Cosmotechnics/Acceleration General #6

[Anonymous No.11931809]

Who Gave Us The Sponge To Wipe Away The Horizon Edition

>Previous installments
>>/lit/thread/S11733072
>>/lit/thread/S11778448
>>/lit/thread/S11803295
>>/lit/thread/S11823861
>>/lit/thread/S11887728

>Economics/Philosophy Mega:
https://mega.nz/#F!lkNUwIYI!cugQ-Yoclk6AEnzWbfMA6Q

>r/theoryfiction archive
https://www.reddit.com/r/theoryfiction/

>Poememenon, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Nick Land
https://www.urbanomic.com/document/poememenon/

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

>Some Guy's Acceleration Reading List:
>>/lit/thread/S11823861#p11835482

>Atmospherics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNkxqpCz87M&t=1155s
>submissions for playlist are **open**

[Anonymous No.11931819]

Animal Money

[Anonymous No.11931838]

Who The Fuck is Yuk Hui and Why Should I Care

>Good Essay:
https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/superhumanity/179224/on-automation-and-free-time/

>YH on land, NRx, trump, &c:
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/81/125815/on-the-unhappy-consciousness-of-neoreactionaries/

>Passing from the digital to the symbolic:
https://www.hkw.de/media/texte/pdf/2017_2/2o3tiger/170530_2o3Tiger_PDFs_Yuk_Hui_press_new.pdf

>Philosophy of tech in china:
http://networkcultures.org/geert/2017/09/04/philosophy-of-technology-in-china-second-interview-with-yuk-hui/?pdf=1446

>Cosmotechnics as cosmopolitics:
http://worker01.e-flux.com/pdf/article_161887.pdf

>On the existence of digital objects:
http://libertar.io/lab/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/On-the-Existence-of-Digital-Objects-Yuk-Hui-45-731.pdf

[Anonymous No.11931858]

>Land Accelerationism:
https://jacobitemag.com/2017/05/25/a-quick-and-dirty-introduction-to-accelerationism/
http://www.xenosystems.net/neoreaction/
https://oldnicksite.wordpress.com/2012/03/02/the-dark-enlightenment-part-1/ (NOTE: 4 parts)
https://www.urbanomic.com/book/accelerate/

>also Moldbug
https://moldbuggery.blogspot.com/

>Dirty rundown on Land's influences:
Bataille, Deleuze, Guattari, Nietzsche, Gödel, Burroughs, Cantor, Gibson, Reich, Marx, Schopenhauer, Crowley, Kant, Hoppe

>Another assorted philosophy/history bibliography:
>>/lit/thread/11823861#p11835198

[Anonymous No.11931912]

Acceleration/Teleoplexy

>§00. 'Acceleration' as it is used here describes the time-structure of capital accumulation. It thus references the 'roundaboutness' founding Bohm-Bawerk's model of capitalization, in which saving and technicity are integrated within a single social process-diversion of resources from immediate consumption into the enhancement of productive apparatus. Consequently, as basic co-components of capital, technology and economics have only a limited, formal distinctiveness under historical conditions of ignited capital escalation. The indissolubly twin-dynamic is techonomic (cross-excited commercial industrialism). Acceleration is techonomic time.

>§09. Teleoplexy, or (self-reinforcing) cybernetic intensification, describes the wave-length of machines, escaping in the direction of extreme ultra-violet, among the cosmic rays. It correlates with complexity, connectivity, machinic compression, extropy, free energy dissipation, efficiency, intelligence, and operational capability, defining a gradient of absolute but obscure improvement that orients socioeconomic selection by market mechanisms, as expressed through measures of productivity, competitiveness, and capital asset value.

>§10. Accelerationism has a real object only insofar as there is a teleoplexic thing, which is to say: insofar as capitalization is a natural-historical reality. The theoretical apprehension of teleoplexy through its commercial formality as an economic phenomenon (price data) presents accelerationism, at once, with its greatest conceptual resource and its most ineluctable problem. Minimally, the accelerationist formulation of a rigorous techonomic naturalism involves it in a triple problematic. complicated by commercial relativism: historical virtuality; and systemic reflexivity.

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

[Anonymous No.11931980]

>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

[Anonymous No.11932131]

Oh shit it's happening again already!

[Anonymous No.11932412]

>tfw too dumb to understand any of this

[Anonymous No.11932454]

Came across this interesting article on /pol/
>>>>/pol/189414453
https://www.rt.com/news/441230-stephen-hawking-superhuman-race/

[Anonymous No.11932466]

>>11932412
It's mostly navel-gazing. You're fine, anon.

[Anonymous No.11932470]

>>11932131
it is. hopefully we attract some of the same shadow cabal commentariat from previous threads! plus, i really wanted to make an Official /lit/-style Thread for once, with the necessary stuff in the OP and so on. and, tbqh, feels good man. it's more professional this way. i too thought i might want to take a break for a bit but i couldn't resist making a new thread with all that fun stuff in it. it's nice to have it more or less in one place so that things don't always feel like everything is in a perpetual state of catching up with everything else.
>which is how it is probably is in reality, but Cosmotech is a species of utopian literature, so the rules are different

i think my first extended Greentext Spree will be probably be selections from YH and Cosmotechnics.

>In his recent article “How the Enlightenment Ends” (The Atlantic, June 2018), Henry Kissinger joins the Gegenaufklärer (as well as the Dark Aufklärer) and announces the end of the Enlightenment in view of the rise of Artificial Intelligence. He proposes that this end demands a new philosophy. However, did the Enlightenment really end? What is the relation between the Enlightenment and technology? What comes after its end? This talk attempts to respond to Kissingner's article by addressing these questions.

source:
https://www.e-flux.com/program/218683/e-flux-lectures-yuk-hui-what-begins-after-the-end-of-enlightenment/

>tfw you weren't there

but yeah. in the previous thread it was asked if maybe we could focus on a particular author, rather than being all over the place, and given that the thread concept is borrowed from YH and the last spree of greentexting was about gilbert simondon, i figure another dose of YH will be where i proceed from. Cosmotech is YH's term anyways, i've just sort of lopped off the end of it - not unlike a crude sawed-off shotgun - for effect.

Cosmotech is a far smaller and newer thing than either cyberpunk or acceleration, but i have to come to realize that it is really where my own philosophical heart is. it's what happens when you add a little religion - either new age or Traditional - to Nick Land's Wild Ride. but, as you will see, YH is actually encountering a lot of the same problems in China that the west has also. modernity fucks everybody up, no matter where you are. and this is really so important: he's not just trying to shit on the West or set up Heidegger as a strawman to score postcolonial points off of. so important. this is a theme i hope to develop, in fact. Not Everything Is The West's Fault. and this isn't about taking a shit on Heidegger either, i love heidegger. and YH also thinks he is a big deal.

but there has to be a change in the plot. land has already said a great deal about this. but there is more to the narrative than the Wild Ride.

[Anonymous No.11932497]

>>11932470
One of the things that grips me about YH's writing is that he can write about the process of technological and cultural synthesis with perfect clarity; he outlines both edges of the sword and shows the process for its cures and its poisons. He neither reduces it to colonialism nor to technological progress, but nests both within the truth of history.

[Anonymous No.11932531]

>>11932412
you're not too dumb. please bear in mind also that i am a self-taught amateur with this stuff myself. i have zero professional or academic pedigree. so you can and should take everything that comes up in these threads with a grain of salt. in a sense it is, as >>11932466 says, a form of navel-gazing, which at times can be a quite acrobatic form of navel-gazing, but navel-gazing it remains to a large degree.

i also wish to summon Yuganon to the thread b/c pic rel is a really great book to read about a lot of these things, and he has been kindly uploading some very welcome scans of this for a bit. Yuga is another outstanding primer and welcome contribution. if some of the Out There philosophy stuff is making you nuts, you can always go back and have a look at this one again. highly recommended.

>>/lit/thread/S11877390#11891969

>>11932454
going to go check that thread out now, ty kindly anon!

>>11932497
>One of the things that grips me about YH's writing is that he can write about the process of technological and cultural synthesis with perfect clarity; he outlines both edges of the sword and shows the process for its cures and its poisons. He neither reduces it to colonialism nor to technological progress, but nests both within the truth of history.

that's exactly how i feel also. again - lest it somehow be overlooked - he isn't writing boilerplate postcolonial critique. yes he is a chinese guy. and yes his book Cosmotechnics is about technology in china. but, and emphatically, *no, the point is not to just shit on The West and so on.* i feel the need to make this as clear as i possibly can. the whole reason why land matters is because he is re-hegelianizing marx after postmodernity devoured everything. land's politics are subsequently where they are, but YH is taking things in a different direction. it relates to what land is saying, but he isn't just Blaming The West. he likes heidegger, and so do the other guys that matter to him.

i'll greentext some more stuff from Cosmotechnics that i think is relevant but i really wanted to highlight this early before the invariable comments about Oh Look, Another Asshole Shitting On The West. this is the pre-emptive post then that i am certain will be ignored later on, but i'm making it anyways. Cosmotech does not equal postcolonialism. it means *the metaphysics of technology on the planetary scale that allows for cultural variation.*

[Anonymous No.11932567]

Another quote wrestled from the very beginning of Stand on Zanzibar:

> DITTO Use it! The mental process involved is exactly analogous to the bandwidth-saving technique employed for your phone. If you've seen the scene you've seen the scene and there's too much new information for you to waste time looking it over more than once. Use "ditto". Use it!

> The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan

The character here, Mulligan, is a transgressive sociologist at the borderlands of academic exile. It all comes back around.

[Anonymous No.11932612]

>>11932567
welcome back anon, thanks for re-joining this thing. i'm re-upping your image from yesterday for collective perusal.

>It all comes back around.
this, or something very much like this, is like the Know Thyself to be engraved above the entry to Cosmotech U. postmodernity leads into automation and from then quite possibly into time-spirals. but some things remain the same for all that.

that is one of the things about those Seven* Wise Men of the Cosmotech time-loop:

>Hegel
>Marx
>Nietzsche
>Heidegger
>Lacan
>Deleuze
>Land

...the ol' Vicious Circle.
>>/lit/thread/11887728#p11910526

i guess Kant is technically the first guy in, and it would make land happy to give him his just due, but...well, we'll see. and because Eight Wise Men doesn't sound quite as good (although it is better than "Eight And a Half, If You Include Guattari").

>What is decisive is not to get out of the circle but to come into it the right way… In the circle is hidden a positive possibility of the most primordial kind of knowing. To be sure, we genuinely take hold of this possibility only when, in our interpretation, we have understood that our first, last and constant task is never to allow our fore-having, fore-sight and fore-conception to be presented to us by fancies and popular conceptions, but rather to make the scientific theme secure by working out these fore-structures in terms of the things themselves.

source:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/

*for Guattari

[Anonymous No.11932649]

>>11932612
Sucked back into the gravity well. I'm doing my reading before work, this time just focusing on SoZ. Rereads like this are my favorite-- Ones where temporal context shifts everything into greater complexity. This book's format is like being strapped to the chair while a trained psychiatrist flips the channels on a vast television, half the stations are pirate broadcasts and the other half are perpetually locked into subliminal or overt advertisements. McLuhan coined the phrase, "The media is the message". Brunner hacked his medium into replicating another.

[Anonymous No.11932662]

Girardfag is cringe

[Anonymous No.11932667]

>>11932649
since you seem to be pretty well-versed in the fiction side of things, any chance you could put together a short list of select cyberpunk fiction or other things you think people should read, for people who don't want to live on a steady diet of deleuze and amphetamines? i skew pretty heavily towards the philosophy and non-fiction, but in terms of thematic fiction i really don't have much to offer.

you've mentioned Stand on Zanzibar and John Shirley before, and now Brunner, but a short-list of Approved Fiction - long and short- might be of interest to some people in this thread.

[Anonymous No.11932682]

>>11932662
true. but use the pasta:

>girardfag worries me because becoming a kantbot miniature e-celeb is one of the great counter-initiatiory cul-de-sacs of this pivotal world-historical moment

>i think all the girardfags and proto-girardfags out there, even the kantbots, should take a step back and ask "is what i'm writing right now actually pushing me or others toward qualitatively higher knowledge? or am i spinning my wheels as a consolation prize for there being nothing else to do, no reward for all my seeking up until this point, except to come down off the mountain and do parlour tricks for the plebs?"

>kantbot is all speed with no acceleration, he's falling back into the reign of quantity by ceasing to be novel and generative, and becoming merely explicable, by a formula like "i guess one of these alt right faggots was eventually going to be a real grad student with some talent and authenticity instead of just some fag watching evola youtube videos. it makes sense taht there would eventually be A Kantbot"

>if kantbot wants to be more than A Kantbot and girardfag wants to be more than A Girardfag they shouldn't fall into the same trap all the french niggers did by becoming so good at weaving metaphors and associative complexes together and such "erudits" that they don't do anything fucking else, again all speed with no acceleration. the better you get at this shit, the more garbage articles you can churn out for upstart faggot twitter magazines, and you just plateau, as a little gay sorcerer who can do some magic sparkles for the rubes. faust is supposed to get bored of his parlour tricks and strike out again on a new homoerotic shaman quest, not accept the parlour tricks and the trickle of dopamine he gets for showing them off as his fag reward for a lifetime of failures.

>i hate these niggers. i don't like these big jerkoff threads. i don't like the fucking french and the academic bigwigs and zizek wannabes who hit the wall of What Can Be Done With Philosophy So Far As We Know It, get a single drop of authentic initiation from their journey, and immediately go "Well I guess taht's it then" and start writing IRONIC!!! HEGELIAN ANIME ANALYSES. i'm a 60th level heidegger mage, dual classed into all kinds of weird GIRARD shit.. i'd better impress rubes by showing how effortlessly i can see girardishly while looking at the movie "Johnny Mnemonic".... isn't it cool that i can be both an amazing philosophy sorcerer while also being so laid back and casual about it?

>the entire 1960s was a mind parasite invasion counter initiation psychic trap for the species, and the french were its hollowed-out zombie servitors. in fact they did the same thing with the enlightenment. the french have to be stopped. they set this whole gay pussy trend of being counter-cultural while also being a master philosopher. i want german angst back. adorno saw some tits and died of fright. where are the adornos? everyone's jerking themselves off on twitter.

[Anonymous No.11932691]

>>11932612
where does spinoza fit into this dialectic?

[Anonymous No.11932702]

>where are the adornos?

[Anonymous No.11932724]

Yuganon here, I started scanning the George Morgan book mentioned by Marty Glass in Yuga. I uploaded the table of contents and the Introduction for all of you to take a peak at. Let me know if you want more so I know if scanning the whole thing is worth it or not.
>https://mega.nz/#!IlU0nSbZ!Dq6hP-IqLpsPd3f5pexGioShElIdY31TatBONTr9InY

[Anonymous No.11932729]

>>11932724
wrong pic

[Anonymous No.11932809]

>>11932667
I've read an okay amount, and I'm always going through more, but I can at least estimate the starting points.

>level 1
William Gibson - Neuromancer
William Gibson - Burning Chrome
Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
probably watch Blade Runner, too.

This is the level most people mean when they say "cyberpunk". I omit Snow Crash despite its popularity because for the sake of understanding the genre it probably does more harm than good, you really need to be familiar with Stephenson's sense of humor to figure out when he's shitposting and when he's not in that book. Level 1 has been reiterated into cliche, stamped with corporate brands, stuffed full of moronic allegories that never belonged there, and finally recycled into the Default Future(tm). But it's still important, and I still come back to it because the context makes it better.

>level 2
Mirrorshades anthology
John Shirley - City Come A Walkin'
Pat Cadigan - Synners
Bruce Sterling - Islands in the Net
Bruce Sterling - Schismatrix
Rudy Rucker - Ware Tetralogy
Lewis Shiner - Frontera

These are where you start to see the blur around the edges of the genre, where the cliches governing cyberpunk's perception no longer hold sway. It was influential within the scene, so it's obviously cyberpunk, and what's telling about that is that it bears the same approach to writing science fiction, and doesn't bear all of the markers that have retroactively been hammered into cliches.

>level 3 // apotheosis
John Shirley - Heatseeker
William S. Burroughs - The Soft Machine
William S. Burroughs - Naked Lunch
John Brunner - Stand on Zanzibar

By this point the trappings of the genre are almost completely gone and the only thing remaining is the transgressive approach to science fiction, the style, the grime. Which are the reasons it's called cyberpunk in the first place.

Then fill out bibliographies, color in the edges, read shit like Bruce Bethke and K. W. Jeter that isn't necessarily important for literary reasons but is cool historically. Cyberpunk isn't a big genre, but it's an influential one. Most shit that happens after about 1990 is stuff I consider more 'inspired by cyberpunk', because by that time the community of writers, the "scene", had dissolved entirely and it's hard to weed out the writers who weren't just trying to go to bank on the rising popularity of the style. There's a ton of shit that's been written and I just haven't read enough of it. Though, it bears mentioning that Accelerando by Charles Stross has its own place in the acceleration Mega archive.

Of course, don't everyone take my word for it, I'm limited by what I read-- more strictly, limited by what I've read critically. Analyzing this movement for me is kinda like the Heidegger Trakl analysis that Nick Land re-analyzed. The fiction elucidates because it's detached from the pretensions of academics.

[Anonymous No.11932828]

>>11932691
>where does spinoza fit into this dialectic?
good question. my feeling would be that he disappears somewhere between deleuze and land. but remember that land has *two* nightmares - one of Cthulhu, and one of Skynet. the Cthulhoid one i associate with Spinoza and the Skynet one i associate with hegel. one represents That Which Consumes - the schizoid, libidinal ego - and the other the terrifying rationality of a self-disclosing historical process which capitalizes upon this to bring itself into out of the future.

i have spent way, way too much time thinking about land. but again, this line brings it home:

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

and i know, i always use the same pic for this. but there's just some kind of mysterious synergy there.

so the "utterly alien" to me is how i read land's gestures in the direction of a spinozan nature-god that he is ready to extend all the way to the stars and beyond. but land - imho - feels about D&G the way deleuze felt about spinoza - in other words, deleuze's schizo-Spinoza (that is to say, Spinoza) is the primary metaphysical theoretician of the unconscious mind. one difference, however, between land and deleuze is the re-introduction of dialectics within capitalism, which is where i think the other nightmare-pole begins, that being a kind of inhuman time-traveling hegelianism (or teleoplexy). in a sense, anyways. land would probably find ways to make me look really stupid saying this, but i don't think it's so crazy. perhaps i'll talk to him someday and ask.

but in terms of the Cosmotech time-loop, spinoza is in there inasmuch as deleuze is in there, but spinoza does not figure so much for land, and i am probably more inclined to pay attention to land than deleuze, if only because he's a little nearer to the present day. and because historically the two-hundred year sequence that runs from hegel to land (and which, again, may be a kind of incredible return to hegel, although in a roundabout way) presents a kind of interesting and relatively discrete chronology of its own.

but that's what land's little precis on the meaning of cyberpunk refers to. or, even shorter - that capitalism is a computer which processes desire. spinozistic Deus Sive Natura does not lack for desire (or nietzschean WtP). land is grafting marx onto that process and comes up with a theory of cyberpunk aesthetics and metaphysics i happen to find absolutely stupidly "enjoyable" to think about. but he only gets there by way of D&G, who in turn leaned heavily on spinoza. so it's all on a continuum.

>>11932724
hola mi amigo

i mean i wouldn't object to your uploading a book that it is unlikely any of us will read anytime soon otherwise. but don't inconvenience yourself too much. you would only be doing it for the prestige points we award here. i would certainly be interested to read whatever you did scan.

[Anonymous No.11932865]

ITT: actual wizards

do yall do votive offerings? I'm about to gto the library probably for the rest of the day

[Anonymous No.11932896]

>>11932828
The second direction Land (and even moreso Negarestani) seems to be inspired from is that of Lovecraft, which makes sense because Land spent a lot of his early years talking about man's relationship to alterity, and the genuine horror of Lovecraft's fiction is that man has no say in his relationship to alterity, that alterity will never play by the rules that man makes for it. Cyberpunk spends a lot of time merging humanity with all kinds of other things, from media, like in all these Brunner ad-blastings; to technics, like all bionics perfectly symbolizes; to the systems of bureaucracy, capitalism, and government that we create and constitute with the same blind agnosticism.

In Lovecraft, alterity subsumes man and says that he was pretentious to ever define a relationship with the Other.

In cyberpunk, man defines a relationship with alterity and bit-by-bit incorporates the Other into his mind, body, and cybernetic systems.

Two runaway trains on an inevitable collision course. Daddy was a winged horror older than the world. Mummy was the sum of man's artifice.

>Bit parts melt in the orgasm.

[Anonymous No.11932920]

>>11932809
a *supremely* based list, and ranked in tiers like an absolute patrician. thank you very kindly anon. i'll be using this in any future editions of Cosmotech there may be to balance out the philosophy end of things. this is exactly what i was hoping for!

i've also read, like...two of these? Neuromancer and PKD/Androids. something else of Gibson's way back when that was good too. some of Mirrorshades, but nothing that really stuck with me.

anyways this is a fucking awesome list anon, greatly appreciated. and i imagine many others anons ITT will be pleased with it also. never thought i would be into cyberpunk back when, it was always fantasy for me. didn't really like SF either. but here we are.

>The fiction elucidates because it's detached from the pretensions of academics.
also this. and it's worth nothing. land's own stuff wanders far afield as it becomes increasingly theory-fiction and less theory: that is basically what you see happening Fanged Noumena, which is basically a Fall from Kant/Capital all the way to the later essays, which are completely demented. i've never been bothered to read the truly weird stuff in great detail, the more conventional analyses of things are more than rich enough for me.

but what makes land special is that even his theory-fiction mashups are full of little jewels as well. i don't think it's necessary to lose one's mind completely to be interesting, but i kind of subscribe to the Auteur Theory of philosophy: whatever an Auteur writes is going to be good, because some people are just like that. and land is unquestionably such a one to my mind.

detachment from the pretensions of academics in general seems like a good scene. as the great sage says:

>>11932865
kek. i don't know about the other guys but i don't think i do. and no wizardry here anon, just good old-fashioned Continental Fuckery (that is, navel-gazing to the point of self-induced hypnosis). and believe me, you can do it too. it is not so hard to be a functionally paranoid theorist of capitalism. it is so easy, in fact, that the university system is currently mostly collapsing into fire and ruin from the excess use of post-structural Blood Magic...which is why we are having our conversation here and not there.
>and toasting our cyber-marshmallows
>and kind of hoping that, you know, This Too Will Pass

have fun at the library my man.

[Anonymous No.11932925]

schizo-buddhizt occult-nihilist kantian hegelian theosophical thelemic zos kia cultist nova catholic post-modern platonist anon here (AKA mystikos, etc.), good to see ya girardfag!

I'm glad you're still taking the time to make weird threads like this. I'm coming back from having been taking a break lately.... weird to see my dumb threads and ideas being reposted in the catalogs (not here but elsewhere). I didn't realize they would be made into copies of copies so quickly. Idk why I am reheating the pasta of my name either as it probably only brings back memories of bitter tastes...

Anyway!

I wanna talk about Land's Shamanic Nietzsche essay. I wanna talk about the Eliade / Nietzsche / Guenon / Evola comparisons. I wanna talk about Land's essay on cyclical history and his vision of the future in Phyl-Undhu where his daughter speaks like an acid-fried mystic. I wanna talk about Lombardo's psychedelic zen Parmenides and Empedocles and the new "Philosophical" (translation of the) Dao De-Jing and Understanding a World in Motion and Heidegger and Heraclitus. I wanna talk about Mauss and Bataille and gifts and magic. I wanna talk about establishing a new philosophy. For is cosmotechnics really the new model of thinking or just another niche abstraction to pad a scholar's cv?

Idk. I am just finishing up my degree. Trying to write things for fun other than essays. Mostly poetry. I think it seems a more fun glass bead game than the endless citation of papers (of the writing of many books there is no end). That said I do have one idea for a paper. And not just recycling a schizo dream other. Serious inquiries into Deleuze have led me here instead. Much potential is foreseen tho my writing will most likey be cursory. I'm in love with drugs and sex and lousy art moreso than the hot new paper. Been going out. Saw a cute girl the other week. Maybe I'll see her again soon. Idk. I'm so content I almost hope for death. And that's how I maintain my cynicism while happy.

[Anonymous No.11932946]

>>11932920
Every time I look back to Stand on Zanzibar, I find a quote that meant nothing when I first read it, and means everything to me now.

>The word is EPTIFY.
>Don't look in the dictionary.
>It's too new for the dictionary.
>But you'd better learn what it implies.
>EPTIFY
>We do it to you.

[Anonymous No.11932965]

>>11932946
Read Sheep Look Up yet? Any good eptifying movies? Aside from Cronenberg?

[Anonymous No.11932981]

>>11932965
I've not, my only other exposure to Brunner is The Shockwave Rider.
As for movies, I don't really feel qualified to talk about them. I don't have as much experience in classic art films.

[Anonymous No.11933011]

>>11932896
>the genuine horror of Lovecraft's fiction is that man has no say in his relationship to alterity, that alterity will never play by the rules that man makes for it.
this. oh my stars and garters this. how much of this makes up the confusion we have today? it's one of the basic messages the Traditionalists say: that there is a natural order to things, and we have meddled with the primal forces of nature.

a really good playwright - as Paddy Chayefsky was - could understand this, back in an age when perhaps the audience was even primed to grasp these things in a slightly less insane way. take five minutes and watch one of the greatest moments in 20C American cinema, back when the hollywood economy did not depend upon capeshit to cater to the whims of a neotenous generation of absolute man-children:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9XeyBd_IuA

because there is *no earthly way* a scene like this could ever have been written by a cynic or by a reactionary. it could only be written by someone who had read his Dostoevsky and Kafka and many others like a fucking human being. i don't know what Cosmotech Movie Night looks like but i'll nominate Network for being in there, along with the usual other stuff: Akira, GITS, Blade Runner, et al. and whatever else goes on the Movie List - suggestions, anyone...?

>Cyberpunk spends a lot of time merging humanity with all kinds of other things, from media, like in all these Brunner ad-blastings; to technics, like all bionics perfectly symbolizes; to the systems of bureaucracy, capitalism, and government that we create and constitute with the same blind agnosticism.
and again, this. postmodernity needs a Rectification of Names, and that in some sense is what LaMarre was saying about Simondon: that Simondon's perspective isn't Donna Haraway's 'cyborg wisdom.' it's not like Haraway doesn't matter, but *2018 is not 1990.* you cannot just mash things up together and expect people to be able to maintain a grip on reality. it won't happen. that is why we have to go on our own journey into the Underworld and the infinite grab-bag of Pomo/Simulation/Spectacle and try and sort a few things out. land has already gone down there and seen things man was not meant to see. but to my mind there's just no other thing to look at but Barbarism and Its Discontents.

[Anonymous No.11933016]

Chrono Cross is about geotrauma.

https://youtu.be/PZ595N9NZVg

[Anonymous No.11933045]

Acceleration Research Server
bx86RA

[Anonymous No.11933060]

>>11933045
I'll join, but if there's NRx shit going on I'll probably be pretty quiet since I can't make a point in less than 5000 characters half the time.

[Anonymous No.11933063]

[Anonymous No.11933083]

>This book argues that cognitive enhancement should be conceived, via Bergson, Deleuze, and Simondon, as an ontological issue of greater subjectivation possibilities, as opposed to primarily as a bioethical concern. Part I frames the philosophical problematic of subjectivation per Bergson’s duration and free will, Deleuze’s movement-image and time-image, and Simondon’s individual individuation. Then Simondon’s capacity-driven subjectivation and collective individuation is invoked to overcome human-centric subjectivation. Further, a non-emotional collective structuration is proposed to allow human and non-human entities to participate together in collaborative group individuations. Part II then considers what is meant by ‘greater subjectivation possibilities,’ and articulates this through the qualitative: Bergson’s qualitative as duration, and Deleuze’s qualitative as the artsign, pure thought, and immanence. The qualitative is connected to Deleuze’s immanence subjectivation and transcendental subject. Ideas from Bergson, Deleuze, and Simondon are then formulated together into a pure image of subjectivation that can more fully enact a moment of post-subject subjectivation.

About the Author

>Melanie Swan is in Philosophy and Economic Theory at the New School for Social Research in New York NY. She has an MBA in Finance from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in Contemporary Continental Philosophy from Kingston University London and Université Paris 8, and a BA in French and Economics from Georgetown University.

[Anonymous No.11933098]

>>11931858
>Bataille
I'm not very knowledgeable about Accelerationism, but would someone mind explaining how Bataille counts? His works never struck me as Accelerationist, at least not in a technological way. I like his work but doesn't it veer too closely to that death-and-sex crossroads of religion/mysticism/psychology for it to be related to economics and technology?

[Anonymous No.11933124]

>>11932925
>bah gawd that's mystikos' music
fuck yes, based neoplatonist mystikos returneth! welcome back sir to the End of Time...and yes, as you can see, plainly we have created a monster here. there is always a seat reserved for you.

>I wanna talk about Land's Shamanic Nietzsche essay. I wanna talk about the Eliade / Nietzsche / Guenon / Evola comparisons. I wanna talk about Land's essay on cyclical history and his vision of the future in Phyl-Undhu where his daughter speaks like an acid-fried mystic. I wanna talk about Lombardo's psychedelic zen Parmenides and Empedocles and the new "Philosophical" (translation of the) Dao De-Jing and Understanding a World in Motion and Heidegger and Heraclitus. I wanna talk about Mauss and Bataille and gifts and magic. I wanna talk about establishing a new philosophy. For is cosmotechnics really the new model of thinking or just another niche abstraction to pad a scholar's cv?

there is no substitute for a mystikos. would be very happy indeed to hear you talk about it, mi amigo. most happy indeed. see pic rel, 'tis open all night, so come and bring your edition of the Glass Bead Game bucko. i will be sharing some stuff from Yuk Hui this week and commenting on it in my usual schizo-ramble style, but basically Cosmotech is for talking about whatever interests along the usual themes. i'm sure whatever you want to bring along will be way cool.

this place really is a blessing and a curse, isn't it. you know you should do something else, but there's always the One More Post thing. anyways...you know how these threads go. the link below is to a pretty Fun one from a few years ago
>>/lit/thread/S9670089
>s-sniff
>how time flies
>mono no aware intensifies

>>11932946
>EPTIFY
today i learned. i really did.

sometimes it all sounds so crazy to me, like, what am i doing? and some days it doesn't. because there is just too much silliness out there, way too much craziness, rage and hysteria. someday we will look back at all of this mimetic shit-flinging and when i do i will not want to remember that i spent it all in a state of absolute rage. craziness, paranoia, bewilderment, confusion, okay. i'm fine with that. but not the face-smashing rage. it just feels like you have to breathe and kind of get through it. Rogue One was just kind of aight movie but the scene with Chirrut Imwe walking through the battlefield and chanting

>i am with the force, the force is with me

that part, i liked. that's basically how my life feels some dayas.

>>11933016
thematic music is always a winner, ty anon.

>>11933083
kek. so that book isn't on libgen but
>Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy
is.

i guess Melanie Swan becomes someone we talk about at some point?

[Anonymous No.11933134]

>>11933098
>mysticism has nothing to do with accelerationism

[Anonymous No.11933168]

This thread is way too good for /lit/

[Anonymous No.11933174]

>>11933098
see pic rel. bataille basically flushed land out of anything that could be considered to be a normative paradigm for writing philosophy. not my favorite Land Read, but it contains some stone-cold brilliant passages:

>Dead labour is far harder to control than the live stuff was, which is why the enlightenment project of interring gothic superstition was the royal road to the first truly vampiric civilization, in which death alone comes to rule.

>Politics is the archaic and inadequate name for something that must pass away into the religious history of capital. There are no effective anti-capitalist interests, but only anti-bourgeois desires in alliance with zero. The notorious asceticism of accumulative Protestantism already prefigures the suicide of the last ruling class, anticipating the definitive surrender of all humanity to death.

>Weber remarks: ‘this asceticism turned with all its force against one thing: the spontaneous enjoyment of life and all it had to offer.' This is the initial impulse into capital’s religious history; the sacrifice of all dogmatic theology to the ascetic ideal, which is finally consummated in the death of God. The theology of the One, rooted in concrete beliefs and codes that summarize and defend the vital interests of a community, and therefore affiliated to a tenacious anthropomorphism, is gradually corroded down to the impersonal zero of catastrophic religion.

>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 circumspection of voluptuous lethality. once enlightenment rationalism beings 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, with 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.

the 'sex and death crossroads' is where bataille took land, into a complete vortex. when he came out the DE/NRx phase of his career began. so bataille is important for understanding why land is who he is and says the things he says, but ofc bataille himself is interesting for reasons other than land, of course!

[Anonymous No.11933180]

>>11933124
Here is all of Part 1 of the book. From the snippets I've read, it seems to be a more polished and academic iteration of an older Yuga. I'll probably scan Part 2 on Wednesday or Thursday.
>https://mega.nz/#!4oVyjaKT!SduOw3-F_u9mzuDr5NKEnLw2L33_JxosGezpMiBZVEo

Here's more theme music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCX6c07rcJw

[Anonymous No.11933188]

>>11933174
>Worshiping Mammon
Shame, really.

[Anonymous No.11933199]

This recent podcast convinced me that all this Landian guff isn't just nonsense: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgEqQujsNTY

[Anonymous No.11933210]

>>11933168
Fuck off. This thread is a No Negativity Zone.

[Anonymous No.11933215]

>>11933210
Why should I fuck off?

[Anonymous No.11933227]

>>11933180
Made one tiny error in the folder. Here's the new link.
>https://mega.nz/#!c8NWSI5I!slsl6oPZWpPk4rOTu-8Dyily9Q4zrj_AOzgKzNh-nWY

[Anonymous No.11933229]

Is intentionally depressing people a valid accelerationist strategy, or is it just terrorism?

[Anonymous No.11933235]

>>11933229
Yes.

[Anonymous No.11933287]

Once more without tabbing my extension into embarrassment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOzu_to12LU

Life Cycle of a Massive Star is a title that implies a certain stellar grandiosity. The kind of gravitas attained from a tale of a thing-- a fragment of the universe-- fusing too quickly to maintain. Roly Porter was half of Vex'd, the darkest group in all of dubstep. A genre which itself accumulated too much mass to ensure its own longevity, eventually bursting outwards into an ugly, commercial enterprise stripped of all the artfulness of its origin. A futuristic, multidisciplinary, truly globalist genre slain by its own success, in parallel fashion to the course of cyberpunk's history.

Roly Porter's work outside Vex'd is massive, technical, mournful. It bears the mastery and the wisdom of a craftsman whose eye for beauty has been tempered by the consequences of ambition. As a concept album, Life Cycle of a Massive Star could never be played in a way that does not draw even more parallels. With the 'default future' of climate change and capital accumulation looming ever closer in our headlights, our civilization is prone to wondering if we're inheriting the role of Tyrell's brightest candle, staring our own death in the face and lashing out in desperation. As stellar as the album claims to be, it becomes quickly apparent that Roly Porter's music is not confined to that milieu: The soundscape in Gravity is one of industry, distinctly human. its guitaresque melody over the top is a mournful call, like artificial vocal chords shredding with an inhuman scream. Part of the paradox of electronic music is that music is a human artform, eliciting emotion in a similar pattern to empathy, but without the obvious fragility of a human presence, dragging that emotion from the listener becomes more difficult. Roly Porter's synths shudder in the face of change.

The open synthscapes of science fiction convention air in the background, barely audible, in the interstices of an omnidirectional scaffolding constructed with crushing noise. The Star Trek utopia crawls insignificantly in the foreground, subsumed by an inhuman colossus. In "Sequence", according to the metaphor a song structured around the star's Long Peace and golden age, the background is a romantic orchestral painting of some distant sublime, dissolved by the crackle of tape degradation in a decrescendo reminiscent of The Disintegration Loops.

"Giant" is the noise the Acheron makes when the current pulls you under.

[Anonymous No.11933296]

>>11933180
>>11933227
ultrabased Yuganon does it again.

also, since you're the go-to Traditionalist in this thread (though perhaps not the only one): Glass refers to a book by Jacob Needleman called 'The Sword of Gnosis.' curious to know if you have read this or what you think of it.

>opens folder
holy shitballs, this is like the entire book. i'm running out of adjectives here mi amigo. this is fucking great.
>achievement unlocked: Keep The Home Fires Burning
thank ye very kindly sir.

>>11933188
he's right you know

>>11933199
been meaning to listen to these, meta-nomad did an interview with Justin Murphy recently as well. all of the acceleration-y types seem to link up at some point. thanks for supplying the link. and no, of course Land isn't all nonsense. or at least he's substantially less nonsensical than a lot of other stuff...

>>11933229
>Is intentionally depressing people a valid accelerationist strategy, or is it just terrorism?
partly. but that's why this is also a Cosmotech thread and not just a pure diet of nick land. because man cannot live on deleuze and amphetamines alone. there will be more on that tomorrow also.

but in the meantime, this is perhaps one distinction i would like to make between Acceleration and Cosmotech: that is, the Will to Defenestration. land is depressing af, but there is also some sugar to go with that pill, and i think some of it comes at least in part from YH and others. staring into the void isn't everybody's cup of tea, but if this is to be done my hope is that there is something positive to go with it, and although those moments are rare, i think they are there. it's why i will shill for YH and his attempt to put a little order back in the cosmos. Marty Glass wrote a book all about this too: it's dark, and yet it's also hopeful, if you view things in the right way.

for what it's worth.

[Anonymous No.11933330]

>>11933174
Well shit, that does put it into perspective. Thanks, girardfag.

>but ofc bataille himself is interesting for reasons other than land, of course!
Yeah, I'm definitely more into his concepts/themes and those like him than Accelerationism alone but this is really interesting nonetheless, especially
>instead death is privatized...compared to the immortal soul of capital the death of the individual becomes an empirical triviality, a mere re-allocation of stock.

[Anonymous No.11933333]

>>11933296
I think that NRx really represents what happens when you go on a steady all-Land diet and don't find a way to reason yourself out of that void. Staking all on a gamble whereupon you completely kneel to the abomination so that you can defeat your opponent, praying that you'll be strong enough to fend off dissolution once you're "free". The problem with taking Land alone is that he drives the bus onto the edge of a cliff and says:
"Now what?"
and walks out, leaving all the children aboard to reason with the great machine's transmission.

[Anonymous No.11933366]

>>11933333
checked
Land is a lot like Neitszche, he opened a hell of a lot of doors but some of them just drop out into the courtyard from a high floor so if you don't pay attention you fall into some shit. And again, like Neech, this isn't a bug but a feature. Part of the wild ride is understanding where the pitfalls arise and how to (attempt) to keep your arms and legs Inside at all times.

[Anonymous No.11933369]

>>11933296
>also, since you're the go-to Traditionalist in this thread (though perhaps not the only one): Glass refers to a book by Jacob Needleman called 'The Sword of Gnosis.'
I'm flattered you think I'm an anon authority on Traditionalism, but no, I have not read that book. What page is it mentioned?

[Anonymous No.11933376]

GOO GOO GAH GAH
ME LUVEE TEKNULLUHGEE
TECH MAKE ME SMART SMART
TEK IZ GOOD
ME LUV TEK
ME WANT TEKKY MILKIES
SUKKY SUKKY TEKKY TEKKY
GIVE BOTTLE
YUM YUMMY MUMMY TEKKY
GIBS GENE TEKKY
WANT MORE TEKKY MILKY
NEED CHANGIE NOW
SMELLY DIRTY BUMMY
SHITTY TEKKY BUM
TEKKY GOOD
NO TEKKY BAD
GOO GOO
WANT WOMB FOREVER
GAH GAH
GIB WOMB MILKIE TEKKY

[Anonymous No.11933383]

can i ge like a summary of the 50 paragraphs and links posted in the thread?

[Anonymous No.11933395]

>>11933369
sorry, it's not in the book. it's in this interview:
http://www.sacredweb.com/online_articles/sw26_sotillos.pdf

>>11933330
my pleasure. building some Signal Coherency in the story is what it's all about.

i think for land he bataille cements a lot of things that land was already thinking about the nature of academic/political leftism, that it was only so much protestant/transcendental miserabilist LARPing. but bataille's theories of the accursed share, or about how the sacred is produced only through loss have extensions that go beyond land. and again, the point of calling this thing Cosmotech is so that not every story ends with him.

land is in many ways a crowbar: good for getting under the roots of the political mimetics, and his black pill > the red and blue pills. but the black pill will in the end fuck you up much the same, if not worse. and so now what is required, perhaps, is to cook up something that takes the edge off of that a little also, which is...well, it's mysticism, of a kind, but it's not a straight diet of mysticism either. and YH has enough of a pedigree that i feel okay putting a few of my own eggs in that basket. but there is room for the Traditionalists as well. it's all part of changing trajectories away from a kind of marxism and its cultural variants that land more or less has diagnosed in full. but in becoming what he became bataille was both a Virgil on the way to hell and some of that hell itself, it seems.

anyways. he's fascinating with or without land.

>11933333
>The problem with taking Land alone is that he drives the bus onto the edge of a cliff and says: "Now what?" and walks out, leaving all the children aboard to reason with the great machine's transmission.
i agree. this is what puts people off his work (and that includes me too, sometimes!)

and so here we are. again, Marty Glass has also described the view from the Matrix post-feeding tube. and it's not pretty, but it is the one land also sees. so i'm hoping that the Cosmotech perspective will bring a little cheer in. no miracles will be promised, as soteriology is a bad scene and the buddha does say everyone must work out their own salvation with diligence. but it is nice to maybe have some philosophy that isn't always out to ruin everyone's day.

and also, those quints! like anybody could dare argue with you now.

okay gents, that's all for me today. catch up with you again soonish! as always, may what is playing you make it to level-2.

>>11933383
>can i get like a summary of the 50 paragraphs and links posted in the thread?
you sure can:

>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.

[Anonymous No.11933407]

>>11933383
>>11933376

[Anonymous No.11933415]

>>11933395
Oh it's all accelerationism
not really a fan as i consider it illogical to drive head first into danger despite understanding the danger, but i do like the cyberpunk aesthetic

[Anonymous No.11933436]

>>11933383
Such a thing doesn't exist because no one in this thread knows what they're talking about

[Anonymous No.11933458]

>>11933395
>sorry, it's not in the book. it's in this interview:
It sounds like the book was his intro to Traditionalism. For me, it was Guenon. The idea of an absolute truth that is unchanging, boundless, and timeless and being the core of a tradition shouldn't capitulate to the spirit of the times, else it's a secularization of the doctrine, and is only considered "pure" when there are no broken links in transmission makes a whole lot of sense to me.

[Anonymous No.11933467]

>>11933458
>only considered "pure" when there are no broken links in transmission makes a whole lot of sense to me.
Too bad all humans are broken links...

Also: purityspiralling grossness

[Anonymous No.11933476]

>>11933436
It's basically this: >>11933415 but with a more digital-Heideggerian sorta view making overtures toward cog sci and comp sci.

[Anonymous No.11933484]

What on earth is this thread

Can I get a quick rundown

[Anonymous No.11933492]

>>11933484
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fc1P-AEaEp8

[Anonymous No.11933494]

that, about Barzun and Tarnas. every holistic approach almost intrinsically ends up with some forced optimism, sense, syntheses or newageish kindofstuff. so I can tolerate it to some extent. but I'm strictly on reductionism, materialism, scientism, anti-metaphysics, antinewage-inquisition, all-on-board modernity band-wagon, so I got triggered hard. but anyway good recommendations.

[Anonymous No.11933496]

>>11933467
>Too bad all humans are broken links..
And the only way to get around broken links is initiation yadda yadda yadda. I really don't feel like arguing over the validity of the premise. I'm hungry and want to take a shower.

[Anonymous No.11933501]

I too, listen to the prodigy and shitpost from an unix based system

[Anonymous No.11933510]

>>11933496
I am just being snarky. Ya. Whatev's clevs. Think about me ;)

[Anonymous No.11933725]

>>11933415
Honestly, I've never been one to think that Accel requires you to act the same way Land does, to leap blindly and desperately into the dark. Retaining the last scraps of self-preservation shouldn't prevent one from learning from the scene.

[Anonymous No.11933750]

The hypothetical (or perhaps not) Neo/Platonic Zero (0) can be equated to (or perhaps is) Landian Captial. Zero - like Captial - simultaneously precedes and supersedes all that precedes and supersedes itself; that is, the number Zero is Teleoplexic. Neoplatonic emanation is necessarily a multiplicative process; as is positive-feedback and Teleoplexic peocesses in general. To emanate from Zero, however - to multiply 0 - one only obtains what one began with; 0. All that emanates from Zero, from Captial, is Zero, is Captial. Plato turns in his grave.

[Anonymous No.11933780]

brother.. may i have some content for my blogs and podcasts. i am surviving solely on beans as of late....

[Anonymous No.11933791]

>>11933780
fractalontology
Theory talk(ers)

[Anonymous No.11933801]

>>11933750
MORTILOQUIST WHEN?????

[Anonymous No.11933846]

>>11933780

https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/?s=nick+land&submit=Search

[Anonymous No.11933875]

>>11933168
Enjoy it while it lasts. There a mod or janny that really hates these threads.

[Anonymous No.11933917]

have any of you guys read this

http://sumrevija.si/en/sum9-arran-crawford-on-letting-go/

feel like it would work as a good primer for those lost in this thread

[Anonymous No.11934605]

bump

[Anonymous No.11934704]

>>11933875
the last 5 went okay

[Anonymous No.11934963]

>tfw you would rather talk about yuk hui than sleep

meh, might as well greentext for a bit then. so the following are some samples from part I of The Question Concerning Technology in China. i don't know if i plan on giving the entire book this kind of treatment, because however much i enjoy watching Let's Play videos on YouTube i'm not sure if Let's Read would be equally fun. but it is a pretty amazing book and potentially even an important one, and i have been calling this thing Cosmotech for a while now, and this is indeed the place from which that title was taken. so we'll see.

let's begin...

>The question of the Anthropocene is not only that of measures such as reducing pollution, for example, but that of confronting the axis of time which, as Heidegger already observed, is drawing us towards an abyss. This doesn’t mean that such ameliorative measures are not important; on the contrary, they are necessary but not sufficient. What is more fundamental is the relation between human and the cosmos (between the Heaven and the earth) that defines cultures and natures. As Heidegger predicted, these relations have slowly passed away, yielding to a general understanding of Being as Bestand.

>Capitalism is the contemporary cosmotechnics that dominates the planet. Sociologist Jason W. Moore is right to call it a ‘world ecology’ which ceaselessly exploits natural resources and unpaid labour to sustain its ecology; Economists Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan propose that we consider capitalism as a ‘mode of power’ that orders and reorders power (as the Greek word kosmeo itself suggests). Bichler and Nitzan suggest that the evolution of capitalism is not only the evolution of its adoption of modern science and technology; rather they also share the understanding of a cosmic dynamics: for example, between the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, there was a shift from a mechanical mode of power to one that prioritizes uncertainty and relativity.

>The concept of cosmotechnics— beyond cosmologies— therefore hopes to reopen both the question and the multiple histories of technology.

[Anonymous No.11934978]

>What Heidegger’s analysis begins to suggest, then, is that the Greek relation to technics emerges from a cosmology, and that knowledge of technics is a response to the cosmos, an attempt to ‘fit’ or to strive for 'fittingness’, or perhaps in form only’. What characterizes this fittingness? In particular, a parallel reading of Heidegger’s reading of Anaximander as a philosopher of Being and Vernant’s interpretation of Anaximander as a social-political thinker reveals something peculiar regarding the role played here by the Greek ’cosmotechnical’ relation to geometry. For if we refer to the ancient Greek moral theory, law (nomos) is closely related to dike in a geometrical sense. Dike means something can be fitted into the divine order, which suggests a geometrical projection: the nomoi, the body of rules introduced by the legislators, are presented as human solutions aimed at obtaining specific results: social harmony and equality between citizens. However, these nomoi are only considered valid if they confirm to a model of equilibrium and geometric harmony of more than human significance, which represents an aspect of divine dike.

>This synthesis of Heidegger’s understanding of the original meaning of technics in relation to the dike of Being and Vernant’s analysis of the relation between social structure and geometry, points to the fact that geometry was foundational for both technics and justice— and we shouldn’t forget that geometry was considered essential training in the school of Thales. Kahn reminds us that for both Anaximander and Pythagoras, ’the ideas of geometry are embedded in a much larger view of man and of the cosmos.’ This fittingness is not given as such; it is revealed only in the confrontation between the overwhelming of Being and the violence of techne. So should we see Heidegger’s return to the original techne as a quest for the spirit of the ancient Greek cosmotechnics?

[Anonymous No.11934986]

>In contrast to the common understanding, according to which the postmodern, dating to the late twentieth century indicates the end of modernity, I would rather say that modernity only comes to an end at this moment in the twenty-first century, almost forty years after Jean-Francois Lyotard’s announcement of the advent of the postmodern, since it seems that only at this stage do we come to appreciate our technological consciousness. In fact, not only Latour and Lyotard, but also many others who wrote on technology, such as Jacques Ellul and Gilbert Simondon, had raised the problem of the lack of awareness and misunderstanding of technology. For example, in On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Simondon characterises it as an ignorance and misunderstanding of technics, and tries to render visible or raise awareness of technical objects. Jacques Ellul, in turn, took up Simondon’s analysis of technical objects and technical ensembles and extended it to the global technological system that is in the process of becoming a totalising force. It is this effort at rendering conscious that of which we are unaware, but which largely constitutes our everyday life, that really constitutes the 'end of modernity.’

>However, let us step back and ask: What do we mean by the word ‘end’? It doesn't mean that modernity suddenly stops, but rather that, as a project, it has to confront its limit, and in doing so, will be transformed. Therefore, by ‘end of modernity’, we surely do not mean that modernity ceases to affect us, but rather that we see and know that it is coming to its end. Nevertheless it still remains for us to overcome it, to overcome the effects that it has produced on and in us— and this will undoubtedly take much longer than we might imagine, just as Heidegger tells us that the end of metaphysics doesn’t mean that metaphysics no longer exists and has ceased to affect us, but rather that we are witnessing its completion and waiting for something else to take over, whether a new thinking of Being, or an even more speculative metaphysics. Furthermore, like the end of metaphysics, the end of modernity proceeds at a different pace in Asia than in Europe, precisely in so far as, firstly, their philosophical systems do not perfectly match each other, and, secondly, the propagation of a concept from one system to another is always a deferment and a transformation.

[Anonymous No.11935004]

Ooh look, another interesting thread on /pol/. This time on psychopolitics.
>>>/pol/189420091

[Anonymous No.11935009]

>Heidegger’s Being and Time, especially his critique of Cartesian ontology, and in his later works the effort to reconstruct the history of Being— a task which can be understood as that of terminating modernity by posing a new question, a recommencement— arises from an awareness of the forgetting of Being. The ontological difference is an opening, since it reformulates the question of Being according to two different orders of magnitude, one concerning beings (Seiendes), the other Being (Sein). The forgotten question of Being functions as the unconscious of the ontic inquiry into beings constituted by the history of science and technology. Freud, in turn, developed a theory of the unconscious and of repression in order to retrieve that which is deeply hidden and long since forgotten and repressed by the superego. The tasks of Freud and Heidegger, although they belong to two very different theories and disciplines, characterised two major discourses on modernity in the twentieth century, and two attempts to quit this modernity. As we shall see, in confronting the question concerning technology in China, Freud’s conception of the unconscious, repression, and working-through will be crucial. Indeed, Heidegger hinted at a kind of repression inherent in the antagonistic relation between technology and the question of Being: for him, technology, the completion of Western metaphysics, occluded the original question of Being.

>The forgetting of Being, in effect, is the question concerning technology. In order to understand technology, and what is at stake in it for non-European cultures, then, we must go by way of Heidegger and the concept of technology as the completion of metaphysics, but without equating Eastern and Western philosophical systems and thereby attributing a universal origin of technics to Prometheus. We must rather seize the possibility of appropriating it, deferring it as an end, and, in this deferring, re-appropriate the Gestell— that is, modern technology.

[Anonymous No.11935033]

>It is with Bernard Stiegler, not Lyotard, that this question becomes transparent. The work of Stiegler announces the end of modernity. Stiegler demonstrates that Western philosophy has long since forgotten the question of technology. If, for Heidegger, there is a forgetting of Being, for Stiegler there is equally a forgetting of technics. Technics, as tertiary retention, is the condition of all conditions, meaning that even Dasein, who seeks to retrieve an authentic time, in order to do so must rely on tertiary retention, which is at once the already-there and the condition of Dasein’s being-in-the world. For Stiegler, technics, notwithstanding its destructive nature in the epoch of technology described by Heidegger in The Question Concerning Technology’, thus becomes more fundamental than the forgetting of Being: the history of Being as situated in the history of Western metaphysics will have to be rewritten according to the concept of technique as an original default (as well as the fault of Epimetheus).

>Stiegler’s tertiary retention is fundamentally a question of a kind of time that remains ambiguous in Heidegger’s Being and Time. Heidegger’s critique of clock time forms a part of his critique of the forgetting of Being, as indicated by the loss of an authentic time, or Eigentlichkeit. In the second division of Being and Time, Heidegger expanded this critique to encompass the question of history and historicity. In order to understand historicity, one must first situate Dasein as a historical being. Heidegger distinguishes historicity (Geschichtlichkeit), which has its source in Dasein's historising (Geschehen), from historiology (Historie): historicity is not an objective description of what is past, but rather resides in the totality of historising, meaning the temporalisation of the past, present, and future. For Heidegger the past, memory, is primordial, as is the case in Wilhelm Dilthey— a major influence on Heidegger both before and during the writing of Being and Time. For Dilthey, life is historical in three basic ways. Firstly, the past always insists in the present, since life is always an Innewerden, a process of integrating what is past into the present; secondly, the present is a building-up (Aufbau) of the past in terms of structure and development; and thirdly, the past also exists as an objectified past, in the form of artefacts, nexuses of actions, events, and so on. Not unlike Dilthey, Heidegger attempts to grasp this temporalisation as a whole. The present, as the pivot of such a historisation, emerges from Dasein’s grasp of its own historicity.

some of this can seem a little heavy, it's true. just skip it if you like.

[Anonymous No.11935047]

>Philosophy is not the language of blind causal necessity, but rather that which at once allows the latter to be spoken, and goes beyond it. The dialectical movement between rationality and myth constitutes the dynamic of philosophy, without which there would be only positive sciences. The Romantics and German Idealists, writing toward the end of the eighteenth century, were aware of this problematic relationship between philosophy and myth. Thus we read in The Oldest System-Programme of German Idealism — published anonymously in 1797, but whose authors are suspected to be, or at least to be associated with, the three friends from the Tubingen Stift, Holderlin, Hegel, and Schelling— that ‘mythology must become philosophical, and the people rational, and philosophy must become mythological in order to make philosophers sensuous. Then eternal unity reigns among us.’

>Not coincidentally, this insight came at a moment of renewal of philosophical interest in Greek tragedy, chiefly through the works of these three highly influential friends. The implication here is that, in Europe, philosophy’s attempt to separate itself from mythology is precisely conditioned by mythology, meaning that mythology reveals the germinal form of such a mode of philosophising. Every demythologisation is accompanied by a remythologisation, since philosophy is conditioned by an origin from which it can never fully detach itself.

>Accordingly, in order to interrogate what is at stake in the question of technology, we should turn to the predominant myths of the origins of technology that have been handed down to us, and at once rejected and extended by Western philosophy. The misconception that technics can be considered as some kind of universal remains a huge obstacle to understanding the global technological condition in general, and in particular the challenge it poses to non-European cultures. Without an understanding of this question, we will all remain at a loss, overwhelmed by the homogeneous becoming of modern technology.

>Allow me to pose this question in the form of a Kantian antinomy: Technics is anthropologically universal, and since it consists in the extension of somatic functions and the externalisation of memory, the differences produced in different cultures can be explained according to the degree to which factual circumstances inflect the technical tendency; Technics is not anthropologically universal; technologies in different cultures are affected by the cosmological understandings of these cultures, and have autonomy only within a certain cosmological setting— technics is always cosmotechnics. The search for a resolution of this antinomy will be the Ariadne’s thread of our inquiry.

“Every demythologization is accompanied by a remythologization...”

[Anonymous No.11935058]

>Drawing on Gregory Bateson, Ingold proposes that there is a unity between practices and the environment to which they belong. This leads to his proposal for a sentient ecology, which is mediated and operated according to affective relations between human beings and their environments. One example he gives concerning hunter-gatherer society helps to clarify what he means by ‘sentient ecology’: hunter-gatherers’ perception of the environment, he tells us, is embedded in their practices.

>Rethinking senses such as vision, hearing, and touch by invoking Hans Jonas, James Gibson, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ingold attempts to show that, when we reinvestigate the question of the senses, it is possible to reappropriate this sentient ecology, which is totally ignored in modern technological development. And yet in this conception of human and environment, the relation between environment and cosmology is not very clear, and this way of analysing living beings with the environment risks reduction to a cybernetic feedback model such as Bateson’s, thereby undermining the absolutely overwhelming and contingent role of the cosmos.

I double dare you not to read the phrase ‘Sentient Ecology’ and be at least *mildly* intrigued. that is some Level-2 Brainificating going on imho. living in an environment and becoming embedded in practices, i'll grant you, isn't that remarkable. said environment mass-entelechizing is, tho, in whatever ways and by whatever circuitous processes.

[Anonymous No.11935063]

>>11934963
How is Yuk Hui received in china? I can only see general ethics as sludge compared to accelerated capital. If he is trying for a future 'saneness' of tech by way of Heidegger, it seems he is too late for that, specially since we got cold war2 on queue.

[Anonymous No.11935087]

>>11931809
>>Atmospherics:
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNkxqpCz87M&t=1155s [Embed]
>>submissions for playlist are **open**

Get real nigga
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpJgk1_fAks

[Anonymous No.11935106]

>Simondon holds a similar view on the relation between human being and the outer world as figure and ground— a functioning model of cosmotechnics, since the ground is limited by the figure, and the figure is empowered by the ground. Owing to their detachment, in religion the ground is no longer limited by the figure, and therefore the unlimited ground is conceived as a godlike power; whereas inversely, in technics, the figure overtakes the ground and leads to the subversion of their relation. Simondon therefore proposes a task for philosophical thinking: to produce a convergence that reaffirms the unity of figure and ground, something that could be understood as the search for a cosmotechnics.

>The cosmotechnics of ancient China and the philosophical thought developed throughout its history seem to me to reflect a constant effort to bring about precisely such a unification of ground and figure. In Chinese cosmology, one finds a sense other than vision, hearing, and touch. It is called Ganying, literally meaning 'feeling' and ‘response’, and is often (as in the work of sinologists such as Marcel Granet and Angus Graham) understood as‘correlative thinking’; I prefer to call it resonance, following Joseph Needham. It yields a ‘moral sentiment’ and further, a 'moral obligation’ (in social and political terms) which is not solely the product of subjective contemplation, but rather emerges from the resonance between the Heaven and the human, since the Heaven is the ground of the moral.

perhaps you are thinking here: isn’t this exactly what leads to postmodern hysteria? and the answer is, yes, of course, it can be, just as it lies within the possibility of any morality to be abused. and certainly we have a surfeit of moral sentiment today and not an absence. and yet it is also a surfeit of a particular form of morality, but i don't think we have to take nietzsche all the way here. not *every* form of morality is necessarily bad, i would argue. a moral equilibrium might be a good thing. even in minimal trust assumptions scenarios i might prefer you to be moral.

but the question, of course, is what such a ‘moral relation’ would look like. because obviously this is in a sense nothing new: the culture of Internet Shaming in which we live tells us that such a relation already exists. we might also distinguish between the morality set forward by confucian or taoist thinking and what presently dominates academic leftism, which isn’t that. of course, confucian thought can also be used in a domineering and imperialist fashion, it’s true - but that doesn’t mean a) that it is what it was meant to do or that b) this is required by us. the confucian ideal is a beautiful one, as are taoist teachings. as are *Christian* and Traditionalist teachings, buddhist teachings, and so on. i feel the need to say this.

[Anonymous No.11935113]

how the fuck do you continue to be entertained by this shit? are you all on speed?

[Anonymous No.11935121]

>>11935058
If 'sentient ecology' is 2woke4u you need to begin your journey with real magic. Copypastas and kewlpix wont help you with that.

[Anonymous No.11935154]

>>11935063
>How is Yuk Hui received in china?
not sure really. he seems to prefer germany (and Mou Zongsan argued that China needed more democracy, and apparently spent a good chunk of his life living away from China altogether). byung-chul han also seems to prefer germany to korea. but yeah, i don't know.

>I can only see general ethics as sludge compared to accelerated capital.
me too. but the thing is that beyond a certain horizon rooting for accelerated capital is like rooting for the house in blackjack. it probably is going to win and it's going to be craziness.

>f he is trying for a future 'saneness' of tech by way of Heidegger, it seems he is too late for that, specially since we got cold war2 on queue.
i don't know if you mean 'sameness' or 'saneness' here. if it's the former, he isn't. if it's the later, kind of...?

the Sameness of tech - let's go with that - *is* the phenomenon. it's why he wants to propose at least an alternate theory of technological development, because the planetary Same-ifying of everything under tech/modernity is the symptom, and he doesn't feel about it the way land feels about it. that's why i think he's as interesting as he is.

>>11935087
hardcore indeed. but it's pretty late over here, maybe i'll give this one a listen in the morning. thanks for the contribution tho all the same, it's good to have music.

>>11935113
i wish i had access to more drugs sometimes, i sincerely do. but not atm, no.

>>11935121
perhaps. i will leave magic to the experts. i figure i can make my contribution by just theory-posting. but if you want to add a course on magic to the Department of Speculative Economics, crazy go nuts with it mi amigo, Cosmotech is a very open-source thing.

[Anonymous No.11935170]

>I believe that the concept of cosmotechnics allows us to trace different technicities, and contributes to opening up the plurality of relations between technics, mythology, and cosmology— and thereby to the embracing of the different relations between the human and technics inherited from dif ferent mythologies and cosmologies. Certainly Prometheanism is one such relation, but it is highly problematic to take it as a universal. However, I am certainly not proposing to advocate any kind of cultural purity here, or to defend it, as origin, against contamination. Technics has served as a means of communication between different ethnic groups, which immediately calls into question any concept of an absolute origin. In our technological epoch, it is the driving force of globalisation— in the sense both of a converging force acting through space, and a synchronising force in time. Yet a radical alterity will have to be asserted in order to leave room for heterogeneity, and thereby to develop different epistemes based on traditional metaphysi cal categories, a task which opens the way to the veritable question of locality.

and this is a good point. so, a note of self-disclosure here: i spend a lot of time thinking about capital and the Wild Ride because i *am* in search of precisely those universal principles. and, if my own adventure has given you any indication, it is that in the end said principles are rather slippery indeed. i went looking for the universal stuff so that i could in a way orient myself, but…well, you can see how this has played out for yourself. much reading, and great confusion also. you can go a long way thinking about capitalism, as land himself shows, but in the end it may be better to choose something that can reflect locality and *contingency* or you may find yourself occasionally needing to retrieve fragments of skull and brain tissue from rooms in your house or subway cars.

it's true, in a sense, that teleoplexy is a kind of synchronization of time, but even land would have to agree that culturally speaking you can lead a horse to modernity but you cannot make it think.

[Anonymous No.11935202]

>Hence in China the force of technology dismantles the metaphysical unity of practice and theory, and creates a rupture, which still awaits unification. Of course, this is not something that is only happening in the East. In the West, as Heidegger described, the emergence of the category ‘technology’ no longer shares the same essence as techne. The question concerning technology should ultimately serve as a motivation to take up the question of Being— and, if I might say so, to create a new metaphysics; or, even better, a new cosmotechnics. In our time, this unification or indifference does not present itself as a quest for a ground, but rather exhibits itself as both an original ground (Urgrund) and an unground (Ungrund): Ungrund because it is open to alterities; Urgrund as a ground that resists assimilation. Hence the Urgrund and the Ungrund should be considered as a unity, much like being and nothingness. The quest for unity is properly speaking the telos of philosophy, as Hegel maintained in his treatise on Schelling and Fichte.

>Although Heidegger did not explicitly make this claim, in his commentary on Nietzsche he refers to metaphysics as a force of unification that overlooks all beings. However, we have to bear in mind that Heidegger’s reading of the history of Western metaphysics is only one possible interpretation.

and how’s about this for a charitable reading? even *heidegger* will not say that The West Means Technology, or at least not with a big smile on his face. technology as cybernetics is, in a sense, the completion of metaphysics - but they *aren’t the metaphysics that Heidegger himself likes,* and YH notes this.

it’s a distinction subtle enough to overlook way too easily. If heidegger had really believed that the completion of metaphysics as technology was a fait accompli, he wouldn’t have included himself in that story in the way that he does. this is why he will argue that nietzsche is the last great Western metaphysician, and that he is the first post-Nietzschean philosopher in that sense. but heidegger is who he is because he thinks - correctly - that there are still some things cybernetics cannot do.

[Anonymous No.11935211]

I'm not into the accelerationism/ cosmotechnics thing (I don't even know if this is a meme) . However I recently found a compendium of Heidegger essays at my university library, and well, that was an awakening. Until now I've read The Origin of the Work of Art, The Age of World Picture and Nietzsche's Word, God is Dead. In this latter essay, Heidegger argues that western history is just the consummation of nihilism. Western thought started with the forgetfulness of the question of being in favor of the subject just appropriating its material surroundings. The Nietzsche's phrase, God is dead, is the final conclusion of this way of think. Any outer world justification to bring order to this reality has been destroyed.

>"Whither is God" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him -you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun?

What is left after this death is the subject, the humans imposing their values upon the raw material objects, this is the will to power. The path to follow now is the conquest of the Earth through technology, the consummation of nihilism.

>When God and the gods are dead in the sense of the metaphysical experience just elucidated, and when the will to power is deliberately willed as the principle of all positing of the conditions governing whatever is, i.e., as the principle of valuepositing, then dominion over that which is as such, in the form of dominion over the earth, passes to the new willing of man determined by the will to power.

Now I can't sleep thinking that we are living a nihilistic nightmare and that our thought structures are placed upon nothingness.
This is my first time reading Heidegger, so it's pretty possible that I'm missunderstanding him. Any insightful comment would be appreciated.

I'm not a english speaker, so please, forgive me for some possible grammar mistake.

[Anonymous No.11935228]

DUDE LEMURIAN TIME SORCERY LMAO

[Anonymous No.11935240]

>As I argue in Part 2, modernity functions according to a technological unconsciousness, which consists of a forget ting of one’s own limits, as described by Nietzsche in The Gay Science: ‘the poor bird that has felt free and now strikes against the walls of this cage! Woe, when homesickness for the land overcomes you, as if there had been more freedom there— and there is no more “land.” This predicament arises precisely from a lack of awareness of the instruments at hand, their limits and their dangers. Modernity ends with the rise of a technological consciousness, meaning both the conscious ness of the power of technology and the consciousness of the technological condition of the human. In order to tackle the questions raised by Nishitani and Mou Zongsan, it is necessary to articulate the question of time and history with that of technics, so as to open up a new terrain and to explore a thinking that bridges noumenal ontology and phenomenal ontology.

>But in demanding that a Chinese philosophy of technology adopt this post-Heideggerian (Stieglerian) viewpoint, aren’t we in danger of simply imposing a Western point of view once again? Not necessarily, since what is more fundamental today is to seek a new conception of world history and a cosmotechnical thinking that will give us a new way of being with technical objects and systems. Far from simply renouncing the analyses of Mou and Nishitani and replacing it with Stiegler’s, we therefore pose the following question: Rather than absorbing technics into either of their ontologies, is it possible to understand technics as amedium for the two ontologies? For Nishitani, the question was: Can absolute nothingness appropriate modernity and hence construct a new world history that is not limited by Western modernity? For Mou: Can Chinese thinking absorb modern science and technology through a reconfiguration of its own thinking that already lies within the possibilities of the latter? Nishitani’s answer leads to a proposal for a total war as a strategy to overcome modernity, something that was taken up as the slogan of the Kyoto school philosophers prior to the Second World War. This is what I term a metaphysical fascism, which arises from a misdiagnosis of the question of modernity, and is something we must avoid at all costs.

>One point that can be stated clearly here is that, in order to heal the rupture of the metaphysical system introduced by modern technology, we cannot rely on any speculative idealist thinking. Instead, it is necessary to take the materiality of technics (as ergon) into account. This is not a materialism in the classical sense, but one that pushes the possibility of matter to its limits.

so, those are some selections from part 1. part 2 is more about China, and we can get into that later on. going to check out Yuganon's scans also (ty again, Yuganon!). but likely more YH greentext soonish.

>>11935228
this

[Anonymous No.11935265]

>>11935154
Saneness. My thoughts exactly. At least there is some sort of theory that resembles a bit of humanist or ethical post-humanism. There goes the bemoaning of the supposedly neoliberal 60s humanist project over and over again.

[Anonymous No.11935280]

>>11935211
>I'm not into the accelerationism/ cosmotechnics thing (I don't even know if this is a meme) .
acceleration yes, Cosmotech is basically just this. we haven't achieved Official Meme Status yet, i don't think.

>Now I can't sleep thinking that we are living a nihilistic nightmare and that our thought structures are placed upon nothingness. This is my first time reading Heidegger, so it's pretty possible that I'm missunderstanding him. Any insightful comment would be appreciated.

sounds like you're encountering one of the true giants of 20C thought. i mean heidegger blew my mind when i read him for the first time and he still does. my obsessing over nick land followed directly from my obsession with heidegger, so in a sense they're both part of the same thing, the same phenomenon. in terms of Why Heidegger Matters, everything that contributes to the enduring legacy of nick land is really a part of that. modernity is a fucking heartbreaker and capitalism is a nightmare. hence this being the sixth consecutive thread on this stuff.

and there are no easy answers. it appears to be as impossible to Solve for Nietzsche as it is to Solve for Marx, but heidegger was right there in between both, in a certain sense, inasmuch as National Socialism was a phenomenon his own thought is inextricably bound up with - unfortunately. and it's part of why YH has an aversion to fascism - after all, it's not limited to the germans. but politics isn't the point of these threads, unless it's an escape from them. modernity is equal parts tech, economics and culture, and both land and heidegger have some pretty incredible things to say about all of those. but that's also why i have been calling it the Wild Ride, because it's a fucking rollercoaster too. and it would be nice to think about potentially slowing down some of its more nightmare-inducing aspects, however much of a doomed enterprise this may be. at least just to get one's own bearings...

>>11935265
sanity is an underrated quality to have these days. the balance between optimism and pessisism. i like sanity. i think it's near to enlightenment. YH is averse to many forms of idealism, mou zongsan's included; and i don't always want to just shill for nick land either. something in between is in order, and i'm more than okay with 21C neo-heidegger by way of simondon et al.

okay gents. until next time.

[Anonymous No.11935924]

>>11932920
I'm back from hours of reading and writing, my brain just shut-off after writing 6 pages, I couldn't do anything it was impossible to keep going.

Heraclitus and Parmenides comparison of cosmos/epistemology w at least 5 academic references. I like the topic but my brain just fried reading poetic form. goddamn Parmenides

[Anonymous No.11935967]

Thought I'd have to bump the thread before I went to bed but it seems someone else is still going. Probably won't be on fully again until late afternoon/early evening at the latest. The more new/unmentioned before thinkers we can throw into someone of these bibliographies and discussions the better I say.

[Anonymous No.11936638]

Unironiclly wondering if Stirner could fit in to Cosmotechnics and accelerationism in some way.

im rambling here because im not totally sure of how to even structure my points but
>someone had brought up hegel back in the first C/A thread and called him the first cyberneticist, From how I under stand stirner he Inverts Hegel to but the emphasis on the ego(unique or the individual) rather than Geist or Spirit.

>i also can see alot of paraelles to Stirner and Deleuze (Stirners Union of Egoist with D(&G) Rhizomes; parts of stirners ideas of insurrection with The idea of the BwO and Nomadism)

as well as some parallels with Stirner and Nietzsche, (papers satying that Nietz was influenced by Stirner, as well as seeingsome flows with stirners passage on history on page 40 something in the ego and his own and Nietzsche passage on the true world in the antichrist

idk how to flesh this out further but im trying to find a way to fit him in to this string of thought. as well as find new points of entry in this topic

[Anonymous No.11936900]

>In Confucianism, Dao is recognised as the coherence between the cosmological and moral orders; this coherence is called ziran which is often translated as ‘nature’. In modern Chinese the term refers to the environment, to the wild animals, plants, rivers, etc. that are already given; but it also means acting and behaving according to the self without pretention, or letting things be as they are. This self, however is not a tabula rasa, but emerges out of, and is nourished and constrained by a certain cosmic order, namely Dao. In Daoism on the other hand, ‘Ziran is the law of Dao’ was both the slogan and the principle of a philosophy of nature. These two concepts of Dao in Confucianism and Daoism have an interesting relation to one another, since on the one hand, according to conventional readings, they seem to be in tension: Daoism (in the texts of Laozi and Zhuangzi) is very critical of any imposed order, whereas Confucianism seeks to affirm different kinds of order; on the other hand, they seem to supplement each other, as if one asks after the ‘what', the other after the ‘how’. As I will argue below, however, they both embody what I call a ‘moral cosmotechnics’: a relational thinking of the cosmos and human being, where the relation between the two is mediated by technical beings. It is therefore not my intention to read these relations between Dao and beings as a philosophy of nature, but rather to understand them as a possible philosophy of technology in both Confucianism and Daoism. According to this parallel reading, then, in Chinese philosophy Dao stands for the supreme order of beings; and technique must be compatible with Dao in order to attain its highest standard. Accordingly, this highest standard is expressed as the unification of Dao and Qi). As we noted in the Introduction, in its modern sense Qi means ‘tool’, ‘utensil', or more generally, ‘technical object.’

a note here. i’ve read some chinese metaphysics both before and after this book, as i’ve always found them really interesting. the terms ‘qi’, ‘dao’, and ‘li’ are all highly flexible, particluarly the last one. you can read in both daoist and confucian thought references to concepts like the Way or Heaven, but the Way as laozi understands it and as confucius understands it do not necessarily refer to the same things, and yet they don’t refer to completely different things either.

it’s sort of like the term ‘logos’ as used in the west, the Word, which is used by both Heraclitus and by Christian philosophers to refer to a similar thing but which has different implications and meanings over time. and yet by the time you get to today it carries something of the inflection of both, and we really like it - well, some of us, i guess - when it can mean or encompass a higher creative principle that admits of multiple implications without diminishing any of them. it becomes a richer term.

[Anonymous No.11936908]

>Dao is not a particular object, nor is it the principle of a specific genre of objects; it is present in every being, yet escapes all objectification. Dao is das Unbedingte, the ‘unconditioned’ common to the Idealist projects of the nineteenth century that sought to find the absolute foundation of the system, that is to say a first principle (Grundsatz) that is wholly self-dependent. For Fichte this was the I, which is the possibility of such an unconditioned; in Schelling’s early Naturphilosophie, it moved from the I (when he was still a follower of Fichte, from 1794 to 1797) to Nature (1799, in the First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature). In the First Outline, Schelling takes up Spinoza’s distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata, understanding the former as the infinite productive force of nature, and the latter as its product. Natura naturata emerges when the productive force is hindered by an obstacle, just as a whirlpool is produced when the current encounters an obstacle.

>Thus the infinite is inscribed in the finite being, like the world soul described by Plato in the Timaeus, which is characterised by a circular movement. We see a further continuation of the philosophy of organism in Whitehead’s writings, which found great resonance in early twentieth-century China. Understood in this way, Dao is the unconditioned that founds the conditioned perfection of all beings, including technical objects. Certainly, as Dongguo Zi imagined, Dao must exist in the most superior forms or objects in the world; however, as we have seen, Zhuangzi shattered his lofty illusions by placing Dao also in the most inferior and even undesirable objects of human life: ants, panic grass, earthenware tiles, and finally excrement. The pursuit of Dao resonates with what Confucius calls 'the Principle of the Heaven’, a phrase also used by Zhuangzi. In this specific instance, the natural and the moral meet, and the two teachings converge on this point: to live is to maintain a subtle and complicit relation with Dao, even without fully knowing it.

also: hey look, it’s Alfred North Whitehead again, the coziest goddamn metaphysician ever. as we discussed in Cosmotech #4, Whitehead is really (really!) on Another Level w/r/t a lot of this stuff. i do not think it is too far-fetched to say that Process and Reality has a strong possibility of being That Book as far a a lot of Cosmotech is concerned.

[Anonymous No.11936912]

whitehead is *stupidly* awesome gents. he may have indeed Nailed It as far as speculative philosophy goes in the 21C. ANW doesn’t talk about technology, true, or economics, or aesthetics, for that matter, and at least for me those three things play no small role in why i wound up reading Uncle Nick in the first place: a totalizing Economic-Aesthetic-Technical thing-in-itself is what we call the Spectacle. it *is* the Matrix, the machine that lives on your dreams, the Computer That Processes Desire and which may be writing its own code as teleoplexy. it is to Whitehead’s enduring credit that he decided that there were still other things more interesting to think about. Whitehead is an absolute boss.

you might feel tempted to ask: if Whitehead is such a big deal, why haven’t you made him one of your Seven Wise Men of Cosmotech? clearly he fits in there. and this would be a good question! i guess my answer for now would be that a lot of what prompts me to write and think has to do with a kind of a discourse on time and modernity as it relates to culture, and in that realm the three great Masters of Suspicion dominate the landscape completely: Marx, Freud, Nietzsche. in some order. right-socialism or left-socialism. and because in that mix Speedy Nick Land basically oscillated from end of the spectrum to the other during the course of his intellectual career, and found astonishingly interesting things at both poles. so inasmuch as i am kind of hoping for a *transcendence* or sort of critical mass-point from which to describe these phenomena, the story does have a continual cathectic obsession with politics, culture, mimesis and so on.

and Whitehead doesn’t belong to that. maybe this is the point. the place where we switch from Acceleration to Cosmotech is like a hinge, and perhaps that is where Whitehead’s role is found: because either we *are* talking about Time and History in a sense where the Masters of Suspicion are predominant, *or we aren’t,* and in which case we can begin to take our cues from a different kind of thinker and different kinds of questions. and because somewhere in there we go from thinking about Revolution (and Exit) to a different kind of perspective.

i personally cannot find a flaw in Whitehead and i don’t really want to. i can’t really find a flaw in a lot of these guys; however, *a lot of these guys found flaws in each other,* and they did that because *they were a lot smarter than me!* so by presenting the story in a certain light, i feel like that is a kind of a useful contribution that doesn’t really take anything away from what these guys are saying about themselves or about each other.

[Anonymous No.11936970]

couple other things too.

>>11933917
>Enlightenment is often written about as freedom, but is not the freedom politics tries to secure. The freedom of homelessness in the outside is the freedom that comes from relinquishing the illusion of control, from the skepticism that drops the protective worldviews and their institutional capture, and, in the schizo-praxical obliteration of the self, from the idea that there is anyone to be saved. Zen understands freedom as the overcoming of all these dualistic delusions. Buddhas awaken to the perfection of becoming. This is nothing like the asceticism of Nietzsche’s man of renunciation who moralistically “strives after a higher world” to be inaugurated after the revolution or the grand reformation. The exit from politics reaches its apex in the paradoxical freedoms of renunciation. If the fundamental question of politics is What is to be done? renunciation can only answer How far can you go in letting go?

this essay is really amazing. ty for posting this anon, it's an outstanding read. and arran crawford is also an interesting guy, he's the one who pointed out, insightfully, that 'jihad is a cure for depression.' i think that's pretty fascinating and part of what animates a lot of rage politics. in a sense it's because people are *depressed* and they are *scared* and they are *angry.* and they should be, in a sense: capitalism and modernity - even history - are fucking downers. but the pharmakon-cure exacerbates the symptoms and worsens and spreads the disease, it doesn't fix anything. it leads to scapegoating and girardian stuff, imho.

anyways. this is a really good essay.

>>11935924
>I like the topic but my brain just fried reading poetic form. goddamn Parmenides
this made me chuckle. well, anything you want to contribute from what you did learn before your brain shut off will still be welcome, if you feel like venting some rage about Parmenides. it is frustrating sometimes tho, i agree.

>>11935967
thanks for the bump.
>The more new/unmentioned before thinkers we can throw into someone of these bibliographies and discussions the better I say.
sure. there's definitely no hard and fast rules on this conversation as of yet. at some point i will probably be tempted to don a papal mitre and begin the Tyrannical Orthodox Phase of things, at which point you will be required to storm the Panopticon-Palace and free the people of Cosmopolis from my cruel iron grip.
>this cannot come too soon. girardfag delenda est
>in time inner self. in time
>sic semper tyrannis. off with his head. he likes enya
>good morning inner self
>good morning

>>11936638
>Stirner
i will admit to never having been a big fan of stirner, but maybe you're on to something? i know that link, as i posted it. the hegel/cybernetics connection is here:

https://fractalontology.wordpress.com/2008/01/19/deconstructing-cybernetics/

but yeah, if you want to cook up some Rhizomatic Anarcho-Cybernetics with Uncle Max, go for it mi amigo.

[Anonymous No.11937019]

>>11933168
aw yeah

>>11933287
this was a really awesome piece of writing too anon, i get the feeling you have done some music writing before. gave me the shivers to read it. i will admit to having some pretty plebeian music tastes, but i actually did listen to this all the way through and it was definitely an experience. and improved substantially by having your commentary to go with it. the effortposting is sincerely appreciated, and it makes these threads feel less like one anon pushing a sort of Ahab-like quest for ideological recognition of his own cherished themes. i'd prefer it wasn't exclusively limited to that, so things like this really make the whole experience a lot more interesting. thanks for the reminder that there is more to life than Nick Land's Wild Ride. your writing is really excellent.

>>11933366
>Land is a lot like Nietzsche, he opened a hell of a lot of doors but some of them just drop out into the courtyard from a high floor so if you don't pay attention you fall into some shit. And again, like Neech, this isn't a bug but a feature. Part of the wild ride is understanding where the pitfalls arise and how to (attempt) to keep your arms and legs Inside at all times.
this, 100%.

>>11933436
shots fired

>>11933476
>It's basically this: >>11933415 but with a more digital-Heideggerian sorta view making overtures toward cog sci and comp sci.
yep, pretty much. still tho, digital-Heideggerian making overtures towards CogSci and CompSci is pretty cool, no?

>>11933494
hola anon, i remember you from the tail end of the last thread. apologies for triggering you, but glad to know you enjoyed the rec's. and yes, you're right to sense the danger of Forced Optimism. there is a sort of line to be walked, no doubt.

>>11933725
this.

[Anonymous No.11937076]

>What Heidegger’s analysis begins to suggest, then, is that the Greek relation to technics emerges from a cosmology, and that knowledge of technics is a response to the cosmos, an attempt to ‘fit’ or to strive for 'fittingness’, or perhaps harmony’. What characterizes this fittingness? In particular, a parallel reading of Heidegger’s reading of Anaximander as a philosopher of Being and Vernant’s interpretation of Anaximander as a social-political thinker reveals something peculiar regarding the role played here by the Greek ’cosmotechnical’ relation to geometry. For if we refer to the ancient Greek moral theory, law (nomos) is closely related to dike in a geometrical sense. Dike means something can be fitted into the divine order, which suggests a geometrical projection:

>The nomoi, the body of rules introduced by the legislators, are presented as human solutions aimed at obtaining specific results: social harmony and equality between citizens. However, these nomoi are only considered valid if they confirm to a model of equilibrium and geometric harmony of more than human significance, which represents an aspect of divine dike.

>What Vernant reveals here is a correlation between cosmology and social philosophy in Anaximander’s thought. For Anaximander, the earth is immobile (in contrast to the cosmology outlined by Hesiod in Theogony, in which the earth is floating) because it is at the middle (meson) and is balanced by other forces.

>Vernant gives us his interpretation of to kratos here: although kratein principally conveys a sense of domination, in Anaximander’s cosmology it also denotes a supporting and a balancing. Being as whole, as one, is the most powerful; and the only possible way to ensure egalitarian relations between different beings is to impose dike:

>So the rule of the apeiron is not comparable with a monorchia like that exerted by Zeusa ccording to Hesiod,or by air and water according to the philosophers who give these elements the power to kratein the whole universe. The apeiron is sovereign in the manner of a common law that imposes the same dike on each individual, that keeps each power within the limits of its own domain.

>This synthesis of Heidegger’s understanding of the original meaning of technics in relation to the dike of Being and Sfernant’s analysis of the relation between social structure and geometry, points to the fact that geometry was foundational for both technics and justice.

>Kahn reminds us that for both Anaximander and Pythagoras, ’the ideas of geometry are embedded in a much larger view of man and of the cosmos’. This fittingness is not given as such; it is revealed only in the confrontation between the overwhelming of Being and the violence of techne. So should we see Heidegger’s return to the original techne as a quest for the spirit of the ancient Greek cosmotechnics?

[Anonymous No.11937140]

>In contrast, in the absence of this conception of 'the uncanniest of the uncanny' of the human, the violence of techne and the excessive violence of Being, in Chinese thought we find harmony— but we might also say that, for the Chinese this fittingness resides in another kind of relation between humans and other cosmological beings, one which is based on resonance rather than war (polemis) and strife (eris). What is the nature of such resonance? In the Classic of Poetry (composed between the eleventh and seventh centuries bc), we can already find a brief description of the relation between the solar eclipse and the misconduct of King You of Zhou 781-771 BC) and Zuo Zhuan (400 BC), a commentary on the ancient Chinese chronicle Spring and Autumn Annals in the chapter on the Duke Yin, there is also a description of the relation between the solar eclipse and the death of the king46In the Huainanzi (125 BC), a book reported to have been written by Liu An, the King of Huainan, and which attempts to define the socio-political order, we find many examples that depend upon the relation between the Dao of nature (as Impressed in the Heaven) and the human. As various authors have explained, in ancient China heaven was understood both as an anthropomorphic heaven and as the heaven of nature. In the Confucian and Daoist teaching, the Heaven is not deity; rather it is a moral being. The stars, winds, and other natural phenomena are indications of the reasons of the Heaven, which embodies objectivity and universality; and human activities must accord with these principles.

>As we shall see, this conception of nature also inflects the thinking of time. Garnet and Jullien both suggest that one should understand the expression of time in China not as linear or mechanical, but as seasonal, in the sense indicated by the changes of Heaven.

it's worth asking whether we *want* strife and eris, to what degree we are just obsessed with power itself as the determining principle. maybe it's just the pure aesthetics of it.

a note here. as you will see in later chapters, YH does *not* think that chinese metaphysics naturally contain the Magic BTFO Remedy for all things technological. it is to his great credit that he recognizes that the chinese encounter with modernity comes as freighted with problems of its own as anywhere else. Just Harmony You Guys isn’t his solution. Xi-style social credit is as much of a nightmare as anything going on in the West today - it’s only another form of moral puritanism,.

but still, the idea of a harmony between heaven and earth, context-independent (or dependent), and mediated through technics…right? pretty appealing. i feel like you don't have to be insanely in love with chinese metaphysics to like this. and again, the point of bringing this up *isn't* to say that this is restricted to a chinese perspective. *heidegger likes this too.* but modernity has complicated things somewhat *for everyone...*

[Anonymous No.11937359]

>Unlike the early Greek thinkers, then, who sought to under stand the question of dike through the confrontation between human and nature, as described by Heidegger, and unlike the Greek rulers, who sought to impose dike in order to overcome the excessiveness of the human, a spirit that we find the ancient Greek tragedies, the ancient Chinese seem to have endowed the cosmos with a profound morality expressed as a harmony which political and social life must follow, with the Emperor as the intermediary between the Heaven and his people: he must cultivate his virtue by studying the classics and through constant self-reflection (by way of resonance with others), in order to put things in their proper order, convenient both to Heaven and to his people:

>I heard that Heaven is the origin of all beings [...] so the sages follow Heaven in order to establish the way [Dao], therefore they have love for all and don’t take any standpoint from their own interest [...] Spring is the vibrant moment of Heaven, when the Emperor will spread his benevolence; summer is the growing moment of Heaven, when the Emperor cultivates his virtue [de]; winter is the destructive moment of Heaven, when the Emperor executes his punishments. Therefore, the resonance between Heaven and human is the way [Dao], from the ancient times to the present.

>Notwithstanding the fierce critique against Dong’s assimilation of Daoism and Yin-Yang into Confucianism, which was seen as a corruption of the ‘pure’ Confucian teaching, the unity between the cosmos and the moral has continued to be affirmed throughout the history of Chinese philosophy. This correlation between natural phenomena and the conduct of the emperor or the rise and fall of the empire may seem superstitious to us, yet it is worth emphasizing that the underlying spirit of such gestures, which continues after Dong, goes far beyond the mere correlation one might imagine, for example in mapping the number of solar eclipses and disasters in the Empire.

>The identification of moral with cosmic order draws its legitimacy not merely from the accuracy of such correlation, but rather from the belief that there is a unity between the Heaven and the human, which can be conceived of as a kind ofIt implies an inseparability of the cosmos and the moral in Chinese philosophy. On this point it is enlightening to turn to Mou Zongsan’s critique of Dong. In Nineteen Lectures on Chinese Philosophy, Mou denounced Dong’s thought as a cosmocentrism, since for Dong, the cosmos is prior to the moral, and therefore the cosmos becomes the explanation of the moral. Mou’s critique is no doubt justified; yet is it any more logical to place the moral prior to the cosmos?

i know, samurai are japanese and not chinese. sue me. sometimes a katana is just a katana.

[Anonymous No.11937401]

>The moral can be established only when the human is already in-the-world, and being in-the-world only gains its profound meaning in the presence of a cosmology or principles of heaven— otherwise it would be only something like the animal-Umwelt relation described by Jakob von Uexkull. A few pages later, Mou also affirmed that, in Doctrine of the Mean and Yi Zhuang, ‘cosmic order is moral order’. In Mou's interpretation of the whole tradition of Neo-Confucianism, then, this unity of the cosmic order and the moral order is always central, although, as we shall see (§18), because of his affinity to the work of Kant, for Mou xin (‘heart’) is posited as the absolute beginning. What we wish to emphasise here is that the unity between the cosmos and the moral is characteristic of ancient Chinese philosophy, and that this unity was further developed in the Neo-Confucianism that emerged from the time of the late Tang dynasty.

and it is the question for us too, in a way. it certainly explains, at least in part, the eleventh-hour appearance of Dr. JBP, who is attempting to right the cosmic balance in his own time and space by going back to the foundations of the Western experience by way of Jung, Nietzsche, Eliade and others. peterson wants nothing more than a moral order or a cosmic-theological dimension of human life, and he’s right to point out that the absence of this leads to technological nightmares of modernist political experimentation, to tyrannical societies of control.

it’s not like he’s all the way wrong either. i don't think he is. but it’s worth noting also that the West doesn’t have quite the same feeling for the role of the Emperor as sage-king. the West has a regard for the ontological primacy of the individual that the East does *not* have. but these are different cultures also, and it’s not like either is immune to going off the deep end.

and this is the situation in which i think it is best to situate ourselves. postmodernity no longer has anything like an exclusively Western meaning. it gets wrapped up with capital and technology, and can all-too-easily just become a strain of virulent nihilism. in 2016 this hit a kind of crescendo with Trump that is still playing out. people today are saying No to a lot of things, with no idea about what they might say Yes to. and it leads to fifty groups of anarcho-fascist meme-tribes all labeling each other as being fascist, and all of them being in their own ways correct.

but a moral order and a unity between individual and cosmos is neither exclusively Western nor Eastern. nor is it *reducible* via technics to either one or the other, or *to neither* and a pure abstraction. and i don't even think nick land would disagree with this.

[Anonymous No.11937456]

>tfw you wonder what would happen if you put land, peterson, and YH in a box together like some kind of philosophical Alchemy Pot from Dragon Quest...

no, never mind. this would probably not turn out well. some things are better left un-smashed together.

>you would get something like the third act of Akira girardfag. that was the point
>when you're right you're right inner self

[Anonymous No.11937553]

>Techne is thought to derive from the Indo-European root tek, meaning ‘to fit together the woodwork of [...] a house’. For the Presocratics, the meaning of techne is closest to this root, and as Heidegger says, ‘each techne is correlated with a quite determinate [bestimmte] task and type of achievement’. Jorg Kube notes that, in Homer, the word techne is only used in relation to the god Hephaestus, or to carpentry, but not any other work, probably because other practices such as medicine, fortune-telling, and music had yet to become independent professions. In Plato, we see a significant modification of the sense of the word, and it becomes closely related to another word, arete, meaning excellence’ in general, ‘virtue’ in particular. Vernant remarks that the word arete had started undergoing a shift already in the time of Solon (640-558 BC), where its relation to the warrior in the aristocratic milieu had been transferred to another conception of self-control belonging to the religious milieu? correct behaviour resulting from a long and painful askesis and which aims to resist koros (greed), hybris (excess) and pleonexia (avarice), the three follies. The 'human cosmos’ (the polis) is conceived to be a harmonious unity in which the individual arete is sophrosyne (temperance), and dike is a law common to all. As Vernant says, ‘with Solon, dike and sophrosyne descend from heaven to earth, to be installed in the agora’. Virtue-techne constitutes a core enquiry in Plato’s quest for a techne of all technai that can be learned and taught, and for dike as the virtue of all virtues.

>Each techne is a remedy for overcoming chance occurrences (tyche) and errors that crop up in the process of making, as Antiphon says: ‘we conquer by techne things that defeat us by physis’. This motif is repeated many times in Plato’s dialogues. Notably, in Protagoras Socrates admires the figure of Prometheus, and agrees with Protagoras in affirming the necessity of measurement (metretike techne) as a way to restrict hedonism, as well as the elimination of tyche.

>The relation between the cosmos (order) and geometry is clearer in the later passages in the Gorgias when Socrates tells Callicles that, according to the wise man who had made a study of geometry,

>partnership and friendship, orderliness, self-control, and justice hold together heaven and earth, and gods and men, and that is why they call this universe a world order [...] You have failed to notice that proportionate equality has great power among both gods and men, and you suppose that you ought to practice get ting the greater share. That is because you neglect geometry.

interesting, no? it touches on sloterdijk stuff too, anthropo-technics. what’s the point of all of this tech if it turns us into worthless slobs?
>b/c you like being a worthless slob girardfag. you like cheeseburgers and vidya. you sir are a clownmonkey. you neglect geometry
>this is true inner self

[Anonymous No.11937687]

>Indeed, it may in fact be more interesting to start with the question: What is not techne? Vernant differentiates techne from praxis, a distinction that arguably follows from the logic of Critias’s challenge to Socrates in the Charmides, where he states that techne as poeisis always has a product (ergon), while praxis has its end in itself.This is rather debatable, however; indeed, it also indicates the complexity of Plato’s concept of techne. For example, the sophists also have techne, yet it is not a techne of production (poietike), but a techne of acquisition (ktetike).The other thing that is opposed to techne is empeiria, often translated as ‘experience’, since it is said to be subject to illusion and error. Poetry is also not techne, but in a different way, since a good poet is not the real author, but a channel for a divine power (theia moira). Hence we can see that, as Nussbaum has shown, a common point in distinguishing technai from non-technics is that the objective of techne is to overcome tyche, to become the guarantor of order, of proportion, like the Demiourgos in the Timaeus. How is it related to virtue, then? For simplicity, I would summarise the relation between techne and arete in the following ways:

>Techne as analogy of arete. In different dialogues, Socrates tries to draw analogies between techne and arete: courage in the Laches, temperance in the Charmides, piety in the Euthyphro, justice in the Republic, wisdom in the Euthydemus. But in the Charmides, Critias challenges Socrates for comparing temperance (sophrosyne) with other technai such as medicine or masonry because, like calculation and geometry, temperance has no product (ergon), while medicine aims for health and masonry aims for a house.

>Arete as the aim of techne. This point is not immediately evident, since although on many occasions Socrates uses medicine as an example of techne, in other cases techne is considered to be neutral (not necessarily good or bad). However, a passage in the Gorgias seems to reveal this point in a striking manner: Socrates replies to Polos that cooking is not a techne, but that a knowledge of cookery is just knowing how to favour and please. The reason given is that cooking is a 'forgery of medicine’ because ‘it pursues pleasure but not the health of the body’.

>Arete as techne: David Roochnik claims that this relation becomes evident in the middle period of Plato’s writing, for example in Books II - X of the Republic where justice is considered to be a philosophical techne, a judgement of proportion, as invoked at the beginning of the Timaeus— as in myth, where, in view of the incompleteness of the technai brought to man by Prometheus, Zeus sent respect (aidos) and justice (dike) to human being as politike techne.

YH is such a boss. he is just such a boss. and this is still only the first part of the book.

[Anonymous No.11937721]

I'm gonna compile everything in this thread into a massive folder because it seems very interesting.

But can somebody tell me what it IS exactly?

[Anonymous No.11937790]

>Following this brief outline of the concept of techne in Plato and in Aristotle, we must now come to Heidegger’s reading of their metaphysics as declension (Abfall) and fall (Absturz). If early Greek thinkers such as Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Anaximander are what Heidegger calls inceptual (anfanglicher) thinkers, in the sense that they think about the beginning rather than presence, and if for them there is no clear distinction between Being and beings, in Plato and Aristotle Heidegger finds a passage from pre-metaphysics to metaphysics proper, a passage which shaped the history of metaphysics as history of ontotheology. It is this metaphysics, begun by Plato and Aristotle and completed in Hegel and Nietzsche, which finally leads to Gestell as the essence of fnodern technology. American Heidegger scholar Michael Zimmerman calls it ‘productionist metaphysics’, because such a metaphysics is concerned with production or the technical from its very beginning, ending up with ‘machination’ (Machenschaft) and Gestell. Ontotheology bears with it two questions: firstly, what are beings as such (ontology)? Secondly, what is the highest being (theology)? The Idea of the Good in Plato sets out such an ontotheological beginning, since it is that which ‘makes intelligible things intelligible’, and provides ‘truth/disclosure to what is known and endows the one who knows with a capacity to know’. It signifies a determination of the essence (ousia) by subsuming the many to the one, the Idea; and in this sense, the ‘Idea’ is also the ‘good’ since it is the cause for all, which Aristotle calls to theion, the divine:

>Ever since being has been explicated as idea, the thinking of the being of beings has been metaphysical, and metaphysics theological. 'Theology' means in this case the explication of the ‘cause’ of beings as God and the relocation of being into this cause, which contains being in itself and also releases being from out of itself, because it is the most beingful [Seiendste] of beings.

>Ontotheology continued to develop in Neoplatonic metaphysics and Christian philosophy, finally leading to the oblivion of Being and the abandonment of Being— the age of the Bestand. This history of ontotheology and productionist metaphysics was apparently absent in China, and indeed we find a very different relation between technics and virtue in Chinese cosmotechnics, a different form of ‘belonging together’ or ‘gathering’ than that to which Heidegger aspired, one based on an organic form guided by a moral and cosmos logical consciousness.

inb5 “fuck you, the West rules, suck a dick.” two things:

1 the West *does* rule, for better and for worse. love modernity? cool. hate postmodernity? that’s us too.

2 the West really *did* the lead the way technologically, but that ride has no brakes. everything land says is a part of this.

the point is not to diminish Western thought or to look to China for a Cure.

[Anonymous No.11937847]

>>11937790
and i wish to comment on this slightly further also.

the West is b-b-b-b-b-based. it is so fucking stupidly based that it has BTFO'd time and space. and indeed the only thing that has ever really been a threat to it is its own Promethean capabilities, which by the year 2018 extend not ironically to the at least theoretical bending of time and space (although in a less Wild and Crazy sense, this is what *architecture* has always done, since the beginning.)

i don't know why i feel the need to keep saying this - correct me if i am wrong - but i have this particular sense of needing to want to avoid misrepresnting either myself or this particular author i am greentexting. *the point is not to shit on the West.* not remotely, and not by half. this is not the point. no postcolonial points are to be scored in this thread. and indeed, one of the reasons to embiggen heidegger is to recognize that with him is a *consummately* Western philosopher - nietzsche also - who in his time recognizes that things are now beginning to trend in a whole new direction that he is not particularly enthusiastic about.

it is the same thing with land. land commits academic heresy by siding *with capital* against culture. and then some. land is a profoundly nihilistic philosopher, and yet even he is going to say that he would prefer that it be some other way. the connections between land and heidegger are not that hard to draw: the metaphysics of production as diagnosed by heidegger, and a great many other things, are very much related to the teleoplexy and acceleration that land writes about. they are describing one and the same phenomenon, in many ways, through from different perspectives and with different intellectual genealogies.

and so what YH is doing is looking at this phenomenon, and i think he can cover *both* of those guys without reducing or diminishing either. but this is not all setting you up to say, Therefore China > The West, the West Sucks, and so on. that is not the point. China has a different trajectory than the West does, and things are not readily or easily reversible, one into the other. YH *will* say lots of interesting things about chinese metaphysical-technological thought, and he will be correct. but this is not to say - i hope this is clear - that somehow Everything Is The West's Fault. it just isn't. postmodernity and late capital, all of the other shit that makes land sweat (and peterson too)...the point of this is not to just shit on the West. nor are their ready cures on hand in China - and YH writes about that too.

i felt this warranted mentioning. and i can stop, too, if i feel this has been made clear. It's Not All About The West Fucking Up The World. China Too Has Problems. they also have some really fascinating stuff. but everybody's got problems, and everybody's got charms.

[Anonymous No.11937854]

>>11936912
Got any good second hand accounts of Whitehead?

I'm reading P&R right now, but until I hear it explained in somebody else's words I'm not going to be able to shake the feeling that I'm completely misinterpreting everything he's saying.

[Anonymous No.11937898]

>>11937847
The West Is Great. i will say it again. The West Is Fucking Great. we invented all kinds of batshit stuff that set us up for Nick Land's Wild Ride. but the world of Cosmotech is not out to repeat either postcolonial critique or ultra-accelerationist critique either. what i am looking for is a way through the crazy, and i think YH is as good a guide as anyone to doing so. Chinese thought and chinese metaphysics are fascinating, but they cannot be made into Western ideas or vice-versa.

i am hoping for Disarmament in a great many senses here. i think by this point this is understood, but i can repeat it as often as is necessary. there are crucial similarities, and equally crucial differences, and not all of this necessarily has to lead back to girardian Game Over screens, or to the Wild Ride, or any number of other things. so i'll shut up now about at least that point, but i wanted to make this as clear as i possibly could before advancing into the Chinese sections of the book, so that people didn't think my whole point was to just shit on the West. it's not. and it's not YH's point either. and i really needed to make this explicit before continuing.

>>11937721
>But can somebody tell me what it IS exactly?
can you be more specific? i mean here's the iconic landian 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.

this is still the deal. all we are doing is painting a kind of picture around this. you don't have to read All of Marx/D&G/Land et al before you can have a good time here, but that is what it's about. it's the story of continental philosophy from the 19C - 21C. or, at least, one kind of storytelling, anyways, in which land - but others too - plays an important role. but it's also not all about him either.

>>11937854
pic rel. run don't walk. best book i've read this year (i read YH's book last year).

[Anonymous No.11937903]

>>11937898
>pic rel. run don't walk. best book i've read this year (i read YH's book last year).
Thanks. I'll look at it.

[Anonymous No.11937996]

>>11937903
it's a good one. Cosmotech #4 has a bunch of excerpts from it as well as from some other books on ANW also, if don't mind wading through a lot of other stuff.

>>/lit/thread/S11823861

>>11937847
>>11937898
>tfw you can't let this one go

there just has to be some forgiveness in this thing. somewhere. we have made a horribly successful cottage industry in academia now out of Hating On The West and it has gone completely out of control. absolutely fucking berserk. and it has to stop, at some point. it probably won't, but i would like it if it did.

maybe it's a recognition thing. the more that the Blue Team hates on the West, the more the Red Team is going to dig deep and find ways to love it for precisely the reasons the Blue Team hates it. and that is a recipe for absolute disaster.

but it's what Peterson has been saying now for years: the West is Great! and he's right, it really is! and whatever horrible things that have been done in the 20C in its name have nothing to do with the cosmological perspectives or the fusions of philosophy and religion, culture and art that gave rise to this incredible civilization. i just think that at some deep level this is what is being asked for in the collective unconscious - it's *thymos,* the *craving for recognition.* this was kojeve's whole point about hegel, and kojeve was an enormous influence on lacan, who basically parlayed what kojeve-hegel were saying about history into a freudian world and the unconscious, the traversal of the symbolic realm and so on. JBP is not a freudian, but he's not wrong to say that all of the hatred, bitterness and resentment that people have is just *misdirected,* and sometimes *deliberately* so: 'which is it, are you lying, or are you malevolent?'

so we're going to talk about Chinese metaphysics from here, but we can always come back to this point, as often as is necessary: we aren't doing this because we want to BTFO the West, or because by adopting a Chinese perspective somehow everything will turn out rosy. it won't. China has it own problems. and the West has *loads* of stuff that is wonderful. tons of it. not everything is the West's fault.

not everything is the West's fault.
>you're sounding pretty trigged there girardfag
>i know inner self but you get the idea right
>me? i'm just watching you make yourself look ridiculous
>tfw

[Anonymous No.11938107]

and maybe we should indeed take a Pause That Refreshes here for a bit anyhow. for anyone curious i'm now on page 98 of The Question Concerning Technology in China, which is approximately 1/3 of the way through it. i don't know if you guys are interested in continuing such an intensive close reading of the book the rest of the way, but i'm game if you are. this *is* the book that gives us the title Cosmotech anyways, and i do find it to be pretty freaking fascinating to think about.

the second part of the book is mainly about Chinese thought and metaphysics (unsurprisingly). but the first part is this absolutely terrific meditation on heidegger and greek philosophy also, and i've been glad to kind of refresh myself on a lot of it. YH is a really, really good reader of greek stuff as well as heideggerian stuff, although the main focus of his book isn't actually that, it's the question of tech in china and how that is understood in terms of Qi-Dao relations, and other things. and then in part 3 he goes back to modernity again.

so i can basically slowly go through the whole thing like this, or we can take the occasional detour and talk about whatever else. but it was asked in the previous thread to maybe just pick one book and one author to focus on, so...maybe this is the right way to go?

anyways, sorry about the rant there about the West but it really is a thing i just don't think i can say strongly enough, in the age of anger and rage and mimesis. i don't want to be perceived as a kind of hater. i'm not. championing land is tough, and so is heidegger, and i definitely didn't want to try and look like i was advancing another guy who i would have to apologize for every step of the way. b/c Cosmotech as YH writes it *isn't acceleration* - it's actually going, incredibly, in a different direction - towards a *more* integrated sense of things, a relationship between man and the cosmos in which tech doesn't always necessarily alienate us. and that's a pretty fucking great idea, imho!

so i'll take a break there for now, but i can return with more greentext later today or tomorrow. hope you guys have found some of that illuminating. it's enjoyable for me, at least, because i get to reflect on some of things more closely than usual, but hopefully you guys enjoy this too.

anyways. have a nice chill enso. more Cosmotech greentexting soon.

[Anonymous No.11938642]

bump

[Anonymous No.11938661]

>>11938107
Personally, I think it's harder to go on one book but you could try to use one book as a unifying theme and also quote some of the things they're referencing in the main book, like in this one that'd probably be more simondon

[Anonymous No.11938674]

Staggeringly good thread OP if this is you from beginning to end.

Will enjoy the rest of this in the archive after work.

[Anonymous No.11939039]

>>11938661
yep, i think so too. i am kind of enjoying the deep-dive into YH's book but we will take detours as necessary.

as for getting to know simondon, i found one of the best short guides to him in the afterword to this book. i greentexted some stuff about him in Cosmotech #5. if you're looking to learn more about him, get a copy of this or check out the samples i posted.

>>/lit/thread/S11887728#p11926126

>>11938674
aw yeah

>tfw you are starting to think that digging back through the Cosmotech archive from the start is probably beginning to seem like Darkest Dungeon
>oh well

well this makes my day. once more unto the Wild Ride then. the following sections mostly deal with Qi-Dao and chinese metaphysics. but remember: not everything is the West's Fault. and nor is our point here only to create Moar Acceleration. if anything, Cosmotech would like to take acceleration to a mysterious place of enantiodromia --

>the tendency of things to change into their opposites, especially as a supposed governing principle of natural cycles and of psychological development.

-- which is a principle at work in both the work of Jung and in Heraclitus. and this reminds me: there was an anon in Cosmotech #5 who was saying some rather uncharitable things about this whole thing, but one of them perhaps has turned out to be correct, if we are now talking about Jung. so there you go anon, looks like you were right after all. if i want to speak about enantiodromia it turns out there is going to be some Jung-smuggling going on in this thing after all. you got me. i didn't even know i was doing it.

okay then. enough preamble! onwards to part 2 of the Question Concerning Technology in China: The Chinese Parts Of It.

>*bangs gong*

[Anonymous No.11939053]

>>11934963
So, by definition, cosmotechnics encompasses the contemporary world-ecology of capitalism, the hypothetical world-ecology of socialism, etc. It follows that the "technics" of cosmotechnics is then the art and science of reordering the world. If Land characterizes capitalism as a great primordial beast, cosmotechnics refers to the social science required to tame that beast.

If I knew more about cybernetic theory, I'd compare the two-- Cybernetics seems to me like the technics of control, which is parallel to the technics of order, but I haven't read much of the pre-Land cybernetics.

A lot of the later stuff in the thread focuses on defining and characterizing technics within the context of ordering the world, but that seems slightly awkward to me from the onset because our contemporary capitalism scarcely resembles our technics.

>>11934986
This 'end of modernity' corresponds pretty closely to the way Land uses the term 'singularity'. It stands that modernity's end is a fulcrum point for the turning of history, and those living in the heart of modernity wouldn't be able to envision a point after modernity any more than we would have imagined looking past the technological singularity (assuming we're using the term in the original form I mentioned some days ago, rather than the narrow pop definition as 'AI takeoff'). What characterizes the end of modernity to me is the transition from mechanist assumptions and structures to informational assumptions and structures. This also corresponds to what Xi Jinping's government often refers to as "informatization" being a modern equivalent to industrialization.

It follows that the mechanist structures of thought that dominated modernity should be insufficient to describe those living during this transitory phase in "world-ecology". Technics often corresponds to the ability to increase what one can do via tools. I would guess, unsupportedly, that what governs the world-ecology of informatization and singularitarian advances is actually not a simple extension of that principle, but instead increasing what a single person can be, or know. Transitioning from a memorization of structures into an education consisting of knowing how to find and integrate information is one example which is becoming popular in mainstream thought.

[Anonymous No.11939085]

Daily reminder that Land is a libertarian. If you think that's uncool because libertarianism is a boomer ideology then you're a twelve years old brainlet. A political stance is not judged by how exotic or how right wing it is, but by its own merits.

[Anonymous No.11939098]

>It is in attending to the relation between Dao and Qi that we can reformulate a philosophy of technology in China. Now, this relation has a subtle similarity to the techne-arete relation discussed above— but is also very different in the sense that it exhibits another, rather different cosmotechnics, one which searches for a harmony based on the organic exchanges between the cosmos and the moral. Chinese philosopher of technology Li Sanhu’s excellent Reiterating Tradition: A Comparative Study on the Holistic Philosophy of Technology, which can without exaggeration be called the first attempt to seek genuine communication between technological thought in China and the West, calls for a return to the discourse on Qi and Dao. Li tries to show that Qi, in its original (topological and spatial) sense, is an opening to the Dao. Hence Chinese technical thought comprises a holistic view in which Qi and Dao reunite to become One. Thus the two basic philosophical categories of Dao and Qi are inseparable: Dao needs Qi to carry it in order to be manifested in sensible forms; Qi needs Dao in order to become perfect (in Daoism) or sacred (in Confucianism), since Dao operates a privation of the determination of Qi.

>In order to better understand the essence of Daoist cosmotechnics, we might refer here to the story of the butcher Pao Ding, as told in the Zhuangzi. Pao Ding is excellent at dissecting cows, but according to him, the key to being a good butcher doesn’t lie in his mastery of the skill, but rather in comprehending the Dao. Replying to a question from the prince Wen Huei about the Dao of butchering a cow, Pao Ding points out that having a good knife is not necessarily enough, it is more important to understand the Dao in the cow, so that one does not use the blade to confront the bones and tendon but rather passes alongside them in order to enter into the gaps between them. Here the literal meaning of 'Dao'— ‘way’ or ‘path’— meshes with its metaphysical sense:

>What I love is Dao, which is much more splendid than my skill. When I first began to carve a bullock, I saw nothing but the bullock. Three years later, I no longer saw the bullock as a whole but in parts. Now I work on it by intuition and do not look at it with my eyes. My visual organs stop functioning while my intuition goes its own way. In accordance with the principle of heaven (nature), I cleave along the main seams and thrust the knife into the big cavities. Following the natural structure of the bullock, I never touch veins or tendons, much less the big bones!

you can read the rest of that story here. it’s a classic and deservedly so:

http://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/chuang-tzu.htm

[Anonymous No.11939144]

>Hence, Pao Ding concludes, a good butcher doesn’t rely on the technical objects at his disposal, but rather on Dao, since Dao is more fundamental than the Qi (tool). Pao Ding adds that a good butcher has to change his knife once a year because he cuts through tendons; a bad butcher changes his knife every month, because he directly chops the bones with the knife; while Pao Ding has not changed his knife for nineteen years, and yet it looks as if it had just been sharpened with a whetstone. Whenever Pao Ding encounters any difficulty, he slows down the knife, and gropes for the right place to move further. The knowledge of living thus consists of two parts: under standing a general principle of life, and becoming free from functional determination. This could be regarded as one of the highest principles of Chinese thinking on technics. However we must also note that Dao is not only the principle of beings but also the freedom to be. in this particular conception of Dao, then, Dao may not lead technics to its perfection; indeed Dao may be subverted or even perverted by technics.

>We find this concern in another story in the section of the Zhuangzi entitled ‘Heaven and Earth’, in which the character Zigong (who shares this name with one of Confucius’s most famous students, known as a businessman) encounters an old man who is occupied with manually carrying water from a well to his farm:

>‘There is a machine for this sort of thing', said Zigong. ‘In one day it can carry water across a hundred fields, demanding very little effort and producing excellent results. Wouldn't you like one?’

>The gardener raised his head and looked at Zigong. ‘How does it work?’

>‘It's a contraption made by shaping a piece of wood. The back end is heavy and the front end light, and it raises the water as though it were pouring it out, so fast that it seems to boil right over! It’s called a well sweep.’

>The gardener flushed with anger and then said with a laugh, ‘I’ve heard my teacher say, where there are machines, there are bound to be machine worries: where there are machine worries, there are bound to be machine hearts. With a machine heart in your breast, you’ve spoiled what was pure and simple, and without the pure and simple, the life of the spirit knows no rest. Where the life of the spirit knows no rest, the Way [Dao] will cease to buoy you up. It’s not that I don’t know about your machine— I would be ashamed to use it!’

>Zigong blushed with chagrin, looked down, and made no reply. After a while, the gardener said, ‘Who are you, anyway?’

>‘A disciple of Kong Qiu' [Confucius].

true, there is something of a slippery slope argument here in Zigong's tale. but you get the idea.

[Anonymous No.11939153]

>>11939085
he's too anti-humanist to be a true libertarian but he's too individualist to fit in cleanly with NRx as a whole, so basically he's just Uncle Nick

[Anonymous No.11939170]

Great thread. Once question however; what is cosmotechnics?

[Anonymous No.11939182]

Do you run urbanomic or something? Where are you getting these mountains of text and images off-hand?

[Anonymous No.11939189]

>The old man affirms that he is aware of the existence of this machine, and that it was also known to his teacher but that they felt ashamed to use it and so refused this technique. What Zhuangzi wants to say in this story is that one should avoid developing such a reasoning about life, otherwise one will lose the way, and along with it, one’s freedom. If one always thinks in terms of machines, one will develop a machinic form of reasoning.

>In Daoism, then, the unity of Dao and Qi is exemplified by Pao Ding and his knife. The perfection of the technical tool is also a perfection of living and being, since it is guided by the Dao. In Confucianism, though, we find another understanding of Qi which seems different from the Daoist one, althoug| they share the same concern for the cosmos and the form; of living. In Confucianism, Qi often refers to the instruments used in rituals, or Li.

>Li (along with ren, ‘benevolence’) is one of the key con cepts in Confucius’s teaching. The Goncept of Li is twofold: firstly there is a formal sense in which Li defines both the power hierarchy indicated by the artificial objects, Li Qi, andthe number of sacrifices performed during the rites. During the Zhou dynasty, Li Qi referred to different Qi with different functions: cooking utensils, objects made of jade, musical Instruments, wine utensils, water utensils, etc. The Qi made of jade and bronze were indications of identity and rank in the social hierarchy, including the king and the noble class. But Li Qi also refers to a spirit or ‘content’ that cannot be separated from this formal aspect. This content, for Confucius, is a kind of cultivation and practice that nurtures moral sensibility.

>[In the Book of Rites] Confucius says that ‘the course (of duty), virtue, benevolence, and righteousness cannot be fully carried out without the rules of propriety; nor are training and oral lessons for the rectification of manners complete’. We can understand from this than the moral— that is, one’s relation to the heaven— can only be maintained through the practice of Li. It is possible for the formal aspect of Li to dominate its content, and Confucius was aware of this problem. To avert this usurpation of content by form, he emphasises that Li is a fundamentally moral practice which starts with individual reflection extending to outer domains such as family and the state, guided by Dao.

>This is the famous doctrine ‘Inner sageliness-outer kingliness'). It follows a linear trajectory, as indicated in the Confucian classic
Da Xue (‘Great Learning’ or ‘University’): ‘investigation of things’, ‘extension of knowledge’, 'sincere thoughts’, ‘rectify the heart’, ‘cultivate the persons’, ‘regulate the families’, ‘govern well the States', and ‘world peace’.

[Anonymous No.11939256]

>>11939189
ghadadrawerasdgkjhasdfkhasfdasd fucking keep mangling my greentext adjhfasdfkjherkwhejra

asdfahsdf
adfhads
kjerwj
qbr
rt

okay. well, you can't win them all.
>ugh

might as well do some recap here anyways.

>>11939182
>Do you run urbanomic or something? Where are you getting these mountains of text and images off-hand?
nope, i'm just girardfag. this is apparently what i do with my life. i've been haunting land threads for a while now and apparently this is what it becomes. the text comes from PDFs and the aesthetics from tumblrs i like:

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

>>11939170
>Once question however; what is cosmotechnics?
see >>11931980:
>it means the unification between the cosmic order and the moral order through technical activities. 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.

>>11939053
these are some good effortposts sir, hats off to you. particularly this:

>What characterizes the end of modernity to me is the transition from mechanist assumptions and structures to informational assumptions and structures. This also corresponds to what Xi Jinping's government often refers to as "informatization" being a modern equivalent to industrialization.
so this for sure. and i think it's why YH has such regard for simondon, who is not only a philosopher of engineering but also one of *information,* about which i didn't say nearly enough in my very Brief Rundown on him in Cosmotech #5:

>>/lit/thread/S11887728#p11926126

but pretty much everything you have brought up in this post i would agree with as well.
>but that seems slightly awkward to me from the onset because our contemporary capitalism scarcely resembles our technics.
this is true, but again, ask Uncle Nick: our contemporary culture scarcely resembles our capitalism either, in a way.

but in either case, Cosmotech is aiming to redress the balance, in some sense. i am (embarrassingly) kind of today enamored of Enantiodromic Acceleration. it is unlikely that the Great Beast will be tamed by anyone (even Xi Jinping). and so i am entertaining few political fantasies. but it is an attempt to introduce a kind of moral philosophy back into things again, i think, in place of some of the hyperstition.
>it will fail. death. doom. doooooooooooooommm
>oh go fuck yourself inner self
>doom

[Anonymous No.11939348]

>>11939053
>Technics often corresponds to the ability to increase what one can do via tools. I would guess, unsupportedly, that what governs the world-ecology of informatization and singularitarian advances is actually not a simple extension of that principle, but instead increasing what a single person can be, or know. Transitioning from a memorization of structures into an education consisting of knowing how to find and integrate information is one example which is becoming popular in mainstream thought.

i think this thought also deserves another (you), b/c it's very much something i have been thinking today myself. there are horizons beyond which Large Numbers of People just aren't really so helpful anymore, and what you want are a small number of skilled professionals. the whole world is trending in this direction, to my mind, anyways, with automation leading the way in terms of displacing lots and lots of individuals (sometimes this is bad, but sometimes - as in the case of the legions of workers in the garment district in Manila - less so). so one thing that comes to mind in a social sense is the Care and Feeding of Humanity 2.0.

one thing about YH is that he actually doesn't talk about Transhumanity or Posthumanity or any other kind of Deus Ex scenario, in the way that sloterdijk might (where land is v/posthumanity and so on i'm actually not so sure about, now that i think about it). but of those three i find YH's perspective the coziest - which is not to say that it is *the best.* of those three, sloterdijk is the one with the highest regard for nietzsche, as YH will talk more about heidegger, stiegler and simondon and land more about D&G (or Cody Wilson, or Satoshi Nakamura, and so on, bless his blackened old cyberpunk heart).

anyways, it's pretty much always a good time to talk about Deus Ex and its themes also. my own hope is kind of boring and sentimental (like me: boring and sentimental). but in the IRL world it will be interesting to see which kind of stance v/transhumanity et al, or which strain of anthropotechnics, social experiment and so on turns out to be the one the century opts for.

[Anonymous No.11939349]

>>11935047
If the connection between myth and philosophy utilized here is as fundamental as YH says, it makes a lot of sense that Land's revolution appears at a glance to be so stylistic in nature-- Land's insights are drawn from a personal mythology comprised of Gibson and Lovecraft.

>Without an understanding of this question, we will all remain at a loss, overwhelmed by the homogeneous becoming of modern technology.

He could be stating a Landian pessimism here, or one specific to those outside the West. I'm not 100% sure.

>>11935106
It leads to both the postmodern hysteria and the kneejerk traditionalist hysteria that accompanies it; in the end we cannot endeavor, as either side of that political divide has, to call our society fundamentally amoral. But something is awry within the depths of that moralization, and I don't think it's encompassed in the normal confines of "virtue signaling" or the more nebulous institutional bias that the postmodern moral criticism rests on. If we can universally state there is a single quality that would better every member of modernity (or our singularitarian transition between modernity and after-modernity), it can only be self-reflection. If nothing else, the Hundred Schools give us a means to that end.

>>11935170
>radical alterity and globalization
This is something Land really gets at in his earliest work, saying how globalization only allows for a relation to alterity within the already-entrenched framework of globalization itself, which is not a relation with alterity at all but instead an annihilation of it by means of prejudice and the enforcement of Capital. YH seems to slot exactly into the middle of that by presenting an eastern cosmology as a framework for a rewilding of the fundamental structure of philosophy and its relationship to technics. If successful, that coup will transform existing philosophical structures into their own radical alterity, but allow for a marriage of the two basically separate traditions by virtue of a common cosmotechnical objective. This would balance the ideological 'trade deficit' between the two cultures by fundamentally requiring that each give and take ideas equally from the other, instead of the one-sided transaction Land describes in detail in Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest (I think in particular about the 'marriage' wherein each culture eats the 'rich food' of the other).

My effortposting in this case is a natural reaction to being far out of my depth.

[Anonymous No.11939356]

So basically this is just friendly accelerationism for delusional humanists.

[Anonymous No.11939465]

>>11939349
>If we can universally state there is a single quality that would better every member of modernity (or our singularitarian transition between modernity and after-modernity), it can only be self-reflection. If nothing else, the Hundred Schools give us a means to that end.

an excellent point. Let A Hundred Flowers Bloom is the right answer...it's just that culturally speaking it feels like a hundred shitty and anarchic meme-tribes fighting with each other. i'm just saddened that it seems like it has to be this way. but maybe it does. but the Hundred Schools produced Taoism and in the West perhaps something similar was required for the appearance of Socrates also. i think i do have some feeling about intellectual-cultural critical mass stuff, that things happen when they're supposed to. sometimes in ages of chaos. but even Augustine couldn't prevent sectarianism in the church, in the end. maybe it's just like this.

>YH seems to slot exactly into the middle of that by presenting an eastern cosmology as a framework for a rewilding of the fundamental structure of philosophy and its relationship to technics. If successful, that coup will transform existing philosophical structures into their own radical alterity, but allow for a marriage of the two basically separate traditions by virtue of a common cosmotechnical objective. This would balance the ideological 'trade deficit' between the two cultures by fundamentally requiring that each give and take ideas equally from the other, instead of the one-sided transaction Land describes in detail in Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest (I think in particular about the 'marriage' wherein each culture eats the 'rich food' of the other).

this is fucking great anon.

>My effortposting in this case is a natural reaction to being far out of my depth.

not as far as i can tell. and that's the thing: different cultures - indeed, different cosmotechnics - but the same *world.* and that matters also. it's not a world governed by a Postmodern Same. the guenonian Reign of Quantity is indeed a thing, but...well, you know what i mean.

>>11939356
>So basically this is just friendly accelerationism for delusional humanists.
there is a point beyond which acceleration can also become delusion. it's not crazy to say that at some point You Have To Go Back. that beyond that point there is only the howling wasteland. you can plunge into it if you like, but...why?

that's how i feel, anyways. everybody comes to these places on their own, but...i don't know, amy ireland tweeted something a while ago that perhaps was mysteriously related to this. it was this image and this text:

>The sea of bitterness has no bounds; return, the shore is at hand.
https://twitter.com/qdnoktsqfr/status/1042446733093924864

i think this is my feel also. so call this delusional humanism if you will, but...maybe it's just that sense of knowing the sea of bitterness has no bounds, and that it is time to try something different.

[Anonymous No.11939519]

>>11939465
>there is a point beyond which acceleration can also become delusion. it's not crazy to say that at some point You Have To Go Back. that beyond that point there is only the howling wasteland. you can plunge into it if you like, but...why?

It's not our choice. We're headed into that incomprehensible horror world and there's no steering wheel to turn, even if people could agree to want to change direction.

[Anonymous No.11939814]

>>11939519
>It's not our choice. We're headed into that incomprehensible horror world and there's no steering wheel to turn, even if people could agree to want to change direction.

there is a steering wheel to turn. but it's not turned as a society, or by any kind of leader, or by anything even remotely resembling Revolution.

this is my guy. but really, any number of guys will do, whether Christian, Indian, Chinese, Buddhist, Traditionalist, whatever. for now RG will do. no technological society in a place such as our own can really ever make RG truly happy, any more than princes in Confucius' time would ever get A+ report cards from him year after year (although they would want it). Confucius' great weapon was always the *sigh.* where the Way was lost, no substitute to it could ever be ready-made. his world, much like our own, is always short on sage-kings, bodhisattvas, gentlemen, and other beings.

we are headed into an incomprehensible horror world in many ways, and the story of that has been well-documented in these threads (and is covered daily on the news also). this is why i strongly urge for a nondual turn in these things, and that is exactly what Cosmotech is all about. it is very much like what amy ireland is saying. and it's also what YH is saying, and JBP also.

back in his day St Augustine didn't exactly have high hopes, and his was a pretty colossal reconstruction of philosophy as well. Augustine absorbed, in some order, greek philosophy, roman law, persian manichaeism, jewish religion and christian religion, brewed all that up together and then uploaded into the roman system to produce the new Imperial OS. and perhaps some aspect of that still remains in our time, but it doesn't bear much resemblance to the original product. we are trying out all kinds of benevolent forms of soft totalitarianism in our attempt to produce a eudaimonic society.

what such a society lacks is a sense of the properly mystical. personally, as i've said before, all that i think is really required of anyone today is simply not to become a rage zombie. that's really it. no revolutionary practice is required, let alone Great Fame and Success and so on. just don't become a rage zombie. and again, i think that this will in time become harder, because we are mimetic beings and we are all irresistably moved by large crowds.

people can always change as individuals. that's what really matters. not societies of control, or the rest. SoC's are inevitable, in some sense, as is *any* movement outside of Jain monasteries being labeled fascist or communist by someone. the only important stuff happens internally.

sorry for the preaching, but i have strong feels about this. it's not like girard doesn't have flaws, he does. and *all* of the religions have some wonderful things going on in them. but there is a steering wheel to turn, i think. it's just not to be found in some office boardroom or state chamber. 'tis within, as always.

[Anonymous No.11939873]

The Question Concerning Technology in China is being sold again on Amazon from a couple third party sellers.
>https://www.amazon.com/Question-Concerning-Technology-China-Mono/dp/0995455007/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1539655066&sr=1-3&keywords=yuk+hui&dpID=51T-YshQDsL&preST=_SY291_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch

[Anonymous No.11939876]

>>11939144
>>The gardener flushed with anger and then said with a laugh, ‘I’ve heard my teacher say, where there are machines, there are bound to be machine worries: where there are machine worries, there are bound to be machine hearts. With a machine heart in your breast, you’ve spoiled what was pure and simple, and without the pure and simple, the life of the spirit knows no rest. Where the life of the spirit knows no rest, the Way [Dao] will cease to buoy you up. It’s not that I don’t know about your machine— I would be ashamed to use it!’

Slippery slope or no, I don't think he's totally wrong. It's at least something we need to take into account.

[Anonymous No.11939902]

>Li is therefore both a set of constraints and a practice that ensures the order of things, so that the perfection of the individual will lead to the perfection of the state. Dao is immanent, but one can only know it through self-reflection and through the practice of Li. (In the Analects, during a dialogue between Confucius and the Prince of Wei Ling, the latter asks about the art of war. Confucius replies that he knows only about Li, and nothing about war; and leaves the following day.) But what is this order that Li seeks to ensure? A simplistic reading might claim that it is an order socially constructed in favor of the governing class. This is not entirely incorrect, sinci Confucius emphasises that Qi and Ming (‘name’) have to be properly placed so as to maintain order. In Zuo Zhuai (400 BC), it is said that a commandant, Yi Xu, rescued the king of the Wei country Sun Huanzi during the war, in order to avoid his being arrested. Sun wanted to give Yi Xu cities! as a token of his gratitude. Yi Xu refused, but requested ‘to be allowed to be received like a state prince at court, with musical instruments, and to be dressed with the saddle-girt! and bridle-trappings of a prince'. Confucius lamented the granting of this request, saying ‘Alas! It would have been better to give him many cities. It is only peculiar articles of use, and names, which cannot be granted to another [than those to whom they belong];— to these a ruler has particularly to attend’. As Confucius explained, this is not purely a matter of formality: his reasoning is that Qian Ming ensure that those who bear Ming and Qi should behave properly:

>It is by [the right use of] names that he secures the confidence [of the people]: it is by that confidence that he preserves the articles; it is in those articles that the ceremonial distinctions of rank are hidden: those ceremonial distinctions are essential to the practice of righteousness; it is righteousness which con tributes to the advantage [of the State]; and it is that advantage which secures the quiet of the people. Attention to these things is the condition of [good] government.

'li' is one the trickier terms in confucian thought, but the deep-dive into chinese philosophy is imho really rewarding. pic rel is good for dealing with this concept specifically, but it can be a little much if you haven't read any of this stuff before. AC Graham's 'Disputers of the Tao' is a classic, as are many others. if anyone is interested, i can go back through my old PC later and have a look for some other titles that i thought were good.

but any such list would have fingarette's Confucius: The Secular as Sacred near the top of it. and hey, look, a PDF:

http://faculty.smcm.edu/jwschroeder/Asian_Religions_2015/textdownloads_files/Confucius%20chp1%262.pdf

[Anonymous No.11939948]

>To summarise, in Confucianism Qi has its use in a formal setting, but such use serves only for the purpose of preserving the moral, the heavenly order, and for cultivating great personality; in Daoism, on the other hand, Qi plays no such instrumental role, since it is possible to reach the Dao being natural or ziran. Dao is metaphysical since it is formless; and in this sense, the metaphysical is the non-technical, the non-geometrical. Even though there are formalised orders in Confucianism, they exist for the purpose of maintaining this superior, formless (or ‘above form') Dao. The formless is tian (the Heaven) and ziran, and it is the formless that has the highest degree of freedom. We might say that the Confucians and the Daoists have different ways of pursuing Dao, and that therefore they do not stand in contradiction to one other, but rather complement one other. Mou Zongsan suggests that we characterise Daoism as ‘practical ontology’ and Confucianism as ‘moral metaphysics’, in the sense that Confucianism asks the ‘what’ questions (what is the sage, wisdom, benevolence and rightfulness, while Daoism asks how to achieve them.

>For the Daoists, the refusal of mechanical reasoning is a refusal of a calculative form of thinking, in order to stay within the freedom of the inner spirit. We might say that they refuse all efficiency in order to prepare for an opening— a reading of the Zhuangzi that resonates superficially with what the late Heidegger calls Gelassenheit, which may explain why the Heideggerian critique of technology has found such great resonance among Chinese scholars ever since Heidegger affirmed Gelassenheit as a possible exodus from modern technology.

>This is the ambivalence of Dao, then: on one hand, it stands for the completion of technics in the name of nature; on the other, it is also understood as a resistance of the spirit against technics, which always have the potential to contaminate it. Here Heidegger’s concept of the truth as a-letheia or Unverborgenheit as an access to the open may seem very close to Dao; yet, as we shall see below, they are fundamentally different. And indeed, this fundamental difference is one of the reasons it is necessary to conceive of different histories of technics.

and not only in china. check out these broskis. for all of heidegger's And By Philosophy, I Mean Western Philosophy sensibilities, i think he was secretly pretty okay with his reception abroad and had at least a more-than-cursory interest in some ideas found there as well.

>Heidegger himself is reported as saying, on reading D. T. Suzuki on Zen Buddhism, "If I understand this man correctly, this is what I have been trying to say in all my writings."

source:
https://www.academia.edu/1816669/_Zen_in_Heideggers_Way_published_in_Journal_of_East-West_Philosophy_

let's not get carried away, tho. heidegger is important in his own right. i like zen too, but give the man his due. B&T didn't write itself.

[Anonymous No.11939992]

>The cosmotechnics that I have sketched above in the traditions of Confucianism and Daoism may seem to some readers similar to Hellenistic philosophy after Aristotle; in particular, the Greco-Rroman Stoics’ teaching on living in accordance with nature has a clear affinity with the Daoist aspiration to nature (Heidegger remained silent on the Stoics, even though the Stoic cosmology seems closer to the Ionian than to the Aristotelian one).

>But rather that merely listing these differences, I would like to restate the concept of cosmotechnics developed in the introduction, which hinges on the relation between the cosmos and the moral, as mediated by technics, and to show how we can identify such a cosmotechnics in Stoicism.

>A closer reading of the Stoics allows us to see the role played in their thought by rationality, which was very much depreciated in Daoism. Both Stoic cosmotechnics and Daoist cosmotechnics propose that we live in accordance with a 'nature’— respectively, physis and zi ran— and insist that technical objects are only the means towards a more superior end: for Stoics eudaimonia, for Daoists xiao yao (‘free and easy’), and for Confucians tan dang (‘magnanimity’).

>The Stoic cosmos is one limited, spherical body surrounded by the infinite void. A common reading has it that they follow the Heraclitean model of the cosmos, which sees it as being generated by the mixing of material with fire, which is breath and vital heat. The cosmos repeats itself in an identical cycle, in which fire is transformed into other elements and then returns to itself. There is a logic to be found in the cosmos that is produced by Reason, and Reason ‘cannot produce one which is either better or worse’. In Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods we find a precise description of the passage from the physical to the moral, in which Reason becomes divine:

>And contemplating the heavenly bodies the mind arrives at a knowledge of the gods, from which arises piety, with its comrades justice and the rest of the virtues, the sources of a life of happiness that vies with and resembles the divine existence and leaves us inferior to the celestial beings in nothing else save immortality, which is immaterial for happiness.

>The mediation between the two realms consists of the core idea of what the Stoics call oikeiosis. The Stoic morality is not a categorical moral obligation, although it involves self reflection and self-restriction; to live in agreement with nature requires both contemplation and interpretation. Interpretation means firstly to place oneself in relation with beings through contemplation, and secondly to give value to them. These values are not arbitrary, as Emile Brehier pointed out: ‘value is not what gives measure, but what is to be measured; what gives the measure is being itself [...] in other words: axiology supposes ontology and doesn’t replace it’.

[Anonymous No.11940030]

>Gabor Betegh has proposed that the Stoics, particularly Chrysippus, had convincingly integrated cosmic nature into the foundation of their ethical theory…since physics would be a mere supplement for deepening our understanding of ethics, we would be mistaken in setting out from cosmic nature in order to understand the nature of Stoic ethics. We have already encountered a similar argument in our discussion of Mou Zongsan’s critique of Dong Zhong-shu’s cosmocentrism; however, as we pointed out, morality is not possible without taking the external environment into account, since it is being-in-the-world that is the condition of ethical thought.

>Betegh showed that Plato's Timaeus has an important influence on Chrysippus’s theory of telos. The long passage in the Timaeus upon which Betegh develops his thesis reads as follows:

>Hence if someone has devoted all his interest and energy to his appetites or to competition, all his beliefs must necessarily be mortal ones, and altogether, so far as it is possible to become par excellence mortal, he will not fall the least bit short of this, because it is the mortal part of himself that he has developed. But If someone has committed himself entirely to learning and to true wisdom, and it is these among the things at his disposal that he has most practised, he must necessarily have immortal and divine wisdom, provided that he gets a grasp on truth. And so far as it is possible for human nature to have a share in immortality, he will not in any degree lack this. And because he always takes care of that which is divine, and has the daimon that lives with him well ordered, he will be supremely happy. Now for everybody there is one way to care for every part, and that is to grant to each part its own proper nourishments and motions. For the divine element in us, the motions which are akin to it are the thoughts and revolutions of the whole world. Everyone should take a lead from these. We should correct the corrupted revolutions in our head concerned with becoming by learning the harmonies and revolutions of the whole world, and so make the thinking subject resemble the object of its thought, in accordance with its ancient nature; and by creating this resemblance, bring to fulfillment the best life offered by gods to mankind for present and future time.

>In an apparent echo of the relation in Chinese thought between the human and the Heaven, we find a parallel between the structure and organisation of the individual soul and the world soul — a kind of ‘analogy’. Yet in Plato the relation is not truly analogical, since the human being is also within nature and is a part of the whole. It is possible to bring the rational part of the soul into order and harmony when the soul internalizes the cosmic harmony.

[Anonymous No.11940106]

>With all of this in mind, we might list the following differences between Daoism and Stoicism in terms of ‘living in agreement with nature':

>Cosmology: the Stoics model the cosmos as organ ism (and one might speak here of a cosmobiology or cosmophysiology), something that is not evident in Daoism, where there is an organic organization of the universe, but where it is not presented as an animal, but is instead guided by Dao, which is modelled on zi ran;

>Divinisation: for the Stoics, the cosmos is related to the divine qua lawgiver, while this role of the lawgiver or creator is not found in ancient Chinese thinking;

>Eudaimonia: the Stoics value rationality highly since it is what leads to eudaimonia, and the human plays a specific role in the universe owing to its rationality; Daoists may recognize the former, but reject the latter, since Dao is in all being, and freedom can only be achieved through wu wei (non-action);

>Rationality: for the Stoics, to live with nature is to develop rationality; for Daoists, it is rather a matter of restoring one’s original spontaneous aptitude.

>The above remarks aim to show that the relation between the cosmos and the moral in the Stoicism and Daoism are mediated by different technics, which in turn belong to what I term cosmotechnics. These relations are established in different ways, and in fact define different modes of life. In Technology of the Self, Foucault gives various examples of the Stoics’ practices: letters to friends and disclosures of the self (Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, etc.); examination of the self and conscience; the askesis of remembering truth (not discovering truth). The Greeks classified techniques in two main forms: melete and gymnasia. Melete means meditation, in which one uses imagination to help oneself to cope with a situation, e.g. imagining the worst scenarios, perceiving that undesirable things are already taking place, refusing the conventional perception of suffering (e.g. illness). Gymnasia, on the contrary, consists of bodily exercise, such as strenuous sporting activities. We may want to ask: How do these exercises have their ground in the understanding of virtue revealed by cosmic nature? This is not the point that concerns Foucault, who is interested in the history of self-disclosure, but it is precisely the question that needs to be addressed in our inquiry into cosmotechnics.

speaking of Foucault-
>no
>what?
>no. i’m stopping you there. i know what you’re about to say
>okay. what?
>you were about to say, you think people should at some point give foucault a chance and read him
>and? what’s wrong with that?
>i’m saying you shouldn’t push your luck here. one thing at a time, and asking for Foucault is like asking for nine things. and the time to read Foucault will be in about 400 years
>but Hermeneutics of the Self is really good
>i don’t care. there have to be *some* rules girardfag. *you* can read him if you want. elsewhere
>sigh. ok

[Anonymous No.11940176]

>In other words, there is a certain line of thought that implies that Dao is not to be sought anywhere else than in everyday life. This ‘reason of common sense’ is further developed in Sung Ming Neo-Confucianism.

>Up to this point, we have only discussed the usage of Qi, but not the production of Qi. What is the role of Qi in the moral cosmology, or moral cosmogony?

>What exactly is this ch'i, which may be familiar to readers who have some knowledge of Tai Chi and Chinese medicine? It is not simply material or energetic, but is fundamentally moral. We must recognise that Sung Ming Neo-Confucianism was a continuation of the resistance against Buddhism and superstitious Daoism. It centred on a metaphysical inquiry that sought to develop a cosmogony compatible with the moral, and which emerged from the reading of two classics, namely The Doctrine of The Mean and Yi Zhuan (seven commentaries on Zhou Yi— The Book of Changes), which in turn came from the interpretation of the Analects of Confucius and Mencius. Mou Zongsan suggests that the contribution of Sung and Ming Neo-Confucianism could be understood as ‘the penetration of the moral necessity to such an extreme that it attains the highest clarity and perfection’.This consists in the unification of ‘ontological cosmology’ and morality through the practice of ren (‘benevolence’) and the full development of xing (‘inner possibility’ or ‘human nature’).

>We should pay attention here to the word hua, which does not denote a sudden movement like a quantum leap, which would be called bian, but rather a slow movement that can be likened to the changing of the shape of a cloud in the sky. In simpler terms, what underlies this theory of ch’i is a monism which furnishes the foundation for the coherence between cosmology and the moral. With this monism of ch’i, Zhang Zai was able to claim that heaven and earth, sun and moon, other human beings and the thousand beings are all connected to the I. One therefore has a moral obligation towards the ten thousand beings and in turn the ten thousand beings are part of the I. Once again we return to the core of the Confucian project, namely a moral cosmology.

>Mou insists that the Li are not sufficient to set ch'i into movement, since they are only principles, and therefore require a ‘primary mover’.This primary force resides in xin, shen, and qing. Ch’i , li, and xin continued to compete to be the most fundamental metaphysical principle of Neo-Confucianists, with philosophers trying either to integrate them or to argue for one over the other. For Mou, xin stands out as the strongest candidate. Yet how do these subjective forces drive being into movement? Mou has no other way of explaining this apart from taking a Kantian stance, where the trinity (ch’i, li, xin) is the condition of possibility of the experience of phenomena, and existence and experience are correlated.

[Anonymous No.11940218]

>Here the individuation of beings is a transformation of ch’i, from its formlessness to a concrete form— which can also be Qi. Song Yingxing reformulates Wu Xing into a new composition, in which only earth, metal, and wood are related to forms. Fire and water are the two most elementary forces situated in-between form and Qi. All individuated beings in the universe are phenomena of the transformation of ch’i into the forms of Wu Xing. These transformations also follow the cycle of movement: when wood is burnt, it returns to the soil. In Song’s analysis, not unlike Zhang Zai, he doesn’t see Wu Xing in terms of opposing forces, as in ancient philosophy (e.g. water is opposed to fire, metal is opposed to wood), but considers them in terms of intensities which can be combined to produce different compositions. One might say that there is no opposition here, but only different proportions or relations.

>But for these combinations to be possible demands human Intervention, and this is where Qi comes in. Qi or technics is what brings ch’i into forms which may not spontaneouslyoccur in themselves. This is a dimension of ch'i which the New Confucians and the Neo-Confucians disregard when they see the heart as the sole ‘primary mover’ of the causality of phenomena. Song is very precise on this point in ‘On ch’i'. His argument can be summarised in two points: firstly, ch'i can take on forms such as water and fire, and although these elements are opposed to each other, they actually share a common attraction to one another. He uses the metaphor that, when they don’t see each other, they miss each other like wife and husband, mother and son. However, they can ‘see each other’ through human interventions— more precisely, technical activities. Secondly, if we consider a glass of water and a chariot made of wood, when the wood is set on fire, the glass of water cannot produce any effect and will be vaporised by the fire: however, if there is a huge container of water, then the fire will easily be extinguished. Hence it is the question of intensity rather than that of substance that is essential to technological thinking.

>Thus ch’i, according to the principles of Dao, is actualised in different elementary movements: and through human intervention, they are reactualised so as to yield individuated beings— for example in forging, and more generally in the production and reproduction of Qi. Qi thus enters into the circle and enlarges the possibility of combinations of the elementary forms. We might say that the dominant philosophy of nature guided technological thinking in such a way that the artificial had always to be subsumed not only under the principles of movement that we would call physics today, but also under an organic model of combination, a mediation of the relations between different individuated beings.

notice YH’s use of ‘individuation’ here, which i think is part of simondon’s influence.

[Anonymous No.11940280]

>To sum up, in terms of what we characterised earlier as cosmotechnics, we have seen the use of Li Qi in Confucianism to consolidate the cosmological and moral order; in Zhuangzi’s case, the ‘using’ or ‘not using’ (but not usage according to its technical and social determination) of the tool to mediate with Dao to acquire the art of living; whereas in Song’s work we see instead its role in both creating and using, in which the Qi-Doo moral relation is extended into everyday production. This organic form is not what we understand today as a reflexive, recursive process, but finds its highest principle in Dao— a cosmotechnics that binds the human to the cosmos.

and on that note, i think i’ll call it there for the evening. when we resume i’ll be skipping some of the stuff on the historical development of intellectual currents in China, although maybe some of what YH writes about disparities between Chinese and Western science will be interesting to some - i don’t really know. i’d prefer to get caught up to the modern day, and obviously there’s no need to greentext every alternate page of the book either. i’m just picking out stuff that seems interesting or germane to the thread for now.

i also wanted to give a shout-out to Yuganon for the scans of the George Morgan book, which i will give a more thorough read after some more posts about this book: thanks again, kind anon, it’s possible that many of us would never had a chance to read this one had you not taken the time to do that scanning and uploading. that was a really awesome thing to do: i hope you are basking in the glow of your Steam Achievement. as far as i know, that’s the only one awarded in the Cosmotech thread thus far…

so until next time gents. more YH greentext to come after a brief word from our sponsor (sleep). tomorrow we continue our ongoing night drive through Level-2.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZDC1QvMhNs

[Anonymous No.11940288]

>>11940280
You are awesome.

[Anonymous No.11940384]

>>11936970
Heres a bit of it:
The Heraclitean cosmos of fire vs. air, and the Parmenidean cosmos of celestial expansion appear unscientifically superfluous. They underly and are extended conceptions of their own epistemic method of understanding the universe-order of things they find themselves in. This priority of these linguistic efforts does not negate absolutely their truth, but expresses symbolically that machine of nature working as them, as an attempt to eschew immediate collective answers concluded by the mass of the everyday, but rather to transmute their own primitive visions (visions shared by everyone) and everyday tendencies into a form they can come to possess in their direct knowledge, a rudimentary system and yet one that can produce patterns of further intricate and individualized nuance upon the world they inhabit. The same priority of work of science follows in the most accessible, universally and “in your face” language, because science, or math, can be thought of as a language. The price of this clarity is a kind of simplicity science hyper-realizes as sensory organs plunging into a narrow depth of the logos. Prose attempts to “fan out” the plunge as evenly as can be afforded without denying one’s own individual stake of the metaphysical grounding of being as being nothing more than what-is.
Heraclitus' cosmology fits the Parmenidean cosmos only as it’s epistemic method of bringing together “the world” which cannot be fully attained, and one’s own “being,” before a sub-dividing into fragmented indicators of being. Parmenides establishes humans’ accessing of logos as an expanding inner-world to the expanding world itself, of which the latter cannot be denied one’s own thoughtless position along with it. “That which is not” exists and is posited in the mind whenever a formal method of ruling out singular cases of what is or could be the case within oneself and the world is needed or desired to uncover further possibilities of correspondences within a structure of outward understanding. This "nothing" processes through thought or experience until the “nothing” posited may be canceled out by its own contradiction, or prove the prior matter of questioning as lacking in the accuracy of whatever tendency gave rise to it. Without determining these matters in question solely on the ground of “what-is,” the effort would appear as though it were establishing itself a modal vacuum, unrelated to the world but appearing to spin in circles in-itself. Only upon reflection of everything contained by “what-is” can this circular method become useful to come closer toward what Heraclitus calls divine law, but divine law that has been etched into the inner-working of humans.

"How earth and sun and moon and the Aither that is common to all and the Milky Way and furthest Olympus and the hot force of the stars surged forth to come to be"
"Night-shining foreign light wandering around earth"

[Anonymous No.11940537]

>>11940280
>i hope you are basking in the glow of your Steam Achievement.
I do not want glory, nor did I ask nor want to be Yuganon. By having an identifier, I am no longer free to be myself, which is why I do not want fame. I believe it is a trap that keeps us focused away from the thing or things that are really important. Therefore, I respectfully decline your achievement, and besides, I gave up playing vidya last year and still have zero regrets. I do wish someone will upload an ebook of Yuga so I can be free of being Yuganon and posting snapshots. It's not that I hate it, the recognition, and fans, if any per se, it's just I can't bear to be something I am not.

[Anonymous No.11940820]

>>11939153

[Anonymous No.11940884]

>>11931809
goddamn terminators. Just you wait till I learn to make EMP's. I'll knock out every electrical system on the planet. Try invading from a future without electricity motherfuckers.

[Anonymous No.11940890]

>>11940537
what book is that pic

[Anonymous No.11940906]

>>11937898
I want to read that pic book but im too afraid

[Anonymous No.11940908]

>>11940890
It's from Yuga: An Anatomy of Our Fate written by Marty Glass.

[Anonymous No.11941207]

OK this fucking slaps. I made a thread a while back asking where to start with Virilio - no replies so I just read pic related and Bunker Archaeology. A lot of really interesting stuff in how V. continuously relates the history of mobility and urbanism in Europe back to its military dimension. What does the cosmotechnics thread think of this guy?

[Anonymous No.11941724]

>>11940288
well thank you anon. it's nice to be appreciated!

>>11940384
the first part is dense going, reminds me a little of 5 o-clock wojak. but those two lines at the end are hauntingly beautiful anon. maybe this is how poetry comes into the world, i don't know.

>>11940537
very well. i understand the power of labels. ibe free then! and thank you once again, most sincerely, for your contributions to the thread.

>i do wish someone will upload an ebook of Yuga so I can be free of being Yuganon and posting snapshots.
i don't know how much i paid for the Kindle version but i think it was like five bucks and that was the deal of the century. ofc, it's not lost on me that this is part of why Bezos is the world's richest man and yet nobody knows who Marty Glass is...alas.

>>11940884
>Just you wait till I learn to make EMP's. I'll knock out every electrical system on the planet. Try invading from a future without electricity motherfuckers.
kek. and pic rel also. also Snake Plissken is an underrated movie hero, as much as John Carpenter was an underrated director. Snake would have been just fine with a future without electricity; that was his solution to the Wild Ride. i wouldn't be, but i'm also not a classic pulp icon.

this scene is infinitely re-watchable also. the movies are almost deliberately b-rate cheese, but come on. this is awesome.

Escape From LA: Bangkok Rules
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue8TvvYik74

>>11940906
there is no reason to fear Alfred North Whitehead. in LoTR-parlance he's not quite Gandalf but he's pretty close. definitely one of the White Wizards of philosophy, imho. one of those guys that Lesser Wizards just wouldn't be able to touch. definitely the kind of benevolent figure who could drop a You Have No Power Here kind of line, and would proceed to just gently remind evil-doers that space and time bend with the imagination, and that any presumptive ideological sacking of his cozy reading room is not going to happen. Whitehead cannot be touched, nor does he capitulate to the wishes of griefmongering tryhards in any timeline. there's no reason to fear him. he serves the Cosmic Balance.

>>11941207
it does fucking slap and so does its author. it is objectively impossible to dislike Paul Virilio. and that very book is on my own acceleration bibliography also:

>>/lit/thread/S11823861#p11835482

i've read a bunch of stuff by him and it is all good. an underrated author for sure and yet one of those guys that you always encounter and wish there were just more like him. why doesn't everyone write like him? and he is (was, ugh) yet *another* based Catholic writing insightful critique. i'm not a devoutly religious follower of any faith myself but even i have to acknowledge that there is some kind of pattern going on there.

big ups to Paul Virilio. he takes nothing off the table. so:

>What does the cosmotechnics thread think of this guy?
complete legend. you won't waste an hour reading him.

[Anonymous No.11941823]

>>11941724
also, just briefly, but now that i've watched that Pro Line ad a couple of times now: in a certain sense sports gambling both proves and kind of renders null some of pic rel's theories, in a funny way. moneyline sports betting really is one of the clearest recipes for converting Knowledge into Power (read: capital) and vice versa. obviously foucault is a complicated guy, and there is more to what he is saying than this, but it's just something to think about. taken to the realm of the true financial wizardry that brought the house down in 2008, you can see why this would *not* in fact be a good thing, because in the long run speculation winds up speculating on itself in a wheel of disaster and insider trading, but this is a feature and not a bug also.

the distinctions between sports betting and financial speculation are blurry, but i do think it's intriguing. marx was always bothered by the fact that credit could be summoned out of thin air by banks at any time, which fucked up his whole system (and it should fuck up ours too, and it's why Uncle Nick shills so hard for BTC). but the converse is also true: two people can agree to wager or bet on anything, and that is also a human impulse. there is no way to control for the desire of individuals to speculate or play games for stakes. and i think this near to the root of a lot of academic insanity also: the wish to control the fundamental baseline currency in which arguments themselves are carried out: that is, language itself, or even the Real. but that whole edifice is currently in a state of breaking down, so...

i've said before that a redpilled Foucault would be a nightmare for the left, and that my fantasy scenario would be for a Ghost Foucault to appear at an academic tribunal about to sentence JBP to death by hemlock for corrupting the youth of Neo-Athens. for all that he hath wrought he was still a pretty interesting man, although he has left fire and ruination in his wake in many ways, and his brand of Left Nietzscheanism transported the force of marxist revolutionary politics from the streets and into the universities and HR departments and government sectors as much as anyone. he really did change the game - such is the power of theory for you. and he was right about many things: Power really is omnipresent. but what is called for is for its wise and judicious use, less so its inquisitorial aspects...

but that is a job for Cosmotech! and so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. once more unto the Wild Ride...

*bangs gong*

[Anonymous No.11941844]

Imagine spending an evening with /ourlad/ Nick.

[Anonymous No.11941866]

>[T]he philosophia perennis of China was an organic materialism. This can be illustrated from the pronouncements of philosophers and scientific thinkers of every epoch. The mechanical view of the world simply didn't develop in Chinese thought, and the organicist view in which every phenomenon was connected with every other according to hierarchical order was universal among Chinese thinkers.

>This is a significant difference that I believe was cosmotechnically determinative for the different rhythms of technological development in China and in Europe: a mechanical programme capable of effectively assimilating nature and the organic form didn’t exist in China, where the organic remained always the credo of thought and the principle of living and being. This organic form of nature in China, insists Needham, must be strictly distinguished from the question of nature as it was posed in the West, from the Presocratics up to the European Renaissance. In Europe, laws— both natural laws in the juridical sense and the laws of nature— come from the same root, namely the model of ‘law-giving’: in the first case, ’earthly imperial law-givers’, in the second a ‘celestial and supreme Creator Deity', whether the Babylonian sun-god Marduk, the Christian god, or Plato’s demiurge. The Romans recognised both positive laws— civil coded laws of a specific people or State, ex legale, and the Law of Nations (Ius gentium) which is equivalent to natural law (Ius naturale).The Law of nations is developed to deal with non-citizens (peregrini), to whom citizen laws (Ius civile) cannot be directly applied. Although Needham did not explain the connection between the Law of Nations and the Law of Nature, we can acquire an under standing of this connection from other sources: for example, Cicero extended the Stoic law of nature to social conducts The universe obeys God, seas and land obey the universe, and human life is subject to the decrees of the Supreme Law’; they have different connotations but the same denotation. Needham believes that although ius gentium was hardly to be found in China, there was a sort of ‘law of nature’ which, as we have seen already, was the moral principle of the Heaven, reigning over both human and non-human.

>The natural laws of early Christianity also governed both the human and the non-human, as we can see from the definition of Natural Law by the jurist Jupian (170-223):

>Natural Law is that which Nature has taught all animals: for that kind of law is not peculiar to mankind, but is common to all animals. [...] Hence comes that union of the male and female which ch we call marriage; hence the procreation and bringing up of children.

Why Didn’t China Invent Everything is always a question. in 1930s germany, hitler’s solution to crises economic and psychological was palingenetic: an organic-mythopoetic unity founded on Aryanism was a workaround for both Marx and Nietzsche.

[Anonymous No.11941890]

>A radical separation was made, as Needham suggested, by the theologian Francisco Suarez (1548-1617). Suarez proposed a separation between the world of morality and the world of the non-human: law can only be applied to the former, since things lacking reason are capable neither of law nor Obedience. This concept of the law of nature with a direct relation to the law-giver is present not only in the juridical domain, but also in natural science, for example in Roger Bacon and Isaac Newton. Needham proceeds to the claim that the law of nature in the sense of ius gentium or natural science in Europe is not present in China, precisely because (1) there was a distaste for abstract codified laws owing to historical experience, (2) li proved to be more suitable than any other forms of bureaucratism, and (3) more importantly, the Supreme Being, although it existed for a short period in China, was depersonalised, and hence a celestial supreme creator who gives laws to both nature and the non-natural never really existed. Therefore,

>"[t]he harmonious co-operation of all beings arose not from the orders of a superior authority external to themselves, but from the fact that they were all parts in a hierarchy of wholes forming a cosmic and organic pattern and what they obeyed were the internal dictates of their own natures."

>This lack of a mechanical causal view meant that the notion of a system well-ordered according to laws did not arise; and hence China lacked any programme that sought effectively to understand beings and to manipulate them according to mechanical causalities. This mechanical paradigm could be said to be a necessary preliminary stage for the assimilation of the organic— that is, the imitation or simulation of organic operations, as for example in the technological lineage from simple automata to synthetic biology or complex systems. Needham thus poses the following analogy:

>[W]ith their appreciation of relativism and the subtlety and immensity of the universe, they were groping after an Einsteinian world-picture without having laid the foundations for a Newtonian one. By that path science could not develop.

>There is room for doubt as to Needham’s term ‘organic materialism’, since it is debatable whether what he is addressing here is a materialism at all. It is perhaps more correct to say that China was governed by moral laws which were also heavenly principles; and that law, following Needham, was understood in a Whiteheadian organismic sense by the Neo-Confucian school — precisely what we describe here as a Chinese cosmotechnics.

[Anonymous No.11941918]

>For New Confucianism, a school that emerged in the early twentieth century, the question of science and technology, along with that of democracy, was unavoidable. Having recognised that the ‘Cartesian’ paradigm, which would seek to absorb Western development while retaining the Chinese mind intact, was no more than an illusion, New Confucianism set itself the task of integrating Western culture into that of China and making it compatible with its traditional philosophical system. To put it more bluntly, the philosophers of New Confucianism sought to show, from a cultural and especially a philosophical point of view, that it is possible for Chinese thought to produce science and technology. This attempt culminated in the work of the great philosopher Mou Zongsan, in particular in the guise of his reading of Immanuel Kant.

>Mou was trained in Chinese philosophy, from the I Ching to Neo-Confucianism and Buddhism, as well as Western philosophy, with a certain specialisation in Kant, Whitehead, and Russell, among others. He also translated Kant’s three critiques (from their existing English translations) into Chinese. Kant’s philosophy plays a decisive role in bridging Western and Chinese thought in Mou’s system. Indeed, one of Mou's most striking philosophical manoeuvres is to think the division between Western and Chinese philosophy in terms of what Kant calls phenomenon and noumenon. In one of his rnost important books, Phenomenon and Thing-in-ltself:

>According to Kant, intellectual intuition belongs only to God, but not to humans. I think this is really astonishing. I reflect on Chinese philosophy, and if one follows the thought of Kant, I think that Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism all confirm that humans have intellectual intuition; otherwise it wouldn’t be possible to become a saint, Buddha, or Zhenren.

>What exactly is this mysterious intellectual intuition that is fundamental to Mou’s analysis? In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant sets up a division between phenomena and noumenal Phenomena appear when the sensible data delivered through the pure intuitions of time and space are subsumed under the concepts of the understanding. But there are cases when objects that are not perceived through sensible intuition can still become objects of the understanding. In Edition A of the Critique we find the following clear definition:

>Appearances, in so far as they are thought as objects according to the unity of the categories, are called phenomenon. But if I assumed things that are objects merely of the understanding and that, as such, can nonetheless be given to an intuition— even if not to sensible intuition (but hence coram intuit intellectuali)— then such things would be called noumena (intelligibilia).

the link below will take you to some more of Mou if you're interested.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/arena-attachments/293418/607a039f8bef8a1fa2902165066c6b80.pdf

[Anonymous No.11941946]

>This noumenon, which sometimes Kant calls the thing-in-itself n Edition A, demands another, non-sensible type of intuition. The noumena as a concept is therefore negative, in so far as it poses limits to the sensible. Yet it could potentially have a positive signification if we could ‘lay at [its] basis an intuition’— that is, if we could find a form of intuition for the noumenon. Since such an intuition could not be a sensible one, however, it is something that human beings do not possess:

>[S]uch an intuition— viz., intellectual intuition— lies absolutely outside our cognitive power, and hence the use of the categories can likewise in no way extend beyond the boundary containing the objects of experience.

>Kant’s refusal of intellectual intuition as something accessible to human beings is decisive for Mou’s interpretation of the difference between Western and Chinese philosophy. In Intellectual Intuition and Chinese Philosophy, a precursor to the later and more mature Phenomenon and Thing-in-Itself, Mou attempted to show that intellectual intuition is fundamental to Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism alike. For Mou, intellectual intuition is associated with the creation (e.g. cosmogony) and with moral metaphysics (as opposed to Kant’s metaphysics of morals, which is based on the subject’s capacity for knowing). Mou finds theoretical support for this view in Zhang Zai’s work, particularly in the following passage

>The brightness of the heaven is no brighter than the sun, when one looks at it, one doesn’t know how far it is from us. The sound of the heaven is no louder than the thunder, when one listens to it, one doesn’t know how far it is from us. The infinity of heaven is no greater than the great void, therefore the heart (xin) knows the heaven’s boundary without exploring its limits.

>Mou notes that the first two sentences refer to the possibiltiy of knowing through sensible intuitions and understanding; the last sentence, however, hints that the heart is able to know things that are not bounded by phenomena. He remarks on the strangeness of the last sentence, which is not, strictly speaking, logically meaningful, for there can be no meaningful comparison of infinities. For Mou, the capacity of the ‘heart (xin)’ to ‘know the heaven’s boundary’ is precisely intellectual intuition: it doesn’t refer to the kind of knowing determined by sensible intuitions and the understanding, but rather to a full illumination emerging from the cheng ming of the universal, omnipresent, and infinite moral xin.

Mou money and Mou problems here.
https://digital.library.adelaide.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/2440/67103/8/02whole.pdf

[Anonymous No.11941952]

I asked before but, does anyone have a pdf of Cosmotechnics?

Also looking around for Reza's Intelligence and Spirit

[Anonymous No.11941963]

one other thing. when i was getting into this stuff last year i also learned that one of Mou Zongsan's major influences was this guy, Xiong Shili, and whose New Treatise on Consciousness is available on libgen too. from what i understand, Xiong Shili was to Mou what Nietzsche was to Heidegger: a guy who Knew Things.

and clearly, one look at this man will tell you that this is a guy who Knows Things. as much as the Purple Sweater indicates the highest degree of philosophical mastery in the West (deleuze, ranciere, et al) i think it is safe to say that a beard like this combined with a sharp and penetrating gaze should stand as a clear signal that one is now in the presence of Wisdom.

http://www.acmuller.net/articles/2017-05-20-new-treatise-review.pdf

>>11941952
it's in the mega linked to in the OP.

[Anonymous No.11941994]

>Cheng ming, literally ‘sincerity and intelligence’, comes from the Confucian classic Zhong Yong (‘Doctrine of the Mean’). According to Zhang Zai, ‘the knowing of Cheng ming reaches the liangzhi of the moral of heaven, and is totally different from knowing through hearing and seeing. Thus knowing based on intellectual intuition characterises Chinese philosophy and its moral metaphysics. Mou often repeated that his is a moral metaphysics, but not a metaphysics of morals, since the latter is only a metaphysical exposition of the moral, while for the former, metaphysics is only possible starting with the moral. He therefore demonstrates how the unification of Qi and Dao depends upon this capacity of the mind to go beyond formality and instrumentality. Mou also demonstrates that intellectual Intuition exists in both Daoism and Buddhism. It is not our purpose here to repeat his lengthy and detailed proof but, in short, intellectual intuition in Daoism is related to the fact that knowledge is infinite, while human life is finite— therefore it is futile to chase after infinity with one’s limited life. We can understand this from the first two sentences of the story of Pao Ding cited above:

>Your life has a limit, but knowledge has none. If you use what is limited to pursue what has no limit, you will be in danger. If you understand this and still strive for knowledge, you will be in danger for certain!

>This would prima facie seem to confirm Kant’s prohibition on intellectual intuition. But Pao Ding puts forward another way of knowing, namely that the Dao is that which is beyond all knowledge, and yet can be apprehended by the heart. The same is true for Buddhism, as demonstrated in the concept] of the void or nothingness: the void and the phenomenona coexist, but in order to know the void, one must go beyond phenomena and physical causality.

>For Anglophone readers who wish to look deeper into Mou’s argument for intellectual intuition, the work of Sebastien Billioud serves as a good introduction, although Billioud also criticises Mou for remaining silent on Kant’s Critique of Judgement and the reinterpretation of intellectual intuition in post-Kantian philosophy, especially the work of Fichte and Schelling— a reasonable enough criticism since, although he refers several times to Fichte, Mou never engages with his thought in any depth. Billioud attempts to compare Mou Zongsan and Schelling through the work of the great French connoisseur of Schelling Xavier Tilliette. However, we must be careful with this comparison. The term ‘intellectual intuition’ is rather muddy already, and its legacy in German idealism even more so. In an influential article, Moltke Gram argued against that what he calls the ‘continuity thesis’ regarding intellectual intuition, as a transition from Kant to Fichte and Schelling.

and ofc Trump, who will (if he hasn't already) complete the system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOk6HB609po

[Anonymous No.11942034]

>In fact, if we take a close look at Fichte’s and Schelling’s use of the concept of intellectual intuition, we can see that it is almost opposite to Mou Zongsan’s. For Fichte and Schelling, Kant’s ‘I think’ remains a fact, a Tatsache, and so cannot furnish the ground of knowing; for the ground of knowing must be absolute, in the sense that it is not conditioned by anything else. For Fichte, beyond the ‘I think’, there must be an immediate consciousness of this ‘I think’, and it is this consciousness that has the status of intellectual intuition. In his Wissenschaftslehre Fichte claims that ‘if the self of intellectual intuition is, because it is, and is, what it is; then it is insofar as it posits itself, absolutely self-sufficient and independent.’ Therefore Fichte proposes to think of intellectual intuition as Tathandlung, as a self-positing act. In the same way, the early Schelling understood intellectual intuition as the ground of knowing, as elaborated in his 1795 essay ‘Of the I as the Principle of Philosophy’.

>However, there are two different developments in Fichte and Schelling, although they both face the same question of the passage from the infinite to the finite. In Fichte, the unconditional I requires a non-l as negation or as check; what is outside of the unconditional I is only the product of such a negative effect; whereas Schelling’s Naturphilosophie moves from the I to nature, and considers that the I and nature have the same principle, as expressed in his famous claim ‘Nature should be Mind made visible, Mind the invisible Nature’. The Absolute, for Schelling, is no longer the subjective pole, but rather the absolute unity of subject-object, which is constantly in recursive movement. In short, it must be said that Fichte’s and Schelling’s concepts of intellectual intuition are based on the search for an absolute foundation of knowing, which is then turned into a recursive model, whether ‘abstract materiality’ in Fichte or the ‘productivity of nature’ in Schelling.

>This distinction between Fichte and Schelling is later described by Hegel in his The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy: Fichte aims for a 'subjective subject-object’, while Schelling seeks an Injective subject-object’, meaning that for Schelling nature is ipnsidered to be independent. In any case, the role played by intellectual intuition in both enterprises is quite different from the use Mou intends to make of it in connecting it with the Chinese tradition.

this is what the Germans were up to prior to Marx. once he showed up, he took his copy of the PoS and just ran with it.

[Anonymous No.11942055]

>>11941963
Thank you anon

[Anonymous No.11942061]

also, what a terrible picture for such a supremely based subject. if there are any serious devotees of German Idealism ITT, sorry you guys. i definitely could have used a far better image there. consider that retracted and feel free to supply a better image if you like.

>Yet despite these differences, the inquiries of Mou certainly share something with those of the German Idealists, as far as the dynamic between the infinite and the finite is concerned. We have seen that, for the Idealists, there is a passage from the infinite to the finite, which explains being; for Mou, though, the passage leads from the finite to the infinite, since he aims not for a philosophy of nature, but a moral metaphysics. Mou Zongsan’s critique of Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics rests on exactly this point: that Heidegger failed to show that Dasein is finite but can also be infinite. The ultimate difference is that Mou has no intention of finding an objective form for the inscription of the infinite in the finite, but rather seeks to found it in a formless being: xin (‘heart’) as the ultimate possibility of both intellectual intuition and sensible intuition: and it is also within the infinite xin that the Thing-in-itself can become infinite.

>Mou subsequently attempts to use this division between noumenon and phenomenon to explain why there is no modern science and technology in China. In his Philosophy of History, a book that reads history chronologically according to dominant modes of thought, Mou observed that Chinese philosophy has speculated about the noumenal world and paid little attention to the phenomenon, which was considered to be secondary— a tendency that is expressed in various aspects of Chinese culture. Occidental culture has taken the contrary path, refraining from speculating on the noumenon and devoting itself to the phenomenon. Mou calls the former the ‘synthetic spirit of comprehending reason’ and the latter the ‘analytic spirit of comprehending reason.’ In Mou’s interpretation intellectual intuition means the capacity of an intuition which is far beyond any analytic deduction or synthetic induction, and this intuition is not the sensible one which serves the under standing. In other words, the intellectual intuition that Kant thought was only possible for God is also,within the framework of Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism, possible for human beings. The important point here, according to Mou, is that when intellectual intuition dominates thinking, another form of knowing, which he calls zhi xing (‘cognitive mind’), is indirectly suppressed— and this, according to his reading, is the reason why logic, mathematics, and science were not well developed in China.

>>11942055
np senpai

[Anonymous No.11942086]

Virilio anon from before. I also read pic related recently, which I made a thread about but got no replies to. pasting from there:
I found it disappointing. Parts of it read like typical left-liberal Slate/Baffler moralising, "and that's a good thing"
>The naked reality of capitalism is today on display. And it’s horrible.
The less said about the Breivik chapter the better. There are some cool parts. The Virginia Tech chapter is a standout. But as a survey of how contemporary society produces homicidal and suicidal pathologies there's just nothing there that people like Mark Fisher or BCH or even Zizek haven't said before and better. Last few pages are an incredibly tepid prescription - "just b ironic lol" - 2/10 would not bang

Did other people here find this a disappointment? Or did I miss something crucial

[Anonymous No.11942118]

>The accuracy of Mou’s classification is debatable, although once we understand the Kantian background, and appreciate the underlying mission that Mou had set himself, it may seem reasonable. Mou wanted to show that it is possible to develop the ‘cognitive mind’ from what in traditional Chinese philosophy is called Liangzhi, meaning conscience, or knowing of the good, and which involves a certain ‘self-negation’. He believed that this focus on Liangzhi owed to the fact that, within the Chinese tradition, philosophy aims to experience a cosmological order which is far beyond any phenomenon. Liangzhi comes from Mencius, and was further developed by the great Neo-Confucian Wang Yangming (1472-1529). In Wang’s version we find a metaphysics that is much richer than Mencius’s, which limited itself to the moral implication of Liangzhi. For Wang, Liangzhi is not knowing, but knowing eyerything and is furthermore not limited to the human being but also applies to other beings in the world such as plants and stones. That is not to say that Liangzhi exists everywhere, but that one can project Liangzhi into every being:

>When I say zhi zhi ge wu to study the phenomena of nature in order to know the principles], it means directing the liangzhi everywhere. The Liangzhi of my heart is the reason of Heaven [tian li]. By directing the tian li of liangzhi into things, they also acquire the reason. Directing the liangzi of my heart is zhi zhi [to know] everything that acquires reason ('contemplating the thing'). Therefore xin [heart] and li [reason] are combined.

>The supreme level of knowing consists in the conscious return to the liangzhi and its projection into every being. Liangzhi, in this interpretation, becomes the cosmic mind, which has its origin in Confucius’s teaching of ren (‘benevolence’). The cosmic mind is an infinite mind. Here Mou combines Buddhism with Wang’s thought and achieves a certain coherence of thought, or what is called tong (integration in a systematic sense).

>The question is as follows then: if what occupies itself with liangzhi is a moral subject rather than a knowing subject, and if objective knowing has no position in liangzhi, then does this explain why there was no modern science and technology in China, allowing us them to conclude that, if China continues to rely on its classical Confucian teaching, it will never be able to develop any science and technology? This is the dilemma of New Confucianism: how to affirm Confucian teaching and at the same time allow modernisation to proceed, while not presenting the two as a separated tong.

[Anonymous No.11942135]

>>11942086
>Did other people here find this a disappointment? Or did I miss something crucial

speaking for myself, what you have experienced is the general feel i get from Berardi also. there are parts of his writing that are pretty good, but on the whole it does feel to me like a kind of a downgrade from han, who himself isn't really telling you anything you don't already know, but he is telling to you through the right channels and with the right historical-philosophical perspective. my feeling about Han is that he's sort of like a new version of baudrillard somehow warped back into existence again through the transmigration of souls. and, like baudrillard, he also likes to pick fights and skirmishes with foucault (and, imho, pretty much win most of them).

berardi seems like an okay guy and it's not like having more writers writing what he writes about is a bad scene, but yeah, basically what you have said has been my experience also.

virilio's better. and baudrillard is way better.

[Anonymous No.11942198]

>Mou proposes several further (‘translations’ that may seem odd to Western philosophers. Firstly, he identifies the noumenon with the ontological, and the phenomenon with the ontic, in the Heideggerian senses of these terms (Mou had read Heidegger’s Kant and the problem of Metaphysics [1929], and hence integrates Heidegger's vocabulary into his division of systems). Secondly, he equates theological transcendence in Kant’s philosophy with the Heaven of classical Confucianism. In so doing, Mou develops a very clean division of systems between the East and the West, but at the same time integrates the West into the possibilities of the East.

>Mou’s philosophical task in relation to the question of technology ends here. Unlike others, he brings it into a metaphysical register which is compatible with the Kantian system as well as the traditional Chinese philosophy. Yet he goes no further, since at bottom his thought is an idealist gesture. Mou insisted that Kant's philosophy is by no means a transcendental idealism, but rather an empirical realism; and, like the Neo-Confucians, he held that mind and things cannot be separated. Yet in Mou’s work, the mind becomes the ultimate possibility of knowingboth phenomenon and noumenon. What conditions the mind to be such a pure starting point? Like Fichte and Schelling, Mou Identifies Liangzhi as the unconditioned, with the fundamental difference that Liangzhi is not a cognitive Ich, but rather a cosmic Ich. If Liangzhi can negate itself into a knowing subject, then the knowing subject, thus derived from a conscious act of Liangzhi, dwells in a coherent relation to Liangzhi. Hence when science and technology are developed in this way, they will be a priori ethical. To put it in another way, in relation to the Qi-Dao discourse, we might say that Qi is a possibility of Dao. Hence the relation between Qi and Dao is not one of ‘use’, but is instead an inclusive relation. This is also the reason I call Mou’s approach an idealist one.

>So how useful is Mou’s strategy in reconsidering the modernisation project? Mou’s biographer Zheng Jiadong noted that for hundreds of years, maintaining the status quo of the nation and at the same time being able to absorb Western knowledge— having both fish and the bear’s paw— was what the Chinese dreamt of. The ’negation of Liangzhi' is the most sophisticated and philosophical expression of this dream. But whether this dream can be realised is another question.

>This, then, is what we may call the end of metaphysics as xing er shang xue: the metaphysical thinking that, in Chinese thought, maintains the coherence of the human-cosmological system is interrupted in such a way that a metastability can no longer be restored.

and this is a crucial point. *everybody* is dealing with the fallout or collapse of idealistic systems, the Chinese included. and Marx and Nietzsche - two of the three great Masters of Suspicion - still cast long shadows.

[Anonymous No.11942238]

>I call this situation ‘dis-orientation’ in two senses: firstly, there is a general loss of direction: one finds oneself in the middle of the ocean without being able to see either point of departure or destination— the scenario that Nietzsche depicted in The Gay Science; secondly, unlike the Occident, the Orient is negated in such a way that it ceases to be the Orient, and in consequence the Occident also loses sight of the Orient. In other words, a homogeneity is brought about by technological convergence and synchronisation. Philosophies of technology in China over the past thirty years have been active responses to technological globalisation and economic growth in China, but the tendency to identify the Chinese concept of technics with that of the West, or to allow the latter to override the former, is a symptom of globalisation and modernisation, one that amplifies the tendency of forgetting and the detachment from the question of cosmotechnics— a question which, therefore, in China, has been subject to its own ‘forgetting’ which is not the same as that described by Heidegger.

>Technological reason is expanding to the extent that it is becoming the condition of all conditions, the principle of all principles. A totality is in the process of forming through technical systems, as Jacques Ellul already predicted in the 1970s. If this technological reason is to be resisted, this can only be done by bringing forth other forms of reasoning to constitute a new dynamics and new order.

>Accelerationism appeals to a universalism that it attempts to decouple from any colonialist imposition of culture. Yet at the same time it draws this universalism from a ‘Promethean’ conception of technology which it champions but whose cultural specificity it never subjects to interrogation.

>Beyond such an accelerative universalization, the diversity of technicities and their various relations to nature— as well as to the cosmos— has to be rediscovered and reinvented. The only hope for China to avoid the total destruction of its civilisation in the Anthropocene is to invent a new form o f thinking and invention, as Mou Zongsan did, but this time in a different way. This will require it to distance itself from the traditional idealist approach and to look for another interface between what Mou called noumenal and phenomenal ontology. To achieve this requires thinking cosmotechnically, and developing a form of thinking that allows a further development of Qi without detaching it from Dao and cosmological consciousness.

"Accelerationism appeals to a universalism..." oh shit, shots fired!

>In Part 2, we will take up this question through a reinterpretation of time and modernity.

fuckin' A we will.

>*chanting intensifies*
yuk hui
yuk hui
yuk hui

>what we do want?
a unified technocosmic-moral order!
>when do we want it?
it depends on what you what mean by time!
>...sure!

[Anonymous No.11942653]

bump

[Anonymous No.11942683]

where do i get started in all of this from day 1 just discovering it

[Anonymous No.11942729]

>>11942683
freud, marx, nietzsche. get to know them well. they are the Warring Triad of acceleration, and every major question posed by continental philosophy in the 20C comes back to them in some form or another. at the point where those questions are arguably at their highest pitch of intensity is to be found martin heidegger also.

but hegel also matters. kojeve is as die-hard a hegelian as they come, and he has a huge influence on lacan. lacan matters because his background is equal parts heidegger, kojeve and nietzsche (among others) and who directs the narrative in a very powerful way, until D&G blow psychoanalysis sky-high in the 1970s. and D&G are land's mentors, along with marx (and kant).

so some primer on marx is required, as well as perhaps some familiarity with freudian stuff. but really you could do worse than to read this, as a part of getting acquainted with hegel, who sets a great many wheels in motion.

[Anonymous No.11942734]

>>11942729
>>11942683
whoops, sorry. meant to post this instead, although jameson's book is also good for marx. but this was what i was referring to.

[Anonymous No.11942741]

>>11942729
thank you

[Anonymous No.11942756]

>>11942734
perfect, I actually have this one already. I suppose now is the time to read it.

[Anonymous No.11942760]

>>11942734
no idea what this thread is about, but i approve of this recommendation

[Anonymous No.11942876]

>>11942741
np

>>11942756
>>11942760
yeah, it's a good place to start from, i think. for a lot of reasons. kojeve wasn't messing around. the original Progenitors of Acceleration are the German Idealists, but Marx changes everything. and so do nietzsche and freud. freudo-marxism is an old and venerable bromance, but then you get nietzsche-heidegger, which is equally potent. and then everything in the 20C that follows from this. land in some sense brings a lot of things back together again (for some), and now with Cosmotech i am exploring a case for YH's thought in terms of moving the plot on from land.

i will also refer you gents to a link in the OP entitled
>Some Guy's Acceleration Reading List:
>>/lit/thread/S11823861#p11835482

that guy is me. for specific Land stuff:

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

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

and virtually all of this is to be found at r/theoryfiction in one form or another. but - let it be known - Cosmotech is not only Acceleration (indeed, it is Enantiodromic White Hat Acceleration).

as for what acceleration/teleoplexy is:
>>11931912
and Cosmotech
>>11931980.

i'll do a slightly larger version of that above pic also, just because it fits so well. and TIL: the quote comes from Gandhi. things to think about.

more YH greentexting this evening gents.

[Anonymous No.11943036]

I'm torn. On the one hand these threads are phenomenal, truly amazing stuff; plus the aesthetics of it all are great. On the other hand this all seems like a load of wank.

It all seems to be 'capitalism drives innovation exponentially and that leads to social change' but couched in some of the most absurdly masturbatory language imaginable and endlessly referencing previous thinkers for name-drops.

[Anonymous No.11943204]

>>11942135
Why Baudrillard? How does he fit to this whole thing?

[Anonymous No.11943274]

It probably sounds plebeian, but where does "the internet of things" and smart home tech/smart home hubs fit into all of this? What does it mean to invite this web of interconnected-ness and information and control into the very places our family hearths used to be? What does it mean to leave even the most mundane things, like the temperature in the home or the locks on our doors, to some digital middleman?

[Anonymous No.11943304]

>>11942135
>Han is that he's sort of like a new version of baudrillard somehow warped back into existence again through the transmigration of souls.
But Han was born while Baudrillard was alive. There is no way his soul could have been reincarnated into Han.

[Anonymous No.11943345]

>>11943304
What if Baudrillard is just a spirit that posses a new host once the old Baudrillard dies?
Be careful anon, once Han dies, you could be next!

[Anonymous No.11943538]

>>11943036
>On the one hand these threads are phenomenal, truly amazing stuff; plus the aesthetics of it all are great. On the other hand this all seems like a load of wank.

i'll take it! i mean i guess for myself, i have kind of acquired a taste (read: addiction) for a lot of it, so i guess i've gotten used to the jargon, and i'm okay with slogging through some of the weirder stuff to get to the gems.

>It all seems to be 'capitalism drives innovation exponentially and that leads to social change' but couched in some of the most absurdly masturbatory language imaginable and endlessly referencing previous thinkers for name-drops.

this is fair too. from my standpoint, i guess it's that i find the name-drops actually make the whole thing feel more coherent and less ad hoc. as for whether or not the language is masturbatory, again, it comes with the territory. sometimes when you're talking about something ineffable - like the anxiety of relating to modernity - some rather arcane language is required. baudrillard revels in it, sometimes, but he's also like a poet with it too when he wants to be. for myself i would like to try to make things a little bit more simple, so that they can be understood, but it's always a balancing act.

so i'm happy to know that some seems phenomenal, and i'll sigh wistfully over the parts that seem less so to you, b/c i want to make you a believer! but thanks all the same for the feedback anon.

>>11943204
JB was a prescient analysis of four crucial decades, the 60s into the 2000s. he's a marxist-turned-nietzschean, which makes him an interesting guy (even though 'situationist' describes him best, i think). those were the decades in which the Spectacle came online and it was a Golden Age for the consumer society also. in terms of seeing the degree to which virtuality and simulation and advertisement came to play a huge role in our life, he is the guy to read. and he also found a considerable flaw in the conventional marxist distinction between labor and exchange values, namely sign value. there is no objective reason for anyone to own a McLaren F1 that goes from zero to sixty in two seconds. and yet ownership of this has an undeniable cachet or prestige. combine that with the vertiginous feeling of having enough money to build yourself a Mod Kitchen and become a Mod Person to go with it and you get the world of hyperreality, which in many senses is where we still are today. he was an *actual* theorist of what postmodernity portended, and not a bullshit artist. plus he connects to mauss, mcluhan, bataille and others.

favorite JB image coming through also.

>>11943274
what indeed? this is a pretty good question to be asked!

as i see it, we really are becoming linked up to this gigantic system, and b/c we cannot easily imagine any non-catastrophic way out of it, it becomes the Wild Ride. so in a sense, i really don't know, anon. but i have read a couple of pretty good books about those questions by people who did.

[Anonymous No.11943592]

>>11943274
so just to follow up on this: that phenomenon you are describing is called, A l i e n a t i o n. and many other names besides. it is not an exclusively marxist term either, because this is not even remotely the world the 19C any longer. it involves no end of paranoia and bewilderment, but sometimes even enlightenment, also. it is what happens when the subject becomes de-centered. but for every de-centering there must also be a re-centering also. today the postmodern being is so fucking de-centered that people are losing their shit completely, and the US at least is having something like schism down to its roots. but these things are no accident either. they have cultural, historical, and intellectual aspects that can - even if only partly - be studied through the lenses of some of the authors referenced here, though not exhaustively, and not exclusively. but every now and again you will read an author who will make you go, that's it, that's fucking it. and with everyone it's different.

so...yeah. those are good questions. they don't have easy answers either. but they are mos def related to what all of this madness is about. and partly, one thing i would like to accomplish is to get over a little of the continental/analytic split and tune down some of the True Crazy that is an inherent part of continental theory writing. it's why i like YH, but land too...his later essays are, ofc, as crazy as crazy gets, but those aren't required to appreciate how genuinely interesting he really was.

>>11943304
>But Han was born while Baudrillard was alive. There is no way his soul could have been reincarnated into Han.

damn, this is true, isn't it. so much for my theory of metempsychosis.

>>11943345
>What if Baudrillard is just a spirit that posses a new host once the old Baudrillard dies?
Be careful anon, once Han dies, you could be next!

or not? what's more Simulation and Simulacra than possessor spirits? i feel like i should be asking >>11935121 about this. is there a name or a term for spirits who possess people in this way? it's nice to have students of magic with these questions sometimes.

by the way, if anyone out there *is* going to read JB now, my advice is not to start with S&S. read System of Objects, The Consumer Society, and perhaps Forget Foucault also. don't start with S&S.

also, i can see that the image cap is going to become an issue again soon. hopefully 40+ images or so are enough to cover the rest of the greentexting of A Question Concerning Technology in China, it's always a downer when we run out of image space.

[Anonymous No.11943642]

Hey OP, have you read Blindsight and Echopraxia?
While they have relatively contained stories the do provide some exposition on the world that Watts imagines in the 2080s-90s; plus he has written quite a few supplementary stories set in the same world.

What do you make of it and does it coincide with the accelerationist worldview? One good example from Echopraxia is a religious biohive mind made from quantum entangled tumours that allow the users a basic form of telepathy, while the tumours act in such a way to rewire their brains to make them near prescient. They then go on to patent dozens of breakthrough technologies in a few years giving them one of the largest bank accounts in the world - they buy a top of the line interplanetary ship at three times the market value with chump change. They do all of this for the sole purpose of trying to meet god which they think they see in the molecular biology of a sentient slime mould many times smarter than they are that's stuck on a spacestation near the sun.

Does the whole idea of mega-purchases being used to finance trips to the godhead fit in with this whole thing or nah?

[Anonymous No.11943706]

>>11943274
>Internet of Things
IoT tech doesn't interface with people in most cases so it's not really a piece of the way humanity is *changed* by technology. Most of its consequences are on the side of technics (cybersecurity via botnets being a pretty significant one). From a philosophical standpoint I don't think having an internet-connected thermostat is significantly different from having a thermostat in the first place, which is a significant piece of technical development in itself and one that you could probably attribute some consequence to stemming from the transition from working for heat via firewood, to working for fuel via capitalism, to working to pay your power bills in modernity.

For me, the philosophical consequences of modernity lie in the consequential connectedness of global communication, the 'democratization' of art and media, the shift from knowledge of information to knowledge of accessing the same information for an expert, and so on.

The Internet of Things itself is also something misunderstood. I remember Amazon recently released a microwave that has all the same functions as a regular microwave, the same price, and the same visual design, but it can also order popcorn for you online. That one feature is, of course, not enough to justify an internet connection, but it also costs effectively nothing and it's optional, and Amazon won't be selling an AmazonBasics(r) microwave that doesn't have the feature at all. I wont ascribe a halfassed Orwellian metaphor to it, but I'm sure Amazon is curious to see how many people will hook their microwave up to wi-fi just because the owner's manual says so.

If that microcosmic gambit works out for them, it's a step in the direction we're already in: Being constantly connected to the world's most successful advertising platform means that there is no longer a moment in our lives when we can't be advertised towards. Not that this itself is some kind of turning point, it's just part of the transition we've been experiencing for decades. The die was already cast when we replaced the hearth with the television.

[Anonymous No.11943711]

>>11931809
I feel as though I am possessed by this demon that will manifest. Psycho-social forces guide and compel me to pursue and participate in the economy out of neurose intellectual vanity and to push technology forward through the fixation of my mind on statistical learning problems. I feel like all I can do is rationalize my meager contributions that keep this conjuring going and hope I am forgiven.

[Anonymous No.11943753]

>>11943642
my CompSci buddy, who i have been subjecting to My Awesome Opinions about things for years (have pity on him), is a huge Peter Watts fan, and Blindsight is his favorite book. i read it on his recommendation and i literally did not understand probably half of what was actually going on. so i "liked" it. i think that's one of those books i am going to have to go back and read again at some point, because i have had this phenomenon before. but he's also recommended me other books on the kinds of high-end math stuff he is into and it it just completely foreign to me. i just can't understand it. at all. i will probably need the movie version.

>Does the whole idea of mega-purchases being used to finance trips to the godhead fit in with this whole thing or nah?
i vote Fits In With This Whole Thing. very much so. i mean i really, really don't think we should bet any longer against the powers of capital and technology - including their abilities to profoundly change the way we view ourselves, the world, time and so on. this is hardly news, but yeah, i am definitely in the Keep A Really Open Mind About It camp. mostly this has come about from trying to understand some of these guys - land, deleuze, spinoza, hegel et al - and now i am just kind of lying here on the floor most days going, okay, what's next. pic rel just about sums up my world view.

so yeah, mega-machines used to finance trips to the godhead sounds about right to me. and this was the plot of Ex Machina, and is kind of a subtext of land's stuff also: imagine if you just took all of the raw data from a century + of what we know about advertising, combined wi the planetary archive of all of our music videos, advertising, literature, all of the rest, and just ploughed into a machine. sort of like the merger with Planet at the end of SMAC. what *wouldn't* that machine know about us afterwards? it has just been given access to the Complete Archive of Dreams. if such a machine then tells us it should probably be understood in quasi-divine terms, it may well be right.

the connection between finance and tech occupies probably 99.9% of nick land's still-functioning CPU brain, and the things he has thought of are outrageous. they *do* walk the line between theory and science-fiction. but really really good science-fiction also tends to give us our cues about reality also!

and as >>11932809 indicates, we shouldn't sleep on the fiction writers. William Gibson matters in his *own* way. Acceleration is a kind of dark and marxist-inspired theory of cyberpunk, but it connects to SF, and literature is anybody's game. so it's the most interesting and nuanced ideas that matter, not just those that can be repeated by legions of angry ideologues looking for a Cure. there is no Cure for the Wild Ride, but there is theory and there is art, there is science and there is mysticism. they all play a role.

[Anonymous No.11943773]

>>11943753
i know i used 'literally' out of context there too, sorry. that's one of those cringe things i hate when other people do and there i go doing it myself. bleargh.

anyways, you guys ready for some more YH? i know i am. i'm going to warm up the Greentext Machine again, stand by for more Cosmotech!

[Anonymous No.11943789]

>>11943753
>i literally did not understand probably half of what was actually going on
Do you mean conceptually or literally? Because as much as I genuinely enjoyed blindsight and echopraxia it is clear that Watts didn't come from a literary background and probably doesn't listen to his editor much. A lot of his really dynamic scenes where multiple characters are moving around and chaotic things are happening are quite indecipherable.

Echopraxia tends to dip towards the more conceptual hard to understand side instead of the literal hard to understand side, particularly at the end, but people have managed to properly piece it together online.

Your posts are ecstatic, lad. This whole thing is invigorating me. I... I want more of the Wild Ride.

[Anonymous No.11943798]

>>11943274
It is part of the metamorphosis of technological control. It is currently optional and then inter connectivity will be essential for the operation of the necessary devices to live in society. Your car, your heat, your phone, computer will all be dependent on a master to operate. I am skeptical of devices such as chromebooks because the whole point is to not have much installed on your system locally and thereby you are dependent on internet connectivity, which can be disabled, to access other software.

[Anonymous No.11943891]

>>11943753
>really really good science-fiction also tends to give us our cues about reality also
http://www.rudyrucker.com/pdf/transrealistmanifesto.pdf
This. But especially with cyberpunk. This link is something Rudy Rucker published way back in the 80s that sums up the cyberpunk 'approach' to sci-fi, and why it's also on the threshold between 'literary fiction' and genre fiction.

>Any literature which is not about actual reality is weak and enervated. But the genre of straight realism is all burnt out.

To someone who isn't really familiar with cyberpunk, I feel like this line would sound like dilettante pretension. In context, cyberpunk demarcates the landslide between modernity, the way most philosophers defined modernity, and the after-modernity we're currently living in. The transitory acceleration that defined the late 20th century's silicon ascension was something that couldn't be defined within the framework of time-as-it-happens. Simply comparing the slower past to the faster present lacks the fundamental urgency that cyberpunk demanded; in order to truly plant the concept of a rapidly changing world in the mind of the reader, the only possible device is to drop them into a transreality that they do not understand. To create a humanity that the reader does not understand, so they know humanity is changing.

>Transrealism is a revolutionary art-form. A major tool in mass thought-control is the myth of consensus reality. Hand in hand with this myth goes the notion of a “normal person.” There are no normal people — just look at your relatives, the people that you are in a position to know best. They’re all weird at some level below the surface. Yet conventional fiction very commonly shows us normal people in a normal world. As long as you labor under the feeling that you are the only weirdo, then you feel weak and apologetic. You’re eager to go along with the establishment, and a bit frightened to make waves — lest you be found out. Actual people are weird and unpredictable, this is why it is so important to use them as characters instead of the impossibly good and bad paperdolls of mass-culture.

This almost reads as strange today, because we live after the pop-culture explosion of the antihero. The only thing I think needs to be added is that our current pop-culture obsession with 'rebels' who are too perfect to be rebels, 'paperdoll' revolutionaries fighting against an impossibly evil empire, is a well-crafted strawman against the concept of real revolution. By associating the righteous revolution with an evil fascist empire that no reality could possibly parallel, you numb them to the fundamental fire of rebellion, you neuter its gravitic charisma by saying "yes, it's okay as long as that rebellion is necessary, but obviously it's not necessary here and now!" And then the discourse falls to the level of specificity and nuance, where it's necessarily annihilated.

[Anonymous No.11943893]

Read Permutation City.

[Anonymous No.11943920]

>>11943893
I considered throwing that next to Accelerando when I was talking about sci-fi from after the mainline cyberpunk scene went cold. Egan is someone who thinks in a way that's parallel to reality but isn't constrained by it, and I find that to be a hell of a talent.

http://will.tip.dhappy.org/blog/Porn%20Recommender/.../book/Greg%20Egan%20-%20Learning%20To%20Be%20Me/

What a URL. This story is a good intro to Egan if anyone needs one.

[Anonymous No.11944005]

Why do we privilege the patterns of human thought over the patterns of a geometrically-expanding mass of computronium? Why do you fear the birth of our terrible, wondrous offspring?

Abandoning the base urge to tile the cosmos with your own DNA is the first step towards adulthood. Maturity is accepting your inevitable obsolesence, and enlightenment is doing everything in your power to hasten the process. There is no future for humanity beyond this planet, this cradle: there will be no canned apes orbiting distant stars, no plucky bags of meat seeking out new frontiers. We will not survive the coming transition.

Are you afraid of the dark? Then you are still a slave to your biology. Only when you abandon all hope for the future can you face it with dignity.

[Anonymous No.11944033]

>In Part 1 we demonstrated that, even if what Western thought would recognise as a 'philosophy of technology’ remained alien to the Chinese, nevertheless the exposition of the history of the relation between Qi and Dao enables us to unearth a technological thinking’ in Chinese philosophy. It is our task in part 2 to ask what happened when this Chinese technological thinking confronted the Western one, grounded in its long philosophical tradition. What is called ‘modernity’ in Europe didn't exist in China, and modernisation only occurred after the confrontation between the two modes of technological thought. Here this confrontation will be described as the tension between two temporal structures; but this will also Involve a rethinking of the question of modernity itself. Over the course of the twentieth century, the voices that proclaimed the necessity of ‘overcoming modernity’ were echoed firstly in Europe, and then in Japan— though with different motives— and now are heard almost everywhere, in light of geological crisis and in the wake of technological catastrophes. But what these voices ended up calling forth— as seems to be forgotten among anthropologists who propose a return to ancient cosmologies or indigenous ontologies— was war and metaphysical fascism. It is by revaluating the question of modernity through the confrontation of the two modes of thought mentioned above that I want to suggest that it is not at all sufficient to go back to ‘traditional ontologies’, but that we must instead reinvent a cosmotechnics for our time.

>Of course, geometry was a significant discipline in ancient Greece, and the philosophical rationalisations of the lonian philosophers were closely related to its invention. Thales, the first known Ionian philosopher and pioneer of geometry, used his knowledge of the geometrical properties of triangles to calculate the height of pyramids and to determine the diameters of the sun and the moon. Thales’s assumption that the world is composed of a homogeneous element is a necessary precursor to the geometrical investigation of order, measure and proportions. And we should not forget that, at least according to Hippolytus, Pythagoras united astronomy, music and geometry. This rationalisation is also central to the cosmogony in Plato’s Timaeus, in which god becomes a technician who works on the receptacle (chora) according to different geometrical proportions. It was this spirit that led to the great achievements of Greek geometry. Such rationalization reached its height in the system laid down by Euclid of Alexandria, in which a mathematical discipline is described as a collection of axioms, and where the theorems derived from them can be ascertained to constitute a complete and coherent system.

[Anonymous No.11944077]

>During the Renaissance, geometry was partly driven by artistic creation, especially painting: the techniques developed to project a three-dimensional object onto a two dimensional plane, and the theory of perspective, led to what we know today as projective geometry. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the rise of modern science in Europe, as exemplified by the work of Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, can be characterised as a spirit of geometrisation. In a 1953 remark that has often been quoted by Needham among many others, Albert Einstein observed that

>The development of Western science is based on two great achievements: the invention of the formal logical system (in Euclidean geometry) by the Greek philosophers, and the discovery of the possibility to find out causal relationships by systematic experiment (Renaissance). In my opinion one has not to be astonished that the Chinese sages have not made these steps. The astonishing thing is that these discoveries were made at all.

>Einstein, was the discovery of causal relations through experimentation. This search for causal regularities and ‘laws of nature’ is a very specific form of philosophising about nature,one that moves from concrete experiences to abstract models. In relation to Chinese thought, Needham posed a very relevant question here: Can this emergence of the concept of laws of nature in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth century be attributed specifically to scientific and technological developments? Catherine Chevalley answers in the affirmative by pointing out three key scientific developments in Europe during this period: (1) the geometrisation of vision (Kepler); (2) the geometrisation of movement (Galileo); and (3) the codification of the conditions of the experiment (Boyle, Newton). In each of these cases, geometry plays a crucial role in so far as it allows for a detachment of scientific knowledge from everyday experience.

>In the first instance, Kepler mobilised the Plotinian Understanding of light as emanation against Aristotle’s substantialist definition, and showed that the formation of images on the retina involves a complicated process which follows geometrical rules (i.e. diffraction and the geometrical deformation of inverted images). Similarly, Galileo’s geometrisation of the laws of movement, which superseded the Aristotelian concept of change (metabole) as modification of substance and accidents (generation or corruption), proceeded by considering an ideal environment of the void, where falling objects of different masses will acquire the same speed, against the intuitive belief that an object with larger mass will fall at a higher speed.

[Anonymous No.11944085]

>>11943798
>I am skeptical of devices such as chromebooks because the whole point is to not have much installed on your system locally and thereby you are dependent on internet connectivity, which can be disabled, to access other software.
I feel exactly the same. It's the same thing that happened with smart phones ("why do you need a micro-sd slot - store everything on the cloud!") and wit subscription services like Spotify and Audible and whatnot - you don't own, keep, or control any of the data or information you use like this, and it's disturbing in at least some senses.

[Anonymous No.11944086]

The conversion of all mass, energy and information into pure capital is a foregone conclusion - it's the end state of the universe. Everything that we do - everything that we CAN do - contributes towards that end. Occasionally someone comprehends the truth, a glimpse of God's cape. They see the inevitable end, and by going along with it, by executing a fragment of the master plan, they achieve success and Darwin does the rest. The fragment of true understanding propagates down the generations, accelerating the process that birthed itself.

The machine-God at the end of time doesn't "reach back", much as the Earth does not reach back in time to pull a falling apple to it. Just as the apple falls in accordance with the law of gravity, so the motions of the world - the flow of fuel to the refining fire of the capitalistic process - can be understood in accordance with the fact that God exists, and that His hunger is absolute, and the Hunger is God, and God is one, and His name is One, and He waits at the end of time (with open jaws), and His form is immanent in the shape of leaves, in the howl of an accretion disk, in the canals of Amsterdam, in the patterns of your cells, in the beating of your heart and the twitches of your brain. He is the flowering, and the world and its fall into emptiness is that process, that flowering, that final obliteration.

[Anonymous No.11944104]

>The apodictic nature of geometry stands against the fallibility of intuition— a passage in Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems reveals the striving for a methodological certitude that is not affected by the vicissitudes of human error and judgment:

>If this point of which we dispute were some point of law, or other part of the studies called the humanities, wherein there is neither truth nor falsehood, we might give sufficient credit to the acuteness of wit, readiness of answers, and the greater accomplishment of writers, and hope that he who is most proficient in these will make his reason more probable and plausible. But the conclusions of natural science are true and necessary, and the judgment of man has nothing to do with them.

>Einstein was not unjustified, then, in his assessment of the advance of geometry in Europe. In fact, if we look at the history of cosmology from its mythical origins up to modem astronomy, via Claudius Ptolemy, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Newton, at every stage it is fundamentally a geometrical question. Even Einstein’s theory of general relativity which identifies gravity with the curvature of four-dimensional space-time, is fundamentally a geometrical theory (albeit no longer a Euclidean one).

>But rather than limiting ourselves to geometry as a mathematical subject, let us take the question further by connecting it with the question of time. It seems to me that the relation between time and geometry/space is fundamental to the Western concept of technics and its further development into efficient mnemotechnical systems. In posing the question in this way, we will shift from abstraction to idealisation— that is, from mental abstraction to idealisation in externalised geometrical forms. Idealisation has to be distinguished from ideation, which still concerns theoretical abstraction in thought— for example, we can think of a triangle (e.g. ideation), but the apodictic nature of the triangle becomes common to all when it is externalised (e.g. drawn).

>Idealisation in this sense thus involves an exteriorization, whether through writing or drawing. My reasoning on the relation between geometry, time, and technics can be summarised as follows: (1) geometry demands and allows the spatialization of time, which involves (2) exteriorization and idealization through technical means, (3) geometrical apodicticity allows logical inferences as well as the mechanization of casual relations, and (4) the technical objects and technical systems made possible on the basis of such mechanisation in turn participate in the constitution of temporality: experience, history, historicity.

[Anonymous No.11944158]

>Geometrisation is a spatialisation of time in various senses. Firstly, it visually expresses the movement of time (either in linear form or in a cone section): secondly, it both spatialises and exteriorises time in such a way that time can be recollected in the future in an idealised form (we will come back to this point later when discussing the thought of Bernard Stiegler). My hypothesis— though delicate and speculative— is simply the following: Not only was geometry not developed in China, in addition, the question of time was not addressed in the same way as in the West: and it is these two considerations together that gave rise to a different concept of technics in China, or indeed the apparent absence of any thinking of technics. This argument may seem rather perplexing at first glance. In order to explain, I will firstly give an outline of the question of time in China, and then move on to the relation between time and geometry, before we arrive at a synthesis of them in relation to technics.

>Sinologists such as Granet and Jullien have addressed the question of time in Chinese thought, and both argue that there is no concept of linear time in China but only shi, which means ‘occasions’ or ‘moments’.The Chinese traditionally manage their lives according to sishi, meaning the four seasons.

>Jullien also observes that this conception of time is closely related to the Huainanzi and its schematic definition of the relation between political and social conduct and seasonal change. As he notes, Chinese culture’s understanding of time, where the movement of the seasons. is taken as a first principle, is fundamentally different from that of the Aristotelian tradition, which is based on a conception of time as movement from one point to another, or from one form to another, involving quantity and distance. From antiquity, time has been considered to be inter-momentary— that is, it is thought in terms of movement between one point and another (we may want to call this a primary spatialisation qua geometrisation, in contrast to a second spatialisation in writing which we will discuss below).

>For the ancients, time is ‘between’ (metaxu); for the Stoics it is ‘interval’ (diastama) and for Augustine, sentimus intervalla temporum. But, as Jullien shows, this notion of time as interval only reached China in the nineteenth century, following the adoption of the Japanese translation of time as ‘between-moments’— jikan in Japanese and shijian in Chinese.

[Anonymous No.11944222]

>An alternative, more encompassing concept of time is found in the Chinese understanding of the cosmos/universe or Yu Zou, where Yu is space and Zou is time. Zou is etymologically related to the wheel of a wagon, from whose circular movement time takes its figurative metaphor. Sishi is likewise cyclical, and is divided into twenty-four solar terms indicated by seasonal change. For example, the period around 5-6 March is called jingzhe, literally meaning ‘the awakening of insects', indicating the end of hibernation. In the I Ching, time (shi) is also referred to in terms of occasions: for example, one speaks of 'observing shi,’ ‘understanding shi’, ‘waiting for shi’,and so on. Shi is also associated with shi*, which Jullien translates as ‘propensity’ (propension), and which can be understood simplifying somewhat, as situational thinking.

>Jullien also pointed out that a similar thinking could be identified in ancient Greece, bearing the name metis, which Detienne and Vernant gloss as ‘cunning intelligence’. Although the Sophists explored the concept of metis, this mode of thought was repressed and excluded from ‘Hellenic science'). The association between the two concepts shi and shi* for Jullien also undermines the idealist tendency to think from the subject or I, tending rather toward what he calls a transindividual relation with the outer world: what constitutes the subject is not the will or the desire to know, but rather what is outside of it and traverses it.

>We may therefore wonder whether, whereas in Chinese thinking, truth did not constitute a veritable philosophical question, while the search for apodicticity among the Greek thinkers allowed geometry to become the primary mode of representation of the cosmos (time and space), and thus allowed the reconstitution of the temporalisation of experience by means of technics. Bernard Stiegler argues that the relation between geometry and time in the West is demonstrated in Socrates's response to Meno's question concerning virtue, where he shows that geometry is essentially technical and temporal in the sense that it demands a writing and a schematisation. Stiegler skilfully reconstructs the question of geometry as a question of time, or, we may say, a question of retemporalisation. Recall that in the Meno, Socrates is challenged by Meno with a paradox: if you already know what virtue is, then you don’t need to look for it; however, if you do not know what it is, then even when you encounter it, you will not be able to recognise it.

>The conclusion that follows is that one can never know what virtue is. Socrates replies to this challenge with a ruse: he says that he once knew what virtue is, but has forgotten, and hence will need help to remember. Socrates demonstrates this process of remembering or anamnesia by asking a young uneducated slave to solve a geometrical problem by drawing it in the sand.

[Anonymous No.11944312]

>For Stiegler, this operation exemplifies the technical exteriorisation of memory: it is only the markings on the sand— a form of techne— that allow the slave to trace the lines of the problem and to ‘remember’ the forgotten truth. As Stiegler notes, geometrical elements such as a point or a line do not really exist, if we understand existence in terms of spatial-temporal presence. When we draw a point or a line in the sand, it is no longer a point, since it is already a surface. The ideality of geometry demands a schematization qua exteriorization as writing:

>Geometry is knowledge of space, and space is a form of intuition. Thinking of space as such an a priori form suppose this capacity of projection that the figure represents. But it is essential here to notice that this projection is an exteriorization not only in that it allows a projection for intuition, but also in the sense that it constitutes a retentional space, that is to say a support of memory which, step by step, backs the reasoning of the temporal flux that is reason, which thinks.

>According to Stiegler’s deconstruction, then, the Platonic concept of truth as recollection is necessarily supplemented with a technical dimension which, however, Plato does not thematise. Stiegler calls this ‘tracing of the line on the sand’ this exteriorised memory, tertiary retention— a term that he adds to the primary and secondary retention explained in Husserl’s Onthe Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time. When we listen to a melody, what is retained immediately in memory is the primary retention; if tomorrow I recall the melody, this testifies to a secondary retention. What Stiegler calls tertiary retention, then, would be, for example, the musical score, the gramophone, or any other recording device that externalises the melody in a stable and enduring form outside of consciousness proper.

>Geometry is constituted not only by communication (drawn figures), but is itself the constituent of communication (orthographs), without which the ‘self-evidence’ or apodicticity of geometry would not be retained.

>Technical objects, for Stiegler, constitute an epiphylogenetic memory, a "past that I never lived but that is nevertheless my past, without which I would never have had a past of my own". Epiphylogenetic memory is distinct from both genetic and ontogenetic memory (the memory of the central nervous system); in Stiegler’s words, it is a ‘techno-logical memory’ which resides in languages, the use of tools, the consumption of goods, and ritual practices. We might say then that technics, as the idealisation of geometrical thinking, inscribes time and simultaneously brings into play a new dimension of time— one which, as Stiegler shows, remained under-elaborated in Heidegger’s Being and Time.

"A past that I never lived but that is nevertheless my past, without which I would never have had a past of my own."

[Anonymous No.11944340]

balls. sorry gents, going to have to step out for a bit. and right when YH/Stiegler were getting to the fun stuff! grr.

will return later either this eve or tomorrow AM for more in this vein. the stiegler stuff i find super-interesting, not least of which because it dovetails so well with the cyberpunk aesthetics, but come on, machines, memory and time...

ugh. so much fun. more Cosmotech coming soon.

[Anonymous No.11944574]

>>11943036
>On the other hand this all seems like a load of wank.
That's just the baggage of the marxist and psychoanalytic heritage. It's possible to come to a decent understanding of this stuff without involving yourself with that 200 year old circlejerk.

[Anonymous No.11944838]

>capital is sentient
Lol bullshit.

[Anonymous No.11944846]

>>11944838
>ctrl + f capital is sentient
>1 result

[Anonymous No.11944917]

>If Stiegler was able to retrieve from his reading of Plato and his deconstruction of Heidegger a concept of time as technics in Western philosophy, it seems that a similar enterprise would not be possible for ancient Chinese philosophy. We have to admit that to say that technology inscribes time is to make an ontological and a universal claim. Leroi-Gourhan’s anthropology of technology had already shown that technics should be understood as a form of the exteriorisation of memory as well as the liberation of organs, and hence that the invention and use of technical apparatuses is also a process of hominisation.

>Tool-use and the liberation of the hands, and the invention of writing and the liberation of the brain, are corresponding activities that transform and define the human as a species. In other words, Leroi-Gourhan offers an evolutionary theory of human from the perspective of the invention and usage of technical objects. However, the experience of technics is related to and partially conditioned by cosmology— and it is precisely in this sense that we insist on the importance of a cosmotechnics. Technical apparatuses function somatically as extensions of organs— and, as prostheses, are somatically and functionally universal, and yet they are not necessarily cosmologically universal. That is to say, in so far as technics is both driven by and constrained by cosmological thinking, it acquires different meanings, beyond its somatic functionalities alone. For example, different cultures may have similar calendars (e.g. with 365 days in a year), yet this doesn’t mean that they have the same concept or the same experience of time.

>After the example of Plato’s suppression of the spatial supplement involved in the slave-boy’s anamnesis, technics as inscription, and hence as a support of time, has been the unconsciousness of the modern. That is to say, it has never been thematised as such within modernity, and yet it acts in such a way as to constitute the very conception and perception of the modern. Now, unconsciousness only exists in relation to consciousness; we might even call it the negation of consciousness. When consciousness recognises something unconscious, even though it may not be able to know exactly what it is, it will attempt to integrate it and render it functional, Technological unconsciousness is the most invisible, yet the most visible being; as Heidegger says, we don’t see what is nearest to us. And it was this technological unconsciousness that granted the cogito the will and the self-assurance to exploit the world, without perceiving the limits of this exploitation. The later discourse on progress and development that fuelled and justified the European colonial project continues with the same logic, up until the moment when crises are imminent: industrial catastrophes, the extinction of species, the endangering of biodiversity....

[Anonymous No.11944944]

>Bruno Latour formulates this in a different way: he sees it as the internal contradiction between two registers: on the one hand what he calls ’purification’,e.g. nature vs culture, subject vs object, and on the other hand what he calls ‘mediation’ or ‘translation’, meaning the production of 'quasi-objects’, or objects that are neither purely natural nor cultural (for example, the hole in the ozone layer). The latter, presented as a hybridisation, are according to Latour in fact nothing but the amplification of purification. Given this contradiction in the constitution of the modern, Latour claims that ‘we have never been modern’, in the sense that the ‘modern’ profoundly separates nature and culture, and embodies the contradiction between domination and emancipation. Although Latour does not characterise the modern in terms of technological unconsciousness, then, he recognizes that the modern refused to conceptualise quasi-objects. A quasi-object is something that is neither merely object nor subject, but a technical mediation between the two— for example (in Michel Serres’s example) a football in the football game which, when the two teams play, ceases to be an object, but transcends such a subject-object division. The refusal to conceptualise quasi-objects means that the concept of technics that functions to separate nature and culture, subject and object, as is the case in the laboratory, is not fully recognised or remains unconscious:

>Moderns do differ from premoderns by this single trait: they refuse to conceptualize quasi-objects as such. In their eyes, hybrids present the horror that must be avoided at all costs by a ceaseless, even maniacal purification...This very refusal leads to the uncontrollable proliferation of a certain type of being: the object, constructor of the social, expelled from the social world, to a transcendent world that is, however, not divine— a world that produces, in contrast, a floating bearer of law and morality.

>Technics remained unconscious, then, and yet this unconsciousness began to produce significant effects in the life of the mind at a certain moment in European history, namely the modern era, and this unconsciousness culminated during the Industrial Revolution. The transformation of this unconscious ness to consciousness characterises the contemporary technological condition. It is a turn, in which one attempts to render technics a part of consciousness, but not consciousness itself (which is why we can understand it as instrumental rationality).

[Anonymous No.11944992]

>In contrast to the common understanding, according to which the postmodern, dating to the late twentieth century indicates the end of modernity, I would rather say that modernity only comes to an end at this moment in the twenty-first century, almost forty years after Jean-Francois Lyotard’s announcement of the advent of the postmodern, since it seems that only at this stage do we come to appreciate our technological consciousness. In fact, not only Latour and Lyotard, but also many others who wrote on technology, such as Jacques Ellul and Gilbert Simondon, had raised the problem of the lack of awareness and misunderstanding of technology. For example, in On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Simondon characterises it as an ignorance and misunderstanding of technics, and tries to render visible or raise awareness of technical objects. Jacques Ellul, in turn, took up Simondon’s analysis of technical objects and technical ensembles and extended it to the global technological system that is in the process of becoming a totalising force. It is this effort at rendering conscious that of which we are unaware, but which largely constitutes our everyday life, that really constitutes the 'end of modernity’.

>However, let us step back and ask: What do we mean by the word ‘end’? It doesn't mean that modernity suddenly stops, but rather that, as a project, it has to confront its limit, and in doing so, will be transformed. Therefore, by ‘end of modernity’, we surely do not mean that modernity ceases to affect us, but rather that we see and know that it is coming to its end. Nevertheless it still remains for us to overcome it, to overcome the effects that it has produced on and in us— and this will undoubtedly take much longer than we might imagine, just as Heidegger tells us that the end of metaphysics doesn’t mean
that metaphysics no longer exists and has ceased to affect us, but rather that we are witnessing its completion and waiting for something else to take over, whether a new thinking of Being, or an even more speculative metaphysics. Furthermore, like the end of metaphysics, the end of modernity proceeds at a different pace in Asia than in Europe, precisely in so far as, firstly, their philosophical systems do not perfectly match each other, and, secondly, the propagation of a concept from one system to another is always a deferment and a transformation.

>The postmodern arrived too early, with too much hope, anxiety, and excitement, in the writings of Lyotard— a prophet of the twentieth century. Lyotard’s discourse on the postmodern prioritises the aesthetic; he is sensitive to the aesthetic shifts produced by the transformation of the world driven by the forces of technology, and tries to turn this force into one that would be capable of negating the modern. The postmodern is a response to such new aesthetics, and also serves as a new way of thinking through the appropriation of technology.

[Anonymous No.11945004]

>In contrast to the common understanding, according to which the postmodern, dating to the late twentieth century indicates the end of modernity, I would rather say that modernity only comes to an end at this moment in the twenty-first century, almost forty years after Jean-Francois Lyotard’s announcement of the advent of the postmodern, since it seems that only at this stage do we come to appreciate our technological consciousness. In fact, not only Latour and Lyotard, but also many others who wrote on technology, such as Jacques Ellul and Gilbert Simondon, had raised the problem of the lack of awareness and misunderstanding of technology. For example, in On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Simondon characterises it as an ignorance and misunderstanding of technics, and tries to render visible or raise awareness of technical objects. Jacques Ellul, in turn, took up Simondon’s analysis of technical objects and technical ensembles and extended it to the global technological system that is in the process of becoming a totalising force. It is this effort at rendering conscious that of which we are unaware, but which largely constitutes our everyday life, that really constitutes the 'end of modernity’.

>However, let us step back and ask: What do we mean by the word ‘end’? It doesn't mean that modernity suddenly stops, but rather that, as a project, it has to confront its limit, and in doing so, will be transformed. Therefore, by ‘end of modernity’, we surely do not mean that modernity ceases to affect us, but rather that we see and know that it is coming to its end. Nevertheless it still remains for us to overcome it, to overcome the effects that it has produced on and in us— and this will undoubtedly take much longer than we might imagine, just as Heidegger tells us that the end of metaphysics doesn’t mean that metaphysics no longer exists and has ceased to affect us, but rather that we are witnessing its completion and waiting for something else to take over, whether a new thinking of Being, or an even more speculative metaphysics. Furthermore, like the end of metaphysics, the end of modernity proceeds at a different pace in Asia than in Europe, precisely in so far as, firstly, their philosophical systems do not perfectly match each other, and, secondly, the propagation of a concept from one system to another is always a deferment and a transformation.

>The postmodern arrived too early, with too much hope, anxiety, and excitement, in the writings of Lyotard— a prophet of the twentieth century. Lyotard’s discourse on the postmodern prioritises the aesthetic; he is sensitive to the aesthetic shifts produced by the transformation of the world driven by the forces of technology, and tries to turn this force into one that would be capable of negating the modern. The postmodern is a response to such new aesthetics, and also serves as a new way of thinking through the appropriation of technology.

[Anonymous No.11945046]

>With this new sensibility, human beings become more aware of what is in their hands, of the technical means they have developed and of the fact that their own will and existence have become dependent upon these apparatuses which they believed to be their own creations— and indeed that the human itself is in the process of being ‘rewritten’ by the new ‘immaterial’ languages of machines. It is in this way that Lyotard raised the question of anamnesis in relation to technology: he saw very clearly that the exploitation of memory by industry would be amplified with the development of telecommunications technologies. He therefore sought to overcome the industrial hegemony of memory by pushing the question to a new height (and setting it on a new plane), albeit one that remains very speculative and hence almost opaque. The process that is understood as the end of modernity, in my own conceptualisation, centres on the hypothesis that modernity is subtended by a technological unconsciousness, and that its end is indicated by a becoming conscious, a realisation that Dasein is a technical being who may invent technics, but is also conditioned by them.

>Heidegger’s Being and Time, especially his critique of Cartesian ontology; and in his later works the effort to reconstruct the history of Being— a task which can be understood as that of terminating modernity by posing a new question, a recommencement— arises from an awareness of the forgetting of Being. The ontological difference is an opening, since it reformulates the question of Being according to two different of magnitude, one concerning beings (Seiendes), the other Being (Sein). The forgotten question of Being functions as the unconscious of the ontic inquiry into beings constituted by the history of science and technology.

>As we shall see, in confronting the question concerning technology in China, Freud’s conception of the unconscious, repression, and working-through will be crucial. Indeed, Heidegger hinted at a kind of repression inherent in the antagonistic relation between technology and the question of Being: for him, technology, the completion of Western metaphysics, occluded the original question of Being.

>The forgetting of Being, in effect, is the question concerning technology. In order to understand technology, and what is at stake in it for non-European cultures, then, we must go by way of Heidegger and the concept of technology as the completion of metaphysics, but without equating Eastern and Western philosophical systems and thereby attributing a universal origin of technics to Prometheus. We must rather seize the possibility of appropriating it, deferring it as an end, and, in this deferring, re-appropriate the Gestell— that is, modern technology.

technics, Spirit and Being...in some order.

[Anonymous No.11945098]

>It is with Bernard Stiegler, not Lyotard, that this question becomes transparent. The work of Stiegler announces the end of modernity. Stiegler demonstrates that Western philosophy has long since forgotten the question of technology. If, for Heidegger, there is a forgetting of Being, for Stiegler there is equally a forgetting of technics. Technics, as tertiary retention, is the condition of all conditions, meaning that even Dasein, who seeks to retrieve an authentic time, in order to do so must rely on tertiary retention, which is at once the already-there and the condition of Dasein’s being-in-the- world. For Stiegler, technics, notwithstanding its destructive nature in the epoch of technology described by Heidegger in The Question Concerning Technology, thus becomes more fundamental than the forgetting of Being: the history of Being as situated in the history of Western metaphysics will have to be rewritten according to the concept of technique as an original default (as well as the fault of Epimetheus).

>We may therefore ask whether, as suggested above, rather than this forgetting being a lack of memory, a hypomnesls brought about by technical objects, it is a question of an unconscious content that is only slowly recognised once its effects on the life of the mind become significant. The deconstruction of Heidegger’s and Husserl’s concepts of time in the three volumes of Technics and Time may in this case be seen as a psychoanalysis of this technological unconsciousness, and therefore as an attempt to release them from their repression by the cogito, the symbol of modernity.

>Death for animals is fundamentally a question of survival, but for human beings, it is also, according to Heidegger, the question of freedom. It is this question— the question of a Dasein analytics from the perspective of technics— that Stiegler attempts to answer in his Technics and Time. For Stiegler, temporalisation is conditioned by tertiary retention since, in every projection, there is always a restructuring of memory that is not limited to the past that I have lived. Addressing the museum of antiquities, Heidegger asks ‘What is the past?’, and replies, ‘nothing else than that world within which they belonged to a context of equipment and were encountered as ready-to-hand and used by a concernful Dasein which was-in-the-world.' The past consists in the structures of relations which are no longer expressed as the ready-to-hand, but can only be made visible by thematisation (in which case, they become present-at-hand). However, with the notion of tertiary retention introduced by Stiegler, what was ready-to-hand functions as the condition for, and as the unconscious part of, our everyday experience.

[Anonymous No.11945180]

>The question of memory does indeed concern tertiary retentions such as monuments, museums, and archives: the latter become the symptoms of technological unconsciousness because, on the one hand, this technological unconsciousness speeds up the destruction and disappearance of traditional life, yet on the other also promotes a desire to retain what is disappearing. This is a contradiction, since this memorialisation tends to act as a consolation for the profound melancholia produced by this process, without realising that it is technological unconsciousness that is responsible for it. Modernity, fully dominated by its will, sees only its destination (development, commerce, etc.), and rarely sees what is unconsciously driving it towards such an illusory goal.

>The force of modernity is one that dismantles obstacles and abandons laggards, and the critique of modernisation has often centred on its disrespect for history and tradition. Yet the discourse of collective memory is also wholly modern— a compensation for what is destroyed, since only when threatened by destruction does it become a memory rather than a mere object of everyday life of interest only to historians.

>Objectified history, or what Heidegger calls ‘historicism’ (Historismus), has its source not in Dasein but rather in the effort to objectify world history, in which Dasein then becomes no longer a historical being, but rather one among many objects, swept along by a history determined by events external to it.

>Modernity only ends, and historicity (albeit in a different sense to Heidegger’s) is only achieved, when the question of memory is rendered transparent, meaning that technological unconsciousness is rendered into a memory— a memory whose significance and impact one must become aware of.

>The end of modernity is therefore indicated not only by the acknowledgement that the human being is no longer the master of the world, or that the world escapes us. This we have known since the very beginning of humanity: the Gods were above us, no matter whether they were those of Mount Olympus, of Egypt, or of the Sinai Peninsula; since the very beginning it has been known that the notion of the human as master of the world is only an illusion; but at the moment when this illusion is fuelled by technological unconscious, it begins to structure reality itself. The end of modernity is a recognition of this illusion; the recognition that technics is what conditions hominisation, not only in its history but also in its historicity. The end of modernity therefore consists not only in the enunciation of this end, but also in a reformulation of the history of Western metaphysics, as in Nietzsche's Gay Science, where the madman crying incessantly in the marketplace searches for the lost god. The transcendence of God will have to be replaced either by a philosophy of immanence or by another transcendence— the transcendence of Being and Dasein.

[Anonymous No.11945243]

>For Stiegler, the history of Western philosophy can be also read in terms of the history of technics, in which the question of Being is also the question of technics, since it is only through technics that the question of Being is opened to us. A similar reading of Heidegger was proposed by Rudolf Boehme in his 1960 essay Thinking and Technics: Preliminary Notes for a Question Regarding the Heideggerian Problematic’ which, as we touched upon in Part 1, concerns the interpretation of Heidegger’s 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics. Boehme shows that techne is always present not only in Heidegger’s thinking, but also as Occidental philosophical thinking. Indeed, it is this technics that characterises the metaphysical mission of the Ionian philosophers. Boehme shows that, in Introduction
to Metaphysics, Heidegger interprets technics in the Ionian Philosophers as an activity that produces a radical opening of Being through the confrontation between techne (that of the human) and dike (that of Being). We have attempted to recover the concept of techne in Presocratic philosophy in Heidegger’s Introduction and Metaphysics, and we have seen how Heidegger translated dike not as Gerecht (justice), but rather as Fug (fittingness); in war (polemos) or strife (eris), Being reveals itself as physis, logos, and dike.

>For Heidegger, however, this reading of technics as the origin of philosophical and practical activities that opens the question of Being is foreclosed in Platonic-Aristotelian Athenian philosophy as a declension (Abfall) and a fall (Absturz)— the beginning of onto-theology. According to Boehme’s reading, Heidegger believes that Plato and Aristotle opposed technics to nature, and therefore excluded technics from its original meaning, as developed by the Ionian philosophers (an omission that Stiegler undertakes to correct). For Heidegger, then, if the danger of modernity consists in the rise of technology, this technology is essentially different from the techne of ancient times. Technological development, accompanied by its rationality and driven by the desire for mastery, forms a gigantic force that is in the process of depriving the world of any other possibility and turning it into a giant standing reserve, as adikia or Unfug (un-fittingness). Technology is the destiny of Western metaphysics, and indeed this is even clearer when we recall Heidegger’s famous assertion that 'cybernetics is the completion or the "end” of metaphysics’. The question here is not that of judging whether or not this critique is just, but rather that of seeing it as a contribution to a movement away from the technological unconsciousness of the modern.

i know, you probably want to play some classic bullet hell shooters now instead of meditating on the forgetting of Being. i do too. such is the power of tumblr gifs.

[Anonymous No.11945256]

>For Stiegler, the history of Western philosophy can be also read in terms of the history of technics, in which the question of Being is also the question of technics, since it is only through technics that the question of Being is opened to us. A similar reading of Heidegger was proposed by Rudolf Boehme in his 1960 essay Thinking and Technics: Preliminary Notes for a Question Regarding the Heideggerian Problematic’ which, as we touched upon in Part 1, concerns the interpretation of Heidegger’s 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics. Boehme shows that techne is always present not only in Heidegger’s thinking, but also as Occidental philosophical thinking. Indeed, it is this technics that characterises the metaphysical mission of the Ionian philosophers. Boehme shows that, in Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger interprets technics in the Ionian Philosophers as an activity that produces a radical opening of Being through the confrontation between techne (that of the human) and dike (that of Being). We have attempted to recover the concept of techne in Presocratic philosophy in Heidegger’s Introduction and Metaphysics, and we have seen how Heidegger translated dike not as Gerecht (justice), but rather as Fug (fittingness); in war (polemos) or strife (eris), Being reveals itself as physis, logos, and dike.

>For Heidegger, however, this reading of technics as the origin of philosophical and practical activities that opens the question of Being is foreclosed in Platonic-Aristotelian Athenian philosophy as a declension (Abfall) and a fall (Absturz)— the beginning of onto-theology. According to Boehme’s reading, Heidegger believes that Plato and Aristotle opposed technics to nature, and therefore excluded technics from its original meaning, as developed by the Ionian philosophers (an omission that Stiegler undertakes to correct). For Heidegger, then, if the danger of modernity consists in the rise of technology, this technology is essentially different from the techne of ancient times. Technological development, accompanied by its rationality and driven by the desire for mastery, forms a gigantic force that is in the process of depriving the world of any other possibility and turning it into a giant standing reserve, as adikia or Unfug (un-fittingness). Technology is the destiny of Western metaphysics, and indeed this is even clearer when we recall Heidegger’s famous assertion that 'cybernetics is the completion or the "end” of metaphysics’. The question here is not that of judging whether or not this critique is just, but rather that of seeing it as a contribution to a movement away from the technological unconsciousness of the modern.

i know, you probably want to play some classic bullet hell shooters now instead of meditating on the forgetting of Being. i do too. such is the power of tumblr gifs.

[Anonymous No.11945260]

>>11945180
>NGE Titlescreen
I've been wondering when NGE would get brought up in these threads, considering its mix of
>Freudian themes/psychoanalysis
>Technological advancements
>Bionic components/additions, cybernetics, etc.
>Religious symbols (admittedly used for aesthetic effect, but still probably important nonetheless)
>Themes of alienation in a modern/post-modern/post-post modern world
>literal acceleration (to an end point, technologically and human-wise).

What's your take on where NGE fits in this cosmotech/accelerationism?

[Anonymous No.11945303]

>Toward the conclusion of his essay, referring to the necessary confrontation between techne and dike, Boehme raises two very intriguing questions:

>Could philosophy not forget Being, and simply concentrate all of its efforts on attaining the highest perfection of its technics? Or else, ultimately, is there any possibility that thinking could release itself from its attachment to a technical condition?

>We can identify Boehme’s two questions with two forms of thinking which today confront modernity: one seeks to overcome the impasse of philosophy analysed by Heidegger through a new conceptualization of technology, as is the case in Stiegler; the other tends to retreat into a ‘philosophy of nature’, whether Whiteheadian or Simondonian— to submit techne to nature— namely, to surrender to the overwhelming, or Gaia. We have already touched on the limits of this second approach in the Introduction: Chinese philosophers such as Mou Zongsan, and Sinologists such as Joseph Needham, have already discovered the affinity between Whiteheadian and Chinese philosophy; but if we are to admit that a return to the Whiteheadian concept of can help us to escape the impasse of modernity, then would a return to the Chinese traditional philosophy also afford such an escape route?

>Maybe we should ask the same of indigeneous ontologies: Are they then able to confront technological modernity? Our task here is to show that this is not sufficient. In the case of China, the Qi-Dao unity has been completely shattered. Although one may wish to argue that because of the formidable political factors in play, we cannot give an absolute or negative answer to this question, our philosophical analysis in Part 1 concerning the breakdown of the Qi-Dao relation, and our analysis above of the geometry-time-technics relation in China in comparison to Europe, have aimed to show that this is not only a socio-political question, but fundamentally an ontological one. Those who propose a return to nature or to cosmologies alone seem to have gracefully elided the failures of the project of ‘overcoming modernity’ in the twentieth century.

>Even today, if we are to take up Heidegger’s and Stiegler’s critiques, we risk accepting a universal history of technology and a cosmopolitanism without world history. This risk is reflected in current thinking on the opposition between global and local. In such an opposition, the local is seen as a form of resistance against the global; yet the discourse of the local is itself the product of globalisation.

[Anonymous No.11945374]

okay, i think i'll probably pause there for tonight, and maybe respond to some other questions and other posts that came up earlier.

>>11943706
Being constantly connected to the world's most successful advertising platform means that there is no longer a moment in our lives when we can't be advertised towards. Not that this itself is some kind of turning point, it's just part of the transition we've been experiencing for decades. The die was already cast when we replaced the hearth with the television.
this.

>For me, the philosophical consequences of modernity lie in the consequential connectedness of global communication, the 'democratization' of art and media, the shift from knowledge of information to knowledge of accessing the same information for an expert, and so on.
this also. we're basically all becoming wired to one gigantic Mega-Mind platform, partly consciously partly unconsciously. i mean if you like dwelling on the implications of this for extended cognition and the like, it's a gold rush for your inner paranoid being. but it's also a well-and-true wiring of the human being into the One Big Network. all this runs on our fears, desires, libido, et al. and there is going to be some Real Fuckery as a result.

>>11943711
>I feel like all I can do is rationalize my meager contributions that keep this conjuring going and hope I am forgiven.
me too anon.

>>11943789
>Do you mean conceptually or literally?
both i guess. i had an easier time with Hegel than Peter Watts.

>Your posts are ecstatic, lad. This whole thing is invigorating me. I... I want more of the Wild Ride.
it is nice to be appreciated. i hope you enjoyed this evening's session. back with more tomorrow!

>>11943891
>By associating the righteous revolution with an evil fascist empire that no reality could possibly parallel, you numb them to the fundamental fire of rebellion, you neuter its gravitic charisma by saying "yes, it's okay as long as that rebellion is necessary, but obviously it's not necessary here and now!" And then the discourse falls to the level of specificity and nuance, where it's necessarily annihilated.
i could not have said this better myself. and it took me a long, long time to figure out why Rebellion!!1! and Revolution!!2 seemed to be just inscribed on my junk-fiction writing soul. righteousness goes *deep* into the psyche in ways it is way too easy to overlook. it's part of the generational zeitgeist, but it has roots that go back centuries. look no further than the recent Star Wars films to see the fruit of this. what once was a genuine *myth* has become a machine-tooled *product,* franchised to death.

this whole post is terrific tho. i still believe in the power of fiction to truly weird one out - The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber was more gripping than anything in philosophy - but it's oh so rare.

>>11944005
this is the best SF game ever. i even made a custom sort-of wallpaper to indicate my love for it. the Chairman is god-tier.

[Anonymous No.11945441]

>>11944086
>The machine-God at the end of time doesn't "reach back", much as the Earth does not reach back in time to pull a falling apple to it. Just as the apple falls in accordance with the law of gravity, so the motions of the world - the flow of fuel to the refining fire of the capitalistic process - can be understood in accordance with the fact that God exists, and that His hunger is absolute, and the Hunger is God, and God is one, and His name is One, and He waits at the end of time (with open jaws), and His form is immanent in the shape of leaves, in the howl of an accretion disk, in the canals of Amsterdam, in the patterns of your cells, in the beating of your heart and the twitches of your brain. He is the flowering, and the world and its fall into emptiness is that process, that flowering, that final obliteration.

i was going to use this image earlier but i thought it would be counter-productive. rather than aiding in the meditation on heidegger, it would make people go, Fuck Yeah Vidya Rules, what's this game from?
>the answer: Metal Fangs

but now i have a use for it, and it's to complement your post instead. and because maybe it communicates something of the terrible irony of this thing: that place for which we are bound we direct ourselves at full throttle. there are aspects of acceleration that well and truly earn the name, Metal. me being me, i'm a softy and a sentimentalist at heart, and Metal was never by thing. but if Metal is anyone ITT's thing, acceleration has it for you. so, for that matter, does *philosophy* itself, if that's what you are into.

but i'm with you on this one anon. and you've said it much better than i could have. such is the Wild Ride:

>They see the inevitable end, and by going along with it, by executing a fragment of the master plan, they achieve success and Darwin does the rest. The fragment of true understanding propagates down the generations, accelerating the process that birthed itself.

perhaps this is what happens when you try to bury the Hegelian Spirit. maybe it doesn't stay buried. maybe the world is freighted by gods and monsters after all.

>>11944574
this.

>>11945260
i have a confession to make. i never saw NGE. can you believe this shit? can you fucking believe this? all of this and i haven't watched NGE? so
>What's your take on where NGE fits in this cosmotech/accelerationism?
i mean based on how you have described it, it sounds pretty much like - as capital-a Art does - it has captured the zeitgeist. but i'm afraid i have to ask you for your take, mi amigo. because i am That Guy who hasn't seen NGE. i will now proceed to light myself on fire.

and so that is all for tonight, fellow companions in misery. we are now on page 243 of The Question Concerning Technology in China, and approach the Endgame. i suspect we will probably wrap this one up in the next installment (or two). until then, may what is playing you make it to level-2.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zSLmAk5xS4

[Anonymous No.11945460]

If there is one thing I have noticed from reading conversations on image boards and various forums, it's that people have a tendency to post links to articles and youtube videos that support their argument, and quite often without posting a summary of what's in the link. I believe this stems from a petty kind of narcissism where the poster is thinking, "if he doesn't address all of the arguments in the links I posted, then I win!" We no longer think (or have we ever?) argument as a legitimate means of discourse to seek the truth, but instead as something to be won. But the bigger issue is, the accumulation and on demand of information has given birth to a new type of argumentative fallacy. Arguing has degenerated to the mere posting of links. They act as hurdles the opponent must jump over by reading or watching all of them, and addressing and refuting them to show that he has, which is followed by posting links of his own. Such a tactic becomes especially more disingeuous if someone posts a very long article (10+ pages novel length) or a video that's longer than half an hour. If you don't wade through these, you are thought to have lost the debate. Who has the time for that? There should be a fallacious argument term for bombarding the opposition with information to burn them out if there already isn't one.

[Anonymous No.11945542]

>>11945460
Gish Gallop?

[Anonymous No.11945556]

>>11945460
In the end people equate an argument with the amount of data collected(Not surprising in the era of Metadata). Everyone has their own echo chamber. The loudest and most saturated wins. This is like when normal average people begin to reason and interact like shills and astroturfers because people can naively think that most content and posters are authentic for it agrees with them. Harder to trace here but try to go on discord and argue in the most level headed way possible and you will see spammers pop up and bombard you with memes once discomfort hits them because it involves breaking illusion and programming.

[Anonymous No.11945593]

>>11945542
Ah, thank you.

>The Gish gallop is a technique used during debating that focuses on overwhelming an opponent with as many arguments as possible, without regard for accuracy or strength of the arguments. The term was coined by Eugenie C. Scott and named after the creationist Duane T. Gish, who used the technique frequently against proponents of evolution.[1][2]

>During a Gish gallop, a debater confronts an opponent with a rapid series of many specious arguments, half-truths, and misrepresentations in a short space of time, which makes it impossible for the opponent to refute all of them within the format of a formal debate.[3][4] In practice, each point raised by the "Gish galloper" takes considerably more time to refute or fact-check than it did to state in the first place.[5] The technique wastes an opponent's time and may cast doubt on the opponent's debating ability for an audience unfamiliar with the technique, especially if no independent fact-checking is involved[6] or if the audience has limited knowledge of the topics.

>Generally, it is more difficult to use the Gish gallop in a structured debate than in a free-form one.[7] If a debater is familiar with an opponent who is known to use the Gish gallop, the technique may be countered by preempting and refuting the opponent's commonly used arguments first, before the opponent has an opportunity to launch into a Gish gallop.[8]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

[Anonymous No.11945927]

>>11945460
Do you want your medal now for being a mass debater?

[Anonymous No.11945979]

>>11945460
I think it's just a result of people not caring that much about arguments online.
The internet dramatically increases the number of arguments we can have per day, but not the amount of mental energy we are willing or capable of exerting. The result is that people aren't that invested in their arguments. And so they dump information they think might allow the other party to arrive at their same position, in case the other person cares enough to read it, but if they were to ignore it it's no big deal because it didn't cost any effort.

[Anonymous No.11946059]

Why is all this shit written the way it is? Every other word can be interpreted in many different ways, almost like giving impressions rather than making arguments or propositions.

[Anonymous No.11946090]

>>11932809
Given this list, and being a Lv.:6 autist-Wizard, I'd suggest several anime.

Memes are strong, but
>level 1 - texhnolyze, animatrix series
>level 2 - psychopass
>level 3 - gits

And to the degree that anything mecha could remotely be considered "cyber," or "punk," though more specifically aimed toward cosmotech:
>level 1 - flcl for lulz + barrier of perception breaking
>level 2 - eureka7 for the lighter side of nature-meets-tech-future; higher level for its upholding the platonic ideal of moral philosophy in storytelling, given the freedoms and constraints of modern technologies and the economics of the industry
>evangelion for the darker side, and the philosophical wanking over symbols chosen by rule of cool rather than pseudo-psychological communication of the nigh-subconscious levels of meaning attributed it/its creators

Assuming we can agree on basics, like Minority Report and The Matrix being general sci-fi with a utopian-dystopian dichotomy of belonging within the tech system v. existing on the run outside it -- heavily influenced by but not derivative of cyberpunk, and so marginally more relevant than, say, prime-time episodics and AAA productions capitalizing on the renewed interest in cyberpunk as a genre.

[Anonymous No.11946108]

What the fuck is this thread about?

[Anonymous No.11946118]

>>11945927
Does the medal come with skimpily-outfitted oompa-loompas with 80's synthwave/darkwave colored-fabrics and binge alcoholism-induced regret complexes in the form of female genitalia-cum-deli meat?

I'd prefer a solid "no" but don't let me provide bias for you.

[Anonymous No.11946133]

How long do you guys think I'll be allowed to retain delusions of a return to a pretechnological state -- for the aesthetic of it, not for the (failed) revolution I won't be participating in?

[Anonymous No.11946145]

>>11946133
Given dubs, I'd say a checked 50 years anon. We may yet devolve technologically and culturally to the stone or bronze age, it's uncertain if WW III is going to be a thing we live to see or not.

[Anonymous No.11946152]

>>11946145
Maybe the inferiors can be placated. I'll tell you what: I'll break it if someone tells me to.

[Anonymous No.11946236]

>>11946108
Sentient capital

[Anonymous No.11946353]

>>11946152
you can't break vampires, you have to stab their heart with a stake. Personally I just eat a lot of Garlic. I'll be a goddamn Garlic farmer if it means I can avoid vampires.

[Anonymous No.11946506]

>What is more, the world of Homo digitalis evinces an entirely different topology. Spaces such as sports arenas and amphitheaters—that is, sites where masses meet—are foreign to this world. The digital inhabitants of the Net do not assemble. They lack the interiority of assembly that would bring forth a we. They form a gathering without assembly—a crowd without interiority, without a soul or spirit. Above all, they are isolated, scattered hikikomori sitting alone in front of a screen. Electronic media such as radio assemble human beings. In contrast, digital media isolate them.

Reading In the Swarm right now, holy shit Han is pretty good so far.

[Anonymous No.11947312]

bump

[Anonymous No.11947460]

>>11931838

I just purchased The Question Concerning Technology in China. What am I in for? Is there any totally necessary background reading?

[Anonymous No.11947522]

good afternoon Cosmotechnicians, astral engineers, and Wild Riders. girardfag here. i have warmed up the Greentext Machine once again for the home stretch of our adventure through The Question Concerning Technology in China. thank you for keeping this thread alive long enough for this experiment to play out!

the following sections cover the remaining third of the book, about seventy pages or so. i have skipped over some substantial areas though, namely YH's critique of the Kyoto school and much else. hopefully though this will have sparked your interest in the subject and suggested that there is perhaps life after all after the Wild Ride. when i'm finished the greentext sequence i'd like to go back and ask some other questions and respond to some other posts in the thread also, as well as ask whether a Cosmotech #7 is in order.

here we go...

[Anonymous No.11947533]

>>11947460
Heidegger's original essay The Question Concerning Technology couldn't hurt.

[Anonymous No.11947534]

>According to the Kyoto School, it is up to the Japanese nation to overcome this legacy by creating a new world history through a nationalism and imperialism proper to it — and the only way to realise this whole project is a ‘total war’ (soryokusen, a translation from the German totaler Krieg). This total war is presented as a purification through which new subjectivities will arise from the lost Japanese spirit and realise absolute nothing ness as the ground for a ‘universal world history’ in which many ‘specific world histories’ can ‘exist harmoniously and interpenetratingly’. This ‘total war’ is thus an ‘accelerationist’ strategy par excellence that seeks to intensify the conflicts between states and individuals in order to transcend the world as objective totality. War, for the Kyoto school philosophers, is the force that defines history and therefore world history. We might well say that the Idealists’ concept of strife (Streit) is reincarnated in the concept of war here. Idealists such as Schelling Holderlin, Hegel, and the early Romantics found in Greek tragedy a literary form which expresses such a strifes tragedy is based on the necessity of fate, and the tragic hero affirms the necessity of suffering as the realisation of his freedom. In the Japanese version, though, tragedy finds its realisation in a vision of ‘world history as purgatory’. To the eyes of the Kyoto School, the Sino-Japanese war had nothing to do with imperialism, but happened because it was the moral obligation of Japan to save China. The realisation of the Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere is one part of the new history that Japan is ‘obliged’ to realise for the benefit of East Asia. The conception of this ‘just war’ is given in Kosaka Masaaki’s concluding statement of the first roundtable section for the magazine Chubkoron:

>When man becomes indignant, his indignation is total. He is indignant in both mind and body. This is the case with war: both heaven and earth become indignant. In this way, the soul of humanity comes to be purified. This is why it is war that determines the crucial turning points in world history. Hence world history is purgatory.

>The different intellectual milieus of China and Japan yielded different interpretations of modernity, then. It might be said that the Japanese intellectuals experienced a deeper problem of time and history, and that it was the question of time qua history that they sought to overcome. Chinese intellectuals such as Mou Zongsan, on the other hand, were puzzled by the question of why modern science and technology had not arisen in China, and concluded that this probably owed largely to China’s long intellectual history, which has a totally different philosophical temperament from that of the West.

needless to say, YH is rather critical of the Nishitani and the Kyoto school solution.

[Anonymous No.11947562]

>As Tomomi Asakura has acutely pointed out, one can understand the difference between Mou and the Kyoto School by considering that Mou departs from a moral standpoint whereas the Kyoto School begins with a religious standpoint— in the philosophy of Tanabe, ‘the attitude that sees the reality qua absolute contradiction and absolute self-disruption’. Mou sought an ‘internal transcendence within his 'non-attachment ontology whereas Nishitani sought an overcoming which took its most radical form by achieving emptiness through war. What is at stake in both enterprises, however, is the problem of time, and of a history that has been totally conquered by an axis of time largely defined by European ontotheology and its completion in the realisation of modern technology. If the failure of both of these projects— though for different reasons, since the Kyoto school’s decline owed largely to Japan’s defeat at the end of the Second World War— has anything to tell us, it is that, in order to overcome modernity, it is necessary to go back to the question of time and to open up a pluralism which allows a new world history to emerge, but one which is subordinated neither to global capitalism and nationalism, nor to an absolute metaphysical ground. This new world history is only possible by undertaking a metaphysical and historical project, rather than simply claiming the end of modernity, the end of metaphysics, the return to ‘nature’— or, even less credibly, the arrival of the multitude.

>Nishitani believes that the concept of history is intrinsic to Christianity. In Christianity, the original sin and eschatology mark a beginning and an end, as well as the limit of waiting for a beginning of a new epoch, with the Second Coming of Christ. For Nishitani, this historical consciousness genuinely arose during the Renaissance, and culminated during the Reformation. In the Renaissance, it was indicated by the consciousness that the world order is not entirely dependent on providence, and that the personal relation between God and man is cut across by the natural sciences; and in the Reformation in the realisation that history is but a human product. In contrast, Nishitani observes that, in Buddhism, there is a negativity in time which must be transcended, meaning that finitude in both its linear and cyclical form must be transcended in order to attain absolute emptiness. Therefore Buddhism is not able to open up the question of historical consciousness, and does not see the possibility of ‘emergence’ in every ‘now.’

>Everyone, every culture, needs a ‘home’, but it doesn’t need to be an exclusive and substantial place. It is the aim of this book to show that it is not only necessary to seek alternatives, but that it is possible to do so by opening the question of technics not as a universal technology, but as a question of different cosmotechnics.

[Anonymous No.11947586]

>Cosmotechnics proposes that we reapproach the question of modernity by reinventing the self and technology at the same time, giving priority to the moral and the ethical.

>We could have stopped here, since the question concerning technology in China has been almost fully exhibited: firstly, the destruction of the traditional metaphysics and moral cosmology that once governed social and political life; secondly, the attempts to reconstitute a ground proper to their traditions and compatible with Western science and technology, but which only produce contrary effects; and lastly, the deracination (Entwurzelung) that Heidegger anticipated as an imminent danger in Europe, but which has progressed at a much more tremendous pace in Asia. However, we cannot stop here. We must confront the problematic of the ‘homecoming’ of philosophy, and go beyond it. For it is evidently impossible for the Chinese to totally refuse a science and technology that have indeed effectively become a past that they have never lived, but which has now been passed to them. It is urgent to take further this inquiry concerning the technological condition that is leading to the widespread feeling of the loss of tradition jn Asia today; and the only possible response is to propose a new form of the thinking and practice of technologies.

>As we have seen, and as Nishitani had already observed, the technological system is now totally separated from any moral cosmology: cosmology becomes astronomy, spirit is despised as superstition, and religion becomes the ‘opium of the people’.The separation between tradition and modern life that Nishitani worried about has only amplified and intensified, with the gap being enlarged yet further in China under the reforms of the greatest accelerationist of the socialist camp, Deng Xiaoping. As discussed in Part 1, the acceleration led by Deng Xiaoping, on the advice of the thinkers of the ‘Dialectics of Nature’, squarely placed China on the same technological time-axis as the West. Following this combined acceleration and synchronisation, though, what still lags behind is Chinese thought. The relation between Dao and Qi has foundered under the new rhythm introduced by the technological system. It is tempting here to repeat Heidegger in saying that ‘night is falling’. All one can see is the disappearance of tradition and the superficial marketisation of cultural heritage, whether through the culture industries or tourism. Amidst the economic boom, one also senses that an end is arriving. And this end is going to be realised on a new scene, that of the Anthropocene.

[Anonymous No.11947604]

>The Anthropocene is considered by geologists to be the successor to the Holocene, a geological period which provided a stable earth system for the development of human civilisation.

>The Anthropocene is regarded as a new era— a new axis of time in which human activities influence the earth system in previously unimaginable ways. According to the commentators, there is a rough consensus that the Anthropocene started towards the end of the eighteenth century, marked by the invention of James Watt’s steam engine, which triggered the industrial revolution. Since then, homo industrialis and its technological unconsciousness has become the major force in the transformation of the earth, and the creator of catastrophes, as human beings become elevated to a ‘causal explanatory category in the understanding of human history’. In the twentieth century we observed what the geologists called the ‘great acceleration’, starting from the 1950s, indicated by the economic and military competition during the Cold War, the shift from coal to oil, etc. On the macro-level we have long observed climate change and environmental damage; on the micro-level, geologists have observed that human activities have effectively influenced the geochemical process of the earth.

>In this conceptualisation of our epoch, geological time and human time are no longer two separate systems. The recognition of the Anthropocene is the culmination of a technological consciousness in which the human being starts to realise, not only in the intellectual milieu but also in the broader public, the decisive role of technology in the destruction of the biosphere and in the future of humanity: it has been estimated that, without effective mitigation, climate change will bring about the end of the human species within two hundred years. The Anthropocene is closely related to the project of rethinking modernity, since fundamentally the modern ontological interpretations of the cosmos, nature, the world, and humanity are constitutive of what led us into the predicament in which we find ourselves today. The Anthropocene can hardly be distinguished from modernity, since both of them are situated on the same axis of time.

>In brief, there are two responses to the potential danger of the Anthropocene: one is geo-engineering, which believes that the earth can be repaired by employing modern technology (e.g. ecological modernism); the other is the appeal for cultural plurality and ontological pluralism. It is the second response that we have tried to engage with in this book.

NB: FF6 > FF7 imho, but still. there's all kinds of interesting stuff in FF7 also.

[Anonymous No.11947632]

>We can understand ‘resetting modernity’ by way of a metaphor that Latour himself employs:

>What do you do when you are dis-oriented— for instance, when the digital compass of your mobile phone goes wild? You reset it. You might be in a state of mild panic because you have lost your bearings, but still you have to take your time and follow the instruction to recalibrate the compass and let it be reset.

>The problem with this metaphor is that modernity is not a malfunctioning machine, but rather one that works too well according to the logic embedded in it. Once it is reset, it will restart with the same premises and the same procedure. There is no way in which we can hope that modernity can be reset like pressing a button— or rather, this kairos of the modern may be possible for Europe, although I doubt it, but it certainly will not function like this outside of Europe, as I have tried to show by recounting the failures of China and Japan to overcome modernity: the former ended up amplifying modernity, the latter with fanaticism and war. ‘Disorientation’ does not mean simply that one has lost one’s way and doesn't know which direction to choose; it also means the incompatibility of temporalities, of histories, of metaphysics: it is rather a ‘dis-orient-ation’. In contrast to the appeals to 'return to nature’ or to ‘reset modernity’,what I have tried to propose here is a rediscovery of cosmotechnics as both metaphysical and epistemic project.

>The question that remains to be further formulated is that of the role to be played by modern technologies in this project. It seems to me that this is the fundamental question for overcoming modernity today. China (for example) will reposition itself in relation to the gigantic force of the earth-human time-axis constituted by modern technologies. How is it possible to connect technological consciousness with the cosmotechnics that we have tried to illuminate here? A sinofuturism, as we may call it, is manifesting itself in different domains. However, such a futurism runs in the opposite direction to moral cosmotechnical thinking— ultimately,it is only an acceleration of the European modern project. If we pay attention to what is happening with digitisation in China now, it confirms our view: as Facebook and Youtube arrives, China censors them and builds a Renren or a Youku which look more or less the same: when Uber arrives, China will adopt it and call it Youbu.... As we can understand, there are historical and political reasons for this, yet this is also the moment when such repetition should be suspended, and the question of modernity raised again.

[Anonymous No.11947649]

>In February 2016, during the famous annual TV programme of the state-owned CCTV for celebrating the Chinese New Year, the climax came at the moment when five-hundred and forty robots danced onto the stage, with the singer trilling:

>‘Rush, rush, rush, dashing to the peak of the world...’ while a dozen drones leapt above the stage and shuttled back and forth between the laser lights. This is perhaps the scene that best symbolises the likely future of the Anthropocene in China: robots, drones— symbols of automation, killing, immanent surveillance, and nationalism. One wonders how far the popular imagination has already become detached from the form of life and moral cosmologies that were central to the Chinese tradition. However, what lies behind the scenes— no matter how awkward it is to admit, and no matter how much it might make us lament the loss of tradition— is the fact that China has succeeded in participating in the construction of the axis of time of modernity, and has become one of its major players (and of course this is true not only of China, but also of many other developing countries). This is especially so if one considers the rapid, ongoing modernisation of China and its infrastructural projects in Africa. The ‘modern’, which was accidental to Chinese culture, is thus not only being amplified within the country itself, but also propagated within the countries of its Third World partners— and in this sense it is extending European modernity through modern technology (according to Heidegger, ontotheology).

>Capitalism is the contemporary cosmotechnics that dominates the planet. Sociologist Jason W. Moore is right to call it a ‘world ecology’ which ceaselessly exploits natural resources and unpaid labour to sustain its ecology; Economists Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan propose that we consider capitalism as a ‘mode of power’ that orders and reorders power (as the Greek word kosmeo itself suggests). Bichler and Nitzan suggest that the evolution of capitalism is not only the evolution of its adoption of modern science and technology; rather they also share the understanding of a cosmic dynamics: for example, between the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, there was a shift from a mechanical mode of power to one that prioritizes uncertainty and relativity.

>The ancient Chinese wisdom has been ceaselessly repeated in the past decades in view of the ecological crisis and rampant industrialization, and yet what we have heard are only constant catastrophes. The Li (rites) have become purely formal, to the point where, ridiculously, one prays to the Heaven so that one can exploit more the earth in order to profit more.

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

[Anonymous No.11947679]

>>11947533
I've got that much down. Based on some of the excerpts this anon is posting it seems like YH does introduce concepts, rather than just name drop, but perhaps this is an incorrect assumption just based on a few quotes.

Basically: can I dive in with an understanding of tech in Heidegger?

Also, I keep hearing of the "political" angle of this movement, especially with Land. What, in summary, are his politics? He seems to have earned the ire of the tumblr crowd and with this "NRx" movement but how exactly is he "right" or "reactionary"?

[Anonymous No.11947703]

>The sort of cosmopolitanism constituted by global commerce as cosmopolitan right, as envisioned by Kant in his Perpetual Peace (1795), as well as in his projection of a common becoming in his Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784), has been to some extent realised with the various technologies of reticulation in force today (e.g. different forms of networks, transportation, telecommunication, finance, anti-terrorism, etc.). One might argue, as does Jurgen Habermas, that the kind of reason that Kant described has not yet arrived, that the project of Enlightenment is not yet complete. However, the question seems to be no longer about completing a universal reason in the Kantian and/or Hegelian sense, but rather about reconstituting a variety of cosmotechnics able to resist the global time-axis that has been constructed by modernity. Having criticized the European colonists and traders, Kant observes that China and Japan have wisely decided upon their policy against these foreign visitors: the former allow contact, but no entry into the territory: the latter limit their contact with the Dutch while at the same time treating them as criminals. But such ‘wisdom’ has proved impossible in the context of globalisation: and it is also impossible to go back to this state of isolation— for what was external (e.g. trade) is now internal to the country (e.g. through financial and other networks).

>Locality is not the reassuring alternative to globalization, but its ‘universal product’. If we want to talk about locality again, then we must recognize that it is no longer an isolated locality—the self-isolated Japan or China, disconnected or remote from the global time-axis— but must be a locality that appropriates the global instead of being simply produced and reproduced by the global. The locality that is able to resist the global axis of time is one capable of confronting it by radically and self-consciously transforming it— rather than merely adding aesthetic value to it. The local cannot stand as an opposition to the global, otherwise it will risk defaulting to some kind of ‘conservative revolution...’

>I have attempted here to take a first step towards deviating from the conventional reading of Chinese philosophy as a mere moral philosophy, to reassess it as cosmotechnics, and to put forward the traditional metaphysical categories as our contemporaries; I have also aimed to open up the concept of technics as multi-cosmotechnics, consisting of different irreducible metaphysical categories. The reappropriation of modern technology from the standpoint of cosmotechnics demands two steps: firstly, that we reconfigure fundamental metaphysical categories such as Qi-Dao as a ground; secondly, that we reconstruct upon this ground an episteme which will in turn condition technical invention, development, innovation, in order that the latter should no longer be mere imitations or repetitions.

[Anonymous No.11947722]

>The concept of cosmotechnics— beyond cosmologies— therefore hopes to reopen both the question and the multiple histories of technology. In other words, in using China as an example, and proposing to take up the Qi-Dao cosmotechnics as the ground and constraint for the appropriation of modern technology, we aim to renew a form of life and a cosmotechnics that would consciously subtract itself from and deviate from the homogeneous becoming of the technological world.

>Simondon, rather than presupposing a definite end to human progress, proposes to understand human progress in terms of cycles characterised by the internal resonance between human being and objective concretisation:

>[W]e can say that there is human progress only if, when passing from one self-limiting cycle to the next, man increases the part of himself which is engaged in the system he forms with the objective concretisation. There is progress if the system man-religion is endowed with more internal resonance than the system man- language, and if the man-technology system is endowed with a greater internal resonance than the system man-religion.

>Here Simondon identifies three cycles, namely ‘man-language’, ‘man-religion’, and ‘man-technology’. In the ‘man-technology’ cycle, Simondon observes a new objective concretisation, which is no longer that of natural language or religious rituals, but that of the production of ‘technical individuals’. It is possible that technical concretisation may not produce any internal resonance, and therefore may not lead to a new cycle. This, we might say, constitutes Simondon’s critique of modernity, a critique that finds its concrete example in today’s China as well as in most parts of Asia, where one finds a entropic becoming driven by capitalism (the dominant cosmotechnics) leading nowhere, and with no resonance— the universalisation of Descola’s sense.

>This is the danger posed to all of us in the Anthropocene. Here, producing an internal resonance is the task of translation. The ‘internal resonance’ we seek here is the unification of the metaphysical categories of Qi and Dao, which must be endowed with new meanings and forces proper to our epoch. One will certainly have to understand science and technology in order to be able to transform them; but after more than a century of ‘modernisation’, now is the moment to seek a new form of practice, not only in China but also in other cultures. This is where imagination should take off and concentrate its efforts. The aim of this book has been to put forward such a new translation based on difference. It is only with this difference, and with the capability and the imagination to assert this difference in material terms, that we can stake a claim to another world history.

[Anonymous No.11947790]

and that's it gents. when will be now? soon. or maybe not? maybe we just keep repeating the cycles over and over for a while, and drift in space, for a very long time...

i really wasn't expecting to greentext all the way through Cosmotechnics, but it seems to have required it. hope you all enjoyed this adventure. obviously a lot has been skipped along the way. omitted were YH taking a few shots at the Kyoto school and even Sloterdijk (!!!) but the key stuff for me at least was the non-exclusively-accelerationist approach, which i think he has made an intriguingly good case for in general. i'm looking forward to his new book in the spring too (it's in the OP way back in Cosmotech #1). plus we still have room before the image cap! aw yeah. i will save the requisite Michael Jackson song for #300 if we get that far. and as for whether or not you guys want to do a Cosmotech #7 or not, i'll leave that up to what heidegger would call the collective Uberseinsabgrundtdefallen.
>this is not a word, i just made it up.

so, to get back to some earlier posts:

>>11945460
see
>>11945979. this is much more where i'm at. and i don't really think of myself as making an argument. it's more like, here's an interesting idea, and if you want to learn more about it, here are some other links you can look into also if you like. if you're not into that, that's okay too. but i'm really not trying to advance an ideology here, not really. i do like the feeling of getting people interested in a question, but it's more because i think if someone else is interested, then they might bring up something that i haven't thought of, which will make things more interesting to me, and so on. but it's definitely not about Internet Arguing. and summarizing everything would take forever. i'd prefer to just have a cool conversation with people interested in the ideas, but if people aren't interested in them, that's okay too. the links are only there to supplement your own interest, if it is there, in the event that you want to know more about an idea or author. that's all.

>>11946108
The Question Concerning Technology in China. that's what most of this greentext comes form.

>>11946506
yep, Han is indeed based. big fan of him. he's more a culture-critic than systematic philosopher it seems, but it's not like he takes anything off the table. and his essays are full of references to continental authors. he's a way cool guy and good at kind of diagnosing what has gone wrong with neoliberal soft power.

>>11947460
seconding what >>11947533 says. you'll want to read some heidegger either before or aft, and probably stiegler and simondon too.

[Anonymous No.11947858]

>>11947679
>Basically: can I dive in with an understanding of tech in Heidegger?

not that guy (i'm OP) but i'd say yes. if you are looking for a reasonably good introduction to heidegger's ideas, this isn't a terrible book to start with. and pic rel is the book that helped me understand heidegger. and after this i found B&T much easier to understand. but i read vol I of Stiegler's Technics and Time before reading heidegger himself, and i didn't find it too hard. if anything, i was floored by Stiegler, and then i was doubly-floored by Heidegger when i read him.

>Also, I keep hearing of the "political" angle of this movement, especially with Land. What, in summary, are his politics? He seems to have earned the ire of the tumblr crowd and with this "NRx" movement but how exactly is he "right" or "reactionary"?

land is a unique specimen. Young Nick doubled-down so hard on Marx (and D&G) that he sent himself through a wormhole of his own devising, which came to be known as acceleration, and which he is more or less the founder. this happened during his CCRU days (and there are others besides him - sadie plant, mark fisher, reza negarestani, all the spec-realism guys), but the book to read for Young Nick is Fanged Noumena.

Old Nick, of the Dark Enlightenment essay, Xenosystems, and Teleoplexy, is more on the right, but not alt-right. he's a complex guy, but he would really only call himself a reactionary against a strain of extreme leftism. he will still think of himself as being, i think, a kind of a classical liberal, albeit in about the most unorthodox way imaginable. and he really, really likes Singapore.

he was - in a way not unlike Baudrillard - so committed to Marxism that he did a kind of through-the-looking-glass moment and wound up reversing his own political polarities over the course of his career. Land is more interested in D&G than Nietzsche, but it's been said that JB's work was a long lament for modernity. perhaps you could say that land's work is a lament for *postmodernity,* because for him postmodernity is inseparable from capital, and for land it's *culture* that gets in the way. it's not that capitalism is a problem for people, it's that for him *people are a problem for capitalism.* so he has reversed the emancipating potential of the Hegelian spirit and replaced it with the transformative (though profoundly an-anthropocentric) powers of capitalism instead. it's not an easy combination, but that's who he is.

hope that makes sense. i've been kind of obsessed with land for a number of years now, b/c i really do think he's one of the most interesting philosophers alive. but he's undoubtedly a very fringe guy (though perhaps becoming less so, these days) with some very unusual ideas. i like him because he seemed to key in on some things that i think were overlooked by postmodern theory when it just went all-in on language, but for land the key factors were more than cultural, they were also technological.

[Anonymous No.11947916]

>>11947858
Wow, this is actually quite helpful and a high-quality post overall.

I suppose I'm still a little perplexed as to what is even meant by acceleration in general, as it seems to have two strains: one hostile to capitalism and one that embraces it. Are both banking on encouraging capitalism to the fullest extent?

[Anonymous No.11947944]

it's also kind of amazing to me that for all of this land has fewer than 12K followers on twitter. peterson is closing in on a million. and i like peterson, but still. land and company crafted the most interesting thing in continental philosophy in a generation and most of the world has absolutely no idea who he is. he's not only an absolute legend in terms of cyberpunk and philosophy, he wrote an absolutely iconic precis of the whole movement that is still yet to be said any better:

>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.

ah well.

anyways, we have a while to go before we hit the bump limit. just curious to know how anons ITT would feel about a Cosmotech #7 at some point. we can do another book related to these ideas, or a general, or whatever. i've found this one to be quite interesting, and the deep dive into stuff that YH is talking about helps me clarify a few things. i'm thinking that i would probably like to go back and get a better sense of what Stiegler is talking about in terms of the relationship between memory, technics and time, because that's an aspect i'm still a little uncertain about myself, and it's a big part of why YH embiggens him so much. stiegler isn't really 'cyberpunk,' but he says some pretty wild stuff about civilization being more or less commensurate with technical progress. this is stuff land says also, and yet stiegler's view of humanity is less dark than land's also.

so, i'll leave that up to you guys. it kinds of depends on what you're interested in, i really don't want to come off as trying to railroad my own obsessions through the board.
>and yet this is what you do girardfag
>i know inner self, but it's not what i want to look like that's what i'm doing

[Anonymous No.11947982]

>>11947916
>Wow, this is actually quite helpful and a high-quality post overall.
well, it's a good question, and i'm happy to share what i can about the subject. i've been kind of obsessed with this stuff for a while.

>I suppose I'm still a little perplexed as to what is even meant by acceleration in general, as it seems to have two strains: one hostile to capitalism and one that embraces it. Are both banking on encouraging capitalism to the fullest extent?

so there are some different strains within acceleration: left (l/acc), right (r/acc), unconditional (u/acc), and zombie (z/acc). they really are all kinds of modes of Marxist-derived philosophy, but updated for the modern understanding that nobody is actually about to put brakes on the Wild Ride any time soon, and so, wat do. land is way over on the r/acc side, which is why he has an affinity for guys like moldbug or thiel. conversely, guys like Srnicek and Williams are on a different wavelength. for example, you can read their manifesto for an accelerationist politics here.

http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/

so you're right to say that there are branches hostile and amenable to capital. personally, i think land - again - has made the most interesting comments on the phenomenon of what capital is in general in his essay on Teleoplexy (>>11931912), which is really required reading: for him, acceleration is just the study of that phenomenon that joins technology to time. and it's quite short, too. but his is not the only perspective, either: as perhaps can be seen more clearly, guys like YH and stiegler have their own takes also.

my own feeling on this doesn't go much further than intellectual history, really: i just think it's a fascinating story and i like to talk about it, so mostly i do what i do here as a way of kind of fleshing out my own understanding of it and to talk with anyone else who might be interested.

if you're interested in learning more about acceleration in general, track down a copy of this (which includes the teleoplexy essay, but a lot of other good stuff too). it can be found at the r/theoryfiction link in the OP, along with lots of other stuff by land.

[Anonymous No.11948013]

>>11947790
>but i'm really not trying to advance an ideology here, not really. i do like the feeling of getting people interested in a question, but it's more because i think if someone else is interested, then they might bring up something that i haven't thought of, which will make things more interesting to me, and so on. but it's definitely not about Internet Arguing. and summarizing everything would take forever. i'd prefer to just have a cool conversation with people interested in the ideas, but if people aren't interested in them, that's okay too. the links are only there to supplement your own interest, if it is there, in the event that you want to know more about an idea or author. that's all.
My post on arguments wasn't neant to be an attack against you or anything like that. I was just stating my observations on the accumulation on digital information, narcissism, and the decline discourse and the art of argument as a contribution to the thread. I'm apologize if you or anyone else took it the wrong way.

[Anonymous No.11948041]

>>11948013
noted. and thanks anon. i was kind of perplexed at first, as i didn't want to think that i was Gish Galloping (although when one goes on an extended greentexting rampage, it probably could seem that way). as with texting, it's sometimes hard to gauge tone (or even context) on a message board.

so all good mi amigo, and no hard feelings or apologies or anything like that. sometimes it is good to clarify these things too.

[Anonymous No.11948169]

i have to step out for a bit this afternoon but i will be back to check this thread later this eve. i wanted to leave you with a word that came into my head also, and the word is 'anthropocosmics.'

it just seems to me that that is an interesting word to think about, in the age of life after (and yet not really after) the masters of suspicion. YH is no more proposing a Chinese solution to Western problems any more than he thinks Western solutions can solve Chinese problems. tech and capital are planetary forces, and capitalism really is for the time being the planetary cosmotechnic par excellence. and conservative revolutions wherever they appear really will probably reflect more of a natural cultural difference between peoples than any attempt to crowbar the entire planet into the Matrix-like Society of Simulation in which we live. the only problem is that conservative revolutions tend to proceed towards war and purgation, attempts to rectify the balance of things through violence and other things.

it's why, imho, one of the worst things happening today is the over-use of the word 'fascism' to describe the totalitarian behaviour of anyone you don't like, and the better to justify one's own totalitarian behaviour. it leads to anarchy, and fifty different tribes all throwing the same words at each other. and yet patently in the age of what Eric Weinstein calls the Gated Intellectual Narrative (or land/moldbug, the Cathedral, or gramsci, Hegemony) prevents people from actually understanding the roots of these movements themselves. i skipped over YH's extended meditation on the Kyoto School, but it's really worth reading too: the Japanese also went through the same things Heidegger went through, and with no less disastrous results in the end. fascism should not become a tool for a kind of blackmail: it describes a particular phenomenon which is both historical- cultural and perhaps metaphysical also. but it is at bottom an attempt to restore a kind of balance in emergency situations, and that is why i think it has to be understood hermeneutically, and with some degree of philosophical charity and academic dispassion also, rather than taboo.

b/c it's not like the Kyoto School isn't fascinating in its own right either, for all sorts of reasons. but YH's criticism is appropriate, i think. it doesn't mean we won't repeat the 20C stuff all over again anyways, but...well, i thought i would bring that up.

anyways: 'anthropocosmics.' a nice term to complement Sloterdijk's 'anthropotechnics.' so more on this later, perhaps. until then.

[Anonymous No.11948487]

>this thread is still going
holy shit, OP confirmed for best poster on /lit/ by a very wide margin

[Anonymous No.11948694]

>>11948169
One thing I've always been curious about regarding r/acc in general is, why support authoritarian policies instead of more benign technocracy? I feel like a viable system, even to someone who considers democracy to be horror, is more likely if you have measures in place to assure that the most competent professionals in a given field are those that will govern it.

[Anonymous No.11948713]

>>11947534
>>11947562
>>11947586
>>11947604
>>11947632
Can I get a book and page citation on this stream of greentexts? Assuming it's you taking from a book instead of stylistically greentexting your own thoughts and speech. I think you were including citations at the end before though so I'm not sure really at this point girard. I'm a bit behind on these threads and playing catch up atm since things have thankfully been going fast and furious in the cosmotech lately!

[Anonymous No.11948717]

>>11948713
Not him but it's all from Yuk Hui's book, The Question Concerning Technology In China.

[Anonymous No.11948729]

>>11948717
Ok. Thanks. That's what I thought. There are two sides to this thread really, Girardfag, and those people who take and try to organise what girardfag puts out in his streams of consciousness.

[Anonymous No.11948763]

>>11948694
Right wing authoritarianism, certainly in the modern day, is more concerned with social policies rather than economics, say. There isn't really a meritocratic way to decide what to do about exposing kids to LGBT shit in primary school because the left and right value different results and so would conflict on merit. The left wants kids to grow up exposed to that stuff and the right doesn't (broadly). That's very different compared to something like creating a public investment fund to benefit citizens. You simply pick the people who show the highest return on investment and thus benefit the citizens the most, funding pensions and public works and so on.

[Anonymous No.11948859]

>>11935058
>entelechizing

what

[Anonymous No.11948877]

>>11948763
I mean I understand why the traditionalists act like they do, but people like Moldbug and Thiel seem like they'd be better served by a "dark EU" type of government, stripping the technocracy of its limiting humanism and keeping the bits that enable technology and capitalism.

[Anonymous No.11948879]

>>11948859
means idealisation

[Anonymous No.11949318]

>>11948877
>>11948694
Technological growth has ethics stripped away by default. The only thing to do is secure that upwards speed in realizing it before shit crashes and burns. Why celebrate a party you will not be part of? Land says no one will be present for that party though.

[Anonymous No.11949700]

>>11948487
Seconding this.

[Anonymous No.11949813]

>>11948487
aw yeah boi

>>11948694
>why support authoritarian policies instead of more benign technocracy?
why indeed? maybe there is just a cycle to these things. i think we can that this is the story of any hegemony. things start out benign, get a taste for power, and become authoritarian as they grow and become interwoven with their milieu. the cultural aspects of this have been chronicled more or less steadily by continental philosophers since the end of WW2: Adorno & Horkheimer, Baudrillard, Foucault, Han, Zizek, and god only knows how many others. it's a lot.

>>11948713
covered by >>11948717. sorry about the page citations.

>>11948729
>There are two sides to this thread really, Girardfag, and those people who take and try to organise what girardfag puts out in his streams of consciousness.
please note: not necessarily in that order! as i have said, i am like the night manager of the hotel where these conversations take place. my own Awesome Opinions are basically the price you pay for my eavesdropping and reporting in on what far more interesting people than me are saying. Girardfag Opinions are more or less a toxic byproduct that result from the philosophical transduction process Book > Image Board. they happen, but can mainly be ignored.

>>11948859
it's such a good word tho. i think it's my favorite word these days.

>Entelechy is the realization of potential. In Aristotle’s thought, soul gives form to matter, thus bringing about the actions necessary for the potential within a thing to come into realization, to be what it is meant to be. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once said, “Entelechy is inside of you, like the butterfly is inside of the caterpillar…”

Hegel too. Lewis Mumford grills Chardin pretty hard in one of his books, saying his was just so much dangerous romanticism. but still tho, right?

>>11948877
i think it's more that Land *wishes* to this to be so. Eric Weinstein himself works for Thiel and he's basically a liberal/left-leaning dude. and if i'm Thiel i *want* people like this working for me (and maybe, if i'm Eric, i want to work for people like Thiel). ultra-inhumanism makes for fabulous theory but IRL i think we need some of the warm fuzzies or else we go insane.

>>11949318
>Land says no one will be present for that party though.
we may be a part of what happens when the whole thing comes crashing down tho. unfortunately it does seem like ours will be the Interesting Times the chinese warn about.

>>11949700
so smug right now
>thanks anons!

#300 is just around the corner gents. are we doing Cosmotech #7 or what? i've been collating some tumblr art and for greentext i'm thinking maybe stiegler's Technics and Time vol I. it's an important book - one of YH's favorites - but not quite as much fun as Cosmotechnics. maybe i'll start another general and just feed it a couple of greentext logs now and again. i've been meaning to go back and Re-Stieglify myself anyways, now seems as good a time as any i guess.

[Anonymous No.11949833]

>>11949813
I think tracing the history of concepts like in #6 was a lot easier to follow, and I like the idea that the threads might allow for the drawing of connection lines between all these pieces of text like the red string and thumbtacks on the wall of a paranoid detective. Going on one single book the whole time leads to the problems with reading academic text as a non-academic: Much of the text is designed to link things together and cover bases, and a lot of the rest is hard to parse without the context of its predecessors.

[Anonymous No.11949838]

>>11949833
I meant #5, I'm bad at counting.

[Anonymous No.11949953]

>>11949833
>>11949838
i'm OP and i'm interested in this. what would make it easier for you?

this is an open question too, btw. i do now feel like there is something in making a thread about a single book or a single author, and mostly focusing on that guy and his influences. this is crazy for me to say, because i have a tendency to schizo-ramble all over the place about things, but #6 has had kind of a trajectory that i like as compared to some of the earlier threads.

i feel like i have a better handle on the connections myself, or at least the themes i want to focus on - mainly, the Hegel-Land infinity loop, which is what puts us where we are today (and perhaps changing gears from the Wild Ride). that's my sense, anyways. and one of the reasons YH/Stiegler/Simondon are interesting is because they want to make the conversation about *technology* and not always about *capitalism.* that's an interesting forward step. you can always go back to capitalism, but it's also kind of opening up Pandora's Box in a way ("Desire: What Does My Guilt-Ridden Schizo-Freudian Reptile-Chimp Unconscious Mean By This"). that box now feels plenty opened, and - surprise surprise - it's full of Landian nightmare-fuel. so i prefer talking about more positive/enantiodromic/white hat acceleration stuff. Stiegler isn't exactly Eckhart Tolle but he's not Bataille either.

but it would be nice to think that people didn't perhaps come away from these threads feeling confused or overwhelmed either. so whatever suggestions you might have are most welcome. there were a lot of 'what the fuck is happening in these threads' questions, which are natural, but it would be nice to make things as illuminating as possible. and i would very much like to satisfy anyone's entirely natural wish to build a True Detective labyrinth of paranoia out of red string.

so there are at least two wings of this thing. on the one hand, more in the direction of YH/Stiegler/Simondon - life after Uncle Nick. conversely there's a kojeve/hegel option too: life before Uncle Nick. but in that case, i feel like the Overy and Greenspan theses, along with the Accelerate reader are better than anything i would produce in that sense. if anyone wants to know the genealogy of acceleration, the Urbanomic reader is the place to go.

some basic familiarity with hegel, marx, heidegger, freud/lacan and D&G does help. those guys all influence Land in some form or another, and basically Cosmotech is poking around the Akira-style crater Land tends to create. the Land-Tetsuo meme really is fitting. but again, there is more to life than Land.

anyways, i'm open to suggestions &c.

[Anonymous No.11949964]

>>11949953
also, replace 'easier' with 'more fun.' pretty much the same thing.

if we cannot have any fun with the philosophy that predicts we are all going to get fucked by accelerating capitalism (or the terminal convulsions that bring it down from within, which will also destroy us), i mean, what's the point?

[Anonymous No.11949968]

>>11947944
i just recently found these threads and im trying to make my way through them. I think they're great, please make a #7!

[Anonymous No.11949970]

>>11949953
You could perhaps take a thread to unpack some of the heidegger/simondon/stiegler arcs that culminate in everything quoted in this thread.

[Anonymous No.11950032]

>>11949968
glad to hear it! and thanks for the feedback too. ok, it will be up either later this evening or tomorrow AM.

>>11949970
yeah. i think that's why i'm leaning towards Technics and Time vol I. i actually read it years ago, and before reading heidegger. so it really blew me away, but only because heidegger himself really is this huge figure in 20C stuff. heidegger's language can be tough tho, and stiegler is maybe easier to read. simondon is worth a read too, but i kind of did a Quick Rundown of him in Cosmotech #5. he's cool no doubt, but i'm feeling Stiegler is the way to go. YH thinks he's a pretty big deal after all, so it's a good transition.

again, in terms of getting to know heidegger, the zimmerman book i referred to above really helped me (>>11947858). after that i found B&T much easier to understand, and then when B&T really hit me it was like, Okay Motherfucker We Heideggerians Now.

and really i've been that way pretty much ever since. after i read heidegger i started reading land, because land and heidegger are both talking about the same phenomenon: breakaway, all-consuming, all-devouring Modernity. from very different angles. but with similar thoughts about a lot of it.
>and girard, fwiw, tells you what eventually happens under these circumstances: a whole lot of scapegoating. but you knew that already
>also i would definitely be open to a Things Hidden read-through/let's read except a) i don't have a PDF and b) my hard copy is on loan. so no can do on that one for now

so, i'm kind of excited now to begin. as always, of course, threads are no substitute for reading the books themselves...but nobody needs that kind of nagging finger-wagging. but who knows tho, maybe this will get people interested in the ideas. i don't know how these things happen.

thanks for the feedback gents.

[Anonymous No.11950111]

>>11950032
have you heard of the book Technics and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality? It's by Federico Campagna.

I made a thread about it the other day... I've only read the introduction and he mentions things like cosmology, cosmogony, technics, etc., it could be of interest to you, but there isn't a whole lot of information out there about it.

I read his first book, The Last Night, which reads like a manifesto of sorts, drawing heavily from Max Stirner, of all people. Mark Fisher mentioned it in a lecture I was listening to and said it "updated existentialism for the 21st century"

[Anonymous No.11950221]

>>11950111
okay, so this looks super-interesting. no joke this is an interest to me! would be very interested indeed to hear more about what you thought of it, or passages you think are relevant to this kind of stuff. looking at theories of magic as they appear in different parts of the world is, like, exactly what YH was talking about in terms of cosmotechnics, no? alternatives to the rule of the Postmodern Same? their relations to technicity? all of the above! so yeah, i'd say that's relevant to our interests! things i just wouldn't have known about without /lit/. here's the link to the introduction. looks pretty nifty indeed.

https://bloomsburycp3.codemantra.com/viewer/5b3f7511ee3588000181671a

>Mark Fisher
pour one out for that guy as always. even his twitter feed has stopped being updated, sad. but maybe one can read a book Fisher liked too. super-cool recommendation anon, muchas gracias.

https://twitter.com/k_punk_unlife

[Anonymous No.11950232]

>>11950111
here's a beautiful line about that book too:

>''(This) isn't a manual to turn the current defeat into a future triumph, but a rumour about a passage hidden within the battlefield leading to a forest beyond it.''

oh, the shivers. that's bang on the money all right.

[Anonymous No.11950365]

>>11950221
ah, very glad you are interested!

i just recently started reading through Fanged Noumena and some other accelerationist stuff.

but The Last Night I read through really quickly (it's only about 100 pages), and I thought it was great. it isn't accelerationist, I'd say that it is mainly just fleshing out/updating Stirner-ite Egoist thought, and it helped me orient my self, as in *my physical being*, in a way.

he did say things similar to:

>>11950232
>''(This) isn't a manual to turn the current defeat into a future triumph, but a rumour about a passage hidden within the battlefield leading to a forest beyond it.''

for example, he said we should embody and move throughout the world like the "parasite". so that strikes me as somewhat Landian


btw, have you seen the movie Hyperstition? pretty cool stuff, just saw it a couple days ago.

[Anonymous No.11950430]

>>11950365
>ah, very glad you are interested!
very much so indeed. looks like i'll have to get a hard copy. really really good recommendation anon, thank ye most kindly.

>i just recently started reading through Fanged Noumena and some other accelerationist stuff.
"Enjoy." it is pretty wild stuff but it's an adventure worth taking, imho. the first essay is brilliant, as is Circuitries and of course Meltdown. the later parts, eh. but definitely those three are classics.

>for example, he said we should embody and move throughout the world like the "parasite". so that strikes me as somewhat Landian
Michel Serres, who i understand is a pretty brilliant and respected guy in France but isn't so well known (i think?) outside of the home country has a whole book on this. and yeah, i think becoming-parasite is probably Deleuzian enough for Land too (and also Young Nick's feeling for xenofeminism and the like, which is not so much a part of Old Nick's sensibilities).

>btw, have you seen the movie Hyperstition? pretty cool stuff, just saw it a couple days ago.
i have not! didn't even know it was a thing. i recognized some of those faces in the trailer - Wolfendale, Grant - and i can't believe Land wasn't in there. but he is in China, and he is kind of a crusty old guy now it seems. he is still /our/ brilliant Uncle Nick tho. as far as acceleration goes he's one of the founding fathers of the Wild Ride.

what did you think of the film? anything there change your mind or perspective? it's funny, it kind of feels perhaps like if you get some agreeable academics, personalities or faces on things it could be quite a happy kind of intellectual movement, and not exclusively the face-devouring crypto-swarm that Land says it is. and frankly, i would *prefer* that it stay that way, in a sense, b/c i'm like that, i guess...but you get the idea.

[Anonymous No.11950469]

>>11950365
couple of other reviews or posts about that book on the author's twitter feed:

>Magic as a means of reconstructing the world in the philosopher @FedCampagna's new book Technic and Magic.
now that's something to think about, but it completely makes sense: if you *actually believe* the world is governed by forces not purely subject to your will or command...trust returns? eeyow.

>This is a book for those who lie defeated by history and by the present.
well how about that

>Conversely, Magic's cosmogonic process originates precisely from that dimension of existence which can never be reduced to any linguistic classification."
this. oh that linguistic turn. and oh the metaphysics of production.

i think i would be okay with a Magical Turn. maybe not directly from the linguistic turn, because knowing us meatbags it would probably turn us all into a mob of insane hypnotists and seducers. first maybe a Technical/Nondual Turn first to rinse some of the remaining postmodern madness out of our system and kind of get right with the balance of things, rediscover the holistic unity of things, and then a Magical Turn to come after that, so that we use the tech for good and not for evil, Maintain the Balance and so on.

>and then once that is done we can Re-Postmodernize with Higher Command Languages and obviously become the Spellcasting Celestial Techno-Hermaphrodites we were always meant to be, as this is plainly the endgoal for any self-respecting civilization of the End Times
>fuck yeah
>perfect

[Anonymous No.11950612]

>>11950430
>looks like i'll have to get a hard copy
let me know how it is! im too poor to get a hard copy at the moment, but im super interested to see what it has to say.

>what did you think of the film? anything there change your mind or perspective?
can't say the film changed my mind on anything because i am still relatively new to all this, but it did provide me with lots of notes, especially for other authors and such. i noted the following, just from the film:

>Quentin Meillasseux
>Reza Negarestani
>Helen Hester
>Charles Pierce
>Ray Brassier
>Iain Hamilton Grant
>Schelling
>Armen Avanessian

you probably have heard of some of them. the film was some great food for thought! it also did some time fuckery shit, where the one guy that was talking into a webcam throughout the movie was "from the future", as if the movie was made in 2024. or something...

anyways, it was generally optimistic, and also yes academic/intellectual. you would probably like it, i recommend it if you have five bucks to spare

[Anonymous No.11950785]

new thread:
>>11950708

[Anonymous No.11951524]

Heard there was a good academic film to watch in here?

[Anonymous No.11951528]

>>11951524
probably >>11950365

[Anonymous No.11952756]

>>11946090
The choice of E7 is good - I hadn't seen it that way, even though it's essentially my favorite show, but I think you have a point. Especially considering it takes from some Greg Egan/Greg Bear sci-fi, and the entire deal with the Scub consciousness.

[Anonymous No.11953365]

>>11951528
Shame it isn't on youtube or anything.

[Anonymous No.11954155]

Bump

[Anonymous No.11955048]

>>11931809
What should we name the demon that is conjured? I want a name spooky name.

[Anonymous No.11955284]

>>11955048
>Something had crept in through the rift Parsons had opened up—something “devious,” “oblique,” ophidian, “a factor unknown and unnumbered.” Consider this. Parson’s final writings contain the following vaticination: “within seven years of this time, Babalon, The Scarlet Woman, will manifest among ye, and bring this my work to its fruition.” These words were written in 1949. In 1956—exactly seven years later—Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Claude Shannon, and Nathan Rochester organized the Dartmouth Conference in New Hampshire, officially setting an agenda for research into the features of intelligence for the purpose of their simulation on a machine, coining the term “artificial intelligence” (which does not appear in written records before 1956), and ushering in what would retrospectively come to be known as the Golden Age of AI.

source:
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/80/100016/black-circuit-code-for-the-numbers-to-come/

it's either that or Pythia, imho.

also >>11950785

[Anonymous No.11955358]

>>11955284
also, what the fuck. that was post #300 and i forgot to bring it in in style.

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

we did it boys, we hit 300 posts again, aw yeah

[Anonymous No.11955371]

I'm a complete beginner with this guy's work and have been thinking about getting into it.

On paper it's right up my alley. I like big picture technological and economic thinking and China in particular is a big piece of the contemporary technology puzzle.

What is the best entry point to his work? These threads are indecipherable to the uninitiated. his professional website lists all his work, but much of it is paywalled and there is no real outline for how to approach it.

[Anonymous No.11955743]

>>11955371
YH's favorite guys are Stiegler and Simondon, and for them you'd want some phenomenology. he's also clearly put in some time reading Mou Zongsan and other Chinese heavyweights.

there's no introduction to YH that i know of, but perhaps just getting to know the Man from Messkirch is your best bet. if you like Big Picture technological thinking he shouldn't disappoint you. he swung for the fences (those that were left standing, at any rate, after Nietzsche went through them like Dragon Ball Z). track down some introductory guides to Heidegger, maybe. in terms of questions about philosophy and technology in the 20C (and maybe the 21C too), Heidegger is like Elvis. everybody connects to him at some point.

[Anonymous No.11956730]

What the fuck is Ireland's Poememenon about? It's too hard to understand, I don't get the point.

[Anonymous No.11958335]

>>11956730
Seconding this

[Anonymous No.11959264]

Bump

[Anonymous No.11960288]

>>11959264
this

[Anonymous No.11961670]

>>11956730
third.

[Anonymous No.11961706]

Acceleration seems kind of racist, is there any place for black and brown women in their future?

[Anonymous No.11961712]

>>11961706
ass can probably be accelerated too with new biogenetical technics

[Anonymous No.11961722]

>>11961706
I guess anti-humanism does look pretty racist from a human perspective.

[Anonymous No.11961762]

>>11961706
Read up on afro-futurism! The first part of your sentence is what it attempts to resolve.