Cyclonopedia

luka

luka

Well-known member
some people just have no aesthetic sense in the same way that some people (often the same people) have no sense of humour
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
dissensus.JPG
 
  • Like
Reactions: sus
versh

versh

Well-known member
Negarestani seems pretty down on the book these days. There's an interview from a few years back where he distances himself from it, particularly the style:

"Yes, predictably I do detest to talk about that book... in hindsight I think it fails to perform and reach the level of its ambitions... it was necessary for Cyclonopedia to have a distinct style. But I agree with you that my style has changed over years. This is because I have come to the realization, after learning the hard lesson, that not everything needs to be stylized or aesthetized.

Style is something that is intrinsic to how one cognizes and re-cognizes the world. It is not, however, a way of peddling ideas or look cutting-edge or scholarly. Philosophy demands as its first priority semantic transparency and a theoretically uncompromising attitude: you should go wherever the impersonal concept takes you, in spite of your psychological convictions. Semantic constraints don’t eliminate the style, rather they positively constrain it so that there is no longer a way to mask the conservatism of content behind syntactic gimmicks, stylistic contrivances, and a libidinal prose."
Click to expand...

"Land ... is a self-conscious stylist. His industriously crafted libidinal prose is less a product of a harbinger of semantic apocalypse who wages an all-out war against meaning (or inadvertent stylistic overexcitement) than it is a mundane yet effective mobilization of style to recruit the impressionable and those who are tired, rightly so, by stale and intellectually frustrating philosophy. But beneath the facade of this titillating, libidinally charged, and insinuating prose lies a philosophically and politically conservative writer, whose ideas of cybernetics and complexity hasn’t advanced since the 1970s, whose brand of social Darwinism as cosmological laws can be effectively debunked by an undergraduate in physics, and whose idea of the will-to-think is no more than a mere lacquer over petty psychological fixations."
Click to expand...

"The very fact that someone like Land manages to convert young people at a relatively large scale should not only be alarming but also objectively understood."
Click to expand...

www.neroeditions.com

Engineering the World, Crafting the Mind | NERO

A conversation with Reza Negarestani
www.neroeditions.com www.neroeditions.com
 
versh

versh

Well-known member
A really awful book. Still haven't finished it and was half tempted to chuck it in the pile with the stuff I took to the charity shop earlier. There's just nothing there. The work of someone who wanted to write like D&G but had nothing to say. Absolute waffle. It's marginally better when he turns his focus to history, but it's still not that interesting and doesn't make up for the pages and pages of mind numbing fantasy mathematics and sub-Deleuzian shit about rats and hole complexes. Almost impressive how lifeless he manages to make such an exciting framework.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
versh said:
A really awful book. Still haven't finished it and was half tempted to chuck it in the pile with the stuff I took to the charity shop earlier. There's just nothing there. The work of someone who wanted to write like D&G but had nothing to say. Absolute waffle. It's marginally better when he turns his focus to history, but it's still not that interesting and doesn't make up for the pages and pages of mind numbing fantasy mathematics and sub-Deleuzian shit about rats and hole complexes. Almost impressive how lifeless he manages to make such an exciting framework.
Click to expand...
You just don't get it, man.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top