C.J. Cala is the author of numerous “schizonautic” texts that are centered on exploring the relativity of holistic reality. NOTE: All of these texts can be downloaded and read for free on Google Books or Google Play.
Glad youre back! 🎉 gonna nom nom this series. Have you read Gerald Vizenor? I would love to see you do a series on his work. He bridges/uses po-mo thought with indigenous knowledge and story telling. Really good stuff! Highly recommend Mannifest Manners, and his fiction Bearheart.
Great to see this, I actually read through this book not too long ago. I was intrigued as the promise that this book seemed to make was that it would in some way go beyond prior philosophies of the transcendental or speculative materialism but as you say here, it seems to just end up recapitulating the same structure just under slightly new terms and metaphors, which is perhaps something that can be said about a lot of work in philosophy. I am not sure if it only comes up in the second part, but one reason that Catren might justify this book as a step forward so to speak, is its relationship to decolonisation and the decolonised subject. The decolonising aspect of Vivieros de Castro's work is an important justification for his philosophical endeavours despite other aspects of his thinking not living up to the hype. Similarly Catren talks about basically continuing the program of German Idealism, but this time around a decolonised subject rather than a European colonial subject etc. He seems to be envisioning a philosophy for a new utopic world order or society, and his re-encounter with religion seems to suggest he is not just working at the level of transcendental critique but consciously ideologising too, almost preaching. I didn't see it doing anything more than trying to refit German Idealism into a decolonising politics, although I am not sure what else could be achieved in terms of this type of philosophy at the moment. It is interesting that he returned to religion/religious language though as this seems to be a recurring trend in philosophy, Zizek, Negerastani, Land even. Will be interested if you find anything more in the 2nd half. Always interesting to hear your thoughts, thanks.
Pleromatica, or Elsinore's Trance by Gabriel Catren (Analysis - Part 1) 1. How can one describe Gabriel Catren's Pleromatica? Stephane Mallarme's poem titled "A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance" links the immanent with the transcendental. We immanently throw dice while chance itself rests Outside our control. Modern-day society must be submerged into a phenoumenodelic solution. "Delic," which is included in the word psychedelic means "to manifest," advocated extensively by Timothy Leary (though "delic" has a specific definition as we'll later address). Phenoumenodelic, of course, plays on the Kantian concept of phenomenon and noumenon. The modern world is disenchanted to Catren, lost in a black nihilistic abyss. Immanent scientific progression has killed the transcendental God. Men seek nostalgia or else get lost in the hubris of Promethean heroism. The transcendental it seems is no longer taken seriously. Can science merge with the spiritual (much like Owen Barfield did when relying upon Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy, with the exception, of course, that it is given over to no father sky-god)? Can we move beyond capitalistic and materialistic consumption while society collapses, mimicking Mallarme's shipwreck, where every thought we have forces us to throw the dice. Catren asks if science and truth can be untangled from the technical ways it has been appropriated by our Debordian consumer spectacle of commoditization. The transcendental father god is akin to Hamlet's father (a ghost) that haunts us in an Elsinorian drama. In Elsinore castle, we throw the dice, where chance open us up to endless pluralities and Deleuzian multiplicities, allowing us to become Other as a form of escape, accepting the nihility of modern-day science. That, or we suffer Hamlet's fate in this conspiratorial castle, haunted by the ghost of our dead father, unable to become anything, trapped to our ORGANized body of being. Like the particle-wave duality in physics (which is a metaphor for the immanental-transcendental duality), the wave function must collapse to arrive at any measurable outcome. Unlike Hamlet, we cannot remain haunted. The immanence of Spinoza and the transcendentalism of Kant must be spliced in this schism. The ideal and real, the finite and the infinite, the subjective and objective, etc. must be synthesized. In a way, we are leading a double-life as an ambivalent being, producing James Joyce's "Allmaziful Plurabilities," as noted in Finnegans Wake (relying upon the process of Deleuzian difference and repetition as opposed to Derridean deconstructionism to manufacture multiplicities). This will allow the Gnostic Pleroma to self-manifest. The phenoumenodelic is the foreground to the immanental background of life's painting. To Catren, the alchemic wedding of these opposites (the transcendental and immanent) will counterbalance each other's errors. The neo-Gnostic idea of salvation from an immanent and fallen world led Pascal to depreciate the sciences. Meanwhile, Spinoza would see God as the one immanent substance (the atheistic god of nature to which most physicists speak of). To Catren, Spinoza is quite dogmatic, though, in his own right, since nothing can exist outside this one substance. To Catren, the transcendental nature outside of us is revealed by our immanent experience. Since all opposites rely upon each other's existence, the pleroma becomes self-revealing, denoting the fullness of revelation. Though Catren doesn't bring up Taoism, the idea of yin operating within yang and vice-versa (or how yin cannot exist without yang) comes to my mind. In this shipwreck we are facing, we are not to be like Nimrod and construct the Tower of Babel, symbolic of ORGANization as well as the regimes of signs. Moving nomadically causes the Tower of Babel to topple; and, with it, men are reduced to speak babble, forcing them to become barbarians (as brought up by the Gruppo di Nun), where common language is lost, relying upon diagrams and lines of flight to the outside as a means of escape. In this sense, Mallarme's shipwreck is not a disaster. To Catren, it throws us into the phenoumenodelic solution, which is compared to the sea in which our shipwreck is situated. Avoiding order and tradition, it is an atonal daydream of hallucinogenic droplets. Catren references Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson's Eight-circuit model of consciousness (which was also used as a plot device in the anime Serial Experiments Lain, connecting the real world to the wired, or the virtual to the real). James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow are commonly quoted. To Catren, the pleroma is thus not stationary or fixed or tonal or an endpoint to reach. It is in constant Deleuzian flow, endlessly becoming Other, never frozen or ORGANized, but operates akin to the BwO (an ungrounded, unhierarchical multiplicity of phenoumenodelic data). It is akin to Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic's schizo-database in some sense. The pleroma is the phenoumenodelic insubstance (since it cannot be ORGANized or fully immanent enough to be a substance) from which all finite experience unfolds and from which all immanent experience is extracted. Hegel would criticize Spinoza since Spinoza's one substance did not include the subject (Spinoza's god or substance dealt with objective nature as Spinoza was a well-known altheist). Like Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's Cannibal Metaphysics (which was discussed in Culp's Dark Deleuze), we can occupy the Other's point of view. Thus, the immanent must take the view of the transcendental and vice versa.
2. Since we have several inside of us in the Deleuzian sense, the I and not-I dichotomy develops. The finite can expand to infinite perspectives. Alpha & Omega does not bring about a Final Judgement, but, like Land's OAsys, it opens us up to multiplicity (it is thus never-ending and openly spiraling). To Catren, we're dealing with subjective abstract experiences. Using Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, the subject/subjective is incorporated into Spinozian immanence. Immanental phenoumenodelia is the pleromatica. However, it is different from Husserl's transcendental phenomenology since it incorporates Kant's noumenon. These are what he calls the "abstract cuts" of the "concrete pleroma" (i.e, the abstract dimensions of experience), which feature affective fields, sense/perception fields, rational/logos fields and social/political fields. These cuts can, of course, cut into (Dedekind) other fields, thus diagonzalizing through pluralities and multiplicities (Cantor). This is a delic nature as opposed to a logical nature. To quote Catren: "This subordinates the transcendental constitution of experience to an immanent institution of constitutive subjectivity." Philosophy is thus to expand upon the abstract human experience. We're looking to the infinite ideas (i.e., transcendentals) that guide abstract forms of thought and practice (like truth, beauty, etc.). Through the delic, we're addressing experience to its full concreteness (a philosophical "stonedness" (drug joke)). The ORGANon of these experiences still acts horizontally and through multiplicity (i.e., rhizomatic). It is not sutured (Badiou) to abstract forms of exploration but transgresses beyond them and human experience. Pleroma does not presuppose a logical or theoretical thesis on the ultimate nature of the real. It is tribal multiplicities of new worlds, opening the doors of perception (Huxley), mediating the transcendental limits through abstraction. As Althusser claimed, philosophy has no object (i.e., it's not objective). As Alexander Grothendieck warned, mathematics works within set limits; instead, we are expanding perspectives by diagonalizing the subject (Cantor). It is not a Theory of Everything (no closed unity or totality). Like Badiou noted, the "Event" is a multiple (akin to Set Theory, which again relies on Dedekind and Cantor (who are basically Set Theory's founders)). With Kant's transcendentalism, experience is "correlative" to finite and subjective phenomenon through experience. This proves problematic for science since the noumenon cannot be known and that science is supposed to be impartial and objective. Science thus uses invariants (basically, the phenomenon won't change even if the subject's perspective does). This makes science rather limited. Like how Dublin is seen from a variety of perspectives in Joyce's Ulysses as noted by Robert Anton Wilson (RAW), we are introduced to a relativity of truth (much like how each side of a die (numbers 1-6) is equally true when viewed at from a different perspective). All six perspectives are true concerning the die. Like Mallarme's poem, the throw of the dice thus involves a Deleuzian-like multiplicity of perspectives. Why confine yourself to a first-person or third-person perspective when we can have a multitude of perspectives? More perspectives thus broaden experience. This is still immanent, however, since the transcendental cannot be viewed. We are immanently adding dimensions of perspective (drilling through multitudes of Deleuzian stratum or layers) that do not transcend the human experience. Science itself is all-too-human in this sense, as Kant noted. Scientific tools (e.g., a microscope) can expand upon our limited human perspectives (what Catren calls a reductive transcendental framing). But, again, the human or anthropocene is just one perspective. Like RAW noted, it seems we all exist in separate realities (looking through our own "reality tunnels"). But we must not abstract things to the point that they all become the same. To Hegel, only uneducated people think abstractly since abstraction can, of course, be dialectically resolved through negation. In short, we exist on two planes (a known empirical one and an unknown transcendental/noumenal plane). We may move nomadically empirically while remaining sedentary on the noumenal plane. Again, it is an ambivalence (like particle-wave duality) between a human and inhuman perspective (inner versus outer). How does one thus transcend beyond the transcendental and abolish the chance noted in Mallarme's poem? To do this, we must alter our perspective and tune-in (Leary) to different forms of perception. This is the speculative landscape, whereby everything is flattened. Again, flattening can be seen in reference to flat diagrammatical lines of escape to the outside (Catren even uses 0-location and 0-type to describes this (most likely in reference to Land's zero)). Like in evolution, mutations allow us to move along different stratum (again, think of Deleuzian strata and Becoming Other through the BwO). Like the "ignorant schoolmaster," the teacher does not teach; rather, they allow students to learn (even to the point that they wil learn things even the teacher does not know), allowing the outside to open up. This is the 2nd level or stratum, where the teacher is no longer needed since the student (who is no longer just a receptacle of knowledge) can offer its own input and, like a cybernetic feedback loop, can alter its own outcomes. When A.I. is able to alter its own dataset, it, too, will be able to alter its own output. Thus we go from learning, to meta-learning, to meta-meta-learning, etc., whereby algorithms regulate themselves without an external advisor. Thus, we now have a self-regulated system. Again, this self-learning is the self-revelation of the pleroma. The problem, as addressed by Kant and later by Meillassoux in After Finitude, is that the transcendental would determine the limits of human experience, not allowing us to go beyond a certain point. Simply put, we are trapped to phenomenon and cannot know the noumenon. It therefore limits (rather than expands upon) experience. To break outside this, man would need to jump over his own shadow. We can throw the dice but we cannot escape the contingency of transcendental perspectivism or chance. We could take a "leap of faith", or, as Hegel did, we can eliminate the shadow (i.e., human finitude) and jump into the sun (as Heidegger noted).
3. Like how Copernicus changed our perspective to a heliocentric one, it also freed us from the limitations of a geocentric model (a human-centered model). Similarly, Kant's noumenon is based on a humanistic ideal (tied, of course, to Christianity). It encompasses the transcendental essence of man. To Catren, however, since the "a priori structure of experience is linked to an a posteriori product," transcendental constitutions are linked to immanental institutions. The Kantian a priori is thus existentialised, transformed in Schelling's swirling vortex (from First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature). Remember, Schelling basically reduced the noumenon to the role of the unconscious (as we brought up with Taubes, Voegelin, and Jason Jorjani). This keeps it open to cybernetic circuits and feedback loops through subjective impersonal experience, which, like evolution, lead to change over time. We can also rely on kinship (as discussed with Land's prohibition of incest) to engage with the outside. To Catren, if the transcendental has a limit we cannot surpass, it is only because of a lack of imagination. The non-human (or post-human) may give us new insights that alter everything. So, here, we see the break from Land, who (as we discussed in Cute Accelerationism) embraces the limitations (or unknowability) of the noumenon, which leads us towards an inescapable singularity point. To keep things always becoming Other (like how Amy & Maya advocate for in their work), all noumenon is reduced to Schelling's unconscious, where the transcendental [eschaton] is immanentized (again, as Jacob Taubes and Eric Voegelin noted). Transcendental idealism and immanental realism become complimentary to Catren. Like Deleuze, the Plane of Immanence is immanent to transcendental subjectivity. All can thus be augmented gnostically and alchemically, where the gnostic rebel revolutionizes like Copernicus, going beyond dogmatic constraints like Kantian limits, which are to be transgressed as we head, again, down the road of history. Catren talks then about the transcendental structure of numbers systems and their limitations. Pi and 'e', for example, are transcendental numbers. Catren notes Lacan, too, since he uses imaginary numbers to represent the Imaginary Realm, making "holes" through mathematical "limits" of a function, where points "do not exist." He also talks about asymptotes that approach (but can never reach) zero, as well as going "hyperbolic" on an accelerative curve. Again, we know in philosophical terms what these metaphorically mean. Using the transcendental to look for new solutions, Catren notes Kant's "pure intuition" and Milton Friedman's "relativisation of the a priori." Still, irrational and imaginary numbers make it difficult, hindering immanentization since the speculative relies upon transcendental reason. In Kant's mathematics, new concepts (like irrational and imaginary numbers) cannot be represented and are thus denied from creation. In terms of aesthetics, Lyotard's "allusive strategies" intend to "point/show" (Wittgenstein) what cannot be said, taken to transcendental limits. James Joyce did the same, deconstructing and dismembering Ireland's language (infecting it, cannibalizing it [Viveiros de Castro], queering it, and vomiting it back up), getting outside the incestuous colonial perspective brought about by England. The transcendental is deformed or changed so that its limits are differentiated and thus displaced, allowing something new to be expressed, opening the doors of perception (Huxley). If this all sounds New-Age-like and gnostic, it's because it is, always attempting to immanentize the transcendental limits (which is the major theme of this channel and my works, going back, again, to what Taubes and Voegelin noted). Hippy drug-induced perceptions and shamanic trance states can bring about these experiences, traversing the interzones (Burroughs). Catren thus concludes that Kant's distinction between phenomena and noumena is inadequate since the noumenon cannot account for any of these experiences. He cites Konrad Lorenz, noting on how what might be noumenal to one subject or species may be phenomenological or knowable to another. He thus diagonalizes phenomenon and noumenon through his concept of "phenoumenon." He does this again through comparing real and complex numbers as well as Grothendieck's functor to show how different sets of solutions can be found in different domains. Again, these speculative extensions open us up to more transcendental possibilities and potentialities through a parallax structure that would have been otherwise unavailable. He then talks of a transcendental landscape that is free from colonial, progressive, and Eurocentric restrictions. Science must be absolved to Catren from this European monopoly. This includes expanding upon language instead of forcing everyone to assimilate to one (which, of course, kills their language and culture in the process). Again, this links to the multiplicity of babble that occurred once the Tower of Babel fell. As Walter Benjamin noted, we need to take on the task of the translator. We need an absolute (Hegelian?) language that does not foster one privileged language, but which contains a multiplicity (Derrida), linked to Grothendieck's functor. The reason why works like Finnegans Wake are untranslatable is because they have already encapsulated so much of the linguistic outside (i.e., it is written in an absolute language). Catren then gives an example of how a coin's phenoumenal properties might be solely phenomenological to some subjects while noumenal to others (thus being problematic since we need scientific invariance for validation purposes). Phenoumenal is thus a twofold form (empirical and transcendental). it is a revelation (self-revelation of the pleroma) that appears differently (through Deleuzian multiplicity) as phenomenon. The appearance of the phenomenon changes when the subjects changes its empirical state (again, think of particle-wave duality here). The phenoumenon is compared to Graham Harman's "real objects" (from Object-Oriented Ontology). The phenoumenon is thus never exhausted by any phenomenal manifestations. The phenoumenon is revealed (self-revelation) by way of filtered objects. Similarly, "real objects" withdraw from being directly accessed and manifest as "intentional objects." In this speculative stance, every form of experience is both made possible and limited by a transcendental frame.
4. Catren looks at transcendental "viewzones" by relying upon the notion of a "sheaf," which is a tool used for tracking sets of data of a topological space. He basically uses a Venn Diagram or set theory model, where a phenoumenon is considered a phenoumenal sheaf when all integrable profiles are integrated in a unique manner (i.e., a sheaf condition). This sheaf offers experiential depth for subjects in wider viewzones on the transcendental landscape. Again, this is a subjective shared multiplicity of experiences towards the immanent outside. Finite experience is always the experience of the phenomena constituted out of the phenoumenal by the transcendental faculties of the subject. Self-revelation is thus the pulling of finite phenomenological experience from the phenoumenodelic solution. Again, it is an immanent outsideness we are engaging with. All can thus be reoriented by a speculative techne. Like RAW and Leary in Prometheus Rising or the 8-circult model of consciousness, like a TV, we can be tuned-in or tuned-out to certain channels or frequencies. What is now tuned-in can be tuned-out and we can channel surf. This is a form of neurological programming. To Catren perspective must be varied and altered to allow for others to come in and shape new horizons. This immanent transcendence is the heart of the pleroma (i.e., experiential depth). All is thus "inter-" and between or betwixt, caught in diagonalization and new virtual becomings, leaving us to a somewhat larval stage (as Deleuze noted). While abstraction is needed, it can make rationality pathological without concreteness (i.e., lost in deals). Like the virtual and actual, there is balance and double articulation between the two (like the claws of the lobster god). It is a two-way street of "abstract forgetfulness" and "resolved memory." As Deleuze noted in his work on Foucault, memory is not contrasted with forgetting, but with forgetting about forgetting. In other words, in dual representation, always remember something is being forgotten or left out. Through this morphogenetic force of the immanent outside, we can mutate into new life-forms. This, however, is not a Promethean project. To Catren "Prometheus radicalizes his separation to appropriate divine force and thus embody ontotheological patriarchy." Catren cites Saint Paul in the second epistle to the Thessalonians and brings up the concept of the katechon, which keeps the anti-Christ from coming. The Promethean figure is the anti-Christ who sets himself up in God's temple. And, again, we discussed the katechon in relation to Jacob Taubes, Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben with reference to the "state of exception." Taubes and Schmitt actually communicated extensively in letters. The Promethean lawless one affirms its own sovereign power of technics to destroy and create new worlds. By taking the place of God and assuming His role or identity, he encloses himself in finitude; and, thus, the lawless one becomes the fallen one, unable to get outside. Again, I feel like I am reading Taubes or Voegelin, only from a more modern philosophical perspective. So Catren describes Prometheus as one who immanentizes (he brings the blazing source of life to man from the gods). He empowers man through technical fire. At times, he is unbound, curing man of his finitude through techno-scientific progress via Shelley's Frankenstein, igniting a pantheistic quarrel between Goethe and Jacobi. In truth, Prometheus is both bound/unbound. So there is an ambivalence and deconstruction needed here. The problem, as Hans Jonas noted (who Catren brings up and who've we've discussed) is when Prometheus is definitively unbound. Armed with technical-scientific power and deconstructionism, he denies subjective finitude (e.g., we know Jorjani's dislike of Kant's noumenon). As Simone Weil noted, unbinding Prometheus from his rock is akin to saving Jesus from the cross. Immanent life is a finitude that should not be forgotten.
5. "Unbound Prometheanism longs for a liberation from finite life rather than the liberation of finite life" as Catren notes. Prometheus thus should not be saved. He shall remain bound to his rock. Technoscience, of course, can be oriented by the infinite idea of truth. Capitalism and imperialism, of course, betrayed the Promethean gift. Should we use science to accelerate to our own end or should we die discreetly without so much drama? Technics can alter our transcendental structure, indistinguishable from magic as Arthur C. Clarke noted. According to RAW, the brain is a self-programmable computer. Maybe we just need a new program or reality tunnel? Like horizontal shamans, we are mediums between inner and outer, diagonalizing and inhabiting inter-worlds through a multiplicity of perspectives. Speculative operations don't remove transcendental framing, but loosen it to allow for more phenoumenondelic freedom. To Goddard, speculative ethics balance between (1) the finite and psychotic Promethean subject that seeks infinity and to overcome the transcendental limit and (2) the neurotic that submits to patriarchal order, symbolic order, and the law (Jorjani might calls these the traditionalists). Speculative ethics balances between these two extremes through the phenoumenodelic experience of an existential nature that has no preset or fixed essence that prevents it from becoming Other (it must be like plastic instead of stone in some sense). The ultimate subject integrates empirical, transcendental, and speculative perspectives from the well of the phenoumenodelic solution and integrates them to the nth-level, enveloping every possible life-form on a plane of immanence. Yet, Mallarme's Maitre was not just about sublating chance. Languages codifies and cuts in the pleroma, acting as a web, where there are holes in the symbolic order. The Maitre's grimoire is tied to grammar. Remember, grimoire, glamor, and grammar are all linked in magic, as we discussed in some of our writings. Like Finnegans Wake, we approach an absolute language. As Badiou noted, the poem and the matheme are the two extremes of language. To quote Catren: "philosophy must progressively construct a linguistic organon intended to tune in to the wholly scripture of the phenoumenodelic revelation." Obviously "wholly" is a play on holy. Through speculation, like light, we are refracting and reflecting, engaging in "transcendental reflection" and "refractive meditation." Like Narcissus, we reflect on our image and refract when entering the narcotic waters of the phenoumenodelic solution. Narcissus is thus baptized, acting as the talisman for phenoumenodelic magic just as the ichthys splashes in the sea. Again, we brought up Narcissus before in relation to Herbert Marcuse in some of our Epimetheist videos. Transcendental reflection and speculative refraction is prefigured in totemism, where incest is prohibited in totemic clans. All thus becomes "inter-" related, producing hybrids (again, a Land reference to the prohibition of incest). Similarly, one does not eat the totem (or, to Freud, the father). Eating one's own is incestuous (it's why Land likens eating the eucharist to incestuous cannibalism). To Viveiros de Castro, Tupi cannibalism allows for transmutation, where "I" becomes Other. By eating the Other, they become you. You are what you eat, after all. Alterity is thus a view of the self. Homi K. Bhabha discusses this as well in terms of ambivalence and hybridity, where the colonizer sees himself in the colonized, which produces anxiety. Life is pure devouring (the treats! The omnomnomadology of the vore machine in Cute Accelerationism). Cannibalism is fine as long as we eat the other (taboo thus becomes totem). Capitalism prohibits incest to Land, resulting in inter-totemic cannibalism. However, to Catren, if, before encountering otherness, we already know its relation to us, it gets obliterated in advance, which is a paradox of enlightenment. Thus, the flaw of Kant's aperspectival (noumenal) synthesis of the outside. Thus, the need to rely on speculative variations through which the other is experienced. The materialistic view of matter is reduced to ma[t]ter (i.e., mater or mother). Matter thus allows ones to mutate their own transcendental structure. Like a mother, we are always procreative, producing or birthing new things into being, thus differentiating and creating multiplicities. Instead of accessing the noumenon, we differently mediate the transcendental limits through immanent experience. Thus, all is self-transformation where we are born again, acting as our own mothers and fathers in the Deleuzian sense of difference and repetition. You are to be different from what you currently are, always a being that is becoming. As the Puppet Master said to Motoko in the first Ghost in the Shell film: "Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you." Thus, we embrace infinity and endless difference while living in the finite.
Isn't this about arrested development, sexual infantilism? It's dangerous to try to pretend you're much younger than what you are chronologically. Adept artistic and spiritual souls retain those rejuvenated energies and they're pretty well documented in scripture.
Some people seem confused, so I added this note to summarize some Deleuzian concepts for purposes of clarification. Hope this helps! ^_^ NOTE: Desire to Lacan stems from a form of lack. D&G believe, instead, in desiring machines, where we do not desire from a form of lack, but as a means to become Other. Psychoanalysis = Freudian repression of desires. Schizoanalysis = liberation of desires for productive purposes (i.e., becoming Other through deterritorialization and reterritorialization). Though this is discussed more in A Thousand Plateaus, D&G are not fans of root or tree like structure (which represent top-down hierarchical levels of ORGANization). They prefer rhizomatic models that operate akin to web or node-like structures of interconnected multiplicities, which lead to further forms of differentiation through the process of Difference & Repetition (which goes against Identicality/Identity or figuratively "fascist" systems of order and ORGANization). Trees are highly ordered or ORGANized while rhizomes are not. Rules (like in Chomskyian linguistic tree structures) are ORGANized and thus similarly repressive, preventing man from becoming Other. Thus, the need to get outside of language through diagrams, which lead to nomadism and lines of flight to the Outside. The Body Without Organs (BwO) is the egg that deterritorializes through differentiation. Most people think repetition creates identity/identicality, but, to Deleuze, it leads to difference. Think of parents repeating the act of propagation as a tangible example. Unless they have twins, no offspring is ever the same. The repeated act thus produces difference and multiplicities or pluralities. The best way to think of the BwO is like the cocoon a caterpillar uses to turn into a butterfly. The caterpillar disintegrates (deterritorializes) in the egg/cocoon (BwO) and rebuilds (reterritorializes) into a new entity. The BwO or egg is then destroyed once we become Other. However, the process then repeats indefinitely, where each strata or layer of being has a new BwO (for the purposes of becoming) to metamorphose it into something Other. Becoming Other is like becoming animal or a sense of lycanthropy (hence why they bring up and disagree with Freud's analysis of the Wolf Man in his case). Again, desire is not to be repressed psychoanalytically but embraced schizoanalytically so as to allow for change. We can see why they would have issues with Hegel (Nick Land shares these same sentiments). Hegel's negation (through the synthesis of antithesis with thesis) eventually leads us back to the Absolute (i.e., unity of God). Oppositely, the Deleuzian model, through deterritorialization and reterritorialization, leads to pluralities and multiplicities. The irony is that Deleuze eventually agrees that "pluralism = monism" via the "plane of immanence" due to his heavy reliance upon Spinoza, who is basically Deleuze's favorite philosopher (still, the monism is linked to becoming and not identicality). SIDE NOTE: @ 15:38, I meant to say "Spinal Catastrophism." Also, the manga I am reading at the start is Ghost in the Shell: Fully Compiled (1, 1.5: Human-Error Processor, and 2: Man-Machine Interface) by Masamune Shirow. Though people tend not to like Man-Machine Interface, one of its main themes (to me at least) is that if A.I. gets to such a level as it does in the manga, it will inevitably become god-like; and, thus, at that point, we will only be able to think about technology in religious terms, where it transcends our very nature of being and or sense of understanding (insert Kant or Lovecraft here ^_^).
NOTE: Not sure how I missed this, but, @ 18:40, the chapter titled Topology of Bobbles is most likely in reference to 10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals (from ATP), which discusses the notion of strata as well as the molar and molecular, and, of course, the Lobster God (all of which we discuss in this playlist). For some reason, I just didn't associate the two titles as being similar enough to make the connection when creating the video (even though the words in the two titles totally rhyme with one another ^_^). Sorry about that. So, yes, every chapter in Amy and Maya's book is in reference to a chapter from A Thousand Plateaus (ATP). Also, remember that 10,000 B.C. basically marked the beginning of human civilization, where the climate stabilized enough so as to allow people to farm and move away from a hunter/gatherer lifestyle. How dare the Earth make us non-nomadic!
Okay I'm not allowed to post links so let's try again with the links - Marginalized journalist Wayne Madsen's 2006 book: 'Jaded Tasks: Brass Plates, Black Ops & Big Oil―The Blood Politics of George Bush & Co.' "...details the criminal forces thought to rule the world today-the Bush cartel, Russian-Ukranian-1$r@eli mafia, and Wahhabist Saudi terror financiers-revealing links between these groups and disastrous terrorist events." __________________ Investigative journalist Craig Unger writes on February 1st 2023, about how two FBI directors --- William Sessions and Louis Freeh --- both worked for the Russian mafia after (and while [?] ) serving as heads of the FBI during the Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush presidencies. 'COMPROMISED: Did the FBI’s Charles McGonigal Help Throw the 2016 Election to Trump? The shocking indictments against the former head of counterintelligence for the FBI in New York raise many dark questions.' ((about how two FBI directors: William Sessions and Louis Freeh, both worked for the Russian mafia after (and while?) serving as heads of the FBI during the Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush presidencies... not to mention Charles McGonigal, New York counter-intelligence chief who plead guilty (in 2023) to violating sanctions and concealing information from the FBI, and admitting to having worked with Russian mobster-oligarch Oleg Deripaska, the Albanian mafia, and so on, and schemed to profit with Deripaska in business after his retirement. Colleagues of McGonigal are concerned that the investigations into election interference were compromised due to McGonigal's corruption.)) "Of course, McGonigal wasn’t the only FBI official who went over to the dark side... FBI Director William Sessions had no qualms about taking on as a client Ukrainian-born Semion Mogilevich, the so-called “Brainy Don” behind the Russian mafia, whom the FBI had put on its "Ten Most Wanted" list..." "Sessions’s successor as FBI director, Louis Freeh, followed a similar path. His pro-Putin benefactor was Prevezon Holdings, the.. real estate firm that won international attention in 2008 when Russian tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky investigated a tax fraud case involving Prevezon." _________________ why are "our own" FBI directors working for the Russian mob again? 🤔 (from the wiki entry on William Sessions) "William Steele Sessions (May 27, 1930 - June 12, 2020) was an American attorney and jurist who served as a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas and Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Sessions served as FBI director from 1987 to 1993, when he was dismissed by President Bill Clinton. After leaving the public sector, Sessions represented Semion Mogilevich, international leader of the Russian mafia. He is the father of Texas Congressman Pete Sessions." _________________ 'Mark Meadows asked about Trump Compromise via Epstein/Mogilevich, Russian/1$sr@eli Intel, org. crime' "Jeremy questioning then representative and current White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in Washington DC on July 18, 2019" ___________________ 'Bloody Mob Sh*t: An Interview with Lincoln's Bible We talk Trump, Mogilevich, Epstein, Giuliani, Fred Trump, Roy Cohn, and more.' ___________________ (Divide, conquer, then toxically mimic the truth in order to cover it up) -- '9/11 Truth, QAnon, and how Pre-Scripting Is Used to Discredit Movements' (at 'The Antedote' channel archives on Odysee) "This week Greg and Jeremy discuss all of the mainstream coverage of Q Anon, and draw parallels between attempts to identify violence with Q supporters and the media portrayal of the June 2009 Holocaust Museum shooting as the actions of a Holocaust denier and 9/11 truth activist, and how this followed a campaign by members of the Obama administration along with surrogates in the media to demonize 911 truth and "Holocaust Denial" as dangerous and rooted in evil. We close by briefly talking about deceased GOP master strategist Arthur Finkelstein and his key role in "Russiagate" via Trump, Russia, Israel and Hungary" ____________________ 'U.S. oil expert Gary Vogler discusses the plan for 1$sr@el to get Iraqi oil' (with MSNBC now taken down) ____________________ 'Shepherd University President's Lecture Series: Iraq and the Politics of Oil with Gary Vogler' (skip to about a half hour into the talk if you are impatient and want the meat and potatoes) _____________________ 'Iraq and the Politics of Oil' (Kansas University Press) "Was the Iraq war really about oil? As a senior oil advisor for the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) and briefly as minister of oil, Gary Vogler thought he knew. But while doing research for a book about his experience in Iraq, Vogler discovered that what he knew was not the whole story-or even the true story. The Iraq war did have an oil agenda underlying it, one that Vogler had previously denied. This book is his attempt to set the record straight. Iraq and the Politics of Oil is a fascinating behind-the-scenes account of the role of the US government in the Iraqi oil sector since 2003. Vogler describes the prewar oil planning and the important decisions made during hostilities to get Iraqi oil flowing several months ahead of schedule. He reveals how, amid the instability of 2006 (largely fueled by the arrogance of early US decisions), the fixing of the Bayji Refinery contributed significantly to the success of the oil sector in the Sunni part of northern Iraq during and after the surge. Vogler gives us an expert insider’s view of the largest oilfield auctions in the history of the international oil industry, and his account shows how US Forces’ focus on a single Iraqi point of failure in 2007 was a primary factor in the record productions and exports of 2012 through 2017. But under the successes so deftly chronicled here, a darker political narrative finally emerges, one that reaches back to the decision to go to war with Iraq. Uncovering it, Vogler revises our understanding of what we were doing in Iraq, even as he gives us a critical, close-up view of that fraught enterprise." __________________ 'Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America' "In the past decade, from Brighton Beach to Moscow, Toronto to Hong Kong, the Russian mob has become the world’s fastest-growing criminal superpower. Trafficking in prostitutes, heroin, and missiles, the mafiya poses an enormous threat to global stability and safety. Today, the mafiya controls over 80 percent of Russia’s banks and has siphoned off billions of dollars in Western loans and aid, almost certainly derailing the chance for a stable democracy there. But that is just the beginning, for the mafiya is now in every corner of the United States and has infiltrated some of the banks and brokerage firms that handle your money. And American law enforcement is just waking up to this staggering problem. No journalist in the world knows more about the mafiya than Friedman, who has covered the Russian mob for Details, Vanity Fair, and New York. At great peril to himself, Friedman interviewed many of the top mobsters, who were stunningly candid about their activities. In their depravity, ruthlessness, and brutality, Russian gangsters make the traditional Mafia look like choirboys. Red Mafiya will appeal to anyone interested in the Mob." __________________ Page n266 "Of all the nations where the Russian mob has established a presence, none has been more deeply compromised than the State of 1$sr@el, America’s staunchest ally in the volatile Middle East. More than 800,000 Russian J3ws have made aliyah or settled in Israel since the first massive wave of immigration in the 1970s. The Russians took advantage of 1$r@el’s most sacred law-the Right of Return, which guarantees J3ws the right to return to their ancestral" Page n234 "But Mogilevich made his first millions fleecing fellow Jews. In the mid-1980s, when tens of thousands of J3w1sh refugees were hurriedly emigrating to 1$r@el and America, Mogilevich made deals to cheaply buy their assets-rubles, furniture, and art-with the promise of exchanging the goods for fair market value and sending refugees the proceeds in hard currency. Instead, he simply made the sales and kept the considerable profits" Page n234 "In early 1990, Mogilevich fled Moscow, as did many other dons, to avoid the gangland wars that were then roiling the capital. With his top henchmen he settled in 1$r@el, where they received citizenship. In Israel, which does not extradite its citizens, Mogilevich kept a low profile, preferring to maintain the J3w1sh state as a place where he could move without restriction, rest, or find refuge in times of trouble" Page n231 "The enigmatic leader of the Red Mafiya is a fifty-four-yearold Ukrainian-born J3w named Semion Mogilevich. Known as “the Brainy Don,” he holds an economics degree from the University of Lvov. But hundreds of pages of classified FBI, British, and 1$r@eli intelligence documents, as well as statements by a key criminal associate and dozens of law enforcement sources in the U.S. and abroad, describe him as a malevolent figure who has become a grave threat to the Stability of 1$r@el, Eastern Europe, and North America"
CIA official James Woolsey and FBI caught working with the Russian-Armenian mafia, Utahn Mormons, and Turkish criminals haha -- and look how the title of this first article won't post - the editors censored Woolsey's name out of the hyperlink blue text that pops up when you try to link and share it directly. It instead shows up as: 'Fallout from Decade-Long, 1 $Billion Biofuel Scam could Decimate Polygamist Sect' (L.A. Magazine) -- [instead of the actual title of the article below: 'Longtime CIA Boss Central Figure in Green Energy Swindle' (L.A. Magazine) "James Woolsey, the former CIA Director under President Bill Clinton and advisor to former President Donald Trump, is repeatedly implicated in massive biofuel scheme" (L.A. Magazine) _________________ 'Money Laundering Trial for Reputed CIA Asset and Turkish Tycoon Pushed - Again' (L.A. Magazine) "Sezgin Baran Korkmaz, who counts James Woolsey (the former CIA Director under President Bill Clinton and advisor to former President Donald Trump) as a friend, was part of massive biofuel scam with polygamist [Mormon] cult and L.A. Armenian underworld, feds say" _________________ 'Catherine Belton: "Putin's roads into the KGB and the road to war in Ukraine" Catherine Belton on how Putin joined forces with the Russian mafia in St. Petersburg in order to rise to power during and after the fall of the USSR ; the subsequent string of suspicious deaths of KGB members in charge of preserving salvageable USSR assets ; Putin's takeover of Russian oligarchs ; the blackmailing of western officials in exchange for western military technologies, conducted by the KGB's East Germany/Dresden operations which Putin was a part of during the fall of the USSR ; Putin's relationships in the Middle East and with Israel, etc. Belton discusses how she was unjustly attacked by Putin oligarch Roman Abramovich and sued for libel by him -- the resulting 1.5 million in legal fees of which were fortunately paid for by her publisher HarperCollins who stood by her and didn't balk at the threats and attacks by Abramovich and other oligarchs. She also shares about how this libel suit against her ended up becoming a catalyst to change the structure of laws in the UK and strengthen the protection of journalists facing SLAPPS and other forms of criminal lawfare. __________________ Her book -- 'Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West' "Interference in American elections. The sponsorship of extremist politics in Europe. War in Ukraine. In recent years, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has waged a concerted campaign to expand its influence and undermine Western institutions. But how and why did all this come about, and who has orchestrated it? In Putin’s People, the investigative journalist and former Moscow correspondent Catherine Belton reveals the untold story of how Vladimir Putin and the small group of KGB men surrounding him rose to power and looted their country. Delving deep into the workings of Putin’s Kremlin, Belton accesses key inside players to reveal how Putin replaced the freewheeling tycoons of the Yeltsin era with a new generation of loyal oligarchs, who in turn subverted Russia’s economy and legal system and extended the Kremlin's reach into the United States and Europe. The result is a chilling and revelatory exposé of the KGB’s revanche-a story that begins in the murk of the Soviet collapse, when networks of operatives were able to siphon billions of dollars out of state enterprises and move their spoils into the West. Putin and his allies subsequently completed the agenda, reasserting Russian power while taking control of the economy for themselves, suppressing independent voices, and launching covert influence operations abroad. Ranging from Moscow and London to Switzerland and Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach-and assembling a colorful cast of characters to match-Putin’s People is the definitive account of how hopes for the new Russia went astray, with stark consequences for its inhabitants and, increasingly, the world." ________________ 'The Trump Campaign’s Collusion With 1$r@el' -- "While US media fixated on Russian interference in the 2016 election, an 1$r@eli secret agent’s campaign to influence the outcome went unreported." (The Nation) "In fact, a recent multinational journalistic investigation revealed that 1$sr@el has become a world center for the export of election fraud, fake news, hacking of private e-mails, and disinformation. Connections were discovered between private intelligence firms and both Israel’s Ministry of Defense and the firm Cambridge Analytica, which illegally collected data from more than 87 million Facebook users for use in the 2016 presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. The eight-month international collaborative project involved journalists from 30 news outlets, including Israel’s Haaretz, the UK’s Guardian and Observer, France’s Le Monde, Germany’s Der Spiegel, and Spain’s El Pais. They discovered an 1$sr@el-based “global private market in disinformation aimed at elections,” according to The Guardian. Among the individuals unmasked was Tal Hanan, a former 1$sr@eli special forces operative and the head of a secretive organization with the code name “Team Jorge” whose specialty was weaponizing disinformation worldwide “to covertly meddle in elections without a trace,” said The Guardian. Hanan told the undercover reporters that his services had been used in Africa, South and Central America, the US, and Europe, and that his company had completed “33 presidential-level campaigns, 27 of which were successful.” What was not revealed in this investigation, however, was the separate and far more covert operation undertaken by Netanyahu and his secret agent to clandestinely manipulate America’s 2016 presidential election for Netanyahu’s own political purposes." ________________ 'The AnteDote - Analysis of James Bamford (1$r@eli collusion with the Trump Campaign)' "We discuss James Bamford's new cover story for The Nation magazine, "The Trump Campaign's Collusion with 1$sr@el," the important details contained, and also how it limits the depths of the 11/9 operation to install Trump as President. We also discuss Bamford's interview on Democracy Now with Amy Goodman as well as his new book "Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America's Counterintelligence." Finally, we read a portion of "Proof of Conspiracy" by Seth Abramson that ties together 1$sr@el, Russia, and the Gulf Kingdoms in the operation to install Trump." _________________ (excerpt from Seth Abramson's 'Proof of Conspiracy') "The Red Sea Conspiracy, variously referred to by its participants and in media as the “grand bargain” or the “Middle East Marshall Plan,” is in its basic contours relatively simple: the Saudis, Emiratis, Israelis, Bahrainis, and Egyptians, in conjunction with the Russians, aid Trump’s election as the next U.S. president while encouraging him to drop all sanctions on the Russian Federation if and when he secures election. In compensation for this dramatic reversal of U.S. policy toward Russia-an about-face worth hundreds of billions of dollars to the Kremlin in recaptured post-sanctions revenue-the Russians will withdraw their support for Iran in Syria and elsewhere, thereby enabling the Red Sea conspirators to conclusively conquer their Iranian foes. The conspirators’ post-bargain expectations are likewise easy to summarize: (1) the isolation of U.S. allies Turkey and Qatar, whose government-affiliated media organs have been unkind to the Saudis and their allies, and whose warm and comparatively uncomplicated relationships with America the Saudis and Emiratis particularly covet; (2) the receipt of American assistance in pushing back against Iranian aggression in the region, both indirectly (against alleged Iranian proxies in Syria and Yemen) and directly (in the form of aiding the Saudis and Emiratis in becoming nuclear powers capable of threatening Iran directly); (3) the receipt of a massive influx of out-of-region infrastructure and other investment from both the Americans and the Russians, with the aim of sidelining the 1$r@eli-Palestinian debate in favor of a new focus on economic development across the Gulf region; (4) the establishment of a new pro-1$r@el and pro-American military alliance of Sunni Arab nations that will constitute one of the world’s largest and most commanding fighting forces, to be overseen-in both its legal and illicit operations-by MBS and MBZ; (5) and the standing down of pro-democracy forces within and outside the U.S. government in the face of encroaching autocracy in 1$r@el and certain of America’s Arab allies- chiefly Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt. This grand bargain was to be overseen by MBZ, MBS, and Egypt’s el-Sisi in coordination with both the Kremlin and Donald Trump. It is as audacious a plot as the world has seen in half a century, requiring years of continent-crossing communications, negotiations, and accommodations that must go unseen by major media until they are complete. It is a complex story drawing into its matrix of persons, places, and events nationals from at least a dozen countries, and it begins many years ago with the slowly converging exploits of three men: a pedophile, a mercenary, and a political flack."
Thank you for replying to my question, Mr. Cala.😊 Your exploration of the dialectic and diagrammatic modes of escape has been very insightful for my own thinking on escape. Your theory of a Gnostic/acc here reminds me of the work of the Maoist philosophers Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreau, who, following May 68, codeveloped the concept of the “Angel” ,based on Ismaili mysticism and theology; as the solitary Maoist militant who will bring about the Revolution. However, following the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge, they reformulated the Angel as a much more personal, spiritual transformation. Their theories are explored and built upon by Non-Standard Philosophers such as Anthony Paul Smith and Gilles Grelet, and the philosopher Miroslav Griško explicitly explores their ideas in connection with Landian Accelerationism. Are you familiar with them? If not, I think you’ll find them very interesting. In connection with the pain of becoming other and how we’re ever closer to it’s breaking point, I’m reminded of Deleuze’s exploration of a world without others in his “Dessert Island” essay as well as his exploration of the figure of the “Dissabled”, who bares uncanny similarities to someone on the Autism Spectrum. What do you think?
Thanks for sharing! Sections 7 and 8 really got my cogs turning, especially in regards to the role of Anamnesis in answering the question "Are we headed toward the Hegelian Absolute and unity through dialectic, or are we headed towards deterritorialization through the Deleuzian Diagrammatical?". You say that if new things are occurring, then there is no remembering or returning, but process ontology would disagree. I have a feeling that this paradox you've found can be cultivated through Brian Massumi's short book 'What Animals Teach Us About Politics' as well as Erin Manning's book 'For a Pragmatics of the Useless' or her essay you can find free online titled 'Not at a Distance, On Touch, Synaesthesia, and Other Ways of Knowing'. They think you can have it both ways as long as you can keep these dynamic tendencies playing together creatively. As we get closer to the development of AGI and begin increasingly "ensouling" technology/ embodying information, the only way we aren't totally assimilated into it is if we can get it (and us) to authentically care for the diversity of non-human intelligences surrounding us (i.e. animals, plants, self-organizing dynamic systems, etc.) We will need to be sensitive to not only our all-too-human Phenomenology (that has so far historically defined the lived experience of a very privledged threshold of personhood), but also the forms of animal sympathy and metacommunicative gestures which afforded the cognitive capacities that have, up until the development of AI, defined human intelligence as distinct; such as the use of language. As late stage capitalism breaks us, the inherent relationality of suffering that is ignored by the hegemonic system which creates disability has the potential to return us to our bodies, unified in the undercommons by the differences which made us 'other'. This affective Anamnesis requires us to actively participate with the real to open self-worlding technicities of rebirth beyond the death of the symbolic order of capitalist value. Following Erin Manning's more-than-human Pragmatics of the Useless, this synaesthetic agencement has the potential to be a democratization of gnostic awakening that is deeply true to the earth. When this participatory awareness of our unique differential relationality to the absolute oppressive systems which unify us is reterritorialized beyond trauma to instead afford modalities for refining existential fluency, we can move past Death Drive Marxism to look more creatively at, for example, Blues Epistemology or Liberation Theology, concerned less with subjects and objects and instead processes of becoming united in affirming difference.
*Gnosticism links back to unity while Accelerationism seeks plurality. And yet pluralism equals monism to Deleuze. Serial Experiments Lain is both a Gnostic and Accelerationist anime, after all. Weird.* . . . Epimetheism - Gnostic/Acc 1. Imperial power proves we have not surpassed beyond Thrasymachus' statements in Plato's Republic (i.e., justice is "nothing other than the advantage of the stronger"). Geopolitics focuses on accumulating resources of economic interest and advantage. Technology merely serves the elite sector of society as a means of producing profit and retaining power for oppressive purposes used to accumulate further capital. As Chomsky notes, profit comes before people. Looking to declassified CIA documents (e.g., Operation Condor, Operation Praying Mantis, Operation Ajax, Operation Cyclone, Operation IA Feature, etc.), we can see how power is often implemented for the purposes of maintaining control so as to ensure the subordination of foreign nation states. The Congo is an excellent example. You can't have smartphones without the harvesting of coltan, after all. Cheap child labor from China also ensure profits can be pulled from "exploited" (in the Marxist sense) people. 2. The reason why the US has a long history of installing dictators across the world is because it ensures a puppet-state is established, which allows the US to control that nation any way they wish. This is done through brutal forms of overt control (again, look to Operation Condor). Covert control is also implemented, of course, through the mass media (again, as Chomsky notes), enslaving mankind ideologically to the dominant social ideals, which, again, serve an elite sector of society. Perhaps the reason "e/acc" is so popular is because it essentially gives the system (which is run by elites) what it wants. It acts merely as a propagandized form of covert control, which, again, serves the interests of "the stronger," as Thrasymachus stated. Meanwhile, threats of nuclear annihilation or environmental disaster (through climate change (which has only been accelerated by capitalistic elites' needs to exploit areas for their natural resources)) are seldom discussed. 3. Let's just say that Neoliberal goals of decentralization and deregulation coincide with many accelerationist themes (Milton Friedman's economic policies during the Reagan-era strike most in my mind). Nick Srnicek, of course, would disagree with this on the grounds that, since the current system we have now is fundamentally a highly ORGANized structure (functioning on elements of human power), it does not embrace true accelerationist forms of deterritorialization or inhuman market dynamics. Still, deregulation allows labor unions and workers' rights to be removed since it does not allow the human security system (in Landian terms) to ORGANize, which, again, assists elites in accumulating more profit off of people by allowing worker exploitation to be more easily implemented. I understand Land's concerns of ORGANized structures leading to "fascist" systems that prevent one from a state of becoming (i.e., keeping one fixed, instead, to an assimilatory state of being, which does not allow the chance for change or escape to the Outside), but understanding how political/corporate power operates proves all the more important in an age of ignorance, disinformation, and counter-intelligence programming. Basically, some level of ORGANization will be necessary for people to escape from out such an oppressive system of enslavement and servitude. People should be deORGANized only as much as their social institutions are. In truth, no one can know the Kantian noumenon. As such, "e/acc" is most likely functioning subconsciously and unknowingly as yet another corporate-backed PSYOP that aids imperial ambitions and the elite sector of society. 4. As we discussed with Culp in Dark Deleuze, the rhizomatic model has not liberated man from institutes of power. Roots thus work within rhizomes. Thus Negri and Hardt's Multitude collapses, unable to liberate human life. Furthermore, it situates man in a Deleuzian control society, where he is a dividual, and where all the borders of his previous Foucauldian disciplinary society have been broken down, thus leaving him in an open prison, where the bars have been expanded to such an infinite extent that he cannot even envision an escape let alone his own imprisonment, where everyone is everywhere at once. Furthermore, I don't believe capitalism is as natural an occurrence as Land proclaims, especially when looking to how much military force and power has been used to ensure its own preservation (as the clandestine operations headed historically by the CIA have indicated, all of which are ORGANized forms of root-based centers that are guided by human power, rules, and regulations). Again, our species still functions on the basis of Thrasymachus' statements. Since public opinion matters little in the face of profit, how does one infect the system and make a chance for change? Boycotting goods may help slightly, but it proves impractical in the face of wage stagnation, which keeps the people poor, and planned obsolescence, which forces people to always replace things they already own. Serfdom under a techno-feudal system (as Yanis Varoufakis points out) may drive man into a new dark age, a darker age.
5. Man may take the Hegelian route, embracing a more Gnostic model as we discussed with Jacob Taubes and Eric Voegelin, seeing himself as the alien outsider rebel who revolts against his masters and false-gods in a Promethean-like fashion. Unlike the humanistic element of Habermas' idea of using communicative action to lead to deliberative democracy, for example, it may be done through more inhuman (or perhaps transhuman) means. But, in the face of realpolitik, are these even realistic? To Georgy Lukacs reification was to be used through the dialectic to switch subject with object or the passive with the active, putting working-class people in their righteous and proper place, thus leading to salvation akin to eschatology for all of mankind. And though Marxism has ties to the inhuman aspects of accelerationism, the eschatology of Marx rested on man's liberation through the dialectic. In this inhuman world, hope or elpis remain within as Epimetheus and Pandora's monsters reign supreme. 6. The inhuman and anti-Deleuzian model of Niklas Luhmann comes to mind. To Luhmann, humans nor their conscious minds can communicate. Only communication can communicate. In Luhmann's model, identicality allows for culture to reproduce itself through autopoiesis, filtering out anything outside itself. All systems are thus nothing more than information centers, where, again, only communication communicates. Even if we remove the dialectic for the diagrammatical in the Deleuzian sense, we are left with reification in terms of Amy Ireland's Cute Accelerationism, where the immaterial becomes material or the abstract is treated as something physical, linked to Landian hyperstition, where the virtual becomes actual. Either way, the object turns into a subject or a subject becomes an object. Currently, the commodity has become the active aspect while people are, of course, kept fundamentally passive. But, again, there is always the link between the producer and consumer, which is bound in an ambivalent or androgynous or hermaphroditic or alchemic manner. Again, the link between class consciousness and its antithesis of false consciousness (through ideology) becomes apparent. Remember, it is false consciousness that distorts our understanding of class identity. Since subject and object can be swapped, objects and people have been turned into subjects through subjugation. And it is this sense of being a subject that sculpts their false consciousness, which is an ideological form of enslavement, leading to alienation and exploitation everlasting in the Marxist sense. Class consciousness thus awakens one in the Gnostic sense towards their objective aspirations. But, again, to move away from discourse and dialectics to the diagrammatical (via Deleuze) moves us to Land's libidinal materialism and away from Marx's dialectical materialism. 7. Are we headed towards the Hegelian Absolute and unity through the dialectic, or are we heading towards deterritorialization and endless difference through the Deleuzian diagrammatical? In the Spinozian sense, God is one substance. And even Deleuze had his plane of immanence. Regardless, man is becoming Other. As we brought up with the I-Ching, when one extreme is reached, things flow into their opposite state. Like reification, subject and object can swap as easily as yin can with yang. The depictions of the hexagrams of the I-Ching reflect the cosmic. Perhaps this is where Yuk Hui's cosmotechnics will occur, where the cosmos (from the outside) can influence the technic through technodiversities, which relies upon Simondon's individuation to diversify our limited alphabet. Through anamnesis, man thus reactivates his sense of human symbology and frees himself from the machine, awakening (again, in somewhat a Gnostic sense) to what he once was. Such a Gnostic awakening through Platonic anamnesis may free man from this machine. Still, anamnesis and remembering assumes we are heading back towards a totality or unity, akin to a closed circle or loop. If new things are occurring, then there is no remembering or returning. Again, Ernst Bloch or Nick Land's model of keeping things open, and thus never complete, would somewhat perish due to this Platonic and Gnostic sense of anamnesis. Again, are we headed towards unity and totality or endless difference? Hui's method is similar to Jorjani's spectral revolution as well, where we are diversifying the definition through deconstruction so as to make it more holistic and less limited in scope. 8. But as Amy and Maya noted in Cute Accelerationism, we do not want to be the "old Marxist man," fixed upon analyzing some state of being without first seeing what it could become. If reification can be used to swap the subject back into the role of an object, bringing about the eschatology of Marx, are we abandoning this potential sense of becoming Other in the Deleuzian sense? And I suppose, through, all of my ramblings, that's the primary point. Becoming Other is a painful process and people are reaching their breaking points. Maybe humans will never become anything more than they already are, playing in their oppressive world of power, swapping between who is the subject and object of attention. The dehumanized man longs for his humanity. The slave wishes to make of himself a master. It is the Promethean and Gnostic promise after all. As Jacob Taubes and Eric Voegelin noted, history makes the transcendental immanent (as we mentioned with Marx). And thus, man goes on to immanentize the eschaton, only now he does it through Deleuzian diagrammatics instead of Hegelian dialectics. Only the noumenon truly knows, and only the transcendental outside can save. Tolkien's eucatastrophe seems the only means of escape, acting as a true sense of salvation in a world where flawed and imperfect people are constantly seeking to save themselves and herald in a utopian paradise of perfection. While people always have the right to retaliate through revolt when wronged, they cannot seem to overcome the flaws that rest at their very foundations.
Great video as always. I’d love to hear your thoughts about how this connects with your own trajectory of ideas which led you to the eucatastrophe of Tolkien.
*"Yes, it's you I welcome Death with..."* Evil Neuro Sings: As The World Caves In by Matt Maltese - ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-nTRNx3XjcRw.html *Putting the pedal to the me(ow)tal:* A Thousand Miles - NECO ARC (Vanessa Carlton) - ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Ddpx0JLOH6o.html *Not Actually & Spiced_ got it right 5 years ago. "We're anime now." ^_^* Not Actually - u/akira - ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-pK_P89hoZsk.html Spiced_ - CCRU anime opening - ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-DFUzbH9E_wM.html *Lain is a superstar (at the gay bar).* AMV : Serial Experiments Lain, Electric Six "Gay Bar" - ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-yq0_ApTwNH4.html *Anime wolves of Wall Street (one or several?):* Wall Street Senpai - ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-YqVaYEQIWzk.html *Interview by Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour:* Amy Ireland & Maya B. Kronic - Cute Accelarationism - ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-IlUzVs6_koc.html
Also theres gotta be a trans-deleuzian joke about eggs(look it up in context), also the trans-supremacist/chauvanist nyx land ripped off sadie plants zeros and ones comparing trans people to turing test vis a vis passing so i thought thats a fun little thing, also any based daoist-feminist takes?
@alexandresalvatore3573 1.5 is basically a bunch of side stories dealing with Section 9. Kusanagi is pretty much absent from the volume with the exception of two chapters. You do, however, get to see Batou rock his ponytail look for the first time (and you get to see Proto's first appearance as a character). It follows the first GITS manga more in terms of artistic design than 2, though (as I know some people don't like the design of 2). If you enjoyed the first series, it's worth a read. But, again, the volume is solely comprised of stand alone stories that seek to give the other members of Section 9 more screen-time (or manga-time?). There's no real overarching plot to 1.5 that holds the stories together, though. As such, I wouldn't shell out too much cash for it (as it is a fairly short read). If you can find a cheap copy, however, pick it up. ^_^ *EDIT:* If you do pick up a copy and read it, you'll notice a lot of scenes in this volume are referenced in both the SAC series, the second GITS movie (GITS2: Innocence), and the SAC: SSS (Solid State Society) movie. So, it might be worth picking up just for that reason alone. Cheers!
You're completely off-base about the V-Tubers, especially the ones you have on screen. Yes, there are some who do take advantage of others, but many of those people have been shunned or deplatformed by and large. As the parasocial relationship between Tubers and Viewers grow, the former really do become more of who they are, and as "past life" records demonstrate, many of them really are who they are 'pretending' to be.
I completely failed to consider how using the same thumbnail for each video would obviously lead to confusion. That's my bad. I've swapped the thumbnails so each video is more distinct. Thank you! ^_^
7:19 The first line reminds me of Lilith in Evangelion. I'm basically just something using a human body. There is something incredibly disturbing, borderline unbearable, in the experience of these creatures that remain so infantile and parts fixated. Forest and trees, you do some black box testing and create a model of their mind, really trace it all out, and find a sort of sort of corruption fetish. Anus this, shaft that, life is poop that poops itself and eats poop and so the sun is the biggest pooper of all, blah blah blah. Every day with these people.
