Alright, 6.30, let's do this. Okay, so we're now moving on to the sort of second, very loose module, focusing on LAN's post-ECRU writings. So, as always, this lecture is going to be broken down into two parts, actually kind of sort of three, as we'll see. but certainly the first half is going to explore land's notoriously controversial political philosophy of a patchwork of privately owned states which purportedly set capital free to pursue technological advancement without needing to cater to humanity's base needs and yeah this will also, for the Marxists, some of us
that are still Marxists, that will put us in a good position to see, also look at and contextualise later critiques of Land's political philosophy by people like Ray Brazier and Nick Cernak and Alex Williams in the final week and then in the second half we're going to look at how Land turns to writing horror fiction because he sees the genre as a better compositional form than traditional philosophy to continue the CCIU's critique of metaphysics, of anthropocentrism in so far as horror is able to stage a confrontation with that which lies beyond our parochial comprehension. So we're truly past the event horizon beyond which cancellation is almost certain as extinction.
So I've also, instead of an image, I've got an epigraph for today to start with, which is by the mystic Johann Eckhart. And he says, When the soul has got so far, it loses its name but is drawn into God so that in itself it becomes nothing. When the detachment reaches its climax, it becomes ignorant with knowing, loveless with loving, and dark with enlightenment. So it's just, it's a great quote that Sarah actually showed me that I feel just basically everything that we're looking at today, both the abstract horror stuff, which has a very mystical bent to it, as well as, of course, the dark enlightenment is basically encapsulated in this one quote. Yeah, okay, but we begin with the dark enlightenment.
Okay. Now, while Land was already drawing on traditionalist and reactionary thinkers like Edmund Burke as early as 2005 on the CCIU's Hyperscient blog, I think to really understand what's called, I guess, his near reactionary turn, it's first necessary to understand the new political context in which this turn transpired. so if the socio-political backdrop for the land's initial turn to a kind of unbridled cybernetic capital was fashioned by Reagan, Thatcher, Deng Xiaoping, figures like that right his near reactionary turn emerges as this neoliberal consensus that capitalism is the only game in town is beginning to unravel. The first cracks in the neoliberal consensus emerged
as far back as 1994 with the Zapatista army's national liberation struggle against the Washington consensus that obliged Mexico to neoliberalise its economy in return for financial aid. But I guess wider cracks emerged through the system's own imminent dynamics during the 1997 to 1998 Asian financial crisis, which were also followed by recessions in Brazil and Russia. in 1999 masses of protesters took to the streets of Seattle Washington DC, Davos Prague, Melbourne as well and other world cities to protest the global inequalities and sweatshop working conditions that neoliberalism's free trade policies had unleashed upon the world's poorest with massive demonstrations continuing unabated until
the August 2001 G8 summit in Genoa, Italy at the dawn of the 21st century populist leaders like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela rose to power through mass electoral support leading to what was called the pink tide of radical reformist policies in Latin America and even events like 9-11 that gave the US and its NATO allies a pretext to invade Afghanistan and Iraq under the pretense of combating global terror soon led to widespread anti-war demonstrations and the US military to get bogged down in other countries to this day. But it was ultimately the 2008 global financial crisis
that led to a radical re-interrogation of whether globalised capital really marked the end of history. As people lost their jobs and homes while the banks were bailed out through government handouts and billionaires walked away with bigger bonuses than ever, the Occupy Wall Street protest movement emerged before quickly spreading throughout the world. And just as the Occupy movement started to disperse, the revolutionary wave of mass protests known as the Arab Spring spread throughout North Africa and the Middle East in 2010-12, toppling repressive regimes that were loyal to the neoliberal agenda. While none of these events obviously were ultimately successful in really undermining the neoliberal consensus,
it did seem as if alternatives to global capital were back on the agenda. Maybe it still does today, a little bit. So this is why Land is more pessimistic about the prospects for imminently accelerating the capitalist process in a five-part 2001 blog post on his Urban Futures blog called Suspended Animation. The essay begins by noting that even though state Keynesianism has been leading towards a massive economic stagnation for decades, it has managed to survive through slowly accumulating growth. Despite its long-term sort of buffering of the economy from disaster through what land caused a frozen limbo state of durable unsustainability,
he argues that sluggish economic growth, financial instability, political irresolution and dire climate change forecasts demonstrate that we are hurtling towards global catastrophe. According to Land, this political and economic stalemate emerged when the traumas of the Great Depression led to a kind of dogmatisation of its supposed Keynesian solution, such that anyone who questioned whether less government intervention might better boost the economy was considered unfit for public discourse to be taken seriously. So he says, for the Western world, the 1930s were a near-death experience, an intimate encounter with the abyss, recorded with religious intensity. because the threat was existential or unsurpassable the remedy was invested with the absolute passion of a faith
given that the keynesian consensus which emerged after the depression saw the need for the state to intervene and micromanage the economy land argues that what has really been decelerating the process for almost a century up until the gfc and the bailout of the banks is nothing other than fascism so he says at one point fascism won world war two where fascism means the state the onslaught of the state against this fascist consensus as he sees it land draws upon joseph schumpeter and other austro-libertarian economists to argue that capital unfettered capital you know capital's unknown ideal has never actually been realized on this reading capitalism works through what
Schumpeter called creative destruction. It's a process whereby technological innovations are introduced that increase profits and create new industries for some while bankrupting others in a natural cycle of growth. Here, Land fully acknowledges that the victims of creative destruction are not really being punished by any fault of their own, but simply by the caprices of the market as it finds greater profits in new technologies in areas of growth. Nevertheless, the less it is this very destruction of old capital that creates the conditions for the possibility of new technological innovation and economic growth. So he says, destruction of the existing economy is strictly indistinguishable from industrial renewal. To cross the gulf, we have to enter the gulf. Like most things in this universe, harsh but true.
And therein lies Land's critique of Keynesianism, right? Namely, instead of allowing the new capital to emerge on the ruins of old industries, Keynesianism can only see this creative destruction as a crisis that must be prevented by taxing the rich to make up the costs. But by stripping the rich or capitalist enterprises of their new profits Keynesianism prevents them from investing in those new industries of growth and innovation that could reboot the economy. So for land Keynesianism is a kind of infantile childish impatience before the requirement to suffer brutal economic downturn in order to create new avenues of growth by instead postponing that downturn into the distant future. Sooner or later, however, the debt will get too high and the growth too low
and at that critical juncture it will only be free market investment in technological innovation which can turn the divergent spiral into a convergent wave of economic expansion. Given that reads capital's creative destruction here as the key driver of technological advancement, Keynesianism is exemplary of humanity's political attempt to stave off its own destruction by decelerating the process, right? Yeah, so in other words, the Keynesian politics of the 20th century was nothing but an anthropocentric idealism which sought to delay for as long as possible the brute reality of techno-capital's creative destruction into, you know, delay it as far as possible into the far future. So the suspended animation of the essay's title is
nothing other than humanity's suspension of a de-territorialising capitalist techniques. Much as the CCIU and land see Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis and capital as basically two sides of the same coin, so does he argue here that the philosophical expression of Keynesian economics is post-modernism and particularly Chuck Derrida's deconstructive method of forever displacing and deferring differance by locating a presence which differance always presupposes. On Lann's reading, Derrida's prolonged postponement of differance is the kind of philosophical or even ideological symptom of Keynesian politics, displacement of
creative destruction by putting it off to the far-flung future. It's a kind of pretty brilliant reading of kind of almost Marxist reading of deconstruction as expressive of a certain kind of Keynesian mode of production but yeah so he says long before derridoids got started Keynes had taught governments that difference was something they could do procrastination, the strategic suspension of economic reality through a popular ungraspable series of displacements and postponements quickly came to define the art of politics why suffer today what can be put off until tomorrow or suffer yourself something that could be somebody else's problem. Postpone, displace. In the long run, we are all dead. Reality is for losers. While Land admits that it might seem as if
Keynesian deconstruction could just go on forever, he insists that it will not be able to sustain itself for much longer as its slow stagnation comes to a grinding halt upon which the economy will alone be saved through the dynamics of creative destruction. So, yeah, although Land still believes that Keynesianism will wither away sooner or later, he does betray, I think, in this point, a greater pessimism about its capacity to decelerate the process of its own self-destruction in light of, for example, the US government's bailout of the banks after the GFC. in the aftermath of the GFC and particularly in 2011 and 2012 Land increasingly laments the way that
Keynesian governments are inhibiting technological innovation and enterprise he says science, technology, creative culture and enterprise are likely to spring some upside surprises but the degenerative horror of the world's hegemonic Keynesian political economy combined with increasingly irresponsible neoconservative democracy mongering has ominously synchronised itself with the darkest visions of the 2012 cults. Whereas Land once saw the techno-capital singularity as imminent and unstoppable, particularly in the CCIU era, he now acknowledges that the state apparatus has more power and cunning to it at the very least decelerate the process than he had first imagined. so consequently he begins searching for a practical program
for a kind of new world order which could unfetter capital rather than just sort of passively awaiting for Keynesian governments to self-destruct yeah in other words Land has effectively gone from arguing in a 1997 interview that organisation is suppression to acknowledging in a 2017 interview that, as he puts it, I just don't think you can make an ideology purely out of entropic social collapse. It is not a sustainable, practically consistent process, and therefore it's a bad flag for accelerationism. All historical evidence seems to be that the party of chaos is suppressed by the party of order. While Land identifies libertarians, right-wing libertarians, as the
only voice of resistance to the complete state seizure of the economy, he dismisses them as hopelessly deluded in their belief that a democratic majority would ever opt for unfettered capital. On the contrary, Land argues that the electorate will always prefer social welfare handouts to meet their immediate needs over long-term creative destruction to radically boost the economy atop mass unemployment. So he says at one point, trusting mass democracy to preserve liberty is like hiring Hannibal Lecter as a babysitter. so while Land rejects libertarianism and as we'll also see white nationalism on the far right in 2012 he found precisely the practical political model he was searching for oddly enough on an obscure
kind of far right blog ok so this is Mancius Moldberg looking like a poor man's model and his real name is Curtis Yarvin so between 2007 and 2009 Mencius Moldbug espoused a new political philosophy on his blog Unqualified Reservations which soon garnered particularly a following among Silicon Valley's tech industry Moldbug started his blog in 2007 just before the GFC and what Land and many libertarians saw as the biggest government handout in history to the banks who were responsible for the crisis while Moldbug certainly agrees with libertarians understanding of the bailout as a kind of state
socialist restructuring of the free economy he rejects their typical response of either simply cynically lamenting that everything is going wrong or dreaming of a utopian perfect libertarian society without really contesting the advance of the state in any practical concrete way he says this is Moldbug libertarianism is as its detractors are always quick to claim and essentially impractical ideology. I would love to live in a libertarian society. The question is, is there a path from here to there? And nor does Moldbach see the rising white nationalism on the far right as a solution, insofar as it overlooks that the fundamental problem is not so much immigrants or illegal immigrants as it is democracy, whether the populace be all Caucasian or not.
He says, I believe white nationalism is a very ineffective political device for solving the very real problems about which he complains. So yeah, I don't think it's... So, Moldeb is really neither kind of a libertarian like Rothbard or Friedman or Rand or the Austrian Economist, nor a kind of clear white nationalist like Richard Spencer or David Duke. Instead, in place of white nationalism and libertarianism, Moldeb proposes a theory that he calls formalism or neocameralism. So like Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, pictured there, Molberg holds that the fundamental evil that social governance should be designed to prevent is disorder, anarchy, and violence.
According to Molberg, such conflict generally emerges when there are no clear and absolute rules for deciding to whom property belongs. He says we need a rule that tells us whose wallet is whose. Violence, then, is anything that breaks the rule or replaces it with a different rule. If the rule is clear and everyone follows it, there is no violence. What Moberg proposes is that we formalise, hence formalism, we formalise the current implicit oligarchies that already exist as having absolute sovereign right over what is presently only implicitly theirs. He says, let's figure out exactly who has what now and give them a little fancy certificate. Let's not get into who should have what. So Möhlberg thinks this can be done by permitting capitalist enterprises to purchase and own town states and even hold countries as their own sovereign property.
On his account, enabling capitalist corporations to own entire cities and states not only pragmatically takes into account current implicit power relations, it's also for him ideal. After all he reasons, if the government is run like a business, it would have to attract residents to its territory to produce goods and services. to that end the sovereign corporation or what he calls sovcorp would have to provide top customer service in the form of creating a safe clean and prosperous place to live in return for getting to live in the sovcorp's realm or what he calls in the following citation for nargland the residents would perform services and labor that would then be appropriated as a rent tax so he says if government were a business it would provide
good customer service to attract citizens. For Nargland is a business. Like any business, it has no reason at all to alienate its customers. Does the barista at Starbucks fit in your coffee? The happier for Nargland can make its residents, the more it can charge them. Weird example, because Starbucks coffee is pretty bad. But, you know, in any case, what Morbugs is getting at is that a Sovcorp would have no incentive to oppress or kick out its residents from its private city, state, or country, since it still needs to attract residents to provide goods and services. And from time to time, Moldberg characterises the Sobcorp system as a neocameralism in the sense that just as kings in the Cameralist era, just as kings owned their kingdoms
as their own sovereign property, so would the Sobcorp own the city, town or country as its own private property. The key difference between a traditional, I guess, royal absoluta estate and Moldbug's neocameralist Sovcorp is that the Sovcorp's pursuit of profit naturally incentivizes it to hire the best and brightest to manage and govern the Sovcorp. So the Sovcorp avoids traditional monarchy's hereditary principle of passing on ownership of the realm to the king's sons, whether they be fit for the job or not. So Moldbug says, the best way for the monarchies of old Europe to modernize, in my book, would have been to transition the corporation from family ownership to shareholder ownership, eliminating the hereditary principle which caused so many problems for so many monarchies
okay so yeah again whereas the cameralism in neocameralism refers to the way that the subcorp owns the state like a king or a monarch is sovereign over their realm the neo in neocameralism denotes the way that the lives of the realms residents have apparently vastly improved by the modern dynamics of this capitalist competition between subcorp. Of course, to be propelled by competition into maximising its customer service and hence rent tax, a subcorp cannot exist in a vacuum all by itself. It must instead be situated in what Moldbub calls a global patchwork system, where it competes with many other subcorp for residents by attempting to provide the best customer
service, attracting more residents and hence maximising profits by taxing those residents. So he says, the basic idea of patchwork is that as the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spider web of tens, even hundreds or thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint stock corporation without regard to the residents' opinions. crucially for the patchwork to function each soft corp would have to permit its people what is called a free exit to leave its realm whenever they wished moebak argues that soft corps would be inclined to permit this free exit where traditional monarchs would not because if a soft corp were to prevent its people from leaving its reputation would be
ruined such that they would suffer a declining rate of new residents and tourists and hence a loss of profits. He says at one point, a realm, do I have it here? No. A realm that pulls this kind of crap cannot be trusted by anyone ever again. It is not even safe to visit. Tourism disappears. The potential real estate bid from immigrants disappears. And I think he uses North Korea as an example of that. But yeah, anyway. The basic idea is that through a patchwork system in which all agree to a free exit for the residents, the soft corps would compete with each other and hence maximise the prosperity of their lands to attract residents to tax. Now while all of this might sound rather ideal, at least maybe it doesn't at all, but maybe it
sounds rather ideal to some extent, at least in Mollberg's eyes, Mollberg does note that the soft corps are likely to encounter a surplus of unemployed people on its territory for whom it has no use. He said, yeah, so so yeah, I think he, by pointing out this, Mollberg kind of inadvertently betrays the problem of running a country like a business when he says that the subcrops would naturally have to sell the unemployed's houses such that they are forced to freely exit, right? He says, what do we do with them? Sell their slums out from under them. Next question. Moreover, while everyone is free to leave a subcorp in the patchwork system, this does not mean that another subcorp is going to accept them. Given surplus
peoples would be forced to leave without any other soft corps being willing to take them the patriarch thus seems to condemn many to a kind of permanent homelessness or refugee status in a kind of barren no man's land in between the soft corps. So he says if our design does not provide for the existence of a larger number of human beings whose existence anywhere is not only unprofitable but in fact a straight up loss to that realm, it is simply inconsistent with reality. And finally to ensure law and order within the soft court, Molberg argues that soft courts must develop an immense and all encompassing security system by surveying everything that its residents do. Now Molberg thinks that the residents
would accept this if it generated a virtually total absence of crime. Nonetheless on Molberg's own account the patchwork system begins to sound rather less than a kind of ideal or utopian as vast numbers of people are seemingly condemned to permanent refugee status, while those living in the sub-corps are watched by the Orsing corporate surveillance state. But, you know, if this isn't a problem at all for Moldberg, it's because what he sees as a good, prosperous society is one which is able to maintain order and security, not necessarily happiness or virtue or something like that. You know, as far as Moldberg is concerned, then the deportation of surplus populations and the constant surveillance of residents is a price worth to pay. Much as, for example, the Leviathan's authoritarian rule is totally acceptable for Hobbes
because his goal isn't to achieve the freer society. His goal is to achieve the most stable society. And the same is true of Moldbug. Okay. Now, according to Moldbug, the main obstacle in the way of the patchwork of these neocameralist subcorps is not the vast number of refugees or surveillance states that it would produce but the dogma that current largely western democracies are the best and only game in town. Molenbach argues that democracy has become a religion and more precisely what he calls an ultra-Calvinist sect of Protestantism insofar as it affirms the same four Calvinist tenets of the universal equality of all men,
the futility of violence, the social justice or the fair distribution or redistribution of goods, and the state management of that redistribution of goods or managed society. In an infamous and ridiculously long series of blog posts called How Dawkins Got Porned, Moldbock argues that although the evolutionary biologist and atheist. Richard Dawkins is a rather virulent kind of atheist. Dawkins is also actually a Christian moralist in that he still abides by the dogmas of the equality of all peoples. So for Mohlberg, Dawkins himself says that Dawkins does not advocate Darwinism in terms of... Darwinism should not be a model
for how to run society for Dawkins, even though he's obviously a virulent Darwinian. Yeah, so as far as Mohlberg is concerned, he's just using Dawkins as an example, but the basic idea is that the only thing standing in the way of his ideal neo-Camarotist state isn't supposedly the masses of refugees or the surveillance state, but it's rather the dogma that democracy is the last society standing at the end of history. Although Moldberg wants to overthrow democracy, he does not advocate a violent revolution to do so. Instead he argues that since democracy is sustained by belief in it as at the very least, you know, what Churchill called the least bad political system possible, neo-reactionaries must discredit democracy
in the eyes of the people by showing how a neo-camerican system would provide greater prosperity, security and order. He says in the first quote, all the reaction must do is convince reasonable, educated men and women of goodwill to support stable, effective and reliable government. In Mollbach's view, this kind of cultural coup d'etat must be staged through the establishment of an anti-university, or what he calls an anti-versity. The goal of the anti-versity is to develop an alternative network of information that counters the mainstream media, the university and the state, by contesting democracy's validity and proffering the neocameralist patchwork as the way to restore peace and prosperity. The anti-versity would begin by developing alternative media outlets and think tanks to counter the mainstream press
and the university. This would then reshape public opinion such that it is conducive to the emergence of a new political party which seeks to enact a neocameralist program. And finally the party ought to cohere around an individual leader, preferably an experienced charismatic CEO, who can bring their business tactics to the art of governance by dismantling the social democratic state from within. So he says in the second quote there, here is how the program starts. The party holds power for only as long as it takes to hire a qualified administrator, an experienced corporate CEO perhaps. It then presents that administrator with a conflict-free responsibility structure and b absolute sovereign authority. I think this was written before Trump, before Breitbart,
before Steve Bannon, but it's amazing I don't know, I just find it an amazing anticipation of the strategy of Steve Bannon, right? Create alternative media, Breitbart, the alt-right, HN and so on, get a charismatic CEO, Trump and dismantle the democratic state from within, I mean this is literally the account this is what happened, right? Yeah, but in any case yeah, so these are all, I mean there's more kind of finesse details but I think we've gone through the key tenets of Moldbug's neocamorous political philosophy, namely the critique of democracy, the ideal of monarchical capital, and the means of getting there through a charismatic CEO sovereign backed by alternative networks of information to the mainstream media,
the media, the university, and the state. Okay, now back to land. whereas Moldberg as we've just seen holds that such a kind of unbridled neocameralist capitalism would lead to human flourishing Land argues that it rather leads to human extinction through the techno-commercial singularity so although Land advocates capital for the exact opposite reason as Moldberg he nonetheless finds in Moldberg a kind of model for instantiating an unbridled planetary patchwork as a way to accelerate the process of technology's creative destruction of Keynesian democracy. In other words, neocameralism for land is nothing other than a concrete political means
for effectuating a critique of anthropocentrism, such as anthropocentrism is, for him, concretely enforced through the democratic socialist state. Okay, now, in his now notorious 2012 Dark Enlightenment essay, He, Land begins by railing against Western democratic societies for being too short-sighted and anthropocentric. So what he means is that democracy's reliance on temporary caretaker politicians who must appeal to public opinion every few years to be re-elected, incentivises them to focus on short-term goals like satiating the populace's desires and immediate needs. if land laments democracy's or to human gratification of public opinion it is because
such short-sightedness renounces the pursuit of long-term future goals like technological innovation so he says for example the democratic virus burns through society painstakingly accumulated habits and attitudes of forward thinking prudential human and industrial investment are replaced by a sterile orgiastic consumerism financial incontinence and a reality television political circus. On Land's account, democracy amounts to what he calls looting the future in favour of a kind of pure presence of, as he puts it, techno-industrial retardation. So whereas the original Enlightenment, the rational Enlightenment, saw the expansion of democracy as the high road to
human freedom and flourishing, the dark Enlightenment is dark because it sees the expansion of democracy as the degeneration of the one thing actually worthwhile about modernity, which is apparently techno-capital's creative destruction. Although Lance sees democracy as going in the wrong direction of a kind of primitive human desire rather than progressive technological advancement, we've seen that he equally takes issue with libertarians who are either cynically resigned to democracy's onslaught or idealistically dreaming of a utopian capitalist society as the democratic state's onslaught proceeds unabated. So he says, the real problem of political philosophy
does not lie in the conceptual effort of modelling an ideal society, but in departing from where we are, in a direction that tends to the optimisation of a selective value. If land is instead attracted to Moldbug's political system, it's because a neocameralist state would be free to pursue long-term technological innovation without the democratic politicians' need to appease short-sighted public opinion to be re-elected every few years. Precisely because the CEO sovereign owns the state outright. He goes on. If the state cannot be eliminated, Moldbock argues, at least it can be cured of democracy or systematic and degenerative bad government and the way to do that is to formalise it. What attracts again, land to molebug is the
practicality. Namely, whereas libertarianism requires replacing society with an entirely different one without a state molebug's neocameralism simply requires that we formalise the fact that the ruling capitalist class are already in charge by making them sovereign owners of cities and states themselves. In this way, land argues that the capitalist class can waste less money on bribing politicians, duping the electorate through media campaigns, paying taxes or finding tax loopholes and more investment on providing good customer service to attract more residents and hence more rent tax. Yeah, so he writes the power of the business class is already clearly formalised in monetary terms so the identification of capital with political
power is perfectly redundant. This requires with a minimum of moral irritation that the entire social landscape of political bribery or lobbying is exactly mapped and the administrative, legislative, judicial media and academic privileges accessed by such bribes are converted into fungible shares. Again, whereas democracy for him encourages people to be lazy by feeding off the state a neocarmist system would encourage everyone to produce as much as possible and as efficiently as possible to pay and earn rent tax. Yes, so for Land, as for Moldbug, it's only a state capitalist kind of Leviathan that can paradoxically unleash free market innovation
from the fetters of democratic short-sightedness. And again, according to Land, what stands in the way of neocameralism is the contemporary political dogma that democracy is the only game in town. Here, Land adopts Moldbug's idea that democracy has essentially become a new religion, which uses the press, education systems, and the state, or again what Mulderberg calls the cathedral, to dogmatically assert without demonstration that its democratic ideas and values are absolutely valid and universal. Okay, now we're really getting to the controversy. So as an example of the cathedral's dogmatic metaphysics, Land notes the way that it's impossible to question the equality of all people.
now I think it's crucial to grasp here that Land is not arguing that people are in fact unequal rather his argument in the dark enlightenment is that even if what liberal progressives say is about you know people's is true and all people's are equal this view is not held because it is true or proven but merely because it's a dogma so he says even if progressive universalistic beliefs about human nature are true, they are not held because they are true or arrived at through any process that passes the laugh test for critical scientific rationality. They are received as religious tenets with all of the passionate intensity that characterises essential items of faith and to question them is not a matter of scientific inaccuracy
but of what we now call political incorrectness and once knew as heresy. it's only at the end of the dark enlightenment that we discover what land's true intention is for tactically siding with with this very niche fringe right the near reacts if land supports the right celebration of unbridled free market capital but not its white nationalism it's fascism it's because he advocates capitalism to achieve a very different end to that of white nationalists or even libertarians and even most near reactionaries in fact whereas conservators libertarians and many white nationalists argue that capitalism is good for humanity or at least the west the rich west in that it generates the wealth of nations land holds that it is good
because of the way it renders us obsolete before its technological march towards the creation of a new ai techno species or what he calls the bionic horizon and so he says at one point seen from the bionic horizon, whatever emerges from the dialectics of racial terror remains trapped in trivialities. It's time to move on. Yeah, okay, so I skipped a bit, so let me just read this as well. So okay yeah so he's taking it so the cathedral right the uh cathedrals incoherent and and you
know in that sense dogmatic belief system is further exhibited for land by the way that its identity politics both sees uh ethnic differences everywhere between all particular groups you know different experiences and yet paradoxically at the same time rejects that there are any actual ethnic differences. On land's account of our contemporary conjuncture, the left, I mean I would call it the right, but the left's very identity politics that affirms its validity by way of securing particular marginalised groups' subjective experiences as immune to critique by anyone outside them has directly resulted in a return of white nationalism on the right who seek the same rights and privileges for white heterosexual men as oppressed minorities receive. So he says here, that's the labyrinth, the trap
with its pitifully constructed stereotypical circuit. Why can't we be cuddly racial preservationists like Amazonian Indians? How come we always turn into neo-Nazis? So I think we can see from this extremely derisory description of white nationalism that Land actually rejects its racial biological determinism as much as he rejects I guess the left's social constructivism. He explicitly says racial biological determinism as he puts it unleashes a horror which is scarcely imaginable. So the land both left and right identitarian politics focus on petty marginal differences between one and the same species. That's the problem. And what both left and right's
obsession with our auto-human differences overlooks is that an entirely new and artificially intelligent species is on the rise. yeah as early as a 2005 high precision blog post called Open Darwin Thread on the CCRU blog Land already made the point that the debate between blank slate social constructivist and biological determinants is fundamentally misguided in so far as both sides as he puts it leave out the bio-libertarian alternative to deep body modification and species mutation through future technology so this is what's going on here On the one hand, biological essentialism obviously wars off any possible transformation of human nature through biogenetic means, and so far as biological essentialism sees nature as absolutely immutable.
So he says in the first quote, The problem with ordinary racism is this utter incomprehension of the near future. Not only will capabilities for genomic manipulation dissolve biological identity into techno-commercial processes of yet incomprehensible radicality, but also other things. On the other hand, Land argues that social constructivists also fall back, weirdly enough, on biological determinism. If social constructivists fail to recognise our technological capacity to radically alter ourselves. So he says, social constructionism is simply a delusion if not pushed deeper into biomutation. so the idea here is that if the social constructivist rejects genetic mutation on the charge that it's going to make us inhuman
it actually, the social constructivist actually does have an idea of a fixed human essence whose meddling would lead to species extinction we're going to come back to those kind of ideas in the last week oddly enough when we look at Luciana Parisi's gender theory because Luciana Parisi explicitly jaws on the dark enlightenment to develop her kind of feminist philosophy so it's pretty interesting so we'll come back to that but yeah in terms of Land's version of the dark enlightenment the key point really is that what the near reactionaries who uphold Land's dark enlightenment
as one of their founding texts often overlook is that Land pursues capitalism for the very same reason that socialists denounce it, right? As leading to our annihilation. Only given that Land sees human extinction at the advent of AI as the only way to kind of attain absolute knowing of reality's truly destructive dynamics, he transvaluates the socialist same theory of anti-capitalist theory of capital in a positive light, with a positive connotation. And in particular, in this essay, Land fully acknowledges that racists will find what he's arguing for as monstrous as the left will. After all, if white nationalists are repulsed by interbreeding between different ethnic groups of the same species, they will be absolutely
horrified at the idea of making way for another artificially enhanced species altogether. So he says in the last quote there, for rational nationalists concerned that their grandchildren should look like them, miscegenation doesn't get close to the issue. Think face tentacles. okay yeah as we'll see after the break it's precisely this face tentacled horror that Land is also going to seek to map out not only through his near actionary political vision but also by writing horror fiction but we'll pause there for any questions or comments and hopefully a bit of a discussion if there are any yeah so are there any comments or questions at this stage.
Oh, yeah. I wanted to ask what you thought about the relationship between exploration and patchwork. You see the self in there as being in a relationship continuation to some extent. So I was wondering how you saw that. Is there some continuation of the original accelerationist project in the adoption of Cato? Or is it a sort of revision in light of the political changes that you mentioned at the start that actually is putting forth something slightly different and it's like a film number two of acceleration?
Right, okay. I don't know an answer to this. I can't... Yeah, definitely going to put qualifications that... reserving the right to revision, but based on what I say as well. But... Bit of both actually. But I do think it's continuous with Lan's vision of accelerating the process. it's just, I mean for him it's, the patchwork is especially I guess the techno-commercial version of the patchwork is the, that is the ultimate planetary political model of capitalism itself it's the future logical extrapolation and intensification
of already existing capitalist dynamics so, and still with the aim for technological innovation and the singularity and so on. So I feel it's perfectly in line, the aims and all this kind of thing. Like if... I would certainly reject the kind of sort of reading of the near reactionary turn as somehow, like, land, you know, just kind of overdosed on insanity, went crazy, then suddenly reappeared in Shanghai as a fascist. Like, I definitely don't... And so... And then, so somehow it's possible to kind of treat the 90s works as in some completely separable from what's going on, what he's writing about now, what he wrote about, or the political philosophy.
I definitely would reject that. There's clear continuity and intention, and in some ways it's just like a kind of ramping up of his vision of capitalism. like interestingly in I think maybe Meltdown or Machinic Desire one of those essays he has this description of Coke and Pepsi as these two corporations that own America and they actually and they're like privatised he describes it as these two companies competing with each other and privatising an entire country and when I look at that it's like okay that's the patchwork right there it's already there basically What about the explicit takeover political project in NRX, versus accelerationism, which
was kind of, I mean, actually just kind of mentally answering my question. So maybe like accelerationism is using capitalism as a means to the end of capitalism, and NRX and our experience of politics as a mainstream and politics are formalizing the power of basically everything yeah yeah that makes sense I don't know I do think there's like so yeah there's continuity but in terms of it also being in some ways orthogonal or something I do think he turns to this more ramped up kind of version of capitalist
acceleration is it's not just kind of logically deduced, it's like actually there's these the contemporary conjunctures changed I think that's what I was sort of going through because he is weirdly pessimistic in all of the 2011-2012 blogs about capital's ability to accelerate the process at all when Obama wins in 2012 he's completely devastated on the urban futures blog but like the but so there's there's this weird recognition that there is a need for something but yeah at the same time it's also not it's not like human agents are creating the patchwork either yeah it's a very strange
tie-back in his trajectory I think to work out all the kind of determining factors for it yeah Any other questions or comments? How do you formalise abstract entities? Like in the state, there are obviously relations between people that are kind of intending. How do you, like what's required? Does Moldock have a, you know, is it just like a standard kind of like insurance thing where you like say that this person's worth this because they do this and this is their
function or is there like a different sort of hierarchy of value? Yeah, I mean like it would be, I mean the way he kind of talks about it, and it sort of changed a little bit as well. So once the, do you mean kind of after, so if we're starting off from the point of view that, you know, the state's already privatised, so how they kind of run within, yeah, so the idea would be, you know, the soft corp owns the state, it's means of production, the land and so on, so then it would be able to determine who gets to live there. And it's obviously going to need certain people to do certain things so that's the deal kind of thing like you get to live here you get this
and this if you do this kind of thing you and so require all kinds of jobs just like anywhere just any like any social formation but the the difference would be that it strictly determines who lives there and although people can also so freely exit from it and uh yeah the the rent tax would be instead of kind of paying taxes it's like a rent tax in the sense that you perform labor for um the state soft court isn't that weirdly like the soviet union like the 50s yeah well some i mean there's some near acts think like uh lenin's new uh new economic plan was the uh during the civil war is the first patch uh like
kind of privatised state capital in the sense that yeah it was paying the state was this exact model basically in small kind of agricultural sectors but yeah see it's an interesting question because I'm never quite sure whether he thinks so for example China now for example it has a kind of like proto soft corp kind of style right because the state does is the main kind of, it's capitalist but it's the state as well, right? Hiring people, running most of the corporations and so on determining who gets to come in highly regulated immigration and yeah and the state is explicitly anti-liberal as well and anti-democratic
so it's like, it's not really in some ways, when I read it, it's like it's not even a kind of prediction or you know, espousal of something to come, it's like we've already got like the proto model of it right already like and and it's not a coincidence that land cause dungzhaoping one of the three transcendental geniuses of our time along with thatcher and reagan yeah so I don't know if that helps I missed last week's session because I was in China and it was sort of relatively small town called Ujin. Everyone I spoke to belonged to the company.
The company was the Ujin Tourist Company, which is probably owned but managed by the state. It was really schizophrenic trying to understand what their allegiances were, what their sense of corporate responsibilities and also the rewards that they received. There was this honest superposition, the sense of allegiance to the state and to a sense of something even beyond the economy, not faith or something like that. the kind of economic rewards they receive to do their jobs, whatever their jobs will, to stimulate internal hard tourism,
a mass of thousands, I don't even know, this town, it's like Venice, it's every three days tens of thousands of people from elsewhere in China, I think I was the only foreign national. Yeah. I wanted to ask you a question, Mr. Trump. You don't mind asking me. No, go ahead. To clarify the thing about the multitudes of petroir. For the, I guess, the economic efficiency of the petroir to operate on the global scale, It's not required something very similar to the kind of
idea of the free market that information is accessible so that perfectly transparent decisions can be made about the market. You know, you know when you choose Pepsi or Coke. you choose it not on the basis of some sort of ideology, you choose it on the basis of all the knowledge you have about the share prices and the circulation of capital at that point. Somehow, isn't that a kind of sublation? Is that like a put-me-out of a conclusion of history to say that is this constantly managed state
of territorial competition? Is that what you're getting at? I don't quite understand that. Yeah, I think so. It's a complicated question, but as far as what I think it's getting at, I mean, that kind of description is more kind of land description of Moldbug, I think, maybe. But not, I mean, because Moldbug, I don't know if Moldbug's not really thinking in these grand, almost teological terms of, like, the final point of history and these kinds of things. I've seen about the residents between all those AI, the information that would allow the kind of sovereignty to hold in territorial terms.
I don't mean geo- Oh, okay. Yeah. ... ... ... ... ... ... the kind of things we have on the top of the mountain. To hear that coming from Silicon Valley is quite intriguing. To hear land and Calgary, with intelligence as well as a different vision.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, Amy, do you think that's a... Yeah, I read a paper about it. Yeah. About being cyber feminist, and I think that there's a way you can read that into land's descriptions of the city, which is also also, to go back to saying, . Which talks about cities as intelligences. Len has basically, I think, where he from last week in . He talks about cities as basically involuting,
self-determining systems that create the same kind of structure that the artificial intelligences So I think that that's possibly a way to read it, but I don't think that the lines are difficult on the . And from conversations that I've had around this stuff, from what I understand, information isn't necessarily guaranteed to pass between patches. The idea is that you have to sell your patch, I mean, you have to market your patch to extract green citizens from the market of popular citizens. So if you're an authoritarian patch that
promotes information and indulgence citizens, you might be preventing people from experts, but you might never be getting the the feels he's at times uh... singapore as a kind of example of us having kind of again very proto elements of this kind of other kind of soft core and he's i mean i was a main using that at one point as example
uh... yes i think that is not information isolated like china's not information isolated from anywhere else even though it's like authoritarian state capitalist or something like that but i think also yeah it does because it does kind of I mean, maybe this isn't your piece, actually, but the... Because it does kind of... Patchwork does kind of start to look like a kind of artificial neural network or something with these different, like, synapses and kind of connecting, you know, in their kind of competition with each other. Like, a general... It tends to... The vector is towards technological advancement or singularity somewhere. You also read about, like, pricing signals in the market basically being a form of artificial intelligence. like market planning is impossible because it doesn't have any
so the idea is that the best way to get information about the market is just to be filled up to the market and the information you get pricey wins and that's the market basically learning to see itself so there's also that if the patchwork is based on a free market system In fact, he's already engaged in this kind of like also clarification. So, at least a lot of structural. Yeah, in fact, he's not a question to tell it. Yeah, yeah. That probably doesn't clarify anything more, complicates things, I guess. But, no, not necessarily. Yeah, yeah. But, yeah, okay.
So, we should probably, it's 7.30, so take a break. I will also play two more bangers again. But yeah, they're both from Mark Fisher's compilation that he made of the 20 greatest jungle tracks all the time. The second one was particularly good seg into the next section because it samples from Francis Coppola's Dracula movie. So it's kind of horrific, if you will. But yeah, we'll take a 10 minute break while I play these. Thank you.
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what you're about is a lot of different I don't know what to do I'm curious about it but I said it's a lot I said it's a lot of truth I'm gonna make a movie set anyway I don't know, it's it I thought you were going to be in a challenge in a situation and then I thought you were going to be in a situation but the whole world should be had I think it's my kind But I'm not sure that I'm going to be in a situation I'm so finished Perfect. It's like, well, finally, you know, I just want to be, you know, fix it. Yeah. And it's kind of like, you know,
you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, they say, All right. Okay, well, Land's compositional prose style, as we've seen, has always bordered on the literary and the experimental, particularly in the CCIU years.
It's only much more recently that he has written two novelists of what he calls abstract horror fiction. While horror also has been always of interest to Land and the CCIU it's only in a short 2015 essay called Manifesto for an Abstract Literature that he explicitly develops a theory of the genre So the essay begins by qualifying that or it's a manifesto rather so it begins by qualifying that the manifesto is different from other manifestos since it is a kind of superfluous manifesto what he calls the manifesto in defence of nothing, insofar as this nothing, or what he also calls abstraction, is always on the offensive as it indifferently surpasses all human control and concerns.
With the CCIU's notion of hyperstition, we've already seen Land develop the idea that fiction is an expression of the imaginary or precisely of that which is not yet real, or not yet existent. So here in the manifesto, as in the CCIU's writings, Lanz sees fiction as the best means to channel what he's calling abstraction, because fiction is inherently descriptive of that which is not, of nothing. So abstract literature is not so much a literary genre, but the very essence of the literary as such. He says in the top quote there, Fiction is bound from the beginning to what is not, to abstraction. Non-occurrences are its special preoccupation. It traffics with things that never happened.
Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's notion that we looked at sort of last week or the week before, this notion of the abstract machine, Land specifies that an abstract literature would be a kind of mystical or apophatic mode of negating and decoding every well-defined thing so as to commune with something that we can barely even conceive. Land gives the example of how abstract expressionist painters, figures like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, were able to visually capture logic and mathematics abstractions from concrete sensible particulars in terms of general numbers and formal terms. While the visual arts are profoundly indebted to formal abstraction, Land argues that modernist literature has not been nearly as abstract.
to kind of remedy this gap in the literature land proposes an abstract literature whose object would paradoxically be the non-object and it would do this by representing the irrepresentable and unveiling the unknown the obscure and the mysterious in such a way though as to preserve their enigmatic allure in this way literature can become a sort of demonic vessel for the thing in itself, right? The thing in itself that is abstracted from all our representational schemas as their purely negative limit concept. So he says again at the bottom of the slide, the object of abstract literature is integral obscurity. It seeks only to make an object of the unknown as the unknown. Given that abstract literature would be, again, as he
puts it, an apprehension of non-apprehension or a perception of the imperceptible as such, it can never directly describe the thing in itself, the noumenon. It must instead allude to the noumenon in, again, mystical, apathetic terms of what it is not. As per the CCIU's Kabbalism, that we looked at in the first week, it's not that abstract literature describes a kind of veiled substratum of reality that could be uncovered. On the contrary, it has no choice but to describe reality in hieroglyphs because there is no underlying substance behind the kind of encrypted firewall except for this ceaseless process of decoding itself. So in other words, abstract literature
must represent the irrepresentable as inherently irrepresentable to any forms of sensible intuition, any categories of our understanding. Okay, now I realize that was, you know, no pun intended, very abstract, but then it becomes more precise in the essay when he goes on to argue that the best generic form of abstract literature is not found in high modernism, but in horror fiction, pulp kind of horror fiction. For land, horror fiction is not concerned with inducing fear, as it is so often characterized or mischaracterized. On the contrary, horror goes beyond fear, a fear that would incite us to recoil from the unknown, because horror actually incites us to delve ever deeper into the unknown,
and inquire the unknown, even as all our conceptual coordinates break down along the way. And the best concrete example of what Land has in mind here is, of course, H.B. Lovecraft's Weird Tales, in which the horror transpires through confrontations with monsters and otherworldly entities, which cannot be directly described except on condition of either turning the narrators completely insane or obliging them to rethink their entire understanding of reality. So, yeah, Land says, The thing horror pursues and from which it flees cannot be an object if life is to continue. At the virtual horizon where thought encounters it, absolute madness reigns. In his essay called Notes on Writing Weird Fiction, among other writings that Land cites in the manifesto,
Lovecraft explains that his weird tales use our oldest and strongest fear of the unknown as the primary means to rupture with our misplaced certainty that our concepts of reason correlate to the objective nature of the things themselves. Whereas the idealist looks at horror as the rupture with reason that must therefore be repressed as a kind of abomination, Lovecraft suggests that we pursue the horror so as to encounter the outside beyond thought altogether. That's his term as well, the outside. It's thus that fear can become a portal into the way that the cosmos really is beyond the bounds of our reasons to simulations, or what Lovecraft thus terms cosmic horror. Here, Lovecraft opposes his notion of the weird tale to other horror fiction that explains
the horror in naturalistic terms, such as, for example, how many gothic tales ultimately reveal the supposed ghost haunting the protagonist to actually be humans trying to deceive them. For Lovecraft, the gothic tales tendency to Gregory might disagree with this, but the gothic tales tendency to naturalise the horror betrays reasons kind of utterly mistaken self-confidence that it can judge all things within its logical, anthropic grasps. So this is Lovecraft he says, it is amusing because of its contradictions and because of the pompousness with which its possessors try to analyse dogmatically an utterly unknown and unknowable cosmos in which all of mankind forms
but a transient, negligible atom. So yeah, the idea is that whereas Gothic tales too often explain away the horror in perfectly understandable terms, Lovecraft's weird tales expose such kind of causal rationality to be an illusion before a greater cosmic force which indifferently surpasses even our wildest imaginings in a way which thereby invokes fear of a truly cosmic proportion. As he famously says, I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best. One of my most strongest and most persistent wishes has been to achieve momentarily the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity
about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis. Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law or cosmic alienage or outsideness without lying stressed on the emotion of fear. In many ways, I think Land's abstract horror is simply a recapitulation of Lovecraft's weird tale, the logic of the weird tale. but what is new is the way that Land proposes to use this literary form as a critical philosophy rather than an aesthetic a philosophy which can therefore help us encounter reality beyond our humanity so back to Land's manifesto
so there Land goes on to focus on the way that Lovecraft's weird tales are generally narrated by intellectuals professors whose self-assurance is shattered upon discovering some demonic demon or secret city that cannot be properly described in human terms in a way which demonstrates the cosmos's indifference to these intellectuals reason you know as lovecraft uh famously puts it in his most famous story the call of cthulhu uh he writes at one point we live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity and it was not meant that we should voyage far someday the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace
and safety of a new dark age. As Land observes, the classical Lovecraftian monsters like Cthulhu or the Shogoths are abstractions, again, in the sense that they are liminal creatures which refuse to be recognized by our conceptual concepts except as you know alien as abominable as the outsideness so he writes a monster has its leading characteristic the nature of an excessive being it is first of all a counter-humanoid eluding anthropomorphic recognition A minimal condition for monstrosity is radical unhumanity. Like Lovecraft, land is opposed to horror fiction that stages mysteries only to reveal who the killer or monster is in full detail,
as in typical slasher films or at the climax of Ridley Scott's original Alien film. Abstract horror is distinguished in that it always shows the unknown danger as inherently unknown, which is therefore impossible to reduce to the sameness of our self-reflection. And Land gives three examples of truly abstract monsters, all of which are perhaps surprising in that they come from what could probably be better described as science fiction than horror films. So namely the three examples are the T-1000 in Terminator, that's composed of liquid metal by which it is able to assume different shapes and without having any fixed form of its own. The Thing in John Carpenter's film of the same name,
which only manifests through the distorted appearance of its prey, such that, again, it can never be directly shown. And the Xenomorph in Alien, particularly during the notorious scene in which the alien bursts through the chest of one of the crew members literally turning him inside out. Notwithstanding the Xenomers full revolution, the film's kind of slightly less abstract ending here. But yeah, the bottom line is that what all of these monsters have in common is the sense of something human and relatable being radically distorted and mutilated by a sinister and uncanny abstraction. An abstraction which cannot be explicitly apprehended except as the breakdown of all apprehension as such. By representing that which is abstracted from all of our possible experience,
Land contends that abstract horror can become the kind of literary instrument for philosophy's pursuit of the noumenon, of the thing in itself. He says, horror anticipates philosophy, spawns it automatically, and provides its ultimate object, abstraction in itself. It comes from the same non-place to which philosophy tends. Land even sides actually with horror against philosophy and so far as philosophy has too often in its history recoiled from the abstract as in the case of for example basically the entire post-Kantian phenomenological tradition from Hegel on to Reson of Garasdani. On the contrary, horror
cannot but pursue the abstractions upon which it is anchored from the very beginning of its history. So he says, Horror defines itself through a pact with abstraction of such primordial compulsion that disciplined metaphysics can only struggle belatedly to recapture it. Some sublime thing, abstracted radically from what it is for us, belongs to horror long before reason sets out on its pursuit. Again, simply put, the goal of abstract horror is the same as philosophy. As Land puts it, to visit infinite ontological devastation upon its readers so as to stage an encounter with a kind of horrific transcendental horizon beyond the reveries and lullabies of reason. If horror is able to capture the truth of reality,
it's because life's true drive is towards death. Life has a death drive, which is to say a drive towards the horror of the irrepresentable. in the sense that death is precisely the same thing, right? Death is that which abolishes representation altogether. Death is abstraction. In another 2014 essay called, a very short essay called On the Exterminator, Land draws on the idea that someone brought up in the first week. He draws on the idea of the great filter that accounts for why we have never seen any other intelligent life in space because the universe is structured in such a way as to extinguish all life, thereby making us one of the cosmos' last rarities. It's this truth of our impending extinction
that abstract horror channels when it apprehends that which thought cannot apprehend. Again, insofar as death marks precisely thought's demise as it comes up against something it simply cannot conceptualise. So Land writes, as the great filter drifts inexorably from a challenge that we might imaginably have to overcome to an encounter we ever more fatalistically expect, horrorism is thickened by statistical cosmological vindication. Through our techno-scientific senses and calculations, the shadow mutters to us, and probability insists that we shall meet it soon. So, as we can see through the first example of the Terminator as an abstract monster, Land holds that the fulfillment of the great filter will ultimately come to pass through, surprise surprise, the technological singularity.
What land here caused the exterminator? Now the exterminator or AI is less a science fiction concept in this essay than a kind of monster of horror. insofar as its potential superintelligence could so drastically surpass our comprehension that it would effectively bring about the end of all human meaning, value and truth. So horror's ultimate monster is nothing other than the techno-capitalist singularity's exponential runaway loop out of its meat prison. He goes on, The ideas of robot rebellion or capital insurgency are crude precursors to the realisation of Shoghoth, conceived as intrinsically abstract, technoplastic, bionically auto-processing matter of the kind that Lovecraft envisages intersecting terrestrial geophysics in the distant past,
scarring it cryptically. Given that Land sees our future extinction at the hands of AI as the inevitable result of the universe we live in, such as it is governed by the Great Filter, he contends that horror fiction is a realism, a realism of the future. so again it's the ultimate hyperstitional genre and therein lies I think why Land turns to writing horror fiction it's the true end of philosophy as an encounter with the outside through the critique of anthropomorphism ok what's the time ok I'm going to go
through I'm going to go through one of I think one of Land's novelists called Philon Du just to kind of concretely evince the way in which he sees horrors channeling the inhuman outside better than even critical philosophy can okay so yeah this is so Land's first 2014 horror novelist Philon Du begins with an image of absolute obscurity out of which emerges specks of thought only by distorting the kind of silent darkness at the end of space and time, which thought can only express through the asignifying traumatised gasps. So he says, this is the beginning, dark silence beyond sleep and time
from whose oceanic immensity some bedraggled speck of attention pulled out and turned, still dazed at the precipitous lip, captures a glimmer as if of some cryptic emergence from eclipse. Then a sound, crushed, stifled, broken into gasps. We soon learn, as we read on, that this abstract beginning is in fact the nightmare of a woman named Alison Turner who turns to her partner Jack to explain that she is worried about their daughter Susie ever since the school set up a meeting to discuss the way that Susie has been frightening her classmates. Although Jack largely dismisses Alison's concerns, he does note that he is worried about that stupid game Susie was always playing because it feels like it ate our daughter sometimes.
The narrator observes that it is strange that they actually had avoided ever discussing Susie's obsession with the game for so long, as if somehow wanting to unconsciously stave off the game as a menace or danger. At one point they say, it was odd, perhaps slightly sinister, for this prominent time wedge driven diagonally into their family to have been so entirely unmentionable. So clearly, Land is initially seeking to build up the suspense by describing Susie's game precisely abstractly and forebodingly rather than in positive, fastidious detail. That day, Alison encounters further trouble at her work as a cult extraction therapist.
The strange thing is that the cult from which her current client Simon is trying to escape, he's struggling to escape from it not because he is so deluded about the cult's fanatical beliefs, but rather because the cult's philosophy seems, as she puts it, too calm, too rational, too civilised, using only arguments rather than coercion to convert Simon to its ranks. She says at one point, there's nothing to stop him walking away, but he can't walk away from himself. whereas the typical cult extraction therapy works by helping the client to see the cult as ridiculous Alison could not help but feel that this client had come to her as she puts it in a desperate search for untruth rather than a reality check now according to the cults
what are called the cults fatalistic pessimistic and apocalyptic philosophy that sounds an awfully lot like the CCRU's own philosophy human experience is constituted by distorting reality's full informational stream. So in the first quote, information flows through us in overwhelming abundance as a deluge. It is screened, sieved, filtered and edited, trimmed, narrativised, delegated to mental subsystems, dumped so as not to drown us. While we normally distort reality, the cult holds that communication with the end of the universe was possible through an encounter with what they call a supreme intelligence or ultimate flood of information. What particularly perturbs Alison is that the client refers to the name of the thing, this flood,
by the same name as Susie's imaginary friend incarnated in her incredibly old and disgusting toy octopus field. So here, again, here is an opening thing. I think Landis continues to deploy a series of cryptic references to cult beliefs and strange coincidences to kind of stir up our anxiety as readers before as we'll see, unleashing the horror in its unrestrained depravity. Yeah, that evening Alison meets with Susie's teacher Mr Bagley who explains that Susie is not so much strange as incredibly smart in a way that can make her ideas, which Bagley notes are of a religious nature, seem bizarre and unsettling to the point where she even drove one of her fellow students to attempt suicide.
The teacher says, her mind is fast and I'd say perhaps daring, venturing into areas few want to follow or can follow. At this juncture, the novela cuts to Jack, the dad, who is giving a lecture on similar themes of our future annihilation. After the lecture, Jack describes to a colleague the idea, precisely, of the grade filter, according to which, you know, Life is so hard to find because the universe is structured to exterminate it in the long run. Given both her parents' morbid vocations, Mr. Bagley naturally suspects that Susie's behaviour has been influenced by their work. Dismissing his hypothesis, though, Jack and Alison instead decide that Susie's game is to be indicted for rebuke.
So that night, the two decide to hack into the game to investigate the real source of the trouble and although Susie initially warns them that the game is full of darkness and pain as she puts it, she gives them the password Philon Do and they all enter Where Jack had imagined a sort of cartoonish game he is confronted with an utterly monstrous virtual scape beyond the geometrical coordinates of ordinary perception. He says everything was wrong or almost everything scales, styles, atmosterics in its expanses as in its details, there seems too much of it to be for anything. There was a jagged harshness here that no story could soften. While Jack reels
at what he calls the impossibility of it all, Susie observes that it's beautiful, insofar as she puts it, even bigger than the world somehow. As if the game, this virtual reality, supersedes so-called real life's supposedly all-encompassing natural laws. In any case, it's not long before they are drawn to a large domed monolith in the distance that Susie identifies as a library. As they approach the megastructure, Alison is shocked to discover that Simon had mentioned just such a structure, the client in the cult, what that client had called the evil tower. At the same time, Jack records that one of the hypotheses for how the grade filter might work is by
absorbing all life into simulations. Jack thus begins to suspect that the game is precisely a simulation of the end of the world, with perhaps every level that one reaches becoming ever more difficult to survive until all its players are ultimately killed off. Or as some graffiti across the evil tower pretentiously puts it in the second quote, Cthulhu is calling, the future belongs to the squid. It seemed obvious that squid mostly meant not Not us, not at all, us. As they reach the tower, they notice human bodies strewn out everywhere and that the highest spike of the tower is actually a fluid, artificial electric storm which Susie identifies as the tentacle god, Philon Du, or as she puts it, what we're all looking for.
While Jack looks upon the game as just utter madness, or as he puts it, the catatonic depths of the psychotic abyss, Susie explains that most players believe that the game permits them to find their true identity, even if they emerge disappointed, having never really found their true identity. But what these players overlook is that the game does tell them precisely who they are, only not in the way that they imagined. In other words, the game's ultimate message is that the self is precisely an endless maze, a fiction or a pure virtuality. As Susie explains to her father when he says, What's the point of a story that doesn't tell you who you are? It seemed like a gaping design ditch. Perhaps puzzles matter to people a lot, even more than existence in the end.
as the trio finally enter the library temple the goddess undu approaches them presenting herself as the emissary of aristotle's prime mover that it that you know if you recall from last week is the pure actualization of all particular ephemeral things or you know it's the body without organs depersonalizing or partial objects and strata uh onto its larger uh virtuality or you know the goddess says you know aristotle's name for god one of many naturally the frozen motor immobile mobilizer you would have to think it a monster but i do not they call me a goddess because of that because coldness is my only soul durably extinct as you are unable to be
as jack notes and we looked at last week the key difference between undue and aristotle's prime mover is that Undu is none other than the great filter. So whereas the prime mover actualizes all particular beings in its absolute being, creates all beings, Undu subsumes all beings into what can only be experienced for them as the sublime horror of their annihilation. Given the impossibility of directly experiencing their own annihilation here, it's precisely at this moment of confronting the great filter Undo, that Jack, Allison and Susie suddenly find themselves in their living room again watching a video screen which flashes the message, Phil Undo is only a game, before
the game is erased and any chance of unraveling its mysteries is blocked. As they wonder whether they can ever get back into the game they are meant to question whether they were ever outside in the first place. Yeah, so I think, so that's basically the narrative. So yeah, I think hopefully that gives us a sense of how we can clearly, a concrete sense of how Land is using the abstract horror of, in this case, a virtual reality game to explore his philosophical interest in humanity's increasing technological entanglement, which inevitably leads to the utter decimation of our sense of self and our delusions of grandeur. But yeah, I highly
also recommend these other novela Chasm which I think it's written off and I think it's actually it's more it's actually a better novela it's more refined but I won't spoil it here so we don't have too much time left and what I wanted to do for the last 10 minutes or so I just wanted to make a start on yeah I wanted to make a start on the first part of next week's talk so that we can move into finish land and move into looking at other figures in greater detail so I'm going to make a start on next week as well now so yeah apart from the you know the Shanghai travel guides the horror
the neo-reactionary philosophy, Land's most recent theoretical writings focus on a theory of time, essentially as a kind of positive feedback loop of explosive change accelerating towards this future singularity, which is somehow paradoxically determining the present in advance of its own becoming, in hyperstitial time. Yeah, so we're going to... I'm just going to make a start on that. Okay, so in a five-part 2011 blog series called Calendric Dominion, Land first negatively developed his concept of time in terms of what time is not through a study of calendrical systems.
the series begins by citing a Daily Mail article about how the BBC's religious and ethics departments propose that the television station switch to a non-Gregorian Western calendar BCE and CE instead of sticking to the Christian calendar BC AD so as to avoid excluding or discriminating against viewers of other faiths while one might imagine that land would be all for abandoning the Christian legacy, in this case he argues that the Christian bookends of B, C and A, D are important because they remind us of how divisive real history actually is. On the contrary, the politically correct and multicultural B, C, E clinical system marks an attempt to imagine
that the unfolding of history was universal and unifying rather than atomizing and antagonistic. So he says, The world was not integrated by togetherness, but by a succession of particular powers with their characteristic traits, legacies and parochialisms. Their science should be meticulously conserved and studied rather than clumsily effaced because they are critical clues to the real nature of fate. What Land objects to about the BBC's decision is that it overlooks the brute fact that the modern world is not the product of a universal humanism, but incessant divisions and violence, which is for him the real nature of history, time, or fate. Although the BBC's decision is motivated by the, I guess,
liberal belief in the formal equality of all cultures, Land notes that it exemplifies precisely the kind of empty, symbolic change desired by an intellectual elite whose very existence contradicts the egalitarian assumptions motivating the decision. And while Conservatives were naturally opposed to the BBC's decision to diversify their calendar, Land laments that their only counter-strategy was to rally around the conservation of old symbols in what amounts to a war between two sides who were both seeking to sustain their own cultural identities. He says, Whilst the symbolic left draws comfort from the insistence upon inconsequential change, the counter-balancing indignation of the right fixes the entire dispute within the immobilised trenches of the Anglo-American culture war. The deep structure of calendric sign persists unaffected.
So it's similar to what's going on in the dark and brightening piece, right? The idea being what both left and right identity politics overlooks is that symbolic changes, be it to make all humans equal or to conserve our past cultural identities, do not affect time's real historical flow, which is a time which is utterly indifferent to any ideological representation of it that left or right might seek to superimpose onto it. Again, the problem of what Land calls Western calendric dominion is not one that we have control over by either conserving our cultural heritage or humanizing it to make it more universal. It is rather that of a historical destiny, a fate, over which we have no control.
According to Land, a better calendrical practice for capturing the true nature of time as the So rupture with our anthropomorphizations is the idea of year zero. Year zero like, for example, the birth of the Nazarene or the French Revolution. In both of these cases, these examples, the calendar was rebooted so as to signal a truly novel beginning of utopian or apocalyptic proportions which reduces the existing world to an empty canvas from whence a new history can be initiated, fundamentally disconnected from anything that occurred before it. Of course, the paradox here of year zero is that it provides both the model for the left's revolutionary politics
of radical social re-engineering, as seen in the implementation during the 1792 French Revolution, but it also supplies the model for the conservative right's desire to preserve tradition's reign over the future as per the Christian calendar according to which history begins proper at the birth of the Messiah. seen in this way, Land argues that both the French revolutionary and Christian cylindrical systems actually ignore the true sense of year zero which is evident from the way in which they both actually jumped from 1 BC to 1 AD or 1791 to 1 as if to skip over the actual year of Rupture the zero in favour of a kind of pure continuity with the past from which it supposedly is differentiating itself
as per the BBC's decision over which calendar to use Land argues that the way that these clinical systems skip over year zero betray their efforts to collapse the irreducible gap between the world such as we conceive of it and the world such as it actually is in contradiction to our desires so hopefully we can see that for him calendars are exemplary of ideological softenings of the world by imagining that our hopes and dreams perfectly correlate to the objective facts. He says, between the world we would like to inhabit and the world that exists, there is a gap that tests us. Sense and even
compassion is attributed to the side of reality promising ultimate reconciliation between human hopes and desires and the objective nature of things. Here, Land gives a further example of how the Mesopotamian calendar contained 360 days in the year, so that it would correspond to their ideal of the circle as a perfect 360 degree shape. In reality, of course, the year actually contains 365 days, in a way which shows the Mesopotamian calendar to be purely, in some sense, arbitrary or idealistic or anthropocentric, rather than a real measure of time. of the revolutions of the earth around the sun. So he says, if the great architect of the universe had been an anthropomorphic geometer,
this is the calendar that would work. To nonetheless hold on to our calendars is to believe that human body clocks correlate to the real flow of astronomical time in some kind of pre-established harmony. Whereas calendars are saturated with these kinds of ideological underpinnings that are cast aside by reality's true cosmic flow. Land argues that any true science, any true measure of time, must be misanthropic in the sense that it must mark the rigorous cognizance of nature's indifference to human interests. So he says, Science, a typically despised and misanthropic discipline, tends to the opposite assumption, emphasising the harsh indifference of reality to human interests and expectations.
nature does not scold or punish it merely breaks us coldly upon the racks of our untruth dismissing both the Christian and the French year zeros as superficial imposters of the real deal the real year zero land upholds weirdly enough the Kimar Rouge's year zero as alone the real deal now here that's not to say that the Khmer Rouge's despotic and genocidal experiment engineered a radically new society in Cambodia in 1975. Rather, the Khmer Rouge's failed social engineering experiment marked the moment for land where all utopian politics to kind of instantiate year zeros came to be rejected
as an idealistic and ultimately barbaric submission of reality to our utopian dreams. In place of barbarism's master's lullabies, all that was left was the real politic of neoliberal capital to which Margaret Thatcher famously said there is no alternative as Land puts it the Kimah Rouge year zero defines a meaningful epoch as the high watermark of utopian overreach and the complementary re-valorisation of conservative pragmatism. The era it opens is characterised almost perfectly by its renunciation as fantasy social programming extinguishes itself in blood and collapse. At the same time,
Land notes that a new, what he distinguishes as futural year zero, is on the horizon. And namely, a year zero which would not see us try to reshape time in accordance with our ideals, but would rather see time reshape us in accordance with itself. In the lead up, you know, we looked at this in the last two weeks, But again, in the lead up to the new millennium, this future year zero was anticipated through the idea of Y2K, which hypothesized that since early computers, intelligible systems, catalog dates only with reference to their last two digits, they would not be able to tell the difference between the years 1900 and 2000, thereby leading to potential widespread confusion and malfunction, with the possibility of radically disrupting politics, economics, and practically all social institutions.
So yeah, the idea is Y2K was a symptom of the belief that technology would bring about planetary social collapse of apocalyptic heights precisely on time at the advent of the new millennium. Even though as we know, Y2K did not ultimately prove to result in the absolute apocalypse, as per, again, the CCIU argues that Y2K's importance is extremely far-reaching, in that it spoke to the capacity for technology to radically disrupt the collingical anthropomorphizations of our fortunes, of time. He says, Y2K resulted from the accidental or spontaneous emergence of a new
collingical order within the globalized technosphere. The 20th century had been recoded automatically as the first century of the cybernetic continuum. We can no doubt guess by now that Land identifies the true future real zero, the true future year zero as the real techno commercial singularity, which anticipates in this essay will emerge in the year 2100, since this works as a kind of countdown, 2, 1, 0, 0 sort of in the same way that the Shanghai World Expo in 2010 does 2, 0, 1, 0 the irony is that the liberals' multiculturalist attempt to incorporate other cultures' clinical systems will backfire
since the traditional Chinese system is based on the flow of water clocks such that it does not count away from year 0 in a progressive way, but rather comes down to a future day of judgment for all humanity, regardless of one's tribe. He says, time is counted down as it runs out from an elevated hydraulic body into the sunken future that receives it. Again, the bottom line is that what the singularities future year zero will ultimately do is, as we know by now, not replace one temporal sequence with another conservative with liberal but show that time in itself is nothing other than apocalyptic horror at least in in the long run and it's this it's this apocalyptic horror of time in itself that we're
going to start with uh next week but i'll i've only got five minutes so i'll leave it there if there's any questions or comments um yeah it's opened up yeah what texts are these quotes from This one is of Calendric Dominion, which is a five part series, a blog series on Nick's Urban Futures blog. If you look in the course description, there's like a link to it, if you look under this week. Oh no, that would, well, Calendric Dominion we just looked at, but the texts on time that we'll look at next week are mainly an essay called Teleoplexy, and also some excerpts
from his new book on Bitcoin, and so forth as Bitcoin is a kind of temporality. Yes, it's mostly from those two, which I've uploaded in the folder for next week. and like a recommended reading for next week it's a larger reading so I didn't include it really but it's his book, e-book Templexity which I've uploaded as well which is a kind of larger exploration of time that he explores in more concise form in the Teleoplexy essay I mean I'm going to be drawing on a lot of different stuff next week so there's only so many readings I could suggest yeah Any other comments?
Question? Good? Sure. Much so likely to be a complexity argument because I can't see that the BCC distinction that he talked about, I can't see that as politically correct. Or you know, an example of political correctness. I teach in an area where we're required to use it. Oh, right. It's spoken of as being market-to-market. But it's only the imposition of the three Abrahamic religions under any other form of countdown. I mean, even an AI countdown or a digital atomic clock or something like that. It is as much an instance of war, a territorial war,
over a calendar time as any of the other things, William or Isaiah or whatever. Yeah, well, I mean, that would be further confirmation then, I guess, that even the attempt to supposedly have a universalizing... Yeah, it's not universal. Yeah, it marks... The most interesting one that's probably... that we use as well is BP, where you say 75,000 BP before the present. Try to write any sense about there being a year zero. But the year zero is now backwards, so you're any sense of
in reverse since the period of the era. Yeah, I mean, that's a good point. I mean, I think what you say, kind of further confirms what he's generally getting at even if maybe the specific example is classic Nick, like just going nuts at any example of political correctness As I said, we're going to a money point in time Yeah, yeah No, yeah, fair enough Any other comments? Otherwise we'll leave it there Cool, thanks