The body count climbs through a series of globewars. Emergent Planetary Commercium trashes the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Continental System, the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet International, cranking-up world disorder through compressing phases.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiSPL27FYUU
So the first question one will probably want to ask about this line is, why does Land speak of, quote, unquote, globe wars when some of these examples are clearly only regional? So for instance, the Holy Roman Empire was not global.
It was not even really an empire. I think it was Voltaire who famously said that it was, quote, neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. The Napoleonic conquests were impressive, no doubt, but they were only European at best or Eurasian at best. Obviously, they stopped at Russia. Land says globe wars because each of these conflicts were really wars against a kind of planetary outside.
A planetary outside which is still not well understood by many scholars or historians. The way that I think about it is that all of these conflicts that he cites were really efforts by human beings to harness a kind of explosive global process, A process that appeared very obscurely and uncertainly during the renaissance. That’s why he mentions the renaissance. We discussed in a previous video his invocation of the renaissance. You can watch that back if you need to review.
But basically, Land is alluding to a kind of long term historical gradient which disintegrates human controls control structures as we know them. Some people might call this gradient capitalism. But the problem with calling it, quote, unquote, capitalism is that that word is used to encompass a bunch of very contradictory processes. You know, Marx, for instance, understood this very well, but his followers, I don’t think really did. I think generally, most Marxists or Marxists after Marx had a bad tendency to conflate capitalism with pretty much anything and everything that they disliked.
Anything that I’ve seen is bad. And so, Deleuze and Guattari are instructive here as a kind of counterpoint. They emphasize that rather capitalism is intrinsically schizophrenic that it’s a lot of bad things and a lot of good things as well. So capitalism oppresses and to use their word territorializes human potential. Sure.
But it also liberates or to use their word deterritorializes human potential as well. So you might say that capitalism deterritorializes tomorrow what it territorialized yesterday. It’s constantly switching schizophrenically between oppression and liberation. And specifically, Deleuze and Guattari dislike monopoly capitalists, but they really quite like disruptive entrepreneurship. In short, they’re basically what we would call market anarchists.
And this is exactly why land is referring to the quote unquote emergent planetary commercial and not just some naive concept of capitalism. That’s because begin beginning in the renaissance, there really does emerge this kind of habitable outside beyond all human control structures really. And on that outside, there is no government. There is no law. There’s only creative and self enforcing operations.
That’s all that can survive there. And so it’s not really capitalism because it oh, capitalism always exceeds whatever people think is capitalism. It’s it’s an intrinsically contradictory in that way. When you look at the renaissance, for instance, like when feudal serfs would run away from the manor to the new cities, they’re not just joining some new thing called capitalism. It’s not like someone told them, hey, there’s this thing over here.
Come join it. It’s a cool structure called capitalism. Obviously not. They were merely absconding to some completely unknown outside. Over time, of course, certain patterns and structures emerge with a certain amount of consistency, and we could, you know, post hoc call those structures something like capitalism.
And that makes enough sense. But the problem is that this hides precisely what is most interesting about the underlying processes and conflicts. So what we really wanna ask now is, why are human control structures perpetually disintegrating? This is what’s really interesting about Nick Land’s work and and this essay in particular. What happens exactly?
And that’s something we’re gonna try to figure out, but we can start in this passage by by saying that, well, we have to go a little bit beyond the text. And and to do so, I’ll say that, you know, one problem in my perspective is that, basically, human institutions purchase their control through strategic deceptions or kind of compromised relationships with reality. So what happens is certain strategic fictions can be highly effective, it’s discovered, for channeling and directing the energy of large masses of people. And so individuals and groups are always trying to leverage these deceptions in competition with each other. And so the winners can quickly scale massive control structures, the people that are good at that lying game, whether that be political empires, corporations, philanthropic organizations, or what have you.
You know, these are big powerful insights, if you will. And they want everyone to feel like their structures are the containers of what is real, that that that is reality as such. And and this works really well. You can really whip a whole mass of people, millions of people into a frenzy, believing, like, their control structure, their container is reality itself. But these control structures are always intrinsically vulnerable to new upstarts who go to the outside and construct something that’s more aligned with reality.
And so this is the history of technology in my in my reading. My history of technology in my in my reading, my Landian reading. I’m I’m somewhat deviating from the text here, but this is, I think, the spirit of his of his argument. Technology constantly cuts the costs of of going to the outside. And so there is a kind of secular trend where technology or technologically provocative upstarts disintegrate establishment control structures just perennially.
This is always happening over time. And so the upstarts calcify, and then they become the establishment that’s overthrown and so on. Alright. And so, you know, once again, I think Nick Land’s historical citations here are not vague hand waving references. They’re actually, you know, surprisingly astute, and and I think he uses his words very carefully.
Consider the case of the Holy Roman Empire, Empire, for instance, which Land mentions in this passage. The disintegration of the Holy Roman Empire looks surprisingly similar to the disintegration of, say, the contemporary US dollar backed American empire, for instance. And so the pejorative adjective, that people use today sometimes called Byzantine, if you’ve ever heard someone call something Byzantine. This actually hearkens back to the Holy Roman Empire, Byzantine bureaucracies. The Holy Roman Empire had a big problem.
And the problem was that it just accumulated too much bureaucracy. That’s where the the the the the term Byzantine comes from in contemporary parlance. And so the accumulation of bureaucracy means that the accumulation of lies and errors, you know, and and and outdated notions just kind of agglomerate. And, they continue to be enforced nonetheless. They have this inertia and that’s a big massive problem of institutions as we’ve always known them.
My friend Josh Rosenthal for instance who’s been on the podcast, you should go listen to that if you haven’t, tells a very interesting story about the end of the Holy Roman Empire. I heard him talk about this on a different podcast. And one of the reasons he says is that, I’m sorry. One of the reasons that the empire collapses, he says, is that it turns out a lot of the paperwork of the empire was composed of forgeries and lies, basically. And at a certain point, highly significant economic and legal transactions turned out to be fake.
So for instance, one example is the document known as the Donation of Constantine, which represented the Roman Emperor’s bestowal of vast territorial and spiritual powers to to the pope. I I believe it was Pope Sylvester the first. And the popes used this document to justify their control of the whole Western Roman Empire for hundreds of years. And then in the early fifteen hundreds, it was shown to be a forgery, thanks to the new field of scientific document analysis that was emerging in the the the rationalizing renaissance that we talked about in the previous video. And so this is an example of how techonomic acceleration constantly breaks the web of elite lies or fibs and beneath that that exists basically beneath any institutional order.
So the blockchain today, for instance, you know, is by the way a kind of solution to this problem, a radical historical rupture where this this solution is possibly going to be solved in in profound ways. It solves basically the problem exemplified by the donation of of Constantine, but that’s a different topic. Maybe I’ll make a separate video about that later. The final thing I wanna end on is that Land says this emerging planetary commotion quote unquote cranks up world disorder through compressing phases, if you recall. And so later in the essay, he will mention specific years that he sees as marking these phases.
And so we’ll explain what he means by it quote unquote compressing phases when we reach that point. Alright. I just wanted to flag that now. He actually gives years later on and we’re gonna look at what those years mean in a future video. So that’s all for that’s all for now.
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