Author Topic: Spinal Catastrophism  (Read 4157 times)

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Nation of One

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The meaning of life is to waste energy?
« on: September 11, 2020, 04:23:40 pm »
This is connected to the work of Nick Land?

The meaning of life is to waste energy?  It all sounds so tongue-in-cheek, so all-too-intellectual, and yet there is something ever so intoxicating about considering such extreme notions:

Quote from: Yuxi_Liu
I took note of the philosopher Nick Land from reading about posthumanism on Wikipedia.

I was intrigued, so I read more. And turns out Nick Land's writing is sometimes easy to read but most of the times extremely hard to read, and probably garbage. I wrote this post so that you don't have to waste time wading through the garbage, looking for fragments of good poetry.

    Nothing human makes it out of the near-future. -- Nick Land

First of all, Nick Land was obsessed with hating Kant, loving Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and their philosophical style (called schizoanalysis, related to schizophrenia). He likes to think about the world from very nonhuman viewpoints, such as other animals, robots, computers, machines that humans made, earth, the universe, etc. He likes capitalism and technological revolution, as fast as possible, without regard for its goodness.

Recently there's some mainstream reports on his philosophy of Neoreactionism ("Dark Enlightenment"), the idea that democracy sucks and monarchy/CEO-president works better. This philosophy has gained a bit of following, but uninteresting to me, so we won't review that. I'd simply note that the phrase "Dark Enlightenment" really should be "Delightenment". Really missing out such a pun.

Schizoanalysis

The idea of schizoanalysis just means that there's a lot of ways to make a theory about the world, and make philosophies, and there's no one way to do it, and further, there could be genuine conflicts that cannot be resolved by appealing to a higher standard.

In mathematics, there's some fringe movement of this style. Most mathematicians are in favor of logical consistency, but some are okay with controlled inconsistency (paraconsistency). Most mathematicians are in favor of using infinities, but some are finitists who think that infinities don't exist, and a few are ultrafinitists who think that there are finite large numbers (such as e^{e^{10}}) that can be assumed to not exist.

Coincidentally, these fringe mathematicians tend to be obnoxious and argumentative (Doron Zeilberger is a prominent example). Maybe there's such a thing as an "obnoxious fringe personality"...

Schizoanalysis uses an analogy for how to think about theories: the rhizome. A rhizome is a bunch of underground roots, touching each other in a messy network. This is in contrast to a tree, from a big trunk going up to little branches.

rhizome

Traditionally, stories about the world are told like a tree: there's a great principle of the world: be it God, Existentialism, or Absurdism, and the story gets more and more details as it explains the smaller things like how to treat other people.

But maybe there are many stories just messed up and knotted, without any way to unify them in a single principle. I make stories about Infinities and you about Ultrafinitism and there's no way to unify us. Two powerful countries with incompatible philosophies go to war, unable to unify their stories.

Really obscure style


Kant is hard enough, Deleuze and Guattari's books are unreadable (I tried). Nick Land, being immersed in such kinds of books, often wrote in the same extreme obscure style. For example, Machinic Desire (1992):

    The transcendental unconscious is the auto-construction of the real, the production of production, so that for schizoanalysis there is the real exactly in so far as it is built. Production is production of the real, not merely of representation, and unlike Kantian production, the desiring production of Deleuze/Guattari is not qualified by humanity (it is not a matter of what things are like for us)...

Don't bother trying to understand that. A big part of reading philosophy is to ignore real nonsense while still spending time on apparent nonsense that is actually sensible.

Earth

Another paper/fiction, Barker Speaks, develops the theory of "geotrauma", a story about how the Earth feels, and it feels endless PAIN. This is my most favorite story so far, just because it's easy to picture (especially if you know Gaia theory).

    Deleuze and Guattari ask: Who does the Earth think it is?... during the Hadean epoch, the earth was kept in a state of superheated molten slag [from asteroid impacts]... the terrestrial surface cooled, due to the radiation of heat into space... During the ensuing – Archaen – epoch the molten core was buried within a crustal shell, producing an insulated reservoir of primal exogeneous trauma, the geocosmic motor of terrestrial transmutation... It’s all there: anorganic memory, plutonic looping of external collisions into interior content, impersonal trauma as drive-mechanism.

Basically, do psychoanalysis on geology. The center of the earth is full of heat, and tension, leftovers from its early pains of being hit by asteroids. This trauma is being expressed in geological phenomena like earthquakes, volcanoes, and continental drifts.

    Fast forward seismology and you hear the earth scream.

Further, even biological creatures should be thought of as one kind of geological phenomenon. This isn't complete nonsense, considering that we have possible clay-life earlier on Earth, and the fact that biological lifeforms have shaped geological strata.

    Geotrauma is an ongoing process, whose tension is continually expressed – partially frozen – in biological organization.

In this story, biological creatures are just one way for Earth to express its trauma. We are the skin-crawls, manifestations of Earth's inner suffering.

Materialistic nihilism

    No one could ever ‘be’ a libidinal materialist. This is a ‘doctrine’ that can only be suffered as an abomination, a jangling of the nerves, a combustion of articulate reason, and a nauseating rage of thought. It is a hyperlepsy of the central nervous-system, ruining the body’s adaptive regimes, and consuming its reserves in rhythmic convulsions that are not only futile, but devastating... An aged philosopher is either a monster of stamina or a charlatan.

    What matters is the violent impulse to escape that gives this book its title. The thirst for annihilation.

This section is based on his book The Thirst for Annihilation (1992) that I have been reading on and off sometimes. This book is a collection of essays on George Bataille, a very weird writer that I encountered twice. The first time, I encountered him during my research on lingchi, as he wrote about it in a really hard to read book (Tears of Eros) that sexualizes violence.

The second time, it was in this book by Nick Land.

Basically, George Bataille wrote a lot, and his writing about materialistic nihilism, death, ****, vomit, garbage, and all that's ugly about life. (He also wrote a lot of sexual fetishes, but it's not very interesting.)

He wrote about them repetitively, not because he wanted to repeat himself a lot, but because to write was to howl in pain. We scream when we are burnt, no matter how many times it happens. Bataille wrote ugly despair whenever ugly despair hit his brain like a tsunami.

The meaning of life is to waste energy

Bataille thought Life is evil and ugly and meaningless. Life doesn't try to conserve energy, instead, life is about wasting energy. The Sun is a giant source of energy, and all the excess energy has to be used up somehow... hence life! Life appears when the blind materials of earth become overheated by all the energy of the sun, and shaken into more and more complicated shapes, in order to consume all the excess energy.

    All energy must ultimately be spent pointlessly and unreservedly, the only questions being where, when, and in whose name... Bataille interprets all natural and cultural development upon the earth to be side-effects of the evolution of death, because it is only in death that life becomes an echo of the sun, realizing its inevitable destiny, which is pure loss.

The Sun is the source of energy. All the energy ends up being wasted, turned to "zero", nothing. Life is a thin, fragile, and very complex middle-layer between the Sun and the zero.

This is a great contrast to the rigorous and ultra-formal mathematics texts I have devoted my energies to.  In fact, the formality in the "explanations" is almost maddening; one wonders how we are to be taken seriously by any possible student.   The students would also have to be mad.   :P
« Last Edit: September 11, 2020, 04:40:56 pm by Sticks and Stones »
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