Accelerationism, Prometheanism & Mythotechnesis
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
COVID-19: How Hateful Extremists Are Exploiting the Pandemic
COVID-19 How hateful extremists are exploiting the pandemic July 2020 Contents 3 Introduction 5 Summary 6 Findings and recommendations 7 Beliefs and attitudes 12 Behaviours and activities 14 Harms 16 Conclusion and recommendations Commission for Countering Extremism Introduction that COVID-19 is punishment on China for their treatment of Uighurs Muslims.3 Other conspiracy theories suggest the virus is part of a Jewish plot4 or that 5G is to blame.5 The latter has led to attacks on 5G masts and telecoms engineers.6 We are seeing many of these same narratives reoccur across a wide range of different ideologies. Fake news about minority communities has circulated on social media in an attempt to whip up hatred. These include false claims that mosques have remained open during 7 Since the outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID-19) lockdown. Evidence has also shown that pandemic, the Commission for Countering ‘Far Right politicians and news agencies [...] Extremism has heard increasing reports of capitalis[ed] on the virus to push forward their 8 extremists exploiting the crisis to sow division anti-immigrant and populist message’. Content and undermine the social fabric of our country. such as this normalises Far Right attitudes and helps to reinforce intolerant and hateful views We have heard reports of British Far Right towards ethnic, racial or religious communities. activists and Neo-Nazi groups promoting anti-minority narratives by encouraging users Practitioners have told us how some Islamist to deliberately infect groups, including Jewish activists may be exploiting legitimate concerns communities1 and of Islamists propagating regarding securitisation to deliberately drive a anti-democratic and anti-Western narratives, wedge between communities and the British 9 claiming that COVID-19 is divine punishment state. -
Avanessian – Xenoarchitecture (Draft) 1 Introduction Armen Avanessian
avanessian – xenoarchitecture (draft) Introduction Armen Avanessian “Man’s desire is the desire of the Other,” Lacan, Seminar XI, p. 235 Following Lacan’s infamous dictum, according to which desire is defined as the desire of the Other, we could ask ourselves what a correlate methodology would look like for the humanities (or should we say “the inhumanities”?). Obviously, the structure of the phrase is ambiguous, or even tautological if taken as a predicative proposition. Instead, I propose to read it as a speculative proposition: we do not simply desire what the other has or hasn’t got, but we desire the state of being an Other, an othering, becoming a stranger to oneself and others—literally alienating them as well as “ourselves.” A desire for the xeno? This transformation has at least three central aspects: alienation (the negative mirroring of a given reality), negation (the construction of an asymmetry that initiates an annihilation of the positively given), and a recursion of alienation and negation through speculation.1 It is a poietic qua productive and creative transformation in the sense that it increases the scope of navigation and liberation by means of manipulation. Together with others, I have thought, experimented, and written a lot about questions of othering and “matching” experimental settings2 for the production of knowledge, tactical spaces in the sense of Michel de Certeau, xeno-spaces that are defined by “a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus. No delimitation of an exteriority, then, provides it with the condition necessary for autonomy. The space of a tactic is the space of the Other. -
Identity & In-Group Critique in James Mason's Siege
A Paler Shade of White: Identity & In-group Critique in James Mason’s Siege J.M. Berger RESOLVE NETWORK | April 2021 Racially and Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism Series https://doi.org/10.37805/remve2021.1 The views expressed in this publication are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the RESOLVE Network, the U.S. Institute of Peace, or any entity of the U.S. government. CONTENTS EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ......................................................................................... 1 INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................... 2 HISTORY AND CONTEXT ...................................................................................... 4 METHODOLOGY: LINKAGEBASED ANALYSIS ............................................... 6 OVERVIEW OF CONTENT ..................................................................................... 7 INGROUP CRISIS: A PALER SHADE OF WHITE .............................................13 INGROUPS IN CRISIS ........................................................................................20 THE OUTGROUP IN THE INGROUP ...............................................................23 CONCLUSION: INSIGHTS & RECOMMENDATIONS .....................................25 BIBLIOGRAPHY .....................................................................................................28 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Discussions of extremist ideologies naturally focus on how in-groups criticize and attack out-groups. But -
Drafting the Inhuman: Conjectures on Capitalism and Organic Necrocracy
13 Drafting the Inhuman: Conjectures on Capitalism and Organic Necrocracy Reza Negarestani ‘And beyond all this we have yet to disturb the peace of this world in still another way..’. 1 Quod exitus sectabor iter? With the burgeoning popularity of speculative thought, it is becoming more evident that what is labelled as ‘speculative’ is more an epiphenomenon of the inquisitive re- negotiation of human faculties, their limits and vulnerabilities rather, than a counter- intuitive foray into the abyssal vistas unlocked by contemporary science. Accordingly, in the more extreme forms of speculative thought, political intervention and political analysis have been curtailed or at least have been temporarily suspended. This is be- cause the horizon of agency (of emancipation or intervention), ontological privileges and conditions of experience are precisely those ingredients of political thought which are under the process of critical interrogation. Yet strangely, it seems that speculative thought has not given up remarking on capitalism—this hypothetical mathesis uni- versalis of politico-economic problems—even in some of its most apolitical moments.2 For the purpose of understanding some of the disjunctive impasses between specula- tive thought and politics as well as possibilities for mobilizing a politics capable of us- ing the resources of speculative thought, this essay will concentrate its energy on the most recurring politico-economic figure of speculative thought: Capitalism. To do so, we shall, in proceeding steps, dissect the uncanny affinities between contemporary capitalism’s insinuations of an inhuman politics and speculative thought’s assault on the human’s ‘empirically overdetermined set of cognitive faculties impose[d] upon the speculative imagination’.3 We shall subsequently investigate the lines of correspond- 1. -
New Books Catalogue 2017-18
PHILOSOPHY, PAGE 2 THEOLOGY, BIBLICAL STUDIES& PAGE 29 RELIGIOUS STUDIES PAGE 41 NEW BOOKS CATALOGUE 2017-18 PAGE 50 9 781350 057005 PhilTheoBib_FINAL.indd 1-2 03/08/2017 11:19 TM Instant digital access to more than 6,000 eBooks across the social sciences and humanities, including titles from The Arden Shakespeare, Continuum, Bristol Classical Press, and Berg. Subjects covered include: Anthropology • Biblical Studies • Classical Studies & Archaeology • Education • Film & Media • History • Law • Linguistics • Literary Studies • Philosophy • Religious Studies • Theology CONTENT HIGHLIGHTS FEATURES • 125 Collections, expanded annually by subject discipline • Advanced and full text search across all content. • Archive Collections in key subject areas such as ancient • Filter results by subject, series, or collection history, Christology, continental philosophy, and more • Pagination matches print exactly • Special Collections such as International Critical • Personalization features: save searches, export citations Commentary, Ancient Commentators on Aristotle, and and favorite, download, or print documents Education Around the World series • Footnotes, endnotes, and bibliographic references are hyperlinked To register your interest for a free institutional trial, or for further information email: Americas: [email protected] UK, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia: [email protected] Australia and New Zealand: [email protected] www.bloomsburycollections.com Collections_advert_2.indd 1 19/07/2017 08:52 Contents -
The Regulation of the Subject by the Technology of Time Maxwell Kennel [1]
Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge: Issue 34 (2018) The Regulation of the Subject by the Technology of Time Maxwell Kennel [1] Abstract: Beginning from the entangled categories of the human and the technological, this exploration surveys thinkers who concern themselves with problems of technology and time, seeking to examine how the confluence of technology and time regulate and condition the formation of subjectivity. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler's work in Technics and Time, Augustine's Confessions, and the myth of Prometheus, the following draws out the technological character of time and makes suggestions about how to reconceptualize these different temporalizing technologies after the critique of capitalism. Surely technology, in its ever-changing form and forms, is a pharmakon that has been with us from the start. Regardless of whether we speak of technology or technologies or the broader field of techne (a practice or craft), it remains that the term ‘technology’ refers to something that, like a double-edged sword, helps us and harms us, something that we use and that uses us, and something that is at once politically charged (often subtly oriented toward particular interests and ends with particular benefactors), yet ambivalent, taking different sides at different times (and therefore available for us to use as means for our own ends).[2] Although it is at our disposal and supposedly outside of ourselves, some have argued that technology is not in fact something extra that is added onto our human nature and experience, but instead something inextricably related to both humanity and history, and indeed something that challenges the legitimacy of these categories. -
Volume 33, Numbers 1-2, Fall 2019-Spring 2020 • Realism Published Twice Yearly, Mediations Is the Journal of the Marxist Literary Group
Volume 33, Numbers 1-2, Fall 2019-Spring 2020 • Realism Published twice yearly, Mediations is the journal of the Marxist Literary Group. We publish dossiers of translated material on special topics and peer-reviewed general issues, usually in alternation. General inquiries and submissions should be directed to [email protected]. We invite scholarly contributions across disciplines on any topic that engages seriously with the Marxist tradition. Manuscripts received will be taken to be original, unpublished work not under consideration elsewhere. Articles should be submitted electronically in a widely-used format. Manuscripts should not exceed reasonable article length, and should be accompanied by an abstract of up to 300 words, including six keywords. Articles will be published in MLA endnote format, and should be submitted with the author’s name and affiliation on a separate cover page to facilitate blind peer review. Photographs, tables, and figures should be sent as separate files in a widely- used format. Written permission to reproduce copyright-protected material must be obtained by the author before submission. Books for review should be sent to: Mediations Department of English (MC 162) 601 South Morgan Street University of Illinois at Chicago Chicago IL 60607-7120 USA Articles published in Mediations may be reproduced for scholarly purposes without express permission, provided the reproduction is accompanied by full citation information. For archives and further information, visit http://www.mediationsjournal.org Cover -
Testimony of Lecia Brooks Chief of Staff, Southern Poverty Law Center
Testimony of Lecia Brooks Chief of Staff, Southern Poverty Law Center before the Subcommittee on National Security, International Development and Monetary Policy Committee on Financial Services United States House of Representatives Dollars against Democracy: Domestic Terrorist Financing in the Aftermath of Insurrection February 25, 2021 My name is Lecia Brooks. I am chief of staff of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Now in our 50th year, the SPLC is a catalyst for racial justice in the South and beyond, working in partnership with communities to dismantle white supremacy, strengthen intersectional movements, and advance the human rights of all people. SPLC lawyers have worked to shut down some of the nation’s most violent white supremacist groups by winning crushing, multimillion-dollar jury verdicts on behalf of their victims. We have helped dismantle vestiges of Jim Crow, reformed juvenile justice practices, shattered barriers to equality for women, children, the LGBTQ+ community, and the disabled, and worked to protect low-wage immigrant workers from exploitation. The SPLC began tracking white supremacist activity in the 1980s, during a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and other organized extremist hate groups. Today, the SPLC is the premier U.S. nonprofit organization monitoring the activities of domestic hate groups and other extremists. In the early 1990s, the SPLC launched its pioneering Teaching Tolerance program to provide educators with free, anti-bias classroom resources, such as classroom documentaries and lesson plans. Now renamed Learning For Justice, our program reaches millions of schoolchildren with award-winning curricula and other materials that promote understanding of our nation’s history and respect for others, helping educators create inclusive, equitable school environments. -
Karl Marx and Poetic Form in the Communist Manifesto
FILOZOFIA ___________________________________________________________________________Roč. 71, 2016, č. 4 EPIC OR TRAGEDY? KARL MARX AND POETIC FORM IN THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO JASON BARKER, Department of British and American Language and Culture, Kyung Hee University, South Korea BARKER, J.: Epic or Tragedy? Karl Marx and Poetic Form in The Communist Mani- festo FILOZOFIA 71, 2016, No. 4, pp. 316-327 Although The Communist Manifesto of 1848 was clearly not intended as a work of poetry, this article considers the merits of reading it according to the aesthetic criteria of epic poetry and of tragedy respectively. Following a brief treatment of the role of poetry in Karl Marx’s evolution as a philosopher and critic, the article then specu- lates that the identification of certain poetic themes in the text can aid our under- standing of the Manifesto’s political meaning, particularly in light of the “dialectical Prometheanism” that played such a defining role in Marx’s intellectual and political universe. Keywords: Dialectics − Epic − Odyssey − Prometheus − Prometheanism − Marx Introduction: Prometheus Bound and Unbound. Karl Marx’s favorite poet was Aeschylus and many personal episodes suggest the former’s incarnation as a modern Prometheus. In March 1843 the Rheinische Zeitung – which at the time was one of the largest subscription newspapers in Germany – was suppressed by the Prussian authorities and Marx resigned as its editor. A political cartoon of the period, now famous, was pub- lished depicting Marx bound to a printing press with a Prussian eagle biting out his liver. The final issue of the Rheinische Zeitung carried the following short poem: Our mast blew down, but we were not affrighted, The angry gods could never make us bend. -
Reza Negarestani – Glass Bead – 2017 1 Three Nightmares of The
Reza Negarestani – Glass Bead – 2017 1 Three Nightmares of the Inductive Mind Of all the disquieting riddles and paradoxes found in the arsenal of epistemological scepticism— understood as a systematic and piecemeal scrutiny into the methods and paradigms of the formation and justification of knowledge-claims—one problem has particularly proved, time and again, to be a never- ending source of cognitive vexation. With few notable exceptions, philosophers and philosophically- minded scientists and statisticians (e.g., Hume, Goodman, Putnam, Stegmüller, Boltzmann and De Finetti among others) have invariably either downplayed and deflected the seriousness of this problem and its variations, or have simply given up worrying about it in the hope that it may miraculously disappear. The said problem is nothing but David Hume’s strong version of the problem of induction which, unbeknownst to Hume himself, was destined to become the superacid of methodological scepticism capable, in the blink of an eye, of eating away the foundation of any epistemic project built on naïve forms of empiricism and rationalism. It is often the case that philosophers who pose sceptical problems recoil in fear once they realize the far- reaching implications of such problems, and Hume, with his problem of induction, is no exception. They rush into defusing their inadvertent exercise in scepticism. But systematic scepticism is something akin to an explosive chemical chain reaction. Once it is set off, with every passing minute it becomes more difficult to extinguish the flames. Pour on more water, and the fire spreads to areas you never imagined flammable. A genuine philosopher—regardless of her alliances—seeks to examine how far the fire spreads. -
Review Article Spirit in the Crypt Negarestani Vs Land
Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 15, no. 1, 2019 REVIEW ARTICLE SPIRIT IN THE CRYPT NEGARESTANI VS LAND Vincent Le ABSTRACT: Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani’s first 2008 book Cyclonopedia was written under the influence of Nick Land’s nihilistic and antihumanist philosophy which seeks to critique anthropomorphism by confronting us with our coming extinction beyond which our concepts of reason cannot reach. Since Cyclonopedia’s publication, however, Negarestani has left behind Landian nihilism to develop in his 2018 book Intelligence and Spirit a neorationalist philosophy of mind whose primary influences are Sellars, Brandom, and Hegel. At 579 clearly written yet dense pages, it is difficult even for a review article to encapsulate the book in its entirety. The first half of this article instead aims to provide a sense of the book’s overall project by focusing on how Negarestani outlines and develops his neorationalist philosophy through a critique of Land’s antihumanism. Never one to remain silent whilst others seek to resurrect Hegel from the dead, since December 2018, Land has been releasing a draft on his blog Urban Futures 2.1 of his new monograph Crypto- Current: Bitcoin and Philosophy, which proffers the most up to date articulation of his main antihumanist tenets. Having organized Intelligence and Spirit around Negarestani’s objections to Land, this article’s second half turns to Crypto-Current to see how Land is able to provide convincing responses to each of Negarestani’s objections, showing some to be based on strawman characterizations, others to stem from misunderstandings of Land’s position, and still others to lack traction at all. -
The Education of Kanzi and the Notion of Progress: Reza Negarestani's Intelligence and Spirit
Pli 30 (2019), 164-190 The Education of Kanzi and the Notion of Progress: Reza Negarestani’s Intelligence and Spirit BENJAMIN NORRIS I. Published a decade after his philo-fictional extravaganza Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials,1 Reza Negarestani’s Intelligence and Spirit draws upon a wide range resources, philosophical and otherwise, in an attempt to ‘think a thought as grand as the universe itself’ as Ken Lui once framed the task placed upon any finite, intelligent species ‘worthy of the name’.2 More precisely, Negarestani describes ‘intelligence’ in such a way that its capability of thinking a thought this grand (one that transcends space, time and death itself) is rendered explicit. In order to accomplish 1 Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Mel- bourne: re-press, 2008). 2 ‘The universe is full of echoes and shadows, the after images and last words of dead civilizations that have lost the struggle against entropy. Fading ripples in the cosmic background radiation, it is doubtful if most, or any, of these messages will ever be de- ciphered. Likewise, most of our thoughts and memories are destined to fade, to disap- pear, to be consumed by the very act of choosing and living. That is not cause for sor- row, sweetheart. It is the fate of every species to disappear into the void that is the heat death of the universe. But long before then, the thoughts of any intelligent spe- cies worthy of the name will become as grand as the universe itself’. Ken Liu, ‘An Advanced Readers’ Picture Book of Comparative Cognition’ in The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (New York: Saga Press, 2016), pp.