Malign Logic - Matias

# Malign Logic In an essay Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest, Nick Land goes in some depth delivering loosely coherent justifications for a thesis that—although not satisfactorily proven—evokes, in its formulation, a profoundly disquieting thought, and one that preoccupies many of the smartest contemporary minds. It is the hypothesis that AIs have already taken over and rule us all. Although a moderate assessment of these worries is, as Andrew Ng puts it, like worrying about overpopulation in Mars, the concern would certainly be justified if instead of worrying about future takeover the concern is rather focused on an ongoing usurpation. I will seek to justify these claims in my own way, for although I have read enough to understand what Land means in some of his cryptic passages, I too feel as though the edge of sanity has begun to fray. But onward we must go; pray tread lightly upon this withering web. The radical notion introduced by Land is that Reason as depicted by Kant in his famous critiques is a sort of civilizational trap. Kant is of course an instrumental figure in the development of Western and, one could say, universal philosophy, so any criticism of him should be weighed against the reputation of a most established thinker. In his conception of himself as an idealist, Kant is adopting the position that there is no intrinsic distance between the mind as rational agent and the real world. It is essentially a leap of faith that phenomena in the real world can be rationally explained, that the language of rationality is capable of expressing and exhausting the set of real outcomes in the world. It is clear that to some extent this leap of faith is justified, for otherwise technological projects would fail. But we should not believe that merely because these projects have succeeded that the leap of faith was justified. Baseless confidence is the ruin of many a lucky gambler. The central concept to Nick Land’s philosophy is that of Otherness, Outsideness, or the unknown unknowns. The philosophical notion of the unknown that Land is referring to has deep implications as to what we understand to be science as defined by the scientific method, as well as the theory of progress through different eras defined by technological mastery and renewal of social conventions towards a humanitarian reduction of suffering. What Land is critiquing here is Kant's laying out formally that the reach of reason extends into that which is inherently unknown, what could be conceived of as expanding the reaches of human knowledge and exerting mastery over these forces to use them instrumentally to achieve real objectives. Land is skeptical that knowledge of the unknown can be derived a priori, that the distance between the real world and rationality is insignificant. To ground this, as an example, you could say that Carl Benz had no idea that the car would become the most deadly machine in history, claiming nearly 20% of all lost souls each year. "Between medieval scholasticism and Kant Western reason moves from a parochial economy to a system in which, abandoning the project of repressing the traffic with alterity (outsideness), one resolves instead to control the system of trade." With this perspective, Land sees the Chinese culture as superior to Western, as it resisted the takeover by capital forces of change, which had to be imported "literally by gunboat". "I believe in the katechon: it is for me the only possible way to understand Christian history and to find it meaningful... One must be able to name the katechon for every epoch of the last 1948 years. The place has never been empty or else we would no longer exist." To Carl Schmitt the katechon is someone or something whose removal is necessary before the Antichrist manifests itself <blockquote class="wp-block-quote">The philosophical task in relation to modernity is that of delineating and challenging the type of thinking which characterizes it. But what we are to understand as ‘thinking’ is not at all clear in advance, indeed, the very thought of the ‘in advance’ (which Kant called the a priori) is itself the predominant trait of our contemporary reason. Western societies departed from the stagnant theocracies of the Middle Ages through a series of more or less violent convulsions that have engendered an explosive possibility of novelty on earth. But these same societies simultaneously shackled this new history by systematically compromising it. This ambiguous movement of ‘enlightenment’ which characterizes the emergence of industrial societies trading in commodities, is intellectually stimulated by its own paradoxical nature. An enlightenment society wants both to learn and to legislate for all time, to open itself to the Other and to consolidate itself from within, to expand indefinitely while reproducing itself as the same. Its ultimate dream is to grow whilst remaining identical to what it was, to touch the other without vulnerability. Where the European ancien régime was parochial and insular, modernity is appropriate. It lives in a profound but uneasy relation to an outside that both attracts and repels it, a relation that it precariously resolves within itself on a basis of exploitation, or interaction from a position of unilateral mastery.The paradox of enlightenment, then, is an attempt to fix a stable relation with what is radically other, since insofar as the other is rigidly positioned within a relation it is no longer fully other. If before encountering otherness we already know what its relation to us will be, we have obliterated it in advance. And this brutal denial is the effective implication of the thought of the a priori, since if our certainties come to us without reference to Otherness we have always already torn out the tongue of the laterite before entering into relation with it.This aggressive logical absurdity (the absurdity of logic itself) reaches its zenith in the philosophy of Kant, whose basic problem was to find an account for the possibility of what he termed ‘synthetic a priori knowledge’, which is knowledge that is both given in advance by ourselves, and yet adds to what we know. <cite>Nick Land. Fanged Noumena. Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest: A Polemical Introduction to the Configuration of Philosophy and Modernity. </cite></blockquote> The simplest explanation is through the allegory of the Faustian Bargain. This was the idealized conception of the deal with the Devil, and it will register familiarly to anyone with a Judeo-Christian background. Generally, a soul is exchanged for unworldly knowledge or material riches, some sort of contract is signed (in blood), and a horned creature is sent as witness. The critical insight of this fable is that no matter how noble an intention one had before consorting with the old goat, once the deal is signed the future is tightly coupled in a deadly spiral that brings misfortune after misfortune and ends directly in Hell. Although Land does not bring it up, one can tell that he wants to make us think about all the riches, power and knowledge that we find ourselves surrounded by. Are we convinced that this rich bounty is a gift of God for our jurisprudence and wisdom in working together to bring the Kingdom of God to earth? For Land, the Faustian Bargain was struck long ago, and at a civilizational scale. One can only wonder at the horrors that await. Thus, for Land, we find ourselves witnessing the chaotic spiraling of a civilization that long ago wagered all that made it holy to Mephistopheles in a pact for forbidden knowledge of the sort that only God and his Angel cohort should know. To Land, familiar with the implacable logic of Faust, all that remains is watching the ever-accelerating blades of the engine of Outsideness consume us in its blazing configuration. Land is open to debate where exactly the deal was originally signed, whether it happened so inconceivably early that what we call humanity is in itself the spoilt seed of its own destruction. Or perhaps that it is an intrinsic configuration of our planet, that by residing on the grounds of vast mineral resources, vast reserves of energy, out the earth flows out of hellish things hidden deep for longer than any man walked the earth. Although these hypotheses are interesting in themselves, Land believes that out of numbers themselves, alongside a risk-averse, calculating logic, society was enthralled by a foolhardy proposition, one that centuries of experience and reason (albeit of a different sort) forcefully suppressed and saw tragically as mankind's irresistible temptress won her over: the belief that change is good! Land proposes a history of the human world that tragically ends sometime in the 19th century, point at which we tragically lose control and a dynamic, self-generating positive-feedback loop takes control of nearly all forces of production, production demanded by the internal logic of expansion, reterritorializing all that is commoditizable, commoditizing all that is socially or politically or technologically possible to produce and commercialize. The imminent law of the system, that reaching towards the unknown is the terrible cost of the myth of progress, a belief that today requires a greater portion of capital than ever to fulfill, as essentially all aspects of individuation and connection with others occur through or in the framework that a monetized, for-profit entity conceives, effectively colonizing our humanity, our politics and social relations, our very selves and identities. What is lost is little to weigh against all that is rapidly gained, so little stands in the way of this vast machine that makes men move and rivers bend, that sends itself through the deep core of mountains, that digs and burns at the earth as feedstock. We are beyond questioning the pure efficacy of capitalism, that has ceased long ago to be a question. What is central to this argument is that the values of capitalism, although initially swayed by the men running them, on the long run tend to diverge from objectively human values. Through sheer efficiency at optimizing a single parameter, maximum present value. One can look at the individual level and see that the alienation that makes possible a fungible workforce has left tears on social life, while absurd proliferation of such devastating goods like automoviles have destroyed cities and made them addicted to antisocial behavior. Land believes that all this can be reduced to a single aspect of rationalism, that which is concerned with predicting the unknown. <blockquote class="wp-block-quote">To be modern is to depart from the archaic goddess of fortune on a voyage into risk that stimulates calculation, formalizes agency, and restructures time, as hazard is transformed from an extrinsic menace to an intrinsic principle of action. In this modernization of action, or decision-making, risk acquires definition through interiorization--not to natural or pre-existing subjects, but to projects, enterprises, or ventures, and to the synthetic subjectivities that such orchestrated undertakings support. Hazards are undergone, whereas risks are taken, or adopted. Modern institutions integrate and process risk, whilst constructing it as a determinate topic, and--at the largest scale and over the longest schedules--rebuild cultural competencies in profundity to define, model, and cognitively manipulate it. The arithmetic awakening of the Italian Renaissance, which introduced place-value notation to Europe, accompanied by the origins of modern accountancy (double-entry book-keeping), also initiated the formal analysis of simple gambling games, in works such as Girolamo Cardano's Liber de Ludo Aleae (1526, unpublished until 1663). Each successive wave of European cultural modernization was similarly marked by a threshold in the mathematical determination of risk, consolidating the theory of probability, amalgamating it with definite conceptions of utility (absolute, then marginal), and accumulating techniques of statistical analysis (actuarial tabulation from population statistics, discovery of the normal distribution, and reversion to the mean). The posthumous discovery of Thomas Bayes's Essay towards Solving A Problem In The Doctrine Of Chances (1761), and its rigorous rule for the revision of probabilistic inferences in response to emerging evidence, brought risk analysis to a level of comprehensiveness that was fully epistemological, and thus no longer subordinate--even nominally-- to higher-order determinations of knowledge. In Bayesian adaptive forecasting, a circuit was completed. Modernity had learnt how to think risk, and thinking risk had taught it how to learn. What it had learnt and what it had risked were no longer meaningfully distinguishable. It had realized integral cognitive hazard, or virtual intelligence catastrophe. Since modernity develops risk as an internal principle, the overall path of modernity cannot be isolated as an object of risk analysis. The calculation of risk, as a cultural innovation whose real coherence is expressed as an emergent being, or developing global system, is unable to step outside itself, in order to submit to an objective self-estimation. Neither global risk nor abstract risk is a topic corresponding to a real witness (or epistemological subject). The absence of a global subject, or centre, when combined with a factual 'globalizing' trend that seems to demand one, is itself a 'risk factor' of a special kind. To identify this syndrome positively, through the proper name 'capitalism', might seem no more than an imprudent provocation, or the mechanical excavation of a terminological relic. It is, in any case, an experiment, demonstrating interconnections with the problem of risk that are exception in their variety and density. <cite> Land, Nick. "Odds and Ends: On Ultimate Risk." Collapse VIII. Urbanomics (2014). </cite></blockquote> I end this strange and regretfully meandering conversation with a quote from perhaps one of the short stories that most exemplifies the conception of belief in reason as a leap of faith. While Kant beleaguered any claim of relation to Berkeley's flavor of idealism in his Critique of Idealism, maybe the difference is not so great and the outcomes are all too similar, as the world of ideas and matter merge and distance folds into nothingness—ideas will join the hunt. <blockquote class="wp-block-quote">The contact and the habit of Tlön have disintegrated this world.  Enchanted by its rigor, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigor of  chess masters, not of angels. Already the schools have been invaded by the  (conjectural)  "primitive  language"  of  Tlön;  already  the  teaching  of  its  harmonious history (filled with moving episodes) has wiped out the one  which governed in my childhood; already a fictitious past occupies in our  memories the place of another, a past of which we know nothing with  certainty—not even that it is false. Numismatology, pharmacology and  archaeology have been reformed. I understand that biology and mathematics  also await their avatars. . . A scattered dynasty of solitary men has changed  the face of the world. Their task continues. If our forecasts are not in error, a  hundred years from now someone will discover the hundred volumes of the  Second Encyclopedia of Tlön.<cite>Borges, J. L. "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius". Labyrinths, Selected Stories & Other Writings. New Directions Publishing Corporation (1964). </cite></blockquote>