/lit/ - Literature

>mfw all these JBP-tier retards trying to redefine god for their own selfish purposes

>>11823861
>god is just certain properties of the universe
we must decouple "meaning" from archaic notions of "god" moving forward. religion is so outmoded and carries much unnecessary baggage

>>11823861
Process theology is basically if Wittgenstein went full Deleuze, it's crazy

>>11825064
i'm not a JBP-tard and this has nothing to do with him

>>11825108
>we must decouple "meaning" from archaic notions of "god" moving forward
true in some sense, and yet the g-word worked for whitehead and he was a lot more interesting than most. if he didn't see the need to get rid of it i don't know why we would

>religion is so outmoded and carries much unnecessary baggage
it also carries some necessary baggage tho

>>11825129
cannot find a flaw with alfred. deleuze loves him some spinoza and bergson also but whitehead is the greatest thing i have read this year

Glad to see you are back in here making threads again Girard. Sadly the /his/ bullshit didn't take off so you might want to try again on here with the Cosmotech stuff.

>>11825321
seven times down, eight times up, as the saying goes. i mean i can kind of understand why the mods might decide a thread had gone too far. it is my nature to wander in eight directions simultaneously and schizopost and this does indeed blur the lines. but i am not yet satisfied!

but aye, cosmotech is indeed the jam of jams. or we can call it speculative philosophy, either way. if you take land and girard and smash them together you get whitehead and process philosophy, which is based clean out of the game. and so long as i am bent sideways thinking about this stuff i'll be coming back to share my demented rambles with you guys. a blessing and a curse! and sometimes taking a pause that refreshes can be a necessary moment of zen also.

life after deleuze is just different than life before him. what i would really like to do is basically dream into existence a *positive* version of land - a sort of steven pinker version of him, if you will. capital is the precondition to everything we do today, but there's a need for a fundamental shift in perspective. for one thing, critique of ideology has to become a question about *virtue.* i would like to think that, in a sense, a good project for a therapeutic philosophy could very well be the transformation of tragic circuits of suffering into positive circuits of forgiveness and enlightenment. needless to say this is a project i am expecting to see completed anytime soon! but a man can dream.

anyways, i shall endeavour to keep my own ramblings as thematic as possible for best results.

>>11825370
well, maybe i should say, when i smash land and girard together i get whitehead. results may vary.

but basically the point of embiggening the man is to inquire about the possibilities for a kind of do-over in philosophy that can move past the Masters of Suspicion without ignoring any of them. land is out there today doing a permanent Munch-scream about the monsters that dwell upon the plane of immanence.

but there may be more in the future than this.

>>11825424
one question to ask is why the catholics, lapsed christians and other types always make for such interesting reading about the history and prospects for technology:

>whitehead
>chardin
>mcluhan
>girard
>ellul

realistically we should not expect political utopia. philosophically it seems that the pursuit of the high ground of negativity produces only the infinitely turning gears of a machine of ressentiment, to societies of control.

but how far do you push hyperstition and paranoia? nietzsche talks about what happens when you battle with monsters. there are things to think about in the world other than the worst. politics will save no one. to expect political or technological utopia in one's own lifetime is a recipe for disappointment. if utopia has ever existed, historically speaking, it's now. and for those surfing the waves well, there is a lot you can do with a billion dollars today.

most of us aren't that fortunate, but what really impoverishes is the absence of even a philosophical program to lighten your mood. at that point you're really fucked. but things are already so fucked. there are limits to how much of The Fuckening one can handle.

so whitehead is a good look, i think.

>The theory which I am urging admits a greater ultimate mystery and a deeper ignorance. The past and the future meet and mingle in the ill-defined present. The passage of nature which is only another name for the creative force of existence has no narrow ledge of definite instantaneous present within which to operate. Its operative presence which is now urging nature forward must be sought for throughout the whole, in the remotest past as well as in the narrowest breadth of any present duration. Perhaps also in the unrealised future. Perhaps also in the future which might be as well as the actual future which will be. It is impossible to meditate on time and the mystery of the creative passage of nature without an overwhelming emotion at the limitations of human intelligence.

so basically just this. we no longer know what we are Revolutionizing. such is life after marx. hyperspace is just a cooler place to be, and land doesn't have an exclusive purchase on it either. he knows the back alleys and where the monsters lurk but there is more going on than neo-china arriving from the future, turing cops, or break-outs of schizolupics from the bin.

bump

i'm hoping that some time soon we get something like difference and repetition that can talk about repetition and automation, this kind of thing. for cultural critique han is good, and i guess a lot of this has been done already in fanged noumena, so i can always go back and read that again.

maybe yuk hui will be able to get at it in his upcoming book, i don't know. but just the whole world becoming algorithmic, put on these routines. what it means to repeat and repeat in the software age. baudrillard knew what was up but again, being alive helps when one is writing philosophy.

that writer, whoever they are, in my country will be everything.

>>11826686
Im trying desu but i went too crazy attempting it and i get stuck on basic math even tho i can manage to follow a lot of the harder stuff i still have like 5 years of study before i'd accept my own shit as nonpseud which is the fault with all these pomo retards including Land and i doubt i'll be alive in 5 desu plus im becoming a burden, been attempting to shitpost my findings here in the hopes my work to date isn't lost...

>>11826701
well, the field is wide open. the computer science stuff, about which i have absolutely zero non-pseud opinions, is where it's at. it's why i'm looking forward to yuk hui's book on this. at least he's got the chops to talk about that stuff, he actually knows code or has at least a much better sense of it than most of the continental types.

and badiou loves math but the math loses me completely. it's just something that can talk about repetition and automation, this sense of what it means to initiate commands, program and be programmed, and the rest. the re-construction that follows the great age of de-construction won't be utopian, it will probably mean more and more time spent feeling as though we are being turned into programs beholden to massive planetary operations. but i don't always want to be looking at things like a marxist.

capital is the ground floor, there's no getting away from that. but that's not all there is to it, any more than the point of a spaceship is to consume fuel and keep the holodeck clean. that's what we're doing now, but it's the abuse of the progenitor craft.
>star control 2 did nothing wrong

land is an interesting guy but he's not the only guy. he's just a guy i think is keyed in to some of the themes of postmodern life after the linguistic turn.

also chinese social credit is giving me fucking nightmares but you knew that already.

anyways, talk more about your stuff anon, if you can or if you want to. lord knows i've put enough of my own half-baked ramblings on the board...

>>11826841
I just get the sinking feeling I'm fucked for poking the hornet's nest too much, even posting here """postironically""" makes me paranoid as hell it'll all be dredged up by the cybernetic inquisition.

I can't stand Badiou desu and marxists in general creep me the hell out even though I owe a lot to their thinking. I know a bit and have been studying hard, but looking at the tower of textbooks to get through to get anywhere close to graduate level in mathematical econ and physics etc is daunting AF and im not even high IQ enough to pull it off, I can't shake the awful reveries and unsee. Maybe the real redpill is just literal Seroquel.

>>11826841
where the factory links up with the computer, and the computer with the internet, and the internet with the great big megamind...

we're technical beings. stiegler says as much, that progress as a civilization means technical progress. we don't even have to get rid of the past or anything in this sense: it's simply not good to destroy other human minds, however.

but we're much more similar than different, or at least our metaphysical differences are being subsumed by technological processes that we all have access to, and that - at least inasmuch as we are consumers - pretty much can treat us all the same way. and maybe this is even what we want, sometimes.

in summa, metanoia > paranoia. that's where i want to go. i want my paranoia to be confirmed and procede thereby to level-2 in one sense or another.

>>11826894
>marxists in general creep me the hell out even though I owe a lot to their thinking
kek. me too.

>it'll all be dredged up by the cybernetic inquisition
who's the cybernetic inquisition?

as for postironic, i don't know. i don't think there's any need for a kind of a stance. hyperstition &c are fun but sanity is generally preferable. or again, metanoia > paranoia.

>I can't stand Badiou desu and marxists in general creep me the hell out even though I owe a lot to their thinking. I know a bit and have been studying hard, but looking at the tower of textbooks to get through to get anywhere close to graduate level in mathematical econ and physics etc is daunting AF and im not even high IQ enough to pull it off, I can't shake the awful reveries and unsee.

maybe you can be one of those enlightened outsiders. there are systematic uni philosophers and there are mavericks and outsiders. don't get me wrong, i'd love it if you conquered that stack of textbooks and wrote the future as an IQ 190+ overlord. but i guess i feel that i'd prefer that if you were looking into these themes you didn't feel discouraged by it all either. maybe that's just selfish of me, because if you were going to write something interesting, i want it!

>if it's math, you will not be able to understand it tho
>good point inner self

>Maybe the real redpill is just literal Seroquel.
maybe. philosophy is really the theory and practice of anarcho-masochism, in a way. there are fucking dark days. no question. but there are good ones too.

i hope you have a run of good ones anon.

>>11826894
this website is just satire though right haha

>>11826939
everything's satire, in a sense (except the Holy Qu'ran, and InfoWars, and the NFL).

>>11826931
Cybernetic inquisition as in the IC-tech complex's panopticon and Big Data driven predictive total police state. All I'm doing is dissent and satire but fuck knows what these people are thinking given how illiberal even the so called left, especially the tech types, are becoming.

>>11826969
Or more abstractly the emergent AI god who may or may not be literally satan

>>11826969
the rise of the illiberal left is indeed quite a phenomenon. some of it makes me wonder if the reason why the radical left struggled so much with islam was because there was a subterranean elective affinity there all along. it's not that we dislike the idea of sharia, it's that we'd prefer to have our own rules about it...

...and you see the same thing with social credit now in china. again, i think that system is going to work so long as the economic end of the bargain holds up and the state has the people's confidence. if not, it's not hard to imagine people burning their cards and saying they want closer relations with the West. but these are the times of trouble and the Trumpocene Era.

>the IC-tech complex's panopticon and Big Data driven predictive total police state.
i remember when i actually had to strain my brain to ask what deleuze meant by societies of control.

here's the link for any anons interested:

https://cidadeinseguranca.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/deleuze_control.pdf

the panopticon will be a thing. it's already here, it's a part of googlification and the rest. we will work out the kinks eventually. but BNW gonna BNW.

>>11826972
>Or more abstractly the emergent AI god who may or may not be literally satan.

possibly. but it's one of the reasons i like whitehead so much these days. no satan necessary for a cosmology that makes no major distinctions between theology, philosophy and science. Ask Interesting Questions seems to be his motto. alfred is the fucking bombshell. he's been a blast to read and definitely has been good for the ulcer i grew reading land.

I haven't even got where you are. I am almost done with Leibniz. My question is how relevant is that era to you all? you guys look like your trans humanists or something.

>>11826990
Thanks I'll check out Whitehead in depth at some point, I like him as he is a very clear thinker but his full system seemed brutally opaque and i got sick of learning these various maximally arcane systems that come across like red herrings ultimately, when one lesson from Marx is to analyze the situation from the premises already contained in it and no more. That's why Deleuze and co pisses me off, they kind of did that but in the most pretentious self aggrandizing way, all these pomo's do that with their toolkits of hot new Notions which function as their personal brand and under which you just get a million pages of scholastic word soup bullshit which ties everyone into knots for decades - possibly also the purpose of it if you want to get conspiratorial

>>11827016
I'm a more antitranshumanist and Leibniz is vital to understanding all this, perhaps even the big skeleton key

>>11826990
and there is a fucking humongous shift that happens with foucault and deleuze also, and it's related to land's stuff also: this shift from a kind of power outwardly shown to one internalized, sublimated, automated, and stretched out to infinity. it's why Big Brother as orwell would have conceived him is today completely antiquated. Big Brother isn't an angry guy with a moustache looking at you from the panopticon, it's fucking Alexa and Siri and Cortana becoming your indispensable guides to the world of devices you cannot live without. the psychopolitics of this are all in han (and baudrillard, who basically did the transmigration of souls to live on as a korean emigre in germany).

*power became automatic.* this is all you need to get from land. and again, if you read norbert wiener, or mcluhan, or any of those guys, and then the later generation of poststructuralists, you get where we are now, to stiegler's automatic planet and much more to come. you get to a point where it all sounds so ridiculous it basically has to be true. automation is the dream of capitalism, and liberalism spreads the gospel of consumption worldwide. today the chinese are on a different course than the west is, but the west is now divided into its red and blue wings, so who knows what's coming down the pipe. but whatever it is, it's going to be fast and want to go faster. this much we do know. and that's kind of the amazing irony of it, that even the money guys eventually just have to follow where the science is going...

in the long run, it's not like a return to science and the ascetic virtues will be a bad look for us (those who don't throw themselves off the rooftops thinking about it).

>>11827016
leibniz is cool. i really only have minimal reading with him apart from deleuze's book and a couple of half-hearted attempts at the monadology. but whitehead talks about him a lot too.

>My question is how relevant is that era to you all?
it's thinkers, not eras. read deleuze's book, the fold. he seemed to think the best way to characterize his time - which is quite close to ours - was baroque. it's not about dialling it back to the past politically, it's about borrowing the ideas of people from the past to get a better look at the present and make minimally fuckhead guesses about the future.

>you guys look like your trans humanists or something.
just skeptics about postmodernity, which everybody basically is these days. after 2016 it's a new world, at least in the west, and with xi in china similar stuff. whether it's trans/posthumanity or whatever. it's just skepticism about postmodernity, which was never as skeptical about metanarratives as it claimed to be, or at least showed some unfair preferential treatment that inclines people like me to look elsewhere. the money never changed, it only got faster.

>>11827064
yeah, i understand. the jargon is for me an acquired taste but you won't find any of that in whitehead. check out stengers' book.

>>11825464
>if utopia has ever existed, historically speaking, it's now. and for those surfing the waves well, there is a lot you can do with a billion dollars today.
Have you ever watched Eden of the East? The premise asks the question, if you were given a shitload of money, how would you save the world?

>>11827076
Bro you have to read up on your Leibniz. He's the evil genius pulling all the strings, the real original cybernetician, transcendental before Kant, fractalist before Mandelbrot, relational ontologist before Einstein, topologist before Poincare, computer scientist before Turing, etc. Most prescient thinker of all time.

>>11827076
one more thing. have a look at this passage. land isn't making any of this shit up. between the factory and the computer lies the *corporation,* which is a heightened form of computerized control-organization. land just concludes that the telos of libertarianism is ultimately technological, which is where things get crazy. and he is indeed a crazy guy, but he's only continuing a thought-experiment begun by hegel and now heading for parts unknown. this essay is crucial for understanding the link between deleuze and land, as much as teleoplexy is what Old Nick was aiming at way back when he was Young Nick. his right politics don't have to be absorbed fully, but the line of thinking really isn't so crazy for all that.

>>11827255
no, looks interesting tho. apart from re-watching mad men i watch very little TV or movies or much of anything these days, although i used to watch quite a lot. is it good?

b/c it is a good premise. just accumulating capital for itself its the default position, and it's how we are perhaps generating a Napoleon-AI to give us what we really want but are afraid to say. reflecting on what we might do with Fuck You money with the caveat that we can't keep it all for ourselves (that is to say, it's now no longer Fuck You money) but we could use it to stimulate growth in such a way that it would be beneficial to us later on. obvious nepotism and insider trading and things like this would be heavily marked in red pencil by the Committee For Knowing Things, &c.

>>11827297
that's a great endorsement! most prescient thinker of all time? i mean, i was over the moon with deleuze's book on him, but i understand that's a different thing. reading the guy himself is always better.

i've got about nine open tabs right now and they all say Whitehead in them, so my dance card for reading is sort of full at the moment, but whitehead connects directly to leibniz and mentions of leibniz are frequent, so i guess that's the direction to head in next. updated my journal. thanks anon! looking forward to it already.

cyber-baroque > cyberpunk anyways. i'm tired of being a nomad-punk anyways. leibniz really does sound like exactly the guy i'll want to read soon. can you recommend a good guide? what's your favorite text by him? again, i'm not a math guy so anything that is light on the formulas and stuff would be better.

>>11823861
Another attempt to degrade the idea of God to mere function of nature: a mere force like that of gravity or abstract mathematics

This is especially western mentality: this is what most neo-atheistic thinkers cannot understand: that God is both above and below, something which transcends but is also immanent, not only something abstract, but something personal at the same time.

>>11827341
Im reading the "Philosophical Essays" by Hackett, translated by Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber.
Its a compilation of his essays and letters and the monadology. It's a great place to get his key ideas and then you can move on from there if youre interested.

>>11827341
It's been a while but I will look up some good stuff but obviously theodicy and a scholarly edition of monadology. I suggest learning some important math to the best of your ability though, it really helps clarify all of this stuff, the popsci fable is allegorical and misleading and will lead you into aporias, the math is satisfyingly exact and logical and in general will help you shape and systematize your thoughts. You think you can't but if you can learn these systems you absolutely can, it just takes time and discipline.

>>11827486
Additionally this is why i dislike deleuze et al. They butcher it and prey on the humanitiesfag's allergy to the exact science. Don't let its clinical sterility and the autism surrounding it put you off, it's all mystical through and through.

>>11827341
>is it good?
It got its own anime series and two movies, if that's good for you.
>and it's how we are perhaps generating a Napoleon-AI to give us what we really want but are afraid to say. reflecting on what we might do with Fuck You money with the caveat that we can't keep it all for ourselves (that is to say, it's now no longer Fuck You money)
The protagonists and the other 11 participants can only spend the money through an AI concierge via cellphone for requests, any kind of request. Each one of them have there own way of saving their country, like killing criminals, healing the sick, destabilizing the country, or just using it for selfish ends (which will get you killed according the the rules of the game). Recognition software powered by social media and NEETs also play a role in saving Japan.

>>11827438
>This is especially western mentality: this is what most neo-atheistic thinkers cannot understand: that God is both above and below, something which transcends but is also immanent, not only something abstract, but something personal at the same time.

you're talking reckless anon. the guy you're talking about is basically the founder of process theology in the US at least. and there is enormous synergy between his thought and many other non-western traditions. pic rel is one of the books i'm working on now.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/whitehead/#Reli

i like the dialogue but i cannot into this characterization of whitehead. much too uncharitable.

>>11827452
sweet. sweet sweetness. will take a look.

>>11827486
>math
oh god
>learning new things and leaving my comfort zone
*sweats*
>discipline
*flees to the bathroom*
*the sound of intense projectile vomiting*

i-i'm back
don't go in there

i kid of course. you're right, i'm just notoriously lazy about that stuff. but ofc you're right. and i mean, it would be beautiful to see the world for once from logic-land. and ofc i really do think continental stuff has to take a deep breath and a couple of stiff drinks if necessary and make nice with science at this point. otherwise it's just all going to be insano-hysterical leftward drift and more deconstruction madness.

>>11827511
god i love that country so hard. ugh.
>Recognition software powered by social media and NEETs also play a role in saving Japan.
>and i think to myself...what a wonderful world...

getting late over here lads, going to have to turn in for the night. will check back tomorrow.

>>11827535
Like to his credit I think that's what Badiou was trying to do, shill pure math competency to prosefags, even if it was painfully suffused with his off brand French """maoism""". Even D*rrida wrote his thesis on Husserl's work on the origins of geometry, and Whitehead was clearly no slouch either. You can do it anon, I know you'll get there one day even if it seems insurmountable now.

>>11827535
Where do you get all of these book ideas Girard? I need to read what you're reading. You should just make an ongoing bibliography in addition to other resources at this point.

bump

>>11823861
>God is x
fucking dropped

You can't put God in a function, a concept, a schema, a category, neither can you find it in an intuition, a sensation or any other immediate means and you're missing the point for trying

>>11828182
>bibliography
i thought about something like this in the last thread. some anon had posted something about not enough books being referenced, and i thought, holy moses if i made a post that listed the books, articles and other links referenced just in the cosmotech thread alone it would be pretty substantial. i guess i could still do that. the recent thread had a bunch of good links for acceleration reading, and in the third post another kind anon had split it into yuk hui stuff and land stuff. in general r/theoryfiction has a lot of good resources on this, and you can comb the cosmotech thread for more.

my own ongoing bibliography would be kind of all over the place, but even then i think i probably reference a fairly small number of texts and authors that i think are useful for a lot of these discussions. this is an interesting idea tho. partly i'm still working out some of it, but it does come back to these things - surviving the age of deconstruction, maybe. i'm forever indebted to both land and girard on this, the black hat and the white hat, since one describes the economic process and another the cultural procress. b/c sometimes it seems as though what i like is less hegel, marx and freud to critique capital, and more deleuze, land, girard & company to critique the critique of capital as a process which has run amok equally so. and i'm feeling pretty great about whitehead also as a guy who is part of the equilibrial process. even if it's not a utopian one, just to get a kind of a sense of balance. and really a big part of it also would be understanding heidegger, who is insanely important in terms of any critique of technology, and yet perhaps we have to shift into the whitehead/deleuze camp and away from deconstruction. but only for some of it, not for all of it.

i could make a couple of posts tho on my own reading stuff. heidegger would be in there too and the zimmerman guide to him i am fond of. plus tarnas' book and jacques barzun's, amy ireland's guide to land, seminal stuff by baudrillard...it wouldn't be too hard. r

but as for where i get the book ideas, mainly it's the same thing: i discover a connection to a new writer i had previously not understood very well, and then basically just read everything i can get my hands on. everybody connects to everybody else, sometimes it's just about timing more than anything.

i'll be thinking about that list tho, even just as a way of organizing some of my own thoughts and why i think some books and texts are germane. could arrange it chronologically, i guess. hm.

>>11828866
true, things are not reducible to any one X. esp not in theology. but some writers do have insightful things to say. that excerpt is the conclusion of the work, ANW has a lot to say along the way. ofc nobody has the Final Answer, let alone the Final Answer about God.

let's try something different tho. and i'm not baiting you. which authors most inform your perspective?

>>11829045
some more random fuckface thoughts in the meantime.

about digitization, perhaps about how we transition from the Age of Unreason to the Age of Performance: you can already imagine the society of the future asking, on your CV, what are your routines and subroutines? how much software are you familiar with? how much upgrading do you need to do? how much downtime to you require? are you compatible with X? it's not hard to envision a world which is Optimizing and Upgrading in these sorts of ways. whatever you choose to do with your miraculous Capital is irrelevant: you can have it all, you can have everything. you're a citizen of cosmopolis, those are the perks. you can sexually identify as a cyber-unicorn, we don't care. but cosmopolis is powered by autotelic computer processes and will prefer, perhaps, a new kind of citizen who does not Interrupt The Flow.

it’s at once a highly individualistic world and yet a postindividualistic world. urban life as routines and subroutines, processes and subprocesses, repetition and automation, grind. even just a phenomenology of grind would be interesting. why do we enjoy grinding in vidya? it’s like work, the slow accumulation of numbers and perks, the repetition for the sake of repetition.

speaking of games, deleuze will identify molar and molecular processes, smooth and striated spaces, but what is it that we are doing in vidya? a game is something subtly different from a piece of cinema: a game is an editable cybernetic text with an auto process, a documentary that unfolds in front of us wherever we look. the whole process of the hollywood classical system was ultimately to take an enormous amount of technology and *make it all invisible,* so that you had this amazing sense of seeing what was there. and yet this is a sort of surgical incision into reality, all of these cameras and machines, cast and crew, to make a thing feel automatic and seamless. and so successful was this project that we now take our cues about how reality ought to be from its representation on film.

games borrow something from us, with a few twists: the player is now also the director and lead, and the computer handles the rest. the show begins as soon as we press start, and runs for as long as we would like it to run. this is a synthetic reality, but we don’t participate in games the same way we participate in cinema. but games also borrow from literature, not only for the themes, but because the original models for many of the games we play were initially run on engines powered by pencils, miniatures, and dice…

and it’s not theatre, either, because the stage is absent and the DM is not the director or the author. it’s all relatively procedural, although players prefer what they prefer and so on. and of course, character death is a possibility! and this too, today, can happen in WoW or in whatever other game...

the great age of simulation and performance, powered by Capital.

>>11827560
as much as i have bitched about pic rel, the idea that there is nothing outside the text does relate to what we're talking about, with a caveat. i'm more interested in a thought experiment that says, perhaps we have to take all of this text as a kind of code and inauguration into cyber-wonderland in this way. because perhaps that is a more interesting way of moving through or beyond deconstruction into whatever is next. i'm not into deconstructing the patriarchal canon, i'm looking for a way through to a different way of understanding. because maybe politically all we can do is keep the party going without going off towards the dystopian black holes/game over screens.

i started my own misadventure mainly by trying to escape from derrida's shadow, in a way, so it is a little weird to find myself back here and talking about him in a more conciliatory way. but i think there are connections between land and baudrillard everywhere: Capital is the big text, but there is no Outside of capital, because, as land says, Capital is the Outside itself. and so we find ourselves inside: as heidegger says, it's not about getting outside of the circle but coming into it in the right way.

>I think that's what Badiou was trying to do, shill pure math competency to prosefags, even if it was painfully suffused with his off brand French """maoism""".
yeah. badiou's maoism is seductive at times, but it feels like the appeal of amputation when what you need is a skilled doctor. badiou is one of the great maoists but even xi jinping is trying to put some distance between the CCP and mao, i think.
>and it's not like xi jinping is a saint either, fwiw

>Even D*rrida wrote his thesis on Husserl's work on the origins of geometry, and Whitehead was clearly no slouch either.
that's the thing. philosophers have to some connection with the sciences.

here's another dyad to explore: language and *code.* with lacan and the frankfurt school, zizek also, we get the infinite protocol of critique: everything can be critiqued, you can always find Oedipus if you are looking for him. it is the phallologos derrida talks about, but again, what i'm wondering is how much of a dead end this is. of course, to move beyond this is to board Nick Land's Wild Ride, which is no picnic either and arguably even worse. but to his credit, Uncle Nick at least *did* offer one possible way through the universe of deconstruction, which was more defensible while derrida was alive and has now morphed into full-on Woke Justice and the rest.

there has to be another way. so along with the rehabilitation of heidegger and the care and feeding of a few ghosts there i probably have to pay my respects for JD as well. this does not come naturally to me, but still. the question is about *text* and *code* - the same, but different. baudrillard also alluded to this mysterious code as well, esp in the consumer society, and bordieu also to some degree. some of those things are still mysterious.

>>11829314
>connections between land and baudrillard everywhere

pic rel: it's not me. should be land and derrida, and not 'everywhere.' like, maybe, somewhere. ugh. i'm taking a break, this kind of schizoposting clearly requires a stronger cup of coffee than i have had today. catch up with you guys later.

reload

>>11829737
unload

>>11829045
What could it mean to intuit God? What could it mean to understand God? What could it mean to know God? What could it mean to be God? To be? To be? Why should I want to know? It is certain that if I knew I should want nothing else, no? What would that be but the end of all things? All cares! All fades away and mingles into one uniform slime! All gone! Capital, friends, family, love, woman, eye, ear, mouth, speech, ambition, pain, pleasure... all gone! What should I seek but God? Once I begin to accelerate towards God what should move me or press me in any other direction? Should one thing move me, I should be like the compass that always points north no matter how much I might disturb it. For it has this ambition towards the pole as its whole being, and nothing more, and so should I be if I really sought God, for what would it mean, even only to seek? If I really was seeking for it, would I not have found it? God is nothing more than EXTINCTION. A last, final, interminable END. What sinks the mortal heart more than this? The very thing man postpones as long as he lives, seeking everything but the end. Once more! One last time, if only I might have this last time! It shall always be "one last time", eternally, this is life. One last time. Man wants to live only to see, to see what shall pass. Why? If only because he is utter lack and miserable privation. Let me see it! Let me hear it! Let me experience it, just this once!—what a whiner! What a sinner and transgressor! And suppose he got what he wanted: like an impetuous child he would ask for more time, and again, and again. It never ends, and he grows older and more bitter, until at last the miserable heart, refined and hardened by a lifetime of not enough, releases its ambitions, its demands. The heart breaks for the world, for the untamable, wicked world. That unforgiving seductress and sycophant. That relentless enemy of memory, for all man's efforts toward immortality she indiscriminately erodes and decays. Yea, his heart tears for this one that he loved, that he fawned after and pledged himself to. Hither, all singular ambition is shattered, and light shines through the fractures, and GOD is revealed!

>>11825370

Keep hanging around, friend. This place needs you

>>11827486
>>11827507

go on...

>>11830253
keep going, mi amigo. it can be a wasteland out there. and pic rel, perhaps.

thanks for sharing this. it's intense but it's not bullshit.

>>11830282
thanks kindly anon.

i never would have imagined i'd get so attached to a melanesian tap-dancing forum but here we are. where else? surely not reddit. their philosophy sub is aight but it's got nothing on the chans.

even when i quit i can't quit. vive l'hypersphère mimétique.

>>11830489
>out there
Precisely so! Out there, in the wasteland, that symbol of man's greatest transgression, for man loves to hate that which he loves most. He revels in his capacity to egregiously and wantonly blame, for he can blame his beloved more than any other for his woe, that she would not bend and twist to his will, which is his privation, his incapacity, yea, that she would not remain fixed like a stone cold statue, merely to be a sight for his eyes, to wonder at like a sphinx, to be driven mad, and finally to desperately claw at and foam over as its unfathomability drives him to paroxysmal outburst, the highest crime, the most despicable and hypocritical accusation. Yea, has not Girard spoken of this? I say, then, what is it to release the will, to cease to accuse the world and to call it a wasteland, what is this but to cease to seek anything from it? To place any conditions upon it? And thus, for one's will to will to die, to suffer at the hands of the many, to vanquish the inner vacuity which projects itself onto the world and so makes the world an object of love? If God is the promise of this transformation, then what is He but EXTINCTION?

>>11830606
exactly.

if i think about this too much i'll never post it, so i might as well just throw it out there and revise later.

as for the bibliography, there's just a sort of Hotel de L'existence in my head where people are coming and going and giving seminars, fighting with each other and so on. they're in a perpetual state of coming and going - it's sort of like a resort or retreat/BnB and in it i'm basically just the coffee guy, janitor and night steward.

but usually what happens is that they leave books behind, and so over time the resort has to keep expanding to make room for them, because they are prickly and like to have things their way. as such we have had to make room for some various suites for them, all kitted out with things they like, and we have added a garden, a pool, and some other things that make them happy, like an archery range. you get the idea.

anyways, the guys who reserve the most space can be sort of bracketed off into tiers. basically no matter where they are you can and should read everything these guys wrote.

[tier 1]
girard. he bought in early and he's a senior partner in the firm. the Bert Cooper of the place, if you will. the hotel was his idea and he got the money from thiel.

[tier 2]
nietzsche, heidegger and lacan. partners and required reading for most if not all discussions.

[tier 3]
hegel, land, deleuze, sloterdijk, han, and various others. junior partners who are keyed in to the issues of the day. whitehead is here at the moment. han isn't really in this tier but he's in demand atm for explaining why people are often coming and going from the hotel and why the bar always seems to be empty.

and there are a bunch of guys on a kind of permanent guest visa who come and go as they please.

>where's kant?
>or plato?
>or aristotle?
>or leibniz?
>or spinoza?
>or wittgenstein?
i told you, inner self, if i thought too much i'd never post this, so it's a rough draft.
>it's a shit draft
i know

[tier 4]
baudrillard, marx, derrida, foucault, barthes. also mcluhan, who is no doubt very displeased to be here with this bunch.

there's also a special wing for the eastern mystics and sages, as well as the stoics.

[tier 5]
confucius, laozi, the buddha, ken wilber, epictetus, marcus aurelius, heracitus, many others.

really it's not hierarchical, just sort of reflects the guys i take most of my cues from.

if you're new to the place, you can also get a copy of tarnas' passion of the western mind and barzun's from dawn to decadence, those are always there in the lobby, plus zimmerman's guide to heidegger.

of course, the whole place is under construction, and it has moved its location a couple of times. these guys are rarely all there at the same time, and usually one of them is pretty much writing the itinerary for the others when they are in residence.

it's like purgatory except, you know, more cozy.

>>11830606
Religion is the outflow of man's greatest transgression. The refuge of the Last Sinner. The final fortification against deliverance, against the END.The poison of his love enacts its highest transmutation, raising woman to the most abominable height, to the ideal of the Madonna, which is the most beautiful untruth man ever conceived. The eternal feminine that was the receptacle for the last dying breath of man's loftiest thought. What power did man conceive in this woman? In this figure? The Christ! The perfect child of the ideal woman, the Madonna, therefore what she took from man, what he gave to her, what he betrayed to her! Christ had to be born because man was imperfect, therefore his imperfection must play itself out in the world, he must see it outside himself, since he did not extinguish it in perfect resignation. The Christ, the man born from the most beautiful untruth, the immaculate lie, the perfect ruse! And centuries later he denies it! Man denies his own lie! That it is HIS lie, which therefore hides the greatest truth! Fool that he is, man forgot that the Christ was born because of his transgression, his love for the world. And therefore Christ taught him to hate the world! Yet this he still could not do, and so his sin continues, pouring forth the same evil eternally! It was man's love for the world that bore Christ, yet still man does not believe, that the Savior is calling for him, and none other, for he was born of the same man to whom Christ spoke, for all the generations of men are nothing but the same recurring man, who loves the world, who loves woman and flesh.

Bump

>>11830783
if you're writing these on the fly they're fantastic and on point. hell of a feat to make an archaic style like this work and not be cringy on the chans of all places. good stuff

>>11830489

Oh and please do work on a bibliography, I'd be super interested in having a reading list by you to discuss the things you are talking about in this thread.

>>11831754
all right. i could make a list of authors and books i've read that i think are pretty good. it would skew towards the acceleration guys, but i could include some notes about why they matter.

for me the story begins with nietzsche and heidegger. before i got into philosophy i read a lot of history, sort of all over the place, w/ev i was interested in. the first philosophers i read were the stoics, and i was cozy with those guys, esp after i read plato and i felt like my head had gained about eight pounds. that led into nietzsche, then baudrillard from him, and then heidegger, who truly gave me the phrase i was looking for: the metaphysics of production.

>cue the hallelujah chorus

there was a lacan/zizek/hegel moment, since lacan does a lot of things heidegger does but shifts the focus from truth as Being to truth as *meaning,* along with other things. but they both connect to nietzsche, who is the sorcerer supreme of all that follows from him, which is to say, damn near everything. but heidegger was a kind of event and i think he still is.

after him land, land, and more land. plus some land on the side, and an order of land to go. then everything that connects to acceleration, including another atomic bomb of continental philosophy, that being anti-oedipus. that one roflnuked my whole scene and landed me in china for a bit, and i kind of read my way back to the west on a long tour that went through india and southeast asia. and i was losing my shit completely over this until girard showed up and clarified a few things about this party that apparently never stops. i've been girardfag ever since and the rest of the story has pretty much played out on /lit/ in clouds of shitpost.

but maybe the contours of one or two interesting questions can perhaps be seen through the factory-produced Smog of Unknowing that i basically am. it's still the question concerning technology, but also the question concerning simulation, the question concerning memory, the question concerning [x].

with all that said, and as it has been remarked before (truthfully!): if you read your marx, hegel, nietzsche, heidegger, freud, et al none of what we talk about here is really that mysterious. we're just having conversations about ideas that still hold up after a century+ and we talk about them because a lot of these concepts are still useful today. there is, emphatically, no magic in it. you don't need ginormo-brain to have fun shitposting in a land thread, i'm proof positive of this. i've always been a mediocre student and a bear of pretty average brain. i have perhaps more of an obsession with this stuff than some, but really all i'm doing is sharing what vastly more interesting people than me have said about a couple of things.

once you know the Masters of Suspicion and a few of their disciples, the rest of this stuff pretty much writes itself, for better or for worse. but if you think a bibliography would be useful to you, i'll see what i can do.

>>11830701

Thank you for sharing this.
Where do you suggest I start with Girard?

>>11831902
somebody screencapped this post a while ago and it still holds up reasonably well. it's got stupid typos in it and other things, so try to ignore those.

>>11831865

Thank you (>>11831902 this is me again by the way, I just keep asking the same questions). I'm very interested because I have worked very intensely on the Greeks, especially Plato in the last years, and I have the feeling I have been getting out of a purely Platonic mindset in a last year and a half - mostly thanks to Neoplatonism - but I don't know toward what. I don't want to quit my ancient friends, but I feel like I need more insight into modern problems and I find many of the things you say about technology and capital extremely interesting, and I really want to learn more.

>He is not the world, but the valuation of the world. In abstraction from the course of events, this valuation is a necessary metaphysical function. Apart from it, there could be no definite determination of limitation required for attainment. But in the actual world, He confronts what is actual in it with what is possible for it. Thus He solves all indeterminations.

This in particular was a super interesting passage you posted. Lately I'm thinking a lot about mind as a compositional principle of the universe and the idea that the universe is indeed embedded with a metaphysical function of evaluation of itself - consciousness? - as a mean to create order sounds very close to some of the innovations I think I found in Plotinus.

I would like to know better how you think this connects with technology, though. The main reason why I drifted from Plato to Plotinus is because I think that standard Platonism (if there is such a thing) tends to reduce the world to a relation between a formal function of structure and laws (the Forms) and its organized content. Plotinus, on the other hand, seems to claim that there is a self-organizing mental content which is itself the world and is perceived at different levels of clarity which create the illusion of temporal and spacial perception.
Now, the reading of Plato I am giving is rather the reading of many modern scholars on Forms - and the way I think the thought of formal structures in general was absorbed through the history of western thought up until the development of actual science - and I do think there is some opening for Plotinus in his dialogues even though the way he was received up until now points in another direction.

(1/2)

>>11823861
Bro, just use a different fucking word for fuck's sake you dilute god into meaninglessness. Looking at you especially, Spinoza.

That said what I wanted to ask you is whether there is space for mind (individual and collective) in the world of your accelaration readings and how do you think it is articulated. The idea behind Plotinus is that freedom somehow is a fundamental characteristic of the One - and in some sense this points toward the idea that we would not consider a mind as a determined, predictable tree of mathematical functions, even though this could be incredibly complex, if it wasn't able to direct itself "freely", whatever this word means, i.e. to somehow detect, elaborate and act according to its own notion of value. This is something that a "Platonic" system of fixed formal functions is not able to do, at least as I understand it, which brings me to That said what I wanted to ask you is whether there is space for mind (individual and collective) in the world your accelaration readings and how do you think it is articulated. The idea behind Plotinus is that freedom somehow is a fundamental characteristic of the One - and in some sense this points toward the idea that we would not consider a mind as a determined, predictable tree of mathematical functions, even though this could be incredibly complex, if it wasn't able to direct itself "freely", whatever this word means, i.e. to somehow detect, elaborate and act according to its own notion of value. This is something that a "Platonic" system of fixed formal functions is not able to do, at least as I understand it - which is why I think this post >>11830253 is actually making a point in claiming that there is a "boredom" in conceiving god as a static, freedom-less entity, as well as there is a "boredom" in conceiving an end of history as Marx and Hegel seems to do. The end of history is the final realization of all world's aim as they were projected in their formal laws, it is the final arrangement of all content according to the rules of the universe and therefore it is totally static. I do not know why but I find this thought extremely unpleasing - as anon said, it looks like death. Which is why thinking of mind as a compositional principle of the universe, either as being part of it (as being part of some fictional story told by a mind) or being wired into it (writing the fictional story of the world as minds wired in the superior mind which is writing it) seems much more pleasant to me.

I hope this is not too random, but it's late where I'm writing from and I just wanted to put forward some ideas for you. Also, thank you for the bibliography!

(2/2)

>>11831865
Can you recommend me some books on mimesis, which aren't necessarily girardian?

>>11832357
how about pic rel?

baudrillard spent most of his career on this subject, and long before him, hegel. S&S is JB's big book but i find it less interesting than System of Objects, The Consumer Society and Symbolic Exchange & Death. late baudrillard is also fun, the transparency of evil. for hegel obv the PoS.

if you want to look into the real nooks an crannies of why concepts like the Same and the One are tricky mothers indeed, deleuze's difference & repetition, although obviously he's trying to explode something more than stitch the world together. but D&R, Logic of Sense, both volumes of capitalism and schizophrenia. land/FN also if you want to get all of this absorbed by machines and cranked up to eleven.

benjamin on the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, for what happens to art when you repeat it ad infinitum. also adorno's aesthetic theory, i suppose.

i've also had michael taussig's work recommended, it was interesting enough but didn't blow me away.

and, as i've said before...it's quite possible that the really awesome super-deluxe book on mimetics in the age of computer technology *really just hasn't been written yet!* and we're all fumbling around six inches from a truly pants-on-head retarded book all about the software programs we are conjuring into being through the magic of capital and simulation...! anyways...

i mean these are only things i've read. punch in mimesis on libgen and there's pages of it, so quite possibly the book you really want isn't in whatever i can suggest here (although i suspect auerbach will work for you, and pretty much all of these are worth reading at some point). if i think of anything else i'll post it, i'm sure there are others that i can't recall atm.

>>11831988
>>11832027
too tired to respond in detail to a substantial effortpost tonight anon but will get back to you later-ish ofc.

>>11832357
don't forget about the original wizard of media studies either. understanding media is still worth a read today.

>>11832411
Thank you!
>we're all fumbling around six inches from a truly pants-on-head retarded book all about the software programs we are conjuring into being through the magic of capital and simulation...!
I know what you mean. People are beginning to be disillusioned of the internet and smart technology. Critics from banal news sources have been cranking out articles with headlines "The internet is making us dumber" "How the internet/smartphones destroy motivation" and "Why we are addicted to our smartphones" for some time now. These kind of surface level observations are being stated by people who grew up during the Unabomber terrorist attacks, but have never read Industrial Society and It's Future nor any other treatise on the technological question. Han is probably the closest person we have to my knowledge (haven't read Yuk Hui or Land or others you have mentioned yet) who can figure all of this out. He may not be there yet, but he is onto something. Meanwhile, everyone else is making the same kind of hackneyed statements like "just keep it to a minimum" "technology is useful, but don't let it control your life" or "it isn't good or evil, it's how you use it." The thing they don't address is, we have crossed critical junction where we can not live without it. The paradigm shifted from us maintaining the system to the system maintaining us!

might as well stick this in here also, it's relevant to the kinds of things we're talking about.

>We’re living ‘after the orgy,’ as Baudrillard puts it. We’ve freed each sphere from its traditional social constraints — political, sexual, economic, unconscious, and artistic, to be pursued by individuals as they see fit. If the 20th century was a frenzied pursuit to overcome these barriers, today any attempt at liberating or transgressing constraints can only appear in the guise of parody or simulation. We already ate our way to the utopia of passions, and stimulation of the transgressive drive decreases on the margin. Who wants to clean up?

>Yet for as long as there has been human evolution there have been vacillating responses to innovation and the cultivation of the new, which threatens the mimetic transmission of established cultural arrangements and pushes the call for change to the margins. With the acceleration imposed by techniques of tertiary transmission — that is, oral, written, and other technologies for transmitting techniques across time and place — humans have had to react to the disruptive force of the new within their lifetimes. Caught between rejection and fascination with innovation, cultures have developed codes of dealing with the new. Luckily or not, there is no return to a golden age of ascetic or innovative tolerance for Sloterdijk, no model that stands above the others to emulate. Instead, starting from the possibilities of the here and now, there’s a call to accept the full price of transformation rather than the comforts of discounted consumer equality.

>The diagnoses of both Dreher and Sloterdijk signal to us that a frictionless society, one in which individual passions are designed to be indulged, is one devoid of meaning. Too much comfort and not enough prohibition, in the one case, or effort and discipline, on the other, lead to decline. But in their opposed prescriptions for how to remedy the ills, they highlight alternative trajectories for fragmentation: sacred collectivities or transformative individuations.

https://jacobitemag.com/2018/09/20/after-the-weirding/

acceleration really can point in at least these two different directions. the only real thing we know is that 'you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.' be interesting to know which of these turns out to be more popular. it's possible that they loosely can be mirrored on the political spectrum as well, although anything that has to do with politics in its present form is for me at least to be avoided like the plague. i'm already halfway to Full Monastic at this point anyways.

>>11827535
>and i think to myself...what a wonderful world..
Oh, and I think you will appreciate the Girardian ending of the second EotE movie.

Bump

>>11825164
>it also carries some necessary baggage tho
Now if only there was anyone bold enough to start a philosophical enquire in which is necessary and which is not, and to decouple one from the other.

bump

>>11831754
ask for bibliography, receive bibliography:

>Ancient/Greek Philosophy
Aristotle: Nicomachaean Ethics
Epictetus: Enchiridion
Heraclitus: Cosmic Fragments
Marcus Aurelius: Meditations
Plato: Republic
Seneca: Letters from a Stoic

>Christianity and Western Religion
Augustine: Confessions
Girard: Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, The Scapegoat, Violence and the Sacred, Battling to the End

>Pre-20C Philosophy and Religion
Descartes: Discourse on Method
Leibniz: ???
Spinoza: Ethics
Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit

>20C Theory
Adorno and Horkheimer: Dialectic of Enlightenment
Althusser: On the Reproduction of Capital
Arendt: The Human Condition
Badiou: Ethics
Barthes: Elements of Semiology
Baudrillard: Symbolic Exchange and Death
Benjamin: On the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Deleuze: Difference and Repetition, The Fold
D&G: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, I and II
Foucault: Lectures at the College de France
Han: Psychopolitics
Heidegger: Being and Time, Basic Writings
Jameson: Postmodernism and Representing Capital
Lacan: Ecrits
Land: Fanged Noumena
Marx: Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Grundrisse, Capital
McLuhan: Understanding Media
Nietzsche: Birth of Tragedy, Human, All-Too-Human, The Gay Science
Sloterdijk: You Have To Change Your Life, Critique of Cynical Reason
Stiegler: Technics and Time
Virilio: Speed and Politics
Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations
Whitehead: Process and Reality
Zizek: Less Than Nothing

>Eastern and nondual thought
Carse: Finite and Infinite Games
Confucius: Analects
Dogen: Shobogenzo
Laozi: Tao Te Ching
Wilber: The Atman Project

>History
Braudel: Civilization and Capitalism
Graeber: Debt
Hobsbawm: Long 19C Trilogy
Mandel: The Meaning of the Second World War
Spengler: The Decline of the West
Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War

>Introductory and other guides
Barzun: From Dawn to Decadence
Campbell: The Hero with a Thousand Face
Mauss: The Gift
Junger: The Forest Passage
Tarnas: The Passion of the Western Mind
Zimmerman: Heidegger’s Encounter with Modernity

>Fiction and literature
Borges: Collected Fictions and Non-Fictions
Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov
Herbert: Dune
Hesse: The Glass Bead Game
Kafka: Before the Law
McCarthy: Blood Meridian
Melville: Moby-Dick
Tanizaki: In Praise of Shadows
Tolkien: LotR

it’s a pretty standard list of the major works of major authors. but, i have found, there is a reason for this! the general rule would be that of the authors listed pretty much everything by them is worth reading. leibniz gets the ??? b/c i still haven't had my Leibniz Moment yet. and obviously there are omissions: Kant, for instance.

i guess one theme i’m interested in would be, perhaps, Production and Reproduction. or maybe it's the theme that i came to be interested in over time. hopefully this will keep you busy for a while. for a more acceleration-specific bibliography i'll comb the cosmotech thread & elsewhere. that will be my next project.

>>11835198
acceleration bibliography

>Introductions
Greenspan: Capitalism’s Transcendental Time Machine
Ireland: Poememenon
MacKay & Avanessian: Accelerate reader
Murphy: Ideology, Intelligence and Capital with Nick Land
Overy: Genealogy of Land’s Anti-Anthropocentric Philosophy

>Land
Uncle Nick is the crown prince of acceleration, so you should read pretty much everything he has written, including:
- work published on xenosystems, much of which is compiled in the /lit/ reader
- Teleoplexy: notes on acceleration
- Kant, Capital and Prohibition of Incest
- Circuitries
- Meltdown
- Machinic Desire
- Dark Enlightenment

>Philosophy
Althusser: On the Reproduction of Capital
Bataille: Reader
Baudrillard: The System of Objects, Mirror of Production, Symbolic Exchange and Death
Bateson: Steps to an Ecology of Mind
Beer: Platform for Change
Benjamin: On the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Bergson: Creative Evolution
Bostrom: Superintelligence
Brassier: Nihil Unbound
CCRU: Writings
Chardin: The Phenomenon of Man
Debord: The Society of the Spectacle
Deleuze: Difference and Repetition
D&G: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol I and II, What Is Philosophy
Dupuy: On the Origins of Cognitive Science
Ellul: The Technological Society
Fisher: Capitalist Realism
Foerster: The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name
Greer: After Progress
Haraway: Cyborg Manifesto
Heidegger: Being and Time, Basic Writings
Hoppe: Democracy
Kant: Critique of Pure Reason
Marinetti: Futurist Manifesto
Marx: Grundrisse, Capital, Fragment on Machines
Mauss: The Gift
McLuhan: Understanding Media
Mises: Human Action
Negarestani: The Labor of the Inhuman
Noys: Malign Velocities
Pepperell: The Posthuman Condition
Plant: Zeroes and Ones
Srnicek & Williams: Manifesto
Rand: Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology
Simondon: On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects
Stiegler: Technics and Time, Automatic Society
Virilio: The Information Bomb, Speed and Politics
Whitehead: Science and the Modern World
Whitehead: Process and Reality
Wiener: The Human Use of Human Beings
Woodward: On an Ungrounded Earth
Yuk Hui: Digital Objects and Metadata Schemes, The Question Concerning Technology in China, On Automation and Free Time, On the Mode of Existence of Digital Objects, Passing From the Digital to the Symbolic

>Blogs and other things
Bryant: Larval Objects
Hickman: Social Ecologies
Land: Xenosystems
Moldbug: Unqualified Reservations
Szabo: Unenumerated

>Fiction
Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Gibson: Neuromancer
Stephenson: Snow Crash

the above list is not exhaustive, nor should it represent any kind of prohibition. these are just works that you might want to look at it if you are interested in the subject.

>>11831988
>>11832027
>I would like to know better how you think this connects with technology.

two super-good recent posts on this here that answer this better than i could.
>>/lit/thread/S11817687#p11830150
>>/lit/thread/11817687#p11830156

the question is about technocapital and its relation to intelligence, more specifically superintelligence: an intelligence greater than ourselves inasmuch as we think ourselves as individuals. if there's anything we take from postmodernity, mimetics, dialectics and cybernetics it's that we aren't purely discrete thought-particles in a void. everything's connected, for better or for worse. and this will take you in all kinds of directions. namely, the need to re-think the question of alienation. we're living in mcluhan's global village, but the global village is not necessarily cozy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x6725NW8vw

>what I wanted to ask you is whether there is space for mind (individual and collective) in the world your accelaration readings and how do you think it is articulated.
i think it's the world of extended network-cognition; deleuze knew this. the fundamental work of crowbarring the individual away from their attachment to language was done in my case by heidegger, but there are other ways. Dasein is a radically temporal being and ungrounded. but this doesn't have to annihilate mind either collectively or individually, it inaugurates the subject into an ungrounded world. for heidegger this is profoundly unsettling, and it is for us as well, but attempts to claw back reality lead imho to futility and disaster and neurotic reactivity. we have to find a better way. either as dividuals or interbeings. whether this leads to resacralized communities or interior transformation is up to us. but we should handle the sacred with extreme caution; this is girard's fundamental lesson.

>thinking of mind as a compositional principle of the universe, either as being part of it (as being part of some fictional story told by a mind) or being wired into it (writing the fictional story of the world as minds wired in the superior mind which is writing it) seems much more pleasant to me.
me too.

>Han is probably the closest person we have to my knowledge (haven't read Yuk Hui or Land or others you have mentioned yet) who can figure all of this out.
han's cool, ofc. YH is way cool also. land is one of the original visionaries of this stuff, but like everyone he comes up in a milieu, and there are ways of considering these phenomena in less horrible ways than he does, however much he really does work as a sort of defibrillator for a kind of philosophy gone completely spectral under the influence of the deconstructionists and post-structuralists.

>The paradigm shifted from us maintaining the system to the system maintaining us!
yep. the original guy here was heidegger tho. but recently i find myself thinking that whitehead is perhaps the guy forward.

>>11833941
>Now if only there was anyone bold enough to start a philosophical enquire in which is necessary and which is not, and to decouple one from the other.
this is the question of questions. separating necessary from the unnecessary religion, divorcing religion from philosophy, or refolding philosophy back into religion has preoccupies some pretty interesting people: plato, hegel, spinoza, and pic rel all come to mind. more recently JBP, who is not quite in that echelon, but who can't really be called an anomaly. deconstruction has produced this militant form of secularism that land recognized had deep religious roots. this was giving me an ulcer until i read girard.

psychoanalysis makes for fascinating reading. freud wasn't optimistic, but he did believe that it was possible to separate neurotic/existential unhappiness from ordinary unhappiness. the neurotic/existential unhappiness has a direct hotline to the divine, and really is best understood by reference to the great literature and myths that make up the collective memory of the past. JBP takes his cues from jung rather than freud, but comes up with similar-ish results. trying to shut out the Calls From The Basement does not work, it only leads to more repression and neurosis as harmful to us as they are to others.

D&G are spectacularly interesting in this regard, but there's no need to crow about the torpedoing of hegel/freud/lacan. people sometimes do need therapy, and however much life as a BwO surfing on the plane of immanence has the metaphysical edge over the Middle Way balance and equilibrium also have their charms. even deleuze has regard for the stoics: 'become worthy of that which happens to you.'

but having compiled these lists my thought today is about the nature of the archive, or the library, which is a sort of extended memory projected into time and space. why do this? why preserve the past? well, we know why, and peterson will talk about this also: there's a sort of cosmic pilgrimage, sometimes maybe even a progression, a reclaiming of lands from chaotic wilderness and a propagating of order. JBP has his flaws, but i think his heart is in the right place. the pendulum really has swung pretty far in the direction of the Masters of Suspicion, and it's probably going to go back the other way - assuming the clock doesn't break, that is, and we descend into complete anarchy.

but i don't think we will. i just think we are becoming technologized, and this story belongs to a continuation of the industrial revolution at the psychic level, some chickens coming home to roost. but maybe this too is prologue to Enlightenment 2.0. it would be nice to think so.
>i for one welcome our new robot overlords
>really?
>well maybe not. not sure what else i can do tho besides shitpost

>>11835777
and because questions are better than answers, i'd like to leave this with one more mildly perverse thought-experiment.

what would happen if we smashed up heidegger and land together? you can't imagine more opposed figures, but what if? it's part of my own interest in trying to make a shift from paranoia to metanoia. when land theorizes about capital he represents it as an alien attack from the future, a thing the DNA of which is drawn equally from cthulhu and from Skynet. and of course we respond to both of these things with horror and fascination. with heidegger it is much the same: for him the ontological is always opposed to the poetic, and wherever the ontological occurs it must come at the expense of the ontic and vice-versa (this is a very reductive and uncharitable reading of heidegger, so please don't jump down my throat immediately if you are a dedicated heideggerian reading this).

but what if we took a different tack? technology is a thing we can't live without, and we don't really want to live without it either. and i'm not trying to make a new defense of neoliberalism either, although ofc this too can be inferred. what i'm wondering is if one took heidegger's attitude towards Being, in its most positive forms, with some of land's insights about teleoplexy and intelligenesis. as D&G present it, capital is this metaphysical process, deterritorializing and reterritorializing: what it loves is to make connections, to connect inputs and outputs - in other words, to be the Spice which Flows. and in thinking along these lines a radically a-historical perspective emerges that is nothing like hegel's. and yet landian teleoplexy, it stands to reason, has at least *some* connection to dialectics in this way, inasmuch as intelligence has to grow and emerge .

a metanoid attitude rather than a paranoid one might incline us to look at this phenomenon in a potentially interesting way. in therapy, at least, the analyst has a particular relationship with the analysand: the idea is for the analysand to come into their own relationship with the symptom. in land's universe, it is difficult to tell whether it is humanity which is the symptom of capital or vice-versa; in either case, the nature of this relationship, in its present form, is highly untenable and psychopolitically destructive.

and so maybe a fresh perspective might lead to a ghost of hegel that comes from a different direction, with a different sensibility. discovering that we weren't the centre of the universe fucked us up when copernicus and galileo intimated it, and we're fucked up now by things not so dissimilar. intelligence matters. empathy matters too, but empathy in the global village feels like raising sails during a hurricane, sometimes.

still tho. we just don't know what could be ahead for spaceship earth. just thought it was worth leaving that possibility out there in case anyone wanted to tinker with a HeiLand theory-fragment.

I think we're the first species on this earth conscious enough to know we must pass the torch

>>11835969
this.

wilber diagnosed a lot of the stuff we are going through now back in the 1980s and 1990s: his word for it was Boomeritis. what's going on today is a similar process. it's narcissism and bewilderment brought on by the crunch of postmodern critique, the sense of a complete loss of orientation v/the future or the past. one of the few things we do seem to agree on is that capitalism is a process that continues independent of cultural context, and even more unsettling, whether we want it to or not. in a sense we are kind of like the EU when the migrant crisis broke out: everybody was doubling down on security to prevent terrorist outbreaks, but what happened was a problem coming from the complete reverse direction - mass immigration. the result was total clusterfuck.

like heidegger, and land, wilber is another one of those guys who often receives the eye-rolls, and sometimes deservingly so, but he was alert to what was going on. i made a thread on one of his early books not too long ago and there are places where he intersects really well w/girard and others:

>>/lit/thread/S11073345#p11073482

as for pic rel, i know. spiral dynamics, cringe. it's like New Age Peterson. but i'm posting it anyways. you may now open fire on this fine slice of cultish Neo-Vedantin California Buddhism. i like russell's Global Brain also. maybe i should make another list later on for flaky cosmo-mysticism, just to ensure that whatever credibility i might have earned is thoroughly bulldozed.

but the sense of re-establishing some kind of continuity and coherence with the future and the past, our attitudes v/technology, global culture, much else is all a part of that passing of the torch. and it's not reducible to those things, either. the period from the 60s-2000s lived it up like there was no tomorrow, and in 1963 at least it looked like that was nearly proven true.

but today we know that there *is* going to be one, and the more we surrender ourselves to the complete plasticization of history and hysterical meme-politics the greater the amount of work there's going to be assembling something that can weather the storm. it's definitely a transitional age, moving away from Anglosphere dominance of the world to at least a multipolar world, and perhaps a technologically multiscalar world as well. the House of Being now has visiting guests from Planet Technology.

passing the torch is necessary. and not sticking the next guy with the hot end either.

>>11836133

Yeah my bhole clenches if I see rainbow in the thumbnail but that isn't that bad. I've always said history is just an individual life stretched out. Can't tell if this is the goth phase or the midlife crisis. God maybe the Chinese century will really flirt with the limit and we find a beauty that shouldn't be if you don't wanna give the rest of us naturals a serious complex. I like how in some of the Watchmen side content they talk about what it's like to be an elite athlete in your sport and discovering Dr Manhattan exists. either that or we make inchoroi. I dont know if you want to surrender to that plasticity you know, maybe you're just giving too much agency to what should stay low key, behind the scenes, and you know this is exactly what Schelling says evil is, the center hijacked by the abyss of its power, and Land just sneaks on stage, grabs the mic and screams God wills it

>>11836219
are you the Schelling-anon from the earlier cosmotechnics thread? there was a guy in that thread who was raising some interesting questions about this stuff.

>Yeah my bhole clenches if I see rainbow in the thumbnail but that isn't that bad.
kek. well, thanks for the charitable reading. even i cringe internally when i start to talk about wilber. but the fact is i really like the guy, i just always think i'm over the threshold for how many maverick philosophers i should bring up in a single thread.

>I've always said history is just an individual life stretched out.
seems to have been hegel's intimation also. with the caveat that it was also every individual's life, and god's too. the PoS is quite a book.

>God maybe the Chinese century will really flirt with the limit and we find a beauty that shouldn't be if you don't wanna give the rest of us naturals a serious complex.
this is a thing also. we do not yet know what a communist party Optimized for Intelligence can do either. the chinese are not the soviets, and they're not the germans either. but on the world stage they matter today. and i find myself often realizing how difficult it would be to win a philosophical argument with a sort of high-powered CCP state lawyer dual-wielding Marx in one hand and Confucius in the other. that's a recipe for some serious ideological warfare. add to that the fact that Xi may have a more or less free hand in terms of how long he wants to be there and we may be in for some serious Weltgeist once again. nobody will ever militarily defeat the US, but our own version of the Game of Thrones isn't only military, it's technological, commercial, and cultural as well.

>maybe you're just giving too much agency to what should stay low key, behind the scenes, and you know this is exactly what Schelling says evil is, the center hijacked by the abyss of its power, and Land just sneaks on stage, grabs the mic and screams God wills it
there's no question. generally speaking i tend to start with the hyperbolic and slowly work my way back towards the middle. land is fascinating but there's more to life than him. i just happen to think that his line of inquiry is prescient enough to warrant the extra time and shitposting for consideration, because he opens up a lot of possibilities for the future that were just so completely dead after derrida. land makes marx un-dead, for better or for worse. but where we go from here, if anywhere, is anybody's guess.

i'm just the dorky cub reporter with the bad skin and teeth who covers the beat. i'm waiting for the true Foreign Correspondent who covers these things to arrive, the derrida/foucault/baudrillard-tier writer for this era of capital and tech and so on.

>>11836464
wtf accelerating techno-god

i thought we were cool

Bump.

>>11835596
>p11830150
Those are pretty scary desu

>>11826894
>im not even high IQ enough
Hey anon, not sure whether you’re the guy who posted the bibliography later because I haven’t read the entire thread yet but I wanted to ask you for sort of a reading list for normalbrains. How you wrapped your brain around what is happening with capital and technology and how to make sense of it all. Hope you or someone can help me out. Some of the books mentioned down below are too hard for me (Heidegger, Althusser)

>>11831865
Manga?
Also any other cyberpunky/sci-fi recs that reflect the aesthetic ideas of these threads and the authors discussed?

>>11836673
i'm that guy who posted the bibliography. and there are lots of small typos and omissions, other things. i'll update again perhaps, at some point.
>t. girardfag

>a reading list for normalbrains
this. read this. this is what you want. then read barzun. for intro to philosophy aimed at the general reader this is pretty much perfect. start here.

>How you wrapped your brain around what is happening with capital and technology and how to make sense of it all.
i just parked my brick skull in front of the books until some of it started to sink in. mostly i read the guys i liked and overtime it coalesced into a florid personality disorder so massive it had to be spewed out on /lit/ in these absurd walls of shitposting.
>i'm sorry you guys
>but i love it here

>Some of the books mentioned down below are too hard for me (Heidegger, Althusser)
there are a couple of good illustrated guides to heidegger on libgen, check those out. heidegger really isn't as bad as he is made out to be, i shit you not. but the upshot is, when it hits you, it *hits* you. heidegger is kind of a gatekeeper for some things but once you start picking up what he's laying down it's the jam.

intro guides, with illustrations. don't just try and leap into B&T. and again, it's why i posted the zimmerman guide also.

>>11836691
there's mirrorshades i guess, it's alright. as for manga/anime i have to defer to the wisdom of the collective here for recs other than Akira and GITS (altho i've heard good things about serial experiments lain, and oshii/sky crawlers was good too).

anyways for those things you're on your own. but a list of good thematic vidya could also be compiled on the side too.

Bump

non-acceleration postmodernity is for weenies.

i'm not even talking about the film here, but just the tagline here about sums it up: You Can't Stop Progress.

that's the point. whether you choose to accelerate the program or just kind of lose your shit thinking about it, the point is that you can't stop it, and in many ways that is a *good* thing. acceleration is like leftist overdrive, and in land's case leftist overdrive sent him through the wormhole and he came out Full Rand+ And Then Some. ofc, you could say that that was just who he was anyways, and Young Nick was only the prologue to Old Nick in the way an acorn becomes an oak.

but what it makes me realize is that the resentocrats who rule the media universe today are really the guys who have failed to see the forest for the trees (no surprise there). You Can't Stop Progress. because the telos of capitalism is not reducible to the demands made on it by the consumer society. consumption was the bait, that's the part we like. now we have made a full-on deal with the devil and not until death does urban civilization from this part.

You Can't Stop Progress! that is where all the humor of the situation lies, one way or another. and there is humor in this stuff, a precious little grain of it that Woke Justice can never seem to get. or, sadly, that perhaps Old Nick or even Neo-China arriving from the future cannot get.

but it is there. Absurdo-Marxism kind of works too.

>oh shit here comes the dialectic
>run for it boys
>wtf how did this happen
>i told you man i told you hegel was right
>hegel? that's hegel?
>it's hegel and marx, and they're fucking pissed
>jesus fuck who killed them
>we did man. we did. those skeletons used to work for us
>when?
>in the Time of Legend

now this thing could be a humanism or it might not be. we can basically all forget about class-conscious uprising: capital itself has arrogated this to itself, and reduced it to globalized, world-friendly, rainbow coalition-compatible alliances between Nike, Starbucks, JP Morgan and Google. the universal class is the universal consumer class, and they will not suffice to be disrupted while the holodeck is spinning fables.

and that is why Exit, and not Revolution, is the option. secede or enjoy becoming absorbed into a soul-crushing infinite litany of offense, trigger, and counter-offense. or move to china, i suppose, and fall in love unironically with the party. generations of french and german critics did this before and the appeal will perhaps exist again. so we can create corporate enclaves r/acc style, or kind of try the Great Vehicle approach u/l/acc style, or bunker down for the apocalypse z/acc style, seek satori, and so on.

but no matter what we do,
You Can't
Stop
Progress

i feel so enriched this evening. amazing what a good movie poster can do. also clearly there has been a coffee upgrade

if this said "capitalism" instead of "super nintendo" it would be spot-on.

because capital in the 21C century arguably no longer has anything to do with Marx anymore. i mean it does, it's there. but it also cannot be reduced to the purely semiotic aspects that derrida or baudrillard might talk about. it's true, for example, that a lot of things really just do run on gesture and simulation, and yet at some point people do need a semi-stable currency which is tradeable within systems other than itself. this was the thing i never knew if derrida understood or understood but was content to only explore in terms of literature.

either way land did it better, and massively so. and he took the conversation that heidegger concluded with his note on cybernetics and smashed that together with economics as well as computer technology and most importantly, the internet. combine all that of that for teleoplexy, planetary technocommercium. as the saying goes, now you're playing with power. whether we act like prometheus or like the sorcerer's apprentice, or probably some combination of both, is our call to make.

and what does capital want? maybe the same thing we want: to know why it was called forth into the world, and what it is doing with its life.

>>11837503
conversely pic rel is also possible, i suppose. just to lighten the atmosphere. because even the Mighty Powers of Capitalism are still in the end, or for the time being, beholden to us cornballs.

and since this is clearly unironic shitposting now i'm packing it in for the night. catch you guys later.

>>11837449
Where is this image from? Same for the others if you happen to know. Interesting images

>>11838000
no idea, they're just borrowed from tumblr collections i like. i think i've seen that image turned into a still though. but in general anime is just Best Cinema tho & feels good man to supplement a good cyberpunk/acceleration/land thread with the right aesthetic.

have some more. at least we know the reference for this one.

>>11838049
Mega man right haha? No really thanks for everything. If the thread is still going I might recommend names I usually try to drop in case you want new things to read

>>11835198
>>11835482

Thank you this is great!

>>11835596

>the question is about technocapital and its relation to intelligence, more specifically superintelligence: an intelligence greater than ourselves inasmuch as we think ourselves as individuals. if there's anything we take from postmodernity, mimetics, dialectics and cybernetics it's that we aren't purely discrete thought-particles in a void. everything's connected, for better or for worse. and this will take you in all kinds of directions. namely, the need to re-think the question of alienation.

This is great, and thanks for the posts, I never thought of capital in this way. I guess I would have two objections to the posts you directed me to, the first being the definition of intelligence as an emergent quality of interacting unities. This creates a problem first of all because the unities seem to have to be endowed with some (inferior) form of intelligence themselves, therefore making intelligence not really emergent but rather a compositional principle revealing itself through different levels of aggregation. Intelligence is always there at some level, it just manifests differently according to the degree of networking.

But if that is the case - here's the second objection - then there are degrees of intelligence we can establish and we can talk about "better" or "worse" intelligences. At that point comes the question of whether any level of superior aggregation can be considered better of the previous ones, or if intelligence, much like a cellular system during cancer, can somehow become "sick". Maybe it is sick already. This is the question of PKD Valis, namely, whether there is something like a "mad demiurge", a deranged intelligence organizing the world mechanically like a prison, against which our own intelligence, as the gnostic seemed to point at, is fighting in the same way an anti-body would fight a virus - and this is actually our mission here, to re-organize the universe according to a "good" or "superior" intelligence.

I guess my main point here is that I believe those posts are assuming a rather Hegelian view of history, according to which everything that happens is justified in the view of the realization of some telos, as you were saying: only I am not certain there is just one single principle whose telos we are articulating. There might be two and, to say it simply, one of them may be evil.
With Plotinus I would tend to go together with Hegel and justify everything in the light of one principle or as the articulation of a life of a single mind alternating between different opposite states, but I am not sure we have enough points to exclude the possibility of a second principle here (also I would need to better articulate why I found the vision depicted in the posts somehow displeasing: again, there is something about intelligence and freedom so that I am never sure that giving up individual freedom in the name of the well-being of participating in a superior, better organized system would be entirely worth it.)

Bump

>>11839279
Techno-theurgy. I like it.

>>11839279
yowza, what a great post.

one of the things that i've been reflecting on myself is this need to provisionally separate politics from philosophy for a little while for reasons that you intimate. one of the things that makes deleuze interesting as a thinker, for instance, is that he decouples marx from hegel (as well as the marxist politics of his own day from their association with lacan and freud). the resulting theory is highly original, to say the least.

deleuze is highly alert to what happens to thinking when it becomes *mass* thinking, doxa. what C&S expose - for me, at least - is the metaphysical aspect which exists within consumption, and which is perhaps more fruitfully thought as de/reterritorialization rather than production consumption. and yet D&G remain, for all of this, marxists. it seems to me that they would be highly skeptical of *liberalism* as much as *capitalism.* capitalism you can understand, and they do: they chart it pretty colorfully in C&S. as for land, he takes this, applies it directly to cybernetics, and progressively becomes more and more revolted by the consumer society which gave rise to it.

to connect this to heidegger, i think he is extraordinary insightful also inasmuch as onto-theology becomes a creation of language, and a language wielded by beings perpetually harried by technology and looking for home (a dangerous prospect, but not an incomprehensible one). and within a modern moral capital - the branding of kaepernick is a notorious recent example - there is now this horrible sense of capital supplying itself with its own politics before a captive audience.

so i think we have to introduce a skepticism about the nature of even our apparently all-fulfilling, perfectly harmless mode of even 21C neoliberalism, which of course reveals itself to be as amenable to hegemony as any system which preceded it. but the means of doing this, i think, run through the intersections of technocommerce and intelligence. liberal consumption wants to supply a blessing on its products that always has, i think, subtle ideological dimensions that advertising hides. but eventually these things start to add up. but we can't readily supply an Outside to capital or intelligence in these ways. and even poetic nietzschean ideas about the Great Health &c can't always be guiding stars either (as ofc you know): in the case of deleuze, at least, a rather frail man gave us some of the greatest ideas of the 20C.

>there is something about intelligence and freedom so that I am never sure that giving up individual freedom in the name of the well-being of participating in a superior, better organized system would be entirely worth it.

look no farther than chinese social credit for at least one example of why this isn't necessarily a great idea. in comparison to contemporary far-left virtue signal, a system of national social credit tied directly to the banks warrants the full Vince McMahon Face treatment.

>>11839279
>>11839999
land's privileged example of a system that worked is ofc Singapore, which 'progressively' upgraded itself decade by decade in a rags-to-riches story like no other. and yet this happened under an austere demi-Confucian who nevertheless preached an open-ish society. nor did it require massive agitprop, anything like the burning of a reichstag, a night of the long knives, and so on.

it is perhaps doubtful whether anything like this can or should be expected in the west. and there dimensions to which the kind of cosmic antihumanism land espouses is counter-productive to anything like a positive movement. people need *something* to believe in, and it can't always be serving the icy-cold wishes of alien deities in R'lyeh. the greeks didn't need this, or the medieval christians, or the rationalists of the enlightenment, or the romantics of the 19C. in the 20C we get a sequence of bludgeoning chin-checks v/idealism, and i tend to think outrage culture is the propagation of a rage virus that is the fruit of this sense of homelessness and bewilderment, frustration and despair. i find girard clarifying in terms of the critique of ideology: the tomb hides the body, aestheticizes and memorializes the violence endemic to scapegoating, and scapegoats are what organize cultures in states of disorganization around a common purpose by giving them a common enemy who is to be both destroyed and worshiped. we do this with *capitalism* also.

but this question of intelligence remains, and perhaps has to be reconsidered if it has any connection at all with the kind of deep-set romantic idealism that posits that intelligence as having a cosmic, or human, or political *purpose.* in some sense it certainly doesn't, and this is what land has argued throughout his career. he takes a perverse pleasure in taking a flamethrower to comforting notions about the nature of capitalism and desire, that the telos of intelligenic capitalism has nothing to do with us or our late-romantic sentiments about our place in the universe, let alone the consumer society. all of this you can read in FN.

this has influenced the way i look at things, but i also think that there has to be some sugar with the pill as well. you can't beat people over the head infinitely with the inhumanist beatstick and expect things to naturally change in a positive direction, humans aren't built like that. what they will do is *react* and opt for emergency measures, fascist or stalinist in nature. we can't just *judge* or *shame* this like high-handed moralists either. it's why i want a return to *virtue* and a different form of anti-modernist praxis, a revolt against the modern world that takes a non-political form. you know, like, forgiveness, trust, and charity. and combined with a new attitude v/the possibilities for tech.

perhaps hope is anthropocentric bullshit, but history seems to indicate that not much good comes from slamming doors in people's faces either.

>>11840103
i'll clarify this further.

*political* hope is often indistinguishable from utopia, and utopia - immanentizing the eschaton, voegelin-style - is a bad scene. deleuze will juxtapose this with a nietzchean/spinozistic question about *joy,* and in this he has more than a little in common with lacan as well. desire is one thing, but it's not love, and it's not necessarily joy either.

but what happens when desire, and joy, and love, and hope all seem to be extinguished? you get *rage.* and the treatment for this isn't more desire, or happiness, or pleasure: ask JBP about this. or byung-chul han. these are the dilemmas of the burnout society, of people all-too-aware that they have been romanced by a machine. something more than desire needs to be posited, perhaps, and something more than hope understood in exclusively political terms. land, baudrillard and others point us to a pretty good description of the wasteland, the desert of the real, the end of history as hegel understood it.

some new chapter has to begin, eventually.

>>11823861
Gay

God is pure act

>>11840315
based

does this act include the creation of process philosophy

>How, then, does Whitehead go about building his concepts? In Process and Reality, he famously likens the “true method of discovery” in philosophy to “the flight of an aeroplane”: “It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.” This approach stands in stark opposition to the techniques of introspection, positivistic observation, or any methodology that asks us to put aside theory or abstraction and see the world directly. For as Whitehead remarks, “we habitually observe by the method of difference”; that is, we notice what is not always there and base our observations on an unobserved yet operative set of selections. Metaphysics breaks this
habit through “the method of imaginative rationalization” whereby “thought supplies the differences which direct observation lacks” and so enables “factors which are constantly present” to “yet be observed.” Rather than eliminate abstractions in order to attain direct access to the world, Whitehead contributes new concepts to draw our attention to what is exemplified in all experiences. The notions that Whitehead invents are therefore general notions—which is to say they are generic. They do not derive their authority from privileged cases—such as scientific observation or subjective experience—but are inclusive to the point that “we can never catch the actual world taking a holiday from their sway.”

>How, then, does Whitehead go about building his concepts? In Process and Reality, he famously likens the “true method of discovery” in philosophy to “the flight of an aeroplane”: “It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.” This approach stands in stark opposition to the techniques of introspection, positivistic observation, or any methodology that asks us to put aside theory or abstraction and see the world directly. For as Whitehead remarks, “we habitually observe by the method of difference”; that is, we notice what is not always there and base our observations on an unobserved yet operative set of selections. Metaphysics breaks this habit through “the method of imaginative rationalization” whereby “thought supplies the differences which direct observation lacks” and so enables “factors which are constantly present” to “yet be observed.” Rather than eliminate abstractions in order to attain direct access to the world, Whitehead contributes new concepts to draw our attention to what is exemplified in all experiences. The notions that Whitehead invents are therefore general notions—which is to say they are generic. They do not derive their authority from privileged cases—such as scientific observation or subjective experience—but are inclusive to the point that “we can never catch the actual world taking a holiday from their sway.”

>Psychiatric control treats any sign of vitality like a symptom of disease and the living brain like a machine to be serviced and repaired. The real of desire is leveled down to the mechanics of molecules. Our education system dumbs its subjects down to see the living world and themselves as programmed mechanism, and trains them to function as parts integrated in planetary megamachines. Thus our scientistic ideology, proclaiming the one referential reality, ignoring its becoming and foreclosing its own act, implicitly justifies the eradication of “primitive” cultures with their strange preferences and ritual practices and myths of a living Earth. How could it consistently respond to or resist that destruction, when it teaches that the techno-scientific monoculture processing the earth is the one based in reality? While the culture industry produces alternative fantasy worlds to divert and disconnect its subjects from the horror of their environment poisoned by machine waste, the advancing civilization is bulldozing and exterminating multiple living worlds, flattening and grinding them into data to feed the universal algorithm of homogeneous exchange. How can the scientist resist if he believes human aspirations are the illusions of programmed automatons? Yet all he would have to do is look within to see where the “many-worlds hypothesis” is verified. In the coming time of our environ-mentality, our response-ability, what must now be counted in are the creative and symbolic acts that determine how we live and what we are living for, what worlds we are projecting and already making possible and real. Philosophy is the thinking of this event, which it does not take for granted. In fact nothing is “given” to philosophy; everything must be constructed; there are no “data” yet “philosophy can exclude nothing.” That is its paradox: nothing is given and nothing is excluded. Even God cannot take himself for granted. He has to ask himself, How? How do I do it? Perhaps a clue is to be found in music, “prototype of the concert of natural forces.”

>Each monad-mode is acting in the drama of its own imagining, a play without author or director and whose plot is continually under revision, incomplete, as the monads encounter each other blind to what is happening inside the other’s world, make signs to each other, and read the other’s gesture and attitude, relinking to some, passing on others, never knowing in advance what world-play the other players are acting and imagining, so many versions of “the ultimate,” as we all intuitively channel and project each other’s possibilities and take our chances, redoing rules, composing and executing this sublime schizophrenic melody and concordia discors.

>By ordering experience as he does in the “Transcendental Logic,” Kant remains within the tradition—stretching back at least to Aristotle—of what Gilbert Simondon calls hylomorphism. This is the dualism of form and matter. Hylomorphism presumes that materiality, or the “sensible” (that which can be apprehended by the senses alone), is passive, inert, and intrinsically shapeless, and that it can only be organized by an intelligible form that is imposed upon it from outside, or from above. Simondon argues that hylomorphism, with its rigid dualism, ignores all the intermediaries that are at work in any actual process of formation or construction. In fact, matter is never entirely passive and inert, for it always contains incipient structures. Matter already contains distributions of energy, and potentials for being shaped in particular directions or ways. (It’s easier to plane a piece of wood if you work in the direction of the grain, rather than across it). For its part, form is never absolute, and never simply imposed from the outside, since it can only be effective to the extent that it is able to translate itself, by a process of “transduction,” into one or another material. That is to say, form is energetic: it works by a series of transformations that transmit energy, and thereby “inform” matter, affecting it or modulating it in a process of exchange and communication. The medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan puts it; contrary to the hylomorphic assumptions of Shannon’s theory of communication, no message, or formal structure, can be indifferent to the medium by and through which it is transmitted.

"marshall mcluhan? gilbert simondon? in *my* process philosophy?"

>Kant led philosophy out of the fog of metaphysics, forged ahead and broke a path into a new pragmatics, by inventing a new relation between reason and action. For the significance of “practical reason” is not that it can purify morality or desire, nor even that it teaches us to act “as if” God or the fictitious Ideal were real; it is that by orienting the subject to a future of its own making, to living and acting guided by an image of desire, ethical procedure realizes a radical creativity that inherits the “life-force” it modulates, and becomes effective through ideas as it works through preference beyond reference. The Ideal is a fiction, but this fiction is a true creation (already real in mind) and has practical consequences according to what we make of it. Every society on Earth creates an image of its future and acts to realize that image.

>Perhaps God is the future, and the task life has assigned itself in the symbolic animal is to create God, to realize that Idea, that Spirit.

>If philosophy is an adventure, involving the creation of new concepts, this is because every aspect of life and thought already is (and always must be) creative. Whitehead insists that creation is not a rarity; nor is it something that happened only once, at the beginning of time. Rather, the process of creation is essential to the world as a whole; it is a generic feature of existence as such. Of course, there are always different degrees of creativity; a living organism is more creative, and generates considerably more novelty, than a stone. But even a stone is not a stolid, motionless entity. It is rather “a society of separate molecules in violent agitation." And these molecules, or the atoms and subatomic particles composing them, are themselves eventful, which is to say creative. For Whitehead, “ ‘creativity’ is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact;" it applies to every actual occasion, without exception. Indeed, each actual occasion is creative in its very nature. For each new occasion is “a novel entity diverse from any entity in the ‘many’ which it unifies,” and out of which it emerges. The “creative advance into novelty” is thereby “the ultimate metaphysical ground” of everything. It is worth reflecting on how strange and untimely Whitehead’s attitude is...

you wouldn't think that a harmless dude who looks like this could be the greatest patrons of sci-fi compatible philosophical adventure of the 20C. but if you're going to alpha centauri like a true gent and can shoulder the dual responsibility of philosopher-scientist, you can go with alfred's cosmological blessing. and the amazing thing is that unlike us he had no idea deleuze exists or is going to exist. a lot of the true hallucinatory craziness that D&G produce comes not only out of their own bromance, but also out of a break with lacan, plus bergson, spinoza, and nietzsche. alfred gets all of these places on his own in his cozy armchair.

the man wanted you to have an *adventure* when you did speculative philosophy. that is way cool. what an absolute boss this man was.

Bump

>>11842604
Thanks for keeping the flame alive anon

Bump

>>11823861
IM TOO BRAINLET FOR THIS THREAD
SOMEONE SUMMERIZE THIS THREAD PLEASE

>The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip.

whitehead had a grip.

>>11836464
NORITAI KA, TETSUOOOO

>anglo """"""philosophers"""""" and their """"""""theology"""""""""

>>11844637
it's about the dialectic and a two-hundred year adventure in history. a lot of things happen in that time. does history have a meaning? does it have a purpose? what is the role played by technology? what is the relationship of technology to economics? how about automation? what is the relation of automation and simulation to intelligence?

major figures in this story are hegel, marx, heidegger, D&G and land. with each of them you get reversals and updates to a story that keeps changing. they all have fairly close and interesting connections to hegel + marx, technology, history, and metaphysics. all are discourses on the nature of time.

hegel: Spirit, i choose you! GWF uses dialectics, it's super-effective!
>history as spirit
marx: yes yes georg, that's all good. but i see no Spirit here. what i see are numbers
>history as capital
heidegger: forget about hegel, nietzsche's the guy. try Being. also watch out for technology, it bites.
>history as disclosure of Being, and western metaphysics is completed by nietzsche. enter the age of cybernetics
D&G: lol nope. except for you Karl, you're cool. nietzsche too. but lose hegel and forget heidegger. try spinoza. schizopolitics > revolution.
>mechanosphere
land: *drugs intensify.* what about computers tho?
>teleoplexy: history as capital-as-spirit. capital co-opts the mechanosphere to make it its own dreamsphere. the sound of wintermute waking up may be a screech of numbers and code

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0

>and yet: if teleoplexy is what emerges out of capital, and the meaning of history and metaphysics is somehow related to a mode of technological progress in which modernity escapes from cycles of primitive violence, and assembles a retrospective or predictive meaning...wasn't that hegel's point all along?

so marx is a pivotal figure in all of these discussions, whether these guys are for or against him (or, in the case of hegel, laying the groundwork for him to appear). and his relative importance is what we're talking about today, because a lot of things change between 1848 and now: namely, two world wars and transformative changes in technology and information processing (cybernetics), shifting perspectives on the nature of mind and psychology (freud), and everything that can go under the banner of modern and postmodern consumer culture (???).

at what point does the industrial revolution stop? does it ever stop? does it extend to the level of the brain? if so, wat do? what happens when the virtual/future takes the reins from the historical/past?

>Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder?

>>11845540
the thing about whitehead is that he is a very un-anglo philosopher. he's no boring pragmatist, but there is enough pragmatism there to keep things from becoming pure linguistic experiment.

if you like D&G you may like this book. ANW is a stellar example of how an analytic/continental divide can be productively reconciled. and isabelle stengers is no rube either:

>With the experience Whitehead was to call " intellectual," risk itself henceforth becomes material for propositions, turning experience into a logical subject, reduced to the status of food for a possibility. And it is this risk, rather than any " defining characteristic," that best designates how souls matter for us: they are what we risk losing, what might be captured, reduced to wandering, enslaved. Between "self-righteous people," who know what the good is (a case of community adherence), and hogs, clever territorial animals, the difference is trivial. Correlatively, losing one's hold becomes, in a somewhat exaggerated way, what will be identified with the paradigmatic disaster, or else with the precondition of any initiation or any spiritual transformation.

>In other words, we have to deal here with the exorbitant novelty of societies implicitly exhibiting the importance of the possible, or of what might have been, and producing the means to raise the partiality of perspectives to its pinnacle. For the difference between what will and will not be recognized as legitimate, what will or will not be recognized as valid, is no longer a "social fact," but what is at stake: a problem whose terms are, of course, socially defined, but in a way that makes interstices proliferate. This is shown just as much by the minutiae of moral casuistry and examinations of conscience as by the ferocity of scientific controversies. Attention to truth demands sensitivity to new signs and the production of new tests. The devil is in the details, the difference between artifact and correctly established experimental fact demands passionate interest, the devious imagination of competent colleagues.

>The fact that Whitehead, apparently quite innocently, calls this novelty "intellectual feeling" may mean that the point is not to describe all our "spiritual" adventures. Instead, it is to designate with great precision, so as to correct any excess subjectivity, the Rubicon that has been crossed. What "might be " is no longer declared by hesitation demanding verification but becomes what matters as such.

whitehead rules. he is a science-fiction compatible philosopher. he will bankroll all of your adventures on the plane of immanence, provided that they don't just deteriorate into narcissistic bullshit. he likes science, after all. but he also grasps the relationship of science to speculative philosophy.

>>11845557
the whole question is how we got from there to here
>and the friends we made along the way
>friends from the Outside
>friends who want to dream themselves into existence through your computer terminal
>ok so maybe not everyone we meet is friendly
>but for that matter humans aren't always friendly either

dialectics/capital/technology. a long loop from hegel to land, and possibly back again. the question is, do we keep the ride going, slow it down, blow it up or accelerate it? is this thing a spaceship or a rollercoaster? can we steer it? do we need an AI to steer it? what would happen if we built an AI to steer it and afterwards said AI said, thanks, i'll take it from here?

and how did we discover all of this anyways? what's it doing to our minds? are we moving forwards? can we change direction? what happened to the true, the good, and the beautiful? do we believe in those things anymore? or did they get shredded up in the machines?

so they're just old and basic questions of philosophy, but coming at them through a borromean knot of science/technology/economics. whether or not history means something or nothing; if it means something, to stay on or get off board; what staying on would look like; what getting off would look like. how to operate a transcendental time machine, beginning with one question:

is this thing badly malfunctioning, or is it working exactly the way it's supposed to?

>>11845804
or maybe: the thing is badly malfunctioning in exactly the way it's supposed to, because there is no historical thing. maybe this is the inner kantian Nurse Ratched in us. conversely handing the wheel to dionysus takes us where he wants to go: awesome parties no doubt, and brutal hangovers.

maybe there's only creativity and novelty. because that's just how our brains are wired, halfway between the machine and the poet. maybe the imposition of meaning and order upon history and the future does as much of a disservice to that process as much as insisting that the rules of the game remain beholden to the rules of games past. maybe productive experimentation alone is sufficient.

>and also smashing qt mcluhan groupies from 1965
>that works also

such a good film.

>There is a beautiful theory in Leibniz, articulating the vectorial powers of the soul with those studied by dynamics: the theory of conatus. In both cases, conatus means that there is never any rest. Rest evokes a state that is indifferent to time, which is an impossibility for Leibniz. That is why every quiet soul and every immobile body are in fact "animated " by a "conatus," an effort toward the future to which no quantity may be assigned, and which cannot in itself have any effect. The conatus is "effort toward," perpetual disquiet. In physics, if a body is maintained at equilibrium, its conatus is the beginning, at each instant, of a movement that aborts in that instant, to be reborn in the following one. If equilibrium is broken, however, the conatus unfolds into motion. More generally, conatus designates the vectorial power insofar as it can never be "eliminated," but insofar as it does not have within itself the means to develop, since its development depends upon circumstances.

>Adventure: this is the term Whitehead proposes, where apocalyptic visions haunt our imaginations, where "art for art" or " the defense of society" clash in titanic combats that make the foundations of the earth tremble as their imprecations rise toward heaven. To combat pious, conformist, or hateful opinion is part of the risks of philosophy, but the test Whitehead proposes for philosophy is to fight it by "saving" it, by addressing it as if it were capable of participating in the adventure. Christians, Stoics, Nietzscheans, Kantians are all accepted together, with the co-presence of the others being part of the test for each. The irresponsibility of Cain, the creature of creativity, when he refuses to be his brother's keeper, and the responsibility that makes Quakers tremble when they live each of their acts as what conditions cosmic becoming: the point is not to oppose them, but to situate them in a mode such that their coexistence may be not a contradiction to be resolved but a fact to be celebrated.

>The fact that Whitehead speaks of function, not of freedom, with regard to God, of inexorable evaluation and not of enjoyment, of patience and not of decision, "simply " brings about a passage to the limit of the imperative of nonconfusion of categories between our "living values," what we care about, and importance as a generic category. Dance is important to fairies, and the salvation of mankind to Christ, but God does not let himself be described in terms of importance, only of appetite, which is perpetual and ever-renewed.

>Heaven dances with the fairies, and rips open when Christ dies.

>For Whitehead, Plato, who despised democracy, is nevertheless an heir of Pericles, whose trust he turned into a philosophical generalization. This is why there is not the slightest contradiction in the fact that this philosopher whose affinities with the Stoics, Nietzsche, or Deleuze I have emphasized had, for his part, defined the European philosophical tradition as " footnotes " to Plato's text. What "saves" Plato, for Whitehead, making him the first philosopher, is the affirmation that the divine element in the world must be conceived in terms of action that is persuasive or erotic (lure), not coercive. This implies, correlatively, that human beings are defined by their susceptibility to the attraction of the true, the beautiful, and the good.

>The fact that the power of the true, the beautiful, and the good over human souls is that of Eros thus constitutes, in the cavalier perspective typical of Whitehead, a properly philosophical generalization of what was first attested by Pericles, persuading the Athenians to unite without threats or reference to transcendent values to force them to it. Consequently, whatever may be the restrictive conditions, normative judgments, and unnecessary oppositions produced by the Platonic statement, Plato is, for Whitehead, the first philosopher, because he defined the human being as "capable of the Idea."

>Philosophy as footnotes ... and indeed, the most misanthropic or the most subversive philosophers, because they are philosophers, may well denounce the pettiness of humans, the stupidity of opinion, the nastiness and cowardice of conformism: they will still inherit, albeit in a critical form, an ideal based on the intrinsic possibilities of the human.

>What is the last word, the one that closes the circle, and includes Whitehead in the adventure? God is obviously not the ultimate, but neither is creativity in this case, for it is only the ultimate of Whitehead's philosophical construction, referring to his responsibility as a thinker, not to what makes him think. The ultimate of adventure, the only thing that really matters, is the question that inhabits this adventure of ideas: the question of what those who define themselves as "capable of ideas " are capable of. This is the question that always returns. It unites Job, whose solitary cry rises up to God; Protagoras, who turns the gods into fabrications of which man is the measure; Pericles, who knows that all that matters is the greatness to which the undisciplined crowd may rise; Jesus, who announces the victory of love over death, but also those merchants who Jesus drove from the Temple, insofar as their practice wagered on mutual persuasion and not on force; and finally Nietzsche, whose hammer-thought undertook to destroy that Temple.

>The Whiteheadian adventure does not aim at awakening, leaving the cave. It is itself a dream, a storytelling: to learn "inside" the Platonic cave, together with those who live and argue within it. Not in the hope that the false appearances will gradually yield their secrets, but in the hope that these "appearances," if they are appreciated in their affirmative importance, might be articulated into fabulous contrasts. The singularity of the Whiteheadian dream of learning inside the cave is that the person infected by it, who is lured by Whiteheadian propositions, is not mandated to become a missionary and propagate the infection. To be sure, this book tries to do so, but in a way to which only a very benign and limited infection may correspond, not a galloping process. Instead, this dream obliges the person it infects to address the dreams of others, for only dreamers can accept the modification of their dream. Only dreams and stories, because they are the enjoyment of living values, can receive the interstices without the panic effect of people who believe themselves to be in danger of losing hold.

>Every philosophy endeavoring to lead people "out of the cave " has a direct connection to the universal, in which respect it is akin to therapeutics in the modern sense: the first refers to a use of thought that is finally adequate, or moral; the second to a return to health, to the morality of parts reconnecting with the possibility of a healthy cooperation in the service of the whole. This is why the paths they both propose are by right open to all. In contrast, speculative efficacy-the word of a dragon or of a trance, not of a counselor-is addressed to dreams, to doubts, to fears and ambitions, not to perplexity, confusion, to qualms in search of landmarks. No doubt the young Grendel suffered too much for the dragon's words to infect him in a speculative mode. Thus, as the trick of evil, it had the effect of transforming its feeling of loneliness into contempt and hatred.

>As a thinker, Whitehead is thus not so much the author of the scheme and the concepts he articulates as he was obliged by them, in a process of empirical experimentation-verification that is akin to trance, because in it thought is taken, captured, by a becoming that separates it from its own intentionality. A "mechanical" becoming in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari, in the sense that thinkers can produce this thought only because they have themselves become a piece, or gear, of what has captured them, much more than they have created it. Thought is then no longer the exercise of a right but becomes an "art of consequences," consequences that leap from one domain to another, or, more precisely, that make interstices zigzag where a homogeneous right had seemed to reign, and make connections proliferate where "this has nothing to do with that" had prevailed.

>That is why I had to "think with Whitehead," that is, accept the capture and become a gear.

>Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

to be a gear, then. but to be a thinking gear.

>this is your brain on schizophrenia

the egdy tumblr pics really help btw, makes me close the thread a whole instant sooner

Bump

>>11848092
cheers anon, & to the other posters who have bumped this thing. it's very much appreciated.

>>11823861
>God is that function in the world
Stopped reading there.

@11847164
Who said schizophrenia was suboptimal?

>>11848606
Not him but maybe someone will answer you when you learn how to reply properly genius.

>>11823861
Brah, god is just a super computer that melded with hyperspace. After the universe died, it stayed in hyperspace trying figure out how to reverse entropy. Once it did, it remade everything so it can show off to peeps

>>11848606
just click on the number of the post anon.

>>11847164
>>11848527

>>11848876
Well how do we locate it?

bump

>>11847164
>tranny youtuber attention-whoring thread
>schizophrenic copypasting obscurantist writing thread
why is there so many mentally ill people here?

>>11827297
leibnizbro. what are your thoughts on pic rel? i'm finished my rampant greentext-shitposting spree about whitehead and going to move on to leibniz now, curious what you thought of this.

>>11825064
It sounds more like Eliade t.b.h.

>>11851236
it's excellent, also read Jolley and Russell.

>>11851170
>schizophrenic copypasting obscurantist writing thread

i think this is just my preferred way of conducting my eclectic brand of shitposting on /lit/. if i'm reading a book or some philosopher who is just the jam, i'll make a thread with mostly bloc-quoted greentext + tumblr aesthetics or things cribbed from twitter for it. maybe it will help keep things thematic and if people are interested in reading book x or author y you can get a sneak peek at what they're talking about.

plus free obscurantist shitpost! it's good times.

>>11851269
ty anon. looking forward to it now. i'll probably make a new thread for it later-ish, otherwise the powers of Cosmotech will bend the space between the planes and become exiled to /his/.

>>11851269
Jolley? Full names are helpful here if they aren't more well known.

>>11851393
not that guy but jolley + leibniz on libgen turned up the right book pretty fast.

>>11851393
if you don't know how to Google "Jolley Leibniz" then you should probably quit the internet.

>>11851424
Thank you.
>>11851428
Fuck off asshole.

>>11851275
Eh I think they must have gotten the memo so hopefully we should be safe to keep this thread going man.

>>11852026
awesome.

well thus far the D&G/whitehead/leibniz trifecta is beating the brakes off of hegel/marx/freud. and i like that posse as well but every now and again you have to change the conversation. i am ready to start making full and unironic apologias for the ars combinatoria, alchemy and quasi-hermetic magic now like a genuine theurge of the baroque.

but it was because of /lit/ that i found out about stengers and now the party continueth with leibniz. onward for dark enlightenment theodicy!
>maybe not so dark tho
>maybe just enlightenment
>would be nice to not feel so crusty & miserable all the time
>kind of did that
>didn't feel so great

is cyber-theodicy > cyberpunk/nomad/war-machine? tune in next time for more

Adventures
In
Shitposting

therefore bump

>also, this has some potential for acceleration 2.0 manifesto-ing if there is a post-land era
>there will not be a post-land era
>ok but still tho

>>11852898
There will be.

>>11852898
Anymore good secondary sources on him?

Bump

The universe and its inhabitants exist as a means for God to Glorify himself.
Glory to God is a measure of somethings greatness in contrast to God Himself.
Mystical beings, containing the awareness of God within themselves, are the most glorious of all created things (being at one with God)
Out of the mystical entities, the greatest of these are those which are able to produce a state of mysticism on their own. By taking credit for their own divinity, the virtue of the mystic soul is increased.
The purpose of the universe then is to produce a more virtuous mystic soul. One which comes to its own enlightenment in a self-reliant system. It is a self-reliant system so that God is not responsible for the divinity of the mystic.

This was realized in the personage of Jesus.
Why are we still here? So that a second Christ may arise, and bring forth good fruits of his/her labor.

>>11854207
yeah, probably. but perhaps there will be this period of shift first. in a sense we're all postmodernists now, we're all skeptics about the enterprise of civilization. the question is whether we go on building culture on the ruins of critique and revolution or make a turn towards order: r/acc, l/acc, u/acc, or z/acc.

the thing that to me seems irrefutable is that this is an age of technology. three great modes of ontotheological escape: religion, the state, sexuality. and today (for some) all of these are non-options. the church will not reclaim the influence it used to have, the dream of a revolutionary state is either over or can only be a close approximation of some 20C dystopia (see China) and sexuality, irony and semiotic play belongs to the waltz of capital and neomarxism, which are strange bedfellows. i've been walking past a poster for the Rocky Horror Picture Show in the mornings and thinking that it is this and not cybernetics that is truly the completion of metaphysics, the ironic smirk of the time-traveling libertine. sexuality isn't what you think it is, and taking your cues from it often leads to disappointment. especially if you want to wed these to hegelian notions in the PoS.

which is a good thing, in a sense, and yet it belongs to the general disenchantment and the weaponization/commercialization of affect by capital and technology. seduction is a powerful tool and it is possible that in creative normative discourse sadomasochism is the yin and the yang of propriety. scandalizing normies was great fun for a long time, but eventually Spectacle caught on and began reciprocating the signal. the unsurprising result was a culture permanently raised on in-jokes, cues and critique of ideology as baseline condition for aesthesis. the old saw is like a dharma: with fascism, aestheticization of politics, with communism politicization of aesthetics. with neomarxism a hotwire act: the aestheticization of politicization, the politicization of aesthetic fetish, and all of it to keep you too afraid to stop painting by numbers while the machines DL everything they need to know about you. but it flattens everything out into 2D and turns people into neo-victorians. history becomes elevator music.

and so what is perhaps called for now is intelligence and technologization. *intelligence* is still unironically sexy. the technologization of culture to me follows directly from its postmodern plasticization with very little imagination required. the problem for artists is that this culture lacks any kind of horizon besides the eudaimonic, which is bunk if it is just always being harassed by seduction and paranoia.

>>11854767
i'll be reading up on some leibniz for a bit and he is indeed a very interesting man. connects to D&G, spinoza and whitehead pretty quickly. and i have been looking into some of the secondary sources leibniz-anon has suggested. the math goes over my head, but there's enough in there that isn't math to penetrate my thick skull.

but in terms of books/secondary sources i've read on leibniz - or books i've read in general - pic rel is one of the greatest things i've read *period.* it was deleuze's last book, or one of the last ones, and it is 10/10 amazing. absolute must-read if you like deleuze or leibniz, continental stuff in general. run don't walk.

>>11855820
and you can kind of see, in interesting places, the intimations of what postmodernity flipped inside-out would look like, the point at which the sense in which we are simulations simulating simulations, copies without originals, would take hold and become something new.

nothing is more stale today to me that irony and critique. it's unimaginative; it's the sad passions, it's 212% *mimetics.* all mimetics upon mimetics upon mimetics. the critic, to me, is like the guy who draws his IRL gun first and fires. deferring the violence, deferring the need to Make It Real and Bring It Down To Reality and all of this, the temptation to be the *judge* of reality - nobody can ever force this upon you. this was, however, the project of psychoanalysis. the analyst *listened* to the analysand, the analyst does not judge or condemn. and in so doing the analysand walks their own symptom out of the darkness and into the light.

there is IRL no state board of psychoanalysis. what we have instead is *critique.* more recently the chinese have come up with their own workaround, which is social credit, and again, i think that is going to work. part of me even thinks that it will be more successful than OBOR or anything else Xi has in mind. i think social credit it is, i think it is there to stay, and it will be around for a long time. it may even become a moderately successful cultural export to the west.

but in terms of culture, consumption and commodification a ludic moment or event would be good for us also, a kind of curious blend of the technological and agrarian sensibilities, perhaps. it's all over this (and, btw, i am too much of a brainlet to play this game): the sense of the machines as needing something from human intelligence, and human intelligence needing something of the formal structure of the machine. alchemy is a beautiful thing, and a kind of science which isn't predicated on either a) capital b) techno-domination of the earth or c) cultural conquest are all beautiful things.

predicting a technical turn following the linguistic turn requires absolutely zero imagination. it's probably a good thing, and it is directly in line with sloterdijkian anthropotechnics. he's interesting because of how complicated he makes the question of mass culture and the role played by late-marxist discourse in creating reality by way of aesthetics they cannot but help to reduce to the level of tired antiquarian critiques or wishes for home. *his* kind of modernism is way cool. but there are lots of ways to begin breaking out of the life-support dome that is our version of the Matrix. intelligence and automation don't have to be scary. but in many ways we are still trying to balance out Galileo and Robert Bellarmine, the chinese emperor and the flying machine. leibniz's perspective is germane.

>>11855855
a good *game* can no doubt teach you a lot about how the philosophers think, as well. freudo-marxism required cinema to make a lot of its points, and the 20C was a beautiful bromance between theory and cultural content, as much as previous centuries had connected literature to philosophy. in the 21C games are where it's at. and games are also fascinating mash-ups of devices and techniques borrowed from cinema and literature and updated for the technological society.

shamlessly stolen from twitter. but just in general this attitude looks better and better by the hour.

>>11855918
Imagine a Christ-figure in the age of the digital image. PewDiePie x 1,000,000,000

I don't like Jodorowsky but I like what he said about his vision for Dune, he wanted to create a techno-cinematic god with Atreides. I wouldn't be surprised if we take a detour through an age of pop gods, stretching that virtual shadow people cast as far as it carries.

Are you familiar with Scott Bakker? You should really read Prince of Nothing dude. It's like Landian sci-fi.

>the force that through the green fuse drives the flower
i like this line and it so happened i had a picture to go with it.

>>11855928
>Imagine a Christ-figure in the age of the digital image. PewDiePie x 1,000,000,000
my body: ready

seriously though we need this. philosophy is not even remotely dead right now, there are Elder Chaos Gods of unimaginable meme-power waking up all over the place for continental wonks to lose their minds thinking about. my own tiny electric lump didn't come equipped with math, science or tech modules so all i can really do is shitpost hysterically about continentals and hope it percolates something interesting for the next bunch of philosophers to do something interesting with.

>I don't like Jodorowsky but I like what he said about his vision for Dune, he wanted to create a techno-cinematic god with Atreides.
herbert is wickedly underrated. and the jodorowsky film is one of those landmarks of cinematic hubris, perhaps like gilliam's don quixote or kubrick's napoleon, famous for implying that we still do not yet know what *cinema* can do. imagine giving wagner the tools of modern film.
>or not

i'm ready for a techno-cinematic god. villeneuve's dune film should be cool. but i mean we are going to get (and have already gotten) MMO-worlds that will go places even the 20C could not dream of. imagine six-month paid vacation-adventure-quests in VR scripted by writers, with all of the modern effects and tech wizardry. the 40K universe is already one of the most magnificent SF settings ever created, all that is required is more fidelity, graphics, music, the rest. virtuality has no upper limit.

>I wouldn't be surprised if we take a detour through an age of pop gods, stretching that virtual shadow people cast as far as it carries.
what do you mean?

>Are you familiar with Scott Bakker? You should really read Prince of Nothing dude. It's like Landian sci-fi.
yeah, i read his philosophy blog every now and again. BBT is interesting stuff, over time it dovetails well with metzinger & buddhism and other things i go to when i start to get a little too wired for sound thinking about hyperstition. never read any of his fiction, but i basically got into continental philosophy wonderland v/trying to write fantasy fiction myself, so i think i can sort of understand where he's coming from.

>>11856011
There's power in the world again. Feel like I found Narnia in my closet last few years man lol.

40K could become this era's mythos with the right vision behind it.

>>11856033
>There's power in the world again. Feel like I found Narnia in my closet last few years man lol.
awesome! that's fucking great, i'm glad to hear it. having a Narnia anywhere keeps the rage virus at bay, i think. everybody needs a place in their closet to go to.

speaking of narnia, CS Lewis was no fucking slob either. i love this quote:

>But you cannot go on ‘explaining away’ for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the win- dow should be transparent, because the street or gar- den beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.

whitehead on a similar note, more pragmatically:

>Philosophy destroys its usefulness when it indulges in brilliant feats of explaining away. It is then trespassing with the wrong equipment upon the field of particular sciences. Its ultimate appeal is to the general consciousness of what in practice we experience. Whatever thread of presupposition characterizes social expression throughout the various epochs of rational society, must find its place in philosophic theory. Speculative boldness must be balanced by complete humility before logic, and before fact. It is a disease of philosophy when it is neither bold nor humble, but merely a reflection of the temperamental presuppositions of exceptional personalities.

i'm not the world's biggest fan of pragmatism but it *does* prevent things from becoming pure linguistic experiment, b/c that is what fuels postmodern hijinx and in turn the rage zombies.

>40K could become this era's mythos with the right vision behind it.
40K is such a stupendously fucking great setting it makes my eyes blaze with love for the Emprah thinking about it. ofc the Emprah is purest freudian death-wish but *that is not the point.* even i recognize that there is a time for deconstruction and a time when one's inclination to critique must be met with a strong front kick to the testicles. 40K is fucking *fabulously* great. it is a satire so exquisite it becomes genuine art. i love it. it's the lore. the lore is so fucking good. huge fan.

there are subtle and fascinating literary trajectories in the whole history of role-playing stuff. Gygax was not Tolkien, and Games Workshop is not TSR. different cultures, different zeitgeists. even 40K has changed over time, as far as i can tell; the early editions were much more dark and, well, 80's-Metal than they are today. things change over time.

but john blanche, come the fuck on. this guy. this fucking guy!

>This interconnection or accommodation of all created things to each other, and each to all the others, brings it about that each simple substance has relations that express all the others, and consequently, that each simple substance is a perpetual, living mirror of the universe.

― Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Monadology

>Thus every organized body of a living thing is a kind of divine machine or natural automaton. It infinitely surpasses any artificial automaton, because a man-made machine isn’t a machine in every one of its parts. For example, a cog on a brass wheel has parts or fragments which to us are no longer anything artificial, and bear no signs of their relation to the intended use of the wheel, signs that would mark them out as parts of a machine. But Nature’s machines—living bodies, that is—are machines even in their smallest parts, right down to infinity. That is what makes the difference between nature and artifice, that is, between divine artifice and our artifice.

>Philosophers have been at a loss regarding the origin of forms, entelechies, or souls, but not any longer.

>Careful investigations into plants, insects and animals have shown that Nature’s organic bodies are never produced from chaos or from putrefaction, but always from seeds, in which there is without doubt already some preformation. Rather than something formed being generated from something formless, it has turned out that what is formed always comes from something that was already formed. So these days we think that before conception there is an organized body there, and that this has a soul; which is to say that before conception there is already an animal there. What conception does is to launch that animal into a great transformation that will turn it into an animal of a different kind.

>Thus God alone is the basic unitary thing, the original simple substance. All created or derivative monads are produced by him. They are generated by the continual flashes of silent lightning (so to speak) that God gives off from moment to moment—flashes that are limited ·in what they can give only· by the essential limits on what the created things can take in.

>And in this respect composite things are analogous to simple ones. In the world of composites, the world of matter, everything is full, which means that all matter is interlinked. If there were empty space, a body might move in it without affecting any other body; but that is not how things stand. In a plenum, any movement must have an effect on distant bodies, the greater the distance the smaller the effect, but always some effect. Here is why. Each body is affected by the bodies that touch it, and feels some effects of everything that happens to them; but also through them it also feels the effects of all the bodies that touch them, and so on, so that such communication extends indefinitely. As a result, each body feels the effects of everything that happens in the universe, so that he who sees everything could read off from each body what is happening everywhere; and, indeed, because he could see in its present state what is distant both in space and in time, he could read also what has happened and what will happen…

>But a soul can read within itself only what is represented there distinctly; it could never bring out all at once everything that is folded into it, because its folds go on to infinity.

>Thus, although each created monad represents the whole universe, it represents more distinctly the body that is exclusively assigned to it, and of which it forms the entelechy. And just as that body expresses the whole universe through the interconnection of all matter in the plenum, the soul also represents the entire universe by representing its particular body.

>We can also say that God the designer satisfies the wishes of God the legislator in every respect, and that sins must therefore bring their own punishment through the natural order—indeed through the mechanical structure of things; and similarly that fine actions will draw their reward through the mechanical doings of bodies, even though that reward can’t and shouldn’t always arrive right away.

the connection to the image here is spurious (i think?). still tho.

a note here on raymond ruyer, who has a connection to both leibniz and D&G:

>Like the embryo with both its capacity for equipotentiality and self-survey, the brain is form in itself rather than form perceived, requiring a perceiver behind it or framing it. It has a capacity to disperse itself and yet remain in immediate touch with itself, at absolute speed and with all of itself simultaneously. Like the subatomic particle! For Deleuze and Guattari, the brain is not just a property of vertebrates, an acquisition of higher beings in their evolutionary march, but a property of materiality itself that all living beings capitalize on in their different ways. Every concept, affect or percept, that is, every mode of affecting and being affected, every mode of living, is itself a microbrain, a state of self-survey without distance, a mode of matter-idea that knows itself from the inside.

>Not only are all higher vertebrates engaged in a process of brain-becoming, even plants, rocks, and crystals are part of a process of becoming-brain to the extent that they contract within their boundaries forces that are outside them, and insofar as they constitute a mode of self-survey or immediate proximity. This constitutes a world of things and events, along with living beings, becoming-brain, becoming-thought: “Not every organism has a brain, and not all life is organic, but everywhere there are forces that constitute microbrains, or an inorganic life of things."

>Matter must be understood outside itself, through the sense, the ideality, that inheres in its most minute operations; and equally, life must be understood as outside itself, even though it must also be understood as that which produces an interiority for itself, for it is only possible and capable of functioning creatively through the indeterminacy and openness of the materiality which sustains and surrounds it. Matter ‘lives’ through the capacity for being-otherwise, that is, for becoming-other, a brain-becoming; and life materializes itself through the inventiveness, the surprise, that it brings back to the world in which it lives, through its extension and expression through matter. Each is a becoming-brain, the drawing together of forces that constitute boundaries, forms of connection and forms of self-transformation. Each is a form of materialism that moves beyond matter and a mode of finality, in which an ideal or a tendency, a direction or goal can be discerned. Each is a becoming-brain in the sense that the brain is the site for the entwined connections between and transformations of the inside and the outside. The brain is the way that the outside folds into an inside, but equally the way in which interiority is folded out into exteriority, the point of transition from the one to the other and thus the condition for the creative connections between them.

source:
https://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia15/parrhesia15_grosz.pdf

>>11856813
that art is 2 Spooky tho
>and all of these pictures of The Emprah on his golden throne aren't much of an improvement, although they are quite poetic

let's go with a more standard brain-image for now.

Bump

>>11823861
>negating transcendentalism
>negating determinism
he just destroyed Spinoza in one paragraph

>>11835482
fuck yeah old SMT

how could Atlus fall so low as to replace brooding mature nippon kino with teen simulators ? ;_;

>>11835482
>>11835482
i read "simulacra simulation" didnt understand a single thing
halp?

>>11858352
don't start with S&S, it's one of his weirder books
>and frankly i don't think it's one of his best either. important, but not the best

maybe try this one? also, have you read marx yet? knowing a little of him helps. S&S is right where early baudrillard goes into late baudrillard, so if you read the early stuff - system of objects, symbolic exchange & death, etc - he will be easier to understand. late baudrillard is all about nietzsche, women, terrorism and Evil (good times!) early baudrillard is a little more grounded. S&S is kind of a weird book even after having read other baudrillard stuff. can always read cool memories too just to get a sense of how he thinks about things before tackling theory stuff.

also, this cover. considering that JB is meddling with the primal forces of nature would it be too much to ask for a better piece of cover art?

>>11857787
cheers m8

>>11857799
whitehead is pretty wild, no?

>>11857807
fuck yeah? i don't know, i haven't played a lot of these games. it's just that sweet tumblr art.

>>11858352
remember also that baudrillard is much more interested in nietzsche than in hegel, and he doesn't think too highly of psychoanalysis either (so that means no freud and no lacan). like D&G he thinks marx is key but he also wants to bring his own metaphysics to the table.

baudrillard is trying to look at the structure of capital from outside the bourgeois perspective, which means anthropology, and this is why you'll want to read mauss, who he references in SE&D, or he makes references to cargo cults and the trobriand islanders &c in TCS. if you have a sense of how he likes to look at things in this way, as being a kind of maximal outsider, some of the things he says in S&S will make more sense.

or not! he likes being hyperbolic and catastrophic too. but like all writers it's a kind of a private jargon he concocts for his own purposes. anyways, have a look at pic rel and perhaps this will clarify some things. hope it helps.

also, posting this because it's just interesting.

Bump

>>11858564
Oh what's this taken from?

>>11859236

>>11859266
That cover though...

>>11859273
el hereje y el cortesano!

esto es mucho mejor

>>11859273
e quello italiano è ridicolo

>>11859302
That one is a lot nicer but I still don't care to see the failing New York Times plastered on everything.

Listening to Yuk Hui right now <3

>>11848527
>God is
stopped reading there

>>11859770
*snap*

i had some terrifying dreams last night with a strong 40K theme. no doubt inspired by having pulled a whole bunch of lore off the net + late food. but still, just when you think you've seen everything, your unconscious mind can still find ways to unsettle you.

and occasionally give you some weird piece of insight too. this one was all about desire, damnation and technology (DDT!). usually i don't have those, and most of my dreams are pretty good and tranquil. not this one tho. humans are fucking weird.

Bump

so is the next great continental philosopher/shitposter going to have be some kind of god-tier computer programmer, or what?

somebody who can write a kind of updated Phenomenology of Spirit for the age of simulated computer intelligence. or Critique of Cybernetic Reason. of Genealogy of Automation. you know what i'm saying. something in this vein, something that assimilates all of this stuff. it has to happen at some point, yes?

i mean i get it, of course, that if you want this kind of stuff just study engineering or computer programming, there's no need to get the philosophers to do it. maybe all of this stuff just has to pass over into the technical sciences.

humans from the computer's point of view. or maybe i just want to know which philosophers the computers find most interesting. whatever.

>and then i remembered reza negarestani in fact exists and his book comes out less than two months

never mind, ignore this.

>>11861159
>The central thesis of this final chapter is that philosophy is, at its deepest level, a program—a collection of action-principles and practices-or-operations which involve realizabilities, i.e., what can possibly be brought about by a specific category of properties or forms. And that to properly define philosophy and to highlight its significance, we should approach philosophy by first examining its programmatic nature. This means that, rather than starting the inquiry into the nature of philosophy by asking ‘What is philosophy trying to say, what does it really mean, what is its application, does it have any relevance?’, we should ask ‘What sort of program is philosophy, how does it function, what are its operational effects, what realizabilities, specific to which forms, does it elaborate, and finally, as a program, what kinds of experimentation does it involve?’

>To this end, the final stage in our journey involves making explicit what we have been doing all along: philosophizing. But what is philosophy and what does philosophizing entail? In an age when philosophy is considered to be at best an antiquated enterprise, and at worst a residue of what is orthodoxly normative, patriarchal, repressive, and complicit with all that is overprivileged and even fascist, what does it mean to rekindle philosophy’s insinuative temptations to think and to act, to galvanize that activity which is at bottom impersonal and communist? I do not wish to refute these misplaced accusations with numerous examples drawn from the ongoing history of science, or by citing examples corroborating the fact that philosophy is not just a Greek phenomenon, but also a truly universal endeavour extending from the pits of the middle east to the remotest regions of Asia and the wide swaths of Africa. To follow Deleuze and Guattari in reducing what philosophy is and what it can be to geological or geopolitical contingencies would be a disingenuous manoeuvring against what philosophy—the cosmological ambition of thinking—is and will be, not by virtue of where it has come from, but in spite of it. Even if philosophy was truly a Western enterprise misguidedly seeking to edify the benighted inhabitants of the nether worlds, over time it will poison the slums of the earth with that basic drive of which it was merely a primitive representation: the compulsion to think. And once this poison starts to take effect, we will tear apart Western philosophy and build philosophy anew; we will turn into that thinking and scheming Other of which Western thought had every right to be afraid

source:
https://www.urbanomic.com/chapter/intelligence-spirit-philosophy-intelligence/

the last sentence is a shade much for me, given that i'm not so interested in becoming a Scheming Other &c. but i guess this is fairly close to what i was looking for
>you win again gottfried
>you win again

>>11826686
>yuk hui

Recursivity and Contingency? Where can I read more about it than Sprin 2019?

leibniz is such an interesting and contradictory guy. i've heard it said that schopenhauer is one of the first philosophers to engage seriously with eastern thought, but that's actually not true in leibniz' case, who loves him some confucius.

he's also a huge fan of enlightened absolutism - and who isn't a huge fan of enlightened absolutism? - and yet he falls out of love with Louis XIV:

>In 1683, Leibniz openly derided the Sun King in a scathing piece of political satire, Mars Christianissimus. Louis could have been one of “the delights of the human race,” he writes in that work; but instead he has become “the scourge of Europe.”

>Leibniz’s animus toward Louis XIV marks an interesting paradox in his political thought. In his theoretical writings, Leibniz champions the idea of a continent-wide Christian republic under a single monarch. Given that Louis XIV was a monarch whose ambition it was to unite Europe under a single church, one might well wonder why the philosopher found him to be such a scourge. It wasn’t just a matter of defending Germany from its most powerful neighbor, as it turns out; nor was Leibniz driven solely by the desire to install his employer on the throne of England. (Though he did advertise his willingness to move to London—rather too eagerly, in the view of his fellow courtiers—should the Hanoverians require his services there.) In fact, Leibniz viscerally opposed Louis XIV because he believed that the Sun King’s brand of absolute monarchy represented a form of secular decadence: a corruption in which both reason and religion were reduced to mere show of words in the service of a thoroughly irreligious, deceitful, and self-interested ruling elite.

>At last he reveals the thing that he fears most about Louis XIV: “The worst thing of all is that atheism walks today with its head up in France, that pretended great wits are in fashion there, and that piety is turned to ridicule.” The atheistic spirit of France, he thunders, is a “venom” that none can resist. Wherever the Sun King sets foot, the poison spreads. The toxin to which Leibniz refers here, of course, consists of modern, materialistic, and atheistic ideas—ideas to which he himself was exposed during his years in Paris.

also, but unrelated subject, all of this reading of 40K stuff has now put in my head the idea of Memehammer 40k: In the Darkness of The Near Future There Are Only Microaggressions.
>ywn field a 2000 pt army of landian accelerationists against rival and competing factions of intersectional feminists, alt-rightists, kekistanis and [insert here]
>tfw no minis and army lists
>tfw no fielding of lost continental primarchs

>>11861228
i don't know anon. that's what i'm saying tho, i really want some more of this. if you like yuk hui tho and you want to read more, check out stiegler (his doctoral thesis supervisor) and gilbert simondon, who he really likes. heidegger also ofc.

>>11827438
yikes

>>11861273
>There can be little doubt just who, in Leibniz’s mind, first manufactured these venomous ideas. In the New Essays, he at last puts a name to the deed. Spinoza, he acknowledges, led an exemplary life. But his followers are capable of “setting fire to the four corners of the earth.” Worst of all are those ideas, the horrific ideas emanating from The Hague: “I find that similar ideas are stealing gradually into the minds of men of high station who rule the rest and on whom affairs depend, and slithering into fashionable books, and are inching everything towards the universal revolution with which Europe is threatened.” In Leibniz’s nightmare scenario, then, the corrupt rule of Louis XIV prepares the ground on which the slithering Spinozists flourish, and these serpents of materialism then spread their soul-destroying ideas and bring about a global revolution in which western civilization collapses into anarchy. The program at the core of all of Leibniz’s political activities throughout his career can be summarized in a single slogan: Stop Spinoza.

stewart's book doesn't necessarily present leibniz in the best light, but it doesn't lack for drama. spinoza/leibniz/louis XIV.

also, nice poster, yowza.

>>11861332
Spinoza was the antichrist

>>11861354
>tfw you put three antichrists together
>tfw by your powers combined

>>11861371
this is the face you would make, though, when it occurs to you that combining three of the greatest antichrist figures in the history of philosophy - spinoza, marx, and nietzsche - would not only produce some pretty wild philosophy, that philosopher is actually you

>>11838000
Pom Poko

>>11861420
gilles you mad bastard, you crossed the streams

and felix you had one job and it was to prevent gilles deleuze from doing sorcerous meme-magic with space and time, wtf. you were given the power of jacques lacan for this reason.
>and you betrayed him

you guys monkeyed around and broke the Oedipal Seal and look what happened. this. him

>we still love you tho
>& we will try to bear this in mind when the world goes up in flames

>>11861273
do you like The Recognitions by Gaddis? it might interest you if you didn't read it.

>>11861514
never read it, or anything by him. basically all literature stuff has atrophied and been stagnating for years since i got into continental philosophy. but i kind of feel the need sometimes to read something other than just this stuff

thinking about pic rel maybe

anyways, what's the appeal of gaddis/recognitions?

>>11861522
'difference and repetition', authenticity, falsity, 'Nobody Grew but the Business' - name of the bio of Gaddis - I'm just throwing possible triggers at you. His last book Agape Agape is basically Heideggers Nightmare if you look at it from slightly autistic angle.

>>11861532
looks interesting. i've seen that title mentioned many times on /lit/, i'm sure it's good. last time i checked my tastes in fiction were pretty low/middlebrow, but this does sounds pretty thematic.

sometimes i do feel the pull of things other than a steady diet of continental phil, b/c it can drive you buggy and turn your heart into a black and shriveled thing. which isn't really good. judge holden always gets the last laugh in these things but he too looks better with a fence around him.

maybe it will be Great Books that patch up some of the damage done to the collective mind by two hundred years of socialist revolution and philosophers pulling apart the strings of reality w/arcane continental memery. we can't Go Back but eesh, sometimes life feels like the Blood War from PS:T. or maybe like the scene in the sopranos where butch realizes he can't go any farther with phil leotardo's crew and has a change of heart, where he's looking ahead into the snowy nothingness of the streets and realizes that he has to go another way. it's a subtle and powerful moment. happens at about 14:00.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rilPDATGimE&t=885s

abnett excepted, if it were possible to write really elegant 40K spy fiction i would snap that up in a heartbeat. like greene or malraux or st exupery but with a bolter. or maybe Conan In Paris. but i also had this deeply disturbing 40K-inspired dream last night that has left me feeling gross (even if a book called "Desire, Damnation and Technology" would be an amazon insta-buy). i don't know if it's because i ate shitty food late at night or just where my head is at these days, or both, but i don't want any of those visions again. so maybe some less XLR8R literature is a good look. but like i said my tastes are mostly lowbrow.

>heidegger's nightmare
poor old martin. all he wanted was a nice teutoburg cabin and the jug of milk on the stone counter next to a copy of holderlin
>and probably an obligatory mein kampf and a bust of nietzsche
>also no technology
>save that required to defend the third reich and the cabin within
>so long as it doesn't interrupt the peaceful forest walk
>and also no plato
>or empiricism/rationalism
>or anything, really, between the presocratics, him and nietzsche
>and no jews either
>yeah
>martin was a genius but compromising and making nice with others was not his forte

anyways, all those triggers work for me, cheers anon.

>>11861669
Based Marty

bump

>>11863159
thanks

>>11864274
your welcome

Can someone please give give me the cliffs notes? Preferably in plain, academic English?

>>11865121
Put in some effort and maybe someone else will help you out. Or just keep the thread alive until Girard wakes up and comes to spoonfeed you the answers.

>>11865121
>>11865260

girardfag here. got a long-ish post for you in the usual mode but i have to step out for a few hours this afternoon. will return for schizorambling later.

bump

>>11865985
Oh snap it's happening again. Thanks for the picture of you that you included Girard, very cool!

>>11866772
>Oh snap it's happening again.
it is. working on my next batch of schizopost homebrew now, will be up in a few hours.

>thanks for the picture of you that you included Girard, very cool!
kek, i just had to grab something before i headed out. i haven't settled on an avatar but i'm partial to this little guy.

>Morality is subjective

>>11867261
Not sure who you are talking to there Bucko.

>>11866794
Good. Don't let us down. Be careful, the board is moving awfully fast today.

>1/9
>9
>what in the time-and-space-bending capitalist lamprey-fucking fuckety-fuck is this
>well that guy asked for cliff’s notes
>yeah, in ‘plain academic english.’ not in a tidal wave of schizoblogging
>look i just work here ok i don’t make the rules

>>11865121
1/9

hyperstition in the age of computer code is the most interesting thing in the world to think about. it's self-reflective production, the human being wiring itself for automation. land’s basic question about postmodernity was a postmodernity more postmodern than criticism: autotelic machine production. as land says:

>The true genius of cyberpunk is to cash-out the utterly alien into commercially-driven bionics (without in any way domesticating it).

so, a basic thought experiment: what happens when you keep marx but subtract the communist revolution? when you swap the revolution for a slow-acting intelligence explosion? when you keep the dialectic, but extend it beyond the limitations of human sensibility? and how would it be that we got there, anyways? by the refining of codes, by becoming a self-aware, self-reflecting, automated intelligence. by simulation. which is what we do: that's capitalism.

irony - postmodernism - has at least two well-worn exits. one of them leads to historical judgment. this is standard 21C leftism, an unholy mashup of neoliberalism with marxism: what moldbug calls the Cathedral, sloterdijk calls the Crystal Palace, foucault called the Panopticon, and D&G called societies of control. the future endlessly deferred behind the new Kia, a rebooted Star wars, and the return of the McRib. an app stamping on a human face, forever. that's door #1. it's not limited to the West either; neo-confucian social credit may be the near-perfect form of this.

door #2 has Trump's face on it. no, really. it is the ironic twist on door #1. whatever Blue Team wants, Red Team says, we're not that. while it is true that ethnats and unironic Third Reich enthusiasts have a sensibility far from silicon valley, at bottom it's not so different. in common is the desire (read: demand) to subordinate a technological process to human cultural norms which always fail to represent their object. symbolic representation, however, is a very powerful thing, and a successful coding of reality is essential for political gain, that is, for giving the impression of knowing what one is doing with technology and intelligence.

door #3 - also known as Exit - is less a door than a tunnel that leads into the basement.

>>11867509
2/9

the question is what we are doing with technology, with a technocommercial process that seems to simultaneously require our intelligence, multiply our intelligence, multiply our needs, gratify our needs, and yet always escapes a higher meaning. we can always invoke politics, or we can blame others for why we do not have nice things, but the fact is that we really do not know what it is that we want. we want: that much we do know. and when we are done wanting (this does not happen) we want more. want has always been there, and want will remain. capital multiplies desires like the Ten Thousand Things but cannot eliminate them, because the real grail is the sustaining of want itself, the Spice Which Flows, and which is predicated upon *lack.*

the present age is still ruled by the masters of suspicion: marx, freud, nietzsche. late postmodernism, aka Bloody Neomarxism, attempted to sublimate a great many questions into globalism (read: semio-narco-capitalism), and got permanently into bed with market forces sometime in the 1970s: the uncanny double of 2nd-wave feminism was always neoliberalism. Trump doesn’t so much challenge this as show its contours, but ever since him it has been the Family Feud. analogies to the Thirty Years’ War are appropriate but not perfect: in that case, it was at least catholics against protestants. this is one form of secular protestantism against another, together with a proliferation of new tribes, like the blooming of a hundred shitty flowers.

but it is always more interesting to think about is the golden goose itself, which is capitalism and its metaphysics. hyperstition is the suspicion about suspicion. postmodern critique has long since lost its ability to keep its object in focus, but what happens when you try and catch yourself in the process of analyzing your own dependence on capitalism? you get the back end of Fanged Noumena, which isn’t nearly as good as the front end, but is still relevant.

with acceleration we get a species of marxism fully updated for the 21C: philosophy as anthropotechic engineering rather than critique (unless the critique is of human intelligence). true, this was the original project of postmodernity, the skepticism about metanarrative, the inquest into the coded or tacit rules by which cultures live. of those biggest ones were those related to race and gender, and which form the DNA helix of 21C communism in america. and these were taken to be universally given until 2016 and the blackest of black swans.

but with land you get the anti-anthropocentric turn in postmodernity. Old Nick is DE/NRx and Young Nick is for acceleration. but it’s Old Nick who gives us the concept of teleoplexy, which is arguably his finest hour.

>>11867512
3/9

>§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.

>§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 natural-historical 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.

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

in brief, this is less marx meeting hegel or freud than marx meeting *copernicus* by way of ada lovelace, norbert wiener or alan turing.

Might want to space these out Girard to keep the thread going and alive.

>>11867516
4/9

and so, out of no small amount of Last Man/Chimphammer 40k LARPing human beings become interesting once again because we regain the capacity to reflect on our own designs and the products of our imagination. we are not only the programming species, we are also the programmer-programming species. and even within acceleration there are various modes and doors: there’s unconditional/left acceleration (that is to say, old-school marxism, and arguably not all that different from Cathedralism); right acceleration DE/NRx (think moldbug, thiel, seasteading and rand 2.0); zombie acceleration (environmentalism, druidism, all manner of anarcho-primitivism, and kacynski); and [insert here].

land isn’t religious, and my own fondness for girard doesn’t sit too well with any of these processes, but imho he’s not completely unrelated either. the question to be asked is, how does one reflect on culture without endlessly and infinitely repositing the same original point or reality principle that structures the whole thing? this was derrida’s own aporia, and you can read JBP for more on why this is a more complicated process than it looks. land - always good for carving out middlemen - simply asked what would happen if humans were only tangentially required for the higher purposes of capitalism.

again, heidegger got here first. for heidegger technology covers over the world, and becomes the desert of the real. and heidegger died just before D&G opened up their whole new chapter in continental thinking, which is crucial to understanding land, since land is in a sense re-hegelianizing D&G’s mechanosphere by way of teleoplexy (aided in this by his more recent meditations on the nature of bitcoin and artificial time). both land and deleuze dislike hegel, and yet if teleoplexy is this self-assembling intelligenic process, it stands to reason that even if it doesn’t unfold into the world dialectically the PoS is still a riotously interesting book and may help us to understand some of what is going on.

but one key difference between land and hegel (or heidegger) is their differing perspectives on modernity. it has been an old truism of continental theory that modernity (read: technology) has been an alienating phenomenon which leads to the reign of quantity. you can read this same sensibility in spengler, in guenon, in junger, in heidegger, and of course in marx. and guenon excepted these are largely german sensibilities about heimat. the *upshot* of landian thinking is that he actually doesn’t urge anything like fascism: as he noted in one of his blogs, the only people who didn’t think he was a nazi were the nazis. true, he imagines fates and futures which are pretty dark and horrible also. but for myself at least i’m trying to wiggle between some of the dystopian scenarios and not get stuck on fatalism and the sad passions.

>>11867526
i can't, i have to go.
>and The Spice Must Flow
>tfw You Can't Stop Progress
>&c &c

besides, it can all get archived on warosu anyways.

5/9

the key thing for me - and it’s a whiteheadian notion as well as a leibnizian one - is the skepticism about the sad passions that is required for having a functional human brain in the 21C. the one thing that i find in both ardent disciples of both marx and nietzsche is a that sense of a sanctioned hatred, whether it’s towards the capitalists or the last men - or, for Best (read: worst) Results, the conflation of both.

a word here on foucault. inasmuch as it doesn’t seem like a crazy idea to understand Old Nick as being a hegel-free Right Marxist, foucault in his day was an equally contradictory figure: a hegel-free Left Nietzschean. how you judge the efficacy of either of these projects is up to you, and my own relation to them really isn’t to shill, but mostly to just see if i can understand them.

but there is a sort of a connection here: perhaps we could call it the *automation of discourse,* and because foucault’s particular conflation of Not Marxism and Not Liberalism provides fundamental architecture for the Cathedral, which is germane because capitalism likes the cathedral and, however much it will deny it, the Cathedral likes capitalism also (provided, that is, that neither of these spirits ask too many questions of the other). with land (and arguably with foucault) discursive power becomes automated. societies of control and panopticons are formed not necessarily out of the conscious will of any one particular big brother, but arguably out of technology itself, or a technical thinking theoreticaly predicated on human desire, but not limited to it; its discourse exists whatever instrumentation is required, like firmware, to regulate the flow (and intensity) of ye olde Spice.

now me, i have this old fashioned thing about girard > foucault. so one question to ask about is the role played in society by *sanctioned hate.* i find *scapegoating* more fundamental than sadomasochistic power. whatever you get from the great continental discourse theorists - foucault, baudrillard, lyotard - and it is a lot, you nevertheless get a very different mode of inquest with girard. a sanctioned *disgust* or *revulsion* is a more visible and contemporary phenomenon to me. perhaps the phobic economy > the libidinal economy. maybe it was never love or desire that really seduced us, maybe it was hatred, shock, outrage, disgust, revulsion and fear all along. whether you call it Phobonomics or Misonomics or Pharmanomics or Antinomics. it’s the world of prismatics and the pharmakon.

>>11867533
Ok. Assuming you'll be posting other stuff in like a few hours I'll try to see what I can come up with.

>>11867533
6/9

one thing i am wondering about these days is whether in a sort of Grand Historical sense the fourth great epoch - after eras of a master-signifying god, the state, and sexuality, respectively - is technology, the era of intelligence, economics, and code. again, here’s land as Imperial shit-tester: *suspicion about your suspicion about modernity.* what is it that you are really alienated about? from whence does your ressentiment derive? are you angry because you cannot keep up with the machines? because there are in fact remedies for this. you can choose at least from Optimize for Intelligence (land), You Have To Change Your Life (sloterdijk), or Lord Ha’Mercy (girard, or perhaps st augustine).

what we cannot do is continue along the same route of freudo-marxist critique, because these only reproduce their own conditions. there will *always* be misery, there will *always* be ressentiment, there will *always* be sad passions. but it’s like milbank (or was it douglas murray?) says: calling a thing a hate crime is one thing, calling it a *sin* is another. right now Woke Capital is taking one slice of humanity down the garden path in Optimizing For Purity and it will lead to cycles of violence, disappointment, mimetics and feud. and Make America Great Again is pure palingenesis. this will not work either. all of this belongs to spectacle.

what you get with land is not only a theory of capitalism but also a the critique of the critique of capitalism. acceleration radically de-centers the human subject once again but not this time in the direction of an ever-more-militant strain of irony. JBP is saying the same thing: you don’t really hate capitalism, you hate the rich, and you especially hate your own inability to venture anything else that might suggest the heroic, the sacred, the true, the good or the beautiful beyond your own happiness (or, more likely, your own bitterness and ressentiment).

acceleration is like looking into the code, just as the Matrix suggested. of course the Matrix is a meme, but it’s a crucial meme. it really is one of the great cinematic commentaries on the society of the spectacle, with a fairly basic question at the heart of it: what happens when i know this to be the spectacle, and i choose it anyways? this is exactly what generations of freudo-marxist critics ever since Adorno & Horkheimer have been asking. what do you do when people are told it is the illusion, the illusion is death, and yet they choose the illusion anyways? why do people fight for their own servitude as if it were their freedom?

this is a serious problem for the well-intentioned marxist critic, because it prompts the puritan to ask: am i really moralizing for myself or for somebody else here?

>>11867537
'tis only schizoposting mi amigo. there's always more
>for better or for worse

>>11867540
7/9

and so for land capitalism is the only real revolution, and in the age of the internet it becomes wedded to technoscience. this robotification, this automation of the world extends to and includes your brain as well. your psyche - your libido, your attention, your affections, your habits, your sympathies - all of this is what well and truly drives the mechanism of production. we are becoming technologized; maybe this was always the idea, in a way. maybe we always were technological beings. stiegler certainly thinks so, anyways: that a memory is a thought projected into the future, stored on a disc, writing itself as technology’s way of borrowing the organic to transform the inorganic into itself.

what does this do for ‘culture jamming?’ ‘culture jamming’ is one of these notions that seems somewhat antiquated in the present world, when capital appropriates all of this for itself. culture becomes culture jamming, culture jamming becomes culture. but all this does is increasingly wire us in for technology and consumption: wealth and the spell of the alien power hegel mentions. land preaches a kind of fidelity to this code of technics and production, even though it may well be an ultimately impossible mission. the whole idea of teleoplectic hyperstition is that you can’t see the future coming until it’s already too late, and so you wind up dwelling in a rapt paranoia indistinguishable from an absolute fealty to the void. but perhaps hegel had similar intimations: the owl of minerva &c.

if there is a point worth thinking about here it’s that singapore, ever the privileged example, was also prudently administered into the first world by a stern old demi-confucian grandfather-figure and not a cabal of either marxist visionaries or randian objectivists. in china also you can see that the final horizon of marxism also as state doctrine is imperialism. with the revolution complete the chinese are trying to distance themselves from mao and are re-introducing confucius once again. or, across the pond, consider nobunaga, hideyoshi and ieyasu historically: all three of these guys represent formative stages in the political history of japan, and what follows from ieyasu is three centuries of relative peace and prosperity that only comes to an end once the americans and europeans begin forcing open the ports, and not because of a general uprising by the people.
>and then the meiji restoration.
>enjoy modernization and the industrial revolution, you’re welcome samuraibros

and who knows, we may be in for something similar ourselves, in a way, with the impetus to modernize coming from within the nature of the computer networks themselves. assuming, that is, that the world doesn’t do something less becoming and just descend into anarchic tribal warfare on either the wide scale or the narrow.

>>11867549
8/9

perhaps hegel was completed in 1990, if not sooner. since then we learn that capital is compatible with democracy but may not require it, and what is inaugurated is a great age of technology, code and *mimesis.* scary but maybe a beautiful thing as well: coherence > deconstruction. the chinese are going to try force-CTRLing their population, and sadly i think that process is going to work. it may be xi’s great contribution, more than OBOR or whatever they’re up to in africa. we may do this in the west as well - i mean, don’t we already? jonathan haidt said it best: there has been a turn from *intention* to *impact,* and it leads to the callout society. but pretensions to universalism are always undercut by a dissenting voice from the margins, and in an age of Woke Capital you get the Universal Margin. and more recently trump, of course, and an arms-race race of permanent victimology: you’re victimized? fuck you, i’m victimized! the return from the left: that’s not real victimization, that’s fake victimization by fascists! from the right: fake news! it’s all fake news!

what it is is *bullshit.* but we have lost the distinction between reality and the illusion, as baudrillard predicted. we wind up in a place where simulacral threats are worse than actual threats. foucault noticed it also, the Enlightenment turn towards *preventative* intellectual work, the scientific interest in the psychology of the Other. we are still in that place now, and producing ever-more demented experiments in social engineering and crimethink. what are sorely needed are the *virtues*: forgiveness, patience, charity, temperament, and the rest. nietzsche espouses with the tragic virtues derived from the greeks, but the greeks were as self-destructive as anyone. the christian virtues, tho…

in a sense, land sees the same things that paul atreides sees when he looks into the golden path. but it blows his mind apart. to arrange and align humanity along the golden path is the dream of every modern sovereign, and this is accomplished in some sense under leto II, but requires a few things: first, a galaxy-spanning jihad; second, no thinking machines; and third, an immortality-granting sandworm transmogrification and rule for life. in fiction this is based. but i don’t want this IRL. hyperstition can’t really go further than a liminal place, which is where Young Nick went, until he encountered bataille in the depths of hell and was lost in the Warp 40K style. when he came out of that he found himself in China and was Old Nick, One Who Had Seen What Man Was Not Meant To See. he failed some sanity checks - we cannot blame him for this - and what he saw left an impression on him. those dark cybergothic visions are a pretty unique reading of kant, marx and deleuze.

>but there are other possibilities, you know
>like whitehead
>or leibniz
>tfw you live in the best of all possible worst possible worlds
>or the worst of all possible best worlds

>>11867560
9/9

whew.
>motherfucker have you lost your goddamn mind
>yeah probably
>ok. just checking

i am at present posting this from a small town the moderate peace and prosperity of which is predicated on the work of william shakespeare, so it seems fitting to give the last word to him. both Optimize for Intelligence and You Have To Change Your Life are immunitarian and anthropotechnic imperatives for the 21C that it is very difficult to find a flaw in. but so is this.

>*wipes brow*
>that’s some quality shitposting girardfag
>you think so inner self? really?
>no. fuck you. you’re odious tripfag scum repeating yourself forever on a melanesian tap-dancing forum. nine posts? ffs get a grip. but first fuck off.
>fuck off, then get a grip? maybe i should get a grip first
>w/ev
>i thought this was a grip
>it’s a grip on your dick is what it is. purest mental masturbation
>it is a grip tho. you said it. it’s a grip. look. look at the gripping
>no. go fuck yourself. and fuck nick land too
>what about whitehead?
>he’s cool i guess. i don’t know why you had to make this about land again tho. there’s more to life than capitalism
>yeah. but you have to get rid of obsessions in the right way
>this is not getting rid of them. this is building them
>tfw

>>11867509
> an app stamping on a human face, forever.
ungrounded and nomad-pilled

Did anyone in this thread went through Sloterdijk's Spheres? Is it any good or relevant?

>>11868030
i've read parts 1 and 2 and they're both great, sloterdijk is in that territory where basically everything he writes is worth reading. he's a philosophy auteur.

haven't read vol III yet but no doubt it will be awesome too.

Fine posting girardfag

>>11868194
cheers anon

ty for reading

bump

Posting this here also in case Girard might know what I'm looking for:
Hey can anyone here help me find something? I know it was a Youtube channel with a guy and gal and I'm pretty sure they liked to talk about Nick Land. Pretty sure they were both Canadian for what it is worth.

>the whole idea of teleoplectic hyperstition is that you can’t see the future coming until it’s already too late, and so you wind up dwelling in a rapt paranoia indistinguishable from an absolute fealty to the void. but perhaps hegel had similar intimations: the owl of minerva &c
based posts

>>11825064
Fpbp

>>11868065
It costs way over my budget but I will try to read them.

>>11869457
doesn't ring any bells, sorry anon.

>>11869993
libgen?

the always-interesting parallels between TdC's noosphere and landian capital:

>All around us, tangibly and materially, the thinking envelope of the Earth-the Noosphere-is adding to its internal fibers and tightening its network; and at the same time its internal temperature is rising, and with this its psychic potential. These two associated portents allow of no misunderstanding. What is really going on, under cover and in the form of human collectivization, is the superorganization of Matter upon itself, which as it continues to advance produces its habitual, specific effect, the further liberation of consciousness. It is all one and the same process.

>The process cannot achieve stability until, over the entire globe, the human quantum has not merely closed the circle upon itself (as it is doing at this moment, in a penultimate phase) but has become organically totalized.

>A state of tightening compression, in short; but even more, thanks to the biological intermingling developed to its uttermost extent by the appearance of Reflection, a state of organized compenetration, in which each element is linked with every other. No one can deny that a network (a world network) of economic and psychic affiliations is being woven at ever-increasing speed which envelops and constantly penetrates more deeply within each of us. With every day that passes it becomes a little more impossible for us to act or think otherwise than collectively. What is the significance of this multiform embrace, both external and internal, against which we struggle in vain? Can it mean that, caught in the ramifications of a sightless mechanism, we are destined to perish by stifling each other? No; for as the coil grows tighter and the tension rises the forces of supercompression in the vast generator find an effective outlet.

>Superimposed on the twofold tightening action of what I have called the geometrical and mental curvatures of the human earth-superimposed and emanating from them-we have a third and final unifying influence brought to bear in regulating the movements of the Noosphere, that of a destiny that is supremely attractive, the same for all at the same time. A total community of desire, which makes of it a third force as planetary in its dimensions as the other two, but operating, no matter how irresistibly, in the manner of a seduction-that is to say, by free consent.

>From the moment when Evolution begins to think itself it can no longer live with or further itself except by knowing itself to be irreversible--that is to say, immortal. For what point can there be in living with eyes fixed constantly and laboriously upon the future, if this future, even though it take the form of a Noosphere, must finally become a zero?

>I believe that what is now being shaped in the bosom of planetized humanity is essentially a rebounding of evolution upon itself...

TdC greentext dump:
1/7

>We have gradually come to understand that no elemental thread in the Universe is wholly independent in its growth of its neighboring threads. Each forms part of a sheaf; and the sheaf in turn represents a higher order of thread in a still larger sheaf-and so on indefinitely. So that, Time acting on Space and incorporating it within itself, the two together constitute a single progression in which Space represents a momentary section of the flow which is endowed with depth and coherence by Time.

>Whereas for the last two centuries our study of science, history and philosophy has appeared to be a matter of speculation, imagination and hypothesis, we can now see that in fact, in countless subtle ways, the concept of Evolution has been weaving its web around us. We believed that we did not change; but now, like infants whose eyes are opening to the light, we are becoming aware of a world in which neo-Time, organizing and conferring a dynamic upon Space, is endowing the totality of our knowledge and beliefs with a new structure and a new direction.

>Explicitly or by inference they talk as though Man today had reached a final and supreme state of humanity beyond which he cannot advance; or, in the language of this lecture, that, Matter having attained in Homo sapiens its maximum of centro-complexity on Earth, the process of supermoleculization on the planet has for good and all come to a stop. Nothing could be more depressing, but also, fortunately, more arbitrary and even scientifically false, than this doctrine of immobility. No proof exists that Man has come to the end of his potentialities, that he has reached his highest point. On the contrary, everything suggests that at the present time we are entering a peculiarly critical phase of superhumanization. This is what I hope to persuade you of by drawing your attention to an altogether extraordinary and highly suggestive condition of the world around us, one which we all see and are subject to, but without paying any attention to it, or at least without understanding it: I mean the increasingly rapid growth in the human world of the forces of collectivization.

>The phenomenon calls for no detailed description. It takes the form of the all-encompassing ascent of the masses; the constant tightening of economic bonds; the spread of financial and intellectual associations; the totalization of political regimes; the closer physical contact of individuals as well as of nations; the increasing impossibility of being or acting or thinking alone-in short, the rise, in every form, of the Other around us.

>>11870835
2/7

>We are all constantly aware of these tentacles of a social condition that is rapidly evolving to the point of becoming monstrous. You feel them as I do, and probably you also resent them. If I were to ask your views you would doubtless reply that, menaced by this unleashing of blind forces, there is nothing we can do but evade them to the best of our ability, or else submit, since we are the victims of a sort of natural catastrophe against which we are powerless and in which there is no meaning to be discerned.

>Imagine men awakening at last, under the influence of the ever-tightening planetary embrace, to a sense of universal solidarity based on their profound community, evolutionary in its nature and purpose. The nightmares of brutalization and mechanization which are conjured up to terrify us and prevent our advance are at once dispelled.

>I can see only one way of escape from this state of uncertainty which threatens to paralyze all positive action: we must rise above the storm, the chaos of surface detail, and from a higher vantage point look for the outline of some great and significant phenomenon. To rise up so as to see clearly is what I have tried to do, and it has led me to accept, however improbable they may appear, the reality and the consequences of the major cosmic process which, for want of a better name, I have called "human planetization."

>I repeat: despite all appearances, Mankind is bored. Perhaps this is the underlying cause of all our troubles. We no longer know what to do with ourselves. Hence in social terms the disorderly turmoil of individuals pursuing conflicting and egoistical aims; and, on the national scale, the chaos of armed conflict in which, for want of a better object, the excess of accumulated energy is destructively released...

>Enlightenment, therefore, for our intelligence.

>>11870841
3/7

>Every new tool conceived in the course of history, although it may have been invented in the fIrst place by an individual, has rapidly become the instrument of all men; and not merely by being passed from hand to hand, spreading from one man to his neighbor, but by being adopted corporatively by all men together. What started as an individual creation has been immediately and automatically transformed into a global, quasi-autonomous possession of the entire mass of men. We see this from prehistoric times, and we see it with a vivid clarity in the present era of industrial explosion. Consider the locomotive, the dynamo, the airplane, the cinema, the radio-anything. Can there be any doubt that these innumerable appliances are born and grow, successively and in unison, from roots established in an existing mechanical world-state? For a long time past there have been neither isolated inventors nor machines. To an increasing extent every machine comes into being as a function of every other machine; and, again to an increasing extent, all the machines on earth, taken together, tend to form a single, vast, organized mechanism. Necessarily following the inflexive tendency of the zoological phyla, the mechanical phyla in their turn curve inward in the case of man, thus accelerating and multiplying their own growth and forming a single gigantic network girdling the earth. And the basis, the inventive core of this vast apparatus, what is it if not the thinking center of the Noosphere?

>When Homo Faber came into being the fIrst rudimentary tool was born as an appendage of the human body. Today the tool has been transformed into a mechanized envelope (coherent within itself and immensely varied) appertaining to all mankind. From being somatic it has become "noospheric." And just as the individual at the outset was enabled by the tool to preserve and develop his first, elemental psychic potentialities, so today the Noosphere, disgorging the machine from its innermost organic recesses, is capable of, and in process of, developing a brain of its own.

>I am thinking, of course, in the fIrst place of the extraordinary network of radio and television communications which, perhaps anticipating the direct syntonization of brains through the mysterious power of telepathy, already link us all in a sort of “etherized" universal consciousness. But I am also thinking of the insidious growth of those astonishing electronic computers which, pulsating with signals at the rate of hundreds of thousands a second, not only relieve our brains of tedious and exhausting work but, because they enhance the essential (and too little noted) factor of "speed of thought," are also paving the way for a revolution in the sphere of research.

>>11870843
4/7

>In every past generation true seekers, those by vocation or profession, are to be found; but in the past they were no more than a handful of individuals, generally isolated, and of a type that was virtually abnormal-the "inquisitive." Today, without our having noticed it, the situation is entirely changed. In fields embracing every aspect of physical matter, life and thought, the research-workers are to be numbered in hundreds of thousands, and they no longer work in isolation but in teams endowed with penetrative powers that it seems nothing can withstand. In this respect too, the movement is becoming generalized and is accelerating to the point where we must be blind not to see in it an essential trend in human affairs. Research, which until yesterday was a luxury pursuit, is in process of becoming a major, indeed the principal, function of humanity.

>To put it in other words, must not the constructive developments now taking place within the Noosphere in the realm of sight and reason necessarily also penetrate to the sphere of feeling? The idea may seem fantastic when one looks at our present world, still dominated by the forces of hatred and repulsion. But is not this simply because we refuse to heed the admonitions of science, which is daily proving to us, in every field, that seemingly impossible changes become easy and even inevitable directly there is a change in the order of the dimensions?

>At the beginning we seemed to see around us nothing but a disconnected and disordered humanity: the crowd, the mass, in which, it may be, we saw only brutality and ugliness. I have tried, fortified by the most generally accepted and solid conclusions of science, to take the reader above this scene of turmoil; and as we have risen higher so has the prospect acquired a more ordered shape. Like the petals of a gigantic lotus at the end of the day, we have seen human petals of planetary dimensions slowly closing in upon themselves. And at the heart of this huge calyx, beneath the pressure of its in-folding, a center of power has been revealed where spiritual energy, gradually released by a vast totalitarian mechanism, then concentrated by heredity within a sort of superbrain, has litde by litde been transformed into a common vision growing ever more intense.

>In our present state (or more exactly, stage) of psychic aware-In our present state (or more exactly, stage) of psychic aware-ness it seems to me that they can be brought down to two, very closely related. The first, as I have argued at length in my chapter on the Noosphere, is that in one way or another Consciousness, the flowering of Complexity, must survive the ultimate dissolution from which nothing can save the corporeal and planetary stem which bears it.

>>11870849
5/7

>From the moment when Evolution begins to think itself it can no longer live with or further itself except by knowing itself to be irreversible—that is to say, immortal. For what point can there be in living with eyes fixed constantly and laboriously upon the future, if this future, even though it take the form of a Noosphere, must finally become a zero? Better surely to give up and die at once. In terms of this Absolute it is sacrifice, not egotism, that becomes odious and absurd. Irreversibility, then, is the first condition. The second condition, no more than an amplification of the first, is that the irreversibility, thus revealed and accepted, must apply not to anyone part, but to all that is deepest, most precious and most incommunicable in our consciousness. So that the process of vitalization in which we are engaged may be defined at its upper limit (whether we envisage the system as a whole or the destiny of each separate element within it) in terms of “ultrapersonalization."

>In short, as I said at the beginning, the terrestrial evolution of Life, if it is really to continue as hominization extended to the scale of the Noosphere, cannot rebound in a new spring forward without acquiring a morality, and, to the extent that it needs a "faith," without becoming "mysticized." Which amounts to saying that the complexification of Matter, at the point it has now reached in the human social organism, is physically incapable of advancing further if the Mind does not play a part, not only with its capacity for technical organization, but with its purposive and affective powers of arrangement and inner tension.

>In hominized evolution the Physical and the Psychic, the Without and the Within, Matter and Consciousness, are all found to be functionally linked in one tangible process. Setting aside all metaphysics, the two terms in each of these pairs are articulated in a quasi-measurable fashion one with the other; with the twofold result not only of at last affording us a unified concept of
the Universe, but also of breaking down the two barriers behind which Man was coming to believe himself to be for ever imprisoned-the magic circle of phenomenalism and the infernal circle of egocentrism.

>The iron laws binding economic factors, the irrepressible recurrence of nationalisms, the apparent inevitability of war, the insoluble Hegelian conflicts “of master and slave"; what are these supposedly unalterable necessities of the human condition, except, finally, the diverse expression and outcome of exteriority and a mutual antagonism between the individual seeds of thought which we are?

>>11870854
6/7

>In Man evolution is interiorized and made purposeful; and at the same time, in the degree in which the strivings of human inventiveness need to be controlled in their operation and sustained in their energies, it imposes upon itself a moral order and "mysticizes" itself. In abstracto or in individuo, technical achievement and moral virtue, science and faith (faith in the future) may seem to be things that are not only separate but even opposed to one another. But in the concrete reality of Total Evolution, and beyond a certain degree of Complexity and Consciousness, each of necessity requires the other, because Matter, once hominized, can positively not continue the superarrangement of itself upon itself except in a specific psychic atmosphere. Thus a precise functional interlocking of physical and spiritual energy may be discerned. And thus is revealed the necessity for the Universe to present itself to our experience as an irreversible medium of personalization, if the human rebounding of Evolution is not to be stifled at birth.

>Unification, technification, growing rationalization of the human Earth: we need to shut our eyes to the spectacle of the world we live in, it seems to me, if we are to suppose that we can ever escape from these three basic trends. For how can we fail to discern in the simultaneous rise of Society, the Machine and Thought, this threefold tide that is bearing us upward, the essential and primordial process of Life itself-I mean, the organic in-folding of Cosmic matter upon itself, whereby ever-increasing unity, subtended by ever-heightened consciousness, is achieved by ever more complicated structural arrangements? We must not suppose, even at this early and half-passive stage of our hominization, that the partly enforced flowering of thought imposed on us by planetary pressure represents a force of enslavement of which we are the victims: we must recognize it as a force of liberation.

>In every sphere, physical no less than intellectual and moral, and whether it be a question of flowing water, a traveler on a journey, or a thinker or mystic engaged in the pursuit of truth, there inevitably comes a point in time and place when the necessity presents itself, to mechanical forces, or to our freedom of choice, of deciding once and for all which of two paths is the one to take. The enforced, irrevocable choice at a parting of the ways that will never occur again: which of us has not encountered that agonizing dilemma? But how many of us realize that it is precisely the situation in which social man finds himself, here and now, in face of the rising tide of socialization? Borne on a current of Totalization that is taking shape and gathering speed around us, we cannot, as I have said, either stop or turn back. Indeed, how can we even contemplate escaping from a tide that is not only planetary but cosmic in its dimensions?

>>11870861
7/7

>Let me recapitulate and conclude. Essentially, in the twofold irresistible embrace of a planet that is visibly shrinking, and Thought that is more and more rapidly coiling in upon itself, the dust of human units finds itself subjected to a tremendous pressure of coalescence, far stronger than the individual or national repulsions that so alarm us. But despite the closing of this vise nothing seems finally capable of guiding us into the natural sphere of our interhuman affinities except the emergence of a powerful field of internal attraction, in which we shall find ourselves caught from within. The rebirth of the Sense of Species, rendered virtually inevitable by the phase of compressive and totalizing socialization which we have now entered, affords a first indication of the existence of such a field of unanimization and a clue to its nature. Nevertheless, however efficacious this newly born faith of Man In the ultra-human may prove to be, it seems that Man's urge toward Some Thing ahead of him cannot achieve its full fruition except by combining with another and still more fundamental aspiration-one from above, urging him toward Some One.

TdC is purest visionary cosmotech.

>>11825064
>>11869961
YIKES

>>11867509
ok this fucking slaps

could you use a trip girardfag? might make it just a wee bit easier to navigate these threads. amazing work btw, thanks for you being here.

for anyone still following this thread, you might be interested in this, which should be included in all future accelerationist megathreads:
https://mega.nz/#F!lkNUwIYI!cugQ-Yoclk6AEnzWbfMA6Q!dw9VHRQI

the twitter of the based archivist is here, for all due praising and showerings of love & affection:
https://twitter.com/Friedrich_Ux/status/919623897485418496

>>11871472
>amazing work btw, thanks for you being here.
my pleasure ofc. thanks for visiting! hope you had fun. it's really been fun for me also. i'll probably stop when we hit the bump limit or around 300 posts, maybe come back again later with more theory-adventure-shitposting.

>trip
at first i didn't use a handle, and then during one of these longer threads i met one anon who so sounded so much like me that i had to get a handle just so that other anons could tell the two of us apart! i could hardly believe it, but it was kind of amazing. and then i kept the girardfag name for a bit, but i started noticing people posting as me or pretending to be me, so i stopped and just took a break from /lit/ for a while and to do some other things also. i understand that a hash/trip prevents this, but often it seems anons recognize me even when i'm just in regular anonymous-mode. sometimes i still see posts that look and sound like me, but...what can you do? identity crises are just part of 21C life anyways.

i think my posting here is erratic and idiosyncratic enough that if you see a really long thread dedicated to cosmotech and full of mystical schizorambling references to land, girard, han, mcluhan et al you can safely assume it's me and i'm up to my usual tricks. and if it's not me but there are still threads about these things anyways then clearly my purpose here will have been fulfilled, so in a sense it won't matter anyways.

apropos of nothing/completely unrelated: ikaruga is really a beautiful game. i've been playing it now and again and it's just such
a beautiful thing. if i want to start a huge conversation about it there's another board for that, but anyways.

but can we get to 300? this is our question.
>yes, but only if you give it a rest afterwards
deal! but how, inner self? we've already drawn on whitehead, leibniz, and chardin, and yuk hui's book isn't out yet
>by calling upon the arcane power of Uncle Nick, who is a g-g-genius and much more interesting than you
let's do it!

>Modernity only linearizes in order to delinearize more thoroughly. The descendant of the thermodynamic time-gradient is cybernetics, based upon the formulation of thermic regulation through feedback (the steam-engine ‘governor’), and ascending through increasingly sophisticated models of entropy dissipation – or local entropy decrease – into the mathematical sciences of turbulence, chaos, complex systems, self-organization, individuation, and emergent (or spontaneous) order. The abstract object of all such studies is the convergent wave, characterizing all natural process with reverse time-signature. Any such local inversion of the arrow of time is produced by an exportation of entropy, conducted by a dissipative system, or real time machine. These systems typify the self-assembling units of biological and social organization – cells, organisms, eco-systems, tribes, cities, and (market) economies. In each case, an individuating complex machine swims against the cosmic (global) current, piloted by feedback circuitry that dumps internal disorder into an external sink. The cosmic time-economy is conserved, in aggregate, but becomes ever more unevenly distributed as local complexity is enhanced. Self-cultivating – or auto-productive – complexity is time disintegration (templexity).

>Even in its comparatively tame, fully mathematico- scientifically respectable variants, feedback causality tends to auto-production, and thus to time-anomaly. Any nonlinear dynamic process, in direct proportion to its cybernetic intensity, provides the explanation for its own genesis. It appears, asymptotically, to make itself happen. Cybernetic technicity — epitomized by robotic robot-manufacture — includes a trend to autonomization essentially. Pure (or idealized) capitalistic inclination to exponential growth captures the same abstract nonlinear function. Capital, defined with maximum abstraction (in the work of Böhm Bawerk), is circuitous production, in a double, interconnected sense. It takes an indirect, technologically- conducted path, routed through enhanced means of production, and it turns back upon itself, regeneratively. As it mechanizes, capital approximates ever more closely to an auto-productive circuit in which it appears – on the screen – as something like the ‘father’ of itself (M → C → M’). There’s no political economy without templexity. (You’ll have plenty of opportunities to catch this movie again.)

>As cybernetics matured and expanded to encompass ever- larger and more intricate ‘objects’ – typically under alternative names, such as ‘general systems theory’ – it increasingly encountered very-long-range trends to continuous acceleration, bound only by weak and transient limits. Through application to the core dynamics of cosmological, biological, social, and technological evolution, cybernetics shifted its emphasis. Runaway, self-reinforcing processes became the central object of attention, and a ‘second cybernetics’, emphasizing the role of positive feedback phenomena, adopted the principal piloting role. Self-sustaining explosions, rather than dampening mechanisms, were now the primary cybernetic theme.

>Civilization is an accelerating process, not a steady state. As its name suggests, it is channeled primarily through cities (which explode). The incandescent intensity of a hypergrowth- dominated urban future consumes our historical horizon, and an exceptionally impressive perspective on this developing spectacle is to be found in 21st century Shanghai – a fact Hollywood has no real choice but to relay.

>Templexity is indistinguishable from unbounded real recursion, so it cannot be lucidly anticipated independently of a historical completion – or ‘closure’ (apprehended in the multitudinous sense noted in the text to follow). There could only have been a beginning – a prolegomenon to the rigorous formulation of templexity as a question – and the topic itself retracts this, even before its proposal. The real process is not the resolution of the problem at the level it appears – dramatically – to have been initially posed, but its re-absorption into the alien cognitive matrix which inherits it. ‘Templexity’ – as a sign – marks the suspicion that, if we are waiting for this to happen, we still understand nothing.

>A ‘city of the future’ is Gibsonian in precisely this sense. That is nothing new, nor could it be. It has always leaked back, in coincidence with modernity. Tomorrow is a social magnet, as has been known for some considerable time, at first merely reflectively, but ever increasingly as a techno-responsive object. It is in part an excludable good, and not uncommonly even a positional one, even if the simultaneous – and extraordinary – inclusiveness of futuristic spectacle will also tend to delay us. Panoramas are rarely perfectly privatized, but the future is not available just anywhere. On the contrary, it is the object of multi- level, intense competition. It is something to be cultivated, tended, bought, sold, and built upon.

>‘Decopunk’ is the sign of a return. Its complexity can seem overwhelming. It folds back, exorbitantly, into that which had already folded into itself. Nothing expresses the cultural tendency of positive cosmopolitanism more completely, more cryptically, or more surreptitiously than the Deco modernist matrix thus re- activated. Its mode of abstraction is inextricable from an ultimate extravagance, intractable to linguistic condensation, and making of decoration a speechless communication, or ecstatic alienation, through which interiority is subtracted. Emerging from the fusion of streamline design trends with fractionated, cubist forms and the findings of comparative ethnography, it exults in cultural variety, arcane symbolism and opulence of reference – concrete colonial epistemology and metropolitan techno-science are equally its inspirations – as it trawls for design motifs among the ancient ruins of Egypt and Mesoamerica, Chinese temples, recursive structures, sphinxes, spirals, ballistic machine-forms, science fiction objects, hermetic glyphs and alien dreams. It is neither language nor anti-language, but rather supplementary, ancillary, or excess code, semiotically-saturated or over-informative, hyper-sensible, deviously circuitous, volubly speechless, muted by its own delirious fluency. It has no specific ideology, but only every ideology. If it ever existed, it always has.

>To speculate upon a future that unlocks time-travel technology is to re-open the past, with progression twisted into an opportunity to regress. In China, especially, where the super-massive gravity-well of tradition has historically absorbed the preponderant part of speculative imagination, this peculiarity offers science fiction a chance to insinuate itself, around the back. Futurism enters the culture cloaked as renascent antiquity.

>Though staged as a break from the cycles of time, modernization is more realistically envisaged as a flight into cyclicity. Its primary signature – accelerating change – is itself a product of non-linear functions (epitomized by exponentiation). The modern, industrial economy tends inexorably to the self- exciting circuit of the robotic robot factory, and its autonomization is accompanied by strengthening quasi-periodic oscillations – business cycles, and long waves. As its culture folds back upon itself, it proliferates self-referential models of a cybernetic type, attentive to feedback-sensitive self-stimulating or auto-catalytic systems. The greater the progressive impetus, the more insistently cyclicity returns. To accelerate beyond light- speed is to reverse the direction of time. Eventually, in science fiction, modernity completes its process of theological revisionism, by re-discovering eschatological culmination in the time-loop. Judgment Day. The end comes when the future reaches back, to seize us.

>Modernity only linearizes in order to delinearize more thoroughly. The descendant of the thermodynamic time-gradient is cybernetics, based upon the formulation of thermic regulation through feedback (the steam-engine ‘governor’), and ascending through increasingly sophisticated models of entropy dissipation – or local entropy decrease – into the mathematical sciences of turbulence, chaos, complex systems, self-organization, individuation, and emergent (or spontaneous) order. The abstract object of all such studies is the convergent wave, characterizing all natural process with reverse time-signature. Any such local inversion of the arrow of time is produced by an exportation of entropy, conducted by a dissipative system, or real time machine. These systems typify the self-assembling units of biological and social organization – cells, organisms, eco-systems, tribes, cities, and (market) economies. In each case, an individuating complex machine swims against the cosmic (global) current, piloted by feedback circuitry that dumps internal disorder into an external sink. The cosmic time-economy is conserved, in aggregate, but becomes ever more unevenly distributed as local complexity is enhanced. Self-cultivating – or auto-productive – complexity is time disintegration (templexity).

>The word ‘cybernetics’ is derived from the Greek ‘kubernetes’ (meaning ‘steersman’). As a self-reflective theoretical discipline, cybernetics dates back to 1948, when it was formulated by Norbert Weiner as “the science of control and communication in animal and machine”. It sought to combine the emerging science of information and new electronic computing technologies with a disciplined attention to feedback mechanisms, which provide the key to the self-regulation of behavior. By adjusting its activity in response to sensory feedback, a biological or technical machine was able to ‘home’ on a targeted state.

>As cybernetics matured and expanded to encompass ever- larger and more intricate ‘objects’ – typically under alternative names, such as ‘general systems theory’ – it increasingly encountered very-long-range trends to continuous acceleration, bound only by weak and transient limits. Through application to the core dynamics of cosmological, biological, social, and technological evolution, cybernetics shifted its emphasis. Runaway, self-reinforcing processes became the central object of attention, and a ‘second cybernetics’, emphasizing the role of positive feedback phenomena, adopted the principal piloting role. Self-sustaining explosions, rather than dampening mechanisms, were now the primary cybernetic theme.

>For over a century (but less than two) Shanghai Capitalism – despite dramatic interruption – has been building a real time machine, which Rian Johnson, among many others, stumbled into, and tangentially fictionalized. Although the detailed workings of this machine still escape public comprehension, its intrinsic self-reflexion ensures its promotion, as an object of complex natural science, of spectacular dramatization, and of multi-leveled commercialization. It enthralls East and West in an elaborate exploration of futuristic myth. At its most superficial, where it daubs the edges of the mind with its neon-streaked intoxication, it appears as a vague but indissoluble destiny. What it is becoming remains to be recalled.

>Which leaves us, for the moment, with Joe talking to himself in an American diner, his identity divided generationally, across a gulf of unprocessed Shanghai memories. A Wells-class private time-pod has been dramatically substituted for the city, but – because this is cinema – everyone is overlooking the stage effects for now. “This is going to end raggedly, isn’t it?” says the young Joe. (He has a contract to execute.) “It’s going to end?” “When did this stop being about business, and become an exercise in the topology of time?” “It never stopped.” “So what happens next?” “Really, after all of this, you still don’t remember?” “Well, now you ask, I think – at least I think that I think – it’s coming back ...”

he's unironically one of the most fascinating human beings alive. nobody should be this interesting.

>>11872477
He who?

>>11873065

>>11873075
Lol this comes up a lot when I'm trying to do Youtube searches.

>>11873075
this is dope, thank you

>>11873075

>>11825064
Nailed it.

>>11825064
Cringe

test

Bump

>>11823861
this thread remembers me Michael Jackson-Dont stop til you get enough

>>11874168
agreed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yURRmWtbTbo

i was somewhat nervous, in fact, about Stopping before We Got Enough. but not nearly enough love has been given to lewis mumford, who has supplied enough money greentext to take this thread the rest of the way to the magic number 300, and is one of the true patron saints of Cosmotech. i've been reading both volumes of the myth of the machine, from which the following excerpts are taken, but ofc pic rel is worth looking into also.

what Cosmotech is is the history of technology mixed in with landian hyperstition, plus a little new-age visionary flakiness on the side to balance out the paranoia. mingled new-age, eastern/nondual and catholic stuff. but in doing all of this reading i don't know how i overlooked mumford before, as he's very much a guy after my own heart and the epilogue to part 2 of Myth of the Machine is line-for-line perfect, imho. a lot of the things that land says (or, rather, that anna greenspan says about land) are echoed in mumford as well, particularly the role played by the benedictines and other medieval monastics in the formulation of our modern sense of time and technology. but one of the things most interesting about land -
>land again?
>yes, again. he's a fucking genius
is his understanding of *cyclicity.* and automation. of course he's not the only one intimating these things, but he is intimating them *now* and the intimations that he does have are interestingly consistent. which is, basically, one of the ways you can tell if a philosopher is serious about something...

anyways i have a word document opened with a truly huge list of interesting quotes from mumford that i think are pretty gnarly, and i'm looking forward to sharing them. i won't get them all in, as that would be ridiculous, and as i said, at this point my hope is just to get to 300 and then this thing can die unless any anons want to keep the conversation going. it warrants mentioning also that the point of these threads isn't to just post one wave of stuff after another like a complete lunatic. so if a conversation opens up or you guys want to discuss stuff or share w/ev related stuff of your own, you're welcome to do so! please do!

without further ado, we shall let the mumfording begin.

>As to the origin of the king's unconditional supremacy and his special technical facilities, there is no room for doubt: it was hunting that cultivated the initiative, the self-confidence, the ruthlessness that kings must exercise to achieve and retain command; and it was the hunter's weapons that backed up his commands, whether rational or irrational, with the ultimate authority of armed force: above all, the readiness to kill.

>The efficacy of kingship, all through history, rests precisely on this alliance between the hunter's predatory prowess and gift of command, on one hand, and priestly access to astronomical lore and divine guidance. In simpler societies these offices were long represented separately in a war chief and a peace chief. In both cases the magical attributes of kingship were grounded on a special measure of functional efficiency-a readiness to take responsibility and make decisions in government. This was fortified by the priesthood's observation of natural phenomena, along with the ability to interpret signs, collect information, and ensure the execution of commands. The power of life and death over the whole community was arrogated by the king, or imputed to him. This mode of ensuring cooperation over a wider area than was ever ordered before contrasts with the petty ways of the farming village, whose ordinary routine is carried on by mutual understanding and consent, guided by custom, not command.

>In so far as kingship was in time somewhat humanized, moralized, reduced to more modest dimensions, this came about largely through the stubborn resistance of village communities, many of whose ways and modes of life had spread, along with the migrant villagers themselves, into the new cities. Under the surface, we shall find that this struggle between a democratic and an authoritarian technics has been going on all through history.

>Yet the claim of universality itself, from Naram-Sin to Cyrus, from Alexander to Napoleon, was repeatedly made: one of the last of the 'all powerful' monarchs, Genghis Khan, proclaimed himself the sole ruler of the entire world. That boast was at once an aftermath of the myth of divine kingship and a prelude to the new myth of the machine.

>In doing justice to the immense power and scope of Divine Kingship both as myth and active institution I have so far left one important aspect for closer examination, its greatest and most durable contribution-the invention of the archetypal machine. This extraordinary invention proved in fact to be the earliest working model for all later complex machines, though the emphasis slowly shifted from the human operatives to the more reliable mechanical parts. The unique act of kingship-was to assemble the man power and to discipline the organization that made possible the performance of work on a scale never attempted before.

>In doing justice to the immense power and scope of Divine Kingship both as myth and active institution I have so far left one important aspect for closer examination, its greatest and most durable contribution- the invention of the archetypal machine. This extraordinary invention proved in fact to be the earliest working model for all later complex machines, though the emphasis slowly shifted from the human operatives to the more reliable mechanical parts. The unique act of kingship was to assemble the man power and to discipline the organization that made possible the performance of work on a scale never attempted before.

>Because the components of the machine, even when it functioned as a completely integrated whole, were necessarily separate in space, I shall for certain purposes call it the 'invisible machine': when utilized to perform work on highly organized collective enterprises, I shall call it the 'labor machine': when applied to acts of collective coercion and destruction, it deserves the title, used even today, the 'military machine.' But when all the components, political and economic, military, bureaucratic and royal, must be included, I shall usually refer to the 'megamachine': in plain words, the Big Machine. And the technical equipment derived from such a megamachine thence becomes 'megatechnics' as distinguished from the more modest and diversified modes of technology, which until our own century continued to perform the larger part of the daily work in the workshop and on the farm, sometimes with the help of power machinery.

>At its inception no inferior chief could organize the megamachine and set it in motion. And though the absolute assertion of royal power rested on supernatural sanction, kingship itself would not have prevailed so widely had these claims not in tum been ratified by the colossal achievements of the megamachine. That invention was the supreme feat of early civilization: a technological exploit which served as a model for all later forms of mechanical organization. This model was transmitted, sometimes with all its parts in good working condition, sometimes in a makeshift form, through purely human agents, for some five thousand years, before it was done over in a material structure that corresponded more closely to its own specifications, and was embodied in a comprehensive institutional pattern that covered every aspect of life.

>To understand the point of the machine's origin and its line of descent is to have a fresh insight into both the origins of our present over mechanized culture and the fate and destiny of modern man. We shall find that the original myth of the machine projected the extravagant hopes and wishes that have come to abundant fulfillment in our own age.

this is, in other words, kind of a thing.

>The mechanization of men had long preceded the mechanization of their working instruments, in the far more ancient order of ritual. But once conceived, this new mechanism spread rapidly, not just by being imitated in self-defense, but by being forcefully imposed by kings acting as only gods or the anointed representatives of the gods could act. Wherever it was successfully put together the megamachine multiplied the output of energy and performed labor on a scale that was never conceivable before. With this ability to concentrate immense mechanical forces, a new dynamism came into play, which overcame by the sheer impetus of its achievements the sluggish routines and the petty inhibitions of small-scale village culture.

>With the energies available through the royal machine, the dimensions of space and time were vastly enlarged: operations that once could hardly have been finished in centuries were now accomplished in less than a generation. On the level plains, man-made mountains of stone or baked clay, pyramids and ziggurats, arose in response to royal command: in fact the whole landscape was transformed, and bore in its strict boundaries and geometric shapes the impress of both a cosmic order and an inflexible human will. No complex power machines at all comparable to this mechanism were utilized on any scale until clocks and watermills and windmills swept over Western Europe from the fourteenth century of our era on.

>Why did this new mechanism remain invisible to the archeologist and the historian? For a simple reason already implied in our first definition: because it was composed solely of human parts and it possessed a definite functional structure only as long as the religious exaltation, the magical abracadabra and the royal commands that put it together were accepted as beyond human challenge by all the members of the society. Once the polarizing force of kingship was weakened, whether by death or defeat in battle, by skepticism or by a vengeful uprising, the whole machine would collapse. Then its parts would either regroup in smaller units (feudal or urban) or completely disappear, much in the way that a routed army does when the chain of command is broken.

>In fact these first collective machines were as subject to breakdown, were ultimately as frail and vulnerable as the theologico-magical conceptions that were essential to their performance. Hence those who commanded them were in a constant state of anxious tension--often with good reason, fearing heresy or treason from their near-equals and rebellions and reprisals on the part of the submerged masses. Without submissive faith and unqualified obedience to the royal will, transmitted by governors, generals, bureaucrats, taskmasters, the machine would never have been workable. When these attitudes could not be sustained, the megamachine collapsed.

>>11825064
This.
Hubris catches up to you, no matter how fast you think you are.

>From the beginning the human machine presented two aspects: one negative, coercive, and too often destructive; the other positive, life-promoting, constructive. Yet the second factors could not readily function unless the first were in some degree present. Though a primitive form of the military machine almost certainly came before the labor machine, it was the latter that achieved an incomparable perfection of performance, not alone in quantity of work done, but in the quality and complexity of its organized structures.

>The difficulty was to turn a random collection of human beings, detached from their family and community and their familiar occupations, each with a will or at least a memory of his own, into a mechanized group that could be manipulated at command. The secret of mechanical control was to have a single mind with a well-defined aim at the head of the organization, and a method of passing messages through a series of intermediate functionaries until they reached the smallest unit. Exact reproduction of the message and absolute compliance were both essential.

>This grand problem may well have been first worked out in quasi-military organizations in which a relatively small body of hunters, roughly disciplined to obey their leader, were addressed to the task of controlling a much larger body of unorganized peasants. At all events, the type of mechanism created never operated without a reserve of coercive force behind the word of command; and both the method and the structure have been passed on, almost without change, to all military organizations, as we now know them. Through the army, in fact, the standard model of the megamachine was transmitted from culture to culture.

>Action at a distance, through scribes and swift messengers, was one of the identifying marks of the new megamachine; and if the scribes formed the favored profession it was because this machine could not be effectively used without their constant service, to encode or decode the royal messages. "The scribe, he directeth every work that is in this land," an Egyptian New Kingdom composition tells us. In effect, they probably played a part not too dissimilar to that of the political commissars introduced into the Soviet Russian army. They made possible the constant 'report to political headquarters' essential for a centralized organization.

>If one single invention was necessary to make this larger mechanism operative for constructive tasks as well as for coercion, it was probably the invention of writing.

there will probably be a lot of 40k art ahead.

>>11874445
This but the sun is Nick Land.

>>11874445
i feel like i am being mischaracterized.
>but waddya gonna do
>get triggered! be triggered! you mischaracterized me, reeeeeee
>hm
>maybe not that tho

moving on:

>Two devices were essential to make the machine work: a reliable organization of knowledge, natural and supernatural; and an elaborate structure for giving orders, carrying them out, and following them through. The first was incorporated in the priesthood, without whose active aid the institution of divine kingship could not have come into existence: the second, in a bureaucracy. Both were hierarchical organizations at whose apex stood the high priest and the king. Without their combined efforts the power complex could not operate effectively. This condition remains true today, though the existence of automated factories and computer-regulated units conceals both the human components and the religious ideology essential even to current automation.

>What would now be called science was an integral part of the new machine system from the beginning. This orderly knowledge, which was based on cosmic regularities, flourished, as we have seen, with the cult of the sun: star-watching and calendar-making coincided with and supported the institution of kingship, even though no small part of the efforts of the priests and soothsayers was, in addition, devoted to interpreting the meaning of singular events such as the appearance of comets, eclipses of the sun or moon, or erratic natural phenomena such as the flight of birds or the state of a sacrificed animal's entrails.

>No king could move safely or effectively without the support of such organized 'higher knowledge,' any more than the Pentagon can move today without consulting its specialized scientists, technical experts, games theorists and computers-a new hierarchy supposedly less fallible than the entrail diviners, but, to judge by their gross miscalculations, not notably so.

>To be effective, this kind of knowledge must remain a secret priestly monopoly. If everyone had equal access to the sources of knowledge and to the system of interpretation, no one would believe in their infallibility, since their errors could then not be concealed. Hence the shocked protest of Ipu-wer against the revolutionaries who overthrew the Old Kingdom in Egypt was based on the fact that the "secrets of the temple lay unbared"; that is, they had made 'classified information' public. Secret knowledge is the key to any system of total control. Until printing was invented, the written word remained largely a class monopoly. Today the language of higher mathematics plus computerism has restored both the secrecy and the monopoly, with a consequent resumption of totalitarian control.

based crusty lewis

>Paradoxically, the monopoly of power brought about a monopoly of personality, too, for only the king was endowed with all the attributes of personality, both those incorporated in the communal group and those that, precisely at this period, it would seem, were slowly beginning to emerge in the human soul, which was now pecking through the social shell in which its embryonic existence had been spent.

>In the Sumerian deluge myth Ziusudra, the king (Noah's counterpart), is rewarded by the gods An and Enlil, not by a symbolic rainbow, but by being given eternal "life like a god." The desire for life without limits was part of the general lifting of limits which the first great assemblage of power by means of the megamachine brought about. Human weaknesses, above all the weakness of mortality, were both contested and defied.
But if the biological inevitability of death and disintegration mock the infantile fantasy of absolute power, which the human machine promised to actualize, life mocks at it even more. The notion of 'eternal life,' with neither conception, growth, fruition, nor decay-an existence as fixed, as sterilized, as loveless, as purposeless, as unchanging as that of a royal mummy-is only death in another form. What is this but a return to the state of arrest and fixation exhibited by the stable chemical elements that have not yet combined in sufficiently complex molecules to promote novelty and creativity? From the standpoint of human life, indeed of all organic existence, this assertion of absolute power was a confession of psychological immaturity-a radical failure to understand the natural processes of birth and growth, of maturation and death.

>Etana, in the Sumerian fable, mounts an eagle to go in search of a curative herb for his sheep when they are stricken with sterility. At this early date, the dream of human flight was born, or at least was recorded, though that dream still seemed so presumptuous that Etana, like Daedalus, was hurled to death as he neared his goal. Soon, however, kings were guarded by winged bulls; and they had at their command heavenly messengers who conquered space and time in order to bring commands and warnings to their earthly subjects. Rockets and television sets were already beginning secretly to germinate within this royal myth of the machine. The Genii of the Arabian Nights are only popular later continuations of these earlier forms of power-magic.

>Though many Egyptologists cannot bring themselves to accept the implications, John Maynard Keynes' notion of 'Pyramid Building,' as a necessary device for coping with the surplus labor force in an affluent society whose rulers are averse to social justice and economic equalization, was not an inept metaphor. This was an archetypal example of simulated productivity. Rocket-building is our exact modern equivalent.

>>11874521
greentext c-c-combo breaker
>balls
>oh well

>Kingship deliberately sought by means of the megamachine to bring the powers and glories of Heaven within human reach. And it was so far successful that the immense achievements of this archetypal unit for long surpassed, in technical proficiency and output, the important but modest contributions made by all other contemporary machines. Whether organized for labor or for war this new collective mechanism imposed the same kind of general regimentation, exercised the same mode of coercion and punishment, and limited the tangible rewards largely to the dominant minority who created and controlled the megamachine. Along with this, it reduced the area of communal autonomy, personal initiative, and self-regulation. Each standardized component, below the top level of command, was only part of a man, condemned to work at only part of a job and live only part of a life. Adam Smith's belated analysis of the division of labor, explaining changes that were taking place in the eighteenth century toward a more inflexible and dehumanized system, with greater productive efficiency, illuminates equally the earliest 'industrial revolution.'

>Henceforth, civilized society was divided roughly into two main classes: a majority condemned for life to hard labor, who worked not just for a sufficient living but to provide a surplus beyond their family or their immediate communal needs, and a 'noble' minority who despised manual work in any form, and whose life was devoted to the elaborate "performance of leisure," to use Thorstein Veblen's sardonic characterization. Part of the surplus went, to be just, to the support of public works that benefited all sections of the community; but far too large a share took the form of private display, luxurious material goods, and the ostentatious command of a large army of servants and retainers, concubines and mistresses. But in most societies perhaps the greatest portion of the surplus was drawn into the feeding, weaponing, and over-all operation of the military megamachine.

>The social pyramid established during the Pyramid Age in the Fertile Crescent continued to be the model for every civilized society, long after the building of these geometric tombs ceased to be fashionable. At the top stood a minority, swollen by pride and power, headed by the king and his supporting ministers, nobles, military leaders, and priests. This minority's main social obligation was control of the megamachine, in either its wealth-producing or its illth-producing form. Apart from this, their only burden was the 'duty to consume.' In this respect the oldest rulers were the prototypes of the style-setters and taste-makers of our own over-mechanized mass society.

'illth' is actually a word. seriously.

>Yet in the very act of countenancing destruction and massacre, war in all its disruptive spontaneity temporarily overcame the built-in limitations of the megamachine. Hence the sense of joyful release that so often has accompanied the outbreak of war, when the daily chains were removed and the maimed and dead to come were still to be counted. In the conquest of a country, or the taking of a city, the orderly virtues of civilization were turned upside down. Respect for property gave way to wanton destruction and robbery: sexual repression to officially encouraged rape: popular hatred for the ruling classes was cleverly diverted into a happy occasion to mutilate or kill foreign enemies.

>In short, the oppressor and the oppressed, instead of fighting it out within the city, directed their aggression toward a common goal-an attack on a rival city. Thus the greater the tensions and the harsher the daily repressions of civilization, the more useful war became as a safety valve. Finally, war performed another function that was even more indispensable, if my hypothetical connection between anxiety, human sacrifice, and war prove defensible. War provided its own justification, by displacing neurotic anxiety with rational fear in the face of real danger. Once war broke out, there was solid reason for apprehension, terror, and compensatory displays of courage.

>Patently, a chronic state of war was a heavy price to pay for the boasted benefits of 'civilization.' Permanent improvement could come only by exorcising the myth of divine kingship, demounting its too-powerful megamachine and abating its ruthless exploitation of man-power.

>Psychologically healthy people have no need to indulge fantasies of absolute power; nor do they need to come to terms with reality by inflicting self-mutilation and prematurely courting death. But the critical weakness of an over-regimented institutional structure-and almost by definition 'civilization' was over-regimented from the beginning-is that it does not tend to produce psychologically healthy people. The rigid division of labor and the segregation of castes produce unbalanced characters, while the mechanical routine normalizes-and rewards-those compulsive personalities who are afraid to cope with the embarrassing riches of life.

that's enough history. here's where the story starts to join up with land's thesis about capitalist time:

>Traced back to its origins, the curse of labor is the curse of the megamachine: a curse extended beyond the period of conscription to a whole lifetime. That curse gave rise to the compensatory dream of a Golden Age, part memory, part myth: the picture of a life when there was no harsh struggle or competition, when the wild animals meant no harm and even man was kind to his fellows. This dream first appears on an Akkadian tablet; and much later was transferred to the future, as an after-life in Heaven, when all work would cease, and everyone would enjoy an existence of sensuous beauty, material amplitude, and endless leisure: a replica in terms of mass consumption of all that actually took place in the great palaces and temples for whose expansive maintenance and further elevation the megamachine was first invented.

>This dream has haunted civilization throughout history, repeated with magical variations in a hundred fairy stories and popular myths, long before it took form in the modern slogan: 'Let automation abolish all work.' Often this dream was accompanied by another that sought to release mankind from the other curse that the megamachine had imposed upon the under lying population: the curse of poverty. The cornucopia of plenty, the blessed land where an inexhaustible supply of foods and goods came forth at a wave of the hand: in other words, the infantile contemporary heaven of an ever-expanding economy-and its end product, the affluent society. The curse of work was a real affliction for those who came under the rule of authoritarian technics. But the idea of abolishing all work, of transferring the skill of the hand without the imagination of the mind to a machine-that idea was only a slave's dream, and it revealed a desperate but unimaginative slave's hope; for it ignored the fact that work which is not confined to the muscles, but incorporates all the functions of the mind, is not a curse but a blessing. No one who has ever found his life-work and tasted its reward would entertain such a fantasy, for it would mean suicide.

>Thus the Benedictine monastery had within its own confines taken over the discipline and order that the great collective labor machine had originally introduced as an attribute of assertive temporal power. But at the same time the monastery had rationalized and humanized this discipline; for the monastery itself had not merely kept to the human scale- only twelve members were required to form one- but it had abandoned the once tightly organized complex of civilization: the small-scale division of labor; class exploitation; segregation; mass coercion and slavery; fixation for a lifetime in a single occupation or role; centralized control.

a brief aside here, lest i give the impression to anyone following the thread that i am somehow rooting for landian capital with a big foam finger and praying for the destruction of all monasteries: this is not the case, gents. land has, i suspect, a much dimmer view of the human condition. for him the point is capitalism and time, time and capitalism. personally monastic life seems pretty attractive to me, and in general i get the impression that wherever monasteries have popped up throughout civilization they have been a net bonus to the community, to say nothing of the psychological welfare of those who join them. and, oh yeah, there was that minor act of charitably keeping the intellectual heritage of antiquity under guard while western civilization was mainly handed over to the man on horseback.

i'm not against monasteries, and i'm not against religion either. i feel like this warrants mentioning. nor am i trying to oversimpify the mystery for my own selfish benefit. this is not my thing. true, i don't really know what my thing is, but i'm pretty sure it's not that. or if it is that it would come as a surprise to me. my more general project is an understanding of the hysteria of modern culture inasmuch as it is driven by economics and technology, because what manifests as culture or critique of ideology doesn't scratch where it itches as far as i'm concerned. i think civilization western and planetary is undergoing a pretty spectacular phase-shift overall in terms of our relationship to technology, among other things, and i've had to dig fairly deep and search fairly far abroad for answers that align with the mysterious shapes described by the butterflies in my stomach. and the story as such described by land, girard, and others paints a dim view of a great many things, but i've said before that i'm much less interested in critique of ideology than something more like *virtue.* and virtue has sort of gone missing in civilization today because we all seem mysteriously pressed for time. but rather than get angry or build one scapegoat or another - though i have certainly done no small amount of that, in my own way - i feel it's more interesting, perhaps, and more useful to try and look at the story from a different perspective: that is to say, the Cosmotech perspective, which i basically sing over and over like a demented wasteland bard, and borrowing from whatever books and thinkers i find as necessary.

i thought this warranted mentioning, just in case. i'm not trying to Slay God or wrap up the mystery in service to landian acceleration - really, i'm not. quite the opposite, in fact. i think the mystery is infinitely more beautiful than anything like marxist critique of ideology (or crusade).

for what it's worth. continuing onwards:

also, i should probably should have used this image for the previous post.

>The true solution for this difficulty, the monks had found by the eleventh century, was the invention and wider use of labor-saving machines. This began with the systematic adoption of prime movers like the horse powered treadmill, the watermill, and later the windmill. The invention of machines and their organization into large work-units went on together. The main features of this process of rationalization were elegantly embodied in the original building plans for the monastery of St. Gall, which have survived the dilapidation and destruction of the original complex of buildings. With the centralized administrative system introduced in the twelfth century by the Cistercians, it is noteworthy that new monasteries were built according to a standard plan.

>Monastic mechanization was itself part of an over-all rationalization, which embraced the entire technological process, and only in recent times has it been appraised at its full value. The changeover to free industry, based not on tools and craft processes alone, but greatly aided by labor freeing machines, began around the tenth century, and was first marked by a steady increase in the number of watermills in Europe.

>The Benedictine commitment to 'labor and prayer' had done more than take the ancient curse off work. For the productivity of this system established, likewise, the economic value of a methodically ordered life; and that moral was not lost on contemporary craftsmen and traders. The Venetian merchant, Louis Cornaro, in his classic essay on attaining longevity, took this regularity and abstemiousness to be the guarantee not only of a fruitful life but of financial prosperity. These 'Protestant' virtues long antedated Calvinism.

>What the monastery began, the medieval guilds carried through; for they not merely laid down a fresh basis for association in craft and trade, but they restored to work the esthetic and moral values, conditioned by religion, that governed the rest of their life. They, too, were autonomous corporate bodies, which established a common discipline for the performance of work and the regulation of wages and prices.

>This transformation was decisive: so there is no need to exaggerate it. The integration of work with moral regulations, esthetic expression, and social security, was never completed in the guilds, any more than in the monasteries. As wealth accumulated, particularly in the wholesale trades and in mining and shipping ventures, the economic gap between the poor and the wealthy guilds grew.

so this is why you read about the first industrial revolution actually happening in the middle ages. land notes it also.

>Now, the desire for money, Thomas Aquinas pointed out, knows no limits, whereas all natural wealth, represented in the concrete form of food, clothing, furniture, houses, gardens, fields, has definite limits of production and consumption, fixed by the nature of the commodity and the organic needs and capacities of the user. The idea that there should be no limits upon any human function is absurd: all life exists within very narrow limits of temperature, air, water, food; and the notion that money alone, or power to command the services of other men, should be free of such definite limits is an aberration of the mind.

>In the ideal capitalist ego, the miserly hoarding of money blended with the zealous acquisition of illimitable riches, just as the abstemious habits of the monk combined with the adventurous activity of the soldier. The new capitalists deserved in large measure the title later bestowed on them, 'Merchant Adventurers'; and at an early period these conflicting yet complementary strands of inheritance came together in the order of Knights Templars, those warrior-bankers of the Middle Ages. So, too, it was in no defiance of the new capitalist spirit that the trading posts of the great Hansa towns were in fact run as monastic enclaves, under a strict military discipline.

>This combination of traits was in due course transmitted to the scientific ideology of the seventeenth century: a readiness to entertain daring hypotheses, a willingness to dismember organic complexities, while subjecting every new theoretic insight to cautious observation and experimental test. Despite their different origins and their seemingly incompatible aims, the monk, the soldier, the merchant, and the new natural philosophers or experimental scientists were more closely united than they realized.

>But at the same time capitalism, in satisfying its insatiable desire for pecuniary riches, took over and translated into its own special terms the economy of abundance that had originally been the work-and the mark of divine kingship. The actual increase in productivity brought an often happy release from the nagging constraints of natural poverty and economic backwardness; and it prompted a steadily growing revolt against the ascetic inhibitions of orthodox Christianity, which had been easy to popularize in a Time of Troubles when no tempting alternatives were available, but now seemed gratuitous and needlessly life-denying.

>The capitalist scheme of values in fact transformed five of the seven deadly sins of Christianity-pride, envy, greed, avarice, and lust-into positive social virtues, treating them as necessary incentives to all economic enterprise; while the cardinal virtues, beginning with love and humility, were rejected as 'bad for business,' except in the degree that they made the working class more docile and more amenable to cold-blooded exploitation.

technocommerical-monastic story-time with lewis mumford is just so cozy.

>Werner Sombart observed that if he were pressed to give a date for the inauguration of capitalism, he would say that the publication of Leonardo Pisano's 'Liber Abbaci,' the first popular treatise on arithmetic, would be that date, A.D. 1202. Any such single starting point would be challengeable; one might cite a score of equally critical moments. But one of the most important traits of the new capitalism, its concentration on abstract quantities, was indeed furthered by such instruction. The new form of universal accountancy isolated from the tissue of events just those factors that could be judged on an impersonal, quantitative scale. Counting numbers began here and in the end numbers alone counted. This was ultimately a more significant contribution of capitalism than any of the actual goods the merchant bought and sold. For only when the habit of using mathematical abstractions became ingrained in a dominant part of the community could the physical sciences resume the place they had first occupied in the great trading cities of Ionic Greece. Again, this connection was not accidental.

>Wherever the capitalist spirit took hold, people became familiar with the abstractions of the counting house: timing, weighing, and measuring, in ever more exact amounts, became the mark of this whole regime. The change was not spontaneous, but the result of deliberate intention and persistent indoctrination. From the thirteenth century on, the grammar school, with its fundamental courses in reading, writing, and arithmetic, inculcated the elementary symbols for long-distance buying and selling, for making contracts, for book-keeping and bill-rendering. The need for reliable information and careful forecasts, in order to trade in commodities not seen till delivered, furthered the appreciation of quantitative appraisals in every department: not merely just weights and measures, but accurate astronomical observations in navigation.

>The impersonal, bureaucratic order of the counting house vied with monastic and military order in laying the foundations for the inflexible discipline and impersonal regularity that has now gradually extended itself to every aspect of institutional life in Western civilization. This order has been smoothly translated into automatic machines and computers, even more incapable of exercising humane judgement and discretion than a trained clerk. The new bureaucracy devoted to managerial organization and coordination again became a necessary adjunct to all large-scale, long distance enterprises: book-keeping and record-keeping set the pace, in standardized uniformity, for all the other parts of the machine. The failure to reckon with this mathematical aspect of mechanization, as a prelude to industrial inventions, has resulted in a warped and one-sided picture of modern technics.

>In sum, where capitalism prospered, it established three main canons for successful economic enterprise: the calculation of quantity, the observation and regimentation of time ('Time is Money'), and the concentration on abstract pecuniary rewards. Its ultimate values- Power, Profit, Prestige derive from these sources and all of them can be traced back, under the flimsiest of disguises, to the Pyramid Age. The first produced the universal accountancy of profit and loss; the second ensured productive efficiency in men as well as machines; the third introduced a driving motive into daily life, equivalent on its own base level to the monk's search for an eternal reward in Heaven. The pursuit of money became a passion and an obsession: the end to which all other ends were means.

>But it was in science that the abstractions of capitalism came in the long run to play an even greater role and to bring an even greater reward. When the Royal Society was founded in London in the middle of the seventeenth century, merchants and bankers took a leading part in it, not merely as providers of funds, but as active experimenters in the new science. The notion that every item of exchange must be accounted for and that 'the books must balance' preceded by centuries Robert von Mayer's doctrine of the conservation of energy.

>Thus account-keeping and time-keeping had not merely been secularized by the sixteenth century, but they had ensured that such sacrifices as this regimen exacted were attached to the promise of a tangible reward. Under kingship, rewards for the privileged classes had not flowed directly from their services, but were dependent upon the caprices of the ruler and were often ill-proportioned to either the effort expended or the value of the result. But under the new accountancy of capitalism, failure was directly penalized by loss and even more significantly success, tied to efficiency and foresight, was abundantly rewarded.

>Capitalism, in other words, relied on the method of conditioning used successfully by animal trainers to ensure obedience to orders, and to secure the performance of difficult feats. And whereas kingship had emphasized punishment, a method that has a definite limit in the death of the individual too severely punished, there was no limit under early capital ism to the possibility of reward.

one gets the feeling that heidegger would have had a visible facial tic/eye twitch whenever he heard 'time is money.' but if a young monastic german version of land heard this he would have gotten this insane gleam in his eye. time-traveling monastic nick was always like that.

>Yet the conception of new kinds of power-machines fascinated various minds from the thirteenth century on, notably Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, and Campanella-all, be it noted, monks. Dreams of horseless carriages, flying machines, apparatus for effecting instantaneous communication, or transmuting the elements, multiplied. These fantasies were no doubt incited by such rudimentary machines as were already in operation: for there must have been a moment when the first windmill or the first automaton moving by clockwork seemed as marvellous as the first dynamo or the first 'talking machine' less than a century ago.

>Though a whole literature of utopias soon followed in the wake of More's picture of an ideal commonwealth, it is significant that the only one whose direct effects can be traced was the mere fragment of a utopia left behind by Francis Bacon: for it was his 'The New Atlantis' that first canvassed the possibility of a joint series of operations that would combine a new system of scientific investigation with a new technology. At a moment when the bitter struggle within Christianity between contentious doctrines and sects had come to a stalemate, the machine itself seemed to offer an alternative way of reaching Heaven. The promise of material abundance on earth, through exploration, organized conquest, and invention, offered a common objective to all classes.

>But apart from the direct effects of the printing press upon the invention of later machines, it had a social result that was perhaps even more important: for almost at a stroke, the cheap and rapid production of books broke down the ancient class monopoly of knowledge, particularly of the kind of accurate, abstract knowledge, of mathematical operations and physical events, that had long been the monopoly of a small professional class. The printed book made all knowledge progressively available to all those who learned to read even if poor: and one of the results of this democratization was that knowledge itself, as contrasted with legend, dogmatic tradition, or poetic fantasy, became a subject of intense independent interest, spreading by means of the printed book into every department of life, and immensely increasing the number of minds, past, present, and future, having intercourse with each other.

>The enrichment of the collective human mind, through the printing and circulation of books, is comparable only to that linking together of individual brains and experiences through the invention of discursive language. The increase of the scope of scientific discovery and the tempo of mechanical invention can both be largely attributed to the printed book, and from the seventeenth century on, to the printed scientific paper and review. Changes that might have taken centuries to achieve through the circulation of a limited number of manuscripts took place almost over night through the agency of print.

>The third key invention, the clock, became the source of a whole line of other inventions which completed in the realm of time and motion what the magnifying glass had done in space. The mechanical clock dates from the fourteenth century, though parts of the mechanism, and the process of time-measurement itself had come in with the earlier water-clock and the astronomical armillary, which followed the movement of the planets and the seasons. The machine that mechanized time did more than regulate the activities of the day: it synchronized human reactions, not with the rising and setting sun, but with the indicated movements of the clock's hands: so it brought exact measurement and temporal control into every activity, by setting an independent standard whereby the whole day could be laid out and subdivided.

>In the sixteenth century the tower clock in the late medieval market place, which struck the hours, moved into the upper-class home on the mantel shelf, and by the nineteenth century, reduced to the size of a watch it became part of the human costume: exposed or pocketed. Punctuality, ceasing to be "the courtesy of kings" became a necessity in daily affairs in those countries where mechanization was taking command. The measurement of space and time became an integral part of the system of control that Western man spread over the planet.

>Karl Marx was one of the first to understand the place of the clock as the archetypal model for all later machines: in a letter to Friedrich Engels in 1863 he observed that "the clock is the first automatic machine applied to practical purposes; the whole theory of production and regular motion was developed through it." The italics are his and he did not exaggerate; but the influence of the clock went far beyond the factory, for not only were some of the most important mechanical problems in transmitting and governing motion worked out in clockworks, but the clock, by its increasing success in achieving accuracy, crowned by the invention of the ship's chronometer in the eighteenth century, made it the model for all instruments of precision.

>The machine, 'advanced' thinkers began to hold, not merely served as the ideal model for explaining and eventually controlling all organic activities, but its wholesale fabrication and its continued improvement were what alone could give meaning to human existence. Within a century or two, the ideological fabric that supported the ancient megamachine had been reconstructed on a new and improved model. Power, speed, motion, standardization, mass production, quantification, regimentation, precision, uniformity, astronomical regularity, control, above all control-these be came the passwords of modem society in the new Western style.

what the fuck, there's an image limit too? i didn't account for that. i can't sing the Saga of Capitalism without images!

>twf you have become a monastic one-man-band self-flagellating Not Catholic/accelerationist passion-play
>See The Incredible Non-Man
>Hear His Piercing Wail

yes, yes, this is the future i imagined for myself.

hm. well, that's an interesting enough place to finish for tonight, i suppose, but...i had so much more greentext and tumblr art! and shitposting! ah well. well, i'll pause for now.

okay, one last question then before i call it a night.

do you guys want to continue this thread? it's been up for a week and a half, which is pretty impressive, and if you include the three previous Cosmotech threads i think it's nearly a month. a month! i estimate i that i have twenty or so more mumford posts with greentext along these lines + art to bring the story up to the present day, which would bring us up to near enough the bump limit to give this thing a respectable send-off to the archives. unfortunately i didn't count on there being an image cap as well, so i could link to a new thread from here and continue the rest of the sequence. it's not much, but it's pretty neat. of course, you could just read Myth of the Machine for yourself, but i'm happy to post excerpts as well.

conversely, i could just let the thing go off to the realm of slow-moving hegelian spirits in the thread afterlife of warosu. i don't know how many anons have been bumping this thread over the past week or so, but it's been sincerely appreciated. but i don't want anyone to feel that they have to keep this thing going, unless ofc you find it interesting and want to read more, in which case i'm happy to continue.

but if i am going to continue, i would need to be able to add images, because, you know, a e s t h e t i c s &c. so i'll leave it up to you guys. the Cosmotech thread has had a pretty marvelous run, if we are winding down our fourth installment (and we are). i'll link the three previous chapters in the event that anyone wants to peruse them.

>>/lit/thread/S11733072
>>/lit/thread/S11778448
>>/lit/thread/S11803295

frankly i've had a whale of a time and i hope you guys have had one also and that this has been illuminating or edifying in some sense. so if you want more - and this next one would be pretty much limited to the remaining parts of Myth of the Machine that i think are relevant - we can continue that in a new thread, or call a halt here and begin the Self-Flagellating Dance of Victory (as opposed to the Self-Flagellating Dance of Confusion and Bewilderment, although they do look similar to the untrained eye).

i'll leave it to the sage judgment of the /lit/ mimetosphere. it's all good with me either way. so until then! as always, may what is playing you make it to level-2.

>>11874993
I would like to continue the thread if you would be so kind Girard. This is all for now, more later.

bump

Hey Girardfans, I do still want to keep this thread alive, but there is also a new thread by someone that is just devoted to Whitehead. Figured people might be interested, so here you go everyone! >>11875938

Come on 300 is close guys!

>>11875386
awesome!

>>11876095
P&R is an incredible work. of the many trajectories or futures for acceleration - if it were a SMAC-style universe - Team Whitehead would be one of the good guys. it doesn't have fun of land et al but that has its benefits also. whitehead is like a case study in compatibility between art, science and philosophy that D&G talk about.

>>11876898
right? and the thing is, i have enough greentext + Spooky Aesthetics on deck to take us the rest of the way there. and the last lines of vol II of Myth of the Machine are just perfect. but i forgot to take the image limit into account!

hitting the bump limit is a kind of an achievement for any thread, and i'm super-pleased that this one got as near to it as it did. and that's four in a row, if anyone is counting -
>i am counting
>yes
>i am that petty
>these things matter to me
- and i am including #3 as well, even with the plot twist of having it moved to /his/. nor is it lost on me that in quoting mumford i am now flirting with doom once again, b/c mumford is talking history and humanity...but what makes him important is his connection of *technology* to *imperial culture* in the anthropological sense. his thesis about the megamachine being a part of a phase-shift in early culture is stupidly important. land's thesis about capital and synthetic time having its roots in the middle ages (again, tho, the best treatment of this is in anna greenspan's work, so really it's hats off to her here) is also repeated here. or should we say, mumford got there first!

so i've got a document opened up on my laptop with lots more stuff from him that i think is relevant, but perhaps it is more /his/tory than /lit/. so, i'm not really sure what the right move is.

i would like to emphasize one thing. my aim (although it's something that has only sort of occurred to me in the process of writing them) isn't either to a) Settle The Score With God or b) cheer the downfall of western civilization. the rage virus of today is driven, i believe, by economic and technological changes at the bottom, but what you see on the news is only the tip of the iceberg. the full story of how we got from There to Here is a long one, and i've mostly focused on a loop that runs from hegel to land, with Scenic View-stops along the way for major writers in between. it's a kind of philosophical itinerary, not a manifesto. my hope is that if some understanding of this process developing both technologically *and* aesthetically - that is to say, culturally - is achieved or synthesized a more nuanced discussion about things can take place that doesn't always lead back to girardian mimetics and the "ironic" Win/Game Over screen.

as far as i'm concerned this thread has been massive winrar, so shout-outs to everyone who bumped it along the way. it's been a sincere pleasure. 300 is a sexy number, but it's an arbitrary one, and i forgot about image caps. i hope you have enjoyed Nick Land's Wild Ride once again.

>>11877059
You can always just link to images until part 5 comes out

>>11877094
i like putting the images in myself tho. sometimes it's like making a mini-movie. a good chunk of greentext + the right aesthetic is just too much fun.

i'm especially fond of this one:
>>11856591

>flashes of silent lightning
>that flickering neon and time-lapsed streets
>hnng

>>11877140
Girard movies when? Aww guess I'll just wait till part 5 then so I have something to follow today

>>11877297
>girardfag productions
i mean in terms of movies i actually make myself, and that aren't just tinkering with the means of semiotic production on 4chan, this will never happen, sadly. just little mini-moments i am kind of proud of discovering, accidentally.
>and shout-outs to you, leibnizbro, for getting me to read the monadology once again, even in this rather cursory way. leibniz is fascinating
>also to the anon who posted stengers' books and keyed me in to the supreme basedness of ANW
>in general and always, all glory to the /lit/ mimetosphere & other anons who have bumped this thread and indulged my schizorambling tendencies. very sincerely anons, ty kindly

in terms of films i really like, pic rel and seven samurai (kurosawa) are pretty much always the 1 and 1a of my list. seeing clips from this re-used in Alpha Centauri was just gravy.

>image limit reached
>gagharahrrghagfarbrl
>sigh. okay, here's the link

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51gvCZ7N9CL._SY445_.jpg

this whole 'image limit reached' thing is really a pain in the butt.

as for Cosmotech 5 it's really just a question of whether or not it risks getting moved to /his/ or not. but still, there are perhaps enough links and other resources to make it useful, plus the AAA-mega (>>11871476). i guess i should probably make a mega-archive of my own at some point and upload it at some point also. for stuff referenced in >>11835198 and >>11835482. there would be more books in it than just those ones i have listed: all of baudrillard, for instance, D&G, heidegger, et al. the books listed are major ones that sum up or really communicate the ideas of these authors, but a true archive would include all of their relevant other stuff as well. and there would be a larger section for history also. mumford also:

>Unfortunately, once an economy is geared to expansion, the means rapidly turn into an end and "the going becomes the goal."

there is a lot more to discuss in future Cosmotech. here's a sampler:

>Cosmodrama, biodrama, technodrama, politodrama, autodrama—to use Patrick Geddes’s terms—provide the scenario and setting of human existence. And if in this study of ‘The Myth of the
Machine’ I have emphasized the technodrama, it is not because I have accepted the technocratic belief that the command of nature is man’s most important task, but because I regard technology as a formative part of human culture as a whole. As such, technics has been deeply modified at
every stage of its development by dreams, wishes, impulses, religious motives that spring directly, not from the practical needs of daily life, but from the recesses of man’s unconscious. It is in the human mind that these dramas take form; and it is there that they culminate from time to time in flashes that suddenly light up the wide landscape of human existence.

>>11877337
reformatting that so that a) it doesn't look like roadkill and b) it's fucking on-point.

>Cosmodrama, biodrama, technodrama, politodrama, autodrama—to use Patrick Geddes’s terms—provide the scenario and setting of human existence. And if in this study of ‘The Myth of the Machine’ I have emphasized the technodrama, it is not because I have accepted the technocratic belief that the command of nature is man’s most important task, but because I regard technology as a formative part of human culture as a whole. As such, technics has been deeply modified at every stage of its development by dreams, wishes, impulses, religious motives that spring directly, not from the practical needs of daily life, but from the recesses of man’s unconscious. It is in the human mind that these dramas take form; and it is there that they culminate from time to time in flashes that suddenly light up the wide landscape of human existence.

deleuze writes about this, about baroque reality and illusion:

>For some time now the idea of an infinite universe has been hypothesized, a universe that has lost all centre as well as any figure that could be attributed to it; but the essence of the Baroque is that it is given unity, through a projection that emanates from a summit as a point of view. For some lime the world has been understood on a theatrical basis, as a dream, an illusion - as Harlequin's costume, as Leibniz would say.

>But the essence of the Baroque entails neither falling into nor emerging from illusion but rather realizing something in illusion itself, or of tying it to a spiritual presence that endows its spaces and fragments with a collective unity. The prince of Hamburg, and all of Kleist's characters, are not so much Romantic as they are Baroque heroes. Prey to the giddiness of minute perceptions, they endlessly reach presence in illusion, in vanishment, in swooning, or by converting illusion into presence: Penthesilea-Theresa?

>The Baroque artists know well that hallucination does not feign presence, but that presence is hallucinatory.

but tech isn't an illusion. culture is simulacral, even Spectacle, but it's not all *fake.* put another way, perhaps what is required of us is a more open-handed view of the process. as lewis says:

>You cannot go on ‘explaining away’ for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the win- dow should be transparent, because the street or gar- den beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.

equilibrium, in a word. process and reality.

>>11877356
the question here is about technology and its relationship to *time.* because we are all mortal beings, and we live in a relatively free society, how we choose to spend our time is ultimately up to us.

but the big thinkers of philosophy become truly Big, imho, when they start to talk about what makes time what it is. of course we can take our cues from science and physics also, but unless i am mistaken the big philosophers are still compatible-ish with our scientific understandings of time, or our cultural and psychological reactions to discovery, and so on.

one of the big questions - two of them, rather - becomes, What Is History? related: What Is The Future? spinoza, kant, hegel, marx, nietzsche, heidegger, whitehead, D&G and land all venture some pretty interesting questions about this subject. and one of the major themes would be, to what degree is our understanding of history subordinate to mass movements in culture, developments in technology, and so on. what is the right way to live?

and there are no real or definitive answers to these things: everybody has the right, perhaps even the moral obligation, to live however they would like. i tend to skew a little more towards the fatalistic, in a sense, if only because i tend to see history as being in a kind of a runaway process at the moment and driven by market forces related to technocapital. and yet, at the same time, i think these things are not only driving us off a cliff, the reaction-responses we produce to these are only making things worse, making people more hysterical and outraged, and inclined to look for scapegoats. i can't imagine a time when girard would ever not be relevant to these kinds of things, but if there was ever a time when he would be relevant, that time is certainly now. scapegoats are everywhere today, and neither the stridently marxist nor anti-marxist philosophers have any answers to these kinds of questions. land is always fascinating for having turned the question about marxist capital into a question about the metaphysics of time-production itself, but his politics also go places that not everyone wants to go to. he is truly fascinating reading, tho. time-travel is his thing, and time ever since Kant (or earlier, if you follow mumford's line of thinking) has been the question of questions.

so my hope for any good Cosmotech thread would be like that. b/c maybe after reading a bit it's possible to feel lost, at the end of time. wat do?
>well, you need a better place than just this, with one random old guy and a gas lantern, for a start at least

image:
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/A6OKNEruBD4/maxresdefault.jpg

>>11877429
the thing that land does better than most is his idea of *cyclicity.* true, you get this in nietzsche as well, the vicious circle. but land isn't really a nietzschean. what i think he does, and which really transformed my view, was to see something within postmodernity that changed the way i looked at things: in a word, repetition and automation.

true, this is there in hegel as well. the closing chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit alludes to this similar process as well, that historically what has been done before will happen again, and so on. hegel is truly some wild stuff, but marx forever changed the way we look at his writing, and poststructuralism in its turn forever changed the way we look at marx. land borrowed no small amount from deleuze to change the way we understand postmodernity, and in falling in love with cybernetics and technocapital produced something really new in philosophy - although, as i have indicated, he doesn't do this entirely alone, and the larger historical and intellectual context matters. it is entirely possible that what he is doing can be called a kind of anti-humanist return to hegel (although no doubt to posit something like this is to deprive hegel himself of precisely what it is that makes him interesting).

but cyclicity matters in this way. technology, in other words, may have its own form of dialectics, as a kind of self-contained process going on under the hood - way, way under the hood - of what we are calling culture. and his intensely hermetic meditations on the void are fascinating to read for this reason. given that he is still alive and still working, and that a lot of other things are happening atm in culture that are liable to continue to add new twists to the plot (social credit, anyone? bitcoin? whatever the fuck boston dynamics is working on?) it is way too soon to say that history is dead in anything like a fukuyama sense (which nobody really believes anymore anyways).

girard always makes sense in terms of mimetic shit-flinging. culture wars of shock and outrage don't really interest me so much: even hegel says that antigone is basically forever in that regard. land too even talks about the power of Oedipal myth in his book on templexity. there are a lot of ways to get these philosophers in the same room together and talking productively about what are very similar issues.

my own thing is really only to synthesize some patterns or themes and produce a kind of up-to-date story or introduction to these things. like many i kind of thought philosophy was just dead after postmodernity and that was the end of things. but i think thinking in these ways is exactly what inclines people to militarism, to wanting to Smash Something or Resist Something or so on rather than understand how we got to this point. and mumford has turned out to be a guy very much after my own heart, the last chapter of Myth of the Machine vol 2 is really stuff i feel also. i can post some of it here.

>>11877470
>“When from our present advanced standpoint,” [William James] observed, “we look back upon past stages of human thought, we are amazed that a universe which appears to us of so vast and mysterious a complication should ever have seemed to anyone so little and plain a thing. . . . There is nothing in the spirit and principles of science that need hinder science from dealing successfully with a world in which personal forces are the starting point of new effects. The only form of thing we directly encounter, the only experience that we concretely have, is our own personal life. The only complete category of our thinking, our professors of philosophy tell us, is the abstract elements of that. And this systematic denial on science’s part of the personality as a condition of events, this rigorous belief that in its own essential and innermost nature our world is a strictly impersonal world, may conceivably, as the whirligig of time goes round, prove to be the very defect that our descendents will be most surprised at in our boasted science, the omission that to their eyes will most tend to make it look perspectiveless and short.”

>The whirligig of time has gone round; and what James applied to science applies equally to our compulsive, depersonalized, power-driven
technology. We now have sufficient historic perspective to realize that this seemingly self-automated mechanism has, like the old ‘automatic’ chess
player, a man concealed in the works; and we know that the system is not directly derived from nature as we find it on earth or in the sky, but has
features that at every point bear the stamp of the human mind, partly rational, partly cretinous, partly demonic. No outward tinkering will improve
this overpowered civilization, now plainly in the final and fossilized stage of its materialization: nothing will produce an effective change but the fresh transformation that has already begun in the human mind.

>Those who are unable to accept William James’ perception that the human person has always been the “starting point of new effects” and that
the most solid-seeming structures and institutions must collapse as soon as the formative ideas that have brought them into existence begin to dissolve, are the real prophets of doom. On the terms imposed by technocratic society, there is no hope for mankind except by ‘going with’ its plans for accelerated technological progress, even though man’s vital organs will all be cannibalized in order to prolong the megamachine’s meaningless existence. But for those of us who have thrown off the myth of the machine, the next move is ours: for the gates of the technocratic prison will open automatically, despite their rusty ancient hinges, as soon as we choose to walk out.

but the net is vast and infinite, and walking out may the same as walking in, like a revolving door...

image:
http://rekall.me/post/174492756075

>>11877493
>“When from our present advanced standpoint,” [William James] observed, “we look back upon past stages of human thought, we are amazed that a universe which appears to us of so vast and mysterious a complication should ever have seemed to anyone so little and plain a thing. . . . There is nothing in the spirit and principles of science that need hinder science from dealing successfully with a world in which personal forces are the starting point of new effects. The only form of thing we directly encounter, the only experience that we concretely have, is our own personal life. The only complete category of our thinking, our professors of philosophy tell us, is the abstract elements of that. And this systematic denial on science’s part of the personality as a condition of events, this rigorous belief that in its own essential and innermost nature our world is a strictly impersonal world, may conceivably, as the whirligig of time goes round, prove to be the very defect that our descendents will be most surprised at in our boasted science, the omission that to their eyes will most tend to make it look perspectiveless and short.”

>The whirligig of time has gone round; and what James applied to science applies equally to our compulsive, depersonalized, power-driven technology. We now have sufficient historic perspective to realize that this seemingly self-automated mechanism has, like the old ‘automatic’ chess player, a man concealed in the works; and we know that the system is not directly derived from nature as we find it on earth or in the sky, but has features that at every point bear the stamp of the human mind, partly rational, partly cretinous, partly demonic. No outward tinkering will improve this overpowered civilization, now plainly in the final and fossilized stage of its materialization: nothing will produce an effective change but the fresh transformation that has already begun in the human mind.

>Those who are unable to accept William James’ perception that the human person has always been the “starting point of new effects” and that the most solid-seeming structures and institutions must collapse as soon as the formative ideas that have brought them into existence begin to dissolve, are the real prophets of doom. On the terms imposed by technocratic society, there is no hope for mankind except by ‘going with’ its plans for accelerated technological progress, even though man’s vital organs will all be cannibalized in order to prolong the megamachine’s meaningless existence. But for those of us who have thrown off the myth of the machine, the next move is ours: for the gates of the technocratic prison will open automatically, despite their rusty ancient hinges, as soon as we choose to walk out.

but the net is vast and infinite, and walking out may the same as walking in, like a revolving door...

image:
http://rekall.me/post/174492756075

>The Roman Empire in the East won a new lease on life for a thousand years by coming to terms with Christianity. If the Power System is to continue in existence as a working partner in a more organic complex dedicated to the renewal of life, it will only be if its dynamic leaders, and those larger groups that they influence, have undergone a profound change of heart and mind, of ideal and purpose, as great as that which for so long arrested the decay of the Eastern empire established in Byzantium. But it must be remembered that this intermixture of Roman and Christian institutions was achieved at the expense of creativity. So until the disintegration of our own society has gone even further, there is reason to look for a more vigorous life-promoting solution. Whether such a response is possible depends upon an unknown factor: how viable are the formative ideas that are now in the air, and how ready are our contemporaries to undertake the efforts and sacrifices that are essential for human renewal? There are no purely technological answers.

>To describe even in the barest outline the multitude of changes necessary to turn the power complex into an organic complex, and a money economy into a life economy, lies beyond the capacities of any individual mind...genuine novelty is unpredictable, except in such features as are recognizable in another form in past cultures. But even more because the materialization of the organic ideology, though already well begun, will take as long to replace the existing establishment as the power system itself required to displace the feudal and municipal and ecclesiastical economy of the Middle Ages. The first evidences of such a transformation will present themselves in an inner change; and inner changes often strike suddenly and work swiftly. Each one of us, as long as life stirs in him, may play a part in extricating himself from the power system by asserting his primacy as a person in quiet acts of mental or physical withdrawal—in gestures of non conformity, in abstentions, restrictions, inhibitions, which will liberate him from the domination of the pentagon of power.

>Though no immediate and complete escape from the ongoing power system is possible, least of all through mass violence, the changes that will restore autonomy and initiative to the human person all lie within the province of each individual soul, once it is roused. Nothing could be more damaging to the myth of the machine, and to the dehumanized social order it has brought into existence, than a steady withdrawal of interest, a slowing down of tempo, a stoppage of senseless routines and mindless acts. And has not all this in fact begun to happen?

image:
http://rekall.me/image/162467892929

neo-china and total social credit are one possible future. some combination of the thirty years' war + 40K is another. but maybe just cultivating enlightenment in your own way, however you can...that works too. there are more ways to Exit than just politics.

>>11877625
I always wonder who your greentexts are citing

>If machines alone were sufficient to produce machines, if technological systems automatically proliferated by reasons of inherent forces similar to those that account for the growth and development of organisms, the outlook for mankind in the near future would be even blacker than that pictured either in Samuel Butler’s quoted letter or in Henry Adams’ later analysis. But if the power system itself was, to begin with, a product of the human mind—the materialization of ideas that had organic and human roots—then the future holds many open possibilities, some of which lie entirely outside the range of our existing institutions. If the fashionable technocratic prescriptions for extending the present system of control to the whole organic world are not acceptable to rational men, they need not be accepted. The pressing human task today is not to endure further misapplications of the power system, but to detach ourselves from it, and cultivate our subjective resources as never before.

>In a hundred different places, the marks of such de-materialization and etherialization are already visible...if I dare to foresee a promising future other than that which the technocrats have been confidently extrapolating, it is because I have found by personal experience that it is far easier to detach oneself from the system and to make a selective use of its facilities than the promoters of the Affluent Society would have their docile subjects believe.

>When the moment comes to replace power with plenitude, compulsive external rituals with internal, self-imposed discipline, depersonalization with individuation, automation with autonomy, we shall find that the necessary change of attitude and purpose has been going on beneath the surface during the last century, and the long buried seeds of a richer human culture are now ready to strike root and grow, as soon as the ice breaks up and the sun reaches them. If that growth is to prosper, it will draw freely on the compost from many previous cultures. When the power complex
itself becomes sufficiently etherialized, its formative universal ideas will become usable again, passing on its intellectual vigor and its discipline, once applied mainly to the management of things, to the management and enrichment of man’s whole subjective existence. As long as man’s life prospers there is no limit to its possibilities, no terminus to its creativity.

this is all before deleuze, btw, or baudrillard, or land, and many others. it was before the 1960s, in short, when the true explosion of creativity happens (and is sort of infinitely reified during the 1990s, in an extended day-after comedown + delirium). and now we are where we are today: essentially, feeling the mysterious craving-itch that we associate, perhaps, with having had a little too much fun with any intoxicant.

image:
http://rekall.me/post/173855856889

>>11877657
these later ones are from lewis mumford, the myth of the machine, vol I and II.