Pill Pod 93 - Nick Land (Exclusive)
Added 2022-09-16 12:00:07 +0000 UTCLeave it to Nick Land to bring out our philosophical difference! He's quite the online douche canoe these days but this paper is worth a read at any rate.
Comments
You're totally fine man. I have the opposite problem. I can only function in school but break down in work environments. Thanks again for the conversation and the resources. I like that the website has the word gonzo in it. I'm a big Hunter Thompson fan.
Walker Goff
2022-11-19 21:42:42 +0000 UTCHere's the page on unconditional accelerationism that I mentioned. https://xenogothic.com/2019/03/04/a-u-acc-primer/
Ichabod
2022-11-19 13:47:48 +0000 UTCJehu had his own web site called the Real Movement which I think is still active at libcom.org. There is a very rich online community of accelerationist philosophy that is being published outside of academic institutions. If you look for a page called the Unconditional Accelerationist Primer, it has links to all kinds of different web sites related to this. Also, you're right about me not being in academia. I've never studied philosophy in an institution. I've never been able to focus in classes and my schizoaffective disorder was coming out in my late teens so that didn't help. But I like to study philosophy regardless. Maybe my perception of universities is inaccurate. I'll stop speculating about that.
Ichabod
2022-11-19 13:43:42 +0000 UTCThe Jehu articles appear to have disappeared but here are the links on the Internet Archive https://web.archive.org/web/20131220054451/http://www.gonzotimes.com/2013/05/clever-monkey-versus-the-accelerationists-1/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130825193918/http://www.gonzotimes.com/2013/05/clever-monkey-versus-the-accelerationists-2/
Ichabod
2022-11-19 13:36:55 +0000 UTCOh yeah that Wolfendale debate was a disaster. Technically even. I don't pay much attention to interviews other than Murphy's. It was the only quality one. Everyone else treats Nick like shit even when he's being polite I feel.
Walker Goff
2022-11-18 18:38:59 +0000 UTCMaybe you're not in academia and I misread you. If so, I'm sorry.
Walker Goff
2022-11-18 18:34:28 +0000 UTCI'm curious why you say no one with a career would want to analyze his work. I'd argue no one with a backbone. I attend a private university so there's a bit more leniency in the topics and characters I can pursue. I doubt it's impossible even at a public university if done with care. It's just that no one wants to do the work. But who needs another fucking class on Derrida?
Walker Goff
2022-11-18 18:32:22 +0000 UTCIs that the guy he mentioned on Justin’s interview? Do you have a link by chance? I’d love to check it out. Jehu is who I meant.
Walker Goff
2022-11-18 18:05:50 +0000 UTCThanks for the recommendation. I mean I’m an academic so I could give a fuck about his public persona. From what I’ve seen he’s pretty chill. I just think all the bullshit Twitter stuff is taken out of context because he likes to troll and irritate people. But regardless: to claim that Fanged Noumena, an edited volume is the only book of his is either stupid or dishonest. To claim that Land doesn’t get Deleuze obscures the fact that Land made an effort to distance his own work from Guattari. And like you said to pick Machinic Desire as the essay to analyze is a straw man. He has much more cogent work than that. I’m a leftist through and through but I think it’s complete bullshit that your public persona overdetermines any reception you might receive academically or intellectually. So to see people I admire fall into that was frankly nauseating.
Walker Goff
2022-11-18 18:03:29 +0000 UTCI personally disagree with a lot of Land's conclusions myself but the groundwork that he has created is invaluable. Unfortunately his persona has made it very unfashionable to talk about him favorably so anyone with a reputation to preserve isn't going to do that. If you want to hear something really frustrating, listen to his recent debate with Peter Wolfendale. It's an absolutely embarrassing moment for Wolfendale, who is obviously thinking only of his own public image the entire time. Jehu has written an actual fair critique of Land's accelerationist work (from a Marxist perspective) which I enjoyed reading. I wish I could find more content like that, because I really do think there are valid arguments to be made against his philosophy, but nobody with a career wants to read it closely enough to make them.
Ichabod
2022-11-18 16:24:01 +0000 UTCI deleted my angry comment and will keep it to this: none of you did Nick Land justice as a theoretical or academic figure. I was pretty let down by this one. It was unfair and frankly kind of lazy. There are factual misrepresentations and theoretical misunderstandings. Pills, you actually agree with Land on a lot of things, but you frame the discussion through your misunderstanding of his material, so you assume he takes a position opposite yours. I doubt either Erik or Victor understood the material at all. Or if they did, it was not treated charitably. I was very excited for this episode, and yet I find myself pretty sorely disappointed. I feel like zero effort was put into researching this episode because none of you like Nick Land. Oh well. Is what it is.
Walker Goff
2022-11-18 16:11:56 +0000 UTCYou're 100% right on that. He is doing with language what he thinks capitalism, darwinian evolution, and aritificial intelligence are already doing: expression without a subject, action without agency.
Walker Goff
2022-11-18 14:55:20 +0000 UTCApparently not, because “Fanged Noumena was Land’s only book.” Cough cough, uh—Thirst for Annihilation?
Walker Goff
2022-11-18 14:41:11 +0000 UTCThank you! Exactly. He literally says in the Justin Murphy interview that the liberation he cares about is the means of production from "the human security system."
Walker Goff
2022-11-18 14:38:26 +0000 UTCAlso, your characterization of Land as someone who believes in an escape from capitalism is entirely incorrect. Land actually believes the same thing you do, that there is no possible way to break away from capitalism. When he speaks of escape or outside, he has emphasized that it isn't an escape for us from capital, but an escape for capital from us. His entire work with accelerationism is based on the idea that capitalism is trying to liberate itself from human structures.
Ichabod
2022-11-10 14:31:19 +0000 UTCHere's my opinion of why Land wrote this paper the way he did: he is trying to demonstrate, through his writing style, the way that cybernetic culture operates on an accelerated level. He has said elsewhere that culture today happens faster than it can be analyzed, that philosophy is inherently too slow for the current world. I think, in moving from point to point without extrapolating anything, Land is trying to demonstrate how this works. If you try to dissect a point that he makes, he has already moved onto something else and you've only wasted your own time. If you want a rigorous philosophy paper from Land, he has other work that does that, but this specific paper is theory-fiction and critiquing it as if it's a straightforward philosophy text is unfair imo.
Ichabod
2022-11-10 13:35:44 +0000 UTCSo like a positive feedback loop builds the activation energy (or non-energetic threshold) for a phase transition? I've never thought of something like the switching on of lactation and other qualitative changes in physiologies working that way "under the hood" so to speak but that makes total sense. Fascinating thanks for sharing!
Rockwell Gulassa
2022-10-21 12:21:58 +0000 UTCInteresting that pills said he felt post-coital after reading the Machinic Desire. The two positive feedback loops I was made to memorize as a biologist were lactation and orgasms. In both cases, you're trying to cross a chemical threshold exponentially higher than resting state. The positive feedback loop is required to arrive at that threshold after which there is completely unique physiology
horch dog
2022-09-28 23:30:05 +0000 UTCthe good avatar or the bad avatar... or the very, very bad avatar based on the good avatar?
Gonzalo Pacheco Covili
2022-09-21 02:17:57 +0000 UTCAlso interested in hearing Matts thoughts on Yarvin. Seems like his area of expertise.
Socialswine
2022-09-20 10:53:06 +0000 UTCTerminator VS Avatar could be cool too
Socialswine
2022-09-20 10:51:58 +0000 UTCFascinating
Khemith
2022-09-20 02:41:41 +0000 UTCInteresting!! Georges Bataille up next?
stoorzender
2022-09-19 14:48:20 +0000 UTC(Erik from 55:00) I agree that scientists have ‘terrible metaphysics’ but not because they have excoriated metaphysics but rather they have so have so deeply partaken of the Platonic koolaid that they can no longer see their metaphysics as metaphysics. I mean US particle physicists are searching for ‘fundamental’ particles in an increasingly fundamentalist society. They keep dreaming up crazier theories in a desperate attempt to rid their theories of indeterminacy, spending billions on colliders that underperform while the planet cooks. Sabine Hossenfelder in “Lost in Math: How beauty leads physics astray” tells us that many physicists are selecting theory based on the beauty of the math and that the development of non testable theories amounts to a rejection of scientific method. For a quick take check her YouTube stuff on why multiverses are religion not science.
Peter Haggar
2022-09-19 01:47:39 +0000 UTCAs a member of the commonwealth Australia is in a similar situation to Canada in having the Queen (or the King now I guess) as the head of state. We have a Governor-General who is appointed by the monarch on the recommendation of the PM as the royal representative in Australia. The Governor-General is technically the one who dissolves parliament to start the election process. Unlike Canada however we have had this cause issues. A constitutional crisis occurred in 1975 when a left leaning PM was sacked by the Governor-General and replaced with the opposition leader. Basically what occurred is that the Labor party, led by Gough Whitlam, was elected in 1972. They were a pretty progressive government doing things such as implementing universal health care, free university, establishing legal aid programmes etc. They controlled the lower house, but not the senate. This left the Liberal party in opposition but still able to stop the government from funding a lot of its policies, which they did. The deadlock led to some back and forth politicking of calling early elections, invoking obscure constitutional laws and whatnot. Eventually it culminated in Whitlam having a meeting with the Governor-General to request he dissolve the senate for another election. The Governor-General instead fired Whitlam and replaced him with Malcolm Fraser, the Liberal opposition leader. Fraser then called another full election and won. Nothing really changed after the election in terms of constitutional law, what did change was that the Labor party dropped any pretense of being anti-capitalist. When they returned to government under Bob Hawke they started instituting all the neo-liberal reforms the governments of the 80’s were all excited about. It’s an interesting story. Some of the conflict the Whitlam government had tied into tensions with ASIO (the Australian version of the CIA), at one point the attorney-general raided the ASIO HQ which was pretty wild. Generally people put most of the blame for the crisis on the Governor-General John Kerr. He ended up resigning, leaving the country and never looked back.
Christmas Jones
2022-09-17 10:12:22 +0000 UTCVictor's critique of "beautiful soul" syndrome around 1: 12: 40.
Steve B
2022-09-17 08:08:32 +0000 UTCDamn, at 1:17:00, I'd agree, people don't know what they want. I personally don't know what I want. I feel like the arc of humanity has always been not knowing what we wanted. And in a very weird way, I see capitalism as the natural birth and manifestation of that insecurity, and that only something like habitual adherence to say the untying of all habitual desires or knots, clearing the table once again, will give us space to actually answer that question (8 fold path enters the chat... 😂)
ageOfBumFires
2022-09-16 21:39:21 +0000 UTCLoved all the discussion about feedback loops! 🙏 My background is controls and systems engineering for about 13yrs now, and it seems like the definitions being applied here (from cybernetics, which I'm not really too familiar with, I deal mostly with motion control, classical control) hold up just as well in the engineering sense, where the same control circuit or loop can fluctuate between positive or negative feedback, depending on the time variant nature of the control compensator and the "plant," just a matter of a 180deg phase shift cumulatively occuring within the entirety of the open loop. Positive feedback is really an unstable singularity, where as in negative feedback there is a whole spectrum of "stability" and "responsiveness." I wonder if yinz have come across terms like disturbance rejection or stability margins, where marginal stability will produce an oscillation about the control command at a specific frequency, while *un*stable is effectively that amplitude ramp up to infinity of the positive feedback loop. It seems like the ideal State (as in *the* State) control would be of a linear time invariant system under negative feedback. I see all of the user data collection to be akin to feedforward techniques, where the controller has such intimate knowledge of it's plant (here being us, the "users") that it can get the desired response without use of it's control compensator, basically with no self imposed time delay from its own control compensator. Basically the post control society, in the sense of no longer needing corrective *agents*, jails or enforcers, in order to get people to do what you want them to. The plant is fully known, and fully knowing it's response through systems modeling, built upon empirical data of poking and prodding, impulse responses and step responses, it is guaranteed to react in a predictive manner.
ageOfBumFires
2022-09-16 21:14:55 +0000 UTCGreat stuff thanks
Some Person
2022-09-16 20:49:49 +0000 UTCPills gonna read CCRU lemurian time war and go deeeeep into chaos magic and hyperstition vids
Zack Klug
2022-09-16 18:18:54 +0000 UTCOh my Erik’s node in a system 🥵
Zack Klug
2022-09-16 18:02:48 +0000 UTCYea this might be inaccurate, erik had found a secondhand source but we didn't find any direct references.
Plastic Pills
2022-09-16 15:56:13 +0000 UTC*Me an American*- “22°?!?!… oh wait they are Canadian…”
Waya Dalimber
2022-09-16 14:47:40 +0000 UTCWhere are you getting the idea that Land has disowned his earlier works? In his interview with Justin Murphy he emphasized pretty strongly that this isn't true.
Ichabod
2022-09-16 14:10:10 +0000 UTCAs an Irishman, I'm delighted that Charles III is finally recognised as King for the first time since 1766. Long live the Stuarts!
Fiachra O Raghallaigh
2022-09-16 12:12:30 +0000 UTCFanged Pills
Zack Klug
2022-09-16 12:01:50 +0000 UTC
