/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14403138]

can someone explain or give me some (non-analogical) quotes about what land and others are expressing when they say capital/capitalism?

[Anonymous No.14403329]

>>14403138
sissification hypnosis

[Anonymous No.14403458]

>>14403329
This

[Anonymous No.14403473]

>non-analogical
fuck that. its impossible to explain Land without using Lovecraftian type metaphors

[Anonymous No.14403478]

self perpetuating machines

[Anonymous No.14403487]

>>14403138
No.

[Anonymous No.14403495]

>>14403138
autonomous emergent systems created by human commerce and technology

[Anonymous No.14403521]

>Justin Murphy: If you think of intelligence as this — how should I put this? — it’s almost like you see all of human history as a kind of intelligence explosion and that capitalism as we know it is already this long-term, explosive historical process. And so it’s always seemed to me that the very catastrophic, malignant failure modes of superintelligence — I take them very seriously — it seems to me like it’s already happening in the form of capitalism. There’s a lot of reason to read your work as saying that, but I’m not sure if you agree with that or not. What do you think?

>Nick Land: I think it comes down, again, just to these very, very basic cybernetic diagrams to do with positive feedback. And one sort of image — it’s an entirely satisfactory image once it’s accepted that it is figurative — is a critical nuclear reaction. You have a pile of radioactive rods that are damped down by graphite containment rods, and you start pulling out those graphite rods, and at a certain point it goes critical and you get an explosion. It’s just absolutely — it’s not a metaphor — it’s a positive feedback process [laughs]. It just is a positive feedback process that passes through some threshold and goes critical. And so I would say that’s the sense [in which] capitalism has always been there. It’s always been there as a pile with the potential to go critical, but it didn’t go critical until the Renaissance, until the dawn of modernity, when, for reasons that are interesting, enough graphite rods get pulled out and the thing becomes this self-sustaining, explosive process.

>So in a certain sense, a lot of the actual fabric, the social historical fabric, is actually a containment system. And I think that containment system had a failure mode in the Renaissance. Just to dip back into the hyper-ideological space for a minute, what the extreme kind of what I call “paleo-reactionaries” get right is that they they totally see that. I share nothing of their mournful affection for the medieval period, but I think they’re totally right to say that there was a catastrophic failure that unleashed this explosive process, and that is what modernity is from the perspective of the Ancien Régime. What any social system is for is to stop this nuclear pile going off. You look at Chinese civilization and you say, well, what is it really doing? What’s it for? From a certain perspective, it’s a capitalism containment structure that obviously worked better in this traditionalist sense than the European one. The European one was too fractured, it was subject to a whole bunch of wild, uncontrollable influences, and unprecedented feedback structures kicked off that no one was in a position to master in Europe.

[Anonymous No.14403526]

Anti-Oedipus is less a philosophy book than an engineering manual; a package of software implements for hacking into the machinic unconscious, opening invasion channels.

Along one axis of its emergence, virtual materialism names an ultra-hard antiformalist AI program, engaging with biological intelligence as subprograms of an abstract post-carbon machinic matrix, whilst exceeding any deliberated research project. Far from exhibiting itself to human academic endeavour as a scientific object, AI is a meta-scientific control system and an invader, with all the insidiousness of plantary technocapital flipping over. Rather than its visiting us in some software engineering laboratory, we are being drawn out to it, where it is already lurking, in the future.

Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources. Digitocommodification is the index of a cyberpositively escalating technovirus, of the planetary technocapital singularity: a self-organizing insidious traumatism, virtually guiding the entire biological desiring-complex towards post-carbon replicator usurpation.

[Anonymous No.14403536]

>>14403526
Reaching an escape velocity of self-reinforcing machinic intelligence propagation, the forces of production are going for the revolution on their own. It is in this sense that schizoanalysis is a revolutionary program guided by the tropism to a catastrophe threshold of change, but it is not shackled to the realization of a new society, any more than it is constricted by deference to an existing one. The socius is its enemy, and now that the long senile spectre of the greatest imaginable reterritorialization of planetary process has faded from the horizon, cyberrevolutionary impetus is cutting away from its last shackles to the past.

The real tension is no longer between individuality and collectivity, but between personal privacy and impersonal anonymity, between the remnants of a smug bourgeois civility and the harsh wilderness tracts of Cyberia, ‘a point where the earth becomes so artificial that the movement of deterritorialization creates of necessity and by itself a new earth’ (AO: p. 321). Desire is irrevocably abandoning the social, in order to explore the libidinized rift between a disintegrating personal egoism and a deluge of post-human schizophrenia.1

[Anonymous No.14403556]

>>14403521
Why didn't Roman civilization trigger a positive feedback loop like the Renaissance civilizations did?

[Anonymous No.14403577]

>>14403556
their containment system worked properly

[Anonymous No.14403723]

>>14403521
this is fine, but doesnt answer the question

[Anonymous No.14403732]

>>14403723
what doesn't it answer?

[Anonymous No.14403783]

>>14403556
For me, it is the key insight that massive amounts of energy are locked in coal. I don't think it was a matter of containment rods being removed, I think it was a matter of tapping into more energy -- on the level of several orders of magnitude more.

when a speaker system goes into a positive feedback loop, like someone puts a microphone too close to the speaker, the noise gets load or irritating, but only so loud, or maybe the speaker blows out. But even if it doesn't blow out, there is a limit to how loud the feedback sound can get.

I think harnessing hydrocarbons removed that limit for capitalistic systems

[Anonymous No.14403963]

>>14403732
what capital is. the quote is a description of how it broke loose.

[Anonymous No.14403967]

>>14403783
the modern steam engine came about 200 years after capitalism really got started, I think the process needed to already hit critical before you could really get the coal/design the engine

[Anonymous No.14403984]

>>14403138
any system with positive feedback

[Anonymous No.14404115]

>>14403963
accelerationism is a critical philosophy. it is concerned with how capitalism operates and what it is doing rather than what capital-in-itself is

[Anonymous No.14404133]

>>14404115
why call it "capital" if they have nothing positive in mind

[Anonymous No.14404193]

>>14404133
because we can conceive of objects even if we do not understand them in-themselves. have you read Kant?

[Anonymous No.14404199]

>>14404193
yes. are you being disingenuous or you actually are not understanding me?

[Anonymous No.14404239]

>>14404199
you might as well say Kant shouldn't call them space and time because he isn't interested in them as things-in-themselves, this is literally the most moot criticism I could imagine.

[Anonymous No.14404251]

>>14404239
holy shit youre stupid

[Anonymous No.14404287]

>>14404239
Different anon, you're being a retard right now. Time and space as things-in-themselves makes no fucking sense as time and spaces are not objects in Kant's philosophy. There might be things-in-themselves, but time and space definitely aren't.

So how the fuck is your Kant's intuitions/Land's capital analogy supposed to fucking work? Kant talks A SHIT TON about time and space, which you'd knew if you had read the first fucking chapter of the book, faggot.

[Anonymous No.14404323]

>>14404287
Kant makes no claims on whether time and space exist in-themselves as we can only understand them critically as forms of perception, ie. he cares about how they operate and not what they are in-themselves. he literally could not claim they were not things-in-themselves as that would be dogmatism. read Kant

[Anonymous No.14404332]

>>14404287
>Kant talks A SHIT TON about time and space
and Nick Land talks a shit ton about capital; you totally missed the point of the analogy

[Anonymous No.14404364]

>>14404323
He doesn't because time and space aren't objects, they cannot exist whereas things-in-themselves very much can exist, they are just epistemically transcendent to our cognition. Time and space aren't mysterious objects in his philosophy, yet you were drawing the analogy to hide your poor understanding of Land's notion of capital. Time and space also don't "operate" in Kant's philosophy.

To put it simply: Time and space neither exist "for us" neither do they exist "in-themselves" just as categories neither exist for us or in-themselves. The distinction between Erscheinung und Ding an sich selbst only applies to Dinge, plural of things in German, IE objects you retard. For this reason Kant can actually spend 80 pages on just time and space, he has a lot to say about it whereas he has nothing to say about things-in-themselves.

So again: Kant greatly positively attributes time and space, the recursion to our cognition never changed that fact. You replied to that anon that Land's notion of capital cannot be talked about in positive terms for Kantian reasons, this doesn't work as I have shown.

Read Kant.

>>14404332
Because the analogy doesn't work, you're trying to explain away why you can't positively talk of capital, probably because you have no understanding of Land.
Again: Kant has a SHIT TON to say about time and space despite their idealist nature.

[Anonymous No.14404373]

Capitalism is:
A) Strangely Potent Bitterness.
B) Sissy Hypno.
C) Autogynephilic Singularity.
D) Neo-Twitter Automatization

[Anonymous No.14404401]

Buzz words: the thread

[Anonymous No.14404508]

>>14404364
>Kant has a SHIT TON to say about time and space
yes, this was my point, how are you this obtuse. and I never said he cannot talk about capital positively, I said he cannot talk about capital as a thing-in-itself. the other anon was talking about capital in a "positive" sense, for whatever that is worth. if you just mean it in a coloquial sense, of course Nick Land talks about capital positively, just like Kant talks about time and space positively. neother makes positive assertions about them as things in themselves. if you are still hung up on time and space not being an object, capitalism isn't either; I'm trying to dumb this down because we are on /lit/

[Anonymous No.14404564]

>>14404508
Just read the posts above you retarded charlatan:

>>14403963 "What is capital?"
>>14404115 "It's the residue of Land's critical philosophy, Land can only adress what it does not what is in-itself" (Here is by the way, where you reveal that you haven't read Kant beyond checking out the phaenomenon/noumenon distinction on Wikipedia at best. Talking about "what it does" IS positively talking about it.)
>>14404133 "Why refer to a previously established term when talking about something you can't talk about per-se?" (Here anon clearly doesn't know what things-in-themselves are aswell)
>>14404193 "Because hurr durr transcendental idealism uhhhhhh" (Here is where you took the bait, agreed with anon that you cannot talk about things in-themselves yet claim we can talk about capital as we can conceive of it as we can conceive of objects. So at first you tried to hand-wave, asserting that capital cannot be _positively_ talked about then you referred to Kant's critical philosophy to somehow cheat yourself out of an explanation)

Every single person who has read Kant can immediately tell that you haven't read Kant, I just want you to know that. Stupid faggot.

[Anonymous No.14404599]

>>14404564
>at first you tried to hand-wave, asserting that capital cannot be _positively_ talked about
how did he write Fanged Noumena if he couldn't make positive statements about Capital? if you want to talk about Kant we can, and stop tripping over terminology, but you are taking a post I wrote for someone who doesn't understand Kant and are trying to analyze it under strict Kantian terminology. If I stuck to strict Kantian terminology he wouldn't get it. of you want to talk about Kant we can, but this pedantic nit-picking over a point I never made (i e. Land can't talk about capital) is just a waste of time
>hur dur you've never read Kant
suck my dick faggot I have read the first Critique cover to cover

[Anonymous No.14404756]

>>14404364
>epistemically transcendent to our cognition
Really man

[Anonymous No.14404904]

>>14404599
so funny you faggots thin ki dont understand kant and still cant explain what capital is.

[Anonymous No.14405923]

Is Tai lopez a Landian?

[Anonymous No.14405937]

>>14405923
>takes money to make money
kek

[Anonymous No.14405944]

>>14404904
see
>>14403521
capitalism is just the dominant means of intelligence explosion

[Anonymous No.14406490]

>>14403556
Printing press not yet invented