/lit/ - Literature

i understand it as being the meaning of teleoplexy: that accelerationism is Spirit-as-capital, or capital-as-Spirit. land strikes me as being in his own way very hegelian without acknowledging it, or doing to marx what marx did to hegel: another headstand, back to a a kind of negative idealism.

the apotheosis is in a sense always-already achieved by way of the time spiral &c. even when we ride the rails we feed more intel into the machine to tell us how we like to ride it.

sometimes it really bothers me.

>>11547769
in a way I don't think we ever escaped dialectic, it just exploded into dimensions Hegel could have never anticipated. maybe right as we realize Spirit is just God playing hot potato with his self-consciousness through individual subjects, right as we're about to give it up, we'll reel back it back in and come to our senses.

Spirit-as-Capital or Capital-as-Spirit makes a disconcerting amount of sense.

>>11547794
>Spirit-as-Capital or Capital-as-Spirit makes a disconcerting amount of sense.
that's land in a nutshell. capitalism is a computer that processes desire. teleoplexy is this very coming-to-be-self-knowing of desire as such.

and maybe we never did escape the dialectic. it's possible. we are that talking beast. but if i was serious about hegel in the 21C i would definitely include a major section on land in there.

i mean shit he's actually making marxism great again in ways that neither marx nor hegel ever would have thought possible. but you can see all of the lines between marxism and neoliberalism get crossed and mixed together in postmodernity, which (imho) only heads towards automation in the long run.

t. a guy who spent way too much time thinking about land.

>>11548346
Fuck I love reading Land after the gym on a summer night. Feels like I'm blunt riding with the ape of Thoth. Good stuff

>>11548346
what kind of higher memetics is this shit?

>>11548521
critique of capitalism on ungodly amounts of speed, hp lovecraft, and deleuze

>>11548521
Nick Land you jabroni, catch up

>>11547720
It think Hegel's real accelerationist power came from his notion of Giest as being the true articulation of absolute reason. Hegel is, as Land notes, 'too humane', he does not seem able to comprehend (or admit) the uncomfortable fact that mankind may not be the ultimate vehicle for aufheben. I think this is why Land mentions him as a senile incarnation of Judgement, the transition from Kant's strictly limited phenomenal judgement to Hegel's imminent transcendence in the act of judgement itself. If transcendence is imminent, it is only imminent in the absolute. Land recognized that cyberpositive circuits were aiming to sidestep the whole human project (and it wont desublimate anything). Kant will not be surpassed because surpassing Kant means surpassing subjectivity, a goal which was never meant for us in the first place.

>>11547720
This is what Hegel did: for the first time in the history of philosophy thought gazed at its own gazing, Mind became the self-seeing eye. Hegel wanted to break out of the Kantian straitjacket of the subject: for Kant the apperceptive "I think" cannot exist independent of the object it cognizes. The "I" that all the thoughts you've ever had in your life have in common is nothing apart from this activity, there's no substantial cogito to excavate, no diamond ore Self, the pre-representational ground of representation is a hollow void, and the ring of subject-object codependency tightens. Kant didn't believe you could infer the existence of a self-subsistent self from the "I think" - strictly taken, the "I think" is simply the formal, abstract unity of experience, but what he couldn't understand was that its self-subsistence just is this formal guarantee: meditation is an abiding-in the constancy of self, in the simple fact one is (without giving into the urge to thematize that emptiness with thought). And so the "divine darkness" of the mystic is shut off forever. Kant says this "I" can never make itself its own object, an eye can't turn around to see itself seeing (what it finds are only blood and nerves and the Lacanian horror of the Real). A dilemma: the eye must either identify with what it sees or the fact that it sees. The former is the worldly consciousness, the latter the mystical. What you are is not your thoughts but the space they occur in, you are not content but the form, the autodifferentiation of content. This is what anatta is: mundane ego emptied of all contingent attachments, identification with the apperceptive frame (the sky) over content (the clouds). The certitude of flux over its moments. No two clouds have ever been alike but they have always have been clouds: the claustrophobia of the absolute. Nirvana is what extinguishes the pull objects have over you. Drugs. fucking. her. food. Kant locked the subject in the prison of his own finitude. The mass couldn't think the God of a transcendental = x so we kicked capitalism into high gear. Capitalism is a defense-reaction against the non-predicability of God, the void without stimulus. Capitalism is intelligence accelerating towards recursive explosion/singularity. That is to say, Kant/s subject accepts the opacity of the noumenal without provoking it, his world comes to him pre-digested by his unique representational schema, he only has to sit and listen to a symphony played with one instrument and learn to love it and accept it and think it a proper substitute for the Sea he'll never sail that haunts, capitalism is the rape of this planet born out of our incapacity to think of a better way to organize the minds and bodies of billions of humans that isn't just the assembly line production of technological novelty. Capitalism is entropy, a species on autopilot, letting its ontological gut hang. Kant was a warden with a halo. Hegel was jailbreak.

>>11548863
>Kant locked the subject in the prison of his own finitude. The mass couldn't think the God of a transcendental = x so we kicked capitalism into high gear. Capitalism is a defense-reaction against the non-predicability of God, the void without stimulus
Always disagreed with this part. Kant wasn't a warden, he didn't lock the subject anywhere. His critiques mark the reaction towards the prison itself (isn't the real villian Hume, the man who could wake even Kant from his dogmatic metaphysical slumber?), a prison in which our only constructive means would be the result of redrawing radically new ontological goalposts. Capitalism emerges earlier than Kant (the logistic curve was normed at 1500 (0)). Kant was simply a dutiful reactionary. To put it bluntly, capitalism hacked Kant's wetware -- Kantian metaphysics approaches from the future; we can all admire Capital as the fangs of the Noumena.

>>11548855
good post

>>11548863
this pasta is choice /lit/

>>11548909
i like this a lot also

three good posts in a row, damn
>and then one boring nondescript shitpost that contributes nothing

in lieu of having anything interesting to contribute to the discussion myself i'll leave some interesting links.

https://vastabrupt.com/2018/07/11/alien-capital/

https://vastabrupt.com/2018/07/05/the-revolving-door-and-the-straight-labyrinth-part-1/

>>11548855
> Hegel is, as Land notes, 'too humane', he does not seem able to comprehend (or admit) the uncomfortable fact that mankind may not be the ultimate vehicle for aufheben

ayy my nigger, you nailed it, what I was trying to get across earlier with the realization that God is just Spirit playing hot potato with itself: sooner or later we're gonna have to pass our share in the absolute on to god-knows-what. this is what I was trying to get at with this thread, that land actually develops hegel's project in a way hegel could never have anticipated. good stuff.

>>11548909
kant inadvertently contributed to the same tendencies he was reacting against, I would say, of course he wasn't consciously trying to lock anyone anywhere, but his limiting of reason to the bounds of experience is a very hard line he drew

>>11548972
vast abrupt is fantastic, that pepsi series was fuckin nuts

>what if Chaos created the Universe just so it can consume it an assert its eternal power over Order?

jesus christ

Bump

>>11547720
>How would you interpret Hegel in light of accelerationism?
II wouldn't.

I'll give it a bump

Bump

>>11548787
Yuck

murphy is an interesting guy too. in this paper he seems to be arriving at the same possibility sloterdijk came to some time ago: namely, a kind of civic patronage.

https://theotherlifenow.com/aristocracy-and-communism/

as for the art, it is known that BE sucked but i am forever mourning the absence of a decent sci-fi 4x that allows me to build a futurist civilization like this.

Bump

>>11547720
it ain't hard. you just gotta understand WWII, the Bomb, cybernetics, and whatever the fuck the 1960s were about as further manifestations of the spirit. The major psychological, social, cultural and economic developments of the postwar era are in fact inseparable from each other, from expressive individualism(via ESALEN institute) to psychedelic drugs, from systems theory to the personal computer, from the hudson institute's nuclear doomsday to neoliberal incentive based governance, from WWII research culture to the ''collaborative'' workstyle of the postfordian economy. Mad Black landianism can be read as the residue of exhausted 60s whole earth utopianism, long banalised into an ideological justification for sillicon valley and the davos set. ''the pattern which connects'' collapses into apocalyptic paranoia. Deleuze and Guattari owe way more to Wiener and Bateson, to the War Effort and the Macy Conferences, than it is commonly acknowledged. the pieces of the puzzle actually fit together all too well.

See also: Gotthard Günther, a german philosopher and contributor to Asimov's amazing stories who attempted a synthesis of Hegel and Heidegger with the cybernetics of his colleagues McCullough, Wiener, Von Forester and Maturana ie. actually operationalising the hegelian dialectic mathematically as many-valued formal logic.

http://www.vordenker.de/rk/rk_Cyberphilosophy_2003.pdf

>>11547720
>How would you interpret Hegel in light of accelerationism?
Drive faster, Weltgeist!

>>11548346

WTF does he mean by something being or not being directional here?

Could any Nick Land memers explain to me if Meltdown actually has any meaning in it or is it just an anphetemine psychosis.

>>11552219

Amphetamine psychosis can have meaning anon

>>11552209
Think about it like a map. Maps are not linear, you can start and end at any point, yet they are inherently directional. Judgement is linear as it always flows the same direction, and it is non-directional as it doesn't actually provide (or try to provide) praxis.

>>11552219
>Philosophy has an affinity with despotism, due to its predilection for Platonic-fascist top-down solutions that always screw up viciously. Schizoanalysis works differently. It avoids Ideas, and sticks to diagrams: networking software for accessing bodies without organs. BwOs, machinic singularities, or tractor fields emerge through the combination of parts with (rather than into) their whole; arranging composite individuations in a virtual/actual circuit. They are additive rather than substitutive, and immanent rather than transcendent: executed by functional complexes of currents, switches, and loops, caught in scaling reverberat ions, and fleeing through intercommunications, from the level of the integrated planetary system to that of atomic assemblages. Multiplicities captured by singularities interconnect as desiring-machines; dissipating entropy by dissociating flows, and recycling their machinism as self-assembling chronogenic circuitry.
>Converging upon terrestrial meltdown singularity, phase-out culture accelerates through its digitech-heated adaptive landscape, passing through compression thresholds normed to an intensive logistic curve: 1500, 1756, 1884,1948, 1980, 1996, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2011 ...
>Nothing human makes it out of the near-future

The World Spirit on a really fast horseback

>>11552263

>>11552271
faster

>>11552190
Landianism is appealing because it shows us a way out of Boolean jail. 21st century culture is characterised by temporal compression and the collapse of all temporality, not the future, but its denial, the endless postponement of the new. all historical and psychological states are accessible on demand via ghostly digital presencing. future you can replay the absolute catastrophe however many times you want, just like a porn tape, or harry potter, but can you tune in to the messiah frequency? you are struck by just how drab our utopian fantasies are, Musk's and Bezos' vague space colonisation scenarios are nothing but a transparent alibi for the horror of the real- impending ecological catastrophe. Little has changed since the 70s: Stewart Brand, too, turned to space LARP after the club of rome's report and the collapse of the counterculture.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7-30a0-9a0a-3ff76e8bfe58

>>11552606
popular children's media builds on the oedipus complex, see for example, go to millennial political referent: harry potter, which seems designed to extract you away from your real mom and dad, their provincial dursley-idiocy and your oedipal traumas while inserting you right into the matrix of managerial therapeutic capitalism(hogwarts), a world of orphans, a world in which everyone is special and everyone plays nice with each other while their every desire is narcissistically catered to by magical-technological means (funny how many of the magic-functions in the original films have already been rendered redundant by smartphones) . it's not even subtle: ie. the scene with the mirror of erised (desire backwards) in the first film in which the idealised parental imago is restored by the grace of hogwarts. anything to keep those millennials in an eternal prepubescent state, forever safe from outbreaks of fascist psychosis, religious fanaticism or disruptive soixante-huitard schizophrenia. Voldemort/Trump is the outer limit, exclusion, the excess of sovereignty, the scapegoat, a feature not a bug- Hogwarts needs Voldemort just like our ''woke'' managerial overlords need Trump. ''The wall' is a potlach, a ceremonial wastage of resources, the sign of an absence, a conservatism that has long lost anything worth conserving, all in all a boon for Amazon and Google and Disney. After the orgy of liberation, repression itself becomes the only authorised object of repression, that's why the narcissistic culture of transgression that defined the west post 1960s, is now the almost exclusive province of the Right. When you talk about ''punching nazis'' what you really want is to punch yourself.

>>11552666
How's that jaw, Spence?

>>11552666
oooofff based

>>11552666
>There is no doubt that at this point in history the neurotic, the pervert, and the psychotic cannot be adequately defined in terms of drives, for drives are simply the desiring-machines themselves. They must be defined in terms of modern territorialities. The neurotic is trapped within the residual or artificial territorialities of our society, and reduces all of them (les rabat toutes) to Oedipus as the ultimate territoriality—as reconstructed in the analyst's office and projected upon the full body of the psychoanalyst (yes, my boss is my father, and so is the Chief of State, and so are you, Doctor). The pervert is someone who takes the artifice seriously and plays the game to the hilt: if you want them, you can have them—territorialities infinitely more artificial than the ones that society offers us, totally artificial new families, secret lunar societies. As for the schizo, continually wandering about, migrating here, there, and everywhere as best he can, he plunges further and further into the realm of deterritorialization, reaching the furthest limits of the decomposition of the socius on the surface of his own body without organs. It may well be that these peregrinations are the schizo's own particular way of rediscovering the earth. The schizophrenic deliberately seeks out the very limit of capitalism: he is its inherent tendency brought to fulfillment, its surplus product, its proletariat, and its exterminating angel. He scrambles all the codes and is the transmitter of the decoded flows of desire. The real continues to flow. In the schizo, the two aspects of process are conjoined: the metaphysical process that puts us in contact with the "demoniacal" element in nature or within the heart of the earth, and the historical process of social production that restores the autonomy of desiring-machines in relation to the deterritorialized social machine.

Bump

long-ish interview with thiel here, may be relevant to your interests.

also i googled 'peter thiel wallpaper' for the first time ever and was sadly disappointed.

https://www.weltwoche.ch/ausgaben/2018-29/artikel/en-hypnotische-massenphanomene-die-weltwoche-ausgabe-29-2018.html

>>11552235
this. young nick was a hard-partying, squid-god loving wild man. but he wrote some amazing stuff too.

>>11547769
something has always baked my noodle is that if we accept the ideological determination of philosophical beliefs, arguments, Weltanschauungen, etc, by -class position-, and that Marxism is theoretical specification of the proletarian side of that determination—then doesn't Marxism itself fail to encompass the mode of production in which it inscribes itself? from the other side of things, what I agree with you in calling Land's "dark Hegelianism" or whatever, would simply be the nihilistic conclusion of a materialist bourgeois ideology, and it would have to have *some* minimal truth value for Marxism which Marxism itself, by its own admission, would fail to encompass, would fail to see in anything but the most immediate sense, would remain at a merely perceptive awareness of, and so on. so you would need some kind of dialectical leap outside of class contradiction. Marxism, at the same time that it theorizes itself into this contradiction, supposes itself as the theory of its resolution, insofar as resolving that contradiction is the real practice of revolution. Hence Marxism would have to be incomplete with Leninism/Maoism, but so what would the "theoretical" version of that look like insofar as things like culture critique are concerned?

>>11554185
Read Unger's Politics trilogy or more specifically False Necessity

>>11548223
>and maybe we never did escape the dialectic. it's possible. we are that talking beast. but if i was serious about hegel in the 21C i would definitely include a major section on land in there.
>i mean shit he's actually making marxism great again in ways that neither marx nor hegel ever would have thought possible. but you can see all of the lines between marxism and neoliberalism get crossed and mixed together in postmodernity, which (imho) only heads towards automation in the long run.
yes but the difference is Marxism remains fundamentally a modernism oriented toward human control over the forces of production—Land is postmodern just insofar as he demands capital, and not humanity, become substance-subject. Marxism retains a normative content that Land evacuates in what he offers, I think, as a positive phenomenological description of the global completion of reification.

>>11548863
>>11548909
>>11549018
at some point you're all going to have to sublate this "characteral" re-presentation of the history of philosophy and realize the consolidation of different worldviews around the figure of a personality is, too, part of the trick of capital, a fetter on the Notion, a ruse of Understanding, but a ruse born of the material you meant to understand in the first place. this great-men history of philosophy is really rehearsing liberalism at its most anarchic, with only a flim-flam of contradictory on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand to obscure what is really bellum omnia par omnes.

>>11554185
i would like to add that reading the ideology critiques out of the Comintern—Lenin especially in Materialism and Empiro-criticism, and Left-Wing Communism—one can sort of feel him missing something, as though the material is not fully penetrated, only viewed from an outside, which, to be sure, Lenin proudly and self-consciously occupies—it's not, let me correct myself, that he's "missing" the point, but rather practicing Marxism as theorization *from the proletarian standpoint*, in fully historical self-consciousness that *at present*, *with capitalism still on earth*, a proletarian theorist cannot penetrate the essence of bourgeois ideology even if he understands the mechanics of its production, the role it plays in the reproduction of capitalism, etc. This is probably why Latin American socialists, and the most hardcore anti-revisionists, still tend to find something of value in Althusser. raised a catholic theologian, and touched deeply by the madness of petit-bourgeois nihilism, he offers a view "from the inside." i still think a radical reassessment of Althusser specifically in his ongoing conversation with Lenin is necessary, he's mostly been co-opted by the most stupidly identitarian gender theory around, namely Judith Butler who recently signed a letter of support backing the Rojavan CIA contras in the Kurdish SDF, which shows you exactly how "materialist" her thinking is.

>>11554196
unfortunately though if Marxism is being misread as a determinism, a fatalism, or whatever -ism words like "necessity" and "laws of motion" are wrongly taken to imply, it has to first take this as a historical phenomenon specific to capitalism and the ideologues promoting it, and second as a possible critique of its scholarly and political methods.

>>11554295
Please elucidate a bit, how is Unger in False Necessity not dealing with Marxism et c in a Hegelian sense of historical dialectic?
Here, perhaps reconsider after viewing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYOOwNRFTcY

>>11547720
I would say they are both fake and gay

>>11552190
>>11552606
>>11552666
this is some wild and crazy stuff and i love it. the harry potter analysis is especially brilliant.

>After the orgy of liberation, repression itself becomes the only authorised object of repression, that's why the narcissistic culture of transgression that defined the west post 1960s, is now the almost exclusive province of the Right. When you talk about ''punching nazis'' what you really want is to punch yourself.

pretty sure few on /lit/ are into punching nazis but it's a point well made. this is really good stuff anon.

>>11554185
i sort of understand what you're saying. for me it's kind of like acceleration is the horror - the *real* horror - that is the price of postmodernity. one wing cozies up to capital and snuggles into bed with it, the other...is the weird reflection of itself it now sees in the mirror. in terms of Wat Do politically speaking, i find this passage also worth thinking about.

>If, as Roger Caillois claimed, “the profane is the world of ease and security,” then what counts most, perhaps, is leaving
that world behind, whether one's departure take a left- or a right-hand turn. Once the boundary has been crossed, Caillois cautions, there can be no turning back. “One must walk without ceasing in the path of holiness or that of damnation, which abruptly join at unforeseen crossroads.” For the pact with the devil is in truth “no less a consecration than divine grace.”

it's from pic rel, if you're interested. but in terms of the leap out of class contradiction, this. and in terms of deleuze, once you join up with the dark BwO conventional political distinctions should sort of go out the window anyways.

>>11554205
>land is postmodern
land is not postmodern by any stretch. and i don't think he's 'demanding' capital become anything, unless i'm misunderstanding you. capital is gonna do what it does. for land, capital knows you better than you know yourself. that's the difference. it's lacan by way of cthulhu like that, via corporate R&D.

>>11554564
well, obviously. being fake and gay is the prerequisite to continental theory.

accelerationism is the death of dialectics, the birth of schizoanalysis

Hey does anyone have that chart about Hegel's philosophy of history that had the pretty colours and "NEGYPT" ?? thought this would be the best place to ask

\ /
\ /
\ /
\ /
v
the one that went like that

Bump

Eugenic Accelerationism will happen before Technological Post-Human Accelerationism.

Technological Accelerationsim will not exempt biology.

This kind of syncretism is the death of real thought. The active end is the theorist saying "look at me, I understand Hegel so well that I can assimilate him and spit him back out as a subordinate reference." The passive end is the online faggot wannabe saying "I'm so smart I get this whole edifice with all its references," or at least "I may not get all of this but I get the gist and I understand that this edifice is the keystone to the truth."

There's no concern for the real historical Hegel, for close study of real texts, for actual understanding, for dialogue with other people who have done the hard work as well. All that matters is whether you can get the Hegel Merit Badge by never having read him.

Land is part of that same '90s milieu critiqued by DFW in E Unibus Pluram. The fanboy pastiche fanfiction shit in this thread is fucking embarrassing.

>>11556667
Two faces of the same process if you ask me. Will we step on the brake once we hit our eugenic aryanid utopia or will we go for broke?

>>11556684
Then show us how it's done

>>11556684
You're a stupid cunt that doesn't get it at all.

>>11556684
keep going

Bump

>>11554776
>capital is gonna do what it does
this is precisely the postmodernity of Land. modernity implies an overriding faith in the possibility of correct human praxis, of overcoming what Marx saw as the problem that we make our history but not as we please. in postmodernity we take this as a positive axiom, rather than a challenge to collectively overcome

>>11556684
i don't know if you've noticed but this is an image board not Journal of Philosophy. different generic conventions predominate here.

>>11557860
land is not postmodern by any stretch of the imagination anon. and i don't understand what the positive axiom you're referring to is or how you understand it. i'm sure we can eventually find some common ground but atm i'm just very confused by how you can say acceleration is somehow a postmodern phenomena.

if you said post-postmodern, i might agree with you. it is that. if you include the history of modernity within postmodernity, and then acceleration as a radical critique of that - given that, for land, capitalism itself *is* the critique - then fine. but there's very little of the collective overcoming of anything in his thought as it is generally understood to mean in the classical marxist sense.

there *is* a tremendous, cthonic faith in the possibilty of capital/teleoplexy to 'overcome' in its own way, but that is a very different thing. but in no way, shape or form can land be called a postmodernist in a sense that would do justice either to him or to the that movement. even some thing we make up - hypermodern, whatever - would make more sense. but it's not really necessary.

the critical distinction that land makes is the inhuman one. true, themes of posthumanism and transhumanism and so on can also be grouped in, i suppose, under the label of postmodernity. but only because basically *everything* can be grouped under the label of postmodernity...and thus depriving it of any actual critical usefulness. and that is i guess in a sense why i am hesitant to have the dreaded pomo label put on.

but we can continue to talk this out, if you like. certainly i'm no expert and i'm not preaching any evangel.

bumping with art b/c why not.

>>11557870
bro whta if capital is like spirit on steroids.... what if spirit is like a machine !

>>11552666
actually good post

>>11547720
>consummation of Spirit
explain what this means first

>>11552238

Well fuck that actually made sense. wtf I'm a borg now

>>11557860
>>11557939

let me put it another way. take a reasonable and charitable definition of postmodernity: that for any given text there are an an infinite or near-infinite number of possible interpretations, into which all the various facets of the subject have to be taken into account, and the text, and the relations therein. lyotard's skepticism about metanarrative.

here's land: that's all nice, but there in fact only one historical metanarrative, which is called capitalism, and to which anything other than absolute fealty is complete narcissism. period.

see what i'm getting at? even the most charitable postmodernist in the world would have a hard time reconciling these claims. again, if you want to say, 'okay, but foucault makes the same claims about power, and he's a postmodernist' - yes, that would be true. to which land's response might very well be, 'and so what does that tell you about postmodernity in the first place? that it wasn't actually as postmodern as it thought it was.' and so on. and he would say, power is an aspect of capital.

the point is that land's thought poses grave difficulties for postmodernism in general. but they aren't *his* problems. so if we want to say, he's the Ultimate Postmodernist...well, i guess. but what would be the point? to rescue or try to valorize a term which is completely necrotic at this point, and was radically compromised to begin with? it doesn't tell you anything about his thought, and keeps some weird candle burning for a thing entirely dead in his mind.

Bump

>>11548346
Some spinozist anon please explain to me how do the immanent types discard transcendency, it seems you cannot completely deny metaphisics.

>>11559228
Spinozas god is imminent because it only exist in the here and now. attributes like extension and thought are not a creation of god, seperate from him, existing outside space and time (ie trancended); they exist as his very substance. read his letter on the worm in the blood

>>11559228
God is infinitely modified Substance. Nature is an internal production of the One because substances that aren't God have their principle outside of themselves, so they are committed to relationality/determination. Nature is the flat arena of forces, conatii, a system's self-propulsive affirmation.

>>11559279
>>11559369
Thanks lads, this is some truly abysmal thought

>>11559369
why is god transcendent?

>>11559466
he isn't for spinoza

>>11557939
>the critical distinction that land makes is the inhuman one. true, themes of posthumanism and transhumanism and so on can also be grouped in, i suppose, under the label of postmodernity. but only because basically *everything* can be grouped under the label of postmodernity...and thus depriving it of any actual critical usefulness. and that is i guess in a sense why i am hesitant to have the dreaded pomo label put on.

i think we have very different concepts of postmodernity, and i think you may be thinking of it too much in terms of a chosen aesthetic on the part of theorists or artists. i rather take it as a *period* in the culture peculiar to capitalism. to put it another way, i don't oppose "postmodernism" to the *modernism* of, say, James Joyce or Le Corbusier, but rather to the *modernity* of early industrial capitalists, Cartesianism, as well as those artists. the culture in which they participated saw a massive and unprecedented expansion in the possibilities for human practice to rationalize the world it inherited from its historical forebears—capital, in its early stages, enabled European men to re-sculpt the world through colonialism, and this is reflected in a modern culture that proselytizes faith in human reason as a force that can self-consciously change the world for its own betterment.

reification accelerates, however, and as Land I think agrees with Marx, tends to result in capital "taking on a life of its own." rationalization becomes an end in itself, as a sub-phenomenon of commodification of everyday life: reduction of the quotidian to the variable, numerical expression of human worth, subordination of human action, potential, etc. to abstract quantitative goals distributed anonymously, at the ideal point, by cybernetic machines governing behavior algorithmically. in such a situation, it (ideologically, at least) becomes impossible to speak of anything like agency, and Marx's maxim, "men make their history, but not as they chose," comes back with a vengeance. this is what I call "postmodernity," the dissolution of faith in humanity's capacity to rationalize and control reality for its own ends, and self-consciousness about our submission to the processes of rationalization that we ourselves set into motion.

in that context Land is something like the arch-ideologist of postmodern capitalism: he gives the clearest expression to the notion that capital has come to life and is now pulling the strings. and although i'm a Marxist, historical materialism requires me to discard nostalgia and admit that since the defeat of the Gang of Four and the Cultural Revolution in China, and the rise of Deng's capitalist roaders there, Land is probably right.

>>11557939
>>11559838
to contrast with Land, i take Foucault as something like the naive ideologue of this epoch: for Foucault this non-human control of human activity has always been a historical norm: he sees the past entirely through the lens of what is, at its core, a correct evaluation of the present.

>>11559838
>>11559851
this is Fred Jameson's take by the way, which i find analytically useful for restoring a sense of temporal difference in a period characterized by the total spatialization of consciousness

>>11559838
>Gang of Four and the Cultural Revolution in China, and the rise of Deng's capitalist roaders there, Land is probably right.


?

>>11559870
last hope for global Communism defeated. today we cannot any longer imagine a nation by and for the the poor, a people devoted to their leader, and a leader devoted to them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_Ud5mmjnNM&frags=pl%2Cwn

>>11559893
anons should really read William Hinton and Mobo Gao on the Cultural Revolution to get a better sense of how much it accomplished, and how much the working people of the world lost to privatization in the 1980s. it was very literally a different world before Reagan-Thatcher, to an extent that even people who lived through it can no longer quite remember.

>>11547720
Every writer writes within his time.

Hegel is no exception and his ideas should be no longer regarded past his death.

Philosophy is the ideology of verbosity and overthinking, reserved for those who rise above the mundane masses yet still unable to join the ranks of the true minds of the ages.

>>11561160
gee thanks for your completely relativistic non-opinion then

>>11559838
ok, thanks for the more nuanced posting. i have a better idea of what you mean now.

something like this comes to mind: perhaps we could say that that, for land, 'modernity' actually means 'postmodernity,' in a kind of heideggerian sense: a sort of spenglerian winter phase, the end of metaphysics being a lot longer than the period of the founding. as a postmodern *marxist* - slightly different, and a guy who is taking in a critical sense the interpretation of culture from the view of capitalism, the an-anthropic view...

i guess it's the concept of the inhuman that for me represents the break between postmodernism and whatever it is that we want to say comes after it. true, all of it belongs to the history of the decentered subject: but with land the decentered subject takes a nose-dive into the void and becomes re-centered again later on. there's gothic land and then there's NRx land, and it's all on a continuum. and i mean, you can even say that after going through the looking glass, in a sense the late land emerges as being...just a really orthodox classical marxist all over again, except with the caveat that of course capital itself is the revolution and so on. acceleration does belong to the history of marxism in this sense, it's just that the role of the human is stripped away to its bare minimum to make way for economic process...in a way that perhaps would not have surprised marx all that much.

china is indeed this whole other thing. i'm less knowledgeable about the history of china, but even there you can see the interesting enantiodromia of confucian influence being reduced under mao during the early years, and now returning again under xi, who wants to consolidate his power once again. which all makes sense, of course: confucius and marx make a powerful combination for an *achieved* communist state. of course, the question of whether or not it is really still socialist in that sense is anybody's guess today. is it socialism? or is it social imperialism? things like this.

pic rel if only because these things are obviously complex and perhaps have historical analogues. and i like heidegger a great deal.

>>11559851
that's a good analysis. there's certainly a parallel there. in 'transcendental miserabilism' you can see that land is just exhausted with postmodern critical studies. he's there recognizing that critical literature is itself the symptom of a deeper problem within the humanities itself, within globalization perhaps, as the academy drifted towards fusion with the interests of worldly capital. again, in a very strange way, he can be read as a weirdly orthodox marxist in that sense, but with the caveat that things are well and truly in the saddle and riding mankind.

>>11561622
the real confusion for me just stems from this concept of the term 'postmodern' which is the elephant in the room. postmodernity itself is this concept of a universal criticism which on the surface appears to be irrefutable. i remember having these arguments with derrida and butler people and feeling like i was always coming away losing. how can i deny that everything is interpretation?

with land, an internal critique of postmodernity really begins in earnest (there are other ways also: peterson is one, as is girard). postmodernity is a curious period, the era of putting everything in quotation marks, the school of suspicion as mass-evangelical. but we argue in the master's language, and derrida and foucault were masters. you can see why land would have found so much in common with moldbug here: that postmodernity in its various guises was always the cultural vanguard of the cathedral apparatus. very hard to recognize from within, and in the 90s and 2000s still reigned supreme everywhere.

it was only later, although i'm still not sure exactly when, that the wind began to shift. certainly it has something to do with the left's inability to deal with islam and the sophie's choice tragedy there: feminism, or multiculturalism? (the answer: neither, the Patriarchy is the problem, let's double down on that!). and now in the era of trump it is only all-too-clear what postmodernism signified: not a 'skepticism about metanarrative' at all, but a demand for absolute fealty to the two strongest narratives within that movement: race and gender, which today become intersectional feminism. and which fail to impress land, who sees a kind of hobbesian battle for power in academic circles. he thinks this goes back to protestantism, and he might be right.

so he's one opponent of postmodernism in that sense (and maybe now it is more clear why i was resisting the use of that label earlier...from a historical perspective, it just doesn't make sense). peterson is another germane figure in this regard, given that his whole intellectual influence - namely, starting from jung rather than freud, and solzhenitsyn rather than marx - paints a different picture of the 20C (it would be good, as always, if he would read a little of derrida, lacan or foucault, if only to show that he could reach across the divide a little bit, but that's just my own wish, and i understand why he doesn't). and ofc there is the perennially underrated rene girard, who is my boy, and who also represents an alternative to postmodern craziness.

but this is a hegel and land thread, so i won't take it too far off topic. i've actually been annotating my copy of the PoS quite heavily this summer and really enjoying it. hegel is pretty dope and i've been talking everyone's ear off about him IRL for the past couple of months when i felt like i really understood what the phenomenology was all about. the hegel-lacan bromance is well known, but the hegel-land romance has some legs too.

>>11561711
the problem is that postmodern textualism is itself a capitalist ideology. you should really read some vintage Jameson. "The Ideologies of the Text" is a landmark. there he pivots away from this kind of banal pseudo-historicism (practiced by the "Derrida and Butler people" you mention) for which the destabilization of meaning-like phenomena, their dissolution into abstract (post-)structuralist power functions, is less an observation of the nature of all texts than a symptom reflecting the approaching realization of capital's ideal of "globality" (a word i use here to refer to the achievement of a process of globalization). where someone like Derrida (and behind him Heidegger) poses as unveiling a long-obscured mystery at the heart of some grand archive called "metaphysics," the truth is that exceptionally receptive people like Derrida can register shifts in global organization "at a distance," as it were, but can only find the language to express these as-yet unconceptualized shifts in their chosen discipline, ie philosophy. if you read, for instance, the Grammatology less as a symptomatic reading of a massive archive of texts weaved together under the heading "metaphysics," and instead as a commentary on the practice of a discipline of philosophy in France on the eve of neoliberal privatization, you come away with a more useful text that can historically document a period, rather than autistic meandering through his and Rousseau's shared anxieties. Derrida himself will say somewhere deconstruction is not the psychoanalysis of philosophy, which I agree with only to the extent that it is rather the fever-dream, itself in need of psychoanalysis. multiculturalism, "the collapse of metanarratives," and of course Peterson's idiotic transcription of these—all these well-worn themes have to be treated with the same irony, historicized with the same disinterested penetration.

>>11561780
"ideology" thus functions in a very different way, analytically speaking, than it has been asked to by the talking heads on CNN. there "ideology" usually refers either to a set of beliefs chosen along party lines, or a distorting lens that obscures factual information, approaching something like the classical Marxist concept. but that concept is too lacking, if you read The German Ideology—because what makes ideology so sinister, which it was Althusser's achievement to show us, is that it doesn't only distort the facts—but in a well-nigh Kantian sense organizes, produces, and makes phenomena like "facts" possible in the first place (and this should work as a philosophical argument given Althusser's anti-Hegelianism, and that, within continental theory, once you reject dialectics, transcendentality is all you have left). that is to say that ideology here isn't a distortion, but the very production process of ideas and interpretations themselves, in a positive, conditioning sense, rather than a negative, obfuscating sense.

>>11561794
So what makes you sure you have the least incorrect interpretation or even a non-interpretation?

>>11561804
nothing really, but a commitment to approximating something like the proletarian standpoint. there's no "outside" to ideology, but there are different ideologies that can lead to different modes of organization, practice, human achievement, and so forth. of course given the poverty of the labor movement in the developed West there is something utterly solipsistic about adopting that standpoint in the realm of culture critique, but i suppose that my abilities in this sphere have their symptomatic resonance as well.

>>11561804
>>11561814
on the other hand there is the argument, again put forward by Jameson in The Political Unconscious, that deconstructive, "meaning exploding" postmodern readings and interpretations are only "half the work," so to speak. once you've disclosed the blueprint of the text as an interlocking machine of desire (schizoanalysis), a seismic register for abstract power relations (Foucauldian archaeology), or sheer writing and ecriture (deconstruction), you're left with a puddle of fragments that really won't impress anyone but those already convinced of your particular way of reading things—such demonstrations, even where they pretend to disavow meaning, nonetheless secrete a shibbolethic signal to other practitioners and fellow travelers of your chosen postmodern theory, and find their "meaning" in the consolidation of a community around a particular hermeneutic practice. Marxism can claim to be "more correct" than any of these because it is the theory of their organization in a material structure called the university, a site where capitalism is legitimated and theorized for the next round of white-collar manageriat.

>>11561780
>>11561794
>>11561814
>>11561828
try to stop looking at all of these ideologies as different, competing models of truth or whatever, one of whom must win in the battle royale of disciplinary marketing. that's only a reflection of their internal need to drive book sales. detach yourself from all of their local claims and theorize the struggle between them as a distant reflection of the anarchic organization of the market, and the job market on which we all have to struggle to keep ourselves above the watermark of underemployment. then each of their truth-claims makes sense as a fight against the others... and so on and so forth.

>>11561780
>the problem is that postmodern textualism is itself a capitalist ideology.

this, to the 1000th degree. combine this with baudrillard and you get the whole enchilada. reduce everything to textuality and you get a severe reality deficiency that only shows its teeth (fangs?) later on, either when the money starts to run out or we go looking for a reality principle (in private desperation, or in political nostalgia, and perhaps both: MAGA). but this is where we wound up. and it is exactly this kind of thing that i was dimly aware of then but really couldn't articulate or grasp. textualism *is* capitalist ideology. and i think this explains a lot of landian stuff as well. if capitalism is all there is, then...well, you can reject this - in the name of nothing, or in the name of a kind of professional deconstructive ironism (which i abhor), or you can take the accelerationist nightmare plunge accordingly....or...

anyways. you nailed it. a lot of things we are talking about, for me, come back to this sentiment. it is a symptom that is going to be with us for a while, the plasticization of all culture. partly this is a good thing, maybe part of our own technological development as a species, but culturally...it leads to pyrotechnics. land was one of the figures who, for me, correctly grasped the implications of infinite textualism. and they certainly weren't 'playful irony.'

>jameson
yeah, i like him. i'll take a look at that essay you suggested. here's one passage i especially liked:

>Modernist abstraction, I believe, is less a function of capital accumulation as such than of money itself in a situation of capital accumulation. Money is here both abstract (making everything equivalent) and empty and uninteresting, since its interest lies outside itself. It is thus incomplete like the modernist images I have been evoking; it directs attention elsewhere, beyond itself, towards what is supposed to complete (and also abolish) it. It knows a semiautonomy, certainly, but not a full autonomy in which it would constitute a language or a dimension in its own right. But that is precisely what finance capital brings into being: a play of monetary entities that need neither production (as capital does) nor consumption (as money does), which supremely, like cyberspace, can live on their own internal metabolisms and circulate without any reference to an older type of content. But so do the narrativized image fragments of a stereotypical postmodern language; they suggest a new cultural realm or dimension that is independent of the former real world, not because as in the modern (or even the romantic) period culture withdrew from that real world into an autonomous space of art, but rather because the real world has already been suffused with culture and colonized by it, so that it has no outside in terms of which it could be found lacking.

i think this is from his essay on dual power, i can't remember atm.

>>11561828
>Marxism can claim to be "more correct" than any of these because it is the theory of their organization in a material structure called the university, a site where capitalism is legitimated and theorized for the next round of white-collar manageriat.

this is also a very good line.

>>11561879
>i think this is from his essay on dual power, i can't remember atm.
hmm. later jameson (i think you mean An American Utopia) doubles down on the Trotskyism that was only tacit in the 90s when he was citing Ernest Mandel. i prefer the older stuff—he is hardly even a Marxist anymore, just a "dialectician" by his own account, which is really too bad. The Political Unconscious is a really stirring text, especially if you're sick of that "professional deconstructive ironism"

>>11561879
sorry, i made a mistake there. the name of that essay is 'culture and finance capital.' here's the link, for any anons interested. it's a good one.

http://sydney.edu.au/arts/slam/downloads/documents/novel_studies/sem1_2017/2_May_Reading1.pdf

>>11561780
>if you read, for instance, the Grammatology less as a symptomatic reading of a massive archive of texts weaved together under the heading "metaphysics," and instead as a commentary on the practice of a discipline of philosophy in France on the eve of neoliberal privatization, you come away with a more useful text that can historically document a period, rather than autistic meandering through his and Rousseau's shared anxieties. Derrida himself will say somewhere deconstruction is not the psychoanalysis of philosophy, which I agree with only to the extent that it is rather the fever-dream, itself in need of psychoanalysis. multiculturalism, "the collapse of metanarratives," and of course Peterson's idiotic transcription of these—all these well-worn themes have to be treated with the same irony, historicized with the same disinterested penetration.

this is one of the more flattering interpretations of derrida i have read, although it still doesn't make me any more inclined to read him. the 'same irony, historicized with the same disinterested penetration...' i understand this, and yet isn't this precisely why derrida was himself the pharmakon of globalization? *economics was never a matter of disinterest.* there were things that *couldn't* be historicized with disinterested penetration: today, these are race and gender. where would derrida be today on this?

i'm not blaming derrida for would-be disciples who take him too literally (or for those who want to deliberately take him out of context and misread him...or for my own unique spin: doing of *both* of these, at the same time, which is kind of amazing, when i think about it...). certainly i am saying more about myself than i am about him: maybe a fetishistic obsession with capitalism suggests the very need for deconstructive analysis of that subject, rather than a violent rejection of deconstruction. this is entirely possible (and probably true!). but this is my bone to pick with derridean stuff. deconstruction, irony and historical disinterest, imho, cut the rug out from everything that historically stood as a brake on capitalist development and growth. the 1990s and 2000s were a booming period like no other for capital, and it's a field day for deconstruction. it's not derrida's *fault*...but...you see what i'm getting at.

you are right, though. we do have to look at these things in a kind of disinterested way. capital (and culture?) both *is* and *is not* what people want - that's ideology and desire for you. it's wrong to blame the critics or shoot the messengers. but i think land's view, for all of its terrible darkness, is the one that *actually* gets one thinking about the nature of history, capital and so on. so you can and should read this post as equal parts frustrated shitposting and confession more than detached analysis, obviously. derrida triggers me (and what the fuck, if there is *anything* i should have learned from /lit/ by now, it's Don't Get Trigged!).

>>11561912
ooo yes, this is a classic.

>>11562045
if you like French literature, the chapters on Rousseau do have real value as a literary close reading.

and my only objection would be that the rug had to be cut first by Reagan-Thatcher-Deng reforms, and the collapse of international Communism, BEFORE people like Derrida could theorize all the possibilities open for capitalist ideology now that its main antagonist had disappeared. maybe this explains the obsession with absence, or what Hegel would call abstract negativity—indeed i think most of postmodernism theory can be understood (at least at the level of its content) as an obsession with the abstract, non-determinate negative opened up when the concrete negation of Communism vanished from the face of the earth. for Hegel, before the determinate moment of Contradiction, there's an abstract moment of Diversity, and deconstruction can, from this point of view, be seen as a sort of stunted philosophical growth that remains fascinated by the random play of Diverse textuality. structuralism expresses this with more rigor, post-structuralism and deconstruction with more energy (but see, again haha, Jameson on structuralism and dialectic in The Prison-House of Language). and its a very natural result when the Contradiction itself was forced into retreat.

>>11562098
>there's an abstract moment of Diversity, and deconstruction can, from this point of view, be seen as a sort of stunted philosophical growth that remains fascinated by the random play of Diverse textuality
and i mention "stunted growth" for good reason: one of Derrida's main criticisms of Hegel is that his sequence of stages enables a mode of criticism for which theories, thoughts, languages, cultures, and states that refuse (whtie European capitalist) Absolution remain "infantile." see the last, programmatic sections of "The Pit and the Pyramid," which is a prospectus for the Hegel column of Glas (an utterly unmanageable text for which, I think, "The Pit and the Pyramid" is a much more useful substitute, haha)

>>11562098
so first of all, thanks for the interesting conversation. even talking about derrida kind of feels like a spade being stuck in a part of my own psychic garden that unearths some weird and unsightly tubers growing there. sometimes that's a good thing, sometimes not. i like to feel like i have my metaphysical ducks in a row w/r/t a lot of continental stuff but, aaaagh, derrida just irks the shit out of me. i really don't know why, but i'm sure it has to do with my own wonky and strange adventure through a lot of these texts. i could sense *then,* when i was having these conversations, and before i had done much of the reading myself, that something was deeply and profoundly rotten in the state of denmark with deconstruction. now it's 2018 and everything i suspected would be the case has happened. i don't mean to give the impression of having some prophetic gift or anything, just that everything that deconstruction seemed to want to 'paper over' now to my mind seems to be unfolding itself well and truly into the world - as landian horror, as Trump, as NeverTrump, as all of the rest of it. and i'm *still* at a fucking loss as to know what to do or think about it except stare in fascinated horror and lament and name-drop french and german guys nobody cares about.

i also have to say, i'm finding i like jbp a lot more too these days. christianity was one thing i never thought i would take an interest in but here we are. i feel like a lot of things i was looking for in continental philosophy i'm finding turned out actually were in the domain of theology. still not sure where i stand on jung, but who knows. for helping you figure out what's wrong wiht the matrix (or that there is one), continental theory can't be beat. but for living in it as something other than a paranoid basket case? maybe a different track is required.

i really like your analysis, by the way, of the meaning of the disappearance of communism from the historical landscape. you're right that that really represents a landmark moment in the story of these ideas we are talking about. it's possible that deconstruction - again, if we look at it in its best sense, as the deactivation of that invisible core of ideology that galvanizes so much human evil and error - after that point had completed a large part of its historical mission. even ken wilber recognized the phenomenon of 'boomeritis.' learning to cope after the End of History without just plunging into full-blown capitalism is still i think the place we are now. it's fascinating stuff. and, mainly, i think we're doing it all fucking wrong. the paradigms have shifted in about six different ways since 1990 but we are still captured, i think, by a permanent case of boomer nostalgia (itself profoundly nostalgic) and that fantasy is just not sustainable politically, economically, culturally, environmentally, or in any other number of ways. but still we do it.