/lit/ - Literature

>>12632798
Simondon really does suggest a kind of escape hatch or secret door through some of the horribly reciprocal and cyclical processes in which we find ourselves. while i have no problem shilling the virtues of Girard et al about the need to recognize each other, these kinds of things, there is also something to be said about doing this as a kind of prolegomena to imagining a world that isn't basically a prisoner of 19C sensibilities running on 21C hardware (or is it the reverse? either way things got incredibly fucking heavy in the 20C.)

Land, like Nietzsche, is to me one of those guys that simply cannot be hand-waved away until there is a better theory in place for what comes after. in Nietzsche's case, to some degree, there are at least two of these: Heideggerian phenomenology, and Lacanian psychoanalysis, which also gives you Deleuze (arguably the most faithful interpretation). but Deleuze also gives you Land, and therein lies the rub. even Land isn't himself - well, maybe not completely - actually willing the complete destruction of human life by capital, he was raising some questions about what is effectivelly the Gestell back in the 1990s and then he found that what appeared to be a tiny little side door in fact opened up directly onto Lovecratian realms beyond imagining. and now he's fallen in love with BTC and is one of the continental world's greatest theorists of the meaning of time-travel.

and yet voluntarily falling in love with our own cyberneticization and industrialization is, i think, what YH is warning against. again, i'm *with* Land here on this - rather than reject a thing, why not follow along where it is taking you? why not sign up for the ride? the view is breathtaking. but there is a horizon beyond which i also think it is built for failure and disappointment, and in turn towards disappointment coping strategies which i *really* do not want.

so YH is my own way of extricating myself to some degree from the cords and wires that the Wild Ride requires you to plug into yourself, like a good old fashioned 80's cyberpunk would. my guess is that he's not even all that optimistic about his own project, as much as perhaps Heidegger wasn't either; i don't know, i'll have to wait until i read the new book. but that teeny little space, and the rest of the gallery of rogues and martyrs that surrounds it, gives you all the philosophical fun you could ever ask for for all the rest of one's natural days.

>>11345315
also, since you're interested in the commons i'd be interested to know also what you make of yuk hui and gilbert simondon. simondon (and the only serious 'simondonian' i know is yuk hui) is still to me kind of an unknown quantity w/r/t a lot of this stuff.

>The general intellect for Virno could be understood as the “common,” but also as Simondon’s “pre-individual” reality, or more precisely what Anaximander calls apeiron. As both Stiegler and Jason Read have emphasized, one shouldn’t confuse the pre-individual with mere nature, but rather understand it as part and product of culture and history. Calling it immaterial or returning to “mere nature” risks missing an important step in understanding our contemporary, or post-labor, condition to come. If the general intellect is exploitable, it is only because the environmentalization of machines equipped with the capacity to collect, parse, and analyze data creates a feedback loop that integrates the individual into technological systems. We can thus understand the double meaning of the German word for “general intellect,” allgemeiner Verstand, that Marx first used: on the one hand, it is the understanding (Verstand), the analytic faculty responsible for cognition and recognition; on the other, it is a generalized or transcendental schema which forces itself onto the whole of society, like how Google has made machine categories indispensable for comprehending the contemporary. In other words, the immaterial is the new material.

>Virno seems to furthermore separate psychic and collective individuation into two stages, with the “collective of the multitude, seen as ulterior or second degree.” However, as we have seen before, there is no separation between the psychic and the collective in Simondon’s theory of individuation, and indeed they are inseparable. The separation between the two allows Virno to advance an opposition between the individual and the multitude, but he fails to account for how the dynamic of individual and collective individuation is mediated by technical objects. Virno’s move could be understood in the same way that he criticized Marx for “completely [identifying] the general intellect (or, knowledge as the principle productive force) with fixed capital, thus neglecting the instance when that same general intellect manifests itself on the contrary as living labor.” But if Virno’s politics of the multitude can be found in the exploited general intellect, its potential for resistance does not rely solely on “living labor” or a theory of “subjectivity,” but rather demands historically recontextualizing technical objects and repositioning them in an understanding of the process of psychic and collective individuation.

the rest of the article is pretty cool too.

source:
https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/superhumanity/179224/on-automation-and-free-time/

>>11029326
>stiegler

i read technics and time a few years ago - weirdly, before reading heidegger - and was basically floored by his conclusions. i might need a brief refresher on this distinction now, tho, it's been a while. but if you like stiegler, you should probably get to know yuk hui as well. he's following from stiegler and the largely unknown pic rel here and has interesting things to say about the need to get over the hump of subjectivity and into inter*objective* and technical relations. i've been quietly shilling for him for a while now. he's got a pretty dope essay here if you're interested.

http://www.e-flux.com/architecture/superhumanity/179224/on-automation-and-free-time/

he gets bonus points for having had lunch with land too and had a good conversation with him.

>If someone could just write one touchstone book that encapsulates the gestalt of machine-capitalism, one little fucking book that captures all the lightning in a bottle of techne-critique and gemeinschat-critique and etc etc etc, and makes it available to people who are out looking for it. That would do so much good.

agreed. until then, there's teleoplexy:

https://track5.mixtape.moe/zphjim.pdf

>the raising of machines to be like men, the lowering of men to be like machines.

peter galison has some good stuff to say on norbert wiener's discovery of cybernetics as black-box psychology as well. basically, the day that the human brain was discovered to be a necessary servomotor component in a machine that tracks and kills other human-piloted machines was a red-letter day for...well, Not The Past. but postmodernism is kidding itself if it thinks the way out of this is Moar Subjectivity.

>Above all, the fact that this process has gone beyond mere primitive capitalism, in that it has penetrated the individual's body and brain and no longer functions by interacting with "individuals" who make "choices" by "deceiving/manipulating them." It has penetrated the body, penetrated the psyche, it's now lashing the drives and impulses and urges of the human directly into machines than then form-fit back into the brain.

yup

>We are being programmed, controlled, directed at a pre-conscious, reflex, instinct level now, and all this is happening JUST as the obsession with "mind-machine interfaces" and AIs comes out, just as algorithms and evolutionary networks are increasingly misinterpreted as reproducing meaningful intentions or autonomously "understanding" meaning in the way a human does. None of this is coincidental.

nope

and this is what it means to be conscious. this is the deal. that, just as you have said it, it is the story. that's the real news. exactly as you have said it.

protesting starbucks is not the answer. nobody knows what the answer is. but this death carousel is unquestionably our death carousel. we are stuck inside it, where we are at once most a prisoner of it and simultaneously where it is also most intimate and most remote. mechanosphere, wat do?