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Friday, 20 July 2012

Life's What You Make It: Vitalism and Critique

Presented atThe Politics of Critique, University of Brighton (July 18th 19th2012)

In a 2009 pamphlet issued out of the student occupations in New York we findwhat we might call the standard rejection of critique: This activity ofproducing novel recommendations for the submission of the population is calledcritique. (2009, III) The activity of critique is treated as one that is indissolublybound to what it rejects, and hence always constrained and always availablefor recuperation: Critique illuminates all the errors of a society that itsmanagers have overlooked. (2009, III) What we find is the rejection of critiquefounded on a rather unstable amalgam of an immanent thought of affirmation

which would charge critique with always being secondary, dependent, and asymptom ofressentiment coupled to a post-Situationist model of perpetualrecuperation in which critical activity is a mere corrective or, as thepamphlet puts it, [a] release valve for intellectual dissonance. (2009, III) Thesolution to this impasse is one of radical separation, which aims to sever therelation to power: Critique must be abandoned in favour of something that hasno relation whatsoever to its enemy, something whose development andtrajectory is completely indifferent to the nonlife of governance and capital.(2009, III)

The reference to nonlife gives a clue perhaps to the nature of what has norelation to the enemy, what has a different development and trajectory: Life.It is the power of Life that will substitute for the impotence of critique. This ismade explicit in the appeal to a form of life which no reason can govern(2009, IX), and the closing assertion: Our task, impossible, is to seize timeitself and liquefy its contents, emptying its emptiness and refilling it with thelife that is banned from appearing. (2009, XI) Of course, what justifies andsupports this discourse is the work of Giorgio Agamben. Its initially somewhatsurprising that the supremely po-faced and hyper-refined thought of Agamben,in which the paradigm of modernity is the concentration camp, should be soprevalent in licensing radical discourse. No doubt, the work of Tiqqun and The

Invisible Committee has been influential in encouraging this take-up throughthe redemptive reversal of the transformation of bare life life everywheresubject to sovereign power into a transfigured life of glory. I will say moreabout this transfiguration later, for the moment I want to pause for a whileon the vitalism subtending this take-up.

Comedy and Critique


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I want to turn to what might perhaps appear an unlikely topic the comic(dont worry this wont be funny). It is the comic that will allow us to explorethe continuing vitality of vitalism and, in particular, how vitalism attempts toreplace critique. Henri Bergsons work Laughter (1900) contains a famous

definition of the comic as something mechanical encrusted on the living. Onekey example of this repetitious mechanism deployed by Bergson is the jack-in-the-box:

As children we have all played with the little man who springs out of his box.You squeeze him flat, he jumps up again. Push him lower, and he shoots up stillhigher. Crush him down beneath the lid, and often he will send everythingflying. It is hard to tell whether or no the toy itself is very ancient, but the kindof amusement it affords belongs to all time. It is a struggle between twostubborn elements, one of which, being simply mechanical, generally ends bygiving in to the other, which treats it as a plaything. A cat playing with a

mouse, which from time to time she releases like a spring, only to pull it upshort with a stroke of her paw, indulges in the same kind of amusement.This example indicates the two tendencies that Bergson traces: the elasticity oflife, represented by the act of playing, and the inelasticity of the comic,represented by the jack-in-the-boxs mechanical and thing-like repetition. Thefunction of laughter is to free us from this inelastic machine-like existenceand return us to the social normality of elastic life to prevent us from merelybeing jack-in-the-boxes, we might say.


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This is, of course, equivocal because the return to social normality can itselfseem like a return to something machine-like and repetitive the routines ofsocial life being hardly more elastic than the comic. Therefore, Bergson himselfnotes how laughter can free us from the machine-like, but also risks returning

us to the limited forms of social life:

Laughter comes into being in the self-same fashion. It indicates a slight revolton the surface of social life. It instantly adopts the changing forms of thedisturbance. It, also, is afroth with a saline base. Like froth, it sparkles. It isgaiety itself. But the philosopher who gathers a handful to taste may find thatthe substance is scanty, and the after-taste bitter.The bitter taste of laughter is this limited critical function and the difficultyof finding a true elasticity of Life. In finding the elasticity of Life we aim toreplace the merely negative function of critique by affirming that elasticity.Yet, the result is still equivocal, seemingly as bound to the social as critique is

supposed to be. On the one hand, laughter threatens to return us to the roteroutines of social life, to what Federico Luisetti calls the founding mechanisms of late capitalisms violent entertainment compulsion (2012). On the otherhand, laughter also incarnates a possible detachment or interruption of thesemechanisms, and the possibility of a new construction.

We can find this latter kind of political (or anti-political) vitalism figured in thecomic turns of activism that aims to mock the inertial repetitions of the 1% orcapitalist capture. Laughter at those in power is the affirmative replacementfor critique, indicating both how we can collapse into the social repetitions andmachine-like roles of our capitalist personas and how we can break with theseroutines. The difficulty is that the very act of the comic, the very attempt tobreak social norms, can itself become another mechanical norm. The

valorisation of the elasticity of Life incarnated in lines of flight, exodus, andmovement threatens to become another rote routine of affirmation, if notto fall back into replicating the ethical and social forms of a mutationalcapitalism. The result is a perpetual conflict, a divine comedy, which serves toenforce the perpetual power of Life. Life as affirmative operator must also bereturned to again and again to free it from any becoming inelastic, including inthe inelasticity of opposition. The dread fear of recuperation, displaced ontocritique, returns to haunt Life that always falls short of the excess it is


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supposed to figure.

What I am tracing is a strange mimicry and replication of the operation ofcritique, and its fate, by this political vitalism. The very stridency by whichcritique is condemned in the name of Life is suggestive of the parallel by which

vitalism comes to replace, or try to replace, critique. The empowering effectof vitalism, and also its comedy, makes it the signature gesture of the moment.It traces a biopolitical populism that poses Life against a vampiric Capital. Thisis an ethical discourse in which are actions are assessed by their ability to liveup to the elasticity of Life and condemned by laughter at their failure to do so.We are perpetually comic subjects, laughing at our own enchainment to themechanical, while repeatedly trying to conform to the vibrancy of Life. I wantto unpack now a little more just why the interchangeability of vitalism andcritique should take place and suggest a little more why this should beproblematic.

A Renegade DiscourseDonna V. Jones has noted the popularity of vitalism in the contemporarymoment as a replacement for the usual discourse of critique:

As a radical or renegade discourse, vitalism represents protest, disillusion, andhope. Life often grounds opposition today, after the political disappearance ofa subject/object of history and scepticism about the philosophy of the subjectin general. A third way, Life disallows bourgeois stasis as certainly as itmakes impossible the achievement of rational controls. In fine, Life conjuresup experience, irrationality, and revolt. (2012: 17)Obviously the slightly coy reference to the subject/object of history indexes

the absent proletariat, and so we might say Life indexes a new populist subjectthat, true to its object, overflows any class canalisation. Also, the reference toexceeding rationality is the trope of anti-planning and anti-rationality that isdriven also by the claimed immeasurability and excess of Life over all control.

What Jones crucially indicates is that despite vitalism claiming the status of anaffirmative and primary force it in fact always functions as a reactive banner,and should be defined less affirmatively than as the negation of its ownnegation the mechanical, machinic, and the mechanistic. (2012: 28) Life


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does not come first, but (as we saw with the comic and laughter) can only berecovered through and against the mechanical. It is for this reason, I want tosuggest, that the hostility of vitalism to critique is a sign of what Freud wouldcall the narcissism of small differences. Vitalism constantly makes a claim onLife as primary and castigates critique as reactive because it remains within

the same matrix.

Now, of course, one response to this could be to suggest the complexity ofvitalism as a critical discourse noting that it does not involve a simpleopposition between Life and mechanism, but rather a complex and dynamictopology (as does Federico Luisetti). The path I wish to explore is rather thestrange interchangeability this analysis sets up between vitalism and critique.Where we saw how vitalism starts to look like critique, I now want to brieflyexplore where critique starts to look like vitalism.

This is interchangeability is posed by Jones. She turns to Bergsons essay on

laughter to track how Bergsons suggestion that laughter is social therapy foraction that has become mechanical (Jones 2012: 52) can be used tounderstand the work of Judith Butler and Pierre Bourdieu as forms ofBergsonian comedy. In the case of Butlers theory of drag as parody the act ofparody frees us from the laughable mechanical repetitions of gender roles,while Bourdieus analysis of the habitus becomes a comedy of class society, arisible provocation. (Jones 2012: 55) These works of critique can be seen asvitalist in the ways they encourage us to mock routine and encourage inventionand elasticity.

What we see here is how theories we might consider to be anti-vitalist and

critical turn back around to vitalism once we recognise the critical function ofvitalism. In this comedy we find positions exchanged as critics becomevitalists and vitalists critics (admittedly this may be a comedy only foundfunny by a few sad souls). In Joness reading the addition of Marxs analysis ofreification is that there we laugh at how inanimate things act as living beings in the dancing commodity form. Marx inverts Bergson to demonstrate livingactivity in inert things (Jones 2012: 55).

The effect of the deconstruction of the distinction between the living and the


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machinic seems to problematise vitalism, but still leaves it as a useful criticaldiscourse. In fact, this speaks to the difficulty of discarding vitalism, should wewish too. There is, if we like, a kind of persistence of the living as normsecreted within the critical apparatus (as well as a critical apparatus secretedwithin the living). This is the vitality of vitalism referred to by Georges

Canguilhem, in which he stressed its ethical and imperative function (Greco2005: 17-18).

Critical LifeDespite, or perhaps because, of these parallels and fusions the critique ofvitalism seems all the more urgent. The very volatility, promiscuity anddispersion of vitalism (which mimics its own account of Life) threatens to leaveno space at all for critique that could not be re-absorbed into Life. MaxHorkheimer, in a 1934 essay, accepted the element of protest againstreification at work in vitalism, but was critical of its elimination of history,evasion of the material, and irrationalism (Horkheimer 2005). Now, while these

criticisms still hold good, I think, we might note the re-tooled anti-criticalvitalism of the present tends to embrace these exact points of criticism.

If history is co-extensive with Capital and Empire, the single catastrophe touse Benjamins oft-quoted phrase, then the elimination of history is the onlyway to found the novelty of the new. The crisis of capitalism and theexhaustion of left or social democratic forms is taken as a given and as the signof the release of the repressed force of Life. In similar fashion the materialonly incarnates the practico-inert slumped into the frozen stasis of thecommodity form. The alternative materialities of Life objects, networks,complexity, et al. are the only hope against the dead matter of the present.

This is what Badiou, in Logics of Worlds (2006), calls democratic materialism.Finally, irrationalism is to be welcomed against the sterile rationalisms ofplanning and order that are taken to encompass everything from state socialismto neo-liberalism.

This is something of clichd presentation of the various forms of politicalvitalism, but I would argue that there is some truth to it, and some truth to itas an account for the attraction of biopolitical populism. In fact, this kind ofpolitical vitalism precisely tracks outside of the constraints of the present andpresents itself as a discourse without limits. This was Michel Foucaults point


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concerning what he described as the savage ontology of life in The Order ofThings (1966) (1974: 303; trans. mod.). The galvanising force of this ontologylies precisely in its disregard for the discourse of political economy. Thedifficulty is, however, that the discourse of Life remains within the forms ofcapitalist and state power as its essential support.

My contention, then, is that Life with a capital L opposed to Power with acapital P is obviously a critical discourse, but an inadequate replacement forcritique. While it constantly tars critique with the brush of being reactive andtrapped by its proximity to what it negates this supposed model of separationand distance replicates the forms and functions of capitalist ideology whichseparate off Life as the sphere of reproduction from production. In that senseit operates as a replacement for critique and founds its superiority on theaffirmation of a productive value on which capitalism depends, and whichcapitalism posits. It mistakes interiority for exteriority, and also dissolves thedifficult questions of class structure into the simplicity of two opposing blocs.

MediationsI want to suggest that critique here finally turns on the question of mediation.Part of the appeal of this political vitalism is its deliberate dissolution ofmediations. Mediations are bad. They stand at the expense of the immediateexpression of Life whether those mediations are the forms of power of stateand capital, the mediations of organisation in the forms of party or union, orthe mediations that would impose rationality and direction on the forms of


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Life. Now as I have noted one form of these mediations, those of the organisedleft, have largely collapsed, or have certainly been hollowed-out andsignificantly weakened. This, however, does not license the complete removalof the problem of mediation.

Part of the difficulty here is that mediation tends to get understood as thesearch for the happy median, for mediation as synthesis, as stabilisation, inline with the usual clichs concerning Hegelian or Marxian mediation. In fact,mediation is a work of negativity and negation that does not propose to bringtogether, but which splits, divides, and exacerbates contradictions. We mightsay, and I would say, that the irony is that the seeming discourse of separation,of the radical division into Two, that is the discourse of the savage ontology ofLife finds itself most subject to mediation in the bad sense it decries. Its verydivision forces it back into mediation.

My suggestion is then that mediation, in critical terms, traces an impossibilityof conjoining and integration. In precise terms the mediation that concerns meis labour, as the very impossibility of labour. So, a thinking of labour does notentail the function of labour as mediator in terms of discipline and generationof either a capitalist or revolutionary identity Marxs stern but steelingschool of labour. Rather, a thinking of the mediation of labour suggests thateven labour cant save us, that wageless life is a future traced within theforms of labour as well as in abandonment from them. Its precisely thecollapsing of this mediation that feeds the fantasy of Life as norm of excess,but also this impossibility that reveals the form of Life with a Capital L as

capitalist fantasy of canalisable excess. Hence it is the political vitalisms thatproduce the antinomy of Life as excess and Capital as vampiric that results in atotalising (in the bad sense) discourse.


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If the compactness of the class did not deliver then the compactness of Lifewill not either. In fact, what is lauded is the dispersion and volatility of Lifebeyond any positive or negative point of identification precisely its lack ofcompactness attests to its always revolutionary potential. I want to suggestthat this folds back into bad comedy in which Life is always about to succeedbut some final pratfall, last minute social or political blunder, leaves uslaughing at Life reduced to mere lives. Rather than this perpetual comedy, Iam suggesting that we look a little more closely at how Life was alreadymediated by capitalist and state power. This is not to sow a countervailingdespair of everything is recuperated. In fact, it is the discourse of Life asradically separate that oscillates between the poles of Life as everything andLife as completely mediated and recuperated. In contrast, mediation lies in thepatient work of insinuation and negation that reveals no affirmative Lifelesson, with its consoling comedy, but rather the divine comedy of thepurgatory we are in.


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Marx remarked, in the Eighteenth Brumaire, that the revolution isthoroughgoing. It is still traveling through purgatory. It does its workmethodically. I doubt we still have quite the confidence of the teleology ofthe journey to paradise. That said, Marx also remarked about the complexity ofany revolutionary process: while bourgeois revolutions storm more swiftly from

success to success they leave you with a terrible Katzenjammer (hangover literally cats wail); in contrast, proletarian revolutions constantly interruptthemselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, inorder to begin anew. This suggests that making life what we want it to bemight be a winding process, more purgatorial, still a divine comedy, but notthe storming to immediate transfiguration Life would promise.


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NON-USELESS LENIENCYNothing

I came across Edgar Morin's 'Approaches to Nothingness' (1989) fortuitously. Itpursues the relation to non-dialectical negativity, and echoes in some respects

the recent work of Ray Brassier and Reza Negarestani (although in a lesstechnical and metaphysical vein). In particular Morin explores the implications ofour binding to a non-correlational negativity, or, in his usefully straightforwardterms, the relation of anthropological nothingness (death) to the "incursion ofNothingness" into the cosmological. At the level of the cosmos we have thenothingness of the big-bang, the nothingness of the universe ending inannihilation, and a resulting ontological nothingness (which to me echoes Reza'sconcept of the "littered universe"). This is Morin, in Thomas Ligotti mode:

Such a universe is based on no foundation, has no center, knows no geneticGod, does not exist in all eternity. It is an acentric and polycentric universe, a

world without aprioristic laws since our known laws of the universe develop withthe world contemporally and coextensively. Clearly, it is a world without aprogram, without divine Providence, without becoming. This world, which knowsno foundation and no creator, which creates itself, engenders itself, generatesitself, unfolds in the context of myriad autocreative and self-producing processes:the stars and atoms, of which there are billions.(85)

As you might guess from the language Morin is interested in complexity theoryand negentropy. What is interesting, however, is that he insists on how theseprocesses of self-organisation always take place "at the phenomenal fringe ofthings that theoretically defies formulation, that bears no name, and whose

presence we surmise." (88)

Morin insists on an effect of "emptiness", a fundamental binding to the necessityof destruction: "Nothingness is everywhere in the interior of the universe." (92)What's also interesting is that he links this back to our experience of thisNothingness. Of course you could regard this as a reactive (re-)turn tocorrelationism, but surely some of the fascination of non-correlational theories(whether "negative" (Ray Brassier), of "twisted affirmation" (Reza), or more"positive" (Graham Harman)) is their relation to us? In a way part of the point ofthese theories is to shock us out of a Kantian narcissim that "we are giving theorders". [1] What do we do with this shock?

I'm not simply trying to restore correlationism, in fact such a restoration is, in away, premised on my missing of the metaphysical level of these arguments. [2] Iwant to consider, however, Morin's arguments which also sketch a political effectof the "embrace" of nothingness. Here is a (unfortunately) long quotation:

Apart from a self-defensive reaction by which human beings ignore negative


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feedback or deliberately forget and simply persist, there is an attitude ofacknowledging that for the first time we are facing Nothingness in all itsdesolation, in all its necessity, in all its mystery. [3] The increasing enervation ofthe myths, which are by no means ineffectual or dead yet, bring us for the firsttime to the insight that there is no messiah or also that every possible messiah is

ill, not just the Messiah of the religious but also that of politics. Every Messiah -including that of science, including that of progress - must be told: no! (94)In political terms this function of the anti-messiah means the refusal of"brotherhood" as consolation and myth in the face of the negative. Rather, wecan elaborate fraternity, or I would even say communism, "on our sharedcondition of being condemned to Nothingness." (95)

Although Morin argues this in terms of an "ethics of agony" and ethics is a word Iam suspicious of (despite my own failure of using it in a piece that perhapsshould be pruned from my CV), his point concerning the anti-messiah may still

hold as one possible starting-point for thinking the politics of the non-correlational.

Notes[1] I am by no means knowledgeable enough to grasp the accuracy of this as areading of Kant, my suspicion is not but I await the next issue of Collapseeagerly.

[2] I seem to lack the "metaphysics gene", and in my rare conversations withphilosophers I can easily be chided for my tendency to completely miss this levelof argument. Hence I am without-philosophy in perhaps the most boring sense.

[3] Reza's work indicates this awareness is not as "new" as Morin suggests.

ReferencesMorin, Edgar (1989) Approaches to Nothingness, in Looking Back on the End ofthe World, ed. Dietmar Kamper and Christoph Wulf, trans. David Antal. NewYork: Semiotext(e), pp.81-95.

Negarestani, Reza (2008) "The Corpse Bride:Thinking with Nigredo", CollapseIV.


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NIHILISM WITHOUT NEGATIVITY Mark Fisher(Some still forming thoughts on Xenoeonomics andaccelerationism...)

Splintering Bone Ashes' case for an accelerationist

capitalism constitutes something like a left Landianism.Libidinal Economymay be, as Leniency says, "the book ofaccelerationism", but Lyotard was then openly intoxicated

with/ by Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus; and NickLand's 90s texts emerged under the euphoric, inhumanistinfluence of both. This was a kind of nihilism withoutnegativity; the only interdiction was on the negative, inall its senses: the 'No' of a sclerotic leftismcharacterised (or caricatured) as eternally resisting andrepressing and the miserabilism of all the parties ofdepressive deceleration were to be abjured in favour of theunleashed full positivity of Capital as monstrous ex nihilo

propagator without limit. The vast, sublime mechanism ofCapital as planetary artificial intelligence wouldliquidate (the illusion) of human agency: you either submitand enjoy or act out the dead drama of your own impotence.

Splintering Bone Ashes' Alex describes his leftist spin onthis as follows:

The blind acephelous polymorph that is capital must beembraced, but not from the point of view of some naveenthusiasm or sentiment of hope that markets can

deliver utopia. Instead, as the way out of thebinaries of a leftism which is utterly andirretrievably moribund, and a neo-liberal economics

which is ideologically bankrupt, we must bend bothtogether in the face of an inhuman and indefatigablecapitalism, to think how we might inculcate a new formof radically inhuman subjectivation. This entails theretrieval of the communist project for a new man, ANDthe liberation of the neo-liberal quest for acapitalism unbound, from both its subterraneandependence upon the state and the skeletal humanist

discursive a priori which animates its ideologicalforms.Three questions immediately occur.

1. Is thispureCapital, a Capital without humanqualification, an unbound Capital without a human face,anything more than a fantasy (the fantasy of Capitalitself, perhaps)? Isn't Capital, rather, essentially


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constituted by the tension between dissolution-without-limits and inhibition (I believe that the importance ofDeleuze and Guattari's analysis lies precisely in claiming

just that.) But this might be the point: if the fetters andbuffers were removed, we would no longer be dealing withcapitalism at all (further: it is the fetters and buffers

which precisely stop capitalism from mutating intosomething new and inhuman).

2. The problem of agency. Let's suppose that such a Thingcould emerge from the husk of late capitalism. One majordifference between SBA's accelerationism and Landianism isover the question of agency: for Landianism, Capital is theonly agent of note, whereas for SBA, Capital must beassisted to become something else. But what form would thisassistance take? As per Tronti's question about the leftafter the demise of the workers' movements, what group

subject could emerge which would be both willing and ableto offer it? In the lack of a collective agent, wouldn't webe back to a kind of theoretical parlour game that has noconsequences?

3. How is it possible 'to utilise the stuctures ofcapitalism against the state' in a way that does not repeatneoliberalism?

Given his scepticism about hauntology, it would be toocheap a rhetorical strategy to adopt to suggest that

there's a way in which SBA's accelerationism could itselfbe a trace (a reinvocation of certain 70s and 90s inhumanforces turned spectres). In any case, hauntology is not, atleast not as far as I am concerned, a political strategy,nor does it preclude other stances or tactics. It is aboutresponding to what is there - or about what absentlyinsists in what is there. It is best conceived of as asymptomatology, cultural rather than political (whereculture is very much read, naturally, as a political-economic effect). Alex is therefore right to characterisehauntology as a kind of "good" postmodernism - the culturallogic of capitalism turned against itself. In culturalterms, sadly, is has been the case that a terminus, perhapstemporarily, has been reached - "that there is nothingelse, (at this moment in time at least) that nothing elseis possible". Much as I wish it weren't the case, it isn'tpossible to bring back modernism by force of will alone.


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OCTOBER 23, 2008

"FRANKENSTEINIAN SURGEON OF THE CITIES"Ben with more on acclerationism... He's right to nominate the

Lyotard of Libidinal Economyas the principal champion of

accelerationist capital. Libidinal Economymight itself becharacterised as an acceleration of Deleuze and Guattari. It was

Lyotard's diabolical, scandalous book, and his whole subsequentcareer could be construed as a retreat from its incendiary

jouissance, an attempt at pious recantation (or re-Kantation,

perhaps - for a discussion of which, see Iain Hamilton Grant'sintroduction to his own translation). Libidinal Economydescribed

capital as a "Frankensteinian surgeon of the cities", thecybergothic lab from which a modernist proletariat would grow, a

constructivist proletariat whose heroism consisted in its

capacity to machine a new inorganic body for itself, capable ofnot only enduring but enjoying the inhuman conditions of the

factory; an amnesiac proletariat that, absolutely devoid ofnostalgia for the earthy cyclicity of peasant life, enjoyed its

anonymous pubs, concrete arcades, and synthetic foods.

Yet, in the end, it is was Deleuze and Guattari who proved to

have the better handle on capitalism, precisely because theyinsisted on reterritorialization as the necessary counterpart of

capitalist deterritorialization. D/G anticipated the postmodern

condition, not the informatic model proffered by the later,insouciant, "mature" Lyotard, but the impasse described by

Jameson: capitalism as a future shock absorber as well as ascorched earth terminator of all traditions and archaisms,

operating in a time of anachronistic conjunctions (genetic

engineering labs next to lovingly reconstructed nineteenthcentury village greens). The Frankensteinian surgeon of the

cities would eventually disguise its hideous suturings andimprobable juxtapositions behind all manner of airbrushings and

recyclings.

Which brings us back to the question of hauntology. There's no a

priori claim that nothing could happen. Rather, there's anempirical claim that nothing is happening. I defy anyone to

gainsay this, to provide examples of culture (popular or

otherwise) hurtling forward, and I'll be the first to give up theghost. The sense that that nothing could ever happen (and, by

depressive extension, the mordant conviction that nothing everhappened) are more affectiveresponses to this inertia than

actual prognoses. In other words, one of my problem with Alex'spost was that it too hastily conflated hauntology withpostmodernism (whereas Alex's claim was, precisely, that

hauntology is too close to postmodernism). Postmodernism is, ofcourse, the dead end from which hauntology starts - but one of

its role is to denaturalise what postmodernism has taken for

granted, to conceive of postmodernism as a condition in the senseof a sickness.


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SPLINTERING BONE ASHES / Sunday, 20 July 2008 /Against Hauntology (Giving Up TheGhost).

A fashionable current in the territory where critical theory touches pop culture is a renewed,expanded, and re-oriented notion of the Hauntological. This philosophical concept originates inDerrida's Spectres Of Marx, but in its current formulation it is applied to a particular aesthetics of

pop music, whilst carrying with it the echoes of its original political context. In a senseHauntology's ghostly audio is seen as form ofgoodpostmodernism, as set against the badPoMoof a rampaging retroism. Beached as it seems we are at the end of (cultural) history, it is certainlya seductive argument. By foregrounding the processes at the material level (sampling, versioning,deliberately invoking buried/false childhood memories etc) it is contended that such music comesto terms with the deadlock which we face, the inability to properly think the new as such, andmakes of this condition something positive.

Set against this we might posit an explicitly nihilist aesthetics of pop music, which whilstin some senses would operate in a similar manner, would be crucially bereft of the quality ofmourning. It is this regard that Hauntology links to a mood of melancholic defeatism in Westernleft wing politics. What is noticeable is that beyond merely foregrounding the processes ofrecording and thereby demonstrating the nature of our time, hauntological musical works arefrequently acts of reverent mourning for some better time, for some golden age forever foreclosed

to us (be it the Ghost Box label's pre-Thatcher era of socialist government from 1945-1979, orBurial's rave-necromancy). Some of the stronger pro-hauntology arguments have run along neo-Benjaminian lines, holding that it is not merely an act of mourning for a non-reclaimable past, butrather a way of redeeming time, of reaching across possible universes towards parallel utopias,thereby showing us the possible, rather than just the dead-end intractability of our present socio-cultural situation. If all pop music now is a process of mourning the past, (most commonly seen inthe retro-necro indie scene, but clearly observable in dance music, hip hop and metal) thenhauntology's emphasis on placing that process centre stage is the obvious logical move.

The problem for me at least, is that this is essentially a position of total defeat, absolutelyof a piece with the comfortably melancholic disease which has afflicted the left since the 1990s atleast. From this perspective, Hauntology is a cowardly move, lusting after utopias that neverwere, or which are now unreachable, a retreat into childhood/youth, just as trapped in the endless

re-iterative mechanistics of the postmodern as the lowest form of retroism, merely in a hyper-self-aware form. In summary, haunology cedes too much ground to what it attempts to oppose,because of an a priori assumption: that there is nothing else, (at this moment in time at least) thatnothing else is possible, and as such we are to make the best of this(and that the best we can dois to hint at the possible which remains forever out of reach- with all the pseudo-messianicdimensions this involves). I would position two strands of argument against this: Firstly (if webelieve the hauntologists discursive a priori), as I have hinted at above, we might think a morenihilist aesthetic which seeks not merely to foreground the processes of postmodern audio-necromancy, but rather to accelerate the system to its ultimate demise, to speed up the rate offashion-flux to a point of irredeemable collapse. Rather than an act of reverence, of mourning, oftouching at impossible universes from a distance, this would be a deliberate and gleefulaffirmation. Alternatively, we might consider Badiou's analysis of the emergence of the new,which would entail a more strategic examination of precisely where the pop-musical evental sitesand historical situations exist within our current time: those regions which appear, from the in-situational point of view, to be marginal, and properly undecideable.


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NICKLAND:MINDGAMESatdazeddigital

Is Nick Land the most important British philosopher of the last 20 years? asksKodwo Eshun. The question might seem like an odd one Land only publishedone book, The Thirst For Annihilation: Georges Bataille And Virulent Nihilism and

a series of short texts, most of which had a limited circulation when they firstappeared. Nevertheless, Eshuns question makes sense because that smallcanon of texts collected for the first time in a recently published volume FangedNoumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 have had an enormous, but until now,subterranean influence. Their impact was first of all felt beyond philosophy in

music (Steve Goodman aka Kode9 studied with Land in the 90s), in art (JakeChapman has long been an admirer of Lands technilism; Eshun, in the 90s oneof the most important writers on music, is now a member of the Turner Prize-nominated Otolith Group), in the inhuman feminism of Luciana Parisis AbstractSex: Philosophy, Biotechnology And The Mutations Of Desire, and in theunclassifiable theory-fiction of Iranian writer Reza Negarestani, whose

astonishing Cyclonopedia was rated by Artforum as one of the best books of2009. Land had instant implications for those few artists I knew who read him,says Chapman. The combination of delirium and the crispest thinking turned thepolitical pessimism of the time into an intensive fatalism that was productivewithout reserve. Land somehow stamped his mark on the death-drive, andanyone who had the courage to read his work was pulled along in the wake.

Lands influence is also now infesting the philosophy departments which tendedto scorn it in the rare cases they were aware of it. Some of the philosophers atthe forefront of the most exciting movement in current philosophy, speculative

realism Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant studied with Land, and their workis still marked by that encounter. The re-propagation of Lands work viaspeculative realism has led younger theorists such as Ben Woodard, author ofthe forthcoming Slime Dynamics, which crossbreeds philosophy, science and

horror fiction, back to Land. Lands work was a welcome respite from much ofthe philosophy I had been reading at the time, says Woodard, His Thirst ForAnnihilation is one of the more interesting texts Ive read in several years as itlampoons the hubris of philosophers while managing to be a work of theory at thesame time. Land demonstrated that one could make rigorous theoreticalarguments without being afraid to engage with unorthodox materials.

In the 90s, Land was what the music critic Simon Reynolds once called a vorticalpresence, capable of utterly transforming those with whom he came into contact,and its a description Kodwo Eshun considers accurate. What struck me uponmeeting Nick Land at an event in Brightons Zap Club in 1993 or 1994 was his

presence, he says. His manner was immediately open, egalitarian andabsolutely unaffected by academic protocol and his style of speaking wasextremely vivid he dramatised theory as a geopolitico-historical epic and henarrated philosophy in the present tense as a series of personifications that drew


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equally upon Isaac Asimov, Norbert Wiener, Alan Turing, Ridley Scott andWilliam Gibson. When you were in Nicks presence, thinking mattered. It took ona mortal quality it became enlivened, libidinised, intensified and it made

demands upon you. Many, if not all of those people that made contact with NickLand have since gone on to make names for themselves in literature, in

electronic dance music, in art, in fiction It is clear to me now that thoseencounters with Nick were intensifying experiences. After Nick, one could notturn back towards a homeland of thought. There was no homeland left to returnto.

I was one of those who underwent this dislocating encounter. Along with ahandful of others, including Steve Goodman, Luciana Parisi and Robin Mackay,the editor of the Collapse journal and the man behind Urbanomic, the publishersof Fanged Noumena, I was a founding member of the Cybernetic CultureResearch Unit (CCRU). The CCRU was convened by Lands former collaborator,Sadie Plant, but, when Plant departed, the Unit became shaped by Lands ideas

and methodology. Although the CCRU was notionally a part of the Philosophydepartment, it never had any formal institutional status. As one Warwickacademic memorably put it, The CCRU does not, has not and will never exist.

This institutional non-existence parallels Lands own strange situation aphilosopher whom few professional philosophers acknowledge.

I still recall very vividly the first time I encountered Lands cyber-writings. I hadread Thirst For Annihilation but it didnt really work for me; even though Iappreciated its experimental form and the way that it tried to become its subject

(the work of the French anti-philosopher Georges Bataille) rather than judge itfrom some supposedly neutral vantage point, there was still something self-conscious about it. It was the piece Machinic Desire that first took hold of me. Iremember reading it, then immediately re-reading it two or three times. Therewas a great deal of cyber-theory around in the 1990s but none of it seemed tocome from inside the machines which is to say, outside us in the way thatLands did. The writing didnt have the distance that one expects from academictheory, it dealt with fiction and film as terrains to be occupied rather than as

artefacts to be commented upon. It found a plane of consistency where thecyberpunk fiction of William Gibson connected up with the philosophy ofImmanuel Kant; where Blade Runner connected with finance capital. Theorywasnt being applied here; it was being plugged in. The writing felt as if it came

from somewhere real, somewhere exterior, rather than from a psychologicalinteriority. The whole thing was suffused by a reckless integrity: it was entirelylacking in the dampening caution and cynicism which makes so much careeristacademic writing dull. There was the unmistakable feeling that you get wheneveryou encounter an authentic project: the sense that this had to be written.

I completely share your thoughts about Thirst For Annihilation, says SteveGoodman, which to me read like a writer trying to liberate themselves from the


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shackles of being trained in academic theory/philosophy. Of course most peoplewho are academically trained one way or another, including myself, dont get pastthe pain, angst and friction such a quest generates, which is ultimately why much

radical post-Nietzschean academic theory is so tedious and adolescent, but itscertainly a worthwhile quest. But what is interesting about Nick, is that his

response to this hyper-rational prison of academic philosophy was not to retreatfrom it, but to accelerate it to a point where it implodes, perhaps taking him withit. So instead of retreating from theory, he actually seemed to understand itbetter than the most dutiful academic bureaucrat ever could. And this is whatmade him, at that time, such an amazing teacher. Anyway, I remember comingacross one of Nicks articles called Cyberspace Anarchitecture and Jungle

Warfare at some point in the mid-90s. This was a moment at which we were allmassively stimulated by jungle not just as a music, but as a theory-generatingmachine. The article had nothing in particular to do with jungle music in a literalsense, but the more I read it, the more this abstract landscape that it seemed to

be mapping was exactly the same one created by the music. I read it about tentimes and still didnt completely get it, but the sense of the concreteness of itscontent... its the lack of distance but also the sense that what it was describingwe were all familiar with already, was so compelling often the concepts seepedin by osmosis, through repeated reading.

I think Nicks writing after Thirst For Annihilation reminds you of this psychedelicfunction of theory, where it has this potential to strip back all the crusted, deadlayers of the catastrophe that we usually refer to as the human race, hecontinues, to zoom into this somewhat reptilian, info-material core, with a coldindifference but simultaneously an intense excitement.

Lands texts were never about 90s experimental dance music so much as theyconverged with it. Clearly he was drawing for a shared set of cinematicreferences that were in the musical air at that moment, says Goodman. But thething that always got me about the resonance between Nicks writing and junglewas this theme of turbulence that seemed to recur across his writings, atdynamic, social, mathematical, physical, economic and libidinal scales his

interest in the productivity of systems on the edge of chaos, for me, was basicallya direct and very literal description of what was going on rhythmically in junglewith breakbeat science. On one level, Nick was around 15 years ahead of thecurve, which is why what he was saying is still so current now.

Text by Mark Fisher


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Against Holism: The Argument fromEntropyPosted by larvalsubjects under Uncategorized

In the last couple years Ive spilled a lot of ink arguing againstholism or thethesis that everythingis related to everythingelse. This is notbecause I believethat relations are unimportantindeed, the only thing that really interests me arerelations

but rather because I think this position says too much.

From a holistic

perspective, for example, Im unable to make sense ofecology.While manyecotheorists defend holistic ontologies, the actualpracticesof ecologists andenvironmental scientists reveals something different. In their practices, theyshow supreme attentiveness to thefragilityof relations, and focus on whathappens when elements are subtractedfrom ecological networks (e.g., theextinction of a species) oraddedto a network (e.g., increased carbon dioxide inthe atmosphere). This wouldnt be possible unless entities possessed someminimal autonomy from their relations. So while I can agree with the holistwhen they argue that it is important to attend to interactions andinterdependencies between entities, I dont think holism can be coherently

sustained as an ontologicalposition.We can call this the argument fromecology.

A second argument could be called the argument from politics. Here theargument is similar, perhaps identical; which shouldnt come as a surprise associeties are ecologies. Here the argument runs that if social and political changeis to be possible, then holism cannot be true. If everything were related toeverything else in holistic wholes, then social and political changes wouldnt bepossible because individualentitieswhether they be classes, identity groups, orwhatever would be overmined (Harmans nice term) insofar as they would haveno being beyond their status as elements within a whole. Insofar as they would

have no being beyond their status as elements in a whole, there would be no wayof departing from existing social regimes so as to form new sets of socialrelations. Put differently, there would be possibility ofemancipation, as theconcept of emancipation is only possible where there is something to beemancipated and where there is something from which that thing can beemancipated. This is only possible where relations are separableand dontconstitute the essenceof a being. Social changes are only possible whereelements constitutive of a wholeif wholes even exist are irreducible to those


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wholes.

As an aside, its worth noting that this is no different than what Badiou says in hisset theoretical ontology.When Badiou defends the axiom of extension, he isdefending the thesis that sets are identicalto their members. Given a set {a,b,c},this set is identical to a set {c,a,b} because both sets contain exactly the same

members.This is equivalent to saying that it is the elements that determine the

being of the set, not the relations betweenthose elements (a point that moredialecticallyrelationallyinclined Marxists should pause and think aboutbefore enlisting Badiou in support of their positions).What Badiou is, in effect,saying is that there is no naturalor intrinsicordering of social relations. There isno great chain of being (right) that orders how peopleoughtto be related, noroughtmarriage naturally be between a man and a woman, nor oughtwhiteshold dominion over slaves because people of other races are allegedly likechildren needing a father to look after them, nor do people necessarily needkings, parties, or authorities to look over them.

Rather, Badiou argues that societies arejustsets that take on a variety ofconfigurations and where, above all, relations among elements or members canbe changed. Theres a reason that Badiou calls his politics a politics ofsubtraction, an operation that wouldnt be possible were relations intrinsic andholistic. In making this claim, I take it that Badiou is just presenting aformalarticulation of every genuinely revolutionary political orientation against everyreactionary, holistic politics (Edmund Burkeand his heirs): relations areextrinsic, external, and separable, such that there is no natural or divine order tothe form social relations ought to take. Social relations can be transformed andreconfigured precisely because the being of beings is not identical to being-related. Things relate, sure, but their being is not exhaustednor is it reducibleto

by these relations. Harman nice

ly makes these points about Edmund Burkein a number of places. People seem to confuse the thesis that things often exist inassemblages or networks of relations and it is important to recognize this, withthe thesis that therefore the being of things is their relations to otherthings. Given that social and political change has, in fact, taken place throughouthistory, we can conclude that ontological holism is mistaken.


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A third argument occurred to me as I was composing my talk for the NetworkedHumanities conference at University of Kentucky.We can call this the argumentfrom entropy. Before proceeding, its important to note that entropy has twodifferent (though related) significations depending on whether were talkingabout thermodynamics in physics or information theory. Generally people areonly familiar with the first of these significations. In thermodynamics, entropysignifies the tendency of closed systems to lose energy available for work overtime. In carrying out operations, some energy is always dissipated into theenvironment or lost, such that it is no longer available for work in the sense thatphysics uses the term.

As an aside, I find it amazing that concepts of work and energy are almostentirely absent in the humanities (and generally in the social sciences aswell). Its as if we believed that being is composed solely of the discursiveandthings, and are then leftwhen raising social and political questionsleft to askwhether it is the discursive that holds social relations together or things.Weforget that holding anything together requires work.When I propose the conceptof thermopolitics (I dont know whether anyone else has used this term), Imsuggesting that we need to attend to work and energy as additional mechanisms

of power that lead people to tolerate oppressive assemblages (Reichs, Deleuze &Guattaris question). Its not simply because people are duped or stupid that theytolerate oppressive assemblages that act against their own interests, but alsobecause they are depedenton certain assemblages for the calories they need tosustain their bodies, as well as the fuels they need to maintain their homes,transportation, and so on.A similar point can be made about time.When Ipropose the term chronopolitics (and again, Im not familiar with how othersuse the term), Im referring to the manner in which the sheerstructuration oftime for people, groups, and institutions can become so overwhelming thattheyre left with no additional time to try and change theircircumstances. Chronopolitics would be the analysis of technologies of time as

mechanisms of power that 1) exhaust people physically and mentally, and 2) sofill the day that other forms of engagement are foreclosed.

Anyway, back to entropy. In information theory, entropy refers to a measure ofprobabilitywith respect to information.Ahighentropy system is a system inwhich there is anequal probabilitythat any element will be related toanyotherelement. In other words, in a high entropy system its impossible tomakeinferencesfrom one element to other elements because theres an equal


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likelihood that any of the other elements will be related to this element. Bycontrast, a low entropy system is a system in which it is possible to makeinferences from a given element to another element.A system in which only onerelation to another element is possible would be a system with0or nil entropy.In this framework, its possible to see why I make the claim that questions ofinterpretation and social and political thought are questions of entropy.When

we talk about texts thatcanbe interpretedand here Im not talking aboutmeaningand when we talk about social orders, were talking about lowentropysystems. In the case of interpretation, for example, were saying that given thiselement, we can infer a relation to this other element. This is above all the casewith the hermeneutics of suspicion or depth readings in the Freudian andNietzschean tradition, as well as in ideology critique. In these contexts weresaying that theres an improbablerelations between two elements that repeats ina variety of different actions, thoughts, or social domains. In saying this, weresaying that theres an orderhere (order is always more improbablethandisorder). It is this improbability that supports the veracity of the depthinterpretation.

Likewise, when we say that theres a social order, were saying

that given a particular element in a social systemsay a person of a particularrace we can confidently infer theirrelation to other things: their economicstatus, range of possible occupations, and so on.Were rejecting the claim thatthe persons relations are stochastic or highly entropic.

This allows us to give a precise definition of power: power is the mechanisms bywhich a society reduces entropy. Order never comes for free, but always requiresoperations, energy, and work precisely because its more probable for anything tobe related to anything else, than for anything to maintain improbable andselective relations to a delimited range of elements in the order of being. Onto-

cartography would be the investigation of the mechanisms by which improbableorders are maintained; and would therefore include investigations of discursivemechanisms (not surprisingly, the favorite of the humanities), chronopoloticalmechanisms, geographical mechanisms (geopolitics), and thermopoliticalmechanisms.Whenever encountering an order in the social and political worldwe should be surprised and ask ourselveshowit maintains itself. Inunderstanding how it maintains itself, we can begin to devise strategiesundermine it where those negentropic mechanisms are oppressive.

All of this aside, we now see a third argument against holism.A world inwhicheverythingis related to everything else is identical to the definition of ahighly entropic system.

It is a world where no inferences can be made to other

elements precisely because theres an equal probability of anything being relatedto anything else. Such a world would be a world of Brownian motion, wherethere was no language, mathematics, ecologies, or social orders, precisely becauseall of these orders are orders in which relations between elements are selectiveorimprobable.As Deleuze said of Hegels categories, the world proposed by holistsis a world that is too baggy, too ill fitted, to get at the real of the world that we, infact, encounter.

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