Text page
sphaleotas Tell Mrs Broadhurst I can't make it to the Red Mercury meltdown either
"sphaleotas Tell Mrs Broadhurst I can't make it to the Red Mercury meltdown either" treats capital as an abstract process of mutation and escape rather than as a merely managerial or institutional system.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The central claim is that capital should be understood as an inhuman process of abstraction rather than a humanly steerable institution. Meltdown names the way this process outpaces moral or political containment.
These texts work by describing markets, media systems, and social life as channels for accelerating abstraction. Capital behaves less like a policy object than like a self-intensifying circuit.
That matters because the section is trying to show how deterritorialization becomes historically real rather than remaining a philosophical slogan. The page belongs here when abstraction is presented as an operative force.
How to read this text
Read for the vocabulary of abstraction, escape, and process first. The page usually becomes clearer once capital is treated as a circuit rather than a classically economic object.
Notice where the argument leaves institutional critique and starts describing systems that exceed human command. That turn is the hinge of the section.
Representative extracts
Stakes · paragraph 1
Nick Land, a character become mythical because invisible since he abandoned teaching, also taught philosophy at the University of Warwick. He sought to connect the two volumes of “Capitalism and Schizophrenia” with Norbert Wiener’s work on cybernetics, but also with esotericism and science-fiction.
Stakes · paragraph 1
He sought to connect the two volumes of “Capitalism and Schizophrenia” with Norbert Wiener’s work on cybernetics, but also with esotericism and science-fiction.
History · paragraph 1
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20120711090220/http://blog.urbanomic.com/sphaleotas/archives/0010… sphaleotas « Everything begins to gel | Main | Doctor’s orders » October 28, 2007 Tell Mrs Broadhurst I can’t make it to the Red Mercury meltdown either [...] [A]ided by the English translations which finally became available between 1980-90, the reception of [Deleuze and Guattari’s] oeuvre progressed noticeably: “In England, ‘deleuzians’ sought neither to commentate on his work, nor to apply it.
History · paragraph 1
In the 90s, he organised several cultural happenings on themes like “Virtual Futures”, “Afro- Futures” and “Video-Technics”, bringing together in the same event conferences and techno-parties at the venerable University of Warwick, little-accustomed to such types of rhythm. — François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari: Biographie Croisée (Paris: La Découverte, 2007), pp. 568-569. Posted by sphaleotas at October 28, 2007 08:07 PM
Appears in sections
Capital, Meltdown, and Cybernetic Modernity Primary section
Capitalist abstraction, deterritorialization, cybernetics, and the archive's account of runaway modernity.