Fragment #6

08/06/2021

While revolutionaries, reformists, left accelerationists, and just all post-capitalists, etc. seek an existent post-capitalist reality, this is just a desire for what Lyotard calls an “affirmative region” (alternatively, I call it ‘the outside’). Theoretically, I argue that these people want change, they want movement, they want directed pulsions, and ultimately this is the name of the game when it comes to capitalism-as-the-secondary-process. But there is still the primary process which is Bataille’s Sun as Land argues in TTFA. So, the primary process is the flow of those non-directed pulsions and this flow is towards the outside of capitalism which is found only in annihilation. Here is the thing: there is no such thing as a post-capitalist reality, capitalism is reality. It is only in those orgies of existential psychosis that we find the non-existential outside that is Bataille’s Sun. Ultimately, capitalism is accelerating towards the abyss. It has identified humanity as a disease which is weak, and tired. It sees humanity as tired from all the running it has been doing. I’ve said this before to Gannon: History is just the history of humanity trying to catch up with capitalism and as each generation goes by, we get weaker and weaker. Capitalism on a structural level is destroying us and itself. I don’t completely agree with the late Landian and neo/post-Landian ideas of capitalism as something that will outlive humanity, mainly because I think capitalism as a tendency starts with subjects, it’s just that this tendency outpaces subjects (Land says that we only had proto-capitalism). So there is not an alternative to capitalism I think, because the alternative to capitalism is non-existential. It is a realm of impossibility. In fact, the outside of capitalism which is the solar annihilation of the subject is the impossible. We cannot escape capitalism… We cannot escape capitalism because to escape capitalism we must escape ourselves…

We are not in opposition to the sun in the sense that we are effects of the sun, right. So, we have the void, and we are the effect of its demand for our existence. The Sun doesn’t demand our existence, but the living matter that we are is a mutation. This process of permutation is animated by solar energy. So, we are an effect of the Sun in that sense, but we are not in opposition to the Sun and here is why: to quote Joseph Stalin, “Death solves all problems — no man, no problem” (Stalin quoted in Children of the Arbat 559) We aren’t even necessarily real; our reality is enclosed in the unreality of death, that is, the primary process is still the primary process to the secondary process as Land says in TTFA.(edited)

[2:31 AM]

In Land’s interpretation of Bataille (which I don’t wholly subscribe to but I’m high key vibing with it rn because of its beautiful cosmological exposition of Bataille), the main movement of Bataille’s work is a movement towards Zero So, what is Zero? Quite simple. Zero is NOTHING. To quote Victor J. Vitanza, “We are spent, Zero” (Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric 98) Bataille sees that inevitably the subject expends itself. This movement of the subject into Zero (Zero is immense as Land says (0 = excess)) is the dissolution of the subject in an inhuman ecstasy. It is the highest order of experience: subject and object interpenetrate one another, and form a community as they are engaging in a communion, that is, they are communicating with one another. But to enter into communication with one another, they must go beyond themselves with the other. So, really this is just the dissolution of the subject. When ever you lose yourself, forget about the future, no longer fear death, etc. you are not, in that, you are NOTHING; you are nowhere, and in your absence, there is only Zero. So, the non-directed pulsion is directed toward Zero and is thus still not directed because Zero is nowhere.