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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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