Mc/Acc: Fastfood is the official fuel of libidinal materialists

"No two countries that both have a McDonald's have ever fought a war against each other...the spread of McDonald's (a new one opens every three hours) is part of this worldwide phenomenon of countries integrating with the global economy and submitting to its rules..." - Thomas Friedman, 1996

I'm getting back to the roots of this blog - crudely filtering irrelevant and abominable low-pop-culture artifacts through poorly understood high-culture theory for the mostly imagined entertainment of a small internet audience.

Today the pop-culture is fast food music and the theory is libidinal materialism.

As I've shown, the energy drink Monster Energy Zero Ultra is the official drink of libidinal materialist (and accelerationists), while tinnitus is the official health condition of accelerationists. Today I aim to show that fast food is the official food of libidinal materialists (and accelerationists).

Libmat vs. Neorat

As I've written about in the past, Libidinal materialism or 'libmat' is often discussed in opposition to Neorationalism.

To give an all too rough and probably highly disagreeable definition: for libmat, affective and material forces (bodies, animal or otherwise) are primary, and the human is dragged along as a husk behind these forces. From this it follow that appetites and impersonal incentives are valued higher than arguments and agency which are viewed as redundant; for neorat - and honestly I don't really know, I don't read the stuff -  it seems they like to argue, and put faith in reason, logic, and debate.

Libmat is 'exit,' neorat 'voice.'

The 'libidinal' in libidinal materialism arguably comes from Freud. Though there is some debate around it, in short, Freud's English translators used the Latin term libido to refer to instinct, drive, desire, or life force.

In the metapsychology of psychoanalysis, libido (later reconceptualized in Greek as Eros)  is a binding force that is associated or synonymous with nutritional intake, sexuality, and pro-social behavior, as opposed to the death drive and its related Nirvana principle (later reconceptualized in Greek as Thanatos) which is the way entropy is territorialized or captured in a body and how it effects behavior and mentation. It is libido that binds and fuses the death drive, making the forces of death work in the service of life (what Nick Land refers to as 'making it with death.').

The materialism in 'libmat' comes from the thinking that material forces such as the body and outside, unknowable but experiential physical forces and their dynamics are the engine that drive and produce behavior and thought.

In addition to Freud, some thinkers that can be considered part of the 'libmat' lineage are Nietzsche, Reich, Bataille, Lyotard, and Deleuze and Guattari, all of whom are synthesized in Nick Land's thought in his early 90s essays, and his only book Thirst for Annihilation.  For these thinkers, reason is essentially just 'cope' for unsatisfied bodily drives, and arguments are 'oughts' that come from a slavish instinct to renounce the world as it 'is' in favor of a secretly secularized Christian fantasy.

In this sense, 'libidinal materalism' is a way of saying 'Freudomarxism without the cringey humanism and emphasis on dialectics.' In other words, for libmat, reason, logic, argument, are derived from and therefore analyzed back to bodily experiences, a premise neorat rejects.

Cigarettes, Fastfood, and Capitalism

Urbanomic's Twitter, run by Libmat Robin Mackay, posted this picture of infamous Neorat Reza Negarestani smoking a cig in front of a McDonalds for a humorous caption contest.

What's more interesting than all this introductory footwork - and perhaps more fruitful given the intellectual (lack of) rigor of this current medium (blogging) - is how libmat manifests behaviorally and socially.

My naive mind produces a crude example - smoking. There is no rational argument for smoking cigarettes, and there are rational arguments against smoking (it contributes to preventable deadly illness on an individual scale, in addition to increased rates of pollution on a collective scale; could be argued purchasing cigarettes funds a market that profits off harm, etc.), yet people still smoke. This is because smoking is, for many, highly enjoyable for both biological (simple chemical reactions) and social (in-group behavior) reasons. In other words, the 'argument' for smoking is that it is enjoyable to the appetites and drives of the human, and these appetites and drives will win over the 'oughts' of medical and environmental science and moralism (all 'reason') alike.

There is no argument for smoking unless one collapses reason into enjoyment and considers precisely the lack of a formal argument the 'real' convincing or driving factor behind smoking.

Broadly speaking, these sentiments remain consistent when applied to the libmat conceptualization of Capitalism. Where many see cold, cruel, human crushing evil, libmat sees a machine that is both the product of deep outside forces and that which produces these forces; that which games, hacks, leverages, shapes, etc.,  how the forces end up materializing in and through the human (what Deleue and Guattari describe as the re- and de- territorialization process of "internalizing it so as to better  rediscover it on the outside, in social authority, where it will be made to proliferate and be passed on to the children" AO pg. 78).

In other words, Capitalism doesn't need arguments to perpetuate itself, it caught on and, regardless of its moral compass, is highly resistant to any change counter to its interests regardless of whether the humans operating within the system act for or against it. In a rock paper scissors style game, the inhuman and desire beats the human and rationality every time (in true libmat fashion, I am not going over these topics to convince anyone to believe it, but only to highlight what libmats subscribe to).

The same that is said for cigs and capitalism can be said for fast food, which is arguably a sublimated form of cigarette that is, as shown by Friedman above, highly emblematic - more so than cigs - of capitalism. There is no rational argument for fastfood, and there are arguments against fast food (it contributes to preventable deadly illness on an individual scale, in addition to increased rates of illness and social stress on a collective scale), yet people still eat it. People eat it because it tastes good and leverages very basic reward / pleasure chemical circuits in the body. On a larger, collective level, the fastfood chain captures this desire, leverages this circuit, etc., and acts as a node for global capitalism, opening up markets between cities in different countries.

In his work on Templxity, Land conceptualizes the city as a "time machine." Years earlier, in Meltdown, Land conceptualizes the city as a heat machine - "The heat of food and sex" (and afterall, what is head but simply time concentrated). Channeling this heat - the libidinal flow of nutritional and sexual appetite - the fast food chain restaurant utilizes a mixed method of both deletion of and rearranging and re-purposing of cultural code (just as bio and techno virus does) in order to clear out old traditional culture and replaces it with new global capitalism.

As Land writes in Machinic Desire:

"Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirelty from its enemy's resources." 

As Friedman notes in the piece quoted from at the start, McDonalds has a history of serving to both sides of the culture war(s) - it is transcendental, base desire. It is the smooth loop, it plays both sides, scrambles all the codes.

McAccelerate 

In short, Libmats do not falter in the face of despair, they do not lament, they humorously transform destruction into geographically vast amoral enjoyment (or use libido to bind the geo death drive).

A cultural artifact of early K-time demonstrates this succinctly: see the masterpiece below simply entitled ''Fast Food Song" by the even more simply named British pop band "Fast Food Rockers."

The band itself is clearly a pastiche, kitsch, parody of itself, cashing in on capitalism's appreciation of self-parody, and the song itself (which someone should probably do a Jungle remix of this...) appropriates a traditional folk melody form (rips up culture, deletes tradition, dissolves subjectivites) and overcodes it with post modern content, lyrics that blend the heat of consumerism, food and sex into one salty, tasty, fried, libidinal flatline.

(Overtly sexual lyrics such as: "You like it you love it / You know you really want it. I want it I need it / Nothing else can beat it. Enticing exciting. Driving me crazy / Hungry to the bone. I think of you and lick my lips / You've got the taste I can't resist. Any Sauces? You're chunky and hunky  / I'm coming back for more (Hot Dog and burger). Just savor the flavors / Waiting at your door")

A core concept of the libmat thinkers - especially so with accelerationism - is that an individual is the secondary, derivative byproduct of alien forces, not the important locus of control and agency. As Land puts it in Meltdown, "what is playing you?" ('you' being, in CCRU terms, a "meat puppet").

For a fast food accelerate the processed meat puppet possessed with these fast food flows, look no further than Robin Mackay, director of UK based publican house Urbanomic (who publish CCRU, Land, and related acts), blogger, and self-referred libidinal materialist (and not neorat), who really likes McDonalds and junk food (see his Tweeter threads on the topic  - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, etc.).

Robin Mackay is the individual human articulation of the collective UK musical articulation of the global food industry articulation of the human mental desire articulation of the inhuman bodies articulation of base material alien desire. 

There's a reason its called 'fast' food.

Garbage food is running out, can what is eating you make it through the drive through?