Theory Fiction

Theory fiction sounds like a cool concept. What are some essential works and what, if any, prerequisites do they require?

What is it?

>>9189796

I would define it as horror/psychedelia written in the style of academic prose. Part pataphysics, part Lovecraft, part Blare Witch Project. Dense prose, made up words, occult-looking diagrams. Basically, people took Deleuze and just ran with it.

Philosophically, it's related to speculative realism, object-oriented philosophy and accelerationism.

Nick Land, Reza Negarestani, CCRU are people to check out.

http://www.ccru.net/digithype/barkerspeaks.htm

>>9189946

Also this:

https://gnomebooks.wordpress.com/2015/04/12/earthmare/

https://gnomebooks.wordpress.com/2015/04/12/earthmare/

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ur a fag pwned

Anyone read The Stack by Benjamin Bratton? I've heard it compared to OP and I'm wondering if it's worth getting

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OG theory fiction. one of the best books i've ever read and so so underrated

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>>9190365
Also in the same vein

Can someone give me a summary of what negarestani's shtick is? I don't want to invest into reading a whole book by some obscure weirdo unless I know what I'm getting into. Is he one of those nihilist guys like Brassier or Land or something different?

"I'm your Chief of Theory"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVRpA-_jzV4

>>9190909
oh, that's from Cosmopolis if anyone is interested. Cool film.

>>9190801

I would say that he's anti/post-humanist, but not in the 'everything is meaningless, MEANINGLESS!' way of most self-proclaimed nihilists. He'll do fun stuff like talk about oil as a sentient entity that is enacting the war on terror as a ploy to enslave humanity. I take it as a way of rethinking humanity in regards to external entities that are of equal/higher standing, but not self-similar (like Christian conceptions of God). He describes the relationship between humans and xeno-agents (the term he uses), but the relationship is more complicated than the mere indifference that Lovecraft describes. If humans are the autotrophs of the mental domain, then negarestani tries to describe the heterotrophs.

What I find exciting about Negarestani and this potential new genre overall is that it uses philosophy itself as a medium for expression, rather than description. I hate philosophy that just keeps telling you about this new way of thinking instead of going off and doing it (like Brassier, Thacker and Morton).

>>9190918
Yeah, I might have to check this guy out.

Reminds me a lot of Baudrillard. While he deals in descriptions, it's a mistake to consider his writing a prescription, or some sort of solution. He always talked about needing to "go beyond theory", stay a step ahead of it, never let it catch up with you.

>>9190918
sounds dope but how deep an understanding of weird pomo philosophy do i need to appreciate this?

>>9189741
i hear this printing is low quality
can you speak on that?

>>9190934
you've already appreciated it

>>9190956
what do you mean by this?

>>9190969
>sounds dope
don't get hung up on prerequisites.

>>9190918
Thanks this is pretty helpful and sounds like something I could get into. I definitely appreciate the performative types of philosophical expression too--it's been something that's happened before in philosophy I think (like with figures such as Derrida and Deleuze) but it hasn't been appreciated much.

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>>9190918
good post

what are autotrophs/heterotrophs?

>>9190924
another good post

cool thread gents, have ass

>>9190987
i just want to know if i need a familiarity with deleuze to understand this, man

>>9191001
no you don't

>>9191010
cool, hope to read him soon

>>9191028
me too

>>9191000
Autotrophs are organisms that take in their energy from the sun, producing organic compounds. Heterotrophs consume autotrophs for energy.

>>9190934
None. Some familiarity with that genre will ground some of the references, but the majority of references I don't think refer to anything real.

# begin quote
Ungrounded and unreported histories of the Earth are full of passages, vents and soft tunnels mobilized and unlocked through participations with the Earth as a compositional entity. These histories are engineered by openings and that which crawls within them; every movement in these passages invigorates the ungrounding of the earth, engineering what makes Earth, Earth. Paranoid cultures and their establishments always leave security leaks; they breed more holes and more solids than anyone; but these latter, far from augmenting or purging the solidus, leave it as a corpse necrotized by heavy scarring (a fibro-proliferative mess) ... hole ... solid ... hole ... solid ... solid ... hole ... hole ... hole ... de-faced; it is left as the corpse of solidus, ready to decay and turn into mess. ()hole complex turns the architectonic solid into an ex-architectural dump: laying waste, rotting erect, oozing pores.
# end quote

>>9190944
Havn't had any problems with the book wrt it's materiality.

>>9190996
It's happened with Alfred Jerry, Rabelas and others, it just never gets taken up by the establishment because it's not good fodder for argument. Derrida and Deleuze stride the line, doing a little bit of both.

Cyclonopedia looks interesting but I can only find a shitty pdf that won't display properly on my ebook reader.

>>9190359
Haven't read it but his lectures are great.

>>9190801
Imagine that peak oil is a myth and oil is actually a sentient being inside the earth that has been waiting for a way to take over the planet in order to completely destroy all life on the planet and turn the earth into another sun. Capitalism and Islam is the way oil is going to do it.

Negarestani is the only good thing to be related to Nrx/Dark Enlightenment. Every other writer is just a talentless hack neoliberal shill.

>>9190934
It's really not that difficult. He repeats himself constantly so if you don't get what he's talking about you're a bit retarded. Also, a lot of the jargon is just for an aesthetic effect (ie. you will feel like a schizophrenic muslim because the book makes TOO much sense).

>>9191001
Not that much, he kind of explains the Deleuzean concepts but I knew about Deleuze before going into it, so maybe I'm biased. Deleuze and Guattari were kind of anti-monotheist so Negarestani isn't a full Deleuzean and he Parsani critiques them in the book.

Just read Nomadology from A Thousand Plateaus and then dive in to Cyclonopedia.

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"At this point, the Islamic Apocalypticism of Jihad as a religio-political event and the role of oil as the harbinger of planetary singularity overlap. Unlike Latin America, Islam has perceived oil as an ultimate Tellurian lubricant, or as the lube of all narrations on the Earth – a radical field of tactics by and through which Islamic war machines can slide forward, fuse with the Earth’s flows and become planetary entities rather than merely religious agencies with a certain geo-political range.

...in other words, the Earth is a part and property of Islam, that is to say, the religion of utter submission to Allah. Islam does not perceive oil merely as a motor-grease – in the way Capitalism identifies it - but predominantly as a lubricant current or a tellurian flux upon which everything is mobilized in the direction of submission to a desert where no idol can be erected and all elevations must be burned down – that is, the Kingdom of God. This act of submission to the all-erasing desert of God is called the religion of taslim or submission, that is to say, Islam. If oil runs toward the desert, so does everything that is dissolved in it."

this stuff sounds pretty interesting as far as taking a new direction in horror literature goes. i'm really ignorant as to the philosophy behind it, though, and it seems like there's a lot of prerequisite literature to understand someone like Nick Land. the way you're describing Cyclonopedia makes it seem like it's not exactly necessary to read any other material, so maybe I'll give it a look sometime soon.

>>9189741
do you have a pdf or ebub of Earthmare ?

Is trunp gonna deport negarestani back to iran?

>>9192633
Are the chinese gonna deport Land back to England ?

>>9192633
No, Bannon is Tellurian-pilled. He's read Negarestani.

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>>9192649
yes