In a recent issue of E-Flux, Gean Moreno has written on many of the same themes I have touched upon in the past, developing his ideas by way of the rather elegant analogy of nano-technology’s ‘grey goo’. His Notes on the Inorganic, part 1: Accelerations, considers capital in light of a Landian reading, regarding it [...]
If it is now a machinic capitalism whose artificial cognition rules our world — its amphetaminic diachronism melting all to air and lava-like, re-sedimenting the crust — we must ask what is this unconscious from which everything is pulled, molten, to the surface? The phenomenal being of this alien mind, whose transcendental conditions must be vastly different than ours produces more information hours than attention can ever repay.
Spiders roam gossamer filaments, burning through RSS feeds, social networking platforms, and blogs, routing back through high-speed fiber-optic cables, and depositing base data to be transmuted in the server-banks to pure gold. Last week, NPR reported that 75% of market volatility was the product of High Frequency Trading (HFT). [1] HFT runs on hyper-engineered algorithms [...]
Accelerationism is the notion that rather than halting the onslaught of capital, it best to exacerbate its processes to bring forth its inner contradictions, and thereby hasten its destruction. As a radical act, the genesis of this idea stretches back to Marx and continues through Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, and Nick Land’s cybertechnics.
Whence then, does resistance rise? It is hard, at this point in time, growing up as a part of the generation that, as she says, “was formed during the Reagan Bush era when anything resembling true critiques of authority and power have been methodically ridiculed, demonized, or erased, creating a cohort that is surprisingly obedient and conformist, when not imbued with a sense of hopelessness.”
The museum is a factory, tightly contained and maintained by the managerial class, safely autonomous, and drunk on the trickle of wealth that flows down the legs of the one percenters. The mill town, of course, no longer need reside in a single place, but now steadily circulates through the international borders that capital has carefully burrowed through sovereignties. One might, of course, miss the runway lights that will taxi you safely into your next destination, but then you may be mistaken for a terrorist.
In Huysman’s A rebours, the decadent aesthete Des Esseintes, after dallying in an interest in paper and wax flowers, decides to push his sensual experiment further, and purchases a variety of live flora which are perversely chosen for their artificial appearance. Des Esseintes watches with satisfaction as a scabrous decoupage of blossoms and leafy things is unloaded onto his doorstep [...]
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Expanding upon Wilfred Sellar’s attack on the ‘Myth of the Given’ – ‘the idea that some of our beliefs or claims have a privileged epistemic status because the facts that make them true are “given” to us by experience’ Metzinger claims that our folk-philosophical intuitions are a direct result of the bounds of our cognition, as expressed in the limitations of our [...]
© 2012 Joshua Johnson