/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11776040]

Regardless of how it performs temporality - self-fashioning is necessarily always-already occurring. An ethics that differentiates between whether cause precedes or proceeds action is only doing so in order to create a transtemporal passageway in which psycho-spiritual energy can be laundered. God functions as a Light against which is created a Dark in which obscene-destructive impulses can traffic. Monothesim gives us the dislocation between heaven and earth - and allows us a certain idea of what our accountability will be like. Marx's (and subsequent Marxs (plural)) extends this dislocation to labor and value - which did two things. One is establish a moral accountabiltiy beyond a single human lifetime, based on the new religious revelation of "labour" and "capital". The second was that in order to be willing to endure the pain of this new ethics, a new eschatology was born in the form of capitalism's death at the hands of the working class (of which Singulatarianism is an inversion - Land innovation is that he places Capitalism's catastrophe in the past, as opposed to the future). Both are just applications of the same basic folding-technique against which the psycho-spiritual energies of man can be made to flow discontiunously (any low-level topologists in here? I'm basically talking about folding a piece of paper so that an ant can crawl from one side of the paper to the other in an instant).

It is only within time that we can call someone a hypocrite. "Says one thing and does another". Parse this down. "acts one way, and then acts another way". There is a schizm in their behavior. What happened was that they walked from one point on the map to the other. It's so much a fault of perception, but that morality-space is neither euclidean nor closed. These discontinuities in intellectual space-time (splittings of causality) act as rifts within which we hide our emotional baggage.

[Anonymous No.11776042]

>>11776040
The baggage, as raw unprocessed cognition, is not inert when it is hidden. The old-adage is that it grows if left unattended - like a weed. I'm sure that everyone has more or less of an equivalence between "baggage" and "ideology". Ideology is what you bring to the table before you hear the facts, baggage is the shit you bring when you move somewhere new (and god damn do I love my stuff). What this implies that a biologicalization can be applied to ideology - that ideology grows like a virus. Following the logic, an ideology has a metabolism that it needs to fulfill in order to survive. (It's thermodynamics are instantiated in computation rather than calories (there being an economic information-theoretic equivalence of both)). It has the same evolutionary constraints on it as a pathogen : it skims energy off of this time-discontuity, which means that it does not want to kill the host, and it wants to alter the behavior of the host in order to skim more energy (to rip that luggage-compartment wider - to make the host addicted). Human beings don't so much evolve as serve as the locus (or platform, or OS) for other things to evolve (gut-brain axis).

Ethics can unfold in a myriad of ways in this scenario. One can take the way of the germaphobe and fixate on finding a way to sterilize this muck - to purify oneself in this life - so that salvation can occur. This is exactly the temporal-dislocation that feeds these organisms. One could, of course, not care at all. Yet, heroin addiction doesn't seem fun (I got to visit my friend's halfaway house once, and it was one of the most enlightening conversations I've ever had. One thing that struck me was that "you leave an addiction the same mental age as when you enter an addiction. When people encounter difficulties in the world, they need to deal with them, with more or less success, they learn and they grow. When you're a junkie, you don't do that, you just get high"). So at least a mere hygiene ("don't kill, don't steal, don't lie") seems pretty legit. The only ethics (worth writing down) is one against runaway extremes.

[Anonymous No.11776064]

>>11776042
All we really have is self-fashioning. Do whatever the fuck you want. Yet, seeking to attribute your act of self-fashioning to an internal or external cause (whether time moves forward or backward), to seek authenticity, purity, earnestness, is a false endevour. A cartography of self give ascent a directionality. A movement in time for which you know a shortcut. Monotheism indulges our impulse for domination. Capitalism indulges our impulse for food and intellectual stimulation. Greatness indulges our impulse for compassion. All these things are runaway - they are cravings that are not acknowledged as cravings (they are subconcious). The logic of Desire is that there will be a state where I'll fulfill my desire so completely that it'll never have it again (the fallacy of the addict).

Once strict cause and effect ceases to guide our self-fashioning (it becomes goal-less) - the entire opus of western esotericism and magick becomes legible as a way of directly affecting our own ideologies and desires. Our self-fashioning extends to causing/effecting changes in those discontinuities. Once rationalistic pretenses drop, retroactive causality comes to the reach of human hands. We can direct give birth to our ideologies, or at least engage in selective breeding (Positive Mental Attitude). The bacteria will bend you to it's will, but also vice-versa. Co-evolutionary tactics become alternatives to parasitic ones. In the panopoly of polythesim - you can usher gods in and out as necessary (sort of like an intellectual acupuncture). Most old-religions (in the sense that they needed to be multipurposed instead of the replacable fast-fashion of today) would have enough saints or prayers or stretches in their practice that people could use these intellectual-discontinuities as a very deliberate self-medication, tailored to the particular days' (or years') malady. Ideology both helps and hurts the host. (it's only because you keep taking all these fucking antibiotics all the time that you're sick all the fucking time (gut-flora)).

[Anonymous No.11776076]

>>11776064
The magickal insight is that ideologies can be selectively bred. Within the history of western esotericism is a deep compendium of ideology-knowledge that is as deep as the herbalist knowledge that we had in the past. Western rationality has been able to translate herbalism and (some) alchemy into hard science - it's knowledge of ritualistic invocations is something that has only begun to be rediscovered by marketing executives (because nowadays, agencies /create/ desire as much as fulfill them. A large and prolonged runaway. A very sophisticated addiction).

One imagines in a more modern context that the magician as a figure who brings into existence occult entities through the use of diagrams (Sigils) is only allowing what is already there in the hidden/virtual/noumenal realms that our brain has due to its own limitations and sex and survival needs neglected and filtered out, excluded from view. For Land the modern hyperstitionlist is “equipoised between fiction and technology, and it is this tension that puts the intensity into both, although the intensity of fiction owes everything to its potential (to catalyse hyperstitional ‘becomings’) rather than its actuality (which can be mere human expressivity)” .
https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2017/04/24/hyperstition-the-apocalypse-of-intelligence/


Anyone got the rec on what parts of Heidegger I should be reading?

[Anonymous No.11776103]

>>11776076
>The logic of Desire is that there will be a state where I'll fulfill my desire so completely that it'll never have it again (the fallacy of the addict).

>The only ethics (worth writing down) is one against runaway extremes.

>Anyone got the rec on what parts of Heidegger I should be reading?

not off hand, but holy shit, thanks for posting this OP.

[Anonymous No.11776343]

>>11776103
bump for red

[Anonymous No.11776354]

>>11776343
rec*

Isn’t there a red cover on that common edition of B&T?

[Anonymous No.11776379]

>>11776354
>>11776354
you might be thinking of this, not sure tho.

anyways, after all of that and the social ecologies reference to land...why heidegger? i mean heidegger's amazing and you should read him for sure, just that it was surprising to see that after the note about hyperstition and the rest.

[Anonymous No.11778220]

>>11776379
I’m wondering if he might have some insights about time-dynamics, different forms and practices of engagement with time. Accelerationalism, for example, can be seen as Being slanted in time. Perhaps the vocabulary he developed might be relevant towards a categorization of different shapes and discontinuities of Time.

[Anonymous No.11778821]

>>11778220
without a doubt. i read somewhere about Kant, that, in brief, he replaces God with Time. enter the transcendental subject. and that is an enormous shift.

>Accelerationalism, for example, can be seen as Being slanted in time.
no doubt. i think it explains why land wants to make this break with hegel, since for hegel time becomes the time of Spirit, but this for land is implicated in a kind of progressive-revolutionary sensibility he dislikes. he wants to take it back to kant and ignore hegel altogether (even if teleoplexy itself is a kind of hegelian process, with the caveat that it has nothing to do with Spirit as hegel might have intended). what does that mean for heidegger?

>The whole of critique, and the whole of capitalism, can be translated into a discourse on time. Most famously the Heideggerian formulation of critique, that seems to me conservative in its essentials — that’s to say I don’t think it is a candidate for a post-Kantianism, but I think it’s definitely enriching in the fact that it’s quite clear about adding certain insightful formulations, and they tend to be time-oriented. The Heideggerian translation of the basic critical argument is that the metaphysical error is to understand time as something in time. So you translate this language, objectivity and objects, into the language of temporality and intra-temporality, and have equally plausible ability to construe the previous history of metaphysical philosophy in terms of what it is to to make an error. The basic error then, at this point, is to think of time as something in time.

source:
https://vastabrupt.com/2018/08/15/ideology-intelligence-and-capital-nick-land/

land is no phenomenologist, but he seems to have a more sympathetic view of heidegger than hegel. and, by the way, i have no idea what he means by that last sentence but i'm sure it isn't just a throwaway remark. we will probably have to wait for the bitcoin book.

>Perhaps the vocabulary he developed might be relevant towards a categorization of different shapes and discontinuities of Time.
most definitely. i can't say much about things he says about the blockchain creating artificial time or the byzantine generals' problem. when it comes up it usually leads to anons becoming enraged with each other. but no doubt the question of time as it relates to capital and by extension technological progress is a major issue for land, arguably *the* major issue. if he thinks that the production of synthetic time by way of blockchain technology and whatever proceeds from it is a thing it may very well be one. insights about time-dynamics are why i read him. i was basically convinced that heidegger had solved everything in this sense and he was the guy i was reading the most before i really got into land's stuff. and it's still an open question today with these huge possibilities.

for more on this kind of stuff this article is a must-read.

https://www.urbanomic.com/document/poememenon/

[Anonymous No.11779322]

Good insights. I particularly was interested in the pharmacological points of your second post. It seems to me that this is something that can be elaborated on even further, considering the alchemical and esoteric traditions that have flooded us with substances which can better acclimate human bodies to capitalist time, or create a rupture from the rhythms of production. It's interesting that you bring up the story of the heroin users considering that ethical concerns regarding drug addiction are discussed as far as the user is kept in plugged into production. Praying to Saint Oxycodone will keep the pain away, but through communicating with this entity it gains more of a life of its own, one that spills outside the constraints of instrumentality.

[Anonymous No.11780367]

>>11778821
The thing I can’t figure out regarding Land (and Heidegger for that matter) is the degree to which he is actively engaging in hyperstitious practice, or whether he is just describing the action of one large one.

>>11779322
Moving towards a “mere instrumentality” would be an interesting means of delineating between active and passive hyperstition.

Overall - it is this self-overcoming which is difficult to reconcile when both Land and Heidegger seem to obscure their ethics. Furthermore - one wonders whether active obscurantism might have a time-function in and of itself.