Pagan Theatrics: “Libidinal Materialism”, Machinic Vitalism, and Anti-Humanism.
“It should be recalled that Fichte made of the “Wissenschafslehre” [Science of Knowledge] a supple instrument for thought’s most various tasks. This idea of a plastic philosophical instrument has its origin in Kant and Critique, obviously, but it doesn’t find its fulfilled form until Eternal return, the only process that is transformed along with its materials and which is consumed/consummated on the spot in order to go further: a machinic process, a power of metamorphosis that can be “specified” as textual, a process of production, reproduction and consumption of signs that has put structuralism and linguistics six thousand feet under and that immanently entails the criteria of the distinction between textual gadgets and textuale machines.” (Francois Laruelle - Introduction to “Textual Machines” 1976)*
This quote from Francois Laruelle comes from a work that bears a striking similarity to Jean-Francois Lyotard’s “Libidinal Economy”, released just two years before the work quoted above. Both thinkers were attempting to synthesize Marx, Freud, Lacan, and Nietzsche (as well as other favorites of French post-war theory such as Sade, Klossowski, Derrida, Deleuze, etc.) into an anti-humanistic Machinic Vitalism shorn of all vestiges of what they saw as Christian guilt and morality that still clung to modern thought. “[A] machinic process, a power of metamorphosis that can be “specified” as textual, a process of production, reproduction and consumption of signs that has put structuralism and linguistics six thousand feet under . . .” The brief period of post-1968 Machinic Vitalism (I prefer Machinic Vitalism to Libidinal Materialism as the heavy influence of Nietzsche and Deleuze prevents this from being a form of materialism) arguably ends with Deleuze and Guattari’s “A Thousand Plateaus” (1980), Lyotard only writes one more “Machinic Vitalist” book (Duchamp’s TRANS/formers, 1977) before abandoning the theme and becoming a follower of Wittgenstein, and Laruelle abandons this position in 1981 (Philosophy I, 1971-1981). The full library of Machinic Vitalism would include, Klossowski’s “Living Currency” (1970), Deleuze and Guattari’s “Anti-oedipus” (1972), Lyotard's “Libidinal Economy” (1974), and Jean Baudrillard’s “Symbolic Exchange and Death” (1976). I believe the reason for Machinic Vitalism’s brief life span is due to the apparent dead end it reaches in its attempt to overturn Kantian humanism (consider the more careful and measured tone of ATP compared to AO).
Libidinal Economy differs from Textual Machines in that Lyotard remains more faithful to psychoanalysis than Laruelle does in that he replaces the Lacanian castrated subject with a “libidinal band” (a dispositif or arrangement), a psychotic mobius strip drive circuit without an ego or unconscious, while Laruelle leaves behind the subject through the impersonal will to power-as-libido. By forgoing subject (or ego) and unconscious, Lyotard, as well as Laruelle, assembles a libidinal textual machine powered by Nietzsche's will to power/eternal return read through Freud's death drive (the compulsion to repeat) that forgoes all questions of meaning and representation and overturns the subject in favor of the endless circulation of impersonal acephalic pre-individual intensities. In Deleuze and Guattari’s “Anti-Oedipus” (1972), the will to power as desiring production is still reigned in by the ethics of power as (potencia), a joyful Spinozistic affirmation of creativity and experimentation, rather than the will to power as a greater degree of power subjugating a lesser degree of power, as it is for Lyotard and Laruelle:
“So you thereby challenge Spinozist or Nietzschean ethics, which separate movements of being-more from those of being less, of action and reaction? - Yes, let us dread to see the reappearance of a whole morality or politics under the cover of these dichotomies, their sages, their militants, their tribunals, and their prisons. . . Not good and bad intensities, then, but intensity or its decompression. And as has been said and will be said again, both dissimulated together, meaning hidden in emotion, vertigo in reason. Therefore no morality at all, rather a theatrics; no politics, rather a conspiracy.” (Libidinal economy pg 42)
Machinic vitalism introduces Nietzsche’s naturalism to Freud’s energetic theory of the drives and creates an intensive Machinic-Naturalism that reveals the inhuman, impersonal mechanisms at work in both Freud and Nietzsche. The dead end of Machinic Vitalism and its psychotic form of animism comes from the fact that psychosis is a symptom of foreclosure (Verwerfung). This foreclosure comes from the insistence of Nietzsche and his followers (Lyotard and Laruelle, amongst others) on absolute immanence, whereby being (nature in this case) is one. To say that nature is one is to say that there is only the will to power as a greater degree of power subjugating a lesser degree of power, and all individual things, subjects, signs, and traces are just greater or lesser degrees of this power. I characterize this as a foreclosure because if nature is truly all one, then not only do we live in a completely deterministic universe in which nothing we do matters, but more importantly, we also can't act in any way whatsoever as we have no free will and can only hope to affirm a will to power that is completely indifferent to us. This is why Kant in the “Critique of Pure Reason” finds the basis for human freedom in the distance at which the human subject approaches being. If it wasn't for this distance between thinking and being the subject would not be able to make decisions and choose how it goes about approaching and making sense of the world it inhabits. If the subject was absolutely immanent to being and existed on the same plane as the things in themselves, there would be no need for language, concepts, or reason. Most importantly, this is the crucial difference between sapience, reason and freedom and mere mechanistic (natural) existence or sentience. “The conduct of man, so long as his nature remained as it is now, would be changed into mere mechanism, where, as in a puppet show, everything would gesticulate well but no life would be found in the figures.” (CPR 152-153) To truly overturn humanism, is to insist not that humans are indistinguishable from the rest of nature as a mechanistic totality, but rather that to be human and to think is to always be artificial and to be at a remove from nature and what is “natural”. To be human is not to have a nature but to have a history.
Nietzsche’s narrative in “The Genealogy of Morals” (prehistoric man/beasts of prey > aristocrats > bad conscience > nihilism/ubermensch >) is a cyclical transhistorical mechanism that subsumes human culture and history under nature as will to power. Machinic Vitalism has escaped Kantian humanism at the cost of creating a self enclosed mechanistic universe where nothing ever changes. This leaves next to nothing for Machinic Vitalism to work towards or attempt to solve and leaves its followers with three options:
Follow Lyotard (and Deleuze) back into a less radical post-Kantianism still under the sway of the linguistic turn and abandon any or all political ambitions.
Stay with Machinic Vitalism and follow Nick Land and the Accelerationists and adopt a hard determinism that makes political change seem near impossible and only leaves open political options on the far right.
Follow Laruelle and abandon Machinic Vitalism in favor of realism and/or transcendental materialism.
Machinic Vitalism as an attempt to overturn Kantian humanism in favor of a post-human pagan pantheistic naturalism was, in the end, unsuccessful but produced a unique approach to overcoming the limitations of bourgeois humanism that has gone on to influence thinkers like Mark Fisher, Ray Brassier, and Reza Negarestani. The term "Pagan" was originally used by Christians like Augustine as a blanket term for the multiplicity of non Abrahamic polytheistic religions in continental Europe. Much like these original "Pagans", what I call Pagan Naturalism does not refer to a conscious affinity between thinkers or a historically defined period of time, but is rather a blanket terms for pre, post, or anti Kantian conceptions of nature that take the shape of various forms and configurations of absolute immanence, panpsychism, and or pantheism that fail to recognize or reject the existence of the distance between thinking and being. This would also include thinkers with no familial resemblance to Nietzsche, like Spinoza, Whitehead, the Neoplatonists, Giordano Bruno, Michel Serres, etc. Machinic Vitalism is merely a particular anti-human variation of Pagan Naturalism that emphasizes the continuity of the organic and the inorganic.
*Translation of F. Laruelle’s Introduction to “Textual Machines” - Taylor Adkins, 9/1/13. https://speculativeheresy.wordpress.com/2013/09/01/translation-of-f-laruelles-introduction-to-textual-machines/#_ftn7
