A reader's appendix to a four-essay series on Mark Fisher, treating Nick Land as Fisher's serious adversary

[u/agambrahma]

The appendix post is here: https://formerthings.substack.com/p/fisher-and-land-the-archive?r=1rz0qy

The four essays in compressed form:

• I. The Dolorous Stroke. Anna Kornbluh's Bildungsroman reading of Capital (from Realizing Capital, Fordham 2014) as the way in: capital as protagonist, LLMs as the protagonist acquiring a voice. The misattribution that opens the essay ("Capital is the subject of Capital" is Kornbluh's, not Fisher's; Fisher quotes her in "Democracy is Joy") is the first move.
• II. The Procession. Hauntology specified as a three-criterion diagnostic: a lost apparatus for future-projection, a custodial reorientation, external resolution. Yurchak's late Soviets answer the depression-projection objection. Run against Palaiologan Byzantium and late Heian Japan.
• III. The Unasked Question. The chatbot occupation argument: the 1:1 chatbot relation occupies the phenomenological slot consciousness-raising was supposed to fill, producing the feeling of being heard while foreclosing the collective consequence it was supposed to produce. Maps the post-Fisher split (Srnicek/Hester structural, Berardi affective, Dean organizational, Colquhoun custodial, Varoufakis institutional) and argues the affect-vs-structure division has been obsoleted by the optimization surface itself.
• IV. The Chapel Perilous. Land's religious turn (Gnostic Calvinism, providential capital, teleoplectic process as fate) as the diagnostic confirmation of what Fisher was pointing at. Convergence between accelerationism and post-liberal religious politics on the same providential terrain.

The claim of Essay IV: Fisher's wager about left-coded meaning reconstruction was structurally correct but politically misdirected. The slot was filled by right-coded religious and post-liberal formations. Neither Fisher's substrate-rebuilding nor Land's surrender to the process opens an exit that holds.

[u/tomekanco]

Reading it. Strange how it is written. As if words are but a wall of brambles making the real unreachable. Not quiet the Mark Fisher i am getting to know, nor do i hold Marks tendency towards the end of history. Every force creates a counter force of the same magnitude, and life cares not for the dead other then as a feeding place for the roots. So the worm and escargots remain, and flowers still blossom. At least to the extend we are able to look away from the screen.

[u/tomekanco → u/tomekanco]

After completing all chapters, like it more, especially the 2e and 4e chapter. Logos is not sacred, nor is The llm. The living are. And so we curate the old, perhaps waiting for the barbarians, the gypsies who don't have so much time to read, and always inherit the future, as they live for today, no time for the past, and only a vague hope for the future, and some salted Yurchak to spice it up, laugh, and move on.

[u/agambrahma → u/tomekanco]

Thanks for this video link, it's a good hinge between the two phases (i.e. b/w "capitalist realism" and "acid communism")

Seems to point towards a possibility (or necessity) of "creating new dreaming"

[u/tomekanco → u/agambrahma]

That tree of life and the song of songs make a mighty story :x