posted on November 25, 2019 09:09 PM by
u/Swevenham
28
u/_c0unt_zer0_31 pointsat 1574718812.000000
I thought the article was shit, I discussed it on German leftbook a
few days ago.
the described influence is very unconvicing. it’s about the same
level of influence Marcuse & Sartre had on leftwing terrorism, where
we actually know that members of the RAF actually did read these
authors, whereas here the connection seems to hanging out on internet
forums with people who read nick land.
also, the described tactics of indiscrminate terrror already appears
in the Turner Diaries written during the 1970s.
and anders breivik, who is actually important to the new wave of
right wing terror, never read any of these authors being lumped together
as “accelerationists” in this text
Vox seems to have a weird inclination to treat far-right movements/figures as way more sophisticated/coherent than they deserve. I could say it's kind of a post-Trump version of Ezra Klein's constant attempts to turn Paul Ryan into an intellectual, but that might be a glib comparison.
at the same time, they are lumping them together in an akward fashion.
Stalin and Max Horkheimer both can be considered Marxists, and they share some basic insights - but that doesn't make them indistinguishable
Land is definitely an influence on the American alt-right because I have seen alt-right people reference Land pretty heavily. Maybe the difference is that he's no much of an influence on the European right which already had a different intellectual foundation from the US right.
I'm not saying he has no influence on the alt right, but the part of the alt right the Atomwaffen guys belong to is rather far away from the part that studies him. they hang around the same message boards, but the overlap isn't very great.
I dunno tho, the [weird satanist part of Atomwaffen](https://www.thedailybeast.com/satanism-drama-is-tearing-apart-the-murderous-neo-nazi-group-atomwaffen) believes stuff that would fit into Land's fiction. They're bizarre *esoteric* murderous Nazis.
but, okay, i totally fell down the David Myatt rabbit hole for two hours. that guy is even weirder then Nick Land, and without taking his own body weight in amphetamines
It's been everywhere: I'm leaving it up for the sake of discussion on here maybe I guess but yeah reading Vox for a take on Nick Land is like asking a puppy to tell you why the bigger dog shits the bed
P.S. Accelerationism is dumb as hell, Theory is crap for over-educated dolts to podcast about, and I will not tolerate any posters who swing Deleuzional
P.P.S. Lots of sympathy for Mark Fisher's life and his tragic death, but all of his work was garbage
> P.P.S. Lots of sympathy for Mark Fisher's life and his tragic death, but all of his work was garbage
I think some indeed is insightful, but there is too much hype
I've written before about what I find insightful and what I find disappointing in Fisher's work, but it was from a partial and personal angle, so I can't say I was doing something higher than he was doing
https://irrationallyspeaking.home.blog/2019/05/16/i-was-and-am-angry-with-my-letting-agent-so-i-wrote-a-rant-about-mark-fisher/
I'm not even a big Mark Fisher fan and generally think his importance is overstated but holy shit that article is unbelievably pretentious. There's like a paragraph of critique of actual content and another 10 paragraphs of bloviating drek.
I know that, but you're not really criticising anything, just saying "you're wrong" in a high tenor
And that's fine, you're free to do it
I just don't really care, because I have read Mark Fisher - as well as associates - and I'm happy to let what I said then stand
Meanwhile you're free to mount a grander critique that "lol you haven't read the material", so fair
I just...why am I supposed to care if somebody thinks Mark Fisher is good instead of bad and says nothing to back it up?
I never said you haven't read the material. I also explicitly said I'm not a fan of Mark Fisher.
You posted this article you wrote substantiating your belief that Mark Fisher's work is garbage. I said that your critique lacks substance. Never said "you're wrong" because that would imply that there was content in that article for you to be wrong about, which there wasn't.
Ah if you were to read it there's plenty of criticism to engage with, although I admit that - with Fisher - I eschewed sources and citations because it is, after all, a blog post after all
And don't deny yourself (and I mean your "self" here) because you did say I was wrong about Fisher, you said I had misrepresented him, or words to that effect
To hide behind that sort of verbal construct is to do the sort of thing you're accusing me of doing re: Fisher. If you think my criticism of Fisher lacks substance, fine, but you haven't really analysed what I said in that critique substantively (which is fine too). However, if you want to be personally consistent, and if you don't that's fine too, you should probably offer a substantive criticism of my take on Fisher.
Which you haven't done.
You are right, in that you never claim that I am misrepresenting Fisher
Instead you just sort of vaguely cast aspersions over my interpretations of Fisher's work, as if I were making some huge but heretofore unidentifiable mistake
You will understand, therefore, why even though I carefully reread this conversation a couple of times I don't take the accusation very seriously
Again, I never said you were wrong about anything because you being wrong about something requires there to be content for me to assess. Your article is like 95% polemic. The other 5% is just boilerplate. It's not a good article not because it's wrong but because it wasted my fucking time.
Also..."poilerplate"?!
I'm offended just on the level of criticism: boilerplate is when you use cliches to meet a word count. Even if what I was writing there was shit you're way off in calling it "boilerplate". Do you even know what that means?
I didn't "incorrectly" use it. It's a commonly accepted definition of boilerplate.
Nonetheless, no argument is more pedantic and useless than legislating definitions. Usually it's the tactic of someone who has failed to make a point and must resort to pedantry to feel like they can get the upper hand. Pathetic.
No, I'm saying it was incorrect because of course none of what I've said is the received opinion on Mark Fisher, who is of course as wildly popular in left wing circles as you are banned for being a twat and refusing to substantiate your sad blather: I fucking hate your lot that come in here from some high-minded leftist subreddit and stalk around like they own the place.
mark fisher is, like mao said about stalin, 70% good. i genuinely enjoyed Capitalist Realism and the sad book by mark fisher. the vampire castle thing is dumb as hell, and kickstarted a generation of angsty leftist entertainers calling cancel culture neoliberal.
theory-fiction sucks though. like oh god it sucks so bad. purple prose plus revolutionary defeatism, you hate to see it.
I did enjoy one of those theory-fiction books, but then only on trains with little else to do, and then only because it was fun not because it was a brilliant flash of insight or whateverthefuck
the vampire castle thing is just fisher griping on a personal level and deciding that everything that hits him is universal, which is morbidly selfish
but for the most part this end of Theory is the worst and most self-promoting end of Theory: most facts of life just aren't as interesting as this whole thing. A melange of people trying to be interesting doesn't interest me. I'm happy to hang out in dive bars or whatever but pretending that you're conducting some revolutionary act in...and I just can't be bothered finishing that sentence
It shouldn't need to be said that the whole enterprise is bourgeois blinkeredness par excellence but apparently it does need to be said
anybody who takes any of the players in this scene seriously is kidding themselves and designing a system in which they can wrap themselves so as to accuse their detractors of kidding themselves
theory-fiction hasn't done it for me, but i guess it might be possible to enjoy if you ignore that it's trying to be theory. still, i would rather just read joyce: he's got a similar cryptic, flowery writing style, but he isn't actively trying to make you depressed, melt your brain, or send you spiralling into a prose-induced k-hole
the best theory is still marx. it's always been marx. hardly anyone is more profoundly interesting and resilient. but people like mark fisher and this latest generation of weirdos i think are useful for exploring the decaying brain of neoliberalism that we live in. I just hate how utterly blackpilled and defeatist they seem to be on the subject of revolution.
side note: how are you using "par"? i'm ESL and i've genuinely never heard that preposition before.
par excellence is a French loan phrase; it's basically the only time English uses "par" in that way afaik. it more or less gets used to mean "unmatched" or something like
Confusingly, that's actually an entirely different word. The French "par" is etymologically related to the English/Latin "per"; our "par" in the sense of "average" or "what's expected" also comes from Latin, but the root is unrelated.
yeah but that's using par as a noun, not a preposition (thus why i specified "in that way"). it's also used in golf, but as mentioned, that's [historically](https://www.etymonline.com/word/par#etymonline_v_46183) been a different word.
Yeah but come on that uni name is past its time. (Also somehow only the 396th best ranked school world wide, my shitty provincial school is better) (also that was a joke ignore rankings)
Fair, but dumb opinions happen at all times. Keep in mind 30 years ago those would probably have been Nietzsche fans.
Again, Kode9, the only thing I thank Nick Land for.
I hated, and continue to hate it
His stuff on music is particularly egregious, because apart from anything else I grew up in London at a particularly creative time for bass music, which he decries as a time when music culture was only looking to the past or whatever instead of being genuinely creative
A lot of the Fisher stuff just seems like a cri-de-culture for when he was a student
Many observations in Capitalist Realism are trenchant, but the best ones are also not something I wouldn't be able to get from messaging a friend who works in social care or whatever
And the media stuff...I dunno it just reads like critical thinking with more unnecessary secondary reading to me
Fair enough. I enjoyed Ghosts of My Life because it touched on a lot of music and media that I've come to love and I thought it was at least, in some sense, insightful.
Like I get it, I'm sympathetic to things he approves of, but at the same time I just think his view is blinkered by his references that mostly speak to his own experience and the process of getting old
I love much of the same shit he loved, it's just that I knew about it independently of Mark Fisher. And I'm sympathetic to the social problems he identifies, it's just that even as a privileged kid I was aware of them long before I heard that such a person as "Mark Fisher" existed.
My problem with his writing is that it always sounds like "The World of Mark Fisher as according to Mark Fisher".
I wouldn't be as vituperative now as I have been about him in the past, but it upsets me that cultural "Theorists" and so on have this privileged position in the discourse when I've tried and failed to get stuff out there about culture at a much more fine-grained level and I guess I just get depressed about the prospects for serious investigation when there's no money nor cultural capital in doing it.
I've succumbed to the blogging disease myself, but I'd be kidding myself if I were helping anybody by doing it.
Some of the more trenchant observations are, topically, sort of rationalist-y renamings of existing concepts with catchier titles. Like "Market Stalinism" is just a more fun way to say "audit culture."
We should always be willing to save some sneers for the center-left -- and *Vox* in particular deserves them. Its whole editorial tone is of that one guy who read most of one book on a subject and then sounds off as an expert on that subject. It's the tone of that one guy in your MA seminar who'd no more read Hegel than you -- but who speaks about the conversational summary he got of Hegel from a professor as though he's read the complete works. It's the dude who's typing a snidely condescending answer while he literally has a second tab open with the Wikipedia article on that subject that he's frantically scanning to prove his point.
And it models this posture for its readers.
I do not like *Vox*.
WTF am I reading?! It's amazing.
> Today, a liberal who finds himself troubled by the currents of contemporary political life need look no further than his Facebook newsfeed to find the explanation:
>Liberals are better able to process new information; they're less biased like that. They've got different brains. Better ones. Why? Evolution. They've got better brains, top-notch amygdalae, science finds.
Evopsych but for the smug center left? How awesome is that?!
I thought the article was shit, I discussed it on German leftbook a few days ago.
the described influence is very unconvicing. it’s about the same level of influence Marcuse & Sartre had on leftwing terrorism, where we actually know that members of the RAF actually did read these authors, whereas here the connection seems to hanging out on internet forums with people who read nick land.
also, the described tactics of indiscrminate terrror already appears in the Turner Diaries written during the 1970s.
and anders breivik, who is actually important to the new wave of right wing terror, never read any of these authors being lumped together as “accelerationists” in this text
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