The Dark Enlightenment

[General Patton]

NRx should get co-opted, stolen and manipulated as often as possible & as soon as possible. Worked for "Bob."

Say, that's a great idea.

This is one time when puppet theater IS appropriate. Make sure Mike Anissimov is the power bottom.

[Wombaticus Rex]

But I do see where you're coming from. I see your ideology masquerading as anthropology. And I miss the days when this board was run by a Canadian socialist rather than a US libertarian with a foible for Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land.

LMFAO, just caught this. I guess one unexpected virtue of "Moderation" is that insults to my actual person disappear into a heuristic blindspot. That's probably more attributable to Twitter, but still.

I think that's the first time I've been called a Libertarian, but at least it's better than Salafi Jihadist, or Democrat. I'm commenting on it here because I think it says something about NRx that it could be framed as such a uniquely contagious -- and damning -- vector of thought. I don't see how anyone could not be fascinated by such an open-source subculture, which enables conversations between Catholic traditionalists, neoprimitive anarchists, and autistic atheist history savants. And White Nationalists, Libertarian cranks, and meth-enabled misanthropes.

And for the record, Nick Land is way more interesting than Moldbug. For that matter, so is Curtis Yarvin. I like Land because his mind is tuned to extraplanetary levels -- sure, his pronouncements can be terrifying and callous and I bet he's not much fun at parties (unless they're at my house) -- but it's because he's out in orbit looking down from space. He also says shit like this:

If NRx isn’t unconditionally fact-oriented, I’m not sure why it isn’t just another ideological life-style option.

This is, again, why I recommend people engage and remix this stuff rather than fleeing in terror from it. It's wide open right now. And it freaks out the normals like whoa.

[MacCruiskeen]

Well, WR, I'm glad to hear you're not a libertarian. I take it back, and I apologise for the insult without reservation. Sorry. And I'm saying that to someone who banned me for a week after calling me "a snarling asshole", which proves I am a saint.

So I now have no clue what your politics are. (I don't expect you to provide a label, or a list.) You did say once that you were not a socialist, which disappointed me. Maybe you're an Ulster Unionist or something, or a Whig. Or an unusually wily Trot. It's an enduring mystery, like the Pyramids.

As for Land: where to start? Fanged Noumena, which he wrote in his youth, gets slagged off a lot for being allegedly incomprehensible, and it also gets called a self-indulgent coke-fueled splurge. It is coke-fueled, and above all speed-fueled.* I think it is a brilliant and disturbing (because eerily plausible) attempt to imagine Capitalism itself from the inside, as if it were literally a living thing (a Thing, the Thing, an unspeakable eldritch horror) with an actual -- pitiless, ravenous -- consciousness of its own, but no soul. Fanged Noumena should have won the Lovecraft Award, or the Nobel Prize for Economics, or preferably both. For all its gnarled density, it is weirdly lucid and illuminating. I would place it among a handful of books that state something real and new, but only at the cost of scarring the reader for life. (Fritz Zorn's Mars is another one, from a very different but equally hard-to-name genre, somewhere between meditation, speculation and tormented autobiography. Beckett's The Lost Ones comes to mind, too. These are all harrowing reads, all windows on hell, in their very different ways.) Anyway: Land describes the implacable enemy of life and love unforgettably. What I can't stand about him is that he likes it. He has a strong masochistic streak, which matches well with his sadism. He has gazed into the abyss and begged it to swallow him whole. He has "made friends with his cancer" and then gone the whole hog and married it.

Much more could be said about him. And yes, I have read a lot of his recent cold cacklings. I might return to this thread.

*Maybe his strict training-diet and spartan lifestyle (black coffee, amphetamines, techno, Deleuze, insomnia and logorrhea) really did enable him to break through the chrysanthemum into the mind of the monster Capitalism, the immortal self-transforming machine-mouth-plus-anus. The Cosmic Snarling Asshole, which he now worships.

I wish he had moved on to mushrooms and DMT. Then he could have exchanged notes with McKenna about those playful elves and basketballs instead. But he made his choice, or it made him.

[Lord Balto]

So a few 25-40 year old nerds decided to LARP mid 90's cyberpunk-esque usegroup tropes parred with Anders Brevik pan-anglo mumbo jumbo writings. It's like TED Talks for crypto libertarian fascists...using
the same masturbatory mouth flapping as their smarmy PC trendoid counterparts. "Hey I just found my older brother's Boyd Rice tapes, copy of 2600 magazine and Turner Diaries...just smoked a fat blunt
and watched The Matrix...I think I'll make a manifesto on tumblr...it'll be like the Men's Rights section on Reddit, mixed with a dash of 4chan and trans humanism fan fics"

snooze.

Not to mention "Dark Enlightenment" is an oxymoron.

Of course, that sounds oh so much sexier than "Let's return to the Dark Ages."

[Wombaticus Rex]

What I can't stand about him is that he likes it. He has a strong masochistic streak, which matches well with his sadism. He has seen the abyss and begged it to swallow him. He has "made friends with his cancer".

I don't disagree one bit. I also own both volumes of Adam Parfrey's "Apocalypse Culture" compilations and watch a couple hundred horror films any given calendar year.

I brought my aside to this thread -- there's several NRx discussions afoot here, all pretty good -- because "The Dark Enlightenment" was specifically his. And I think the biggest reason I keep up with Xenosystems is precisely the cosmic horror stuff rather than the neocameralism or Rushdoony Reconstructionism design specs.

I found this riff especially profound:
http://www.xenosystems.net/cosmological-infancy/

There is a ‘problem’ that has been nagging at me for a long time – which is that there hasn’t been a long time. It’s Saturday, with no one around, or getting drunk, or something, so I’ll run it past you. Cosmology seems oddly childish.

An analogy might help. Among all the reasons for super-sophisticated atheistic materialists to deride Abrahamic creationists, the most arithmetically impressive is the whole James Ussher 4004 BC thing. The argument is familiar to everyone: 6,027 years — Ha!

Creationism is a topic for another time. The point for now is just: 13.7 billion years – Ha! Perhaps this cosmological consensus estimate for the age of the universe is true. I’m certainly not going to pit my carefully-rationed expertise in cosmo-physics against it. But it’s a stupidly short amount of time. If this is reality, the joke’s on us. Between Ussher’s mid-17th century estimate and (say) Hawking’s late 20th century one, the difference is just six orders of magnitude. It’s scarcely worth getting out of bed for. Or the crib.


For anyone steeped in Hindu Cosmology – which locates us 1.56 x 10^14 years into the current Age of Brahma – or Lovecraftian metaphysics, with its vaguer but abysmally extended eons, the quantity of elapsed cosmic time, according to the common understanding of our present scientific establishment, is cause for claustrophobia. Looking backward, we are sealed in a small room, with the wall of the original singularity pressed right up against us. (Looking forward, things are quite different, and we will get to that.)

There are at least three ways in which the bizarre youthfulness of the universe might be imagined:

1. Consider first the disconcerting lack of proportion between space and time. The universe contains roughly 100 billion galaxies, each a swirl of 100 billion stars. That makes Sol one of 10^22 stars in the cosmos, but it has lasted for something like a third of the life of the universe. Decompose the solar system and the discrepancy only becomes more extreme. The sun accounts for 99.86% of the system’s mass, and the gas giants incorporate 99% of the remainder, yet the age of the earth is only fractionally less than that of the sun. Earth is a cosmic time hog. In space it is next to nothing, but in time it extends back through a substantial proportion of the Stelliferous Era, so close to the origin of the universe that it is belongs to the very earliest generations of planetary bodies. Beyond it stretch incomprehensible immensities, but before it there is next to nothing.

2. Compared to the intensity of time (backward) extension is of vanishing insignificance. The unit of Planck time – corresponding to the passage of a photon across a Planck length — is about 5.4 x 10^-44 seconds. If there is a true instant, that is it. A year consists of less the 3.2 x 10^7 seconds, so cosmological consensus estimates that there have been approximately 432 339 120 000 000 000 seconds since the Big Bang, which for our purposes can be satisfactorily rounded to 4.3 x 10^17. The difference between a second and the age of the universe is smaller that that between a second and a Planck Time tick by nearly 27 orders of magnitude. In other words, if a Planck Time-sensitive questioner asked “When did the Big Bang happen?” and you answered “Just now” — in clock time — you’d be almost exactly right. If you had been asked to identify a particular star from among the entire stellar population of the universe, and you picked it out correctly, your accuracy would still be hazier by 5 orders of magnitude. Quite obviously, there haven’t been enough seconds since the Big Bang to add up to a serious number – less than one for every 10,000 stars in the universe.

3. Isotropy gets violated by time orientation like a Detroit muni-bond investor. In a universe dominated by dark energy – like ours – expansion lasts forever. The Stelliferous Era is predicted to last for roughly 100 trillion years, which is over 7,000 times the present age of the universe. Even the most pessimistic interpretation of the Anthropic Principle, therefore, places us only a fractional distance from the beginning of time. The Degenerate Era, post-dating star-formation, then extends out to 10^40 years, by the end of which time all baryonic matter will have decayed, and even the most radically advanced forms of cosmic intelligence will have found existence becoming seriously challenging. Black holes then dominate out to 10^60 years, after which the Dark Era begins, lasting a long time. (Decimal exponents become unwieldy for these magnitudes, making more elaborate modes of arithmetical notation expedient. We need not pursue it further.) The take-away: the principle of Isotropy holds that we should not find ourselves anywhere special in the universe, and yet we do – right at the beginning. More implausibly still, we are located at the very beginning of an infinity (although anthropic selection might crop this down to merely preposterous improbability).

Intuitively, this is all horribly wrong, although intuitions have no credible authority, and certainly provide no grounds for contesting rigorously assembled scientific narratives. Possibly — I should concede most probably — time is simply ridiculous, not to say profoundly insulting. We find ourselves glued to the very edge of the Big Bang, as close to neo-natal as it is arithmetically possible to be.

That’s odd, isn’t it?

[guruilla]

So I now have no clue what your politics are.

Wait? You mean people have politics here? I feel like I stumbled into the wrong room at the party.

Parapolitics = outside politics...

Regarding NRx, this is the first I heard of it. As always my kneejerk response is "displacement activities work better when they allow for a feeling of global importance." People with time on their hands and too much internal angst to process; what you going to do in the Age of Leisure as the Big Crunch Approaches? Plot a Movement. That said, I haven't spent more than ten minutes reading this thread & skipped the cosmology.

Eugene Thacker writes about how the horror genre as we think of it today, that reached its apotheosis with Lovecraft, arose in tandem with The Enlightenment, Age of Reason. So are we looking at the Jekyll-Hyde polarity on a global scale?

The thread that runs through Lovecraftianism and into modern occultism is evidenced by Kenneth Grant's material, and the neo-thulean movement, the return of the repressed/revenge of the id-nerd/4chan-fury, and so on, such as is overtly on display at Red Ice and Golden Dawn in Greece. Scratch the skin of every Liberal and what bleeds is a Fascist. Fun times. Not a good time to have "politics," IMHO.

[Belligerent Savant]

.
Quite eloquent, guruilla.

Love this:

As for Land: where to start? Fanged Noumena, which he wrote in his youth, gets slagged off a lot for being allegedly incomprehensible, and it also gets called a self-indulgent coke-fueled splurge. It is coke-fueled, and above all speed-fueled.* I think it is a brilliant and frightening (because eerily plausible) attempt to imagine Capitalism itself from the inside, as if it were literally a living thing (a Thing, an unspeakable eldritch horror) with an actual -- pitiless, ravenous -- consciousness of its own. Fanged Noumena should have won the Lovecraft Award, or the Nobel Prize for Economics, or preferably both. It is weirdly lucid and illuminating. I would place it among a handful of books that scar the reader but never leave them. (Fritz Zorn's Mars is another one, from a very different but equally hard-to-name genre, somewhere between fact, fiction and autobiography.) Land describes the implacable enemy of life and love unforgettably. What I can't stand about him is that he likes it. He has a strong masochistic streak, which matches well with his sadism. He has seen the abyss and begged it to swallow him. He has "made friends with his cancer".

There is much more to be said about him. And yes, I have read a lot of his recent cold cacklings. I may return to this thread.

*Maybe his months-long diet of black coffee and amphetamines and Deleuze really did permit him to break through the chrysanthemum into the mind of the monster Capitalism, the immortal self-transforming machine-mouth-plus-anus. The Cosmic Snarling Asshole.

I wish he had moved on to mushrooms and DMT. Then he could have exchanged notes with McKenna about those playful elves and basketballs instead,

Also, from a review of Fanged Noumena:

The following sentences, selected at random from an essay entitled “Meat,” speak to the difficulty of the book and the prevalence of religion therein: “Monotheism arrives as a break from ancestrality effected by a transcendent instance that overcodes all genealogy, and severs the ambivalent integrity of taboo. As the Abrahamic God of monopolism decays into Christianity and swallows its mysteries, shamanic voyage is transferred to a transcendent Christ figure, the fruit of an autogerminal sublime incest, with whom communion passes through a second-level ritual cannibalism.”

Land’s prose is heavy with technical jargon, and sometimes plays with formal and stylistic devices that many will find off-putting, indulgent, even masturbatory. Whether the vocabulary and style Land deploys are apt to his subject matter and indicative of philosophical innovation, or whether it is so much onanistic nonsense, is a question that readers should address through their individual experiences.

I will readily admit that I've yet to take a deep dive into Land's work, but that tiny sample sentence above screams of self-indulgent onanism, though I've grown increasingly intolerant of semi/non-coherent gesticulations of late. Must be getting old.

[Wombaticus Rex]

I will readily admit that I've yet to take a deep dive into Land's work, but that tiny sample sentence above screams of self-indulgent onanism, though I've grown increasingly intolerant of semi/non-coherent gesticulations of late. Must be getting old.

That earlier stuff was too D&G derivative to me and I always felt like Manuel De Landa did a much better job of taking that A Thousand Plateaus rhizome and running with it. As for inhabiting Capitalism as Malevolent God, there's a very dense and fascinating "horror novel" -- a misnomer for something more complex than Danielewski's House of Leaves -- called Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials by Reza Negarestani.

Cyclonopedia is theoretical-fiction novel by Iranian philosopher and writer Reza Negarestani. Hailed by novelists, philosophers and cinematographers, Negarestani’s work is the first horror and science fiction book coming from and written on the Middle East.

'The Middle East is a sentient entity—it is alive!’ concludes renegade Iranian archaeologist Dr. Hamid Parsani, before disappearing under mysterious circumstances. The disordered notes he leaves behind testify to an increasingly deranged preoccupation with oil as the ‘lubricant’ of historical and political narratives.

A young American woman arrives in Istanbul to meet a pseudonymous online acquaintance who never arrives. Discovering a strange manuscript in her hotel room, she follows up its cryptic clues only to discover more plot-holes, and begins to wonder whether her friend was a fictional quantity all along.

Meanwhile, as the War on Terror escalates, the US is dragged into an asymmetrical engagement with occultures whose principles are ancient, obscure, and saturated in oil. It is as if war itself is feeding upon the warmachines, leveling cities into the desert, seducing the aggressors into the dark heart of oil ...

At once a horror fiction, a work of speculative theology, an atlas of demonology, a political samizdat and a philosophic grimoire, CYCLONOPEDIA is work of theory-fiction on the Middle East, where horror is restlessly heaped upon horror. Reza Negarestani bridges the appalling vistas of contemporary world politics and the War on Terror with the archaeologies of the Middle East and the natural history of the Earth itself. CYCLONOPEDIA is a middle-eastern Odyssey, populated by archeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers, Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, corpses of ancient gods and other puppets. The journey to the Underworld begins with petroleum basins and the rotting Sun, continuing along the tentacled pipelines of oil, and at last unfolding in the desert, where monotheism meets the Earth’s tarry dreams of insurrection against the Sun.

Ol' Eugene Thacker was a big fan, I recall.

Not to mention "Dark Enlightenment" is an oxymoron.

Of course, that sounds oh so much sexier than "Let's return to the Dark Ages."

Well, it's a winking paradox more than unknowing self-parody. It's Neo-Reactionary because what separates it from your garden variety grumpy "Traditionalist" Reaction is the realization there is no accessible, better model to retreat to. The notion that Capitalism has devoured the Commons; the Garden is gone.

Really, the fact you can have arguments about "What NRx Means" that are so arcanely self-referential they're more like experimental exercises in counterpoint harmony than actual, like, arguments is probably what keeps me interested. That and all those sweet, sweet anime memes.

[FourthBase]

Just as I probably vigorously agree with 5-10% of any given Daily Worker, I similarly agree with at least 5-10% of the Moldbug POV.

[tazmic]

It's the only entertaining politics I'm aware of. And old Nick is pretty good with the words...

Everything of value has been built in Hell

It is only due to a predominance of influences that are not only entirely morally indifferent, but indeed — from a human perspective — indescribably cruel, that nature has been capable of constructive action. Specifically, it is solely by way of the relentless, brutal culling of populations that any complex or adaptive traits have been sieved — with torturous inefficiency — from the chaos of natural existence.

All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher’s yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of the bloody grinding mills of selection, either, but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible preservable trait, and then — still further — of the unavowable horrors that ‘fitness’ (or sheer survival) itself predominantly entails.

We are a minuscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite.

~ Nick Land

[guruilla]

Seems like he'd make a lively podcast guest.

[MacCruiskeen]

.

Love this:

Thanks, Savant. I had to go back and edit it because I had sloppily misdescribed Fritz Zorn's book. I then took the opportunity to revise, slightly, my characterisation of Land. I wanted to get it a little righter, because I don't want to spend much more time commenting on him beyond this page. There is a war on that includes a war for our attention, and we'd all do well to choose our priorities carefully. But I will reply to WR later.

[tapitsbo]

Land making his transition from Marxism seems a bit like a preacher who who begins to worship the devil.

Especially given the vast range of deep structures considered in these parts, it can be tempting to wonder what subterranean powers capitalism serves as a golem or egregore for.

Then we have the idea that the moment capitalism subsumes everything else is the moment it collapses, lol.

The idea that figures like Yarvin and Land are there to derail, not to accelerate, is also a fun one. As it becomes more and more difficult to discuss all sorts of issues in the public sphere, these containers like neoreaction are going to suck more and more conversations into themselves

On the other hand, it's obvious that there are a considerable number of groups that have been living neoreaction, so to speak, while bloggers speculate on what it would be like. Not to suggest that LARPing isn't a powerful determiner of future events - on the contrary, it seems that is a potent one

Also love how NRX idol Lee Kwan Yew was originally a Fabian protege! Just wow

[Belligerent Savant]

.

I will readily admit that I've yet to take a deep dive into Land's work, but that tiny sample sentence above screams of self-indulgent onanism, though I've grown increasingly intolerant of semi/non-coherent gesticulations of late. Must be getting old.

That earlier stuff was too D&G derivative to me and I always felt like Manuel De Landa did a much better job of taking that A Thousand Plateaus rhizome and running with it. As for inhabiting Capitalism as Malevolent God, there's a very dense and fascinating "horror novel" -- a misnomer for something more complex than Danielewski's House of Leaves -- called Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials by Reza Negarestani.

You've provided some intriguing follow-up for me to dig into during my spare time. I'll need to withhold further review of Long until dedicating some more time to his work, not to mention De Landa as well (among others), before I can spout further commentary on this 'Dark Enlightenment' genre with any level of clout.
Appreciate the intel, WR.

.

Love this:

Thanks, Savant. I had to go back and edit it because I had sloppily misdescribed Fritz Zorn's book. I then took the opportunity to revise, slightly, my characterisation of Land. I wanted to get it a little righter, because I don't want to spend much more time commenting on him beyond this page. There is a war on that includes a war for our attention, and we'd all do well to choose our priorities carefully. But I will reply to WR later.

Indeed. I'll have quite a bit of catching up to do on this topic before shoving my mug in this thread again...

[MacCruiskeen]

Just got sent this. It's extraordinary in more ways than one and I think it belongs in this thread:



---

WR; I still owe you that reply but it'll have to wait a bit. Distracted by the trolling last night and in a rush right now. Land's cosmological riff: very interesting. I have a couple of things to say about it. Also about him and Terence McKenna (one could see Land as the photographic negative to McKenna's developed picture).