acephalousuniverse posted:this stuff is really weird (the whole nick land / neoreactionary / race realist thing) but i doubt it's really significant other than being an interesting new online crank subculture (unless anyone wants to prove otherwise)
i like listening to some vaporwave stuff but i don't think all of it really has ties to accelerationism (esp accelerationism in the nick land sense of bug cyborg from the future deleuze whatever the fuck vs. accelerationism thats just dumb academic marxists) except in the fact that journalists and msg board posters think everything that satirizes something by exaggerating it is "accelerationism" now bc they just learned that word and want to use it
yea i think vaporwave is more explicitly a practice of situationist detournement, i remember reading an interview with one of the musicians that i cant remember who said as much, but roughly this type of situationism transposed onto the conditions of late capitalism is exactly the system of thought land et al. come from, i mean sadie plant's first book was subtitled the situationist international in a postmodern age, mark fisher is like the number one apologist for land's accelerationist garbage & he is a neo-situationist more than anything, besides the whole mad black deleuzianism i would say the university of warwick wire magazine thing comes pretty clearly from the london psychogeography thing & early hacker zines that borrowed si ideas
i mean i agree with you that most of what has been written about accelerationism and vaporwave recently is pretty dumb and missing the point but like the politics of accelerationism are roughly a practice of detournement in itself, that is an appropriation of the expressions of the capitalist mode of production, that is the deterretorialization of primitive accumulation and the development of productive forces, against capital itself... you cheerlead for the reckless overextension of capitalism because thats where it will end up destroying itself and creating something better... and isnt that what the monster energy drink dubai mall tokyo hotel aesthetics of vaporwave doing, appropriating the expressions of the late capitalist cultural machine with the same kind of distance, this ironic celebration of its unmitigated & totalizing schizophrenia ...
but the problem here is that this distance isnt actually possible, simply instrumentalizing the tactics of hypercapital doesnt work, as ray brassier said in his response to land's accelerationism
You end up endorsing and embracing a kind of neoliberal politics or ideology, and the pretence of instrumental distance, that this could just be the cunning of schizophrenic reason, quickly evaporates because it’s not possible to dissociate praxis from identifiable ends any more.
In other words, once you dissociate tactics and strategy–the famous distinction between tactics and strategy where strategy is teleological, transcendent, and representational and tactics is immanent and machinic–if you have no strategy, someone with a strategy will soon commandeer your tactics. Someone who knows what they want to realize will start using you. You become the pawn of another kind of impersonal force, but it’s no longer the glamorous kind of impersonal and seductive force that you hoped to make a compact with, it’s a much more cynical kind of libertarian capitalism.
i mean sure vaporwave is a satirical appropriation of hypercapitalist 'culture' but accelerationism is basically a satirical appropriation of capitalist reproduction and i think the two are pretty inseparable. & that i think is the meaning of land's neoreactionary leanings come from, the distance required for accelerationism to be a revolutionary program is completely illusory, he just ended up regurgitating the ideological edifices of libertarian reaction, with all the racist and misogynist extremities that entails
Ironicwarcriminal posted:it's monday morning and i'm at work right now lol
blinkandwheeze posted:acephalousuniverse posted:
this stuff is really weird (the whole nick land / neoreactionary / race realist thing) but i doubt it's really significant other than being an interesting new online crank subculture (unless anyone wants to prove otherwise)
i like listening to some vaporwave stuff but i don't think all of it really has ties to accelerationism (esp accelerationism in the nick land sense of bug cyborg from the future deleuze whatever the fuck vs. accelerationism thats just dumb academic marxists) except in the fact that journalists and msg board posters think everything that satirizes something by exaggerating it is "accelerationism" now bc they just learned that word and want to use it
yea i think vaporwave is more explicitly a practice of situationist detournement, i remember reading an interview with one of the musicians that i cant remember who said as much, but roughly this type of situationism transposed onto the conditions of late capitalism is exactly the system of thought land et al. come from, i mean sadie plant's first book was subtitled the situationist international in a postmodern age, mark fisher is like the number one apologist for land's accelerationist garbage & he is a neo-situationist more than anything, besides the whole mad black deleuzianism i would say the university of warwick wire magazine thing comes pretty clearly from the london psychogeography thing & early hacker zines that borrowed si ideas
i mean i agree with you that most of what has been written about accelerationism and vaporwave recently is pretty dumb and missing the point but like the politics of accelerationism are roughly a practice of detournement in itself, that is an appropriation of the expressions of the capitalist mode of production, that is the deterretorialization of primitive accumulation and the development of productive forces, against capital itself... you cheerlead for the reckless overextension of capitalism because thats where it will end up destroying itself and creating something better... and isnt that what the monster energy drink dubai mall tokyo hotel aesthetics of vaporwave doing, appropriating the expressions of the late capitalist cultural machine with the same kind of distance, this ironic celebration of its unmitigated & totalizing schizophrenia ...
but the problem here is that this distance isnt actually possible, simply instrumentalizing the tactics of hypercapital doesnt work, as ray brassier said in his response to land's accelerationism
You end up endorsing and embracing a kind of neoliberal politics or ideology, and the pretence of instrumental distance, that this could just be the cunning of schizophrenic reason, quickly evaporates because it’s not possible to dissociate praxis from identifiable ends any more.
In other words, once you dissociate tactics and strategy–the famous distinction between tactics and strategy where strategy is teleological, transcendent, and representational and tactics is immanent and machinic–if you have no strategy, someone with a strategy will soon commandeer your tactics. Someone who knows what they want to realize will start using you. You become the pawn of another kind of impersonal force, but it’s no longer the glamorous kind of impersonal and seductive force that you hoped to make a compact with, it’s a much more cynical kind of libertarian capitalism.
i mean sure vaporwave is a satirical appropriation of hypercapitalist 'culture' but accelerationism is basically a satirical appropriation of capitalist reproduction and i think the two are pretty inseparable. & that i think is the meaning of land's neoreactionary leanings come from, the distance required for accelerationism to be a revolutionary program is completely illusory, he just ended up regurgitating the ideological edifices of libertarian reaction, with all the racist and misogynist extremities that entails
Thanks blinky, I don’t know what vapourware really is (what IS vapourware?) but you write lucidly about things I have a hard time getting my head around.
but all this stuff is just
cynical libertarian capitalism
libelous_slander posted:Ironicwarcriminal posted:
it's monday morning and i'm at work right now lol
i'm nearly always at work when i post. i love the rhizzone but let's be honest, posting when you're not getting paid for it is a bit of a waste of time
mustang19 posted:The 20th and early 21st centuries are going to prove to be a brief secular episode in history because the same social evolution that caused religion to grow in the first place is going to return things to equilibrium.
starvation/infection-induced hallucinations and schizophrenia, yep
tpaine posted:seapunk lol. gonna guess this isn't real...i'm a little gunshy after the coachella image fiasco
manchester music
house
reggae
sometimes folk
Ironicwarcriminal posted:All of this is just a schizoid reaction to feminism by unwanted, redundant beta males.
People who are getting happily laid and cuddled don’t become ‘Theonomists’
i think my period of peak frantic sexhavery coincided with peak fascism tho
mustang19 posted:The latest generation of 18-20somethings is probably the most bored and retarded generation that has ever lived.
MUCH
LIKE
YOUR
POSTING
mustang19 posted:The latest generation of 18-20somethings is probably the most bored and retarded generation that has ever lived.
Edited by prikryl ()
deadken posted:Ironicwarcriminal posted:All of this is just a schizoid reaction to feminism by unwanted, redundant beta males.
People who are getting happily laid and cuddled don’t become ‘Theonomists’i think my period of peak frantic sexhavery coincided with peak fascism tho
woa, hold up, the peak of your misogyny coincided with the peak of your fascism? Hold up. Wait a minute. Hold up. Wait a minute. Hold up wait a minute wait a minute hold up
acephalousuniverse posted:this stuff is really weird (the whole nick land / neoreactionary / race realist thing) but i doubt it's really significant other than being an interesting new online crank subculture (unless anyone wants to prove otherwise)
i dont know about the nick land tip (i at least used him & DIS mostly as linking devices for this whole ~paradigm), but race realism as a whole is pretty big and growing i think. the youtube view counts & those racialist/genetics forums where you can detail your DNA information on your profile speak for themselves
and of course chans/imageboards, stormfront, mypostingcareer and who knows what else
i mean cycloneman could make the same argument for MRA or reddit i guess, but still
and its obv all to do with the more extreme internet libertarian community so its just fully blossoming...
e: like this is the ideal time to post your fave weird LLCO MTW screeds:
the ideology for the future for white working and middle class men will be a mixture between nazism and ayn rand-ism
they will call themselves alpha males and brag about their superior education and genes with increasingly shrill voices
at the same time they will dream nightmares of hordes of third world poors screaming at them
raising torches
raising their fists
their fingers like claws ripping their convulsing bodies apart
Edited by prohairesis ()
prikryl posted:A country approaching the fascist phase showed symptoms among which the existence of a fascist movement proper was not necessarily one. At least as important signs were the spread of irrationalistic philosophies, racialist esthetics, anticapitalistic demagogy, heterodox currency views, criticism of the party system, widespread disparagement of the "regime," or whatever was the name given to the existing democratic set-up. In Austria the so-called universalist philosophy of Othmar Spann, in Germany the poetry of Stephan George and the cosmogonic romanticism of Ludwig Klages, in England D. H. Lawrence's erotic vitalism, in France Georges Sorel's cult of the political myth were among its extremely diverse forerunners. Hitler was eventually put in power by the feudalist clique around President Hindenburg, just as Mussolini and Primo de Rivera were ushered into office by their respective sovereigns. Yet Hitler had a vast movement to support him; Mussolini had a small one; Primo de Rivera had none. In no case was an actual revolution against constituted authority launched; fascist tactics were invariably those of a sham rebellion arranged with the tacit approval of the authorities who pretended to have been overwhelmed by force. These are the bare outlines of a complex picture in which room would have to be made for figures as diverse as the Catholic free-lance demagogue in industrial Detroit, the "Kingfish" in backward Louisiana, Japanese army conspirators, and Ukrainian anti-Soviet saboteurs. Fascism was an ever given political possibility, an almost instantaneous emotional reaction in every industrial community since the 1930's. One may call it a "move" in preference to a "movement," to indicate the impersonal nature of the crisis the symptoms of which were frequently vague and ambiguous. People often did not feel sure whether a political speech or a play, a sermon or a public parade, a metaphysics or an artistic fashion, a poem or a party program was fascist or not. There were no accepted criteria of fascism, nor did it possess conventional tenets. Yet one significant feature of all its organized forms was the abruptness with which they appeared and faded out again, only to burst forth with violence after an indefinite period of latency. All this fits into the picture of a social force that waxed and waned according to the objective situation.
The fascist local bosses, the ras, perceived and exploted the state's dilemma. They saw that "two states" actually existed, one waveringly democratic, centered on the constitutional parties, the other more authoritarian, centered on its executive arm. They sought to widen this fissure and infiltrate both. In May 1922, Balbo organized a march of forty to fifty thousand laborers into the center of Ferrara to demand employment. He persuaded the police and troops to stay away from the mob, promising that the squadristi would keep order. The authorities were pleased to avoid a riot. Then he said he could not control the mob unless some of its demands were satisfied. He demanded the prefect promise a public works program within forty-eight hours - or violence would break loose. Frantic telephoning between the prefect and Rome secured the promise within the day... In Ravenna, Balbo warned the police chief that his men were intending to burn the socialists' houses. But Balbo said he could prevent this if the police provided a fleet of trucks to take them out of the city. He did so but kept the trucks, which he then used to spread a 'column of fire,' burning socialist and communist headquarters throughout the provinces of Ravenna and Forli.
edit http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/06/golden-dawn-greece-fight
This fits with a wider atmosphere of impunity. Klio Papapantoleon, a lawyer who has represented victims of assaults committed by Golden Dawn members, told me that the Greek justice system had been "unusually lenient" in judging them, while clients and witnesses had often been "obstructed and encumbered by police officers" when trying to pursue a complaint.
Encouraged by this treatment, Golden Dawn has been doing its best to sink roots into Greece's institutions, building networks of support inside the police force, entering hospitals and, perhaps most worryingly, trying to win teenage recruits by spreading its ideas in schools.
A recent Council of Europe report concluded that Golden Dawn's well-documented role in perpetrating racist violence meant it could be banned under existing laws, yet for now the Greek government seems unable or unwilling to act, preferring to mimic its rhetoric: in February, 85 MPs from New Democracy, the largest party in the coalition, signed a motion that called for anybody not of the "Greek race" to be barred from joining the country's police and armed forces. This contrasts with a recent crackdown on leftwing groups, which has included raids on squats, the closing of Athens Indymedia and the ongoing terrorising of villagers in the north of Greece opposed to a gold mining project.
Yet while journalists understandably want to draw attention to the threat Golden Dawn poses, every piece of sensationalist media coverage reinforces the party's deliberately crafted image. The violence it inspires is real enough, but Golden Dawn is far from being in a position of power. Its activist base remains small; it can not mobilise supporters in large numbers; and its rallies often take place unannounced, so that anti-fascist activists do not have time to gather and chase its members off the streets. The food handouts, staged mainly for the benefit of the media, pale in comparison with the network of solidarity initiatives like the "potato movement" – markets that allow farmers to sell their produce directly to customers, at around 30% less than supermarket prices – or volunteer-run medical clinics, or free after-school tuition for children, that are helping Greek people cope with the impact of mass unemployment and falling salaries. By contrast, as a member of Solidarity4All, a national network that co-ordinates such initiatives, described it to me, Golden Dawn's handouts are a grim affair: "They buy the food, they make everyone listen to 30 minutes of political speeches, then they make everyone wait in line. There's no co-operation."
Edited by Crow ()
thinking of vaporwave in terms of detournement is more useful than accelerationism. the whole thing is weird for me though because honestly i just find the stuff that's more oriented toward chopped & screwed r&b, straight drone music, and other shit (chuck person, vektroid, etc.) to be just basically cool to listen to and most of my friends listen to it in that way; i don't think it functions as any kind of detournement or critique at all and is just "rehabilitative" sort of pop art collage or ambient music or whatever and not very different from sampling or experimental music generally.
the stuff that's actually abrasive digital pseudo-muzak or conceptual stuff etc i can see functioning more in the way of critique (far side virtual, laserdisc visions, fatimi al-qadiri) since it is jarring and difficult to listen to rather than immersive and aesthetic. i.e. far side virtual gets people saying "wtf is think its just ringtones and out of time second life samples what is he doing" vs chuck person "aw man he made a sick track out of corny r&b samples kool." i think some kind of brechtian alienation is really key if you're gonna make any art that actually functions critically or intellectually (as opposed to being a pure aesthetic experience which i also value highly and think is important viz. bataille) especially at this point in history i dunno
prohairesis posted:i dont know about the nick land tip (i at least used him & DIS mostly as linking devices for this whole ~paradigm), but race realism as a whole is pretty big and growing i think. the youtube view counts & those racialist/genetics forums where you can detail your DNA information on your profile speak for themselves
and of course chans/imageboards, stormfront, mypostingcareer and who knows what else
i mean cycloneman could make the same argument for MRA or reddit i guess, but still
and its obv all to do with the more extreme internet libertarian community so its just fully blossoming...
well i'd say "race realism" as a concept is as old as the civil rights movement++ and is just a new name for old white reactionary bullshit. it is a problem and may be more of a problem lately in fact, same for libertarianism etc., but i don't think it's necessarily tied to the neo-reactionary thing as those people are literally in favor of feudalism and stuff (though justified through first principles that bizarrely begin in libertarianism) and i feel pretty comfortable dismissing those people specifically as just internet cranks typical of our fucked up era but not dangerous in and of themselves if u know what i mean
but yeah race realism, mra stuff, whatever is terrible and oughta be stopped regardless of how big or old it is
Edited by toy ()
acephalousuniverse posted:blinkandwheeze good post and i actually basically agree with everything you said. i guess it's hard for me to see land's accelerationism as originating in satire or detournement at this point given his current leanings but that's just the present coloring my view of the past. i think i have a pdf of that sadie plant book somewhere. i do think that brassier quote is a good summation of what is dumb about accelerationism generally esp among committed communists. i think at this point "accelerationism" for land is just being a racist hyper libertarian with no distance or desire for any kind of revolutionary reversal at all, just advance neoliberalism until most of the world except for high iq paradise china collapses into feudal ethnostates or whatever bullshit
yes i mean land has this particular self seriousness about him in his recent writing but i mean he comes from a circle that wrote weird lovecraftian blade runner fan fiction on cryptic websites, while staging multimedia installations that seem explicitly situationist in practice, before they received any substantial institutional attention, lands thought to me seems pretty inseparable from that sense of provocation and play. and yeah, i think its actually difficult to identify him as actually being an accelerationist proper anymore, while accelerationism isn't teleological in the same way a genuine revolutionary program is its still founded on some possibility of some kind of singularity & i dont think land has any resounding faith in any of that, as you say i think he simply believes in coming societal collapse & the necessity of maintaining a high iq / white / patriarchal community to weather that storm
obviously the discussion gets problematic here because vaporwave ceases to be a useful term when you focus in enough cause its a pretty clearly constructed grouping of some often very disparate artists under a terminology that is at best vague, from some thinkers who, err, i dont think really know what theyre talking about at least some of the time. chuck person and ultrascrewed r&b i think has more to do with marble surf era ferraro or someone like mark mcguire than it does with gatekeeper or the ferraro of far side virtual, the stuff youre talking about seems to be based on a sentimental extraction of emotion or pathos from moments of the cultural past (whether that's literal as in lopatin's sampling or more like mcguire's focus on saccharine pop melodies) ... then you have stuff like the night slugs / fade to mind axis which frequently works towards the same 'rehabilitative' pop art you talk about, with jam city or recently girl unit exploring the aesthetics of s.o.s. band 80s r&b with a fidelity to hypercolour pop ambitions of that sound without filtering it through the tape haze of hypnagogia. the question all that begs i think is what the function of nostalgia in bourgeois culture is, which mark fisher has approached in the past -
If Land’s cyber-futurism can seem out of date, it is only in the same sense that jungle and techno are out of date – not because they have been superseded by new futurisms, but because the future as such has succumbed to retrospection. The actual near future wasn’t about Capital stripping off its latex mask and revealing the machinic death’s head beneath; it was just the opposite: New Sincerity, Apple Computers advertised by kitschy-cutesy pop. This failure to foresee the extent to which pastiche, recapitulation and a hyper-oedipalised neurotic individualism would become the dominant cultural tendencies is not a contingent error; it points to a fundamental misjudgement about the dynamics of capitalism.
the understanding of the dynamics of capital in land's personal vision was founded on an aesthetic veneration of the prophecies of replicants & terminators, but the actually existing cultural tendency of bourgeois society has been in the other direction, the primacy of the human subject, of sentiment and memory... and while i doubt he is personally concerned with theory on any level, we shouldnt forget that the most visible cultural producer to come out of the theorists of acceleration is burial, and is there anyone in music today who taps the emotional world of nostalgia with as much dedication? or look at something like ford & lopatin's distillation of their aesthetic to "anything that reminds us of our dads at work"... so while this material i dont think is necessarily a critical process of detournement in the same way as land's philosophy (& the sound of something like gatekeeper or ferraro's side projects that approach what i have talked about earlier) i think there is an accelerationism at work there, i mean what is pastiche but the product of deterritorialization, the vapor that results from everything solid melting into air?? and there are sites where this starts to get pretty problematic, like when this begins to seep through racial lines ... ferraro's bebetune$ appropriating the signifiers of american street rap as if it is any other form of plastic detritus, a culture which brandon soderberg identified bebetune$ as either "poorly approximating or lazily mocking"
to me there is certainly no critique at work in ferraro anymore than there is in nick land, adam harper cites him as applauding the future, much in the same way land waves the flag for the capitalist juggernaut, & i think his turn towards this forward march despite his previous explorations of the haze of memory speaks to how these focuses are strongly connected as, to different degrees, expressions of the cultural logic of late capitalism. if there is something in the tradition of brechtian critique, i think, it's in fatima al-qadiri, her often repeated story of playing a sega megadrive game based on the strikes on kuwait little more than a year after actually experiencing them, the idea that this inhuman distance of accelerationist culture is inseparable from the violence it promotes
toy posted:i don't see vaporwave as 'accelerationism'. it's detournement, though unlike the SI or Adbusters version of it, i doubt its practicers hold any hopes for it being an actually effective political statement.
accelerationism is detournement & detournement is accelerationism m8 thats my whole point
Edited by blinkandwheeze ()
Makeshift_Swahili posted:ferraros best stuff was with the skaters and also Marble Surf. dwi
yea & spencer clark is better anyway 
Makeshift_Swahili posted:ferraros best stuff was with the skaters and also Marble Surf. dwi
vodka soap!
palafox posted:Makeshift_Swahili posted:ferraros best stuff was with the skaters and also Marble Surf. dwi
vodka soap!
vodka soap is spencer clark aka black joker aka charles berlitz aka monopoly child star searchers aka fourth world magazine, idiot! death 2 false skaters fans
NoFreeWill posted:i like how this turned into shitty, nostalgic electronic music chat.
i too can't get enough oldschool IRCAM, and if it ain't the-excess-of-late-capital-fully-embodied-in-physical-and-artistic-form-thanks-to-state-largesse then i'm just not interested
the occaisonal harmonic ineptitude from the performer (starting at 4:19) and the computer's failure to deal with his incompetence (plus turtlenecks) cracks me up every time
NoFreeWill posted:i like how this turned into shitty, nostalgic electronic music chat.
thats basically what any discussion of CCRU is though really
blinkandwheeze posted:palafox posted:Makeshift_Swahili posted:ferraros best stuff was with the skaters and also Marble Surf. dwi
vodka soap!
vodka soap is spencer clark aka black joker aka charles berlitz aka monopoly child star searchers aka fourth world magazine, idiot! death 2 false skaters fans
shit! i really screwed the pooch!
(pooch screw aka broken dick wheel aka the running man the movie the game the book aka young armand hammer aka prity boi)
acephalousuniverse posted:Haha i just noticed this aaaaarg.org comment that calls nick land "the cry-wank of british deleuzianism itself"
lol
piss posted:i ran the sonic 3 soundtrack through a delay pedal and now im a vaporwave star. everyone wants to suck on my nipples
I said this exact same thing (but w the mario kart soundtrack) at a party to impress this music nerd guy. He laffed, but in the end, was str8. In other waords quit trying to steal my game