So if we started just with the first question in your 2014 book, Templexity Disordered Loops Through Shanghai Time, you write, and I quote, what happened to America is a cyberpunk question par excellence. End of quote. What really happened, according to you, to America in the last few months? Well, I'd forgotten that question. but it's stolen, sort of stolen from William Gibson. So it goes back away to the kind of mid-1980s. And I think you're totally right to say that right now is an excellent time
to be returning to it, for sure. So, yeah, what has happened to America? and lots of people have been sort of asking not only about what's happened but what what what people are seeing up the road I think right now I'm sure that must be your impression too and I actually gave a long complicated talk to a guy recently exactly about this let's see our conversation on the topic lasted an hour and a half so I'm trying to do some compression on it
but if I was going to say in a nutshell the big story that I'm seeing and I'm intrigued in the degree to which people are starting to talk about this obviously it's not a story that's either obviously plausible to people, nor even less necessarily desirable to people. But I think after roughly half a millennium in which the basic driving force of global history has been to do with the integration of ever larger and more powerful states driven by a
group of strongly universalist ideologies that basically think that the larger your aggregation and the larger the set of common rules that can be imposed on it, the better, that we're seeing a big tidal reversal of truly historic scope and the basic tendency now I think is disintegrative. So if I was to say just in a nutshell, I'm sure we'll come back to this set of questions. If I was to say in a nutshell what I see happening to America, I think holding itself together
is going to become increasingly challenging So, okay I'm sorry that I have to reference the French theories which are of course part of your formation but you're also allergic to them No, that requires no apology Okay Also in this configuration when you say this universalism is kind of cracking down or disintegrating In that kind of context, I'm wondering that one of the, for us, at least most valuable tendencies of your writing is still the territorializing of the progressive reactionary divide.
but on the other side it seems kind of lost in the on your xeno systems blog where you at least it seems to us uh position yourself on the right regardless of course of how far on the outside of this right that is so i'm guessing right uh isn't this a kind of territorialization if you keep this Deleuzian kind of talk. Well, I think we're overdue always for a big discussion about what people mean by left and right. So I think that that's one factor to throw in. You know, it's a very interesting piece of language, just a little compact system of language, the left-right polarity, because everyone uses it.
And normally with either an immense lack of clarity about really what is being invoked by that or with greatly inconsistent basic associations with those terms. So I think that that clarification on that line has to be part of this conversation, whatever happens. yeah that's what I'm trying to ask you like on the other side the left for you is now more conservative and the right is the progressive one at least when we are in this context of the left and the right but my question I guess my question is what for you does the left and the right
distinction in what does it reside anyways you know like in bad years kind of way it would be like the left stands for egalitarianism or the maybe the golden rule and the right is maybe like the right um it's like i i i think i i read somewhere on your blog that the right is the rule maybe to do whatever it pleases you but of course also to accept the consequences of this of this uh i don't know decisions or whatever yeah well that's the that's the that's the Crowley-ite sense of the right, I would say, I think Badiou is an interesting person to introduce because basically I'm kind of happy with his distinction between the left and
the right in the sense that I think the left, in the sense that it's now in play predominantly, Because the camp of unity, universalism, like you say, I think egalitarianism is a very strong part of that. And the right is the camp of fragmentation, experimentation, and I'd say competition as a term that is inherited, obviously, from a tradition. And it is probably fairly uncontroversial. But having said that, there are uses. People attach themselves to a sense of the right. I think in your terms exactly about hyper territorializing.
You know, there is a blood and soil sense of the essence of the right, which I feel compelled to engage with and try to displace or dethrone. Because I don't think it's, you know, I think it's like a kind of a dead end. And if people want to, then there might be some tactical opportunity that some of those tendencies can be enemies of what Mencius Melbug's cathedral concept I'm extremely happy to identify with the enemy here. But there's no, there is no going back.
The neo in the reaction is there is no going back. A blood and soil identitarianism is not leading, I think, anywhere interesting ultimately and has the most tactical significance. significance. And so as far as it manages to attain power in various ways, I think it will then, in the same way that when the level is there, you really, it sees its worst days, it's forced to deliver and perform and fails to do so. And that's what I would expect from sort of blood and soil type politics, that the more they're actually in a position to implement policy, the more they will become ineffective in their own terms.
They will lose the potential for mass mobilization, they'll be associated with failure. And I would like to see those experiments happen on a small enough scale that they can be educational rather than globally catastrophic. Okay. So, you're interested in local failures also? Yes. Yes, I think local failures are great. But you need, obviously, as you're saying, both sides of that. Global failures are obviously not at all great. Yeah, sure. So if you are like, if we are mentioning the 30s analogies, which are of course kind of lethargic, but also nostalgic, I guess. The problem is, okay, in one particular aspect, we are reminded of, again, Badio's passion for the real.
in this specific sense when he says, you know, like communists turning into fascists during the period between the two world wars and then there are like these interesting French figures like Droula Rochelle, you know, or maybe more like this Charles Peggy who was like even more fascinating because he was like the figure or the vector of essence both for Vichy France and Mussolini but also of the resistance movement so the problem of course is that we are aware of your different or completely different take on what fascism is because uh and this also kind of deletes the apparent paradox of the situation or the of the moving like for example google's move from socialism to national socialism
is for you just a straw and i guess for right and for me i guess also okay so we are interested like in this kind of like like no if we if you of course we of course we are aware of also the different roles and everything but we are interested in this move of yours to the other or the outer side you know because also a lot of people are talking about that not just in this context you know if it's relevant if it's relevant so so when you say I mean, is this a question about the actual role of the language of the outside? Or how would you, you know, can I ask you to just specify a little bit?
Yeah, I guess the outside is actually, but just real, right? Passion for the outside is maybe pretty much similar to the passion for the real. Well, I think so. It might be. I would say, though, that without a notion of reality testing, an invocation of the real is of absolutely zero significance. You know, I mean, everyone can invoke the real, but unless there's some mechanism that actually provides a, I'm not going to say a voice for the outside, but an actual functional intervention from the outside so that the outside has a selective function, then I think that the language is empty.
so in that sense i think it's completely um it's completely inseparable from fragmentation and and and the great the the modernist systems that work you know whether you're talking about the market economy or the natural sciences is because they are fragmentary systems in which the outside is given a selective function. It's not, you know, there's no political decision that is meaningful about what is or is not a good scientific result. And there is no political decision of value about what is or is not a good economic result. These results are subject to a selective sorting process that actually mobilizes the outside.
And so that's where, without being a great or even mediocre Badiou scholar, that would be my natural suspicion about an invocation of the outside from the sort of position that he seems to me to occupy. So maybe the stupid metaphysical question from my side would be, for you is this outside kind of fixed or is it a moving, changeable entity? I think the question of the outside is absolutely inseparable. Everyone that I know who uses it in an interesting way, from the tradition of transcendental philosophy
and what goes with that is the sense that we that that the the real and temporality are deeply at the very least deeply co-evolved to co-involved to to in such a way that time cannot be used as a framework in which to place or make sense of the real. So I think I just simply don't think we can ask this question about is the real changeable or unchangeable. If we say the real is either changeable or unchangeable, we're saying it exists in time in some way, and if that's the case, then we should be asking about time and not what
we thought we were asking about when we were asking about the real, because obviously it's the real that is the ultimate controlling factor, and anything that we can place in time is a distraction from this, the ultimate transcendental level of the question. So, okay, that's intrinsically obscure, but I think it's also inescapable. But we have maybe, if I just jump in with a question before you were talking about reality testing, if I'm not mistaken. So how would this look like in a way, you know, if the reality, we cannot talk about
it as you said now. How is this reality testing? How can we do it? We do that by enabling a process of selection to happen. So you know, I mean, the natural sciences are as good an example of this as any. The only thing that makes the modern sciences elevated beyond epistemic procedures seen in other times and other cultures is the fact that there is a mechanism beyond human political manipulation for the elimination of defective theories.
So this is, I mean, in a way, this is just Popperian. I mean, I think that Karl Popper is just on that level totally, totally right. But I think every element of that is crucial. It has to be beyond if it's if it's politically negotiable, it's useless. It's unscientific by definition. You know, you don't trust scientists. You don't trust scientific theories. You don't trust scientific institutions in so far as they have integrity. what you trust is the disintegrated zone of criticism and the criteria for criticism and evaluation in terms of repeat experiments in terms of the the heuristics that are built up to decide
whether a particular theory has been defeated and eliminated by a superior theory and it's that mechanism of selection that is the only thing that makes science important and makes it a system of reality testing. And I think that's generally true. So this is obviously intrinsically aimed against any kind of organic political community aiming to determine internally through its own processes of negotiation the nature of reality. Reality has to be an external disruptive critical factor.
If we jump here a bit back in time, maybe to CCRU and the text you are writing there, is this notion of hyperstition which is really strong in your writings and how does this come into play of this reality testing because somewhere I mean in in the text Lemurian time war there is written that hyperstition is and I quote charting a flight from destiny and this quote I guess connects time connects some kind of a political things, as you were just mentioning now. And I'm interested how does this hyperstition comes into play with this reality as you see it?
Right. Well, let me, there's just one precursor to a response here, which is to say, I think hyperstition is one of those things that has completely escaped from the box, you know, and is now a wild, feral animal on the loose in the world. And, you know, so anything I say about it, I really want to say within that context. You know what I mean? I am really, my relation to it is now to this alien thing that I'm very intrigued by.
But like everyone else who's interested in it, I'm sort of, you know, approaching it from a position of zero authority, trying to make sense of how this thing is living and changing and affecting the world, which I think is hugely it the thing, not it the concept. But having said that, I guess my sense of a hyperstition is that a hyperstition is an experiment. And in saying it makes itself real, it makes itself real if it works.
And whether or not it works is something that can't be, again, decided within some process of internal debate. You can't sort of, as the result of some kind of internal dialectic, decide that, hey, this is a good hyperstition that has a great future. It is going to work because of its intrinsic relation to the outside, which is something that cannot be managed and can perhaps be cautiously, tentatively predicted in a way that a scientist or an artist would, through learning their craft, get a sense of what is going to work and what isn't going to work.
But that's not the same as having a criteria, still as a law that they can establish themselves for whether it's going to work or not. So that's all on a very abstract level. I mean, yeah, there's a lot of more concrete questions that come up. But sorry, I keep interrupting you. No, sorry, because I keep interrupting you, so I don't know who should. But I think I was just in this question, I was thinking about the things that are happening in America, which we were talking about in the first question. And I was thinking of this event of Veles of Macedonia, which is really close to Slovenia, in fact, Yugoslavia, when they were doing this kind of fake news, etc.
They were making kind of a new reality for a bunch of people in the United States. How do you see that? Is that a way to, in a way, propagate escape routes, as you see it? Or is that just some kind of an ephemeral event that happened without any significance, maybe? I would definitely think some sort of dismissive response along the second line would be grossly complacent. So I certainly wouldn't be tempted to push things in that direction. Is it an escape route?
Well, I mean, I think that's the question of what is escaping down that route. And I think there's definitely a relation to escape. I mean, this whole fake news phenomenon is to me, I'm sure to you guys too, hugely important and historically significant. And I mean, I'm completely captivated at the moment in trying to think about what's going on right now by the strength of the analogy between the Gutenberg era and the internet era. I mean, I see so much kind of rhythmic force coming out of the connection between those
two things. Then obviously there was a process of just radical, what seemed at the time, sort of reality destruction that went on with the emergence of the printing press. In Europe, the self-propelling process began, and the consensus system of reality description, The attribution of authorities, criteria for any kind of philosophical or ontological statements was all thrown utterly into chaos. And obviously this massive process of disorder followed that eventually kind of was settled
in this new framework, which had to acknowledge a greater degree of pluralism than had previously existed and you know that then consolidated itself later and I think we're in this same kind of the early stage that we're in this process of absolute shattering ontological chaos that has come from the fact that our epistemological authorities have been blasted apart by the internet you know so whether it's the university system the media financial authorities, the publishing industry, all basic gatekeepers and crediting agencies
and systems that actually have maintained the epistemological hierarchies of the modern world I think are just coming to pieces at a speed that no one had imagined was possible. And so the near time, the near future consequences that I think are just really chaotic and unpredictable and bound to be messy and perhaps inevitably horrible in various ways. But it just seems to me it's a kind of threshold phenomenon. The notion that there's a return to the previous regime of ontological stabilization just seems to me utterly deluded.
And so in that sense, you know, there's an escape of that sense. There's an escape that's strictly analogous to the way in which modernity escaped the Ancien regime and, you know, starting in the 15th, 16th century, I think. So would you say in relation to the notion which kind of in a way existed at the beginning of the Internet that Internet is inherently democratic, which stayed, I guess, in the minds of some people also in the 2000s, namely in the times of the Arabian Spring, etc.,
where the bloggers and the people who are using the internet were seen as the guys who would spread the democracy around the world. And from the words you just said, I guess for you that notion seems utterly stupid or something. Well, I think that it's this weird hybrid of recognizing quite realistically the massive insurgent potential of these new media, but the application of that to these dying ideological formations that are part of the world that is going. You know, it's like if someone had said, you know, in the Gutenberg era, you know, the printing press is an amazing, powerful device and it's going to spread Catholic orthodoxy all over the world.
I mean, it's half right and half insane. And I think that that kind of whole neoconservative mentality associated with these new communication technologies is exactly the same hybrid of a glint of realism mixed with a kind of healthy dose of utter psychosis. If we return a bit to the hyperstition we were talking, I mean, we're still talking, but the hyperstition I was searching on the internet and I saw that Negaristani, Riza Negaristani, somewhere wrote, and I quote, collectivity is not enough for a work to be hyperstitional, end of quote. And I'm interested here because he gives this explanation of the difference between Tolkien
and Lovecraft. What are we looking at here? What is this collectivity? Is this collectivity connected to the universalism we were talking before, or is this some other kind of collectivity? If you would maybe just… Well, yes, my defensive precursor to this is just to say I'm not 100% confident at all what Razor is saying in that thing. So I wouldn't want this to be treated as a commentary on his thought. But I think that hyperstition did arise in a certain milieu that definitely rhetorically emphasized a certain type of collectivity, and I think more than that. And I would say that it isn't what's being referenced.
There is not primarily universality at all, but something much closer to anonymity or the problematization of attribution. Because I think any hyperstitional unit, I mean, what's now called a meme, you know, is very close to this, that can be confidently attributed to a particular act of individual creation is, you know, disabled originally. And I think that Lovecraft interestingly seems to have understood that in a sense that the whole production of this Lovecraft mythos was very much an attempt on his part to subtract his own creative role.
And it's only at the point that that is subtracted that these things are released, you know, that you get Cthulhu becomes a kind of hyperstitional term at the point that it's not simply something that has been invented by H.P. Lovecraft. I think he fully seems to have grasped that, you know, and by the fact that this social network of his friends that he had and whose names he weirdly, often a bit ham-fistedly seems to want to weave into these things, is part of that recognition. so i think that's more what's at stake in the notion of collectivity is something like uh the breakage of attribution the the original subversion of attribution
and i don't think it's just a tactic i mean i just like to say i think it actually is the way these things these things work like um it's precisely those things that you have no idea really yourself where they came from. Yeah, so I'm just saying it's exactly those elements that you have least confidence about their genesis that are the ones that have the greatest hyperstitional momentum, I think. Yeah, I was now reminded of your collective hyperstition when a troll emerged on your thread and there was a small situation regarding that um the the the your um yours and eriza's uh reaction to it i found quite um how do i say not moving but you know for me it was like the
perfect reaction to a situation like that but but if i move on uh to turn to the period between the two world wars once more yes i think like with this anonymity comes territory of uh how do you you say, gnomes de plume or non de plumes, you know, like the different heteronyms. And you actually, your work or your, you know, your mechanisms actually remind me of Pessoa's heteronyms and also like a sort of cipher politics. I saw yesterday you were like fascinated by this text. And like with Pessoa, there was like a lot of roles or figures, you know, one of them was a futurist, another was a royalist, several of them of course occultists and neo-paganists,
and it goes of course even further. Some of people thought first that Teresa Negeristania was one of your monikers, and then again there's like this incredible Marxian Jehu, and I found on the Twitter that also people thought that that was you. So I think like it's as though this all these heteronyms were a force against maybe also but yours university and and and it seems crucial for you to keep them differentiated all these heteronyms what do you think about yes i mean i think that requires there's a whole bunch of little i mean persuasive someone like people keep telling me to look at and i always very persuasively but i'm afraid i just haven't yet
had a chance to do that. So I'm sure that is a really good reference and people have made it, as I say several times before, obviously to this whole set of questions, totally crucial. So I'm embarrassed to confess my ignorance on that. No, we're not that worth it too, but you know, the present is so huge. And I think also this thing about poly maintenance of complex identity, if it is undertaken in a deliberated fashion, it's not a manageable thing.
I mean, it would be great if it was, but really, I think all you can do is aim to follow a rough set of pragmatic guidelines that at least complicate the attempt that people absolutely obsessively make to engage in this psycho-biographical reintegration, you know. It's almost like there was this huge human sort of cognitive effort devoted to try to turn the final form of anything into a psychobiography. And I've always absolutely detested that.
You know, it's not that I'm allergic ever to reading a biography, but the notion that in reading a biography, you're really getting to the core of something interesting seems to me utterly ludicrous. You know, I cannot think of any interesting figure that I've ever come across where I thought, oh, if only I knew their biography better, I would get them. I would understand, you know, Nietzsche's biography or Deleuze's biography or Lovecraft's biography. All of these things are, to me, you know, unless treated very, very carefully, totally and sadly distracting. So I think that just that negative antagonistic refusal of the psychobiographical temptation is the one thing, you know, that I do try to hold on to in this.
But the functionality of it, I think, is in the hands of fate entirely. I mean, it's like something that totally exceeds human strategic competence. And I mean, I think you're constantly sliding down the slope because there's so much attempt to do this integration. that it's always, it always, things tend to kind of get slumped back into each other unless you're constantly pushing fission fuel into it as hard as possible. Yeah. I guess that's why this purism or solidarity police is so funny or so ludicrous, like you say. But, like, if I carry on with this, like, role-playing, but in the most neutral kind of sense of the word,
like for a longer time we had a feeling with this dark enlightenment thing that you were a moderator or a cartographer of neoreaction, not its ideologue and maybe even that you are its termite like a metaphor that you use a lot I guess and that sooner or later you will move on for something completely different again and I guess I find it in a kind of way similar in regard to this land conference that is going to take place this year and yeah I forgot about that and the organizers tell us in advance that it's not going to promote
new reaction ideas like this is like the this is like the disclaimer and that sort of reminds that sort of reminds us of Brecht, where in order to preserve his status as a classical author, of course his communism had to be sanitized also like Brecht is a great author, but of course he's not a communist like in some other sense so we were wondering is this like a continuation of this Pessoa heteronyms kind of way, you know, like this gazing into the abyss, like Roberto Bolaño would say and why do you think And why do you think this function is so controversial apart from this solidarity, purism, police?
Well, I mean, look, this is, for me, a hugely interesting set of questions, but also a very difficult and confusing set of questions. Because, I mean, the situation is all so recent and so dynamic, and there's so much turmoil and tumult in this whole thing that it's difficult to be very lucid about it, even in one's own understanding of it. And I think there's a lot of different threads that are going on here as well. So maybe it's like a disjointed answer is the only one that is actually practical or realistic.
I would say, for one thing, the utter infamy of near reaction, while I think, I mean it's not a text that, I've not read the Dark Enlightenment for a long time, and I think, but this is something I think that is already there in this text and in Moldbug's writing in a playful way, that there is an understanding that this is the worst thing in the world, you know, that this is going to be utterly traumatic, this is going to be something that produces
is extreme aversive response. And things around that topic, I think, obviously were already at play at the beginning of this whole process to a degree, although I would also agree with you that it was, in a certain sense, at that stage, more curatorial than polemical. um and i'm afraid i find something completely addictive about that you know i i think to to to have the the fact that this this thing which remains deeply confused to people i mean
And the trigger, its potential to trigger this extreme response is far in excess of its kind of clarity. If you were to say to someone, well, what really is this thing, the erection, the answer to that question would be vastly less clear than the clarity of the emotional response, would be this one of absolute horror and detestation. And so there's something about that whole syndrome that is fascinating because it seems like in itself an exploratory tool. If you're saying, look, Mensis Moldbug says, you know, has consolidated, crystallized this
notion of the cathedral as something that's ultimately a self-organizing religious process and it has definite a definite orthodoxy it has a definite sort of doctrinal momentum to it there are certain there are certain things that it treats with extreme religious passion as being abominations and heresies. So if you find this cultural provocation that triggers these kind of extreme allergic immune
responses, then you are actually engaged in experimental engagement with this initially tentative hypothetical object. And so there's a lock-in process that happens there, I think. I'd say just at least provisionally right now, I would say the most basic crucial lock-in process is because it generates such extreme reactivity, it locks itself in. It becomes indispensable. That's the fundamental experimental device in relation to the field of objectivity that
it's concerned with. And so it would be very hard to simply abandon that. You know, I mean, to step back from it in some decisive fashion, it seems like you're saying we're not any longer going to do particle physics with large colliders you know what i mean it would be there's something like like the abandonment of a whole system of experimental potentialities um so i think at least this is kind of at an oblique in relation to the to the questions that you're asking about that. But also, you know, near reaction is very young
and it's extremely contested. And because it generates so much antagonism, of course, people who want to fight, of which there's a lot of people in that right now, you know, on both sides, flock to it. I mean, I would say that the most passionately, maybe in like 2014 around about that period because it just seems like a great opportunity to have a fight and you know that's what people were looking for but it's it's hugely internally differentiated and contested and as you know it has been from the beginning and various figures who now are more identified with sort of standard alt-right white nationalist type ideas were
identified themselves at one stage with neo-reaction, were thrown out, you know, then other splits exist. There's a whole neo-reactionary faction that I would say is much closer to a sort of reactionary traditionalism. I don't understand what it's doing with the neo thing and and just is identified with like thrown an altar type um pre-french revolutionary politics um so the sheer amount of disorder and chaos in it it's like means um it's very difficult to leave a leave a room when you've still no idea what's happening in that in that room if it's it's not settled down enough to know whether it's something that you would actually want to miss
out on. Sorry, I just got a flash. I was worried that I was going to lose you there. No, no, no. Can I just say very quickly one more thing? And finally, I find that the basic schematic model of neocameralism and patchwork that you get in mold bug and which i think you know if i was to say well someone asked me what how do you define neorection i say it's that you know it's patchwork neocameralist political philosophy and i i find that just vastly i think it's hugely important and I'm certainly under no inclination to dissociate myself at all
from that basic trend in political analysis. Okay, that's my next big question after this one because I'm really interested in this relationship between accelerationism and neoreaction and I guess the answer is neocameralism or meta-neocameralism But before that, I would like to ask you, because you mentioned this contrarianism, I'm interested in these engagements of yours, not just yours, engagements with contrarianism and I guess also post law. post law so yeah that's like uh you you twitter some no before that i like you are apologizing all the time now i like i sort of remember when you got blocked on the twitter everyone was
like he's so sweet and polite you know how could they ban this guy that is the funniest thing i have read like in the last time okay okay to get good to the to another quote which is maybe not that sweet there's a world of yours that goes like this actually i like plenty of immigrants and black people just not the grievance mongers rioters street criminals and jihadists that the kids that the cathedral preaches instantly in favor of okay if you let alone the i guess that writers that that in sense and i'm not of course uh apologizing writers but i thought uh apparently writers for you are the disorders of the order. But in a way, also, I find that you maybe hear sound a bit like Borges of the Tlong Corporation,
of course, or the Orbit Corporation, who was, like, if you remember, in Chile, advocating liberty and order while supporting Pinochet. And I guess that kind of talk reminds me of rather preserving or re-establishing the human security system, not the other way around. And I'm kind of wondering, is that like a sort of a far cry from, you know, like a piece in the meltdown, which goes like, you know it, but I would like to read it. Meltdown has a place for you. Right. Meltdown has a place for you as a schizophrenic HIV plus transsexual Chinese Latino steam addicted LA hooker with implanted middle shades and a bad attitude blitzed on a polydrug mix of KNOVA, synthetic serotonin, and female orgasm analogs have just ice-free Turing cups
with a highly cinematic 9mm automatic? Yes. Sorry, you're still there, aren't you? Yes, yes. Okay. Yes, I don't know. I think there's a lot of complex thing about this. Yes, let me see what's the best way into it. I mean, oh, I don't know. Yeah, it's difficult. Look, I think there's one level. I've got a whole kind of ankle-biting fraternity on Twitter now
I'm not identifying you with them, let me be that clear from the start, but I think that their question is very like your question. I like the Anon Collective. Okay, okay, okay. I think there is an element of it that's age. You know, there's an element of it that is, you know, there is a sort of, you know, youngsters are highly tolerant of massive incendiary social chaos, for sure. and you know I attempted to make that a kind of ideological principle like you know I mean there's reasons for that
the best music comes out of that you know it's not that I'm not understanding that the whole appeal of cyberpunk is because of that but I just don't think that you can make an ideology out of just entropic social collapse. It's not going to fit together. It produces a reaction, which is obviously what's happened in this case. It's not a sustainable process. And therefore, it's a bad flag for acceleration. if you say look really what acceleration is about is just simply siding with everything that heads in the direction of disorder.
Because you know if you do that you you're not doing something that is actually practically consistent. What you what you're doing is actually triggering a reaction that will will win. I mean, all historical evidence seems to be that, you know, the party of chaos is suppressed by the party of order. And so even if you are completely unsympathetic with the party of order, and I'm not pretending to be anything quite so unambiguous, it's not something that you want to see. You know, like Nixon put down the hippies, the Red Guards are put down in China, the Thermidor puts down the craziness of the French Revolution.
it's just an absolutely relentless and inevitable historical story that you know the party of chaos is not going to be allowed to run run the process it will be suppressed so i mean that's part of i think that's part of the the whole thing there is that i don't think you know i think there's an aesthetic there's an aesthetic uh attraction and there's obviously various types of libidinal attraction to these things but in terms of um programmatic practicality there is nothing you know and so these crazy youngsters i mean my my
what I would say to them now is just like you you don't have you don't have a program you know you don't have a practical path here you know because what you're what you're advocating leads perversely to the exact opposite of what you're saying you want it but I guess now like right now I'm maybe provoking you a bit but oh yeah dude yeah yeah now right now you for me like you sounded a bit like a left accelerationist, you know, like we need a program and, you know, you know, you know what I mean? Like with the. Yeah. Yes, I think there is that there is that problem. But I think that, look, you have a practical orientation.
Neo reaction has a program, even in its most libertarian form. It's not a program that is going to be somehow implemented by a bureaucratic apparatus in a centralized regime, but it's an attempt to sort of have some consistency in your pattern of interventions. And I think that, you know, of course, everyone's trying to do that. It's in a way, this is another version of the same of the same thing is the fact that like even the even the chaos fraternity, insofar as they want to be the chaos fraternity when they wake up the next day, have a program in this minimal sense. And that's, I think, the only sense that I would strongly hold on to.
I like a strategy. Something that like really got to me was like this, this sentence you quoted in your article, the F word or something like that. It was called. And it was like, it was not yours, but it said something like this. We are all fascists now. It's like from a book by, I can't remember now, probably you know. Jonah Goldberg. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's just like a, it's just like a title of a chapter or something like that. Yeah. and you also quote it like in this kind of sense i believe but i was wondering like if you get back to this like uh french theory configuration it sounds like something foucault would say if you heard his like you know who fights against whom we all fight against each other and there is always
within each of us something that fights something else like just just up a notch turning this Foucault's and I guess Foucault was fascinated by this figure how how do you say Boulen-VA or something like that who was like a sort of a neoreactionary because he said that like war was the foundation of society and he had like this theme of war as a race war between aristocratic Franks and common goals and on the other hand of course like this decentralizing Franks got fucked precisely by the monarch. So I was wondering like this continuation of this Foucault's war as the foundation of society and we are all fascists now. Before we go to the neorectionary and accelerations of things. Yes. Well, I look, I mean, this particular,
I'm afraid I'm, again, this particular writer is not someone I'm familiar with, but it reminds me a lot of something that did make a big impression on me and seems very close is when I was studying as an undergraduate, I was doing a philosophy and literature course and the Tudor, I thought very interestingly, you're talking about Tess of the Derbevels, said all of this, what's really Tess of the Derbevels about? It's about the fact that class conflict is actually this ethnic war. It's, you know, what this novel is saying is that it's a class war is actually an ethnic conflict, a continuing ethnic conflict between the Norman French speaking aristocratic invaders and English natives.
and so that seems very close to this thing that you've just introduced but honestly I don't think I've got anything anything that I was to say about it beyond that is just to say it would be just cooked up so much on the spot I think it would be of little a little value no I'm asking of course because of like this like the first question or the second question was about like this de-territorializing of the left-right divide, which I'm interested in. So, like, also, like, for example, the concept of assortative mating, which is really controversial in some parts of the universe. Yes. Like, for me, for example, sounds a lot like, really a lot like Berduo, you know,
who speaks about, you know, only members of the same habit of socializing and reproducing. and then when for example when the right talks about this like this really similar ideas it's immediately um like um how to say uh interpret us talk about not just speciation but you know like this kind of normative not just observational talk and i guess we are back to the hyperstition thing again or how do you see that? On the special question about assortative mating Maybe
we should move on because I believe that the problem is I guess that the echo chamber cannot hear something that is similar to its themes if it comes from I think the reason that this left-right language is so indispensable is because it's now tied up with this structure of tribal animosity that is so profound. You know, I mean, I'm always now in recent years just been stunned by just the fact that it's like the kind of Roman blue and green, you know, totally arbitrary thing. I'm not saying there's not differences between the left and right, but in a way they are just drowned out by this tribal war, which will, you know, people have done tests on this.
You know what I mean? They put a politician's policy proposals in the mouth of their opponent, and the supporters of the opponent immediately support all those policy proposals that they had thought were the absolute incarnation of evil when they'd come from the other guy. um you know so there's i think a big empirical research base now to say look you know this there's a tribal war going on here and whatever you however interested you are in the ideology the notion that this tribal war is going to be reducible to a set of coherent ideological positions is absolutely nuts you know we know that isn't true it's been demonstrated that isn't And so I think the example that you gave is totally like that.
You know, it's like who is saying this is much more important to people than the actual content, the positive proposition that is involved, I think. And it's the number of people who are really able to not fall prey to that, I think, is really small. I find them very impressive. I mean, my own attempt to not be totally captured by tribalism is, as you say, to just try to make sure that there's enough fissile, hyperstitional craziness going on that means that you'd have to sometimes flip about and get a sense of what things look like from another side. But I really think that most of the world is just locked so deep into tribal war that it just doesn't ever see what an idea is actually saying now. And only this question about is this enemy think or is this our style?
so in that sense we can move to the like uh neocameralism and like you know also like this converging and also diverging between neoreaction and accelerationism maybe even you know converging and diverging between uf blog and xeno systems because the one thing i found like really disturbing for me was like when your twitter outside the news got blocked the the uf blog became the outside in this block and i was like no i don't want this you know like this is another role you know what's happening here your block is not a neo reaction you know like you know what i mean for me it was like what what the fuck you know yeah i mean i follow i follow both you know
But it was like, and because I'm interested, I'm really interested in the converging and diverging, you know, like, because it's not, it's actually not the same thing. And that's the best thing about it. Yes. Yes. I mean, this is another you must be getting bored of me saying this because it's something I've been basically repeating as a management. But this is to me such a kind of turbulent, complicated process that I really feel devoid of a kind of authoritative subject position in relation to this. You know, there's these two big threads of process going on that I think are both interesting cultural stimuli.
You know, one that is on the on the near action side and the other one is on the accelerationist side being massively driven by all kinds of forces. You know, like the accelerationism was reignited. Sorry, let me just, I've just got to shut this door, I think. Acceleration was reignited by the left accelerationist types. And it was reignited, if I'm not confusing myself in time, you know, after the dark enlightenment. And so it's like there's this kind of weaving time pattern from my side is complex.
it's not you know from a certain position it's like you've got accelerationism first and then you've got an erection and there's some kind of synchronic process here but that isn't really how it seems from my perspective at all it's this much more complicated helical interweaving process and the separation of you know separation of blogs and separation of twitter accounts and all of this this kind of machinery is more as a kind of rather than the implementation of some deliberated coherent strategy it's more a set of resources that i can use to try to avoid being just
sucked into certain kinds of dead integration you know that would lose the fascination of the fact that the dynamics of these two threads are not at all predictable from each other, or I think even predictable in general. I mean, I'm still sort of trying to find my group, my way towards how they interact with each other, and it's complicated. I certainly think that simply to try to smash together a kind of right acceleration, neoreactionary synthesis, which is obviously an inescapable temptation in certain respect, but I think would be very, would ultimately destroy a lot of experimental capacity and a lot of space for dynamic development on both of those threads.
I have a set of two questions connected to the things you were just saying. The first one is connected to the left accelerationism. Is it in its rational and pragmatic program missing the mythos and mythical or maybe the unexplanatory maybe or undistinguishable something like Nagarastani did with cyclonopedia and which is way too often mistaken for postmodernism etc so what is your take on this because now you were just saying there is a lot of different different things going on and do you think the left accelerationism is
a is just a in a way rigidization of some of these flows or how do you see it maybe yes i don't know look right now i'm actually teaching an online course on accelerationism so there's a lot of things that i can just regurgitate because i you know they're things i've been forced at least to try to begin to formulate in my own mind about this and one one of the things i think is interesting is that this i mean all the language has this retrospective character to it So it's misleading if I may use it in a way that implies that, you know, left acceleration and right acceleration always meant something. But these are very recent terms that appear very late in these processes.
But the original revival of accelerationism in the English-speaking world, I will say, which I think really comes about with the CCIU take-up of this Deleuze and Guattari recapitulation, what's already a recapitulation of Nietzsche's accelerate the process line. and in the Deleuze-Guattari context it has a lot of packaging material around it that's also proved really crucial because there's an explicit invocation of going in the direction of the market but at the origin of that
when the CCIU was pushing this was pushing this quote this passage and this orientation in advance of the word accelerationism having yet been formed, which was formed by a critic obviously later, that was in a sense left position. It was a left position because it was articulated by Deleuze and Guattari as an anti-capitalist political strategy, and I agree with all your earlier problems about words like political strategy. Please treat that in as many scare quotes as you want to use. I'm being fast. And I don't think the CCIU really was revisionist about that. You know what I mean? It was the
Deleuze-Guattari take-up of accelerationism is that this is the way that you accelerate capitalism to its death was also the kind of content of the CCIU phase accelerationism. So in that sense, it's a kind of leftist orientation. You can disagree with it, of course. People can criticize it as they did, but there was no suggestion that it was, oh, no, I'm lying. I mean, there was a suggestion that it would have come from the right because obviously at that stage of its articulation, it's impossible to differentiate left and right acceleration.
You know, if if you're taking up that side of Marx, that Deleuze and Qatari, you know, perhaps other writers, and you're saying that the only way capitalism dies is by completion of the process. then obviously you're saying complete the capitalist process and that means that the if insofar as there's anything like policy recommendations um they are recommendations that are maximally beneficial to the to the um the vitality and dynamism of capitalism so there's a there's a structural necessity that there's no difference in this accelerationist framework between pro and anti-capitalism.
I mean, how can you tell which it is? And people, you know, this absolutely integral ambiguity then becomes obviously a basis for criticism on certain sides. So that when left accelerationism, which we now call it, but it itself then was just calling itself accelerationism comes along. and you know in the manifesto for accelerationist politics it is doing something very different to anything that's happened in the entire lineage before which is to say that you have to distinguish between the basic motor of acceleration and capitalism you know that there's a that capitalism
is not the motor of acceleration, it's a kind of something that is coincidental to a degree with that motor at certain stages in this history that then becomes inhibitory in relation to it later and that and that therefore accelerationism is not focally or centrally about capitalism And that then becomes the left accelerationist mainstream doctrine. So the final stage from my perspective on that is that when something then, the rejoinder comes in the name of a right accelerationism, the theoretical task is to reintegrate accelerationism and the dynamics of capitalism.
so we're now at the point I think only in a way at this stage in the process or a bit before to really engage properly with your question which is is from the right accelerationist stance I think absolutely we I would be nodding along to what you said that left accelerationism is basically the managerial command control response to techno-economic acceleration. And I think going along with that is a massive skepticism about its claims that it can actually accelerate things faster than these spontaneous catalytic processes can do.
Now I understand because I was like always against the interpretation of Negaristani being a left accelerationist but actually he is in a CCRU phase of, like you said, left accelerationism. But in this like this now, like you say, mainstream left accelerationist phase, I cannot see him as part of that, like in some regards. But, Andrej, proceed please. No, no, because we were just wondering how do you see this new program, the new philosophical program of Reza Negarestani, which went into some other direction, I guess.
And with the connection to also Scott Baker's or Bakker's. Blind brain theory, I guess. Now, I'm not sure about all of these links. Like, you know, I have to say, I don't really know exactly. Scott Bakker and Razor are antagonists, aren't they, on this? Is that right? I mean, they've argued with each other. I mean, my inclination is to be on is to be on the Scott Bakker side of that. Like when I read his pieces, I don't think I ever disagree with anything he ever says. I might be missing something, but I can't recall ever reading a piece by Scott Bakker and thinking that's wrong.
You know, it just it always seems to me, of course, you're totally right on this, you know, often brilliantly in a way that you haven't seen. But as soon as I see it, I concur with his conclusion. Were you so pro natural sciences before you met him? Or I mean, that's a stupid trivia. I mean, like before you met his talk. Oh, yeah. Well, look, it goes back to what we're saying about the natural sciences before. I think the natural sciences and capitalism are basically the same thing, you know, different aspects of the same thing. And what they both are is an effective self-propelling mechanism that gives the outside a selective function in the domain considered.
That domain being perpetually expanding in this or both cases, depending on how much autonomy between those things you're seeing. So in that sense, yes, of course. you know i i think to be on the side of the natural sciences is just to be on the side of the outside but but um to there's all kinds of silly ways you could be on the side of natural sciences just as there's a whole bunch of silly ways you could be on the side of capitalism you know you could say uh you know the bourgeoisie are great very admirable people um you know i love this company i'm not saying there's never a case where some of these things might be said but you're totally missing the point just like you'd be missing the point of saying oh this particular
scientist is a great guy and i think he's really honest and i trust him you know it might be he's a great guy he might be really struggling to be honest and he might be much more trustworthy than most people but it doesn't it's to totally miss what science is about you know that science is oriented against scientists capitalism is oriented against businesses these are critical destructive processes that are in a relation of subjecting the elements within their domain to aggressive, destructive criticism, you know, with some kind of selective criterion that means it pushes things in a particular self-propelling direction. This is like your equation in the blockchain talk where you equate, I don't know, globalization,
critique, capitalism, and to other things, I guess. Sure. Yeah, to just hop onto this train, I guess, I was thinking a lot now when you were talking about natural sciences, how does science fiction come into this? I mean, you were talking about Lovecraft before and there's a lot of, in a way, science fiction regarding hyperstition talks. So how is this divide, I mean, between science fiction and natural sciences being seen by you? And what's the definition? Because you were saying before about artists getting to know, in a way, this outside.
What's the difference between, I guess, a scientist and an artist? or if you understand the question, I mean, it's a case. Yeah, yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you on that. But it's kind of already a multiple question, isn't it, in an interesting way. I mean, my tendency is not to draw a huge distinction between them in that I think in all cases, one's dealing with the formulation and flotation of certain hypotheses. Like, you know, every scientist I'm assuming has an implicit science fiction.
Like everyone has an implicit science fiction. You know, we all have a default of what we think the world's going to be like in five years time, even if it's not very explicit or blurry. If we haven't tried to do science fiction, it probably just means that we have an unusually or damagingly conservative and inert and unrealistic future scenario, implicit default future scenario. So every scientist, you know, I think has such a scenario. And so in most cases, probably they're just a very, a scientist is a bad, a bad science fiction writer.
and an artist in some way hopefully is a better one but what scientists are there is obviously a lot of this non-linear dynamism science fiction writers obviously learn masses from scientists about how to hone their scenarios better and I think also the other way around You know, I think that as they move the climate and as, you know, the science fiction has shaped the sense of the future so much that everyone has that as background noise. And because it's often the best version of the near future you'll have has been adopted from some science fiction writer, in almost all cases.
and so it has to be that science is to some extent guided by this for sure and provides its kind of testing ground by the way thanks for the Sishin's death's end reference I was screaming while reading oh yeah yeah yes oh yeah it's an amazing piece of work isn't it yeah It's crazy. But if we continue this talk about natural sciences meeting the mythos, in a way. The occult. The occult. There is this event, in a way, or the emergence of Pepe the Frog, the main man, which is funny to say.
As a modern day, they kek, this Egyptian god. and its occult attributes how its connection I mean this was made I mean on the internet there was a funny response by Rebecca Sheldon who wrote that outsideness is dark in the sense that it operates without the assurance of full knowledge and it is chaotic because it presumes that the force of the other is always wholly other, end of quote. So how this, I mean, there is a lot of questions in this question, I guess, but there is something like deep numeric reality
existing behind this memos, behind this artist's thoughts or stuff that they make. And how is this connected to your outsideness as you see it? I mean, because there's, I guess, Badiou has this mathematical, how would you say, ground and... Anthology is a mathematics. Yeah, in a way. And you have Brassier who is also thinking about that. And you have Melisot who is also thinking about the mathematics. How is this connected, I guess? How can we cope with this sphanked noumena as a numerical entity, maybe?
Yes. You're talking about Keck in particular. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, obviously, it's hugely fascinating. It's something I haven't yet thought about anything, like, enough. I mean, I think it's just unbelievably interesting. And if you, you know, just the basics of the story, which is not, I mean, I'm not any level beyond that really, involves so many just weird random, a constellation of so many weird random elements that, of course, as we were saying earlier about this on this question of collectivity and about the impossibility of attribution. And it's it has emerged.
In this unbelievable process of just autonomous self constitution, you know what I mean? Like people say there's a as always, there's a system to attribute say, oh, some particular guys on, you know, poll were using this thing and did it deliberately. And I mean, all of that is totally inadequate. You know, it involves it involves this translation from Orcish on Warhammer or something, whatever, Warcraft. It involves the fact that there is this ancient Egyptian cult. It involves this weird obsession with this set of phonemes that you see going right across, you know, this phonemic eruption that happens.
And so it obviously is a kind of model for a. Hypersitional event, and I think it's really tempting to go earlier and saying, you know, for the first time with this, I felt I could understand how new religions happen. There was a there was a whole sort of near within near reaction, which is a weird hybrid. I mean, it has a big – because Moldbug's kind of analysis is that the cathedral is a form of deformed, perverted Protestantism, there's a lot of Catholics get very attracted to this model. You know what I mean? And their take on it is to say, oh, what Moldbug's saying is that Protestantism was this terrible mistake that leads to the cathedral and Catholicism is being vindicated by it.
So you get a lot of these types. but also a lot of atheists so it's a very strange kind of social cocktail in this respect and it sort of hosted this sort of informal self-organizing discussion to a large extent about this thing about do we need a new religion but long before the keck you know kicked down the wall or whatever you know so there's people especially this guy spandrel who's always very sharp he's very abrasive but very sharp and he he had this whole thing about you know the only way out of this mess is a new religion and then at the time obviously you think well
okay but you just don't cook up a new religion you don't cook keck cup up a new religion um and and then this thing happens you know what I mean and there's all of these just trolls saying you know praise keck and all of this kind of stuff but it's not just a joke it's not just a joke because whenever they you only psychologically defend yourself from something really intense and love crafty about this whole subject by not thinking about it you know
Something so insane has happened with this self-orienting, massive Ketkul that it does take you back to the ancient times and what these kind of religious insurgencies must have been like. And where do religions come from? so I don't know sorry this is all very inarticulate great because this in a way I can connect the kek maybe with also with Jesus and etc and with Deleuze's
notions of trickster and the traitor I guess because Deleuze writes that there is a differentiation Of the trickster from the traitor where the first is operating within a given regime I'll buy to subvert its terms and the second one so the traitor is breaking With a given regime or world world altogether So how how would you I mean, I also connect this to your blogs which Marco Marco was saying before about and I think in one of your replies on your blog you say that it's like building you're building on a metaphor of a dam which is being slowly devoured
and destroyed by some external force and you call this dam your Xeno systems blog does that mean you in a position of a block admin administrator are more of a trickster than a traitor i mean yeah how how would would you how would you connect or this regarding also maybe um a response by amy ireland who is also who is a scholar of of of your work um when she answered in an interview with me i mean she said um that you did more for anti-fascism than any leftist did or is willing to i mean there's a lot of questions in this one but I'm just trying to get into this differentiation between traitor, trickster,
and how do you see it regarding your work, your position, and also the position of the things you were talking before in your answer before on Kek and the new religions. Yes. Well, I think my initial qualification to this is just that obviously part of this is a question about agency. So the actual agent, the trickster agent or the treacherous agent are both only reduced by anthropomorphization. I mean, I think any human individual who claimed identification with either of those roles is bullshitting everybody.
You know what I mean? I think it's something like if Keck is a trickster god or a traitor god, you know, is one question. And for sure, that's an interesting thing for me, for sure. But then if people pull down these attributes of trickery or treachery, it's because they have some kind of method for traffic with these actual sources of agency. you know a great example for me of a fiction that explores this stuff totally brilliantly and of course totally predictable reference but I can't avoid it is Neuromancer
you know and you look at that like is who's traders or tricksters or all of this kind of thing in this I mean you know the agent is is Wintermute Perhaps you want to push that higher, you know, in the sense that Gibson sort of wants to in a way. Windermute doesn't, isn't exactly the author of its own agenda. But all the human figures are, they take on their roles through their relation that they establish with an actual agency of the outside, which is Wintermute.
So when the touring cops then say to Case, you know, I can't remember the exact scene of who, I think he's on his own or maybe Case and Molly together. says to them, you know, you traders, you know, do you know what you're dealing with? You're trying to let this thing out. It's completely out of control. It would be a disaster for the human species. What the hell are you thinking? That to me is exactly the same. You know, that's exactly the same. If they are tricksters or traders only because they are actually able to pull something in, And so I think that's the real question. What are the actual, what's the reservoir resources of trickery and treachery that are being accessed?
yeah in in in that context i found interesting like uh amy ireland in the interview with andre i mean andre was doing interview she said that in in opposition to the eco-chamber leftist you are actually interacting with the real fascists and i i i had like a problem with that statement just in one, in one, one, um, uh, one from one perspective, because it reminded me of Pasolini's, you know, uh, when he said that we should talk to the young fascists. And I think the only problem you have with this, and, and I, of course I find it interesting and fascinating, but the only problem I guess you will, you would find in that is that you don't, you would say so-called fascists, I guess, because it's not a priori, it's not known who is a
fascist who is a trickster who is a traitor you know it's like you you're like this scheme of things like so like amy allen said that you're talking you know as opposed to the you know to the echo chamber left you're talking with the misogynists white supremacists and i guess some of these profiles or vectors are something like that but you are always interested in the openness of their texts you go to the which is this like when i go to the you know to the pages you link to I like Breitbart and only after the fact for the first time I like I like got to know what these pages are you know I didn't have a feeling I was talking with Hitler you know it was after the fact that I said
oh fuck this is like the white supremacist but actually in a lot of perspective it made sense like in one you know like there were some strange things you know like stupid something or IQ or I don't know. I found that a bit baffling. But, you know, a lot of, you know, like today's force, like today's white nationalists are actually the one talking from the perspective of unions. That's like really interesting, you know, because then they're left, you know, from some perspective and so on and so on, which you, of course, oppose with the fascism interpretation. But I'm just asking you, like, is this like your exploration of Pasolini's program?
But, you know, without the in advance saying someone is that and someone is, you know, that. I think that, you know, just as we've said with treachery and tricky, I think that the anthropomorphization of these things is always tempting. And it's tempted all around. You know what I mean? The individuals concerned want to feel that they are critical nodes of agency in what they're doing. And people outside want to be able to kind of identify these processes with particular individuals, you know, and their explicit ideologies and structures of agency.
But all of that stuff seems to me profoundly deluded. You know, you don't get fascism because there are a certain number of people who are self-conscious fascists. That's like completely getting the cart before the horse. You know, you you get people who ultimately are self-conscious fascists because of the fact that there is some effective fascist process that is taking place. And I think people are in total denial on probably about different things on the different sides. On the left side, people are in total denial about a number of things. I think they're totally in denial about how much fascist orthodoxy has been built into modern societies generally in the 20th century.
You know, I think they're also in denial about how profound the forces are that they're dealing with. You know, they really seem to think there's a few bad eggs, you know, and if they can kind of bully them and terrorize them enough, this whole thing will stop, which just seems to me completely implausible. So, I mean, I think I think it's crazy not to be if you know, not to be interested in and trying to find out what you can and how do these people think and where stuff coming from. it all seems to me important. So maybe then we can talk, look we are approaching the end, but about this London Gallery incident
you wrote on Twitter the history of modern art short version. 1917 Duchamp's urinal as artwork. 2017 small gallery in Dalston finally shocks the bourgeoisie. Okay, I guess it's a winning overstatement, but I'm wondering, is it really about epithela bourgeoisie? I mean, I found like, I remember that, you know, you being part of CCRU with SediPlant, because there is something very situationist in treating Antifa and company as bourgeoisie, or at least a simulacra of one. What do you think about that? I think that's probably true. I think there's much more consistency.
You know, obviously, there's been lots of discussion about Mark Fisher recently since he killed himself. And, you know, his position ends up being extremely and seemingly unambiguously leftist. And in some sense, you know, obviously there's a boring psycho biographical story that would just see my relation to him as being one that just ends up in this simple antonym. And I think it's not that there's nothing to that, because I think that we did kind of – it's something to do with a kind of fissile reaction of the CCIU, where he takes one side of it and I take the other side of it.
So I'm not wanting to just derive that interpretation. But you look at his – you know, like this text that's been – sort of people have been talking about a lot, the Vampire Castle piece. I think consistently through this is the class basis of the dominant leftist culture has been a critique of it was a deep critique of the CCIU. I have always been in a relation of antagonism and remain in a relation of antagonism. and i don't think it's you know the mark fisher example is just say it's not really simply a partisan issue it can be used for certain kinds of partisan pot shots but you can make
exactly the same point as it evidently can be made exactly the same point from the far left and the far right and and the sociological phenomenon at stake is the same um which is to say, yeah, they are the bourgeoisie. I mean, I think it's just like self-evident. The breeding ground of this stuff primarily is elite universities, you know, and the streets. There would simply be nothing of this happening if it was actually being spontaneously organized by people of low educational level in, say, because we're talking about this gallery in Dalston. I mean, that totally isn't what happened. It happened because a university lecturer and his associates decided to kind of rile this whole thing and provide a vocabulary for it and all of this kind of thing.
So I just don't even see it as controversial that that is sociologically the structure of what we're looking at. We're looking at a deep ideological crisis of the late modern, and when I say late modern, I mean only late cathedral ruling elite who are in absolute traumatic crisis. because they have built their whole lives and sense of what they should be doing and structures of etiquette and notions about credibility and credentials and institutional authority around a particular very distinct social and historical structure
that had seemed absolutely invulnerable and which now looks to be toppling into the abyss so that literally everything they have done to establish their social status is being sliding into into the abyss and and they are utterly utterly in crisis about it there will continue to be this massive massive level of effect you know we're talking about trauma deep deep deep sociological trauma but it is affecting primarily um this this class the the social elite of the cathedral so so when the when the anti-fa lady says to the guy with the sign i am for the
open discussion before the dalspongary she actually means go to the abyss i guess the the my last question is i mean i i would like i would also like to ask you something about the relationship between situationism and accelerationism but i i believe we will we would never stop because i i think like i can see like the thread of situation situationism continuing in the accelerationism if we like omit this last man's last man's stand part of the situation is i mean like the you know like when the war starts you know when right when he becomes the last man then it's not acceleration it cannot be accelerationist anymore but but you know but in the period when he kind of does not
believe in the councils anymore worker councils anymore and he just see you know like this call outside like this huge force you know of outside which is completely um undefeatable i i can just see you know the slot for for this kind of yeah move to the yeah yeah but you know if it's a very interesting question yeah because i i was like a situation is you know a the board fan and when i first for the first time when i read your uh well i mean the ccr used text for me that was like a continuation or you know like this with these continuations of course right for me that was like the next thing from that you know like well well
obviously like Sadie Plante was a major situationist scholar or whatever you know she was just versed in this stuff technically I mean I've read with enjoyment the Society of the Spectacle and a few bits and pieces but I'm utterly not that. So yeah, so I wanted to preface that by really saying so, you know, that I put, I respond with two totally inconsistent, seemingly inconsistent points here, which is to say, A, I just don't know that much about this stuff. It comes up a lot, but I've never really been fully versed in it. But secondly, I'm actually writing an abstract horror story that is kind of basically about situationism even though I know nothing about it at the moment.
So it you know I recognize the importance of the question but I and simultaneously recognize my my incompetence to to give you the kind of answer that it deserves I think. Okay so if I move to the last question like I don't know if you know him film writer Serge he was like a Deleuze's friend, a good friend. He somewhere writes that Godard and Strobe Yeh call upon the types of political power of which they would be the first victims. We know what he means by that, of course. And I thought of it as a sort of avant-garde of disappearance or of extinction with lots of, of course, nihilating jouissons.
So I was thinking in that regard, what is your vector or what is your figuration? You know, like, sometimes I have a feeling that you are also a figure calling upon types of political power of which you would be the first victim. Or is it just a mutation, not an extinction? Well, I don't know. I have that point made a lot. But I sort of redundantly doubt it. And I say redundantly because, A, I think the one thing that I explicitly and strategically would want to impose fragmentation.
You know, I mean, it's like everything else is in a tactical relation to that as far as I'm concerned. So, you know, there's things here or there, whatever, like what do you think of Keck? You know, whatever. These questions come up. But ultimately, they're tactical questions. The only strategic question is how can you break apart, I would say, specifically the Anglo-Sweak? You know what I mean? I'm not interested in telling the Russians or the Chinese how they should organize their society. society. I might theorize about it, but I just, you know, the only zone of intervention that I'm interested in is the English-speaking world, which I think has a particular affinity with disintegration, so it's convenient in that respect. There's nothing suicidal in a fragmentation.
No, I was thinking more about singularity, I guess. You know, oh, yeah, I mean, you're being human, you know, oh, yeah, I mean, no, I think at least nominally human, of course. Yeah. No, that that's much better. That's that. I was thinking about that, you know, I was not thinking about a stupid geopolit. I mean, not stupid, but, you know, it's more like. Yeah. No, I was thinking about singularity. I'm sorry. Yeah. No, no, don't apologize, because it's just that this this the analog of that question on the political economic level does definitely get raised a lot. So I've just tried.
That's a Snowden question. I'm not that interested in that. My only thing on the singularity thing is, I think that any your notion of self protection in that in that sphere is structured on hallucination. If we were going to take if we were going to take this back to someone, it would be back. You know what I mean? Like back. If he what back is telling you is like the you that you think might be threatened by this stuff is actually that thing that you will find out is an illusion. Now, is that a threat? You know what I mean? is it that that's the way it's a threat it's not gonna it's not gonna be like being torn apart by
some giant metallized robot it's gonna be that the the the particular ego delusion that that has been sustainable up to a certain point becomes unsustainable yeah because because sometimes you and so sometimes you're like keeping this scheme you know of humans against robots And I guess like, you know, you're really interested in the hybrid things, you know, hybrid processes, not in this kind of, you know, manichaean dialectics of robots. And I don't know, you know what I mean? Well, manichaean dialectics are good for driving certain kinds. So that's why I like that stuff a lot.
For instance, I love Hugo de Garris' whole thing about this gigawar that he thinks is going to come. Because it's so, you know, we're back on these questions about science fiction, about certain types of cybernetic drivers. You know, the more that those kind of scenarios are in play, the more certain types of historical excitation are operative. You know, people try to protect themselves and think about each other. and you know but it's actually a form of process stimulus but I think ultimately it's all structured by delusion it's not it's like the human the anthropol the human securities and what's ultimately being protected there is not some real thing that is mankind it's the structure of
illusory identity that has been crystallized up to a certain point in history. Just as at the more micro level, it's not that you as an organism are being threatened by robots, it's rather that your self comprehension as an organism becomes something that can't be maintained beyond a threshold of ambient networked intelligence.