#Accelerate; The Accelerationist Reader II (Session 3)

Can you mute yourself after you start? Until you're ready to speak? Okay. Okay. Welcome to the second to the last meeting of Accelerate 2. And we're coming here from Grand Rapids, Michigan. And sorry, I'm just going to mute Robert here for a minute. So we're coming here from Grand Rapids, Michigan, and I'm joined here by Sedgis Solomon. Who's that? Jameis. Jameis. Oh, Jameis. Jameis, okay. Solomon, I'm happy to see you again. We've come out one time before Grand Rapids and we've known each other through several

online projects such as this. And Jeremy Nickermacher also, who has also been interested in participating. And who else do we have? Aaron Marcus, Laura Lottie, Jesse Beyer, Patrick Kendall, Ivan, Amy Ireland, and Robert Anderson, and Mohamed. So we are all here and looking forward to this particular meeting. For this meeting I'm going to be running basically the whole thing. Mo might pop in here and there to say what he wants to say or contribute to the discussion in the way that he wishes to. But for the most part I'm going to be running it.

We won't have any guests today. So my hope is that we can be a little more interactive between all of us. So whenever you want to speak, if you could just unmute yourself, it would make it a lot more dynamic. and then whenever you're not speaking, re-mute yourself again. So basically today we're going over a number of readings. Let me just give you an overview of what we're going to do today in the seminar. I basically have things divided between going over the three readings, And then we need to go through and select some of the people who will be presenting on the readings in the seminar.

For the rest, we have one more meeting, and I can tell you what the readings for the next one are, and then maybe in a minute here we can go over this and figure out who has not already chosen something to work on. And then we're going to see who might be presenting today. So today's readings are divided between two thinkers on the one hand who are very focused I guess on the relationship between science fiction and accelerationism and between that and Marxism. and particularly the manner in which the division between the organic and the technological,

the way that it's articulated in left-wing discourse, in critical theory, critical thought, the way it's historically been defended, including arguably in Marx, although I take some issue with the way Ian Hamilton Grant articulates that, But I think he's partially right at least. But the way that this division between the organic and technological and critical thought has very often actually restrained the capacities of the left rather than intensified them. So, and we'll look at that. And they both use sci-fi to make this argument. And the interesting thing that I see here is the way that they articulate different sci-fi

films somewhat differently. So like Avatar is sort of, at least as I read what Mark Fisher is saying, Avatar is sort of the wrong kind of science fiction or a kind of regressive type of science fiction. And we all saw when that came out, I think a lot of us saw a lot of criticisms of the the way that indigeneity was portrayed, the white hero and things like that. But really, even those kind of more typical cultural critiques, race-based and kind of sub-colonial type arguments, or post-colonial type arguments, part of why they have some force to them is that there is this kind of artificial imposition of a division between

and culture, or between the organic and technological. So Avatar being this kind of regressive retreat back into a simplistic organic technological split, and then on the other hand Blade Runner and Terminator being something that really kind of transcends that division and takes it to another level that is a lot more advanced. And obviously, arguably you could say, I think this is partially what Hamilton Grant and Fisher will say, is that, is basically that capitalism as a function today, we want to call it techno-capitalism or some other similar term.

high-tech capitalism today basically functions as, basically functions through the kind of destruction of any sort of division of that sort. And so where does that leave left perspectives if the left is not even kind of like up to date with where technology currently is or even where capitalism really is? because if what we're responding to is the way that capitalism organizes these things, then we need to, to some extent, meet it on its own ground. And then the second reading we'll look at is Luciana Parisi's Automated Architecture, which is a really interesting reading.

And for those of you who have followed some of the questions about the relationship between race race and accelerationism. There has been a lot of debates on that particular question. Some who kind of implied that while accelerationism may be applicable to certain forms of cyberfeminism and to more advanced theories of gender and sexuality, that it's not particularly well tool to deal with the questions of race and ethnicity. But actually I think Parisi is one of the best figures to go through if you want to see how a kind of accelerationist approach to technology and social conflict, social change, would deal with the question

with the question of race. There's a great essay called by Luciana Parisi, it's made a mute, you just rule, Parisi, mute, race, you'll find it. But I think it's called Dividing the Species, Race, Science, and Culture, or something like that. But it basically does for race what cyber feminism does for gender, I would argue. So I was excited to see that included in the book and I'm a big fan of Parisi's work. But what Parisi does in this chapter has nothing to do really in any direct way with race. It's, although obviously, but the chapter is called Automated Architecture and it's not meaning architecture

in like the explicit definition of that term. Rather it's basically Parisi's using Whitehead trying to develop a theory of autonomously creative algorithms, so that we're not just talking about computation, or humans directly computing and developing algorithms, but rather algorithms that themselves become creative and have a certain spontaneous creativity. And she kind of frames this, she refers to it as speculative reason, and we'll look at how she does that. But this also is basically an approach to reason

in which kind of materiality and ideation are no longer separated, and it's a much more materialist group of reason, I guess, and one that is about process theory and process . So I also just want to introduce the other few people who just came in. Adore Trosol is joining us again. I was also here last week, so thanks for joining. Jason, if it's possible, you know, like I don't know, your microphone is set up in a way that every little sound made in the room gets amplified and interrupts your lecture. So if like people need to take things out of their bags or do something, let's just do it all and then we concentrate on you and it's just really really hard when somebody

is dragging paper and opening things and stuff. Thank you. No it's okay. Okay. So yeah, so if you want to, anybody in the room who wants to speak, obviously we're all on the same mic so you can just kind of raise your hand or indicate that you want to speak and then you can speak. For those of you who are in Hangouts, you can just go ahead and as I said mute your you're not speaking and unmuted when you are speaking. Okay, so, alright. So first of all, let's pick out who's going to present on what for the rest of the seminar. If you could come on the microphone, Ivan, for a minute.

Did you, OK, I see you posted a link here. Yeah, it just seems that it's only on the Wednesdays that those presenters defined. OK. OK, yeah, so I don't think we have one defined for today. I'm looking in this link right now. So if you let me, can you hear me? Yeah. Okay, so if you look at the document, right, all those videos deal with the same Ray Bracier, so I assume that Jose will be presenting on all of those. And then Nick Cernicek and Alex Williams, I will be presenting on the manifesto on Wednesday.

Basically, the only thing left to be presented on is Antonio Negri. Nobody has presented on it, right? Am I right? Seems like this is what's going on, right? Yeah, nobody has presented on it at Negri. Would anybody like to choose that one, and we'll bring your name in? If all the enrolled students have already picked their, I think Robert hasn't picked the presentation. Maybe we should, because I don't see his name. And he was in the room. There he is.

That's Robert. Hello, Robert. Hey. We were just talking about how you're one of the enrolled students who have not picked a presentation topic. So I thought maybe you can do the Negri, pardon Negri, but I just warn you. Sure. I warn you that it is kind of like, Jason, it would be great when I talk if you can mute yourself because that room has a lot of pollution. Thank you. So I was thinking Robert that you and me should present in a row because Negri responds directly

to the manifesto. So I will do the manifesto and I'm very excited because I have a lot of notes and I'm actually going to be sort of like looking critically at the manifesto. So I will do the manifesto and then you will follow up by talking about Negri's. Negri's, okay. And then I want to say that I'm open to meeting you between now and then if you want to give it a read and meet me so we can coordinate and maybe we can do something more interesting than that. But if we don't do that, that's fine too. I'll just do mine. But I just want to warn you that you might need to read the manifesto because Negri's response is directly a response to manifesto and some of it may not make sense without reading the manifesto to begin with. So maybe talking to me can maybe speed up that process a little bit.

Oh yeah, I'm willing to collaborate on that, definitely. Yeah, so I guess Jason, if we put Robert's name down for that, then we're done, right, with all the readings now? And Jose and Jesse, you guys are perfect with Jesse doing Patricia read and Jose covering all those videos, right? Yeah, that works. And you have the document actually, right? Yeah, I have the reader. Yeah, it's lovely. Okay. That would be great. I would be sort of like going back and forth with you because I'm very familiar with that piece. Awesome. Yeah, lead a good discussion next week.

And yeah, so Jason, I'll give it back to you. Thank you so much. JASON MAYESHIRSCHIROVSKY- OK, so we don't really have anyone selected to present today except for myself. So my idea is that basically I'll just give a synopsis of each of the readings, and then I'll open it up for discussion. But I do want to ask if anybody who in the meeting right now would like to give their own synopsis. You certainly don't have to and I'm perfectly prepared to do it. But if anybody else here would like to do it, I'm happy to turn the floor over to you for a particular reading. So the three readings,

let me just start with the first one and see if anybody would like to do that one. This This is Ian Hamilton Grant, LA 2019, Demopathy, and Xenogenesis. Would anyone else like to do the synopsis for this or otherwise I'm happy to do it. Anybody? Okay. Okay. So I will do that one. And then how about the Mark Fisher one? Would anyone else like to do the synopsis for that before the discussion begins? I wouldn't mind doing that, briefly. Okay. Since you already have three synopsis to do. Yeah, I could add some comments also, just in case.

Okay, yeah, I have a lot to say about that one. But I think it's better actually to start from more than just one person if possible. And then the last one is the Luciana Parisi automated architecture. Would anyone like to do the synopsis for that one? Okay. All right, so let's begin with Grant. So in Hamilton Grant, this was a pretty complicated reading, a lot more complicated than Fisher, I thought. Fisher is a journalist so he's used to writing for more of a general public but also still retaining quite a bit of complexity in his work.

And I think we'll notice when we get into Fisher later that he actually starts with Grant and gives him a kind of prided place alongside Nick Land as being an originator of a lot of these central discourses, particularly as it relates to science fiction. But basically, what Grant does at the beginning, he begins with a quote from Miliani, who argues for, quote, a philosophical methodology, and this would be a methodology that would retroactively reflect on the advances of technology, sort of forming as a philosophical machine of machines, So being kind of a reflective critique. And this is kind of similar, I don't know if people have read Paul Borilio,

but that's kind of how Borilio functions. Doing this sort of criticism, and very often this type of work does become kind of pessimistic, often has somewhat moralistic resonances in various ways. He argues that Billiani's approach, however, you know, that it assumes that if the machines are to think, they must think like us. And I think this kind of gets us into the Parisi reading, because basically what Parisi is saying is that, Parisi is saying that that's exactly what we need to get beyond. Instead of trying to get machines to think like us, we need to get them to think autonomously

and to actually become kind of forms of artificial intelligence that can transcend the kind of merely human limits of cognition and hopefully help to advance existence as such, not just humanity. And he goes on and talks about Marx. Marx is a pretty ambivalent figure, I would say, in Grant's writing. Certainly much more ambivalent than in Mark Fisher's writing, who I think is a lot more specific Marxist, although Grant could maybe be read that way too. Hi Alex. Hi.

So, right, so Grant argues that, quote, the ruling ideas never reflected as Marx desired they should, the ruling class is rather ideas affect materiality and capital recodes and reassembles reality. And from this reading of Marx, which is a criticism of Marx really, saying that, and he'll go on to criticize Marx a lot more very shortly in the reading, but basically he's saying that we can't just assume that the ruling ideas are not appropriable by the left by the working class or whatever the subject of history is,

that even ideas that are dominant may actually be perfectly serviceable for social change and cultural change. So this is the first thing, and he then goes on into Blade Runner, And he uses Blade Runner as kind of a criticism of, Blade Runner as a way of criticizing, basically criticizing figures like Illiani who try to impose a kind of moral critique or kind of retroactive reflective critique of technology, but to instead kind of go through the process of technology and through the

of technology in a way that is materialist but that does not do away with thought. Or I should actually say realist, not materialist. For Grant, Blade Runner is a realist film. I'd actually really like to show a clip and we actually do have the capacities to do this on Hangout, which is great, but I can't actually do it, I don't think, because according to Tony, you can't do it on Hangout on Air, first of all. And even if you can, the algorithms that YouTube and Google use to allow you to do that, they actually shut down the Hangout automatically or something like that if they detect any copyrighted content. So I don't really want to risk suddenly losing the Hangout, so I'm not going to do it.

But I will describe a number of clips and it would be great if other people, if you remember these scenes, if you remember these aspects of Blade Runner or later on when we're talking about Terminator, if you remember these aspects of those films, it would be great if you would chime in and maybe add a little more richness to it that we could get, but we unfortunately cannot get due to the capitalist copyright algorithm. So, okay, so basically what Grant says about Blade Runner, He says the real in Blade Runner breaks out of the representational model and moves into a Baudrillardian cybernetic realism.

So whereas a kind of morally reflective figure like Guiliani approaches critique from the perspective of lack, Grant instead proposes an ontology of abundance. we're trying to find something to oppose lack to. Sorry, ontology of what? An approach of lack. Ontology of the approach of lack? No, an ontology of abundance. Abundance, okay, thank you. Rather than lack, rather than the Lacanian lack. So he says in this part of the chapter, he says, the question is not one of sameness of difference, but rather one of cybernetics plus or minus.

Then it goes to this scene. So this is a place where people could jump in if you want to, if you remember some details about this particular scene, or if you have some reflections on it. He talks about this scene in which Rachel is a replicant, and she attempted to protect who was one of the Blade Runners, the central Blade Runner in the film. And his role was basically that he was supposed to retire her because she threatened the genetic makeup of humans. There's a scene where he tries to kiss her. The scene is actually on YouTube, so it's kind of frustrating to me that we can't use it.

But he tries to kiss her, she leaves, and then she kind of reverses it and actually doesn't just do what he tells her to do, which is to say that she wants him and this sort of thing, but actually sort of actively starts acting on her own as well. And this is where Grant invokes a kind of what he calls a Marxian organicism. This is one of the quibbles that I have a little bit with this text because if you know Marx's theory of human nature, he very explicitly says that human nature changes with the mode of production. There is no timeless, organic human nature at all. There's just, you know,

like for example, he says that there's proletarian human nature and there's bourgeois human nature. that if the proletariat and the bourgeoisie are temporally framed modes of existence or subjectivity, then in an earlier time of feudal economy or a later time of communist economy, we would see totally different forms of human nature. So I personally have read Marx as not being organicist in any way whatsoever, but he does make an interesting point that has nothing to do with the human nature question in which he may be right. I'm not sure what I think of it. But basically what he says is that this idea that kind of what comes up when Rachel the replicant and Deckard the Blade Runner

are about to copulate is the question of is this really a bridging of fundamentally organic differences between organic life then copulating with purely technological side work life if you want to call it life. And they do call it life, Fisher and Grant use that term but but not in a vitalist way. That basically Grant invokes this idea, so the organism that he's looking at here and that he's invoking is that between living labor and dead labor. So you know in Marx's philosophy,

living labor refers to essentially variable capital, those forms of capital that, meaning like workers, people who have to go into a workplace, they have to physically go there, they get sick, they die, sometimes they're too young, sometimes they're too old, there's all of these variables that go along with this form of living labor, this form of capital. So they're not as dependable in a way. And so, whereas fixed capital, which could be argued as dead labor, although dead labor can take a lot of weather for it too, dead labor would refer to the way that, for example, this, I don't know if you can see it, but for example, this e-cigarette is really a form

of congealed labor. It's a technology, yes, but basically when I use this to take a few puffs and to try to not smoke regular cigarettes, analog cigarettes if you want to use technological terms, when I take a few puffs of this, I am not only using a technology that is just sitting there, I am using a technology that is the product of past labor that is now congealed into a a technological object. And this is the same thing that capitalists do when they're involved in the process of production. So you have the living labor of individual human beings

who go into the factory and then you have the basic technologies that the factory already has there in the first place. So the question that Grant raises here is he says that this kind of distinction of living labor and dead labor is itself a kind of organicism because it assumes that the variable capital of fleshy human beings and that sort of thing is somehow fundamentally different from fixed capital or from dead labor. When in fact, especially but we're looking at it through the lens of Blade Runner, really what we're talking about is really what the question the film really proposes is,

and in this love scene or sex scene, the question that is kind of proposed there is, is Deckard, this Blade Runner, this supposedly just simply human individual or this individual human subject, is this human subject not itself already technological? Because I think this is a question that comes up over and over throughout these texts. Is there anything that is purely non-technological or has there ever been in the past? Is there even today or was there ever before? If you know Derrida's theory of originary technicity, Originary Technicity basically argues that we have always been technological essentially

and that there is no non-technological period and if you take that even further into the question of the human and the human subject, is the human itself even something that we can oppose to technology? And so from that perspective, if you're going to start from the perspective of Originary of our theory of the theory of the theory of the theory of the theory of the theory of the theory of the theory of the theory of the theory of the theory of the theory of the theory of the theory of the theory of the theory of the theory of the theory think about that and think a little bit beyond Marx in a number of ways.

So he goes on and I'm going to open the floor in just a minute here so I don't go on forever about this film or this reading. But I'll come back and continue presenting. But basically the question he asks is if Deckard and Rachel copulate, is this really interspecial between totally different types of subjects, or is this hyper replication? Was it not always a form of replication? That being sex. So, and he has this part where he talks about, he brings in Levi Strauss, he says that Strauss has this concept of a new synthetic border.

He talks about Marx's noy producer in this capital, and these being forms of ways of thinking about this. And I think it's also important because I'm sure Latour will come up or Haraway and their various theories of nature cultures. One thing I noticed that is fundamentally different from the idea of nature cultures is that with Grant he's really talking about not just the synthesis of nature and culture as being both, but really the abolition of both categories, and no longer thinking in those categories at all. So yeah, if people remember that scene, if you want to reflect on it, or if you want

to just reflect on that portion of the essay, let's open it up a bit. And I think Mo wants to start it out. Yeah, I just wanted to talk generally about the film and then relate it to this discussion. To me, and I've seen this film in different time periods, like I saw it when it first came out, prior to my engagement with philosophy, I've seen it a few times in the beginning of my research on technology and then throughout my encounter with accelerationist thought and then just very recently I watched it again for the class.

And my understanding which is just kept more like reinforced in every viewing of the film is that what we're dealing here with is, like the subject of the film is not like an android or a robot at all. This film is about the conditions of being a human sometime in the late or mid or early 21st century. Even though, I don't know, there's a date in the beginning of a film, right? Let me sort of contextualize it. But what you're dealing with here are already, like I mean, already a form of humanity that is indistinguishable from technology.

And that's what the corporation has been able to successfully create. So these are, yeah, 2019, thank you. So these replicants are actually the human subjects of the 21st century. And in a way, Harrison Ford is sort of like, or like the state apparatus, is sort of like the past trying to haunt the future, trying to sort of like preserve, preserve, use whatever use whatever is possible use whatever lack of real technological progress exists to clamp down on history clamp down on

this creature moving forward which means using the fact that they don't live long and that's how at the end of the movie it becomes such a like Harrison Ford is rescued by the fact that this guy is going to die and he basically realizes it's sort of like organic finitude. And then he sort of like forgives him. So I never saw the film as a sort of commentary on anything but the new human. And so I think I'm kind of like on the Ian Hamilton Grant side on this. And as much as I agree with Jason and with a few notes posted here by Jose about the open-mindedness of Marx,

I think some of those Marxist bifurcations really are at the heart of what separates left accelerationism from the old left, the 20th century left. One of them being here, the bifurcation between dead labor and non-dead labor. Yes, that is definitely a major difference and then also the way that alienation is positive as a positive thing and various things like that. So yeah, that's really great. Who else would like to intervene? Anybody in the room?

If you could just speak a little bit off. Okay, I was wondering how the distinction between living and dead labor is made. In the text? Yeah. I mean, okay, basically living labor refers to kind of the idea of the fact that if you're running a factory, for example, you need a human to go and physically do the work basically. As long as these things are automated. So for example, grocery stores used to require clerks

to run the cash registers and to do that kind of work. And now increasingly when you go to the grocery store, especially the big box ones, they've already automated this and the machine is now doing it. So when the machine does it, that's basically dead labor because the machine, according to Marx anyway, that machine would not be there if people had not created that machine, which is now taking the place of other workers. But basically, okay, yes, humans are being replaced by machines, but the thing that makes it dead labor, dead labor, specifically dead, is that those machines were produced by living labor previously. So that previous labor is congealed into the production of the product no matter how that

product functions, especially if it functions as part of the production process. But I don't understand how that makes it dead. I think it's just a rhetorical, you know. I think it's no longer being active. A human subject is no longer being . So when something is being produced, it can be . When people are working on this commodity, that's living labor. But as soon as that human activity ceases, it's no longer living labor. So let's just engage with Jose's little note here, right? right like Marx's concept the capital is dead labor right so this is sort of like

one of the problems with with Marx's conception of capital we we now know and I speak from a sort of like a more certain position than that most people in the class because I've engaged for for several years with with thinkers who gone past this limited idea of what is capital, that capital in fact, if anything, capital is sedimented power. So what he, what Marx kind of like, what Marx conceptualizes as the idea of labor, labor is one form through which power

expresses itself or is enacted it and then through the production of commodity and turn into value form, power becomes capital. But as we know it, then a piece of coal is already dead labor too, right? If you want to use labor, whereas we know that a piece of coal or a mine, a petroleum mine is not really dead labor, it's sort of like a potential for energy or power. There's other examples of it, you know what I mean? Social capital, it's social power, social power enacted on. So this is the limitations here that then once applied to the movie kind of like by

showing these replicants and they're kind of like how they're mistaken for humans and how they're part human but part machine kind of like challenges the idea of dead labor. or like capital as dead labor, or labor having some form of primary dominance over the category of capital. And this is sort of like the Marxist dogma that really just shuts down the conversation between a lot of accelerationists and Marxists, because for Marxists there's this intrinsic relationship between production and labor and then capital or even power.

And there's no way that anything else could be added to the basket of things or objects or phenomena that contribute to the production of capital or accumulation of capital. So it's great to see this film being used as an example to kind of question that. So do you feel like you, does it make sense to you, Alex? Well I guess I just want to push that to ask why would the machines at the grocery store that you used your bags to check out with be dead? It's like someone already built them and there's congealed labor in them, so why would they

be considered dead? Right. Okay. Yeah. No, I understand. I mean, I think your resistance to that is actually somewhat similar to that. Because that's what he, I think that's what he's trying to say, is that this, you know, this assumption that instead, I mean, you could take the question exactly how you did it. You could say, well, why would you consider that to be net labor when obviously there's like an active force that is still kind of alive within it, arguably.

You could also go the other way, you could say, well, you know, is, so if you're saying, why is dead labor considered dead labor, maybe it's actually alive in a certain way, you could also go the other way, you could say, what about living labor, isn't living labor, like physical human beings, quote unquote, aren't they also the product of prior activities such as your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents copy of it, for example. And especially if we're starting from an oncology that assumes that there is no pure distinction between the technological and the human or the technological and the organic, then even living labor is arguably a form of dead labor.

So these terms and these binaries that don't seem to make sense to you, they also don't make sense to you in Hamilton Grant. He's the one that we're discussing right now. Okay. And so for him these binaries are just not, they just don't really hold up and they're kind of, they don't really help us to think at the level of complexity that we really should be thinking basically. Anybody else want to chime in? That is clearly demonstrated through Reza's very well-known piece from the earlier issues

of Collapse called The Corpse Bride. And it's online. If you search for it, you'll find it. essays called corpse bride which in which he flips it around and in a way labor is what is dead or like a body is what is dead is a corpse and it's only through sort of like the action of the soul and then intellect that this dead body is sort of like it prevented from decaying further and becoming sort of like stinky and destroyed so like there it is Petra posted it thank you Petra

but let's see if Igor wanted to talk right now he goes he's gonna come back yeah he's popping in and out so he'll be back a little bit but we can move on a a little bit. So just moving on, another thing that Grant talks about in here is he basically suggests that in this film the Blade Runner itself must become synthetic machinic in order to access the replicant order. So in other words, if you want one hermeneutical anchor, anchor, if you want to use that term, that Grant uses to read this film is the Tyrell Corporation slogan, more human than human. So in other words, the goal of the Tyrell

Corporation is to become more human than human, and this is what the Republicans do, but you could also use that as a way to read the entire film and say, this is what the entire film is saying that we should be doing culturally, politically, and things like that. And And so the goal is for the Blade Runner, for the human to become a replicant. Here's the way that he phrases it. He says, okay, well first let me preface this by saying, now this is one of the critiques that a lot of techno-pessimists bring up, and I think he takes it really head on here. I'm a scholar of Paul Borilio. I've written a lot on his work.

My most recent book is on Borrelio. My master's thesis is on his entire body of work. And Borrelio and many technopessimists say that if we create artificial intelligence, or if we create a kind of cyborg kind of order of beings, then in the process of doing that, we immediately downgrade the merely human. and then we create this hierarchy of cyborgs over physical human beings. But instead of that, he explicitly says the point here is not to create a hierarchy, but actually to level hierarchies, false hierarchies between the technological and the organic.

He says basically to create a quote, universal becoming synthetic of human, annihilating the difference between, sorry, the universal becoming synthetic of humanity, annihilating the difference between the organic and technological. So that's actually kind of a leveling and horizontalizing move that he's trying to create there. The thing to me, Jason, the problem that that creates is that, again, we're back at diagonal here. And that is like, to me, showing that these distinctions are false and there's this horizontality is not going far enough. The far enough to go is to, first of all, show how this unity or this imminence is not created historically.

It's always been there. It's just that we're becoming more and more aware of it or it's accelerating. And second, to show that the debate or the question is over what kind of human and machine symbiosis we want, rather than whether human symbiosis is good or bad, or is it actually has taken place, or the real human exists, or the pure machine can exist or not. It's to show that this symbiosis has always been going on from the beginning of time, and it's about we have power and agency collectively to determine to a great extent its future. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. So then he goes in to talk about Leotard. If you remember Leotard's

from the very first part of the book, Leotard plays a major role in this book. There's a chapter called Energy Men Capitalism and a couple other chapters, or at least one other that is by Leotard. And I'm pretty sure that one of the big reasons for that is that Ian Hamilton Grant was one of the first people to help develop these ideas along with Nick Land and Sadie Plant and some others. But basically, the way that Leotard comes into this is he says that Leotard is trying to, especially in Libidinal Economy and a couple other books, an essay is trying to to quote, produce an attempt to theorize a political space following the advent of information

technologies that extend capital's realm even into language, memory, population, planning, and communications. And that the effect of this, one of the effects of this is the postmodern condition that we live in. If you've read the postmodern condition, you know that one One of the central aspects of that is the collapse of grand narratives, one of which will obviously be Marxism, which he's kind of grappling with here and saying that these grand narratives are on the way out partially due to the way that techno-science operates under capitalism. So basically in this process capital absorbs the socialist or left project putting liberation

up for sale. But this also from a left perspective maybe potentially provides a model for what the left or what critical theory could do as well. He then talks about Kant. Kant comes up quite a bit of course. If you know Leotard's work, he has quite a bit on the sublime and on various aspects of Kant. And he says that, and this will also come up later in Fisher, he says that today in the postmodern condition language no longer functions as a social bond, rather communication becomes info commerce. And we

witness a quote, and this is the crucial quote that is also kind of built upon in Fisher, a quote, gratuitous reassembly of a proletarian body and the recalibration of its senses producing a sublime pleasure pain during the industrial revolution. And this he attaches to concept the census communis, except a census communis that is now reconstituted by xenogenesis, reconstituted by the technological and not only by the beautiful or the sublime in terms of art or something like that, but specifically within a techno-cultural frame. Now the key part here is he's saying that there is a sublime pleasure pain that goes

along with the reassembly of the proletary body. So for more organicist approaches and more traditional left approaches, in my opinion, those that don't read Marx very closely are the ones that tend to do this. But in many versions of left approaches to politics and to philosophy, there's kind of this idea that there is, you can see this I guess for example in Pico Feminism, Vandana Shiva, kind of a lot of these approaches that sort of naturalize harmonious pre-existing community or collectivity that is sort of repressed by Apple or repressed by technoscience, maybe

engineering or bioengineering and things like that. But actually what Grant is saying here is that Grant actually says that the loss of these prior agronomies, the loss of for example the feudal era extended family and just the crushing of that and the emergence of the nuclear family and then the crushing of the nuclear family to the single parent family, this is just an example. The crushing of all these forms is actually experienced not only as something that's painful, but also as something that's pleasurable, partially because people, for example, people getting out of bad marriages

and finally being able to divorce. That being a fundamental change that happens in relatively recent periods, that finally being able to divorce and get out of a bad relationship, despite prior moral obligations to stay together, is actually a very pleasurable and very positive thing, ultimately. So that's what he's basically saying here, is that there is a certain pleasure in the dissolution of the old, the dissolution of the old forms and the emergence of totally different forms. And we can't just say that capitalism, in the way that it tends to be destructive, has no positive aspects, has nothing that the left would want to retain,

and that we should just go back to some prior reform like the extended family, or today you might even say the nuclear family. So there is something fundamentally positive about this. So that's the sublime pleasure pain that he's referring to there. And then he goes on and talks about laborers, saying that their job is basically to lease affective distributions and to prevent the free play of the faculties that cognitive violence is as the beautiful. So the beautiful being the preplay of the faculty is the response to a beautiful aesthetic,

whereas the sublime is more about dissolution, quote, the powers in disarray, confronting the limits of their power. He actually invokes masochism here as just sort of a way to think about how this dissolution of prior forms, even though it may be painful, is also a pleasure, is also a positive thing, the loss of these old subjectivities based on what they make possible in the future. But we'll come back to that in Fisher. I don't want to hold things up by stopping to talk about that because we'll have a lot more time talking about that when we're on Fisher.

One thing that I think really stands out in this essay that I really liked a lot is that very early on here, this essay is from quite a while ago, several decades ago already. One thing that I really liked here is the way that he talks about, the way that he critiques kind of the situationist definition of the spectacle. So, and of course that really makes perfect sense because the same way that he's critiquing the organic and the technological in Marx, you know, if you think about the situation as concept of the spectacle, spectacular society, really what you have is, and this is one thing that Ron Seager critiqued in Art Forum in his essay, The Emancipated Spectator.

You can find the PDF of that online if you go look for it. But basically what it assumes is that you have this kind of organic humanity that has been exposed to this spectacular representation that they then become sort of absorbed into and passively subordinated to. And what Bronsier argues the emancipated spectator, and this has been suddenly a popular critique of the situationists, is that first of all that's a false division between the spectacular and the organic. And second of all, it assumes that the quote-unquote audience is fundamentally passive and does not take part in the production of meaning in the process of engagement with the work of art or with the spectacle as such. So what I was impressed with was that Grant

is already directly confronting this assumption way, way before. It kind of made me wonder of the front seat and maybe engage this, or maybe read this and kind of fix it off. But basically what Grant says is he's talking about Debord's concept of the integrated spectrum, and he basically defines it as saying, quote, the disappearance of a stesis, meaning the the disappearance of the sensate, of the presentational, and the incapacitation of representation. Instead of that, in the integrated spectacle, the spectacle becomes a replicant, the replicant code for constituting the real.

And this is where he invokes Kant. Those of you who are friends with me on Facebook might have seen the post that I just made a couple hours ago that came from preparing for this class. It's a quote from Kant's final book, Opus Postumum, where Kant says, quote, he who would know the world must first manufacture it. So in this quote, if the person who is attempting to know the world must first manufacture it, we're definitely not talking about a passive observer of the spectacle or someone who's subordinated to this spectacular representation or commodification of life but rather one who is an active agent in the process.

And so I thought that was very interesting and the way that he did that. If you read the Ron Sierra version of the critique of situationism and more of an embrace of the spectacle, his version is kind of against Plato in saying that this is a Platonist, idealist kind of assumption, there is some truth out there that we don't have, sorry, the realm of the pure forms and that sort of thing. Okay, so moving on just a little bit here, and this does come up again at the end, this approach to the spectrable, and he goes even a bit further.

Before we get there, so he talks about the replicant Leon who's asked to tell Holden about his mother. This is that scene where the replicant shoots the bird. Basically the Tyrol, the cop, the playrunner from the Tyrol Corporation is basically saying, only tell me your good thoughts, tell me about your mother. And the replicant says, I'll tell you about my mother. and then he shoots him and he falls out the window. So this is kind of the way that he's framing it here is that he's trying to point out that the meaning of that scene is that Holton has no mother and is not the product of organic procreation and doesn't care about that particular way of thinking about existence.

But at the same time, also the point of the film is that the person who asked him that question also does not have a mother, also is a replicant, depending on how you look at it. So Grant, he has a little critique of Brian Misumi here where he says that Brian Misumi, if you know Brian Misumi, he's a Delusian, one of the more prominent Delusians. But basically Misumi talks about how technological possibility is captured by capitalism.

And that might seem a lot more advanced than I guess a typical techno-pessimist perspective of someone like Perilio or Peter Ward or somebody like that. But at the same time, it may seem more advanced. But Grant is saying that even Misumi is not that advanced, because Misumi is assuming that the technological possibility is completely captured by capital. Whereas he's saying it's not completely captured by capital, there's also a kind of hyperlogic, a more profound logic that would allow for possibilities that we even see within capitalism. like I was saying, with the nuclear family and the single parent family.

But for things like that to be actually positive things, it actually needs to be embraced, and they're not completely captured by capital. And here again is where he brings up the integrated spectacle, and he actually embraces this concept of the spectacle and tries to look for how it's positive. He says, for example, one thing that it does is it, quote, liquidates both the experiential real and the distant orbit of its representations. So that we're not just talking about phenomenological experience, or these sort of distant representations, but a kind of third order version of reality. Another thing he does here that I think is telling, he brings up the concept of cyber positivity.

which to me clearly shows more of the resonance between land and, say, the plant and grant together. So that's kind of interesting. So I think I've covered most of the things here. Let me just give you one final closing quote, and then if we want to discuss a bit more about this, we can. Otherwise, we can move on to Fisher. So, although we should probably wait for Ivan to come back because I think he wanted to give the synopsis of Fisher. So, okay, so here's the quote that I wanted to give you. The spectacle was always integrated and its technology is genetic.

Following the board's integrated spectacle, theory dissolves into integrated cyber amnesis, absorbing it into the very matrix of the synthetic collection of the real. That the Blade Runner is a replicant tech does not impose undecidability upon human-machine relations, nor does it give rise to express and theorization, since no gaze, no theoria is untrammeled by side work technologies. So in other words, everything is always already side work. There never was a division between the human and the replicant, And that's why this whole question of incest prohibition comes up throughout this entire text, because there is no incest if there is no pre-existing division in the first place.

So, alright, so let's open it up and who would like to respond to that? Maybe somebody wants to say a little bit about this actually affirming the spectacle as opposed to opposing it. That would be one thing we could look at. We could look at the question of incest prohibition. What role does that play in this text? Why does that keep coming up for grants? What role does Infest prohibition play for grants?

Okay, I think I just gave a really brief synopsis of it, but I think I actually said it slightly wrong. Okay, it looks like Jose is open to give some presentation. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, that's great. If I can, before we move on, I did have some questions. Yeah. Okay, so you were talking about the, like, Platon, that Ranciere's critique of the spectacle is kind of looking towards Platonism, and I was wondering if you could tell me in that way what Hamilton Grant's critique of the spectacle is looking towards that isn't Platonism. Like, how is that—where is his critique coming from? Or if you could tell me anything

about that. Well, I think, yeah, well, I think they both kind of share some roots in, you know, to some extent in Deleuze for one thing, which Ari, Leo Turner, obviously, the people I'm saying share some of these sort of roots meaning Ian Hamilton Grant and Laotierre in their critique of DeBoard. And so the argument that DeBoard is making kind of assumes that there is some sort of uncontaminated perspective from which, perspective that is then imposed upon by the spectacle. And that people are sort of, you know, this goes back also to the Frankfurt School and

this whole idea of the culture industry and how people are kind of, this image of people being kind of passive observers in the face of spectacularized capital and just being subordinated to mass culture. Whereas I think what both Ranciere and Grant are saying here, especially the way he gives this blockbuster Hollywood film such pride in place, basically he's saying, if you read this film closely, this is not just spectacular control of the passive observers, this is really, this actually has the potential to be a transformative mode

of public thinking, I guess. And so the argument that Ron Seier makes about Plato, he basically says that, yeah, basically what he says is that the underlying assumption of, the underlying assumption of situationism and of Debord is that there is this kind of pure form that is separate from materiality, separate from like actually existing materiality. Like a Voigt-Kampff machine of reality, like the appropriate series of questions to confirm reality as it is. That's the presumption? Right.

Yeah, something like that. Exactly, exactly. As opposed to, and that goes back to Marx's division of the organic and technological living labor and dead labor and all of that. So the idea of being here to kind of break down those distinctions and the process of breaking down those distinctions you actually increase, you actually enhance the presupposed agency of the masses more less, instead of seeing them as purely passive. And so Ranciere's critique is of the presupposed platonic reel, and what is Hamilton Grant's critique of Debord's critique of the spectacle?

I think his critique is that—I mean, I'm not sure I would say it's critique. It's more like, okay, yes, you're right, we do live in the integrated spectacle, we do live in a period in which there isn't even really a division between the spectacle and like everyday life as it's experienced. But instead of seeing that as a bad thing, he's saying, yes, that's true, and let's go even further because if you're starting from an assumption of originary technicity, that's what we always already were in the first place. So we just have not been able to see that. And so in a really weird way, given that we always were originally technical or technological

and there never was this pure moment, actually the more technological society has become, this is actually a very positive development because, not because now we're turning into machines but because we've always been machines. And it's only now that we can see it clearly. Jase, I think Ian Hamilton Grant either read the Boer's comments as a metaphor or he misunderstands the Boer's, like why did Boer write this piece and why is it called Integrated Spectacle. In DeBoer's text, I'm kind of familiar with that text because I work with it, the integrated

spectacle is merely, and I'm not siding with DeBoer, I'm only trying to correct what really DeBoer says, is a result of the end of communism and the sort of like, because you know, in the original spectacle, he actually talks about two different types of spectacle. One being sort of like the American type of spectacle which he called diffuse spectacle in which there's no center and periphery and there's all sorts of little spectacles kind of like occupying the social space and then agency or liberation is possible in spaces that are

in between these circles of influence. Whereas in the centralized spectacle which is sort of like the Stalinist Maoist model, you have a figure in the center which is the dictator or like the state and the further you get from the center, the spectacle becomes weaker and you find places of liberation on the peripheries. And then in the integrated spectacle he talks about we should not read the end of communism as the triumph of one type of spectacle over the other, but as how these two are going to get integrated into a system in which we're going to end up with the central state, central and diffuse spectacle overlapping,

basically leaving no room and no space for social action. And that's the starting. And then what does this type of overlapping does to the production of subjectivity and you know what I mean, all that. That is really what the second, the comments is about. Now, Ian Hamilton Grant, I think, reads it metaphorically and used that as a sort of metaphor to talk about the integration of technique and nature, in my opinion. Yeah, that sounds accurate to me. So it's less just if I could try and paraphrase that

briefly to see if I understand Hamilton grants critique is less of like that platonic presumption of the real and more actually kind of continuing it for what for how it is useful in in the poor in the boards the board has that platonic view in the original society of spectacle because he started with with a for bar like quote and then it's set up in a way that says the real is gone and all you have is the representation right in this an integration for the board is not the integration of real and a spectacle is the integration of two

forms of spectacle already for the board in the original text the real is gone and the representation has already taken over that's how I've kind of like read those two texts so so I don't think you can read the second one as a way of saying that the board is argue that the platonic real is collapsed into the platonic real represented is collapsed that already takes place for him back in the awkward post-war war and the sort of like the society of spectacle which is sort of like when modern condition of men when modern conditions of production In societies in which modern condition of production prevails, all life presents itself as a collection of images.

Everything that was once lived has not turned into representation. That's like the first thesis of the original spectacle. So right off the bat, there's no platonic real and represented anymore. Representation has taken over. Sorry, it just became like a little bit of a class about DeBoer. but it's something I know a lot about because I've researched it for different purposes and I just thought I should clarify that. I hope you don't mind it, Jason. No, no, no. Another text I would recommend is something like comments on comments at the site of the spectacle or something. I can't remember what it's called, but it's basically in Giorgio Agamben's Means Without End

and he points in this really interesting way how despite the board being this, oh no, that's something Muhammad wrote. I was getting the titles confused. But there is a chapter in there, I think it's marginal notes on something, Society of the Spectre or something. But basically what Godman says in there, he makes a move that's very similar to both Grant and Ranciere in pointing out that not only did he, not only did, it's all about his films basically. So not only did DeBoer use text and kind of written critical theory type of text, but he also, he actually engaged in the spectacle. He actually

became sort of part of the process of spectacular production by making these films. And a lot of what he does in his films is very similar to what we see today in meme culture where you have a kind of pastiche combination of different elements that then produce a totally different meaning than what they previously met in capitalist culture. You said inside what culture? I didn't catch that. Just capitalist culture. Oh, okay. So what I'm referring to there is determent. Amy, are you following?

I was going to see if you want to join me in like an anti-rancier little bit of a rant. I'm going to do it. I'm going to explain this. The problem with, I mean, and this is sort of like coming from a left field, and I'm I'm not sort of like, I think the use of the Ranciere quote here is totally valid. But the problem with Ranciere's position is that it's totally based on phenomenology. this is so like audiences ability to interpret interpret interpret the

spectacle first of all has less to do with acting upon the world and has more to do with like interpretive interpretive power of the subject in creating more multiplicities and differences which in a context of contemporary art causes to further the problem of indeterminacy and basically it's this phenomenological loop that the audience complete the spectacle, right? Whereas we know the only operation that really can break this is the intervention of reason, intellect, logic, thought as a third category above body and soul or sort of like material and essential and that is

lacking from from from right here and ran sears utopia is anti-universal there's no universality in it it's it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a world of move multiplicity of interpretation of the spectacle which does not amount to any any kind of effort to act on the social real. But just like, and these are not things that I say. These are sort of like the stuff that a lot of us who interact with Ranciere work in the art world have already established and talked about. And I'm not just making these up. It's not just me. Particularly, Suhail Malik has written quite a lot.

And he's going to come out in a book about what is the problem? What is the problem with the reconfiguration of the audience's relationship with art? Yeah, Jason needs to put himself on mute when I talk, but he forgot to do it. Sorry about that. All right, sorry about that. Okay, let's move on to Jose. Can everyone hear me? Yeah. All right. Yeah, I don't know how long you want me to go for, but I'll keep it short just in case Igor comes back. I don't want to take up two points. Let me just say real quick,

Igor's not going to be coming back. He had some work demands that are stopping him. So you can go on. Do a full version if you want. All right, I'll just, I guess, read my notes here. Yeah, so in the beginning of the art essay, he... Oh, Jose, I'm sorry to interrupt, but I forgot. I want to make sure there's space for Amy to fill in if she wants to. Oh, definitely. For sure. Yeah. I thumbs up everything I said, and I don't want to hold the class up anymore. So go for it, Jose. Thanks. But yeah, the introduction kind of situates Leotard

and specifically his text Libidinal Economy. But I guess I'll start from the last set of quoted texts from Leotard in Fisher's essay. Primarily just to get a sense of Leotard's writing style, the tone, the kind of caustic nature of his writing, but also the controversial nature, which I think Fisher really wants to develop. And so Leotard, this is on 339 for everyone who's a reader. Leotard says, you know, the English unemployed did not have to become workers to survive. They hang on tight and spit on me, enjoy the hysterical and masochistic whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, et cetera, et cetera. And so from this quote, Fisher's almost driving question throughout the essay is,

okay, obviously this is a very controversial claim to make on Leotard's part, but, as Fisher writes, quote, but in what does the alleged scandalous nature of this passage reside? And I think for Fisher, the passage from Leotard is indicative of something larger than the question of the English unemployed. So rather, it is indicative of the entire situation of capitalism as Lyotard saw it, and extending Lyotard's sentiments, Fisher asks, you know, hands up, who wants to go up their anonymous suburbs and pubs and return to the organic mud of the peasantry? Hands up, that is to say, to all those who really want to return to pre-capitalist territorialities, families, villages, etc. So the claim here is that, like Lyotard, there's no going back to a pre-capitalist

era that does not hold enough violence to make us cling to the benefits, though few, that capitalism provides certain portions of the globe. So thus the scandalous aspect of Lyotard's remark, we might say, resides in the fact that by reaping the benefits of capitalism, by finding some satisfaction of our desires within it, we become, however minimally, libidinally and not just materially complicit with capitalism itself. And I think that's kind of the main point there. So thus when Lyotard points out the masochistic joy of life under capitalism, it is not to point out how great it is as opposed to a pre-capitalist time. Rather it is to underscore that one of the hard and ugly truths about contemporary everyday life is the way in which we are complicit, whether in thought or desire, with capitalism

itself. And so I think this is why Fisher kind of returns to Lyotard's text, because Lyotard kind of forcefully forces us to confront capitalism and its reality. So to begin to confront capitalism, we must confront the pleasures we find within it, and we must confront the fact that there are parts of capitalism we genuinely like and desire. And so this is kind of one way to see the shift to Fisher's use of Avatar in the essay. So the image of Avatar becomes important here for Fisher, since it is the cinematic representation of this idea of a no going back to pre-capitalist times. As Fisher writes, and this is again on 339, so yeah, as Fisher writes, what is so important in Cameron's films, quote, is

that we can only play at being inner primitives by virtue of cinematic proto-VR technology whose very existence presupposes the destruction of the organic idol of Pandora, end quote. So it is because of this no going back that Fischer will then put forward the three main claims in his essay. That everyone is an accelerationist, accelerationism has never happened, and that Marxism is nothing if not accelerationist. So by taking seriously Leotard's claim that we fundamentally enjoy forms of alienation under capitalism today, Fischer makes the wager that we should reverse the Deleuze-Guattarian and Leotardian project and, quote, quote, not take politics as a means to greater libidinal intensification, but rather it's

a question of instrumentalizing the libido for political purposes, end quote. So Fisher thinks that the political task today comes from the Lozenguaterian leotard, but it should be reversed. So the claim here is that because we have now reached a moment where alienated existence is enjoyable, we have to find ways to change the nature of neoliberal or capitalist desire itself. So if capitalism has captured our desire so we no longer feel the impetus for resistance, the task then is to find ways of catalyzing desire itself to search for new ways outside of capital towards a post-capitalist future. And added to the idea of politicizing the libido comes Fisher's argument that the reason why someone like Nick Land seems out of date, and so this is this idea of intensification,

intensification of desire and finding a way out of capital and one tactic of that as being intensifying desire itself. He invokes Nick Land as a counterpoint and says, you know, Land was very formative for a lot of us. He was our Nietzsche. He would tell us hard truths but also had some conservative undertones, but it makes him an even more important person for us to engage with. And so he says, so when talking about Land in this context, he'll say that Land is out of date. But the reason why land is out of date, he says, is the same reason why cyber culture, the cyber culture he was embedded in seems out of date. So this is a long quote from 344 in the reader, if everyone has it. Quote, because the future as such has succumbed

to retrospection, the actual near future wasn't about capital stripping off its latex mass and revealing the machinic death's head beneath. It was just the opposite, new sincerity, Apple computers advertised by Kitsipop. This failure to foresee the extent to which pastiche recapitulation and a hyper-eticalized neurotic individualism would become the dominant cultural tendencies is not a contingent error. It points to a fundamental misjudgment about the dynamics of capitalism." And this is interesting since it uses Leotard's earlier statement about our existence as being alienated and loving, to use a phrase from the CCRU, that kind of attitude against land's projection of a posthumous future. So that is, it is because capitalism

has excelled at capturing subjective desire that it has progressed as far as it has, and not because the technological innovations underlying capitalism were the fundamental motor of its progress. So Fisher will continue, and he will kind of juxtapose land in Dullism when he writes that land collapses capitalism into what Deleuze-en-Gua-Tri calls schizophrenia, thus losing their most crucial insights into the way that capitalism operates via simultaneous processes of deterritorialization and compensatory re-territorialization. Capital's human face is not something that it can eventually set aside. And that's from 345, the next page. So it's due to this Janus face of capital. that for Fisher, he thinks this is fundamental for capital to continue its own existence,

is that it must continue this Janus space of, in some sense, whether effective or not, pandering to being able to satisfy human desire, but also satisfying technological innovation. So it's due to this fact that Fisher ends his essay with a quote pulled from Jameson's Valences of the Dialectic, and when he talks about, you know, what would it mean to think about this lineage of accelerationism coming from the lostitarian land, but doing it in a leftist variety. And I think the ending quote of the article or the essay is really good because it plays upon the Nietzschean idea of beyond good and evil and tries to read it together with Marx and Engels, where the essential claim is that when we see capitalism

as being the most productive force in history, while at the same time being the most destructive and oppressive, we understand capital from the point of view of something like beyond good and evil that does not allow us to simply call for a return to previous modes of organizing society nor the idea that if we commit ourselves to the logic of capital itself things will eventually get better since capital will transform into its opposite whether it be socialism, communism whatever you want to call it so thus I guess, I mean that's my brief, really brief summary I can pose a few questions, I have my own questions about Fisher's piece, criticisms, I don't know how you want to go about it. Yeah, please go ahead and if you want to just maybe start with one question and then we can discuss that one and then we can come back to the other ones.

Sure. Yeah. So first, I guess it's just something I noticed that out of the three positions that Fisher put forward, the first one was clear to me how he would be able to argue that everyone is accelerationist. And the last one is clear to me that there is a way that you can get a Marx that is through and through accelerationist. But I don't know what really he even means or has in mind when he says acceleration has never existed. whether that just means he thinks accelerationism is a project to be undertaken, and so because it's a project it has yet to reach some type of satisfaction through its process. But yeah, that part was very unclear to me as to why he said that.

I can start out with the beginnings of an answer. When I took my notes, I basically organized my notes around each of these assertions. So, some of what I have for this particular question that accelerationism has happened. The first thing is that when he talks about Leotard's book, you know, basically what he says is that this is the kind of book that a lot of people wanted to write. People, you know, but there are things that stop us from writing certain things. Like for example, when I was in grad school, I had a transgender friend who was in the philosophy department and who had studied analytic philosophy exclusively and just never,

for whatever reason, just never really encountered queer theory or like Foucault or Deleuze or anybody like that or some of the others who we talked about in the news seminars. And so when she really started to grapple with queer theory, especially continentally focused queer theory, she was kind of like bored by it and kind of wished that she had really focused on that rather than analytic philosophy. Now of course a lot of what we're looking at in a bit of both, but in a lot of critical theory circles they're still kind of stuck back in a division of analytic and continental.

So the circles I was around in grad school, all the people who did the theory were pretty strictly continental and there was almost no analytic philosophy part of it. One of the things that came out of those discussions was like, well, there is kind of a political economy of investment. Like you invest a lot of time in a particular framework, such as in this example, you invest a lot of time in analytic philosophy, even though it may not have, or from some perspectives, it may not seem to offer a whole lot to the subject matter that she was concerned with. And so then by the time you're almost done with your PhD, how do you, you know, in all of your time has been invested in analytic philosophy, even if you do discover something like, something like queer theory, are you really going to be able to suddenly switch gears in the last six months of your PhD and go do that?

In her case the answer was for the most part was no. So in this part in the beginning talking about what a lot of people wanted to say, what the book a lot of people wanted to write, that particular book would kind of conflict with the political economy of their educational investments. So, if you made all these investments, I guess, in Marxism, continental philosophy, phenomenology, other kind of approaches like that that are more popular, you're a lot less likely to really take the plunge and say, you know what, actually there is a good…

This is something that, Jason, this is something that actually only comes up privately when we discuss with like-minded people of their responses. Because I wrote a status today and I just by mistake deleted it and I never posted it that 2014 was the year in which old enemies, Marxist, anarcho-marxist, classic Marxist, post-structuralist, you know, you have to put your microphone on hold because, you know, it's creating too much noise. Thank you. Marxist, post-structuralist Latourians, even like

Harman, Harman type OOO people, they gave up their differences and they all were united in sort of like making sure that accelerationist thought is rendered as like meaningless. They were like one thing they all agreed upon was how to minimize the significance of acceleration through talking about it. Like all sorts of conferences, books, essays, well written, used the idea of accelerationism to kind of like make it look like that it doesn't, it's not really anything, or it doesn't really matter, right? And, but what I saw lacking in the response that like, you know, when people advocating

for acceleration had was to highlight the fact that why a wide array of people from different philosophical and political positions are sort of like, are unison almost in their criticism or attack is because of this anthropological slash political economic dimension that they feel threatened. They feel their investment in a particular type of knowledge threatened by a new kind of approach that might become a turn. So it's all about sort of like preventing an accelerationist turn, preventing it from becoming one of those turns. And now the good thing is that acceleration to me, a turn is like the end of something,

right? That it itself is not interested in its turn, it becoming a turn. But there is a fear that what if young people catch on, what if they want to go back to classic and re-read them and do something else with them. So yeah, and what you just said is so beautifully put has so much to do with it. And I think it's very important. I remember talking about it with Peter, with Nick privately on Facebook. They all understand that this is very much part of the problem, but there's no way of sort of like entering this into public discussion about like how these types of investment in older more sort of like 20th century type of knowledge prevents the stretching of what it means to produce knowledge today.

Right. And I think another thing that part of what Fitcher is saying here, so to get back to just fundamental question why would you say that acceleration has never happened? One reason that you might say that is that I mean even going back to Leotard and going back to Nick Landy and Hamilton Grant and Sadie Plant and all of these kind of earlier moments, he also talks about all of these kind of Nietzschean, I'm trying to remember the other that he mentions. So there's like a kind of a Nietzschean turn at the end of the 60s. I'm not finding it right off the bat here, but basically, Leotard, Grant, Land, I mean

this has already been happening since the 60s. There has been this desire to articulate something like this and it has come up and it actually has been articulated. But the moment that it is articulated, suddenly there's this huge backlash from the organises left, organicist left you might call it, or the decelerationist left, that just does not want to see this come about even though privately, you know, they have, many of them have exactly the same discussions. But at least in a public forum for whatever reason, it has had these blips of coming up and coming down. So in that perspective, from that perspective you could say it has has never happened because it's never really been able to take hold in the fear of a normal

poor climate as Petra says. Fear of a health-quality climate. So those are a couple of ways. He talks about a little bit, there's part of this section where he talks about the hatreds and negativities that he suffered on the part of the working class against the, quote, priests of the left who counseled the proletariat and moral indignation against capitalism and against its washing away of prior identities, prior social forms, prior types of collectivity. So in other words, to be on the left means that you have to decry the single parent family, You have to decry the nuclear family and you have to celebrate the old extended family

the way it's naturally supposed to be kind of thing, right? And so we constantly have this sort of regressive element working and that has actually really prevented it's prevented critical theory or popular culture from really becoming accelerationist. And in some ways, weirdly, actually popular culture is maybe more open to it than most of the left. You know, there's so much work to get done in this territory, and that is how there was sort of like, you know, during the sort of like the dominance of Derrida, like like sort of like post-structuralism right there was this like pact made between Marxist in

academia and post-structuralists they kind of like divided up certain types of discourses and they kind of made this secret pact that like as long as they don't like rigorously undermine each other's TERFs, like the academia will exist in this semi-Marxist, semi-poststructuralist mode of existence. So really, just calling it left is sort of like, is not proper because it is a particular type of left that comes from Frankfurt School and then makes a certain type of alliance with certain Foucauldian slash Foucauldian slash like Derrida type of look at culture, you know, difference.

And so like we get into this like late 90s existence that we're not supposed to leave anymore. And that's supposed to be what continued on throughout the OOs in universities, the deadness of academic world until this recent sort of like incursions of like, you know, from the right people like Latour and then from the center people like speculative realism and from the very left which is acceleration. Really like trying to like, and then they're more receptive to Latour because Latour is already like type of network neoliberalism that they're familiar with through sort of like a recuperation of the loose right and then really it's about how some

some departments and some some some fields are kind of like more open to specular realism but they're all still against acceleration and irrationalism and like Amy said this is where we come in and how academia or like institutions like us become kind of like crucial spaces in which these ideas can be like rigorously critiqued, assessed, examined without that type of political economy, anthropological prejudice that already comes in trying to fend it up and trying to write it up and trying to discredit it. Yeah, I mean, all those were really great answers for Fischer's comment about why acceleration

has never existed. But as we're talking about this, yeah, the pushback on accelerationism, especially on people from the left, has been shocking. And the first person that comes to mind is Ben Noyes. And I don't want to go too far and just specifically talk about Ben Noyes and his critiques of accelerationism, but for someone like him in particular, I feel like a lot of his criticisms are very confused at best and equivocates a lot of positions between different thinkers. So I don't know if that's also something that you've noticed in the criticisms leveled against what could assessively call a left accelerationism. Oh, definitely.

We had Ben Noycia, but the good thing about Ben is that he's engaged and he's willing to listen. But some of these are more on the anarchist side and more on, sort of like more hardcore labor theory of value type of people, are not even interested in any kind of like dialogue. They're just like, they just like, they just equate like, you know, like everybody is a closeted racist fascist who secretly worships Nick Lant. And basically it's a strategy to point to Nick Lant as the bad guy while kind of like infecting the mind of people with the Nick Lantian racist sort of like type of attitude, which is totally unfair because it's unfair to knowledge because it kind of like confuses all these real distinctions that exist, you know.

And also it's unfair to Nick in a way because like Jason brilliantly showed us last week, there's a lot of nuances in Nick's thought that really needs to be sorted out and Amy is involved with some of that. So yeah, so what I wanted to, I don't know, there was something I wanted to add to what you brought up, but I forgot, so I'm just going to stop. Maybe it comes to me. Yeah, I'm open for anyone else to jump in. I mean, my comments are pretty much over. Another thing I was going to say, sorry, another thing I was going to say is that this comes up in like the way Deleuze looks at the introduction of new ideas into the body of knowledge, right?

He basically particularly talks about it in a Bergsonism book, right? In the very first few pages of it. And also I think in a cinema book because the cinema book is also about Bergson, right? And he talks about how the first encounter of a new knowledge with the the old knowledge is not going to produce or allow for the potentiality of this new knowledge to be realized. Because that first contact involves a lot of back and forth things, but also it involves using a lot of the old techniques and languages in order to enter the body of knowledge. And it really takes a while for the new knowledge to shed its skin, shed its skeuomorphic skin that it needed to camouflage itself and come in.

And then to be able to, and then also like the fact that like say the reason why we can have like ideal accelerationism is that all of us are who we are and our world view is shaped so much under the old paradigm. So there's real limitations to how far we can actually push this and we really have to sort of like give it time. It takes time like Ray Bracier says, knowledge takes time. It takes time and maybe the second or the third generation can actually potentialize what's really at stake with a brand new type of approach and a new way of looking at the world and all that or new way of creating the world.

Let's see. I can't confirm it all right. So what are you talking about Amy? I'm not sure. Just a little bit of sidebar Gus. OK, OK, I just didn't want to ignore it anyways. So that's what I wanted to bring up. Maybe that's why we haven't had accelerationism yet, in the way Mark Fisher talks about it. I don't know how much time we want to continue spending on this article, but I just had another question. But it might lead to a longer discussion, since it's about Fisher's characterization of land. Let me just say something about that real quick. In my opinion, even though I love Parisi, the Fisher one I think is really the key one this time.

But so I would say we have until 8 is 7.20. I would say if we spent like 20 more minutes until about 7.40, 7.45, that would be pretty good. And then we can move on after that. So yeah, there's plenty of time. Okay. Yeah, cool. Would it be good to move on to the Terminator section of the Fisher as well? Yeah, I mean, if someone has a specific direct point about that, go ahead. I don't really have anything on that off the top of my head. Could that be part of how you present this, Jason? I don't know what your plan was for that. I could definitely say some things about Tramander.

Do you want to do that now, or maybe we could listen to Jose present for a little bit, and then we could maybe round it out with that. Yeah, Jose, go ahead, whatever you were going to say. Okay, no, no, just because I'll try to find the specific passage. Also, on 342 and the Reader, Fisher asks, what then is land's philosophy about? That's in the middle of the page. Sorry, what page was it? 342 in the reader. And it begins on the middle of the page. It's just that one sentence where Fisher writes, What then is Lann's philosophy about? So in a nutshell, Dilzenguatri's machinic desire remorselessly stripped of all Bergsonian vitalism

and made backwards compatible with Freud's death drive and Schopenhauer's will. And I was just curious what people made of that characterization of land's thought as being stripped of all Bergsonian vitalism. Specifically because how land and plant open cyber positive by contrasting catastrophe and anastrophe, or the human interpretation of the future and the future's interpretation of itself, or a technological interpretation of the future, those two contrasting poles is very reminiscent of how Bergson will talk about metaphysics. And he'll say, you know, there are two types of thoughts, roughly speaking.

There's the kind of thought that moves around the object, tries to pick all the pieces together and construct a representation of the object for the viewer. And then there's a thought which begins from within the object. And the second kind of thought is what Bergson will call metaphysics, as he thinks of it. And in Bergson's own elaboration of it, it seems very similar to what Land is saying in the essay, at least in Cyber Positive with Plant, where he'll say, crisis is a convergence misinterpreted by mankind. And so I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts as to the relationship between Land's own work and Bergson, or just this idea of Land breaking free of every type of machinic vitalism

which he gets from the losing lottery. I found it an interesting remark, but I just didn't feel 100% on board with it. I mean, I can say something about that. I mean, I think it's pretty accurate. I think you can see it, for example, oh, it looks like Amy was going to... Go ahead, Amy, I can come back in after you. Please go ahead. You finish what you're gonna say. I'll talk after you. Okay, so just basically what I was going to say was I think it is actually pretty accurate that at least as far as I understand Nickland, particularly in those writings, the whole the fundamental thing that I saw in Cyberpositive and the readings from last time was this idea

that cybernetics is not yet cybernetics enough. And that the problem with cybernetics discourse, even in his inauguration with Norbert Wiener and some other people like that, was that it still retained a kind of, even though it articulated this framework that could be completely machinic, completely technological, and completely non-human, his very first response was to write, I think it's called The Human Use of Human Beings, and some other kind of moralist, humanist, philosophical reflections on why we shouldn't go too far with cybernetics. Whereas Nick Land is kind of saying, actually, if we approach it that way, we're not actually yet cybernetic enough,

We're not really machinic enough or technological enough. And we're still kind of retaining some element of vitalism. So I personally think that it is kind of accurate, despite the fact that it may have resonances with Bergson. I think that probably comes out of the fact that Bergson is kind of the background to Deleuze, Inglitari, and a lot of the other people. So there may be some resonances there, but maybe not vitalist resonances per se. Very briefly, if I could say, like, while we're contrasting Avatar with Terminator, you can look at that Bergsonian vitalism as, like, the corrupt vital inside of Avatar

and Skynet inside of Terminator as the fear of becoming that more appropriate level of cybernetic. I was just going to say originally that I pretty much agree with Jason's characterization there that the Bergsonianism that does exist in land comes through Deleuze and Guattari and specifically through the critique of the possible in order to make space or to kind of reveal how the virtual works instead, is where he's really prevalent in Land. But the thing that takes the place of vitalism, as Fisher kind of, I think, quite correctly puts here,

is this notion of the will. And there's this great essay in Fang Numenau where Land kind of goes through all these iterations of the will in Western philosophy to kind of pull out this phenotropic death drive version of it that will end up becoming the Terminator in Skynet called Artisansurrection I think is the name of the essay but yeah it's more about the will as the death drive which is the animating force here rather than any kind of vitalism I reckon I disagree a little bit.

I think, no, I do, because I think land thought suffers from residues of vitalism, machine vitalism or machinic vitalism inherited from the Luzangatari and inherited from a form of inverted naturalism. But you know, I'm going to give Amy and Jason the benefit of a doubt and wait to see more of their contribution in text about this because I'm not as familiar with Lan's work as these guys are. I think that's an interesting point though, that you can have a machining vitalism. But Yeah, maybe we should talk about this later on Facebook or something, Mo, because I'd

like to hear more about this angle. I don't have any kind of definitive pronunciation on Lan's work. I'm still figuring it all out myself. You know, it is kind of like Bergsonian because Bergson's pure temporality, right, pure duré is like this sort of like this thing that we only strive for but we never get there, right? Like, what is this, like, we're not cybernetic yet or we're not cybernetic enough? I think a more sober, I don't know, we can talk about it elsewhere, but I just wanted to file my dissenting opinion. No, yeah, I share a lot of your sentiments, Mo, about that. Hey! I'm not bothering anybody. I think this is very relevant to the material we're doing, or at least it's really interesting

with the material that we're doing. Okay, Jason, do you want to get into Terminator? Okay. So, yeah, there's a lot about Terminator in here. I think it's relevant to Avatar, of course. So let's see. The first thing I want to start with is maybe just not from the text at all but from the score to the film. If people, I don't know if people paid attention to the music from

the film, the score and the music from the film. But it had a very kind of unique sound I think and one article I found talked about kind of the rhythm that it had which turned out to be 13, 16. And if you listen to it, I wish I could actually just play it, but usually when I watch a film or I look at some kind of cultural artifact like that, I personally prefer to look for things that aren't really the narrative. And I also look at film, but I don't really want to look at the visual. I want to look at the audio.

I want to look at some other dimension than what people are usually looking at. So I would just say that the sound of it, I thought it was interesting what Fisher says about how this related to jungle. I thought this might be something that Petra or Ivan, although Ivan is not here right now, might want to expand upon. Let me see if I can find that in my notes for a little bit here. Okay so here's a quote. He says, so he's talking about Terminator, where actually he talks about, this is part of where he's talking about Nickland. He says that Nick Land pirated Terminator, Blade Runner, and Predator as examples of

an accelerationist cyber culture. And this cyber culture he defined in the following way. This is a quote. A cyber culture in which, quote, digital sonic production disclosed an inhuman future that was to be relished rather than abominated. Land's machinic theory poetry paralleled the digital intensities of 90's jungle, techno, which sampled from exactly the same cinematic sources, in this case meaning Terminator, and also anticipated impending human extinction becoming accessible as a dance floor. If any of you want to, one thing you could do is just go on YouTube and type in Terminator,

comma main theme, or Terminator 1 comma main theme, and you'll hear this very off kind of sounding score that the film has, particularly in that song. There's also a, if you type in Terminator comma 10 hour on YouTube, you'll also find this massively, massively long YouTube video of just the score and the sound for the whole film. And apparently that's because there was supposed to be a 10 hour director's cut. That's some rumor I saw in some comment. I'm not sure if that sounds unlikely to be, but maybe it's true. It seems like it could be true. If somebody actually produced a 10 hour

score, it could certainly maybe be true. But this comment said that that director's cut would be coming out in 2015. I wouldn't be surprised if it's not true. But let me just give you a quote that kind of describes that score. It says, this is from somebody who went to investigate it because of this very off sounding rhythm. It says, basically what the guy who created, his name is Brad Feedle, he recorded samples of himself whacking up a frying pan to create these clanking sounds. Then he played melodic griffs on a synthesizer over a looped beat.

Amid the throes of creation, what he hadn't quite noticed was that his finger had been a split second off when it pressed the button to establish that rhythm loop. an old machine there is no auto correction and this produced a profoundly herky-jerky time signature. Field just went with it. The beat seemed to be falling forward and he liked its propulsiveness. I think if you listen to it, this description, the beat seemed to be falling forward and he liked its propulsiveness, you can really hear a lot of the more, I guess, edgy forms electronica and other kinds of music coming that are maybe somewhat indebted to that. So I don't know if you want to pick up on that, Petra, because I know that's something you thought a lot about. Sure, I can try and pick up on that in terms of how I think it relates to Jungle,

but maybe, like, do you want to ask me that in some kind of way? Sure, okay, so here's a possible question. Do you think that, or how exactly, what exactly is the, I mean, you can get into, like, the film itself, but in my opinion, it's always all as, as well as visual, amongst other things. So, to me, this is the film itself. So, I I guess I'm just wondering what relates to between these kind of offbeat rhythms and time signatures that you find both in the Terminator score and in Jungle, he says, Jungle,

Techno, Doomcore, and some other things like that. What is the relationship to the accelerationism and this auditory aesthetic? One word that was used a lot, I don't particularly like it from a style perspective, but one word that was used a lot to describe Jungle is sample with Dalek, which I think is kind of interesting as a concept. I think that's Simon Reynolds who writes that way, and I guess what he's trying to say with that is that Jungle came together as a result of very early but consumer level, you know, PC music. It was, there were, you know, cheap consumer level samplers that kind of virally

spread out into the culture in a way. And what it allowed people to do was kind of take the raw material of their spectacular media world and recombine it into this kind of, like, inhuman, cybernetic... I kind of relate it to, like, Batai's maybe, like, general economy, where, like, that material is all being, in a way, sacrificed to this machinic desire or desiring machine. is kind of how I see it connects back into Land and Dalus in that way, and into Terminator,

which is also kind of about a planetary consequence of these desiring machines, and really... And then connects also back into the... I think Mo was talking about the... Or maybe it was you, Jason. about the human being already always technological, and that we are ourselves always participating in this sample-adelic desiring machine. And it's a kind of machine vitalism in that way. Jungle music is, I think. You were talking about the Terminator score and how there was this happy accident of the sequencer being too old to synchronize with the rest of the song,

the song, and what you have there is this kind of vitality of this machine, right? It sounds like it's falling forward of its own accord, and that's what's interesting about it, in a way. Great, thank you. Anybody else have any reflections on the Terminator aspect of this? I guess in terms of the context, I'll just make sure you speak up one. I don't know if everyone can hear me. I guess in terms of the film itself and the emotional response, that I feel like the offbeat sort of time signature produces this sense of discontent, right?

It's like a rhythm that never really resolves itself. and so I think it produces like a feeling that reinforces this fear of becoming cybernetic, right? It adds to this kind of dissonance that I think the film really sort of presents, right? With the idea of humans and their cyber future perhaps. Yeah, absolutely. yeah, it's a kind of anxious yeah yeah anybody else? Fear of a cyber goth planet

I just wanted to flag one issue which has been bugging me and it's only very briefly brought up in Mark's piece where he, on the bottom of the page page, 343, where he says, this is quite deliberately theory of cyberpunk fiction, Deleuze-Guitari's concept of capitalism as the virtual unnameable thing that haunts all previous formations pulp-wolded to the time-bending of the Terminator films. What appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligence base that must assemble itself entirely from its enemies' resources, from land.

Does this determinism, or fate, or I think Land calls it doom, using one of the old words for fate, the terminator indexes in this particular vision of capitalism, that I'm still trying to reconcile with the cyber positivity or the political potential of a lot of this earlier writing. And I think the determinism of the terminator figure, the fact that whatever you do, it's already here and it's already bringing about its own eventuation in the future, in the present. Or as Fischer puts it here, that it's the thing that's in all

of the previous social formations. It's always been here, just waiting to kind of come out. And Jungle, in a way, is like the opera music of the Terminator being always already here. Totally. But yeah, I just find that a really curious point, that there is this cybernetic Terminism in early accelerationism, as it is kind of figured here in its CCIU version, that the openness of the future that left accelerationism is kind of heading towards. Those two possibilities are completely at odds, and the Terminator figure is something

that even though Mark Fisher brings it up here as an opposition to the avatar of primitivism and organicism, to me it still has this inevitability of a particular historical path or a particular outcome to it that I'm having trouble reconciling with the whole accelerationist move. So if anyone had any kind of comments on that, I'd be really interested to hear them. Yeah, you know when I read that, so I don't know if this is exactly what he has in mind, and I do get a sense of a little bit of the determinism that you were saying, but in Anti-Oedipus, I think it's the third chapter where dualism, let's re-talk about the state, they talk about

capitalism as being one of the virtualities of the state along with despotic and barbaric you have capitalism or capital as a virtuality in a process and that each of these virtualities themselves can become actual at any point in time but they don't have to be. I mean, I would have to pull out the book and actually reread this stuff and actually think about it more and more, but the first thing that came to my mind was maybe something like that is happening here. But yeah, I don't know if that is something that would satisfy your answer. No, no, that helps actually.

I'm gonna go look it up after this. Thanks. I was going to just add a couple of words to what Amy was saying, and that is, even though these types of returns to the future, going to the past to rewrite its own future, they're not that determined actually, nor in the stories, right? in the stories nor in the way biological, technological, cultural evolution has worked.

And that's what's exciting about all those movies in which there are two types of these types of movies, right? When the time machine lets you go to the past or something and then you want to intervene to stop something from happening, but you can't because, you know what I mean, there's this, like, fate and this inevitability or, like, determinism. But then there's the types of, these types of return, future returning to the past, in which in the story itself, there's an openness and contingency, so, like, plays to a greater extent, and the movie's open to allowing contingency to change the future in the past. So even like the future is successful in coming in the past to change its own future.

Good example of that would be this movie that I really wish somebody took it on and took a position on it, which is like 13 monkeys, and you must have seen that movie, right? In which the field is completely open for 12 monkeys, yeah. And isn't 12 Monkeys a remake of, you guys probably know. Isn't it a remake of like. La Jeté? Yeah, yeah, La Jeté. Yeah, it's a remake of, or it's done. It's inspired by it or something. Yeah. That is a great. Except it's an actual movie and it's not like black and white photos and all that.

So I just went straight to the films. The Hollywood ones. Yeah, yeah. Gary Gilliam, yeah, who directed it. I don't remember what happens in it, but I've watched it so long ago. But it keeps coming up, so maybe I'll go back and watch it and see if I can see what you're talking about. Let's see if there's any last things to say about... I mean, we haven't, I guess, maybe that focus on the jungle took us a little bit off of, because I mean, obviously the most fundamental difference, the most fundamental way that Terminator is playing into his article in particular is that in Terminator there is no assumption

of some organic life really. That really depends how you read it of course. But that narrativistically and the whole point of the film is, if you agree with practice, some people agree that way, is that we're all already replicates. Just like everything is already originally technical. And if you juxtapose that to Avatar, in Avatar of course it's not really like that at all. kind of organic and then there's this organic community who are kind of figured as the natives being colonized externally from technological, from like a technological colonial power and

I think that's not at all what's happening really in Terminator. Any other reflections on Terminator, like the visual side of it or the narrative part of it? Relation to accelerationism or Fisher? Alright, so let's move on to Parisi and we're almost done. We'll be done at 8. than the eight. So Parisi is doing some of the same things, I think, that are kind of implied in the other pieces. Parisi's piece is called Automated Architecture. And she begins by invoking algorithm and the ways

that algorithms have developed quite rapidly over the past four decades or so. But there are still things that algorithms cannot do despite becoming more and more integrated in things like real time and live and interactive technologies such as the Google Hangout that we're in right now. One of the algorithms of course being the way that the moment someone speaks on here, unless we have it set up on presentational mode, which we do now, the algorithm of the Google Hangout automatically features whoever is speaking, so it's totally voice activated.

But that's still something that is being programmed into the algorithm. And I think the question that Parisi is raising here is can they get to a point where algorithms are already capable themselves of creatively developing in some kind of semi-autonomous fashion or maybe fully autonomous fashion. And another move that Parisi makes here, Parisi I think is a little bit more on the Deleuzian side, kind of a new materialist kind of approach in a way, but also intersects a lot with those who are not so Deleuzian. Another major thing that is, so one of the things that she wants to do right away is

to look at the relationship between computation and materiality. And so she talks about how these new algorithms and their development over time have given a rise to computational design thinking. And design thinking which she says is not representational but is directly creative and is a quote material computation. Quote the acceleration of automation is pushed forward in an anti-digital form of computational thinking that aims to become one with the fluctuating dynamics of matter. And this emerges out of the rise of interactivity. She says that this quote allows matter to become the motor of truth,

to become one with and ultimately constitutive of formal reason of the rules and the patterns that emerge in the automation of space and time. And she quotes Costas Trusidis in a way that actually kind of reminded me a bit of Jasper Poirier's recent essay on panopticism. It's just a brief essay that appeared just recently where she talks about super panopticism and data bodies that data bodies being surveilled prior to any physical body actually being surveilled. In other words, what's surveilled is what you search for on Amazon, what you search for on the library website. That which NSA's treasure map enables the

cyber persona layer of the security state. Yes, yes, exactly. Yeah, and so, I think And so when she's citing Terzidis, basically what she says is that the abstraction that happens now is not on the level of experience or perception, but instead, quote, becomes a vehicle for exploration that extends beyond the limits of experience or perception. So the old model being, in this case you could say, the old model being that of panopticism and of surveilling the actual, quote unquote, actual physical body, and now the rise of super-pronasticism and the surveillance of searches that people make and purchases that

people make with their credit cards, your digital profile. And so this, she says, is a move beyond vitalism, according to which material computations are are still induced by the continuity of physical processes, which then produces what she calls an algorithmic reason. So because we're no longer dealing with physical computation or even the surveillance of, say, physical bodies per se, now we have a form of reason that is algorithmic. And so the whole kind of point of this text is to begin to articulate a concept of speculative reason.

And this is defined as, quote, a theory of speculative reason is one that not only does away with the dominance of deduction and or induction in computational design thinking, but it also adds another mode of reason to both of them that is able to surpass and nonetheless bring forward both truth and fact into an experimental axiomatic. And something like Siden Shiburo does, she goes back to Whitehead for this, and she says that Whitehead rejects both pure and practical reason, rejects both the pre-Kantian idea of reason and the post-Kantian neo-Kantian idea of reason. And instead of that she realizes theory, so instead of realizing theory on the one hand,

making theory real, or treating reason as one fact amongst the other facts of the world as practical reason, she says that Whitehead's speculative reason, quote, sits comfortably neither with the formal nor practical methods and suggests instead that reason must be re-articulated according to the activity of final causation. And so the type of reason that she's trying to develop or this algorithmic reason that she's trying to think of would be a function of reason that is, quote, progressive and never final. In other words, algorithms, this is how I read it, I might be wrong. What I'm reading her is saying that she wants a form of algorithm that is itself, that has its own internal creativity and ability to create new algorithms rather than just being

a computative form of algorithm that is created by humans on the input side or that is addressed to human on the output side but is instead less concerned with physical humans and more like data bodies as Quark calls it, or that the algorithm itself becomes a creative entity. So we have about six minutes left. If people have any comments on those ideas? I guess what's interesting is that unlike the, I guess, supposedly only organic body,

the data body becomes an interesting site of a new politics, like, and an accelerationist politics as well. Oh yeah, yeah, that would have been nice. What kind of comments? I don't know what that is. I mean... Yeah, go ahead. Maybe like, I'm getting a little feedback. Okay, just a minute. I'm gonna mute and then you can go ahead. Okay. in what way, what kind of politics of the data body? I mean, that's a really good question. That is actually something, like, the new center research group might be really interesting for,

is, like, dissociative data politics in a way. So it's, like, non-politics in a way. Yeah, it is, like, non-politics in a way. Yeah, non-Euclidean politics. Yeah, like non-Euclidean politics. Like, I called it that, and I've been referring to it. It's like the era we live in and the growing significance of collaboration between humans and machine, you know what I mean? Like, forces the question of politics back to the table of epistemology.

And this is really what's at stake here, which is sort of like a new conception of politics, which is not separate from what it means to produce knowledge. And I'm not talking about, obviously, not about the way Foucault figured it out for us, which is sort of like still the, and that's like part of like what Marxists agreed with, you know, like knowledge is power, right? And how for Foucault, knowledge was political, but more like the reverse of it, which is knowledge is political, yeah, but politics is knowledge.

And sort of like, you know what I mean? Like breaking that discourse bottleneck that Foucault created for the relationship with knowledge and politics, right it's like because you know I'm just I'm just like reducing to just make it make a point and correct me for for Foucault it's so like it's like there's all these sorts of knowledges but then through discourse knowledge is picked by power and whatever big whatever's whatever is useful for power becomes the dominant knowledge and become discourse right so like the bottlenecking right and what we're talking here is like the bottles being cracked the bottles being broken no longer there's this possibility that actually the hold of politics over knowledge can be loosened or completely opened.

And that's what's interesting to me about sort of like what you said and how I joined your conversation and called it non-politics. Or non-Euclidean politics. It's like the Klein bottle has been broken. Like the non-orientable Klein bottle of politics has been broken. So if knowledge is power in one orientation, and when the body in the organic sense is the site of politics, then the non-body... There's an opening for the non-body to become the site of a non-politics.

Yes. So, like, social media is not self-expression, expression but it is non self-expression and that's really interesting there's so there's so much work to be done so much good rigorous work to be done about all of these and and like we're in the first page of all this and really this is what excites me because you know like I mean I've been you know There's like the popular knowledge, you know what I mean?

New York Times, you know, like New Yorker magazine, and kind of like mainstream media. Middle ground. Yeah, like people who have talked about how technology is changing the world and how social media is changing the world and all that. And then there's the academic one. And really, we're still, I don't think the rigorous work has even started to happen. And to me, that's what the potential there is. particularly in what we do and more generally in what the discussion of technology among people who contribute to acceleration discourse and irrational discourse are doing. The AGI, you know, the kind of work that Reza and Peter Wolferndale and others are doing philosophically are just like the beginning of real promising work in really sort of like

not just understanding but kind of like shaping this, shaping it as we move forward. Yeah, I agree. The inhuman, right, in terms, in Reza's terms, becomes really interesting here for me as we're on this topic of like the non-politics, what is that, or what... Well, you know, to put it in Foucault and Agamben, like, so to just like, so biopolitics, right, becomes technopolitics. That's sort of like, that's sort of like, but you know what I mean?

The word biotech already means so much that we really need a new word for it because if you say biotech politics, you know what I mean? It's just like biotechnology has a history of being like part of applied science, right? So we really need to sort of like figure out ways to describe this continuity between like all the discussions we've been having so far about like how humans are always post-human, how like the stuff that me and Jason have been bringing to the class of how there's no distinction between technology and you know what I mean, real organic and all that. But biotech is just like not a good word. So let's just see if you can come up with a term and maybe put it on a glossary. That's a really good idea.

But while biotech is the term we have, there's something really interesting about biotech in terms of non-identity or non-identity politics in a way. The distinction between sex and gender generally comes out of the 1940s very early biotechnical medical industry where clinicians had to find a way to make a distinction between people who wanted what we call sexual reassignment surgery and people who didn't. And that's where we get the word transgenderism, and that is a non-identity politics to transition

from the gender you're assigned to the one your non-self would prefer to express. And that's only possible because of the biotechnological discourse of the 1950s, really. But that's problematic in its own way too. So if we can find a core of reference that's more non-political than biotechnology, which is a very particular techno-science and an institution that really mediates transition, but at the same time as in the way that capital is generally useful and the way that

accelerationism means to reappropriate what is useful in capitalist production, the gate of biotechnology can be broken, right, and stolen. We can loot the gate of biotechnology. Well, I put a word down, and I think maybe I'm reading Jose, it's like it's so hard to kind of like talk and read, but I guess you have to learn how to do that. But yeah, maybe we should like abduct the term biotech and redefine it. Reorient it, yeah. For a new purpose, you know, along the line of biopolitics. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, yeah, along the, exactly, along the line of biopolitics. Biotechnology, I mean, we all know what biotechnology means, right? Biotechnology refers to

medical machines, like that's what, when you say, I'm studying biotechnology, that's what people do, right? Maybe we just invert it. Maybe it's technobiology. Yeah. I'm typing all these things in. Anyway, Jason, sorry I interjected. No, that's fine. I think we are at kind of the stopping point for this week. The only thing left would be to divide up the words for the glossary. So if people would like to do that. And I'm just pulling up the syllabus here.

Sorry, Jason. Oh, go ahead. I was going to ask, do you mean signing up for the words? Yes, yes. There's also like, it's OK to have a couple of people picking up the same word. And then we will collapse their contribution into one. But it's also good to look on how these glossaries are done at a graduate level. There's a lot of information on how to write these types of glossary entries. So it will be great to not follow rules, but be aware of the extent in which you need to go to define these terms. And Jason, I just want to say please copy-paste the conversation,

sidebar conversation in the classroom, because there's a lot of interesting stuff here. I also have all of it too, if there's any problem. Okay, so I'm just going to go through these words. If you have your syllabus up, I'll just take notes on who is doing which one. So first of all would be abduction. Who would like to do abduction? I'll just write it here in the chat and then we'll have it. Would it be... Go ahead. Sorry, it's just a bit loud here, so I don't want to overwhelm.

But would it be easier, since there's just a few of us here, to just say which ones we've taken? Or because I think Jose and I have both signed up, and I don't know if Robert is still there. Yeah, I'm here. I just don't have the syllabus. I don't know how to sign up for these things. Oh, okay. So yes, and that would be helpful to you. Okay, yeah, if you're ready to tell me which ones, I will write down your name, and then I'll write down the ones that go with you. Yeah, I just signed up on Google Docs already, and I put my name with hyperstition, platform, and speculation. I just linked to the Google Doc that Igor started for all of us to go into and sign up for the glossary.

Yeah. Thanks. Okay, can you just get onto that from the NewsCenter email? Because it says I need permission with my email. Oh, okay. Can't get to it. Are you signed in with your NewsCenter email? No, no, that's my question. Should I be in my NewsCenter email for this link? Yeah, if you want to sign into it, you need to be in your news center email. Okay, sounds good. But actually, since we have this thing, you can just do it online. You don't need to sit here and do it. Is everybody comfortable with that, or do you need any more explanation, or do you feel comfortable just signing up via online? If I'm

like auditing as a member should I still be participating in this or would you rather I stay out of it? No, absolutely if you want to and one other incentive why you might want to is that we are going to try to do something with this so it's a chance to get involved in writing something that will be seen Okay, cool Well, then, yeah, I think this spreadsheet is probably the best solution, Ben. Great, great. All right, well, thanks for joining us, everybody, and next week is going to be really great. Not only a bunch of more good readings, but we're also going to have, coming into the Hangout, we're going to actually have Mark Fisher as a guest, and we'll also have Patricia Reid.

So I'm really looking forward to that, and I think it'll be a good wrap-up for the session and for the seminar and for the new center's first season. I have one more question, Jason. Sorry. Yeah. Just for my annoying planning purposes, is there a rough time for these things that we want to try and work towards? Just by probably just like the 23rd, you know before you know just before people go up. Cool. Thank you. Okay. Well thanks a lot everybody. We'll see you soon. Thank you.

Bye everyone.