Welcome back to what will probably be the final episode of the reading group arch. We started off with Badiou and we’ve been all around the houses, but it feels about time to we jump into something new. From here on out we’ll be reading Benjamin Bratton’s new book The Return of the Real. Get your copies in soon if you want to read it along with us, probably starting in two or three weeks.
In the meantime, we read Gilles Deleuze’s essay “Bartleby, or, the Formula”, which we were meant to read last week but instead just chatted about general stuff. We dug a bit deeper into the essay this week, but still bounced around its central concepts. Reading this sent me into a poetry rabbit hole personally, and so Bec and I ended up chatting for quite awhile about Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, in a way that I hope sheds some light on the literary associations and interests embedded with Deleuze’s own philosophy.
The book mentioned about poetry was Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry, published in the UK by Fitzcarraldo Editions, and the Ted Hughes documentary was Stronger Than Death, available on YouTube here. Part of my thoughts on that already made it into a blog post posted yesterday, if you want the more polished and less rambling version.
Welcome back! Just a brief hangout this week. We were scheduled to discuss Gilles Deleuze’s essay “Bartleby, or, the Formula” from Essays Critical and Clinical, but we had a low turnout. Nevertheless, rather than just straight-up reschedule, we had a hang out anyway and the chat was good!
We talked about the changing state of Covid, a little bit about Bartleby and Deleuze’s interest in the outsideness of American literature, as well as Benjamin Bratton’s new book The Revenge of the Real, which I think we’ll read together soon once it is out properly and people can pick up hard copies if they so wish.
We’re not leaving Deleuze alone just yet though. We’ll take another run at this chapter next week, hopefully with a few more people available to chat about it. Until then, enjoy this nice hour of a few of us just shooting the shit.
Below is the true crime YouTube channel I’ve been binge-watching at work, which I think is genuinely interesting as a phenomenon (and as content). Still, it’s very existence just goes to show that we really do live in a society…
Hello! We’re back, reading the fourth and final chapter of Jodi Dean’s Blog Theory. Really enjoyed this book, for all its twists and turns, and particularly how prescient it is. Though some parts have aged, the “affective networks” discussed in this final chapter remain depressingly familiar. We primarily talked about that this week, and how affect and participation create a weird catch-22 between active and passive engagement in contemporary politics. Lockdown, in general, has made me more interested in engaging with grassroots organising once it is safer to gather together in person. I think this book has only strengthened that feeling for others.
As Dean says: “It’s easier to set up a new blog than it is to undertake the ground-level organisational work of building alternatives.” That’s certainly true, but there’s no reason why we can’t do both!
Next time we’ll be reading Deleuze’s essay “Bartleby, or, the Formula” from Essays Critical and Clinical.
Hello! We’re back again, this time reading chapter 3 of Jodi Dean’s Blog Theory. One more to go after this, and then I think we’ll do a bit of Deleuze.
This week we tried to untangle Dean’s Lacanian drifts, as well as what role psychedelics can play in the community building to come, when we’re uninstalled the Human Operating System and are fully on our way to fully luxuriated acid communism.
Thanks to Wassim, as ever, for the title.
Links below to bits and pieces recommended over the course of the chat:
We’re back again, sticking with Jodi Dean’s 2010 book Blog Theory. No notes again this week, but I have included a few choice quotations that I pulled out. You can also find links to things we talked about below as well.
This week’s session actually ended up dovetailing with a project I’ve started on this past week… The accelerationism book is on hold right now, as I’ve sort of burnt out on it a bit, but a book on photography and selfies is in the oven. Since it felt relevant to this chapter, maybe I’ll post this first chapter on Patreon next week as a teaser.
Social media allows for “friendship without friendship” — one of a “series of objects or practices deprived of their harmful features that Slavoj Zizek associates with contemporary culture: beer without alcohol, sugar-free candy, coffee without caffeine, etc.).”
“The term ‘blogosphere’ tricks us into thinking community when we should be asking about the kinds of links, networks, flows, and solidarities that blogs hinder and encourage. ‘Blogipelago,’ like archipelago, reminds us of separateness, disconnection, and the immense effort it can take to move from one island or network to another.”
“The opposition of the death of the old and vitality of the new, as well as the concomitant cries to condemn the old ways and celebrate the new, is a recurrent theme in technology and media writing that tells us nothing about the technologies and media practices involved. Inserting new actors into old series, the opposition between old and new obscures the practices and settings of technologies, the ways technologies are used (ways that are often diverse, conflicting, and unexpected), and the ways these uses produce different sorts of subjects.””If desire is like the path of an arrow, drive is like the course of a boomerang. What is fundamental at the level of the drive, Lacan teaches, is ‘the movement outwards and back in which it is structured.’ [Four Fundamental Concepts…, 177] Through this repetitive movement outward and back the subject can miss its object but still achieve its aim; the subject can ‘find satisfaction in the very circular movement of repeatedly missing its object.’ [Ticklish Subject, 297] Because failure produces enjoyment, because the subject enjoys via repetition, drive captures the subject.”
“In the Lacanian view, drive as death drive encompasses the way that even a drive for life results in paradoxes wherein saving life entails sacrificing it, pursuing life leads to risking it, and cherishing life looks like a bizarre fixation on morbidity. Turning back in on itself, turning into its opposite, the death drive is reflexive.”
“Blogs and search engines are different approaches to the same problem, different occupations of the same place. They point, though, in different directions. Faced with the challenge of providing a trusted guide through a chaotic, indeterminable, changing field, search engines say ‘trust the algorithm’. In contrast, blogs say, ‘trust doesn’t scale.’ So while the former offers a reliability based in equations and crawl capacities, the latter says, know the knower. It focuses on the person providing the link, offering the searcher the opportunity to know this person and so determine whether she can be trusted. Social network sites refract the problem of truth yet again: if the issue with blogs is the credibility of the guide or writer, the issue for social network sites is trust in the audience, in the others who might be following me.”
I wrote a bit about this one on the blog the other day here.
“Michel Foucault describes some of the early practices of writing the self. In first-and second-century Rome, writing contributed to an ascetic practice of training the self, of changing the character by positing another before whom one would feel a sense of shame. Here writing is not simply a method for recording one’s thoughts or reflecting on one’s actions. It is a way of making present one who is not there, of summoning a companion in the imagination in order to feel the pressure of the other’s gaze. [Narcissus, who does this but then cannot take it.] With the supposition of an other and of shame before this other, first- and second-century Romans, Foucault argues, construe writing as a technique for changing the self, not simply recording its thoughts or for reflecting on these thoughts. Writing is a training with effects on an individual’s character and practice.”
What does it say about the self portrait that it first took off in Italy after the Roman empire’s affair with self-writing?
“Foucault’s technologies of the self rely on the installation of a gaze, of the perspective of another before whom the subject imagines itself. […] It provides the subject with an ego ideal, a point of symbolic identification. Zizek argued that this gaze is a crucial supposition for the subject’s capacity to act. The gaze qua ego ideal is the point from which one sees one’s actions as valuable and worthwhile, as making sense. Absent that gaze, one may feel trapped, passive, or unsure as to the point of doing anything at all. To this extent, identifying with the gaze enables the subject’s activity.
The gaze structures our relation to our practices. For example, instead of experiencing the state as myriad forms and organisations, branches and edicts, presences and regulations, in our daily activities we tend to posit the state as a kind of entity, an Other aware of what we are doing. Similarly, we may posit an enemy assessing our every action. The point is that through symbolic identification the subject posits the very entity it understands itself as responding to. How it imagines this Other will be crucial to the kinds of activities the subject can undertake.
Weirdly, then, the active subject has to posit a kind of passivity: that is, a passive Other before whom the subject appears. The subject has to imagine himself, in other words, as fascinating the Other, as doing something or saying something or even watching something that captivates the Other. As Zizek emphasises, the gaze is thus reflective, doubled insofar as the subject sees itself being seen. The one who is captivated, in other words, is the subject.” [Zizek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality]
We’re back again after a little bit of a break — my fault: I had a minor mental breakdown but I’m fine now!
This week we read the first chapter of Jodi Dean’s 2010 book Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive, which was so good, and which threaded together so much of what we’ve talked about so far in this series of talks, that we’re going to continue reading it over the coming weeks.
I didn’t write anything like an intro this week, but I did pull out a lot of quotes I found resonant with previous discussions. First, links to articles, games, and videos referenced through the discussion, then a few Dean aphorisms after that.
Thanks to Wassim, as ever, for this week’s pun title.
Agematsu has an exhibition on at the moment that Robin Mackay has written an essay for:
Four Seasons is a unique artist book presenting Yuji Agematsu’s renowned zips, miniature sculptures comprised of reanimated urban detritus collected by Agematsu on daily walks in New York City and encased within the cellophane wrappers of cigarette packs. The book features images of a selected month from each of the four seasons.
[…]
The essay written by philosopher and Urbanomic publisher Robin Mackay incisively captures and theorizes the spirit of the artist’s daily assemblages, likening them to video game creator Keita Takahashi’s “clump spirit [katamari damashii, ??]—a cosmic disposition which places great hope in the obsessional collecting of heterogeneous stuff.” Gathering inspiration from a wide swath of sources including Plato, Philip K. Dick, Zoolander and Dante’s Paradiso, Mackay pays homage to Agematsu’s work.
I’ve spoken to Robin before about katamari damashii, which he sees as the best analogy for Deleuzian assemblages.
A few things I wrote down whilst reading the chapter. No extensive intro — little need to summarise what Dean has said with far more clarity. But maybe the notes below are useful jumping off points when read in context of the discussion. Numbers in brackets are page numbers from Dean’s book.
Accelerationist theory
Brassier’s critique that the internet is a orgy of stupidity
“The temporal take-over of theory displaces sustained critical thought, replacing it with the sense that there isn’t time for thinking, that there are only emergencies to which one must react, that one can’t keep up and might as not try.”
“communcative capitalism fragments thought into ever smaller bits, bits that can be distributed and sampled, even ingested and enjoyed, but that in the glut of multiple, circulating contributions tend to resist recombination into longer, more demanding theories.”
Blogs bad: “Drowing in plurality, we lose the capacity to grasp anything like a system.”
Blogs good: “Rather than restricted to positivist methods of description and measurement or linear, developmentalist, histories of technical change, this emerging critical media theory anchors its analyses of technologies, users, and practices in an avowedly political assessment of the present.”
Zizek on reflexivity in The Ticklish Subject
How does Dean’s / Zizek’s theory of reflexivity lead to our own reflexive impotence; see also Noys essay — S low-down is a tactic in worker struggles but coming to a standstill and affirming stillness is the bourgeois viewpoint, is it not? There’s no way we can alleviate our contradictions. “Human inquiry into the world affects the world.”
Dean on capitalism, economy and the affirmation of contradiction and volatility, pg 12 — “reflexivity leads to uncertainty and indeterminacy”. But the reflexive subject does not function quite like the reflexive market — “the endless loop of reflexivity becomes the very form of capture and absorption. A completely reflexive self is as incompatible with democracy as reflexive self-goverance is with fully reflexive subjects.” (13)
Without active and engaged resistance, things get worse for us. Why? Because we provide the negative feedback that keeps things in check, and which can further influence later outcomes. Yes, this means intervening in capitalism on its terms, but to withdraw from this process, in its current global state, would mean being trodden over roughshod by the sheer informational excess it produces.
Fred Turner comparing impotent hippies to the New Left, pg 19 — also relevant to libertarian frontierism in cyberspace — “In taking over systems theory and the collaborative practices of military research, then, the New Communalists assumed as their own the basic practices and suppositions of their opponent.”
It is true that capitalism can seize upon the tactics and strategies of counterculture, but it is also true that many counterculture have adopted the tactics and strategies of capitalism as their own. The New Communalists, for instance, didn’t realise that “the military, state, corporation, and university were already functioning in distributed, decentralised networks… they failed to acknowledge how their ostensibly countercultural practices themselves served as the conduits for spreading the communication and control mechanisms of the technocratic research world not just throughout US society but, via the Internet, throughout the whole world.” (22-22).
“displaced mediator” — what happens when a blogger becomes an academic? “… obliterating the prior open and antagonistic position.” (27)
“What proffered itself as a vehicle for bringing in something new, something better, becomes the mechanism for further embedding and extending the old, now strengthened by the rhetoric of its own over-coming.” (27)
“Media appear as displaced from the perspective of a backward look. Their displacement is retroactively determined in the context of an attempt to pull an explanation out of the multiplicity and contingency of technological change. Thus, a benefit of ‘displaced media’ is that it yields ‘newness’ in advance. Rather than linking critical media theory to its currency — has it kept up and incorporated the latest techno-trends? — the idea of displaced media embeds the instability and volatility of media practices into the analysis.”
Lacan on will to create from zero, will to begin again — ethics of psychoanalysis
“Accelerations and repetitions throughout their circuits gain in momentum and intensity — feeding frenzies, vicious circles, bubbles — until their result in extreme or catastrophic ruptures, zero points from which something new begins.” (30) — Should we keep an eye on those aspects of the blogosphere that return, generation after generations? (How long is a blog “generation”? 3 years these days?) Or should we affirm those moments when we grow out of things? Break with them and rupture? (Punk to post-punk.)
“what idealists from the Enlightenment, through critical and Democratic theory, to contemporary techno-utopians theorise as the very form of freedom is actually a mechanism for the generation of extreme inequality and capture.” (30)
“The contemporary challenge, then, is producing the conditions of possibility for breaking out of or redirecting the loop of drive.” (31)
This fortnight we read “‘Fleeing, but while fleeling, pick up a weapon…'”, the fifth and final chapter of Sadie Plant’s 1992 book The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in the Postmodern Age.
A brilliant suggestion by Niall, there was a lot in here about negation and the crisis of negation, which we’ve talked about in recent weeks in orbit of Badiou and Brassier and Williams, but in that sweet spot right before the emergence of the Ccru.
No notes from me this week. The chapter is pretty self-explanatory, but we had a great chat about accelerationism and the intensification of the commodity form, which led us onto — you guessed it — NFTs, amongst a lot of other things.
Next time, we’ll be reading “Blog Settings”, the first chapter of Jodi Dean’s 2010 book Blog Theory. I haven’t read this before either but it seems to chime a lot with Plant’s book, albeit updated to consider the more recent developments in communicative capitalism.
Below, a few links to things discussed over the course of our conversation, or links otherwise shared in the group chat:
On an administrative note, apologies about the weird levels in the audio this week. I had some technical difficulties at the start and the eventual recording was inverted as to how I was hearing it… Live, everyone else was clipping whilst my levels were quiet. Out the other end, I’m dominating the mix whilst everyone else is lower down… I’ve tweaked the audio to fix as best I can with my complete absence of audio production and will bear this in mind in future weeks.
This week we read / listened to Ray Brassier’s critique of Nick Land — unofficially(?) referred to by the title “Mad Black Deleuzianism” — given at a one-day symposium at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2010.
The symposium was the first public event to discuss accelerationism, in light of what were then two forthcoming publications: Benjamin Noys’ The Persistence of the Negative and Fanged Noumena, the collected edition of Land’s writings edited by Brassier and Robin Mackay.
Brassier’s critique is incredibly dense but worth picking apart. As he argues, “If you want to understand if a politics of accelerationism is possible or feasible, you need to confront the internal conceptual intelligibility of the accelerationist program.” We have tried to unpick Brassier’s critique in this session and my notes below hopefully provide some initial expositions that help lay out the stakes of each of his points of contention.
You can read a transcript of Brassier’s talk here or listen back to a recording of it below. The rest of the talks given as part of the symposium are also online here, featuring Mark Fisher, Alex Andrews, Benjamin Noys, Nick Srnicek, and Alex Williams.
(Also RIP no punny title from Wassim. A few clashes this week. We’ll endeavour to find a better night that works for others next time!)
In the Landian apparatus, materiality is construed solely as the production of production. Transcendental materialism in its Landian version becomes a materialization of critique.
Historical materialism, in a Marxist sense, is the argument that history is driven by matter — that is, by developments in material conditions. Material conditions create consciousness, not the other way round. If consciousness created material conditions, that would be idealism.
But idealism is still complicated by its relationship to matter, especially in Kant. Consciousness might produce material conditions, but that doesn’t mean that we retain access to those material conditions. Kant calls this transcendental idealism.
For instance, we can understand Kant’s notion of a thing-in-itself in a rudimentary way by thinking about a table. I understand what a table in, what it feels like, what it is used for. I have an understanding of “tableness”. I can even learn how to take wood and turn it into a table. But even that level of mastery over what a table is doesn’t allow me to know what a table is in-itself. No level of knowledge about tables allows me to think a table outside of my perception of it. And that’s Kant’s transcendental idealism. There is always a gap. No matter the extent to which I am able to master a “thing” and create “things”, I cannot know those things in themselves.
Land makes an interesting twist here. If Kant has a transcendental idealism, then what is a transcendental materialism? Isn’t that something quite horrific and eerie? I can accept that I can’t possess absolute knowledge of the things my ideas produce. That’s quite humbling, actually. There’s something quite Romantic in the idea that I can be a master sculptor but still not have absolute knowledge of the things I create. It’s quite liberatory.
But what Land suggests is that I cannot possess absolute knowledge of the things that produce my ideas. We retain Kant’s transcendental gap and may think we’re doing the right thing in folding it into a Marxist framework, but what we end up with is the realisation that we are at the mercy of things to which we do not have direct access to. Deleuze and Guattari similarly make this point in “The Geology of Morals”. But Land turns desire less into a question for geology as a horror story about puppeteer capitalism. Capitalism, through his texts, becomes a set of material conditions that create consciousness and they are conditions that we cannot really intervene in. We cannot understand or hope to grasp capitalism-in-itself.
Land’s inversion of Kant goes a little bit further than this too. We might note that critique, for Kant, has a very specific meaning. It is a process through which we can ascertain the limits of humanity. That is why he has three critiques of our capacity to reason. There are limits of what we can know, which in turn place limits on what we can do, and it is reason’s job to ascertain where those limits are and what becomes possible within them.
Land’s transcendental materialism shifts the stakes once again. It’s not a question of the limits of our own thought but the limits of capitalism. And since we cannot attain absolute knowledge of capitalism as a material process, then it’s not such a stretch to say that capitalism knows more about us than we know about ourselves. Capitalism, then, is a form of critique — quite literally, in how it valorising our labour and all the rest of it. Capitalism is an autonomous inquiry into the nature and value of human life. When Brassier talks about the “materialisation of critique”, that’s what he’s talking about. Critique itself is a material process carried out by capitalism, according to Land.
The problem with this for Brassier, though, seems to be that we end up in a wholly impotent feedback loop. Whilst that may, in part, be Land’s point about capitalism, it is already effectuated at the level of thought itself. It short-circuits philosophy, boiling down to an admission that the Lord works in mysterious ways. It is deferring to appearances, or lack thereof. I think this is what Brassier is nodding to when he says that, for Land, what needs to be “destratified is the empirical/transcendental difference.” When you realise that the nature of appearances is constituted by a pair of capitalist blinkers, how do you take the blinkers off? But the problem is that these blinkers aren’t just something to be discarded, like the sunglasses in They Live. They are being actively produced by capitalism, and we do not have access to that production process. As Brassier says, capitalism “generates its own representation, and by this account, representation itself is relegated to the status of a transcendental illusion. It’s a misprision of primary processes; it’s at the level of merely secondary processes.”
That present a problem for accelerationism, doesn’t it? If we’re supposed to be “accelerating the process”, how is that supposed to work if that process, in its materiality, is accelerating us. We’re not at the wheel; we’re the car and something else has its foot on the gas pedal. Brassier suggests that, for Land, this becomes a question of intensification. We might not have full control over that which is driving us, but we can either lean into it. We can lean into the death drive, for instance, and attempt to “make it with death”, as Land says, or we can try and frustrate that process and cause it to change tack.
To do this we’re supposed to try and engage with our machinic unconscious. This isn’t the institutionalised unconscious that Freudian psychoanalysis tells us about, and which Deleuze and Guattari ridicule — a sort of internalised mother-father that means all our problems can be traced back to some primal scene. It is that part of the unconscious that is still accepting of inputs, and is, in fact, responsive to the world around it. So, the question becomes, for Brassier: “how do you access the machinic unconscious?”
Brassier draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis here. It is a praxis intended to get you in touch with the machinic unconscious, which is a “conceptual practice [that] is no longer tracing intelligible structures from a pre-existing, readymade reality, it’s actually tracing movements and tendencies in material processes.”
But then, how is this supposed to work with regards to accelerationism? It may have a bearing on a kind of clinical practice at the level of an individual subject, but are we not utterly detached from our own stakes at this point? At the level of the social and of history, is this not a form of idealism intervening in materialism? Precisely what we’ve been told we cannot do? I start to get lost on the finer points of Brassier’s argument here, and want to spend more time with them before professing to have an explanation, but the key lies in his explication of the Landian paradox:
The paradox is simply this: under what conditions could you will the impossibility of willing? How could you affirm that which incapacitates all affirmation?
Perhaps those are the best questions for us to try and unpack together tonight.
It’s been about a month since our last session, mostly due to my fat January, but we really went the distance in this session.
We read Ray Brassier’s essay “Prometheanism and its Critics”, as found in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader. I think we really got round to clarifying a lot of the questions we had initially tiptoed around during our last session, and I hope we’ve got some sort of trajectory now that will carry us forwards through a certain set of readings related to Badiou and accelerationism.
I’ve every excited about where this new series of sessions is headed.
As ever, thank you to Wassim for his amazing Shakespearean pun — beautifully stitching together a load of points of discussion. Below I have included the notes I wrote for this reading. Join us in the #book-planning channel on the Discord for information about what we’ll be reading next.
Until then!
In a forthcoming conversation with Thomas Moynihan for the MIT Press podcast, we ended up discussing a topic that I’d like to refer to as “the ethics of infinity”.
Tom’s book X-Risk makes the case for this magnificently and very early on, when he challenges the “principle of plenitude”. He explores how, for much of human history, we have maintained a view of nature as an inexhaustible resource, from which nothing can ever truly disappear because, in her wisdom, nature is always productive and reproductive. However, against the backdrop of existential risk, we have slowly begun to appreciate the horrifying fact that we have driven many species to extinction, which nature is not going to just vomit forth again in its infinite evolutions. In possession of this knowledge, we must take greater responsibility for our own species and other species also.
But this doesn’t wholly eradicate the concept of infinity as such. Our world might be finite but infinity, as a promiscuous concept, continues to trouble us. In fact, we should probably try and understand infinity in a new way that isn’t tied to some sort of Kantian imperative, allowing us to relinquish all responsibility. After all, to focus too much on finitude is risky business in itself, when we consider that one of capitalism’s central constraints is the imposition of an artificial scarcity.
And perhaps this is part of the play-off here. We can perhaps better understand our ideological understanding of infinity via capitalism, which imposes upon us an artificial scarcity of wealth whilst at the same time constantly talking up the potential infinity of capitalism’s productive capabilities itself. What we end up with, however, is a pretty lacklustre understanding of what infinity actually means for us and how capitalism’s artificial scarcity fundamentally limits those potentials.
I think this is part of the problem that Brassier is approaching in his essay on Prometheanism. What comes after the otherwise (artificial) scarcity of human life? Or the supposedly soon-to-be-eclipsed finitude of human cognition? We can’t just understand these great adventures on the horizons as the sudden proliferation of possibility, avoiding a firmer understanding of what parts of our own existence are within our power to act upon and change. But, against this diverse background, the question that he asks — “What can we make of ourselves?” — suddenly takes on pretty enormous proportions.
I think a good way of thinking about this, with regards to infinity, is probably to consider that basic analogy about monkeys and typewriters. As a way to articulate the generative potential of infinitude, people often point out that an infinite amount of monkeys given an infinite amount of typewriters and an infinite amount of time would eventually produce, word for word, the works of Shakespeare. The point is, perhaps, about probabilities. What is the probability of one monkey with one typewriter typing out those works? The probability, represented as a fraction, would probably be very difficult to calculate and write down. But with infinity, it doesn’t matter. Eventually it would happen.
But this is also a bit of a backwards insult to Shakespeare, isn’t it? If we reframe the analogy, and understand the history of humanity as a proliferating number of very smart monkeys, we sort of loose sight, under infinite, of the specific conditions that gave birth to those works in the first place. Under infinity, Shakespeare is essentially rendered meaningless. They are just a long series of words presented in an arbitrary order that could be repeated. It undermines the specificity and commitment of Shakespeare himself in his proper time and place.
Now, to expect a monkey with a typewriter to account for the Shakespeare’s sociohistorical context, rather than just getting the words in the right order, is probably an “unreasonable” expectation to apply to a thought experiment regarding infinitufe, but that’s where the stakes lie, isn’t it? And isn’t that part of Brassier’s argument here? “Reason is unreasonable” — to fully account for the conditions under which change happens and the new occurs is harder to affirm rather than a probabilistic understanding of the organic emergence of works of culture. But what is the point is aiming for anything less?
Prometheanism, then, is maybe a sort of infinity feedback loop. It is true that “there is not limit to what we can achieve” but we have to commit ourselves to achieving it, and may particular attention to the conditions that make it possible. This is how Brassier reframes that critique laid at Prometheanism’s feet, which is that “the Promethean error is to formulate a rule for what is without rule.” But infinity without rules is meaningless. And when infinity is itself a concept, how can it be without meaning? Infinity is, instead, a concept constrained by a kind of artificial scarcity of reason. And this is how we might better understand Brassier’s sense of a nihilism unbound. How is nihilism the denial of all meaning, when an -ism is, by definition, a kind of distinctive practice. Nihil unbound, then, is nihilism un-ismed — freed from its artificial limitations so that we can finally understand the conditions of its appearing. In this sense, Brassier’s Promethean nihilism is a way of affirming infinity as a truth rather than just a truism.
[What follows are some further notes I wrote down to remind myself of a few talking points but which are a bit more formless and unclear — this is the next stage of understanding on the horizon for me.]
I think this is also connected to our understanding of zero — not “nothing” but rather pure potential. This is why Lacan turns to mathematics, which might further build on our previous session looking at Brassier’s critique of Badiou. In one of his seminars, Lacan argues that “the thing”, or “the real”, can be represented by a vase — a signifying object that holds nothing. But an empty vase is still more a signifier for vases than it is for the emptiness inside it — such is the tyranny of language — so Lacan turns to mathematics and, specifically, Cantor’s notion of an “empty set” in order to discuss the void in a way that is not contaminated by our aesthetic sensibilities and linguistic conceptualisations. In being outside of signifying language and instead in the realm of mathematics, the empty set is a better way of understanding emptiness not as zero (which can be a measure of lack) but rather as a set without elements.
It’s a tricky way of framing things, and my complete lack of mathematical knowledge doesn’t help, but if anyone saw my talk with Isabel Millar at the end of January on Repeater’s YouTube channel, she explained it really well I thought, in the context of Lacanian psychoanalysis anyway. [See her response starting from about 1hr in.] She explained why Lacan uses Cantor’s “empty set” as a way to talk about women or femininity or, even more specifically, female sexuality. Under patriarchy, and especially Freudian psychoanalysis, we can see how female sexuality is woefully misunderstood and takes on this kind of empty set-ness — woman has no elements of its own. It is lack. It is, in terms of masculinity, the thing desired, but to understand femininity as having desires of its own is this sort of striking taboo. (It’s worth noting here too, as Isabel did, that these senses of masculine and feminine are not necessarily tied to a gender binary but rather are these signifiers for a sort of broader social relation.) Anyway, Lacan suggests that we can affirm this sense of being an “empty set” because it produces a space of pure potential. And whilst I cannot say that I fully understand Lacan’s reading in this sense, and also haven’t read his twentieth seminar directly, I think it is the sort of argument we can recognise from Sadie Plant’s Zeroes + Ones. Plant’s identification of women with zero is very much in line with Badiou and Lacan, I think. And it is all of this that I see lurking in the background of Brassier’s essay here, which he removes from the highly specific nomenclature of Badiou’s mathematical ontology and Lacanian subjectivity and instead turns into a kind of post-Enlightenment nihilism — what he calls “subjectivism without selfhood” or “autonomy without voluntarism”.
This empty set issue may also be understood via Brassier’s exploration of the distinction between “the human condition” and “human nature” in Heidegger. The former has no fixed essence, and is therefore malleable, whereas human nature is less so because it is understood relative to the behavioral qualities of other species.
Last year we spent the majority of lockdown reading Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia. It was a trip. Now we’re back for 2021 but I’m personally hoping to forestall our diving into some blisteringly difficult and massive text, and I’m instead looking forward to reading a few shorter essays as one-off readings.
For our first session of 2021, we read Ray Brassier’s 2004 essay “Nihil Unbound: Some Remarks on Subtractive Ontology and Thinking Capitalism”. Not to be confused with his 2007 book Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, this essay is instead taken from the collection Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, edited by Peter Hallward.
Thanks, as usual, to Wassim for providing this session’s titular pun.
Below, you can find my introduction to the session.
For my sins, I’ve been reading a lot of Badiou recently. In fact, I’ve been reading him for most of the pandemic.
After many years of tactical avoidance, I’ve found myself coming full circle, following a trajectory that I imagine is quite common — first, dismissing him out of hand for his unorthodox and heretical take on Deleuze, only to now appreciate the generative power of his militancy.
In reading Badiou, even (or especially) when you disagree with him, his provocations become sharpening stones for your own positions. This isn’t always the case — sometimes he is just bad — but at his best, and whether he is right or wrong, he moves thought forwards. It’s hard not to respect that.
Last night, I was reading The Adventure of French Philosophy for the first time. It might just be the perfect example of how his thought operates in this way. Here we have his infamous essay on the “potato fascism” of Deleuze and Guattari, among other striking polemics that are unlikely to convince many readers of his value, but Bruno Bosteels’ translator’s introduction frames Badiou’s provocations in the right way. He writes of a series of what he calls “constitutive polemical knots that give Badiou’s philosophy its distinctive orientation, tonality and feel”. For Bosteels,
one of this thinker’s greatest virtues — which to others might seem to be a defect, especially in his writing on other philosophers — lies in giving thought a decisive orientation by leading readers to the point where they must take a stand in one way or another. Each of Badiou’s knots, in this sense, begs to be cut. And the task of his thought — for example, in reviewing someone else’s work — lies in facilitating these cuts and in elucidating the consequences of choosing one knot and one cut — one act — over another.
It feels like a innately post-punk maneuver — a strange way to frame Badiou, I know. It makes me think of Phil Christman’s poignant essay on the Postcapitalist Desire lectures, in which he writes — in quite Badiouan terms, come to think of it — of Fisher’s fidelity to the event of post-punk:
not the loud, colorful, simple, proudly incompetent, and often nihilistic music known then and now as punk rock, but the strange and often foreboding music that came immediately after it, made by artists who occupied the space of possibility that punk had created by saying “No” to manners, taboos, and musical skill. Such artists — Joy Division, the Mekons, the Fall, the Raincoats, Wire — turned punk’s nothing into something, or many somethings.
Badiou’s thought feels very similar. It could be described as a kind of mathematical post-punk — his assertion that being is produced ex nihilo, making the void or zero his foundation — which is not a nihilism but a challenge to turn this the being of nothingness / the nothingness of being into a something. (For Ray Brassier, however, this is precisely what nihilism – a Promethean nihilism, at least – should be.)
Central to this is Badiou’s arguments against Deleuze and Guattari, particularly in his essay “The Fascism of the Potato” from The Adventure of French Philosophy. Here Badiou argues that Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the multiple is confused. “Only a moron can confuse the Marxist dialectical principle ‘One divides into two’ with the genealogy of family trees concealed in ‘One becomes two’.” For Badiou, “in the dialectic two times One does not equal Two but once again One – the only Two worthy of the name being the essence in becoming of the One.”
Badiou’s way of thinking about this is via an amoeba. An amoeba divides itself into two. The tension here is between saying, is this division the production of two distinct amoebas or is it the amoeba cloning itself. Badiou thinks the latter — what you have is two of the same, not two that are different. Badiou compares this to how capitalism operates. When capitalism fractures and splits, is it producing difference or the same? For Badiou, again, the answer is that we are seeing sameness rather than difference. We are seeing the duplication of the finite rather than the Deleuze’s recombinant infinity.
The amoeba analogy is fitting, I think. It illustrated why materialism is important (and this importance is Brassier’s starting point). Relying on the deceptive identity politics that can result from multiplicity in Deleuze and Guattari’s work is to leave yourself open to all sorts of complications, so Badiou insists on a materialism that does away with the apparent omnipotence of the One and instead insists on Zero or the void as his starting point. This is Badiou’s “subtractive ontology”. Being and truth, two central pillars of his philosophy, are names prostituted for all kinds of meanings and ideals. But being and truth, for Badiou, are instead those things left over when all presentation (and representation) is subtracted. It is a materialism that takes the voided matter of being very seriously. And that is why, for him, mathematics is the only way of exploring being and truth without ideological presentation.
This is Badiou’s mathematical Platonism, which asserts that there are mathematical concepts that are wholly independent of human being and language. It’s an assertion that is arguably similar to Nick Land’s fascination with numerology. “Counting always happens on the outside”, Land says in his essay “Mechanomics”, and Badiou would no doubt agree.
This surprising similarity between Land and Badiou is the implicit starting point for Brassier’s critique. Badiou does succeed in subtracting Presence from philosophical debate in order to get the truth, but he also inadvertently reveals the ground within which the seed of capitalism’s takeover was first planted.
From here, Brassier reintroduces Deleuze and Guattari back into the heart of Badiou’s thought. Their project becomes newly relevant to Badiou’s own, to the extent that, if there is a dialectic in the present, it is arguably Deleuzo-Badiouian, rather than Badiouian contra Deleuze. Brassier attempts to demonstrate, rather than Badiou refuting Deleuze and Guattari’s “potato fascism”, all he does is return to the very grounds of its generation, delineating, as he puts it, “the generic infinite’s composition out of the finite, and hence its immanence to finite situations.” This is affirmed, in his opinion, by the work of Gregory Chaitin, who demonstrates how “incompleteness” – arguably more analogous to Deleuzian infinity rather than Badiouian zero –
is far more than a marginal, metamathematical anomaly. It is a central, possibly even ubiquitous mathematical predicament. There are non-deducible, un-provable mathematical truths everywhere, quasi-empirical ‘facts’ that are gratuitously or randomly true and that can only be integrated by being converted into supplementary axioms.
I wonder if it is possible to convert this into cultural terms – perhaps similar to the genre-proliferation that defines postmodernism. The weird genres that have been birthed in recent decades, the “undecidable excess” of our voided cultural landscape, which are arguably supplementary sub-genres to the central cultural movements of the twentieth-century, are precisely the product of what was previously understood to be an anomaly coming quite explicitly to the fore. They are instances of capitalism, as Brassier puts it, converting “random empirical facts into new axioms” – or, rather, converting random experimental pockets into new pillars of cultural production. (A shaky analogy, admittedly.)
The production of these new pillars seems to emerge from nowhere, like radioactive mutants, Things, extremophiles crawling out of an otherwise putrid lifeless swamp, but that swamp is not a void. It is only voided of human influence. What lurks in there is, in fact, capitalism itself.
* * *
This hopefully introduces the stakes of Brassier’s essay, whilst saying very little of its conclusions. My central takeaway, which is broadly driving the research on my accelerationism book, is that, taken together, Deleuze and Badiou produce a matrix through which we might be able to understand the collapse of the distinction between punk’s New and post-punk’s New, albeit through a mathematical rather an cultural framework. I cannot claim to grasp many of those conclusions at present, and I’m also happy to be corrected on this introduction also, because, I must admit, it is hardly a confident elucidation on my part, but I’m hoping that, between us, we might be able to uncover a few of Brassier’s conclusions with more clarity.
