Skip to main content

The trouble with ´territorialization´

Reza Negarestani, in particular in bits of the last chapters of his Intelligence and Spirit (chapters 7 and 8), brings together the opposition between natural and artificial (farm and forest, p. 402; causes and unbound sovereignty of thinking, p. 422-3; causal heteronomy and pure autonomy of the formal, p. 376-7; thoughtless natural processes and artificial logical autonomy, p.386) and the one between what is Given (in the sense of the mythical, in McDowell´s use of the capital ´G´) and the spontaneous, for example in the assertion that taking form to conform to experience is falling into the myth of the Given. Negarestani seems to favor a notion of thinking that is progressively autonomous and head towards its artificial medium that brings together language, logic, and computation in order to elicit the commonalities between them that enable a disconnection with its causal support. This disconnecting autonomy echoes the idea of causality through freedom with which Kant asserted the autonomous nature of spontaneity and thought and action. Further, it heads towards the project of a universal realm of the artificial that expresses itself formally in something like what Negarestani calls the dasein of Geist which is this very common element between language, logic, and computation - a characteristica universalis, in the sense of Leibniz. The trouble with this disconnecting autonomy - which escapes from the Given and is increasingly artificial - is that somehow receptivity has to get into the picture. The danger of what McDowell´s once described as a ´frictionless spinning in the void´ (in his Mind and World) haunts the project of thought autonomy that Negarestani pursues. This is perhaps because his emphasis is explicitly on the power of recognizable negation - philosophy, conceived as the game of games (422) is found on the architectonics of negation as the engine of thinking. Negation is a ready-made ticket to the unbound, the artificial, the deterritorialized or, in any case, to what is not currently the case. It is a ticket to a separate realm if it is coupled with the idea that cognition is recognition.

The idea is that about the artificial (and the spontaneous) that takes it to be the opposite (or the complement or the dual) of the realm of causes - and hence the territorialized and the deterritorialized form a totality. The trouble lies maybe in the very opposition between territorialization and deterritorialization - between natural and artificial, between what is attached to the nature of things and what is unbound, between causes and the autonomy of thinking. Perhaps the opposition between physis and techné. Or rather, in the idea that a fully artificial, unbounded, unlimited, autonomous realm is conceivable and attainable. Thinking is perhaps precisely about this border, about this launching platform where an autonomous rocket is about to depart but is still attached to the ground. This is because thinking is crucially open to frictions - it is subject to the Great Outdoors and not close to it; before being autonomous, thinking is responsive. To fully make sure thinking is not going to spin frictionless, thinking has to be challengeable from all sides. Otherwise, it is confined in a gesture of self-recognition that makes all talk about the collective or the impersonal dwindle into a project for the autonomy of a bubble.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dismantling absolute contingency

I´ve been wondering about whether we can formulate something about contingency along the lines of a principle of irreduction: aucune chose n´est par elle-même contingent ou necessaire . The principle asserts that necessity is always contingent on underlying fixed things: something is physically necessary (or contingent) given the fixed laws of nature, something is deontically contingent - allowed - or necessary - mandatory - given the fixed ethical rules (or laws of the land). Finally, something is logically necessary (or necessary simpliciter) given a fixed logic. The irreducible diversity of ethical rules, the absence of eternal laws of nature and the plurality of logical systems, if accepted, makes necessity relative to those parameters. An aggiornamento of Heraclitus would have that nothing is necessary comes what may. Surely, of couse, if there is no absolute necessity, there is no absolute contingency. We can then say that in a broader, more abstract level, things are up for grab...
6 comments
Read more

Necropolitics and Neocameralism

It is perhaps just wishful thinking that the alt-right seemingly innovative and intrepid ideas will disappear from the scene as Trump's reign comes to an end. They have their own dynamics, but certainly the experiences of the last years, including those in the pandemics, do help to wear off their bright and attractiveness. Neocameralism, what Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land with him ushered in as a model of post-democracy that relinquish important ingredients of the human security system, is one of these projects that is proving to be too grounded in the past to have any capacity to foretell anything bright beyond the democratic rusting institutions. It is little more than necropolitics - which is itself a current post-democratic alternative. Achile Mbembe finds necropolitics in the regimes were warlords take over the state-like institutions (or mimick them)  to rule on the grounds of local security having no troubles killing or letting die whoever is in their path. Neocameralism pos...
Post a Comment
Read more

Memory Assemblages out!

  Memory Assemblages is out at Bloomsbury This is the book I wrote during most of 22 and 23. It proposes a spectral realism based on the idea that archives are ubiquitous - I call this pan-mnemism. It offers a conception of how memory related deeply with persistent addition of new events, thoughts and circumstances and this addends concoct varying assemblages of what is retained and what brings this archives to the fore. It also rejects the idea that there is an archeology to the archive - or an ontology to hauntology. Even if it boils down merely to postulate traces or forms. I have neglected this blog for a while and I don't expect myself to be very much back to it soon. But I will talk about the book in my youtube channel, in an English language playlist called "On Memory Assemblages" .  
Post a Comment
Read more