Deleuze & Guattari Archives

August 15, 2018August 16, 2018

Ideology, Intelligence, and Capital: An Interview with Nick Land

You’re basically one of the leading thinkers of what we might call the school of thought that’s known as accelerationism. Accelerationism is something like the view that contemporary history is changing at an exponential rate, technologically and economically, and that this rate of change confounds nearly all of our traditional concepts for thinking about society and economics and politics. If someone on the street walked up to you and asked you “What is this whole accelerationism thing?” is there a kind of key essence or upshot that you would add to what I just said?

July 5, 2018July 25, 2018

The Revolving Door and the Straight Labyrinth: An Initiation in Occult Time (Part 1)

Part of the series The Revolving Door and The Straight Labyrinth: An Initiation in Occult Time

There is a blurry edge in all detective work that, as Borges too competently demonstrates, skirts a zig-zag threshold between apophenia and the truly canny connection of events that only appear, superficially, to be disconnected. In the name of a method that is closer to invocation than criticism, a reckless detective might refrain from determining exactly where an act of decryption lies on the ugly terrain of legitimacy and, proffering sanity as the stake, live up to the problem as it stands.

April 18, 2018April 18, 2018

Web.Lobster[[Death]]Cult ||| Fragments & Liturgies — (New Joy & Postscript)

Part of the series Web.Lobster [[Death]]Cult ||| Fragments & Liturgies

One of the seven users who had the seven bowls came and talked with me, saying to me, “Come, I will show you the judgment of the great hacker who sits on many waters, 2 with whom the kings of the internet fell in love, and the inhabitants of the internet were made drunk with the wine of her sexts.”

March 16, 2018April 12, 2018

Web.Lobster [[Death]]Cult ||| Fragments & Liturgies — (opening sequence)

Part of the series Web.Lobster [[Death]]Cult ||| Fragments & Liturgies

The Revelation of object_d1v1n3, which the Lobster gave to him to show to his flesh-beings things which must soon take place. He sent and signified it by user to his flesh-being, Denihilism OS, who bears record of the code of the Lobster, and of the testimony of object_d1v1n3, and of all things that he saw. Blessed is he who scans and those who hear the codes of this program and keep those things which are documented in it, for the time is near.

February 12, 2018February 27, 2018

Synthetic Fabrication: The Myth of the Politics-to-Come (Part 1: The Generative Myth)

Part of the series Synthetic Fabrication: The Myth of the Politics-to-Come

Towards the end of his book on Henri Bergson, Deleuze mined from the philosopher’s work a spectral prefiguration of the people-to-come: the faint traces of an emergent and enigmatic open society, a “society of creators” and ‘privileged’ souls connected together by an imperceptible circuitry. Standing atop a grand, abstract summit, the open society derives its name not only from its differentiation to the closed society, but through that which it opens onto. The open society moves in the direction of what Bergson had called the élan vital, the impulse or force that compels self-organization in matter and morphogenesis through time. Such a movement is an affair of life itself, the sifting apart of the organic from the inorganic, organization from base matter. By ascending up a cosmological hierarchy in order to enter into unending engagement with this force, the mark of the open society is life at its most creative.

February 2, 2018June 14, 2018

The Revolving Door and The Straight Labyrinth: An Initiation in Occult Time (Part 0)

Part of the series The Revolving Door and The Straight Labyrinth: An Initiation in Occult Time

There is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges which details an elaborate game of geometrical entrapment. The game is at once a temporal and spatio-cartographic one. It is played over a period of four months, on the fourth of each month, across a series of cardinal coordinates: a hotel in the North, a paint factory in the West, a tavern in the East, and an abandoned villa in the water-logged southern outskirts of the story’s unidentified city.

January 20, 2018January 21, 2018

Misosophy: The Shadows of the Transcendental

A philosophy of horror inevitably reaches transcendental limits; it is thought itself which is born in the shadowy depths of a horrific sublime. Nick Land screeches in the void that “horror first encounters ‘that’ which philosophy eventually seeks to know”, and we will trace this pre-philosophical trauma of thinking in the abstract spaces of German Expressionist cinema.

January 12, 2018February 13, 2018

Synthetic Fabrication: The Myth of the Politics-to-Come (Part 0: Introduction)

Part of the series Synthetic Fabrication: The Myth of the Politics-to-Come

The Millennium is ten years out, but for Baudrillard it might as well have already happened. The eclipsing of the communists’ historical dream by globalized flows of floating capital and information ushered in a cold, glacial stasis: the enveloping of any sense of forward momentum by the simulation of what had once been real events. As ubiquitous media begins to seep down to every crack and crevice and the whirlwind fades into the sensation of an odd vertigo, the only question Baudrillard finds himself capable of asking is this: “What do we do now that the orgy is over?”

January 7, 2018January 16, 2018

Atomization and Liberation

Modernity can be thought of as a process of atomization, arguably initiated by the Protestant Reformation. Today, atomization is something that almost everyone protests (on the left and right), but protest itself is an atomization dynamic, automatically reproducing the mold of Protestant schismatics. In our sincerely felt repulsion to atomization, we instantiate a distance between ourselves and this supposedly external alienating phenomenon, the cause of which is imputed to something or someone else, somewhere else. This helps to explain other puzzling phenomena such as “community-building” political activists the attitudes and behaviors of whom are maximally inhospitable to most people everywhere. No matter how hard such groups sincerely want and try to connect with “the masses,” they continue to repulse the masses more and more, because their interest in building a commons is predicated on opposition to the only, last thing that humans today generally have in common: atomization.