The Coming Authoritarianism.
constant escape
winter withered, warm
I'm listening to this right now. Gives a good, brief primer on materialism and idealism.
linebaugh
Well-known member
https://www.alamut.com/subj/economics/de_landa/antiMarkets.html
this is a good delanda article, constant you should read it so you can remind me of all the points
this is a good delanda article, constant you should read it so you can remind me of all the points
De Landa Destratified - Techgnosis
This interview first appeared in Mondo 2000, Issue 8, Winter 1992 In War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Manuel De Landa cuts through humanism and adopts the position of “robot historian.” Like a techno-Foucault, he traces the evolution of self-organizing machine consciousness under the...
techgnosis.com
FLOWING DOWN THE BLACK HOLE
Deleuze and Guattari emphasize over and over that once you take the route of destratification, there’s an inherent danger that it will turn fantastic, that it will turn against itself. For them, certain aspects of Nazism were very destratified – for instance, Nazi tactics. That’s why they beat the shit out of everyone. And yet there was this smell of death there – the holocaust. They were destratifying themselves, but they bounced off the wall and restratifed themselves in a much more gross, evil, and resentful way, lacking joy in the worst way.
I just saw the Doors movie. Jim Morrison just tried to break on through to the other side too fast, thinking that all you had to do was take more and more acid. When you can’t break through anymore, when you bounce off it, you become resentful and turn to death. You won’t find that world of purity that you were expecting, and now you become resentful and turn against yourself, turn suicidal. Deleuze and Guattari call it a black hole. You enter the wrong attractor. The 60’s were extremely destratifying, and yet, because they thought they were going to achieve everything within the 60’s – and what they wanted was not achievable, period – fringes of this motion went into the wrong track. Then you have the Weathermen, completely pathetic terrorists blowing themselves up. That’s that impatience and resentment that Deleuze and Guattari warn about.
Deleuze and Guattari emphasize over and over that once you take the route of destratification, there’s an inherent danger that it will turn fantastic, that it will turn against itself. For them, certain aspects of Nazism were very destratified – for instance, Nazi tactics. That’s why they beat the shit out of everyone. And yet there was this smell of death there – the holocaust. They were destratifying themselves, but they bounced off the wall and restratifed themselves in a much more gross, evil, and resentful way, lacking joy in the worst way.
I just saw the Doors movie. Jim Morrison just tried to break on through to the other side too fast, thinking that all you had to do was take more and more acid. When you can’t break through anymore, when you bounce off it, you become resentful and turn to death. You won’t find that world of purity that you were expecting, and now you become resentful and turn against yourself, turn suicidal. Deleuze and Guattari call it a black hole. You enter the wrong attractor. The 60’s were extremely destratifying, and yet, because they thought they were going to achieve everything within the 60’s – and what they wanted was not achievable, period – fringes of this motion went into the wrong track. Then you have the Weathermen, completely pathetic terrorists blowing themselves up. That’s that impatience and resentment that Deleuze and Guattari warn about.
Interestingly, the final section of that interview talks about bifurcation.
@suspendedreason
WALK SOFTLY AND CARRY A LITTLE LAND
As they say, they key word here is not wisdom, but caution. You don’t know what happens at bifurcations. You have absolutely no control. The smallest fluctuation can make things go wrong. The predictive power of humans and technology is nil near bifurcations. All you can do is approach carefully, because the last thing you want to do is get swallowed up by a chaotic attractor that’s too huge in phase space. As Deleuze says, “Always keep a piece of fresh land with you at all times.” Always keep a little spot where you can go back to sleep after a day of destratification. Always keep a small piece of territory, otherwise you’ll go nuts.
@suspendedreason
WALK SOFTLY AND CARRY A LITTLE LAND
As they say, they key word here is not wisdom, but caution. You don’t know what happens at bifurcations. You have absolutely no control. The smallest fluctuation can make things go wrong. The predictive power of humans and technology is nil near bifurcations. All you can do is approach carefully, because the last thing you want to do is get swallowed up by a chaotic attractor that’s too huge in phase space. As Deleuze says, “Always keep a piece of fresh land with you at all times.” Always keep a little spot where you can go back to sleep after a day of destratification. Always keep a small piece of territory, otherwise you’ll go nuts.
constant escape
winter withered, warm
Does "fresh" here mean that the piece of land you keep should be routinely refreshed?
vimothy
yurp
he means dont totally destratify
sus
Moderator
this bit too is good and relevant:
There might be an ethics here: how to live your life poised at the edge of chaos, how to allow self-organizing processes to take place in all the strata that bind you. In your life, you could create maps of attractors that bind your local destiny – those behaviors that are habitual and so on. And try to find those bifurcations that would allow you to jump, if not to complete freedom – that doesn’t exist – but to another set of attractors less confining, less binding, less stratifying. Or learn to lead your life near a bifurcation without ever crossing it – the lesson of being poised on the edge of chaos.
There might be an ethics here: how to live your life poised at the edge of chaos, how to allow self-organizing processes to take place in all the strata that bind you. In your life, you could create maps of attractors that bind your local destiny – those behaviors that are habitual and so on. And try to find those bifurcations that would allow you to jump, if not to complete freedom – that doesn’t exist – but to another set of attractors less confining, less binding, less stratifying. Or learn to lead your life near a bifurcation without ever crossing it – the lesson of being poised on the edge of chaos.
constant escape
winter withered, warm
As in, don't transvaluate all values, but leave some familiar and safe? But would it work to cycle through values, letting freshly destratified lands "cure" or stabilize, and then hop over to those, and destratify the land you had been calling home?
Or does that amount to the same thing as trying to destratify/transvaluate everything? Am I mistaken in thinking those two terms mean similar things here?
constant escape
winter withered, warm
Could this be a sort of evolutionary argument for the existence of conservative ideology? Makes sense, as far as I can tell. That is, if we didn't feel any compulsion to conserve or protect certain values, or more concrete things, we would destroy ourselves. Some things must remain sacred, no?
constant escape
winter withered, warm
Its just that when I imagine the sort of thorough, active nihilism that complete destratification entails (if that means what I think it means), it almost necessarily leads to destruction of bodies. Either that, or some kind of purgatorial state of groundlessness and dismay.