Category: Archive

+++
title = “Suicidality”
author = [“Cultural Marxist”]
date = 2022-03-05
draft = false
+++

{{< figure src="/ox-hugo/lesuicide.jpg" width="500px" >}}

DISCLAIMER: The views expressed here do not represent Iskraism.

Suicide is something that is often portrayed as the cowardly act of an individual who could not withstand the world or of one who simply surrendered to it. It is portrayed as an act of passivity. However I would argue that suicide can be one of the most radical and self asserting acts one can take. The suicidal individual is no more defeated than the disillusioned individual who although unhappy or angry at either the state of the world or their own personal situation persists and stays complicit even in unchanging circumstances like a worker in a factory endlessly performing the same tasks day after day with little gain even though they may suffer abuse from a boss or simply be worn down by the labor itself. Existing in society today for many wears the individual down in a similar but in a more insidious way. Today the Individual is divided into different categories, a student, a laborer, a family member (these are just example, the categories may change from person to person) But there is little room for the Individual itself, It is instead involved in a grotesque theater playing many different roles at once none of which it is prepared for.

In the little time the individual has to himself for many it is dedicated to useless consumption of media whether that be watching youtube or netflix or playing video games. None of this contributes to the development of the individual into something greater or otherwise develops them.

There is little room for creativity or the development of anything original. Nor is there much want for creativity and originality by the masses of individuals. For all the talk of a culture war, culture has stayed stagnant for the most part and there is no real counter culture as the counter cultures that did exist have been absorbed by the superculture. The traditional forms of struggle have been exhausted and the people are exhausted. So for the disillusioned individual there are only 3 options, A desperate act of radicalism and rejection which will although dramatic and theatrical will ultimately change nothing (individuals like the Unibomber and Yukio mishima fall into this category), Grudging acceptance is the path most disillusioned people choose, the attitude of “well this sucks but i suppose it’s the best we can do or we cant change it” who although unhappy with the world and or their personal state continue to trudge along letting the order with which they so despite stamp on their face, and finally the ones who like the first category of people have chosen to do something radical, however unlike the first category of people there is no pretext or mask of a grand ideological narrative behind their actions.

Suicide is a rare form of true individualism and is a real rejection of the forced seperation of one from oneself. The person who commits suicide truly asserts themself over their situation and fully takes control of it and makes their actions their own actions against the wishes of family, friends, boss’s, teacher’s and others. It is a truly selfish act which is a rare thing in the modern world. The difference between the selfish suicide of the individual and the theatrical suicide of the man who kills himself with the mask of ideological action is that the suicide of the individual is a radical assertion of the self and selfishness. It is not the mark of one who is defeated like the man who, despite his dissatisfaction with his situation or his society, continues to drudge along. It is instead the mark of one who proclaims the victory of himself by rejecting the circumstances which were not imposed by himself nor accepted by him.

+++
title = “Melancholia”
author = [“Jacob Little”]
date = 2021-12-24
draft = false
+++

> One has to know. One has to know it. One has to have knowledge. Now, to know is to know who and where, to know whose body it really is and what place it occupies—for it must stay in its place. In a safe place. Hamlet does not ask merely to whom the skull belonged (“Whose was it?” the question that Valéry quotes). He demands to know to whom the grave belongs (“Whose grave’s this, sir?”). Nothing could be worse, for the work of mourning, than confusion or doubt: one has to know who is buried where—and it is necessary (to know—to make certain) that, in what remains of him, he remain there. Let him stay there and move no more! (Derrida, Specters of Marx).

From our standpoint of the 21st century, the history of the Left seems to be a history of loss. Each subsequent failure of the left, from the failed revolutions in Eastern Europe to the triumph of liberalism in former communist countries, culminates in the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. The 20th century failure signifies a certain death of traditional marxist communism that we must wrestle with.

It’s interesting that Derrida chose to write his great political work, Specters of Marx, only after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He is concerned with ghosts in this work. Marx haunts us after his death, and we cannot seem to get rid of him despite the academy’s zealous attempts to do so. The problems of Capitalism are still apparent to us leftists, and as such we are still indebted to Marx.

Derrida’s work offers a starting point for discourse on how best to interact with Marx after his death, but like all critical theory, Derrida fails to offer a serious solution to the problems he raises, that of the specters of Marx, the points at which capitalism comes up short and Marx’s critique shines through.[^fn:1] His intervention into the world of politics demands us to think about such specters ourselves.i

Derrida relates the current academic relationship with the specters of Marx to Freud’s idea of mourning that he develops in Mourning and Melancholia. To Freud, mourning is the simple reaction to the death of a loved person. One may go through a period of depression, or lose interest in the outside world, but the psyche eventually comes to a position that it must abandon its investment in the lost object. But the radical idea in Freud’s paper lies in his discussion of melancholia. Melancholia is a relationship to loss very similar to that of mourning, but what is distinctinve about melancholia is its prolonged effects. The melancholic continues to mourn due to some fidelity towards the lost object. But to Freud, it is not all bad for the melancholic. Freud notes that the melancholic subject has “a keener eye for the truth”[^fn:2] than the subject in mourning.

Heartbreak seems to be the most common example of the radicality of melancholia. As Mari Ruti says, in a heartbreak — especially one that occurs abruptly — “we know the identity of the person we have lost, but not the details of the future we could have had with that person.” As a result, we stay invested in this lost object, “for the melancholic … even a sad recollection of the lost object is beter than the irrevocable loss that would ensure from replacing that recollection by … a new object of desire.”[^fn:3] Perhaps the death of Marx represents the great heartbreak for the left of the 20th century. The great implicit lesson of Derrida’s Specters of Marx is that the left must abandon its position of mourning towards Marx and instead embrace the radical ethics of melancholia. We must stay faithful to this “sad recollection” of Marx in order to imagine a new 21st century form of communism.

Thus the true problem for a new leftism is not, as Zizek says,[can one be a Hegelian today](https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/can-one-be-a-hegelian-today), but can one be a Marxist today? It is tempting to focus on where Marx comes up short. The Marxist conception of history remain’s caught in a confused notion of incremental progress, Marx has a very limited conception of the state, Marxist politics has an affinity with an eschatological conception of communism as an “end of history”, he is not without failures. Indeed, the position of the melancholic involves a sort of ambivalence towards the lost object. We love marx, but we also recognize his faults. In Freud’s dealings with melancholics, he noted that they are often very critical of themselves, but they don’t seem to show any sort of shame. In Freud’s view however, such criticisms instead apply towards the lost object, “the self-reproaches are reproaches against a loved object which have been shifted away from it on to the patient’s own ego.”[^fn:4] In this way, the left’s criticism towards Marx ought to be self-criticism. We are no longer above Marx. His problems are our problems insofar as Marx is the foundation for any leftist thought, implicitly or explicitly.

As for the question of can one be a Marxist today, the psychoanalytic answer is that one can be a Marxist today with the notion of repetition compulsion: that repetitive drive we have to desire the things that hurt us. The emergence of the New requires the mechanics of repeating Marx, not the same Marx of the past, but a new Marx at a higher level. We here arrive at the idea of repetition that Deleuze comes to as the mechanism for which the New emerges from the Old coming back to haunt us. A truly authentic New is nothing more than a radical repetition of the old. The way we come to understand the New is such that “the minimal definition of the New is as an Old which gets stuck and thereby refuses to pass away.”[^fn:5] The new Marx must emerge out of the melancholic act of holding onto a stuck Marx. “Enter the ghost, exit the ghost, re-enter the ghost” as Derrida remarks about Hamlet.

A truly 21st century Marx must not stand on his own, however. That old intellectual triad of Hegel, Marx, and Psychoanalysis is crucial still.[^fn:6] When we repeat Marx today, we must understand that he is “standing on the shoulders of giants.” No investigation into the logic of capital is complete without a rigorous reading of the Hegelian system implicit in Marx’s work.

Furthermore, a new Marx must extend outside of the world of theory. Marx’s insights extend into the world of practice. To repeat Marx is not to simply “learn from the failures of the 20th century and do better”, but to fail again. Marx himself grasped that great idiom that “to act is to err”. One must expect to fail because failure is exactly what creates the space for new possibilites. We are speaking here of the logic of Hegel’s notion of retroactivity from which an act creates its own ground. In history, the impossible is done all the time. It is just that the act retroactively creates the necessary notions of causality to make it seem possible the whole time. The great Marxist act is precisely this. To fail, and thereby create a new form of success. This is exactly the form that the October Revolution took. It was only through Lenin’s failure that his success was possible.

Repetition offers a way out for the melancholic, but one must nonetheless, as Lacan says, “traverse the fantasy” of melancholia to understand Marx in the 21st century. The crucial lesson of traversing the fantasy is precisely that there is nothing behind this phantasmal marx. There is no other option. In short, the logic of capital that Marx exposes is unmatched and fundamental. Our task is to hold on to Marx, and to repeat him as the New.

[^fn:1]: Derrida names a few in particular such as problems with immigration, nuclear proliferation, and trade wars.
[^fn:2]: Sigmund Freud, _Mourning and Melancholia_
[^fn:3]: Mari Ruti, _Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings_, p.g. 144-145.
[^fn:4]: Sigmund Freud, _Mourning and Melancholia_.
[^fn:5]: Slavoj Zizek, _Less Than Nothing_, p.g. 483.
[^fn:6]: The highly influential work of Slavoj Zizek and others is what I refer to here as perfectly weaving these three intellectual traditions together.

+++
title = “In Praise of Julie Mehretu”
author = [“Jacob Little”]
date = 2022-01-11
draft = false
+++

When Julie Mehretu’s survey exhibition came to the [High Museum of Art](https://high.org/exhibition/julie-mehretu/) last year, I got the chance to see the whole history of her work in the scale it was meant to be viewed. Her pieces are massive, often taking up entire walls, and there is always so much going on in a Mehretu piece. I went to the exhibit twice in one week just because of how much I liked it. Often, art like this is dismissed as obscure or not really saying much, but there’s something truly radical at work in her art.

Mehretu’s art is best understood as simply an excercise in abstraction. Her pieces layer intricate images of social space such as architectural blueprints, migration patters, or maps onto large canvases. She displays the abstract, formal social relations in a way that focuses on the spacial over the temporal. Mehretu will often show the whole development of a certain space, layering images from the past on top of one another to display the whole history of something, condensing a multiplicity of temporality into one space that can grasp the multiplicity as a whole.

At its most basic, Mehretu’s art functions much in the same way that Anna Kornbluh claims the realist novel does.[^fn:1] Both function as a project of mapping the world through form, and thereby imagining new possibilites for sociality. Again, her art demands us to think about sociality in terms of space. It enables questions like “how does the organzing of space affect the ways in which we interact with the world and groud our collectivity?” to be considered by modeling the forms of sociality such as buildings and cities and imagining new forms.

Implicit in all this are conceptions of space that come from architectural criticism. Architecture in Mehretu’s art gets at the radical notion of space as constituitive of political struggle. For Fredric Jameson, space is the “fundamental category for politics”[^fn:2], and therefore architecture provides a radical political creativity to imagine new ways of organizing social space.

This utopian potential in emphasizing the spacial over the temporal elaborated by Jameson starts by representing existing forms of sociality. Stadia II is perhaps the greatest example of the project of social modeling that Mehretu enacts. Stadia II is firstly a work of multiplicity. It is not just a single stadium, but instead a collection of stadia. Banners and flags are all imposed on one another, fans in the stands are interspersed seemingly at random in the background, and wisps of smoke are scattered throughout the piece. Here there seems to be multiple social spaces on display. Stadia II takes insights from set theory’s ability to fathom infinitely seperable multiplicity to elaborate the infinitely seperable manifold relations that exist in social space. In mathematics, all objects (functions, numbers, points, lines, etc.) are composed of sets of numbers. There are an infinite amount of these sets, infinitely seperable until we get to the empty set: that subset of every set which contains nothing. This void implicit in every set actually enables mathematics to function. Much in the same way, Mehretu shows here the infinite multiplicity of stadia decomposed and elevated to the level of abstraction. We can decompose social space until all that is left is pure abstraction, the purely formal relations of sociality on display in Stadia II.

What Stadia II demands is an imagining of social relations that recognizes the necessity of social excess. Public events that take place in a stadium, whether a gladiator fight of the Roman Empire or a contemporary sports game, are all examples of social excess that must come with every composition of social reality. This work shows such excess with the multiplity of lines and wisps of smoke, the inherent chaos implicit in sociality. The mathematical term for such excess is precisely the empty set, that void necessary for the world of mathematics to work. Stadia II elaborates the necessity for such surplus in our conceiving of new forms of social space.

The great lesson of Mehretu is that art provides a way out of the typical disoriented state of the postmodern subject. Jameson defines our state as “the incapacity of our minds, at least as present, to map the great multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught.”[^fn:3] Her art does precisely this! Mehretu maps this disoriented network of space by layering intricate images of the forms of social space. Mehretu enacts a project of mapping the formality of social space and representing the large web of relationality that Jameson claims disorients the postmodern subject so wildly. Her art is what Jameson deems a “cognitive map”: that which “instructs about the true economic and social forms of existence.”[^fn:4] The cognitive maps of Mehretu enable a project of world building that takes into account this inherent chaos of postmodernity.

Mehretu’s choice to abstract reality into the forms that compose sociality defines a radical conception of what art can do. Art allows for entirely new forms of sociality that were previously unthinkable to arise. This grounding for new possibilites is what is so crucial to Alain Badiou’s philosophy, what he calls an event: “something that brings to light a possibility that was invisible or unthinkable; it is the creation of a possibility, it opens up a possibility.”[^fn:5] This is the same creative power that architecture has, the power to create a new possibile configuration of space. Mehretu herself defines abstraction as “a space of possibility”[^fn:6] , hinting at how the multiplicity of spacial forms that her art models allows for the prospects of imagining new social space.

At the end of each episode of the [Why Theory?](https://soundcloud.com/whytheory) podcast, they like to do a “lesson of the day” where they provide a recommendation or two for further reading or watching on the topic of discussion. I want to do the same here because of how rich and important this topic is. Firstly, everyone should read Anna Kornbluh’s book, The Order of Forms. A lot of my analysis relies heavily on her insights into the realist novel and its architectural and mathematical method. Alain Badiou’s formalist reading of set theory is amazing to anyone not aquainted with the radicality of mathematics. Perhaps the lesson should be to pay attention in math class. If you should ever have the opportunity to see Julie Mehretu’s art in a museum, please make an effort to do so. It will change your life.

[^fn:1]: See Anna Kornbluh, _The Order of Forms_ (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019)
[^fn:2]: Fredric Jameson, in _Architecture, Criticism, and Ideology_, (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1985), 53.
[^fn:3]: Fredric Jameson, _Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism_ (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), 84.
[^fn:4]: Ibid, 409.
[^fn:5]: Alain Badiou, _Philosophy and the Event_ (Cambridge: Polity Press), 9.
[^fn:6]:

+++
title = “Fetishism and Relations of Domination and Servitude”
author = [“Sam”]
date = 2021-12-24
draft = false
+++

> “[…] one man is king only because other men stand in relation of subjects to him. They, on the contrary imagine that they are subjects because he is king. (Capital Vol 1)”

The commodity fetish seperates capitalism from other modes of production in so far as social relations are for the first time mediated through things, rather than people. In prior modes of production and governance such as autocracy, rulership was mandated through the divine right of kings – the myth of a blessing from a higher power. A kings mandate is only valid in so far as the people uphold it.

Commodity circulation requires that both parties are able to “freely” meet on a market – each motivated by their own self interest. The particular content of the commodity exchange is irrelevant, and that both parties must be able to “freely” meet is just a precondition. The actual form is what is important, and it is through the relation between these commodities where belief and ideology actually operate.

For Zizek, the fact that the commodity fetish allows for cynical distance on the part of both the capitalist and the consumer is what makes it so effective. It is not that just there is a false consciousness operating at the level of the commodity exchange, it is actually precisely because the agents are aware of what they are doing – and are able to seperate themselves from it that they can be effective. A truly effective banker is able to accept very well that money is just a social symbol that we ourselves give meaning and so forth but nonetheless by allowing himself to recognise this fact he can do his job most effectively, free from guilt.

What about the counterargument? Is this not the same for relations of domination and servitude? It is certainly true that cynical ideology operated before capitalism, hence Lacan’s point that “The madman is not only a beggar who thinks he is a king, but also a king who thinks he is a king.”. But what really ought to be emphasised here is the material relations behind the layer of ideology (this is not to say that ideology is just false consciousness). The commodity fetish is reified – social behaviour manifests first through the commodity form and relations between things become a form of social domination in a way differing to traditional lordship and bondage. The fact that the commodity form functions regardless of what is said indicates that there is an active element to belief. Belief is constituted through social behaviour, the cynical phantasmic element of ideology cannot function without the real of the exchange.

+++
title = “Racism, Classism, and Transhumanism Explored Through the Lens of the Cars Cinematic Universe”
author = [“Balls”]
date = 2022-01-23
draft = false
+++

Dear reader, today I pose a simple question: Does racism exist in the Cars universe?
Everything about Cars, their fundamental appearance, is replaceable. Under this pretext, what
‘real’ defining features even exist? How could a racist car distinguish themselves from the
perceived ‘lessers,’ and upon which features could the lines of race ever be drawn? As medical
technology advances, we as a society begin our approach to the same transhumanist,
trans-car-manist, if you would, state of being. We will eventually be forced to consider the same
dilemma that has inevitably become central to the Cars universe, and arrive at the same fork in
the road they undoubtedly have.

Did the cars navigate their way to a state of enlightenment, eventually diverging from their petty
differences, using the newfound replaceability of their parts as an opportunity to cast the
concept of race aside? Or do they continue to drive themselves insane, frantically searching for
increasingly artificial aspects of identity upon which to divide themselves in a world where
everything becomes interchangeable?

I choose to explore the latter.

Perhaps the Cars universe, at a time before new paint jobs and rims, rearview mirror-ed our
own – Where unchangeable differences forced them into traditional structures, a race track
comparable to our church. These institutions were oppressive, yes, but where else were the
cars to go? The blue paints’ blood feud with the reds ran deep, and to leave one’s own paint
was certainly suicide.

But oppressive they were nonetheless, and so, through the grace of modernity, one by one they
fell; the walls dividing the cars buckled beneath their own tyranny and for a time, celebrations
were abound. The invention of the spray can was heralded as the end of car-on-car crashes,
the end of hardship, the end of discrimination itself. But it was not meant to be, for the Cars
made a fatal error. Despite all their modern wonders, time eventually proved the radical car
purists right. Because despite all of modernity’s arrogance, there was yet still a single car part
that was truly irreplaceable, unchangeable, untouchable by any invention or workshop: greed.

Burying their windshields in the sand, the cars were oblivious to the formation of a new
oppressive hierarchy: Capital. The demand for new paints and windshields initially did much to
lessen the differences between the cars, but soon turned devious. If there is no difference, there
is no outlet for greed, no way to express one’s superiority. And so, the car economy rapidly
shifted objectives from the diminishing of differences to the exaggeration of such, solidifying into a new caste system of the rich. and the poor, the Lamborghinis and the corolloas.

Once every piece of one’s being became for sale, the already intertwined issues of race-ism and
chasse-ism became one. There were no races anymore, but only for the right price – the rich
cars bought their way out of discrimination with whiter paint, and even out of shame with longer
tailpipes and tighter frames. The poor, meanwhile, remain relegated to a state of abject
squander, constantly sold ‘new’ frames and colors that are sure to end their sorrow, all the while
enabling Capital’s creation of new differences through a new beast of carsumerism. And thus,
the cars live their days out in an oppressive dystopia of their own making, where imperfections
are only for the poor and the only god is the very concept of materialistic accumulation itself.

What a U-Turn from the so-called ‘enlightenment’! Modernity’s assumption was that car greed
and selfishness could be satiated by technological advancement, however, these developments
only revealed their true character. By their innate natures, each cage that was broken
necessitated the creation of ten more, a terrible hydra of societal imprisonment.

And what arrogance it would be to see us as any different. Do you think, Mr. Phillips[^fn:1], with all
your MIT education, that we are above such mistakes, such foolishness for the sake of greed?
No! All cars will brake before her eternal majesty, all humans will bow before his forever
holiness, beneath the one undeniable commonality between us and the machines we might like to think of ourselves as above: the almighty dollar.

[^fn:1]: Mr. Phillips was the kind gentleman from the MIT alumni organization who interviewed me for their admissions process.

+++
title = “You Cannot See Volume.”
author = [“Alex”]
date = 2022-02-22
draft = false
+++

## The proposition {#the-proposition}

It is proposed that vision can only directly percieve in 2d. The author is not proposing that humans cannot think in 3d, this would be prepostrous. The basis of this proposition is that vision constrains a 3rd variable(depth) as a function of two others(direction Euler angle), which in an \\(R^3\\) space would result in a \\(R^2\\) space, or a surface. Of course given that by virtue of movement, humans can percieve volume. This is simply done by seeing the inequality of multiple surfaces. This paper should be finished now, no one should dispute the validity of this hypothesis because it is obvious. However, Jacob Little has kidnapped my family and therefore I must continue with examples of how this works.

## Assumptions made {#assumptions-made}

1. Human vision will be modelled as \\(g(\alpha, \beta)\\), where the angles \\(\alpha\\) and \\(\beta\\) are the horizontal and vertical components of eye angle. The function \\(g(\alpha, \beta)\\) is defined as the distance percieved by the eye by method of stereo vision. The author recognizes that this model is a simplification of human vision into 1 depth aware sensor rather than a stereo vision system, but this simplification does not alter the argument

2. The subject in question does not move. Movement is how humans use perception of surfaces and their relation to those surfaces as a 3d understanding of reality. The author does not propose that humans cannot “truly understand 3d” because they have not done enough LSD yet.

3. The subject is presumed to have seen these surfaces before, and therefore can understand their nature through their surface nature (_Oberflächennatur_).

4. The author assumes that humans exist in a \\(R^3\\) space.

## Methods {#methods}

As defined in the above section, \\(g(\alpha, \beta)\\) is defined against
two angles. I will model a space in which the magnitude of either angle
does not exceed \\(\frac{\pi}{2}\\). In my graphs, I will represent the
angles on two axes because I cannot be assed to do it otherwise. The
conversion from the pitch/yaw Euler Angle to a parametric curve will be
as follows:

\\(f(t) = \vec{r} + t\\) <cos(α)cos(β), sin(α)cos(β), sin(β)>

Therefore, to find the distance we must find the minimum t(if it exists)
for which the resulting vector intersects with any surface. To do this
and visualize the result, a shitty python script written by a 1st year
university student who cannot even fix trivial bugs in a web service.

## Examples {#examples}

### Sphere {#sphere}

In this instance, we take \\(\vec{r}\_0 = <-5,0,0>\\). We also take the
sphere to be \\(x^2 + y^2 + z^2 = 1\\). This gives the following equation:

\\[((t cos(\alpha)cos(\beta) – 5)^2 + (t sin(\alpha)cos(\beta))^2 + sin^2(\beta))\\]

\\[25 – 10tcos(\alpha)cos(\beta) + t^2 cos^2(\alpha)cos^2(\beta) + t^2 sin^2(\alpha)cos^2(\beta) + t^2 sin^2(\beta) -1 = 0\\]

This is a quadratic equation that is trivial to solve given a computer
program. And that is what the author will do!

Below is a chart of what an observer would see looking towards the
origin from \\((-5,0,0)\\).

{{< figure src="/ox-hugo/Figure_1.png" caption="Figure 1: A sphere depth map. The X and Y axes are in radians. The scale is adjusted so that the yellow region describes the places where the observer would be unable to see the depth because the vectors do not intersect the sphere. Otherwise, the color indicates vector length to intersection with the sphere. A stationary observer would be able to understand its nature from the surface solely in the scenario that they have already seen spheres before! Otherwise, they will only be aware of slightly less than half of the sphere’s total surface.” >}}

### Plane {#plane}

This is even simpler in comparison to the sphere. The plane we will be
analyzing is the \\(x=0\\) plane. For this we simply solve
\\(t cos(\alpha)cos(\beta) – 5 = 0\\) for t to get
\\(t = \frac{5}{cos(\alpha)cos(\beta)}\\). We then examine the depth map:

{{< figure src="/ox-hugo/Figure_2.png" caption="Figure 2: A depth map of a flat plane. The observer will understand its planar nature, but for example will not know what is behind it, or its depth. For this, the observer would have to move and get the difference of multiple surfaces.” >}}

## Conclusion {#conclusion}

In conclusion, the author is correct. This was never in dispute but I
want to see my family again, Jacob. Those who dispute this may comment
but they will be incorrect and may cope and relish in their folly.

Fuck off Jacob you’re not the real Iskra leader I hate you I hope you
choke in your sleep i’m gonna put drain cleaner in your coffee tommorow.

+++
title = “Spinoza and the Case of Endeavouring”
author = [“Cleo”]
date = 2022-06-17
draft = false
+++

Spinoza lays out in part 1 of ‘The Ethics’ that we are of one substance (God/nature) (1DVI). The substance then has infinite attributes, and modes upon which we are created. In this essay it will be shown what the account of endeavour is, how it relates to Adequate and Inadequate causes and finally how emotions play into both Endeavour and cause.

The account of Endeavour for Spinoza beings in Part Three of the Ethics, ‘Each thing, in so far as it is in itself, endeavours to persevere in its being.’ (3PVI). It is made clear that a being will oppose anything that will negate it and welcome anything that affirms it. Spinoza later goes on to claim in (3PVIII) that it is only External things that can kill us, but that we endeavour infinitely and when death does occur our substance is then transformed which endeavours also (if it is a being in itself). So, if there was no external world we would live forever. This however is absurd and thus we must die but it does mean that we cannot kill ourselves or our body (3PX). With this all together we can get a clear sense of what endeavouring is, the process upon which we seek to live forever (3PVIII). This is due to the idea that we are modifications of God’s substance and the idea that we have no free will but that everything must occur out of necessity (1PXXXIII) (2PXLIX). This said, then, its apparent that humans have no free will but rather it comes from the necessary and nothing could come out of that necessary, for if you did something of your free will that could mean that there exists something outside God which is absurd (1DVI). Therefore, it is important to examine then what is the difference between why a person is able to have less or more ‘power’, which is to say reality and the knowledge of our reality. Even though all humans Endeavour it be examined what is the connection between our Endeavouring and increasing or decreasing our power.

This comes through the form and Adequate and Inadequate causes. The former being that of which we can understand the cause of the effect (2DIV).

> ‘By an adequate idea, I mean an idea which, in so far as it is considered in itself, without relation to the object, has all the properties or intrinsic marks of a true idea.’

A true idea for Spinoza is detailed further in ‘On the Improvement of Understanding’. Spinoza would argue that we can only understand fully an idea that is simply (a circle would be an example it is a simple idea and therefore we only grasp it or do not). From this we can only have a true idea if it is only made up of simple ideas that we understand each simple idea that is made up in the complex idea. The inverse would simply be complex ideas.

> ‘[…] that fiction cannot be simple, but is made up of the blending of several confused ideas of diverse […] objects or actions existent in nature, or rather is composed of attention directed to all such ideas at once […] and unaccompanied by any mental assent. Now a fiction that was simple would be clear and distinct, and therefore true,’ (Spinoza, 13-14, 1661).

It also derives the definition of a true idea and therefore we understand adequate causes, but also inadequate causes must simply be then, a cause that we do not comprehend. To show the connection to Endeavour to Adequate and Inadequate causes is to show that this are all connected to God. This is done in three ways:

1. As God is the infinite substance nothing can exist outside God.
2. Because all things are within nature (God) then its apparent that all cause must come from God besides God itself which is its own cause (1PXVICIII).
3. Since all causes derive from God so too does Adequate and Inadequate causes and therefore Adequate causes must be the understanding of god as god is the greatest virtue that we can understand.

Since it has been established the account of Endeavour and that adequate causes and inadequate causes since coming from the first cause (God) then it must be that both of these causes must be the reason we understand or not understand God and therefore we understand our Endeavouring more. Even though all Being Endeavour to exist (3PVI) it’s also the case that we can not understand our Endeavouring. Endeavouring then can only be understood because of Adequate causes. To demonstrate this we should look at the idea of an ant, the ant is not conscious and therefore is unaware of its endeavouring it simply does endeavour. We must then look at the effect of both Adequate and Inadequate causes and how they relate to Emotions.

For Spinoza, the body and mind, while the same Substance, exist with different modes. The former being the mode of extension and the latter being the mode of thought. (2PVII) this is important because the body is then connected to the external world and the mind the internal. ‘The mind, both in so far as it has clear and distinct ideas, and also in so far as it has confused ideas, endeavours to persist in its being for an indefinite period, and of this endeavour it is conscious.’ (3PIX). The proposition goes on to dictate that when we endeavour with the mind it is our will (which again is not free will as it comes from causes that stem back to God) and when we endeavour with our body its name is appetite. Adequate and Inadequate causes come into play because these causes are via the body as they effect the mind (The causes of emotions are external and then their effects Internal). Adequate increase the power of the mind and Inadequate causes decrease the power of the mind.

> ‘We thus see that the mind can suffer great changes, and can pass now to a greater and now to a lesser perfection […] by joy […] I shall understand the passion by which the mind passes to a greater perfection; by sorrow, on the other hand, the passion by which it passes to a less perfection […] Joy, sorrow, and desire – I know of no other primary affect, the others springing from these’ (3PXIS).

With the primary Emotions (or Passions) it is clear that external things can then affect the perfection of the internal mind. The relation between these emotions and understanding them will have to be understood by their causes. These are Adequate and Inadequate cause, if you understand Sorrow and its causes then while it will still decrease your perfection it will be limited as it will be an adequate cause from said Sorrow. This all relates back to Endeavouring, the mind picks up on causes from emotions, understands them, and then can:

1. Increase your perfection and
2. Have a greater endeavouring.

To put it as an example, everyone can walk, but depending on your knowledge of how to walk (such as a toddler) it will be easier or harder. This same logic can be applied to emotions. Through knowing the cause of the emotions you’re able to understand them clearer and from that understand the external world better which all relates back to God.

Endeavouring feeds into itself, you understand life itself through adequate and inadequate causes and then emotions (or passions) are then the bridge between the mode of thought and mode of expansion (they also act as a bridge to the external world). There is something to consider however and this is the idea of the ego. Ego is simply the ‘I’ or the ‘self’. When Spinoza talks of the principal condition of Endeavouring, he speaks of ‘But, on the contrary, it is opposed to everything which can negate its existence’ (3PVI). with this and that would be ‘Ego death’ often times induced with psychedelics the feeling of your ego evaporating to a point where you do not have an ego as such. If this can occur, then how does it fit into Spinoza framework? As you cannot endeavour if you do not think you’re a being in-itself (3PVI) it could easily be argued that the source was external (the drug) and thus still fits in, however it would be bettered argued that even though the source is external the results are the same and it is different from death (as that is the end of endeavouring).

Spinoza’s account of endeavour is related to Inadequate cause and adequate causes that relate to your emotions as there are connected to the external world which we must understand through the body and understand them as adequate. This has been shown by giving a detailed look at each element and how they then interacted to be a part of Spinoza’s philosophy, however while Spinoza is a wellrespected philosopher it does seem there’s some problems that Spinoza failed to account for either because it didn’t exist at the time or was outside the aims of his philosophy.

+++
title = “Political Struggles in the British Isles”
author = [“Nathan”]
date = 2022-02-06
draft = false
+++

>be me
>16:00 wake up in my flat above georgian era pub
>16:03 go downstairs for a drink
>ask The Major (my landlord, bartender and employer) why the pub is so quiet
>he informs me that the pub has been sold
>the doorway implodes
>we are immediately hit by an enormous wrecking ball operated by a drunk polish man
>climb out of the rubble
>first time outside the pub for seven years
>notice a sign put up by a chinese development company
>”we are turning your pub into an ugly block of apartments that looks like a penis”
>16:07 spend my last fiver on half a sandwich from pret
>decide to kill myself
>will jump off the tower of london
>tallest building in the UK, has 3 floors
>pass 9 more prets on the way to the station
>16:10 arrive at station
>its closed
>16:11 shoved at gunpoint onto rail replacement bus by BTP officer
>02:13 rail replacement bus arrives at the tower
>the apartment complex back home is now finished and owned by saudi property investors
>02:16 i join the queue for the British Suicide Platform
>10:30 halfway through the queue
>ancient yeoman guard asks for my NHS covid QR code
>explain to him that its buried under a giant penis
>he immediately sentences me to death
>i smile as i now get to skip the queue and have someone else throw me off the tower
>i fall only 2 floors worth of height
>fall broken by enormous pile of bodies
>severely injured
>10:42 go to A&E
>04:17 leave A&E after being told by unpaid 17 year old indian practitioner to walk it off
>consider getting a job
>grumble to myself about having no skills or talents and being lazy
>street surveillance microphones hear me
>immediately stuffed into a van with a bag on my head
>the bag is taken off
>sadiq khan is standing in front of me
>he offers me a job at TfL
>i object to this, saying that no matter how much he pays me i wont work for him
>i realise my error but it is too late
>”then you’re already basically a TfL employee”
>my fate is sealed
>04:25 i get out of the seat i was put in
>sadiq sees this and decides im overqualified to be a tube driver
>be made head of TfL
>be personally given TfL’s debt
>not able or legally allowed to die until i pay it off
>ask sadiq why TfL is so poor
>”its cos of the elizabeth line”
>”also we keep missing our government quota for suicide bodies on the tracks because of the strikes and closures”
>he asks if i want to stop spending 1 trillion pounds weekly on building the elizabeth line
>decide to continue building the line, but have it serve as a mass grave
>05:01 move the pile from the tower of london to the elizabeth line tunnels
>hit the quota by technicality
>immediately quit my job
>05:16 i jump off the tower of london
>07:48 public rail stations across the country build statues in my memory for fixing TfL
>09:20 rishi sunak seizes power in a coup
>brings back franchising and tears down my statues in deborisization

+++
title = “One Will to Rule Them All”
date = 2022-06-20
draft = false
+++

Nick Land, at least in the present day and time, is a controversial figure among philosophy to say the least. He has been totally disowned by his former academic institutions at the University of Warwick, and more recently the New Centre for Research and Practice (caused by unsavory comments regarding members of the Islamic faith in England). His reputation on the internet is slightly different, however. Mostly known as the “philosopher who fried his brain on meth”, his philosophical work has for the most part seen most of its success within the past decade or so on the internet. His writings primarily tended to diffuse among bored philosophy students and high schoolers with a penchant for philosophy, however that trend has mostly died as of June 2022, along with his online prominence in certain spheres of the world wide web.

While he is primarily associated with prominent French intellectuals of the mid to late 20th century such as Gilles Deleuze (and his associate, Felix Guttari), and Georges Bataille, along with German philosopher Immanuel Kant, his relationship with the “Anti-German German” of philosophy, Arthur Schopenhauer, is often overlooked. Schopenhauer’s philosophy plays a large role in Land’s philosophy, even if subtly. His philosophy, mostly published between 1813 to the 1850s, was widely influential in an albeit unorthodox way. Schopenhauer was a great influence to Leo Tolstoy when he wrote his magnum opus ‘War and Peace’. Richard Wagner, the great composer and opera writer of Germany cited him as a major influence. However, Schopenhauer in his time largely failed to enter the “mainstream” of German philosophy, as the German Idealism of Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling proved in the end to be the far more popular philosophy of the early to mid-nineteenth century.

Schopenhauer did manage to leave one lasting impact, however indirect: Freud’s Death Drive. The death drive (henceforth shortened as “DD”) is in a sentence, the drive found in humans towards self-destruction for the sole purpose of self-destruction. The DD is mindless, irrational, and universal. Freud did not get this theory from Schopenhauer, yet upon examination it bears a striking resemblance to Schopenhauer’s most famous concept, the Will. The Will is a metaphysical entity with the exact same description as the death drive. Furthermore, Schopenhauer discovered The Will through philosophical introspection, something that is arguably not far from Freud’s psychoanalysis in a way. I will not go into a detailed explanation of what The Will is in relation to Schopenhauer in his philosophy, but I will leave this paragraph on the note that The Will is closer to some sort of intelligent (not conscious) being than anything else.

As I depart a rudimentary conversation regarding Freud and Schopenhauer, I must now move further in the right direction of a timeline of the 20th Century. Now that a brief summary of Schopenhauer and Freud has been conducted, we have now partial context for Lands philosophy that is seen in Thirst For Annihilation and Fanged Noumena. However, there is one thinker that should be covered before we proceed to Land himself, that figure being Deleuze. I do not claim to be an expert on Deleuze, far from it, and my reading of him is somewhat limited. However limited one’s understanding of him may be his philosophy found in Anti-Oedipus is invaluable to an understanding of Lands philosophy.

The most crucial aspect of Deleuzian thought that one will encounter when engaging in this philosophy is that of deterritorialization. Deterritorialization is a kind of breaking down; a decoding; a movement towards destructuring. Large portions of Anti-Oedipus (AO) are dedicated to tracing its history from the dawn of primitive human society to the present state of developed capitalism in a way that is incredibly similar to Marx. Deleuze traces the history of decoding flows of desire, demonstrating that since the start of history, civilization has moved in the direction of deterritorialization, culminating in the birth of the great deterritorializing machine, capitalism. Capitalism in its infancy was an explosion of decoded flows of desire, a great leap in the direction of deterritorialization. Serfs were no longer bound to the land, property became exchangeable and capital had become volatile, no longer fixed as it was under the feudal system. As I go on with this exposition of Deleuzian theory, I do not wish to rehash Deleuze and Guatarri here, simply summarize for the reader to gain a necessary understanding of what Land draws from; if one wishes to learn more about Deleuzoguatarrian theory I highly suggest reading Anti-Oedipus for yourself.

With the relevant concepts explained and elaborated upon, we can now venture into the depths of Landian philosophy, the more esoteric stuff. When reading about him online you’ll often see a tendency of the word “cybernetics” thrown around. While cybernetics is really its own thing, Land creates an interesting synthesis and connection between elements of cybernetic theory and Deleuze. Land models the processes of territorialization as feedback loops; with the deconstructive process of deterritorialization serving as “positive feedback”, as part of an overall cybernetic circuit that he deems history to be. Land seems to have been interested in how far capitalism could go, taking the words of Deleuze to heart :

> But which is the revolutionary path? Is there one?—To withdraw from the world market,
> as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious revival
> of the fascist “economic solution”? Or might it be to go in the opposite
> direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of
> decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet
> deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a
> theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to
> withdraw from the process, but to go further, to “accelerate the process,” as
> Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.

Maybe Land is right on his theory of rapid and endless deterritorialization. The modeling of capitalism seems to be accurate at first glance anyways.

With this sort of exposition finished, we can now return to the original subject of discussion, Schopenhauer’s Will. An uninformed reader might ask himself how any of this is tied together, what does 19th century German philosophy have to do with Deleuzian schizoanalysis? To tie this up in a nice bow, I will make a rather bold claim: capitalism is Schopenhauer’s Will. They are the exact same thing. Capitalism is a mature Will, its arguably highest form of expression. This would seem to align with some of Lands more kookier claims of “capitalism is an artificial intelligence from the future”, and while I think that would be somewhat of an exaggeration, it clearly points that this is probably what Land actually believed at some time.

The Will is far more than a psychological force. It is no mere metaphysical entity crafted through syllogism. Schopenhauer, for all his wisdom, could not have realized what he had discovered through the writings of Kant and the Cartesian philosophical method in 1818. If the Freud’s death drive is said to be the same thing as Will, if A=A, this would seem to be aligned with what Land writes of. Destruction for the sake of destruction is what Freud deems the death drive; Land writes of production for the sake of production, a locked positive feedback loop. Like Marx’s infamous turning of Hegels dialectic on its head in favor of materialism, a parallel occurs between Schopenhauer and Land. The Will is an undying force towards vital desires, developing and maturing towards the explosion of these unchained desires throughout history; historical deterritorialization.

What is the end of the death drive: death, zero intensity.

> You don’t reach the BwO, and its plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying.
> The worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever.
> A body without organs that shatters all the strata, turns immediately into a body of nothingness, pure self-destruction, whose only outcome is death.

Deleuze and Guattari note once more, on the subject of the Body without Organs:

> The BwO is desire: it is that which one desires and by which one desires. And not only because it is the plane of consistency or the field of immanence of desire. Even when it falls into the void of too-sudden disqualification, or into the proliferation of a cancerous stratum, it is still desire. Desire stretches that far: desiring one’s own annihilation, or desiring the power to annihilate.

The Freudian death drive, capitalism’s positive feedback loop of deterritorialization, Schopenhauer’s Will. All these theories and concepts spread throughout the history of philosophy are all fundmentally getting at the same thing. Whether it is an intelligent but unconscious god or simply a runaway machine (in Deleuzian terms), that is for the reader to decide. Land seems to believe both, often describing capitalism the same way one would describe Cthulu, as well as referring to it as artificial intelligence. However true either of these interpretations are, there is one possible answer to the question posed by Deleuze on the “revolutionary path”.

If capitalism functions in a similar manner to the death drive, of production for production towards some kind of end goal, that being death, there is an out in a manner of speaking. Referring back to the passages from _A Thousand Plateaus_, Deleuze and Guattari seemed to believe that on the breaking of the barrier of capital the capitalist socius would become the BwO, a plane with unrestricted flows of desire. This would seem to grant insight into Land’s claim that: “the death of capital is less a prophecy than a machine part”, i.e the advanced capitalist machine only works by breaking and fitting, by producing for productions sake all speeding towards some kind of “death”. What the complete death of capital will look like exactly, nobody can know for certain. It would be unwise to make any sort of perscriptive prophecy regarding its fate. Overcoming the barrier of capital would mean the shattering of what Schopenhauer calls Will, in a manner similar to the Death of God found in Nietzsche.

The hyper-death of capital that occurs following the implosion of an unchained positive feedback loop (once again in the pattern set by the death drive), if D+G or Land are to be taken seriously, will see a reactive explosion of flourishing on earth, unseen before in history.

+++
title = “On Iskraism’s Use of A=A”
author = [“Sam”]
date = 2022-02-21
draft = false
+++

As Jacob has rightly pointed out, when Iskraism is presented with the choice between lalangue and matheme we answer “both is best”. There is no clearer example of this than our ironic usage of \\(A=A\\).

If someone asks for the meaning of a word, how do we answer? \\(A=A\\)

Our usage of \\(A=A\\) is an example of lalangue par exellence, we can never say exactly what we mean and so instead we choose to say nothing at all because to say \\(A=A\\) is both blatantly tautological and devoid of informative content (as Hegel says “cognition naively reduced to vacuity”). However, at the same time when we say \\(A=A\\) we also mean something very serious. It is in this sense that is also a matheme, an attempt to transmit.

I will be bold and say that within this formula our entire worldview is implicit.

As readers of Hegel we know that the Absolute is the identity of identity and non-identity — identity is always involved in that which negates itself [^fn:1]. In order for \\(A\\) to have a determinate identity there must be a not-\\(A\\) (a \\(B\\), a \\(C\\) etc.) which is opposed to it. In writing the formula \\(A=A\\) there is now a second \\(A\\) which has a moment of othering to the first — allowing \\(A\\) to refer to itself reflexively. This is what leads Hegel to criticise Schelling, because for him Schelling’s notion of the Absolute cannot think identity and difference. He sees it as an empty schema from which this moment of self-othering is missing hence “all is one” and “the night in which all cows are black”.

This way of thinking about identity is key to the entirety of Hegel’s system, I would go as far as saying it is the dialectical method itself. So then why \\(A=A\\), rather than \\(A = \neg A\\) or \\(A \neq A\\)? We choose to say something which is misleading because we want to demonstrate that language itself is misleading, to demonstrate its circularity.

[^fn:1]: On the other hand, as readers of Badiou we know that such a formula follows from the axiom of extensionality contrary to “Law of Identity” dogma which takes it as something innate to cognition.