Comments on: Hammer of the Witches

By: northanger

northanger — Fri, 17 May 2013 06:36:08 +0000

so that’s why we ran out of popcorn.

By: David

David — Fri, 17 May 2013 05:57:47 +0000

I thought the dark side was the stick.

By: admin

admin — Fri, 17 May 2013 05:54:24 +0000

Counter-factuals are difficult, but it looked like a needless bar-fight brewing. It reminds me of Chan Buddhist pedagogy — unexpectedly whack someone with a stick and — *zap* — enlightenment. Does that work on the dark side? Certainly not often.

By: David

David — Fri, 17 May 2013 05:41:17 +0000

A totalizing claim that someone else’s totalizing claim is total crap generally risks coming off as total crap.

By: admin

admin — Fri, 17 May 2013 05:05:07 +0000

Thanks for the Accelerationist Manifesto — I enjoyed it. As you might expect, some quibbles (in rough order of importance):
(a) Is there really an effective and sympathetic audience for this kind of program? Assuming that the only accelerating processes for which we have historical precedent have involved some kind of ‘exploitation’ (directing energies into self-reinforcing productive systems, rather than leisure consumption), how realistic is it to envisage a left-accelerationist alliance? Would this not require that the labor resources which are to be channeled into accelerating growth subjectively embrace the intensification and economization of work? This strikes me as politically implausible, in the extreme.
(b) The acceleration / speed distinction is not very precisely described. Impressionistically, it suggests that capitalist ‘speed’ lacks some kind of qualitative openness relative to a ‘left acceleration’ — that it is too narrowly channeled. Without seeing more clearly what this missing quality might be, it is hard to respond precisely. My suspicion is that it involves a romantic attachment to some conception of productive ‘liberation’ beyond that captured by the capitalist index of economic value (which in turn reduces to the self-reference of auto-excitation, or production-for-production). Since the capitalist formula tends to capture mathematically-pure acceleration (self-referential growth) with great exactitude, it is hard to see what it is missing. (Do the Left Accelerationists really think they can drive the production trend harder? That sounds like the early-Soviet and Maoist illusions that markets slow things down.)
(c) Is ‘collective self-mastery’ being conceived as an immanent goal of economic evolution — in Marxian fashion? No reason is given here for embracing it. Perhaps it is supposed to be self-evident, or the Left political identity is taken as a given, which then upgrades itself through accelerationist theory, without discarding prior moral commitments. In any case, it seems extraneous to the immanent accelerationist principle, which is intensification of practical self-reference on the part of the productive machine. Optimization for intelligence is intrinsically accelerative, can the same be said of ‘collective self-mastery’? Why would such ‘mastery’ be directed towards driving the process harder? Process and goal seem to be entirely disconnected.
(d) ‘Neoliberalism’ is undefined, and given that it means everything from intense laissez-faire capitalism (when used critically by ‘Bolivarian’ Latin Americans) to mildly market-reformed New Deal social democracy (when used affirmatively by Clinton-era Democratic Party sympathizers in the United States) it is difficult to know what to make of it. The implicit idea that we are presently in a post-Keynesian epoch strikes me as preposterous. This vocabulary is a tribal rallying cry, rather than a serious contribution to political-economic analysis.
(e) Does the preliminary eco-panic do any theoretical work? It looks like an awkward fit, to say the least.
(f) “The future must be cracked open once again, unfastening our horizons towards the universal possibilities of the Outside.” — My PhD supervisor warned me against ‘must-aphysics’ and I’ve tried not to forget it. If it ‘must’ through some naturalistic destiny, OK (great). If ‘we’ ‘must’ ‘do it’ it sounds like silly soap-boxing. Waving guns at people might earn a ‘must’. Waving a politico-theoretical manifesto at them really doesn’t …

By: spandrell

spandrell — Fri, 17 May 2013 04:16:20 +0000

Pointing out that dirt poor Russians and Chinese have 100+ IQs wouldn’t?

By: admin

admin — Fri, 17 May 2013 04:04:15 +0000

“It’s just not true.” If I didn’t already agree, that certainly wouldn’t persuade me.

By: admin

admin — Fri, 17 May 2013 04:03:18 +0000

Thanks Erich, I appreciate the tone (civility tends to evaporate quite fast on this topic). When people feel harassed and persecuted — not an uncommon perception on either side, regardless of merits — the rhetorical consequences are generally unfortunate, and crude group-loyalty signals replace careful arguments. Not that I’m pretending to a structured argument here (I consider the basic HBD case to have been reliably established, and defer on the topic to specialists with intellectual integrity, such as these).

I’ll take a look at the acceleration article.

My email: ccru00@hotmail.com

By: spandrell

spandrell — Fri, 17 May 2013 03:31:19 +0000

Richwine wasn’t talking about malnourished Peruvians in the Amazon. He’s talking about Mexicans in the US. Those aren’t malnourished or mistreated during their infancy. As aren’t the millions of blacks in the US.

Russian kids grow up in dysfunctional families full of alcoholism, drug use, violence and just plain nastiness. They still manage to score 3 figures in IQ tests.

As a peruvian, stop repeating the same old universalist crap. It’s just not true.

By: Erich

Erich — Fri, 17 May 2013 03:18:09 +0000

Nick I think that what I wanted to make clear was that if we agree to move beyond the distinction between the social/cultural and the natural to a unified cosmic historical process, we need to take into account that those distinctions are not just facts but processes. I just felt that the results were mentioned in a very simple way. My point is that if there is differences that does not mean that they can change or even be reverted. So acting as if thos outcomes were brute facts to legitimze certain policy is for me nothing but a contested matter. In any case, I am definitely pro discussion about those subjects and issues.

***

By the way, I would like to know what are your opinions about the recent (leftist) “Manifesto of accelerationist politics” that argues that you confuse acceleration as such with speed:

http://speculativeheresy.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/accelerate.pdf

Sorry for the off-topic but I don’t have your email.