Formalizing the Subject (Session 8)

Hello and welcome to the new Center for Research and Practice seminar series, formalizing the subject, dialectics and cybernetics in Calle pour la Analyse and CCRU with Daniel Sassolotto. This is the eighth and final session. Daniel, please take it away. Thank you, Jamie. Hello, everybody. So today, obviously, we're talking accelerationisms, you know, feminism. Before doing that, I want to start by talking a little bit about the Mark Fisher piece, because we obviously didn't get to that, and I don't want to sell it short, because it's an interesting piece in its own right, and it's also the one text from the previous readings

that obviously also has a clear connection to the CCRU as well insofar as it deals with Lovecraft and you know hyperstition and so on so forth but it also tries to connect itself to Harmon's reading of Lovecraft so it's kind of interesting in that regard so very quickly I'll just go over that if you don't mind and then we'll get to today's business proper so one second um crap no hold on hold on I'm sorry hold on what's going on was hold on the app is being weird I need to okay share oh here we go that's what I'm okay there we go now you're

seeing the PowerPoint right yeah great thank you so the first thing I want to say just very I mean I'll go through this rather quickly because obviously we're in a different place right now. So, and just one second to make sure that nothing is. Oh yeah, my command station is. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, so in this piece that I made, it's really just like the opening piece from The Weird and Eerie. Here, Fisher basically uses Lovecraft to draw the contours of what he names a hypermaterialism, right? And, you know, this is an idea in which, this is an idea which we're actually going to find again, sort of, especially when we get to the xenofeminism place, which is attempts to sort of negotiate with the

legacy of naturalism in an interesting way. And this is something that incidentally is important to my own research quite a bit, since as some of you might know, one of the dividing lines between those of us who like to call ourselves neorationalists is, well, the place of naturalism, where some, for example, Reza and Pete have sort of drifted towards Platonist territory and have become rather hostile to naturalism. Others, like Ray and myself, have remained rather close to naturalism. Now, the status of nature, what naturalism means, of course, that's one of the things that I think is most interesting about the xenofeminism bit. And in any case, in this essay, in this Fisher essay,

there's also this kind of elaboration of a, I mean, not elaboration really, it's a very coarsely grained conception of naturalism, hypernaturalism. But what Fisher wants to do, regardless, I mean, if we're going, if naturalism is tenable, obviously, this is something that also, you know, we have to begin by thinking, it is not tenable in a good old essentialist sense, in which, for example, one grants something like a principal priority or prerogative to the natural sciences to tell us what the world is or what ontology is or whatever in an uncritical manner. That would just be a blatant relapse to a kind of pre-critical dogmatism or ontology or metaphysics, whatever you want to call it. So naturalism, in any case, needs to be reforged, reconstituted

after critique and after the critique of critique, right? So what is hypernaturalism? Well, Fisher introduces it by precisely saying, peddling a notion of nature that would be unbound from notions of familiarity and from representation. And this is another thing that keeps coming back, I think, in both of the vectors of thought that we have seen is this permanent hostility to the notion of representation. And I think if there is one thing that in the speculative realist sequence, we start to see, specifically formed by Ray Brassier, is the attempt to rehabilitate the notion of representation. So he is a good Kantian that he is, well, he was at least at that moment, very much influenced by Sellers, of course, and to this day. One of the ideas is that, you know,

representation might not be as bad of a thing as philosophers have thought for the better part of two centuries now. So in any case, it begins, Fisher wants to say that, you know, there's this possible notion of naturalism that dislodges itself from representation. So he shares that hostility. And he begins by separating, you know, weirdness in the sense that he wants to elaborate it from wrongness. So the weird is not supernatural. It's not something that is outside of nature, but it is something within nature that, you know, is a kind of excess or something that you cannot interpret or internalize into a representational grid, into what Jameson would call something like cognitive mapping, right? So the idea is that it's something very similar to Kantian sublimity,

in the sense of something that escapes the contours of common experience. And he reiterates this trope from Land, which also appears, you know, in the CCRU in several places, which is that the central concept that, you know, this hypernaturalism seeks to think is the notion of outsideness right um which is why horror becomes this predominant mode that that is uh you know like effective mode if you will for this kind of hypernaturalism um and it's interesting that you know the for for fisher really the the notion of horror doesn't have to do with you know something like stupefaction or something it's it has to do with like an intrusion from the outside

So horror is what happens when outsideness leaks into the domain of interiority and shatters our capacity to cope, right, to cope in the sense of cognitively, practically cope. So there's this kind of fascination with horror in the sense that it's disabling, disempowering infiltration from outsideness is a unique prerogative of this genre of writing. So here's the very short quote, an outside that breaks through in encounters with anomalous entities from the deep past. Of course, he is already speaking about the deep ones and the old ones, the whole Lovecraftian mythos. In altered states of consciousness and bizarre twists in the structure of time, the encounter with the outside often ends in breakdown and psychosis.

and he he traces this interestingly back to this uh you know to the psychoanalytic to a psychoanalytic register again in a very coarse-grained manner but uh revisiting the concept of jouissance as of course i presume we all we all know jouissance is not just simply simply pleasure in the sense in which freud defined it right which is a basic a diminution of excitation, right? Pleasure is what you get when you have an excess excitation. You have a release of this excess intensity. But juriscence is something that simultaneously is an interface between pleasure and pain, which involves something like a non-dialectical negativity, a kind of excess or surplus, which

is completely barren from any concrete content. Juisance has just this pure libidinal pulsion, which precisely insofar as it cannot be simply pleasure or pain, but there's always this kind of, it's ambiguously or indiscernible suspended between the two. It is pure in a sense that it doesn't have any inherent content, as opposed to, you know, you can always correlate pleasure and pain with a specific sort of, you know, event or object or whatever.

So, here's another quote where there's this link being woven. So, it's interesting. He very quickly means a very elegant, beautifully written piece is everything that Mark ever did, which is, you know, how seamlessly it weaves these different registers without getting really into, you know, dense exegetical, you know, exposition or anything like that. It's very, very, very, you know, streamlined. line. So here's a quote. An excessive preoccupation with objects that are officially negative always indicates the work of jouissance, a mode of enjoyment which does not, in any case, redeem negativity. It sublimates it. That is to say, it transforms an ordinary object causing displeasure into a thing, capital T, which is both terrible and alluring, which can no longer be libidinally

classified as either positive or negative the thing overwhelms it cannot be contained but it fascinates right and here the thing has this duplicitous sort of uh displacement right the thing is as we know the freudian thing right which is both it's like the object cause of desire which is like you know this kind of libidinal anchor but it's a purely formal point and it uh but it's also the thing in the Lovecraftian sense of like the intruder, the, you know, this kind of aberrant outside force or entity or whatever you want coming from the outside. So in this regard, you have this kind of, you know, interesting, beautiful integration. And also I should just say briefly, Nick Land has also done some relatively recent work on horror, some texts

and some of the stuff that he's been writing in the fictional mode sort of explores this dimension of horror fiction very much inspired by lovecraft um there's two novels specifically chasm and you've read these yeah i have oh wow i i don't know many people who have read them i feel so it's like the book on like traveling in china that i recently discovered oh yeah uh yeah well there's there's complexity and shanghai sometimes yeah but the other one is phil undu Phil Undo is, I think, the one that's most indebted to Lovecraft. And that one, actually the collection, well, I mean the PDF or whatever, includes this essay of Lance called Abstract Horror.

And then the other one, which is called Exterminator, which he devotes to the Terminator sort of movies. We read Exterminator for Thomas Moynihan's class on existential risk, actually, because it's about the great filter for me paradox yeah that one was great yeah it's a great i mean both of those are really good and honestly i don't like nick's writing as a fiction writer i think it's super corny i don't think it's very good but but um the novels in themselves are interesting in their own right um i mean that that was a cool one uh phil undu is actually cool in content it's about uh well i shouldn't it's not as i shouldn't spoil it just just read it and it's very short You can read it in one day, like, easy. Anyway. Actually, Ramiro Sanchez, he's translating next those horror tales about abstract horror into Spanish.

Wait, the novels or the? Yeah, the novels and the essay are coming up soon. I posted, I think I posted in the classroom something about him, like making an essay about alien and xenomorphism. So if you want to check it out. Yeah, yeah, I'll definitely check it out. That sounds cool. I mean, I can't imagine that reading any better in Spanish than it would in English. But regardless, it's kind of weird, right? Because Nick is honestly one of the best writers, just cold-hearted stylists in the game. But when he shifts into literary mode, he becomes oddly, strangely... You don't think it would translate well into Spanish, even considering magical realism and that tradition and how there could be perhaps... yeah no actually thinking about it it wouldn't be a moron idiom i mean i was just thinking that

it reads already so you know cornyly that i can't imagine it being anymore you know he really doesn't have i mean i think nick is he is too intense so he doesn't have a good sense of pacing so when he recreates dialogues they are so awkward and not awkward and you know in a way that's organic. Yeah, like cyber revolution is so cringy at times. It is so cringy. And some of the, like, there's that Easter essay from the Thirst for Annihilation, which is also cringy. Anyway, back to Fisher. So, you know, of course, another trope that keeps recurring is this resistance to anthropocentrism, right? and he thinks that what's really unique about Lovecraft in this regard is that you know you

have a mythology a lore blah blah but rather than trying to model this lore on you know sort of like familiar deities or you know again humanoid creatures or something like that you know the Lovecraftian mythos is really a strange beast where you know the Necronomicon or you know the deep ones and the old ones are rather amorphous and kind of incomprehensible cosmic deities that do not only not resemble let's say the human form but more more radically they are not even described in a uniform manner across registers right so you know if you look at any of the you know whether it be you know uh what was a yuck uh i keep getting the names always right but you

know there's cthulhu there's this there's that anyway the point is they are more like conceptual conceptual entities or agencies or forces than you know uh discreetly individuated material bodies or entities right and so the idea is that you have you know something that cannot really be described mutually by or literally by by anybody so you know you have this kind of like displacement of all these like weird descriptions and this is something that of course uh graham harman also sort of enjoys about Lovecraft. Because as you know, one of the things that Harmon sort of emphasizes is that insofar as you don't have direct access to anything, right, you have to meet, you know, all form of relation is mediated by what he calls intentional objects

or sensual objects. The only way you can really approach the reality behind the appearance or behind the sensual object is by allure. And the thing that he likes about Lovecraft and that he emphasizes in his own work on Lovecraft is precisely that the way in which, you know, you can never exhaust the thing, right, with all these descriptions of it. So that the description, yeah. So one short question on Harmon. Yeah, sure. What I asked myself is his theory of object-orientated ontology. So if he takes his triple O to be a theory of everything, that ontology and his own theory is part of this world

and therefore it must be itself an object. And then you have this, okay, you can only allure to things. There's no way of conceptual, literal propositions. and how does he deal with that doesn't this render a self-contradiction a performative self-contradiction like how does he even know what he's actually saying that he's actually exhausting his own thing yeah that is my me it's that's pretty obvious I think no that's that's really well so so one thing to say on Harmon's behalf even though he thinks there are this there's this distinction between real and sensual objects he accepts of the status of purely sensual or intentional object. Now, you ask a very good question, which is what's the status of, say,

a theory insofar as it belongs to this ontology? Is an ontology a real object of some kind that has then a sexual double insofar as we read it? You would think it would have to be because obviously theories are the kind of things that people have to interpret and reinterpret at infinitum, right? So, you know, you have the same, and he actually says this at different points that you know what makes a philosophy interesting or it's not just whether it's right or wrong right but it's uh how fecund it is in the sense that how how much can people make out of it right we we still talk about plato you know after all this time a your average undergraduate can come up with clever objections obvious objections to plato's arguments so it's not his his immunity

to error that makes him an interesting philosopher i think harmon is right on this incidentally right Like Plato might be ridden with like contentious arguments, but he's far more interesting than your next analytic philosopher who publishes some kind of boring paper in some journal who might be pristinely immune to critique. So there's more than clarity and rigor involved in philosophy. But to answer your question, I don't know. I mean, I don't know what he would say. My hunch is he would have to accept that there is such a thing as like, you know, a real theory and therefore you have an access problem. You're right. But he might be fine with that. Well, like he might be fine with saying, you know, I don't own my own theory. After all, you know, it's going to go on forever. People are going to read this and they're going to reinterpret in their own way.

What, why should I have a prerogative over my own work? Right. Nobody does. You know, once it's out there, it's in the wild, it's an object like everything else. But I think there's a deeper problem, actually, which is, you know, Harmon wants to generalize the subject-object relation that Kant builds, right, and the fact that we don't have access to the thing in itself to all objects in the world. So for him, it's a ubiquitous phenomenon in nature and the world. But we, insofar as we are objects ourselves, right, we also are necessarily, our experience is mediated with the outside. We only encounter the world through sensual doubles. So then the question is, well, why, under what criteria, can we even postulate that there are real objects? Like, how does he know?

How does, I mean, he still, insofar as he cannot get over his own forms of mediation, right, how do you actually know that there are real cats or real theories or real anything? All you know is what's sensually presented or intentionally presented to you, right? I don't know enough about Heidegger, but I think that's where his interpretation of Heidegger's tool analysis comes into play. Not just, okay, how do I know that they aren't just sensual objects, but also real objects. And I think there is Heidegger's tool analysis that's important for him. Well, with the tool analysis, it's more the withdrawing thing, right, I think, as far as I can tell.

tell because it's like you know that there is something that withdraws there and that's the point therefore you can tell there is something beyond pure appearance okay but for heidegger what withdraws is the being of beings which is not a being right so harman wants to say it is a b their objects so they're discrete things so the question for harman would be just straight up why do you think there are things as opposed to the being of beings what how do you know that what withdraws is an object as opposed to the apeiron which he likes to you know say or whatever else right so the question is once you have shut down direct access to the thing and that the only way that you actually know it is through these like sort of surrogates intentional surrogates even though allure approximates you to that which withdraws you never actually are able to say what

is out there right what is the real so you know the the actual the question of how does he actually know that there are real objects behind it very intentional facades to me remains unresolved i don't think that's a question that he has a very good answer but regardless um let me just like very briefly say a couple more things about the fisher so we can shuttle into the into today's stuff because there's obviously plenty there so two more points just very quickly is that um you know the the the relationship between interior and exterior right the outside and the inside um And these different, you know, domains or the dimensions of time, blah, blah, blah, that Lovecraft flirts with or introduces. One of the things that Fisher emphasizes is that they cannot be in a simple like sort of, let's say, mystical way.

Worlds that do not communicate, right? Like in a blunt dualist sense or in a blunt sort of like quasi mystical sense. So worlds must interact. and you know it can be just that there's this kind of weird beyond and then there's the actual world and we imagine it blah blah blah but there's a kind of a perturbing exchange of information between the two so that what is impossible in the actual world makes an eruption and here he you know fisher overtly makes makes a sort of contrast with uh modal realist metaphysics right so he's not just trying to peddle and i you know this kind of more hazy and uh fictional you know idea that there are these alternative worlds, blah, blah, blah, possible universes, the kind of garden of fork and path thing. But that, you know,

he actually takes a little jab at Borges at the end, which I think is unfair, but whatever. But that's because I'm Latin American. In any case, here's the quote. Worlds may be entirely foreign to ours, both in terms of location and even in terms of the physical laws which govern them without being weird. It is the eruption into this world of something from outside, which is the marker of the weird. So it's eruption, infiltration of the outside. And the final thing that I want to say is that here he, once again, everybody we've been reading does this. He tries to displace this into a theory of trauma. right this infiltration from the outside can be uh reconceived or it helps us reconceive the theory of trauma and what's interesting is that for for the way that he proposed to think trauma

is as a transcendental perturbance to the forms of space and time right so as everybody knows Kant forms of space and time is the forms of intuition it's the way that we experienced the world of representation insofar as the outside is what shatters representation it's the impossible, blah, blah, blah. So it constitutes something like a transcendental shock to the faculties, right? To the faculties of our sensibility specifically and our understanding also. So here's the quote. Trauma can therefore be thought of as a transcendental shock, a suggestive phrase in relation to Lovecraft's work. The outside is not empirically exterior, it is transcendental exterior. It is not just a matter of something being distant in space and time, but of something which is beyond our ordinary experience and our conception of space and time

itself. And not just, of course, space and time, but beyond our categories of the understanding as well, presumably, right? Because, you know, it's not subject to representation altogether. Lovecraft's descriptions do not allow the reader to synthesize the logoraic schizophony, schizophony, or whatever, or, hold on, I can't see the rest of the slide, of adjectives into a mental image, prompting Graham Harmon to compare the effect of such passages to cubism, a parallel reinforced by the invocation of clusters of cubes and planes and dreams in the witch house. Cubist and futurist techniques and motifs feature in a number of Lovecraft stories, usually as ostensible objects of loathing. Even if he was hostile to it, Lovecraft recognized that modernist visual art could be repurposed as a resource for invoking

the outside. Insofar as, you know, obviously modernism, you know, begins to play with the deformation of representation where you know you have both like the effects of the unconscious disfigure the sort of cleanliness and impulcritude of the image of the body you know you have the infiltration of uniric of the unconscious of trauma of the screen but whatever you want right so for him this is the the the only let's say proximate artistic model for you know what what the kind of uh phenomenon i suppose or model of trauma that lovecraft is working within um so here he returns finally to the hyperstition business right so question sure um okay a lot of the

thinkers that we've been looking at from the sr following off of the ccru are you are relying on and Deleuze on some level, yet Deleuze is a flat ontology. So where do they bring in the ability to think the spatial separation between inside and outside? Well, I think in the case of, so in the case of Fisher, right? So there's Lann and then there's Fisher, the two big thinkers of the outside, at least. I mean, all of them, all the speculative realists also want to have a notion of exteriority, right? In the case of Harmon, Harmon is an explicit dualist, right? So he is not, he's actually very disengaged with Deleuze. So I don't think it's so much a question for him. In the case of Landon Fisher, it's more interesting, right?

Fisher does not really have an ontology because he's not really a philosopher in the strict sense of like, you know, having a positive system of any kind. sorry to the extent that to the extent that he's a philosopher he works outside of any fixed say ontological frame and you know this allows him to have his cake and eat it as it were because and i keep saying that for you but it's like what what i mean is you know he he he has no truck with moving from register to register like you know as we've seen there's like 10 pages which is this first chapter, he weaves, you know, Harmon and Lovecraft and, and, and, and, you know, and Freud and whatever, whatever have you. So I'm not sure where he stands on Deleuze,

but he clearly has some sympathies to, to land still, which you can see, even though he doesn't talk about him as much anymore there, it's still the presence is there. I think for, for, for land is the, it's the big question, right? Because the outside for land is a central concept. Now, Now, I think what he would want to say is that insofar as death, I mean, if you remember, one of the things we saw was that Nick Land generalizes the account of the death drive. Not only, I mean, for Freud, it already was something that drives you the organic from within, right? So the death drive is not just like outside. It's death, like, you know, the stimuli coming from the environment that threaten to eradicate you.

It is the way in which the organic itself is engaged in this rerouting protracted route back to the inorganic. So death inhabits the living, right? And for him, of course, this is just, this is bloated through Bataille and everything we talked about into this cosmic model of extinction, of solar extinction and so on and so forth. So what I think he would say is that outsideness, death, which is death, infiltrates within a flat ontology is simply the way in which all matter is engaged in this vector of dissipation, right? That in fact, interiority in the sense of representation or whatever is part of what he would call the human security system, right? This kind of like attempt to latch into, well, interiority in the sense of human interiority, of course, right?

Human psychology or human representation. And that really, insofar as death inhabits us all, and insofar as we're material in this kind of like resolutely, you know, purely flat plane, we can only hold on for dear life, basically, right? But that's, again, always just a temporary retention, right? I think the same, something very similar applies to Ian Grant, right, who actively has to think of like the, you know, the abyssal ground or grounds as retentions relative to possible formalisms and possible formations. But, you know, the only horizon in this kind of ontology is absolute indifference, right?

Daniel, because you just made the explicit connection between land and Grant, I want to ask, because Grant deals with this question, okay, if this here, this primary production, this undifferentiated flux is ontologically primary, how can it even be that the street entities emerge out of it, that they actually exist? and grant seems to tackle this question but i don't know if does land actually do this or is he just okay well we will dissipate to death and we cannot and that's all he got so that's raised question to him right like why is there certification in the first place right and and

and no land as far as i know does not have a theory of individuation like like for example the list does right so the list tells you of course he has an ontology of the virtual but he has a theory first of larval individuation and difference of repetition and later he describes in you know in a thousand plateaus how it is that you know the the order of abstract machines becomes concretized in functional expressions and you know uh what is it's functional expressions and and um and and and formal contents or something like that yeah functional expression of formal contents and you know across different like sort of levels the geological the biological you know blah blah blah land does not have that i presume he just ascribes to the delizio guattarian model even though he's not that you know like friendly to a thousand plateaus but there's the

other there's another question attached to that which is the the model of you know there's this play in land between the primary process and the secondary process right and we'll get to this when we talk about teleoplexy but the secondary process is precisely what is modeled on the model of is the cybernetic model of negative feedback homeostasis retention and this is where he wants to allot consciousness the human security system blah blah blah so something would i mean if i had to to to to speculate it would be that everything that occurs at the level of discrete individuation or objectivation for land is part of secondary process. That is, in other words, underwritten or underlying it

lies this primary process of destratification or, well, in the case, it's not just destratification. I mean, it is destratification, but it's also restratification, right? Because that's the thing about the primary process, which is modeled on positive feedback. It is a perpetual destratification that in doing so reconstitutes itself, right? So capital expands itself by destroying, by liquidating and pulverizing every concrete content. Now, we'll get, I don't want to jump into that immediately just because, of course, we have the essay coming along. And then we can actually look at the passages more closely and try to figure out what's going on. Just to close this up very, very quickly. I mean, this is all I wanted to say really about the Fisher, unless anybody wants to say anything else. That he introduces, reintroduces the concept of hyperstition.

but he says unlike Borges right who nobody could possibly believe I mean everybody knows that you're dealing with a fiction when you read this you know Lovecraft um you go like people have actually showed up at libraries and asked for a copy of the Necronomicon right and and and I think Al had asked the other day in the chat room whether uh Daniel Barker was real or something like that you know like it it raises an eyebrow sometimes like wait hold on is this is this and who got an email who was oh I can you you were writing to the micastonic virtual university right so you see it's like it's this kind of it's yeah it gets out of hand that's what I mean they're an actual publication though now so well yeah yeah yeah I mean but which you should all contribute to I think yeah I think so too I mean it's fun um anyway so that's

it for this for this uh that part of the course so let me just very quickly plunge into today's stuff. And Jared, don't worry, I have it in mind. We have two presentations. So what I'll do is just start speaking very quickly about accelerationism in the very abstract before diving into the text themselves. And then we'll get to, well, Jared first, because he has to leave a little early, and then we'll do Alexei's presentation after. Is that okay? All good? okay and this is shaky my camera anyway are you seeing the slideshow thank you okay so the first thing i want to say is just very briefly i don't want to get into too much

historical context i presume you're all familiar with the accelerationist corpus and in any case the reader gives you all the background materials you need to know to get yourself familiarized with the genealogy of it. So what I want to do is just like give you the very threadbare origins of the idea and then the basic state of the sort of predicament as it stands. So the first thing is that, as I presume all you all know, there are two proximate origins of the accelerationist thesis, and both of them come from Marx. The first one is from the fragment on machines from the Grundrisse and the account of fixed capital that is described in there. Now, here's a quote from there that I think just tells you what you need to know, which is basically the way in which the production process passes through different stages,

which leads, of course, to the machine automation and how this transforms the structure of labor by extension of capital. Here we go. Once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labor passes through different metamorphoses. whose culmination is the automatic system of machinery set in motion by an automaton a moving power that moves itself this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages it is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker is itself the virtuoso with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it, and it consumes coal or oil just as the worker

consumes food to keep up its perpetual motion. But Nick Land actually has a different fragment on the machines, which of course comes from Marx's speech on the question of free trade from 1848. and in there he actually land does not only give his fragment on machines and automation proper but here we have Marx develop what land considers to be the sort of blueprint for the excel of the acceleration is thesis but of course not just any acceleration is thesis but the quote-unquote right acceleration is thesis right and here's the interesting quote in which Marx describes the way in which capital functions as a quote-unquote pulverizing mechanism that shatters all forms

of established identity or recognizable human culture, right? Quote, in general, and this is from, I mean, Land quotes this in the quick and dirty introduction. In general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade. So the reason why Len likes this, of course, I mean, Marx has something quite specific in mind. He thinks that, you know, the free trade, to the extent that it escalates the inherent contradictions of class struggle,

will eventually lead to the revolutionary process. Now, once that idea of a revolution is given up in favor of looking at capital as a kind of permanent revolution, what you get is a full endorsement of this thesis, right? So Land would see like, yeah, I am completely in favor of capital and free trade and blah, blah, blah, insofar as it accentuates the destructive nihilistic potencies that lead into a human future. forget about revolution for i mean or rather forget about political emancipation you haven't capitaled a permanent revolution already um so in any case it's it's funny because of course he hijacks this fragment um to to to to to you know his own purposes and we will return to this

idea of marx actually when we see uh when we talk a little bit about brassier's piece which of course is is the most intellectually sort of dense of the bunch raised very very very against in that regard. Now, the term accelerationism itself, I think, was coined by Benjamin Noyes. At least Land credits it to him. I don't know if this is correct or not. And as you know, as it becomes first elaborated and popularized by Nick Land as a kind of program, it's sort of like connected back to what we have already discussed more than once, which is the elaboration by Deleuze and Guattari in Antioedipus and the account of capital as this kind of impersonal unconscious, machinic unconscious, right, which transforms progressively

the dependency of capital on human labor, like Marx describes on his fragment of machines, and becomes this kind of self-amplifying dynamism, which quickly enough introduces human history or embeds human history into this wider machinic history of cybernetic takeoff, right, That's the core thesis that, of course, fascinates Lance since the beginning, since the beginning of his engagement with M.T. Oedipus. So here's a quote. Which is the revolutionary path? Is there one? To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises third world countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist economic solution? or might it be to go in the opposite direction, to go still further, that is in the movement of

the market, of decoding and deterioration. For perhaps the flows are not yet de-territorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character, not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to accelerate the process, as Nietzsche put. In this matter, the truth is that we haven't seen anything yet and one of the things that uh some of you might know is that land prefers the the lozen guateri of antioedipus to the lozen guateri of a thousand plateau precisely because in a thousand plateaus you have this sort of uh qualified uh call to to de-stratify or to

de-territorialize right you have the idea that maybe there is such a thing as the you know do not de-territorialize too quickly, they will say, right? So that there is still a sort of like management, a human management or political management or something of de-territorialization. And he thinks, Lamp thinks, that this is a kind of like conservative or humanist relapse at the core of the Liz and Guattari's ontology. He thinks that this original fragment, which you get from Antioedipus, is the basic model to intensify the process, to you know to accelerate to to to to accentuate capital itself is the way one one question um because the question of um what kind of accelerationism does one prefer like or um

the um the injunction uh at all to to accelerate is somehow a normative stance i don't know if land would call it normative but and then one can ask okay is if you want to get rid of all anthropomorphism of all anthropocentrism then then go fuck normativity then why are you writing this at all why are you saying and and there's this real tension between lance saying yeah well you can't do anything the world is getting more and more unequal and his with his new reaction stuff is very very political stuff which is like okay yeah and which is very very much human action and very normal how do how is one to understand something like the imperative to accelerate as

opposed to what i mean look you you can't have you know you're you need it in other words you either liquidate normativity and embrace determinism this kind of like you know deterministic frame all the way or you say okay no there is such a thing as a decision making process Now, sometimes Lent writes as if there is such a thing as deliberative metacognition or decision making. It's just that it's being pulverized progressively by, you know, capitalist, techno-capitalist takeoff. sometimes he writes as if as if you know decision making is just an epiphenomenon right you know when he writes that we what appears to us as history or the history of capitalism is really the ai singularity assembling itself from its enemy's resources or whatever

when he subscribes to the bar yeah to to to daniel baker's uh that not daniel baker scott baker's uh like blind brain theory and he has sort of like expressed sort of like affinity to that what sense is that is there to be made of anything like a you know prescription to accelerate to not accelerate to to you know near reaction versus the left or blah blah blah i mean it seems like theoretical and practical sort of reasoning goes out the window all together with all things normativity and therefore there really is much there isn't any room left for that kind of process I would say his injunction to normativity is that normativity is a sliding scale between legislation and automation, you know, the radicalized dyad that you see in a lot of, I mean, you see it in Marx, you see it regurgitated in a lot of distinction between the machine or automaton and animality.

but I mean in land's most recent articulations it is essentially the slipping of animality to the automaton and technesis as facticity. I got in a bit of an argument with him on Twitter over this because he's become like a Kittlerian where the camera for instance is factitude and so these automatic machines are the instantiations of oh yeah yeah i remember well but but you know i still don't get how that takes care of the normativity part because one thing is to understand the migration of the animal into the inorganic into the artificial or whatever you want another thing is to to to make sense of what do you do with the space of reasons right um because you can you know you give that up too

no no yeah yeah of course of course he wants to give that up but the thing is can he even make sense of it within the animal right that that's i think what what's the deeper question it's not what happens to the normative once you migrate into the artificial or to the post-human or in human or whatever is whether it makes even sense to speak of normativity while you are within the human domain or whether on the other hand like a good sort of cold-hearted natural naturalist you know you're already you know deliberative metacognition is already just an illusion a metacognitive illusion that you know doesn't have any kind of traction really on on on practice in other words that practice what you do appears to you you know woven through the whole machinery of

will and normativity and reasoning blah blah but that really what guides the process from without or from within is really, you know, a blind neurophysiological processes that are completely impervious to the second order dynamisms of deliberative metacognition precisely. And I think, so Len does not really address that question. I mean, again, I think he sort of shifts back and forth. Sometimes he writes as if, yeah, we are, you know, deciding and trying the best to keep it from being pulverized. sometimes he writes the other as if you know we can't do shit so i think eric's question is is pertinent because the the question is if in fact we have to embrace the idea that you know

deliberate medical condition is a meta is an illusion epiphenomenal illusion then it doesn't make any sense to to say recommend one course of action over the other it doesn't mean couldn't one say that um uh that he is um consequent with that when he switches his mode of operation in the 90s to writing a theory fiction that okay he stops doing philosophy anything kind of normative and just functions with his texts well if his texts so no because because i mean maybe maybe he would want to think so and i think this is why he starts going further and further deeper into an order of writing, which is no longer even governed by the norms of language, because getting out of

philosophy won't get you out of the rabbit hole. I mean, if you're writing sentences in English, you're still within the order of description, explanation, natural language, right? That's not going to do the trick. So he's got to need something like a radically anti, you know, linguistic or conceptual ideography or something of the sort that doesn't allow itself to be translate it into intelligible discourse but of course he can't do that either because as soon as he introduces a quote-unquote non-standard numeracy or whatever in order for it to actually make any sort of import to thinking he has to weave it to this conceptual machinery right um you know if you know the kabbalah and the the archons and all this shit doesn't make any sense

without it being stapled back to the hyperstitional lore of the architectonic order of the eschaton. And the whole Barker and Lemuria business doesn't make sense without this whole intensive, you know, zero multiplicity, blah, blah, blah, ontology that he gets from Deleuze and Guattari. So at the end of the day, the dependency on the norms and strictures of philosophy keeps coming back. You know, he wants to say that he's out of it, but it's like, it's the same story. I think it's very similar to what happens to Lacan, right? or that what happens to maybe of many of the members of the CA that wanted to sort of escape the clutches of natural language in the name of formalization or science or whatever in the case of what kind of course the the clutches of philosophy which is that there is still such a such a obvious dependency on the strictures of natural language somehow and that

big you know always it comes back to the this is the question i've raised now several times as well what is the status of i think that the unresolved question for all of these thinkers is the status of the relationship between natural language and formal languages which i think ray in a way touches upon when he raises the question of the brontosaurus as a thing right last week we're seeing how is that even when you're trying to adjudicate the question what is science right you have this question of what do you do with everything that we know about the world that presumably would just get through. Daniel, this is essentially the question of what Daniel Dennett calls the Cartesian theater, no, the character of, you know, Thomas Nagel's, what is it like to be a bat? No matter what you described in terms of the bat extrinsically, you don't know what it's like

to be a bat. And here I side with Paul Churchland that this argument is fundamentally flawed. It confuses what it is to know something with what it is to actually be something. The reason the explanation of the bat's internal experience doesn't you know make us feel or experience what it's like to be a bat is because that description is not true to us well okay hold on no i think i think i think the church line argument uh goes or and i agree with you that i agree with that that that sort of straddling of the line that works if you think that there's something like qualia that are precisely irreducible to let's say objective descriptions functional descriptions of what's going on at the level of, let's say, neural architecture, right? So if your phenomenology is premised on something like qualia, then sure.

But this is not what we're talking about right now because qualia, so there's two things, right? What do you do with like the nature of consciousness, you know, like consciousness in the sense of like conscious awareness, right? Like conscious in the sense of like sensory sentience, right? Then that's one question, whether you need to introduce qualia or something spooky of that kind, emergent properties of some kind. Don't we have to when there's automaton and we sort of treat the automaton as the bat in this instance? Well, I don't know. I mean, so the question of whether you need to actually in the end postulate sort of emergent properties or qualities or objects, like sellers thought so, you know, obviously Chalmers thinks so. You know, Delanda thinks that emergentism has been rehabilitated. I mean, I think so. So emergentism is not discredible.

uh and and and just but the status of quality i think is more finicky like um so for example sellers thinks that in order to account for sensory episodes right which is one of the two things we have to explain and we're going to naturalize consciousness you need to introduce something he calls sensor you need to amplify your concept of space and time and he thinks this can only be done within a process monism and he only sketched this out but then johannes Sugg sort of like develops this in like, you know, dynamic systems theory, uh, in a dynamic systems theory framework, uh, you have then the flip side of this, which is like, you know, somebody like Chalmers who thinks that, you know, you have these, I mean, he's a resolute dualist in this regard where you need like, strictly speaking in commercial, like, you know, these qualitative states that are non continuous with, you know, the functional

dynamisms of nature. So he thinks that dualism is a credible hypothesis. Now, I, I don't think so. I personally stay clear of that branch of, you know, of quality. But then, so there's that. But then there's the other question, which is what do you do with the normative core of reason, right? So there's the forms of sensibility. That's the question that we are asking now. Then there's the question of normativity and rationale. Because that one has a different status than sensibility, right? That's a different story. And I think the question we're raising now is not so much the question of what do we do with consciousness in the sense of conscious awareness, but what do we do with the sphere of natural language as it relates to formal languages and how it is in the attempts to escape humanism by trying to weasel your way out of all things logos.

right the all these thinkers are forced to sort of embrace formalization in some way or another whether it's legit maths or not but nevertheless invariantly of course insofar as they have as this formal formal ideography serves a purpose there needs to be something that explains its import that translates it back to you know natural language and you know even churchland i mean Churchland has this wonderful instance where he's saying that there is nothing, you know, like if you're a trained neurobiologist, like he gives an example of, you know, Patricia coming back from work, like having a bad day. And the way she describes her day, as opposed to being like a phenomenological description, is something like, you know, oh, my serotonin levels are going low.

well, you know, she gives just a strict physical description of what's going on at the level of brain. So he's saying the, the idea that phenomenology cannot equate this is, uh, cannot, can, cannot, you know, provide an accurate account of consciousness is, is, is gone. You can, you can be completely objective and phenomenological at the same time, but here would be my rejoinder to trick to Paul would be, yeah, but notice how these, these descriptions of like what's going on in the brain are still woven within sentences and natural language right i mean the the presumed liquidation of the intentional stance in the name of this kind of like you know one naturalism would have to dispense even of the like what would you have to do you would have to just simply speak out formulas or or you know not even descriptions of that so but at that point what

are you doing conversation with his wife where they're like speaking in formulas i think but But then the very notion of a speech act dissolves, of course, right? Because there's no longer any kind of like propositional attitudes or intentional attitudes. So if those go away, then me actually just spelling out formulas doesn't carry with itself any sort of impact to your understanding or it shouldn't, right? It shouldn't. You couldn't take my blah as a description of anything because description is a normative category, right? it's a practice that people with intentional attitudes and propositional states do. If those are gone, then description is gone. Then me talking in numbers is not going to change that. So it seems to me that we're back to where I think John McDowell is right in

his critique of bald naturalism. Now we're getting a little deviated. So let me like retake the threat because I want us to get to the presentations. And I only have this one slide that I want to like present and then we'll get to the presentations actually if you don't mind. So I wanted to just to give a feel like, you know, of course, as it stands today, the accelerationist thesis has become sort of subject to a central division between left and right accelerationism. And lo and behold, of course, these two iterations very, very easily map into the two trajectories we have seen.

On the one hand, of course, you have left accelerationism, which directly sort of identifies itself within the neo-rationalist lineage, and which, of course, very much continues with the idea of trying to rehabilitate the valences of, if not dialectical materialism proper, at the very least, a kind of emancipatory revolutionary political notion of agency and practice. On the other hand, you have a right accelerationism, which is overtly anti-political. It skews and pulverizes the kernel of collective agency as it does individual agency, and in which the intensification of capital really is part of an inhuman, let's say, historicity that completely divorces itself from the interest of social utility.

So you can no longer subordinate, you know, the idea that we can congregate, collectivize, you know, in any way, shape or form to do politics and to, you know, pursue a betterment for our children and grandchildren, you know, that's gone. So it's very, very, you know, you have a kind of anti-political practice that's analogous to anti-philosophical practice in this regard. a complete disavowal of the valences of agency as we understand it and therefore practical reasoning the practical reasoning then that of course ordains political activity so when i write i know the the subdivisions of accelerationism are freakingly difficult and they are multiplying

by the second but um i think it's it's very very important to insert unconditional accelerationism in here i know that land says yeah unconditional accelerationism is just right accelerationism with better pr but at least from the viewpoint of the unconditional accelerationists they say well know also lands near reactionary phase is a turn away from his 90s tciu stuff it's re-entering politics and therefore a deviation of the original accelerationist project and the unconditional accelerationist project is basically anti-politics and anti-philosophy and they see near reaction and right accelerationism as political and uh um and there are various deviances in the unconditional

accelerationism to the right and to the left so xenogothic who wrote about mac fisher this this book which just comes out next year for just for example for a left-leaning unconditional accelerationist well so so here's what i think about that so long so i simplify of course you can you can find shades and iterations and and the thing has grown way past uh this kind of of course this division is germinal it it corresponds to let's say the stage of the text that we have been exposed to and so on. Now, whether you can read the neo-reactionary turn, the Lance neo-reactionary turn as a sort of like reinsertion into the political, I think is dubious. I think it's right. I think you're absolutely right.

I mean, because it presupposes precisely agency and collective decision. He thinks it's not because he thinks that this privatization and complete what he calls formalization of governance trivializes politics precisely, right? So in the very first essay from The Dark Enlightenment, the way that he presents, you know, neocameralism is a kind of formalization of governance, of state, right? Which basically transfers the power into shares, into fungible shares. And this precisely eradicates the need for politics because what you do effectively in theory is you transform the sort of, you know, political space of, you know, both voting and, you know, democratic consensus or whatever

into a purely contractual transactional mechanism. So it's an assimilation of politics into economics. Now, that, of course, is very short-sighted because as soon as you have the question of, all right, you have these, like, you know, the patchwork model, of course, that he inherits from and so on, you're going to have questions of, well, like, you know, what about military? What about decisions? I mean, so politics is going to come back flooding in regardless. Whether it's state politics or democratic politics or not, it is. So I think that you see people are right in this regard. But I, so you see, I don't see the distinctions so much between right and you accelerationism i just think there's two ways to read the same phenomenon i think honestly so i

mean trade right with you if if that is more palatable i think that the only reason why there is now a distinction between right and you accelerationism as far as i can tell is because there has been a atrociously misreading atrocious misreading of land that wants to sort of like call him a fascist and all this other crap now he's a right-winger no question about that but he's you in the libertarian tradition of course and i mean there's nothing fascist as far as i can tell about what he's saying i mean he could be many just as followers to want to like reinstate a king and like you know the feudal model etc yeah but that's okay but that's so stupid of course yeah yeah so like who cares about that you know it's like so so for me it's like okay call it right

acceleration is because it is in the right it is part of the right you know tradition and i think think it's important that because land for land it is important to to to rehabilitate the legacy of the right he thinks that actually i mean of course this is his little sort of like uh zizekian inversion right which is you know the left is the conservative party today right it is actually those who are in favor of all things like cathedral blah blah you know uh you know humanism it is the the libertarian this kind of offshoot of the libertarian tradition that you get from mole block, at least once it's sanitized, it's like racist excesses, right? That is actually revolutionary or emancipatory. And so here's the interesting thing, right? And we'll talk about

this in a little bit as well. But one thing that comes out, I think, very clearly is that from the quick and dirty introduction as well, is that for land, left accelerationism does not even qualify as part of the accelerationist thesis, right? This kind of sanitized, repoliticized accelerationist thesis, which he again says is basically, you know, like Leninism without the NEP, plus with some morsels of Chilean managerialism, right? Like socialism managerialism thrown in for good measure. And that's what you get, you know, like, he thinks like that's not accelerationist, I'm sorry. But, I mean, that is just, you know, sort of like a glorified social democratic sort of, you know, revamping or, you know,

kind of like techie, you know, social democratic revamp. But I just want to like emphasize this, this continuity between the two vectors that we said. And I really like the idea. I mean, this is a concept that I think might be useful, you know, anti-philosophy and anti-politics, you know, in the Vedouian sense, I think can be, can be really neatly matched together. because I think what I think is that left and right accelerationism are the kind of practical counterparts of the theoretical division that we have been tracing since the origins of the seminar, since the beginning of the seminar, right? So again, left accelerationism on the side of rationalism, on the side of, you know, rehabilitating some form of dialectics, you know, on the side of avowing, you know, the valences of modern science. And this is where the

neorationalist camp today sits, including xenofeminism, right? So I think of xenofeminism as an extension of the left accelerationist program as it was first drafted. Although they have, of course, very, very interesting also contributions, specifically to the normativity and nature debate. I think that's a really, they introduce a really beautiful distinction between social natural or normative naturalism and ontological naturalism, which I think goes a long way. On the other hand, you have the right accelerationism, which is the anti-politics. And it's, again, a kind of practicism, a practicism that eschews the valences of reasoning, right, of reasoning, both not theoretical reasoning only, but practical reason. So just like the CCRU,

you know, and Len's solo work sort of like promotes this kind of anti-philosophical program, cybernetic program. So right accelerationism is promoting this kind of anti-political program, which is, again, that can be conceived as a program in the sense of like a political collectivization. Now, I think, like Eric said, that this is like almost a performative contradiction so that the same problem that we see in the theoretical domain maps back into the political or rather to the practical, right? These are indissociable polarities. And here's just a quote and then we'll get to the presentations um so from the accelerate collection i think mckay uh writes this really good just general overview although i have to say that i think that that

introduction to the accelerate collection is too colored in the sense that it it it lines up too strongly with the left camp and i think uh sort of doesn't really capture the dimension of what, say, somebody like Nick was after, right? But regardless, here's the quote. Explorationism seeks to side with the emancipatory dynamic that broke the chains of feudalism and ushered in the constantly ramifying rage of practical possibilities characteristic of modernity. The focus of much accelerationist thinking is the examination of the supposedly intrinsic link between these transformative forces and the axiomatics of exchange value and capital accumulation that format contemporary planetary society. Well, this sort of examination of the intrinsic links

between the axiomatics of exchange value, I don't think you get that really in the left accelerationist, Nick and Alex's work, it's not really part of their program as much. But you do see the beginning of an interrogation of this question both in the teleoplexy essay and in uh nick uh i'm sorry and in race wandering abstraction i say let me stop there uh and here's a here's just an illustration of both camps right left this is a the cover of inventing the future uh and that's a portrait of the sith lord himself so daniel you need to step up your meme game seriously i like this hey what are you talking about this is great yeah this is really good if you really go into left accelerationism left

acceleration is like modernism unbound and not fucking yang gang oh come on yang gang is like yang gang is like i don't think you don't i i don't know how one can associate are you are you are you a left acceleration is all right come on i'm a hardcore left acceleration i feel i feel hardcore but i think but i think one really needs to read them from the theoretical basis upwards from like breccia and prometheanism and not like social and not like take from the from the political but from the board from the theoretical up this is like analogous of what happened to me with the urban omelet okay two two qualifications one i consider myself to be a left acceleration of some sort um although i have my i mean not not in nick and alex's program but but

I don't cancel you, Daniel. Everything's okay. Number two, I am in the, well, I'm not in the Yang Gang, but I would vote for the man. Yeah, okay. There you have it. There needs to be like a higher UBI, lots of technical matters, obviously. You shouldn't be taken away from social services. I don't know. I mean, I really, I'm a Philistine in these matters. I just know I don't like Bernie Sanders. Whoa, okay. We'll talk later, are you supposed to? We'll talk later, but we can squash that at some other time. So, Jared, actually, do you want to jump in and illuminate us? I'll try. Let's see. I'm not sharing.

Are you seeing? Am I still sharing my crap? I still see the beautiful meme. I see Eric. Wait, have I used it before, right? How do I share my screens? There's a button that's a green button next to participants. Share. Oh, yeah. It says share. And then you pick a specific window. Thanks. I'm a decelerationist, apparently. Wow, that color. That title is beautiful. That title. don't get don't get too excited um gotta mute myself forever uh let's see i do know how to do

the i don't know if anyone remembers but oh shit i need to time myself because last time i talked for like 25 minutes uh jared i'll time you don't worry what do you want okay what do you want like three minutes three minutes yeah i'll talk really fast no i'm i'm starting okay go yeah i'll time What do you want? Seriously, what do you want? Like 10? Let's shoot for 10. I'm already at like 8. Let's shoot for 10, yeah, because we have another presentation to go. Yeah, yeah. Okay. God damn it, I'm going to play the show now. Yeah. Okay. This is mainly focused on, it's pretty much strictly focused on Gracias Essay, along with a response published by a writer

who I'm not otherwise familiar with. It was in a journal called SICK, a journal which I believe is not defunct. And so it mainly consists of passages curated against each other. And I'll just kind of like emphasize different aspects and add some kind of additional comments as I figure out if I have these things in any kind of intelligible order. So it's, let's see, I don't want to see my face while I do this. So of course, Presti's account, he takes off by himself comparing the accelerationist and communization traditions via Cyrano Sutherland Williams and the Endnotes volumes.

And so there's this question of whether we can kind of disentangle cognitive abstraction from real abstraction. We'll get to more of that kind of really towards the end. So I'll just kind of... The variety is the representational modeling. The question is whether we can have representational modeling that has cognitive traction on the abstract dynamics of capital that will not be disqualified in advance by the claim that such representation is congenitally blind to its own social determination. Generally, at least within the scope of Ray's essay, this follows from the fall claim that capital's real subsumption of

intellectual labor reduces all scientific representation to calculation abing the abstractions of the value form. But this in turn invites perplexity as to what gets read is to our same concepts themselves, what distinguishes good, cognitively virtuous and politically emancipatory, abstraction for bad, cognitively deficient and politically reactionary abstraction. So capital of labor, value form, et cetera. By what criteria do these succeed or fail to map contemporary social reality when deployed and competing and often politically and toxic explanations. Like shit, that was not what I was doing.

Yeah. And so, start up by talking about limits to subsumption, kind of like against Kamar. So against the idea that we can take this kind of Archimedean point of view from the outside and kind of idealize a notion of past community. I'll just read. The onset of real subsistence seems to mark the terminal phase of humanity's fateful self-estrangement. There is reason to doubt whether the distinction between formal and real subsistence can be used to characterize distinct successive phases of capitalism's historical development. Viewed analytically rather than historically,

it seems that formal and real subsumption are simultaneously, simultaneous intertwined aspects of the capital relation. Moreover, Kamat's insistence that capital has now achieved complete dominion, not just over the sphere of production, but over every aspect of social existence, is equally contentious. And as the labor process in both real and formal subsumption is the immediate production process of capital. Nothing comparable can be said of anything beyond the production process, for it is only production which capital directly claims as its own, the accumulation process, that is. While it is true that the valorization process of capital in its entirety is the unity of the processes of production and circulation, and most capitalist capital brings about transformations

of the world beyond its immediate production process, these transformations, by definition, cannot be grasped in the same terms those which occur within that process under real subsunction. Nothing external to the immediate production process actually becomes capital, nor, strictly speaking, is subsumed under capital. So, let's see. In the C, in his account of total subsunction, the logic which would propel him towards a politics involving little more than the abstract assertion of some true human community against the monolithic, capitalist totality and the needs to leave this world. So I feel like everybody

talks about this. So I mean the challenge is for to produce a materialism that must be able to explain what constitutes the reality of conceptually foreign abstraction without hypothesizing that form, you know, without, without asserting a capital is some kind of causa sui, some kind of like totalizing subject that overtakes everything outside of the production process. The key to the de-reification of abstraction is an account of conceptual form as generated by social practices. This requires distinguishing between practice and labor. All labor involves practice, but not every practice counts as labor." And so

curiously, Endnotes and at least some accelerationist literature kind of locates this in a kind of neo-rationalist tradition, although they often come to heads as kind of accusing one, accusing the other of a primitivist or ludic kind of sensibility, the other accusing of kind of like technocratic, crypto-fascist sensibility. Anyway, so, while capital posits the labor that provides its substance, i.e. its presupposition, this positing itself is ultimately constituted through the extraordinarily complex set of human practices without which capital's self-valorization could not be. Values assumption of labor as positive presupposition also presupposes something that it does not posit spontaneous human activity.

This spontaneity invoked here should not be understood in the Kantian sense as the determination of sensation exercised by the human mind in the act of thinking. That is what Kant called pure apperception. The fact that I am aware of myself as having my own experiences, this is a spontaneous act. It's the opposite of something natural. A spontaneous act is one that is freely undertaken. In fact, the word spontaneous derives from the Latin sponte, meaning of one's own accord, freely, willingly. In this sense, spontaneity is not about acting compulsively or automatically. It's a matter of acting without external constraint. And so, I mean, the hope is that by reading this kind of apart from a caricature of Kant,

which would see this as some kind of a mysterious supernatural unmover, impervious to external determination, or as a kind of in a phrase that has come up in this course, other courses, unexplained explainer, some better more dialectical reading of him, which understands the freedom exercising the spontaneity of apperception is resulting from the wills and grace of an intersubjectively instituted role, rather than a wholly undetermined eruption at Sihua. So it's not just the agent's rational self-determination, but that determination through is a spousal of a universally applicable rule. And so the question is how do we disentangle, if we're going to kind of

like socialize Kantian rationalism in an intersubjective kind of way, how do we we demarcate that from from you know its instantiations historically in capitalist society I mean this may seem like a pretty pedestrian or a predictable argument please don't vomit at this point but I mean so this is how I don't know how Laurie puts it. Jared, I'm not going to vomit, but you have about one. Yeah. Let's see. How much do I want to say? I feel like it kind of explained that. I like this one better.

So the appeal to a human community can also not be satisfied and countered by reaffirming the concept of society. Asier argues in favor of necessity of mediation, of people so that a real universality, a maximally expansive human solidarity can exist beyond hierarchical unitarianism. He reminds us of the concept of species being, understood not as biological category, but the capacity of self transformation. Celebrations like talk about collective self mastery. It is worth considering this interpretation species being beyond Marx in the economic and philosophical manuscripts whose alienation can be considered as problematic as Kamat's authentic

community particularly if life activity is not deciphered from labor. So let's go to that. The universality of man appears in practice precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body both inasmuch as nature is one, his direct means of life, and two, the material, the object, and the instrument of his life activity. For labor, life activity, productive life itself, appears to man in the first place merely as a means of satisfying a need, compulsion, which kind of seems to be intentioned with the definition of spontaneity proposed earlier, a need to maintain a physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the species, it is life and gender in life. This also seems to be

tension with kind of the reinscriptions of a thanotropic death drive that we talked about with regard to Ray and Reza in the last session. I'm not really gonna have time to talk about all of this stuff. This is too much. you know the good stuff it's just gonna go away well I can send the slides I don't want to talk forever though yeah sure you can post them in the classroom yeah okay yeah no yeah obviously there was a lot there so so send us send it to

awesome okay because I haven't read that essay by O'Larry but um you know some interesting stuff yes it looks like it I mean so maybe I mean I'll use this opportunity just to to to talk about this essay because obviously yeah you're gonna run out of time again and there's no more time after so so there's another presentation and I you know I like say already had to present last week so obviously I want to get to that but but so so as to be uh efficient let's just briefly talk about this essay because I think this essay touches on something important so as far as I I mean as far as I can tell um so it you know a few things I mean the wandering abstraction piece of course

I'm talking about. So Brasier wants to really interrogate this kind of attempt to weave back accelerationism with rationalism, with rationalist legacy. And of course, for him, this involves sort of coordinating these two senses of what is abstraction, conceptual abstraction and social abstraction. But what the hell is social abstraction? That's the first question, right? And he takes this back first to Marx's account of real subsumption, which is the idea, real subsumption is the complete assimilation of the means of production and labor to capital, which is the ultimate end result of what is called formal subsumption.

So when formal subsumption is complete, which is the process by virtue of which capitalism becomes progressively instantiated and industrial technology by extension, real subsumption is when all spheres of life are presumably subordinated to capital. right and then there's the other idea which is a the son breathile idea that there's a asymmetrical relationship between conceptual or theoretical abstraction of social abstraction such that social abstraction determines theoretical abstraction and the idea that he begins with this kind of this question of representation is well you can't reverse this relationship and say

that you know you can just sort of swindle your way out of social determination by producing a kind of theoretical framework in pains of idealism or naivete because whatever discourse you're going to produce or whatever you know whatever discourse presumably escapes or reverses a relationship will be in turn really subsumed under capital and therefore it will be oblivious to its own to its own conditions of social subsumption of social abstraction. And so the idea is what kind of, you know, what kind of theoretical register would allow us to escape this kind of like naive idealism, while at the same time tracking the mechanisms of real subsumption and, you know, getting away from

real subsumption. And long story short, I mean, what I get from this essay, so he goes through Kamaté's, I don't know how you pronounce his name actually, Kamat, but Kamat's thesis is of course that, you know, in the wake of real subsumption, which basically renders all kind of ideological critique redundant and so on, the only thing to do is to sort of prioritize production over the product. So you have to understand that there's this thing called production labor that exceeds the commodity form that is assigned, you know, that produces the circulation of goods in a capitalist economy. But this is a very weak, you know, alternative, right?

Because I think it sort of like tethers back to the idea that, you know, a collectivity has to be a kind of community that is sort of woven around you know forms of productivity or production and and and brassier does right as endnotes does to to sort of castigate this this this part from commentaire now the the the engagement with endnotes as far as i can tell is the the important thing there is that um there is this kind of first of all there's two things The first thing is this kind of reinscription of the original thesis of Marx, which is the idea that late capitalism progressively expels humans from the productive process so that it creates these kinds of surplus populations.

And so that the proletarian can really no longer be considered the working class, but it's rather this kind of increasing aggregate of the excluded or nameless or something like that. and and and and what the end knows what's wants to think is well you know this kind of there's no understanding of who we are there's no sense of collective or community irrespective of the class relation because of because of real subsumption um so what we have to do is abolish the class relation as a whole and this will somehow lead into new forms of you know a kind of collectivity or whatever. I think this is also very weak sauce, personally. I don't see anything coming out of this. What Brassini wants to do, and here's where I think it's his own sort of

contribution here, also sort of trying to like sort of think this back to the theoretical sort of origins of the project, is to think of what he, well, he wants to say that real subsumption is not exhaustive, right? The whole idea is real subsumption encompasses everything that can be filed under human labor, and it certainly encompasses the labor process, but it's not exhaustive. There is a surplus. and what is what what is the surplus that can never be sort of fully assimilated to

again to to capital it is a spontaneous human activity and here is where i think shit gets really stupid um where i mean that's stupid in the sense that race but it's just like incomprehensible like i don't understand what we're talking about anymore because a spontaneous human activity goes back of course to this idea of the kantian idea of the spontaneity of thinking which at the end of the day is human freedom, right? And what Ray wants to say, as Jared showed, was we shouldn't understand human freedom or spontaneity as a kind of ex nihilo action coming from nowhere, like a self-determination, but rather we should think of it in this kind of brandomian sense, right? A kind of collective subordination or intersubjective subordination

to a rule that we set for ourselves socially. So it's an account, this is Sellers and Brandom, specifically Brandom, of trying to explain freedom in terms of how we abide ourselves to norms, how in other words we institute norms that then have power over us. this capacity to bind ourselves to norms is what constitutes rationality and by extension also politics or political action now of course what this is going to turn out to require brassier is going to say is an account of social practice because you don't get that from sellers you get that from random what is a social practice you know and that's what making it explicit is basically all about really at the end of the day now i think i don't know what you guys think about

this okay but but but but as far as i i'm concerned this just raises again the the the this kind of primitive question concerning uh the status of the normative because okay who's doing this i mean for rules to be instituted intersubjectively you need a this a linguistic community of weak sayers right i mean that's the starting point of brandoms making an explicit for those of you who haven't read it's like who are we we are you know we sayers who who treat each other as as agents in this like mutually recognizing you know sense blah blah blah um it so it presupposes already that uh there is the space of more primitive sort of deliberation

cognition that on whose basis we ground the social consensus right which is the subordination to the role so there still seems to be something like a kind of volunteerism at the core i know ray doesn't want it i know ray wants to eschew any kind of residual volunteerism that that sort of makes an appeal to like decisionism or you know freedom ex nihilo but it seems i mean i just don't see how who is making the decision making process in the community who are the members of these communities on what basis do they make these decisions these are presumably decisions that take place in a kind of dialogical concessions consensus right but if the but if but if something is right about what nick and the others are the right accelerationists are saying is that the

resources of deliberative metacognition even if in its socialized form and its political deliberative form are exhausted they don't have the emancipatory potential that they might have once had you know that in other words us talking and getting together and making decisions and organizing ourselves is not going to change anything at the end of the day that in other words real subsumption cannot be simply you know you can't appeal to the irreducible dimension of human spontaneity and sociality as a fulcrum to expect that we will magically congregate and make a better world outside of capitalism unfortunately i think this is where the the the even though race piece is the most intellectually sort of theoretically rigorous right when it comes to

specifying so so okay tell me what kind of okay so you know what are we left with at the end this is what i want to ask what are we left with and at the end we're left with people get together and abide themselves to rules so then the next question is okay what rules what rules are these rules that would presumably emancipate us from the capital relation so it's it's woefully abstract right it's woefully abstract it's empty of content if the problem with kamate was that the notion of community was too abstract to be of use and if the problem with endnotes was that again the abolishing of the class relation just begs the question what does that mean how does this concretize itself right that i don't see that we've made any progress by appealing to a social to social practices you know social practices ever be as abstract a concept as we wanted and

honestly reading the 850 pages of making it explicit doesn't help you move one inch forward as far as i'm concerned at least in settling what kind of social practices would be you know class abolishing right or consider so anyway i mean i'm just throwing this in there obviously i had something much more organized that i wanted to present but we don't have time for that so so anybody wants to chip in and hear i would be most um well i i don't know if um you know i don't know what you would think then about this Brandomian shared semantic space? What would you think about the labor of the inhuman in Ressa? I mean, when he criticizes the same like automatism that might be produced in the critical left through his concept of the kitsch Marxism, like,

what would you think about what he proposes about the constructible we and the sharing of the mandic rules like in the in the brandonian sense like uh i know that rosa is like not an explicit political thinker i mean i think his political stance might be implicit but i don't know how would you like uh put his position within this uh i mean he concludes into the spirit pretty politically so it makes it explicit there yeah i guess i mean yeah but but i think no i do think Federico's right in that it's sort of it's not an you know he doesn't have a program or anything like that you know um well there are few dudes yeah no you're right you're right but but but so about the labor of the human in particular I think that piece is programmatic it was when

Russell was transitioning to Salarsian like mode and I think there are a lot of conceptual confusions unfortunately in the essay that run that that make it um theoretically wonky to begin with so so so i i would just be i would stay clear of of that part i think that's resa again in transitionary mode rather than having fully settled now i think what you get from it is like i mean unfortunately i mean this is i can't help but but get the same impression um you have something similar in the scene of feminist manifesto about the reconstruction and the infinite plasticity of the self through technological and conceptual means right so the idea is that once we accept that we are nothing once reason is understood as a protocol for

intervening upon ourselves and each other right then reason um emerges as as an instrument through which, you know, the construction of the human becomes a possibility and in which the future becomes an open possibility. Now, that's fine. I don't have a problem with that at all. I mean, I do think that that, that rationality works in that way. That's fine. The question is, what do we do? Like what concrete interventions are the ones that we want to say? I mean, talking about alien futures, talking about this and that, that only goes along. I mean, you have to think about, okay, what's an alternative economic model of production? What's an alternative model of production? Daniel, maybe one can say that this theoretical side of left accelerationism

cannot give you any practical plans, any practical alternatives, because that's not its objective, its aim. Its aim is to give a theory of the condition of possibility of anything like social praxis and that then to ask yourself, okay, what could be alternative modes of production? This cannot, the theoretical part of left acceleration cannot answer this. Therefore, you must resort to science and so on. But there's a strict labor division, I think. Well, yes and no, because Nick and Alex explicitly set out by saying that the big bad with the contemporary left, of course,

it's the delusion of its propositive ambition and its universal ambition, right? And then we have to recuperate this. We have to retrieve the lofty propositions that emancipatory politics once had. Now, their program is not – I mean, they understand the limitations of their – I mean, they have a set of prescriptions, right? UBI, you know, the dismantling of the work ethic and so on and so forth. They have their four-point agenda, full automation. And I'm missing the fours. I forgot about it. But so that's fine. I mean, those might be perfectly good imperatives, although I do think they work in certain – I mean, you can't – UBI might work very well, you know, in some places.

I certainly don't think it will work in Peru, right? right now so or colombia right so so in any case it's so so so they want to scale it up right they want to think of a post-capitalist future i i personally don't see the post-capitalist part of it i mean i have a set of local interventions and propositions that are very you know that are laudable which are but which are still of a local you know applicability now you're right in that specifically race piece is more geared toward interrogating like the the theoretical question of what is a social practice what what are the conditions under which we could think of emancipation and in that regard i think you're right it would be unfair to to say have to get

for not having given you a program for revolution right but unfortunately my my my feeling is that we have been in this mode for a long time where you know i've been hearing this now for decades which is like you know we have to badu says this jizek says this you know we're in square one we're at the beginning of politics we need to interrogate again what revolution means and so on now what there's an essay by nick land called critique of transcendental miserabilism and that essay is basically a castigation of what he calls the frankfurtian spirit which now rules the frankfurtian spirit being well marxism and the left has relinquished all aspirations of what

they call positive economicism right the idea that we could have a mode of production that would outperform capitalism so all that's left once that project is gone is a series of disgruntled resentments against capital so and because nobody can actually give you the goods like tell me what is a plausible alternative mode of production to the capitalist mode of production a sketch even like i can i can send you some links if you want wait because right now i'm on the same page as daniel i this is the thing that frustrates me the most in life i'm i'm working in a political left political uh accelerationist organization called association for the design of history and we have one member called philip dabbrich who was a student of paul cockschott who works

on simulations for socialist planned economy which are more effective than capitalism and we have some texts online about them that would be yeah so i mean this sounds maybe you can tell me how it's different i work with bernard stiegler we've been working on this for quite some time it's not just me it's quite a bit of people are going to present this in a few months to the united nations geneva conference in 2020 the idea is there's this community that stiegler and a few other people have cultivated north of paris and saint denis that's contributory learning there's a lot of computer scientists and economists and philosophers and teachers there's an autistic school of autistic children that has been one of the first places where this integrative

contributory learning was tested but then also to a few universities and such it's a commune essentially in like the old sense but it adopts virtual techno you know i mean like coding and such is taught in tandem um and it seems to work on a small scale the ideas to use this in a larger means but at the same time you know that i realized that this does not make sense poor places i don't want to just say peru i'll say turkey and so much of turkey doesn't make no sense this is a ridiculous proposition that almost is insulting to villagers in that regard i think that kind of experiment would be liable to nick and alex have a you know when they critique localism specifically so you know they they're in there in the second chapter of inventing the

future in the critique of the contemporary left they devote themselves to a critique of horizontalism on the one hand and then localism on the other now this is a case where i think the critique of localism would apply in the sense that as you as you put it can uh there seems to be just a basic problem of scalability right and generalizability it seems like this this sounds like a nice retreat for professors and scholars in a very advent you know in a position of privilege now you want to do this kind of like macrocosmic, you know, let's move every member of a shantytown in Peru to, to a Stiglarian, like, you know, seminar. Let's see what that goes like, right? How do you organize? And also, I mean, for me, the question that's going to hit everybody in the face, and this is

why I'm very interested about what Eric is doing in this regard with like simulating socialism, is you're going to have to answer very concrete questions about production, which is relative to different sectors of production? What do we do with mining? What do we do with, you know, agriculture? What do we do with this and that? What do we, you know, et cetera, et cetera. If you have a non-state economy, a non-state form of, you know, organization, how do you regulate, you know, decision-making process, sanctions and prohibitions and so on and so forth. All of these questions are the beginning of social engineering, right? And they're the beginning of economic engineering but i find it that people like to stay in the critical phase or in the lofty phase of you know we're just like we have to like and honestly i'm not sure where

we have made much progress uh you know i've been hearing the same thing for 15 years at this point since badu started saying yes we are in the beginning of politics and it's like all right so get to work now like let's you know let's let's like let's see something concrete like an actual proposition that could actually resist and you know it's so woeful you see for example Gizek is another great example of course I'm not going to expect Gizek to come up with anything except you know movie critiques but you see something like someone like Gizek come along and say somebody asks please do the critique do the you know no somebody will ask you something like uh well can you tell me what this post-capitalist future is and he says well i see

problems so you know like ecology intellectual property and so on so yeah and it's like dude all right we know there are problems we know this you're brilliant yeah it's just jesus i mean come on um yeah i actually find the same trouble i mean i'm on the same page like what what does it take to make the program work like actually like make it a material you know entity in like a concrete entity and like and make it work and uh i i i think that that it's important to us like for us like uh that we come from like a different uh place of euro privilege or whatever like to decolonize this kind of localism that is being proposed everywhere. Like, it doesn't work. It

doesn't work like in South America. It doesn't work, you know, in Iran or Turkey or, you know, it doesn't work. I mean, we would have to think like, I don't know, in another kind of scale and make it work like in a real sense, not just like in this bourgeoisie academic life, you know. I think so, too. I think so, too. I mean, and honestly, this has led this led to such frustration in my on my behalf, at least when dealing with with local issues in my country where I just I just took a turn to legal and, you know, strict reformist agenda. I was like, all right, let's try to work to make life easier for people by formalizing government so that they can pay taxes through a website.

Now, that seems woefully mediocre, right? No, this is what you have to do. You're right. I mean, but that's just like, you know, I really lose my patience with, this is why I am terminally allergic to getting political political in robot mode oh, sorry, sorry could you please repeat what you said? no, no, it was interesting but we didn't hear it No, I was just saying that I feel always reluctant to delve into the political debates in this turf, not because I don't think they're important. Of course they are. I'm not one of those people who says, oh, screw the theory, the polar bears are drowning, right? No, no.

It's just that I detect a degree of indulgence in the quote-unquote political sort of discussion that is so dramatically divorced from the concerns of what is actually going on. And to me, if there is one metric, and this is why I really respect Nick and Alex, you know, I think that their project, with the limitations that it has, is to be commendable, is because they know economics. For me, this is the starting point. If you want to call yourself a Marxist or whatever you want, right, like you can be whatever. if you don't know what the GDP of a country is or how to calculate it then don't even use the

word capitalism I don't want to hear it like I don't want to even get to talk to you and talk about politics like I am I'm obviously traumatized by comparative literature and having gone through years and years of listening to people talk about why Batman is a dean or the Joker whatever is a dangerous movie and you know with while sipping on cheap merlot and people that don't know the first thing about economics and i'm i'm sorry but i just don't have i don't have time or patience for that crap yeah and even in the arts i mean the arts world in general like all of these uh leftist uh activists political artists and they don't even know like even like anything about capital the book itself it's just like yeah and i would side with resa in this sense of the kitsch

marxism like this automatism that comes from the critical philosophy thing you know yeah it's not critical and i think i think there is something to be said there one thing which is uh that unfortunately i think that we are paying the price of so nick and alex diagnose a few very important phenomena like in trying to explain the weakness of today's lab they trace it back to the progressive normalization of social democratic politics after the 70s, the sort of scaling down of the big ambitions, the kind of like ossification of party politics into a kind of like, you know, new status quo. And I think that's all right. I think another phenomenon that's important to understand is the progressive assimilation or displacement of leftist theory into the humanities away from

its scientific backlog. Because, you know, Marx was in the business of political economy, and it is conspicuous that today's academic left, by and large, does not only not know the first thing about economy, but they cannot not reasonably be said to be practicing political economy. It has become such an exercise in hermeneutic, textual, exegetical interpretation, ideology, critique, whatever you want, that I think we're paying the price. It's become so safe to be a leftist today that, in fact, it can transpire in the academy, and you have, you know, the politics of whatever book come out every week by, you know, press, whatever, and this will not make a difference, right? And, of course, the horizon, the limitations in the theory, it's sort of scientific

scientific weakness is coeval or co-extensive with its practical flaccidity. One of the things that also Nick and Alex, I think, do very well to diagnose when they critique horizontalism and occupy movements and so on, while acknowledging that there's an irreducibly important dimension to social demonstration, unrest, and so on, that this form of direct participative democratic sort of, you know, oppositional politics does not solve the question of what do we do when the riot quiets down, right? Once the party's over, right? Once we're back in the house, and I think the only solution here is to do work, to get together with legal specialists,

with economists, and to start, you know, with programmers, with social engineers, and so on, and start actually thinking of models and start doing hard work. But people don't like that. I think you're right. I mean, that's what Stigler sort of came to as a conclusion too. But I think there's something you have to add to this, which is that localization is going to be different, yet it has to be in some way in communication with how it transpires in other localities. This is not only other countries. This is, you know, transgeographic, rural, urban, like, you know, I mean, it has to be like hyper localized, but also in communication. And so, I mean, it begins to take a different form at that moment. Yes, absolutely. I mean, how else could it work, right?

I mean, a perfect example. I mean, people always ask me, what is your political position? And I always just say the same answer, which is, I'm a situationist. Ha ha ha. But that's not, I mean, you know what I mean. I mean, it doesn't make sense to give a blanket answer to that question. I don't think that the same economic model or political options work in Peru than they do in Canada. And just to carry a flag around, it doesn't help me think about the particularity of the situation. Now, what's interesting to me is to try to find, for example, what's going on, like take UBI, right? So UBI is a proposal that now has been brought into the American context. Now, this creates an opportunity to think about, to review the experiences that have been going in Northern Europe and in other parts of Europe, to learn from those experiences and to try to think about, okay, here we have a concrete possible implementation of a policy set, right?

Okay, we can do similar things by looking at similar costs. So, for example, I look at some of the things that have been going in Australia in terms of like political reform when I'm thinking about Peru or Canada. because they have similar, you know, geographical situations, they have similar population numbers, widely divergent, obviously, economic, you know, and formalization rates and things like that. But I think that's where you have to start, you know, as opposed to just, I mean, the philosophy, I think, I think we have all the philosophy we need, honestly. I don't, I don't think we, we lack the theory at this point. The theory is there. I think that also people need to start reading the criticisms of Marx a little bit more seriously.

Like, I don't know if anybody here has read the Bon Bauwerk, for example, critique of Marx, most like known critique to the labor theory of value right now. Now, it struck me as very, very conspicuous that, you know, I meet Marxists every six seconds of my life here in California, or call themselves Marxist. And I always ask them, well, what do you think about the labor theory of value? What's your theory of value? What do you think of von Bauer's critique of the labor theory of value? What's your rejoinder to that? And they don't know what I'm talking about. So that's a place to start, for example. If you want to do something concretely theoretical, it's okay, because the beginning of capital is of course the analysis of the commodity form and the theory of value, and the mystification that the value form

and parts of the commodity. Now, any kind of new mode of production would have to presumably include a reshuffling of the organization of the value form. So let's start there, for example. What is such that it leads itself to a different conception, for example, of labor and of the organization of the means of production? So that would be, to me, the obvious first question that Andy Marstall should ask himself or herself in the context of thinking about how to use it today. But I don't see that. I mean, there's people doing that, but it's not being widely read. You know, it's not being it's not piercing through. Do you have a good summation sort of about, you know, the positive theory of interest and Bauer?

because I'm familiar somewhat about you know the what is it like the shouldering of risk like the of like the worker going and going into you know like I mean I think the examples that he gives are profits made by tips like a waiter or something about the roundaboutness hey yeah rounded about this but I don't remember very well if you could perhaps just actually well actually you know Nick Land actually we have about 15 minutes oh yeah yeah sorry yeah let me let me let me jump we can talk about this at some point Alexei should should jump in and give us his

presentation and we'll reconvene after just shortly Daniel because we wanted to talk about the paper for the course. Yes. Just so we will . Absolutely. That will be at the tail end. I will talk about the paper at the tail end. OK, just want to remind you of that. Thank you very much. Alexei, can you jump in? Can you hear me? Yes. Yes. OK. Can I demonstrate this? OK, I'll try to be very brief, and I'll just show the pictures so you don't have to stare at my face all the time. So my presentation is about geotrama for the last week. And I will particularly focus on the usage of . I'll make a few remarks, and I'll also

talk about how . So because it's about geotrama and . So there are certain arguments and conceptualizations based and supported by challenges work, which can be also used to argue somewhat exact opposite things in comparison to what has been said in Geodrama. So we will skip the recap part, just to save time, maybe. So a math scientist, Professor Challenger, hints us with something of a speculative realism story. In the text we are reading, Barker places the argument in how to develop the Challenger's model of certification. And here also interesting that Delos and Gauterie used Challenger's model of certification

the thousand quatores. For them the earth is alive and its shell is full of life. And it's the idea of stratification that shows how geology is much more dynamic than that matter. So for the losing quatari, life consists of dynamic patterns of variations and stratifications. The intensities of earth, the flows of it, the dynamic and stable matter are locked into starter and the process of locking and capture is called classification. So in textual reading, we are further offered the Barker's flattening of the theory of psychic trauma on the geophysics and their repercussions of trauma in the materials of unconscious of Earth. So following Challenger, Barker sees a crustal shell of Earth as a capsule for primal trauma,

which is the molten core. And for him, it is the core, the unorganic memory, plutonic looping, impersonal trauma as a life mechanism. And to me, it seems like Barker, based on Challenger, pays a lot of attention to the very inner of Earth, to the molten core. Barker is fascinated with form. He places the very core of trauma to the core of Earth and makes it a gigantic mechanism. He says it's a sheer, impersonal, non-subjective memory of the outside. And the perspective articulated in Geotrama somewhat also leaned into this direction. But on the other hand, there is another reading of Challenger suggested by Barika. It has more to do with the crust instead of the core.

The Challenger's experiment with drilling the Earth focuses on the layer and the fact that Earth is living. So drilling the earth is described as rape-like scene when Professor Challenger penetrates the soil. I'll skip the citation, but it's already the crust which is traumatized, not only the core. And interesting to note that the scene resembles rape because earth has been historically associated with a female figure, which also echoes the Freudian ideal way of seeing. earth so mother earth and here alongside drilling i want to make comment about spinal catastrophism

the argument goes like this if major evolutionally challenges changes are results of planetary environmental shifts the biological can be understood in geotraumatic terms therefore spinal catastrophism is something like a vice versa of unsurpassing freedom where a geotrauma the earth, the crust, the molten core is the determinant and the condition for the change in the human. But Parika also kind of reverses the challenger's argument and reestablishes the linkage back to the anthropocentism because the challenger's drilling, as in fact by Parika, claims something like more and more mines appear and more and more drilling shapes the crust. And the increasing demand for metal results in the cartelization of mining and

the earth's scream is caused by drilling, mining, extraction, which changes the gale of the earth and changing of the gale of the earth, those brings back the anthropocentric aspect back into play and emphasizes the mutual influence. Yeah, that's good. Thanks. so now we're back in the in the deep ends of the the craziest theory from we were we're slowly descending into economic matters and now we're back in geotrauma and honestly that's i mean i didn't have at that point because that's that's i mean i just i just um yeah um so i guess well we we have about 10 minutes so so obviously we've run out of time There was quite a lot that I wanted to talk about. Also, I should make just a brief comment about the Zeno Feminist Manifesto, and I guess anybody who wants to chip in about this.

I am, I'm very impressed with that text. I think it is, it's not only extremely well written and very precise, but I think, I really think that the distinction that they draw between normative naturalism and ontological naturalism is really highly productive. because it allows it it shatters the sort of consensus you know like the confusion that occurs when naturalism like resa sometimes does i think is associated with kind of a blandish you know obverse of empiricism that simply you know reifies exteriority or the notion of empirical content in some dubious way that escapes the clutches of form right and i think

what they do of course i mean i think and i really think this is the core theoretical move in the manifesto is to simultaneously reject a normative naturalism which would reify categories in these kind of in this kind of retrograde atemporal manner specifically categories pertaining as for example to gender humanity the nature of humanity whatever you want uh and on the other hand accepting a resolute kind of naturalist materialism which would you know which doesn't have any truck with kind of supernaturalism right so you can you can you can be simultaneously an adherent to a flat ontological naturalist picture while rejecting the idea of, you know,

there being fixed essences or, you know, kind of dubious essentialism. Now, I do think that there are some questions to be raised on theoretical grounds about this, specifically concerning, well, yes, I mean, nature is bound to... Whoa. yeah it's me i'm listening i just wanted to intervene so but yeah finish place i'm sorry yes uh no i just was going to say very quickly that um what was i going to say oh i was going to say one of the questions that emerges is so so nature is uh malleable right it's it's it's it's it's changeable uh we intervene upon ourselves we transform ourselves uh there are no you know

fixed essences seems like a retrograde concept. Nevertheless, not everything can be changed, right? I mean, it's not, we're not in this kind of hyper, you know, relativistic territory where nature is simply indefinitely and indeterminately malleable. There are natural and material constraints to our intervention, which are determined by physical law, right? And we don't know, you know, we don't have a complete physics or we might never have a complete physics or a complete, you know, science or sciences, but certainly it is an excess, I think, to say that, that, you know, everything goes into reorganization and transformation process.

There are constraints. And so this, this, unfortunately, what I'm, what I guess I'm trying to say is that there is a level of essentialism that you can't get away from in a right which is that there are if you know if nature is organized and something under some fundamental principles laws or whatever you want then it's not just simply that we can play with those as we would see fit um so so how do we think about those constraints because those constraints could also be relative to biological endowment for example right the fact that you know we have nervous systems in fact we have certain you know sort of you know the structural sort of components that of course there is a whole question of how do you artificially or technologically intervene upon the body or transform the

body and so on so forth but but but even though those procedures have to be materially constrained and the question is how does one think about those constraints in a naturalist non-essentialist register right I mean that's a question that would be plainly theoretical. Yeah, like, first let's intervene with your, with what you say about the Zeno Feminist Manifesto. I kind of don't agree that this question is fully theoretical, because like, I think with the Xeno Feminist Manifesto, they really describe when they say if the nature is unjust, change nature.

I think they mainly, they partly refer to the trans rights and to transgender and they mainly start from puricidal and stuff like this. So, it's not, I don't think it's fully theoretical, but of course this returns to the question, like everyone have been asking the xenofeminists, like, how do we do this? What is the reproduction and production behind this? And like concerning this, I've been like what I found the most interesting in their, in

the manifesto is the way they deal with rationality. And like what I find really interesting is that they basically say that rationality is something we should not take back. And I really like what Parisi was saying about the way science and rationality can be reused for feminist claims. But it's also interesting like when Bogné... I reread really briefly Bogné and Conier text on the xenofeminist manifesto and so it's interesting that she

points out that the way xenofeminists criticize ecofeminism, mainly following Harris criticism of them, it doesn't really take into account the decolonial theory and the way it also kind of dealt with nature as something to be transferable but not in that permission manner as xenofeminist manifest kind of starts I think I've been really like yeah that's

it no i think i i i really agree with you in that honestly um the most the most persuasive part of this is the the the when it's very concrete about um appropriate for example the this continues also with the left accelerationist uh movement in general which is the appropriation of reason away from any kind of uh let's say reification of western white you know patriarchal overtones or conceptions to sort of decant that and to claim that the rationality the scientific rationality in particular is is something that is everyone's all the same and

And because it is neutral in this regard, it has to be deployed actively to the purposes of a feminist struggle, as well as all kinds of political struggle. It can't be simply maligned or debased or calumniated as it has been for the 20th century and continues to be so. I literally yesterday was at a coffee shop and I was listening to two people from the comparative literature department. And one of them saying, I used to believe that there was this thing called reason. And, of course, that was before reading something. And they were in the context of talking about colonialism, precisely. And I almost spit my coffee through my nostrils and had a heart attack, of course. But I let them be, and I walked away in peace.

Now, with regards to the nature question, though, I have to read you a quote from the text, which I think points to the issue that I was trying to address. which is, here's a quote, to say that nothing is sacred, that nothing is transcendent or protected from the will to know, to tinker, and to hack is to say that nothing is supernatural. Nature, understood here as the unbounded arena of science, is all there is. But here comes the important part. And so, in tearing down melancholy and illusion, the unambitious and the non-scalable, the libidinized puritanism of certain online cultures and nature as an unremarkable given, we find that our normative anti-naturalism has pushed us towards an unflinching ontological

naturalism. There is nothing, we claim, that cannot be studied scientifically and manipulated technologically. This does not mean that the distinction between the ontological and the normative between fact and value simply cut and dried. The vectors of normative anti-naturalism and ontological naturalism span many ambivalent battlefields. The project of untangling what ought to be from what is, of disassociating freedom from fact, will from knowledge, is indeed an infinite task. There are many lacunae where desire confronts us with the brutality of fact, where beauty is indissociable from truth. Poetry, sex, technology, and pain are incandescent with this tension we have traced. But give up on the task of revision, release the reins and slacken that tension,

and these filaments instantly dim. It's a wonderful text. And I think they point to the question that I'm raising, which is a complicated one. What are the limits of intervention? there are the question of local and contingent limits and then there's transcendental limits transcendental limits in the sense that they are not just imposed by say our motor capacities our bodies our minds our intelligence our our faculties right but in in the deeper sense in which they're constrained by physical law right or or by or by just you know or by logical laws even more more radically right so i think a next step to to like flesh this project out and this also goes into back into the left accelerationist program is a

articulate a clearer line of demarcation or elaboration of of the borders between what freedom is what freedom allows us to do you know i think this is a big thing i really think that we need a we really need a concept of freedom if it makes any sense at all if politics makes any sense at all and therefore of intervention that is that is not parochial and i think this is where i still see some work left to be done i think that the scene of feminist manifesto does a really good job at touching the the where the issue lies i think calling it an infinite task is a provisional way to get us started, basically, right?

But it's definitely there. And the concrete parts of the essay, when they deal with the overcoming of melancholy and resentment, the appropriation of rationality, the question of abolitionism and how it is that gender abolitionism dovetails to class and race abolitionism as part of an integral set of operations or interventions, right? All of these things, I think, are supremely valuable, even though I do think, as I was saying earlier, that specifically when talking about class abolitionism, we have to start thinking about the value form and economic questions. And I'm sure that, you know, the question of race and the question of gender they have their own native quite you know problematics so they can't be

conflated not that i'm not saying that the xenofeminist manifesto does um but so this is this is fertile i do think this is where we're we're where stuff is happening now we're already two minutes over but uh since we started 10 minutes late i think it's okay exactly in fact we started like 15 minutes late so okay so we're we're cool because i do want to like leave three two minutes to talk about papers i really don't have much to say about that but to wrap up uh you know anybody wants to chip in say anything about whatever i'd like to recall because i just read katrina kolosova's book for a journal and reviewed it and while most of the text is not dedicated to xenofeminism it is a feminist text um and i i kind of wanted to just bring her uh problematization

with xenofeminism into purview. So there's this claim in the Xenofeminist Manifesto that they want to expel essentialist naturalism because it, quote, reeks of theology. Kolosova thinks that to aspire for, you know, a xenofeminist project that recognizes the dialectic ratio between physicality and signification sort of reifies the problem between the Kantian absolute of the reason and nature as it's used in a lot of natural philosophy, in natural philosophy in German tradition even.

The xenofeminist project can maybe be paraphrased by Zizek's capitalism with a friendly face because of its atavistic garrison. There's this decenterous, decentered humanism of material physicality, and then the xenophamous opposition to naturalism is entrapped within the old humanism that's determined from this binary of naturalism versus rationalism, the extension of a Cartesian divide that still doesn't recognize its own devaluation or subordination of matter and physicality to the cognitive practice of self-standing abstraction, universal egoist, or all-encompassing entity of reason.

And the xenofeminist appeal to the anti-materialist solution building seems to reveal its complicity with the inherent process of dematerializing in the MCM, you know, the capitalist bottleneck, which is capitalism's impulse for erasure or becoming surplus. And Kosovo also sort of captures the destruction of the physical body through the image of the Holocaust. Not the Holocaust as it was historically, you know, used in World War II, but the Holocaust, the Greek burning of flesh. And so to paraphrase the very end of this critique, the Xeno Feminist Project sort of, according to her, fails to regard the technical becoming

of automation as a node of originary alienation, qua Marx and what you sort of prefaced in the beginning of the Coramdis, and that the Xeno Feminist Manifesto contends with negotiating with capitalism for more rights, less consumerism, and the better protection of vulnerable groups while querying why is there so little explicit organized effort to repurpose technologies for progressive gender political ends. So then it gets a bit more into our world and re-engineering the world by a technical appropriation. But I do think that one critique to this critique could be sort of what we were talking about before, that you have to make those micro solution building, you know something as small as paying for your taxes online if you can sort of retrofit that

within the xeno-feminist manifesto where it is a sort of an articulation of better gender politics via you know less explicit organized effort but perhaps more explicit you know an action as such I just wanted to sort of articulate our critique. Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure I understand it very well yet. I mean, because, I mean, it's obviously very dense and in the sense that, you know, contentually. So I'm not sure I followed, but whether, one thing is clear, though. I mean, what I was saying earlier about that left accelerationism cannot proclaim to be generally post-capitalist.

Even if they think that going on the way of automation, UBI, and post-work culture helps us prepare the way for post-capitalist thinking, it certainly isn't. And I think by the same token, the Xenofeminist Manifesto, the emphasis they play on the powers of intervention and retransforming our material basis and our normative structures, right, is a reiteration of this sort of construct to this conception of the subject and of community and collectivities and of the different dimensions of identity. That identities are fluid and therefore can be sort of like, you know, dismantled, repurposed, and so on and so forth.

But this is not by itself post-capitalist in any way, shape, or form. The only thing that will be post-capitalist or non-capitalist is positive economicism. This is something that has been maligned. And one of the things that maybe we should really take at heart from Nick and Alex's critique of folk politics is that the pathologization of having demands and of positive programmatic thinking, the kind of like thinking that no demands is a radical gesture, blah, blah, blah. that needs to be taken also extended to the pathologization of positive economicism there's

a very very popular reading of Marx that the bad thing about Marx was that he prioritized economic relations i.e class over other forms of relations right and other forms of subsumption um by Daryl um well can I ask you about first like really quickly I guess summarize what I think katrina kolzova's critique in a material sense amounts to is that the xenofanous projects focus on uh the chain material changes can be retro mapped onto the same structure of capitalism which is creating surplus value out of out of a full unfolding of matter a refolding unfolding of matter mcm it's it's the same uh you know it's bound by the body which is material changing the

body, there's surplus associated. But what I think is actually more curious, and I want to hear you talk about more, I mean, was Brom Broward and about, I mean, if other people don't mind, the exploitation theory of socialism. Yeah. Daniel? Eric? I don't know. It sounds like it's a very special interest from Ecken at the moment. I wanted to respond to what you said about positive economicism and this just shortly. Yes, and we can talk about that later as well, because obviously we're very short on time and I don't want to like be getting to something so specific right now, right? So we'll tackle that in conversation. But Eric, yes.

Yes, I have two points. And the first one is what you said about the demands and like utopian demands, which give somehow a horizon of political imagination of, okay, how could society be organized and economy organized in a different way, but at the same time, which doesn't need to be a rigorous plan of like, okay, it has to be exactly like this in a utopian planning manner. And I think they're the emphasis on think tanks and on organizations and hegemony building from the left accelerationist side is very, very interesting because it's like a positive feedback

of building hegemony, people becoming more and more acquainted and favorable for these ideas. Maybe then more and more work gets put into think tanks on organizations who actually can work out with empirical, scientific, and have more resources to build such models which then can be implemented better like that's maybe the first point and the second point about Marx's economism I think we all know this line of okay he race class gender intersectionality and that the problem is then for Marx okay that the class relation is at the at the core of all of this, but like modern sociology,

basically has this thesis that modern societies are functionally differentiated. Like there are subsystems of societies, for example, the economy, law, education system, and some others, but they are functionally separated and that you don't have like base superstructure. from Marx and they don't have this intersectional approach and that's their critique of Marx that mark that economy is just one subsystem and not determinant on anything of everything and I think that yeah you are in robot mode right now no which is gonna say oh sorry

I just wanted to briefly say, I think the trick is precisely to aid. The concept of economy has to be rich enough to include forms of determination other than class assumption. right so that's part of the i think one of the one of the uh concepts that needs to be reworked is basically the the basic model of contradiction that is still at work in in in marx i think is too too simplistic right what you're describing is actually an assimilation of economic of positive economicism that that is not so you know just just like sort of like the superstructure based relationship class relationship but that encompasses its relationship to all these

different modes of determination as well right so i think of course that's that's exactly what needs to happen and and the economic theory has gone a long way you know i like to read some you know papers in a you know from economists actually and i talk to economists all the time just just to keep myself sort of like updated on what's happening sometimes and uh yeah they they generally you know they don't listen to anything that anybody has to say from from like our perspective let's say right because we don't have anything to really teach them but one of the things that i think is is is at least approximating uh an interesting i mean i think that nick and alex are approximating a very modest beginning for something that would eventually lead you know to

to a serious theoretical engagement yes i think ubi and labor blah blah are are limited you know and still local and i don't see how they can be you know the model for post-capitalist society but i think the critique of whole politics is very strong i think it's i you know i i abide to basically all of it and i think yeah uh yeah i don't know what else yeah so dan daniel we have about maybe five minutes left. Okay. In addition to whatever your specific comments are regarding the papers, I was wondering if you wanted to present some sort of a kind of like a conclusion or some summary remarks kind of tying together

the differences that we've covered back, you know, from the CAHE through CCRU to some of the speculative realism to just to give us a nice kind of yeah sure sure no of course uh so obviously one of the things i mean the the reason why this this trajectory feels so natural right having read through this and having culminated in this place is because i think the predicament that that this that this bind this acceleration is question the question of accelerationism has risen or you know uh given us is is a clear inheritor of this basic divide that we saw from the beginning which really is a question as old as philosophy itself and this question really pertains i think at its core in

its sort of theoretical underbelly on the question of the nature of agency and its relationship to cognition in the sense of how we overtly deliberate through language. There has always been, since the critique of metaphysics launched in the 20th century, a kind of prescient sentiment that there was a need to escape from the clutches of natural language, which is metaphysically loaded and laden. This is, of course, Heidegger. And in order not to relapse into a kind of global theoretical nihilism, both the thinkers of the Kaye and of the CCRU were trying to find levers or means of expression that would escape the clutches of traditional metaphysics

while also trying to rehabilitate in some way the possibility of a new kind of creative practice that would be generally emancipatory in a way. Now, of course, on the side of the Kaye, this was done by way of an alignment with science, dialectical materialism, a rehabilitation of dialectical materialism, and the concept of revolutionary practice and emancipatory politics, revolutionary politics. On the side of the CCRU, a kind of radical, aberrant, anti-politics, which really makes use of this hyper-statitional practice. Both, however, see it or try to find new means to escape from the clutches of natural language, either through non-standard numeracy, or mathematical standard formalization.

And of course, this leads to divergent conceptions of subjectivity and by extension of agency. Now, as we shuttle into the contemporary context, what we have seen is that these questions reemerge and the same problems that afflict both of these reemerge as well. First, the problem that I really have been emphasizing time and time again, which is the relationship between natural and formal languages. That seems to me to still remain an unresolved question, not just for thinking science, but for thinking more generally about how it is that practices of formalization can claim to be ontologically informative. If ontology is mathematics or mathematical physics or whatever other thing you think it is, then you have to explain nevertheless how it is that this level of conceptual articulation relates to its formal basis.

And unfortunately, this is also part of the issue that we feel recently afflicts the question of political agency as well, which is the upverse. when you divorce any kind of political prescriptive practice from any kind of formal grounding in scientific economy, for example. So there seems to be two deviations, a fetishization formalization, which simply eschews its conceptual underbelly or opposite. And on the other hand, a sort of rumination in the manifest image and in conceptual lofty territory that is divorced from any kind of you know, palpable scientific methodology.

And I think that those two pincers give us a sort of predicament. There is a deeper question at stake that has also been raised and re-raised, which is the nature of the connection between nature and norm or culture and nature, whether in fact there is a space for political action, whether in fact there is a space even to accelerate or to make prescriptions or as good old determinism says we're just screwed accelerate the process is not something that's really up to us revolution is not duty but surrender that is the landian thesis in its purest and most cold-hearted form right that it's happening without you anyway and it's just going to keep happening so like heidegger

would have put it only a god could save us and since there are no gods i guess that tells us where we are anyway that is the territory we have covered i think it is that's a great closing line thank you yeah well it was improvised but uh but but i hope i hope you see the the the the the the vitality of this this this trajectory how it all begins in this kind of innocent context in the 60s and then of course in the 90s a common aversion to the kind of ubiquity of cultural studies heideggerian phenomenology postmodernism and yet with this rehabilitation of these basic questions what we get in turn

is a return of these primordial philosophical questions the priority of being and becoming the nature of culture nature the place of rationality and determination is there freedom or not and so on so forth i guess this is just to say we are in the same place we were when we first started right and and and and I don't know there's much to go from there regardless let me just say something about the papers to close shop on a very boring bureaucratic note you can write about whatever it is that you feel compelled about obviously I want you to write about something related to any of these questions concerning the course any of the materials concerning the course I would like to see you deal with whatever your own projects are whether in theory or in practice

in art or whatever it is you do, uh, other than attend the seminar, you know, how it is that this somehow has helped you think for something that you are yourself doing, because I like to not just give you feedback on what I think is right or wrong or, or, or interesting or not. I like to learn from what you have to say as well. So, uh, hopefully you can do that. Um, just don't, you know, like the only thing I would say, just don't do is summarize a piece, right? Now length anywhere from, you know, eight to 12 pages is fine. Um, I'm not a sucker. I'm not like a, like a dictator of length. As long as it's a good idea, it could be three pages as far as deadlines go. Um, you know, I'm extremely busy right now. So it's not like, like the previous seminars, I had a lot of

leverage and I could just be like, honestly, just submit it whenever you can. But because I am in such a you know stranglehold now i need to sort of have my time organized so i can't get back to you if you just like send me a paper maybe you know two months from then so i'm gonna give you like a three-week horizon um you know which which should be plenty hopefully if you want to actually read these and get back to us with like comments was that you're you're really going to like read these and give comments and such you can ask you know the people who have attended my previous No, no, I believe you. It's just, you know, I mean, like, it's quite nice of you. It's very, very good kind. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I give a lot of comments, actually. Very cool. So, yeah, yeah, of course. And I'm interested in reading this stuff. Why? Is this not common practice?

Well, I mean, I don't know. The previous seminars I've taken were while I was, like, writing some articles that were related to my Ph.D. application. So I asked in specific for, like, very detailed comments. but I don't know if like you know had I not asked I would have it seemed like the onus was on the students well okay so well I'll read them and get feedback I mean I still have a couple papers I haven't looked at from last time because a lot of people submitted them very late and I started with my my semester now you will probably be getting those back sometime in the winter break because I until now until the end of the semester which ends December 12th I think I am basically destroyed I don't have a life right so until that point you'll have to wait but three weeks

this is should be okay if you need a little bit extra time on flying notes we should try to publish some of these in that that mvu journal asking more about the publication Daniel you were back in robot mode Did that make any sense? Did you hear what I said? I just I heard the voice of the machine talking with him. Machining unconscious. Ah, yes, yes. No, no, what I was saying is just that I don't know if Mo is going to pull to come through with that publication offer or thing. I would love to participate and whoever is willing it would be great now if that goes through then

of course I'll write to you and explain to you what's what's going on obviously I wouldn't I don't I don't think it would be a mandatory thing because Mo hasn't told me anything so it would be kind of weird to to force you all to write a publishable article but at least those of you who would be interested in participating would be able to do so those of you who wouldn't be for whatever reason uh you know can do whatever else also don't don't try to think about the paper at least right now as like it has to be something that would be eventually published because you can those can be two two different things as far as i can tell because if there's if there's a book like a book project underway that we will you know do that will be longer term i'm sure we'll

have more time to work on that okay so so don't don't don't conflate those things anything anybody wants to say i mean it was been a great time i had a wonderful wonderful good time it's been so much fun you know um yeah hopefully it wasn't too casual for your interest i try to be you know engaging i thought it was the best seminar that i've had so far frankly oh thank you so much Thank you, Daniel. Well, thank you. Thanks to everybody. Excellent. I just want to propose that we leave the chat, not leave the chat, that we all stay in the chat and that in the process of researching and writing our papers and maybe re-watching the seminars and if they're, here's my cat's tail, ha-ha.

I have like six or eight glass balls because I never bring them back into the other room. The catch. There's a vodka bottle and another vodka bottle. Yes. Yes. No, I just want to say in the process of research that we can just chat. Absolutely. Yeah. And also that chat is so much fun. So it's like, yeah, let's keep it going for sure. I don't think anybody will mind. But really, thank you. It was my first seminar. I think there are still a lot of basic questions that I need to revisit. Sure, sure. And maybe by re-watching the seminars and maybe also in combining with your ontology seminar, the thinking sense.

Yeah, yeah. There it goes for some of my own stuff as well, which is, and, you know, hopefully once my book project gets finished, hopefully soon, that, you know, if any of you are interested, you can get a feel for Word. where I'm coming with some of this stuff or what I'm doing with some of this stuff. Because I have my own philosophical project, of course, that some people have been moderately introduced to, but it's something that I've been working on for many years. And this seminar was an opportunity to also chart new waters, but also to go back and deepen my understanding of some themes that I had been working on to begin with. So like, for example, working on Badiou and the historical background behind it and Deleuze and blah, blah, blah. And yeah, I mean, anybody will tell you I'm really available. So if anybody

wants to ask me any questions or anything wasn't clear also, Oh, yeah, one more thing today, there was so much more that I wanted to say, like, you know, like more seriously worked out stuff. So obviously, all the PowerPoints I will be uploading now, because you know, the seminars over, you can take a look at those. Those are very sort of helpful summatorial work. I know this is going to help me forever, you know, because it's like having those in the background will always help me. So take a look at those, especially for today's material, which we didn't get to obviously cover everything. There's a lot there on Nick and Alex, on the Ray paper, on telia plexa, which we didn't get to discuss, but we talked so much about Nick anyway. And finally, of course, the scene of feminist manifest. All right. I have just one, sorry, just one final bureaucratic question, because I don't

remember if it stood in the handbook um are the papers going to be graded so is it is it just passed or not passed or i i don't know how it works i don't i don't i haven't i haven't yet graded the papers because i don't i don't i don't there's no this is not a a context where there are criteria where i can deploy in any reasonable way like giving you an a what does that even mean so i'll give you comments and i'll tell you what i think is you know productive or not But no, I don't think grading is, you know. Even in graduate school, you sort of stopped getting grades on your papers after a while. Yeah, I mean, I did. Okay. Okay. I think that's a great method. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah.

Also, because, you know, what is it? I mean, you are all too mature for grades. This is not a, well, not mature, but you know what I'm saying, intellectually mature. what does it mean for me to give you a gray this I feel silly I'm intellectually hysterical so I cannot play that well I'm not exactly all there myself anyway we've abused uh Jamie's courtesy already oh by the way Alan are you there yeah I'm here oh everybody should congratulate Alan You wrote a wonderful MA thesis that is a complete joy. It's in Spanish, so Federico can read it.

But wonderful work on Stigler and Smart Cities. Alan, we should talk if you're into Stigler. No, Alan really did a phenomenal job. So congratulations, Alan. Really, we were all superlatively impressed. Thank you, Daniel. Thank you. Anyway, it was a pleasure. And enjoy the rest of your Saturday. Thanks, Daniel. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks, Daniel. Excellent class. Danke. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.