Category Archives: Philosophy

Land, Wilderson, and the Structure of Alterity

“[W]e have always already torn out the tongue
of alterity before entering into relation with it.”
–Land1)Nick Land, “Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest: A Polemical Introduction to the Configuration of Philosophy of Modernity,” in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2017), 55-80: 64.

In “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Wither the Slave in Civil Society?” Frank B. Wilderson III, expanding upon the positionality of the black body in civil society, takes a slight detour in an attempt to answer the question ‘why is the black body so radically Other, and thus a “sacrificial lamb”?’2)Frank B. Wilderson III, “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 9, No. 2 (2003), 225-240: 234. Following up by extending J.M. Coetzee’s work on the black-white discourse of the Cape of Africa, Wilderson notes that engagement with the Other – what we can call ‘alterior engagement’ – is not uniform. Where Europeans engaging with other Europeans, even in times of conflict and strife, could recognize a (minimal) shared bond – humanness –, Africans were not so lucky. For Wilderson, a minimum level of sameness was required for ‘productive’3)I use this term very loosely and with little to no positive connotations. engagement. Indeed, contrasting the KhoiSan and Xhosa peoples, Wilderson notes that while the Xhosa were “agriculturists” and thus provided European colonizers with a certain level of sameness insofar as they could recognize instantiations of labor and thus at least affirm an “historical play of difference,” the KhoiSan represented an “Anthropological scandal.”4)Wilderson, “Gramsci’s Black Marx,” 235, 234. Indeed, the KhoiSan peoples were

being[s] without (recognisable) customs, religion, medicine, dietary patterns, culinary habits, sexual mores, means of agriculture, and most significantly, without character.5)Ibid., 234.

Such a lack supposedly produced the conditions for abject violence as the Other was not only foreign, but wholly inhuman. Wilderson’s contention is, ultimately, that the incommensurability between the existence of the colonizers and the “condition” of the KhoiSan inevitably led to one end: “annihilation.”6)Ibid.

Is it correct to say that unknowability is the harbinger of violence, however? Does violence occur when we cannot understand the Other, or might it occur as we try to know the Other? Perhaps the imperative to synthesize the Other for the Self – that is to say, the imperative to (re)produce discourses – is an intrinsically violent action.

In Nick Land’s reading of Kant and Lévi-Strauss in “Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest,” the structuring relationship of alterior engagement is an attempt at synthesis. Drawing upon Kantian transcendental understandings whereby our relationship to the Outside is always mediated by structuring categories – “the unchanging manner in which things must be if they are to be for us” –, a desire for understanding and absolute knowability underpins what Land sees as the paradox of understanding Otherness through Sameness.7)Land, “Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest,” 67. Land traces this paradox back to the Enlightenment (while arguably the same issue arises in the Meno) and the tension between growth and homogeneity. For Land, the dream of the Enlightenment was “to grow whilst remaining identical to what it was, to touch the other without vulnerability.”8)Ibid., 64-65. Such a dream thus structured Enlightenment thought by attempting to know the Other through already existent (safe) conditions and therefore not engage with the Other on its own terms, but rather already bring it into relationship with the Self before learning about it. The Other is thus stripped of their Otherness as the Self presupposes, and indeed prescribes, Sameness in Otherness – the synthetic a priori becomes the Procustean bed of the Enlightenment.

Returning to tangible engagement with the Other, perhaps a new way of making sense of seemingly ‘irrational’ violence against the Other is not to appeal to the Other’s utter incommensurability – an odd form of victim blaming? – but to appeal to the Self’s fetish for control from a safe distance. Thus, violence against the Other can be understood not as being catalyzed by complete unknowability, but rather by a desire for total prior knowability and assimilation into existent régimes of knowledge. While it’s true that the tongue of alterity is always already torn out before engagement, the limbs of alterity are thus chopped and stretched after we’re confronted with the Other.

References

References
↑1 Nick Land, “Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest: A Polemical Introduction to the Configuration of Philosophy of Modernity,” in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2017), 55-80: 64.
↑2 Frank B. Wilderson III, “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 9, No. 2 (2003), 225-240: 234.
↑3 I use this term very loosely and with little to no positive connotations.
↑4 Wilderson, “Gramsci’s Black Marx,” 235, 234.
↑5 Ibid., 234.
↑6 Ibid.
↑7 Land, “Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest,” 67.
↑8 Ibid., 64-65.

On Peripheral Philosophy

[I]f there is to be a philosophy at all,
[it must be] withdrawn from all State influence.
– Arthur Schopenhauer1)Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Philosophy at the Universities,” in Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, Vol. 1, trans. E.F.J. Payne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 137-197: 180.

[E]verything interesting happens on the periphery,
outside the standard modes of “developed” existence.
– CCRU2)CCRU, “Communiqué Two: Message to Maxence Grunier (2001),” in CCRU Writings: 1997-2003 (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2017), (:)(:)-::(:), (:)(:).

In philosophy, the only thing that we are taught to
“expose” is a weak argument, a fallacy, or someone’s
“inferior” reasoning power.
– George Yancy3)George Yancy, “Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 19, No. 4 (2005), 215-241: 215.

Photo of the Academy Assimilating Radical Thought

While the history of anti-academic philosophy has its roots as far back as Ancient Greece and Socrates’ relentless mocking of the Sophists for whom truth was merely a fad destined to change during the next pay-cycle, its spectre has never disappeared.4)Schopenhauer, “On Philosophy at the Universities,” 153-154. Academic philosophy, further interlinked with the state in late-capitalism, has been the subject of scorn not only by those who remain unafraid of the monolith of the Academy, but also by those individuals who are always-already on the periphery. Despite becoming enlightened and supposedly shedding old religious dogmas that infected professional philosophy, we’ve managed to become nominally post-religious while replacing a visible system of control – retribution from the Church – with an invisible system of exclusion built around hegemonic attitudes and accepted norms. One must pass the Academy’s Turing test and never slip up.

Read the Rest

References

References
↑1 Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Philosophy at the Universities,” in Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, Vol. 1, trans. E.F.J. Payne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 137-197: 180.
↑2 CCRU, “Communiqué Two: Message to Maxence Grunier (2001),” in CCRU Writings: 1997-2003 (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2017), (:)(:)-::(:), (:)(:).
↑3 George Yancy, “Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 19, No. 4 (2005), 215-241: 215.
↑4 Schopenhauer, “On Philosophy at the Universities,” 153-154.

26+2, 1.308

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Musings on Hyperstition in Deleuze and Guattari

19 years before the CCRU and 0[rphan] D[rift>] collaborated for Syzygy and began to formulate (or be informed of) the concept of hyperstition, Deleuze and Guattari wrote the following:

[I]n order to give a positive meaning to the idea of a “presentiment” of what does not yet exist, it is necessary to demonstrate that what does not yet exist is already in action, in a different form than that of its existence. Once it has appeared, the State reacts back on the hunter-gatherers, imposing upon them agriculture, animal raising, an extensive division of labor, etc.; it acts, therefore, in the form of a centrifugal or divergent wave.1)Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 [1980]), 431.

Making DeleuzoGuattarian prose more anthropoid-friendly, one can read the above as saying that what is required for a constructive view of “presentiment” — sentiment = “a view of or attitude toward a situation or event,” pre = “previous to” — of the non-existent is a change in what it means to “exist.” As opposed to viewing existence as an immanent characteristic of a thing, we must think of existence as a realm of potentialities; “what does not yet exist is already in action.”

Take Marxian false-consciousness. You see an ad for a product at T2 that makes you think “I need that even though I didn’t think I did.” The Marx-Occultist account is that at T1, an “idea” — or more specifically, a recognition of a lack — was implanted in you as a sleeper-agent to, at a later time, trigger the actualization of your desire for a given product.2)I recognize that all talk of linear time is to make a transcendental error — to think of time in time –, but until Kantianism is complete, it’s the best we can do. See “Acceleration & Capital with Nick Land.”

Compare Deleuze and Guattari to the CCRU in “Lemurian Time War”:

Loosely defined, the coinage [hyperstition] refers to ‘fictions that make themselves real’.
[…]
In the hyperstitional model Kaye outlined, fiction is not opposed to the real. Rather, reality is understood to be composed of fictions — consistent semiotic terrains that condition perceptual, affective, and behavioral responses.
[…]
The hyperstitional process of entities ‘making themselves real’ is precisely a passage, a transformation, in which potentials — already-active virtualities — realize themselves.3)CCRU, “Lemurian Time War,” in CCRU: 1997-2003 (Falmouth: Urbanomic: 2017), [[:]][::]-::[:][:].

There’s no need to quote further as the link is clear. For Deleuze and Guattari, thinking “presentiment” — no doubt harkening back to Deleuze’s work on the virtual vs. the actual — requires a more liberal understanding of existence. Further, the State, an elaborate series of fictions,4)See Deleuze and Guattari on Dumézil’s theses, ATP pg. 424. acts upon “pre-State,” or “primitive,” social structures drawing them into relations of commerce and connection requiring centralization thus forming the basis of unicephalic control.

Thus, not only is the State holographically existent in “pre-State” societies, the potential for its rise always-already existing in dormant forms, but hyperstition as an idea pre-/post-/a-dates the CCRU and is holographically looming over Deleuze and Guattari.5)I owe the use of “holographic” to Meta-Nomad’s conversation with John Cussans. In fact, were one to excavate the “origins” of hyperstition, one would likely hit a time spiral from which there is no escape.

References

References
↑1 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 [1980]), 431.
↑2 I recognize that all talk of linear time is to make a transcendental error — to think of time in time –, but until Kantianism is complete, it’s the best we can do. See “Acceleration & Capital with Nick Land.”
↑3 CCRU, “Lemurian Time War,” in CCRU: 1997-2003 (Falmouth: Urbanomic: 2017), [[:]][::]-::[:][:].
↑4 See Deleuze and Guattari on Dumézil’s theses, ATP pg. 424.
↑5 I owe the use of “holographic” to Meta-Nomad’s conversation with John Cussans.

On Gender Acceleration and Its Critics

Halloween 2018 has been especially interesting for those of us embedded, either willingly or unwillingly, in the weird-theory milieu of Twitter. Land officially began the release of his book Crypto-Current: Bitcoin and Philosophy,1)For those interested in the project, I suggest reading Part 2 of “Ideology, Intelligence, and Capital: An Interview with Nick Land” on Vast Abrupt. and n1x finally dropped the long awaited Gender Accelerationism (G/Acc) Blackpaper on Vast Abrupt. Following the release of “Gender Acceleration,” some so-called “spicy” shots have been fired claiming n1x’s essay is less-than savory. Thus, in this post, I want to lay out my take on G/Acc and an interpretation of n1x’s argument and, in doing so, hopefully answer some of the criticisms leveled against it.

The first thing any reader should obviously do is go and read “Gender Acceleration: A Blackpaper.” After that, hit the jump and dive into the aphotic abyss!

Continue reading →

References

References
↑1 For those interested in the project, I suggest reading Part 2 of “Ideology, Intelligence, and Capital: An Interview with Nick Land” on Vast Abrupt.