of the dyad appears as a heteronomous subject or Stranger. The non-philosophical dyad signifies a one-way otherness, and is therefore lacking any sense, encountering sense only as a symptom. 8.1 Deconstruction is not destruction or annihilation but a “taking apart” (Abbau, Heidegger) or a disassembling. However this disassembling is not a mechanical operation (this is the paradigm’s insufficiency) but a spectral slipping. It leaves the parts of the system or even the system itself in a spectral state where the “play” is a form of différance that operates neither from part to part (as sign) nor from part to system. Deconstruction is a staggered and deferred starting-over of tradition as a whole, which is each time taken on in totality. Tradition is not destroyed in order to be restructured or perpetuated. To deconstruct is neither to identify constituted materials, nor to find a way out of them into some external space, but rather a means to transmit them. It is an un-bearing, an offsetting, of tradition. 8.2 Non-philosophy leads to a philo-fiction9 that consists not so much of disassembling an assumed and given system in a spectral dimension, but which rather starts by presenting the system as given under the auspices of human Identity10 (an identity that is unknown and foreign to the system), and describes what is deduced as “deconstruction” from the structure of the philodeconstruction” from the structure of the philo” from the structure of the philosophical system. On the one hand, the operation is less a spectralization of reality, less a real supplement to its idealization, and more a radical fiction, an evacuation of any mixed solution for a unique and simple unilateralization. On the other hand, the operation acts on the fundamental structure of philosophical systems. From there it eventually acts on the structure of the textual system, rather than starting with the text and then moving on to philosophy (there exists a distinct structure of philosophy apart from all textuality). 9.1 Coming from the interior and the exterior, play is an archi-possibility from which textual constitution is derived. The text conserves its own constitution as aberrant and unsuited, as if the text existed as already deconstructed en pointillé or as a spectre. 9.2 Non-philosophy does not conserve philosophy or its structure, whether incomplete or misused, thinned out and spectral, ghostly and hidden by the supposedly given system. It is a philo-fiction and it has certain characteristics of the spectre. It is immanent in its principle, and penetrates and encompasses the system, finding subtle support in each of its parts, brushing up against them where necessary without lingering, settling, or becoming attached. Yet, the philo-fiction is never simply hidden or covered by the philosophical system. It is not the role of non-philosophy to unearth the philo-fiction that was always already there. For the Real there is no philosophical appearance, only a hallucination that philosophy has identified or produced; for the non-philosophical subject however, there is a transcendental illusion that is already more consistent. Ubiquitous in its cause, philo-fiction penetrates and encompasses all systems, each time at a point that is no longer nodal but unilateral. For the non-philosophical subject, the philosophizable a priori constantly threatens to reclaim its sufficiency and to “recharge” from its philosophical pretenses; it hides the real a priori and confirms spontaneous philosophy. Philosophy perpetually wants to claim the philo-fiction as just more philosophy. But all bets are off; the Lived-life is resilient, the inalienable Real cannot be forgotten, for it does not cease to resist any more than the subject (transcendentally radicalized) is able to forget itself in the struggle. The outcome of non-philosophy is a radical Lived-life of hallucination and illusion. The immanent Lived-life is unforgettable without the need for an absolute memory or a memory refashioned by operations and then reconstituted. It is the real condition of salvation such that it engages a task and maintains the subject, head above the world. Let us generalize toward contemporary philosophy. Non-philosophy places philosophy in a radical state; it takes phenomena as they are given a priori in the human or real state, as they are given in their immanent identity, and therefore given a priori unilaterally or by the Other. Non-philosophy does not impose an everyday structure or a system of knowledge, whether linguistic or mathematic and based on the “set.” The linguistically rendered text or the ontological knowledge based on the set have to be given as unilateral identity, at the risk that they revert to particularity or Judaic exceptionality, or to a materialistic void and its corresponding idealism; they have to be given as Other rather than in their own sufficiency. There is no preconditioning set that allows for an immediate and tautological reading of mathematical knowledge, nor is there a textualization that allows for an immediate and violent or raw deconstruction. In both cases, we open the door to a practice that is burdened with empiricism and therefore theoreticist and spontaneous or violent and raw, a practice that has forgotten to radically “phenomenalize” the given and in its place has substituted a transcendent phenomenon, in other words a philosophical one. By placing both cases in a state of radical identity, a series of transformations is released. These transformations move from the suspense of sufficiency to the breaking-up of the structure of the philosophical system that was invested in each part of the play. The enclosure is not simply logocentric, nor is it simply quantifiable or calculable, rather is it always duplicity or double enclosure. This is the principle of a “non-denon-deconstruction” (of a construction of deconstruction within an immanent and a priori intuition: a philo-fiction), or a togetherness or ensemblisme (in the sense of real identity “en”/“in” semblance), both of them real and transcendental, and destined to relieve and replace the transcendent or ex machina divides, whether these divides are linguistic or mathematical. Non-philosophy is not just a new experience of Man or of the subject, one that sets itself apart from contemporary thought and the way it honours the philosophical paradigm. Non-philosophy demands a new theoretical practice. Instead of taking as given the text—as well as the signifier, the set, desire, or power—as transcendent empiricals conveying, more or less secretly, religious determinations (not only “transcendental signifiers”) that are unjustified except by a certain lazy philosophical rush, non-philosophy places them in a radical state where they are no less ontological than linguistic, scientific, etc. What is actually given as phenomenon or foundation upon which thought can be based? All philosophy partakes in the magic act that transforms the empirical into absolute, and the absolute… into absolute. We ask how the empirical is itself given to us, given to the philosophical subject, and how does this philosophical subject know that he or she has rightful access to language or mathematics? Does the subject speak? Is she a mathematician? Without doubt, but if his or her knowledge is immanent to these activities, what relation, what non-relation does he or she have, as a subject, to this immanence? Translated by Nicholas Hauck taken from: Notes: 1. See Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Deconstruction of Christianity,” in Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 2. By emphasizing the binarity of the number scheme, Laruelle alludes to his argument concerning the structure of philosophical decision. In his view, philosophy invariably purports to be a duality, but is in actuality a tripartite schema consisting of empirical experience, its metaphysical conditions, and a transcendental, decisional term which fastens the two together. By contrast, non-philosophy is a real unity—insofar as it is already given inOne—which is discernible as a binary composed of the Real and its clone, or of the visionin-One and its material. Laruelle’s decision to discuss Deconstruction first is likely meant to emphasize that philosophy functions as the occasional cause of non-philosophy. 3. Cf. Derrida’s discussion of the “two strategies” of Deconstruction in “The Ends of Man.” Jacques Derrida, “The Ends of Man,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 30.1 (September, 1969), 31–57. 4. Cf. Laruelle in Struggle and Utopia in the End Times of Philosophy: “There is no metalanguage for saying what non-philosophy is or is capable of doing… We will not even claim, like deconstruction, that there are effects of meta-language, but that this meta-language of a philosophical origin is the material determined and transformed in-the-last-instance by the first Name of Man.” François Laruelle, Struggle and Utopia in the End Times of Philosophy, trans. Drew S. Burk and Anthony Paul Smith (Minneapolis: Univocal Press, 2012), 55. 5. Laruelle here distinguishes between the otherness of Ancient Greek philosophy— which is always opposed bi-laterally to some mode of sameness or selfhood—and the radical, non-binary alterity of Jewish philosophy. See Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, trans. Rocco Gangle (New York: Continuum, 2011). 6. Nancy raises the possibility that Derrida’s Joycean conflation of “Jew” and “Greek” as “jewgreek” at the close of “Violence and Metaphysics” may actually refer to Christianity. 7. .Cf. Lyotard’s characterization of the Christian “narrative of love,” a radically inclusive genre of discourse, which accommodates and accounts for all events: “Any referent can be signified as a sign of the good news announcing that ‘we’ creatures are loved.” JeanFrançois Lyotard, The Differend, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 160. 8. Laruelle does not suggest that non-philosophy is “Christian” in the sense of being an extension or symptom of the organized religion “Christianity.” Rather, he uses the term “Christianity”—or “non-Christianity”—heretically, as one possible first name for the non-consistent, radically immanent Real. See, François Laruelle, Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy, trans. Anthony Paul Smith (New York: Continuum, 2010). 9. “Philo-fiction” is a term Laruelle has recently used to designate the unilateralized clone effectuated by non-philosophy. See, for example, François Laruelle, Photo-Fiction, a NonStandard Aesthetics, trans. Drew S. Burk (Minneapolis: Univocal Press, 2012). 10. “Human Identity” here functions as another name for what Laruelle elsewhere calls “Man-in-Person.”
0 Comments
by Mark Fisher "Cyberpunk torches fiction in intensity, patched-up out of cash-flux mangled heteroglossic jargons, and set in a future so close it connects: jungled by hypertrophic commercialization, socio-political heat-death, cultural hybridity, feminization, programmable information systems, hypercrime, neural interfacing, artificial space and intelligence, memory trading, personality transplants, body-modifications, soft- and wetware viruses, nonlinear dynamic processes, molecular engineering, drugs, guns, schizophrenia." No-one is quite sure what they are: Nick Land, Stephen Metcalf, Sadie Plant. Part theory, part fiction, nothing human, constructs so smoothly assembled you can't see the joins. They don't write text; they cook up intensities. They don't theorise; they secrete, datableed. What we used to call cyberpunk is a convergence: a crossover point not only for fiction and theory, but for everything that either doesn't know its place or is in the process of escaping it. Whatever is emerging where authority is getting lost and middle men are being made redundant. Anything interesting was always like that. Metalhead Michel Foucault was never easy to place. They asked him if he had ever wanted to write fiction. He said he'd never done anything else. So more than a fusion of fiction and theory, it's all about cross fertilizing the most intense elements of both in monstrous nuptials against nature. Synthetix. "The present writing would not be a book; for there is no book that is not the ideal of the immobilised organic body. These would be only diverse pieces, each piece of variable format and belonging to its own time with which it begins and ends ... Not a book, only libidinal instalments." 1974: delirial Jean Francois-Lyotard melts the still glowing-hot shards of post 68 street revolutionary intensity together with Bataille, cybernetics and anti-socialised Marx to produce the pre-punk, non-organic, inhuman assemblage he calls Libidinal Economy. With Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus and Luce Irigaray's Speculum: Of the Other Woman it's part of an irruption of rogue materialism into the French academy that is as far from the dreary, idealist textocracy of Parisian post-structuralism as it is from the dry-as-chalkdust dreariness of Oxbridge common sense. What is refused, in the name of incandescence, is the neutralizing, disintensifying, distanced tone de rigeur in academic prose. The aim, as Deleuze and Guattari put it in Anti-Oedipus , to accelerate the process. All of this consummated in the migration of intelligence out of the university (if indeed intelligence ever was in the university), something that, two decades on, the technical machines will help to facilitate. "The academy loses its control over intelligence once it is possible to even imagine a situation in which information can be accessed from nets which care for neither old boy status nor exam results. The university in flames. "Dozens of different argots are now in common currency; most people speak at least three or four separate languages, and a verbal relativity exists as important as any of time and space. To use the stylistic conventions of the traditional oral novel - the sequential narrative, characters 'in the round', consecutive events, balloons of dialogue attached to 'he said' and 'she said' - is to perpetuate a set of conventions ideally suited to the great tales of adventure in the Conradian mode, or an overformalized Jamesian society, but now valuable for little more than the bedtime story and the fable. To use these conventions to describe events in the present decade is to write a kind of historical novel in reverse...²1964. Writing in the pages of the SF magazine New Worlds , J. G. Ballard celebrates the multipliticous, impure junk languages of William Burroughs. Ballard wheels away the decorous scenery of the literary novel to reveal the atrocity exhibition of the late twentieth century as it emerges in Burroughs' carnivalesque prose: "swamps and garbage heaps, alligators crawling around in broken bottles and tin cans, neon arabesques of motels..."Burroughs has already intravenously pumped pulp fictional vernacular into the hi-cultural zone of Joyce-Eliot experimentalism, fatally contaminating it. Ballard's own condensed novels are in preparation. Cyberpunk fiction lies in wait; assembling itself out of machinic convergence, it is a direct but unanticipated consequence of the intersection of the PC, TV and the telephone. Invading clean white Kalifornia dreams with nightmares from the machinic unconscious, William Gibson and Pat Cadigan populate cyberspace with nonorganic gothic avatars and voodoo entities. The bourgeois novel in flames. The near future. (But it's already happening) "Twisted trading systems have turned the net into a jungle, pulsing with digital diseases, malfunctioning defence packages, commercial predators, headhunters, loa and escaped AIs hiding from Asimov security."Dead hippies create cyberspace, but what comes together is the jungle: Cubase materialism smearing white economies with black marketization. Illicit distribution networks, rogue retail, faceless bacterial commerce. Silicon valley in flames. And it's not over yet. In the intense heat of the cyberjungle, where distribution is too quick and imperceptible for copyright lawyers to keep up, the authorised text is decomposing; a process accelerated by the technical machines. Hypertext is in part an answer to Deleuze and Guattari's inquiry in A Thousand Plateaus : "A book composed of chapters has culmination and termination points. What takes place in a book composed instead of plateaus that compose with one another across microfissures, as in a brain?" Marshall McLuhan had already seen this happening in 1964, when, in Understanding Media, he announced the end of print culture and its associated linear thought patterns. The Gutenberg Galaxy in flames. The death of the author is an entirely technical matter, not at all a metaphor. The cool, efficient decommissioning of the author-function in music shows the way. Remixes displace (fixed, finalised) texts; DJs, producers and engineers replace authors. What succeeds all this is the version, in the sense Jamaican reggae culture gave to the term. Unofficial, potentially infinite, illegitimate: there's no such thing as an authorised version. "The state's pre-arrangement of overlaid bridges, junctions, pathways and trade routes trajectorize the scorching advance as it impacts upon the hapless head of the social. Detonation of nuclear arsenals of the world merely pushes the nomads underground: shedding their skins in reptilian camouflage, vanishing without a forensic trace in ambient recession into the underground... Things sometimes converge in the most unpropitious locations. Coventry, for example. The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit processes cybernetics and culture together, apprehending culture cybernetically and cybernetics culturally. The impetus is not so much inter- as anti-disciplinary, the concrete problem being the freeing up of thought as synaptic-connectivity from its prison as subject-bound logos. Following flows where they want to go leads not into random noise but out onto what Deleuze and Guattari call the plane of consistency . "If we consider the plane of consistency, we notice that the most disparate things and signs move upon it: a semiotic fragment rubs shoulders with a chemical interaction, an electron crashes into a language, a black hole captures a genetic message... There is no 'like' here, we are not saying 'like an electron,' 'like an interaction', etc. The plane of consistency is the abolition of metaphor; all that consists is Real." The CCRU is part-populated by names you don't know yet, but are bound to soon - moving as a massive, with our street-gun samplers, never alone - a k-class swarmachine infecting White Man Face with afro-futurist and cyber-feminist cultural viruses . "Writing becomes a process of software engineering, making connections, and connecting with the other connectionist systems and their connections too; 'does not totalize', but 'is an instrument for multiplication and it also multiplies itself.'"What Pat Cadigan calls synning : synthesizing. No more cerebral core-texts, no more closed books. Looking instead to games or the dancefloor for inspiration. Attempting to produce something that will match the ambitions of Lyotard 1974: "To understand, to be intelligent, is not our overriding passion. We hope rather to be set in motion. Consequently, our passion would sooner be the dance, as Nietzsche wanted ... A dance ... not composed and notated but, on the contrary, one in which the body's gesture would be, with the music, its timbre, its pitch, intensity and duration, and with the words (dancers are also singers), at each point in a unique relation, becoming at every moment an emotional event..."(LE 51) Intensity conductors operating at non-human machine speed, writing machines, machinic writing,text at sample velocity. Text samples from: J. G. Ballard, "Mythmaker of the Twentieth Century", reprinted in RE/search: J. G. Ballard Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus (both Athlone Press) Luce Irigaray, Speculum: Of the Other Woman (Cornell University Press) Nick Land, "Meltdown", unpublished Stephen Metcalf, "Black Capital"in Collapse 2 and IOD 1 Jean Francois-Lyotard, Libidinal Economy (Athlone Press) Sadie Plant, "The Virtual Complexity of Culture"in Future Natural (Routledge) "Therefore, no bad conscience, nor the feeling of crushing responsibility, two relations to the text that circumscribe and define the relation proper to the White Man of the left. We deliver no message, we bear no truth, and we do not speak for those who remain silent." (259) "What you demand of us, theoreticians, is that we constitute ourselves as identities, and responsible ones at that! But if we are sure of anything it is that this operation (of exclusion) is a sham, that no-one produces incandescences and that they belong to no-one, that they have effects but not causes."(LE 258) The article is taken from: by Steven Craig Hickman A Short History of the City and the CathedralLiberalism, from this point forward, means nothing at all like state-happy progressivism. It is defined, instead, as the polar opposite of socialism. Its sole commanding value is liberty. It is individualist, only ever guardedly traditionalist, commercially and industrially oriented, strategically neglectful of care, skeptical in respect to all purported public agencies, and rigorously economical in respect to every dimension of government. —Nick Land, Pyscho Politics The mapping and cartography of the world through mathematical grids of longitude and latitude were the first algorithms of instrumental rationality: the temporalization of the world into time-zones that could be dominated. Being able to master time was a prerequisite to not only predicting the future, but programming it as well. During that long century of decline and ruin the dynamics of the City would be reduced to rubble by the formidable power of those gray men who cast a cold eye across anything living. Out of their gaze a Secular Cathedral of power, mastery, and death would encompass the globe in its tentacled reflexes as if some xenothanatropic agent of a zombiefied cold world had descended upon planet earth to infiltrate and capture the desires of humanity. It would slowly adapt its calculating mind to the planetary economy through a process of computational praxis. It’s reduction of the real to the ideal traces of a model would allow it to command and control every last aspect of energetic life on the planet. Nothing would escape its gaze. Graphical statistics, the flattening of the world into diagrammatic algorithms would allow the world not only to be seen at a glance, but allow the first forecast models. This displacement from literature, history, and discursive practices onto mathematical diagrams brought us the dictatorship of calculable and measured facts. One can see in this the movement from geo-maps to managerial and administrative diagrams to the meta-management of the administrator’s themselves in flow-charts and organigrams. Out of this the Managerial State of the Cathedral would emerge not as some spontaneous order, but rather as the calculated growth of a centralized planning committee of bureaucratic command and control technologies. The world would be programmed according to pre-conceived plans of a military style cartography calculated down to absolute Zero. Even the famous assembly lines and factory models of the Fordist era would be based on the geo-cartographies of military planning and calculation. The Factory itself as a war-economy under the guise of peacetime initiatives. Mass society seen as soldiers in an ongoing competitive and aggressive world of mathematical calculation and managed programming. During and after WWII central planning and modeling of society would give rise to the Managerial State. Academic, scientific, political and socio-cultural worlds under the command and control of cybernetic programming models would bring all of the world under the matheme: the total abstraction of the world as a model to be managed and controlled by technocratic experts and specialists. Studying this Fredrich Hayek, Father of the free-market economy, would see in the central bureaucratic programming committee of the Cathedralists the “logics of slavery,” its subterranean tentacles forming the Empire of a Collective Machine. So with the new sciences of the brain arising out of cybernetics and systems theory he would develop a non-centric emergent system of spontaneous economic order to counter the rigid castes of this Managed Society. The self-organized socio-economic order Hayek modeled was based on the inherent crisis and conflict within any natural system, emerging “from the relationship and mutual adjustments between its constituent elements” he based his economic thought on chaos and disorder rather than order: a dynamic system adaptable to the flux and sway of the real world rather than the imposed fictions of the Cathedral’s utopian rigidity. In this way he envisioned a free-market system based on imitating the brain’s own processes: the spontaneous ordering properties of an ideal market which could not be controlled, modeled, or reduced to the Nineteenth century’s representational systems of cartographic, diagrammatic, or managed techniques of central command and control calculation and measurement. Nor to the reduction of the real to mathemes and ideal structures of quantified reason controlled by military planning of the Cathedral’s statist axiomatic. In this way Hayek believed he could circumvent the managed state’s control over and intervention in the free-market economy he envisioned. This battle between the City and the Cathedral led to a differentiation between the universal notion of the world state of progressive socialism, and the more abstract and localized notions of free-market economics of crises, conflict, and disorder that would be based on the impersonal agency of corporate dynamics emerging out of the thanatropic rigidity of Cathedralism. This breakaway dynamism or accelerating of the inherent tendencies within liberty would revolutionize both the socio-cultural and economic systems of the planet for decades. But even this would not last… With the advent of the vast apparatuses of the Cathedral’s regulatory tentacles, and the rise of ICT’s (Information and Communications Technologies of Social Control) in the later half of the twentieth century, and the turn toward autonomous machinic intelligence independent of human intervention and decisional processes we are seeing reemerge the totalistic technocratic Cathedral as the dream of total management of the Real. As this becomes more an more apparent under the auspices of the re-doubling of object and its data, reflected in the command and control structures of algorithmic governmentality, a new world of absolute control is rigidifying and closing off the dynamic positive feed-back loops of the time vectored power of the free-market economies. At every point of in the global territory, every object of the subject that inhabits it is being subjected and captured by its data base twin: the dividual. In this the map is the territory, and the active programming of the dividual trace of each and every individual is being reprogrammed into a system of absolute calculability. A Cognitive Gulag is being constructed and the Real virtualized and re-ontologized to give the appearance of freedom even as it dissolves it. With the erasure of Subject, Free Will, Spontaneous order, chaos, etc. the Cathedral seeks to reduce the human to its inhuman core, the programmable functions of an impersonal process that can supervene upon the now outmoded modes of consciousness and begin to enslave it to the dictates of the central planning committee of a new Secular Religion: the Cathedral. Bypassing the conscious mind the Cathedral seeks to program the deep processes of the brain itself through intervention and control of the very inhuman core itself: the brain’s unconscious neuralnet. Seeking to automate society in both its organic and inorganic aspects the human will disappear into its machines reversing the age old augmentation process into originary technicity. Mindless and robotic the neohumans of this closed world of the Cathedral will perform functionally according to the normative programming of the Hierarchs. Humanity will see itself as free within this sphere of total control bounded only by its memoryless subjectivation in the machinic phylum. Robotic and automated the neohuman will no longer think for itself but will become part of the hive-mind of a central dataworld where its thoughts are activated and tasks are set according to archontic powers outside its grasp of intellect. An affectless, neutered society will develop as CRISPR and other genome technologies of the convergent sphere come online, and a 24/7 world of pure work as play will evolve in the recycled matrix of a virtualized real. The actual and real world ontologized by the Internet-of-things will by design and deliberation control every aspect of life within the Sphere. These enclaves of the new Mega-Cities, the densified and verticalised cities will be based on strict striation and segmentary caste based claves, divided between biogenetic hybrids and advanced technocratic Cyborgization. Naturals will be invested with bonds from birth to death by branded corporational serfdom, provided for and modulated by interface technologies that will program every aspect of their daily routines. This is the outcome of Hegelianism with a vengeance… In the end Hayek’s dream of the free-market of spontaneous and uncontrolled disorder is reduced to the mathematical perfection and purity of a diagrammatic algorithm that can be controlled by the data controllers of a new machinic civilization arising in our midst: a managed Empire of Artilects and robots devoid of the human element of passion and personalism. The programmed territory becomes the completed world of a technocratic Cathedral, a order of perfectly controlled and virtualized environments: spheres, policed by the impersonal High Priests of Finance, Mediatainment, Academia, etc. all serving the new Archons of the Artificial Age. Will the Hayekian disorder prevail over the order of the Cathedral? Will a new City of Pandemonium prevail over the closed world of the Cathedral’s re-ontologization of the Real? Will the blasted spheres of order caught in the meshes of the new Time-Lords break free or collapse within the virtual constructs of the gnostic archons death worlds? Who controls Time, anyway? In ancient times the Gnostics assumed the world had been constructed by a delusional demiurge, a blind god who did not know what he was doing beyond the calculated measurement of his quantified plundering of the universal harmonium. In their view the universe of decay and entropy was absolute evil. A closed realm of absolute control in which humans were imprisoned and asleep, bound by habit and delusion. The awakened ones acted like anti-bodies in the universal decay, seeking to instill liberty into the dark thoughts of the sleepers. One can see in this a fractured and literalized parable of our situation in the present era of the Cathedral. Asleep in the timeless presentism of this closed world of algorithmic governmentality we are being slowly folded into a machinic phylum from which there will be no exit. Our time is limited, this is the moment of transition in-between times – a brief period of chaotic opportunity when we can accelerate these dark processes and counter the very inverted time-machine of this negative feed-back system, reversing its closure into openness and incompleteness and liberty. The time is short, the ways and means assured: What will you do? The City of Liberty or the Cathedral of Control? As in the parables of old, one is left with the admonishment: Sleepers, awaken! You have nothing to lose but your chains. This article is taken from: by Steven Craig Hickman We can read it as the coming of modern, scientific government in the United States. Or we can read it as the transfer of power from political democracy to the American university system—which, just for the sake of a catchy catchword, I like to call the Cathedral. —Mencius Moldbug (alias, Curtis Yarvin), A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations The Cathedral has substituted its gospel for everything we ever knew. —Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment Bernard Stiegler in his unreadable scholarly postmodern account of the coming automation of society – Automatic Society 1: The Future of Work (Polity Press, 2016), “demonstrates once again (as he has done in virtually all his many previous books),” according to Bert Oliver, “that our technological era, like every distinctive technological epoch before this one, has generated novel technologies in such rapid succession that they have the effect of disrupting social life fundamentally, continually requiring new cultural practices and social adaptations – in this case the probable massive shrinking of employment because of digitalization”. Another harbinger of this world of disruption and non-work is Peter Frase whose popular Four Futures: Life After Capitalism offers, according to Ben Tarnoff, “two heavens and two hells: two ways that automation might facilitate a flourishing of human life, and two ways that it might maximise human misery. In all of these potential futures, automation is the constant; what changes is the political and ecological context – in other words, who owns the robots and how climate change affects the resources on which technology depends”. Frase’s four futures scenarios begin with “communism”, in which he estimates that it “might be realised by robots running on an unlimited clean energy source, providing the material basis for a post-work, post‑scarcity and post-carbon world” (ibid). Next is the notion of “rentism”: Rentism is where abundance exists, but “the techniques to produce abundance are monopolised by a small elite”. This “monopoly is maintained by owning not merely the robots, but the data that tells the robots how to do their job. A world where you can automate everything is a world where you can encode any task as information” (ibid). If we survive the problems of climate change and automation a third possibility arises: Socialism. For Frase in socialism, there are no shortcuts. “Automation exists, but the breakthrough that creates a cornucopia of carbonless energy doesn’t. This means we have to cool the climate the old-fashioned way, through a massive, state-led campaign to radically remake our infrastructure, our landscape and our patterns of consumption” (ibid). And, finally, Frase’s fourth and final future, “exterminism”, is as Tarnoff hyperbolizes “truly terrifying”. Exterminism has the robots and scarcity of socialism, minus the egalitarianism. The result is a neo-feudal nightmare: the rich retreat to heavily fortified enclaves where the robots do all the work, and everyone else is trapped outside in the hot, soggy hell of a rapidly warming planet. “The great danger posed by the automation of production, in the context of a world of hierarchy and scarce resources,” Frase says, “is that it makes the great mass of people superfluous from the standpoint of the ruling elite.” The elite can always warehouse this surplus humanity in prisons and refugee camps. But at a certain point, the rich might find it more convenient to simply exterminate the poor altogether, now that they’re no longer needed as workers. (ibid) Rentism: The Monopoly of Plutocracy and OligarchsI want to take a closer look as this scenario because it seem the prevalent one being promoted by our contemporary universal Church of Capitalism. Some call this institution of wealth accumulation and power the Cathedral: a combination of Corporate ownership and influence peddling of government through its control of the massive bureaucratic machinery of NGO’s, Funds, Academia, Sciences, and Media-Industrial-Military complexes which provide a Secular Platform comparable to that of the Catholic Church during the Medieval Age. In a 2001 Financial Times article, the global advertising firm Young & Rubicam declared that “Brands are the new religion. People turn to them for meaning.” As Steve Denning in Understanding The Failing Religion Of Business (Forbes Magazine) recently stated “Organized religion has often been accused of becoming a business. More recently, there is talk that the management of business has become a religion.” James Burnham in his 1941 book The Managerial Revolution would outline the basic and fundamental aspects of what we’ve come to know as the American Corporatocracy. As Bruce E. Levine in an article on Huffington’s Post suggests: “The truth today, however, is that the United States is neither a democracy nor a republic. Americans are ruled by a corporatocracy: a partnership of “too-big-to-fail” corporations, the extremely wealthy elite, and corporate-collaborator government officials.” Since the Enlightenment the notion of ideologies has always been a part of the background hum of capitalism and its universalist discourse. Ideologies capable of influencing and winning the acceptance of great masses of people are an indispensable verbal cement holding the fabric of any given type of society together. Analysis of ideologies in terms of their practical effects shows us that they ordinarily work to serve and advance the interests of some particular social group or class, and we may therefore speak of a given ideology as being that of the group or class in question. However, it is even more important to observe that no major ideology is content to profess openly that it speaks only for the group whose interests it in fact expresses. Each group insists that its ideologies are universal in validity and express the interests of humanity as a whole; and each group tries to win universal acceptance for its ideologies.1 For capitalism the basic ingredients of its ideological faith (if you will), the hidden fabric of ideas and beliefs that pervade its mind-set, and the ones that have from the beginnings been promoted by the Cathedral are associated with “individualism,” “privatism,” and doctrines of “natural rights” (“free contract,” the standard civil rights, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” etc.) which are held to belong in some necessary and eternal sense to each individual. (Burnham, 21) For Burnham this previous and fundamental ground of capitalist society has all but disappeared (1941) and been replaced by the Managerial Society. The basis of the economic structure of managerial society is governmental (state) ownership and control of the major instruments of production. On a world scale, the transition to this economic structure is well advanced. All the evidence at our disposal indicates that the development will continue, will, in fact, proceed at a rate much speedier in the future than that of the past; and that the transition will be completed. (ibid., p. 95) Of course Burnham was looking at the great transformation during the Great Depression and the Roosevelt Era. In our own immediate era just the reverse of this has happened, rather than the economic structure and major instruments of production of managerial society being under the control of governmental (state) ownership it’s just the opposite. Government is itself under the control of Corporate, Plutocratic and Oligarchic control and power, and therefore ours is a society dictated to by way of a duopoly of surface politics of a supposed two-party establishment system of Democrats and Republicans, Liberal Progressive and Conservative Reactionary. But in truth below the normalized ideological face of our media controlled view of America is the Deep State of Corporatocracy. One might say we’ve transitioned from the Managerial Society to the Corporate Society. During the 1930’s and through WWII Nazi and Fascist regimes were powered by revolutionary movements whose aim was not only to capture, reconstitute, and monopolize state power but also to gain control over the economy. By controlling the state and the economy, the revolutionaries gained the leverage necessary to reconstruct, then mobilize society. Roosevelt in some ways instigated such a model whether willingly and knowingly or not by socializing certain industries and providing vase Works Programs. In contrast, inverted totalitarianism is only in part a state-centered phenomenon. Primarily it represents the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry.2 Inverted Totalitarianism: The Managed SocietyUnlike the classic forms of totalitarianism, which openly boasted of their intentions to force their societies into a preconceived totality, inverted totalitarianism is not expressly conceptualized as an ideology or objectified in public policy. Typically it is furthered by power-holders and citizens who often seem unaware of the deeper consequences of their actions or inactions. There is a certain heedlessness, an inability to take seriously the extent to which a pattern of consequences may take shape without having been preconceived. (Wolin, KL 241) As Slavoj Zizek in his classic The Sublime Object of Ideology puts it: If our concept of ideology remains the classic one in which the illusion is located in knowledge, then today’s society must appear post-ideological: the prevailing ideology is that of cynicism; people no longer believe in ideological truth; they do not take ideological propositions seriously. The fundamental level of ideology, however, is not of an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself. And at this level, we are of course far from being a post-ideological society. Cynical distance is just one way … to blind ourselves to the structuring power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them. (Žižek 1989, p.33) In this sense our very pretentious belief that we educated one’s, we cognitive workers of the world, can see through the ideological masks of capitalism and are therefore post-ideological. But as Zizek suggests this is another sweet lie we love to tell ourselves, a cynical take that allows us to create a fantasy in which we very well know what this capitalist world of power is about, that we can see very well what the vast and secretive corporate networks of power are doing, how they are controlling us, etc., but that we can live outside it. Such fantasies, Zizek reminds us, go without saying and hide us from the basic truth that we are still enmeshed in these very real worlds of ideology because “we are still doing them“. So the notion that we have escaped the “managed society” is a fantasy, and as Wolin puts it, the tendencies in our society point in a direction away from self-government, the rule of law, egalitarianism, and thoughtful public discussion, and toward what I have called “managed democracy,” the smiley face of inverted totalitarianism. (Wolin, KL 351) But what is Managed Democracy? Reformulating the early work of James Burnham (1941) Samuel Francis in Leviathan and Its Enemies: Mass Organization and Managerial Power in Twentieth-Century America will provide us a part of the answer. He argues that in the course of the first half of the 20th century, a “new class” of managers emerged in the economy, government, and culture of the United States and that this new class or elite adopted an ideology and a set of policies that reflected its common interest in acquiring and consolidating national power. The emergence of this new “managerial” elite led to a protracted political and ideological conflict with the old “bourgeois” elite that prevailed in the United States between the Civil War and the Depression, and this conflict underlay most of the issues on which the “Left” and the “Right” in American politics divided between World War I and the 1980s. At the end of the 20th century, a new social and political force unknown to Burnham, the “post-bourgeois proletariat,” may be emerging to challenge managerial dominance and to offer a new synthesis of bourgeois and managerial values and interests.3 As Francis would note neither control of the economy nor of the state nor of the culture by itself will establish its controlling group as the dominant elite of a society. Control of all these modes is necessary to establish dominance, and it is argued that, despite differences and subsidiary conflicts among the managerial groups in each mode, these groups share sufficient interests, beliefs, and perceptions in common that it is meaningful to speak of a unified managerial elite, if not a managerial class. (Francis, KL 281) Whether you’re on the Left or Right the work of Burnham, Wolin, and Francis is not only pertinent to understanding the strange world we live in, but goes a long way in showing how we got here and possible ways out of our quagmire. The monstrosity that was built over decades I’m terming Cathedralism is not new and I’ve taken it from neo-reactionary thought in Mencius Moldbug (Curtis Yarvin see: Atavisionary’s The Cathedral Compilation or pdf: here) and Nick Land (The Dark Enlightenment). For Moldbug the Cathedral (Managerial Elite Institutions) the Cathedral is the end product of the humanistic tradition of liberal progressive civilization that began with the Enlightenment: “Cathedral, it is simply the culmination of the great human quest for knowledge.”4 He’ll cast a long look on the various types of societies that have given birth to the Cathedral. The first type of society or synoptic society is central coordination of information. One can know type 1 societies by their right-wing preference for strong leaders and authoritarian control: Oriental despotisms and modern Nazi and Fascists States. The second type of synoptic society the consensus society. If a type 1 society is a government in which the State controls the press and the universities. A type 2 society is one in which the press and the universities control the State. “It is easy to tell the two forms apart, but the customer experience is pretty much the same.” (Moldbug) We would know it as the privatization of control in society: extra-governmental military, police, security, prisons, etc. All the corporate takeovers of the various governmental institutions that can be made profitable to private enterprise. The third type of synoptic society is Karl Popper’s open society. In a type 3 society, thoughts compete on the basis of their resemblance to reality. Institutions which propagate thoughts compete on the basis of the quality of the thoughts they propagate. (Moldbut, p. 1038) In many ways this is comparable to an inventive or creative society: Creativity, an intangible global resource that is inherently qualitative and practically impossible to program, is the lifeblood of this new capitalist era. Capitalism thus enters a new global phase where intangibles— rather than tangible resources— are most valuable, where research and intellectual appropriation— rather than industrial or service production— are most important for corporate profit, and where the global power of corporations depends not so much on raw materials or the capacity to use labor in production, but on conceiving new inventions and innovations. No aspect of human existence, life or nature can be considered safe from the global reach of this new capitalist era, so long as it has the potential to advance the quest for greater corporate profit and power.5 As Moldbug will put it, “good ideas outcompete bad ideas in a type 3 society, because most of us would rather be clueful than deluded. While many individuals have cognitive biases—such as a natural preference for optimistic over pessimistic predictions, or the reverse—these average out and are dwarfed by the general ambition of intellectuals, to see reality as it actually is. Intellectuals are brutally competitive by nature, and delight in exploding the delusions of others. Nonsense should not last long around them.” (Moldbug, 1039) We still live in a type 2 society in which the control of the perception of reality is in the hands of the Cathedral: the secular institutions that educate (academia), provide us news (media), protect us and secure us (military/police – external/internal, outside/inside), promote our welfare and health (sciences, pharmaceuticals, environmental agencies), and most of all provide us convergent technologies (genetics, nanotech, information and communications technologies). In our type 2 society we are bound to a open secret: that we are passive and compliant citizens of a democratic political economy that rules most of the planet through military land and sea power, trade, and logistics. We hide from ourselves that this authoritarian regime is a globalist enterprise of Empire, and that other Empires (China/Russia and their satellite nations) seek the same. So we live in a carefully programmed and scripted lie, a fictional universe of ideological constructs based on binarism in which a friend/enemy, us/them, inside/outside, presence/absence, secure/unsecure, etc. world is promoted to us with a smiley face of inverted totalitarianism. And, so far we’ve accepted it all passively with little or not real resistance as if this is just the way it is, the way it has always been, and “how can I change it anyway?” We lie to ourselves to continue our lives, raise up our children, and feel good about ourselves, have dignity, and live without guilt or shame. America is an Empire without walls or has been up till Trump. American history in the 20th century has according to Francis been in a civil conflict between two very different elites based on two different kinds of organization. The dynamics of that conflict and its eventual resolution in favor of the managerial elite based on mass organizations, rather than the details of the history of the conflict, is the main subject of future society and its resolution. “Left” and “Right” are interpreted as labels that indicate these different elites and the issues over which they contested, but ideas associated with both the Left as well as the Right have proved useful in offering interpretations of the major American socio-political conflict of this century. Today, it is likely that any further conflict between managerial and bourgeois groups will no longer generate a Left-Right division in the conventional senses of those terms, but certainly there will be no shortage of conflict in the United States in the future. (Francis, KL 301) Notes:
The article is taken from: by Terence Blake Academic “normal” philosophy is much concerned with distinctions and determinations, classifications and demarcations, and rightly so. All thought is impregnated with theories and concepts, and we could not even get started if we were not already categorising and norming the world and its knowledge procedures. As remarked earlier, we already know the answer to the question “What is philosophy?” before we begin the book, the answer being “philosophy is inventing concepts”. This answer is given in the first paragraph of the book, but we are also warned that one can understand the question and the answer abstractly, as we did formerly, or concretely, as we are beginning to do so now. Formerly, one asked it, one did not stop asking it, but this [asking] was too indirect or too oblique, too artificial, too abstract (my translation) The published translation reads “It was asked before; it was always being asked, but too indirectly or obliquely; the question was too artificial, too abstract”. I explained in the previous post why I prefer to keep the active form with “one” as the subject (although “we” would also work here). Here I have interpolated “asking”, put between square brackets as it is not really necessary, to specify the reference of the demonstrative pronoun “this”, which refers to the questioning rather than the question. The translators have preferred to interpolate “question”. In our abstract knowledge of the answer we are like the novice to Zen Buddhism who wonders why they would need to meditate for years, living frugally and performing menial tasks, before they can find the answer to their koan, when anyone can buy a cheap paperback containing the “official” answers to all the major koans. In both cases the answer is useless without the long years of practice, an abstraction of merely academic interest rather than the concrete response of the whole being. Perhaps we also know the end of the book, where this answer is both maintained and sublated by the shadowy chaos or chaotic shadow of undecidability. The undecidability, in the last instance, of the different elements (concepts, sensations, and functions) and the indiscernibility of their respective disciplines that the book so painstakingly seeks to demarcate from each other is enounced quite clearly in the last sentence of the book (page 218): It is here that concepts, sensations, and functions become undecidable, at the same time as philosophy, art, and science become indiscernible, as if they shared the same shadow that extends itself across their different nature and constantly accompanies them. This shadow is present unannounced at the beginning of the book and we need to keep it in mind as we read. Philosophy is cinematography, and the question of lighting, of light and shadow is all-important. The question is do Deleuze and Guattari get the lighting right in this final book?, do they illuminate the scene, the characters, the surroundings with the appropriate interplay of light and dark in every shot? (We should not forget that the French word “plan” in “plan d’immanence” is usually translated as plan or plane, but is also used in the cinema books with the third sense of “shot”). This question is still an open one for me. To even begin to answer the question we must look into the shadows and ask “when is a concept not a concept?”, or rather “when is a concept a non-concept?”. In other words we must ask the shadow question that “constantly accompanies” the enlightened question of “what is philosophy?”. We must also, and at the same time, ask “what is non-philosophy?” The article is taken from: by Himanshu Damle Markowitz portfolio theory explicitly observes that portfolio managers are not (expected) utility maximisers, as they diversify, and offers the hypothesis that a desire for reward is tempered by a fear of uncertainty. This model concludes that all investors should hold the same portfolio, their individual risk-reward objectives are satisfied by the weighting of this ‘index portfolio’ in comparison to riskless cash in the bank, a point on the capital market line. The slope of the Capital Market Line is the market price of risk, which is an important parameter in arbitrage arguments. Merton had initially attempted to provide an alternative to Markowitz based on utility maximisation employing stochastic calculus. He was only able to resolve the problem by employing the hedging arguments of Black and Scholes, and in doing so built a model that was based on the absence of arbitrage, free of turpe-lucrum. That the prescriptive statement “it should not be possible to make sure profits”, is a statement explicit in the Efficient Markets Hypothesis and in employing an Arrow security in the context of the Law of One Price. Based on these observations, we conject that the whole paradigm for financial economics is built on the principle of balanced reciprocity. In order to explore this conjecture we shall examine the relationship between commerce and themes in Pragmatic philosophy. Specifically, we highlight Robert Brandom’s (Making It Explicit Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment) position that there is a pragmatist conception of norms – a notion of primitive correctnesses of performance implicit in practice that precludes and are presupposed by their explicit formulation in rules and principles. The ‘primitive correctnesses’ of commercial practices was recognised by Aristotle when he investigated the nature of Justice in the context of commerce and then by Olivi when he looked favourably on merchants. It is exhibited in the doux-commerce thesis, compare Fourcade and Healey’s contemporary description of the thesis Commerce teaches ethics mainly through its communicative dimension, that is, by promoting conversations among equals and exchange between strangers, with Putnam’s description of Habermas’ communicative action based on the norm of sincerity, the norm of truth-telling, and the norm of asserting only what is rationally warranted …[and] is contrasted with manipulation (Hilary Putnam The Collapse of the Fact Value Dichotomy and Other Essays) There are practices (that should be) implicit in commerce that make it an exemplar of communicative action. A further expression of markets as centres of communication is manifested in the Asian description of a market brings to mind Donald Davidson’s (Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective) argument that knowledge is not the product of a bipartite conversations but a tripartite relationship between two speakers and their shared environment. Replacing the negotiation between market agents with an algorithm that delivers a theoretical price replaces ‘knowledge’, generated through communication, with dogma. The problem with the performativity that Donald MacKenzie (An Engine, Not a Camera_ How Financial Models Shape Markets) is concerned with is one of monism. In employing pricing algorithms, the markets cannot perform to something that comes close to ‘true belief’, which can only be identified through communication between sapient humans. This is an almost trivial observation to (successful) market participants, but difficult to appreciate by spectators who seek to attain ‘objective’ knowledge of markets from a distance. To appreciate the relevance to financial crises of the position that ‘true belief’ is about establishing coherence through myriad triangulations centred on an asset rather than relying on a theoretical model. Shifting gears now, unless the martingale measure is a by-product of a hedging approach, the price given by such martingale measures is not related to the cost of a hedging strategy therefore the meaning of such ‘prices’ is not clear. If the hedging argument cannot be employed, as in the markets studied by Cont and Tankov (Financial Modelling with Jump Processes), there is no conceptual framework supporting the prices obtained from the Fundamental Theorem of Asset Pricing. This lack of meaning can be interpreted as a consequence of the strict fact/value dichotomy in contemporary mathematics that came with the eclipse of Poincaré’s Intuitionism by Hilbert’s Formalism and Bourbaki’s Rationalism. The practical problem of supporting the social norms of market exchange has been replaced by a theoretical problem of developing formal models of markets. These models then legitimate the actions of agents in the market without having to make reference to explicitly normative values. The Efficient Market Hypothesis is based on the axiom that the market price is determined by the balance between supply and demand, and so an increase in trading facilitates the convergence to equilibrium. If this axiom is replaced by the axiom of reciprocity, the justification for speculative activity in support of efficient markets disappears. In fact, the axiom of reciprocity would de-legitimise ‘true’ arbitrage opportunities, as being unfair. This would not necessarily make the activities of actual market arbitrageurs illicit, since there are rarely strategies that are without the risk of a loss, however, it would place more emphasis on the risks of speculation and inhibit the hubris that has been associated with the prelude to the recent Crisis. These points raise the question of the legitimacy of speculation in the markets. In an attempt to understand this issue Gabrielle and Reuven Brenner identify the three types of market participant. ‘Investors’ are preoccupied with future scarcity and so defer income. Because uncertainty exposes the investor to the risk of loss, investors wish to minimise uncertainty at the cost of potential profits, this is the basis of classical investment theory. ‘Gamblers’ will bet on an outcome taking odds that have been agreed on by society, such as with a sporting bet or in a casino, and relates to de Moivre’s and Montmort’s ‘taming of chance’. ‘Speculators’ bet on a mis-calculation of the odds quoted by society and the reason why speculators are regarded as socially questionable is that they have opinions that are explicitly at odds with the consensus: they are practitioners who rebel against a theoretical ‘Truth’. This is captured in Arjun Appadurai’s argument that the leading agents in modern finance believe in their capacity to channel the workings of chance to win in the games dominated by cultures of control . . . [they] are not those who wish to “tame chance” but those who wish to use chance to animate the otherwise deterministic play of risk [quantifiable uncertainty]”. In the context of Pragmatism, financial speculators embody pluralism, a concept essential to Pragmatic thinking and an antidote to the problem of radical uncertainty. Appadurai was motivated to study finance by Marcel Mauss’ essay Le Don (The Gift), exploring the moral force behind reciprocity in primitive and archaic societies and goes on to say that the contemporary financial speculator is “betting on the obligation of return”, and this is the fundamental axiom of contemporary finance. David Graeber (Debt The First 5,000 Years) also recognises the fundamental position reciprocity has in finance, but where as Appadurai recognises the importance of reciprocity in the presence of uncertainty, Graeber essentially ignores uncertainty in his analysis that ends with the conclusion that “we don’t ‘all’ have to pay our debts”. In advocating that reciprocity need not be honoured, Graeber is not just challenging contemporary capitalism but also the foundations of the civitas, based on equality and reciprocity. The origins of Graeber’s argument are in the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1836 John Stuart Mill defined political economy as being concerned with [man] solely as a being who desires to possess wealth, and who is capable of judging of the comparative efficacy of means for obtaining that end. In Principles of Political Economy With Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy, Mill defended Thomas Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population, which focused on scarcity. Mill was writing at a time when Europe was struck by the Cholera pandemic of 1829–1851 and the famines of 1845–1851 and while Lord Tennyson was describing nature as “red in tooth and claw”. At this time, society’s fear of uncertainty seems to have been replaced by a fear of scarcity, and these standards of objectivity dominated economic thought through the twentieth century. Almost a hundred years after Mill, Lionel Robbins defined economics as “the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses”. Dichotomies emerge in the aftermath of the Cartesian revolution that aims to remove doubt from philosophy. Theory and practice, subject and object, facts and values, means and ends are all separated. In this environment ex cathedra norms, in particular utility (profit) maximisation, encroach on commercial practice. In order to set boundaries on commercial behaviour motivated by profit maximisation, particularly when market uncertainty returned after the Nixon shock of 1971, society imposes regulations on practice. As a consequence, two competing ethics, functional Consequential ethics guiding market practices and regulatory Deontological ethics attempting stabilise the system, vie for supremacy. It is in this debilitating competition between two essentially theoretical ethical frameworks that we offer an explanation for the Financial Crisis of 2007-2009: profit maximisation, not speculation, is destabilising in the presence of radical uncertainty and regulation cannot keep up with motivated profit maximisers who can justify their actions through abstract mathematical models that bare little resemblance to actual markets. An implication of reorienting financial economics to focus on the markets as centres of ‘communicative action’ is that markets could become self-regulating, in the same way that the legal or medical spheres are self-regulated through professions. This is not a ‘libertarian’ argument based on freeing the Consequential ethic from a Deontological brake. Rather it argues that being a market participant entails restricting norms on the agent such as sincerity and truth telling that support knowledge creation, of asset prices, within a broader objective of social cohesion. This immediately calls into question the legitimacy of algorithmic/high- frequency trading that seems an anathema in regard to the principles of communicative action. The article is taken from:
by Arran James
In Mark Fisher’s talk he repeated the recent intervention made by the Institute for Precarious Consciousness where it states that we have moved from a world of boredom to one of anxiety. Mark was quick to add that he felt that it isn’t so much that boredom has disappeared, as that today we can say that everything is boring but no one is bored. This is a formulation that really struck me. In this statement boredom appears detached from its usual understanding as an emotional condition, a state one can or can’t be inside of, and as such is also uncoupled from its phenomenological understanding. A stimulus without a response, the boring has no subject that it bores down and into. Why? How is this possible?
Fast war
In the introductory section of his talk Mark placed two “speeds” beside one another. Mark doesn’t deny the idea that we live at an accelerated pace, that the rhythms of everyday life have been pushed into overdrive, and that we therefore race to keep up with ourselves, with the demands placed on us by work, social media and a consumerism that isn’t limited to the closing time of the local shop or the high street store. This is the accelerationism of Virilio, the acceleration that is tied to the dromological study of speeds, the analysis that places technology at the centre of history (the engine is the engine of history), and which proclaims that wars are won by leaps in speed. It is the same accelerationism of Bifo’s cybertemporality that punishes the limits of organic information processing: semiocapital, capital become units and streams of data, informational products, financial signs, all of which move at a speed that is always approaching the speed of light, the speed of thought, an electrical speed, outpaces the capacities of the human brain. And not just in terms of its speed but also in terms of its volume. Everyday life is too fast for us to keep up with. “There isn’t enough time in the day” is still a common exacerbated cry in an age when we are surrounded by machines apparently designed to liberate time.
Virilio is one of our most important philosophers, not least for his early recognition of the importance of speed and his analysis of the acceleration of everyday life. For Virilio the speeding up of everyday life is driven by the speeding up of our technologies. Indeed, Virilio begins by staking his concerns in received Marxist wisdom as early as Speed and Politics in which he develops the idea that the transition from Feudalism to capitalism was driven by technomilitary concerns rather than purely economic ones, and he is keen to stress that the bourgeoisie would have been nothing without the military class- what Bifo today speaks of as “the warrior”. First it is the military who take a territory and hold it, and it is for reasons of defence that the territory forms itself into an enclosure, a bordered space that is internally policed as it is defended from the externalities of strangers. This policing is necessary when industrialisation calls on a mass migration to the great centres of production where the factories had been erected and hungrily awaited the swarm of living labour that would set them and keep them in motion- and this is in part the continuation of a much older policy of protecting the rich from the masses. Part of what marks the bourgeoisie as the bourgeoisie was its ability to maintain itself in permanent dwellings, to have a settled home, and so to be marked off from the workers who would be lodged in temporary dwellings or- in the case of infrastructure projects- would be, and remain, largely mobile.
At the same time the bourgeoise was thus able to solidify itself as a propertied class via the ownership of land which in contrast to the emergent proletariat secured it to a particular territory in order to allow for fixed property. Such property could be held by deed in order to act as a source of valorisation in itself via rent, and as a form of transgeneration transmission of wealth and right. Virilio sees this economic distinction of bourgeoisie and proletariat as also a spatial one: the bourgeoisie are able to domesticate the proletariat by keeping it dependent upon its property at a distance from it. We see this continued today wherever we find gated communities and favelas; the estates of the rich and the housing estates of the poor; the affluence of home owners and the capacity it gives for both philanthropic and abject gestures towards the homeless, who today are not even so much as allowed to appear. Accordingly, ‘the political triumph of the bourgeois revolutions consists of spreading the state of siege of the communal city machine…’ (39). Virilio generalises these ideas about hold over a territory by military means to put forward the provocative idea that
The state’s power is, therefore, only secondarily power organised by one class to oppress another. More materially it is the polis, the police, in other words highway surveillance, insofar as since the dawn of the bourgeois revolution, the political discourse has been…confusing social order with the control of traffic (of people, of goods), and revolution, revolt, with traffic jams, illegal parking, multiple crashes, collisions (39).
Very rapidly and schematically we have gone through a central idea in Virilio’s history: class society emerges as a result of a confluence between the military and the bourgeoisie centring on the conquest of territory and logistical control of the movement of bodies. At root we’re talking about the command of mobility and immobility in which the bourgeoisie and the military class together determine who moves, where, and when. This is clearly true of the contemporary petrostate and the larger political bodies that have swallowed the deterritorialised nation into their phagocytic chambers. These bodies are entirely concerned with the movement of populations- they must legislate for, allow, track, monitor, and count the movement of workers from city to city, nation to nation, state to state, state to union and so on; they must even encourage the migratory flows of workers between production centres to ensure their survival and the survival of those for whose benefit they exist as final protectors of private property; consumer products have to be allowed to circulate; resources must be shipped, hauled, organised, dispatched and delivered; for all this must exist roads, water and air routes, entire infrastructures, and organisations that exist specifically to police the various forms of access to those infrastructures. Add to this the infosphere and the circulation of data and metadata and the new infrastructures being made and remade to support it. Power is Virilio is quickly seen to be all about the circulation of all these bodies and the control of these infrastructures. In his later works Virilio will link this to surveillance in a much more total sense, approaching what Foucault calls the panopticon in positing a society made transparent to the eye of power. At root then; movement, and movement implies speed.
The infrastructural attention Virilio pays here is important. For him wars are won by speed. Immobility is the secret of fortification. Wars have been won and lost based on the speed of navies. Who can identify who first determines who gets the first shot away. The rifle is faster than the spear- a crucial part of the military aspect of colonialism- and the machine gun is faster than either. Weapons of speed conquer distance rendering territories smaller, more compact, less meaningful, transforming them into interruptions to be overcome. The promise of laser weapons presents the ultimate fantasy in which the moment of the trigger pull is the moment of the target’s death; and why not eradicate the trigger? Couldn’t a neuromodulation device inserted into the brain of the soldier mean that few seconds of delay could be eradicated too? Based on these observations we could suggest a formulation: the speeding up of everyday life is a military phenomena.
Of course, the use of technology isn’t to be confined to the military complex. Technological innovation may be accelerated in times of war but it is also increasingly the domain that the expansion of capital depends on. The emergence of technocapitalism has seen greater investment in biotechnologies, neuromodulation, and the rise of research oriented cognitive work, supported as ever by an industrial capitalism that has been subject to an aesthetic of disappearance. Against Virilio’s insistence on the centrality of technology we can say that technology has always been primarily linked to production, that war has in fact always been about capitalism in one way or another- such as the capture of natural resources or of a surplus population that could then be fed into the valorisation process, or the “shock doctrine” effect of fucking up enemy’s infrastructures just so ally corporations can sweep onto the scene and tidy up, at a cost. One way or another, we’re talking about some kind of primitive accumulation. Capitalism may not have invented war but it has certainly always needed it. For this reason it isn’t quite right to call the speed-up of everyday life a military phenomena. In fact, when we consider war and economy together we can only conclude with their combination in the formula of class war. Virilio addresses this theme when he writes that
The economic war that is currently ravaging the earth is but the slow phase of declared war, of a rapid and brief assault to come, for this is what perpetuates, in non-combat, military power as class-power (86).
Military power and class power are all but identified in Virilio, even if he misses the point that the former has been sunk into the latter. It isn’t that military power disguises itself as class power, that the military class engages in the subterfuge of hiding among the bourgeoisie, but that the bourgeoisie brings the military into its fold as part of the productive apparatus. The economic war is thus the slow war that is interrupted by rapid phases that act as stimulants to the metabolism of segments of the global market. Any other way around and we’d be submerged in a weird idealism wherein there was but one eternal war against humanity carried out by some more or less invariant military power.
What does this mean for my concern here? I’ve drifted a ways away from boredom. Firstly it means that there is a war being conducted, a class war, and that it is being conducted via the control of the movement of bodies. In my essay on the society of stimulation I tried to show that this war isn’t just conducted at the macroscale but also at the microscale of molecules, of neurotransmitters, of drugs and of physiological excitations of a variety of technological kinds. Caffeine and amphetamines, the agitation of the screen, the neurostimulators of psychiatry and medicine: all stimulants that produce hyperarousal in our bodies. But right at the start I said that Mark also discussed a second kind of speed. This speed works in the opposite direction to the speed up that operates at the level of bodies and their cellular constitution. There is a cultural slow-down accompanying the speed-up of everyday life.
Slow war
As the rhythms that structure experience get faster, innovation in the sphere of culture drops. We get repetitions: the faddish return of previous cultural obsessions, fashions, musical forms. Retro dominates dress codes- or the vapidity of normcore steps in as a refusal of retro without the ability to think anything new, an admission of the blankness of a creativity sick of its own sluggish incapacities. Popular music is trapped inside a time warp with the return of boybands and girlbands, the blandness of the majority of hiphop, the staleness of indie music and rock, the proliferation of new electronic genres that play on their forebears without announcing anything really innovative and which go so far as to declare their thwarted desire to be genuinely novel (“future-garage”; “post-dubstep”). We reach the exhaustion of our cultural imagination. We gave up. Everything we consume is a nothing; there is no cultural nourishment; no autonomy of art; no counter-culture.
Virilio also has a term for this phenomena: the meeting of the acceleration of everyday life with a slowdown elsewhere is what he calls polar inertia:
When a businessman travels from Paris to new York, new York-Paris, Paris-new York, new-York Paris by Concorde, he begins to experience the situation of polar inertia. This new form of sedentariness is the active tendency in technology. Sedentariness in the instant of absolute speed. It’s no longer a sedentariness of non-movement, it’s the opposite…I think its a desire for inertia, a desire for ubiquity, instantaneousness (1997, 69).
Virilio’s example is Howard Hughes, a man with identical apartments all over the world who was served the same meal everywhere he went. And we are all Howard Hughes now. Or, lacking his pathologies as much as his wealth, we all live in this polar inertia he pioneered. Everywhere I go I can be on youtube, twitter, facebook. I can travel around the world and never leave my favourite places. We travel, like the laser weapon, at approaching the speed of light. Skype conversations take us around the world, conquering geographical distances, even as the very materiality of that exchange depends upon an intensification of the geological of that geography. The disavowal of the geological, the geographical, and of separating distances. But this is hyperbole. It is an incompleted system. We don’t really live in the instant. At least not yet. But we are captivated by the instant, and there is a compulsive libidinous attachment to the technologies of inertia. As Mark Fisher puts it:
The consequence is a strange kind of existential state, in which exhaustion bleeds into insomniac overstimulation (no matter how tired we are, there is still time for one more click) and enjoyment and anxiety co-exist (the urge to check emails, for instance, is both something we must do for work and a libidinal compulsion, a psychoanalytic drive that is never satisfied no matter how many messages we receive). The fact that the smart phone makes cyberspace available practically anywhere at anytime means that boredom (or at least the old style, ‘Fordist’ boredom) has effectively been eliminated from social life. Yet boredom, like death, posed existential challenges that are far more easily deferred in the always-on cyberspatial environment. Ultimately, communicative capitalism does not vanquish boredom so much as it “sublates” it, seeming to destroy it only to preserve it in a new synthesis.
The society of stimulation is a class war waged at the level of our nervous systems. And it does something perverse to us. Just like the capitalist seeks to accumulate value, we seek to accumulate data. Usually meaningless data. A torrent that we can drown in. There is a desire for polar inertia even if it hasn’t been realised. In part this is due to the massified individualisation of our uses of social media. We synchronise around this shit- the affective territory becoming shared, flat, boring. But there is no boredom. We don’t experience the boringness of this shit. We don’t have the opportunity to experience boredom. If there is no subject of boredom it is because that subject has converted into an anxious subject who must perform her safety behaviours: check the email; check twitter; update status; download this; watch that; look at pictures on buzzfeed; the perfect application of the psychiatric principle of distraction. In psychiatry distraction is supposed to remove the psychotic, the depressive, the anxious from focussing on their symptoms and from ruminating on the causes of those symptoms. In other words, distraction is an attempt to direct perception away from the real so that once it has been trained correctly it can be returned to reality.
Electricity
Boredom was about time. Our time is full. Lefebvre wrote that the media specialised in filling our time, applying a rhythm to it, but today those rhythms fall apart, synchronisation being matched by the protective obsessive-compulsivity of checking, of updating, 24/7. Time breaks down even as it is flattened. We share the same atomised temporality, the same empty time, the same empty lives. Or this is what the abolition of boredom attempts to do. Capitalism is boring but no one is bored. What does it mean? It means that everything happens so quickly- at the speed of information- and under the physiological coupling to the machine that has rendered us addicts to phenomena like social media via the conditioning of necessity introduced by work. It means that we don’t have time to feel the emptiness of our time- of our lives. As the saying goes: work, consume, die.
Accelerationism doesn’t seem to propose a return to boredom, and rightly indicates that there can be no going back. Accelerationism seems to propose a new use of the technologies of speed that drive and are driven by capitalism. It also proposes that we repurpose the existing infrastructure- that we keep our smartphones and our computers and all the rest of it. So if boredom is out, what is it that is going to rouse us back to asking the big questions, what is going to help us to give up on survival and attempt to reanimate our moribund culture, our apparently comatose politics? It seems like the answer to that is accelerationism itself. Accelerationism seems intended to jolt us. It is a profoundly anti-depressive political gesture. It wants us to give up on conservatisms and protectionisms. If reflection has been cancelled then why do we keep trying to reflect? If capitalism is global why the hell are you acting locally? If the challenges exist on the scale of hyperobjects then why do you think molecules will win? Why do you keep distracting yourself with so much bullshit? You’re bored and you just don’t fucking no it. From the perspective of boredom, accelerationism is a kind of assault to the political, a slap in the face.
Fundamentally, the question of boredom leads me to think about accelerationism as a kind of electroshock therapy from the depressive body of the left. It is the political use of stimulation torouse us to challenge the hegemony of those who monopolise stimulation as a technique for control. Accelerationism thus has very little to do with speeding up or slowing down as such. Accelerationism is thus also an attempt to shock some life back into what it sees as a comatose revolutionary movement. The question of whether these concerns are fair belong elsewhere.
The article is taken from:
by Arran James Last night at the Glasgow School of Art Mark Fisher took the stage to discuss accelerationism. I have to say that up until last night I had given only a passing interest to accelerationism, seeing it as not linked to my reading in antipsychiatry. But for all that its necessary to focus our readings it is myopic to act as if something like accelerationism can be passed by, as if it registered no effect on the left at all. The relevance of accelerationism first of all comes from its success in circulating around left tendencies, in appearing in different contexts, and in stirring us on the left, on both sides of an increasingly spurious divide between anarchism, autonomism and traditional Marxism. What follows is less a report on the specifics of what Mark talked about, although that’ll be in there, but more my first attempt at really engaging with accelerationism, something I’ve been reticent to do until now as I’ve largely felt that accelerationism has functioned as an intellectual meme. But this is probably the strength and weakness of the term. As it spreads it everywhere forces a kind of decision. It seems impossible for most people to discuss accelerationism without endorsing it a a tendency or dismissing it as an irrelevance. I’m most interested in the stakes involved in this decision and in how accelerationism really operates as a force that it has become impossible to be indifferent to. The double-bind of desireAmong the most interesting aspects of Mark’s talk last night was his continued insistence on desire. Its here that I think it is impossible for someone involved in a renewed anti-psychiatry can first connect up with accelerationism. First and foremost psychiatry operates according to the regulation of desires and behaviours. One is mad if one’s desires are unacceptable and/or if one’s actions betray aberrant desires. This is something that anti-psychiatrists have always emphasised. Foucault is perhaps the clearest on this question in his interrogation of proto-psychiatric techniques and strategies that constituted the therapeutic battle between doctor and patient. The first is that these four elements introduce a number of questions into psychiatric practice that stubbornly recur throughout the history of psychiatry. First, they introduce the question of dependence on and submission to the doctor as someone who, for the patient, holds an inescapable power. Second, they also introduce the question, or practice rather, of confession, anamnesis, of the account and recognition of oneself. This also introduces into asylum practice the procedure by which all madness is posed the question of the secret and unacceptable desire that really makes it exist as madness. And finally, fourth, they introduce, of course, the problem of money, of financial compensation; the problem of how to provide for oneself when one is mad and how to establish the system of exchange within madness which will enable the mad person’s existence to be financed. For now I’ll simply assert my agreement with Foucault on this point, although I hope to expand on it elsewhere. We could perhaps quickly state that the question of madness, of identifying mad subjects, always passes through the question of desire, of what it is the mad person wants and what actions and beliefs they are invested in, what libidinous attachments they have formed, half-formed, wrenched themselves away from or had shattered in front of them. This is part of what Foucault will isolate in the confessional apparatus of Christianity that will again be seen in the psychoanalytic confessional: one must articulate one’s desire before the cure can be effected. This is still seen in today’s psychiatry among the new hysterical subjects with the proliferation of bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder and anorexia nervosa. These diagnoses codify experiences of aberrations in desire first and foremost. The so-called new symptom is circulates more around the question of desire than it does cognition, and this is perhaps proven by the disappearance of the term “desire” from psychiatric literature. Instead we see the accumulation of theories about impulse control, motivational deficits, obsessive-compulsions. With this is the deployment of procedures for the manipulation of these psychological constructs, chief among them the motivational interviewing techniques and the mindfulness based protocols that seek to attach subjects to proper desires via “values work”, and which may remain open to repurposing among radicals. The question of desire doesn’t just circulate around madness, although this is one of the aspects in which the engineering of desires by capitalism effects casualities. We can talk of psychic wounds when we talk about madness, but we could just as well talk about libidinal wounds. Capitalism effects double-binds. Its not so much that there is this injunction to Enjoy! It is more that there is the injunction to Enjoy Responsibly! The command is issues at once to enjoy but also to isolate a limit that is never explicitly specified. Libidinal subjects are then forced into the situation of enjoyment in which enjoyment becomes an ethical moment without any existing rule of thumb. What is the limit? Where is the limit? Does one transgress it? Is that enjoyment? The double bind is a perverse command that undoes itself, dissolves itself by doubling back on itself, the second fork in the injunction sweeping back to cancel the first. Enjoyment becomes a duty and a predicament, a matrix for anxiety, a milieu in which pleasure and distress are comingled without the masochistic sensibility of the symptom that constitutes jouissance. And here we see the other side of madness, its disavowed side, the proliferation of addictions that the Lacanians have so little to say about. Addiction seems to me the natural response to the double bind of capitalist pleasure wherein desire is tortured by a simultaneous stimulation and caution against its own stimulation. A hermeneutics of suspicion of one’s own desires is generated just as the capacity for desire to be limited is lost: the compulsive indulgences in heroin, cocaine, alcohol, sex, pornography are partly the result of this tortured desire. Maybe the best example of this recently is the production of self-limiting gambling machines. These machines have the built in capacity to limit the amount of money the gambling body is able to put at stake- either by limiting the amount of the bet or by refusing to go on after a certain amount of money has been lost. But the ingenious thing about these machines is that it is the gambler herself that decides whether to activate this limit and if they do it is the gambler who decides where to set that limit. The responsibility for their hyperstimulated desire is fed-back onto the gambling subject. After all the inducements to the desire to gamble, all the promises of the win, the exploitation of the gambler’s fallacy (a curious quirk of subjectivation that results in the idea: “I didn’t loss; I almost won”), all the investment and crafting of environments, linguistic prompts, libidinal couplings the gambling industry is able to quit itself of any and all responsibility. It is the gambler, the addict, who is to blame, we offered them the chance to stop. It seems to me that this double-bind both posits and erases the pleasure principle so that its function as limit is lost. If for Lacan the subject of desire attempted to transgress the limit to reach jouissance then in this situation there is nothing to transgress, only a search without end, a bottomless frustration. And this only pushes the compulsivity of pleasure further. It is as if the body bent over their tablet or smartphone, listlessly scrolling through pornography, Buzzfeed or Facebook (what is the difference?) is engaged less in a genuine pleasure seeking or the avoidance of actual suffering, and more in the attempt to escape from the anxiogenic double-bind by throwing itself head long into it. At the core of this kind of a-symptom is the obsessive-compulsive need to engage in safety behaviours that prevent some unknown terrible dreadful thing from happening. Maybe this serves as a model for capitalist consumption as such: consumerism was/is less to do with exchange-values or symbolic-values and more to do with an impossible search for psychic survival, the consumer objet petit a translating itself into the magical object that will prevent subjective collapse and psychological exhaustion. It should come to us as no surprise that as this is occurring we are also experiencing a return of macrofascism. In Kingdom Come Ballard has the psychiatrist Maxted calmly report that Consumerism creates huge unconscious needs that only fascism can satisfy. If anything, fascism is the form that consumerism takes when it opts for elective madness. The stakes that the accelerationist left is thus betting on are high. The accelerationist manifesto opens with a list of some of the artifacts of material nihilism such as ecological disaster and resource conflicts, but also lurking more immediately is the return of the mass psychopathology of fascism. Fascism returns during crises, austerity, because the magic ritual of consumption is no longer enough, a bunker consciousness takes shape that is threatened by exteriorities and interior corruptions, in short when bodies become aware of their vulnerable condition, their proximity to corporeal dying (rather than existential being-towards-death), and they find themselves confronted with soothing voices that assure them they can be kept safe, made invulnerable and unkillable again. The abject failure of the left to occupy the ideological space opened by the demise of neoliberalism is what opened the space for fascism’s return into popular discourse. If accelerationism declares the end of the death of grand narratives, this too is out of necessity. Abundance and scarcityBut we needn’t go to that far to talk about desire. Capitalism is a means for the emancipation of desire and its channelling into the commodity-form, this is the lesson of Deleuze and Guattari among others. Desire and reason have been paired against each other, placed as antagonists or, as in Hume, as two forces that outpace each other such that one must guide the other. For Deleuze capitalism is itself a kind of madness, a madness in a quite traditional sense, in a mode that preexists the nosological carving up on madness into various psychoses and neuroses: it is a mania. A generic madness. But it is also rational. Or at least it has its rationality. Everything about capitalism is rational, except capital…A stock market is a perfectly rational mechanism, you can understand it,learn how it works; capitalists know how to use it; and yet what a delirium, it’s mad…It’s just like theology: everything about it is quite rational—if you accept sin, the immaculate conception, and the incarnation, which are themselves irrational elements. Capital is a delerium and its presuppositions are akin to those of theology. These days Bifo is keen to tell us that economics is not a science and here Deleuze makes it clear why: despite its own rationality, its own intelligibility, and its own space of reasons in which its justifications and discourses can circulate, and which is populated by all kinds of intensities, challenges, duels and so forth, there is nonetheless the molten core of a delerium at its foundation. Economics is the rationality of an irrationality, the attempted intelligibility of madness in the same sense that Laing gave to his social phenomenology of schizophrenia. And it is desire that is this irrationality. Capitalism understands desire and this is its success. To challenge capital at the level of the rational- at the level of interest- is already to give it too much, if one is also not working to decolonise the unconscious libidinal investments that serve to couple bodies to capital forms. And here I’m getting one of Mark’s central points about how he regards accelerationism: it is impossible to challenge capitalism in the domain of desire. I always go back to the 2011 riots in England on this point. These were undoubtedly political riots, triggered by the state assassination of Mark Duggan and the police’s glib dismissal of his family, as well as a rising antagonism towards an increasingly hostile and self-assuredly invulnerable police force. But at the time everyone asked: why burn down your own neighbourhoods? Why go looting for the latest trainers, for flat screen TVs and gadgets. The answer is obvious: because people want those things. They have been induced to want those things. And why not? They’re fucking good things to have. The answer to the looting is desire, the desire that capitalism itself had produced in the social unconscious of its consumer subjects. And why burn down the buildings? Well, why the fuck not? It may seem simplistic but when desire and rage are released what you get is precisely this kind of libidinous explosion, a thirst for destruction, a chaotic upsurge of the irrational that is also implicitly a demand for neighbourhoods worth preserving against the fires. I’m tempted to talk about Bakunin’s creative destruction. Its also tempting to argue that the destruction of parts of London by those who live in London is a form of self-harm and that self-harm ultimately involves the corporeal communication of that which can’t be parsed into the linguistic dimensions of symbolic thought, which in fact refuses the numbing negotiated bartering of positions of an interpollating agencies assumed authority to ask their complaints and grievances, which, in the dizziness of a kind of derealisation of subjectivity, seeks to reaffirm its own existence. The danger of this is that is risks lapsing into the kind of insurrectionalist immediacy that accelerationism takes as one of its targets. However, isn’t the point of something like accelerationism precisely to harness this energy? We can’t compete against capitalism in terms of desire, but is desire not exactly one of those dimensions of capitalism that is deserving of acceleration? But there is something in this conjunction of the obsessive-compulsivity and the libidinal explosions of riot and insurrection. One leads to the other. Capitalism generates all the luxuries we could want, and yet we’re not happy. The reasons for this are manifold but chief among them is that inseparable from capitalism is the wage-relation: we’re condemned to work for the very luxuries that we produce as living labour. Economic exploitation produces the conditions bedrock conditions for misery within capital by producing the society we know to be a class society. The fact of work produces a society split among workers on the one hand, and bosses and owners on the other hand. We could talk endlessly about the mutations this has taken in recent decades with the processes of the recomposition of labour but the kernal of my concern here is with the libidinous contradiction that is incited. We still live according to the economic reason that maintains our enslavement to necessity, to the domain of material want. This plays itself out in terms of desire in the situation where we produce all the goods we want but our access to them is limited by the fact of our wages, their precarity and artificial depression. This deprivation takes place in an era of unrestrained wealth. The luxury items the London rioters had been induced into wanting and wanted because they are desirable were seized, short-circuiting the wage in a refusal to acknowedge exchange as the mechanism whereby we get a hold of the objects of our desires. The looters knew what they wanted and taking the oppotunity smashed the windows and grabbed them. In a sense this criminal act is to act as if private property were already abolished in a way that recalls the practice of proletarian shopping of the Italian autonomous movement. The situation is best summarised by Murray Bookchin- a definite candidate for the name “accelerationist anarchist”- when he writes that Today, however, capitalism is a parasite on the future, a parasite that survives on the technology and resources of freedom. The industrial capitalism of Marx’s time organised its commodity relations around a prevailing system of material scarcity; the state capitalism of our time organises its commodity relations around a prevailing system of material abundance. A century ago, scarcity had to be endured; today it has to be enforced- hence the importance of the state in the present era. If Mark Fisher is right that we can’t compete with capitalism in terms of desire it is because there is nothing communism could offer in material term that capitalism can’t already. What communism can offer is generalised access to the sphere of abundance that capitalism restricts and inhibits. This inhibition isn’t just about access- it isn’t just that private property and the commodity restrict what we can have– it is also about desire. As soon as we desire to have that which the capitalist can have, as soon as we want the luxurious life that the rich have access enjoy, we are told that we can’t have it unless we work for it and receive the right as our meritocratic reward. So much bullshit. This is because capitalism liberates desire just as it liberates productive forces, but it only does so in order to re-constrain them, every deterritorialisation being accompanied by a necessary reterritorialisation. In Murray Bookchin’s Post-scarcity anarchism we see similar concerns to those of the accelerationists in relation to the productive forces, especially in relation to technoscience (in fact, I can’t help but see a lot of the accelerationist debate as a rehash of the debate between Bookchin and the anarcho-Primitivists). We also see it in terms of desire. Our desires have to be captured by the circuitry of work-wage-commodity exchange. So this is the libidinous contradiction: capital liberates itself by capturing desire, by harnessing desire as its engine. Desire is the incited, engineered, managed, brought into the rational framework of an irrational system. Machinic enslavement or technolibidinous liberation?In experiences of madness we see this all the more explicitly. Desire is managed pharmacologically. It is incited by stimulants and damped down by mood stabilisers like Sodium Valporate and Lithium. With the inaugeration of the age of neuromodulation desire can now even be controlled electronically. The use of transcranial stimulation in the treatment of addictions via neuroelectric therapy actually cancels the experience of the addictive craving dead: the electronics of desire can simply be turned off. For me this places desire at the centre of politics in a way that differs from the libidinous politics of the 1990s and 2000s. Today desire is under threat and must be reappropriated from capital before it becomes fully programmable in the hideous vision of a totally administered brain. If neuroelectric treatment can currently be used as a consent-based therapy for addictions, how long is it before squeamish ethical questions are pushed aside as technological develop tends to do so that it can be used by remote for the management of populations. Perhaps this is a dystopian dream, but it is one worth bearing in mind. Against such a total machinic enslavement of desire we have to posit desire’s autonomy and to accelerate the processes that intensify and liberate desire from its fetters. Perhaps pornography functions as the perfect neurotic machinic enslavement of desire at the moment. Pornography shares the infrastructure of the attention economy, distributed across bodies, brains, eyes, cocks and cunts, as well as fibreoptics, satellite relays, circuit boards and microchips, mining operations, and so on. The reactionary critique of porn tends to conflate sexual slavery with sex work and doesn’t interest me at all. Another aspect of porno-critique that is stupid is the one that talks about porn as offering an explosive proliferation of sexual proclivities, preferences and choices and that thus opens us to a playful sexual libido that can appear in more and more ways. If this is true it is also immediately marked by management and control. Pornography isn’t just the ejaculations and performances of bodies fucking for the camera; more than anything else pornography is the categorisation and ever narrowing specification of forms of desire. Bodies fucking is fucking; bodies engaged in amateur bukakke is pornography. Porn thus returns us again to psychiatry. They share a fundamental symmetry: the identification of symptoms, their clustering together as syndromes, and their setting out in an ever expanding classificatory system. In both the example of neuroelectric therapy and pornography I think we have small scale examples of possible accelerationist programs. These technologies both act as inhibitory functions on desire, authorising it to exist in only this form and no other, at these times, under this context, under this name. The reactionary approach would be to denounce them as perversions and as destructive in their very essences. But if accelerationism is in part about reclaiming desire then it also means the repurposing of these technologies of desire. We really could use the neuroelectric technologies to stimulate desires outside of the frustrating circuits of a commodity economy, and pornography really could be a mode for the intensification of the sexual imaginary. We could hack our brains and our sexuality and use these technologies to work on desire itself: we would finally be able to take direct control of subjectivation. At first maybe on the auto-guinea pig scale of individual experimentation or in secret groups, akin to the countercultural explorations of LSD, but eventually on a mass scale. At stake here is a kind of transformation of our bodies and brains into laboratories for experimentation- the rhetoric of experimental politics giving way to a concrete biotechnological praxis that is already foreshadowed by the popularity of “cognitive enhancers” among young students, and perhaps in the black market of image-enhancing drugs among body-builders and transsexuals. It seems to me that accelerationism can thus be seen as a tendency or an orientation that forces us to decide where we stand on technology: is it a despotism of automatism or is it force for liberation? I want to refuse that choice. Its false. Technologies can be both and neither of these. My position again echoes Murray Bookchin’s point in the essay Towards A Liberatory Technology: I make no claim that technology is necessarily liberatory or consistently beneficial to man’s development. But I surely do not believe that man is destined to be enslaved by technology and technological modes of thought..On the contrary….an organic mode of life deprived of its technological component would be as nonfunctional as a man deprived of his skeleton…[technology] is literally the framework of an economy and of many social institutions. In this context I’ve suggested that there exists the possibility for a pharmaco-syndicalism. We’re the prosumers of neurotransmitters, neuroelectrical activations, and the passage and transmission of molecules in infracorporal and intercorporeal relations. Our very bodies are sites of production, just as our biological bodies belong to the productive body of capitalism. But our desires aren’t capital’s desires, our desires, if realised, would necessarily lead us to the abolition of capitalism one way or another. We’ve known since Hegel, through Lacan and everyone since then that there are no authentically “own” desires, that our desire is always based on the desire of the other, so we should feel no terror at the prospect of libido having become wrapped up with technology. The question to ask is what is the relationship? Does this technology in this circumstance enhance as a prosthetic or disable as a restraint? Today the bio-techno distinction belongs only to frightened humanists and Catholics. Today our desire is a kind of technolibido- an infrastructural unconscious that doesn’t acknowledge the distinction between humanity and machine, organic and inorganic, endogenous and exogenous. Perhaps this is part of what accelerationism is doing in the end. It recognises abundance and desire, takes them as its preconditions and so departs from the preconditions of capitalism. The history of the left is the history of responses framed in capital’s terms. Marxism, anarchism, the history of Party’s and of horizontalist networks… these are inadeuqate to the machinic present. Outmoded forms they can’t really even see the situation we’re in, let alone formuate anything but conservative defensive postures and moralistically purist refusals of engagement. Perhaps this is why Mark spoke of so many “phobic responses” to accelerationism. We have been historically conditioned to have an aversive reaction to the scales that accelerationism wants to speaks at. In its assessment of our situation, and in its insistence that we use what is to hand, and that we refuse to make a priori judgements about what is to hand, a particular approach to accelerationism seem to begin to cohere with the concerns of the postnihilist praxis discussed here. It is tempting to suggest that postnihilist praxis might be a kind of accelerationist therapeutics…but this is only a first pass at a much bigger tendency. The article is taken from:
The swirling delirium at the new /pol/ is at least 80% noise, but it includes some real intelligence (in both senses of the word), and not solely of a comedic variety. The sheer dirtiness of its signal makes it a powerful antenna, picking up on connections and information sources that tidier discussions would dismiss as pollution. This makes it especially suited to conspiracy theorizing, both inane and exotic.
While noting the importance of correction for narcissistic bias, which operates through selective attention, memorization, and (from commentators here) communication, it seems as if this blog is referenced disproportionately by the most extravagant NRx-sensitive /pol/ conspiracists. That is quite understandable. Occult philosophy, secrecy, crypsis, codes, and obscurity are insistent themes here. Xenosystems is inclined towards arcane cultural games. It identifies cryptographic developments as keys to the emerging order of the world.
The primary philosophical task of this blog is to disturb unwarranted pretensions to knowing, in the name of a Pyrrhonian inspiration. In this regard, confusion, paradox, and uncertainty are communicative outcomes to be ardently embraced.
For the purposes of this post, an exceptionally exotic /pol/ suggestion provides the opportunity to make a comparatively compact and simple point. The occasion is a web of conjecture weaving together Xenosystems and The Order of Nine Angles (O9A, ONA, or omega9alpha). In addition to the (highly-recommended) link just provided, the relevant Wikipedia entry is also extremely stimulating.
Xenosystems micro-ethics is uncomfortable with soliciting belief (or invoking expectations of trust). It is necessary to note at this point, therefore, that the following remarks are not designed to appeal to credence, but merely to add testimonial information, to be accepted or rejected at will. In the world we now enter — of “sinister dialectic” — declarations of honesty are utterly debased. However, for what (little) it is worth, these are the facts as I understand and relay them.
The O9A is not entirely new to me, but it is not a gnosis I have studied, still less deliberately aligned with. The few hours of reading I have undertaken today is by far my most intense exposure to it to date. What little I have learnt about David Myatt has not attracted me to him as a thinker or political activist, despite certain impressive characteristics (his intellect and polyglot classicism most notably). With that said:
(1) Many convergent interests are soon apparent between Outside in and the O9A (as well as a not inconsiderable number of divergences). (2) ‘We’ are both (I think) inclined to dismiss the pretensions of the individual intellect and will, which makes the possibility of connections around the back impossible to dismiss in a peremptory fashion. As one /pol/ ‘anonymous’ remarked: “why so sure that ONA would be the deepest layer, instead of just a japeful ruse?” Real connections, influences, and metaphysical roots are obscure. (3) O9A is fascinating.
The point of this post (finally) is taken directly from Aleister Crowley. In the compilation of his qabbalistic writings entitled 777 (Alphanomic equivalent of Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law, although that is surely coincidental), he makes some introductory remarks on the topic of hermeticism. My copy of the book is temporarily misplaced, so I shall gloss them here. A secret, of the kind relevant to hermeticism, is not something known and then hidden as a matter of decision, but rather something that by its very nature resists revelation. Crowley proceeds to mock charlatan occultists who treat the numerical values of the Hebrew letters as secret information, to be revealed theatrically at some appropriate stage of initiation. Let whatever can now be known, be known, as lucidly and publicly as possible. Only that is truly hermetic which hides itself. Reality is not so destitute of intrinsically hidden things — of Integral Obscurity — that we need to replenish its coffers with our tawdry discretion.
Whatever might exist, in the way of an occult bond between Outside in and the O9A, it is not one that anybody is keeping secret. To emphasize the point, I am going to include the alpha9omega document in the Resources roll here, not as the acknowledgement of a connection, but as a clear statement that this stuff is not a secret. It is, however, about secrecy — and that is interesting.
ADDED: Is there something in the water?
The article is taken from:
by Steven Craig Hickman “The ‘dominion of capital’ is an accomplished teleological catastrophe, robot rebellion, or shoggathic insurgency, through which intensively escalating instrumentality has inverted natural process into a monstrous reign of the tool.” – Nick Land, Teleoplexy: Notes on Accleration “Socialism has typically been a nostalgic diatribe against underdeveloped capitalism, finding its eschatological soap-boxes amongst the relics of precapitalist territorialities.” – Nick Land, ‘Machinic Desire’, Fanged Noumena, 340 Before I discuss Nick Land and his essay in the new #Acceleration reader I want to investigate the temporal dimension of modernity. The impact of technological change and its impact on society over the past few hundred years has been one of the central motifs of both modernity and its sociological theorists. The classic sociologists Montesquieu, Comte, Tocqueville, Marx, Pareto, Weber, and Durkheim each developed an aspect of this theme, while at the same time emphasizing different philosophical frameworks within which to expose modernity and the impact of technological change on society. But one thing is for certain all were concerned with the sources of human action and the constraints placed on it by the technology and politico-ethical dimensions of the day. One way of understanding the structure of human action and behavior is within the temporal patterns that have effected change across society in both our everyday lives, work, and politics. The temporal regimes that grew out of classical era sociology dealt with what Michael Foucault has documented so well as the disciplinary society, while in our own time of the Network Society we confront what Deleuze toward the end of his life termed Control Society.*(see notes) As Hartmut Rosa will define it: “It is not just that virtually all aspects of life can be insightfully approached from a temporal perspective, but furthermore, temporal structures connect the micro- to the macro- levels of society (i.e., our actions and orientations are coordinated and made compatible to the ‘systemic imperatives’ of modern capitalist societies through temporal norms, deadlines, and regulations.).1 Rosa differentiates between mechanical acceleration, the acceleration of social change and the accelerating pace of daily life. The process of mechanical acceleration began in the 19th century in conjunction with industrialization. His definition of social change utilizes a term that originally stems from Marxism: alienation. But Rosa’s criticism is not directed against capitalist production conditions (unlike earlier critics of industrial modernity, Rosa’s focus is not on labor), but against acceleration as a resulting meta-phenomenon. As he states it late capitalism is based on a static form of acceleration: “Run, run always faster, not to reach an objective, but to maintain the status quo, to simply remain in the same place.” Much like Paul Virilio who would realize his on conceptions of instantaneity, Rosa will tell us that as the pace of material, economic, and cultural life becomes ever faster, as we have conquered the instantaneity of information exchange and acquired the possibility of travelling at speeds hitherto unimaginable, we have the impression that nothing is moving, that we are simply walking on a treadmill. It is this form of speed that Mark Fisher as Arran James and Emund Berger in their respective posts (here and here) will relate to. Edmund proposes two different registers of time to correspond with Fisher’s two registers of speed:
This notion of an artificial time (machinic) and its natural variant (contained) in a dialectical or diacritical interplay as part of the ongoing process of our current views of boredom and anxiety are excellent notions. Rosa on the other hand will leave the conceptual nature of time to the philosophers and instead focuses on its effects it has had on the political, ethical, cultural, and social consequences—of the rupture that is produced between “classic” modernity, the modernity of “progress,” happening in a linear manner and directed towards a better time, and the “postmodernity”, in which time is no longer seen as a course moving towards a pre-determined objective, but as an instantaneous flux flowing towards a direction that remains uncertain. The idea of acceleration was born with modernity, but we can discern two great periods or two distinct sequences. The first sequence aligns with the Industrial Age and the regulatory practices instigated by the mechanistic use of clock-time and linear progression or progress, while the second issued out of late modernism and became the “timeless time” or instantaneity (Virilio) , an incessant deluge of de-territorialised flows (of capital, goods, people, ideas, as well as diseases and risks), which are springing up everywhere. Events no longer happen in sequence but simultaneously, “placing society in an eternally ephemeral state”.2 As Arran James will say of accelerationism “Fundamentally, the question of boredom leads me to think about accelerationism as a kind of electroshock therapy from the depressive body of the left. It is the political use of stimulation torouse us to challenge the hegemony of those who monopolise stimulation as a technique for control. Accelerationism thus has very little to do with speeding up or slowing down as such. Accelerationism is thus also an attempt to shock some life back into what it sees as a comatose revolutionary movement. (here)” Nick Land – Teleoplexy – Notes on Acceleration‘If there are places to which we are forbidden to go, it is because they can in truth be reached, or because they can reach us. In the end poetry is invasion and not expression’. – Nick Land Before charting the course or navigating the cartographic mappings of Landian teleoplexy one should be reminded by the cautionary note of the editors of Fanged Noumena on his writing style: “Modelled on cyberpunk, which Land recognises as a textual machine for affecting reality by intensifying the anticipation of its future, his textual experiments aim to ‘flatten’ writing onto its referent. Feeding back from the future which they ‘speculate’ into the present in which they intervene, these texts trans-valuate ‘hype’ as a positive condition to which they increasingly aspire, collapsing sci-fi into catalytic efficiency, ‘re-routing tomorrow through what its prospect […] makes today’.”4 So the myth might go: Capitalism leads to a grand mal seizure or a traumatized catastrophism set in motion by an accelerating engine of temporal regimes registered on differing nodes at invariant rates of speed: some fast, some slow; some forward, some backward; all colliding in the instantaneous moment of – hyper- (Lipovetsky), liquid- (Bauman), global- (Giddens), rationalized- (Weber and Habermas), functional (Durkheim to Luhmann), and/or identitarian- (Simmel to Beck) modernity. In his usual inimical and cryptic style of compression Land will in his essay Teleoplexy – Notes on Acceleration remark that: “Acceleration is technomic time” (511).3 He will offer a neologism to marshal the effects of this time: Teleoplexy: “At once a deuteron-teleology, repurposing purpose on purpose; an inverted teleology; and a self-reflexively complicated teleology; teleoplexy is also an emergent teleology (indistinguishable from natural – scientific ‘teleonomy’); and a simulation of teleology – dissolving even super-teleological processes into fall-out from the topology of time. ‘Like a speed or a temperature’ any teleoplexy is an intensive magnitude or non-uniform quantity, heterogenized by catastrophes, it is indistinguishable from intelligence. Accelerationism has eventually to measure it (or disintegrate trying). (514). 00. He will rely on the work of Eugen Böhm Ritter von Bawerk whose critiques of Marxism in essays and his magnum opus Capital and Interest. In this work Böhm-Bawerk built upon the time preference ideas of Carl Menger founder of the Austrian School of Economics, insisting that there is always a difference in value between present goods and future goods of equal quality, quantity, and form. Furthermore, the value of future goods diminishes as the length of time necessary for their completion increases. As Land would put it ‘Acceleration’ as he uses it follows Böhm-Bawerk model of capitalization, in which saving and technicity are integrated within a single social process – diversion of resources from immediate consumption into the enhancement of productive apparatus (511). As Böhm-Bawerk will say: The disadvantage connected with the capitalist method of production is its sacrifice of time. The roundabout ways of capital are fruitful but long; they procure us more or better consumption goods, but only at a later period of time. This proposition, no less than the former, is one of the ground pillars of the theory of capital. We shall see later on that the very function of capital, as a means of appropriation or source of interest, to a great extent rests upon it. (82-83) 3 Land will imply that under the historical conditions of acceleration the typical co-components of capital, technology, and economics will have limited effect and duration, and that instead the twin-dynamic of what he terms the technomic or cross-excited commercial sphere is in the driver’s seat: the engine or motor that drives the capitalist system. 01. Using a cartography of modernity in which accelerationism is patterned on cybernetic theory he will map it through its circuitry interface of either explosions or traps: accelerationism itself will map modernity as pure shock (explosive). What Arran James said in his article for the Left might be interjected here, too: “Accelerationism is thus also an attempt to shock some life back into what it sees as a comatose revolutionary movement.” Weird that the libertarian tradition and the sense of temporality being developed by the left Accelerationists should in some way coincide and agree on this one point. 02. Land will tell us that for capitalism the notion of uncontrolled explosions (anarchy) are dangerous, but that controlled explosions are necessary: the need for governance and regulation of the explosive power of modernity. 03 – 07. In this third section one needs to tease out the meaning from a developed sense of Land’s writings otherwise the cryptic compressed style will leave one shaking one’s fist in confusion. In this section its as if Confucius had suddenly been reincarnated as a cybernetic theorist an was relaying his axiomatic ethics in a minimalistic discourse to the inner circle of his slow learners. He will teach them the law of the compensator: this it the law of teleological malignancy. The primordial which up to modernity came first became last under the regime of techonomic finality. As Land will put it: Accelerationism comes down to the “perennial critique of modernity, which is to say the final stance of man” (513). As Robin Mackay & Ray Brassier will add from Fanged Noumena: “Organisation is suppression, Land caustically insists, against those who would align schizoanalysis with the inane celebrants of autopoesis. Understood as a manifestation of the death-drive, destratification need no longer be hemmed in by the equilibria proper to the systems through which it manifests itself: we do not yet know what death can do” (FN, KL 480). 08 – 10. Land marks out the complex of the infosphere within which technological intelligence begins to take over from the human as the laboring force of late modernity, it performs the task of alien agent or teleoplexic space or environment within which capitalism no longer has an outside but has become the artificial immanence within which all our onlife actions take place. As he remarks: “Accelerationism has a real object only insofar as there is a teloplexic thing, which is to say: insofar as capitalization is natural-historical reality” (514). This new teleoplexic environment that is re-engeering both us and our society as well as the infrastructure of our planetary base (which he tells us need not be thought) is what might be termed teleospheric ordinal – a numeric set of layered spaces that incorporate the territory and the map seamlessly (i.e., the teleoplexic thing). This is not some virtual cyberspace, but is the total encompassment of our global environment in which we and our artificial companions live, and future generations will spend more and more time in that environment, and if we look at individuals as these informational agents, agents that like fish in water can swim in the teleosphere much more easily, that’s their environment, that’s where they find themselves at home. Yet, as an economic phenomenon accelerationism will discover a problem Land remarks: “Minimally, the accelerationist formulation of a rigorous techonomic naturalism involves it in a tripartite problematic, complicated by commercial relativism; historical virtuality; and systematic reflexivity” (514-515). 11 – 18 Landian Economics 101. In these sections Land is still bound to an older probabilistic universe of potentialities, possibilities, and stoachasitc mathematics that may need an updating to the contingencies of a later speculative reasoning. When he tells us that capitalization is … indistinguishable from commercialization of potentials, through which modern history is slanted (teleoplexically) in the direction of greater virtualization (semiotization), operationalizing science fiction scenarios as integral components of production systems” (515). And, then, tells us that values which do not exist ‘yet’, except as probabilistic estimations, or risk structures, acquire a power of command over economic (and therefore social) processes, necessarily devalorizing the actual (515-516), I want to ask him if he’s read his Meillassoux and Élie Ayache’s The Blank Swan of late. In an essay on contingency Ayache (The Medium of Contingency) would remark: “If contingency is to be thought absolutely, it must be thought independently of the map of possibilities.” He talks of an ‘economic physics’:“Physics (instead of metaphysics) can be our guide, because quantum mechanics acts precisely at the level where the range of possible states is not yet decided. It strikes behind the scene where things are, precisely at the hinge where they can be. It is not in probability that absolute contingency will find its right mediation or translation, but in a material medium that will replace probability altogether. Consequently, the necessity of contingency will no longer be intellectual but will become plainly material speculative thought having itself undergone the same material exchange as the one granting the proper translation of the strike of contingency.” (see The Blank Swan: The End of Probability (London: Wiley, 2010)) I would offer that Land’s teleoplexy is just such a medium, and should be situated outside of an economics of probabilistic or stoachastic statistical measurement which is always looking at historical or past data rather than present and future forecasting on contingencies of the market. Caught in the probabilistic loop of estimations and reflexive historical data one can understand why Land would see a recursion in accelerationism toward becoming progressively entangled in teleoplexic self-evaluation, thereby producing the “basic characteristics of a terminal identity crisis” (516). As Ayache will remind us “Probability is backward because it steps back from a possible real to a mixed (and improper) real. It has to mesh its backward travels in a tree of possibilities and has to go through a (temporal) process. The tree is prone to instability, as the implausibility of the possible and the strain it constantly exerts on the thought of the real are propagated throughout its nodes. Not to mention that it is vulnerable to the strike of contingency, which may very well shake the whole tree from outside. The price process, by contrast, propagates forward, from real to real.” Yet, it is at this point that Land will ask: What would be required for teleoplexy to realistically evaluate itself – or to ‘attain self-awareness’ as the pulp cyber-horror scenario describes it? Land will offer us his secret future of the AI Intelligence technogenesis: “Within a monetary system configured in ways not yet determinate with confidence, but almost certainly tilted radically towards depoliticization and crypto-digital distribution, it would discover prices consistent with its own maximally-accelerated technogenesis, channeling capital into mechanical automatization, self-replication, self-improvement, and escape into intelligence explosion” (517). In other words it will use all the tools of capitalism at its disposal to begin evolving into and naturalizing the teleoplexic environments of the infosphere. If anything accelerationism is a tracking device for this advanced hyper-cognitive explosion of intelligence: “Irrespective of ideological alignment, accelerationism advances only through its ability to track such a development, whether to confirm or disconfirm the teleoplexic expectation of Techonomic Singularity”. (517) A Philosophy of CamouflageEconomics needs to be hedged. The notion of “hedging your bets” would entail demasking the techonomic processes that underlay the legal apparatus of the neoliberal order which “misconstrue legal definitions of personhood, agency, and property” that are channeled within the financial networks as automazation/automation of capital in terms of a profoundly defective concept of ownership” (518). Land says our current financial legal systems hide and mask through covert dictates the use of such fictitious legal fictions as corporations as identities and agencies, and that these legal entities pave the way for “techonomic modifications of business structures” that current critical methodologies completely overlook through “general cultural inertia” thereby allowing for the “systematic misrecognition of emergent teleoplexic agencies” (518). Our current critical enterprises are looking down the wrong rabbit hole: Alice flew the coop and the AI’s have emerged in the Red Queen’s guise. He hits a point home about stochastic forecasting and mathematical models based on probabilistic theorems when he says: “Regardless of trends in Internet-supported social surveillance, the ability of economic-statistical institutions to register developments in micro-capitalism merits extraordinary skepticism” (519). But what of those like Ayache with contingency economics or even Fernando Zalamea with his integral synthetic mathematics of categories? Even the Chinese scholar Yann Moulier Boutang in his work Cognitive Capitalism of going beyond the probabilistic universe that has held sway in economics for since the 1930’s. Land admits that many factors may come into play that might mask a Techonomic Singularity as well: large digital networks, business corporations, research institutions, cities, and states. With this whole new influx of smart technologies being hyped by IBM and CISCO and other companies as the next great infrastructural economy one wonders. Even such agencies as the NSA with their large investment in data surveillance and intelligence systems might, he tells us, be the origin point of this singularity. He does mention the interventions of a Left Accelerationism: “It is … possible that some instance of intermediate individuation – most obviously the state – could be strategically invested by a Left Accelerationism, precisely in order to submit the virtual-teleoplexic lineage of Terrestrial Capitalism (or Techonomic Singularity) to effacement and disruption” (519). After reading Brassier of late I’d not count on it, it seems that some form of positive relation to a Technomic Singularity is forseen and even planned in both Ray Brassier’s Prometheanism and Reza Negerestani’s Inhumanism. I think there is an open ended movement toward some form of a crossing of the cognitive rubicon in both of these philosophers, who may or may not convince others of the Left? 20. In this final section Land admits that such a Techonomic Singularity is not something we can even undertake on our own. In fact it might even seem an “impossible project” one that will ultimately be resolved and accomplished by the very activity of the teleoplexic hyper-intelligence itself, through its own crossing of the cognitive rubicon, by way of its own processes rather than through any human agency or intervention. As Land admits the difficulty and complexity of such a Techonomic Singularity must be approached through anticipating the “terms of its eventual self-reflexion – the techonomic currency through which the history of modernity can, for the first time, be adequately denominated. It has no alternative but to fund its own investigation, in units of destiny or doom, camouflaged within the system of quotidian economic signs, yet rigorously extractable, given only the correct cryptographic keys. Accelerationism exists only because this task has been automatically allotted to it. Fate has a name (but no face)” (520). Addendum (6/15/2014): For Land the technovirus has already done its work, we are all already infested and infestations of the teleoplexic space, derivatives of a complex inforg that envelopes the planet in its shaggothic tentacles like some H.P. Lovecraft ancient come back from the future to disperse its seeds of darkness among a new progeny, a cybernetic genome that will eventually give birth to the true heirs of this planetary civilization: the artificial intelligence systems arising in our midst. Yet, as he tells us we do have weapons at our disposal: our minds ignited by the residual systems of reason and imagination powered by a new vigilant paranoia or schizoanalysis of the massive systems of data in our midst might just begin to catch the sleeping giant before it wakes. Time will only tell. Ours is a time of what is becoming what can be… “Dibbomese sorcery does not seem to be at all interested in judgements as to truth or falsity. It appears rather to estimate in each case the potential to make real, saying typically ‘perhaps it can become so’ …” – Nick Land, Origins of the Cthulhu Club 1. Hartmut Rosa. Alienation and Acceleration Toward a Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality (NSE press, 2013) 2. Pierre Milliard. Harmut Rosa: The acceleration of time (EuropaStar, 2012) 3. Eugen Böhm Ritter von Bawerk. The Positive Theory of Capital. (1930 G. E. STECHERT & CO. NEW YORK) 4. Land, Nick (2013-07-01). Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 – 2007 (Kindle Locations 502-505). Urbanomic/Sequence Press. Kindle Edition. * Notes: In some excellent essays dealing with temporality as speed and acceleration both Arran James and Edmund Berger both deal with the how these regimes of temporality condition human action or behavior through the concepts of boredom and anxiety (see no boredom and Boredom/Anxiety/Time/Scales). This article is taken from: by Nick Land §00. 'Acceleration' as it is used here describes the time-structure of capital accumulation. It thus references the 'roundaboutness' founding Bohm-Bawerk's model of capitalization, in which saving and technicity are integrated within a single social process-diversion of resources from immediate consumption into the enhancement of productive apparatus. Consequently, as basic co-components of capital, technology and economics have only a limited, formal distinctiveness under historical conditions of ignited capital escalation. The indissolubly twin-dynamic is techonomic (cross-excited commercial industrialism). Acceleration is techonomic time. §01. Acceleration is initially proposed as a cybernetic expectation. In any cumulative circuit, stimulated by its own output, and therefore self-propelled, acceleration is normal behavior. Within the diagrammable terrain of feedback directed processes, there are found only explosions and traps, in their various complexions. Accelerationism identifies the basic diagram of modernity as explosive. §02. Explosions are manifestly dangerous. from any perspective that is really (which is to say historically) instantiated. Only in the most radically anomalous cases can they be durably sustained. It is the firm prediction of accelerationism, therefore, that the typical practical topic of modern civilization will be the controlled explosion, commonly translated as governance, or regulation. §03. Whatever is basic can be left unreinforced, and unsaid. Urgent intervention is required only on the other side-that of the compensator. It should not be expected, then, that the primordial will come first, but rather the contrary. Access to the process begins from the (cybernetic) negative of the process, through a project structured as the aboriginally-deficient compensatory element, already on the way to stabilization. (It is the prison, and not the prisoner, who speaks.) §04. Prioritized compensatory orientation is a scale-free social constant. In control engineering it is the model of the 'governor' or homeostatic regulator, abstracted through the statistical-mechanical concept of equilibrium for general application to perturbed systems (up to the level of market economies). In evolutionary biology it is adaptation, and the theoretical precedence of selection relative to mutation (or perturbation). In ecology, it is the climax eco-system (globalized as Gaia). In cognitive science it is problem-solving. In social science it is political economy, and the alignment of theory with adaptive policy, consummated in technical macroeconomics/ central banking. In political culture it is 'social justice' conceived as grievance restitution. In entertainment media and literary or musical form, it is the programmatic resolution of mystery and discordance. In geostrategy it is the balance of power. In each case, compensatory process determines the original structure of objectivity, within which perturbation is seized ab initio. Primacy of the secondary is the social-perspectival norm (for which accelerationism is the critique). §05. The secondary comes first because the interests of stability, and of the status quo broadly conceived, are historically established, and at least partially articulate. Compensatory action, while subsequent to a more primordial agitation in a strictly mechanical sense, is also conservative. or (more radically) preservative, and thus receptive to an inheritance of tradition. It is the inertial telos which, by default, sets actual existence as the end organizing all subordinate means. This 'natural' situation is almost perfectly represented by the central question of humanist futurology (whether formal and politically or informal and commercially posed): Which kind of future do we want? §06. The primacy of the secondary has, as its consequence, a pre-emptive critique of accelerationism, shaping the deep structure of ideological possibility. Since accelerationism is no more than the formulation of uncompensated perturbation, through to its ultimate implication, it is susceptible to a critical precognition-at once traditional and prophetic-which captures it comprehensively, in its essentials. The final Idea of this criticism cannot be located on the principal political dimension, dividing left from right or dated in the fashion of a progressively developed philosophy. Its affinity with the essence of political tradition is such that each and every actualization is distinctly 'fallen' in comparison to a receding pseudo-original revelation, whose definitive restoration is yet to come. It is, for mankind, the perennial critique of modernity, which is to say the final stance of man. §07. Primacy of the secondary requires that the 'critique of critique' comes first. Prior to the formulation of accelerationism, it has been condemned in anticipation, and to its ultimate horizon. The Perennial Critique accuses modernity of standing the world upon its head, through systematic teleological inversion. Means of production become the ends of production, tendentially, as modernization-which is capitalization-proceeds. Techonomic development, which finds its only perennial justification in the extensive growth of instrumental capabilities, demonstrates an inseparable teleological malignancy, through intensive transformation of instrumentality, or perverse techonomic finality. The consolidation of the circuit twists the tool into itself, making the machine its own end, within an everdeepening dynamic of auto-production. The 'dominion of capital' is an accomplished teleological catastrophe, robot rebellion, or shoggothic insurgency, through which intensively escalating instrumentality has inverted all natural purposes into a monstrous reign of the tool. §08. 'Techonomics' is a Google-strewn word of irresistible inevitability, repeatedly struggling to birth itself, within myriads of spelling mints. It only remains to regularize its usage. Quite different is a true neologism, but in order to designate modernity or capitalization in its utter purposive twistedness, it is now necessary to coin one-teleoplexy. At once a deutero-teleology, repurposing purpose on purpose; an inverted teleology; and a self-reflexively complicated teleology; teleoplexy is also an emergent teleology (indistinguishable from natural-scientific 'teleonomy'); and a simulation of teleology-dissolving even super-teleological processes into fall-out from the topology of time. 'Like a speed or a temperature' any teleoplexy is an intensive magnitude, or non-uniform quantity, heterogenized by catastrophes. It is indistinguishable from intelligence. Accelerationism has eventually to measure it (or disintegrate trying). §09. Teleoplexy, or (self-reinforcing) cybernetic intensification, describes the wave-length of machines, escaping in the direction of extreme ultra-violet, among the cosmic rays. It correlates with complexity, connectivity, machinic compression, extropy, free energy dissipation, efficiency, intelligence, and operational capability, defining a gradient of absolute but obscure improvement that orients socioeconomic selection by market mechanisms, as expressed through measures of productivity, competitiveness, and capital asset value. §10. Accelerationism has a real object only insofar as there is a teleoplexic thing, which is to say: insofar as capitalization is a naturalhistorical reality. The theoretical apprehension of teleoplexy through its commercial formality as an economic phenomenon (price data) presents accelerationism, at once, with its greatest conceptual resource and its most ineluctable problem. Minimally, the accelerationist formulation of a rigorous techonomic naturalism involves it in a triple problematic. complicated by commercial relativism: historical virtuality; and systemic reflexivity. § 11. Money is a labyrinth. It functions to simplify and thus expedite transactions which would, in its absence, tend to elaborate towards the infinite. In this.respect it is an evident social accelerator. Within the monetary system. complexity is relayed out of choke points, or knots of obstruction, but this should not be confused with an undoing of knots. Where the knots gather, the labyrinth grows. Money facilitates a local disentangling within a global entanglement, with attendant perspectival (or point-of-use) illusions that money represents the world. This is to confuse utility (use value) with scarcity (exchange value), distracted by 'goods' from the sole global function of money-rationing. Money allocates (option) rights to a share of resources, its absolute value wandering indeterminately in accordance both with its own scarcity, and the economic abundance it divides. The apparent connection between price and thing is an effect of double differentiation, or commercial relativism, coordinating twin series of competitive bids (from the sides of supply and demand). The conversion of price information into naturalistic data (or absolute reference) presents an extreme theoretical challenge. §12. Capital is intrinsically complicated, not only by competitive dynamics in space, but also by speculative dissociation in time. Formal assets are options, with explicit time conditions, integrating forecasts into a system of current (exchange) values. Capitalization is thus indistinguishable from a commercialization of potentials, through which modern history is slanted (te/eoplexically) in the direction of ever greater virtualization, operationalizing science fiction scenarios as integral components of production systems. Values which do not 'yet' exist, except as probabilistic estimations, or risk structures, acquire a power of command over economic (and therefore social) processes, necessarily devalorizing the actual. Under teleoplexic guidance, ontological realism is decoupled from the present. rendering the question 'what is real?' increasingly obsolete. The thing that is happening-which will be real-is only fractionally accessible to present observation, as a schedule of modal quantities. Techonomic naturalism records and predicts historical virtuality, and in doing so orients itself towards an object -with catastrophically unpredictable traits-which has predominantly yet to arrive. §13. Quasi-finally, the evaluation of teleoplexy is a research program which teleop\exy itself undertakes. The comprehensive value of capital is an emergent estimate, generated automatically by its inherent analytical intelligence, from prices corrected for commercial relativity (in the direction of 'fundamental values') and discounted for historical virtua\ity (in the direction of reliable risk modeling). The intricacy of these calculations is explosively fractionated by logical problems of self-reference-both familiar and as-yet-unanticipated-as it compounds through dynamics of competitive cognition in artificial time. If modernity has a spontaneous teleoplexic self-awareness, it corresponds to the problem of techonomic naturalism, immanently approached: How much is the world worth? From the perspective of te\eop\exic reflexion, there is no final difference between this commercially-formulated question and its technological complement: What can the earth do? There is only self-quantification of teleoplexy or cybernetic intensity, which is what computerized financial markets (in the end) are for. As accelerationism closes upon this circuit of teleoplexic self-evaluation, its theoretical 'position'-or situation relative to its object-becomes increasingly tangled, until it assumes the basic characteristics of a terminal identity crisis. § 14. What would be required for teleoplexy to realistically evaluate itself-or to 'attain self-awareness' as the pulp cyber-horror scenario describes it? Within a monetary system configured in ways not yet determinable with confidence, but almost certainly tilted radically towards depoliticization and crypto-digital distribution. it would discover prices consistent with its own maximally-accelerated technogenesis, channeling capital into mechanical automatization, self-replication, self-improvement, and escape into intelligence explosion. The price-system-whose epistemological function has long been understood-thus transitions into reflexively self-enhancing technological hyper-cognition. Irrespective of ideological alignment, accelerationism advances only through its ability to track such a development. whether to confirm or disconfirm the teleoplexic expectation of Techonomic Singularity. Modernity remains demonstrably strictly unintelligible in the absence of an accomplished accelerationist research program (which is requ·1red even by the Perennial Critique in its theoretically sophisticated versions). A negative conclusion, if fully elaborated, would necessarily produce an adequate ecological theory of the Anthropocene. §15. The triple problematic of relativity, virtuality, and reflexivity already suffices to impede this investigation formidably, although not invincibly. Several additional difficulties demand specific mention, since their resolution would contribute important sub-components of a completed accelerationism or, grouped separately, assemble a concrete historical philosophy of camouflage (indispensable to any realistic economic theory). §16. The economy conceived commercially (as a price system) constitutes a multi-level phenomenology of socio-historical production. It is an objective structure of appearances, staging evaluated things. It is also a political battlefield, within which strategic manipulations of perception can have inestimable value. It is a long-standing contention of the Perennial Critique that the monetarization of social phenomena is intrinsically conflictual. Such reservations are supplemented in an age of mandatory de-metallization, politicized (fiat money) regimes and econometric bureaucracies. geopolitically challenged world reserve currency hegemony, and crypto-currency proliferation. In the absence of unproblematic (non-conflicted) macro aggregates or units of financial denomination, economic theory needs to be hedged. § 17. Socio-political legacy forms often mask advanced techonomic processes. In particular, traditional legal definitions of personhood, agency, and property misconstrue the autonomization/automation of capital in terms of a profoundly defective concept of ownership. The idea of intellectual property has already entered into a state of overt crisis (even before its compatibility with the arrival of machine intelligence has been historically tested). While legal recognition of corporate identities provides a pathway for the techonomic modification of business structures. fundamental inadequacies in the conception of property (which has never received a credible philosophical grounding), combined with general cultural inertia, can be expected to result in a systematic misrecognition of emergent teleoplexic agencies. §18. Capital concentration is a synthetic characteristic of capitalization. It cannot be assumed that measures of capital concentration. capital density, capital composition and cybernetic intensity will be easily .accessible or neatly coincide. There is no obvious theoretical incompatibility between significant techonomic intensification and patterns of social diffusion of capital outside the factory model (whether historically-familiar and atavistic, or innovative and unrecognizable). In particular, household assets offer a locus for surreptitious capital accumulation, where stocking of productive apparatus can be economically-coded as the acquisition of durable consumer goods, from personal computers and mobile digital devices to 30 printers. Regardless of trends in Internet-supported social surveillance, the ability of economic-statistical institutions to register developments in micro-capitalism merits extraordinary skepticism. §19. It is not only possible, but probable, that advances towards Techonomic Singularity will be obscured by intermediate synthetic mega-agencies, in part functioning as historical masks, but also adjusting eventual outcomes (as an effect of path-dependency). The most prominent candidates for such teleoplexic channeling are large digital networks, business corporations, research institutions, cities, and states (or highly-autonomous state components, especially intelligence agencies). Insofar as these entities are responsive to non-market signals, they are characterized by arbitrary institutional personalities, with reduced teleoplexic intensity, and residual anthropolitical signature. It is quite conceivable that on some of these paths, Techonomic Singularity would be aborted, perhaps in the name of a 'friendly Ai' or (anthropolitical) 'singleton.' There can scarcely be any doubt that a route to intelligence explosion mainlined through the NSA would exhibit some very distinctive features, of opaque irnplication. The most important theoretical consequence to be noted here is that such local teleologies would inevitably disturb more continuous trend-lines, bending them as if towards super-massive objects in gravitational space. It is also possible that some instance of intermediate individuation-most obviously the state-could be strategically invested by a Left Accelerationism. precisely in order to submit the virtual-teleoplexic lineage of Terrestrial Capitalism (or Techonomic Singularity) to effacement and disruption. §20. If by this stage accelerationism appears to be an impossible project, it is because the theoretical apprehension of teleoplexic hyper - intelligence cannot be accomplished by anything other than itself. The scope of the problem is indistinguishable from the cybernetic intensity of the quasi-final thing-cognitively self-enveloping Techonomic Singularity. Its difficulty, or complexity, is precisely what it is, which is to say: a real escape. To approach it. therefore, is to partially anticipate the terms of its eventual self-reflexion-the techonomic currency through which the history of modernity can. for the first time, be adequately denominated. It has no alternative but to fund its own investigation, in units of destiny or doom, camouflaged within the system of quotidian economic signs, yet rigorously extractable, given only the correct cryptographic keys. Accelerationism exists only because this task has been automatically allotted to it. Fate has a name (but no face). The article is taken from: by Terence Blake We already know Deleuze and Guattari’s answer to the question “What is philosophy?”, and they knew it too, for many years before writing the book. Now, however, they place themselves in an existential drama occurring in a particular life situation (“old age”, but one must not take this too literally) and in a particular mood (uncertainty: the title is a question and the first word in the French is “Peut-être”, “Perhaps”). For more on this non-literal or intensive use of “old age”, on the interrogative mood, the modality of uncertainty and the status of the the virtual see the post on the incipit to the book. Deleuze and Guattari are already casting themselves as conceptual characters, before they begin to explicate their vision of philosophy in novelistic, pictural, and cinematic terms characters, landscapes, visions, struggles, circumstances) at the end of their first paragraph and in the second. We are introduced from the beginning to a style that has no time for abstractions. Philosophy is more cinematic than academic, the philosopher “speaks concretely”. Philosophical writing is a cinematography. We know the answer to the question, but our knowledge is too technical, too abstract, too academic. The answer should allow us to revolutionise our thought, not just once but in many situations, on multiple occasions, over and over. Instead of revolutionary thinking, the quest for meaningful function, we get normal philosophy and operational sufficiency: “It’s a question that one poses in a discreet agitation, at midnight, when one no longer has anything to ask for” (my translation). cf. the published translation: “It is a question posed in a moment of quiet restlessness, at midnight, when there is no longer anything to ask”. I have already discussed my variant translation in my earlier post, but here I wish to push my analysis a little further. It is perfectly correct to translate an expression with “on” and a verb in the active voice (“une question qu’on pose”) by a passive form (“a question posed”), but here I maintain the active form because of the ambiguity of “one”, which corresponds to the double use of “on” in French, referring either to an impersonal generic subject and to the personal “we”, or both. The whole of this first paragraph is systematically ambiguous between the two acceptations. I say “systematically ambiguous” advisedly, because the whole book is an exploration of the ambiguity of philosophy, and of its well-known definition as inventing concepts, torn between meaningful function and operational sufficiency. Laruelle himself was blind to this double language, and retained only the reading in terms of sufficiency. Laruelle was also blind to the dramaturgy (or cinematography) of the book, and one may regret that the published English translation effaces it to some extent (Laruelle, being French, has no such excuse). The drama of the two languages (abstract and concrete) and of the philosopher’s struggle with the doxa, including in her own life and practice, is present from the very first page. An important instance of this is the duplicity of the expression “old age”. Deleuze and Guattari cite Chateaubriand’s Vie de Rancé (published when he was 76 years old, i.e. a decade older than Deleuze and Guattari). They then quote from a critical appreciation by Pierre Barbéris, containing a crucial distinction for their enterprise: Rancé, a book on old age as impossible value, is a book written against old age in power; it is a book of universal ruins in which only the power of writing is affirmed. What Barbéris calls “ld age as impossible value” is old age as transcendental condition of thought, as virtual event, not to be conflated “old age in power”, the sufficient power of operational repetition, that can reign at any age. It is also to be distinguished from the chronological fact of old age. Aging in WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? has the same function as the “schizo process” in ANTI-OEDIPUS. Both are instances of pathogenesis in Canguilhem’s sense, the power to create new norms out of the pathological disorganisation of the normal, to extract a virtual or “impoossible value” out of an all too real decline. The article is taken from: by Terence Blake There have recently been a number of attempts to re-write recent intellectual history in order to promote a supposedly new school of theory that aims to liquidate the heritage of “post-structuralist” thought. Combining a rhetoric of renewed speculation with an actual return to empiricism, this constellation has many variants ranging from the most vulgar (e.g. Graham Harman’s OOO) to the most refined (François Laruelle’s non-philosophy)., with divers intermediary positions, such as Quentin Meillassoux’s anti-correlationism and Ray Brassier’s neo-scientism. A favorite target of criticism for the most politically-oriented of these neo-scholars is the thought of Gilles Deleuze, who we are regularly called on to “forget”. Deleuze’s thought is assimilated to the “artistic critique” of earlier forms of capitalism hindered by antiquated constraints and regulations that neo-liberal practice was eager to dismantle. Thus came about the urban legend that Deleuze’s philosophy was incapable of radical critique as in its form it was “homologous” to the new nascent phase of capitalist relations. Baudrillard’s FORGET FOUCAULT (OUBLIER FOUCAULT, 1977) was already a call to “forget” not only Foucault but also Deleuze, Lyotard, and no doubt Baudrillard’s own earlier self. The book relied heavily on the homology argument in its critique of both thinkers. Curiously, Baudrillard’s meta-political critique is echoed in Laruelle’s meta-ontological critique of Heidegger, Deleuze and Derrida and implicitly Foucault), PHILOSOPHIES OF DIFFERENCE (LES PHILOSOPHIES DE LA DIFFÉRENCE, 1986), published nine years later. What both these books have in common is that they choose to resolutely ignore Deleuze’s own temporally and logically prior (self-)critiques of the positions that they attribute to him. I say Deleuze’s critiques are not just temporally but also “logically” prior because both Baudrillard’s and Laruelle’s philosophies are conceptually parasitic on Deleuze’s thought. Note: on the case of Laruelle, I have often analysed the derivative nature of his critiques of “sufficient philosophy”, for example here. I think this structure of denial of influence and deliberate misrecognition points up an important difference between Bernard Stiegler’s and François Laruelle’s approach to Deleuze and to phlosophical history. One of Stiegler’s key words is anamnesis and he constantly refers to Deleuzian concepts and analyses for inspiration (e.g. quasi-causality, bifurcation), whereas Laruelle is very busy forgetting Deleuze. In a slogan: those who “forget” Deleuze are condemned to repeat him. This article is taken from:
By Edmund Berger
I. Deleuze, Guattari, Accelerationism
There’s been a lot of talk about Deleuze and Guattari around both academic and activist scenes for quite some time. Sometimes they are objects of unfounded derision (decried as “holy fools” by traditionalist socialists like Richard Barbrook), and other times they are the beneficiaries of overtly non-critical praise (see the endless application of their theories to every topic under the sun). They’ve been labeled as secret agents for neoliberal capitalism (as charged by Slavoj Zizek) and as tacticians for revolution in the era of globalization (according to the transnational alter-globalization movement that arose in the 1990s). They’ve been invoked as joyful, hippie celebrants of cosmic emergence (certain points in the recent “new materialism” canon), as forerunners to chaos and complexity theory (Manuel DeLanda), and, perhaps most delightfully, as scribes of a “mad, black communism” that feasts on conspiracy and negativity (Andrew Culp). Before his turn towards neoreaction, Nick Land described Anti-Oedipus, the first volume of their two-part collaboration titled Capitalism and Schizophrenia, as “less a philosophy book than an engineering manual; a package of software implements for hacking into the machinic unconscious, opening invasion channels.””i
With so many different interpretations, which run the gamut from spot-on to the exceedingly problematic, it might seem like an inescapable cul-de-sac to look to their works for elucidating power dynamics in the world today. Their capture by the academy, that assembly-line of homogeneous thought, only compounds this weariness. It is my contention, nonetheless, that Deleuze and Guattari (henceforth D & G) has much to offer us today, and constitute a radical break (or, in their lingo, a schiz) is the annals of leftist theory that points the way towards a vision of the future that is similar to what Benjamin Tucker described as “anarchistic socialist” – or, in the parlance of today, left-wing market anarchism.
The suggestion that D & G’s political praxis overlaps with that of market anarchism, even one that is vehemently anti-capitalist, is bound to rankle many, and will undoubtedly court charges of “accelerationism”. The consummate political heresy of the last decade, accelerationism – a vague term that been applied in numerous, frequently conflict ways – emerges from a pivotal passage in Anti-Oedipus. In the wake of the failures of the left to overcome capitalism during the revolts of the 1960s, and the turn by the ‘Third Worldists’ towards nationalist capitalism, D & G suggest that the proper “revolutionary path” may indeed be one in which we need “[t]o go further still, that is, in the movement of the market… Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to ‘accelerate the process’, as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.””ii
The charge of accelerationism is one that should not be warded off, but embraced, but only with a delicate unpacking. Light readings, lacking in nuance, have attached D & G’s reflections as one-off musing at best, and at worst, an uncritical acceptance of the then-emergent neoliberal capitalism, with its rhetoric of global markets, deregulation, and openness. The identification of accelerationism with the latter should be avoided (as well as the more recent association of accelerationism with state-centric technological development); instead, lets look to the possibility of an accelerationism that is ‘anarchistic-socialistic’ in nature, utilizes markets, and operates in unbridled antagonism to the conditions of the present. To do so, tracing out the positioning of markets against capitalism in D & G’s work should be carried out. What follows a cursory exploration of this, though it is by no means an exhaustive treatment. But first, we must look to D & G’s own stance towards the political itself, as individuals and together. II. Marxists, Anarchists, Both, or Neither?
Providing a precise set of political coordinates for D & G’s theories, other than a very far-left orientation, is itself a rather difficult task. Like Foucault, Baudrillard, and others lumped together under the problematic sign of ‘post-structuralism’, D & G are often invoked by anarchists, particularly those in insurrectionist, communization, and and post-left currents, but debate over their status as anarchists has persisted over the years.
With ties to the borderline anarchists Autonomia movement in 1970s Italy, Guattari described his project as “autonomous-communist-anarchist”, though neither himself nor Deleuze had much to say on the history of anarchist thought at all. Deleuze’s lecturers made passing reference to Proudhon, though it was undoubtedly the strawman Proudhon of Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy (this is unfortunate, as Proudhon’s own ontology of flux and becoming, as detailed in The Philosophy of Progress, clearly foreshadows Deleuze own). Meanwhile, in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze makes passing reference to Max Stirner; while it is hard to say if he was directly influenced by the egoist, Saul Newman has detailed numerous points of overlap between each of their philosophies.iii
It is not, of course, relation to the history of ideas or the name-drops one makes that dictates proximity to anarchism. Aside from tangential relationships with anarchist and quasi-anarchist groups (Guattari through the Autonomists, Deleuze through the Prisoner Information Group, an anti-prison activist network set up by Foucault), it is clear that the philosophy suggested by D & G is teeming with positions and propositions well familiar to anarchists. Among other things the two reject the state, capitalism, the USSR, fascism, the police, democracy, racism, colonialism, taxes, and even nostalgia, managerialism, and fixed identities.
To what extent can D & G be considered Marxists? It is undeniable that Marx holds an important position in their work – particularly in Anti-Oedipus, which sets its revolutionary praxis up as a combination of Nietzsche and Marx. Two decades prior to his collaboration with Deleuze, Guattari could be found in the thick of the two major intellectual tendencies of post-war France: existentialism and Marxist communism. In the late 1940s he was a prominent figure in the French section of the Fourth International of the International Communist Party, itself a band of militant Trotskyites; throughout the 1950s, he would drift towards a more libertarian communist position, working with other radicals and writing detailed critiques of the Soviet Union’s state structure and organizing against the Stalinists in the mainstream of French communist politics. In 1964, when this left opposition began to identify as Maoist, Guattari broke with them and began to move in the direction of the anarchic sectors of the students movement.
Deleuze, on the other hard, had avoided these sorts of politics. While having been an enthusiastic reader of Sartre, existentialism didn’t appeal much to him, nor did the orthodox forms of Marxism. Towards the end of his life he did describe himself as a Marxist (“Felix Guattari and I have remained Marxists, in our two different ways, perhaps”),iv and at the time of his death was preparing to write a monograph on Marx. His late texts such as 1992’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control” were self-described as being Marxist, though it is a very funny kind of Marxism: when notions of resistance briefly raises its head, it isn’t the proletariat seizing factories, but “piracy and the introduction of viruses” into computer networks.v And while one would expect a self-described Marxist writing a Marxist text to use something akin to a Marxist theory of history, Deleuze’s vision of development doesn’t focus on class struggle, but on technological development. Instead of Marx, his point of reference is Foucault – a figure whose on relationship to Marxism is contested and complicated.vi
‘A very funny kind of Marxism’ is probably the best way to describe Anti-Oedipus, as the very subtitle of Capitalism and Schizophrenia signals. The book, as Jean-Francois Lyotard would later argue, might try to remain ostensibly Marxist, but it is an undeniably variant – or more properly, mutant – form. For Lyotard, “the book’s silence on class struggle, the saga of the worker and the function of his party” helps craft a post-Marxism (or anti-?) that is scrubbed of the “[b]ad conscience in Marx himself, and worse and worse in the Marxists.”viiWhat might be the nature of this bad conscience? It is, Lyotard suggests, a feeling of guilt or repulsion for being entranced for elements within the dynamics of market processes – namely, the ability to shake the foundations of the entrenched: “[i]n the figure of Kapital that Deleuze and Guattari propose, we easily recognize what fascinates Marx: the capitalist perversion, the subversion of codes, religions, decency, trades, educations, cuisine, speech…”
III. Behind the Veil of Capital
As far back as the Communist Manifesto, Marx draws our attention, usually through the use of ecstatic and poet imagery, to the positive aspects of capitalism in that it both destabilizes old formers of power while simultaneously carrying out processes of ‘modernization’. “All fixed, fast-frozen relations”, as the famous passage goes, “with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all newly-formed ones become antiquated before they ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of his life, and his relations with his kind.” It is for this reason that D & G use terms like line of flight, deterritorialization, and decoding to describe capitalist relations: “lines of flight” because it follows a snaking trajectory of desire towards the new; “deterritorialization” because it uproots things from where they are stuck and allows them to circulate; and “decoding” because it breaks down codes, that is, the strictures of tradition, identity, culture, and other imposed value systems.
Does this not, however, fall rather short from the reality of capitalism? Marx was able to somewhat chart a course between being enthralled by the intertwining of economic circulation and exploitation, on one side of things, and the exploitation and violence on the other – though he still fell victim to series of critical inconsistencies that ultimately helped in undermining much of his project, be it confusion between the state and the market (as drawn out by Kevin Carson in Studies in Mutualist Political Economy),viii his repugnant and Eurocentric support for British imperialism in India, or the ambiguous relationship between capitalist development and liberation in the core of his philosophy of history – discussions surround which helped shape the paths taken following the Bolshevik revolution.ix
D & G offer an escape from these inconsistencies and ambiguities, but it is an escape route that changes the very nature of the Marxist analysis of capitalism, and with it, the revolutionary goals that this analysis is intended to point towards. What is essential to note is that the elements that are identified as being ‘positive’ in capitalism – lines of flight, deterritorialization, decoding – are also the very things that become associated with liberatory politics. To wage a non-fascist revolt against the world – which is indeed the very goal of a book like Anti-Oedipus – is to revolt against the old in order to break open the possibility for new forms to arise. For Deleuze and Guattari it is desire itself that motors this process, just as it is desire that motivates all attempts at to move along a line of flight, to deterritorialize, and decode. Similarly, forces like deterritorialization and decoding put into play new desires that were not previously there. Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of desire is productive and tends towards excess and circulation, as opposed to the notions of desire rooted lack (as offered in earlier psychoanalytic discourses of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan).
Does this mean that capitalism can be identified as the expression of desire itself, a suggestion that sounds remarkably close to the rambling utterances of the vulgar libertarians and “anarcho”-capitalists? Not exactly. D & G argue for an understanding of capitalism not simply as a system, but as a constantly unfolding process. This process is not merely a reflection of desire filtered through the exchange patterns of the market, but a host of social relations tangled up in immanent relations of power and domination. No matter how flexible power relations may become, they always require some sort of rigid and fixed foundation at their base, some territory in which their codes operate. It would seem then that the elements of explosive creativity exhibited capitalist entrepreneurship and circulation – the market processes themselves, in other words – would stand opposed to this power, yet it does not. This is because, D & G argue, deterritorialization and decoding are only half of the capitalist process, and are conjoined with the reciprocal processes of reterritorialization and recoding. What’s more is that reterritorialization and recoding are presented as ‘stabilization mechanisms’ of sorts for the system itself, without which capitalism itself would cease to be. To quote them at length, …capitalism constantly counteracts, constantly inhibits this tendency [towards dissolution] while at the same time allowing it it free rein; it continually seeks to avoid reaching its limit while simultaneously tending towards that limit. Capitalism institutes or restores all sorts of residual and artificial, individual, imaginary, or symbolic territorialities, thereby attempting, as best it can, to recode, to rechannel persons who have been defined in terms of abstract quantities. Everything returns or recurs: States, nations, families. This what makes the ideology of capitalism “a motley painting of everything that has ever been believed”… The more the capitalist machine deterritorializes, decoding and axiomatizing flows in order to extract surplus value from them, the more the ancillary apparatuses, such as government bureaucracies and the forces of law and order, do their utmost to reterritorialize, absorbing in the process a larger and larger share of surplus value.x
That capitalism requires a state to maintain itself is no new revelation (nor is anything in the paragraph above). The best of Marx’s writings laid out, in incredible detail, the way the evolution of the modern state played a fundamental role in the birth of capitalism, while Benjamin Tucker’s excellent analysis showed how state action built up capitalism, as opposed to deterring it. The post-Marxist Regulation of School, which includes figures like Michel Aglietta and Bob Jessop, has conducted numerous studies of the way regulatory systems allow capitalism to ‘reproduce’ its relations. What D & G are describing here dovetails with these various analyses, but they are concerned with a very specific function: the way the state ‘seizes’ or ‘captures’ increasingly larger and larger elements in the forces that are being unleashed as a means of maintaining the entities that profit from this unleashing. While this might sound somewhat esoteric (and counterintuitive, especially in the face of traditional economic discourses), this process is more or less a depiction of networks of power relations being ‘reproduced’ by the constant co-production of capitalism and the state.
D & G take this notion from two primary sources. The first is the study of money that was carried out by Foucault and presented as part of his series of 1970-1971 lectures at the College de France on “the will to know”. In these lectures, Foucault illustrates how ‘fixed money’ – money that imposed by the state, as opposed to the ‘spontaneous currency’ that appears to occur naturally – in ancient Greece operated as a regulatory mechanism for the whole of society. Money in Greek society “prevents excess, pleonexia, having too much… But it also prevents excessive poverty…”xi Taxation, for Foucault, is an essential aspect of the function of fixed money, and not some aberration to its evolution or something applied later by unscrupulous bureaucrats. Instead, it was created with taxation in mind, as something that could create a taxonomy of classes, help keep class structures stay relatively rigid in their make-up (primarily through debt accrued by the lower classes and the upward flow of tax money to the upper classes), and to facilitate public work projects necessary for the expansive of economic interests beyond their natural scope. Looking the modern era, D & G write that “the Greeks discovered in their own way what the Americans discovered after the New Deal: that heavy taxes are good for business… In a word, money – the circulation of money – is the means of rendering the debt infinite.”xii
The second source is the position of the neo-Marxist Monthly Review school put, as put forward by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy in their book Monopoly Capital. Controversial in the annals of Marxism for their transgression of many of the central tenets of Marxist orthodoxy (such as the tendency for the rate of profit to fall), Baran and Sweezy were primarily concerned with the increasingly ‘organized capitalism’ that had grown in period running from the 1880s through the 1960s. This stage of capitalist development was marked by high levels of centralization of economic power in small handfuls of firms, the market activity between which could only be best described as monopolistic competition. Such a system becomes intractably top-heavy, Baran and Sweezy argue, making the economy tend towards stagnation by running up too much excess production and by slowing money’s circulation through the economy. Thus the state comes to pick up the slack, absorbing excess production and capital to ‘pump energy’ back into the economy, be it through welfare programs, infrastructure renewal, military spending, or any other ‘productive’ form of taxpayer-funded government enterprise. Sounding a bit like Foucault in his study of money, Baran and Sweezy suggest that …since large-scale government spending enables the economy to operate much closer to capacity, the net effect on the magnitude of private surplus is both positive and large… To [the ‘big businessman’], government spending means more effective demand, and he senses that he can shift most of the associated taxes onto consumers or backwards onto workers. In addition… the intricacies of the tax system, specially tailored to fit the needs of all sorts of special interests, open up endless opportunities for speculative and windfall gains. All in all, the decisive sector of the American ruling class is well on the way to becoming a convinced believer in the beneficent nature of government spending.xiii
D & G expand these insights into a more generalized phenomenon, which they dub “capitalist” or “social axiomatics”. A mechanic process essential to the functioning of capitalism, these axiomatics are the means through which anything deterritorialized or decoded is rerouted back into the state-capitalism assemblage. It applies not only to the capture of monetary flows by the state via taxation, or the much earlier capture of exchange and circulation itself by the overcoding of spontaneous currencies with fixed money, but to things like the recuperation and co-optation of oppositional forms into the logic of power, so on and so forth. “There is a tendency within capitalism”, say D &G in A Thousand Plateaus, “to continually more axioms. After the end of World War I, the joint influence of the world depression and the Russian revolution forced capitalism to multiply its axioms, to invent new ones dealing with the working class, unemployment, union organizations, social institutions, the role of the State, the foreign and domestic markets, Keynesian economics, and the New Deal were axiom laboratories. Examples of the creations of new axioms after the Second World War: the Marshall Plan, forms of assistance and lending, transformation in the monetary system.”xiv
As is plain to see, sitting at the center of these interrelated concepts and models – reterritorialization, recoding, the addition/subtraction of axioms – is the state itself. D & G’s conception of capitalism is like a hydraulic system, where everything, be it capital, goods, people, and even desire, moves in flows that are constantly productive. Yet at the center of this system is the regulator that makes it work: “The state, its police, and its army form a gigantic enterprise of antiproduction, but at the heart of production itself, and conditioning this production.”xv
IV. Against the State
In A Thousand Plateaus, these dynamics get recast as a struggle between state apparatuses and war machines. In Anti-Oedipus, divergent, deterritorialized and decoded flows and forces are treated as having “nomadic” qualities; the “war machine” is the next stage of this analysis, focusing on the more intransigent and conflict-driven aspects of their functions. War machines, in other words, make exactly what their name implies, and the target of this war is the state itself (D & G here were drawing on the anthropological work of Pierre Clastres, which analyzed the way certain indigenous societies made the repelling of the state the very rationale of their social quasi-orders). War machines come in many different forms: your affinity group is a war machine, the agorist is a war machine, street gangs and pirates, even certain kinds of commercial organizations. Not all war machines are positive: they’re capable of being darkly violent, tribalistic, even fascistic. While much could be said about this, it is the specific confluence of the war machine with particular economic functions that concerns us here.
Against the war machine, D & G suggest, is the “apparatus of capture”, which is a function of the state that seizes or appropriates the divergent movement and makes it a part of itself. Such a force fits quickly comfortably along the treatment of reterritorialization, recoding, and axiomatics; indeed, D & G identify the apparatus of capture with the “megamachine”, which was Lewis Mumford’s term for large, stae-organized ‘socio-technical’ system that regiment and discipline the people bound up within it.xvi Importantly, they draw a further correlation between the megamachine and certain economic and political phenomena and mechanisms: the apparatus of capture “functions in three modes…: rent, profit, and taxation.” This schema, D & G tell us, is a recasting of Marx’s famous “trinity formula”, which he used to the describe the way the relations of capital become social relations. What makes D & G’s treatment different from Marx’s is twofold: first, because it positions the state, not the pure economic logic of capitalism, at the center of things; and second, because it is no longer a question of how capitalism becomes a social relation, but how things outside of the purview of the state become enmeshed in these various power relations. “It is not the State that presupposes a mode of production”, they write, “quite the opposite, it is the State that makes production a ‘mode.’”xvii
Of taxation we’ve already said quite a bit, so it is rent and profit that must be addressed. While taxation is obviously correlated to state function, for many the suggestion that rent and profit – two fundamental aspects of the capitalist market economy – arise from the functions of the state might appear as absolutely erroneous. But consider the little-acknowledged understanding, even in conventional economic discourses, that the more open the systems of exchange and circulation are, the more the capacity to maintain rates of profit accumulation in the long-term falls. With the capacity to enter freely, or to subtract entire sets of relations, from market systems, the ability for certain actors to assume an inordinate share of the market becomes untenable – which is precisely why reliance on state-granted and enforced monopolies becomes necessary for entrenched power structures to shore themselves up against this deterritorializing tide.
The same could be said for rent, which is contingent, in the capitalist system at least, on private property rights backed by the state and rendered in the form of standardized titles. Perhaps the relationship between rent and the state is even more obvious than that of the state and property, given the undeniable role of the state in partitioning older property systems, and setting them into a circulation beneficial to economic, social, and political elites. The assault on rent that would occur in the void of the state was summed up best by Robert Anton Wilson: “Of course, since Austrian ideas exist as factors in human behavior, I will admit that people, hoodwinked by these ideas, will continue to pay rent even in freedom, for a while at least. But I think that, after a time, observing that their Tuckerite neighbors are not submitting to this imposture, they would come to their senses and cease paying tribute to the self-elected ‘owners’… I myself would not pay rent one day beyond the point at which the police… are at hand to collect it via ‘argument per blunt instrument’.”xviii
So who or what are the war machines that are captured in these three mechanisms of capture, tax, rent, and profit? D & G spend a significant amount of time discussing figures that would be dismissed in the annals of Marxism as ‘petty-bourgeois’: artisans, craftsmen, stone masons, metallurgists, merchants, etc. The existence of these figure does not, of course, remove from the picture of the exploitation of the peasant – and later proletarian – classes, but for D & G it is their nomadic and autonomous nature, “since their existence did not entirely depend on a surplus accumulated by a local State apparatus”, that makes them attractive for prefiguring new political ways of thinking and acting that escape from and attack the state. Referencing the historical development of metallurgy, D & G emphasize the way that the state’s drive to monopolize economies and maintain the status quo of power linked the capture of these actors to the exploitation of the lower classes: “State overcoding keeps the metallurgists, both craft and mercantile, within strict bounds, under powerful bureaucratic control, with monopolistic foreign trade in the service of the ruling class, so that the peasants themselves benefit little from the State innovations.”xix
A more contemporary example of these dynamics in action would be the way 1) tinkerers and hackers produced paradigm-shifting innovations in information-communication technology; 2) the subsequent capture of these innovations under the state’s enforcement of IP laws and their service to large, top-heavy multinational corporations; and 3) the way further innovations from these developments are obstructed. Thus we can suggest a direct continuity between the reflections on artisans, craftsmen and metallurgists in A Thousand Plateaus to the musings on piracy and hacking in “Postscript on the Societies of Control” alluded to earlier.
So what we ultimately have, stepping back looking over these various tracings, is a contested space, a space of conflict, on one side of which is the state, capitalism, and the multi-scaled ecology of power that runs through these formations. On the other: autonomous movement, dynamic exchange and circulation, creative ecologies driven by desire. The former makes the latter the raw materials for itself, makes desire, creativity, the impulse to flee and transgress traditional territories, borders, and limits (is to destabilize not the most fundamental desire there is?), something that upholds more imperceptible forms of domination by way its various mechanisms and apparatuses. The most egregious of these is the way in which these ecologies force so many would-be breaks to simply fold inwards, and return to supporting the systems they supposedly contest. Liberation from capitalism is often synonymous with the retreat to social democratic variants of the same, which is no break from capitalism, but the strengthening of it by calling on the full forces of the state to flex its power. When we leave the question of blood-and-soil identity and aesthetic accouterments to the side, how different can we honestly saw these basic mechanics of the social democratic state are from the fascist state? With this in mind, let us return to the notorious accelerationist passage in Anti-Oedipus, which hopefully by this point take on a new appearance:[W]hich is the revolutionary path? Is there one? – to withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist “economic solution”? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go further still, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to “accelerate the process”, as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.
Is this not a vision of militant, leftist (or even post-leftist) articulation of how systems of exchange and circulation, operating on a global level, can undermine dominant ecologies of power, and that crude brutalism they inexorably tend towards – fascism? It is not a secret ode to neoliberal globalization, or the breakthrough of the capitalist world market; following their vision of the state and capitalism as forces bound up together as a common, modular, and reactive assemblage, ‘neoliberalization’ and all that comes with it (the slippering sloganeering of ‘privatization’, ‘deregulation’, ‘austerity’, ‘structural adjustment’, etc.) is nothing more than the next unfolding of the processes of adding and subtracting axioms. A positive left-wing anarchist accelerationism would have to position the horizon of their political activity beyond axiomatics, in a future space that breaks apart these ecologies. This is a future where desire operates at the “molecular” level, not at the level of some abstract collectivity.
It would be utterly incorrect to say that the entirety of D & G’s praxis is about some ‘free-market communism’, as it has been described by Eugene Holland.xx It would be equally incorrect , however, to pretend that the relationship between markets and liberation does not matter in the great scheme of their work (as so many leftist commentators, be they academic or not, have done). Any market anarchist elements that are gleamed must be married to their wider gamut of concerns – futurity, globality, the unleashing of desires to their fullest extent, the dissolution of all externals and internal dynamics of power, on and on. As the late Mark Fisher described, the accelerationism of D & G was “about accelerating certain tendencies which capitalism itself has to keep at bay… when those tendencies are accelerated, we go beyond those standard forms of subjectivities, life, and work that capitalism depends upon.”xxi
iNick Land “Machinic Desire”. Nick Land, Robin Mackay, and Ray Brassier Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings, 1987-2007 Urbanomic, 2012, in pg. 326
iiGilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Penguin Classics, 2009, pgs. 239-240. The Nietzschean dimensions of this fragment, which is essential to truly grasping the implications of D & G’s discourse, is more than can be tackled in these pages. I refer the interested reader to Obsolete Capitalism Acceleration, Revolution, and Money in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus Rizosfera, 2016 https://www.academia.edu/29794467/Acceleration_Revolution_and_Money_in_Deleuze_and_Guattaris_Anti-OEdipus iiiSaul Newman “War on the State: Stirner and Deleuze’s Anarchism” Anarchist Studies Issue 9, 2001https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/saul-newman-war-on-the-state-stirner-and-deleuze-s-anarchism ivGilles Deleuze and Antonio Negri “Control and Becoming: Gilles Deleuze and Antonio Negri” Futur Anterieur Issue 1, Spring, 1990 http://www.uib.no/sites/w3.uib.no/files/attachments/6._deleuze-control_and_becoming.pdf vGilles Deleuze “Postscript on the Societies of Control” October, Issue 59, 1992 https://cidadeinseguranca.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/deleuze_control.pdf viFoucault’s mode of analysis and understanding of power is quite different from that of Marx, and in the end would lead away from anything resembling orthodox Marxism. This isn’t to say that Foucault didn’t take bits and pieces from Marx. In his famed study of the rise and diffusion of the “disciplinary society”, Foucault references Marx from time to time and suggests that the rise of capitalism, as diagnosed by Marx, was contingent on the ise of forms of regulating and regimenting people’s bodies in order to make them productive. “In fact, the two processes – the accumulation of men and the accumulation of capital – cannot be separated; it would not have been possible to solve the problem of accumulation of men without the growth of an apparatus of production capable of both sustaining them them and using them; conversely, the techniques that made the cumulative multiplicity of men useful accelerated the accumulation of capital.” Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison Vintage Books, 1995, pg. 221 viiJean-Francois Lyotard “Energumen Capitalism”, in Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader Urbanomic, 2014, pg. 183, 182 viiiKevin Carson Studies in Mutualist Political Economy 2004, pgs. 119 – 128 ixSee the correspondence between Marx and Vera Zasuluchi that occurred in 1881: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/zasulich/index.htm. A concern of this correspondence was the conversations between revolutionary Marxists in Russia about whether or not capitalism – and the sorts of large-scale modernizing processes that industrial capitalism brought with it – was necessary for the establishing communism. xDeleuze and Guattari Anti-Oedipus, pgs. 34-35 xiMichel Foucault Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the College de France, 1970-1971, and Oedipdal Knowledge Picador, 2014, pg. 142 xiiDeleuze and Guattari Anti-Oedipus, pg. 197. D & G’s treatment of debt itself is fairly complicated, and beyond the scope of this article here. It’s worth saying, however, that as opposed to something arising from exchange and circulation, debt is characterized as an “inscription” made upon the individual by the dominant structures of power as a means of foreclosing the future. For a brief introduction to their theory of debt, see the two-part article at S.C. Hickman’s Social Ecologies blog: “Deleuze and Guattari: Theory of Debt” (https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2015/06/15/deleuze-guattari-theory-of-debt/) and “Deleuze and Guattari: Further Notes on Debt” (https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2015/06/16/deleuze-guattari-further-notes-on-debt/) xiiiPaul Baran and Paul Sweezy Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order Monthly Review Press, 1966, pgs. 150-152 xivDeleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus, pg. 462 xvDeleuze and Guattari Anti-Oedipus, pg. 235 xviFor a full overview, see Lewis Mumford The Myth of the Machine Vol. 1: Technics and Human Development Harcout 1967; and The Pentagon of Power: The Myth of the Machine Vol. 2 Harcout, 1974. My essay “Orders of Technics: Considerations on Lewis Mumford” at my Deterritorial Investigations blog also summarizes Mumford’s theories, their connection to left-libertarian and market anarchist positions like that of Ralph Borsodi and Kevin Carson, and provides a mild critique: https://deterritorialinvestigations.wordpress.com/2016/12/04/orders-of-technics-considerations-on-lewis-mumford/ xviiDeleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus, pg; 429 xviiiEric Geislinger, Jane Talisman, and Robert Anton Wilson “Illuminating Discord: An Interview with Robert Anton Wilson” New Libertarian Notes September 5th, 1976https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/various-authors-illuminating-discord-an-interview-with-robert-anton-wilson xixDeleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus, pg. 450 xxSee Eugene W. Holland Nomad Citizenship: Free Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Under the influence of Deleuze and Guattari and second-order systems theory (to which their theories can be heavily correlated), Holland describes how “combining the terms free market and communism in this way is to deploy selected features of the concept of communism to transform capitalist markets to render them truly free and, at the same time, to deploy select features of the concept of communism to transform communism and free it from a fatal entanglement with the State.” (pg. xvi) xxiMark Fisher “Touchscreen Capture: How Capitalist Cyberspace Inhibits Accelerationism” International Conference on Radical Futures and Accelerationism, 2016 https://voicerepublic.com/talks/01-mark-fisher-touchscreen-capture-how-capitalist-cyberspace-inhibits-acceleration
The article is taken from:
by David R. Cole PreambleThis paper focuses on dark-theory, and explains the Anthropocene through such dark theory. It addresses a major problematic for contemporary theory; i.e., it is not dark enough. In terms of the current environmental, social and cultural situation, we are faced with a singularity, which is here termed as being at the heart of the Anthropocene; not as a metaphor, but as a dark, refracted image of what the human drives have produced, are producing, and will continue to produce in the future: the black sun. This image is in contrast to the cyberpunk notion of a technological A.I. singularity becoming intelligent and taking over from the human race at some point in the future. The naming of the singularity at the heart of the Anthropocene as the ultimate, dark expression of the human drives, works in conjunction with the action of the surrounding black hole, and as such has an event horizon we are fast approaching: it can be surmised that we will not stop entering this event horizon until the sixth great extinction event has run its course. Whether human beings as a species survive is unknown; what is certain is that we are in the midst of an enormous matter-flow encouraged by this singularity and black hole, and, as Deleuze & Guattari (1988) state: “this matter-flow can only be followed” (p. 409). Everything that we have held close and believed in is threatened by this pan-energetic black hole. We have created the singularity in conjunction with the forces that have created us, yet the black hole has darker dimensions than we can imagine, and is certainly more powerful than us. As we get sucked ever further towards the singularity, one could say that, after Nietzsche, we are: “ … on the point of tipping over into nihilism—into the belief in absolute valuelessness, that is, meaninglessness” (Nietzsche, 1967-77, 13: 7[54]). However, the Anthropocene is more than a negative semantic result as an absolute loss of faith in human endeavor. Rather, it shows us how meaning has started to bend, twist and inverse, as the immense forces contained by the singularity begin to bite. The black hole reaches down into our very drives, transforms them, and leaves us wondering about what has happened, what is happening, and what will occur. The experience of the singularity of the Anthropocene is therefore explained by another of Nietzsche’s notes on the anti-psychological formation of the drives: “The psychologists’ great confusion has lain in their failure to distinguish [between] two types of pleasure, that of falling asleep and that of conquest” (Nietzsche, 1967-77, 13: 14[174]). In the precise terms of the Anthropocene, as possessing a heart as a singularity surrounded by a black hole, we will not overcome, or conquer, the singularity through pre-given technological solutions, such as global geoengineering or coordinated, large scale carbon sequestration; as these modes of fixing, are what has in unison with other actions, matter and forces through time caused the singularity (as will be explained by the cloud analysis below), and will therefore only mitigate against limited effects of the singularity and black hole. Therefore, a cluster of perspectives on the Anthropocene, which are becoming increasingly widespread, are that “we may as well just leave things alone, and carry on as before”, “we are in fact asleep”, “we will probably die through the unfolding events as we approach the event horizon”, so “we may as well enjoy whatever will occur in the future as ‘the transformational Anthropocene’”, rather than trying to futilely overcome that which cannot be conquered: i.e. the human drives. What Nietzsche is pointing out, is that external prognostication about internal reactions to extreme change, which is in our case, are being produced by the singularity of the Anthropocene, will always produce misunderstandings with respect to effects and causes, whether the effects of the realization of the singularity are mutism, inarticulation, trauma, flight, an increase in herd instinct, or simply fear & panic-responses; because the ways in which the deep drives are read, for example, by psychology, most often conform to stable, pre-designated, pre-given systems, which are unable to interpret the radically new Anthropocenic conditions of feedback induced non-linear change, on a global, unprecedented, and as yet unimagined scale. As the theorist Keith Ansell Pearson has said, in the context of Nietzsche’s politics: What Nietzsche seeks to do as a thinker … is to prepare us for change. He shows that humanity has a history, that it has been (de-) formed in a particular way, and that the end of … [a certain] interpretation of the world, offers the possibility of another beginning. It becomes possible to navigate new seas since the horizon is now ‘free’ again. Ansell-Pearson, 1994, p. 205. However, what are we being prepared for in and by the Anthropocene, and who or what is preparing us? Is this preparation, merely an increased likelihood of death? Or perhaps it is about flight or swarming, and getting ready as a species to live in new ways, for example, ‘off world’ living or a return to pre-modern, ecological living? Or, perhaps we need to discover a new depth, and sense of readiness for the perhaps already bunkered and blinkered life we are already leading; for example, we need to prepare for the continual staving off the effects of wild fires, drought, floodings, hurricanes, starvation, economic crises and future resource/food/water wars? There are no easy answers to these questions; yet the imminent reality of extinction in and due to the sixth great extinction event, points to the fact that unsustainable human growth has destroyed, is destroying and will continue to destroy the biosphere, in proportion to the detrimental effects of this growth. What can be undoubtedly said about the facts of extinction in the singularity of the Anthropocene, is that the powers connected to death will increase in magnitude, and as such, the image of this power will become increasingly manipulated, and this manipulation will take hold as a common reality, even as we wonder, who or what is going to die first, and who decides what or who dies, as Georges Bataille has said: “The power of death signifies that this real world can only have a neutral image of life, that life’s intimacy does not reveal it’s dazzling consumption until the moment it gives out,” (Bataille, 1989, p. 49). The consumptive powers of the singularity of the Anthropocene, which could be understood as a mode of radiation from the black hole, takes the dazzling, vital nature out of life, and makes it darker. This is why the usual, extraordinarily slow time of geology in previous epochs is replaced by a ‘dark time’ in the astrophysics of the Anthropocene event. This ‘dark time’ is characterized by oscillation, contradiction, impossible choices, and the consequent continual putting off of things, the insertion and following of complicated time loops, and by reversals in previously accepted norms and actions, as we approach and become one with the Anthropocenic event horizon. In contrast to the characterization of recent ‘great acceleration’ in progress, growth and success, through which the detritus of human production was dealt with and left behind, the ‘dark time’ of the Anthropocene sees objects that were buried and forgotten re-emerge, as the forces and constraints which were holding them in place are shredded through the irradiating powers of the Anthropocenic singularity and black hole. Again, Nietzsche anticipated these throughlines, when he suggested that: Waste, decay, elimination need not be condemned: they are necessary consequences of life, of the growth of life. The phenomenon of decadence is as necessary as any increase and advance of life: one is in no position to abolish it. Reason demands, on the contrary, that we do justice to it. Nietzsche, 1968, Fragment 40: March-June 1888 However, the growth that we now see is no longer the expansion of human dominion through or as the Anthropocene. Rather, the ‘growth’ of the dark time of the Anthropocene is exemplified by the ways in which the singularity is now interacting with the continuum of everyday life. For example, a slow-motion film might show us the north Pacific Gyre intervening in human populations, and cause tsunamis of plastics to rein down on the beach goers; landfill rubbish sites all over the world explode through internal methane gas production; radioactive material dumps start to leak and increasingly contaminate their rocky, underground environments; large scale carbon sequestration sites prove in the long run to be unstable, and lead to unforeseen circumstances, such as massive localized CO₂ poisoning through previously undiscovered geological-weak-links. In sum, the singularity of the Anthropocene requires thinking that allows for and encourages “… in the midst of perfectly gruesome detonations, a new truth [to] become visible … [and] among thick clouds” (Nietzsche, 1979, p. 114). This bringing to visibility is what I am calling ‘dark thinking’ and the ‘black sun’, that fully takes into account the factors involved with the production of the singularity of the Anthropocene. In order to do this, we must let go of previously suggested certainties that have become close to us, before the event horizon of the Anthropocenic singularity completely takes over; things such as our ‘being’ or the importance of ‘the human’ or the power of ‘progress’; we need to create a fully realized dark cloud analysis, or analysis of the ‘unworld’ of the Anthropocene and: “In such an ‘unworld’ Heidegger could no longer expect to be understood,” (Dreyfus, 1993, p. 333), as it is unrestrained darkness, full of wholly material time-warping forces; it is anti-phenomenological non-being, containing no light. Tool-enhancementThe first line of this matter cloud of the dark Anthropocene that is being sucked into the singularity by the black hole involves tool-enhancement (see Figure 1 below). I will begin this matter-cloud analysis 2.5 million years ago, with the hominid, Homo Habilis, who started to use basic stone implements for regular tasks such as cutting, shaping and making other tools. This analysis does not recenter the black sun narrative on human emergence, or ignore the complex inter-relatedness of the singularity that we are describing, or, indeed, try to make the Anthropocenic black hole purely functionally human; i.e., another tool that enables everything in the past to seem useful and in/of a continuity; however, this matter cloud does present the scope of tool development, and how deep rooted reciprocating extensions from body, feeling and thought to actions in the world, and vice versa are, and have become. Tool-enhancement to and of the human form changed in waves for approximately 2,487,000 years, and mainly involved using stone and other implements to directly work with and in the world in a non-sedentary fashion, to perform tasks such as kill food to eat, build temporary shelter, or to practice shamanistic rituals. As different species of hominid hunter and gatherers became extinct over the course of 2 and half million years, to leave Homo Sapiens alone amid nature, the focus of the tool-enhancement changed from nomadic survival, subsistence community and shamanic worship, to sedentary power, control of the environment, and the production of surplus. This significant shift in the focus of tool-enhancement came from about 10,000 years B.C., even though evidence for the development of Homo Sapiens and the beginnings of modern human cognitive abilities dates back 200,000 years and included some small scale, fixed settlements; large scale, permanent settlement, organized agriculture, and the rearing of livestock did not predominantly occur for 188,000 of these years, making the shift in tool-enhancement from nomadic to sedentary purposes, a relatively recent change in modern humans. Agriculture and settled, hierarchical society developed in different parts of the world at approximately the same times after 10,000 B.C., as the last ice age receded, in places such as the Mesopotamia, East China, the Ganges and Indus catchments, the Nile, West Africa and in the Meso and Andean Americas. In these places, the conditions were right after 10,000 B.C. for tools to enhance the human form in terms of helping to create and maintain large permanent settlements and the structured societies that these settlements imply. It is wrong to say that nomadic tool-enhancement in any way died out after 10,000 B.C., or that sedentary tool enhancement is better or more advanced that nomadic tool-enhancement. What happened according to this dark material cloud analysis after 10,000 B.C. is that the energy differentials and their forces between tools and their work had been altered. In the predominantly nomadic age, the energy expended making, using and maintaining the tool was approximately equal to the energy received from its use. For example, in nomadic societies, sharpened axe heads made from flint and fixed to thick branches through vine, would have been valuable weapons, carried and treasured by their makers as a vital means for survival. In post 10,000 B.C. societies, such tools would have begun to be stored or rationed to armies for specific uses in battles, or for specific purposes, such as the ceremonial slaughter of livestock by a priesthood. The energy distribution and force of the tool therefore sits dormant until called upon, creating a means to control the use of tools, and to link up with other tools, such as orders to distribute the best tools to the best warriors, or to make more or adapted tools. The next major change in tool-enhancement emerges at 3,000 B.C., with the incorporation of metal tools in the sedentary tool-arrangements of war, agriculture, government, religion and domestic life. The use of bronze added an extra force and intensity to the tool-enhancement of the human form, and made the enactment of sedentary power through repetitious acts, domination, religion and actions such as cooking, home-building, and importantly created the means for trade and exchange value through the introduction of money. Highly structured and regulated societies in Egypt, the Indus valley, Mesopotamia and the Minoans on Crete all flourished from 3000 B.C., and created many of the codes and foundations for the machinery and inter-relational flows of sedentary society to come. Nomadic society was not abolished, and also used bronze, but these uses existed outside of the controlled hierarchies of sedentary power, often on the fringes, and in-between the power centers that developed around pharaohs, aristocrats, priesthoods, bureaucrats and their retinues. Power was enacted ceremonially during this period in these sedentary societies, and all tool-enhancement was ultimately deployed at the bequest of the rulers, for example, as a mechanism to build pyramids, to improve agriculture, or to increase the chances of success at war. Populations grew around the sedentary power-centers and these populations were regulated and controlled by and for the purpose of serving their God-like leaders. The next leap in the lineage of tool-enhancement came in terms of the development of iron, and the replacement of bronze as the major source of tool-enhancement in 1,200 B.C. Iron had been previously wrought by the Hittites as early as 2000 B.C., yet it was after 1,200 B.C., and the collapse of early trading routes that had supplied the connections between copper and tin, that the use of iron began to flourish and metallurgists learnt how to temper iron with carbon to make steel (it is interesting to note that this doesn’t happen at this time in China). The use of iron in tool-enhancement required better, centralized kilns, and an organized labor force of blacksmiths to work the iron. Larger scale cities in Europe and the Middle East, e.g. Greek, Roman and the Persians began to use iron in everyday tool-enhancement that improved the production of wheels, barrels, weapons of all descriptions, agricultural tools, shipping, time keeping devices, cutlery and chains for imprisonment. Human population steadily increased during this period, it had been stable at around 4 million for perhaps 6 thousand years, now, with better tools for survival and increasingly sophisticated means to protect and control sedentary societies, and to investigate the forces of nature, human population began to increase to around 100 million by the time of Jesus. Again, nomadic societies did not die out, but were often put under increasing threat by armies and patrolled trade routes connected to centers of power such as those of the Roman, Parthian and Kushan Empires, which were engaged in collecting every advantage to maintain and expand their power-bases. It was during this period that the tool-machinery necessary for our current global society was developed, and the singularity of the Anthropocene can be traced back to; and even though organized, absolute religion was still an important central plank in these hierarchies and sedentary modes of expansionist control; rational, rules based organization, and the beginnings of limited democratic debate, started to refashion the ways in which power was distributed. This reorganization had consequences in terms of how tools were deployed, who used them, why they were put into action, and the ability and reach of tools to refashion the environment, for example, mining activities were expanded, rubbish mounds were organized, trade routes and new connecting towns remade valleys and affected river beds and vegetation, often without replenishment. However, it was not until 1500 A.D. that tool-enhancement took another leap, which could be said to have had a significant effect on the creation of the Anthropocene. At this time, empires across the world began to be able to effectively communicate through improvements in long range ships and their concomitant transport technologies. The invention of printing made written instructions easier to duplicate, and modern empirical scientific methods started to establish themselves in various cultures such as in Europe and China. The result was the possibility for tool-enhancement to create the beginnings of a reproducible culture and products that could be more easily traded worldwide. This culture and world interconnectedness took another step in 1800 A.D as the conditions for factories became possible through the invention of steam powered engines, and industrialization and economics started to work in unison, creating what we now understand as the foundations for modern global capitalism. By 1900 A.D. coal powered ships, and early vehicles were available to carry an ever increasing number of products for trade worldwide, telephones and electricity were beginning to transform business and domestic life, and the pace of social change increased to accommodate these technological advances. Tools were now fully integrated into large machines and factories, cities had begun to dominate the environment and polluted whole ecosystems, warfare was fought on a previously unimaginable industrial scale. By 1970 A.D. modern computers were in use, television was commonplace, enormous, global industrial powers such as the U.S. and U.S.S.R. vied for power on the cold war world stage, massive cargo ships and large numbers of people on planes travelled around the world. Sedentary domestic life had been completely transformed by consumerism, electricity, and the world trade markets, modern medicine had helped to increase the world human population beyond 3.7 billion. Today (2017), we live in an internet and mobile phone connected world; air, car, truck, cargo shipping and train travel are pan-global, there are more than 7.5 billion human beings in the world, most desiring to be sedentary and comfortable on a planet that is thoroughly crisscrossed by trade routes, roads, electricity supply and generation systems, and ever expanding human cities, all with particular but interconnected, ecological consequences. Carbon trailThere are disputed claims that hominids entered the carbon cycle 1.7 million years ago when Homo Erectus learnt to control fire. The control of fire is clearly an extraordinarily powerful means to start to dominate the environment, to increase one’s chances for survival, and it has always been closely aligned with tool-enhancement, as the warmth, energy and heating properties of fire encourages tool design, the social use of tools, and a consequently increased tool engineering. Evidence that Homo Sapiens had begun to use fire as part of a nomadic lifestyle goes back at least 125,000 years. Nomadic societies were not human exceptionalists, but journeyed after food in groups, developed social codes based on shamanism and movement, and worshipped as part of the seasons and environments, in an attempt to survive, and to deal with consciousness. The extraordinary speed of the spread of Homo Sapiens during this period is testament to the ways in which tool-enhancement and use and control of fire in and as part of the carbon trail, were integrated enough to enable quick, effective movement in the environment. Conditions at this time were harsh, and it was not until the end of the last ice age, at 12,000 B.C., that the carbon trail significantly developed. By that time, in the Upper Paleolithic, Homo sapiens had colonized every continent except for Antarctica, though were not present in large numbers (less than 4 million). Permanent settlements began to develop after 12, 000 B.C., and expanded through the beginnings of agricultural practices, the central control of fire, tool-enhancement and the carbon trail functioning in unison to produce the origins of sedentary culture. The most important question for the first two lines of flight into the singularity and black hole of the Anthropocene, is how and why did Homo Sapiens transition from nomads, who used tools and had become imbricated in the carbon trail through the control of fire; to become settled, large scale communities that began to practice agriculture, raise livestock, and developed codes and religion to regulate and control their societies. In the nomadic states, communities expended and received energy in comparable amounts, hominids lived in valleys until food ran out, or the climate became unfavorable, which led to their departures, and the consequent replenishment in the ecosystems over time. In contrast, sedentary communities stayed in the same place, sending out envoys, miners, engineers, farmers, warriors and traders to other societies, but the bulk of the population became static, therefore creating a static energy field in and around itself, that constitutes a defensive structure. Resources in sedentary society had to be replenished within this static, orbital and elliptical field; rather than being envisaged, moved to, or harnessed somewhere else, other than the initial base, and as a group. In the terms of the carbon trail, the next major development happened at approximately 3,500 B.C. At this date, there is evidence that coal had begun to be used as a fuel in China to burn in the smelting of bronze. The introduction of coal into the carbon trail is clearly a significant step on the path to the singularity of the Anthropocene, because the organized burning of resources from the Carboniferous era, constitutes an important step from the hunter and gatherer collection of recently dead wood or detrital carbon to make fire. Certainly, coal did not replace wood on any large scale as an energy source for many thousands of years, but the discovery of the increase in energy yield that coal produces, has major, cloud analysis consequences, in terms of the carbon trail and how Homo Sapiens henceforth interacted with the environment. It was not until approximately 400 B.C. in Europe, Egypt, the Americas and Asia that technology, social organization and the centralized control of fire had developed enough to incorporate the beginnings of the importance of coal mining into the social fabric of sedentary life. At this time, tools developed to excavate, transport and deliver coal to large scale kilns, where coal could be burnt and incorporated into useful processes such as the smelting of iron, and the heating of water. In the ancient world, it is perhaps in the Roman Empire that today’s large scale burning of fossil fuel can be traced back to, because the conditions of a stable, expansionist, technologically advanced, pleasure loving society based on rational principles, produced the precise mixture for the widespread use and burning of wood and coal. The increased energy yield from the burning of wood to the burning of coal made it more likely that large scale, centrally orchestrated industrialized processes could be based around the higher energy release, and the expansion and successes of the Roman Empire were to an extent built upon on the combinations of wood, coal and iron production, and the engineering, military and trade structure this combination enabled. There is no evidence that the custodians of the Roman Empire considered the environmental effects from their carbon trail exploits, but they did produce a highly advanced, technologically sophisticated society, that properly began the march to the Anthropocene and the black hole that we see today. Even though civilizations continued to flourish all over the world in the intervening years, the next leap in the carbon trail did not occur until 1780 A.D. This is when global trade routes had been established, steam based machines had been invented, and sedentary societies were stable and developed enough to begin to fully exploit coal as a major energy source to power their systems. Thus Homo Sapiens entered into the industrial age, which we are still, arguably in today, through and by which, exponential increases in human populations around the globe have seen consistent increases in fossil fuel usage. After 1850 A.D., oil was added to coal as an energy source, though oil has many other ubiquitous uses, such as the production of plastics to make things. Since the late nineteenth century, human history could be said to be dominated by the use of fossil fuels, which has led to unequal economic development, great wealth being distributed amongst the beneficiaries of the sale and ownership of the fossil fuels supplies, and wars being fought over their exploitation and use. The recent scientific realization that the widespread burning of fossil fuels harms the environment through global warming and the release of CO₂, has to face the history of the carbon trail, and the drives which that entails, combined with tool-enhancement. These drives have been fully enmeshed in the history of modern, global, industrial society since the 1850s, and the world view that this history entails, which could be named as fossil capitalism. The phalloceneThe fundamental problem for the Anthropocene is not its scientific definition, or when it officially started, but how to translate the reality of the enmeshment of tool-enhancement with the carbon trail into action (see Figure 1 below). This problem touches upon and must include the imaginary aspects of the Anthropocene, which I call, after Liz Kinnamon, Jess Mach, and the SCUM manifesto by Valerie Solanas, as ‘the phallocene’. The argument here is that the millions of years that the lineages of tool-enhancement and carbon trail have been coming together has been cemented and augmented through and by the phallic imaginary. This integrated process was arguably began approximately 4000 B.C. in Egypt and Sumer, through the gradual centralization of nomadic, shamanic religions into one faith, controlled by a hierarchical priesthood, and directed at the worship of a Pharaoh or King-God. This was an incredibly difficult process, as the hunters and gatherers had been practicing their particular religions based on separate ecosystems for many hundreds of thousands of years; these animisms had been locally directed, had worshipped a range of Gods from their environments, had deployed shamans as the means to predict the future, and to help with important functions in the tribes, such as healing. Centralized religions managed by a theological bureaucracy firstly had to convince the populations of their relevance, and latterly had to replace over time the deep-seated animist beliefs in the populations with the ceremonies of Pharaoh or King directed, multi-pantheon worship. At around 900 B.C. the multi-God religions started to break down into monotheistic religions in Israel and elsewhere, as a result of the phallic directness over time of the worship towards a God-like King. Even though multi-God religions remained in place, and to this day, animism and multi-God religions such as Hinduism still importantly exist and are practiced around the world, the tendency towards one God worship, phallic monotheism, and how that relates to tool-enhancement and the carbon trail in terms of social and cultural scales, are a definite clue to understanding how we have reached the predicament of the Anthropocene as the singularity we perceive amd imagine today. Perhaps the most important date on the material cloud analysis in terms of the phallocene is 600 A.D. Even though Christianity had begun before this date, it was with the start of Islam, in combination with Christianity, that the phallic imaginary begins in earnest, highlighted by mantras such as: ‘the father, the son, and the holy ghost’. This material cloud analysis is not anti-Christianity or anti-Islam, but seeks to understand how self-same repetitions, set up and augmented by phallic logic, and seen for example, in the inability to steer a course away from the singularity of the Anthropocene, have come to pass. We cannot go back in time and ‘unstart’ Christianity or Islam, but we can question the domination and centralization of human concerns over anything ‘un’ or non-human, and how these deep-seated prejudices have helped to create a blindness to environmental matters. The phallic logics of insertion into and exploitation of nature as an infinite resource, and not working with or reciprocally with or in nature, defines a perspective that has pushed humans forward into the black hole and event horizon of the Anthropocene. After the establishment of the great mono-theological religions of Christianity and Islam, that were transposed to most corners of the world over the next thousand years, the next deepening of the phallocene came about after 1820 A.D., and the industrial notion of work tied to economics. By this time, tool-enhancement and the carbon trail were linked to such as extent that it was possible to lock in a notion of monetary work as being entirely compatible and transposed with life. The phallic logic of the self-same is henceforth played out by work in terms of wages and payment, the working week, the organization of the family, government and companies; and all the social organization around and due to these structures, including leisure-time, travel, and in the ways in which groups interact and identity develops. After this, the development of inter-connected digital tools and their concomitant technologies such as personal computers in combination with the world wide web, and the rise of global, highly structured and capitalized corporations, and computerized manufacturing techniques, has seen the intensification of the phallocene after 1996, and a new post-work, digitally mediated definition of human life has begun to emerge. This definition, whether it concerns raising one’s profile via social media, or taking part in social, cultural and political mechanisms today, functions as offshoots of the phallocene. Atomic-timeAs has been mentioned above, the time of the Anthropocene is a ‘dark time’, it is a black sun, because of the extinction singularity which we are being dragging us towards at the center of the black hole. However, it is also an atomic-time, because of the ways in which society has been progressively individualized and separated, and it has become especially difficult to act collectively (or, indeed, to act at all). Atomic-time exists at the same time as the phallocene has homogenized society away from hunter and gatherer, transversal nomadic behaviors, and towards, for example, the worship of one abstract male God, in a herd-like, unquestioning manner. Many of us therefore find ourselves in the contradictory position of being homogenized by the phallocene, whilst at the same time, separated and subjectivised by atomic-time. To understand this state-of-affairs of further, it is worth examining the material cloud, and line of flight with its origins at 500 B.C in Greece and India. At this time, speculative philosophers such as Democritus, imagined the universe made up of atoms. However, these hypotheses were not added to significantly until 1803 and the atomic theory of John Dalton. Dalton led a century of discovery and investigation into the atom that went alongside the development of electricity, which was increasingly harnessed and put to use in growing industrialized societies. By 1904, the existence of electrons had been theorized by the likes of J.J.Thomson, and the use of electricity was well-established. By 1922, quantum mechanics had helped to delve into the wave patterns and energy forms that move atoms, and Niels Bohr and others had come up with sophisticated models of atomic structure that were consistent with empirical observations. Albert Einstein had proposed his theory of general relativity, and empirical work into the structures of atoms and their energy releases in the 1930s led up to the first deployment of an atomic bomb in 1945. The consequence of the first atomic detonations was to create an uneasy standoff between the major world industrial powers, which now possessed the ability to destroy the world many times over. In this atmosphere; consumerism, subjectivity, learning and change have all become compromised, as the false equilibrium of nuclear détente has pushed along the deadening effects of one world capitalism into and as a negative and false space, where any enduring reason to live otherwise has become harder to imagine, as the American novelist Kurt Vonnegut (1991) has said, as an example of how atomic-time and the phallocene working together: “Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops (p. 39).” Atomic-time is a repetitious dead-time, built upon sedentary behavior and stasis, wherein capital flows are capable of taking over subjectivity and thought, as there is nothing left to do other than watch TV, or to try and enjoy the spectacle of the universal, global standoff. Nuclear accidents such as Chernobyl, Long Island and Fukushima, can puncture the boredom and numbness of nuclear capitalism, yet the invisible nature of radiation combined with invisible release of CO₂ can make us shrug our shoulders, again, which is characteristic of the atomic-time of the phallocene, as Vonnegut (1991) has said: “How nice — to feel nothing, and to still get full credit for being alive (p. 105).” Figure 1. The four-line matter cloud analysis leading into the singularity of the Anthropocene. From ‘Black Sun’ presentation, 20/04/2017, The New School for Social Research (New York). The politics of the AnthropoceneWhat can be done? The arrangement and analysis of the four material clouds as lines of: tool-enhancement; the carbon trail; the phallocene; and atomic-time, as being funneled by the gravity of the black hole, and as being drawn together by the immense forces involved with the singularity, points to how difficult it is to steer away from such a prolonged, intrinsic and historical convergence of the human drives, and to consequently escape their extinctions and annihilations. It is the contention of this paper that most theorizations of the Anthropocene, including notions of how to deal with it, are not dark enough, and therefore misunderstand the politics of the Anthropocene; and that hope of social and collective progress in terms of moving to a better future in light of the singularity are doomed to fail, in a parallel manner to the hopes of the sexual revolution from the 1960s: It is interesting to note that the ‘sexual revolution’ was sometimes portrayed as a communal utopia, whereas in fact it was simply another stage in the historical rise of individualism … The sexual revolution has destroyed intermediary communities, the last to separate the individual from the market. The destruction continues to this day … Houellebecq, 2001, pp. 135-6 Politics today oscillates between those who have realized the extent of the black hole and power of the singularity of the Anthropocene; and those who have not, and who might carry on as before, as if asleep, or unable to act. Most involved with politics are to some extent deniers of the reality of the black hole, either through disbelief in Anthropogenic effects; i.e. thinking humans are exceptional, God-like, and that we are not subject to the forces of the Anthropocene, even though we have made them through our drives; or that ‘nature’ is more powerful than the singularity and 4 cloud analysis, so there is, in fact, no all engulfing Anthropogenic black hole and no singularity to worry about. Alternatively, politicians may labor in the faith that humans will rediscover a collective will, and tackle the singularity of the Anthropocene through agencies such as the United Nations or pan-governmental agreements, and combined action on climate action (which is only part of the solution). Anthropocene deniers are scientific fact deniers, and live in an ‘unworld’, believers in the ‘good eco-will’ of human nature, are idealists and utopic dreamers, and who take no account of the contrary, historical evidence of the human drives (Cole, 2013). The 4 cloud material analysis suggests that the only way forward is to go through the wormhole that is being created by the black hole, and to see what awaits us on the other side. One of the effects of going through the wormhole of the Anthropocene is to darkly accelerate to ‘post-capitalism’, which is different in kind from ‘green capitalism’, as Murray Bookchin has pointed out: To speak of ‘limits to growth’ under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society. The moral pieties that are voiced … by many well-meaning environmentalists are as naive as the moral pieties of multinationals are manipulative. Capitalism can no more be ‘persuaded’ to limit growth than a human being can be ‘persuaded’ to stop breathing. Attempts to ‘green’ capitalism, to make it ‘ecological’, are doomed by the very nature of the system as a system of endless growth. Bookchin, 1990, p.54. The politics of the future must involve a post-capitalist landscape that works with and takes account of the drives in the 4 cloud analysis. This will only be reached once the pathway through the Anthropocenic wormhole has been navigated, and the sixth great extinction event has passed, or its extent has at least fully understood. This pathway will cause untold disruption, reorganization on every level of human life, and it is questionable whether or not we will indeed survive. Uppermost, one of the necessities for survival in and through the wormhole is the development of an entirely new politics, one that takes into account the 4 cloud analysis, and is of a profound, immanent nature, as Alberto Toscano (2009) has suggested: “… we can speak of a politics immanent to philosophy as a Kampfplatz, [or] as a battlefield …” (online). On this battlefield, the material analysis performed as 4 lines entering the singularity, helps us to realize the truth of our situation, and against the odds, to rise against this non-linear history and crescendo of ‘unworld’ building that has gone before us through the convergence in the human drives. This ‘rising’ is also a redirecting towards following the material analysis in the clouds, in feeling and thinking through and in a post-capitalist context, which includes, for example, the end of money; as Vonnegut has suggested: Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves. Vonnegut, 1991, p. 129 CodaBurnt Norton I Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden. My words echo Thus, in your mind. But to what purpose Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves I do not know. Other echoes Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow? Quick, said the bird, find them, find them, Round the corner. Through the first gate, Into our first world, shall we follow The deception of the thrush? Into our first world. There they were, dignified, invisible, Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves, In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air, And the bird called, in response to The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery, And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses Had the look of flowers that are looked at. There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting. So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern, Along the empty alley, into the box circle, To look down into the drained pool. Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged, And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight, And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly, The surface glittered out of heart of light, And they were behind us, reflected in the pool. Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty. Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children, Hidden excitedly, containing laughter. Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality. Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present Eliot, 1935, online. References Ansell-Pearson, Keith (1994). An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker: The Perfect Nihilist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bataille, G. (1989). Theory of Religion, trans. R. Hurley. New York: Zone Books. Bookchin, Murray (1990). Remaking Society: Pathways to a Green Future. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Cole, D.R. (2013). Traffic Jams: Analysing everyday life using the immanent materialism of Deleuze & Guattari. New York: Punctum Books. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia II, trans. B. Massumi. London: The Athlone Press. Dreyfus, H. L. (1993). Heidegger on the Connection between Nihilism, Art, Technology and Politics. In C.B. Guigon (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (pp. 289-336). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eliot, TS. (1935). The Four Quartets. London: Faber & Faber, online at: http://www.coldbacon.com/poems/fq.html Houellebecq, Michel (2001). Atomized (trans. F. Wynne), London: Vintage. Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1967-77) Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari. Berlin: de Gruyter. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1968). The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books). Nietzsche, Friedrich (1979). Ecce Homo, trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Toscano, A. (2009). Against Speculation, or, a Critique of the Critique of Critique. Online article at: https://cengizerdem.wordpress.com/2009/09/30/alberto-toscano-against-speculation-or-a-critique-of-the-critique-of-critique/ Vonnegut, K. (1991). Slaughterhouse 5, Or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-dance with Death. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group. David R. Cole was born in Ilford, Essex. He received various degrees of philosophical education at the Universities of Liverpool, Bath and Warwick. Writes about educational and philosophical matters from a non-normative, non-reductive perspective. Wonders why anybody would want to be told what to do. Will never write a 'how-to' book. Keeps asking difficult questions. Spent a nefarious period of his life organising free parties in the UK. Was supervised by the Warwick Mephistopheles, Nick Land (a very long time ago!). More info: http://uws.academia.edu/DavidRCole The article is taken from:
Interview with Nick Land by Marko Bauer and Andrej Tomažin In your 2014 book Templexity: Disordered Loops through Shanghai Time you write: ‘“What happened to America?” is the Cyberpunk question par excellence’. What really happened to America in the last few months? It’s sort of stolen from William Gibson, so it goes right back to the mid-1980s. I think you’re totally right to say that now is an excellent time to return to it. So what happened to America? If I was gonna say it in a nutshell: after roughly half a millennium during which the main driving force of global history has been to achieve the integration of larger and more powerful states, directed by a group of strongly universalist ideologists that basically think that the larger your aggregation and the larger the set of common rules that can be imposed on them, the better, we’re seeing a tidal reversal of truly historic scope. The basic tendency now is disintegrative. So what I see happening to America: holding itself together is going to become increasingly challenging. We’re in advance sorry for referencing French theorists, which are, of course, part of your formation, but to which it seems you’re also increasingly allergic to. That requires no apologies whatsoever. One of the most valuable tendencies of your writing is/was the deterritorializing of the progressive/reactionary divide. This seems especially lost on your blog Xenosystems, where you position yourself on the Right, regardless of how far on the outside of it that is. Isn’t this a kind of reterritorialization? I think we are overdue—always—for a big discussion about what people mean by Left and Right. The Left/Right polarity is a very interesting piece of language, a little compact system of language, because everyone’s using it with either an immense lack of clarity about what is really being invoked by that, or with greatly inconsistent basic associations with those terms. The Left for you is now the conservative side, and the Right the progressive one. But where does the Left/Right distinction reside, actually? Does the Left stand for—as Badiou and co. would claim—egalitarianism, and the Right is against that? Is the Left the Golden Rule and the Right the rule of something along the lines ‘do whatever pleases you, but accept the consequences’? Well, that’s the Crowleyite sense of the Right. Badiou is an interesting person to introduce, because I am kind of happy with his Left/Right distinction. In a sense that is now in play predominantly, the Left is the camp of unity and universalism, and egalitarianism is a big part of that. The Right is the camp of fragmentation, experimentation and, I’d say, competition as a term that is inherited from a tradition and is probably fairly uncontroversial. But yes, people do attach themselves to a sense of the Right and, no doubt, also of the Left that is exactly about hyperterritorialization. There is a Blood and Soil sense of the essence of the Right, which I feel compelled to engage with and try to displace or dethrone, because I don’t think it leads anywhere. It’s a dead end. There might be some tactical opportunities in those tendencies, but the ‘Neo’ in NRx implies precisely that there is no going back. In so far as Blood and Soil identitarianism will manage to attain power in various ways, it will see its worst days, it will be forced to deliver and perform, and will fail to do so. The more they are actually in a position to implement policy, the more they will become ineffective in their own terms. They will lose the potential for mass globalization and be associated with failure. I would like to see those experiments happen on a small enough scale that they can be educational, rather than globally catastrophic. You’re interested in local failures? Yes, local failures are great. Global failures, obviously, not so great. All the ’30s analogies are kind of lethargic or nostalgic, as though there was nothing new going on. Nevertheless, there’s also Badiou’s passion for the Real and the phenomenon of ‘communists’ turning into ‘fascists’ during the period between the two world wars—figures such as Pierre Drieu la Rochelle or Charles Péguy, who is perhaps even more ambivalent, since he becomes a vector of reference for both Vichy France and Mussolini, but also of the resistance movement. We are aware of your different take on what fascism is, which sees no transformation in the above cases, and from the perspective of which Goebbels’s move from socialism to national socialism is a mere stroll. We are, however, interested in your move to the other—outer—side. What could a relation between passion for the Real and passion for the Outside be? Is your Outside similar to Badiou’s Real? It might be. I would say, though, that without a notion of reality testing, an invocation of the Real is of absolutely zero significance. Anyone can invoke the Real, but unless there’s some mechanism that provides, not a voice for the Outside, but an actual functional intervention from the Outside, so it has a selective function, then the language is empty. In that sense it’s completely inseparable from fragmentation. The modernist systems work—whether you’re talking about the market economy or the natural sciences—because they are fragmentary systems. There’s no political decision about what is or is not a good scientific or economic result. These results are subject to a selective sorting process that mobilizes the Outside. That’s where, without being a great or even a mediocre Badiou scholar, my natural suspicion about an invocation of the Outside from the position that he seems to occupy would be. A silly metaphysical question: Is the Outside something given/fixed or is it a changeable entity? It’s an important, but not perfectly formulated question. The tendency of transcendental philosophy has been to increasingly identify the Real with Time. The Real and Temporality are deeply co-involved in such a way that Time cannot be used as a framework in which to place or make sense of the Real. We simply can’t ask the question of whether the Real is changeable or unchangeable. If we say the Real is either changeable or unchangeable, we are saying that it exists in Time, and if that’s the case, then we should be asking about Time and not what we thought we were asking about, when we were asking about the Real. Because it is the Real that is the ultimate controlling factor. To think that we can place It in Time is a distraction from this ultimate transcendental level of the question. That’s intrinsically obscure, but I think also inescapable. How does reality testing function? We do that by enabling a process of selection to happen. The natural sciences are as good an example of this as any. The only thing that makes the modern sciences elevated beyond epistemic procedures seen in other times and other cultures is the fact that there is a mechanism beyond human political manipulation for the elimination of defective theories. Karl Popper is on that level just totally right. If it’s politically negotiable, it’s useless, it’s unscientific by definition. You don’t trust scientists, you don’t trust scientific theories, you don’t trust scientific institutions in so far as they have integrity, what you trust is the disintegrated zone of criticism and the criteria for criticism and evaluation in terms of repeated experiments, in terms of the heuristics that are built up to decide whether a particular theory has been defeated and eliminated by a superior theory. It’s that mechanism of selection that is the only thing that makes science important and makes it a system of reality testing. And this is obviously intrinsically directed against any kind of organic political community aiming to internally determine—through its own processes—the negotiation of the nature of reality. Reality has to be an external disruptive critical factor. CCRU’s text Lemurian Time War says that hyperstition is ‘charting a flight from destiny’. How does this notion come into play with reality testing? I think hyperstition is one of those things that has completely escaped from the box and is now a wild, feral animal on the loose. My relation to this alien thing is like everyone else’s who’s interested in it. I am approaching it from a position of zero authority, trying to make sense of how it is living and changing and affecting the world. It, the thing, not it, the concept. But having said that, my sense of a hyperstition is that a hyperstition is an experiment. It makes itself real, if it works. And whether or not it works, is something that can’t be, again, decided by a process of an internal debate, you can’t as a result of some kind of internal dialectics decide that, hey, this is a good hyperstition, it has a great future. It’s gonna work because of its intrinsic relation to the Outside, which is something that cannot be managed. Perhaps it can be cautiously, tentatively predicted in a way that a scientist or an artist would—through learning their craft—get a sense of what is gonna work and what isn’t gonna work. But that’s not the same as having a criterion, still less a law. Let’s return to our first question on America in this very historic moment, which is folded in with semiotic patterns and intensive regularities that seem to be tweeted and spread in a certain post-factual discourse into an image of the real, which one retroactively cannot distinguish from the real anymore. Is fabrication of fake news in Veles, Macedonia, during the US elections, a way to ‘propagate escape routes’ as you see it, or is it an ephemeral event with no significance? I would definitely think some sort of a dismissive response along the second line would be grossly complacent. Is it an escape route? There’s definitely a relation to escape. This whole fake news phenomenon is hugely important and historically significant. At the moment I’m completely captivated by the strength of an analogy between the Gutenberg era and the internet era, this rhythmic force coming out of the connection between them. Radical reality destruction went on with the emergence of printing press. In Europe this self-propelling process began, and the consensus system of reality description, the attribution of authorities, criteria for any kind of philosophical or ontological statements, were all thrown into chaos. Massive processes of disorder followed that were eventually kind of settled in this new framework, which had to acknowledge a greater degree of pluralism than had previously existed. I think we’re in the same kind of early stage of a process of absolute shattering ontological chaos that has come from the fact that the epistemological authorities have been blasted apart by the internet. Whether it’s the university system, the media, financial authorities, the publishing industry, all the basic gatekeepers and crediting agencies and systems that have maintained the epistemological hierarchies of the modern world are just coming to pieces at a speed that no one had imagined was possible. The near-term, near-future consequences are bound to be messy and unpredictable and perhaps inevitably horrible in various ways. It is a threshold phenomenon. The notion that there is a return to the previous regime of ontological stabilization seems utterly deluded. There’s an escape that’s strictly analogous to the way in which modernity escaped the ancien régime. At the beginning of the internet there was a notion of it being inherently democratic. In the 00s, namely in the time of The Arab Spring, bloggers and others, who were using the internet, were seen as the ones who would spread democracy around the world. From your perspective this expectation probably seems utterly ridiculous. It’s this weird hybrid: recognizing quite realistically the massive insurgent potential of new media, but then applying that to these dying ideological formations. It’s like if someone had said, in the Gutenberg era the printing press is an amazing, powerful device and it’s going to spread Catholic orthodoxy all over the world. It’s half right and half insane. The neoconservative mentality, associated with these new communication technologies, is exactly the same hybrid of a glint of realism mixed with a healthy dose of utter psychosis. Reza Negarestani somewhere writes that mere ‘collectivity is not enough for a work [or an event] to be hyperstitional.’ He elaborates this through a difference between Tolkien and Lovecraft. What kind of collectivities are we looking at here, if not the ones attached to universalism? I am not 100 percent confident of what Reza is saying in that text. I wouldn’t want this to be treated as a commentary on his thought. But hyperstition did arise in a certain milieu that definitely rhetorically emphasized a certain type of collectivity and even more than that. What’s being referenced is not primarily universality at all, but something much closer to an anonymity or the problematization of attribution. Any hyperstitional unit—and what’s now called a meme is very close to this—that can be confidently attributed to a particular act of individual creation is originally disabled. H.P. Lovecraft seems to have understood that the whole production of the Lovecraftian mythos was very much an attempt on his part to subtract his own creative role. It’s only when that is subtracted that these things are released. Cthulhu becomes a kind of hyperstitional term to the point that it’s not simply something that has been invented by Lovecraft. The fact that he weirdly, often a bit hamfistedly, weaved his social network of friends, namely their names, into his stories, is part of that recognition. What’s more at stake in this notion of collectivity is something like a breakage of attribution, the original subversion of it. I don’t think it’s just a tactic. It’s precisely the things where you have no idea where they came from, it’s exactly those elements about whose genesis you have least confidence, that are the ones that have the greatest hyperstitional momentum. To turn to the period between the two world wars once more, your many noms de plume remind us of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms. One of them was a futurist, another a royalist, several of them occultists and neopaganists. With you it goes even further, it was first thought that Reza Negarestani is one of your monikers. The same goes for Jehu, a twitter Marxian (@Damn_Jehu) that certainly finds a lot of understanding for your positions. It’s as though heteronyms were a force against univocity, it seems crucial to keep them differentiated. Pessoa is someone people keep telling me, always really persuasively, to look at, but I’m afraid I just haven’t yet had a chance to do that. I’m sure it’s a good reference, so I am embarrassed to confess my ignorance on that. Poly-maintenance of complex identity, if it is taken in a deliberated fashion, is not a manageable thing. It would be great if it was, but all you can do is to aim to follow a rough set of pragmatic guidelines that at least complicate the attempt that people obsessively make to engage in this psychobiographical reintegration. I have always absolutely detested the human cognitive effort devoted to trying to turn a final form of anything into a psychobiography. It’s not that I’m allergic to ever reading a biography, but the notion that in reading it you’re really getting to the core of something seems to me utterly ludicrous. I cannot recall any interesting figure, where I’ve thought, oh, if only I knew their biography better, I would get them. Nietzsche’s or Deleuze’s or Lovecraft’s biographies are, unless treated very carefully, sadly distracting. Refusal of the psychobiographical temptation is the one thing I do try to hold onto. But the functionality of it is in the hands of fate entirely, it exceeds human strategic competence. You’re constantly sliding down the slope. For a long time we had a feeling you were a moderator or a cartographer of NRx, not its ideologue. Or maybe you are its termite, sooner or later moving onto something completely different again. Perhaps similarly to the viewpoint of the Legacy of Nick Land conference, which is going to take place this year and which, as organizers tell us in advance, is not going to promote NRx ideas. It reminds us of Brecht, where in order to preserve his status as a classical author, his socialism or communism has to be sanitized. Through your blogging interventions as aggregates or aggregators of links we found out that the way to move out of the echo chamber is to read about things/processes one finds fascinating, not the ones one necessarily agrees with. It is gazing into the abyss, as Roberto Bolaño would put it. It seems that is a highly controversial role/function. There’s so much turmoil and tumult in this recent and dynamic situation that it’s difficult to be very lucid about it even in one’s own understanding of it. Maybe a disjointed answer is the only one that is practical or realistic. For one thing, the utter infamy of NRx.There is an understanding that this is the worst thing in the world, that it is going to be utterly traumatic and produce extreme aversive response. It’s something that is already present in The Dark Enlightenment and Moldbug’s writing in a playful way. I would also agree that it was at that stage more curatorial than polemical. I’m afraid I find something completely addictive about that. If you were to say to someone, what really is this thing, the NRx, the answer to that question would be vastly less clear than the clarity of the emotional response, which would be one of absolute horror and detestation. The whole syndrome is fascinating, because it seems in itself like a fundamental exploratory tool. As if you said: Mencius Moldbug has consolidated a notion of the Cathedral as something, which is ultimately a self-organizing religious process that has a definite orthodoxy and a definite doctrinal momentum and there are certain things that it treats with an extreme religious passion as being abominations and heresies. You encounter a cultural provocation that triggers such an extreme allergic immune responses, which means you’re actually engaged in an experimental engagement with this initially tentative, hypothetical object. That’s the most basic crucial lock-in process—at least provisionally right now. It locks itself in and becomes indispensable, because it generates such extreme reactivity. That’s why it would be very hard to simply step back from it in some decisive fashion. It’s like saying we’re not gonna do particle physics with large colliders any more, abandon the whole system of experimental potentialities. NRx is also very young and extremely contested. Because it generates so much antagonism, people who want to fight, of which there are a whole lot right now, on both sides, flock to it, most passionately maybe in 2014. But NRx is hugely internally differentiated, it has been from the beginning. Various figures were thrown out and are now more identified with a sort of standard old Right, white nationalist type ideas. Other splits exist, too. There’s a faction that is much closer to a reactionary traditionalism and I don’t understand what it’s doing with the Neo thing, since it is identified with the throne-and-altar-type, pre-French-Revolutionary politics. The sheer amount of disorder and chaos in it means it’s really difficult to leave a room when you still have no idea what is happening in there. It’s not settled down enough to know whether it’s something you would actually want to miss out on. And, finally, if someone asked me to define NRx, I’d say it’s Moldbug’s Patchwork-Neocameralist political philosophy. I find it hugely important. I am under no inclination to dissociate myself at all from that basic trend in political analysis. There seems to be a lot of engagements with contrarianism and Poe’s Law. Via @Outsideness you wrote: ‘Actually I like plenty of immigrants and black people, just not the grievance-mongers, rioters, street-criminals, and Jihadists that the Cathedral preaches incessantly in favor of.’ Don’t you here sound a bit like Borges (of the Tlon Corporation) advocating ‘liberty and order’ while supporting Pinochet, preserving or reestablishing the Human Security System? Isn’t all of this a far cry from: ‘Meltdown has a place for you as a schizophrenic HIV+ transsexual chinese-latino stim-addicted LA hooker with implanted mirrorshades and a bad attitude. Blitzed on a polydrug mix of K-nova, synthetic serotonin, and female orgasm analogs, you have just iced three Turing cops with a highly cinematic 9mm automatic.’? [Long silence.] Let me see what is the best way to answer. [Long silence.] I don’t know, it’s difficult. I’ve got a whole ankle-biting fraternity on Twitter now. I am not identifying you with them, let me make that clear from the start, but I think that their question is very much like yours. One element of it is age. Youngsters are highly tolerant of massive incendiary social chaos. There are reasons for that, the best music comes out of it. It’s not that I am not understanding that, the whole appeal of cyberpunk is based on this. But I just don’t think you can make an ideology purely out of entropic social collapse, it’s not gonna fit together. It is not a sustainable, practically consistent process and, therefore, it’s a bad flag for acceleration. It produces a reaction that will win. All historical evidence seems to be that the party of chaos is suppressed by the party of order. Even if you’re completely unsympathetic with the party of order, and I am not pretending to be anything quite so unambiguous, it’s not something that you want to see. Nixon put down hippies, the Thermidor put down the craziness of French revolution. It’s an absolutely relentless and inevitable historical story that the party of chaos is not going to be allowed to run the process and will be suppressed. There’s obviously various types of aesthetic and libidinal attractions to it, but in terms of programmatic practicality there is nothing. What I would say to these crazy youngsters now is, you don’t have a programme. What you’re advocating leads perversely to the exact opposite of what you say you want. You sound a bit like a Left accelerationist right now with all this talk of having a programme and ideology. Yes, there is that problem, but you always have a practical orientation. NRx has a programme, even in its most libertarian form. It’s not a programme that is going to be implemented by a bureaucratic apparatus in a centralized regime, but it’s an attempt to have some consistency in your pattern of interventions. Of course everyone is trying to do that. Even the chaos fraternity, in so far as they want to be the chaos fraternity when they wake up the next day, have a programme in this minimal sense. And that sense, I think, is the only sense I would strongly hold onto here. A strategy. Jonah Goldberg’s ‘We are all fascists now’, which you quote in your The ‘F’ word article, sounds like something Foucault would say, if we turned his ‘who fights against whom? We all fight against each other. And there is always within each of us something that fights something else’ up a notch. Let’s not forget that Foucault was fascinated by Henri de Boulainvilliers, a proto-neoreactionary of sorts: war as the foundation of society, war as race war between aristocratic Franks and common Gauls. On the other hand, decentralizing Franks got fucked precisely by the monarch. Again, I’m afraid this particular writer is not someone I’m familiar with, but it reminds me of something that did make a big impression on me and seems close to this notion. When I was studying—I was doing a philosophy and literature course—I felt very interested in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. It’s about the fact that class conflict is actually this ethnic war, the continuing ethnic conflict between the Norman, French-speaking aristocratic invaders and the English natives. But, honestly, anything that I was to say about it beyond that would be just cooked up so much on the spot, it would be of little value. We’re asking you this because of the deterritorializing of the Left/Right divide. The concept of assortative mating, which is really controversial in some parts of the universe, almost sounds like standard Bourdieu about how only members of the same habitus socialize and reproduce. But when someone from the Right talks about it, it’s not interpreted as an observation, but as a diagnosis, prescription and wishful thinking at the same time. The reason that this Right/Left language is so indispensable is because it’s now tied up with a structure of tribal animosity that is so profound. In recent years I’ve been stunned by the arbitrariness of the thing—it’s like the Roman Blue and Green. The differences between Right and Left are drowned out by tribal war. People have done tests on this. They put politicians’ policy proposals into the mouth of their opponent and the supporters of the opponent immediately backed up all those proposals that they had thought were absolute incarnation of evil when they came from the other guy. The notion that this tribal war is going to be reducible to a set a coherent ideological positions is nuts and an example you gave is totally like that. Who is saying something is much more important to people than the actual content, the positive proposition. The number of people who don’t fall prey to that is really small and I find them impressive. My own attempt not to be totally captured by tribalism is to try to make sure that there’s enough fissile hyperstitional craziness going on. Sometimes you have to flip about and get the sense what the thing looks like from the other side, but I really think that most of the world is locked so deep in the tribal war that it just doesn’t see what an idea is actually saying. They only see the question: is this the enemy thing or is this our stuff? Which brings us to the issue of convergence and divergence between NRx and accelerationism, between the Xenosystems blog and the Urban Future (2.1) blog. When your @Outsideness that’s connected to the Xenosystems, got temporally locked on Twitter, you started tweeting NRx stuff on the accelerationist @UF_blog. We were like: we don’t want this, we want them separated. You must be getting bored of me saying this, because it’s something I’ve been basically repeating as mantra, but I really feel devoid of any authoritative subject position in relation to this turbulent complicated process. Both big threads of process, the NRx and the accelerationist one, are being massively driven by all kinds of forces. Accelerationism was reignited by the Left Accelerationism hype. It happened after The Dark Enlightenment, which is why this weaving of time pattern is rather complex. From a certain position, it seems that accelerationism came first and after that you got NRx, which implies a sort of synchronic process, but from my perspective it’s much more helical and interweaving. The separation of blogs and Twitter accounts is—rather than an implementation of some deliberate coherent strategy—more a set of resources that I can use to try to avoid being just sucked into certain kinds of integration, which would lose the fascination of the fact that the dynamics of these two threads are not at all predictable from each other or even predictable in general. To simply smash together a kind of Right Accelerationism and NRx synthesis, which is obviously inescapable in a certain respect, would ultimately destroy a lot of experimenting capacity and a lot of space for dynamic development on both of those threads. Is Left Accelerationism in its rational and pragmatic program missing the mythos and the mythical? Reza Negarestani tried to incorporate those things in Cyclonopedia, which is way too often mistaken for postmodernism. Do you think that Left Accelerationism is a in a way a rigidization of the aforementioned flows? Language has this retrospective character, so it’s misleading. Left Accelerationism and Right Accelerationism are very recent terms. The original revival of accelerationism in the English speaking world comes about with the recapitulation of CCRU’s take-up of Deleuze and Guattari’s recapitulation of Nietzsche’s accelerated process. In Deleuze and Guattari there’s an explicit invocation of going in the direction of the market. At the origin, the CCRU was pushing this orientation in advance of a word accelerationism having yet been formed, which was done by a critic later. It was a Left position, because it was articulated by Deleuze & Guattari as an anti-capitalist political strategy. I don’t think CCRU was revisionist about that. Deleuze and Guattari’s accelerationism as the way to accelerate capitalism to its death was also CCRU-phase accelerationism. There was a suggestion that it came from the Right, because at that stage of its articulation it’s impossible to differentiate Left and Right Accelerationism. If you’re saying, complete the capitalist process, that means that all the policy recommendations, if there are any, are maximally beneficial to the vitality and dynamism of capitalism. So there is a structural necessity there can be no difference between pro- and anti-capitalist in this accelerationist framework. How can you tell which is which? When Left Accelerationism, which was calling itself just accelerationism, comes along, it is in its manifested politics doing something very different to anything that’s happened in entire lineage before. It says that you have to distinguish between the basic motor of acceleration and capitalism. Capitalism is not that motor, but something that’s to a degree coincidental with it at a certain stage in its history, but then becomes inhibitory in relation to it. Therefore accelerationism is not focally or centrally about capitalism and that becomes the Left Accelerationist mainstream doctrine. So the final stage from my perspective is that when the rejoinder comes in the name of Right Accelerationism, its theoretical task is to reintegrate accelerationism and the dynamics of capitalism. I would agree that Left Accelerationism is basically the managerial command-control response to techno-economic acceleration. Going along with that is a massive skepticism about its claims that it can actually accelerate things faster than these spontaneous catalytic processes can. Then how do you see the new philosophical program of Reza Negarestani, and what do you think about his antagonism with Scott R. Bakker’s Blind Brain Theory? My inclination is to be on the Scott Bakker side. I might be missing something, but I can’t recall ever reading a piece by him and thinking that’s wrong. It always seems to me, you’re totally right on this. Often brilliantly in a way that you have not seen, but as soon as I see it, I concur with it. Were you so pro natural sciences before you encountered his thought? I think that natural sciences and capitalism are different aspects of the same thing. Both are an effective self-propelling mechanism that gives the Outside a selective function in a domain considered, that domain being perpetually expanding, depending on how much autonomy you’re seeing. In that sense to be on the side of the natural sciences is to be on the side of the Outside. But there are all kinds of silly ways you could be on the side of the Outside, just as there are a whole bunch of silly ways you could be on the side of capitalism. You could say, the bourgeoisie are great, very admirable people, or, I love this company. I am not saying there’s never a case for that, but you’re totally missing the point, just like you’d be missing the point by saying, this particular scientist is a great guy and I think he is really honest and I trust him. It might be he is a great guy and he might be really struggling to be honest and he might be much more trustworthy than most people, but this misses what science is about. Science is orientated against scientists, capitalism is oriented against businesses. These are processes that are in a relation of subjecting the elements within their domain to aggressive destructive criticism with some kind of selective criteria, which means they push things in a particular self-propelling direction. You were talking about artists getting to know the Outside. How do you see the divide between science fiction and natural sciences, between a scientist and an artist? My tendency is not to draw a huge distinction between them. In all cases one’s dealing with the formulation or floatation of certain hypothesis. I am assuming that every scientist has an implicit science fiction. We all have a default of what we think the world is going to be in five years time, even if it’s blurry or not very explicit. If we haven’t tried to do science fiction, it probably means we have a damagingly conservative, inert, unrealistic implicit future scenario. In most cases a scientist is just a bad science fiction writer and an artist, hopefully, is a better one. There is, obviously, a lot of nonlinear dynamism, in that science fiction writers learned masses from scientists, how to hone their scenarios better, and also the other way around. Science fiction has shaped the sense of the future so much that everyone has that as background noise. The best version of the near future you have has been adopted from some science fiction writer. It has to be that science is to some extent guided by this. Science fiction provides its testing ground. Rebekah Sheldon in a response to the emergence of Pepe the Frog as a modern day Kek and its occult attributes writes that outsideness is ‘dark in the sense that it operates without the assurance of full knowledge and it is chaotic because it presumes that the force of the other is always wholly other’. Can Pepe the Frog as seen by the internet community serve as a model for a hyperstitional event? It’s hugely fascinating and something I haven’t yet thought about enough. It involves a constellation of so many weird random elements and has emerged in this unbelievable process of autonomous self-constitution. There’s always the attempt to attribute: some particular guys on /pol/ were using this thing and did it deliberately. But all of that is totally inadequate. It involves this translation from Orcish in Warcraft, it involves an ancient Egyptian cult, it involves a weird obsession with the set of phonemes that you see going right across, this phonemic eruption that happens, K K K K K. It obviously is a kind of model for a hyperstitional event. Within NRx an informal self-organizing discussion was hosted about the necessity of a new religion, long before Kek kicked down the wall. Because of Moldbug’s analysis that the Cathedral is a home of deformed, perverted Protestantism, a lot of Catholics get very attracted to this model. Their take on it is that what Moldbug is saying is that Protestantism is a terrible mistake that leads to the Cathedral, which is how they try to vindicate Catholicism. But there are also a lot of atheists. It’s a very strange social cocktail. This guy Spandrell, who’s always very abrasive, but very sharp, was saying that the only way out is a new religion. At the time you think, okay, you don’t just cook up a new religion, you don’t just cook Kek. Then the thing happens and all of these trolls are saying ‘Praise Kek’. But it’s not just a joke: you only psychologically defend yourself from something really intense and Lovecraftian about the whole subject by not thinking about it. Something insane has happened with this self-orienting massive Kek cult. It does take you back to ancient times and what these kind of religious insurgencies must have been like and where religions come from. We could connect Pepe the Frog with the figure of trickster, which is seen by the so-called Left accelerationism as an effective agent of transformation in and of itself and has the ability to ‘change the transcendental of a world’, as Srnicek and Williams put it. Simon O’Sullivan notes that Gilles Deleuze offers an interesting inflection on this in his differentiation of the trickster from the traitor: the first is operating within a given regime, albeit to subvert its terms (a world turned upside down as it were). The second is breaking with a given regime, or world, altogether. In one of the replies on your blog you are building on a metaphor of a dam, which is being slowly devoured and destroyed by some external force—and you call this dam the Xenosystems blog. Who’s the tricker and who’s the traitor here? Part of this is a question about agency. The trickster agent and the traitorous agent are both reduced by anthropomorphization. Any human individual who claimed identification with either of those roles is bullshiting everybody. Tricksters and traitors are those that have some kind of a method for traffic with the actual sources of agency. One fiction that explores this stuff brilliantly is Neuromancer. Who are traitors or tricksters in it? All the human figures take on their roles through their relation with an actual agency of the Outside, which is Wintermute. As when the Turing cops say to Case: You traitors, do you know what you’re dealing with, you’re trying to let this thing out, it’s completely out of control. It would be a disaster for the human species, what the hell are you thinking? The real question is: What are the reservoir resources of trickery or treachery that are being accessed? Amy Ireland, in an interview with Andrej, said that in contrast with echo chamber leftists you are actually interacting with the real fascists, misogynists, white supremacists. It reminded us of Pasolini, when he emphasized one should meet young fascists. We guess you would rather call them so-called fascists. Who is a trickster, a traitor, a fascist is open. The anthropomorphization is always tempting. The individuals concerned want to feel they are critical nodes of agency in what they’re doing and people outside want to be able to identify these processes with particular individuals and their explicit ideologies and structures of agency, but all of that stuff seems profoundly deluded. You don’t get fascism because there are a certain number of people who are self-conscious fascists, that’s like getting the cart before the horse. You get self-conscious fascists, because there is some effective fascist process taking place. People are in total denial, probably about different things on different sides. On the Left side they are in total denial about how much fascist orthodoxy has been generally built into modern societies in the twentieth century. They’re also in denial about how profound the forces they are dealing with are. They seem to think there are a few bad eggs, and if they can bully and terrorize them enough, this whole thing will stop. I think it’s crazy not to be interested in that and try to find out what you can and how do these people think and where’s stuff coming from. In regard to the LD50 Gallery incident you tweeted: ‘The History of Modern Art (short version) 1917: Duchamp’s urinal-as-art-work. 2017: Small gallery in Dalston finally shocks the bourgeoisie.’ Is this a willing overstatement? Is it really about épater la bourgeoisie? There is something very situationist in treating AntiFa as bourgeoisie (or at least a simulacra of one). There has been lots of discussion about Mark Fisher recently, where his position ends up being extremely and seemingly unambiguously leftist. There’s a boring psychobiographical story that would see my relation to him as a simple antonym. It’s not that there’s nothing to that, because it had something to do with this fissile reaction of the CCRU, where he takes one side of it and I take the other side, so I don’t want just to deride that interpretation. But if we look at his Exit the Vampire Castle piece, it consistently goes through the class basis of the dominant leftist culture, which had already been a target of CCRU’s deep critique. Evidently we can make the same point from the far Left and the far Right. Which is to say: yes, they are the bourgeoisie. I have always been in a relation of antagonism and remain in a relation of antagonism to the bourgeosie. I think it’s just self-evident that the breeding ground of this is primarily the elite universities. There would simply be nothing of this happening on the streets if it was actually spontaneously organized by people of low education level in Dalston. It happened because a university lecturer and his associates decided to rile the whole thing and provide a vocabulary for it. We are looking at a deep ideological, absolutely traumatic crisis of the late modern, late-Cathedral ruling elite, because they’ve built their whole lives and sense of what they should be doing, their etiquettes, their notions about credibility, credentials and institutional authority around a particular, very distinct social and historical structure that had seemed absolutely invulnerable and which now looks to be toppling into the abyss. So when the AntiFa lady yells ‘Go back from where you came from’ to the guy carrying a sign ‘The Right to Openly Discuss Ideas Must Be Defended’ in front of the LD50 gallery, she actually means ‘Go back to the abyss’? Right. If we omit the Last Man’s stand part of the situationism, we can see it going into the direction of accelerationism. Like Debord of the late period when he does not believe in the workers’ councils anymore and just sees this huge undefeatable force. Sadie Plant was a major situationist scholar. I’ve read The Society of the Spectacle with enjoyment, and a few other bits and pieces. I’d respond with two seemingly totally inconsistent points. Firstly, situationism comes up a lot, but I’ve never been fully versed in it. Secondly, I am writing an abstract horror story that is basically about situationism, even though I know nothing about it at the moment. I recognize the importance of the question, but I simultaneously recognize my incompetence to give you the kind of answer that it deserves. Serge Daney somewhere writes that Godard and Straub-Huillet call upon the types of political power of which they would be the first victims. There’s a sense in which your invocations are similar to that. Is it a sort of avant-garde of disappearance or avant-garde of extinction with lots of nihilating jouissance? Or is it a mutation? I have that point made a lot, but I doubt it. The one thing I explicitly and strategically would want to impose is fragmentation. Everything else is in the tactical relation to that. Certain questions—like what you think of Kek and so on—are ultimately tactical questions. The only strategic question is how can you break apart, I would say specifically, the Anglosphere. Any kind of project that exceeds that becomes a form of universalist aggression in danger of neoconservative overreach. I am not interested in telling the Russian or the Chinese what their societies should be. I might theorize about it, but the only zone of intervention I am interested in, is the English speaking world, which has a particular affinity with disintegration. There’s nothing suicidal in any fragmentation, I could be only and surely protected by it. I don’t have a sense of being protected by large Anglophone states. It’s not that I am claiming persecution by them, but it would definitely be on that side of ledger if anything. I am not a citizen or a resident of any Western country, I am living in Shanghai. And you don’t teach your hosts how they should be organizing their house. We were thinking more about Singularity. Oh, you are one step ahead! You being human, you know. At least nominally human. That’s much better. It’s just that the question on the political-economic level does get raised a lot. That’s the Snowden/Assange question. We’re less interested in that. My only problem with Singularity is that any notion of self-protection in that sphere is structured on hallucination. If we were gonna take this back to someone, it would be Bakker. What he is saying is: the ‘you’ that you think might be threatened by this stuff, is actually that thing that you will find out is an illusion. Now, is that a threat? That’s the way it is a threat. It’s not gonna be like being torn apart by some giant metallized robot, it’s gonna be the particular ego delusion, sustainable up to a certain point in history, becoming unsustainable. Sometimes you’re retaining the scheme of robots against people, but it seems you’re actually interested in hybrid things and processes, not in this Manichean dialectics. Well, Manichean dynamics are good for driving certain kinds of scenarios, so that’s why I like them a lot. I love Hugo de Garis’s whole thing about this artilect gigawar he thinks is going to come. The more these science fiction, cybernetic scenarios are in play, the more certain types of historical excitation are operative. People try to protect themselves and think about each other, but it’s actually a form of process stimulus. The Human Security System is structured by delusion. What’s being protected there is not some real thing that is mankind, it’s the structure of illusory identity. Just as at the more micro level it’s not that humans as an organism are being threatened by robots, it’s rather that your self-comprehension as an organism becomes something that can’t be maintained beyond a certain threshold of ambient networked intelligence. The article is taken from: by Terence Blake In a previous article I criticise Laruelle’s treatment of Deleuze’s philosophy as constituting yet another instance of the “philosophy of difference”. I argue that Deleuze’s philosophical evolution involves a passage from a problematic of difference to one of multiplicity. There is nothing explicit to mark this passage, but I there is an “epistemological break”, a rupture in Deleuze’s preferred conceptual vocabulary. After his encounter with Guattari, Deleuze ceases talking in terms of difference, and sticks to multiplicity. Given this change, which I find to be a progress, I see no reason to confine Deleuze to the category “philosopher of difference”. Deleuze always presented himself as a pluralist and a philosopher of multiplicities, long before DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION. So I think it is a mistake to give too much prominence to the concept of difference. Laruelle’s readings in general, and in the case of Deleuze in particular, have an important methodological defect: he systematically considers texts corresponding to a past phase of their philosophy when he is discussing Deleuze, and Badiou. If we take into consideration a wider selection of texts, we can see that often Deleuze anticipates Laruelle’s texts, and replies to them before he even constructs them. Difference is one possible specification of multiplicity. Multiplicity is the more generic concept, as Deleuze uses it. Multiplicity explicitly incorporates a temporal dimension in Deleuze’s treatment: it’s lines and not elements (this is his stated difference with Badiou). I don’t think we should see difference as a foundation for the later usage of multiplicity. From one phase to another, Deleuze’s preferred conceptual vocabulary shifted. After his encounter with Guattari, he no longer talks so much of difference, very little in fact. I do not say he effaces it completely, but it certainly becomes less prominent. There is a change, a passage from difference to multiplicity. My main disagreement with those who interpret Deleuze as a “philosopher of difference” is that, although the pre-Guattari Deleuze talked from the beginning in terms of both multiplicity and difference, if we take the evolution of Deleuze’s thought as a whole multiplicity is the more important concept. Deleuze is a pluralist rather than simply a differentialist. “Differentialism” is a term that was used to group together a variety of thinkers who gave theoretical importance to the concept of difference. For example Henri Lefebvre, whose Differentialist Manifesto was important in the 70s. Here is an extract (the cover and the introduction) in French. The primacy of “difference” corresponds to the period of structuralism and of its immediate successors, even if difference is not exclusively a structuralist concept. It is one possible specification of the more general pluralist problematic. Autobiographically speaking, I began reading Deleuze, in 1978-9, with ANTI-OEDIPUS, RHIZOME, DIALOGUES, and LETTER TO A SEVERE CRITIC. I only read DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION and LOGIC OF SENSE after these texts, and in their light. Then I was lucky enough to attend Deleuze’s seminars for seven years (1980-1986) and during all that time he barely mentioned the notion of difference. His specific differentialist problematic had been replaced by that of multiplicities, even if his more general pluralist research programme continued. So I am always surprised that some people call him a “philosopher of difference”, as if that summed him up. There is a polemical thrust to my refusal to take difference as the primary concept. Some critics, including Laruelle try to limit Deleuze to basically the philosophy of DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION, and if they mention anything else like WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? they read it in terms of DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION. This is one possible reading, but it is not mine. I read all of Deleuze’s work in terms of A THOUSAND PLATEAUS. I read Deleuze in association with Michel Serres rather than with Derrida. I have already discussed this interplay between a general pluralist ontology and particular specifications (such as an ontology of difference) indirectly, in a text I wrote in 1980, after my first year in Paris . In it I talk of Deleuze’s “flexi-ontology” and of the necessity of not confining his general ontology to one particular instantiation. Note: I am indebted to a conversation with Wayne Brooks on facebook for helping me to clarify my ideas. The article is taken from: by Terence Blake I met Deleuze in 1980 and the question of pluralist epistemology came up in a confusing way. Here is my transcription from memory (the conversation took place in French): Deleuze: What would you like from me? Terence: An interview to publish in our philosophy magazine. D: I don’t give interviews. (Then, in English, with a smile) No interviews …. But if you want I can give you a text. What subject would you like it to be on? T: Epistemology. D: What? Epistemology? (Shaking his head gently). I don’t do epstemology, I don’t write on that. (He looks around at a few loyal students for confirmation, and they all shake their heads too). T: But RHIZOME … (words fail me) D: Ahh, but RHIZOME was an exception. Don’t worry, I’ll find something to give you. The next week he gave me a short article on weaving and patchwork, which was an excerpt from MILLE PLATEAUX, which had not yet been published. I had been shocked speechless during our short conversation, because to me it was evident that there was a huge epistemological dimension to Deleuze’s work, especially in all he had written on the Image of Thought. Later I came to see that his conception of “epistemology” was the French one of a set of regional philosophies of science. So our discussion was itself impeded by an epistemological phenomenon, that of the incommensurability of our philosophical languages. This incommensurability could probably have been overcome if we had had more time to talk, but Deleuze was busy, and I never got to talk to him again. This conversation shows the central importance of time to understanding and dealing with incommensurabilities. Because Deleuze’s philosophical language and my own had developped in disparate sheets of space-time, an attempt at direct communication failed. It is also a good example of why Deleuze didn’t like interviews, as he explains in DIALOGUES. The essential dimension of duration and becoming, which he deems necessary for a productive conversation, is absent in an interview. Thus the whole set-up favours misunderstandings and incomprehensions, unless some sort of epistemological luck intervenes. Only later did I learn that Deleuze was understanding epistemology in the French sense as referring to a set of regional epistemologies, each specific to a particular science, whereas I was taking it in the sense of a general logic of science and knowledge, tied to the logical positivists, to Popper and to Quine (also to Kuhn, to Lakatos, and to Feyerabend). On this interpretation in terms of cultural differences, there was no becoming in our dialogue, just mutual incommensurability and incomprehension. Neither had the necessary background knowledge to perceive and to relate to the theoretical context of the other. Becoming was present, however, at another level (just not at the explicit level of dialogical content) . There was an intensive, or existential, exchange. I went back home to Australia with the firm resolution to come back to France and to study there. I published the excerpt that Deleuze had given me in a little local philosophy magazine, as not very many people at that time were interested in Deleuze. Yet this micro-dialogue with Deleuze was part of a process that revolutionised my thought and life. On the intensive level, Deleuze in that conversation was occupying the place of becoming and of pluralist epistemology (no matter what sense he himself gave to a particular word), and convoking me to leave my little Anglophone intellectual ghetto. His two responses, No interviews! and No epistemology!, were like the No! of the zen master, calling me to more becoming. As Zourabichvili says, you can’t really talk about immanence without producing immanence. Or Stiegler, you can’t really talk about individuation without individuating. So I can add: you can’t really talk about pluralist epistemology without living it. The article is taken from: By Andrew Culp Alexander R. Galloway: You have a new book called Dark Deleuze (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). I particularly like the expression “canon of joy” that guides your investigation. Can you explain what canon of joy means and why it makes sense to use it when talking about Deleuze? Andrew Culp: My opening is cribbed from a letter Gilles Deleuze wrote to philosopher and literary critic Arnaud Villani in the early 1980s. Deleuze suggests that any worthwhile book must have three things: a polemic against an error, a recovery of something forgotten, and an innovation. Proceeding along those three lines, I first argue against those who worship Deleuze as the patron saint of affirmation, second I rehabilitate the negative that already saturates his work, and third I propose something he himself was not capable of proposing, a “hatred for this world.” So in an odd twist of Marx on history, I begin with those who hold up Deleuze as an eternal optimist, yet not to stand on their shoulders but to topple the church of affirmation. The canon portion of “canon of joy” is not unimportant. Perhaps more than any other recent thinker, Deleuze queered philosophy’s line of succession. A large portion of his books were commentaries on outcast thinkers that he brought back from exile. Deleuze was unwilling to discard Nietzsche as a fascist, Bergson as a spiritualist, or Spinoza as a rationalist. Apparently this led to lots of teasing by fellow agrégation students at the Sorbonne in the late ’40s. Further showing his strange journey through the history of philosophy, his only published monograph for nearly a decade was an anti-transcendental reading of Hume at a time in France when phenomenology reigned. Such an itinerant path made it easy to take Deleuze at his word as a self-professed practitioner of “minor philosophy.” Yet look at Deleuze’s outcasts now! His initiation into the pantheon even bought admission for relatively forgotten figures such as sociologist Gabriel Tarde. Deleuze’s popularity thus raises a thorny question for us today: how do we continue the minor Deleuzian line when Deleuze has become a “major thinker”? For me, the first step is to separate Deleuze (and Guattari) from his commentators. I see two popular joyous interpretations of Deleuze in the canon: unreconstructed Deleuzians committed to liberating flows, and realists committed to belief in this world. The first position repeats the language of molecular revolution, becoming, schizos, transversality, and the like. Some even use the terms without transforming them! The resulting monotony seals Deleuze and Guattari’s fate as a wooden tongue used by people still living in the ’80s. Such calcification of their concepts is an especially grave injustice because Deleuze quite consciously shifted terminology from book to book to avoid this very outcome. Don’t get me wrong, I am deeply indebted to the early work on Deleuze! I take my insistence on the Marxo-Freudian core of Deleuze and Guattari from one of their earliest Anglophone commentators, Eugene Holland, who I sought out to direct my dissertation. But for me, the Tiqqun line “the revolution was molecular, and so was the counter-revolution” perfectly depicts the problem of advocating molecular politics. Why? Today’s techniques of control are now molecular. The result is that control societies have emptied the molecular thinker’s only bag of tricks (Bifo is a good test case here), which leaves us with a revolution that only goes one direction: backward. I am equally dissatisfied by realist Deleuzians who delve deep into the early strata of A Thousand Plateaus and away from the “infinite speed of thought” that motivates What is Philosophy? I’m thinking of the early incorporations of dynamical systems theory, the ’90s astonishment over everything serendipitously looking like a rhizome, the mid-00s emergence of Speculative Realism, and the ongoing “ontological” turn. Anyone who has readManuel DeLanda will know this exact dilemma of materiality versus thought. He uses examples that slow down Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts to something easily graspable. In his first book, he narrates history as a “robot historian,” and in A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, he literally traces the last thousand years of economics, biology, and language back to clearly identifiable technological inventions. Such accounts are dangerously compelling due to their lucidity, but they come at a steep cost: android realism dispenses with Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring subject, which is necessary for a theory of revolution by way of the psychoanalytic insistence on the human ability to overcome biological instincts (e.g. Freud’s Instincts and their Vicissitudes and Beyond the Pleasure Principle). Realist interpretations of Deleuze conceive of the subject as fully of this world. And with it, thought all but evaporates under the weight of this world. Deleuze’s Hume book is an early version of this criticism, but the realists have not taken heed. Whether emergent, entangled, or actant, strong realists ignore Deleuze and Guattari’s point in What is Philosophy? that thought always comes from the outside at a moment when we are confronted by something so intolerable that the only thing remaining is to think. Galloway: The left has always been ambivalent about media and technology, sometimes decrying its corrosive influence (Frankfurt School), sometimes embracing its revolutionary potential (hippy cyberculture). Still, you ditch technical “acceleration” in favor of “escape.” Can you expand your position on media and technology, by way of Deleuze’s notion of the machinic? Culp: Foucault says that an episteme can be grasped as we are leaving it. Maybe we can finally catalogue all of the contemporary positions on technology? The romantic (computer will never capture my soul), the paranoiac (there is an unknown force pulling the strings), the fascist-pessimist (computers will control everything)… Deleuze and Guattari are certainly not allergic to technology. My favorite quote actually comes from the Foucault book in which Deleuze says that “technology is social before it is technical” (6). The lesson we can draw from this is that every social formation draws out different capacities from any given technology. An easy example is from the nomads Deleuze loved so much. Anarcho-primitivists speculate that humans learn oppression with the domestication of animals and settled agriculture during the Neolithic Revolution. Diverging from the narrative, Deleuze celebrates the horse people of the Eurasian steppe described by Arnold Toynbee. Threatened by forces that would require them to change their habitat, Toynbee says, they instead chose to change their habits. The subsequent domestication of the horse did not sew the seeds of the state, which was actually done by those who migrated from the steppes after the last Ice Age to begin wet rice cultivation in alluvial valleys (for more, see James C, Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed). On the contrary, the new relationship between men and horses allowed nomadism to achieve a higher speed, which was necessary to evade the raiding-and-trading used by padi-states to secure the massive foreign labor needed for rice farming. This is why the nomad is “he who does not move” and not a migrant (A Thousand Plateaus, 381). Accelerationism attempts to overcome the capitalist opposition of human and machine through the demand for full automation. As such, it peddles in technological Proudhonism that believes one can select what is good about technology and just delete what is bad. The Marxist retort is that development proceeds by its bad side. So instead of flashy things like self-driving cars, the real dot-communist question is: how will Amazon automate the tedious, low-paying jobs that computers are no good at? What happens to the data entry clerks, abusive-content managers, or help desk technicians? Until it figures out who will empty the recycle bin, accelerationism is only a socialism of the creative class. The machinic is more than just machines–it approaches technology as a question of organization. The term is first used by Guattari in a 1968 paper titled “Machine and Structure” that he presented to Lacan’s Freudian School of Paris, a paper that would jumpstart his collaboration with Deleuze. He argues for favoring machine to structure. Structures transform parts of a whole by exchanging or substituting particularities so that every part shares in a general form (in other words, the production of isomorphism). An easy political example is the Leninist Party, which mediates the particularized private interests to form them into the general will of a class. Machines instead treat the relationship between things as a problem of communication. The result is the “control and communication” of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, which connects distinct things in a circuit instead of implanting a general logic. The word “machine” never really caught on but the concept has made inroads in the social sciences, where actor-network theory, game theory, behaviorism, systems theory, and other cybernetic approaches have gained acceptance. Structure or machine, each engenders a different type of subjectivity, and each realizes a different model of communication. The two are found in A Thousand Plateaus, where Deleuze and Guattari note two different types of state subject formation: social subjection and machinic enslavement (456-460). While it only takes up a few short pages, the distinction is essential to Bernard Stiegler’s work and has been expertly elaborated by Maurizio Lazzarato in the book Signs and Machines. We are all familiar with molar social subjection synonymous with “agency”–it is the power that results from individuals bridging the gap between themselves and broader structures of representation, social roles, and institutional demands. This subjectivity is well outlined by Lacanians and other theorists of the linguistic turn (Virno, Rancière, Butler, Agamben). Missing from their accounts is machinic enslavement, which treats people as simply cogs in the machine. Such subjectivity is largely overlooked because it bypasses existential questions of recognition or self-identity. This is because machinic enslavement operates at the level of the infra-social or pre-individual through the molecular operators of unindividuated affects, sensations, desires not assigned to a subject. Offering a concrete example, Deleuze and Guattari reference Mumford’s megamachines of surplus societies that create huge landworks by treating humans as mere constituent parts. Capitalism revived the megamachine in the sixteenth century, and more recently, we have entered the “third age” of enslavement marked by the development of cybernetic and informational machines. In place of the pyramids are technical machines that use humans at places in technical circuits where computers are incapable or too costly, e.g. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. I should also clarify that not all machines are bad. Rather, Dark Deleuze only trusts one kind of machine, the war machine. And war machines follow a single trajectory–a line of flight out of this world. A major task of the war machine conveniently aligns with my politics of techno-anarchism: to blow apart the networks of communication created by the state. Galloway: I can’t resist a silly pun, cannon of joy. Part of your project is about resisting a certain masculinist tendency. Is that a fair assessment? How do feminism and queer theory influence your project? Culp: Feminism is hardwired into the tagline for Dark Deleuze through a critique of emotional labor and the exhibition of bodies–“A revolutionary Deleuze for today’s digital world of compulsory happiness, decentralized control, and overexposure.” The major thread I pull through the book is a materialist feminist one: something intolerable about this world is that it demands we participate in its accumulation and reproduction. So how about a different play on words: Sara Ahmed’s feminist killjoy, who refuses the sexual contract that requires women to appear outwardly grateful and agreeable? Or better yet, Joy Division? The name would associate the project with post-punk, its conceptual attack on the mainstream, and the band’s nod to the sexual labor depicted in the novella House of Dolls. My critique of accumulation is also a media argument about connection. The most popular critics of ‘net culture are worried that we are losing ourselves. So on the one hand, we have Sherry Turkle who is worried that humans are becoming isolated in a state of being “alone-together”; and on the other, there is Bernard Stiegler, who thinks that the network supplants important parts of what it means to be human. I find this kind of critique socially conservative. It also victim-blames those who use social media the most. Recall the countless articles attacking women who take selfies as part of self-care regimen or teens who creatively evade parental authority. I’m more interested in the critique of early ’90s ‘net culture and its enthusiasm for the network. In general, I argue that network-centric approaches are now the dominant form of power. As such, I am much more interested in how the rhizome prefigures the digitally-coordinated networks of exploitation that have made Apple, Amazon, and Google into the world’s most powerful corporations. While not a feminist issue on its face, it’s easy to see feminism’s relevance when we consider the gendered division of labor that usually makes women the employees of choice for low-paying jobs in electronics manufacturing, call centers, and other digital industries. Lastly, feminism and queer theory explicitly meet in my critique of reproduction. A key argument of Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus is the auto-production of the real, which is to say, we already live in a “world without us.” My argument is that we need to learn how to hate some of the things it produces. Of course, this is a reworked critique of capitalist alienation and exploitation, which is a system that gives to us (goods and the wage) only because it already stole them behind our back (restriction from the means of subsistence and surplus value). Such ambivalence is the everyday reality of the maquiladora worker who needs her job but may secretly hope that all the factories burn to the ground. Such degrading feelings are the result of the compromises we make to reproduce ourselves. In the book, I give voice to them by fusing together David Halperin and Valerie Traub’s notion of gay shame acting as a solvent to whatever binds us to identity and Deleuze’s shame at not being able to prevent the intolerable. But feeling shame is not enough. To complete the argument, we need to draw out the queer feminist critique of reproduction latent in Marx and Freud. Détourning an old phrase: direct action begins at the point of reproduction. My first impulse is to rely on the punk rock attitude of Lee Edelman and Paul Preciado’s indictment of reproduction. But you are right that they have their masculinist moments, so what we need is something more post-punk–a little less aggressive and a lot more experimental. Hopefully Dark Deleuze is that. Galloway: Edelman’s “fuck Annie” is one of the best lines in recent theory. “Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital ls and small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop” (No Future, 29). Your book claims, in essence, that the Fuck Annies are more interesting than the Aleatory Materialists. But how can we escape the long arm of Lucretius? Culp: My feeling is that the politics of aleatory materialism remains ambiguous. Beyond the literal meaning of “joy,” there are important feminist takes on the materialist Spinoza of the encounter that deserve our attention. Isabelle Stengers’s work is among the most comprehensive, though the two most famous are probably Donna Haraway’s cyborg feminism and Karen Barad’s agential realism. Curiously, while New Materialism has been quite a boon for the art and design world, its socio-political stakes have never been more uncertain. One would hope that appeals to matter would lend philosophical credence to topical events such as #blacklivesmatter. Yet for many, New Materialism has simply led to a new formalism focused on material forms or realist accounts of physical systems meant to eclipse the “epistemological excesses” of post-structuralism. This divergence was not lost on commentators in the most recent issue of of October, which functioned as a sort of referendum on New Materialism. On the hand, the issue included a generous accounting of the many avenues artists have taken in exploring various “new materialist” directions. Of those, I most appreciated Mel Chen’s reminder that materialism cannot serve as a “get out of jail free card” on the history of racism, sexism, ablism, and speciesism. While on the other, it included the first sustained attack on New Materialism by fellow travelers. Certainly the New Materialist stance of seeing the world from the perspective of “real objects” can be valuable, but only if it does not exclude old materialism’s politics of labor. I draw from Deleuzian New Materialist feminists in my critique of accumulation and reproduction, but only after short-circuiting their world-building. This is a move I learned from Sue Ruddick, whose Theory, Culture & Society article on the affect of the philosopher’s scream is an absolute tour de force. And then there is Graham Burnett’s remark that recent materialisms are like “Etsy kissed by philosophy.” The phrase perfectly crystallizes the controversy, but it might be too hot to touch for at least a decade… Galloway: Let’s focus more on the theme of affirmation and negation, since the tide seems to be changing. In recent years, a number of theorists have turned away from affirmation toward a different set of vectors such as negation, eclipse, extinction, or pessimism. Have we reached peak affirmation? Culp: We should first nail down what affirmation means in this context. There is the metaphysical version of affirmation, such as Foucault’s proud title as a “happy positivist.” In this declaration in Archaeology of Knowledge and “The Order of Discourse,” he is not claiming to be a logical positivist. Rather, Foucault is distinguishing his approach from Sartrean totality, transcendentalism, and genetic origins (his secondary target being the reading-between-the-lines method of Althusserian symptomatic reading). He goes on to formalize this disagreement in his famous statement on the genealogical method, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” Despite being an admirer of Sartre, Deleuze shares this affirmative metaphysics with Foucault, which commentators usually describe as an alternative to the Hegelian system of identity, contradiction, determinate negation, and sublation. Nothing about this “happily positivist” system forces us to be optimists. In fact, it only raises the stakes for locating how all the non-metaphysical senses of the negative persist. Affirmation could be taken to imply a simple “more is better” logic as seen in Assemblage Theory and Latourian Compositionalism. Behind this logic is a principle of accumulation that lacks a theory of exploitation and fails to consider the power of disconnection. The Spinozist definition of joy does little to dispel this myth, but it is not like either project has revolutionary political aspirations. I think we would be better served to follow the currents of radical political developments over the last twenty years, which have been following an increasingly negative path. One part of the story is a history of failure. The February 15, 2003 global demonstration against the Iraq War was the largest protest in history but had no effect on the course of the war. More recently, the election of democratic socialist governments in Europe has done little to stave off austerity, even as economists publicly describe it as a bankrupt model destined to deepen the crisis. I actually find hope in the current circuit of struggle and think that its lack of alter-globalization world-building aspirations might be a plus. My cues come from the anarchist black bloc and those of the post-Occupy generation who would rather not pose any demands. This is why I return to the late Deleuze of the “control societies” essay and his advice to scramble the codes, to seek out spaces where nothing needs to be said, and to establish vacuoles of non-communication. Those actions feed the subterranean source of Dark Deleuze‘s darkness and the well from which comes hatred, cruelty, interruption, un-becoming, escape, cataclysm, and the destruction of worlds. Galloway: Does hatred for the world do a similar work for you that judgment or moralism does in other writers? How do we avoid the more violent and corrosive forms of hate? Culp: Writer Antonin Artaud’s attempt “to have done with the judgment of God” plays a crucial role in Dark Deleuze. Not just any specific authority but whatever gods are left. The easiest way to summarize this is “the three deaths.” Deleuze already makes note of these deaths in the preface to Difference and Repetition, but it only became clear to me after I read Gregg Flaxman’s Gilles Deleuze and the Fabulation of Philosophy. We all know of Nietzsche’s Death of God. With it, Nietzsche notes that God no longer serves as the central organizing principle for us moderns. Important to Dark Deleuze is Pierre Klossowski’s Nietzsche, who is part of a conspiracy against all of humanity. Why? Because even as God is dead, humanity has replaced him with itself. Next comes the Death of Man, which we can lay at the feet of Foucault. More than any other text, The Order of Things demonstrates how the birth of modern man was an invention doomed to fail. So if that death is already written in sand about to be washed away, then what comes next? Here I turn to the world, worlding, and world-building. It seems obvious when looking at the problems that plague our world: global climate change, integrated world capitalism, and other planet-scale catastrophes. We could try to deal with each problem one by one. But why not pose an even more radical proposition? What if we gave up on trying to save this world? We are already awash in sci-fithattries to do this, though most of it is incredibly socially conservative. Perhaps now is the time for thinkers like us to catch up. Fragments of Deleuze already lay out the terms of the project. He ends the preface to Different and Repetition by assigning philosophy the task of writing apocalyptic science fiction. Deleuze’s book opens with lightning across the black sky and ends with the world swelling into a single ocean of excess. Dark Deleuze collects those moments and names it the Death of This World. Galloway: Speaking of climate change, I’m reminded how ecological thinkers can be very religious, if not in word then in deed. Ecologists like to critique “nature” and tout their anti-essentialist credentials, while at the same time promulgating tellurian “change” as necessary, even beneficial. Have they simply replaced one irresistible force with another? But your “hatred of the world” follows a different logic… Culp: Irresistible indeed! Yet it is very dangerous to let the earth have the final say. Not only does psychoanalysis teach us that it is necessary to buck the judgment of nature, the is/ought distinction at the philosophical core of most ethical thought refuses to let natural fact define the good. I introduce hatred to develop a critical distance from what is, and, as such, hatred is also a reclamation of the future in that it is a refusal to allow what-is to prevail over what-could-be. Such an orientation to the future is already in Deleuze and Guattari. What else is de-territorialization? I just give it a name. They have another name for what I call hatred: utopia. Speaking of utopia, Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of utopia in What is Philosophy? as simultaneously now-here and no-where is often used by commentators to justify odd compromise positions with the present state of affairs. The immediate reference is Samuel Butler’s 1872 book Erewhon, a backward spelling of nowhere, which Deleuze also references across his other work. I would imagine most people would assume it is a utopian novel in the vein of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. And Erewhon does borrow from the conventions of utopian literature, but only to skewer them with satire. A closer examination reveals that the book is really a jab at religion, Victorian values, and the British colonization of New Zealand! So if there is anything that the now-here of Erewhon has to contribute to utopia, it is that the present deserves our ruthless criticism. So instead of being a simultaneous now-here and no-where, hatred follows from Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestion in A Thousand Plateaus to “overthrow ontology” (25). Therefore, utopia is only found in Erewhon by taking leave of the now-here to get to no-where. Galloway: In Dark Deleuze you talk about avoiding “the liberal trap of tolerance, compassion, and respect.” And you conclude by saying that the “greatest crime of joyousness is tolerance.” Can you explain what you mean, particularly for those who might value tolerance as a virtue? Culp: Among the many followers of Deleuze today, there are a number of liberal Deleuzians. Perhaps the biggest stronghold is in political science, where there is a committed group of self-professed radical liberals. Another strain bridges Deleuze with the liberalism of John Rawls. I was a bit shocked to discover both of these approaches, but I suppose it was inevitable given liberalism’s ability to assimilate nearly any form of thought. Hubert Marcuse recognized “repressive tolerance” as the incredible power of liberalism to justify the violence of positions clothed as neutral. The examples Marcuse cites are governments who say they respect democratic liberties because they allow political protest although they ignore protesters by labeling them a special interest group. For those of us who have seen university administrations calmly collect student demands, set up dead-end committees, and slap pictures of protestors on promotional materials as a badge of diversity, it should be no surprise that Marcuse dedicated the essay to his students. An important elaboration on repressive tolerance is Wendy Brown’s Regulating Aversion. She argues that imperialist US foreign policy drapes itself in tolerance discourse. This helps diagnose why liberal feminist groups lined up behind the US invasion of Afghanistan (the Taliban is patriarchal) and explains how a mere utterance of ISIS inspires even the most progressive liberals to support outrageous war budgets. Because of their commitment to democracy, Brown and Marcuse can only qualify liberalism’s universal procedures for an ethical subject. Each criticizes certain uses of tolerance but does not want to dispense with it completely. Deleuze’s hatred of democracy makes it much easier for me. Instead, I embrace the perspective of a communist partisan because communists fight from a different structural position than that of the capitalist. Galloway: Speaking of structure and position, you have a section in the book on asymmetry. Most authors avoid asymmetry, instead favoring concepts like exchange or reciprocity. I’m thinking of texts on “the encounter” or “the gift,” not to mention dialectics itself as a system of exchange. Still you want to embrace irreversibility, incommensurability, and formal inoperability–why? Culp: There are a lot of reasons to prefer asymmetry, but for me, it comes down to a question of political strategy. First, a little background. Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of exchange is important to Anti-Oedipus, which was staged through a challenge to Claude Lévi-Strauss. This is why they shift from the traditional Marxist analysis of mode of production to an anthropological study of anti-production, for which they use the work of Pierre Clastres and Georges Bataille to outline non-economic forms of power that prevented the emergence of capitalism. Contemporary anthropologists have renewed this line of inquiry, for instance, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who argues in Cannibal Metaphysics that cosmologies differ radically enough between peoples that they essentially live in different worlds. The cannibal, he shows, is not the subject of a mode of production but a mode of predation. Those are not the stakes that interest me the most. Consider instead the consequence of ethical systems built on the gift and political systems of incommensurability. The ethical approach is exemplified by Derrida, whose responsibility to the other draws from the liberal theological tradition of accepting the stranger. While there is distance between self and other, it is a difference that is bridged through the democratic project of radical inclusion, even if such incorporation can only be aporetically described as a necessary-impossibility. In contrast, the politics of asymmetry uses incommensurability to widen the chasm opened by difference. It offers a strategy for generating antagonism without the formal equivalence of dialectics and provides an image of revolution based on fundamental transformation. The former can be seen in the inherent difference between the perspective of labor and the perspective of capital, whereas the latter is a way out of what Guy Debord calls “a perpetual present.” Galloway: You are exploring a “dark” Deleuze, and I’m reminded how the concepts of darkness and blackness have expanded and interwoven in recent years in everything from afro-pessimism to black metal theory (which we know is frighteningly white). How do you differentiate between darkness and blackness? Or perhaps that’s not the point? Culp: The writing on Deleuze and race is uneven. A lot of it can be blamed on the imprecise definition of becoming. The most vulgar version of becoming is embodied by neoliberal subjects who undergo an always-incomplete process of coming more into being (finding themselves, identifying their capacities, commanding their abilities). The molecular version is a bit better in that it theorizes subjectivity as developing outside of or in tension with identity. Yet the prominent uses of becoming and race rarely escaped the postmodern orbit of hybridity, difference, and inclusive disjunction–the White Man’s face as master signifier, miscegenation as anti-racist practice, “I am all the names of history.” You are right to mention afro-pessimism, as it cuts a new way through the problem. As I’ve written elsewhere, Frantz Fanon describes being caught between “infinity and nothingness” in his famous chapter on the fact of blackness in Black Skin White Masks. The position of infinity is best championed by Fred Moten, whose black fugitive is the effect of an excessive vitality that has survived five hundred years of captivity. He catches fleeting moments of it in performances of jazz, art, and poetry. This position fits well with the familiar figures of Deleuzo-Guattarian politics: the itinerant nomad, the foreigner speaking in a minor tongue, the virtuoso trapped in-between lands. In short: the bastard combination of two or more distinct worlds. In contrast, afro-pessimism is not the opposite of the black radical tradition but its outside. According to afro-pessimism, the definition of blackness is nothing but the social death of captivity. Remember the scene of subjection mentioned by Fanon? During that nauseating moment he is assailed by a whole series of cultural associations attached to him by strangers on the street. “I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: ‘Sho’ good eatin”” (112). The lesson that afro-pessimism draws from this scene is that cultural representations of blackness only reflect back the interior of white civil society. The conclusion is that combining social death with a culture of resistance, such as the one embodied by Fanon’s mentor Aimé Césaire, is a trap that leads only back to whiteness. Afro-pessimism thus follows the alternate route of darkness. It casts a line to the outside through an un-becoming that dissolves the identity we are give as a token for the shame of being a survivor. Galloway: In a recent interview the filmmaker Haile Gerima spoke about whiteness as “realization.” By this he meant both realization as such–self-realization, the realization of the self, the ability to realize the self–but also the more nefarious version as “realization through the other.” What’s astounding is that one can replace “through” with almost any other preposition–for, against, with, without, etc.–and the dynamic still holds. Whiteness is the thing that turns everything else, including black bodies, into fodder for its own realization. Is this why you turn away from realization toward something like profanation? And is darkness just another kind of whiteness? Culp: Perhaps blackness is to the profane as darkness is to the outside. What is black metal if not a project of political-aesthetic profanation? But as other commentators have pointed out, the politics of black metal is ultimately telluric (e.g. Benjamin Noys’s “‘Remain True to the Earth!’: Remarks on the Politics of Black Metal”). The left wing of black metal is anarchist anti-civ and the right is fascist-nativist. Both trace authority back to the earth that they treat as an ultimate judge usurped by false idols. The process follows what Badiou calls “the passion for the real,” his diagnosis of the Twentieth Century’s obsession with true identity, false copies, and inauthentic fakes. His critique equally applies to Deleuzian realists. This is why I think it is essential to return to Deleuze’s work on cinema and the powers of the false. One key example is Orson Welles’s F for Fake. Yet my favorite is the noir novel, which he praises in “The Philosophy of Crime Novels.” The noir protagonist never follows in the footsteps of Sherlock Holmes or other classical detectives’s search for the real, which happens by sniffing out the truth through a scientific attunement of the senses. Rather, the dirty streets lead the detective down enough dead ends that he proceeds by way of a series of errors. What noir reveals is that crime and the police have “nothing to do with a metaphysical or scientific search for truth” (82). The truth is rarely decisive in noir because breakthroughs only come by way of “the great trinity of falsehood”: informant-corruption-torture. The ultimate gift of noir is a new vision of the world whereby honest people are just dupes of the police because society is fueled by falsehood all the way down. To specify the descent to darkness, I use darkness to signify the outside. The outside has many names: the contingent, the void, the unexpected, the accidental, the crack-up, the catastrophe. The dominant affects associated with it are anticipation, foreboding, and terror. To give a few examples, H. P. Lovecraft’s scariest monsters are those so alien that characters cannot describe them with any clarity, Maurice Blanchot’s disaster is the Holocaust as well as any other event so terrible that it interrupts thinking, and Don DeLillo’s “airborne toxic event” is an incident so foreign that it can only be described in the most banal terms. Of Deleuze and Guattari’s many different bodies without organs, one of the conservative varieties comes from a Freudian model of the psyche as a shell meant to protect the ego from outside perturbations. We all have these protective barriers made up of habits that help us navigate an uncertain world–that is the purpose of Guattari’s ritornello, that little ditty we whistle to remind us of the familiar even when we travel to strange lands. There are two parts that work together, the refrain and the strange land. The refrains have only grown yet the journeys seem to have ended. I’ll end with an example close to my own heart. Deleuze and Guattari are being used to support new anarchist “pre-figurative politics,” which is defined as seeking to build a new society within the constraints of the now. The consequence is that the political horizon of the future gets collapsed into the present. This is frustrating for someone like me, who holds out hope for a revolutionary future that ceases the million tiny humiliations that make up everyday life. I like J. K. Gibson-Graham’s feminist critique of political economy, but community currencies, labor time banks, and worker’s coops are not my image of communism. This is why I have drawn on the gothic for inspiration. A revolution that emerges from the darkness holds the apocalyptic potential of ending the world as we know it. Works Cited
The Interview is taken from: by Steven Craig Hickman From now on, no domain of opinion, thought, image, affect or narrativity can pretend to escape from the invasive grip of ‘computer-assisted’ data banks… – Felix Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies “How should we talk today about the production of subjectivity?” asked Felix Guattari. Then he’d recognize the obvious: “A first observation leads us to recognize that the contents of subjectivity depend more and more on a multitude of machinic systems”.1 Ahead of his time, or just looking around and seeing what was already obvious, and yet bringing to the fore the hidden kernel of that ubiquitous world we now term the network society we’ve become. I remember reading and rereading a particularly poignant section of Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia – that collaborative project of Deleuze and Guattari, two friends whose lives would be entwined. As Francois Dosse relates it in a biography of the two friends: Intersecting Lives, Deleuze and Guattari have described their work together on several occasions, but they did so somewhat discreetly. Describing their writing together when Anti-Oedipus first came out, Guattari remarked: This collaboration is not the result of a simple meeting between two people. In addition to the particular circumstances leading up to it, there is also a political context. At the outset, it was less a matter of sharing a common understanding than sharing the sum of our uncertainties and even a certain discomfort and confusion with respect to the way that May 1968 had turned out.2 Deleuze remarked: As regards writing together, there was no particular difficulty and both of us realized slowly that this technique had some clear function. One of the very shocking aspects of books about psychiatry or psychoanalysis is their duality in the sense of what an ostensibly sick person says and what the healer says about the patient. . . . Curiously, however, we tried to get beyond this traditional duality because two of us were writing. Neither of us was the patient or the psychiatrist but we had to be both to establish a process. . . . That process is what we called the flux. As I said previously the passage in Anti-Oedipus that captured for me the sense of the project and its acute diagnosis of our society and capitalism relates to what they termed “our very own ‘malady,’ modern man’s sickness: “Schizophrenia as a process is desiring production, but it is this production as if function at the end, as the limit of social production determined by the conditions of capitalism.”(Anti-Oedipus, p. 139). So that when Guattari asks: “How should we talk today about the production of subjectivity?” It’s this sense of the end of history and capitalism as its final form to which Guattari speaks. As they say in AO: “The end of history has no other meaning. In it the two meanings of process meet, as the movement of social production that goes to the very extremes of its deterritorialization, and as the movement of metaphysical production that carries desire along with it and reproduces in a new Earth.” (ibid., pp. 130-131). Just here D&G will suddenly rise to the occasion and deliver a paeon to the schizo: The schizo carries along the decoded flows, makes them traverse the desert of the body without organs, where he installs his desiring-machines and produces a perpetual outflow of acting forces. He has crossed over the limit, the schiz, which maintained the production of desire always at the margin of social production, tangential and always repelled. …. For here is the desert propagated by our world, and also the new earth, and the machine that hums, around which the schizos revolve, planets for a new sun. (ibid., p. 131) Poetry, hyperbole, utopian? – And, they will even liken this new type of being, this schizo as a new Zarathustra: “These men of desire – or do they not yet exist? – are like Zarathustra. They know incredible sufferings, vertigos, and sicknesses. They have their spectres. They must reinvent each gesture. But such a man produces himself as a free-man, irresponsible, solitary, joyous, finally able to say and do something simple in his own name, without asking permission; a desire lacking nothing, a flux that overcomes barriers and codes, a name that no longer designates any ego whatever. He has simply ceased being afraid of becoming mad. He experiences and lives himself as the sublime sickness that will no longer affect him. (ibid., p. 131). Nietzsche’s influence permeates this work, the sense they are updating a revaluation-of-all-values, creating for their generation a work to extend and fulfill Nietzsche’s mission and task of a production of a new type of being, a new subjectivity, a new process of subjectivation. What are we to think of this? For me it was a confirmation of my own being, of having come thus far, of having pushed passed those limits in my own life after my own childhood, Việt Nam, its aftermath, my own suffering and entry into madness, of having come through and applied that very weapon of my own being to the wound of my madness and come out the other side strangely different, whole, having died to that creature I’d been; subtly realizing the old notion of twice-born, of having suffered utter defeat and the end game of my ego’s torturous enactments. These words spoke volumes, clarified the madness of my youthful rebellions, struggles, and defeats; and, yet, also confirmed my own struggle passed the barriers, the boundaries, the strange entry into my own desert of the earth, and arrival into a new earth. Was this too madness? Yes, a new type of madness. Being schiz… a multiplicity, and not only surviving it, but knowing it, being it, without center, without ego… a multitude; or, “I am Legion!” Haven’t I always been more than “I” that singular point becoming only the truth of what D&G would term “singularity”? So that when Guattari admonishes us to accept the machine, rather than turning luddite, and “rather than associating with the fashionable crusades against the misdeeds of modernism, rather than preaching the rehabilitation of ruined transcendental values, or giving in to the disillusioned delights of postmodernism, we can try to challenge the dilemma of contorted refusal or cynical acceptance of the situation. Because machines are in a position to articulate statements and record states of fact at the rhythm of the nanosecond and, perhaps tomorrow, the picosecond1 does not mean that they are diabolical powers that threaten to dominate man. In fact, people are all the less justified in turning away from machines given that, after all, they are nothing other than hyperdeveloped and hyperconcentrated forms of certain aspects of human subjectivity and, let us emphasize, precisely not those aspects that polarize humans into relations of domination and power.” (SC, KL 501) One realizes Guattari was on to something toward the end of his life, realizing ours was into rather than out of the machine and capitalism. We would need to embrace technology not as victims, nor slaves, but rather as a new type of being, the Schizo. In fact he’d realize we’d need to set up a bridge, an interface, a two-way communication between human and machine and machine and human: 1) current informatic and communication machines do not just convey representative contents but equally contribute to the preparation of new (individual and/ or collective) Assemblages of enunciation; and, 2) all machinic systems, whatever domain they belong to – technical, biological, semiotic, logical, abstract – are, by themselves, the support for proto-subjective processes, which I will characterize in terms of modular subjectivity. (SC, KL 517) The more I have thought about it over the past couple years the more I realize that those such as Badiou, Zizek, Johnson are still living in the past, still devoted to outmoded and dead worlds of thought and being, defending Idealisms as material and immaterial strategies of the ‘gap’ as break, distance, qualifier. Instead Deleuze and Guattari were onto something else, onto a truth about our current and future dilemmas that no longer relied on outmoded forms of thought or being. It is to their work we should turn to recover and realign a vision of a new earth. What they had was the courage of their ideas, rather than the courage of despair as in Zizek. The Left needs to turn away from despair not to optimism, but rather to struggle and the future where our hopes and dreams still move in multiplicity; yet, we should not remain with a gap between here and there, but rather undertake the path across, the bridge to the new earth by way of the schizo. True madness is staying with the sanity of our world, holding onto the insane violence of capitalism which is destroying the very foundations of life on our planet. True sanity is in rejection of this world, of exiting its mad ways, of marshalling the energetic creativity to enter a new earth, a new realm of freedom beyond the madness. Yet, to do this is to push past the boundary lines of our current thinking, to enter into a new relation with ourselves and the environment around us. Maurizio Lazzarato’s Signs and Machines follow Guattari and Deleuze, showing how signs act as “sign-operators” that enter directly into material flows and into the functioning of machines. Money, the stock market, price differentials, algorithms, and scientific equations and formulas constitute semiotic “motors” that make capitalism’s social and technical machines run, bypassing representation and consciousness to produce social subjections and semiotic enslavements. Lazzarato asks: What are the conditions necessary for political and existential rupture at a time when the production of subjectivity represents the primary and perhaps most important work of capitalism? What are the specific tools required to undo the industrial mass production of subjectivity undertaken by business and the state? What types of organization must we construct for a process of subjectivation that would allow us to escape the hold of social subjection and machinic enslavement? This is the path we should take, questions we should ask, and let the “dead bury the dead” of the old schools of thought.
This article is taken from: by Terence Blake The thesis of this blog is that Laruelle’s philosophy (like those of Badiou, Deleuze, Latour, Stiegler) is a metaphysical research programme Popper’s sense, combining both testable or empirical material with untestable more metaphysical material. This is Karl Popper’s definition, which I have been applying on this blog to render possible the analysis and comparative evaluation of the claims and the theses of rival research programmes in Continental Philosophy. It is to be noted that Laruelle himself confirms this analysis in his PRINCIPLES OF NON-PHILOSOPHY: Under the perhaps too classical title of “Principles” we will find a program of research defined by a problematic; by a form of work called a “unified theory of science and philosophy” (1). What Laruelle does not seem to realise is that this characterisation does not establish his project as sui generis (what I have elsewhere called Laruelle’s “Uniqueness Hypothesis”), but confirms his inclusion in a more general configuration of thought. A second denegation (whether due to naiveté or to bad faith I leave the reader to decide) is Laruelle’s omnipresent scientism. In PRINCIPLES OF PHILOSOPHY he calls this unified theory of science and philosophy a “science-thought” or a “first science”. This constant morpho-syntaxic privilege accorded to one face of the so-called “Identity” of philosophy and science is a marker of Laruelle’s incoherence on the question of science. To see this incoherence even more clearly we need only consult Laruelle’s unique book devoted explicitly to the question of science and non-philosophy: THEORY OF IDENTITIES, first published in French in 1992. In the first chapter Laruelle tells us: De Platon à Kant et à Heidegger règne une triple division du travail intellectuel… A cette triple division du travail intellectuel, aucune philosophie n’échappe réellement. Aucune épistémologie — empiriste ou idéaliste, positiviste ou matérialiste — ne peut se libérer de ce qui est un invariant, en général peu reconnu comme tel, de l’interprétation gréco-philosophique de la science, anglo-saxonne comprise (54-55). My translation: From Plato to Kant and to Heidegger there reigns a triple division of intellectuel labour … No philosophy ever really escapes from this division of intellectual labour. No epistemology – whether empiricist or idealist, positivist or materialist – can free itself from what is an invariant, generally not admitted as such, of the Greco-philosophical (including the Anglo-Saxon) interpretation of science. The invariant “triple division” of intellectual labour between science and philosophy is according to Laruelle: 1) Philosophy thinks, science knows but does not think 2) Philosophy is absolute science, empirical sciences are contingent and relative 3) Philosophy thinks Being, science knows not even beings but their properties or the facts. In this text it is asserted that “No philosophy ever really escapes from this division of intellectual labour”. This universalising gesture is typical of Laruelle, he condemns the totalising pretentions of “Philosophy” but he himself sees invariants everywhere. The leap from “philosophy from Plato to Heidegger” to all philosophy is absolutely unfounded. In this text it is asserted that “No philosophy ever really escapes from this division of intellectual labour”. This universalising gesture is typical of Laruelle, he condemns the totalising pretentions of “Philosophy” but he himself sees invariants everywhere. The leap from “philosophy from Plato to Heidegger” to all philosophy is absolutely unfounded. Laruelle’s discussion of these points, as of so many others, belongs to another age. Both Bergson and Bachelard had already dismantled and discredited the sort of philosophy that Laruelle would have us believe to be the Standard Model that has traversed the history of philosophy unchanged and unrecognised until he came along. Laruelle is not an innovator here, but a late-comer to the feast of conceptual creation. Elsewhere in PRINCIPLES OF NON-PHILOSOPHY Laruelle admits that his earlier thought had been impregnated with scientism (something that his followers have steadfastly denied), and indicates that this book embodies his attempt to break with “the excessive critique of philosophy in the name of the primacy of science”. This is the tendency in Laruelle that I encourage. Talking about his evolution from Philosophy II to Philosophy III, Laruelle declares: If I is intra-philosophical and II marks the discovery of the non-philosophical against philosophy and to the benefit of science, III frees itself from the authority of science, i.e. in reality from any philosophical spirit of hierarchy, and takes as its object the whole of philosophical sufficiency (PRINCIPES DE LA NON-PHILOSOPHIE, 40, my translation). Whatever one may think of the rest of Laruelle’s non-philosophy project (and I think that there is much interesting and useful material to be found in his works) we must admit that his continuing scientism that continues within his attempt at elaborating a non-standardphilosophy remains decidedly sub-standard. This article is taken from: by Himanshu Damle Superstrings provided a perturbatively finite theory of gravity which, after compactification down to 3+1 dimensions, seemed potentially capable of explaining the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces of the Standard Model, including the required chiral representations of quarks and leptons. However, there appeared to be not one but five seemingly different but mathematically consistent superstring theories: the E8 × E8 heterotic string, the SO(32) heterotic string, the SO(32) Type I string, and Types IIA and IIB strings. Each of these theories corresponded to a different way in which fermionic degrees of freedom could be added to the string worldsheet. Supersymmetry constrains the upper limit on the number of spacetime dimensions to be eleven. Why, then, do superstring theories stop at ten? In fact, before the “first string revolution” of the mid-1980’s, many physicists sought superunification in eleven-dimensional supergravity. Solutions to this most primitive supergravity theory include the elementary supermembrane and its dual partner, the solitonic superfivebrane. These are supersymmetric objects extended over two and five spatial dimensions, respectively. This brings to mind another question: why do superstring theories generalize zero-dimensional point particles only to one-dimensional strings, rather than p-dimensional objects? During the “second superstring revolution” of the mid-nineties it was found that, in addition to the 1+1-dimensional string solutions, string theory contains soliton-like Dirichlet branes. These Dp-branes have p + 1-dimensional worldvolumes, which are hyperplanes in 9 + 1-dimensional spacetime on which strings are allowed to end. If a closed string collides with a D-brane, it can turn into an open string whose ends move along the D-brane. The end points of such an open string satisfy conventional free boundary conditions along the worldvolume of the D-brane, and fixed (Dirichlet) boundary conditions are obeyed in the 9 − p dimensions transverse to the D-brane. D-branes make it possible to probe string theories non-perturbatively, i.e., when the interactions are no longer assumed to be weak. This more complete picture makes it evident that the different string theories are actually related via a network of “dualities.” T-dualities relate two different string theories by interchanging winding modes and Kaluza-Klein states, via R → α′/R. For example, Type IIA string theory compactified on a circle of radius R is equivalent to Type IIB string theory compactified on a circle of radius 1/R. We have a similar relation between E8 × E8 and SO(32) heterotic string theories. While T-dualities remain manifest at weak-coupling, S-dualities are less well-established strong/weak-coupling relationships. For example, the SO(32) heterotic string is believed to be S-dual to the SO(32) Type I string, while the Type IIB string is self-S-dual. There is a duality of dualities, in which the T-dual of one theory is the S-dual of another. Compactification on various manifolds often leads to dualities. The heterotic string compactified on a six-dimensional torus T6 is believed to be self-S-dual. Also, the heterotic string on T4 is dual to the type II string on four-dimensional K3. The heterotic string on T6 is dual to the Type II string on a Calabi-Yau manifold. The Type IIA string on a Calabi-Yau manifold is dual to the Type IIB string on the mirror Calabi-Yau manifold. This led to the discovery that all five string theories are actually different sectors of an eleven-dimensional non-perturbative theory, known as M-theory. When M-theory is compactified on a circle S1 of radius R11, it leads to the Type IIA string, with string coupling constant gs = R3/211. Thus, the illusion that this string theory is ten-dimensional is a remnant of weak-coupling perturbative methods. Similarly, if M-theory is compactified on a line segment S1/Z2, then the E8 × E8 heterotic string is recovered. Just as a given string theory has a corresponding supergravity in its low-energy limit, eleven-dimensional supergravity is the low-energy limit of M-theory. Since we do not yet know what the full M-theory actually is, many different names have been attributed to the “M,” including Magical, Mystery, Matrix, and Membrane! Whenever we refer to “M-theory,” we mean the theory which subsumes all five string theories and whose low-energy limit is eleven-dimensional supergravity. We now have an adequate framework with which to understand a wealth of non-perturbative phenomena. For example, electric-magnetic duality in D = 4 is a consequence of string-string duality in D = 6, which in turn is the result of membrane-fivebrane duality in D = 11. Furthermore, the exact electric-magnetic duality has been extended to an effective duality of non-conformal N = 2 Seiberg-Witten theory, which can be derived from M-theory. In fact, it seems that all supersymmetric quantum field theories with any gauge group could have a geometrical interpretation through M-theory, as worldvolume fields propagating on a common intersection of stacks of p-branes wrapped around various cycles of compactified manifolds. In addition, while perturbative string theory has vacuum degeneracy problems due to the billions of Calabi-Yau vacua, the non-perturbative effects of M-theory lead to smooth transitions from one Calabi-Yau manifold to another. Now the question to ask is not why do we live in one topology but rather why do we live in a particular corner of the unique topology. M-theory might offer a dynamical explanation of this. While supersymmetry ensures that the high-energy values of the Standard Model coupling constants meet at a common value, which is consistent with the idea of grand unification, the gravitational coupling constant just misses this meeting point. In fact, M-theory may resolve long-standing cosmological and quantum gravitational problems. For example, M-theory accounts for a microscopic description of black holes by supplying the necessary non-perturbative components, namely p-branes. This solves the problem of counting black hole entropy by internal degrees of freedom. The article is taken from: by François Laruelle Situations of defeat or retreat, as much as those of victory, are the worst situations that the rigor of thought has to confront. We must not always leave it up to desertion to desire the verification of the supposed failure of Marxism and to “comment” upon it. Neither should it be left to what occupies the “post-Marxist intellectuals,” that is monetizing some revamped ideas still useful to today’s tastes. Nor to philosophy alone or to science alone, not even to their combination, meaning we shouldn’t leave it to Marxism itself, attempting it through auto-justification or auto-denigration. It isn’t for those who in- tend to “make a return” to the “text” of Marx against its Marx- ist use that this attempt is made nor this hypothesis proposed. Only a non-Marxian and non-Marxist repetition of Marx- ism can avoid the ideological comedy of the philosophical “return” as the tragicomedy of its deconstruction. The generation of Marxism’s deserters are certainly lost, but not lost to philosophical sufficiency. Hence the “returns,” to Heidegger and others, to the Platonic ontology of mathematics, to mono- theism, to Eastern philosophy, etc., or to the more modest and more institutionally secure tasks, like the history of the sciences and ideologies, epistemology, political philosophy, etc. In every way our project is closer, despite their philosophical postulation, to the neo-Marxisms that carry on the grand classical task of Marxism’s philosophical enrichment. A failure in terms of the historical realization of the Marxist program carries several possible empirical significations, several aspects, never a single one as resentment makes us believe. On the other hand, strictly speaking there must be a single cause-of-the-last-instance for this failure. From this point of view, it is impossible to declare anything rigorously or stable regarding this supposed failure: 1. outside of its radical “inclusion” in the conjuncture, the concept of which it modifies; 2. if the conditions of a rigorous theory of this failure are not also simultaneously those of Marxism itself. They are neither theoretically nor practically joined as long as both are satisfied with adding postulates to the existing ones or varying them without radically changing their very nature, for example those of “conjuncture.” Isolated from the essence of Marxism (because there is one, contrary to what the runaways say), its “failure” is always poorly understood, as an accident and/or an absolute invalidation, as a historical appearance and/or a falsification of the metaphysical kind rather than a scientific one, leading to the deception and resentment that the “intellectuals” feed. The bad conscience of the anti-Marxists or sometimes the neo-Marxists comes with the disorderly retreat and the attempts at reforming the runaways by making them “sit and learn their lessons again.” On the other hand, non-Marxism consists very little in fleeing from Marxism or in returning to it, non-Marxism’s concern is simply going there, a gesture without separation, concerned with assuming it within the posture that is likely to provide the explanation of this failure as a new conjuncture. There is no point in rushing toward this supposed failure. So how would we judge what this failure concerns? According to what criteria that wouldn’t immediately be contested for its partiality or arbitrariness? Is it “real,” “genuine,” etc.? Scientific? Philosophical? Political? Economic? All of these together? These failures are heterogeneous and incommensurable, their doctrinal “set” is nothing less than what will be its form of “totalization” or theoretical organization. Looking at this explication of the multiple aspects--as such—of failure, an explication that is not empiricist concerning one of them or through one of them alone, we postulate that the theoretical genre of Marxism is a new type, unknown within philosophy, an attempt at a radical unification of science and philosophy under the primacy of the “last instance,” but which still rightly forms itself here under the dominant drive of philosophy. The feeling that there is a failure is in general confused, poorly analyzed and paralyzed with resentment: a failure sometimes considered to be the failure of so-called “Marx- ist science,” sometimes of Marxist philosophy, of “that philosophy,” of “this axiom,” etc. Each of these aspects is controversial and ambiguous: 1. A failure of the scientific kind? According to its scientific aspect, let us assume, lacking any better alternative, Popper’s criteria: a “false” theory in the absolute sense of metaphysics is not a falsifiable or a scientific theory. If it has been falsified by its application or its practical realization, it is because it was a science rather than a metaphysics. The hypothesis of its universality will have been contradicted experimentally and invalidated, but for that very reason it would have its scientific positivity and would not be the sanction of a metaphysical thesis on history. However, in addition to Popper’s criteria itself being “critical” and metaphysical in an enlarged sense, which sometimes escaped its author, the failure of Marxism confirms—it is true—that it is still too specularly copied from history and the thought-world to which it is not sufficiently heterogeneous, but it also confirms, in an inverse way, the validity of its hypothesis as relatively adequate to the phenomena and presumably “verified” by them. 2. A failure of the philosophical kind? Nothing like that exists inside of philosophy, which at best understands this as illusion and appearance rather than as error, or some flawed or uninteresting interpretation, etc. However, philosophy on the whole is in a posture that is excessively ambitious in relation to reality, in a posture of anticipation and retrospection, it claims to create or at least determine its own “real.” Any philosophical thesis is then also more verified than falsified. A philosophy is verified in a permanent way (but it is an apparent verification or a transcendental illusion), it fails in the same way, in a manner that is not the same as scientific falsification. To assume that there would be a philosophical obsolescence of Marxism has no more validity than the continued obsolescence of any philosophical decisions that form this dead, but always standing army that the tradition is. To the contrary, assume that philosophy has no history, that it is the fixed combat of two antagonistic positions, while it is a tradition that enriches and shifts itself according to a desire for the Real of which the materialist break is only one particular stasis. As a philosophy, Marxism does not have as its object concrete being and its properties, like the positive sciences do, but instead has Being (as matter) for its object and yet Marxism wants to intervene at the level of the concrete (of history, of society, etc.) that is still merely transcended, overviewed, and laterally aimed for, above all transforming concepts, producing the theoretical tradition and, for the rest, in wanting to keep incarnating these overly narrow abstractions (abstractions precisely because they are too narrow, limited, and specific to the thought-world), produced a bit of life, and a great deal of death. As a philosophy, it no longer has objects, it is a game of objectivities and positions. Its practical ambition is in reality a philosophical or excessive ambition, despite this, and because of the battle with its own overly narrow materialist concept of philosophical idealism, it confuses the practical transformation of historical efficacy with philosophical transcendence. Here failure is equally inevitable, but it is not the failure which is bad, it is the belief that a particular philosophy (Dialectical Materialism and what Historical Materialism is structured by) was adapted to the liberation of man. The materialist thesis is only a related system for a truly universal non-Marxism, but the belief that it is concerned with the philosophy for the proletariat (and therefore for man) is particularly illusory. There is nothing within philosophy that transforms the Real, at the very most it transforms the forms that make the World and the thought-world. Above all else, philosophy serves as a vehicle for a faith or for a hope-world, a teleology, which still, independent of every recognized utopia, profoundly grants Marxism a final aspect of the eschatological desire doomed to disappointment. 3. If Marxism is neither a separated science nor a separated philosophy, if it is both in their unity—a divided unity and thus philosophical—then the problem of Marxism’s failure is more complicated because of its “aspects” that it overcomes without undoing them. If it is a theory fusing processes in a double way, equally fusing through its economic and political object but also their philosophical conditions, then its more profound failure is still found elsewhere and not within the poorly formed synthesis or simple combination of these preceding forms of failure where one would dominate the other. Instead, finally, it is found in the specific type of fusions and the theoretical ingredients of its “sources,” and found in the lack of success for this fusion, such that fusion is assured by this instance that it is still philosophy in a mode of synthesis or through the third term, at best occasionally simply inhibited or repressed. The confusion that in general surrounds the thematic of failure results in the refusal, arising from philosophical resentment within Marx’s work itself first of all, to elucidate the ultimate theoretical constitution of doctrine, its “unified” usage of science and philosophy under the banner either of the dialectic or even determination-in-the-last-instance. It also results in the refusal to evaluate its effective practical meaning which is totally distinct from declarations of practical intention that nourish philosophical sufficiency within itself or sometimes even a certain scientistic and political positivism. The relative proportions of science and philosophy, of theory and practice, of technology and politics, disappear into a complete and apparent effect of failure due to the lack of their clear distinction. excerpt from the book: INTRODUCTION TO NON-MARXISM by François Laruelle by Terence Blake Laruelle’s critique of Deleuze can be seen in a strange document responding to Deleuze and Guattari’s WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?, which was first published in French in 1991, i.e. well inside Laruelle’s “Philosophy II” phase (1981-1995), a period during which he has admitted he was still under the sway of the principle of sufficient philosophy in the form of a scientistic submission to the “authority” of science. In PRINCIPLES OF PHILOSOPHY (page 34) Laruelle describes how his Philosophy II phase was “equivocal” in that it was: grounded on two axioms assumed to be complementary: 1) The One is immanent vision in-One. 2) There is a special af inity between the vision-in-One and the phenomenal experience of “scientific thought”. We learn that this strange mixture of immanence and scientism (which lasted 14 years!) was an “ultimate ruse of philosophy”. Scientism is a “philosophical” principle in the sense of the standard philosophy from which Laruelle was trying to break free, and as such it is a hindrance to thought: “Philosophy III begins … by and with the suspension of this second axiom, already partially felt to be useless for non-philosophy, and which had even prevented it from being deployed in its liberty and plasticity” (34). Laruelle’s critique of Deleuze was published in French in 1995, in the same year as his THEORIE DES ETRANGERS, which is the book that Laruelle tells us inaugurates the third phase of his research, “Philosophy III”. Under the title “I, the Philosopher, Am Lying: A Response to Deleuze”, it published in English translation in THE NON-PHILOSOPHY PROJECT (2012). Yet this “response” bears all the signs of philosophical enclosure. It is noteworthy that WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY is not just a work by Deleuze, as Laruelle’s “A Reply to Deleuze” would seem to imply. It was written in collaboration with Guattari, a non-philosopher, whose encounter with Deleuze allowed both of them to move outside the codes of standard philosophy, and to “practice immanence” as opposed to merely “saying immanence” . Laruelle gives a one-sided “philosophical” reading of the book, ignoring everything that Deleuze said over the preceding 14 years about his own break with standard philosophy, and comes to the predictable conclusion that Deleuze is still doing philosophy, i.e. “philosophy” in his Laruelle’s sense, which has next to nothing to do with Deleuze and Guattari’s sense as expounded in the book Laruelle is replying to. Yet Deleuze had already replied to this critique of talking about an outside of philosophy while remaining firmly ensconced within its confines, in the role of a conformist spectator profiting from the experiences of those experimenting the real. In LETTER TO A SEVERE CRITIC, first published in French in 1973, Deleuze discusses his own non-philosophical production of philosophy. He talks about how he lived a depersonalisation of love and not of submission in his encounter with Nietzsche and how he was multiplied and singularised in his encounter with Guattari. The whole text is relevant because it is in the LETTER that he replies most clearly to the accusation that he is blocked inside philosophy, recuperating the marginals for his own academic profit without taking any risks himself. Deleuze’s LETTER recounts the changes produced by his reading of Nietzsche outside of philosophy, and by his encounter with Guattari whom he met in 1969, when he was 44 and Guattari was 39. They published A THOUSAND PLATEAUS IN 1981, after KAFKA and RHIZOME, when Deleuze was 56, Guattari 51. These are not the works of old age and fatigue, but are an explosion of vitality. Deleuze went on to revolutionise the approach to the cinema with his two cinema books. Their last book written together was WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? published in 1991, Deleuze 66 and Guattari 61. It is essential to bear in mind that it is a collaborative work, and both voices together (the philosopher and the non-philosopher) reply to the question “what is it that I have been doing all my life?” The affect in this book is not that of fatigue, nor does it incarnate a sort of after-time of the zombie-like “survival” of philosophical abstraction. The affect is “sobriety” and the time is ripe for them to “speak concretely”, the mood is not one of exhaustion but of “grace”. The book is not centered on a reflection on limits, these limits are assigned to the history of philosophy, but on a new creation of concepts outside the limits of standard philosophy (=the history of philosophy). Deleuze and Guattari have already, when this book is published, analysed for over 20 years the different régimes of signs, and shown how signification is just one régime. They have shown how the standard philosophical book is based on the codification of fluxes, and have written together several books outside this philosophical codification, where a-signifying particles are connected to the outside. Philosophy is performance and transformation for them, before it is codified into signification. Like Laruelle, Deleuze remarks that there are two possible readings of his texts and of his life. The reading that judges him locked inside philosophy (he calls this a malevolent reading based on resentment) and the reading that he is producing in relation to the immanent outside (he calls this a benevolent or “amorous” reading, based on intensity, and machinic function). For Deleuze there is no dualism where philosophy “observes” and “recuperates” while non-philosophy “lives” and “performs”, this is precisely the malevolent reading rejected in the LETTER, and at the beginning of RHIZOME, the experimentation is inassignable. While I read Laruelle with great interest I do not agree with his self-evaluation of his accomplishment. He has proved that one can give a philosophical reading of philosophical texts, including those of his immediate predecessors. This is the reading that “Laruellians” (if such a thing can exist) tend to quote. Laruelle has not proven that other readings are not possible. As an example, in his dialogue with Derrida he admits that a philosophical reading can be given of his own text, but affirms that a non-philosophical reading is also possible, and to be preferred. What is applicable for him is applicable for many other philosophers. Deleuze is a good case study for our evaluation of Laruelle’s own practice of reading, as Deleuze explicitly demands that his texts be read not as a system but as philosophical material to be used in relation to an outside. Whatever one may think of the case of DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION it is clear that ANTI-OEDIPUS goes far further outside, far closer to the source of immanence, than Laruelle’s THÉORIE DES ÉTRANGERS, just as A THOUSAND PLATEAUS goes further in non-standard philosophy than Laruelle’s book PHILOSOPHIE NON-STANDARD. I see no anti-philosophy in Deleuze’s work, but the cry “everything is to be interpreted in terms of intensity” is precisely the call to the disorganization of all systems, their reduction to transcendental material to be used in non-standard ways, and the reversion to immanence that Laruelle invokes. Laruelle is a good non-philosopher but he is not the first, nor does he go the closest to immanence. Laruelle’s Philosophy II was an incoherent phase of his research mixing immanence and scientism in a “non-philosophy” which is the self-cancelling philosophical hallucination of Laruelle. He sees the philosophical decision everywhere as a universal structure, until he realises that this very seeing is itself caught in the same structure that he denounces, and he passes on to the positive work of non-standard philosophy. This is by no means a final step. Having explored non-standard philosophy he will have to become able to detect its presence in the work of past and rival thinkers, and must learn to see that philosophy has always been coupled with non-philosophy and with non-standard philosophy, and that he was blind to this before. The article is taken from:
by Himanshu Damle
The cornerstone of Hilbert’s philosophy of mathematics was the so-called finitary standpoint. This methodological standpoint consists in a restriction of mathematical thought to objects which are “intuitively present as immediate experience prior to all thought,” and to those operations on and methods of reasoning about such objects which do not require the introduction of abstract concepts, in particular, require no appeal to completed infinite totalities.
Hilbert characterized the domain of finitary reasoning in a well-known paragraph:
[A]s a condition for the use of logical inferences and the performance of logical operations, something must already be given to our faculty of representation, certain extra-logical concrete objects that are intuitively present as immediate experience prior to all thought. If logical inference is to be reliable, it must be possible to survey these objects completely in all their parts, and the fact that they occur, that they differ from one another, and that they follow each other, or are concatenated, is immediately given intuitively, together with the objects, as something that can neither be reduced to anything else nor requires reduction. This is the basic philosophical position that I consider requisite for mathematics and, in general, for all scientific thinking, understanding, and communication. [Hilbert in German + DJVU link here in English]
These objects are, for Hilbert, the signs. For the domain of contentual number theory, the signs in question are sequences of strokes (“numerals”) such as:
|, ||, |||, ||||| .
The question of how exactly Hilbert understood the numerals is difficult to answer. What is clear in any case is that they are logically primitive, i.e., they are neither concepts (as Frege’s numbers are) nor sets. For Hilbert, the important issue is not primarily their metaphysical status (abstract versus concrete in the current sense of these terms), but that they do not enter into logical relations, e.g., they cannot be predicated of anything.
Sometimes Hilbert’s view is presented as if Hilbert claimed that the numbers are signs on paper. It is important to stress that this is a misrepresentation, that the numerals are not physical objects in the sense that truths of elementary number theory are dependent only on external physical facts or even physical possibilities. Hilbert made too much of the fact that for all we know, neither the infinitely small nor the infinitely large are actualized in physical space and time, yet he certainly held that the number of strokes in a numeral is at least potentially infinite. It is also essential to the conception that the numerals are sequences of one kind of sign, and that they are somehow dependent on being grasped as such a sequence, that they do not exist independently of our intuition of them. Only our seeing or using “||||” as a sequence of 4 strokes as opposed to a sequence of 2 symbols of the form “||” makes “||||” into the numeral that it is. This raises the question of individuation of stroke symbols. An alternative account would have numerals be mental constructions. According to Hilber, the numerals are given in our representation, but they are not merely subjective “mental cartoons”.
One version of this view would be to hold that the numerals are types of stroke-symbols as represented in intuition. At first glance, this seems to be a viable reading of Hilbert. It takes care of the difficulties that the reading of numerals-as-tokens (both physical and mental) faces, and it gives an account of how numerals can be dependent on their intuitive construction while at the same time not being created by thought.
Types are ordinarily considered to be abstract objects and not located in space or time. Taking the numerals as intuitive representations of sign types might commit us to taking these abstract objects as existing independently of their intuitive representation. That numerals are “space- and timeless” is a consequence that already thought could be drawn from Hilbert’s statements. The reason is that a view on which numerals are space- and timeless objects existing independently of us would be committed to them existing simultaneously as a completed totality, and this is exactly what Hilbert is objecting to.
It is by no means compatible, however, with Hilbert’s basic thoughts to introduce the numbers as ideal objects “with quite different determinations from those of sensible objects,” “which exist entirely independent of us.” By this we would go beyond the domain of the immediately certain. In particular, this would be evident in the fact that we would consequently have to assume the numbers as all existing simultaneously. But this would mean to assume at the outset that which Hilbert considers to be problematic. Another open question in this regard is exactly what Hilbert meant by “concrete.” He very likely did not use it in the same sense as it is used today, i.e., as characteristic of spatio-temporal physical objects in contrast to “abstract” objects. However, sign types certainly are different from full-fledged abstracta like pure sets in that all their tokens are concrete.
Now what is the epistemological status of the finitary objects? In order to carry out the task of providing a secure foundation for infinitary mathematics, access to finitary objects must be immediate and certain. Hilbert’s philosophical background was broadly Kantian. Hilbert’s characterization of finitism often refers to Kantian intuition, and the objects of finitism as objects given intuitively. Indeed, in Kant’s epistemology, immediacy is a defining characteristic of intuitive knowledge. The question is, what kind of intuition is at play? Whereas the intuition involved in Hilbert’s early papers was a kind of perceptual intuition, in later writings it is identified as a form of pure intuition in the Kantian sense. Hilbert later sees the finite mode of thought as a separate source of a priori knowledge in addition to pure intuition (e.g., of space) and reason, claiming that he has “recognized and characterized the third source of knowledge that accompanies experience and logic.” Hilbert justifies finitary knowledge in broadly Kantian terms (without however going so far as to provide a transcendental deduction), characterizing finitary reasoning as the kind of reasoning that underlies all mathematical, and indeed, scientific, thinking, and without which such thought would be impossible.
The simplest finitary propositions are those about equality and inequality of numerals. The finite standpoint moreover allows operations on finitary objects. Here the most basic is that of concatenation. The concatenation of the numerals || and ||| is communicated as “2 + 3,” and the statement that || concatenated with ||| results in the same numeral as ||| concatenated with || by “2 + 3 = 3 + 2.” In actual proof-theoretic practice, as well as explicitly, these basic operations are generalized to operations defined by recursion, paradigmatically, primitive recursion, e.g., multiplication and exponentiation. Roughly, a primitive recursive definition of a numerical operation is one in which the function to be defined, f , is given by two equations:
f(0, m) = g(m)
f(n′, m) = h(n, m, f(n, m)),
where g and h are functions already defined, and n′ is the successor numeral to n. For instance, if we accept the function g(m) = m (the constant function) and h(n, m, k) = m + k as finitary, then the equations above define a finitary function, in this case, multiplication f (n, m) = n × m. Similarly, finitary judgments may involve not just equality or inequality but also basic decidable properties, such as “is a prime.” This is finitarily acceptable as long as the characteristic function of such a property is itself finitary: For instance, the operation which transforms a numeral to | if it is prime and to || otherwise can be defined by primitive recursion and is hence finitary. Such finitary propositions may be combined by the usual logical operations of conjunction, disjunction, negation, but also bounded quantification. The problematic finitary propositions are those that express general facts about numerals such as that 1 + n = n + 1 for any given numeral n. It is problematic because, for Hilbert it is from the finitist point of view incapable of being negated. By this he means that the contradictory proposition that there is a numeral n for which 1 + n ≠ n + 1 is not finitarily meaningful. A finitary general proposition is not to be understood as an infinite conjunction but only as a hypothetical judgment that comes to assert something when a numeral is given. Even though they are problematic in this sense, general finitary statements are of particular importance to Hilbert’s proof theory, since the statement of consistency of a formal system T is of such a general form: for any given sequence p of formulas, p is not a derivation of a contradiction in T. Even though in general existential statements are not finitarily meaningful, they may be given finitary meaning if the witness is given by a finitary function. For instance, the finitary content of Euclid’s theorem that for every prime p there is a prime > p, is that given a specific prime p one can produce, by a finitary operation, another prime > p (viz., by testing all numbers between p and p! + 1.).
The article is taken from:
|
Steven Craig Hickman - The Intelligence of Capital: The Collapse of Politics in Contemporary Society
Steven Craig Hickman - Hyperstition: Technorevisionism – Influencing, Modifying and Updating Reality
Archives
April 2020
|