SynTheory: Syn-ergy, Syn-thesis, and the Inhuman Orientation of the Individual - Presentation...

8/12/2019 SynTheory: Syn-ergy, Syn-thesis, and the Inhuman Orientation of the Individual - Presentation (Transcription)

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Syn-theory: syn-ergy, syn-thesis and the

inhuman orientation of the individual.

Transcription.


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Introduction

Thanks very much. Its great to be here in Osaka and to have the

opportunity to speak at ACERP. Im going to talk about the

work or at least, some of the work, of two contemporaryphilosophers; Reza Negarestani and Nick Land and Im going to

talk about how their work relates toself-hoodand the individual

and how we can attempt to re-construct or, in fact, destroy

certain notions of the self and the individual. Im going to try to

do this in relation to a concept that I have superficially entitled

syn-theory, that is, relating to the logic of the syn- prefix in the

English language and the repercussions this logic has in the way

we think about ourselves in the world.


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Deleuze and the BwO.

In the chapter on the Body Without Organs in Gilles Deleuze

and Felix Guattaris Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze outlines a

project that seeks to dismantle the folk psychological, stratifiedconception of the self into a body through which intensities are

able to move and fluctuate freely. The BwO is a plane of

experimentation and discovery for the individual tending to

intensive zero. It is important to note the differentiation that

Deleuze makes in relation to the tendency towards intensive

zero, which is death. In the cancerousBwO the patterns of

desiring and flows of intensities are realized, repetitive and

destructive resulting in death. Here Deleuze and Guattari givethe example of the drug addict. A healthy BwO functions with

intensive zero as a horizon. One that cannot be reached. Like the

arrows in Xenos paradoxes we can only approach the BwO but

we should at least promulgate and orient ourselves towards this

horizon. The BwO is the end point of the destarification of the

organism where the organism is understood as the ordering,

restricting, and catagorizing of the organs into a fully

symbolized model of the individual. For Deleuze and Guattarithe two proponents of this subordination of the body were God


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(or more widely, a religious organization of the body and the

individual) and biological science (or medicine). The orientation

towards the BwO or the orientation towards the horizon of the

BwO should seek to destratisfy and deterratorialize this

construction.

This is elucidated in a passage from Thousand Plateauswhere

Deleuze says:


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How can we convey how easy it is and the extent to which we

do it every day? And how necessary caution is, the art of

dosages, since overdose is a danger. You dont do it with a

sledge hammer, you use a very fine file. You invent self

destructions that have nothing to do with the death drive.

Dismantling the organism has never meant killing yourself, but

rather opening the body to connections that presuppose an entire

assemblage, circuits, conjunctions, levels and thresholds,

passages and distributions of intensity, and territories and

deterratorializations measured with the craft of surveyor.

In other words, for Deleuze and Guattari the orientation towardsthe horizon of the BwO should be taken in small measure with

the formulations of new concepts and connective intensities with

the aim of reformulating the way in which we both think and

interact with ourselves as individuals. I think this nicely sets up

the point from which I chose to undergo the thinking that

constitutes my talk today and I want to propose a way in which

we can think about the individual and the subject in a way that

will allow us to destratisfy the organism (in theDeleuzoguattarian sense) and reconstitute the way in which we

can traverse the continuum of the desiring body.


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Reza Negarestani

Using this as a starting point Id like to go on to discuss the

work of two philsophers whose work I believe provides us with

some of the conceptual tools by which we can approach

Deleuzesproject. The first is Reza Negarestani, an Iranian

philosopher and writer whose book Cyclonopedia helped topioneer the genre of theory-fictionand who has made many

contributions to contemporary philosophy in the form of articles

published in the philosophical journal collapseas well as

contributions to the loosely assimilated philosophical movement

known as speculative realism. Today I want to look at his recent

work(or more exactly, a particular moment in his recent work)

on rationalism and its relation to humanism and the way in

which Negarestani espouses a project of inhumanism as a wayof orienting the self towards new horizons.

For Negarestani reason is a tool by which one is able toreconstruct the image of man and corrode the delimitation of


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this image placed upon it by history and conservative

humanism. Reason provides us with a revisionary and

reconstructive tool that renders the image of the individual as a

vector that is manipulable and error tolerant. One of the most

interesting moves Negarestani makes in this regard is to propose

the automation and autonomization of reason by allowing reason

to propel its own revisionary and reconstructive abilities not

only on the individual, in regards to concept creation etc etc but

on reason itself. He defines the normative function of the

rational in relation to oughts as in ought to beas opposed to

iswhich would define the given status of natural causes or

things that have been contingently posited (here he gives the

example of the atmospheric condition of the planet). Whatdifferentiates oughtsfrom the cognitive appraisal of natural

causes is that oughts work in dynamic chains of synthetic

association that create new oughts which allow us to escape

form the quagmire of the crystalized order of the here and

now. By effectuating the connection of simple oughts to

complex and revisionary oughtswe are able to combat internal

performativecontradictions in commitments by encouraging a

continual updating of commitments by employing theconceptual powers of autonomous reason. One of the major

critiques of contemporary Marxist thought is exactly in its

inability to update its commitments, instead relying on doxasof

out-dated materialisms and cultural critiques. Because reason is

not given but produced and socio-culturally mediated it is also

constructible and has the ability to be oriented towards

constructed horizons. Conservative humanism would instead

discourage any revisionary programme of reason and individualconstruction preferring to anchor our understanding of the

individual in interpretations of dusty religious manuscripts. The

consequences of such an understanding of reason is that we are

not only able to employ the powers of reason on conceptual

categories or individual objects in the world but also on reason

itself. As Wilfred Sellars points out the only tool capable of

assessing reason is reason itself. In Negarestanis programme

this logic creates a positive feedback loop of reinvention of


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reason byreason initiating a dynamic, synthetic, and synergistic

orientation of reason. This orientation allows us to understand

both reason and the conceptualization of the individual (or the

subject) as a manipulable vector. And this is, I think one the

most interesting consequences of Negarestanis work.

What we are left with is a future orientated vector that is error

tolerant and subject to reinvention allowing for a deflationary

understanding of the self in opposition to any folk-psychological


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manifestations of self-hood. By using the tools of scientific

reasoning we are able to reconstruct an appreciation of the self

as a vector in phase space, one that is subject to change and

alterity in response to shifts and fluctuations in effecting

intensities. Jacques Lacan had already discussed the

construction of the self in such a way in his work on the mirror

stage in self-development and indeed even deploys the language

of vector space models in a speech given in 1936 that can be

found at the beginning of his collection ecrits, quote:

We have only to understand the mirror stage as identification,

in the full sense that analysis gives to the term: namely, the

transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumesan imagewhose predestination to thisphase-effect is

sufficiently indicated by the use, in analytic theory, of the

ancient term imago.End quote.

When the orientation of self hood is reimagined or

conceptualized as a vector with orientation through a phase

space propelled by this kind of Negarestanian feedback loop of

reason we can begin to more concretely talk about the virtualpotentialities of the self. Just like a physical, biological or

mathematical vector moving through a phase space the self

becomes loaded with potentiality, with becoming. The next

move to be considered which is beyond the scope of this talk

and the point at which I have to move away from Negarestanis

work, is to think about how we might be able to manipulate and

control these virutalities, how we might be able to construct a

the path of orientation and capitalize on the consequences of thisdeflationary manifestation of the self in the world.


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Nick Land

Next, I want to talk about a second philosopher whose work had

a very direct influence on Negarestaniswork, particularly his

early work, both stylistically and thematically. The philosopher

in question is Nick Land, who was professor of ContinentalPhilosophy at Warwick University in England until 1999 and

whose work provides us with a remarkable, strikingly original

and relentlessly caustic contemplation of the post-kantian

philosophical landscape and the status of hyper kinetic cultural

capitalism. Lands work, while largely unknown today

(although his popularity has grown a little in recent years),

accounted for a movement towards an updated and reinvigorated

form of anti-capitalism that has come to be known asAccelerationsim. Im not going to talk about Accelerationism

today, but you can find plenty of material on it, including a

manifesto, freely available on the internet. Today Im going to

talk about the devaluation of the self in Lands work,

specifically in his book, and in fact, one of only two books

published of his work, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges

Bataille and Virulent Nihilism.


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What Im acutely interested in here is a moment in Lands work

where he sets about to devalue subjective experience by

understanding it in terms of ebbs and flows of dynamic

energetics stemming from and returning to the sun. The sun is

the enabling condition for life and for Land also the organising

principle for the flux of subjective duration. The Landian cycle

of energetics which organises the way in which he attempts to

destratisfy the empirical/ transcendental difference is founded

on the axiom that matter is primary process and matter produces

the conceptualization of matter itself. In a schizo-analytical turn

on Schellings natural philosophy Land reduces subjective

experience to secondary process. The sun gives rise to

conditions that allowed evolution to develop to the point thathomo-sapiens were able to employ the powers of cognition on

their own environment and use reason to construct and parcel

out meaning in a world of chaos. Evolution is the evolution of

matter and cannot be said to have produced anything other than

highly complex and sophisticated systems of matter interaction.

The brain is a material product of this continuum of matter

production and produces nothing but matter itself. It is out of

the subordination of transcendental synthesis to empiricalmateriality that Land continually insists upon his organizing

principle that nothing is given, everything is produced. And it is

within the cycle of the production of excess that Land accrues a

moment in his anti-humanism that I find to be particularly

caustic.

Lands project in this work is the devaluation of the self, one of

the first times we hear Lands own voice in the book he says: I

have always unconsciously sought out that which will beat medown to the ground, but the floor is also a wall. For Land the

horizon towards which one should orient the self is an instance

of what the Scottish philosopher Ray Brassier (who we will

return to later), adapting a critique of Deleuze and Guattari by

Vincent Descombes, called mad black Deleuzianism. That is

an intensification of the Deleuzoguatarrian project by means of

the casting out of vitalism from the orientation towards the

BwO. For Land the horizon (or the floor) is not just something


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which should be approached but one that should be accelerated

towards and surpassed, an orientation towards zero intensity

which for the Landian project is an orientation towards death.

As I mentioned earlier this orientation towards intensive zero is

articulated in relation to what Land calls solar economics and

it is to this point which I wish to return. For Land the sun is

always a double sun; the enabling, infinitely bright sun of

production and the black sun whose death core (as Land calls it)

orients life back towards intensive zero. Thus creation and life

(as an expression of excess) are always intrinsically linked with

death, you cannot have one without the other. While these two

suns are able to be thought of distinctly they are one in the samething, inextricably linked and each fuels the other. Death is a

return to the originary state of life as production and life and

subjective experience are an intensive flux that expresses a

tension and attempts to tear apart the two faces of the sun from

one another, an attempt that is doomed to fail. Life is a splitting

and fluctuating vector that attempts to express a tension between

the productive excesses of matter and its conclusive horizon.

Intensive zero is matter without transcendental synthesis, areturn to chaos, death, and for Land if we intended to persist in

the search for truth then we have to do away with representation,

ditch transcendental synthesis and approach intensive zero with

an as accelerated an orientation as possible.


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Syn- Theory

By reading Negarestani via Land in light of Deleuze and

Guattari we can see an attempt to deflate and reduce the primacy

of subjective duration (Land) and a remodelling of it using a

vector model propelled by self-updating reason (Negarestani)with an orientation towards destraification and

deterratorialization (Deleuze and Guattari). The next turn I

would like to take here is to re-examine some concepts within

the field of subject building in an attempt to ward off the

infection of this model by some conventional models of

progressive tendency in areas that I would align with

conservative-humanism. These areas lie with conventional

interpretations of concepts reacting to the syn- prefix in theEnglish language; syn-thesis, syn-ergy, sym-biosis etc. I want to

insist that the conceived positivism of such notions is not only

damaging if we are to set about on a project to reconstruct self-

hood but also contradictory upon inspection. It is not just the

projection of subjective experience through time that needs to be

remodelled but the concepts by which we understand its

progression. This model which I am seeking to elucidate today

is one that must be motivated by openness,or more specifically


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an openness to the future. This is articulated by Lars Iyer in

reference to Hiedeggerian concept of Dasien where he states:

Dasein, for the author of Being and Time, is not a substantive

and self-present unity, but an opening to the future, an ecstasis

or standing out which understands itself in terms of what it will

accomplish. The I of Dasein is first of all the I can; Dasein

relates to itself as potentiality-to-be, Sein knnen: its being-in-

the-world must be understood in terms of the measure implicit

in this potentiality, that is, of the ability to be able. Then it is as

though the I were the Ulysses of the Odyssey, adventuring,

risking himself, but always as part of the task of returning to

Ithica, to his kingdomSo for the I of Dasein (that is the being-in-time or the who is

time of Heideggers project) an openness to the future is central

to its movement through time and its construction. So how

does this work in relation to the syn- prefix? Common sense

conceptions of syn-ialtrajectories are ones that espouse with-

ness or a coming together of concepts, orientations or

phenomena to form apositiveand constructive progression and

creation of new concepts, orientations, progressions etc. I wantto insist that this positivistic imbuing ofsyn-ial trajectories is

not given, not inherent to the concept itself because something is

always lost, destroyed and left behind. With the coming together

of any two things to create a new thing something of the

previous dualistic state is destroyed to give way to the new

individual whole. The positivity of creation (creation as a kind

of syn-thesis and sym-biosis of previous forms) is a signifier in

the service of late-capitalist ideology. To echo Ray Brassier, theperceived inherent positivity of creation (of the logic of the syn-

prefix) is there to cover up a failure of thinking and one that

does not espouse open-ness in its necessary radical

instantiation. Late Capitalistsyn-inal orientations deny the

potency that such orientations should be imbued with because

open-ness and being-open and moving through intensive

constructions into new assimilations is not some joyous,

positivistic growth vector that self-help books and corporate


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strategies would lead us to believe but one that is intrinsically

linked to death, horror, the outside and the unfamiliar to quote

Negarestani in relation to this idea. The task of the philosophical

project in this regard should be an orientation towards a re-

understanding of these concepts such that ventures into these

territories become opportunities for deterratorializarion and

destratification, opportunities for speculation, time to make a

break in other words towards the BwO.


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Ray Brassier, Nihilism and Suffering

One of the mires of late-capitialist subject construction is that it

reformulates concepts of subject building; concepts of syn-

thesis, sym-biosis, syn-ergy etc etc that are imbued with the

powers necessary to wrest us from the constraints of turgid

historically mediated ventures into the future, ones that deny usPrometheus fire. The manifest image of man in this

conservative humanist instantiation is a superficial over-inflated

concept that needs to be destroyed. This is not to espouse some

sort of Christian orientation of the growth that comes from

suffering because the benefit of subjecting oneself to suffering

in this instance is guaranteed by an ideology that understands

there to be a goal after death and the magnitude of the reward is

proportional to the degree of suffering (in relation to the castingout of the manifest image and opening oneself to the true

implications of open-ness precluded by syn-ial orientations).

But there is no afterhere, in the instance of Deleuze, Guatarri,

Negarestani and Land. The teleology and eschatology of

Christian suffering is not really suffering because it is a means

to a spiritual end that recodes suffering in its own terms as not

suffering. In fact the motivatingprincipal of the project that Im

talking about today is one that precludes the meaningfulness ofsuffering. To quote Brassier here:


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to invest suffering with the varieties of meaning concomitant

with the manifest image is to automatically reinscribe woe into a

spiritual calculus which subordinates present suffering to some

recollected or longed-for happiness.

For Brassier the powers of the negative are ones that can be

turned on the manifest image of man to help to reconstrue an

understanding of self in the world. Within nihilism are the

powers by which we can recapture the flame of creation,

reaffirm affirmation that has become non-affirmative. The

power of Brassiers work in this regard in his wresting away of

the conflation of the Nietzschean will-to powers ability toovercome suffering with its religious iteration that the gaps in

Nietzsche work allow for. Brassier turns the will-to-powers in

itself to an in and for itself. In a turn similar to Negarestanis

reengineering of reason, Brassier imbues the will-to-power with

a self-motivating conceptual apparatus that prevents it from

foreclosing on its on potential. The powers of the negative here

can be used to re code and reinvigorate creation into a concept

that can work towards a radicalization of the self.

Nietzschesaudacious philosophical gambit is the suggestion

that the poison is also the cure, that untrammelled negativity

harbours the seeds of its own metamorphosis into an

unprecedented power of affirmation and creativity: when pushed

to its ultimate extremity, the destruction of difference unleashed

by the will-to-nothingness turns against itself and yields a

hitherto inconceivable variety of difference.

The renegotiation of the of terms of negativity should be used to

render notions like the syn-suffixed terms, creation, open-ness,

and even negativity itself away from their forestalling by

parochial historicism and reallocated into a conceptual

vocabulary for concept construction and for the realization of

the virtual trajectories of the vector of self-hood.


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Conclusion


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What I hope to have achieved here to some degree is the

sketching out of the beginnings a synthetic philosophical

program fusing some ideas from 20th

and 21stCentury

philosophy that might allow us to renegotiate the terms of our

own subjective experience and to continuously reallocate and

redetermine the categories that allow us to understand the vector

of our becomings, how we might be able to control and

manipulate the becomings of self and to destabilize the

absoluteness of conservative humanist conceptual categories by

regrounding the self in territory that is tolerant to revision and

oriented towards constant deterratorialization and

reterratorialization by intensities coming from without.

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