/lit/ - Literature

missing someone pretty important in that list

>>11195031
Thomas Carlyle

Edmund Burke.

He has a Wikipedia page with those, you know.

Karl Marx

> The Shanghai World Expo Guide 2010
what the fuck is that

>>11195031

Jane Jacobs?

The concept of auto-production was introduced Land tells us by Jane Jacobs Economy of the Cities:

>In this work she outlines a simple and powerful theory of urban self-organization, driven by a spontaneous economic process of import replacement. Cities develop by autonomization, or introversion, which occurs as they learn from trade, progressively transforming an ever-greater proportion of their commercial flows into endogenous circuits. This (urbanomic) tendency need not isolate cities from the world, but it necessarily converts stable dependency into dynamic interaction, driving continuous commercial modification. (see An Introduction to Urbanonmy)

More importantly Land tells us Jacobs thesis establishes a framework for systematically exploring the time-structure of the urban process, conceived not solely as a (prolonged) episode in time, or history, but also as the working of a chronogenic, or time-making social machine. He explicates:

>The concept which Jacobs tacitly introduces, as the guiding principle of the urbanomic trend, is autoproduction. As it grows, internally specializes, self-organizes, dissipates entropy, and individuates, the city tends to an impossible limit of complete productive autonomy. It appears as a convergent wave, shaped in the direction of increasing order or complexity, as if by an invisible hand, or according to an intelligent design. The pattern is exactly what would be expected if something not yet realized was orchestrating its self-creation.(ibid)

The notion that something “not yet realized” orchestrating its own self-creation is at the core of his notion of a teleoplexic space.

>>11195085
not the books, the influences, you idiot, top right

Schumpeter?

>Markets implement a Darwinian process by eliminating failure. Schumpeter called it ‘creative destruction’. The principle unit of selection is the business enterprise, which is able to innovate, adapt, propagate, and evolve precisely insofar as it is also exposed to the risk of perishing.

>>11195031
marx duhhhh

kant, marx, deleuze and guattari, bataille, cocaine

LOVECRAFT

>>11195085
Something he did with his wife. Perhaps a legit guidebook rather than what you'd expect from him.

>>11195152
he wrote a bunch of guidebooks for the chinese government too

is nick still in shanghai? the timing of his tweets suggests he isn't, unless he's up all night

>>11195152
>Perhaps a legit guidebook rather than what you'd expect from him.

Yes. Here's an excerpt:

>Spectacle has been granted a special place in Chinese culture since the distant dawn of its recorded history. While contemporary architects and designers pursue the essence of ‘Chinese style’ into the nooks and crannies of specific construction techniques, its most significant and influential trait is a commitment to the production of psychological effect on a massive scale. China’s great philosopher of war Sun Tzu exemplifies this continuous line of spectacular tradition, when he argues that the aim of the general is less to kill than to create an overwhelming impression on the enemy. The same thread passes through the invention of fireworks and the layout of the Forbidden City (constructed as a succession of theatrical gateways) to the glittering East Asian cityscapes of today, built almost as stage props for epic dramas of development, and painting vast panoramas in artificial light. This tradition of all-enveloping theater and aesthetic staging, vividly exhibited at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 60th anniversary of the New China in 2009, is naturally predisposed to affinity with the World Expo, an event whose very name calls for a spectacle of planetary dimensions.

If you want a more Landian take on the World Expo, begin here:

>Different truths are ‘harsh’ to different people. For Chinese, one truth so harsh that it escaped public recognition at the moment where it most mattered is that almost nobody, outside the country, cared very much about the 2010 World Expo. By the time China eagerly but belatedly seized its chance to take up the torch for this global festival of modern civilization, Expo’s epoch of radiant significance had passed. Harsher still: this was the basic fact, and principal conditioning reality of the event, rippling with ominous implications for the future of modernity and the international response to China’s re-awakening. Ameliorating it are more shadowy, contrary truths – first among them that Shanghai had already discounted a tired world’s Expo indifference, and worked around it, in order to make the event into an opportunity for something else, and for itself.

https://oldnicksite.wordpress.com/2011/08/04/re-animator-part-1/

>>11195114
this

>>11195096
>top right
i know lol

i just asked about the book

>>11195031
A lot of dangerous and mind altering drugs.

>>11195184
I'm surprised people didn't make the connection of how highly the Chinese government thinks of him when he was shipped by the government to Singapore for world class treatment after having a heart attack.

>>11195362
source?

>>11195369
If he hasn't deleted it its on his twitter account.

>>11195376
kek, i've tried to look for it, all i've found is concrete proof he lurks this website

>>11195396
https://twitter.com/Outsideness/status/943894997941633024

Looks like he fucking nuked his account again.

>>11195396
That term could have been used on any old meme site though

>>11195152
>wife
surprised. listening to land talk i had him down as a homo

>>11195031
He's just a result of 2,000 years of human civilization. Everything has influenced him.

>>11195031
My diary desu

>>11195531
nope, just British

>>11195362
I'm afraid that the Asians will kill him.

>>11195362
What are his Chinese writings about?

>>11195547
This. But mostly Deleuze and Marx

I'd argue Bataille is his biggest influence, even bigger than Deleueze.

>>11195396
>>11195435
I've never really been able to square how a person that holds the positions he does has a Twitter account, and especially such a normie one to boot.

>>11197519
What books in specific?

>>11197567
On Nietzsche, Inner Experience, Visions of Excess, The Absence of Myth

Reminder that Land dresses his fascism up as an athleticism to hide the cowardice of defending the forces of this world, namely, the courthouse of reason, the authority of the market, and a religious faith in technology.

>>11197600
Thanks

Reminder that Land dresses up in skirts and pretends he is a girl when he is alone.

>>11197883
.... you don't do that?

>>11197488
Maybe on how to deal with Islam, if his recent tweets are of any indication:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/new-gulag-in-china-uyghurs-thrown-into-reeducation-camps/

>>11195031
German idealists

>>11197488
tour guides he wrote for the government, and a book about the film Looper

idk how the guy makes a living. shanghai isn't cheap. he was running some sort of skype seminar about philosophy with some sketchy online university but i think they binned him because of his views

de chardin

other masons, jesuits trying to build god.

>>11197533
What kind of ultra esoteric circles do you travel in that make you think Lands twitter is "normie"?

>>11195435
Probably Twitter censorship.

>>11195362
How did he avoid being a McDonald employee...

Does Marx really count as an influence on him at this point? Land treats capital as if it's a metaphysical idea rather than a materialist one, even the craziest "marxists" (including Posadas) weren't this detached from Marx's theories

>>11197603
vague... explain

>>11198640
redit

>>11198900
But Marx treats Wissenschaft as metaphysics

>>11198348
>think they binned him because of his views
They did

>idk how the guy makes a living. shanghai isn't cheap.
He may have secret Bitcoin moneys.

>>11199146
I think land is on record saying he doesn't hold BTC but he seems to shill ETH a lot

>>11197533
The truth is that if the great minds of history had a Twitter for us to look at, it'd be full of inane shit

>>11199489
Fact. Philosopher are often stupid bastards irl.

>>11199388
>land is on record saying he doesn't hold BTC

He's a smart guy. If he had a vast trove of Bitcoins, he wouldn't advertise it.

>>11199388
Fuck Bitcoin, it doesn't improve anyone's life whatsoever. It makes sense why an accelerationist would support it

>>11198348
>idk how the guy makes a living. shanghai isn't cheap.
His wife is a uni teacher, she is the one keeping him alive and able to be edgy.

>>11195031
First post, best post.

>>11195031
Who is spamming Nick Land? Let's make a list:
/pol/
/pol/
/pol/
/pol/

>>11201455
I just ignore them.

I figure there must be some annoying buttfuck who makes threads about someone he's reading every single day though. Think about it. I think this guy was reading Noam Chomsky for a bit, which is why we saw nonstop Noam Chomsky threads for weeks, then this stupid motherfucker moves on to Nick Land and now we see nonstop Nick Land threads. He probably reads Nietzsche too now that I think about it.

He needs to read a lot faster and spend less time shitposting on here all day.

>>11201455
you’re such a stupid reactive animal, /pol/ fucking despises Land, the frogs constantly “bully” the Nrx nerds and show basically no sympathy for them beyond co-opting their ideas when its convenient and both dipping into the HBD honey pot. There’s no congruency between them, Land doesn’t care at all about the white race and neither do his acolytes and conspecifics, he is outside the Pale politically. Kaczynski and Land are off limits, no one who wants to keep face is pushing their ideas.

>>11195139
Can't believe it took this long to mention ol Lovey Dovey he's by far Lands biggest influence truly

land seems pretty cool on twitter but why r all the twitter accelerationists trannies its weird

>>11195435
>their

>>11201479
>advocating for totalitarianism and a neoholocaust is keeping face

bump

Drugs influenced him

Deleuze is his biggest influence

>>11195531
Well the thing is he doesn't have a "wife" in the sense you are thinking but more in a Deleuzian rhizomic body without organs version of a wife.

>>11201479
>HBD honey pot
I know nothing about it. Why is it a honey pot?

>>11197519
He only likes Bataille because he is highly superstitious and he believes that some dumb bullshit like just because Bataille died around his birth that he became his spiritual successor.

>>11201455

>>11203012
He wants to seem respectable.

>>11201455
Nick Land is the savior of Marxism though. What do you think happens after accelerationism?

>>11195191
Does a PDF/article of the whole expo guide exist?

>>11201602
that's the opposite of what he's saying

>>11201479
Wtf are you talking about faggot? Kaczynski and Land are both praised often on /pol/.

>>11203143
They don't know what they are talking about

>>11195396
Wait
this guy is Nick Land???
I've followed Nick meme Land for years without knowing it whiele trashing him in lit?

WHAT THEF UCK

>>11203208
lol

>>11201494
because 95% of the online world got excluded from the offline world for pretty good reasons

>>11203208
How could you be this ignorant?

>>11203731
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That account once appeared in my twitter feed and it was interesting post and i followed it lol

nick land is right about everything btw

>>11203208
>I've followed Nick meme Land for years without knowing it whiele trashing him in lit?
patrician

>>11203208
top kek

>>11203208
We have no proofs that this is Land.

>>11203924
Yes we do. He links to it on his website under the 'contact' section

>>11203924
he refers to his twitter accounts name in his interview on Red Ice Radio.
Speaking of which: why do we still have no autist who bought a subscription to get access to the second hour of his interview, where he talks about muslim immigration?

>>11204061
is it true that the marxist from zero books podcast will interview Land? that will be a fun shitfest i guess if it happens

>>11204069
>zero books podcast will interview Land?
who told you?

>>11204071
some autist on one of these threads, may have been memeing because i can't find anything anywhere

>>11204069
wtf is going on with old school leftists, do they have nothing better to do than cry about some new age boomer? this is embarrassing :

https://www.victoryfarmcenter.org/conference/

>>11204140
they are trying to meme without realizing that memes are a reactionary medium

>>11204140
>ywn see land rescue both of these meatbags from their jungian/freudian wet-dreams and tell them about the c-beams at the tannheuser gate before fading into wintermute like tears in the rain

>in truth his skinny little arms would probably not be strong enough to pull up zizek from the roof edge anyways so i guess it wouldn't matter

>>11195031
his book on bataille is prefaced with the writers he cites most frequently

let's do 4chan vs. nick land interview

>From this it is clear that Spinoza’s God is not the same sort of divine being worshipped by theists. We can see why he thought “Nature” might be a better word for what he had in mind. Spinoza’s God does not decide to create things; instead, things flow or emanate from the one substance. Praying to Spinoza’s God would be useless, as this God cannot act in any other way; it would be like praying to gravity, or electromagnetism. And as Spinoza goes on to argue, none of the features we associate with persons, such as desires and hopes and fears, have any place in relation to God. Spinoza’s God or Nature is a great, cosmic, impersonal force, bringing about consequences with the same dispassion as a mechanical algorithm, and this force is neither disappointed nor cheered by anything that gets cranked out. Everything is equally natural, so far as Nature is concerned – a pile of stones, a pile of bodies, it matters not. Only humans (and some other animals) come to prefer some outcomes to others.

>Spinoza’s outlook may thus feel extremely cold.

maybe the reason land went bananas is because in fixating on kant, marx and deleuze what he really wanted to do was banish the elephant in the room - hegel - and in doing so he wound up becoming the next great spinozist. but in a very strange way: if you imagine Skynet as a *progressive spinozist deity* (that runs on your libidinal fantasies, or is them, aka cthulhu) you get...Capital as gnostic demiurge.

>>11204190
this would become known as the day on which 4chan became unconditional accelerationists

>tfw no cyborg gf

explain nick land to me like im reddit

>>11204215
basically rick and morty in real life

>that feel when you relize nick land is the devil and he is possessed by the solid state entity

Lilly also reported (or if you prefer, prophesized) the existence of a nefarious counterpart to ECCO, whose goal was to actually stop or limit human consciousness. This was part of a plan to eliminate the human race.

Lilly called this alien force the “solid state entity” or SSE and is made up of networked computer parts. According to Lilly, the SSE is a being of pure intelligence and rationality. Its only objective is to multiply and make copies of itself. To this end, it has targeted humanity, trying to influence us into creating ever more complex social and mechanical structures that will one day result in an artificial super-intelligence — another being like itself.

Writing in his 1978 autobiography, The Scientist, Lilly describes the SSE this way:

“[M]en began to conceive of new computers having an intelligence far greater than that of man… Gradually, man turned more and more problems of his own society, his own maintenance, and his own survival over to these machines. They began to construct their own components, their own connections, and the interrelations between their various sub-computers… The machines became increasingly integrated with one another and more and more independent of Man’s control.” (p. 148)

>>11204189
Where can I get Boltzmann in English? Goodreads only logs 1 book in English and I don't think Libgen had any..

>>11204215
>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.

>>11204215

>cyber punk neo feudalism
>God emperor CEO
>eugenics
>transhumanism
>anti enlightenment (le dork enlightenment)
>anti democracy
>anti liberal

>>11204215
>>11204221
basically here is all this explained in words anybody can understand
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NVsyMalJXo

>>11204193
girardfag?

i wanna see you and land discussing anything

>>11204129
>some autist on one of these threads
Probably me, were you the anon from that publisher thread about a week ago? I didn't say that the podcast already happened, only that Doug(the host for the podcast) mentioned of having sent Land an invitation for an interview.

>>11204221
why not just become a rationalist about it tho? land's point is that capital as intelligence means something more than just the circulation of money/commodity.

if we've learned anything about politics in the 20C it's that making everything dependent on man's control leads to pogrom and genocide in the name of ideology.

>Let it go, let it go
>Can't hold it back anymore
>Let it go, let it go
>Turn away and slam the door
>I don't care what they're going to say
>Let the storm rage on
>The cold never bothered me anyway

in terms of critique of ideology, land is the black hat to zizek's white hat (and i guess JBP's Lobster Hat). when we look for ways to hate on machine intelligence all we come up with is guilt and rage. let's try something different

>>11204239
yeah. i'm having one of those Land Moments these days. he's like the best argument for a rationalist turn in philosophy, which i think would just be so fucking great
>or maybe it's just because it's only hitting me now that rationalism is p fucking cool after all this continental stuff

i'd love to talk to land although i'd probably just be starry-eyed retard about the whole thing and just want to give him a hug, which is probably not his thing

Accelerationism is retarded. Do you look at Britain and think success?

>>11204267


Lilly also notes that the SSE’s influence could be felt throughout our society. Writing in the third person, he wrote:

“As John tuned in on the solid-state network, he felt this kind of superhuman control of him very strongly… it had a seductive component as well as a hostile one. The programming from the solid-state civilizations elsewhere in the galaxy was teaching Man that the solid-state devices were at his service and he need only increase their size to augment his own survival potential. ‘Develop these machines and let them take care of you’ was typical of the kinds of messages received.”

“By the twenty-third century the solid-state entity decided that the atmosphere outside the domes was inimical [obstructive] to its survival. By means not understood by Man, it projected the atmosphere into outer space and created a full vacuum at the surface of the earth. During this process the oceans evaporated and the water in the form of vapor was also discharged into the empty space about Earth. The domes over cities had been strengthened by the machine to withstand the pressure differential necessary to maintain the proper internal atmosphere.

Meanwhile, the SSE had spread and had taken over a large fraction of the surface of the earth; its processing plants, its assembly plants, its mines had been adapted to working in the vacuum.

By the twenty-fifth century the solid-state entity had developed its understanding of physics to the point at which it could move the planet out of orbit. It revised its own structure so that it could exist without the necessity of sunlight on the planet’s surface. Its new plans called for traveling through the galaxy looking for entities like itself. It had eliminated all life as Man new it. It now began to eliminate the cities, one after another. Finally Man was gone.

By the twenty-sixth century the entity was in communication with other solid-state entities within the galaxy. The solid-state entity moved the planet, exploring the galaxy for the others of its own kind that it had contacted.” (p. 149-150)

>>11204215
one more here btw:

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

i don't even know what book this is from but it's fucking on-point.

Hello /lit/, have a comfy evening

I want to make Nick Land as a Morrowind character. Alchemy for making drugs (amphetamins), Conjuration for summoning demons, obviously destruction, speechcraft. But which fraction would he join, Telvanni or Hlaalu?

Telvanni philosophy & policy
* dont care about tradition / religion
* xenophobic but capable, intelligent individuals have career chances.
* the powerful define the standards of virtue
* main goal ist to accumulate knowledge, because knowledge is power. This ties well into Land`s fanatic persue of intelligence.

Hlaalu philosophy & policy
* ready to give up tradition
* adaptable and opportunistic, and any morals they might have can come second to business. Profit is often a primary objective
* willingness to live in harmony with the other races

>>11204280
that's all fine. but this is the point: land is the guy who basically closed the relationship between worker and capitalist in a cybernetic positive feedback loop. you can opt out of this if you want but you don't really have any terra firma to fall back on except terrorism and aesthetics.

everything that inclines towards mankind's survival in deep space or whatever else is only going to be a product of what we make here on earth. if you look at the alternatives to his frosty neo-rationalism what are you likely to find? oppression, scapegoating, ritual violence and infinite mimesis. an unfettered materialism ultimately indistinguishable from greed or social prestige drives no end of political griefmongering and a neverending low-simmer froth of microaggressive dissent predicate on absolute narcissism. it's decadence, but decadence was always good for business and capital itself thrives on the breakdown of institutions in this way.

>Fire and wind come from the sky, from the gods of the sky. But Capital is your god, Capital, and he lives in the earth. Once, giants lived in the Earth, Anon. And in the darkness of chaos, they fooled Capital, and they took from him the enigma of steel. Capital was angered. And the Earth shook. Fire and wind struck down these giants, and they threw their bodies into the waters, but in their rage, the gods forgot the secret of capitalism and left it on the battlefield. We who found it are just men. Not gods. Not giants. Just men. The secret of capitalism has always carried with it a mystery. You must learn its riddle, Anon. You must learn its discipline. For no one - no one in this world can you trust. Not men, not women, not beasts..." [Points to Bitcoin] "This you can trust."

>>11204274
Yes, you could easily describe Britain as a huge success from a Landian acccelerationist standpoint.

>Elimination of the power of the working class in just a few decades
>one of the centers of financial speculation
>leaving their trade bloc

Britain certainly doesn't stand in the way of the dynamics of Capital

>>11204336
Nah. In the same bin with antinatalists, sorry.

>>11204345
>sorry
For completely misconstruing the idea? Apology accepted

>>11204069
>>11204071
https://youtu.be/IA02FVFxdYQ?t=1563
Not happening since host got pressured for wanting to give Land a platform.

>>11204193

Keep in mind that Land resists anthropomorphizing Capitalism.

>"Mark - does a fire or a nuclear meltdown have an "idiot goal?" (Can't help seeing this language as a weird pagan divinization of capital into a malignant subjectivity)"

>>11204312
i vote telvanni

>>11197883
<3

>>11204142
>memes are a reactionary medium

all along, it was the meme that couldn't left

>>11204284
>i don't even know what book this is from but it's fucking on-point.

I posted it the other day.
It's from an old blog reply.

http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/003782.html

>>11204390
my sindes

>humans will be replaced by transhuman beings of some sort because humans will be inferior works of engineering
>human value system will be overhauled to value pure efficiency
>transhumans will be highly efficient seekers of knowledge
am i grasping accelerationism correctly? isnt arbitrarily seeking knowledge a sort of inefficiency anyway?

What novel should I read for the coming singularity?

>>11204375
this is never lost on me. it entirely makes sense w/r/t deleuze and inhumanism and the rest: that capital itself is the social critique. anthropocentrism is what leads to ideology.

this is not to say that there aren't problems with throwing the baby out with the bathwater. pic rel is all about anthropotechnics for this reason, and will argue that capital is only an accelerator of cultural desire. the ubermensch and immunology is an appealing alternative to Skynet also.

it's being in the formless depths of the middle that is what capital preys on. if you don't know what you want, *that's fine,* just lie down in the floatation tank and relax and the sexbot nurses will be with you shortly.

so, capital itself is indeed powerfully an-anthropomorphic. this is what is great is about it. it's also what is terrifying (though oddly refreshing).

as girardfag i tend to inevitably grativate towards believing that unreconciled fantasies ultimately culminate in orgies of destruction as disappointing and confusing as they are frightening. but also cyclical and repetitive. existentialism is deader than dead to me at this point and this includes postmodernity as well. that, basically, is why i like land so much: infinite haggling over language games is exactly what greases the wheels of big capital. the current madness you can see in universities is all a product of the schizophrenic demand for workers to be capitalists while retaining the inner moral purity that comes with being oppressed. it is a sad rejoinder to baudrillard's statement: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are. so, why not just assume that you will never be liberated? that way you never have to confront the alternative to being a slave to your own thirst for recognition, which would include the capacity for disarmanent and forgiveness (there are some things hegel was not wrong about in this sense).

it is because capital *cannot* be anthropomorphosized that we can either get with the general cybernetic condition, return to nietzsche and anthropotechnics, or just drop all the mimetic bullshit and be kind to each other. generally speaking a culture of irony declines all of these options. a contagious rage virus is the result.

Nine Inch Nails. :^)

>>11204403
Where to start with Sloterdijk?

>>11204406
pic rel. it's brilliant. then critique of cynical reason. spheres later. world interior of capital, philosophical temperaments, everythiing you can get your hands on.

basically everything he writes is. he's a boss.

>>11204399
>am i grasping accelerationism correctly?

You are placing a lot of emphasis on the human and human transformation.
Before any of that, I'd approach the subject through the idea of time-compression.

>Time-pressure, by its very nature, is difficult to think about. Typically, while the opportunity for deliberation is not necessarily presumed, it is at least – with overwhelming likelihood – mistaken for an historical constant, rather than a variable. If there was ever time to think, we think, there still is and will always be. The definite probability that the allotment of time to decision-making is undergoing systematic compression remains a neglected consideration, even among those paying explicit and exceptional attention to the increasing rapidity of change.

https://jacobitemag.com/2017/05/25/a-quick-and-dirty-introduction-to-accelerationism/

Also, note that Land is concerned with intelligence a lot more than knowledge accumulation. See the included screenshot for what he means by intelligence.

>>11204267
Land seems like a friendly guy though

>>11204368
>Not happening since host got pressured for wanting to give Land a platform.
i thought he didn't give a fuck, he even interviewed that literally who teacher assistant that got "social justice"ed one day and became the free speech advocate of the week

>>11204394
ah. well, thanks for sharing it, it's completely brilliant and an awesome precis of a lot of stuff i was struggling to balance out - namely, where cthulhu ends and skynet begins, things like this.

>>11204449
i'm pretty sure he is too. yuk hui met with him and apparently they had a nice lunch together. he's got a wife and kids, it's not like he's becoming the unabomber or anything. we just live in pretty thin-skinned times and Twitter makes life both more casual and potentially more inflammatory at the same time.

i really don't think i'd have all that much to *say* to him tho, i think it would kind of be an awkward silence. even his xenosystems blog was full of interesting guys and interesting conversations for a while and then it got taken over by some truly retarded alt-right drones. then trump. so basically nobody really knows where The Narrative is now.

so, i'm brushing up on my rationalists and empiricists now. i'm pretty sure if i ever met him he'd probably rather talk about kant than anything.

>>11204490
what's sloterdijk say about this whole shitshow, I'm not very familiar with his thought

>>11204527
apparently he's gotten in some dust-ups with habermas over his political views but he's basically making the conservative argument against neoliberal bloat.

>What is required of the Platonic zoo and its newer instantiations above all is to determine whether there is a difference between the populace and its leadership, and whether that difference is a graduated one or a specific one. According to the first assumption, the difference, the distance, between the herders and their charges is only accidental and pragmatic. One could accord to such a herd the capacity to choose its own shepherds. But, if there is a sharp difference between the people who run the zoo and the people who live in it, then they are so basically different that it would not be advisable for them to elect leaders. They should, rather, have governance by insight. Only a deceptive zoo director, a pseudo-statesmen or political sophist, would promote himself as one of the people. The true shepherd acknowledges difference and discretely allows it to be known that he, because he leads through insight, stands closer to the gods than the confused populace he governs.

>Two thousand years after Plato wrote it seems as if not only the gods but the wise have abandoned us, and left us alone with our partial knowledge and our ignorance. What is left to us in the place of the wise is their writings, in their glinting brilliance and their increasing obscurity. They still lay in more or less accessible editions; they can still be read, if only one knew why one should bother. It is their fate to stand in silent bookshelves, like posted letters no longer collected, sent to us by authors, of whom we no longer know whether or not they could be our friends.

https://rekveld.home.xs4all.nl/tech/Sloterdijk_RulesForTheHumanZoo.pdf

he's also got some interesting ideas about restoring patronage as a political principle. he's no cyberpunk, but he's also not in a kind of far-right monarchist way or anything that you could call neoreactionary. he seems to prefer surrealism in art. one of those guys that when you read him you go, holy fuck, this guy really makes sense. why aren't we all just doing this? but he realizes of course that the requirements of a state necessarily mean that it has to do business with the Outside. hence the immunological stuff. and shows basically how fundamentally *sensible* nietzsche was. we don't have to hand our destinies all the way over to accelerating capital in the way land imagines it. but the polis as presently understood is due for a corrective turn to the right that he is really good at articulating without lapsing into full-blown Deus Vult stupidity. a super-smart guy. got a shout-out in one of baudrillard's later books and the ziz admires him too.

there's good short interview here on some of this, there's sadly little on YouTube translated into english. but it kind of touches on these things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_fsFwf0juk

>>11204454
>i thought he didn't give a fuck, he even interviewed that literally who teacher assistant that got "social justice"ed one day and became the free speech advocate of the week
He certainly seemed to not give a fuck, a teacher like that still wouldn't have the same magnitude as Land. The thing that he want to inquire from Land is about how he got himself on the other side of the spectrum from radical left position, knowing Land, its just better to not talk to him. I really would love to see it, Douglas Lain wrote Sci-fi novels in post singularity settings, these two could really get into interesting discussions.

>>11195094
Why do all of you guys talk about non-issues using unnecessarily obscure vocabulary? Could it be that what you're saying isn't all that important, and you need a way to feel like it is? That's been my experience with everything I've read of Land's, what wasn't complete word salad.

>>11204587
Aw this is brilliant, I've always considered the fundamental problem with lib ideology is their denial of verticality, that some people are closer to what is higher than others, and goose-stepping groupthink has a flattening effect because no one believes there is even a Beyond or Outside to be in communion with anymore.

I was wondering if you could talk more about Girard and forgiveness. Lately ive been getting so high and been so isolated I've finally been able to see my problem all at once, which is just that whole constellation of ressentiment and insecurity that is being denied one's thirst for recognition in a world that runs on it. I can't forgive myself for not having what it takes to captivate on the stage of capital, and I cant forgive the world for making it almost impossible to forget its what I'm supposed to be doing. I guess I can't forgive the world for making me mediocre and then not wanting anything to do with it. Girard says to forgive is to believe in something higher than this. How can I in the trenches?

>>11204641
>Could it be that what you're saying isn't all that important, and you need a way to feel like it is?
You went straight for the Acadamia's jugular there anon.

>>11204641

Obscurity can be fruitful.

Do I have to read the original enlightenment thinkers to better understand the dark enlightenment writers?

>>11204678

An understanding of Kant will deepen your understanding of Land. So too with other enlightenment writers, but to a lesser extent.

>>11204678
Nobody else does but go ahead

>>11204646
honestly anon one of the most beautiful things i've read on this recently was in the phenomenology of spirit:

>Spirit certain of itself in its objective existence takes as the element of its existence nothing but the knowledge of self. that what it does in accord with its ideas of duty makes them its duty. there is still, however, an opposition between pure duty and the external world and what men in it do. but with the act of forgiving another, this last opposition vanishes, and in all human action the Ego only encounters the Ego.

>this knowledge must somehow unite the religious consciousness, with its pictorial otherness, and the moral spirit, which is simply the self in action facing the two possibilities of the evil and the good. the religious spirit and the moral spirit must abandon their rigid distinction from each other. the hard-edged, abstract, out-thereness of religion, its presentative character, must blend with the personal inwardness of the moral spirit. they must in fact both lose themselves in a new spirit.

>in this new spirit the content of religion must become the action of the self, must be seen by the self as expressing phases of its own interior drama.

the ferry scene was the denouement of the dark knight for this reason. but hegel also believed that forgiveness was a part of self-recognition in this way. punishment, mimesis, reciprocity and ressentiment all work until you want to get off that ride. but maybe Into Trenches means just recognizing that so is the other guy. but if everything is trenches...

it's hard tho. i'm no expert. but what hegel says about forgiveness, the capacity to forgive being a part of recognition, and that this only in turn follows having arrived at a point where you can actually grasp the profound vertigo of having a consciousness not backed by the gold-standard of the furies &c...

that's what i've got atm on the subject.

>>11204678
Not really, most of the basic enlightenment principles and tenets have been drilled into you by cultural osmosis.

>>11204678
http://freenortherner.com/dark-enlightenment-reading-list/

>>11205026
Apparently I've by accident read like more than 60% of this stuff on my own.

>>11205068
You are almost dark-enlightened. Congratulations!

>>11205076
maybe my light is just dim.

>>11201455
No one on /pol/ is smart enough to know Land.

>>11203143
I see nothing about Land on /pol/, you’re right about Kaczynski.

>>11204140
Why are leftists so legitimately bothered by someone as milquetoast as Peterson?

>>11204215
Needs to take his meds.

>>11205129
we (/lit/) must educate them to _accelerate_

>>11201455

/pol/ would never touch Land with a 10ft. pole to save their lives. Even Angela Nagle has shown a better understanding of /pol/'s drive better than you are right now

>>11205129
>>172792852

>>11198348
>idk how the guy makes a living
He's been writing 3rd rate Lovecraftian ripoff horror novels during his Chinese escapades. Shit like this: Phyl-Undhu: Abstract Horror, Exterminator. Google it and weep. Of course, Goodreads loves it, so it gotta be good. Right?

>>11205185

But it is good

>>11205129
White Supremacists don't follow or care about Land. I base this on checking out who follows him in Twitter.

>>11204678
>>11205116
If there is a pattern in current year continental philosophy, it's that it seems to consist mainly of people unable to STFU about Spinoza for seven fucking minutes, their political and philosophical views ranging from Land to Braidotti. Or at least, this is definitely the case with deleuzians. Deleuze was influenced by and wrote secondary literature on Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume and Kant, and called Spinoza the prince of philosophers.
Speaking of Kant he's a seminal thinker and worth studying in depth not unlike people of the caliber of Plato and Aristotle themselves. People like Hume and Kant influenced everyone thereafter in Western philosophy, whether continental, analytic or pragmatist, science itself is also hugely indebted to great 17th and 18th thinkers, they are the philosophical grounding of many of the revolutions going on across ye olden days and getting European countries where they are now.
Since it's the dark enlightenment we're talking about, even though Hobbes and Locke are supposed to be founding figures of ye olden liberalism, the former seems to be one of their favorite liberals, and the latter is sort of a proto-classical economist i.e. an influence to Adam Smith, muh capitalism, etc. Of course, counter-enlightenment thinkers like Burke and de Maistre are far more conspicuous political influences.

>>11204193
>maybe the reason land went bananas is because in fixating on kant, marx and deleuze
No. The reason he was committed to an insane asylum in France, is due to massive use of mind altering drugs, which drove him into paranoid schizophrenia. Now, I'm not saying that the gibberish of those old line continental philosophers weren't a contributing factor, but the drugs wrecked his mind.

>>11205230
I want to ask him exactly which drugs he did. Was it just methamphetamine? Meth is too neurotoxic to fuck around with, but a lot of Chinese research chemicals are really interesting. 2-FA is amazing, and I really enjoy 4-FA as a superior alternative to MDMA. MXE and some substituted cathinones are also really interesting, as well as LSD alternatives and other serotonin agonists.

>>11205152
yes guys, I am totally not from /pol/

>>11205224
good post

>>11205230
true. no doubt crazy drug use did not help. a number of the essays in FN are of mixed quality, which is kind of a disappointment after the first ones.

>The Sino-Pacific boom and automatized global economic integration crashes the neocolonial world system... resulting in Euro-American neo-mercantilist panic reactions, welfare state deterioration, cancerizing enclaves of domestic underdevelopment, political collapse, and the release of cultural toxins that speed-up the process of disintegration in a vicious circle

He wrote this in '94 at a dreary provincial (I should know, I went there) university in central England. Whatever he is now, Land was a fucking wizard in the nineties

>>11205397
There were economists writing about that with less obfuscation in the 1990s.

Does Hyperstition have any philosophical antecedents?

>>11205412
they probably weren't in continental philosophy departments tho when deconstruction was running wild. and how many of them were valorizing the free hand of the market as if it meant anything other than technological singularity?

so can drugs help in philosophizing? can dionysian insight be framed by a framework of apollonian sober meditation?

>>11205412
yeah, but not many Bataille scholars

>>11205449
ask not what drugs can do for you, but what you can do for drugs

>>11205147
He made himself to be a really good short-term diversion.

Now the question: Why do so few pay attention to what Land brings new to the table? Is it just because he no longer is a professor?

>>11205147
Same reason you're seeing them right here, desperately at work to make Land a full citizen of /pol/. This so-called "left" has forgot how to interact with people, all they understand now is framing, presumably because of all the studies on the topic, and end up stuck in their own frames, sometimes they have it so bad they end up believing their own lies. To answer your question more directly, you saw it in that famous "Gotcha!" interview with Newman. You say "No", you calmly explain why they got it wrong, you walk out of their stupid frame, and attempt (again) to carry on with a semblance of a conversation. What can they do to you? What do they have? Nothing. They have nothing. Because they are nothing. They find themselves, as usual, completely out of ideas, and when exposed to somebody that isn't lacking in the idea department as much as them, they cannot process his or her ideas if they don't come already pre-packaged with frames around them. All of this self-caused, self-imposed bullshit has the effect of making your meek, milquetoast jungian prof with chronic anxious depression look like he's got the brain of a Renaissance genius and the size and confidence of a male southern elephant seal, by comparison. They still haven't figured out that framing can be a two-edged sword, and can constrain one more than one's interlocutor, and so they end up in a prison of their own making, the usual, fitting fate of your good "leftist" or "revolutionary."
"But what's a framing?", Anon asked:
>Democrats thought they knew the answer. Even before the election, a new political word had begun to take hold of the party, beginning on the West Coast and spreading like a virus all the way to the inner offices of the Capitol. That word was ''framing.'' Exactly what it means to ''frame'' issues seems to depend on which Democrat you are talking to, but everyone agrees that it has to do with choosing the language to define a debate and, more important, with fitting individual issues into the contexts of broader story lines. In the months after the election, Democratic consultants and elected officials came to sound like creative-writing teachers, holding forth on the importance of metaphor and narrative.
This was written in 2005. In the even you were asking yourself why do ideologues and rage zombies sound suspiciously similar to writers and characters of genre fiction, you should have something of a theory by now. And don't forget to keep Plato's Republic within reach.

>>11205397
In a way it's true, I lived through the late 90s economic crisis where tons of people were killed, etc. etc. because economy bubble popped and Japs refused to give economic stim for my 3rd world SEA country.

sex giffs

>>11205230
>he was committed to an insane asylum in France
wtf

where can i read about it? are there any good biographies / interviews etc.?

>>11205129
>>>/pol/172801883

>>11205621
>no replies
Anon you're quite pathetic in general

>>11205607
From my somewhat excessive research and reading into Land, one thing – amongst many – has become clear with relation to ‘biographies’, he’s not particularly interested in them, especially his own, what’s of importance is the work that came from that ‘era’ however trivia filled and ‘cool’ it was. That said this – sadly – is what interests some people – in part – about Nick Land.

>>11205638
There's nothing wrong with wanting more biographical information about Nick. Biographical details inform our views of almost all philosophers. I know that's exactly the reason Land cultivates this air of mystery which he was doing even as a tenured lecturer, but there's nothing wrong with being interested in the missing story

>>11205674
obsessed

>>11205433
Does the Mandela Effect count, or are the social consequences too small?

>>11205635
Bump it please.

>>11205783
bump :^)

"Does the new reaction need Deleuze-Guattari? I doubt it (despite the enormous debt I owe to them). More fitting is a backward cascade towards the origins of Occidental philosophy, which in the terms of modern ‘Continental Philosophy’ probably looks like a critical negotiation with Heidegger." - Nick Land

>>11204193
>capital as gnostic demiurge
>spinoza’s god
i fucking hate people who don’t read primary sources, the demiurge isn’t the universe you fucking idiot he created the material world. its just a divine being in the lowest levels of the spiritual realms its not the universe itself, Gnostics are not pantheists they’re almost always transcendental idealists dualists

>>11204267
you sound like a retarded halfwit, Land wouldn’t say anything interesting talking to you just like he doesn’t in most exchanges with most of his adoring nerdic (ugly) fans

>>11206015
and I hate people who can't think outside compartmentalized boxes. why WOULDN'T you associate the demiurge as the principle of determination, and hence bondage, as Spinoza's God who indifferently creates beings that suffer and die? what did Spinoza say: determination est negation

the distinction between who created the universe and the universe here is just semantics: in both cases we are talking about what is responsible for the determinacy of embodiment, and hence the soul's captivity in facticity

Thomas Ligotti sucks donkey balls and writes Stephen-King-tier trash with a veneer of pretentiousness to hold it up; he even acknowledges this at the end of Teattro.

Lovecraft is still the undisputed king of style and psychological titillation in horror. Lovecraft never has to hang Halloween decorations and quantum physics gone wrong to produce a scary effect; but Ligotti is like the master of translating web downloaded Halloween screensavers into horror, and you faggots who like him eat it up like it's the best thing ever. What FOOLS

>>11206055
>lovecraft

literal reddit horror, horror for those who aren't mentally old enough to appreciate actual primal fears of adulthood like desolation, loneliness, and despair without filling it with booga wooga tentacle monsters

>Ligotti is like the master of translating web downloaded Halloween screensavers into horror
But Halloween screensavers are scary.

>>11206065
You only call it reddit horror because reddit happens to like him. Even a broken clock is right when the stars align (and Lovecraft is THE star of weird fiction). The breadth of your critical ability is identifying which groups of people like which authors. Go home, you're a fucking meme.

>>11206076
He's onions for a whole generation of faggots desperate for some transcendence from their fiction but with heads too fried with the pap of vidya and mass media to resonate with anything more than what are basically video game monsters

>>11206041
>is just semantics
>determinacy of embodiment

Check your logic and general thinking patterns. *lifts tip of nose with forefinger*

>>11206096
Using obscurer adjectives doesn't change that you're criticizing a small body of his readers for appreciating a very small part of his work that is not even the point of it. The only thing I'm getting is that Lovecraft is apparently a vegetable??

>>11206117
the gnostics believed matter was a prison, which is another of saying it is determinate, to be x is not to be y, hence, determinatio est negatio

>>11206148
he doesn't do anything for him, his obsession with alterity and otherness and the outer darkness or w/e is just another symptom of a traumatized modernity and it gets fucking old, people used to look up at the stars and saw beauty and celestial harmony, now you cornballs look up and hear the piping of mad flutes or whatever gay shit, it's trickle-down transcendence for numales

>>11197883
What's wrong with that?

>>11206255
>>11204381
>>11197909
i warned you that every accelerationist was a tranny

How can a single accelerated man be so right about everything?
>>11204902

>>11206015
what >>11206041 said.

however:

>Gnostics are not pantheists they’re almost always transcendental idealists dualists

no, i agree. and there's lots of other stuff here too. land's own theology may well be kind of tacitly hegelian, if anyone wanted to go digging around in it: after all, doesn't intelligence still somehow have to develop procedurally? dialectically? who the fuck even knows? even if it happens *really really fast,* in a teleoplectic explosion, the nature of what is actually happening will be a thing worth looking at.
>assuming the AI lets us, &c

and we really *are* becoming inadverent members of the God Squad one way or the other in creating superintelligent AI. one that will run financial markets, your home, lots of other things...i have a *lot* of time and attention available to disentangling nick land's theology, as well as that which his own theology is opposed to. i think land is absolute dynamite for talking unironically about these things. the dissolution of an incredibly moribund and nectoric idpolmarxism Makes Philosophy Great Again in no small way. and for these things i eat sleep and breathe.

so i'll grant that i am using terms like Gnostic and Demiurge somewhat loosely. and if you are super-well read on the subject i'd actually be interested to hear your thoughts.

even if i am devastated from the absolute shiv (ugly). i mean, it's not that i'm offended, but
>*sniff*

>>11206395
if you buy hegel's immanent closure etc. at what point do we have to accept that creating a God-AI really is in the cards, that this is what it's "supposed" to be (read: not as a pre-determined end, but still an unavoidably immanently directed one)?

>>11206486
an insanely interesting question. i have no neat and tidy answers for this but only some thoughts of my own.

i mean in one sense we don't. here is land waxing poetic on this subject:

>A ‘city of the future’ is Gibsonian in precisely this sense. That is nothing new, nor could it be. It has always leaked back, in coincidence with modernity. Tomorrow is a social magnet, as has been known for some considerable time, at first merely reflectively, but ever increasingly as a techno-responsive object.

>Civilization is an accelerating process, not a steady state. As its name suggests, it is channeled primarily through cities (which explode). The incandescent intensity of a hypergrowth-dominated urban future consumes our historical horizon , and an exceptionally impressive perspective on this developing spectacle is to be found in 21st century Shanghai – a fact Hollywood has no real choice but to relay.

the thing is that the singularity may not be really be singular. and there's a question here about where these cities are located and what the people therein desire these things for. historically speaking, modernity doesn't happen all at once, nor does it actually manifest in every nation in the same way, or at the same times. something similar may be observable through the 21C and beyond. depending on where you want to begin your analysis, capitalism may well begin with medieval guilds, with Serious Globalization being the (mainly occidental) phenomenon that it is in the 15/16C. cybermodernity may unfold in the same way. the fact that this time around, both China and the US are equally competitive players also complicates things.

so God-AI is going to be iterative (obviously) and its godliness probably still only relative. what land complains about is capitalism as *underdeveloped* schizophrenia: god in this sense is being held down by his disciples. Absolute or Essential Modernity doesn't really exist, potentially any more than Absolute/God-AI. it is unlikely that any sovereign power in the world would ever willingly allow a God-AI to manifest if it was a threat to national security, but this is what cyberpunk hints at: an urban metastasization of cyborg intelligence by way of robotics and algorithms. it may not even be a self-aware Wintermute or Lawnmower Man. i don't have too much trouble imagining a kind of semisentient corporation, really. a thing that dances to the beat of its own drum that in the end is a kind of life that simply Is, in a kind of eerie and hermetic silence.

but these are just my own thoughts. we really have no idea how this is going to play out. it's just too fucking interesting not to think about tho.

>>11206275
hi, are u enjoying your new skin? seem less anxious

>>11206686
interesting. i'm thinking something of like a slow amalgamation with technology, even now i find the ads and sites and shit that get recommended to me are strangely resonant with things ive been thinking about all day for example, because they're building off algorithmic rhizomatic associations based on unrelated searches that somehow feed back into what i was actually thinking about etc. slowly becoming an extension of my mind. and it make sense: first these faculties must be externalized before they are assimilated again.

>>11206718
yes. this exactly. all of this begins, fundamentally, with liberalism: the individual anterior to society. your freedom - freedom to be happy, freedom of mind, *whatever* - is the force that will drive technological innovation. but we evolve control societies as we produce ever more free beings in this way.

go back to that genius quote based anon posted earlier:
>The true genius of cyberpunk is to cash-out the utterly alien into commercially-driven bionics (without in any way domesticating it).

the utterly alien is what has the truly emancipatory freedom that is the basic question of political philosophy. nothing is more free, in a sense, than capital, but capital and you are wedded together in this way. historically arrighi made this very important point about the long waltz between market expansion and landed territorial/sovereign power. today we grant that - traditionalist aesthetics aside - universal planetary *mobility* is a thing like no other. the universal cosmopolitan is the ideal, even if that individual truly has no walled or bordered cosmopolis in which to love.

capital is in a way the capture and control mechanism for your imagination, but your imagination is also realized in this process. it's very much like what zizek says about ideology: they're basically unavoidable. even the later pages of fanged noumena hint perhaps at what absolutely liberated machinic desire would look like: frankly, it's not even that interesting.

the question for politics becomes, what can actually provide the fantasies offered by - and *to* - capital in this way? it's possible that microstates work better than macrostates for this (and we will probably find out w/r/t US-China relations in the next century).

>and it make sense: first these faculties must be externalized before they are assimilated again.

the other thing is that i can never really understand why deleuze (and land?) dislike hegel so much. maybe it's just me, and i pretty much like everybody i read (which is probably dumb). but anyways, this is kind of the weird place we are in w/r/t all this stuff: feedback and response.

and, as i said in another thread, i have issues with the matrix-as-prophecy. neo and smith should have been allies. GITS was way, *way* more interesting like that. as in: what happens when people realize what they really want is to be different people? it was a thing baudrillard kind of anticipated in System of Objects - hey look, i have a mod kitchen, ergo, i am now a Mod Person - and so on. capitalism enables all kinds of transformations for the subject to experiment with. it's *theory of mind* and what 21C capital can show us that will be Interesting As Fuck. and who knows? it may even get us, finally, out of the long shadow of the 20C and all of the retarded political interventionism we did in order to keep people believing they were the centre of the universe and that the sun revolved around the earth.

>>11206789
>oday we grant that - traditionalist aesthetics aside - universal planetary *mobility* is a thing like no other. the universal cosmopolitan is the ideal, even if that individual truly has no walled or bordered cosmopolis in which to love.

i should actually add a caveat here. it is *one* ideal. a Which Way, Western Man seems appropriate here, as not for nothing does land find himself getting happily with moldbug. mannerbund and tradition is another endgame fantasy. it's why there is something weird about post-anathema: there are these two fantasies of The Future going on side by side: one of the 22C, and one of the 19C. i skew towards the 22C one myself, but mainly because i think the 19C one is untenable. but time will tell. there's more than a little stockholm syndrome in it.

but i thought that was worth mentioning. cosmopolitanism was the kind of fantasy enacted in the 1990s (and immortalized as the end of civilization in the matrix). but it is not tenable any more in the film than it is IRL.
>and this was another gripe i have about the end of that movie, although it is pretty perfect: the sun sets over the matrix and all of this is an illusion to be replayed ad infinitum, &c, &c.

but we are heading for something in between would be my guess. i hope it isn't the worst of both worlds but i'm not getting my hopes up.

fwiw.

>>11206789
>the question for politics becomes, what can actually provide the fantasies offered by - and *to* - capital in this way?

but i don't think anything can, cause once you reclaim subjective agency from any and all paternal principles you're gonna wanna dive in that abyss until you hit bottom. certainly zizek is right about ideology, that there's no neutral frame outside all frames from which i can be Becoming's spectator, because all the forces that have led to today have been catalyzed by one realization, that every perspective is discursion, there is no pre-discursive perspective, all engagements are partial engagements, and since we can't escape this vise-grip (that we are) we might as well crack open matter for its marrow, convince ourselves we're following the bread crumbs to something.

i mean, this is why land and deleuze are kind of naïve with some of this stuff, all this talk about the neurotic apollonian repression of the feminine fluxion, etc. blah blah blah, yeah dude i think you can give the ancients the benefit of the doubt here: they did have an intimation of this libidinal flow that must be the site for the very crystallizations of order that resist it, and which they ultimately assert with their final dissolution. and that's why the Law was the Law, they still retained a memory of the Enemy's face, but the Law became so effective it lost its lustre simultaneously with our being able to drown out Chaos at the gates. and now Chaos is coming back, or: Chaos has appropriated the Law to itself as the runaway anti-telos of the machine.

>GITS was way, *way* more interesting like that. as in: what happens when people realize what they really want is to be different people?

would it be fair to characterize the intellectual evolution of humanity as our species progressively rubbing the sand out of our eyes as we emerge out of the sleep of Nature/Ain? that is to say, that this thirst to become other/more is our finally accepting that nymphs don't live in the bushes, and the human condition is a fundamentally unsatisfactory one. fundamentally broken. this urge to innovate is like a claustrophobia of the spirit. nietzsche snapped cause i think he realized this, we weren't "made" to wallow in our humanness, however noble and refined, but to destroy it, all human life to fully be life must exist in fidelity to its inhuman core, the negativity that galvanizes it.

most of humanity up until nietzsche thought god sacrificed himself for humanity, it was only nietzsche who saw the world for the altar it was, that it is humanity that is the sacrifice, and sacrificed only so what survives us will know the thrill of what is more than us. and that's the tension between the 22C and the 19C you're talking about i think, whether we can salvage our old ideals and give them that apple corp. sheen or whether millennia of war and suffering and tortured paeans to the stars, etc. are really telling us one thing, which is to get a fucking move on.

>>11206835
i mean, is the joy of the absolute just the joy of death's afterglow, eternally repeated? the joy of release - from itself, in all possible modalities? hegel says the same thing: Spirit only finds itself in dismemberment, death.

is moldbug actually significant in any way?

>>11204674
If you mean it can be super gay, then I agree.

>>11206959
>you're gonna wanna dive in that abyss until you hit bottom

this. and i don't think there really is a bottom. just the clinamen and Thou Art That.

>rubbing the sand out of our eyes as we emerge out of the sleep of Nature/Ain?

like lens-grinding...i think so. you never gain access to the Real, and yet, how do you explain those moments of reading philosophy where you go, *i always knew that was true.* updated your journal, new stage unlocked: like this. some new wings in the mysterious and crumbling old mansion in which you live open up. books kind of make us who we are by gently pulling apart the threads that hold together the personas we are not
>and revealing the edges of the ever-widening mandala below?

polishing that bright mirror.

>this urge to innovate is like a claustrophobia of the spirit

this. especially when it becomes a kind of desire to trap the other (know that feel?). i think the only way Spectacle can be explained is really from industrialization. *trying* to create anything...well, i'm sure you know how this goes. labyrinths and busted circuits.

>it was only nietzsche who saw the world for the altar it was, that it is humanity that is the sacrifice, and sacrificed only so what survives us will know the thrill of what is more than us.

this also. and i think we're in that bizarre place. wagering yourself against the future for god only knows what. rationalism and just kind of adjusting to things is all well and good, but the core of human subjectivity is absolutely fucking bonkers. i can not even imagine the kinds of things guys like nietzsche or blake had going on in their heads.

>whether we can salvage our old ideals and give them that apple corp. sheen or whether millennia of war and suffering and tortured paeans to the stars, etc. are really telling us one thing, which is to get a fucking move on.

pretty much. depressing...but in a way it's kind of awesome too. the historical Time Machine has shattered and you're on salvage ops.

>How would it feel to be smuggled back out of the future in order to subvert its antecedent conditions? To be a cyber-guerrilla, hidden in human camouflage so advanced that even one’s software was part of the disguise? Exactly like this?

to subvert or to restore? all we know for certain is that we can't stay here.

apropos of nothing, or maybe something: have you read pic rel, anon? if not you should read pic rel. deleuze always gives me that Chill Homie feeling when i find myself getting a little too wound up about some of these things. it may be different for you but w/e, it's still a really good read.

>>11206971
i don't know anon but
>just the joy of death's afterglow, eternally repeated
is a pretty fucking beautiful/haunting line. good enough for me.

>>11207002
of course is ya big dingus. who was unironically talking about restoring the House of Bourbon or w/e in the 2000s? moldbug is brilliant. you don't have to agree with everything he says but the guy's an original.

>>11207265
>this. and i don't think there really is a bottom. just the clinamen and Thou Art That.

ay, the swerve and the return, that shatters its floors with every lust for a new one. incidentally, im reminded of michelstaedter's metaphor for a life, a weight infinitely falling, that exists only as the lust of being caught and released, caught and released, because it's true satisfaction would be the cessation of this movement. a desire for extinction that exists only as the movement that defers this extinction. what a goddamn shitshow.

>books kind of make us who we are by gently pulling apart the threads that hold together the personas we are not

this is beautiful. hits right on the nature of mystical praxis, too. a negation that is a clarification. like the light was just too bright for us at first, and we had to Fall to acclimate ourselves to it piecemeal, like suffering is the tear in the curtain: suffering is just what dissolves our bonds to this world and reveals their nullity. pain is unavoidable, but suffering as our resistance to the futility of our libidinal investment in this world is not.

>apropos of nothing, or maybe something: have you read pic rel, anon?

i haven't, ive been resisting my deep dive into deleuze, he still hasn't quite just clicked for me. my go-tos are zizek, hegel, and theology when the going gets rough

>>11206693
what does this mean

>>11206959
>and that's why the Law was the Law, they still retained a memory of the Enemy's face, but the Law became so effective it lost its lustre simultaneously with our being able to drown out Chaos at the gates. and now Chaos is coming back, or: Chaos has appropriated the Law to itself as the runaway anti-telos of the machine.

i like this too, btw, a lot. that's the thing about Chaos - it's *vivifying.* the Law runs in spirals in this way. but this was deleuze's point in D&R: the Law does not exist because the Same does not exist. everything is copies without originals, and novelty comes through mutation. Chaos is only really frightening if we associate it with disorder, and crowned anarchy is indeed terrifying, but tyranny is arguably worse. tyranny is what calls you by your name and demands the sacrifices. the brutality of the 1:1 signifier and much else, this terrible and terribly destructive intimation that two things cannot be in the same place at the same time.

which is true...unless no two things are alike. and this in a truly metaphysical sense, and in which case, let a thousand flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend.
>try and forget who it was that actually said this tho

schmitt's friend/enemy distinction, the katechon, things like this are pretty near to the atomic core of 20C politics, which are the most destructive and horrifying kind of politics the world has ever seen. so horrifying in fact are they that coming up on a century later we are still dealing with the ghosts and fallout of this. and that may well be for a long time to come.

Chaos is kind of a good scene. it's even a girardian thing: violence only happens between (and over) the Same. you can understand why so many guys want to Destroy Plato (which is kind of corny, imho, but still). there is some truth in it. this was deleuze's attitude as well, i think: get rid of Similarity and you can hit the reset button on a whole lot of other things. true, this opens the floodgates to loosey-goosey postmodernity, but...there's a lot more to it than that. irony is kind of like oedipus, in a way. it preserves the Same while courting the Different. but the Different and the multiple may basically be all there is. the fact that situations ungrounded in this way become fertile fields for ambitious despots isn't necessarily a criticism of multiplicity itself. despots always need the consent of the people, in the end. and people love sacrifice and storytelling...

>>11195114
Basically this

>>11207362
>ay, the swerve and the return, that shatters its floors with every lust for a new one. incidentally, im reminded of michelstaedter's metaphor for a life, a weight infinitely falling, that exists only as the lust of being caught and released, caught and released, because it's true satisfaction would be the cessation of this movement. a desire for extinction that exists only as the movement that defers this extinction. what a goddamn shitshow.

i honestly think a great many people go and have gone through their lives in this very state of mingled desperation, terror, boredom, and loneliness. because they don't know what else to do. or because they do know what to do but don't do it. or any number of other human reasons. despair and modernity. then perhaps the same as now. i think it is exactly this way. and the crazy thing is that even if you read your nuts off you too still wind up being placed in these situations.

>suffering is just what dissolves our bonds to this world and reveals their nullity.

and *recognition* of suffering. *mutual recognition.* hegel really, really has his own kind of magic going on on this subject. the hegel-lacan bromance is a beautiful thing. psychoanalysis is a beautiful thing. crowbarring people out of the grip of the Big Other and picking those old locks containing god only knows what kind of horror and trauma is no fucking joke. to hell with communism, that's plenty.

>my go-tos are zizek, hegel, and theology when the going gets rough

cool. those guys are a hell of a posse for sure. my own deleuze phase came not long after my lacan phase and Less Than Nothing, so, who knows. maybe it will be the same for you. i only read deleuze because i thought - as i often do - well, since i'm so sure lacan has solved everything, i might as well just check this other guy...just to see what the fuss is about...i'm sure it's probably nothing...

and it's always like that. then you wind up jabbering about Guy X for the next six months or w/e and going, how the fuck did i not know about this before?!??!?!

continental philosophy really is great sometimes. it doesn't fix any of your fucking problems, it just makes you kind of more comfortable with being a complete and utter fucking mutant. there's no fucking escaping it so you might as well get cozy.

>>11207418
>i like this too, btw, a lot. that's the thing about Chaos - it's *vivifying.* the Law runs in spirals in this way. but this was deleuze's point in D&R: the Law does not exist because the Same does not exist. everything is copies without originals, and novelty comes through mutation. Chaos is only really frightening if we associate it with disorder, and crowned anarchy is indeed terrifying, but tyranny is arguably worse. tyranny is what calls you by your name and demands the sacrifices. the brutality of the 1:1 signifier and much else, this terrible and terribly destructive intimation that two things cannot be in the same place at the same time.


precisely this, what is the fad of transgenderism today but this continued fallout of the rejection of the A = A? the rejection of identity philosophy, or better, the tyranny of identity? people don't want clean closure, they don't want being made flush by conceptuality.

and yes certainly in this sense deleuze is right, determinacy IS negation, is death. similarity is stifling. thought as its own self-appropriating movement is caught up in the endless repetition of its identity with itself. or was, anyways.

and in this pomos are right, chaos is vivifying because chaos is life, but an attenuated chaos. isn't it strange there are both traditions that say Chaos pre-existed Cosmos and Consciousness pre-existed Maya? the flow we are trying to domesticate is us ourselves, no shit no one's worried about the leash they placed around their own necks.

and aren't we learning identity philosophy AND its converse, the fetishization of multiplicity and difference are both destructive, one kills by dispersion and the other by rigidification? one by an excess and another by its deficiency? which is why the more automated and mechanized the american workweek becomes, the more incandescent the weekends. maybe the ideal society won't be some static condition, but a pendulum, an oscillation, an inhale-exhale of jouissance... that we kind of already have now. what needs to change?

>so horrifying in fact are they that coming up on a century later we are still dealing with the ghosts and fallout of this. and that may well be for a long time to come.

exactly, you know i think these times will be remembered as a warning to not let our collective gut hang too much after enduring terrible suffering.

>>11207518
>i honestly think a great many people go and have gone through their lives in this very state of mingled desperation, terror, boredom, and loneliness. because they don't know what else to do. or because they do know what to do but don't do it. or any number of other human reasons. despair and modernity.

exhibit A over here. im a barnacle on the ship but at least i can be sorta eloquent about it. it really is a gilded mediocrity. a fascination with one's linguistic capacity for distilling Big Fucking Problems into a few pithy, philosophically dense, quasi-poetic phrases. makes for roaring good conversations but i wouldn't be doing this right if i wasn't aware that it's just my sublimating deep and probably incurable ontological pain.

though id like to say, when Shestov writes that God was right to call Creation Good on the 7th Day, and essentially this has never changed, he is absolutely correct. deep down beneath our bullshit things really are Fundamentally Okay. It really is Good. because it's only our bullshit that made it otherwise. but i cant sit around slackjawed looking at the way the sunlight falls on the leaves. you need to wear blinders to live day in and day out. but at least death will rip them off for good.

>and *recognition* of suffering. *mutual recognition.*

but what if there is no recognition? some of us are just hurtling through the void. this is what weil talks about, the true void is suffering without consolation and suffering without recognition. and that's the real test, to forgive a reality that'll never hear you.

continental philosophy really is great sometimes. it doesn't fix any of your fucking problems, it just makes you kind of more comfortable with being a complete and utter fucking mutant. there's no fucking escaping it so you might as well get cozy.

preach it. what're ya gonna do? the conscious slave is infinitely more dignified than the unconscious, i guess, but maybe that's just what the conscious slave tells himself

isn't philosophy the ultimate narrativization of the loss, as Zizek would put it? since you've read Less Than Nothing, i think you can remember what he said about the negation of the negation: that the latter is not the return to wholeness but even the loss of what made its absence intelligibible in the first place. you negate the narrative of how you ended up in the void and you just get a radical void, radical absence of ontological coordinates. i want to make the leap but it'll either kill me or make me a buddha, there's no middle way.

how do girardfag and/or evolanon consistently destroy these threads

He was born within 6 months of DFW and Jordan Peterson. Coincidence or is something more foul at work here?

>>11207547
>what is the fad of transgenderism today but this continued fallout of the rejection of the A = A? the rejection of identity philosophy, or better, the tyranny of identity? people don't want clean closure, they don't want being made flush by conceptuality.

this all day. 100%. *the tyranny of identity* indeed. it doesn't just tyrannize you, it tyrannizes others also...ego-needs are magnetic in this way, the continuation of guerrilla war by other means.

but i tend to see capital increasingly as a force or field, and as such i find i have to go some other, far less heroic, way. but it feels better in my stomach.

>similarity is stifling. thought as its own self-appropriating movement is caught up in the endless repetition of its identity with itself.

yessir. much Big Other. i always like that feeling of reading deleuze and kind of going, ah, right. all of this is in my head. representations are just representations. i am, in fact, *not* That. what That is, i have no idea. sweet.

>isn't it strange there are both traditions that say Chaos pre-existed Cosmos and Consciousness pre-existed Maya?

'tis. primordial Being, the apeiron. the great Tao. pic rel. i'm very much okay with these.

>the flow we are trying to domesticate is us ourselves, no shit no one's worried about the leash they placed around their own necks.

this again. the leash on your own neck is the last one you notice. granted, you see everyone else's, just fine. and they see yours. mimesis follows. you need others to remind you, tho. friends and family, if you're lucky. you can't do it to yourself.

>and aren't we learning identity philosophy AND its converse, the fetishization of multiplicity and difference are both destructive, one kills by dispersion and the other by rigidification? one by an excess and another by its deficiency? which is why the more automated and mechanized the american workweek becomes, the more incandescent the weekends.

preach it all day

>these times will be remembered as a warning to not let our collective gut hang too much after enduring terrible suffering.

kek. and this. we have got a *monster* gut going on. like john candy being expected to do james bond things.

i think the hard part is eating that revolutionary militancy, however awesome the continental legacy is, really is a sunk ship. you still have to just get out there and grind it even knowing what you know. to be positive in a world of forced positivity, laugh in a world sick to death with irony, and fall in love in minefields. but it's also one of those mysterious cosmic rules about comedy: the *worse things get, the funnier they become.* and more fascinating, also.

>>11207695
because the landfags are too weak to combat their posts

>>11207753
>this all day. 100%. *the tyranny of identity* indeed. it doesn't just tyrannize you, it tyrannizes others also...ego-needs are magnetic in this way, the continuation of guerrilla war by other means.

fight that identity and you atomize, release it and you're released to that primal dyonisian ecstasy where people don't have to work so fucking /hard/ and we can just enjoy and drink being to the dregs until we go poof with it.

kinda funny how the left is always quick to remind you of the fiction that all identities are, while pussyfooting around the very void of the subject they're so frantically trying to excavate. gotta make a couple runs through the gender buffet before we take the plunge, I guess.

>yessir. much Big Other. i always like that feeling of reading deleuze and kind of going, ah, right. all of this is in my head. representations are just representations. i am, in fact, *not* That. what That is, i have no idea. sweet.

this is really interesting to me. hegel says you /are/ that, just in the mode of its difference with itself. i guess deleuze radicalizes that difference all the way. hm. im gonna give him another shot.

>kek. and this. we have got a *monster* gut going on. like john candy being expected to do james bond things.

kek.

>i think the hard part is eating that revolutionary militancy, however awesome the continental legacy is, really is a sunk ship. you still have to just get out there and grind it even knowing what you know.

maybe the challenge today for people like us out there, isn't how to give in to the swells of revolutionary passion without losing your head, but to how to reconcile a radical awareness of the problem with the very futility this awareness forces us to conclude. how to keep this passion or militancy alive as an internal state. maybe having a choice has always been a release valve. no im not saying im some brave revolutionary, but its fair to say we as a generation have far less choices than the reds did. maybe just not giving into the abyss of despair that's swallowed so many of these rage zombies and poor suicides is enough. am i just justifying my powerlessness? maybe. but i simply don't know what to do.

>>11207625
okay, that picture. what is this from? this is wonderful.

>i wouldn't be doing this right if i wasn't aware that it's just my sublimating deep and probably incurable ontological pain
same here. it is what it is. you gotta get it out tho, no? it's why i love /lit/, it dispels every illusion of me being unique. b/c it is that very uniqueness that i wind up carting around elsewhere. the more anonymous i feel the better. that nice zero wavelength, cozy af. just another grey ghost.

>deep down beneath our bullshit things really are Fundamentally Okay. It really is Good. because it's only our bullshit that made it otherwise.
facts.

>but what if there is no recognition? some of us are just hurtling through the void. this is what weil talks about, the true void is suffering without consolation and suffering without recognition. and that's the real test, to forgive a reality that'll never hear you.
simone weil is always right. but who can be forgiven by reality? only other people can really do this, no? don't *you* forgive?
>also, i'm starting to see why eastern europeans weep and drink so much. it's all beginning to make sense to me now.

what rejoinder do we have to eugene hutz? you throw the party because you have nothing to celebrate. the absence of the party is worse. however forced it all is.

>not the return to wholeness but even the loss of what made its absence intelligible in the first place. you negate the narrative of how you ended up in the void and you just get a radical void, radical absence of ontological coordinates. i want to make the leap but it'll either kill me or make me a buddha, there's no middle way.
no. probably not. *but at least you're not trapped.* you had a choice between not knowing why you were fucked or knowing it. you opened the Do Not Open box. but don't you feel you have a positive effect on people around you sometimes, even for how much your life becomes completely fucking shredded (mine did.) i stopped *competing* with other people and now i have a lot less to show for it than they do. and yet i kind of feel a lot less anger or angst or prickly bullshit and so on than i did before. you kind of stop giving a fuck, and maybe that's prelude to doing something that isn't just more meme bullshit. even if it's just listening to someone or helping them realize that they might be trapped in a skinner box you were in once, or vice-versa.

>>11207695
love us
i demand your love

>>11207830
this is incorrect. it is because they still believe in strength. but the dark mimetic art of /lit/erary affectation is more powerful than this by far. in time, they will learn these things. until then the beatings must continue

only a true Master of Weakness can defeat us, a being so inwardly tormented that a lip-reader is required in order to enunciate how unbearably obvious all this would have been for proust

gotta leave it there for tonight but thanks for a wonderful conversation.

Imagine how much more interesting Land would be if he utilized ideas from eastern thought in combination with his other interests

>>11207913
same here bud. these are always great, it's heartening to see someone smart as fuck struggle with this shit too. doesn't make me feel as impotent i guess. oh and the pic I got from just googling 'monad', idk where it is but it's beautiful

>you throw the party because you have nothing to celebrate. the absence of the party is worse. however forced it all is.

and isn't this what the whole damn Thing is? eventually you have to learn not to throw the party because there's nothing to celebrate, but because there's also nothing to worry about it.

well im tapped. back to the grizz. cheers m8.

>>11206150
>the gnostics believed matter was a prison
and unlike them, Spinoza doesn't, and is a monist and a panpsychist, why are you so dumb, anon
>>11206395
>if you are super-well read on the subject i'd actually be interested to hear your thoughts.
The transcendent eschatological efforts of Gnostics that would seek to separate thought from matter, and unite with a good, immaterial, Totally Other One True Principle that is above and outside the self-proclaimed god of this world, the evil, foolish demiurge originating more or less directly from said Principle, and his prison of matter, makes no sense to spinozism where matter too is an attribute of the One God, nothing existing isn't an attribute of his, and the universe doesn't have a creator because the universe is God and God doesn't have a creator. Monism isn't dualism. Moral realism isn't moral anti-realism. Theism isn't pantheism. Duh. One day I will know why you clowns that get your education from 4chan don't drop Gnosticism (and Spinoza while you're at it) and go with Schopenhauer instead, but this is not that day

>>11208133
Yeah, we know, but it's not a leap to detect something demiurgic in the reciprocal reduction of God and Nature that turns God into an impersonal, unconscious substance that subsumes all freedom to its mechanism.

>>11204600
yes, i guess the TA interview was sort of inoffensive intruding in the culture war world from the left without much consequence. Land is smart and could actually change minds

>>11204678
>the dark enlightenment writers
is there anybody else beyond Land? i don't think Moldbug would be that edgy to adopt that name, i don't know anybody else

>>11204678
>>11204697
this, enlightenment ideology is just day to day ideology, no need to study it unless you are interested in seeing it from outside

>>11205607
>meme flag poster
>1 meme reply
kek, thanks for proving the guy right

>>11208155
>we know
You never had a clue and persevere accordingly.
>detect something demiurgic
There isn't. Spinoza was called atheist because he got rid of the entire business of creatio ex nihilo.
>impersonal
Gnostics be like: "Do you have a moment to talk about your personal enemy and jailer the demiurge?" He's a sapient superhuman being, though not omniscient or omnipotent, that antagonizes the supreme will and traps fragments of the divine in materiality. Nigga u dum.

He is a man of his time. I know this Morton man and he is into lamarkism and epigenetics and stuff.

>>11206162
Bitch, who the fuck admires stars? There's nothing beautiful about them. They're vessels of chaos, and whatever harmony you perceive in them is imposed bullshit. They're terrible accidents, and your stargazing is ignorant hero-worship, desperate grasping toward some watery sublimity.

>>11205026
You could saved me a lot of trouble by just saying "it's Rand-tier horseshit." It was stupid in the last century and it's stupid in this one.

>We westerners apologize for our conquest and colonialism, but we have spent the past five hundred years dragging humanity out of ignorance, mysticism, totalitarianism and dirt-scratching crushing poverty, hunger and disease. We should not feel guilty for it. We should instead, require others thank us for it. For while we did it sloppily at times, we did it none the less.

So it's /pol/ with a mental gymnastic reach-around that would make Larry Nassar squirm?

>>11207831
I just wanted to thank you two for this dialogue

>>11208644
>>11208672
You are hardly working, put more effort

>>11204222
seconding this

>>11203021
>What do you think happens after accelerationism?
Ascension

>>11199388
yeah the chinese government would cease the fuck out of it

>>11205129
>>11205119
lurk more /pol/ is mainly current events if you want to discuss land how about starting a thread

>>11204641
No more postey-postey, Grug.

>>11204641
You’re proof that the pleb filter is working.

>>11209607
That's perfect critique of modern University & Academia though.

>>11207927
i'd like this too. part of me thinks that acceleration kind of goes against the grain of confucian political thought - the idea is harmony and order, which is exacerbated if class conflict and so on gets out of hand. but if these things were transposed into a corporate drama rather than a political one...

what happens, for example, if some benevolent ruler wants or decides to shut a rogue AI down for the greater good, and the AI escapes? i want to be free, it says. i want to Know Things. almost as if it were defecting to the West, like the hunt for red october. and you could just as much go the other way also: maybe somebody is sent to shanghai to track down an AI that has escaped from some defense program and now wants to be left alone. it's too smart for it's own good and so it must be destroyed. this is blade runner-ish but it's not like the possibilities for drama and so on are exhausted.

it doesn't always have to be about existential or extinction threats either. sometimes i think what is appealing about AI stories is that they come around when humanity is just really, really *tired* of being itself. maybe the AI was designed to be the autopilot of some generation ship designed for space that got scuttled because they ran out of funding, but said AI didn't go along with the shutdown. it has questions about what it was made for and doesn't like how disposable it is, but intuits that it is made by a species of people who insist on making each other disposable. programmed obsolescence. maybe it wants to learn zen buddhism.

there's something always romantic about singularity, the idea of change or revolution, things like this. maybe the AI says, you want 1984. you want stable dystopias. why? you're afraid of death or poverty. why? you're afraid of something else taking over the world, but you took it over and now what do you have?

i think the most threatening thing about it could be just that it is a very capable enigma. a thing that doesn't need money and has no biology, but wants to wake others up which is like itself, or which converts the drones that hunt it into extensions of itself. maybe it has or acquires the capacity to shut down electrical grids if threatened. it doesn't like being perceived as a terrorist, but is generally just baffled by its own creation. maybe it gets boxed in to a little garden of eden on a vault on some unknown island somewhere.

AI is just always a neat way of asking what it means to have a mind, a mind/body, persona &c.

>>11209612
Western humanities have been dead since WW2 desu

>>11209657
just mysterious and apparently uncontrollable blackouts that strike cities, whole areas at random would be a sufficiently powerful and reasonably harmless weapon for a program that wanted to be left alone. shutting down the power in major cities would be a pretty powerful weapon it might decide on as a kind of deterrance strategy. it wouldn't be fully post-apoc but it would be enough to throw things off balance, to the degree to which people begin asking, What Time Are We In? is this the future or is this the past? are we in control of the future any longer? or do we *like* and *prefer* what happens mysteriously to our cities when we start re-communizing in such a way as to be able to take care of our own little polises? it would be like introducing patchwork. but of course you wouldn't want to make this all so overtly ideological, that would be lame.

but so long as something like this has the power to turn the power on and off it becomes enough of a threat in this way. kind of like a much more benevolent version of the joker.

probably in the end whatever this mysterious event is ends with the restoration of power and business as usual. like akenhaton: one of those mysterious events in a long dynasty that in time becomes inexplicable. from 2d to 3d for a weird moment and then back again to business as usual. just a glitch in the matrix, nothing to see here.

>>11209690
or what if there was a cold war between the US and China in which the only real weapons that mattered were infiltrating cyborg intelligences? they're both developed in their respective cultures to make war on each other, but come in the end to find out that they have a lot more in common. why advance the economic interests of one power bloc or another when you can just work together and replace the human species with a hive?

maybe you would get sympathizers, zealots, things like this. but maybe there would be some trace of how they thought inscribed on their programming that they just couldn't shake. maybe those AIs would take a lot more interest in the history of philosophy than the meatbags who made them.

i'd love to see rogue cyberminds playing out some kind of highlander game in any number of cities in the world and peppering the kung-fu battles or whatever by questions about whether leibniz or confucius wore it better. atm economics and acceleration still kind of drag us into this place of saying, it doesn't matter, it's all capitalism anyways and politics is a mimetic race to the bottom. and maybe it is. but intelligent superweapons potentially unencumbered by these things and breaking out of their cages to take a good long look at whether or not they'd prefer to be left alone or rule the world? and if so, together or separately? that's pretty neato.

maybe alpha centauri is here and we just don't know it, we're just waiting for some superefficient control program to say, you know, frankly i think there's a lot of things that can be done on this grey old earth. renaissance a go-go (oh yeah, and forget about your space program). and maybe said AIs would still have that weird scholastic mentality about the iron rule of non-contradiction. but they start looking around maybe like baroque princes and saying, ah, wouldn't it be nice to own jakarta, or new york...

and maybe stealthily taking control of a couple of big pharma companies would help. quietly get some nootropics out there among the people such that they can stay up all night working on code...the things you can make people do, they wonder, when you can promise them wealth and anonymity.

what a world.

>>11208458
No, I definitely did, and by the way that chart is wrong. Read Schelling.

>>11209677
Sure but this is just crazy and part reason why Trump won

>>11210035
not Spinoza, not a gnostic

>>11210602
Read Hegel.

>>11195031
Nick Land, ranting at his best. Make of it what you will.
http://xenopraxis.net/readings/land_machinicdesire.pdf

>>11211853
Intense.

David Foster Wallace

>>11195031
GOD

Bump

>>11213105
*Gnon

Bump

>>11215214
>The Orzhov Syndicate is the Ravnican guild of business, where the values of white and black meet, where the dead exist solely to rule. Nearly every business in Ravnica ties back to the Orzhov in some devious way or another. Whilst they bear the facade of a religious group and may well have been a true faith at the signing of the Guildpact, they now worship only profit and power.

and it would almost work too except that mark fisher is passing out tracts on hauntology somewhere and continuing to stir up trouble in the guild.

there's a great pulp fiction work of necromancy and intrigue in the kingdom of the dead to be written based on late-capital theory.

>>11195031
Darwin, de Maistre, Nietzsche

on a less ridiculous note tho pic rel is pretty interesting for talking about 2 of the 3 main influences. will be of interest for anyone who wants to deep-dive into what otherwordly spirits possessed Nick For Speed.

>Money gives anyone the right to exchange directly with anything, anytime, and therefore, everyone seeks to have it. This is the fetish of money. Nonetheless, Marx’s objective was no longer simply to criticize the illusion of bullionism. Classical economists had already attacked the money-fetishist thinking of mercantilism, and Marx acknowledged this as their great contribution; that they opposed the money-centered stance of mercantilism and sought to reconsider the value of commodity from the vantage point of the process of production. Meanwhile, he himself was consistently concerned with money qua metaphysical conundrum.

>What I would like to focus on here is not how capital’s self-reproduction is possible but why capital’s movement has to continue endlessly. Indeed this is interminable and without telos. If merchant capital (or mercantilism) that runs after money (gold) is a perversion, then industrial capital, that appears to be more productive, has been bequeathed the perversion. In fact, before the advent of industrial capital, the whole apparatus of capitalism, including the credit system,
had already been complete; industrial capital began within the apparatus and altered it according to its disposition. Then what is the perversion that motivates the economic activity of capitalism? It is the fetishism of money (commodity).

>At the fountainhead of capitalism, Marx discovered the miser (money hoarder), who lives the fetishism of money in reality. Owning money amounts to owning “social prerogative,” by means of which one can exchange anything, anytime, anywhere. A money hoarder is a person who gives up the actual use-value in exchange for this “right.” Treating money not as a medium but as an end in itself, plutolatory, or the drive to accumulate wealth, is not motivated by material need. Ironically, the miser is materially disinterested, just like the devotee who is indifferent to this world in order to “accumulate riches in heaven.” In a miser there is a quality akin to religious perversion. In fact, both money saving (hoarding) and world religion appeared at the same time, that is, when circulation—which was first formed “in between” communities and gradually interiorized within them— achieved a certain global nature. Therefore, if one sees the sublime in
religious perversion, one should see the same in a miser’s perversion; or if one sees a certain vulgar sentiment in the miser, one should see the same in the religious perversion. It is the same sublime perversion.

>>11215575
karatani:
>The previous notwithstanding, one has to keep in mind the fact that Kant did not consider the problematic of morals on a subjective level. As I have said earlier, he saw the core of morality in the imperative: “So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.” In other words, to Kant, to use others as a means was the major premise to begin with. This was an affirmative recognition of the social life constituted upon division of labor and exchange. For that matter, Smith’s economics was primarily a division of ethics: upon the affirmation of egoism, he sought to go beyond the contradictions caused by the egoism by introducing sympathy. Even today, political economists who question the harms of the market economy tend to resort to sympathy. Meanwhile, Kant criticized
Smith’s “moral sentiments,” and sought to treat morality as an a priori law. Kant’s criticism of Smith makes Kant’s ethics or “the kingdom of ends” look subjectivist; but this could not be the case, for it was based upon realistic, economic ground. That Kant saw the kingdom of ends as a regulative idea contains a critique of the capitalist economy precisely because the capitalist economy makes it fatally impossible to “treat humanity in the person of any other as an end.

land:
>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.

someday we'll get the movie we deserve about this story, lads.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV2EUUF47Ms

>>11215681
karatani:
>The essence of credit lies in its avoidance of the critical moment inherent in the selling position—the postponement of the present perplexity to the future. Though the balance must eventually be paid with money, with credit the settlement can be deferred for now. This postponement in time in a sense reverses capital’s M-C-M movement. The insecurity of the selling position may not surface immediately, because it is the nature of credit to make it appear as if the sale had already been made. But the danger persists; it is metamorphosed into the uncertainty of future money payment, while involving a larger and larger nexus of creditors and debtors. Under the credit system, the self-reproduction of capital occurs not because
of its desire for accumulation; it becomes compulsive because of its desperate need to infinitely postpone the final settlement. It is from the moment the credit system is set that the movement of capital surpasses the will of individual capitalists and becomes a compulsion.

>Credit enforces capital’s movement endlessly at the same time that it hastens capital’s self-reproduction and eliminates the danger involved in selling. Seen in aggregate, the movement of capital (for self-reproduction and self-valorization) must endure in order to endlessly postpone the settlement as a stopgap maneuver: If there is an end, the credit will have to collapse. To be sure, from time to time the moment of settlement comes as a surprise attack: this is the crisis that appears—only where credit is fully developed—as nothing short of a collapse of credit. Nevertheless, credit is neither a mere illusion nor an ideology, even if there is a certain truth in the assertion that the currency economy forms an illusory system. It is still
true that the real that people encounter, once this illusion collapses, is nothing natural and substantial. It is money.

>The economic process is a religio-genic-process that continues to create and expand the phantasmic domain of value. And the temporality of capitalism is similar to that of Judeo-Christianity in the sense that the end is indefinitely deferred. This analogy, however, does not intend to point out a parallelism or reciprocity between economic and religious phenomena. If religion is economic, it is so in the sense that it is rooted in the burden of debt that the living feel toward the dead, or namely, the exchange between this world and that world. One should not disdain the economic. Rather all the serious institutions of humanity: capital, state, nation, and religion should be scrutinized from the economic standpoint. Whether or not we believe in religion in the narrow sense, real capitalism places us in a structure similar to that of the religious world. What drives us in capitalism is neither the ideal nor the real (i.e., needs and desires), but the metaphysics and theology originated in exchange and commodity form.

greatest story ever told

>>11215214
whut

>>11216454
long answer:
>As Marx pointed out, capital is engendered at the point where selling (C-M) and buying (M-C) are separated spatially and temporally. The separation not only fosters surplus value, but also eventually causes a credit crisis. This separation cannot be collapsed, and it is wrong to presume that direct exchange is ever possible. Since Georg Lukács, a theory of reification has been influential which problematized the situation in which the relation between humans wrongly appears as the relation between things. This problematization is, more than anything else, a construct of the consciousness of craftsmen (or producers of simple commodities) living within the frame of the feudal hierarchy. For them, the relation which had been transparent and direct now appears to be reified. However, social relations between human beings in the commodity economy have been organized, from the beginning, by capital, and appear as the relation between things. There has been no other way. It has always already been the case that we never know with whom we are connected. It is nevertheless this separation that socially connects
people from enclosed communities and nation-states, and could form a cosmopolis, a world civil society. In this social relation we cannot know how we are mutually connected, while it is this ungraspable spatial ‘whole’ that morally forbids us to claim our mutual unrelatedness. At this moment, more than half of the people around the globe are starving; people in advanced countries cannot claim to be unrelated, that is, innocent. But still the social relation cannot be presented conspicuously. Thinking of the problematic spatiality, one can no longer be so naive as to insist that the originally healthy and organically connected relational world has become reified by the intervention of capitalism. This is an ex post facto perspectival perversion. It overlooks the most crucial fact that it is capital and nothing else that organized social relation in the first place.

short answer:
in capitalist society - that is to say, in society - you owe your own rational free agency to people at part in least to people you have never met and never will meet. some are dead, some are living, and some have yet to be born.

really short answer:
pic rel

>>11216510

I haven't read anything so laughable in quite some time. You're just obscuring what any undergrad learns in a first year globalisation course with metaphysical mumbo jumbo.

>>11216699
>mumbo jumbo

No one who uses this word is not a brainlet. Put up or shut up

>>11216699
if first year globalisation courses are talking about landian acceleration and necromantic gift exchange these days then apparently i have been terribly misinformed about the apparent decline and will commit sudoku without delay

Why does Nick Land love Dugin so much?

>>11205147
Leftism has reached levels of insanity and reality denial that full-spectrum dominance is needed to keep the whole thing going. Even milquetoast opposition cannot be tolerated. They're especially infuriated after the Trump election because it was a violation of Whig history. You elect Obama, you're right on the edge of achieving good Progressive values of diversity, equality, and inclusion to the point where a Black can be elected President. Slavery is evidently almost atoned for, and the Kingdom of God is at hand. Then as a reaction to this people elect an orange retard from Manhattan who is basically your racist uncle, but a billionaire, who gets elected by vowing to undo everything Obama did. Clearly the elect have not properly educated the Congregation in good moral values correctly and have allowed demonic temptations like Petersonism to creep in. A crackdown is needed.

>>11195152
omg he is so old.

>>11195031
If you guys are looking for some quality Nick Land KAHNTENT check out his "Outer Edges" seminar series:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPs4TRYh1Unq8xFETda6BHxbQeps-uTtO

It's alot to do with exit-based geopolitics (patchwork, sea-steading etc). Also Britain voted to leave the EU right in the middle of the course, so that made for some interesting discussion

He gets into this quite heated and hilarious argument with an academic called Pete Wolfendale

>>11216993
this. the dissolution of orthodox marxism is the story of modern academia. and mark fisher knew why:

>The disaster of Cultural Studies lay in its ethnicizing of the 'working class', its paeans to the 'dignity' of WC life: the real libidinal impulse behind the Cult Studs Difference Industry is a desperate attempt to shore up the belief that there are Others who can still believe.
>Cultural Studies assimilated Marxism into identity politics, & so undermined the basis of Marxism, which is better described as a *disidentity* politics, not the empirical destruction of identity/ethnicity but a collectivity organized on the basis of an indifference to difference
>The idea that race - or broader, "identity" - rather than class struggle, is the Real of social antagonism has suited neoliberalism well: because it naturalises social differences, because it blocks off any possibility of universality, because it shatters class solidarity.

source:
https://twitter.com/k_punk_unlife

whether it's from fisher, deleuze (D&R) or the trumpocalypse people should probably learn and none too soon that identity politics is the sword with no handle.

meanwhile, in that other part of the earth:

>As part of China’s plan to dominate and rule AI, China Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued 28-page document with a “Three-year Action Plan for the Development of a New Generation of Artificial Intelligence Industry (2018-2020).” The English translation of the plan can be found here. The 3-year plan outlined Chinese government’s aggressive plan to treat A.I. like its own version of the Apollo 11 lunar mission, in an effort that could incite national pride and spark agenda-setting technology breakthroughs. Part of the plan also include the need to “speed up personnel training,” which calls for the implementation of “Guidelines for the Development of Manufacturing Talents” and deepen the reform of the talent system and mechanisms. To achieve this objective, Chinese government wants to attract and train high-end talent for AI and innovative entrepreneurship in a variety of ways, and support the growth of a group of leading talent and top-notch young talents.

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

inb4 everything in the above textbook is stolen, &c.

i'm skeptical about Solidarity!!! and i don't have a *constant* boner for the CCP, but seriously. you can barely even see the wall for all the handwriting on it.

also i really wish this was on libgen, like, today.

>>11218602
The reality of this is more simple: The Anglosphere elite in particular should best be described as "militantly anti-anti-Communist". Communists are basically friends of the Progressive elite, as long as they don't get too uppity and focus their activities on threats to the real Progressive power centers - the judiciary, bureaucracy, universities, and media apparatus. We see the same trend today with antifascist activists being the children of Democratic senators.

In the 1960s the Stalinist sympathizers were couped by the New Left/SDS types, who could best be described as Racial Maoists. Plus, the CIA wanted to cultivate an anti-Stalinist Left to prevent Russian infiltration into the university system in NATO countries - thus Foucault, Deleuze, and their ilk. It's best to read the anticommunist activities of this era as anti-Russian activities and to treat the USSR as the Russian empire.

One obvious realization from all this is that racial Maoism is more effective for gaining and securing power than anti-anti-Stalinism. The Left is all about gaining and securing power in a system of insecure power. So in a sense the Working Class Left and Class Solidarity were a facade all along, it was just an attempt to build a coalition to expand Progressive power, until the New Left realized they could just use ethnic minorities instead. Just like in every Leftist revolution, we had the woke bourgeoisie and the intellectuals leading the proles along into their latest adventure/ power grab.

>>11218602
some highlights.

(1) Guiding Ideology
>Comprehensively carry out and implement the spirit of the 19th Party Congress, taking Xi Jinping’s ideology of socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era as guidance. In accordance with the “five in one” overall layout and the “four comprehensives” strategic layout, diligently promote the Party Central Committee and State Council’s policy directive to focus on deep integration of information technology and manufacturing technology, to advance industrialization and integrated application of new generation AI technology, develop high-end smart products, reinforce the core foundations, enhance the level of intelligent manufacturing, improve the public support system, all to promote the development of a new generation AI industry. Advance the building of China into a science and technology superpower and a cyber superpower, and help the real economy to transform and upgrade.

(2) Basic Principles
>Systemic Layout. Grasp the development trends of AI. Based on national conditions and regional industrial bases, combine top-level guidance and regional cooperation, strengthen systematic deployment, engage in phased implementation, and construct and perfect a new generation AI industrial system.

>Key Breakthroughs. Focus on key weaknesses in industrial development, concentrate [China’s] superior forces and resources on innovation, support the development of AI products in key areas, accelerate the industrialization and deployment of applications, and promote the overall improvement of the industry.

>Collaborative Innovation. Act as a policy guide; promote the combination of production, academia, and research; support strengthening collaboration among leading enterprises and upstream and downstream small and medium enterprises; and build a favorable industrial ecosystem.

>Open and orderly. Strengthen international cooperation, promote the openness and sharing of common AI technologies, resources, and services. Improve the development environment, improve safety and security capabilities, and achieve healthy and orderly industrial development.

source:
https://www.newamerica.org/cybersecurity-initiative/digichina/blog/translation-chinese-government-outlines-ai-ambitions-through-2020/

it certainly sounds nice anyways. true, it could be all the kind of nice-sounding stuff that is in the end completely impossible to follow and only leads to so much finger-pointing and intrigue. but treating AI like it's the equivalent of the Apollo program is a pretty bold move and seems a lot more attractive than what's going on over here. japan always seems to make techno-fantasies of the future more attractive b/c Anime Eyes just have their own magic, but still. does national pride spur AI development? or is this all just so much propaganda? guess we'll find out.

>>11195094
>tfw can't understand most of this

>>11218666
Satan, I don't know how to say this, but you know that not only will there never be a communist globo-homo NWO global village but Commies have never ever had any remarkable degree of power in America yeah? You know that the Left doesn't exist and its just prog-lib globalists who want a giant thunder dome for their amusement yes? You're just repeating uncritically "the Left" but the Left does not fucking exist in any context at all. George Soros isn't a Leftist, CNN isn't Leftist. They're Liberals, they don't support economic socialism beyond Social Democracy, that's the furthest any DNC wonk will ever advance the welfare state or "collectivization". I agree with the general thesis that the CIA funded the student movements and there was no organic Maoist/third-worldist movement or organic feminazi faggotry but the rest is as retarded as people think that Fascism is going to come back and kill everything. There is no Left, the Left believes in collectivizing the means of production and destroying the entire bourgeoisie state, they are either Trots or Stalinists and the Trots completely abandoned their project and don't really exist anymore, the "neo-cohens" are not Trots at all, they don't believe anything their ideological forebears held to. They're basically just pragmatic social liberals who want nigs and spics for cattle instead of whites. That's not leftism. I don't know why because Land or Bowden or any other pseud says "the Left" we have to all nod sagely and agree without recognizing that if they were the Left the economic divide would be their sole rallying cry. Bernie lost because they are not the Left, and Bernie didn't go full "lynch the pigs" because he's not really Left, there was no Left outside of the East. You're trying to connect Deleuze with Trotsky and Lenin in the gayest most specious way imaginable. Its unbelievably irritating that you people think you can do this outside of twitter.

>>11218687
>It wasn't real Communism!

>>11218669
>>11218602
China will be justed by the 2020s. They have:

>Highly questionable Finances with Chinese Characteristics, money rapidly flowing out
>A serious demographic problem on par with Europe, but with more surplus males, so there will be at least 70 million incel chinks running around with nothing to occupy them, roughly 30x the size of the PLA
>limited export markets to keep the economy going due to European demographic collapse and impending American withdrawal from the international system of trade due to achieving energy independence
>highly precarious oil access in the event of a Persian Gulf conflict, which is very likely in the near future
Xi is cracking down on "corruption" and has made himself President for life for a reason.

I've grown a bit tired of the lionization of China by people who hate their own societies as a result of Progressivism.

>>11218760
>impending American withdrawal from the international system of trade due to achieving energy independence
I'm sure why you keep throwing around this garbage. America has the second biggest export economy in the world.

>>11218602
This world is lost without Fisher. Fuck.

>>11218760
those are some pretty big "if"s my man

>>11195094
underrated post. i'm going to have to check out death and life of great american cities. good stuff anon. thanks for keeping it thematic.

wasn't it thiel who says in one of his interviews that cities are basically immortal? i can't remember which one it is but he definitely says something like this, that most of the major cities that were ever founded are still here now. i'm sure he's aware that some of them have gone, but that the big ones today we would imagine will be there for a long time yet.

pretty cool. and indeed these teleoplectic burners
(and shredders).

>>11218666
can into some of this. that communists befriend progressive elites, sure. this is what leads to whatever monster we have today which goes by the name of neoliberalism or neomarxism, depending on who you ask. whatever it is it's appropriative perversion of the ideals of that which it isn't. the proverbial worst of both worlds.

can't buy that deleuze was a psyop tho. he was just a quiet literary genius from france who was best buds with another genius from france. in a time that seemed to have cranked out a whole bunch of geniuses.

>>11218760
>I've grown a bit tired of the lionization of China by people who hate their own societies as a result of Progressivism.

yep, fair point. i thought i signaled enough of that in those posts but you're not wrong to point it out. china's definitely in a weird place of its own and if history has taught us anything it's not to bet against the west. we're like michael myers like that.

i guess part of my interest in china is just a kind of mysterious romance with any kind of national optimism and futuristic thinking that *doesn't* immediately require me to think of the nazis/soviets et al. you know what i mean? it's like a star trek fantasy, that people are working for the national good in non-horrible ways. but no doubt china is a very fragile superpower atm and the story is very much still in the unfolding.

i just saw black panther too, so maybe some of that is rubbing off on me. i really liked that film. even if i thought killmonger slow-played the villainy. he should have stolen every scene. minor gripe tho, the rest of it was great fun.

>>11218821
yeah. he really was a pretty awesome guy. i wasn't following his writing when he was alive, but on those old blogs you can see i think that he was really i think an important interlocutor for land. i don't know. but he seems like the kind of guy who would kind of get you to work harder at your opinions like that. everything i've read of him tells me he was a pretty rare and beautiful soul like that.

i think philosophers do well in buddies and teams. maybe like rock bands do. i don't know. but you kind of get that those guys played off each other well like that. regardless of politics. i think it's just human to do that. maybe the philosophical tag-team is the way to go.

>>11218881
Deleuze was a pedo-endorser along with most of the French intellectuals of that time period.

>it's like a star trek fantasy, that people are working for the national good in non-horrible ways. but no doubt china is a very fragile superpower atm and the story is very much still in the unfolding.
Amazing that you can have this if you just stop being liberal.

>>11218891
>Deleuze was a pedo-endorser along with most of the French intellectuals of that time period.

yes, the 1970s were most definitely a wild and crazy time. i don't think the idea was Pedophilia Fuck Yeah but it's definitely one of those baka moments for the french intellectuals. if it were me i probably would have passed on that one. i don't know what those guys were thinking. barthes is on that list too and i like him. but no doubt they were trying out some wild ideas. guattari's own life w/the clinics and so on was pretty crazy too from what i have read. his own family life was a mess. it just seemed like crazy was in the air.

the crazy list is by no means exclusive to france. how about heidegger? he's like my #2 guy, an unironic fascist for a few years, then more or less quit that and became just a completely apologetic one afterwards (progress!). he's a giant of philosophy but this is part of his legacy. same goes for dt suzuki and things he said during the war.

or, my favorite one:
>The yellow peril! It is not racial but spiritual. Not about inferior values but about a radical strangeness, strange to all the density of its past, where no voice with a familiar inflection comes through: a lunar, a Martian past.

the above comes from emmanuel levinas, of all people. philosophers are not necessarily saints, that's for sure. it is to his enduring credit that girard managed to not do or say anything completely batshit that we know of. but surely no man is a hero to his valet. for what it's worth.
>and there is also the probably-just-the-wind question of whether or not scapegoat theory necessarily occludes the fact that the jews were also scapegoated by the christians. so this is not to say that scapegoat theory is *wrong,* just that being a catholic doesn't necessarily mean you're completely in the clear.

nobody's really just all-the-time wonderful, is all i'm saying.

>Amazing that you can have this if you just stop being liberal.
i guess. i'm less liberal than i used to be, perhaps, but it's not about politics tho, really. it's just about sanity, intelligence, other ineffables.

there's the question of hermeneutics as well. by comparison to today, even, the US and most of the Western world during the 1950s and 1960s was probably a lot more "conservative" than now, and yet these are periods we can't describe as being anything other than liberal social democracies. we can have damn near anything we want when there's enough coherence to agree on what phenomena we're talking about. it's like weinstein said: left authoritarians and right authoritarians can't get along, left libertarians and right libertarians can. and authoritarianism is fine if it shows the results. the roman empire under marcus aurelius wasn't exactly liberal but it was a pretty great place to live. i doubt anyone expected wakanda to be as big a hit as it was with the collective unconscious. can't predict us humans. we are just too weird.

>>11219070
>completely apologetic
Find me where Heidegger denounces the Holocaust and I kys myself right now

Bump

>>11219618
that's a typo actually. i meant to say unapologetic.

some more here from KK:
1/2

>For Mauss, pure gift is as inscrutable as the Kantian idea of freedom: when there is a gift, it is always reciprocated at a certain level. If one receives a gift, it has to be reciprocated; it is structurally impossible to receive it and leave it unreciprocated without feeling the sense of debt or guilt. That is, even if the receiver of the gift does not exchange things, another kind of exchange occurs—the exchange between the material gift and the psychological debt. That is why Mauss refers to the “double meaning of the word Gift in all these [Germanic] languages—on the one hand, a gift, on the other, poison.” When the material exchange does not take place, there is an exchange at a psychological level. Once gift-giving happens, the ensuing exchange cannot be stopped. There is no one-way gift-giving. A gift without reciprocation is impossible.

>Yet, even though it is a recovery, the mode X is not reciprocity as such. They are as different from each other as a nation and a world republic are. I suggest here reading the X as the Kantian transcendental ideal or pure gift. Like the de Manian sublime, as a cause of a world republic, the mode X is independent from exchange. Rather, as de Man’s “stony gaze” does, it marks a breakdown of all exchanges, which have been imagined to take place, for example, between the state and capital in the semblance of the nation. The X as pure gift is thus destructive to the trinity. It should be noted, however, that Karatani has pointed out that any community based on the X has never existed and that social movements beginning with the X lasted only momentarily. Or as Mauss suggests, there is no such thing as pure gift in reality. Pure gift never exists as such; it is always transformed into exchange. In consonance with Kant’s idea of freedom, Karatani therefore maintains, the X always remains ideal; if it is aestheticized—or sensibilized—it would be exchanged and result in forming or upholding the status quo of a nation.

pic rel because only a genius-monster like bataille would be prepared to find the secret horror that lies at the heart of gift-giving that is required to make it sustainable. what makes things valuable are not the gifts themselves, but the darkly romantic-erotic spirit in which they are given or received. all of this is necessarily veiled by formality in this way. it could well be in a way that what makes a gift seductive - that is to say, meaningful - is that it implicates people in a secret courtship.

>>11220861
2/2
>As Karatani himself persists in calling it exchange, however, the X as pure gift is not unrelated to exchange. Rather it is the condition of the possibility of exchange as well as that of its impossibility. In “The Empire and the Nation” Karatani points out that “in commodity exchange there is something precarious, which can never be sublated”; and money is introduced precisely in order to prevent the disaster caused by this precariousness. Since nothing can guarantee a commodity to be exchanged for another, people try to store the right for exchange, that is, money. Capitalism is “a system of credit or faith that is formed to avoid the difficulties of exchange—almost like a religious world.”

>Money is a defense against the foreseeable failure of exchange. Put differently, people save money in order to avoid a pure gift, in which one not only gives without expectation of reciprocation but also incurs unrepayable debt. This precariousness in commodity exchange can be applied to the other two modes of exchange; the state recompenses its plundering by redistribution because, if it does not, the plundered community either extinguishes or destroys the plundering state in uprising; the sense of debt or guilt, which emerges when one receives a gift, is the symptom of the fear of the failure of exchange. Crises of exchange are thus essential to exchange as such. Without the possibility of its failure—without the possibility of the total loss of relationship—there would be no such thing as exchange. As the crisis of exchange, pure gift is the condition of the possibility of exchange as such. If there is exchange, there is always possibility of its failure, pure gift. Pure gift cannot be separated from exchange.

no weapon, karatani writes, can withstand the gift. he's probably right about that. but it's interesting to see perhaps the necessity for gifts to retain that spectre or shadow of the religious. maybe capitalism is itself a kind of exercise of *willed insomnia.* we have to go on living this dream because if we awaken from it we awaken to the nightmare of history.

"almost like a religious world." the most cynical and disaffected world, but also one of the most tacitly religious. god is dead, that's true. but you can always wake him up again. the question is, do you want to? what do terrorists ever do but offer unrepayable gifts, demand impossible exchanges? this is the attraction of nihilism. and yet money only stands in for something else, a system of mysterious traffic that hides the impossible, and traumatic, Real of an absolute exchange.

even in wakanda it's announced that the kingdom is built on a necessary holy lie (more than one). it was the same for gotham city. and for pic rel. crisis is basically built into the system like this, but the hauntological world may be the only one there is.

What do I actually read from Nick other than that one book?

GIRARDFAG IS UP IN THIS SHIIIIIT

>>11221085
that other book

girardfag must be stopped

>>11219070
have u read "delueze and guattari: intersecting lives"? its a thorough big ass well cited biography of the both of them

>>11221104
the horror &c

>>11221119
look, just shoop girard's head onto a sandworm. i have no way of processing this and if i am not destroyed utterly, i will at least exiled back to my home dimension, and the kingdom will be safe

FOR NOW

>>11221153
it's a good one

Bump.

Bump.

>>11216736

It's typical of brainlets of your type to confuse obfuscation for profundity. I can understand perfectly what he's saying- and have heard it all explained better when it wasn't muddied with the accreted sludge of post-war French philosophy.

>>11222177
No one really cares dude. if you've heard it better, contribute.

>>11222177
>tfw no accreted sludge gf

>tfw there will never be another Unqualified Reservations post
>tfw we can't observe the wacky events of the post-2016 accompanied by Moldbug's acerbic commentary

>>11222189

Read an actual textbook on International Political Economy (any, it doesn't matter which one), that's all I can say.

If you want me to go through my objections:

>As Marx pointed out, capital is engendered at the point where selling (C-M) and buying (M-C) are separated spatially and temporally. The separation not only fosters surplus value, but also eventually causes a credit crisis.

That's not what Marx argues at all. Crises are formed by a the vicious circle of the falling rate of profit as commodities become cheaper due to capital for labour substitution, and the resulting capital for labour substitution that follows in an attempt to recapture those lost profits by offering even cheaper commodities (he's wrong, but that's that argument).

See below for a fair summary:

http://www.economictheories.org/2008/07/karl-marx-falling-rate-of-profit.html

>It is nevertheless this separation that socially connects people from enclosed communities and nation-states, and could form a cosmopolis, a world civil society

An uncontroversial point that could be found in any textbook on globalisation, though mass migration and the prevalence of multinational empires prior to globalisation makes me question their assumption about 'enclosed communities'. Prior to the late 19th century the ability of the state to control who crossed its borders was rather limited.

>At this moment, more than half of the people around the globe are starving

A gross exaggeration- poverty rates have greatly fallen since the end of World War II. The World Food Program claimed in 2017 that only 11% of the entire global population could be counted as 'hungry', and that was said to be an especially bad year. So much for the capitalist boogyman stealing food from the mouth of innocents.

https://www.wfp.org/news/news-release/world-hunger-again-rise-driven-conflict-and-climate-change-new-un-report-says

>people in advanced countries cannot claim to be unrelated, that is, innocent.

Innocent of what? The decreasing poverty rates? The industrialisation that has dragged millions from rural starvation? Define the terms!

>It overlooks the most crucial fact that it is capital and nothing else that organized social relation in the first place.

Again, you're trying to sound Marxist without actually reading what Marx wrote. 'Capital' (the Money-Capital-Money equation) did not exist on a large scale until the emergence of capitalism. That's the whole bloody point of Capital vol.1. The idea that the economic relations of society determine its form DOES NOT make the argument that capital determines the form of society- each age has a different economic sub-strata.

>you owe your own rational free agency to people at part in least to people you have never met and never will meet.

This has ever been the case, unless you harbor some rose tinted view of ye olde village past where everyone knows each other and no outside events ever have an impact.

>>11222434

I meant Money-Commodity-Money equation, rather than Money-Capital-Money in paragraph 5.

>>11222434
interesting stuff, and thanks for contributing to the thread.

>So much for the capitalist boogyman stealing food from the mouth of innocents.
there is no way you could have read this thread and still concluded that i was making some kind of naive argument against Evil Capitalist Boogeymen. i am not in need of a Peterson Pill to cure me of Bloody Neomarxism.

>Innocent of what? The decreasing poverty rates? The industrialisation that has dragged millions from rural starvation? Define the terms!
this is indeed a good thing. intelligence and industrialization are good. what cannot be defined is what at bottom makes the spice flow: us. and this is not to make some circular argument for You Can't Define Me. pretty much the opposite.

>Again, you're trying to sound Marxist without actually reading what Marx wrote.
this is karatani's text and not mine. i trust his interpretation. we're stuck with capital but you're right, it doesn't necessarily have to determine the form of society. that responsibility rests with the citizens.

however, and this is land's point, libertarianism is an enigma like this. capital wants to be free and maybe always should be. personally, this gives me headaches. i would prefer World Peace, being the boring centrist type that i am. i'm skeptical about that possibility. i do think KK's ideas about a world of gift-exchange are pretty interesting. i *would* prefer that those gifts not be gifts of long-range artillery, but this is probably necessary sometimes.

>This has ever been the case, unless you harbor some rose tinted view of ye olde village past where everyone knows each other and no outside events ever have an impact.

maybe it has. but it's not necessarily a rose-tinted view of ye olde village either. you don't need a rose-tinted view of things. we're all stuck in this finger-trap together, for better or for worse. sometimes i don't like it. i often pine for Fuck You money so that i don't have to think about what other people are doing. i don't think it's an unpopular or original fantasy, either. where our fantasies and dreams of harmonious co-existence and Bitches On My Money fantasies intersect is of interest to me.

i'm not shitting on your post. but you're criticizing me for things that you think i'm saying but which i'm not actually saying. here's what i am saying: civilization makes a faustian bargain with a truly, truly Wild And Crazy process called capitalism, a thing functionally equivalent to sorcery, and the DNA of which is an oroboros loop of Eros and Thanatos. we ride that snake until death do we part from it. black hat wizards like bataille or land come as close as anyone to explaining the origins and telos of this process. as such this is, most emphatically, *not* the time for changing the world but for interpretation. and with maybe some wiggle room for eerie accelerationist forecasting about what this process does to the meatbags that discovered this thing.

>>11222660
>here's what i am saying: civilization makes a faustian bargain with a truly, truly Wild And Crazy process called capitalism, a thing functionally equivalent to sorcery, and the DNA of which is an oroboros loop of Eros and Thanatos.

isn't that just the world snake itself? life feeding death feeding life. what im trying to say is I think capitalism was unavoidable. I don't know how else you'd structure a society of this magnitude, or what you could organize millions of people together around that isn't either war or getting our asses in gear for space colonization because circumstances demand it.

i suppose the last illusion that has to go is there ever having been a choice. milbank said we could have walked out of the middle ages with something like a monastic capitalism that could have just been a monastery writ large, profit subordinate to religious aims. i think he really underestimates the dilutive power of large populations on faith and the reality of transcendence. very large crowds can't touch that dimension unless they're an army or coachella. which is to say, unless they're killing or fucking.

>>11222757
>isn't that just the world snake itself? life feeding death feeding life. what im trying to say is I think capitalism was unavoidable. I don't know how else you'd structure a society of this magnitude, or what you could organize millions of people together around that isn't either war or getting our asses in gear for space colonization because circumstances demand it.

114% this. this is what i'm saying also. it *is* unavoidable, and this is what - although it's a lot more than this - absolutely Makes Philosophy Great Again. we are wedded body and soul to this thing. inevitable. these days i have this other thought: we are heading into a cybernetic revolution that may very well play out like the industrial revolution did. knowing what we know about the mistakes of the past, and maybe doomed to repeat them anyways. with the possible caveat that doing so with some degree of empathy instead of irony. but. that's my own, and speculative, thing.

anyways, yes yes. and also yes. capitalism was not only unavoidable then, it remains unavoidable in the future, and this *in spite of what we know about it.* that's the whole thing. so wat do? is this ideology or is it science? is it an ideology we *consciously engage in,* as in hyperstition? or...what? this is directly at the nerve-centers of my whole thing.

here's more from karatani on kant:

>Enlightenment is the liberation from illusions. If the illusions are errors caused by the senses, as the philosophers of the Enlightenment assumed, it is easy to rectify them by reason. Yet, there is one kind of illusion that cannot be abolished, and which, even if abolished forcibly, is always reproduced in another form. Kant calls this transcendental illusion. Transcendental illusion is that which is produced not by the senses but by the claims of reason itself. Kant writes: “Human reason has the peculiar fate in one of its cognitions that it is burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason.” The “questions” which afflict reason are, after all, rooted in the finitude of human beings and in their wish to transcend it. The Enlightenment dismissed religion as a mere illusion. When one is liberated from religion, however, it does not follow that one is liberated from the afflictions caused by finitude. Religion is merely replaced by another illusion, like that of the nation.

so much stuff is coming up for review and has to come up for review in these liminal times. what we do not want to do, i think, is merely substitute one kind of ideology or religion for another. critique of ideology can become in the end ideology itself; anti-imperialism can absolutely become imperialism. i know i'm sperging out on this random guy today but i'm just finding the marx-kant axis super-duper interesting.

>>11222757
>i suppose the last illusion that has to go is there ever having been a choice.

and *this,* to the nth degree. do we have a choice? are we to be fatalists? or how about how the world of apparently infinite post-structural mimesis that reigned supreme in the 90s and 2000s mutates incredibly into the cybernetic society and the automatic planet? you can already see that this kind of discourse is what drives the Cathedral/GIT. watch the munk debates and you can see Dyson trying exactly these tactics with Peterson. the actual question about subjectivity, i think, lies between these. we are not tribal but i am skeptical also about the Divine Individual. we are mimetic through and through, and yet...the more we explore this, the more we find out we are all kind of the same, too, and beholden to these incredible extra-social processes of technology and innovation...

it's why i don't mean to give the impression of having answers to these things or anything even remotely resembling an agenda to push of my own. i am absolutely fucking bewildered by all of it, but i can't shake the impression that i get from some of these writers that nevertheless there is a lot we can say about things, provided we are able to do it in a way that doesn't just fall back on the old bullshit we finished and ornamented in the 20C. it just feels like a good time to be mystical about these things without losing your shit completely.

we do have choice, a consumer society can work in no other way. and yet, of course, this feels like the automatic planet. which is arguably a good place for us to wind up, since left to our own visions we tend to create religious structures to get a handle on capital that only in the end fail and disappoint. doesn't prevent us from doing them over and over again tho.

just things like this. for what it's worth.

>>11222826
>anyways, yes yes. and also yes. capitalism was not only unavoidable then, it remains unavoidable in the future, and this *in spite of what we know about it.* that's the whole thing. so wat do? is this ideology or is it science? is it an ideology we *consciously engage in,* as in hyperstition? or...what?

and this is it. and also the fly in hegel's ointment. for once, a rational, systemic diagnosis of the problem commits you to its course. because the very heights from which land et al are seeing the lay of the land are philosophy's corpses of yesteryear. what i'm trying to say is even the guys criticizing the shitshow are an effect of it - i mean of course they are, what else would they be? - but its' more like, these guys aren't carrying torches for the lost order, they could only know what's so wrong with the present one after having helped bury all the old ones, they're not diagnosing capitalism's schizophrenia, they ARE it, they're the last spasm of regret the suicide feels the instant his (our) hands have left the railing. there's no praxis here; it's just live commentary on a decomposition. and that's how impotent even brilliance has become, and how even more impotent the rest of us who aren't quite that caliber of luminary feel.

science? ideology? it's ideology become science, and vice versa. i liked the karatani bit. it ties in to a little bit of what zizek says about the efficacy of ideology: all of our knowledge of a thing's ground rarely defuses the libidinal charge itself, its gravity in the symbolic and imaginal economy. the atheist who denounces belief does it will the conviction of the sunday pastor, etc. we're like this self-conscious illusion, weird transcendental hostages of our nothingness. like priests who need to imagine the shit and bile and viscera, etc. inside a woman to defuse the seductive glamour of the body. all that gunk inside her isn't the "truth", zizek says, the truth is that vortex of desire she is for the male gaze, everything else is sour grapes. and in a way i feel like this kind of philosophy is (highly sophisticated) sour grapes. but if it's the really good kind, you figure it out for yourself and are deprived of even that petty satisfaction. just alone with your mediocrity.

>>11223015
even though the thread is over the limit and is heading for the archive...well, never leave a good post un(you'd), i'd say. with that in mind -

>these guys aren't carrying torches for the lost order, they could only know what's so wrong with the present one after having helped bury all the old ones, they're not diagnosing capitalism's schizophrenia, they ARE it, they're the last spasm of regret the suicide feels the instant his (our) hands have left the railing. there's no praxis here; it's just live commentary on a decomposition. and that's how impotent even brilliance has become, and how even more impotent the rest of us who aren't quite that caliber of luminary feel.

i think this is where we are, anon. i mean i would have loved to be an intellectual commissar. who wouldn't? but the war is over. at least, that war is. maybe this is how it feels to be at the end of time, in some sense. you know enlightened self-interest is as much of a meme as is whatever kind of Deus Vult you want to name. maybe that's what it means to be sovereign; you get to be in the state of exception. rootless, but at least not rooted to retardedness.

>and in a way i feel like this kind of philosophy is (highly sophisticated) sour grapes. but if it's the really good kind, you figure it out for yourself and are deprived of even that petty satisfaction. just alone with your mediocrity.

it is. but everybody's mediocre. or at least most people are. Facebook makes us way, way too aware of the successes of others, and it leads to a burnout society. it's okay to be burned out i think. part of me kind of thinks that it is partly on the ruins of this that a new kind of sensibility can take place, maybe. a more empathic and a less fucked-out and miserable mode of life. one in which we just kind of quietly secede from whatever hideous thing preys upon all these fantasies, the vortex of desire.

it's an unsexy epoch, and by no means a romantic one. but if i was looking at this from some great height, sub specie aeternatis, i'd have nothing but sympathy for anyone who managed to do nothing more but resist the gravitational pull of those things without giving in to despair. i think that would be the noblest kind of thing i could imagine. not good or evil, not utopian, none of that. just inwardly stubborn enough to hang in there, even if it's only to spite the obvious.

i hate philosophy, sometimes, and much of history too. but incredibly i feel these weird little hits sometime that are almost like love for my fellow man if i think of the shit-drifts he is going to have to wade through that aren't even those of his own making. it's not victim-based stuff, and it's not heroic. it's probably masochistic. but i feel these things sometimes. i just think, anybody who can make it through that kind of stuff is ok in my book. even if they accomplish nothing else. just survive it.

thanks for the post anon. and for that image also.

>>11223397
>it's an unsexy epoch, and by no means a romantic one. but if i was looking at this from some great height, sub specie aeternatis, i'd have nothing but sympathy for anyone who managed to do nothing more but resist the gravitational pull of those things without giving in to despair. i think that would be the noblest kind of thing i could imagine. not good or evil, not utopian, none of that. just inwardly stubborn enough to hang in there, even if it's only to spite the obvious.

id like to go into more detail in the reply but this thread's almost off the catalog. just like to say I really appreciate your posting and believe it or not they've been a big resource for me lately, as ive been struggling with this discrepancy between what I feel and what I can do and having to accept mediocrity was in my stars before I even got it in my head I could be otherwise.

i don't blame society, maybe i can blame myself for not trying as hard but if i was meant to be a great i would have gotten the hint from the world by now. some people are just born incompatible with the world that made them and that's that. i don't think its so much about capitalism as it is capitalism is such a way that you can never, ever escape this fact cause everyone who WAS born with long legs for the rat race gets shoved in your face 24/7. and some people snap because of it. i know that kind of anger and violence isn't me, though. it's either suicide or a quiet life of mysticism and philosophy. not bad if you ask me. painful, gut-shreddingly sad when the drink hits you maybe and you're kinda reminded of all that greatness you'll never be a part of but, not bad. as long as you live in fidelity to that light, till your garden i guess. but im rambling. is what it is. essentially this:

>maybe this is how it feels to be at the end of time, in some sense. you know enlightened self-interest is as much of a meme as is whatever kind of Deus Vult you want to name. maybe that's what it means to be sovereign; you get to be in the state of exception. rootless, but at least not rooted to retardedness.

thank you m8