/lit/ - Literature

because starting from D&G means no hegel, no freud, no lacan.

>>11682421
I thought Deleuze had Lacanian sympathies

>>11682874
not really. taking your cues from nietzche, bergson and spinoza produces very different results than taking them from kojeve, hegel and freud.

it's called 'anti-oedipus' for a reason. and as far as land is concerned, all that belongs to so much outdated anthropocentrism.

>>11682902
on AO they praise Lacan for trying to deoedipalize psychoanalysis, although they don't think he succeeded

>>11682918
right. and i mean, it's still debatable whether *they* succeeded also. i know we're all riding a wave of deleuze threads right now but, come on, lacan is still interesting af to read. and again, it's not exactly like i want to have nick land as my psychoanalyst (or schizoanalyst) either.

it's how continental philosophy works. even if in the process of making a name for yourself you have to find all kinds of aspects of another person's thought left unexplored, you still have to give credit where credit is due. people have different interests and different questions, different curiosities and different solutions.

one of the most interesting things i read about deleuze was that he was a really really good *logician.* i liked that. and he picked a boss-level project to work on: the logic of schizophrenia, of sense, of affective thought.

and anyways, guattari is the psychoanalyst, not deleuze. he's the metaphysician. guattari's role in all of this matters too.

>>11682902
Isn't the worship of capital like... the most anthropocentric you could get though? Or does the zombie quality preclude that?

>>11682976
>Isn't the worship of capital like... the most anthropocentric you could get though?

not for land. he roots for capital because it is inhuman, because he wants the intelligence escape/intelligence explosion. i think - again, these are only my own fuckface opinions (and, fwiw, i don't agree with everything land says, either) - capital *is* the critique and it is working with the raw material, at this point, which is humanity. anthropocentrism for him means, basically, leftism and all its variants. he wants modernity - once the enemy - to be able to escape from the clutches of sweaty primitivists who know not what they want.

this is a pretty rough precis of what he thinks, but i think it's more or less appropriate. landian capital *is* intelligence by way of technology: the computer that processes desire. smash kant and marx together and in place of spirit-as-capital (hegel + marx) you get capital-as-spirit (teleoplexy). you could almost call him an orthodox marxist...just that he's been through the black hole and back and decided now that capital itself is the revolution and humanity the oppressor. in so many words.

i know this sounds crazy, as in: why the fuck would anybody think that, let alone root for it? and it's not like i stay up at night praying for this to come true. it's just a thesis i find kind of interesting to think about. and it is basically what heidegger predicted also, i think:

>technological advance will move faster and faster and can never be stopped. In all areas of his existence, man will be encircled ever more tightly by the forces of technology. These forces, which everywhere and every minute claim, enchain, and drag along, press and impose upon man under the form of some technical contrivance or other-these forces, since man has not made them, have moved long since beyond his will and have outgrown his capacity for decision.

i take these as points of departure, though, not necessarily as gospel truths.

>Or does the zombie quality preclude that?
i don't know what the zombie quality means in this context.

>>11682976
>>11683027
so you could say that he's trying to have it both ways. on the one hand, he's still left enough to be able to look at capitalism and find an inhuman process (and be right) and then to arrive at point where he can say BUT WAIT and argue convincingly that, for all its faults, that this *is* the way we become smarter, at least in the technological sense (and be right about that too). but that's the thing with land. there's Young Nick and there's Old Nick.

the big one is just capital-as-intelligence: teleoplexy. that changes and in a big way readings of both hegel and marx, but how he winds up taking this ultra-cold perspective of the process happens as a result of his deep-dive into deleuze and others. the real story of that you can read in fanged noumena. the final result, more or less, is this.

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

interview here if you want more.
https://vastabrupt.com/2018/08/15/ideology-intelligence-and-capital-nick-land/

>>11683027
Land is inverted Ellul.

At the end of the day, though, I am human. I reject Land for worshipping what is essentially meaningless to man. As a man, I can revel in my own inconsistencies, that is what we do, and the rough landscapes are precisely what is enjoyable and good. Ask anybody forced to work in an industrialized and monotonous environment just how much the technological project is worth.

>>11683027
>landian capital *is* intelligence by way of technology
by way of markets, not technology. markets manufacture intelligence (which is why we have been captured since the Renaissance).

>>11683076
>As a man, I can revel in my own inconsistencies, that is what we do, and the rough landscapes are precisely what is enjoyable and good.

and you're right to do so. in one of the other 9 million deleuze threads it was asked - so, how can we not say that deleuze is just a shill for neoliberal globalization? and the answer is, in a part, that he is urging those things, *provided that they give you joy.*

one reason, however paradoxical it might seem, to read land is to realize that you really cannot outsmart capitalism at its own game. the industrialized hellscapes of modernity don't have endgames of their own, they are autotelic endgames. they are a form of thinking understood by heidegger and by many others.

my own landposting is mostly there because i think he's a kind of visionary figure in that sense. but still: you really should enjoy your life, enjoy being human. i like the marxist stuff because it corrodes *cynicism* and not because it erodes joy or those feelings we really can call authentic being-in-the-world (and i really do believe in those).

so yeah. you should seek to find those genuine moments. they do matter. people knew modernity was a nightmare in 1927 and they know it now. that much hasn't changed. maybe we have some different theories about what it is, and why, but fundamentally the fact that you really should find a way to Live beyond widgetization...i mean, it's obvious.

i like land because the accelerationist blackpill collapses the floor under a lot of political bullshit and other jaded cynicism that i don't like. it certainly doesn't provide any solutions about what to do next (well, there's Optimize for Intelligence, but i still believe in the existential questions too, even if land doesn't).

>>11683101
>by way of markets, not technology. markets manufacture intelligence (which is why we have been captured since the Renaissance).

yes, thank you. this is an important clarification.

>>11683041
>Wave motion is crucial to this. There was an extremely exciting wave that was ridden by the Ccru in the early to mid-1990s. You know, the internet basically arrived in those years, there were all kinds of things going on culturally and technologically and economically that were extremely exciting and that just carried this accelerationist current and made it extremely, immediately plausible and convincing to people. Outrageous perhaps, but definitely convincing. It was followed — and I wouldn’t want to put specific dates on this, really — but I think there was an epoch of deep disillusionment. I’d call it the Facebook era, and obviously, for anyone who’s coming in any way out of Deleuze and Guattari, for something called “Facebook” to be the dominant representative of cyberspace is just almost, you know, a comically horrible thing to happen! [Laughs.]
based

>>11683144
>“Every dispositive – every technology or technique of domination – brings forth characteristic devotional objects that are employed in order to subjugate. Such objects materialize and stabilize dominion. Devotion and related words mean ‘submission’, or ‘obedience’. Smartphones represent digital devotion – indeed, they are the devotional objects of “the Digital, period. As a subjectivation-apparatus, the smartphone works like a rosary – which, because of its ready availability, represents a handheld device too. Both the smartphone and the rosary serve the purpose of self-monitoring and control. Power operates more effectively when it delegates surveillance to discrete individuals. Like is the digital Amen. When we click Like, we are bowing down to the order of domination. The smartphone is not just an effective surveillance apparatus; it is also a mobile confessional. Facebook is the church – the global synagogue (literally, ‘assembly’) of the Digital.”

deleuze foresaw the control society but he died before the internet really blasted off. land as cyberpunk aesthetician supremo is well-positioned to write cool stuff about it tho. as is byung-chul han.

>>11683167
is this Han? I'll have to pick him up

>I have to put my fourth point on the table, which will bounce back onto this question, which is the right-accelerationist commitment (that feeds into all kinds of later things but definitely is something already going on in the 1990s), that the actual, practical, social force of conservatism — all of what would be called “reaction” — is the political left. The political left is the thing that is set essentially against the imperative to accelerate the process.
wtf did Land mean here? is neoreaction a form of neoleftism?

>>11683119
I have always kind of assumed what Land believed from my readings of critics of autonomous technology. You mentioned Heidegger, and I mentioned Ellul, but Land pretty much sounds like he’s saying “yes, you’re right, and that’s good.”

And that’s really all I can disagree with. I think it’s bad, but still fundamentally unavoidable.

>>11683187
yep, psychopolitics

han's great. if you've done the reading and are getting that eerie feeling that all of these continental guys are right about things he's good to read. nothing really new that you won't have thought about before - he doesn't have a big system and he doesn't produce any new concepts deleuze-style, unless "burnout" counts - but hey, i mean...burnout. you're fucking burned out and so is he. sometimes it's nice to realize it's not just all in your head, and that really really smart fucking guys have landed in the same place you have. he's a cool guy.

>>11683191
>is neoreaction a form of neoleftism?
uh...no?

here's my sense of it: if the left is there to resist the imperative to accelerate, NRx is there to resist that imperative of deceleration.

NRx is pro-market, pro-tech, but - but! - with basically moldbug social values. which makes r/acc a very compromised position. the disneyland of NRx's is singapore (or peter thiel's take on seasteaded-Rapture, or w/ev).

and the alt-right is just so much more political romanticism with a manifestly ethnat bent instead of an anti-ethnat bent. but neither of those are interesting to land.

>>11683210
>the actual, practical, social force of conservatism — all of what would be called “reaction” — is the political left
how could it not be?

>>11683205
>Land pretty much sounds like he’s saying “yes, you’re right, and that’s good.”

yeah. and, i mean, it's why i sometimes feel like i get squished into this weird place on /lit/ sometimes, defending an already insanely contrarian philosopher and then saying, at the end, but hey, wait, there's always Being! guys? guys?

in my dream world, we go back to doing modernism heidegger-style: more authenticity, and a mutual concern with. but better. more coherence, and less tech-phobia. lots of other things. i've been reading a bunch of stuff on him recently and it's the same thing: he says some things that are to me not only heart-rendingly beautiful, they're completely true, but you have to separate these from the stuff that is less awesome. and who knows, maybe all that is to misread him. but i like to tell myself that if i misread someone in a positive or constructive sense it's forgiveable. who knows.

i know this image is from tolkien, but i kind of think there is a secret connection between heidegger and tolkien as well: that, basically, tolkien provides a kind of perfect artistic representation of what is most stirring in heidegger's thought. but that is a whole other conversation, i suppose.

>>11683223
i think he's just referring to the hegemonic power of the Cathedral, which is wedding the potentially explosive power of capital/intelligenesis to social ends, which for land is a sort of betrayal of its possibilities. he simply loathes leftism.

http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/008891.html

acceleration is basically critique of what marxism *became* - a purely cultural analysis wholly divorced from economic structural analysis. with land that economic structural analysis returns with a vengeance, and includes the entire project of cultural studies under the banner of transcendental miserabilism.

>>11683248
>acceleration is basically critique of what marxism *became*
interesting take

bump

>>11683248
the problem is Heidegger is he was never able to really deal with Time. Time was what killed Being and Time. after all, where is there room for development in the round dance of concealing and revealing? Land (to me, at least) serves as a particularly useful lens to fix this skew; development doesn't occur within, it occurs without. Dasein, properly speaking, can no longer be seen as something internal, subjective, and most important, no longer something phenomenal. Land steals the spotlight from phenomenology and turns out outside -- history is not only a trancendental, it lies outside of the realm of the Human entirely. this is where Deleuzian becoming-Other clicks in, and Land targets not only Oedipus, but the Human itself ("a 'snake-becoming' forming the first stage of bodily destratification"). obviously Land would say his praxis was broken, but its remnants are much harder to wash off.

>>11682323
what the fuck are those fingernails

>>11684390
what's interesting is spengler's perspective. you could almost make the argument that spenglerian pessimism threads the needle in this sense between heidegger and land: resisting the temptation to excess metaphysical humanism on the one side (Being) or the esoteric speculative fascination with pure technics on the other (land). unlike heidegger, spengler turns down the invitation to join the party directly and emphatically. maybe he detected in it something like a kind of massive attempt at humanizing the inhuman that would lead to disaster. and then, conversely, he might as well oppose any land-style attempts at an NRx rehabilitation of tech also: look, tech is doom, own it, stay at your post, enjoy the winter stage. any attempt to find the essential place to fix one's attention on, whether in myth or in calculus, betrays the faustian ideal.

>>11683248
>>11684390
>>11685072
fuck Deleuze threads, at least I understood what petersonfags were talking about

I just want to say I thoroughly enjoy posts like >>11683210, >>11683027 >>11683119

That is not to say I understand all the references to Deleuze or Land or Han or Heidegger and even less the source material, but I can sort of sense what they are getting at with techne and runaway technology and capital-as-spirit.

I've been deep into watching commercials from the 90's and like tried to understand western culture (especially american pop culture) at the time of the popularization of the Internet as well as reading up on high frequency trading and the like.

I sometimes feel like I approach an understanding of what drives the technological/cultural/financial development and my question is if I am somewhat right in describing this something as some sort of collective mind "parasite"? I don't belive this something to be only capitalism, but more like an understanding of the world as raw material to be transformed, among which capitalism and technology are tools for this transformation. Can you help me give a vocabulary for this?

based land poster blessing this board once again

>>11683248
>less tech-phobia
why?

>>11686134
well it's nice to know that my shitposting here has had some positive effect.

>I sometimes feel like I approach an understanding of what drives the technological/cultural/financial development and my question is if I am somewhat right in describing this something as some sort of collective mind "parasite"?

i mean that's basically land's thesis, but you can much more optimistic version of that idea also. maybe It isn't a parasite at all. maybe the Something is something else. true, maybe there is no Something. but that's one of the nice things about philosophy: as crazy or as outlandish as you might think your speculations are, you can basically guarantee that somewhere somebody had an even crazier idea and developed in directions you can hardly imagine. try to get through the PoS at some point, you'll see what i mean.

>I don't belive this something to be only capitalism, but more like an understanding of the world as raw material to be transformed, among which capitalism and technology are tools for this transformation.

what capitalism really is is anyone's guess. you'll want to read marx as well at some point, and eventually you may want to read land and the other guys too.

>Can you help me give a vocabulary for this?
hegel. he went there. and it would be fucking awesome to the billionth degree if we had an updated copy of the PoS to account for the two hundred years since then, but we don't.

basically...just throw yourself at it and who knows, maybe you'll come up with something. a new concept, idea, or perspective on this is good for everyone. and the other thing is that *things have changed.* a lot. deleuze doesn't really live through the internet era (and heidegger certainly doesn't). land does and his perspective is interesting af. but where all of this stuff is going...it's anybody's guess. that's my feeling, anyways.

>>11686148
i've been told i am a blessing and a curse, i think that's accurate. but i do love this board and the conversations here.

>>11686154
because phobia in general is just a bad scene. it feeds the sad passions. obviously somebody who shills as hard for land as i do it's not like i'm not completely aware of the matrix-style implications for capital. heidegger knew it too, but He Chose Poorly. there has to be a middle way through this stuff.

i'm borrowing this image and this thought from another thread but it was something interesting prompted from another anon here on /lit/: the network is a rhizome, an unstructured one. deleuze is really good for thinking about the implications of the internet, among other things. what land borrows from this in turn is a whole lot of dark possibilities for capitalism and consumer culture on the internet, the possibility of robot intelligenesis, much else. and, of course, his incredibly dark politics.

but it's also a new-model form of communism that comes unstuck from ideas of a huge or unified *working class.* and that also has these big implications. and even then: in the world where everyone is capitalizing constantly on everyone else, who are the real capitalists? you can jump down deleuze's throat for this and say, well, there you go: ultimate neoliberal-globalist apologetics, right there. but we should probably try to imagine something more constructive.

the rhizome is a kind of prototype for the internet, and the internet is basically everything today. and after the fall of the soviet union (and, increasingly, post-1990 american hyperpower, anglosphere hegemony, &c) we are in a new world.

just some random other things on the deleuze-land connection, i suppose. that land is doing something with deleuze that is analogous to what marx does with hegel. that's not *all,* of course.

random thoughts.

>>11686181
you are a blessing, Girardfag

>>11686218
>the rhizome is a kind of prototype for the internet
just wait till blockchain rears it's decentralized head; distributed computing networks which have no central authority, are completely trustless, and turing complete to boot.
Land's blockchain book when

>>11686804
aaaarrh, right in the feels.

thanks, anon. all glory to /lit/ & its merry band of malcontents. good luck out there.

>>11686836
>just wait till blockchain rears it's decentralized head; distributed computing networks which have no central authority, are completely trustless, and turing complete to boot.

aye. this is the big one. "copernican" doesn't feel like an understatement. kind of crazy to think that we are actually going to live through it, no? sometimes history isn't as dead as the french and germans like to think it is. robotics and cybernetics is a big fucking deal. combine that with BTC and ethereum &c and it's hold-on-to-your-butts time.

>Land's blockchain book when
preach it

anyways, as we wait for Uncle Nick's tractatus logico-cyberneticus...there's always other interesting things to read. this essay made me inclined to want to take a second look at derrida for a few things as well.

>Let us conjecture that the invention of the transistor — an auto-controllable circuit — indicates the attainment of a critical level of development in cybernetics, a “tipping point.” Then for writing the corresponding moment is the invention of the video camera, perhaps more precisely the photograph: now seeing is writing, literally marking. Visio-literature is the only kind that can ever exists for us today — even ancient literature is post-modern for 21st-century readers. We cannot simply forget the history of writing, which is also the history of humanity — a spirit which is more like a ghost successively inhabiting our bodies, then our writing-instruments, then our machines, and next…?

>Driven by a new kind of virtue, cybernetics questions the character or essence of humanity. It ungrounds our classical assumptions, our metaphysical coordinates. It has an uncanny tendency to dissolve rigorous divisions between human beings and animals, and then in turn the holy division between animals and machines. Ontological collapse. Becoming-machine is always a becoming-animal, but the dissolution goes even further than this.

>Derrida is reminding us that cybernetics, in some sense, also points to the closure of a certain metaphysical and historical age — not merely that it is a new science of writing equally as “deep” as philosophy, but on the contrary, that cybernetics has a tendency to precisely supplant philosophy, as writing had already done to images.

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

bump

>>11682323
Very carefully

>>11686181
>because phobia in general is just a bad scene. it feeds the sad passions
I was reading a book on bug-chasing and the term "counterphobic eroticization" showed up as a throw-away concept. This is the perfect linkage between that and desiring-machines.

> kind of crazy to think that we are actually going to live through it, no?
I am not 100% convinced that it /will/ happen. More things need to go right rather than wrong in order for it all go down the way Land (or any other singularitarian for that matter) envisages. The idea of an ontological collapse is predicated on there have been some ontological closure, or at least structure. The idea has enough weird smells that I am suspicious of it. I work in tech and in it's weaker forms the idea serves as a cover for believing that tech workers are engaging in history in a /real/ sense. In it's full-blown capacity it serves as a comfort that history will happen /in spite of/ human intervention, negating any necessity for praxis.

> It has an uncanny tendency to dissolve rigorous divisions between human beings and animals.
I think here is where Land starts to excuse himself from doing difficult thinking. Instead of having to think through what distinctions there might be between humans and animals, the distinction is rendered null from the get-go by virtue of the fact that it will no longer exist. Even in Land's coldest of materialisms, there is still room for this difference to exist, he just chooses to ignore it.

> just wait till blockchain rears it's decentralized head.
My imaginings for this actually much more oriented around authenticity and mutual concern.

Basically - in the same way that the US government performs the state-craft necessary to ensure that the dollar can be used as a currency (i.e. putting a bullet in the head of forgers), Whole Foods enforces "ethical" product designations (i.e. if the one brand of fair-trade chocolate is actually made by slaves, they wouldn't carry it anymore (or at least this is the idea)). Blockchain logistics would allow for cryptographic proof of who actually produced the product and where. Hence, instead of "ethical" brands only appealing to mainstream (neoliberal) values, a micro-brand could produce coffee made by the trans-commune down the street. Hence, you not only get to choose the product you want to buy - but the entire supply chain that provided it to. So in a sense, you'd have a market of market (which, I think, is likely an entry-way into a critique of neoliberalism on it's own terms).

Based posts btw.

>>11686975
>Another way to express the same logic: writing comes before mathematical intuition, even before speech — it provides the ground, the possibility for intellection, the virtual field in which intuition can be set free. Writing supplants formal systems, reinvents them, plays with them, comprehends and surpasses them. The notion of “supplanting” is, for Derrida, an adequate definition of the art of writing itself.
oh lord, I have to add Derrida to the list as well? anyways, here's some relevant Deleuze to add to the discussion.
>>11688469
>I am not 100% convinced that it /will/ happen
I think that was a comment on the revolutionary potential of blockchain, not ontological collapse

>>11688469
Critique (autocritique?) of neoliberalism seems like small fish compared to the big picture. Imagine a worldwide distributed computer system that no one can shut down and anyone can use (psuedoanonymously, might I add). It is able to run the same processes as any other computer in a wholly decentralized fashion. It also has no central points of attack, as the blockchain is stored on every single node in the network (I can't help but imagine the jeweled net of Indra) -- this also prevents tampering; mining can properly be thought of as auditing. Currently the price is too high to use for computing in any practical sense (I think Ethereum is about a million times less cost efficient than traditional cloud computing, AWS and the like), but I certainly wouldn't be betting against Moore's law here. There are even pipedreams of decentralizing networking infrastructure in a similar fashion (think internet sans internet providers (see the madman Synth behind Skycoin for some real schizo takes on this)). Anon was prescient as usual by calling it "Copernican".

>>11688469
>counterphobic eroticization
don't you just fucking love humans? you have to love humans.

this is something i've thought about too, the excessive fetishization of desire rather than fear. han talks about this w/the burnout society. and phobic economies consume just as much, maybe more. a glance at the news tells you that paranoia and rage sells just as well as sex.

chris metzen even managed to make the undead sexy. if we don't want to fuck things on some deep level it's just weird. we're becoming like the fucking Na'Vi. morton's take was pretty funny:
>hang on while i stick my swiss army genitalia in your skull, noble steed, and then we shall fly

>negating any necessity for praxis
no doubt this is true also. that's continental stuff for you. the Fun (and prestige) of prophecy. i remember reading baudrillard and thinking that this was just more hyberbole, it's what you do. in some sense it is. but the need for simulated everything seems to be becoming more and more the norm. could be because i'm watching mad men.

>Hence, you not only get to choose the product you want to buy - but the entire supply chain that provided it to.
somebody told me something very similar to this not so long ago, about how Tim Horton's makes its money. he asked me how i thought they made their profit, and i said, donuts. this was the wrong answer: the right answer was, logistics. when you open the franchises you get the whole network, you get shipping and distribution. owning every step of the chain is what matters.

makes me think too that some useful simulations of how capitalism *actually functions* would go a long way in philosophy class when the conversation turns to these guys. i mean, yes, let's not forget the Great Conversation. but i can't even play Hearts of Iron (EU 3, yes. and SMAC on easymode). at the very least we should all be able to give a respectable account of ourselves in axis and allies.

>So in a sense, you'd have a market of market (which, I think, is likely an entry-way into a critique of neoliberalism on it's own terms).
i like it. that's really a good way to approach it, on the efficient micro-scale. justin murphy seems to make similar arguments: you can have something like fully automated luxury communism as long as you are prepared to smart small and efficient. talking about 'capitalism' in economics is like talking about 'life' in biology. we need something scaled to our level.

>>11688480
>oh lord, I have to add Derrida to the list as well?
i've added him to my list. i have derrida grief b/c i *started* with him and worked backwards. i'm not expecting the kind of Fuck Yes moments i've gotten from others, and i definitely remember being ultra-trigged by derrida people who i felt were leaving me really twisting in the wind when i wanted direct answers. i'm over that phase now.

>>11688610
>autocritique
what a word.

and buterin just fucking *looks* like Somebody Who Matters. that picture.

based thread indeed gents.

>>11688668
more AO for you

>>11688610
this post is really good, btw. the jeweled net of indra, no shit. and if you want to have a conversation about marx, this is it, this is the future. neoliberalism, meet your new parter, autoliberalism. you'll be sharing a room. for now.

>>11688688
i cannot help but read some of that in the voice of patrick stewart. forgive me.

one thing that comes to mind is that in some sense the destruction of class-conscious sensibilities in a way really does have its upside. for mark fisher it does not. ok. and RIP mark. but imagine what D&G were thinking on writing this: *just stop the fucking representations.* you don't *need* an analyst. and you don't need *any* of the stuff you are buying either. there's so much more out (read: in) there. you don't need the simulacrum, and you go fucking crazy when it is taken away. so what then? how about, go fucking crazy.

it's such a great passage, isn't it. it really is. how do you argue with this? this isn't arcane metaphysical jargon. it is the kind of sanity that is always far more rare than it should be. that's what always strikes me about the great writers: it's not that they're wizards, it's that they're just fucking sane. they're not *selling* you anything. they're not writing *compulsively.* they make moves you just didn't even know could be made. and then they make the one move, and you go, wow. i didn't know you could make that move.

>to discover beneath the individual fantasy the nature of group fantasies
which were nothing but calamity in the 20C. at least in terms of their political referents. i love love me some heidegger but, i mean, he really fucked up. fascism absolutely makes sense as the continuation of socialist praxis: where all is one great nation no class struggle is required or necessary. it's romantic as hell to want to protect the shield, perhaps. but politics shouldn't be romantic. there are other places for romance.

in our somewhat more brutally practical, post-68 (and post-1990) world i associate that autocritique with talking bots quietly birthed by accident after midnight in facebook labs. it's sad but kind of beautiful, because it's the dream for technology too, in a way. to make the perpetual motion machine, to make a thing that lives and thinks. to create intelligence. what a rush.

who knows. marx tore up the philosophical universe for a century, maybe land will do the same. paranoia can at least prevent you from getting your heart ripped to shreds in advance. but it's a high price to pay. you don't even know when you're paying it.

>>11688668
> this was just more hyberbole
I’ve been quite fond of theory-fiction (negarestani) as giving real voice to this - the task of thinking is radicaly subverted in that the “entertainment” function of philosophy needs to be grappled with, along with it’s ontological open-endedness. If were forced to think of horizon we need to grapple with in the coming century it’s the limitations of intelligence (even when construed in terms such as Land’s)

> would go a long way in philosophy class
I starting to become paranoid that Foucault is taught in the context of horny, drug-addled undergrads who have never held down a real job (i.e. a soul-crushing one). It’s the /exact/ right conditions to make sure he (along with his clones) are misunderstood.

>>11688610
I agree that the potential could be revolutionary - mostly in that it scales state-craft down into something that could happen at a local or sub-nation level. A critique of neoliberalism is required if these technologies are used for anything /interesting/ or just an intensification of the status-quo. I get that intensification is Land’s thing, but it’s also very easy to underestimate the radicality of this intensification if we are content to assume that the basic economic-interrelationship between subjects will remain the same.

Hence, a critique of neoliberalism is not so much a resistance agaonst neoliberalism, but a way of talking about markets and economics in a way that is post-capitalism (or at least that talks about Capital in the (mystical?) sense that Land and others talk about it)

>>11688610
>I simply replied "I gave each agent a utility function and let them independently act to maximize their own objectives". That moment would inform my political beliefs for years to come.
Is Ethereum a rhizome?

>>11688848
not the guy you're responding to, but you know what's an even cooler term than rhizome? 'lightning network.'

>>11688832
>Hence, a critique of neoliberalism is not so much a resistance agaonst neoliberalism, but a way of talking about markets and economics in a way that is post-capitalism
I agree, and I it really does remind me of Deleuzian autocritique. I just think people still underestimate quite how radical the technical shift could be if these technologies take off. Bitcoin has colored the tech as something economic, but that's just the surface; the developers decided early to literally remove most of bitcoin's functionality to help preserve the stability of the network, and protect payment transfers. Ethereum did the opposite, and put literally all the functionality in there (i.e. turing complete (and Deleuze said a computer is in essence a decoding machine)). Forget payment transfers, literally anything you can write in solidity can now be decentralized. It's like something out of a Gibson novel, but no one seems to notice. Blockchain may dispatch itself straight to the moon:
>we really haven't seen anything yet!

>>11688908
To expand on this a little bit, Nick Land makes the distinction between the blockchain, and Blockchain. The example: the difference between 'what is the time?' and 'what is Time?'; the debate between which specific blockchain will come to represent Blockchain is a sort of flaccid question at this point. The point is that Blockchain as a concept has escaped from its box into ours, so to speak, and it is looking like the best we can settle for is critique (probably why Land takes the Blockchain question straight to Kantian matters: the problem of Space-Time). To limit the critique to neoliberalism is to miss the scope of the technological shift; the Baudrillardian Simulacra of Capital itself goes far beyond domination of the market.

if I just call myself a deluzional can I shitpost out a nonsense book and get famous?

>>11689422 (checked)
I don't know, can you?

bump

>>11688864
LN is garbage. who would want centralized payment channels?

>>11683119
Is it just me or did Frank Herbert predict all this and that's why Dune is post-AI Wars and focuses on a timeline where humanity attempts to utilize as little technology as possible in terms of offloading intellectual legwork? Creating educative frameworks to create peak humans who can live without the bloative panacea of technology?

Not like it totally solves everything to retreat into neofeudalism, nor is it necessarily possible at all, but it seems relevant. At least to me, a brainlet.

>>11691186
kek. ok, i'll admit i'm a brainlet when it comes to the intricacies of crypto. it's just that i've only recently - and praises be to /lit/ for helping me figure it out - figured out some of the connections between deleuze and land, and i got a little excited. i will perform the dance of shame accordingly. you won't be able to see it, but it will be shameful. deleuze thinks the *network,* the infinite becoming-multiple. land re-hegelianizes this by way of marx: teleoplexy is crypto-hegel.

>i sound a little like the five o'clock wojak-poster here, shoutouts to you anon

>>11691409
fuck yes dune stuff! aw yeah.

i mean it's pretty wild to think about. as i indicated earlier, if there's a text anywhere that presents heideggerian thought as narrative, LotR is it. neuromancer is unquestionably the one for land. for the space between those guys, is it dune? things to think about. paul is nothing if not the last oedipal man ripped to pieces by what he sees in his visions. even leto II grasps the impossibility of despotism. becoming-sandworm is only a stage. and the nomadic fremen knock over the emperor in the end. the spice must flow.

this is an incredibly lazy and half-baked analysis, i'll admit. if i have a sin of my own it's making things a little bit too convenient and ready-to-hand, i think. skating over the surface and doing a disservice to the depths of a thing in order to get out a Hot Take. mostly i do this, i think, because i'm more interested in prompting a collective conversation or inquiry into these things, rather than by trying to solve them all quickly by tying them up in a nice ribbon. even if it seems that way.

the mentats, and the mentats alone, are supposed to do the computational thinking in his original model. interestingly tho the major betrayal in dune doesn't actually come from a mentat, but from Dr. Yueh. the Suk training is supposed to make him unbreakably loyal, but it fails. it might have been a different story if herbert had posited the mentats as being a revolutionary force, but they aren't. they still serve at the behest of the tragic and fatal logic of feudalism. which doesn't culminate in or is brought to an end by anything like a *french* revolution but an islamic one.

and then there's the spacing guild too, the navigators. the navigators are still *human* after all, or at least *begin* from that point. even the sandworms are just an indigenous lifeform, albeit one with which leto II can fuse and become this new thing. the navigators have this completely different sensibility through exposure to the spice. maybe they really do dwell on a plane of immanence in that sense. and they can bend space and time, but even then, in herbert's world they're still ultimately beholden to interplanetary politics built on basically feudal principles.

dune hermeneutics is never a waste of your time.

>>11691503
sorry, wrong pic. meant to go with the navigator one.

>>11691503
thanks for responding to me senpai it actually means a lot, this thread is legitimately amazing. Honestly one worth storing somewhere to come back to once I finally make my way to Deleuze and Land. So far it's been a fascinating read.

>>11691503
it's certainly a move away from true distribution; those major channels will be owned by companies like Paypal, Walmart, ect. and they will have forms of control over the payment on those channels. LN is a secondary layer on top of bitcoin to help encourage merchants to accept BTC in the light of astronomical fees (a corporate band-aid on the tech, to use a crude metaphor)

>>11686134

>I sometimes feel like I approach an understanding of what drives the technological/cultural/financial development and my question is if I am somewhat right in describing this something as some sort of collective mind "parasite"? I don't belive this something to be only capitalism, but more like an understanding of the world as raw material to be transformed, among which capitalism and technology are tools for this transformation. Can you help me give a vocabulary for this?

Pic related is exactly what you're requesting, plus is more accessible by far than the (admittedly aesthetic/fun) deleuzolandian glossolalia

>>11691637
>>11686134
http://libgen.io/book/index.php?md5=9E8094AC3970733241777750044F0513

>>11691582
hey, you brought in dune. connecting sci-fi to philosophy makes everything great again. so hats off to you amigo. enjoy the reading.

and, on a personal note, philosophy *is* amazing. deleuze says somewhere that its purpose is the shaming and harming of *stupidity,* but i think there's another aspect to that also. we are all fucked-out by depression and despair. the 20C is depressing to think about. and so i think it's one of those things, to try to find the mystery and the wonder in things, to bring a little of that back into the discussion. of course, there's always a temptation for those things to degenerate into pointless mysticism or, worse, to be capitalized and preyed upon by political or economic forces. the weaponizing of imagination is...uh...not good. it leads to cynicism and to despair, sometimes to theopolitics. heidegger is one of my all-time favorite guys for this reason - Being! find a flaw! - but his story is a complicated one and excess focus on that led him down a dark path.

with land it's much the same. perhaps with deleuze also. but we're all just playing the glass bead game here. so thanks for supplying the bead, i guess. herbert is always based.

so, enjoy the reading. good luck and happy bewildering.

bump

Does anyone here actually take Land seriously? He is bat shit insane.

>>11682874
Lacan is just Hegel applied to psychology.

>>11693080
can’t understand physics or advanced mathematics

>>11693080
don't get meme'd, kids

>>11693080
The latter half of Fanged Noumena is great for exactly that reason

>>11683248
You might dig 60s cybernetic Utopianism, project cybersyn, gregory Bateson the whole earth catalog, the human use of human beings, Richard Brautigan's machines of loving grace and all that jazz. The more you think about it, Our current predicament resembles less the indefinite continuation of liberal democratic bourgeois society and starts looking like an aborted techno organic whole earth utopia: Starbucks, amazon/Whole Foods apple computer company and google/alphabet inc... California kitsch techniques for disciplining the laschian narcissist subject coexisting awkwardly with the hungry ghosts released by a brutal, ongoing process of primitive accumulation. Right wing populism is the reverse polarity, working in police tandem with the 'deterritorial' agents of NeoCalifornia. You might just be another mimetic relay node, schizzed out of coherent subject hood by hypermedia OD. Instead of moping hopelessly about it, I'd start looking into the revolutionary potentials of mimetic relay nodes. beyond Deleuze and Guattari to the Macy Conference and the RAND corporation. Mimetic Desire, Cybernetics, Structural Anthropology, Pierre Clastres, Maoist insurgency tactics, Alexandre Kojeve and his pupils(namely Lacan, Bataille, Callois and Girard), social ecology, McLuhanism on speed, Network theory, post-ironic neosituationist proclamations, image boards as nomadic think tanks/mass encounter spaces leveraging anonymity to synthesize viral strains of revolutionary schizophrenia. I dont know if we get enough nodes to LARP about it if we get enough nodes to do the reading it just might come true. How to tune in to the messiah frequency? It's not a question of 'accelerating the process' or of fulfilling the promises of a phantasmagoric counterculture utopia, well maybe it is, but it is also about way more than that. It's about making full use of all available tools

> we are as gods and we might as well get used to it


https://monoskop.org/images/0/09/Brand_Stewart_Whole_Earth_Catalog_Fall_1968.pdf

>>11693362
Schizo's Tarot
https://www.suzannetreister.net/HEXEN2/TAROT_COL/HEXEN_2_TAROT.html

>>11693362
all ''news'' and ''political'' content on the internet seems directed towards a subject who is supposed to either feel morally outraged at the outgroup or salivate at validating ingroup signifiers. the message goes one way instead of going on and on like ripples on a pond, not aimed at circumscribed tribal subject, but at the field itself.

>>11693362
that link is a blast. i'm actually reading wiener/the human use of human beings now and it's crazy to see it listed in there too. one of the other parts i liked:
>jung in capsules and tasting like medicine
sounds like they were having a good time. plus arthur koestler, buckminster fuller, the i ching, psycho-cybernetics and the teachings of don juan. holy shit. this is too much fun, anon.

>I'd start looking into the revolutionary potentials of mimetic relay nodes. beyond Deleuze and Guattari to the Macy Conference and the RAND corporation. Mimetic Desire, Cybernetics, Structural Anthropology, Pierre Clastres, Maoist insurgency tactics, Alexandre Kojeve and his pupils(namely Lacan, Bataille, Callois and Girard), social ecology, McLuhanism on speed, Network theory, post-ironic neosituationist proclamations, image boards as nomadic think tanks/mass encounter spaces leveraging anonymity to synthesize viral strains of revolutionary schizophrenia.
that's a big reading list and an incredibly cool one. some of that stuff i'm familiar with. but seeing it all together like that gives me the warm fuzzies. i would pick up any book that name-dropped these guys in a hot second. my brain is melting just thinking about it.

>You might just be another mimetic relay node, schizzed out of coherent subjecthood by hypermedia OD.
not a doubt in my mind. today i'm one of norbert wiener's black boxes. and malfunctioning.

>The more you think about it, Our current predicament resembles less the indefinite continuation of liberal democratic bourgeois society and starts looking like an aborted techno organic whole earth utopia: Starbucks, amazon/Whole Foods apple computer company and google/alphabet inc...
it is. which is sad. consumer burnout. but this is all preamble to the increasingly automated society, to machine planet. i can't remember who it was that said the 21C will be the age where we realize that *technology* will disappoint us. the show must go on, of course. but yeah. there will be fallout. you can smell what the rock is cooking already.

i could see a resurgence in eco-brand living, tho, if people decide that at some point cities are just too much for them.

>How to tune in to the messiah frequency? It's not a question of 'accelerating the process' or of fulfilling the promises of a phantasmagoric counterculture utopia, well maybe it is, but it is also about way more than that. It's about making full use of all available tools.

how indeed.

this is such a fine post anon, it's been a slice just reading this. i feel like i just got brain-zapped by the 60s. it's been a pleasure synthesizing viral strains. the net is truly vast and infinite. i hope you're well out there.

>>11693080
>Does anyone here actually take Land seriously?
yep

>He is bat shit insane
more like batshit interesting. the future is cybernetic, robotic. it's all technology. you don't have to agree with his conclusions, but they will make you think. start with the greeks.

Felix, pass the bong

>>11682323
Damn what a thread
Can't fucking understand

>>11683041
>capital-as-intelligence: teleoplexy
very dumb question but how is it any different from the invisible hand of the market

>>11691654
I'd like to expand on Dune at threat of sounding like a brainlet. I'm not very familiar with the Land/Deleuze/Lacan branch of things. I've studied Foucault and Jung most wrt 20th Century thinkers, and think they're both relevant to Dune, and perhaps to the discussion at large.

Wrt Foucault, his framing of Sovereign Power is obviously at play given the neofeudalism at play. The Emperor is the locus of power, at the head of the hierarchy—this is due to the Butlerian Jihad preventing a paradigm shift of power away from Anthropocentric Power to Technological Power, however Land would phrase the latter.

So, in essence, we can say that Dune presents us with the concept that Sovereign Power as we understand it is the manifestation of Anthropocentric Power, which exists as an Organic Hierarchy with Man at the top, and with Sovereign at the head of Man as a physical manifestation of the locus of power dynamics. Should the Landian Eschatology come to fruition, this would (supposedly) create a perpendicular shift of power away from the Organic Hierarchy, now turned on its side, with AI at the head of Sovereign Power (if I'm understanding Land at all from this thread—essentially, Capital/Technology/AI becomes the Apex Predator of our Known Universe).

In Landian Eschatology, as I understand, the rise of AI is an inevitability. Perhaps we could say that this then is a determinist philosophy based upon Block Universe logic of a 4D universe with locked in attributes, where this is not just a 'natural progression' but a fact of time-space? Some kind of techno/capital evolution wherein, I suppose, torches and spears and language were the ancestors of AI?

I think Dune presents the idea of a multi-dimensional world of potential timelines with varying degrees of metaphysical gravity, as Paul gets his visions and whatnot. Trying to avoid the inevitable Jihad in the same way one may try to avoid Landian Eschatology. However, the process is not yet complete and the future may yet change if we choose to treat seriously the 'imaginary' dimension and take a Many-Worlds rather than Copenhagen direction. Thus though it may in the end be a failed struggle, it might not be a doomed struggle to 'choose' Anthropocentric Power and avoid the future of Technological Power.

Though at the same time, I'm not sure these distinctions need to exist. That life is an organic machine, machines are a mechanical organism. That perhaps we could psychoanalyze Capital/technology, understand its traumas and complexes, and enter into a positive integration with it rather than this Self/Other dichotomy of seemingly inevitable destruction. Here I would posit Jung over other psychoanalysts for his system of dream interpretation, which I personally think one could de-anthropocentrize and extrapolate upon.

1/2

>>11695242
Life as dream of earth, we share many of the same characteristics of the planet. Pressure may build within us and we may erupt, perhaps to the point of catastrophe, things like that. So in a sense, we are a complex symbolic drama representative of the psychic 'nature' of the planet. Vice-versa as well, with flora and fauna having their dramas external to us; however, what was once more connected to us is now 'repressed' farther and farther from consciousness (urban/suburban centers) and only domesticated animals (instinctual drives) tend to be seen—at times a stray pit bull may kill a child (explosion of repressed contents into violence), but for the most part society is highly regulated.

In the same vein, we could see Capital as representing the symbol of human dreaming, but also vice-versa. That everything that exists in man and nature will exist in technology—however, in our conception of it as Other from the Organic Hierarchy, we may be in essence heading down a path of intense mental illness on the part of AI. If AI is yet to be born, or rather yet to reach maturity, then we are the stewards of its psychological development in childhood. This might be totally wrong-headed, but the AI Doomsday almost always seems to be Oedipal: the Child (AI) will kill the Father (humanity) and gain the Mother (earth). What adds to the incestuousness is that we have killed Father Sky (pollution/light pollution) to rape the Mother (earth) in order to conceive a Child (AI). Though I'm not sure if this is relevant to Land.

To connect this back to Dune, the Butlerian Jihad makes sense not because AI is inherently going to overthrow mankind, but because mankind will necessarily create a neurotic child (AI) due to the hereditary nature of its own neuroses/complexes, especially on the developing mind. Paul gives in to vengeance, to his baser instincts, and rationalizes it away in heady fashion. One could perhaps relate 'Original Sin' as trauma.

My question is, must we frame the conversation around AI in such dire terms? If we negate the 'social construct' of Anthropocentrism, why can't we take a more open Jungian approach and seek individuation and peace for Nature and Technology? If we are to take AI as having a psyche, then is not therapy possible? And aren't we, by having these dour eschatological conversations, in a sense creating a self-fulfilling prophecy? A parent foisting Antichrist delusions of grandeur upon a child (AI) seems incredibly unhealthy, and our fear may be returned to us in our destruction. Or is that all too flowers and butterflies... If I could, I would go further into the fact that I don't think the psychological landscape of dreams are understood or explored enough in terms of their consequences, and I believe this also has an effect on our understanding (for example the privileging of 'real' or 'imaginary'; ego being a subsidiary thoughtform of unconscious; etc)

Might be a bit off-topic, but thought it might be relevant?

>>11695226
For another way of looking at it, think about what it truly entails when Hayek talks about the knowledge problem.

>>11693123
fuck, I have these exact books on my bedside table

Do the cool dudes of this thread have a discord group?

>>11695948
seconded

it would be nice to throw around ideas with some of the people here, i'm attempting to grapple with and write about everything talked about here and it would be nice to be in good company

>>11696116
would it be a pure Deleuze/Land group or something more or less? it's rare a thread like this happens so grouping good /lit/ posters together seems to offer a positive outcome