When the acceleration finally hits you

Hi nick

So if I get this right, in a very simple sense Land posits that EVERYTHING exists ultimately to die, because death essentially erases phenomena, and Acceleration is the idea that things that are alive progressively contribute to faster and more efficient conceptual death, until we break the threshold where 'we' are never conceptually alive in the first place (Transhumanism, or hyper-Automation) and noumena and phenomena become inseparable inseparable as they were always intended to be?

that is pretty much the most optimistic interpretation of his thought.

>everything exists to die
>most optimistic interpretation
Damn
I know Land's also talked about Capital existing to exponentially procreate itself, and that life is only a temporary byproduct of the evolution of Capital - but that sounds rather prescriptive. Seems more likely that the exponential growth of Capital is an emergent property of the evolution of death.

Also in order for this to work Land has to be positing that the ship of Theseus has already sailed, otherwise even after the Transhumanism event horizon death will continue to be bogged down by phenomenon-driven thought.

not nick

not the worst interpretation, except that that everything you are describing cannot really encompass the horizon of capital itself

capital is meta-everything, it's really Outside in that sense

he's taking deleuze and guattari and looking at them kind of in reverse, which is why they (and land) are important

this book is a good primer on a lot of this too

Thanks, will check it out. Land's concept of Capitalism is the thing I'm most sketchy on.

>yep

I'm tempted to fill this thread with Catholic shitposting.

>capitalism is meta-everything
Yeah it's funny how a term once all its denotative content has been hollowed out can be ascribed to just everything. Seriously y'all niggas need Wittgenstein.

Okay nick.

hyperstition is starting to make sense to me now also, it's not even that crazy. it's the moment when the memes become real

so much pseud-deconstruction is failing to see the forest for the trees as a kind of misplaced humanism. irony itself creates the conditions of the real in a cultural sense. what is basically happening now is that capital knows more about us than we know about it

so either we can lapse into having our fantasies spoon fed to us like docile little puppies or we can accept the strange and weird possibility that we are really in a world where there isn't a difference between imagination and reality, b/c all of this shit tinkers with the future in ways that are very very real

the age of the meme makes a lot of sense, like a cultural technology that winds up producing shit that is actually real

whatever tho

>“We are all deep in a hell each moment of which is a miracle.” – Emile Cioran. Ours is a culture of the excrescence of death, a thanatopic pursuit not of profit but of total annihilation. The principle of deregulation inherent in global capitalism is inextinguishable from the total acceleration of a deterritorialized, systematic and efficient cannibalism, one that seeks to incorporate every last niche of biopower within a machinic phylum – a civilization of machinic and technocratic infestation from which there is no reprieve. The question is whether one accepts the truth of this and joins the comedy of destruction and implosion (helps it along, gives it a push), or whether one spends one’s time in the factories of oblivion, illusory worlds of decaying narratives of disorder and madness spinning out of control, reversions to outworn heresies of a bankrupt and decadent ethno-apocalypse by way of irony and fake solutions.

Did the author mean inextinguishable or indistinguishable?

>capital knows
Are you so far gone that you can't see how that phrase is absolute nonsense?

good luck

go for it, we love catholics

the wittgensteinian monastery silence-barrier is potentially the last line of defense against azathoth

srsly i mean it

i don't know. for a smart guy he has a lot of weird typos. i think he meant indistinguishable

makes sense 2 me senpai. i'm on the land rover now

Seems about as unrealistic as "natural selection"

>Wittgenstein monastery
silence-barrier
Another phrase with no sense.

>makes sense to me
It doesn't, you are just being defensive and coquettish.

Nick plz

>go for it, we love catholics

Do you? Because it seems to me that Catholicism's vision of the future--and by that I mean The End--doesn't jive with Land's, simply because The End for Catholicism is the Second Coming. Christ rolls back up in all his unspeakable glory and puts all things to right. It would, ultimately, reveal Land's Capital as just another false god, all its reality-munching self-proliferation wiped away like so much dust on a window.

Too right. It's funny how meaningless two word phrases have such an impact on retards.

Jesus is the anti-capital.

it's not that complicated

restless & relentless unconscious production is what produces capital

>Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

aka be still and know. this causes the alien space monster that feasts on your desires great pain. wittgenstein is the wise & cruel pai mei to the beatrix kiddo of desire

>you are just being defensive and coquettish
not defensive at all, i'm just taking the brakes off for a bit

Yeah, pretty much.

>The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. And He found in the temple those who were selling oxen and sheep and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. And He made a scourge of cords, and drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen; and He poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables; and to those who were selling the doves He said, “Take these things away; stop making My Father’s house a place of business.”

>whereof one cannot speak...
>aka be still an know
Except that's wrong you fag; if that were what he meant he would not have written several books. Also
>wittgenstein is summed up in one sentence from the introduction of his first book

>taking the breaks off
I appreciate that but please why shill for Nick Land? Am I missing something I keep coming into these threads but I'm starting to feel like it's just another meme like Infinite Book.

Surely Nick doesn't really think that capital has sentience?

not nick

i'm not anti-catholic & it's worth remembering that nick land loves jordan peterson

twitter.com/outsideness/status/804359811840102400

the enemy is not capital in and of itself but the monstrously mediocre demi-fascism of unpilled normies

going to church is infinitely more radical than changing your gender, wearing a trump hat and is arguably the endgame of cleaning your room kermit-style also

what the nick hand deterritorializes the peterson hand reterritorializes and in the end the catholics will be proven correct

silence is ultimately the answer

read pic related. nietzsche heidegger and wittgenstein were all dealing with christianity and i agree

but maybe life has to get real dark on earth before the church makes sense again

idk

just a pseud

he really only wrote two books and the second repudiated the first

give the man a break

i'm not shilling for nick land, it's just fucking interesting ya big dingus

we wuz stars

also this

the peter thiel-rene girard connection is worth thinking about

Okay I can appreciate that. It is fun and I've honestly always wanted to live in BladeRunner

I suppose most of my objections to Land are actually not philosophical, but mystical and supernatural. Land seems to believe that capitalism has generated its own kind of mystical continuum. In keeping with his theme of Capital as God, he seems to think it's created an entire mystic framework: souls, an afterlife, ghosts, fairies, the whole old medieval reality, the true numinous because back in the day it was invested with a belief in its actuality, its genuine reality. It seems to me Land thinks that there's almost a new "capitalist supernatural" that's arisen and replaced the old stuff.

I find myself in conflict with this as a devout Catholic, since of course I believe the old supernatural never really went away. It's like the old nerd debate of science vs magic, but it's actually real instead of being confined to the pages of comic books. It's a matter of either believing in digital ghosts or spectral ghosts. At least that's how I see things.

i do too sometimes, not as much as nick land does

and blade runner is of the greatest films of all time

i understand that

reading continental philosophy and trying to cheese-grater my own heart only made me realize how fucking nonsensical it is to try and do philosophy or even really live and not try to have a dawning sense of the mystical

for me the great value of land's work is that like nietzsche it eradicates cynicism

nick land wants to be as cold as he can and in some ways that's doing an important service to civilization in at least alerting us to the dangers of selling everything off

people are cynical fucking idiots but somebody has to be the canary in the coal mine. nobody has to follow him all the way and secretly i think that he like the rest of us is only responding in despair to something beautiful that is receding from view, so he turns back thought against the corroding power much as has always been done. some problems can't get fixed with the warm fuzzes so he is basically trying to wedge an ice-pick into the heart of capitalism with his mind

for what it's worth i wish you the best user

that was some cringe blog-tier shitposting but w/ev, life is short

Is paradise or the garden of eden or whatever reactionaries view as the previous better world simply a metaphor for childhood and when Jesus says you have to become like little children to enter the kingdom of heaven and when heaven and the resurrection are described as paradise is it just talking about fucking reincarnation? I'm literally shaking.

I do agree with you on certain points. I find Nietzsche deeply valuable for the same reasons you say you find Land valuable. Nietzsche is great at wiping away illusions, or at least illusions that accrue to us through inertia and merely going with the flow. And I suppose if Land operates in the same capacity, he's valuable too.

I suppose the time for my sort of thinking will be the aftermath, whatever that looks like.

bear in mind also that while Land is not a big fan of Christianity it is ultimately Protestantism-as-defection and ultimately the forerunner of all things "liberal"/secular/progressive/atomized that he really reserves his big rockets for

for me at least it's why i like Girard. the greatest literary critic and diagnostician of memes since Jean Baudrillard. and a Catholic.

land often talks about life in hell, about how hell is the forge of virtue and so on, but for Catholics, well...it's complicated, isn't it?

many of the greatest atheist philosophers in the Western tradition were still fundamentally indebted to Christianity: the Mulhall book explains more. without the Church there's nothing at the centre even for the wildest and most outlandish feats of speculative reason - witness Land's own bete noire of atomization. the more we defect, the more we produce atomization, niche, nuance, difference, the more capital thrives. of course there is a difference between ethically positive and ethically negative difference - in a word, nietzschean/deleuzian joyous affirmation vs. mere simulacral memery/irony/I Got Mine. but you understand all this

nothing more radical today than being a Catholic to my mind. if anything land to me just signals where the alternatives lie

good luck thinking my man

I have not read Girard, but I'm thinking I need to. He seems deeply interesting.

I'll get to him when I'm done with Benedict's "Jesus of Nazareth" books. Thanks for the recommendation.

Benedict was a great scholar and a very humble man who did not desire the task he was given. I feel bad when people shit on him, he doesn't really deserve it.

my pleasure, girard is my all-time fave guy so i'm happy to share. i think you'll enjoy that reading

going to check out that book too

Where should I start with Girard if I like to get at the architectonic of a thinker and not just snipe at his best soundbites or flashiest works?

>Surely Nick doesn't really think that capital has sentience?

This esoteric interpretation ought to be popular with the Baudrillard and Battaile folks, but no he does not mean anything as such. But why does the Capital require sentience to act AS IF it had motivations and purpose? Sure you don't believe bees in a hive (including and specially the queen) are acting according to their own will, but there is also no need to ascribe the status of sentience to the emergent effects happening across the hive itself (reproduction and search for food and elaborate defenses).

It is common sense by now in complex system theory and statistical physics that emergence plays an important factor in every phenomena involving large numbers of individuals. Like other emergent effects, the Capital cannot be explained out by any model, no matter how exquisite, of its single components (people or commodities or whatever you use for the model). It arrives only at the macro level and is heavily non-linear. And it acts "out of its own volition" not as if it has sentience, but as if it has a drive, like a swarm of ants building a bridge out of themselves as if the whole swarm had a single will: to get to the other side of the precipice. We apply our human individuation to bees and ants in order to claim the queens are totalitarian leaders, but in reality they are no less pawns than the rest of the colony, serving their own pheromones and instincts to perpetuate the Colony, which actually can be considered to be a thing-in-itself, even if an emergent one which depends on the collective. But then again, our own conscience is just like that, as neurons are not really that interesting in standalone.

Also I can't see how does Witty play into this; He actually wrote the Tractatus and thought he zeroed in on the whole of philosophy, stopping work altogether for several years. Then when he was much older he came back for a second round with Philosophical Investigations where he talks about Language-games. And then he's out again. If anything that guy is correct, not engaging in things which will lead you to Accelerationism is the only way to not accelerate, which is what Witty was very good at doing (and also painting houses).

>ask a girardfag about girard
>fuck yeah

Start here, go check it out. Lots of good FAQs and downloads and so on.
ravenfoundation.org
ravenfoundation.org/faqs/

Palaver's book - pictured here - is a good introduction. Can do worse than this.

For literary stuff, Desire Deceit & the Novel is where he founds his theory of mimetic desire, and then there's more of that in his book on Shakespeare. I can't tell you much about that, since I just ordered it today. But DDN is excellent, especially if you are into capital-G capital-B Great Books.

Violence and The Sacred, The Scapegoat, and Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World are his more cultural and anthropological studies. If you're interested in scapegoat theory and so on, that's there.

Battling to the End is also good but that's for after you've read some of the other stuff. The Girard Reader has lots of other stuff.

He's got a lot of shit to talk about. I got into him after reading a lot of analysis - basically, desire and mimetics. So the core stuff is his theory of triangular desire. He's basically a god-tier cultural critic who is neither a Marxist, a Freudian, or a phenomenologist. Some people don't like him because he's got a Theory of Everything, but I happen to subscribe to that theory of everything.

In the interests of balance, you can go back and read Landy's criticism later - although it actually might work as an introduction to the man's thought also.

arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/deceit-desire-and-literature-professor-why-girardians-exist

Stellar post.

>how does Witty play into this
You basically answered this, which is what I was getting at.

>not engaging in things which will lead you to Accelerationism is the only way to not accelerate, which is what Witty was very good at doing (and also painting houses).

People are drawn to capital - which, in the depths of psychoanalysis land, is libidinal/narcissistic/and much, much weirder - like moths to a flame. But, we can know this...

text for the text god

Warrants mentioning also that Deleuze and Guattari were already on to the idea of the wasp/orchid parallels. Although it's not like Mandeville himself wasn't already understanding bees and capital back when...

Anyways, more interestingness on Bee-ing and time:
>inb4 kys

>Ah, there is the progressive catch of the true Leftist, we must “draw the lines of a new ethics in order to be able to retain our humanity in the course of the trans-human transition”. So that Berardi like a good son of Kant would like to keep one foot in prison just in case this transitional moment into the posthuman future ends in failure; a hedging of one’s bets, a capitalist move of risk assessment and profit for the human(ist) vision of the transcendental illusion. Yet, as Land admits this is an old trick of the Left, a rearguard action to conserve while acting the part of the radical: “Humanity is a petrified fiction hiding from zero, a purgatorial imprisonment of dissolution, but to be stricken with sanctity is to bask in death like a reptile in the sun” (Land, p. 131).

>Being is the last illusion of a dead metaphysics. Philosophy is this dark betrayal that has constructed the very lie of civilization from its beginnings till now. “Being derives only a vanishing speck of an eliminative negativity. The overwhelmingly preponderant part of its deviance stems from its irresolvable composition, beyond which there is only idealist phantasmatics” (Land, p. 158). Under the sign of elimination being begins to dissolve its hold on us and slips away into its own illusory system of fictions. Breaking with the logic of salvation, of the humanist paradigm, we follow the convulsions of hazard, break free from the Kantian nihil negativum (Land) and begin to float among the tributary whirls of the coming data storm, freed to pursue a antilogical cosmism in which the irresolvable improbability, irrational negation, and interminable compositional intricacy of interwoven spaces of aberration corrupt the earth and everything on it – a labyrinth of desiring machines roaming the bad lands of futurity implode upon us like metalloid locust from an alien slipstream.

Source:
socialecologies.wordpress.com/2017/06/08/the-suicidal-civilization-technopessimism-and-the-coming-collapse/#more-95363

So by Capital he means something in the way of the Superego but in this case the Id had become superior to the Ego?

That seems to me like he was trying to protect religion from Capital's incursion, not that he was against Capital period. Christianity is in many ways a primer on how to be useful human capital.

If Land is right, then Capital will conquer everything. Even if he's only partly right, it's almost certainly the case that Capital will assimilate anything that tries to accommodate it.

And anyway, near as I can tell, Christ's point is that God just flat out doesn't have a use for Capital. God is self-sufficient, and anyone who wants to follow God needs, as it were, to be God-sufficient. God is almost the mirror of Capital, it seems--and like Capital, with sufficient devotion to Him God winds up crowding out everything else in life. But that's the point, isn't it? At least it is in Christianity. Christians are meant to belong to God, and so they no longer fit in the world, which belongs to Capital.

>arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/deceit-desire-and-literature-professor-why-girardians-exist

i thought something was up when i saw the "rofl" in a stanford.edu url, but my nostrils were not ready for:

>Reading 2. Hamlet is unhappy because he, like all of us, is full of body thetans

almost blew a booger on a my keyboard for that one f a m

>So by Capital he means something in the way of the Superego but in this case the Id had become superior to the Ego?

Kind of. It's helpful also to consider this through the perspective of Deleuze and Guattari as well as via Freud/Lacan/Zizek, since there are these two paths through psychoanalysis and Land is following from D&G, who are basically trying to explode Freud.

For Freud et al, the conscious mind is under siege from the unconscious, which it is repressing. For D&G, however, the conscious mind is basically throttling the unconscious, which is properly "schizophrenic" - don't read that too literally.

Our own drives feed consumption, which drives capital. This is boilerplate Freudo-Marxism of course. Under the presumption that we are rational Ego-beings we feed it with the Id, and I suppose in the long run it might become Superego when it wakes up in the technological singularity Land anticipates.

That said, trying to look at Land's work using Freudian vocabulary doesn't really do it justice (although in a certain sense I suppose it doesn't matter all that much). Deleuze and Guattari are going to talk about flows, flows of capital and desire that basically overwrite everything.

Check out Anti-Oedipus, it's an incredible read. D&G basically don't separate or draw any lines between capital and desire at all, and this can extend all the way to include theory as well: even criticizing capital can reproduce capital, just as submitting to the laws of Oedipus and castration symbolically reproduces those rules of Oedipus and castration.

For Land Capital is, in a sense, only unconsciously superegoic, I would say - hence the idea of retrochronicity, that it represents the alien attack from the future and so on, the really crazy stuff like Roko's Basilisk. Personally I find there's more than enough meat on the bone as it is without having to dedicate too much time to the really outer-fringe parts of his thought tho.

Maybe that other user can present a clearer answer tho.

Yeah, mercifully there are no thetans in Girard's work. He's just got a nice elegant old-school theory of reading great literature. No shenanigans required.

&whoever

>The logical consequence of Social Darwinism is that everything of value has been built in Hell.

>It is only due to a predominance of influences that are not only entirely morally indifferent, but indeed — from a human perspective — indescribably cruel, that nature has been capable of constructive action. Specifically, it is solely by way of the relentless, brutal culling of populations that any complex or adaptive traits have been sieved — with torturous inefficiency — from the chaos of natural existence. All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher’s yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of the bloody grinding mills of selection, either, but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible preservable trait, and then — still further — of the unavowable horrors that ‘fitness’ (or sheer survival) itself predominantly entails. We are a minuscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite. (This is still, perhaps, to put an irresponsibly positive spin on the story, but it should suffice for our purposes here.)

>Crucially, any attempt to escape this fatality — or, more realistically, any mere accidental and temporary reprieve from it — leads inexorably to the undoing of its work. Malthusian relaxation is the whole of mercy, and it is the greatest engine of destruction our universe is able to bring about. To the precise extent that we are spared, even for a moment, we degenerate — and this Iron Law applies to every dimension and scale of existence: phylogenetic and ontogenetic, individual, social, and institutional, genomic, cellular, organic, and cultural. There is no machinery extant, or even rigorously imaginable, that can sustain a single iota of attained value outside the forges of Hell.

>What is it that Neoreaction — perhaps I should say The Dark Enlightenment — has to offer the world, if all goes optimally (which, of course, it won’t)? Really, the honest answer to this question is: Eternal Hell. It’s not an easy marketing brief. We could perhaps try: But it could be worse (and almost certainly will be).

xenosystems.net/hell-baked/

I found the lamest pic imaginable to go with this, maybe anons here can find a more appropriate or fitting one.

is there any fiction based on these concepts? like fiction based in a time period where capital is about to overtake humanity?

>Beyond the sobs of the troubadours of the Sublime lies the ocean of darkness, a realm where we who meld into the folds of oblivion chart the destiny of stars like members of an endless assemblage, a swarming cellular mass of inexistence that vanishes in the deepest abyss of zero. The data storm is flowing out of the future and into our lives, we have only to surrender to its accelerating annihilation, float among the debris of dead and dying civilizations like insects in a inexistent holodeck, members of a strange and terrible world that seeks to absorb us into its interminable labyrinth. Shall we follow?

Source:
socialecologies.wordpress.com/2017/06/08/the-suicidal-civilization-technopessimism-and-the-coming-collapse/#more-95363

Land actually writes some fiction-fiction as well as theory fiction, but I haven't spent much time with it.

That he likes Neuromancer is no great surprise, since he's sort of like the house philosopher of cyberpunk. Maybe he read Neal Stephenson or Peter Watts at some.

I think he liked Snowpiercer and on his blog he was raving about the new Ghost in the Shell.

>t. guy who suddenly realizes he knows way too much about nick land
>i'm okay with this

also, and because why not, d'vorah the explorah.

Is there anything that explicitly deals with accelerationism and concepts like gnon?

Land described pic related as "utterly magnificent."
xenosystems.net/quote-note-157/

Beyond that, other fiction that deals specifically with accelerationism and Gnon? Can't think of any at the moment. But there's lots of good sci-fi. If he disliked PKD I'd be very surprised.

Will put this up here too, worth a read for anons into this stuff. Definitely lots of material there to get your noggin' floggin'.
urbanomic.com/book/accelerate/

Void Star and Blindsight both strongly give off the vibe that humanity is on the verge of obsolescence.

So is the endgame, at least according to Land's line of thinking, that eventually capital will supplant humanity? I believe I read somewhere that Land said humanity is currently capitals host, not its master, which implies eventually humanity will be overthrown?
If that is the case, the only sensible timeline where this happens is through some kind of self-replicating AI, yes? Are humans just thrown aside like trash to decay on our own, or would this new technogod actively seek to destroy humanity?

I like reading Land and his colleagues but there is so much jargon that I am unfamiliar with (I haven't studied much continental philosophy) that I often feel like my understanding is hardly even surface level

Where does Land talk about what capital is? Like where does he define it. Saying it's identical to singularity or death are characterizations but the literal connection isn't explained.

Dude like, what if leaving the oven on causes a semantic nuclear apocalypse? What if the barcode in my ramen pack is actually sentient and what it really wants isn't my money but the dreams and feeling that money represents in the australopithencine compartment of my mon(k)ey software? What if my vaporizer is actually God's penis (not the Christian God btw, but what God meant to the Christian God)? You think if I keep appropriating more jargon and keep trying to make philosophy into gut reactions I'll finally manage to put myself above the physical and metaphysical plebs without making any compromise? But then what will I owe and to whom? You think if I find anything else to fret about this cold will go away?

Shit man, I'm not even mad. You clowns are funny as hell.

Great post, user!

Maybe he's talking about AI, but he could also be speaking about the haves and have nots, with the "have nots" representing humanity as a whole. Think Elysium.

>So is the endgame, at least according to Land's line of thinking, that eventually capital will supplant humanity? I believe I read somewhere that Land said humanity is currently capitals host, not its master, which implies eventually humanity will be overthrown?
Basically yes. We are hosting capital right now via consumption (and banking, which is why NL is so hip to the idea of bitcoin and what it potentially represents also, I believe, because it won't be tied to fiat currency and gold reserves, which will skew a lot of narratives).

>If that is the case, the only sensible timeline where this happens is through some kind of self-replicating AI, yes?
Entirely possible. Or post/transhuman ubermenschen. Whether this means Multiplicity starring Peter Thiel or CRISPR babies in China or Elon Musk and Ray Kurzweil uploading themselves or the Age of Em or Skynet nobody knows. But whatever it is it's all happening through capital.

>Are humans just thrown aside like trash to decay on our own, or would this new technogod actively seek to destroy humanity?
Nick Bostrom is very concerned about this. So is Sam Harris. A lot of people are. On top of that there's this idea of an intelligence revolution realizing that it can do away with all of humanity in a microsecond. Maybe it destroys us out of some horrible sense of mercy. Anything is possible. But we're rapidly building our way towards finding out. Every Chicken McNugget gets us closer.

>I like reading Land and his colleagues but there is so much jargon that I am unfamiliar with (I haven't studied much continental philosophy) that I often feel like my understanding is hardly even surface level
This is Veeky Forums. Nobody knows anything here. Just read what you like and ask questions you're interested in.

>Where does Land talk about what capital is? Like where does he define it. Saying it's identical to singularity or death are characterizations but the literal connection isn't explained.

He doesn't define it so much because he's following from these guys. This is the book you need to read. It should basically just be understood as the prolegomena for all Land threads. Capital is a kind of deterritorializing/reterritorializing power fundamentally built into our minds. All of the time-warp/unconscious stuff you need to know is in here. The difference is that Land isn't a revolutionary in the same way that Deleuze & Guattari are. The whole idea here is to think capital in this new way: it's not anti-Marxist but it's not classically Marxist either. Capital is this process of mechanic assembly and reassembly that is just part of who we are and how we think about things. Which is why it's damn near impossible to understand how it works. Much in the same way for Oedipus. It's wired into us and tied to our minds.

Oh, throw me a bone here! You know how boring it gets when you can just brush all this stuff aside without a second thought? I've been looking for a good honest-to-God philosophical scare for weeks and all I'm getting from you guys is the same babble about losing your personality/dreams/projects/soul/whathaveyou with a techno coat of paint! I just can't take this stuff seriously.

>The difference is that Land isn't a revolutionary in the same way that Deleuze & Guattari are

I'm going to take that back. He is. He's just interested in the deep-space Kantian cold rather than the joyously dancing Nietzschean vitalism. Talking about Singaporean micro-states or the Awesome Economic Power of China is more what he's into. It really can become seductive too.

But it all runs on envy and mimesis...

thanks user I appreciate the explanations

Congrats, you're the ubermensch

woah you helped me here. I haven't read that book yet but I've been studying deleuze on his own and something clicked. Reporting back with results later

t. Second guy you replied to

my pleasure

awesome, looking forward to it. deleuze&guattari go go go

girardfag is fucking crazy

I know I am That, but what That art Thou?

this is good too if you're planning on getting into C&S

true

>tfw you realize that Veeky Forums is genuinely, unironically one of the best places on the internet to talk about both reactionary and neoreactionary thought

I can't say I blame people for thinking Land himself comes here. At least here we attempt to appreciate him.

>It would, ultimately, reveal Land's Capital as just another false god

it is though

>deleuze and guattari to rinse the marxism out of your system

what? d&g were staunch marxists as far as i'm aware...i think anti-oedipus is more marxist perhaps on the idea of money but i dont think AtP escapes marxism

by all means disprove me

this is manuel de landa's big critique of deleuze (de landa is a deleuzean who thinks marx was "wrong about almost everything")

That is because on most sites you would likely get called a racist thus ending any discussion

As far as anime goes, Texhnolyze and Serial Experiments Lain are probably the best examples. Evangelion has similar themes about humanity being obsolete.

What I'm curious about is why nearly everyone imagines the posthuman overman to be a malevolent monster. Isn't something like a JC Denton/Helios just as likely?

Probably because most examples of "superior" beings coming into contact with "inferior" beings is pretty negative.
Humanity might live in harmony with some kind of overmind for a time but I think eventually humanity, unless we become like the overmind, would at the least be made second class persons.

>rise the Marxism out of your system
Good point. You're right and I should qualify this.

D&G were influenced by Marxism but to my mind the portrait of capital they present (and the goals of schizoanalysis) transform Freudo-Marxism by internalization. Which is why both Badiou and Zizek admire Deleuze, dislike Guattari and seem to lament the influence Guattari had on C&S.

So yes, they were Marxists, it's true. But they're also (now) patron saints of acceleration, which is now drifting towards something that could be called Right Marxism (or futurism), and as such isn't really the left-Marxism of old.

If people schizo-accelerate/whatever *into* it, then...that's what I mean. Marxism as it was practiced before them (or "through" them) was of a qualitatively different kind than before.

>We have not at all minimized the importance of preconscious investments of class or interest, which are based in the infrastructure itself. But we attach all the more importance to them as they are the index in the infrastructure of a libidinal investment of another nature, and that can coincide as well as clash with them. Which is merely a way to pose the question, "How can the revolution be betrayed?" -once it has been said that betrayals don't wait their turn, but are there from the very start (the maintenance of paranoiac unconscious investments in revolutionary groups). And if we put forward desire as a revolutionary agency, it is because we believe that capitalist society can endure many manifestations of interest, but not one manifestation of desire, which would be enough to make its fundamental structures explode, even at the kindergarten level.

>No political program will be elaborated within the framework of schizoanalysis. Finally, schizoanalysis is something that does not claim to be speaking for anything or anyone...we are still too competent; we would like to speak in the name of an absolute incompetence...

>so what is the relationship between schizoanalysis and politics on the one hand, and between schizoanalysis and psychoanalysis on the other? Everything revolves around desiring-machines and the production of desire. Schizoanalysis as such does not raise the problem of the nature of the socius to come out of the revolution; it does not claim to be identical with the revolution itself.

>For the new earth ("In truth, the earth will one day become a place of healing'') is not to be found in the neurotic or perverse reterritorializations that arrest the process or assign it goals; it is no more behind than ahead, it coincides with the completion of the process of desiring-production, this process that is always and already complete as it proceeds, and as long as it proceeds.

If you would, talk about DeLanda's critique tho, that will probably be more helpful. Basically I should have just said they weren't Freudo-Marxists.
>which is obviously perfectly fucking obvious to everyone

Also posting industrial scapes b/c why not.

>Probably because most examples of "superior" beings coming into contact with "inferior" beings is pretty negative.

Can't argue with that.

Well, at this point I'm hoping that the "humans are the reproductive organs of machines" theory is true, and they at least keep us around for that purpose.

>Evangelion has similar themes about humanity being obsolete.
If anything, it's the opposite. Instumentality doesn't represent progress or evolution but a return to a womb-like primeval state without boundaries, motherly parallels included. Remember that while the FAR and the Seeds are more powerful than humans, it's the latter that derive from the former still. If anything is obsolete in by the End of Evangelion it's that kind of superbeing, not humanity as we know it; Yui/Eva-01 even ends up as an eternal testament of humanity's existence.

Now Getter Robo, that might be a better fit for what you want.

And more qualifications...
>Badiou and Zizek admire Deleuze
>but user, fascism of the potato

Yes. Also true. But Badiou also wrote this about Deleuze, much later:

>So how can we evoke him for our times? Why is it so obvious that he is by our side, even in the ironic distance of his perpetual retreat from the frontline where we were fighting against reactive infamy?

>...fight the spirit of finitude, fight the false innocence, the morality of defeat and resignation implicit in the word 'finitude' and tiresome 'modest' proclamations about the finite destiny of the human creature; and in one affirmative prescription: trust only in the infinite. For Deleuze, the concept is the trajectory of its real components 'at infinite speed'. And thought is nothing more than a burning to a chaotic infinity, to the 'Chaosmos'. Yes, that is the frontline I was talking about earlier, the frontline where he stands alongside us, and by doing so proves himself to be a very important contemporary: let thought be faithful to the infinity on which it depends.

So there you go. Badiou, who is a staunch Marxist, nevertheless finds himself in at least some sense on common ground with Deleuze later on, even after all the fascist potatoes.

Virtue is dangerous to those who don't have it.

Eventually machines would be capable of reproducing and also collecting the materials necessary to do so much faster than humans could without becoming some kind of technogod ourselves.
And humanity could only impose Asimov style rules for so long.
Humanity as we know it will either become slaves to a superior (probably robotic entity) or become robotic ourselves. Even then I believe it is only a matter of time before an AI of some kind sees little utility in us and takes action, probably not genocidal though.

Maybe the blind brain theory will be something for your liking?

Seems to rely on the same attachment to people's concept of self. Apparently it's disconcerting to not know how this one organ is processing information (which we're supposed to be), even though the thing has been running more or less fine for a couple millenia, even though all our discoveries have been made, not by chance, but because we've been looking for secrets, even though there's no evidence anywhere for a real permanence, conceptually, but hey we're still going to keep mapping this place because that's very important, and it shows in that we can make a giant fart machine in outer space because we have an inferiority complex and can't stand silence (which doesn't even exist anyway).

It's so tiring. If I had access to a billion libraries of Alexandria I would nuke them all, one button at a time. You people and your mental pacifiers.

I like that image user

great reply, thanks, my man

have you read Andrew Culp's Dark Deleuze? maybe i'll make a thread about it

I have, it's definitely an interesting read. I suppose I'm still so floored by the "regular" reading of Deleuze that I don't feel much need to explore Culp's version, but not because it's uninteresting. Really just because it's already an embarrassment of riches.

So Land and Accelerationism and all this stuff is certainly good for noggin mastication.

The propagation and dissemination of these sorts of ideas on somewhere like Veeky Forums and in particular Veeky Forums is also pretty intriguing for me. Like who else is actually going to bother reading through all this stuff if not time rich, meaningful activity poor lit neeks?

Will be fun watching these ideas percolate, I mean obviously they already are but the fact that these threads seem to be increasing in frequency and "accelerating" is fascinating in and of itself.

I'm a fucking stupid pleb but just to throw my worthless tuppence into the pile of burning faggots, I'd be inclined to agree that the only alternative to a headlong dive into this stuff is a form of disengaged silence. Wether that be through Wittgenstein, Zen, Buddhism or some sort of corporatised managerial "mindfullness". I don't think the specific strain or genre of silence is necessarily important, more that the process of just sitting and not doing engenders something that is the antithesis of nuerotic self replicating capital.

I also find it all a bit melodramatic, like sure everything feels a bit fucked and messy and maybe the shiny bio-punk AI overlords will either destroy or redeem us, but maybe they won't. Maybe all that will happen is a long slow movement into some sort of anti-climatic middle ground that still leaves humans doing the same things we've been doing for millenia. Grubbing around in the dirt and blindly stumbling through life, occasionally grasping the odd insight here and there.

Basically I sometimes feel that all these high falutin' bleeding edge technological doomsday/rapture/utopian theories are really just a way to distract from the mundane and banal everyday realities of our lives and boring and banal humans.

You will probably just get old and tired and fat like most people and the AI/Capital/Gnon/God won't save you or damn you to hell. If anything "it" won't give a fuck.

Anyway, that's a ramble. Probably makes no sense.

I regard Capital as a kind of a muse. There are basically two ways of writing about it - one philosophically, the other via fictions. Somewhere along the way, or in the background, those two lines connect. If you approach the subject too metaphysically you wind up sounding like an ideologue (or just insane) and if you approach it too naively you wind up writing ideological trash.

There is a turning point where it starts to become hard to look away, esp if you are a shut-in introvert who just wants to brood on these things, and for some folk there's nothing more edgy or provocative than continental theory. So I started reading this stuff because I wanted to see how the world worked, and then how metaphysicians described the mind working. But eventually there comes a point where you can't not see it, and which manifests as a kind of a paranoia.

And paranoia is unbecoming. Personally, I think the way to deal with this stuff is through mindfulness, or through art. Or through the process of philosophical articulation and conversation (which is why Veeky Forums is such a great place). Kind of finding some way to make peace with the world, or situate yourself in a group or context where the voices in your head become stilled for a while or can otherwise be used productively instead of critically, because there is no end to criticism.

For myself I became interested in philosophy because I am a failed writer, and the more I fail to write the more I shitpost about philosophy. I'd like to think someday that I could complete a piece of fiction that might alleviate some of the need to see Capital everywhere, so that's what I'm working on. And then just go out anonymously into the world and be another boring and invisible slob who doesn't need to namedrop anyone in order to get through the day. To not think Capital. But sometimes it seems you have to really realize that most of the problems one has in this world are a result of one's own behavioural/psychological works. Which is what some of this stuff has taught me.

Envy, in a word. Hence the Girard spamming (and the fascination with Landian black holes).