(Session 4) Closing discussion

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Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: stage-1 acceptance ruling — lane unknown approved for opus-only hosting; mp3 tier deferred pending a disk volume). Series: #Accelerate panels. Source: audio original (.mp3).

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These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:00

  Okay, politics, writes Nick Bland in a 1992 essay entitled Circuitries, is obsolete. This is one of the central thematic strands running throughout his brief corpus. Politics is not simply absurd, but archaic, a human nicety which history, and on his account the history of techno-capitalism in particular, has rendered…

• 00:02:21

  A ruthless fatalism rules, with no room for decisions, responsibilities, actions, intentions. And as a result, rules out the very possibility of morality, ethics and politics. This position is admitted to be above all massively irresponsible, which is as impossible to ever actually occupy fully, and that can only…

• 00:04:50

  To clarify his position, we might profitably compare him to a greatly more popular pulp proponent of capitalism, Ayn Rand, who's already been mentioned by Alex. Rand, the gruesome favourite of American right-wing youth, is principally an apologist for capitalism, and indeed a moralist, albeit a highly distasteful…

• 00:07:32

  The emphasis on desubjectivation, hinting at the horrifying neurophilosophy of illimitivist materialism, intent on unveiling the reality of selfhood as a sham. OK, so the central paradoxes of Land's thought are twofold. Firstly, his vision of capitalism and human intelligence is demonstrative. It is demonstrably…

• 00:10:15

  Negrestani, in turn, seeks to criticise both Land and Brassiere. On his account, the speculative opportunities opened up in the wake of cosmic extinction, of subjects, of life, perhaps of all matter, are limited by the energetic frame of reference in which it is couched. Negrestani's argument, such as I understand…

• 00:12:58

  The post-autonomist thinker Massimo de Angelis has written extremely eloquently in his book The Beginning of History on the competing array of divergent value practices which necessarily exist besides those associated with capitalism, the most important of these being the world of unwaged work, which supports wage…

• 00:15:34

  Of course, this opens up the question of who or what is to act. For Land, he abjures what we would consider to be the very conditions for political activity. In the strong post-Sartrean register which currently seems to rule the world of continental understandings of politics, the subject acts as something like…

• 00:18:59

  And I think that you probably and necessarily cannot.