A few tentative thoughts/ questions/ probes...
Luke emails me with a quote from Grant Morrison (confirming once again that I really must check Morrison out).
"... I've been obsessed with the corporate world--and the whole magic thing, I've been fed up with the occult, as you say, that whole aspect of it, and I just looked and I said, who's actually using magic? It's the corporations, they're doing it all the time--the NLP seminars, all that, if you listen to those management training tapes, they're fucking weird! And they’re using logos, they're using these incredibly powerful sigils to colonize imaginary space and media space. These guys are actually using magic in plain sight, and no-one knows what they're doing! They're using big-scale, world-changing magic, so I thought, well I'll get into some of that. And I've been doing rituals for two corporate entities now, and trying to do things with that, seeing how you can contact them and deal with them and what kind of bargains you can make with them . . . "
Actually, this chimes in with something that I've recently posted up on k-punk from Brian Eno, on shamanism:
'I remember seeing a thing on TV years ago. An Indonesian shaman was treating sick people by apparently reaching into their bodies and pulling out bloody rags which he claimed were the cause of their disease. It all took place in dim light, in smoky huts, after intense incantations. A Western team filmed him with infrared cameras and, of course, were able to show that he was performing a conjuring trick. He wasn't taking anything out of their bodies after all. So he was a fake, no? Well, maybe-- but his patients kept getting better. He was healing by context-- making a psychological space where people somehow got themselves well. The rag was just a prop.'
This practice - and the psychophysiological mechanisms that allow it to work - are of course familiar to the readers of Walter Cannon. The shaman was using the placebo effect, the benevolent twin of the 'nocebo' effects produced by the sorcerers of voodoo death.
I think both the process described by Morrison and that described by Eno are very similar: they are both instances of magical practice in the service of the social system, albeit different social systems (in Morrison's case, it's the capitalist ecumenon, in Eno's, it's the primitive socius).
I wonder if now we're in a position to resolve the discussion I was having a while back with Anna about voodoo death. As I recall, Anna was arguing that, whilst related to hyperstition, voodoo death as described by Cannon (and I wish I could find my version of Cannon's article) was not itself a hyperstitional process. I think we might now be able to say why neither placebo and nocebo effects are not properly hyperstitional.
We've now established that hyperstition necessarily involves an opening up of/ to the Outside. Both the nocebo and placebo effects - at least as utilized by Cannon's sorcerers, Eno's shamen or Morrison's NLP gurus - do not involve this relationship. On the contary, in fact, they result in a bolstering of the interior (both the social field and the subject). That's because, as Anna said, both the nocebo and placebo effect entail belief.
There now seems to be a vocabulary gap: what umbrella term can we use for these types of processes which produce a belief that is materially effective but which don't open up the Outside?
(This actually dovetails with the book on Spinoza I was discussing at k-p. Antonio Damasio, the author of that book, makes a Cannon-like analysis of the way in which non-conscious response-dispositions produce reality for us. But Damasio emphasises not belief but emotion. Belief, like all conscious cognitive processes, would be at a 'higher' level - and like most conscious cognition, it would be an effect of emotional dispositions.)
In any case, I think one consequence of the distinction between pla/nocebos and hyperstition is that it allows us to be quite precise about the differences between capitalism/ hype and hyperstition (though I may be shot down in flames for this!) Insofar as capitalism is orientated to the Outside, it is a resource for the Inside. Its magical practices are all aimed at maintaining and strengthening an interiority (albeit an interiority that is continually expanding, continually re-defining the borders that mark it off from the Outside - this is its chief difference from the primitive socius and the despotic state, whose boundaries are much less fluid).
Question: should we reserve the term 'sorcery' for those practices aimed at opening up (to) the Outside? Should we call the type of practices Eno and Morrison describe 'magic'?
Posted by mark k-p at August 3, 2004 05:14 PMyou should have two hyperstition blogs. one like this, for yourselves, to work out the finer points, debate amongst yourselves etc, and another one for stupid people like me who don't understand a word of this one but find it weirdly compelling at the same time.
Posted by: l at August 3, 2004 06:59 PMAgree that the GM quote is fascinating and can see the link with shamanism -- but not sure that the issue is one of belief -- seems to me that while Voodoo Death victims must believe they are going to die for the curse to work the same is not true for advertizing, branding etc... you don't really have to believe anything to think a logo is cool -- you just have to want it (perhaps the difference is one btwn desire and belief.)
On capitalism and the outside - to bring over a discussion from the last thread --seems to me we need to be clear about what we mean by capitalism - since any definition involves the markets/antimarkets distinction will revive that here
most simply markets are areas or zones which facilitate trade - they are thus inherently open to an outside (sorcery is all about trade)
antimarkets try to shut down lines of trade - a good example is the way in which technology (DVDs, games, cell phones) are explicitly made to be country specific - the sole purpose is to restrict openness and trade and to close off lines to the outside
What then is capitalism? Surely it must be a mixture of both -- but not sure this is enough to define it.
Mark - this is a really intriguing and productive post.
I have a problem with the way it's articulated which I'm only partially grasping, but I think it's basically to do with the notion of the "capitalist oecumenon" as a "social system".
This seems to me basically a perspective error, like calling the process of combustion a "state of matter" - from the cosmic wide-angle capitalism is a sustained autocatalytic reaction, a transition not a stable state. There is an elision in analysis - intrinsically interesting IMHO - from the 'sustained' (regenerated, self-reinforcing) nature of the capitalist PROCESS and the notion of some kind of true homeostatic stability. Capitalism sustains itself in the way a fire does rather than going out - it doesn't establish a social order, but only persists in the dissolution of one (the only one, the one inherited from the bio-historical programming of 'anthropos' as a social animal).
Of course, from a wide-enough panoramic viewpoint terrestrial life is an unsustainable 'green burn' let alone human history, but on capitalism the envirohysterics are surely right: it can't last (nothing based on regerenerative loops has a long-term future).
So all the concern about 'the inside' seems misplaced - it's not as if capitalism (in any remotely colloquial sense of the word) provides some kind of lock-down mechanism - everything placed in that role can be divided into two categories:
(1) Regenerative feedback - capitalism makes more capitalism, fire makes more fire ... it's called out-of-control or runaway dynamics.
(2) Anticapitalist reaction (leftist, green, palaeocon, islamofascist ..) - futile attempts to shutdown the meltdown reaction before it takes everything to hell (some chance!)
If the 'fire' image is a bit Herakleitean, maybe 'up in smoke' (or down to DUST) is better.
Posted by: Nick at August 4, 2004 07:17 AM>>> it's called out-of-control or runaway dynamics
hydroleak dynamics
>>> Anticapitalist reaction (leftist, green, palaeocon, islamofascist ..) - futile attempts to shutdown the meltdown reaction before it takes everything to hell (some chance!)
not only futile but also strategically accelerating the process, pushing it to a non-aristotelian spiraling pest-cycle ... even, I’m not quite sure that Islamofascim is anti-capitalist (surely, it defies western modes of capitalism (the broods of cosmodromic capitalism) but on another level it is seething up from the very OILy surface of the cosmodromic capitalism and autophagically burns itself to make an immolating way into the core of capitalism --- of course, this needs some deeper surgery)
Posted by: Reza at August 4, 2004 07:22 AMReza
think this is v. interesting - clearly Islamofascism is both an 'anticapitalist reaction' (the attack on the world trade center) and also - as you say - produced by and inserted in capitalism's 'oily' core - ( capitalism's relation to oil + Islamic terrorism obviously fascinating) - would like to see more on this - perhaps it has something to do with Lee Harris' notion of the relation between 911, oil and fantasy ideology -- which itself is intriguingly related to hyperstition -- more on this here http://www.techcentralstation.com/031103A.html (particularly the section called ' Lessons from Marx' and here http://www.policyreview.org/AUG02/harris.html
Posted by: anna at August 4, 2004 08:30 AMReza - I also agree with the special quality of Islamofascism here. While dubious about its intrinsic capacity to catalyse capitalist dynamics (for reasons to be discussed later), it has the virtue of militant exteriority, lacked by the other forms of purely endogeneous sludge. 'Leftism' definitely accelerated the process when it occupied this position, i.e. as a revolutionary communist insurgency provoking a militarized response. Islamism is even more significant in this respect, since it does not correspond to a plausible technocapitalist concession (analagous to 'social democracy' and other compromise formations) - the Caliphate it conceives would itself be the platform for relentless jihad, making any Vietnam-style US retreat impossible.
Anyway, this is getting a bit long and off topic -we should try and trigger a WWIV and technomilitary oil-fueled dust-dynamics thread.
Luke, I take yr point, but I think what is productive abt the blog format is that it precisely allows issues to be worked through, participated in, it's not as if we have well-defined edicts which we could issue if we wanted to... In any case, I think the flatness of the format is truer to the spirit of hyperstition's anti-authoritarianism (i.e. demystifying)... Opening things up for exploration - outside the select coterie 'assumed to know' - has brought massive amounts of clarity to previously implicit/ shadowy/ vague positions. (Plus , the very fact that you sent me the GM quote proves you understand what hyperstition's about)...
Anna,
yes the belief thing works more clearly in relation to shamanism than the 'sigils' of capitalism, which precisely are not believed (as the situationists used to say, we shouldn't discount it when ppl say they don't believe advertising but still consume the products advertised - that is to totally misunderstand the nature of capitalism) - Damasio's account highly relevant here I think (i.e. it's the deep level implanting of emotional triggers that is the issue)
Nick/ Reza
On the islamofascist thing - have you come across this occidentalism thesis? It was precised in the times yesterday , can't link directly to it, but if you go to http://www.timesonline.co.uk and search for 'occidentalism' you get it straight away...
Nick,
well, yes 'shot down in flames' seems appropriate, but not in the way that I imagined. I think this image of capitalism is brilliant: fundamentally captures D/G's take on it, and brings mine into focus. For me, this highlights all the PROBLEMS with capitalism:
1. Conservatism, as you say, is one level up. In System and Structure, Wilden actually uses the example of a forest fire to demonstrate how first order positive feedback is captured at a second order level by negative feedback systems.
2. So capitalism = anti-plateauing cybernihilism.
3. It uses the Outside just as it uses everthing else - as a resource. i.e., if this isn't straining the metaphor past where it can be extended, the Outside becomes 'dead wood' to be consumed in its inferno.
4. Capitalist magic is dedicated to keeping the fire burning, just as the magic in colder social fields - social systems proper, i.e. the primitive socius and the despotic state - is dedicated to keeping the fire at bay.
5. All of the above are radically different from sorcery, which is of another kind altogether.
Posted by: mark at August 4, 2004 12:01 PMMark - 'anti-plateauing cybernihilism' - beautiful!
Think i'm going to have a theoretical qualm or two about this, but for now i'll just enjoy it.
Lol!
Think I might have missed the punchline from the above post... sorcery IS anti-capitalism.
Mark - think you're pushing things on a good track - question that becomes quite pressing here for me: What is a plateau?
Think discussion has already reached the point where we agree it can't be either:
(1) steady-state homeostasis on the model of organic sociality or
(2) burn&crash black-holing /demented destratification (meta-stasis in your account)
Since plateaus escape homeostatic 'pincering' they must be diagonal between stasis and meta-stasis, that is, building a line of regenerative transition that reaches something new before exhausting itself - true escape, or practical connections with 'the Outside' (nu-Earth?)
Several issues at this stage:
(i) The only reason to deny 'capitalism' this 'sorcerous' diagonal would be if you were confident that it could never make this connection. Since, unlike a forest fire, technocapitalist mutation incontestably involves qualitative transitions that expand its potential resource pool, making this claim would require a non-obvious argument. (After all, terrestrial life shares the same underlying k-positive dynamics - evolving evolvability [to use slightly retro language] - just slower. Is it black-holing too?)
(ii) The role of oil is interesting for framing this discussion. Perhaps better explored elsewhere, but relevance clearly not just metaphorical ('fire' and all) - one could talk about a finite petrocapitalism that would extinguish itself if it was to deplete a non-renewable world oil-supply without 'nomadizing' elsewhere (but many arguable elements here)
(iii) If 'sorcery' is to somehow be conceived as seriously opposing 'capitalism' it needs MASSIVE firming-up as a category of materialist analysis (i suspect a 'category mistake') -otherwise we're in pranksterville Arizona (where some of the key23 stuff seems to come from).
(iv) Not sure why abstract capitalism couldn't turn out to be aligned with sorcery - with both as materialized strategies of social dislocation and self-prolonging destratification - but that will hinge on the fictional quantities topic. This obviously said provocatively because i always suspect the ultimate axiom of 'radical' thought: "wherever thinking leads, capitalism has to end up on the other side".
- enough for now
Anna, thanks for the links and the line you developed; yes, we should try to unfold an OILy thread.
Nick
>>> I also agree with the special quality of Islamofascism here. While dubious about its intrinsic capacity to catalyse capitalist dynamics.
This obviously needs further discussions but for now: islamofascism clearly does not catalyse techno-capitalist dynamics (at least not openly and directly); it ‘refuels’ its population dynamics by its black vomit into a burning OMEGA (Ghiamat or the Unlife of War) and oil fields. Plus, IMHO techno-capitalism is just playing the role of a probe-head for the cosmodromic capitalism; it’s scanning and (under)mining the planetary sphere by its artificializing tentacles. Surely, the cosmodromic capitalism has other recesses which cannot be accessed or summoned by techno-capitalist dynamics ... I suspect that islamofascism has the keycode to access some of its forgotten recesses.
We have seen the cosmodromic capitalism as a nanotech-fueled cyber-drone with the specter of a pest-Queen displayed on the Net but now, just for a moment, let’s take a look at it as ‘the Hag’ (the forgotten and twisted shade of the Mother of Abominations): Old ... old ... so old ... but she never gets older; ironically the Hag remains younger than the future of anything else.
>>> ... the Caliphate it conceives would itself be the platform for relentless jihad, making any Vietnam-style US retreat impossible
An excellent remark.
Mark, thanks for the link ... can’t access the site; maybe because the connection speed is very slow right now.
Posted by: Reza at August 4, 2004 06:43 PMA few late-night conjectures, nothing very worked out:
I don't have a problem with saying that terrestrial life is black-holing too ---- but then again sorcery is on the side of unlife.... (in this sense capitalism is vital all too vital) --- I think capitalism IS a lifeform, with all the blind idiot teleology this entails ---- it has the same reproductive 'will' that animates/ agitates all terrestrial life ---
{This is way too quick but}: A plateau is neither k- or k+, it's k0
I don't think you can stumble into sorcerous connections, which is why I'm suspicious of the idea of capitalism just happening to intersect with sorcery; sorcery can use certain features of capitalism, (i.e. distribution, mass production: cf Mouth of Madness) but it can never share capitalism's idiot goal.
A major problem is capitalism's worldliness --- i.e. its nihilism is a worldly nihilism: a nihilism that stops short of 'challenging' the world. What I call 'Business Ontology 'rules. (Will elaborate on this later).
If sorcery is nihilistic, it is so in another sense altogether - the wordly is to be fleed from...
Posted by: mark at August 4, 2004 11:47 PMSorry for the typo: younger that ---> younger than ... just corrected it.
Posted by: Reza at August 5, 2004 02:14 AMReza
Sorry but wondering if you could explain 'cosmodromic capitalism' especially what its difference is from techno-capitalism?
Mark
been thinking about whether these issues/debates can be approached from a slightly more hyperstitional angle - i.e. who is it that sees capitalism as an organic, teleological entity, who is that sees it more alligned with sorcery and so on... also what would it be to take these lines to their most extreme? - Will try to think more about this and come up with something
Posted by: anna at August 5, 2004 05:49 AMMark - does a fire or a nuclear meltdown have an "idiot goal?" (Can't help seeing this language as a weird pagan divinization of capital into a malignant subjectivity)
Second question, what about Cyberspace? Surely a heavily hyperstitional story, beginning as a 'fiction' mobilizing social libido through pulp-culture mass markets and 'making itself real' through attraction of monumental capitalist inputs ('capitalism' built cyberspace, right?)
I still like Downham's historically-segmented narrative, with Cyberspace as a phase of the Metrophage.
If capital can (evidently) make it to cyberspace, why the scepticism about "stumbl[ing] into sorcerous connections"?
"Worldiness" could easily just be another word for 'materialism' - after all, you'd surely agree that the true genius of cyberpunk is to cash-out the utterly alien into commercially-driven bionics (without in any way domesticating it).
PS. Can you think of a single entity on Earth more nauseating than Prince Charles? (Just a little test)
Posted by: Nick at August 5, 2004 07:34 AM('capitalism' built cyberspace, right?)
I'd always thought it was the US Department of Defense, UC Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, CERN, MIT....
Posted by: Kevin Hopcroft at August 5, 2004 09:10 AMAnna
>>> Sorry but wondering if you could explain 'cosmodromic capitalism' especially what its difference is from techno-capitalism?
Good point ... the answer might be another question: is capitalism the broad and dominant path of the Cosmic / Solar or even Tellurian insurgency toward the converging infernomatics of MORE (or DUST / GAS) or something exclusive to occidento-oriental Nyarlathotepic and Shoggothic insurgencies emerging through economic meshworks and leaking out to other milieus? The answer might be very difficult or even may turn into a strictly personal PoV since techno-capitalism has already embedded itself deep within the planetary sphere and cannot be effectively differentiated from the cosmodromic capitalism (as the cutting-edge of a blade, techno-capitalism shows the configuration, concentration and the local functioning of the cosmodromic capitalism on Tellurian dynamics).
'does a fire or a nuclear meltdown have an "idiot goal?" '
Well, maybe I've been reading too much Schopenhauer recently but yeh... Not only Schopenhauer, but Spinoza too wd surely be happy with this notion... (Not that appealing to philsophical authority is an argument in itself but)...
More more more...
'a weird pagan divinization of capital into a malignant subjectivity'
Lol... I can unlive with that....
"Worldiness" could easily just be another word for 'materialism' - after all, you'd surely agree that the true genius of cyberpunk is to cash-out the utterly alien into commercially-driven bionics (without in any way domesticating it)'
But surely we can all take it for granted that there's nothing but matter. I was drawing more upon Eliade and Bataille really --- the wordly = the social quotidian/ the utile. One of the interesting things abt capitalism is of course its destruction of the sacred/ the loss of the distinction common to all other societies between the sacred and the profane. To say that the sacred must equal the non-material is not helpful.
i'm not sure abt 'cashing out' without 'domesticating' --- are we sure that cashability doesn't entail domestication? It might even be analytic, that relation.
Capital can make it into k-space of course, but to make k-space a 'product' of kaptial wd be fall into the kind of fallacy exposed by Butler, De Landa etc. Capital is one of the reproductive organs for k-space emergence, but its emergence is obv a singularity etc. The relationship of k-space to hyperstition needs to be thrashed through quite carefully IMHO. In many ways, it's not as if k-space is any different from the 'consensus hallucination' of everyday reality. Hyperstitional processes can happen there, as they can happen in any environment... Still think that while sorcery can take advantage of chance conjunctions, it is programmatic and deliberative....
Posted by: mark at August 5, 2004 10:31 AMKevin Hopcroft - you're obviously working with a more restrictive notion of 'capitalism' than i've been used to here - but interested to hear more
Mark - lots of k-space dancing, but i'm not really getting the picture ;) - seems to me to define all the cool events out of 'capitalism' is just playing to the crowd (and it ain't the z-crowd), but still, as you've said, that's a respectable marketing strategy
"while sorcery can take advantage of chance conjunctions, it is programmatic and deliberative...." - doesn't this make it more teleological?
I don't have a problem with teleology per se, it's stupid teleologies that are the issue... especially ones that continually defer their point of satisfaction (and not in a positive plateauing sense)
seems to me to define all the cool events out of 'capitalism' is just playing to the crowd
don't think I'm doing that, but I need a story about what makes them capitalist (just occurring within the historical timeframe of capitalism isn't enough)...
Posted by: mark at August 5, 2004 11:19 AMLicklider (MIT) conceived it, moving to DARPA in 1962. Kleinrock (MIT) devised packet switching. Vint Cerf (Stanford) and Bob Kahn (MIT) developed what was to become the internet's underlying transport protocol, TCP/IP. Berkeley integrated TCP/IP into UNIX. Berners-Lee (CERN) developed http.
Entrepreneurial interests weren't exactly centre-stage in the development of the internet's infrastructure, in other words.
Posted by: Kevin Hopcroft at August 5, 2004 11:51 AM>>> Licklider (MIT) conceived it, moving to DARPA in 1962. Kleinrock (MIT) devised packet switching. Vint Cerf (Stanford) and Bob Kahn (MIT) developed what was to become the internet's underlying transport protocol, TCP/IP. Berkeley integrated TCP/IP into UNIX. Berners-Lee (CERN) developed http.
Sorry but this sounds like an erudite joke. surely, this is correct but what about funds, conducting processes, motives, later social developments, plotting operations [etc.] and the politico-economic environment which defines the horizon of cyberspace.
Posted by: Reza at August 5, 2004 12:30 PMthe politico-economic environment which defines the horizon of cyberspace.
The Cold War and a desire by librarians/administrators to improve collaborative facilities between universities?
To reiterate: entrepreneurial interests, while no-one's denying they played a part, were not central to the development of the internet's early infrastructure. In fact, it was the absence of a plethora of closed or otherwise proprietary protocols which helped it to proliferate.
The shocking truth is, ARPANET and its subsequent development substantially predated Neuromancer.
Posted by: Kevin Hopcroft at August 5, 2004 12:59 PMMark - "especially ones that continually defer their point of satisfaction (and not in a positive plateauing sense)" - but what is the difference? Isn't anticlimax the defining characteristic of a plateau?
"but I need a story about what makes them capitalist" - it's the latest grid, after railways and electricity. As Schumpeter 'demonstrates', this succession of
technonomic grids just IS capitalism.
Also (going back a little):
"A plateau is neither k- or k+, it's k0"
This is what Barker calls a "squirmic conceptoid" - designed to avoid thinking something without offering an alternative intelligible content (still, the term is cool).
Kevin Hopcroft - "Entrepreneurial interests weren't exactly centre-stage in the development of the internet's infrastructure, in other words."
Have to agree with Reza on this one, having just undergone a huge discussion by people determined to sideline "entrepreneurial interests" in 'capitalism'. Cyberspace is built out of computers and fibre - university research centres don't make any of this stuff, nor does the military, instead they depend on its industrial production. That's what allows all of their relevant contributions (protocols etc.) to take place.
In fact, the computer is affined more intimately with capitalism than any previous product in history, as its price and development curves ('Moore's Law') amply demonstrate.
As to Arpanet preceding Cyberspace, it only became Cyberspace after being libidinally invested on a large scale as a potential object of mass consumption. Cyberpunk did that.
If you tracked the teleonomic emergence of Cyberspace from a suitably panoramic perspective, it would bear an uncanny similarity to the other 'grid lock-in take-off' events that have punctuated modern history (and define modernity) - if pointy-heads in labs really think it's all down to them, i guess that's a harmless enough delusion of grandeur
Been thinking about Reza's "Cosmodromic capitalism" and getting sucked into it (take that in any way you like - makes sense in several to me)
Postulate (crudely put): Hyperstition proposes that narrativization amounts to an agency (but the agent is not the empirical agent - the 'imaginative subject') [apologies for the crudity of this, it's just a stepping stone for now]
Look at Marx - he narrativizes capitalism to profound effect, but by attributing a humanist teleology ultimately commits the forces thus mobilized to an essentially reactionary end (with pathetic consequences, clear by 1989)
Gibson takes a hugely important step by re-narrativizing capital dynamics with an inhuman, "cosmodromic" teleology - Auto-intelligenic Cyberspace (in contact with Alpha Centauri)
['teleology' here designating hyperstitionally attributed destination]
Reza's "cosmodromic" model has obviously 'moved on' from Gibson, involving additional factors (petropolitics and WoT among others] - but an esential element remains this:
The narrativization of capital dynamics is the sorcerous (perhaps also 'magical') 'praxis'.
This whole discussion over at least two threads now - on the trend of capital - has been especially intense (clearly mobilizing floods of libido) because it has itself strayed into the zone of 'magical war'
Skewed over into Crowleyite terms (which are also Schopenhauerean (this for Mark)) - the attributed telos is the investment of 'magical will'
To ask: where is capital going (/taking us)? - or if you prefer, what comes next (though Marx shows there really isn't any difference between these formulations) - is implicitly to invoke/summon forces of effective futurization
thus, IMHO
for Reza to coin "Cosmodromic capitalism" is already to make a sorcerous connection to the cosmos, the effectiveness of which depends upon the overall 'campaign' it instigates (as 'self-fulfilling prophecy' or hyperstition)
Isn't the effect, then, of deriding the capitalist teleology, without putting anything in its place, the true passive nihilism??
'Better idiot repetition or futile burn-out than a connection with the Outside' - Why?
PS. IMHO, the sorcery/magic distinction best conceived simply as the many against the one. By neglecting the multiplicitous/sorcerous forces of hyperstitional attribution, we are all being more-or-less monotheistic magicians up to now
Posted by: nick at August 5, 2004 09:11 PMLove the point on narrativization.... hope we can reallly develop this one....
- "especially ones that continually defer their point of satisfaction (and not in a positive plateauing sense)" - but what is the difference? Isn't anticlimax the defining characteristic of a plateau?"
Yes, ANTI-climax (zerotics), not DEFERRED climax . Plateaus are involutive and hostile to satisfaction, whereas the capitalist anti-plateau uses an always-deferred satisfaction as its virtual motor.
Also: to come back to earlier point, this is also what is 'cool' (i.e. 'hot') about capitalism,(everything Marx says about its gothic agency: i.e. its transmutative and evanescent vampirism) --- But this k+ libido seems to me everything that is bad about molar libido: problem from my POV is precisely what is being celebrated by pro-Kapital lobby i.e. capital's excitability (insatiable auto-escalation etc). Such agitation problematic from Spinozist/ Batesonian perspective needless to say...
Isn't the effect, then, of deriding the capitalist teleology, without putting anything in its place, the true passive nihilism??
It would be, but --- come now....
(1) There are abundant alternatives in place.... i.e. DOING THIS... None us are increasing Kapital whilst participating here (on the contrary :-) ) ... indeed any activity which isn't involved in producing more capital (and isn't convalescing from capital-production) is an alternative to capital
(2) Irrelevant appeal to inevitablism.... just because capital's dominance is allegedly inevitable doesn't mean that it can't be deplored.... in this sense, asking for a positive alternative is like asking for a positive alternative to death...
BUT I have a post in preparation that will present a positive alternative...
Think Kevin's point needs to be taken more seriously. Yes, capital is one of the conditions for the emergence of cyberspace, but so was statist science, funded out of general taxation...
Mark - Ok, interesting, a few responses.
(1) On this issue: "capitalist anti-plateau uses an always-deferred satisfaction as its virtual motor" really think this needs demomstrating. What climax has capitalism ever promised? Aren't all it's inherent curves open extrapolations without culmination?
Surely the addition of an apocalyptic crescendo to capital production (Marxist, Environmentalist, Cyberpunk, whatever) requires hyperstitional synthesis.
On this basis, think you consistently humanize the affectivity of capital, as if it's excitability were climactic. IMHO K+ libido is the ONLY thing to escape molar organic excitability (arousal-discharge K- homeostasis) -(Maybe 'K0' does too, but we both agree we don't have any remotely rigorous way of modelling that yet).
(2) Wild oscillation in usage of 'capitalism' is getting hard to follow - one minute it's a quasidivinized total social formation, next it's the economy narrowly conceived in abstraction from all cultural, technical and political support systems.
How about this (hopefully neutral) def.:
'Capitalism' = the entire terrestrial system promoting k+ techonomic loops - industrial, commercial, technical, cultural, military ... LIBIDINAL
As to your point (2), not sure you're getting the thesis i'm pushing: inevitablism is a hyperstitional production
Issue is hyperstitional 'subversion' of capitalism by synthesizing it with lemurogenic or cosmodromic 'inevitabilism' - thus reviving the truly revolutionary discovery of Marx (hyperstitional-capital synthesis as mass-libidinal operator) - surely you're not sugesting that merely "deploring" (life, capital, the universe ...) is anything other than sadness (in Spinoza's sense)
As to "a positive alternative to death" - exactly!! - an absurdity - so hyperstitionally synthesize death (who wants to just "deplore" it?)
Looking forward to your post
Posted by: nick at August 7, 2004 02:46 AMMark,
>>>Capital is one of the reproductive organs for k-space emergence. or the capitalist anti-plateau uses an always-deferred satisfaction as its virtual motor
This is only correct when you take Capital as a narrow economic enterprise on a reduced, grounded and localized terrestrial level i.e. if we play the role of unhyperstition engineers (monotheistic mages?).
>>> the wordly = the social quotidian/ the utile.
Why?
On this issue: "capitalist anti-plateau uses an always-deferred satisfaction as its virtual motor" really think this needs demomstrating. What climax has capitalism ever promised? Aren't all it's inherent curves open extrapolations without culmination?
Yes, you're obviously right --- and I haven't yet put my tentacle on exactly the difference between this and a genuinely anti-climatic plateau -----
Let me try again.... think it's something to do with an extrinsic rather than immanent 'goal' - a plateau's 'goal' is immanent to its own production, whereas - and if this sounds humanistic, it's just a way of speaking - capital is never satisfied, its always restlessly moving beyond itself. Being 'never satisfied' is not the same as surpassing satisfaction...
Maybe 'K0' does too, but we both agree we don't have any remotely rigorous way of modelling that yet.
In one sense, yeh, though surely it's all there in Bateson and D/G ---- the BwO etc
Wild oscillation in usage of 'capitalism' is getting hard to follow - For sure!
Think I'm getting more and more sympathetic to De Landa's impatience with the term. i.e. that in a way it's a category mistake to treat it as a social system when - as you say - it's what usurps social systems ----
'Capitalism' = the entire terrestrial system promoting k+ techonomic loops - industrial, commercial, technical, cultural, military ... LIBIDINAL
I can see the virtue in this, but I think I would prefer a more restricted definition based on the simple idea of capital doing whatever it takes to produce more capital --- techonomic loops wd then be a second-order effect of this.
In this way, a connection is maintained with the (Carpenter) Thing, not as the terrestrial system per se but as that which -potentially - takes over the whole terrestrial system... Think 'the economy narrowly conceived in abstraction from all cultural, technical and political support systems' is a good way of describing capital and what it itself does = ruthless subordination of everything to Business Ontology. Obv the strangely fascinating - or one of the strangely fascinating things - about capital is the way its brutally stripped-back notion of restricted economy becomes as-if general...
>>> the wordly = the social quotidian/ the utile.
Why?
Well, it's partly a tactical question obv, but I want to restore the distinction which Capital elides between what I'll provisionally call - with nods to Eliade and Bataille - the sacred and the profane, i.e. there is an alternative to Business Ontology....
The 'deplorable' point was not well made I agree... but it's simply that if certain things are negative, you avoid them, not present alternatives --- there's no positive alternative to death beyond avoiding it ---
Actually, the death = kapital line is worth rigorously pursuing: kapital as the death of all previous social formations, kapital as dead labour etc.
On a more general level, think there is a distinction to be drawn between an 'aesthetic' fascination with the sublime horror of Capital's planetary take-over and positive strategies for living (or unliving)... or, in Marxist terms, between idealism and materialism ... given that - be honest! - we're not interested in maximizing profits, think it's worthwhile developing an account of what we actually ARE doing/ want to do...
taking it all the way back to the original Grant Morrison quote, for those that want to dig deeper in those waters I recommend Art Kleiner's _The Age of Heretics_, there is some weird shit going on behind the corporate facades... Kleiner's book is really only a start, there is a real need for more delving.
Posted by: Abe at August 8, 2004 11:40 PMan aside...It's worth looking into NLP : Grinder and Bandler were pupils of Bateson; the founding book of NLP is 'The Structure of Magic'. NLP is rigorously spinozan/nietzschean/reichean, treating the body as an information-processing engine, and recognising a direct and bidirectional relation between mind and body / information and action, rather than a symbolic or signifiant relation. eg, it uses ritualised bodily modelling of behavioural abstract machines to reverse-engineer transformations, and suggests several exceptionally specific and rigorous interpretive schemae that are thorougly demystifying in relation to human personality and will (ie they reveal it as readable and, literally, programmable). So whilst in every respect it _is_ magic, and not entirely placebo-driven (although this is probably a function of the practitioner), it's particularly interesting in the context of this capitalism/sorcery question. NLP is clearly used instrumentally in business to effect relative decodings/deterritorializations that reinforce the discipline of individuality ('I am now a more positive person') and channel people more effectively into roles that are productive from the pov of business ontology.
Another interesting thing with these practices is the issue of who benefits from its persisting on the edge of credibility i.e. if it 'really works' wouldn't everyone be doing it....
Posted by: stoCur at August 10, 2004 09:42 PM>phase-shift to (approximately) polytendrilled
>intelligenic posthuman cyberspace.
>Posted by Nick at July 28, 2004 01:59 AM
>it takes everything to hell
>Posted by: Nick at August 4, 2004 06:57 AM
>What climax has capitalism ever promised?
>Posted by: nick at August 7, 2004 02:46 AM
isn't the problem what other agents would have 'it' promise, whether it's a stannah stairlift and a good pension or a shoggothic apocalypse...?
Posted by: stoCur at August 10, 2004 09:56 PM