READING NOTES #13
R.I.P. John Magufuli.
1 + 8 OCTOPUS
Nick Land here.
See ‘On The Rewritability of Finnegans Wake’. Angelicism is at least 01 through 08.
SAINT-JUST (DUST)
‘I always liked when Saint-Just said “I despise the dust that forms me to speak to you” and I cut to turn things to dust—maybe if I thought bodies were the key, I’d do more long takes. It goes back to Jackie Chan dubbing his own voice because his voice is not his own, he’s already in this gap.’
Isiah Medina here.
The Saint-Just original:
‘I detest the dust I am made of and which speaks to you. Let them persecute and kill that dust. But I defy them to wrest from me the independent life I gave myself before the centuries and the heavens.’
IMAGINARY NUMBER
Anna’s jump is at 4:12 and 3:48 to 4:42 [timestamped] is where the imaginary number meets the real number. In this section the jump is right in the middle.
COVID
Possible reading : to understand the whole of ‘covid’ as an immunological apparatus/stack/Gestell/war, take one slice and read across the slice.
Dr. John Magufuli for example.
Read here, but (crucially) then here, and especially (after that, amazingly) here.
AR
A text I began reading ‘in early lockdown’, Avital Ronell’s ‘A Note on the Failure of Man’s Custodianship (AIDS Update)’, published in 1993 and available here.
One of many notable moments, in this instance related to the Magufuli case, refers to the possibility of how ‘Western medicine was forcing upon Africans an internalization of Ge-stell . . . by injecting’.
The third article listed just above in point 4 develops the argument that there is now more than ever an injection of medical Gestell into/in Africa in the name of vaccine conformity.
Tanzania, Burundi, Zambia . . .
]
💉
FRIVOLITY
Elsewhere Ronell refers to ‘stinging acts of frivolity’.
SATAN’S MOONWALK
There was a new dance move in April . . . lucifer aka asturel aka axxturel aka xhango aka shiva aka melek taus aka horus aka enki aka noktifer aka gebhuza aka akahadiza aka amaymon aka samael pivoting backwards and to the ground like Michael Jackson [timestamped].
LEADER
Heinrich Wiegand Petzet, Martin Heidegger, Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger, 1929-1976 (1993), p. 159.
I’m working on a translation of/post on the first line of Hölderlin’s Antigone.
Gemeinsamschwesterliches! O ismenes haupt!
‘Pale and young, I am your leader,
golden hair and speaking eyes,
pale and young, I’m at your service,
painted for the end of time’
SETH PRICE
New Seth Price/MoMA/Michelle Kuo dialogue super confused in a revealing way. The liberationalist vector (pink) has no way of accounting for the legal/mortal/inscriptive dimension that still undercuts it (yellow):
If it leads to growth is maybe most telling and could have been both pink (innovation, rescue) and yellow (finitude, legalese), since descriptive language is in the process of confusing itself with legalistic language (contracts for absolute singularity) as an internal not extraneous problem. It’s what defined the delirium of Pascal’s ‘calculator’.1
Even though I wrote an essay called ‘NFTs After Finitude’ and one called ‘No NFTs, Not Now’, I don’t think it was ever about recalling NFTs to finitude (nobody can imo) or developing digital singularity critique, but at the same time Seth’s dialogue inside MoMA, and shared e.g. on the newmodels.io homepage at the time of writing, doesn’t make new statements. It’s a Russian doll shell game (new models inside old models (new models are old models)).
In fact, Price talks about the ‘old model’ (internet 1.0, iterability, legal concepts, ownership) and opposes to it a ‘final erasure of any distinction between owning the set of masters, and then the copies’, but there’s nothing ‘new’ about this distinction and this language (singularity, at whatever level, is always iterative).
There is a text/image-machine that does without human ownership, escaping ‘old models’, yes, but what that freedom dictates is delirious usage, for example in this language itself, in its level of confusion.
NOTE: angelicism did find one piece of language memorable, when Kuo says:
It’s this curious conjunction of the contract, the mathematical singularity, and then the JPEG or GIF or whatever.
EVEN INDIANS
Like, here is Price iterating MetaKovan on MoMA to the effect that NFTS are so liberatory that even Indians and POCS can be patrons. Mind = blown. 🤯 Like, FUCK THE ID CONTRACT POLICE bro, liberate the global south like Harry Burke on an adreno-hydroxychloroquine snowball, give them all the leftover digital 💉, in Tanzania , Burundi, Zambia, they can take.
R.I.P. John Magufuli.
Note: ‘collective desire to build something’ is like I just can’t.
WHY CAN YOU ONLY SAY THIS NOW
This is from January 2020 on the TL. This time angelcism01 is not really making believe about getting at Dean too much, just noting that this was a great example of the ‘now it’s okay’ thing that’s now a thing in action. Kissick had just shared the Intelligencer lab-leak hypothesis article.
Also for example:
Which all leads to the next point.
THE RECKONING
Nicholas Wade’s ‘The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?’ is p essential or something, and one of the main moments is at the very end:
The common sense perception that a pandemic breaking out in Wuhan might have something to do with a Wuhan lab cooking up novel viruses of maximal danger in unsafe conditions could eventually displace the ideological insistence that whatever Trump said can’t be true.
And then let the reckoning begin.
So the question becomes, just how many things that it wasn’t okay to say or that couldn’t be true because Trump said them a year or even a few months ago will now turn out to be not only true but totally sayable?
One starts with the complicated origin of the virus, but then one may wish to proceed to the absolutely manipulated 2020 election, and so on, and so forth.
What does ‘appropriate’ mean in this case?2
TOBI HASSLETT
I didn’t bother to read the whole thing because my intelligence was being insulted so frequently so early on I just opened other tabs.
I just can’t. (See footnote 1.)
WAB
Joel Skousen is a homophobe and one of the best writers/analysts around. This one sentence from his most recent subscriber-only World Affairs Brief contains a lot:
The Powers That Be have developed the perfect pseudo medical fear formula for continual control: A not-very-deadly version of a commonly contagious virus that mutates rapidly so it never goes away, a manipulable PCR test that can produce scary high numbers of ‘cases’ despite a lack of symptoms (mostly false positives), an exaggerated claim about asymptomatic spreaders, so that even healthy people can be stigmatized as a threat, and an outrageously falsified death rate labelling anyone who tests positive or is even suspected of dying from Covid as a Covid death, instead of mere comorbidity.
COVID ISN’T COVID
Covid doesn’t have a name yet. Certainly, Covid isn’t its name, and, given that it is coming for Africa and all that means, another name, a vastly different one, is implied.
KOAN
I’m gonna do it just don’t know when
What angelicism is saying is that it is always possible to copy a unique contract or even, at some stage, to replicate or resurrect part of the blockchain, just as for example one day pure intelligence may solve the continuum hypothesis. Said again, the liberatory and as-if prescriptive elements of this dialogue about crypto art are not simply extraneous with regard to a performative legitimation, which confusion both Price and Kuo are accountable for, but constitutive. They produce, if you like, in the very moment of technical euphoria and discovery, an apparently more conventional language of legitimacy, signatures, paternity, and so on. NFTs, in this sense, are not to be mystified. New models, old models. (Old wine, new models.)
OK, so there’s an answer to the question WHY CAN WE ONLY SAY THESE THINGS NOW, and it’s this (semi-obviously): TRUMP. But then why? Why this answer? Angelicism01 refuses all Joshua-competing-for-the-hearts-and-minds-of-the-young-Citarella-level bullshit about ‘utterly bullshit conspiracy theories’ here . . . the reason we didn’t say these things while Trump was in power isn’t that they might have been confused with ‘fascism’, since if they are sayable now, then, obviously, they were not ‘fascist’ in the first place, and were sayable all along. For example, will all Marxists in the house disavow using the language of the ‘class enemy’ because just this language was used during the Holodomor as a coded way to kill millions of Ukranian peasants? It’s impossible not to conclude that the ‘conspiracy theorists’ were the ones who refused to make things sayable precisely because of the unanalysed element still, just about, called ‘Donald Trump’.
Striking, as always.
As to Hölderlin’s "Gemeinsamschwesterliches": one could imagine a contemporary translation of "co-head," insinuating "corporate."
John Magufuli Monument