A Review of and Response to J. Murphy's Based Deleuze

Though brief, this review aims to be both critical and balanced / nuanced.

I will publish it in parts.

Part 1 - Twitter and Guattari

Twitter Origin Story 
Murphy's book seemingly spawned out of a Twitter thread (or a few) to the effect of 'Culp's Dark Deleuze isn't really dark, he is a little edgy but not dark in any way that escapes the shackles of left mainstream academia' (relax, I own Dark Deleuze and enjoy it despite feeling it does not go far enough, and relax again, I'm sure there are ways to be effectively edgy - if that's what you want to do - within a left milieu while also keeping true to left values, etc. etc....).

Following the Twitter thread, my first encounter with the idea of the book was one of disagreement considering the book seemed to position Deleuze as the main creative drive in the collaborative works with Guattari, slotting Guattari as a sort of jester / idiot leftist riding D's coattails.

• Tl;dr: the book was initially presented as being a sort of answer to Dark Deleuze that disparaged Guattari and elevated Deleuze. Whether or not this implication was intended is up for debate, but it was my impression.

Now onto the book.

Reclaiming Guattari 
The book never touches upon Culp, but does, towards the end, throw Guattari under the bus. As this is where my personal interest/bias lies,  I will address this first.

Murphy writes on pg. 84

"...person is adopted or sponsored by someone much smarter, more joyous, wealthier, more based, etc. In some sense, this is the politics Deleuze appears to have practiced toward Guattari. Deleuze’s biography is a tranquil desert: though he was inflicted with painful respiratory problems throughout his life, and would ultimately kill himself by the somewhat dramatic method of jumping from a window, there is not much else to observe, other than his thinking, writing, and teaching. He spent his life married to one woman, they had kids, he avoided travel, and avoided Guattari’s constant social, political, and psychiatric happenings. Guattari, in contrast, was a deeply troubled man. He was certainly intelligent, creative, and capable of executing significantwork, as he did with his sole-authored books and his activist and psychiatric work. But the man’s life was an utter mess, to a degree that has scarcely been confronted by any of the secondary literature. The tragic life of Guattari will provide a sad but fascinating foil for appreciating Deleuze’s imperceptibly based vitality."

Murphy goes on for about 2 pages pointing out the differences between Guattari and Deleuze - Guattari, morose and sickly, Deleuze, based and functional, etc. before writing on pg. 86

"The very notion of a “Deleuze-Guattari collaboration” must therefore be revised. It was not so much a collaboration as a pedagogical sponsorship by Deleuze, an experiment in tutelage based on a political ethic of Christian charity. Stable genius Deleuze knows privately that this gifted but depressive, womanizing, socially liberal activist is doomed to personal and philosophical dissoluteness, but he — a based husband & father — would turn the boy’s ideas into
something special."

I'm the first person to admit to these faults in Guattari (see, in addition to my upcoming book on Guattari and Psychoanalysis, my upcoming book on Nick Land and Mark Fisher that covers left suicidal melancholia and right homicidal mania where I draw connections between Guattari's left activism and his depression - something that Bifo covers in his book on G...). Murphy isn't completely wrong here, and he does pepper in some generous and understanding commentary on Guattari, remarking on his intelligence, creativity, and compassion. It's true that Guattari caught the bug much of the left catches, which is that in trying to help everyone and solve the world's problems he neglects his family and own mental and physical health. However, to play this game of pitting D vs. G opens up the space to reverse the polemic and pick out some things Murphy missed regarding D in addition to some of things he overlooked in G.

As is well known, Deleuze was an academic philosopher who before Guattari mainly published monographs on dead (Kant, Nietzsche, Hume, Bergson, etc.) or drying (Foucault) philosophers. He was also a severe alcoholic in part because of his respiratory illness, both of which kept him from getting out much. One could speculate on D's emotional lack or psychological make up that would predispose him to such an affliction, bad habit, or - to frame things somewhat in Murphy's realm - sin (and I don't mean to say 'addicts are bad' or anything reactionary like that...). One could also say that coping with life by relying on alcohol is not very 'based.'  In fact, it is easy to present a somewhat convincing narrative that Deleuze was a drunk old boring shut-in stuck in the academic rut of producing accurate, succinct, but 'perceptible' work (i.e., nothing ground breaking) until that zany Guattari came along with a bunch of cool, outside ideas that, to invoke Kant comments on Hume, 'woke Deleuze from his dogmatic slumber.'  In fact, its not a controversial statement to say that all the literature seems to point to the fact that Guattari was the driving force behind Deleuze and Guattari's collaborative work - mainly Capitalism and Schizophrenia project -  except for What Is Philosophy? which, it is rumored, Deleuze only tacked on Guattari's name as a nice gesture to his friend.

Furthermore, Guattari was in many ways more 'based' than Deleuze. In her autobiography Guattari's daugther describes her father as being quite, to use her word, "authoritarian" at times, ruling the house with an iron fist and forcing his children to eat (despite his gentleness). After all it was G, not D, a militant with prominent relations in early communist circles for years,  that stressed the notion of micro-fascist tendencies that we all carry inside us. As some Twitter guy said when I replied to Murphy with some of these - 'The communist who lorded around that asylum had some fascist tendencies, big suprise' (and again, I don't really wish to argue that Guattari was based or whatever...).

• Tl;dr: D was not quite that vital, G was not that (N)PC, and yes, the D and G collabaration must be revised - revised from viewing Guattari in the shadow of Deleuze to viewing Guattari as absolutely central to the work. But this is mostly besides the point, probably. It's Based Deleuze, not Unbased Guattari. So let's just start with beginning of the book (which I enjoyed reading) and work through the chapters.

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Part 2 - Preface to Terminology Sections 

I'm going to move quickly through the first two sections of the book here. I make no claims to authority, great insights, etc. This is essentially a collection of my notes and opinions with some attempt at expanding what is being say. 

In places where others are generous I will attempt to be critical, in places where are others are critical, generous. Or maybe not. We'll see.

Preface and Terminology

On page 2 , demonstrating in the least a faint awareness of academic trends (and I don't mean this polemically, almost everyone can point to the post modern turn in academia...) Justin sets the tone quite cleverly by simply 'owning' or affirming in advance the criticisms he is likely to receive. The book is supposed to be "accessible," does not attempt to take an 'objective' stance instead leaning into opinion, and admits to being "just one portrait" that may rely on cherry picking. 

Take this anecdote to emphasize why I find this important: In the past I've worked as a researcher (nothing rigorous or brag worthy) at a nonprofit, and in my own psychoanalytic doctoral program I have worked as a lowly teaching assistant (and as a freelance editor from time to time). In these positions, mostly the latter, I have helped masters level students hone their research projects. Students come to me worried about this or that flaw in their text or thesis and time after time I tell them the same thing - 'you don't have to change any of those things, you just have to name them as limitations in your limitations section in the text which makes the text stronger as it takes away the chance that a critic can count that against you.' 'I don't have enough data' - limitation. 'I only saw the patient in this or that capacity' - limitation. etc.

• tl;dr: Murphy, as he proclaims often, is/was a social science researcher. As researchers do in studies, he's included the limits and scopes of his project as to focus it and disarm criticism. 'You can criticism my project for not having done X or Y, but as I said, I never intended to do X or Y.' 

After criticizing mainstream academia for a bit (a position which at face value is basic enough to be agreeable), Justin - as if to say 'the book you're about to read; A: is crazily inaccurate, as you say, but this inaccuracy is consistent with the literature, or B: may be provocative, but is still more sensible than the goofy literature you're about to see -  ends the preface with the following rhetorical flourish: 

"I respect why many readers will be similarly skeptical of the Deleuze they meet in the following pages. If my portrait of Deleuze seems impossible on the face of it, then perhaps we should inquire into who or what has generated the face of Deleuze we currently take for granted. Even the quickest look at the academic consensus on Deleuze will make any reader far less confident in whatever they’ve already heard about Deleuze. Consider the following masterpieces of scholarship one might find conducting research on Deleuze:

• Un-Glunking Geography: Spatial Science A er Dr. Seuss and Gilles Deleuze (Doel 2002)

• Deleuze and Guattari in the Nursery: Towards an Ethnographic, Multi-Sensory Mapping of Gendered Bodies and Becomings (Emma and Mellor 2013)

• Becoming Rhizomatic Parents: Deleuze, Guattari and Disabled Babies (Goodley 2007)

• “Ecosystem Service Commodities” - a New Imperial Ecology? Implications for Animist Immanent Ecologies, With Deleuze and Guattari (Sullivan 2010)

• Immaculate Defecation: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Organization Theory (Sørensen 2005)

• Virtually Sustainable: Deleuze and Desiring Di erenciation in Second Life (Hickey-Moody and Wood 2008)

• Transgender Without Organs? Mobilizing a Geo-A ective Theory of Gender Modification (Crawford 2008)

• Deleuze on Viagra (Or, What Can a “Viagra-Body” Do?) (Potts 2004)

Do these titles inspire confidence? Do you believe the institutionalized culture generating these titles would likely impart to the public an accurate and useful image of a complicated French philosopher? And yet... Most of what you think you know about Deleuze has come to you, through osmosis, from the same kind of geniuses
who cra ed these titles."

Tl;dr: Either my book is better than these, or it fits with them, so what can you criticize now?

I can affirm this in my own experience with Deleuzian literature. I purchased The Force of the Virtual: Deleuze, Science, and Philosophy (2010) which is a collection of essays from various authors on Deleuze and different topics related to science and philosophy. To speak very plainly of this collection - some of the essays are great while some of the essays I remember nearly falling sleep reading (i read in bed) often thinking to myself "this is all just fluff, just the author doing one big 'what if this where the case?' or 'what if we thought this instead of that?'" Bogus speculative BS (and I am all for speculation, but this was speculation that also wanted to appeal to a sense of authority over belief...).

Anyways, back to Murphy's book.

The terminology chapter where Murphy correctly points out that Deleuze was a post structuralist (a move away from Marx) not a postmodernist who wanted to look for better problems to discuss, not find solutions, does not need to be discussed, but a line towards the end regarding reactionary politics does.

In this line Murphy makes a connection that Lyotard, contemporary of D and G, published Libidinal Economy in 1972, the same year D and G publish Anti-Oedipus. The importance this connection has is that, as Murphy points out, Lyotard in this book can be not inaccurately thought of as being reactionary in disavowing Marx and suggesting that the working class not only somewhat invites their oppression, but that they enjoy it too (keep in mind that Murphy seems to be referencing the same excerpt of Lyotard that Mark Fisher uses to open up his Terminator vs. Avatar lecture which is the only bit of Fisher to be featured in Urbanomic's collection #Accelerate: the Accelerationist Reader. I.e., Lyotard is in fact in the accelerationist and leftist canon).

• tl;dr: in the 70s Marx and therefore traditional leftism was going out of fashion and a new, provocative line of somewhat reactionary leftism was growing (no wonder they called D a potato fascist...). For Murphy, this is where Deleuze takes off.

...

Part 3 - On Troubled Land 

If anything truly interesting has happened to Deleuze literature its Nick Land. He's the Terminator-Robocop VHS double feature of Deleuzian scholarship.

And this is not to knock Shaviro, DeLanda, Culp, and all the other less 'notable' folks who contribute meaningfully to D scholarship, but rather that Land offers something very wildly different than what you might expect.

Thus, consistent with Justin's project, it's no surprise that he covers Land quite early in the text.

Justin seems to think Land thinks Deleuze thinks capitalism is great (let that sentence gel for a sec).

This may be true, but in my reading of Land it seems that Land doesn't care what Deleuze thinks of anything but rather - in a sort of Deleuzian fashion - Land derives conclusions from Deleuze and Guattari's work that D and G did not themselves intend or were unable to formulate for whatever reason (cathédrale?). Likewise, gone are the days of scholarship where we try and suss out what a thinker 'really' means, in are the days where we see how their thought interfaces with the real (or diagrammatics). There's what D (and G) thought and believed, and then there's the real effects of their work. Nick Land hijacks (and this is not a bad word) their effects.

But this is all a little besides the point. Justin probably knows this anyhow...

Justin ends this section with the following excerpt

"I began to realize that, if one posits the existence of an esoteric “reactionary” thread in Deleuze’s work, then the whole network of his ideas suddenly starts to make much more sense. Even his well-known concepts become more intuitive and immanently productive. On the other hand, though Nick Land’s capitalist Deleuze has been a much-needed provocation, it’s still at odds with almost everything else we know about Deleuze and his milieu. Thus, it is the purpose of this book to account for Deleuze’s weird reactionary currents in a way that also does justice to his voluminous and explicit left-wing affirmations. If his systematic deviations from his purported left-wing allegiance do not render him a full-bore capitalist, then what do they render him?"

It's OK if Land's ideas are at odds with Deleuze because it's not always a scholar's job to make a thinker clearer, sometimes its a scholar's job to dredge up and reconstruct parts of a thinkers thought that the thinker isn't aware of. In a way, this is a possible 'line of flight' Justin could have taken in regard to Deleuze - 'he is not himself a reactionary, but was unconsciously espousing reactionary positions in a way of working through conflicts in an attempt to attain a less reactionary position...'

• Tl;dr: Murphy introduces Land's Deleuze as to slightly differentiate his own take. He means to communicate that his Deleuze is somewhere between Land, the outlier, and the typical literature (as I wrote in the margins, and consistent with Justin's earlier comment, this is where Fisher, Lyotard and Guattari fill the gap - we in part desire capitalism, partake in it with joy, and are in part microfascist and need to analyze our own desire and investments if we wish to make changes in those areas...).

We'll cover the next chapter in the next session (and we'll talk more about Land and Guattari at the end of the review...).

Part 4 - Decentralized Pronomianism

This entry is more of a free association or discussion than it is an elucidation, so don't get too excited. I'm not even really touching on the title of the section or that part of the argument. 

It's a more technical section than those before it. It's also the section I find least interesting (which is not necessarily reflective of the quality, but of my own interest...).

Some good points are made however which I will mention before going on to extrapolate and amplify a few themes of the chapter I liked and had more interested in.

To be short - D wasn't as left as his left as his colleagues as he stayed relatively out of politics and was more interested in philosophical conceptualization of law.

Justin writes

"When Deleuze tells Negri he is interested in 'user-groups' generating their own jurisprudence, he is...not asking that we let loose unconstrained authority and power via informal institutions: 'We don’t need an ethical committee of supposedly well-qualified wise men.' Rather he is suggesting that autonomous groups should begin to
generate their own Law, with defined parameters, 'free consent,' no imposition on third parties, etc" 

Here, Deleuze (as understood accurately it seems by Justin) is interested in law the same way that Lacan was, and therefore, to an extent, the same way that Guattari was. That is, Lacan said an analyst cannot be made official by knowledge, a test, credentials, etc., but has to be self authorized (though G in some interview somewhere does say that this is not true, Lacanian analysts make unconscious appeals to scientific meta models to create the image of authority, but whatever...I think both positions merit consideration). When the trainee is ready to be an analyst (after reflecting on what is learned in his/her own analysis) he calls the secretary of Lacan's Freudian School and says something like 'I'm ready to see patients, put me on the roster,' or whatever.

That is, the psychoanalyst does not take his cues from an other - arbitrary bureaucratic stuff, gameable structures, traditional politics of alterity, etc. - he makes his own law, creates his own cues based on his own desire (which we see in practice when the analyst locates the locus of meaning as being often strictly between analyst and analysand). This is of course reminiscent of the quote attributed correctly to Deleuze (and not D and G) - "If you're trapped in the dream of the other you're fucked." It can be said, broadly and vulgarly, that this phrase describes a major aspect of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Similarly, as Andre Green put it in his interview from 1994 (see my psychoanalysis blog entry 19), despite their talk of the law of the father, there isn't much law in Lacanianism other than what the analyst wants to do.

This gets us to the Landian notion of patchwork, or Justin's take on it that he mentions in this section - "Neofeudal Technocommunism." Democracy is stuck in the idea of enlightenment tropes, arguments, debates, fights of and for legitimacy over who has what control to call who this or that / do this or that to whoever, over land, etc. Changing opinion to force unity, often through large mediated bureaucracies, rather than some other model which would allow groups to form alliances based on meaningful wants and needs (who gets along with who, who desires who, material substratums, communities of heterogeneous or homogeneous populations, depending on the desire of the groupuscule that is) and decide what works best for them in their own space without having to convince the other group of their indisputable legitimacy (patchwork, in theory, is a way out of politics towards a material existence connected to desire - in talking with some smart people who I won't throw under the bus, I can confidently say patchwork is intended to be anti-racist and anti-political. But if you don't believe me, also see Xenogothic's work on the matter which quite uniquely approaches the left / right debate on patchwork...).

This reminds me of one of my favorite passages of D and G's What is Philosophy? (which I quote at length here in another of my texts concerned with politics):

“The best one can say about discussions is that they take things no farther, since the participants never talk about the same thing. Of what concern is it...that someone has such a view, and thinks this or that, if the problems at stake are not stated? And when they are stated, it is no longer a matter of discussing but rather one of creating concepts for the undiscussible problem posed. Communication always comes too early or too late, and when it comes to creating, conversation is always superfluous. Sometimes philosophy is turned into the idea of a perpetual discussion, as "communicative rationality," or as "universal democratic conversation." Nothing is less exact...it never takes place on the same plane...All these debaters and communications are inspired by ressentiment. They speak only of themselves...Debate is unbearable...in Socrates was philosophy not a free discussion among friends? Is it not, as the conversation of free men, the summit of Greek sociability? In fact, Socrates constantly made all discussion impossible, both in the short form of the contest of questions and answers and in the long form of a rivalry between discourses. He turned the friend into the friend of the single concept, and the concept into the pitiless monologue that eliminates the rivals one by one.” (What is Philosophy? pg. 28-29).

If this all sounds familiar - the passage and Justin's section -  its because it's Nietzschean, psychologically healthy, and philosophically and socially critical. Escaping the dream of the other and self-authorizing is the psychoanalytical practice of getting in touch with your own desire and 'true self' (non mystically), the marxian practice of reattaching values to material, and the Nietzschean act of transvaluating values, i.e. making new values that connect up with one's own instincts  or will to power (Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud being the unholy trinity of true noncringe 'critical' theory...).

Fitting, as Justin's next two sections of the book either anticipate or center on Nietzsche...
...

Entry 5- Bearing One's Cross and the Eternal Return

I'm well aware that this series is turning into me narcissistically associating to Justin's book...

So be it (the review will bleed through here and there...the response will take over...IDK)...

I'm obviously the most dedicated reply guy (Not really, I will end this series with criticisms of the book...).

In keeping with my trend of shamelessly inserting myself into this book response/review I will say that I find these chapters excellent because I once wrote an essay (which was never published but will be a part of my book on Guattari...) that covers very similar points as these two sections of Based Deleuze.

Justin correctly points out that Deleuze was - consistent with the old adage that it costs nothing to critique but takes a lot to create - not a fan of objections.

Justin writes

"A philosopher who refuses to object can hardly be a left-wing activist capable of protesting. For Deleuze, there is never any question of protesting injustice. He may think about, and articulate his
thoughts about, various situations of social injustice..."

Likewise, in my essay, utilizing Lyotard, Zizek, Fisher, Land, D and G, etc., elaborating on the idea that contemporary political protest is often an impotent, reactive affair related to voice and symbolism, I write

" Beckman (2017 pg. 41), in her biography on French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, an active participant in May 68’ via Guattari, writes that  “[Deleuze’s position is that] it would have been more efficient…for people to finish their dissertations than to collect signatures for petitions.” Beckman goes on “Being a leftist, for Deleuze, is a matter of perception. It is about ‘perceiving the horizon’ [text in inverted commas are Deleuze’s words]…” "

This is what I call 'be smart not loud' (exit not voice), that is, finish your studies so you're informed.

The point here is not so much that Justin and I share a small agreement over Deleuze, but that it would not be totally incorrect to say this position of Deleuze's is somewhat 'reactionary,' and therefore there seems to be some secondary and primary literature that both supports Justin's position here and has larger political (or anti-political) implications.

This is not the kicker, however. This shorter section really takes off in the next few lines. Justin writes

"Our sufferings, including material deprivations caused by more powerful individuals, are not actualities but virtualities." 

"It is easy to see that actual facts are a relatively small component of the larger psychological and emotional ensemble constituting any “material deprivation” (e.g., the fact that someone has no money in their bank account is only one small portion of the much larger and often painful life experience called “poverty.”). We know this because there is variation in the relationship between actual facts and psychological or emotional ensembles — for instance, the existence of people who are poor and joyous, and people who are rich and sad."

Here Justin makes his argument by relying on a combination of  'common sense,' some consistencies in Deleuze's work, and their possible connection to some more contemporary social theory. He is correct but obfuscated and unconvincing. Here is a more clinical - i.e. both a finding and guiding theory of mine and importantly, many others psychoanalytical therapy practice - that captures what Justin means to say about Deleuze's ideas on suffering.

There is no 1 to 1 correspondence between the environment and internal emotional states. Freud developed 'drive theory' and speaks of 'vicissitudes of drives' to account for this (similarly, in brain science there is no 1 to 1 relation between objects and how they are perceived and mentally modeled internally. Brain science, linking up with Kant, posits that the outside is mapped by the faculties of the inside whereupon the map of in/out feedbacks back into the inside creating layers of consistency...).

Here's drive theory in a few sentences: The human organism as it naturally grows comes to embody or captures energy on its inside. That is, instincts and bodily needs - thirst, hunger, sex, comfort, violence, etc. - seek for objects or discharges. These body states may remain somatic and be gratified or frustrated or they may be converted or transformed into mental images and eventually language, thought, or feeling where again they may be gratified or frustrated. There is always a conflict between the inside and outside; between the impetus to gratify an internal need while also maintaining a sense of safety or concern for social norms, or to navigate the negative feelings aroused in these ways when the need is frustrated. The way we resolve the conflict creates pathways that our drives tend to follow.

This all sounds like folk biology or psuedoscience. Here is how I describe it quite simply to parents who can't understand why their child - rich, not weird looking, well taken care of,  etc. - who has little to no external conflicts somehow has severe mental health issues. I tell them 'as children grow they have feelings and sensations that well up on the inside regardless of the outside, and the way those thoughts and feelings sit with the kid can cause conflicts, internal conflicts that have little to no relation to their family or environment. This is why your child is depressed despite having no reason to seem depressed.' Parents are reassured and children under my care do get better. I.e., even if it is folk biology, this drive theory model has a clear heuristic and diagnostic effectiveness.

As I wrote in my psychoanalysis blog entry

"Or, more broadly in relation to the vitality of psychoanalysis, the death drive solves the problem of naïve humanism. The death drive is an ethical position, an as if, that says ‘even if this is bogus science, who cares! It’s not about the science, it’s about acting as if you had a death drive in you,’ or whatever, because humanism relies too heavily on projecting the 'negative' into the environment where it can be left undealt with. The death drive brings the conflict back to an internal level." (Guattari was also known to say in interviews, probably in reference to Marxism,  that we need to move away from this 'everything on the outside world has made me bad' model, i.e., what I call humanism).

What's the point? Justin is essentially correct. Just because X (no money in my bank) happens doesn't mean we need to react with Y (suicide). There are certain tendencies for certain feelings and ideas to arise in relation to certain stimuli, but it is not strictly determined. Object and subject have a complexity to them. Over the course of treatment, what helps many adults and children become more well adjusted is that they gradually learn  that they have many possible tools and 'choices' (not in a cognitive or conscious sense) to pull from as different responses to the same stimuli. One analyst I know (who has been at it for 50 or more years) will sometimes say in a caring but also stern way 'Is being sad the only reaction you can have to this?' This is incredibly important in a clinical sense. Nothing makes anyone do anything (or what elsewhere I call psychotic humanist determinism).

To this effect, but in a less clinical sense, Justin goes on to use Deleuze in a way that explicates the basic fact that pain and suffering are part of the fabric of life, but that this does not mean that one must be morose, depressed, suicidal, resentful, etc. In fact, it's when people insist that pain and suffering can be expunged from the world given enough social coordination, enough effort, enough intellect, etc. (impossible utopianism, a collective social objet petit a) that one slips into morose, depressed, resentful, suicidal positions to life (things are bad and I have to react only in this way to the bad thing and therefore I have to feel this or that...).

This gets us to the second section I'm covering in this entry, The Eternal Return.
Again, I will insert myself. Justin claims the eternal return is an ethical device. This is not untrue. In undergrad I suggested to my philosopher professor (a rabbi at a progressive temple who wrote a two volume 1k+ word dissertation on Nietzsche and who taught me Jewish mysticism such as Kabbalah - this guy was cool...) that 'the eternal return is an immanent version of Kant's categorical imperative' (which I will not elaborate on and will instead allow the intelligent reader to determine if true or not) to which he agreed. Again, not stressing our agreement, simply stressing that Justin's point is not so strange that it was, retrospectively, ill received by a relatively well read and idiosyncratic Nietzsche scholar.

Considering I have already written quite a bit in this entry, and that I also think this section is best read and not explained, I will end here by saying that in this section Justin recuperates with Nietzsche the positive project of the critical gestures of the previous section. The eternal return is about affirming chance without slipping into anxiety, necessity without slipping into hopelessness, and therefore about affirming life.
...

Entry 6 - Creativity is Submission, A Fascist Mother..., From Christ to the Bourgeois 

In Creativity is Submission Murphy begins with the uncontroversial position that Deleuze differed quite markedly from what could tentatively be called his colleagues - other French poststructuralists like Foucault and Derrida - in that Deleuze favored ontology of becoming that conceptualizes a 'real' Outside as opposed to an abstract political or linguistic conceptualization that does not go beyond itself. I say uncontroversial because this echoes the adage about Deleuze that can be read across the literature that he is essentially an 'old metaphysician at heart.'

This is old news, but the conclusion Murphy draws - or the consequence he posits - from this info is of interest for many reasons. Murphy writes

"For Deleuze, it is only a radical empirical basedness that makes possible true freedom and creativity. For the ultimate insight gained from a fidelity to reality is how reality can be changed, even if it cannot be changed any way one pleases. There is no access to the mechanisms whereby reality can be changed, wherever there is less than absolute fidelity to reality. Submission to a status quo reality reveals the paths to escape it, paths which exist objectively within it. Trying to create something new by ignoring or disobeying what really exists leads to a confused, incessant repetition of the same."

Here we see three interrelated things that together make one interesting point and separate make their own different but still interesting points; 1: Accelerationism; 2: Nick Land; 3: Slavoj Zizek

1: Here we see how Deleuze (without Guattari who, as the Anti-Oedipus papers point out, was actually the one to insert the Nietzschean bit about 'accelerate further still,' not Deleuze) anticipates accelerationism. Reality or an actual Outside needs to be engaged with and accelerated, not strange myths, social niceties, and mental defenses we use to codify and refute the Outside/Real (the Cathedral). An is over an ought, though, as critics point out regarding Landian accelerationism, for Land an ought is itself an 'is' due to the hyperreal nature (hyperstition) of existence and feedback processes. That is, an 'ought' is an 'is' for input into the machine.
2: As hinted at above, Deleuze here is somewhat consistent with Land's reading of Deleuze (though, as I mentioned earlier, who cares if Land's reading of Deleuze is 'correct' when what we should be considering is if its interesting and what it diagrams into existence) in that Land on Twitter has described the core of his philosophy simply as 'Reality rules,' i.e., his Twitter tag 'Outsideness.' Elsewhere in interviews he has said that politics as a whole offer false solutions because it refuses to conceptualize real problems due to the mental restrictions the Cathedral places on thought.
3: This position of Deleuze's which Land intensifies is relatively consistent with notions that Zizek has raised several times in lectures and also at least once in writing. As I mentioned earlier - shamelessly bringing my own unpublished work into things -

" Beckman (2017 pg. 41), in her biography Deleuze writes “[Deleuze’s position is that] it would have been more efficient…for people to finish their dissertations than to collect signatures for petitions...being a leftist, for Deleuze, is a matter of perception. It is about ‘perceiving the horizon’ [text in inverted commas are Deleuze’s words]…' " 

What I did not include from my own work was the next bit from my work:

" "Similarly, in his book which looks at the failure of various leftist political movements from 68’ to 08’ and in doing so erects Guattari’s friend Negri and Deleuze as strawmen for misguided political activists, Lacanian-Psychoanalytic philosopher Zizek (2009 pg. 11) writes: “The old saying ‘Don’t just talk, do something!’ is one of the most stupid things one can say...rather, the problem lately has been that we have been doing too much…perhaps it is time to step back, think and say the right thing. True, we often talk about doing something instead of doing it; but sometimes we also do things in order to avoid talking about them. Such as throwing $700 billion at a problem instead of reflecting on how it arose in the first place.”  "

Think, don't just act.

That is, Deleuze, Land, and Zizek all say roughly the same thing - the 'real' needs to be considered before action is taken, and political action is often impotent unless it faces some ugly facts, i.e., interfaces with the real.

Not only does this create a consistent thread - albeit somewhat of a stretch - between Landian accelerationism and some more 'popular' 'leftists' like Deleuze and Zizek, but it confirms to a degree what M.Crumps (Murphy's playful nemesis?) has stated on Twitter and on Jacobite - that Ziz is kind of a reactionary, or, in Murphy's terms, Deleuze is based like Ziz and Land.

This latent line of thinking culminates in the next section - A Fascist Mother - in that, as we mentioned just now as well as earlier in regard to Deleuze's disdain for political protest, Deleuze's passivity in the face of left activism put him in a overlapping position with fascist and bourgeios sentiments (the ole' 'can't be neutral on a moving train' / 'bystanders are as bad as perpetrators' motif).
The next section of the book - From Christ to Bourg...-  reiterates this last idea, and though it has its interesting moments it personally strikes me as less interesting so I will only say this about it - Murphy argues that Deleuze is influenced by Christianity and mysticism (or both) which is consistent with some literature (like how one of Deleuze's first papers is a paper on Jung that he later had expunged from his official bibliography!).
...

Entry 7 -  Deleuzo-Petersonianism, HBDeleuze and Becoming Imperceptible 

I'm a shitty reviewer. This isn't a 'woe is a me' moment. It's just me giving myself a way out. That is, I didn't love these sections so I am not really going to say much on it.

It's interesting to connect Jordan Peterson to Deleuze and there is some psychologically and statistically (as opposed to psychoanalytically and clinically - which are understandably not present here) correct information about surface level schizophrenic phenomena but ultimately I view the section as a missed opportunity to riff on Zizek and Peterson's debate as being a repetition of difference within the eternal return given Zizek's standoffish (and criminally lazy) take downs of Guattari (this 2012 lecture) and Deleuze (that terrible Organs Without Bodies book). That is, Peterson is to Zizek what Deleuze was Badiou what Guattari was to Lacan, etc. But for me to say all this amounts to nothing as this is the chapter I would've written (which I am writing) not the one Justin wanted to write. So go read the chapter and see what you make of it yourself.

Moving on.

Ok. The section 'HBDeleuze...'

I thought HBD stood for 'happy birthday' until people started arguing over whether it was fascist or not on Twitter. 'How could happy birthday be fascist?' I thought.

Instead of 'human biodiversity' I personally use the old developmental psychology term 'disposition' which refers to a number of complex factors that converge to form an organism with certain traits and tendencies. Bound up with this concept of disposition is the following: consistent with ethological thinking, there are certain inborn traits that exist latent in the earliest form of the organism which later unfurl following a sort of unsaid blueprint and develop into structures or traits specific to certain animals. To speak vulgarly of the ethology, there are learned behaviors and innate behaviors; there are necessary inborn dispositional traits that tend to almost always occur as the organism grows (birds grow wings, humans do not grow wings), accidental traits that may or may not develop in specific forms (some birds may learn certain ritualistic behaviors while others may not), as well as more general acquired or accidental traits (all animals may learn to do similar kinds of rituals). There is the effect of traits or structures interacting with each other internally as well as interfacing with the world. These lead to differences in physical and mental abilities. 

Society - to continue speaking vulgar by using large reiffications - sets as a moral mandate or ethical code that, despite any real or fictional differences that may exist among people, that all people are equal in the eyes of God's law. As society (according to Weber - and Moldbug...) unconsciously secularizes itself this statement transforms into 'the eyes of the law' or human law instead of God law. In other words, part of the 'social contract' (simply living with others in a system of order) is having the same chance as your neighbor at accruing stuff, not being killed, etc. etc.

In short, this section makes this argument by showing D and G's appreciation and reliance on ethological research interpreted through a philosophical metaphysics of pure difference (difference and repetition as opposed to difference as a negation). In very vulgar language - stuff happens in many different ways and not everything is just one thing at one time. Darwin and all his stupid birds. Nature churns out 500 fucking finches at random and the ones who accidentally end up with long thin beaks can get the bugs and the ones who accidentally end up with someone else die and etc. etc. Nature is a permutation machine that repeats differentials. 

But whats the pay off?

As Land writes himself 'I know what you're thinking, don't talk about race, don't talk about race...'

Murphy, despite his recent 'not being provocative' tendencies, and echoing Peter Sloterdijk's critique of Sartre, handles the (hot, hot, hotter) topic of race gracefully and respectfully (he is still a leftist afterall). He writes that in Deleuze and Guattari there is 

"...an emphatic refusal of Left moralism on race talk...They [D and G] are not racists — not at all — but rather race-accelerationists: The liberation of oppressed races will not be won through “anti-racism,” which has resentment built into its very concept, but through a kind of excessive elaboration of races. Because the concept of race is the morbid fixation of an uncreative identity, purifying it means exposing it to the Nietzschean “eternal recurrence,” which means, as we have seen, Darwinian selection. Purification of race does not mean harboring but exhausting it, shedding all that is rotten within it. Purifying means filtering until all that is left is a real kernel, a real core. And the real core of race ultimately has little to do with race, but rather the continuous variation of creativity, previously overcoded by race"

Now you the reader are smart, and Murphy is quite clear here, so I will not explicate this phrase. I will however relate it to one of Murphy's previous guests Elliot Rosenstock a leftist Lacanian/Zizekian psychotherapist and Zero Books author in California. Rosenstock in his blog post responding to Andrew Culp (much like Murphy originally was) which is centered on the film Black Dynamite, a self aware parody of black exploitation films, writes

"A tradition of racist caricature can not be simply negated by bland critique, but it needs to perhaps, even accelerate this process. “Black Dynamite” takes into account the libidinal vulgarity which is offered by blaxploitation, and it turns it against itself."

This puts Murphy's 'race acceleration' neatly into context showing it to be consistent with leftist critiques of racial epithets (as well as bonding over not loving Culp [who I have never met or spoken with and have no personal feelings for other than thinking his to be book lackluster at points]).

Now onto becoming imperceptible. 

This chapter can be summed quite simply as 'one should be aware of why they are speaking, writing, acting, creating, etc. If one is creating to appease others one is necessarily sacrificing part of one's creativity in order for it to be well received. Part of your project is now coded in advance with the other's response in mind (part of what Andre Green explicating Donald Winnicott refers to as 'the false self,' when the child takes its parents' wants and needs into account more than its own thus leading to neurotic and sometimes psychotic conditions). In a sentence, as we said above, Deleuze's adage 'if you're trapped in the dream of the other, you're fucked!'

Entry 8 - Accelerate the Process, The Real, The Evolved, and the Traditional,  Becoming Minority 

We're nearing the end and I am getting lazy...

So pick up speed...

Murphy has his own take on acceleration. He doesn't rearrange old arguments as to look smart or give way to jargon. He starts off with talk of concrete realities - capitalism and markets (some will argue these aren't concrete realities and that the right makes what Whitehead calls 'the error of misplaced concreteness' i.e. reiffies abstractions. Incorrect. As Lazzarato, a good leftist, shows in his book Signs and Machines, markets and money have direct diagrammatic effects on the everyday lives of people. They are concrete machines). Suspend this for a moment however.

Murphy gets that accelerationism is about making connections between pre-existent entities, 'riding historical waves' which, if I were to further reduce into layman's terms, is basically 'going with the flow,' etc., all in order to 'express deeper forces,' that is, interface with the real.

Again, though, this seems simple, so what is the consequence of this insight?

Murphy writes

"In short, all the injustices we observe in society — problems of power and domination — are never due to the flows but to the institutions installed onto the flows..."

Connect the dots in accordance with reality and 'justice' (here I take it in its Platonic sense to mean, vulgarly, things being where they belong and thus producing syntonic effects) will occur. Try too hard - and any amount over zero is often too hard - to organize things by an 'ought' (rather than interface with them as an 'is') and one neurotically slips into attempting to omnipotently controlling reality in a way that disavows or rejects reality. 

OK. Now recall the market / capitalism talk from earlier. This 'is over ought' is a sort of 'let the market run its course and see what happens, no regulation please' kinda deal.

After these assertions Murphy moves onto to tackling the concept of 'the body without organs' (BwO). Speaking of Whitehead and reality, Murphy neatly conceptualizes reality as being composed of actual, virtual, and real. 

"The actual is what naïve materialists and Marxists take to be 'material reality,' or the hard facts. But Bergson showed that, in fact, the actual is not the real. The actual is only a set of arbitrary, contingent, and fleeting circumstances and sensations. The present is always slipping into the past, so whatever is merely actual is no true ground. Rather, what is real is the entire flow of time that leads up to and produces the present. This long continuous flow does not actually exist anywhere, it is virtual, and yet it is the realest of the real."

We assemble reality from material circumstances coupled with real virtualities (we symbolically interpret real intensities). So reality is bound up with our sense organs that compose or synthesize sense data which is filtered through internal categories. Thus the BwO is a mental or conceptual maneuver that helps us work towards thinking 'as if' our organs were not filtering our experiences - a real interface with the Outside. My understanding of this is that becoming a BwO means making yourself phenotype-esque and therefore open to lines of flight and deterritorialization due to the fact that rigid structures have yet to ossify which leaves open virtual valences.

Building on this notion of a novel reorganization, the last chapter discusses what it takes to make one's self something truly different in a political world. This chapter is perhaps the best chapter of the book, but I will not discuss it at length for a few reasons; 1: Some of the Anti-Guattarin sentiments (if we can call them that, I wouldn't commit to this) I discussed at the beginning of this blog post; 2: it should be read and the reader should make their own thoughts about it; 3: in many ways the chapter is 'anti discussion' so I would like to emphasize that aspect of the chapter by not having a 'voice' on the matter and encouraging my reader to experience it own their own.

With that said I feel obligated to offer at least a brief overview - Murphy compares Deleuze and Guattari's atypical stance on identity to the (un)political writings of Nick Land pointing out that neither thinkers are 'racists' but in fact looking for affirmative models of existing in groups that avoid racist violence and senseless politics. One specific solution is the notion of patchwork.

Before getting to patchwork, let me make this parallel connection - much of Nick Land's 'democracy is simply convincing other people to think how you think / why bother voicing debate when you can exit?' is directly derived from D and G's thinking. I return to the excerpt I used earlier here, and elsewhere in my blog, 

“The best one can say about discussions is that they take things no farther, since the participants never talk about the same thing. Of what concern is it...that someone has such a view, and thinks this or that, if the problems at stake are not stated? And when they are stated, it is no longer a matter of discussing but rather one of creating concepts for the undiscussible problem posed. Communication always comes too early or too late, and when it comes to creating, conversation is always superfluous. Sometimes philosophy is turned into the idea of a perpetual discussion, as "communicative rationality," or as "universal democratic conversation." Nothing is less exact...it never takes place on the same plane...All these debaters and communications are inspired by ressentiment. They speak only of themselves...Debate is unbearable...in Socrates was philosophy not a free discussion among friends? Is it not, as the conversation of free men, the summit of Greek sociability? In fact, Socrates constantly made all discussion impossible, both in the short form of the contest of questions and answers and in the long form of a rivalry between discourses. He turned the friend into the friend of the single concept, and the concept into the pitiless monologue that eliminates the rivals one by one.” (What is Philosophy? pg. 28-29).

Moving on.

Rather than reiterate the chapter I will simply make my own point on this matter that some smarter people than me (who I will not name but carry far more name-authority) agree with: Patchwork is a way out of things such as genocide, race wars, and endless divisive political battles. Let people choose who they find comfortable living with and how they feel comfortable living. There will always be a place for those who are left out as they can live with other people who feel the same. This does not mean ethnic divisions (the racist ethnostate) nor bloody political battles over who deserves what land or what social privileges. It is, at heart, a nonpolitics of desire - what do you want and how do you want to get it. 

Conclusion

Whether or not you like Murphy you may want to simply read the book. It's short, cleanly written, and attempts to use direct excerpts and biographical information to support some interesting claims.

Now about those claims...who cares if they are right or wrong - they're interesting! And, we should add, not very provacative for a thinker who has in recent times come to be known as the guy who says 'not to be provocative, but...' Is the Guattari stuff a bit off? Yes. But Murphy did not set out to write a book on Guattari, and the rhetorical positioning of Guattari vs. Deleuze is somewhat warranted. Was Deleuze somewhat reactionary? Probably. Regardless of whether you read Justin's book or not its pretty clear that early in his life he was into people like Nietzsche and Jung who have come to be associated with somewhat reactionary thought, and before he met Guattari he was a straight shooting academic who had little interest in politics. After he met Guattari, of course, he had no interest in being 'politically correct!'

So - read the book and whether you hate it or love it, write something on it...

Meltdown / SmashMouth /

neochina (re and de territorialization)

0-1
Meltdown.
Smash Mouth!
What mean?
One two.

1. According to urban dictionary entry 2, Smash Mouth refers to doing copious amounts of drugs - specifically coke - through your nose or mouth in one grand gesture.
2. It's the late 1990s band that wrote that Shrek song and that other song.

These two meanings seem unrelated. Luckily the internet, being the incredibly extensive entropic-permutation-repetition machine that it is, tends to cycle through codes in an arbitrary fashion to the extent that eventually all disparate things connect in some way. In other words, I stumbled upon a very neat blog by a woman named Alice Lee that synthesizes these two otherwise disconnected meanings (put another way, give the internet enough time and it will produce god...or it is god...).

One of Lee's articles "12 Hit Songs From The 90's Secretly About Crystal Meth" lists Walkin' on the Sun as a song that is - well - secretly about meth without elaborating at all on why this is the case.

Ok, meth isn't coke, but they'r both uppers that are often snorted or gummed. And this is consistent with other takes from other weird parts of the internet...

According to a poorly verified / evidenced (and that't not necessarily a bad thing...) Column for Audiofemme, Smash Mouth's 'Walkin' On the Sun' (their second well known song next to All Star, the Shrek song) is

"about the 1992 Los Angeles Riots...the chaos of the time...though he sees marijuana as a peace-maker [referencing 'toking'], he warns about the perils of harder drugs with a prescriptive in the last verse: “Put away the crack before the crack put you away.”

But we'll come back to the coke and meth later...

For now let's take a look at some of the lyrics here:

If you got the goods, they'll come and buy it just to stay in the clique (1
So don't delay, act now, supplies are running out (2
Allow if you're still alive, six to eight years to arrive (3
And if you follow, there may be a tomorrow (4
But if the offer is shun, you might as well be walkin' on the sun (5

Twenty-five years ago, they spoke out and they broke out...(6
And fought back against the melt-down (7

So don't sit back, kick back and watch the world get bushwhacked (8
News at ten, your neighborhood is under attack (9
Put away the crack before the crack put you away (10
You need to be there when your baby's old enough to relate (11

Let's just extrapolate the important notions: desire and capitalism (1), a sense of urgency related to temporality and survival (2-3), and the possibility of there being no future due to some sort of heat death or sun related heat overload (4-5) with it's ultimate culmination in social o-/re- pression and meltdown (6-7) from which follows world destruction (8) narrated by the media. And finally,  territoriality associated wish Fisherian middle america and nuclear family aesthetics (9) which is ultimately de-territorialized by uppers/stimulant Drugs (10-11).

This was 1997. Shoot ahead 2 years to 99, prime Y2K territory.

In 99 we get their other hit All Star. Let's take a look at some lyrics:

Well the years start coming and they don't stop coming (1
Fed to the rules and I hit the ground running (2
Didn't make sense not to live for fun (3
Your brain gets smart but your head gets dumb (4
So much to do, so much to see (5

It's a cool place and they say it gets colder (6
You're bundled up now, wait till you get older (7
But the meteor men beg to differ (8
Judging by the hole in the satellite picture (9
The ice we skate is getting pretty thin (10
The water's getting warm so you might as well swim (11
My world's on fire, how about yours? (12
That's the way I like it and I never get bored (13

Again, lets extrapolate the important notions: A sense of urgency (1 and 5) related to speed, motion, limits (2) and desire (3-4). Climate change and the conflict that arises between personal experience and abstract scientific notions handed down to us as consumers from authorities on high. That is, the world is cold and inhuman (6-7 and 10), but the "meteor" man asserts it is getting warmer (8, 11) - and here we should note that in the song it sounds like the word 'media' man, not meteor man, which links up nicely with the next line (9) which refers to media and communications technology with a paired association to the ozone layer burning up. And, again, the ultimate culmination of these events being a fiery end tied up with desire (11-13).

To synthesize both these hits - the 'natural' geological world and the social world alike are de-territorializing or accelerating towards a meltdown singularity and all we can do in the meanwhile is participate in the market and utilize the effects of the heat to enjoy ourselves.

It would be cringey to force a connection between accelerationism and Smash Mouth so lucky for us that the connections seem to make themselves. Resonances interlock and autoproduce.

As I pointed out elsewhere - Lemurian TV War: Teletubbies and the Lemurian Occult - the 90s leading up to the anticipated singularity of Y2K lent itself to a paranoiac and apocalyptic cultural (un)consciousness and associated resonances:

"On the one hand, mundanely, and as pointed out by the CCRU, the 90s, lurching each day closer towards the singularity of Y2k, was a time of techno-anxiety and accelerating culture, so its no surprise we see these themes reflected in...[media]. On the other, it could be the case that something hyperstitional occurred, and that random patterns in thematic content  autoproduced, gained resonance, and realized themselves. In other words, either the CCRU picked up on themes in the culture, or hyperstitioned these themes into being to begin with. Whichever way the temporal vector runs (and for templexive and hyperstitional phenomenon, it is precisely the point that it runs both ways...), we have the connections laid out bare..."

But enough of me quoting myself. It's time to get back to the coke and meth...

If the 90s were a time of accelerating culture it wasn't simply because of the technology and the social transitions, it was because people were taking uppers like crazy.

It's nothing new to say that the 90s were a big time for meth - also known as crank, crystal, or speed.

It's unclear if Smash Mouth were on meth. I read somewhere once that they were, but I can't find that article now. But what comes to mind for me first is Korn. These guys were methed out of their minds during most of their career (check out Hed's autobiography Save Me From Myself where he documents how he quit meth and found Jesus). Now, where Hed, guitarist of 90s nu metal act Korn, went from meth to God, 90s musician Scott Stapp (singer for 90s Christian hard work band Creed) went from God to Meth and suffered a severe psychotic break wherein he believed he was a CIA agent tasked with...well read the piece...(also, see this Ranker list of 90s songs about meth).

But it wasn't just musicians mixing meth and God. Nick Land, in what seems like a constant psychotic 90s jungle-techno-rave binge, met and killed God through meth.

In his book Thirst for Annihilation (pg. 75-76) which was written 'between deaths' in which Land states that he has been beyond and back again, Land writes

" 'Yeah, I 've killed him, knifed the life out of him, once I started I
got frenzied, it was an ecstasy, I never knew I could hate so much.'
'So God's dead?'
'If that's who he was. That fucking kid lied all the time. I just
hope it's true this time.'
' ... and we have killed him' writes Nietzsche, but - destituted of
community - I crave a little time with him on my own.
In perfect communion I lick the dagger foamed with God's blood. " 

Anti-Communication:

"We do not lack communication.On the contrary, we have too much of it." 

“The best one can say about discussions is that they take things no farther, since the participants never talk about the same thing. Of what concern is it...that someone has such a view, and thinks this or that, if the problems at stake are not stated?...Communication always comes too early or too late, and when it comes to creating, conversation is always superfluous. Sometimes philosophy is turned into the idea of a perpetual discussion, as "communicative rationality," or as "universal democratic conversation." Nothing is less exact...it never takes place on the same plane...All these debaters and communications are inspired by ressentiment. They speak only of themselves...Debate is unbearable...in Socrates was philosophy not a free discussion among friends? Is it not...In fact, Socrates constantly made all discussion impossible, both in the short form of the contest of questions and answers and in the long form of a rivalry between discourses." 

- D and G  What is Philosophy?, pg 108 and 28-29 

“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate... We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.” 

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden... pg.41

I'm  a group and individual 'talk' therapist in both an inpatient and outpatient setting. I'm also about to tell you that we need to talk less.

Put your pessimism pants on.

If you watch TV, read magazines, go on twitter, etc., the idea you're bombarded with is that if we 'just talked' to each other we'd get along. Conflict would vanish or in the very least make things make sense and be OK for the majority of people.

'Let's open a dialogue'
This is the democratic dream and its accompanying pragmatism.

The dream is that rational debate or discussion will allow us to make group decisions that meet most if not all of our needs, and any conflict aroused in this democratic process can be smoothed over by either explaining to a mistaken position, or a better alternative (the education industry and its related cognitive therapy machine - don't function at school, get some CBT. to get back into school...). Oh, and if someone can't be convinced to see that their wrong, or change their mind, they're just 'bad' - (crazy, stupid, ideologically blinded, this, or that, etc. etc.).

As a talk therapist - a misleading label really as we mostly listen - I think people need to shut up.
Ok, that was a bit harsh. I was feeling angry. I'm not really a polemicist and I don't want to hurt peoples' feelings or silence their voices.

Here's what I really mean: There's more than enough discussion on how to solve this or that problem. How to help this or that. In fact, instead of trying some of the suggestions, we seem to just endlessly suggest counter suggestions or reinforcements to other suggestions. And this is without mentioning that talk just gets us bogged down in arguing over different meanings we're not even sure we're on the same page about to begin with.

And this is not to say 'talk is cheap' or we simply need 'action.'  Talk is not cheap, there are multi-billion dollar communication networks - and I'm just talking social media, think educational systems, universities and their think tanks, the media and its drones, the pay to play model of publishing papers based on prestige, etc., - that can have a meaningful effect on the material lives of people, and action is just a way to escalate or obfuscate things without addressing the underlying issues.

In other words, too much communication is making us unable to determine how we feel, why we feel that way, and what to effectively do or not do with the feeling (too much noise, not enough signal). So we talk and talk to hide our own inability to process, and rope others into the dysfunction as well (as Lacan and Freud show us, patients often talk to obscure the analyst from knowing something, not to help us understand them...). In fact, this overcommunication and its effect on feelings has even slipped into the way we talk about feelings.

Look at this absolute fucking abomination.

Would you just look at it. Holy shit.

These are commonly found in the milieus of group homes, inpatient units, mental hospitals, etc. The chart is meant to help a patient who is numb or too overwhelmed to identify what they are actually feeling as to help them process the feeling, or use a skill or support system to make a safe or health decision, etc. A chart like this might be used all the same for someone who has Borderline Personality Disorder, or mild Autism.

For some god damn reason some therapist thought that bombarding the patient, who is already having difficulty determining their internal states, with over 60 feelings signs - a few of which are not incredibly distinct from one another - would help with reducing overwhelming or numbing internal stimuli. Common sense dictates that more choices do not mean more ease of identifying a feeling, probably less. In fact, when I run any group that utilizes this kind of sheet I test this hypothesis, and more often than not my patients prefer a simpler chart over a more complex chart precisely because, when they are overwhelmed (and remember, being numb is actually a reaction to being overwhelmed, not a lack of internal feeling), one wants to be grounded by a reductive process (from overwhelm - alot - to only a few choices, as opposed to from overwhelmed to multiple choices which will increase overwhelmed feeling, etc.) not an expansive process. This is why I trim it down to 4 choices - Mad, Sad, Glad and Afraid (if you want to argue with me on why there should be more, tweet @ me, otherwise I am not planning on expanding why this is the correct move...).

Rather than continue to talk myself, here is what I mean via a re-purposing of the above quotes:

"We do not lack manifestos. On the contrary, we have too many of them."  

“We are in great haste to construct a dialectical relationship between workers and intellectuals; but workers and intellectuals, it may be, have nothing important to communicate... We are eager to share papers on how to topple capitalism and bring the theoretical s nearer to the real; but perchance the first praxis that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be something we already know, or something we cannot change.” 

Manifesto overload.

Yanged Noumena: Why Andrew Yang is an Accelerationist and Why It Matters

Yanged Noumena 
"if we play out the capital efficiency race, we lose - like on an epic level..."
- Andrew Yang

A c c e l e r a t i o n i s m  is a theory of time. Don't forget it. 

Time A - Entrance:
2012: Mark Fisher says "1: Everyone is an accelerationist. 2: Accelerationism has never happened. 3: Marxism is nothing if it is not accelerationist."
2019: Andrew Yang corresponds to all three.

Provocative, I know. But there's no longer any doubt as to whether Andrew Yang is or is not an accelerationist; its a question of whether or not he is this or that kind of accelerationist, and, considering all the riff-raff in the media about the term, let's not waste anytime - Yang is a materialist with a Marxist streak who falls somewhere between Srnicek-Williams and Nick Land.

Here's some evidence in the form of thematically arranged excerpts from Yang's recent H3H3 interview (if too much, skip to the next session where I arrive at the point):

- Technology:

• "automation trends picking up steam"

• "machine learning algorithm...can solve...incredibly complex problem beyond any human intelligence, but they're essentially complete idiots and 2 year olds at anything else [however]..these trends can sometimes explosively happen in non linear ways"

- Work and Economy (related to technology):

• "I would read various books about the future of work...like 'hey robots are coming and you should start looking into what that will mean'"

• "in an age were technology is going to end up assuming more and more work...we need to rethink...work...and...come up with better, more human ways...of valuing our...time..."

• "future trends...artificial intelligence...that's going to end up replacing...workers...the public is going to get...zero of this value...this is why you need a mechanism so we all share in that progress or things are just going to get darker and darker..."

• "our economy revolves around...capital efficiency where the market says if 'you're an accountant you're worth ...if you're a truck driver you're worth...'...tech is going to come along and do the job of the accountant and the truck driver...so...we need to...find new ways to value our own time...we have to transform what we think of as intangible value, so if you make another human being stronger and healthier, that's immensely valuable, its just right now our economic statistics don't value that appropriately"

• "why do so many Americans also not have much faith in the democratic solution [and] policies? Maybe we need to translate them into something that will actually touch people day to day - that trusts people. One danger that democrats get into is they trust institutions more than people..,more Americans would be excited about if you put your confidence in them and acted like we were all owners and shareholders in this..."

• "how do we reward and incentivize  the work we need more of for ourselves...[UBI] is not a solution, its a foundation...it gives us a chance to start measuring our economic progress in things that would matter to us, like our health and well being...whether we enjoy the work we're doing, things that might actually get us excited...the joke I make is how many people get excited about GDP when they wake up in the morning?...we need the right measurements for our society...we need to evolve...we can integrate them [other metrics noted above] into our economic measurements...if individuals, companies, or organizations put resources to work to move society in that direction they actually get rewarded economically because right now the problem is all the economic rewards cut in this [one] direction, and all the helping people rewards cut in the other direction...there are different ways to create carrots and sticks with these companies, but the trick right now is to align their well being with ours..."

• "[UBI is not going to reduce work, it's a] catalyst [for work that] supercharges the local businesses...nonprofits...volunteer organizations...so what do the jobs of the future look like? It could be that 20 years from now its very normal to work in a job that just helps make other people stronger...things that right now there is no market demand for...capital efficiency says these things are worth zero...the big change we have to make is change the measurement and say these things are actually worth a lot"

• "trickle up economy...increasing the purchasing power...creates a virtuous cycle"

- Societal and P Problems (related to work and technology): 

• "I'm running...to solve the biggest problems of our time, and I think those problems are accelerating...I didn't think I had 5 to 10 years to climb the ladder to address these problems...we don't have time for that shit [political jockeying, or going from being a CEO directly to running for president]

• "here are the real problems...the democrats response...[to trumps slogan] was 'America is Already Great.' That is not what I'm saying...we have real problems and we need to solve them as fast as possible."

• "We're in a period of vast disillusionment where if you came of age in another era they would say hey here are the things that are important and if you do this its going to work out for you...and now we just don't believe any of it...we don't believe in our institutions, we don't believe in what my future holds...we've lost confidence in our government, and we've lost confidence in our government to update its own operating system..."

• "its amazon's job to try and pay as little in taxes as possible. It's our job to make it impossible for them to pay zero taxes."

- Other Notable Excerpts (related to all of the above):

• "people call me a futurist...I call myself a presentist, just the other politicians are behind"

• "It's not socialism, its Capitalism where income doesn't start at zero" 

• "solve the problems of this time with the tools we have of this time" 

• "gotta go where the money is"

Accelerationist Bingo:

Garbage time is running out, so let's pause for a moment to check on how our players are doing.

Dark future? Check.
Accelerating? Check.
Sense of urgency? Check.
Capitalist efficiency? Check.
It's not bad, its worse? Check.
Emphasis on temporality? Check.
Humanity to be wiped out? Check.
Trends, cycles, catalysts, and nonlinear growths? Check.
And - not included in my excerpts, but present in the interview - a small circle of mega corporations with their privatized tech usurping the governments power and the effects this has on political debate which is already essentially a form of literal reality TV (reminiscent of Baudrillard). Extra check.
Now resume.

Ok. So what. Yang uses the accelerationist jargon, and probably unintentionally as most of these terms overlap with basic business and technology language (part of what Fisher might call Business Ontology) from the 90s onward (a connection made accurately by those nerds in Tiqqun in their uninspired The Cybernetic Hypotehsis, even if they draw the wrong and boring conclusion from the basic facts). It's a coincidence, right? So that's the end of it, right?

Not quite. There are no coincidences, only interlocking fictional resonances taking shape, spilling over into the subject, making themselves real, turning into beliefs, and  contaminating other hosts. Think information AIDS - and we don't get it from sharing needles, but beliefs, feelings, and ideas.

Time B - Resonances:
No more coincidences.
2000: the CCRU, speaking through the accelerationist Nick Land, writes in Split Second Timing “by the turn of the millennium 700 million years of biological evolution had been recapitulated in 70 years of technical development, leading to AI programs running…approximately ‘equavilent to the brainpower of a guppy’…technocapitalist trends involve positive nonlinearities increasing returns, or runaway trajectories…” (pg. 178).
2019: Yang says "machine learning algorithm that can solve an incredibly complex problem beyond any human intelligence, but they're essentially complete idiots and 2 year olds at anything else [however]...these trends can sometimes explosively happen in non linear ways"

The similarities are undeniable - though explainable - but there's more...

2015: Left accelerationists Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, following their #Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics in 2013, write the book Inventing the Future Postcapitalism and a World Without Work which contains excerpts from the manifesto and has the following cover.

Machine automation? UBI? Futurism? Sound familiar?

2019: Yang says that when he started his nonprofit Venture for America in 2011 that he "would read various books about the future of work [that said] like 'hey robots are coming and you should start looking into what that will mean'"

To synthesize these 'coincidences' - 2017: Nick Land, in part discussing the above book, in the Concept of Acceleration New Center for Research and Practice Session 4 says

"The UBI argument is very close to the cynical and anti-humanist side of the argument we've come to...UBI is the expression of this extremely classic comprehension of what Capital should be...it should be a productive service in the interest of humanity...What makes it accelerationism on the left is that there's a demand for the trend of automation be continued...rather than a circuit that couples workers and capitalism together, there's an autonomous capital circuit in which robotic manufacturing substitutes for the human pole..." (Note that Nick is giving a generous reading of UBI, not necessarily arguing for UBI or a humanist Capitalism...).

Coincidence? No. Information AIDS, remember? One could very well imagine a world where Yang, a double Ivy League graduate, author, and tech savvy entrepreneur, picked up and read this Srnicek-Williams book or at least some of the related literature that may be cited in the book - and the world I imagine is one in which Yang read the CCRU and Land...

What's that you say? You now see that there is more than just a coincidence here?

Bingo.

So What Makes Yang a Real Accelerationist....(Short Accelerationist Lineage):
As seen, the Srnicek-Williams in Yang is his conceptualization of the acceleration of technology and its replacement of humans as not anti-human, but as a catalyst (accelerator) to re-emphasize the human; his appreciation for the fact that machines will free up workers' time and reduce costs thus raising profits and allowing workers to engage in care taking of their self / others, creative acts, and positive leisure time (one is reminded of the 'fully automated luxury communism' stuff too) while reaping financial kickbacks from the increased profit margins; and his proposal to use the preexisting capitalist structures (what in the CCRU is referred to as cargo culture, or using the remnants of whats there to make due) - as opposed to trying to radically change things or reinvent the wheel - as a method and case study to move towards a new politics. And, of course, again as the cover of Inventing the Future implies, Yang and Srnicek-Williams agree that universal basic income (UBI) can be paired with automation to pave the way towards a decent future. Srnicek and Williams are boring though, and I have no interest in arguing for them. Yang's saving grace is his Landian streak which is most notable in his tolerance (or absence of moralistic disdain, unlike Srnicek-Williams) for capitalism (he says universal basic income is "not socialism, but capitalism that doesn't start at zero") and his renunciation of the title of politician instead opting for a business model that understands human appetites, incentives, desire, and drives (akin to Land in the Dark Enlightenment - "Where the progressive enlightenment sees political ideals, the dark enlightenment sees appetite..."). Tl;dr: capitalism isn't to be critiqued morally or politically, it is the method and means of critique of  itself and of morals and politics. 

However, to say that this is why Yang is an accelerationist or that this shows Yang's understanding of Capitalism and therefore his competency as a leader does not say anything of importance. Rather, what is important is that Yang understands the 5 following interconnected gears, levers, and switches of Capitalism and the plane of consistency it has deployed (what Guattari calls Integrated World Capitalism) and therefore that he also understands the humans who are attached to this machine and its parts (whose subject and subjectivity, as Guattari and Fisher point out, come to be defined of. in, and through capitalist enunciations):

1. Transitioning between one government system to another is never without its tragic backslides and severe damages to the (middle class, everyday) people, places, and institutions it is supposed to be governing and therefore the momentum or structures of the system already in place needs to be used to get to the next level, whatever that may be. 
2. Values are derived from affective experience and material, not by other values / ideas or by purse reason.
3. Values that stick with people often arise organically and intuitively when people are brought together through and with material means which act as an objective third party mediator (balanced interpersonal distance).
4. Desire
5. The death of God, i.e., the cultural milieu of nihilism, the falling out of authority, the morose malaise of political disengagement, etc., of our Western world.

These are 5 important and highly interrelated facts that underpin the accelerationist position and are elaborated by theorists imperative to the accelerationist canon such as Kant, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard,  Moldbug, and, of course, Land who synthesizes all these thinkers.

Let's elaborate.

- 1: Gov't Transition:

Moldbug, in Chapter 1 of  his famous An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives, writes

"Here…is a Times Story on the fight against malaria…: ‘Before the 1960s, colonial governments and companies fought malaria because their officials often lived in remote outposts...Independence movements led to freedom, but also often to civil war, poverty, corrupt government and the collapse of medical care.’ Let’s focus on that last sentence. Independence movements led to freedom, but also often to civil war, poverty, corrupt government and the collapse of medical care. What we see here is that independence movements…led to some very concrete and very, very awful results, in addition to this curious abstraction—freedom. Clearly, whatever freedom means in this particular context, it’s such a great positive that even when you add it to civil war, poverty, corrupt government and the collapse of medical care,the result still exceeds zero...colonialism, with its intrinsic absence of freedom and its strangely effective malaria control... was in any way superior to postcolonialism, with its freedom, its malaria, its civil war, etc.”

Revolutions or independence movements, in breaking with previously established government - the purpose of government as Moldbug points out  being to simply establish order - can lead to serious disorder - the opposite function of government -  or some 'very very awful' things. This is not to say that revolutions or rebellions aren't sometimes appropriate, but rather that the left often doesn't conceptualize that if you're for revolution, you're in it for the long, nasty haul. To revolt consists in, yes, overthrowing the bad gov't, and, also yes, going through X amount of years of absolutely destabilized hell - bad nongovernment - without government or creature comforts (electricity, clean drinking water, shelter). Those who already suffer from these things (the prols) and your regular modern day 'revolutionary' alike (the petite bougie) is neither emotionally nor physically equipped for this, basic facts that play into the bigger motif through Open Letter which is that switching government is in fact like rocket science in that it needs to be done  quickly, cleanly, transparently, and all at once with the proper equipment and theoretical calculations. In accelerationist terms, one cannot turn the speeding machine on a dime or it will crash, one needs to use the speed generated by the machine and direct that vector towards something new.

- 2 and 3: Values Organically Arising in Relation to Affective Feedback to Material Conditions:

Kant, Marx and Freud have shown us the most on these matters.

For Kant, internal systems (categories, faculties, etc.) dynamically interact with one another to create a synthetic model of the outside world which is otherwise unknowable. We are not in contact with the outside directly, we are in contact with our reconstructions or synthesis of the outside, and our knowledge is limited to internal functions that uneasily map onto the outside. We know our internal models of the outside, not the outside itself. That is, for Kant's critical philosophy reason is not master in its own house. A bunch of mishmash of faculties legislating this or that take turns being master of this or that.

Freud, for the most part a secret Kantian, extends this critical approach and its emphasis on 'internal' dynamism inwards, making not only the outside unknowable, but the deep inside too (the drive, instinct, or object petit a often being likened to Kant's thing in itself). That is, for Freud's critical metapsychology, and as he says, the ego is not master in its own house. A mishmash of instincts and their vicissitudes, blah blah blah...

Deleuze and Guattari combine and extend these notions to conceptualize a universe composed of conjunctive impersonal flows and their tendencies of capture, articulation, coding, and de- and re-territorializing (or acceleration) which occur as ‘the process’ sediments into an assemblage, or organization of strata, the parts or layers of which, always amounting to more than the sum of their parts,  interact with one another inclusive-disjunctively -i.e. machinically and diagrammatically without negation - while also feedbacking into their own process of becomings. Jargon, I know. In other words, the impersonal base material flows of the noumenal outside get trapped and stratified into a thing that develops an inside, or the inner and outer unconscious (just as Freud describes, in a Kantian fashion, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle).

Nietzsche, predating Freud (who took immense inspiration from him) and engaging with while also critiquing Kant and Schopenhauer, reminds us with his own critical psychology that - to be vulgar and brief - the world is constituted of instincts transformed into human values which are then projected onto the outside as to seem more objective than they really are (see Tausk's influencing machine or Bion's strange objects for psychoanalytic hypothesis on this process) and that instincts not expressed outwardly turn inward and create personality or illness.

Marx, who, again in a critical fashion, concerns himself almost exclusively with the notion of value, runs parallel to this motley crew of thinkers and reminds us that we are unconscious of our class, i.e. our situation in a social antagonism between those who control the means of production and those who are forced to attach their bio-labor-power to and through these machines, and as a result of this unconsciousness, the values external and internal to us are skewed or distorted - perverted, as Zizek explains in his first book. As Foucault (who some argue is a Kantian, others a Marxist) puts it in the foreword to Anti-Oedipus, Anti-Oedipus - and therefore, we will say, accelerationism -  is arguably a synthesis of Nietzsche and Marx (which Land agrees with) that also toys with Freud and Kant (to the extent that D and G were polemically called 'old Kantians' after the book's release...).

What all this theory boils down to is the basic lived (and clinically verified) fact that meanings and values that form organically as life plods along, ones that occur without being consciously willed into being  - feeling laden associations to people, places, things that happen along the way or are more in accordance with instinctual activity - tend to stick in a person's experience and be used as meaningful directors much more than abstract, moral oughts that come from some authority figure without any organic situation  or personal meaning (neurotic superego injunctions inherited from mommy, daddy, state). Lived and felt experience as opposed to lofty morals are what bring people together. To apply our previous theorists, peoples' values aren't derived solely of 'pure' reason (abstract logic, 1 to 1 correspondence with the outside) and their environmental influences (vulgar humanist materialism), rather values are bound up with experience and affect, and if its one lesson that Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud emphasize its the idea that values should be one's own, attached to one's own meanings, not the ideas of others or abstract systems outside of the subject (a lesson demonstrated in the praxis of psychoanalysis where the curative factors arise through the naturally unfolding transference or emotional relationship between the patient and therapist, not necessarily through abstract cognitive or intellectual facts being taught or revealed).

- 4 and 5: Desire and Nihilism:
To be far too brief, Kant, Nietzsche, Marx and Freud's criticisms of internal, external, psychology, and social reliability or realism via the deconstruction of reason and its replacement with unconscious internal drives and their sublimation into values projected into the external realm relocates authority in the subject or body and its desire as opposed to - in this ontological order -  an omnipotent God, an outside world apodictically imposing itself on our senses ruled by this God, and a reliable internal stream of known consciousness (Descartes ego, sort of) in relation to this outside world ruled by this God. As Nietzsche foresaw, this kind of death of God and reason supplanted with a psychology of instincts or desire - a transition from outside truths to internal wants - leads to nihilism and a surplus of desire now unrestrained by slave morality.

This is where Nietzsche offers what is essentially a mythical method of remedying the nihilism he uncovered through his critical psychology, a mythical utilization of desire which Freud later turns into a therapeutic practice tied to medical science and a new theory of mind centered on the pathologies that occur when desire circuits are disturbed. Deleuze and Guattari exorcise psychoanalysis of Freud's own nihilism and the nihilistic linguistic vectors Lacan introduced via his overly structuralist approach to Freud thus freeing desire from the grips of the negative and reintroducing it as the material of one flow doubly articulated as economic and libidinal investment. Lyotard, contemporary of D and G, highly interested in psychoanalysis and Nietzsche - an interest which, as Land points out saves him from slipping into the overemphasis on language that Derrida, like Lacan, was championing at the time -  ventures through the strange land of libidinal dynamics before declaring in his book on postmodernism that in our current cultural milieu, master narratives of legitimacy and authority are dead. That is, religion, science, reason, logic and traditional moral values, deterritorialized to a pulp by capitalism, are over - cancelled. Now the only authority, legitimacy, and order - currency perhaps - is desire and how desires connect with other desires, or metanarratives.

...and Why Does It Matter (Yang vs. Sanders):
Why care about any of this?

Let's cover the first three points in one motion: gov't transition (1) and values as material and organically arising (2-3) are important to understand as Yang looks to install his very own concrete machine whose mechanisms make use of the abstract momentum of capitalism to plug-into and re-engineer (not unlike the cargo culture of CCRU) the concrete mechanisms of capitalism towards a new object. He engineers environments that will create organic relations conducive to the kind of relationships that will ignite desire; he aligns interests, connects excitements, attaches flowers of desire to one another, all through money as a third party connector.

Furthermore, Yang, in a move akin to early Marx (without the intolerance for capitalism), aims to appeal to capitalist notions of value as to help working class people reconnect their lived everyday experiences of personal value back to the value of money as opposed to the current situation of working class people struggling to live in a world where the value of money is solely connected to other values of money (CMC) and others' (big banks, state, billionaires) desire and therefore disconnected form the lived experiences of the working class people. Rather than 'Money --> work-->Money-->Other' as a circuit with personal values completely excluded, the circuit now looks like Money--> work --> life --> Self-->Other, etc. Why get rid of capitalism to let humans thrive when you could simply connect the capitalist machine to the human machine in a way that the human is registered on capitalism's terms? (Don't get too carried away answering this sentence, its rhetorical. If you disagree, you probably aren't going to change your mind are you?). Get Capital to work / fold the human into its value system, don't attempt to jam the overflowing forces of capitalism into the weak human containment system.

To get a better grasp on why this matters, lets compare Yang to Sanders' impotentized (to use a Guattarian term) politics which in discussing will  help us get to point 4 and 5, desire and nihilism.

In his Joe Rogan postcast, Bernie, utilizing almost solely negative and moralistic rhetoric in proposing a list of nice things he plans o do without providing any concrete plan, alternates between an overreliance on facts, science, cognitive reasoning, human rights, and moral fairness in the form of fuzzy, warm, but vague ‘got to,’ ‘ought to,’ and  ‘have to do this, have to do that.’ What is more, in order to convince people from all walks of life to come together around common values and ‘get on the same page,’ so to speak, Sanders argues these things aren’t actually that radical or utopian, a communication which seems to serve the function of implying that his positions are reasonable and that if one were thinking straight one would have no choice but to agree with.

Joe, possibly sensing Sanders’ lofty moralism and rhetorical defensiveness, brings up the power of anti-Sanders lobbyists and anti-climate change disinformation agents (which Sanders earlier mentions are extremely difficult to battle politically due to their entrenched positions in the corrupt system), etc., asks Sanders the following

 “these ideas sound great, but in the competitive environment of global politics how would you convince Russia or china…to do something that would put them in some sort of competitive disadvantage?”  

Sanders responds to by saying

 “well, the answer is Joe, if we do not do that, in 50 to 100 years everybody is going to be at a terrible disadvantage…you gotta make the case, these people…Putin…Xi…they’re not crazy people, and presumably they have concern about their kids and their grandchildren…this is a planet under siege, I don’t want to become a science fiction…but we gotta get together”

In perfect opposition to Yang, this not only shows Sanders’ misunderstanding of our current cultural milieu - a wasteland of postironic nihilism -  but also shows Sanders’ misunderstanding of desire and the role it plays in contemporary politics and how the two  (nihilism and desire) relate. That is, I am willing to bet that most millionaires, billionaires, CEOs, world leaders, despots, whatevers, don't give a shit about the future of the world or their familial bloodline at all. Rich and powerful people want to make as much as money as they can, conquer as much territory as possible, and consume and enjoy life frivolously as much as possible. These people want to eat and fuck the world and leave a big stinking corpse behind. They have no concern for the future generations, and no incentive to begin to develop a concern. The modern self made man is a postmodern nihilist at heart. They desire and fulfill their desire for their own self preservation, even if that self preservation destroys others and is ultimately self destructive.

Consistent with this misunderstanding of nihilism and desire, Sanders, in perfect opposition to Yang who states 'its Amazon's job to try and pay 0 taxes and its our job to try to get them to pay taxes' (two vectors of desire meeting in an event of reality) calls corporations and billionaires (Amazon and Bezos) greedy for wanting 0 taxes. He goes on “how does it happen that on issue  after issue the American people – the working class of this country – want something, nobody pays any attention to it, but billionaires want something and it gets done, and that has to do with a corrupt political system.” Ultimately, he thinks that telling a company that “their short term profits are not more important than the future of this planet" is not  " a hard sell to make” (because, as mentioned above, they’re “not crazy people”) the bottom of line of which is telling fossil fuel companies that they have to stop selling fossil fuels. A move like this will never fly as it does not take into account the desire of the corporation and how to re-engineer that desire to benefit the working class.

This critical oversight is not to be credited to Sanders being bad, stupid, immoral, etc. It's to be credited to the fact that Sanders is unconsciously a nihilist who is unconsciously operating on Capitalist terms. Consider the following: Sanders, like many politicians, tries to fix values (greed, working class not coming together) by using other values (Sanders' oughts and mandates, appeals to facts, convincing others, etc.) to change other values, a failed method which operates by the very capitalist logic protested and critiqued wherein abstractions devoid of material base are related to and effect other abstractions devoid of material base (CMC - where commodities are related to other commodities with capital, or money, as the generic exchange value deterritorializing all values and codes; making money off of moving around money; etc.). The Marx inspired left seem to miss the fact that to change values one needs to change material base that values derive from, not 'rationally' or emotionally convince people to change their values (and thus the psychoanalytic goal is to help someone have a new material-affective experience that allows them to form new values that make sense to their life and thus help others).

Another related way Yang triumphs over Sanders - one that relates back to Moldbug, revolution, and rocket science -  is that Yang knows that people don't want (desire) to take time out of their overworked days to volunteer for some heroic struggle of political valor that is likely to amount to naught. People want to be able to spend more time doing what they like with who they like, and from this the political change people want will occur as the automation feedback takes off. This is because politics don't change because of politics (just like mental health doesn't improve through a willful attempt at being mentally well, i.e. self help and motivational books, CBT, etc.), politics, an abstraction or reiffication (a commodity if you will) is an ossified version of the organic comings and goings of people (what Communism aims at returning to) and thus it is 'nonpolitics' or 'the-outside-of-politics' that is the only thing that can change politics.

But this is not the point, just one fact on the way to the point. The point is that Yang gets the power of money and sees that we have been conceptualizing money ineffectively. Money isn't an abstraction devoid of material base, it is the concrete material instantiation of internal/mental belief or affect - the flow of raw powerful desire. Money is hyperstitional. It works because we all believe in its power, and through believing in it, it becomes real and has real a/effects. It brings together heterogeneous components - subjects, objects, whatever - and provides for them a common point of reference that then sets things in motion in a way that amounts to more than the sum of its parts. It is a transcendental connector. 

To relate this to horror for a moment: if  Stephen King novels and their film adaptions - not to mention horror classics in general - have taught us anything, its that an out of the ordinary event will bring a group of heteregenous but ordinary people together, forcing them to temporarily put aside differences to occupy a foreign territory and solve a problem or address a threat. The Mist, Storm of the Century, Night of the Living Dead, etc. Capital or money (I know they don't completely equate) is the transcendental horror event that draws us together.

Summary:
In believing that agents make rational decisions, mainstream politics relies on trying to convince people to come together and bond over humanist morals in order to to artificially convince other people to believe certain things based on appeals to science, reason, logic, morals, etc. I.e., Sanders - who epitomizes the ideals of the left at this point - believes that he can appeal to the morality and reason of regular peoples and world leaders alike as to create solidarity and save the world. This kind of politics attempts to negate what already is, to disregard the current gov't structures and their vectors of influence, and move against all current entrenched power structures to install something new. 4 to 8 years to undo all of this and reinstall something new? I don't think so. Sanders is stuck in modernism and doesn't understand desire or nihilism. Yang, using the preexisting structures of Capitalism and the plane it has implanted, installs a mechanism that organically unites interests, incentivizing group activity and value co-creation.

If we are going to have a politics for the future, we need to have a nonpolitics of desire and nihilism.

Time A - Exit:
2000: the CCRU  under the direction of accelerationist Nick Land writes in Split Second Timing 
“…by the turn of the millennium 700 million years of biological evolution had been recapitulated in 70 years of technical development, leading to AI programs running…approximately ‘equavilent to the brainpower of a guppy’…technocapitalist trends involve positive nonlinearities increasing returns, or runaway trajectories…” (pg. 178).
2012: Mark Fisher, after leaving the CCRU, says "1: Everyone is an accelerationist. 2: Accelerationism has never happened. 3: Marxism is nothing if it is not accelerationist."
2015: Left accelerationists Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, following their #Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics in 2013, write the book Inventing the Future Postcapitalism and a World Without Work which contain themes of automation and UBI.
2017: Nick Land in the Concept of Acceleration New Center for Research and Practice Session 4 , "The UBI argument is very close to the cynical and anti-humanist side of the argument we've come to...UBI is the expression of this extremely classic comprehension of what Capital should be...it should be a productive service in the interest of humanity...What makes it accelerationism on the left is that there's a demand for the trend of automation be continued...rather than a circuit that couples workers and capitalism together, there's an autonomous capital circuit in which robotic manufacturing substitutes for the human pole..." (*Nick is giving a generous reading of UBI, not necessarily arguing for UBI*)
2019: Andrew Yang fulfills all three of Fisher's requirements, reads books dangerously similar to Srnicek and Williams, and makes use of Landian concepts in addition to saying things like "machine learning algorithm that can solve an incredibly complex problem beyond any human intelligence, but they're essentially complete idiots and 2 year olds at anything else [however]...these trends can sometimes explosively happen in non linear ways"
2020: Andrew Yang wins the presidential election. Andrew Yang has always won the 2020 presidential election.
2049: Yang4ever, like positive feedback, once UBI catches it can't be stopped

Fictions become real. Fictions infect. Inf(i/e)ctions

Accelerationism is a theory of time. Don't forget it...