Formalizing the Subject (Session 7)

Hello and welcome to the new Center for Research and Practice seminar series formalizing the subject dialectics and cybernetics in Calle Polanalyze and the CCRU with Danielle Sassolotto. Danielle please take it away. Thank you Jamie. Hi everybody. As I mentioned I'm really under the weather I have the flu actually right now which is why I'm getting the cameras flickering that's why but anyway I'm sick so forgive me for coughing and being unpresentable in general and probably not totally there I also haven't slept much so today what obviously what we're gonna do but before we jump into today's materials and none is gonna be presenting on the day lambda so I'll

figure where to you know make that jump in and I think Federico your your respond into a man right great okay so but before we get to today's business um i want to pick up from where we left off last week because we still have uh some stuff to talk about we left off talking about harman rather quickly but um i want to move and talk about grant and then um a few further observations about last week's stuff and then we can get into today's stuff if that's okay Does that seem reasonable? Because I don't want to shortchange Ian's stuff as well. So just give me one second so I can project this. Sorry. All right.

Here we go. All right. Are we all seeing the slideshow? Cool. Yes. Let me minimize the sidebar because I can't read the whole. Okay, great. So the first thing to say is, okay, so what is Grant's project? Of course, we all know it is basically a reiteration of Schelling's project. It's a form of what he names speculative physics. And this basically amounts to a kind of transcendental materialism in which one tries to do essentially as in all variations of this project, is to try to explain the conditions of thinking out of the more general conditions for material becoming. So you explain thinking or mind as a phenomenon

to be explained within a ontological register rather than as something that is properly, let's say, transcendent to nature or that is an exception to nature. So for, you know, for Schelling and for Ian by extension, the essential move that occurs is basically what we could call a naturalization of the transcendental. And this is a move that, of course, should be quite familiar to all of us by this point. After talking about, for example, how Nick Land appropriates Deleuze and Guattari's ontology. obviously and uh deliz himself proposes a variation at least his early work is is a kind of transcendental materialism or transcendental naturalism so what does this mean essentially

you know as everybody knows i presume for kant you know um the transcendental conditions of possibility of experience determine how it is that you know the human subject or mind represents the world of phenomena as it is presented to the world to the mind well what you know transcendental materialists try to do is to basically directly ontologize this transcendental structure as the engine of ontogenesis right so rather than simply tracking the mechanisms for the representation of matter now transcendental materialists try to describe the conditions of possibility for the actualization of matter already constitutionally. And this is credited directly to Schelling and Ian, just like Deleuze, proposed different

variations on this general motif, transcendental materialism. So the difference is, and one of the things that I wanted to just lay out from the get-go with regards to Grant's project is that I really, I am just not sure what you get from Grant's constructive project. I think it's wonderfully instructive as a reading of philosophy and what he does with the history of philosophy is wonderful. I just don't see what you get of it that you don't get from say Deleuze or anybody else or Schelling himself. You know, there are only brief indications in the, Obviously, in his book, he gets into this into much more detail. But really, even the book is, by and large, exegetical.

And the constructive side of the story is really very much continuous with what we are already familiar with in other registers. So maybe somebody can help me out here and say, well, okay, here's what's really new about this approach. but one thing that of course comes out that is um at least you know more classical in a way than than say the Deleuze-Guattarian transcendental materialist approach is that of course uh Grant does not consider or is not hostile to the dialectic or to idealism right I mean he in fact is much more classical Schillingian in this regard where he actually thinks that when he is uh you know, he thinks there's an actual co-evil or co-determination of realism and idealism,

that the real is ideally structured. And by ideal, of course, he doesn't just mean conceptually, but he has a conception of the ideal that covers specifically abstract languages as well. So, mathematician, right, is ideal and by extension material. But this is going to lead, Grant, I claim to a methodological deadlock, which I mean, I'll get to this in a second. But the quote that I have here at the bottom of the slide is where he declares this kind of coextension between realism and idealism, which I find to be interesting to begin with. So the universe is actually manifesting logical laws and their expression is largely indifferent.

what we will find is that nature does behave in this way so there's price this firstness preceding as it were the production of the loss of logic insofar as they are overt law loss of logic and are articulated by ourselves for some variant thereof idealism is committed to a realism about all things a realism that applies equally to nature and to the idea and in general terms i think this is true i think this is what all idealism in fact does it approximates more or less no i don't know why yeah it approximates nonetheless uh you know the idea that it supposedly expresses the idea is external to the thought that has it the thought is external to the thinker that has this uh that has it the thinker is external to the nature that produces it both the thinker and the thought and the idea so the uh he you know he um proposes these what

he calls a series of exteriorities so rather than to think of ideas as a private sort of internal state, you know, or an internal representation or something like that, ideas are actually supposed to be incarnate in, you know, real structures in nature, right? But again, it's not the idea understood in this kind of like, you know, like, you know, the counterparts of, say, natural linguistic nouns or tokens. These are ideas in the sense of like differential structures, which are mathematically tractable, right, or mathematically expressive. So here he's already, again, very close to Deleuzean territory. And in fact, much of what he will say in his book himself, I mean, he endorses this, an account of a formal ontology or a formal naturalist ontology, which abides to the notion of to basically a principle of individuation as differentiation.

And, you know, the transcendental conditions for the actualization of matter or material production is a mechanism of material differentiation. And I'll get to that in a second where it becomes a little bit clearer. But I think Ekin was asking last week or so about to clarify about this firstness and secondness or prius and posterior business, right? because this is where Grant, well, I mean, echoes Schelling's recoding of Kant's distinction between the aprorae and the apostrae. And it's basically, it's an ontologized recoding of the distinction between the aprorae and the apostrae. And the way that this is actually understood

is that, you know, firstness is, first of all, identified as nature as a whole. so firstness is always what is going to be the conditions of production and secondness is the actual product that results from these conditions of production so this is again very this should be familiar to any to all of us who are you know even cursorily versed in delizian jargon right like you have like the virtual conditions of production and you have the actual product or You have the pure ground of pre-individuated intensive multiplicity, blah, blah, blah. And then you have the actualized, individuated, extensive bodies in space and time. And so on, so forth. This is just one more version of the same old story.

Daniel, one question. Sure. You said that the conditions of production come first. And I don't know if this is just a misunderstanding on my part, but it seems that these conditions of productions seem to be not produced themselves. So they are fixed, they are not contingent. And then you again have like, okay, yeah, transcendental and the transcendental and okay, maybe not empirical, but the transcendental and the produced distinction. you have like a distinction again which is again thick I just don't yeah I just

don't get it then how you can like the argument behind this how you can I have I'm sorry I have difficulties explaining what I mean yeah how you can say there are these conditions that are not produced themselves right so i think i think grant so here's here's where this kind of metaphysical program faces i think a quandary i was going to get to this in a little bit but might as well drop spill the beans right which is there's a question of foundationalism here right uh the and and grant is attentive to the problematic of what he calls ground the problem of ground now in in the case of shelling as i presume all of us know there is

such a thing as like the sort of zero level ground which is indifference basically you know this kind of like pure amorphous an indeterminate you know thing which is basically the ground of becoming pure becoming if you will and everything that you know that that comes after that is premised on this ground which is just like you know nature considered in complete abstraction of any determination or positive characterization right but but grant wants to say well you know in in the wake of you know like uh after you know coon and everybody else you know we have to ask ourselves well is there just one ground or are there many grounds uh and and this of course is going to relate to the question of firstness in other words the question will become is it that these conditions

of production are a prorite or you know in the sense of themselves not uh you know constructed out of any you know other principles if so then what does this mean what does this entail about them their their status i mean it could be understood as simply an epistemic status like these are the most general conditions that guide the actualization of matter so they would be a pruri and, you know, in the strict Kantian sense in which they just describe the mechanisms by virtue of which anything that can deserve to be called material will be constituted. And I think that's what Grant wants. But Grant does not think that this is the prerogative of any one vocabulary or scientific theory. So he says explicitly that the question for him is really how many

formalizations are possible, right? So the question will be for Grant, rather than saying, okay, what's the, let's say, vocabulary which provides the foundation or the home language game from which all these conditions are supposed to emerge, the question will become, well, there are all these possible formalizations or possible sciences or, you know, different. And I wanted to get to that in a little bit because I think that's another big, like, just glaring lacuna in his program, which is it's really not clear what he means by formalization. You know, it really is. I mean, he seems to think that it has something to do. I mean, it seems to have to have something to do with mathematical formalization, right, in the sense of like having a mathematical physics or something like that.

But then I think Ray Brassier's question, which he sets out at the very beginning of the whole thing in his introductory sort of intervention, is perfectly well in order, which is, well, what do you do with everything that is not formalized then? You know, what do you do with biology? What do you do with brontosaurus? And what do you do with and so on, so forth? I mean, once again, I think there's this is going to lead us to the same question that we've been sort of already poking at from both ends of the spectrum, right, which is this compulsion, both in rationalist and empiricist sort of like materialisms, to identify formal languages, whether they be in like sort of bona fide mathematical registers,

or, you know, some kind of like non-standard numeracies and weirdness, right? But the whole point is formalization is like the key or the lever to unearth, you know, the nature of materiality, whether materiality be conceived as intensive materiality or as pure multiplicity or the materiality of the real object of causal desire or whatever you want. But the whole point is formalization is supposed to be the key. And I think, again, Ray's question is completely pertinent. What do you do with the brontosaurus? I mean, and I think we can get back to that in a little bit once we get to that part of the text. But yeah, so, I mean,

This is also, I mean, a reiteration of something that I think even on the other side of the spectrum, when we were looking at the CA, right, one of the things that we were looking at is that how this virtual, actual, or, you know, conditions of production versus product informs even like, you know, Jacqueline Miller's conception of how it is that overdetermination functions in the site. So this has become a very powerful, heuristic device for philosophers to use in all these domains. I'm just having a hard time figuring out what Ian is doing that hasn't been done before. Then, so here's where things get really insane as far as I'm concerned, and where I really just don't understand. It's just a complete confession of just not understanding what Ian is trying to say.

And this is when he has to make good on the idea that, you know, well, okay, thinking is a natural phenomenon. So like everything else, explaining the genesis of thought or the constitution of thought implies explaining the mechanisms of ontogenesis, i.e. the conditions, the prius of ontogenesis for thinking, right? Now, this leads him first to make this quasi-vitalist, penpsychist, scandalous claim, which of course will lead in the Q&A, Alberto Toscano and Peter Hallward to be rather perplexed and justifiably so. and here's the quote that that ian first drops and um right let's let's just read it and then

then we can take it from there because then ian what we'll see is he sort of like uh backtracks a little bit and qualifies his claim but i think the qualification of the claim introduces just more ambiguity um anyway so like the the quote is as follows there are things and there are thoughts What's the basis of their relation? Well, the thought that specifically occurs at that point, that point, is the means by which they are related. And that if there is no other body reference, are we talking about a world? No, the world's talking. Now, the question therefore becomes if the world talks, if the world is articulate, and if, that is, nature thinks, and however many strata we want to place in between the agent

and its product is fine by me, well, there ought to be loads. However many strata we want to place between the agent and its product, between the thinker and the thought is fine. But it seems to me, okay, but it seems to me that if nature thinks, then it follows that nature thinks just as nature mountains or nature rivers or nature planetises or whatever have you thinks, right? Okay, so this seems just straight up panpsychism. okay so this is where the reza calls things out there i mean this is like a latour litany you know again it's like you know what doesn't think right everything thinks my my glass of beer my my sneezing thanks everything thinks so but of

course okay so this is a short just a short remark um it's i think it's pretty clear that he says it's not that mountains think or something but that like uh nature mountain in the sense of okay it produces mountains as a saying as it produces thought and thought is just a product of nature as mountains and rivers are but not that mountains think no you're right you're right it's not the panpsychism in the sense that every object every produced object in the world things but there's projection is capable of producing thought right so so what he's doing he's i mean sellers does something very similar where he uh transforms the noun into a verb right and so so as to describe like mount nature mountains is like you know the borgesium uh

like what is it like the mooning of the whatever but you get the point it's like um it's just basically saying that nature produces mountains just as nature produces thought right And insofar as it's nature or that thinking is a phenomenon within nature, then of course it will follow that it is actually the world itself that is thinking in some localized dimension. And you're right. So what his qualification will be immediately to say, I do not think that nature thinks everywhere or at every point. There are only certain points, certain localizations in the world that think. So it becomes a question for him of where rather than, you know, what. So it's, you know, it's all nature. It's a, you know, flat ontology. It's everything in the same plane. But insofar as nature has different modes of individuation, insofar as it mountains and it thinks, the question is, well, it mountains here and it thinks there, right?

um however this of course raises the then so that was the first like impression i got i was like okay so nature thinks nature as a whole thinks okay then he qualifies so he says no there's a distinction and then the question becomes of course the question that anybody who is in this business is going to have to have you know have to answer which is how do you explain not only the the genesis of thinking within the natural order, but how it is that thinking emerges also in a capacity to refer to the world that's out there in its referential function. And therefore, how do you explain the fact that language or thinking can have this dimension of explanation, description, and so on, right? So not just thinking in the kind of like broadest possible sense in which you

might want to track sentient, you know, awareness by, but more robustly, how do you explain the conditions for linguistic practice, linguistic description, explanation, including constitutively metaphysics? Because if this is not going to be any, just like, you know, a surreptitious, dogmatic metaphysical picture that just, you know, reifies whatever it pleases, is going to have to explain under what conditions in a perfectly naturalist register, you can explain something like the conditions for metaphysical production. So metaphysis is not going to be the exception to the rule. So he's going to have to explain this. What is your philosophy of language in naturalistic terms? And here is where things get, again, kooky, right?

So this is where he says that, you know, in order to explain linguistic representation or thinking more narrowly understood as sapient, you know, discursive cognition, whatever have you, you're going to have to understand what he calls the production of referential signs. So again, reference seems to Ian to be the essential property that will have to be accounted for. I think he's right in that reference needs to be accounted for, for sure. So then the question is, of course, what's the prius, right? what are the conditions of production that lead as a which which which result in a kind of linguistic token as a product right a symbol or a sign that has a reference that plays a referential function

and he doesn't tell you that you know of course he doesn't give you the you know it's a well it's going to have to be some formalized vocabulary presumably but I mean what is it is it neuroscience Is it what? Is it mathematical physics? Is it, I mean, what's the vocabulary? And here's where I find that here he introduces this other problem, which is that there is always an asymmetry, according to Ian, between the conditions of production and the product in the sense that there's always an excess in the former in relationship to the latter, right? So here you have a kind of like analog to Harmon's thesis of withdrawal, which as you remember, is the idea that the real object is always, as it were, inexhaustible.

You can never sort of reduce it to any number of descriptions or any quote unquote central correlates. There's always more in the thing itself than there is in the sort of way you relate to the thing. And this is, you know, this is, Ian has a kind of version of this thesis, which is the idea that, again, there's always an excess of prius over, you know, the product. you know so then the question is well and he gives the example of a mountain right like he says well you know if i wanted to explain to you the ontogenesis of a mountain all the events that span you know the millions and millions of years that you know lead to this creation of a mountain uh obviously it's it's it's sublime and you know right in in a Kantian sense it's it's in

complete excess of my capacities well thinking is no different it turns out right obviously so so one of the things that Grant says is that you can't actually retrieve the price for thinking. You can't actually capture the conditions for thought. And that leads into a problem, right? Because of course, then you want to say, well, okay, so if this is not going to just lead us back into the skeptical sort of correlationist, you know, transcendental skeptical water, which is you can never actually retrieve the conditions of production, right? You're going to have to say, well, okay, so there has to be at least some kind of partial knowledge or something like that, right? But then what's that criterion? What criteria do you use to gauge this level of

proximity? And at this point, Grant tips over into a kind of practices, borderline instrument, instrumentalism, where he says that the only criterion for gauging, quote unquote, the match between your discourse on the world or your theory in the world is that there is a kind of consistency between different theories or between different sort of versions of the story or between scientists talking to each other. So here's the, you know, this formal consistency at the level of formalism or coherence, right, for him is, renders the question of whether the conditions

of thought are actually described or whether the conditions or ontogenesis for anything really are adequately described trivial. And as long as it works, as long as you have coherence, then you basically, scientists, science doesn't have to worry about the epistemological question And this quote at the bottom really, you know, touches on this one. If there is an unrelated prius and posteriors in the production of thought, and if this has the effect of making the thought particular to its conditions of production, but incapable of reflexively recovering those conditions, then we are condemned to a complete... Jesus I don't know why I just like kept cutting those sentences like that then

we're condemned to a complete oh yeah here he says we're we're condemned to complete he says that you know if you abide by this then science cannot work basically right if you abide to there being this complete absolute incommissionability between the conditions of thinking and if the fact that you cannot retrieve the conditions of thinking as a whole entails that you you can't practice science, then you couldn't do science altogether. You would be defunct. But here's where he says, no, well, the fact that we can do science and the fact that science proceeds means that you can't get by with simple coherence without the capacity of retrieving the wealth of conditions. So theory itself, the very idea there are theories is dependent on some kind

of consistency being reached that makes it irrelevant what the conditions of the production of thought are. Is there one ground for all patterns or are there several grounds for several patterns? In other words, how malleable are logics? How many possible formalizations are there? That seems to me the question that nature poses to thought. So the question for him is not going to be, again, have we arrived at the right theory, right? It's just a matter of consistency. It's like, okay, we have all these possible formalizations. They all describe, you know, a mechanism of ontogenesis in some domain. And the question is, well, how many possible different, you know, formal languages to describe different mechanisms of individuation there will be.

Now, here he calls them logics. And so one thing that I'm just like not sure is that whether he has in mind something that is more general than, say, a specific empirical scientific formalization, a formal scientific register, something like, you know, promptly speaking, a logic, like, you know, I don't know, topological logic or logic in some other sense, or whether he's just speaking about formalization in the sense of, again, empirical science. I don't know what he means. I really just don't know what he means um does anybody have any ideas about what he means what is logic supposed to mean here no no no no bulb yeah fair enough okay so we're all in the dark so um wait somebody

just said something in the chat maybe it's helpful i can well there's a little mail party there but It seems like logic is a placeholder for conditions of virtual becoming, conditions for thought. It's just like schematization, but that doesn't bring us anywhere closer to an actual firm system. Yeah, I mean, it's again, this word formalization is being just dropped here as a kind of unexplained explainer. and you know i mean i have to just think that he means a mathematic mathematized language of some sort whether axiomatized or not but then becomes the question of okay so you know method what about pure

mathematics right so pure mathematics so are is he a platonist in the sense that he thinks that you know every possible consistent formal language describes you know an ontological domain a regional ontology or does he think that there are you know some formal languages that do not track real structures or real dynamisms and others do. What's the criterion is only empirical science or natural science. I said the social sciences, what about partially formalized sciences, right? I.e. non-fundamental physics. You have this problem once again, which is just simply how did you adjudicate the wealth of scientific knowledge or the wealth of, you know, linguistic production. And this is why, again, I mean, we're going to get this in the next slide, I think, which is how, you know, Ray really

presses on the issue of formalization and, you know, what do you do with natural language as a whole? I think this is incidentally an important question everybody should be thinking about when relating to this kind of material, which is what do you do with natural language? What's its status? You know, we know what, you know, people from the CA and from the CCRU think. logocentric verbaria the hostage to meta all things metaphysics qualitative the level of the ego ideology everything bad happens in the level of natural language right so natural you can almost you know if you use natural language you cannot but you know betray ontological perspicuity in a way in fact you know you remember when we were reading um badu's attempt to you know dialecticize

this this kind of like movement of formalization one of the things that we saw was um so there's a stratification which is this imminent operation that occurs at the mathematical formal level and then you know i was i was trying to explain to you how he reconceived of the of of the interplay between ideology including philosophy and mathematics and there is this like an envelopment of the mathematical formalism with philosophical concepts, then it shuts itself out, and so on and so forth. And there's this like play back and forth. And then of course, you have, you know, the flip side of that, which is with the CCRU, we have the idea that, you know, even mathematics, even, you know, rigorous, like academically bona fide mathematics is too polluted by, you know,

all things logos or whatever. And so you need this kind of like aberrant, you know, non-standard numeracies which cannot even be translated or you know vociferated into kind of intelligible sentences or words but of course all of it is supported in natural language just like this is so I guess this is another question what could just like simply ask Grant which is okay granted that the conditions of production for any system including thinking are going to be these formalized formalist you know these logics what is your philosophical program doing I mean what is this system of composed of words in English right what status does that have what is that track how do you explain that within the variantology what's the you know very you know what's

the ontology that generates that condition because you always have this kind of like you know you want to have your cake and eat it natural language no but here I'm offering you this conceptual ideography which is a philosophy right which somehow is required to make sense of what role the formalism plays so without the philosophy you know set theory doesn't tell you that you know anything about the event or presentation right or you know certainly you know you know parentheses don't tell you anything about ecumenical you know orders of radiation so you need the natural language. So to me that interface has not worked out satisfactorily in any of these registers and that's a pressing question. So here, if you notice, but I think somebody wants to hear.

Yeah, I'm sorry. I was thinking about this thing of logics in Hamilton and they were thinking about a curse Deleuze did in Vincennes. I think it's not translated yet in English, but he was talking about axiomatics and I'm thinking that probably I don't know Graham thinks about axiomatics as this interchangeable thing like if an axiomatic doesn't explain x then we're gonna change it into another kind of formula to see if it works to fit to explain the material world or whatever it's outside I'm thinking that that's maybe the technique he's used in his sense of logics like this interchangeability of axiomatics in the sense that Les has applied it in his course in Vincennes.

I'm thinking about that. You could very well be right. Now, if he's thinking about that, right, then, of course, you have to think that theories, formal theories, do not only come in axiomatized form. There is also what is called the network coherence method. You know, those of you who were in my seminar last semester, one of the things we read was Lawrence Puntel, and he emphasizes that you know um the axiomatic method while it's quote unquote the gold standard for what is considered a formal theory is not exhaustive by any means even within the domain of formal theorization right so then there goes the other question right like okay axiomatics yes and network coherence theories no you know uh you have a problem there again you know uh and again

for things like for example dynamic systems theory right which something like you know a the Louisiana ontology seems rather close to, it's not clear that that is, you know, properly axiomatized in any like standard sense, right? Like you don't have an axiomatics for that, even though it can be tapped back to axiomatic, you know, those morsels you have, you know, again, you know, a variety of registers that interplay with each other. You have inferences that behave non-monotonically in the kind of cyclical manner. And you have, you know, you have different structure altogether. So anyway, this is like, you know, a big, a big issue, I think, in the core of it. Now, in the Q&A, we reach this moment of dramatization, I think, at the end where Peter Hallward specifically starts to lose his patience. And, you know, Toscano and Hallward

obviously being the kind of, you know, rampant Marxist in the, you know, in the background here, well, Ray himself also, but really, you know, Hallward being, you know, it starts to wonder about what you get, you know, if in fact the conditions of production are amenable to some kind of formal scientific register. And these have nothing to do with like the manifest image of man in the world, as Wilfred Sellers calls it, right? Because that again, that's like the framework of the intentional stance, as Dan calls it, like the framework of persons and the liberation, wherein we understand ourselves as people with, you know, wills and volitions, which make decisions. And, you know, of course, that is also the space for political action, right? That is the space of normatively invested discourse. And well, the question becomes very quickly, well, if that goes

away, if the actual conditions of thinking are not tractable through this kind of vocabulary, but through some kind of, you know, quote unquote, formal logic, what happens to politics? What happens to decision, right? And is it, you know, like, do we have to endure some kind of eliminativism concerning the manifest image or the intentional stance? Is then, you know, deliberative metacognition, epiphenomenal with regard to the conditions of production, which are tracked, again, by some kind of science? Doesn't this lead to a kind of like crass determinism? You know, very basic questions that anybody who proposes to naturalize cognition and thinking is going to have to answer, right? Like, what do you do with all this? And it seems like Grant takes the dive to determinism properly.

I mean, he quotes Spinoza, but of course, after that, Hallward just says, well, yeah, that eliminates politics, it seems to me. And Grant goes, yeah. And, you know, I don't have a horse in the race. I don't care. I mean, I don't care about politics, but let it fry in the gutter. But, you know, that happens here. So listen to this little exchange here. I think it's like quite delicious. But what about cases where you will something to be true, though, or to be the case? I mean, just banally, holding a promise, making a commitment, right? Peter Hallward sounds like Robert Brandon. There are cases in which something comes to be because you will it so. And politics would be completely disarmed if you lost that. There's the spinosis response to that.

What I think of as my freedom is my incapacity to explain the cause of the event that I'm trying to describe. I move my arm because I will it so, or do I just not know the causes of my arm moving? That's the Spinoza's answer. And of course, Hallward says, yeah, then that gets rid of politics. And Grant just nods. Daniel, can I ask something? Because this is very near and dear to my heart. I'm a hardcore determinist. I have been ever since before I had the words for it. And after I discovered it, I simply cannot understand how anybody is not. Now, the way that Peter Hallward phrases this question, and I agree that Ian Hamilton Grant doesn't leave room for politics, but there's a way out of this tension, which is just sort of what you said, the epiphenomenal response.

that we have the qualitative or the qualia we undergo the qualia of having free will despite we recognize that if we were able to construct a cause and effect schema as an atomic one that began with the beginning of history and we were to map out every single cause and effect uh microscopically macroscopically etc we would be able to to map out all future conditions of the world, but this is an impossible task. Therefore, we will never have a perfect cause and effect, super science, as it's sometimes called. And therefore, despite we realize that there is this determinist grand narrative, we also recognize that we have to

undergo politics, undergo, create erect legislation, as if we do have free will, using epiphenomena as a central node. I don't even think that we now need to use the Spinoza's answer that we don't know the cause of our moving. We know what it is, or at least we know what it would be if we had the super science. It would be a combination of physics and history and world conditions that have sort of this infinite, you know. Yeah, I mean, it's basically a science in which nothing is left unexplained and all your predictions come out right. Right. Yeah. Isn't that, I know, Brassier's critique of evolutionary epistemology.

Yeah. And it seems like that, what you said again, what you said before that, okay, here Grant has a theory, but how can he explain the conditions for his own theory? How can he explain his theory with itself? and that if you this complete naturalization cannot explain science itself like and and yeah that's the first point and the second you already uh wrote down here the division between near rationalism and landing accelerationists and i wanted to ask like because this basically sounds very much like land if you think uh there is this weird uh tension in land with between yeah well against everything every leftist tendency whatsoever like oh we need to get rid of politics

and at the same time yeah politics is an impossible task like this is like and there is like um yeah uh an inconsistency and the symptom of inconsistency i think and i yeah i just want to ask if you see any difference to land here whatsoever at all okay so uh so a couple of things there so first with regards to this eliminativism question right so as i'm sure you know one of the things that uh ray is um most known for is launching i mean he used to be mistakenly called an an eliminativist but uh he he actually in nihil unbound the first chapter is a critique of

eliminativism uh you know the church ones and i my my the reason why i think there is a real question here to be asked is um so i i do agree that there is like you know causal um saturation and that's you know that's what it's called causal saturation in the sense that there there's no like you know what if there is freedom it can't be defined as a causal gap where there's something like an instantaneous act of the will that is not you know not causally prompted what would that be that that's just silly so whatever it is that you know however it is that agency or the will you know everything else you want to you know those concepts are to be intelligible and you know credible within a scientific view then you have to explain them in a way that does not preclude

them being causally instantiated. So that's the first thing, right? The other thing, however, is that the eliminative stance runs into a problem, which is that you can't really eliminate certain concepts without throwing away the conditions for explanation themselves. What concepts? Explanation, for example. Because of course, you're in the business of providing a theory, right? So you have to be able to say, well, okay, you know, this, these symbols in the page track this phenomenon in the world, and, you know, therefore we can understand how it is that this happens. Knowing, explaining, describing are normative notions, right? Because they are things

we do as part of a discursive practice whose job is to explain precisely the way the world works. right among other things how we work but if you eliminate all of this all together explanation blah blah blah then you have fallen into it you know this is the the um john mcdowell has called the problem this is the problem what is called bald naturalism a naturalism that eliminates from within itself the conditions that makes itself its own practice intelligible so you cannot not even understand what naturalism is as a as an option let alone recommended as you know a preferable stance over non-naturalism or the same goes for determinism right you can't understand

what determinism is i a position that one can hold i a view that requires you to have some kind of commitment right without having under your wing uh you know notions like explanation commitment belief, and so on and so forth. So if you throw, if you completely eradicate those out, you have simply nothing to do to, you know, to explain what explanation does. You have no way to explain what a theory is. So you can't really get rid of that. And this is not just some parochial conceit concerning the manifest image, right? Like, oh, there's a core about ourselves, it's ontologically reduced. No, no, no, it's nothing like that. It's purely explanatory. Like you can't explain explanation itself right like you can't even say what what science is or mathematics is or discourse

is or you know believing is or having a commitment so like to etkins uh like claim it's it's conspicuous that you say yeah i'm a complete determinist right and so on and so forth and and and and we you know i we can envisage even if it's impossible the idea of a super science and so on the intelligibility of a science altogether hinges on the non-elimination of certain basic concepts that are precisely, you know, those that the eliminativist wants to get rid of, namely, you know, the whole framework of intentionality, of normativity, and so on and so forth. So to me, that's like just a pressing question. And this is actually something that I think, you're right, Eric, assuages every variation of elementivism or determinism that I know of,

including lands. Because land in particular is haunted by, in my opinion, by another ambiguity in his program, which is, on the one hand, sometimes he writes as if, in fact, we are, you know, there's no choice on the matter, right? And, you know, it's just like, there's this sort of a futural intelligence that's assembling itself from its enemy's resources so you know we're being hijacked what we experience as history as decision is just this futural intelligence coming or you know pooling itself up right on the other hand there are all these prescriptions right uh yeah you know let's you know he's not doing philosophy he's like you know we shouldn't like we should defy the infantilism of the logos.

You know, cybernetics versus philosophy, this versus that, accelerate, right? And so the question to me is, well, prescription is a normative concept, right? Prescription is something that we do, presumably. It's a practical, it's related to our practical capacity. What sense does that make in a framework in which presumably you've liquidated the entire fabric of intentionality? Does that even make sense? Yeah, but couldn't one say that in this phase where Land, like shortly after circuitries, which are still where he slips into this theory fiction mode, not proper philosophy any longer, but theory fiction, that there he, like he got to the point theoretically where he is eliminating everything philosophically.

and then he comes to the cognition which he wouldn't say is a cognition any longer okay philosophy is impossible everything is this machinic practicism and then he switches his mode of operation so it's a performative consistency he retains but yeah this phase of transition of switching the mode of operation according to certain yeah well actually cognition yeah it's it's a really interesting the switch mode of operation is really interesting and yeah if there is something

to gain from it I don't know that's yeah so you know one of the things that Ray asked Nick and you can hear this in his little talk on Nick it's online uh it's also transcribed is he asked he used to ask nick um what did he think he was doing which is a great question if you think about it like okay but what's the status of what you're actually you know your production because you're describing the world right like you're you're doing metaphysics right like you're describing how it is that future intelligence assembles itself all this stuff happens so you you know you want to say like you want to pretend like you're not doing theory and whatever but you clearly are so come on and and and of course land would always

retort no no no no you're mistaking what i'm doing you know what you think is a it's a theory is just a machinic practice precisely right so it's it's like again he tried to like fold the conditions of theorization and so on back into the stupidest thing i've ever heard what does that mean it's a machinic practice exactly exactly i think that's where he is like cheating that's that's cheating everything we do is machinic practice exactly yeah yeah well well you know i'm happy to grant okay it's machinic practice but your machinic practice your specific machinic practice has the peculiar machinic practical propriety of describing the world right right so you have to not only explain machinic practice as a whole but you have to explain how some instances of machinic practice has this peculiar property of serving as a isomorphic double of the

of the generative mechanisms of machinic practice right so you're doing a machinic practice that makes the mechanisms of machinic practice explicit now tell me what those conditions are well he hasn't he hasn't have he doesn't have that because in order to have that what you would need to do is to have a theory of how these words correlate to presumably the quote-unquote cybernetic formal mechanisms or you know whatever you want the numeracies that that track the real mechanisms of machinic practice but it's similarly like to to flip it around and to ask but you the question right you would have to have a theory of how the metontological discursive layer relates to the mathematical layer um you know but you wax this decision and you know all the you know we

make a decision to identify the blah blah blah but you actually don't have a theory of how the natural linguistic metaconceptual apparatus relates to the formal apparatus because you don't have really a theory of discourse you know what i mean so i think this is like again a problem that runs across all of these iterations and i think actually badu is much more elegant in this regard because he is at least very aware of this question right um and he has continuously tried to refine his position from like this sort of crass identification of ontology with said theory to then a nuanced sort of appreciation which distinguishes in the mathematical between phenomenology and ontology and now in his latest iteration he wants to have an even more pluralistic

approach which takes you know not doesn't simply ontologize one mathematical language anymore right um so i think that's the way to go but i think this is the price you get for not having a philosophy of language or for throwing a personality out of the water in the name of metaphysics, right? It becomes impossible to explain how the conditions of thinking in this peculiar operation, which is theorization, become capable of tracking down the mechanisms of ontogenesis, right? And then you basically fold back to dogmatic metaphysics. That's the inevitable fate of these things. It's a bit like the recent talk of Ray and Ian, that they talk about the reabsolation of theory.

Like, I mean, if you try to be subjectivized in the way that Land or any other philosopher did in his vein, you end up with metaphysics again, even if you don't like it. Yeah, completely. And I think that Ray was the one who, I mean, I think Ray Salarsian, in turn, really opened up a whole new sort of level of appreciation for the importance of epistemology in my thought. I mean, I had completely, you know, relinquished any interest in epistemology basically for years. And then it became, you know, it comes through in his assessment, right? When he really starts poking holes at the formalization sort of fetish, you really start

to ask yourself the question, okay, yeah, maybe this derision of natural language was overstated a little bit, you know, and maybe actually we have to, you know, we have to begin by, you know, raising the Kantian question again. Maybe that question remains a not terrible one, which is, sure, yeah, we want to ask about the conditions of emergence of thinking in the natural world, but before we can do that, we have to understand the conditions under which we can understand the natural world, right? Because insofar as we're going to explain the emergence of thingy and nature, we're going to have to understand what an account of nature is premised upon. And I think that requires an account of what discourse does, what ontology is, and that is by default not ontological in nature, right? So this is where I think methodology is necessary, right?

It's just, this is why I hold that ontology cannot be first philosophy. I'm convinced of that at this point. Now, so that we move a little quicker, because I want to get to today's stuff, obviously. I'm not sure to change it. But I just wanted to take note of this, like, Brasarian, like, last poke. So I think we already talked about this question, you know, the problem that he sees with transcendental physics, in particular Ian's program. Another thing that he of course is concerned about that he mentions, and again I won't go through this in detail because I think, but actually this is an important one because here you see how his critique of Ian also maps into Lance and his critique of

Land and Bergson and Deleuze. So this is actually quite relevant to us, which is you also have the problem if you're going to define materiality again as this kind of like undifferentiated, pre-individuated undifferentiated ground or whatever have you like domain of virtual multiplicity ideal blah blah blah well then the question is of course the conditions of actualization and you know the conditions of individuation and these are going to have to be robust enough to explain not only how it is that rocks and mountains emerge or nervous systems but furthermore how these nervous systems instantiate anything as robust as having theoretical discursive capabilities that are, you know, dialogically instituted, you know, the whole community of giving and asking for reasons and whatever have you, right? You're

going to have to explain that. And so here, actually, these two quotes track down a kind of analogous critique. The first one is from the panel. The second one is an extract from his talk on Nick Land. And I think if we read just both of these, we get a good feel for what he sees as a fundamental problem. So the first one, just very quickly, how do we account for discontinuity in the continuum of production? And while I have no doubt that it is possible to do so, it is a significant problem for any process philosophy that wants to defend or prosecute a form of ontological monism based on something like pure productivity, pure becoming duration, or whatever one chooses to call it. Because then it seems that you're always introducing, you always have to introduce some posit, I'm sorry, to introduce or posit some sort of conceptual contrary,

some principle of deacceleration, interruption, deintensification, or whatever, in order to account for the upsurges of stability and continuity and consistency within this otherwise untrammeled flux of becoming a pure process. So even if one then goes on to reintegrate it into the former as a mere moment, one still has to explain why there is anything but a pure process or why the processional flux is ever momentarily stabilized. So, right? That's number one. Now, check this out the check this out check the uh the flip side says uh i need to move the panel okay here we go in mapping the process the process of movements of de-territorialization and partial re-territorialization you're mapping activity itself because it's nested upon strata it occupies an imminent position vis-a-vis these material processes you no longer have the transcendent

exteriority between theory and world. The theory itself is implicated in the reality it's describing. Then things become unclear. There is a substitution of a sublimated materialist eschatology for all forms of rationalist teleology. Why keep intensifying? Because there's always a surplus of stratification. One wouldn't need to deterritorialize and destratify unless there was always a complement of re-territorialization and re-certification. You only need to de-territorialized because there are strata. Why is there a stratification in the first place? It's clearly analogous here. And the problem of the status of theory and how you account for theory in this kind of like process monism, materialist metaphysics, becomes highly pressing.

And so then the last thing that he does that I think I want to call into question is again, And he then pushes hard on the question of formalization, which is, again, a common thread that runs in Ian and Mayesu. Of course, here is where, I mean, the unlikely sort of place where I presume that Ray and Graham would most agree. But here you get this brief observation, which I think is exquisitely pertinent. and every bit as relevant today as it was before. It is a question of scientificity here, whether mathematical formalization or mathematical science can and should be privileged, the privileged paradigm of scientificity.

So we're back here with the Cayer's question, right? What's science? Is it formalization? Because there's another issue here, which is that lots of what we know about the world before and after humans is not mathematical knowledge. Lots of biology and geology is not mathematically formalized. And yet we surely want to say that we know that dinosaurs existed and that we know quite a lot about the morphology of brontosaurus i mean i know the question of dating is crucial here here but it is not just that we know that the accretion of the earth happened 4.5 billion years ago because we have a mathematical way of determining the date but that we know much more we know about the processes involved which are geological physical chemical processes just as we know an incredible amount about the pre-human world about the pre-human flora and fauna and my worry is that if you turn into that criterion of scientificity, you accidentally or unwittingly

compromised the authority of all sorts of non-mathematical knowledge, which surely we want to say is our objective, geology, biology, etc. I think that is a perfectly good question. I'm open, I'm all ears if anybody wants to say anything they think about this. I don't know if this question could be posed to Melasue, because of his reduction to the mechanization of the world and the unknown ability of the other that is not human. I think that Ray is actually making a good point here. We actually do know through the scientific or through a more clear, applied definition

of scientificity what we know this makes us know the world. I mean we can't put it into pure mathematics or unknown ability. Exactly and also I mean the other thing that really grabs one's attention is that Measus is really concerned with the arquefossil of course right as the kind of standard of what shatters representation or your phenomena or the correlation right because it's unthinkable for the for correlationism presumably and brassier's uh brassier agrees that you know yeah any realism has to be able to explain about the phenomena before thinking emerged but he makes a very banal obvious point which is yeah but so it's you know the past is not special in that

regard like we have to explain how it is that now you know with everything is like you know that There's a mind independent world, period. Forget about the art of hustle. Just to comment on that, I just started to write a blog post on that shit, inspired by a zombie film, which was just in all this discourse on speculative realism, the question of, okay, how is the world without us, without the human, without the subject? And in the zombie film, there are some people wandering through abandoned city and they experience how it would be if all other humans vanished and this um this uh also this emphasis on the prior to the emergence of

the human the arca fossil or the extinction of the human after the human has gone is like uh yeah just as Ray says, why not now? It's a question of, does the human subject has ontological actuality, efficacy, so it needs to go to know how the world is without the human? It's basically, it's a question, does the subject has ontological efficacy, and or could we just say okay yeah also now just let's abstract from the subject and how the world is in itself but it seems that these these theories that say yeah before the emergence

of the human or after it got it did go extinct yeah commit to an ontological efficacy of the subject that it actually changes something in the world and it's not just okay a transcendental schema and the world is just as it is well i don't know about um if it if it dovetails into um i mean i don't know if i don't understand why thinking that there is a world before you know like prior to the emergence of thinking entails that the subject would be ontologically efficacious in the sense of like changing that no no i i i didn't mean that that uh that of course they can say yeah the world was before there um it's the commitment to this emphasis on okay we

need to look at the world without humans oh right right well actually i mean that that this is necessary but that that you couldn't also say yeah let's just look at the world how it is now because it doesn't matter if they are humans or not it's a view of perspective because think about this uh you know land has the flip side to this which is the future right a future without humans So like in both cases, you have a kind of like either a primal archifossil or a future, you know, singularity point, which serves as the anchor to precisely talk about a world in which humans are pulverized or trivialized or, you know, something. But isn't it the same with extinction for Brassier and Nihil Unbound?

Also a future point without humans, which is the point of departure for all thinking. But it's not the same thing. I'm sorry, but in Nile Unbound and the Intelligence and Spirits final chapter, where you also get this outstripping through geistic, there is a kind of synthesis that is related to existential angst and environmental outstripping of the human as an asymptotic node that we're heading towards. And thus, I think it has a bit more of a political end than the arch fossil, which we obviously cannot politicize in the same asymptotic world history. I think that, you know, I honestly don't see how to translate the extinction story to anything political, but I don't think it's incompatible with it.

All it does is like, and incidentally, the same about the Arctic fossil. I think they're on the same plane politics regarding. Obviously, with land is a different story because the future AI thing presumably trivializes decision. Now, the thing about extinction is, sure, it means that, you know, whatever, I mean, if he's right, right, whatever plots, ends, goals we have could only be in the grand scheme of things, but temporary retentions. they, you know, so, you know, in cosmic history, they appear as rather trivial. But then again, who cares, right? Like, because, I mean, the fact that that that every material body in the universe will disintegrate in asymptotia, a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, however many trillions are embedded in that is not enough to dissuade anybody from, you know, engaging in

political activity, I presume. I mean, as long as you keep the proportion in mind, you can have your realist cake and your political, you know, sort of party as well. I don't think that's a problem for, for, for Ray. It doesn't help the political case in any way that I can see it though. I mean, it's just an autonomous. Why? I mean, this is not the same strike of idealism that reading any type of philosophy that's not a materialist text prompts. Like if anything, it gives you maybe a sense of comfort with this environmental outstripping that will undoubtedly proffer the same way that any idealist text that doesn't

present a manifesto of politics at the end essentially ends in mental work. Is that too weak? I don't know. It's fair if you say, like, that's, like, not very much that you get out of it. Sure. Well, maybe, maybe, I guess this is why Ray also gravitated away from Laurel a little bit. Because he thought, I mean, and I know this because we've spoken about this in detail, that he felt that he just didn't have enough resources to say anything about, you know, the nature of agency and theorization. I mean, it served like a really powerful point for positional realism, right, which is basically what it is. But, you know, beyond that, it was just like a little bit too austere, too minimalist, if you will, for, you know.

It absolutely is. You end up having to like hijack other theories like Katarina Kolosova does if you're going to make any political texts. text right and i exactly exactly and i think by the way that's a perfectly sound alternative like you know catherine has like done quite quite wonderful stuff like staying in that path ray obviously went full solar soon um i i can't even localize any remnants of laurel and his writings in the last 10 years you know honestly uh except when he's writing all over obviously but but but and yeah and it's not clear to me also whether the extinction business what status it has in its in his present thinking to be honest you know like whether it in fact even makes sense to him anymore um whether it plays explanatory role or you know i don't know i really

just don't know um but but it's in reza's work and it's in thomas moynahan's work so i mean it still has a place uh and we're gonna get there yeah for sure for sure i mean yeah definitely And of course, the essay of Ressa that we read is explicitly addressed to this issue. So maybe with that in mind, we can shuttle to the... Question, Daniel? Yeah. Question, Daniel? Just an idea here that if you compare mathematics and biology, isn't there an argument about their trajectory? That is, it would be rather difficult to imagine a biology interpretation that overpowers mathematics.

But you could see that over time, mathematics chips away at what biology says. Yes. I mean, of course. I mean, and in fact, as biology progresses, the more that it nurtures itself for mathematical methods, right? from statistical, you know, from statistics to, you know, programming languages. I mean, as far as they are formalized as well to, you know, the calculus and you name it. So absolutely. I mean, but what, so what conclusion would you want to draw from that? Or what insight? Well, that seems to be the argument that Brassier is hanging on in that last quote that you put up there.

It's like, okay, but you're hanging your argument off of something that looks like it's going to run out of steam eventually. Oh, oh, oh, I see what you're saying. Well, here's the question, right? Whether, so, you know, Brassier is talking about all this stuff that is not formalized, right? Including, you know, or I mean, it could be numerically indexed, right? Like, for example, you can say, you know, the Brontosaurus is like, you know, 10 meters tall, whatever. But the point is, not all of it can be like just trickled back into an axiomatized mathematical language, right? Now, what you're suggesting is that might be provisional. Like eventually, we will have a full, complete mathematical language that dispenses altogether any kind of non-mathematical description.

Now, that is, you know, that would supervene precisely. here's where the here's where uh the the question of natural language comes back right whether it's in fact intelligible to have a self-sufficient formal mathematical language without any kind of conceptual adage or ideography now what would that be right first of all would it be an axiomatized language would it be a network-based formalized approach of course we don't know because such a language is not here if it is even possible. But I think that here is where you get the problem of explanation back, which is that for any theory to constitute itself as such, it has to be possible to explain what it's doing, right?

How it is that this theory, for example, enables us to gain predictive leverage? How is it that it enables us to describe phenomena in space and time? How is it that it gives us a definition of space and time? How is it that it can be used to form predictions and so on? Well, prediction, explanation, all these concepts are, of course, concepts that we use to define artistic scientific practice, right, and scientific discourse as such. What would it be to formalize those conditions? Now, I have no idea what that would even mean, you know, in the sense of how you could get rid of that in a purely mathematical language, right? I have just simply no idea of what that would even mean. Of course, you can change the syntax.

But it seems to me that one of the things that is underappreciated is how natural language's non-formal status, the fact that it's not axiomatically organized, the fact that it's highly ambiguous, that it's always recodable, that it's what gives it this epistemic flexibility. and that you, in fact, cannot understand the heuristics of mathematical theorization and revision without understanding how it is that you metaconceptually interpret these. But again, I don't know. I mean, this is an open question. I mean, this is like a deep question, right, concerning whether, in fact, it is possible to mathematize the world as a whole.

I know where Ressa stands on this point, but, you know. Any other thoughts before we get to geotrauma? Okay, geotrauma. I'm just making sure. Yeah, cool. We're good. So geotrauma, right? So we've already briefly spoken. I didn't want to talk too much about this before because we were going to talk about it more now and it obviously makes more sense now. but I think we all get the the basics right it's an attempt to sort of generalize the Freudian account of the death drive that you get in beyond the pleasure principle from a biocentric model into a geophysical model right so basically bloating the death drive into this kind of cosmological and geological register which provides a kind of mechanism for mapping a

genealogy of life and thinking as well the formation of the organism all the way to a final catastrophism, right? Which is really a sort of like regional theory of this larger thing, which is geotrauma, the cosmic theory of geotrauma, also called plutonics. I love it. So it's a crazy, crazy story, of course. And there's a definition that we get from the CCRU collection. And this is like the basic definition that you get. Geotraumatics, polymathic hypertheory of the terrestrial machinic unconscious, which refuses the distinction between biology, geology, linguistics, and numeracy. Geotraumatics processes the

becomeings of the earth as intensive products of inorganic tensions, especially those compacted from arcade xenocatastrophies. So of course, the whole idea here is that you have a flat ontological domain within which the linguistic the biological the geological are all explained in this like sort of flat ontology right square number one part of like this kind of machinic like ontology and then you explain individuation in this kind of genealogical sort of genetic story in terms of a series of catastrophes or you know macrocosmic events which of course encompass these epochs of, you know, cosmic history, planetary cosmic history, of geological history.

And so this is, as I mentioned, something that Lamp really builds upon from his earlier excursion into or extension of Bataille's solar thanatropism. And I've been reading Bataille lately just to get a stronger feel for the origins of this entire sort of saga of the sun, which I think honestly one of the most beautiful I think moments and like recent philosophy is this kind of like solar odyssey that it has been you know sprawled from that of course the land retrieves from Bataille and that then you know you have with Ressa and Ray you know this this marvelous discussion and Robin of course regardless of when one thinks but just to

for those of you who don't know the the the demotivations i mentioned this before but so the the basic idea i mean but ty in the cursed chair develops what he he's in the project of outlining what he calls a general economy which very much like in the in the idea of like pursuing a kind of flat ontology what it tries to do is tries to say that while economic science i.e the science that is practiced you know in the lab and the in the academy by by trains it's concerned with like the immediate ends of mankind you know you know you know the circulation of goods and their product and their activity and labor blah blah relative to their time and their you know their interests and

so on their goals or projects these are of course parts there these have to be embedded within a quote general economy that looks at the flow of energy in a planetary scale and in this scale um bettai surmises with no scientific evidence to back him up just that um what one sees in fact is that uh it's not just as freud put it which is that you know in freud's account of the death drive, the organism has to sacrifice part of itself so as to buffer the shock of intensity that would annihilate it spontaneously. And so it engages in this kind of protracted return

to the inorganic. And Reza will make a big fuss about the, and, you know, land himself, thinks that the scientists, but precisely the dynamics of affordance, right? Well, anyway, so it's not only that. It's not only that the organism needs to buffer a shock nut to spontaneously sublimate itself, but that, in fact, the organism is always receiving an excess of energy in relation to what it can productively use for growth or for maintenance. And this excess of energy can only be squandered or spent like waste. In other words, it's this radically anti-teleological vector of expenditure without any kind of palpable end or productivity.

and so he you know this is bataille and in in in the thirst for annihilation uh land draws this uh bataille and general economic model to think of a in a properly you know physicalist quasi-physicalist register looking at uh the work of ludwig bolt uh bolzman trying to sketch the the outlines for what he calls a kind of hyper materialism he also calls it energetic materialism or libidinal materialism. But the idea there is to, again, try to bloat the Freudian death drive into a kind of cosmic unconscious in which, at the end of the day, what there is is the entropic dissipation of all forms. So that at the end of the tunnel,

what you get is absolute deterritorialization or absolute annihilation, right? Now, of course, everybody knows this idea that at the end of the tunnel lies the sort of the absolute destructification is land's probably most singular contribution to the entire roster of thinkers that we have been visiting and you know ray resa robin everybody has a version of this thesis at some for it, right? Solar extinction, you know, even rest of toys with this. And in fact, much of what we see coming out of land in the quote-unquote neorationalist sequence is an attempt to resist the, not nihilist, because of course Ray thinks positively of

nihilism as a speculative opportunity, but to sort of resist the sort of fatalistic, disarming consequences of this kind of solar thanatropism that land first hijacks from Bataille and bloats into a ontological model as well but this particular sort of model of solar thanatropism is what becomes potentiated in the in the theory of geotrauma into a concrete periodization or historicization of the history of the earth so just like you have a bloating of the death drive into the kind of cosmic unconscious, which is this energetic libidinal unconscious, which is just matter, libidinal matter, according to him, you know, the flux of being and entropic dissipation, blah, blah, blah.

So you understand the formation of geocosmic history or geophysical history as this kind of like giant unconscious that accrues trauma in this sediment of layers. And that these, yep. Daniel, sorry that I interrupt you. Absolutely. But one question right at the beginning. I wanted to ask if this theory of geocosmic trauma or geotraumatics has any aspiration of being taken seriously as a kind of scientific, I don't know if it's, if it would say a scientific theory or metaphysical theory or if it's just like, just like the myth building of the CCRU.

And because if you could just say, yeah, it's just a myth building, then yeah, why take it as an object of philosophical reflection? Why to invest any energy into this and think about this at all? And just as you say, Ray tries to deal with this nihilism and its consequences. But yeah, why take it seriously at all? Okay, so thank you for that question because this is the perfect moment for that question. So yesterday I was trying to explain what I was doing with my life to somebody, and they asked me, what is this supposed to, you know, why? And I had a hard time. I really did. I didn't know what to say. I came across as a madman, which I guess is not far from the truth.

But the point, I mean, it's a good question. What I think, so I haven't thought of it a little bit harder. if there is a potential quote-unquote scientific lesson to be sort of drawn. Because obviously the periodization is just bona fide science. It doesn't add anything in particular to that, right? But the thing that it seems to me to be particularly interesting in any case is the idea that, well, two things. First is this rehabilitation, this revisionary rehabilitation of the recapitulation thesis, right? Which is widely considered to have been discredited scientifically, right? That phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny or something like that.

It's the other way around. Just shortly, what is the recapitulation thesis? It's that phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny, right? is that it i think that's the the the the it's heckles i have no idea what that means to be honest yes oh wait i i no it's alan is ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny that's how do you recapitulate yeah yeah sorry sorry i'm talking to you yeah yeah yeah so so it's it's so the idea is that um and i actually don't know how how to understand this but but the idea here is that um the head getting bigger is the history of species you know right exactly so so like basically

looking at i mean that's that's the the the most like direct way to say it is that you can track there's a kind of correspondence relationship or a mapping that you can track between um you know the genetic mutations and becoming that is just the course of evolution, natural evolution, and the specific formation of specific traits that are expressed, like, for example, the formation of the skull or the formation of, but so an extension of this thesis to explain how it is that something like, you know, terrestrial or planetary bodies are formed seems like a kind of like, you know, and sort of revisionary amplification and rehabilitation of the recapitulation. Of course, we're no longer just talking about genetic information being passed through,

but something like, you know, cosmic, you know, information at a kind of cosmic scale, right? So that's one thing that I suppose comes out of this, and they make this claim time and time again. Hold on, there's something in the chat one, I just want to make sure it's ontogeny, recapitulates, phylogeny. yeah i said it the other way around i screw up cephalization is another you know i mean there was a moment where there was a lot of uh scientific theorization uh cephalization is one uh you know where the head and the nerve ganglia become concentrated in the front end uh that sort of corresponds more so with like the way Thomas Moynihan has taken this, and he's sort of uncovered a lot of pseudo-histories or

pseudo-scientific theories that have been lost history. I think reading that book is like one of the best ways to answer your question. That's what I was going to say also, that that is a document that I suppose should add to this stuff significantly. It's definitely the most exhaustive monograph that's been written on this on this topic so at least in the spinal catastrophism bit i don't know if he makes much of the geotrauma oh he does he does yeah i linked my review of it which probably is not terribly ethical but i i mean i yeah he definitely talks about the geotrauma element and i argue in this review that it's actually like a very political work because in the end it's uh so to to make something manifest of this nihilism uh he does something

different with it than Ray and others, I think. Fair enough. Okay. That's, uh, and I'll take a look at it because I still haven't read the book and I really want to read it. Um, obviously it's supposed to be very good. Um, I don't know if it is, but you know, I, I, it's very good, but it's dense. Like there's a lot of medical terminology. I had to read it with a dictionary in hand. Oh, wow. Uh, yeah, I don't mind that. It's actually cool. You learn things when you read the CCRU and right for sure you'll learn about science um well it's actually surprising right that you read the CCRU and this kind of stuff and then you find yourself reading about you know geophysics and just trying to make sure that this is not just complete lunatones and and well it is

complete lunatones but um I think I learned more about natural science reading this than than I have reading, you know, Haywell my entire life. So anyway, so here's the first periodization that Daniel Barker offers and Barker speaks in the interview, which is basically a good way to begin, right? I start with a scientific story. Between 4.5 and 4 billion years ago during the Haitian epoch, the Earth was kept in a state of superheated molten slack through the conversion of planet planetesimal and meteoric impacts into temperature increase. Kinetic, sorry I gotta move the sidebar here, kinetic to thermic energy. As the solar system

condensed the rate and magnitude of collisions steadily declined and the terrestrial surface cooled due to the radiation of heat into space. Reinforced by the beginnings of the hydro cycle. During the ensuing Archean epoch, the molten core was buried within a crustal shell producing an insulated reservoir of primal exogenous trauma, the geocosmic motor of terrestrial transmutation. And that's it. That's plutonics or neoplutonism. It's all there. Anorganic memory, plutonic looping of external collisions into interior concept, impersonal traumas drive mechanism. The descent into the body of the earth corresponds to a regression through geocosmic time. Beautiful. And also, like, notice one thing, just like very sure. I mean, I'm sure you all noticed this, but this Archean epoch, right, which is the moment in which basically you have the burying or the,

you know, the sinking of the core. This, do you remember in the architectonic order of the eschaton that the order of radiations are all related to concealing this central point, right, the point of origin and what do you call the brackets the archons right so that is actually like you know obviously a way to recode or formalize quote-unquote right diagramatize the way in which there is this kind of like concentric center the molten core and it is progressively sort of like sedimented outward with you know in the Archean epoch right like by different layers I I don't know if you had noticed that, but it's like, it's cool.

No, I had not, but that was very clever. Yeah, it's really clever. You see, it's fun. You can have fun and learn. And here is, again, this is the inter... Hold on, there's another comment here. I've been saving... Okay, shit posting. So, yeah, there's always that. Trauma is a body, ultimately... This is a phenomenal quote, by the way. trauma is a body ultimately at its pull of maximum disequilibrium it is an iron thing at the micastatic virtual university they call it cathel the interior third of terrestrial mass semi-fluid metallic ocean mega molecule and pressure cooker beyond imagination it is harder than the surface of the sun that double f is obviously one three thousand clicks below the

crust and all that thermic energy is sheer impersonal non-subjective memory of the outside running the plate tectonic machinery of the planet via the conductive and convective dynamisms of silicate magma flux bathing the whole system in electromagnetic fields as it tidally pulses to the orbit of the moon. Cthell is the terrestrial inner nightmare nocturnal ocean sanadu the an organic metal body, trauma howl of the earth, crosshatched by intensities, traversed by thermic waves and currents, deranged particles, ionic strippings and gluttons, gravitational deep sensitivities transduced into non-local electron mesh, and feeding volcanism. That's why plutonic science slides continuously into schizophrenic delirium. No shit. That is absolutely right.

um what's the plutonic scientist uh sort of slides into schizophrenic delirium if we take mclan to be like you know the epitomized yes absolutely i mean one thing to be said though more seriously now is like i think that the the the reason why this is just amusing honestly is because when you start talking about non-subjective memory, you know, blah, blah, blah, unless you want to wax vitalism, you're really just talking metaphorically. That's the truth. You know, all this talk of memory and trauma is, of course, a metaphorical transposition of the vocabulary of psychic trauma, from which it makes sense to speak about, speak about something that is

completely mindless. So the same kind of things that people usually crucify Harman for, you could easily, you know, transpose it here. Like, you know, okay, you know, central objects make sense for, you know, minds, but what does it mean for the cotton to have a central object when it relates to fire? Well, similarly here, you can be asking, you know, what is like memory in this sense? I mean, I understand how it is that you can trace it back. You and I can trace it back, right? But to speak of actually like a crude memory in the actual material sort of, you know, formation, either requires a reconstructive conception of memory that's no longer just a psychic phenomenon, which of course is implied by this, but that's of course not part of a theory itself.

So what we get is this kind of just metaphorical reference to this register. Let me just move forward. So that's, let me check the chat just to make sure. I wanted to ask, photonic science is not science. well yes nothing we can all agree i'm not going to read this one because too much reading um so i want to get to to robin's uh elaboration on the joe trauma story which i think it's a it's a wonderful text robin is a great writer i i really wish he wrote more uh and that he actually begins by tracing this backward into um freud's recapitulation of uh brewer's analysis of Anna O. And I didn't remember this part of the essay when I was rereading this week.

So I revisited actually the Freud, which is actually arguably the most insane text of Freud's in many ways, this recapitulation. It's just so bold and insane when he draws these three structural trajectories, it's just a complete insanity. At first, I thought when I was reading McKay that this might be just like a Borgesian sort of, you know, fictional Freud. I was like, did Freud really write this stuff? And then I went and checked that out, and it's true. And so the whole idea here begins by noticing that there are these three structural uh, layerings in, you know, in, in, in, in, that you can look at memory through three possible

structure, uh, orderings or structural orderings. The first one is just a simple chronological succession. You look at memories, right? So the memories of NO in chronological succession, then you begin. So that's like the simplest one, right? The obvious, but then you get the second one, which is already more interesting, which is the inverted one in which you have, you begin with the most immediate, the most recent, and you'll work your way backwards. And as you move your way backwards into the past, memory becomes more fragile or more hidden. And therefore it becomes less accessible to Anna herself. So she's like, you know, incapable of making explicit

these deeper layers of a crude memory and therefore trauma so that the further back you move you kind of you know uh peel away these sedimented layers of memory until you reach this you know exogenous trauma traumatic point of origin which is of course at the end completely inaccessible so here's the quote from um and again this recapitulates the whole aoe and like the and and the whole art thing um is there a question in the there was a very lovely little naive question if dr barker was a real oh no i have a i have a short question uh

because it's always popped out everywhere this zero intensity zero or this this this in all of ccu land and all this it seems like some like what is it like is it pure productivity without differentiated products basically that's pure product like the way you don't have any cybernetic distinction between system and environment like total dissolution right so not pure productivity but pure in productivity in a way right it's like a pure a pure becoming that yields nothing okay so so so when you when the last system the the last most primitive system dissolves that's pure improductivity because you need a distinction distinction between

environment an actual distinction between environment and system to produce something right exactly you need you need a minimal distinction of that okay okay that now that's clear. That was great. That is why Land identifies it with death. So zero intensity is death itself. It's like it's a xenotropic transvaluation of the Bergsonist Elen Vittal. So becoming is for Bergson the ceaseless emergence of new forms and this dance of life blah blah blah. And he wants to say Land in this kind of entropic register no, no. Pure becoming is just the unraveling of all forms in this kind of macrocosmic scale, the sundering of all life forms, where everything dies and everything collapses and becomes annihilated or disintegrated.

So it's like the metal version, the Colombian black metal version of that. So here's the Freud quote, which I think is very interesting, because then he goes and discerns a third stratum, which is even deeper. right the most peripheral peripheral strata contain contain the memories or files which belonging to different themes are easily remembered and i'm always being clearly conscious so that's you know forward layers moving this is the second this is the second structure the deeper we go the more difficult it becomes for the emerging memories to be recognized till near till near the nucleus we come upon memories which the patient disavows even in reproducing. And then he goes on to discern a third current, which he says logically links the

thought contents in an irregular or twisting manner in the form of a foreign body designated by, and this is the quote, a broken line which would pass along the most roundabout paths from the surface to the deepest layers and back, and yet would in general advance from the periphery to the central nucleus, touching at every intermediate halt in place, a line resembling the zigzag line in the solution of a knight's move problem, which cuts across the squares in the diagram of the chessboard. And I just included one diagram of what this looks like, this zigzagging movement, which is, of course, cutting diagonally across discrete stratums, right so it moves so i i mean freud is completely unclear on what this even means right this is like

as abstract as the ccru itself so what he wants to say is that um there's not only this kind of linear logic chronological logic and this like reverse logic which goes from most explicit or conscious to most repressed unconscious but there's also a way to link the different layers at the level of content. And in this way, you have these kind of diagonal sort of transversal communication between the different layers from the deeper ones to the surface ones. So you have these kind of backs and forths, right? So you have these kind of, but nevertheless, yes, as you move in the sequence, you are approximating a primal point of origin, which is a traumatic origin, right?

So the trajectory that you see in the screen, in the in the in the like knight's move solution is basically it's what's called a knight's journey or the knight's uh something like that it's basically you know a movement which progressively moves towards the center even though it's erratically like sort of zigzagging all around right i mean that's as abstract as it comes so you don't need to worry about this too much have. Also, it's not that important for the actual theory. So, I mean, again, once again, it's the idea of sort of mapping or bloating the psychic phenomenon into a geopolitical, geopolitical, geophysical one. So I don't need to read this one. And here's the idea that where

where I think you get a kind of like, you know, pan, pan psychist, pan, you know, pan, uh, psychoanalysis or something like that. Geotraumatics radicalizes professor challengers insistence that schizoanalysis should extend further than the terrain of familial drama to invest the social and political realms, pushing beyond history and biology and incorporates the geological and the cosmological within the purview of a transcendental unconscious, The root source of the disturbance which the organism identifies according to its parochial frame of reference, mommy-daddy, the adipal complex, or which it construes in terms of the threat of individual death is a more profound trauma rooted in physical reality itself. Trauma is not personal, and the time of the earth is recorded, accreted, knotted up inside us.

All human experience is an encrypted message from Cthel to the cosmos, the scream of the earth. Nietzsche suggested that the structure and usage of the human body is the root source of the system of neurotic afflictions coextensive with human existence but this is also a planetary neurosis geotrigmatic cryptography must proceed as ultra genealogy accessing these memories deep frozen and imprinted in the body and determining the planetary events which they index so here's one more suggestion which is that to the extent that we're still in the terrain of trying to like sort of pursue a kind of flat ontological spectrum within which the conditions of subjectivity and thinking are explained within the conditions of materiality and material individuation more generally, right? So you have this basic idea, which is if Freud gives you a biocentric model of trying to understand how it is that organic life constitutes itself as a protracted return to an earlier state of things,

then the proper physicalist or geophysical you know way to explain the generation of thinking has to pass through the history of the becoming of life on the earth and this in turn has to go through the conditions of the formation of the earth itself and so you have this kind of like cosmic genealogy which dates from the origins of the universe all the way to the human voice Right. So you go from. So it's again, it's an attempt to genealogically flatten all domains of explanation. So before we were talking about the prospects of a kind of like all encompassing science. Right. Well, this would be it. Right. Like in theory, this would be a macro genealogy, which would completely absorb any possible, you know, deviation or any possible.

sorry, ambiguity or gap in the causal chain of events. You go from the formation of matter to the vertebrae, to the clicking, to the clicks and clacks of the human voice, you know, colliding against the, you know, the throat. So that's, I guess, it's major impetus. And I, you know just to sort of like recapitulate the essential epochs and this is just you know plain science um actually the piece in none of neither the barker speaks nor the the robin piece you you get the completed genealogy but this is sort of a more complete one that i just like fill in the blinds with the last two because you only get the hidean and the archaean moments but of course this

goes all the way until you know what what would be spinal catastrophism and you know so first you have sorry the birth of the solar system the formation of a tiny spherical mass which is in deviation from the protoplanetary disk from the solar net which emerges from the solar nebula roughly between 4.5 billion or 4 billion years ago right then you have what is called the iron catastrophe catastrophe which is when the planet cools down 500 million years later and matter sinks into a dense metallic core and this precipitates the layered formation of the planet right so it is already in this period it should be said that you have uh the emergence of

life a bacterial life is specifically what are called the strometallites those of you who know the science probably know more about this but i was looking into this yesterday just to just to make clear. Hold on. There's a comment. Keep losing the... It's shitposting. Thank you. Then you have the formation of the surface property, which is a combination of external processes like climatic denundation and deposition. And this is rooted in the sun, we are told, and internal processes. So the movement of igneous and magmatic fluids rooted in the molten core. So you have this kind of like two centers of energetic, you know, let's say transfer. One, the sun, this exogenous traumatic, you know, point, which is of course,

you know, casting its abundance onto the earth and which it determines the condition for climatic sort of denomination and deposition. And then you have these kind of volcanic eruptions and magnetic fluidities that are erupting from the core. And this is why they call the molten core, the iron core, the Cthell, is a surrogate. It's like a miniature sun, which is a reminder of the solar origin of all terrestrial formations. After this, you have really the Proterozoic era or epoch, which is the moment where you have the oxygenation crisis.

And this is where you have the formation of the atmosphere and the formation of eukaryotic life and multicellular organisms properly. And finally, in the Phanerozoic epoch, this is the moment with what's identified with the Cambrian explosion, where you have the emergence of the philia that are in contemporary modern science understood as organizing the animal world, the emergence of hard-crusted shell animals and exoskeletical beings, metazoa, and the abundance of plant and animal life that, of course, eventually we are just an extension of. So I think these are the essential epochs that comprise the history of geotrauma, if

you wanted to draw it out in detail. And then you have a spinal catastrophism, which is an extension of this, kind of like just skipping some steps forward all the way to try to explain how it is that the origin of bipedal posture or the bipedal vertebrae is just an extended expression of this process of accrued geotraumatic events. and the human voice in fact is nothing but a kind of uh you know agonizing scream or like you know feral voice or sound that just once that's also a marker for trauma so i won't get into this too much because i know that this is something that you know there's much more work that has been done

recently so probably everything that has been said has been more recently reworked and and in Moylan's book. So just this one quote, I guess you do, but due to erect posture, the head has been twisted around, shattering vertebral perceptual linearity and setting up the phylogenetic preconditions for the face. This right-angled pneumatic oral arrangement produces the vocal apparatus as a crash site in which thoracic impulses collide with the roof of the mouth. The bipedal head becomes a virtual speech impediment, a subcranial pneumatic pallet discharge as lingual gestural development, encephalization takeoff. Burroughs suggests that a proto-human ape was dragged through its body to expire upon its tongue. So beautiful sentence. It's a twin axial system, howls and clicks, reciprocally articulated as a vowel,

consonant, phonetic palate, rigidly intersegmented to repress, staccato hissed continuous variation and its attendant Becoming's animals. That's a Deleuzean and Guattariand favorite. The anthro post-structural head smash that establishes our identity with logos. This is from Barker's Feats, of course. And finally, just the last point to make on this before jumping into the Rasa's text briefly, and then we'll do the presentations. We still have time. We're doing good. what does Ressa contribute to this? Obviously, the point that Robin wants to say is that, and of course, Ressa develops this in Cyclinopédia,

but also in other places, is the idea that the whole solar cult that develops from lands of preparation of Bataille runs still a kind of latent conservatism at its core, at its core, right? which is precisely that geocosmic history, I mean, Ressa, at least like early Sith Lord Ressa, right? He subscribes to the idea of like geotrauma and the whole, you know, he thinks is cool. But he thinks that thinking of the sun as the ultimate horizon that anchors all of the sort of possible, the horizon of futurity and the expiration of the sun as the end is uh is actually quite

myopic because there's a there's a long history of what occurs after the sun dies right so the question for us is actually that there's a there's a whole way there's there are whole layers of darkness awaiting the cooling of the suns um so the sun cannot be the ultimate terrestrial horizon or horizon for life or matter more generally. We have to radicalize the approach. And this is the extended genealogy that Reza sort of helps build. In 3.5 billion years, the core of the aging sun grows hotter, causing a severe greenhouse effect that sterilizes the entire biosphere. Its outer surface cools, expanding to engulf the inner planets. In 7 billion years, the earth slips

out of orbit, but outside the small chance it can be flung out into the icy desolation of deep space is dragged into the core of the sun to be evaporated. Its only legacy a small amount of fuel for the red giant's farewell glow. The sun becomes a small block of hydrogen ice. 100 trillion years into the future all the stars go out, followed by an era populated only by the degenerate remnants that survive the end of stellar evolution. 1,040 years later, there was a problem there, I'm sure, with the copy-pacing. I don't know what that's supposed to be, but there should be some more something. Well, 1,040 years, the catastrophe of proton decay ushers in the era of black holes,

where the only stellar objects left are black holes. Black holes convert their masses into radiation and evaporate at a glacial pace. And then the scarcely conceivable dark era populated by atomic waste products entering into desultory, increasingly rare and fruitless chance encounters. The cosmic abyss is deeper than the solar furnace, right? That's the rest of the extension. And I really want to know what went wrong in that pace of the quote. So that is the idea. So talking very briefly about rest is peace, which is really an exercise in redundancy if there ever was one, right? It's so redundant.

It's just like it could be three pages long, and it's 30 or 20. But it's interesting in its own right because these variations are all – I mean, the idea of the paper that centers the paper is very simple, I think. It is basically the idea that there are alternative regimes of affordance than that which land draws out explicitly and which Ray Brasier fails to displace through his model of extinction. So Ressa begins the paper really recapitulating first the kind of solar thinatropism that Land elaborates in The Thirst for Annihilation and in his essays, as he says, right?

And then he wants to really articulate a program by interrogating the basic postulates of this kind of solar thinatropism in terms of two constitutive questions. First, these are the two questions that are quoted here. to what extent does the Freudian appropriation of capital tipped by Deleuze and Guattari and fully fashioned by Nick Land through the political economic combining of Freud's theory of thanatropic regression as an anti-humanist emancipative conception shattered the elusive sovereignty of the human and allied itself with the inhumanism that it claims to be the harbored of that's the first one does the cosmological reinscription of Freud's account of the death drive that extends the thanatropic regression from the organism to all other forms of embodiment,

from organic life to the plant, to stellar formations down to matter itself, repudiate the image of capitalism as an inexorable yet emancipative twister towards utter liquidation? Can the reinscription of Freud's theory of thanatropic regression on a cosmic level redeem anti-humanism and rescue it from the clutches of capitalism? for it seems that in his recent work Nihil Unbound, Ray Brassier, following Land's novel approach to Freud in The Thirst for Annihilation, has resorted to the latter solution in order to wipe the stains of capitalism from the face of a cosmically eliminativist model of enlightenment, scientific nihilism as the daredevil of speculative form. And of course, the answer is going to be yes, right? Like the answer is going to be that it is possible to unbind these two things. It's

possible to imbide the model of, you can imbide the phenatropism from the sort of equation of capital as emancipation, right? And in fact, what Ress is trying to do in the essay, long story short, is to try to say that, no, in fact, the model proposed by both Land and ultimately Brassier fails to achieve a properly inhumanist freeing of natural history and by extension, you know, fails to emancipate an account of material becoming from this kind of pious circumscription to the human and by extension to capitalism. And he thinks capitalism is just, I mean, Ress's contention, of course, is that capitalism can only be equated as this kind of vector of

emancipation by ignoring how it is that the regime of affordances that occurs as constitutive of the Freudian death drive as the third pincer of its, you know, structural core is subject, however, to different regimes of binding or, you know, failed binding, umwege. So the whole idea is affordance is an ineliminable structural component of this thanatropic history, regardless of the scale in which you want to place it. However, there's different regimes of affordance than that which is instantiated by the capitalist mode of production in particular. What does this involve? Well, Ressa doesn't really tell you that. What he tells you is that

this involves elaborating new forms of quote-unquote non-conceptual negativity, right? and that's what we're left on now he wants to think of course of trauma then as a kind of like speculative opportunity so that it is actually possible to reconstitute or forge you know something like a horizon of emancipation beyond capitalism that is however still cozy enough to admit of a thanatropism at its core. So this is what I call transitionary land, like Reza, you see. So this is Reza beginning to turn the tide away from his Landian face and slowly trying to figure out a way back into rationalist waters and philosophical waters.

And of course, what he will do eventually, what we see has happened, is that he even gives away the phenatropism as far as I can tell and inhumanism becomes squarely assimilated no longer in a non-dialectical negativity vector or whatever of material production or trauma but in a fully dialectical register that is in fact you know hegelian in its in its original scope so the reason why I think this this essay is interesting is because it is it is again it's like trying to play a trick on on on resa himself which is it serves as a marker of the landian trauma right where when you move forward as as you move forward in in resa's uh you know philosophical work

you see like there's a deeper and deeper concealment of this like originary encounter with lands solar thinatropism and this entire like ccru world there's this recoil this sort of recoil into philosophy for i mean i mean i'm not trying to make it sound like it's um like it's a failed attempt or anything of the sort i myself i'm i'm i'm you know on that end of the spectrum but it's so clear that he's desperately trying to find a way out right it's so clear and it's so clear that he couldn't find a way out at this juncture still um because you know again this this whole regime of necroc necroc necrocacy sorry how do you pronounce this name necrocacy it's a horrible word but um basically is is the idea is like if it's possible

to sort of unbind the regime of death and extinction from the model of capitalist self-reproduction the failed binding of capitalist model self-reproduction then of course the question is going to arise well how what what is this alternative regime that you're talking about how do you do it but we get nothing of the sort here right um so here's the the essential quote i think uh i'm just going to read the last one because i really want to to get to uh hernance the talk this is just the last quote in the page and then we can just briefly decant and and talk about this. So here's the last point. Then we can tentatively define the inhuman by the possibility,

and I'm reading it like Reza, by the possibility of alternative ways of binding exteriority by conceptless negativity. The inhuman, respectively, is outlined by those ways of binding exteriority or complicity with non-conceptual negativity, which are not imminent to the anthropic horizon and betray the economical order of the anthropic horizon in regards to exteriority. Such alternatives do not simply suggest dying in ways other than those prescribed by the organism, but rather the mobilization of forms of non-dialectical negativity, which can neither be excluded by dominant dissipative tendency of the anthropic horizon, nor can be fully sublated by its art order. For this reason, these remobilized forms of non-dialectical negativity should not be

completely unaffordable or external to the economic order for such absolute resistance to conservative conditions or exteriority to the affordability of the horizon is index as an exorbitant negativity. And of course, the whole point is exorbitant negativity is a no go in the sense that it, you know, the conservative dimension that is tracked by this regime of affordance and which Nick Land simply brushes off as what he calls a security hallucination, right? and Brassier simply ignores in his piece, he thinks is necessary because it basically provides an answer to what Ray was asking in the panel, which is, okay, if you have this kind of like pure destratified death, whatever we want to call it, or pure flux, zero intensity as the base, you're going to have to explain how it is

nevertheless that individuation takes place, i.e. how is that natural history unfolds and forms and everything happens within it. So what Reza wants to say is, We have to conceive positively of different regimes of affordance. But the question, of course, is just like, you know, looking at you in the face, which is what does this even mean? Constructing alternative regimes of affordance based on non-dialectical negativity. This seems like voluntarism, you know, a confusion between voluntarism on the one hand and something like a weird naturalism on the other. because non-dialectical negativity, what is that really? I don't understand what that even means. I wanted to ask that. I remember that Ray also in his panel on land,

he emphasized that he thinks that's the most interesting part of land, that land develops something like non-conceptual negativity. And I wanted to ask if this non-conceptual negativity maybe relates or maybe even is critique as a material process, which, which lent us as Ray paraphrases, paraphrases Land, which, okay, critique is no longer on the conceptual level, but it's a real material process, which is basically capital does critique. Right. And maybe that's non-conceptual negativity. Right. But the thing is, so for land, that non-conceptual negativity, and by the way, Ray now does not think that such a thing is even cohesive or coherent.

In other words, negativity is of the conceptual order, and any talk of non-conceptual negativity is idealism by default. That's Ray's position now. I think he's right on this. But that aside, you're right in that talk in language is from 2010. So this is prior to what I'm describing to you. If you want to hear his full departure from this kind of account of non-conceptual negativity, I advise you to take a look at the Q&A or the discussion panel from the Saghreb seminar that they had on Berkson from 2011, just a year later, in which Nathan Brown, Catherine Malibu, and uh yeah adrian johnson and a few others were there anyway so there he really really like sort

of like brushes us off but land thinks what land means by non-conceptual negativity is exactly what what you know deleuze means by something like that it's not negativity exactly land doesn't talk about negativity in that way what um it's something like the way that matter differentiates itself so it's the mechanisms of stratification and destratification that organize the machinic process, right? What he calls a primary process. So yeah, you're absolutely right. So to the extent that those can be considered to be still sort of woven by something like negativity, right? Well, how is negativity to be understood then? Well, it's obviously a mechanism of differentiation, right? But it's not the kind of differentiation that you get in the order of the concept, i.e.

relationships of inferential incompatibility and consequence that are you know precisely you know what defines discursive cognition the logos these would be purely differential dynamisms that have no sort of like ideal quote-unquote envelopment i mean they do if you're thinking like deleuz does of ideas as virtual multiplicities like you know intensive multiplicities but not ideas in the sense in which, you know, it pertains to concepts probably, right? So anyway, any thoughts on this? Because, I mean, that's all I really have to say about this paper. I mean, I think it's a really interesting paper. I think it's super interesting to track the transition from CCRU, thinetropism,

and Landian, like, you know, sort of accelerationism to this neorationalist sequence. both land sorry both resa and rey are really trying to to to recover from the trauma of of imparted by land in a way right it's almost impossible to read you know their nihil and bound or or you know what's going on now especially the retreat to kant and to representation and to Plato, right, and Hegel, as anything but like the most sort of like direct resistance and like direct like a recoil from the Landian moment, right? The anti-philosophical Landian moment. Let me just, more like just a comment.

I asked myself, I wanted to track this, um that's but maybe for my ba thesis um uh reconstructed genealogy of left accelerationism basically which um as far as i know starts with this block in this block discussions around 2008 where alex williams uh calls it starts much earlier than that and listservs in the 1990s during the early days of the internet. Okay. Please, if you have any sources on that. I've written about this a little bit, and I have a piece about this coming out in Rhizomes. You may be interested in some of this early history of the internet. It's fascinating stuff. Lots of news. Yeah. Also, share that piece with a group again, please.

We'll hope. Sounds really great. No, what I wanted to say is because as far as what of the stuff I have read, it seems like uh just this this trajectory where williams starts with yeah we need something like a left landianism or that and it's still in this in this inhuman speculative realism uh uh terms and yeah he calls it casino economics like economics on the purely inhuman perspective right and abstracted from everything human and then more and more they get uh through this yeah this is basically this neo-rationalist uh well you know you know how land characterizes in this like really beautiful short piece called a quick and dirty introduction to accelerationism and when he has to do a brief summary of leftist accelerationism he says something along the lines

of it's something like uh yeah leninist party politics plus like uh chilean social managerialism or something like that, right? So he's, obviously, he says, you know, that was dead on sight, basically. You know, everybody could see past it. It's like, it was basically the old, good old ghost of social democracy coming to bite us in the Andrew Yangs, right? One more comment I want to make about this essay, though, is that I really had a hard time figuring out what was wrong with, what his problem with Ray's position was for a while. I just didn't understand how Ray's model of extension was somehow, you know, insufficient. And I figured it out. And it's just that, I mean,

I think, and anybody correct me if they think I'm off, but it's because Brasier precisely oviates this regime of affordance, this dimension of affordance, which gives you this kind of positive counterpoint to the pure dissipation tendency. So I can remember you were, mentioned earlier that you think that the extinction model was at least more friendly to the possibility of political practice or whatever. Well, I think Ressa thinks that it's not and that he's trying to look, ruminate in the dark, obviously, for resources for precisely that. And he thinks as it is, even though extinction unbinds itself from this kind of

you know, residual vitalism that you might get, or, you know, residual anthropocentrism that you might get by reifying capital. Nevertheless, it does not help us think of alternative regimes of affordance, which is precisely what Ressa is trying to propose here. But But this is one thing that I personally, I mean, I'll just close this rant by saying what I think without any hairs in my tongue. Every time that I hear we need to think of a different world, different regimes of affordance, a post-capitalist future, whatever you want, I'm like, tell me what it is.

I'm just like tired of that rhetoric, right? And so I'm sort of at the, I think we've been hearing that kind of prose for a long time, and it's time to really start thinking about concrete solutions, right? And UBI is not going to cut it to think about post-capitalism, I don't think. Anyway, I think Hernan is going to present on, sorry, I think somebody was, okay. Well, Hernan has got to be presenting. what we have an alien intruder of sorts yeah the insider right that's what um hernan i think that's my own voice just like yeah yeah anyway so hernan i think he's gonna present on um

and then federico's gonna respond so have have a way hernan okay um so i had a many shots of coffee so if I speed up, just please accelerate me. Okay. Here we go. Can you hear me okay? Yep. Yeah. Cool. So this work seems to condense two of Delanda's major books, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy from 2002 and Philosophy and Simulation from 2011. The latter was at the time of the writing of this essay probably already finished and released shortly after. It appears to be an exercise of unification of previous concepts that DeLande is aiming at, combining a rigorous account of the concept of emergence with his earlier theoretical framework.

This synthesis means that the essay is densely packed with scientific examples and recapitulations of DeLande's ontology, as well as DeLande's rekindling of the scientific validity of the notion of emergence by revising the concepts of causality and law. He progressively liberates and complexifies the notions of causality from its linear and homogeneous ossification, namely, quote, same cause, same effect, always. By illustrating and emphasizing the nonlinear, heterotypical, and statistical nature of causality that can be observed in natural phenomena, and simultaneously refuting the notion of natural law, appealing to the non-determinacy in nonlinear systems that present multiple singularities. where what seems to dictate the final stable state of a system

follows the gene, cooperation, chance and determinism. We will not review these in detail, instead we shall give an overview of the movements that Delande has in mind and concentrate on the points of fusion that we deem most interesting. Delande is a rigorous reader of Deleuze, but as he puts it in an EGS seminar, Quote, I like my Deleuze on the rocks. He is careful to subtract any humanist or subjectivist residue from the process of becoming, so as to arrive at a purely objectivized matter that is by all means productive on its own terms. Now, I will endeavor a reconstruction of a morphogenetic process using liquid water

to animate the land's ontological commitments. A delusion warning to this approach would be to recognize that there are inherent limitations of attempting to describe an intensive process in natural language. Having said that, let's go ahead. First, the identity of a body of water at thermodynamic equilibrium in a closed system may be defined by its properties and tendencies. Properties such as temperature, volume, and purity of composition, and tendencies such as solidity or liquidity or uniformity or periodicity of flow. All of these properties and tendencies are emergent phenomena of the body of water and are explained by the interactions between the populations of molecules we constitute it. If a constant source of heat is applied locally to a side of the

container, the influx of energy modifies the intensive properties of a part of the population of water molecules, making them distinct enough so as to become separate of the previous whole, meaning they effectively have different behaviors and should be considered as an isolated novel part. To state it more plainly, temperature difference now becomes a real distinctive feature between both populations to a point where it's no longer recognized as the same whole. Now the two bodies of water with different temperatures are in contact with each other and hence out of thermodynamic equilibrium and it's this intensive difference that drives the emergence of a hole that manifests as a novel phenomena in the form of a convection cell. What is most interesting is that

the emerging phenomena is generated and can be explained just by the temperature difference between the interacting parts, which in this case are the bodies of water, not the molecules that compose them. Using the latter to attempt an explanation would turn to be redundant due to the fact that many configurations of these parts of parts would yield the same results, i.e. same temperature. This has epistemological and ontological implications. In DeLende's words, quote, when a particular property emerges from the interactions between the components of a whole, i.e. temperature, and when the property is endowed with a symptomatic stability, it becomes enduring enough to be used as a factor in an explanation. In other words, a stable property is typically indifferent to changes in details of the

interactions that give rise to it, the latter being capable of changing within limits without affecting the emergent property itself. And this is the key. In turn, this ontological indifference translates into epistemological irrelevance. When giving an explanation of the outcome of the interaction between two different holes, we don't have to provide any details about their component parts or what amounts to the same thing, including details about their components, becomes causally redundant because the emerging properties of the two interacting holes would be the same regardless of those details." End quote. Now if we advance our example further, as Delanda does, we may now think of a series of convection cells as the moving parts that fuel a thunderstorm, which is an

emergent hole with novel tendencies and properties. Now as I hope it was made clear from the previous examples, the tendencies and properties of an emergent hole arise from the interactions of its parts. Using Deleuzean terminology, tendencies of the emergent whole can be described in state space by the singularities that structure the evolutionary possibilities of the system. DeLanda accounts for emergence of holes as mechanism-independent bifurcations or phase transitions of singularities in state space. In the previous example, a pointed tractor shifting into a periodic attractor, which are driven by mechanism-dependent intensive differences of parts in physical processes that embody them. New properties and tendencies emerge that weren't

available in the previous phase portrait or were not among the possibilities for a given system. This briefly characterizes the flat ontology that Delanda is bringing forth, which can be understood as a sequence of nested part-whole relations. The interpretation of emergence provides Delanda with the means to establish epistemology and ontology as two sides of the the same coin. Quote, on the one hand, emergent properties give reality a means to enter into an open-ended becoming, with new holes coming into existence as tendencies and capacities proliferate. On the other hand, this objective divergence explains the divergence of scientific fields, that is, it accounts for the fact that rather than converging into a single field to which all the rest have been reduced, the number of new fields is constantly increasing. End quote. Now let's

turn to the most contentious part of the philosophical stance, the status of the formal structure and its relationship with singularities, which also merits a comparison with the place of structure within the carrière pour l'analyse. There are two main features that make singularities the ideal candidates to replace essences. First, the mechanism independence of topological accidents structuring state space observed by the invariance of the singularities across physical phenomena. Second, the distinct mathematical reality of trajectories and attractors. The former represent the integration of actual states of physical systems, while the latter are never really actualized but symbolize the long-term tendency of a given system. Therefore, it is important to distinguish that in this view,

although resources of mathematics are used to describe the imminent patterns of the coming, the formal language is but another actualization of concrete universals. In other words, mathematical formalizations of a process and realizable material intensive processes are two solutions of the same problem. The formal dimension is crucial to think about the virtual, but it's not itself the virtual, just an expression of it. This begs the question of how the virtual, being historically constructed from experience through a mathematical model that formally emulates it, is even detached from both these instantiations, but nonetheless governs them as a concrete universal. This movement reflects an important contrast between the use of formal language in this case

and the position attained by Cahier pour l'analyse. The role of the formal dimension is instrumental in the process of building this philosophy. It's what makes it getting a glimpse of the virtual event possible. It's used to build a system from the ground up just to, in the end, be divested from its ontological significance and confirmed merely epistemological value. This final unkind move towards the very language that enables the articulation of the philosophical system itself is the last metaphysical leap that releases the imminent patterns of being and becoming into the realm of the inhuman. Yeah, that's the end. Phenomenal. Hernan, that was excellent. That was really, really, really good. And I think before, you're going to jump in to,

can you mute your, your, cool. I think, yeah, thank you. Very briefly. I mean, I think you touched on something that is so, you know, important to note, which is the state, this kind of enigmatic status of the virtual, which is said to be real, however, never actual. In fact, you know singularities which are precisely the the kind of model for virtual you know for virtual for virtual entities as it were are precisely these points which designate basins of attraction you know in a system that define how a system will you know behave and how trajectories or tendencies approximate these points asymptotically but they never quite reach it so the he you know

Deleuze makes a very important distinction between the possible and the virtual, because the possible, in theory, can always become actualized. But these purely virtual, you know, singularities can never be actualized. They're virtual through and through. So the weird thing is that they, nevertheless, they're, Deleuze tells us they're real, right? They're, however, what is that? Like, that seems like very, very strange, right? To say that these virtual singularities are real, and yet they're not actually materially instantiated in space and time. They define and govern tendencies, but then their concrete ontological status becomes

really enigmatic. And the other thing I wanted just to say before, Federico, you jump in, is simply that there was that weird moment in which he wants to weave the account of emergence to the proliferation of fields of science where almost there's like this kind of suggestion as if this kind of like you know reworked notion of causality the separation between a mechanistic conception of nature and one which is also complemented by the notion of singularities and in which the notion of an emergent property becomes legitimate blah blah blah can help you explain the proliferation of mathematical theories or sorry scientific theories themselves and i find that move unpersuasive like I don't know how you get from explaining emergent properties to emerging all the plurality of scientific fields so I think that move

was Alexi you're also presenting today I believe so huh well you'll we can do it next week if that's okay yeah that's okay is that okay cool yeah and well Federico, yeah, do you want to jump in quickly? We have like five minutes. Yeah, I'm going to apologize beforehand because of the noise. It's worse than Chuck E. Cheese here. So I'm going to be brief. What I wanted to do instead of making like focusing on the technical aspects of the Landis text and the reading that Fernand gave is trying to link the emergence as a complex casualty

that can probably answer Ressa's non-linear negativity, non-dialectical negativity. And I'm going to try to explain why. So I think that maybe this complex casualty can bring a synthesis of new, let's say, new subjects or subjectivities of difference. and I think it might be well it can be linked to the to the concept as well that mark fisher uses of hyper naturalism this means the expanded sense of the material cosmos so maybe through science we can actually get to another kind of synthesis that that let us things let us think and materialize this

virtual or this outside and what I actually thought about this is like how we can actually synthesize organic processes, make them inorganic, and maybe present them through science via biohybrids. I'm thinking about what they're working right now of, let's say, printing animal, let's say, this sort of animalistic entities that work by themselves, but they actually still work, let's say, to Ressa's anger, let's say, in this position, in this essay, that they actually work with light. I know that Harvard, some years ago, printed this biohibrit ray that works through light, through sunlight.

It's still not cognizant, but it works. So I'm probably thinking about making points there between how we can actually do, elaborate, make a synthesis of a complex casualty that is like not, that doesn't appear purely in nature, but we can actually synthesize it and present this, let's say, new world or this expanded sense of the material cosmos through this biohabits. That was what I was actually thinking. And also making, let's say, this small genealogy that Resson makes, like expanding it a little bit more, like the first stage is Lyotard, the inhuman, how he worries about the biological extinction of the human intellect. Then how land responds to that by, let's say, turning the human into its own biological dissipation

that still remains within the human domain. I think about replicants and how replicants still work through the organic death system in Blade Runner, for example, and Brassier still works through the organic death, the cosmological extension. So maybe if we actually synthesize through complex, casual complexities, we can actually bring an end to that organicism or conservatism of the, of the, of the organic death of the human and etc that's just the points that i want to take i agree with that i actually i think exactly something like that has to give i mean um well we don't have time to well we're out of time but uh no i completely agree and in fact the only thing i will say is that one of the things

i have tried to do uh coming out of this entire mess is try to reconstitute the concept of synthesis itself synthesis to unto be understood no longer as simple aesthetic contractions or synthesis of concept and sensibility but a progressive theory of synthesis in the sense that you track different ways in which there are degrees of individuation but synthesis is a distinctive operation of thinking and of representation has to do with um instantiating a peculiar kind of functionality that is completely

external to the you know causal um causal dynamics specifically so how does that occur it's a long story i'm not going to get into that right now but but it's basically an account of how thinking emerges from nature and yet at the same time can be set to be transcendent vis-a-vis nature so that's like the the core of it right um we're out of time before closing shop uh so next week we have a couple of uh presentations uh it will be more leisurely because i want to wrap up and i want to have more time to just everybody to sort of uh think uh you know squash down whatever was left and so on uh we don't know we don't know we don't

No, we don't, Alan. Oh, wow. I think he said that because in Europe we had it's called in German Zeitumstelle. You turn the clock one hour before. They say yes. They say that. Okay. Well, so next week it will be a more leisurely pace. and I'll make sure to have time to wrap things up and to tie it all back into a cohesive vision, hopefully. Then I got your one hour left. So next. Does anyone know who the other presenter is next week

so that we can coordinate? Who was the other presenter? Who was the other presenter? Are they here? Maybe not. They're not here. Okay. Next week or last week, yeah? Yes. We'll send you a message on Facebook. I'm sorry? What was that, Jerry? I said about the identity of the presenter, we'll send you a Facebook message later today with the names so that you know. So next week being the next, the last week, there was talk in the beginning of all of this that some publication to manifest and I don't know if that's like that's what Mo said Mo said that I haven't heard of him

since so I'll let you guys know I'll also speak a little bit about the paper I mean again I said basically as much as I mean you those of you know me I'll say more about this next week anyway but you shouldn't worry about that too much but yeah I'll also try to like touch base with Mo about that and if there's any news on that front I'll let everybody know okay because it would be cool to like you know it would be cool yeah it would be great I would definitely enjoy that alright well thank you everybody a pleasure forgive me for being a second and I'll get well yeah hope you feel better yeah thank you thank you okay yes yes

bye everyone bye everyone