well i guess there are hippies that believe in fairies and benevolent aliens or some shit...
discipline posted:
also worth noting the israelis also occupy palestinian electromagnetic frequencies, for god's sake
ive heard rumors the Wall contains a hidden Faraday cage to secretly trap the souls of recently murdered Palestinians during their first tastes of freedom
Edited by shennong ()
Prospero posted:
but how come nobody imposes over the fake reality a super-pleasant one? how come its always these alexjonesian "the air is poisoned, the conspiracy gods in mount olympus of washington are raping you in the spirit world" etc instead of "the bureau of diana is conspiring to make you laugh" and shit like that?
well i guess there are hippies that believe in fairies and benevolent aliens or some shit...
the core reality would be so utterly removed from any orientatable human context that it would likely be infinitely more horrifying than whatever juvenile version of living hell that most of these rubes dream up for themselves. although the processes of the human mind would also necessarily change with the composition of the phenomenological strata they occupy, so things probably only seem so scary from across the fence
Edited by shennong ()
Superabound posted:
i think a lot of the Lovecraft shit youre talking about relies on the idea that "reality isnt real", a fundamental truth which sits like a pea under mattress of the human mind and has been the genesis of creation for everything ranging from religion, to conspiracy theories, to quantum theory. Its something every human being instinctively knows to a certain degree, but most simply cant face or acknowledge head on. Its Lovecraft's treatment of all of human existence and civilization as nothing more than a thin scab over a giant unseen festering wound
this, i do not agree with. in lovecraft - negarestani in particular, too - i would say it is a more a case of "reality is realer than you could ever even imagine". lovecraft's scab, the material and structural field of human interaction, is not a farce, it's existent, but this existence is so inconsequential and temporary, on every perceivable level, in the face of the eternal cosmic abyss (and the unimaginable that exist beyond it).
what is farcical, what isn't real, is our fantasies, our semiotic field of ideological constructions, anything that hides from the gaze of our unspeakable reality. even our subconscious, our slumber, is no escape, there is the idea pervading through lovecraft's works that dreams are nothing more than a brief glimpse into another unbearable universe, venturing through our unimaginable fractured reality, past the unspeakable that exists between the cracks. it isn't that our experiences are the imaginary cloaking the real domain of the lurker at the threshold, it's that yog-sothoth pervades every single aspect of our reality. negarestani's qiyamah, total desert, isn't islamic. it's not a day of judgement, where we ultimately transcend the system of test and submission and ascend to some other state, what's unbearable in lovecraft and negarestani's apocalypticism is that there is no transcendence, no end, reality endures in all its horror. the return of the Old Ones simply transforms everything we hold dear into a playground for things unthinkable, reality continues as if we never even existed.
so that's where negarestani's apostasy comes in, muslims do not act in submission to Allah, this is nothing more than a fantasy, they are the unknowing servants of the Old Ones, dedicated to a process of reality we couldn't begin to understand. and that's the same for the deluded secularism of western technocapitalism, the same for any ideological construction, our thought games have no bearing on the totality of our existence, we're little more than vessels for forces that can't, on any level, be accounted for.
that's also where you get negarestani's fixation on the tellurian, this base materialism, this obsession with geography and archaeology. oil, dust, desert, even the sun, are capable of an agency comparable to and even exceeding any human. solarcapitalism is an important concept because it strips the connotations of that term entirely from the field of human activity or discourse. and then you also get his macabre fascination with corpses, the body, blood, violence, animality, rot, this is the truth of our existence. and you get his obsession with crypts, graves, (something you get in lovecraft too) and architecture (obviously in lovecraft as well, with his ancient cities of non-euclidean geometry). physical constructions, transformation of our environment, manipulation of solidus, whether that be the formation/reduction of building materials or our own bodies (think about the introductory parable about the piles of sun bleached bones) - these are the only traces it's possible for us to leave, even if these traces aren't anything more than a world-spanning necropolis
Superabound posted:
although the processes of the human mind would also necessarily change with the composition of the phenomenological strata they occupy, so things probably only seem so scary from across the fence
but then lovecraft would deny this. any glimpse of how things really are, our minds just shut down, even reading the mysterious texts of lovecraft's universe that hint at how things really are (and cyclonopedia obviously owes a lot, in terms of aesthetic at least, to these. i mean, essentially it's a horrific grimoire penned by a mad arab) is enough to turn you insane
this idea that we are even capable in any tiny insignificant way to dream up the unbearable totality of this existence is an anthropocentrism you don't find in lovecraft or negarestani, instead we have this purely antihumanist cosmicism. it's profoundly materialist, in a way that goes beyond simple vulgarity, into a totally excessive, sadeian materialism, more fascinated with blood and sand than it ever could be with any human ideal. it's your pea under the mattress, this disavowal of reality, that is summarily rejected by these thinkers. the kingdom of god, any aspiration of immanence or transcendence, any humanism, any universality, any aspiration to a meaning beyond the dirt of our existence, is a sad joke.
Edited by blinkandwheeze ()
which is interesting given that his next book is this: http://blog.urbanomic.com/cyclon/archives/2009/07/the_mortiloquis.html
thats his blog btw, lots of cool Blogs on it
like this:
http://blog.urbanomic.com/cyclon/archives/2010/12/pest_rationalis.html
http://blog.urbanomic.com/cyclon/archives/2009/04/instrumental_sp.html
http://blog.urbanomic.com/cyclon/archives/2008/11/speculative_rea.html (namedrops in the mouth of madness here)
blinkandwheeze posted:
well i cant really comment on Negarestani because i havent actually read Cyclonopedia yet, but as far as Lovecraft and dreams are concerned with the ability to behold strange realities, you have the singular exception of King Kuranes, who essentially became the god of his own dream realm.
I think the horror that any outer sphere would inflict upon a human mind is primarily a factor of it belonging to a higher order universe. Its like the Flatland analogy thats been used a million times to explain extra spacial dimensions. That itself is an extremely common trope in Lovecraft's work: "impossible" angles shapes and colors that could not possibly rationally exist in our world. Its a higher order universe intruding upon our own. The horror and mind fracture comes from "peering across the veil", not necessarily EXISTING beyond the veil. This is our environment, we are adapted to it, in a universal sense, were are COMPRISED of it. The denizens of the other spheres are adapted to and comprised of things completely alien to use, but intimately familiar to them.
Its the fundamental inability, on a basic physical and existential level, of a lower-order-universe-residing being to understand a higher-order universe/higher-order simulation. The Outer Gods might as well have been computer programs interacting with a simulated universe.
And as far as inanimate objects acting with agency, the basic concepts of solipsism still apply: 100% inanimately acting in ways which could even CONCEIVABLY be retroactively described as having intelligent motive is pretty much completely indistinguishable from actual agency. Hell people use that argument every single day to use the clockwork-like order of the universe as a justification for belief in God. People think that just because something works, just because it efficiently achieves a "goal", that a conscious intelligence must be behind it, when it is clear that that usually means the opposite is more likely to be true.
i'm really excited for the mortiloquist, a west to cyclonopedia's east is a really good idea. and in a sense it's a return to form of sorts, cyclonopedia has a really singular aesthetic, but it looks like it's going in the direction of some of his earlier writings (especially under his basilisk pseudonym, still buggin that i found that). it's really cool that he can keep this really coherent and singular artistic vision but still incorporate all these really unexpected and diverse influences, turning from islam via carpenter to de sade & viennese aktionism via body horror films, pretty dope.
has anyone here read houellebecq's lovecraft bio? it looks pretty cool
Superabound posted:
but i think what you're missing is that the higher order universe here is not simply exterior to our own, it exists within and is in direct communication with the one we inhabit. that's where you get these zones of emergence, i mean the impossible angles and colours might not rationally exist here but they manage to regardless. lovecraft's unimaginable constructions can be found as much in the antarctic or a pacific island as they can in any dream universe. we do exist beyond the veil, or more accurately, what is beyond the veil exists within us. we aren't simply comprised of our own tellurian matter, and there are other spheres comprised of alien matter, but our own tellurian existence, everything that we are comprised of, is completely infiltrated by and connected to these forces that we can't understand. lovecraft's madness, this inability to realize a higher-order-universe, isn't just an inability to look at a sphere distinct from our own, this madness occurs completely in the mundane, it can be as simple as reading a book in your university library or wandering down a path you have no business being near. and you get a figure like nyarlathotep, who walks on the earth and directly interferes with and influences our actions. so whatever it is that we are comprised of is not a distinction from forces that are alien but can very well be completely attributable to them.
the agency i'm talking about isn't the same as possessing a conscious intelligence in any human sense, something related to an intelligent motivation, divine or not. think about the blood test scene in the thing. it's different from any retroactive attribution like you mention because we resign ourselves to the fact that we can't even conceive, on any level, what these motivations might be.
Edited by blinkandwheeze ()
Edited by shennong ()
blinkandwheeze posted:
i was thinking the other day about the 'post-maoist' (badiou, zizek, balibar, etc.) and this particular sphere of speculative realism (negarestani, land) as being a platonic / aristotelian divide.
thats on point imo
has anyone here read houellebecq's lovecraft bio? it looks pretty cool
its the best houellebecq (which is to say that its worth reading, not garbage)
blinkandwheeze posted:Superabound posted:but i think what you're missing is that the higher order universe here is not simply exterior to our own, it exists within and is in direct communication with the one we inhabit. that's where you get these zones of emergence, i mean the impossible angles and colours might not rationally exist here but they manage to regardless. lovecraft's unimaginable constructions can be found as much in the antarctic or a pacific island as they can in any dream universe. we do exist beyond the veil, or more accurately, what is beyond the veil exists within us. we aren't simply comprised of our own tellurian matter, and there are other spheres comprised of alien matter, but our own tellurian existence, everything that we are comprised of, is completely infiltrated by and connected to these forces that we can't understand. lovecraft's madness, this inability to realize a higher-order-universe, isn't just an inability to look at a sphere distinct from our own, this madness occurs completely in the mundane, it can be as simple as reading a book in your university library or wandering down a path you have no business being near. and you get a figure like nyarlathotep, who walks on the earth and directly interferes with and influences our actions. so whatever it is that we are comprised of is not a distinction from forces that are alien but can very well be completely attributable to them.
the agency i'm talking about isn't the same as possessing a conscious intelligence in any human sense, something related to an intelligent motivation, divine or not. think about the blood test scene in the thing. it's different from any retroactive attribution like you mention because we resign ourselves to the fact that we can't even conceive, on any level, what these motivations might be.
blinkandwheeze posted:
can we get this stupid shit out of my thread please.
it is kinda embarassing how appropriate it is
Prospero posted:
it is kinda embarassing how appropriate it is
honestly i'd rather stop talking about lovecraft entirely if you guys aren't reading cyclonopedia or aren't going to discuss it
babyfinland posted:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xExP1ThOcyg&t=2m6s
the sound on my laptop is broken atm what are u getting at & also why do u kno this video so well that u can pinpoint a relevant section ...
blinkandwheeze posted:Superabound posted:but i think what you're missing is that the higher order universe here is not simply exterior to our own, it exists within and is in direct communication with the one we inhabit. that's where you get these zones of emergence, i mean the impossible angles and colours might not rationally exist here but they manage to regardless. lovecraft's unimaginable constructions can be found as much in the antarctic or a pacific island as they can in any dream universe.
but those are almost always pale mockeries of other things and places, paeans and elegies to distant worlds and dead civilizations, alien technologies, prisons to hold nightmarish but inherently physical and organic lesser gods, etc. There is a clear distinction between the things that are simply 'out there', interstellar, alien but terrestrial, some things immensely powerful but still comparatively mundane and Euclidean, albeit usually still magical or paranormal--and the things beyond that, beyond our phenomenological universe, beyond any classification or understanding.
we do exist beyond the veil, or more accurately, what is beyond the veil exists within us. we aren't simply comprised of our own tellurian matter, and there are other spheres comprised of alien matter, but our own tellurian existence, everything that we are comprised of, is completely infiltrated by and connected to these forces that we can't understand. lovecraft's madness, this inability to realize a higher-order-universe, isn't just an inability to look at a sphere distinct from our own, this madness occurs completely in the mundane, it can be as simple as reading a book in your university library or wandering down a path you have no business being near.
true, but another major theme is the idea of all these things existing existing concurrently in superposition on top of one another. All these other realms are simultaneously distant and right on top of us, accessible though secret knowledge. it screams hyperdimensionality. Sometimes these things are accessible through some form of "science" as in From Beyond, proposing a realm invisible but ultimately tied to and "close" to ours in a sense, a realm that still relies somewhat on physical laws, a realm that is itself scientific, recognizable, and thus breachable by our own science, and physical objects. Things can simply "bleed" through from one to the other. But others are clearly more far away, more clearly alien and unknowable, completely separate from any form of matter or arrangment that would be familiar with a resident of our reality. But all these things still right on top of us. Different membranes, different layers, different levels of abstraction
and you get a figure like nyarlathotep
Nyarlathotep is a User Interface
who walks on the earth and directly interferes with and influences our actions. so whatever it is that we are comprised of is not a distinction from forces that are alien but can very well be completely attributable to them.
but that makes me wonder about how all of these other things can be so powerful, so alien and unknowable, so much bigger, so far removed from us, but then clearly interested in us. all logic should dictate that we would be completely insignificant to them, completely beneath consideration. the only explanation is that our reality is some kind of zoo or petri dish, that our lower-order universe is their creation (or the creation of a universe above theirs, with them as intermediaries or autonomous/regulating programs)
the agency i'm talking about isn't the same as possessing a conscious intelligence in any human sense, something related to an intelligent motivation, divine or not. think about the blood test scene in the thing. it's different from any retroactive attribution like you mention because we resign ourselves to the fact that we can't even conceive, on any level, what these motivations might be.
yes but what we are talking about is movement. physical movement, physical and chemical reactions. those are the only ways anything interacts with its environment. Thought is externally unknowable and thus irrelevant. Even the human brain itself evolved only as a means of more precisely and selectively coordinating movement. We dont have brains so we can "think", we dont have brains so that we can be smart or know more things, we dont have brains for us to take in more information, brains evolved to FILTER information. rather than reacting to every stimulus, the brain sets criteria and thresholds, for movement and reaction. all the brain is is a sophisticated movement coordinator. now of course The Thing was created on the screen with the specific intention that it be and appear to be a living organism with a motive: survive. But in its native form, it has no dialog, no voiceovers, no sense of thought. it merely reacts to stimulus, by moving. we believe it is alive because it moves in ways that we can ourselves apply a motive to. the same could conceivably be said of a magnet. an ignorant person might say that a magnet is alive, that electricity moves with a purpose. honestly ive taken a lot of allergy medicine and mid-scentence i kinda lost whatever point i was wanting to make but whatever, The Thing is awesome i bet the remake sucked. diphenhydramine is a sentient titty
Superabound posted:
look i think you're approaching this in completely the wrong way, you can't speculate on the logic of lovecraft's universe because it openly and ardently defies any logic of any fashion. and that means finding anything that could be potentially analogous in our own conceptions of reality - whether that's computer software, conceptual models of concurrent universes, or a kind of zoo, whatever. nyarlathotep isn't a user interface, because we can't even begin to understand what role nyarlathotep plays in any wider scheme of things, because there is nothing there that is perceivable to us in any way
and you're making a mistake by suggesting that these forces that are so unknowable and alien are removed from us, that's wrong. i'm not denying that things tellurian are only a glimpse of the vast unknowable cosmic abyss of lovecraft's mythos, but there is nothing human or euclidian about r'yleh. there are no lower-order or higher-order universes, there are no spaces of exclusion where the outer gods or old ones are not active, there is no hierarchy or absence, it's an unending and unimaginable mass of processes we can't even catch a sight of. the reason these forces so beyond us are so active in human affairs is because they are active in every affair. it's a farce that human thought is anything immanent or unknowable, it's limited and pathetic
i agree with you of course that all there exists is this movement, this constant flux, this base materialism. and that's why i think it's ridiculous and anthropocentric of you to bring any conception of consciousness or motivation into the equation. the monster in the thing acts in ways we can attribute a characteristic of resilience to, but it has no visible purpose or intentions, a question of sentience is even probably irrelevant. the same is true of negarestani's oil, we're talking about agency that exist outside any idea of sentience or consciousness
this lovecraftchat is lame and tangential, bordering on irrelevant, so please stop talking about it or whatever stupid shit or i'll start probating you guys because i can do that now apparently. read this book!!!!
Edited by blinkandwheeze ()
look how worm-like it is! convergent evolution in action
Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 ()
blinkandwheeze posted:Prospero posted:
anyone know where i can get hollow land? aaarg one is out
Thank you!
discipline posted:
it's off topic and I don't want to post too much publically but my work is gonna be on spatial theory in the context of capitalism (harvey 1985) and it's going to own, my life is so weird and amazing sometimes alhamduilleh
i didn't know you were specializing in geography related stuff, that's cool.
Here's something vaguely relevant: welcome to the future:
http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/consumer-security/stalker-app-pulled-after-tool-for-rapists-outcry-20120402-1w7p4.html
In a statement to The Wall Street Journal, the company behind the app, O.O.O. SMS Servicies, defended its creation, saying it was designed to make "geo-social exploration of popular venues easy and visual".
It's cool (i.e. horrific) that the most cynical ends of capitalism seem to adopted and refined this continental pomo rhetoric to squeeze out the most cynical rationalizations for what they do. I guess they don't have to appeal to god, country or virtue anymore.
I suppose Israel and Palestine is the perfect place to examine these processes in a way because of the density and intensity of the geography and the issues that go along with it. Water politics, land politics, cultural and religious politics.
But these things happen all over the world and to be honest i'm surprised there isn't more literature and work about critical geography, especially urban geography. Browse the shapes and networks on google earth for 15 minutes and it seems to me that you'll find a million interesting stories and patterns.
http://urban-age.net/0_images/14_SA08Ref_Caldeira1.jpg
Either way if you have any literature on this stuff to recommend please do so. I've read some Mike Davis and a bit of Harvey but he's got a lot of work and i'm not sure to find what i'm looking for. The bits i've read of him writing about Baltimore are cool.
Ironicwarcriminal posted:
Either way if you have any literature on this stuff to recommend please do so.
cyclonopedia
blinkandwheeze posted:Ironicwarcriminal posted:
Either way if you have any literature on this stuff to recommend please do so.cyclonopedia
ok ok i've been putting it off since lf and your posts on this page swayed me a bit. I kind of suspected it was all a bit mystical (or at least borderline mystical and untethered in the way D&G is) but i liked your thing about how it's still fundamentally materialist. i'll see if i can find a copy in this philistine country.