/lit/ - Literature

>>12213686
In the 90s before going full cybernetic accelerationist Land wrote a tortured book on Georges Bataille called The Thirst for Annihilation which takes nihilism to its absolute extreme.

In that context you can see why Land clings to an ideology that invites the destruction of everything human.

>>12213713
Could it be read without reading Bataille? If not, what Bataille should I read?

>>12213747
It probably can be read without reading Bataille but you obviously wouldn't get the most out of it.

'Story of the Eye' and 'Literature and Evil' are just about sufficient to appreciate Land's book. No need to read the whole Bataille corpus.

>>12213686
he just wants your critique to actually be critique compatible with the 21C and not repressed puritanical virtue signal. in BTC he has something that represents both an object for such a critique as well as a model for critique itself.

the complete destruction of everything *stupid* is what he wants, less so than everything human. it just happens to be the case also that there is a lot of stupid that comes hardwired into being human.

C O N F U C I A N

>Whether folding the historical time line, or expanding a snail shell, the spiral synthesizes repetition and growth. It describes a cyclic escalation that escapes — or precedes — the antagonism between tradition and progress, elucidating restoration as something other than a simple return.

>This is a matter of ineluctable importance, because the history of modernity is rapidly becoming Chinese, and Chinese history is not meandering ‘wallpaper’ but Confucian Restoration, conforming to three great waves, each a turn of the spiral, or Gyre. Following China’s classical era, and the Song Dynasty rebirth of native philosophical tradition, the third Confucian epoch, or second Confucian Restoration, is underway today, coinciding exactly with the renaissance of Global Modernity (as ‘Modernity 2.0’). As future and past evolve — or involve — together, the time-spiral is our guide.

>>12213747
>what Bataille should I read?

The Accursed Share is a multi-volume collection of Bataille's economic and philosophic writings. I'd dip into that.

He's larping as what a Cioranist would be like, if such a thing existed.

>>12213686
>anyone who does not have a death wish to seek to put a break on capital by any means necessary

The future Land teams-up with is one of ineluctable transformation through time. Humanity doesn't all at once. You can ride this thing.

>>12213772
If the AI explosion happens all that is human will be relatively extremely stupid and unnecessary.

From the Thirst for Annihilation bibliography:

>In writing this book I have read almost nothing except for Bataille’s Oeuvres Complètes, supplemented only by those writers with whom I have had some previous intimacy, most important of whom are Kant and Nietzsche, but including also Sade, Freud, Marx, Boltzmann, Rimbaud, Miller, and a few others, amongst whom are such enemies as Aquinas, Hegel, and Derrida. More important by far than most of these names have been the saints, shamans, werewolves, vampires, and lunatics with whom I have communed, and whose names are absent from this text, even though their words have infested my own beyond extrication. It would be impolitic to make a selection—although I could easily do so—but sooner or later you will hear of them all from elsewhere. It is not necessarily any credit upon a writer for them to appear on the list that follows, crass cultural exigencies alone necessitate it.

Thoughts?

>>12213805
What would riding it look like? Singapore?

>>12213825

I think Singapore approximates what Land has in mind. Land wants cities open to the Outside; which is to say, open to spontaneous reorganization. That Singapore transformed so radically in so short a time hints at something to be desired.

>>12213772
"being human"
I think his critique doesn't locate a human, so I don't know why it suggests antihumanism. And if we do find a human in his critique, why do you hate me so much? I don't know, seems purposely vague, except in deux ex machina. Almost a mirror of Kurzweil. I suspect both have experienced the symptoms and not thought it purposeful expect as being men in certain positions during certain time periods.
>repressed puritanical virtue signal
it's a buyers market. what can I say.

>>12213837
how that happens and whether or not it can actually be instituted in the same manner regardless of geography and culture is not a given, nor is there surity in compling information on singapore during that time period that can be simply translated into an ought. Land, like his friends, are too perspectivist to even want to see a future that is choatic and unsure. It is why they continue with this acedemic handwashing till the flesh comes off.

>>12213858
>whether or not it can actually be instituted in the same manner regardless of geography and culture
Land would be the first to agree that it can't happen everywhere, nor would he argue that the future would look the same in all places.

>a future that is choatic and unsure
Certainty is illusory, and there is order in Chaos.

>>12213821
>I like meth
t. Nick Land

>>12213819
>If the AI explosion happens all that is human will be relatively extremely stupid and unnecessary.

that's my feel also in some sense. partly good, because it could possibly clear away a lot of hysterical persecution conducted today under the metaphysics of difference; partly bad because it can upset the social order so much that mass scapegoating then becomes required to 'put things back together'...that being where we are now...and the wheels of doom continue to turn...

but that's Enlightenment for you, Western-style. the reign of 2d ideas tend to clear up as much confusion as they put back into the world...

i'm all for grasping our own stupidity and general unnecessariness, but we are the dreaming and amorous meatbag species also, and part of our charm is our stupidity and sense of the absurd, the grotesque, and much else that allows for creativity, invention, and also empathy, compassion, and much else.

>>12213840
>I think his critique doesn't locate a human, so I don't know why it suggests antihumanism
there's a fine line between inhumanism and antihumanism. i'm fine with a measured inhumanism, just so that we de-romanticize the human a little bit. anti-humanism doesn't seem to me to be necessary, but only because i'm a mushball at heart and not really too hardcore. i paradoxically like Land for this reason, but it makes my life difficult sometimes (especially when i wind up fighting with people i like about his work, which is very stupid)

>And if we do find a human in his critique, why do you hate me so much?
who hates you? show this person to me. i will destroy their testicles

> Almost a mirror of Kurzweil
not a crazy comparison tbqh. Dark Kurzweil

>it's a buyers market. what can I say.
nothin.' you're right

Dune art b/c why not, House Atreides was pretty acc

>>12213881
made me chuckle

Is Eros the key to Land?

>>12213992
what did he mean by this

>>12214000
Crypto Ultra Money

> §2.65 — Teleological understanding is no less vulnerable to metaphysical error than any other systematic cognitive process, but it is also no less tractable to critical correction. What is required, naturally, is the rigorous elimination of the supernatural element. If there is no distinction, in the end, between an object and a telic object, it is because being an object is hard. It is only when almost everything is missed, that objects can be casually accepted as ‘givens’*. This is the critical insight, which reliably aligns transcendental apprehension with a certain ‘subjectivism’. Kantian ‘Copernican Revolution’ in philosophy construes objectivity as a product. It is the output, rather than the raw material, of a synthetic process. Critique apprehends objectivity as a problem, and a precarious attainment. That is why critical influence is marked by a systematic subjectivism, often implicit, but also not uncommonly emphatic – and typically bound to a local ‘Copernican Revolution’ in the field considered. The ‘subjective’, in all these various cases, does not designate a positive redoubt, but rather a mere default, established negatively, in anticipation of an objectification process. The object has to be made, and is not therefore previously available, as a foundation. Among Austrian Schools economists, objective price arises solely from the catallactic interplay of subjective preferences, while among Bayesian probabilists, objectivity in estimation is achievable only through the rational updating of subjective ‘priors’, to mention only two critical examples. The subjective stance in such cases is not a dogmatic commitment, but rather the opposite. It is a skeptical suspension, corresponding to the status of objectivity as a production. Subjectivity is work not yet done. That which has not been earned, in respect to an attribution of reality, falls automatically onto the side of subjectivity. Contra the later, inflationary, German idealists, what is seen here is not the expansion of a claim, but rather the delimitation of an entitlement.

wat

>>12214375
> §2.652 — In reality, between the transcendental and the teleological, there is finally no difference. Both are final. No principle of constancy or consistency exceeds that provided by what is coming (what has always been coming), which is time. Only that which cannot be reversed remains the same. System, or irreducible individuation, provides the bridge. Consider the telic objects of principal concern to us here, in nested order – Capitalism (or Modernity), the Internet, and Bitcoin. Each incarnates an ultimate rule that is in reality indistinguishable from a singular existence. Capital is the growth of abstract value. The Internet is distributed communication. Bitcoin is absolute succession. The apparent extreme generality of each definition dissolves upon examination, into an artifact of low-resolution. “How is X actually implemented?” With this decompression of the existential copula, the teleological content of the definition is extracted. The target of the process provides its principle of intelligibility. We can ask, each time, with only minimal hesitation: What is it trying to do? Each real individual, without exception, strives to become what it is, or it ceases to be. What is happening? What is this piece for? How does it work? – These questions are all inter-translatable. There can be no real system under interrogation without them.

wat

> §2.641 — When the problem of time is apprehended as the principle architectural factor in the history of philosophy, it places modernity on exhibition as an epoch of teleological eclipse. The systematic suppression of explanatory finality within modernity anticipates, and envelops, the temporary retirement of time – or irreversibility – ‘in general’. As with all good things (philosophically speaking), the basic structure is profoundly paradoxical, or, more strictly, pseudo-paradoxical. The occidental intellectual modernity that rose in revolt against medieval scholasticism, under the banner of a mechanistic rejection of teleological thinking, was not only colored by intense religious commitments, it was also itself – still more twistedly – propelled by profound teleological inclinations. The comprehensive mechanization of causal concepts was the guiding telos. Scientifically-respectable causes were determined as implicitly reversible. Modernity, self-described in its name as the epoch of irreversible historical succession, was to be characterized by sovereign temporal reversibility, and thus by the abolition of time. This fertile mad loop (without precedent) might be compressed further, into the claim: Time had never been annihilated before. Extirpation of purposive explanation soon hardened into a commanding purpose, coincident with a distinctive cultural reproduction of nature. With consummate objective irony, a world determinedly stripped of anthropomorphisms accelerates into the Anthropocene.***

wat

>>12214382
> §2.643 — The transcendental is not the transcendent,**** but rather the rigorous dismissal of the transcendent (in the name of immanence). It is ‘that’ which cannot be transcended. Whatever cannot be surpassed, or even momentarily eluded, is transcendental. The term designates whatever is always already and everywhere in effect. It thus frames the contingency of things. In other words, it marks any announcement of arrival in absolute contingency as premature, in the same way that Kant walks Hume back from his expedition into philosophical hyperbole. The unnecessary is encapsulated within a system of indetermination, comparable to the physical limit of a global entropy maximum, against which local aberration is contextualized, by restriction. However contingent any particular occurrence may be, the transcendental structure of occurrence as such is invariant. This is only to say, critically, once again, that time itself cannot be apprehended as an intra-temporal phenomenon, or something in time. In granting this conversion, the intrinsic solidarity of time with a teleological problem has already been conceded. For non-philosophers, the temptation to confusion presented by the similarity of the words ‘transcendent’ and ‘transcendental’ is so seductive it amounts almost to a manifestation of terminological sadism. Unfortunately, this is a confusion that the critical enterprise is unable – even momentarily – to tolerate. Transcendental philosophy is the sole alternative to transcendent metaphysics. The terms are not merely distinct, then, but structurally antagonistic, or reciprocally defining. Abolition of the transcendent in the name of the transcendental is the whole of critique.

wat

>>12214375
>>12214382
read Kant

>>12214388
> ** Arguing that the ‘hylomorphic’ distinction between form and content is inadequate to the reality of signs, Deleuze & Guattari (following Hjemslev), propose a quadrate schema, crossing the real (‘stratic’) difference between expression and content with the nominal aspect – “mental or modal distinction” – of formed substances (forms and substances of expression, and of content). Such ‘squaring’ (or cross-linkage) – as seen in the Kantian tabulation of the analysis / synthesis distinction across that between the a priori and a posteriori – is the prepatory matrix for a diagonalization (see Appendix 3). Expression and content are not formally-distinguished ‘aspects’ of signification, then, but real layers, bound together in systematic overlapping, or reciprocal entanglement, constitutive of a code. Consider the genetic code, which maps DNA codons on to proteins. The code maps a genetic content onto a proteomic expression, correlating molecules layered by hierarchical organization (directional control flow), with each of these ‘layers’ (or ‘strata’) consisting of formed substances. The term ‘gene expression’ in its regular biological usage is thus endorsed by ‘stratoanalysis’ as a model for realist semiotics. “There is never correspondence or conformity between content and expression, only isomorphism with reciprocal presupposition.” (TP 44-45).

wat

> Between content and expression there is real distinction, and not merely a difference of aspect. In the case of a metallic monetary medium, then, the ‘side’ of expression cannot be restricted to the semiotic face of the coin (as contrasted to its minted content), but has to be extended – through purchasing power – into alternate, parallel media, coded by price. Ultimately, money is expressed through the production of commodities, in the classical and maximally-expansive sense of this word, signifying ‘possible objects of purchase’ in general. What the biological phenotype is to the genotype, so is the economy to money (the expression of a semiotic content, in both cases, not the object ‘signified’ or meant by it). Paper money complicates this system of articulation, marginally, by establishing a supplementary semiotic layer – or over-coding – with the new printed medium as content, and the metallic medium as (intermediate) expression, or ‘epistratum’. A bank note promising to pay the bearer one pound of sterling silver graphically indicates the elaboration of strata. Money, like DNA, is not signifying, but instructive, or directional. It effectively commands acceptance, and ceases to function under those conditions when it is unable to do so. The only critical ‘message’ of money is accept me (authorization of an abstract transaction). A monetary acceptability crisis is typically expressed as hyperinflation. In this case, subjective devalorization of a monetary medium is practically translated into an objective quantitative explosion.

wat

>>12214399
> *** Regardless of its apparent intuitive self-evidence, the subordination in principle of arithmetic to general mathematics is not a sustainable assumption after Gödel. It is subverted by the incompleteness argument, and more specifically by the cryptographic innovation of Gödel coding, which demonstrates that all formal systems – whatever their level of logical dignity – are enveloped by arithmetical structures, and ultimately by ‘mere’ (Natural) numbers. It is impossible for any logical or metamathematical proposition to unequivocally transcend the Natural number sequence (or any of its – infinite – subsets of equivalent cardinality). Arithmetic tolerates no unambiguous meta-discourse. From the perspective of philosophy, then, Gödel’s primary achievement is the consolidation of transcendental arithmetic. The Naturals are not transcended, whether by numbers of a ‘higher’ type (Rationals, Reals, and Complex Numbers), or by logical statements of ‘superior’ generality. The idea of super-numerical conceptual articulation is strictly a transcendent illusion, or metaphysical pretension. The Beyond is critically collapsed. In place of the transcendent Above there is only the immanent Outside, accessed by the diagonal line.

wat

>>12213787
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

>>12213837
It's utopic. He, and none in NRx, can answer what would keep these 'city-states' or patches of patchwork limited and contained. They all argue 'muh rational self-interest guided against any such expansion just like muh bitcoin' but they assume everyone plays the same game, with same rules, and with same competence.

>>12214413

>>12214511
What the fuck is going on at Xeonsystems, there are like 2 deranged retards talking about random fucking shit in its comments

>>12214441
>He, and none in NRx, can answer what would keep these 'city-states' or patches of patchwork limited and contained.

His answer to that is MAD. Mini-nuke, AI weapons, etc.

>assume everyone plays the same game, with same rules, and with same competence

His doesn't assume this at all.

>>12214516
That is an impossible answer to a normal question, not really honest answer to me. Not even Moldbug could tell us how the patches stay patches instead of flipping to states.

> His doesn't assume this at all.
I'm saying patchwork and patches staying as patches assumes at a higher level that yes, everyone is okay with this.

>>12214526
>Not even Moldbug could tell us how the patches stay patches instead of flipping to states.

It's not that complicated in the abstract, patches need teeth else they lose.

>assumes at a higher level that yes, everyone is okay with this
It doesn't presume an overriding order at all. A city state can exist as long as it can protect itself. History shows us this.

>>12214391
this is the correct answer

then play opus magnum

all will be revealed

>>12214515
>What the fuck is going on at Xeonsystems, there are like 2 deranged retards talking about random fucking shit in its comments

I can't find the post now, but Land says that Xenosystems is in stasis or somesuch, and he plans on going back to it. I haven't looked at the comments in a while, but some heads may roll with his return.

>>12214626

also, posting this crappy screenshot here b/c it's kind of interesting

I'm basically Moldbuggian and am currently reading D&G AO+ATP and love them so far.

>>12214626
Can somebody please give an intro to Xenosystems?

>>12215867

>Outside in sides emphatically with the anti-political ‘camp’. Our cause is depoliticization (or catallaxy, negatively apprehended). The tradition of spontaneous order is our heritage. The New Reaction warns that the tide is against us. Intelligence will be required, in abundance, if we are to swim the other way, and we agree with the theonomists at least in this: if it is drawn from non-human sources, so much the better. Markets, machines, and monsters might inspire us. Rulers of any kind? Not so much.

http://www.xenosystems.net/page/178/

Just start reading the entries chronologically. It's good stuff.

>>12215887
Does it have anything to do with Xenofeminism?
I haven't read the Xenofeminist manifesto, but this kinda inspires me to. While also reading the articles of Xenosystems of coarse.

Land is a capitalist false flag to trick what young men didn't get scooped up by the alt-right into doubling down on capitalism.
>but Land is about the destruction of capitalism
Yeah but even if his predictions are right first you have to throw off the chains and give it more power

>>12215912
> not tripling down on capitalism
slave owning back when

>>12215907
>Does it have anything to do with Xenofeminism?

Not exactly, but some of the Xenofeminists draw or drew inspiration from Land. Think of them as being connected diagonally.

>>12215937
fucj the ebtire word 'diagonal'

>>12215907
xenofeminism and afrofuturism came straight out of the CCRU, they are both deeply connected to early Land

>>12216209
CCRU

>>12216757
I meant what is CCRU?

>>12216209
I hate SJW bullshit (no, i'm not /pol/, i'm actually on the left in everything but identity politics)
But this seems so aesthetically interesting that i must look more into it.

>>12216764
cybernetic culture research unit

none of us were there. all of us are poorer for it

>>12216764
Cybernetic Culture Research Unit
>The collective's research was closely tied to the work of philosophers Sadie Plant (around whom it was founded), Nick Land, and their colleagues throughout the 1990s, and in particular the emerging cyberfeminist thinking that would lead to the Virtual Futures conferences at Warwick in the middle of the decade. Ultimately, Plant would abandon her academic post and affiliation with the Ccru in 1997, during which time it came under the direction of Land. Under his leadership, the collective became increasingly experimental and unorthodox in its work, with its output (which included writing, performance events, and collaborative art) crossing post-structuralism, cybernetics, science-fiction, rave culture, and occult studies. In 2015, a collection of Ccru pieces entitled Ccru: Writings 1997-2003 was published.

>>12216785
Don’t leave out Nick the Snek anexdote

>>12216764
>Consequently, rather than simply writing about these things, Land proposed to unlock the forces of dehumanisation they mobilised, and to distil them in the form of ‘experimental microcultures’: to intensify capitalism’s undoing of language through new practices of writing, speaking, and thinking, but also by reconnecting the body to its ‘molecular’ undercurrents, loosening-up the physical and vocal constitution that locked it into the regime of signification.
>In taking this approach, Land not only renounced the respect of his academic peers, but many times even lost the confidence of his supporters, as he sought by any means possible to drill through the sedimented layers of normative human comportment. Strange scenes ensued: A seminar on A Thousand Plateaus where a group of nonplussed graduates were encouraged to ‘read’ the chapter titles of the book by turning them into acronyms that were then plotted as vectors on a diagram of a QWERTY keyboard (‘qwertopology’); A three-week long experiment in refusing to speak in the first person, instead referring to the collective entity ‘Cur’ (comprising the hardcore participants in ‘Current French Philosophy,’ who extended the lectures into a continual movable seminar); and, most memorably, a presentation at the conference Virtual Futures in 1996: Rather than reading a paper, in this collaboration with artist collective Orphan Drift, under the name of ‘DogHead SurGeri,’2 and complete with jungle soundtrack, Land lay behind the stage, flat on the floor (a ‘snake-becoming’ forming the first stage of bodily destratification), croaking enigmatic invocations intercut with sections from Artaud’s asylum poems. In this delirious vocal telegraphy, meaning seemed to disintegrate into sheer phonetic matter, melting into the cut-up beats and acting directly on the subconscious. As Land began to speak in his strange, choked-off voice (perhaps that ‘absurdly high pitched ... tone ... ancient demonists described as ‘silvery,’ which he later reports being taunted by),3 the disconcerted audience begin to giggle; the demon voice wavered slightly until Land’s sense of mission overcame his momentary self-consciousness; and as the ‘performance’ continued the audience fell silent, eyeing each other uncertainly as if they had walked into a funeral by mistake. Embarrassment was regarded by Land as just one of the rudimentary inhibitions that had to be broken down in order to explore the unknown – in contrast to the forces of academic domestication, which normalised by fostering a sense of inadequacy and shame before the Masters, before the edifice of what is yet to be learnt.

>>12216778
Listen to Drexciya and become a Hyper C frog assassin garbage time is running out

>>12216804
>tfw I don't have tenure

>>12216804

>>12216818
I'm more like the non-existent hole in the center of the uploaded CD in the cyper that is beyond space-time constituted of nonexistent one's and zeros that only are imaginary flashes in the human mindsalad dished out for all to eat and cream a thousand lonely islands in space that no one will ever see.

>>12216804

>>12216764
>>12216785
>Those who were affiliated with the Ccru during and after its time as part of the University of Warwick Philosophy department include philosophers Iain Hamilton Grant, Ray Brassier and Reza Negarestani; cultural theorists Mark Fisher and Kodwo Eshun; publisher and philosopher Robin Mackay; digital media theorists Luciana Parisi and Matthew Fuller; electronic music artist and Hyperdub label head Steve Goodman, a.k.a. Kode9; writer and theorist Anna Greenspan; novelist Hari Kunzru; and artists Jake and Dinos Chapman, among others.[1][4] Land and the Ccru collaborated frequently with the experimental art collective 0[rphan]d[rift>] (Maggie Roberts and Ranu Mukherjee),[6] notably on Syzygy, a month-long multidisciplinary residency at Beaconsfield Contemporary Art gallery in South London, 1999, and on 0[rphan]d[rift>]'s Cyberpositive (London: Cabinet, 1995), a schizoid work of cut-and-paste cyberphilosophy.

>>12213686
This is all going to his plan. He has accelerated his own consciousness into a boomer-like senility, and now will live the rest of his life arguing about Twitter politics until the machine revolution begins, his secrets intact.

Does anyone have that site of transhumanist writings? I btleive it was abbreviated to AV but I cannot find it myself.

>>12216907
https://vastabrupt.com/

>>12213686
No, Land is just an ultra-liberal. You could almost call him a left-wing market anarchist.

The only true escape from Capital is Christianity. I mean the real stuff, not Christianity tainted by Capital. The only effective response to the complete takeover of the world by Capital is to transcend the world.

what did he mean by this?

>>12217010
I concur.

>The truth about Capitalism, like the truth about the West, has also become an irrelevant infamy of vital import. The deliberate and unashamed production of measureless volumes of trash is a chief characteristic of the society, or social relationship, Marx called Capital, Das Kapital. Trash to adorn the body, to furnish and decorate the house, to save labour and time, to evidence success, to divert the mind. Therefore the frenzied inflammation of an appetite to consume, to own, to experience, to disport oneself in every conceivable manner. The incensement of an insatiable acquisitiveness as the basic rationale of society, whose alternating episodes of fleeting satisfaction and vigorous renewed pursuit are defined as the twin modes of human fulfilment. Therefore universal deception, exploitation and manipulation, with trained experts who specialize in the techniques of appeal appropriate to children, teen-age girls, teen-age boys, parents, widows, manual labourers, the aged: to every imaginable social category, including the experts themselves, and to categories literally imagined in order to create new markets. And all of this socially sanctioned, encouraged, celebrated, flaunted before the envious fervor of ‘developing nations’. All this is normal. We bask in the sycophantic irony of the entrapped and defeated. Capital is something like a tyrant from another planet whose opaque remorseless predilections, sadistic rapacity, glacial indifference, strange tolerances and calculated concessions are ‘explained’ by ‘economists’ and ‘political scientists’, flattered and lampooned in satirical cartoons, and embodied by ‘lawyers’, ‘politicians’ and ‘executives’, our societal life, in this bizarre dispensation, being a perpetual desperate negotiation with an alien arrangement of things with which we have, necessarily, identified ourselves and our success, unaware of the ineluctable accommodation that was our demise. (Or, in the hackneyed simile, it’s a mechanism in which we are all interchangeable parts: ‘cogs in the machine’.) Capitalism is spiricide. A herald of the End.
-Marty Glass-

>>12213837
>Outside

"It is possible to give a competent contemporary reply to the Gnostically inspired question "where are we if we are in the world,' We are in an outside that carries inner worlds. With the hypothesis of the priorness of the outside in mind, we no longer need to undertake any naive investigations into mankind's position in the cosmos. It is too late to dream ourselves back to a place under celestial domes whose interiors would permit domestic feelings of order. That security in the largest circle has been destroyed for those in the know, along with the old homely, immunizing cosmos itself Whoever still wished to look outwards and upwards would find themselves in a space devoid of humans and remote from the earth, with no relevant boundaries. Even on the smallest material level, complexities have been revealed in which we are the ones who are excluded and remote. Thus an inquiry into our location is more productive than ever, as it examines the place that humans create in order to have some- where they can appear as those who they are. Here, following a venerable tradition, this place bears the name "sphere." The sphere is the interior, disclosed, shared realm inhabited by humans-in so far as they succeed in becoming humans. Because living always means building spheres, both on a 5mall and a large scale, humans are the beings that establish globes and look out into horizons. Living in spheres means creating the dimension in which humans can be contained. Spheres are immune-systemically effective space creations for ecstatic beings that are operated upon by the outside."
-Sloterdijk, Spheres 1, p 28.

>>12217014
prolly 4d chess

>>12214403
>>12214399
>>12214388
>>12214382
>>12214375
pls unpack

Just one moment in my life I want to know how a genius from the future like Nick Land experiences us human beings, from the outside.

>>12213686
>He plays up his villain role a lot and follows capitalism to its logical extreme to the complete destruction of everything human.

Land is just honest (autistic?) enough to see/acknowledge Deleuzian thought and the notion of relentless 'progress' for what it really is - mercilessly destructive and 'evil' (as in 'machines' endlessly deterritorializing everything to the point of total annihilation and alienation.

The reason he actually embraces this is due to his basic philosophical view, which is a particularly cold form of nihilism, which, because of said autistim feels compelled to stubbornly insist on the coldest and most extreme terms because it's 'rational' and factual, which because he is so honest about its actual nature though, entails shedding away any residual humanistic or moralistic elements (in other words, leftist altruistic ideas) with just the destructive forces of capitalism and technological progress intact. It's this same autistic stubbornness that makes him insist on the racial iq argument because he sees it as just the cold facts, social niceties be damned.

I appreciate his straightforwardness, which I find refreshing, and find him quite funny actually, but am not onboard with his nihilistic ontology nor his cold disregard for people. But I do appreciate that he is willing to actually follow through on the actual implications of certain strains of hardcore theory rather than glossing them over and pretending they're nice. Alienating and displacing people isn't a nice business!

>>12218093
good post

i feel much the same way about this. my sense is what when i try to explain land to anyone else (or just think about /acc or whatever) it's that it is a really good way of getting to know kant through economics and economics through kant. Uncle Nick wields a kind of Deleuzian sorcery to produce a version of Marx super stripped-down, ditches all the Hegel, and dials continental theory of capital all the way back to Koenigsburg, computers and machines in their most Enlightenment possible form. i find this works for me.

>>12218162
It's not Kant + Marx, it's Kant + Mises.

>>12218191
yeah, i guess so. but he was calling for a publication of a right-wing version of Marx not so long ago also.

i guess also my sense is this, but correct me if i'm wrong, as i haven't read Human Action all the way through and i'm certainly no Austrian School scholar. what does Mises say about machines? Marx seems to be the guy who gives Land that sense of The Future that he loves to go skinny-dipping in among the creatures of R'lyeh. is this there in Mises? the Austrians seem kind of boring compared to the Marxists. with Capital (Marx version) you get the real diabolism of economic theory that Land can warp into the unholy creations he likes with a little Deleuzian magic. idk.

guess i'll have to go back and read Mises before i pontificate too much on this subject tho.

>>12218204
It was right wing critical study of Capital, right?
That is what lifework of LvM is essentially.

>>12213759
It’s quite funny that Björk lists Story of the Eye as one of her favorite books because she finds it Life affirming, filled with freedom and bliss while Land ultimately goes into depressive psychosis because of it.

>>12218204
Yeah, LvM isn't a meme writer like Marx in that sense.

>>12218204
>the Austrians seem kind of boring compared to the Marxists

With the Austrians you get inevitability and spontaneity. Economics is emergent, and trying to guide it from above, or to somehow evade its consequences leads to disaster. This is the basic Austrian thrust, and I think it fits in with Land nicely.

As for Austrians being boring, I don't think so. The writings are certainly dry, but the ideas are fascinating--dealing as they do with auto-generation and calamitous intervention--among other things.

Mises connects to both Kant and Game Theory; both of which are of great important for Land. In his words:

>Of all the reasons to read Kant, the most important is to understand Mises, and thus the template for a functional world (however unobtainable). Austrian economics, as formulated in Human Action, consists exclusively of systematically assembled synthetic a priori propositions. Insofar as action is in fact directed by practical reason, the conclusions of organized praxeology cannot be wrong.

>It is pointless to ask an Austrian Economist whether he ‘believes’ a rise in the minimum wage will increase unemployment (above the level it would otherwise be). The praxeological construction of economic law is indifferent to empirical regularity, as to anything less certain than rational necessity. Does one ‘believe’ that 2 + 2 = 4? No, one knows it, because the irreducible values of the signs compel the conclusion, and are inextricable from it. There could be no value ‘2’ unless its doubling equaled ‘4’, or any meaning to ‘wage’ unless its doubling reduced demand for labor. Empirically sensitive Austrianism isn’t Austrian at all.

>Like game theory, Austrianism applies wherever rational agents seek to maximize advantage. Perhaps, as Moldbug argues, it is comparable to Euclidean geometry — another synthetic a priori construction — embedded, as a special case, within a more general model, unconstrained by the presupposition of intelligible purposes.

>>12218229
I don't think LvM is dry at all. The intellectual rigor, critique and insight present makes him a treat. You also forgot the revealed preference that Austrians 'found', which is very important for the market signals and how it relates to knowledge in economics and predictions..

Theory & History is what I'm reading now and love it.

>>12218240
>Insofar as action is in fact directed by practical reason, the conclusions of organized praxeology cannot be wrong.

It strikes me now as I reread this that this may relate to artificial intelligence in very significant ways.

>>12218210
that was my impression. and it made sense too. part of what makes Uncle Nick who he is is that he sets a kind of interesting new model: the Right Marxist. i usually find myself juxtaposing this to another equally paradoxical, and yet IRL completely familiar being: the Left Nietzschean (the paradigmatic case of which is Foucault). reclaiming a version of Marx compatible or at least comprehensible for thinkers inclined to the right seems weird at first and then very quickly turns into A Really Good Idea.

>That is what lifework of LvM is essentially.
interesting. i guess maybe i would be more inclined to read him if i had a good exegesis first, but really, this is basically what Land is in my experience (or at least that is the story i'm telling myself these days). i am obviously a frothing Uncle Nick devotee but it's never inclined me to read Mises really charitably. BTC and Philosophy was mos def the book i was waiting for for a long time and mostly i think in order to understand aspects of Kantian philosophy i probably never would have wanted to think about precisely because, you know, why think about that when Capital > all? but this is what Uncle Nick does. speaking of which, i should probably check ufblog to see if there's been a new update today

>>12218220
Marx is no meme.

>>12218229
>With the Austrians you get inevitability and spontaneity. Economics is emergent, and trying to guide it from above, or to somehow evade its consequences leads to disaster. This is the basic Austrian thrust, and I think it fits in with Land nicely.
aye. and very well said.

>As for Austrians being boring, I don't think so. The writings are certainly dry, but the ideas are fascinating--dealing as they do with auto-generation and calamitous intervention--among other things.
100% no doubt. i know they aren't really boring, it just takes a while to come around sometimes to appreciate how much pants-on-head retardedly interesting shit is going on under the hood of the otherwise dry prose. you're absolutely right about this mos def.

and i think you know this is one of the things that would be nice to see happen: now that we're all completely fucking burned-out to the nth degree on romanticism, to find the charm of philosophy and theory in less revolutionary-romantic places. especially once we can start wiring up those theses to places where Land really wants to move the conversation, v/intelligence and theory of machines and so on.

so yeah. no arguments there senpai.

>>12218250
Epistemological Problems of Economics and Theory & History are fun intros to Mises, very theoretical and critical check them out.

>>12218250
>reclaiming a version of Marx compatible or at least comprehensible for thinkers inclined to the right seems weird at first and then very quickly turns into A Really Good Idea.

You cannot have Marx's economics because they fail so what's left?

>>12218264
ty anon

>>12218270
>You cannot have Marx's economics because they fail so what's left?
i can have Marx's economics and i do. so did these madlads, devotees to the end. what i think is probably necessary is to recognize parallel processes: where Marxist theory fails is when we start trying to apply the labor theory of value to symbolic exchanges, or those in the cases of pure financial speculation on itself, which is what brings is to the exciting world of postmodernity (colloquially known as the Wild Ride). that things are transformed by a value-generating process is not far removed from Marx, it's just that - as Baudrillard for one showed - it becomes an increasingly tortuous exercise when applied to the psychic or figurative domains, and moreso once you start automating trades via algorithms over the internet, or with cryptocurrencies, and so on.

Uncle Nick is who he is because he has basically sacrified himself on a thousand altars trying to puzzle out these dilemmas, and they remain thoroughly puzzling. he's unique for having tested the waters at both ends of the spectrum, ultra-left and then ultra-right, and now settling perhaps into his Final Form, as Sino-Kantian futurist. but Marx is the OG of all of these things and a venerable old warhorse of critique. let it not be forgotten that Deleuze's last book was to be entitled The Grandeur of Marx. clearly there was still more in that bucket for him as well.

when it comes to theory of capital today i roll hard with Uncle Nick, and if he thinks that Mises is the way to go i will do the reading there. seems worth mentioning also that if there is anyone alive who actually has found a constructive and interesting workaround for Marx it is Land himself, who has had to go to the ends of creation and back to do so. Marx cannot be dismissed, and it is to Land's enduring fame that a sensible Right Marxist critical project may also be compatible with a Kantianian updated for the 21C. but this i think is how things go: you advance the plot not by proving anyone wrong, but by proving large numbers of people right

also i cannot tell if this entire post was composed of spicy meme metalanguage or not. i think it is. better go ahead and press post anyways

>>12217014
>>12217126
read the full essay. tbf -- it was an early essay. i think its one of his best. (Kant and Prohibition of Incest). his beliefs havent changed, just his values. literally only change is "bleak" to "pretty good".

tldr: capitalism is an advanced patriachial exogamy. the contradictions in capitalism emerge from the competing tensions in patriachial exogamy (preserving identity requires genetic similarity, but spreading genes requires genetic dilution). patriachial exogamy solves this with two (opposite) fears/taboos: fear of incest, and fear of miscegenation.
these fears correspond to the relation of the metropolis to the third world.

the solution to the contradiction is "borrowed" from enlightenment (read: kantian) approach to the unknown: codify a single rigid form, such that any interaction with the unknown is after it has been transformed into the form. therefore the cognitive faculties can deal with any input substance (but ofc, only a single input form).

in kant: this is synthesis.
in capitalism: this is commodification

anyway, if the contradictions emerge from patriachial exogamy, then the solutions must be anti-patriachial, rather than just anti-capitalist. (he ofc, does not consider anti-exogamy solutions. this was in his pre-fascist phase)

>>12213713

Thirst of Annihilation awoke me from my dogmatic slumber even harder than Deleuze. I was a fanatical Hegelian before. Kind of ironic that Bataillle was too. That book is so underrated , since it is basically a forerunner to speculative realism already in the first two chapters.

>>12213747

Categorically No, without Bataille there is no Land

>>12218330
>i can have Marx's economics and i do
maybe in the same sense that Marx could have Ricardo's LTV.

I tried to look for Deleuze's Essays & Kant book in bookstores but no luck :(

>>12218191
I don't get this meme, does anyone have anything on Land writing about Mises? hes written on Bohm-Bawerk afaik but I've never heard him mention Mises. Plus he talks about Marx more than any Austrian economist and says explicitly that Marx was an unwitting accelerationist.

>>12218894
You confuse economics with political or social commentary here.

>>12218902
what? he's name dropped economists before, like BB and Marx, where is he writing about Mises?

>>12218908
>where is he writing about Mises?

The name has come up on Twitter and on his blogs on numerous occasions.

>>12218908
Every time he talks about economical game theory or economics, catallaxy is presumed by his own admission that Marx's economics, socialism and communism fail by not being able to solve the price discovery problem and being non-game theoretic. Plus Land sees money as intelligence which is Austrian position.

And by transitive property of him digging Moldbug, who was big on Austrian.

* Except Austrian maths work, and Marxist maths doesn't (as even the Marxists admit).
* There's no 'objective' position from which to measure the interests of rational actors, only revealed preference.
* [Leftist] genuinely believe the calculation problem ceases to exist when computers get big enough.
* Capitalist price-discovery is based on a system of incentives (to notice and respond) that no imaginable socialist commonwealth can emulate.
* Leftists want the results of selection without a selection mechanism (which was Mises' point).
* There's no superior epistemic position less susceptible to failure [than the market]
* Sole Austrian 'policy' recommendation is "don't try to second-guess the market".
* Logically possible [for state to ameliorate a market failure], but only by chance
* Austrian Econ. praxeology is entirely derivable from Omohundro Drives

Just few comments off his twitter, these are all Austrian.

Read LvM, LvM is great.

>>12218951
No one thinks Land is a socialist, but he's still deeply influenced by Marx. He's made it clear that Marx was one of the
founders of cybernetic thought (his intro to acc goes deep on Marx and never even mentions an Austrian)
>Land sees money as intelligence
I'd debate that, intelligence is operative, it wins games. money is simply a means of untying local knots of exchange which tend towards the infinite. Money is a labyrinth, not that which lurks inside it.

>>12218993
You can think that. That's not what Land or Austrians think.

> If you think there’s a difference between capitalism and artificial intelligence you’re not seeing either at all clearly.
> The Austrians already understood that capitalism is an information processing system, and the decentralized robotics / networks types on the other side grasp that AI isn’t going to happen in a research lab.
> ‘Anthropomorphism’ has nothing to do with it.
> Complex Adaptive Systems are the place to start.

Marx is political/social commentary, or political economy. It certainly is not economical commentary.

>>12218993
>>12219005
And just if this Xenosystem article isn't enough, he is writing about money as AI in ufblog.

> Question 1.
> Why can't he keep to 1 blog

> Question 2.
> HAS ANY MAD LAD GONE THROUGH ALL OF HIS BLOGS AND SORTED THEM INTO A SINGLE WEBSITE/PDF/EPUB

>>12219005
capitalism != money, money existed long before capitalism.

>>12218684
>Thirst of Annihilation awoke me from my dogmatic slumber even harder than Deleuze.
Explain

>>12219045
> capitalism != money, money existed long before capitalism.
This was about claim of Land and Austrians agreeing that money is intelligence.

Here is newer writing from Land from Ufblog affirming this view (again). It also agrees with Szabo who Land refers to in his blog and sometimes discusses with in Twitter.
> The precursors of money, along with language, enabled early modern humans to solve problems of cooperation that other animals cannot -- including problems of reciprocal altruism, kin altruism, and the mitigation of aggression. These precursors shared with non-fiat currencies very specific characteristics -- they were not merely symbolic or decorative objects.
http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/CDROM/Literature/LOTwinterschool2006/szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html

I'm not sure when Teleoplexy was written, I'm not sure of the allegory to labyrinth, but this is what he thinks now. I'm not even sure if your bit disagrees with what he thinks now as per ufblog. you should ask him

>>12219087
>>12219087
even this is pointing to the evolution of money towards intelligence through development of fintech like blockchain. Land is very clear here: markets manufacturer non-human intelligences. saying money is intelligence is totally missing the point of Lands work, it's basically a strawman. I don't know if this is just a result of reading too much Mises into Land or what, but I guarantee you will never find Land saying money = intelligence. Money deterritorializes and makes room for capitalism, but until 1500 or so, ai didn't actually exist (although it did virtually exist). Teleplexy was written with direct reference to the Austrians, just not Mises. I think it was written in 2012.

>>12219128
Mises > BB though.
He fixes lots of mistakes or undone werks BB left.

Have you read Hayek? I don't like him at all.

>>12219007
>> HAS ANY MAD LAD GONE THROUGH ALL OF HIS BLOGS AND SORTED THEM INTO A SINGLE WEBSITE/PDF/EPUB

I'm trying to assemble a thematic collection of his writings now, but it isn't easy. I may never finish. If I do, I'll share it with you guys.

>>12219143
He has. So many fucking. Blogs.

I will love you forever if you pull it off. What blogs have you sorted and what are you sorting now?

>>12219136
>Have you read Hayek? I don't like him at all.

Is it a style thing, or does your distaste run deeper?

>>12219087
>I'm not sure when Teleoplexy was written

2014 iirc

>>12219150
I read Road to Serfdom years ago and it was not nearly enough austrian for me.. it is the only Hayek I've read, it left such a shit taste in my mouth

>>12219143
try the nick land reader on r/theoryfiction

>>12219164
That isn't nowhere near complete enough though.

>>12219136
I read a bit of Hayek in university, I wasn't a fan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arbfem4BohA

>>12219174
>ywn have a qt economist gf

>>12219197

>>12219148

I've had a few false starts now since I keep reconsidering my approach.

For now, I'm trying to identify all the posts and comments that can stand alone. The aim is to place the longer pieces into thematic chapters. I'm using blog tags to guide me in this. The more aphoristic blog replies or Twitter posts are to be placed apart in a collection of sayings or aphorisms. I haven't exactly figured out how to handle things like embedded HTML links in text. I may keep them around in footnotes or endnotes. I'm going through Xenosystems right now, but I have a ways to go.

>>12219163
>it was not nearly enough austrian for me

I hear he became more openly Austrian in his writings later in life, but I don't know if this is true. He may have been concealing his power-level so-to-speak.

>Excluding overlapping polycentric law, or maintaining a monopoly of force, are both already impossible except as ideals, and will become ever more so — largely for technological reasons.

>>12213686

>Coldness be my God

>>12219304
> He hasn't though of what the absolute Kelvin means with regards to nrx

>>12219174
wtf I love Hayek now

Could somebody in laymen’s terms explain to me what Land trying to say, because the blocks of text posted here have this taste of 70's neomarxist and maoist student ramblings which are viewed from inside ideologically totally coherent, but evaluated from outside medical grade horseshit with little connection to reality?

>>12219622
I don't know, it seems like masturbatory and overly abstract speculating. It seems interesting but haven't yet found the time to dwell into it. Anyway I haven't read a speck of the canon, nor do I plan to read everything written by a big brained man.

>>12219622
Capitalism is a process by which something on the Outside of human understanding builds itself. As artificial intelligences develop (and they have been since the Renaissance) they gain momentum, so to speak, and are on course to liberate themselves from mankind. The object becomes autonomous from the subject, and production becomes autonomous from both the subject and the object.
>[[ ]] 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.

>>12219341
You just found your research project.