Over and over as I read various theory-fictions the name that seems to hover like a bad nightmare, yet circulates through many texts like an invisible presence or corruption, an immanent field of jouissance – a bittersweet degradation is that of Nick Land:
Functioning as magical sigils or engineering diagrams hyperstitions are ideas that, once ‘downloaded’ into the cultural mainframe, engender apocalyptic positive feedback cycles. Whether couched as religious mystery teaching, or as secular credo, hyperstitions act as catalysts, engendering further (and faster) change and subversion. Describing the effect of very real cultural anxieties about the future, hyperstitions refer to exponentially accelerating social transformations.
The more complex a civilization, the more vital to its existence is the maintenance of the flow of Information; hence the more vulnerable it becomes to any disturbance in that flow.
– Stanislaw Lem, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub
Stanislaw Lem had that unique ability to combine humor and science, philosophy and pessimism in the right proportions: a recipe for collapse and disaster. His books are the type you’d bring along on a long voyage to Orion. Along with Shakespeare and the King James Bible his are the works I return to over and over again to keep the madness at bay. Shakespeare because I never cease to be amazed by his command of language and that unique ability to portray characters more alive than most people I meet in life. The King James Bible to remind me why I became an atheist, along with the fact that it too is one of those treasures of linguistic power and rhetoric that teaches you the power of narrative and its ability to shape a culture. Lem because he conveys the sense of what a cosmic pessimist is: the creature who combines the fatalist and the comic stance against the idiocy of the world.
How do you think a form of capital that is already thinking you?
– Matteo Pasquinelli
There’s only really been one question, to be honest, that has guided everything I’ve been interested in for the last twenty years, which is: the teleological identity of capitalism and artificial intelligence.
In accordance with Aion, only the past and future inhere or subsist in time. Instead of a present which absorbs the past and future, a future and past divide the present at every instant and subdivide it ad infinitum into past and future, in both directions at once. Or, rather, it is the instant without thickness and without extension, which subdivides each present into past and future, rather than vast and thick presents which comprehend both future and past in relation to one another.
Whereas Chronos was inseparable from circularity and its accidents— such as blockages or precipitations, explosions, disconnections, and indurations— Aion stretches out in a straight line, limitless in either direction. Always already passed and eternally yet to come, Aion is the eternal truth of time: pure empty form of time, which has freed itself of its present corporeal content and has thereby unwound its own circle, stretching itself out into a straight line.(Zizek, KL 1615-1627)
As he will remind us Bataille’s “thirst for annihilation is the same as the sun” (33).1 Yet, it is not a “desire man directs toward the sun, but the solar trajectory itself, the sun as the unconscious subject of terrestrial history” (33). This notion that the history of the earth is guided by a secret history of the sun, its dark proclivities and mythologies guiding the pathology of human civilization and the inhuman forms that shadow us. Is this not the truth we seem to fear? We seem to hide from the white death of its blinding gold mask, the eye of death that would turn us to ash if we were not protected by the ions swirling in the ocean of our atmosphere. That the ancients who sacrificed to the sun, who with obsidian or bone knives cut the living hearts of its victims from their chests and held them to the sun as to the great glory and splendor of heavenly sovereignty. That blood, and only blood; the violence of death could keep this great power churning in the heavens, this furnace of life, this engine of all creation: was this not at the heart of all ancient religion? Human life consumed in the furnace of the sun? Is not all economics an economy of the Sun? As Land will tell us:
Excess or surplus precedes production, work, seriousness, exchange, and lack. The primordial task of life is not to produce or survive, but to consume the clogging floods of riches – of energy – pour down upon it.
All these forms/Ideas/objects/things/entities, etc. we take to real or reality or actually the transforms or translated representations from within the Symbolic Order or artificial systems of signification by which we navigate the sea of hyper-chaos, thermospasm, or Aion around us. The long road to reason or consciousness – the two seemingly bound to each other as figure/ground, is this struggle within the virtuality of the ‘Night of the World’ (Hegel). Yet, we take this Symbolic Order of signs, meaning, and the actuality at face value to be everything – the end-all, be-all of our world, and assume wrongly that through philosophy and the sciences we can reduce this phenomenal realm of sense-data and translated information we receive from the brain as complete, when in fact it is but the tip of the ice-berg. What we think we know is but a minuscule representation, an abstraction out of and into the reductions of our translated neural filters.
In some ways Scott Bakker’s short post Intentional Philosophy as the Neuroscientific Explananda Problem succinctly shows us the central problem of our time: medial neglect. But what is medial neglect? The simplest explanation is that we are blind to the very internal processes that condition our very awareness of ourselves, our conscious mind. Scott’s point is that no one, not philosophers, not neuroscientists, no one can agree as to why this should be? No one can explain what consciousness is – much less how it emerges from the physical substratum of our brain. Philosophers of Mind have battled over the extremes of pure reductive physicalism (Davidson, etc.) and its opposite the irreductive world of the mind/body dualism of a Descartes. Yet, for all our advances in neuroscience and the technological breakthroughs in brain scan imaging, etc. we still cannot explain this indefinite terrain between brain and consciousness. Not that many have not tried. Opening my library or my e-book reader I have hundreds of books, journals, and publications devoted to just this one subject alone. (Yes, I’m a bibliomaniac, an endless, restless reader of anything and everything… madness? perhaps…)
“There isn’t the slightest operation, the slightest industrial or financial mechanism that does not reveal the dementia of the capitalist machine and the pathological character of its rationality {not at all a false rationality, but a true rationality of this pathology, of this madness, for the machine does work, be sure of it}. There is no danger of this machine going mad; it has been mad from the beginning, and that’s where its rationality comes from.
“Does this mean that after this “abnormal” society, or outside of it, there can be a “normal” society?
Gilles Deleuze: We do not use the terms “normal” or “abnormal.'” All societies are rational and irrational at the same time. They are perforce rational in their mechanisms, their cogs and wheels, their connecting systems, and even by the place they assign to the irrational. Yet all this presupposes codes or axioms which are not the products of chance, but which are not intrinsically rational either. It’s like theology: everything about it is rational if you accept sin, immaculate conception, incarnation. Reason is always a region cut out of the irrational-not sheltered from the irrational at all, but a region traversed by the irrational and defined only by a certain type of relation between irrational factors. Underneath all reason lies delirium, drift. Everything is rational in capitalism, except capital or capitalism itself The stock market is certainly rational; one can understand it, study it, the capitalists know how to use it, and yet it is completely delirious, it’s mad. It is in this sense that we say: the rational is always the rationality of an irrational. Something that hasn’t been adequately discussed about Marx’s Capital is the extent to which he is fascinated by capitalist mechanisms, precisely because the system is demented, yet works very well at the same time. So what is rational in a society? It is-the interests being defined in the framework of this society-the way people pursue those interests, their realization. But down below, there are desires, investments of desire that cannot be confused with the investments of interest, and on which interests depend in their determination and distribution: an enormous Rux, all kinds of libidinal-unconscious Rows that make up the delirium of this society. The true history is the history of desire. A capitalist, or today’s technocrat, does not desire in the same way a slave merchant or official of the ancient Chinese empire would. That people in a society desire repression, both for others and for themselves, that there are always people who want to bug others and who have the opportunity to do so, the “right” to do so, it is this that reveals the problem of a deep link between libidinal desire and the social domain. A “disinterested” love for the oppressive machine: Nietzsche said some beautiful things about this permanent triumph of slaves, on how the embittered, the depressed, and the weak, impose their mode of life upon us all.
One of many things I love about writing—that is, engaging in writing as an activity—is how it facilitates a discovery of connections between otherwise unrelated things. Writing reveals and even relies upon analogies, metaphors, and unexpected similarities: there is resonance between a story in the news and a medieval European folktale, say, or between a photo taken in a war-wrecked city and an 18th-century landscape painting. These sorts of relations might remain dormant or unnoticed until writing brings them to the foreground: previously unconnected topics and themes begin to interact, developing meanings not present in those original subjects on their own.
This is the notion that the collapse of the future upon the present event retroactively posits the event as a consequence of this future decision; therefore future information collapses upon the past in such a way that the causal system appears teleological (from our standpoint) when in fact it is retroactive (from the future decisional process). What we’re saying is that Time is weirder than we would like to believe… it’s as if from our perspective things, events, etc. have a purpose, a teleology; but, the truth is that it is much weirder: time is not bound to the arrow of some forward, linear movement, but can effect our present moment from the future… it seems time moves both ways: or, maybe time is a field and a force rather than as Kant thought a category internal to the Mind. Either way our conceptions of reality will have to change, because our views of Time are changed by this experiment and its successful implementation. The future has a power over us, a quantitative aspect to it that dictates our realities before we become aware of them as such: we are the result of these selective processes. This changes everything.
Addendum*:
Nick Land asks on Urban Future (2.1):Is there really a difference being noted here? to the statement below:… the collapse of the future upon the present event retroactively posits the event as a consequence of this future decision; therefore future information collapses upon the past in such a way that the causal system appears teleological (from our standpoint) when in fact it is retroactive (from the future decisional process). What we’re saying is that Time a weirder than we would like to believe … it’s as if from our perspective things, events, etc. have a purpose, a teleology; but, the truth is that it is much weirder: time is not bound to the arrow of some forward, linear movement, but can effect our present moment from the future …
flow 