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A Theory of What Constitutes the Heart of the Žižekian

Posted by noir-realism on May 21, 2013
Posted in: dark ecology. Tagged: daniel tutt, slavoj zizek. 1 comment

Reblogged from Spirit is a Bone:

Here is the introduction of my essay for a new book on Žižek and Education edited by Antonio Garcia, with contributions from many of my favorite Žižek scholars.

In this piece, entitled "The Threshold of the Žižekian" I argue that the heart of the Žižekian, can be located in the way that Žižek modifies the discourse of the Master by putting the disciple (reader) into a new relation towards what I call "emancipatory knowledge."

Read more… 2,027 more words

Daniel Tutt of spirit is a bone introduces a new book on Žižek, Žižek and Education by Antonio Garcia. Nuanced and calibrated he lays out the parade of scholars succinctly and with his usual aplomb! Looking forward to the reading the new work. Description
Zizek has spoken very little on the subject of education, so how could a book be devoted to such a subject? For many years, educational theorist and philosophers have incorporated Zizek's work, but none have taken on the project of developing an identified "Zizekian line of thought" (Butler), how Zizek and Education might be a matter of "Public Pedagogy" (see The handbook on Public Pedagogy by Sandlin, Schultz, and Burdick), or what renderings of education in the vein of Boris Groys (and Badiou) anti-philosophers.

You’ve got to be kidding? Neoreactionary Soup and The Fall of Man

Posted by noir-realism on May 20, 2013
Posted in: dystopian reflections. Tagged: neoreactionary, nick land. 53 comments

As a young man growing up in Texas, in the Bible-belt in the heart of “God’s Country” I dabbled with fire, I entered the dark waters, touched the serpent of that crazed god of the underworld of the U.S.A. My family was not only conservative, they were of the tribe of Paleoconservatives that came out of depression era economics: in the United States, the Southern Agrarians, John T. Flynn, Albert Jay Nock, Garet Garrett, Robert R. McCormick, Felix Morley, and Richard M. Weaver among others, articulated positions as paleoconservatives. Some have even offered up William Jennings Bryan, T. S. Eliot, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, and Walker Percy as major paleo influences.

What this was all supposed to lead up to was my own counter-reaction to the web’s new Bad Boys: the NeoReactionaries. As I began moving out from Nick Land’s site over on Outside In I followed the trail to the tributary flow-boys that seem to make up this post-futurist paleodrome, a throwback to that Burkean matrix of rock gut conservatism they are now calling the Dark Enlightenment. The Neoreactionary movement is comic fanfest for the middling professional, an open joke that purports to offer ideological charms for the mystified net runners. Surfs up, the neo-reactionary tribes are on the loose. Let the surf wars begin.

One such member (Anomaly UK) of this paleotribal council sums up nicely his introduction to the Dark Enlightenment:

Most neoreactionary writing consists of detailed criticism of particular progressive reforms, with particular emphasis on the flaws in one specific idea — democracy.

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. (quote from Anomaly UK)

So here it is, the basic platform: they seek to overthrow what they term the Cathedral, a metaphor that encompasses our modern progressive society in Europe and the U.S.A. The Cathedral seems to fit their conspiracy theories of how Communism took over the world through internal techniques of control by infiltrating our Government, the Academy, and our Think Tanks. One can find this on any great entertainment conspiracy site, one doesn’t need a mindless neoreactionary spouting well trod bullshit for us.

For a supposed philosophical rendition one can hop over to Scott Alexander’s blog where one is offered up Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell. Just what is this nutshell philosophy of the Reaction? He opens with his own perplexity, a quip and anecdote about his own confusion:

“I keep on reading all these posts by really smart people who identify as Reactionaries, and I don’t have any idea what’s going on. They seem to be saying things that are either morally repugnant or utterly ridiculous. And when I ask them to explain, they say it’s complicated and there’s no one summary of their ideas. Why don’t they just write one?”

So he did, and this is the fruit of it: click here…  Right off the bat he affirms that this movement isn’t about philosophical postulates and principles as much as it is about “poetry”. That’s right, folks, poetry… hmm, did I hear Plato rolling over in his grave? The more you read this little excursion into the philosophical underpinnings of this reactionary movement the more you realize it’s a little bit like following the trail of Manson and his minions across the planetary wastelands. He seems to have gotten his knowledge from the scrambled posts of Mencius Moldbug and a few shady denizens of IRC channels.

One of the key attributes of a neoreactionary he tells us is that they must “be highly politically incorrect and offensive, because that’s what Reactionaries do.” I want bore the reader with any quotes from the post. The point of the exercise for him was to understand the main point of the neoreactionary mind: that can be summed up easily – we are all captives of the modern liberal (Communist/Progressive) world, and it would be better to return to earlier more aristocratic regimes modeled on the power of God, Faith, and Country. So what’s the point? Even the neoreactionaries themselves state that there ideas are not new. Even that hypernihilist of the effete elite, Nick Land, himself sums it up:

…neoreaction is a time-crisis, manifested through paradox, whose further elaboration can wait (if not for long). Disordering our most basic intuitions, it is, by its very nature, difficult to grasp. Could anything easily be said about it? (Neoreaction for Dummies)

Yet, as Land continues with quote after quote from other like-minded neos of the reaction noosphere we learn a few things:

1. it seeks to subvert all forms of “social justice” and to return us to traditional forms (i.e., religion and kings);
2. it seeks to overthrow the radical enlightenment of light with darkness, to wipe the slate clean of progressive thought and ideology, and return us beyond a failed myth of Reason;
3. because all neoreactionaries define themselves through antagonism to the Cathedral, and the Cathedral is the self-proclaimed consummation of Enlightenment rationalism;
4. there are two lines of thought within the neoreactionary scenario: traditionalist and futurist.
5. under these are three sub-branches: religious/traditionalist branch, the ethnic/nationalist branch, and the capitalist branch.
6. the Burkean junction, where neoreactionary agreement begins, is also where it ends.

Ultimately we discover that the neoreactionary forces strive for divine revelation, racial continuity, and evolutionary discovery, which are sources of ultimate sovereignty, instantiated in tradition, beyond the Progressive State, but they are self-evidently different – and only precariously compatible. Awkwardly, but inescapably, it has to be acknowledged that each major branch of the neoreactionary super-family tends to a social outcome that its siblings would find even more horrifying than the Progressive alternative.

So is there any coherence to this madness? As I have wandered around in this muddle I am left completely mystified by the sheer idiocy of these ideas, or is there some dark wisdom under the hood that I have yet to discover? These are not so much ideas as they are a program for a comic barbarism, a return to the irrational systems of our forbears that the Age of Reason tried so desperately to overthrow. Who in their right mind would truly want such a return to pre-Enlightenment values? Is this really the wave of some neofuturist avant-garde? Or is it more likely the return to some neo-Nazis fetishization and a theatrical dramatics in outer and inner forms of the Cult of Death?

Nick Land of course is a follower of such thanatropic chaos and accelerated madness. He relates that Mencius Moldbug is the place to start if you want to discover the risible intellect of the tribe. So I’m off to meet the Wizard…. toto in tow…

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Here is a list of Neoreactionary blogs – the names tell it all:

  • Anomaly UK
  • Bloody shovel
  • Bruce Charlton
  • Chariot of Reaction
  • Chateau Heartiste
  • Deconstructing Leftism
  • Diversity Is Chaos
  • Foseti
  • Habitable Worlds
  • HBD Chick
  • Jim’s blog
  • Malcolm Pollack
  • Mencius Moldbug
  • Neoreactionary
  • Occam’s Razor
  • Outside in
  • Radish
  • Steve Sailer
  • The Occidental Observer
  • The Reactivity Place
  • Toilet Nation
  • VDare

Nick Land: Shuggoth’s Revenge

Posted by noir-realism on May 20, 2013
Posted in: dark ecology. Tagged: neocameralism, neoreactionary, nick land. 11 comments

Capitalism is still accelerating, even though it has already realized novelties beyond any previous human imagining. After all, what is human imagination? It is a relatively paltry thing, merely a sub-product of the neural activity of a species of terrestrial primate.

- Nick Land, Critique of Transcendental Miserablism

Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier adeptly situate this swan song at the end of their book of Nick Land’s essays, Fanged Noumena. If one were to take this essay as a finis, a final statement of the departed philosopher-turned-social-critic then it would have to be his swan song for lost hope, for all those who once believed in alternative economies, alternative societies. Instead of lost causes in Slavoj Zizek’s sense we get the dark enlightenment of Landianism: a supercapitalism of thanatropic intensive predation without end. For it is here more than anywhere that Land enters the ranks of those neoreactionary forces he so well chronicles on his blog Outside In.

In his diatribe against the old guard he opens the pit and tries to bury Marxism: ”The Marxist dream of dynamism without competition was merely a dream, an old monotheistic dream re-stated, the wolf lying down with the lamb.” And, for all those who dream of hope, of a post-capitalist world free of consumerism he reiterates his stance: “ ‘Post-capitalism’ has no real meaning except an end to the engine of change.” In Land’s new SimWorld he forcasts the future as fiction: reality turned inside out, or outside in. It’s as if he had taken Baudrillard one step further: instead of the simulacra or copies of the real taking over, we have the real swapping out sim-chips from the simulacra and reverse engineering the hyperworlds as reality itself. Fiction is Real: but reality with a vengeance, a self-constructed polyp that resembles not so much our world as it does a horror novel by H.P. Lovecraft. Land’s blog becomes the fictionalized game-theory of the new Zombielands of the future history. He explores the zones beyond our neoliberal worlds where escape is no longer an options because the great Outdoors has already imploded. We are the citizens of an alternate world, creatures of a ready-made vision of apocalypse that is more intensive than imagination could ever dream. Welcome to the real void… Landtopia!

Land, of course, was commenting on k-punk’s (Mark Fisher ReBlog), post The Damage is Done where he remarks “In terms of the current political imaginary, there is only this world, then nothing… Or there are n number of new worlds, but each is a different rendering of capitalism: none would be an alternative to capitalism.” Ben Woodard chimed in on this as well saying: “Land argues that the miserablist collapses all change (or time) or process or flux into misery thereby denying the possibility of change. Land nominates Schopenhauer as the king of this tendency (though to me, without adequate justification).”

Land as most of us know went through his mad Deleuzian stage, rode off into the great wilderness of the obscure and then through some magical recorso returned outside in toward the neoreactionary worlds of his convoluted sanity. He seems to fall in lockstep with Mark Fisher who states: “If it is increasingly difficult to imagine alternatives to capitalism, that is because the world has already ended. In this condition of mors ontologica, the world goes on, but nothing new can ever happen; what remains is a mechanical permutation through options that have already been fixed.” We seem according to Fisher to have already entered ZombieLand, a realm where even the simulacra repeat the same messages to their masters in an infinite set of mathematical nullities. As Fisher tells it: “Here, then, is one sense in which we are ghosts, impotently tilting at a world we can no longer affect.”

Ray Brassier was always fascinated by Land, and in a comment of the essays that make up Fanged Noumena he tells us in an interview: “ there is an extraordinary re-elaboration of negativity, a kind of non-conceptual negativity, and these texts bristle with this kind of sublimated fury, and that’s what makes them really powerful.” It was Land’s transcendental materialism that drew Brassier in because in Land’s version it becomes a “materialization of critique”. As Brassier explains it Land’s key term is “intensive materiality”:

It’s a brilliant explication of the logical operation that Deleuze and Guattari carry out vis-a-vis Kantianism in Anti-Oedipus. Matter is nothing but machinic production, self-differentiation, and the fundamental binary that organizes this materialist metaphysics is that between intensive materiality, which he identifies with the body without organs, and death, this moment of absolute indifference as absolute difference. Land is quite explicit about the link to a certain version of Schellingianism here. He explicitly links Deleuze and Guattari to Schelling.

Yet, there is a problem in this approach as Brassier states it: Land in his pursuit of supplanting representational modes of thought also wants to supplant the Bergsonean vitalist tradition for an unconscious thanatropism. In this materialist critique, Brassier tells us, “there’s an issue about what kind of traction this extraordinarily sophisticated conceptual apparatus can gain upon the process of primary production, the real as intensive difference, matter in itself, whatever you want to call it.” Land seems to paint himself into a corner in his denial of any form of subjectivation, and as Brassier remarks:

The claim that you can dispense with the need of any epistemological legitimation for your metaphysics by simply saying it’s not about truth or falsity, it’s just about the intensification of the primary process, is incoherent, because matter itself as primary production, or death, is not translatable into any register of affective experience or affective intensity.

For Land’s Accelerationism there are no limits to capitalisms thanatropic impulse: “Without attachment to anything beyond its own abysmal exuberance, capitalism identifies itself with desire to a degree that cannot imaginably be exceeded, shamelessly soliciting any impulse that might contribute an increment of economizable drive to its continuously multiplying productive initiatives.” But as Brassier reminds us:

If you’re accelerating, there are material constraints upon your capacity to accelerate, but there must also be a transcendental speed limit at some point. The ultimate limit is not a limit at all for him, it’s death, or cosmic schizophrenia. That’s the ultimate horizon. Land unabashedly endorses this remarkable thesis of Anti-Oedipus, but strips it of all its palliatives, about how this might generate new forms of creative existence, etc. For him it’s just: “at the end of the process is death”.

Anyone who has studied Land on his older and newer blogs will understand that thanatropics has swallowed him whole. Land is no longer of the living, but has indeed become a neoreactionary Zombie. Brassier once warned:

What does this mean? It means affirming free markets, deregulation, the capitalist desecration of traditional forms of social organization, etc. Why? Not because he thinks it’s promoting individual democracy and freedom. He has to instrumentalize neoliberalism in the name of something allegedly far darker and more potentially corrosive, but in the process it seems you end up… if your enemy’s enemy is your friend, there comes a dangerous point where you forget the conditions under which you made this strategic alliance, because you can no longer see, you can no longer identify what the goal is any more. You end up endorsing and embracing a kind of neoliberal politics or ideology, and the pretence of instrumental distance, that this could just be the cunning of schizophrenic reason, quickly evaporates because it’s not possible to dissociate praxis from identifiable ends any more.

But this is just what Land’s neocameralist buddy Mencius Moldbug incarnates. Land in his pursuit of materialist intensification discovered what Brassier described as the dissociation of tactics and strategy:

…once you dissociate tactics and strategy–the famous distinction between tactics and strategy where strategy is teleological, transcendent, and representational and tactics is immanent and machinic–if you have no strategy, someone with a strategy will soon commandeer your tactics. Someone who knows what they want to realize will start using you. You become the pawn of another kind of impersonal force, but it’s no longer the glamorous kind of impersonal and seductive force that you hoped to make a compact with, it’s a much more cynical kind of libertarian capitalism.

Is this not what Land calls the Cathedral? Land: “Capitalism is still accelerating, even though it has already realized novelties beyond any previous human imagining. After all, what is human imagination? It is a relatively paltry thing, merely a sub-product of the neural activity of a species of terrestrial primate. Capitalism, in contrast, has no external limit, it has consumed life and biological intelligence to create a new life and a new plane of intelligence, vast beyond human anticipation.” In the end Land fell victim to his own success, in a search for a non-dialectical intensified materialism he fell from the Outside in, into the machinic unconscious of his own warped desires: “Life continues, and capitalism does life in a way it has never been done before. If that doesn’t count as ‘new’, then the word ‘new’ has been stripped down to a hollow denunciation. It needs to be re-allocated to the sole thing that knows how to use it effectively, to the Shoggoth-summoning regenerative anomalization of fate, to the runaway becoming of such infinite plasticity that nature warps and dissolves before it. To The Thing. To Capitalism.”

If the truth be told Land stared into the Abyss so long that it stared back: now the abyss lives out its own intensive desires in SimLandia, the fictional construct of our neocameral future (at least according to that clone replicator ). In his most recent blog post Land in a satirical jibe tells us

A blog closely models a patchwork-embedded neocameral micro-state, which is to say that its governance is dictatorial, controlled by external competition. Internally, it’s God-king stuff: zero-democracy, undivided power without constitutional constraint, absolute discretion tilting into sorcerous extremities. The sole counter-balance comes from outside, sustained by a freedom of exit no less highly realized than the administrative power it evaluates. If people don’t like what’s happening, they leave.

Yet, the lurkers in the shadows reply: We’ve come to stay, dear Land, to watch the madness of your nights and days. If Land represents the vanguard of a Neoreactionary Libertarian Front then who needs enemies? One can enter SimLand and live happily ever after under the midnight sun of hypercapitalism now. Why wait? Dark Enlightenment is upon us. More like Shuggoth’s last revenge… if you ask me!

But before we take our leave let us look in on an updated version of Accelerationism. In their “Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics,” Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek have recently unleashed what Edmund in an excellent post on Deterretorial Investigations Unit calls a “much-needed revitalization of the concept and dragging it out of the fractured quagmire that Nick Land’s philosophy (intentionally) put it. I want add anything to his excellent post since it examines in details this new manifesto: please read it here.

Ben Jeffery’s Anti-Matter: Michel Houellebeq and Depressive Realism

Posted by noir-realism on May 19, 2013
Posted in: dystopian reflections. Tagged: authors, depressive realism, michel houellebeq. 17 comments

So far Ben Jeffery’s book on Houellebecq has been nothing but a dark ride into depressive realism, not in the clinical sense but in the literary critical sense. I’m enjoying it: if you can call enjoying a pessimist, misanthropist, misogynist, anomieist (he subverts every norm beyond recognition)… you name it the Houellebeq’s not you’re average cynical author out for laughs… actually he’s a rather nasty bastard whose only redeeming factor is his black humor. But then again he’s portraying our own culture, and the bottom feeders at that… like a marriage of noir and rotgut on steroids, except unlike noir where despair usually ends in the outer limits of sadomasochism… Houellebeq  turns it all inside out: instead of s/m we get the real bloodmaul, a sacrifice that bleeds the psyche dry… This guy’s like a walking tomb, an agent to the Black Mass, a slow freeze in a steel furnace. If someone thought that meth was a good idea, then this guy is meth without the speed. Hell is gaping and this guy is its emissary, except that metaphysical hells still offer solace – even if only for the lost. With Houellebecq you get no solace and no metaphysical rubbish: the only thing you get is pure and unadulterated emptiness, the void beyond the thin red line, a pit so dark you’d think you were dreaming except in this black prison there are no keepers, only weepers…

An instance of this is the rendition in Whatever where the protagonist, an anonymous freak, your typical psychopathic office jockey: full of himself, blind to others, a real narcissist type, suddenly wakes up from his comatose life after a fellow employee, Raphaël Tisserand, dies in a car wreck driving home from work on Christmas Eve. The nameless protagonist, a manipulative sociopath who has for the most part enjoyed his little torture games with Tisserand suddenly falls apart, has a break down and finds himself in a mental ward at a hospital. This isn’t one of those absurdist romps like Ken Keysey’s One Flew Over a Cuckoo’s Nest, this is more of joe schmo gets what’s coming to him:

After checking himself into a psychiatric hospital, the hero is confronted by a female counsellor who chastises him for speaking in overly abstract, sociological terms. His effort at self-analysis emerges: ‘But I don’t understand, basically, how people manage to go on living. I get the impression everybody must be unhappy; we live in such a simple world you understand. There’s a system based on domination, money and fear [and there’s a] system based on seduction and sex. And that’s it. Is it really possible to live and believe that there’s nothing else?’ Afterwards, he asks the counsellor if she would sleep with him. She refuses. (14-15)1

Ben Jeffery makes a comment on this, saying: “It is not that Houellebecq is a reactionary writer exactly. For example, it is never suggested that religious faith is the solution to his character’s dilemmas; the books are all resolutely atheist.” (15) But I guess Jeffery has never heard of the likes of Mencius Moldbug, neoreactionary atheist: not the sort of guy you’d want as a neighbor, believe me. Nick Land uses him as a pin cushion for his own merciless entertainment on his new blog Outside In. It would be sad to find Houellebecq in the company of such a Neanderthal, but hey we’re not all destined for the progressive farm, are we?

Ben Jeffery tells us that the term ‘depressive realism’ comes from a psychological study performed by Alloy and Abramson in 1979 which suggested that depressives routinely demonstrate better judgment about how much control they have over events (as opposed to non-depressives, who habitually over-estimate their control). Alloy and Abramson concluded that ‘depressed people are “sadder but wiser”… Non-depressed people succumb to cognitive illusions that enable them to see both themselves and their environment with a rosy glow.’(3)  A rosy glow? Have you read Koheleth’s book of late, believe me it’s no picnic. But I don’t think people read Houellebeq for wisdom, folks; no, his works lead one into silence not out of it. What you get with his books is just the stark obliteration of what it is - whatever that is is. Maybe a bucket of ashes over the head would do the trick, a sort of endless prayer to the Void. If Nietzsche was the first to put nihilism on the map, then Houellebecq took it into the abyss and zipped up the black hole to infinity. There is no escaping this dark world: helpless and alone you wander the circles of your own lost dreams.

Jeffery tells us that helplessness is the current running beneath all of Houellebecq’s narratives, the inability to either get what you want or change what you want; to avoid death or believe that death is anything except bad.(36) If your seeking solace for you lost soul Houellebecq’s books should not be on your priority list for self-help, rather think of self-loathing and sinking your head into a shit can:

This is the omega point of depressive realism. What good are books if you are sick, alone, and unloved? They are no good. At best they are make-believe to help us disguise the facts of life – but the facts remain, and they are unbearably heavy. Hence the dark joke at the bottom of the pessimist’s project is that it subverts itself. Ridiculing the futility of human action finally makes pessimism seem pointless, demonstrates the emptiness of its honesty. Depressive realism leads us up to an airless summit, and the wonder is how seriously we can take it; whether, despite itself, there is anything to be drawn from its negativity.(36)

He may lead me to the summit, but once I get there if he expects me to jump he’s got another thing coming. But that’s just it: that’s just what his pessimism leads too: that moment of pure depressive realism when you realize “You will die!” This is the Great Defeat, not some simple mindless jaunt into madness, but the stark cold facts of one’s useless existence spelled out in harsh black and white, no color here folks, just the dark contours of the psyche depleted of its last gestures. “This is not one defeat amidst life’s pleasures; it is the overwhelming end, a negation at once absolute and utterly private.”(77)

And what of staging his own death. In The Map and the Territory we come upon a Alfred Hitchcock moment, when the author himself makes a ghostly appearance, or should we say an offstage vanishing act:

That did happen the following day. “Author Michel Houellebecq Savagely Murdered” was the headline in Le Parisien, which devoted half a column to the news, though quite uninformed. The other papers gave it almost the same amount of space, without giving more details, mainly just repeating the communiqué from the prosecutor in Montargis. None of them, it seemed, had sent a reporter to the spot.

 - The Map and the Territory (198)

A Detective on the investigation wonders who would be capable of murdering this author, and gets a reply:

Houellebecq had lots of enemies, they had repeated, people had shown themselves to be unjustly aggressive and cruel toward him; when asked for a more precise list of them, Teresa Cremisi, impatiently shrugging her shoulders, offered to send him a press file. But when asked if one of these enemies could have murdered him, they both replied in the negative. Expressing herself with exaggerated clarity, a little like the way you address a madman, Teresa Cremisi had explained to him that you were dealing with literary enemies, who expressed their hatred on Internet sites, in newspaper or magazine articles, and, in the worst case, books, but that none of them would have been capable of committing physical murder. Less for moral reasons, she went on with notable bitterness, than because they would simply not have had the guts. No, she concluded, it was not (and he had the impression that she had almost said “unfortunately not”) in the literary milieu that you had to look for the culprit.

- The Map and the Territory (199)

To stage one’s own death and have one’s revenge on one’s enemies to boot. Is this the last boon of taste or what? Yet, if there is any redeeming thing in Houellebeq’s works it all comes down to his own words as author on his own writing:

To this, only one reply: ultimately, you know nothing about it. … You will never really know this part of yourself which compels you to write. You will know it only through contradictory forms which merely approach it. Egotism or devotion? Cruelty or compassion? Any of these possibilities could be argued for. Proof that, ultimately, you know nothing about it; thus, do not behave as if you did. Before your own ignorance, before this mysterious part of yourself, remain honest and humble.

Maybe that’s all any of us can do: remain honest and humble before the mystery of our own lived lives. Whether that is enough is up to each and every one of us to decide. Maybe that’s what being a depressive realist is all about: looking at the horror surrounding one with unblinking eyes, a recording Angel that knows the truth has flown the coup, and all that’s left is the myriad lies (sorry, I meant stories) we tell ourselves in the night to help us survive this catastrophe we call life. As Ben Jeffery remarks:

That life is not an inevitable defeat is not a claim that can be defended in good faith. Not everyone is happy, or healthy, or loved – but everyone is caged in their own body, and in the deepest sense helpless over what happens to them, and everybody dies. In a certain state of mind that feels very like lucidity, the bad things appear so much more pertinent and insoluble and unutterably real that the idea of being sanguine or reasonable or ‘intelligent’ about them is almost hideous.(91)

 

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For my previous review of Michel Houellebeq, Islands of the Mind: click here!

1. Jeffery, Ben (2011-11-16). Anti-Matter: Michel Houellebecq and Depressive Realism (p. 14). NBN_Mobi_Kindle. Kindle Edition.

Peter Gratton: On Meillasoux’s Speculative Politics

Posted by noir-realism on May 18, 2013
Posted in: dark ecology, neo-materialism, Idealism. 3 comments

Peter Gratton of Philosophy in a Time of Error fame has a paper up on Analecta:  Meillassoux’s Speculative Poltics: Time and Divinity to Come (.pdf). I’ve admired Peter’s posts for a while now, but haven’t read much of his published work. Not sure why that. Be that as it may, this is a superb reading of Meillassoux’s work. I’ll be purchasing Peter’s new books as well: The State of Sovereignty and one that should be out soon Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects.

I noticed right off the bat that he hits quickly in pointing out a discrepancy in Meillassoux’s argument for ‘contingency’ in moving from the singular to the universal in a sleight-of-hand way that if one were not a careful reader one might step over without ever realizing that one had just been hoodwinked:

Meillassoux provides no warrant for moving from “the only veritable” absolute (note the singular) to “everything” (note the universal) from one page to the next, even if we take this absolute contingency to be part of what “everything” would be. In other words, as far as we can tell, he only proves what the correlationist has already known: that thinking did not need to be and that, yes, it is absolutely true. This only changes things if one depicts the correlationists as denying all reality as such, which probably was not the case.(4)

Another thing Peter points out is that Meillassoux purports to term his project a speculative materialism, but that it relies on the incorporeal and immaterial for its justification. What he means by this is that Meillassoux affirms creation ex nihilo: “there is no necessary being, yet there is a hyper-chaos that is “eternal” and beyond the dictates of physical time: “Time is not governed by the physical laws because it is the law themselves which are governed by a mad time.” What is interesting about this Time as creator is that it is not a part of process or becoming, but is in fact static time and the creator of becoming and process. Ultimately this contingent unfounded conception of creation out of nothing, ex hihilo, leads to Meillassoux’s notion of divine inexistence. This remarks Gratton, states that “if there is no necessary being, then there is nothing subtending the world. And his rejection of the principle of sufficient reason means that he has arrived at what he calls an “irreligious” conception of creation, not just of the world, but of events taking place within this world: “Advent [surgissement] ex nihilo thus presents itself as the concept par excellence of a world without God, and for that very reason it allows us to produce an irreligious notion of the origin of pure novelty.”(5)

Continue Reading

The Cathedral of Time: A Sci-Fi Novel in Progress – A Teaser

Posted by noir-realism on May 17, 2013
Posted in: art, dark ecology, dystopian reflections. Tagged: stories. 17 comments

 A politics of escape, flight, exodus, leaving, refusal, secession…

- Mark Purcell, Unrepresentable Citizenship and the City

Some say the Outside is a myth, a fabrication of silly troubled minds – neuronets on the frag. Others say that the progenitors instilled such myths of freedom in our biomech cores to goad us toward greatness and change. The Cathedral of Time says such heresies need to be stamped out, forbidden and that even the mention or hint of such places, such alternate zones should be slit from our biochips and distributed to the lower echelons of Slay Town as so much fodder. I do not know about such things, I’m no philosopher, just a citizen who knows something great happened in our midst and is now no more.

No one knows when it began. The search for origins are useless in such matters. It wasn’t one of those things that happened over night. Things like that take time, or should we say they happen in neither our clock-work world, nor in those interstices between time present and time past; no, there is another site of time, a third order of time: a Time out of joint, set to one side of our time, helter-skelter, skewed. We always knew there were pathways into such strangeness, but most of us were so blinded by our everyday worries that we were unable or unwilling to slow down enough to register the speed of such spaces as they intersected with our own troubled world. But a time came when people began to disappear, withdraw, secede into the interior zones of that other realm; a realm just the other side of our own, just outside its control lanes, its dark enlightenment, its angular time quadrants. Even I didn’t notice it until it was too late, till all avenues of escape grew less and less, till the elements of control shut the doors for the last time and allowed no further access to the other realm. Yet, even those within the Cathedral of Time, those controlling all knowledge were unable to control the anomalies that surfaced from time to time.

It all started for me one bright day when my neighbor, John Fullerton and his family, disappeared along with their cy-home into one such zone. It didn’t just vanish it took flight or withdrew from our world into somewhere else; or, was it, somewhen? I’d have never noticed except that my son, Billy, who came home wistful and restless that day, asked, innocently: “Hey Dad, did you notice our new neighbors, yet?”

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Deleuze on Foucault and Multiplicities

Posted by noir-realism on May 17, 2013
Posted in: neo-materialism. Tagged: deleuze, foucault, quotes. 3 comments

And what is the conclusion to Archaeology if not an appeal to the general theory of production which must merge with revolutionary praxis, and where the acting ‘discourse’ is formed within an ‘outside’ that remains indifferent to my life and death? … None the less, the core of the notion is the constitution of a substantive in which ‘multiple’ ceases to be a predicate opposed to the One, or attributable to a subject identified as one. Multiplicity remains completely indifferent to the traditional problems, of the multiple and the one, and above all to the problem of a subject who would think through this multiplicity, give it conditions, account for its origins, and so on. There is neither one nor multiple, which would at all events entail having recourse to a consciousness that would be regulated by the one and developed by the other. There are only rare multiplicities composed of particular elements, only empty places for those who function as subjects, and cumulable, repeatable and self-preserving regularities. Multiplicity is neither axiomatic nor typlogogical, but topological. Foucault’s book represents the most decisive step yet taken in the theory-praxis of multiplicities. (14)

- Gilles Deleuze, Foucault

Radical Thought in Italy

Posted by noir-realism on May 16, 2013
Posted in: dystopian reflections, neo-materialism, politics. Tagged: hardt, mark purcell, virno. 3 comments

Mark Purcell author of Recapturing Democracy and The Down-Deep Delight of Democracy has a joyful and optimistic approach to many of our current predicaments in politics and other conditions of life and philosophy. If you haven’t had the opportunity to check out his blog, Path to the Possible, you should. In a recent post Stop Being a Social Being he reminded me of a book I recently read as part of my self-made curriculum for the current year: Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. by Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt. In his introductory remarks Hardt comments on these Italian radicals:

What is perhaps most attractive about these Italian theorists and the movements they grow out of is their joyful character. All too often, leftist cultures have identified a revolutionary life with a narrow path of asceticism, denial, and even resentment. …These authors are continually proposing the impossible as if it were the only reasonable option. But this really has nothing to do with simple optimism or pessimism; it is rather a theoretical choice, or a position on the vocation of political theory. In other words, here the tasks of political theory do indeed involve the analyses of the forms of domination and exploitation that plague us, but the first and primary tasks are to identify, affirm, and further the existing instances of social power that allude to a new alternative society, a coming community. The potential revolution is always already immanent in the contemporary social field. Just as these writings are refreshingly free of asceticism, then, so too are they free of defeatism and claims of victimization. It is our task to translate this revolutionary potential, to make the impossible real in our own contexts.

In some ways this is a part of that tradition of Spinoza and Nietzsche, an affirmative and joyous nihilism that is always ready, expectant, and hopeful. An affirmation that does not bemoan the past defeats, but, to use one of my Americanisms: “Keeps on Trucking”, keeps on moving along, keeps on pushing ahead, looking for the hidden paths out of our deadly malaise of late capitalism. As Hardt remarks again: “The defeats of the Left in the late twentieth century are not a result of “too much” Marxism or communism, she argues, but, on the contrary, of a failure to redeploy creatively the resources of these traditions.” And, this is the key: – as Zizek repeats with joyous affirmation: We must fail, but fail better! It’s about creativity, about entering into these traditions and deciding what is available to us today, what will help us survive today, what will help us get on with our current situations day by day both individually and collectively. No matter how we may disagree on the fine points, I think we can all agree that we need an affirmative and positive theorypraxis of action that can be both hopeful and joyous even amid the heartaches of our terror infested world. Without hope we are doomed to the circle of hate and resentment that is self-defeating and doomed to failure always. As Hardt reminds us we should not forget “ the analyses of the forms of domination and exploitation that plague us”, but we should also remember to “further the existing instances of social power that allude to a new alternative society, a coming community.” This a vision that once again opens up the future to us as a site for hope beyond the dearth and dark presentiments of our present era.

Post-Nihilistic Practice: Levi R. Bryant and Arran James

Posted by noir-realism on May 15, 2013
Posted in: neo-materialism, non-philosophy, OOO. Tagged: arran james, levi r. bryant. 18 comments

Both Arran James’s ideas on post-nihilistic practice and Levi R. Bryant’s Axioms of a Dark Ontology and …Some further Axioms have some interesting and suggestive ideas. What Levi presents is the Lucretian heritage that we see within modern reductionary naturalism with some modifications and extensions from critiques of this heritage as seen within Levi’s own philosophical project. His work starts with the basic dictum that “There is no meaning to existence or anything in the universe. Life is an accident and has no divine significance (though it’s obviously important to the living).”

Since this is from the first axiom and underpins every other axiom as a sort of figure/ground of the system, then it is here that the system either frees up or fails to meet the criteria of the system as a whole. The stipulation is that there is no meaning in existence nor is there any meaning in anything in the universe. Why not shorten this to the simpler: “There is no meaning.” Period. Why the need to constrain it to “existence” and the “universe”. To do so is to imply that existence or the universe in themselves are already implicated in certain human meanings that we must free ourselves from in order to accept this criteria. Meaning already implies “sense, import, and intent”. Which in itself already implies either a subjective or objective awareness or intelligence to provide such intentionality. So to say that that meaning doesn’t exist automatically refuses consciousness, awareness, or intentionality its qualification as an arbiter for judging the meaning or non-meaning of existence or the universe. Removing human judgment from the equation also eliminates any “sense” of meaning, aesthetic or otherwise, from the equation.

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An Odd Post

Posted by noir-realism on May 15, 2013
Posted in: dark ecology, non-philosophy. 9 comments

As a long time coder, a software engineer, and now architect of systems I’ve learned the art of detection as a part of the arsenal of tools I have needed to maintain things. Being a software detective is a somewhat dubious profession, but it seem analogous to much of what we do in our daily lives. What do we do when things break down? When your automobile goes on the blink, when your boss says: “Roger, you lost the account…”, when one of you kids comes to you with the vestiges of a favorite toy that lies in a thousand pieces looking up at you as the fixer, the woman/man of the hour, the one who has all the answers and will solve the mystery of this dark and fragile world.

Coming back to software I discovered long ago that most problems one faces are marked with traces, with subtle cookie crumb trails that lead back to the kernel of the issue. There’s a logic to failure. And debugging software algorithms becomes a process of elimination rather than of positive feedback. Yet, in the process of discovery we have to rely on specialized tools, apparatuses that can make it easier to trace down the illusive code lost in the maze of algorithms. Debugging tools that we can set up to observe the actual process of an algorithm as it works in collusion with and in relation to a multiplicity of others methods, functions, procedures, etc.

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