benjamin noys

🧩 composite

pictured: intergallactic benjamin noys by andrej synkar

core 🎲 specimen number: 𓁋 type: person ⊞ quote fragments: ⍟ key operators: external grafts: ⌘ external graft: ⚐ counter nodes: ❏ glossary: ◐ concepts:

basic stats benjamin noys (b. 1969) professor of critical theory, university of chichester education: b.sc. brunel university; m.a. and d.phil. university of sussex research areas: critical theory, literary theory, avant-garde, psychoanalysis, cultural politics, accelerationism key works: the persistence of the negative (2010); malign velocities: accelerationism and capitalism (2014) editorial / institutional roles: external affiliate; corresponding editor, historical materialism; contributing editor, angelaki; advisory editorial board, film-philosophy (university of chichester) teaching & administrative roles: coordinator, ma english literature (chichester); doctoral supervisor (literature, theory, art, film)

advanced stats this philosopher is still alive so i’ll get sued for defamation so instead you cand get more boring stuff metrics / citation data: 16 research works; ~239 citations (researchgate)citation impact: malign velocities frequently cited in debates on accelerationism and the theory of speed/capitalism (philpapers)selected articles: “the breakdown of capitalist realism” (2019), mediations

𓂃📜selected synkar quotes

in fact, my criticism of them actually is creative enough to realize that this may mean that accidentally noys is right, if post-accelerationists … realize they cant create creative forms outside of capital, only then they can be creatively stunted and must admit its a totality. 1 ❖

synkar

plus you could see that logic in certain thinkers before capital existed, meaning it isnt even intrinsic to it. anyways, we can simply call off the violence of networks, including genocidal violence itself, as simply forms of violence on equal levels. all forms of violence are abstractual engagements. this doesnt mean we dont question the ethics of these networks, but why does it even matter, is my point, if noys enjoys commie violence and latour enjoys genocidal violence, or whatever else? i know thats kind of a scary reduction of their points, but i almost look at this whole fist fight as like, trying to score cheap ideological points over and instead of trying to disrupt or continue a greater rupture in the actual conceptual domain we have.

synkar

the point is that the destruction of habits is what capital does, it doesnt get you stuck in a fully self-referential reified state, it accelerates reterritories, its so simple. habit destruction is equivalent to capital's tendencies, it is one and the same process, capital heralds its own destructions the same way marxist revolutionaries want to destroy the meaninglessness of every day life by way of executing the protogenocidal imperative of violent mass murder, equivalent to cabbage head splintering as per hegel precisely because its what causes the logic to transfer historical modes and gives it an easy, clean blank slate to quickly pass the ghost of the real abstraction through. it doesnt need anything else. it doesnt even need marxist revolutionaries, capital can auto genocide. maybe it can even auto abort lives in the future. point is, noys is so behind himself he's accidentally in front of himself.

synkar

📓 synkar’s notebook

director’s cut → quotes by synkar from various texts on the author

full notes archive → the unedited context surrounding the quotes fragment dump → only synkar’s thoughts without biographical distractions

director’s cut | ✦︎

full notes archive | ❖4

86: the existence of capitalism is so wonderfully confusing, and so ambigously dense, concentrated, virtual, that it can be considered (in the contradictory totality that it is) as a non totality precisely because of the reference of capture capitalism itself demonstrates - capitalism, by formal subsumption, shows us that transcendent categories can be imminatized to a process of ontologically alien acccumulation. capitalism shows that concrete differences can be achieved through processes of abstraction and reification, but it also shows that concrete differences exist whatsoever.

noys in his critique of latour reduces capitalism to a contradictory totality between two prior (lesser) contradictions, the contradiction of capitalism and pre-capitalist modes, but fails to see how latour is trying to find the objet petite a of capital. why would capital be the bossmaker of abstraction? capital is not absolute, its immanent process and its failure to posit itself as anything essential that interacts in any way with its process is simply its modus operandi, but its not the modus operandi of all ontological accumulators. capital is the empty totality, which is itself only one part of the infinite (virtual) difference capital unlocked for us. capital doesnt have to be both the portal and the creator, it can be one or the other, we dont know yet, but it doesnt have to be the final causer if its the first mover. even anime cliches, of all things, know and understand this to be the case and replicate it, but noys somehow doesnt, supposedly.

latour isnt undermining the intervention he opens, hes presenting it, by recalling difference hes brushing aside acted abstractions, hes showing that because of capitalism's contradictions (total asymmetry between its expected effects and its inner essence when in consideration of an abstract intention, or in its case, non attention) its possible to consider non reified commodities, non alienated abstractions, as essential categories that exist somewhere, because the process of capital creates abstractions, alienations, commodities, but in their fixed modes they are but appearances, if their general status of existence is such. its a type of pseudopositivism, positing the gnostic existence of the hidden concepts behind capital due to the essence of the way the virtous works, so much so that considering capital itself is undermining capital's introduction to advanced axiomatic abstraction that we can draw as indirect inspiration from it.

right but noys is an ethicalist, hes an old man shouting at clouds in this case? im asking about our dialectics, im trying to make sure im in front of him instead of behind him. its not about parallelity, capital is a live thing and it moves around, it doesnt matter if we accelerate it or not, im trying to even jump around within the accelerationalist readings right and left, poking here and there. capital has my back, i dont have its back. every time noys says something i just hear silence and then remember the oversaturation and perpetuation of objects drowns noys's point every time.

im making sure he isnt accidentally ahead of me, otherwise im not trying to be in conversation with his ethics. plus even his criticisms of the unproductive aspect of accelertionalism or actor network theory which is a subset of the same aspect is crap, because negative philosophy either has to accept it has a way more naturally ascetic character or alternatively even worse that it wants to be positivist but is characteristically way worse at it because it fails to interact with capital. in fact, my criticism of them actually is creative enough to realize that this may mean that accidentally noys is right, if post - accelerationalists like what im trying to be realize they cant create creative forms outside of capital, only then they can be creatively stunted and must admit its a totality.

but then, ‘[o]ne makes a difference only in a world made of differences’,29 court fatuity – a world of differences is precisely what prevents us making a difference"" - obviously they fail to consider different conceptions of difference if they still see it as gradient and not novelty or repetitively novel re-iteration. but if its a gradient, then homogeneity is just relative to a broader center. an implicit difference is relative to total homogineity, but a universal difference is a pure difference, categorically distinct obviously. a difference can only make sense in a world of differences is a better way to put latours point, and does capital open or close that possibility?

92-94: noys criticism of latours constant arrogance is great and entertaining, because latour fails to realize how communist revolutions or revolutionary acts of violence regardless of ideologies are also a part of capitalist accumulation of abstractions (abstracted violence) latour simply needed to see that even that was a part of capitalism and accept it. and what isnt a part of it?

well. either anything that layers densities of abstractions to the extent that it clearly replicates a historical mode or recurrent logic that we cant find even in the ways that capitalism reterritorializes and subsumes, or in new historic conceptual modes (not lived architectures but further real abstractions, aka conceptual domains like something other than commodity, reification, even other than abstraction. and no, hyper doesnt count, this is how you know its still a part of the same subgrouping of concepts simply following itself through). anyways, i do see latours point about marxisms monopoly of violence, and its weakness too. obviously, macro level scale changes, even changes where capitalism is no longer the dominant logic, is itself a product of capital. capitalism as an economic model isnt even foreshadowing of the totality of capital. capital is both more totalous than thought, and also more partial than transcendently possible. it both spreads apart and closes in, thats where its contradiction lies, not in that it mutates everything but posits nothing, thats a side effect of a new logic, but is itself not even its most impressive feat.

also the impossible isnt ever impossible if its posited as the impossible, obviously this is the dominion of the virutal. the impossible is what capitalism did, its also the existence of the world itself, so in that regard, capitalism isnt even a mutation that surpasses the world, its still secondary to it in levels of ontic absurdity, but the conquest of the world itself (nihilism/posaidism/misanthropy when it comes to the non-human vs. human accidental subjectifying sequention) isnt thought of as revolutionary in the same way, huh? also near the end of the chapter (95-96) noys is so annoying because the distraction of habits, including of capitals own, is already subsumed by capital itself. and no, this isnt an impossible paradox, you have the other of the other right here in capital, which he says oh yeah lacanianism doesnt target.

"latour’s "denial" of revolutionary violence is not ethically naive, but capitalistically accurate." no, his denial of it is bullshit, cause its a network, its literally part of his theory. noys correctly shows him as an ideologue, he dick sucks capital way too much,, which inversely means he isnt dick sucking it enough (to really pray to capital you must not want to pray to it, and not to pray to it). capital reproduces itself in the models of its critics, capitals admirerers will destroy it, they are also capital, like a sith lord and his apprentice.

there are only three historically productive processes that we've discovered (and an infinity more of them that we havent) and they are: history (which includes post history, the history of post history, meta history, histories, the end of history, post the end of history, pre history (Which only arrives post the end of history, because history begins with history, and nothing begins prior to history that is historical in any way), and then history, and this isnt a dialectical moment, it doesnt have to be the same history, or even a different iteration, it could have just come back or whatever, doesnt even matter), capital, and deleuze.

fragment dump

fragments

📚 works

click on any of the books to read any material synkar has written in regards to them

guide: ✦ counter text ✧ review ❖ fragments ✗ n/a

1. the intelligence of evil ❖

2. crisis and criticism ✗

3. the persistence of the negative ❖

4. envisioning the good life ✗

5. the culture of death ✗

6. the matter of language ✗

🛸 first encounter

pictured: two different correlated images of andrej synkar discovering benjamin noys for the first time

ben noys is being presented to me as a fascinating figure, with very little biographical information for me to work with, i have to rely on the text themselves for impressions. from the tragedy of coining the term accelerationism only for it to be adopted by his enemies, to being a phd supervisor to topics such as the textual politics of pornography, something i myself am fascinated by, to lenin's realism, the study of drones and so on, noys presents a great case for exactly how to approach theory in the contemporary age, as well as a platform to try and figure out exactly how the question of capital is the conceptual (not thematic) equivalent of german idealism’s nature dilemma or theology’s trinitarian debates.

🕵️‍♂️ mission observations

observation 1:

ᯓ★ table graphs

graph 1:

𓂃🪶selected quotes

📈 malign velocities

we see a collapsing of fantasy, and also a collapsing of the fictional space, into the real of production and acceleration. if someone like me should accuse this of a psychotic collapsing of our capacities for language and symbolization then the response can simply be you haven’t really gone all the way… no matter how impossible it might be to imagine or think a pure immanence the appeal to such an experience carries relentless attraction as utopian promise. to put fantasy into action, to realize ourselves as productive machines, to realize our scattering of personality as gateway, is the promise of accelerationism. and yet… virilio’s insight into the boarding of metabolic vehicles, reinforced by pynchon’s provocation, suggests the metaphysical desire for integration and dispersion of human and machine at work in the dynamic of technology, military power, and capitalism. it is this dynamic of dispersion that is often lauded in contemporary accounts of protests and struggles, which are seen as instances of resonance between bodies, including technical bodies, that can resist power. the difficulty is that these metabolic vehicles, which is to say living bodies, risk being occluded by an assimilation of their struggles to the same dynamic by which capitalism insists that we are endlessly transferable and mobile labor. what is lost is a real sense of the friction or resistance of the body against integration into fluxes and flows, as the real acceleration of struggles is seen as a line of flight from the limits of the state and capital

📉 the persistence of the negative

in terms of agency this art is collective rather than the work of a singular artist. the material of art, its ‘primary matter’ is the ‘flesh’ conceived of as the point of a ‘common living substance’ in which the body and intellect coincide. negativity, in terms of the negation or destruction of existent materials to open the space of creation, is denied through an immanent collective productivity incarnated in the monstrous production of the fi gure of this very excess. art is then the exercise of power. in a counter- intervention to this purely positive conception of artistic power the post- autonomist thinker franco ‘bifo’ berardi has indicated the psychopathologies of social relations under capitalism that result from the integration of the new ‘cyberspace’ technologies within the subject. again, we should note the role of financialisation here, which both relies on such tech- nologies and integrates them within the subject in the form of constant risk calculation [full out] resulting in the de- realisation of the subject. in a way analogous to fredric jameson’s well- known account of post- modern subjectivity as ‘schizophrenic’, berardi is signalling that, contra deleuze and guattari circa anti- oedipus, we have to recognise the negative side of this experience. berardi is suspicious of the uncriti- cal deployment of signifi ers such as ‘creativity’ and ‘activism’ in post- autonomist thought, which he regards as commensurate with a new social organisation of the ‘prozac economy’. in particular the social closure of such possibilities makes berardi far more sceptical about the emergence of any new wave of revolutionary or radical subjectivation. the result is a highly pessimistic stance in which all that remains is ‘withdrawal into inactivity, silence and passive sabotage’. although couched in the terms of absolute impasse, the flip side of negri’s abso- lute optimism, berardi’s signalling of this psychopathological situation offers an indication of the hidden economy of negativity qua negative affect denied by negri.

👩‍🍼crisis and criticism

in terms of fiction what we find, as we have traced, is the reduction of the space of alternatives. we should note that when this space did exist it was not much taken up with the imagination of alternatives, but rather with tracking the differentiations of contemporary capitalism.48 now the conceptual per- sona of money appears empty or malignant, and the tracking of this disintegra- tion impinges on the forms of narrative. instead of the dynamics of money qua dynamism requiring forming into narrative, with the usually linked questions of the sublime, excess, and a cognitive mapping that can never be fully com- pleted, we have money qua deceleration and the necessity to put into narrative a reduced and meagre world that is all too graspable and lacking in sublimity. the turn to the apocalyptic is predictable in such a situation, thinking espe- cially of cormac mccarthy’s the road (2006) as prescient work, but this form of narrative only reads capitalism in crisis in terms of its appearance as disin- tegration and cannot read the unity that is the result of crisis. we can also see the turn to fantasy not simply as a desire to escape a destitute present but also, in the mode of the quest and the sprawling form of fantasy, a negotiation of the landscapes of crisis capitalism.