The Dark Enlightenment

[American Dream]

I definitely have a fascination with the DeLeuzian current but don't claim to be that well versed in it all. I am particularly interested in anti-Psychiatry and communist praxis as it appears there but also find it all a bit beyond me (and/or I am a bit lazy and unmotivated). Milo I consider to be a contemptible character and Nick Land, the jury's not in for me but he's looking to be kind of a sketchy character.

I asked because I had the impression that you might be more positive than I towards Milo and Land and they seem mostly antithetical to Tiqqun and Agamben.

[liminalOyster]

I definitely have a fascination with the DeLeuzian current but don't claim to be that well versed in it all. I am particularly interested in anti-Psychiatry and communist praxis as it appears there but also find it all a bit beyond me (and/or I am a bit lazy and unmotivated). Milo I consider to be a contemptible character and Nick Land, the jury's not in for me but he's looking to be kind of a sketchy character.

I asked because I had the impression that you might be more positive than I towards Milo and Land and they seem mostly antithetical to Tiqqun and Agamben.

I'm certainly in no way alt-right sympathetic if that's what you are asking. I'm very interested in communism. So Milo's on par with Tucker Carlson or even Glenn Beck, to me at. I defended him on this board in the sense of his right to be understood as a survivor but find his pseudo-intellectual presentation almost totally discardable. Land has a long history before the Cathedral et al when he had a huge influence on 1990s Brit cultural studies doing alot of drugs (some linkage to your TIDS thread btw) and increasingly absurd performance before clearly breaking down mentally and disappearing to Asia. I don't think he's sketchy. I also don't care for his fascism but then I'm not convinced, given his trajectory so far, that he's really quite arrived at his endpoint yet. I guess I've just talked to alot of people who he really impressed twenty years ago - some of whom are big names in speculative philosophy today, and they have instilled in me a certain respect for him. He's not really *that* interesting. I just have a fondness for him.

[American Dream]

Thanks for the clarification- I didn't know exactly where you're at with all that and- as one might guess- people like Milo are anathema to me. As to the happenings of 20 years ago, I haven't explored it much here but COIL, Genesis P-Orridge, the OTO Caliphate, David Tibet and Current 93 etc. would be interesting subjects to explore.

Any idea what caused Nick Land to "go mad"?

[liminalOyster]

Thanks for the clarification- I didn't know exactly where you're at with all that and- as one might guess- people like Milo are anathema to me. As to the happenings of 20 years ago, I haven't explored it much here but COIL, Genesis P-Orridge, the OTO Caliphate, David Tibet and Current 93 etc. would be interesting subjects to explore.

Any idea what caused Nick Land to "go mad"?

I've heard convincing cases for speed LSD, ambition and a thousand plateaus, respectively. I imagine there's a big and less romantic role for disillusionment with and/or rejection of a young darling by the academy in that mix too.

ps. FWIW, I still enjoy following him on twitter which is recently more exuberantly Kek etc than I remembered: https://twitter.com/outsideness

[American Dream]

Another interesting subject is the far left/far right flip, generally...

[American Dream]

http://conversations.e-flux.com/t/why-i ... cenes/6329

Why is Nick Land still embraced by segments of the British art and theory scenes?
Mar 29



The group Shut Down LD50 Gallery has published a blog post about philosopher Nick Land327 and his continuing influence on certain segments of the British art world and academia. They write that Land's philosophy, couched in terms like "Human Biodiversity," is a dressed-up form of eugenics. They call on institutions that provide a platform for Land to their withdraw their support and to refuse to be complicit in the spread of far-right views. Here's an excerpt from the piece:

Nick Land advocates for racially based absolutist micro-states, where unregulated capitalism combines with genetic separation between global elites and the ‘refuse’ (his term) of the rest. It’s a eugenic philosophy of ‘hyper-racism’, as he describes it on the racist blog Alternative Right, or ‘Human Biodiversity’ (HBD). Here, class dominance and inequality are mapped onto, explained, and justified by tendencies for the elite to mate with each other and spawn a new species with an expanding IQ. Yes, this ‘hyper-racism’ is that daft – and would be laughed off as the fantasy of a neoliberal Dr Strangelove if it didn’t have leverage in this miserable climate of the ascendant far right. Regarding the other side, the domain of the ‘refuse’, Land uses euphemism to stand in for the white nationalist notion of a coming ‘white genocide’: ‘demographic engineering as an explicit policy objective’, ‘steady progress of population replacement’, is the racial threat he describes on the bleak webpages of The Daily Caller.

It is claimed Land has a superior philosophy of capitalism (‘accelerationism’ – you’ve heard of it – the topic of his New Centre course). But like the Nazis before him, Land’s analysis of capitalism produces and is sustained by a pseudo-biological theory of eugenic difference and separation: the redemptive productive labour of well-bred Aryans, for one, the escalating IQ of an inward-mating economic elite for the other. There’s no ‘philosophy’ here to be separated from Land’s far right ‘politics’; the two are interleaved and co-constituting. ‘More Capitalism!’ has always been the essence of Land’s supposedly radical critique, from his early philosophy at the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) to now. Hence it’s little wonder that his philosophy is inseparable from the racism that has always accompanied capitalism as an integral dynamic – from chattel slavery and the blood-bath of colonial expansion, to the passive slaughter of migrants in the Mediterranean and Black populations at the hands of the police, their mundane exposure to death calibrated to the crisis of the labour form. Land’s oh so virulent assault on the ‘Human Security System’, as he framed it in CCRU days, thrilling those who thought him the transvaluation of all values, is revealed to be the latest in a long and monotonous line of tropes that would disqualify the life of particular humans – the working class, minorities, and other ‘refuse’. For hyper-racists can rest assured, the elite’s ‘Human Security System’ is to be bolstered, by capital accrual and the proliferation of hard micro-borders.

That Land’s chosen people are internally homogeneous global classes of high ‘socio-economic status’ and not exclusively ‘white’ should not be the distraction he intends; the physical and psychological violence of racism has its own sorry architecture, but it has always closely partnered with the production and perpetuation of class privilege and pleasure. And inevitably, more traditional racist tropes of fear, hatred, and ridicule of Black people and Muslims, of ‘cucks’ (as the alt-right call those who would live without ‘race’ boundaries), feature with enough regularity in Land’s blog and Twitter (Outside in, @Outsideness, @UF_blog) that his ideas can merrily slop around on social media with the full gamut of racisms.

[liminalOyster]

AD have you read Fanged Noumena? IIRC Ray Brassier wrote the intro for the new edition. It's somewhat ironic to see that text used as the image accompanying this particular piece, given that it's a collection of writings mostly from twenty years ago (CCRU, etc) long before Land 2.0. I dig that book which makes little to no mention IIRC of anything in line with "hyper-racism."

Again, I'm not a Land fan boy and don't draw much from him intellectually but it's hard to read this kind of material you've posted as it is - at best - belies a wilful misunderstanding of it's very target - Land's goal is to accelerate extant systems of subjugation to a point of phase transition, not to sustain or bolster them. This doesn't interest me and I don't "agree" but it has at least an iota more intellectual integrity (if only as a cohesive philosophy) than those who frame his as a classic white nationalist afford to him.

[American Dream]

I can't claim to understand the inner workings of his mind, much less his intent but putting aside complete credulity I'd say he's entering an extremely murky zone, at best.

[liminalOyster]

I just find it all a bit amusing given how rarefied much of the material in FN is - fyi I don't mean that as a compliment to Land necessarily.

As a result is is practically a given that at least many of those protesting his involvement at the LD50 show are waving that book around in a manner that cannot be entirely unlike a down-home fundie Christian waving the Koran as a fetish object of this or that outgroup.

Here is a sample from the essay Fanged Noumena which is actually much more readable than his experimental writing at the time:

With Kant death finds its theoretical formulation and utilitarian frame as a quasi- objectivity correlative to capital, and noumenon is its name. The effective flotation of this term in philosophy coincided with the emergence of a social order built upon a profound rationalization of excess, or rigorous circumscription of voluptuous lethality. Once enlightenment rationalism begins its dominion ever fewer corpses are left hanging around in public places with each passing year, ever fewer skulls are used as paperweights, and ever fewer paupers perish undisturbed on the streets. Even the graveyards are rationalized and tidied up. It is not surprising, therefore, that with Kant thanatology undergoes the most massive reconstruction in its history. The clerical vultures are purged, or marginalized. Death is no longer to be culturally circulated, injecting a transcendent reference into production, and ensuring superterrestrial interests their rights. Instead death is privatized, withdrawn into interiority, to flicker at the edge of the contract as a narcissistic anxiety without public accreditation. Compared to the immortal soul of capital the death of the individual becomes an empirical triviality, a mere re-allocation of stock.

[American Dream]

To a certain degree, I would say that Nick Land did it to himself. Could he ever hope to recover a positive reputation now?

[American Dream]

http://conversations.e-flux.com/t/the-s ... onism/6418

“The Silicon Ideology”: A technological history of neoreactionism



Recently, a number of valuable essays have offered various histories of neoreactionism, including Shuja Haider's "The Darkness at the End of the Tunnel: Artificial Intelligence and Neoreaction13," published in Viewpoint, and "No Platform for Land: On Nick Land’s Racist Capitalism and a More General Problem8" by the Shut Down LD50 collective. (Also check out Yuk Hui's "On the Unhappy Consciousness of Neoreactionaries6," in the latest issue of e-flux journal.) Another piece that uncovers a key genealogy behind figures like Milo Yiannopoulos and Nick Land is "The Silicon Ideology" by Josephine Armistead, which traces modern neoreactionism back to the technology and ideology produced by Silicon Valley starting in the 1960s and '70s. Armistead's piece first appeared on the web last summer but it hasn't had the audiences it deserves. Read an excerpt below, or find the full text (in PDF format) here.

But all of this is ignoring the “alt-right” side of the culture. Let us, then, delve into the wretched hⅳe of chan culture and see how it birthed the alt-right. 4chan was founded by Christopher Poole, then 15 years old, under the name “moot”. It was based on the Japanese imageboard Futuba Channel (2chan) and originally intended as an imageboard for discussion of anime. By default, users would be afforded anonymity, and moderation was lax, only prohibiting clearly illegal content, upon the nature of which I shall not elaborate (and even that was gⅳen leeway). Originally (and, to an extent, today) 4chan had several cultures based on the board in particular and its topic of discussion. However, the anonymity and lack of moderation made its userbase quickly homogenize, especially in the random (/b/) board: shock-value centric humor (which, though originally supposedly ironic, in the vein of the use of fascist imagery by punk, metal, and industrial bands, quickly became earnest) and surrounding racism, misogyny, homophobia, and tansphobia was the centepiece of the culture, and so the userbase quickly became limited to young white cis straight men, who could show their investment in strutures of power. This made 4chan an excellent place for recruitment by white supremacists, patriarchs, &c &c, who at this time were centered on Daⅵd Duke’s website Stormfront, who quickly took over the boards /news/ and, later, /pol/. Furthermore, this culture lended itself easily to rage against “uppity” members of marginalized populations. With large numbers of anonymous masses who could easily be whipped into a rage, 4chan developed new harassment tactics. Most of these developed out of old troll techniques that originated on Usenet in the 1990s, but now instead of merely being used “for laughs” (though this was still the stated intention), these were largely weaponized against marginalized people in raids. In 2014, the biggest example of this occurred with the debacle known as GamerGate. In order to understand that, we must remember that traditionally in America, ⅵdeo games had been marketed to the audience that was likely to use 4chan, and engaged in the æstheticization of war and technology–but women, people of colour, and LGBT people always had played games and were a quickly growing audience for ⅵdeo games. Thus, in recent years, games that did not feature or emphasize the æstheticization of war and technology, or the objetification of women had grown in popularity and critical acclaim, much to the displeasure of the “traditional” audience of ⅵdeo games, who had called for serious critique not ten years prior in an attempt to legitimize their hobby (for this, see their engagement with the late Roger Ebert on the topic) but seemed unable to square with the ramifications of critique: they wanted legitimacy but not criticism, especially not social criticism, and they especially wanted to limit the demographics of ⅵdeo game players to themselves, and the range of ⅵdeo games made to those that participated heaⅵly in the æstheticization of war and technology.

Image: Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and neoreactionary.

[Wombaticus Rex]

To a certain degree, I would say that Nick Land did it to himself. Could he ever hope to recover a positive reputation now?

You mean "meth-addicted cyberfeminist," yeah? Verily, the man could have been Mayor of London if not for that Dark Enlightenment essay. Such a tragedy.

Onwards: http://jmrphy.net/blog/2017/04/11/on-tu ... -darkness/

For instance, a remarkable feature of Nick Land’s current writing is his obsession with coldness; I have never read anyone who so conscientiously endorses the absolute evacuation of care as a political project. Many on the left find this so evil they are resolutely insisting that if one so much as speaks his name with even one non-negative adjective in the same sentence, that very act is enough to force the speaker out of the publicly defined circle of “good humans” into that outside zone of cast-off inhumanity (consider that Land’s handle is @outsideness), via the same intellectual-social process I described above. If we self-servingly cast off human beings as if they are sub-human, we cannot then feign surprise and indignation if they say, “OK then! I’ll go off to become one with the superintelligent eugenically produced cyborg overloads you’ll be enslaved by in a couple of generations and I will laugh my ass off all the way to the singularity!” That’s the vibe I get when I browse Nick Land’s ongoing work, and when I look at the objective reality of runaway global finance and the tech sector, it does not seem implausible that something like this could potentially be underway. Of course I find that horrifying, which is why I am calling absolute bullshit on the people who say that it’s “too evil to engage.” On the contrary, it’s too alarming not to engage.

The more evil you think someone is, the greater should be your concern to ensure there is not the slightest chance they understand something better than you. If they are so evil, and they understand even one tiny thing you don’t, perhaps they are off using that edge in knowledge to engineer you out of existence. This suggests to me that when people say, “intellectual engagement with person X is prohibited,” what they are actually saying is “we are so afraid they might be part of the superintelligent cyborg army coming to enslave us that, even if they are literally preparing to, we do not want to know about it, even if there is a chance that we can still stop them!” And this is where I get off the train to nowhere, for this is where moderate respectable leftism (including most currently existing “radical” variants) converges with the most insiduous and cowardly conservatism. If there is some chance that hyperintelligent cyborgs are preparing to overtake humanity once and for all, because there is some chance that for generations now they have been operating on a model of the world we made it our pact to never consider, then I’m going to take a real look. Not everyone has to be comfortable doing so themselves, but at this point I think that any honest, decent, thinking being on the radical left will at least allow me to try.

I believe that currently, a dirty little secret on the the left is that for some people, the “left” is an agreement to protect each other’s right to look away from the most horrifying and potentially tragic realities of planetary life today, to (implicitly) secure amongst ourselves the last bits of interpersonal warmth available on the planet, agreeing to allow the rest of humanity’s descent into irreversible coldness. It helps to explain why, if you even approach these issues with the slightest indication of analytical coldness, you have to be ejected from the warmth cartel, for ejecting such existential threats is a condition of its survival. But I believe it has always been the vocation of the revolutionary left, properly understood, to risk its own survival on deploying just enough analytical coldness to engineer the unique machine that would take as an input the left’s unique material resource (warmth or energy via care) and produce as an output non-linear, systemic dynamics the ultimate equilibrium state of which would be peace and abundance for all. What that machine looks like is the question, and this is only a formal statement to illustrate the revolutionary left position today as an engineering problem. There are many reasons that have been adduced as to why such a machine cannot exist, and I do not pretend to offer responses to them here. I am only suggesting that any revolutionary left today, worthy of the name, would need to “solve for X,” as it were. The point of the engineering metaphor is not that everybody in the revolutionary movement will need to be an engineer, not at all; the point is only to show that any left-revolutionary project, to succeed, will have to solve this engineering problem.

What does this mean for revolutionary politics, in plain conversational terms? By putting all of our eggs in the basket of care and kindness, the radical left is now suffering from an engineering crisis it does not have enough engineers to even notice. In short, making revolution is a complex practical problem we are not solving because we are now generations deep in a long-term strategy of prohibiting people who are good at high-level problem solving but bad at being polite. Not to mention people who are good at creative and social openness, but bad at obeying rules. Thinkers of the respectable-radical left, people such as Paul Mason or Srnicek and Williams are selling a hope of technological super-abundance, but they are too sweet to tell any of their left comrades that all of the people you would need to actually produce that super-abundance are off building hyper-exploitative super-capitalism in part because they once went to an activist meeting and everyone treated them like fascists.

[MacCruiskeen]

Now that is an interesting and timely piece. It might be re-titled "Abolish the ignore function."

The more evil you think someone is, the greater should be your concern to ensure there is not the slightest chance they understand something better than you. If they are so evil, and they understand even one tiny thing you don’t, perhaps they are off using that edge in knowledge to engineer you out of existence.

That line, and much of Murphy's essay, could have been written by Brecht.

[dada]

Fascinating stuff, certainly. The discussion sings like a Siren for the attention, all the players thinking of new and exciting ways to capture the imagination. And I've finally learned what an accelerationist is. eh, doesn't seem so fast. That's false advertising. Like "Mr. Do's Wild Ride." It isn't wild, and you don't ride anything, you just dodge roller-coaster cars. False advertising.

Still, I don't see the case being made for anything, really. Engage the techno-fascists, ignore the techno-fascists. Engage the troll, ignore the troll. What kind of strategies are these? It reminds me of Khan vs Shatner. Shatner easily outsmarts Khan, because Khan is just a genetic superman from 21st century earth. His thinking is flat. Shatner is a 23rd Century starship Captain. His thinking is cubic.

You want to be Khan, or Shatner? I think the answer is obvious.

Good point about the left being bankrupt at this point, from top to bottom. It isn't just the liberals. It's all these -isms and ists, leaders and followers. On the right, too. Everyone yin-yanging. He said this, she said that, I define myself in relation to that. Good for you, make a buck, maybe some social capital. Ride the carousel, grab the ring. Great, kids, proud of you. Here's some cotton candy and a hot dog.

These academic bubbles are just too pretentious for me. A lot of fancy talk, saying things that could be easier said with plain talk and one tenth of the words. But then everyone would see what bullshit it all is. Existences would not be justified. Poor mom and dad paid so much for my education, what would they think.

You know what it is, politics, video games and other such hobbies are for well-rounded people. When discussing politics and video games becomes your profession, or your college major, or your top priority, I know there's something wrong with you. You are an imbalanced individual, and your thoughts and opinions reflect that, only making sense to others who are similarly obsessed and disconnected.

Intellectual fiefdoms. Ass-kissing, back-biting, jockeying for position in the pecking orders. Leaders and followers, just get out of my way. There are natural leaders, sure. You know Pete Seeger's song, "waist deep in the big muddy"? What it's all about.

I like the idea of a dark enlightenment, though. I've almost clicked on the thread just for the title. My idea of a dark enlightenment has nothing to do with the trendy meaning. Am I allowed to not give a shit? I humbly ask your permission, oh great internet status quo.

Ignore button, no ignore button. I'll post about it here, because does it really matter? To me, it seems inconsequential. Our time is better wasted on higher quality thought-distractions. Sure, this place isn't what it was ten years ago. Neither am I. Did spam ruin it? I don't know about that. The world is Rigorous Intuition now, if you haven't noticed. Maybe we're just having a crisis of identity.

And I don't know if the place is totally ruined. Bruno Borges the alien artist disappears, it registers nary a blip, here. We don't analyse the writing on his wall, or wonder what is in his books. We all know what is in his books. Louise Mensch does her shtick, we don't spend pages wondering if she's making fun of the Russia-ate-my-democracy left, or trolling the trolls, or whatever. We simply don't care. I say we've grown as a message board. And anyway, when the place has run its course, and we can't stay the hand of the fate that cuts the thread, I hope we have the grace to die, uh, graciously. Knowing that we were part of something... I don't know. And we can carry the warmth and magic around, a part of us, forever. You can. I won't. I travel light.

[liminalOyster]

Now that is a good Nick Land riff. Cremation of Care, indeed. Thanks Wombat.