THEORY

[106-2]

you're definitely not alone in not getting it, just found this as top review on its goodreads page:

Maeby: No, deep is good. People are going to say, “What the hell just happened? I better say I like it.” ’Cause nobody wants to seem stupid.
Rita: I like it!


Somewhere, in some beautiful alternate universe, some years ago the young Iranian student Reza Negarestani was denied entry to the graduate school of the University of Warwick and, crushed, never received any academic training in the field of philosophy. After wallowing in disappointment for a few years, he channeled his despondency into Cyclonopedia, a beautiful and despairing horror novel that densely wove together critical theory and the story of an American artist stranded in Istanbul to re-imagine the geopolitics of oil in the Middle East as an occult attack by ancient Lovecraftian horrors out to turn the entire Earth into a desert.

In our humdrum reality, though, Negarestani did go to grad school and did become impressed with how many ridiculous theoretical neologisms he could create and so just tricked someone into publishing his notes for said novel. That or he wrote an essay/article that was not accepted anywhere so he plopped it into a "frame story" (ie 5 pages and a few footnotes) and published it as a novel. I don't know. This would be a good joke if Negarestani (and apparently everyone else on goodreads?) didn't take it so seriously.

I mean, here are his philosophical interests:

"Subsurface Political Geography; Surface Globalization; Underground Facilities and Chthonic Militarization; Archeology as the Science of Military Education in 21st Century; Tora Bora and the Cappadocian Complex; Worm Factor; Middle Eastern Necropolises and Underground Nuclear Facilities; Petropolitics, Guerilla-states and Architecture of Holes; Videogame Rhetoric and Memory as the Models of Alien Incursion; Poromechanics of War."

This is what informs his fiction, which would be fine, except that I lied and there's no fiction being informed by anything here - that list, with some conjunctions and prepositions tossed in, is pretty much what this book is. Seriously, this is the most unreadably pretentious nonsense I have ever encountered and man, I can usually get into some embarrassingly pretentious nonsense. Not to mention the fact that it's also flatly and awkwardly written. There is no art to any of it.



lol

[eli7]

This isn't a very thought out post but there's a special place in my heart for Reza Negarestani. He's a total kook and I don't think I learn much from reading his work, other than some very dry humor at times. I was into speculative realism a couple of years ago after reading some pataphysics (the science/philosophy of imaginary solutions), and I think there's a nice parallel there between the two groups. There's never an ah-ha moment reading this stuff for me, I just kind of enjoy how he manipulates language. It certainly doesn't clarify or enhance D and G for me.

I've seen Reza talk a couple of times with Robin Mackay, most recently at some gallery in Soho. The room was almost entirely young white fashion boys, which was new to me because in the past, his talks most drew old and nerdy speculative realists. But yea, it was like a fashion party which made a lot of sense to me because it's more aesthetic than intellectual or interesting.

I also sometimes get spooked by SR cross-over with dark enlightenment and Nick Land crew but that's old news and maybe not worth getting into.

[WussWayne]

speculative realism is me realizing I may have fooled someone in my social circle into majorly dating me in 2019

[kickingthefly]

never heard of this book and i can see why you'd dislike it so much having seemingly plowed through it (like me throwing richard powers across the room)- the passage you quote is particularly godawful. but tbf a quick google throws up some quite interesting passages, like little generative aesthetic machines- so i broadly agree with eli, perhaps one can just accept, even admire them on those terms

[INNIT]

actually has me thinking about "theory-fiction" as a genre

couldn't you pretty easily argue that much of "a thousand plateaus" reads more like fiction than theory, with its heavy use of metaphor/allegory? half of d+gs neologisms work better as creative metaphors than stable "concepts" anyways (rhizome, nomadism, contagion, pack, etc.). except 1k plateaus doesn't seem to care about being "theory-fiction" and seems to just not care about the genres of theory and fiction at all and just does whatever. maybe thats why it's a better work of both theory and fiction and doesnt come across so cringe/heavy-handed (like cyclonopedia does in the passage quoted above)

[106-2]

I've been wondering for a while about Adorno's 'no art after Auschwitz' thing(?), and Arendt and Agamben's insistence that no man-made situation will ever compare to the conditions of the death camps in the Holocaust - does this come from an ignorance of the transatlantic slave trade or? This is in no way to trivialise the horror of either situation but it seems really strange to me that its become accepted that multiple prominent figures seem to have completely ignored an undeniably major event in world history. Obviously there's no value whatsoever in 'ranking' them, but surely an acknowledgement that such inhumane treatment of entire populations isn't a completely isolated instance is important?

I'm admittedly under-read on this idea, partly because of how much it's bothered me, so I could be missing out on something really obvious that explains/rationalises these exclusions, but could anyone explain further/point to any good responses?

[106-2]

[jylt]

anyone here that reads denise ferreira da silva or sylvia wynter?? i love them both

[INNIT]

how do we all feel about zizek v. lobsterman royal rumble 2019??

[106-2]

Anyone read much into/about the whole notion of or Given how much of a lost cause p much all other accelerationisms have been - either through not really having any feasible praxis, or that praxis being pretty explicitly fascistic - I've found it p interesting to see how the sentiment can be re-routed to be viewed as already being an aspect of the experience of blackness, particularly the US.

Forget where the quote's from (swear its Sun Ra, or at least he's definitely said something similar), but I think there's something to be said for uncovering a 'posthumanism' in a population that already "owes nothing to the idea of the human", bc if that condition's being enforced from without the same issues of pushing us all to the limits of 'the human' are sort of side-stepped as its been outside of your control.

Would be really interested to hear anyone else's take, and definitely not because I'm writing a paper on it that's due next Monday

[Sam]

https://www.aesop.com/it//r/the-fabulist/gayatri-spivak

[106-2]

hahahahahaha

[kickingthefly]

trying to read more denise da silva, working with otobong and i liked this text she wrote:

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/79/94686 ... -of-value/

so what should i read next? 'toward a global idea"?

[jylt]

[106-2]

On the topic of Da Silva, does anyone have a link to her collaboration films with Arjuna Neuman, 'four waters' and 'serpent rain'? Been struggling to find a way to watch them (even legally!!) since they were screened at my uni last year (followed by a discussion by Da Silva and Neuman!!), and would love to get another chance to watch.

[106-2]

: I've actually not read a huge amount of her work so its difficult to compare but I found them really, really compelling in how they drew attention to their temporality (extremely long takes, very slow 'pacing' - if you could call it that) as a means of (in Da Silva's words) making a film 'without time'. It's difficult, having only seen it once, 6 months ago, to really tell how successful they were but it's an interesting experiment at least - definitely link me if you're able to find it!

[INNIT]

i keep doing this thing where instead of reading things that are actually relevant to what i'm doing i instead read cryptic poststructuralist monographs and spend weeks trying to decipher them.

on that note, i just finished kittler's "discourse networks 1800/1900". what a fucking weirdo; has anyone read this? always kind of hated media theory because it seems hell bent on destroying literature studies (it probably will succeed at this) but i find kittler's book a pretty good compromise between the two

[INNIT]

[106-2]

This is a massive stretch but I don't suppose anyone knows of anything that's been written on Brecht's "lehrstück"'s (learning-plays)/the pedagogium and how the we could read holodecks on Star Trek wrt them?

[Sam]

Interested in writing on or by Hito Steyerl on images, obviously I've got copies of wretched of the screen and duty free art.

I've read: medya autonomy of images, digital debris, pattern recognition, ripping reality, poor images, in free fall, spam of the earth

obvs really like poor images essay and i especially like the spam of the earth essay as find this idea of withdrawal from representation to be very prescient.

also anything by Hito or anybody else that links Hito to Harun Farocki would be cool...

thanks

[jylt]

WEB Du Bois in Ghana in 1963!! I saw this on Twitter and hopefully it's appropriate to post about theory-adjacent fashion here lolol



taken from https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-i0853

[106-2]

anyone in London should be heading to these!!!

Especially looking forward to hearing from Mireille Fanon Mendes-France (!!!!) and Anne Querrien

[106-2]

well i really enjoyed 'family guy and philosophy', maybe i'll see what this Fisher guy's got to say for himself..

[jylt]

[kickingthefly]

does anyone have access to project muse? i think you have to be part of a subscribing academic institution. trying to get a pdf of fred moten's 'knowledge of freedom' (ofc i'd happily paypal you the purchase price)

edit: thank you!! been so immersed in 'all that beauty' & 'in the break' recently.

[INNIT]

is fred moten theory's bad boy rn?? remember that time he critiqued fanon/wilderson using heidegger's ontology? wild stuff

[kickingthefly]

you'd know better than me if he's the hot thing in theory circles? fred is longtime close collaborator of an artist i work with and so met him through that. the baldwins eyes sequence at the start of all that beauty was fantastic and led on to in the break, black and blur and the consent stuff. as you say i like his wildness, it seems endlessly generative. i didnt really connect with denise da silva (also a collab with one of our artists!) in the same way, but perhaps i just haven't read enough

[kickingthefly]

don't suppose anyone has access to amiri baraka's essay 'hunting is not those heads on the wall?' (fred often refers to it).

again happy to pay costs and for your time/trouble.

[106-2]

found it in this collection! https://b-ok.cc/book/2950678/9074ac

[106-2]

So about a week ago I found out a got a 90 on my dissertation, which feels fairly great. I wrote about subjectification and anti-fascism from a D&G/anarchist perspective so if anyone fancied a breezy and uplifting read lmk!

I've been strongly encouraged by p much everyone who's read it to try and get it published, so to all the theory heads on c-t - do you have any ins anywhere/any recommendations of places to approach? I'm feeling very fuck-the-academy atm so the less ivory tower the better!

edit: that is Dolce & Gabbana ofc, im not a fuckin nerd reading about rhizomes and that