/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11342790]

I can barely grasp the ideas that Land proposes, but I know there's a deep link between Land and Deleuze in how people meme them together and all that, yet I haven't found anyone that can explain it in simple terms using Google, and I don't have the time or the knowledge to read A Thousand Plateaus and arrive at the ideas that I should

Can someone dumb it down?

and while at it, explain what a Body without Organs is supposed to be

[Anonymous No.11342812]

bump

[Anonymous No.11343316]

i'll take a swing at it. more perhaps just to get some feedback on this myself.

even land struggled to sort this out, i think. the later chapters of FN go bananas as he tries to imagine what complete deterritorialization would look like. but here's one of my all-time favorite land-lines:

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

now that is a line you can work with. the 'utterly alien' is what you will probably wind up asking yourself, at some point, is spinoza's god, or deleuze's infinitely larval-squishy universe. again: ask yourself what 'pure difference' would really mean. the BwO pretty much resists any accurate description, given that it is a kind of metaphysical process.

>“The body without organs is not a dead body but a living body all the more alive and teeming once it has blown apart the organism and its organization. Lice hopping on the beach. Skin colonies. The full body without organs is a body populated by multiplicities. - ATP

in other places, it is the plane of consistency itself:

“The plane of organization or development effectively covers what we have called stratification: Forms and subjects, organs and functions, are “strata” or relations between strata. The plane of consistency or immanence, on the other hand, implies a destratification of all of Nature, by even the most artificial of means. The plane of consistency is the body without organs. - ATP

what land borrows from this, and adds to it, is cybernetics and the idea of time spirals.

>Land's right Deleuzianism aims at liberating the forces of auto-production rather than actively establishing a new set of human possibilities. This is because it is rigorously anti- anthropocentric and is concerned with the removal of societally created blockages in the productive flow of desire. Any potential future conceived by an individual would be flawed because it would be tainted by human subjectivity. Instead, the future is to be realised by releasing the impersonal forces of desire-production. Such auto-production is an effective reaction against Oedipus precisely because it is inhuman (the work being done by forces like Capitalism and GNoN), whereas any choice between solutions to Oedipus is, in some way, a return to Oedipus.

>Entropy (considered, properly, as an inherently teleological process) is the driver of all complex systems. Capital Teleology does not trend towards an entropy maximum, however, but to an escalation of entropy dissipation. It exploits the entropic current to travel backwards, into cybernetically-intensified pathway states of enhanced complexity and intelligence. The ‘progress’ of capitalism is an accentuation of disequilibrium.

see teleoplexy for more. the above extract is taken from a pretty good thesis written on land and his intellectual influences.

https://theses.ncl.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/10443/3350/1/Overy%2C%20S.%202016.pdf

[Anonymous No.11343559]

>>11342790
Freud + Marx = Desiring production. Capital exploits (Marx) innate subconscious drives (Freud) on a mass scale via technology; as technology accelerates (think google/amazon deep-learning AI mapping your purchasing patterns - in effect learning your unique desiring drives) these desiring drives accelerate along with it. Your subconscious overpowers your ego, and we go from unique, individual rational agents to a biomass of unconscious consumers more similar to an insect colony.

[Anonymous No.11343583]

>>11342790
read the fucking diptych

[Anonymous No.11344884]

bump

[Anonymous No.11344913]

Land is taking post-Marxist German social critique of capitalism as a self-reinforcing, invasive, all-rationalizing, life-desiccating, inescapable mega-machine and instead of saying "Oh no!" like the Germans normally do, he's saying "Good! Fuck it! And also, this process recently created algorithms and computer programs and shit, and people are even trying to make AIs, so the whole instrumental rationality problem all these German fucks have been whining about since the 1860s is really just the incubation chamber for the AI, which is the apotheosis and telos of all these tendencies."

He combines this with some French cultural and discourse theory, that already shares and draws from the Germans' dislike of machinic capitalism, and obsessively talks about ways to escape or evade machinifying processes of rationality, except he turns that around and says, no, instead of making culture and discourse lumpier and more full of uniqueness, let's make it smoother and more homogeneous so it will be easily processed by the capitalism booger man so that they AI can be created

tldr he's taking two old-hat discourses that anybody can sorta-kinda learn to manipulate and play around with just by spending time in a comp lit department for a few years, and putting one mildly interesting rhetorical/emotive twist on them (instead of "oh no!!! humanity is fucked! instrumental rationality keeps gettin' us!" you go "yeah!!! humanity is fucked! instrumental rationality is inescapable!")

[Anonymous No.11344942]

>>11342790
Gonna repost something from another thread in case that one dies:


Basically D&G fucked up with Anti-Oedipus as it was the book equivalent of shitposting, filled with irony and even literally calling psychoanalysts autistic. What's worse is that D&G disagreed bavk then on what a BwO is (they admit it in interviews and essays) and only properly explain it in the BwO chapter of A Thousand Plateaus.

A BwO is the necessary condition of desire understood as every possible experience independent of the desired object, just the feeling associated with any subjective state and the ontological reasons for such affects to arise. Every object in the world can connect to countless desires based on BwOs and their interactions (sex can be arousing as well as anguishing for example). The three examples of BwOs that D&G give in ATP are masochism, drug use and infatuation (falling in love). Part of the reason for this is that our body is covered in erogenous zones which active under certain conditions. The sensation you get when touching a loved one at the height of passion is not the same as when you touch the mouse while browsing the web even though it's still the skin doing the touching so to speak. This allows for complex connections between sensations, such as the connection of pain and pleasure in masochism, made possible by desire reaching a threshold that permits it, in this case a buildup (Deleuze, in Coldness & Cruelty, insisted on how both Masoch and Sade advocated for a suspension of regular sexuality in order to make their practices possible, Sade for example basically insisting on a violent discharge after 2 weeks of nofap so to speak).

Part of the difficulty lies with Deleuze's ontology of intensive differences (intensive as in having their internal logic and capacities irreducible to external phenomena which they condition) producing effects when interacting within the body and with external intensities.The other difficulty pertains to D&G's rhizmatic model of connections which try to go beyond "first person" subject-object relations as well as conceptual barriers (as in keeping the BwO to a bodily description), the result being that the BwO isn't just a "personal" practice, but a social description as well since it is on some basic level political as long as affects and their interactions still govern individual political stances and the genesis of the ideas that carry and perpetuate them.

[Anonymous No.11344983]

>>11343559
> unique, individual rational agents

D&G never take reason for granted. It's always the product of unreason. If it were otherwise you could easily convince a mad man that he's being unreasonable in his beliefs. It's more a matter of how reason, as a problem solving capacity (a plant is contemplating the water and nutrients it takes out of the soil, it's reasonable in a sense), can account for the unreason at the core of every assemblage that has its own reason. For example, someone about to commit a crime of passion has his practical reason specific to that assemblage (that is to say, his way of going about achieving his goal of revenge), even if at a different moment (while in a different assemblage) he would consider his past actions unreasonable and dangerous (ruining his life if he gets caught).

>>11343316
> Such auto-production is an effective reaction against Oedipus precisely because it is inhuman (the work being done by forces like Capitalism and GNoN), whereas any choice between solutions to Oedipus is, in some way, a return to Oedipus.

This feels weird to me because a psychoanalyst could always retrace Oedipus and say "ah, so you want to escape your subjectivity, all you're doing is committing to a death drive" or something like that. In the end, it feels to me that for D&G all you can really do to escape Oedipus is to not care about it and make your assemblages work and be happy about it.

[Anonymous No.11345015]

>>11344983
>This feels weird to me because a psychoanalyst could always retrace Oedipus and say "ah, so you want to escape your subjectivity, all you're doing is committing to a death drive" or something like that. In the end, it feels to me that for D&G all you can really do to escape Oedipus is to not care about it and make your assemblages work and be happy about it.

sure, but if you think about it, it's hardly bad advice. especially if you are a terminal neurotic. making those assemblages work - *just work* - is kind of brilliant. and even Freud says this, somewhere: the goal is love and work, period.

i don't know what the intellectual climate was for D&G when they were coming up but i think it might be worth bearing in mind also. if everyone is completely convinced that lacan/hegel/kojeve has the right idea, then you're looking around and going: okay, but all i see are various forms of despotic statism dressed up in Oedipal language. even today it's easy to see how little difference there is between the neurotic and the tyrant. it always makes me think of Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. or hitler, or stalin, or whoever...there's always a sort of core black-box that, true, can be explained in terms of psychoanalysis, but that same psychoanalytic practice can also be used to justify whatever else you want to do in the name of a symbolic order.

now, this is not to say that the same cannot be done with schizoanalysis too. it is not hard to read in it the inner workings for the worst excesses of shithead neoliberalism, fascism (as Badiou understands it, although i think he's off the mark there) or even the laying of groundwork for land's own All Your Base Belong To Capitalism.

'just make your assemblages work,' or, just *ask* yourself how and why your assemblages work and so on is one of those things that always gives me the feels whenever i think about it or get super-hung up on language and symbol and representation. it is a pretty handy way of reminding yourself that it is possible to defect or secede from symbolic regimes when they become horrible, or sort of recursively self-justifying, and so on.

marx materializes hegel in much the same way, i find, that land materializes deleuze. it's a downer in both cases - even a nightmare - but you kind of hope that in doing so at least some kind of foundation is laid for the next iteration of whatever it is we mean when we talk about consciousness.

[Anonymous No.11345067]

>>11343316
>>“The body without organs is not a dead body but a living body all the more alive and teeming once it has blown apart the organism and its organization

haha, the mummified corpse unravels. confirmed for duplicate. read passion

[Anonymous No.11345082]

>>11345067
interesting, i'll check that out.

apropos of nothing, or maybe something - isn't the deleuze/land combination an interesting way of explaining a game-thing like pic rel? just sort of leaving this here in case anyone else wants to muse on it.

[Anonymous No.11345101]

>>11345082
one more related image.

[Anonymous No.11345108]

>>11345015
I should've been more precise, I do agree with you that D&G's escape from the constant appeals to the symbolic and to language can be refreshing and important even if it might seem simple when compared to some profound truth that psychoanalysis might reveal to us (but even some psychoanalysts reject this, even Zizek says that that inner truth is mostly shit rather than something profound).

My hesitation concerns Land's solution to escaping Oedipus through capitalism (although I've only read quotes from Land posted on here so I can't say for sure) since for D&G this could very well be an attempt to suppress difference's constant striving and just accept every drive and every "subjectivity" no matter how contradictory. Of course it could be argued that capitalism operates a kind of selection, but this selection is still secondary to difference (like Nietzsche's weird criticisms of Darwinian natural selection as being secondary to will to power, like merely an effect of something more fundamental).

Zizek might argue something similar about Marx's relation to Hegel, now that I think about it, to the extent that at least his version of Hegel isn't deterministic in the same way Marx is.

[Anonymous No.11345114]

>>11345082
The image works, but the whole mechanic-machinic distinction in D&G and the more rhizomatic or chaotic side of it might not be captured well enough.

From the other thread:: Desiring machines are replaced by assemblages in ATP because the first concept or at least the words felt too mechanical and too rigid in their capacities to connect to all kinds of things (not rhizomatic enough). Machinic is different than mechanical for D&G, but the reasons are complex as they involve a kind of infinite movement where if desiring machines did not interrupt one another constantly (like pleasure interrupts the productivity of desire), they would go on indefinitely creating an unbearable experience like that of the people that cannot quench their thirst after a brain injury no matter how much water they drink.

[Anonymous No.11345171]

>>11345108
>>11345114
good posts mos def.

land likes to dwell or operate in that place between politics, economics, and philosophy, but in his own particular way. there was a good summation of his work in that jacobite article from not so long ago:

>capitalism is a computer that processes desire.

so:

>My hesitation concerns Land's solution to escaping Oedipus through capitalism

if we are land, we can find capital teleology in just kind of accepting this. the solution is never perfect: what we call cybernetics is that pure difference coming into existence, time-spiral style, through technology, and nothing drives that technology more than innovative consumer production and consumption. this is, however, i think the place where pic rel comes to mind. even the wildest flights of metaphysics come back in the end towards the need for market production. well, until/unless there is some kind of intelligence blastoff-revolution, capital becomes self-sustaining on little island-enclaves of billionaire megawealth, sentient computer viruses seize control of power grids, &c, &c. various apocalyptic-disaster scenarios. in the meantime sweaty, smelly humanity is stuck with itself while the machines percolate intelligence among us.

>the whole mechanic-machinic distinction in D&G and the more rhizomatic or chaotic side of it might not be captured well enough.

but that's the thing, right? the plane of immanence can *never* be captured well enough. if it did, it couldn't be commodified. everything is iterative, and eventually comes out as market production, price, value, and so on: intelligence traveling backwards from the future, assembling itself out of the enemy's parts, and so on.

i sometimes think if land wasn't such a curmudgeon he would almost be a utopian. maybe that is my own self-appointed role, to put a white hat on cthulhu. my own attraction to land's thought really does proceed from this, in some sense: forget about the bullshit idpol and language games, just optimize for intelligence! but maybe that's all fatalistic (or spectacularly misreads him).

you might also be interested in this. land actually appears in the comments section and there's an interesting exchange with a finance guy who has some things to say about how capital works.

https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2014/06/14/nick-land-and-teleoplexy-the-schizoanalysis-of-acceleration/

anyways, you're probably right: machinic > mechanical. but that is the crucial place to look at, as was MCM/CMC for many an older generation of freudo-marxists, i think. *how value comes into the world* - nietzsche's question also, it's true.

just some random thoughts. and thank you, of course, for an interesting discussion.

[Anonymous No.11345194]

>>11345171
>but maybe that's all fatalistic (or spectacularly misreads him).

for what it's worth, i recognize also that my own temptation to try to Make Land Cheerful is probably a disaster too, and maybe even a counter-productive one. i'm aware - as games like opus magnum, or whatever, might suggest - that there's always a danger in trying to anthropomorphize or bring down to one's own all-too-tiny human scale that which is truly cosmic, and might be better regarded with dread and horror, lovecraft style, than any kind of optimism. kind of like this guy. jurassic park took place on an *island,* and a very remote one. when the raptors got loose, the worst that happened was that Newman got chewed up while he was taking a shit, and we all knew that he deserved it.
>and that cool australian guy, but he went out like a boss anyways.

IRL the story almost certainly much darker, stranger, and potentially more chaotic.

for whatever that's worth. and i'm too much of a brainlet to play opus magnum well anyways: i kind of enjoy just fetishizing the aesthetics of it all and being hypnotized by machine production.

[Anonymous No.11345284]

Yall are crazy. Just please explain the end goal of capitalism in the eyes of these accelerationists. Is there are hope at all for humanity? What is the singularity? Is this something we should be looking forward to? If the advancement of capital is driven by our death drive, does that mean our collective death is guaranteed? Thx.

[Anonymous No.11345312]

>>11345284
>Just please explain the end goal of capitalism in the eyes of these accelerationists
for some, techonomic singularity; for others, constructivist politics. variants of zombie marxism (or just marxism?).

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

>§10. Accelerationism has a real object only insofar as there is a teleoplexic thing, which is to say: insofar as capitalization is a natural historical reality.

>Is there are hope at all for humanity?
not for barbaric, scapegoat-fetishizing humanity. Enlightenment, western or eastern style, is a better look all round. there's no prize awarded in racing to the bottom of decadence.

>What is the singularity?
see above.
>§13. Quasi-finally, the evaluation of teleoplexy is a research program which teleoplexy itself undertakes.

or this. there are less grimdark political implications:

>The future needs to be constructed. It has been demolished by neoliberal capitalism and reduced to a cut-price promise of greater inequality, conflict, and chaos. This collapse in the idea of the future is symptomatic of the regressive historical status of our age, rather than, as cynics across the political spectrum would have us believe, a sign of sceptical maturity. What accelerationism pushes towards is a future that is more modern — an alternative modernity that neoliberalism is inherently unable to generate. The future must be cracked open once again, unfastening our horizons towards the universal possibilities of the Outside.

>Is this something we should be looking forward to?
partly yes, partly no. depends on how much you want to repeat history, what parts of it can/should be salvaged from the general slaughter-bench.

>If the advancement of capital is driven by our death drive, does that mean our collective death is guaranteed?
not necessarily. humanity is tenacious like that (except when we are being self-destructive, which is a sadly high amount of the time). partly it means asking ourselves what it is that we are really being collective about. is it the collective love of pornography and chicken mcnuggets? outlook looks grim. is it the collective love of [x]? maybe things look better.

source:
https://libcom.org/files/Accelerate%20-%20Robin%20Mackay.pdf

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

[Anonymous No.11345315]

>>11345171
Thanks for the discussion as well.

Perhaps I'm still too attached to a problem of commons (not truly reducible to the market) to truly appreciate Land. I'm not even sure where D&G stand on this since capitalism's "fluidity", its capacity to always create new axioms to sustain itself isn't the same as the deterritorialization that they prefer.

Zizek's notion of commons (genetic material, intellectual property, the environment) which a new communism is supposed to protect still appeals to me (as opposed to the probably libertarian versions that advocate for pricing these things and letting the market go to the end in fixing the problems). We're probably too far gone at this point, even Heidegger famously said: "philosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and endeavor. ONLY A GOD CAN SAVE US". But the problem of commons goes a bit further than that: if today we get all kinds of conspiracy theories about ressentiment filled Cultural Marxists looking to destroy traditional values, if you look at why Marx and Engels attacked the family, it boils down to at least two things: it was already a decayed institution due to capitalist thinking (not just inheritance, but alliances based on money and power) and it was within a framework in which the wife was the man's caretaker and the capitalist got two workers for the price of one essentially. So Peterson's (and others) point about wages halving due to the number of workers (now male and female) doubling depends on the framework just as much. Point being that even here there is a problem of commons since until now birth rates and housework could be taken for granted, but now that is no longer the case and it's debatable just how much throwing money at the problem will fix it (as much as I want to believe leftist solutions).

Even what you mentioned:
> intelligence traveling backwards from the future
Can be read as not merely ulteriorism (in the sense that we always look for explanations after something has occurred), but also as a formula for the banking system as creating money out of nothing (bringing it from the future so to speak) in order to give out loans (rather than, as most people believe, giving someone else's already deposited money to the credit seeker).

Not saying I have an answer to all of this, I'm just wondering if the market can truly cover everything. Varoufakis had a cute example about his daughter helping a neighbor out for free out of kindness. Varoufakis asked his daughter: "if the kindness was lacking and the neighbor had instead paid you a small sum to perform the same trivial task, would you still do it?" and she said no. Maybe this anecdote isn't worth anything, but it does appeal to that part of me that thinks of unquantifiable relations.

[Anonymous No.11345410]

>>11345315
you brought up some good points there. i agree with you on a lot of it, really.

i don't know if you've read this, but anarchist economics are definitely a thing. one of the reason land shills for BTC so hard is because of the inherently sorcerous nature of fiat money you describe, which is inevitably partnered up with everything he hates: that is, arbitrary Because Reasons humanity-doing-its-thing. he likes crypto for this reason, i think. and it's not hard to see why, for all kinds of reasons. so i'm definitely in agreement with you here.

and your whole paragraph about the question of the commons &c is super on-point as well. you can see why people would get irate with JBP for, as you say, doubling down on the metaphysics of that which is oppressing them. it's one of the things about JBP that makes him the blessing and the curse that he is: he doesn't really understand where his enemies are coming from (but being airhorned in the ear a couple of times will do this). jungian psychology cannot into marxist economics and vice-versa. humanity can (and maybe should?) muddle on in spite on this but, of course, you're completely right about the consequences of this when you really parse the different arguments and see where they do (or more frequently, don't) line up. so yeah, really good analysis there, i think.

it's definitely hard not to like varoufakis also. i thought his speech in Geneva was great: he says (and means it) that he is a libertarian, a marxist, and a keynesian. it's a very compelling argument and hard not to think that that is the way to balance things. land appeals to me b/c i've always had a kind of deranged bent for the extremes (left and right), and i like accelerationism in theory now really as a corrective for misplaced extremism. i'm a kind of boring universalist-humanist at heart, and landian stuff i think is valuable in that sense of saying, look, if Capital is our god now, we had better understand what it means to actually worship this thing. like spinoza's god, we can love it, but it cannot love us in return. so what is the right way to tackle culture, the legacy of the Enlightenment, being-in-the-world and so on? i'm fond of saying that land was like the defibrillator on deconstruction for this reason: he moved the plot forward when it was really needed. the news to me only seems to confirm and reconfirm how right he was in those insights he had in the late 80s/early 90s.

>i'm not even sure where D&G stand on this since capitalism's "fluidity", its capacity to always create new axioms to sustain itself isn't the same as the deterritorialization that they prefer.

guattari might well throw a brick through land's window. deleuze would no doubt write an absolutely sensational book on it.
>tfw you will never read The Grandeur of Marx, deleuze's last book, unfinished when he died

[Anonymous No.11345434]

>>11344913
Good dumbing down and good post desu,even though you're wrong.

[Anonymous No.11346182]

>>11345410
> the news to me only seems to confirm and reconfirm how right he was in those insights he had in the late 80s/early 90s

Interesting. Could you elaborate on this? From the little of Land that I know, at least the way demands for autonomy are framed, such as in the recent Catalonia crisis, do reflect his conception of fragmentation (I believe it's called Singaporization of the world or something like that) since the demands feature a heavily capitalist component ("Catalonia is a rich province, Madrid is taking away all our money"). Of course there's also an authoritarian component to Singapore as far as I know, which also fits in this narrative. Zizek himself admits this openly, that weird authoritarian figures (like an open secret such as Stalin's "democratic" rule that nobody was allowed to question) are emerging everywhere (Erdogan, Putin, Duterte, Trump, Orban, etc.) . I'm asking because maybe you had something more or something else in mind.

I do understand the appeal of Land, but I fear that it's a bit like those provocative passages in Nietzsche which basically say "do whatever, the species will prosper even if you perish since it got rid of the weak". For example, it's recently been on the news that BitCoin's peak growth was the result of fraud. Not only that, but there were countless other scandals associated with it (drug trade, money laundering, etc.) which would require a truly different world to function properly (as in not to represent simply decay or danger). We are however already stuck in a kind of technophilia (Franco Berardi's term) and the next step is technognosticism (Zizek's term) and somewhere in between accelerationism will probably come in. Nietzsche's Overman, for which man will be an embarrassment like the apes are to man, will know (technognosticism) his desire perfectly, his libido (with its subjective states and thresholds) cannot take him by surprise and he will be able perhaps to live in such a new world, unless of course his knowledge transforms it even more so that even anarchism does not apply to it.

There is something Franco Berardi mentioned that stuck with me despite being very simple, namely that Cyberpunk connects the decayed body of punk and the possibilities of the future of the cyber.

https://youtu.be/uXfmwqM6YT0?t=18m59s

[Anonymous No.11346252]

>mfw Nick is ITT posting this stuff

[Anonymous No.11346337]

someone else find this a little disconcerting that Land went silent after posting about BAP ? I'm a little creeped and some of you may know why

[Anonymous No.11346343]

>>11346182
berardi is cool. i read The Soul At Work a while ago and liked it. he's an interesting guy, even if i didn't find a whole lot in there that i didn't kinda-sorta already agree with. same thing with byung-chul han, in a way. you're really glad some poor bastard is out there who has read and synthesized all of this stuff, even if in the end the conclusion is more or less what you expected: that life is being reduced to charred cinders, but for some reason Feels Good Man to have somebody arrange all of the pieces and conclude upon that which you were pretty sure was the case but needed to be said in clarifying jargon. i'm sure i don't have to explain this, you probably know the feeling. looking forward to watching this interview too, so thanks for posting kind sir. italian philosophers are often good times.

anyways.

>I'm asking because maybe you had something more or something else in mind.

meh, not so much really. i do expect interest in moldbug/patchwork to grow, especially if migration remains a talking point into the future. but i've been (re)reading some stuff from the other side of landian acceleration of late as well, zizek, hegel, mark fisher also. maybe because they sometimes seem like the underdogs on this, or because beyond a certain horizon rooting for land is like rooting for the house in blackjack. even if you're right, nobody gives a fuck, and you kind of look like an asshole doing it. it is worth paying attention too, though. i'm just sort of both burned out and lazy from a lot of politics stuff in 2016-2017 and now kind of thinking that i have to be on the side of positivity somewhere rather than succumb to the rage virus (which i have, no doubt, contributed in some part to spreading...). fwiw.

>Cyberpunk connects the decayed body of punk and the possibilities of the future of the cyber.

that is indeed it (and, btw, is it not kind of strange that only *now* that we are getting a neuromancer film?). it's land's intimation also (and no doubt can be explained in dialectical hegel-ese as well, i'm just not the guy to do it). i mean it's entirely possible that deceleration (already a nascent thing, apparently, if you hunt around) will become attractive in the coming decades if/when people really decide to fold their social-democratic cards. and Young Nick/Old Nick kind of describes two different ways of rolling cyberpunk, which is another interesting thing about him.

>For example, it's recently been on the news that BitCoin's peak growth was the result of fraud. Not only that, but there were countless other scandals associated with it (drug trade, money laundering, etc.) which would require a truly different world to function properly (as in not to represent simply decay or danger).

this too is also germane. zizek wrote a pretty angry essay about this in pic rel, saying that high-frequency trading and so on confirms that the market is ridiculous and criminal, rather than rational.

>>11346252
hi nick

[Anonymous No.11346402]

>>11346337
here's a random thought: what if he's just lonely (or bored, or fucked-out exhausted)? if you read those old hyperstition blogs (one of you kind anons shared these a while ago), you can see the kinds of productive exchanges he has with fisher and reza negarestani.

and then, later on, he creates xenosystems and for a while attracts a whole bunch of random but interesting people. unfortunately, it got colonized by a bunch of alt-right retards who only wanted to talk about the blacks and the jews and the whole thing went to shit. i really miss reading nick's chaos patches and links to other interesting stuff. he just sort of stopped updating that after a while. you can see the results here:

http://www.xenosystems.net/quote-note-365/

maybe philosophy works in the same way that bands and musical acts do. you need the right chemistry and the right collaborators, and at the right time, or else the thing just goes dead. i don't really know much about the intrigue of life at warwick or in the early 2000s or whatever but it's not hard to imagine that any good thing in intellectual circles is benefited from having other people to play the glass bead game with. and no doubt the surprise election of trump threw a huge monkey wrench into the whole thing, as much as the trump effect fucks up everything.

it's a shame too that his connection with the New School or w/ev it was got canned as well. and there was some meetup at an art gallery in england that also created some shitstorm b/c of land's affiliation with the right. i think there was a big NRx meetup too, but it all had to be done in secret because they didn't want the media attention, which almost certainly would have gone against them and forced them to play games they're just not good at playing.

hopefully he's working on the BTC book or something.

has anyone read the BAP book? interested in getting it? i'll probably get it at some point because it belongs to this conversation and all but i don't feel like i need to storm the gates for it.

here's the link to the neuromancer film story also.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/9/16121760/neuromancer-movie-deadpool-director-tim-miller

[Anonymous No.11346435]

>>11346402
I know some of his former leftists friends believed for some time that the whole Land-NRX turns right was just a superstitous experiment but I think that train is long gone now

[Anonymous No.11346441]

>>11346435
I meant *hyperstitous

[Anonymous No.11346443]

>>11346337
>>11346402
Geniuses don’t need company to be genius. And Land welcomes the rw elements into his tent, everyone who supports u/acc is welcome and especially those who support eugenics and unfettered biomedical tampering with the human organism. He went silent because the faggots resent him for being right about the fate of capital. Fascism thrives off fascists lying openly about what techne and capital do to organic life. They attacked him because he supported a midwit outsider faggot journo hack writing a disgusting piece on BAPbook which was uncharitable and tasteless. That’s it.

The guy has to pay bills and is old and just had a fucking heart attack/stroke (forgot already)

I find it grating that there’s a camp of people on the Left who can’t accept that quantifying reality means racialism is correct and we cannot provision special programs to protect weak taxa. Land just took his own beliefs to their logical conclusions. He is superior now that he has total respect for inhuman might. The alt-right are superfluous and a death throe of a dying type.

[Anonymous No.11346450]

well, by he went silent i actually meant his twitter went silent a week ago or so after he posted about BAP

[Anonymous No.11346455]

>>11342790
>Can someone dumb it down?
Capital has become self-aware and it doesn't care about you.

[Anonymous No.11346470]

>>11346450
yes you passive aggressive twerp, he is busy and has health problems and twitter is not fun when your young acquaintences snap and bite your throat for saying something smarmy about one of their big brothers. he’s annoyed and bored, busy and ill constituted. leave him be, don’t worry about people who don’t personally know you. They won’t ever repay you for it and they’re not thinking of you. He’s gone silent multiple times for weeks on end before, and if he perishes then so be it! Learn to accept mortality and the brevity of star fire

[Anonymous No.11346477]

>>11346343
>byung-chul han
I never thought I'd see him mentioned on here. I read The Agony of Eros a while back and agree with everything you said about him and Berardi and to me it's a bit of reinforcement of my own opinions that others synthesized these things so I can mention them when I talk about this stuff even if it's rather obvious stuff.

The interview I posted isn't the most interesting, only the short timestamped part which is about cyberpunk, but Berardi does have many conferences and interviews which are far more interesting despite his sometimes esoteric style (his sister is a psychoanalyst, maybe that's where it comes from). Still, it's nice to see someone who was mentioned in A Thousand Plateaus still walking and talking, as silly as that might sound.

Franco Berardi also frequently mentions how, because of the nature of the stock market, it is very much possible to speculate on destruction rather than creation so already financial capitalism is even further away from its roots in production/consumption of goods and services or mere accumulation.

>>11346252
If he is, he certainly is much clearer than usual. The conversation should've already devolved into an encryption that only AIs can read and which has something to do with how blockchains will solve quantum mechanics or whatever. Pic related: the reason why I'm starting to hate Deleuze & Guattari for encouraging something similar to this style of writing.

[Anonymous No.11346489]

>>11346455
this is pretty much it
even when he starts going into the oecumenic significance of primes and the infinitude of infinite number sets, it pretty much all ammounts to "Capitalism has not only failed everyone, but will inevitably kill everyone, and it is way too late to turn back"

[Anonymous No.11346494]

>>11346470
I'm starting to think Nick Land really is in this thread, writing angrily about himself in the third person. I'd expect nothing less!

[Anonymous No.11346497]

>>11346435
No, it's that the alt-right is a Marxist project to crash neoliberalism. Right acceleration is a strategy part of left accelerationism. Trump, Putin, Dugin, even Lauren Southern (seen her pics with Dugin?), Spencer, Bannon etc are all part of this. The game is much bigger than it seems. The right is being duped into bringing about its own demise, and that of western civilization with it.

[Anonymous No.11346504]

>>11346477
there is no shame at all in skipping that section of FN

[Anonymous No.11346507]

>>11346497
> even Lauren Southern

Kek. Here I was thinking many right wingers were retarded when in fact it's all part of the left's plan. Also, seriously, why do Lauren Southern and Faith Goldy have such deep man voices? Does it have something to do with testosterone turning females into conservatives or something? Can't remember the names, but quite a few other conservative females had such booming voices although there are plenty of counterexamples so I never made much of it.

[Anonymous No.11346512]

>>11346435
it's an amazing story, when you think about it. it really is.
>I, Robot's robots move beyond their programming as they develop a machine unconscious: they dream ... but bring overt & hidden sides of capitalism together: under the (affective) face, lie unseen, inhumanly mute networks of assembly/distribution that don't rely on language at all

https://twitter.com/k_punk_unlife/status/1003383262104948736

fisher was no joke. his twitter page, or the one that is being kept in his name, is full of brilliant insight. negarestani is his own thing. you just kind of get the feeling that iron sharpens iron in that sense, that they all had to get a little bit sharper around each other. sadie plant clearly had something going on too. maybe i'm just being pointlessly sentimental, but still. it's just that nick's turn to the right, and into darkness, turned out to be potentially the most intellectually productive move at all, however horrible.

we should all be so lucky to be around academics worthy of the name, i think.

>>11346443
>just had a fucking heart attack/stroke (forgot already)
did he really? shit.

>quantifying reality means racialism is correct and we cannot provision special programs to protect weak taxa
HBD is for real. diversity actually *is* our strength when it leads to better, smarter, more capable human beings (and, it is to be hoped, civilizations). it's part of what makes the constant griefmongering over racism such a clusterfuck. genetics and culture do matter, but we're passing the point of no return on having a reasonable conversation about it if Evergreen was any indication.

>>11346477
berardi is referenced in ATP? he must slay at dinner parties on that anecdote. how could you not want to mention that to everyone you met?

>it is very much possible to speculate on destruction rather than creation so already financial capitalism is even further away from its roots in production/consumption of goods and services or mere accumulation.
this, hugely. even sloterdijk has asked somewhere for more philosophy of explosion. i was just wondering about this myself the other day: the continental metaphysics of a bomb and so on.

[Anonymous No.11346545]

>>11346512
> berardi is referenced in ATP? he must slay at dinner parties on that anecdote. how could you not want to mention that to everyone you met?

It was only a short mention about the leftist radio stuff he was doing at the time in Italy, but it's there.

[Anonymous No.11346580]

>>11346470
>if he perishes then so be it! Learn to accept mortality and the brevity of star fire

as terrifying as the 21C world is, the advice given for living in it absolutely cannot be topped

[Anonymous No.11346593]

>>11346545
cool. will keep an eye out for that then.

might as well throw a classic deleuze mind-twister in here, b/c why not. uncle Gilles is best uncle.

[Anonymous No.11346719]

>>11344942

>>11344942
>A BwO is the necessary condition of desire understood as every possible experience independent of the desired object, just the feeling associated with any subjective state and the ontological reasons for such affects to arise.

is this intended to be understood? what do i read to actually comprehend what you just said?

[Anonymous No.11346844]

>>11346719
You'd have to read a lot since D&G were shit at explaining themselves, despite their interesting style. Basically once you've read everything they wrote and every interview ever and several deleuzians, you begin to piece together what they're saying in a detailed and precise manner (rather than a self-help delirium or something similar).

As for that particular sentence, maybe it was a bit convoluted now that you mention it. It's hard to summarize this stuff without becoming a Deleuze imitator and writing dense prose.

Let me try to explain it a bit. Suppose you have an experience: you're currently sitting at your computer trying to understand what a BwO is. You desire something external, in this case knowledge, but this process does not imply a subject looking for an object, but rather an affect associated with certain things (words, thoughts, images, environments, moments of the day, etc.) so that if you suddenly got anxiety or if something external (like a phone call) intervened, you would no longer be in the same mindset. You might try to get back into it, which might succeed or it might fail. In any case, the BwO is the result of the affects (capacities to affect and be affected) at play in a given moment so it is, like I mentioned, the necessary condition (or condition of possibility I guess, but I tried to avoid Kantian terminology) for desire as experience. You do not have experience without desire (even if you don't desire anything external at a given moment) and you do not have desire without a BwO associated with that desire. There are many BwOs, as many as possible desires or experiences or subjective states (but Deleuze will try to avoid subject-object dualities so he doesn't use such terms). I should mention that the affects (capacities to affect and be affected) are ontological, they "exist out there in the world" so to speak, or at least the result of something ontological rather than mere feelings. Feelings result from these affects, hence another reason to avoid subjectivity when discussing affects.

I was a bit imprecise in that sentence you mentioned because using affect both as capacity to affect and be affected and feeling or subjective state can confuse further rather than simplify as was my original intention.

[Anonymous No.11347423]

bump

[Anonymous No.11347554]

>>11345315
also, since you're interested in the commons i'd be interested to know also what you make of yuk hui and gilbert simondon. simondon (and the only serious 'simondonian' i know is yuk hui) is still to me kind of an unknown quantity w/r/t a lot of this stuff.

>The general intellect for Virno could be understood as the “common,” but also as Simondon’s “pre-individual” reality, or more precisely what Anaximander calls apeiron. As both Stiegler and Jason Read have emphasized, one shouldn’t confuse the pre-individual with mere nature, but rather understand it as part and product of culture and history. Calling it immaterial or returning to “mere nature” risks missing an important step in understanding our contemporary, or post-labor, condition to come. If the general intellect is exploitable, it is only because the environmentalization of machines equipped with the capacity to collect, parse, and analyze data creates a feedback loop that integrates the individual into technological systems. We can thus understand the double meaning of the German word for “general intellect,” allgemeiner Verstand, that Marx first used: on the one hand, it is the understanding (Verstand), the analytic faculty responsible for cognition and recognition; on the other, it is a generalized or transcendental schema which forces itself onto the whole of society, like how Google has made machine categories indispensable for comprehending the contemporary. In other words, the immaterial is the new material.

>Virno seems to furthermore separate psychic and collective individuation into two stages, with the “collective of the multitude, seen as ulterior or second degree.” However, as we have seen before, there is no separation between the psychic and the collective in Simondon’s theory of individuation, and indeed they are inseparable. The separation between the two allows Virno to advance an opposition between the individual and the multitude, but he fails to account for how the dynamic of individual and collective individuation is mediated by technical objects. Virno’s move could be understood in the same way that he criticized Marx for “completely [identifying] the general intellect (or, knowledge as the principle productive force) with fixed capital, thus neglecting the instance when that same general intellect manifests itself on the contrary as living labor.” But if Virno’s politics of the multitude can be found in the exploited general intellect, its potential for resistance does not rely solely on “living labor” or a theory of “subjectivity,” but rather demands historically recontextualizing technical objects and repositioning them in an understanding of the process of psychic and collective individuation.

the rest of the article is pretty cool too.

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

[Anonymous No.11347654]

Are there any works of fiction that are inspired or mirror Deleuzian thought? I ask as someone who is interested in Deleuze, but would like some sort of basis as where to start and usually I find that fiction can help bridge that gap

[Anonymous No.11347791]

>>11347654
it's an interesting question. i will admit to not having read it in full, but some parts of this sound pretty good:

>A market need no longer be run by the Invisible Hand, but now could create itself-its own logic, momentum, style, from inside. Putting the control inside was ratifying what de facto had happened-that you had dispensed with God. But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful, illusion. The illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can do. Things only happen, A and B are unreal, are names for parts that ought to be inseparable...

>The silences here are retreats of sound, like the retreat of the surf before a tidal wave: sound draining away, down slopes of acoustic passage, to gather, someplace else, to a great surge of noise.

>Don’t forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world.

D&G were both pretty crazy about kafka, and deleuze has a lot to say about lewis carroll in logic of sense.

i kind of wonder if Roger Rabbit - or animation in general - would also work in terms of describing what it would be like to be a kind of BwO. all intensities, and beholden to rules and laws of physics that are kind of outside of our own, and yet not completely unhinged from reality. not quite sure about this, but it's interesting to think about.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpDaNqSXxp0

[Anonymous No.11348379]

>>11347554
I must admit I don't know anything about Yuk Hui other than his association with some deleuzians. I haven't studied Simondon either yet so everything I know about him comes from Deleuze.

The article you posted is interesting, I don't yet quite know what to make of it. Varoufakis proposed treating those who use social media as a kind of cognitive workers which must be in some way compensated for their work (even if not directly), but I'm not sure how far I'd go with it. It's just too tempting to just think of it as simply a service and to say that the consequences that arise from it are almost epiphenomenal, that nobody in fact controls this general intellect. It's probably naive though.

>>11347791
I did see deleuzians on occasion use cartoons to describe delirium and the movements of desire in general. Not just because, as Zizek points out, there is a kind of death drive logic to it where the characters instantly come back even after injuries that would normally cause death, but also because there is a certain fluidity there in the way a character can become one thing and then something completely different, like when Tom & Jerry are in one episode their regular selves and in the next they're Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham and the next they're astronauts on a moon made of cheese. There is also a movement of irony or humor in Deleuze's sense in cartoons to the point of it being metaphysical (you see a cartoon character run in mid air instead of instantly falling, you know it is impossible in our world, but the possibility of such an alternate world existing in some way cannot be excluded).

Pic related.
> You think you have made yourself a good BwO, that you chose the right Place, Power (Puissance), and Collectivity (there is always a collectivity, even when you are alone)

[Anonymous No.11348487]

great thread

[Anonymous No.11348502]

>>11347791
>11347791
>who framed roger rabbit
man wow.... i think that was the only movie i watched more than star wars and indiana jones as a kid.... fucking amazing movie. something really mysterious and profoundly disturbing about it. great nostalgia post

[Anonymous No.11348533]

I feel as if I may have approached a misinterpretation while simultaneously rereading Fanged Noumena (and reading Anti-Oedipus for the first time), so here me out. If the nomadic following of flows, into the primtive kinships of which it is programmed, is adjacent into the productions of the body of the socius, then would the geotrauma produce the negations of the nomadic in the Deleuzean form of the concept, or would the Deleuzean nomad simply convert itself away from the recurrence of the primitive flow of which it arised, now assimilating into a technocapitalistic swarm?

[Anonymous No.11348549]

>>11348533
technocapital devours all my friend. there is no more hiding in the cyberjungle. technocapital is the cyberjungle.

[Anonymous No.11349052]

are ATP and AO interchangeable or is ATP the only one that matters?

[Anonymous No.11349071]

>>11342790
Just read something more clear and rational.

[Anonymous No.11349261]

>>11349052
Both matter and they're not interchangeable. Both can be annoying to read at times, but Anti-Oedipus is worse. Make no mistake however, there are some important concepts in there and you understand ATP much better if you endure through AO.

[Anonymous No.11349663]

>>11346494
why is this thread so infested with Neo-Marxists and leftist scum
But i wondered about something else
Could it be that Bronze Age Pervert = Moldbug?

[Anonymous No.11351006]

>>11346470
hey Nick, are you ever going to publish that blockchain book?

[Anonymous No.11351050]

>>11351006
that post is so far Land's style
his posts are always detached and impersonal

[Anonymous No.11351059]

if nick really was in this thread, the thing i would want to ask him is if teleoplexy is really another way of saying Cyber-Hegel. or, to go in another direction, if something like nicht-dasein is a concept worth writing about. what if teleoplexy is just a way of describing the last pages of the phenomenology, and now the future dialectical history of the world passes into Spirit returning to itself in this whole new way? is teleoplexy a kind of fusion of spinoza with hegel? would be big if true.

and then what? i know, i know, asking What We Should Do is silly, okay, okay. but we don't always want to be memed into total submission. some of us are still stupid and crazy enough to wonder about these things.

there's just too many interesting things to think about, nick, and you opened up these doors. you can't just punk out now and shitpost about bronze age pervert. you're one of the most interesting people in china. get off your duff and write more cool stuff to make our minds kersplode.

[Anonymous No.11351173]

>>11346450
He's just on a vacation perhaps, calm down.

[Anonymous No.11351222]

>>11351173
nice find

[Anonymous No.11351242]

>>11345194
what is this game you speak of?

[Anonymous No.11351349]

>>11351242
opus magnum. it's by zachtronics. all the games he makes are these next-level puzzle/simulators that will make your brain bleed: spacechem, shenzhen I/O, &c. i'd like to be able to say that i'm good at them and enjoy them but this is not the case.

i do enjoy the feeling of being really stupid tho watching other people come up with miracle devices and other things.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/558990/Opus_Magnum/

[Anonymous No.11351356]

>>11351349
thx anon will check out