all right everybody Welcome to Theory underground I'm your host David mccarrier this is my channel and it is basically the advertising and free media arm of the theory underground uh thing I've built which is basically a course platform on my own website and app which you can download at the IOS and Android stores okay but with that said most of the courses exist behind membership or paid um walls of some sort because we try I have to try to make some kind of money off of this so does Mikey um or any of the other co-instructors I've ever worked with and so um but I wanted to give you all a freebie uh a sort of taste of what's going on at Theory underground because this what I'm about to show you all here is something that I'm really proud of it just happened tonight um it is the intro to nickland course taught by Michael DS and uh I I just I'm going to let it speak for itself I'm just going to get it going here in a second and so I just want you guys to to watch this to to get a taste of it to to see if it's right for you um and even if you're not into say taking the the course itself I think that this will stand alone as a resource as a sort of gift um from us to you um Mikey put in a lot of work a lot of work um to say us a lot of time making so many different thinkers from Kant through schopenhauer Nicha batai Freud um all of these different thinkers up to DG and then he even explains the body without organs right and he does it in a way that's very straightforward and it's just so it's kind of a meme right like oh explain the body without organs and do it without you know do it in a straightforward way like this is the meme and Mikey actually does it and so you know it's a it's a heroic sort of um thing that he did here I don't know I'm not going to talk it up too much but I think it's [ __ ] badass and so he did a lot of work so we don't have to and so I think a lot of people like treat this as a sort of like intro course to a bunch of different really interesting philosophers and a really interesting divide in the field itself because ultimately that's what is being traced out here is a divide in the field um between two camps and it's you know where do you between these two camps in philosophy between the sort of like more humanistic um or existential or phenomenological tradition um versus this kind of posthuman um vitalistic Pro metaphysics kind of philosophy um this on the one side a philosophy of of of lack and and negation on the other side like affirmation and positivity um this is a really good intro to all of that to and to all of these thinkers and so I hope that you'll enjoy thanks peace all right everybody Welcome to Theory underground I am about to introduce to you all Michael DS who is the instructor of this course introduction to Nick land this is day one technically syllabus day but at Theory underground we don't [ __ ] around with the syllabus that much all you need to know about the syllabus for now is that it's where you'll find the link to the zoom call and if you want to have access to these things after they are recorded they will be available on the website under the courses tab go to the courses go to the module for the week and you'll see it there if you don't see it there don't feel bad about messaging me sometimes I do need a reminder to get that up in a timely manner or sometimes I run into some other kind of a hitch or whatever um but it's coming along the there is an app for the theor for Theory underground you can get it on Android or iOS all you got to know about the app is that it's buggy as hell and currently uh you can't even get half the stuff it's supposed to have on it so I'm working in the background trying to make that all work I'll give you all updates week to week as that goes okay so what I want to tell you all about Michael DS is that besides our friendship um I consider him like a colleague I consider him to be um a mentor in certain areas of philosophy uh especially things like delus and guari Nick Lance ccru um he is partially responsible for having gotten me into levinos back when he did he got me super into Lon um he's getting me into bodard there's all these different things that I've been able to learn from him chances are if you're taking this course then you already are familiar with some of his work or at least the conversation that we the conversations that we've had on the theory under underr Channel over time but for anyone not familiar I'll just say a couple more things about it and that is that um the dangerous maybe blog is where you'll find all of his writings um and these these writings are a National Treasure these writings can be [Music] um I guess I'll just say that I like the way that he said it one time and and that was that he was going platinum in the of Napster right and so for anyone who doesn't get the reference is like you can't expect an album to go platinum in the age of Napster well when your blog is succeeding when nobody else is really blogging anymore that's interesting and of course you know people do blog but not in the world of theory not the way they used to not not the way they used to back during the time of Nick land and Mark fiser right and so um why why do people still appreciate his blog so much and well it's basic L because of this thing that we all just have taken to calling the Mikey standard which is this impossible standard that even he can't live up to but he tries which is that is to say he tries to be able to uh explain Concepts to somebody like they're on a bar stool and uh they're not a specialist in this domain of knowledge right so um most recently he got published in the underground Theory volume a couple of his things are in that volume um but the the one that you would definitely want to check out is called wage labor and jouissance um or if you know for Stuff related to this course there's a bunch of stuff that he'll be pointing you towards really I think that a lot of people come to it for the leanian stuff or the jijii and stuff and so a lot of us um are likely surprised to see the Mikey's going to be teaching us things like K and tusen guari or Nick land but that's ultimately what we're all here for and so with that um please put your literal or figurative hands together for Mikey oh and you can turn on your cameras you know so that he can see the audience but also you know you don't have to there's a reason why that we understand no worries um okay so yeah our nightmare has uh arrived from the future um okay so we're gonna spend four weeks talking about he who shall not be named we're gonna name him uh so we're gonna talk about Nick land and so what I want to do with this course is basically just give an overarching in introduction to him and there's lots of good videos on Nick land on YouTube but what I think because if you're doing YouTube videos a lot of times you don't have you want to keep them relatively short what I think is missing is anything that's trying to give a comprehensive systematic view of what he's been doing his whole career and I think overall there's a real consistency to L's thought there's one big turning point in it um but other than this one thing which are spoiler it's how he views Capital early on he thinks Capital was part of the system that that the the overarching system that staves off change um all of that whereas he's going to end up seeing Capital as the great mechanism of change deterritorialization Etc so he changes his view on Capital this is right between the the era that he was writing circuitries and machinic desire and that that's the big pivot point but after he aligns Capital to the outside and we'll get into all these terms um once he does that he stays with that through everything else he does the ccru stuff stuff on China the stuff on bitcoin That Remains the Same and so but it's worth saying all this stuff that we're gon to talk about tonight pretty much stays the same too which is it's his basic metaphysics so the metaphysics from the early days really kind of coalesces and stays the same all that changes is his position on Capital in particular and so tonight what we're going to do is we're going to discuss Nick Lan's libidinal materialism which you don't really hear him talk about this much anymore you don't hear people who are in land talk about it but that's really the name of his ontology and what he's gonna do is he's going to develop this ontology out of how he reads the modern traditional philosophy starting with Kant in particular um he doesn't have much to do with any precontent philosophers um for him philosophy get serious with Kant and then it's a whole matter of how do we read the sub subsequential developments in philosophy after K so we're talk Hegel schopenhauer shelling batai the losing this whole thing right so what we're gonna do tonight is try to get an understanding of what the metaphysical Foundation of land's thought is next week that's where we're going to do the the most famous period of L's work which is the stuff on capitalism and cybernetics and meltdown and all that you know that the the good stuff from the the mature land period week three is going to be the neoreactionary stuff the dark Enlightenment and then week four we're g to tackle to the best of my ability um what land in the ccru were up to with their whole uh dive into the occult and so that's the basic out um layout of the course and so what we're going to do some of the our our lectures Theory underground tend to go long and so I just want to stay upfront first off I know this is uh Saturday before Halloween if you guys have Halloween parties or you got plans or something that's why we record them you can always come back to them tomorrow or throughout the week and I have no problem doing lectures that are typically longer than a lot of lecturers would give because mine and day our Viewpoint is look even if you four hours is a lot of lecture right but since it's recorded you can go back to it throughout the week and watch it in increments and so for me it's more important to just go okay this is my opportunity to lecture on this specific topic let me ring out as much as I can on it so anybody who wants it in the future it's there as a resource and so it's not a a pressure thing oh I I I'm here do I have to stay if you goes four hours no this is about facilitating your understanding of nickland and if that means you guys leaving early and then watching it later that's totally cool that's what it's recorded for so there's no pressure it's only it's only two hours if you double speed it guys there's that too um but in tonight in particular I think might it it requires probably the the longest lecture because there's so much contextualization to give to land and that's what's always missing in these discussions of Nick land I think everybody here probably knows that he's a very controversial thinker and there are people who have reached out to Dave and said you shouldn't even let Mikey teach this course because you're platforming a fascist or whatever he's not a fascist doesn't mean there aren't issues with his thought or his positions but he's not a fascist for reasons that we'll get into here um but there's there's really good reasons to talk about Nick land and that's what Dave and I when we were talking about the possibility of this course we uh we really were like well look okay here for one any of us who are interested in contemporary politics you got to know something about Nick land because his his whole thing with the Neo reaction and the dark Enlightenment certain positions that he develops in that period of his work along with minus moldbug Curtis yvin he's another founding figure of the Neo reactionary movement he and Lan develop a political philosophy that when you look at it seems like Steve Bannon read these guys and then implemented it during the the Trump election and you know Bannon starting breit Bart we'll get into that in week three but the point is whether like somebody might not like Nick L but he's affecting their world I I think and I think he's going to continue to have a major influence he'll probably become I mean he already has a kind of cult status with certain people I think once he dies that even solidifies even more and he's gonna continue to influence things so I think we do ourselves no favors by not knowing who he is not knowing what he thinks um I think that creates this lore or this Mystique around him like he's the philosophical Boogeyman and you know he he's to me he's just a serious philosopher who was unapologetically nihilistic um unapologetically anti- anthropomorphism anti-human and because of that he gets he gets turned into a like an evil genius horror movie character and he's not he's a a British philosopher who uh who who is doesn't shy away from human or anti-humanism and but but okay so the on the one hand he has an immense influence on um neoreactionary thought which has influence on the real world so there's that reason to study him another reason is his influence on contemporary philosophy and theory and he he had more influence than people know because accelerationism speculative realism and xenofeminism uh especially this work right here uh the Xeno feminist Manifesto of politics for alienation um these three schools of thought here U accelerationism speculative realism xenop feminism all of them basically are you trace them back to land and with accelerationism I think we all know that he's linked to this um that but that means that if you want to know Mark fiser if you want to know Nick cernich and Alex Williams work if you want to understand Resa Rani if I don't care if you're doing left accelerationism or left inhumanism or whatever you're going to have to understand what land was doing and then how they're modifying it same goes with the ne reactionary stuff and write accelerationism and then there's all kinds of other forms of accelerationism that have developed out of this so there's that speculative realism this this movement that wants to return to thinking things in themselves right but while understanding the the fundamental cont and contribution of uh understanding that the mind in some ways it's actively shaping experience that it's not a return to naive realism but rather speculative realism which is we accept that we bring something to the table when it comes to experience but we're not going to shy away from trying to think Numa or things in themselves well that's directly inspired by land so I don't care if it's Quinton Mayu with his whole thing with RK fossils and ancestrality um Graham Harmon with his kind of Aristotelian substances um you know the whole thing is in ways now I don't know if Harmon would say he was directly influenced by land but I know that um definitely Ray brasier and Ian Hamilton Grant they were close I mean Grant was in the CCU rossier was right around and was always associated with them even if I don't think I don't think he was official member but brasier and uh Grant deeply have engaged with L's work so and then the Xeno feminism thing is it's this whole idea of how you know feminism has has to double down on accelerating technological advancement so that we can overcome certain oppressive gender Dynamics right that that accelerating Tech is a way to undermind the patriarchy and all these kind of things and so all those schools of thought are indebted to land um and then of course the the final thing I should say about this is is Theory fiction which has become more and more of a popular genre you have uh people who resanar rasani who was with the ccru his his book cyclonopedia pure Theory fiction and land he gets the idea from bodard but bodard didn't write Theory fictions he talked about how Theory and fiction are basically contaminated or subject to transversality which for him is like a contagion or a contamination of one thing and the other and so for him you kind of have to view Theory as fiction and fiction as Theory but land and the ccru are the first ones to really say okay let's actually develop that as a genre and so you have more thinkers who are doing this um you know I I I think there there's books called spinal catastrophism and omnisite I'm forgetting the names of the authors I should have checked those out but you have you have different thinkers now who are experimenting with this stuff and um so Theory fiction also goes back to land then there's oh go ahead want to throw it out there because I think this is probably the right time it's not on the syllabus everybody but with Theory underground courses there's always some possibility that if you put a lot of work into one of your final projects on one of the courses it could be featured in a volume right like so uh Sean right here in the chat or you can see Sean right there um he uh he did something on Lon and XII and and Hue P Newton and that is in the underground Theory volume um Nance did something in the PMC course that got into the volume um well this this course is sort of laying the groundwork for at least one volume that's going to be um we'll be working on it in 2024 probably published early 2025 um but basically there will be a conference fall of 2024 and and the topic of this one volume that's related to this work uh to to Nick Lan stuff would be called human Futures all right and the human Futures volume uh will be a mixture of just straight up academic type essays like rigorous essays and on the other side Theory fiction so this is officially an opportunity for people to begin thinking about their Theory fiction work U that they might want to do and uh stay tuned there will also be writers workshops for all of this coming up um but before before we get into you know the metaphysics and everything like that Mikey I just wanted to let everyone know as well that we have um a notes document that Nance and I will be adding to you you're all going to get the link I'll send it to you all here in a second but with the with your access basically you can suggest additions and comment and then we might incorporate into the main body but La last time we did this the collective document got too messy there was a lot of stuff going on in it to me it was useless um and so I'm hoping that by only having two people with the actual editing privileges uh will'll be able to keep it all a lot more streamlined but anyway anyway yeah um and we don't have a chat normally we have a chat there's no chat function for you all uh but if you do want to say something in the written form you'll be able to on the Google document using the link I'm about to send you cool yeah and so okay just to finish up this right here so a couple more reasons why land is worth studying one he's an amazing stylist he's an he's an incredible writer especially in that period where he was writing the essays in Fang numina and as young thinkers are always trying to develop how they want to write how they W to go about presenting their ideas reading land just simply for style purposes is worth it um because you'll you'll figure out real quick like do I want to write like this guy or not but and he'll help you figure out what how you w to express your ideas and and you know develop your your arguments and look and part the other thing he is an original thinker he he really did think his himself to a very original position whether you agree or disagree it's kind of insubstantial on this point the point of a philosopher is to think his or her way to a unique position a unique perspective that isn't reducible to anything that's come before and so this this lineage of great thinkers from to Hegel to schopenhauer and heiger and Marx and all of them made these incredible original contributions and I think land he did he he thought himself to an original position and I think arguing with that or studying that will only help you develop yours in in a fuller way Fuller degree and L's not afraid of taking bold positions taking sharp positions that most people are not G to agree with and again because of that he he a lot of philosophical academics you never feel like you can pin down what they think what like what's their actual position the the great thinkers you it becomes clear what they're they're not afraid to take a bold position and that means that they become susceptible to criticism but it's very stylish to just flirt with a bunch of different ideas talk about them vaguely and never really take a core principled stance because that prevents you from ever being critiqued right and land is very susceptible to critique but this is to his credit I think because he wasn't afraid to take sharp positions right um and then like what Dave was getting at so the other thing that this is maybe the biggest influence land has positively had on both Dave and I L's not afraid to speculate on the future and a lot of philosophers hesitate at this and partly because there is the epistemological we we can't know what the future is gonna be okay great but what land shows us is that yeah we might not be able to know the future but the point is speculating on the future can actually serve to help bring certain Futures into being and this is what he he has in mind with this concept that the ccru develops called hyperstition fictions that make themselves real right certain speculations on the future actually have a way of bringing the future into being and now some of them don't catch on it's not just oh I sit around in my basement and I think the future is going to be like this and then it doesn't happen I wonder why of course not but the point is and I mean his his his go-to reference that we'll talk to is William Gibson's Neuromancer Gibson's sci-fi actually he coined the term cyberspace he he was he was giving futural visions of this communicational network called you know cyberspace and he talked about the Matrix and um all of these kind of cyber spaces and you know nonphysical all this kind of stuff that Gibson was doing actually became reality they caught on right and um this is where you can see the the the ontological weight of fiction that fictions actually can pull you know fictions into reality if they catch on in the popular imagination and so this is a really important contribution and I I think all of us here in some way shape or form are concerned about the future I mean and we got to realize the great thing right he Nick L's I don't know if we'd call him Protege but one of his students Mark fiser who was in the ccru he's the one who declares the future has been canceled right and so you have this tension even between land and Fisher about the future right but this battle over the future and trying to Envision a future I think that's a core contribution that and I give land credit for having the balls to go no I'm going to do robust speculations on the future based on Tendencies I see right now and I bodard also did this and I mean there's ways bodard was very prophetic and I think land in some ways is he very well could have the same potential with some of these uh predictions maybe not we'll see but this this whole idea of Paving a path towards future studies which it's it's G to require Theory fiction or hyperstition right because we're not you can't investigate the future like this is why Hegel says uh the Alam manura only takes flight at dusk what does that mean the Alam manura is a symbol of wisdom or philosophy and so so if philosophy can only take off or start to do what it does at dusk it means that philosophy can only interpret things you know after the fact after they've happened right so philosophy can't really tell us anything about the future it's past oriented because if it's going to talk about things it has to talk about things that have happened well L's like yeah [ __ ] that um I'm GNA do something else and I'm going to actually try toite things that happen to influence the course of things like I'm trying to direct towards a future and so that was a that's a unique position that he had and then finally look part of the course is I think there's so much Mystique around land and you know so much kind of enigmatic Allure I really want to cut through that demystify his work and get to the heart of it and show it for the the the philosophy that it actually is especially the early stuff and um just give all of you a clear picture of who what land actually thinks what his metaphysics is about how his politics consistently comes out of his metaphysics and um give this kind of systematic picture so that's where we're at with that um so okay just real quick to to get started like we have to acknowledge the fact that land is he has a unique status among philosophers and that's what I said to slavo xek when Dave and I interviewed slavo I said you know land has this online presence and I don't mean his Twitter activity I mean that he's a meme that he's caught on in a way just like slav boy has that most philosophers never will and I think we have to reckon with the fact that's because there's something in land's work that is more enthralling more captivating than your average philosophy professor and that's I mean the same goes with slavo right there's a reason why these guys transcend just being philosophy professors and become I don't know cult figures almost like almost pop culture icons I mean obviously not on the level of say Tupac or you know but the they have more of a pop culture status than most philosophy professors do so the question is why so look with land there's all these questions to start asking you go well who is Nick land well you can just start uh he's the greatest philosopher to ever come out of England he's a mythological figure of the ccru a cult leader Delo guaran Bayan nian jungle music party boy speed freak 90s zeitgeist experimental lecturer virent nihilist libidinal materialist techn lovecraftian sci-fi occultist who crafted Crowley's pad lemur King Mark Fisher's nche a death Seeker psychosis suffer nightmare ultral leftist turned nightmare libertarian Capital Stan China apologist follower of minus mul bug Edge Lord meme Twitter ship poster blockchain contition musk Fanboy The Entity itself sent straight from the futural outside and so but the point is like this this kind of thing like this is why he has this status right is he's interesting on a personal level even though he hates psycho biography he hates this idea of reducing a philosopher to their you know their their personal narrative he he I mean he concocts A Narrative of his own uh origin because he hates these psycho dramas right and nonetheless he he's caught in the problem that he is more interesting on a personal level than uh than your typical academic and so again but this is why we're we're doing so I mean look there's a funny passage from The Thirst for annihilation page 147 where Lan says this is land's own autobiography Europe is the racial trash can of Asia and Britain stems off Europe's charred froth my ancestors were vagrants [ __ ] and Killers mines melted by toad stools they exalted in the ashes of monasteries the Baseline of the human animal slimed across the sea rocks of the north with so much Ash in the blood I never had a chance of Peace so many years gnawing and scratching at the metal bars Until I Collapse with exhaustion and disgust it's hard to understand those great graceful creatures who seem to have escaped from being knifed into inarticulate wreckage by life I see now that my terrestrial her mother was ravaged by some fanged and insane from the Wilderness and that I am a vampire veiled raggedly in humanity corrupted from birth by an Unholy intimacy with death so okay so he's a vampire and uh so you see he makes except this you know because we got the real story he's just a British kid right but his whole point is he's trying to explain like somehow I think he feels called to be this site where what he calls the outside expressed itself in some way and so he yeah he he's doing a kind of theory fiction here about his emergence and birth as a thinker but uh yeah okay so it's important to talk as as as we head through the course and I talked about it a little bit but there's really six main periods in land's work even though there's great consistency across them again the main the main pivot point is where he changes his mind on the nature of capital but the six like literary moments or you can think of them as moments of ins philosophical inspiration you have the early leidal materialism of the first seven essays or so in Fang Numa along with thirst for annihilation then you have the the mature land period which is the the stuff from I don't know like 93 up until the 2000s where he's talking about capitalism this is meltdown machinic desire cyber Gothic meat right all of those great essays that he's known for that's that period so but towards the end of the 90s Winnie's doing the stuff with the ccru starting around 97 as this kind of theory Collective right which was made up of Sadie plant Nick glan Resa Rani Mark fiser Ian Hamilton Grant Robin McCay and a whole bunch of others right what he's doing in that period is really working out his his theory fiction and the Occult stuff the stuff with the demon lemurs and the numr and all that stuff that we'll get to in week four so there's that period I don't know if you guys know this but during this whole thing with the occult land and the ccru were heavy into drugs especially speed and they would self-induced insomnia there's philosophical reasons for this we'll talk about a little bit but basically it led to land having a psychotic break and he he recovered and he and one of the other members of the ccru and a green span they end up moving to Thailand and then they end up moving to Shanghai which they are still living there today but people don't know this so this is another interesting thing about land and and and uh and a green span but okay so land has his psychotic break and then he ends up moving to China and then during this period from I don't know the I don't know he's recovering from his his psychosis he gets to China before he goes into the Neo reactionary stuff there's this other period That's focused on Shanghai mega cities uh and China as such and so check this out I don't know if you guys know this see this this is let see the light see that okay this is an actual travel guide to Shanghai this is the 2008 Edition and then they did one in 2009 and then there's a 2010 one I don't have that one that's the only one I don't have but I mean they're I wish I could show these up close but like they're real travel guide books and somehow land and Greenspan got commissioned uh by the local governmental authorities somehow or whatever to write these tour guide books and it's really inter I mean I don't know of any philosophers written in this genre and it's bizarre right because these are meant to be sold to English-speaking Travelers like you use them like you would a any guide book you buy at Barnes & NOA or where Amazon now but it's weird because Lance still will write like land in these China explosion Singularity right like he'll do his in the and you're like who the hell is gonna use but they they they sold them and here even this is probably even more entertaining on a dark level he even wrote a kids guide a family guide right and yeah it's like a it's one geared towards kids I mean this is crazy and so these are actually kind of hard to get some of them I still can't get the 2010 World Expo one like now I just want them for the novelty of them uh but it is it is kind of cool and you try to I I heard one somebody lecturing on land say something like can you imagine land being commissioned to go to these spas and get massages and all of this [ __ ] so he could write these tour guide books but somehow I think he just got paid to go to all the cool spots in Shanghai and check them out and then write about him oh sign me up I'll take that job uh but so okay so there's this period and and I mean look spoiler alert I guess but the whole point of mega cities this is where he he starts developing his his New Concept of the singularity he thinks super intelligence will emerge as a mega City not tucked away in a lab like in The Terminator movies with Skynet so he's envisioning mega cities as being the engines or facilitators of super intelligence and so that's part of why he's so interested in Shanghai is he thinks out of all mega cities Shanghai is the Mega City that most likely has his potential okay and then the the next period in lands work is the neoreactionary dart Enlightenment stuff um and then the the the last one and we're not going to have a chance to get to this so much in this course this might be another course I could teach down the road it's this whole thing on blockchain and you know I always kind of put the stuff on blockchain on the back burner I'm like okay he likes blockchain what turns out this book that he wrote on it some of the the guys I know who really appreciate Lan told me it's arguably the greatest thing he ever wrote and it's greatest thing philosophically the most robust philosophical writing he's ever done and as I started reading it I started going I think they might be right so to do that work any e Justice that has to be its own project but that would be the the six main the areas or or uh periods of land's thought even though there's great continuity between all of them and so um okay so we can basically really so going here so is it for so I'll just run this run this run over periodizing land so it's first is his early leidal materialism then there's mature land period 93 to 2000s basically the the the third one is the ccru and Ault stuff that's kind of starting in 97 roughly these are all like roughly like there's overlap because he still writed he still kept writing Standalone essays in his own name but then he's also doing the the ccru stuff during this period so there's overlap but more of it is just trying to zero in on these main points of where he's developing different ideas and so like the core stuff on leidal materialisms the early stuff the core stuff on Capital and the techn future and all of that that's the stuff from 93 to 97 roughly 97 to 2003 is going to be the more cabalistic occult Theory fiction ccru stuff 2003 up to 2008 is is and and but you see they kept going with these tour guide books to 200 um 2010 or whatever they they stopped doing them at some point but that and then he gets the dark Enlightenment stuff and then the Bitcoin stuff is I think that came out 2019 the Bitcoin book he just he was going to publish it I think and then he decided just re release it online so you can go get a copy of it a PDF or whatever it's available online and then you know he he would sprinkle in ebooks like there's suspended animation and t uh or um Tim plexity and there's a bunch of little ebooks he released throughout the years and then I mean of course there's this isn't just Lan but then you have the accelerationist reader right that was Robin McKay of the ccru he helped edit this right and so he helped put together some of the core writings on accelerationism so that's kind of a land book too but CCU WR that ccru writings book just came out like what a year ago or two years ago oh the CC that one well the accelerationist reader when was this yeah the CCR right yeah that CCR one's pretty new the one that has the 2016 but I'm not sure I'm not seeing this yeah this accelerationist readers 2014 um I know let me see point is though that the C I don't have it uh the ccru one all those writings I mean all of this stuff was sprinkled across the internet on these various blogs and so I mean a course like this probably wouldn't be possible if if you know they hadn't compiled all the writings and everything so also I mean I want to give a shout out there are certain YouTubers so the reason this course happened like I look I've been familiarized with accelerationism and land for a while I I took courses at the new center for research and practice and a lot of the people there big into accelerationism and it was something I I was kind of picking this stuff even though I wasn't primarily interested in it at the time I was picking it up back then and so as a weird coincidence or whatever I just one I was like I something I can't even remember what made me curious about land like six months ago but I did I got curious about him again I'm like I I wantan to I want to read meltdown or something for some reason and then at work I ended up becoming more of a full-time driver so I had a lot more time to listen to podcasts and lectures and YouTube videos and so I just started listening to um you know stuff put out by Vincent leay who really great scholar of land um uh her hermedics who his real name is James Ellis he's got a YouTube channel really good stuff on land he did a good interview with him Justin Murphy I mean the the interview that Justin got out of land was a really good interview that you know so Justin stuff and then there's another YouTube channel called not actually all of these guys have done incredible work explaining land and so they helped really connect a lot of dots from me and at some point I I mean to give them the credit they deserve throughout this lecture they've influenced ways I understand parts of L's philosophy so um the the issue is look I'm saying this up front because it's hard for me to give them the precise credit they deserve at each point or whenever I'm referencing them because all of their lectures have blurred together for me so like I just want to give a like a kind of citation of all of them because at this point I'm not sure who said what because again I I learned all the I learned a lot of these insights from them through listening to them while I was out on routes and so I couldn't write it all down and do the scholarly thing so credit to all of them yeah I just want to say man that like there's a way that you had said this back when we did the ex when Nance and I were reading communic one and two um where you said something along the lines of you made it you're talking yourself down a little bit which is normal everyone does it but you did it in a way where it made it sound like yeah you just decided oh I could teach a course on this because you listen to some YouTube and it's like I just want to say everybody I've been watching him study this stuff for like the last decade so it's it's not it's just that sometimes it takes a few other people to suddenly oh now everything crystallizes and all the dots get connected it yeah those dots could not have been connected though if you hadn't already done this thorough Research into guys like D or bodard or Bay yeah but here part of it is look I'm somebody I I know a lot of people will go oh I only read the the primary sources and I've just never been like that I for me heiger I could not have learned haiger without Hubert dfus and Mark Ral and Ian Thompson and Sean Kelly there's a whole group of these guys who made heiger intelligible for me and these guys are the the they don't get the credit they deserve they're always eclipsed by the big names you it's always haiger or land or bodard and these Scholars these these commentators they are what actually give people like me access to these thinkers and so for me I just want to always if somebody taught me something and I I learn something from them and they don't get that kind of bigname recognition like gak or bedu I always want to shout them out because they put a lot of their time and energy into being able to make this stuff more intelligible for me and they're saving me time by doing that and so that's part of why this is a kind of collective project we call underground Theory where it's almost like all of us doing our individual passion projects or whatever it all culminates into this sprawling web of accessible Theory and again like so Dave's right like i' I've been working on accelerationism and this stuff off and on for years but really having this time to listen to these other guys and then think it through on my own terms and every it really helped connect these dots for me and so yeah I just want to give them the the the shout outs they deserve because yeah and again I feel bad like this is the one thing I have like scholarly guilt over there's points where I should be able to go Vincent lay says this or Justin Murphy said it like this or I just because it's all blurred together Len in in the on the routes that's where I kind of feel bad so again I'm just giving them all their credit and I'm basically saying I site them um throughout this because they have these great little nuanced understandings of particular things here or there and uh yeah so with that being said let's let's get into the let's go into the Heart of Darkness right so what are we doing with this early land stuff right what what's going on with these yeah and you see the syllabus right um we're talking about certain writings like K capital and the prohibition of incest we're talking about the essay art as Insurrection uh uh chapter one from thirst for annihilations called the death of sound philosophy and then you have the other great early essays like uh after the LW shamanic n delighted to death spirit and teeth all of this is him working through what he thinks about n batai schopenhauer Freud um and there's a little DG in there but the real influence of d& doesn't fully take hold with him until a little bit later on but this whole thing that he's going to call libidinal materialism this tradition is completely comp like d& or like the fullest embodiment of it and then I guess I think L would probably say and now I am I'm carrying this mantle forth right but the question is what is this lineage that because Lan's the only one who talks about libidinal materialism so part of his early work is trying to develop and you got to realize land is a m libidinal materialist so he's working out his own philosophy but he's doing it through understanding a certain hidden trajectory in postcon philosophy and so he's connecting dots in in in the development of postcon philosophy that nobody has really connected before and that's that's what's at stake here now this whole thing is is developed in contradiction to this other tradition which roughly he would just call phenomenology but it's not look if you go get a book on introduction to phenomenology it's going to go cero heiger sart Merlo ponti and maybe levs and da da if you're lucky but it's going to be those big four in particular now of course everybody goes but Hegel wrote a book called The phenomenology of spirit yeah he did and there's ways to connect hegel's phenomenology to her seran phenomenology but most of the time they're kept separate and they're they're not thought of as having this direct correlation or or conceptual linkage because what Hegel was doing with his phenomenology is really different from what holl was was doing holl is more conen with his phenomenology than than uh hegelian but here's the thing though for land he can say starting with Kant there is a transcendental phenomenological tradition which is to say there is a a tradition that's going to focus on phenomena and it's going to focus on phenomena from the perspective that we are actively participating in the constitution of phenomena so we're going to have to think our role and how things appear to us but we're going to stay fixated on appearances on phenomena right this is what land is ultimately gonna reject because he wants to he wants to Champion Numa but basically what we've got is two different lineages and it runs like this so we can think of the first one which is this uh lineage of phenomenological idealism let's just call it that for sake of so we got phenomenological idealism versus libidinal materialism so this phenomenological tradition is gonna start with Kant it's going to go to fcta then shelling then Hegel HL heiger sart Merlo Ponte levos dered daah and then I don't know I don't know who he would put I don't know if anybody really belongs in it at this point after Lev a and daop but that would be this one contion postcon trajectory for Lan though he's going to develop his differently it does get initiated in a way with K but it doesn't really fully get initiated until schopenhauer but we'll get into that goes K schopenhauer shelling is see there's a couple names who are on both trajectories so shelling belongs over with the phenomenological idealist with certain periods of Shell's work but then there's this other period in Shell's work that you could say he fits libidinal materialism and this is why Ian Hamilton Grant again former ccru member he wrote this this speculative realist uh Masterpiece on Shell's philosophy of Nature and even in Grant's early writings at Warick he he was defending shelling as a kind of libidinal materialist or you know he's a minable to this this other tradition and there's points where land even seems to go okay I I see what you're getting at here so Shell's one of those iy ones like he can be on both lists um and there's a way in which Freud could be on both so okay leidal materialism Kant schopenhauer shelling n Freud batai vilhelm Reich to losing guari then land now again but Freud see Freud because he puts this emphasis on the the subjective and the psychical he could be on the first list too but the reason I didn't add him in there is because even Freud even with his emphasis on subjectivity and the unconscious his whole thing is I'm not studying phenomena the whole point is that what I'm about is something beneath phenomena and so I I I think Freud better belongs on the the bottom list just with certain maybe a lot of qualifications but we'll see why land puts him in this tradition as we we move along so the point is like okay so on Twitter land his his handle is outsideness right and his little I don't know the little motto that's been on his page for a long time is coldness be my God right and so what he's getting at that the the god that is the coldness right that is his God is the outside it is the Fang numina um it's it's matter with like a capital M right it's the the cosmic forces Beyond appearances and so that's that's why he talks like and so a lot of time I mean you could call L Mr Zeno I think that's a little funny name for him because he Champions the outside he Champions radical alter like Zeno is uh the prefix it means other outside foreign I.E the the con and numon right and so libidinal materialism Champions impersonal forces Sublime energies and inexperience realities Numa whereas phenomenological idealism Champions the ego and first-person experience I.E phenomena so that these two different trajectories are based on what they privilege either phenomena or and again we that's all going to get clear as we move along here so for land true philosophy though is libidinal materialism and it's because it's an extreme anti- anthropomorphism so land thinks that a Philosophers like a true philosopher's job is to traffic with the numon with with that which is beyond human cognition human reason Etc and he thinks that if you think the the The Pursuit Of Truth with a capital t is reducible to our little parochialism like I'm thinking on behalf of my species I'm thinking on behalf of my people with my limited frame of perspective right he thinks that's somewhat like a disrespect of what philosophy can be is oh I'm just going to limit it to our little human perspectives and so but the case can be made well what if that's all we've got right like what if that's all we've got to work with but lands sense and and I mean there even con reasoning get like you still get to this thing like yeah we have some hint or sense of something bigger than our little phenomenological reality right and so L thinks it's the job of thought any kind of integr any type of philosophical Pursuit with any type type of Integrity in it is to try to think that which is beyond the human um and not turn philosophy into a roundabout way of you know reifying or solidifying our e egotism as a species and this is you will'll see part of nich's influence on them and so there's these four key elements of libidinal materialism that land lays out in thirst for annihilation this is from and and I'm I'm not going to read all this because it's somewhat of a lengthy passage here but this is from the preface and this is I think this part in particular is on page 20 of the preface but you want to read around this these four bullet points he lays out because this is really him getting to the heart of his anthro uh or his anti- anthropomorphism his anti-humanism and so he says so there is one simple Criterion of taste in philosophy that one avoid the vulgarity of anthropomorphism It Is by failing here that one comes to side with cages now that again this is the whole thing of like are the idea the way that we as a default setting organize our experience conceptualize our experience when it comes to trying to think being or reality or truth right uh this is these are cages right we're limiting ourselves to our little default paroquial isms right or our local perspective on things in this vast universe and so he thinks real philosophy has to be at war with our little anthropomorphic perspective so here are the specifics of libidinal materialism a thoroughgoing dehumanization of nature involving the uttermost Imp personalism in the explanation of natural forces and vigorously a theological cosmology no residue of prayer and instinctive fastidiousness in respect to all the traces of human personality and the treatment of such as the excrement of matter as its most ignoble part its gutter so you go well why would he why does he hate human P perspective so much part of it is our hubus that we think that we're like the crown of Creation with our perspective and he would say do you know how much reality has to already be there and in play before our Consciousness can even emerge and then we think somehow we're going to judge the immensity of the Universe on our little scale of egoism and self-interest and all of this he thinks like he he's a offended by how prideful we are in the face of being in a sense and so he's saying No this idea that we're the crown of creation or whatever this is [ __ ] we're we're the we're we're not even the fruit of it we're the excrement of it because we think we're above it because we think we're so much higher than the physical reality that actually produced us and so we're like ungrateful nuggets of [ __ ] to him from how we typically view things so okay number two ruthless fatalism no space for decisions responsibilities actions intentions any appeal to Notions of human Freedom discredits a philosopher Beyond familiarization so again bold statements right um part of it is that with libidinal materialism as we'll see the fundamental reality is impersonal forces this is what schopenhauer's will n's will the power like there this is this lineage that sees the metaphysical Foundation of reality as some sort of willing or Desiring and it's the it's the driving productive cause of the universe and thinking that somehow our free will or our actions or decisions are somehow immune or above or outside the flows of this this cosmic energy for him is laughable so he's going to deny any importance of human Freedom or willing or anything like that on our level because he thinks there's these massive energies Fang Numa that are ultimately Beyond us and we're just we're living in their world they're not living in ours and so then number three hence absence of all moralizing even the crispest most Aristotelian the pent for correction let alone vengefulness pins one in the shallows and so again he thinks that if you think that what philosophy is supposed to do is just sit there and critique what people are doing and judge them oh that's good that's bad blah blah blah he thinks that that pins you it puts you in the shallows of thought forever you're you're never going to get to the depth of thought if you think morality is somehow the highest form of thought and especially moralism and then fourth contempt for common evaluations one should even take care to avoid strain accidentally into the right even to be an enemy is too comforting one must be an alien a beast nothing is more absurd than a philosopher seeking to be liked now see this is where even if you disagree with him he'll drop quotes like that that are just Jewels right and you can deterritorialize it decontextualize it and use it in your own context but the wording is fantastic you know um and I think this is something that a lot of us here we do understand that I mean we're going to come at things more from ideology and all that but we understand that a philosopher's job is to critique doca right it's to critique what counts as the common sense of your society and to not accept everything it face value to not just simply accept what your society says is right and wrong and good and what's true and false and all like a philosopher job is to critique these fundamental presuppositions and for land he thinks like no if you're really gonna do this you're gonna be hated right and I think we get that with the image of Socrates of course which all right [ __ ] drink the poison you gotta [ __ ] go and even though land has his mixed feelings on Socrates he talks about that in the uh after the law essay and ultimately rejects Socrates um there's still this dimension of L thinks that a philosopher if you're doing philosophy right you're gonna be hated by most people and that's why he had no problem when when so with the ccru stuff it I'll tell that story when we on the fourth week but ultimately land was forced out of Warick University right and it was because he he's a wild party man [ __ ] smoking weed in his office and blasting jungle music and doing this started doing occult rituals and everything and they're like this fucker's got to go get the [ __ ] out of here and he was absolutely fine with it because in his heart he knew like a real philosopher doesn't belong in this type of space this is not what you know and I think early on he had this kind of Hope where it's like let me radically transform what Academia is to make it aable to an actual philosopher but he would ultimately I think say now like I look I was youthful ambition uh I'm not you're not going to win over uh a university with anything like real philosophy so because I mean you're a real philosopher is going to critique the foundations of the University itself right so you know he he basically accepted being fired and didn't have a problem with it okay now let's dive into this this trajectory here so here's what I want to do going forward we we've laid some context what I want to do is I want to talk about k schopenhauer n Freud batai then we'll have a break and then I'll come back and I'll do the stuff on delus and guari and then we'll wrap it up right um and I'm looking at the notes I prepared way too many notes on all this so I'm going to still give you the cliff notes version because all of the this is not supposed to be information overload this is supposed to be give me a bird's eye view on this trajectory so I can Orient myself within it and then you can go back and look I I love the idea of teaching some of these essays as Standalone projects or whatever I think those are fun exegetical readings so we're going to go into this stuff in more detail in the next year or so um these are fun little Standalone projects so um what I'm going to do tonight we got we got to get the connections of how these thinkers click together okay so let's start with Kant right so kant's concept of critique is going to be very important for land and you're gonna hear land and you're going to hear people who are Lans or people influenced by they're always going to use this word critique and a lot of times even if you're familiar with philosophy you sit there and you go I don't know what the [ __ ] they're doing with this word so L will take it and run with it but what it means really is there in Kant it's just land will take that meaning and Flip Flip It on its head kind of so what kant's critique of pure reason is doing and why it's so radically new in the history of philosophy is that K wants to do a critique of the knowing subject and throughout the history of philosophy philosophers just took for Grant like we're just passive receivers of experience there's the world and we just our senses open to it we're not filtering it we're not organizing it we're just receiving it in our in the passivity of our sensibility and our perception right well because there's all kinds of different philosophical problems that are circulating in kant's time Kant uh trying to figure out what to do with hum's critique of causality he's trying to figure out who's right on the nature of time and space is it Newton or is it livets there's this other guy named wolf who was important to Kant and so there's these big philosophical issues time space causality and what Kant did was he figured out a way of introducing a new philosophical position in the history of philosophy and a lot of people will tell you this is actually where philosophy begins that everything before K is Proto philosophy because what kant's original contribution boils down to is the discovery of the transcendental the transcendental field now what the hell does that mean because he's not using transcendental in the way that we would typically think it's being used here Transcendence usually means like that which is beyond right that which goes beyond transcendental for Kant is not Transcendence transcendental has to do with the necessary conditions of possible experience so we could have we can sit here and do all kinds of stuff with empirical experience I can say there's a copy of GJ Sublime object of ideology right there that's a book there's a lamp there's a computer I can start name but what philosophy hadn't investigated is okay your those are experiences what are the fundamental structures of experience itself what makes experience possible Right what are its foundations what K comes through realize is that these structures or foundations of experience are not in reality they're in us that there is an unconscious and it's not the Freudian unconscious it's not the psychoanalytic unconscious but it's this cognitive unconscious within us that the basic rules and Protocols of time space causality substance Unity multiplicity all of these fundamental ontological categories are actually actually processing rules in our head they're like software and we organize the flood of Sensations right so for K and this is a example I always like to use he he talks about the manifold of sensation now the manifold is raw sense data and so the thing is if if if we are actively constituting our experience if we're taking raw sense data and arranging it at an unconscious level into the intelligible Co erent distinct types of experience we have then the question is okay what would it be like to experience the manifold in a way that isn't synthesized synthesis is this key content term it it does mean like assemblage or composition or combination what you're doing is organizing putting together assembling and also drawing lines between various objects right and um so the point is but okay if there's raw sense data and that's what hits what would unfiltered it's like some of you are probably too young to remember this but back when I was a kid uh TV would often uh TV stations would go off at 10 o'clock or midnight and what you would get is chaotic snow is we called it TV snow um or noise right but um this kind of wild flickering of Sensations is what I've always taken the manifold to be like if we could experience it it's just wild sense data and it's our organizational schema it's our organizational rules in our mind that takes all of that and says Ah okay let me arrange it and fix it on this makes it temporal this makes it spatial now we can see causes between things and that is kant's in a nutshell his great discovery is the synthetic or produ activity of the knowing subject when it comes to experience now the the hard pill to swallow here is that he thinks time and space are in us now here's a key thing why is this not pure idealism well for Kant all of us share these exact same operational rules or procedures so even though the phenomenological field the field of experience is not the things in themselves the numina that which is not filtered through our cognitive apparatus right the thing is when it comes to time and space you want to go no no no that that can't be right they those are those are things in the universe not things in us but Kant makes the incredibly bold claim that time and space are the matrices or the filters or the uh almost like like zones of our sensory apparatus they are where sense data gets filtered primarily into organized experience and so linearity um this is here that's over there this is all our sensory apparatus taking this flood of Sensations and temporalizing them and spatializing them and K call these the two pure forms of intuition now intuition is a weird word for us we think of it as like know something without knowing how I know it right but what intuition boils down to is perception these are the two pure forms of perception right because any of your perceptions anything that you experience through your eyes or your ears or anything they are in some way shape or form temporal and spatial and so this is what lays the foundations for our transcendental esthetic now this is like K's great contribution here aesthetic doesn't mean art in that sense aesthetic in this other eological sense means sensibility so transcendental aesthetic means transcendental perception or transcendental sensibility and so this is what K's doing he goes okay so on the one hand our sensory apparatus our perceptual apparatus has two pure software programs like default like that's the thing that our Hardware which is to say our physical senses our eyes our ears it's like that Hardware comes with two default software programs time and space and so that makes up our transcendental sensibility which is to say it makes up the perceptual or sensible conditions of empirical experience right okay but then there's this other side that K's gonna develop in the critique of pure reason transcendental logic which we can also call basically transcendental understanding or transcendental conceptualization so okay on the one hand we got time and space they have to do with perceptions every perception we have through our senses is filtered and organized around time and space but when it comes to how we understand things how we conceptualize things Kant lays out a table of categories they're primarily derived from Aristotle categories but Aristotle had 10 but for the sake of uh you know symmetry K's going to take them and make 12 and there there's three in each category okay long story short we're talking about you think about how I mean I'm looking at these I've got a pile of books right here look I'll turn them around so okay I got a pile of philosophy books so think about how I can categorize this experience right I'm looking at them and on the one hand I can apply the category or concept of unity I can say this leotard introduction is one book this B introduction is one book The accelerate book is one book right okay fine but then I can also view them as a plurality right I can go all right this is one two three four five I can see them as multiples right but then I can also view them as a totality which is okay so there's four stacks of books right here but that stack it's itself a Unity so it's the single or Unity of a multiplicity right this is one of the most basic ways we cognize or conceptualize experience and so Unity multiplicity totality these are categories the Mind brings a and that we think experience through right subst substance and accident right this idea that okay so I see various there's white there's green there's words I can predicate all kinds of stuff about this object but then I also attribute to it a kind of substantiality that there's something there that holds it together Beyond its accidental properties so for example we could change the color of the book we could cut you know we could cut some of the pages out but it still would maintain its thisness like it's a substance it's a it's Kant thinks we're bringing all of this to the table and the big one of course is causality you know okay here we go again you know the basics but uh okay a simple okay so the accelerate reader caused the leotard book to fall or whatever right basic causality 101 he thinks that we're bringing this this is part of our cognitive apparatus and so what we end up with for Kant is this distinction there's the world of phenomena which is governed by our transcendental Sensibility or perception time and space and then our transcendental logic or understanding or transcendental categorizations which is governed by substance accident Unity multiplicity totality um causality cause and effect right all of these are Concepts that fundamentally make basic experience possible for us now K will even add in a third category called the schema transcendental schema because I mean and this is great he said there must be a third thing if sensibility or perception is fundamentally different than conception or conceptualization he thinks there even has to be like little blueprints between perceptions and uh Concepts uh precepts and Concepts in order to make them align or click together like oh here here this clicks to that and that so he has this whole incredible theory of how transcendental conditions of experience work right and so this is the heart of the contan solution to all these problems so the Hume problem right Hume says oh well causality it's not a universal principle because what it really is is just us with our repetitions of habit so I saw the sun rise in the morning two days ago then I saw it yesterday now I see it today therefore the the the causality right there the sun goes down and blah blah blah right and and then he there's the great example of the billiard ball right so every time I've ever played pool I use you know you take your shot the ball hits another ball so you think the first ball is set in motion hit striking the other ball the first ball is the cause the second ball is the effect right and so the one ball is causing the motion of the second ball but Hume is hume's point is this is all induction this is not a universal guarantee there's no reason why the one ball causes the other ball to move it's contingent it could maybe one day the second ball doesn't move right this is all just based on pattern recognition and habit and it's not rooted in Universal rules but K goes ah I got the solution to it right what if causality is a transcendental filter or rule of our mind so regardless of what things are doing in and of themselves we have to organize our experience causally un at a universal level because it's a fundamental unconscious AR priori pre-experience um mode of experience it's an operating procedure and because of that Kant can say see I've saved the universality of cause by making it transcendental within our our our cognitive apparatus okay so the point is Kant ends up saying look we can have empirical knowledge all of us exist in the same phenomenological world because all of our minds have these same Universal rules we are all processing experiencing the same way at this core fundamental level look there's all kinds of leaving rooms for like you don't relate to how I feel on this I feel K knows that there's idiosyncratic stuff uh particularity of course that we don't relate to everything in our specific experience the point is though we have Conformity and coherence at the level of the most basic structures of experience so that means that whatever things are in and of themselves are inaccessible to us we don't have access to things in themselves and K puts up a Prohibition which is to say we can't investigate numina we can posit them in the sense of look we know that like this isn't an absolute idealism of the the barlean kind because sense data are not in us like we are receiving sense data and that sense data is coming from things in themselves but because that that sense data first off the wild sense data of the manifold are representations of things in themselves right they're not the things in themselves they're the way that the things in themselves hit the senses and because all of that is filtered through our cognitive apparatus the things in themselves are forever inaccessible to us and so K prohibits it like look we can't say anything about him he would even say like okay should I even use the singular numon or should I call them Numa you're already employing the concept of unity or plurality even in how we talk about them right so we're doing an injustice to them even in using the singular or the plural or totality or whatever and we're also doing an injustice because we're saying that things in themselves are the causes of our Sensations well causality only works in the phenomenal field we can't attribute we can't talk about ninal causality because causality is only in how we process things so the point is we can't help but posit these things of course we have to posit things in themselves as the causes of sense data right but we ultimately are contradicting ourselves or even even kind of breaking the rule in doing that point is this leaves this whole Realm of numina the things outside of our experience um and con basically like we can't we can't talk about them that that's off limits we just have to limit ourselves to the world we experience and so whatever is out there in The Great Outdoors it just has to remain a mystery we can only talk about and have knowledge of The Great Indoors so now you can see why on the one hand land is he's a conent in the the sense that he fundamentally builds his metaphysics out of this distinction between phenomena and Numa he is totally not a Conan because of how K limits the you can't talk about numina land and all of the other libidinal materialists are going to in their own ways Terrier traffic with Pina and that's what is going to build this tradition okay so instead of looking at my notes I kind of just on that so I want to make sure I didn't miss anything on K before and I did I want to say a couple things here um from kant's aesthetic Theory which is to say his third critique critique of the power of judgment so look Lan's not going to do a whole lot with the second critique the one that has to do with morality it's primarily interested in the first critique and then the third critique and the third critique is essentially about aesthetic judgment which now we are talking about basically like aesthetic in the sense of the beautiful the sublime right works of art and also thology te logical judge making judgments about a thing's purpose right like what what's the deal with that so here's the thing in comp's third critique he's talking about art he's talking about how art is made and everything starts thinking about the concept of the genius and as he analyzed it he starts thinking like you know the the artistic genius is different than the Craftsman or anybody working in handycraft because the Craftsmen um the handycraft all of them are geared around basic utility this is what heiger is talking about in the first division of being in time where he's talking about equipmental totalities readiness to hand which is his tool analysis right and con sitting there going yeah tools and using Tools in a productive way yeah we use them to make things but this isn't artistic genius there's something else going on with artists so part of it is if if you go to a good skilled Craftsman or Carpenter they can start telling you how to do what they do and they can tell you look we use a hammer for this specific purpose the hammer is that which we use for this to to hammer in Nails right uh that's it's uh for the sake of which right uh you know the these different assignments right different tools have you know use the hammer in order to hammer in Nails right nail you you you fasten nails down hammer in Nails in order to hold boards together right there's a whole equipmental productive practical logic in in craftsmanship and it's fairly intelligible and you can pretty much pass it on to anybody right now if you go and ask Michelangelo about how he you know how'd you do the 16 chap like artists can't ask Beethoven hey Beethoven can you tell me how to write something like the the the Ninth Symphony they cannot convey this they can't tell you now we we know that with great art that there's a certain uh skill level to it that uh you know classical pianists have to do their uh finger exercises that you know you're G to do your Hayden piano exercises but when it comes to the act of actually composing something and you compose something that's almost so it's so singular you can't really expect Beethoven's Ninth cine CH these amazing works of art but I don't care even a great pop song like Prince's Purple Rain or something you're like how do you do it how how do you tap into something like the artist can't convey it and when you talk to artists and this is K's point they always end up saying the same like it's like almost I'm receiving it from somewhere like something else is doing this I'm just along for the ride and I can't tell you how to do it I don't know myself how I do it it just kind of happens and something is is at work through me now that this is this core moment where K stumbles upon the Fang Numa the active Fang kind of numina in the sense of look for him this isn't fanged in the in the nightmar she nightmarish love crafy and way for land but the point is he's he's stumbled upon a kind of impersonal as subjective Force that's working through us that we can't properly understand right and so he thinks on the one hand we get a kind of it's not even an experience in the empirical sense but you get some sort of inner hint at something else is at work here Beyond us right and so we get it with the genius the other thing that Kant will talk about so K makes this important aesthetic distinction between Beauty and the sublime and these are two different experiences for him so the key thing with both of them though and this is what makes them artistic aesthetic experiences there's an indeterminate concept of beauty and an indeterminate concept of the sublime which is to say look if we want to know the concept of a hammer right it's this is easy to figure out we don't sit around and have problems understanding what is the couch really for it's to sit the [ __ ] on like it's next right like we don't have to sit around and worry about but if you say what is beauty ah now we're in some real philosophical territory right because the thing is beauty who is the great there's a quote I can't remember who said I don't I don't know how to define pornography but I know it when I see it um it it's kind of like that for comp with Beauty and the sublime you can't Define Beauty but you know it the moment you see it right and we all have this sense of being able to look at works of art and saying you know what I know we always say beaut is in the eye of the beholder but there's certain works of art where we go I don't know what's going on here but this is universally beautiful like and if somebody doesn't recognize the beauty of this specific thing something's wrong with them like it's not purely subjective there is something Universal in certain beautiful artworks and yet you can't articulate it it's indeterminate and the difference though between the beauty the beautiful and the subblime for K is that whatever we register as beautiful is something that we can actually bring within our sense uh our perceptual capacities right even if it remains indeterminate you can get a handle on the beautiful right it it's it's within your frame of sensible experience so you go to a museum you you see an incredible the Mona Lisa they use the generic type of example and you go wow this painting's incredible it's it's it's it's so beautiful and you can't explain the beauty of it but you can get a hold you you your the painting itself is within the range of your experiential capacities okay the sublime however whil while being an indeterminate type of in uh experience what makes the sublime different is that our senses can't get a handle on it it's too vast now there's two types of sublime here mathematical Sublime and dynamical Sublime the mathematical sublime or basically it's like the thought of infinity right I'm trying I try to think infinity and I just kind of you feel staggered by this thought like it's so immense that I cannot process it I can say the words and I can give the definition of infinity but I can't really wrap my head around it now that's the mathematical or abstract Sublime the dynamical or kind of kind of experience here here's what we got it's immense aspect of nature earthquakes or being at Sea and this giant storm is overtaking and you just cannot or being in front of a mountain that's so immense you cannot get a perceptual grasp on this thing as an object the object is so immense um it overloads the senses in a way and yet there's a kind of enjoyment a kind of self-destructive jant in these moments of the sublime um precisely because they're so much vaster than we are and this this dynamical Sublime is really what it's it's a hint at the fanged numina right so one of the the writings in thirst for annihilation the the chapter actually called f numon and then it's the Cyclone right so the Cyclone is this instance of this dynamical Sublime kind of experience that isn't a typical experience because it's that which you experience as overloading your experience okay now I'm writing like a a real [ __ ] talking like an [ __ ] philosopher but that's basically it though it's an experience of the breakdown of your ability to fully experience the object right and so that hints at the Numa twoo right okay so worked our way through genius we worked our way through the sublime this gets us to schopenhauer and so schopenhauer's metaphysics picks up right where K basically leaves off but schopenhauer is going to rework things so schopenhauer totally accepts kant's transcendental aesthetic he goes you're right time and space are the basic matrices active synthetic matrices of sensation of perception and we're not I'm not gonna go in this because this isn't really this doesn't lend itself to anything we're g to talk about but point is so K had 12 categories schopenhauer thinks that you can boil them all down to basically causality and all we really need is causality we get the other ones you take them or leave them but nonetheless he does think that we have a kind of transcendental understanding primarily through causality and um so he totally is going to embrace this field of phenomena now schopenhauer is going to take the phenomena Numa distinction and turn him into the distinction between representation and will this is why his his magnumopus is the world as will and representation other way another title could just have easily been the world as Numa and phenomena okay so for chenhow yes our experience is the world of phenomena but he thinks he's going to and this is what makes him the true inauguration of leidal materialism because he's gonna say yeah but this this whole thing with things in themselves they there's something going on there and I'm gonna tell you what's going on there and in fact they are the metaphysical Foundation of our reason of our cognitive apparatus see Kant wants to make us like the grand legislators of nature itself like nature is in Us in the sense that all of the fundamental laws and rules of the natural order are imposed on sense data by us so we are the the law of nature itself right this is one of these things like land would hate because oh I am the legislator of the universe itself and he's like yeah okay Pat on the head little [ __ ] calm down um so but schopenhauer is also he's going to say look we are in nature it's just that we have a li limited perspective and yes we are active in how we experience it but he's going to put the emphasis on Numa as the ultimate grounds of our experience of reason and so it's not like reason is the the endall Beall it's a parochialism for Chop andhow it's a local perspective on things and not the perspective on things and so that the idea is that will is basically this this Cosmic substratum of Desire of willing of urging right and I mean you you can see the Eastern influence here on schopenhauer on the one hand in uh viic Hinduism right you have this distinction between Brahman and Maya Brahman is the god absolute uh the Deep reality right whereas Maya is appearance or Illusion so this Brahman Maya distinction Maps nicely on to Will and representation and then the whole thing with Buddhism you know the the Noble Truth you know all is suffering all is suffering because of desire right you get into this whole Buddhist thing so schopenhauer basically thinks that the fundamental entity the fundamental substratum of all things is this kind of metaphysical desire this willing this push and that is from which everything emerges now schopenhauer's kind of he's a he's a postcon in the in the proper sense of he realizes that we're actively con constituting experience but there's almost like a presocratic dimension to him as well in the most classic presocratic metaphysical sense and like he like phes all is water right um an ax Mander all is TA opy roome right so they um ericl it's all is fire right um the he's not afraid to do this kind of presocratic move to say that all of reality is fundamentally one fundamental substance right so for schopenhauer though um yeah we feel the will inside of us it's like a non-sensible push but it is not empirically observable which means it's not temporal or spatial the will is what the body is in itself right and that's I mean schopenhauer I think would just say that's what K was getting at with his concept of Genius that this this other thing that's kind of experienced but it doesn't fit within our parameters of content experience it's this will that's rising up or swelling up in us and we actually have some kind of inner feeling of it right so it's important like so if Will is separate from phenomena then it is not subject to space and time time and therefore is not subject to individuation and plurality so it's this ultimate pure one Oneness or substance and he's going to view all of us all entities inanimate uh plant Animal Human all of us are individuations like it's our fundamental substratum but we are all individual individuated instances of it right and so the difference is like for Kant the will is like the individual subject's duty to the moral law but for schopenhauer this the will is actually non agentic which is to say for Kant the will is the will of a moral agent right but for schopenhauer the will is not an agency it's not a a willing person or subject right it's just pure will to will to life right um and so I I want to read a quote by land here this is from art as Insurrection he says for Kant the will is aligned with reason as the principle of the investment of nature with intentional with intentional intelligibility in contrast schopenhauer's great discovery is that of non- agentic will the positivity of the death of God rather than thinking willing as the movement by which conceptually articulate decision is realized in nature he understands the appearance of rational decisions as a derivative consequence of pre-int tellectual and ultimately pre-personal even pre- organic willing unconscious desire is not just desire that happens to be unconscious as if a decisionism desire it is rather that Consciousness can only be consequential upon a desire for which Lucid thought is an instrumental requirement for schopenhauer the intellect is constituted by willing rather than being con constitutive for it we do not know what we want so shopen how yeah go what's up Dave can you send me that quote just through Facebook would work as well as any others that you read as you go because I'll kind of incorporate them into this note stock let me do that real quick I was able to fetch the other one yeah guys that's in Fang Numa Pages 54 to 155 and and everybody you've everybody you've got links to all the texts that Mikey will be going off of hope you all saw that in the this okay and let's see a couple more things on schopenhauer on the will and then we'll skip to the next part so by the way I just have to say man this speedrun is [ __ ] awesome I think that's again that's what I'm trying to do I don't want to get lost in too many details this is about like I say broadscale philosophical orientation knowing your way around knowing how to start with all this [ __ ] right and again if if we zeroed in just on one of these thinkers and like no like we got to get these broad Strokes of what because this is Lance's contribution like keep in mind as we're we're working our way through this this is land like nobody's connected these specific dots and these now sure people can see oh schopenhauer did this as opposed to but the way that he's going to chain this tradition together that's really his his contribution here so that that's why I'm doing it this way where we can get these broad Strokes we can understand these these broad connections between these thinkers so okay so yeah the will is what pushes human creativity reason understanding intellect the will is also what pushes animal instincts it even pushes the plants reaching out for the sun right and uh it even be what uh gra gravity willing the moment and positions of inanimate objects and so it is it's this this Mo of force behind all things right it's the bean behind beans now heiger would of course critique that and go bean is not a bean so this for heiger would still count as onto theology But ultimately let's just keep it on its own terms and that's that's an instance of onto Theology and that's what schopenhauer's going with here so schopenhauer's non agentic will is for land the inaugural and the official start of the traditional of tradition of libidinal materialism precisely because it's it's going to privilege impersonal force over personal desires will interests inclinations Etc it's the thing that say there is a determinant numon out there and it is more important than we are and I it's the fundamental ground of all things not reason not our cognitive apparatus our cognitive apparatus is grounded in it it comes out of the will at least for schopenhauer so for Kant reason is the ultimate organizing principle of all phenomena but for schopenhauer reason is demoted to the status of just being one instance among others of the impersonal will willing what it Wills so think of it like this k nature comes out of the intellect but for schopenhauer the intellect comes out of non-conceptual unconscious will so Lan loves schopenhauer because he is the first true metaphysician he remains faithful to the pursuit of the absolute the will but he also understands that this absolute will not be anything made in our own image that is it is a fanged numon or inhuman otherness while while at the same time schopenhauer understanding the conent Insight that given our phenomenological experience we are actively producing it so this is why land's like okay schopenhauer got a lot right in his reassessment of K so but here's here's where land is gonna have his issue with schopenhauer and then we're gonna pivot into Nicha right because he thinks nich is the proper response to this philosophical shortcoming on schopenhauer's part so schopenhauer ultimately denies the will he has a kind of pessimistic denial of the will and for him I mean you can almost see a kind of leanian thing here because his whole thing is well the because the will is our substratum that means that our desire can never be satisfied like we're we're we're at war with our we can never be at peace we can never be satisfied because our very metaphysical Foundation is something that can't that pushes it it cannot be satisfied it's pure willing in and of itself and so that means that we are always destined to be unhappy dissatisfied Etc so [ __ ] the will let's deny the will let's find ways of battling the will going against the will and we're we're Limited in what we can do here but um there there's two there's two paths and there's a couple others but I don't want to do too many of these tonight we'll we'll do the two big responses that uh schopenhauer came up with right because yeah if desire is the ultimate source of our suffering and if the will makes it impossible to satisfy desire then the will is the ultimate source of our suffering so again [ __ ] the will right so and this is worth reading so I'm gonna give you this quote too Dave this is from the world as will and representation and I'm gonna take this opportunity to just say if any of you haven't ever read schopenhauer himself you really should and it not even you don't have to read the whole book it's a it is a a big project but I would maybe argue schopenhauer's the greatest writer of philosophy in the history of philosophy the guy's a master he is so [ __ ] clear he he's on the same complexity level as any other philosopher but his amazing Clarity of writing is really I mean it's a kind of Ideal for me at least where you read them and you just go my God this guy could he do philosophy at the highest level and yet make it just clear as a bell on what he was trying to say so let's read a little he says this is uh from world as will and representation page 309 he says we have long since recognized this striving this constitutes the kernel and in itself of everything as the same thing that in us where it manifests itself most distinctly in the light of the fullness of Consciousness is called will we call its hindrance through an obstacle Place between it and its temporary goal suffering its attainment of the goal on the other hand we call satisfaction well-being happiness we can also transfer these names to those phenomena of the world without knowledge which though weaker in degree are identical in essence we then see the is involved in constant suffering and without any lasting happiness for all striving Springs from want or deficiency from dissatisfaction with one's own state or condition and is therefore suffering so long as it is not satisfied No Satisfaction however is lasting on the contrary it is always merely the starting point of a fresh striving we see striving everywhere impeded in many ways everywhere struggling and fighting and hence always as suffering thus that there is no ultimate aim of striving means that there is no measure or end of suffering I think this is this smacks a Lon right because the whole point of Lan is that desire can never be satisfied it's always in pursuit of an impossible object called obj which is essentially a virtual Surplus you can never actualize it and yet it's what sets desire in motion and so even though LAN doesn't have the same metaphysics as schopenhauer his image of Desire is very very similar and that's precisely why land is not g to like laon or any of the anybody who views desire as structured around a fundamental lack and and for schopenhauer the fundamental lack at the heart of Desire is it's in ability to ever fully be satisfied once and for all right so land as we'll see is we get into DG especially L's GNA go no I I'm not with that image of Desire um same same n also is gonna com combat that in a way um so okay so what is schopenhauer's advice well it boils down to this all right chenhow so we're destined to [ __ ] suffer our lives away what the [ __ ] should we do about it you want us to deny the will and he would go um uh look at art or starve yourself that's really kind of what it was so he thinks that there is a temporary suspension of the will in aesthetic contemplation and it's it's Unique right when you're at a museum and look even when we go to museums a lot of times it it's annoying I do it too like it's almost like we rush through museums more of like in a consumer thing like I got to see everything here like or like we're at the zoo or something um I respect the people who go to the museum and basically look one piece of art for two hours something like that right because the point is they're really in a sense engaging with it right they're not passing it but like there's all these people in Museums Art Museums and you're like I don't think any of them actually look at the art and for chenhow though true artistic contemplation and look I think we can expand this to I I I wonder what schopenhauer would do with movies because like GJ says like movies are where are what train our fantasies so in a way you could say movies get us Desiring right but I don't know taking in a a a painting right for schopenhauer it suspends the will for a minute for a moment you don't want anything you're not trying to get something beyond the painting you're not even trying to like consume the paint you're just it's a suspension it's almost like ah a relief right in this moment and so the problem with this again is that it's you can't do this forever you have to get the [ __ ] up and leave and it's back to being a subject of the will you know and so but the the great denial of the will is obviously aesthetic practices like starving yourself or whatever and that's that's his other way of denying the will is to starve yourself to perform aesthetic practices and so on so it's like okay I guess um and so that's really I mean there's this whole thing with like okay love you can talk about compassion right compassion is almost a moment that suspends the will because when you care about others more than you care about yourself you always do so like this is kind of a contient influence they're like ins in themselves right you don't desire anything from them you're not trying to consume them or use them um compassionate love towards other people seems to break down this this dissatisfaction and willing especially for our own individualistic egoic purposes right um so compassion is one uh to but that's kind of that's where we're left um we're left with this ethics of self-denial and renunciation of individual desire and this you know for land this is what leads schopenhauer straight back to Christian morality albeit in a secular form because we're we're back at this self-denial denying the will Etc um and land is going to reject this denial of the will the denial of the thing numon and this is precisely why L likes n so much right so okay now we kick to n because n himself is gonna acknowledge the role of these these these Larger than Life forces right this this creative play of the universe but going to radically affirm it even though it involves suffering and that's what land in particular likes about n is yeah we we're gonna suffer but let's joyously affirm the suffering and let's let's joyously affirm whatever the thing numina throws our way right so yeah n fully embraced hum suffering with joyous affirmation we all know the famous n quote what doesn't kill me makes me stronger but it's important though when we're thinking about this stuff with nicho one of two of these key nian concepts are play here the Overman and a more FY which is the love of Fate right the love of Destiny the love of I fully Embrace Life despite how much suffering is in it and I accept it as it is with all of its imperfection right and so but when it comes to us right so this this is a key takeaway when thinking about look I haven't said it yet but I think a lot of you know that land is ultimately for human extinction um now oftentimes especially on Theory Graham or you know on the philosophical meme circuit he's always presented as the cunning Evil Genius Like go it's going according to plan right but you know and Dave really helped me think through this recently this whole thing with human extinction doesn't have to be like some maniacal Evil Geniuses plot in a bad carton what it can be is this Nan thing of the Overman which is to say what if we're not that great and something better could come out of us if we were to transcend our current state right and ultimately that's why land land knows that he's going to be positioned in the pessimist School of philosophy right but from his own perspective I don't yeah yeah and I get it like he knows what he's doing with Colin thirst for annihilation virent nihilism right but you gotta real his nihilism is like I'm nihilistic towards our current state of humanity like I don't think that has some profound meaning that should Define the whole 15 billion year history of the universe right we are one moment and something more beautiful could come out of us something better something more intelligent right Us in in such a incredibly enhanced form we can't even begin to process it and so this is where there's this nian joy in inhumanism in posthumanism in anti-humanism it's not from this okay what I'm trying to say is and I've come to have to deal with it like it's not mal I don't think I don't think l wants us to die because he's like he hates us and wants us to suffer I don't think it's sadistic that's how it's and I used to think that right and that's definitely how it's presented on in the memes that's he's he's a nitian in this sense and once that clicks you start going he doesn't want us to like suffer and die because he just enjoys the thought of us suffering he wants us to go to extinct because he thinks we're holding back what actually can creatively happen and so this is what Dave said to me about Extinction it made this click look if we start augmenting ourselves with technology at what point do we cross a threshold here and we are just something different so that would count as Extinction for land we are extinct in the sense of like we've transcended our current status right but it's not this evil maniacal genius thing it's like no let's actually take our potential and see how far it goes why are we holding back in what we can actually become it'd be like the caterpillar going no no don't no C cocoon for me thanks I no I don't want to turn into a butterfly and so the whole thing with Fang Numa of course like this this idea like what we could become or What technological realities Could Happen through this process are horrifying to us right but part of him is like his thirst for annihilation is this other Spirit which is just like bring it on let's [ __ ] push it as far as we can and see what can creatively come out of us instead of what we want to bum around in the status quo forever and never go anywhere new for him that's the whole thing the emergence of the new itself can spell extinction for us and he's just not afraid of that he wants to go down that road and he knows that the vast majority of people aren't going to want to go down that road and they would be drugged down at Kicking and Screaming but the trick of like technological transhumanism is if we make small changes over a long period of time we will go extinct and then nobody will even have known the extinction event took place so it's like kind of how bodri talks about the Perfect Crime which is the murder of reality we developed electronic media over the span of decades right and because it wasn't this punctual thing because it happened across like nobody even noticed that we destroyed the reality principle that we killed it right this is the perfect crime it's a crime that nobody even knows took place right it's a crime that nobody knows was committed and this is this whole thing with technological transhumanism where if we technologically augment ourselves become cyborgs whatever we can do all of this in the name of human progress we're changing ourselves we're modifying ourselves we're overcoming illness we're overcoming certain disabilities we're overcoming all this [ __ ] via technology but then 100 years later there aren't humans left and this is this other form of Extinction where it doesn't have to be the Matrix where the machines rise up and put us in pods it could be that and it doesn't have to be the evil love crafty and Singularity that immediately gains super intelligence and wipes wages war on us like Skynet it could be that but it could be this other thing where we just as humans technologically overcome we can prolong Our Lives we can enhance our intelligence we can do away with cancer we can do away with all of the ailments of the body we can transcend the B all of these kind of sci-fi dreams we have would ultimately lead to our Extinction as we know it and let's be honest if we could resurrect somebody who lived 500 years ago would they count us as cyborgs right now now are we the same species to somebody 500 years ago I mean part of me wants to say yes another part of me wouldn't blame that person if they viewed us as [ __ ] aliens so I don't know but the point is n's or Lance's whole thing with this technological horror show this lovecraftian thing he doesn't deny that it's horrific and terrifying from our phenomenological parochial Viewpoint right here and now right that's why it's Fang numina but in the Nan Spirit of what doesn't kill me makes me stronger a a more FY he wants to say [ __ ] it I'm I'm brave enough to affirm all this let's go all the way with it and so it's the nian dimension as opposed to the schoper schopen howan dimension and that's why n's famous words right I teach you the Overman man is something that shall be overcome what you have done what have you done to overcome him and that's precisely what land is saying everything I'm doing with Theory fiction is in this nitian vein I'm trying to overcome the human from this niichan perspective by any means necessary and so and then of course the the great the quote on the Overman that's from Thus Spoke zarathustra and then this other great one on a Mor fatti is from uh eom homo um he says my formula for human greatness is a more FTI that you do not want anything to be different not forwards not backwards not for all eternity not just to tolerate necessity still less to conceal it all idealism is hypocrisy towards necessity but to love it and that's exactly land thinks that capitalism has made this techn future Extinction an inevitability it's necessary and he's going to say like with n and I'm gonna love every minute of it as we go down this path and yeah you can try to stifle it with the state you can try to put impediments in the way of capital but this thing is like Thanos it's gonna [ __ ] happen um again the joke is Iron Man you know I am Iron Man and it doesn't happen but uh for land again this is this is the I'm just trying to give a bit of nuance to how he himself views this which is usually lost in the memes right and then oh go yeah go oh send me those say what send me those links oh okay sorry the quotes not not links quotes let me see yeah the one for we're going to get there this is going this is going according to plan all according to plan I just I told myself look the the number one goal of the whole night is to have enough time to go through the Del losing batari stuff because ultimately I mean look obviously all this stuff is essential but his greatest influences are DG so we gotta talk about them and of course their their little Circuit of terminology is the hardest to deal with so let's see actually I'm gonna not go through those other quotes they're not necessary um so let's yeah let's Okay so schopenhauer has the will to life n has the will to power and N also I mean if you read the loses book on N the wants to say look a lot of people read NCH as kind of a scatterbrained man of letters type thinker and uh Delo is like that's [ __ ] he's an incredibly systematic metaphysician and for Delo there's two key types of forces for n and his metaphysics active forces reactive forces But ultimately even those are going to be connected to will power and so and everybody knows this right there's this key difference from schopenhauer to n because of this Rec conceptualization of the will to life as the will to power and on this point I'm going to send this uh passage here Dave because this one I do want to read this is one where I'm like I probably can't begin to say this any better than land himself says it okay this from thirst uh thirst for annihilation Pages 10 to 11 Lance says n wholeheartedly subscribed to the basic tenants of schopenhauer's diagnosis but sought to deepen his cosmology and to jettison the residual egoism that lay in its continued obsession with Redemption n no longer considered the sufferings of the self to be a serious objection to the basic Cosmic processes that underpinned it where schopenhauer had depicted the unconscious striving of nature as a will to life whose most sophisticated form is the egoism of the individuated human animal n remained or I'm sorry n renamed this fundamental Drive the will to power for which survival is a mere tool for n life is thought as a means uh life is thought of as a means in the service of an unconscious trans individual Creative Energy mankind as a whole is nothing but a resource for creation a dissolving slag to be expended in the generation of something more beautiful than itself the end of humanity does not lie within itself but in a planetary artistic experiment about which nothing can be decided in advance and which can only be provisionally labeled Overman for Overman is not a superior model of man but that which is beyond man the creative surpassing of humanity n read Christianity as the NAT of humanistic slave morality the most abject and impoverishing attempt to protect the existent human type from the ruthless impulses of an inconscious artistic process that pass through and Beyond them the mixture of continuity and discontinuity connecting n's atheism with schopenhauer is encapsulated in nich's Maxim man is something to be overcome now as somebody who has been seriously studying land for six months let me tell you that is a quote you need to save because so many of the other little distinctions that are going to become important for land later on are there in laral form so this whole thing where he talks about humankind is as a whole is nothing but a resource for creation uh blah blah blah let's see uh the end of humanity does not uh lie within itself but in a planetary artistic experiment about which nothing can be decided in advance and which can only be provisionally labeled Overman that artistic experiment are the cybernetic feedback loops of capital later on which are going to bring about the becomings the the transhumanism the techn future all of that right so that's what that's going to become uh when um look and then look what he says uh n read Christianity is the NAT of humanistic slave morality the most abject and impoverishing attempt to protect the existent human type from the ruthless impulses of an unconscious artistic process that passed through and Beyond them right there you have the whole thing with the architectonic order of the escaton the AOE that's this this organization that the ccru um it's a fictional organization but what it's describing is essentially humankind's Global militaristic technological goal of preventing runaway technological development in the form of singularity it's what's trying to put the breaks on human extinction what's putting the breaks on the explosion of technology and so it's he's talking about Christianity here but this idea of the AOE is what's trying to preserve the existent human type like we're not going to allow ourselves to be transcend this point we're going to stay here we're going to defend this status quo and anything that tries to go against us is this threat from the outside right which is the threat of our Extinction um and so whether we're talking the AOE whether we're talking about the K uh Insurgency which that's another we'll get into all this right point is this quote has all of these later distinctions there um in Virtual larel form okay so the will of power Wills self-overcoming which is to say going Beyond ourselves transcending our elves becoming something different undergoing qualitative changes right uh and it fully affirms this and so in other words like the will of power is going to be aligned with what D&G call deterritorialization uh it's G becoming affirmative self-destruction um Etc so this is the joyful spirit in which land Wills the extinction of humanity uh so whenever you see the the little Matrix memes of him like laughing his face on the sentinel's body what he's thinking is ah something more beautiful comes out of our Annihilation right and so yeah and so I mean we've kind of already talked about it but this is what I wrote on this um yeah go ahead just want so I know I had raised this question of you know basically reinterpreting Extinction to say maybe it's just the Uber MCH idea maybe it's just like this you know once we've modded ourselves out to a certain extent like then are we even human anymore blah blah blah um but I'm just saying so just because it's might be more likely or or whatever isn't it still on the table that he just actually wants the extinction of humans like like a more hard extension the extension where we all get ripped apart mancal genius thing yeah isn't that still on the table Yeah and let me tell you why because early on I didn't read the quote let me go back to it real quick so there is this quote that would lend support to that right here's what I'm trying to do and and and Dave is big on this everybody and Dave knows what I'm doing what nobody nobody who's remotely a leftist will do and I am in some way shape or form remotely a leftist right I'm trying to steal man land which is what nobody who's remotely leftist would do I'm trying to actually give him the fairest reading possible one because I I'm just unapology apologetic I respect him as a thinker I don't like his politics is what it was but like all of this stuff I find this stuff it resonates with me I think it's philosophically Rich um I appreciate the the uness of it and so instead of just and I I used to kind of have this tendency a land just wants us all to die and wants us all to suffer and okay but here's the thing I've been as Fair as I possibly can so far here's where Dave you can you can get a little support he says in thirst for annihilation page 55 I have been I he goes let's see I have not been a theist for a single second of my life in my first assemblies at Primary School when the theistic idiocy was first wheed out I remember thinking it is natural that adults should lie to you but is it really necessary for them to insult the intelligence quite this much as for the longing to believe nothing could be more alien to me because nothing is more obvious than the fact that Humanity far from being a creation is a disease so he's even saying from early early on as a kid how much is this real how much is this fiction whatever but he's saying as a kid I I thought humans are [ __ ] diseases so yeah I'm doing the Steelman thing for the sake of you know philosophical Integrity but do I think he kind of hates us yeah I kind of do okay but but but we do have to take this whole nitian thing I mean he's being very clear like he's explicitly aligning himself with n and this whole and here's the thing like I I'm not going to treat him like the unbarred big other like he he has to be perfectly consistent could he be inconsistent on things too sure I think on the one hand he can hate Humanity at one moment but he probably can sit there and go I don't really hate him I just think the where we're at is [ __ ] trash and I don't understand how anybody could want to remain in this state [ __ ] it pedal to the metal let's see how far we can go let's see what can become out of us and I think I to use that examp why the [ __ ] hey caterpillar get in the [ __ ] cocoon bud what the [ __ ] you're not great you're just a thing you're not the end all Beall to what the universe can produce [ __ ] it let's see what else you got but you got to transcend yourself for us to find out so I think that's there too right I do think the nian thing is there okay so but here's here's this interesting thing Dave and I I wrote These down just for you because you you're the one who got me thinking about these two I love these paradoxes right these are great these are I was talking to Philip about these last night so we have the sides Paradox which okay so the the Greek word the prefix uh Soros right it means Heap or pile or Mound so we're really talking about like the Heap Paradox or the the the pile Paradox it is real simple you have a grain of sand you put it on the table you get another grain of sand you put it on the table you get a third one and you put it there and then you ask yourself do I have a heap of sand no you have three grains of sand but if you keep putting the the grains of sand on the table at some point you make the qualitative change over to it being a pile of sand now the whole philosophical debate would be ah what's the precise grain of sand that makes it shift from being a a you know a a bunch of grains of sand to being a pile of sand now see this is the whole conent thing we were talking about with the unity multiplicity totality thing where does in conent terms what is what exact grain of sand does it trigger the [ __ ] cognitive apparatus to go from interpreting it as a multiplicity to seeing it as a totality right one unified thing made out of things as opposed to just a bunch of things and this Paradox I mean you try to I and this is also what's at play with dialectics when it comes to the dialectic of quality versus quantity how many quantitative changes do you have to make until that shifts it over into a qualitative change right well you can guess where this is going how many little technological modifications do we have to make in ourselves before we undergo a qualitative transhuman becoming where we we cross the the essentialness our Essence is transcended so okay we have little essential differences so again if I have 10 Nanobots in my bloodstream circulating clearing out cholesterol doing whatever they do right um moderate you know okay okay nobody's going to say that I'm not human because I have 10 Nanobots in my bloodstream what if I have a million that if I got shot in the head they immediately heal it like in the movie Transcendence right and do I am I still what you are now it's a little bit fuzzier of a distinction right then what happens if I have the Nanobots I have so many of them that they actually form a kind of synthetic Collective that integrate my very Consciousness into them and now my Consciousness is merely in the swarm of the nanobot and I shed off my fleshly body once and for all am I still me am I still a human this is where all of these transhumanist basically sties uh paradoxes start to creep up so of course for land if we he would go I don't know where the qualitative threshold is but there's one right there is one there that that you we technologically modify ourselves at some point we're not the same thing and therefore we've gone extinct and this almost works the same way with the ship ofus uh Paradox if we apply it to humans now the ship of Theus Paradox works like this you take the ship of Theus it's it's their docked Port right like a ship port and it it was this great Battleship that was used in a war if I remember remembering the the story correctly and the point is though over time the various parts of the ship start to Decay or rot and some of the wood has to be replaced and the nails have to be replaced and then the [ __ ] sails have to be replaced and over a 100-year period every part of the original ship has been replaced the question is is that the same ship you want to go in some sense yes because it's the name that makes it the same ship and not the pieces but you can philosophically argue ye it's the pieces that make a thing not the name and so this is just one of these questions that's Up For Debate but the point is if I take off my flesh arm and put on a a cyborg arm and then you start modifying yourself to the point where there's no fleshly remainder of you are you still the same species at the end of this Prospect so that's just these are other ways to try to think through this shift from being human to being transhuman and again if these Pro if these changes are small incremental take place over an extended period of time we go extinct without even knowing it happened it's not this violent trauma it's we don't even again it's like the perfect crime this is like the perfect Extinction right the extinction that nobody knows even anything became extinct so okay we're we're we're getting close to taking a break I'm just gonna say a couple things about Freud and batai and then we'll take the break okay so with Freud land and dng they all they this Camp has a LoveHate relationship with Freud they hate this whole edus thing they hate the whole thing of mommy daddy me and desire has to always be ediz and has to be trained to desire whole persons and it has to be trained to conform to the Norms of proper Society blah blah blah blah blah it's all rules and prohibitions and Concepts and language that Force desire into these strictures right and then it does this and then desire feels guilty and it gets gets hung up on itself and these are neurotic symptoms and so you have to go through analysis in order to work through these symptoms produced by the representations which is to say the the basic models concepts of society that are imposed on desire right and so they all are GNA hate Freud and the con by extension for the edle [ __ ] and for the emphasis on the signifier of course Freud doesn't talk like that that's Lon but the losing guari and land are going to Champion materialistic energy over the representations the signifier the Norms the rules the symbolic organizations Etc of society so however though they also love Freud the Freud that D&G love is the Freud of the work the early work on the drives on polymorphist perversity which is to say when a baby is born their body is not coded by societies prohibitions they don't understand like they don't know they're naked they don't know that certain parts of their bodies have to be covered none of this has registered for them yet and all their body is is basically um a field of potential enjoyment right they can get enjoyment from their genitals from their hands from their mouth from their feet from their anus doesn't matter all of it is fair game for the baby who has not undergone what Le con calls symbolic castration proabition socialization process and um so DG are all about the Freud of the partial drives the these energies that get enjoyment from you know just enjoyment for enjoyment sake right humans are unique for Freud because animals seem to interact always on the basis of utility now I'm sure that there's you can get modern studies of that have a more robust understanding of animals but the typical Story Goes Like Animals don't get enjoyment simply from breastfeeding they get enjoyment from breastfeeding because they're getting it's the source of nourishment of uh satisfying the biological need of hunger right whereas babies we all know this babies enjoy breastfeeding because they enjoy sucking on the nipple that's why you give a baby a pacifier because their mouth enjoys the sucking itself right and this is what's unique to human is that we use our sense organs as like end in themselves when it comes to enjoyment right and this is why we we take on all these this proliferation of Kinks and uh fetishes and all of these things in our sexuality that animal sexuality doesn't drift around the way sexuality does for humans it really seems align to basic biological imperative and instincts whereas ours is like this free play because because our mouths our eyes our anuses our genital all of it none of it is rooted in just basic biological utility they become Source again they're ends in themselves they're not means to an end like they are for Animals uh they ends in themselves which is to say we enjoy the act of sucking we enjoy the act of eating we enjoy the act of smoking cigarettes just for the sake of the enjoyment at play in the Drive getting that type of satisfaction or that stimulation right and so but for land like he he of course is going to Champion the Freud of beyond the Pleasure Principle with this emergence of this idea of the death drive so for Freud it's important to remember the this this I mean career defining idea at least according to Todd mcowan and slavo xek and alanka zupanic of the death Drive really only shows up late in Freud's work before the emergence of the death Drive Freud had only thought of libido in terms of the Pleasure Principle so the point is our libidinal economies our you know sensorium so to speak um its primary goal is to achieve homeostasis equilibrium right calm peace Etc which is a lack of excitation and this was this is how Freud always defined pleasure but later in his career he realized like I've got patients that are doing things that I cannot square with the Pleasure Principle being the sole tendency at work in our libidinal economy something else is pulling them in a different direction so after World War I Freud started to do psycho analysis with some of the guys who fought in World War one and they came back they had shell shock or what we now call PDS D and part of it what Freud was sitting there going they keep having these recurring traumatic nightmares every single night and this isn't helping anything it's it's it's just it goes against the Pleasure Principle it doesn't get rid of excitation it's just repetitiously building it up every single night and it's ruining these guys lives um I don't know what to do with this right and then he observed his grandson getting this kind of enjoyment through playing a game called Fort Daw here there here there Fort da right German for Here There and Freud like could tell like the mother had left and the kids's trying to work through this trauma of the mother's departure her absence right and so he's trying to master the inocence here there here there and so what he would do is when he was doing this here there here there he had a little spool and he'd throw the thing and make it disappear and it was attached by a string and so then he'd pull it back and make it come back and then gone here gone here present absent present absent right and but this this was it wasn't just joyful like there there's this kind of excessive excitation that was somewhat traumatic in the kid that he was like repetitiously reenacting right and then Freud also observed that a lot of the times with his patients he was coming near what he would call The Cure or the end of analysis like okay we've worked through the majority of this person's symptoms there's a lot less neurotic suffering things are getting better I think this is wrapping up and what he would find is there'd be something that they would do that would just steer them right back into neurosis and they'd have new symptoms or old symptoms would come back or what and it's like they self-sabotage their whole analysis their whole trajectory towards the Cure and it's like here we go back at square one and so all of these led Freud to pait the death Drive which is to say no there's this other tendency at work in liido economy that is this type of impersonal force that leads to the self-destruction the self-undermining of the subject it destroys their pursuit of homeostasis of pleasure this is of course what lon's gonna call jant right and so that's Freud and so this this Death Drive thing is this Force within us that is a kind of we we would call it extimacy in our leanian circles right this exterior intimacy this thing that's radically other but it's also the core of our being right um but but uh you know the way land is going to read this is this is this wild impersonal alterity right this this kind of ninal fanged force working against us right undermining our pleasure undermining our well-being and yet it one once this concept clicks it seems to have more force in our life than even the pursuit of pleasure and so Freud this is how he's part of the trajectory or lineage or tradition of libidinal materialism because once this concept of the death Drive is there as this self-destructive impersonal Force well then this is similar to n's Will To Power with its affir affirmation of self-destruction and obviously we can see the the unconscious will of schopenhauer also as a as as part of this so that's essentially the the Freud Dimension here now for batai wait yep just a check so You' said he likes early Freud but then is it be principle hold on I can clarify okay DMG like the early Freud of the three essays on infantile sexuality right that that paper because that's where Freud makes this distinction between Instinct and drive and they're all about Drive Desiring machines as we're going to see in a little bit right but the their their focus there is like oh this is this is this thing with the body with how we get excessive enjoyment from different parts of our body right this is not like the clever unconscious that's coming through with slips of the tongue it's not the edus thing right this is just Freud theorizing the human dimension of our body right as drives as opposed to instincts DG like that and they're going to take that and run with it um lamb likes this the whole thing of like the self-destructive impersonal Force undermining us um as a kind of numon right Fang numon later on what DG and land have in common is they don't like the Freud of edus of the personal unconscious of you know the slips of the tongue and this this whole py drama about our childhood they don't want they don't go for that but they do like the the early stuff on drives and the later stuff on Death Drive okay so batai so Bai is I mean the whole book The Thirst for annihilation is in a way a book about batai and the preface is really good like this is not like a typical secondary source like not to they William poet under the the bus this is a really good secondary source on Bai William poet he also wrote a fantastic book on bodard he's a great secondary source writer um but L's book on batai is as much a book on land as it is a book on batai he's really thinking with batai and it's a creative engagement right and I think honestly it would probably be bai's favorite book written about him ever written I think Bai would love what Lan did with it um and look so the fact is in a way like the only book about a philosopher land ever wrote is batai so there's so much that like I mean we could teach a whole thing just on his reading on Bai so it's funny though like I'm almost gonna say the least about Bai over the other ones because it would you know maybe we'll we'll have a discussion uh series on thirst for annihilation in the future who knows but ultim ultimately I think there's just two key things with batai to to understand about him fitting into this libidinal materialist tradition and so let me talk about this and then we'll take our break okay so bai's concept of death and slash sexuality and how they relate this is key for for uh land and you gotta realize Bai wrote a book on n b like n this is all a cluster of thinkers who are on the same wavelength in a lot of ways so yeah Bai influen land's concepts of death desire and enjoyment I.E The Thirst for annihilation right and so I think there's this great quote from B's eroticism that kind of sums this up right Bai says we receive Bean in an intolerable Transcendence of being no less intolerable than death death and since in death it is given and taken away at the same time we must seek it in the feeling of death in those unbearable instance where we seem to be dying because the being within us is only there through excess when the fullness of horror and joy coincide now let me send that to you because that is another one of those key quotes that you want to refer back to and so okay let's let's unpack that we receive being in an intolerable Transcendence of being which is to say like for human beings for us to actually be whole or complete is to be a [ __ ] corpse it's it's it's to be a pure object right and so but we can't we're not around for that experience right and so for us to actually get the pleasure or the whole fullness of death we can't actually be dead we have to be on the brink of death we have to be in death's vicinity right and so he we receive being in an intolerable intolerable Transcendence of being right like in death right uh no less intolerable than death and since in death it is given and taken away at the same time like we get we reach our wholeness by being a corpse right but we also lose that because we're not there to experience it in any way shape or form we're [ __ ] dead right is given away or given and taken away at the same time we must seek it in the feeling of death in those unbearable instance where we seem to be dying because the being within us is only there through excess and when the fullness of horror and joy coincide okay so this is what we're getting here is some sort of near-death experience of being totally overloaded by Sensations that basically are breaking down the psyche breaking down our sense of self but in horror and joy right so batai he loved this image of this guy being tortured because the guy yeah exactly Nance you know what I'm talking about here um there's a photo that bat used to stare at and it's a I believe it's a Chinese torture victim but the guy has the most like Sublime euphoric look on his face as he's being cut apart and it's almost like the look on that statue that LAN uses to talk about feminine Jance uh the statue of St Teresa it's similar like this guy's being his gutted or whatever is going on and yet he looks like he's experiencing some sort of sublime Transcendence of you know pure being something that Beyond normal experience but it's obviously a horror and joy in this experience right well this is ultimately going to be the [ __ ] type of experience land and the ccru are going to seek in this kind of ritualistic practice on the one hand copious amounts of speed on the next self-induced insomnia uh large consumptions of alcohol uh other drugs I'm sure um overloading the senses with jungle music right the the the Techno music uh jungle playing it levels that you're beyond what your ears should be able to deal with right um while doing occult practices trying to channel demon lemur the point is this for a prolong yeah for one instance it looks silly and ridiculous but if you actually try to do this for I mean this was what they did for a [ __ ] year other members of the ccru basically had psychotic breaks or at least mental breakdowns of some kind because of this all of this is what is called a death like capital a hyen death which means artificial death so this whole this type of experience that the ccru was constantly seeking artificial death is directly coming out of this idea with batai on death and sensuality this is the thirst for annihilation right I I want to enjoy my utter destruction right this is where real jant and this is is not the Jance I'm talking about in the warehouse this some whole other level self-destruction sensation excitation it overloads you I mean the the point is land actually had a psychotic break now that's some [ __ ] jant for your ass right like but when that when you do speed and self-induced insomnia for a year you'll get some [ __ ] demon lemur right and so that is that is he asked for it and he got it and then he I don't think he's ever done speed since so I don't know he he talks about that he worship the amphetamine God but I I've always wondered what he would say about like you still want some a death now I don't I don't think he does but uh he would probably be it it overloaded me and I I just I I learned my lesson something like that I don't know but okay this whole thing artificial death a hyphen death or even what they call unlife right this is the what they're getting from batai and this whole way way he has of connecting sensuality to death and death to sensuality and all that right and so the the last thing I want to say about batai and this is the other like bai's whole his ontology is based around the accursed share which for batai in his I think it's considered his Masterpiece the accursed share um he's he's talking about the Sun and he's talking about all of the energy the excess energy produced by the Sun and he thinks he calls it the accursed share so he thinks that the sun is this radical force that uh is the source of everything which of course we can't process like we we can't even begin to process how hot the surface of the Sun is I don't care if you name like the actual temperature that scientists say it is you can four billion degrees blah whatever it is okay but I was saying this I think to cadell or one dime in our talk think about like okay so the temperatur just dropped 40 degrees in Kansas City and we're all feeling it right it it's it's like oh my God we you know like winter is here and that's 40 [ __ ] degrees can we even begin to Fathom a million degrees temperature change I can say the words but do I have any way in my sensorium of even trying to register first off no because my [ __ ] body can't even exist I mean if the temperature goes up a thousand degrees my body's [ __ ] right the sensorium is [ __ ] a million a billion like these are forces that and and these are intensities that are it's like trying to understand the mind of God or something like it's so [ __ ] Beyond any human comprehension or perceptual inclination anything you think you could no it is so radically other that we can't process it and yet the sun is the source of us of all life on Earth and so it is this in a way look you could of course you can go what do you mean the sun's a [ __ ] phenomena I mean oh if I look at it I'll go BL know yeah yeah of course the sun has a phenomenal Dimension to it it also has this Pinal Dimension which is to say none of us can even begin to process every way the sun is influencing everything going on on Earth the apprehension of that is so beyond us that it is Pinal right and and I've said this before this whole thing this sharp line between phenomena and Numa you got to realize for land the way he would just Define it as any type of force whether it's Global Capital whether it's the Sun it's any type of sublime in the conent sense right Sublime force that is so vast and so Mammoth so gigantic we cannot cognitively conceptually or perceptually get a handle on it right and so but that's why he would say but we can there's ways we can try to think ourselves to a hint of it but we ultimately have to they're not so radically separate from us we can't talk about them at all we can but it's always through this like filter of yeah but ultimately we can't even begin to grasp them here's the point right and I was gonna save this for later but these types of cosmic forces right this is why he Likens all this to love crafty and deities like cthulu right but here's the point right the nightmarish immensity of cth thulu is registered in those horror stories precisely because it drives people mad but if they didn't register it and any way shape or form they just stare cthulu in the face like what's the big deal dude no it drives them [ __ ] mad because they do process it but almost like in this negative way where oh I it imposes itself on me I'm aware of it but I'm aware of my inability to ever make it under understandable the way this [ __ ] lamp is right and so that's why cthulu well all of the love crafty and deities for the most part that's why he always makes these references to this is uh they're they're the they're the fictional um Horror Story versions of these Fang Numa these Cosmic energies that are completely outside our scope of or range of exper experience and so okay so the sun is the excess source of the excess energy the accursed share and so there's a couple things here so in after the law Bai or um sorry Lan says now okay just real quick so what after the law is basically split in two parts and you have the trial of Socrates and then you have the trial of um what's it Jill D this famous serial killer right and so the way he's going to do it is like the trial of Socrates even though there's aspects of how Socrates thinks about death that L liked he ultimately thinks Socrates sides with reason rationality human intelligence cognition Etc right whereas batai in his interpretation of this serial killer with the serial kill but of course it's look batai obviously was if you've ever read his novel story of the eye he's very open to very transgressive uh imagery so how much it's weird like when I say that batai sides with the serial killer I feel like I'm doing an injustice to Bai because I don't think he's sitting there it's not like oh yes I'm so glad he killed all those people what he siding with is this alien type of Desire or Force that's enacting itself through these horrific acts of the serial killer right um these the point is human rationality and and the whole idea of justification of tribunals we're trying to judge certain human desires right and ultimately if you think that um human rational ity can get a hold of these things what you have to do is encounter a serial killer with the desires that this guy had in order to go no there's there's like I can't even judge this guy on a normal human level right like the these acts were so heinous and came from somewhere else so drastically different than what I think of as The Great Indoors of human reality that it's like our sense of justification Justice um all of that breaks down in the face of these horrific desires forces impulses in this serial killer and so the way land words this is after the law across the line of Unknowing where tribunals count for nothing Socrates is silent and accusation is dissolved into the sun okay so there's the batai thing with the Sun the point is our frame of what counts as justice as morality really operates in this little tiny area of reality and there are these Mega forces that underpin everything now you're getting it becoming repetitious you get the point But ultimately when he says that uh accusation is dissolved into the sun again this is him with having his way with words that's impressive he's saying that our little sense of human Justice our ideals our virtues Etc they do not hold sway over all of reality they are dissolved into the Sun and that human rationality is one tiny little terrain within reality that is much bigger and there are these Cosmic alien forces that our sense of rationality of Justice cannot get a hold of and that's why like it's it's like with dmer even right any of these serial killers where you go like I can blame gangsters or I can blame these kind of like I get that like oh I'm gonna break the law because X Y and Z reasons and I'll kill people if they [ __ ] with me in order for my money these are all human motivations that even though they're violent we can process most of us we we don't have a way to get to like where did dommer impulses come from right where do these there's something radically other and alien I think that's why serial killers Fascinate so many of us um is because they're like these little uh concentrated little spots of radical alterity that seem and that's the thing right these forces are so strong in them it's like we it's hard to even accuse them like we would accuse normal people right like there's something so alien about him it's like I'm going to hold you responsible Jeffrey dmer it doesn't seem to work in these moments and and that's because these forces are beyond our frame of reference so to speak and that's what that quote is getting at so in another one from thirst for annihilation Lan says the death of God is the ultimate transgression the release of humanity from itself back into the blind infernal extravagance of the Sun so I think what this means here the death of God I think we're talking about God as this Al imate it it's almost the foyer bachan thing right like God is the ultimate image of us right this exterior projection of us as the most in our most Sublime humanly moralistically pure form right God is the ideal human Type Thing Once that dies and we don't have this image of God to model ourselves after all we're left with is the blind infernal extravagance of the Sun right like that's the ultimate ground of our being not this uh conceptual ideal image of the Divine but rather the wild Pinal forces of nature the Sun and it's worth pointing out that the ccru when they get going they're GNA talk less about the Sun and they're going to talk about cathell they spell it weird too it's CT h l l l which is it's that molten layer or the core of the Earth right it's the it's the core of the earth um and Noti cathel hell also this is where they say that the 45 demon lemur reside you know but the point is cathel is basically what for the ccru what the sun is for batai it's the ultimate source of the energetic unconscious the the forces of energy structuring Our Lives and everything and yet beyond our comprehension right um so yeah in the ccru writings there's uh one of the key essays or or pieces is called Barker speaks and so he says and look trying to unpack all this I'm not gonna do it just hear me out this is on page 158 so this is uh DC Barker this hypersal fictional character they cre uh trauma is a body and so this is this whole theory of geot trumatic again I'm not going into this it's not completely relevant I mean it could be but look we have only so much time tonight so if you want to explore this go go read this uh writing he says trauma is a body ultimately at its pole of Maximum disequilibrium it's an iron thing at mvu miskatonic virtual University they call it cathel the interior third of terrestrial Mass semifluid metallic ocean Mega molecule pressure cooker Beyond imagination it's hotter than the surface of the sun down there 3,000 clicks below the crust and all of that thermic energy is sheer impersonal non-subjective memory of the outside running the plate tectonic Machinery of the planet via the conductive and convective dynamics of silicat silicat magna flux bathing the whole system in electromatic Fields as it tifully pulses to the orbit of the moon cathel is a terrestrial inner nightmare nocturnal ocean Xanadu an anorganic metal body trauma how of the Earth cross-hatched by intensities traversed by thermic waves and currents deranged particles eonic strippings and glutting gravitational deep sensitivities transduced into non-local electrom MH and feeding volcanism and that's why plutonic science slides continuously into schizophrenic delirium point is cathell is a real [ __ ] it's a Fang numon to of any of them so that's it okay time for break we'll come back we'll do the delus and guari stuff and then that's that y send me that quote okay I think there there's hold on it's kind of it's not edited properly here hold [Music] on while you do that okay um I'll say what is gonna happen while you're away so folks um if you've if a lot of you were here for the four they know not what they do course with Mikey basically what we do during the halftime is housekeeping and sometimes that just means I ask you guys some questions and we shoot the [ __ ] other times it means I get I give you all the rundown on whatever it is that you should know about and so what I was thinking is we could do some introductions um we're missing plenty of people who are here um what I would like to encourage everyone to do is to introduce themselves on the actual forum and so what I wanted to do first before we actually get into introductions and stuff like that is just pull up the Forum and give you guys a quick little tour of this thing so assuming some of you haven't really been on it yet let's go ahead and share the screen all right so there you're able to see that now um [ __ ] this no stop wrong screen I mean it is the right screen but I just realized that's not going to work for reasons having to do with OBS so let's go ahead and fix it stop the share okay do it this way instead three two there we go okay um show of hands though uh has anybody been in this forum yet an is even wondering if he's been in there okay so you can all see it now um this is wildly out of date like really needing an update uh it will get it eventually but for right now the most important thing is yeah Theory underground.com obviously that's where you signed up for the course but if you go to groups okay if you just click on the tab that says groups there is a pop down that says forums groups contain forums you don't see the forums uh you don't see most of the forums unless you're already in a group for that Forum except for the public forum there is a public forum so people can come in off the YouTube or whatever and introduce themselves but the groups that you will see in here are kind of dependent on what you're signed up for on the site um but yeah you can just go straight to forums all you really need to know about the group is that when you're using the app like your activity timeline can include things that are going on in the group that aren't on the Forum okay so you can actually make a post that is not a forum post but is more of just like a a random off-the-wall post so what I mean is like let's just go to the intro to nickland group I'll open that in another Tab and then I'll just go to forums okay because the main thing I want to show you all is the Forum but I do want to kind of just drive home the point that you can go into the group and just post to the group's wall okay so that's kind of like a it's kind of like a Facebook function you know just the fact that you can come in here it's loading see right now at defaults to members we wanted to to to show feed that's the wall I'm talking about so the group just has this wall and you can go spray paint on that wall right Nobody Does it the only the only thing that's going to really like drive everyone crazy is if you get pissed off because you don't get instantaneous responses or if you want people to have to like your [ __ ] like it's just not going to work but if you want to drop something there um if this is a right place to put it especially if you're not doing let's just say like there's a quote you like but you don't want to start a forum post for a quote you like right that makes sense there's plenty of quotes that might relate to this kind of stuff but but if you're not trying to start a big back and forth kind of conversation you just want to share it um that's understandable and this is ultimately where you would place that I'm like looking where where's that note I was just I was just making notes what oh here we go all right so I'll just take this one Mike H shared this is uh from eroticism death and sensuality so let's just click to make a post okay I past it in the quote post it other people can see that now on their timeline um boom you did it and I added a little time energy thing here you can click the time energy thing it means it doesn't mean you like it doesn't mean you hard it doesn't mean anything it just means that you gave it like this iota of time energy which isn't really time energy properly speaking but you know it's it's like an analogy it's the difference between a like a like a grain of sand and a and a heap right all right but let's go into the for forums and so find the nickland Forum there's a lot of forums in here that are not active or just started and a lot of them we started like the week before tour and so they really haven't been going um and some of these are related to courses the ones like the Spanish club German club French Club album listening club uh get fit and healthy the swarat dialectics of health and fitness club the theory underground Writers Workshop Club the film club these are all currently free to participate in um people who are regular attendees early on we'll get grandfathered in once there are various kind of tiered gates to access um and we got a million reasons for all of these things if you ever want to hear the why everything is the way that it is that's a conversation for later let's just go to nickland you see how it says private it's because only people who are registered in the course actually see this you might go to the Forum and go you go to the forums and you go oh there's only a couple things here yeah there's a lot of things there you just don't see most of them right all right and so that this is where you can make a new intro a new discussion and I'm just going to go ahead and title this one [Music] introductions um introductions Etc and and then uh what do you want to say about yourself or blah blah blah okay and then I'll post it you don't have to do it nobody has to do it but it's it's a way of of giving us all a little bit more context for you um there's a sort of neurotic uh suicide of of these kinds of educational spaces that takes place when everybody thinks that because of equality and direct Democratic whatever whatever values people think I've got to have my voice be heard I've got to be included and our response has always been [ __ ] shut the [ __ ] up no if you want to be included and have a voice listen to us for a while develop your thoughts and then share your thoughts and your actual voice in the written form on the Forum okay and you don't have to do that there's nothing that should be rushing you to do that because you know take your time and you know and and part of it is also like as as the app says if you download the app and look at the front page it says like don't be yourself we don't want people to be anonymous here we do want you to like have your actual name and kind of like be like like yeah this is some version of actually me um so like that anonymity no but being your full self or thinking that this is like a space for friends to like accept your whole self that is not the point folks and that is we believe one of the things that is ruining the university as we speak people trying to turn classrooms into those kinds of spaces and it's why some of us would prefer not to and so this is a safe place for us to be the [ __ ] away from safe places in that sense in that sense at the same time I think it is a safe place in the sense that well we do care we do care um we we do we do but you know within reason and so um yeah go ahead and say some stuff introductions whatever let's go back to the feed though you see right here I'm going to click on the feed and once it loads I'll show you the other only existing actual other post there right now then I'll tell you a little bit about office hours and hub events Nance what was that was that where the movie recommendations was or was that somewhere else that's where the movie recommendations was okay yeah and Mike Mikey's yet to share his in there um getting Mikey to do new things is kind of like not one of the impossible things that we actually care about achieving in this course so he probably won't use the Forum really um but potentially if there's something really great in there you know I'm going to show it to him and we could always do some kind of a response to it in the same way that I don't know why it's freaky I can't get this thing to work right now but um this is once I'm back regularly doing stuff with these Hub events um going over Forum posts and actually recording video audio video responses to the things that people are saying in the foreign posts is going to be a lot more normal right now there are places on the website where you can see that I timestamped I share a video and I timestamp it so that people can cut right to the part where I'm responding to the comment or whatever and I do this for myself but I also recommend it to anyone who gets overly neurotic when they write okay like I I want to write but I'm not trying to write to strangers and sit here and have to be all careful about how I say things or whatever I'm very blunt on the internet um a lot more so than in normal life okay I'm I'm extremely blunt on the internet because I'm not trying to have sensitive online friends but I've got lots of sensitive real life friends and um I don't know I don't know if that's good or bad but it's just the way I operate I try to be blunt because I get overly neurotic when I start thinking about how to say things in a way that might not offend a person and then I remember some people get offended when you assume that they would get offended okay and so there is this whole spiral that I go down and then I go [ __ ] it dude I don't give a [ __ ] about you or any of your friends or any of the things you wanted me to see [ __ ] you I'm trying to stay away from you that's why you have to pay me to be a part of anything I do it's not because I'm your friend I'm not in your part of your commune right so it it triggers me in that sense and I spiral up but this is not normal Dave this is just spiraling Dave now nor what a sales pitch for Theory underground yeah no you're paying for access to the cool people hey customer [ __ ] you that's true dude that's the person saying that like I why do you think I'm here [Laughter] Rec for for this this exactly this yes so the other uh thing in here is any recommendations pop culture homework movies and books so I already showed introductions okay so I just asked if anyone's got any recommendations okay that's different than just making a post on the sort of wall of the group right where you might want to put a quote or whatever no instead we've got like okay if you want other people to add on over time this is where you want to do that and so um I uh I [ __ ] up uh now there's a bunch of code here don't worry about it just read the very beginning whenever there's a bunch of code you just have to look over it and just kind of skip on it these kinds of problems will not be fixed until I have actual programmers paid by Theory underground right now there's not actual programmers I'm just paying for a plugin the plugin this is the best that the internet can give me if my name is not Mark Zuckerberg so we've got all these people who suggested movies um I came back in here and said that um so far the ones Mikey's recommended me out of the ones he's recommended me I've watched Terminator 1 Looper and Transcendence I rewatched Looper the same week it was so [ __ ] watch it this morning dude you did yep nice nice yeah and uh I I saw it again with an so I think she's a she's listening to us while she's working at Amazon as we speak so shout out to an and Looper um looks like Christopher putam his said Mission Impossible has some landan themes um Amanda who's sadly not able to be here Mandy uh she's the one we met she's uh we met her in Kansas City um she said she like shared a book and said it's kind of psycho and um Mikey you recognize this book I actually looked it up and downloaded yeah I I I it's cting hold on what's the title so yeah it's right here hard to see from here what's got my copy so let me tell you just got to connect a couple Dots here James Ellis I mentioned him earlier he's the guy who does the hermetics YouTube channel who's done a lot of good stuff on land he basically is a landian and um I mean he's interviewed Todd McGowan uh he's interviewed a bunch of people um but land was one of them and so this is James's book on basically how L's philosophy has impacted him and how he thinks and everything and it looks really interesting I haven't had a chance to read much of it yet but I know James has a really solid understanding of land and um so yeah and I I've heard that what he write so there's this word land's always gonna you're gonna see crop up all the time zero and trying to understand exactly what land is doing with zero is difficult and I've heard that James what he he has some good stuff on nice WR so yeah I'm looking forward to reading it but haven't had a chance yet nice so Mandy recommended that text and said that hi Mand wish you were here yeah we wish you were here Mandy um also shared some jungle music adjacent or jungle adjacent music yeah um Mandy said I wish I had a related movie or something in mind God I don't know great question it's nuts because I didn't know about those guys yet I was totally into jungle and also I was obsessed with the movie Apocalypse Now and they were too I was not exactly their age but I was there for the entire Rave scene LOL I was a teenager in the 90s so it's nuts to learn about the ccru crew crew now and I was reading all of those magazines in 21st century computer and Rave culture media but just in the USA and then she says I made a lemur Dan uh party dance mix on a YouTube playlist it's good it's pre jungle from Mandy and then says I was a crazy insane junglist this is so wild for me I didn't know about Mark Fisher until a few years ago it's really hard to imagine the r scene or even to describe the feeling of being in that culture just wow so the reason I wanted to read this is because not only is Mandy not here but if Mandy was here physically in the zoom call in this present moment that wouldn't mean that man is all here right like just because I see you guys doesn't mean that you're all here you know you could be distracted you could be thinking about other things and there's also just like misrecognition fundamental misrecognition at the end of the day but most importantly and this is beyond the the fact of of misrecognition how that's never going to go away there is like getting to know a person's voice and intellectual project okay so you could be in this call with us all live right now but if you've not read me Mikey sha Nance an or Phillip in the underground Theory volume you don't really have a sense for what we're doing and you're not going to get that off the Forum you're just not um now this is this the elements of that can still come through on the Forum right but it's not kind of the same it's not imbued with the same sort of symbolic import and so I just wanted to say like a person who's not live with us right now but is watching this on their own like Brian who is in this course and he's going to be watching these on his own so shout out um is not less with us because if we've read him in the underground Theory volume and he's read us he's more with us than the person who's present in the call and Mandy met several of us in Kansas City when we were on tour just like a month ago and we were with Mikey okay like uh she came and hung out and had barbecue with us afterwards it's a different level now right it's a different level so I wanted to go ahead and read her stuff because also it's entertaining it's thoughtful it's fun um and this halftime that we just did here uh before we switch back into lecture mode it's just like the slightest little taste of what's going to be going on during office hours okay the idea of office hours is that it's for review plus anything you've got on the week's reading bring it let's talk about it all right but the but you will always be sidelined if you show up just wanting to talk and we've got a bunch of good [ __ ] on the forums that we want to be reading so the best way to get into office hours yeah be present that's a great way to kind of interject and maybe say something sometimes but the main thing is through the Forum and so um there will be office hours going out every week if if you have an account on this website then you get emails they might go to your spam but you get emails with the Hub schedule and the Hub schedule will have multiple times per week every week for you to be able to come during office hours that week and if you're taking this course or any past course you can come to office hours so you could be doing uh division one of being in Time chapter 2 and come to office hours with a question about chapter 2 or if you actually filled out like a a a reading reflection and posted that to the Forum and it's something that we want to talk about then we're going to read it over the zoom call and if you're there in person and you want to read it aloud in your own voice you'll be welcome to do so but yeah we kind of let the the people who are participating at the level of the Forum talk more because otherwise we get these people who kind of Bounce in off of some random part of the internet usually Instagram they talk a lot they ask they don't ask questions they ask they they do these runon things where they just go and go and go and go and go and we don't have the space for real conversation here this is just not the space so instead I and a couple others of us we we'll take turns kind of highlighting good [ __ ] from The Forum and then our highlighting of it and response on it to it riffing off of it all of that will get put back into the forum and so the Forum becomes the place where we're really at even when it's dead especially when it's dead it's always being watched just most things don't Merit like you know like a what we're not going to write books in response we're not going to write essays of response and we don't want to just be disrespectful by by saying huh interesting or hahaa LOL like you know what I mean so a lot of times it's crickets don't take that as some kind of a dis or something um in a lot of cases uh it's not and so then go ahead and just click the little time energy button if you do read somebody else's thing though it at least shows somebody oh I looked at it but guess what folks that doesn't count for the people on the app the people on the app don't have that little button that's just people who are doing it from their desktop this is just another problem with not having paid programmers otherwise I would have that continuity between the desktop browser version and the app but with all that said let's bring it back around to Mikey here so um thanks thanks for your patience um a lot of people will never use the Forum but it's really there for the people who will and that's what we're here for and that's what I ultimately built this little castle for let's go okay so just a kind of piggyback off of Mandy's post here I wanted to give you guys this so you guys the next couple weeks or whatever you you have these as references so Dave I'm going to post this and then you can send it there are there's three artists that are fundamentally connected to the ccru two of two of them are members um or well three of them were members so in the 90s when land and sad plant were running the show in the philosophy department at Warick University um as they started to experiment with philosophy conferences like the virtual Futures conference they they wanted conf is to be fun and exciting and not the typical boring philosophy conference situation so they'd have jungle music playing land would lay on the ground and croak into a microphone uh crazy [ __ ] and so like the famous story I think Robin McKay tells it in the I think it's the preface to Fang numina that he wrote he says something like the one of the old marxists stood up and while land was croaking into the microphone and screamed some of us are still marxists you know and stormed out of there and uh so but basically they were like techno Rave concerts uh where people would also do philosophy readings and so this group called orphan drift is a group that the ccru collaborated with and it was a collective of musicians uh that made up orphan drift but they would take Nick's writings and particular and they would read them and then they modify the voices and they'd put them on jungle beats and add audio visuals to it and they make it a whole audio visual essay thing and a lot of this stuff is on YouTube so if you search orphan drift you'll get their their artistic version of meltdown and some of these other things and so you guys should definitely go to YouTube uh check out orphan drip and okay so they were or um orphan drift was always closely associated with ccru but I don't think they were ever official members um they did see uh cyber or U orphan drift put out a collection called cyber positive which had a lot of the ccru writings in it and um but within the ccru itself there were artists and on the one hand you had uh code nine whose real name is Steve Goodman um but it's k o D9 so you can go and you find code n stuff and then there were two brothers uh Chapman Brothers Jake and Doos Chapman and and their artwork is that's very it's very interesting to check out to say the least so basically orphan drift code nine and the Chapman Brothers these are all the ccru related artists that you should check out when you have a chance um and you you you'll get the you'll get the you'll get the vibe of C ccru more from seeing the artworks and listening to the music um than maybe even reading some of the stuff so it's it's worth your time okay so Dave hold on I'm looking at some of these Jake [Music] and like they they'll statues or whatever of like like a little boy but instead of a nose he has a penis and the point of it is it's getting at the whole body modification thing that Nick's always talking about and um that type of image is supposed to excuse me disturb us just on the thought of how much we could in the future modify ourselves right like I mean because cl's always talking about think face tentacles like we're gonna modify ourselves into looking like cthulu but no I I I like the uh all the Ronald McDonald's hanging on these but I don't like this boy with that boner nose because little little children should not have boner noses and O mouths that's it's a little disconcerting but well okay okay just a check though for the notes orphan drift or drip drift d r i ft did I yeah okay all right so Delo and guari so for a long time Dave has waited for me to write a blog post where I explain their basic ideas because the ongoing thing with Dave and I is that nobody's done for dng what Hubert dfus did for haiger what Todd mcgaan does for laon and I think GJ right so D&G never found and never got their their their person who can take these Concepts and really make them concrete and intelligible and so I you think most of you know I'm some kind of lanan Gan but Dave's like it's gonna [ __ ] take you to do the the you're gonna have to do it because we're not gonna get a deloo guaran to do it but I guess you guys are going to get the little um Proto Mikey introduction to DG Concepts here uh before anybody else does so first things first I mean these guys they could just pour out new terms and like trying to run through every single bit of gzo guaran terminology is impossible so I got to limit myself to the key ideas of Delo and delo and guari um but this stuff is essential especially for next week when you guys get into stuff like meltdown and machinic desire and circuitries and all those great essays from that period because DG are at the heart of it and so the task is trying to make the body without organs in particular uh intelligible but I think this is going to go more smoothly than uh than it would in other circumstances right so in yeah there's my Pat narcissistic Pat on my back um I think I can explain this [ __ ] for you guys in a way that makes it click um okay so let's start off so the whole thing is with the lose and D&G I mean there's there's other important books they wrote but the big four in this situation are difference in repetition logic of sense anti-us and a thousand plateaus now my the main thing I'm going to do here is connect difference in repetition to anti atypus I think this is the easiest way and then you know you want to go Terry with logic of sense and anti or a thousand plate that's great but this is primarily about lands reading of DG and land is absolutely going to privilege anti-us basically over everything else but it's important to know some of the stuff from difference in repetition in order to understand the metaphysics that's undergirding the theory of anti-us and so that's what I'm going to try to do I'm trying to give you the key aspects of L's DG as opposed I mean you we could do talk about Brian mumi and we could talk about uh Brent Atkins and we could talk about um uhem Manuel danda all these other famous delians and these are people that we owe a big debt to and that you I mean me secondhand through you but I have read some Brent Atkins and you know he does and I think that you know to be fair like when we say no one's done for DG what you know say David Harvey's done for capital or what dfus did for being in time um that's to say like teaching the same difficult tone year after year after year after year after year year and then putting that [ __ ] out on the internet um that's what they did and so um Brent Atkins or any of these other secondary kind of like authors could be doing that and they're the next great professor and we don't even know it yet so we're working within the realm of like what we have access to which is kind of the Internet it's YouTube if it's not on YouTube we don't know about it which is on the internet you get a bunch of deluso guaran running the terminological circuit of just does line of flight body without organs sedimentation blah blah blah apparatus of capture line line of flight and they just use all the other terms to define the one term and you never feel like the [ __ ] clicks okay so to start off let's talk about Theo's metaphysics of imminence now what Delo essentially did and I was God I think I was saying this to cadel on his channel when we were interviewed but here's the rundown what deles metaphysics boils down to indifference in repetition is it is a metaphysics of science so to speak so basically what he's trying to do is give a metaphysical theory of how physical objects especially new physical objects emerge into reality right so he's going to try to Define what the process of individuation is how a new individual thing whether it's a tree whatever emerges into the world so it's a a process um it's a it's a theory of process a theory of becoming and it's imminent because Delo thinks there's a fundamental distinction that's always operated within philosophy that has made it impossible to understand how new things new singularities emerge that distinction is the distinction between possibility and actuality now here's the problem we all know that possible things end up becoming actual that's all great we know what some gut level how it you know how it works we don't know how it works theoretically or philosophically and so the point is if if possibilities are not actual how is it possibilities get drugged Kicking and Screaming so to speak into actual what's the process right what makes possible things turn actual right and throughout the whole philosophical tradition philosophers have just thought in terms of possibility and actuality and take it for granted that possible becomes actual without giving a metaphysical basis for this transformation so long story short Delo figures out that there's you know how earlier we were talking kti and schema there has to be a third thing all right well this third thing for Delo is intensity right so what his metaphysics of imminence is going to do is say all right the there's always seemed to be like a metaphysical or ontological line or gap between possibility and actuality which is to say actuality is what's real possibilities are not real unreal right and so what happens though if one I figure out what the goet is and two I reconceptualize the possible as the virtual or the potential which is to say it's not that possibilities are not real and actualities are real what if virtual potentials intensities and actualities are all real all present in the imminent one reality but in different modes right so this is the kind of Spinosa influence where Spinosa thinks there's one substance but that substance is comprised of both mind and body so where dayart thinks that there's mind and bodies there radically separate that's it Spinosa says no there's one underlying substance and bodies and minds are expressions of that one substance right and so Delo is going to do this similar sposit uh maneuver but he's going to do it I think in a far more fundamental scientifically rigorous way um so virtual singularities I'm gonna use the two examples my friend Brendan Holt who uh he was one of my friends when I first got into doing philosophy online he came up with a couple great examples of this when we were reading Delo and so these are my Brendan examples um so Brendan figured out he was like okay let's try to figure out a good example of the virtual being pulled through intensity into actuality okay so here's what we've got imagine you're standing in front of a big piece of glass and you happen to be holding a big rock in your hand if you throw that rock with a specific amount of force intensity and it hits a specific part of the window a crack pattern is going to emerge in that window now from the Delian perspective that crack pattern was already real it was already there as a potential right and it's the intensity the force of the rock acting on the actuality of the window that pulls the virtual potential out into reality and basically there's a whole multiplicity of these singularities right so the singular crack pattern that emerges that's completely contingent and relative to the position where the rock hits it how much force is in the rock all of this these intensive Dynamics are essential to the virtual being pulled into actuality so you can imagine right like all of those various crack there's like a multiplicity of singularities within the glass there's like an infinite you know connection an infinite web of potential crack patterns that could emerge um in that in that glass right one of my now this is one of my favorite examples of it um popcorn kernels right if you if you got a bag of popcorn you got you're having a movie night and uh want to pop popcorn what you're doing is you take the popcorn kernels and putting them in the microwave that's the Intensive field right it's through the intensity of the heat that you're going to pull the potential popcorn out of the kernel transform it into popcorn now think about like look around your room look around the space you know what would happen to everything around you if the temperature went up like we were talking about a th000 degrees 5,000 degrees whole field of actual things that you're around is based on it's the the The Sweet Spot it's in within a in in a field of intensities right the whole reason the Earth can bring forth life is its relative position towards the sun if we're too close everything burns up if we're too far everything freezes and so it's The Sweet Spot in intensity that enables certain things to materialize to actualize and this is so fundamental to doing philosophy of of thinking about actual things and yet going back to PL and Aristotle philosophers just missed this essential role of intensities whether it's temperature whether it's pressure whether it's the the rate of flow various rates all of these intensities that make up reality are absolutely essential to physical things actual things um and so this is this three-fold distinction Delo is going to use in his metaphysics um between the virtual the the Intensive and the actual and I mean you see it like you get a glimpse of this it's almost like a Conan Sublime but if you watch footage of tornadoes taking taking hold you know that there's all the intensities of the wind and there's pressure systems and all this kind of stuff a meteorologist could tell you about but with the formation of a funnel cloud you're seeing intensities actualize the funnel cloud you're seeing it come into actuality and I think this is one of these Sublime moments of of delusi and becoming you of a singularity a virtual Singularity getting pulled through intensity into being an actual Singularity right and um and Singularity here we're not using this in the the landan sense of like the techn capital singular we're talking about the emergence of a concrete individual thing right singular in that sense okay so the point though and this is a key key development here right so Delo is going to talk about transcendental empiricism so K's philosophy is Transcendental idealism and we know why because the very conditions of experience are imposed on rth sense data via our cognitive apparatus right so the transcendental conditions of EXP experience are in our mind and we all inter subjectively or collectively share these same structures okay but what Delo is going to do and this is a genius maneuver he's going to go yeah but the very conditions of possibility of your mental apparatus are fields of intensity like it the outside the empirical the empirical world of intensity actually is the transcendental condition of experience right because our sensor our sensory appar our eyes our ears our brains again if we get too close to the Sun none of this works if we get too far away from the Sun none of it works so experience is conditioned by these things these forces outside of us and so the conditions of possible experience are actually in the empirical field for delus more so than in our mind he I don't know if he would deny that I mean I think he would say yeah our minds do a kind of their organization or synthetic fine but it doesn't change the fact that this type of Ideal activity is conditioned on being in the organic sweet spot of intensity in the universe and so this is this Delian reversal and land of course is going to love this this is so in line with transcendental materialism because you're saying that these these exterior forces are more fundamental than our mental rationality our mental functioning right so so you got to realize dng they're going to take this onology that Del loses developed of virtuality intensity actuality or what he also calls extensity extension right extended things actual things and they're going to start to think in terms of desire and this is where we get to anti atopus is they're going to take this metaphysics of becoming and apply it to desire and also apply the concept of desire to it so so we're here we're going to start talking about machinic desire because anti-us is essentially an ontology or metaphysics of machines now we don't mean technological machines basically when they're taking machine and they're turning it into like an ontological principle so our our mouths are machines um so biological things are machines uh I think they would take it as far as atoms a machinic quality I think they take it all the way down to the fundamental aspects of reality um and I think they would con connected on on the the higher level of cosmology the solar systems Etc yeah Dave doesn't danda call them apparatuses or something assemblages he calls them assembl well and so there's a whole thing right so is it the same thing or is it different I've seen Del latarian argue over this actually where sometimes they act like assemblages or something new and then other times I see them kind of use machines and assemblages interchangeably and so I'm not exactly sure the here's what I do know all the talk of machines is an anti atopus that basically drops out in a thousand plateaus and that's where they kick into talking about assemblages I don't know if they prefer the word or if there's a but it seems like they'll talk about the assemblage of what is it the it's the man horse sword assemblage I think right so like in battle like certain certain force a certain violent Warrior capacity is produced through the assemblage or the machinic connections between horse man and sword right that connection of machines or that assemblage makes certain possibilities Poss like you can actualize virtualities through that con connection right I don't know if they want to draw a sharp distinction between machines or assemblages um but this is they're thinking in these terms along these Pathways okay so here's the thing right this whole process that Delo is talking about in difference in repetition I'm not gonna unpack all this because that would be a whole lecture but he ultimately calls this process of the actualization of a singular potential he calls it into drama into differentiation and hold on let me see just so you guys can see the term I not have it here so here's I think it's C here's how he spells it the Inda is individualization Right drama is this other aspect of it like you're dramatizing this this whole process and then there's different differentiation with a c and differentiation with a t differentiation with a c is what applies to virtuality with a T it's actuality so the word he spells it i n d hyphen d r a m a hyphen D FF e r e n c slash T IO N I think that's different differentiation something like that okay I am having trouble following yeah right hold on look yes it's a I shouldn't even try let me just [ __ ] send it to you sick but yeah thanks for the reminder on differentiation differentiation differ it was very very sexy at the time for French intellectuals to use a word that sounded exactly the same for two different things like Delo did this with differance he didn't say different differance different than how he says different so when he first presented that he kept using the exact same word even though he was talking about that this one word differance and this other word difference they're spelled different but they sound the same that was part of his point like there was a sort of meta thing he was doing and it [ __ ] with people people but anyway differentiation is one of those things I even I like I usually have to go look it up to spell it whenever I use it in a [ __ ] article or something here so this is the term like maybe the worst [ __ ] drama differentiation so it's a t c okay here's the point though if you do if you do differentiation with the T and the see are you saying both the extensive and the virtual yeah that's what different differentiation with a c i which one's first hold on God damn it the t is first the t is first okay then that's gonna be I think that's the virtual side and then the one with the c is the actual side but that the that's the point he uses differentiation on the level of the virtual and at the level of the actual so what he's trying to do is cocka theory of how this whole process of becoming unfolds okay in anti atopus this whole process is g to be talking about in ter they're gonna talk about in terms of like machinic desire so this pulse this impulse you could say that the universe or Nature has to make things and let's be honest the universe [ __ ] makes things new things planets all the species like I think it's funny we forget we didn't make all this [ __ ] like this [ __ ] was here long before us and so th this is this whole question and heiger in his own way this is what he's talking about with the S gipt it gives being gives this is this productive dimension of being for haiger where it's like no the very process of things being actualized in space and time that being this goes beyond being as this background familiarity with objects that he that he talked about early on into the very it's fusus it's the productive dimension of nature that the Universe makes new things and that is what Delo is tapped into and he's GNA keep rethinking it in different ways but here difference in repetition it's into drama differentiation in anti atopus we're going to talk about about machines or uh machinic desire and we're going to talk about it in terms of Desiring production right the forging of machines through this process this Desiring process making new connections between things okay all right hold on okay so this whole process of how nature forges new connections by connecting part of things to other parts of other things this is what a machine is for DG it's one it's part of one thing forging a connection to a part of another thing so on the level of Desire the mouth connects to the breast like when the child's breastfeeding right um but when you start to think about human sexuality a lot it's Parts connecting to other parts right and it's it's this is why even in psychon analysis we talk about partial drives because I mean for d& at least like our bodies we can never form whole connections my entire your body can't connect to the entire it's always Parts connecting to parts and so this is why sexuality is machinic here right is because it involves Parts connecting to Parts it sounds funny but this is the hardware basically of the production of the new for them and so but again this goes beyond even human desire in a parochial sense right this is ontology of all things right and so this whole process is referred to as machinic desire or the machinic unconscious right so you're going to see this term machinic unconscious get brought up all the time into lzo guaran circles but because they don't bother to explain it or unpack it you're going to be sitting there going like what how are they modifying the Freudian uncon because when you hear unconscious you think Freud or you think laon which is this very cunning sophisticated semiotic thing right um it has to do with language and slips of the tongues and dreams and displacements and all of these kind of semiotic acrobatics that Freud and Lan attribute to the unconscious but that is okay and look even Lan might talk about the unconscious this this type of unconscious the semiotic thing as impersonal but even but from d delus and guitar's perspective even what con and Freud are talking about a personal unconscious compared to what they're going to talk about which is truly this impersonal force of creative nature right that is the machinic unconscious we're not aware of these flows these this energies at work in nature and basically our sense of conscious subjectivity is an Epi phenomenal byproduct of all of this machinic becoming that d& are going to talk about and so they're going to talk about these different syntheses of desire and of experience right um and the third one the one of uh uh I believe it's conjunction I think uh basically point is the third synthesis is this last thing like oh I'm enjoying myself right but the point for them is no your body and this whole forceful process of Desiring production they're they're running the show here and you're you're an afterthought in a you're an Epi phenomenal byproduct like I said and this is their critique of subjectivity that the the true motor of Desire is this impersonal Force itself not your conscious egoic intentions or even what you register as what you want or what you wish or what you desire okay but we'll come we're going to come back to machinic desire machinic unconscious in a second now let's talk about some of these key terms territorialization deterritorialization reterritorialization okay simply put it's we're really talking about something being territorialized now think about it like this we can use heiger example of uh equipmental totalities systems of equipment right tools so hammers have a very specific function we know that first off you keep hammers in you know know the workshed or out in the garage like they they have a place they belong so they're territorialized in the physical sense of where they belong in space right um they also are territorialized withinin a whole system of references hammers are connected spatially in the system of references to nails to boards right they have a a a certain territorialized relationship to other equipment uh hammers don't have much to do with stereo systems right like I I mean sure maybe you use a hammer to try to fix your stereo in some weird but typically we know where hammers belong right this is why they're territorialized right now I'll give you a little example of deterritorialization um you can take a hammer and if your back is itchy you can scratch your back with the hammer right in a sense you're territorializing it you're taking it out of its Pro its proper place or its proper function and giving it a new material function right you're repurposing it you're resituating it you're recontextualizing it um to perform a different function right and that's the whole thing is that while the hammer has a specific function for US Nail hammers right it can be used for various other things we can deterritorialize it now a great example of deterritorialization from a spec like one region of society or human activity to another is Marcel duchamp's deterritorialization of the urinal from a public bathroom so so to speak to being an artwork in a museum right if you take it out like okay so he just took a urinal this was his his artwork the fountain right for Fountain he took commonplace Journal takes it out of public restroom and puts it up in as an art piece in an art exhibition right at a museum he deterritorialized it and he takes it from being a piece of instrumental equipment into being a work of art simply by changing the space simply by deterritorializing it right and so this is this great instance of just thinking about how you can modify something simply by by where you put it like where where you place it right now this whole process though is if if you want something to undergo a becoming you deterritorialize it you put it in a new space um a new relation to other things Etc right but so territorialization would involve stasis consistency um uh stable identity right der territorialism ation is going to free it from its identity it's going to undergo a becoming it's going to be something new its identity is going to be modified but if you reterritorialize it then you're going to produce a new identity a new uh sense of stability a new sense of essence to it right but the point is we're defying essentialism here precisely because we're showing how it's kind of makeshift like you can change it by simply rearranging things uh per taking a thing and having it exist in new connections um in new environments okay another example of this and this is maybe my favorite example of deterritorialization the the the weapons that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles use the katana the bow staff the nunchucks and the size right do you know that in uh feudal Japan okanawa these were originally farm tools all of them they use them in in farming procedures right but they ended up being deterritorialized into self-defense weaponry and you think about all of the the skills that come along with the nunchucks and the size and right there's I mean it's amazing but it's as simple as shifting it from I use these to you know the the nunchucks I don't know they use them on the threshing Flor or something I think use it from that to going no I can use them to to self-defense and right and it's this this shift right and so in one way they're physically the same object but they undergo a profound becoming simply through reterritorializing them now this whole process territorialization deterritorialization reterritorialization it's usually I think I mean most of the time accompanied by a complimentary process coding decoding recoding right but why dng opt for these distinctions between territorialization and coding is because we're getting at two different things so I think territorialization has to do with the material location or material spatiality of an object it's material relationships to other things whereas decoding is what's going on at the level of the symbolic order of language of its position in our uh symbolic understanding right so when to to turn uh you know the nunchucks into farm equipment into being a weapon you also assign them different meanings at the the symbolic level right at the conceptual level and so think about it before if somebody was walking around with nunchucks and you they simply were defined in the symbolic order as farm equipment that's fine but if they become Weaponry then they can be legislative it's a legal those you can't have those blah blah blah right because their coding has changed they're very placed within our sense of our world of intelligibility now has been modified and so you can take coding which is a kind of like conceptual identity you can decode it you can change the concept of the thing the identity of the thing at the symbolic level and then you can recode it you can think of it in new terms so coding and deterritorialization are different one's material I think the other one's primarily semiotic but they auor overlap and are interconnected right and so this is these uh fundamental concepts here are essential to how we register or understand becoming uh especially for DG so this this whole thing with machinic desire in anti atopus it also has these other desire these other Concepts built into it so Desiring production right they're going to talk about this a lot in the first chapter Desiring production is their way of getting outside of the typical way of thinking about desire that they think starts with Plato and goes all the way down to Lon which is thinking about desire as a lack I desire because there's something I'm missing I something I've lost something I don't have and they think that this is essentially um basically a dogmatic image of Desire because what desire primarily is isn't the desire of a lacking subject it's this flow this this energetic unconscious this machinic unconscious this this will of creativity right that we see in schopenhauer and n and all this and they're just doing their machinic version of it in a way and so they are totally going to reject laon they're going to totally reject um Plato but I mean so much of this is lon right they're going to reject this image of the desire is lack because they don't think desire is actually see okay if you make desire desire is lack you're going to make desire pass oriented because you're gonna say oh there's something back there I try to find substitutes for it but I suffer because nothing fills the void I don't have the thing dos ding thing with a capital T whatever the the the thing is for you whatever um so there's this overarching sense of lack and D&G are like that's not what's primary right desire is ultimately future oriented it wants the new it's not hung up on the past it wants fresh connections it wants to become it wants to experiment and we force it into this this desire is lack thing through prohibition through law through edipo isation and they think we forc desire into this um modified form this neurotic form through all of the prohibitions and ediz that we impose on it right but but they ultimately think that even though we put these restraints on it it's still operating beneath the surface it's just stifled right it's it's repressed um but it still is operative in our creativity uh so on and so forth so Desiring production is this overarching process but it's made out of hardware and the hardware are the Desiring machines which are as they would call it these binary couplings of flows and partial objects okay so the point is there's like a a break machine and a flow machine and they they talk about it all but the point of the matter is for them like you get enjoyment from uh you know if if your mouth connects to a a Coke can but it's the flow of coke like right that you get the enjoyment from or a bottle of water and it's this whole thing of how we you know the the garden hose on a thirst when you're out in the summer heat your mouth connects to the hose you're siphoning off a portion of the flow right this is what a connecting Desiring machine is for them right it's one part siphoning off a flow of another part for whatever purpose um and It ultimately results in enjoyment and so you you also see that for Lon gek Todd McGowen uh enjoyment is always in us not getting what we want but notice the difference here for them it is in the attainment of the flow they they think enjoyment is getting what you want so it's just these profound conceptual differences between the camps but ultimately that's they think of machines as these couplings of the these machines connecting to each other and one of them siphoning off the flow and flow is another technical term the flows are any kind of flows um in fact there's a quote here where is it did I not save it oh damn it I did I found a good quote on this and then I didn't say wait no I didn't [ __ ] it all right anyway but look they'll talk about flows every type of flow you can think flows of semen flows of minstral blood flows of [ __ ] flows of Commodities it's it when you think about flow like distribution networks are just flows of products and you know and so they're viewing all of these flows as flows of energy flows of enjoyment and different things are going to siphon off portions of them this is machinic couplings for them binary machines for them so okay the question is we got Desiring machines parts of bodies connecting to other parts of bodies here's the big what the [ __ ] is the body without organs right okay here's here's like spoiler alert this isn't nearly as complicated as every deluso guaran makes it the body without organs is it works like this look when when it's body without organs what they're really getting at is bodies without organization so if you get in certain patterned habitual habits with your Desiring machines you eat the same type of food Foods you go the same type of places you experience the same type of [ __ ] there's a certain sedimentation in how you connect to the world right you repeat certain there's certain flows that you always tap into um you know whatever certain types of movies your eyes connect to them right point is they're you're territorialized with your Desiring machines there's a certain now in lanan we call this the Circuit of the drives right which is to say there's just a habitual patterned circuit or territory that your body exists within and various parts of your body get hooked on certain things and you stay within that basic Arrangement right but something in you is always pulling you away from your territorialization from your specific Arrangement or or uh situatedness right materially speaking the thing that's pulling you away to the new to to deterritorialize to to make new connections is the body without organs which is to say it's this part of you that is this impulse this this push right um to to become new to to try new things to break off from old codes and old territories and experience something new and so because of this because it's trying to basically destroy your identity you can see how this is kind of death drive right it's it's undermining your stable sense of self right here for something else and so at the same time though they don't really attribute will or intention to the body without organs it's more of just this the these two tendencies in reality as such look in the universe things break down but things also get assembled and as simplistic as that sounds it kind of we see that the universe is geared towards stasis but it's also geared towards change and they think that this process again what Heidi grp would call fusus this production of entities right involves both production and anti-product creativity and destruction right and the side that's geared towards destruction liberation of of your current stasis all of that so in a simple terms the body without organs or the body without organization is that virtual Reservoir within us where our body could do all kinds of things and so in a weird sense in a a way when Dave and I but Dave in particular is championing time energy right and all of the things that we could learn to do all the skills we could develop what time energy enables us to do is tap into the body without organs to tap into all of the virtual potential in our bodies you could maybe be this great violinist if only you had time energy but time energy is limited so you can't tap into this potential to become a VI violinist right but that could be a a virtual singular a virtual potential in you that if you had time energy you could pull out from so to speak the body without organs and it would Pro provide a new Organization for you in your life right and so these all these virt ual potentials of our bodies I mean Spinosa famously said we still don't know what a body can do why because the body is not just its physical structure it's all of these ways that these physical structures and parts can be reconfigured reterritorialize and perform all kinds of new uh potentials actualize new potentials now for land he thinks that what capital does and technological development does is tap into the body without organs the virtual Reservoir in US and all kinds of things can become actualizable through technological innovations so increases in our eyesight increases in our intelligence increases in our bone density increases in our strength right the idea is that a super intelligence let's not think of it as love crafty in here just for the sake of right the point is it could hack our DNA it could understand our bone structure our our our our organic structure in such a way that can enable it to stretch and modify and we could become God knows what right um based on the fact that we do not have a clue what type of potentialities are lurking within us as the body without organs as the virtual reservoir of our materialist potentials right and that's essentially what the body without organs is it's this virtual reservoir of potential in us that under certain circumstance and so so in a thousand plateaus they're going to really uh come to think in terms of the body without organs more and so like they'll talk about like seom masochistic practices where a person is tied up and right and say they're whipped right what that does is it enables you to experience intensities that you normally wouldn't and those intensities can make you undergo changes in your life and that's why schizoanalysis this is their term that they oppose to psych analysis skizo analysis is all about getting humans to experience new things to experiment right and experimentation is essentially ways of tapping into the body without organs your virtual potential which could push you to free yourself from your various territorialization your current habits patterns sense of self Etc and become something new right and so for them they align Desiring production with schiz Fria because schizophrenia for them is not what we typically refer to it is this free play of Desire that wants to constantly deterritorialize constantly decode play with all of this stuff experiment with the new and not be caught up on certain identities certain patterns Etc and they think they catch glimpses of it in actual schizophrenics um but they're not advocating like oh let's all be literal schizophrenics that's not it they're advocating the liberation of Desiring production which is experimental creative Desiring of the new right tapping into potentials so this is the thing though yeah so with body without organs we got to think in terms of potentiality our our our virtual Reservoir potentials within us and um the point is though they also talk about you can make yourself a body without organs which is to say it's not like every like I walk around around with all of these Potentials in me just intrinsically like part of it is just like the there's something situational based on like we go back to the window example with the crack pattern it is Rel like if the temperatures outside is different then the rock even if the rock hits it with the same Force you're going to get a different crack pattern because whether the window was 30 Dees or 110 degrees like all of these variabl and that's what I'm getting at variables matter to the construction of a body without organs and so um it is based on so even if you're typically in one environment part of becoming a body without organs are tapping into your potential is putting yourself in a different environment right so for example if you're not a swimmer and you've never never been a swimmer getting into a body of water is essential to you you creating tapping into your body without organs to become a swimmer right so all of this is at work when we're thinking about machinic desire when we're thinking about Desiring production when we're thinking about the body without organs right and um so okay like a line of flight right what's a line of well before we before we get into the line of flight uh since an's still here while she's working I just wanted to say they get the Pha The the actual the term body without organs from somebody that you've read and that you like like ANS into arto and they get the concept of the body without organs from arto who's like a a theater theorist basically um he does the the the uh I think it's a theater of horror or something like that basically really experimental [ __ ] and the body without organs as a term is something to uses but the way it gets employed by DG it's like it is their own thing yeah yeah and it is I think I think a lot of times this term is I don't know which one's more Opus skated in online Theory circles I don't know if it's obj Patito or if it's body without organs but neither one of them once you get what's going on is as difficult to understand it's just there's a lot of good like I said there's Todd mcgaan out there um you know and I guess me because I'm you know Todd's influenced me you can learn you can figure out what the obj is at this point but body without organs always remains so obfuscated but you just have to think of it as this uh this reservoir of virtual potential within yourself now a line of flight is going to be a specific strategy or a certain Vector of ascape which is to say there's again like you could think like okay I'm stuck in a shitty situation if I learn this new skill I could get out of this shitty situation and so this is why I mean it sounds funny but that's why a lot of kids used to go to college like I don't want to live with my parents forever I want to escape the situation and if I go get a education or or develop a skill this is a way for me to deterritorialize out of my parents territory and so that's I mean and that's part of it so um I mean something as simple as like Michael Jordan learning to play basketball was his line of flight out of the his earlier circumstances right um it's anything that's and I I know vector or it's funny to talk like this but it is in a lot of ways spatial like my life changed simply because I went to a bookstore which is a certain direction um and got philosophy books right and so on the one hand it is like spatial but in another sense there are I think we could extend it to like if you if you get a new interest in something I think even that like at the mental level uh the the intellect right that can serve as a line of flight in a way too right I'm sorry if somebody grew up uh in a secular house and they get exposed to Christianity and their interest latches on to Christian ideals or Christian way of life that interest is going to deterritorialize them in all kinds of ways and so basically a line of flight is a vector of becoming it's a vector of escape from your territory right into something new into into something fresh and that's what a line of flight is so then but here's the thing they also use this term stratification so with DG there okay I don't know if you guys have heard this but Christian fundamentalists love to use this example when it comes to thinking about the the Trinity so they'll say well just like how H2O can be water ice and gas right so the the the Trinity is father son Holy Spirit I say that though because Delo and guari their their Vision their their metaphysics kind of views reality in this same type of gaseous to liquid to solid right like there's hardenings of of connections of becomings and basically it is it it's like the body without organs they always talk about it as a smooth surface right it's almost like and again I don't know how much I like it being referred to as a surface I okay but I think what it's helpful to view it as slippery like because if you tap into it it can it's like being on ice right you can slide very easily into something new um whereas if you're on a gravel road or there's there's strong friction it keeps you in place and so DG they understand that solidification stratification these are all parts of reality they're not going anywhere but they're trying to give us ideas of how to not let stratification solidifications habits patterns identities lock us into place forever and stifle us and there's this whole smooth liquid type of thing we can do to free ourselves from those to become something new and to exist in different strata right it's not that you pure tabbing into the pure body without organs for them would be death right it would be a pure absolute Liberation from actuality which would be death right so they're not advising that but the point for land land's gonna connect capital and this is the big connection for next week he's going to connect Capital to being that which facilitates and Taps into the body without organs it's what it has this direct connection to being able to pull out new things new potentials and I think I mean this is why he would say he has history on his side with how how Innovative technologically the capitalist mode of production has been as opposed to tribal Society feudal society ancient societ blah blah blah so but that's where that's going um and so look a lot in in anti atopus they're also going to talk about the state apparatus and they're going to talk about the nomadology and all this stuff and these are just more ways of thinking about this kind of stuff where the State uh the apparatus of capture it's the state right basically the state has all kinds of ways of imposing structures on you limits on you rules on you that want you to behave in forces you to behave in certain ways act in certain ways identifying certain ways Etc and yet they think there's other ways to move in the world so to speak and like nomadology Nomads in a sense they don't belong anywhere they're not captured by any overarching symbolic order they're always on the move which is to say they're always taking up temporary territorialization here or there they move around they become new and so D&G like this image of The Nomad because they think that it it more primarily aligns to the skitso in their sense of that which wants whose enjoyment and desire is in the breaking down of codes breaking down of territories and and the exploration of the new right right and so all these terms and then I mean like abstract machine right so an abstract machine there they're not going to want to talk about structures so much because you got to remember their whole historical position in relation to Levy Strauss and structuralism and so they have issues with structures because I think they're GNA say they're I mean they're thinking like out through a I think there's this negative connotation that comes along with structures whereas they do understand there's virtual machine and I mean look in language there's syntactical rules grammatical rule there's all these invisible virtual rules that make new statements possible they make communication possible right and so just like basketball that you can do a great incredible play in basketball but only because there's these virtual rules that are determining what is possible or what's virtual within the game of basketball so the cool creative things that Michael Jordan did or LeBron James did right it's within this the structure of this abstract machine the virtual and I'm just going to call it the virtual structure of the game the rules Etc that these moments of creativity in basketball are possible right and so what you find is abstract machines enable certain concrete material things to happen and it's only within the structures of these abtract machines that it can occur just like the amazing words that Shakespeare wrote or William Blake wrote or Edgar Allen Poe wrote were possible within the abstract machine of the English language as a virtual system right um so they're they're trying to view the abstract machine as yes it imposes limits but in such a way as to make certain creative acts possible Right certain becomings possible and um in that sense the abstract machine is the transcendental condition of of the creativity of a given assemblage right again the rules of basketball are what enable a basketball team as an assemblage to pull off an amazing creative play and um so for them Desiring production is schizophrenic and revolutionary whereas desire as lack neurotic desire is paranoid and fascist and uh Mark Monta and John proi in their book Delo and Geo philosophy really sum this up and this will I'm I'm basically done this will pivot us into where we go next week with capitalism and everything but uh this is a great quote so and first off when they say paranoid there there's a little bit of confusion like are we talking about paranoia SCH schizophrenics now they're talking about paranoid in the sense of when you think about people who are paranoid they're super paranoid about something bad going to happen to them they're going to lose something right it's desire is lack that is is oper like I'm afraid of losing something or I've lost something and all of that and they think fascism piggybacks on this kind of paranoid logic and so again they write again Monta and protiv the paranoid fascist pole of Desire forms whole subjects who cling to their identities in a social production Network that must not change and that reinforces the rigid tribal or imperial coding and channeling of flows faced with the release of uncoded flows of capitalism paranoid desire turns fascist that is desires a state overcoding of the flows and an escape from the world economy into an autonomous aats economy schizophrenic revolutionary desire in contrast rides the energies released by capitalism and takes them far beyond the pathetic reterritorialization on family and private property maintained by psychoanalysis and the capitalist State and so that's the point for land is that Capital capitalism especially Capital facilitates Desiring production machinic desire the energetic unconscious all of that whereas he's anti-fascist because he thinks fascism is always based around paranoia or the fear of the new or the fear of loss or the preservation of identity and he is totally against this I want to cling to my identity I want to cling to my roots [ __ ] all that [ __ ] Capital go and Destroy destroy destroy let's have as much machinic becoming and deterritorialization as possible I'll end it there guys this was so much to try to get through I I'm really going to try to keep the other lectur is a little shorter I don't want you guys to have to you know I mean it's here and like I said at the beginning I know Dave I know what you'll say no no most people will wish that you'd gone on for two more hours but you know like but yeah but no so okay guys that's the conceptual background and I guess the last thing I I'll just say is you see how d& G fit this whole thing of libidinal materialism too that ultimately they're on the side of these creative forces um that that our egos and our sense of identities is they we ride them like like a surfer rides a wave right we're not in control all we do a lot of times is try to fascistic hold them back and tame them and um this is where this is where you can see why land was perceived as like an ultra leftist right because he's tapped into like [ __ ] the fascists [ __ ] their identities [ __ ] these little local codes and all this [ __ ] uh break all that [ __ ] apart let's become let's let Desiring machines do whatever they want that is you can read that that's for you know that that supports trans that supports gay it's all kinds of liberations are in there where it's like no let people have their Desiring machines let them connect however they connect and let's not yeah there's a relative place for identity we're not of course but don't get so hung up on your identities and your particular territorialized Desiring Machines That You Hinder becoming That You Hinder the free play of desire and if you do want to stop that you're a [ __ ] fascist [ __ ] you so when people on you know social media lands a fascist this is why I sit there and goou gonna have a lot of problems with Land he's not a [ __ ] fascist racist probably but not and that's the social Darwin and we'll we'll we'll reckon with that in week three because you're right but that's why he but he goes out of his way in that short piece that I it's one of the supplemental readings for week three he says is neoreactionary fascist absolutely [ __ ] not and here's [ __ ] why and then he says is it racist he goes yeah probably and it's because he does EXA accept social Darwinism and so this is the great his great philosophical sin in most people's eyes and like I'm not I certainly don't support social Darwin social Darwinism and he's like uh one of these IQ guys like oh racial I IQ somehow measures it and it's I want to be like dude how can you with all the DG that you know actually like this is I think he goes against d& here this is maybe his philosophical inconsistency at its at its worst but I don't we'll have to explore it um but basically look I said I wanted to give you guys all as much of the background philosophical context as I could this week this is his lineage this is his tradition um he's gonna stay in this metaphysic for the whole rest of his career this isn't going to change like I said next week we'll we'll talk about how he goes from viewing capitalism as the on the side of the apparatus of capture to being the very uh agent of the outside right that's the big change but um yeah I mean you know this is why it's so essential to get the the concrete philosophical uh context and background and all of that stuff that a philosopher is operating in because this is what theory Graham is not going to give you via memes what's up Sean what's up do do we have a minute to ask questions or yeah sure I'm game for that no I have a couple um what do you think delus and gu would think of Nick land ah okay well good to guess so no it's it's a I I'm pretty I'm pretty sure I would know what they would say and I think Mark fiser th so next week we'll I I'll have the quotes and we'll look them over but fiser says look L's mistake is that he wants to link schizophrenia or the the whole process of Desiring production to Capital itself and DG are absolutely clear this is not even up for interpretation this I mean anybody who reads the book will get this capitalism what it deterritorialize with one hand it reterritorialized with another so it deterritorialize us it strips us out of our feudal networks of identities and that whole class arrangement of surfs and Lords and all that it rips that [ __ ] to shreds right but then it R territorial izes us as wage laborers and capitalists and consumers and all that so it locks us back into identities it's just these identities are far more flexible and amenable to the logic of capital accumulation than the old ones were and um so yeah when we get in next week I want to talk about chapter three of anti atopus and I can't I mean it's I I I kind of love that chapter um but and there's so to say about it but basically it's trying to think through these different um social machines what they call Savage what I I'm just going to call it tribal um tribal and then there's the despotic or the imperialistic or the feudal or um it's basically the the despot right um type of social order monarchy could be part of that and then you have the capitalist order and so that chapter three of anti atopus if you guys want to read it it it'll be helpful it's but it's Hardo but um so basically look answer question it's that Nick basically just fully identifies Capital with deterritorialization and D andg would go pump the brakes like that's why we talk about the new Earth that's why we talk about this other social formation that's post capitalist Nick doesn't there's no new Earth there's no post capitalism for him um he doesn't think ret alization as as much of a factor and that's the main thing that Mark fiser critiqued him on was ignoring how capital is based on reterritorialization unless someone else wants to go that kind of maybe bleeds into another question anyone else want to go first though go ahead um so the other the other one was like is so he's he's anti-humanist is there any sense at all of like ecology in nickland or is he just like he doesn't care he would just watch the world burn and like it literally is just a for it'll be fine like he does we only like what we think of as the Earth like oh we're gonna destroy the environment with climate change the earth will be just fine from this other perspective right like George Carlin there's a whole skit where he's like it'll just shake us off like a [ __ ] cold like we're nothing to this planet and uh it'll be just fine and so again because we can't think of I mean try to think how long the Earth has been here like we're we're a blip we're nothing on in the big scheme of things to the history of the earth L wouldn't he he has no concern for the Earth because he knows the Earth is basically a Fang Numa it's it's just it's its durability the the the geot trumatic if you get a chance look at that the The Barker speaks part of the ccru writings where he lays out geot traumatic because he's talking about the history of the earth through there as a whole series of traumas and he views the the production of the earth like how psychoanalysis views the production of a psyche but he he views it at this Cosmic level almost of um there's all of these traumatic events that have destabilized the Earth throughout its long production right and like the strata of the Earth the layers of the earth can be read as layers of trauma because they're the residue of traumatic planetary events and yet it's still here so us raising the climate you know two three four five six degrees for the Earth that's nothing for us on the other hand for us and all the other creatures yeah yeah and I guess that's the but he just VI like well yeah but think about all the dinosaur think of you know how many creatures this Earth has produced that aren't here anymore like this is just this is like his social darwinist thing almost even back here this is just reality pal like and I'm I'm talking like just like suck it up bud like things die the cre creation is creative destruction like he's gonna take this idea for Marx and Joseph Scher of creative destruction and it's basically a metaphysics where yeah it's awesome things are created and they're created because other things are destroyed I'm sorry you don't like that too [ __ ] bad now again I don't like it I think it [ __ ] sucks me Mikey I I I have an issue with it Nick he's gonna n affirm it with nii and joy which I just want to say this is me because I've been I think you guys will say I've been very I've steel manned him I've been very my whole thing is I think that nii and joy [ __ ] can be used to just not care about people I don't give a [ __ ] about what situation you're in doggy I affirm everything I you're the [ __ ] who's complaining about you're oh you're oppressed who gives a [ __ ] oh your parents were killed in the Holocaust who gives a [ __ ] affirm I personally and and I haven't told you this Dave in the big Mega post that will come out whenever it comes out this is one of my issues with n I think aor fatti is super egoic [ __ ] enjoy enjoy doggy don't [ __ ] complain don't [ __ ] complain don't [ __ ] have a problem enjoy [ __ ] that's to me the real underlying message of a Mor FY it doesn't give you a space to truly wallow in the pains that are your [ __ ] life it doesn't it doesn't even want you to get to [ __ ] complain it's like a no complain ethics and yeah that's a that's a burden to [ __ ] carry around so not only does my life suck I'm not I have to pretend to be happy and affirm it the whole [ __ ] [ __ ] you now my life is twice as bad because now I can't even [ __ ] about it yeah doesn't doesn't DET deterritorialization like taken to an extreme just end up being like the ultimate territorialization where like you must not have boundaries like you must enjoy you must you know you must liberate all your potentials you know yeah but for him for D&G like ultimate absolute deterritorialization is death yeah because you're basically to deterritorialize in an which is to say let's take the jargon out it to be freed up for absolute potential it sounds funny but the only like that actually leads to death because you're you're abandoning all actuality like a deterritorialization is like you're abandoning certain actualities in the pursuit of something else but if you take that trajectory and say no [ __ ] the actual [ __ ] territorialization period your line of flight is death itself and so that's not the losing gu's position they don't want no I think that's DG themselves yeah no but I mean like they don't they don't want they're not advocating no so in a thousand plateaus they're gonna safe they're gonna go you got to be very [ __ ] careful with deterritorialization it can get out of control you got people who think because they're drug addicts they're like the the the embodiment of deterritorialization that is not what we're they they want you to have a better life they want you to not have to be stifled in your shitty situation and you got yes they're coming from a more we want humans to be emancipated type Dynamic opposed to land like he next week I'll read the quote he says it very clearly he does not care about human emancipation he never has and he's never going to he doesn't give a [ __ ] about our emancipation he cares about the emancipation of capital that's all he cares about is capital itself and this is where you go okay yeah there's a parting of the ways Nick like I can't no I'm not going to affirm the autonomization and liberation of capital you know in the face of how my friends and I and everybody I know are suffering because of capital no I choose humans here and now over this virtual mechanism that Taps into the body without organs like yeah yeah yeah yeah I don't it's not even a question for me I know who sidam on and it yes it's a very parochial perspect oh me and my stupid human I care about my mom and I care about my best friends I'm such a [ __ ] PE brain I'm a [ __ ] dip that's gay Mikey so gay that's gay Mikey you can't do that come on want to have everyone killed at hand of the techn capital Singularity but look I you know what I can joke about it I've done my philosophical Duty which is to be impartial Steelman blah blah blah now I can [ __ ] joke no I don't want everybody like again I'm you all I think some of you know I'm a pessimist so there's weird ways where when I hear him talk about human extinction I'm like okay but like here's the thing I think being a human comes with all kinds of [ __ ] problems I think existence sucks I think it you know existence I'm with schopenhauer you're never going to be happy like I I do that whole thing I don't want us ripped apart by Nanobots that swarm us on because of what the techn capital Singularity Wills right like there other ways to go extinct and so that's that's the whole thing like I think this whole thing of technologically modifying ourselves into something else okay there's a human extinction that I actually would be okay with because no no I'm not against us look we didn't exist for millions of [ __ ] years at some point we're not going to exist again my thing is what I'm against is human suffering like that's my issue I don't want humans to needlessly [ __ ] suffer and there's a lot of that that goes on so if if I think like oh we we use technology we modify ourselves and 500 years from now nothing remotely like us remain I don't care that's oh whatever because there would be no suffering involved that would just be I don't I know this doesn't count in the darwi but it's evolution right okay things change and things go away I guess I can deal with that like okay but these images of this like the love crafty and deity and it you know when we get to the [ __ ] black Lake syndrome next week where the Nanobots break out and all like all these horrific depictions of what's gonna happen I'm I'm sitting there going okay if you're gonna affirm that like yeah I got an issue with you and then I'm back to Dave going don't give me this like nii and [ __ ] you just you're you have a sadistic Dimension to you that you know if you're but hey but hey here's the thing and Daniel TS right about this this is why the nian thing actually is reactionary like it actually is like this is not a deviation from n that's the point this is just good nism this is D&G are also good nians you know what I mean like but Tai is a good nian like these are all people that uh d t has a fundamental beef with I think it's you know I think there's something to both sides right to to to my simplistic copout is there something to both sides I just come down more heavily outside of the DG Camp even I love their Concepts hey hold on are you talking there Mikey no it's gonna be the feedback here oh was it oh I was hearing feedback okay well what was I even saying um I first of all just just want to say that there are other ways of going extinct is like my favorite thing I've ever heard you say probably I just when it it like I love that um now I got to close out in a second um and I guess I want to give everyone like a chance to say their final things you know what I mean um and so what I want to say is I'm looking forward to reading chapter three of anti atopus I encourage everybody else to do so also there are other readings I want to give Mike you in in your closing you know thing here do touch on the like hey if you are doing the readings these are the ones to do they're optional but these are the ones to do and then these are extra extra extra right and then people can like productively procrastinate by doing the extra extra extra or whatever um some people won't do any of the readings that's fine but a lot of people will be doing the readings like Brian and Elton are doing the readings I'm pretty sure Mandy's doing the readings um if if uh Nance and I do an exical of something and is likely to listen to it while working um so that's awesome uh but I want to encourage everybody else to do their own exal and or read throughs okay so you don't have to type in the Forum you can just make your own videos and then put those in the Forum and so I mean will will anyone actually watch it will anyone actually engage with it hey sometimes some people do the potential recognition and the potential engagement is there and it's then something that you can always reference later it might be a year before someone genuinely engages with it but the fact is is like it's there and so it's it's cool to drop those there um you could also just time-lapse yourself doing the reading and then like potentially say something about it because especially with the exical readings we try to keep those to the the rule we try to keep with is that we listen to it or read it ahead of time and then do the exegetical reading so it's like really your second reading at at minimum it's your second reading and then you're not really supposed to talk about it the whole time you're supposed to mostly read it but then like kind of unpack it here and there right test your knowledge by unpacking it and it's a fun challenge to do with another person it's also a great way to hang out it's like one of the best ways to hang out um Christopher's nodding his head n is nodding his head Mikey we've done a couple now that a lot of fun and so everyone else is encouraged to pair up um if you can start a thread like looking for um someone to do an exegetical reading with um and then see if other people want to do it um and so this is not just the people who are currently here but this is also the people who are listening to this in the near future if that thread's not already there then go ahead and get in there all right I just wanted to make sure to make the plug for doing exegetical readings it's something we'll all be doing throughout this next these next four weeks and uh it's one of my favorite things that we do at Theory underground for it is it is by far like the bread and butter of like what keeps me happy you know is being able to do those and um you can do them by yourself as well you don't have to have someone else you can just read and talk about it a little bit and then read and talk about it a little bit it's just a good way of testing yourself and Hyster azing yourself and being like do I really because otherwise you read it you're like oh I think I got that I think I got that okay this is a way to break out of that unless you're going through you're reading it and you're saying oh this is just this and this is just that and this is just this and this is just that you're simplifying it and comparing it to other things you're just reducing it um that's that is something that we all can [ __ ] up and do um it's just a bad habit because you're not really trying to take on the text on its own terms and see what's unique there you know see how it contrasts with other things it's a lot easier to say how things are similar than how they contrast especially with thinkers you know a lot of people are going to want to oh this this thinker is kind of like to lose this thinker is kind of like this this thinker is kind of like that and it's like okay when we're dealing with a thinker we want to know how they you know obviously how we do with land here what is their inheritance what is their context what are they working with but we also want to like see what's original there and so when we read these things out loud just remember like part of what you're holding yourself up to is like this ideal of like breaking that [ __ ] down um oh and by the way Mandy's in here so uh we're all doing our closing thoughts right now Mandy uh you'll get a chance to say something if you want to but right now like yeah yeah let's let's everyone say a thing and we'll close it out Mikey you can share the recommended readings Mikey got eaten by a lemur I think he's not making any noises I'm back had to pull it up all right so next week primary readings are meltdown a quick and dirty introduction to accelerationism and communicate to that's from the ccru reader um the secondary readings are machinic desire meat Laman time War Tim plexity disordered Loops through Shanghai time um the I that's on my old list I took it off because I don't know if you guys can get a PDF of it it was an ebook it's available for like a dollar on Amazon but I don't don't buy it if you don't want to um or you know it is an important thing that's where he talks about Looper and that's where he's working at his theory of time uh explicitly he always kind of presuppose it it's a good piece um and then also um that's that would be enough so and maybe if you want to read circuitries or cyber Gothic right those work too um but it's it's just those key essays primarily from the mature period the quick and dirty introduction to accelerationism which we did our stream on that's an incredibly helpful one for Big Picture stuff and so uh yeah those are the the primary readings for next week um yeah if you can't go like I said go listen to those go check out orphan drift check out code n check out uh Jake and Doos Chapman um they'll help help kind of contextualize this further um if you want I mean look I'm going to touch on this a little bit next week but you guys could go watch some basic in uh introductory videos on cybernetics positive feedback loops negative feedback loops I was going to talk about that tonight but it just didn't fit the lecture so if you guys actually could just go look at that yourselves I mean I don't want to spend a lot of time on that next week so I'm not going to go into detail but it's easy stuff and there's some good uh videos on YouTube on that so I think that'll do it share some of these things in the Forum or we should yeah we should share some of these things in the [Music] Forum should watch alien Covenant for like a landan or like nian techn technical technological overcoming of man sure yeah yeah that I should add that to the recommended movie list I think Dune is another good one Dune it's it's fatalistic um and I actually think Foundation is a great Counterpoint to Dune um found is that the Pew Jackman movie Foundation what am I thinking about no it's uh it's it's a great book series it's also a TV show that's that's on Apple um it's it's [ __ ] great man um I think Olaf stapledon last and firstman is another like anti- landan piece of fiction but it's old as [ __ ] it's like turn of the century I and I gota I should say if you guys do want to read fiction I mean the big influence on meltdown is Neuromancer like I mean he's literally using the terminology from that book so that one is that's another one too all right well there's no more questions I'm gonna go watch a horror movie bad [ __ ] badass Mandy we read your uh we read your uh one of your messages from the The Message Board and so we and and we we rad it we engaged with it a bit and so you'll get to see that and I'm going to go post it right now so it should be up within an hour you'll all get an email once it's up I just want to get it up in a timely manner because I know a lot of people want to get their hands on this or want to go back over stuff already so everyone have a really good rest of your night so excited Halloween try not to get eaten alive by the the Fang numina on uh Halloween so I hope you like that as much as me if you've watched it all the way through at this point then you might be interested in taking more class class at Theory underground if not this one right which is ongoing you can always take it um even after the fact you can always sign up for the intro to nickl course as well as any other course that's happened at Theory underground and so make sure to get on the website here this is what it looks like um you can go you can navigate to courses and you can sign up for the different courses or you'll be able to go to the shop and purchase tiers subscription tiers of involvement that access all past courses ongoing courses different levels to the different courses there's all kinds of stuff that you can get into there um but if you're like well I'm totally broke Dave I cannot do that check it right here I got a scholarship all right so just click the scholarship button you're not taking money from one other person some people are like I I don't want to do that like it's a pride thing um this is just uh my way of saying if money's an obstacle then there's a way around that if you want to pay what I think the value of these courses prop properly speaking is then you can do that or uh you can um if you're in a situation where you just can't afford that because my numbers are based off of averages and you don't fit into the average then just go ahead and fill out the little application you don't even have to share very much information but like if you really want access to some stuff let me know what you want access to and like I just don't want you to be blocked from that because ultimately I want this to be for people like me people who are working at Amazon or doing construction work um people who have like kind of like free time for their mind as long as they can listen to Audi books and sort of like intellectual materials there's a sort of like yeah you you're still doing labor but you're freeing your mind right and like I want to make that accessible and so it's like um a lot of people who work jobs can still afford the things that they love and that's why everything that everybody uh gives me is coming from like wage labor like I don't have big investors or anything like that I just have a small handful of people lit literally just like you um but yeah no if if you're in a spot where you're like no it's too much because I live in a different country where the currency is like [ __ ] U because of your goddamn American dollar or if your situation is like oh I'm unemployed right now or like hand to mouth like whatever paycheck to paycheck look [ __ ] I just want you to have the access so fill out the scholarship make sure to do it do it all right and with that um I think that I'll just let you all go so um make sure to check out the scholarship if you need it if you don't if you don't need a scholarship if you actually just want to support then there's also a way you can do that by going up to shop support this effort all right and then there's different ways that you can do that there so appreciate Everybody Take Care peace