/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11887728]

>In a mood of submission and self-abnegation, sensitively recorded by Henry Adams, people began to worship the machine and its masters. If anyone was unreal, Adams wrote, it was the poet, not the businessman. We had created a topsyturvy world in which machines had become autonomous and men had become servile and mechanical: that is, thing-conditioned, externalized, de-humanized— disconnected from their historic values and purposes. And so it has come about that one whole part of man's life, springing from his innermost nature, his deepest desires and impulses, his ability to enjoy and bestow love, to give life to and receive life from his fellow men, has been suppressed. Those deep organic impulses for which art is both the surrogate in immediate action and the ultimate expression of that action as transferred to the life of other men—all this part of man's nature has become progressively empty and meaningless. The maimed fantasies, the organized frustrations, that we see in every comprehensive exhibition of modern painting today are so many symptoms of this deep personal abdication. Pattern and purpose have progressively disappeared, along with the person who once, in his own right, embodied them. Man has become an exile in this mechanical world: or rather, even worse, he has become a Displaced Person.

>There is something noble, as Emerson recognized long ago, in the fact that our railroads, our ocean steamships, our planes, run on a time-schedule almost as regular as the movement of the heavenly bodies. Uniformity, regularity, mechanical accuracy and reliability all have been advanced to a singular degree of perfection. And just as the autonomic nervous system and the reflexes in the human body free the mind for its higher functions, so this new kind of mechanical order should bring about a similar freedom, a similar release of energy for the creative processes. Because of our achievement of mechanical order throughout the planet, the dream of Isaiah might in fact come true: the dream of a universal society in which men shall be weaned from habits of hostility and war.

>But the good fairy who presided over the development of technics did not succeed in forestalling the curse that accompanied this genuine gift: a curse that came from this very overcommitment to the external, the quantitative, the measurable, the external. For our inner life has become impoverished: as in our factories, so throughout our society, the automatic machine tends to replace the person and to make all his decisions—while, for its smoother working, it anesthetizes every part of the personality that will not easily conform to its mechanical needs.

— Lewis Mumford, Art and Technics

https://monoskop.org/images/e/e8/Mumford_Lewis_Art_and_Technics.pdf

read mumford
he’s a cool guy

[Anonymous No.11887735]

he says interesting things about cities also

this man

he knows things

[Anonymous No.11887738]

Nah

[Anonymous No.11887745]

>>11887738
based

[Anonymous No.11887787]

thanks for this thread dude. thank you

[Anonymous No.11887819]

>5 posts
>3 ips
Hmm...

[Anonymous No.11887825]

>>11887787
don't thank me, i'm just the messenger. reserve your admiration for this fine gent. i'm in love with this man

>Mumford was an inspiration for Ellsworth Toohey, the antagonist in Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead (1943)

kek. not so much mademoiselle. receive this hairy nutbag of mine on your forehead instead, mumford was a fucking legend

anyways i can basically greentext mumford quotations to the moon and back, and that is basically what i will be doing in this thread. he also has some pretty epic takedowns of teilhard de chardin, but that's ok

>>11887819
give it time. i can probably hit the bump limit with fewer than ten posters. but it would be better if a more democratic approach were tried

[Anonymous No.11887851]

>I should be uneasy about my own interpretation of the evidence before us if I had not been anticipated more than a century ago by one of the most prescient political interpreters that Europe has ever produced: Alexis de Tocqueville. He was not un aware, in his observation of the New World democracy in the United States, of the many promises that the new technology already held out: indeed he said in so many words that the history of the last seven hundred years was a history of progressive economic and social equalization. But he was also aware of the terrible price that might be paid for these improvements. “I seek,” he said, “to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world among a multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures that glut their lives...

>“Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in a perpetual state of childhood: it is well content that people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, increases and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

>“After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of men is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting...I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom, and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people.’’

>No one else has better described either the bribe or the threat that the very success of megatechnics, culminating in the final assemblage of a planetary megamachine, would bring about. What was once pure speculation in the utopian and scientific fiction writers, is now uncomfortably close to the point of materialization.

[Anonymous No.11887866]

so basically i will be updating this thread with a lot of greentext mainly taken from mumford's works here, with whatever divergences, stops, tangents or assorted other things we may want to do along the way in discussing all things cosmotech. mumford wrote an absolute shit-ton of books and he is basically Mah Hero atm. there will be no shortage of greentext and tumblr art and other things cribbed from twitter and elsewhere. i can basically just pick things from his works at random and they're interesting enough. the main story is technology from Plato to NATO but, of course, on 4chan and in postmodernity life is schizo-kaleidoscopic and that's fun also.

but, you know, if we want to talk about Xi Jinping or peter russell's Global Brain theory or Nick Land's Wild Ride or Jean Baudrillard or whatever else we can do that too. posting will be a little spotty for me through the weekend b/c thanksgiving & family stuff but i should be able to sneak in a shitpost in there along the way somewheres. you guys are familiar enough with how these things work by now.

[Anonymous No.11887922]

>>11887851
damn dude

I am liking this thread

is that green text from a particular book?

[Anonymous No.11888465]

>>11887922
seeing as how he posted De Tocqueville, it should be his book “Democracy in America”

[Anonymous No.11888487]

>>11887922
cheers m8

>is that green text from a particular book?
aye it is, pic rel

i don't know if i will be methodically posting from the same book over and over again, or if it will just be kind of stuff i'm into. the full story of Cosmotech is technology and culture from Plato to NATO (actually, before Plato) but in these threads it's just whatever seems interesting. which usually means nick land, b/c he's the crown prince of acceleration. but there's more to life than him also.

it might be a good idea for me to source the greentext tho, if people are interested in it, so i can do that.

previous installments of cosmotech here:

>>/lit/thread/S11733072
>>/lit/thread/S11778448
>>/lit/thread/S11803295
>>/lit/thread/S11823861

[Anonymous No.11888497]

>>11888465
it's mumford talking about de tocqueville. sorry for the confusion. most of the greentext i will be posting for a while will be mumford unless otherwise specified.

and, again, updates will be quite spotty over the weekend. if the thread is still here on monday i'll have some more stuff going on.

of course, we can always discuss all things acceleration, simulation, technology in the meantime. just remember, intelligence consists in a double refusal...

[Anonymous No.11888548]

i should do a requisite Things To Know About Acceleration (But Were Afraid To Ask Nick Land) post as well, with all the usual references, vidya, megas and other sources in there so that, you know, it's a true /lit/ thread. i've already fucked this up - should have been in the OP - but i'll get one in here later. there's a good mega in Cosmotech 4 that has an accelerationist archive, as well as my own meme bibliographies and other stuff. maybe somebody else wants to take a swing at it?

here's some references for you in the meantime:

>>/lit/image/NK6VbWcLhb1TBA80AmJLzA

>>/lit/image/hJq95xYGyRjc0WWR97LpNw

>>/lit/image/lrySTMhEjaiQ2jAqjGEWIQ

after all, it's okay to fuck things up sometimes, right, chairman yang?
>r-right?

[Anonymous No.11888664]

and there are at least two aspects of mumford's work that for the moment i find most interesting: the first being his study of medieval technics and its relationship to time - again, you can read more about this in greenspan's thesis on land, where the process of creating his not-so-crazy thesis about the invention of capitalist time after Kant - and his analysis of 'megamechanics' in antiquity, and the connection between imperialism, engineering, and monotheism that predates the roman empire.

to say nothing of the fascinating stuff he has to say about the adoption of the christianity by the roman empire (or was it the other way around?) and that being a mega-transformation of another kind.

as an aside, i was reflecting today that - and i know this will sound crazy - that foucault is in many ways a kind of postmodern analogue to augustine. i know, i know, i will proceed to the Stoning Chamber in a moment. but hear me out. foucault is like the ultimate philosopher of human resources, and the perfect guy to announce the fusion of neomarxism and neoliberalism. foucault is That Dude for discourse and critique. now today, of course, we are currently reaping the whirlwind of this and new inquisitions to prosecute moral justice are springing up left and right because - surprise surprise - power is a fucking headache, and it may have nothing at all to do with justice, or at least not in the kinds of neat and easy terms most amenable to capitalism and the flowing of the spice.

>and if it wasn't for rene girard i would well and truly be losing my shit over this
>fortunately girard exists
>and he was a boss
>and he understood these things pretty well also

but this is all a part of the story. mumford died in 1990, which is like right on the cusp of the turning of things into the world we are in today: the fall of the soviet union, a few moments before the launching of the internet, the release of Die Hard 2, and various other world-historical moments.
>i'm kidding about Die Hard 2
>you know this right

anyways. the referendum on foucault is another one of these things that is going to be a long and difficult process, because there is no complete story of neoliberalism without him, and no full story of cosmotech without neoliberalism, since acceleration is basically just neoliberalism + neomarxism on overdrive. but who disciplines the disciplinarians? who punishes the punishers? whether you take your cues from land (the answer to both: capitalism) or girard (jesus, motherfuckers! jesus!) the post-foucaultian era is going to be like a spenglerian winter phase. with no shortage of rage zombies in it. i wonder what michel would have made of social credit.

anyways. the story of tech and culture. it is a wild one.

[Anonymous No.11888665]

for the sake of usefulness, whatever interesting shit you got, let us have it. copy-pasted greentext or otherwise, mumford & sons or otherwise

i want sharp to the point shit, i want shit that fucks me up like the rest of what you posted. keep it coming. i want to be blown blind.

[Anonymous No.11888676]

pretend the readers are complete plebs, I am. I want to be blown blind without having to know what you are talking about when you talk about a specific philosopher. i like talking about ideas instead. couldnt afford to go to college for philosophy, though i tried to

[Anonymous No.11888702]

>>11888665
i mean if you want true continental ultraviolence, proceed directly to Fanged Noumena and begin there. go straight to meltdown and enjoy Ye Olde Wilde Ride. but mumford has a historical perspective that is crucial to understanding why the Outside infected Uncle Nick.

>In so far as the universal religions, and not a few more primitive cults and myths, have had some sense of the all-enveloping cosmic process as more significant than anything that is immediately visible and intelligible on the stage, they have had a firmer hold on reality than those delimited, factual descriptions that remain unaware of the wonder and mystery of the whole performance. 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.

lewis my man this is 100% how i feel also! what else you got?

>So far, nonetheless, these activating manifestations of mind arc the ultimate witnesses to the cosmos itself—whose potentialities remained invisible and undetectable for billions of years until man himself, through the massive growth of his brain, achieved his greatest technological triumph: the invention of symbols and complex symbolic structures that enhance consciousness. For it was initially through the fabrications of the
mind, through dream and symbol, not alone through the cunning of his hands, that man learned to command his own bodily organs, to communicate and cooperate with his kind, and to master so much of the natural environment as would serve his actual needs and ideal purposes.

>The effort to eliminate the formative role of the mind, making the artifact more important than the artificer, reduces mystery to absurdity; and that affirmation of absurdity is the life-heresy of the present generation.

so again, mumford is our boy for history. land is the guy for theory. but in his sensibilities, and i think why he writes what he does, i find myself agreeing almost line for line with a lot of what LM is saying. for sheer mindfucking, you want land and not him; but we also want to know why some people, like land, choose to fuck their minds as they do.

[Anonymous No.11888725]

>>11888676
>pretend the readers are complete plebs, I am. I want to be blown blind without having to know what you are talking about when you talk about a specific philosopher.
in brief, these guys are the titans of the modern age. you can put hegel in there too, in some sense he's there even further in the background. but basically, all of the modern 20C continental stuff you read about or hear about proceeds from these guys in one way or another. i'm partial to heidegger also, and he's a true giant of modern continental thought also.

but i'm sure you're no pleb, anon. and even if so it doesn't really matter anyways, because trust me, *everyone* is beguiled by these things. if it were not so the world would not be presently losing its shit in the way that it is. there is no easy civilizational way to Solve For Marx or Solve For Nietzsche. analytics disavow both of them, continentals double down on each, and disaster follows in each case. all we can do here is kind of talk about what we know about them, as best we can, and who knows, maybe some interesting conversation will percolate.

>couldnt afford to go to college for philosophy, though i tried to
full disclosure: i'm entirely self-taught in this stuff myself. no shit. i have an undergraduate degree and a master's degree, and neither are in this, which is all that i care about. take that as you will. i'm no expert either, just an enthusiastic fan of the material who loves to share it. but i am 100% amateur myself. i just really like what these guys are laying down.

in terms of getting off the ground, i can recommend no book more strongly than this one. it gets a little new age in the closing chapters but for the rest, if you are brand-spanking new to the heavy hitters of continental phil, you really can't go wrong by getting a copy of this and working your way through it. highly recommended and precisely zero prior reading required.

[Anonymous No.11888754]

>>11888725
>these guys
sorry, forgot pic. them, the Masters of Suspicion. everything that blew up in the 20C was planted in the 19C and the hangover extends into the 21C. and land is an heir to this. all Death of God stuff. but -

>The present analysis of technics and human development rests on belief in the imperative need for reconciling and fusing together the subjective and the objective aspects of human experience, by a methodology that will ultimately embrace both. This can come about, not by dismissing either religion or science, but first by detaching them from the obsolete ideological matrix that has distorted their respective developments and limited their field of interaction. Man’s marvellous achievements in projecting his subjective impulses into institutional forms, esthetic symbols, mechanical organizations, and architectural structures have been vastly augmented by the orderly cooperative methods that science has exemplified and universalized. If we are to save technology itself from the aberrations of its present leaders and putative gods, we must, in both our thinking and our acting, come back to the human center: for it is here that all significant transformations begin and terminate.

>The nature of this interplay and this union between the subjective and objective aspects of existence defies any extensive description, since it involves nothing less than the entire history of mankind. So it was left for a poet to sum up this underlying reality in a few words. What Goethe said about nature applies equally to every manifestation of culture and personality. “Nature has neither core nor skin: she’s both at once outside and in.” It is on that assumption that I have given equal weight, in describing man’s technological advances, to every part of his organism, not to the hand and its derivative tools alone. And this is why, too, I have emphasized the part played by wishes and projects, by symbols and fantasies, upon even the most practical applications of technology. For it is through all the activities of the mind, not alone the intelligence and the dynamic instruments of intelligence, that radical departures from conventional practices are made in technics itself.

>This approach, if sound, carries with it a conclusion that challenges those who imagine that the forces and institutions now in existence will go on indefinitely, becoming bigger and more powerful, even though their very bigness and power threaten to nullify the benefits originally sought. If human culture in fact arises, develops, and renews itself through fresh activities in the mind, it may be modified and transformed by the same processes. What the human mind has created, it can also destroy. Neglect or withdrawal of interest works as effectively as physical assault. This is a lesson that our machine-oriented world must quickly assimilate, if it is to preserve even its own successful innovations.

this is very much how i feel as well.

[Anonymous No.11888781]

>>11888754
so while the origins of the industrial revolution can be said to begin in both the 18-19C with the age of steam, and even earlier, in the medieval industrial revolution of guilds that carried into clockworks, for mumford megamechanics begins with the earliest imperial empires and engineering projects, even back to the sumerians. that there has *always* been a relation between technology and monotheism is one of his themes. and, more recently, it's land's also: that for all the fuss about difference within postmodernity, all that is really happening is a) the refinement of selected and preferred metanarratives with an ever-more markedly leftward drift, and b) the increasingly incompatibility between libertarian capital and democratic culture.

and there is more on that story in this book also: namely, the interesting historical bromance that takes place between mobile market capital and landed, or sovereign, territorial interest. markets always want to be free and creative, landed interests need things to Follow the Rules. when they get along, and the speculative power of free capital connects with the military-infrastructural aspects of landed power, great cities that dominate their respective centuries or eras tend to arise. but this is also what leads to the downfall or ruination of market forces, because those free forces almost invariably have to get into bed with things that aren't so free: see Krupp and the Germans, the Genoese wool traders and the Vatican, or tiny little Holland deciding to muscle up and join the colonial race and getting smashed by the French and the English.

or any number of our tech conglomerates today, and the internet.

but in a cultural sense we still think in terms of utopia and revolution. and i was happy to find out today that - guess what? - lewis mumford wrote a whole book dedicated to precisely that. so no doubt we'll get some of that greentext in here at some point.

the story of world capitalism, culture and tech - cosmotech - is a long one. it's like a homeric fucking epic. it just has everything in it.

[Anonymous No.11888807]

thank you for the mind fuck, my good man. every time you post i am saving a new version of this .html to have for reference

[Anonymous No.11888808]

mumford coins a word of his own, 'etherialization' as a process opposed to materialization. basically, it's hegel:

>The following account of the modes of human development must not be confused, because of the verbal resemblance, with either Hegelian idealism or Marxian materialism, though there is a modicum of abstract truth in both those philosophies, with their recognition of dynamic and contradictory processes, which I seek to reconcile with concrete historic realities. An organic concept of cultural and personal change must treat both inner and outer aspects as coeval, not mutually exclusive. Emerson, in his ‘Essay on War,’ came near to formulating my own view when he said: “Observe how every truth, every error, each a thought of some man’s mind, clothes itself in societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers.” I am grateful to Emerson for realizing—contrary to both Hegel and Marx—that error as well as truth, evil as well as good, may play a part, for, as he noted in ‘Uriel,’ “Evil will bless, and ice will burn.”

>Both etherialization and materialization go through a series of distinguishable but not always successive phases; and if they take place at the same time, they move in opposite directions—though not always at the same pace or with the same impact in different areas of the same culture. If etherialization begins originally in the direct impression that the external habitat and its inhabitants make on man’s mind, materialization begins rather in the human mind itself, at a stage prior to abstraction and symbolization: the stage of dreams and pre-conscious activities whose stimulus comes mainly from within, through the hormones and endocrines, notably those connected with sex, hunger, and fear.

>The first phase of materialization springs from neural activities to which the term ‘mind’ can hardly yet be attached: what later will come forth as an ‘idea’ might with greater accuracy be called an apparition, more impalpable than the traditional ghost. This apparition is, by definition, an entirely private experience, unformed, wordless, incommunicable—and therefore more difficult to lay hold of than even a nocturnal dream. Obviously such an intuitive process cannot be investigated scientifically: its existence can only be deduced by a backward reading from its later developments. But the constant flow of stimuli from the internal organs of the body, including the brain itself, which shows activity even in sleep, must be posited as the starting point for all formalized and organized mental life.

it's culture, in a sense, but it is culture both conscious and unconscious. and, like the dialectic itself (or freud), it connects to a dimension much larger than what is ever said or represented *completely.* which is what zizek has been saying his whole life. land too; but zizek and land have very different interpretations of what is meant by the Unconscious or the Outside.

[Anonymous No.11888825]

>>11888807
it is my very sincere pleasure anon.

i actually have to pack it in for the night pretty soon and will be AWOL until probably monday, sadly, at which point irregularly scheduled shitposting can return. you won't hear much from me between now and then, so you guys will have to keep the flame alive while i try to avoid being asked what i am doing with my life over thanksgiving, because thanksgiving dinner is not a time to discuss why the stars take so long to die.

if the thread dies it dies, as drago says; but, you know, life. life has its charms also.

anyways. i can definitely sneak in and check now and again but hopefully this will satiate cosmotech fans for now.

[Anonymous No.11888838]

my dude, i really hope the smart motherfuckers of this world get their shit together and really make some good happen. i am trying on my end, working on it, i hope you believe in yourself. you're onto some really good shit here.

thank you again

[Anonymous No.11888892]

>>11887825
>ten posters
i really should have said twenty, to please the meme gods. but really that's all that is required. most of the bulk of the interesting stuff that percolates in earlier threads just ultimately comes out of a very small number of people asking interesting questions and not just shitposting.

which is, of course, what this board is for. always. this thing is not to be taken seriously, it's just greentext and the adventures of the Merrie Band of Faster-Goers.

[Anonymous No.11888926]

>>11888838
>my dude, i really hope the smart motherfuckers of this world get their shit together and really make some good happen. i am trying on my end, working on it, i hope you believe in yourself.
it's all mutual anon. a marathon and not a sprint. but that is the hope. there has to be hope. of course the usual rule is barbarism, stupidity, ignorance and the rest. i've been stewing on that stuff for years. but every now and again you hit on some writer or encounter someone who just seems to see things a little too much like you to believe they're full of shit. it's just a surprise to realize that you're not alone, that's mainly what does it. that's always been the attraction of philosophy for me: 'hold on, wait, *you saw this too?* holy shit!'

b/c once that happens, once you realize that even in the darkest recesses of your imagination, someone else has basically been to the same places...you just feel less lonely, less alienated. de-alienating, or dis-alienating, is kind of a nice goal to have. just so that people don't feel the need to re-invent the wheel (or, more likely, the torture device) to cure some existential need that in fact people have already written extensively about...

true, some things - like capitalism, or technology, or whatever else remain puzzles. but that is the point of the philosophy stuff, imho: not to solve the problems but to re-open some of the questions and just look at them, so that we can maybe de-escalate some of the hyper-intense mimetic shit-flinging that is going around these days. i kind of used to think that that was, in the end, the only way to go. but then i discovered my favorite guy and had a change of perspective. i've had a bunch of favorite guys along the way - heidegger, baudrillard, the chinese, many others - but girard is basically my guy for the foreseeable future. i would prefer, of course, to live in a world - or perhaps be a different person - where the bulk of my thoughts weren't always about scapegoating, mimesis, envy, desire, greed and hysteria. but these are the times and i am that shitposter. so here we are.

>you're onto some really good shit here.
it's good because people enjoy it. and i didn't invent any of this, or even plan to become obsessed with it. i thought shit would *end* someday! or that people knew what the fuck they were talking about...so really, all i'm doing is just passing along what much, much wiser people than me puzzled with. but it is a sincere pleasure to share and i'm happy to do it. bonus points if others like it also. no need to thank me or embiggen my ego, it's big enough already! trust me...
>and it's a pain in the ass

>thank you again
it's my pleasure anon. take care. and have fun! fun is important...

[Anonymous No.11888986]

>>11888926
I feel the same way, it is such a relief to find that there are folks out there thinking the same things. Definitely been getting a lot of that from this thread. Will definitely be looking into all the things you have referenced.

keep the faith, and I hope you don't limit yourself on what you think you can do

[Anonymous No.11889114]

>>11888926
>i would prefer, of course, to live in a world - or perhaps be a different person

check out "The Courage to Be Disliked" -book

[Anonymous No.11889191]

>>11889114
hm, that does look interesting. thanks anon, i'll check that out.

reading self-help books popular in japan is kind of funny, because japan often strikes us as being a kind of magical and mysterious place. but ofc they need self-help stuff too.

i always found it interesting that heidegger was so well-received there and found so much kinship with DT suzuki's works, while lacan said, 'these people can't be psychoanalyzed!' and barthes also goes there and falls in love and writes Empire of Signs.

i say i want to be a different person, but i don't really work hard at it. mostly because i prefer to fixate on capitalism instead like a complete corn-nut.
>this is a bad idea btw
>don't do this
>go outside
>fall in love
>drink wine
>smell the rainbows
>sex the unicorns
>get arrested for exposing yourself to the sun and worshipping solar generosity
>&c &c

[Anonymous No.11889649]

>After the theory of Marshall McLuhan, André Leroi- Gourhan, and other thinkers of technics in the twentieth century, it is no longer a surprise to say that technologies are the extension of the body. This also resonates with the work of some cognitive scientists and analytic philosophers, such as Andy Clark and David Chalmers, who have proposed an understanding of the “extended mind.” The mind outside of the skull conditions the appearance and hence the experience of the phenomenon. Let’s follow Clark and Chalmers’s example of two protagonists, Otto and Inga, in their article on the extended mind. Otto suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. He is not able to remember things, so he relies on his notebook, in which he stores his notes and which acts as his externalized memory. Inga is normal and has proper access to her memory. If Inga wants to go to the Museum of Modern Art, she recalls that it is on 53rd Street, whereas if Otto wants to go to there, he will have to access his notebook to find out this information. Now there is a relation between Otto and the notebook that is comparable to the relation between Inga and her mind. These extensions are spatial. It is probably only in the work of Bernard Stiegler that we see technics as time in the form of retentions. The body can extend following a technical lineage, but only through time can we retrieve the status of existence and put extension into question. This chapter is very much in debt to the works of Bernard Stiegler, especially his analysis of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in the third volume of his Technics and Time 3— Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise. I want to develop the implications of the hypothesis that imagination itself is no longer the imagination of the subject but rather shifts from subject to algorithms and digital objects. How about things that we cannot experience, or that we can call nonexperience, such as the execution of an algorithm that gives us the givenness of digital objects? On one hand, as we have already stated in the first chapter, discussions of lower- level realities, such as atoms, electrons, or logics, ignore the concreteness of phenomena, that is, the other factors that give rise to a perception of reality as such. On the other hand, we have also noted the ignorance of phenomenological inquiries, which bypass the lower-level reality and its relation to higher-level presentations. We cannot have an experience that an electron has just struck our skin, but we can imagine it; in like manner, we cannot experience the algorithm itself, but we can more or less imagine it within the limits of our cognitive capacity. What happens when such nonexperiences now concretely participate in our imagination?

[Anonymous No.11889709]

>>11889649
>We can see that, more so than the “natural environment,” technology is engaging more and more in our thinking processes, not only in that our environment is full of gadgets but more importantly in terms of the logical capacities and operations of machines. With Edwin Hubble’s hundred- inch Hooker telescope, humanity suddenly discovered that there is nothing more fearful than the infinite. What people saw before their eyes were no longer simple objects like trees but the consequences of pre-pre-predicative experience: the mind reaches the world through the lens, without which there remain only trees in the garden and the walls that surround it. There is a distinction that we need to make here. Our engagement with technical systems is no longer the same as the encounter between Dasein and simple tools such as the telescope. Inside the system or an ensemble, decisions are systematically determined by algorithms instead of relying on the subjective selection of significations. The obstacle to thinking about protention and algorithm together lies in the general conception of an opposition between imagination (time) and mechanism (formal logic), which has to do with the foundations of metaphysics. We still tend to believe in the human as the only subject that imagines; though machines produce a range of choices, the ultimate decision belongs to humans. In the following sections, we will see why time and logic compete to be the ground of metaphysics by looking at the debate between the neo-Kantians and Heidegger. Heidegger wanted to retrieve the transcendental imagination of Kant instead of logic as the foundation of metaphysics. If transcendental imagination constitutes the foundation of metaphysics, to what extent can we also understand the tertiary protention in terms of a metaphysical question? And to what extent does this allow us to investigate the existence of digital objects? With our general method, we will try to understand time and logic as two orders of magnitude and see how to push forward the idea of tertiary protention by resolving (or jumping across) this division.

[Anonymous No.11889710]

>>11889649
aw yeah. stiegler is by way of being YH's thesis supervisor gold-star cosmotech. this makes yuk hui also smile somewhere also.

>The term which Stiegler introduces for technics thought from out of the originary process of exteriorization is: “organized inorganic beings.” Neither living nor inert material, technically organized matter can be seen as an autonomous third order of beings. Although Stiegler stresses the differences opened when life becomes technically mediated, one of the important aspects of continuity which is retained across this rupture is the character of both pre-technical and technical life as negentropic configurations of matter. The movement of life as a continuous deferral of entropic diffusion, i.e. an “increase in negentropy,” is not first opened by technics, but rather, is an aspect of life that is accentuated by technical exteriorization. Although technically mediated life is a new configuration of negentropy it must be seen as also an accelerator of entropy. Technical beings as the matrix of hominization are paradoxically both the condition for the opening of negentropic transformations and equally the source of entropic regressions as what is most threatening to life as such. This inherent co-possibility of vital advance and decline is the basis for Stiegler’s later characterization of technicity as pharmacological. Earlier than metaphysical accounts, which have always opposed the human to the technical, technics must be rethought as co-original with the very emergence of the human as such.

>This original technicity is connected with the fact that man is marked by an original ‘default of origin’ (défaut d’origine), that is, with an original absence of intrinsic qualities and the lack of a natural mode of existence, entailing the necessity to continuously (re)invent and permanently cultivate such qualities and modes of existence. Man’s mode of existence is therefore essentially artificial, that is to say: essentially accidental. It is a historical happening that is uniquely grounded in a process of technical exteriorization with which man must permanently negotiate and through which he himself permanently changes.

the whole thing about digitized and uploaded memory and what this does to consciousness is worth losing your continental noodle over. we hardly notice it now because we basically live in it all the time. but that's exactly what philosophers are required to do sometimes, close study of the obvious...

how about french theory that doesn't ruin your life and bore you to tears, but asks you to think about what tech is, wants, and does? this isn't nick land's wild ride. stiegler is cool.

+ links
http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/pdf/Stiegler%20glossary.pdf
https://www.academia.edu/20136235/A_Summary_of_Bernard_Stiegler_Technics_and_Time_1
https://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia27/Parrhesia27_Colony.pdf
https://www.onlineopen.org/download.php?id=377

good stuff anon

[Anonymous No.11889740]

also, from the cosmotech news file, which occasionally also happens:

>"By 2030, we shall make artificial intelligence theory, technology, and application at the world's leading level," the Chinese Government said in its top-level AI plan.
>"[China will] be the major artificial intelligence innovation centre of the world."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-06/china-plans-to-become-ai-world-leader/10332614

older story, similar themes here:

https://techstartups.com/2018/05/08/the-chinese-government-is-adding-artificial-intelligence-into-the-high-school-curriculum-unveils-mandated-high-school-ai-textbook/

>>11889709
>We still tend to believe in the human as the only subject that imagines; though machines produce a range of choices, the ultimate decision belongs to humans. In the following sections, we will see why time and logic compete to be the ground of metaphysics by looking at the debate between the neo-Kantians and Heidegger. Heidegger wanted to retrieve the transcendental imagination of Kant instead of logic as the foundation of metaphysics. If transcendental imagination constitutes the foundation of metaphysics, to what extent can we also understand the tertiary protention in terms of a metaphysical question? And to what extent does this allow us to investigate the existence of digital objects? With our general method, we will try to understand time and logic as two orders of magnitude and see how to push forward the idea of tertiary protention by resolving (or jumping across) this division.

i'd like a source on this also. is this from yuk hui?

[Anonymous No.11889748]

>>11889740
yea, it is from On The Existence of Digital Objects, chapter 6.

[Anonymous No.11889756]

>>11889748
awesomeness. cheers anon

[Anonymous No.11889772]

>>11889649

I think you’re on the right track but your terms might be a little mixed up. Nonexperience isnt some non-phenomelogical neumena that somehow transcends perceptible sensory information. It’s more of the inverse of sensory experience. One can’t even say you can imagine an electron or photon or what have you passing through the epidermis because such an experience wouldn’t be “non-experience” perse. One can can perhaps contemplate what such a thing would *look* like, in the mind’s eye but not IMAGINE it because such a thing is non-phenomenal...anti-phenomenal even. Any book arguing the opposite would quite frankly stiff the buyer and i don’t see how someone could attach his name to such a theory in front of others without claming up.

[Anonymous No.11890244]

Ok. So I finally found the new thread where Girard is hanging out!

[Anonymous No.11890323]

>>11887735
It's universal.
https://youtu.be/0Z760XNy4VM

[Anonymous No.11891008]

bump

[Anonymous No.11891113]

>We are approaching such a state of symbiosis with machines...but is this really something that we should celebrate, or is the logic of symbiosis as an ontological understanding in itself problematic? In such a vision, the perfection of the fourth synthesis reconstructs the organization of images. Indeed, the transcendental imagination is becoming a passive force of synthesis, because the recognition process can be short- circuited: the future is always the present. Deleuze, in Difference and Repetition, has identified this temporal structure as the third synthesis of time. The first synthesis of time is the time of habitudes, the Humean time that we discussed earlier in this book; the second synthesis of time is the active and passive synthesis of memory; the third synthesis of time is the repetition “by excess, the repetition of the future as eternal return.” It is clear that Deleuze wasn’t thinking about the tertiary protention of algorithms and digital objects; he was addressing the temporal constitution of subjectivity through three syntheses of time. In contrast to the repetition of passive habitudes and the repetition of memories, the third synthesis of time as the repetition of the future is the highest level of synthesis: the eternal return of the not- yet- present.

>Deleuze takes a similar path to Heidegger in taking time as the foundation of subjectivity, which is the form of the determinable in addition to the “I think” (determination) and “I am” (undetermined). Deleuze saw this as the cerebral response of Kant: “the form under which undetermined existence is determinable by the ‘I think’ is that of time.” The fourth synthesis that we have derived from the reading of Heidegger’s critique of logics contributes to another formulation of time, taking up my past and the past of those who I don’t know. It gives us a new form of determination that is not “I think” but “I guess you think...” We call it tertiary protention. The active synthesis of the tertiary protention gives us a future that is present, like the third repetition of Deleuze, in which “the present is no more than an actor, an author, an agent destined to be effaced; while the past is no more than a condition operating by default.” In the affirmation of the third repetition, we see also a detachment of the future and memory. Because neither memories nor habitudes are the determining factor any more, the projection is already there before their synthesis. Through the spatialization of both habitudes and memories in digital objects, the algorithms have already produced the synthesis without consulting the other syntheses. The third repetition is the repetition of signs, of symbols, of objects that I have encountered or that I may have encountered.

-- yuk hui, OEDO

cyborg status as individuals, and machine synthesis in network society. for land, kant replaced god with time; D&G altered the plot once again; and now...?

[Anonymous No.11891148]

>>11891113
one of the real turning points in all of this is the role-played by the master-signifer of all master-signifiers, that being Capital. it seems to me that as soon as we start talking about a Human Network and occluding the role played by economic relations, we immediately become the dreaded Fucking Neoliberals, and any humanist sensibilities added in after that point only those of Bloody Neo-Marxism.

the societies of control D&G talk about - or foucault, or baudrillar - are in a sense indistinguishable from the kind of reality many people want (well, those who aren't envisioning life in monasteries, or in going back to the land as druids, or those who desire mannerbund, &c). we like the internet, and yet the internet has transformed the nature of time. we are becoming algorithmicized beings, beings known by a system, and now and again i get these mysterious intimations about the uselessness of the body itself, how the mind can now basically do all cognitive labor on the symbolic, digital, and network planes. in terms of socialist egalitarianism, we perhaps feel this new force of gravity coming on: that sheer intellectual/cognitive/processing horsepower will do all the sorting. the numbers themselves will sort out those who belong in utopia from those who do not. this will lead to much strife...

i listened to an interesting debate about just these themes yesterday, about how fragile this makes any kind of middle or centrist position.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pw33NKXQSlc

but all of this in turn is still driven by the wishes and demands of the consumer society, which increasingly wind up ensnaring everybody in these systems of recursion. and we don't, as douglas murray has said, have any real sense or purpose of what it is for. a purely eudaimonic society alienates even those who are theoretically made most happy by it. get everything you want, and you realize that it's doubly hollow. what you want is a sense of meaning, purpose, or fulfilment, and there's plenty of that to be found in idpol crusades, but this too leads only to rage and brutal zero-sum games of recognition, violence, force, reciprocity and mimesis.

on the one hand, you want to isolate yourself, and set up your own positive microcircuit of happiness and growth; and yet, on the other, all of these link up on Planet Meme. time itself has changed again. FB's attempt to algorithmicize the news was one of the most insidious examples of this, to make what was trending that which mattered, simply because the most people were talking about it - but how do you get a lot of people to talk about something? prime it for spectacle, load it with bait, and have it produce shock and outrage. the CCP may be designing the firmware and hardware for social credit, but we learned how to bait and seduce people more effectively than they did.

don't know where else i'll be able to use this art, so i'll stick it in here. pic unrel, i guess. still pretty tho.

[Anonymous No.11891153]

>Read-Only Memory, or ROM, is designed to protect temporality from the feminized feedback of the woman-demon-machine continuum. But the fragility of the structural relation between the profiteers of the specular economy and its appropriated outside only manifests long after its power has been functioning in reverse.

[Anonymous No.11891166]

>>11891153
based

[Anonymous No.11892156]

bump

[Anonymous No.11892419]

Thanks for letting me know this was officially the Cosmotech V thread. Should have labelled it though so it would have been more easily recognised as such.

[Anonymous No.11892473]

Has anyone bought that new Negarestani book yet?
if so please scan and upload it to libgen, kisses and many thanks
btw MIT Press is compiling an anthology of his writings. Should be released next year I think.

[Anonymous No.11893047]

>>11892473
When next year are we talking? I think we should make something with a list of interesting upcoming books. That could be a good idea.

[Anonymous No.11893807]

>>11891153
what in the dickens

>>11892419
>Thanks for letting me know this was officially the Cosmotech V thread.
it is!

>Should have labelled it though so it would have been more easily recognised as such.
yeah. you're right. i'm still kind of amazed that cosmotech is a thing at all. in the earlier threads i could put up stuff related to yuk hui &c, in #3 some other anon took over that role, and in #4 it was just whitehead. #5 follows with being mostly mumford, but...yeah, you're right. it should have had all of the links and cool stuff in the OP like a true /lit/ thread.

>>11892473
not yet, but negarestani is a player in this universe

>>11893047
>I think we should make something with a list of interesting upcoming books. That could be a good idea.
i agree. between reza's book, yuk hui's book and zizek's book (which is now released) those are three things all related to these ideas, but those are also all of the books i could name that are a part of it.

[Anonymous No.11894002]

>>11893807
Well I'm sure there are plenty of other books that are coming out on a yearly basis with deal a bit more generally with technology, yet still can be usefully applied here to our threads. Maybe tomorrow or sometime else I can look for some general technology books in edition to the particular tech authors which I already enjoy.

[Anonymous No.11894166]

>>11894002
there's no question that there are lots more, just that those are the only three that i could actually think of. but for sure, there are probably lots of other ones, and a list of upcoming or related stuff would be a way cool contribution to these threads and a really good idea. no doubt!

i also wanted to connect this thread to some of the posts in the baudrillard thread, in particular the scanned excerpts posted from Yuga, which is also really required reading for these threads. glass has thoroughly digested his marx, mcluhan, and especially baudrillard - many others too - and the result is a pretty powerful screed against the modern world. a very cool anon has put together a collection of screenshots that you will find interesting if you're into the philosophical themes of these threads also.

>>11891969

[Anonymous No.11894524]

Bump

[Anonymous No.11895208]

>>11894524
>Tfw I can't think of anything to post in the thread but no one else is really saying anything and it has been rather dead lately.

[Sage No.11895268]

>>11891153
>>westros sidelined in the dogleg of the nose-hair, indeed, outwardly wise betwixt before ambulatory spaces. According to sublimity over threefold hegelian dialectic examining eastern poot slap, we conundrum spork wire ice zings toad.

[Anonymous No.11895276]

A question from Zizek's new book on post-human capitalism that's been turning the gears:
>From a traditional Marxist standpoint, strange questions arise here: if fabricated androids work, is exploitation still operative, does their work produce value that is in excess of their own value as commodities so that it will be appropriated by their owners as surplus value?

[Anonymous No.11895513]

>>11894166
this yuga shit fucking slaps

[Anonymous No.11895576]

y'know, I hate to say it because I love a lot of this thread, but I will be honest

all this techno-masturbation is really gay.

hung on hopes of cyber-immortality, escaping the earth we have destroyed, hopes of virtual reality, vast visions of utopia that aren't all that different from the matrix

stop doubting that the interconnected utopia is already here. some of its on the internet. some of its psychic. wake up to it. technology is a tool or a distraction. you can use it the right way, or you can use it just to masturbate your imagination, to validate your perceived ineptitude or stagnation. it is a fucking addiction.

sounds like what you need is some non-technological experiences of human connection, nature, and the divine. technology can be wielded, and though it threatens us and this can be scary, it does not mean we should submit everything to it and hang all our hopes and dreams on it. thats too easy and too gay a dream. and ultimately would just suck.

the true strength of a human being lies in what they have inside of them, inner wealth. technology is a form of outer wealth, to remove responsibilities from ourselves and through that actually blunt ourselves and our natural capacities- that would be stupid

not saying we shouldn't take advantage of what we can. but at this point. if you want to have hope for the future, a technological wet dream is not the path my friend

[Anonymous No.11895582]

dont fall for the fucking techno-cliche

instead experiment with falling for mysticism, deep meditation. take some fucking drugs. volunteer at a soup kitchen. sell all your shit and become a drifter, an artist, a poet. quiet your fucking rationality down for a bit and try just feeling some

[Anonymous No.11895607]

these apocalyptic visions of the machine are just a goddam feargasm, im pretty sure its unproductive and its better instead to focus on the gifts that humans inherently possess, yet refuse to accept or develop

[Anonymous No.11895632]

what do you do when faced with a feargasm?

jerk off to detailed narratives of how badly we could all be fucked, but also how cool it could be?

id say skip that shit and go straight to the solutions, and if you havent thought of any yet, especially outside of the context of technology or the machine itself, then you aren't *thinking* deeply enough

[Anonymous No.11896007]

>>11887728
Based.

Not gonna lie, I want to rub my dick against her bones.

[Anonymous No.11896203]

>>11895208
i have some stuff borrowed from mumford and yuk hui to bring in but logistics have been complicating things.
>plus i had to watch ufc 229 last night
>yowza

>>11895268
based

>>11895276
has anybody read zizek's new book yet? i'm really curious to read this one. androids ofc *do* represent the holy grail, in many ways. you can't exploit androids and they don't go on strike. this is why so much of this is the ultimate fantasy: Fully Automated Luxury Communism.

>>11895513
it absolutely does. Yuga is a special book. it's from a guy who really has done his reading and thought about this stuff. there's a guy who really has managed to remove his own matrix feeding-tube and looked at the resultant dystopia and realized how monstrous all of it is.

and there are no ready ideological cures. that is the point. at least, as far as i can tell. i mean, there *are* but that's not the thing i think matters. ofc, anybody can read the state of marxism in 2018 and decide to join whatever tribe or band is offering the Cure, but the Cure in a political sense is, imho, the problem.

anyways. giving some love to marty glass is always a legit move.

>>11895576
i agree with all of this ofc. no doubt. you're completely right. so are >>11895582 and >>11895607. no question. a balanced life of mingling the optimism with the pessimism is the way to go. politically, my attitude is very much like mumford's (as well as land's, or la boetie's, or whoever else): just withdraw and secede, as much as possible. it can't be done forever, b/c going Full Kaczynski is not the way to go. but Thoreau is a pretty good look, as are most schools of meditation.

anyways, >>11895576 gets it, so there's no need to belabor the point. he's/you're right. all of you guys are. there's no question. balance is the deal. what i think is interesting to do on the side is to tell the story of technology through these various sources, and perhaps in such a way that it *doesn't* always produce ideology.

at bottom, retracing continental philosophy's long discourse on time - its meaning, theory and practice - is the final goal.

>>11896007
i think i will probably go on a minor schizo-ramble about Starcraft at some point b/c of the interesting parallels between Kerrigan and Darth Vader. sci-fi myths of power and tragedy for two different generations, but with some really interesting scenarios. in Starcraft, it's a love story between raynor and kerrigan; in star wars, the main narrative is the one of luke and vader. i think there are interesting stories in this.

anyways. sorry about the lull in greentext and other schizoposting, as i said i've been on the road. but thanks kindly to anons who have kept the thread alive in the meantime. i have a file loaded up with some interesting text to share, and i'll post some of that later today. it's possible, in the end, that a lot of this is really only so much commentary on glass' book, but who knows, maybe that's needed.

[Anonymous No.11896281]

>>11896203
the thing is the anger and the fear, two aspects of the sad passions, and they're all driven by desire, the golden goose of capital and ideology. the 20C arguments *should* be over. 21C repetitions of these will be just as bloody and destructive, but they're not, to my mind, the actual things worth thinking about.

build better *people* and the better *politics* will come. the story is what land says it is: Optimize for Intelligence. politics never does this (and certainly advertising doesn't). the reason why sloterdijk always comes up is because anthropotechnics really is the deal, and it's a reading of nietzsche that isn't so crazy, it's eminently sane. anthropotechnics is clinical nietzscheanism: the self-engineering man, and a collectivity of said immunitarians could engineer themselves a pretty good society also. everything sloterdijk says about the practicing planet seems inarguable to me: the ascetic, disciplined, practicing planet. speaking for myself, the allure of Fuck You money and the rest is inviting because it implies complete freedom from the hysterical and infinite triggerings one is exposed to on planet meme. but i don't think there's a place you can get to, either in your imagination or in reality, where you are ever really fully and completely insulated from these things. the news gives you a bouquet of this madness every day. and looking for the silver lining in the clouds thus presented by the MSM is a fool's errand.

it's the anger and the rage, the fear and the triggerings, the Tale of Woe and the Litanies of Grievance that really destroy you. but this i think is the nature of philosophical life going forward. if i have a kind of hope, it's that philosophy or these kind of reflections become in the end a part of a reclamation project that makes some of the Desert of the Real an arable plot of land again. i'm never optimistic about this stuff, but i'm pessimistic about pessimism and skeptical about skepticism. we do are seeing DFW's predictions coming true, about what happens when you try and found a literary culture on pure irony, with the added caveat that New Sincerity really does manifest in tribal politics. fanatics and moral puritans may have incredibly blinkered views, but they don't lack for sincerity. if anything there is a surfeit of it.

in antiquity at least i think there was one guy who inarguably knew the score, and it was aeschylus. the furies have a case to be made against orestes, who is only following the law of the land in the oresteia. blood feud, revenge and reciprocity, are default conditions of human psychosocial life. that athena intervenes on behalf of him, and that athens only comes into existence when the furies are exiled from the discourse, is about as complete and perfect a summation of my own feelings about this as there can be. ofc girard comes to similar conclusions about the meaning of the gospels, but in terms of an earlier ancestor for girard it's hard to beat aeschylus.

[Anonymous No.11896314]

>>11896281
and to have athena intervene and decide the fate of orestes would otherwise be an act of unforgivable deus ex machina were it not the case that there seems to be something mysteriously and incontrovertibly *true* about the nature of this process: that the polis cannot simply be the site or locus of bloody-handed mimetic transfer, justice, exchange or reciprocity. it can *become* that way. in the french revolution it *is* that way: the city is where you place the guillotine. justice loves publicity. and we have at least one phenomenon that would have complicated the life in ancient greece, that being the media (unless, of course, we can understand that the role played by the chorus in ancient drama also served this function, to express the general and phantasmatic will of the collective unconscious).

but that's not the goal. and universities today seem to me to becoming Grievance Industries and Critique Institutes that only drive this process to ever-higher and ever-further peaks of bitterness, misery, resentment and rage. and i hate all of this stuff, because the super-triggered, enraged, aggrieved and furious one always seems to have the high hand on reason, reserve, or dispassionate argument today. molyneux is a cornball also, i'm not trying to embiggen him, although he is right about some things. i might even be more interested in him if he could at least understand that *not everything has to be an argument,* which is really the key issue. philosophical charity and trust are to discourse what the capacity for humor is to truth: the sign of a middle ground in which more is possible than the continual reiteration of the Same as motivated and driven by the sad passions.

the furies were the bane of the ancient greeks and they are to us today as well. the furies are Wired for Justice and not for reason, and girard i think would have said the same about many early forms of religion. and it's not like sometimes the stuff that girard says doesn't sound a little weird to me - again, there are lots of reasons to read mythology and religion that aren't Waiting For Girard for the same reason that ancient theories of mind aren't all predecessors to freud. that's not the point.

but i'm bringing this up because it is technology - and intelligence - that links cultures together geographically and historically, even when mythology doesn't. but also because in the case of aeschylus and his relevance today it's hard to find a better example of a writer who really had thought through the implications of a politics of shock and outrage, and decided against it.

[Anonymous No.11896358]

>>11896314
oh the furies.

so again, the point here isn't just to have a fear-wank about the nature of our modern machine overlords. i personally tend to take the view that whatever we see happening in politics or in culture comes about as a result of economic processes, at the bottom, and that often - not always - these are implicated with technics and technical development. but as we continue into the 21C, where a lot of the political stuff that we are doing is either a) a repetition of something we already tried out in the 20C or b) a question about our own intelligence or tragico-fatal sensibilities, what could be useful is that cognizance of how it is we got here in the first place.

i think what is unique about the 21C is this need to understand that what is happening with land really is well and truly a copernican re-alignment, and this carries with it all of the potential for enormous upheaval. copernicus knew the earth was not the center of the universe, but he also didn't trumpet this to the crowd. galileo had no problem with it, but he was still put under house arrest for being a douchebag about it. what we are going through is imho something similar: look, the far horizon of technocapital is ultimately driven by human passions, human invention, and human creation, but it's ultimate possibilities are obviously not to deliver Great Tasting Chicken. it's way more than this, and in a civilizational sense little has prepared us for a completely new sense of time, space, and the meaning of mind and intelligence.

so i do think a balanced perspective is called for in these things, as other anons have pointed out: meditative practices, withdrawal from media, a new connection with nature, spirituality, and much else. everything that goes under the banner of Waking Up. ready-to-hand ideological paint-by-numbers strategies to muster and direct weaponized wrath are pure pharmakon, whether they come from the left or the right: everybody knows this. so what can we do that isn't participation in that? again, just reiterate the nature of the story, or (and i have some stuff from yuk hui to share on this, cheers to >>11889748) remind ourselves that much of philosophy is a discourse on the meaning of *time* and that time is not reducible to politics.

it's hard to be a sane, peaceful, capable, competent human being. it's easier to be a rage zombie. and nobody comes with built-in immunity from the rage virus. but the rage will fuck us all in the end.

[Anonymous No.11896382]

>>11896358
and, let's face it: athena is a pretty fucking dope deity. at least one reason to reject the furies is because they aren't athena. as polytheistic gods go she's hard to top, and aeschylus made it pretty clear where she stood v/bloody-handed vengeance.

[Anonymous No.11896433]

>>11896007
there is a lot to say about kerrigan and the redemption arc, as well as the nature of transformation and mutation and so on. there may also be parallels to pic rel, and FF6 is another one of those texts i am fond of drawing on when i want to score points about nietzsche and heidegger.

but starcraft has a pretty complete mythos of its own. and again, it doesn't matter if it's *cheesy* - it is - it matters because however cheesy it was, a lot of people tuned in to follow it, and it may have been impossible for the game to be as successful as it was without having one.

but unlike star wars, the central character of starcraft was kerrigan rather than vader, and the turn to the dark side - the zerg experience - actually ends with the 'dark side' becoming itself converted, in the end, to Kerriganism: and, as such, it can't really be that bad. which is kind of amazing. in Star Wars there is no humanizing the Sith: one way or another, the Sith are bad. and the fact that they make you *physically ugly* no doubt plays some role in this: the emperor in the end has a giant scrotum-head. but Kerrigan doesn't become *less sexy* for becoming the brood queen; if anything, her sexiness gets cranked up to eleven. with Terra Branford it's a similar process.

partly, of course, it might be said that the developers at Blizzard just couldn't keep anything un-sexy for long. Blizzard (but not, for example, Games Workshop) has given us Sexy Orcs and Sexy Undead as well, which are things that would have puzzled Tolkien, for instance, or the early developers of the 40K universe (Gygax, maybe not so much). but the whole aesthetic process of Sexification For The Greater Good is kind of a fascinating and hilarious one. would the greeks have worshiped Athena if she was morbidly obese? probably not.

but this kind of stuff also fucks with our sensibilities, because in the end, we are kind of hilariously inclined to just root for whatever is most physically beautiful to us, even if it's the zerg (or the Espers). but more on that later perhaps.

[Anonymous No.11896612]

so much of the stuff we're talking about is a kind of referendum on hegel, or at least hegelianism as gnostic-political demiurge. does the truth of history reside with the will of the people?

land's unique ideological creation - Right Marxism - is a kind of analogue for foucault's equally potent invention, Left Nietzscheanism. both have relations not only to the meaning of government but of revolution, cyclicity in history, and much else. personally i'm skeptical about a lot of it, but i think there is something irresistably seductive about hegel, the temptation to participate in, if not to actualize, historical eschaton.

it came up, in one of the other cosmotech threads, the meaning of an AI singularity happening *in our lifetimes.* it's a good point to bring up, so that we don't get too carried away with ourselves, but it's also worth mentioning that this doesn't have to be the case for land's contribution to the big discussion to matter. the real shift is the one away from taking the lead from mass politics and towards the meaning of intelligence, and perhaps whether or not it is possible to build the socius around that idea, optimize for intelligence.

and beyond a certain horizon, it isn't. everybody has their own threshold for this stuff, but it's not like nondual mysticism has lost any of its charm. you can - and probably should - leave the field of play once you get to the point of unironically praying for the second coming of Lee Kuan Yew in the west, or thinking that social credit can lead anywhere in the end but to a dystopian nightmare.

i'll be posting some stuff from Yuk Hui's book later on, either today or tomorrow, about the new theories of time that he has begun to puzzle out by way of Simondon and Stiegler, about tertiary protention and interobjective relations.
>if you want the spoilers, just read the later chapters of On The Existence of Digital Objects

i don't know what the full implications of this would be, but it certainly wouldn't be unironic communism or fascism. mass political movements aren't the endgoal, but neither is absolute withdrawal: it's just not possible. you have to participate, in some sense, however loathsome this may seem on some days. but basically we've had about two straight centuries of political romanticism since Napoleon and it really doesn't look like that party is about to stop anytime soon. it's probably going to happen again in the age of new tribal warfare that i think are on the horizon. for that stuff i think you just have to withdraw.

my unique form of withdrawal is narrativization, if that makes any sense.

[Anonymous No.11896645]

>>11896612
i am deeply fucked up by social credit, tho. there is something incredible to me about the idea of re-grounding the Real of capital in the will of the party itself. we have been abstracting money for centuries in the west, and have gone all the way from tribal exchange of mana-freighted talismans, to double-entry bookkeeping, to networks of (arguably proto-sentient) Bitcoin. and now perhaps this system has an eerie doppelganger in China, where the CCP is going to make it Real Simple for everyone, in a kind of breathtakingly simple way: the real credit is your score, it is only your score, it will only be your score, it always was your score, and so glhf.

systems of economics are also systems of culture, but those systems of culture are deeply intertwined with technological systems, which perhaps in the end almost inevitably must become systems of economics. it's old Marxist stuff, and the story is more fully explored by Fredric Jameson, if you want to read more on this - and in particular, those areas where he talks about the unique situation of postmodernity engendering a culture which, like its own financial resources, is capable of living entirely on the fruits of its own self-speculation.

it is possible to imagine china led by Xi Jinping Thought engaging in an ultimately very similar process.

[Anonymous No.11896786]

the story of the lure of technology - and perhaps its relationship to a power which carries within it the ability to redress wrongs, create or enact justice, and resolve political issues - is also told, i think, in another Blizzard mythology.

vidya has no end of Cosmotech goodness, but my own feeling is that the last thing to do anywhere is to unpack texts and reduce them to fodder for critical theory. what i prefer is looking at these things as being fundamentally mythological in nature, and expressing certain basic intimations about the human being and their relationship to technology and its potential, which is almost always excessive: it's the Swarm for Kerrigan, and it's the Lich King for Arthas. the fact that these stories are similar and the romances not exactly dostoevsky doesn't bother me in the slightest. what i'm fascinated with is the fact that they exist at all.

[Anonymous No.11897295]

Good morning my sentient squad. If you haven't you should really try to see if any of the CCRU and other sorts of scholars would reply to your emails girard, or anyone else for that matter. I'm curious honestly if anyone here is considering breaking into academics with some of this stuff as part of their specialisation.

[Anonymous No.11897343]

>>11896203
>has anybody read zizek's new book yet
I'm about half way through it. there is some standard Zizek boilerplate as always but he has a wonderful analysis of Bladerunner 2049 that I really enjoyed.

[Anonymous No.11897369]

>>11897295
(not girardfag) I would go for MA in phil (and beyond) with this stuff but I'm too damn broke. I'm going to go for a law degree just to fund my studies. there's a couple of thesis on /r/theoryfiction focusing on this stuff so people are certainly doing it.

[Anonymous No.11897386]

>>11897369
I'm sort of on a similar track. Probably going Law then PhD for phil if things work out. Feel free to link any of those thesis papers if you think they might be of interest. It would also probably help girardfag if here ever ends up producing a giant guide/reference with all sorts of things to read.

[Anonymous No.11897412]

>>11897386
greenspans work is especially worthwhile
https://gpreview.kingborn.net/558000/34d2c784670c49adbcb3f597e54bf5c2.pdf
https://theses.ncl.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/10443/3350/1/Overy%2C%20S.%202016.pdf

[Anonymous No.11897522]

hola gents, girardfag here. i want to go on a crazy tear about yuk hui, ludics, inter-objectivity, games, simulation, programming and time &c but i have to go out for the evening for family + turkey (and avoiding conversations about what i am doing with my life) and probably won't be back for more time-bendy shitposting until sometime late tomorrow aft. hope the thread is still here then! love & memes to all until then, talk to you guys soon.

[Anonymous No.11897760]

>>11897412
Thanks. I'll maybe try and read that sometime today and get back with you on my thoughts. Just lost and confused with my life like most of us here.
>>11897522
Love and memes. If I know how many hours until you are back I can try and watch over the thread until then oh wise one.

[Anonymous No.11897881]

>>11896281
optimizing for empathy should be placed on a higher pedestal than optimizing for intelligence

it's much more difficult to teach people to be intelligent than it is to teach them to be empathetic - all you have to do to teach someone to be empathetic is to be empathetic to them. but of course, optimizing for intelligence should be Very important as well - just less

with that knowledge, one could arguably devote their lives to being as virtuous, as empathetic a person as possible- showing others to do so through example. devotion, willing to endure suffering, willing to be truthful, compassionate, and patient with anyone. change people one interaction at a time- the effect will surely bloom outwards

interestingly, experiments have shown that there is No correlation between intelligence and virtuousness

[Anonymous No.11897891]

>>11897881
along this line of thinking, perhaps the solution has actually been this fucking simple all along - just live by the examples of jesus, buddha, gandhi, MLK - ETC ETC ETC

but for us intelligent folk, such a simple solution seeming feasible would seem out of the question. the solutions *must* be something as similarly complicated as the way that we think about things and view the world. maybe things are wayyyyyyy simpler than we enjoy making them, getting caught up in all the details, in looking at all the bits and bobs of the machinery and not seeing the forest from the trees

ultimate simplicity has a great value- combine that with the christ consciousness - extreme devotion - and live it - and encourage others to do so

[Anonymous No.11897990]

the solution is both in the individual as well as the interactions between individuals, and the communities of the whole- eliminating the bad habits, bolstering the good ones - in our private lives, as well as in the bigger picture

but it starts with you, always, for everyone. fucking alchemical shit n shit.

[Anonymous No.11898026]

>>11897881
Not doubting you but I'd be interested in seeing through some of these experiments. Just to give us here in the thread some more content to examine.

[Anonymous No.11898043]

>>11898026
youd have to look that one up yourself m8, dont remember where i read it. report back

[Anonymous No.11898054]

>>11898043
You should probably look it up though. I mean you'd know it when you saw it plus I wouldn't know where to begin with that sort of stuff. Eh if we are all just being lazy today then perhaps Girardfag will come back on tonight and find the studies for everyone.

[Anonymous No.11898068]

>>11887728
>>>11887728
>>There is something noble, as Emerson recognized long ago, in the fact that our railroads, our ocean steamships, our planes, run on a time-schedule almost as regular as the movement of the heavenly bodies. Uniformity, regularity, mechanical accuracy and reliability all have been advanced to a singular degree of perfection.

lmao its 2018 and even in Germany the trains don't run on time all the time

[Anonymous No.11898083]

>>11898068
I wonder why.

[Anonymous No.11898233]

>>11898068
Mumford thought the invention of the clock, not the steam engine, revolutionized the west, and mechanized our daily life.

[Anonymous No.11898511]

>>11894166
>The Kali-Yuga happens to the people you love. You see the inner shape, the real one, when they're just walking away across the room with their backs to you, you see their secret faces when they're alone, and you see that they're trudging, their shoulders hunched and rounded under the burden, their faces baffled and bewildered, almost muttering, but still defiant, still determined, because they're human, and their demand, their consciousness of birthright, is ineffaceable, ineradicable. The divine imprint. His image. And you think they haven't got a chance, but then again you can't really know. God alone knows their fate. It happens to the people you love. That's what breaks your heart. Breaks your heart.
-Yuga pgs. 95-96

[Anonymous No.11898814]

>>11898233
He was pretty spot on here. Do you happen to know where he specifically wrote about that for further reference?

[Anonymous No.11899053]

>>11898814
He literally says in his essay The Monastery and the Clock in his book Technics and Civilization "The clock, not the steam engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age."

A quote from the same essay:
>"The clock “is a piece of power-machinery whose ‘product’ is seconds and minutes: by its essential nature it dissociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences: the special world of science. There is relatively little foundation for this belief in common human experience: throughout the year the days are of uneven duration, and not merely does the relation between day and night steadily change, but a slight journey from East to West alters astronomical time by a certain number of minutes. In terms of the human organism itself, mechanical time is even more foreign: while human life has regularities of its own, the beat of the pulse, the breathing of the lungs, these change from hour to hour with mood and action, and in the longer span of days, time is measured not by the calendar but by the events that occupy it. The shepherd measures from the time the ewes lambed; the farmers measures back to the day of sowing or forward to the harvest: if growth has its own duration and regularities, behind it are not simply matter and motion, but the facts of development: in short, history. And while mechanical time is strung out in a succession of mathematically isolated instants, organic time—what Bergson calls duration—is cumulative in its effects. Though mechanical time can, in a sense, be speeded up or run backward, like the hands of a clock or the images of a moving picture, organic time moves in only one direction—through the cycle of birth, growth, development, decay, and death—and the past that is already dead remains present in the future that has still to be born."

I also find this 2-page chapter from Yuga to be relevant.

[Anonymous No.11899063]

>>11899053
Thanks,I think you've got me interested in the Yuga now Yuganon. I'm assuming you're not Girard but I can never tell who is who anymore in these threads at times.

[Anonymous No.11899064]

>>11899053
2/2

[Anonymous No.11899214]

>>11899063
Thanks. I'm not nearly as well read as girardfag, and I'm still much of a brainlet compared to him. If you are serious in getting a copy, I suggest you not go to Amazon, unless you want an ebook. The book is unreasonably overpriced there since it has been out of print for some time now. In any case, welcome aboard! The roller coaster starts off slow, but it suddenly picks up early with each page bombarding you with truth bomb after truth bomb. And the prose. My God, the prose! If there were a preacher like Marty Glass in my town, he would actually get me out of bed early on Sundays for church. The back summary is pretty accurate: "But the master achievement of YUGA, which lies neither in its 'argument' nor its style, is its voice. That voice speaks so palpably from the author's heart that we find it resonating in our hearts as well." It's not a book you want to speed through.
>Yuganon
I don't know how to feel about this. I don't want any fame nor glory. Such status will only keep me boxed in, but if it's necessary to distinguish between me and girardfag, I guess it can't be helped. Just please, don't expect any profound insights from me.

[Anonymous No.11899554]

>>11887728
God I wish that were me, whoever that is

[Anonymous No.11900080]

>>11899214
It's fine it's not like I have much to say here myself. I just like to watch.

[Anonymous No.11900318]

>>11887728
>thing-conditioned, externalized, de-humanized
None of that means anything.

[Anonymous No.11900715]

bump

[Anonymous No.11901656]

>>11900318
It does though

[Anonymous No.11902200]

>>11897295
>If you haven't you should really try to see if any of the CCRU and other sorts of scholars would reply to your emails girard, or anyone else for that matter. I'm curious honestly if anyone here is considering breaking into academics with some of this stuff as part of their specialisation.

i guess. could you imagine tho? i can barely contain myself as it is on the melanesian tap-dancing board. for the time being i find it works better to schizo-ramble here. and i'm still kind of working a lot of this stuff out too.

>>11897343
>there is some standard Zizek boilerplate as always but he has a wonderful analysis of Bladerunner 2049 that I really enjoyed.

maybe post an excerpt? we all like bladerunner stuff here.

>>11897386
>It would also probably help girardfag if here ever ends up producing a giant guide/reference with all sorts of things to read.
yeah, maybe. i will refer you guys tho to >>11888548, there's my own meme bibiolographies plus a link to a mega of economic and other philosophy stuff in there. i probably should make a mega of my own at some point but there's still too many interesting things to schizo-ramble about. you know, time and yuk hui and so on. i haven't forgotten my promise to ramble about this yet either, just that i've had to run all over the place this weekend.

>>11897760
it's always appreciated, kind anon.

>>11897881
>optimizing for empathy should be placed on a higher pedestal than optimizing for intelligence
it 100% is. part of the problem for me has been that Optimize for Empathy in the age of Woke Justice is like raising sails in a hurricane. it's not like it isn't important, it's just hard. of course, an age of revenge and mimesis has only made the case for girard et al more convincing and not less so.

>with that knowledge, one could arguably devote their lives to being as virtuous, as empathetic a person as possible- showing others to do so through example. devotion, willing to endure suffering, willing to be truthful, compassionate, and patient with anyone. change people one interaction at a time- the effect will surely bloom outwards
i agree with this 100% also. Optimize For Intelligence is land's idea and i've spent some time thinking about it, but it's not really mine. you are correct anon, empathy really does matter.

>all you have to do to teach someone to be empathetic is to be empathetic to them
yep.

>>11897891
and this too, of course.

>>11897990
>but it starts with you, always, for everyone. fucking alchemical shit n shit.
preach it

>>11898054
>if we are all just being lazy today then perhaps Girardfag will come back on tonight and find the studies for everyone.
i do apologize for the interruptions, this weekend has not been amenable for cosmotech-posting. will be back to regular schedule soon.

>>11898511
such a great book. a heartbreaker. but a really, really good one.

>>11899214
all this. anon gets it.

[Anonymous No.11902245]

>>11899214
>I'm not nearly as well read as girardfag, and I'm still much of a brainlet compared to him.
girardfag is a brainlet also
>t. girardfag
never forget

>>11899554
>whoever that is
das sarah kerrigan mane. and i hope at some point to be able to talk about how interesting the Starcraft mythos is w/r/t a lot of this stuff also. it's not Star Wars, and it's not 40K, and it's not FF6, but it is an interesting myth about prometheanism, change and transmutation. in particular it has a very particular story about the role played by Kerrigan as a kind of aesthetic redeemer of the zerg swarm, and the question about why it is that we aestheticize evil. and other things. i find Starcraft aesthetics pretty compelling.

but a *lot* of vidya aesthetics is compelling. FFXV appears to be one of the darker ones, and the world in which it is set is a pretty fascinating one. crazy to think we've gotten to a point where 'fantasy' includes luxury cars and shopping malls, but the game studios are wonderful like that.

>>11900318
>None of that means anything.
you need heidegger in your life. and maybe a smidge of marx also. becoming alienated, thing-conditioned, externalized and de-humanized happens to all of us at some point, it's part of growing up in the world of capitalism. but even *before* capitalism, it was...part of growing up. we all get conditioned by things that 'de-humanize' us, but for me at least it's the question of how it is that we frame the idea of humanity &c. personally i think it runs the risk of anthropo-narcissism, which is what Uncle Nick has been talking about for years. and before him marx, heidegger, and others. however, i also think that following through on Uncle Nick to the end perpetuates and does not reduce the rage virus, which is my fundamental personal project. hence the love for somebody like Yuk Hui, who may play an important role in White Hat Accelerationism, also known as Cosmotech, b/c maybe we are in the process of opening up a new way of thinking about the nature of time in a world of technology.

and the original authors of that were for him, in some order, gilbert simondon and bernard stiegler. stiegler came up with some intense meditations on heidegger while he was in prison, and simondon has theories about technology that are situated right in between heidegger and deleuze, which makes him an interesting guy. yuk hui has synthesized both of these into some interesting new ideas - it warrants mentioning that Cosmotech is stolen from the title of one of his books - and, happily, he's read nick land too (and he disagrees with him!)

anyways. tech does fuck with us, we've known this since marx and heidegger. but we don't want to become professional griefmongers or rage zombies either. but de-humanized, thing-conditioned, externalized? it's all just so much ways of saying, 'alienation.' but in a sense other than expressly or directly derived from marx.

[Anonymous No.11902323]

>>11892473
i have it. how would i best go about uploading this, isnt there a more efficient way than individually scanning 600 pages

[Anonymous No.11902384]

i guess i should to put this out there first and not over-think it. for the academic components and the good stuff you'll want to refer to the later chapters of yuk hui/OEDO. but as far as i can understand it, what makes YH interesting is the concept of inter-objective time.

graham harman seems to have come up with something similar, that being OOO. but it's basically Being and Meh. it's heidegger minus the dasein, but that's minus a lot. conversely, part of the reason why i like Land/Cosmotech (and they are not the same thing, Cosmotech being basically a made-up term used to discuss a made-up ideology, although it is derived in some sense from Yuk Hui's book) is because clearly we are suffering these days from an excess of subjectivity and, in a way, a kind of overall reality deficiency governed by politics on overdrive. the Red Team/Blue Team feud is going to spill over into every area of life and probably only escalate as it does so. i just saw some footage of Antifa guys directing traffic in portland. all of this, imho, is madness. it's like a kind of Cold-Civil War that may here or there become actual Hot-Civil War in the form of various anarchic shit-flinging and so on.

this is one of the reasons why i think YH matters: he's articulating a theory of inter-object relations for a world in which 'the virtual' in some sense seems to be taking the reins from the real. but this doesn't mean a) complete baudrillardian situationism or b) complete political imagination which reduces everything to politics. in a way, one of the things he is doing that i like is working out a kind of a theory of games. what happens when we play games? i'm thinking here of the sorts of meme table-top games that i like, but it can extend to vidya and other forms of virtuality or simulation also. we do agree to inhabit a shared virtual space which is governed by rules, and the time of the game is in a sense both real and it is not real. game-time is, in a way, the kind of Artificial Synthetic Kantian Time that land talks about, which IRL - he believes - is instantiated by the blockchain.

i don't think it's necessary for us to leap to that conclusion yet. it's enough to ask, in the meantime, if the idea of a kind of 'ludic time' itself makes sense - imho, it does, and it's not all that complicated - and if so, how far the conclusions of that go. for the easiest example of this, think of any game of Magic: The Gathering (or insert the game of your choice here). you play the game, you share the rules, and as such you don't have absolute freedom to import new rules into the process wherever you like or however you please. that would be called cheating. and the time of a game happens in a sort of logical order and so on. were it not so, it wouldn't be possible for us to play games with each other at all.

so i won't go into a full or ridiculous tangent here, but i'll pause for now to see to what degree we can at least be on the same page in at least this sense.

[Anonymous No.11902392]

>>11902323
is there a epub/pdf out there? I'll buy it if it's not uploaded anywhere

[Anonymous No.11902434]

>>11902384
The Real is one of those terms that shouldn't just be taken at face value. The Real is a construct of a lot of continental theory-mongering in its own right: thing-in-itself, Das Ding, Being, Capital, and 20m other things. land has his own concept of this, that being, the Outside.

so there's no need to give me too much wiggle room when i tacitly try and slide a term like this in, it's obviously highly contestable. but my point is to say that we do seem to be becoming a world more and more governed by capital and economic relations, a world governed by abstract numbers, and that these have a kind of a mysterious force or potency in them. *something* is there, in the end, that legitimates the use of force, or the Law, or what have you. but - at least in my dingbat imagination, which is obviously damaged by far too much reading of land, baudrillard, et al - the virtual world of numbers &c increasingly takes on its own self-propelling, self-guiding autonomy, and culminates in the end in things such as social credit or teleoplexy. the mysterious force of ideological gravity, whatever we are calling it, intra-socially, is the Real.

but here we are, after having gone through the looking glass of continental theory over the past fifty years, and what has remained throughout this process is capital, simulation, technology, and the rest. even hegel still lives, in a sense, it's just that hegelian thought after Foucault changes a great deal, as it does after land also (although land is arguably bringing him back, albeit in a very different sense, if teleoplexy works in this way).

but yuk hui, imho, is a legit alternative to landian thinking. gilbert simondon and bernard stiegler are not D&G and they are not marx. land for his part has already intimated the need for a rapprochement with heidegger:

>Nick Land: 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/

what i'm wondering is, how much of what YH is saying constitutes this return to heidegger (including stiegler) and simondonians (simondon) once more with feeling?

[Anonymous No.11902460]

>>11902434
a lot of this stuff is also making me seriously contemplate going back to re-think my confucianism as well. in terms of anything like an order of political time, in a world of multiple and competing or overlapping dialectics, the world of the sage-kings starts to look very appealing.

but it is also heidegger's world, in many ways, however much he would have detested vidya, and said that all we had done with all of this enframing is convince ourselves that the world was an illusion, which would have been a recipe for disaster for him. and yet...

http://timothyquigley.net/vcs/heidegger-owa_outline.pdf

[Anonymous No.11903012]

>>11902200

[Anonymous No.11903212]

While some of this stuff is interesting, I feel it's one or two esoteric words away from being a dank meme. Maybe it's just my ignorance but there seem to be a lot of logical leaps, always in the direction of sweeping and bombastic statements.

[Anonymous No.11903390]

i just saw the Black Mirror episode 'Nosedive' and i'm more convinced than ever that social credit is going to "work."
>fortunately i will probably kys long before i see it in full flower

that is some of the greatest stuff on television.

>>11903012
you guys are the best. thank you anon!

so what do you think? is zizek just repeating himself, or what? i've heard that this book is something of a departure from his other stuff, that he's making some kind of turn of his own.

>so why do the new generation of replicants not rebel?

why indeed.

curious to know if we'll get a sequel to 2049 at some point. i'm kinda-sorta interested, but sequels once they start to involve Epic Revolutions...well, here's hoping they make one, i guess, and that it's good.

anyways, i'd be interested to hear your thoughts anon.

>>11903212
>Maybe it's just my ignorance but there seem to be a lot of logical leaps, always in the direction of sweeping and bombastic statements.

it's not your ignorance. continental theory does do a lot of imaginative stuff with the theory. baudrillard was the king of this, in many ways, and for some he's kind of an acquired taste. and i would say that nietzsche and heidegger are major parts of the reason why we have a continental/analytic split today. pic rel is a good book about it, although it's not a ripping page-turner unless you are super-into the characters or the issue at hand.

there are some wild logical leaps, no doubt. my own feeling is, in general not to make things *more* obtuse, arcane, obscurantist &c. because i ultimately don't think they are. land is a good example of this. the back end of Fanged Noumena is wild, and sometimes you're looking for wildness, but the first half has imho held up much better. but land, like heidegger (and baudrillard) are all controversial figures who do do a lot of pretty wild stuff with language to make their points. but in almost every case they start from relatively sober positions, and go to increasingly adventurous places.

again, a lot of this goes to nietzsche, who could be quite sweeping and bombastic when he wanted to. but he could also be incredibly precise. Being and Time: again, lots of people find it dense and arcane, but i don't think it is. once you get the idea, it's really not so wild. baudrillard also: early JB is writing insightful critique, late JB starts writing stuff that becomes theory-fiction. lots of people - myself included - like the theory-fiction stuff, but it will seem like just so much pyrotechnics unless you have a sense of where they were coming from at earlier, usually more sober points in their careers.

i'll put some interesting greentext stuff up tomorrow gents, less of my own opinion-mongering. thanks for keeping the thread alive through the weekend.

[Anonymous No.11903406]

>>11903390
aaand i fucked up my image.

> pic rel is a good book about it, although it's not a ripping page-turner unless you are super-into the characters or the issue at hand.
meant to refer to this. again, won't keep you up late into the night, but the continental/analytic split is what i would like to if not reconcile at least not make any worse. but heidegger being who he is does make life complicated.

[Anonymous No.11903474]

>Despite the difference between Simondon and Heidegger, I have characterized Heidegger as a thinker of interobjectivity, because Heidegger attempted to find in philosophy a force that reattaches Dasein, things, and the universe, that is, through a certain trajectory of philosophical thinking, to reattach the human to the world from which it has been alienated. Heidegger’s critique of the idealization of things from Plato to the technoscience of his day, which considers things as standing reserve (Bestand), is in certain sense genealogical, in that it outlines a problematic path departing from a fundamental forgetfulness and the exigency of a fundamental Ontology. Heidegger wants to retake the technical object, for example, the jug, as a site that allows the reattachment of the human being to the world to happen. There is a tendency to reverse materialized interobjective relations into invisible and magical relations, or as Simondon might put it, a tendency to return to the totality or unity of the ground and the figure. We may also be able to derive a similar reading from Sein und Zeit, when we consider that Heidegger’s hermeneutic approach to the use of tools (Besorgen) and the understanding of historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) always refers to a background that is present but not present- at- hand. For example, when explaining the ready- to- handness of using a hammer, the significations come from the background, which consists of both habitual and cultural knowledge that Dasein cannot thematically grasp.

>Ellul proposes that to study a specific technology, we cannot take it only as a tool but rather should approach it as a technical system. A technical system does not simply group its elements in a random manner but follows certain causalities and constitutes its own totality. The technical system evolves according to its own logic as if it has a kind of existence in itself. Technology is gradually “organizing itself as a closed world,” and the process also eliminates nontechnical factors. Yet one can find an isomorphism between different technical systems. At least on this point, we may observe that Ellul’s understanding comes from a parallel reading of Simondon’s technical evolution and von Neumann’s self-reproductive system. Similar to Ellul, Bertrand Gille developed the concept of a technical system as a group of technics that depend on each other and maintain a certain coherence among themselves:

>“All the technics are to diverse degrees dependent on one another, and there needs to be a certain coherence between them: this ensemble of the different levels of coherence of all the structures, of all the ensembles and of all the procedures, composes what one can call a technical system.”

-- YH/OEDO

simondon's ideas about transduction lose me a little bit, but i think i understand what YH is talking about. also: simondon's not a heideggerian, but his thesis supervisor is french phenomenology overlord merleau-ponty.

[Anonymous No.11903499]

>The clock time that Heidegger criticized in Being and Time is only one mode of existence of time in a technical system that serves the function of
synchronization. In a technical system, the synchronization of technical objects is always triggered by different causalities. For example, in a bureaucratic system, we always need to wait for a document to be passed to the right person. Within a digital system, we similarly have to synchronize with machine time. The computer scientist inspired by Heidegger, Philip Agre, illustrated this with an AND gate: the abstraction is the truth value of an output produced when two inputs are fed into the gate. The abstraction virtually doesn’t have time. Or, if it does, it is always the time of the instant. It is implemented by the physical arrival of the signal, which depends on the length and resistance of the line. Consider a much more complicated circuit that consists of many different electronic gates: the implementation (physicality) and the abstraction have to be synchronized; otherwise, incorrect outputs will be produced and the whole circuit will be in chaos.

>The clocking regime controls the physicality of the computer system. It is abstract time, which is distinguished from what Agre calls “real time.” The latter is “real” in the sense that it is human time. In this decoupling, the abstract time also dominates “real time,” for example, waiting. The parallel between these two systems of time points to a standardized clock time, which is used to control the physicality of the system, for example, synchronizing geometrical distance. This synchronization at the same time gives us the illusion of nearness that was at the center of Heidegger’s critique. We could further investigate different orders of magnitude regarding synchronization. Let’s now look at the first level. Today, teleconferences between people in different parts of the world can be synchronized by Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) or Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). To synchronize, there must be a universal standard that breaks the barriers of spatial and cultural limitations. Such standards are today the forces that shape the technological system in its various dimensions. The semantic web standard, as we have seen, is one of these forces; it attempts to integrate with other forces in the name of interoperability and to consolidate the digital milieu as a unified technological system. This process of integration is at the same time the self- transformation of technical systems.

-- YH/OEDO

the land/heidegger connections are interesting. this is why YH (and stiegler & simondon) matter. you might not find much overlap between land & heidegger, but a kind of synthesis is cool. and synchronized time isn't crazy, it's just that both land and heidegger can take the implications of it to the moon and back. for now maybe it's enough to just see what *can* be said about time and its relation to technology in other-than-arcane terms.

[Anonymous No.11903509]

>The clock time that Heidegger criticized in Being and Time is only one mode of existence of time in a technical system that serves the function of synchronization. In a technical system, the synchronization of technical objects is always triggered by different causalities. For example, in a bureaucratic system, we always need to wait for a document to be passed to the right person. Within a digital system, we similarly have to synchronize with machine time. The computer scientist inspired by Heidegger, Philip Agre, illustrated this with an AND gate: the abstraction is the truth value of an output produced when two inputs are fed into the gate. The abstraction virtually doesn’t have time. Or, if it does, it is always the time of the instant. It is implemented by the physical arrival of the signal, which depends on the length and resistance of the line. Consider a much more complicated circuit that consists of many different electronic gates: the implementation (physicality) and the abstraction have to be synchronized; otherwise, incorrect outputs will be produced and the whole circuit will be in chaos.

>The clocking regime controls the physicality of the computer system. It is abstract time, which is distinguished from what Agre calls “real time.” The latter is “real” in the sense that it is human time. In this decoupling, the abstract time also dominates “real time,” for example, waiting. The parallel between these two systems of time points to a standardized clock time, which is used to control the physicality of the system, for example, synchronizing geometrical distance. This synchronization at the same time gives us the illusion of nearness that was at the center of Heidegger’s critique. We could further investigate different orders of magnitude regarding synchronization. Let’s now look at the first level. Today, teleconferences between people in different parts of the world can be synchronized by Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) or Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). To synchronize, there must be a universal standard that breaks the barriers of spatial and cultural limitations. Such standards are today the forces that shape the technological system in its various dimensions. The semantic web standard, as we have seen, is one of these forces; it attempts to integrate with other forces in the name of interoperability and to consolidate the digital milieu as a unified technological system. This process of integration is at the same time the self- transformation of technical systems.

-- YH/OEDO

the land/heidegger connections are interesting. this is why YH (and stiegler & simondon) matter. you might not find much overlap between land & heidegger, but a kind of synthesis is cool. and synchronized time isn't crazy, it's just that both land and heidegger can take the implications of it to the moon and back. for now maybe it's enough to just see what *can* be said about time and its relation to technology in other-than-arcane terms.

[Anonymous No.11903529]

If this world is a perfect machine made to tear us from our humanity, we just need to turn one gear in the opposite direction to reverse this whole process. Gives me hope. This has been the history of civilization but it's only been like what 5,000 years? We've got a lot of time to figure this out.

[Anonymous No.11903544]

>>11903509
found a rare pic of Young Nick here to share.

because the question land will argue is, *what synchronizes time?* in a sense, can we say that tech is this kind of self-assembling system that happens through capitalism? and we know what heidegger would think a lot of this *politically* - in a word, it sucks - but the question is about whether or not heidegger metaphysics are actually still useful in asking ourselves what time is or means in the age he suspected would happen, which is the age of cybernetics.

i mean yes, *it is us.* we are doing it, and we do it for basically common-sense reasons. not everything is a conspiracy. it can be, but it doesn't have to be in order to make the philosophy stuff interesting. and beyond a certain horizon it is that way for land: he applies his Marxist Brain so intensely to the question of capitalism that he ultimately comes up with a theory about time-travel to explain it. and maybe he's right. heidegger didn't do anything quite like this, going more in the opposite direction, towards poetry and the primordial experience (and husserl before him), and now - kind of amazingly - yuk hui may be connecting some puzzle pieces. YH doesn't talk about land all that much, but i think his contribution is germane for reasons we've talked about.

so, more on that tomorrow. i'm packing it in tonight for now. tomorrow probably some more YH stuff on how he theorizes stiegler's new mode of heideggerian time, and basically a few notes on how we arrived at this point (which is one of land's primary contributions to Cosmotech).

[Anonymous No.11903760]

also had to share a twitter guy i check quite often giving a shout-out to the boy.

[Anonymous No.11903776]

>>11903760
>Expecting SJW scapegoaters to read books that calls out their scapegoarting behavior which were written by a dead white male

[Anonymous No.11903828]

>>11903776

[Anonymous No.11904165]

Fuck yeah. More paragraphs from girard to read!

[Anonymous No.11904476]

>tfw I'm doing a deep dive unpacking Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest, annotating every line
>girard is busy existing to show how much shit I still have to analyze
i wish i could sleep

[Anonymous No.11904808]

Bump

[Anonymous No.11905060]

>>11904808
Thanks. Like >>11904476 I've been unable to sleep in part due to this thread.

[Anonymous No.11905324]

>>11904165
greentext for the greentext god

>Time is artificially constituted in a technological system, but it is nevertheless the reality that we live. Synchronization resulting from the development of concrete and material interobjective relations presents us with the danger of freedom, because we may ask: being in a more and more concrete technical system, does it not necessarily imply being in constant control? We can see this question of the relation between technicity and control being asked in different ways by different thinkers, notably through Deleuze’s societies of control and Heidegger’s critique of modern technologies as essentially enframing (Gestell). What is the position of the human being in technical systems as such? Heidegger asked, “Where are we now? We have arrived at the insight that for the call ‘to the thing itself’ what concerns philosophy as its matter is established from the outset."

>To retrieve the da of Da-sein, Heidegger offers a solution through appropriating a new kind of interobjective relation. There is a nuance to this that we have to reinstate here. At the beginning, we characterized Heidegger as a thinker of interobjective relations, because he didn’t only discover the interobjective relations present in equipmentalities as significations, contacts, but also wanted to provoke a new type of interobjective relation, one that dematerializes itself, for example, in the case of heaven, earth, god, and mortals. These new relations resonate with Heidegger’s interpretation of the mission of metaphysics: “thinks beings as a whole— the world, man, God— with respect to Being, with respect to the belonging together of beings in Being.

>It would be easy to set up an opposition between Simondon and Heidegger, but Simondon didn’t celebrate the fact that humans are displaced from the center, because this also constitutes one of the conditions of alienation in which the human loses its role as the technical individual. We can identify in the thought of both Heidegger and Simondon a strong concept of convergence as a remedy to this situation: for Heidegger, it is Ding as dinc, as gathering; for Simondon, the philosophical task is to find a new way to reunite the divergence of technics and religions, theory and practice, and restore the role of human beings as technical individuals. In fact, speaking about convergence, Simondon referred directly to Heidegger: “the thought that recognized the nature of the technical reality is the one that, going beyond the separated objects, the utensils, according to the expression of Heidegger, discovers the essence and the meaning of technical organisation, beyond the separated objects and the specialised professions.”

-- YH/OEDO

[Anonymous No.11905337]

>But what is meant by convergence here? Simondon proposed two directions. One would be to restore the encyclopedism of the Enlightenment, whereby each individual should study and acquire a sufficient level of technical knowledge. This question concerning pedagogy has today been realized in a certain sense through Wikipedia and similar websites, hacker spaces that effectively cultivate the culture of the amateur. The other direction is that of a reconstitution of reticulation through philosophical thought, with the aim of transforming the key points, and hence the technical system itself, from within. It is precisely on the second point that we are confronted with the uncertainty of Simondon’s thought as well as the challenge it leaves us. Because Simondon didn’t live in a time when networks were so dominant as they are in ours, the network remained something to be given rather than created...

>one changes tools and instruments, one can construct or repair a tool oneself, but one cannot change the network, one doesn’t construct oneself a network: one can only tie in with the network, adapt to it, participate in it; network dominates and encloses [enserrer] the action of individual beings, dominates even every technical ensemble.

>Today we may not be able to change communication networks in terms of transatlantic cables, but we are able to establish social networks, file networks, data networks, by using Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Dropbox, and so on. But on the other hand, can we consider the realization of a technical system qua network as actually having given us the new possibility that Simondon dreamed of ? Heidegger sought to find new relations by reaching outside the technical system, whereas Simondon wanted to find a solution from within. Heidegger proposed mediative and poetic thinking as a new possibility, that is also to say, a nontechnical imagination, going back to language. In contrast, Simondon, like Bertrand Gille, sees modification of structure as the ultimate possibility for human beings to rediscover the remedy within the technical system itself:

>Transforming all the conditions of human life, augmenting the exchange of causality between what man produces and what he is, true technical progress might be considered as implying human progress if it has a network structure, whose mesh is human reality; but then it would no longer be solely an ensemble of objective concretizations.

-- YH/OEDO

whether one thinks the current era as 'network as created' and/or 'network as given' is probably significant also.

[Anonymous No.11905367]

christ. so much name-dropping. how do you expect anyone to think about wtf you're talking about when every sentence is dominated by HEIDEGGER HEIDEGGER NIETZSCHE NIETZSCHE GIRARD GIRARD. BAUDRILLARD WAS RIGHT! etc. like i get it they all fucking do it. they all name-drop previous thinkers. i just think it's an unproductive way of thinking. which is what they all crap on about. "new ways of thinking" "we haven't begun to think!" then stop fucking name-dropping like it means anything. where's the novelty in that?
>>11888926
how does one escape the spirit of revenge?

[Anonymous No.11905368]

>It is necessary to think of a more perfect system than automation. Automation here means a closed system with overdetermination, and for Simondon, such is only a low level of perfection of technical objects. From the discussions of chapter 1 to the account of interobjective relations and technical system in this chapter, we have unfolded a technical reality that we are living and the technical tendency that already lies ahead of us. Now, if we understand that both Heidegger and Simondon point to a higher degree of convergence, in comparison with the one that is brought about by network technologies, then how can we imagine this higher degree of convergence in an already converged technical system? To reconsider convergence, we can no longer take the notion of network for granted as signifying convergence in its totality. Instead, Simondon and Heidegger point to types of logic that are more profound than efficient connections and reticulations: on one hand, a logic of convergence that points to an intuitive thinking beyond objectification, namely, whose role is to think about the “thingness” of the thing; on the other hand, a logic of convergence that needs to be reinvented inside the technical systems against the alienation effected by them.

>Hence, for Simondon, instead of aesthetic thought, philosophical thought is the penetrating force that will be able to produce a convergence effect
in the later stage of technological development. That is to say, it is not the perception of objects that matters but rather the modification of the interobjective and intersubjective system. Philosophical thought is able to produce a force in favor of transduction, given that this thought is fundamentally relational. This also constitutes the task of the previous parts of this book, that is, to constitute a theory of relations. Transduction in my
reading also implies convergence, which concerns the interoperability and compatibility (as well as incompatibility) between humans and machines,
seeing them as a structure that is at the same time individual and collective. Transduction is not a pure becoming but rather a rupture that reconfigures the structure of both the being and its milieu. We can say that the shift from analog to digital produces transductions in different domains of society. This also corresponds to our previous discussion of the difference between milieu and context, because a change in context is a change in
information, while the change in milieu is a change in structure. A change in information can trigger a change in structure, but it is not entirely correspondent to transduction in the milieu; hence in this chapter we explore this change in context as informational change, which in turn provides the motivation for a transduction.

-- YH/OEDO

[Anonymous No.11905376]

>It is necessary to think of a more perfect system than automation. Automation here means a closed system with overdetermination, and for Simondon, such is only a low level of perfection of technical objects. From the discussions of chapter 1 to the account of interobjective relations and technical system in this chapter, we have unfolded a technical reality that we are living and the technical tendency that already lies ahead of us. Now, if we understand that both Heidegger and Simondon point to a higher degree of convergence, in comparison with the one that is brought about by network technologies, then how can we imagine this higher degree of convergence in an already converged technical system? To reconsider convergence, we can no longer take the notion of network for granted as signifying convergence in its totality. Instead, Simondon and Heidegger point to types of logic that are more profound than efficient connections and reticulations: on one hand, a logic of convergence that points to an intuitive thinking beyond objectification, namely, whose role is to think about the “thingness” of the thing; on the other hand, a logic of convergence that needs to be reinvented inside the technical systems against the alienation effected by them.

>Hence, for Simondon, instead of aesthetic thought, philosophical thought is the penetrating force that will be able to produce a convergence effect in the later stage of technological development. That is to say, it is not the perception of objects that matters but rather the modification of the interobjective and intersubjective system. Philosophical thought is able to produce a force in favor of transduction, given that this thought is fundamentally relational. This also constitutes the task of the previous parts of this book, that is, to constitute a theory of relations. Transduction in my reading also implies convergence, which concerns the interoperability and compatibility (as well as incompatibility) between humans and machines, seeing them as a structure that is at the same time individual and collective. Transduction is not a pure becoming but rather a rupture that reconfigures the structure of both the being and its milieu. We can say that the shift from analog to digital produces transductions in different domains of society. This also corresponds to our previous discussion of the difference between milieu and context, because a change in context is a change in information, while the change in milieu is a change in structure. A change in information can trigger a change in structure, but it is not entirely correspondent to transduction in the milieu; hence in this chapter we explore this change in context as informational change, which in turn provides the motivation for a transduction.

-- YH/OEDO

[Anonymous No.11905420]

>>11905367
>christ. so much name-dropping. how do you expect anyone to think about wtf you're talking about when every sentence is dominated by HEIDEGGER HEIDEGGER NIETZSCHE NIETZSCHE GIRARD GIRARD. BAUDRILLARD WAS RIGHT! etc.

so that there is a coherent storyline and a chain of influences. what i like is when thinkers relate their systems of thought to other systems. it's not all there for name-dropping, but to make the ideas they are saying more persuasive by linking them up to other systems. it makes their perspectives more enriching.

>they all name-drop previous thinkers. i just think it's an unproductive way of thinking. which is what they all crap on about. "new ways of thinking" "we haven't begun to think!" then stop fucking name-dropping like it means anything. where's the novelty in that?

i sort of understand where you're coming from. obviously we are culturally fucked-out with this stuff now, we want philosophers to Do Something &c. and yet when somebody really does have an interesting idea, you don't always want to just shout it from the mountaintop, but you want to connect it up to other people not purely for the sake of name-dropping or academic prestige points, but because they have either said things that you are also thinking, or because they started or opened up questions that maybe nobody else looked at yet or answered.

yuk hui is looking to score no academic prestige points, and he's also said he has no interest in postcolonial critique. warrants mentioning also that he has read land - met him, even - and he *disagrees* with him.

there's novelty in this stuff but it's also because there was plenty of novelty in the earlier stuff also. connect the novelty voltron-style for ultra-novelty. but if you have an interesting idea sometimes you do want to check it against earlier people who have thought the same way, or in related ways, to strengthen your own position and to highlight what made other thinkers interesting. sometimes people - like simondon - ask questions in their own time that nobody follows up on. YH is bringing simondon back in a big way, and it leads to some interesting places.

>how does one escape the spirit of revenge?
it's a humongous question, and basically stands for me imho as an enduring measure or record for a civilization. there is no easy way, but it's not something we should celebrate either. it leads to destruction. forgiveness, kindness, satori. or by cleaning one's room, perhaps: peterson isn't crazy to say that weakness leads to as much tyranny and horror as strength. that's an internal journey, however it is taken. it absolutely cannot happen through Societies of Control. those work too, but they're mainly through dystopian measures of soft coercion that really only make people's lives into nightmares and fuck with their psyche.

girard has answers to this question, as does laozi or the buddha. nietzsche does too. there is no one or absolute or final answer.

[Anonymous No.11905432]

>Simondon retains the technical meaning of transduction as a means of communication and transmission. Furthermore, he identifies transduction as the third way of reasoning beyond (and juxtaposing) induction and deduction, giving rise to a type of thinking that doesn’t move unidirectionally from inside to outside, outside to inside, individual to collective, collective to individuals, but rather presents itself as a process of the transformation of forms and structures. It will be also useful to think of transducer and transduction together, that is to say, to identify technical objects as transducers in the process of individuation. Simondon often uses the example of crystallization to illustrate the process of individuation. When a supersaturated solution is heated, it starts to crystallize; the ions then take on the structure of “crystallization germs,” releasing energy that propagates from part to part and triggers further crystallization. Here we see two phenomena: first, a process of amplification, as the transmission of germs is sped up because of the energy released during crystallization; and second, the creation of tensions between ions, which are resolved through crystallization to achieve a metastable state:

>A crystal, which from a very small germ, grows and extends in every direction in its water- mother, provides the simplest image of transductive operation; every molecular layer already constituted serves as the structuring base of the layer in process of formation; the result is an amplifying reticular structure. Transductive operation is an individuation in progress.

>Transduction is a new form of convergence in the sense illustrated by crystallization. The transductive condition for Simondon always manifests in a systematic way, being simultaneously energetic, material, and informational. Transduction happens when these conditions are modified in such a way that a threshold is overcome. Transduction is essentially relational. For this reason, Simondon distinguished the knowledge of relations and the knowledge of phenomena.

>Our question is, if formal logic is the foundation of digital objects, can we still imagine a transductive logic of digital objects? Simondon himself is not a logician, hence to directly confront the question of logic, we need to move to Husserl, while having Simondon in the background and constantly looking for dialogues. This link between Husserl and Simondon was first made by Deleuze in A Thousand Plateaus, where he showed that Husserl developed a protogeometry— a science that deals with something “anexact yet rigorous."

-- YH/OEDO

[Anonymous No.11905482]

>>11905420
what ISN'T a society of control?
reminds me of a quote i saw in a book about burroughs
"He who opposes force alone forms that which he opposes and is formed by it"
I feel (most of the time) that there is no escaping the production of force. And I'm not saying force and production are bad, but that there is no rest. There's no space for silence or slowness or non-production. There HAS to be space to maneuver and create another way. or not??

[Anonymous No.11905929]

>>11905482
>what ISN'T a society of control?
this is the ultimate question of questions.

the answer is, nothing. or everything. anything can potentially become a society of control, just as anything can potentially resist or undermine one. i shill hard for girard because imho the only thing - or one of the major things - that resists this relentless drive is *forgiveness.* the infinite lure of punishment, hate, rage, vengeance, mimesis, anger and scapegoating is ad nauseam ad infinitum. the crusade for an eternal or infinite justice within a technological or consumer society is an infinite one and as such it is doomed. this is, i think, what girard wants to communicate: one of the meanings of christ within history is the forgiveness, it is the repayment of those debts of murder, feud and sacrifice that societies of control are inseparably bound up with.

one of the best things i ever read on /lit/ was this:
>if everyone is big brother, then no one is.

that is still News That Stays News. we live in that world, a world harried and driven by a force of technological modernity that is without end (and has a pretty distant beginning). the ultimate horizons of technological capacity may be well and truly beyond reckoning, and that is why we are required, i think, to take a different course of living within such a world if we don't always want to be driven by it to repeat or reproduce the SoC time and time again, with newer and better weapons, for ever-sharper reasons, and with ever greater payouts.

>The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill. -- gilles deleuze

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.11905957]

>>11905929
>And I'm not saying force and production are bad, but that there is no rest. There's no space for silence or slowness or non-production. There HAS to be space to maneuver and create another way. or not??

and i feel a pretty deep kinship with marty glass. we know these things. we do them anyways but we know them.

for me it was heidegger who really unlocked the kinds of answers i was looking for, the meaning of this relentless, technologically-oriented time or sense of production. the space for silence, slowness, or non-production...i feel these things too anon. i was very cozy indeed with heidegger and i was convinced - i still am - that he had hit on something essentially true about the nature of the technological world we were building for ourselves. my own adventure through continental philosophy wonderland went from him to land and i have been with land pretty much ever since, although i have read lots of other guys as well - in particular, rene girard, who basically summed up the answers for me in terms of where this process would ultimately go: destruction and violence that didn't necessarily change the system, but wouldn't lack for fireworks, and it certainly wouldn't lack for arguments or reasons.

but people don't really want to listen to girard, b/c scapegoating pours cold water on a lot of things. and besides, as long as we are consuming and producing for Good Reasons, or because we can create state-sanctioned scapegoats of whatever kind, these wheels of hysteria and madness only turn and repeat themselves. ask marty glass, he knows. he gets it. so did rene guenon, oswald spenger, jean baudrillard, marshall mcluhan, and many others.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x6725NW8vw&t=1s

and yet it still keeps happening. it will probably *always* keep happening. however you find enlightenment - withdrawal into nature, satori, monastic life, social work, whatever...it's all good. the silence is necessary. meditation is as important as brushing your teeth. there's a hindu guy i talk to where i buy cigarettes and we talk about this stuff also. he reads two chapters of the gita every day, salutes the sun, and quietly hopes for humanity. i do too. probably you do also.

that is *always* going to be going on in the background. i don't even know if it's possible to do much more than pray, sometimes. i can tell the story of Cosmotech as relayed by heidegger, land, girard, han, &c but in the end, it is just a story. the important stuff isn't done by philosophers or by politicians, technocrats or theoreticians of control societies. if you can grow a little garden of sanity within that's all anyone could ever ask or hope for. stoicism, buddhism, the vedanta, christianity, the tao...

...you know what i am saying here. maybe i need to say it anyways. marty glass said it. everyone says it. every nondual mystic since day one has said it. it still bears repeating.

that's basically it.

[Anonymous No.11906019]

>>11905957
>we know these things. we do them anyways but we know them.

by 'we' i obviously don't mean, 'Marty Glass and me,' like a complete asshole. i mean *everybody.* i'm sure this was understood but, you know, perceptions.

politically speaking love probably does not conquer all. but i think in an age of self-cannibalizing metapolitics hate has a mysterious tendency to undermine itself. as i have said, i think that the human species is going through a copernican phase-shift w/r/t capital and tech and this is driving us squirrelly in search of scapegoats to blame. my own rule - You Shouldn't Be Stupid And Evil (At The Same Time)- is really all i have to contribute to the discussion. sloterdijkian anthropotechnics can work if you want to improve yourself, much as the Peterson Rules can be helpful. or you can, you know, try to forgive the neighbour, check the mote in one's own eye, and so on.

on a personal level, in an interior sense, this is the case. and whether we take our existential cues from the buddha, confucius, laozi, girard, nietzsche, John Madden or whoever...it really doesn't matter. simply not becoming a rage zombie is sufficient. whoever or whatever it is that keeps you resembling a human being is enough. and, i think, it will be difficult!

and so perhaps this needed to be said. yuk hui is at the moment doing some interesting engineering work on Nick Land's Wild Ride, and lewis mumford's perspective on the history of the construction of said Wild Ride are both germane perspectives. heidegger matters here hugely also, and he connects to YH by way of stiegler and simondon. so we are assembling a certain group
>we're putting together a team
>&c &c

for the telling of a particular story. but - spoiler alert - something very much like Love Thy Neighbour or whatever spin on the Golden Rule you like will still be there at the ending, or near to it.

[Anonymous No.11906135]

>>11887735
I visited my sister at her home in Cambridge Massachusetts a week or so ago and found that she and her friends were incapable of smelling the sewage leaking out of the pavement in a very gentrified area. I live and work in a rural area, so I asked her if she could smell it, and she said no. “You get used to it anon if you stay here long enough.” Cities are vile things that create chronically polluted people. They ought to be destroyed.

[Anonymous No.11906532]

>>11906019
This book that critically analyzes transparency was published last summer.
>https://www.amazon.com/Transparency-Society-Subjectivity-Critical-Perspectives/dp/3319771604/ref=sr_1_11?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1539113052&sr=1-11&keywords=transparency
And some kind anon was kind enough to upload it and save us one-hundred dollarydoos.
>http://b-ok.xyz/book/3574750/1bc69a

[Anonymous No.11906617]

>Through what method do we obtain a universal and also fixed a priori of the historical world which is always originally genuine? Whenever we consider it, we find ourselves with the self- evident capacity to reflect— to turn to the horizon and to penetrate it in an expository way. But we also have, and know that we have, the capacity of complete freedom to transform, in thought and phantasy, our human historical existence and what is there exposed as its lifeworld. And precisely in this activity of free variation, and in running through the conceivable possibilities for the life- world, there arises, with apodictic self- evidence, an essentially general set of elements going through all the variants; and of this we can convince ourselves with truly apodictic certainty.

>This explicitness brings objects and human beings closer; it also brings meditative meanings to lower levels, which allows automation to be dominant. For Simondon, automation is the lowest level of perfection of machines (we understand here that by automation, he refers to the simple repetitive operation of machines); in contrast, automation must be problematized and the human must be reintegrated into the technical system. It seems to me that Simondon’s seeking to restore human beings as technical individuals (in which the human is able to create an associated milieu of its own) is similar to Husserl’s agenda to retrieve experience from abstract symbols and rules. Husserl’s phenomenological method has been little used in the construction of web ontologies, because most of the ontologies we use today are merely inductions from the empirical experiences of engineers; however, Husserl’s phenomenology seems to me valuable in its problematization of pairs such as logic– automation and ontologies– meaning horizons. The Husserlian method remains a useful motif for us to
think about digital objects.

>We can also see that this metaphysical difference contributes to the opposition between culture and technologies. But if all logical thinking has to be grounded in transcendental imagination, then can we not also see these as two different orders, one coming out of logic, the other out of temporality? In the interpretation of Kant, Heidegger performed a second transcendental deduction (compared to the transcendental deduction Kant discussed in Critique of Pure Reason) which proposes temporality as the ultimate a priori of philosophical thinking. Only through the reduction of the transcendental apprehension to time instead of schemas does it regain its transcendence without losing the world.

-- YH/OEDO

"can we not also see these as two different orders, one coming out of logic, the other out of temporality?"

[Anonymous No.11906646]

>And it is precisely through time that Heidegger opens a broader perspective for critique. For what is most important now is not the collection of pure rules that govern the synthesis but how time makes synthesis possible. This gives us one of the keys with which to resolve the difference of orders. Bernard Stiegler in Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise shows that in the third synthesis of Kant, or the primordial synthesis for Heidegger, recognition demands a spatial exteriorization. It demands that something be re- cognized: something exists, but not in Dasein. The recognition hence needs memory support, which is technics.

>Stiegler has discovered here a new organization of time, in which it has to engage the support of memory. The fourth synthesis, a name Stiegler gave to it,51 has already reconstituted Dasein into a technical ensemble. Synchronization, which is the force of imagination, happens according not only to Dasein’s own consciousness but also to the time of the technical system.

>If this reveals that it is with technology that the third synthesis can function properly as recognition, then we can see a new relation here between transcendental imagination and logic, because techno- logy presupposes λόγος. That is to say, through technics— but not in its pure form— logic returns to its place as the foundation of metaphysics. Technics brings together the two orders of magnitude. If our thesis so far makes sense, then we can ask about the role of the imagination in technics, which entails not only memory or objects for recognition, such as a recording, a drawing, but also programs, algorithms. The works of Jack Goody and Walter J. Ong demonstrate the relation between writing and cognitive processes as involving not only a functional transformation of the body through the use of tools but also a transformation of the mind.

-- YH/OEDO

logic returns to its place as the foundation of metaphysics, *BUT* - but but - this is not carte blanche to fuck with human beings and turn them into droids. this has to be borne in mind. when you fuck humans and force-submit us to the protocol of modernity, We Rebel. we freak out and go fucking bananas because *that is what we do.* and no amount of landian hyperstition will ever give us back what we need to be there that heidegger identifies - conversely, no amount of heideggerian poetics will ever account for what land says about technocapital either. heidegger is wrong to conflate the gas chambers with the food industry, and he's also wrong to presume that the teutoburg cabin of the year 3000 would not need to be defended by advanced jet fighters. we need tech *and* we need Being. they aren't fundamentally interchangeable. but, says YH, the *logic* has to go *first.* it's an important point. it doesn't mean Logic Uber Alles, and in the year 2018, we know why: because we are suffering, god-freighted, suffering, empathetic beings.

ikaruga art b/c sometimes you just gotta Ikaruga Art.

[Anonymous No.11906679]

>Two immediate pieces of evidence are given: first, technics offers us a storage function; second, the emergence of the visual domain (e.g., signs in written form in contrast to speech) made possible a different kind of inspection, a reordering and refining of meanings. Writings are technical objects that deal with single streams of data, whereas digitization allows the logical synthesis of large amounts of data and knowledge exceeding our imagination. This fourth synthesis that came after digitization brought us a new sensibility. This sensibility is no longer to be described in Kant’s terms as something purely passive and waiting to be synthesized; rather, it comes with a purpose, a force. The fourth synthesis also has its own characteristics of temporality.

>Let’s consider an example: you go home after work, tired and sleepy; when you open the door, a freshly made coffee is already there waiting for you. The machine has prepared the coffee for you before you have decided to have one, because it knows that you would like (or will want) to have one. This is one of the examples of tertiary protention working from a distance, that is to say, of the imaginative force exerted from the outer world. Well- collected and structured data and efficient algorithms make very good predictions of our movements, and we can no longer say that they are just retentions. The whole discipline of network analysis and human mobility analysis is dedicated to the study of statistical predictions. Without algorithms, digital objects would be mere retentions residing on the hard drives of computers and servers. Through the analysis of data— or, more or less, through speculation— the machines are able to produce surprises (not just crises) by identifying a possible (and probable) “future,” a specific conception of time and space that is always already ahead but that we have not yet projected. We then see that tertiary protention is important for pre- pre- predicative experience, which in turn becomes our primary and secondary retention.

-- YH/OEDO

and this is the (incredible/liminal/???) uniqueness of our present-day situation: using our own memories to predict and regulate the meaning of the future, regulated and processed through increasing intelligenic-machine synthesis on the planetary scale. no wonder Uncle Nick went berserk thinking through the implications of this in 1992. we build the future out of the past and vice-versa.

>>11888665
>i want to be blown blind.
hopefully you're getting something off this.

[Anonymous No.11906708]

>We are approaching such a state of symbiosis with machines, indeed, it is probably already here in some contexts. But is this really something that we should celebrate, or is the logic of symbiosis as an ontological understanding in itself problematic? In such a vision, the perfection of the fourth synthesis reconstructs the organization of images. Indeed, the transcendental imagination is becoming a passive force of synthesis, because the recognition process can be short- circuited: the future is always the present. Deleuze, in Difference and Repetition, has identified this temporal structure as the third synthesis of time. The first synthesis of time is the time of habitudes, the Humean time that we discussed earlier in this book; the second synthesis of time is the active and passive synthesis of memory; the third synthesis of time is the repetition “by excess, the repetition of the future as eternal return.” It is clear that Deleuze wasn’t thinking about the tertiary protention of algorithms and digital objects; he was addressing the temporal constitution of subjectivity through three syntheses of time. In contrast to the repetition of passive habitudes and the repetition of memories, the third synthesis of time as the repetition of the future is the highest level of synthesis: the eternal return of the not- yet- present. Deleuze takes a similar path to Heidegger in taking time as the foundation of subjectivity, which is the form of the determinable in addition to the “I think” (determination) and “I am” (undetermined). Deleuze saw this as the cerebral response of Kant: “the form under which undetermined existence is determinable by the ‘I think’ is that of time.”

>The organization of digital objects through the standardization of data structures and the invention of algorithms is not simply what has fashionably been called the “organization of knowledge” but is also the organization of time. The making- present has its primordial mode of bodying forth to the world, is redirected to the abstractness of the pseudo “We” and “I.” The imagination based on the programming of intersubjectivity through interobjective relations is an attempt to enact this, and it is no surprise to find that social norms are increasingly easily formed because of this programmability. That is to say, technological normativity is the source of social normativity.

>The industrialization of categories and algorithms has become the fundamental agent in the synthesis of time today. All kinds of censors, CCTV, and pattern recognition technics are contributing to the new form of protention. This is a technical tendency, rather than a technical fact, accompanying the digitization process.

-- YH/OEDO

space qts to make life better for everyone. sometimes you just need space qts.

[Anonymous No.11906748]

>If I may simplify, I would say that philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century endeavored to understand human existence ontologically. In the second half of the century, the deconstruction of the concept of the human through the discovery of its dependence on the prosthesis of technics led to the concept of the inhuman or posthuman, but this understanding is still ontological in the sense that it seeks to categorize the inhuman. We can also understand from this perspective the rise, and eventually the triumph, of the phrase technical system over technical milieu. But when we take technology into account, such an ontological understanding doesn’t have much to say besides expelling the human from the center. The fact is that we cannot even derive an ontology of technology, because it may not even exist. It is probably more appropriate to follow what Simondon calls ontogenesis. If this book has succeeded in bringing this point to light, the implication is that a new critique or conceptualization of the human– inhuman should take technical systems into account to analyze them together as relations.

>We can also say that between discursive relations and existential relations, which constitute care, there is a similar relation between forms and ground. Now, because of the technology of digitization, we can easily materialize, analyze, and transform discursive relations into material forms. But for a transformation to be carried out, we should bear in mind how these forms contribute to the ground, both in terms of technical compatibility and the structure of care. The question is, how are we going to identify the concurrent causality between these two orders, and hence to reorganize the associated milieu and its corresponding relations? The details certainly vary from one case to another, but an analysis of the ground is necessary before the forms can be transformed. This could be the general principle for the discipline Simondon envisaged: mechanology.

-- YH/OEDO

D&G announce Mechanosphere in ATP. Uncle Nick has given some insight into how this thing works. but YH's notion of a mechanology to accompany this doesn't seem all that crazy. the question here is about time, and that's why YH is so interesting. the machine has a certain relation to time, and so does the culture or civilization in which it is located. how we choose to use or spend our time is always up to us. and we do always have the capacity to rewire the cultural parameters and priorities of the civilizations in which we live as much as we can change our own behaviour, to some degree, and to follow one set of rules or another. but what YH is contributing by bringing heidegger back into the mix through stiegler and simondon (or maybe it's those guys by way of heidegger) is really something.

again, tho: pic rel, or some version of it, is the way to survive the rage virus perhaps almost invariably produced by societies of control.

[Anonymous No.11906793]

anyways, that's plenty of Cosmotech to digest for now. i have more greentext lined up from both lewis mumford and karen barad but Yuk Hui is really a player in this world, i think. i like him for a great many reasons. not only because he has supplied us with the word Cosmotech(nics) but also because he is bringing back heidegger in ways that aren't crazy, and that his way of synthesizing things doesn't diminish what land is saying either. land-compatible philosophers are a major shit-test for me and YH passes it with flying colors, as far as i'm concerned.

plus, again, what he's saying isn't remotely crazy (which is a relief, because i get tired of having to champion contrarian thinkers all of the time). logic is good. we should have logic. and logic probably *should* be the foundation of metaphysics, *AT LEAST FOR NOW.* you know, while we are fucking falling over each other to set people on fire for moral crimes and heresy. and maybe, once things de-escalate a little, we can shift gears and trend towards the aesthetic a bit more. but right now the question is whether or not we can *survive* a feels > reals world. YH seems to think we can and that is a hopeful message that doesn't require either another larger and stronger dose of idpol or a stronger dose of the landian blackpill. it is a largely pill-free philosophy, as far as i can tell. and lord ha'mercy is my body ready for this.

>>11906135
>“You get used to it anon if you stay here long enough.”
and you see this everywhere, right? part of being a human being. the frog and the boiling water.

>Cities are vile things that create chronically polluted people. They ought to be destroyed.
i don't know what cities are, but urbanology is a thing for sure. they don't seem to be like places intended for people, sometimes. well, some of them. Montreal is fucking great. i'm good with Montreal. Paris is pretty sweet too.

but yeah. modernity. it's a heartbreaker.

>>11906532
noice

good ol' byung-chul han writes some good stuff about transparency societies also.

and moar transparency is another one of those Things to Talk About. i've read arguments for and against. for b/c obvious reasons. but against also b/c transparency is a boon to lobby groups who love to weaponize intel for political gain, and because we also sequester juries for good reason...

always a pleasure to Cosmotech it up with you gents. hope you've enjoyed the ride today. more again soon, of course. thanks for the conversation. i hope you guys can remain calm and peaceful and well out there, wherever you are. will ring the Bell of Enlightenment once and hope so.
>*clonk*
>jesus girardfag not with a stick you dumb fuck
>sorry inner self

[Anonymous No.11906981]

>>11887728
We need another great plague.

[Anonymous No.11907685]

Bump

[Anonymous No.11907967]

>>11906981
just some fundamental awareness of the natural balance of the universe. the stoics were good for not forgetting these things. and even my hindu buddy quietly makes a nice little case for metempsychosis when we talk. if you know that you are going to do this again and again, and that you can karmically rewarded for virtuous behaviour not in an *afterlife* but in your *next trip through this life* - a subtle, but important distinction! - maybe you will be less inclined to do the wrong thing just because you think you can get away with it, or because #YOLO &c. no #YOLO for the hindus, buddhists, confucians, daoists...or, for that matter, christians.

for nietzsche, yes. and nietzche matters too. he really may well be the greatest ethical teacher the west has known since socrates, or at least that's what sloterdijk thinks. but really our dilemma is having all of these guys and just not choosing any of them, b/c cynicism or the rest. peterson says some crazy things that i disagree with, but he's no cynic, and he doesn't believe irony will save anyone. DFW didn't think so either. they're different people, but they're both right. hell, we don't even meditate, or spend time in nature, or any of that.
>by we i mean me

societies of control are symptoms that something has gone wrong, in many ways. we do need systems of technical organization, but we will only get the kinds of people, the kinds of human beings, we get. and there has to be empathy, and maybe for that some cognizance of mortality is required. it's the total absence of any kind of religious, theological, contemplative or meditative practice in life that is disastrous. the Black Death certainly changed the economic order of things, but hopefully we are capable of learning lessons that don't require catastrophe.

>you are not capable of learning lessons in the absence of catastrophe
>yes i am inner self
>no you aren't
>yes i am
>no. also i thought you said this was all for today
>that was fake news

i'm re-reading Yuga again now and basically he says a lot of the same stuff i mean to say about these kinds of subjects. there really is no cure or final system. the YH/heidegger/land connnection makes me feel a little better about the nature of tech + capital, if only b/c i feel as though perhaps it can be understood as assembling itself into systems that don't have to turn us into paranoid creations from a William Gibson novel. things make sense, and they make sense because the philosophy does not become reduced to politics. that's a nice feel.

as for the theological work of things, i suppose it does make sense to remember that all things are subject to change and that we all work out our own salvation with discipline, in our own ways. those mysteries stay mysteries, and that's probably for the best.

[Anonymous No.11908522]

bump

[Anonymous No.11908988]

>>11903390
oh boy you'll get a kick out of this part then. if you haven't seen the episode 'Crocodile' make sure to put it on the list. Zizeks book is good, but it does get repetitive.

I see the book (so far) as more of a sifting of his disparate views on tech, automation, biogenetics, ect. into somewhat of a continuous series. there is some repetition (with Zizek it can never be totally avoided) but I'm hoping it's not simply an intellectual one-off but the beginning of a new project. I don't see an 'accelerationist turn' either, nothing more explicit than he's stated before at least. he's already reached such an oddly accelerationist position from without it's hard for him to really turn short of straight up quoting Land (and no luck on that by the halfway mark).

The reason Zizek and accelerationism always jived with me was his notion of ontological incompleteness. substance is a broken, progressing thing rolling through time in an incredibly contingent and indeterminate process, something which explicitly has no "big Other", and yet which still manages to capture us absolutely by the very process itself. a subjective position is only possible if at the basis of the real there lies a gap, a literal incompleteness which drives the absolute. Zizeks noumena is fanged too, but his process is much more deterritorialized than Lands; as a good Marxist, Zizek never arborializes substance around Capital as a big Other. the fusion dance of Zizekian Hegelianism and Landian accelerationism is too tempting for me to pass over in silence.

[Anonymous No.11909043]

>>11907967
Just finished reading the first essay in the Sandstone Papers. I gotta say this fucking slaps! That second to last paragraph:
>From the historical point of view cosmic realities are merely subjective, figments of the imagination, the indulgences of an inner life having the same reality as a dream: they are "all in your head." From the cosmic point of view the most that can be said of historical realities is that they come and they go: to define oneself by the ephemeral is to become ephemeral, whereas to disengage oneself from it, to discover what is enduring, is to discover reality and become real.
Atheists, materialists, and logical positivists eternally BTFO'd! How can they ever recover?

[Anonymous No.11909269]

>>11909043
What is Glass's background? I'm too tired to check, maybe I will when I wake up later in the morning.

[Anonymous No.11909775]

Bump

[Anonymous No.11910410]

>>11908988
zizek is still a guy and he matters. before hickman disappeared he was on a huge tear about Less Than Nothing, and he was a guy who had read land and others thoroughly. any barely conscientious soul can see that something today is rotten in the state of denmark, and that this may be one of those things like the crack in the golden throne. it cannot be fixed but only papered over/sublimated/repressed for as long as possible.

that concept of ontological incompleteness is i think why heidegger rocked my socks as well, if i can borrow that. everything coming-to-be, and the elusiveness of language to ever match up with its object, until it becomes a question in good faith, piety of thought...and so on. such was heidegger's phenomenological magic, as much as i understood it.

thanks very kindly too for the excerpts from that book and the reviews also anon.

>>11909043
he just seems like a guy with his heart in the right place. however dark it may be, discovering that book was a real treat. makes life so much easier when there are go-to reads or authors you can look to.i have seen TSP recommended before too, i may pick that one up at some point.

as for greentext i have some stuff from mumford to share but it's more just kind of Crusty Cultural Observer stuff that i agree with, and relates the same story told by MG in Yuga. it's funny, too, i noticed glass' name being mentioned along with baudrillard, marx and ellul. Yuga really is a major go-to read for Cosmotech stuff precisely because it is the tourist guide to the wasteland, to the desert of the real. so maybe we'll see about mumford if it's just stuff you can read in Yuga anyways.

the stuff i was posting yesterday from YH is a different aspect of Cosmotech, that being theories of time. the zimmerman guide to heidegger i think explores pretty well the shock of the encounter with modernity that heidegger feels, because it is still our own today...we just don't realize it, because it is all taking place in the background of the consumer society, and hidden behind a dense ecology of advertisement so much a part of our day to day world that it's like asking a fish about water. and yet it is there, and once seen cannot be unseen.

[Anonymous No.11910526]

the existence of these multiple modes of time, tho. it's really a thing. just consider the following Short History of Time Travel:

Kant replaces God with Time.
Hegel replaces History with Spirit.
Marx replaces Spirit with Capital.

now marx's Capital arguably has two modes of temporal existence, the money form and the commodity form, and moreover all of this is Waiting For The Revolution. marx is a fucking colossus, btw. he does not deserve half the shit that is thrown at him. true, a lot of ridiculous stuff was done in his name. but those days are over now. the actual guy who was looking at this process didn't *invent* Capital any more than freud *invented* the unconscious. all they did was try to express what they were seeing as best they could. anyways.

Nietzsche posits the Eternal Recurrence, the basic form of the circuit.
Heidegger 'platonizes' Nietzsche, in a way, by changing the terms: N's WtP becomes H's 'openness to Being.' but in B&T, two parallel modes of time: the ontic time of technology and the ontological time of poetry.

Spengler has his own enormous thesis about Culture and Civilization, including the winter phase, which echoes heidegger's 'end of metaphysics'.

Lacan fuses Nietzsche and Heidegger together to create 'Oedipal Time,' including the phases of imaginary, symbolic and real. the therapeutic journey is the subject-analysand's traversal of that symbolic realm, the near-impossibility which delights Zizek to no end.

D&G posit Aion, the time of Events, and Chronos, the time of Measurement. they don't even go near history as hegel imagines it, and yet they stay Marxist. the Mechanosphere thus presented may in fact bear some resemblance to hegel's 'realm of slow-moving spirits' described at the end of PoS, but hegel-D&G connections are probably a bad idea.

Land re-hegelianizes marx by suggesting teleoplexy. more recently, he has been suggesting that Bitcoin instantiates artificial synthetic Kantian time, and he might be right about that. i guess one question to ask is whether or not he has now smashed hegel inside of kant or kant inside of hegel. it's hard to tell.

in a more boring sense, but not less important for being so, Daniel Kahneman's 'Thinking Fast and Slow' is arguably the psychologist's way of re-presenting this story told better imho by philosophers but perhaps with more sobriety.

and now Yuk Hui, no slouch either as Cosmotechnician/astral engineer. by drawing on stiegler's concept of tertiary protention and simondon's idea of transduction, YH has actually offered a really crucial new perspective on the meaning of technics and time. stiegler is a boss here for having come up with a thesis about time that heidegger overlooked (that is, *memory* and its relationship to technics), and YH thinks simondonian transduction is the right way to explain technological innovation. it also gets the mad bonus points for being a land-compatible theory.

[Anonymous No.11910530]

and if the ghost of alexandre kojeve were here (and who is to say he isn't?) he would be mad too for not including some of his funky diagrams in this discussion, given that he sincerely and not unironically believed that he also had achieved Absolute Knowing, and everybody else except him and hegel was a dork.

[Anonymous No.11910583]

>We are now faced with a situation quite different from that which characterized Western Europe in the fourteenth century, when the disintegration of medieval civilization became visible. Europe, at that time, had created an imposing symbolic structure, in the dogmas, the philosophy, the ritual, and the daily pattern of conduct promoted by the Christian Church. Medieval civilization was overcome not by its weaknesses but by its achievements. So successful was this effort at symbolization, this habit of seeing every fact and every event as a witness to the truths of the Christian religion, that a plethora of symbolic “inner” meanings lay over every natural’ event and every simple act: nothing was itself or existed in its own right, it was always a point of reference for something else whose ultimate habitat was another world. The simplest operations of the mind cluttered by symbolic verbiage of an entirely nonoperational kind. In order to come clean, man took refuge in a different kind of order and a different kind of abstraction: in mechanical order, in number, in regularity, in drill. Unfortunately, Western Man in his search for the object, presently forgot the object of his search. In getting rid of an embarrassing otherworldliness he also got rid of himself. In the effort to achieve power and order by means of the machine, modern man allowed a large segment of his personal life to be displaced and buried. In the very act of giving authority to the automaton, he released the id and recognized the forces of life only in their most raw and brutal manifestations.

>So, today we confront just the opposite problem to that faced at the end of the Middle Ages. Technics itself, by its overdevelopment at the expense of the humanities and the arts, has given rise to a special kind of aberration—the result of undue success in displacing emotions and sensitivities and feelings, in disregarding man’s deepest sources of life and love, in cutting itself off from the values and purposes disclosed by religion and art. If we are to save ourselves from the threatening miscarriage of the technical functions, we must restore primacy to the human person; that is to say, we must nourish those parts of man’s nature that have been either neglected or made over into the image of the machine. To overcome the distortions of technics, we must cultivate the inner and the subjective as our ancestors during the last three centuries cultivated the outer and the objective. But our proper goal is a balance between these essential aspects of the personality. In my succeeding lectures I shall try, by concrete illustrations, to show what is meant by such a reconciliation and balance.

-- Mumford/Art and Technics

i was happy to see mumford's name dropped in Yuga. in the end mumford has conclusions not unlike glass' - withdraw yourself from the megamachine, understand it, be with Nature, and follow a kind of spiritual path through the darkness, perhaps.

[Anonymous No.11910596]

>The fact is that in every department of art and thought we are being overwhelmed by our symbol-creating capacity; and our very facility with the mechanical means of multifolding and reproduction has been responsible for a progressive failure in selectivity and therefore in the power of assimilation. We are overwhelmed by the rank fecundity of the machine, operating without any Malthusian checks except periodic financial depressions; and even they, it would now seem, cannot be wholly relied on. Between ourselves and the actual experience and the actual environment there now swells an ever-rising flood of images which come to us in every sort of medium—the camera and printing press, by motion picture and by television. A picture was once a rare sort of symbol, rare enough to call for attentive concentration. Now it is the actual experience that is rare, and the picture has become ubiquitous. Just as for one person who takes part in the game in a ball park a thousand people see the game by television, and see the static photograph of some incident the next day in the newspaper, and the moving picture of it the next week in the newsreel, so with every other event. We are rapidly dividing the world into two classes: a minority who act, increasingly, for the benefit of the reproductive process, and a majority whose entire life is spent serving as the passive appreciators or willing victims of this reproductive process.

>So an endless succession of images passes before the eye, offered by people who wish to exercise power, either by making us buy something for their benefit or making us agree to something that would promote their economic or political interests: images of gadgets manufacturers want us to acquire; images of seductive young ladies who are supposed, by association, to make us seek other equally desirable goods, images of people and events in the news, big people and little people, important and unimportant events; images so constant, so unremitting, so insistent that for all purposes of our own we might as well be paralyzed, so unwelcome are our inner promptings or our own self-directed actions. As the result of this whole mechanical process, we cease to five in the multidimensional world of reality, the world that brings into play every aspect of the human personality, from its bony structure to its tenderest emotions: we have substituted for this, largely through the mass production of graphic symbols—abetted indeed by a similar multiplication and reproduction of sounds—a secondhand world, a ghost-world, in which everyone lives a second hand and derivative life. The Greeks had a name for this pallid simulacrum of real existence: they called it Hades, and this kingdom of shadows seems to be the ultimate destination of our mechanistic and mammonistic culture.

-- LM/AaT

bullet hell shooters are rad tho. bullet hell vidya is still okay. even if IRL seems like 'Golden Disaster,' sometimes.

[Anonymous No.11910625]

>One more matter. The general effect of this multiplication of graphic symbols has been to lessen the impact of art itself. This result might have disheartened the early inventors of the new processes of reproduction if they could have anticipated it. In order to survive in this image-glutted world, it is necessary for us to devaluate the symbol and to reject every aspect of it but the purely sensational one. For note, the very repetition of the stimulus would make it necessary for us in selfdefense to empty it of meaning if the process of repetition did not, quite automatically, produce this result. Then, by a reciprocal twist, the emptier a symbol is of meaning, the more must its user depend upon mere repetition and mere sensationalism to achieve his purpose.

>This is a vicious circle, if ever there was one. Because of the sheer multiplication of esthetic images, people must, to retain any degree of autonomy and self-direction, achieve a certain opacity, a certain insensitiveness, a certain protective thickening of the hide, in order not to be overwhelmed and confused by the multitude of demands that are made upon their attention. Just as many people go about their daily work, as too often students pursue their studies, with the radio turned on full blast, hearing only half the programs, so, in almost every other operation, we only half-see, half-feel, half-understand what is going on; for we should be neurotic wrecks if we tried to give all the extraneous mechanical stimuli that impinge upon us anything like our full attention. That habit perhaps protects us from an early nervous breakdown; but it also protects us from the powerful impact of genuine works of art, for such works demand our fullest attention, our fullest participation, our most individualized and re-creative response. What we settle for, since we must close our minds, are the bare sensations; and that is perhaps one of the reasons that the modern artist, defensively, has less and less to say. In order to make sensations seem more important than meanings, he is compelled to use processes of magnification and distortion, similar to the stunts used by the big advertiser to attract attention. So the doctrine of quantification, Faster and Faster, leads to the sensationalism of Louder and Louder; and that in turn, as it affects the meaning of the symbols used by the artist, means Emptier and Emptier. This is a heavy price to pay for mass production and for the artist’s need to compete with mass production.

-- LM/AaT

the same story is famously told in benjamin's essay, 'On the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' and in his Theses on the Philosophy of History. and it is re-told by McLuhan, Baudrillard, Ellul, and others. as always, you can read Marty Glass' take on all of this in Yuga, which is maybe the best single-volume history-screed about a lot of it. land is who he is for drawing conclusions about this process, but his aren't the only possible ones.

[Anonymous No.11910643]

>Mass production imposes on the community a terrible new burden: the duty to constantly consume. In the arts, at the very moment the extension of the reproductive processes promised to widen the area of freedom, this new necessity, the necessity to keep the plant going, has served to undermine habits of choice, discrimination, selectivity that are essential to both creation and enjoyment. Quantity now counts for more than quality. There used to be an old popular song with the words, ‘I'll try anything once, if I like it I’ll try it again.” But under the machine system, you'll not only try it again, you'll try it a thousand times, whether you like it or not, and a vast apparatus of propaganda and persuasion, of boasting and bullying, will coerce you into performing this new duty.

>You know the old fable of the Sorcerer's Apprentice, which Goethe thought it worth while to put into verse, and which has even, in our time, gotten into the animated cartoon: the clever apprentice who repeated the old sorcerer's spell and got the pail and the broom to do his work for him, when the master was away, while he stayed idle. Unfortunately, though he knew how to bring into existence a whole regiment of pails and brooms, which went about their work with unflagging automatic energy, he had never mastered the formula for bringing their activities to an end: so presently he found himself floundering in a flood of water that these self-willed pails were pouring into his master's house. So with the apprentices to the machine. We not merely encourage people to share the new-found powers that the machine has opened up: we insist that they do so, with increasingly less respect for their needs and tastes and preferences, simply because we have found no spell for turning the machine off. The grim fable of the Sorcerer's Apprentice applies to all our activities, from photographs to reproduction of works of art, from motor cars to atom bombs.

>It is as if we had invented an automobile that had neither a brake nor a steering wheel, but only an accelerator, so that our sole form of control consisted in making the machine go faster. For a little while, on a straight road, we might feel safe, and even, as we increased our speed, gloriously free; but as soon as we wanted to reduce our speed or to change our direction or to back up, we should find that no provision had been made for this degree of human control—the only open possibility was Faster, faster! As our mass-production system is now set up, a slowing down of consumption, in any department, produces a crisis if not a catastrophe. That is why only under the pressure of war or preparation for war, in which wholesale waste and destruction come to its aid, does the machine, as now conceived, operate effectively on its own terms.

-- LM/AaT

the Sorcerer's Apprentice is JB's favorite fable also. and it has to be land's as well, who theorized Broom.Net as well as anyone.

[Anonymous No.11910663]

>Underneath my discussion of the symbol and the tool, of the development of the machine arts and the dangers of the reproductive process when uncontrolled, likewise underneath my discussion of the symbol and function in architecture, was an effort to arrive at some understanding of a crucial question for our time: Why has our inner life become so impoverished and empty, and why has our outer life become so exorbitant, and in its subjective satisfactions even more empty? Why have we become technological gods and moral devils, scientific supermen and esthetic idiots—idiots, that is, primarily in the Greek sense of being wholly private persons, incapable of communicating with each other or understanding each other? I put these questions in the most extreme form possible, for the sake of clarity, trusting that you will supply the shadings that would turn these diagrammatic contrasts into workable truths, giving due weight to all the symptoms of health, integrity, vitality, creativeness that are still visible in our society.

>The conditions I have been trying to fathom in our own time are, you must note, just the reverse of the conditions in which art and technics originally took form in human society. For in the beginning, men worshiped the symbol as a magical power; whether as word or as image it was the very core of their humanness, the condition for their emergence beyond a purely instinctual animal intelligence. For a long period, the symbol made men arrogant, and they undervalued the tool and the process it furthered. But today just the opposite condition prevails. We are full of humble misgivings or withering cynicism about the symbol. Thanks to the gorging abundance of our reproductive devices, we deface the symbol and debase it, treating it contemptuously, negligently, only half-believing that its employment makes any difference. By contrast, we overvalue the technical instrument: the machine has become our main source of magic, and it has given us a false sense of possessing godlike powers. An age that has devaluated all its symbols has turned the machine itself into a universal symbol: a god to be worshiped. Under these conditions, neither art nor technics is in a healthy state.

-- LM/AaT

confucius talks about 'the rectification of names.' i think that's what's going to happen, in a sense. the long effect of debasing all symbolic currencies will lead to a kind of correction - and it's either a machine society of automation (BTC) or one in which states forcibly re-standardize the weights and measures (social credit). either way tho, it happens.

also mumford > rand. maybe i can see rand's point here: well, the problem is, The Herd! we need more rugged supermen, not fewer! fuck you guys! but it's such reaction. it's blaming the symptom. it's blaming the sufferers for the disease, and doubling down on contempt for lack of inability to see how far deep the problem goes.

maybe all utopia is, at some point, bailout and a loss of faith.

[Anonymous No.11910702]

>At the end of the First World War, a German philosopher of history, Oswald Spengler, attempted a universal explanation of the facts that we are now confronting, in a book that prophesied, not without a certain sadistic elation, the downfall of the Western World. Spengler divided the development of every culture into two phases: first, a humane organic phase, the springtime of culture, when man’s powers ripen and the arts flourish as a natural expression of his inner life and creativity; and, second, an arid mechanical phase, with life on the downward curve, a phase in which men become extraverted and externalized, given to organization and to the creation of hardened forms of life, creating a shell of empty custom and habit that prevents any further growth, so that, if the civilization that so takes form continues for any length of time, it is given over merely to vain repetitions, with no fresh content or meaning.

>Our failure so far to regain the initiative for the human spirit, our inability, in general, to produce symbols that would help restore our inner composure and confirm our hidden desires and give buoyancy to sunken hopes, our inability to pull ourselves out of a Bunyan-like Slough of Despond in which we are struggling—all these failures are not peculiar to the arts: they afflict in similar ways almost every other activity. In a world whose need for peace and brotherhood and planetary cooperation is now close to absolute—since a false move here may bring about a swift downfall of civilization—most of our deliberate collective actions on both sides of the Iron Curtain are in the direction of isolation, non communication, and destruction. We have submitted even in democratic countries to an unconditional surrender of the higher aspects of human life, justice, art, love, truth, fellow feeling, and have elevated into a position of command all the lower aspects of group existence— tribalism, irrational hatred, brutality, pathological self assertion and self-adoration—all piously masked as a patriotic obligation. The automaton and the id, the uncontrolled machine and the unconditioned brute, have captured the normal sphere of the personality. In a desperate effort at compensation we bestow the attributes of personality upon a single dictatorial figure: the modern equivalent of the Saviour Emperor who first appeared in the third century BC in Greece, a time of similar disintegration. The Leader alone then becomes a real person.

-- LM/AaT

lacan ofc got Epically Served by D&G. adorno had a garland of flowers draped over his head by a topless naiad. mumford likes thoreau, emerson, and william james. that's his feeling: withdraw from the megamachine.

>I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces. - Étienne de La Boétie

[Anonymous No.11910714]

>If modern man does not recover his wholeness and balance, if he does not regain his creativity and his freedom, he will be unable to contain the destructive forces that are now conspiring, almost automatically, to destroy him; and even if they were held in check, he will, if he continues along the present route, in the end go completely out of his mind. It will require only a little further commitment to machines already in existence, a little further devaluation of the person, a little more contempt for life and the values of life, before modern man out of his boredom and purposelessness, if not out of destructive malice, will let loose his weapons of total extermination. He may do this, though everyone knows, as General Douglas MacArthur observed in 1945 and has lately said again, that there can be no victory for either side in a third World War. No victory and no peace. If our present state of unbalance continues, with “art degraded and imagination denied,” our present society, for all its powers of organization, will bring on its own downfall. Given a little more time, even a war would not be necessary to effect this negation of life. A congealed condition of enmity, a “deep-freeze war” prolonged for a generation, would be sufficient to produce the same result.

>Still the impulse, whether it has a base objective or a sound one, actually allows for qualities and human interests that were flatly disregarded under a purely quantitative ideology of the machine. As Emerson said when pianos were imported by Western mining towns, “the more piano, the less wolf.” So one may say of this new attention to the form and esthetic appeal of machine products, the more art can be integrated with the machine, the less need of art as a mere compensation. This is part of a more general humanizing influence that is beginning, even in the most mechanized spheres, to bring back a personal, I-and Thou relationship, as Martin Buber would call it, into realms hitherto mechanical, impersonal, not to say brutal.

>All this means that a Confucian, if not Christian, human-heartedness is coming back into even the most routinized factory or office; and men, instead of feeling excluded and belittled by the machine’s achievements, will increasingly feel released by them; so that all our mechanical operations, instead of being geared to produce the maximum quantity compatible with profit, will be geared to produce the maximum quantity compatible with a fully developed life for both the person and community. In such an order, we shall be able to curtail and simplify the products of the machine, not merely to elaborate, to expand, to multiply them. If necessary, we will dismantle our assembly lines in order to reassemble the human beings who have been harnessed to them.

-- LM/AaT

[Anonymous No.11910716]

>>11910702
Didn't bother to read the whole thread, but is this guy saying anything you wouldn't already get in Adorno?

[Anonymous No.11910730]

>The renewal of life is the great theme of our age, not the further dominance, in ever more frozen and compulsive forms, of the machine. And the first step for each of us is to seize the initiative and to recover our own capacity for living; to detach ourselves sufficiently from the daily routine to make ourselves self-respecting, self governing, persons. In short, we must take things into our own hands. Before art on any great scale can redress the distortions of our lop-sided technics, we must put ourselves in the mood and frame of mind in which art becomes possible, as either creation or re-creation: above all, we must learn to pause, to be silent, to close our eyes and wait.

>What I am saying here, in effect, is that the problems we have inquired into within the special realms of art and technics are illustrative of much larger situations within modern society; and that, therefore, we cannot solve these problems until we have achieved a philosophy that will be capable of re-orienting this society, displacing the machine and restoring man to the very center of the universe, as the interpreter and transformer of nature, as the creator of a significant and valuable life, which transcends both raw nature and his own original biological self. Man is not merely a creature of the here and now: he is a mirror of infinity and eternity. Through his own experience of life, through his arts and sciences and philosophies and religions, the brute world of nature rose to self-consciousness and fife found a theme for existence other than endless organic transformation and biological reproduction. When man ceases to create he ceases to live. Unless he constantly seeks to surpass his animal limitations, he sinks back into a creature lower than any other brute, for his suppressed creativity, at that moment, will possess with irrational violence all his animal functions. Since wholeness and balance are the very conditions for survival, no less than for creation and renewal, these concepts must take the place of a philosophy based on isolation, specialization, the displacement of the personal, the one-sided emphasis of the external and the mechanical.

>The tool, once so responsive to man's will, has turned into an automaton; and at the present moment, the development of automatic organizations threatens to turn man himself into a mere passive tool. Fortunately, that does not mean either the end of art or the end of man. For the creative impulses that stirred in the human soul hundreds of thousands of years ago, when man's inquisitiveness and manipulativeness and growing intelligence and sensitivity caused him to throw off his animal lethargy—these deep impulses will not vanish because, temporarily, one side of his nature, that disciplined by tool and machine, has gotten out of hand.

-- LM/AaT

[Anonymous No.11910760]

>We are now at a critical moment of history, a moment of great danger, but also of splendid promise. The burden of renewal lies heavily upon us; for there is no going on with the rigidities and compliances that have so far disintegrated our culture, without finally undermining the basis of life itself. The present curtailment of political and intellectual freedom in the United States, as the result of insidious changes that have taken place within the last decade, is only a symptom of a larger loss: the abdication of the human personality. Our acceptance of this curtailment with so little effective protest gives the measure of our moral collapse.

>Yes: the burden of renewal lies upon us; so it behooves us to understand the forces making for renewal within our persons and within our culture, and to summon forth the plans and ideals that will impel us to purposeful action. If we awaken to our actual state, in full possession of our senses, instead of remaining drugged, sleepy, cravenly passive, as we now are, we shall reshape our life to a new pattern, aided by all the resources that art and technics now place in our hands. At that decisive point we shall perhaps lay the foundations for a united world,
because we shall aim to join together, not merely the now hostile tribes and nationalities and peoples, but the equally warring and conflicting impulses in the human soul. If that happens, our dreams will again become benign and open to rational discipline; our arts will recover form, structure and meaning; our machines, however highly organized, will be responsive to the demands of life. And in the end, proudly reversing Blake’s dictum, we shall, I hope, be able to say: Art elevated, imagination affirmed, peace governs the nations.

-- LM/AaT

so, that's some of Lewis Mumford. there's a lot more to read in both volumes of Technics and Civilization, which are pure Cosmotech stuff.

>>11910716
perhaps not. again, there's a lot of overlap between authors on these themes. ellul, baudrillard, adorno, mumford, glass, mcluhan, benjamin...adorno is a smart cookie too. among the very smartest. he doesn't share mumford's perhaps inherently American pragmatism or his optimism. they're all basically telling the same story, in many ways.

and it's not lost on me that someone might read this thread and say that i'm trying to have it both ways. hope/don't hope. withdraw/don't withdraw. secede/don't secede. and so on. and that's fair, i guess. i don't really have an agenda of my own to push, i'm as bewildered as anyone (and a lot less interesting than these writers). nobody has the answers. only interesting questions and charts here and there of the Terra Incognita.

what mumford offers is a pretty awesome history. again, the full story of that is in Technics and Civilization. i've been quoting from Art and Technics here but there are quotes from T&C in Cosmotech 4. left to my own devices i would greentext the entire book but that would obviously be silly.

[Anonymous No.11910768]

>We are now at a critical moment of history, a moment of great danger, but also of splendid promise. The burden of renewal lies heavily upon us; for there is no going on with the rigidities and compliances that have so far disintegrated our culture, without finally undermining the basis of life itself. The present curtailment of political and intellectual freedom in the United States, as the result of insidious changes that have taken place within the last decade, is only a symptom of a larger loss: the abdication of the human personality. Our acceptance of this curtailment with so little effective protest gives the measure of our moral collapse.

>Yes: the burden of renewal lies upon us; so it behooves us to understand the forces making for renewal within our persons and within our culture, and to summon forth the plans and ideals that will impel us to purposeful action. If we awaken to our actual state, in full possession of our senses, instead of remaining drugged, sleepy, cravenly passive, as we now are, we shall reshape our life to a new pattern, aided by all the resources that art and technics now place in our hands. At that decisive point we shall perhaps lay the foundations for a united world, because we shall aim to join together, not merely the now hostile tribes and nationalities and peoples, but the equally warring and conflicting impulses in the human soul. If that happens, our dreams will again become benign and open to rational discipline; our arts will recover form, structure and meaning; our machines, however highly organized, will be responsive to the demands of life. And in the end, proudly reversing Blake’s dictum, we shall, I hope, be able to say: Art elevated, imagination affirmed, peace governs the nations.

-- LM/AaT

so, that's some of Lewis Mumford. there's a lot more to read in both volumes of Technics and Civilization, which are pure Cosmotech stuff.

>>11910716
perhaps not. again, there's a lot of overlap between authors on these themes. ellul, baudrillard, adorno, mumford, glass, mcluhan, benjamin...adorno is a smart cookie too. among the very smartest. he doesn't share mumford's perhaps inherently American pragmatism or his optimism. they're all basically telling the same story, in many ways.

and it's not lost on me that someone might read this thread and say that i'm trying to have it both ways. hope/don't hope. withdraw/don't withdraw. secede/don't secede. and so on. and that's fair, i guess. i don't really have an agenda of my own to push, i'm as bewildered as anyone (and a lot less interesting than these writers). nobody has the answers. only interesting questions and charts here and there of the Terra Incognita.

what mumford offers is a pretty awesome history. again, the full story of that is in Technics and Civilization. i've been quoting from Art and Technics here but there are quotes from T&C in Cosmotech 4. left to my own devices i would greentext the entire book but that would obviously be silly.

[Anonymous No.11910803]

the next stuff i have lined up is from pic rel. in many ways, it follows from the mad love given to Alfred North Whitehead in Cosmotech 4. the stuff i have bloc-quoted is mainly about why quantum entanglement is a better look than Foucault-derived metaphysics of power & so on. it's more my own way of trying to pry philosophy from the Clutchy Fingers of maximally-triggered postmodern theory, which is what gives me the stomach ulcer and the twitchy eye.

in general tho this is all part of the plan for Cosmotech, which is finding a way through the Forest of Suspicion. again, land to my mind serves up the blackpill which > both the blue and red pills, but the black pill will burn you out. the story of burnout is told by both Marty Glass in Yuga, by Baudrillard's voyages into Max Simulation, by byung-chul han's diagnostics of psychopolitics, and elsewhere. YH matters because he is re-synthesizing the technological stuff back into a world of Cosmotech, which is planetary but not necessarily 'global' in the sense that it has become associated with neoliberalism, and for which land has supplied imho a pretty good reason to secede.

and yet the problem then becomes how one gets off of Nick Land's Wild Ride, which is where we are now. and for that in a sense there are, as i have suggested - and rather boringly and pedantically - no end of spiritual adventures to be taken. in terms of speculative philosophy, Whitehead is very, very cool, and it is because he doesn't take his cues from nietzsche, marx, or freud. and whiteheadian process philosophy is also right next door to process theology, if that kind of stuff blows your hair back.

so Cosmotech inasmuch as it is White Hat Acceleration is told varyingly through all of these different authors, adorno as much as mumford, marx, ellul, baudrillard, and all the other guys glass references in Yuga. and many others along with them - including Ken Wilber, whose early books - Atman Project, Up From Eden - are also very much to my liking, inasmuch as they are telling the story of history as the *search for consciousness.* and not exclusively as either the story of politics, or economics, or technology.

i made a thread a while back with some greentext from UfE, if anyone is interested in reading that also.
>>/lit/thread/S11073345

to my mind all of these things a part of a single story, ultimately. or at least that is my hope. but yeah, adorno is cool and you should read him also.

[Anonymous No.11910807]

>>11910768
Well thanks for sharing. Always fun to read eloquent criticism.

[Anonymous No.11910846]

>>11910807
you're very welcome, and it's my pleasure.

going to take a break this afternoon but i'll check in on this thread later today. probably will not be any greentext-posting tomorrow as i'm traveling again, but on friday if the thread is still here i can put up some stuff from KB that i think is interesting or germane to the thread. mostly it's about why quantum theory matters, but it's not like this will come as a surprise to anyone. mostly i have it excerpted to remind me that other people much smarter than i are way ahead of the curve on what is ailing society, and so there is no need for me to get triggered or mount any soapboxes to preach. i try and keep the preaching to a minimum but it's kind of an occupational hazard with some of this stuff.

my thanks as always to the glorious /lit/ mimetosphere for letting me vent, and i hope you gents are having a good one out there. threads like these really are super-helpful for me in at least clarifying what it is that animates me so much about these things, or why some guys really matter and so on. YH really matters, i think, at least in the tiny world in which i live. but being prompted by >>11889748 to go back and read OEDO again was really useful (so thanks, anon!). there has to be life after nick land, but land is a real shit-test for philosophy, in many ways. but, as indicated, i think YH has passed it and moreover i'm happy to think that he has brought the ghost of martin heidegger back with him into this brave new world in which we live, by way of stiegler and simondon. and i'm also inclined to catch up on my neo-confucians as well if that is the case, along with the other nondual mystics that i like.

anyways. until next time. and bullet hell art b/c why not.

[Anonymous No.11911589]

its going to take me forever to read this thread

[Anonymous No.11912212]

good interview with MG here for fans of Yuga.

http://www.sacredweb.com/online_articles/sw26_sotillos.pdf

[Anonymous No.11912556]

these threads sold-out YH book. now we have to wait for Urbanomics to republish it. I'm looking forward to new Reza shit. It seems ambitious.

[Anonymous No.11913007]

>>11912556
it's nice to think a little business gets directed urbanomic's way and YH too. true philosophers are rare but he seems like a cool guy. thinking about land is driving me insane anyways, life can be perhaps a little more mellow with Cosmotech.

reza is fascinating too. in a way he's even darker than land is, but the prizes being awarded for Total Darkness also can be of diminishing value. Ben Woodward's book about the ungrounded earth and humanity as only so much slime - NyxLand also identifies as 'slime girl' - i mean, these things come with life after the linguistic turn, postmodernity, and so on. eugene thacker is another guy writing ultra-dark philosophy, and sc hickman talks about this stuff also. horrorcore marxism is a potent combination (not quite as potent as marx + confucius, perhaps) but the point surely cannot be an infinite sequence of episodes from Saw.

and maybe in a certain sense it has to be this way. there is some kind of copernican shift going on, imho. i know i throw that word around a lot, but i don't think it's unwarranted. cybernetic intelligence, robotics, AI and all the rest is the thing. it is the future. even marty glass is diagnosing the view from the end of some kind of adventure. the kali-yuga is not sunny, but it's also the edge and the tipping point. true, both heidegger and spengler will say that the winter phases can last a lot longer than their formative periods, and these are very gothic things to say.

but we don't have to stay with the gothic perspective simply because it is the darkest possible one. clouds must have silver linings in them somewhere because when you shut the doors in people's faces over and over again, eventually they freak out and start militarizing. and when one group militarizes, the guys next door tend to counter-militarize, and then you're off to the races. in 1914 everybody thought the war would be over by christmas...and look where that led. a depression, a second world war worse than the first one, a cold war and then the spectre of nuclear annihilation. and now this! us, here, now, today...

so, i'm bailing out of that ride. land and heidegger have explained technology as well as any continental philosophers ever, but theirs isn't the whole story. YH and reza matter too. i don't think i will ever get as excited about negarestani as i am about YH, but who cares, i'm just one guy with an opinion.

negarestani is interesting tho. i still don't think i really grasp everything he's saying well enough to talk about it, but it would be nice to able to get some greentext from things he's saying. for any anons interested the essay below is very good.

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/52/59920/the-labor-of-the-inhuman-part-i-human/
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/53/59893/the-labor-of-the-inhuman-part-ii-the-inhuman/

i don't know anything about this band or if they have any bearing on the thread, or anything at all really. just thought this was a cool album cover.

[Anonymous No.11913048]

>>11911589
feel free to ask questions too anon. these threads are - i think? - kind of the culmination of a couple of years' worth of shitposting on /lit/ for me, i've been on this board since 2016 but pretty much yammering on and on and on about land and acceleration forever. if anything this is just the final phase of a long process of trying to figure out what exactly it is that makes a man want to spend his every waking hour thinking about nick land.

if there's something in particular you want to talk about or focus on, please don't hesitate to ask. the Cosmotech team is ready to spring into action. like XCOM except, you know, the aliens aren't really real.
>except they sort of are
>shh be quiet you idiot you'll make this more confusing
>sorry inner self

[Anonymous No.11914006]

bump

[Anonymous No.11914735]

Is The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics just gone? It's not for sale on Amazon, Abebooks, Urbanomic, or MIT Press' site.

[Anonymous No.11915026]

>>11912556
>>11914735
Fuck, can someone please update us here when the book is available again? I was going to get it off of Amazon this week.

[Anonymous No.11915653]

bump

[Anonymous No.11915687]

hola gents, girardfag here. i wanted to share a Morning Thought and then i have to hit the road. it's related to this post: >>11902323

it's 'ludic time.' this is kind of a dumb meme idea but i was just curious to know how interesting it was. again, one of land's master plans w/r/t BTC and teleoplexy is, in a way, to re-instantiate an order of time rooted in technology. this is i think what the blockchain does and why it appeals to him. in a nutshell: time means work, work means intelligence, intelligence means tech and tech is time:

>§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.

YH is familiar with land's work, but he's not really an accelerationist, and that is what makes him interesting. in a sense, what he is doing in proposing Cosmotechnics is asking into an alternative order of technological time, or at least one that could explain things from a non-western point of view *that does not go crazy with postcolonial critique.* and this is really important. land matters because he is ferociously attacking postcolonial/pomo thought to such a degree that he is prepared to sacrifice large swathes of humanity itself on the altar of tech. but YH's guys are not kant, marx and D&G, they're heidegger, stiegler, and simondon. stiegler is a pro-tech heideggerian and simondon is an engineer-phenomenologist. they aren't literary theorists.

the thing i wanted to leave you with was this idea of ludic time. it's a potentially non-commercial form of time, although ofc games are in a sense entirely commercial enterprises - trading, exchanging and so on. and yet they also aren't. complex simulations are rulesets that allow for the creative use of new rules, but are fundamentally logical at the bottom. we can choose to gamble or not. we can play and enjoy simple games or complex games. we can do *all kinds of things with games.* we can have multiple forms of things called money in a game, or resource systems, or lots of other things. we can play games online, IRL...

i just wanted to leave this here. i have to go and i'll be away from my PC for a while but i thought OEDO actually has interesting things to say about the nature of simulation and game-playing, game-time that would perhaps be interesting.

and pic rel for thematics and for a couple of other reasons too.

[Anonymous No.11915694]

>>11915687
kek. i also pointed that post to the wrong reference - meant to say, >>11902384.

but that means more FF6-posting also, so perhaps it is for the best.

a Cosmotech theory of games and ludic time is what i will be thinking about on my drive this aft. perhaps you guys will find it interesting also.

[Anonymous No.11915737]

it's not that we're slowing you down, phantom train, it's that there are rules that govern the cosmos that include in them the fact that even a train ferrying souls to the afterlife can be suplexed.

and in this crazy mixed-up world of ours - which includes monks, ghosts, and trains - it actually all makes sense. because if there are rules for any one thing there are rules for the others. and it's a surprise to everyone when we find out that rules that apply in one place also make sense in another. there are no rules for the rules themselves, but everything connects.

my body is so ready for Cosmotech and ludic time > acceleration and historical time.

[Anonymous No.11915767]

and none of this is to flirt with the thrill of postcolonial critique, or unironic communism, really. the ghosts are right in a sense: there is nowhere to run or hide from things as they see it.

but things also can happen in the world that are full of surprises which change the nature and meaning of things.

political gnosticism should get more or less wiped out by acceleration, but there have to be things also which reverse the accelerationist polarity also, and i think yuk hui and his gang have figured out what they are. it doesn't diminish what land is doing, because he's a sort of economic nietzsche like that, in a way: he will always be right, as long as there is scarcity, intelligence, and accelerating machine production. but those things together become a force not unlike a daemonic ghost train. and the ghost train as such is neither good nor evil, but it is a thing which is doing its job.

ugh. i don't want to get carried away here. there is more to what YH is saying than this, and i don't want to get anyone's revolutionary sensibilities excited. this is a good time for intelligence and understanding, not smashing faces. but that a sense of time exists which is instantiated in technology and in memory, and is not exclusively limited to economics and acceleration is kind of a nice feeling for me atm. it's more like reminding me that i'm much more like the train and the ghosts itself than i realize.

and, as such, it is good to get suplexed once in a while. you know, for a reminder.

[Anonymous No.11916344]

Good morning Girard, Yuganon, and company!

[Anonymous No.11916573]

>>11887728
>>11887735
A bunch of blithering, shortsighted nonsense with a lot of buzzwords.

[Anonymous No.11917076]

>>11916573

[Anonymous No.11917338]

>>11910625
Mechanical reproduction itself, it seems to me, was always a one way street. The printing press replicated without allowing its viewers to participate, it allowed only the outside passivity of the subject's regard. Television was a horrifying exaggeration of the same, not only was the content a replication but no single being could even aspire to create the products shown on television--only, if one specialized in it, to contribute to their creation in part. The eventual culmination of this, of course, is the Internet, which takes the action of flickering images paralyzing their enthralled victims and further develops it, raising its efficacy and its stakes. But what Mumford and Glass were not in position to foresee was that this next step in the evolution of art's reproduction is a participatory one, that encourages rather than disbars its penitent members to the holy act of creation. From the imageboards to Instagram, from fanfiction to youtube, the universal theme of online life almost requires participation. This is the most recent overarching development in the entirety of art, and its consequences are impossible to discern. But those of us young enough to have been raised after the onset of the social media economy have also become the first to be natives of this collaborative evolution of the machinic world, a metamorphosis to match the social and creative impulses of the people that comprise it.

We have all seen that this upheaval has come with consequences that none today can possibly understand the true extent of. It will not be ours, but history's duty to recall whether our act of forcing the machine to enable our most banal impulses was a transcendental boon, or a strengthening of the bars that encompass our garden of machines. But it seems to me that it shows the exact transition that Mumford begins Art and Technics by hoping towards. We now use technology to create pieces of data which serve no purpose to us, to capture the minutia of our experience and emphasize the beauty of the inconsequential interstices of human experience. There is beauty in that, and it is a uniquely human beauty.

[Anonymous No.11917396]

>>11915767
Can you please explain to a brainlet like me what Heidegger means by enframing? I don't care how many posts it takes.

[Anonymous No.11918054]

>>11916344
good morning anon

ty for the cool aesthetics

>>11916573
and good morning to you, crabby guy

>>11917396
it would take a while. if you can get through the basic writings - or just 'the origins of the work of art' - it would be much easier. below is a very basic guideline to some of the big heidegger themes.

http://timothyquigley.net/vcs/heidegger-owa_outline.pdf

>>11917338
fuck yeah effortposting

fuck yeah

have to dodge out for a bit but basically fuck yeah
>also fuck yeah

you nailed it anon. and this is the thing. i've been re-reading glass/Yuga and it just dovetails so well with YH/Cosmotech. the philosophers and the seekers converging on the same processes, history and the meaning of this age, all the rest...

it's just all starting to become so obvious it hardly bears repeating, sometimes, but this really is the Reign of Quantity. in some sense it's good, even historically necessary, and there are wonks like me who will go through no end of contortions to explain it...

in the end,
Time
Is
Precious
>no surprise there

[Anonymous No.11918154]

>>11918054
>it would take a while.
That's okay, I can wait.

[Anonymous No.11918266]

>>11918154
as i understand it, enframing/gestell is why heidegger not only believed that nietzsche had completed western metaphysics, it was also what bothered him to no end, because the world become standing-reserve for art means that basically anybody at all can wield the earth however they see fit. it leads to the plasticization of the earth and, by extension, the plasticization of history, time, and culture. it's the birth of irony, simulation, and the Guenonian/Spenglerian reign of quantity. it's also death to the poetic sensibility, because it allows everything to be subordinated to the rule of production and consumption. heidegger was no marxist, but it's not hard to see the connections.

there are some well-read heidegger anons on this site, however, so perhaps they will be able to illuminate this more comprehensively. i'm a big heidegger fan but i'm also self-taught in all of it, so you're not likely to get scholarly stuff from me. impassioned and enthusiastic amateur stuff, yes. but not rigorous or scholarly stuff. again, tho: i don't think it's really *so* complicated.

>We often hear people criticized for wanting to "put everything into boxes." This expression usually means that a person thinks uncreatively, narrowly, with too high a regard for established categories. The "frame" metaphor in Heidegger's concept of "enframing" corresponds to these "boxes," but for Heidegger, all of us have a tendency to think in this way.

>We noted before that nature reveals itself to us in its own terms, and all that humanity can directly control is its orientation to the natural world. We should think of "nature" here in the broadest sense, as the entire realm of the non-human--but also including such things as our physical bodies, over which we have only limited control. What characterizes the essence of modern technology, for Heidegger, is the human impulse to put the world "into boxes," to enclose all of our experiences of the world within categories of understanding--mathematical equations, physical laws, sets of classifications--that we can control.

>When Heidegger states that "the essence of technology is by no means anything technological," he means that technology's driving force is not located in machines themselves, nor even in the various human activities that are associated with modern modes of production. In his example of the automobile, the parts the make up the machine as well as the labor of the factory workers all belong to technology, but are not its essence. The "frame of mind" that views the world--its reserves of metal ore, its chemical structures, its human population--as raw materials for the production of automobiles approaches more closely what Heidegger means by the essence of technology. Heidegger's argument, however, is more far-reaching. He claims that enframing stems from the human drive for a "precise" and "scientific" knowledge of the world.

source:
http://www.english.hawaii.edu/criticalink/heidegger/guide6.html

[Anonymous No.11918351]

>>11917338
this is a brilliant analysis, anon. and it's one of these things i think also: the world as *editable text.*

>From the imageboards to Instagram, from fanfiction to youtube, the universal theme of online life almost requires participation. This is the most recent overarching development in the entirety of art, and its consequences are impossible to discern. But those of us young enough to have been raised after the onset of the social media economy have also become the first to be natives of this collaborative evolution of the machinic world, a metamorphosis to match the social and creative impulses of the people that comprise it.

exactly as you said it. vidya takes over from cinema, imho, but the world itself becomes gamified, and online presence is actual presence. even threads like these...

>But it seems to me that it shows the exact transition that Mumford begins Art and Technics by hoping towards. We now use technology to create pieces of data which serve no purpose to us, to capture the minutia of our experience and emphasize the beauty of the inconsequential interstices of human experience. There is beauty in that, and it is a uniquely human beauty.

i wouldn't change a word of this. well said anon.

i've been looking for an excuse to use this image for a while now...this seems like about as good an opportunity as any. the cinematization of cinema...

[Anonymous No.11918366]

I have a question since I'm a philosophylet and I'm just learning (so I have no awareness of preexisting formalized terms to describe the things I'm thinking about, any references to study would be nice by the way)

Because machines were originally created by man, and then the concept "machine" was given its semantic meaning by human thought, does this imply that the existence of a definition of a machine also relies on the existence of a definition of man?

I'm thinking about hypothetical philosophy-universes (I don't have better descriptions) which are like sets for ideas rather than numbers, and in one of these philosophy-universes I'm thinking about the definition of a machine can't also be present unless the definition of man is also present. I wondered if, by intentionally blurring the line between man and machine in his prose, Mumford was implying that now there are also philosophy-universes where this "must-have-one-for-the-other" relationship between the two definitions no longer exists, so that there exist philosophy-universes where man conceptually has never existed and machines always have.

Maybe my post doesn't make sense because I'm kind of tired.

[Anonymous No.11918472]

>>11918366
>any references to study would be nice by the way
see the book referenced here >>11888725. designed for the layman and absolutely perfect for people with no formal training. Yuga is on this list now for me as well, no question. and Barzun's Dawn to Decadence.
>plus zimmerman's heidegger guide, &c &c.

>Because machines were originally created by man, and then the concept "machine" was given its semantic meaning by human thought, does this imply that the existence of a definition of a machine also relies on the existence of a definition of man?

the key word here is *techne* and it is a doozy. it is why i find yuk hui so interesting, because he is trying to explore this concept from the perspective of chinese thought. and obviously the book for that is this one. and *heidegger.* he's not the only guy, for sure. and it is because of him we have derrida, who may or may not cause you to instantly defenestrate yourself. but for land, of course, technology is the whole shebang.
>and we are trying to find a way to balance out some of Nick Land's Wild Ride before it destroys the universe
>maybe it should be destroyed tho
>but maybe not

another book you will want to read on this is both volumes of capitalism and schizophrenia, because there again what D&G are doing is important: they are saying the unconscious as described by freud and lacan - as representation, as Oedipal theatre - is wrong, and that the function of the unconscious itself is *machinic in nature,* and this is why they remain marxists but not hegelians. marx's machine-dialectic makes more sense to them than hegel's phenomenology of spirit, and what land is doing is - although he would deny it - re-hegelianizing marx by way of teleoplexy. we cannot get away from the nature of machines, and the more we try, the more we wind up making things weirder and worse.

but again, this is why yuk hui matters, because he - negarestani also - is trying to resituate *logic* at the heart of metaphysics again so that we *aren't driven around everywhere by pure aesthetics.* we don't want this. this leads not only to postmodernity but to Psycho Batshit Postmodernity, which is where we are now. because whatever reality is, it is at the bottom a shared, if not dialectical, phenomenon at the bottom...

>I wondered if, by intentionally blurring the line between man and machine in his prose, Mumford was implying that now there are also philosophy-universes where this "must-have-one-for-the-other" relationship between the two definitions no longer exists, so that there exist philosophy-universes where man conceptually has never existed and machines always have.

in terms of continental philosophers unironically believing in the meaning of if not the possibility of multiple universes, i think Badiou goes in this category too. i can't really talk about his work in detail because i have no math brain, the philosophy of the Event is related to what you are talking about.

[Anonymous No.11918490]

>>11918366
the whole question about multiple or alternate philosophy universes, or stages through which history must pass on its way to being The Universe We Are Supposed To Have, and much else...it's there in hegel too.

pic rel is some wild times if you haven't read this. everybody should read kojeve at some point, just in case all of this land-posting and deleuze-posting and heidegger-posting gave you the impression that somehow it was okay to sleep on hegel or throw him out. that's a bad idea. hegel is an absolute colossus and kojeve thinks he really did close up and answer every question about the meaning of history and time that there was. he will convince you. Cosmotech (our version, not necessarily YH) respects The Authoritah in some sense there also.

[Anonymous No.11918500]

the difference between man and machine in an age of machine synthesis also is a fundamental question for all things Cosmotech. vol I of technics and time is mandatory reading, and you will enjoy it if you like heidegger, but pic rel is way good also.

[Anonymous No.11918564]

>>11918366
but you have raised a kind of amazing science-fiction question which really is worth talking about, and it is directly in Uncle Nick's wheelhouse. see his book Templexity for further details.

imho hegel is the first guy - well, first inasmuch as Cosmotech is studying the circuit from hegel to land- to really assign history a *meaning.* it is the passage of god over the face of the waters in a sense: history is Spirit, and Spirit is this procession of God not only throughout historical process, but also within the individual subject themselves, from the earliest little twinkles of sentience all the way up through to Absolute Knowing and the 'slow procession of spirits.'
>read hegel you guys
>seriously
>he is no fucking joke

but marx fundamentally changes the story. now history does not signify Spirit but Capital - again, however, it is arguable to what degree you can really separate hegel and marx in this sense. in the end, marx does wind up concluding that the material process of capital is in the end sufficient to explain history as economic process. what land is bringing to the table is an insanely creative reading of the fragment on machines, aided by Uncle Gilles and Uncle Felix, who not only thoroughly rinsed the hegel out of marx, they replaced him with spinoza too. land in his turn gets rid of the spinoza and does precisely to marx what marx once did to hegel: 'turns him on his head.'
>this saying is so fucking hackneyed, but it still has its use

but imho what this does is return hegel From Beyond The Grave - that is, as teleoplexy. teleoplexy is essentially *Machine Spirit* - the 'alien attack from the future. or, more poetically:

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

but again, we have the question of *standardized time* to deal with. which timeline is the right one? is it this one? where's the dialectic? we know what land will say: just wait, the machines will be with you shortly. for Derrida, Please Stand By was an end-of-history injunction of its own. for land (or deleuze) it isn't. but this *all* has to do with the question of how we evaluate historical process, or progress, and what we think is leading the way (if anything). but multiple realities, the capacity of the Event to change the course of things is something badiou will talk your ear off all day about. you might want to look into him. start with Ethics (badiou's, not spinoza's).

[Anonymous No.11918597]

>>11918564
but this is the fundamental thing we are talking about: What Is The Meaning Of Time. how do we think it, how do we present it, is it historically, is it subjective, if so wat do, is it inter-objective, if so wat do, and so on, and so on. every big-shot philosopher there is offers some perspective on the meaning or question of time and time in history, and i've tried to provide a short run-down on some of the major ones and how they relate to each other here: >>11910526.

land and heidegger are, in many ways, polar opposites. heidegger's nightmare about the enframing is exactly what land plunges into, all the way. as much as there is no easy middle ground between hegel and spinoza, there is little middle ground between land and heidegger either - except that both did/do think that the phenomenon to be looked at was *cybernetics.* and, again, this is where yuk hui comes into the frame - he's bringing heidegger into the 21C by way of stiegler and spinoza, and he's aware of land, but he thinks that there is arguably more going on within the world of machines because of the possibility of *digital objects.* and there is also the question of simondonian transduction, or stiegler's 'tertiary protention' - memory - and i have tried to give some indication of the meaning of this here:

>>11891113
>>11903474
>>11903509
>>11905324
>>11905337
>>11905376
>>11905432

b/c those are all yuk hui and not lewis mumford.

anyways. man, machines, artifice, the invention of time, the destruction of time, the meaning of time under modernity, time and the primordial, the primordial and the psychotherapeutic, time and the technical, ludic time, time for cigarettes...that's what's cooking.

and just remember that whenever start to go a little batshit crazy thinking about all of this, there's always Enya. aah. good old Enya. b/c nobody was ever
>smuggled back out of the future in order to subvert its antecedent conditions/a cyberguerrilla, hidden in human camouflage so advanced that even one's software was part of the disguise
and didn't feel like Enya was exactly what the situation called for.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yRgiXh2fP4

>enya? really?
>you're not into enya inner self?
>someday i will be free of you girardfag. someday
>so mellow tho

[Anonymous No.11918598]

>>11917338
I'm stealing this

[Anonymous No.11918637]

>>11918597
also, you can read my posting of enya as a signal that thematic music recs are always welcome, given that i had One Chance to post some thematically relevant music and came up with Enya.

if you want to post Time-Travel music to go with the art/aesthetics, please go for it. i've said before that music never was my forte. submissions for a Cosmotech soundtrack or playlist are always open, given that my own music choices are almost hilariously bad (as was pointed out in Cosmotech #2, iirc). i'll submit this one for the time being, but a Cosmotech playlist would be lovely also if anyone wants to add some atmosphere.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNkxqpCz87M

>enya tho
>sorry inner self
>you went with enya
>i know
>you were summing up the meaning of time travel and you fucking went with enya
>there's only so much time inner self. i focus on the books. my music tastes are cringe
>...

[Anonymous No.11918696]

>>11918637
Music is more relevant to the Mumfordian merging of art and the than maybe any other artistic medium except installations. I have all kinds of things I listen to for this feeling but I'll need to post them later when I'm not at work.

[Anonymous No.11918710]

semi-serious prompt also: what's after cyberpunk?
>nothing. death
>okay inner self i know you're mad. i want to ask a question tho
>fuck you
>i said i was sorry

whatever it is it's going to be cool. Cosmopunk. or maybe no -punk prefix will be required. it will be acceleration for a while, that's true.
>and unironic fascism

well, that's also going to be a thing. but politics is death to art, aesthetic and intellectual movements. when things get political, they Keep It Real and i don't want to Keep It Real. things are excessively Real at the moment and some de-escalation is in order. that's what we're doing here.
>i hope you're not talking to me girardfag. i am not fucking listening. fuck you

Cosmotech takes just enough religious stuff to leaven the landian blackpill. land and acceleration supply the requisite Hard Stuff of philosophy in its economic and historical sense, but imho doubling down on land all the way turns one into a crusty shitlord who dreams ever more unironically of Fantasies Unbecoming. as impossible as it often is to try to remain in the centre of things, this is still what i think has to be done. and at least in this sense there is love for JBP here. even though he doesn't like a lot of the guys we talk about, he's still trying to walk the line on a higher path. so is Marty Glass.

the answer to 'what's after cyberpunk?' is acceleration, and after acceleration, who knows. it kind of depends on who, and where. but i can't help but feel as though Mysteriously Hopeful Cyberpunk still has something going on for it.
>it does if you replace Mysteriously with Brainlessly
>ok. Brainlessly Hopeful Cyberpunk it is. you're being pretty crusty tonight tho inner self
>enya

i'll go with the only other track i know that captures this feel, then. may it inspire your reading, gents.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oe1wA1hAdd0

>>11918696
sounds good. and cheers anon. music taste is not a thing i am known for but non-cringe thematic music would be most welcome.

[Anonymous No.11918757]

>>11918710
>prefix
>not suffix
i'm going to bed. you know what i mean. sleep well and dream of large cybernetic women all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLjQRgBuN9M

[Anonymous No.11918840]

>>11918266
>http://www.english.hawaii.edu/criticalink/heidegger/guide6.html
I read through that and the rest of the pages. Heidegger is a genius!
>>11916344
And good evening to you too. Have a poem.

[Anonymous No.11919406]

>>11918710
>what's after cyberpunk?
Us.

Cyberpunk's authors, and I relate more to the John Shirleys and Pat Cadigans than the people who are often cited as its figureheads, were a leading indicator. If, as Mumford asserts early on in Art and Technics, the prevailing moods of our culture's major artworks are indicative of the qualities of our culture itself, amplifying its good and ill, it goes without saying that cyberpunk was a cultural landslide without equal.

I always found William Gibson to be a better short story author than a novelist, and Burning Chrome begins with a story called The Gernsback Continuum which is itself a countercultural weapon of mass destruction. It stars a marketing man, it evokes sci-gilded postwar behemoths like the timeless beasts of fable, it excoriates the flaccid optimism of technics with a series of precise lyrical incisions.

>"You'd sit there with a peanut butter sandwich and a glass of milk, and a static-ridden Hollywood baritone would tell you that there was A Flying Car in Your Future. And three Detroit engineers would putter around in this big old Nash with wings, and you'd see it rumbling furiously down some deserted Michigan runway. You never actually saw it take off, but it flew away to Dialta Downes's never-never land, true home of a generation of completely uninhibited technophiles.

A thousand thesis statements are contained within the trim thirteen pages of this story, but "You never actually saw it take off" is one of the most heartbreaking.

In a rather beautiful piece of temporal parallelism, the moments in time this story snidely recounts are the same moments Lewis Mumford did some of his most significant writing.

>While I was waiting, I thought myself in Dialta Downes's America. When I isolated a few of the factory buildings onn the ground glass of the Hasselblad, they came across with a kind of sinister totalitarian dignity, like the stadiums Albert Speer built for Hitler. But the rest of it was relentlessly tacky: Ephemeral stuff extruded by the collective American subconscious of the Thirties, tending mostly to survive along depressing strips lined with dusty motels, mattress wholesalers, and small used-car lots.

Cyberpunk is often said to criticize the science fiction that came before it; the impression given is that Gibson and Sterling and the like were sickened by the optimism of their predecessors. But looking at Dick, and Asimov, and more, you see that that optimism is not something that pervades the literature of that time. What it did control, with the authoritarian glitz of propaganda, was pop culture. That pop culture is what cyberpunk is a wailing protest against, and in a tragic irony, cyberpunk's trappings became eventually a chrome-armed marketing representative of that very pop culture, though even in diluted form, its pessimism is retained. Cyberpunk went from darkening the fringes of fiction to darkening our TV screens and iPods.

[Anonymous No.11919507]

>>11919406
>"Think of it", Dialta Downes had said, "as a kind of alternate America: A 1980 that never happened. An architecture of broken dreams."

A lot of cyberpunk eschewed the practice of attaching years to its fiction, but for the ones who had years, those years are largely past or fast approaching. In some cases, that emphasizes the divide between their foreseen future and the one we live in now; the crumbling tenements many of Gibson's protagonists lived in were extrapolations of an urban decay that we have largely reversed. Mumford spoke of the metropolis transitioning into a necropolis, but recent history shows that if they ever truly were necropoli, we have since recolonized their rotting sepulchers. This is both a good and bad thing: We charge more for those wallpapered husks of stuccoed shitholes than we ever thought possible. And other cyberpunk works contained pieces of futures that were off the mark in other directions. In about five years, we will pass the start date of Islands in the Net, and it is unlikely that our Galveston will be rid of the McMansions and megahighways that Sterling places abandoned in the hurricane'd dust of south Texas.

But what living in the tumultuous years of cyberpunk's prediction shows, in practice, is just how close to the mark those authors really were. Cyberpunk was not a truly pessimistic future, but a pragmatic and even-handed one, where we are given great wonders and compensated with inconceivable drawbacks. In the age of the internet, the death of truth, the echo chamber, the unutterable end of privacy, it becomes clear that their approach to the future was historically perfect, regardless of the particulars. They showed us a path forward where we pay the cost of progress, and we are holding the bill today. I do not know if Mumford ever wrote a word about cyberpunk. Maybe it came too late in his life.

The most important quote from The Gernsback Continuum is the long one in my image. The fakeness of the American Dream's futurism, the pseudofascist charm of the could-have-been couple's Aryan purity, the list of the crises that let us know exactly what it was that finally ended that dream. This story is less a cyberpunk short and more of a fiction-form essay on why cyberpunk was necessary to write.

At the end of the story, the protagonist tries to get rid of these visions, he's told to look at "really bad media" because that works on the people who see UFOs instead of the haunting retrofuture he sees. That doesn't seem to entirely work for him, and then this passage hits:

>I spotted a flying wing over Castro Street, but there was something tenuous about it, as though it were only half there. I rushed into the nearest newsstand and gathered up as much as I could find on the petroleum crisis and the nuclear energy hazard. I'd just decided to buy a plane ticket to New York.

To rid yourself of the sickly-sweet necrosis of a dead future, you must purge yourself with the ugliness of today.

[Anonymous No.11919549]

>>11919507
In the end, cyberpunk's tragedy was that it became big enough to be subsumed and assimilated into the cool-factor of the default future. Very little of cyberpunk made it in, thematically, but that was never important to pop culture. That leaves a lot of us with the impulse to make a "new" heir to its long-abdicated throne.

My instinct is that if literature were released that was written with the same mentality as cyberpunk was, I would just call it cyberpunk, and it'd feel like home. But recolonizing the dead zone left by its absence requires us to shed the empty skin of cyberpunk's cliches, its robot arms and mohawks, and to view the future through the ragged, speed-stained glasses of the genre's progenitors. And that probably means shedding the name, the -punk suffix, the glamour, and writing something that can't be put to a marketing label. As a generation, I suspect we've all grown tired of hashtaggable mass-market preference indicators in the first place.

[Anonymous No.11919986]

Looking to binge Sci-fi and political philosophy, taking any recommendations guys.

[Anonymous No.11920725]

bump

[Anonymous No.11920728]

>>11894166
>>11898511
God I have been trying to get a hold of this for months now.

[Anonymous No.11920749]

>>11919406
>A thousand thesis statements are contained within the trim thirteen pages of this story, but "You never actually saw it take off" is one of the most heartbreaking.

no shit. that is some good writing. kind of like a curious dilemma: we're so used to the walter benjamin/angelus novus/storm of progress that when absolutely *nothing* happens, it's almost as bad as something bad happening...

consumer dystopia is the story.

>Cyberpunk is often said to criticize the science fiction that came before it; the impression given is that Gibson and Sterling and the like were sickened by the optimism of their predecessors. But looking at Dick, and Asimov, and more, you see that that optimism is not something that pervades the literature of that time. What it did control, with the authoritarian glitz of propaganda, was pop culture. That pop culture is what cyberpunk is a wailing protest against, and in a tragic irony, cyberpunk's trappings became eventually a chrome-armed marketing representative of that very pop culture, though even in diluted form, its pessimism is retained. Cyberpunk went from darkening the fringes of fiction to darkening our TV screens and iPods.

this is solid gold. there is in some contemporary cyberpunk aesthetics that flicker of romanticism still, but it's the apocalypse turned inwards. instead of the threat of external, perhaps nuclear devastation, it's an internal devastation brought about by computing and the standardization of the psyche, the incipience of a ghost town in which nothing lives but money. and we did this, we want this, it has to be us that wants this. nobody else did it, we created these places because we feel ourselves alone.

sloterdijk said that karl marx was in his way a kind Orphic figure, a hero who descends into the underworld (dead labor) to do battle with the daemons and forces of values there. it's hard to tell whether he won or lost, or both, or neither. but the surface world bears the traces and the history of this struggle, which has been going on for centuries and is now taking its new turns and twists. we have not escaped death.

>The philosophical problem at the core of critique abides in this strange circuitry, no longer requiring a god for its productions, no longer sustaining hard truth / error, essence / appearance distinctions, reconstituted in a dark zone of the subject itself — the abstract I.

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

[Anonymous No.11920787]

>>11920728
Just buy the kindle version off amazon

[Anonymous No.11920797]

>>11919507
also you write like a good writer anon.

gibson doesn't write like a guy trying to Cure or Fix anything, and he doesn't write Spectacle either. he writes like a man who has direct first-person experiences of realities that are not our own, and yet illustrate more clearly the paradoxes of our own life than reporting on this reality would be - because i think for many the attempt to do so lies the road of philosophy. which has its charms, but also one particular problem as well, that being, The Subject.

>Cyberpunk was not a truly pessimistic future, but a pragmatic and even-handed one, where we are given great wonders and compensated with inconceivable drawbacks. In the age of the internet, the death of truth, the echo chamber, the unutterable end of privacy, it becomes clear that their approach to the future was historically perfect, regardless of the particulars. They showed us a path forward where we pay the cost of progress, and we are holding the bill today.

yes. this. retracing the footsteps of people like baudrillard, for instance, through those decades of the 60s-2000s is one of the wilder VR trips you can take, because it leads to the End of History, or so they believed at that time (which doesn't mean that they were wrong). land's (and he feels about gibson the way heidegger felt about holderlin, basically) thesis is that capital would in the end necessarily break with the culture that founded it, and that is i think what we are seeing. he is to my mind the aesthetic philosopher par excellence when it comes to the *meaning* of cyberpunk, but it doesn't mean his is the only perspective, or even that there aren't ways of looking at this phenomena that lay outside of discourses on marx, which is what gibson does, and really he does it better than anyone. he basically invented the genre.

>The fakeness of the American Dream's futurism, the pseudofascist charm of the could-have-been couple's Aryan purity, the list of the crises that let us know exactly what it was that finally ended that dream. This story is less a cyberpunk short and more of a fiction-form essay on why cyberpunk was necessary to write.

i'm very glad you joined this thread anon.

>To rid yourself of the sickly-sweet necrosis of a dead future, you must purge yourself with the ugliness of today.

purge yourself *with* and not purge yourself *of.* i missed this on first glance. this also is brilliant anon. purge *of* and you wind up in politics. purge with and perhaps you can exit that stuff altogether. i don't know. but Dead Cities are the ground for all political palingenesis. and to me this leads to the site of the ultimate girard-land fusion site: the factory-tomb and the world of the Polis which is a weird forerunner of the universal Ghost Polis. things done and sacrifices made in the name of the city in which nobody lives but everyone visits.

i'm getting today's aesthetics from here, btw, if anyone is interested.
http://cypulchre.tumblr.com/archive

[Anonymous No.11920846]

that factory-tomb is the necropolis, but it is also a time-traveling locus, in a way. it is where History comes to be transmuted into the present as simulation, and where those simulations subsequently write the meaning of the future by way of technology and recursion. time is fed into them through the passage of living beings, beings who become aware of this process and yet in becoming so adapt to this spectral form of existence.

once again, i discovered that land had already beat me to the punch by writing a pretty good book on the meaning of time and cities, and it's his book Templexity, which anyone who is interested in this stuff should read. in any case, cities - at least our modern ones - do have a kind of arcane role to play in the world seen through this lens. most of land's book is a review of Looper but he has some other landian stuff to say. i'll post some greentext from it in a bit and you'll see what i mean.

>>11919549
>That leaves a lot of us with the impulse to make a "new" heir to its long-abdicated throne.
those quotation marks. that is the deal for me also. because in my experience the more one tries to create the new, the more one winds up with the automaton.

>But recolonizing the dead zone left by its absence requires us to shed the empty skin of cyberpunk's cliches, its robot arms and mohawks, and to view the future through the ragged, speed-stained glasses of the genre's progenitors. And that probably means shedding the name, the -punk suffix, the glamour, and writing something that can't be put to a marketing label.

that's the thing. there's nothing left to Punk Out about. well, there is, but it loses the narrative and replaces it with politics - in other words, creating new narratives destined to fail to escape the gravity well, and which only become contemporary anarcho-politics. or unironic fascism.

vaporwave was a pretty interesting phenomenon, that was one of the few times i thought i had actually understood what a music wave or aesthetic wave was about, what it was actually saying. vaporwave saw what was on the horizon after cyberpunk, but it was still a satirical kind of thing, i think. of course, if you follow the trajectory of irony, what's more satirical than reality? you wind up LARPing a mode of politics to show how distant you are from it, and you wind up being taken as a representative for that thing itself. it wouldn't have surprised baudrillard, in any case.

>As a generation, I suspect we've all grown tired of hashtaggable mass-market preference indicators in the first place.
no doubt. but such is the nature of a customizable planet. in a way it's like our new grammar. tag and flag everything, say nothing, be known by your preferences. it feels like a kind of process amenable to a chinese metaphysical perspective, perhaps. i'm not sure. but part of me wonders if chinese thought ever really would find itself so displaced by ultra-late postmodernity, or if we are just catching up with that.

[Anonymous No.11920865]

>>11919986
apart from the obvious 1984 and BNW, Starship Troopers comes to mind. handmaid's tale. ender's game for sure.

>>11920728
see >>11920787. that's the one i bought too. five bucks or whatever for an indispensable guide to life outside the matrix.

a few words here then from Uncle Nick:

>We can reach the end in a single moment: Cities are time machines. Some will work better than others, and the workings of each have been singular.

>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.

[Anonymous No.11920889]

just briefly, but because it's one of these phenomena i always wonder about - the curious place in which the post-apocalyptic parallels the cyberpunk world. in the post-apocalyptic world the destruction and devastation wrought on cities is external, it comes about as a result of nuclear weapons and their explosive impact. with cyberpunk the devastation is just as intense, but the weapons are implosive - it is not that something has happened to *history* but that something has happened to *time.*

post-apoc also goes very well with americana and american culture, i think, or at least a kind of culture with recognizably american tropes, such as the wild west. true, Mad Max is an Australian film originally, but Fallout has become to post-apoc what 40K is to Catholic Space Nazis. they've taken the genre and really industrialized it, run wild with all of its possibilities. *irony* seems to work better with post-apoc, perhaps because there is something playful or even hopeful about a New World even on these terms. or maybe because after the end of the world there is a kind of releasement, a sense in which utopian or quasi-fascist plans to reconstruct the world and reclaim history and so on *always comes too late.* post-apoc takes the seductive bloom off the rose of fascism because the world is already lost and you can go ahead and LARP Caesar's Legion or whatever, that's fine. but in a world which is *still going* - our world - it's different, in a way.

just thought i would float that one out there b/c it's something i think about sometimes.

[Anonymous No.11920925]

>It is here, precisely, that the greatest threat of misdirection arises, in a confusion between losing the future and being left behind. Such an equation overlooks the most notable feature of time-travel stories – their tolerance for retrospective science-fiction. 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.

>In other words, no less than a paradox about time-travel, it is a depiction of self-contradictory freedom, in the absence of temporal constraint. One cannot return to the past to do as one wants, unless what it to ‘want’ anything (in reality) has already undergone fundamental revision. The freedom to choose an action inconsistent with one’s established existence as an agent makes no sense. It is not a constructible circuit.

-- Land/Templexity

[Anonymous No.11920947]

it is true that one can be put off, sometimes, by the preponderance of You Can't and so on that one encounters in continental writing. this is an old, old thing, the position of the maximally negative. again, it's why i think it's good to compare or contrast it with some of the peculiarities of post-apoc or at least steampunk stuff. and perhaps the Anglo-American pulp of old, which didn't give a fuck about Nick Land's Wild Ride.

Robert E Howard, for example, had no problem whatsoever making his main character a Cimmerian from a swampy and backwards land who was suspicious, not especially well-educated, and notoriously Barbaric. but *his* form of barbarism was also a unique one - it was the barbarism that came from a place of being suspicious and fearful of precisely what one ought to be suspicious and fearful about - namely, the culture of cities, or the sense of history as being a cycle of barbarism and decadence marked with violence at every step of the way. Conan was a barbarian but he was no fascist, for example, and he was even skeptical about the nature of kingship, although he rose at least to that challenge and did do a tour of duty as the Lord of Aquilonia. that fails, but it's an interesting kind of failure. at no point did Conan ever tear himself to pieces fretting about the general will of the people or whether or not he would build a legacy for himself. plainly Howard didn't think much of this either.

there's a story out there somewhere about Lovecraft and Howard getting together and having an adventure IRL that is both like the stories they write and in which they play the roles that their characters play. of course there is no arguing with Lovecraftian (or Landian) modes of paranoia: they are spectacularly interesting, and horrible. but Lovecraft actually had a Robert E Howard IRL, and Land does not.

just something else to think about, i guess. barbarism isn't necessarily The Cure, but the rare noble, or at least *self-consciously barbaric barbarian* is a beautiful literary thing too. there is no reason to think that the future may not be bright for figures like this amidst all the cyberpunk psychic necrosis.

[Anonymous No.11920959]

here is land doing the Land Things that only he can do.

>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.)

-- Land/Templexity

it's dark stuff, no doubt, but it's also disgustingly fucking brilliant.

[Anonymous No.11920992]

>>11918840
>Heidegger is a genius!
martin heidegger was a double-chocolate-scoop g-g-g-genius of the first order. and he had both the fortune of misfortune of coming directly in succession after friedrich nietzsche, who is a blazing star for all time and arguably the greatest ethical teacher of men in the west since plato, and who ranks with the greatest visionary-mystic-poets of all time. it's a tough act to follow, and he followed it during some historically Interesting Times.

but he is *the* guy to understand both modernity and postmodernity, poetry and technology, time and language, and much much more. 'on the origin of the work of art' is a pretty brilliant text and it is worth reading and re-reading now and again just to re-situate ourselves as these conversations go ever-further into space and time-spirals and wherever else. heidegger is a Big Deal. as Deals go there are few Bigger, at least from the Cosmotech perspective.

http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/filmphilology/heideggerworkofart.pdf

thank you for posting this poem also, btw.

[Anonymous No.11921010]

>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.

>As cybernetics has eaten the world, it has retreated into invisibility, rendered inconspicuous by the absence of significant contrast. Nonlinear dynamics, as the old saw goes, is roughly as specific as non-giraffe animals. If it is today more convenient to speak, for example, of ‘the Anthropocene’ it is because something other is still available for recall, or – at least – is imagined to be. Yet tangles remain tangles, even for those inextricably tangled within them, and the greatest tangles of all are still only very partially seen.

>"What happened to America?” is the Cyberpunk question par excellence.

>For reasons that are to a considerable extent sociologically intelligible, based upon the professionalization of non-technical academic disciplines within the era of mass tertiary education, postmodernism has been uniquely devoted to its own difficulty (and thus to the implicit special competence of its practitioners). Extreme animosity to ‘vulgar’ summarization was its central practical (if not professed) ethic. Even today, with its prestige greatly attenuated, an aura of cultural deterrence still surrounds it. This will eventually seem simply bizarre. Its intellectual content was almost entirely exhausted by the more- or-less rigorous translation of macro-economic management principles into humanistic disciplines. Pomo was Keynes for literary theorists – displacement and postponement of consequences, ontological dissipation, hyper-politicization on behalf of an installed revolutionary power, and strategic inflationary laxity (in respect to rhetoric, inference, reputation, and even grades).

-- Land/Templexity

[Anonymous No.11921062]

anyways. war has a bright future, as it has always had a bright future. it's hard to know what the terms of it will be. perhaps the micro-wars and acts of sabotage or terrorism, guerrilla incursions or ideological duels will take place in realms too multidimensional to be reduced even to girardian terms. it's hard to tell. perhaps they won't be as destructive on the wide scale as wars previous, but will simply be an aspect of the cost of doing business: as always, the spice must flow.

war is perhaps the most aesthetic of all human phenomena, but this is a part of why i think YH matters, among others. perhaps it has to do with our still being trapped in the world of aesthetics, and yet faced with a perilous double-bind of needing to re-situate logic at the heart of metaphysics and yet knowing that to do so may deprive us of all those sentiments that make life worth living. perhaps martrys for peace are no less dangerous than artist-visionaries of state.

Cosmotech hopes for forgiveness, charity, trust, and intelligence in a world of economic disequilibrium, breakaway technological progress, mass suspicion, environmental degradation on a planetary scale, the destruction of a literary tradition that might slow the rate of human en-dumbening, deadly macaques from outer space and much else. whether this is accomplished by something more resembling a Mahayana or a Theravada approach is unknown. maybe both are required. the worst and most violent contests usually happen between people who resemble each other too closely to not result almost inevitably in crises of symbolic origin or usurpation.

i don't know where things go from here, but it is a guaranteed certainty that they are going to go somewhere. probably to repetition down through the ages until perhaps we arrive at some point at something like a hindu, buddhist, confucian or otherwise metempsychosis-inspired perspective: we have done all of this before, this has been done before, it will be done again, always was it so, and all this is a part of the search for enlightenment. nor is it necessarily the case that only an eastern/nondual perspective is the only gate: the Traditionalists and the Christians also know all of this. and yet we go on doing the dance of retardation, and every day the news reports the crimes.

it can't last forever.

[Anonymous No.11921109]

socially, i think, a more enlightened civilization at some point might look at all of these dystopias and feel inclined to put them in a kind of museum, or even a zoo; species of urbanology, complete with ideologies and cultural milieus all simulated in VR, so that we can how, and why, things turn out to have the shapes and forms that they do. history and time being what it is, all of them are possible, and most of them have happened, but there is a horizon beyond which we start to realize that fantasies of the polis almost uniformly end in disaster. glorious disaster, but disaster.

i don't know if it's because i am falling under the spell of Marty Glass these days, or other reasons, or just from having been talking about this stuff for a while - b/c when i'm not here shitposting, i'm basically saying the same things IRL to everyone within earshot, over and over. which aren't very many people, because i prefer life as a hermit or itinerant wasteland bard. it's just how i'm wired.

but that meditative life, the contemplative life as expressed by the Traditionalists, as well as by any number of eastern mystical approaches - (neo-)confucianism, taoism, zen...sometimes it just feels like it hangs together and makes sense, that a profound kind of skepticism is required about all things political, or at least during the present Times of Trouble. it definitely has something to do with yuk hui also and the possibility of life after Nick Land's Wild Ride, which has been obsessing me for years.

sloterdijkian anthropotechnics has a bright future also, i think. it takes some of nietzsche's stuff down out of the clouds and makes it present in the world. true, this is to diminish some of nietzsche's poetry. but it also gives a perspective on the Overman that doesn't point directly to crusade. engineering better people - learning to live on the practicing, ascetic, *necessarily* (self-) disciplining planet - this isn't craziness. what is craziness is what we are doing now, which is like the final scenes of scarface: mountains of coke, automatic weapons, and the mansion under siege. it's the dizzying ecstasy of life just before the final collapse.

an enlightened neo-humanism sounds retarded, but seriously, what's the alternative?

[Anonymous No.11921121]

>>11906981
This. Just a hard reset.
It would solve so many of the world's problems.

[Anonymous No.11921172]

>>11921121
except that we *survived* the Black Death. there's no guarantee that that happens the next time around. if the soviets and americans had pulled their mutual triggers in 1962 we might not be having anything like the conversation we are having now.

if there's going to be a Hard Reset there has to be some sense of planning for what comes after. it's known, of course, that this is the problem. trillionaires building Vivos bomb shelters and presumably being open to fucking up an already fucked-up system in order to survive the collapse is like a Jenga puzzle. it's going to come down, and the more you plan for the breakdown the more you bring the breakdown to come to pass. a perfect vicious circle.

http://www.terravivos.com/

maybe it has to be that way, i don't know. and maybe the prevention is just fundamentally linked to the system, that things really are at that advanced state. i have no idea myself. nobody does. but the fact that we are talking about this kind of stuff at all is pretty wild.

[Anonymous No.11921220]

>>11921172
i guess the question is about the threshold. withdrawing from the system we have created for ourselves - if this is in fact possible - is going to be like coming off of heroin. there will be an Adjustment Period and it will not be pretty.

it's funny, tho, that this is what mumford was saying back in the fifties. to respond to something that >>11919507 said:
>I do not know if Mumford ever wrote a word about cyberpunk. Maybe it came too late in his life.
as far as i can tell, he didn't, but he did write some stuff about the hippies and it wasn't friendly. like adorno he thought the hippies were doing it all wrong.

there is a need to withdraw from the megamachine. even land will always say that Exit > Revolution. but just like footage from any Black Friday sale will tell you, *mass exit* (or, i suppose, mass entry) - large numbers of people running for the doors - leads to chaos and mayhem. and so perhaps there has to be a gradual transition out of one epoch and into another. like anything else, i suppose.

or, conversely perhaps, you can take the land/nietzsche route and double down on it, all the way. perhaps somewhere in there lies the question of whether or not religion enters into the frame for you, and if so which religious practice, and how much, enters into the question for each individual person. but it seems like an ever-more wildly speculative form of gambling.

but we do like to play games for high stakes, here on planet meme.

[Anonymous No.11921305]

>>11920846
related:

>Like all blocks of reactive libido, annihilationist Christianity mapped a displaced active impulse within itself. Utter dissolution is offered as a lure, but safely imprisoned in a system of ethicological exclusion processes; permeable only to that inarticulate ardour which springs from the repressed materiality of the human animal. The taint of evil, or of divine (paternal) disapproval, serves as one barrier screening the ego from the non-image of death. Even more important—because more deeply concealed—is a trap simultaneous with the origin of the logical; that of viewing death from the perspective of God. God—a being—is conceived as thinking both being and its negation with unperturbed mastery, so that non-being is thought through the power of a (supreme) being; as being qualified by absolute impoverishment, and as the inferior pole of a bifurcation within being. Above all, non-being is simply to be thought, and the divine model of logical relatedness secures being in its privileges; adorning it in the robes of methodological presupposition. Death expresses the law, and thus subordinates itself to the highest being. The intellectual neutrality that is thus attributed to God in his comprehension of non-being is the real possibility of a thanatology, or logic of death.

>With Kant death finds its theoretical formulation and utilitarian frame as a quasi-objectivity correlative to capital, and noumenon is its name. The effective flotation of this term in philosophy coincided with the emergence of a social order built upon a profound rationalization of excess, or rigorous circumscription of voluptuous lethality. Once enlightenment rationalism begins its dominion ever fewer corpses are left hanging around in public places with each passing year, ever fewer skulls are used as paperweights, and ever fewer paupers perish undisturbed on the streets. Even the graveyards are rationalized and tidied up. It is not surprising, therefore, that with Kant thanatology undergoes the most massive reconstruction in its history. The clerical vultures are purged, or marginalized. Death is no longer to be culturally circulated, injecting a transcendent reference into production, and ensuring superterrestrial interests their rights. Instead death is privatized, withdrawn into interiority, to flicker at the edge of the contract as a narcissistic anxiety without public accreditation. Compared to the immortal soul of capital the death of the individual becomes an empirical triviality, a mere re-allocation of stock.

-- Land/TfA

going with the cheesier Orzhov Syndicate wallpaper here b/c it makes the point clearer, but the pulp does diminish what land is saying here about Kant, capitalism, time and cities. modernity happens in phases - in the industrial revolutions of the middle ages and in the 19C, but also with kant's own thought. the necropolis has a reason for being there, and it's because Capital implies a form of undeath.

[Anonymous No.11921326]

>>11921305
>The heresy of annihilationism, by ridding itself of the distracting circus of damnation, clarifies the fundamental impetus of Judaeo-Christian monotheism as no other doctrine can. This God is the antagonist of zero, and therefore the fortress of identity, personality, individuation. To be exiled definitively from such a God—to lose his protection—is to relapse into indivisible non-being; decreated into the nihil. That annihilationism has failed to have a significant influence upon Christian orthodoxy attests in part to the tenacious privilege that folk religion and superstition have always maintained over intellectual consistency within the churches, but more importantly, it indicates the voluptuary and disciplinary investment in the thought of the eternal torment of the wicked (exemplified by Augustine).

>For the pious annihilationist the perpetuation of existence beyond death is conceived as a reward, reserved only for the deserving, more precisely, the good. More profound than the vulgar empiricity of torment, it is non-being that is the true punishment. The souls of the wicked are subject to the undifferentiable pole of an absolute judgement; simple extinction. For those who remain stubbornly unenticed by the prospect of the long postnecroid haul under God there is thus a surgical and non-penitentiary alternative.

>Pious annihilationists are committed not only to the possibility of thanatology, but to its effective existence in the divine intellect, as the absolute pinnacle of reason and justice. For them thanatology is architecturally fundamental to divine law. Such servile annihilation is an eliminative negativity, which can be thought of in two broad ways: either as a formal or as a speculative relation (deconstruction is happy to accept it as either before displacing it).

-- Land/TfA

annihilationism preceded accelerationism, in a way. but it definitely connects to Necro-Urbanology, which is what his later experiments in cities and time-travel are all about. he got all wrapped up in Calvinism for a while as his preferred form of protestantism, and was writing some interesting stuff like hell-baked. but it's all part of his intellectual career trajectory, which brings us up to today.

anyways, orzhov yo.
>and the reasons to take a different approach

[Anonymous No.11921418]

>Death is no longer to be culturally circulated, injecting a transcendent reference into production, and ensuring superterrestrial interests their rights. Instead death is privatized, withdrawn into interiority, to flicker at the edge of the contract as a narcissistic anxiety without public accreditation. Compared to the immortal soul of capital the death of the individual becomes an empirical triviality, a mere re-allocation of stock.

and so perhaps some of that that ghostly, flickering light which is so often seen in cyberpunk aesthetics - the glow of a romanticism sublimated into the circuits of 21C urbanology and its necronomic mechanisms - is at once a thing which is capital, the death drive, intelligence, technology and time. it is all of these, and their mysterious alchemy, which percolates out of the shadows and the machinery and the windows of the sleepless cities.

if that the flickering light is the Spirit, however, the one thing we do know is that it rarely stays within its confines for long. it can be sublimated, as a thermodynamic rule, but neither created nor destroyed.

[Anonymous No.11921604]

>>11888487
What is cosmotech?

[Anonymous No.11921678]

>>11921604
the word comes from the title of one of yuk hui's books (>>11918472). it's essentially a way of talking about nick land, but it includes history (mumford), cultural theory (baudrillard, han), other philosophy (deleuze, lacan, heidegger) and some religious and mystical stuff (marty glass, tarnas, others). in Cosmotech 4 there was a lot of shine thrown Alfred North Whitehead's way also, since process philosophy is not only highly compatible with science, it also allows for process theology also, and i think these things are good in terms of de-escalating the rage and hysteria everywhere in society today, and maybe helping to point the way forward beyond postmodernity and its discontents.

basically as long as i've been on this board i've been talking about philosophy, whether it's deleuze, girard, land, baudrillard et al, but my interest in that has been primarily driven by two guys: rene girard and nick land. i was a big heidegger fan until land ruined my lovely Being-parade, and girard pretty much tells me that most of life historically, anthropologically, or culturally understood can be understood in the way that girard presents it. so i defer to land on a lot of questions related to marx, but to girard on a lot of other things, and girard always makes me inclined to hold the door open in a certain sense.

so i sometimes describe it also as White Hat Acceleration. the way that yuk hui uses it is to describe a theory of technology which *isn't* always and fundamentally rooted in the western perspective, but he is important because he's not a bog-standard postmodern theorist. he's not trying to just write another anti-western or anti-scientific polemic. he is interested in the history of technology in china, but his sources are also western ones: heidegger, stiegler and simondon. he also likes mou zongsan, who read kant and hegel very deeply.

so for me Cosmotech means a theory of acceleration which doesn't always end or terminate with nick land, although i believe nick land really matters. the problem is that land's view of humanity is incredibly dim, and i happen to think that one of the reasons for this is that it lacks an aspect of the sacred and a right relation to it that for me was convincingly argued by girard. but i also really like marty glass' book also, and for him the Traditionalists matter. and then on top of that, if yuk hui is right about some things - and i think he is - then perhaps there is an opportunity to move the conversation beyond land without diminishing what land says about technology and economics and so on.

at least, that's what i would like it to mean. it also means a lot of tumblr art. basically it's accelerationist stuff with less politics and perhaps a little more mysticism to leaven the landian blackpill. Traditionalism as glass understands it is welcome, but so is the possibility of a neo-heideggerianism by way of YH, stiegler and simondon.

[Anonymous No.11921768]

>>11921678
i should note also that yuk hui does not spend nearly as much time as i do thinking about land. he has read land but he is less persuaded by land's thought than i am. on top of this, he's met land also and they have talked too, apparently more or less on friendly and productive terms. i don't know what land thinks about yuk hui, but that's fine.

the reason why i think yuk hui is such a cool guy is that to my mind he is proposing a land-compatible theory of techno-genesis that doesn't prove land wrong but potentially proves him right, which is always a good look for philosophy, and yet doesn't end with a Game Over screen for humankind. my own fixation on land has come from a sense that, if you follow the line of thinking from hegel, through nietzsche, deleuze and baudrillard to today, it really is a world ruled and governed by aesthetics: a feels > reals world. and for land that culminates in a pretty harsh statement: that capitalism is a computer which processes desire, full stop period, and the meaning of its software is teleoplexy.

land's teleoplexy article is here, if you're interested.
https://track5.mixtape.moe/zphjim.pdf

however, if that is the case, i would be most welcome to a new way of thinking about some of these questions related to intelligence and technology, and those are things that i believe yuk hui is particularly good at, and it has to do with both him and his influences. i really like heidegger, but heidegger's nightmare seems to be coming to pass, and land has been good at diagnosing why. in a sense, heidegger's nightmare is land's own playground. but yuk hui - by way of bernard stiegler and gilbert simondon - might be bringing heidegger back again, and moreover, he's raising some interesting possibilities about the meaning of tech in other-than-exclusively-western terms, and which would be a good thing, and which, again, is not limited to a postcolonial critique or yet another polemic about Why The West Sucks. i don't care about that and neither does he. but i feel the need to communicate this so that no one gets misrepresented.

so that's cosmotech. technology on a *planetary* scale, rooted in metaphysics both eastern and western, and in which neither is disastrously reducible to the other. or perhaps simply the culmination of a few years' worth of shitposting by one odious tripfag prone to florid episodes of theory-fiction schizo-ramble Clouds of Unknowing, on a melanesian tap-dancing forum, in which his own private existential woes become magically transformed into a quasi-religious ideology buried under piles of name-drops. one or the other. probably both.

some other good essays by YH here if you're interested.

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/81/125815/on-the-unhappy-consciousness-of-neoreactionaries/
https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/superhumanity/179224/on-automation-and-free-time/

[Anonymous No.11921790]

where do I start with simondon

[Anonymous No.11921793]

>>11921768
ah thanks for the rundown

[Anonymous No.11921803]

>>11921768
>logic
this quote again:

>We still tend to believe in the human as the only subject that imagines; though machines produce a range of choices, the ultimate decision belongs to humans. In the following sections, we will see why time and logic compete to be the ground of metaphysics by looking at the debate between the neo-Kantians and Heidegger. Heidegger wanted to retrieve the transcendental imagination of Kant instead of logic as the foundation of metaphysics. If transcendental imagination constitutes the foundation of metaphysics, to what extent can we also understand the tertiary protention in terms of a metaphysical question? And to what extent does this allow us to investigate the existence of digital objects? With our general method, we will try to understand time and logic as two orders of magnitude and see how to push forward the idea of tertiary protention by resolving (or jumping across) this division.

the competition between time and logic for the ground of metaphysics is a big question. it may also be the basic roots of the source of a division between the continentals and the analytics, the divorce between which has had spillover effects into culture we now see everywhere. land doesn't care about these things in a cultural sense (well, he does, but it's complex) and yet the reality deficiency we have been struggling with since nietzsche is only exacerbated by economic disequilibrium and technological breakaway, which is now taking the reins for itself. in some sense, this might be a good thing - again, i don't think it's crazy to talk about land's theory of tech and not use the word 'Copernican' to describe it. teleoplexy, techno-genesis, machine synthesis, robotic intelligence and much else are once again going to de-center the human being in an epochal sense, and this historically has made us humans prone to a lot of Chimphammer 40K. but for the sake of my own well-being, as well as my growing stomach ulcer, heart condition and facial tics i would like to resolve this question in *some* sense so that, when you encounter me IRL i will have your pancakes for you the way you like them and with the two sides you like, and all of this will only be a dream, and we will not mention the Wild Ride. it will be like it never happened. and all shall be tranquil and peaceful, because i will not be so fucking agitated by this shit anymore.

>All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

>>11921790
maybe pic rel? honestly he's still kind of a puzzle for me also, although i think i understand YH, stiegler and heidegger. i've actually found yuk hui's book - pic rel - the most helpful in understanding why he matters, but in terms of transduction and his other stuff there are still aspects which puzzle me. but i'm very much on board with trying to learn more about him.

there's this too.
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/411ACeAcTXL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

>>11921793
my pleasure.

[Anonymous No.11921839]

>>11921803
as for simondon books, this also. GS is fascinating because of where he is located in the history of continental philosophy, for all that he has been a relatively forgotten man: he does his doctoral work under merleau-ponty, who is obviously massively influenced by heidegger, and is a relative contemporary of deleuze, who doesn't talk about him all that much, and yet mechanosphere/mechanology is basically exactly the kind of stuff that simondon is good at talking about. he wasn't a literary theorist, and neither is YH or stiegler.

of course, the other guy to talk about is reza negarestani, who is also doing the philosopher-engineer job as well as anyone alive, and is probably the #2 guy in the world of acceleration after land, as far as i can tell. so when Intelligence and Spirit comes out that will no doubt make some waves in this pond also.

[Anonymous No.11921842]

>>11887728
>technology bad
>feelings good
god you humanities people are fucking pathetic.
you've been bitching about the same shit for 250 years.

[Anonymous No.11921852]

>>11921839
if i can find some relevant or appropriate stuff that i think is illuminating and germane to the thread, i will stick some in. it's probably more relevant than the stuff from karen barad i had planned to include, b/c mostly i liked that for her extended arguments against foucault and judith butler. but for things like that...we can all get to those places on our own.

this is another one of the simondon books i looked into before and found helpful, iirc. i kind of feel like when simondon clicks into place i will have a much better understanding of a few things, but i'm still not there yet.

[Anonymous No.11921875]

>>11921842
did you actually read the thread?

we're not having this thread because we want to Tech Bad, Feels Good! we're doing it because we want to change that polarity. a feels > reals world is a world of retardedness, but the feels are the feels because they are afraid of a world in which tech/capital becomes a boot stamping on a human face, which is absolutely one of the things that i can do (and, if you ask land, *must* do in some cases).

so it's a double bind. and we want to get *out* of the double bind. YH thinks it can be done and so do i. but come on, there's no way you could have read the thread and concluded what you have concluded if you had actually read it with some engagement.

[Anonymous No.11921886]

>>11921875
>>11921842
should be 'it' and not 'i,' obviously. although that is quite a typo.

anyways. this isn't bog-standard humanities-fagging, anon. it's not Tech Bad, Feelings Good! not at all. the tech is there but the humanity must also be there: logic *and* time.

it's trying to get out from that wheel of doom, not repeat it.

[Anonymous No.11921913]

>>11920889
To me, post-apoc works well with cold-war americana because apocalypse is not a slow dissolution of life, nor is it a transformation-- Apocalypse freezes the world like a museum to our hubris. The Road is maybe a bit overrated but its passage here is symbolically important:

>“The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions."

The clocks stopped in absolute. After the apocalypse, time itself becomes an irrelevant vanity. I don't actually know the particulars of the Landian techno-time that was quoted earlier in the thread, I haven't read and understood all that much within accel yet. But it feels like there's something compatible.

[Anonymous No.11921920]

>>11921842
>feelings good
feelings are not always good. sometimes feelings are good. but you know, sometimes...they aren't.

>technology bad
sometimes technology is bad. sometimes technology is good. and sometimes...it's like, both.

[Anonymous No.11921960]

>>11921913
no, that's it. you got it. the meaning of the apocalypse, in a sense, and how we think or imagine this in relation to history. it's almost an opening move for continental philosophers today, and it certainly animates no small amount of activist-academics.

i think derrida really sort of felt it had happened, in some sense. baudrillard for sure. but this idea of living at the end not necessarily of all time, but certainly some kind of historical epoch that had the European experience at the centre, and perhaps by extension the Anglo-American alliance that came after WW2 and led up to 1990, when the soviet union falls and fukuyama says, okay, that's it. and, in a sense, he was right, that was it - free markets and liberal social democracies, what's better? the only problem is that those things were capital-compatible, but capital wasn't necessarily compatible with them, and in the long run, people chose capital. and now, perhaps, they are reaping the whirlwind, because we can't go back to what we gave up before to get here.

and so, the questions begin: have the clocks stopped? how are we measuring them? in terms of technological progress, social progress...?

>But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning?

and so, we have to get a grip on this process, in some sense. even if is the Grip of No-Grip or whatever else. because otherwise things get carried away under their own momentum. totalitarian forms of government do exactly this, in times of economic and psychological crisis, as do revolutionary movements, which in the end become totalitarian forms of government engendering revolution...

...but those are humans for you, perhaps. Ye Olde Dethe Spiralle.

also, we're coming up on the image cap, always a sad moment. we can keep going and if we want to post images just stick the link in below, but, aarrh, it's annoying.

[Anonymous No.11921967]

Though I appreciate the vigor of Capitalist Eschatology, you must understand that your musing is in vain since there is no such thing as Capitalism. The trope that Capitalism is congruent with, emergent from, a perversion of, "laws of nature" is true in a sense, but in a far more grievous way, the quantitative inversion of the inference it makes. "Nature", as it were, "Space", or "Matter" - they do not provide the amoral or mysterious means by which Capitalism manifests its horror, they themselves ARE horrors fully manifest, Capitalism being only a faint imitation. Nothing its worst detractors have accused it of can allow it to seal a contract half as evil as gravity, for example.

[Anonymous No.11922010]

>>11921967
>there is no such thing as Capitalism
wat

>Nothing its worst detractors have accused it of can allow it to seal a contract half as evil as gravity, for example.
wat

>Nature", as it were, "Space", or "Matter" - they do not provide the amoral or mysterious means by which Capitalism manifests its horror, they themselves ARE horrors fully manifest, Capitalism being only a faint imitation.
i like to think of myself as being an open-minded guy but i'm going to need some clarification or at least something like a reading list anon. i will grant you that my musing is probably largely in vain, but There Is No Such Thing As Capitalism is a little too far out in left field even for me.

[Anonymous No.11922126]

>>11921967
unless you mean, of course, this:

>The purpose of the new religion, as preached by Jesus and propagated by the apostles, was not to conquer the temporal world and establish a place for itself in History but rather to announce that the Kingdom of heaven was at hand, bringing with it the end of the world. Like all great religions, Christianity first made an impact upon its devotees by effecting a fundamental change in the relationship between man and time. For the Gentiles—or Pagans—living in a Time cycle in which religious ceremonies, festivals and sacrifices unflaggingly perpetuated the same original events, within a repetitive (and therefore endless) universe, Christianity brought the sudden, distressing revelation of progressive Time, which evolves and passes, of a growing universe and therefore one capable of coming to an end. Is not one of the themes frequently to be found in the words of Jesus the fact and the imminence of the end of the world? The universe is soon to cease to exist, for Jesus, having come once on earth ‘to fulfill the prophecies,’ will return a second time to bring the history of the world to a close.

>The Fall into Time, the Reign of Quantity, the Mutation into Machinery, the End of Nature, the Prison of Unreality. The five hallmarks of the Kali-Yuga.

-- Glass/Yuga

if this is what you mean, then yes, you are right. there is, from this kind of perspective, no such thing as capitalism. i guess i just don't know if i'm quite ready to commit to that kind of perspective just yet. i guess i'm still attached to my theoryfiction shitposting still, uncertain about whether or not i want to go with a kind of Greater Vehicle or Lesser Vehicle attitude w/r/t a lot of this.

[Anonymous No.11922187]

>In other words, just as we are Capital (Marx), or the Reign of Quantity (Guenon), and as we are Technique (Ellul) or Power (Mumford), or the Mutation into Machinery, and as we are Hyper-Reality (Baudrillard) or the Prison of Unreality, and as we are the Fall into Time (Eliade), that is, historical humanity, so we are the End of Nature. We are the Kali-Yuga. ‘Please allow me to introduce myself,’ as Mick Jagger sang. Our mutations in the Kali-Yuga: our Spiricide, our Suicide. ‘We have met the enemy, and they is us.’

>The outer now is a creation of the mutations we have collectively become. Capital, Technique, Mechanism.

>As the Heart-Intellect, Cardiac Intelligence, the intuition of the Absolute, withers away, it is—with rigorous reciprocity, as one sinks the other rises—replaced by a satanic ‘intelligence’, the ‘mind’ of the Kali-Yuga, which is ‘smarter’ than ‘we’ are: we cannot, as the collective, see through its devices, and as individuals only sporadically, and with cynical despair. It is ourselves as self-deception, ‘fiendish’ as it is the Archfiend, the Adversary. It causes everything to appear to make sense, to appear natural, normal, plausible, from television commercials and freeways to the logic of principal and interest and the ‘stock market’. It’s terminal form, the terminal ‘mind’ of the Kali-Yuga, is the Computer, in which the whole of reality is transformed into the human absence called ‘information’, the incontestable ‘data’. This is the Great Dead Brain in whose lightless lifeless plastic chambers the world we loved will die. Reality is not Information. The transformation into data is the murder of the real, whatever becomes Information is now dead. The Computer, the Internet, the Web, the Thing we have collectively become, is not human, and our relentless transformation into It is our dying. An ‘intelligence’ that is not alive is dead, and what is dead knows nothing.

-- Glass/Yuga

obviously land would have a place in here as well. but it's all much the same process. cyberpunk is a way of seeing precisely what is there, but we won't get out the same way we went in. and the 40K aesthetics have raised all of this to a peak of satire indistinguishable from poetry. we should talk about simondon, at some point, because he matters, but in terms of The Meaning of It All it's marty glass who really brings it all home.

[Anonymous No.11922447]

>>11887735
I did want to mention this, and I brushed on it in my essay on Gernsback, but in order to understand Mumford's statements on cities you cannot treat them like our cities, like the way things are today. Mumford wrote during the process of urban decay, something that a drooling legion of academics and agenda-pushers have written a library of incomplete ideas on.

Mumford begins the chapter mentioned in that pic by suggesting that the trend towards urbanization was, at that moment, slowing, and that it would plateau and potentially cease. He challenged the assumption that the "metropolis economy" was a permanent function, and did so in the environment of so-called "white flight"-- the time when the suburbs usurped urban centers as the destinations of moneyed individuals. This was accompanied by a general disdain for cities, one that painted them as dens of crime and decay, most enthusiastically by the very capitalists who sought to benefit from the change in real estate pricing. Of course, the status of the cities themselves was more or less irrelevant to the trend, because it was also a positive pull from the suburbs that led to the rise of the suburban sprawl-- The suburb encoded into the "american dream", leading to a unique isolation: America lived in a picket-fence solitude, travelling daily along grey highways to join a metropolis synonymous with capital and work. In this environment it would be impossible not to absorb this disdain for urban centers, but the cities were the result of this pattern as much as its cause.

Cities in Mumford's time were soulless because they were wastelands where Capital ruled, and life itself had been largely excised from them by a deliberate and calculating effort. If one had the choice, they spent enough time in the city to work, and no more. Nobody engaged with the communities of the city because everybody believed themselves to live somewhere else; everybody identified with the more colorful suburban monotony that allowed them to live in profoundly safe isolation, eschewing community for the false prophet of security that White Flight had sold to them.

For the most part, this trend has not ever been reversed in America. Europe and Asia have had entirely different approaches to the problem, but their success cannot be estimated by an outsider. The trend, however, is changing: America's skeletal urban centers have been "gentrified", the coffins painted over and draped with realtors' signs heralding the coming of a generation with no attachment to the spectre of suburban security. I live in a city, now. I work in the same neighborhood I live, and I therefore identify with it. I see familiar faces, I walk the roads without the dissociating perspective of a driver in traffic, and that lets me understand the place I live. I view it as a sort of transcendentalist sublime: an impossibly-complex network that I inhabit, which itself is coldly enchanting.

[Anonymous No.11922660]

>>11922447
>Cities in Mumford's time were soulless because they were wastelands where Capital ruled, and life itself had been largely excised from them by a deliberate and calculating effort. If one had the choice, they spent enough time in the city to work, and no more. Nobody engaged with the communities of the city because everybody believed themselves to live somewhere else; everybody identified with the more colorful suburban monotony that allowed them to live in profoundly safe isolation, eschewing community for the false prophet of security that White Flight had sold to them.

this is a remarkable point and i'm really glad you brought this up. i do have a tendency to get kind of swept up in the vision of whatever an author is presenting to me, there's no question about that. i believe mumford is right about a certain pattern of things, but you're right to highlight this need to situate him within his own context as well.

we can agree that societies do follow a kind of a trend, but it's worth asking whether such a trend is normative, prescriptive/descriptive and so on, and this can be done without the slippery slope. it would be good to be neither an agenda-pusher nor a counter-agenda agenda pusher, which is part of this new phenomenon today.

>The trend, however, is changing: America's skeletal urban centers have been "gentrified", the coffins painted over and draped with realtors' signs heralding the coming of a generation with no attachment to the spectre of suburban security. I live in a city, now. I work in the same neighborhood I live, and I therefore identify with it. I see familiar faces, I walk the roads without the dissociating perspective of a driver in traffic, and that lets me understand the place I live. I view it as a sort of transcendentalist sublime: an impossibly-complex network that I inhabit, which itself is coldly enchanting.

i look forward to reading more of your thoughts on this stuff anon, it's most welcome in the thread. if we do a Cosmotech 6 i am already thinking that getting to know Gilbert Simondon would be a good idea but i'm kind of hesitant to go on a shitposting rampage about him now, given that we are near the image cap and starting to close in on the bump limit also. might be good to kind of leave the rest of the way to 300 open to discuss things like this or other questions and thoughts that percolate. i usually have something weird going on in the mornings that i like to share but if it's opening up a new can of fun predicated on Simondon that to me warrants a thread of its own.

anyways, thank ye kindly for contributing these thoughtful posts anon, they're very much appreciated. would be open to hearing more about your theory of urban development and other things too, they're super-interesting and relevant to these threads. the theory stuff is fun but i don't want to get too carried away from reality either.

[Anonymous No.11922777]

>>11922660
I don't have extremely cohesive theories at this point, I'm someone who wandered into accel and cosmotech after spending a number of years as a sort of bohemian criminal living far from organized society. I would probably be talking more about the theory of acceleration if I knew it, but I'm more drawn here because I always identified with cyberpunk and the sort of dark pragmatism that it offers, and since acceleration uses that as its foundation it reads so comfortably, and in line with my worldview, that I can't ignore it. I'll probably ask your thoughts on some pieces as I go through them, I'm reading Art and Technics, Cyclonopedia, and Fanged Noumena at the same time right now so I'm bound to hit things I don't understand.

[Anonymous No.11922779]

>>11920728
Yuganon here, the other anons have stated the kindle version is the most affordable and available option, but if you want a physical copy that badly at a reasonable price there are a few places to go besides Amazon.
>https://www.alibris.com/Yuga-An-Anatomy-of-Our-Fate-Marty-Glass/book/7368594?matches=6
>https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/yuga-marty-glass/1022306384?ean=9780900588297
>https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/yuga-marty-glass/1022306384?ean=9780900588297
>>11922187
Tell us about the Lovecraftian capital monster from the future Land mentions. There is a passage in Yuga where Glass calls capital a 'tyrant from another planet.'
>replaced by a satanic ‘intelligence’, the ‘mind’ of the Kali-Yuga, which is ‘smarter’ than ‘we’ are
I should get on scanning The Human Predicament: Dissolution and Wholeness, then again, I do feel myself coming down with food poisoning...

[Anonymous No.11922814]

>>11922660
>simondon
getting to three hundred is kind of a nice feel tho, and we do have something of a streak going on, and maybe some text from simondon is what the doctor ordered. so, we'll see.

i'm just feeling kind of lazy because in order to find some good simondonian greentext to share i'll have to go back and actually understand what i am saying, and it's more fun to be lazy...but decadence of that kind is spiricide and in lieu of posting something interesting i'll just mope about the kali-yuga and land and other things.

sigh. given that i have thrown all this love at yuk hui i guess i have to start brushing up on simondon anyways. now is as good a time as any i suppose. more on that note tomorrow then, perhaps.

[Anonymous No.11922830]

>>11922779
Is there a PDF anywhere? I usually like reading through these things and annotating them on Mendeley, which really prefers PDF to ebook formats. I suppose if I get a .mobi I can probably convert it.

[Anonymous No.11922875]

>>11922777
>I don't have extremely cohesive theories at this point, I'm someone who wandered into accel and cosmotech after spending a number of years as a sort of bohemian criminal living far from organized society.

well pull up a chair at the bar mi amigo, it sounds like you're going to be most welcome here. friendly reminder that bernard stiegler came up with his revisions to heidegger while he was doing time in jail, iirc, so it's not like the outsider perspective on things is not entirely welcome. land torpedoed his entire career and became the court philosopher of DE/NRx. we're a long way from kansas in that sense.

>I would probably be talking more about the theory of acceleration if I knew it, but I'm more drawn here because I always identified with cyberpunk and the sort of dark pragmatism that it offers, and since acceleration uses that as its foundation it reads so comfortably, and in line with my worldview, that I can't ignore it. I'll probably ask your thoughts on some pieces as I go through them, I'm reading Art and Technics, Cyclonopedia, and Fanged Noumena at the same time right now so I'm bound to hit things I don't understand.

this thing is very open-source. if you think something is interesting, it probably is. and as such it is very likely to interest the rest of us ITT also. and i don't know about you guys, but i am a self-taught amateur in all of this stuff, so there's no academic prestige points to be gained or lost. all we can do is discuss what we think is neat or where there may be some patterns. it's all i do, really. i tend to pretty much repeat what i know about the same bunch of guys, so...you get the idea. this whole thing is pretty homebrew.

>>11922779
greetings based Yuganon. sorry about your food poisoning.

>Lovecraft
it's kinda-sorta there in one of my all-time favorite NL one-liners:
>The true genius of cyberpunk is to cash-out the utterly alien into commercially-driven bionics (without in any way domesticating it).

i mean for the Lovecraftian stuff, i think it follows from land's allegiance to D&G's spinozistic nature-god, which links up with Skynet when land uploads his own fertile and horror-stricken imagination about How Far Things Can Go Down - again, it's bataille who really rinses any kind of conventional academic perspective out of his system - into capitalism, and comes up with the alien attack from the future. our own desires are a schizo-kaleidoscopic wonderland, and they have no fixed or final form. attach those to teleoplectic recursion and you get the basic circuitry of the Wild Ride.

there are references to Face Tentacles late in the Dark Enlightenment essay tho. that's a whole other chapter of land's career arc, during which he was fleshing out his Oath of Fealty to NRx, which is currently status: unknown. and apparently xenosystems is now dead forever too, so...yeah.

http://www.thedarkenlightenment.com/the-dark-enlightenment-by-nick-land/

[Anonymous No.11922940]

>>11922779
>>11922875
the thing about spinoza i have come to understand - it applies to schelling too - is that Deus Sive Natura really will fuck you up. it fucked up leibniz and it fucked up hegel also, those well-intentioned germans of the enlightenment courts or university systems who like to have a concept of the divine compatible with well-to-do, rational-ish, optimistic, government-led systems. *and it's not like these are bad things.* i love to play EU3 now and again and when i do i play it because i want to make France or w/ev awesome and draped in glory. i like the idea of a baroque enlightenment world very much, and part of me wishes we had it in reality also.

but a spinozan god necessarily includes things in nature that we don't like to associate with the divine - like tapeworms, for instance. and yet, deleuze would be well within his rights to ask: what's your problem with tapeworms? not in a purely medicinal or biological sense, but because on some level the *squirminess* of things unsettles us, because we like order, hygiene, cleanliness, and all the rest. and we should have them, to a degree. it's just that those kinds of things aren't inscribed on the order of nature, and when we try to force nature to act the way we want it to in that sense things usually go pear-shaped.

so land is okay with Lovecraft, perhaps, because Lovecraftian stuff is in a sense right next door to spinozan stuff. and because horror really does cut the rug out from any kind of sense of bourgeois propriety that, by his time, only becomes synonymous with a kind of perverse critique of normativity for its own sake that has entirely lost the plot: he calls it Transcendental Miserabilism. and he starts to wonder if anything can make the Transcendental Miserabilists happy because, rather like Ernst Junger coming back from the war and saying, you know, it was pretty intense but i have to admit there were parts of it that i liked, land takes a hard look at capital and decides that it's *culture* that is the problem. by 1990 this was academic heresy, but in a sense it's because the nature of marxism had been completely taken over by literary theory. he became the notorious Right Marxist that he is as a result.

anyways, that's a long post and rather roundabout, but i think you understand what i mean. there might be a more appropriate Lovecraft-related text on xenosystems somewhere. i'm sure there is. but maybe that helps somewhat. basically, Cthulhu is a true libidinal monster. it desires. it desires to desire, and its desires really are deathless and infinite, much as in some sense the psychoanalysts agree the id or WtP is: blind, undead, hungry, and unkillable. That Which Consumes. he does have a kind of charming grain of Victorian horror about the Deeps.

[Anonymous No.11922986]

>>11922875
Well, if my lack of academic background made me feel truly inadequate, I wouldn't have started posting to begin with, I think. It's more of a task list; I was away from the world for long enough that I've been left with a backlog. Acceleration itself facilitates a sort of fear of falling behind, but that kind of attitude is necessarily defeatist.

I remember Elon Musk was recently criticized for a tweet where he talks about prioritizing fast decision-making over correct decision-making in the specific context of a high-growth company. A lot of liberals chided him for deliberately not thinking about his maneuvers, a few libertarians and stock traders said that was the natural way of things when your stock is going exponential. I don't mean to idolize CEOs, to me companies and markets are a game rather than a component of my reality. But that whole discussion seems to have a similar notion of speed: when the world accelerates, we won't have time to be correct. If I had to guess, I would think that the optimization of our decision making systems will eventually rely on reducing the amount of decisions that human minds are required to make and shifting the mental workload to AI and the algorithm. In theory, that would mean the inheritors of the accelerated velocitopia we're making will be, paradoxically, the ones who have meticulously and slowly created a base of knowledge for them to work off of, and not those who have specialized in the rapid-fire profit race that typifies the stratification of modernity. That's optimistic, but it's exactly how I'd prefer to make my way.

[Anonymous No.11923465]

bump

[Anonymous No.11923618]

>>11922986
>Acceleration itself facilitates a sort of fear of falling behind, but that kind of attitude is necessarily defeatist.
it's a monster double bind. you can drop out but the world keeps going. and Revolution 60s-style winds up co-opted by totalitarian extremists. it's like Weinstein said: the left and right totalitarians can't get along, the left and right libertarians can. i wouldn't consider myself libertarian by any stretch - i think 'anarcho-masochism' is probably about right for me. but this is the thing that keeps me up at night too: you have to keep up with a headless simulation machine, because it still has the possibility of being better than the headless simulation non-machine, which is just chaos. i really don't know why i do this, i got sucked into it because i wanted to write a fucking fantasy novel. and now i've basically become a habitual and daily guest and perhaps volunteer tour guide of the Wild Ride. madness.

>If I had to guess, I would think that the optimization of our decision making systems will eventually rely on reducing the amount of decisions that human minds are required to make and shifting the mental workload to AI and the algorithm. In theory, that would mean the inheritors of the accelerated velocitopia we're making will be, paradoxically, the ones who have meticulously and slowly created a base of knowledge for them to work off of, and not those who have specialized in the rapid-fire profit race that typifies the stratification of modernity.

your guess is fucking interesting tho. this is fantastic. machine-assisted free will is beyond question where things are headed, but i wholly and not partially like your theory about how things can subsequently play out. land talks about this too, the contrasting worlds of short and long time preference, but *all* of this stuff is going to be affected by tech. it would indeed be quite a thing for the rapid-fire profit race as it degenerates ever-further into the true alchemical hijinx of financial experimentation and paranoia to be slowly pushed out in favor of large-scale Collective Mind. and perhaps, if we are imagining positive futures, collective or general decision-making intel that isn't always subordinated to insano-politics. the irony is, of course, that this is kind of thing was - and is - what the internet was supposed to be. but jacques barzun said it, way back when: the web isn't an 'information superhighway' if it duplicates and multiplies all of the extant error and craziness already in the world, and gives you equally fast access to that too. that is what happened, but...well.

also 'velocitopia,' holy shit. i'll be stealing this but i'll give you the credit for a wicked neologism. thank ye very kindly.

>when the world accelerates, we won't have time to be correct.
awesome post, anon.

[Anonymous No.11923740]

>>11923618
And isn't that feedback loop something market economics terms "reflexivity"? We already know from that world that when our decision-making processes are collectivized and regulated in the manner of the market that collective psychology becomes a dangerous and barely-tamed beast. If greed and optimism weaponize themselves into boom-bust cycles with the kind of regularity that leads them to be seen as inevitable, that is invariably the least dangerous version of collective decision-making. After all, the market limits the individual impact to "yes" or "no", with the only lever you can moderate those answers with being the financial confidence you have in your answer (the value of that in itself being diminished by the inequality of the system inherently). The algorithmized Internet, and the ideological shatterscape of philosophy and politics (never were the two truly separate) housed within it, presents a collectivized decision-game that prioritizes how relatable or agreeable a statement is and amplifies it accordingly, using metrics no human being can discern. This is obviously a primitive utilization of the internet's useful connectedness, but we've already seen that the system bucks its riders just as violently as market economics ever has. The complexity will only ever rise from here.

[Anonymous No.11923837]

>>11923740
Reading Yuk Hui's article on neoreaction, I just came across this:

>We urgently need to imagine a new world order and seize the opportunity provided by the meltdown to develop a strategy that opposes the relentless depoliticization and proletarianization driven by the transhumanist fantasy of superintelligence.

I'm terrified of Yuk Hui.

I can survive Land because his relentless intellect allows him to delineate the universal technic horrorscape of modernity, and while his stated goals include a repugnant neoreaction and subjecting one's self to Thiel's hard-AI "lottery", his real objective always seems to me to be more like the Hyperstition movement: Land seeks to mythologize the real, and in doing so realize the mythological, and force the world to see the underlying patterns of history and politics with systems more robust than the philosophy that preceded him. I can fundamentally feel his gravity without being ushered beyond the event horizon (isn't the event horizon, the physical "spaghettification" into singularity and the speed of light, a perfect mathematical parallel to acceleration itself?)

Likewise, Moldbug presents no real threat to my being because he lacks the intellectual stature of Land or any of his predecessors. Moldbug has a peeve with Internet culture that he uses as an abstract template he wishes to apply to all of his grievances, and he's even come up with a pithy name for his Cathedral. Mumford is innately compelling, but also partly a product of his time, and I can see the fracture lines where reality turned away from Mumford's vision and into something he was never in a position to foresee. Mumford is a stepping stone, a brilliant one. His pragmatism enthralls me but I can keep my distance. Negarestani I'm unsure of, but so far I feel like he's parallel to Land, showing a way of looking at the world rather than anything I need to buy into in order to reap the rewards of his literature.

Yuk Hui is dangerous, though. He seems to combine Mumford's pragmatic relentlessness with a perfect clarity of humanity's place in history. Everything he writes comes with the even-handed wisdom of a writer unharmed by the ideological battleground we live in. That's at once the kind of writer I've been waiting to read, and the kind of writer I'm afraid of becoming a blind disciple of.

[Anonymous No.11923858]

>>11923740
>And isn't that feedback loop something market economics terms "reflexivity"?
it is. and to just watch information scrolling through on the financial networks or on your local Weather-Traffic-Murder Channel (or whatever the rest of the world will call CP24) is like watching something just...dreaming. anyways yes. get ready for a lot of yes, in fact.

>We already know from that world that when our decision-making processes are collectivized and regulated in the manner of the market that collective psychology becomes a dangerous and barely-tamed beast.
yes. as in, the lion-tamer has apparently confused himself with the lion. so too have the spectators. and even the lion is beginning to have some doubts about this game. it is this way. the market is that collective psychology, but it's also now exteriorized and has been prodded into a state of proto-sentience.

>If greed and optimism weaponize themselves into boom-bust cycles with the kind of regularity that leads them to be seen as inevitable, that is invariably the least dangerous version of collective decision-making.
yes. once upon the nile floods. or we live, monastically, with the seasons. or insert here. monasticism changed the game, in some ways, but somewhere along the line things picked up rapidly. this is land's whole point in his iconic sound-bite:

>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.

you get read the rest here, if you haven't already (of course you have): it's in your copy of Fanged Noumena too. in general tho i like it when i read a post and just have to sit here and go, yes. yes it is like that. yes.

https://genius.com/Nick-land-meltdown-annotated

>The algorithmized Internet, and the ideological shatterscape of philosophy and politics (never were the two truly separate) housed within it, presents a collectivized decision-game that prioritizes how relatable or agreeable a statement is and amplifies it accordingly, using metrics no human being can discern.
'shatterscape.' anon i can only handle so much fucking awesomeness in one post. i'm not used to this. the answer is yes. and you are correct also about 'no human being.' teams maybe. entelechies. machine-augmented entelechies.

>This is obviously a primitive utilization of the internet's useful connectedness, but we've already seen that the system bucks its riders just as violently as market economics ever has.
we have.

>The complexity will only ever rise from here.
it will.

fuck.

also: only one image left in the thread anons, i'm not using it. somebody else can. make it a good one (or squander it? fy squandering), this thread has been terrific thus far.

[Anonymous No.11923917]

For everyone watching.

[Anonymous No.11923944]

>>11923837
>I'm terrified of Yuk Hui.
heh. really? i don't get the impression he wants to mind-control anyone for the CCP or the World Order, he seems to prefer the life of the wandering scholar in Germany. mou zongsan was also fiercely critical of the chinese gov't - if anything, he said they needed more democracy over there. true, YH isn't MZ, but...i don't get the dark feel from him that i get from land (or dugin, who truly wears his heart on his sleeve).

i guess the funny thing to me is that of all those guys you named - Moldbug, Negarestani, Land and YH that YH is the guy you're most intrigued by. Negarestani has just as much horror-show stuff going on in the background too (you know, you're reading Cyclonopedia) and Moldbug is unironically ready to dissolve the US into full patchwork. it won't happen, and of course your analysis is completely fine by me, but...mild-mannered Yuk Hui is the guy you're most tweaked about? it's just not what i was expecting. but that's good too!

>Everything he writes comes with the even-handed wisdom of a writer unharmed by the ideological battleground we live in. That's at once the kind of writer I've been waiting to read, and the kind of writer I'm afraid of becoming a blind disciple of.

well for all of the shivers his ideas may give you, i'm at least glad to have been able to share a writer who dwells in that space - as you say, the guy you've been waiting to read and at the same time the one you're nervous about becoming a blind disciple of. philosophy really *is* the greatest story ever told, and it is that way because of those feels and intimations, in a way. because just when you think you've seen everything...there's another plot twist, and A New Challenger Approaches. i think this is more or less what happened to me with land, and in my case the only way out was through. i basically talked and talked and talked and shitposted and talked and blogged and rambled and talked some more about land until i felt, okay, i think i'm good now (by which point, of course, it's entirely too late, you've digested the neurotoxin to such a degree that now He Lives In You and You Don't Notice.) ah, continental theory mind-control. good times.

well anon, all i can say is that i think it is at least a fair bargain. your posts of late - including this one - have given me all kinds of things to think about, so i'm happy to have returned the favor, in a sense, by giving you somebody you really can get stuck with for a while. i'll be very interested to read any further thoughts you have on YH also, as they arise...

i'm trying atm to hack my way through a couple of books on simondon to get a better sense of what GS is saying, and it's rough going, which is kind of a good feeling also. kind of makes me have to sharpen my own brain a little and process something new. i may have some notes on simondon to share tomorrow, but i suspect it will be a while before i have him sorted out. we'll see.

>>11923917
perfect!

[Anonymous No.11924036]

>>11918696
>Music is more relevant to the Mumfordian merging of art and the than maybe any other artistic medium except installations. I have all kinds of things I listen to for this feeling but I'll need to post them later when I'm not at work.

and hey, where's the music? we need music for the home stretch to the bump limit. unless you're working a crazy double-shift in a triage ward somewhere and saving lives you must have returned home at some point, anon. or are you about to say that somehow a conversation about nick land and yuk hui on a grenadine soap-carving forum is somehow less important than real life? surely you jest, sir.

we need some appropriate theme music if we are going to keep this party going. otherwise it will be enya.
>oh god no please fuck no
>yes inner self. enya. i like that song
>my fucking god you are the cringiest fucking hominid on this green earth. have you no shame man
>i do not. it is known inner self. it is known
>okay just please i have to live in you and i cannot handle the shame of it. don't do this to us. me. you.
>well i guess we'll have to wait and see won't we inner self. we will have to wait and see

[Anonymous No.11924084]

>>11923858
I think the misconception of accelerationism, to people who aren't innately familiar with it, is to assume it's predictive. It certainly sounds like it's predictive, what with envisioning a technological singularity and its consequences, and even the word itself "acceleration" necessitates thinking about the next stage of its velocity. But what I've realized is that accelerationism is a depiction of the way things are; the heart of Land's writing is an encompassing of the process that brought us to this point, the one we're in the heart of. To predict the future you must vectorize the relationship between the present and the past. Land puts past and present on the table in horrorshow glory and stops just short of explaining what the future could be, because it's more terrifying to let the reader extrapolate on their own.

I've been thinking about Marx, because in the game of synthesizing philosophy and politics, he's the first and hardest boss battle. Marx makes a lot of difficult statements to contend with, and it often does feel like the world hasn't actually diverged from Marx's fundamentals, but instead has fractalized them, iterating recursively on the elements of his analysis to the point where today, we look back at Marx and see a pixelated outline, something that suggests a perfection of form but vaguely enough that it barely resembles our world. Most people who intend to take Marx and Engels down a peg contend mostly with their extrapolations, the idea of the global revolution or the way capitalism should be a stepping stone to socialism. Even worse, they might just detach from his writing entirely and criticize those who sought to apply a transcendental socio-capital template to a pragmatic and broken world-- itself such an obvious philosophical error that it has no place in analysis. Taking somebody who defined their present and criticizing them for inadequately defining their future is a coward's way out. Accelerationism requires the same bargain: one cannot limit their criticism to nitpicking the writers' futurism and expect that to be a sufficient takedown. It's the detailing of their present which offers the truest value.

>>11923944
I can't explain it entirely, except to say that Nick and Reza's horrorscape is something I can compartmentalize, I can deal with it on my own terms. YH, on the other hand, emerges from the inherently practical. His absolutisms wash in on the wave-crests of truth, where I'm unprepared to take them.

>>11924036
I'll have to dig through some things to really talk about it, but I've got some stuff here. I'll start with what I consider one of the most special pieces of music in the last decade.

https://soundcloud.com/amnesia-scanner/as-angels-rig-hook-1

Music produced with a cybernetic mastery of technics. An audible merger of man and machine. The internet's hyperpopulated shopping mall, stapling price tags to banalities and consumerism. (artificial) artificial intelligence.

[Anonymous No.11924096]

>>11918472
Is there any word of a reprint of Tge Question Concerning Technology in China? There isn't even an ebook of it, and it sucks as I think I'm missing a lot of the conversation without it.

[Anonymous No.11924212]

>>11924084
>Land puts past and present on the table in horrorshow glory and stops just short of explaining what the future could be, because it's more terrifying to let the reader extrapolate on their own.

in this post (>>11888548) the third link is the link to a mega containing a shitload of philosophy/economic stuff that some other cool guy on twitter compiled, and somewhere within that is land's book Templexity. it's worth a read. not so much horror, more the later phase of a disgustingly brilliant writer who set out to write a film review of Looper and wound up with an eighty-page essay. it's good stuff.

>I've been thinking about Marx, because in the game of synthesizing philosophy and politics, he's the first and hardest boss battle.
i am fucking with you 100% anon. the worst thing is people shitting on marx or throwing him away without reading him, because they have taken their cues from what other people have said about him, or worse, they have skipped or replaced him entirely. marx didn't *invent* capital, he fucking stumbled into the inferno and wrote what was there. he has to be read! and whether or not you stick with him all the way to the manifesto is everyone's own choice, but...what the fuck, he really *is* a true boss and that is a major part of why land is who he is and why he matters. teleoplexy is, as i've said, the re-hegelianizing of marx from beyond the grave, but this is because capitalism really fucking is the monster that marx said it was. marx is a fucking monster. anyone can read him and not have to be a marxist thereafter, but...well, it would be nice to at least have some kind of common ground if we are going to go fucking batshit over capital. or, as you say,

>Most people who intend to take Marx and Engels down a peg contend mostly with their extrapolations, the idea of the global revolution or the way capitalism should be a stepping stone to socialism. Even worse, they might just detach from his writing entirely and criticize those who sought to apply a transcendental socio-capital template to a pragmatic and broken world-- itself such an obvious philosophical error that it has no place in analysis. Taking somebody who defined their present and criticizing them for inadequately defining their future is a coward's way out.

so, this.

>Accelerationism requires the same bargain: one cannot limit their criticism to nitpicking the writers' futurism and expect that to be a sufficient takedown. It's the detailing of their present which offers the truest value.

and this also. and that's why you're right to bring gibson into the frame as well, who is land's muse, but he's also a fucking important guy to read in his own right.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.11924235]

>>11906135
Based and Slav-pilled

[Anonymous No.11924259]

>>11924084
YH, on the other hand, emerges from the inherently practical. His absolutisms wash in on the wave-crests of truth, where I'm unprepared to take them.

i am greatly looking forward to reading more of your adventures on that front anon. part of me is really glad that YH is writing because he seems to be trying to bring order back to the Magic Kingdom, where things have been an accelerationist-expressionist roadshow under the directorship of Monsieur Land. i *like* order because i am wired like that, and i like heidegger, and heidegger had to go into cryo-freeze once land showed up. but capitalism has no endgame as long as we live on planet meme and aesthetics has control of metaphysics. it's not like this is even such a bad thing, or that it doesn't have some god-tier champions in nietzsche or deleuze. it's just that life in Wonderland can get a little bit much, and it leads to rage politics when fantasies can't share. YH bringing heidegger back from the dead is a plus for me, b/c i like heidegger, but also because i don't see any other way off the wild ride except for Full Monasticism in the middle of nowhere, with a potato patch, wi-fi and a heavily locked door. which i am probably going to do anyways, but it would be nice to think that the world could get by otherwise and on a different program.

but now i'm very curious to know how your encounter with him goes! keep us posted!

image:
https://walker-web.imgix.net/cms/cabinet_of_dr_caligari_weine_05_W.jpg?auto=format,compress&w=1920&h=1200&fit=max&dpr=1.5

chinese mysticism and metaphysics have just always worked for me, on some level also. no surprise there, they charmed CS Lewis too, Herman Hesse, and many others. i'm good with the Tao and i would be good with a mildly Confucian world also rather than a world of heroism and rage politics. of course, everything i wish for in politics seems to come true and be fucking horrible, and then i wish for something else, but...well, that's not so important.

>music
that was quite the interesting piece, thank you for sharing that. very experimental. we've hit the image cap, but - ha ha! - there is no Music Cap, so
>what are you doing man
>posting music inner self
>jesus man no. you have no taste. you know this. stop
>i'm sure it will be fine inner self
>may god have mercy on your soul girardfag
>it's a silver mt zion inner self. not enya. should be ok

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tptjMb8WTCQ

well, it's true, i have no taste. so i'm intrigued by whatever you'd like to share there. and again, this is an open-source invitation, for anyone else who thinks they can really nail the general atmosphere.

>>11924096
meh, you don't need it so bad. you've got hegel, marx, heidegger, D&G and land to work through in some order. YH is cool but there are lots of other guys that preceded him. stiegler also, and for him you may want to read heidegger first (but it's not necessary).

don't sweat not having the book, it's the larger story that matters.

[Anonymous No.11924335]

>>11924212
Gibson is actually one of the cyberpunk authors I talk about least. I've been doing to cyberpunk since I was a teenager what you appear to have been doing with accel/cosmotech, proselytizing to anyone who'd listen. I have a bittersweet relationship with the entire genre; for every time I get to talk about the pieces of literature I'm most inspired by, there's always an example of the popular conception of the genre. Like I said with Gernsback, cyberpunk has been usurped by the spectre its own success. I've talked to people who were paid to write thinkpieces on cyberpunk's political themes and only afterwards realized they'd never actually read a word of John Shirley's work.

Punkism is a self-fulfilling tragedy. It contains a gravitic allure fundamental to counterculture, one that speaks to the caged spirit of rebellion that howls within the heart of all men. But anything that speaks to people is a lever by which those same people can be marketed towards. Every American these days is aware of the argument of consumerism and anti-consumerism. We all understand that marketing, advertisement, data collection, product placement, and art-for-profit are forces that seek to subjugate our economic conditions to our beastly innate desires. Just knowing about the mechanism doesn't release you from it. Our stomachs turn at consumerism; still we buy. I'm not aware of any anti-consumerism that doesn't start with an exit from society. But where I'm different from most people associated with anti-consumerist cyberpunk is that I've been in those woods. I grew weed, sold drugs out of an abandoned RV park in southern Colorado; I excoriated the world from a NorCal hilltop speckled with the means of narcagricultural production. To me, those environments constitute no exit. It trades the regimented empire of Capital for a struggling pit of economic warlords. The self-sufficient "retreaters" who claim to desire the pseudo-asceticism of exit, they only do so because they started with the means to leave, and the rest in that world are chained to it by the same competitive prisoner's dilemma that strikes the world of capital. There is no exit until you exit from humanity itself, raising fences and erecting yourself a prison cell.

The alternative is to ride the lightning.

https://soundcloud.com/lsdxoxo/fentanyl

[Anonymous No.11924403]

>>11924335
oh wow, that teardrop sample. can do more massive attack too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH9HA9AI_RI

>Punkism is a self-fulfilling tragedy.
this. an absolute heartbreaker. it's hard to let it go. but i think about this stuff all the time. i read and i read, and all it tells me is that we are guided by animal spirits. you go to all of these harrowing places in your soul thinking through where humanity has been and where it is going, and then, in the end, you still have to stay on board that fucking ship of fools one way or the other for who the fuck knows what reason. it's the most god-awful thing in the universe sometimes, when you realize what the storyline might be. you read all of this stuff about the horrors of modernity, and then the real plot twist comes at the end: And Now It's Your Turn. the rage politics we see everywhere are testament to how many people how forcefully Do Not Want To Go Further, but...the show must go on. that's the fucking dagger. Advance To Ringside.

a lot of the present stuff has been building for a while: OWS, for instance, kind of fizzled out but now i think what we see today is the return of That with a holy vengeance. but the vengeance and the reciprocity is what took me to rene girard in the end, the guy who said, okay, maybe that's how it is. you want to balance the books and settle all debts, but it will never work the way you want it to work. it will only repeat ad nauseam ad infinitum. repetition is inscribed on your innermost being, and as above so below. and the inability to distinguish justice from vengeful repayment is just a thing that i was never able to find a flaw in. maybe it's mind-control, but it doesn't change. frustratingly. but scapegoating is like objet a - once seen, not unseen.

the rage tho. the brainless fucking anger. and it's not like continental theory has ever made anyone feel more at home in their own skin. well, that's not true. sometimes. like when lacan or whoever nails that one butterfly arc you've had for years, that Thing you keep doing, and then, once realized, is no longer there, but becomes a kind of telepathic device...that's what the theory does best, i think. as lacan says, you become capable of discussing your own symptom rationally, transference shifts from you analysand to analyst, folded into the hermetic circle of Enlightened Conspiracy to ride out the Yuga.

>Just knowing about the mechanism doesn't release you from it. Our stomachs turn at consumerism; still we buy.

yeah.

>There is no exit until you exit from humanity itself, raising fences and erecting yourself a prison cell.

it is known.

>The alternative is to ride the lightning.

it is. something like that. amor fati one way or the other.

[Anonymous No.11924554]

>>11924403
I haven't had the chance to dig into Girard yet. I don't know when I will, though your appreciation for the guy means it's probably inevitable that I'll eventually do so. Maybe while I read Yuga. I work at a supermarket these days, so I've been short on both time and money.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OD1Jg8ZxAKY

Somewhere in the jungle of possibility, there's me, writing an essay that pulls apart some of electronic music's wildest artists. It'd be an excruciating process, though. I'd need to sequester myself for some days, in the dark, with the screaming siren-synths and subterranean kick drums I've been hearing for years now.

[Anonymous No.11925116]

bump

[Anonymous No.11925366]

Bump

[Anonymous No.11925686]

>>11924554
>Girard
authors are always a personal thing, and boundaries between psychology and philosophy are blurry. by the time i got to girard i was convinced that heidegger and lacan were on to something about the nature of language and representation. i was blown away by nietzsche too. this was making me think about history and so on - what's the point, what are the forces that drive things, where does it all end? for all of the antipathy that land (and deleuze) had for hegel, it's not like it's hard to see the connections: capitalism > everything, but where does it all go, and where does it lead?

so girard was kind of a double whammy for me. on the one hand, he was offering an anthropological psychoanalysis that explained culture - mimesis and structure - and with the same tools, he was also building a theory of history that by drawing on clauswitz rather than hegel presented a clear picture of where things were likely to go - mutually assured destruction, back-and-forth feuding, and in the end, apocalypse. the same guy, with the same basic theory, that went all the way from the micro-internal to the macro-external and back again. so for me he came at the right place and he brought the right argument to convince me. and i've really been convinced by that argument ever since.

for my own reasons i've decided to continue the philosophy adventure, because i am still fascinated by the nature of technology and so on, and because i have found land's theory of tech riotously interesting to think about. but land himself doesn't exactly make the sun come out. and then, on top of that, there's this whole other thing going on in the 21C and the possibility of a shift in world geopolitics, tech, and so on. i'm good at being able to sit waaaaaaaay back and kind of process all of this stuff, but it leaves you feeling kind of stuck in place. and eventually everyone has to move on and keep up with things. i'd like to be able to do that in a way or form other than being critical, so i'm sort of consciously trying to wire myself to see more in the world than Scapegoating and Capitalism, even though this can always be done and in a sense it's nearly always true. but there's more to it than that. you read the guys you like when you read them and they move you when they move you. it's like this for everyone, i think. and time is always short.

>Somewhere in the jungle of possibility, there's me, writing an essay that pulls apart some of electronic music's wildest artists. It'd be an excruciating process, though. I'd need to sequester myself for some days, in the dark, with the screaming siren-synths and subterranean kick drums I've been hearing for years now.

curious if you've read any of Mark Fisher's stuff. he wrote quite a lot on music and other things. he was a companion of both land and negarestani, and he was quite brilliant in his own way too. his writing on music might interest you.

https://twitter.com/k_punk_unlife

[Anonymous No.11925721]

>>11925366
>for all of the antipathy that land (and deleuze) had for hegel, it's not like it's hard to see the connections: capitalism > everything, but where does it all go, and where does it lead?

of course hegel doesn't say anything like this himself, so maybe i should clarify: hegel not only gives you Spirit-as-History, he also gives you karl marx. marx changes the rules of hegel's game, and then D&G show up and replace hegel with spinoza, while keeping the marx. land doesn't even really care about spinoza either, as deleuze himself comes to fill this role, but by taking D&G's question about the nature of mechanosphere, land goes back to a hegelian version of marx in a sense by inquiring into the relation between acceleration, accumulation, and cybernetic processing power. this is what gives him teleoplexy, which i think is what that numogram represents, at least in part: this is the other side of the Angel of History, but it has a dark and daemonic face, and it comes from the future in terms of cyber-intelligence and so on. land re-hegelianizes marx, with Spirit now representing a kind of revolutionary potential of a very different kind, and now traveling backwards to the present rather than forwards to any kind of Absolute Knowing...or is this not precisely what AI singularity represents? and again, land's themes are that a) said singularity is not necessarily optimistic or utopian, and b) it may well be profoundly distorted in both space and in time, and as such not a thing likely to happen any time soon, or even with a sense of immediacy we could point to. however the future comes to happen, for him, it happens in the form of modernity, which historically takes place at different levels of intensity, and in different forms, all over the world, according to the milieu.

which is, actually, quite a good segue into talking about simondon, which i am hoping to do a little of today by posting some greentext from the works i have been looking into. from what i can understand so far, he's all about the milieu. but the point here was just to say that the Cosmotech loop between hegel and land, in which each of these guys are situated at extremes, presents them as being interestingly parallel, in many ways, as they run through marx by alternate polarities. marx remains a central figure for both, while *theories of the unconscious mind* as presented by heidegger, nietzsche, or deleuze also change the meaning of all of this as well.

YH is not a marxist, although bernard stiegler seems to be, and simondon's politics are to me still hard to make clear (not that it matters). land in his time was both extreme left *and* extreme right, but these are in many ways positions on Marx and Hegel themselves.

anyways, i'll be back with some simondon stuff perhaps a little later today.

[Anonymous No.11925743]

>>11922779
Thanks yuganon, it Seems like the kindle costs as much, if not more, than the paperbacks you posted. The trouble is that i'm not from the U.S or the western hemisphere for that matter.

>>11922830
I've looked around for a while and came up with nothing, the book is quite a rare one and not many beyond these threads have taken a conscious interest in it. Though I prefer physical copies for they are the way cheaper alternative here and reliable, i don't think i have much of an option left.

>>11924096
You will find the rough copy of it, along with rest of his corpus, here in the link related.
https://mega.nz/#F!lkNUwIYI!cugQ-Yoclk6AEnzWbfMA6Q

[Anonymous No.11925772]

>>11925743
>>11925743
>You will find the rough copy of it, along with rest of his corpus, here in the link related.

it is there! nice work anon. i have a hard copy so i didn't think to look for the PDF. but indeed it is there.

[Anonymous No.11926126]

okay, here we go. so after wandering through a couple of PDFs i finally found what i was looking for. the greentext below actually comes from the afterword to muriel combes' book (see>>11921839), and is written by a lovely gent named Thomas Lamarre. there's more to simondon than this but there's enough in what Lamarre/Combes are saying i think to give a sense of what simondon is saying and why he's relevant to YH.

we're over the image cap, and i have formatted these quotes to fit within the text limit, which posting related image-links below will fuck up. so you'll have to use your imaginations for this one, or any of the tumblrs linked to elsewhere. a few to get you started:

http://rekall.me/
http://helaeon.tumblr.com/
http://cypulchre.tumblr.com/
http://god-code.tumblr.com/
http://blvckbleach.tumblr.com/

with that said, here's some selections to help you understand gilbert simondon.

[Anonymous No.11926133]

1/12

>Cyborg wisdom entails a simplistic hybridity model: identities have ontological priority, and the subsequent combination of two identities is experienced as a crisis of categories. Seen in this light, it becomes clear that the cyborg model implies a juridical model of power in which the distinction between humans and machines is a matter of law, a de jure distinction. This is why the cyborg or human-machine hybrid comes to be seen as a form of transgression or subversion. This is also why the cyborg model often appears ambivalent about, or even indifferent to, relations between humans and machines, that is, the actual techniques that couple human and machine, and the kinds of governance that simultaneously emerge to regulate them. What counts in the cyborg model is the blurring of the law, what renders law ambiguous or transgresses it. Because of this underlying reliance on a juridical conceptualization of power and thus on sovereignty, the cyborg model lingers not only on law and transgression but also on fantasies of disembodiment and intransivity, that is, on instances of unpredicated or self-predicating subjectivity, which, in keeping with the connotations of the prefix "cyber" as "guidance," "steering," or "navigation," prepare the way for the cybernaut as the new great helmsman.

>Rather than blur or collapse the distinction between human and machine, or for that matter, organism and mechanism, [Simondon] sustains it yet stubbornly refuses to allow it to take on substantialist weight. Humans and machines are different; they can even be said to be ontologically different, but within an ontology that methodologically avoids dualism and substantialism, which is indeed more precisely called ontogenesis. The same holds for bodies and minds: they are different, but not substantially, and likewise organisms and machines, as well as living beings and technical beings: different, but not in accordance with dualism or substantialism. Simondon also parts ways with Heideggerian ontology as well as its deconstruction, for his ontogenetic perspective does not hinge on a distinction between beings and Being, or between the ontic and ontological. The Heideggerian lineage tends toward an unending (deconstructive) displacement of substantialism, rather than finding new points of departure. The cyborg model oscillates between two understandings of technology: on the one hand, a Heideggerian or post-Heideggerian deconstructionist understanding that speaks of an "essence of technology" while ultimately resorting to a linguistic model for techniques, which tends to bring everything back under the signifier, law, and Being; and on the other hand, Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic theory, which, for all his interest in and admiration for it, Simondon thought quite dangerous in its tendency to blur the distinction between animals and machines, ultimately reducing the human and society to one paradigm of the machine.

[Anonymous No.11926138]

>>11926133
2/12

>Simondon's interest lies not in Law or Being (quasi-juridical distinctions between Being and beings, and an incessant blurring and reasserting of them), but in what he calls, and means quite literally, “modes of existence" of technical objects, that is, the ontology of machines. In a manner of speaking, then, an "essence of technology" emerges in Simondon's account of machines. But his account does not assume, on the one hand, a distinction between technique and technology, which invariably tends toward substantialism; rather, his use of the term "technics" (la technique) comprises both. As such, on the other hand, the "essence of technology” does not pose a metaphysical threat in the form of covering over Being with mere beings. If we wish to think in terms of a metaphysical threat, for Simondon it comes from dualism, substantialism, and hylomorphism—that is, operative ways of thinking and doing technology. While Heidegger's notion of "gaining a free relation to technology" might be construed as analogous to Simondon's move to think and do technics differently, Simondon does not fret endlessly over the conditions of (impossibility for a different relation to technology. Perhaps because of his training in sciences and engineering, Simondon confidently speaks of an inherent value to technics, which he calls "technicity."

>For all that Simondon draws heavily on biology in his philosophy of technology, he is equally fond of physics, which serves as another reminder that the rejection of dualism and substantialism in Simondon entails a shift from dialectics to energetics, as Alberto Toscano puts it. In other words, his approach is not that of material determinism (whether that of genes or atoms, or certain manners of dialectical thinking). Instead, in keeping with the fact that neither genes nor atoms are foundational in contemporary sciences, Simondon's approach eschews material determinism, looking to what might be called "energetic determinations” or more precisely, in the language of physics that he adopts, dephasings or phase shifts. That Simondon occasionally glosses dephasing as “doubling" (dédoubler) indicates that he is not intent on dispensing with contrasts or conflicts. Rather, it is a matter of not beginning (and thus ending) with an ontological dualism, with a scission between spirit and substance (substantialism), between human and nature (dialectics), between human and machine (cybernetics), or between form and matter (hylomorphism).

>In another language, we might say that Simondon looks at the individual as an open system rather than a closed system. But then, for Simondon, it is not merely a matter of stressing the openness or nonfinished nature of the individual, but rather of exploring its specific kind of openness, that is, the implicit limits or potential orientations enabling such openness.

[Anonymous No.11926142]

>>11926138
3/12

>For Simondon, the individuals in question are not just out there, as forms or structures that preexist human thought. Rather, these individuals are also those given to us by modern sciences and disciplines: sociology approaches society as an individual; psychology takes up the psyche as its individual; biology sets up life forms, cells, or species, as individuals; media studies works through the isolation of different media; and so forth. For Simondon, the problem of modernity, then, is twofold. On the one hand, there are signs in Simondon of a Foucauldian concern for how knowledge constructs its objects, because the apparatuses or paradigms that discipline, regulate, normativize, or control specific individuals tend to generate knowledge precisely by erasing individuation (process) and treating the individual (structure or form) as given. Simondon's focus on individuation as process evokes the absolute origin of the form-ground relation in order to repotentialize the ground of the (modern) individual, because this is where resistance (in the electrical sense) to nonprogressive modes of rationalization is already at work, where resistance may be brought into play, activated, or potentialized in progressive ways.

>On the other hand, unlike Foucault, who, despite his interest in Thomas Kuhn's paradigms as a manner of rethinking history, shied away from the so-called normal sciences, Simondon turns to individuation as process in order to address what he sees as another dangerous tendency of modern knowledge: the isolation of disciplines from one another on the basis of their construction of different individuals (society, psyche, medium, organism, species, machine) that are not allowed to communicate with one another, whose relationality becomes unthinkable. And he dislikes two common responses to this situation: the large metaphysical erasure of difference (every discipline is really talking about the same thing), and what I have somewhat unfairly characterized as the cyborg model, that is, a remix or mash-up of individuals from different domains without any concern for relationality, for actual differences, techniques, apparatuses, and paradigms. This is why Simondon works so intently within and across different domains of knowledge: he aims for a truly concerned multidisciplinarity.

>Placing the human between machines is one of the major concerns for moving in that direction. In this respect, if we wish to retain terms and phenomena such as "remix" or "cyborg," for instance, Simondon offers a way to engage them at a deeper level than a frenetic yet indifferent disassembly and reassembly of received, socially sanctified individuals.

[Anonymous No.11926152]

>>11926142
4/12

>For Simondon, the problem of modernity, then, is twofold. On the one hand, there are signs in Simondon of a Foucauldian concern for how knowledge constructs its objects, because the apparatuses or paradigms that discipline, regulate, normativize, or control specific individuals tend to generate knowledge precisely by erasing individuation (process) and treating the individual (structure or form) as given. Simondon's focus on individuation as process evokes the absolute origin of the form-ground relation in order to repotentialize the ground of the (modern) individual, because this is where resistance (in the electrical sense) to nonprogressive modes of rationalization is already at work, where resistance may be brought into play, activated, or potentialized in progressive ways.

sorry, minor fuck-up here.

[Anonymous No.11926156]

>>11926152
5/12

here’s a crucial point:

>Consequently, although one of Simondon's key points is that, under conditions of modernity, technical individuals are becoming closer to natural individuals, he does not blur the ontological distinction between them. Indeed, Simondon's comments on popular attitudes toward robots and automatons, in which machines become so like humans that they begin to replace them, are pointedly deflationary ("We would like precisely to show that the robot does not exist,"), to the point where I don’t think it an exaggeration to say that he sees in the tendency to collapse or conflate distinctions between natural objects and technical objects, not merely a metaphysical error but a form of moral panic as well, which ultimately serves to depoliticize the technical existence of humans. Near the end of the first part of Du mode d'existence des objets techniques, he strives to clarify the stakes historically and politically: as, in modern times, humans have constructed machines that can bear tools and thus replace them as technical individuals or tool bearers, humans have tended wrongly to apply ideas of slavery and freedom to this new relation. Such a mistake is not purely or simply psychological in origin. It derives from actual conditions in which humans now tend to work over or under machines, rather than alongside them. Yet, when humans look at their relationship to machines in terms of slavery and freedom, they merely repeat these conditions, striving either to liberate themselves from machines or to enslave the machines once and for all. Needless to say, the fear of a robot revolution grows as a result. Simondon's comments suggest that thinking in (largely juridical) terms of human freedom from, or mastery over, machines constitutes a genuine blockage for progressive politics. This is why he pointedly remarks, "The robot does not exist.”

>This is also why I began by contesting the cyborg model in which a fascination with the blurring of the distinction between humans and machines, oscillating breathlessly between technophilia and technophobia, forecloses any reckoning with technical equality or technicity and reifies the paradigm of freedom and slavery by displacing it onto juridical paradigms of law and transgression.

[Anonymous No.11926164]

>>11926156
6/12

>If Simondon singles out this wrong thinking about freedom for attention, it is not because his politics bear no relation to democracy or freedom. On the contrary, when he insists on the ontological equality between humans and machines, he is positing something analogous to what Rancière styles as "aesthetic equality.”

>Aesthetic equality, then, is a matter of equal participation in aesthetic production, which does not preclude difference; indeed, it assumes it. Similarly, when Simondon insists on ontological equality between humans and machines, he implies a sort of "technical equality,” which is another way of describing "technicity." As with Rancière's notion of aesthetic equality, technicity implies equal technical participation even as it presumes difference. While technical equality, like aesthetic equality, is no guarantee of political equality or democracy, political equality is not practical or operative without a relation to this technical operativity (which is also, like aesthetics, a sort of inoperativity in the sense that it refuses utilitarian operativity).

>Simondon characterizes the internal milieu of the machine in terms of recurrent causality. A host of other, apparently synonymous terms also peppers his account, such as "circular causality," "circularity," “recursive causality," "reciprocal relations," and even "feedback loop." "Recurrent causality" is by far the favored expression. But what does this term mean? As the technical individual becomes more concrete, synthetic, and practical, its internal ground, the spacing between elements, ceases to be empty space; it ceases to rely on purely logical relations. The inventor begins to see that elements can be used with more than one function, for instance, thus tightening up the relations between elements as well as producing the possibility for internal circularity, feedback, reciprocity, or recurrence, and thus, ultimately, for self-regulation. I should add that, although I am presenting this transformation from the point of view of the inventor, it is clear that the invention, on its side, can be said to enable and suggest such concretization. It is not passively altered. Technical individuation proposes connections and new relations. Although it is too much to say that the machine is thinking for itself, it is clear that the inventor and invention are thinking with one another, and this thinking, insofar as it is a relation, is on both sides, and it is entirely real.

interestingly, this brings us all the way back to Cosmotech #1, which started this adventure b/c of YH’s book on recursivity and contingency and
Adventures
In
Shitposting

[Anonymous No.11926169]

>>11926164
7/12

>To summarize the account of technical individuation thus far, what characterizes it is, first of all, the relation between form and ground. As the individual becomes concrete, it also differentiates, resulting in a stronger bifurcation of its ground into internal and external milieus. The ground of the crystal bifurcates into contrast and spacing, but, because these two aspects of the ground do not entail recurrent causality, they are not potentialized to the same degree that the doubling of the ground in technical individuation is. The ground of technical individual shows recurrent causality, both internally and externally. But these two sites of recurrent causality are not symmetrical or identical. As such, the internal ground and external ground have to "communicate" more actively across their asymmetry, and have to stabilize that communication. The result is a self-regulating individual, closer to a natural object than a physical object. But how are we to relate to this self-regulating individual?

>It is here that Simondon's resistance to automatism is telling. He is as impatient with those who characterize machines in terms of automatism as he is with those who simply reject machines. Evidently, then, his emphasis on self-regulation is not an invitation for us to stand back and let machines run on their own, automatically. Rather, he continually reminds us, we're already involved in machines. There is something of the human in machines. At one level, this is obvious, since humans make machines. But, again for Simondon, it is not merely a matter of the human origins of machines in the sense that humans made machines and therefore can choose to use them or not to use them, for posing the question in this way leads us back to applying the paradigm of freedom versus slavery to human-machine relations. In other words, what is human in machines cannot be seized consciously or rationally in the sense of pure reason or cognition. In effect, how machines are "used" (or rather, participated in) should follow from how machines are invented. It is precisely because invention proceeds in a hands-on, practical, and inventive fashion, as a sort of dialogue between humans and machines that engages the preindividual within humans, that humans should not strive to "use" machines in a purely rational, utilitarian fashion. Rather, that relation to machines needs to sustain a practical inventive engagement with what is human in machines—in a word, technicity.

this brings things in line with stiegler too, although as you will see, stiegler and simondon don’t necessarily agree all the way.

[Anonymous No.11926173]

>>11926169
8/12

>As Combes notes, such a view of human-machine relations is not compatible with a notion of technics as a means of compensating for or supplementing an originary lack, as Bernard Stiegler would have it. Stiegler seems to adopt a rather Lacanian point of departure: humans are deficient from birth; they are born too early, and to meet their needs, must compensate for their weakness, which they accomplish first by making tools and then machines. But, the argument goes, such compensation or supplementation goes far beyond needs, taking on a life of its own, so to speak. Thus machines swarm over the world, as a massive overcompensation for our weakness. Ultimately, then, the problem of human-machine relations turns into a psychoanalytic problem: only by recognizing and coming to terms with our primordial fragility will we be able to break our vicious cycles of technological overcompensation.

>Again, as Combes notes, such an understanding of technics, exemplified in Stiegler's notion of “originary technicity," is completely at odds with Simondon's understanding of technicity. It is not that Simondon does not countenance the fragility (or, we might say, precarity) of humans, but it is not for him an ontological ground. Humans for him are not originally or primarily fragile or lacking; they are also potentiality, capacity, powers in the world. Our situation vis-à-vis technics today is indeed precarious, but Simondon does not see it as a psychological or existential problem: if the situation is grim, it is not because we have ignored that we are ontologically constituted by lack.

the shadow of Lacan hangs over all of france to this day.

[Anonymous No.11926178]

>>11926173
9/12

>With the advent of technical individuals that bear tools, humans find themselves situated either below or above the machine. They become either caretakers of the machine or supervisors of ensembles of machines, a contrast reminiscent of that between worker and foreman or capitalist in Marx. For Simondon, such a genealogy is also remarkably close to the cyborg or cybernetic understanding of technicity, in which humans oscillate between enslaving machines and being enslaved by them. Not surprisingly, then, Simondon introduces a strange twist in this initially straightforward history: in fact, the role of tool-bearer, or of technical individual, does not rightly belong to humans. It is as if they had preemptively seized it from machines but had forgotten and come to mistake toolbearing as their function. In other words, while Simondon proposes a break with the industrial factory system that effectively makes humans into workers under, or supervisors over, machines, he is not interested in a return to a premodern guild or artisan formation in which the role of humans was closer to the technical individual. In effect, he is proposing that humans dig deeper into their evolutionary sources, to seek something prior to the technical being and human being that traverses them.

>Simondon sees the emergence of technical individuals or machines in modern times: with the gradual "liberation" of technical procedures that were formerly "enslaved" or inferiorized, that is, forcibly associated with lesser social positions and actively disavowed, inventors begin to attend to the potentiality within the operations of technical objects, resulting in machines. But Simondon is adamant: such progress is not a matter of greater automation but of a great margin of indetermination (due to recurrent causality) within machines and between machines and the world. This is technical individuation from the point of view of ontogeny, of the genesis of an individual machine, so to speak. But, because machines also exist in series and in ensembles, we also need to look at their phylogeny, at the relation between reproduction and transformation. On the basis of his running analogy with the natural object, Simondon notes that technical evolution is very different from that of organisms: with machines, it is as if the organ separated from the body and functioned as a seed or germ for a new individual or a new line of individuals. Thus we return to the point of the departure of this essay as well, to Canguilhem's analogy between machine and organism in which machines have organs like organisms. In Simondon, a similar analogy comes into play, which thoroughly defamiliarizes our sense of how machines form series.

[Anonymous No.11926181]

>>11926178
10/12

>In sum, technical being unfolds or evolves in series by articulating relations between three phases of its being, which are called technical elements, technical individuals, and technical ensembles. (Recall that the technical ensemble is like a field of rationality in which the technical individual is a mediator, a threshold for a paradigm or dispositif.) If Simondon describes the series of technical evolution as serrated, it is because he looks for resistance to the linear vision of technological progress in which we move from, say, the needle to the sewing machine, to the sweat shop that mobilizes scores of workers busy at their machines under the supervision of a boss, or to the fantasy of a completely automated garment factory without human workers at all. It is precisely this linear vision of technology that leads humans to fear the machine, for even the sewing machine implies a teleological movement toward the enslavement or ultimate redundancy of humans in the domain of fabrication. Simondon shows that there is no evidence that this is how things have proceeded or will proceed. Again, we suspect that if things have often turned out badly, it is because of the imposition of economic concerns upon technical individuation, which forces a rectilinear movement and a simplistic temporality of progress. In any event, Simondon's attention to the relation between three modes of technical being—element, individual, and ensemble—allows him to parse the heterochrony of technical evolution: technical evolution does not proceed from element (organ) to individual (organism) and then to ensemble (culture), for technical individuals do not reproduce as organisms do.

>Crucial, then, for coming to terms with technical evolution is not to mistake the function of the technical individual. We must not assume that humans should play that role, for in effect, we then begin to collapse the distinction between human and machine, entering into a war over which will play the role of technical individual. The facts of technical evolution suggest to Simondon that, rather than impose rectilinear progress on technicity, humans should insert themselves into the true tendency of technical evolution, which is nonlinear and discontinuous, by situating themselves alongside technical individuals, and thereby participating equally in the relation between technical elements and technical ensembles. The result would be, if we paint it in utopian hues, technical ensembles and fields of rationality that assume and prolong equality-in-difference, between humans and between humans and machines. This is what machines might do with us.

[Anonymous No.11926188]

>>11926181
11/12

>In any event, humans' becoming-minor vis-à-vis technical individuals in Simondon hinges on a kind of neoteny of the human being, in which humans "return" to a moment that might be described as historically prior to their usurpation of the role of technical individual, to a more juvenile relation to technology that entails a genuine reckoning with technical elements as technical values that are autonomous of other concerns, such as economic value. With this "rediscovery" of the essence of technicity, humans will no longer strive to play the role of technical individual, or to play the role of servant or master to machines. The new role for humans might be described as technician, physician, or diplomat vis-à-vis machines, which implies the discovery of new kinds of technical ensembles for working with machines, closer to laboratories, hospitals, and embassies than to factories. Indeed, in an era when communications technologies have enlarged the politics of what counts as work, as a complement to Combes’s emphasis on the political usefulness of seeing in the perspective of factory workers a form of counterknowledge, we should add the perspectives of these other workers-with-machines. At the same time, we should resist the temptation to signal one specific perspective or figure to bear the historical or evolutionary burden of transformation, which would transform the politics of knowledge into the politics of militant redemption.

>Simondon's description may indeed verge on the utopian and redemptive, if it is not qualified in relation to politics, and if we lose the concern for specificity and thus techniques and apparatuses. In effect, the role of the human in Simondon is reminiscent of what Foucault called the “specific intellectual" in contrast to the universal intellectual. It implies a politics in which one's technical role or technical value is not beside the point, but is instead the point of departure, what brings you to the threshold. Unlike Foucault, however, Simondon does not contrast the specific intellectual with the universal. This is because, in Simondon, as human beings rediscover technical value, they also discover technical equality, and in effect, technical universality.

you can see why YH would think that this was a guy badly overlooked in this story.

[Anonymous No.11926200]

>>11926188
12/12

>There are now, however, multiple universes, because as Simondon embarks on his inquiry into the technical essence of the human, he discovers the "place" of the human, that is, the relation of the human in the universe. The essence of the human lies not in natural right, natural sovereignty, or even communicative reason. It lies in technical equality, which can now be glossed as the relation between efficiency and finality, between efficient causality and final causality, which is also the "neutral point" of the human where its technical eventfulness transforms the power to technically affect and to be technically affected by universes of value.

>As Simondon concludes in his essay on the limits of human progress: "The questions of the limits of human progress cannot be posed without that of the limits of thought, because it is thought that appears as the principal depository for evolutionary potential in the human species."

so that's your Quick-ish Rundown on gilbert simondon, or at least a very condensed intro. i have a couple of other books open also on simondon but i feel 0.4% more aware of what simondon was going after and why YH thought he was so interesting. perhaps you guys feel the same way.

[Anonymous No.11926267]

>>11925116
>>11925366
also thank you gents for keeping the thread alive, as always, and long enough to get here! Cosmotech 5 has been quite fun.

[Anonymous No.11926420]

>>11926267
You are welcome. I'm glad it resulted in another stream of your posts. Yeah I just noticed how 5 was already coming to a close and how we may have to usher in part 6 as early as today if things hold up at this rate.

[Anonymous No.11926778]

>>11926420
well, the magic #300 is always a kind of an accomplishment, so i'll be happy if we can get there again (cue the michael jackson song). i'm thinking tomorrow or monday probably for that milestone. it's kind of hard to evaluate because that's part of the mystery of threads, whether new anons come in or new conversations or ideas percolate and so on. but - the curious fate of #3 aside - this will be five threads in a row that will have reached 300+ posts, which is really amazing if you think about it.

i have some various other stuff from karen barad, mumford, combes et al that's all varyingly interesting, but as >>11925743 pointed out, there's actually a PDF of The Question Concerning Technology in China on hand now in the mega for anyone who wants to read YH. which is pretty great news! so clearly some stuff from him will have to come in at some point too. i don't think he's quite land-tier yet, but mostly it's because i think of Cosmotech as being this loop-circuit from hegel to land. but what is quite wonderful about his ideas is that they give us a way of kind of closing one chapter (within a chapter, within a chapter, within a chapter) and moving on in life beyond Nick Land's Wild Ride in a way that doesn't discredit him. if anything, YH only clarifies why land is right about many things...but he gives even the darkest landian clouds a silver lining.

>except for some anons, such as >>11923837
>fufufu

but it all kind of depends on where anons are at. sometimes you need to take a break between these things to to refill the tank a little bit also. i pretty much always have something that i want to talk about but i also don't want to water down the brand too much or it gets stale and boring. in terms of the Gallery of Cosmotech Heroes we have done some pretty good service to most of them over the course of the past couple of threads. simondon was really still kind of an unknown quantity for me in many ways, but the afterward to that combes book cleared up some of the mystery there.

plus i miss having the images, that's part of the fun of posting. so i guess Cosmotech 6 will happen at some point too, but i'd like to get to the magic number here first and celebrate appropriately. here's hoping!

[Anonymous No.11926804]

>>11926778
Which one was the book you quoted on Simondon?

[Anonymous No.11926845]

>>11926804
it's from the afterword to muriel combes' book (>>11921839, >>11926126).

and oh man. i'm already starting to comb through the PDF of The Question Concerning Technology in China. frankly, Feels Good Man to actually be using YH's actual term Cosmotechnics so that this whole thing doesn't feel like such a pirate op:

>I propose what I call cosmotechnics as an attempt to open up the question of technology and its history, which for various reasons has been closed down over the last century.

>I will give a preliminary definition of cosmotechnics here: it means the unification between the cosmic order and the moral order through technical activities (although the term cosmic order is itself tautological since the Greek word kosmos means order). The concept of cosmotechnics immediately provides us with a conceptual tool with which to overcome the conventional opposition between technics and nature, and to understand the task of philosophy as that of seeking and affirming the organic unity of the two. In the remainder of this Introduction, I will investigate this concept in the work of the twentieth-century philosopher Gilbert Simondon and that of some contemporary anthropologists, notably Tim Ingold.

>The magical phase is a mode in which there is hardly any distinction between cosmology and cosmotechnics, since cosmology only makes sense here when it is part of everyday practice. There is a separation only during the modern period, since the study of technology and the study of cosmology (as astronomy) are regarded as two different disciplines— an indication of the total detachment of technics from cosmology, and the disappearance of any overt conception of a cosmotechnics. And yet it would not be correct to say that there is no cosmotechnics in our time. There certainly is: it is what Philippe Descola calls ‘naturalism’, meaning the antithesis between culture and nature, which triumphed in the West in the seventeenth century. In this cosmotechnics, the cosmos is seen as an exploitable standing-reserve, according to what Heidegger calls the world picture (Weltbild). Here we should state that for Simondon, there remains some possibility of reinventing cosmotechnics (although he doesn’t use the term) for our time.

>I would suggest that what Simondon hints at in the third part of On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects is precisely a ‘cosmotechnics’. Once we accept the concept of cosmotechnics, instead of maintaining the opposition between the magic/mythical and science and a progression between the two, we will be able to see that the former, characterized as the ‘speculative organisation and exploitation of the sensible world in sensible terms’, is not necessarily a regression in relation to the latter.

-- Yuk Hui/Cosmotechnics: The Question Concerning Technology in China

and now that perhaps we actually know a little more about simondon, this can be more interesting.

[Anonymous No.11926871]

>>11926845
in other words, "Acceleration That Doesn't Ruin Your Life."

how great would this be?

[Anonymous No.11927413]

>>11926845
I think Yuk Hui, Stiegler and Simondon are fucking retards.
>hurr durr let's just think away these tensions Heidegger presented with chink slave-morality/jungian/derridean shit

Merging "cosmology" and "technics" isn't a fucking end

[Anonymous No.11927692]

>>11927413
>hurr durr let's just think away these tensions Heidegger presented with chink slave-morality/jungian/derridean shit

there is no chink slave-morality shit.
there is no jungian shit.
there is no derridean shit.

these aren't the droids you're looking for.

[Anonymous No.11927783]

>>11927692
Simondon's modes of existence is clearly a jungian philosophy extended to machines

Stiegler's project is about framing all of Heidegger's history of Being into Derridian notions of technicity (techne), and archi-writing which results in a deconstruction of Heidegger's "fallenness" narrative from the time of the Greeks.

Hui's fusion of cosmology and technology is just fucking ridiculous stem-tard shit that could only come out of oriental mysticism.

[Anonymous No.11927911]

>>11927783
>Simondon's modes of existence is clearly a jungian philosophy extended to machines.
jung was never required to make any of this interesting. if you believe it's there it's there, and if that makes it more appealing to you, great. if it's there and you don't like it, okay. again, i don't see what any of this has to do with jung. we've had five of these threads and the occasional reference to JBP here and there. mostly it's been about land, deleuze, et al. jung connections if they are there is stuff that is news to me. and again, it doesn't have a lot of bearing on the thread.

>Stiegler's project is about framing all of Heidegger's history of Being into Derridian notions of technicity (techne), and archi-writing which results in a deconstruction of Heidegger's "fallenness" narrative from the time of the Greeks.
sure. and according to combes, stiegler and simondon aren't saying the same thing. YH seems to appreciate both of them, and i agree. i don't think liking stiegler's work prevents you from liking heidegger's also. heidegger is a giant and he's obviously important. i'm happy to have him back in the conversation, b/c when land showed up heidegger went into deep-freeze. now he's back. this is good news.

>Hui's fusion of cosmology and technology is just fucking ridiculous stem-tard shit that could only come out of oriental mysticism.
it's not the case. for one thing, i'm frankly glad the man speaks six languages and has computer-science chops. that's a good look for a field overrun with Insano-Humanities. it's not ridiculous STEM-tard shit, it's a close reading of heidegger and two other guys who like heidegger. he does like oriental philosophy, and so do i. he thinks the question of tech in china is an interesting one to look at with metaphysical dimensions. that's a good idea.

i mean i'm not persuaded by this. if you don't like it, you don't like it, fine. but in terms of just shitting on these guys without reading the thread - and this is like the fifth installment of a conversation that has been going on for a straight month - i don't know, it just feels like we could be talking about something more interesting.

maybe i'm wrong. maybe you have some awesome stuff to contribute to the conversation. it could be. it never occurred to me to think of jung, i've never been a jung guy anyways. but i guess? and if you like heidegger, great. you will probably enjoy his book Cosmotechnics, because YH likes heidegger too and he's not just setting him up to score points for Oriental Mysticism. and sure, stiegler has things you may disagree with. ok. and he has derrida connections too. derrida is interesting. but this doesn't mean Ha Ha, Derrida Wins Again! it's more interesting than that, imho.

i'm open to criticism. criticism is good. but Stem-Tard Oriental Mysticism Chink-Slave Morality is not it.

[Anonymous No.11928176]

What should one study at uni to ensure that they become part of the tech CEO monarchy?

[Anonymous No.11928325]

>>11928176
my first instinct would be Royalty-Marrying with a graduate degree in Owning a Small Country. a minor in Early Tech Startup Investor would be good too. and probably mandarin.

but, this is cynical. i don't know anon, maybe somebody else will have some better advice. after all of this reading the only advice i have come up with is "don't be stupid and evil at the same time, for long stretches." i want to say that doing all the right things, getting good grades, eating your vegetables and whatever else is the royal road to happiness...but i think byung-chul han did all of this stuff and all he does is write books about burnout and how hollow it all seems. true, i imagine he's got a kind of a cozy life for himself, cycling to work somewhere in germany to give a lecture to grad students, which beats what i will be doing.

but yeah, i don't know. maybe you don't even need to join the monarchy. just get a good job in a field that isn't going to go away soon and maybe whatever spiritual stuff is required to help you sleep at night. just not being galactically stupid, decadent, cruel, lazy and generally evil seems to be enough. i mean literally, like, don't become an Uruk-Hai. i suspect that this is going to actually be more difficult than it would appear on first glance if things continually trend in the direction of madness and stupidity.

>Valmiki the Poet looked down into water held cupped in his hand and saw into the past. Before he looked he thought the world was sweet poison. Men seemed to be living in lies, not knowing where their ways went. The days seemed made of ignorance and doubt, and cast from deception and illusion. But in the water he saw—a dream, a chance, and a great adventure. Valmiki trusted the True and forgot the rest; he found the whole universe like a bright jewel set firm in forgiving and held fast by love. Widen your heart. Abandon anger. Believe me, your few days are numbered; make one fast choice now and no second! Come, clear your heart and quickly walk with me into Brahma, while there is time. -- Ramayana

Yuga is just such a good book. it's just so goddamn good. tomorrow, if the thread is still up, i'll post some stuff from YH from Cosmotechnics that is interesting, but in terms of "wrapping things up" i just can't award Marty Glass enough stars. i'm so glad he wrote this book.

[Anonymous No.11928720]

Bump

[Anonymous No.11929004]

>>11928176
To me, the pseudo-technocracy of blockchain entrepreneurs and ven-capitalists that Thiel and Moldbug are trying to wish into existence is a masturbatory hubris. To allegoricize Gibson, those two are trying to live in Dialta Downes's America, where "tech" is everything and everything is "tech". They're selling you used cars that fly and replace your government. And they're calling back to the same fake Aryan propaganda oil painting of America, to show their customers that they, True Americans, are the ones who will inherit the blockchain Utopia. The monarchs of the gloss-white iSepulchre that they envision are already written into the seed of their chain's Genesis block. There is no combination of upward mobility shrewdness and technical education that will keep you from rotting in their future.

[Anonymous No.11929268]

>>11921305
>Once enlightenment rationalism begins its dominion ever fewer corpses are left hanging around in public places with each passing year, ever fewer skulls are used as paperweights, and ever fewer paupers perish undisturbed on the streets. Even the graveyards are rationalized and tidied up. It is not surprising, therefore, that with Kant thanatology undergoes the most massive reconstruction in its history. The clerical vultures are purged, or marginalized. Death is no longer to be culturally circulated, injecting a transcendent reference into production, and ensuring superterrestrial interests their rights. Instead death is privatized, withdrawn into interiority, to flicker at the edge of the contract as a narcissistic anxiety without public accreditation. Compared to the immortal soul of capital the death of the individual becomes an empirical triviality, a mere re-allocation of stock.

oof

[Anonymous No.11929732]

My experience is defined by an oscillation between two modes: on one pole, a high-velocity integration marked by gregarious urbanity and technical self-evolution, on the other a wild and criminal stasis in primordial forests, a nega-walden. Something in me is trying to smooth out the dissonance.

>The high road to thinking no longer passes through a deepening of human cognition, but rather through a becoming inhuman of cognition, a migration of cognition out into the emerging planetary technosentience reservoir, into 'dehumanized landscapes ... emptied spaces' where human culture will be dissolved.
>Land, Circuitries

When you say "singularity", usually you mean the artificial intelligence takeoff: some researcher at MIT or Carnegie Mellon cracks the code and writes AI that improves itself, taking the burden of decision-making eternally out of human hands. This is not the original definition.

>In his 1958 obituary for John von Neumann, Ulam recalled a conversation with von Neumann about the "ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue."
>(wiki)

The ever accelerating changes in the mode of human life. We await the event horizon where all the old ideas dissolve in a slag of steel and silicon and the shape of human time is irrevocably pushed into the void. Reducing this to artificial intelligence was a mathematician's answer and an easy way out. From the perspective of Ulam and Von Neumann, the singularity would have been the point at which humanity (never separate from technology, not truly) has changed beyond the merest possibility of prediction. A transition which would be impossible to see from the inside.

John Brunner is someone who isn't always mentioned in the Cyberpunk Canon(tm) because he's inconvenient to the narrative. He wrote a novel on overpopulation called Stand on Zanzibar, a dystopian, innately political, pragmatic and revolutionary work that straddles the line between science fiction and philosophy with a playful and destructive gait. It's a novel I've read once, and while I immediately knew I must read it again, I never quite did. He starts Stand on Zanzibar from outside the garden of fiction entirely: He quotes Marshall McLuhan in an analysis of Harold Innis, linked below. Stand on Zanzibar is multidisciplinary theory-fiction, prototypical and nostradamic cyberpunk.

https://i.imgur.com/qwAlNgp.png

It was also published in 1968.

Funny thing, that.

McLuhan and Innis seem to share a lot of thoughts that at least kiss the gravity well of Cosmotechnics, but the book quoted here, The Gutenberg Galaxy, is about advertising, mass media, and the way humanity itself was altered by mass media. In a region of thought where we pursue the way technology penetrates our fundamental humanity, it seems at least worth a spot on my reading list.

[Anonymous No.11929923]

>>11926778
You could maybe try and make each thread have a featured author and try to base the discussion around said author. That could possibly work if in the previous thread you announced which author would become the focus of the following cosmotech general. Sort of like a loose take on a reading group or something, even though I wouldn't mind having other threads for us to have those in as time passes.

[Anonymous No.11930583]

Bump

[Anonymous No.11930956]

yeehaw!

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

and also this?
>image:
>https://thecinematicexperiance.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/300-the-spartan-movie.jpg?w=547

i don't know what kind of universe would produce This Is Disco-Sparta but all i can say that is that if it can produce that it can do anything. deleuze was right you guys, presence is hallucination.

that's five Cosmotechs in a row that hit the bump limit. five! incredible! since the last thread i'm averse to making the three hundredth post myself, but i'll do this one.

we did it boys. we did it. we did it again

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

[Anonymous No.11931015]

ah Cosmotech is so much fun. it is just too much fun.

>>11928720
ty anon

>>11929268
>oof
yes. Oof is right. but that is the power of Uncle Nick for you. he really was like the defibrillator of continental philosophy. and you have to bear in mind the time in which he was writing also: the late 80s and early 90s were perhaps when the successive Lyotard Wave, Foucault Wave, Baudrillard Wave and Derrida Waves had all passed in europe, but were coming on strong in the US. land was doing his CCRU experiments during *that* time. i don't embiggen land because i really love his visions about the future, but because he was keying in on things that had really been overlooked, imho. and he basically produced a wave of his own that is playing out now, or perhaps has played out, or may even be yet to really present itself in full. but yeah, he was fucking brilliant then. he was a no-joke Continental Philosopher and those guys have The Power. it's the power of really good writing.

>>11929004
>The monarchs of the gloss-white iSepulchre that they envision are already written into the seed of their chain's Genesis block. There is no combination of upward mobility shrewdness and technical education that will keep you from rotting in their future.
i can't remember who it was that said this about Facebook, that it was like a life-long custom obituary. like the tomb of some Egyptian pharaoh, with all of your victories carved on the inside, so that you can bask in them forever. but such is our world. we fear death and we love souvenirs. we love *owning the image.* it is a perilous thing to do. and yet i wonder if this is one of those things were there is no *alternative* to Wonderland, only only other doors within it that just keep opening up forever and ever. like a version of Alice in Wonderland in which the real plot twist at the end is that the Ruby Slippers don't work. you thought they would work. they do not work. if i were a movie guy, it's exactly where i would end Part One of the story and roll credits.

>>11929732
>My experience is defined by an oscillation between two modes: on one pole, a high-velocity integration marked by gregarious urbanity and technical self-evolution, on the other a wild and criminal stasis in primordial forests, a nega-walden. Something in me is trying to smooth out the dissonance.
just here to say i support this line of thinking.

>>11929732
>When you say "singularity..."
you nailed it. this is how people Get Land Wrong but you are not doing that. in a sense, capital-teleoplexy *is* that singularity, in a deep, nascent, or even dreaming form. there may not be an Event, but if there were, on the scale he envisions it, one has to wonder if the mysterious vanishing of reality we all intimate isn't a substantial a part of it. something is different now, somehow. maybe it always was this way. but that feeling of being wired for the future, of modernity...

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.11931049]

>>11929732
>the singularity would have been the point at which humanity (never separate from technology, not truly) has changed beyond the merest possibility of prediction. A transition which would be impossible to see from the inside.

that's it. and in a sense, this is where culture has this kind of regulatory function. the meaning of time as understood relatively in this way. and so too the meaning of *death:* are we hard atheists? do we believe in a Day of Judgement, a Day of Reckoning? are we aligning ourselves for Hindu-Buddhist metempsychosis, in which what has been done before shall be done again? are we unironically planning for cognitive upload, cloning? all of the above? none? as individuals, perhaps, none of these things matter, or all of them do, and we grant that we all must work out our own salvation with diligence. but culturally, large numbers of dreaming human beings have an impact on the way things play out. it's not so crazy to talk about the meaning of religion and philosophy in this Brave New World of ours, especially not in what appears to be a nascent age of anarchy and faith, where *fidelity to a metanarrative* becomes a real form of currency and CTRL. this too belongs to the history of postmodernity. from skepticism about all metanarratives to the ironic plot twist that necessitates fidelity to them. you have to laugh, sometimes. and weep. probably both. but here we are.

also, that quote you posted from McLuhan/Innis is much too interesting for me to properly parse without a lot more coffee, so i will come back to that one later. but it looks brilliant. before Cyberpunk was, McLuhan was. he's so underrated. the line about 'an alphabet graven on stone not being the same thing as an alphabet written on light paper' - how many things like this did he just say *accidentally* that people passed over and thought, well, there goes Marshall again saying crazy things? it's fucking crazy. he was a true Cosmonaut/coal-mine canary of what was coming in every sense of the word. wickedly underrated.

as you say:

>McLuhan and Innis seem to share a lot of thoughts that at least kiss the gravity well of Cosmotechnics, but the book quoted here, The Gutenberg Galaxy, is about advertising, mass media, and the way humanity itself was altered by mass media. In a region of thought where we pursue the way technology penetrates our fundamental humanity, it seems at least worth a spot on my reading list.

undoubtedly this. McLuhan is always the deal. Live, and On The Air, in neon. live and on the air. it's just one of those incredible lines swept under the carpet in the torrent of 1950s-60s consumer bliss. people had *no idea* what was going on. it was all just happening too fast.

image:
http://widnesvikings.co.uk/~media/images/imagesource.php?image=10397.jpg&maxwidth=600

[Anonymous No.11931124]

>>11929923
yeah. you're right about this. i mean the one guy i was thinking we would want to do next was Yuk Hui, given that a) 'Cosmotech' itself comes from his book b) we actually *have* a copy of his book in PDF (>>11925743, and cheers again anon) and c) this started with a discussion about his book and now that there's been some useful greentext about simondon to help that looking at the actual book itself that spawned this thing would be a good look.

in terms of having a featured author and basing discussion around that author, you're right about this. my attention and mind tends to wander around a lot, which is why i post in the way i do, the schizo-rambling where Everything Connects and yet perhaps it is hard to tell where things are actually going. one of the things i do hear myself say is that this is a story about the journey from hegel to land which runs through marx, heidegger, and D&G, with YH playing a kind of important role because he opens up the possibility for life after Nick Land.

YH, in other words, brings us up to *today* in a way that i am just over the moon about, because it's just so germane. the simondon greentext i was bringing in earlier really also presents a picture of a shift in thinking away from a fundamentally *economic* aspect and into a technical dimension, which is, i think, a fundamental re-orientation or confucius-style Rectification of Names, continental philosophically-speaking. because to my mind the thing is that Spectacle means Economics + Aesthetics, and for decades we have been in this weird place of going, yeah, i know the Spectacle is death, but *i can't tell the difference,* and even if i could, *maybe it wouldn't matter to me.* and again, what YH is doing is saying, you have to think this thing in terms of an intelligenesis *and not in terms of a revolution.* and even the Matrix would have been a different film if it were so...

image:
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/TO-LFVHpA4s/maxresdefault.jpg

the Matrix is not only Spectacle, it is also Volitional Spectacle. which makes it, in a way, not quite the same thing. or consider vaporwave and the rest: the flirtation with fascism and those aesthetics that eventually become indistinguishable from the real thing. it is highly possible, in other words, that there is nothing so ironic as fascism, which is also - in a political sense - as Real as it gets. and this is How It Be in 2018 and beyond. it's a feels > reals world, a world of aesthetics and economics, and both land and baudrillard (and many others, but especially those two) are without peer in their analyses and diagnoses of these phenomena.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.11931206]

>>11929923
so me being me, i have a kind of preference for wanting to hold the reins fairly loose on these things, not only because of the way my own addled brain works but also because of my desire to create fruitful cross-pollination wherever possible. but you are absolutely right that a little focus would be a good idea also. so i'm not quite sure how to approach this.

i should probably go back and re-tweak my bibliographies as well. early editions here:

>>/lit/thread/11823861#p11835198
>>/lit/thread/S11823861#p11835482

...but that's a lot, and i don't want them to be prohibitive. lots of people are capable of insightfully commenting on all of this stuff without reading that, but it can seem perhaps overwhelming too, and a closer focus on a smaller number of authors would probably prevent people from feeling overwhelmed, which would be good.

Marty Glass - blessings be upon him - has given a fairly good Short List of authors who have described his world-view, which is also very much like my world-view, and they are

>Lewis Mumford
>Jacques Ellul
>Jean Baudrillard
>Neil Postman

and those are just his historians and theorists. for the Traditionalists:

>I draw heavily upon both, Western Masters and the sophia perennis or Wisdom tradition: religion, as it is usually named: Revelation. The contribution of the few who are at home in both universes of discourse, in both archives, such as Frithjof Schuon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, René Guénon, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Marco Pallis, Mircea Eliade, Martin Lings, and Huston Smith, is priceless, and they are my principal Masters.

Spengler should be there too, imho. the five - seven guys who i think open and close the Cosmotech Loop are

>Hegel
>Marx
>Nietzsche
>Heidegger
>Lacan
>D&G
>Land

and YH, who is not quite in that echelon, but who is super-interesting and chronologically important. and fucking Alfred North Whitehead, who is just wonderfully cozy. somewhere in those guys is a story being told about time-travel in some form (>>11910526).

so yeah. some kind of itinerary would be a good idea, clearly. i guess i could open the floor to whoever you guys are into reading next. i'm leaning towards going with Cosmotechnics itself, for obvious reasons.

>but there is so much shitposting i want to do also about FF6 and Starcraft and capitalism and
>control yourself girardfag
>sorry inner self

[Anonymous No.11931314]

>>11929732
okay and that quote you posted is absolute fucking genius. there's a line in deleuze and the postscript on societies of control that reminds me of this also. compare and contrast:

>There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons. -- deleuze

>When he interrelates the development of the steam press with 'the consolidation of the vernaculars' and the rise of nationalism and revolution he is not reporting anybody's point of view, least of all his own. He is setting up a mosaic configuration or galaxy for insight … Innis makes no effort to "spell out" the interrelations between the components in his galaxy. He offers no consumer packages in his later work, but only do-it-yourself kits... -- mcluhan

source:
https://genius.com/Gilles-deleuze-postscript-on-the-societies-of-control-annotated

and you are right anon: 1968. an extraordinary year this, arguably the high point of the Age of Aquarius. in a way, it even reminds me of another historical parallel: the fact that heidegger and tolkien, who were on opposite sides of two world wars, were - imho - arguably describing the same phenomenon in writing and in mythology-fiction. heidegger's philosophy to me is *beautifully* described by tolkien: all of it, the Openness to Being, the feeling for nature, the power of spoken poetry, the fear of Mordorification of the world, and much else. the irony, of course, is that in heidegger's case he really was working for Sauron, but, of course, this is why the hermeneutics are necessary. to understand why the germans did what they did is not only to require us to look at european history, but also the history of technology. which is what Mumford does so well: the real story of megamechanics does not begin with the industrial revolution, but arguably millennia before this. and it's what land says as well: if capitalism has a relation to philosophical *time,* it is a story which winds through Kant and Benedictine monasteries on its way to where we are now, which is the birth of an automatic planet...

obviously the current reaction against neoliberalism - which includes moments like kanye west gushing over trump - is a referendum on where the Age of Aquarius went
>slow clap
>ok inner self i know i didn't say it was brilliant
but this is the point about this stuff today. we discuss philosophically what, in a sense, we do *not* want to enact politically, or at least *blindly*...

[Anonymous No.11931322]

i have Family Obligations today so i will be away from my PC for a bit but i should be able to sneak back once in a while. that's my contribution to Cosmotech today for now.

as always, enormous and profound gratitude. hope you guys find some of this illuminating or enjoy it as much as i do. it is always my very sincere pleasure to meme it up with you guys here. catch up with you again soon.

[Anonymous No.11931388]

>>11931049
>the meaning of time as understood relatively in this way. and so too the meaning of *death:* are we hard atheists? do we believe in a Day of Judgement, a Day of Reckoning? are we aligning ourselves for Hindu-Buddhist metempsychosis, in which what has been done before shall be done again? are we unironically planning for cognitive upload, cloning? all of the above? none?

image:
https://selectbutton.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/original/3X/8/9/89d2bf6905659bfc352f2c769800261ad5156c9c.jpg

[Anonymous No.11931495]

thank you for making these threads girardfag. it will probably take me years of reading to process a fraction of these ideas, but the archived threads will be of great help.

[Anonymous No.11931503]

oh, and by the way, i have found a way to efficiently scan the new negarestani book. will probably be on libgen by next week, i'll post a link in the next cosmotechnics thread then.

[Anonymous No.11931622]

>>11931495
it is my very sincere pleasure anon. Cosmotech is at once i think the culmination of my shitposting here and perhaps the proper name for a long-standing obsession that extends back several years (and contains also the ghost of a failed manuscript or two). it took me years of reading also, but in my case it was just because a small number of authors really "scratched where it itched" in an existential sense. but i'm happy to think that some of this can be transmuted into something other than mere shitposting. that's a good feel. and so thanks also for contributing to the threads, bumping, et al. this stuff is nothing if not a collective cross-pollination of ideas, but i'm sincerely grateful for being able to think these things through and share them with you guys. it really is my pleasure!

>>11931503
sweet
sweet sweetness

okay! looking forward to it. and yeah, reza is another one of those guys that like simondon i don't know if i have really that that Vulcan Mind-Meld with. some of these authors i feel like i have a pretty solid grip on (you never really know, in a sense, but that's okay) but i wouldn't be able to give anyone a Quick Rundown on reza negarestani. i'm definitely interested in reading intelligence and spirit for that reason, because he really is up there with land in a few key categories. land has had a comparatively much larger influence, and he was the original coal-mine canary (and also, Meltdown is fucking iconic!) - but reza matters too.

they *all* matter. nietzsche's epic mic-drop - Who Gave Us The Sponge To Wipe Away The Horizon - is *still* an unanswered question. it's what i was alluding to here (>>11931388): that, in a sense, what we (read: me) want to do is reclaim something from this that makes this not always a question of despair, because imho despair is what leads to politics, and politics is death to actual thinking. there are a *lot* of ways not only to understand what is going on today, but how we got to this point, and all the implications and ramifications therein that we can handle without losing our shit completely.

oh, and apparently my Family Obligations today have been cancelled, so...yeah, we can talk about whatever is on anyone's mind today also.
>oh god
>look i don't make the rules inner self.
>stop him. stop him before he posts again
>oh come on inner self. you must enjoy this too in some sense. we'll have images again soon also

i'll also try to give Cosmotech #6 a proper OP this time with some links and such too. i just haven't worked out a theme yet, or if we are going to have one, and so on. that's all open to discuss for now as long as the thread is up. i'll make a new one after this one hits the archives.

[Anonymous No.11931636]

>>11931206
I'm surprised Christopher Lasch didn't made it in Marty's list.

[Anonymous No.11931673]

>>11931636
good point.

there's also love for TLP in these things too. that we are all hypnotized today by selfies is no accident.

[Anonymous No.11931751]

Oi, op, explain to me what exactly do you get from these two books (you recommended) and how exactly they relate to things you are interested in, except the obvious - From Dawn to Decadence and The Passion of the Western Mind.

From Dawn to Decadence is borderline reactionary, angry, but eloquent rant against modernity while Passion is screeching against to modern reductionist approaches in science and philosophy, with even some new age tendencies in the end. Do you agree with the author stance on those topics or you read them in the negative?

[Anonymous No.11931867]

come on over lads

>>11931809

[Anonymous No.11931896]

>>11931751
i read them both in the positive, which is what makes our world as complex as it is. this is both an age of late-late-capital, postmodernity, but also something quite possibly like an Age of Corrections if not a rectification of names. i agree with *both* of those authors. things have indeed slid into a place of unironic decadence, and yet it is precisely because of this that a kind of new age sensibility in some sense is required. it's why i agree with both of those guys. barzun and tarnas are both recapping intellectual and cultural history, and really, that is my thing also. and it's why land plays such a crucial role in so many things, and wears so many hats for me. he's articulating to my mind he need for a paradigm shift (well, in a sense, it would be more accurate to say that there has already *been* a paradigm shift, and we are in a way catching up...but hegel said this also, that being the whole point of the Owl of Minerva taking flight at dusk).

barzun and tarnas are both imho one-volume guides to history and culture. they're not exhaustive, and they're aimed at the general reader, mainly. i also like the zimmerman guide to heidegger because heidegger is a hugely important figure in this story - massively - and because the zimmerman book can help to explain the context of heidegger's work, b/c he can be daunting to read.

i have a lot of love for new age stuff and i can be crusty at the same time. i don't regard these as being mutually exclusive, tho. and the whole point of throwing some shine at YH and talking about Cosmotech as White Hat Acceleration, as a potentially *positive* thing, comes out of all of this.

let's discuss this in the next thread tho, this one is on the way down...

[Anonymous No.11932657]

Bump