Updatage…
by rsbakker
One of my big goals with Three Pound Brain has always been to establish a ‘crossroads between incompatible empires,’ to occupy the uncomfortable in-between of pulp, science, and philosophy–a kind of ‘unholy consult,’ you might even say. This is where the gears grind. I’ve entertained some grave doubts over the years, and I still do, but posts like these are nothing if not heartening. The hope is that I can slowly gain the commercial and academic clout needed to awaken mainstream culture to this grinding, and to the trouble it portends.
I keep planning to write a review of Steven Shaviro’s wonderful Discognition, wherein he devotes an entire chapter to Neuropath and absolutely nails what I was trying to accomplish. It’s downright spooky, but really just goes to show, at least for those of us who periodically draw water from his Pinocchio Theory blog. For anyone wishing to place the relation of SF to consciousness research, I can’t think of a more clear-eyed, impeccably written place to begin. Not only does Shaviro know his stuff, he knows how to communicate it.
Robert Lamb considers “The Great Ordeal’s Outside Context Problem” over at Stuff to Blow Your Mind, where he asks some hard questions of the Tekne, and Kellhus’s understanding of it. SPOILER ALERT, though. Big time.
Dan Mellamphy and Nandita Biswas-Mellamphy have just released Digital Dionysus: Nietzsche and the Network-Centric Condition, a collection of various papers exploring the relevance of Nietzsche’s work to our technological age, including “Outing the It that Thinks: The Coming Collapse of an Intellectual Ecosystem,” by yours truly. The great thing about this collection is that it reads Nietzsche as a prophet of the now rather than as some post-structuralist shill. I wrote the paper some time ago, at a point when I was still climbing back into philosophy after a ten year hiatus, but I still stand by it and its autobiographical deconstruction of the Western intellectual tradition.
Ah, the Unholy manuscript rears its head. That’s some great news, though hopefully not as many years between that copy and the publication this time 😉
!
No jinxes!! Those are the three I sent out, btw.
Yaaassss!
Onward to Golgotterath!!
Solid!
Man, I’m so incredibly happy for you. Congratulations!
Honoured, as always, to have shared in this incredible journey so far.
The same goes for me too Mike.
Digital Dionysus is not available as a Kindle e-book? Isn’t there a law that any book with “digital” in its title must perforce be released in a digital format?
I’m not sure what the story is there… I’ll ask around.
https://punctumbooks.com/titles/digital-dionysus/
Way cool, thank you.
Reblogged this on alien ecologies and commented:
Bakker’s essay “Outing the It that Thinks: The Coming Collapse of an Intellectual Ecosystem,” in a new Nietzsche book of essays: Dan Mellamphy and Nandita Biswas-Mellamphy have just released Digital Dionysus: Nietzsche and the Network-Centric Condition.
Thank you my brother. Have you ever checked out this?
Going to read it today, thanks… almost reminds me of the CCRU and Nick Land mid-90’s number strangeness with the mythologies of MOO and Chthulhu (Lovecraft), etc.. Land was always a hyper-mathematician into code etc., even now he is an adept in the bitcoin and platform economics underlying it. Of course that’s his scenario, the replacement of the human by the inhumab machinic systems: our successors as optimize intelligence, etc. I’ll have to read this see what is being said about algorithmic culture,
As I’m reading through this two names from the 19th Century jut out: SaintYves and Louis Jacolliot.
Jacolliot would influence Nietzsche as well. His work on Occult Sciences: seeking an origin of Western Occult traditions (Hermetic, Kabbalistic, Gnostic heresies, etc.) in India… one can imagine Nietzsche connecting this to his readings in Schopenhauer’s threads on Indic religions… https://www.amazon.com/OCCULT-SCIENCE-INDIA-AMONG-ANCIENTS-ebook/dp/B01JVPNDEE/ref=sr_1_3?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1474145029&sr=1-3&keywords=Louis+Jacolliot%2C
SaintYves seems to have come up with the concept of Synarchy: a for of cultural algorithm governing human history and civilization; also connected to India. (Of course the 19th Century is replete with this influx of texts from India, Egypt, etc. Seemed to fascinate the European psyche who was trying to find an alternative to Catholic thought, etc.). https://www.amazon.com/Kingdom-Agarttha-Journey-Hollow-Earth-ebook/dp/B005CW62B2/ref=sr_1_5?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1474144500&sr=1-5&keywords=Saint-Yves
Still reading the article, but appears the author is trying to construe a sort of theory-ficition that incorporates our current algorithmic culture into a political-mystic governance mythology underwritten within a sort of pseudo-scientific philosopheme. The one author who did this so well was Stanilaw Lem: his satires are still under read and underated; yet, of late on Amazon it appears a new generation of young readers have four Lem and he seems to be making a come back… his novel: His Master’s Voice would be right up your alley…
His Master’s Voice: A pulsating stream of neutrino radiation from a source with the power of a sun has been detected on earth and a team of scientists assembled to study and decode the mysterious message. As the scientists wranle among themselves, clashing and conspiring while jockeying for favor and position, Lem produces a witty and inventive satire of “men of science” and their thinking. In the race to discover whether the message is a technological gift or the formula for the ultimate weapon, the author grapples with the issue of scientific responsibility in a compelling sci-fi thriller.
https://www.amazon.com/His-Masters-Voice-Stanislaw-Lem-ebook/dp/B0085TK6WU/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1474145758&sr=1-1&keywords=His+master%27s+voice
I’ve never read His Masters Voice – definitely on the list now!
Even stranger The Secret World an MMO by Funcom uses this whole Agartha and algorithmic culture routine within a large virtual system of questing:
http://www.thesecretworld.com/
I played that a couple years back… one of the better games based on Conspiracy Theory with Illuminati, Templars, and Dragons; three secret societies that pull the strings of our world. Work your way to the top, earn titles and rewards, and play a key role in the battle for world domination as you engage in furious player vs. player battles throughout the world.
It’s as if reality has become a total immersion system gobbling up our minds with all these 19th Century memes… 🙂
I thought it interesting that she aligns Deleuze with Saint Yves in the notion of synarchic mathesis, etc. and quotes many of Deleuze’s passages on his early work on universal knowledge, etc. There’s a work by a young scholar Joshua Ramsey The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal of interest in this regard: https://www.amazon.com/Hermetic-Deleuze-Philosophy-Spiritual-religion-ebook/dp/B00CJRI42S/ref=sr_1_sc_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1474163641&sr=1-1-spell&keywords=deleuze+hermtic
Yea… a few snippets that remind me of Nick Land’s alien invasion from the future by predatory machinic intelligence to further its own ends toward Singularity. They follow me and I them on Twitter, but never made the connection till now. Quite and interesting take to say the least:
What is today either heralded as a new techno-utopian mode of algorithmic governance or conversely as an utterly dystopian kind of computational empire is precisely what we are here calling the Algorithmic Agartha: an altogether esoteric, over-human (übermenschlich), and calculatively mathè-mètic matrix that has taken the reins of power in our current techno-cultural dronological surveillance societies.
The rise of an algorithmically-governed planetary regime ‘manages’ and ‘makes use of’ humans (as well as animals, objects, what-have-you/what-have-use: the entire purview of the so-called ‘anthropocene’) as conduits for machine evolution, machinic intellection, and the proliferation of overhuman orchestrations that occur and recur under the cover of computational power supposedly instrumentalized by human beings. It does not dispense with humans altogether, but rather lures humans into a predatory economy of tantalizing prostheses that promise to extend, expand and enlarge the dominion (never mind the desires) of what in fact is an ever-waning species – a species on its way out.
What we are suggesting here is that the anthropocenic worldview occludes what might at present be an even more fundamental (underground as well as overarching) ‘electro-synarchic’ agent of inscription with respect to which the human is only a conduit and carrier: namely, a force of inscription that the human does not see (one that operates at the ‘vanishing-point’ of human communication). The ‘vanishing-point’ of human communication, we propose (pace Baudrillard 1992, 2009: 15-24), is the point at which another regime of communication arises – one that is altogether obscene (ob-scena, i.e. literally ‘off-the-scene’ (cf. Baudrillard, 1983: 150) and that cannot be represented within the theoretical framework advanced in the dominant conception of ‘the anthropocene’. It is precisely by way of the anthropocentricity of the human species that the electrocene comes to encroach, entrench and establish itself, hidden in plain sight. (Mellamphy & Mellamphy: 14)
This passage also nicely pinpoints the place where I’ve pressed them on this paper, where I think they run the conspiracy theory risk, the notion that some kind of occluded ‘Other Intelligence’ is operational behind the scenes. There’s nothing in charge… what’s happening needs to be thought along the lines of the development of multicellular life.
Yea, exactly, that’s closer to insect intelligence, or just blind cunning with no agent or agency behind the curtain (appearances) (i.e., not even the Borg Syndrome). Nothing but blind endless repetition and algorithmic chance and necessity. This is Land’s take below: “All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher’s yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of the bloody grinding mills of selection, either, but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible preservable trait, and then — still further — of the unavowable horrors that ‘fitness’ (or sheer survival) itself predominantly entails. We are a minuscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite.”
―Nick Land, A Thirst for Annihilation
http://RSBakker.Wordpress.Com/2016/09/16/updatage-2/#comment-47096…“… ‘information’…has [to this point] been conceptualized primarily in terms that are protocological and computational, hence almost exclusively #Apollonian (or as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would say, ‘striated’), rather than #Dionysian (or as Deleuze and Guattari would say, ‘smooth’) terms” (DD.11)…“as Scott Bakker reminds us in his contribution to this volume), Dionysus symbolizes the ‘forgetfulness and random noise’, the #pre- or #proto-individual ‘background of all media’ out of which arises the Apollonian signal qua ordering ‘principle of individuation’ (the ‘principium individuationis’ of The Birth of Tragedy §1-2). According to Nietzsche’s thinking, then, we can conceptualize the #Apollonian as the tendency toward concretization via selection, individualization, and formalization (e.g. the complex computational processes required for physiological formations, including cognition, representation, signification); the #Dionysian, by contrast, is that tendency which continuously mediates the former—threatening to dissolve, disrupt, and dissipate it (#chaos in this sense is the Dionysian weapon #par_excellence). To date, we have tended to view networks and our current network-centric condition in almost #exclusively Apollonian terms—that is, in terms of networks of discrete elements, informational protocols, and platforms. From the Apollonian perspective, the Dionysian is ‘a chiasmic turbulence that the computationally-centric [viz. Apollonian] concept of network[s] tries to keep at bay’. The result is that ‘so far, there is no digital Dionysus’—hence a fundamental aspect of network-centricity remains almost entirely occluded (i.e. unthought)” (DD.12).
The Thousandfold ᵁⁿThought of R. Scott Bakker 😉
What’s the book under the manuscript? ___ and Intervening?
nevermind, found it.
Hacking’s representing and intervening–brilliant. A great eye for messiness.
Shite, I’m scared to read the discussion of the Tekne. Reality might go pop!
It’s a monstrous spoiler though, so don’t! Cut reality a break
I have sent an email, don’t know if you have seen it.
I like reading books but also listening to audiobooks. The first trilogy was amazing while the rest sucked. I do not know why they changed narrators.
If you care about this, you could talk to audible, you can probably convince them. Getting the 4 books from the Aspect emperror read by the first guy would be amazing and i would buy them at once.
I have even messaged the narrator and he would be glad to continue. I hope you think about this, i know many people like me who would pay to see the old guy back.
Would really appreciate a response so i can lay this to rest without having my hopes up for nothing.
I’m sorry you feel that way, but there’s nothing I could do even if I wanted to.
I understand writers have some influence with this. Could you not talk to them ? Are you not paid royalities for each copy? you could take a look on audible, the new narrator has bad reviewd and virtually nobody liked him. Probably hundreds if not thousands of sales are lost in the long run..
I tried to make the economic point clear , my tastes are not the main concern…
I have spent arround 50$ on your audiobooks. I am willing to spend 100-130$ more(assuming 4+2 books) on the rest if the old narrator comes back. I know many others feel this way.
I know few people read these books, i want to play my part in helping you because I don’t want other issues with publication…. waiting for the great ordeal was truly a great ordeal…
I hope I made my points clear… this is all I have to say! Can’t wait for the conclusion of this epic story!
Go to reddit.com/bakker. There is a thread there where people are saying the same thing.
This is bad for everyone involved. You and audible don’t get the money while we tha fans don’t get a good product.
At least try contacting the guys from audible, a message from you can”t hurt no matter what they decide…
Hey Scott (is it okay if I call you Scott?),
I was planning on emailing rather than replying to an unrelated blog post, but I just saw the comment (linked from a Reddit.com/r/bakker thread about the audiobooks).
I understand that you don’t care about our opinions of the narration, or if you have no control over the audiobooks. However, have you ever listened to them while reading your text? Kevin Orton mangles it. He constantly skips, replaces, or rearranges what you write.
I’m halfway through TGO at the moment, and I deleted the audiobook last night after he changed four words on a single page.
I won’t even start on his pronunciations.
I love your text. If you aren’t bothered by his butchery of it, I guess I’ll just stick to your ebooks.
It’s really exciting to see the Unholy Consult manuscript looks ready to send out.
You guys do realize I’m just a cult author, don’t you? You’re not so much increasing the chances that things will get fixed as the chances that there will be nothing to be fixed.
I realize it. Many times cult authors have(and need) more dedicated and obsessive fans, so don’t take our messages the wrong way.
I have spent a lot time reading your books, talking about them, recommending them to everyone i know because I love them and i know being a dedicated Bakker fan is much more “important” than being a Harry Potter fan… very popular and mainstream authors dont need our help but you decided to write something special.
So I do what I can to help you out because I respect your work… there are issues with the audiobooks,me and others dislike the new guy and would pay to get the old one back.
If you realize this than we suceeded. This is an opportunity for you and the audiobook fans…I don’t know what will happen next,maybe your word matters more than you think… remember you have some huge fans out there who love what you do ! Our issues are not with you , the problem comes from a very disrespectful and bad adaptation, you(and the series) deserve better…
@Robert I loved Kevin Orton’s narration. The Aspect Emperor is a different series than The Prince of Nothing. The characters age 20 years and we have a whole new slew of characters and places. It makes sense to switch to a new voice.
I’ll admit his style was off putting at first, but by the time we meet the Skin Eaters, it was over. Great stuff. David DeVries has his Cnaiur, but Orton has Sarl.
NO SPOILERS. Very cool article about the Outside Context Problem. Although, is that referring to the Earwa “outside”? Ah…..wordplay.
To be honest, I just assumed in reading this scene in TGO that since Kellhus was able to consolidate all the sorcerers and scholars in Earwa to his cause after becoming AE back in TTT, along with that came every scrap of literature and knowledge of the world (which he would spend his next 20 years getting up to speed on the land, culture, myths, histories, etc). In 20 years of study, Kellhus must have absorbed countless ancient obscure texts or perhaps heard a legend or clue about the yada yada, thus some prior context to many things….including things which the narrative has revealed, or has yet to reveal. Unless I’m assuming incorrectly and there’s more to this than what is currently presented in TGO/TUC thus far.
BTW- Any chance we can get a sample chapter or segment soon from Unholy Consult?
TGO isn’t even released in Europe yet. Also, if you remember TGO, there was a chapter excerpt some 4ish years before the release. I think maybe we should wait a year and see what happens 🙂 .
if folks are on twitter a link to share, thanx
https://syntheticzero.net/2013/07/05/cyber-nietzsche-tunnels-tightropes-net-meshworks/
Thanks for the update drink bartender.
Nice place you have here, this Crossroads Tavern:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossroads_(mythology)
Is a publication of Light, Time, and Gravity still in the works somewhere? There must be tens of us still waiting to see it in print.
[…] too big to handle, and so the Aspect-Emperor trilogy is now a quartet with The Unholy Consult, from recent online appearances, being fairly far along in the process toward […]