This puts me in mind of what Geoffrey Hill called “plutocratic anarchy”, or the social and epistemic derangement wrought by the rule of money.
I think part of what Ben Noys was getting at in his critique of “affirmationism” (later, “accelerationism”) in The Persistence of the Negative is that systems without negation, without the principle that X entails not-Y, represent themselves philosophically as affirming a sort of abstract puissance - performativity, effectiveness, the ability to make stuff happen - which overruns taxonomies, territorial distinctions, binary oppositions and so on. But this puissance cashes out as pouvoir, coercive force majeure, the ability to rule opposition out of bounds. It can’t endure negation so it organises to crush whatever resists it.
Psychedelic fascism has something of that flavour to it. It’s all rainbows, permission structures, euphoric affirmation, until something or someone says no.
Thinkers on the left have become increasingly critical of what we can loosely associate with psychedelic fascism, like “toxic positivity,” in recent years, but I haven’t seen an analysis of toxic-positivity cultural crusts that connects them to the materiality of technology. Such an analysis would be useful for making 2020s-era psychedelic fascism more readily intelligible.
I should probably read The Persistence of the Negative.
This puts me in mind of what Geoffrey Hill called “plutocratic anarchy”, or the social and epistemic derangement wrought by the rule of money.
I think part of what Ben Noys was getting at in his critique of “affirmationism” (later, “accelerationism”) in The Persistence of the Negative is that systems without negation, without the principle that X entails not-Y, represent themselves philosophically as affirming a sort of abstract puissance - performativity, effectiveness, the ability to make stuff happen - which overruns taxonomies, territorial distinctions, binary oppositions and so on. But this puissance cashes out as pouvoir, coercive force majeure, the ability to rule opposition out of bounds. It can’t endure negation so it organises to crush whatever resists it.
Psychedelic fascism has something of that flavour to it. It’s all rainbows, permission structures, euphoric affirmation, until something or someone says no.
Thinkers on the left have become increasingly critical of what we can loosely associate with psychedelic fascism, like “toxic positivity,” in recent years, but I haven’t seen an analysis of toxic-positivity cultural crusts that connects them to the materiality of technology. Such an analysis would be useful for making 2020s-era psychedelic fascism more readily intelligible.
I should probably read The Persistence of the Negative.