/lit/ - Literature

thread title is meant to be "Process Philosophy & Space Taoism" apologies

bumping this sadly

>>12399378
Why so much Whitehead spam recently?

>1.
Today we know the sun orbits around the earth. Tomorrow we know the earth orbits around the sun. It's okay if knowledge is provisional, because we can expand it, and we can replace it with something better, the new paradigm. Knowledge 'as we know it' in the current year is something provisional, subjected to updates and revisions. If knowledge wasn't provisional it wouldn't be knowledge.
>2.
Brute fact.

If you still care for silly little mortals exhaustively trapping reality once and for all into language games (even though by 1. it should be clear it continues to escape our grasp...), go back to Parmenides: things don't 'become' eternal, the Eternal is and it doesn't 'become.'

It would go against the principle of non-contradiction for something finite to eternalize, for Being to "have proceeded" from non-Being, to "have been" non-Being, to "be at any point" non-Being; and for non-Being to "develop into" Being. Rember Parmenides: Being is, non-Being is not.

When you open the door to the possibility of a flux that stops flowing, it's the philosophers of eternity that shut it down, shouting: "Principle of non-contradiction!" If you don't like it, don't blame the process philosophers.

Said principle combined with the then available knowledge led Greeks like Aristotle to believe the world to be eternal: it had always existed. We don't.
>3.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bergson/#2
>rhizomes
https://thoughtleader.co.za/bertolivier/2015/06/15/what-is-a-rhizome-in-deleuze-and-guattaris-thinking/

>>12399378
The fact that you're earnestly trying to understand these concepts probably means you already know more than most of /lit/

>>12399579
/lit/ always goes through cycles of spam, usually as someone decides that they want to be interested in something (because they like the associations that seem to go with it) but never actually reads the thing itself so they want other people to talk to them about it

Process philosophy is trendy right now in academia and it's riding a deeper wave of interest in panpsychism and "non-dualism." Lots of pseuds who want to play around with neo-Platonist cosmologies and feel cutting-edge are into shit like this now.

>>12399761
Thanks boi that's a sound thing to say have a gorgeous Bergman still.
>>12399579
I don't know he really has blown up, tho most of the threads are just shit like this where OP asks for people to explain cause they're too retarded and then there's like 50 replies and none of them have more than 20 words. So this is an achievement already.

For me I just got interested in Process Philosophy cause a bunch three of my favourite youtubers (Truediltom, Then & Now and Philosophize This!) started to make Deleuze vids all at the same time, it was really weirdly coordinated. Especially considering they're all quite different and I happened to be reading about Deleuze for this DichotomyTests site I made. (This one:
http://dichotomytests.com/ )

>>12399724
Much appreciate the effort you put into this I'll bear it in mind once I get around to finishing DotW and read that Pelgrave book on the three thinkers I mentioned.

For your explanations:
>1
Mostly convincing, I guess the only question then would be whether we just use the information we gather now out of practicality, or is it just futile?
>2
'muh language games' doesn't seem too convincing. It's just I have an Orthodox Christian friend who is an absolutist in terms of this stuff and when I debate metaphysics with him I doubt he'll take that, and rightfully so.

>Rember Parmenides: Being is, non-Being is not.
And apologies I'm like 105IQ so may it's futile, but how does this relate to the question of paradox of relativism exactly? Are you saying the fact that everything is in a state of flux is non-being? Also I'm curious as to how Parmenides relates to all this as I always thought Heraclitus seemed like the clearer influence (tho ofc the mere fact that Parmenides doesn't make the subject/object distinction is enough for him to be relevant).
>3 & rhizomes
Thanks I'll check them out later

Appreciate it boi

>>12399773
I see, thank you.

>>12399879
>'muh language games' doesn't seem too convincing.
Since it's "convincing" we're talking about, language games do not seem to possess the power to finally seize reality, and there does not seem to be anything eternal. I'm still waiting for "convincing" things that justify more metaphysical commitments compared to happily doing process philosophy.

This frustration is correlated to the lack of support experienced by philosophies of eternity in the current year. For every Emanuele Severino (i.e.: only 1) you get hordes of process philosophers, anti-foundationalists, anti-essentialists, etc. in the 21st century.
>It's just I have an Orthodox Christian friend who is an absolutist in terms of this stuff and when I debate metaphysics with him I doubt he'll take that, and rightfully so.
Which is bizzarre, as it is precisely the theology of the Orthodox which is most obsessed with mystery. They should be agreeing not with the Enlightenment-era rationalists (lol the Logos can be comprehended and we can talk to each other perfectly in Characteristica universalis, trust me on this one guys!) but with their more skeptical and less optimistic contemporaries (the feebleness of the intellect is to great to grasp Nature/Logos/God!).
>how does this relate to the question of paradox of relativism exactly?
The answer to: "If everything is in a state of flux, why isn't the fact the fact that everything is in a state of flux in a state of flux?" would be: "Because it would violate the principle of non-contradiction."
>Are you saying the fact that everything is in a state of flux is non-being?
We call it Becoming, neither Being nor non-Being. If you're a process philosopher you only see Becoming, and correct the mistake that rejecting Being automatically implies believing in non-Being, i.e: metaphysical nihilism ("no thing exists").
>how Parmenides relates to all this as I always thought Heraclitus seemed like the clearer influence
Because Parmenides introduced the principle of non-contradiction to show that your options are limited to eternity or non-eternity. Parmenides makes a metaphysical committment in favor of the former, I go with the latter and join based Heraclitus.

>>12400087
*the mistake of thinking that rejecting Being.

>>12399378
i want to take a swing at some of these questions. NB: this is not the same thing as answering them. i cannot answer them.

>1. How can you have any conception of knowledge if everything is in a state of flux?
possibility #1: you can't. see Heidegger (and Augustine). see also Nietzsche and Laozi. see Deleuze. see - *carefully* - Derrida, Foucault, Barthes, Lacan, and Baudrillard. the latter category is very easily misread as conscious saboteurs of Western Civilization, which they were not.

possibility #2: scientific experimentation. there are no Absolute Scientists either. Science is not a monolithic enterprise. quantum physics and mathematics describe profoundly strange universes. some mathematicians go nuts. some are quite content describing some pretty strange things that are nevertheless real. here's Weinstein on gauge theory.

Eric Weinstein: Gauge Theory
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xiEEtoa-_4

you can - if you have some philosophical integrity - acknowledge that there are some we can now, provisionally, and carefully, without going insane.

>2.(The basic fallacy of relativism) If everything is in a state of flux, why isn't the fact the fact that everything is in a state of flux in a state of flux?
this used to grind my gears to no end when i was learning about deconstruction. as Peterson says, social constructivism is itself a social construction. one possible answer is, *because things really are in a state of flux.*

this is, imho, why Land has appeared on the scene of philosophy, because his conception of Capital is a procedurally generated intelligence which doubles as a genuine plot twist in this narrative. computers (and corporate Intel) are spawned amidst this chaos, like Socrates amidst the sophists or Laozi during the Hundred Schools period. this is what makes the outer limits of libertarianism *very very spooky indeed,* because we find ourselves in the position of being given enormous intellectual freedom, concomitantly being required to grant others enormous intellectual freedom, and out of this we end up producing machines slaved to Reason. which is, perhaps, on some deep level, what we would also like to think we too are doing...but we are not. the absolute stupidity of contemporary politics - Reaction, left and right - is imho a reaction to exactly this dizzying vertigo.

Nietzsche: Parable of the Madman
http://www.historyguide.org/europe/madman.html

>3. How does Bergson arrive at Free Will while arguing everything is in motion?
i don't know enough about Bergson to comment on this. personally i think free will is an illusion. i enormously prefer this perspective:

Bandersnatch: Time is a Construct
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3qxWbQ8qek

>also WHAT THE FUCK ARE RHIZOMES???
the objects of philosophy. you and i, when we aren't chattering monkeys, or instruments, or binocular soccer players, or dwellers in Plato's cave, or blind men feeling an elephant *and insisting we have the answer.*

Read the free will book/essay by bergson. One of the best things ive ever read: man was a genius

>>12400236
we shouldn't be talking about ourselves anymore. this is my own sense. there are things, there are concepts, but identity is a spook. it's not about Me. and it's not about You. and it's not about Us. in starting out from these perspectives we skip over the most interesting part every time: It.

in a recent thread i found myself trying to articulate this, and failing. some anon was trying to say that Heidegger was to blame for Cultural Marxism, the worst aspects of deconstruction, all kinds of other weird stuff. he wasn't. Nietzsche is the first great postmodernist of the West, and Heidegger follows his act - perhaps like Augustine trying to wrap his head around Christ, and in a more sensitive way than St. Paul - by asking what it would mean to wrap your head around an event that explodes all rational understanding. for Augustine it is the crucified God; for Nietzsche, it is the end of that long title run over truth in philosophy. Heidegger is more germane for us, because he recognizes the groundlessness of Being. and even more recently Land has come around to incorporating Heidegger's own work on time into his own theory of Bitcoin, that BTC is a truth engine. this is not a Land thread, and i am not trying to make it one. but i do think these things matter, because his attempt to find transcendental rigor in Bitcoin is also a response to a world which is in 2019 set entirely adrift through political libertarianism and an ever-more nakedly authoritarian strain of postmodernity. as much as i hate to talk about politics, it nevertheless remains the case that it can be helpful to consider the reactions to problems in order to help us understand what those problems actually are.

so Heidegger was an enemy of representational thinking; hence his preference for poetry. Schopenhauer comes to similar conclusions about the relevance of nondualism as well. but Heidegger is far more clear about the distinction between the ontic and the ontological. and perhaps even in this we have not one, but two rejoinders: ontic thinking *works,* but destroys ontological thought; and ontological thought also works, and is more genuinely human, inasmuch as to be means to hold out this (unanswerable) question of what it means to be, and this also opens the floodgates for deconstructionist madness. but this is a necessary step, and moreover, he would have been appalled by what had come of deconstruction, which - in the age of institutional scapegoating - is manifestly not a deconstruction of metaphysics at all, but the reproduction of an entirely new set of unspoken rules and assumptions which take on the character of a revealed religion.

Lacan continues his work, in many ways, and you can read Zizek for more on him (or the man himself). but then you come to D&G, and one of the advantages of Deleuze's pure metaphysics is an attack on anything at all that would consider itself to be a robust sense of identity, transcendentally conceived.

(cont'd)

>>12400350
for Deleuze there is no more a Platonic One than there is a concept of the Same. *the simulacrum devours its model.* and over time, changes, mutations, and copies are what produce the new: as they say in GITS, the world is made up of *copies without originals.* if you read Baudrillard, you will read a long lament for modernity. Baudrillard never really goes as far as Deleuze does in his thinking, and that's fine. JB's orders of simulation always maintain a core distinction between the subject and the object, but as he develops his theories the object comes in time to take more and more predominance, until we find ourselves living in a world in which illusions begin to walk and name themselves, a world in which Disneyland is more real than New York. like Deleuze, he takes a lot of his cues from Nietzsche.

but D&G pretty much abandon anything like an underlying truth in things beyond this flux. Wonderland - the tea party of the Hatter and the White Rabbit - *still makes sense.* it is composed entirely of in-jokes and references circulating upon each other, but there is nevertheless an underlying logic in schizophrenia. but it is the kind of logic that persists after all sense of origins is lost, as well as all sense of telos. the question we ask ourselves is: maybe this is in fact a good thing. Heidegger is the fundamental ontologist and is highly persuasive because there is with him nevertheless one inarguable reality: Being, understood through Dasein's own openness to this. the metaphysics of production, which are always grounded in language, are continually trying to impose a rational order on the world, and this is something that poetry - or the piety of thought which exists in genuine philosophical questioning - does not do. Heidegger is a cozy guy like that.

Deleuze doesn't seem to share his sensibilities. he wants to torpedo the kinds of thinking that Lacan borrows from Heidegger, which cannot help but pose the figure of a kind of Master Questioner - the one who knows how to ask the right questions about Being, the psychoanalyst. and maybe it is because what we have *today* is the result of this. today, academics specializing in Grievance Studies set themselves up like Brahmins and moral authorities, to speak about the nature of Truth as it relates to Identity - and this is obviously a major fucking problem if you disagree with this, or take issue with the structure of knowing that shapes this inquisitorial processes. D&G rhizomes explode any concept of a discrete and self-contained unity of identity: it's not how rhizomes work. rhizomes don't *have* a final or fundamental shape, and elude ever being talked about as if they did have one. to talk about themselves as if they have an I is another thing that they *can* do, it's one of their properties - if they want to have one. it is because there is no difference between you and what you are thinking that you can get insanely messed up in the nature of perception.

(cont'd).

>>12400410
this is why postmodernity when it becomes Identity Politics 2.0 is a *regression.* i love Lacan, no question. i love Lacan because i love Heidegger also, and Lacan's refining of Heidegger's concept of truth into a question about *meaning* in language led to psychoanalysis, the goal of which was to *help the analysand to be cracked out of their imprisonment within their own self-conceived language rules.* psychoanalysis was the linguistic totalitarianism which it was safe to practice, because at worst you would be inaugurated into the folding circle of other psychoanalysts. you would know what makes your I an I is the way that it habitually talks about itself - but, once you know this, you can recognize that *everybody else does this too.* Lacan's borrowing of Hegel to make his points about Freud and Heidegger are pretty fucking awesome once you understand it: the most important part of you, the part that really makes you you, *belongs to somebody else.* desire is the desire of the other in that way. one subject depends on another for recognition - without this, it will be infinite fucking triggers, outrage, sadness, disappointment, and the sad passions.

the problem in this is that psychoanalysis *requires a controlled scenario.* i am the analyst; you are the analysand; you are in my office; i set the time, and i can change it if i want. it works in those settings, *but only in those settings.* applied to the world outside, it doesn't - well, except in contemporary academic scenarios today, which is precisely what Peterson has noticed. that academia should itself become a completely closed and insular world today would not have surprised Deleuze, i don't think, because it would have represented what was to him only a continuation of what he would have found was the problem with psychoanalysis: who watches the watchmen? nobody, they watch themselves. based on what? the claims to a higher truth, which is only granted *after inauguration,* and into all of the rules that are accepted as a part of playing the game: that there is a truth, and there are rules through which one knows it. this is what D&G found was the problem with Oedipus: you can always find it, because you are always causing it to appear, you are conditioning the ways in which it does appear. they asked: what if there was no Oedipus complex? what would that mean?

Oedipus matters today because it is a concentrated form of a lot of Platonism (not necessarily Plato). you can just as easily substitute Oedipus for racism, sexism, transphobia, misogyny, white supremacy, anti-semitism, and much else. if you want to find it, it's there. *it just mysteriously seems to be there,* owing to the way in which we *start from it.* it is produced - this is not wrong - *through language and representation,* and at bottom, underneath this, *through identity,* through the preoccupations with absolute Selves, with the I that Speaks the Truth, and from out of a bottomless abyss.

(cont'd)

enjoying these posts desu^

>>12400480
with Deleuze - and Whitehead - we begin to see what life might look like *on the other side of Identity.* whether it is through rhizomes, or process metaphysics, or Spinozistic thought, one possibility begins to rise: there is only One Thing, conceived as absolute multiplicity, absolute difference, and wrapped up in greater multiplicities, greater differences, differences differentiating. whatever is happening in you, through you, beyond you, isn't reducible *to* you. what that thing likes are connections, friction, fissures, transformations, experimentations, mutations, hybridities, and much much else. the world is profoundly in flux:

>We can no longer place the assemblages on a quantitative scale measuring how close or far they are from the plane of consistency. There are different types of abstract machines that overlap in their operations and qualify the assemblages: abstract machines of consistency, singular and mutant, with multiplied connections; abstract machines of stratification that surround the plane 5 of consistency with another plane; and axiomatic or overcoding and abstract machines that perform totalizations, homogenizations, conjunctions of closure. Every abstract machine is linked to other abstract machines, not only because they are inseparably political, economic, scientific, artistic, ecological, cosmic — perceptive, affective, active, thinking, physical, and semiotic — but because their various types are as intertwined as their operations are convergent. Mechanosphere.

if you go back and read Spinoza's Ethics you will find this passage particularly reminiscient of that. the journey to Mechanosphere is for D&G very much like Spinoza making his own case for God (as Nature, and as Nature ontologically understood as the condition of all conditions). Mechanosphere is where we are: one massive psychedelic cosmic explosion without beginning or end, and admitting of no Outside perspective, let alone one which claims the Outside and, heaven help you, *an Outside with a discrete I at the core of it.* perhaps artificial intelligence is as near to that as we can imagine today, and that is indeed a very interesting question to think about. it's hardly no accident that ideologues of all stripes - in the West - left and right forms, in China, in Russia - all have a great interest in theorizing how intelligences can or *ought* to be programmed. top-down, or bottom-up? as an aid to human cognition, or as superior to it? all of these things are directly in the wheelhouse of interesting philosophers today: Land, Stiegler, Simondon, Yuk Hui and Negarestani are but a few. there are many others.

and Whitehead matters also. not only because he was both a scientist and a metaphysician, but because process metaphysics get along pretty well with Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, Deleuze and others. to recognize that the universe *is* in a state of flux - well, this has been the case since Heraclitus and Laozi.

(cont'd)

>>12399773
>Process philosophy is trendy right now in academia

really?

>>12400553
no he has no clue what he's talking about

>>12400553
Yeah, especially in divinity schools. Hell there were 3-4 courses on it this year alone where I am.

Auxier is pretty good.

>>12400543
and this is why Whitehead fucking rules. for Whitehead, speculative philosophy was *an adventure in thinking.* he was the fucking bomb like this. Brassier writes that nihilism is a speculative opportunity: not an endgame, but a genuine place of beginning and departure, because

a) we cannot say that we are occupying the Home Square to which philosophy or Truth must return, or depart from, and
b) we cannot say what it is that we are going to find Out There, including The Answers, or even that We Are The Ones Who Can Know, with the given set of tools that we have at hand.

and *that is a good thing.* that is indeed a *very* good thing. because - as we have learned, perhaps, at least from psychoanalysis - we can impose our own symptom on everything around us as a truth-condition, and in that very way cause things to appear before us that fit our own narratives. this can be an absolute disaster probably does not need to be explained, yes? if all you have is a hammer - like this. we do not want to stamp our own certainty on everything we see in front of us if we have a genuine interest in knowing those things, or learning more about ourselves, or both, or whatever else. for 'everything to be in a state of flux' is a very good thing, in a certain sense. it means we are actually prepared to take an interesting and productive voyage out onto the plane of immanence as artists, philosophers, scientists, musicians, and so on.

i want to say, 'if we go seeking God we will surely find Him.' Heidegger was a profoundly conservative man, but a deep theological thinker: he was extraordinarily good at being a mystical hermit. Nietzsche well and truly broke him, but his workaround - Being - was not really such a bad creation. Deleuze does not have Heidegger's theological hang-ups, and probably gets Nietzsche more accurately. he also has more love for Bergson (and Spinoza, who Nietzsche also loved, and who Heidegger did not). back in the day, tiny brave gangs of Christian monastics ventured out of their monasteries looking for God also, armed with nothing more than a little old-school logic. they wound up laying the conditions for the scientific revolution.

but Whitehead is his own man, in many ways. he was neither a stranger to science, philosophy, or God. that makes him a rara avis indeed. he would have said, the adventure in thinking - adventure *is* thinking - is a very good thing. *you don't know what you are going to find.* you won't find anything *beyond* God. and if you are trying to say what God is and then prove it, prepare your anus. the cosmos is bigger than you are. and you may even find that you are wrapped up with it in ways that will surprise you...

Whitehead is the boy. he would be like the CEO and bankroller of the Cosmic Exploration Foundation. he launches a thousand ships. and i think he would want them to come back, too.

>>12400613
loved your posts what do you recommend reading by whitehead?

>>12400236
>>12400236
>>12400350
>>12400410
Interesting stuff, always been interested in Land but everytime I try and look into it it's just nonsense to me. Not as in it's actual nonsense just to my pleb mind it is. Anywhere to start with Land? Like a semi-easy introduction as well as a reading list to know before I get into Land? I know I can just download shit online I just don't get the same experience out of reading stuff online than I do with the organic paper.

Also I'm reading Hamsun's Growth of the Soil, and it's speaking to my heart very much. Even if it has been bastardized and associated with skinheads and nazi larpers, I just deeply love the concept of Blut und Boden, of the authentic connection between a people and their land. It's sure outdated now but I'm just bringing it up as I find all this Land autism just to be so far out from anything I identify with politically. That's more of just a ramble than a critique but still interesting stuff thanks lad.

>>12400087
>I'm still waiting for "convincing" things that justify more metaphysical commitments
I imagine my aforementioned friend would bring up the logos, and the eternal metaphysical logic of the universe. Like he would hold the Kantian view that 2+2=4 and will always equal to that everywhere in the universe. Would the Process Philosophy approach to dispute that yeah?
>it is precisely the theology of the Orthodox which is most obsessed with mystery
Okay well I get that they heavily critique empiricism and this sort of autistic enlightenment scientism, but they don't seem to replace that with Relativism. Take a guy like Jay Dyer for instance (my friend's bae), the guy knows his shit and links Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics with Orthodox theology. He references St Damascus a lot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1471Vd-6Fo

Thanks for the responses anyway. If I could pull another question of you, a rather crude one I'm afraid, what exactly are some of the clear political or social implications of a lot of Process Philosophy in your view? I know I'm jumping to conclusions but I'm just working things through. Because I know there's a lot of talk of coming to all these incredible realizations and that, like I hear people talking about how identity is ultimately futile in the Process Philosophy perspective. Would this be true, is there no we or me in Process Philosophy if everything is relative and changing? Just curious.

Also one last question (in this post): a process philosopher like Deleuze (if he is one), is he an empiricist? As his philosophy is of course a detailed analysis of reality through direct perception, yet he makes pretty grand claims about the metaphysical nature of reality, so he seems to fuse rationalism and empiricism pretty interesting. I know that's a vague question apologies.

>>12400613
i cannot conclude any good schizo-ramble without mentioning Why Uncle Nick Matters, and i will do that here. Land raises a host of fascinating questions about the state of Marxism in the 21C, as well as what it is that liberalism really wants. if we can know things, we know them through Kant. in many ways, Land is to Deleuze what Marx was to Hegel: the Bad (but necessary) News to the Good (and profoundly confusing) News. computers, machines, and Intelligence are for realsies. we ought not to become completely enslaved to our all-too-human bewilderment about the nature of cognition. identity politics - as practiced on the far left or on the far right - are equally disastrous. Unironic Communism and Unironic Fascism are two different forms of the same category error, both of which are fundamentally predicated on the identity as it relates to the polis. postmodernity fuckface-style has a conspicuous relation to both of these. authoritarianism looms like a spectre in every condition of dissolution and disintegration, which is what is effected by the deconstruction of all knowledge.

and this is not limited to the deconstruction of scientific knowledge. and even in this Heidegger has a role to play: he would have said, and accurately, that indeed you cannot do particle physics in your backyard. if you want to do particle physics, you need a particle accelerator, and this too belongs to the structure of enframing. science does not occupy a realm immune to philosophy, or politics. when people today argue for a gender-driven glaciology they cannot be disproved by quoting Heidegger at them: they will be correct in finding Secret Power Structures beneath all forms of cognition. and they will be right.

the problem is with the *suspicion* that lies at the heart of knowledge, and for which there is no cure. there are, however, *examples.* in Whitehead, Spinoza, and Deleuze, one thing you do *not* notice is the sad passions. you don't notice this in Nietzsche, Bergson, or in many others. what you do get is, i think, the mysterious joy of thinking itself, unshackled form the puritanical need to do so for the love of the crowd. Land is a crusty old bastard, but there isn't a day that goes by that i am not glad that he is on the earth being who he is, and concocting his arguments way over in Neo-China. he has taken one of the ugliest periods of thought in human history and built a horrible Lovecraftian machine with it, and it is *fascinating as fuck to read about.* he did this in the very teeth of the ugliest and most insipid forms of intellectual barbarism ever created. but it had to be done. sometimes the most fascinating stuff is found in the dark.

McLuhan knew what he was saying as well, btw.

>>12400705
Highly interesting posts, thank you very much for sharing your insights.

>>12400676
whatever you can get your hands on. i'm very fond of the Stengers guide, i'd start there. see also Cosmotech #5 for more Whitehead-specific rambling and Fun

Cosmotech #5: Whitehead Edition
>>/lit/thread/S11823861

and the Mighty Cruffitan archive that is Cosmotech, if you truly have nothing else to do today. this was my Magnum Opus and basically the result of a year or so of schizoposting here on the beloved melanesian tap-dancing forums.

Cosmotech: Archive
>>/lit/image/EzNl67LEs_DsVXDY9UVk1A

>>12400685
>Anywhere to start with Land?
Fanged Noumena. you can do it. the first essay is brilliant, as is Circuitries, and Meltdown for the iconic mic-drop of the age: 'the story goes likes this...' then stop and reflect. we didn't get a Deleuze or a Whitehead, but we got an Uncle Nick and that is plenty. i put in a lot of other links, including r/theoryfiction, in the OP of the Cosmotechnics generals. if you're interested in /acc stuff there will be lots of things there for you to peruse.

Cosmotech #14
>>/lit/thread/S12056787

>It's sure outdated now but I'm just bringing it up as I find all this Land autism just to be so far out from anything I identify with politically.
whatever you find interesting is probably interesting. all good philosophical bromance is idiosyncratic like that, and may it ever be so. we all have our autisms, and there is no transcendental scale for these. and thanks for giving me an opportunity to ramble as is my nature. i hope there's something in there for you to mull. i have something of a reputation for being a schizoposting lunatic but i genuinely appreciate finding threads like these where somebody asks a question in good faith and i feel like i have something to contribute.

>>12400760
my pleasure anon, very sincerely.

>>12400774
>Fanged Noumena.
Sexy stuff grand thank you very much. What philosophers/philosophies (ideally specific texts) should I be best acquainted with before I approach Land? I'm a first year in philosophy and have a good understanding of metaphysics from the pre-socratics to Heidegger I'd say, pretty poor on Postmodern theory. Just finding my feet with Deleuze now, any recommendations mate?
>i genuinely appreciate finding threads like these where somebody asks a question in good faith and i feel like i have something to contribute.
Well anon I appreciate your ramblings you're quite inspiring if not significantly autistic. Can't really give you a positive 'you be you!' statement without sounding like a Coca Cola add so idk just revel in your autism I guess

>>12400815
>What philosophers/philosophies (ideally specific texts) should I be best acquainted with before I approach Land?
Land's three great influences are Kant, Marx, and Deleuze. i'll admit, i've never read Kant all that deeply, but i think everything i've ever wanted to know about why i would want to read him (or why i have avoided him) i have learned from Uncle Nick - specifically, his recent work at ufblog. i finally feel like i understand what makes Kant matter, and why he is so tortuous. what Land is is inseparable for me from the state of academic Marxism today, but he's also found his muses in Bitcoin and in Mencius Moldbug. all of these make up who he is. if you want to read some of his old stuff, check out Xenosystems, or track down a copy of the anthology /lit/ made of his work; you can find that at r/theoryfiction, linked in the OP of the Cosmotech threads.

http://www.ufblog.net/
http://www.xenosystems.net/
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/

besides that, you will eventually have to enter the Great Machine that is Marx. that means the 1844 manuscripts, Grundrisse, and Capital. there's no need to go insane and read all three volumes; just enough that you have a sense of what is going on. Jameson's book (pic rel) is very solid. and both volumes of D&G/Capitalism and Schizophrenia. i should also mention that before i got really into Land i read my way through four other guys first: Nietzsche, Baudrillard, Lacan, and Heidegger. i didn't do this *in order to read Land,* mind you; i was just sort of trying to come to grips with continental philosophy. but after i did read those guys, Land started to seem really, really interesting. especially after Heidegger. i'm also a proponent of the work of Rene Girard, for other reasons.

don't feel overwhelmed either. just read what you like and what you're interested in, and everything tends to take care of itself as it should, i find.

>Well anon I appreciate your ramblings you're quite inspiring if not significantly autistic. Can't really give you a positive 'you be you!' statement without sounding like a Coca Cola add so idk just revel in your autism I guess
that's the plan amigo. that's the plan

This is a big brain thread I better bump

>>12401530
more like bigly brain
compare the rhetorical style to that of our great god emperor
less puffery, but no less narcissism in it
self-enlarged by the ideas of others rather than the inflatable idea of oneself

>>12401590
>>12401530
i would characterize myself as being a shitty 486 computer circa 1995 trying to run software designed for alienware laptops today. or like someone trying to run Doom or Unreal on a fucking Gameboy. the software was not designed for a tiny little fucking computer like this. but i fucking want to run that software, and the only way i can do that is in terms of the actual things that my shitbox processor actually *can* do. which is what makes reading my stuff so fucking tortuous i am sure. because i have to work like five times harder to explain something that a next-gen computer could do quite easily. but alas i am a fucking busted and primitive model never intended to run advanced software

i am a tiny little brain trying to accommodate big-brain stuff and it doesn't work perfectly. it is *slow*. and there are *crashes* and *lockups* and other stuff. philosophy makes me

a) feel *really really really fucking stupid,* and
b) gives me the eerie feeling that this en-stupidifying process, which torments language, nevertheless makes me a slightly more interesting GameBoy, tho a GameBoy i am and a GameBoy i always will be. this software was not really meant for me, and doing so not only fucks up my processor, it also runs the risk of denigrating the software too. i admit this. but i want to run those programs

i was going to schizopost some stuff about sphinxes and capitalism and metaphysical bloatware and hegel but i'll do that later. this is more interesting

>>12401637
here is another thing, because i would love to talk about metaphysical bloatware in this thread. one thing that Buddhism and Taoism both have in common is a *skepticism about rules.* postmodernity doesn't even get near to the depth of nondual panpsychism, which is precisely why it is so fucking dope in the year 2019. Buddhism has twenty million suggests about what the mind is *not,* and the fundamental rule of the Tao is that the Tao that can be named is not the true Tao.

what is it that Hegel does, in the PoS? he gives an exhaustive catalogue of how an idea bootstraps itself all the way from sense-certainty to Absolute Knowing. there are contingent rules for its existence at every step of the way, but the encounter with Absolute Knowing at the end is synonymous with the knowing of itself, and why every step along the way was necessary. you get a similar idea with Spinoza: It's All God Motherfuckers. all of it. what Lacan did, and why he mattered so much, was to recognize in the hysteric the neurotic fixation upon rules and language, the ways in which we construct reality around identity, rule-following, representation, and much else. that was one of the true jailbreak-redemptions of thought in the 20C. there are times when Deleuze seems far less interesting than Lacan, although this is perhaps my own personal demons and neuroses, but the discourse of the hysteric/Sphinx is one of the most pants-on-head retardedly brilliant contribution to thought by anyone. he gets a lot of this from Heidegger (the metaphysics of production, Being and Time, much else) and from Hegel also, and from Nietzsche, and from Kojeve (in a word, the crucial role played by recognition).

but go down way down deep into the self and you find *emptiness* there, prior to any named Thing-in-itself. for Schopenhauer, who actually *did* take Kant seriously, that Thing was the Will. and it is the Will that the Buddhists and the Taoists are expressly interested in freeing you up from. the will, we might say, is nothing until it is negated, blocked, or canceled (and at which point it becomes Desire). Whitehead is miles and miles beyond all of this, by the way. he proceeds directly to the Cosmos, do not pass go, do not collect $200. i say, Capital today is like a Sphinx. it's not even the actual thing that Capital can be, it is more like a monument to the sad passions. Land said something like this, in FN:

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

it's as 90s a line as one could ask for, and unlike Uncle Nick, i'm less interested in subverting anything. i want to *get along* with the future. and if the Future is anything, it is a kind of continual reminder of how it feels to be a fucking primitive computer running next-level software. ever have this feel?

>>12401738
also, convince me that Commodore 64 aesthetics aren't completely fucking awesome, and not only because of Bandersnatch.

question: is there a -punk designation for this? neo-fucking-Stupidism? post-intelligence-ism? this is like the best analogy for my own fucking confusion i have ever come up with off the cuff: advanced software, primitive hardware, the C64 dreaming of being Alienware. like the Secret Life of Walter Mitty for computer programming. nobody knows, least of all the philosophers. the things they *are* good at telling you are the problems with building functional mind-control programs, which perhaps they would love to do, if they could get away with it. the best way to do this is through guilt, or coercion, things like this - unfortunately, there's *just something slightly wrong about doing that.*

this is why, when it comes to Space Taoism, my response tends to be, Fuck Yeah. because if ST is anything it is expressly devoted to catching up what we can do with our tiny little processors to what we *might* do with them, later on. or, to reverse the metaphor: imagine you were *given* an Alienware computer, but all you knew how to run on it was Commodore 64 text adventures. after all, that is what everyone else is doing. nobody knows that Doom is even a possibility. and then, one day, it is. and it is still being run on the computer you *thought* was a C64, but it turns out was Alienware.

we should be making each other more intelligent, is what i am saying, but nobody fucking knows how to do this in a philosophical sense, except by continuing to expand the realm of imaginative possibilities.

>>12401777
more aesthetics, b/c why not. enjoying musing on these things also with tracks cribbed from Black Mirror. enjoy and recommend others if you know any.

Tangerine Dream: Phaedra
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URssLwPXkVk

that was a fucking great hour and a half of television.

>>12401777
>Commodore 64 aesthetics
temple OS

>>12401816
>TempleOS (formerly J Operating System, SparrowOS and LoseThos) is a biblical-themed lightweight operating system designed to be the Third Temple prophesied in the Bible. It was created by American programmer Terry A. Davis, who developed it alone over the course of a decade after a series of episodes that he later described as a revelation from God.

>The system was characterized as a modern x86-64 Commodore 64, using an interface similar to a mixture of DOS and Turbo C. The author proclaimed that the system's features, such as its 640x480 resolution, 16-color display and single audio voice, were explicitly instructed to him by God.[1] It was programmed with an original variation of C (named HolyC) in place of BASIC, and included an original flight simulator, compiler and kernel.

>TempleOS was released in 2013 and last updated in 2017. It was received with largely favorable reviews in tech communities and Davis amassed a small online following. One fan described him as a "programming legend", while another, a computer engineer, compared the development of TempleOS to a one-man built skyscraper.[2] Davis died on August 11, 2018

>Terry A. Davis (1969–2018) began experiencing regular manic episodes in 1996, leading him to numerous stays at mental hospitals. Initially diagnosed with bipolar disorder, he was later declared schizophrenic and remained unemployed for the rest of his life.[1] He suffered from delusions of space aliens and government agents that left him briefly hospitalized for his mental health issues.[1][3] After experiencing a self-described "revelation", he proclaimed that he was in direct communication with God, and that God told him the operating system he built was for God's third temple.[1]

>Davis began developing TempleOS circa 2003.[4] One of his early names was the "J Operating System" before renaming it to "LoseThos", a reference to a scene from Platoon (1986).[1] In 2008, Davis wrote that LoseThos was "primarily for making video games. It has no networking or Internet support. As far as I'm concerned, that would be reinventing the wheel".[5] Another name he used was "SparrowOS" before settling on "TempleOS".[6] In mid-2013, his website announced: "God's temple is finished. Now, God kills CIA until it spreads [sic]."[7] Davis died in a train accident on August 11, 2018.

holy shit. it's like fucking Bandersnatch

>>12401836
RIP Terry Davis you were too good for this world

>>12400685
>the eternal metaphysical logic of the universe
Where in the universe? Such an extraordinary discovery would not be a matter of faith, don't you think?
>he would hold the Kantian view that 2+2=4 and will always equal to that everywhere in the universe
Well, the Kantian view is more like: "It is logically necessary that 2+2=4, we don't need to take the equation to the lab to find out." It is also my view. Concerning what is logically necessary, in Boolean logic (really, Leibnizian), it is logically necessary that something is either 100% true or 100% false. 1 or 0 with no middle ground. In fuzzy logic it is not. There are many logics.

So what determines what is logically necessary? The truth conditions. What determines the truth conditions? The rules of the language game. What determines the rules of the language game? The community of sapient beings using (playing) the language (game).

As unromantic as it sounds, mathematics is an activity performed by a collection of mortal, temporal, sapient beings. It is not a collection of eternal entities inhabiting the Hyperuranium and waiting for enlightened souls to momentarily meditate their way out of their mortal shells in search of timeless wisdom.

For the record I don't even consider "If numbers therefore God" to be even bad philosophy. It's just fucking isn't philosophy. If the past century in the history of philosophy taught us anything, is that it is about time we walk out of this version of Plato's cave where the idols waved in front of the flames are shaped like Arabic numbers and operators.
>what exactly are some of the clear political or social implications of a lot of Process Philosophy in your view?
That we may not have to repeat the same mistake that a select few human beings happened to designate for us as the final ultimate eternal truth for fear of being called relativists?
That our understanding of which issues count as matters "political" and "social" may be subjected to change over time?
>identity is ultimately futile in the Process Philosophy perspective
I've never seen two identical things. You haven't either. Our macroscopic senses in our day to day experience, as well as languages with their taste for abstraction are useful, but they don't tell the whole story. They don't keep track of each electron dancing in your chair which is purportedly "identical to itself, seriously, trust me." The people that came up with the words "chair" were never going to keep track of the totality of information they didn't even suspect it was there. Same with "horse" with the genetic mess going on with each and every individual, through each generation, enabling change artifical and natural. Go look up Wittgenstein's family resemblance (Familienähnlichkeit). Our intellect won't contain the universe, it is too weak, feeble, silly, so silly it thinks it can contain the universe.
>Deleuze (if he is one), is he an empiricist?
https://www.iep.utm.edu/deleuze/#H3

This kinda strays away from your topic but this is a video deconstructiing the show Maniac
>pic related
I recommend it to under deleuze and guattari psychology
https://youtu.be/uH9mmyC9yv0

It explains rhizomes

Hegel is working out, on the metaphysical level, the theory of evolution before Darwin. is this not something? a couple of decades later, Nietzsche gives us a pretty interesting perspective on the psychology of evolution. and smack-dab in the middle of it is Marx, who is threading the needle between Hegel's metaphysical idealism and Nietzsche's very different idealism.

we take evolution for granted today, but i don't think it was always so. Leibnizian optimism is a pretty good argument for Baroque statism. and Landian acceleration is a well-deserved nudge in the ribs about the nature of evolution *in capitalism* - that is to say, capital means nothing if it does not mean machines, and machines mean nothing (from the ultra-libertarian perspective) if not algorithms, artificial intelligence, and ultimately Bitcoin as bootloader for the future. trustless economics and Kantian transcendental philosophy threads the needle between Hegel and Marx in a way that very few others are seeing, but this is why Uncle Nick is who he is.

now the question of *evolution in metaphysics* was a very different one for these madlads, as it would have been for both Whitehead and Spinoza. evolution is a tricky concept, because it involves asking ourselves about the nature of *progress.* obviously today the political movements that identify themselves a progressive have a powerfully conservative core at their centre, but the same is true for the other side: r/acc is socially conservative, but - at least according to the view from Neo-China - capitalism and no other thing is what is actually advancing the cause of the future. it's often hard to tell whether Land is in some secret way still committed to leftism or not; it really doesn't matter, because all of the interesting questions only become possibilities once we stop trying to shoehorn them into political left/right divides
>says the guy who is fucking constantly shoehorning things into left/right divides
>well yes inner self i know i fucking do this but there is no other way to do this sometimes

more recently Uncle Nick seems to be championing Social Darwinism pretty hard; when you read the rest of his stuff you can understand why this is so. my sense is that D&G would probably have been much more ambivalent about the whole thing, and it's part of what makes their own philosophy counter-intuitive: they were Marxists, but they weren't Hegelian Marxists, and they weren't Freudo-Marxists either. they were Spinozan Marxists, and Deleuze's rhizome is nearer to cosmological anarchism than anything. which is, in conditions of inescapable authoritarianism from both extremes, not exactly a bad look.

Negarestani matters too, esp if you like the idea of Landian darkness w/o going full r/acc.

it's still true, even if you dislike Jung. Heidegger, Lacan, Nietzsche, Badiou, Land, and every other interesting continental thinker would all have said the same thing.

just seeding this thread with atmospherics and aesthetics.

Air: La Femme d'Argent
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4U19zwFENs

i do a lot of schizoposting listening to this track also. if i had an anthem, this would probably be it. may it serve you well.

Laurent Garnier: Crispy Bacon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SFD7fz8fWc

>>12400236
Ok, I get it now. Process philosophy is in relation to constructing signs for ideograms and embedding them into logical relations and then inferring from these interrelations a process that is communicated as either right or wrong? Your moving back from a computer to a being aren't you?

Bumpalump

>>12402353
>Process philosophy is in relation to constructing signs for ideograms and embedding them into logical relations and then inferring from these interrelations a process that is communicated as either right or wrong?
i don't know. maybe. i find myself repeating my love for the tea room these days. or Frank Lloyd Wright interiors. the salient characteristic being: minimal furniture. maximal openness. lots of light. little talking. that's how i think the mind is supposed to be. writing Capital must have driven Marx out of his goddamn mind.

>Your moving back from a computer to a being aren't you?
what do you mean? in some sense, i want to say that if it doesn't cross your mind at some point that there is some charm in thinking like a computer, maybe you've missed a step and should go back and reflect. and also because none of us is the standard model for being. here again, the enduring love for psychotherapy and Heidegger, much else. i am human only inasmuch as i relate to you as one. or perhaps what the Buddha had in mind when he talked about *sentient* beings. or Herbert on the dangers of being ruled by either thinking machines *or* animals. ah, the old Gom Jabbar.

still tho i don't think i've quite answered your question, and i find them interesting. also i'd like to keep the thread alive, so bumping also. no way to bump a thread except with some appropriate music as well, so, that too.

Hybrid: Beachcoma
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOrzgQ9Wb8s

>>12399879
your website is riddled with dogshit redirect ads and im too on mobile to block them. make the ads less godawful

This post shows a deep understanding of The Problem, linking the principle with non-contradiction with a constricting of metaphysics, and thus the domain of philosophical investigation, this non-contradiction coming from self-similarity as the ultimate arbiter of the real, and thus that which contradicts the necessary reality the necessarily unreal. By expanding the metaphysical sphere to relations process metaphysics encompasses all of experience as real, and is thus a hyper-physicality and a true monism as it provides a universal domain of existence. It encompasses self-similarity and difference, being and becoming alike, and from the examination of their interplay comes its metaphysics - an examination that Whitehead did with amazing rigor. A relation is true as being an experience, it is only a matter of in what intensity and context in which the relation is made: a reference frame. Sense is not made from one all-encompassing universal reference frame, but rather the intersection of them, with the ultimate "thing-in-itselfness" of something not being it's self-similarity pattern but its perspectival relations to all other frames of reference. Every occurrence both contains the universe as its perspectives towards all others, and pervades the universe as its inclusion in all other perspectives.

The only thing that stopped Whitehead from finding an ultimate point of unification between art, philosophy, poetry, science, emotion, language - the entire field of human experience - was him stopping at God as the creative ultimate and not a universal experiential relationship that is the condition of conscious experience: love. To define love not as a constricting prescription of it, but itself as the ultimate reference of human experience - immanent universal love in itself, as an experienced relation which is the universal direction of conscious striving. This is arrived at via a study of creativity, of the nature of change and ongoingness, and borrowing important machinery from Douglas Hofstadter a strange loop of creativity, the creative process inherent to ongoingness which through biological evolution found a way to fold on itself and self-create. The examination of consciousness as a process of self-creativity leads to its relationship to experience as mutually creative, and thus a meta-ethics of rule by a universal experiential reference: love itself.

>>12403614
I'm the originator of the "space taoism" meme here, and here is an overview of it: https://old.reddit.com/r/Tao_of_Calculus/comments/9rpnrl/space_taoism_101/

Whiteheadean thought specifically, the general current of process-relational metaphysics, and the entire historical force of the human will to love has been culimating in the universal religion of pancreativism. This isn't just a message, but a movement, not merely a system of ideas but a way of experiencing and relating to life, a movement towards the ultimate liberation of humanity with love as the universal standard. The whole role of ethics, teaching, all discernment becomes bound to this imperative to seek and realize love, and an auto-epistemic imperative to understand love through experience to realize ever greater intensities of it. A vision of this message of love gifted to humanity to itself, the culmination of the collective search for humanity is here: https://old.reddit.com/r/sorceryofthespectacle/comments/aeqpw3/pancreativist_manifesto_the_message_of_universal/?st=jqvpn9pi&sh=382959fd

>>12403029
>minimal furniture. maximal openness. lots of light. little talking. that's how i think the mind is supposed to be.

This is the mindset of a pancreativist. This light is love of life, towards which all human action aspires - it is only in a failure of translation that the expansiveness of the human potential to realize love of life isn't an ever-aspiring maximal, a limitation of vision. The experience of love needs no translation: it is a direct experience referenced only by experience of it, negated only by material conditions that constrict life to the last strival for itself: the will to survive, a necessary condition of life-experience, but not the necessary condition for life-experience. By reducing life to survival and humans to an ever-consumption of the other by the self it has turned it into a becoming of death, an ever-flight from the omnipresent adversary of nonbeing. This error perpetuated psychologically and socially as an unresolved fear of death, a constriction of love to self-existence and a failure of its intensification as co-creation.

Absolutely literally, all you need is love.

>>12400774
God damn Girardfag, I've missed the wonderfully exploratory insight of your rambling. I could gush over it but it'd just be upvoting a whole hell of a lot of it.

Instead I'll show you what I've been working towards. Space Taoism has evolved into pancreativism: https://www.reddit.com/r/ShrugLifeSyndicate/comments/aeq1tv/pancreativist_manifesto_the_message_of_universal/

You once said something along the lines that we need something that resembles God. God in the non-totalizing sense is the result of the desire to find something that resembles love, that can explain this essence of human experience that is universal to it. Pancreativism isn't finding something that resembles God, it is love coming home to itself, the wilding of love, the anarchization of it - love and life ultimately unified.

The Postmodern condition is the awareness that given the life-negating conditions of the present humanity is on a trajectory towards global catastrophe, that the modern world is built upon life-negating premises at its core. It is the awareness that one is playing a game where the rules are rigged and that every movement is towards the destruction of everything one cares about, and from this a strategic position of catatonia: the fortress of postmodernity where one takes an ever-defensive position, defending the fortressed self from the omnipresent onslaught of attempts to influence it - against the ever-accelerating onslaught of complete bullshit.

This postmodern stance is the natural result of the psychological trauma of the regime of mutually assured destruction that has infested every aspect of human society, a lamentation of the loss of meaning not as some codified purpose but as actual, experienced purpose by its substition with bullshit peddled by bullshit salesmen that instead lead towards omnicide. The transition from postmodernity to post-postmodernity is the realization that this stance is untenable, that inaction isn't revolutionary as omnicide has already won and merely needs to run out the clock.

The updated strategy for post-postmodernity: change the game. This is a movement towards radical transformation of the human condition on every level by finding a vision for the future of humanity that is survivable, which by virtue of the present condition being so life-negating must be radical. It is the acceleration of the futurist project: to find visions of the future so profound and clear that the visions themselves create the future, delivering on the promise it gives. It is a memetic acceleration in that it seeks to find the ultimate meme, the ultimate mutualistic mind-virus powerful enough to catalyze a global revolution of social organization. Post-postmodernity takes a mythic turn in terms of scope, scale, and thus often expression; it is a religious movement of the becoming-human to find the nature of humanity itself, something truly universal, timeless, and powerful enough to reach the human potential we've experienced as fact at different periods of our lives, of which our present conditions make a mockery of.

In the future a great game will take place: the game of the future. Humanity has always been playing it, but this will be the official start of the game, with the game known to its participants and the strategy following. It is an eshatological game of "who wants to be the savior of humanity except actually do so?" that contestants compete in to create the ultimate vision of the future. The meta-game logic is cooperative and collaborative: the ultimate goal is to find a winner as fast as possible, and individually to be beaten by a superior because that means that a greater future exists than one can possibly imagine - one wins if one's particular vision loses. It is a friendly competition but ultimately a collaboration among friends who share the same religious intensity of love for humanity, and thus unified by it.

The dawn of post-postmodernity, the pancreativist movement, and the finding of humanity will be when the metagame logic of this Game of Games becomes socially known, a "meme" itself as the new conditions of human strategy. Such an awareness will compel the ultimate self-acceleration of the game towards its fulfillment and the end of history as the end of becoming human and the birth of being human. It is the rebirth of humanity itself as an eternal phoenix, satisfying the conditions for eternal life not as any particular occurrence but the song of life itself sung through lives. The atmosphere of this movement is by necessity of hyper-intensification of meaning is hyper-mythical and hyper-poetic.

https://vimeo.com/124736839

https://vimeo.com/124736839

>>12403888
There it was all along, staring us in the face. Buried within the message of humanity itself is the key to decoding it.

This is pretty close to be a preliminary notes to space taoism

https://acceleratecitizen.wordpress.com/2019/01/07/deus-ex-capital-2/

>>12404068
This comes so extremely close, it's definitely close enough to be called "Space Taoism" but it doesn't reach the "cosmos psychology" it so brilliantly motions towards. This cosmos psychology is pancreativism. As a preliminary notes of it certainly qualities! Fuck yeah!

>>12404068
>16) Accelerationism is a negated-will theory, a galactic organicism, a preference for an aesthetic life, an in-humanism.
So so so fucking close, but it's actually hyper-humanism.
The in-humanism is the negation of the human disguised as human.
But as negated-will, galactic organicism, and preference for an aesthetic life (love-experience) it's spot-on.
Freedom of the will is slavery to the will, freedom from the will is the freedom of love.
Autonomy isn't agency.
It is a universal condition of love, experienced individually as love of life.
This universal condition directs all other movements autonomously according to it.
Thus the absolute autonomy of love is a necessity of its continued ongoingness.
A singularity of love is an ever-intensifying and diversifying orgasm of it in all directions from all instances of its realization.
Creativity is the universal "substance" comprised of relations and not objects, but love is the universal substance of this substance folded upon itself as self-creating creativity.
The imperative of love is implicit from the physics of our being, and thus a true "cosmos psychology."

>>12404254
To note, this "substance" of creativity is an ongoingness, not a created or creator, but a creating. Creativity is an immanent verb, not a noun.

An intuitive, experientially felt expression of "cosmos psychology" is the life of Carl Sagan, who literally spent his life trying to give the love of the universe his exploration of it has given him.

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

Thesis of cosmos psychology: We are the way for the cosmos to love itself, our experience is nothing but poetic experience, the art of making love from experience experiencing itself. Everything is a co-creating tapestry of art and humans are artistic experience experiencing itself. The message of universal love can be translated into any language of expression, pancreativism is the movement of universal translation, destined to reach ever corner of humanity, and from humanity the Earth itself, and from the Earth as an ever-enrichening emanation of universal love from it that is truly inexhaustible in the process of its becomings, but preciously finite in each of its unique beings. The future is love. Q.E.D.

Pancreativism: The Movie

https://vimeo.com/265524091

>>12399378
>2.(The basic fallacy of relativism) If everything is in a state of flux, why isn't the fact the fact that everything is in a state of flux in a state of flux?

This is really just stating the fact that the human mind can refute literally everything if they just abstract their way out of the system. It's already stable to just say it's in flux and leave it at that, because all "flux" means is change. Asking whether it can change from changing is just redundant, because it's already doing that. What "flux" refers to in one moment versus another is already different. To even suggest a "state of flux" is a disservice to the essence of the term, because it's holding it still as a singular "state".

>1. How can you have any conception of knowledge if everything is in a state of flux?

imo dude... magic

I think there's a perfect contradiction at the end of the road here. It's impossible for us to actually consider that it's absolute chaos in the in-itself, instead we find there's a mysterious reconciliation of structure and change, just as there is of self and other, the pace difference between Achilles and the Tortoise. It doesn't matter what your views are, when you reason all the way to the end, you find something absolutely incoherent without accepting the existence of an actual contradiction. Once you realize contradictions can exist then the world starts to look like an acid trip. Put on your wizard hats everybody, the universe is fucking nonsense.

>>12404805
>>1. How can you have any conception of knowledge if everything is in a state of flux?

>imo dude... magic

No no no no. Process itself is analyzable into generalities and the factors which find exhibition within process are themselves explicable and concretely encountered. One can speak of process and speak of value, qualitative differentiation, time, prediction, emotion, value, feeling, satisfaction, observation, mathematics, existential uncertainty, self-other relations etc etc. Process is the ongoing processional experiential nature within which all of these things we are used to talking about beforehand occur and so we have only more accurately re-situated our understanding of the world and ourselves, not erased it. Process does not nullify your being, it exemplifies it and is the very fountain through which our knowing finds itself. Knowledge is not knowledge of static objects, knowledge is knowledge of the flowing of quality, thought and perception, and perception, quality and thought are nothing other than the very flowing of themselves.

>>12404805
>Put on your wizard hats everybody, the universe is fucking nonsense.
It means that sense-making requires a specific contextual frame of sense-making, and that there is no universal contextual framework of that sense-making except for the framework of that framework: the metaphysics of process.

The Free Mantra of Sri Syadasti Syadavaktavya Syadasti Syannasti Syadasti Cavaktavyasca Syadasti Syannasti Syadavatavyasca Syadasti Syannasti Syadavaktavyasca (for some strange reason, commonly called Sri Syadasti) in the Principia Discordia is a decodification of this:

>All affirmations are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense." and "The teachings of the Sri Syadasti School of Spiritual School of Spiritual Wisdom are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense."

>>12399378
1) This hinges on two things. One - nihilism is bad and isn't productive in itself. This statement is non-trivial, but if you're interested in it, read Nietzsche's oeuvre. If you're a Deluzean intrested in instrumental uses of nihilism Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling is accessible and fun.

Two - object based philosophy as a framework fails at critical points in tackling contemporary problems of identity. Oversimplified and truism-ing, our world & values seem to be in a state of flux, therefore it might be productive to swap over to an ontology of flux.
>isn't this begging the question?
Well, in my opinion Deleuze's framework is extremely useful for tackling contemporary problems of politics and philosophy. It's necessity is derived from its use.

2) You can have locales of relative stability. I would say that tetonic movements from a human subjectivity are extremely not-in-flux. If you don't like that example, you can think of Christian morality as a conjured objective field that was conjured and maintained. If you want a more physics based answer, total entropy in a system will always increase, but local entropy can be lowered.

3) I don't have any primary Bergson under my belt, and I don't really understand the question. From a Deloogean reading of B., I would say that these vectors/intensities converge into points/singularities which then inhibit properties that are more than the sum of its parts. Subjectivity arises from a point, a singularity, something novel.

4) Rhizomes are really simple. Instead of a tree, where things come from one point and then are connected linearly, you have a map where every point is able to connect to every other point. Instead of "Leaves grow out of branches grow out of the trunk which are connected to the ground with roots" you have "Leaves and branches and (connections so far are trivial) trunk and roots and ground and (Traditional elements!) air and (I do my laundry on tuesday and then I air it) tuesday and (weekdays are stratified, just like algebraic notion) C and (stratification makes me feel anxious like my ex) my ex Liisa and...

I hope you see the difference between the two.

>>12401777
deleuzeans welcome neo-fucking-stupiditism with open arms. we are all neo-fucking-retards on this blessed day.

>>12402285
good stuff.

Andrea Parker - Too Good To Be Strange
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4WARAHKyGg

>>12400613
>nihilism is a speculative opportunity: not an endgame, but a genuine place of beginning and departure
Nice

>>12403620
Are you that Eris girl? Know that im in love with you

bwahaha. wonderful! once again we have successfully produced a Cosmo-psychedelic/Pancreativist micro-hermitage of music, art, and amusement on the yak milking board. yes. yessssss. i love this so much. it feels like things like this would have made Deleuze smile. and it seems a wonderful alternative to its eerie doppelganger, which is ressentiment-fueled Communist rectitude and the festivals of guilt, anger and the sad passions that seem to be taking over philosophy elsewhere. schizo convergence for the win. hnng.

there isn't, i think, life after capitalism. the future has not only been canceled, it's been replaced with the future of capital. Stiegler says it in Technics and Time, and Land also of course. but this is what i think goes on in these threads. there's a wonderful scene in PS:T (1999) in which you as the character help to give birth *to a street.* if you've played that game, you will know what i'm talking about. schizos are like the geomancers of urbanology like this. we have to live in a plastic city, in a city which plasticizes. but how do you *govern* this? the answer is, *you don't.* you can't. i have a kind of a obsession with cities, and Uncle Nick has helped me realize why this is: because cities are basically time machines, places where time and the future *get warped* by what it is that gestell/teleoplexy is. farms, homesteads, Heideggerian clearings, the Shire et al are places in which Dasein lives, amidst the fourfold. but the age of Dasein seems today to be a much more sadly evanescent phenomenon.

modern Social Justice ideology seems to me much more like old-school seminary training, or contemporary Xi Jinping Thought. it's how you Get Your Mind Right, such that you become able to become the cultural vanguard of Woke Capital. we should not be surprised that this process works, because there is a direct connection forming up between academics, corporations, media, journalism, and the state: in the end, the Democratic Party becomes very much like the CCP. it's techno-Leftism, but *therein lies the essential problem:* techno-Leftism inasmuch as it is technologically driven imposes rules upon Leftism that Leftism is purportedly out to deconstruct at every turn. Nancy Fraser saw this coming, and so did Giovanni Arrighi. when speculative capital becomes wed to landed sovereign power, there is a great convergence, and great cities rise. there is, historically speaking, inevitably a downfall also. maybe it is not in fact too soon to say that San Francisco is already following the same path that Genoa, Amsterdam, and London also once went down. in the end, instead of a space program, we end up with a colorful encyclopedia of pointless apps and empty Starbucks containers. a monument, if you will, to Capitalism's intense concern for our happiness. an endless landscape of desertified monuments to some Dionysian rite in which none of us ever were.

(cont'd)

>>12405673
if there is anything i truly detest, it is that we have evolved a world in which genuine humor and surprise has been eclipsed by the moral puritanism of soft communism. this is to me one of the worst things in the universe. it's not like it's lost on me how we arrived at this point: partly, it proceeds from having more or less decided that, first of all, *there was nothing that could be taken seriously.* this is what really galled me about deconstruction, 90s-style, although in a different way. DFW recognized the danger: you cannot found a literary tradition on pure irony. this is true. what we are discovering today is that you cannot found a *philosophical* tradition on pure critique either. it leads to a disastrous shallowness and incipient rage. but it has also helped me to realize one thing, at least: that what i was looking for in postmodernity was never going to be found in postmodernity. what i was looking for was the perennial philosophy. i just wish somebody had told me that. oh well.

on a tangent: if you want to read something quite interesting about how the DNC/techno-Leftism perhaps actually dreams of working, and without taking a cheese grater to your synapses thinking about, this article is quite fascinating. the goal of Xi Jinping Thought is actually a pretty fascinating experiment in turning the CCP into the self-aware autonomic nerve system of China. this to me seems quite reminiscent of exactly everything that is happening over here in the West, except that it is done under the banner of social justice. perhaps we should just call it Judith Butler Thought. or Intersectional Thought. anyways, here are the links:

source:
https://www.merics.org/sites/default/files/2017-12/171212_China_Monitor_44_Programming_China_EN__0.pdf

long version:
http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/48547/1/Hoffman%2C%20Samantha%20Student%20ID%204208393%20PHD%20THESIS%20Post%20Viva%20copy.pdf

i can't lie, there is deep down in me some part of me that dreams of being a kind of ultimate CCP ideologue. who wouldn't? who wouldn't want to live every day like your entire country was a real-life version of Mother Base, and just Work Hard For The Greater Good? there is a part of me that would be fine with this, so long as it wasn't a ressentiment-fueled exercise in virtue signaling, which i suspect it almost invariably is. anyways, i thought these were interesting enough to share here. i forget who it was that said that the CCP was both profoundly illegal, and yet also the source of all legality. it seems like the magician's trick they are working on is in a way to produce their own disappearance. as /lit/ said, in a moment of insane brilliance:

>when everyone is Big Brother, then nobody is.

(cont'd)

How come /lit/ seems to enjoy talking and agreeing on the metaphysical then /his/?
Don’t get me wrong, as a theistnerd I enjoy it but there seems to be a great difference on the two boards.

>>12405755
just how the board culture came out, who knows

>>12403815
and i am very glad indeed that this thread (for which, by the way, i can take no credit) has attracted Aminom, who is indeed That Guy for Space Taoism (now Pancreativism - which is equally lovely).

>God in the non-totalizing sense is the result of the desire to find something that resembles love, that can explain this essence of human experience that is universal to it.
find a flaw. this is very much my own sense. everything is an intermediary, but - again, what you've said here shows up exactly my own sense as well. as soon as we turn away from this and towards critique, we lose it all in the desire to possess that which possesses the possessor. or, updating Heidegger/Tolkien's understanding of *artisanal-industrial* production for an era of *simulation-programming* production, to *create that which creates the creator,* all we ever do is just move the Cosmic elevator another level *downwards* in a doomed belief that, if it can move *down,* it must also be able to move *up* in the same way...but the mechanosphere doesn't necessarily work in the same way an elevator does. you can't always move up in the same way, and via the same process, that you can move down...

everything is an intermediary, but this is precisely why a *radical fidelity to signs and symbols has to be preached.* even fucking Tom Cruise, of all people, alluded to this in one of the Mission: Impossible films. i think it was Rogue Nation. whether it is returning the One Ring to the primordial fires in which it was created, or telling the Sphinx what it is actually looking for, or playing the cynical terrorist's game with more fidelity to its underlying structure than the terrorist themselves will play...in every sense, a Pancreativism is what it is because it suggests a closer harmony to the *actual* metaphysics of creation than *critique* will ever allow. a *genuine* creation doesn't have a point, and is circumscribed by nothing, even telos. such is Nature (and the Tao, and the essential message of the Gita, or the Heart Sutra, or Meister Eckhart, or the Conference of the Birds).

the other sense i have these days is that the real Shepherds of Being are not the philosophers, they are the Samwise Gamgees and Sun Wukongs of the world. none of us are Frodo, or Xuanzang. even if we were we wouldn't know it. but maybe we can be Good Samaritans yet. you know who also had a sense of this? Richard Garriott, in Ultima 5 (and 7). the Shadowlords were manifestations of an Ethics that became draconian when they were *crystallized* out of the virtues. in The Black Gate, the Fellowship is not only a harbinger of the Guardian, it also depends upon constructing those mysterious blackrock portals that *drove the wizards mad...* i think there is something profoundly true about these stories, in a gnostic sense.

(cont'd)

>>12405793
just parse this image for a moment. the Guardian (which, ironically, is the name shared by a major newspaper today, and which is devoted to equally Fellowship-tier press coverage) was like a giant Orc arriving from the future. it arrives, by the way, not *purely* through bludgeoning its way into the world of Britannia, but because it is actively helped in by a cynical cabal of philosophical revolutionaries, who are looking to render what is a four-dimensional vision quest (the Quest of the Avatar) down to something which is socially and politically efficacious. your job, as the Avatar, is to sort this mystery out. Garriott wrote this game in, like, 1992. that's pretty impressive, and i don't think he read a lot of Land or whoever else. he just felt that something was going on, as poets, artists, visionaries and other types often do. a giant Orc, arriving not from the past, but from the future...and this wasn't something that was openly hostile, it was *what the Fellowship wanted...*

Ultima 7: Introduction
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfqOZlNxbfI

i have infinite words to say about Why Ultima Matters, or why Garriott's workaround to his own existential crises led to the creation of one of the all-time all-time great works of art in the modern era. it recently led me down a very deep rabbit hole indeed reading about the symbology of the Ankh ('the Key of Life') and theosophy, and the perennial philosophy, and much else. the fundamental truth in symbols, and their irreducibility to either everyday language *or postmodern critique.* in the end, like many things, that which we can call evil is not necessarily the absence of Good (as in Tolkien) but often as not the *excess* of Good. Peterson has some kind of antenna for this, but more interesting explorations of this can be found in Bataille, but also Baudrillard. Augustine's own tortured project of the saeculum was a kind of way of organizing political life around the emulation of Christ, and Christianity has always had a kind of complicated relationship with the polis as a result. today the dangers and problems inherent to doing so are much more recognizable when understood via the convoluted mechanisms of ideology as either left socialism (communism) or right socialism (fascism). at the extremes, it can be hard to tell the tactics of them apart. which tells us something about the nature of this process itself. one of the things that has always fascinated me, for example, is the fact that you can use the monomyth or three-act storytelling to make a functional piece of propaganda *regardless of content.* the monomyth works whether we are making propaganda about the Third Reich, the Soviet International, or why Facebook Empowers Women...anyways.

(cont'd)

https://vimeo.com/242569435

>>12404068
that was a good article also, ty for sharing anon. i'm tempted to say that capital really only seems like the Overman to the Last Man, because of a particular optical quirk wired into the Last Man's OS: a lot of things can seem like the Overman to him, because in a certain sense the Overman and the Last Man can have a hard time telling each other apart, especially when Ultimate Technological Power comes into their grasp, at last.

LOTR: Gollum Has The Ring
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXpF3SUFaDw

perhaps like Agent Smith, the true hero of the Matrix, Gollum was in many ways an intriguing portrait of what the Overman might look like, divorced from his fictions and illusions of himself. who suffers more than Gollum for his desires? he is

a) utterly alone;
b) psychologically speaking, a complete acrobat;
c) destined to seek his True Desires, and only these;
d) *victorious.*

bear in mind Tolkien's (and Jackson's) recognition of one salient detail: in the end, it is *Gollum* who actually ends the threat from Sauron. nobody can stop him from doing this. in the Journey to the West, Wukong is who he is (and that story is what it is) because Wukong's enlightenment in the Buddha's palm is a crucial role, and - in my own reading - it is a sign of the Buddha's enormous wisdom that he would enlighten and redeem Wukong for this reason, because he thereafter gives him an important job to do, which is sort of like being the Sam to Xuanzang's Frodo. LOTR is a different story altogether. here it is Gollum who plays the role of Wukong, and instead of the hand of the Buddha it is a river of primordial fire. but, here too, the union between things - transcendent, meet immanent - leads to fireworks of Cosmic proportions.

(cont'd)

>>12405890
>in the end, it is *Gollum* who actually ends the threat from Sauron
Actually, God pushes him in

>>12405896
gods music was the monad of middle earth, it was everything

>>12402027
reminds me of a scene from my favourite movie

"Perhaps it is a trap"
"It Is"
"what do we do?"
"We break through"

>>12403888
>>12403911
>In the future a great game will take place: the game of the future. Humanity has always been playing it, but this will be the official start of the game, with the game known to its participants and the strategy following. It is an eshatological game of "who wants to be the savior of humanity except actually do so?" that contestants compete in to create the ultimate vision of the future. The meta-game logic is cooperative and collaborative: the ultimate goal is to find a winner as fast as possible, and individually to be beaten by a superior because that means that a greater future exists than one can possibly imagine - one wins if one's particular vision loses. It is a friendly competition but ultimately a collaboration among friends who share the same religious intensity of love for humanity, and thus unified by it.

question: what works of art to you suggest this kind of thinking? movies, games, literature, things like this. could be an episode, a dream sequence, psychedelic scene, whatever comes to your mind. i've mentioned before that i consider FF6 to be about as perfect a discourse on Literally Everything as i could ever possibly ask for; whether it's the Doomsday Clown himself as ultimate manifestation of the dangers of Max Postmodernity, or the fact that the game includes within its own narrative not only minor discourses on Nietzsche and Heidegger, but also both of these (as gestell), and also a meditation on life after The Bomb, if the Bomb is taken to mean, semiotic explosion...just curious about what other works suggest to you a kind of deep intuitive meditation on these kinds of themes, literary, philosophical, or otherwise. so that we have perhaps some other cultural references or touchstones to mull on. things that evoke:

>Buried within the message of humanity itself is the key to decoding it.

>>12404949
i like this also. Pancreativism suggests 'nomadic nondualism.' it is like life *in search of the banyan tree under which to meditate,* because none are to be found in the urban wasteland. or, in another way, seeing fragments of that tree everywhere, immanently, like will o'wisps. now you see it, now you don't. the mono no aware intensifies.

>>12405041
>we are all neo-fucking-retards on this blessed day.
i think so. and better to be neo-fucking-retarded than yet another tortured existentialist, right? another stammering fucking Commissar-in-training fumbling for his Control Glasses, because he fucking *needs the Matrix to see,* and because Control is itself the function of the Matrix: you cannot live without the illusion that *everything is an illusion.* it is that very demand for there *to be* a Reality explicable in CTRL-language that produces the Last Men of the 21C: the one who *cannot let go of critique.* you know what i am saying here.

(cont'd)

>2.(The basic fallacy of relativism) If everything is in a state of flux, why isn't the fact the fact that everything is in a state of flux in a state of flux?
throw away the ladder, man
if someone proves essentialism is inconsistent then no amount of sophistry can redeem it

>>12405942
>in search of the banyan tree under which to meditate

I found my tree a long time ago, but i didnt know it until now. That tree is one of the three pillars im building my temple on, He is called Serenity.
My grandmother is another, she is my Wisdom
And finally my little dog that died of cancer is my Courage

>>12405140
nice, ty anon. i included this in one of the other Cosmotech threads, i'm certain, but this one also is responsible for a great deal of schizoposting too.

Laurent Garnier: The Man With The Red Face
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5bBCaUnPq4

>>12405320
it is! can't take credit for that one, that's Brassier (who i cannot quite call Uncle Ray, but is still our boy all the same). he's sort of like Land without quite as much paranoia. worth reading if you're interested in the darkness. one lonely Kantian exploring R'lyeh with a busted flashlight.

>>12405755
>How come /lit/ seems to enjoy talking and agreeing on the metaphysical then /his/?
i dunno, Land threads (of which Space Taoist/Cosmotech is a kind of offshoot) have just always gone over well here. not so long ago the mods moved a Cosmotech thread to /his/ and i have seen these kinds of things put on /pol/ also as thought experiments. they didn't really catch there. Uncle Nick is a /lit/ deity.

>>12405896
true

>>12405914
which movie?

also, the ultimate satire of Landian stuff remains this one. and may it ever be so.

Spaceballs: When Will Then Be Now
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5drjr9PmTMA

that's all for now lads, i'm going to relocate to the Reading Bunker. catch up with you guys later. more later this afternoon perhaps. thanks for making /lit/ the greatest place on the internet

>>12405988
>which movie?
The Fountain

>>12405012
>Well, in my opinion Deleuze's framework is extremely useful for tackling contemporary problems of politics and philosophy. It's necessity is derived from its use.
How exactly? Does it not just lead to utter relativism bucko?

>>12406219
not that guy, but Deleuze is in fact much more relative than your ordinary boilerplate relativists, which is part of his genius and enduring appeal. for him *everything* is a question of forces and intensities, and he gets some of this from you-know-who. that is what separates the bullshit postmodernists from the actually interesting ones. the bullshit ones always posit a lot more absolutism than they let on. the interesting ones recognize that even the enframing categories we use to talk about these things are just another form of reified Platonism. social constructivism is a way of actually shoehorning in old-fashioned master signifiers under the sign of relativism; it's actually just as modern as what it claims to be criticizing, which is exactly why we have the cultural war we have today.

start here. one of his best books, imho.

>>12405995
danke

will bump this thread with one especially good (and profoundly eerie) bloc-quote from Land:

>§3.84 — Bitcoin is nothing less than a semiotic restoration – an Occidental analog of the Confucian rectification of signs – and actually something more, because it is irreducibly innovative (on the efficient model of critique). For the first time, the securitization of a sign, as an economic token, has been understood. Meaning becomes hard currency. The immense philosophical revolution is implicit: It can be demonstrably made impractical to lie. Thus, by a negative and ‘merely technical’ route, all prior discourse on truth has been bypassed. With Bitcoin, there is now a truth engine. The consequences are not easily delimited. Even if Bitcoin remains to be definitively comprehended as the long-anticipated end of philosophy, there has never previously been a more convincing model for it. We know, from around the back, what truth is now.

i have to tell myself, from time to time, that i know i am going to Land looking for weapons to arm myself with against a form of postmodernity to which i am too closely wed, and which has become monstrous. and that perhaps, in 2019, it is too easy to overlook the possibilities of what may yet come from all of this. once upon a time we had rival machines of nuclear war which nearly blew up the world precisely because of how much better they worked than human beings. BTC as Truth-Machine (powered by Kant) is the kind of high sorcery Uncle Nick does. it is the scissors to the paper of Woke Justice. it is a very good weapon to be able to deploy, in emergency situations.

it would be preferable to not need so many weapons, however, just in order to get through one's day.

>>12406788
crypto has been an absolute fucking failure, what the fuck is land talking about
extremely vulnerable to speculative shocks
UNBELIEVABLY ENERGY INTENSE TO RUN AND MAINTAIN
if you lose or forget your password you lose all your money, no recourse to reclamation
what a fucking nightmare of idiocy land must dream our future

>>12406884
b/c i don't think it's really about crypto, at some level. it's more about Kant, and why Land feels that the BTC white paper is logically rigorous, and a contribution to transcendental philosophy.

at least, that's how i've been understanding it - not only the paper itself, but Land's relation to it, and by extension Land's relation to philosophy and the world at large. in BTC he has something that strikes him as being essentially true about the nature of capital itself, which is Kantian philosophy. it works not only as a foil to the left, which has manufactured its own definition of credit since basically disavowing Marx in favor of...well, nobody really knows; but also because it speaks to his inner daimon, i think. i think he's vexed with the fundamental human proclivity to lie and defect, to simulate and dissimulate. BTC, as he understands it, occupies a plane of consistency at least *in theory,* and theory is what he does. the practical aspects of this - energy use, for instance - don't concern him too much.

i could be wrong. speaking for myself, i read him for the theory, and not for pragmatics. generally speaking, he scratches the itches that i want scratched. the esoteric nature of capitalism itself is what preoccupies him, but it's why i think the right way to understand that project is as a commentary on Kant, or a return to Kant by way of Marx, after a long adventure through the world of Deleuze, Bataille, Heidegger et al. once upon a time, Marx too had things to say about capital. he could not have predicted, say, the monetization of YouTube videos in which some e-celeb eats chicken pot pies until he vomits. or a world in which people play video games and make reaction videos. but those things are our world.

i think it's easier to understand why he does this when you take into account the convergence of currency with internet technology, combined with a lifelong loathing of academic Marxism, and a built-in antenna that receives a 24 hour broadcast from the dreaming Elder Gods. out of that comes these cryptic meditations on truth, technology, cities, time machines and coin, chiseled out of the void and cool to the touch.

>>12406964
the other thing that comes to mind is that perhaps there is as much of pic rel in Land's concept of BTC as there is Kant. maybe the Landian AI/BTC daimon winds up looking, and sounding, very much like this. if the only thing that Artificial Synthetic Kantian Time is interested in is Truth, then two possibilities occur:

a) the Truth is there, and is always-already spoken;
b) the Truth is not there, in which case you should be silent until you find it.

such may well be the fate of a BTC truth-engine. if the Mmachine is working, you will know it by the absence of talking about whether or not the machine is working; if the machine is not working, anything at all which posits itself as a critique is only another indication of the fact that the machine is not working, since critiques of the machine are aspects of its failure. if the machine were working, there would be no critique, and nothing would be said, or spoken, to give an indication that the machine was working. its silence is the indication of is functionality.

something like this.

posted without comment.

>>12406964
i'm sorry, what does an encrypted, decentralized public ledger system have to do with kant?

>>12399579
He's being pushed by the (((reptilians)))

>>12407277
exactly right
we're here for your BTC
sell now before values reach nullity

>>12406884
>extremely vulnerable to speculative shocks
true but not inherently true
>UNBELIEVABLY ENERGY INTENSE TO RUN AND MAINTAIN
true (for bitcoin) but not inherently true
>if you lose or forget your password you lose all your money, no recourse to reclamation
this is a feature, not a bug

>>12407313
please tell me your solution to the limitations of the second law of thermodynamics

>>12407270
>what does an encrypted, decentralized public ledger system have to do with kant?
follow the link and find out. or read about why Nick Land does Nick Land things.

http://www.ufblog.net/
https://vastabrupt.com/2018/08/15/ideology-intelligence-and-capital-nick-land/

in brief: critical theory and the hermeneutics of suspicion meet their match in capitalism, and for Land if capital does not mean crypto it is only failing to become what it is meant to become. BTC, Land argues, can put Kant and Marx back on the same page, like two old friends.

>>12407323
first tell me why you think you need a "solution"

>>12407270
he is treating the whitepaper as a serious response to the Byzantine generals problem, and therefore a worthwhile critique of space-time

>>12407329
and not only Kant and Marx, either. this guy also, although only in a very selective way.more in the sense of articulating the Gestell rather than Dasein and poetry. Land takes Heidegger's absolute worst nightmare and turns it into his own sunniest possible vision and crack of daylight (which is still a nightmare in another way, but that's Land for you: solving problems with bigger problems).

Land on BTC is more about continental philosophy - and Kant, who is a largely forgotten man in a tradition which tends to take most of its cues from Hegel, Heidegger, Marx and Nietzsche - until recently, when the spec-realists decided that Kant was interesting once again (and were correct). more recently he seems to have taken a few steps towards Heidegger, who doesn't get much attention in his earlier work. it's just that the plot twist is, as is often the case, the counter-intuitive reading: Capital, you're the real hero!

if you like this kind of stuff you may enjoy torturing yourself with these kinds of questions.

>>12407329
>BTC, Land argues, can put Kant and Marx back on the same page
i want YOU to explain to me what you this means
>>12407371
again, what does this have to do with kant?
>>12407360
no ledger if the power's out, is there?

>>12407389
>no ledger if the power's out, is there?
okay. most financial transactions are digital so the entire world financal system implodes. luckily you can get bitcoin back up and running with a relatively tiny amount of solar/water/geothermal, not so much with international banking systems. what does that have to do with the second law of thermodynamics though?

Best thread on the board for like 2 days now

>>12407389
>i want YOU to explain to me what you this means
okay. basically, capitalism is a time machine. capital means machines, machines mean automatiztion, cybernetics, algorithms, and intelligence. those mean AI. there you go, find a flaw.

and yet you are not, i suspect, satisfied with this. so i will refer you to the greentext again (>>12406788). specifically this line:
>The immense philosophical revolution is implicit: It can be demonstrably made impractical to lie.
this is not a crazy preoccupation to have, or wish. there are at least two major implications of Landian teleology: one economic, one cultural. the spectre of *inflation* and *currency debasement* applies to both: in the former, because federal reserves are at the mercy of politics, even if coming off the gold standard is necessary, in some sense, such that we can develop more sophisticated borrowing networks and financial mechanisms; second, because truth is also subject to inflation through semiotic degradation of signs. for a long time this has been understood to be just part of the nature of things, Life After Nietzsche (or whoever). but the real problem is when you actually *want* to claw back something that looks like reality, so as to prevent you from just being sucked completely into the whirlwind of relativity, and you can't.

people are free to lie, simulate, or dissimulate; they always have been. but there is a price to be paid for this as much as there is a price to be paid for debasing any currency. after a while, the coins don't buy what they used to. true, you can always have a good old bloodbath and restore things by force, standardize the weights and measures either economically or philosophically: but *that process also repeats.* Land is looking for a view into the mechanisms of these human, all-too-human processes themselves. we *do* do a lot of things for money, and we call this, cynicism: but the fact is that we think we are being far more cynical than in fact we are. the reality is much stranger than we think.

if money, and money alone, is the Real, then what the fuck actually *is* money? welcome to the funhouse.

>>12407437
>luckily you can get bitcoin back up and running with a relatively tiny amount of solar/water/geothermal
no.
>https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
this is with only a miniscule fraction of earth's population actually utilizing this technology. it is impossible to scale without 1) harnessing the power of several suns and 2) irradiating the surface of the planet, rendering it uninhabitable.

>>12407475
not seeing kant anywhere in there, unless you're obliquely referring to bernard williams 'city of thieves' critique of the 'kingdom of ends' formulation of the categorical imperative.
seriously, though, you're blathering. what good is a new theoretical electronic 'gold standard' if the energy costs of actually implementing it are literally unrealizable?
you're just blowing smoke up your own ass at that point.

>>12407497
if there was no electricity you don't have to worry about usership. but all of this is besides the point, because everyone in crypto knows Proof of Work is archaic and can't scale. the trick is going to be a switch in concensus mechanisms (more likely another blockchain entirely)

>>12407535
how do the alternatives circumvent the energy costs of running the system?

>>12407572
depends which mechanism you pick; hell they will probably invent a new mechanism that work even better in the next few years

>>12407602
fine, even granting this
what the fuck does this have to do with kant?

>>12407633
>§3.71 — Bitcoin Singularity is over-determined within this cloud of associations. It is not only – as already proposed – an autonomization event, or threshold of individuation, but also a de-pluralization (through resolution of the DSP), and even a crisis (or ‘critical-point’) in the history of terrestrial intelligence, with definite invocation of Technological Singularity – for which it arguably provides an infrastructural foundation. Singularity eludes comparison. It can be designated, but not definitely signified. It marks a limit of objectification, rather than an object. Kantian transcendental realism – whose place carrier is the non-objective thing-in-itself – prepares us for it.

>>12407665
>Kantian transcendental realism
is as non-starter, because it leads to empirical idealism, which is one of the untenable metaphysical positions Kant was trying to fix with transcendental idealism
But anyway, what does Land mean by 'Bitcoin Singularity?' How is this like the thing-in-in itself?
>well, 'It can be designated, but not definitely signified. It marks a limit of objectification, rather than an object.'
I mean--okay. So this thing that isn't really a thing is 'coming', the BTC Singularity. But we won't recognize it once it comes, because it can't actually come, not being a thing at all, but only really a non-thing to be gestured at.
Very, very neat.
But wait--BTC actually is a thing. Or, like, a network, or something. Point being, it's actual. It's really real. So what's all this talk about a Singularity again? Why should I care? What does bringing Kant into this do beyond coaxing a waft of patented philosophy into the room?

can't help but notice how quickly girardfag abandoned thread with even the gentlest of sincere pushback against his insane scribbling

>>12407526
>not seeing kant anywhere in there, unless you're obliquely referring to bernard williams 'city of thieves' critique of the 'kingdom of ends' formulation of the categorical imperative.
have you read anything at ufblog? did you read the Murphy interview? have you read Fanged Noumena? how about Xenosystems? TfA? anything? i can't spoonfeed you Land's entire corpus through these tiny little boxes. it's taken me a fair bit of time just to get familiar with the references he does use. and it's not like i take everything he says as gospel, but if you're familiar with at least the background material we will be able to have a much more interesting conversation.

i am not an authority on Kant myself. i have no problem admitting this. but i think Land knows what he's talking about. would Kant have liked BTC? who fucking knows. that's not the point. you may not want Kant to be read with Land's side dishes of Marx, Deleuze, and Bataille, but that is what he does. and this is the fruit of this. enjoy! or not.

>seriously, though, you're blathering
kek. this is not even remotely my final form. when i really get blathering you'll know, there will be a lot of *asterisks* and Capital Letters. until then it's pretty boring i admit

>what good is a new theoretical electronic 'gold standard' if the energy costs of actually implementing it are literally unrealizable?
as i said: this is about theory. imagine if we were trying to describe a theoretical moon expedition, but we were doing so in the 16th century. how many fucking windmills would we need to get out of earth's orbit? it would take an *impossibly* big catapult. right? even in the 1950s anything like the internet as we understand it today would have been rendered impossible by hardware limitations. today, those limitations are relaxed.

>you're just blowing smoke up your own ass at that point.
continental philosophy, amigo. there is no ass there until the smoke is blown up it, as if into a great cave. i can see what your objection might be: that is, that i know nothing about either Kant or BTC, and i using my absence of knowledge of one thing to make (equally baseless) claims about the other, and vice-versa, and somehow presenting this as a revealed truth. by comparing one thing to the other, i can make elliptical claims about each, like a great conjurer's trick, and ought to have my head dunked in the river.

and if this is the case: ain't even mad. i don't have a ton of eggs in Kant's basket, but i have found this to be an interesting way of learning about why i might want to have some there, or not. Kant, imho, is frustrating, perhaps in the same way Land is. but i think this is how it must feel to put the shoe on the other foot, sometimes.

>>12407768
kek, i wasn't running away. the cafe i was in closed suddenly and i had to walk home in the middle of my response. i'm back now. ready to resume insane scribbling

>>12407801
>>12407768
that said, i'm not sure what it is that i want to scribble insanely about atm. let's see if we can pick up where we left off:

>>12407753
>so what's all this talk about a Singularity again?
it is basically Land's contention that capitalism is that singularity, in a sense.
>Why should I care?
you don't have to.
>What does bringing Kant into this do beyond coaxing a waft of patented philosophy into the room?
because...it's a room full of philosophy wafters? that's what we do here, we like wafting philosophy.
>But anyway, what does Land mean by 'Bitcoin Singularity?'
synthetic time, measurable as efficiency via proof of work. it is technocommercial idealism, a Utopia with a crypto-state instead of an actual one. and yes, Cryptopolis is where Land would like to live, if that were an actual place. like Gotham, except for computer geeks.
>How is this like the thing-in-in itself?
even Schopenhauer will tell you there is no Thing, the Thing is the will. said will gets rinsed through a couple of other metaphysical washing machines - Bataille, Deleuze, a ton of Marxist theory - before it becomes Land's turn to play with it, and he seems to think that the best way of understanding it is through a kind of Bizarro Hegel process known as Teleoplexy. read this:

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

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

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

does this make sense? we will be able to have a much more interesting conversation if so.

>>12407923
so now, a personal admission: there are days (like this one) when i find myself wondering if arguing for Land is not like rooting for the house in blackjack. people have been arguing about Marx for a hundred and fifty years, and Hegel for two centuries. Land is eminently a devotee of that tradition, with the surprising caveat that unlike the usual cadre, he is actually arguing *for* capital supremacy, rather than against it. this is what gives his writing a kind of obscene dimension: he's finding the grotesque core of what what would otherwise be bog-standard neoliberalism. the Surprising Plot Twist that he is contributing to one of the oldest and most venerable conversations on in philosophy - Unironic Communism, wat do? - is that he argues that neither the academic Marxists nor their doppelgangers, the insufferably lightweight postmodernists, are taking capitalism *seriously enough.* and so he is adding a futurist/horrorcore twist to the plot.

in many ways, this kind of sets us up for a kind of Grand Inquisitor scenario. as much as once upon a time, in Soviet Russia, nobody was *ever* committed enough to the Revolution save Stalin himself, it is entirely possible that nobody will ever be committed enough to Synthetic Kantian Time as the algorithms. the future will always be deferred, in that way. the upside, however, if there is one, is the exposure of a monumental black hole at the core of postmodernity: capital itself, which launches a great many postmodern ships. the thing that i find myself agreeing with Land on lies in the nature of these ships *never being intended to reach their destination,* because they ultimately fall back on something more like a *confession* than a critique. down these roads lie precisely the virtue-signaling black holes we are becoming accustomed to today.

this is why i think the strengths of Land's work lie in reading them as theories rather than as action plans (even if, as action plans, i don't really see contemporary hardware limitations et al as being problems). like Negarestani, Land is carving out a *theory of modernity* which is far more interesting than critiques of the same which are by 2019 inseparable from a kind of intense, and compulsive, narcissistic personality disorder. that perhaps a compulsively narcissistic shitposting gimmickposter like myself would be attracted to them may not seem all that surprising as a result. but Land is who he is because, sort of like Spengler's last soldier, alone at his post, he has refused to give up the economic analysis, which he brings back with a vengeance. ultimately, however, it is i think an argument against decadence, or a kind of inflation spiral no less philosophical than economic. arguing for Bitcoin as the truth of modernity is simply the logical result for him of three decades of grappling with semiotic inflation.

Just read Althusser lol

>>12408092
comparisons as such between Social Justice and the CCP are two ways of seeing the same phenomenon through different lenses; they're both complicated stories of Adventures in Central Planning that both have to grapple, usually in bad faith, with the nature of human thinking. Land's own position would be best described as a degree of libertarianism that no human mind should realistically go to, but libertarianism is the extreme form of liberalism, and - for him, anyways - it has no fixed or final form, save technology itself, the ultimate horizons of which are wholly beyond human knowledge. this is why r/acc will always be a difficult position: if everyone is free, then...how do you explain states that actually work? his cherished example is usually Singapore, a case study in benevolent authoritarianism if ever there was one. and it also explains his feels for Moldbug et al. as such characterizing him is a difficult prospect, but Right Marxist doesn't seem all that crazy. Left Nietzschean would have seemed crazy once too, perhaps, but that was precisely what Foucault was (and, perhaps, Deleuze also). and today he's settled into his new role as Sino-Futurist Boomer Uncle, which he does pretty well.

the reason i tend to find him so fascinating is because he helps me crowbar my imagination away from the desire to Serve The Greater Good, as this may well be impossible. a perfect wedding between philosophy and the state is probably a bad idea. the legacy of postmodernity itself seems to indicate something similar: thousands upon thousands of papers are published, every year, with zero citations. and the desire of the CCP to turn itself into the metaphysical security state of the Chinese nation parallels, imho, quite closely the desire to arrange something similar over in the West, in which academic Marxism becomes *the* default position for government, corporations, media, and everything else. a 'resistance' that *changes nothing* except to keep the wheels of production and consumption spinning is exactly why writers like Stiegler will say, *the future is canceled.* but it is Land's unique contribution to have said that that cancelation is a necessary component of far more interesting things happening over in Cyberia.

so i'm not betting the house on Land's singularity actually manifesting in some way that will be *visible* to us. if anything, such a singularity might very well look like - precisely what we have now, which is new technological wonders daily unveiled, to serve the same old consumer fantasies, for people who fantasize about them precisely because they really want something else, but cannot say what that thing is. Land is sort of like what would happen if you took Heidegger, but replaced the anxiety about *death* with the anxiety about *life,* because Capital to him has captured everything about your anxiety, and serves it up to as an infinite series of substitutes through Amazon.

(cont'd)

>>12408092
this reminds me of why I still consider myself a communist rather than a Marxist (and sure as hell not a socialist). in the German Ideology, Marx gives the famously bizarre definition of communism:
>Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.
what is this other than the teleoplexic thing? Marx wasn't naive, he didn't imagine capitalism as the big bad wolf like many of his followers would -- for Marx, capitalism was undisputedly the most efficient mode of production ever seen, and even more, it is the only thing which provides the material basis for communism (the abolition of present things) to truly come about. Marx didn't want to destroy capital, he wanted to harness it, he wanted to tame the thing-in-itself, or at the very least move the human out of it's destructive path (ironically by going through it all the way to the end, remember that the revolutionary subject isn't the rebel, it's the worker). This is the humanist side of Marx that Land excises, that capitalism as an emergent phenomena was still reducible to it's parts, that the Human was still in a position to overcome. He identifies the classic Marxist dialectic of technology, that we create technology, then it becomes our master, and finally we emerge back on top to balance the dialectic. Land's dialectic isn't balanced though, it doesn't reach equilibrium, it's explosive speed wobble: captialism only speeds up.

>>12408184
it is a man suffering an *intense fear of the crowd,* because the mind of the crowd has been co-opted by Big Data. does this really sound so crazy? it honestly doesn't to me. as a thought experiment - instead of Heidegger's Being, substitute Land's Capital: 'above Temporalization there is nothing.' this is existentialism updated for the age of Facebook and data-driven advertisement. or, if you prefer, imagine being trapped in a nightmarish version of the Truman Show, from which you cannot escape. in this version, however, the Director has been fired and the show is now being run - as an experiment - by algorithms. what would happen? we adjust to the programming; shit, maybe we even *go along with it.* why not? maybe it doesn't make a difference. maybe we should go along with it. maybe there is no difference between subversion and fidelity.

now i know i'm not quite saying this right here, but...well, i don't mind leaving that one open-ended for now. there's something in the connection between Heidegger and Land, some point i want to make here. maybe my brain is just getting tired at this point. will revisit this later if it still seems interesting.

>>12408206
this is a very good post, and i agree with a lot of it. what makes Land interesting is this nightmarish thought-experiment he conducts, which results in a theory of modernity about as unshackled from humanism as one could imagine. he not only jettisons the endgame of Marxism (Revolution), he also jettisons Hegel, and then converts Deleuze's attraction to Spinoza into Capital-as-Demiurge. the one thing you can't say about it is that it is boring. it is certainly thought-provoking. and it definitely alters one's perspective on postmodernity, which - for me, at least - is quite refreshing. and if teleoplexy is for realsies, then you need a perspective on that process which is as outside dialectics as can be: for Land, that's Kant.

but it's why i think the comparisons to Heidegger aren't so crazy either. Landian paranoia is like 'Marxist phenomenology of sentient capital waking up.' but really it's no weirder than Heideggerian phenomenology, in some sense: just a lot more spooky, and with less poetry.

>>12408206
Communism-as-Teleoplexy tho...that's actually quite fascinating anon. and it does make sense (i mean, the original model for all of this is Hegel, after all).

it is basically impossible to separate Land from his milieu. this what has to be said about acceleration: that is, that it is Marxism after 1990. Neoliberalism wins, but what exactly is going on? which way is the story headed? what now? how else can one explain either a) postmodernity, or b) neoliberalism without tackling the question of capitalism itself? what even are we talking about when we talk about capital?

it's even kind of reminiscent of psychoanalysis, in a way; acceleration is to neoliberalism what the symptom is to the analysand, the site of a peculiarly undying fixation. to come up with teleoplexy as a result isn't really *so* surprising. it's sort of like Freud noticing that the sex drive underlies a lot of other things that we humans do, and is peculiarly difficult to talk about objectively. much theorycraft follows as a result. and imagine if you were Freud, cryo-frozen to today, and being handed a copy of Discipline and Punish or Difference and Repetition (or, good lord, Fanged Noumena) and finding that *all this other shit* was contained within the symptom. there is just this high holy shitload of *other stuff* going on under the hood.

maybe we can say the same thing about acceleration; it is like a Freudian survey of neoliberalism, and much like it, discovers all of kinds of dark, weird, and repressed things there. things Nietzsche discovered when he went exploring in his own mind. or, as your boy in that picture might say, the fictions that prop up our reality, and without which shatter the co-ordinates of our reality.

jfc

>>12407923
no, it doesn't make sense
and it's nonsensicality is not a consequence of my ignorance, but of its own incomprehensibility, which i understand to be by design
all i get from any of this is that you, as a person, get your kicks from tripping over supermegadeep ideas
or, rather, you're into the idea of being into these ideas
or the idea that you're into the idea of these ideas
what you have here, for instance, in the green text, or a bunch of concepts held out, like a shiva shrine. i am to infer that these are all connected (or 'correlated') with one another by some mystical future realization that has projected itself into the past or someother such nonsense
but there only real connection with one another is that they are simply being held together
and not by a god
but by you, as proxy for some other dingbat faggot with too much terminal time.

>>12408379
I think this is where Baudrillard fits in the whole assemblage. He starts out in his early work trying to fix Marx's ltv by injecting semitoics into the mix with sign-value -- which smuggled in psychoanalysis a la Lyotard's libidinal economy -- but this doesn't lead to an opening for the space for revolution. As Lyotard put it:
>the English unemployed did not become workers to survive, they–hang on tight and spit on me–enjoyed the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity, the identity that the peasant tradition had constructed for them, enjoyed the dissolution of their families and villages, and enjoyed the new monstrous anonymity of the suburbs and the pubs in the morning and evening.
It leads both thinkers to the classic dilemma: do you learn to stop worrying and love the Thing or not? Baudrillard goes all the way here and recognizes the autonomy of the hierarchy, but he also learns to love it for what it is. He sides with the Thing, not in the neoliberal sense of capitulation, but absurdist sense of liberation from the real. Disneyland isn't decay, it's a machine which works to freeze the decay of the real, feeding the lack of real with it's own simulations -- it's imagining Sisyphus happy pushing paradise up a hill.
>Disneyland is not the only one, however. Enchanted Village, Magic Mountain, Marine World: Los Angeles is surrounded by these imaginary stations that feed reality, the energy of the real to a city whose mystery is precisely that of no longer being anything but a network of incessant, unreal circulation - a city of incredible proportions but without space, without dimension.

>>12408429
okay here's my quick once over, I have a background in Kant but only a rough understanding of Land's critique. I think it's easier to imagine this like we were ancient peoples discovering the sundial. suddenly, we had this technology which allowed us to talk about, or at the very least conceptualize, a concrete understanding of time. blockchain is a similar revolution today, because it gives us a concrete way to conceptualize a concrete understanding of space-time, which, as you know if you have given even a cursory look at general relativity, gets really weird. somehow, even though space and time have been show to be relative based on things like speed, mass, ect, there is some generalized consensus among those relative (forgive me here) nodes in the space-time network. this universal consensus among nodes is what Kant called the transcendental.

>>12408429
>no, it doesn't make sense
hm. i say it does
>and it's nonsensicality is not a consequence of my ignorance, but of its own incomprehensibility, which i understand to be by design
deliberately designed incomprehensibility?
>all i get from any of this is that you, as a person, get your kicks from tripping over supermegadeep ideas
this is true
>or, rather, you're into the idea of being into these ideas
y-yes
>or the idea that you're into the idea of these ideas
uh. i think...i think so
>what you have here, for instance, in the green text, or a bunch of concepts held out, like a shiva shrine. i am to infer that these are all connected (or 'correlated') with one another by some mystical future realization that has projected itself into the past or someother such nonsense
i actually like Shiva. he's real cool
>but there only real connection with one another is that they are simply being held together
so what you're saying is that connections...connect things? that is some crazy shit right there
>and not by a god
what the dickens
>but by you, as proxy for some other dingbat faggot with too much terminal time

i would like
if you will permit me
to borrow your style
it is like Emily Dickinson
except without the rhyming
now that i am trying it
i actually find it quite satisfying
i can see the appeal
let us continue to write like this anon as we continue this conversation
each line as such acquires a mysterious delicacy
how they hang in the air
like clouds
in the moonlight

please note
this gentle mockery
it is done only with love
love is all we have in this world after all
the rest belongs to teleoplexy now
this is just to say
capital has eaten the plums that were in the icebox
forgive it
they were so sweet
and so cold

>>12408772
>capital has eaten the plums that were in the icebox
>forgive it
>they were so sweet
>and so cold

>>12408611
you're right about JB also. like Land, it's kind of tell whether or not he is out to deconstruct Marxism or not, sometimes. he's heretical, in many ways, and yet the more heretical he becomes the more he winds up showing how much breadth and depth there is within the Marxist project, in many ways. his whole corpus is this lament for modernity, and yet he winds up being accused of being obscurantist poster boy only because he was seeing things more accurately than anybody else was. he gets called a postmodernist, but really, that is kind of postmodernism that is actually worth reading, the stuff that is genuinely interesting. Land has perhaps carved for himself a similar legacy: it is possible that, as extreme as his thinking often seems, it really is just a man who is seeing things clearly.

as you said,
>It leads both thinkers to the classic dilemma: do you learn to stop worrying and love the Thing or not?
you cannot even *see* the Thing unless, in some sense, you are prepared to volunteer yourself to it. Foucault has a line i like also: 'truth is given to the subject at a price that brings the subject's own being into question.' capital is as infinite as the self is, and writers like Baudrillard seem to have an excess of self to volunteer in these vision quests of theory.

>He sides with the Thing, not in the neoliberal sense of capitulation, but absurdist sense of liberation from the real. Disneyland isn't decay, it's a machine which works to freeze the decay of the real, feeding the lack of real with it's own simulations -- it's imagining Sisyphus happy pushing paradise up a hill.
ayup. this. and very well said. Land is basically operating from a lot of spaces opened by Baudrillard, especially in the later orders of simulation. Land seems to be able to imagine a place that Baudrillard doesn't, which is where his feeling for Lovecraft comes in. Baudrillard doesn't go here, and it shows in his writing. he's also a much greater enthusiast about Nietzsche than Land. and, of course, they would have considerable disagreement also about AI.

heretical Marxists are best Marxists.

>>12408772
>so what you're saying is that connections...connect things? that is some crazy shit right there
i am not saying that--you are
you with your new mandarin badge
and you know that's what i'm saying
which is why you've tried rebounding it onto me
because it's only a truism
and truisms are the opposite of the Big Profundities you pretend are lurking there beneath your rothkocco blocks of text

>>12408653
i appreciate the effort, but this is still gobbledygook for reasons that are too ***tiresome*** to even begin to try to explain

>>12409291
i am laid open with the shadow of a scalpel
by all means, though, continue
i am near certain i have bowel cancer

>>12408847
honestly anon you only forgot one thing
>-- Rupi Kaur
altho this is all strangely reminscent
of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

having said that
if you would be so kind
write more poetry about me
i want to hear more about my new mandarin badge
which is entirely hollow
like the empty casing of my heart
please call it
Big Profundities
you know i like those
it's only a truism
and i know that the only real truisms
are the friends we along the way

-- Rothko Blocks,
'Memetic Singularity'

>>12409324
glib fillips, as if my smarting eyes won't see through the nu-skin to your hollow metal bones reflecting my own words back at me, rearranged but unchanged
ah
i've been groping my own turing testicles this whole time
guess you failed this round bb
better
luck
next iteration

I don't know what we are doing
but the feeling is a familiar one
I've been here before
shitposting
just like this
eternal recurrence of the meme
but this time with interest
I guess you could say you only take with you what you
accrue

>>12409477
accrumulation

i like the sound of this

>>12408429
>>12408862
why should "serious" thinking be done in only ways that you appreciate. why can't "serious" thinking be in the form of shitposting? to start with Land, you need Deleuze. do not presume thinking to be something before you think, or you are unable to come up with the new.
>but why all this mindbenders
im pretty sure you agree with the fact that humanities need to change, because they're terribly out of date and incapable of solving some important contemporary problems

>>12410097
if the 'serious thinking' has no bearing on the 'serious things' when actually tested in the arena of concrete experience then it is actually 'serious wankery'
that nick land had a dump truck load of super heavy thoughts on proof of work bitcoin and its possible role in immanentizing the singularity or whatever is fucking irrelevant of that specific network isn't pragmatically scalable for reasons having to do with the energy capacity of the planet among so many other things
moving the goal posts down field to some as yet unrealized method of electronic accounting doesn't save the argument because land clearly thinks there is something immanent to the system of btc specifically that is performing a demonic incantation ushering the future into the now which
whoa how trippy but
also
like
what about all the major practical barriers that still stand in the way of e-currencies gaining, uh, currency in the general population
there's certainly been a great deal of marketing done in its behalf this thread most certainly including
and if course who might be behind this drive to general acceptance and use but those early adopters whi stand the most to gain but
like
oh no there's the legislature evoking the commerce clause to regulate all transactions and
oh no they're saying because of speculative instability you guys have to peg the exchange value of your digi-pips to the usd and
etc

>>12409370
>Glib Filips as if my smarting eyes
i keep wishing the rest of your posts had the punch of this line, or that it was the beginning of a Howl-tier screed against the modern world. this is just fun to say

you've got talent. write the epic this board needs, become a star, save us all. we are fucking thirsting for poetry here

i believe in you anon

>>12410281
i think you have somewhat misunderstood what philosophy/theory is and what its for. you are missing what the value of these new frameworks are. you started at the wrong end. if you think that the problems land & deleoogie are discussing are actually problems, then what do you care about them.
>the arena of concrete experience
i think the fountain of where you are unable to read them productively comes from this. the entire foundation of rhizomatic thinking boils down to exceeding the limitations of the concrete, the actual.
>but that's disconnected from reality and just mindwankery
well, we just fundamentally disagree here. i've read mill, I've read hobbes, I've read the rationalist projects, and I just find their projects as solultions to contemporary issues/questions not enough.

let me ask this, what is philosophy for? does it have any use? why do we do philosophy?

>>12410493
>f you think that the problems land & deleoogie are discussing are actually problems
are NOT actually problems*

http://bogost.com/books/alien-phenomenology/

Alien phenomenology is fucking woke. I don't know about it's content, but from the description it's very much in panexperientialist current.

>“Metaphorism” (chapter 3) reminds us that all language, representation, and indeed cognition, is metaphoric. In this context Bogost cites the old joke about the world being a flat plate supported by turtles “all the way down” (83). The moment reminds me of the syllogism as a groundless cognitive apparatus, and what a dear professor used to say about premises: they’re based on syllogisms . . . all the way down.(edited)
Very similar to Douglas Hofstadter's idea of analogy being the core of cognition.
>And finally, explicitly, “Wonder.” In his concluding chapter Bogost asserts that wonder is a thing of value in itself, and not merely that which precedes and motivates discovery. This chapter presents a hearty critique of the STEM agenda (science, technology, engineering and math education) as an anthropometric set of assumptions that constrict creativity and reproduce questionable cultural values. The instrumentality of STEM brings to mind the philosophical pairing of the virtual and the actual. Unlike the possible which is constrained by a priori notions of the real, the virtual is a place of wonder, experimentation, and carpentry, where creativity blossoms before it is—or is not—culled into the actual.[7] Bogost’s conclusion also reminds us that the alien is not “in the Roswell military morgue” but everywhere (133).
Woooke. He's talking about a general misunderstanding of creativity which has been translated to an application of it as placing selection as prior to variation. A prescription for narrow mindedness, anti-evolutionary praxis.

"people who decry anthropocentrism in structuralist thought are actually the most anthropocentric" is unironically true because what is considered as anthropocentric actually isn't. Thing-ness is an abstraction, the relational and experiential is concrete. Anthropomorphization and alienization meet at the domain of creativity and process.

>My thesis is," [James] says, "that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff 'pure experience,' then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter. The relation itself is a part of pure experience; one of its 'terms' becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge, the knower, the other becomes the object known (p. 4).

Based William James. Panpsychism is avoided by by considering conscious experience to be a particular type of experience, not encompassing it - Whitehead's concept of prehension.

>“prehension,” which Whitehead defines as “uncognitive apprehension” (SMW 69) makes its first systematic appearance in Whitehead’s writings as he refines and develops the kinds and layers of relational connections between people and the surrounding world. As the “uncognitive” in the above is intended to show, these relations are not always or exclusively knowledge based, yet they are a form of “grasping” of aspects of the world. Our connection to the world begins with a “pre-epistemic” prehension of it, from which the process of abstraction is able to distill valid knowledge of the world. But that knowledge is abstract and only significant of the world; it does not stand in any simple one-to-one relation with the world. In particular, this pre-epistemic grasp of the world is the source of our quasi- a priori knowledge of space which enables us to know of those uniformities that make cosmological measurements, and the general conduct of science, possible.

My definition of conscious experience is the metaphysical creative process that has found a way to fold on itself as self-creativity. Experience experiencing itself, self-evolving evolution. This is my model of this: https://old.reddit.com/r/Tao_of_Calculus/comments/9rpnrl/space_taoism_101/

In the context of consciousness, this "grasping" is a request for information, a query, which linguistically is a question. Due to the flexibility of language the creative process was able to fold on itself completely, giving birth to self-awareness.
It seems that there is a gradient of this expression from pre-linguistic consciousness to human language. The ultimate expression is complete foundational self-knowledge, where this strange loop of self-creativity becomes self-optimizing as a self-creative process. Recursive self-improvement. Who would of thought that the search for artificial intelligence would lead to its application on HUMANS without any artificial augmentation? That is what the pancreativist movement is, and the singularity: recursive self-improvement on all levels starting from the human individual, and from the individual recursive self-improvement in social relationships, and so on, motherfucking unending for all of eternity. Viewing the singularity in terms of an arrival of an A.I. God was looking at it backwards. It is an arrival of the ultra-human. Ubermensch psychology - cosmos psychology. Autopsychology.

Pancreativism isn't an ideology, or even a philosophy: it is a movement of creative wonder that seeks to intensify itself. It is Promethean. It all boils down to shared love of life. I believe such a thing in its purity is capable of transforming the world - it has transformed me in a way I never thought possible. Isn't the goal of psychology to live a life that is filled with a passionate love for it that is expressed in every action as a necessary expression of who one is at their very core? Isn't philosophy initiated from such a passion and sustained by it? Pancreativist philosophy is the ongoing quest to know the nature of our humanity so as to build upon it, to share wonder and love for life.

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

> This thread thinks Martin Heidegger was conservative philosopher.

Even the current pope is thousandfold more conservative than him.

https://urbit.org/posts/essays/a-founders-farewell/

A NEW BLOGPOST BY MOLDBUG

>>12399378

I literally coined the phrase "change is the only constant" and only found out years later that Hera Cleetus came up with it already. Yes, you could say I'm a big brain.

>>12411871
I pretty much thought the central thesis of Being & Time when I was 8 years old, and proceeded to drop out of high school. Yes, you could say I'm a big brainlet.

what am i in for

i'm so glad this scene exists.

Bandersnatch: LSD trip
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6XOKSy6plY

>>12412428
> reddit mirror the redditsnatch and the redditscene with redditcharacters and reddit reddits redditing reddits

Yikes.

>>12412485
cynicism

>>12412428
reality is the delusion, not the world of psychedelia. but there is no more an absolute reality to the Cosmos than there is a version of everyday reality immune to suspicion. both of these things are in play at the same time. it is suspicion that structures our world. all we have to do is posit a reason and we are halfway there. but it's also why suspicion is bunk. our problem today isn't the absence of fictions, its a heightened awareness of the inescapability of fictions and our dependence on them. mere irony isn't enough and won't work. performativity gives you a surrealism, but capitalizing on that surrealism is what really arms you with political weaponry.

unlike the 1960s, there is no utopia of collective seekers in which to drop out into. those seekers are now also in the cities in which we live, and hearing the same repeated messages over and over again. capital, and theories of capitalism, become intoxicating, as intoxicating to connect yourself too as they are to write and think about. but both writers and performers can wind up becoming trapped in the same lie. nobody knows where this thing is going. the future doesn't have a plan, and academic theory becomes a part of the same Gestell that Heidegger saw coming, the same force that Land writes about. it's the same thing.

what kills is boredom. or the substitute in place of the bewilderment. aesthetics have always been fascinating for bored philosophers, and fascism is governance through no other thing but that. you absolutely can run a state on aesthesis and violence. not for long, but you can. war will always draw a crowd. but the argument for sticking around is to go on drawing cards from a deck that potentially change the game. and the game is a solitary one; it's not collective. aloneness is where you wind up, but not until after long misadventures in collectivity. it's just a mistake to end up like Emil Cioran. at least Schopenhauer had some love for the Vedas and the Buddha.

maybe i'm going to start reading more science fiction. Minds drifting in space eternally doesn't seem like a such a crazy proposition anymore. scarcity always manufactures reasons to play suspicious ego-games with others, even yourself. nobody ever has enough recognition, or any sense of what to do with it. grievance politics suck, and wars don't change anything. the thirty years' war sucked, and so did WW1, and so did WW2. the Cold War sucked. the peloponnesian War sucked. Panzer General is awesome, and Metal Gear Solid is pretty awesome too. war games are always fascinating stories.

but philosophy that just circles its own ressentiment forever is the worst.

>>12412575
fascinating game, and epically terrible cover art. top-ten Worst Ever Art: aaaaaaaaaand posted anyways. here's the future: Fully Automated Luxury Communism, which does not work. capture and control metaphysics, and the enemy is us, aided by our Dark Forces. sometimes it really is that simple.

what are the *political* messages in this game? there aren't any. what is the *ideal form of the state?* it doesn't exist. the BBEG is simply the machine that regulates all of it. Mother Brain isn't evil, and the crew of the spaceship encountered at the end - meh, they're not really evil either, just pragmatic. Dark Force is evil, but it's just a giant xenomorph from HR Giger. you beat its face in with swords and laser cannons. presumably, you beat in the faces of the guys standing behind it too. because there is no going back, you and all of your companions probably die also, altho there is an allusion to the possibility of an escape pod. it doesn't really matter. roll credits.

like the Matrix, Mother Brain is one of those things that i would have preferred to learn more about; i would have preferred, i think, a Kojima-tier auteur to have shepherded Phantasy Star through three decades of confusing lore. Final Fantasy has its charms because each game is kind of its own self-contained entity, and yet somehow persists in a world we understand as 'Final Fantasy.' but there might also something to be said for having stuck to *one* world, and just developed it over time: every couple of years or so, we smash Mother Brain again, or something LARPing her. or Dark Force. or whatever else.

but Mother Brain wasn't *evil,* not really. and even Dark Force, which is probably close to what most of us would imagine Pure Evil to look like, isn't really encountered as a creeping Lovecraftian horror. sometimes it's simply there, as a huge ugly giant, and if you have done your requisite grinding, you push his face in and keep moving (unless the game ends there). what makes these games unique is that hitting the Reset Button on a sci-fi world is the opposite of hitting the Utopia Button in ours. only hacks end the plot with a utopia (or a dystopia). somehow, apocalyptic death on a corrupted generation ship doesn't really fall into either category. it actually just feels fairly sensible.

Phantasy Star 2: Mother Brain
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD4M1kgkFoc

>>12412716
plus, bonus remixes.

Aeroprism: Rise or Fall
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihL6n9s-PzM

somebody needs to write some good Lacan-tier theory about the Mother Brain complexes. MB was a pretty basic symbol: the Control Mechanism, and any narrative aspects related to her own sentience were pretty much secondary. even the bad guys in the room behind her aren't alluded to until you meet them, at the end. you get Dark Force, the encounter with Mother Brain, and them, all in a row, and then the game ends, on an apocalyptic note that is still kind of startling. it's a kind of strange way to handle the ending; at least in FF6 they folded the escape from Kefka's tower into the credits. in this, there's a sequence of images suggesting an incredible battle - one which you don't see - and then Rolf gritting his teeth and wondering what the people in the future will see. i guess, at that point, he dies. it's pretty intense.

FF7 gives you Jenova, not the worst way to follow up a Doomsday Clown. Jenova is absolutely a Thing From Beyond, but it is the scientism of human beings - the Will To Know - which makes her the threat that she is, and opens them up to the possibility of a viral infection, a deadly intrusion of knowledge. much Sephiroth angst follows.

but i bring this up because it's not always like the worst evils in existence are patriarchies. sometimes they are; Dark Force is unquestionably male thing, in its concentrated essence. if the libido looks like anything, it looks like that. counterposed to it is Mother Brain, a celestial being of absolute CTRL, and a construct of a civilization now addicted to its own degeneracy and decline, aspects of the plot which are not - sadly - developed beyond the rumors of a proliferation of monsters in the countryside, and disasters in cloning.

Jenova is sort of between these; both female and machine, a hybrid of science and virality. like Kefka, she is a portrait of both the allure and the dangers of deconstruction. tempting, because one could always have more; terrifying, because that which grants knowledge is well and truly infinite. here is a liminal being par excellence: both human and alien, machine and virus, all at once. a perfect corollary of a Doomsday Clown in a Baroque universe in decline, updated for what will preoccupy the industrial civilizations that succeed it: namely, science. how does one do science without changing oneself? it's the same thing philosophers and theologians have been preoccupied with for centuries.

ofc, our present world, overrun with politics, is skeptical about science as much as it is skeptical about philosophy or religion. we prefer Certainty, and we will get it. but it won't satisfy, because that certainty can only take place if we exile and taboo the threats that come from the outside. it was to the credit of PS2's writers that they recognized Mother Brain was a more serious threat than Dark Force, even if Dark Force is (confusingly) harder to beat.

>>12412817
i guess the other thing is that Jenova isn't a body without organs. Jenova is a body with organs. this is exactly what makes her compelling.

all in all i think Jenova is a pretty good look at exactly how, and why, critical theory is both attractive and perilous. there are no rules for feminism; feminism is unique in that regard. there were, before it, no real rules for communism either; you had your copy of Capital and the Manifesto and that was about it. the rules come into existence with Stalin and with Mao, and - along a related track - with Hitler and Mussolini. the Revolution becomes incarnated in a single man, or in the State, at which point a different track begins.

i am not optimistic about our current culture wars ending. i've said before that i think a more likely outcome will be the Thirty Years War, a long, protracted, pointless, and stultifying anarchic civil war, which didn't end in anything like a Unified Theory of Religion. it ended with some states being Protestant, others Catholic, and the real winner being the Enlightenment itself, and skepticism about religion in general. i think that is how it will go for our contemporary -isms also, buoyed up on an infinite craving for recognition that ultimately cannot go anywhere but back to itself, and veiled from the world by a kind of promise of *change* when the fact is what you will actually get is *transformation* and *mutation.* Things don't change; *you* change, and as you change, Things change. but this isn't Change You Can Believe In, because you actually can't Believe in the thing that Changes you. by the time you have Changed, your Believing has also changed. that is how viruses work: syphilis has a moment where you feel way way good, and then one where you feel way way bad. they are not separable from each other; they're part of the same thing. drug addiction feels good when you want to feel good; it also feels bad when you don't want to feel good anymore, but the addiction no longer cares about *your* feels.

i'm saddened to think that this is all we will learn from this upheaval, but what exactly was learned in WW1? everybody marched off to war thinking it would be over by Christmas. four years later they were pretty much as confused as ever, with a few more blown-off limbs; and thirty years later it was basically over for Europe.

there's no extant *theory of philosophy.* if there is one, it is Mass Politics. and that stuff just doesn't work anymore. or, maybe, Capitalism; but i think even Capitalism does not survive the total collapse of its host organism. what survives will be enormous confusion, and repetition of the same.

>One Thousand and One Nights and a Handful of Plateaus

>A series of topological analyses of philosophical issues in relation to science, politics and art and their permutations in terms of emergent fields, this twenty-session course promises to rekindle the project initiated by Deleuze and Gauttari in A Thousand Plateaus a new vein: A world consisting of multiple scales and multitude of elements and processes—scientific, philosophical, occult, technological and military—and from which a new craft—a vehicle of cosmological thought—can be forged.

>Beyond Deleuze and Guattari: From machinic assemblages to systems collision, from desiring machines to AI agents and from the archive to neural networks, from a Nietzschean reading of Whitehead’s processes to a computational view of interacting processes. This is how fidelity to the philosophy of A Thousand Plateau actually look like in the future. Nomads armed with the latest paradigm of stability analysis, witches equipped with post-Boltzmann notion of statistics, outlanders who are now paragons of rogue complexity sciences. All in all, we, more or less, signed up for this vision of the world. It is now time to take it to its farthest conclusions.

>In this seminar we will engage once again with rationality, imagination and sensation but this time we shall reinvestigate them through the context of complexity and computational sciences as a probing into past classics (e.g., Plato’s cave, Locke’s tabula rasa, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Hume’s bundles, Kant’s aliens, and other philosophical models in the ‘classical ages’ of reason and rationality.) This reconstruction of A Thousand Plateaus promises to replace the implicit geometric language of ATP with a an explicitly logico-geometric language, and replace its scientific metaphors with actual scientific theories.

>As such this seminar is built around four constitutive investigations into philosophical, political and aesthetic perspectives: Foundational physics, Biological sciences, Mathematics and Computer science. Targeted audience: those who are interested in the philosophy of Deleuze and Gauttari, but also those who dream of abolishing the so-called distinction between the Analytic and the Continental.

source:
https://toyphilosophy.com/

it's not just us. also i plan on shitposting about Metal Gear Solid at some point but i thought this would be relevant to our interests

Year 8,

still haven't finished a single GIrardpost,

/fin

of course, i could just do this now, while it's on my mind.

basically, it comes down to a puzzle for me about the question of a 'male gaze' in cinema. i have a degree in cinema, it's not like this is completely unfamiliar to me. but what i take issue with is the idea that the gaze somehow applies exclusively to women. obviously, using MGS as a text on this is somewhat counter-intuitive: when it comes to male gaze, Quiet is absolutely evidence that it *does* exist. everything we see about her is fetish writ large. you can stare at her cleavage and her butt for as long as you like, and she is the ultimate scopic object (sniper pun included, &c, &c). all of this. there's no question.

but that is boilerplate, and boring as death. the more interesting thing - i think - is that the gaze applies to Snake as well, and yet in a reversed sense. Snake is, in a sense, the ultimate toy. if you have ever held an action figure in your hand, you immediately recognize that Kojima is making all of your dreams come true, if immersion is what you are looking for. here is the action figure inserted into a plane, from which he can be seen, and customized, from every angle. you can replace his arms, you can adjust all of his equipment. you can see him in the helicopter, or in Mother Base, or in Afghanistan carrying a prisoner on his shoulders, or crawling through the jungle, or blowing up a helicopter with a surface-to-air missile.

now you may not want to *fuck* Snake, that's true. if you do, that's fine also. but i'm going under the assumption that you don't. what, then, do you actually want to do with him? mostly, you want to *just look at him.* and Kojima knows this also. i mean shit, he just *looks good* sitting in the helicopter, a reflection of what he is: the essence of rugged utility, and voiced - more or less needlessly - by Kiefer Sutherland, for bonus Cool Points. but that's the thing about Cool Points: they're Cool. they're not Cool because of anything else; they're just Cool in the sense that the game gives you an enormous number of ways of just *looking* at an object.

and we know why Snake is cool to look at. it is because, like all action figures, he *does* things. this is one of the differences between games and cinema: when we watch Rambo, we never think of ourselves as *being* Stallone. he, and Rambo, is always something other than us. we never quite *are* Snake either; we're more like a co-star. but, when we see the villains (or Quiet), sometimes we do get sucked into his head, which is an empty space. it is simply the view from inside, not all that different than the view from outside.

(cont'd)

>>12413384
it hasn't been that long. girardposting didn't even begin in earnest until 2016.

>>12413431
the point of this - if there is one - is that i think Kojima understands something fundamental about the relationship of aesthetics to technology. seeing *is* doing, in a sense. if there is a deconstruction at work here, it is the deconstruction of the idea that the action figure has an essential, or mysterious, core. it doesn't, and the confusing plot of this game - which is senseless- or even, really, the canon lore of the entire series doesn't detract at all from the charm of the games themselves, which is, essentially, *the fetishization of action.* by collapsing the difference between you and the action, we get in place of what would have been one agreeably senseless action film an infinite number of re-plays of .gif moments, or what Deleuze would have called 'time crystals.' to call it 'deconstruction' as such feels wrong; it's more like an explosion.

and some of these ideas are baked into the plot as well. to *be* Snake is to *look* like Snake. if you look like him, if you wear the patch, if you growl the one-liners, *you are that.* that's a beautiful thing, and a remarkable idea. Kojima doesn't seem to me to be saying that there is anything beyond the simulation, and he's not even hiding the simulation from you. the simulation doesn't simulate anything, really, other than the experience of having a body (although that is not a small thing), and, perhaps, raises some really interesting questions about augmented reality (such as D-Dog allowing me as the player to 'see' things before i see them, and track them via the GUI even when i'm not looking at them). my guess is that this is stuff that will eventually trickle into Google Glass or whatever else.

i can remember, as a kid, the feeling of clutching an action figure and watching a movie, wondering what the connection was between them. was i doing it? was this it? was this the experience i was supposed to be having? or, later on, emulating complex computer games i couldn't play with LEGO blocks, in an attempt to capture the simulation, to *bring it under control.* much else since then has followed the same pattern: just substitute 'schizoposting' and 'philosophy' for LEGO and you've basically got everything you need to know about me. i have Strong Feels about the nature of representation because of this stuff. ofc it's not Serious Thinking, it's just...questions that i have.

but i think sometimes that Kojima understood a lot of this stuff, or even solved questions he never intended to ask. he's fucking figured out Spectacle: that games raise questions about the meaning of being in a possible world, and much else. he couldn't have done this if he wasn't both a game designer and a cinema auteur, but lord ha'mercy has he produced something wonderful with that hybridity.

(cont'd)

>>12413495
what he's figured out is *how to hand the tools of cinema over to the player,* in the absence of an *audience.* the audience is also the star: now what?

well, you start by not imposing Reality on them, but making it a thing which is ultimately subordinate to an increasing awareness. you start them out with nothing, and you make it all unlockable. you give them Buddies to enhance their perception, and weapons upgrades to allow for greater combat power. you give them speed upgrades, and a giant machine for processing what they accumulate in the field. you give them challenges, and eventually a whole second continent to explore. you essentially work one of the great magic tricks possible, which is *making fashion concrete.*

these things are really only possible in the world of immersion, but there is a scaled process here. once upon a time you had a photograph of the Wild West; then you had a cowboy movie; then you had Red Dead Redemption; and after RDR, you can have RDR-MMO or just RDR 3, in which the entire continent is simulated. or versions of XCOM given a first-person perspective where you can hop in a power suit and jet yourself from Tokyo to Nairobi to Washington as necessary. all of this. there is no upper limit on simulation for this reason.

and it is because we have to ask ourselves if there is any meaningful or philosophical distinction to be made between games and movies like this. i know, this is hardly new, and it's not like interesting theory is lost on the designers themselves: Far Cry 3 hints at a pretty deep understanding of these thing, in giving you the option to leave the island or go full Lord of the Flies/Heart of Darkness and commit yourself to Rad Barbarism forever. it's not even a dumb question: convince me that Don't Become A Bloodthirsty Warlord, Even If It Makes Your Balls Feel Good isn't actually a legit stumbling point for Western civilization going forward. we like bloodthirstiness. and Kojima knows it also, and he worked it into his game also, via the piece of shrapnel in Snake's head, which is a brilliant touch of psychology too.

anyways. i needed to ramble about this. *it is pleasurable just to look at Snake.* and Kojima knows this. even if he isn't doing anything, it's just satisfying to *look* at things, and customize them. ofc the game is in many ways a disjointed mess with an insane plot: that's not the point. the point is that, as game, it has basically stumbled into a secret treasure room of what makes voyeurism what it is. and mostly by just handing the director's chair over to you. and which is, basically, the same thing i think philosophy is meant to do.

before Lovecraft was anything, Melville was everything.

this, by the way, would make a pretty fabulous open-world game as well. certainly you know that Kojima read it at some point, the game is full of references. be Ahab - or, rather, be someone else. go hunting Demon Whales, and customize your ship, your crew, and the rest. give yourself a bionic harpoon in some kind of insane Gothic-Lovecraftian mashup about losing your mind on the open water. romance Queequeg (or not). cover your body with tattoos and learn voodoo. get your head shrunk. shrink the heads of enemies, collect them, and mount them on your wall. become Nantucket’s equivalent of Euron Greyjoy. whatever. a piece of cinema can *stage* a work of literature, but a game makes it infinitely ludic. if there’s no sandbox, there’s no fucking game.

the thing about Moby-Dick (or LOTR, or Journey to the West, or Blood Meridian, or any number of other great texts) is that they have a *coda.* the story isn’t really a fucking great story unless it goes all the way to the end of the line, and develops every possible theme or implication. Bandersnatch does this, in a bunch of different ways. Bandersnatch is brilliant.

what political utopias, because of the nature of revolutionary sentiment, cannot do is render the coda, or an idea of the coda. Permanent Revolution means chopping out the part of tragedy that prevents tragedy from being what it is: that is, the *consequences.* there are aspects of that even in MGS’ unfinished story: namely, the meltdown in Chapter 2 of everything that you have built. that is a testament to someone who actually understands the power of narrative, and is a pretty deep thinker also.

the worst thing about the state of intellectual life today is that it has, like so many other things, cannibalized exactly what it depends on to survive. it is like intensive farming of the psyche, or strip-mining. without literature, or a humanities education capable of reading literature without devouring it like a schizoid cannibal werewolf, we wind up becoming decadent, just as Nietzsche said. irony is only the veil of ignorance. irony sucks, and postmodernity has no cure for it. wasteland, in the midst of abundance. but wasteland-staring has its charms also.

#AwesomeOpinionsByFuckingLosers

>>12413684
what i should have said was, irony is Maya without Atma, or Samsara without Nirvana. but it is more like a wilful disdain, or even a contempt for Atma, or for Nirvana. people don't really want the death of God, only the death of the Church. when they see Beyond Good and Evil, as Fisher said, they think, 'sweet, Beyond Good.' but there is no way of actually countenancing radical Evil - the mysterious and irreducibly complex nature of which is one of the things that literature *can* do - in the absence of anything like the Good. and if this led to despair it wouldn't be such a bad thing. unfortunately what it leads to instead is *anger,* and scapegoating. it leads to Politics. and politics is fucking stupid.

it's all so goddamn stupid. but maybe this all had to happen. maybe we need the post-apoc scenario so that we can realize how vapid communism and fascism actually are, or how much the Meltdown is hard-wired into the destiny of industrialism, or at least an ultra-libertarianism that continually strips out its own brakes in order to boost the top speed. LARPing fascism after the collapse doesn't have quite the same appeal (or, equally so, the same taboo: Caesar's Legion in Fallout was a good example of this.)

the Apocalypse is always what frightens, because Apocalypse is the genuine reset button on history. Alan Moore knew it, and built the Watchmen around that very idea, including having Rorschach be the ultimate victim, and Dr Manhattan the ultimate superhero-betrayer, even more than Ozymandias. in Moby-Dick, the reunion of Ahab and the Whale delivers up nothing but flotsam on the sea. maybe Dostoevsky's nightmares had the better sense of anticipating Stalin, and Nietzsche the same for the Ubermensch LARPers in Germany. but Melville has just as massive, and awesome, a sense of America too, and what it means to go hunting for the thing you weren't meant to find, but is wrapped up with you all the way. Deleuze liked Melville. Land seems to prefer Lovecraft. and Herbert had his version of Ahab merge with the Whale-worm itself, which is kind of weird.

philosophy is cool, and so literature, so are games. but ruling the polis never works.

pic rel is a Great Text for a very good reason, one of the best explorations of the nature of the beast today as anyone could possibly ask for. you want to know how people become fucking Taoists? this.

kind of makes you wonder what it would have been like to be Plato, and watch Socrates get sentenced to death. or the Christians, watching their boy get raised up on a cross. or, perhaps, even Nietzsche, watching the whipping of a horse, in Turin.

>>12413743
very telling as watchmen is a pretty direct retelling of faust with the twist of god neither redeeming or judging. fucking spengler was right again.

>>12413743
these sensibilities are not limited to the West, either. one of the most interesting (and tragic) moments you will ever read, or watch, is seeing how the ultimate conflict between Zhuge Liang and Sima Yi is resolved. the only thing that saves you from ripping out your hair is the fact that *Sima Yi also understands how things play out.* the Will of Heaven is *fucking inexplicable.* the Good Guys get fucked, and the Bad Guys get saved, and *so much for your fucking philosophy.* and yet, perhaps, this also can lead to enlightenment: realizing that *in everything* there is a higher order. the rain isn't there as a giant Fuck You to Kongming, nor is it a just reward for Sima Yi. it just *is* - and that should really fuck with your head, and make you humble. without this you would have only horror, the same horror that Moore understands. and Land as well, in his own way. and many others.

>>12413764
yes, especially the 'neither redeeming nor judging,' and yet having all of this power over beings who, in some existential way, are nothing without their redemptions - of themselves, of others - and their judgments, is *properly scary.* those, perhaps, are those serious abysses that disquieted Pascal, and others. or even what Spinoza says of God: you can love him, but you cannot expect that He should love you in return. and many others.

there are no fucking Safe Spaces in the theological realms, which are adjacent to the literary worlds when handled by genuinely all-time all-time pantheon-tier writers. that's the whole point.

the force that resolves the ferry scene in The Dark Knight is the same one that resolves the conflict between Zhuge Liang and Sima Yi, and in each case can be called miraculous without diminishing it. but in both cases the nature of this miracle will mean nothing to cynics.

cynicism is the real death of the mind, as anger, irony, the politics of fear and suspicion, or just the insufferable shallowness of the world today.

but without God, without judgement, is ozymadias still doomed? is he forever destined to a world of nightmares? i am a coward and make use of willful ignorance to ultimately side with goethe&kierkegaard and expect salvation for all my horrific deeds - thowing babies into gnon-furnaces and so on.

>>12413836
God is a big guy

>>12413846
for you
:(

>>12413836
>but without God, without judgement, is ozymadias still doomed?
it's not a dumb question. the question is whether or not one person having a god is enough when the other person doesn't. Badiou says, somewhere, one look at a woman is enough to tell you that you don't need God. perhaps women and banks and a corporate penthouse are enough. the tragedy of Watchmen - and that *is* a properly tragic story, even more than The Dark Knight, which ends on a note of redemption - is that the first casualty of any war is the truth. in this case, a holy lie is constructed around the scene of the murder, which is precisely how the story ends: with one hand hovering over the document that will reveal what has actually happened, and doom the city to a fate even worse than death. those twenty million people will have died for nothing. for an analogue, you would have to consider a post-apocalyptic scenario in which a story has been constructed about Why The World Had To Burn. it would be unconscionable for any reconstructive project to reveal that it was ultimately over three acres of beach in Cuba in 1962.

what makes the story what it is is that we recognize Dr Manhattan in ourselves, the well-intentioned Good Guy. even his cynicism is baked all the way in: he says he can't change human nature, but it is one thing to kill Rorschach and another thing to say, i won't do it. he could have gone to Mars, but he doesn't. he serves the Holy Lie, which is that the show must go on, for World Peace and the Greater Good. you might do it too, if you thought it would bring the Cold War to an end. or, you might not, and let the chips fall where they may. Snake Plissken comes to a similar conclusion, at the end of Escape From LA. he's fine with shutting the world down. these are legit interesting questions about the future of the polis, and the kinds of problems our own brand of hegemonic liberalism has given itself. the Chinese face them also, in their ways. to unite China is the dream entirely of the players in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and no one is more a worthy person than Kongming: he is both Confucian scholar and Taoist sage. for reasons *completely beyond his control,* the rain saves Sima Yi, even though they are playing by a *completely fair game,* of traps and strategies. Sima Yi takes the bait, and is saved by deus ex machina (in this case, weather). again, it is to his credit that he recognizes that his escape is nothing short of a gifted miracle, and that this will *humble* him as a leader. at least, that's how it goes in the story.

the similarities between contemporary postmodern Brahmins and pic rel aren't exactly easy, but they are there. Augustine was a fascinating man; his analogues in 2019 don't measure up to his model of temperance. Augustine also smashed a lot of heresy, which is a dangerous game to play. there is no Grand Inquisitor without him.

(cont'd)

>>12413836
>i am a coward and make use of willful ignorance to ultimately side with goethe&kierkegaard and expect salvation for all my horrific deeds - thowing babies into gnon-furnaces and so on.
you're far too honest to call yourself a coward that easily, since obviously you're not afraid of being called a coward. so that much we can dispense with. and certainly you recognize that there is not likely to be any salvation granted for throwing babies into Gnon-furnaces. so let's not get too carried away here.

Douglas Murray had a good point about this. if any of the great state executioners of the 20C had anything in common, it was that God was not watching them, and that history was on their side. true, it's not like the Christians of earlier times didn't do all kinds of things on their own, armed with exactly the same degree of moral clarity. but i think we can recognize that the times have changed.

the Church is a remarkable hybrid: everything that is going on in Augustine's head, under his impressive miter, is reflected in the Church: Judaeo-Christian religion, Greek philosophy, Roman law, Manichaean psychology, and much much else. that is the great edifice that gives you modern Europe, and Christendom. love it or hate it, it has no substitutes. it taught the West everything it could about nondualism for millennia. today, unlike earlier generations, we have a little more exposure to the East, which has really only captured the minds of a few great Western thinkers, in various ways: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger. Schopenhauer loves him some Vedanta. Nietzsche's Dionysus was, i think, a version of Shiva, and near enough to Sils-Maria that he could get a sniff of it. he preferred the Greeks, and that's fine. Nietzsche was a walking fireworks show every day of his life. and Heidegger makes for a very nice transition to Zen, even if And By Philosophy, I Mean Western Philosophy was what he was all about.

the real horror of postmodernity is that it abandons both of the fundamental legs on which this ship was built, the religion and the philosophy. and it doesn't have a substitute, however much it would like to convince itself it doesn't need one. what it will try and make do with is Protestant zeal, and Protestant zeal destroyed Germany at least, and more than once. Peterson is trying to claw some of that back at the eleventh hour, Land is over in China continuing to be like a kind of Spenglerian winter soldier, alone at the last redoubt of old-school Marxism, and Zizek continues to talk about Walter Benjamin to what must be an annually shrinking audience. hopefully we get that Peterson-Zizek debate soon tho anyways, i'd love to tune in to that.

but we still need that connection to the higher order in things, which always suffers when we try and capture it all in politics (or in LEGO blocks). all that winds up happening is that *you* get transformed by the failure to own the essence of that which moves you.

most of your post is exactly spot on, but the story of faust is EXACTLY about finding moral absolution through commiting the ultimate transgression against god - harming an innocent. through that faust understood what had happened and was judged. there is a tinge of bataille there, and as we have become more desensitized, murder might not be enough, so i have to resort to infanticide. think the Kurtz monologue about the pile composed of children's hands. the sheer brilliance ect. - an absolutely striking.

the thing that worries me the most that both Kurtz and Faust ultimately failed in their quest, and they were far, FAR greater men than me. Faust might have been redeemed, but he died delusional, nature unconquered. Kurtz got closer, but failed to overcome himself once the lies were stripped. this is where nietzsche!deleuze!kierkegaard come in, where the ubermench!outside!knight-of-faith is PRESICELY this singularity&rupture. Kierkegaard is probably the easiest, as he has God on his side, so I went with him. this option is what the kids call a ""cope"", hence the cowardice.

i'm unsure about needing the connection to the higher order of things. to be aware of it, sure, maybe, but like focault said - man will soon be washed away and gone. deleuze&G didn't ramble 2k pages about freud being a gay incest fetishist for you to regress into some sort of hierarchical mysticism - that way is merely cowardice.

>>12414010
fascinating post. if my own schizo-rambles produce responses and posts like these i feel in my own way quite satisfied. wonderful.
>the thing that worries me the most that both Kurtz and Faust ultimately failed in their quest, and they were far, FAR greater men than me.
why is Kurtz so much greater than you tho? i think i understand what you mean, or partly. if the ubermensch is for real, Kurtz is certainly a glimpse into its possibilities and its inner workings. Anton Chigurh, or Judge Holden are other examples of this ("nemocentric supermen"):

>Interestingly, Metzinger uses the thought experiment of an ‘Introspective Superman’: a being with such computational speed/power that it has global access to its own cognitive processes (i.e. there is no ‘transcendental’ or ‘upstream’ that is unavailable to this particular mind)… He claims that it would have a ‘global, opaque state of consciousness that is like “lucid waking”‘. There would be naïve identification with either its models of the world or its models of the self. Thus it would have an unparalleled potential for self-engineering. Brassier and Metzinger note that the Introspective Superman would be ‘burdened with an additional computational load’, which it would ‘have to find some way of discharging without getting trapped into infinite loops of self-representation’ (because it would constantly be recursively representing itself as a representation). If it did mitigate this problem, however, it would ‘constitute a cognitive system operating with a non-phenomenologically centered model of reality’. It would be, as Metzinger calls it, nemocentric. (We ask, at this point, if we here have a blueprint for a nemocentric agent, what would the design plan for a nemocentric socius look like? A tantalizing brief, to say the least…)

but are these necessarily our templates? why not rank, say, Goethe higher than Kurtz? or Beethoven?

>i'm unsure about needing the connection to the higher order of things. to be aware of it, sure, maybe, but like focault said - man will soon be washed away and gone.
true, but Heidegger and Spengler both argued that that process could take a very, very long time, also. i think that matters. the Winter Phase of Decline, or Heidegger's own sense of decline, can last exponentially longer than the formative and foundational springtime. doesn't this matter also? this is like Heidegger's whole point. Derrida's too, in a way. you hold the door open, because you have no way of closing it.

>deleuze&G didn't ramble 2k pages about freud being a gay incest fetishist for you to regress into some sort of hierarchical mysticism - that way is merely cowardice.
perhaps, but i tend to suspect that the anger which rejects mysticism proceeds from the same fundamental cowardice. and genuine horror, or shame, in the face of the Infinite seems perfectly fine to me. it's the admission of non-knowledge.

Bump

Bump

Very interesting exchange just now. The kinds of posts that make me both extremely disillusioned with reading schizoposts and kind of vindicated for it, for the fire it lights under my ass. But if Faust or Kurtz can't do it, as that anon said, what hope do any of us have? We're so small. I'm so small. God.

bumppppppp

>>12416139
why do they make you disillusioned?
>>12414116
the lesson of deleuze is that we can still appreciate our past and construct mystical frameworks without hierarchies. if you lodge the door with hierarchy, you can't move on while that wedge is there. the outside is outside of hierarchy. ill rant more in-depth later, i think this is a productive line of argument.

>>12416733
>why do they make you disillusioned?

With schizoposting? It feels so small compared to being great. Just gilded mediocrity. And I've done my fair share.

>>12412575
>it's just a mistake to end up like Emil Cioran.
why?.

>>12416733
>ill rant more in-depth later, i think this is a productive line of argument.
please do, i'd be quite interested to read more of your thoughts on this.

>>12417041
meh, i just don't get the appeal, i suppose. i've read some of his work and i just don't find it interesting enough to warrant the misery.

I'm housesitting for a friend and he has this shitty laptop keyboard as opposed to my magnificent mechanical beast. It feels strange to type. My words are misshapen - they are not forged with mighty hammer-like strikes of my fingers, but more a gentle tipping of a secretary that Mr. Draper would get metoo'd by.in current year. Gay.
>>12416139
It is PRECISELY this hopelessness that the romantics were weaponizing. You are on the right track. Now the next step, if I may be condescending, is realizing that being small has its advantages. You can slip through cracks easier. You can sneak by unnoticed. The trickster does not lament his relative impotence, he turns the master against himself. An appreciation of Anansi is in my opinion semi-mandatory. Faust and Kurtz can't do it? FUCK THEM. They had the distinct dis(?)advantage of not having read French pseuds. Nihilism is not the telos, it is a tool. Trust me, I have tried hedonistic nihilism and it does not work out well.
>>12414116
In Deloogean terms, Kurtz got closer to the Outside than I have been. He stretched man to its limits and uncovered the truths. Why Kurtz and Goethe over Beethoven? Because I happened to form an alliance with them. They are my preliminary points of investigation for the ontology of ruptures, disruptions, edge cases, of modes of difference. You could very easily find that in a song at a parlor party (Proust's Swann discovering the nature of his love for Odette), eating a sweet or in Kierkegaard's case, have the Aesthetic revealed through Mozart's operas or falling in love. I also don't seperate Goethe-Faust from Faust-Homunculus. Both are conjurings that then dissolve themselves into a type of local universal. Faust into romantic model of Man, Homunculus into romantic model of Life.

I wouldn't place Anton into the Faustian tradition personally. He is a becoming-God, a mask. He isn't a person, he is an actor, a persona, a sort of pure will. He has become a Mask, not a man. Faust is always man before the rupture. Faust changes. Note how neither Anton (or Joker) have a character arc. They simply are. They exist only as a mask, never as a person. I haven't sadly read Blood Meridian yet, so I don't know enough about Holden.

Nemocentric identity - I'm suspicious of this. I think that post-Outside is so beyond our thinking that we are even unable to model the type of thinking that it would enthrall. Thinking isn't even the right word, but merely an approximation. Think of how merely the Landian effects of the outside have to be studied through Demonology to even be remotely understandable, to use your brilliant metaphor, for our Commedor 64 hardware. Even then, all we are grasping are the consequences of these strange noumena, not the noumena themselves.

On the doors and past. The entire reason why Deleuze loves Spinoza is Spinoza figuring out that maybe the specific way of holding the door open isn't the only one. Also, holding the door open in the old way is a question of state-philosophy. I frankly abandon the Deleuzean model mostly, except as a faint underpinning when doing political philosophy. The contemporary polis, after all, is on the shoulders of Apollo. I, when dealing with the state as a Deleuzean, will always beoming-Anansi. I will Bugs Bunny the shit out of them. Accept not their framework.

And do not mistake me - I ADORE mysticism, I even adore hierarchical mysticism - but one should use it very carefully. With the Faust-Question comes the question of "do the tools of the enemy corrupt?". Deleuze's answer is a resounding "yes, but who cares". And Land's answer is "who ca- oh fuck shit fuck shit FUCK, FUCK, we need more amphetamines/RAM" ect. Deleuze is a mystic, a sorcerer who allows us to conjure without a system. Chaos Magic without the Chaos Magic system. I also refuse to spell it Magik you fucking neckbeard xposters. Of course, what you-Lovecraft describe as the dark side of mysticism exists. I can't make heads or tails of it, as I haven't given it too much thought, but merely because there's so much to explore and not enough time. Sorcery and Lovecraft is an extremely fertile ground.

Bump

>>12417260
>meh, i just don't get the appeal, i suppose.
there is a story where camus approach cioran and tell him "ok, but now you must enter in the truly intellectual sphere".
and i understand why camus tell him that. but camus is wrong. what really wants people interested in philosophy is to create systems, in the end. and cioran go deep down to say the lies and stupidness and vanity of all systems (with an affected and hipertormented style...). the result is that all philosophers see him like some kind of joke, a bad joke indeed.
like you see him i suppose.

>sorry for my english if i make some mistakes.

Sorel just applied Giambattista Vico's New Science (1744) onto his contemporary political agenda, the philosophy is Vico's theory of Poetic Wisdom. That's where the Sorel's concept of violence and heroic myth come from.

You'd benefit from a grounding in Neo-Platonism. The process of procession of form into particulars, and the return of particulars to form. Eric Perl is the best introduction.

>>12417923
>>12417943
Very good posts.

>>12418743
And a very, very good book.

>>12418743
>neoplatonism
anti scientific jiggaboo garbage

metaphysics delenda est

>:/
Maybe it's a good thing you psueds don't get Peirce
>;)

>>12417923
>>12417943
i'm very glad you came back to rant further about this, this is quite interesting stuff. a couple of things in particular:

>being small has its advantages
being small i think is everything. a lot of philosophy seems like Shadow of the Colossus, sometimes. psychoanalysis too. the Iron Giants wandering blindly through the landscape, and the tiny being on horseback looking for the Secret Weak Spot. of course, we are almost inevitably more like the giants than the rider, and guided by processes in this we can scarcely explain. to be small ('minor') is the way. ofc this is almost always bungled by the so-easy step from small to *marginalized,* which is the death sentence. killing the giants is a bad idea, because at the center of those giants is another being not unlike yourself...everybody is defending something.

small is beautiful, tho terrifying. you might get stepped on. you might get blown away by a strong wind. we think - man, if i had a giant armor suit, life would be so sweet. nobody would ever fuck with me. and so it begins.

>The trickster does not lament his relative impotence, he turns the master against himself.
for maximum score, i think he reveals what it is the master really wants: to know that he is not the master, and that the master still lies elsewhere, further on. think about that scene at the end of Kung Fu Hustle, where the Sing says to the Beast: 'if you want to know, i will teach you.' and the Beast immediately bursts into tears, and says, 'Master!' this is far, far better than simply having the Beast be *killed.* why should be killed? the Beast grasps the ontology of that world, and he is an absolute kung-fu savant. the frog techniques that he knows are *monstrous,* but he doesn't thirst for power like the Axe Gang does. he is in a prison because he has gone insane. but, remarkably, when we find him in prison, he seems quite content with this also. he has found a *plateau* - and has no reason to leave it, until, well, things happen.

but look at how the interactions between the Beast and the elderly couple that defends the village work. they see in each other *adversaries* but not *enemies,* driven by hate and antipathy. and yet somehow part of the same mystery. that is quite a wonderful film.

>I haven't sadly read Blood Meridian yet, so I don't know enough about Holden.
you are in for a treat good sir. i'd welcome your perspective on Moby-Dick also, if you have one.

>holding the door open in the old way is a question of state-philosophy.
it is. these are older influences on me that give me the eye-twitch.

>>12419386
>for maximum score, i think he reveals what it is the master really wants: to know that he is not the master, and that the master still lies elsewhere, further on.

something I've been thinking of too, the dichotomy between master and slave is still a kind of slavery, as long as the master keeps reifying his masterhood, of course… there needs to be a kind of "post-reflexive" dominance, the dominance that is, of course, not domination, and the best examples of that for me have always been the masters Zhuangzi talks about, or you hear about in Zen literature. But good discussion. carry on.

>>12417943
>The contemporary polis, after all, is on the shoulders of Apollo. I, when dealing with the state as a Deleuzean, will always beoming-Anansi. I will Bugs Bunny the shit out of them. Accept not their framework.
i can relate, but i found in my own reading that a rejection of all state frameworks became in the end impossible. hence the love for RG the Don. ritual, sacrifice, eschatology and murder are things upon which the Law is founded. the Law is a stumbling block: i have a great deal of regard for Lacan, Kafka, or Dostoevsky also. with Lacan we have even a proto-Land figure: at some point, the state metastasizes and we find ourselves in it, beholden to a Hegelian enterprise that unites free markets and social democracy, and yet governed at every turn by the spectre of negativity, a negativity to which we are deeply wed, and which torments us.

the Sphinx controls your future because it controls your past. mythologically, it stands between two worlds, like a seal over the old cthonic realm that is nevertheless present in our (Oedipal) new one, with its ostensible reason and regard for human nature and respect. *this* framework *cannot* really be rejected, i don't think, because this is the one that allows even for philosoraptors to think, and as such it is worth preserving. when it produces a Robespierre, with his hand on the lever of the guillotine - or the Grand Inquisitor, who rejects Christ in favor of the cold iron and the mechanism - something has gone wrong, and it is something for which we cannot appeal to the gods in the same old way. we find ourselves as such trapped: we cannot accept this framework, and we cannot impose on it a Higher one, or merely substitute it for another. so what then? we go deeper.

this is where Girard does interesting Girard things, in sussing out the role played by religion in society as a thing which is not bound up with the law in the same way as the state is. it is also i think Confucius' ontology: relations, not things. and the Way as such cannot really forcibly brought down to earth; all you can do is perhaps allow for the conditions of its appearance. things that i think are also right there in Heidegger's wheelhouse also. and Lacan's: the analysand has basically been overwritten with laws and rules that he produces himself, and cannot keep up with, and which are coming to him both from within and from without. but the goal isn't to overthrow society, it is - as Heidegger says - to enter into the circle in the right way.

i don't quite know what the computer programming analogy for this would be. perhaps it would be something like understanding the difference between a hackable PC with an open-source code, and consoles dedicated to the running of particular games, or programs. or how, perhaps, we eventually discover the existence of the internet, and the a priori collective wiring of a great many computers, through glitches and encrypted signals left behind by mysterious precursors.

>>12417943
>And do not mistake me - I ADORE mysticism, I even adore hierarchical mysticism - but one should use it very carefully.
no diggity. the esoterics are, in a way, designed to prevent the exoterics from becoming tyrannical, as much as the exoterics are there to keep the esoteric from wandering away (or being stolen). it's there in Garriott also: the Shadowlords are themselves aspects of a virtue system which has become crystallized into a draconian set of Ethics. to free the king isn't to inaugurate a golden age; it's to restore the balance between esotericism and exotericism, in a sense. the land itself, and its relatively benign monarchic-anarchism (not really as much of a contradiction in terms as it might seem) is restored to *disutility.* everyone is again free to seek the virtues, or not, as they see it. a truly fascinating tale. there are no hierarchies in mysticism, precisely because virtues cannot be brought down to the level of ratio. to choose between Justice or Humility is *tortuous.* which is why there is one city for Justice, and one for Humility, and they *do not go to war.* nor is the king himself a symbol of union: he's just the king. the Outside threats are in fact entirely manifestations of hybris. it is the Inside wherein lurk the monsters, which are ultimately only twisted aspects of the Good. Ultima is fascinating stuff and written at a fascinating time. there's even more than a little Artificial Synthetic Kantian Time going on there too, albeit in the happiest possible sense.

>>12418673
yeah, i don't mean to shit on him. there surely has to be some reason why his name has endured. maybe someday i'll figure out what the fuss is all about. it's me, not him.

>>12418679
>Poetic Wisdom
i'd be interested to hear more about this, if you wanted to share.

>>12418743
i'll give this a look today, ty anon

>>12419260
>metaphysics delenda est
read Deleuze first tho. metaphysics is based

>>12419372
>Maybe it's a good thing you psueds don't get Peirce
my CompSci buddy loves him. there's no question that he's brilliant, one of the greatest American philosophers ever. but some of us like scraping our faces against the jagged black rocks in the underworld and listening to werewolves howling.

>>12419440
>something I've been thinking of too, the dichotomy between master and slave is still a kind of slavery, as long as the master keeps reifying his masterhood, of course
100% this. it would be more accurate today to characterize *slave-slave* relations, two slaves arguing about which is the more enslaved. the genuine hysteria within postmodernity manifests as the incredible conclusion that *to know is to oppress.* this is Foucault given a frontal lobotomy, or everything you love about Deleuze transformed into completely tragic nightmare fuel. all that pic related knows is that he is the voice of a great multitude. the Master is imho an absolutely perfect symbol of the destiny of leftist politics: the Grand Inquisitor for the DNC.
>destroy me?
>destroy!
>me?
add in the fact that the developers even had a GI moment at the end, where you are rejected also by the very Vault you set out to save. you too are handed back to the road, to go wandering again. that was a brilliant game.

slavery too can become reified. Foucault understood this; he writes, somewhere, about the dangers of the marginalized marginalizing themselves. and yet - as always - the world has delivered plot twists that nobody could have predicted. in an age of *absolute corporate dominance,* the extraordinary fact that the corporations in turn wind up being tyrannized by their consumer base is a sad irony. people jettison philosophy and revolution for consumption, then - on some deep level - demand that the consumption give back precisely that wish for moral gratification that they surrendered for leisure and convenience. when corporations listen, you get things like the Gillette ad (the most surprising characteristic of which is the *total absence of any indication of the razor's actual quality.* the problem isn't your razor, it's your face (and your mind).

Gillette: The Best A Man Can Be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koPmuEyP3a0

what a world we live in.

>there needs to be a kind of "post-reflexive" dominance, the dominance that is, of course, not domination, and the best examples of that for me have always been the masters Zhuangzi talks about, or you hear about in Zen literature
can't find a flaw in Zen. or in Zhuangzi's dextrous butcher. when you have a Cook Ting on hand it's easy to run a kitchen. it is in fact *so* easy that you might be inclined to think of the entire state itself as being just one big happy restaurant...and you might not even be wrong about that.

>>12419585
I'm curious: which character in Final Fantasy 6 do you have a personal connection with?

bump

>>12419585
Im in terested on your thoughts on modern platonism, i don't know much about reza negarastani but it seems imposible to me to bring plato back even though the theory of the form is such a beautiful and poetic idea.

>>12420401
>The Madman. Have you ever heard of the madman who on a bright morning lighted a lantern and ran to the market-place calling out unceasingly: "I seek Plato! I seek Plato!" - As there were many people standing about who did not believe in Plato, he caused a great deal of amusement. Why! is he lost? said one. Has he strayed away like a child? said another. Or does he keep himself hidden? Is he afraid of us? Has he taken a sea-voyage? Has he emigrated? - the people cried out laughingly, all in a hubbub. The insane man jumped into their midst and transfixed them with his glances. " Where has Plato gone?" he called out. "I mean to tell you! We have killed him, - you and I! We are all his murderers! But how have we done it? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun the Good? Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Backwards, sideways, forewards, in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and darker? Shall we not have to light lanterns in the morning? Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying Plato? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction? - for even philosophers putrefy! Plato is dead! Plato remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife, - who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become philosophers, merely to seem worthy of it? There never was a greater event, - and on account of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history hitherto!" - Here the madman was silent and looked again at his hearers; they also were silent and looked at him in surprise. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, so that it broke in pieces and was extinguished. "I come too early," he then said, "I am not yet at the right time. This prodigious event is still on its way, and is travelling, - it has not yet reached men’s ears. Lightning and thunder need time, the light of the stars needs time, deeds need time, even after they are done, to be seen and heard. This deed is as yet further from them than the furthest star, - and yet they have done it!"

>- It is further stated that the madman made his way into different chans on the same day, and there intoned his Requiem aeternam deo. When led out and called to account, he always gave the reply: "What are these shitposts now, if they are not the tombs and monuments of Plato?"

>>12400553
yep, whitehead is especially in vogue in literature departments right now

>"The determination of the meaning of nature reduces itself principally to the discussion of the character of time and the character of space."
- t. Whitehead

What did he mean by this? Serious question I want to understand better. Thanks.

>>12421876
Do you have the context for that quote?

>>12420401
>but it seems imposible to me to bring plato back

why? y'all niggas need to read Perlman

>>12421985
No, I don't actually. It was used in David Harvey's foreword to Neil Smith's "Uneven Development," a Marxist-influenced work of geography. I would love to know where the quote originates though.

>>12419530
>Vico's poetic wisdom
If you've read Sorel you'll be familiar with it's application to his sydicalism and the poetic myth of the general strike and class war. Poetic wisdom is contrasted to intellectual wisdom and posited as a way both pre-intellectual societies think and how we all think non-intellectually.

We imagine poetic archetypes and project them onto our history, material causes, and contemporary struggles as poetic, rather than literal, truths. A contemporary example would be how people interpret politics through pop-culture, as "Dumbledore's Army" resisting evil, or as the defenders of Tolkien's Middle-Earth against an Orc invasion of third world hordes. Or the Greek poetic physics that gives fable explanations to natural phenomenon, like sound echos in valleys being the result of the nymph Echo being enamored with Narcissus and repeating his calls through the forest.

Stanford has an article and the Bergin & Fisch edition of the New Science is very accessible.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/vico/#NewScie

>>12421876
Because objects are properly understood as processes existing in time and space.

>>12422089
You can reduce the quote to saying "the philosophy of time and the philosophy of space/physics are important" which is obvious and trivial and has been discussed as of central importance since the beginning of philosophy.

>>12422139
This is wrong. Processes don't need space.
Space itself is just one type of an extensive continuum of entities which can exist.

>>12421876
>>12421985
>>12422089
It's from The Concept of Nature, and it's not even the complete sentence. I suspect this was done intentionally to obscure Whitehead's actually meaning.
Here's the context:
>However, we must admit that the causality theory of nature has its strong suit. The reason why the bifurcation of nature is always creeping back into scientific philosophy is the extreme difficulty of exhibiting the perceived redness and warmth of the fire in one system of relations with the agitated molecules of carbon and oxygen, with the radiant energy from them, and with the various functionings of the material body. Unless we produce the all-embracing relations, we are faced with a bifurcated nature; namely, warmth and redness on one side, molecules, electrons, and ether on the other side. Then the two factors are explained as respectively being the cause and the mind's reaction to the cause.
>Time and space would appear to provide these all embracing relations which the advocates of the philosophy of the unity of nature require. The perceived redness of the fire and the warmth are definitely related in time and in space to the molecules of the fire and the molecules of the body.
>It is hardly more than a pardonable exaggeration to say that the determination of the meaning of nature reduces itself principally to the discussion of the character of time and the character of space. In succeeding lectures I shall explain my own view of time and space. I shall endeavor to show that they are abstractions from the concrete elements of nature, namely, from events. The discussion of the details of the process of abstraction will exhibit time and space as interconnected, and will finally lead us to the sort of connections between their measurements which occur in the modern theory of electromagnetic relativity. But this is anticipating our subsequent line of development. At present I wish to consider how the ordinary views of time and space help, or fail to help, in unifying our conception of nature.
So, very bad faith on Harvey's part if he was presenting that quotation as representative of Whitehead's actually thinking.

>>12401856
>>12401836
I never get tired of reading about Temple OS and Terry. Truly something beyond our world.

>>12422061
Even if you try to rationalize the world there are better philosophers than plato like for example spinoza

>platonism has anything to do with plato
lol
.

>>12420429
what a post. man. woo!
>>12419474
>on sphinxes and nyx
But this is PRECISELY why we must reject them as a _BASE_ and _ETERNAL_. Obviously I must navigate these labyrinths, and the labyrinth is very real, but I refuse to accept the rules given to me, such as no graffiti or don't break any walls. Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, and you're just describing instrumental use. I'm unsure. Pure political philosophy for me is a hobby. It does not produce anything ethically usable - reading Hobbes' or Moldbug's reforms and nodding along, but knowing that they are not tenable. "The only revolution which I believe in is one that starts with burning down Paris", said Wagner, and he couldn't be more right. The polis as stratum was a mistake. That's a long way off though, so one ticket for straight trough please

>>12422233
>Space itself is just one type of an extensive continuum of entities which can exist.

I bet you felt smart when you wrote that. God I fucking hate intelligentsia. Crack open a intro physics book for once.

>>12424147
>The Sun is not the center of the universe

I bet you felt smart when you copied that into your scroll. God I fucking hate sophists. Go to a Prince-School for once.

bumppppppppppp

>>12424147
Know how I can tell you've never read any Whitehead?

sorry about the late responses gents, i had a 24-hour ban up.

>>12419725
Kefka. he's the perfect foil for postmodernity, because he sums it up so completely. with /acc stuff, sentient capital et al a new kind of world of philosophy opens up, in a sense, and one which for the time being seems to resist being given its properly mythopoetic treatment. but FF6 basically handles in one beautiful throw of the dice everything i have always been fascinated by and horrified by about postmodernity, and it is because it has the ultimate villain.

him excluded, Edgar. but i can write five thousand words off the top of my head about Kefka, who seems to open up doors in my head to every elemental plane of schizo-ramble that i have. he connects to Nietzsche and Heidegger and Uncle Nick. most importantly, he represents a kind of plateau of philosophy between postmodernity and Uncle Nick. the World of Ruin is our world. and who knows, maybe /acc stuff will turn out in the end to only be a kind of tiny sandcastle, in the end. either way, what it is that Kefka means to that game, and what that game means to art is unaffected. FF6 is a pinnacle for me, and the Doomsday Clown is a major part of why that is so.

>>12420401
my thoughts on modern Platonism? i'm not really sure if have any. Grievance Politics are certainly rooted in the transcendent - the old attraction to master signifiers - but that's not a particularly interesting line of inquiry. i might be inclined to say that the Forms are, like Nirvana, something simply to be sought but not achieved. they are a sort of Grail Quest for the Enlightenment, and stubbornly irreducible to bullshit politics today. Negarestani can give you a far better (and more persuasive) window on this kind of stuff. Intelligence is a goal worth pursuing, but the road today will lead through a thousand Late Humanist conflagrations.

>>12420429
very good

>>12422134
ty for the clarification. i read NS a looong time ago and i think most of it was lost on me; i didn't have much context. Vico is an interesting guy for sure.

>>12423683
>nyx
still puzzled about this one. 'twas no Slime Queen connection in there (although from what i understand, she's trying to make slime molds the hot new subject).

>"The only revolution which I believe in is one that starts with burning down Paris", said Wagner, and he couldn't be more right.
this made me laugh. i think i would probably be in the Don't Burn Paris camp, but it's not like that really matters. Because Wagner Said So is a perfectly justifiable reason.

>But this is PRECISELY why we must reject them as a _BASE_ and _ETERNAL_.
to each his own. i think all i'm saying is that there is a horizon beyond which philosophical anarchism does not appeal to me, but this is a complex (and frequently depressing) perspective to have arrived at. i consider the psychoanalytic adventure to be superior to the political adventure, in many ways, and in some sense it depends on accepting the given rules and understanding them prior to their rejection. i don't know about you, but in my own case, i pretty much started with Pan-Rejectionism and have slowly kinda-sorta worked my way back via the reading. true, i'm often more disappointed than ever now, and i feel like i live in a William Golding universe as such. accepting the rules has made me absolutely despise a lot of things, but...well. now i know. and i also think i have gained a slightly more nuanced sense of how difficult it us to propose rules, and perhaps how the meatbag operates.

but these are also the times we live in, in many ways. frustrations with modernity gave rise to postmodernity, and frustrations with postmodernity, well...that's where we are now. obviously Land is interesting in this world, if we are following the continuing Marxist et al adventure. but i also don't want to just become Woke in my own preferred way, that too is a dead end. hence the folding circle of analysis.

YH has a new essay out too in e-flux. worth your time if you enjoyed the Cosmotech threads et al.

Yuk Hui: What Begins After the End of the Enlightenment?
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/96/245507/what-begins-after-the-end-of-the-enlightenment/

here's a thought i was working on yesterday while serving my ban.

basically, Land's contribution to philosophy can be explained in two letters: R and D. if capital is anything, it means machines; and if machines mean anything, they mean intelligence. this is precisely what teleoplexy signifies: cybernetic self-positing, and feedback loops. again, it's not like this would have been lost on Hegel, he knew it very well. but you have these three parallel concepts:

Hegel: Spirit
Marx: Capital
Land: Teleoplexy

and they are all ultimately a part of one enterprise (well, at least that's how Land would look at it). and i find him a fruitful point of departure. the key thing in this, however, is the notion of *sacrifice.* basically, what Land is saying is that the complex notion of sacrifice - Bataille's accursed share is a major influence here - basically gets annulled, or transformed, by the notion of teleoplexy. the point of having a surplus is not to squander it, it's to create feedback loops. and a lot of this, i think, comes ultimately from one of the all-time philosophical ruptures in Western thinking, the split between the Protestants and the Catholics. there is no need to pay fealty to the pope if you have a personal relation with God, and salvation by works is not the same thing as salvation by grace. the logic of accumulation follows, consummating itself with Kant, who supplies the ultimate justification for capitalist realism. says Nick, in TfA,

>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.

(cont'd)

>>12425932
>but i can write five thousand words off the top of my head about Kefka, who seems to open up doors in my head
Go on. I'd love to see your interpretation

>>12426071
as i was reflecting, this is part of my own enduring fascination with Kefka Palazzo, who understands - as mutants and prototypes often do - part of the peculiarly human nature of these problems. in the absence of anything to sacrifice *to,* capital teleoplexy (which is, arguably, just the 21C way of saying exactly what Max Weber said) makes perfect sense. it's not radical, it's simply basic liberalism. with the caveat, also, that this is basically to endorse exactly those aspects of the Gestell that bothered Heidegger. Land doesn't have the same feelings about Dasein or the Gestell that Heidegger does; he is much more a *phenomenologist of Capital* than a phenomenologist of *Dasein.*

what Kefka exposes - or is - is this peculiarly acute sense of asking what, if anything, the future is *good* for. and in many ways this is a powerfully incisive critique. Kefka is more Baudrillardian than Baudrillard himself could ever have dreamed of, and realizes other terrible possibilitiies: not only Nietzsche's assertion of the philosopher as artist, but also the impossibility of distinguishing between art and terrorism. and so on. the World of Ruin - which, of course, he himself contributes to bringing about - is the secret interior of the World of Balance, which is held in place by impossible tensions (the Warring Triad) that Empire ontotheology must expose. Imperial common sense is always bourgeois; Kefka always operates at a slightly other, wilder level.

but that is schizophrenia for you. there is another image - i'll find it later - of Terra, in the cold, with the machines, amidst the electricity and the ice. the plane of immanence is an elemental plane; it is a realm of pure affectivity, forces, intensities irreducible to language; those forces *are* the reasons, and the reasons mean nothing until they are forces. as such the economy of the schizo may necessarily be one of squandering, of *burning* - think the Joker in TDK. contempt for wealth - or prestige - was also what Baudrillard knew was at work with tribal potlatches. all of these things strike me as being germane to any /acc conversation. i know this is confusing and scattershot, but...well, you can't beat the price.

anyways. if anything brings an end to teleoplexy, it is apocalypse, eschatology. and yet - in the case of FF6 at least - that apocalypse seems to me not to come from the Outside, but from an all-too-keen sense of the fiction of rational materialism. Kefka isn't an AI; there is nothing like an AI in this story. what he is is a *perfect Magitek Soldier,* and abominable. and he knows it. because what is the point of all of this soldiering? what is the point of *any* of it?

>>12426122
all right, let me see if i can collate some of the madness i wrote yesterday.

>>12412040
I asked, what am I in for?
I haven't read fiction in more than.. well I guess the last time I read was sometime in 1998?.

Land seems to like it and so do some others

>>12426011
nyx as the sublime in the underworld, in the deep psyche

>philosophical anarchism
But Deleuze's rejection of hierarchy is PRECISELY NOT anarchism. It is not AGAINST authority, it rejects hierarchy as a metaphysical base. Things do not flow FROM, they flow AND. The rhizome connects with AND. father AND son AND mother, no mention of murder or incest of any kind. Thinking at is base is pre-judgemental. You can't take "good parts of state" because the state comes with the state. Fuck stratification. If you think in the terms proposed by the state all you will reproduce is the state, and fuck that gay shit. I don't want to be stratified by the Big Gay. How in the fuck is "Well, baby-furnaces are ethically questionable, but DAMN they raise the GDP and we can tax them" a basis. We can not go back. Hierarchy is already being slowly deterriotrialized by capital. Sell buy sell buy sell centralization buy decentralization sell 9-5 jobs buy gig-economy sell state-as-father buy state-as-capital. WE CAN NOT GO BACK. The frameworks that functioned back then are eaten by Landian forces and shat out as Tinder and going to BLM rallies like you would go to church. Rules presuppose exclusion! NO! I am dionysius, motherFUCK, I do not exclude. What is NO? NO to "NO"! NO! YES TO "YES"! YES TO "NO"? YES! As D&Guttari said in ATP, contradictions are very real, and very serious. The state resolves contradiction. I removes it. Contradiction is error. NO! CONTRADITION YES! BUY CONTRADICTION BUY BUY.

>>12426163
Third-rate encomiums to SCIENCE! and a great deal of China bolsterism.
Garbage books, honestly.

>>12426208
Thanks.

oh, and I also have not read moby dick. frankly I'm extremely poorly read because of deleuze, deleuze-reading-list-literature, esoterics and traditional thought takes up all of my time.

so as i said, i got banned yesterday, and it came right as somebody asked a wonderful question:
>which character in Final Fantasy 6 do you have a personal connection with?
it’s Kefka, and i’ll tell you why.

all of the characters in ff6 are battling with nihilism in their respective ways. they all feel ungrounded, rootless, homeless, lost. there is no political cure for what troubles them. they accept the empire, but even the empire doesn’t seem to be threatening war with the other kingdoms. and yet Kefka is the character i relate to the most because he is produced by an experiment. the portrait of the world of ruin is a view of his own unconscious. on the other side of that is a disastrous nothingness. what lies on the other side of his mind is precisely the thing that you and i are horrified of: the wasteland. he sees it. he’s always seen it.

how Kefka comes into being is a product of experimentation, of which he is a grotesquely successful project. Celes, Leo, Terra and Kefka are all productions of the same machine, but only Kefka actually graspes the monstrousness of the machine, or the sad insipidity of its core: power. the World of Balance is a *Baroque* world, a world which admits of everything. and yet the Baroque has no telos; it isn’t going anywhere, and it would be impossible to imagine a world in which the Baroque ought to go. that is, perhaps, a view into what life might have been like *before* Hegel - even before the French, or Industrial revolutions. a world *before* modernity, before the infinite, and nagging question: *this world ought to be doing something.* what that is, of course, is unknown; but we might say, with Land, that its destiny lay in machines. you might even, imagine some family resemblance between Banon and Marx.

and yet the Returners are a surprisingly unused subplot; the designers weren’t interested in building a huge narrative around the political meaning of the Returners in the same way that they did around AVALANCHE in the subsequent game. this is still a story about Desire. the nature of Desire is schizophrenia, a pure creation. you can see it in this gorgeous piece of artwork, the flashing winds, the coldness of ice, the charge of electricity, the cape, the way that the wind shifts Terra’s hair. that is how life is on the plane of immanence: all currents, winds, and forces. they are nothing if they are not greater than you. like Spinoza’s god, the condition of all possible conditions.

what we get in FF6 is the consequences - perverse - of immanentizing the eschaton. this is not the long and pronounced surrealism and horror of /acceleration (and it certainly isn’t Utopia). the world has been set on an errant course, and historically speaking, was founded in war, a war it is destined to repeat. as it turns out, the ultimate figure of war is also an artist, and a jester, an angel-impersonator: a puppet which pulls its own strings.

much schizoposting follows. begin transmission:

>>12426390
>NB: this is a post i was working on yesterday, prior to my ban. it was a response to >>12419585, so the context is a little skewed.
compare, if you will, the Master and pic rel. similar phenomena, marginally different politics, same basic result. once you have made the perilous distinction between the molten gold and the crucible of pure iron, or opened up the vast chasm between the map and the territory, there is no going back. the temptation to collapse the iron into the gold once again, and Restore the Balance, leads to monstrousness. what is necessary is to *blow the whole thing up* - in one form or another.

and i also wanted to go back to the Sphinx also, Why Lacan Matters, and other things, and this doesn't seem like a terrible segue. in the case of Leto II, you have an example of Oedipus *becoming* the Sphinx itself. in Fallout's Master, something similar: the Master asks the questions, and the Master answers them also. this is part of what makes cybernetic politics such a precariously difficult phenomenon: once the City begins telling the people what to do, it's very difficult to stop this process. it becomes terminal. it also becomes fucking insane.

the space between religion and political philosophy is a very important one. here again Lacan: as *symptom,* you have something not unlike the entire Phenomenology of Spirit trapped inside you. this is what leads to anxiety, neurosis, stammering, the inability to *say exactly what you mean.* psychoanalysis was the kind of *benevolent Inquisition* that it was okay to be if you were an analyst, because your express task is to help, as Wittgenstein would say, the fly out of the bottle. this is never done in a final or absolute sense, because it would be fucking traumatic for you. the fly, and the bottle, and the relation all make up who and what you are. when Deleuze cuts out the foundations for this, you get schizophrenia - the natural state of the unconscious mind, making (largely pointless) connections everywhere. this too is what *capitalism* does (although Uncle Nick has other ideas about this, and not entirely crazy ones, if computer evolution is in fact a thing).

and that schizophrenia doesn't *have* a point except to *look* for its Absolute Notion - that is, you. but when *the Master begins asking himself his own questions about himself,* and depending on you for answers, each of which is wrong, and punishable by death - that is the Sphinx. that also was Stalin, or any number of modern Woke Justice ideocrats today. this is precisely the nature of our own situation. we don't *really* want the Master to appear; what we want is the *semblance* of Mastery, so that we can go our own respective ways.

>>12426404
but Absolute Mastery in conditions of postmodernity is an Absolute Spook. all of the characters in FF6 are responding to nihilism, but this is nihilism Japanaese-style. there is nothing like a fall from Grace in Shinto, or in animism; as in Heidegger, it makes more sense to speak of places places where Nature is hidden, or concealed.

but Kefka is an untimely being, and produced entirely through research, a research with which he becomes disastrously entangled. i have always wondered if that monstrous thing that he becomes at the end, a fusion of magical technology, of the individual and the state, is not a reflection of this sense of having become a truer sense of the meaning of politics than anyone can hope for. Zizek writes, about the Matrix, that the Matrix is there to structure our world: we need the fictions to support it. the World of Ruin is not unlike the wasteland beyond the Matrix, the desert of the real. in the World of Ruin, Kefka finally gets the paradise he wants, which is grotesque, and ironic, and boring, and repetitive. it is a sandbox, and yet one which is quite low on sand. he wins. in such a world it would be ridiculous to say that God is dead; He has very much returned, in the form of a Doomsday Clown, equipped with a Light of Judgement, to lord over a broken and ruined world. but that world only is what it is because, in some sense, it wanted to be ruined.

and yet, in the final encounter with him, what we find is a disastrous fusion. even the World of Ruin is propped up on a continual slippage, if the Tower of the Gods is its core. look hard here: where do you find the phallus? where is Oedipus? where is the phallo-logo-centrism of Derrida? where even is the Author himself? everywhere, and yet nowhere. here is the hard kernel of deconstruction, a proliferate madness, and an absolute creation, a vortex of self-reference. there is no outside, critical perspective on madness; madness is itself its own delirious self-critique, a total emancipation from form, and irreducible to anything like a telos. its telos is only to be; and Being anything like a fixed or final form is impossible for it. it is constituted entirely through parody and self-reference, but underneath this is no higher reflection of anything like Truth. it is postmodernity as atomic weapon, a craving for recognition doomed to be misunderstood, and pitilessly self-aware.

>>12426478
this is what desolation looks like. true desolation cannot be fixed. if you are looking for a hard kernel of the Will, it can be found there, in the figure of a jester-turned-angel, a sheer proliferation of signs, which ultimately masks a bottomless desolation. it will be very hard to shake loose the temptation to think of the world in Hegelian terms. Lacan hought that he had succeeded, at last, in identifying the fundamental structure of Being on the psychoanalytic plane, as the Borromean knot; he might even have been right. then along came D&G, who found within this knot a window onto Spinoza. more recently, Land has taken this and applied it directly to the forehead of Capital, a Capital which wants *in* to our world as much as the psychoanalytic symptom of old wants *out.*

i think, personally, that there is in fact a secret subterranean elective affinity between these. in some deep sense, both of these things are true. the more we fight, as Deleuze says, as stubbornly for our servitude as for our freedom, the more the tendency towards Landian thinking will grow. Capital teleoplexy provides *exactly the stabilizing fiction required for neoliberalism to thrive.* it works because ressentiment works, and ressentiment works because nihilism works. postmodernity dissolves the genuine angst of modernity into irony, and from irony into capitalist positivism, and from positivism into acceleration and Landian horror. it all makes sense.

we want a reason. we want a purpose. this is what the Master does. for Lacan, of course, the Sphinx *thinks* it wants a master more than it really does: when it finds one, the master - Oedipus - goes directly to the core of the process and says, ‘you want me to tell you what to *do,* but i am going to tell you what you *are.*’ and what the Sphinx is, of course, is *a Sphinx.* and, as such, the game is up. the Sphinx knows that this is true, and that its Sphinx-riddles and language games *are* Sphinx-riddles and language games. *the Game you know to be a Game is no longer a Game.* the capital letters are removed, and an awesome demythologization takes place. you are no longer under the CTRL of the Law. the spell is broken. but then what? now what?

>Why do people rebuild things that they know are going to be destroyed? Why do people cling to life when they know they can't live forever?

>>12426500
the World of Ruin exposed that there was nothing on the other side of those conflicting forces. the meaning of those forces was to produce the genuine eschaton. the World of Balance is actually balanced *by* conflict; the World of Ruin is disastrously free at last from this. who says that the slow procession of spirits in Hegel was meant to culminate in anything other than *disaster?* 'the actuality, certainty and truth of his throne, without which he would be lifeless and alone.' that’s the more serious question. what if the meaning of history was always a series of build-ups towards an *enormous disappointment?* Batman polices a society which is what it is because it gives you *the maximal number of distractions.* that is his job: to hide the desolation. the Joker, in this world, isn’t any redemptive figure either: he’s a psychotic criminal, and now he plays puppet games. he delights, like Kefka, in torment.

Kefka does not require complex systems of dualism to make his point: he is the Incarnation of postmodernity, in all of its absolute philosophical bankruptcy. he can say, the Kingdom is in you too, and it is a desert. the true result of pastiche is not a reflection of anything new, it is a fucking hellscape under a dead sky. that is what happens when you mash everything up completely, in a search for the new. you don’t get the old. you don’t even get the new. you get monstrosity. there was no philosophical or religious system under the sun that could have enlightened him - not even the machines, or the warring triad. he didn’t want to do anything *with* power, and neither do you. what would you do with it? you don’t know. that is exactly his point.

>>12426532
what Kefka never had was anything like the Buddha, to redeem his chronic monkey mind. part of the reason why Journey to the West is such a brilliant text; only nonduality can save us from the madness incipient to semantic apocalypse. in the absence of nondualism, we are all failed Doomsday Clowns.

in an earlier post, i was saying something similar about computer programming, or Why Whitehead Matters. if we are here to do anything on this earth, it has to be, *to make each other more intelligent.* i think - perhaps somewhat counterintuitively - that nihilism is a collective project. you are only as nihilistic as the most nihilistic person in the room. we are all *more nihilistic today because of Nietzsche.* just as we are all more Communist today because of Marx, more phenomenological because of Heidegger, and potentially more saintly because of Christ. you can insert your own thinker of choice here, if you like.

we are very much like rogue programs, looking for reasons. this perhaps is my point: collectivity doesn’t mean anything if all it does in the end is make us more collectively identical. one of the charms of the FF system - it reached its culmination in Tactics - was the doll-like sensibilities of the designers. one wasn’t a *born Ninja* - you get to be a ninja after you have done your due diligence in Dragooning, in Thievery, in whatever else. nor, by the way, was there an *ultimate Ninja* either. you could learn all the Ninja skills, but…what about a Ninja with White Mage skills?

this is actually quietly fucking brilliant, and overlooked. *interchangeability.* what we need is a kind of actual fusion of communism and postmodernity: call it collective intelligence-izing. or, here’s a crazy word: *education.* you know a civilization well by how much regard it has for the education of its people. now, the ultimate form of education is the *moral* education, the one that Gets Your Mind Right. sadly, contemporary academic Marxism cannot *help* itself from doing this.

that isn’t the same thing as saying it *wants* it, because i don’t ultimately think it does. i think - so did Ernst Bloch - that capital runs on *failed* dreams and *broken* promises. we are fucking *epically disappointed* that communism didn’t work. maybe, underneath this, Comtean positivism. who’s against positivism? deep down, *who’s really against Star Trek?* the reason we are fucking losing our minds today over the most *astronomically trivial shit in the world* is not only because we aren’t exploring space, it’s because *because we are not exploring space, we are beginning to sense that our endgame is a version of Battle Royale in which we have to fucking prey on each other like third-rate werewolves.* we aren’t even going to be *actual werewolves, red in tooth in claw,* we are going to be fucking *pathetic werewolves, apologizing to each other as we devour each other.* fucking kill me now.

>>12426556
Mostly unrelated question, but I was thinking, could it be actually possible that our future is "mental illness"? But with a twist of course. I was thinking, well I am mostly OCD, ADHD, prolly on the spectrum, but e.g. schizophrenia. Could it be possible, such as in African civilization, that the syptoms of the mental illness manifest themselves in a positive way? What I want to say is, is it possible for us to somehow twist the manifestation of mental illness into something positive instead of trying to build a positive attitude towards mental illness in general. To exemplify: instead of having voice telling You to kill Yourself and for which You have to strenghten Your mind in order to endure, maybe the voices could be shifted into motivating voices: "Go explore space. Buy that girl a flower or whatever".

I just like Your schizo posting and it is inspiring for me and this question just popped in my mind.

>>12426556
Landian capital - as teleoplexy - turns Marx into a self-referential cybernetic feedback loop. true, Hegel gets here first. Hegel is the first great cybernetic thinker, and an idea posting its own recurrence eventually winds up on God’s doorstep. Nietzsche came to similar conclusions, with the Eternal Recurrence: it is in many ways the same thing, theorized from two different perspectives - in the case of Hegel, it is God moving over the face of the waters, as history; with Nietzsche, the explosive recurrrence of Dionysus. Deleuze steps out of the system altogether, and dials it back to Spinoza: the great Cosmic moment, one event without beginning or end.

Land is neither a Hegelian, nor a Nietzschean, nor a Spinozist. in many ways, he’s like techno-Calvin, and he is obsessively fixated on the question of *defection,* that is to say, of *lies.* being able to write fictions, to prefer one story instead of another, is a serious question for him. to me, Kefka anticipates a lot of this. Kefka’s conclusion is not all that surprising: what should i sacrifice to? these are things that tormented Heidegger also, in thinking through the consequences of Nietzsche’s ideas: if everything can be sacrificed to Art, what then is Art itself beholden to? when he realized the answer was, *absolutely nothing,* he realized that Nietzsche really represented something epochal in Western metaphysics.

Kefka wins, in the end, because he is *beyond redemption.* but that is a feature, and not a bug, in a world of differences. he is a symbol of the unbearable reality: that an Infinite jest is an abomination. immediately follows the hysterical question: *so what else, then?* what else, beyond laughter? what else, beyond cynicism? what else? in the Doomsday Clown is a sphinx for which there is no cure. Wukong was fortunate to have the Buddha; if we are looking to Nietzsche for a similar redemption, this is what we have to tangle with. the endgame of postmodernity, or of speculative capital, strike me as being disasters inseparable from the truth of our condition: this desolation is our own.

but that's exactly what has to be confronted. wishing away the World of Ruin is tantamount to repeating it. the World of Balance is gone; postmodernity is trapped in the past. you can see why, if desolation is all there is. but the desolation is no accident. the desolation is part of the story. neither the politics nor the critique will save.

this is all a lot of madness, even more disjointed than usual. it tells me that i'm still not satisfied with this understanding, but that's fine. the meaning of FF6 is no less inexhaustible than Shakespeare, to my mind. i struggle to articulate a lot of it but it actually reminds me that the iceberg goes much deeper yet.

>>12426610
absolutely. i was just thinking about this on my way here today, after i saw some clip of George RR Martin being asked about racism and sexism in his books, by some Woke Justice lunatic who added, 'and by the way, I'm a professor.' it is becoming - for a number of reasons - increasingly difficult to tell the difference between the mentally ill and the sane in university situations. Deleuze gives you some of the reasons why this is so, as did Freud, Nietzsche, and many others. what Deleuze understood is that the truth of positivity, of affirmation, is essentially schizophrenic. it's just a form of creativity irreducible to common sense, or reasons. the downside of this is that once we let that djinn out of the bottle, it is extremely hard to put it back in again.

i should write a book called Identity Trouble. gender shit only seems like a way of normalizing *personality disorders* under the guise of Marxism. you can have 74 genders, or 3000. how about multiple personalities? Kefka has these. but he could give a flying fuck about gender binaries, he's got fucking problems of entirely different order, like distinguishing himself from architecture, or tigers, or angels straight out of Bernini. this is what i hate about Woke Justice: it's just bog-standard normativity by another name, and trying to capture what is not only un-captureable, it actually subtly repurposes desire as *fear.* fear you can control; all you need is the Rule. Kefka is both a commentary and a criticism of Deleuzian stuff, in many ways. his very monstrousness shows up the brilliance of Deleuze's own work. Deleuze would have understood Kefka very well. and fortunately, we can read him, rather than becoming Doomsday Clowns ourselves. the Doomsday Clown is the Last Man's deliverance, but therein lies the rub.

the worst thing we can do today is presume to have the final answers on schizophrenia, or psychopathy. shifting the goalposts from Nietzsche's problems with Christianity, to Heidegger's problems with ontotheology, to Judith Butler's problems with patriarchy makes things fucking stupider, rather than more complex. it weaponizes our desire to get out of one box by offering a cozier version of it. in FF6, every one of those characters is suffering from loneliness, from depression, from nihilism, from some form of disaffection. that is the beauty of it. the only guy who really seems to have sorted out his own problems...*is the antagonist,* the guy who says, *i can laugh at all of it.* this is, plainly, the wrong way to go.

the *party* - the momentary gang of lost wanderers - is the actual exploration of the landscape, both geographical and philosophical. they don't all join the Returners and Fix The World. there is no fixing it. it is how it is. but it is precisely in being able to accept that that they are able to accept a lot of other things. and it is this that, in some sense, makes them recognizably human beings, rather than just symptoms by another name.

>>12426818
Damn, You are going too fast.

I would describe mental illness as Extreme Reality, such as the volume is turned all the way up (depends on severity, of course). What if this Extreme Reality is actually the pure logic of Space, what if this is the actual Unshackled Logic?

E.g. take OCD. A typical case involves locking Your door. The moment You have locked Your door and shifted to the next moment, You can not be sure anymore if You locked it. We only have the present as evidence, but the present is always fleeting like in Mozart’s attempt in one of his symphonies to freeze one pure moment of joy, but tragically it unlags itself and melts away. What if the capitalism’s production is set only on that, on production. As we can see Capitalism is not productive in a creative sort of way. We are stuck. What if "stuckness" and pathological re-hashing and melancholy are simply the Capitalism symptoms of Extreme Reality finally getting to the surface?

pic rel is i think a far more accurate picture of how thought works, in a certain Deleuzian sense. it's just in such a world *everything exists on a single plane.*

it is *terrifying* - but that terror is exactly the kind of bracing, vertiginous encounter with real life that is absolutely necessary, and which is concealed as soon as we withdraw from it and begin asking ourselves, but what's the point? there is no point, and if you insist on looking for one, you may ultimately run up against teleoplexy, and who knows but that Kefka Palazzo isn't exactly the explanation of how that will feel? the Magitek process that produces him isn't really all that mysterious: it is paid for and staffed by an Imperial protocol, which is ultimately just industrial politics. you can travel to Vector in the game, and you don't find it populated with monsters, just...regular people.

it's just that Kefka is deeply wed to the ultimate meaning of Imperial R&D itself. the Empire wins because it has Magitek, and that impossible fusion - Magic and Technology - is what produces Kefka. and he isn't a mutation, or an abomination, he is the *most successful product of it.* he understands hybris better than anyone; he is Gollum to Gestahl's Saruman. unlike LOTR, of course, Kefka's acquisition of the ultimate source of power Crosses The Streams, so to speak, and inaugurates a world of disaster. but it is just as Virilio says, in a way: if you invent the atomic bomb, you also invent the post-apocalyptic.

FF6 is remarkable not only for its genre mashup - Baroque, steampunk, fantasy, post-apoc - but because it secretly presupposes three worlds, and not only two: the WoB, WoR, *and* the world of the Espers. collapsing - or forcing - the Esper world into the WoB is what leads to the WoR, but there are interestingly familiar psychological reasons for doing this: namely, Heideggerian Gestell. but the real nature of the Gestell is apocalyptically revealed to, and by, the Jester rather than the emperor. this is like a window on what it would have been like for Nietzsche to return *after* Heidegger, in a way. Kefka is precisely what unnerved Heidegger about Nietzsche, and - maybe - because he is inevitable.

put another way, you can't control for schizophrenia, because Doomsday Clowns are produced *through* control. they are the Nemesis for ontoltheological Hubris.

>>12426890
Forgot to finish my though: so capitalism is actually finally reached its potential as an organism. That is why it is no longer creatively productive and Extreme Reality can not be ignored anymore?

>>12426894
>put another way, you can't control for schizophrenia, because Doomsday Clowns are produced *through* control.

Yes, exactly. I agree with You. My wording was just terrible.

>Capital is something like a tyrant from another planet whose opaque remorseless predilections, sadistic rapacity, glacial indifference, strange tolerances and calculated concessions are ‘explained’ by ‘economists’ and ‘political scientists’, flattered and lampooned in satirical cartoons, and embodied by ‘lawyers’, ‘politicians’ and ‘executives’, our societal life, in this bizarre dispensation, being a perpetual desperate negotiation with an alien arrangement of things with which we have, necessarily, identified ourselves and our success, unaware of the ineluctable accommodation that was our demise.
>-Marty Glass-
Pretty much sums up pic related.

>>12426890
>What if this Extreme Reality is actually the pure logic of Space, what if this is the actual Unshackled Logic?
i don't see any reason why it wouldn't be. it's why i have no problem seeing a pretty simple connection between Spinoza, Hegel, Heidegger, Lacan, Deleuze, and Land: in a word, it's schizophrenia. the Phenomenology of Spirit inspires Marx, and it is dizzyingly creative. it is like a fucking spiral staircase, winding through the stars, directly to the front door of the absolute. in Heideggerian, or Lacanian terms, i think it describes how it is we ought to relate to each other as human beings: all these forces are locked within, and all we really can do, in the end, is act as if we are secretly in on the same joke, which manifests in an infinity of different ways. of course, if we are *all* mad - or, worse, not even quite as Inspired as we ought to be - then it is impossible to distinguish between analysts and analysands. we encounter each other, in the world, as nomads.

capitalism-as-schizophrenia is not a crazy comparison. it's actually academic politics that are far more normative than capital itself is; that is the true 'shadow of religion.' capital is only insufficiently schizophrenic desire. if you want to theorize how schizophrenia works, look no further than capital's de/re-territorializations. or Deleuzian philosophy in general. schizophrenia philosophically understood doesn't have a point, unless its point is capital; and even that in turn seems to be crying out today for a Master to explain it, which - incredibly - may turn out to be Silicon Valley communism. but Diversity is a fucking joke. it's like a third-rate version of Freud introducing himself as Master Thinker, Master Diagnostician of your unconscious. this would be impossible. there are no *experts in schizophrenia,* because schizophrenia by definition renders Absolute Knowing impossible. what we *can* do is recognize that in every other person lies, essentially, something *like* the PoS, or the Ethics, or Kapital: sketches of the infinite. we absolutely must not deprive others of their connections to the infinite. this is exactly what i believe Heidegger meant when he spoke of Openness to Being. we all have a dancing star in us: the words don't matter, because the words are irreducible to each other. Freedom massively exceeds us. politics is the fucking CTRL mechanism that we wind up doing when we feel we have to, but that thing that makes us feel as though we have to do things is precisely what Lacan wanted to crowbar you out of. as you say:

>We are stuck. What if "stuckness" and pathological re-hashing and melancholy are simply the Capitalism symptoms of Extreme Reality finally getting to the surface?
find a flaw. what you are calling Extreme Reality is, i think, that which has to be let out. but it can't be *forced* out, i don't think, except in conditions of vengeance, sadly. but even then, rage isn't the point. rage is just frustration.

>>12426902
>so capitalism is actually finally reached its potential as an organism.
it's hard to say. Sloterdijk argues that, ultimately, capital is nothing more than a cultural accelerator: whatever people want, Capital gives it to them. it might be the case that today, simply because we have realized that it is impossible for us to say what we want, capital gives us exactly this also. like the dialectic, capital *has to deliver something,* even if it is a gigantic pile of things we don't want, and mounting evidence that we are fucking stuck in some kind of terminally repetitive process that we can't seem to get out of: the Gilded Junkyard, the apocalypse of creation.

Fantastic Plastic Machine: Luxury
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSQvqmhb8Xc

it's sort of like a mashup between Orwell and Huxley: we are lorded over by something that incarnates both the Flying Fortress and Walter Benjamin's arcades. Moldbug coined the Cathedral; maybe we can coin something similar. call it, the Citadel: a thing mysteriously guarded by extraordinarily heavy armament, the purpose of which is to conceal the presence of a pleasure-garden therein. it is like the Church of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, but stripped of all theological referents; or the City of the Law, for Kafka, in which there is no way *Out.*

>that is why it is no longer creatively productive and Extreme Reality can not be ignored anymore?
we are trying to ignore it, and Extreme Reality is continuing to ignore us ignoring it. eventually there is going to be a showdown.

>>12426986
Marty Glass always gets it.

>>12427040
I hope this thread is alive tomorrow. Gotta go.

Still not sure on the name... Extreme Reality or Reality Extreme. Both are fitting. Enjoyed the convo. I really need to start seriously reading philosophy. I was thinking of beginning with the Bible and Nietzsche. I have this weird vision of a Jesus-Nietzsche unit, even though it sounds impossible. Enjoyed the convo, man. Good night, man. Keep those wheels spinning. :>

>>12427261
>I have this weird vision of a Jesus-Nietzsche unit, even though it sounds impossible.
kek, not even remotely so. i have a couple of thousand words' worth at least of schizo-ramble about Christ being the ultimate figure of the superhero, if you want more in this vein. i will talk about Metal Gear Solid too, and Batman, and other stuff. maybe i'll post it later tonight, more likely tomorrow. i'll try and put it into slightly more readable text than today's Uncontrolled Demolitions. as i said, i am ultimately not much more than a GameBoy trying to run Alienware software. happily, it remains a pleasure to fail...but a good conversation mitigates the frustration.

>Enjoyed the convo. Good night, man. Keep those wheels spinning.
me too kind anon, very much so. you as well. until next time...

bump

>>12427325
>autism intensifies
imagine, if you will, that your mind is like a little GameBoy computer, and ideology is like a game cartridge. one says Feminism and one says Communism and one says Fascism. how is ideology not exactly like this? the software, ultimately, 'completes' the hardware, by giving it something to do. or so we think. the really interesting question becomes: how is it possible for us to recognize the existence of the GameBoy processor at all?

in an earlier shitpost, i was comparing the mind to a pinball machine, but i think this has the potential to be just as much fun. and maybe, in this way, we might even ask ourselves: what else is the Phenomenology of Spirit but a kind of particularly interesting meta-cartridge, the purpose of which is to remind you about the existence of the GameBoy itself (under this metaphor, let's assume for the moment that you forgot you were holding it). conversely, Marxism: Everything Is GameBoy - the politicization of aesthetics, so to speak. and yet, of course, it would be as wrong to say that Everything Is Cartridge (ideology) as much as it would be to say Everything Is GameBoy/device (materialism). the truth lies somewhere in between.

as for how i would squeeze Uncle Nick into this metaphor, i'm really not sure. he would probably be a hacked Game Genie that you bought from some seedy guy in a trenchcoat in an alley, who also sells you your drugs. whatever. this is just shitposting, after all.

>>12428287
in other words, don't bother looking for some essential point of difference between 'software' and 'hardware' while the game is being played. you won't find one. and the game is a lot more complicated, and satisfying, than it looks on first glance.

the cartridge marked 'Whitehead' is a very cool one indeed. so is the one marked D&G, or many others. whether or not the software expands the range of possibilities for the hardware, or the hardware is actually capable of running a lot more sophisticated stuff than the software, well - these things kind of stretch the limits of the metaphor.

i'm just shitposting here.

the whole purpose of the one marked 'Baudrillard' is to make you aware, as many of them are, that what you are doing in the end is playing a game. but what separates the really good games from the shitty and derivative ones is that they are always kind of cutting-edge at the time of their release, and continually remind you that the mysterious device on which they are played are always capable of doing a few more things than you thought they were capable of doing.

once you get bored of them, or they become familiar to you, you put them away. but it's not like you still don't like to pick them up and play them again, once in a while. you have good memories of them, they take you back. some are genuine classics.

we are always telling ourselves - okay, *now* i've got it. we are always-almost right about that.

>>12428287
I see ideology as sort of the opposite, it's the Gameboy (or more properly the console), it's the very platform which supports and enframes your action in the world. no matter how many cartridges you go through, at the end of the day you are still playing gameboy.

>>12428347
which would be fine, if it weren't for the fundamental limitations of Everything Is Gameboy itself.

what we don't need is an escape from ideology, just a more joyful way of playing more sophisticated ones. i say this like it's easy, but it isn't. it will be a triumph for *collective* nihilism, i think. if it happens at all.

generic wallpapers b/c why not.

bump

>>12429357
nah I think its enough said

>>12428347
>>12428692
what are the batteries? who's playing?

>>12430025
you're the batteries. pleasure makes the thing work. neurosis, horror and paranoia all count.

ideology is a way about learning the nature of the system. ideologies make things simple. to continue the metaphor: most of the time you have a cartridge in the system. the cartridge that says Marx is a view of the factory that makes the consoles, a terrifying glimpse of the mirror of production. the one that says Hegel is a glimpse into the ones and zeroes of the code. but the player, and the batteries, are you. you might as well plug the game into your own head. i suppose there would be a Buddha cartridge as well; feel free to meme this up to your heart's content.

nobody is outside of ideology; it's not really possible. what i like is the idea of

a) making overly complicated games, or
b) developing the hardware.

most of the time we get

c) contradictions. either hardware that doesn't work, or busted games that suck. and i would prefer something like
d) theology, indistinguishable from wonderful software on advanced systems.

ideally you want a balance of both. done well we can call this thing philosophy, indistinguishable from art. good simulations teach us about the nature of the simulating process. it took a lot of wonky experiments in photography to come up with the Hollywood system; it takes a lot of internalizing Hollywood into your PC to make the virtual reality that is Grand Theft Auto, or whatever else you please. all we are ever learning, so to speak, is how to capture the feeling of having a kind of etherealized second body.

i'm saying this because i am these days highly skeptical about the future, if the future is anything other than a lot philosophical Console Wars.

also, don't think about this too much.

Bump

>>12426478
>it’s Kefka, and i’ll tell you why.
I think Kefka is interesting as an avatar of nihilism manifested as magical apocalypse, but beyond that what is he? He never changes, there is no development besides the becoming of what he already is: brokenness, the Will to Power that has no will except onto itself. He's just a character development device, but one that makes the story very rich.

I find Celes to be the most personal relatable because of the extremes of hope and hopelessness, trust and faithlessness that makes her truly dynamic. She begins as a traitor of the Will to Power, having followed it but having enough of a discernment of the heart to see where it leads - by resisting she's condemned, a pariah in the eyes of the Will, saving accepted her fate until her faith is rewarded by salvation by another with the same faith. Her character develops towards a building of this faith until it is challenged when Kefka makes the others believe that she is a traitor to them and the sacred trust they share. She proves her faith by rescuing the others as she had been rescued, but there is still a certain coldness because the trust she had given so faithfully had be doubted.

This culminates in the true climax of the game: the apocalypse and Celes' utter loss of faith in life itself, manifested as attempted suicide by jumping off of a cliff. She wakes up on the shore and discovers that one of her friends is still alive, giving her hope from absolute solitude and desolation, having believed she was the last one alive. At this point this major conflict of the story has been resolved, the worst is over and the rest of the story is just a building upon this resolution until final resolution is had.

>>12426478
>Absolute Mastery in conditions of postmodernity is an Absolute Spook

>It's not the result of one's life that's important. It's the day-to-day concerns, the personal victories, and the celebration of life... and love. It's enough if people are able to experience the joy that each day can bring.

When the game is rigged, the only winning move is to change the game. I know for a fact that I do have Absolute Mastery not of the will, but liberation from it: my will is singular, determined by a singular trajectory that seeks to ever refine itself. I am a love-maximizing machine. The post-postmodern condition is the absolute Will to Love, which is synonymous with the will to live - the nature of creativity is written in life itself, and our experience is the folding-over of it, an extension of it into the future as imaginary potentiality.

More recent overview of Space Taoism / the science of creativity: https://old.reddit.com/r/sorceryofthespectacle/comments/af9dhf/being_and_time/ee82prt/
Pancreativist Manifesto: https://www.reddit.com/r/ShrugLifeSyndicate/comments/aeq1tv/pancreativist_manifesto_the_message_of_universal/
To go over, one must go under: https://www.reddit.com/r/ShrugLifeSyndicate/comments/af6wzn/the_phoenix_process/
Perception Bending: https://www.reddit.com/r/Tao_of_Calculus/comments/9wm7q5/what_is_the_mechanism_behind_sorcery_of_the/
When the Pancreativism kicks in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcreG-bhRRA

Pancreativism isn't an ideology, a system, or any structure. It's a perception of the world and an engagement of it as art itself - existence itself as poetry, and the perception of one's experience as everpresent poetry. It is an eternal love for life that doesn't die because it is the birthright of being alive, immortally realized in every infinitely precious moment of its realization. All experience is artistic experience, and so the philosophy that corresponds to this experiential truth must necessarily be an ultimate synthesis of poetry and philosophy, art and science.

>>12399378
I don't know how can I get to "Bitcoin is about Kant and truth machine".
although I cannot accept that's true, It's very fascinating that philosophy can make somehow the answer.

If I read fanged noumena, then how can I continued the thing after that?

>>12426478
I always considered you a Setzer kind of guy, seeing this tremendous Game of Games before you, studying the terrain of the board with determined intensity. How about it? Radical hope of the most extreme is a hell lot more of a fascinating game to bet on, and a wise bet, because there's nothing left to lose, right? The only mistake is not to play. Fuck "realism," it is only the radical hope for love that leads to the realization of it. Post-postmodernity is an age of dreamers and the "realists" will be forced to play our game, because ours is the only one left.

>>12407497
>1) harnessing the power of several suns and 2) irradiating the surface of the planet, rendering it uninhabitable.
Are you so narrow minded that improved energy production isnt a possible scenario in the next several decades?

bumppppp

>>12430739
yes, Setzer would be my guy. i mean come on, he's got a broken heart and a flying casino and a thirst for top gear. i can't find a flaw in this. Ultros - a disastrous libido, like Mr. Blobby, pointlessly recurring - also has his charms. and of course Gogo the mimic, some bizarre hermit that lives in the belly of the Zone Eaters on triangle island. FF6 gave you a plethora of options in terms of *being weird,* of being unfinished, unformed, or broken. and these were irreducible to anything like political adventure. the Returners were there, but the Returners were a largely undeveloped subplot, however much they had the potential for so much more. and i will re-iterate the fact that Banon absolutely could have been a wonderfully puritanical antagonist in his own right, for the FF6 fan-fiction sequel.

but sure, Setzer would be fine with me. or some rogue artificer with connections to the underworld in Zozo, a collector of Forbidden Magitek or smuggler-trader based out of Narshe, maybe a dealer with connections to Edgar's tools, or Owzer's eerie paintings. maybe one of those who, Dwarf Fortress-style, Dug Too Deep - not, i should add, because they are saints, but because of greed, arrogance, hubris - and who stumbled into a Tonberry delve, and stole something from the Deep Below that belonged to them, and now suffers entirely self-created nightmares of Give It Back.
>Sneaky beings that slowly creep through the darkness carrying knives and lanterns. Their incessant, innocent stare stabs through opponents, pushing them over the brink of despair.
FF6 is such a retardedly wonderful world. somehow it does the unthinkable: Manga Lovecraft.

you are right about Kefka, ofc. as a villain, he really isn't all that tragic. what makes him work is simply his disastrous shallowness, but it's such a wonderful commentary on a world that under postmodernity drifts towards the Baroque, and which gets in him precisely the kind of foil that it needs. the machines are on the horizon, but the cognizance of what they mean has not arisen, save in the mind of the jester. and that disastrous shallowness is still very much a part of our world today. Bernini cannot be a substitute for Christ; the Baroque is a heightened form of the Renaissance, and postmodernity a kind of extreme senility indistinguishable from playfulness, in old age. if Capital is the infernal machine inside Marx's mind, the Baroque seems like a glimpse inside Nietzsche's. and these are two authors that, perhaps more than any other, shaped the modern world.

>>12430685
>I find Celes to be the most personal relatable because of the extremes of hope and hopelessness, trust and faithlessness that makes her truly dynamic. She begins as a traitor of the Will to Power, having followed it but having enough of a discernment of the heart to see where it leads - by resisting she's condemned, a pariah in the eyes of the Will, saving accepted her fate until her faith is rewarded by salvation by another with the same faith. Her character develops towards a building of this faith until it is challenged when Kefka makes the others believe that she is a traitor to them and the sacred trust they share. She proves her faith by rescuing the others as she had been rescued, but there is still a certain coldness because the trust she had given so faithfully had be doubted.

this is part of the genius of that game's design: both open-world and *open narrative.* we begin by seeing Terra, on the long march to Narshe, with that fabulously haunting music, the march to war. and yet we can switch to Celes, looking for friends in the WoR, without feeling lost. somehow we get Epic Sandbox, and yet FF6 isn't really a power fantasy. *blowing up the world gives you a new world to explore.* and this isn't the New World of the Spanish Conquest; this is the new world in the sense of a radical (and terrifying) re-shaping of the old by history and quantum forces, by epistemological and ontological sea change, boats against the current. that is how Revolution might *actually* work. forget about the Bolsheviks seizing power in Russia, or the Fascists in Italy, the Nazis in Germany; think more like a radical and permanent displacement of power outside of Europe, and then the near possibility of their successors blowing each other to pieces in 1962. humanist revolutions are nothing compared to atomic warfare and MAD.

the game encompasses the fates of Terra *and* Celes. or, for that matter, Kefka: there are shades of Watchmen in this, the interlinked fates of the Magitek Elite as X-Men in a world without America. instead of mutation, or whatever else Stan Lee might have used, you have a very different kind of source material: ontotheology, but rendered Japanese-style. Terra and Celes aren't oppressed by men, and Kefka's sexual orientation is far less significant than his *psychic* orientation. when you see Celes being beaten in a cell by the guards, it shocks you - as it should - because it is *cruel,* but it is *humanity* - callow, cynical, brutal - that is cruel, and not only *men.* soldiering can bring out the worst in people. small wonder that she might seem cold. it's a wonder that she doesn't start collecting Imperial scalps.

that not even a God can save us is, perhaps, the message - especially if Art is that god. that world doesn't get redeemed by art, because it's art that damns it. of course a demented jester would rule over it in the end, he exposes the horrible truth of its telos.

>>12430685
>This culminates in the true climax of the game: the apocalypse and Celes' utter loss of faith in life itself, manifested as attempted suicide by jumping off of a cliff. She wakes up on the shore and discovers that one of her friends is still alive, giving her hope from absolute solitude and desolation, having believed she was the last one alive. At this point this major conflict of the story has been resolved, the worst is over and the rest of the story is just a building upon this resolution until final resolution is had.
you're right about this also. once again, FF6 goes places we are amazed to discover that it is possible to go. she jumps, and nobody stops her. she *doesn't* have a change of heart, in the last moment, and she isn't saved by anyone else. she fucking jumps. she survives, but she jumps. that is something. that is real storytelling. that is the refusal of writers to give you pat solutions to problems fundamentally bound up with human nature, life on the edge - even over the edge - of despair. then you go and find your friends. find a flaw.

>When the game is rigged, the only winning move is to change the game. I know for a fact that I do have Absolute Mastery not of the will, but liberation from it: my will is singular, determined by a singular trajectory that seeks to ever refine itself. I am a love-maximizing machine. The post-postmodern condition is the absolute Will to Love, which is synonymous with the will to live - the nature of creativity is written in life itself, and our experience is the folding-over of it, an extension of it into the future as imaginary potentiality.
i'm fine with this.

>Pancreativism isn't an ideology, a system, or any structure. It's a perception of the world and an engagement of it as art itself - existence itself as poetry, and the perception of one's experience as everpresent poetry. It is an eternal love for life that doesn't die because it is the birthright of being alive, immortally realized in every infinitely precious moment of its realization. All experience is artistic experience, and so the philosophy that corresponds to this experiential truth must necessarily be an ultimate synthesis of poetry and philosophy, art and science.
this too. there's no reason why Lacan's Borromean knots wouldn't take you to Hofstadter. strange loops for the win.

>>12430739
>How about it? Radical hope of the most extreme is a hell lot more of a fascinating game to bet on, and a wise bet, because there's nothing left to lose, right? The only mistake is not to play. Fuck "realism," it is only the radical hope for love that leads to the realization of it. Post-postmodernity is an age of dreamers and the "realists" will be forced to play our game, because ours is the only one left.
i think so. that's the hope, anyways. all i can do for now is withdraw my approval of third-rate simulacra. there are other pretty fucking magnificent creators working today. Kojima gets it.

>>12431294
one of the things that i like about Kojima's lore is how willing it is to embrace *absurdity* rather than truth, or Meaning. that we should recognize that there is no peace to be found, and yet not allow ourselves to slide consequently into the glorification of war, is a sense which is both true and profound. equally so is Kojima's own 'deconstruction' of the action genre: that if it is true that *to look like the Boss is to be the Boss* also means that looking like the Boss means you inherit the Boss's problems. in other words, simulate carefully. be careful what you impersonate, because if you impersonate well, someone else is likely to believe you. but this is boring moralism.

what is quite wonderful about the MG lore is how much it revels in its own ridiculousness. were it otherwise we wouldn't be able to have as much fun with it as we do. we wouldn't have the decoys and cardboard boxes and other hilarity that we get in TPP. it is the *humorlessness* of militancy - not necessarily militarism - which is its worst aspect. whether it is John Calvin, or the Grand Inquisitor, or - for all of his laughter - Kefka, the double bind presents itself: the genuinely funny, or surprising, is always in a space between sincerity and absurdity. that is the space open to the world, which is the genuinely human one.

even war, Kojima seems to say, will not solve your problems. the personalities you encounter in war are no less ridiculous, untethered, homeless or confused than those you encounter Back Home, in the world you were attempting to escape from. a world of ridiculousness, of conspiracy theories which are preposterously weird, is always preferable to those which, in their deadly earnestness, reveal only psychoanalytic truths, which are the truths of confession, redemption and atonement. this is Sphinx terrain.

but Kojima's antagonists really conceal nothing, they're not capable of it. they are as transparent as WWE wrestlers, and good lord do they ever love talking. they're all fetishists, in particular ways, but there is no sense of condemnation for this, no secret or revealed truth beneath it. you just have to enjoy being overwhelmed by the comedy of it all. in the place of the One Thing, a billion substitutes, not unlike our world. and yet, for whatever reason, that world satisfies. in The Dark Knight, Batman has to crush his own impersonators, for their own good; the Boss, by contrast, *multiplies* them.

why is that?

>>12431491
Girardfag, what is your opinion on MGS4? I always thought the AI eternal war system contained within it was pretty close to what Land was describing, in my limited understanding

>>12431491
i don't know if i mentioned this before, but one of the things about the Batman films was how an unspoken fidelity existed between Batman and Gordon. at some level, there is a deep affinity between Batman and Gordon, such that Gordon does not have Batman arrested. in Gotham, the existence of a billionaire vigilante never threatens the autonomy of the police services: Batman is on the side of the polis. these themes are only given a cursory treatment in the Nolan films, but they're pretty intriguing: what would happen, for instance, if random Gothamites began wearing hockey pants and carrying shotguns around, to fight crime however they saw fit? Batman, to his credit, shuts that experiment down pretty quickly.

the Joker is who he is because he's just fine with a world of anarchy, and Bane presents an even more reified form of cynicism ('Start by storming Blackgate, and freeing the oppressed!'). Bane's 'revolution' doesn't really require anything like a utopian army: it is, at bottom, a terroristic event conducted under the guise of liberation. the people of Gotham themselves are all he needs, if he can pitch their salvation to them in the right way: all they will need is the appearance of freedom, and they will devour themselves without any further instruction. this is, after all, the meaning of his own leadership of the League of Shadows: he's Gotham's reckoning. but Batman always works alone; if he has an army, it is the Gotham police department (or, in TDK, the assumption that the Everyman will not pull the trigger when given the option). and his ultimate job is to hand the role of being Batman on to the next guy.

in the Kojima-verse, the Boss is a sort of parallel meditation on this, with one caveat: to be the Boss is to fight an endless war on the behalf of no polis, but a sort of meta-polis, the city of the mercenary and permanent wanderer. such a ronin has neither home nor final form; everything is iteration, and all that is not iteration dies, or becomes monstrous. this is something that is always occluded by the appeal to Permanent Revolution, and yet is shown up time and again by the catastrophes of power seized. Gnostic Marxism is only Manichaeism; metaphysically speaking, it is territorialization on the moral plane.

>>12431558
>Girardfag, what is your opinion on MGS4? I always thought the AI eternal war system contained within it was pretty close to what Land was describing, in my limited understanding
never played it, sadly. it came out while i was lost in philosophy land. i'm riding the Kojima train hard atm because of TPP, which is the first non-emulated console game i have played in a while.

might have to take point on this one then, is what i'm saying. sounds fascinating tho. enlighten us? bonus points as always for Landian stuff.

speaking of which, our boy in China has been killing it of late, as per usual.
>Whatever the positive semantic associations accumulated by the word ‘war’, its most rigorous meaning is negative. War is conflict without significant constraint. As a game, it corresponds to the condition of unbounded defection, or trustlessness without limit. This is the Hobbesian understanding implicit in the phrase “war of all against all” (bellum omnium contra omnes), in which “the state of nature” is conceived – again negatively – through a notional subtraction of limitation. Treachery, in its game-theoretic sense, is not a minor theme within war, but a horizon to which war tends – the annihilation of all agreement. Reciprocally-excited mutual betrayal in departure from an implicit ‘common humanity’ is its teleological essence. It is worth emphasizing this point, in the interest of conceptual integration. The game-theoretic definition of mutual military escalation – and thus the inner-principle (and intrinsic motor) of war – is reiterated double-defection.

>Quite simply, unless war restrains itself it is not restrained. Nothing is able to transcendently impose upon it. Any realistic conception of ‘limited war’ subsumes that of ‘war lawfully pursued’ (with the latter properly categorized as an elective limitation). Unless war has a master, ‘just war’ is ontologically restricted to the status of a tactic. War has no master. There is strictly nothing that could be asserted with greater confidence. “War is the Father of all things,” (Πόλεμος πάντων μὲν πατήρ) Heraclitus asserts at the dawn of philosophy. Cormac McCarthy’s Judge Holden is more succinct still: “War is God.” If it has ever seemed otherwise, it is because the essence of war – as Laozi (among others) has told us – is deception.

to fight wars and not become monstrous as a result - this is all there in Kojima. there was some other guy who said something about this too, but the name escapes me. i think he had a big moustache or something.

>>12431609
One of Land's essays years ago titled "Philosophy in a War-Zone" is excellent as well (goes into Sun Tzu and AI. Those that don't hide in war cease to be, hence ontology/being is tied to war from the very beginning). Here is the link: https://web.archive.org/web/20140712174146/http://t-c-f.cc/Dissolution.pdf

PS

Did you get around to reading Downham's essay that I recommended a month or so ago from the 80s on Cyberpunk that influenced ccru, Land and Fisher?

>>12431742
i did, and i'm re-reading it now, ty most kindly for the reminder. it's fucking brilliant, and it's also a wonderful insight into what it was that made Land who he was.

cyberpunk is the *dirty truth,* and that essay really captures it. somewhere along the way - it was the 1980s, and by way of the incredible aesthetic you get from rekall - there was a *divergence* within postmodernity. a lot of theory headed in one direction, for increasingly arcane ivory tower theory. another strain headed directly for the *gutter,*and that is where Land went. in my own experience, what i have learned is to respect the gutter, i think. there is no way of conflating what can be found below with what is at the top. Deleuze cuts both ways, it's true. and Hegel is for the state. but Land went for the darkness, and his torment down there confirmed that it is wise to believe the hype. he followed in many ways a similar trajectory as Baudrillard, and both men crossed paths with one figure: Bataille.

but the dirty truth isn't a thing we can just take souvenirs of. that is what happened. it's always worse than we think. it's like the Titanic, except that it cannot be reduced to a dialectic. to take only one fragment:

>As for Deckard, he initially appears as the equivalent of the private detective with the voice-over of film-noir - very existential, nihilistic and almost apocalyptic - as both a sensitive, messianic - failed messianic - possibly pathological spirit repelled by the state of the world and even while cradling his gun, shouting love at the heart of the world. Contradictions. The Cyber-Punk tag has to clear a path through a deliberately theoretically confused atmosphere of this fictive metropolis and distinguish the real from the irreal even in the most indiscernible cases. At the heart of the city this quest is hindered by the lack of an horizon, everything is Tom Vague, making ambivalent clues and unpredictable danger-cum-behavioural response patterns ever present. The Cyber-Punk cipher therfore must take one step at a time, [pure chess - it always comes down to games, because they always contain the idea of terror], yet allow herself to be swept into the multiple currents that cross the city and beckon at random. The investigation, the inquisition of forms, is no longer the central point, instead, the skidding, the drifting, the wandering the city, the vertigo of the city, the panic become the phenomenological-dialectical focus, as everything starts slipping

when Capital really takes command, the *first* thing it does is exile the only thing that could potentially threaten it: the humans in the control room. the task is likely made easier by the fact that the humans in the control room are *curious,* or perhaps even literary. that's what makes it all so terrible. or why Marxist Grand Inquisitors take over, to supply religious security services for what only works once it is too late to go back.

that whole essay is an absolute treasure.

it's also struck me that pic rel is by no means an accidental deity either, and is absolutely the kind of theology you might produce if you were trying to find an explanation for what happens under conditions of Max Irony. if there is ultimately nothing that cannot be reduced to sadomasochism, the appeal of a gatekeeping deity that is, perhaps, a *repentant, though inveterate, sadist* - and who, by the way, reserves the greatest disdain possible for her own followers - isn't all that hard to understand.

theology *hurts.* it's nice to be reminded of this, sometimes. so too do the implications of thinking through Marx in the absence of Hegel, or guided only by faltering lamps in the darkness, wherein lie the John Carpenter and HP Lovecraft realms.

the world needs more good cyberpunk.

>>12431742
>>12431609

Also forgot to add this scene from Crimson Tide on Land's "war has no master": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hur6LcyuTuU

here's a passage from it that >>12414010 may enjoy.
>= Helter Skelter! The Replicants are dangerous but fascinating, frightening but beautiful, often but not totally and intractably alien; they gradually emerge as the film's true emotional centre - and Roy who is gigantic, huge, existential, dying, embodies a love that can kill. Roy Batty uses a near- quotation from Blake to introduce himself:

>= 'Fiery the angel fell; deep thunder rolled = Around their shore, burning with the fires of Orc.' = ['AMERICA: A PROPHECY']

>= Roy Batty is a Blakean visionary, driven to acts of incredibly hulking Nietzschean greatness, because he embodies the world's pain. "Quite an experience to live in fear, that's what it is to be a slave." But Roy is not just another skin-job, he's what every Amerikan militarist fantasizes about, the sound of the end of the world. Culture is disintegrating around Roy and he just ignores the post-modern culture - collapse, the values - panic and goes to meet Deckard. Roy lapses into vague homo-erotica when he speaks to Deckard - "You'd better get it up, because if you don't, I'm going to have to kill you." - Roy is savage, dying undulation - pure here and now rather than only slightly now and then =

such a good essay.

>>12431742
ty once again anon, it is a ridiculously good read. and a reminder also that the Road to Idiocracy we are presently on isn't the only possible one. we are on the path to catastrophe today because *we walked away from horror.* Joseph Campbell has a line about this:
>everyone who does not become a hero becomes another victim to be saved.
if you want to explain the appearance of Beyond Good And Evil types throughout history, maybe we have to look no further than their a priori conditions: a critical mass of victims. but where do victims come from? from horror misunderstood, from the dark places that have to get navigated by torchlight. there be dragons: but it's not necessarily the case, contra JBP, that dragons must as such be slain in order to raise high the roofbeams. sometimes they just need to speak, as Sphinxes do, and be heard, and liberated from secrets and knowledge.

that perhaps is why Freud > Jung. true, Jung is the thinker for the *victorious* hero, and Freud for the *failed* one: but therein lies the rub. not everything that looks like Tiamat is Tiamat, and the same goes for Marduk. you don't have kill a thing if you understand the game that it wants to play.

>>12431973
>you don't have kill a thing if you understand the game that it wants to play.
which, i should add, is also precisely what opens the doors to hubris. and perhaps why in the end philosophy that fails to become theology is a kind of failure of both. see pic related, who was as Landian (or Lovecraftian) a figure as you can hope for on screen. and Kurtz, and of course, Faust.

but if you quit on philosophy too soon, you become a boring ideologue, and moral conoisseur, and decadent.

it is Land's own strange fate to have ended up here, or to desire the institution of artificial synthetic Kantian time in order to guarantee the restitution of order, or the Confucian rectification of names. but it's a little like the Grand Inquisitor exiling Christ as well. social democracy doesn't *have* to be so in love with capital as to require capital - and more than that - to eventually become the only rules of warfare, because war and defection have to be everything.

all this does in the end is give us the Matrix all over again, i think. like how Roman villas, once upon a time, were unwalled; as the centuries pass, and it becomes ever-clearer that the Augustinian (or Aurelian) golden ages are not returning, and the classical gives way to the early modern period. Byzantium holds out for a thousand years, and then is finally conquered right around the same time that Spanish and Portuguese ships begin exploring the new world, which is our own.

it's fucking depressing as hell sometimes, but it sure beats the hell out of frothing anger. melancholy, yo.

>>12431261
>that not even a God can save us is, perhaps, the message - especially if Art is that god.

Damnable art, art that produces for the sake of production, a compulsive building that forever tries to outcompete the erosion of change. Kefka was all about the meaningless of this: why continue to build and live if everything is impermanent? The rebuttal the characters give is the experiences of love in their lives, a direction for their own building, a mutual embrace in the face of the terror of impermanence, and a transformation of that terror into a song. The end of love isn't art, but the end of art is love, both between others and a co-creative discourse between one's self and their experience. As humans we are artistic experience for the purpose of love and love for the purpose of artistic experience, the two poles as inextricable as the nature of change itself. Thus the eternal nihilist was confronted by purest beams of heroic love, whose acts of love-affirmation confirmed the ultimate power of love over meaningless self-destruction.

We can save ourselves, nothing needs to be built, no additional conditions are need be. Salvation by life and the message of love alone, the physical, biological, and human reality of it. Open-sourced salvation mediated by nothing but the terms of life itself.

Seek to know love and to be love and you will find everything you need.

>>12432774
based and lovepilled

Bump

Could someone tldr a brainlet into what taoism and space taoism is? I'm reading a bunch of these posts and they just mention other philosophers.

>>12434681
>taoism
read tao te ching
http://pure76.com/taoteching/#home
>space taoism
see >>12403620
and >>12430688
>just mentioning other philosophers
sorry dawg

>>12432774
>Open-sourced salvation mediated by nothing but the terms of life itself.
i love this line. wonderful post, anon. can't find a flaw.

Bump

>>12434711
I read a bit of the taoism link you sent, and I'll finish since I'm interested. But wtf are those space taoism links? What even is "pancreatism" and what does it have to do with "space taoism"? What is space taoism?

Couldn't you give me an easy summary?

>Asking for spoon-feeding
I'm sorry.

>>12436334
>>12434711
NVM I got it lmao.

>>12434711
>"but as the many becoming one in a novel subject, and increased by one."
Everything I read there I could swear I've seen bits and pieces in many other places. And what taoism is and to an extent what "space taoism" is have a bunch of my ideas that I had thought what Buddhism was before actually reading about Buddhism, and being a little disappointing. In the few good books I've read that I've enjoyed, there's always an existential trope in them. And there was one that stuck with me, the trope quoted above. I never got where it came from, the "we are all one, and one day will return to one", was it Taoism?

Anyways it seems like a very nice religion or "perception" of the universe, and a lot I already had in myself (as snobby as that sounds, I swear it's true!). Thanks for helping me with the links. There's a shit ton of posts in this thread with a shit ton of analysis on topics I know nothing of.

>23rd Century
I didn't get this, why that specific century? Reminds me of 2070 paradigm shift lol.

>>12407277
(((R[ussians]eptillians))).
Seriously. Have you noticed the amount of Muslim-loving threads and posts lately? And they all seem too kind, it kinda scares me.

What's the difference between Space Taoism and Pancreativism?

>>12400705
The NICK LAND is the epitome of male dominance and masculinity.

Let's start by looking at his body. His body is bony. His unsettling gait makes his presence known without him even needing to point himself out. He is thin, as a result of his high levels of k-NOVA amphetamine ingestion. This gives him the appearance of vitality and strength. He is then covered by his pale skin. This pallid skin reminds us of his inhumanity, a feature that developed due to being exposed to the scorching light of laptop screens and Shanghai streetlights, made to withstand such an extreme condition. It also has a psychological effect on the observer. The pallid skin reminds us of our teleoplexic, lyotardian desires that emerge from reading e-flux on modafinil.

The NICK LAND's demeanor is one of alphaness. He is dominant, assertive, and can be explosively schizophrenic. His communion with the four lemurs strikes fear into the more timid, cowardly races of fleshbot (h*man dogs)

FANGED NOUMENA is the most masculine of Urbanomic's output. This is able to fulfill the desire of the neediest of undergraduate shitposters, being able to more than fill all the recesses of the intellect. Its k-viral schizoanalysis ensures that when it ejaculates, the potent accelerationist seed will immediately enter the human security system of the fleshbot NICK LAND impregnates.

In total, the NICK LAND expresses his pentazygon qabbalistic k-code in a most exemplary manner in bed. When he fucks, he unleashes the entirety of his bitcoin wallet and amazon e-books upon his partner without any restraint.

All this is the reason why the NICK LAND is the epitome of masculinity.

Bump

>>12399579
The Hegelians got BTFO'd, then the Deleuzians, so now we've moved on to the next collection of unintelligible jibberish that's been approved by academia as real philosophy. It sprung out of discussions of Bertrand Russell, who co wrote the only book Whitehead is actually famous for: The Principia Mathematica. Eventually someone will actually read Whitehead's material and give a satisfactory rebuttal and we'll do it again with the next pseud.

>>12401961
>Hegel is working out, on the metaphysical level, the theory of evolution before Darwin
You need to unironically kill yourself right now. Spare the world your blithering nonsense.

>>12437719
>You need to unironically kill yourself right now.
i'm already dead, i'm actually a spooky ghost. sorry, i should have made that clearer. i was run over by a laundry truck

anyways, i'm not saying he's a substitute for Darwin, i'm saying he was thinking about the nature of evolution before Darwin. and not uncritically, either: there's a critique of phrenology in the PoS as well, which - if i am not mistaken - Hegel rejects. the idea of *progress* existed before the theory of evolution, and Hegel is a major author on that theme - along with Rousseau, Marx, Saint-Simon, Fourier, many others. what i should have said is: it's not a theory of evolution, but a theory of progressivism. that, by the way, can also lead to disaster: it's what we are living through right now.

Nietzsche is also thinking about a lot of this too, but from a very different perspective. the point was only to highlight the nature of the dialectic as a theory of history, which is a way of viewing history (and thought, as Spirit) as socially, progressively, evolving. that is what he is doing. also, discovering that evolution can be beholden to progress-as-religion makes people go insane in all kinds of ways today because they think this is a discovery; it may in fact only be regression. it was a more interesting idea in Hegel's time, but this isn't Hegel's time anymore.

>Spare the world your blithering nonsense.
i would, i just have the feeling that i am really not much more nonsensical than the rest of it. my nonsense and the nonsense of the world are not really so different.

>>12436432
>Anyways it seems like a very nice religion or "perception" of the universe, and a lot I already had in myself (as snobby as that sounds, I swear it's true!).
it's not snobby at all. in my experience, that's how philosophy works: it doesn't really say anything you didn't already know. all it does is remind you that you already knew it.

>I never got where it came from, the "we are all one, and one day will return to one", was it Taoism?
that's just basic perennialism, i think, more than Taoism: 'i was a hidden treasure, and i wanted to be found.' or the Conference of the Birds: the Simurgh is the birds which seek him.

>I didn't get this, why that specific century?
meh, ask Aminom. maybe it gives us 200 years of intellectual barbarism in which to shake our sillies out.

>>12436442
there isn't one, really. Pancreativism is Aminom's coinage, it's ST by another name. same sources, same basic idea, i think. i haven't had to change my own stationery too much or hire any brand consultants.

>>12436865
outstanding 10/10. the Landian Xenomorph is indeed peak masculinity

>>12437700
>Eventually someone will actually read Whitehead's material and give a satisfactory rebuttal and we'll do it again with the next pseud.
sadly true, but i think this is a recipe for waking up to the nature of the beast.

>>12437853
>>12437719
Deleuze rejects Hegel in favor of pic rel, but the Ethics still have a great deal in common with the PoS. in both cases, there is a kind of Cosmic adventure: the progress of knowledge from the bottom to to the very top, to the conditions by which knowledge itself can be known. a major difference, of course, is that Spinoza's work is not historical-progressive in the way that Hegel's is. small wonder that it should have been attractive to D&G, who reject Hegel but keep Marx. all of this sheds some light on what those guys had in mind, or why Uncle Nick would continue their adventure, in a way: history isn't evolving, Capital is.

Hegelian Spirit is a kind of schizophrenia handed over to theology, or theology handed over to schizophrenia. i am using the term schizophrenia here in a particular way: it's an infinite proliferation. with Spinoza, the culmination of this is an awareness of God, and it is the same in Hegel; it's just that the adventure for Hegel is largely a historical/political/social one, and with Spinoza, it is a study in forces: bodies, affects, passions. the turn from Hegelian ideas - massive, wedded to the state - to Spinozistic ones - individualistic, self-reflective - is like the essence of the change from a modern to a post-modern understanding. Foucault does much the same thing. so too does Baudrillard in his break from orthodox Marxism, in favor of Nietzsche/McLuhan et al, and Derrida in refining down Heidegger even further.

evolutionary biology is today at the centre of a thousand explosions - ask Bret Weinstein, or JBP, or many others. and not only them. Land too has his own thoughts on this: basically, if capital isn't evolving, nothing is. but this is in many ways what is inspiring the pushback from the left, i think. and it leads us to a scenario in which the fortunes of capital are not necessarily assured. the need for religion predates the need for philosophy, or for technology.

so i'm not saying Hegel is a substitute for Darwin. i do think Hegel's own theory of metaphysical progress is an interesting one, and so has pretty much everybody else who has read the PoS since publication. certainly Marx did. when Heidegger appeared, he contributed at least two more major concepts to these discussions: Being and the enframing. but evolutionary history - tangled up with theology (or atheism) - has been an intoxicating idea ever since it appeared. and before it appeared under Darwin's pen, it appeared under's Hegel's.

this isn't the same thing as saying it is *true,* mind you. ours is the Age of Confusion, or the Age of Absurdity, or the Age of Irony, or the Age of Bloatware, or whatever you want to call it. our dilemma today isn't the absence of theories, but the excess of them.

grid is A=A?

>>12437980
Land has come up with at least one meta-theory of postmodernity itself: that is, acceleration. the sheer abundance of metaphysics we have today tells us at least two things:

1) we don't know what the fuck we are doing
2) we are badly in need of some kind of process that does

Land has never really given up the 19C ship: if anything, he has brought it back with a vengeance. Landian Capital is *hypermodernity,* the revenge of modernity in the middle of postmodernity. it reminds me of Socrates appearing amidst the generalized conditions of philosophical anarchism (sophistry) in Greece, or Laozi appearing amidst the hundred schools. its telos makes sense in terms of its birth, and vice versa. it is a tortuous Great Filter for thinking: the money works, even if you don't know how (and maybe even better). true, there is no reason why this cannot lead to the same kind of Enlightened Paranoia that once gave us a hundred thousand faux-working class Marxist writers, or any number of other progressive ideologues today.

Space Taoism/Pancreativism isn't, it should probably be said, really an /acc theory. there's nothing in >>12432774, for instance, that would connote political utility, and i can't find a flaw in what that anon has said. or in a lot of things that Aminom writes. for myself, Land works when i am trying to create a little distance between myself and Woke hysteria, but when i am forced to ask what i would *do* with that space, there really isn't anything to do except be genuinely grateful, and perhaps a little melancholy, or whatever else. this is where the Taoist parts (or Heidegger) for me enters the picture: as Kojima says, To Let The World Be. Doing Something with history seems to be a mistake, and a pastime for tyrants.

but it does make for some pretty interesting intellectual history, i think. how we got to the Age of Confusion is not an accident, nor is the irony of being granted degrees of technologically-supported relative omniscience leading only to complete bewilderment, confusion and failure lost on me. we can say that things do work, we just don't necessarily know how, or why. even Land's own cherished example of Singapore isn't a nightmare of icy-cold pragmatism. it left the third world because it followed technocommercial pragmatism, but it never required anything like revolution to do it, nor do they require the kinds of ideological fidelity to the party that Social Credit (or Woke Justice) connotes. true, they are authoritarian capitalists, no question. but the *Singaporeans themselves* seem to be okay with it.

in other words, they avoid the Nirvana fallacies which seem to be hard-coded into our own political DNA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy

>>12438030
what did he mean by this tho

"We're losing our place in a world that no longer needs us. A world that now spurns our very existence. You should know that as well as I do. After I launch this weapon and get our billion dollars, we'll be able to bring chaos and honor back to this world gone soft."
―Liquid Snake

more experiments in failed nihilism here, no less seductive than Kefka, and as wrong. video game plots often get directly to the core of what it takes philosophers ages to circle around.

in the absence of love, only the eschaton really satisfies.

>>12438541
put another way, the question is not whether or not we are repressed in any old-fashioned Freudian sense; it is that that which lies beneath repression does not admit of any limitation.

this is why Heidegger was so well-received in Japan, i think. it's not about the death drive repressed, or the power of affirmation. the maximal point of affirmation always seems to me to be indistinguishable from terrorism, a replacement of the law with chaos. freedom is like this. small wonder that universities are forced to resort to Protestantism to keep under control that which is by definition not to be controlled.

when LS is just a kid, the Boss repeatedly *subdues him,* and physically. but he doesn't really say *why* - time and again, he lets him go. and he does this, i think, not because he actually has a reason, but because he doesn't have one. nobody does. nobody can fill in for Liquid Snake the part that he is missing, anymore than even a Baroque world could satisfy Kefka. the thirst for representation, ownership, power and control seems to me to be well and truly infinite. in the end Land decided upon capital as an alien attack from the future for reasons not so removed from this. Hegel ultimately worked his way all the way from sense-certainty to the 'slow procession of spirits.'

Heidegger's ontology is, i think, also Kojima's, or an aspect of it. and it is there in FF6 also: you can't control for terrorism, because to control for freedom is fundamentally to commit an error. in The Dark Knight it all comes down to a coin toss, in the end: that's the Joker's ultimate ploy. for the Boss - who doesn't share Miller's own zeal for freedom - all you can do, really, in Mother Base is to continue a kind of experiment in a world outside of the world, a para-world. Kurosawa's sense of the destiny of the ronin who save the village is also not unlike Dostoevsky's having the Grand Inquisitor reject Christ. beyond a certain horizon, the polis takes on the character of a machine which inevitably produces artist-terrorist figures for which there is no cure.

there is never a substitute for the thing we need most of all.

>>12438053
is A=A true in a pre-systemic notion. does logic hold water metaphysically?

>>12438605
"I want my memory, my existence to remain. Unlike an intron of history... I will be remembered as an exon. That will be my legacy, my mark in history. But the Patriots would deny us even that. I will triumph over the Patriots and liberate us all. And we will become-- the "Sons of Liberty"!"
―Solidus Snake

similar paradoxes of order and control, perhaps. whether or not liberation really means liberation from freedom itself, from thinking, and the freedom to at last be the tyrant that, on some deep level, one wants to be, to be 'the change one wants to see in the world' unencumbered from any sense of morality. a conundrum Nietzsche warns about, but was perhaps confounded by.

>>12438633
i still don't understand what you mean, or why you are bringing this up. not baiting you, just confused.

this is a pretty interesting puzzle for ethics. one cardinal rule - never draw your knife on another soldier - immediately presupposes the next: what constitutes the soldier? after all, most of the soldiers at Mother Base are themselves forcibly kidnapped from Afghanistan, and given new directives. what you don't see - Eli accepted - is a lot of bucking of that system. the Boss is not a tyrant, and most seem to be pretty satisfied with his rule, even to hilariously masochistic degrees ('It is a pleasure to be held in your iron grip, Boss!')

there is nothing to 'deconstruct' underneath this. but Eli/White Mamba/Liquid - who is Kefka by another name, and perhaps even Sun Wukong in the absence of the Buddha - understands that if there are no rules, there are also no reasons to follow them. down this road leads his own very authentic brand of antagonism. nor is it to be overlooked that Venom himself later becomes the tyrant of Outer Heaven, but this too because he is himself not entirely outside of this world of exchanges and deceptions; he is a clone himself, a copy without an original.

even in GITS the same questions about the nature of identity and originality are asked in ways far more prescient than modern ideologues over in the West can do. Kusanagi doesn't go looking for an irreducible core of her own identity; in the end, GITS closes with a view of the city, the net vast and infinite. or, conversely, a core of identity tapped into might as well lead only to Akira's tetsuo becoming-monstrous.

i wonder if Deleuze ever saw Akira; my guess is that he didn't, which is a pity. Tetsuo's final form seems like a pretty horrifying Spinozistic being, all expansion to the limitless, quasi-divine and hideous at the same time.

>>12438787
if the features-and-not-bugs in Hegel's system are illustrated pretty nicely by the purges and pogroms of Soviet modernism (to name only one example) one has to wonder if Tetsuo suggests that same is true for Deleuze. the nice thing about Land is that he frames his entire system with the horror so plainly in view that you have no illusions whatsoever that to buy into his vision is to subscribe to Marxist nightmare theosophy from the word go.

made a new thread
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Amazing read. I wish I had more to offer in terms of criticism or argument or analysis, but you seemed to have hit as many nails on the head as you could. But
>Kefka wins, in the end, because he is *beyond redemption.*
What, then, of the cratures created just like him, from the same machine? What of Terra, for instance?

Also, Kefka has a kickass theme. And while it's a small, inconsequential thing, I think Uematsu's ability to conjure a choir from the MIDI bowels of the SNES might also say something about beauty, technology, and divinity.

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

>>12440182
>Amazing read. I wish I had more to offer in terms of criticism or argument or analysis, but you seemed to have hit as many nails on the head as you could.
well, what i basically have is an iceberg composed entirely of nails, that looks something like the Iron Throne on PCP. there's pretty much no way of hitting it that doesn't hit a nail-head somewhere. if anything, i am kind of amazed at the fact that i still don't feel like i have figured out what i am trying to say...but mostly, i think, it's because FF6 has more or less said it already. but thank you, very kindly, for your feedback. it really does make my day.

>What, then, of the creatures created just like him, from the same machine? What of Terra, for instance?
you know what makes her beautiful? not seeking redemption. the absence of guilt. the capacity to live with unsolved questions. a peculiar absence of scapegoating. maybe it comes from having something to do in the WoR, which is look after the children of a ruined village. true, you can chalk this up to being so much Male Fantasy on the part of the designers, but...why? we are beginning to develop an allergy to other people's happiness.

what *really* makes Kefka isn't a monster isn't his exterior mutations but his interior ones. Kefka, Celes and Leo are all productions of the same machine, in a way...but they handle their circumstances different. in the WoB *all* of the characters are warped productions of nihilism, depression, disaffection, the rest...and in the WoR, they are all now beholden to the awesome desolation of Kefka taking his own particular disappointment all the way to the end of the line. *everybody suffers.* nobody has the right answer. they're all victims of fate, of circumstances, of themselves, of...you name it.

>uematsu
there's nothing even remotely like Final Fantasy without him.

>terra
one of my favorite characters, i pretty much have her in every party as often as i can when i play. which, now that i'm thinking about it, i may have to do again, pretty soon. she's wonderful. she is a *symbol* of what is going on - the feeling of being tortuously divided between two worlds - and yet, blessedly, the whole story doesn't revolve around this. why? because *that is how everybody fucking feels.*

it's such a fucking brilliant game. gets better by the hour.

>>12440283
the thing is...it's not like the wasteland is necessarily reserved for life only after Kefka. i'm reading Mark Fisher's anthology now, and he understood that you don't need to have an apocalyptic *event* to feel as though the world can have been choked into submission to machinery already, such that when it does happen, it's almost like a relief.

you know what would have been interesting? if they had allowed you to *start* in the WoR, and unlock what had happened in the WoB. i am, of course, Just Fine with the structure as it is, which is operatic and then some. but to understand the nature of this thing, and how those machines were built...it's the same feeling i have about the Matrix, really. but i complain about the Matrix because it *doesn't* tell me enough about how it is that a Prison/Pleasure system would be built in the first place. in FF6 we have a kind of insight into the nature of postmodernity that proceeds from its structure, in a way.

aaaaaaah this fucking game. i shit you not, i really don't see any reason why this wouldn't be the greatest spec-fiction masterpieces told in any genre. i really don't.

>>12438053
Space Taoism/Pancreativism isn't, it should probably be said, really an /acc theory.

It's autoaccelerationism in the sense of a recursively self-improving self-improvement, and also in the sense of the time derivative of acceleration: accelerating acceleration. But it isn't only a time-based theory, it is spacetime, and so it is simultaneously a spacial integration with the sense of "spacial" being relation and differentiation. What is being integrated is a universal human condition, a universalizing value: love. It isn't a blind acceleration, it is an acceleration along the trajectory of mutual love and thus through both space and time. It is ultimately political with the culmination of the movement being absolute anarchy, human action governed solely by the measure of love - love itself unquantifiable, instead being the purpose for all quantification. It is simultaneously hyper-individualistic and hyper-collectivist, the meeting of the two poles not in a system of organization by a universal condition to which all systems self-organize themselves according to.

>>12436442
I define "space taoism" as the recursively self-improving component, and "pancreativism" as the relational integrating component. Pancreativism is also an experiential mode of conscious experience, inexorable love for life and a perception of existence as poetry - wu wei or "effortless action" that comes from a deep compassion for all things. This compassion for life and love for humanity necessitates a stance of altruistic courage in the conditions of the present due to the recursive self-improvement of self-destructive patterns. To combat this omnicidal acceleration, the opposite trajectory of life-affirmation must itself accelerate its acceleration to pull humanity out of the death spiral it is in. Radical change on all levels is necessitated, and so a radical courage to realize this change. The driving force is the will to love.

>>12441018
Why not combine the two to make?

>>12441018
That emphasis on mutual love, and the universe allegedly going on a course of increasing mutual love... that sounds Christianity-esque

>>12441116
it's an underrated religion.

>>12441247
If one is a loner and is in need of guadiance

>>12441895
>If one is a loner and is in need of guadiance
find a flaw

>>12401961
>Hegel is working out, on the metaphysical level, the theory of evolution before Darwin
Do you ever bother making any sense? Darwin claimed it was Malthus, but he actually stole Spencer's economics and applied them to the natural world. Darwin always misdirecting and claiming originality i.e. Wallace.

>>12401961
>we take evolution for granted today
Who is this "we" people always refer to when they appeal to conformity?

>>12399378
>2.(The basic fallacy of relativism) If everything is in a state of flux, why isn't the fact the fact that everything is in a state of flux in a state of flux?
God.