Philosophy | jdemeta

The Experiment of the Future

By: mnold

08-01-2018

The Experiment of the Future

Deleuzoguattarian Nietzsche: Overcoming as Capitalism.

Introduction

The aim of this essay is to extrapolate on the claim that accelerating capitalism would act as inherently beneficial for Nietzschean man’s overcoming of himself into Overman. I plan to do this firstly by defining what man and amor fati mean for Nietzsche, alongside defining both that which man shall become, namely the Overman and its counterpart of Eternal Recurrence, alongside their inherent connection. Primarily focusing on the possibility and actuality of man’s overcoming, what it means to overcome and that which man is against during his process of overcoming e.g. the herd. From here I plan to explain why in the current day or epoch what it means to be ‘man’ has been drastically altered, largely due to capitalism being western man’s political horizon. I plan to briefly attend to a common description of capitalism, then utilize the writing of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari as a means for extrapolating what it is capitalism does to man, and what man is under or within capitalism, with extrapolations on both man as desiring-machine and the Civilized Capitalist Machine itself. In the final section I plan to achieve 3 things in a linear fashion, yet assimilated into one another. Firstly a basic overview of Nietzschean man’s overcoming, secondly the process of overcoming for Deleuzoguattarian man, and thirdly the process of overcoming for Nietzschean man subsumed into Deleuzoguattarian capitalism, expanding on the idea that not only is capitalism beneficial for man’s overcoming but due to its inherent qualities it is in fact the greatest vessel for overcoming.

Man, Overman and Recurrence

To begin with Nietzsche’s fate of man, for where else could one begin except with man’s becoming, the fatal amor fati. That proclamation of purpose amidst schematic metaphysics and the passing of value; for Nietzsche the macro-pursuit or task of humanity, of man in its grandest sense is a thorough “going-across and a down-going”. (Nietzsche, 1961: p44), a personal and herd-external recognition of that rope so “fastened between animal and Superman” (Nietzsche, 1961: p43) and so within Nietzsche’s call for a “down-going” is an – often unheard – cry for man to act as Socrates once did and “descend from the plane of his intellectual understanding” (Pappas, 1995: p17-21), man baring all for the future, to accept what comes – as we shall too – and [justify] “men of the future” (Nietzsche, 1961: p44), those Overmen, greater than man, those who’ve overcome humanity. For the task of man is to overcome himself (Nietzsche, 1961: p41). For aid and direction in such a feat one and man must turn to Zarathustra, aloud at the marketplace: “The hour when you say: what good is happiness” (Nietzsche, 1961: p43) he proclaims to the herd “your very meanness…” he concludes. Within 19 short lines Zarathustra brings to the fore the decadence and degeneracy of man, a man subsumed into the herd, of the herd; the stasis of the marketplace dances confidently upon the corpse of God, confident of their apathy. Arrogance and ignorance in a new world deprived of God’s light, searching for pity and sympathy, a world bereft of creation. Confronted with the herd’s apathetic nature Zarathustra in haste defends “What is great in man” (Nietzsche, 1961: p45) a list the likes of the herd and the last man find at once burdensome and heavy. Yet those who are to overcome, those who for Zarathustra “prophesy the coming of the lightning…” (Nietzsche, 1961: p45), those men who under darkened clouds continue planting seeds for trees they shall not see, those men who carry and own their fate. The becoming towards Overman true, a love of creation even when it is destruction; a simultaneous innovation, growth, creation and longing for life, all of life. These men who become are those who wish to “perish by the man of the present.” (Nietzsche, 1961: p45). Men so utterly subsumed into their amor fati that they question a positive roll of the dice; a man who feels indebted to the future and understands it is he who must pave the way against the belly laughs of the herd, this is what it means for Nietzschean man to become.

What of this ‘becoming’ of which man must attend, wherein must man begin? The process prior to those who have overcame, what will and does overcoming look like in actuality? For these questions we turn to the abstraction of the Nietzschean rope of animal, man and Overman. The rope of overcoming as a guide for transcendence. Beginning with the former coupling of animal and man or nature and man, and so one turns to Section V, Dawn, (Nietzsche, 1911: A434 and A464) wherein lies a critique of man’s reaction to nature: “the great things of nature and humanity must intercede.” (Nietzsche, 1911: p274) For there should be no return, for fear of clawing at old animalistic rope, there in fact should be a cultivation, an active improvement of nature wherein the duality of man and nature – expanded upon later – becomes a symmetrical improvement for both sides’ inefficiency: Man as he who improves upon nature’s shortcomings and nature as reminder of origin, of how far man can fall. Within Dawn’s critique and Zarathustra’s proclamations we find man’s perpetual opposition to that which he creates, as Kaufmann comments (Kaufmann, 2013: p248), that much akin to Wilde’s smelt of bronze (Wilde, 1894) man must melt, form and re-melt his bronze ad infinitum, each reforming a Heraclitean improvement of his creation and his being. This albeit ‘practical’ form of becoming is at its heart the private ownership of one’s own amor fati; a “down-going” into fate, however light, however bleak. I shall return to becoming in abstraction later, for now, that which man shall become: the Overman.

If one is to speak of man as a rope: from animal, to man, to Overman, then one may ask what difference lies between man and Overman. The difference presents itself in the way each influences and is influenced, for “Man is a polluted river.” (Nietzsche, 1961: p42) and though he could recast his bronze a new, or bare the future’s weight, both acts, along with his present agency are prey to the external influence of herd-entities: state, religion and society, all of which act as forms of ‘pollution’ for weak, fearful man; those men who are not as of yet themselves. His thoughts, his ideas, his morals, his structures even, are perceived via a gauze of epoch-centric stimuli altering the original and authentic into the lulls and whines of the herd; and thus what is his, is not his. Whereas “the Superman: he is the sea” (Nietzsche, 1961: p42) and thus can receive the pollution of the river, of many rivers, of all rivers without losing his original form, without losing who it is he is. The Overman therefore, is he who can withstand external pressured perspectives en masse whilst retaining authenticity and origin. Indeed if one is to turn to the literal (published) origin of the Overman, to The Gay Science, they shall find him within a reverent triptych “of gods, heroes and overmen.” (Nietzsche, 1974: A143), it is here in origination we find not only is the Overman he who withstands the rabble’s infectious strains of decadence, but it is he who – in the future, once born – will be able to create structures and systems akin to those of gods and heroes. It is of course no mistake that the Overman finds his literary birth in an aphorism focused on the problematic nature of restriction, specifically the restrictions of monotheism in comparison to polytheism; why worship the singular, suffocative ideology of a long since murdered God, when one can overcome restrictive pollutions and help the future bare witness to the birth of the Overman. To lure “him who justifies the man of the future.” (Nietzsche, 1961: p44) forward so, away from all sources of pollution, man, in plural, may glimpse at a future bearable, recurrence bearable…

For why write of a Nietzschean future if one doesn’t address the only future: Eternal Recurrence. For Nietzsche the doctrine of eternal recurrence is the impenetrable metaphysical horizon: “Eternal recurrence – that is to say of the absolute and eternal repetition of all things, in periodical cycles.” (Nietzsche, 1911: p73). The finite number of atomic configurations within the infinity of time recurring over and over, a perpetual reorganization of chaos again and again. A succinct description of the atheistic horror, the atheistic universe. For not only has God been murdered (Nietzsche, 1961: p41) and thus been made mortal by man, but the act of murder shall recur. Recur out of sight and out of cycle (Nietzsche, 1961: p234), and so it becomes an impossible act for any mortal man to comprehend…the recurrence of all his pain and loss, strife and suffering, let alone wish once more than he act out his mortality. Yet this is the ‘heaviest weight’ which the Overman must bare, not to “curse the demon who spoke thus.” (Nietzsche, 1974: A341) but in fact, to embrace his announcement, the great amor fati, to want no difference of fate, nothing ever changing for all of eternity, this fate only the Overman can embrace and it is this virtue that make him thus. Recurrence of such is here prior to any ‘arrival’ or birth or the Overman, and thus we exist in an anti-anthropocentric universe that cares not for our wallowing in chaos, for our lack of atomic organization or baring of tragedy, the justification of the future is in the arrival of he who will bare the horizon of recurrence. For recurrence without the Overman, without he who can accept it…own it, truly, would result in a death of possibility, of potential, a repetition of the finite forever, without hope for value, transcendence or hierarchy. The Overman without recurrence however, would act as a fatalistic tyrant, leaping into the unknown whilst dragging humanity behind him. In their connection the present belongs to no one, it is the end-result of a past configuration and the future is only that which is to be overcome. “For greatness in man is amor fati: the fact that man wishes nothing to be different, either in front of him or behind him, for all eternity.” (Nietzsche, 1911: p45) For the Overman, the wish for non-difference is their a priori connection to recurrence. Yet this relationship is asymmetrical, for it is inconsequential to the universe whether or not chaos is organized; yet to those who benefit from a reorganization it is not. “After the vision of the overman…recurrence now bearable!” (Kaufmann, 2013: p327)

A Deleuzoguattarian Epoch

The horizon for man, specifically contemporary western man, has changed, the epoch altered: that which man creates, destroys and lives from, has itself altered in such a fundamental way that which ‘man’ is has too changed, at least in relation to the ‘man’ of which Nietzsche referred. Man for Nietzsche as he whose potential for overcoming would have directly conflicted with strict ideological value adherence, the Utopian dream and modernity, all of which act in opposition to the epoch of contemporary western man, who pushes to and fro, from and with…capitalism.

Capitalism: A free market economy wherein the means of production – and product – are privately owned by an individual and are operated primarily for profit. A dynamic of recurrent success and the dissolving of failure. Man as controller or controlled, employer or employed; strength and weakness appropriated as economic status and authority. From a Nietzschean perspective it is true that all forms of economy, state and ideology are themselves hindrances of authenticity or pollution for the mind of man, for man’s overcoming. Yet capitalism’s unique machinic nature with relation to man’s unconscious desire allows not only for the possibility of overcoming, but for the ‘acceleration’ of such a process, the nature of capitalism as such is expounded by the philosophy of Deleuze & Guattari.

One, in fact, must turn to Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus for a full understanding of the socio-philosophical consequences of man’s subsumption into capitalism. For that ‘man’, that humanity, first spoke of as he who is to justify the future’s existence has since been altered by the eventuality of capitalism, which mutates man’s nature into that of a desiring-machine (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013: p12), integrated into the societal meshwork of desiring-production (Ibid, p19). Desiring-production: The perpetual loop of production and consumption along with their inherent bind: “Hence everything is production: production of productions, of actions and passions…Everything is production.” (Ibid, p14) within this machinic capitalist process “the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man becomes one within nature in the form of production and industry.” (Ibid, p15) That ‘nature’ which the ‘man’ of Nietzsche is to cultivate and improve, has since, in its duality with man been subsumed into the form of production and industry. The rope of becoming ground from its animalistic beginnings into man by the process of production, both moving forward into a process larger than themselves, of which shall accelerate the motion of man towards Overman. This duality of man and nature, this “Production as process” (Ibid, p15) as that which subsumes all: desire, ideals, identity and categories, and thus is not itself a means to an end (Ibid, p15), nor infinite perpetuation, but is the essential productive reality of man and nature entwined as process for the refinement of both. Man as a “producing/product identity” (Ibid, p18) process amidst a process of momentary cyclical lapses of production, wherein the whole process starts again, a non-means to an end, a “continual birth and rebirth.” (Ibid, p18), a continuous melting and sculpting of Kaufmann’s Nietzschean bronze (Kaufmann, 2013: p248); man reassembles himself again and again from the remnants of his singular past bronze creation into a new original form, a glimpse thereof for a moment, before the product is consumed and melted back into the process of production along with man: a process of the continual lapsed process of micro-productive overcoming. Man as desiring-machine amidst the capitalist landscape, wherein the distinctions of: production, distribution and consumption are immediately flattened onto a single immanent plane (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013: p15), alongside industry, man and nature all acting as a means for the process of production, as such man becomes a process…a process of production. As a furnace produces the heat to smelt, man produces sweat to cool, both acts interlinked under the horizontal process of capitalism as that which emancipates becoming from the suffocative pollution of utopias into the perpetual “decoding of flows.” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013: p257), into a non-linear, fragmented Nietzschean explosion! (Nietzsche, 1990: p108)

What of these men, these desiring-machines whom are of the capitalist socius, what does it do and what does it alter of their agency? These men who, in accordance with Deleuzoguattarian philosophy, becoming desiring-machines. Wherein that latter machinic nature is not metaphoric (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013: p12), but actual, man assimilated as machine into “only a process” (Ibid, p12) driven by an unconscious desire of “fragmentary and fragmented” (Ibid, p12) ‘objects’ and ‘flows’. “Desiring-machines work only when they break down, and by continually breaking down.” (Ibid, p19) and so, as this “identity of production” (Ibid, p19) acting simultaneously alongside the naturally decoding and fragmentary processes of capitalism, with desire as the underlying catalyst for the ‘current’ and ‘break’ of capitalism’s decoded flows, we find man as he who now exists within a continual machinic birth and rebirth, product and production; fragmented man as process removed from archaic independent spheres into a political project of immediacy and divergence.

What of these men within and of capitalist process(Ibid, p257), of The Civilized Capitalist Machine, a construction of semantic parts of which each must be swiftly deconstructed as a means for understanding the horizon of man: ‘The Civilized’ as in the singular capitalist machine which in its unification acts as a vessel for and of decoding and deterritorialization, which via the proclamation of its ‘civilized’ nature has been brought, or brought itself to a correct developmental stage: So via a deconstruction herein we understand that of a singular accepted capitalist machine, the process of which – production, process, man – acts as both its civility and machinations. Internally holding the emancipative process of the decoding of flows and deterritorialization, a process which subsumes man as desiring-machine into as a means for man’s accelerated overcoming.

Towards the emancipative process itself: “That is why capitalism and its break are defined not solely by decoded flows, but by the generalized decoding of flows, the new massive deterritorialization, the conjunction of deterritorialized flows.” (Ibid, p259). The Deleuzoguattarian primacy of capitalism as that which decodes; a removal of structure, a reversal of apparent limitational natures; ‘coding’ as linearities wherein growth has an ‘end’ or a blink (Nietzsche, 1961: p46). And what of the flow that is to be decoded: “What is it that moves over the body of society? It is always flows, and a person is always cutting off a flow. A person is always a point of departure for the production of a flow, a point of destination for the reception of a flow, a flow of any kind; or better yet, an interception of many flows.” (Deleuze, 1971) This Deleuzoguattarian ‘person’ taken as man, humanity, a multitude of persons, is man within capitalist process as desiring-machine, entirely subsumed into decoded and perpetually decoding flows, man fragmented into the process of production (of production) of capitalism itself. These “decoded flows that makes of capital the new social full body.” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013: p261) become capitalism itself, assembly of the capitalist machine as the “production of productions.” – the great creation – with man taking his place in and within and of the machine, no longer a capitalism which “installed itself in the pores of the old socius”(Ibid, p261) but a capitalism entirely deterritorialized into a civilized production machine, with subsumed man as desiring-machine, flattened onto the semantically reductionist plane ‘capitalism’ from which one can begin a trajectory towards an isolation of desire and of overcoming, using capitalism as its natural propellant.

Man’s Transcendence As Capitalist Process

This isolated trajectory towards overcoming…of overcoming, this possibility of transcendence via the utilization of capitalism’s inherent emancipative processes benefits from a return to the Overman/Recurrence duality. Such an Overman is he who is beyond capitalism, beyond the pollution of any -ism or -logy, those so transcendentally emancipated they can lure humanity from the decadent present with their call for ‘man to justify himself’, that which makes great men act, thus: build the future from the future. The inherently problematic yet beneficial nature of capitalist process if that the alterations it has performed on man of course change that which he is to overcome, namely himself, for it is man to be overcome and man has changed. Yet these processes too – as we shall see – allow for an accelerated reassembly of the recurring finite. First: overcoming as Nietzsche’s man, secondly: overcoming as Deleuzoguattarian man, thirdly: utilization of both forms as a means for accelerated overcoming as process.

“Great men…in whom tremendous energy has been accumulated…there has been no explosion for a long time.” (Nietzsche, 1990:p108) What of these ‘explosions’ and why have there been so few? For they are held back by the Nietzschean pollutions: state, religion and epoch. So of the former ‘great men’ we find a symmetrical characteristic with the Overman, both care not for their epoch’s chaos and both ‘become who they are’(Nietzsche, 1974: A270). However, those great men of present, taken henceforth by capitalism’s all consuming process, acting as a vessel for the “overwhelming pressure of the energies.” (Nietzsche, 1990:p109) as such that the unhinged, free market capitalist state allows these men to become that process towards which there is the Nietzschean explosion.

To grasp the Will to Power both as text and as actual will in consideration with the contemporary socio-political organ is to invite an abstractive haste titled under the principle of more! (Kaufmann, 2013: p185), guided into the future, attempting to justify the future via posthumous fragmented jottings, decoded from author into flows alien to their temporal origin seems fitting: To guide us, bluntly towards the perspective of the non-end, the forever-end of man prior to the coming of the Overman: “To invite disease and madness, to promote symptoms of derangement, meant to grow stronger, more superhuman, more terrible and more wise. (Nietzsche, 2017: A48) Invitation, promotion, growth and more, more, more, the perpetual decoding of flows is that which we must invite; acting as a contemporary deification wherein one actively allows and invites the process of capitalism further into his desire. Wherein man attempts an assertion of his place within the authoritative triptych(Nietzsche, 1974: A143), utilizing the naturally creative powers of capitalism as a means for future – God & hero-esque – value creation.

“If we remove the idea of purpose from the process, can we still affirm the process? We could if something were accomplished at every moment of the process.” (Nietzsche, 2017: A55) What purpose does capitalism hold and promote except that of continued deterritorialization and the decoding of flows, each decoding, intersection and multiplicity of flows is at once and “every moment” a creation, a deterritorialized creation without root of purpose, unconscious creation from and of man! A miraculous creation amongst [modernities’] “breaking up of traditions and schools.” (Nietzsche, 2017: A74) This fragmented disintegration via capitalism’s decoding of modernity, of all which could have possibly coded, caged and polluted man, is at once subsumed into the unconscious process of production and forthwith a flow of production, of creation. – “As a matter of fact, great growth is always accompanied by tremendous fragmentation and destruction;” (Nietzsche, 2017: A112) thus from the ashes of decoded schools and relics of tradition arises “the transition to new conditions of existence.” (Nietzsche, 2017: A112). Utilizing capitalism’s inherent unchecked growth and mechanisms of decoding the Nietzschean pot of smelted bronze meets its greatest furnace; for the Overman as transcended is he who creates!

For “Consciousness only extends so far as it is useful.” (Nietzsche, 2017: A505) not only must the process of overcoming accept pollution as a physical limitation, but to overcome, man must accept the nature of consciousness as anchored to the herd, to the state, to those and that which hinder and impede the process of overcoming: For man’s conscious intentionality is always drawn to pollution and decadence prior. To be and to allow and own the unconscious is to begin to overcome. Such a process of overcoming finding itself inherently within the socio-ideological organ of The Civilized Capitalist Machine: “An organ of what controls us.” (Nietzsche, 2017: A524) the organ Nietzsche speaks of in relation to commerce acts symmetrically to that of the desiring-machine, taken into and in control of an organ. It is from said organ that the limitations of consciousness’ usefulness are left behind in favour of desire, wherein man’s overcoming he shall “trace something new to something old.” (Nietzsche, 2017: A552) as flows decode, and parts are deterritorialized, micro-justifications for the future fragment and decode into process, perpetually, a constant ‘tracing’ of new to old. Such a temporal tracing within capitalist process can be allowed to expand and diverge due to its inherent decoding of flows and form of ownership: “great men…” acting as employers, CEOs, entrepreneurs, visionaries and inventors are “shaping and commanding forces – extending the sphere of their power – the demand increasing.” (Nietzsche, 2017: A644) via appropriation of the traditional ‘strong and weak’ onto the asymmetrical replacement of employer and employed, the capitalist and the capitalized or “Being useful for accelerating – and being useful for [stability]” (Nietzsche, 2017: A648). Thus it is from capitalism that great men are born once more and allowed full reign within their sphere of power, utilizing the multitude of weak marketplace energies to construct, build and create a justification for the future, for the men of the future, for “The herd is a means and nothing more!” (Nietzsche, 2017: A766)

Accelerative processes, no: “NB. Processes considered as ‘beings’.” (Nietzsche, 2017: A655) and asymmetrically beings as processes, a recurrent subsuming of one into the other as a means for overcoming themselves; weak and strong, humanity and capitalism. “NB. Hitherto, man has been man of the future so to speak.” (Nietzsche, 2017: A686) that is, what is man but an effort towards not a better future, but a greater future, capitalism allows man his “Subsumption into the larger whole in order to satisfy its will to power.” (Nietzsche, 2017: A774, 2), man into capitalism as to satisfy desire via unconscious decoding and power by application of practical free market economies, both as a means towards overcoming and to benefit the Overman, to pave route to the birthplace of the Overman.

And so in utilization of contemporary capitalism, with man as desiring-machine, the Nietzschean dream has begun: “He must be endowed with the virtues of a machine.” (Nietzsche, 2017: A888) and so he has been endowed, with the virtues of the desiring-machine, who acts in such a way to acquire little pollution, the unconscious machinic process of capitalism, the unchecked, accelerative virtues of desiring-machine are indeed “The strong who are to come – investing not in society, but in the future – That great process, the levelling of European man, is not to be retarded; it should be accelerated.” (Nietzsche, 2017: A898)

And here in the late, maddeningly fragmented jottings of The Will to Power do we find the origin of Deleuzoguattarian acceleration, acting as the form of ‘end’, the continuous birth and rebirth, the only conclusion man can muster to the civilized capitalist machine:

“For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough – Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to “accelerate the process””(Deleuze & Guattari, 2013: p276)

Herein lies the fatal bridge between Nietzsche’s late – decoded – attempts at offering a solution for man’s potential becoming and Deleuzoguattarian capitalism; for man has become and is always becoming a desiring-machine of unconscious desire, such a machine acting as a part of and as the process of capitalism itself, driving his desire ever forward, yet remnants of recurrent stability remain. His attachments are still to the old as a means of pleasing the strong, he must relieve himself of familiarity and accelerate himself, overcome himself as a process towards the future. Deleuze & Guattari’s call to “accelerate the process” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013: p276) is a call of acceptance towards the emancipative powers of capitalism in relation to man’s overcoming of himself. And so this production of process and its reverse, the process of production, both acting as capitalism itself and as man, should not be lapsed or halted, but in fact should be accelerated pushing man ever further towards his limit, towards the future, towards his birth as Overman.

Conclusion

Man as he whom will always – a la Nietzsche – be indebted to his fate and to his future, is as such always burdened with the task of preparing/actualising the existence of the Overman. Against the whines of the herd, man must take up the abstract process of overcoming and cultivate a symmetrical relationship with nature wherein the inefficiency of both is improved, this interceding of both man and nature via a Deleuzoguattarian capitalist framework allows man to utilize the inherent present capitalist process capabilities: decoding of flows, excess fragmentation and the assimilation of independent spheres into a unified process, as a means to accelerate the process of man’s overcoming. Deleuzoguattarian Nietzsche therefor is the interceding of man as desiring-machine with his amor fati, which to the desiring-machine is the unchecked acceleration, fragmentation, decodification and divergence of flows. An amor fati which in conjunction with the emancipative powers of capitalism with regards to product, production and process is accelerated due to its natural inclusion within the Civilized Capitalist Machine. And so: Desiring-machine as humanity within the Civilized Capitalist Machine, are still eternally indebted to the future to their amor fati, as such man must accelerate the inherent capabilities of capitalism as a means towards the emancipation of man, as a means towards overcoming and the creation/birth of the Overman.

Bibliography

Text originally submitted to M.A. course.

Note on Bibliography: Preceding a number: p=page and A=aphorism.

Nietzsche, F (1961) Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. Hollindale, R.J., London, Penguin

Pappas, N (1995) Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Plato and the Republic. Routledge, London.

Nietzsche, F (1911) The Dawn of the Day Trans. McFarland Kennedy, J, The Macmillan Company, New York.

Kaufmann, W (2013) Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. The Princeton University Press, Princeton.

Wilde, O (1894) The Artist [online] Available at: http://www.online-literature.com/wilde/2315/ Accessed: 07/01/2018.

Nietzsche, F (1974) The Gay Science Trans. Kaufmann, W, New York, Random House Inc.

Nietzsche, F (1911) Ecce Homo Trans. Ludovici A, M ,Morrison & Gibb Limited, Edinburgh.

Deleuze, G and Guattari, F (2013) Anti-Oedipus Trans.Hurley, R. Seem, M. Lane, H, R. Bloomsbury Academic, London.

Nietzsche, F (1990) Twilight of the Idols Trans. Hollingdale, R, J, Penguin Books, London.

Deleuze, F (1971) Capitalism [online] Available at: https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/116

Accessed: 07/01/2018

Nietzsche, F (2017) The Will to Power Trans. Hill K, R. Scarpitti, M, A. Penguin Books, UK

K-Addiction

By: mnold

08-10-2017

Philosophy

Mandatory self-interest enforced by a suffocative culture, a culture accelerated & exacerbated by K. Apathetic towards linear systems and stable networks, the chaotic assemblage of sensual content is a fix, an escape from the mundane. Surrounded, interrogated by K at all times. Each sense-organ & orifice ready to receive a gleaming K-splinter. A desk flooded with tit-bits of writing ,scrawling, jottings, gnawed pen nibs, pop cans, junk wrappers, wires, notifications, dopamine hits; for your space is chained into the perpetual K-space. A spine slowly remodelling itself inward, a pure-APT is a means for upper K-intake. Home, hyper-hedonism, unalloyed-pleasure-park is your only existence; the slightest nudge tipped you into this Ballardian heaven; you’re ascending into an eternal link-binge spiral of self-loathing.

K—it was a melting pot of Ks. Josef K from Kafka, K from the german spelling of cybernetics, K from K-waves in Kondratieff theory in economics, Ko from the I Ching, etc etc. K was in the air. –

Kode9 interview. (Hyperlinks mine)

The additionals: (K)etamine, (K)-hole (κ)υβερνητικός , Y2(K), r/(K) Selection theory, (K)-Theory – link yourself in, descend into K.

Take K as cyber if thee be a layman. Take it as a cocktail of K-tags for a truer vision. But let us for a second extrapolate to a base level K:

We’re talking of cyber when we talk of K. Cyber from cybernetics and cyberspace: Systems, networks, structures, communications, control, regulation, chains and feedback all converge at K. The cumulative controlling systems & networks – tech or bio – that are leading you towards an abyss of fatigue and schizo-attention.

“In the past man has been first, in the future the system must be first.” – Frederick Winslow Taylor.

NEUROPLASTICITY

The human mind is plastic beyond infancy, forever a blubbering imitator looking to fit in. Long into adulthood systems mould the plastic-mind, the pathetic cortex, the ambiguous consciousness finding its feet just to please the system-God. The western system is the most vacuous, your cortex a slave once more to the lowest bidder: to repetitive entertainments and micro-content, spewed forever. These new systems are unlike the ‘blank-slate’ linear systems of old. Blank-slate systems are incompatible with K due to their built in possibility for conclusion. For once you could read a physical book, engage your mind, and fin, clear your mind…and breathe. K, however, gives you want you really want, an unfiltered, 24/7 orgy of content causing your mind to overheat and the plastic to melt eternal, allowing for multiple probes to enter; probing in new behaviours. A structure weak enough to yield an external influence without interjection will always be a slave to the immoral, the malicious.

Each sensory input, motor function, association, reward system or awareness thus enters via K. K is the future filter between Being and intentionality. K’s incessant dopamine reward system: every like, every comment, retweet, every accelerated net-process helps mould human plastic into a K-slave. K has already taught us a couple of good tricks: Lower IQ[1] and lower attention span.

UNIVERSITY

All that is truly malicious enters under the guise of progression. Nostalgic feedback to before university allows you a glimpse of an origin. You remember the birth of K. K before K: the net, internet, the web, mobile telephones, the continued push towards uninterrupted connection, the only direction is away from possibility of exit out of the mainframe. So the subtle forms begin to arise, from hedonistic need grew mass entertainment, lifetimes of media, multiple distributors, affordable chains. You no longer went out after university and if you did you took your phone. Eyes fixed onto your cliché Macbook, re-watching a series you’ve seen 4 times already, re-checking the same 3 dopamine reward systems every few minutes.

Distractions to distract you from larger more structured distractions, tabs upon tabs, lists upon lists, the hours pass as your mind enters into schizo-attention mode; eyes flickering between unrelated K-points, as your mind overheats allowing for behavioural change. You’re smart, but not smart enough to out-think the simplicity of K, not intelligent enough to stop your cortex from becoming a mush. You waste hours in the datacombs reaping pointless systematic rewards, telling yourself it’s good to continue your own intellectual demise. You’ve got a headache, backache, you’re tired, cold and hungry, it’s 3am. Sleep.

You’re sat at a meal with ‘friends’, soon to be K-Data, names on file utilized to pump up your rank. One of them jokes about playing the game where all phones are placed onto the table and whoever checks there’s first pays the bill. There’s slight chuckles coming from the members, all awkwardly checking their (K) phones, just in case the implication was serious, it wasn’t of course, the addiction runs too deep. You’re waiting for your food now, you can no longer chat to one another for that behaviour has been dismantled, replaced with a K-centric motor function: the awkwardness rises and so all are huffing great quantities of K.

K, retaining IT, VR and PC culture as its base expands into the future, accelerating its sociopolitical domination. K is phantom pocket vibration syndrome kicked into overdrive, tactile hallucinatory events invading intuition. Sensibilities apathetic nature is at the whim K-space’s incessant stimulation. The public surgery has begun, to wield distraction & high-fructose hedonism as a scalpel. The populous fatten and tire, their necks crook forward, spines de-evolving into ape-shape. Motivation is thrown into the street and discipline is publicly sodomized.

Night-in. Login. The contents accelerative nature is subversive, quasi-transgressive. The rational and the linear are undermined, K takes Gutenberg out back to be shot. Possibility of conclusion becomes illegal. The press mutates. Vowels erode first, being replaced with emojies and post-meme hieroglyphs. Your thought processes fragment entirely, latching onto bits of data for seconds at a time.

ARE YOU ADDICTED?

“(i) excessive use, which may be associated with a loss of sense of time or a neglect of basic drives;

(ii) withdrawal, leading to feelings of anger, tension and/or depression when the computer is in-accessible;

(iii) tolerance, including the need for more advanced computer equipment and software and/or more hours of use;

(iv) negative social repercussions.”

“To be everywhere is to be nowhere.” – Seneca

[1] The Shallows – Nicholas Carr, Chapter 7 Pt II: A Digression On The Buoyancy Of IQ Scores

Aguirre, the Wrath of Gnon

By: mnold

25-08-2017

Neoreaction, Philosophy

Aguirre, Wrath of ~~God~~ Gnon

‘Gnon’, the modification of ‘Nature’s God’ into “the abyss of the unknowing.”[1], an overbearing…overriding fate of acceptance to Reality. That which not only avoids intentionality, but annihilates it prior to any amount of construction; the disinterested super-ego of the il y a. Potentially dragging it into context may do it a disservice, for Gnon shall never be illuminated by the eyes of humanity, nor even cast a shadow upon them. Once more we’ll find ourselves clutching at a nothingness, pining for hope.

Romantic notions of bleak voids aside Gnon has its origin amongst reactionaries, acting as a practical acronym of “the God of Nature Or Nature.”. – these are your only choices, as Land states, Gnon is not Spinozistic [1] – An acronym which amongst reactionaries attends to aligning two camps: the religious and the non-religious, whether it is Nature or a God it is acceptance of an order beyond all doubt. Utilization of such acceptance allows the two camps to lay down looping discrepancies and debates in place of thoughtful mutual work towards the ‘here-and-now’, which itself is undoubtedly controlled by Gnon at base level. But what of Gnon?

One might say to coax the idea of Gnon through the standard ‘film as metaphor’ analysis would be redundant or gratuitous, to align this arrogant behemoth alongside plot would seem down right absurd; one might add that to cinematically encapsulate Gnon one need only watch a hurricane decimate a town, or footage of a hawk gobbling on some young for one to understand their place. Yet when Gnon surrounds desire, power, fame, duty and honour one garners the full effect of its disinterest.

Aguirre, The Wrath of God: 1560 amongst the freshly conquered Inca Empire in the Andes mountains we’re faced with the gruelling march of some Spanish conquistadors, a hundred Indian slaves, a few family and an oh-so human desire to discover the fabled El Dorado. Herzog sends us forth on our journey with this maddening vision of ascent and descent. The mountain effortlessly still as knees lock and armour clangs, sodden, humid exhaustion berates.

“From here it will be easier.”

These words spoken early on of course could be repeated again and again, for the next 2000 years if one wished. The commander, whose name I need not mention, orders a group of men to scout down river, taking with them Don Lope de Aguirre as a stoic military man, the fat nobleman Don Fernando de Guzman and Brother Gaspar de Carvajal; military, royalty and religion cast down river amidst the rainforests dense suffocation. Ultimately none of their honoured affiliations comes to help them, nor allows them any comfort.

Many of the Indian slaves begin to die of colds.

As one of the 4 rafts made to tackle to river gets stuck the insanity and tension of the camp only heightens, a sense that the foreign reigns supreme, that if one was to arrive at El Dorado, it needn’t matter for they wouldn’t be themselves, a journey akin to Colonel Kurtz yet what in Heart of Darkness could said to be an anthropocentric arrogance is replaced tenfold with a pathetic confusion. Acting not as if a flood were a sign or even a subtle hint of the right to return, but that which is to be justly overcome; once again it is supposedly the water in the way of us and not the reverse.

Obstacles only acting as fuel to Aguirre’s infectious rage. As the first raft becomes stuck and its crew are slaughtered in the night, the only action is to allow Gnon, destroy the raft and let the river clutch its victims. With the remaining rafts also consumed the commander thinks it best to return. Leading a mutiny – and encapsulating a loosely packed collage of human emotion – Aguirre continues to push the group further into that which has already fucked them.

The increasing tightening of the micro-community only worsens the heat and emotion. Aguirre’s new found leadership releases his oppressive inner nature, and thus the orders mutate into fear and terror. Shots of heavily clad men coated in dirt, blood, sludge and dust are frequent. Midway in their journey two options are stated: “By water or by land.” or ‘By Gnon or by Gnon’. This is not to confuse Gnon with the Nature-as-environment cliché, only that each option forthwith is under obligation to a higher acceptance, the knowledge of which is beginning to seep under the skin of Aguirre.

The correct answer to “What is Gnon?” should always be followed by “like that, but more red in tooth and claw.” [2]

The final raft holding the remaining few, all starving and lost. Eventually all meeting their death to the arrows of strangers never seen. Aguirre alone remains:

“I, the Wrath of God, will marry my own daughter, and with her I will found the purest dynasty the world has ever seen. Together, we shall rule this entire continent. We shall endure. I am the Wrath of God… who else is with me?”

A typical interpretation would see Aguirre’s loss as related to his desires, filled with passion and lust upon adventure to El Dorado, to become the one who found the myth. Yet there is none so blind as those who will not see. Aguirre need only look backwards mere days, hours even to see he’s lost, abandoned and defeated, it was always that way, he merely wanted to venture a step too far for proof of failure, a wish that maybe, just this one time man will win, in whatever minor way.

Aguirre approaches the inconsequentiality of humanity more sincerely every passing minute, until all the viewer is left with is a single human defeated by its own supposedly ‘unique’ nature, adrift and alone within a hellish terrain. A sweaty speck of humanity caught in the unstoppable fever of Gnon.

[1] http://www.xenosystems.net/the-cult-of-gnon/

[2] Taken from a Reddit comment

Origins of Gnon in Nick B. Steves’ links: https://nickbsteves.wordpress.com/2013/05/29/going-meta-on-meta/

Aguirre, the Wrath of God

Internet as Gutenberg 2.0

By: mnold

25-06-2017

Accelerate, Economics, Neoreaction, Philosophy, politics, Uncategorized

Utilizing the London Bridge terrorist attack (June 3rd, 2017) lead Theresa May to proposition for net regulation, a transparent scapegoat to push a regressive and potentially catastrophic call. The cracks are beginning to widen within archaic organizational forms, largely within democratic hierarchical institutions such as the UK government. Their eyes anxious in the face of political obsolescence, watching with fear as the – in their opinion – intolerable decentralized chimera that is the internet (cyberspace) exponentially grows and mutates within their supposedly air-tight system. Clawing at the last flecks of a systematic reverberation ready to break free. Unable to efficiently mould a tool they once thought would be a footnote in technological history into their antiquated party. Of course those who actually know understood May’s plan for regulation was absurd.

Even to the most amateurishly tech-literate May’s call was ludicrous and short-sighted. With a vast amount if not the majority of businesses, institutions (inclusive of State), educational facilities and personal computers using open source software, alongside a call to ban end-to-end encryption, that which keeps all manner of personal files safe would then be at the whim of any bored hacker. In short her call to make cyberspace cybersafe would in fact act in the opposite direction. The Conservatives currently bearing the 15th century Catholic torch only too awake one morning to find someone has hard-coded a theses into No 10’s door.

Something incomprehensibly large is at stake here, an event of which the only comparison resides with the invention and widespread utilization of the Gutenberg press, or printing press – the wide or wider assimilation and decentralization of the internet, cyberspace and networking (with a strong emphasis currently on the Blockchain) into society and general day-to-day life; pervasive technology at its most viral. This motion or acceleration in its entirety could come to a country-wide not worldwide halt if net-regulation was to pass, transforming the UK into a closed network, a form of network which is incompatible with the future. Net-regulation acting historically as the Pope not banning the printing press per-say, only restricting its usage to a central body. Though by their very nature both the printing press and the internet are destined for decentralization, it is either to destroy them entirely or let them: ‘Do what thou wilt’.

“In the age of information sciences the most valuable asset is knowledge, which is a creation of human imagination and creativity. We were among the last to comprehend this truth and we will be paying for this oversight for many years to come.” – Gorbachev, George Gilder, Economic Education Bulletin, 1991

Fortunately due to the ever-increasing concentration on popularity in politics the chances of UK based net-regulation are now slim (though we do already have the Snooper’s Charter). Ironically the drop in Tory favourability is in large part due to Labour’s understanding and utilization of social media and memery in the recent election.

In short net-regulation would allow the Government – via control of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) – to regulate/control/authorize what it is the population is allowed to see, learn, watch and use. Basically the call for a severing off from the internet into a state-controlled micro-net, away from one of the last truly free ‘spaces’. Away from an internet free of state jurisdiction, kept from an immediate personal freedom the likes of which haven’t been seen since the advent of the printing press.

“It cannot survive without a captive media and educational system, which the Internet will route around. Also, its financial system is a mess and could collapse at any minute. The whole thing will be lucky if it lasts another ten years.” – UR

EFFECTS OF GUTENBERG 1.0

“He who first shortened the labor of copyists by device of movable types was disbanding hired armies, and cashiering most kings and senates, and creating a whole new democratic world: he had invented the art of printing.” – Sartor Resartus, Thomas Carlyle.

The Gutenberg press invented in the 15th century by Johannes Gutenberg is the reason you have widely available books, the reason – to an extent – you know what you know: religious texts, school textbooks, political manifestos all owe their popularity to abundance, a feat only achievable via a printing press…in some ways it’s the reason you’re reading this – the ever growing need for literary mobilization and accessibility. (Of course a lot of what you know has its inherent footing in multiple factors: tradition, family, birthplace etc. yet one can clearly see that without the press widespread literacy and ideas wouldn’t hold anywhere near the kind of depth it currently does.). And in many ways the printing press was the second largest factor in the Protestant Reformation which effected your life in an unparalleled manner.

One must however look at the pre-Gutenberg dilemmas/restrictions to truly understand its impact. A time in which texts were written by hand by copyists and scribes, meaning only a few copies of singular texts were ever produced sky-rocketing their value and thus creating a clear divide between those who could afford to be literate (the elite) and those who could not (the serfs). The serfs thus becoming reliant on a travelling scholar or mere tradition for their education which in itself holds inherent restrictive factors.

The key problem with remaining reliant of a single source as a means for knowledge/education is – of course – that your world-view is entirely bias and somewhat controlled by what the elites entitle you to know. A claustrophobic system of knowledge in which what you ‘know’ is moulded by what you’re allowed to know – one can see clear parallels here with the proposed net-regulation. A distinct system of oppression via reduction of a means to understand one’s cage, or that one is even in a cage. In relation to free speech “It is not just the right of the person who speaks to be heard, it is the right of everyone in the audience to listen and hear” (Hitch). Yet with reference to our literary travelling scholars herein lies an inherent flaw, for if one is only given one person to listen to, or a single collective, or a centralized controlled mass of outlets, then the right to listen is merely an illusion of freedom. (Think the difference between BBC, ITV and C4.). This is exactly where your freedoms lie under net-regulation. One can imagine paying a monthly fee for a ‘News Package’ for the internet, or perhaps a higher monthly fee for the ‘Advanced News Package’ etc. etc., yet at their root each package is to go through a form of vetoing process anyway so what you receive need not matter. To receive only what another wants you to receive.

‘If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.’ – Thomas Pynchon

I digress. Prior to the printing press the production of a text was a laborious process. As such ‘events’ such as book-burnings could truly be held as a means to control the flow of specific information, or the movement of a society of religion. Generally speaking scribes and copyists were of religious affiliation and were already under a form of print-regulation themselves, with what it was they were copying/transcribing undergoing strict authorization from the Catholic church, and as such an echo-chamber is created in which only the smallest of leaps are to be made, more than likely via the most minor of alterations to the text. So to invent the printing press was to increase literacy amongst the general public, an entire system of knowledge no longer restricted by capital gain.

“Scholars have long recognized the essential role of the press in spreading Protestant doctrine. Luther himself, in fact, claimed that the invention of printing was a gift from God to reform His church. But Eisenstein argues that print did more than spread the Protestant Reformation: in an important sense, print caused the Reformation. Without access to the printed editions of biblical texts and church fathers, and the worrisome variants on crucial dogmatic issues they contain, Luther might never have been stimulated to develop his revolutionary new theology. And without accessibility to print, Luther might never have spread his ideas not only in the Latin of the scholarly community but also in the vernacular German of the lay community.” – Robert Kingdon, “Review of The Printing Press as an Agent of Change”, Library Quarterly (1980)

It is a mystery to me how my theses, more so than my other writings,. . . were spread to so many places. They were meant exclusively for our academic circle here. . . . They were written in such a language that the common people could hardly understand them.” – Luther addressing the Pope.

The single most drastic and everlasting effect of the advent of the printing press was its utilization by Protestant Reformers in the creation and dispersion of pamphlets (Theses) which in turn pushed towards the Reformation. Which in itself has far, far wider implications than those immediatly apparent in the 16th century.

“ Protestantism sealed a pact with historical destiny – to all appearances defining a specifically modern global teleology – by consistently winning. Individualization of conscience – atomization – was made fate.

When considered as rigid designations, Atomization, Protestantism, Capitalism, and Modernity name exactly the same thing.

Protestantism is a self-propelling machine for incomprehensibly prolonged social disintegration, and everyone knows it.” – Nick Land, The Atomization Trap

I’ve used Land’s piece quite crassly here I have to admit, but to understate the effect of the Reformation and in turn Protestantism on contemporary society would be a grave error. As Land states: “When considered as rigid designations, Atomization, Protestantism, Capitalism, and Modernity name exactly the same thing.” so the advent of the printing press has a lot to answer for, but quite bluntly the Gutenberg Press is the catalyst for modern Democracy as we know it. The vessel which unknowingly sailed swiftly away from any & all forms of socio-political hierarchy and centralization, hierarchal structures which the certain parties often find themselves stuck within. Yet the effects of the press were not seen until 100s of years after its implementation and as such one feels as if we’re still in the wake of Gutenberg’s mutation. There exist here – in terms of the press acting as catalyst – few parallels with the internet, at least those specifically related to inherent technology. For the internet is tech-in-itself, as opposed to the press which is reliant on that which it produces and isn’t inclusive of built-in networking capabilities. The press can only become a ‘faster-horse’, it cannot transform or innovate into an engine.

INTERNET AS GUTENBERG 2.0

In 2016, 85 % of European households had access to the internet from home, as for the world see here. To ignore the prevalence of the internet is to ignore that which will be at the forefront – or more than likely will be the forefront – of the next ‘era’ of human history – in whatever multiple changing forms it holds throughout. It has assimilated into every business, official body, Government program and economic counterpart, alongside its central role in popular society (social media, smartphones, smart-TVs, etc.) It is an accelerative force within itself, growing and evolving each day, at an uncontrollable rate. Therein lies a problem for retrograde forms of government, those who want the state to remain separate from the internet. For a state to say they want to remain separate, or create a separate centralized, nation-based internet is for that state to admit that they do not understand the internet, either you have none, or you have all (and free). One could argue here that North Korea have managed to control their internet output in relation to their public, I would reply by arguing that they’re finding it difficult to control their electricity and as such I can’t imagine the percentage of North Koreans on the internet is vast.

As we’ve seen from history, the single revolutionary theses isn’t the problem (one can burn a single theses in minutes), it is the Internet’s networking (we’ll get onto networks later) ability to spread a single piece of ‘dangerous’ information quickly and efficiently, and once it’s ‘out-there’ it is near uncontrollable. The State’s attempts beyond net-publication become fruitless, for to capture, segregate or ‘ban’ the publisher is only to acknowledge that there’s something ‘out-there’ they don’t like, which urges one all the more to read it.

ACCESSIBILITY AND COST

The statistics I’ve previously linked show the rate at which in the internet is growing/expanding…is accelerating. With access to the internet becoming close to a human right (see Web Junkies for the adverse effects of this). It’s in our homes, our libraries, our schools, our jobs, our pockets etc. there is no getting away from it. In fact those who are ‘away’ from the internet nowadays often do so in a moment of Walden or McCandless-esque romanticism, as if to be away from the net is in itself some feat, like climbing Everest, or running a marathon or…deleting Facebook. Not only this but in terms of affordability there is little competition when it comes to a course of pure knowledge/entertainment, one can buy a used PC for under £100 and subscribe to a monthly line rental for less than £10 per month. One could in fact go as far as to buy a Raspberry Pi, connecting them to the net for under £100. All of this is ignoring Smartphones of course, which are slowly becoming the vast majority’s primary means of networking and communication, allowing for the ability of instantaneous updates whilst mobile. This accessibility allows for the general population – those who’ve become largely disillusioned with their Government – to be at the forefront of not a revolution but a transition:

“Revolutions are relative; if you get mugged by change, it is a revolution. If you were prepared for, or ably adapted to, the change, you may be able to call it a transition.” – Is it a transition or a revolution? – Carl H Builder.

It is of course very unlikely that just by the vast amount of accessibility, smartphones etc. that the population are adapted for a full transition. There is always the possibility of a dark-transition, in which access becomes control, those locked into a pre-monitored social system – especially one under the already passed Snooper’s Charter – are submitting prior to any technological-Reformation, they are complicit with changes either way, whether that be the emancipation of the left, or the authoritative AI control of the right.

SHORT CRYPTO HISTORY & THE BLOCKCHAIN

Before beginning any extensive extrapolation into what networks are I feel the need to ‘briefly’ explain cryptocurrency and the Blockchain, as it will be of the utmost importance in the network section, those of you already familiar with the technology feel free to skip to ‘NETWORK’, seriously, it’s dry.

In late 2008 Satoshi Nakamoto, the unknown inventor of the now very well known currency Bitcoin, announced he had developed a “Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”, the idea of ‘digital cash’ had been around for a while, but up until Nakamoto’s development, no on had been able to create such a thing, at least not a system which avoided the ‘double-spend problem; (I’ll get to that) The most important aspect of Nakamoto’s invention however is not it being ‘cash’ but the fact it is decentralized.

Centralized systems usually have something along the lines of a central server, team, ‘bank’ or middle man to take account of all transactions, accounts and transfers etc. which in turn prevents double-spending (A given set of coins is spent in more than one transaction). This server could then be referred to if disagreements amongst users or within payments came up, the task was to create a system in which this central entity – in this case a server – wasn’t/isn’t needed. If one is to take this idea further however they realise the drastic real-world implementation, a state, economy or world without banks or state affiliated third parties, an economy in which each Blockchain is entirely its own.

So how does this work? Well money, generally, is basically a system of verification: Data-entries, numbers on a screen, proof of transaction, digits within an account etc. So, how do the databases of a cryptocurrency work?

There is a network of peers (Peer-to-peer), every peer on that network has the entire history of every single transaction on that network, and as such, the balance of every account.

Transactions

Meta gives X Bitcoin to Tim; transaction is signed by Meta’s private key; the transaction is broadcast network-wide; the transaction becomes confirmed. This confirmation is key, confirmation means the transaction is set-in-stone and becomes an irremovable part of the Blockchain (which I’ll get to). Miners confirm these transactions: Miners make it clear these transactions are legit, send them throughout the network, and help make them part of the Blockchain: for doing this ‘job’, the miners get rewarded with the currency in question.

Miners

Since the network is decentralized anyone can be a miner, there is no central authority to delegate jobs/tasks. Miners use their computers, or computer’s power to find a ‘hash’ which connects the newly mined block with its predecessor. The miner’s computers are in a certain way working out a puzzle, the difficulty of this puzzle increases with time and as such limits the amount of currency that can be created in a given amount of time. Once the puzzle is figured out the miner adds the block-mined to the blockchain and is rewarded.

BLOCKCHAIN

Put simply: A shared collective history of all transactions on a digital network, a copy of said history is stored on each and every user’s computer (a node), the blockchain itself and all transactions are public and can be viewed by anyone.

Cryptocurrencies are cryptographically stored. They are not secured by humans, or matter, but by maths, which does-not break. I’ll add these descriptions of the Blockchain are very dry, as for their importance and potential for ‘transition’, that will be made apparent in the ‘network’ section.

To use conventional banking as an analogy, the blockchain is like a full history of banking transactions. Bitcoin transactions are entered chronologically in a blockchain just the way bank transactions are. Blocks, meanwhile, are like individual bank statements. Based on the Bitcoin protocol, the blockchain database is shared by all nodes participating in a system. The full copy of the blockchain has records of every Bitcoin transaction ever executed. It can thus provide insight about facts like how much value belonged a particular address at any point in the past. The ever-growing size of the blockchain is considered by some to be a problem due to issues like storage and synchronization. On an average, every 10 minutes, a new block is appended to the block chain through mining. – Investopedia

By design, the blockchain is a decentralized technology. Anything that happens on it is a function of the network as a whole. Some important implications stem from this. By creating a new way to verify transactions aspects of traditional commerce could become unnecessary. Stock market trades become almost simultaneous on the blockchain, for instance — or it could make types of record keeping, like a land registry, fully public. And decentralization is already a reality. A global network of computers uses blockchain technology to jointly manage the database that records Bitcoin transactions. That is, Bitcoin is managed by its network, and not any one central authority. Decentralization means the network operates on a user-to-user (or peer-to-peer) basis. The forms of mass collaboration this makes possible are just beginning to be investigated. – Blockgeeks

Note the decentralized structure below.

NETWORKS

Let’s first take a look at the four basic forms of organizational structure:

“1. The kinship-based tribe, as denoted by the structure of extended families, clans, and

other lineage systems;

2. The hierarchical institution, as exemplified by the army, the (Catholic) church, and

ultimately the bureaucratic state;

3. The competitive-exchange market, as symbolized by merchants and traders

responding to forces of supply and demand;

4. And the collaborative network, as found today in the web-like ties among some

NGOs devoted to social advocacy.” – [link]

[link]

The four basic organizational structures T, I, M, N: “To do well in the twenty-first century, an information-age society must embrace all four forms.”

With a tribe acting as tribal or clan type structure: kinship, blood.

Institutions: classical management structures with leaders and hierarchies.

Market: Acting in this case not as capitalism but as pure ‘exchange’

Network: All-channel network where all member are connected and can communicate with each other.

“For democracy to occur, the framework requires not only the addition of the forms but also a feedback of the latest form, in this instance the market, into the realm of the earlier form, e.g., the state.”

Below the embedded tweet I’ve transcribed Naval Ravikant’s entire thread of the importance and innovation possibility of Blockchain’s with relation to markets and organizational structures in the coming future, it may seem a bit gratuitous to transcribe it in full, however, there was nothing I felt needed cutting.

1/ Blockchains will replace networks with markets.

— Naval Ravikant (@naval) June 21, 2017

“Blockchains will replace networks with markets. Humans are the networked species. The first species to network across genetic boundaries and thus seize the world. Networks allow us to cooperate when we would otherwise go it alone. And networks allocate the fruits of our cooperation. Overlapping networks create and organize our society. Physical, digital, and mental roads connecting us all. Money is a network. Religion is a network. A corporation is a network. Roads are a network. Electricity is a network…Networks must be organized according to rules. They require Rulers to enforce these rules. Against cheaters. Networks have “network effects.” Adding a new participant increases the value of the network for all existing participants. Network effects thus create a winner-take-all dynamic. The leading network tends towards becoming the only network. And the Rulers of these networks become the most powerful people in society. Some are run by kings and priests who choose what is money and law, sacred and profane. Rule is closed to outsiders and based on power. Many are run by corporations. The social network. The search network. The phone or cable network. Closed but initially meritocratic. Some are run by elites. The university network. The medical network. The banking network. Somewhat open and somewhat meritocratic. A few are run by the mob. Democracy. The Internet. The commons. Open, but not meritocratic. And very inefficient. Dictatorships are more efficient in war than democracies. The Internet and physical commons are overloaded with abuse and spam. The 20th century created a new kind of network – market networks. Open AND meritocratic. Merit in markets is determined by a commitment of resources. The resource is money, a form of frozen and trade-able time. The market networks are titans. The credit markets. The stock markets. The commodities markets. The money markets. They break nations. Market networks work where there is a commitment of money. Otherwise they are just mob networks. The applications are limited. Until now. Blockchains are a new invention that allows meritorious participants in an open network to govern without a ruler and without money. They are merit-based, tamper-proof, open, voting systems. The meritorious are those who work to advance the network. As society gives you money for giving society what it wants, blockchains give you coins for giving the network what it wants. It’s important to note that blockchains pay in their own coin, not the common (dollar) money of financial markets. Blockchains pay in coin, but the coin just tracks the work done. And different blockchains demand different work. Bitcoin pays for securing the ledger. Ethereum pays for (executing and verifying) computation. Blockchains combine the openness of democracy and the Internet with the merit of markets. To a blockchain, merit can mean security, computation, prediction, attention, bandwidth, power, storage, distribution, content… Blockchains port the market model into places where it couldn’t go before. Blockchains’ open and merit based markets can replace networks previously run by kings, corporations, aristocracies, and mobs. It’s nonsensical to have a blockchain without a coin just like it’s nonsensical to have a market without money. It’s nonsensical to have a blockchain controlled by a sovereign, a corporation, an elite, or a mob. Blockchains give us new ways to govern networks. For banking. For voting. For search. For social media. For phone and energy grids. Networks governed without kings, priests, elites, corporations and mobs. Networks governed by anyone with merit to the network. Blockchain-based market networks will replace existing networks. Slowly, then suddenly. In one thing, then in many things. Ultimately, the nation-state is just a network (of networks). FIN/ Thank you, Satoshi Nakomoto. And to all the shoulders that Satoshi stands upon.” – (originally split into multiple tweets), Naval Ravikant.

What begins now is my reading of Ravikant’s thread. To replace networks with markets is to begin the transition, to understand that with Blockchains as pure-replacements there begins a deconstruction of hierarchy, a complete removal of third party entities involved with business and transaction. Though it begins a deconstruction of hierarchy in the traditional sense it also allows for micro-states in which a single Blockchain is taken as the network. This is reminscent, but entirely opposite to Mencius Moldbug’s Patchwork:

“as the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions. If residents don’t like their government, they can and should move. The design is all “exit,” no “voice…A Patchwork realm is a business – a corporation. Its capital is the patch it is sovereign over.” – Patchwork1

DISCLAIMER w/regards to Patchwork: I understand, as many did not, Moldbug’s original Patchwork within the 4 parts rested completely on government control, there was ZERO room for individual constraint, so before someone comments saying I’ve bastardized Patchwork, yes, I have, but in full knowledge of what the original meant.

Blockwork (short/crass):

So, really, as the crappy regressive governments who failed – as Gorbachev stated – to understand that knowledge and data are the single most valuable currency begin to crumble, they will indeed be replaced/naturally split up (via a reversion to archaic organizational structures) by mini-states, micro-nations etc., yet each one of these would have it’s own Blockchain, it is not beyond the limits of technology (as we can clearly see) to alter rules, rights, permissions etc. therefore each countries network/market = Blockchain is their basis for government.

“First, security is a monotonic desideratum. There is no such thing as “too secure.” An encryption algorithm cannot be too strong, a fence cannot be too high, a bullet cannot be too lethal…No cop ever stole my bicycle. And this will be far more true in the Patchwork, in which realms actually compete for business on the basis of customer service.” – Patchwork1

More than likely beginning from the classic decentralized platform in which those who reside in said micro-nation are able to view each vote as it is counted – if that’s their chosen system -, they can view government expenditure, tax expenses, etc. Of course, one could just as easily ‘exit’ to a Zuckerberg fairy-tale UBI land wherein they’re controlled by a dictator-corp, or a fully communist Blockchain wherein equal payments are paid out regularly etc. etc. you get the picture. However, with this concept of micro-nations as underlying Blockchains comes the bringing of the past into the future, for the previous organization structure layout of T,I,M,N, becomes overwhelmed, one could if there was enough people who wanted it, begin a tribal state, or a hierarchal state with a trickle-down Blockchain, or a divine-right system wherein tokens are gifted to those with certain DNA strains…the world is your decentralized oyster after all.

One could (quite easily) argue that with the inclusion of various forms of organizational states security would become but an illusion, yet, in-keeping with the original Patchwork (I’m ready for hell on this one.) the emphasis on security as customer service alongside “exit” over voice allows for those who aren’t receiving the service they feel they deserve to leave, as a meritocracy one can in all transparency view those who have and more importantly have not worked towards the profitability (if that’s the states’ aim) of the Blockchain, one can by all rights move (exit) to a state in which their Blockchain is working, or distributed agreeably to their tastes whether that is an agenda based around: Commerce, tech-innovation, acceleration, monarchy, entertainment, energy etc. if they feel that their current states’ Blockchain isn’t distributing its resources effectively…they can leave, if its system of accumulation doesn’t meet their standards….they can leave. It allows those who feel a compulsion for ‘return’ to do so, and those who feel compelled to accelerate to do so, allowing T, I, M, N to all exist freely, together, or not at all atop a horizontal decentralized -at first – Blockchain.

I digressed…hard. The conclusion(?) will be somewhat of a ramble, I’m not sure I can piece this mess together. Though, in terms of the Gutenberg press, which is where started remember? The internet is its 2nd iteration, not physically of course, merely in terms of its accumlative effects, many of which – I hope – I’ve listed here. It’s world-wide pervasive assimilation can’t come fast enough, for it shall throw us far beyond where we ever thought we’d end up, much like in the 16th century. Those who attempt at net-regulation/control will be severing the artery of the future, with the potential for a full scale national fatality if they don’t heal the wound. Those adhering to hierarchal restrictions are free to do so – once it all comes down – yet it’s more applicable they do so within a micro-state. If you disagree with a top down hierarchal structure – the structures that work by the way- then you are free to exit, head off to grey-shirt Soylent-ville, you are free to do this. You’ll feel cheated when you’re stood in a (soylent) bread line, and the other’s stand out like a Jackson Pollock abstract hanging in Plato’s Academy.

Nick Land, CCRU, Accelerationism and Neoreaction – An Overview & Guide

By: mnold

01-06-2017

Accelerate, Neoreaction, Philosophy, politics, rhetttwitter

INTRODUCTION:

Firstly, why the hell am I writing ‘this’? There have been countless attempts in recent months at articles towards something like a ‘Who is Nick Land?’, ‘What is Accelerationism?’ or ‘What is Neoreaction?’ or short essays attempting at a general encapsulation of a man whose work, as far as I can see, exists purposely in a Pynchonian cyber-scattering. When one comes across a fresh piece of Landian theory, they become a momentary data-archaeologist, raking through the datacombs in the hope of finding a measly piece to this chaotic assemblage. So, why? Because scatterings aggravate me, especially when it comes to monetized repetition, articles repeating vague biographical ‘facts’ and tit-bits without any real relation to the theory and critiques Land has made; simple frustratingly transparent semi-hagiographic pieces largely in relation to the mythos of Land’s time at Warwick. So I felt, in a way, that there should be at least some attempt at a ‘piece’ which not only discussed Land himself – only when needs be – but also extrapolated as to why there is such a following. A place in which 3 key ‘theory’ components which are in way ‘linked’ can be found together. I must stress, this is not my attempt to lump any 1 of these things with another, no, only that when one comes across Land’s work they hear of Accelerationism, and following that Neoreaction, and not always in that order, think of this as a kind of beginner’s guide, or overview of 3 very eclectic and scattered ideas.

I already understand that this piece, article, essay, word-mash, is going to come across as a complete gushing for my admiration of Land’s work, which in itself will utilize many of the stylistic choices and theoretical devices employed by Land himself, hopefully by the end of this piece, the reader, in part, will understand why the work of Land (& the CCRU) is so infectious – whether maliciously viral or not – and why it finds its way seeping into the smallest of academic and creative pursuits and quandaries. Take this piece as assemblage of Land, CCRU and all that gravitates towards, a place on the internet where you can (hopefully) find all you need to guide you down each dirty ‘n clean alleyway à la Land.

And with regards to the Dark Enlightenment/Neoreaction section, if by now it’s clear, simply talking or writing about something does not mean an affiliation or support for that ‘thing’, however toxic people may find it.

Discussion ≠ Support.

Enjoy, or don’t.

BIOGRAPHICAL HISTORY:

“Academics’ lives are seldom interesting…What do you know about me, given that I believe in secrecy? … If I stick where I am, if I don’t travel around, like anyone else I make my inner journeys that I can only measure by my emotions, and express very obliquely and circuitously in what I write. … Arguments from one’s own privileged experience are bad and reactionary arguments.” – Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, pp. 11–12

Henrik Palmgren: “Introduce yourself to the audience a bit…”

Land: “Umm…well I mean…it’s hazy to me, so I think it will be hazy to other people.

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

And so: (all links are NON-referral)

Nick Land is an English philosopher and writer – Wikipedia.

1987-1998: Land lectures in Continental philosophy at Warwick university.

1992: The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism is published.

1995: Land becomes co-founder (along with Sadie Plant) of the Cybernetic Culture Research Institute (CCRU), a student-run collective unofficially ‘part’ of Warwick’s philosophy department.

1997: Plant leaves Warwick, as such Land becomes ‘leader’ of the CCRU.

1990’s: Land produces/publishes various short articles for & alongside the CCRU.

Unknown Year: Land collaborates on a text called Necrophysics with physicist Rhett Allain.

Unknown Year: Land moves to Shanghai

Unknown Year: Land becomes editor of Urbanatomy and teaches at the New Centre for Research & Practice.

Unknown Year: Land begins writing psychological horror.

2011: Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 is published.

2014: Templexity: Disordered Loops through Shanghai Time is published.

2014: Phyl-Undhu is published.

2015: Chasm is published.

Land’s two current blogs are: Urban Future 2.1 and Outside In, alongside his twitter: @Outsideness

Also a link to his old blog posts: Old Nick Stuff, Hyperstition and CCRU

And I’ll leave this here as a sort of footnote, for those who can be bothered with the ‘cool’ biog-elements.

EARLY-LANDIAN PHILOSOPHY:

I shall try give a brief overview of elements of Landian philosophy, however, to succinctly explain ‘it’ in its entirety within say, 10,000 words would be difficult. Also, when talking about Land’s older word (pre-Shanghai) it’s important to keep this quote from the man himself in mind:

It’s another life; I have nothing to say about it – I don’t even remember writing half of those things … – An Experiment in Inhumanism, Robin Mackay

The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism is Land’s only full length academic book, and more than likely be will be his last, due to his distain with Western academia, whether or not there will be more theory-fiction, who knows?

The book itself is unlike any other ‘commentary on another’s work’ I’ve read, it’s far more lucid, much like a set of meditations on Kant, Bataille, Nietzsche, Marx and Schopenhauer, as opposed to a rigorous in-depth ‘critical’ analysis of Bataille’s work.

Being Sufficiently does a great job overviewing the work.

“Ever since it became theoretically evident that our precious personal identities were just brand-tags for trading crumbs of labour-power on the libidino-economic junk circuit, the vestiges of authorial theatricality wear thinner” – Land, Thirst, Preface XIII

“There is one simple criterion of taste in philosophy: that one avoid the vulgarity of anthropomorphism. It is by failing here that one comes to side with cages. The specifics follow straightforwardly:

“1. Thoroughgoing dehumanization of nature, involving the uttermost impersonalism in the explanation of natural forces, and vigorously atheological cosmology. No residue of prayer. An instinctive fastidiousness in respect to all the traces of human personality, and the treatment of such as the excrement of matter; as its most ignoble part, its gutter…

2. Ruthless fatalism. No space for decisions, responsibilities, actions, intentions. Any appeal to notions of human freedom discredits a philosopher beyond amelioration.

3. Hence absence of all moralizing, even the crispest, most Aristotelian. The penchant for correction, let alone vengefulness, pins one in the shallows.

4. Contempt for common evaluations; one should even take care to avoid straying accidentally into the right. Even to be an enemy is too comforting; one must be an alien, a beast. Nothing is more absurd than a philosopher seeking to be liked.” – Land, Thirst, Preface XX

Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 begins with Land’s more formal essays on Kant, Heidegger and Nietzsche, the kind of essay you would find from an extremely gifted and philosophically energetic and original thinker, this aside, these essays are, in terms of Landianism, components of an academic system and as such are a falling back into the security of the institution. From here there is a set of 4 essays (Spirit and Teeth through to Making it with Death), each of which are still within academic jurisdiction, yet one feels they are beginning to push away from the ‘accepted’.

From here on out in Fanged Noumena we are reading the Land we’ve heard about, the central section of the text I would personally say is the most theoretically important in terms of Landianism, spanning from Circuitries through to the famous Meltdown, we feel Land is working with the philosophical intensity of a madman, a worry begins to build during reading, as one realises what it must have been like to have this kind of scheme flowing 24/7, a hypnotic whirlwind of anti-humanism, cybernetic-theory, Gibson-esque language, post-structuralism, nihilism, and a general sense that at any second something has to give. Which, in a way, during the last sections of the text it does.

“Level 1, or world-space, is an anthropomorphically scaled, predominantly vision-configured, massively multi-slotted reality system that is obsolescing very rapidly. Garbage time is running out.

Can what is playing you make it to Level 2?” – Fanged Noumena (Blurb)

From A zIIgothIc–==X=coDA==–(CookIng–lobsteRs– wIth–jAke–AnD–DInos) through to Tic-talk something has given way in the author, they’ve entered into and are writing from a plane of existence which is very difficult for the reader to attend, there’s a level of separation which in itself addresses in some ways why the ‘Human Security System’ the Land of the 90’s sought to leave/destroy is actually beneficial at times.

“Whenever its name has been anything but a jest, philosophy has been haunted by a subterranean question: What if knowledge were a means to deepen unknowing?”

CCRU

As I’ve stated in the BIO section, CCRU stands for Cybernetic Culture Research Institute, a collective, that:

‘does not, has not, and will never exist‘.”

A collective whose interests spanned a broad range: Continental philosophy, post-structuralism, cybernetics, science-fiction, rave culture, jungle music, occultism, cyber-philosophy & culture, AI, accelerationism, time-theory, theory-fiction, Lemurian-studies, cryptography, Marxism, capitalism, Afro-futurism, Indo-futurism, Sino-futurism, & more.

Here’s a the CCRU Glossary – You’ll need it.

I have to admit at this juncture – and this will most likely be the case for much of this piece – that the CCRU is difficult to ‘sum-up’, and near impossible to begin describing without using source material from the Unit itself:

“Ccru retrochronically triggers itself from October 1995, using a UK University as a temporary habitat. Its emergence is sequenced and accelerated by a series of singularities” – CCRU, Communique One,

“Many members of the Ccru had fled cultural studies, disgusted by its authoritarian prejudices, its love of ideology, and pompous desire to ‘represent the other’ or speak on behalf of the oppressed. To us, it never seemed that the real articulacy of the left academic elites was in any way superior to the modes of popular cultural expression which were either ignored or treated as raw material to be probed for a ‘true’ (ie ideological) meaning by white middle-class intellectuals.

These events sought to reinforce and energize the interrelations between elements of theoretical research and popular culture.

Ccru is an ongoing experiment in collectivity, collective production, anonymity, and masks, dedicated to practically dismantling standard models of social existence, by pursuing ethics in the spinozistic sense (experimental production of collective bodies).“- CCRU, Communique Two,

“Still nominally affiliated to the famously post-structuralist Philosophy Department of Warwick University, England, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit is a rogue unit. It’s the academic equivalent of Kurtz: the general in Apocalypse Now who used unorthodox methods to achieve superior results compared with the tradition-bound US military. Blurring the borders between traditional scholarship, cyberpunk sci-fi and music journalism, the CRRU are striving to achieve a kind of nomadic thought that to use the Deleuze & Guattari term—“deterritorializes” itself every which way: theory melded with fiction, philosophy cross-contaminated by natural sciences (neurology, bacteriology, thermodynamics, metallurgy, chaos and complexity theory, connectionism), academic writing that aspires to the future-shock intensity of jungle and other forms of post-rave music.” – Renegade Academia, Simon Reynolds. (As a matter of fact the Renegade Academia article is probably the most succinct when it comes to describing CCRU.)

“Their unattributable, arcane writings, telling of strange inhuman entities, hyperstitional personages and syncretic pantheons, are uniquely disturbing and compelling: it is as if the group had collectively accessed hitherto undiscovered realms of bizarre archetypes. They successfully smeared the line between the real and what they called the ‘hyperstitional’: fictions that make themselves real through collective practice.” – An Experiment in Inhumanism, Robin Mackay

So, what the fuck is or…was the CCRU? I guess in ‘layman’s’ terms it was a collective that wanted to push the boundaries of philosophy and theory, a collective who felt suffocated and constrained by the over-bearing heavily – being an understatement – left-wing leaning academic system. A group who sought to utilize methods, devices, texts and ‘thinkers, whom/which otherwise would be deemed weird, non-professional, unquantifiable, ‘esoteric’ and not fit for proper academic theorizing/essay production.

(Links to most relevant page – directly to their work)

The list below is but a few of the members of CCRU, the selection is of those who are more prolific, or perhaps simply standing a little more in the spotlight, that said, a trip down any one of these hyperlink-holes will shed some (dark) light on the ‘point’ of CCRU.

This mythological somewhat cult-like group is inclusive of and affiliated with:

Jake and Dinos Chapman

0[rphan]d[rift>]

“He regarded the degeneration of his ‘breakthrough’ into a ‘breakdown’ as ultimate and humiliating proof of the incapacity of the human to escape the ‘headcase,’ the prison of the personal self. Wretchedly, for Land, it was no longer possible to tell whether his speculative epiphanies had been (as he had believed at the height of his delirium) glimmers of access to the transcendental – or just the pathetic derangements of a psyche pushed to the derisory limits of its tolerance. The experiment was over.

When I contacted Land about the republication of his works, he did not protest, but had nothing to add: It’s another life; I have nothing to say about it – I don’t even remember writing half of those things … I don’t want to get into retrospectively condemning my ancient work – I think it’s best to gently back off. It belongs in the clawed embrace of the undead amphetamine god.”

– An Experiment in Inhumanism, Robin Mackay

One commented (on Twitter) has made it clear that leaving out Gnon was a grave error, I feel this is the most applicable place to put ‘Gnon’, it especially needs to be put prior to NRx.

Land’s own short write up of what Gnon is can be found here: http://www.xenosystems.net/the-cult-of-gnon/

Extracts from the piece:

“If The Arbiter of the Universe merits abbreviation (“TAofU”), Nature or Nature’s God has a much greater case. A propeller escapes awkwardness, and singularity compacts its invocation. NoNG, Nong, No — surely, no. These terms tilt into NoNGod and precipitate a decision. The ‘God of Nature or (perhaps simply) Nature’ is Gnon, whose Name is the abyss of unknowing (epoche), necessarily tolerated in the acceptance of Reality.”

“Gnon is no less than reality, whatever else is believed. Whatever is suspended now, without delay, is Gnon. Whatever cannot be decided yet, even as reality happens, is Gnon. If there is a God, Gnon nicknames him. If not, Gnon designates whatever the ‘not’ is. Gnon is the Vast Abrupt, and the crossing. Gnon is the Great Propeller.”

ACCELERATIONISM

Both the left and right accelerationist thought can be tracked back to the work of Marx, Nietzsche, Land and the CCRU. That’s as much of history of accelerationism really needs, it wouldn’t be in-keeping to drudge up the past every 5 minutes now, would it? (But that’s the way things are…now.)

So, what is accelerationism, that elusive political and social ‘theory’ which has been picked up by the likes of The Guardian and the New Statesmen, yet still comes across as a little vague.

To put accelerationism into a sentence:

“‘accelerationism’ is the idea that the only way out is through”. – Steven Shapiro.

Capitalism isn’t exactly working and there’s no going back, so what can we do?

“Accelerate the process” – Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p260.

“if capitalism generates its own forces of dissolution then the necessity is to radicalise capitalism itself: the worse the better. We can call these positions accelerationist.” – accelerationism, Benjamin Noys

and Noys 3 examples of accelerationism:

Behaviourism is a psychology which begins with the needs of commodity production in order to develop methods with which to influence buyers, i.e., it is an active psychology, progressive and revolutionizing kathode (Kathoxen). In keeping with its capitalist function, it has its limits (the reflexes are biological; only in a few Chaplin films are they already social). Here, too, the path leads only over the dead body of capitalism, but here, too, this is a good path. – Brecht

There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present-day society: to retreat ahead of it.
– Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes (1973)

One must push through to the other side rather than drag one’s heels.
– The Exploit: A Theory of Networks, Galloway & Thacker (2007)

“Accelerationists argue that technology, particularly computer technology, and capitalism, particularly the most aggressive, global variety, should be massively sped up and intensified – either because this is the best way forward for humanity, or because there is no alternative. Accelerationists favour automation. They favour the further merging of the digital and the human. They often favour the deregulation of business, and drastically scaled-back government. They believe that people should stop deluding themselves that economic and technological progress can be controlled. They often believe that social and political upheaval has a value in itself.

Accelerationism, therefore, goes against conservatism, traditional socialism, social democracy, environmentalism, protectionism, populism, nationalism, localism and all the other ideologies that have sought to moderate or reverse the already hugely disruptive, seemingly runaway pace of change in the modern world.” – Accelerationism, Andy Beckett

“For Landian Accelerationism, capitalism is a machinic, ‘techonomic’ (technological-economic) explosion, whose self-reinforcing, self-excitatory mechanism is best modelled as a runaway cybernetic feedback loop (it should be said that if you’re a cyberneticist, everything is best modelled as a feedback loop). This just means that the immanent dynamics of capital push necessarily towards the ever-greater expansion of capital – Marx’s M-C-M’ circuit is cybernetic runaway par excellence – and immanent within that expansion is a necessary co-dependence of technological and economic advance, including ever-increasing powers of abstraction and computation. As ‘capital’ expands in both space and time (imperialism, futures’ markets), the market, understood in its Misesian sense as catallactic, itself becomes a sort of distributed computer for the calculation of prices, spontaneously generating collective intelligence far in excess of what humans are consciously capable of mastering. Thus, the market an sich is a form of ‘artificial superintelligence’ long before the computer is even invented. This is, in part, what Land means by the “teleological identity of capitalism and artificial intelligence.”- Accelerationism, Left and Right, Park Macdougald

LEFT-ACCELERATIONISM (L/Acc):

Left-Accelerationism wants to accelerate technology for the benefit of mankind, beyond the oppressive nature of capitalism, to utilize modern technology as a means of emancipating man from a life of work, to use technology in a socially beneficial way (automation etc.)

Probably the most read and prolific text with regards to accelerationism is Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek’s #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics.

Also: #Accelerate. The Accelerationist Reader

“[Inventing the Future by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams] consistently refers to its future not as communism, but “postcapitalism.” It’s a world without work, but also without the commons. “The theory of the Communists,” write Marx and Engels, “may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” But here, private property remains untouched. The productive apparatuses are to be fully automated, removing workers as much as possible from every stage of the production process: who, then, will own them? Who will own the commodities that these apparatuses produce? And if humanity is unburdened from the need to work and left to produce freely in the pursuit of its own self-expression, who will own that? Without anything to oppose bourgeois property, the result could be fully monstrous: a bloated, gluttonous ruling class engaged in limitless production, and recapturing any losses when the new peons come to spend their universal basic pittance. The propertied classes would fuse with an automaton that requires no human parts except for ownership to form a single apparatus; Utopia as a cyborg dictatorship.

This future has, in fact, already been described – it’s E.M. Forster’s 1909 science-fiction story The Machine Stops. Here, all of humanity lives in tiny cells within the body of the vast subterranean Machine. The Machine produces all their consumer goods, it provides them with anything they might want or need at a moment’s notice, it speaks to them, and allows them to speak to each other through video-messaging. People tend not to leave their cells; it’s not forbidden, but it’s certainly not encouraged. Full automation. Universal basic income. A networked society. In the end the Machine starts to slowly disintegrate. Billions die, and Forster, who had something of a reactionary streak, can only see this as a good thing. Who owns the Machine? The Machine does.” – The Future Has Already Happened, Sam Kriss

“Work for work’s sake is a perversity and a constraint imposed upon humanity by capitalism’s ideology of the work ethic. What accelerationism seeks is to allow human potential to escape from the trap set for it by contemporary capitalism.” – #Accelerationism: Remembering the Future, Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams and Armen Avanessian

“But politics is not all hopeless. Left Accelerationism is an alternative, and it’s the idea that the only way out of multinational late capitalism is through it. Capitalism has one direction at this point and that’s collapse. Either it collapses into socialism or fascism, but it’ll collapse. Technological growth is a consequence of capitalism and technology. It can and should be repurposed. Left acceleration anticipates this collapse and aims to utilize technology to not only nudge the collapse Leftward, but to seize control via a counter-hegemony symmetrical to right populism. Marxism for the 21st century is nothing if not left Accelelerationism.” – Nick Land & Accelerationism, Isaac Camacho

RIGHT-ACCELERATIONISM (R/Acc):

“Right-accelerationism has converged with neoreaction precisely because it identifies the deterritorialising force with capitalism itself: it sees itself as biting the bullet, and claiming that if we want to accept the liberating alienation of capitalism we also need to accept an inevitable return to the familiar feudal structures it fleetingly displaced. Whereas classical fascism used techno-capitalism as a means to the end of anti-modernism, neoreaction uses anti-modernism as a means to the end of techno-capitalism. This is why it is sillier than fascism in my opinion – because it has sacrificed whatever liberating force it initially ascribed to capitalist alienation upon the atavistic altar of feudal domination. It is the only strand of accelerationist thought that could be said to read the above paragraph and find something worth accelerating, at least insofar as it sees capital’s oppressive reconfiguration of the social space as the inevitable price techno-industrial development.” – So, Accelerationism, what’s all that about?

“Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic desire remorselessly stripped of all Bergsonian vitalism, and made backwards-compatible with Freud’s death drive and Schopenhauer’s Will. The Hegelian-Marxist motor of history is then transplanted into this pulsional nihilism: the idiotic autonomic Will no longer circulating idiotically on the spot, but upgraded into a drive, and guided by a quasi-teleological artificial intelligence attractor that draws terrestrial history over a series of intensive thresholds that have no eschatological point of consummation, and that reach empirical termination only contingently if and when its material substrate burns out. This is Hegelian-Marxist historical materialism inverted: Capital will not be ultimately unmasked as exploited labour power; rather, humans are the meat puppet of Capital, their identities and self-understandings are simulations that can and will ultimately be sloughed off.”- Mark Fisher

“Chalmers says there are four options for us in a post-singularity world: extinction, isolation, inferiority, and integration.

The first option is undesirable. The second option would keep us isolated from the AI, a kind of technological isolationism in which one world is blind to progress in the other. The third option may be infeasible because an AI++ would operate so much faster than us that inferiority is only a blink of time on the way to extinction.

For the fourth option to work, we would need to become superintelligent machines ourselves. One path to this mind be mind uploading, which comes in several varieties and has implications for our notions of consciousness and personal identity that Chalmers discusses but I will not.” – The Singularity

The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis – David Chalmers

UNCONDITIONAL ACCELERATIONISM (U/Acc):

Unconditional accelerationism begins with a renunciation of the retrograde politicisation to which accelerationism has fallen subject. It denounces the tedious political forms and utopian humanist fantasies of the self-titled left-accelerationists, their high-modernist pretence to control over the uncontrollable. That Srnicek and Williams identify Land’s work as pointing merely to an indefinite steady state of ‘neoliberalism’ betrays the radical limitations of their conceptual universe. The triumphal march of capital does not begin and end with a historically limited human ideology.

Unconditional accelerationism rejects simultaneously the right-accelerationists’ Yudkowskian concern with control and evaluation, with shaping the explosion of modernity, with guaranteeing its heterogeneity, with exploring the possibilities of a supposedly ever-improving transhumanism. The aggregate improvement of humanity’s condition is, to be sure, a fact to which the traditional left seems incapable of responding. But beyond the nostrums of race and nation, the right-accelerationists seem all too anxious over the tearing-apart of humanity that this process has increasingly entailed. Despite their claim to a radical and ‘dark’ identity with acceleration, they model with bureaucratic pedantry forms of government within which they hope the explosion can be moulded and recuperated.

Against all this the unconditional accelerationist celebrates and intensifies the fire of modernity as a whole: both the flows of capital that compress the world ever tighter in a liquid despotism of the machine that is remodelling and resequencing humanity, and the flows of social cybernetics that are overwhelming political institutions, turning despite themselves towards terminal delirium. In the West, it is Frankenstein that constitutes the figure determining modernity’s course: the tool that overthrows its master. Trade. Social media. Artificial intelligence. In cybernetic modernity the story is repeated over and again. Unconditional accelerationism identifies with this process of overthrow in its kaleidoscopic multiplicity. System disease. Weaponised nihilism. K-insurgency. – Acceleration without conditions, Vincent Garton

REAL LEFT ACCELERATIONISM:

The distance ‘to’ communism and towards the creation of the material basis for communism can be shortened by means of accelerating capitalism. Capitalism blinded by its insatiable hunger for self-expansion doesn’t produce with living conditions of the producers in mind, as such, taking reference from Marx’s Capital, Jehu’s R-L/Acc is a utilization of capital’s blind self-acceleration towards an abrupt ulterior (communism), the material basis of which is slowly (unknowingly) built during the accelerative process.

“Of course, capitalism does not intentionally lay the material basis for communism, but the creation of the material basis for communism is the necessary result of capital’s incessant revolutionizing of the forces of production of material wealth. Communism, Marx argues, is the necessary, though unintended, by-product of capital’s own relentless self-expansion.

Even if we assume that capitalism creates the material basis for communism, this does not imply the process itself can be sped up. What is it about the unconscious manner capitalism creates the material basis for communism that makes an accelerationist program possible?” – Making a Marxian labor theory case for an accelerationist strategy, Jehu

“The real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself. It is that capital and its self-expansion appear as the starting and the closing point, the motive and the purpose of production; that production is only production for capital and not vice versa, the means of production are not mere means for a constant expansion of the living process of the society of producers.” – Capital, Karl Marx

“According to Marx, the limited aim of capitalist accumulation is itself a barrier to the completion of its historical mission to create the material basis for communism — and this requires an important caveat: Capital is only concerned about its self-expansion and nothing we do can alter this essential character. While capital is creating the material basis for communism, it does this in a self-contradictory way as the blind working of the laws inherent to the mode of production.

The case for intervention is the blind, unconscious character of capitalist accumulation itself.

Marx explains what happened when England introduced a limit on the duration of the working day that had the effect of limiting the aggregate duration of both paid and unpaid hours of labor: Capital immediately went to work on means to circumvent this limit by intensifying the exploitation of wage labor within the new shorter work day.

These new means of evading the cap on aggregate labor time included new technologies, more advanced science, increasing efficiency of labor time and materials, new organization. The shortening of the labor day also facilitated this intensification because the workers could labor more intensely in shorter bursts. As a result of the shortened working day, economic expansion, i.e., capitalist accumulation rose five-fold.” – Making a Marxian labor theory case for an accelerationist strategy, Jehu

ACC/EXTRA:

Meltdown – Nick Land

Cyberpositive – Sadie Plant and Nick Land

LA 2019: Demopathy and Xenogenesis – Iain Hamilton Grant

Swarmachines – CCRU

Nowhere fast? A brief critique of the Accelerationist Manifesto – J D Taylor

Some Reflections on the #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO – Antonio Negri

A Quick and Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism – Nick Land

Fragments on Machines – Karl Marx

#rhetttwitter

DARK-ENLIGHTENMENT, NEOREACTION (NRx):

We’ve been attempting to re-order society on the basis of equality for a very long time, we’ve been trying to make everybody and everything equal as best we can, we’ve noticed unjust and unfair systems and have tried are damned best to work them through and make everything ‘right’. It hasn’t worked, why? People just don’t want to cooperate; our attempts at making life better for people via utilization of modern scientific and technologic innovations have failed miserably. Why is this? Well, humans are far more complex than any seemingly transparent equality system we conjure up. Our inability as the human-race to not fit in means any machinery or processes we create, which in their creation are ‘tight’ and intricate, eventually end up being bastardised towards our lack of complacency. The majority of systems have ignored Hobbes and have completely forgotten that man is animal and is constantly competing for power, influence, wealth and (now) fame. Limitations merely create competition as opposed to equality, the stakes get higher and higher, the tension builds until the split becomes a 5/95.

People have been lured in by quasi-innovation, their lives have become ‘better’ in the most comfortable ways, better quality mattresses, attainable food 24/7, high-fructose, MSG-pump, infantile knowledge sources that are easily digestible, maddeningly large amounts of high-end entertainment, a catastrophic amount of complex escapist systems and structures, all this innovation makes them feel as if their lives are going exactly as they should be, and that everything they need they have, whereas, the matter of fact is, this material camouflage only acts a defence mechanism against a failing, deteriorating and generally incapable government.

As far as where to begin with Neoreaction, I personally would recommend listening to the first hour of Nick Land’s recent interview with Red Ice Radio. It’s definitely one of the more accessible sources, and it means you can get to grips with a vast amount of material in a short time.

“Ultimately, however, if after all these centuries of trying to improve society based on abstract ideas of justice have only made life worse than it would have been under pre-Enlightenment social systems, the time has come to simply give up the whole project and revert to traditional forms whose basis we might not be able to establish rationally, but which have the evidence of history to support them.” – Introduction to Neoreaction

Welcome to the “Dark Enlightenment”: We are unequal and Western Civ is Unique and impossible to replicate.

Western civ is the product of individualistic aristocratic egalitarianism caused by indo european battle tactics learned as pastoral radiers. Objectivity, debate and science, and the unique western solution to the problems of politics and market are the product of the need to obtain consent from other peers, rather than obey a chosen leader. – Welcome a New Member

The Dark Enlightenment – Nick Land

“Neo-reactionaries head for the exit.”

“…winning elections is overwhelmingly a matter of vote buying, and society’s informational organs (education and media) are no more resistant to bribery than the electorate, a thrifty politician is simply an incompetent politician, and the democratic variant of Darwinism quickly eliminates such misfits from the gene pool.”

“Where the progressive enlightenment sees political ideals, the dark enlightenment sees appetites.”

“As the democratic virus burns through society, painstakingly accumulated habits and attitudes of forward-thinking, prudential, human and industrial investment, are replaced by a sterile, orgiastic consumerism, financial incontinence, and a ‘reality television’ political circus. “

“By cropping out all high-frequency feedback mechanisms (such as market signals), and replacing them with sluggish, infra-red loops that pass through a centralized forum of ‘general will’, a radically democratized society insulates parasitism from what it does, transforming local, painfully dysfunctional, intolerable, and thus urgently corrected behavior patterns into global, numbed, and chronic socio-political pathologies. “

“Once it is accepted universally, or, speaking more practically, by all social forces wielding significant cultural power, that intolerance is intolerable, political authority has legitimated anything and everything convenient to itself, without restraint. “

“Firstly, the crime is augmented by a purely ideational, ideological, or even ‘spiritual’ element, attesting not only to a violation of civilized conduct, but also to a heretical intention. This facilitates the complete abstraction of hate from criminality, whereupon it takes the form of ‘hate-speech’ or simply ‘hate’ (which is always to be contrasted with the ‘passion’, ‘outrage’, or righteous ‘anger’ represented by critical, controversial, or merely abusive language directed against unprotected groups, social categories, or individuals). ‘Hate’ is an offense against the Cathedral itself, a refusal of its spiritual guidance, and a mental act of defiance against the manifest religious destiny of the world.”

“Secondly, and relatedly, ‘hate’ is deliberately and even strategically asymmetrical in respect to the equilibrium political polarity of advanced democratic societies. Between the relentless march of progress and the ineffective grouching of conservatism it does not vacillate. As we have seen, only the right can ‘hate’. As the doxological immunity system of ‘hate’ suppression is consolidated within elite educational and media systems, the highly selective distribution of protections ensures that ‘discourse’ – especially empowered discourse – is ratcheted consistently to the left, which is to say, in the direction of an ever more comprehensively radicalized Universalism. The morbidity of this trend is extreme.”

“At its most abstract and all-encompassing, the liberal-progressive racial dialectic abolishes its outside, along with any possibility of principled consistency. It asserts — at one and the same time — that race does not exist, and that its socially-constructed pseudo-existence is an instrument of inter-racial violence.”

Above quotes from: The Dark Enlightenment.

Another key reactionary is Mencius Moldbug who’s archived blog Unqualified Reservations displayed a ferocious appetite directed at underpinning and explaining contemporary political, technological and social problems.

“The other day I was tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology.”

“In my experience, most sensible people consider themselves “moderate,” “centrist,” “independent,” “unideological,” “pragmatic,” “apolitical,” etc. Considering the vast tragedies wrought by 20th-century politics, this attitude is quite understandable. It is also, in my opinion, responsible for most of the death and destruction in the world today…”

“…the problem with moderation is that the “center” is not fixed. It moves. And since it moves, and people being people, people will try to move it. This creates an incentive for violence – something we formalists try to avoid.”

“Replacing your own ideology is a lot like do-it-yourself brain surgery. It requires patience, tolerance, a high pain threshold, and very steady hands…”

…There is no point in starting this messy experiment only to install some other ideology that’s the way it is just because someone said so. Formalism, as we’ll see, is an ideology designed by geeks for other geeks. It’s not a kit. It doesn’t come with batteries. You can’t just pop it in. At best, it’s a rough starting point to help you build your own DIY ideology. If you’re not comfortable working with a table saw, an oscilloscope and an autoclave, formalism is not for you.” – Formalist Manifesto

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”- The Education of a Libertarian

Neoreactionary Movement – Rational Wiki

Geeks For Monarchy: Rise of the Neoreactionaries – Klint Finley

Dark Enlightenment Reading List

Social Matter – Contains a weekly ‘This Week in Reaction’

Reactionary Philosophy in an Enormous Planet Sized Nutshell

The Dark Enlightenment for Newbies

Moldbug’s Gentle Introduction

Moldbug’s Open Letter

#Islandtwitter

By: mnold

31-05-2017

Islandtwitter, Philosophy, Uncategorized

#Islandtwitter

I awake on an Island.

These islands have not always been here.

(Photographer Unknown, Found Document, XX//)

…a sentence uttered once and then forever by an assemblage of bodies, [the] alive ones, now, perpetually stuck.

One could say they were on the Island, or could say they were/are Island. And as such the ‘the’ of the ‘the Island’ is always replaced, for the ‘Island’ acts as verb, it is a physical brother of the il y a, a teasing malicious awakened presence that grows its opportunity from meaningless suffering.

[The] Island is at once with the trapped and entirely distant from them, one can never fully grow into [the] Island, a physical manifestation of trapped desires, apathetic and lonely desires included in a pure form of stasis. Island is trapped, you see, it is in stasis, within which there are dumb-movements, non-movements, their ends and beginnings are entirely worthless, and as such their journeys are the laughing-stock of the universe, fodder for a bully-God.

(The Echo-Sheds, Oil on Canvas, Malter Wacken, Xx//)

The entire idea of calendars destroyed on your silent impact. Once they begin to tinker away, the existence that once was of days ‘n weeks means nothing; once a structured time is lost it cannot be retrieved, as such, upon arrival – and thus a structured destruction of temporal-structures – one is entirely at whim to light and the absence of as a means to form a ‘time’. The sun merely a synthetic-orb powered by a cosmic news studio; time is powered by the audience’s cheers. (“Ma boy!)

“I might be doomed to lie in bed, eventually recover, and yet remain entirely ignorant of how many days, weeks, or even months had passed. It would be like losing one’s whole grip on time, like having part of one’s life irretrievably lost.” – Tom Neale.

//XX//

“Man, who is a land animal, welcomes by instinct a bit of earth in the vast expanse of sea.” – Rachel Carson

Not this bit though, he will always regret welcoming this [non]-bit of land, for as long as he shall exist, which, upon setting foot upon, shall be a long, long, time.

(The Trapper(d), Malter Wacken, X//X)

XXXX//

HISTORY OF THE BIG EAR:

DOcUMENT NOT FOUND

DOCUMENT NOT FOUND

////

[The] Island acting as an ulterior form of unconditional accelerationism, with the acceleration mutating into forms of temporal-narcissism, thus creating only a bastard form of progression; in to itself it finds no new horizons, only illusions of difference. The only acceleration is a repetition of the same which is attempting a direction towards a difference.

There’s nothing you can do here; you cannot turn left not right, and there’s nothing you can do about that fact. You are here, that’s about it, the rest, is most definitely NOT up to you.

But he was utterly alone and so terrified by the prospect of a lifetime of solitude that to preserve his sanity he had to shut his mind to reality, had to pretend there was some hope. – James Poling

“I was a better Christian while in solitude that I ever was before or, I am afraid, ever was again” – James Poling

XX<>X

MONDAY:

Time-lost immediately, I know not when I fell asleep, or where; it’s grey now.

My bare feet come into contact with the grass, I can touch it, but I cannot feel it. Though I sense it’s touching me back. Entirely disjointed and depersonalized nothing I sense I can actually contact.

The beaches breach rabbit-heads from the sand, sometimes you can witness their bodies hop around in the flux-forest.

At all times one senses something making an attempt to seep in; the breeze carries the real, it brushes against your limbs and tingles the hairs, each goose-bump acting a micro-glitch between a nostalgic dream and the hell that is [this] Island.

The daily eviction happens, it’s pure-tradition and carries no weight, the walkers evict men at random, casting them into [the] Eternal Sea, they always return within the next few days, something of them lost.

There are these storms…that aren’t exactly…there.

The pier curls at the end, wood splitting, with the splinters halting immediately in the sky, frozen slices of grain, meaningless material existing for the sake of it.

My only memory is of laying on a bed(?), watching the night draw in, encapsulated, suffocated, asphyxiated by the feeling of non-existence; empirically focused on the pure-negation of Being, this is my only memory. — It seems the other Islanders all have something of the same.

Those who’ve been here a short-time – not that they know – walk miles to The Big Ear, it listens, absorbs, but never returns.

//<>//

The walkers consist of a piece of stretched raw cow-skin, with assorted hair used as sewing thread, lacing tightly between the pushed skins.

(ISLAND WALKER, XXXvxx//)

/////<>xX

A continual drone of ancient indecipherable languages is found in the winds, and howls in the breezes, peace, never.

I seem to enter into the wild pastime of the cliff, and to become a companion of the cormorants of the crows. – J. M. Synge

“Throw the baskets of soil circuit-board into the [endless] sea” he said; wonders at the command, at the authority that was thrown from the voice, and so the slaves began to throw pile upon pile of circuit-board fossils into the acidic sea, it began to burp and belch and ask for “oh-so much more tech, pleee-eeease.” it groaned. And they did not sink into the broiled depths, the chip and wire grew into a simulacrum prior to reality, a simulacrum from which reality could grow; from the strewn forgotten synthetic bastard chipsets came an Island bent backwards into and onto and of itself; the breezes glitch in, the palms rendered, the ‘fresh’ smell of the oranges a complex algorithm, the sky came in last, with a large start-up hummmmm the sun’s rays now seem crrough crrzk Real. Reality, done.

“and without a doubt the most agonising thing of all was the manner in which the island seemed so tantalisingly close, yet frustratingly never seemed to come any nearer.” – Tom Neale

Arrival – Heidegger, Levinas and Fatalism.

By: mnold

13-04-2017

Film, Philosophy

Arrival – Dir, Denis Villeneuve. 2016.

“I used to think this was the beginning of your story. Memory is a strange thing, it doesn’t work like I thought it did. We are so bound by time, by its order.” – Louise Banks

Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival is as gentle as a Kubrickian film is ever going to get. Overbearing stoicism, captured in wide shots and a general sense of seclusion and alienation, one is not so worried about the aliens as a potential for hostility, but if this will actually change anything, one feels for the earth. Whatever this is, it is already above the idea of humans vs aliens, it is beyond the horizon, into a dark unknown, an unknown even those who travel through space and (potentially) time cannot enter.

Amy Adams as linguist Louise Banks, who we see from the beginning has lost a daughter to cancer, in a flashback overcast with the idea of a dream made, then destroyed. The news comes in, as it always does and always will, aliens have landed…finally? It seems this way to Banks, who is nonchalant to the news, it’s clear to the viewer nothing could overthrow the hand life gave her, she cares not for the one dealt to the world. She’s asked by the government to use her skills as a linguist to communicate with the aliens. At the army camp, situated next to the ‘landed’ ship, she meets Ian Banks, a physicist, whom she has a relevant love interest with. I feel in the case the word ‘alien’ cheapens the detail and nuance applied to this film’s extraterrestrial, who I feel are at opposition to hostility, one has a sense of fright and worry, the extraterrestrials understand they are the strangers. Which at once gives the viewer the feeling of unease, who here is the authorative ‘species’ or genus, the hierarchy has been dissembled, we are at threat together.

The aliens or ‘heptapods’ landed in an oval pebble type ship, as high a skyscraper, yet gentle on the landscape, not too authoritative, not cold nor warm, there, still and settled.

The heptapods reside in there ship, within a lit room filled with what seems to be steam or smoke, separating them and the humans is, I guess, the heptapod equivalent to glass, the humans the other side, in their own large room…which is only illuminated with light from the heptapod side, and their own feeble technology (Glow sticks, lights etc.)

The heptapods bring a new illumination, one humans are only just becoming aware of, a world anew; and so the task begins of how to communicate. The illumination in a sense is post-Platonic, our minds are no longer the only source. Illumination of the Other? Or has the horizon simply ‘moved’. The Levinasian illumination (Existence and Existents) is inverted, the possibility and potentiality of hostility from light, a physical manifestation of uncanny-sense. We supplied the light to our own world for so long, and now an-Other supplies a new light, one that can go beyond our ‘known’ horizons, through time and temporality.

And so the task begins of how to communicate. The heptapods communicate via what seems to be 3-dimensional rings of smoke, the meaning of which change via the subtleties of the shape. Banks begins to understand the language as something which addresses time, addresses temporality, eventually leading her to understand that it can help one understand and view their individual history and future directly, a language that can take one within their history, within their future, within their time. A language in-keeping with Martin Heidegger’s theory of historicality:

[Death] is only the ‘end’ of Dasein; and, taken formally, it is just one of the ends by which Dasein’s totality is closed round. The other ‘end’, however, is the ‘beginning’, the ‘birth’. Only that entity which is ‘between’ birth and death presents the whole which we have been seeking… Dasein has [so far] been our theme only in the way in which it exists ‘facing forward’, as it were, leaving ‘behind’ all that has been. Not only has Being-towards-the-beginning remained unnoticed; but so too, and above all, has the way in which Dasein stretches along between birth and death. (Being and Time 72: 425).

Thus, Dasein, a being such as a human, one which can interrogate its own being is at all times behind its past, and ahead of its future. We are pushing our past, correcting and changing our experience with knowledge of our past, and attending to our past with direction towards possibilities of the future. So the language of the heptapods is a practical manifestation of Heideggerian historicality, praxis-language.

The film doesn’t however, extrapolate on whether the language is in favour of will, or is in fact fatalistic. The ending allows the viewer the knowledge that Louise Banks has seen her future, and that in fact the flashback at the beginning was a flashforward, and at ‘current’ she is witnessing her future, the one she will have with Ian, whom she met whilst working with the heptapods, they will marry, have a child, divorce, and the child shall die of an incurable disease. She decides to stay with Ian despite knowledge of her future, thus can she now – via heptapod language usage – change her future? Improve her relationship with Ian, have the child at a different time so it may potentially avoid the disease. It’s unclear whether at the beginning she (potentially) subconsciously knows of her future – this would be a possibility within the logic of the film.

These questions are classic philosophical questions, those of freewill, free-choice, determinism and fatalism, are our actions our own? Yet the questions are asked via a Heideggerian framework, one in which language is employed as spatio-temporally free-floating, existing outside of physics. A pure metaphysical language. A Heideggerian language of historicality, applied via a Levinasian ‘extraction’:

“Moreover, the very fact that a painting extracts and sets aside a piece of the universe and brings about, in an inwardness, the coexistence of worlds that are mutually alien and impenetrable, has already a positive esthetic function.” (Existence & Existents, Emmanuel Levinas, p48)

Usually it is only that of a physical ‘spatio-temporal’ object that can extract from culture, physically that is, an idea etc, an object such as a painting or poem or film carries with it a sense of time, an individual-time. The language of Arrival and that of the heptapods is the extraction of time from a fixed linearity, it is a language to remove the shackles, the individual’s time becomes economic, theirs. Though if the language is, as the film’s linearity would have us believe, fatalistic, then the language is but a curse, we can view our future and do nothing about it? A world learning of their unchangeable futures is a paradox in itself. To teach a class of students how to utilize heptapod language to view their future, would be to teach a class of linguistics students their future’s look very bleak, many of them will die and suffer loss, and will want to change their future, as such, the language only be a tool, a gift, a means to alter one’s future.

The heptapods act as the symbolic manifestation of a transcendental understanding of Heideggerian thought, an understanding in which one can transcend human limitations, break free of deterministic shackles.

Afterword: There is of course the argument that the heptapod language would be part of one’s ‘preset’ path, as such determinism still stands outright, the language may only act as the ability for larger states of flux within a preset horizon.

— jdemeta

The Experiment of the Future

K-Addiction

Aguirre, the Wrath of Gnon

Internet as Gutenberg 2.0

Nick Land, CCRU, Accelerationism and Neoreaction – An Overview & Guide

#Islandtwitter

Arrival – Heidegger, Levinas and Fatalism.

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