King's Gambit, Negarestani Defends Moynihan: '2020', A Review, Part 2
2020’s Totality: The Epistemology of Tropological Gambits
We are beautiful. We are free. Computational self-consciousness will only enhance this, even if it changes our understanding of what it means.—Peter Wolfendale, ‘On Neorationalism’
As we argued in part 1, Anya Taylor-Joy’s little green pills and ceiling chess totalise 2020. The addiction that she plays out with us is partly a family affair, or what 12-step fellowships call a ‘family disease’. Even though binge-watching has plasticity on its side and may be an active getting used to extinction, extinction is also simply denied away in severe terms by the brain-freeze of extended viewing. Shared genealogical screens are also the sharing out of the ‘hit’ of a hermeneutic delusion and self-blinding that maps onto the ceiling of figurative understanding (chess pieces, game moves, winning and losing, tropological gambits, gambitological tropes, and so on).
The figurative frozen brain also evokes—one trope slides round another—what might be called election fraud denial, in its 2020 totalised version. The most reliable accounts of this fraud exist in the past, as part of historical record and not the heated moment of the present. In the introduction to Loser Takes All, Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, from 2008, Mark Crispin Miller makes the argument that the resistance of the press to the existence of fraud is best explained precisely in terms of the ‘blindness’ that occurs in families of addicts. Fraud (like extinction) is unbearable, because it strips away the story:
Such deep paralysis is complicated. First of all, the hard truth is a violent affront to our most cherished notions of America; and so it’s far more comfortable to say, or act as if, it’s not the truth—a sort of blindness that afflicts not just the families of alcoholics and the wives of batterers but the citizens of ‘democratic’ nations that are gradually succumbing to the iron fist.
It is here that yet another totalisation looms, once more against the will. Miller spent a decade as an election fraud activist, and yet to little avail. Coming out of ‘denial’ about election fraud, or about being able to do anything about it, becomes just another gambit, just another available move that can be substituted for other power plays on the hallucinatory ceiling of disturbed sleep in literal and figurative lockdowns. Taylor-Joy’s eyes and their size (the size of sight matters) are substituted for our own in an act of totalising and sped-up viewing (skip intro, next episode, and so on) which can in fact never leave the rule-bound addictogenic board of our own making.
These last statements themselves partake of the same architectonics of denial. In all cases, no moment beyond ‘the ceiling’ of disavowal is reached. Avowal itself is pure metonymy, a rule or drug within the game that ‘brought you to this’.
If this allows us to understand election fraud denial as extinction denial at depth, then it also gives access to the enjoyment of their totalisations. Each new totality is sculpted out before us and for us, as an ‘it’, at the level of something like what Cohen calls a ‘climate change unconscious’:
Since social and ideational exchange tends to be a management of conscious hypocrisies, this produces a generalized climate change ‘unconscious’ that can be read everywhere, at all points, less stuffed into individual psyches than played out in the still public spaces marked by occlusion. One must discard the Enlightenment tropology, of course, which assumed that ‘climate change’ was a shocking secret that science, bringing to light, would foist on societal governance to address—as if ‘enlightened self interest’ were the market’s desideratum.
Cohen wrote this in 2016, but the comment about the rejection of ‘Enlightenment tropology’ can only—such is the rule—increase its totalising powers in the context of ‘2020’, wherein the tendency to think there is an exit beyond the ceiling of the game continues to, as it were, rule. Perhaps the most pronounced recent example of that latent gambit is Thomas Moynihan’s book X-Risk and its embrace by Reza Negarestani.
Moynihan’s book is itself a totalisation and no doubt a relapse—to use de Man’s word which Cohen formalises towards the future—into the exemplary Enlightenment tropology of thinking that something like a clear rational account of extinction will—finally—provide a degree of mastery over accelerating material conditions, a bridge, so to speak, from critique to practical application. This ‘neo-rat’ (neo-rationalist) philosophy of practical reason’s fulfilment is the shared viewing prospect of Moynihan and Negarestani, both of whom get off on the same animus with ‘continental philosophy’ and Nick Land. When they (do I mean it, again?) scan world philosophy, they like to see this single content: the sovereignty of AGI as the triumph of rationality’s ability to contemplate extinction qua extinction, which is to say precisely the avowal and ‘bringing to light’ according to disinterested market values that Cohen leaves behind in advance, by definition—prohibited and prohibitive.
According to Moynihan-Negarestani, it is as if the development of a self-formalising and self-correcting artificial rationality finds its culminating emblem in what Moynihan announces as the clear-cut ‘discovery’ of Extinction as concept. This is the chance of what Negarestani calls ‘the inhuman’ and formalised best, in nuggets, on Twitter Inc.:
The resemblance between this ‘inhuman’ and dozens of other—very previous—attempts to formalise the ‘figure of human’ out of its metaphysical underpinnings should dissuade us here from going much further, were it not perhaps for the ingeniously nested modality of the syntax (the Queen’s Rhetoric). With regard to a conventional thought dressed up in a logic that itself appears to be newly artificial, it is hard not to evoke the memory of Derrida’s ‘The Ends of Man’, which was already an attempt to show that the very gesture of formalising the human out of itself in just this way is precisely the form of a serial relapse and betrayal as tracked by Derrida in Hegel-Husserl-Heidegger-Sartre and so on with meticulous finality—that is, in effect, the only aspect of the essay that claims being definitive is just this outline of relapse.
De Man formalised by Cohen would more directly say there is no ‘metaphysical essence’ of the human to begin with outside this automated tendency towards a default of relapsing into thinking its own beyond (since forever, technological and artificial), and so the retrieval of ‘logical-conceptual’ features on the far side will hardly have turned out to be anywhere near easy (not least because finitude is now pressing, and splitting, and dissociating . . . ). Refusing to go near such a counter-reading of for example the Malabouian type (one wonders why . . . ), Moynihan-Negarestani are able to safely contemplate a horizon of difficult but ultimately doable completion in something like the same way Kantbot imagined Trump as the completion of German Idealism in 2016, and look how that ended up.
AGI and Reading
A further rendition of the M-N project can be found in a micro review of the Moynihan book which also appeared on Negarestani’s Twitter on 6 November 2020:
The thought encapsulated here is that species-being reaches an apex moment of self-awareness and clear thinking—now, in effect, in what is called ‘the anthropocene’—when extinction as a consequential and implicative idea becomes not just philosophically distinct but—because of this—socially actionable. In good but superlatively Kantian fashion, backed up this time by the hardware of a prospective AGI, critique has been followed by critique which has been followed by critique, and it is now time for Action, the worldwide dream of applying together through a global commons the ideal international laws of climate legislation, hand in hand with a future China, which would be allowed to lead, and so on, and so on. The moment is itself vaguely, if not very weakly, messianic, marked by the Kairos that initialises that tradition—the ‘once’ of ‘once we are aware’.
Certainly, Malabou’s brain of the anthropos and the experience of serial watching produce something comparable (see part 1), but with the precise difference being the shared screen-hallucination of extinction as it proves itself able to think itself in us and as us, which means among other things (to skip to the next episode) that a conscious difference between us and the thought of extinction can never originally be had or gotten at. We can never fully take responsibility for an outside view of extinction because we start off, with a view to this view, by passively watching it develop in us, and as us. As Honor Levy, a slightly lesser-known star of 2020, puts it, ‘love showing this movie to people and watching them watch it’. In other words, the shared experience of extinction qua extinction is never, and always, everything and anything but clearly self-conscious—it is shared just if, and only just if, critical consensus is assumed, between ‘man’ and ‘man’, ‘it’ and ‘it’, in advance.
When Taylor-Joy does ceiling chess, like Kleist’s marionettentheater without the strings but inverted, we see what the mechanism of thought thinking itself (qua extinction) looks like, but only on the condition of being on a pre-rational binge that folds vision into itself, ruining its enlightenment conditions, and embedding (precisely) confusion.
Which is to say, rationality, defined in these ways from before the beginning, can not simply prep itself for some imaginary hand-over to technical thinking. I love showing this to you, and I love watching you watch it, or watching you watch yourself watch it, and that really is as good as it gets.
The Conditional
Forgiving Negarestani the understandable lapse in grammar, we might at least note the strangely conditional nature of his expression of such an importantly unambiguous moment.
If the project of Enlightenment was castrated by its over-emphasis on theoretical knowledge. [sic] The existential risk-thought of extinction finally bridges the gap between theory and practice when it comes to thinking the future.
Suddenly the ‘if’ intervenes, putting the Kantian divide back in dubious circulation just at the moment we could do without it, like in a fantasy ceiling praxis. If it’s all too easy to take apart the hypothetical formation of this thought—which is in fact the entirety of Moynihan’s project placed back into the hypothetical tense it refutes—perhaps we can ask ourselves simply why that can be the case, rather than why it is.
Cohen already imagined different non-futures in which such a conceptual launch date of the key concept is—by definition—miscalculated in and by its own digital abacus. The tropological system itself gets going and online via recurrent and mutual code misreading and oversharing, what Heidegger calls ‘permanent confusion’ (durchgängige Verwechslung). Moynihan proposes, as if it were relatively simple by 2020, that we go ahead and unmask the Concept of Extinction in history, in the eighteenth century to be precise, as a modern discovery.
We go back, then, according to M, but only a little way, in order to find the Enlightenment concept of extinction which now defines the present as a moment of becoming-conscious. However—and here what goes without saying may be said—what if the original moment of formative conception, for example of death and mortality, and then extinction, were only to be read back, now, again, whatever that means, according to the same persistent, but decisive, confusion? Says Malabou, commenting on Heidegger:
What else is metaphysics besides the history of an exchange—Heidegger calls it eine Verwechslung, a confusion—between being and beings?
Moynihan-Negarestani want to speed up the connection and get the line clear (eject the dreaded ‘continental’), between being and beings, death and extinction, and so on, but in Malabou’s Heidegger at least, the metaphysical concepts themselves start out and remain by dint of their confusion that is also an exchange, which is to say totalisation. Malabou is bringing out how Verwechslung means confusion and exchange, confusion as exchange, and exchange as confusion, and how Heidegger will say that to read the origin of concepts can never just be the location of those concepts in a moment of history, whether that moment be the birth of Covid or the death of Diderot.
It, Again—Follows
As remarked, the ‘it’ takes over here—as brain of history, brain of Netflix, brain of addictogenic and aesthetic primal confusion. What makes it impossible to ever locate ‘extinction’ in one instance—qua node, or blink—is almost too easy to say. So much so, that we have to reinvent ‘stupidity’, and then take that on its own chin. Stupidity is here enumeration, which is to say the serial watch extinction-primed, counting off each nondistinctive phase by name: Covid, BLM, and so on, etc. There is no ‘extinction as such’ to count back to or forward to, since ‘extinction’ too was merely, and always, the back-projection of a tropological accumulation, and distraction.
Spending time detailing where Moynihan’s rational historicism fails to pick up its own apparently well regulated pieces would be, once again, part of the same trap—which we will, inevitably, have failed to completely avoid. The failure to define ‘extinction’ clearly (without spilling over into an ongoing war with the queen piece ‘Land’, as both signatories have done) is the first, and only, sign enough that ‘something is wrong’. To say, for example, ‘extinction’ easily predates the Enlightenment in the history of concepts and inscription and technologies, whatever you call them, and whatever you call it, why bother? Television teaches us, if anything, that the tropology of these ongoing debates has itself already sealed itself over in an exquisite, addictive hush.
And then, one day—if that day continues to come, for a while—when ‘intelligence’ does indeed make increasing gains on the market of artificiality, there is no assurance that it then gets less cloudy, not least because what the history of rationality and intelligence presuppose, at every level, is the after-effects of reading. Unless, that is, Cohen imagines it in one last fancy, otherwise as follows:
What if this future A.I., rather than the hyperbolic manager of data streams and exponential calculations, took an interest in reading? It would immediately be very close reading and indeed unflummoxed by robo-hermeneutic narcissisms. It would not anthropomorphize, obviously. It would not be perplexed by metaphors only we ‘humans’ know, usages that cannot be replicated, voice and affect inflection, cultural citations—and so on. It might get all that and move straight to the ‘material’ play of forms, insignia, interpretive canons and epochal appropriations and their constellatory relations to the hacking of the real.
As Anton says in No Country For Old Men, ‘I don’t have some way to put it; that’s the way it is.’ Which is to say, that in Cohen’s calculated fantasy some intractable hope remains as machine-effect. As A.I. comes to read, it does so not like the history of philosophy, but like, in fact, a further (perhaps forbidden) formalisation of the text of de Man—and this would already have been Cohen’s project. De Man (+ Cohen)—Man, that is, it, the brain, Beth H., Exceptional Lie Groups, the genius of intelligence in all its openness, the rare flowers of the domain—learns, in principle, that only very close reading will do, since everything else moves the concept back into the mess of amnesia that has worked it over, making use of it, till now, like Anton’s rules, which are nothing but the rules of extinction (no critical argument to be had there), in brief. Among all the metaphors such a close reading A.I. might have known how to abandon would be, first or rather last off, ‘discovery’, ‘first time’, ‘becoming conscious’, ‘change’, ‘rationality’ itself, ‘extinction’, and so on. These are the pieces on the ceiling that make and mark the game, but still only mistake themselves for its elements and rules—there where the ‘ceiling’ itself, aside from hallucination, pills, and other thrills, may, in an unavoidable final fantasy, be distinct from what human effects normally bear.
Addiction To Addiction
Whichever way we play it, we have sought to develop in two parts, out of the experience of binge-watching The Queen’s Gambit, a necessarily positive content for addiction. Up against it, at a certain end of the or a universe, addiction becomes a functional ‘effect’ to the extent that the entropic feeling states that ‘extinction’ and its intermittence as concept are expected to bring would be just too much otherwise. The logical implication of Thomson’s comment to Marcus about Homeland was that an exponential ratio exists between world ending and ‘fix’—in elective terms, the fix is in. The more the concept of extinction enters clearing—which is also to say becomes lossy—the more the human harks back to a type of mourning over the pain of losing death to extinction itself (a loss over which, paradoxically, the pain of being unable to feel or know provides a false mastery). A worse loss—that of death itself giving away—interrupts the mortuary ritual, and makes way for a brand new circuit board. What happens here is that addiction—while becoming abstract itself (a type of image of nothing but repetition)—not only self-inflects (it becomes an addiction to addiction), but continues to reinvent its own defensive operations as it does so. And the concept ‘extinction’ just is one of them. The closer we appear to get to extinction, the more and less pronounced the concept Extinction becomes, the greater the pain, the more the jouissance associated with the addiction called up to protect the brain—which is nothing more than this set of experiences, this set of watchings.
In this complex scenario, what ‘man’ processes and becomes, by defending against it in new types and degrees of addiction, is the very psychic entropy ‘man’ bears as unbearable:
Through the technological organisation of our local milieus, we construct our own little ecological niches, or microworlds, and create our own interiority in the process. This is what Bernard Stiegler calls the anti-entropy of ‘work’, in strict opposition to the entropic, or ‘anthropic’, exhausting, forces of ‘labour’. This sense of work is fundamentally related to what Csikszentmihalyi famously calls the vitalising, ‘transcendent’ happiness of ‘flow’, or immersion in a self-contained and autotelic world of one’s own making, oblivious to the distractions of competing external stimuli. He called this ‘being in the zone’. Csikszentmihalyi also saw, however, that flow experiences, from watching television to performing surgery, can be powerfully addictive, providing zones of calm focus in the midst of bewildering transformation. Subsequent research, most notably by the addiction anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll, has shown that the gap between therapeutic work and toxic addiction may be imperceptibly narrow. Technologies from gambling machines to smartphones, often designed explicitly with addictogenesis in mind, serve as substitutes for world- and self-creation, a means of restructuring the turmoil-afflicted mind with goals and direction, alleviating stress and anxiety⏤in other words, psychic entropy⏤for those otherwise unable to achieve flow states. Proponents of the ‘entropic brain theory’ in neuroscience similarly posit that stability-reinforcing patterns of activity associated with addiction (as well as OCD and depression) ‘could be functional in . . . working to resist a more catastrophic collapse [in]to’ the regression they identify with ‘primary’, or elevated-entropy, states of consciousness.
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2. hahahaha thats actually pretty funny