'Reaction' as the Fermi Paradox: Mitchell Heisman, Harmony Korine, Hitler, Nick Land
Auschwitz, then, can be viewed as a legitimate implication of Marxism.
At the start of the last decade, it was Mitchell Heisman in his Suicide Note who best explained the implication between leftist progressivism and cultural extinction. Formatted hyper-paradoxically, the essence of this logic is to be found in the chapter called ‘Hitler Refutes Marx: The Industrial Revolution of Genocide’. It goes as follows: because it places human economy before human biology, that is, because it puts racial differences before life itself as bio, Marxism as a broadly adopted thought-format is the effective condition (in the strong material sense) of all forms of ‘reaction’. As Heisman at his most historically granular puts it, ‘Auschwitz, then, can be viewed as a legitimate implication of Marxism’. Heisman says that Hitler refuted Marx at Auschwitz and that Auschwitz can be viewed as an unthought implication of Marx’s theory precisely because Marxism (like modern viral ‘Leftism’) raises to the power of distraction the priority of human economy and difference over anthropics (life’s singularity and perhaps universal probability as One). The simplest statement of this is the one Heisman provides, which is that ‘before one can worry about securing or maximizing one’s existence, one must first have an existence’. Any system of thought that sets anything above the fact of existence is the implication (to use again Heisman’s specific word) of fascism as an accelerative test of biology’s occlusion. As Harmony Korine put it way back when in A Crack Up at the Race Riots — and as can now be scanned more formally — Hitler had shit going on.
This is what ‘reaction’ means in the long-run: opera, vindication, ‘resistance’, relapse. Last blast. Last blood. Last rights. ‘Reaction’ is not a positionality (racist or otherwise) but an adherence to a cosmogenic cleft. When Steve Bannon says that ‘granularity is your friend here’, then this, read in the most autistic sense, is part of the relevant mystery. Take as an example the attempt to remove, shut down and cancel the work of Nick Land in early 2017 as part of the so-called ‘LD50 affair’. This effort was mainly a prohibition of reading and therefore a deep comment on the technogenesis of ignorance. It was also a pre-emptive slander of the word, ‘reaction’.
Yet, one has only to turn to Land’s early and hesitant discussions of ‘reaction’ as a term to note that it names for him something that vacillates between the status of ‘phenomenon’ and ‘problem’. This means that what Land was writing in November 2013 for instance, long before more vivid consequences were felt, was not a celebration but an analysis of ‘reactionary’ modes. Even the more sophisticated critiques of Land, by Yuk Hui and Ray Brassier, omit to read what Land says at the most obvious level about what ‘reaction’ is, not as position but as ‘problem’, and take for granted something like a homogeneous ‘fascist turn’. Instead of a flagrant ‘shift to the right’, we might wish to observe that a terminological hesitation characterises Land’s early formulations on this terrain, as seen for example in a series of Xenosystems blog posts recently mysteriously ‘removed’ (not by the author himself, so it seems):
Neoreaction, from the problematic perspective, is the insistence of a question, rather than a solution struggling to be born into settled doctrine. It is a word contrived to preserve its own dynamic illegibility (or unstable paradox), at least as much as the name for a program on the path to acceptance (arriving at consensual significance).
The name ‘Land’ came for a time to stand for the insistence of the unreading of this ongoing illegible problem.
The refusal to read this insistence of a question is, then, expected; it is, moreover, the by now predictable and itself unreadable refusal to contemplate Generic Extinction. This is the real future of cancellation, as a supposedly understood term, if it has one. LD50 completed aesthetic modernism, according to Land, around the same time that Kantbot claimed that Donald Trump completed German Idealism. These two completions are not just coincidentally neon moments in the history of internet culture that can be herded out of consciousness when and if American political life is redialled back to its ‘normal’ state, but avatar aporias, crisis points in what may be a more-than-real thermal end of a universe from the anthropic point of view (when we go, everything goes). Political media has replaced aesthetic attention precisely because it is on the chyrons of Tucker Carlson that one can see (read or not) the fierce granularity of this ‘problem’; it is there, in Disney’s CCP-financed colours, stupidly, and yet with rigour, that we may ask ourselves whether there is something beyond recall.
Ultimate Shit
‘Reaction’ therefore names the unreading of a cosmogenic problem and what that ‘problem’ actually is, in specific terms, is the Fermi Paradox. This, in turn, is how AI will read off ‘reaction’ in its overfriendly granularity in future states, if they come. Ultimately, the most grisly consequences of all this can be expressed, as Heisman indicated, in terms of race. That race trumps everything as a distraction now is perhaps the most intimate explanation of the Fermi Paradox. In other words, as race (the idea that whiteness must undo itself in time, as if there were time, all the time in the world) becomes more and more the tone of an epoch as a definite sign of repression, so distraction becomes machinal and complete (call this the question of China and technology as a ruse). The inability to think about anything other than race becomes an explanation for a cultural inability to get past the nexus point in civilisations thus generically produced (exo-cancellation), and multiplied. The atrobiology of anthropocenes is here threaded, on the x-spot of the American race war as a kind of ontological import, with the lurid granularity of everything at stake in the online Battle of Being (gigantomachia peri tes ousias). The race war is, pushing this to an extreme that is far from unwarranted, the height of cosmic political incorrectness.