the reason these forces so beyond us are so active in human affairs is because they are active in every affair

Can anyone more familiar with Spinoza than myself expound upon his relation to all of this please?

Makeshift_Swahili
The tiny burrowing snake is really interesting. I can't remember off the top of my head but I believe there is some stuff in the book about the fig wasp? I might have just been reading about them at the same time as reading the book but the interlocking symbiosis, the tight loops of decay and creation resonate strongly with the book, especially the concept of the Trison. Insistently, for anyone having issues with sorting the out the rather sketchy section under the smoke screen of numerology, this link was really useful for me.

On a side note of the beautiful generative terror of the formless immanent field of matter which the Old Ones bring, here's our friend Nick

"In contrast to the pompous declarations of the orthodoxies, which come from on high (like a stroke of the whip), an infernal message of subterranean, a whipser from the nether-regions of discourse, since 'hell is certainly below'. Just as the underworld is not a hidden world - a real or true - but is that hidden by all worlds, so it the crypt-mutter form hell something other than an inverted scene, concept, or belief. In their infernal lineaments words are passages, leading into and through lost mazes, and not edifications... Poetry does not strut logically amongst convictions, it seeps through crevices; a magmic flux resuscitated amongst vermin. If it was not that the Great Ideas had basements, fissures, and vacuoles, poetry would never infest them. Faiths rise and fall, but the rats persist." Nick Land, Shamanic Nietzsche in "Fanged Noumena" 2011
[interestingly enough, especially considering the distinct possibility that Reza is not actually a person, or at least not the person he supposed to be, while searching to see if this essay was online so I wouldnt have to copy the whole quote form the book I found it pretty much verbatim, yet uncited in an essay by a man called "Adrian Gargett", then when I looked up his name i found this. A little more looking found that he is now a photographer with a different name here though I wouldn't be all that surprised to find out that he is actually Nick Land himself.]

While I have the book out, here is something else from Fanged Noumena that is relevant:
"The sublimity evoked by an experience is in direct proportion to the devastation it wrecks upon the imagination. Because the pain resulting from the defeat of the imagination, or the animal part of the mind, is the tension that propels the mind as a whole into the rapture of the sublime experience. Sublime pleasure is the experience of the impossibility of experience, an intuition of that part of the self that exceeds intuition by means of an immolating failure of intuition. The sublime is only touched upon as pathological disaster" - Delighted to Death

Which is essentially what we were describing earlier in terms of the lovecraftian horror in-comprehendible immensity of the real. However, the previous Land quote, (as well as the rest of that essay) develops the author’s (and Negarestani’s) position against this, which following from Bataille, see reason’s joy at violence toward the imagination as a tyrannical oppression which underpins the horror of modernity. Which leads neatly to Masciandaro, particularly this interview which features some nice stuff on the Sublime. I’m particularly interested in the stuff on rock climbing as relating to Bad and True Infinity (from the trison link). Being quite heavily into bouldering myself, the only way I can effectively climb is to think in terms of the immediate, atemporal moment. To think of the end hold or indeed the notion of grades and routes - which is something I think is not being addressed by Masciandaro- is have a duality of form (language) and matter (the screaming failing body). I'm really uncomfortable about seeing climbing as the romantic conquest of nature by the will. better to see it as it is, ones skin and skeleton forming a network with the rock, with the upward direction being more or less arbitrary (which is suggested at by his "ultimate bouldering problem" idea, but I think movement is a part which is missing from that model). Not wrestling but training. This for me, resounds with the fluid and infinite immanence of things like “leper creativity”.

I'll go read some more of the book now.

deadken posted:
re: horizontality, i thought one of the key points in negarestani was of not thinking in terms of horizontal planes but of holey and deformed spaces, he writes that with the plane of consistency d&g betrayed radical thought.... every supposed horizontality also contains a within or submerged that is the source of horror.... surely horror is that which is not immanent but not transcendent either, something which is present but submerged, an abject sensation of that which is both here and elsewhere...... iono

i think what we're talking here is in terms of a conceptual model of the speculative physics engaged in by lovecraft in reza, that horizontality is in terms of their anarchic / non-hierarchical universal model as opposed to Superabound's suggestion of higher & lower order universes (and consequentially the concept of a 'false' reality below a 'real' one), horizontality in terms of structural arrangement and organizational principle rather than a liter horizontality. lovecraft & reza's speculative realities are full of cracks and holes, a flux of matter submerging into each other and gradually emerging, there is no transcendence because upwards movement is impossible. there are holes, deformed spaces, but falling through them doesnt send you to lower state, or lower order universe, it sends you into another swerve ... the geometry isn't euclidian

so there you have lovecraft, and then bataille, but you also actually get althusser, actually (who is of course fundamental to our pals zizek, badiou & co, what i was thinking of previously as a platonic/aristotelian divide to our buddy reza, obviously distinct philosophical projects but at the same time intertwined)

Epicurus tells us that, before the formation of the world, an infmity of atoms were falling parallel to each other in the void. They still are. This implies both that, before the formation of the world, there was nothing, and also that all the elements of the world existed from all eternity, before any world ever was. It also implies that, before the for­ mation of the world, there was no Meaning, neither Cause nor End nor Reason nor Unreason. The non-anteriority of Meaning is one of Epicurus' basic theses, by virtue of which he stands opposed to both Plato and Aristotle. Then the clinamen supervenes. I shall leave it to the specialists to decide who introduced the concept of the clinamen, present in Lucretius but absent from the fragments of Epicurus. The fact that this concept was 'introduced' suggests that it proved indispen­ sable, if only on reflection, to the 'logic' of Epicurus' theses. The clinamen is an infmitesimal swerve, 'as small as possible'; 'no one knows where, or when, or how' it occurs, IQ or what causes an atom to 'swerve' from its vertical fall in the void, and, breaking the parallelism in an almost negligible way at one point, induce an encounter with the atom next to it, and, from encounter to encounter, a pile-up and the birth of a world - that is to say, of the agglomeration of atoms induced, in a chain reaction, by the initial swerve and encounter.
The idea that the origin of every world, and therefore of all reality and all meaning, is due to a swerve, and that Swerve, not Reason or Cause, is the origin of the world, gives some sense of the audacity of Epicurus' thesis. What other philosophy has, in the history of philo­ sophy, defended the thesis that Swerve was originary, not derived? We must go further still. In order for swerve to give rise to an encounter from which a world is born, that encounter must last; it must be, not a 'brief encounter', but a lasting encounter, which then becomes the basis for all reality, all necessity, all Meaning and all reason. But the encounter can also not last; then there is no world. What is more, it is clear that the encounter creates nothing of the reality of the world, which is nothing but agglomerated atoms, but that it corifers their realiry upon the atoms themselves, which, without swerve and encounter, would be nothing but abstract elements, lacking all consistency and existence. So much so that we can say that the atoms' very existence is due to nothing but the swerve and the encounter prior to which they led only a phantom existence.
All this may be stated differently. The world may be called the accom­ plishedfact in which, once the fact has been accomplished, is established the reign of Reason, Meaning, Necessity and End . But the accomplishment qf thefact is just a pure effect of contingency, since it depends on the aleatory encounter of the atoms due to the swerve of the clinamen. Before the accomplishment of the fact, before the world, there is only the non-accomplishment qf thefact, the non-world that is merely the unreal existence of the atoms.
What becomes of philosophy under these circumstances? It is no longer a statement of the Reason and Origin of things, but a theory of their contingency and a recognition offact, of the fact of contin­ gency, the fact of the subordination of necessity to contingency, and the fact of the forms which 'gives form' to the effect of the encounter. It is now no more than observation : there has been an encounter, and a 'crystallization' of the elements with one another (in the sense in which ice 'crystallizes'). All question of Origin is rejected, as are all the great philosophical questions: 'Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the origin of the world? What is the world's raison d'etre? What is man's place in the ends of the world?' and so on. I repeat: what other philosophy has, historically, had the audacity to entertain such theses?

which is really wonderful, imo, i need to read more althusser to understand fully the implications of this. more bataille, too ...

deadken posted:
im taking this class on literature and the urban focusing on los angeles and it could be really interesting to consider urban geography in terms of ( )hole complex i think

yea, it is really interesting, i was approaching it before here, but thats warfare oriented, there are more things to say

deadken posted:
haha i just noticed that the Enemy always sequesters itself in holes, like even when bin laden was living in a two-storey house near Abbotabad everyone kinda assumed he was hiding out in some cave somewhere, any holey opposition to the flat plane is conceived of as intrinsically evil

haha maybe so, for the purpose of delusions, but you're forgetting the gog-magog axis, jihadists fight for horizontality as much as any western technocapitalists. you kno mohamed atta wrote his masters thesis as a critique on the introduction of western skyscrapers in the middle east?

discipline posted:
that's amazing, life is so weird and perfect sometimes, how can you not believe in god

Why is that weird, if anything it makes perfect sense and he just applied the theory of the subject he was interested in to real life. It would be weirder if he’d written his thesis about donkey farming or something.

hail satan

deadken posted:
it could be argued that 9/11 was already implicit in the architecture of the wtc, that 9/11 represents an architectural shift ultimately precipitated by the building itself and not external factors

this is ultimately true i think

jools posted:

deadken posted:
it could be argued that 9/11 was already implicit in the architecture of the wtc, that 9/11 represents an architectural shift ultimately precipitated by the building itself and not external factors

this is ultimately true i think

the short-skirt rape argument applied to the urban form, i like the way you guys think here