Collected Film Commentary (Version 0.1) [1 ed.]

Table of contents :
Editor’s Note - 3
King Kong & Godzilla - 4
Batman, Bane, & Ra’s al Ghul - 9
Transformers - 14
The Godfather & Scarface - 15
Blood Diamond -18
Alita: Battle Angel - 19
Terminator & The Wandering Earth - 20
Avatar - 31
Hellraiser - 36

Citation preview

Haz

Collected Film Commentary Version 0.1 Edited by a fella

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Are the British capable of comprehending David Lynch? -

Haz, 06/05/2022

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Table of Contents Editor’s Note - 3 King Kong & Godzilla - 4 Batman, Bane, & Ra’s al Ghul - 9 Transformers - 14 The Godfather & Scarface - 15 Blood Diamond -18 Alita: Battle Angel - 19 Terminator & The Wandering Earth - 20 Avatar - 31 Hellraiser - 36

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Editor’s Note Haz is a member of the Infrared collective. This is a compilation of some of his commentary on film. To produce this collection, auto-generated YouTube transcripts from Haz’s stream VODs were scraped and edited for intelligibility (removing duplicate words for instance) or in cases where Haz made a mistake and then retroactively corrected himself to enable a smoother reading experience. Other minor changes were focused on changing spelling or phraseology for clarity. Removal of speech is denoted by [...], generally to cut out tangents or interactions with Haz’s stream chat. This is not a comprehensive collection of every time Haz has mentioned movies on stream, nor is it a comprehensive collection of Haz’s film analyses. Not all stream VODs could be scraped and many mentions of film are only in passing. Cover art was drawn by me in GIMP and Inkscape. All dates are links to the original content. I hope you enjoy.

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KING KONG & GODZILLA 01/28/2021 [other collective member, offscreen] "What do you think they're going to represent in the film?" That's a really interesting conversation. King of the Monsters was a deep Heideggerian, deep ecology film to me, but in that movie, Godzilla represents the kind of hyperobject of ecology that's described by the speculative realism people - he represent - not Gaia but he just represents the ecological being of the Earth, so to an extent there is a contradiction between Earth and Humanity. But since we live on Earth, Godzilla protected Humanity against Ghidorah who represented a foreign, alien intruder. You can maybe see Ghidorah as the alien invasion of modernity right that's crushing the Earth. But now we're seeing Godzilla vs. Kong, let me explain to you what King Kong meant originally. Let me show you this scene from Peter Jackson's King Kong 2005, when he escapes the city. I want you to think about this scene and think about what it means. [responding to chat comment] I'm on king kong's side if you need to know. [...] [reading chat comment] "Comrade Kong" It's very true, and I'm going to explain it to you. [...] [watching a scene from King Kong (2005)] What is this really showing you, emotionally?

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Look at all these lights, all these signs - this is the quintessential encounter between the proletarianized subject and the modern world. When I went to Chicago, I felt like this. This is the encounter between primordial Humanity, the proletariat, the worker and this wild, ruthless, alien, unnatural, sick world that we live in of industrial modernity. That's what King Kong is about, King Kong is about the Christ-like martyrdom and sacrifice of the most primordial representative of Humanity being just shot down by planes, everyone's attacking him, he's confused, he doesn't know what's going on, the whole world is coming after him. And when they try to kill Kong, it's representative of the fact that capitalism or modernity is trying to kill Humanity itself. [other collective member, Ezra] "There's also slavery imagery" Yes, the colonialism interpretation is the same, it's exactly up the same alley. There's two main basic interpretations of King Kong: the colonialism one, which is basically the the encounter between colonized people in modernity and the fact that colonial Humanity represents Humanity at its most fundamental, and there's the proletarian interpretation, which is that King Kong represents the proletariat and how the proletariat is living in an alien world, it's treated as a beast of burden. And I think they're actually one and the same interpretation, so I unite both of those interpretations. So that's what King Kong represents, King Kong is Comrade Kong, King Kong represents the proletariat in a way, represents Humanity, our unalienated humanity is what King Kong is. [watching scene from King Kong (2005)] See, King Kong who wants this woman - and she's a white woman, so that's also symbolic imagery because the white woman means a certain thing within the imagination of America - but it represents that this unalienated humanity is looking for a kernel of goodness in this bad, wicked world. And you know, we live in a white supremacist society, so it's going to be represented as a blonde-haired white woman.

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So that's what Godzilla versus Kong means: I think Kong represents Humanity and Godzilla represents the Earth, ecology. That's what the real battle is about. So who do I side with? 100% Kong, I also like Godzilla, but I gotta side with Kong, you know you guys take your picks. Godzilla represents the alien but also the consistent whole, ecological Earth and its deep, terrestrial - you know he's underground in the vents, you know swimming around in the vents. Also the conflict between Humanity and like lizards, I'm not a reptilian conspiracy guy, but that is a thing in history - lizards kind of represent our cold, mechanical, animal self. They represent nature. And King Kong represents warmth and humanity. So that's the difference that's going on - it's geology, plate tectonics, versus the anthropocene, not to be a pseud. [reading chat comment] "What was King Ghidorah?" I think King Ghidorah represents not only the alien modernity that's destroying the earth, like in the parable, but you gotta think of King Ghidorah as Reddit Wall Street Bets - just this vortex coming from an alien place that's hijacking the ecological processes and feedback loops and sucking it [reading chat comment] "lizard-brained Godzilla." Exactly, but the lizard brain is also why Godzilla defends the Earth, because we think of ecology in a lizard-like way: it's just this blind force that doesn't care about Humanity and that we humans have to take care of the Earth because it's like a lizard. [...] [reading chat comment] "What's Mothra and Mechagodzilla?"

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I just learned this, Mothra was first discovered in China so I think Mothra represents the eloquence and beauty of the object of the Chinese aesthetic. Ezra, correct me if I'm sounding like an idiot. [Ezra] "it makes sense to me right, I don't know much about Mothra but I can see that interpretation." Mechagodzilla - that's going to be an interesting one. I've never seen what Mechagodzilla looks like. [reading chat comment] "5,000 years of civilization." Yeah, I think that's what Mothra represents, eloquence and beauty. 07/30/2022 The gorillas and suns started out in one of our earliest streams and we were analyzing King Kong in the spirit of the upcoming movie Godzilla vs. Kong. And we were talking about the symbolism and meaning behind King Kong and we were saying that even in the original King Kong - the Peter Jackson King Kong especially - it's very clear that King Kong is an allegory for the proletariat and King Kong is also an allegory for the colonized subject - it's not racist, maybe the creators of King Kong were racist because they're making that comparison with an animal. But because gorillas are so similar to us - but at the same time appear more archaic and more base and more fundamental - it's like a symbol for a more fundamental aspect of our humanity. The movie King Kong is about this situation of of basic alienation in which we are brought and we are forced to reflect through the lens and through the perspective of our fundamental humanity: what kind of fucking world have we built and created? When King Kong is roaming through New York City and he's looking up at these billboards, you're seeing the point of view of almost a kind of pure humanity,

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which is able to judge the culmination of human progress and say "is this a human world, is this a meaningful world?" I mean what is this, it's a world of sensory overload, it's a world of complete meaninglessness, it's a search for meaning, where's the meaning? There is none. And you're just getting bombarded with this sensory disjointedness, an aggression upon your senses, and this is the basic alienation that the working man finds himself in in the modern world, as well as the colonized subject depends on how you want to look at it. So King Kong represents primordial humanity. That's not the rational side of our humanity, it's not the explicit side of our humanity, but it's the part of our humanity which is 'longing for belonging' - you want to look at in the Heideggerian perspective, human beings can be represented as a Dasein for whom there is a question of being. A question of being is also a question of dwelling - we want something to dwell in which reflects meaning back upon us, we want a habitat that is human, we want a world that is human. So King Kong represents a state of humanity that aggressively insists upon its own belonging in the world. It's humanity wrestling for its own habitat. But the reason it's King Kong is because King Kong can't just go in his habitat in the jungle, that's that's the myth, King Kong is roaming this city that he's radically alienated from but the movie is basically trying to say that city is the culmination of King Kong's evolution into humanity - apes, and then humans, and it culminates into the city. So you can't just return to the jungle, it's not a primitivist symbol - it's basically representing humanity awakening to the question of its belonging, to the question of its being. It's the awakening of primordial humanity, that's what it means.

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BATMAN, BANE, & RA’S AL GHUL 03/06/2022 [tweet] The new Batman movie reminded me how, sometimes it appears like the ruling class is purging its 'corruption.' With Panama Papers, talk of cracking down on London shell companies, and finally Epstein being used as a sacrificial lamb... What if all the corruption is now open? 03/07/2022 [tweet] The Batman movie - it was good. It was a movie that unraveled into its ending, which is its real object. The journey there was a type of recap of the 2010s (and the Dark Knight movie). This, like death stranding, is about the aesthetic of great reset, large eco theme. It is historico-aesthetically advanced (post-romantic), which should be praised. Ideologically speaking, I'm not sure. Maybe it's a film about Build Back Better, or the aftermath of spoiled stimulus package spending. It has a potentially sinister meaning. Be suspicious. I don't agree that this film is ideologically on our side. The ending, which is about renewing trust in the institutions, easily can be interpreted as 'baptism of democracy.' The politician at the end is a type of Progressive Democrat funded by Soros to implement Green New Deal. 08/17/2022 I kind of want to write write fictional books, I don't have time to but I've always wanted to do that and I want to write a fictional book or write a script for a movie where the hero is going to be like some soy detective or some fucking Interpol agent or some CIA agent like a James Bond movie but the villain is actually where I'm going to project my the views that I flirt with, and the villain is going to be this twisted interpretation of

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Ilyenkov according to which he has seen all of the fucking horrors and evil of the deep state and the ruling class and MK Ultra, the fucking child trafficking - he's seen all of it and he's realized there's no justice, there's no redemption, and, even worse, there's no meaning. There's not even any way to distinguish good or bad in this world, the world is somehow fundamentally meaningless and Humanity as a whole has presented itself as a Gordian knot where the more you try, the more you try to fix it, the worse it gets everything you do fundamentally makes it worse within the realm of the human world. And he realized the most horrific insight of all, the most horrific, nihilistic insight of all, which is that it is fundamentally meaningless - this whole thing is fundamentally meaningless, all the suffering, all the pain, all the horror, all this evil. It's all meaningless, there's no point in the fabric of this human world where you can find meaning. Now is this that I believe? I don't think so, but I flirt with it, I want to flirt with that idea. So that's kind of it right there's nothing in this human world where there's any meaning at all, so he arrives at the conclusion that the only way to restore meaning to reality is to destroy the world. The only way that you can actually have a point where we are all going to be united by a singular meaning - we're all going to be united by one underlying reason and there's going to be one moment that gives all of us meaning that will actually restore and redeem meaning to the world - will be the involuntarily collective self-sacrifice of humankind through the unleashing of a nuclear armageddon. [...] The villain is pursuing the goal of the most cliche, simplistic thing you can think of pretty much destroying the world. But the villain is not motivated by revenge, they're not motivated by anger, they're not motivated by anything like that - they genuinely and enthusiastically believe that this will be better for everyone. They believe that this is the only way to restore meaning to the world, this is the only way we can make sense of all of the evil. And I really feel like I could do a lot with that.

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[reading chat comment] "Is this actually what you believe?" No it's not, but I believe in the truth in the metaphor. I'm a 'postmodernist' so when I say destroy the world, I'm not actually talking about literally destroying the world. I am talking about destroying a specific horizon of meaning that we're instantiated in. I'm talking about the destruction of the human world in the sense of the world of meaning. So I'm talking about something at the level of the unconscious signifiers, something at the level of our ideology, our collective consciousness or ideology. I'm not actually talking about the literal destruction of the world - to me that's a literary device that I want to use to open people to the idea of the destruction of the world in the Lacanian or Heideggerian sense. [...] I want the audience to try to prove the villain wrong. I don't really think you can prove the villain wrong. I don't think the audience will be smart enough to - I think I can have an argument against the villain, but it's really difficult, you have to really think about it to understand why he's wrong. But at face value I think the villain is right, the world needs to be destroyed. There's no way to argue against that, I don't see how anyone could successfully argue against that view. [...] [reading chat comment] "It's anti-human." What if reality is anti-human? If reality is anti-human then unleashing an actual apocalypse would be the most human thing you could do, it would be the most human act. This is kind of what Ilyenkov is trying to say: the thinking consciousness culminates

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in the act of cosmic, self-sacrificial heroism and that is the only way we prove our humanity to the cosmos. By destroying ourselves to offset the process of entropy. [...] [responding to chat comment] This is the problem with life in modernity. Within us we harbor some kind of meaning: we have something that we consider meaningful that we want to express to the world, we want to tell the world something. But the tragedy of course is that the world interprets what we give to it in a completely different way from what we conceived it as. There's something about us, namely our humanity, that we want to be recognized for. We want to be recognized as human. But we are recognized in a way that is fundamentally different from what we actually are and in a sense, in a literary sense, I think that is worthy of a complete mass extinction event. That can be the only thing that establishes one indisputable - here's why I think it's beautiful: because the translation error isn't just bypassed, it's turned against itself. It doesn't matter what the intention was behind the nuclear disaster, it affects all of us in the exact same way so the input-output problem is gone: input becomes output, output becomes input and we are all victims to it. And there's something fundamentally beautiful about that, in my view. It doesn't matter what the motivations are, the fact that it happened and it's unavoidable is enough for me. And then how do you interpret that on a literary level? It's something like Mao's Cultural Revolution: it's this one event that happens, it doesn't matter what the intention behind it was, it's affecting all of Chinese society in the same way. That's how all these events are in reality, but I think there's merit in representing that as a nuclear destruction of the world or some kind of destruction of the world to help people understand it. [...]

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Actually, some of the movies that are up the alley here are the Nolan Batman movies, So the first one with Ra's al Ghul - what he wanted to do to Gotham - and then the third one the way in which Bane's revolution in Gotham had this undercurrent where the whole time they just literally wanted to destroy Gotham, that was so fucking based. That is what made Bane fucking based, that's what makes Bane a fucking hero. And maybe I don't need to do this, maybe Ra's al Ghul is already the character I'm looking for. Because Ra's al Ghul believes Gotham is so fundamentally corrupt that it's a Gordian knot - the more that you try to untangle it, the worse it fucking gets you, gotta fucking cut the Gordian knot, you gotta destroy the corruption outright. And I think there is something fundamentally true about that.I agree with Ra's al Ghul 100% about Gotham and I think Batman is just coping. Batman is just running around in his fucking underwear beating up homeless people making the knot worse, actually. So yeah, maybe I'm just plagiarizing DC Comics. [reading chat comment] "It's not the same thing as destroying the whole whole world." I think it is because Gotham is the world of that fictional universe, it is the world as far as that setting is concerned. That is what the world is. Gotham is a stand-in for the human condition. And also Ra's al Ghul does want to do that to the whole world, he wants to do a year zero to the whole fucking world, so that is part of the character. Year zero on a planetary level is actually what it's about for Ra's al Ghul.

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Transformers 01/28/2021 [reading chat comment] "Analysis on transformers?" Here's my analysis of transformers, I actually do have one. The transformers represent the new relationship between the substantial forces of production and financial virtual abstraction. The transformers represent the modular nature and malleable nature of the Marxist ‘classical forces of production’ to this new kind of socialism - that's why they're transforming and the metal is floating and shit, that's what that whole aesthetic is about. It's just like what Reddit is doing - you want to know about transformers, look at what Reddit's doing. Reddit is creating a transformer because they're directing capital into Gamestop and they're making the machine malleable. [reading chat comment] "In dumbass terms please." Okay, when you think of a towering hunk of metal you think of something that is solid and stable, but transformers are hunks of metal that are malleable and virtual. So the whole point is the new relationship between the forces of production, or if not the forces of production, the substantial means of production and the new virtual type of digital capital signaling. The virtual and the actual.

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The Godfather & Scarface 08/19/2022 I want to talk to you about the movie The Godfather because I've been watching it, I've been watching Part II, I'm almost done with it, I've got like 40 minutes left to Part II then I'm going to Part III. And the first thing that strikes me about The Godfather is that it's not a crime movie. The Godfather is not a crime movie at all, there's nothing criminal about it A lot of people think The Godfather is a crime movie, it's not; The Godfather is a family movie, it's a family movie, "Haz what about all the killings and violence" - who cares, it's part of life, there's nothing 'criminal' about that. The Godfather is like Big Momma's House, it's like a family movie - it's not a crime thriller at all. It doesn't register to me that it's a crime movie unless we're talking about drugs, if there are no drugs involved then in my book it is not a crime thriller at all. And I want to give my thoughts on this movie. I find The Godfather an extremely tame film, it's a very Catholic film, obviously, and it's about American Catholicism. And it's about how Protestant America was never enough, the overt and explicit allegiance to norms and laws of society is not enough - you also need implicit ties of family. But what I found really bizarre, watching The Godfather, was that the don spoke in a very autistic, explicit way, he outlined how it worked. When the first guy came to him to ask for a favor he said, "why have you insulted me? if you had come here as a friend" - he's laying out the rules of engagement, and in the mafia that they depict everything's explicit. The rules are only hidden insofar as they're not overt in the law, but beyond that there's still these really weird, explicit rules you have to follow in the mafia: "I am the don I'm gonna appoint you the consigliere, I'm gonna appoint you" - that's not how it works, that's not how family ties are, so I find that very Catholic because Catholicism is both secretive, as the secretive church and it's also explicit. From my perspective, the

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way actual tribal, clannish relations work - it's all implicit. Nobody just sits here and says "I'm now the leader" - that happens very implicitly, that doesn't happen through any kind of rules. There's something I really don't like about the film, and the reason I don't like it is because I just see all these fucking brooklyn Chapo listeners and all these New York City art people who are soy facing over their avant-garde Catholicism they're like "Francis Ford Coppola" - shut the fuck up, they think it's so subversive like "oh my god they're undermining Protestant WASP society" - I know DSA people love this kind of shit and they love The fucking Godfather and they love all that fucking bullshit, and I find it so fucking cringey and I hate it. I really hate how they think it's so badass they're like "oh I'm in the know about the action" - it's irony, that's what irony is, like "oh I'm not following like the overt Protestant hunky-dory rules of society, I'm also adding irony a little bit below the surface but it's still like super regulated and still like a lot of rules and shit but it's like irony are you in on it are you in on the DSA chapter are you in" - that makes it so fucking ugly and cringe, and that's my criticism. Another criticism I have of The Godfather - I'm a huge Al Pacino fan, if you didn't know. I'm a really big Al Pacino fan, I really love that movie he did, Devil's Advocate where he's a lawyer, and then obviously there's Scarface. I really don't like his performance in this movie at all, this is Al Pacino at his worst to me, I don't like his character. His character is this fucking boring fucking uptight asshole. There's something about this Al Pacino I don't like in The Godfather. Maybe it's just because he's too young and he doesn't have any facial hair and he's formal, and he's too professional and shit, but I really dislike that version of Al Pacino. In contrast, think of the Al Pacino in Scarface, that's an Al Pacino I liked - now I do not identify Tony Montana in that movie. I rewatched Scarface as well a few days ago, and I really don't like Tony Montana. I think Tony Montana lacks discipline, I think he's a fucking wrecker, and i don't like what he did to Frank - now I'm not a big fan of fucking

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Frank but Tony Montana came and this dude Frank gave him a fucking job, gave him something to do and this fucking guy, because he thinks he's such big shit, he went and fucking cucked Frank, fucked his wife, and then wrecked the whole fucking thing because he's got that emotional fucking bullshit. [...] But I love the movie and I think the character is great and it works for the movie, it's just I don't like people who see that as a role model. It's not a role model. I identify most with Sosa, actually. That's the temperament I strive to have. Do I succeed in having that temperament? No, but that's the kind of mentality - like that cunning. I like sosa the most. I don't like Tony Montana. But here's the thing, Scarface is a crime movie, The Godfather is not a crime movie. The Godfather is just a family drama movie about family life and all that kind of shit right but fucking Scarface, you've got people tied up and you got a guy with a fucking chainsaw in a fucking motel in Miami, I mean that's a fucking crime movie, okay? Scarface is a real crime movie. And it's a great movie. It's a fucking great great movie.

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BLOOD DIAMOND 11/22/2022 I'm one of those people that loves Africa. Africa was the thing that made me happy in my childhood, like safaris and African elephants. I always wanted to go on a fucking safari and just see giraffes and shit because I just love Africa. I love African environments, because that was my childhood. [...] Can I tell you guys actually what politically radicalized me? When I was in elementary school I watched Blood Diamond, and that was the first thing that put in my head "what is a revolution? What are rebels? What does that mean?" Because in that movie, these rebels are fighting the government and I'd never thought of that idea before in my life when I was in elementary school - I was like "what does it mean to revolt?" And at first I was like "oh those are bad guys" because in Blood Diamond they were really bad and evil, like dramatically evil and I'm a fucking nine-year-old or some shit, but then I started doing my research and I was like "ahh, so it's a good thing to be a revolutionary, not a bad thing." So in a way, Africa has played a big role.

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ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL 11/22/2022 you know a movie I really loved was Alita: Battle Angel, which James Cameron also worked on. Now why did I love Alita: Battle Angel so much? I think the visuals were great in that one too because he used the same technology as this [referring to Avatar]. I watched it on a 4K TV, and I loved being in a different world. The character was cringe and shit. But actually the story of Alita: Battle Angel is really cool, I loved Alita: Battle Angel's story actually, I loved the background lore. When they introduced the United Mars Republic, it was so cool. Did I ever tell you guys the pill on Alita: Battle Angel? It's about the Soviet Union. Typically you'd think of this lost and ancient golden past, it's like Lord of the Rings where this is feudalism - no, they're living in a feudal society today, and then the golden past is this Republic - like more modern, more advanced, and it was lost. And there's something so beautifully tragic about that, and it reminds me of the Soviet Union. So among the rubbish pile of Soviet ruins there's an Alita. I think it's a beautiful story. The movie is so - the sound, the visuals, soundtrack, themes. It's a great movie, I cannot recommend it enough. I liked it. [responding to chat comment] I think the anime aspect was cringe, but the background was so cool. Panzer Kunst the lost martial art - that's so fucking cool, I thought that was really cool. [reading chat comment] "Like an actually competent version of Warhammer." No, no it didn't give me those vibes at all. Alita: Battle Angel, it's in a different league of its own.

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TERMINATOR & THE WANDERING EARTH 08/17/2022 We are going to talk about Deng Xiaoping. Why is Deng Xiaoping correct? I was talking about my villain who wanted to destroy the world in order to redeem meaning in it. Creating something fundamentally outside of individuals, outside of interpretation and perception, an objective externality in which we are all compelled to experience the same reality by force through an actual apocalypse. Let's go back to the problem of communication. The problem of communication is the fact that there's a disconnect between the inputs and the outputs. The input being all of our intentions, all the things we use to formulate meaning, the output being how that meaning is interpreted by society or by other people in general. The fact that it seems like we don't share any reality at the level of bilateral communication between two parties, that's the problem of communication. So what if I told you the problem of communication is the same thing as the problem of Communism? Now the Austrians talked about the calculation problem, but that's just another phrase for the problem of communication. Instead of a problem of calculation, it's actually a problem of communication. A Communist society cannot prove any common sociality on the terms of the Communist Party itself. The Communist Party cannot decide how we are social or how we have a common reality, and the intentions of the socialist planners or the socialist leaders to build socialism radically differ from the actual outcome. So the problem of communication that I gave you is this - you have an intention but when you say it, it comes out differently than what you intended. The problem of Communism is kind of what right-wingers say: when you set about to the task of building it, it turns out radically different from what you intended. It's the same shit. The difference between the intention and the result.

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[...] The problem of communication and the problem of Communism are the same exact thing. What Deng Xiaoping's Reform and Opening Up accomplishes first and foremost is an acknowledgement that the pace of socialist construction escapes the purview of socialist consciousness, the pace of socialist construction is irreducible to socialist consciousness. Socialist consciousness is actually derivative and secondary with regard to the material scale of time at which socialist construction occurs. Within the linear temporality of modern time - modern temporality - there is an actual connection between consciousness and the scale at which time proceeds. This takes the form of the Big Ben clock in London, the mechanical clock. The extent of our perception of time is synonymous with the concept we have of time that exists in our consciousness. We measure time according to the solar revolutions and we divide these down to seconds or milliseconds or however we want to, almost like a digital clock, and it's just moving, and it's moving at the exact same pace as our consciousness of it. What if I raised the idea that time moves at a scale that is not continuous with our consciousness of it? Then we are returning to premodern time or postmodern time, depending on how you want to look at it. But this is a form of temporality that is very much implicit in modern socialist China. In modern socialist China the pace of socialist construction is happening at a level that is not reducible to the socialist consciousness that exists. Now what does that mean? It means that within the process of the development of socialism all sorts of immoral, unjust, unacceptable things are happening at the level of our individual conscious experience. For example if you want to think about this outside of the context of China, think about it in terms of multi-polarity. [...]

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You want to think about this from the perspective of multi-polarity, think about it in terms of the arms deal between China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia - why are we supporting that? "Look at all the injustice Saudi Arabia inflicts" - we know, I'm a Shia I know that Saudi Arabia executes Shia, we all know about that. Yet I'm praising this. "Oh my god how could China have diplomatic relations with the U.S. in the Cold War after all the things the U.S. did" - China's complicit according to the leftists. We're all complicit though. And there's an event horizon of extinction beyond which the modern subject does not possess any faculty of perception that establishes a fundamental difference between our experience and intervention into reality at the level of consciousness and the way in which reality is actually developing at the material and social level. [...] If you can understand this difference you can understand anything about Infrared. There's a difference between the development of reality and our experience of reality and our intervention into reality at the level of our rational consciousness. Our intervention into reality is based on will, our expression of will is an extension of our rational consciousness. You make choices based on your consciousness. Our experience of reality is filtered. The way we judge reality is based on our rational consciousness. All these things are individual: they happen at the level of a sovereign, individual subject. They happen at a conscious level and we experience them in an immediate way. For example take the way in which most Communists interpret the meaning of 'praxis': "I want to change the world and build socialism, so I'm gonna go run out on the street and 'do things' because I need to experience the construction of socialism in a way that is immediate and co-temporal with my experience and intervention in reality as an individual person." But as I have just demonstrated, or at least alluded to, there's a problem of communication and a problem of Communism in which our intentions at the level of our faculties of reason, which we give expression to consciously, radically differ from their outcomes and their actual consciousness when they are given

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expression in reality. Theory and praxis differ. When you implement theory in reality it turns out to be something radically different than your theory - that's what Marx made very clear as a materialist. So what does this mean at the level of socialist construction? When we build socialism are we doing so according to a conscious rational plan, or even an idea in which we build a society according to what we think is moral, just, ideologically correct, etc? Or does the temporal scale of socialist construction and the development of socialist construction happen in a way that is radically discontinuous with our conscious rational experiences? According to Deng Xiaoping, it's the latter which is the case. Why is it still socialism then? Why isn't the outcome something radically different from the original intention of socialist construction? Why even still call it socialism if the outcome is so radically different? Because even though the development of socialism in China gave rise to an inadvertent consequence, which was not created by Deng and his policies, by the way, the consequence being this re-emergence of some kind of socialist commodity form in the case of Stalin's building of socialism or in the case of China the way in which the people's commune system gave rise to a new form of exchange value and some new form of the value form. And when Left Communists said that, in some sense they were right - there was a new re-emergence of the value form both in the Soviet Union and China, which seems like an inadvertent consequence of socialist construction. But it's not inadvertent. From a retrospective perspective. But if you perceive socialist construction to be reducible to its development at an individual conscious level, then yes it is. But if you recognize the pace of socialist construction to be beyond individual consciousness and rational consciousness you start to treat the socialist mode of production as a material thing, an objective material thing. If it's an objective material thing it's like a hyperobject.

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If you're on the ground and you see Godzilla or you see some kaiju, it's too fucking big to see the whole thing. When Godzilla is walking, he's too fucking big to see all of him walking at once, you're just gonna see his big-ass thighs, or his leg because he's too big for your individual experience to perceive him. So in the theoretical tradition, the school that was called Object-Oriented Ontology, that's what you would call a hyperobject: it's an object of our perception whose consistency goes beyond the bounds of our phenomenal experience. Another example of a hyperobject would be, for example, a geological development that occurs at a time scale of millions and millions of years - it's a real object it's happening, but we cannot perceive anything happening because the scale at which it develops is so radically heterogeneous with the scale of time we experience as human beings. I am just saying the development of socialism is exactly like that. And that is Deng Xiaoping's achievement - articulating this fact within Marxist-Leninism. Deng Xiaoping Thought, in part, amounts to the contribution of this acknowledgement within Marxist-Leninist theory. Socialist construction is happening at a scale imperceptible to the modern consciousness that experiences an immediate, linear development of time. Why am I bringing up linear? I'm bringing up linear time specifically because the alternative to linear time, which is hard for people to think about, concerns the fact that sometimes in material reality a thing is already there, or already exists, or is already materially real first, and then its development is something we experience at the level of individual consciousness. For example, an example of non-linear temporality would be the Terminator movies where the future already has happened and they send someone back in time to develop that future to ensure that it happens, or maybe even ensure that it happens in a different way. Also the phenomena of retroaction in quantum mechanics and retrocausality, which I've talked about before, in quantum mechanics - these are all examples of temporality that are non-linear. And non-linear temporality is relevant here specifically because linear time within modernity also corresponds to the immediate experience of time corresponding to time itself. Time only flows in one direction and that direction just so happens to be one that is immediate, that is co-temporal with the

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flow of our experience. So the same flow of experience we have, we measure that in terms of time. But the flow of our experience is not the only reality. Our experience of reality and reality are not exactly the same. It's part of reality, sure, but there's a discontinuity between them, obviously there is. If there wasn't we would not be able to think of the sun, for example, because of course the sun is imperceptible as an object if we reduce it to the frame of reference which is our experience. We couldn't think about things like the speed of light which obviously could not be experienced at that level, etc. We wouldn't be able to engage in modern physics with all of its complicated mathematical formulae, which clearly refer to something non-empirical - when I say something non-empirical I just mean impossible to observe, not only is it not a result of observation: you could not observe this, it's just beyond the bounds of human experience. It's somewhere in the real that can only be translated into the abstract terms of mathematics. So this is what I mean by outside of linear temporality. But modernity involves one tyranny of time - that is linear time. Linear, immediate, individual time. The time on your stopwatch. If there is a scale of temporal development occurring at a level heterogeneous with the scale of temporal development that we can experience as human beings, we're in for a wild, wild ride, aren't we? That means Lovecraft is correct: there are Old Ones exerting their influence on the world of humanity from without. So what does it mean to acknowledge this at the level of socialist consciousness, and again why still call it socialism? Deng Xiaoping is not a revisionist but is merely elaborating Marxism-Leninism to its conclusion. Socialism conceived as a mode of production that reflects the reality of the socius, that the socius exerts its significance as the driving force of the mode of production - according to scientific socialism that is something materially real. That is a reality that is not created voluntarily, but which is itself a consequence of the development of the capitalist mode of production - meaning it's a materially real reality it just has to be acknowledged. According to a consciousness based not in morality, not in a utopian vision for an ideal society but in a consciousness

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of necessity. Socialism is a necessity for no other reason than the fact that it is a material reality. Many people think socialism is necessary to save the planet, or it's necessary to prevent some harm, or it's necessary to alleviate poverty, or it's necessary for some other reason. That means it's not necessary at all. That means you are choosing socialism to fulfill a different necessity: a moral one or a rational one. But that's not scientific socialism according to Marx and Engels. Scientific socialism means you perceive the development of socialism in reality itself, and you only recognize its form in consciousness. What was Mao doing, and what were the Soviets doing when they implemented socialism, state socialism? What were they actually doing? Were they building something from scratch? No, they were not. So you see, socialism had already happened when the Soviets and the Chinese were building it. How did it already happen? The specific understanding of the economy as something that possesses significance at the political level, at the discursive level, that is something that had been made real in material reality itself. The space with which this continent of conscious intervention could be exhumed and explored already happened before. It became possible to build a socialist economy with state socialist institutions only because the economy itself became real at a different level. Because the economy itself, the real material economy, was pushed to a scale outside the device of modern consciousness. That means all of the aspects of state socialism that existed in the Soviet Union, and in China, and other Communist states - that was not the actual economy proper, that was an aspect of modern state political consciousness or political intervention that had already been opened up according to a more fundamental change at the economic level. State socialism was just an epicycle of some other economic material development that could not proceed according to a plan. The economy is always something you cannot plan for. Planning as Engels described it doesn't refer to a determination of the economy as a result or extension of political will, but more like a steering, almost a cybernetic conception. A science of direction, something that is already moving, already going in a

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certain direction and like the great helmsman you're just steering it. That is more what planning is referring to, rather than creating from scratch. So state socialist planning in the Soviet Union and in China did not actually encompass the whole of the economy. The state planning was a moment within the actual, material economy that had developed, the economy is always material that's why it's called an Economy. If it wasn't material, that is discontinuous and non-transparent, the device of modern rational consciousness - it would not be an Economy. There would be no divided oikos to begin with, there'd be no need for there to be an economy because it wouldn't be discontinuous from politics to begin with. Economy proper refers to a science and law of humanity's interaction with nature and distribution of the products of that interaction, production and distribution. A science of this that proceeds according to its own laws and its own development. It's not an extension of politics, it's actually a reality more primary than politics is. What was the ultimate significance of socialist construction within the Soviet Union and China? Was it bureaucratic central state planning? No. Bureaucratic central state planning was already a material reality of imperialism, it was certainly a reality of the post-war Bretton Woods American globalist economy. That is not what distinguished Soviet socialism, that is certainly not what distinguished Chinese socialism. What distinguished Soviet socialism was the Kolkhoz, it was a sphere of economy outside of state socialism. Same with China: the people's commune was also outside of central state socialism, and by central state socialisms I mean not proceeding according to a central plan, it was an economic unit that formed not according to a central plan, but according to the immediate necessities of economic life, therein allowing the breathing room and the space for economic laws to assert themselves independently of the voluntary control of the central state. And somehow, that was still socialist. Somehow when Stalin and Mao acted as libertarians the economy was still socialist. When they allowed the state to be hands off in some sphere, the Kolkhoz or the people's commune, it was still socialist. Why was it socialist? Because of the relation between these units

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and the central state plan. The relation being one of exchange, which at the same time produced a surplus product that was economized in a social way. The surplus product of the relation or of production in general was economized in a social way economically, not because of a political plan. This speaks to the reality of a socialist mode of production that is not reducible to political planning. Even if it involves political planning, it's not reducible to it. Deng Xiaoping's greatness lied in his ability to unleash that reality of the socialist economy. So the problem of Communism or the problem of communication is resolved only in the acknowledgment of a third element or a third point of reference between the relationship of the central socialist state and the socialist economic units of society. That third element being a material reality of the socius. Because in the relationship between the central socialist state and the socialist civil society, there's an accidental byproduct - there's an inadvertent consequence of the central plan. That inadvertent consequence cannot transparently reflect the initial aims or inputs of socialist production. There's an inadvertent result. The only way in which this inadvertent result can acquire rationality, and by rationality I just mean consistency as part of some coherent rational reality, not just some chaotic meaningless one, is insofar as it is recognized that the object of production, the actual site of the socialist economy, is beyond the threshold - beyond the scope of direct planning, yet still socialistic. This, my friends, is the meaning of the socialist accelerationism. Accelerate the forces of production like a ruthless libertarian capitalist, but actually that mode of production is already socialist, so by accelerating it you're just accelerating the development of socialism. That's what it means for socialism to be material and that's what it means for socialist construction to occur at a level beyond modern time. The dilemma of Ilyenkov, of the fact that we cannot have a socius outside of what appears to be the annihilation of the world - because here we are individuals, you're an individual, I'm an individual, where are we in common? Ilyenkov says we are in common

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in this collective act of self-sacrifice, at least at the cosmic level - that's the only place we are in common. Deng Xiaoping Thought exists beyond the threshold of Ilyenkov's self-sacrificial apocalypse. The reason it exists beyond the threshold of this apocalypse is because it amounts to a recognition that even though our socius is not here, in the direct relation between an individual's will and other individuals, or even at the level of the voluntary association of individuals, there is a materially real socius - that in an asiatic way, a fatal asiatic way if you want to be orientalist, is acknowledged in the terms of historical necessity, or in the terms of material socialist development or in the terms of unleashing the productive forces. Deng Xiaoping's unleashing of the productive forces amounts to the aftermath of Ilyenkov's apocalypse - it is post-apocalyptic. Where Ilyenkov cannot perceive any reality outside of this apocalypse, in which we are actually human beings in common, that reality is already taken for granted in Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. Hence films, for example, like The Wandering Earth that depict this directly. The Wandering Earth is a post-apocalyptic world, yet it's also a world that, if you watch the movie. eerily resembles an aestheticization of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. And of course The wandering Earth, if you don't know the details of that film, is not just wandering aimlessly in space - it is, in a mathematically precise way, calculated to reach a new solar system in how many millions of light years or something. It's not just wandering in empty space. Just because you can't see the new Sun doesn't mean you're not going in its direction, just because you cannot see socialism in the immediate sense in China doesn't mean China is not being characterized by the development of a socialist mode of production. China dwells in not only a different world, as a space, but also a different time than the West and America. China dwells in a place after the American apocalypse. China is the future. China is arriving to us from a future, but also a future that has already crossed the threshold of the end of America and the end of the modern West. China has taken

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for granted the destruction of the modern West. It has fulfilled the destruction of the modern West by virtue of its being, it has already taken that for granted, and it has developed according to a temporality of retrocausality. Now we have the Taliban to just fulfill this process. Taliban, or global Islam more generally, acting as China's Terminator. If China is Skynet, the Taliban is the Terminator.

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AVATAR 07/10/2022 [segment ordered & offered for context] [donation] "Does Marxism's materialism come into conflict or contradiction with your immaterial religious beliefs, in your opinion?" No, short answer is no. I think Marx was attacking the idealism of modernity and modern universalism and modern abstraction. I think there needs to be a Marxism that reintroduces the possibility of a material idea. Is there a material idea? Well maybe it's not an idea, maybe it's like Lacan's symptom. But I don't think religions are about ideas, I think they're about symptoms. I think they're about material forms, material patterns. And they try to make sense of these material patterns through wisdom. So I'm a religious materialist. I'm an angelic materialist, this is what I call. It's called angelic materialism. I'm a kind of Zoroastrian, when a lot of Salafis accuse Shia of being secret Zoroastrians it's kind of true in my case. I'm a materialist of fire, fire is my materialism. For me, the material is so spiritual that it burns hot, it's so material that it's spiritual, it's so spiritual that it's material. it's angelic materialism. I think there should be a materialist rediscovery of transcendence. Transcendence has been monopolized by modernity, but we should rethink transcendence, up to rethinking Dharma. To me, Dharma has been completely co-opted by Western modernity. But transcendence, spirituality, like air - that does not necessarily fall under the dictatorship of the exclusive principle of logos. There's something else there. [...] I think a big mistake is we think of material as 'stuff,' get this association in your head out of your head - material is not 'stuff.' Because in Europe we say 'material,' there's a

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'material,' we use the 'material' to build. So we already when we say think of material we think of 'stuff' in Heidegger's word that's 'ready at hand' to be disposed of, to be used, that exists before us. Get this Association of the word 'material' with 'stuff' out of your head. Material does not refer to 'stuff' it refers to essence. Let me tell you my thesis that's through Lacan. I'm going to drop this big pill on you. My thesis - and Dugin, strangely, said the same thing after I independently arrived at this - the feature of transcendence, let's draw from Ilyenkov and call it spirit. The moment upon which the spirit distinguishes itself from the 'stuff' - form from the content, say, or the spirit from the substance - the moment of distinction between the spirit and the substance has been monopolized by the history of Europe as the moment of the emergence of the idea, or the logos from chaos. So spirit is immediately claimed as the logos. I think this is too quick. This is also Heidegger. This is too quick, something got lost. When the spirit arised from the substance, and this was immediately translated into the form of the logos, something got forgotten, something got lost. When we immediately identified the spirit with ideas, something got lost. There is a more fundamental and material reality of the spirit that is not capable of being reduced to any form of the logos including the idea of Plato. So what is that? I think Lacan points the way. Because Lacan talks about the signifier. Lacan's logic, or logos, of the signifier is the key to understanding a type of form that is not an idea, that is not a form of logos. The signifier, signifier of the unconscious, out of which the imaginary form is derivative - that's the key to me. Lacan's signifier. Also Lacan's symptom. And by the way symptom and signifier - if you read late Lacan - are the same, just different words for the same thing, they have the same logic. That's my secret, and I share it with you tonight.

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05//19/2022 Music is about feeling. When you're starting to consciously explain music and why you like it - it's so fucking ugly. "I'm enjoying this but I also know all of the reasons why I like this music" - it's so fucking overly reflexive and super self-conscious. You can't just actually appreciate the music, you have to make it seem like "I know exactly why I like this music, it's because of this specific text - that's fucking cringe. Music is where you're supposed to let go and not be dominated by your consciousness. It's supposed to deliver you to a higher form of contemplation than just conscious thought. That's the whole point of music: music is supposed to deliver you to you to a higher form of feeling and contemplation than can be contained within logic or rational thought, so when you're conscious about your music taste in the sense of trying to consciously justify it in any kind of way it's so fucking cringe. That's why I don't like people who are like "oh name every album" - shut the fuck up bitch, when you make music about knowledge, why even listen to music at that point? Why don't you just fucking read a book. "Oh I'm an expert in this genre of grunge music. Do you listen to Bladee? You listen to Bladee Haz?" - shut up dude. Making music about knowledge is fucking cringe. "I'm an expert in Beauty. I'm a beauty expert." No you're fucking not. You notice every male 'beauty expert' is a little bit, um, 'fruits' not 'vegetables,' you know what I mean by that? Whenever a man becomes obsessed with thinking they're an expert on beauty in a technical sense, they're kind of more for the 'fruits' instead of the 'vegetables,' if you know what I mean. They prefer a different type of food. Thousand percent. Because when you treat beauty as an object of knowledge, you're assuming that the intellect is more true than beauty, which I fundamentally disagree with. Beauty is not an object of knowledge. Maybe it's an object of a TYPE of knowledge, which is the intuition, but it is not an object of overt, explicit, rational or logical thought. That is a

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disgrace and that is the ugliest fucking thing I can even imagine. "I'm an expert in what's beautiful" - no you're fucking not, do you even know what the sublime is, you dumb fuck? The sublime is literally the upper limit to reason. That is why it's called the sublime. Sublimity is literally the limit of reason, when reason encounters its limit that is the sublime. [reading chat comment] "Music taste is subjective" No, that's another stupid cope. Just because something cannot be reducible to logic or reason doesn't mean it's arbitrary or 'subjective.' Something can follow a definite law or pattern or deeper meaning and purpose without being reduced to some kind of thought. I'll give you an example of this. I watched the trailer for the new Avatar movie, and I really like it. And Avatar is disgusting on an ideological level, but James Cameron is such a brilliant artist, he's such a brilliant visionary. His appreciation of water is so beautiful, his depictions of water are so beautiful. For the first time in a long time I really feel like "wow this is a 2020s movie," it's almost like we're going back to the future. Remember when Avatar came out felt, it so futuristic and shit and like we were heading toward this new era? I finally have returned. [responding to chat comment] No, James Cameron's way better than Dennis Villeneuve. He's way better. Avatar really seems like a movie for the era. Aesthetically it's so beautiful, it's this combination of the modern and the archaic and natural. But it doesn't put them at odds; it describes their relationship. It keeps flashing these contrasts between technology and nature, but the way it depicts nature seems not as in contradiction to the technology, but as the vital source and wellspring of the technology. So it's a form of postmodernity, in a good sense. Like the object of modernity is living essence, there is a living rather

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than dead essence of modernity. Which I think is beautiful, I find it so fucking beautiful. Even when we go into the deepest recesses of the real, and of nature, that wilderness we find spirit. And that's the angelic materialism I was describing to you through the lens of Hezbollah. It's angelic materialism, when you go deep into the materiality of the wild and the abyss and the natural you still find a reawakening of the spirit. And I think that's James Cameron's significance of water. Water is different from space in the following way. Space is negativity, it's the void. And then space is pure space, so if you have a spaceship, that is defined purely against the nothingness. Here we have a spaceship: we have meaning and purpose and community, and then out there it's just nothing, nothing just blackness. Water is different, water is not nothing it's just indeterminate, it's a kind of beautiful form of chaos. Water is like space - undefined, there's nothing clear already defined there - but that's where all the possibility comes from. Life comes from water, for example. And then when you go in and explore the water you find things. When you explore empty, dark space you find nothing but planets and celestial bodies. But when you explore water, you find a wealth of being. So water is different from space in that way. And my materialism is relating to the old 'Marxoid,' 'dogmatic' materialism in exactly the same way. Old 'Marxian' materialism - the revisionist, dogmatic, mechanical kind that prevails now - that's based in this notion of materiality as dead space. I have a materiality of water. Angelic materialism. [...] Avatar - it's very Chinese, that view of the relation between technology and nature. Very much what prevails in China. it reminds me of Yuk Hui's The Question Concerning Technology in China, which is a Chinese Heideggerian talking about technology in China. I recommend that book.

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HELLRAISER 03/19/2021 By the way guys, I'm a big fan of the Hellraiser films and have been for, like, a long time. 11/03/2022 And why am I giving MK Ultra and the fucking CIA all this shit about my psych? Because I genuinely am so arrogant that I think "dude I'm on a higher level than these fucking MK Ultra CIA agents" Let me tell you what plane of existence this MK Ultra psy-warfare division of the US military is on. Those people are on the plane of existence of American pragmatism, and it's an extremely limited philosophy - now I like pragmatism,but there's things that pragmatism cannot address and I'm going to talk exactly about what those. I'm going to explain to you their view of psychological warfare. So what they do is they basically try to break down the brain in a really formalistic, reductionist way to cognitive sciences. So MK Ultra is really about visualizing the brain like a machine, even down to how you process the color spectrum, how do you process sounds, how do you process these kinds of things. They basically decontextualize all of our phenomenal experiences: sound, imagery - I don't know about taste or feeling, but there probably is something there. They break those down into Lego blocks, decontextualized from any meaning, and they try to manipulate those accordingly, which is like an affect of psychosis. To a person like you or me it would drive them crazy because it's like experiencing schizophrenia. When you're a normal, sane human being you have a lot of data coming your way, you're sensing a lot of things: images, sounds, whatever - and you are cohering all of those things into some kind of meaning. So your phenomenal experiences are meaningful: they're part of some kind of world and web of meaning, they're anchored by some kind of fundamental meaning - some kind of fundamental sense of meaning.

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Now what a drug like LSD will do is it'll detach all of those things from that anchoring point of meaning and that's why people say "oh it inspires so much creativity": because it allows you to experience the same phenomena in a way that is unmoored from the way that your mind coheres them into meaningful experiences. So you could look at a fucking sink and you could be like "oh my God it looks like a dinosaur" - I don't fucking know, you're looking at it in a completely new way because you're not passively incorporating it into some kind of coherent singular experience. MK Ultra and psy-warfare works in exactly the same way. They don't actually recognize fundamental meaning, and I'm going to give you the secret but I don't know if you can handle the secret - and you know if you're an atheist or whatever that's fine, but I just want to tell you there's no way around this. The fundamental meaning is what they call God. The CIA doesn't incorporate God, they're either atheists or they're satanists who want to cut off the access human beings have to God. So if you are a believer - if you're a real believer - I think that already places you in a position that makes it hard for you to be targeted by psychological warfare and MK Ultra bullshit. If you're connected to the Divine Light it's hard to hijack your fucking brain and turn you into something else. And I know it's vague -like "okay what does it mean to be connected to Divine Light, going to church?" No, you can be a religious person and get manipulated easy - probably the easiest of all, that's the tragedy. But if you're REALLY connected to God if you REALLY believe in God you REALLY know what that means, I don't think MK Ultra can do shit to you, I don't think you should be scared of any psychological warfare: you are more powerful than the fucking CIA at that point. It all depends on ignorance, that's my view. But maybe this is just a Muslim perspective I'm speaking from, because I can't imagine the Islamic ritual prayer getting hijacked by MK Ultra, I just can't fucking imagine it.

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I'm so used to these inversions of the Christian religion, like a horror movie - you know the Hellraiser movie where Pinhead is like "I am the way" and he's mocking Jesus Christ? It's so common where it just feels like all the rituals of going to church and the priests and all that kind of stuff - it's subverted in media, and I can't imagine that successfully happening in Islam. This isn't a criticism of Christianity it's an observation. I don't think it's all malice, I think oftentimes when horror movies, for example, (or even comedy) play with Christian symbolism in a disrespectful way, I feel like the symbolism still works. I feel like oftentimes it doesn't actually efface the symbols. It actually just puts them in a different perspective with the same structure. But I feel like if someone would try to efface Islamic rituals, you would not be able to preserve the aesthetic of the Islamic religion. It would just be a form of disrespectful blasphemy, and there would be no nuance or subtlety, like "oh is this a re-grounding of some kind of Gothic Catholic orientation," I mean there'd be no room for that. It's like night and day, there'd be no way to subvert the customs and rituals of Islam. Maybe subvert's a bad word, there'd be no way to hijack them to give expression to any ulterior perspective - at least as far as my limited experience is concerned. Again I have a limited experience. I could be wrong, but it's what I think. It's what I think in my very limited perspective. 11/10/2022 What I wanted to talk about is this movie I watched on Hulu a few days ago - and this is not going to seem important but it's actually really important, and it underlies the entire vision of Infrared. And the movie was called Hellraiser. If you don't know what Hellraiser is about I'm going to give you the synopsis. Hellraiser is actually a brilliant story, it started out as a few books by Clive Barker and it got adapted into a movie in the 1980s, instantly became a cult classic - you know Pinhead the guy with the pins in his fucking head and shit. Hellraiser is not just a horror movie I'm going to give you a really mediocre analysis here. It's going to sound boring, but it's

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a movie about modernity, the whole lore is. So there's a puzzle box and if you touch the puzzle box or if you play with the puzzle box it'll cut you and then Cenobites come, Cenobites are these horrific BDSM-looking monsters that are wearing leather and they're ripped apart and they just look like they're in excruciating pain but they're very calm. Their flesh is being mutilated, they're all white, there's pins in their head. And they come to you and they say "we are angels to some, demons to others, but since you've fucked with our box, you fucked with our Lament Configuration, we are gonna like torture you now," and that what they basically will do is they'll have hooks and chains strap into you, and the idea is that they will give you an experience beyond the threshold of your typical ability to sense the world. They're going to put you in such an excruciating level of pain that you reach the threshold beyond empirical reality, like empiricism, and to the level of transcendence. You will arrive at some kind of transcendent state. Now if you don't know what transcendence means I mean this in the hardcore Kantian sense of the word, because with Kant he was dealing with empiricism: this question of "do we get our knowledge of the world through our senses and nothing else?" And then Kant says "no, there is a synthetic a priori that is a part of this transcendental way in which we structure the world, there's a structure to the world that is transcendentally mediated." Transcendental meaning - and someone can correct me if I'm wrong about the specific etymology - like beyond sensibility, like sensible things, and also beyond reason, beyond just the use of reason: axiomatic, logical thinking. So beyond reason and beyond the senses lies something called "the transcendental thing" which is the real, the real reality that is beyond our specific, but if you want, "biased," way of warping it to give us a coherent experience. Kant calls it "the thing." Now is the thing something metaphysical or is it just a construct which is useful for the purposes of establishing his system of philosophy, there's a huge debate about that. But this is the idea of Kant. What Hellraiser does - I don't think there's a direct reference to Kant - is it basically explores this question of "what is the threshold beyond which we can arrive at transcendence - the transcendental object - what is the threshold beyond which we are delivered to some kind of realization of this transcendental thing beyond

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the sensible and apparentworld, beyond the phenomenally sensible world?" So Hellraiser is really interesting, it's scary at first because it's the idea of extreme pain. [reading chat comment] "you're saying pervert stuff." Actually, it's not directly sexual. You would think it was, but it isn't. There's not any direct reference to sex at all actually. It's mainly just putting you in such a state of pain that you experience this pain as some kind of liberation from your ordinary sensible experiences. If you want to think of it this way, the terrifying thing about Hellraiser is this idea that sense is relative, everyone has different pain tolerance, everyone experiences pain differently. And the idea of Hellraiser is that the Cenobites are in a constant state not even of pleasure or pain but just kind of transcendence - they're just very stoic. Look up clips on YouTube if you want, you'll see Pinhead just walking - he's like Count Dracula very stoic: "I have sights to show you" - and he's got pins in his head, and it's like "dude aren't you like hurting right now?" No, he's not. Because they've arrived at a state beyond all of that - through pain. [reading chat comment] "isn't this a bit Calvinist?" It's extremely Calvinist, that's what makes it so interesting. So the Cenobites are not necessarily punishing the person who was playing with the box: from their perspective they're freeing you from your flesh, the world of flesh, and you're being delivered to the world of the real rational or transcendental structure of the world. It's this very stark opposition between the world of life and sensibility and flesh and the world of concrete and structure. So that's what I'm saying, it's about modernity as a whole. And I think explicitly so in the lore. On the one hand there's the human animal with all of their desires - and well the thing about desire, I'm not going to get into that, that's like the key to the whole thing, but it's like shit that's gonna take too

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long to explain. Think about it this way, when you're in New York City or you're in Chicago or something, you have this extremely alienating feeling that you're in this city, this concrete jungle, and you kind of feel like you're a piece of flesh ground between the gears of this monstrous concrete, alien, and unnatural environment. And this is kind of what Hellraiser is exploring, it's this opposition between the world of rational modernity and the world of humanity. Or some inner human feeling. So it's also dealing with that alienation, that's important, keep that in mind. Anyway, these Cenobites are not monsters in a strict sense of like a Freddy Krueger or like Michael Myers just chasing people around, they're just: they have a code of of justice and ethics, And Pinhead, who is the main guy, is actually like a quintessential ethical figure, he's the ultimate ethical, kind of Kantian figure who is supremely just, supremely stoic, and not really an evil person within the the framework of the story. Now in Hellraiser 3 they make him into just a deranged asshole, but that was just a blockbuster Hollywood thing - 1 and 2 offer the real insight into what you're dealing with here, and Pinhead is this ultimate figure of a modern ethical person. With a clear sense of justice, like "okay you played with the puzzle box? now you're in debt to us." And this is where I'm gonna give my idea for what I think would be a good Hellraiser movie, and I'm not just saying this because it's interesting or whatever: there's like a philosophical or ideological undertone here that I'm going to give to you. So the Cenobites are from this realm, this dimension, which many identify as hell, they call it hell, but it might be a different dimension, who knows it doesn't matter. And this place is a labyrinth and it's supposed to represent the labyrinth of the human mind, of human reason, the labyrinth of the faculties of reason coldly abstracted from their living context. And here it's a very cold place, it's a very dark place, and it's all made of concrete and stone, it's very much reminiscent of all of the alienating aspects of a city, like a concrete jungle. And the Cenobites are from this place, and Cenobites are actually servants of a god called Leviathan. And Leviathan is represented in this - and this is what makes it so terrifying - abstractly geometrical way, it's a geometrical god, it's like

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the god of Francis Bacon or Thomas Hobbes - literally it's called Leviathan. It's like a Baconian deity, that's what I think. Anyway, Leviathan is this deity that is the ultimate antipode to life, it represents reason and cold, brutal, rational modernity. Completely opposed to the world of humanity and the world of flesh. So then you actually get to the root of the matter, which is something really interesting - a lot of people miss this. The reason the Cenobites are so mutilated and the reason they're torturing people isn't actually because it's sexually gratifying and there's some perverse thing going on. [reading chat comment] yeah it's literally an anglobox god, yeah you guys exactly. It's literally an anglo-box god, believe it or not. But the reason there's all this mutilation going on, all this pain and suffering - why are the Cenobites doing it, why are they so mutilated?It's like they're getting off on it, are they perverts? No, more terrifyingly - this is what makes Hellraiser interesting - it represents this struggle between this cold, mechanical world and the world of life. So when they're mutilating the flesh and they're torturing the flesh and they're torturing people that represents an encounter between two things that are fundamentally incompatible: between this kind of brutalistic - and the literal brutalist architecture, if you want - this brutalistic world of cold, rational modernity and just life, flesh, nature, Between order and nature, between order and chaos. And in this sense Leviathan is struggling to kill life and destroy life. But it fails to, because life is vital, life is active life - there's something about life where it's just constantly reproducing itself, it's driven. It's life right? It's chaotic, it can't be controlled. And in the attempt to annihilate life or assimilate life or subsume life into this rational order the end result is torture, the end result is mutilation, it's a struggle that's going on. It's almost like if you're trying to grab someone and they're running away from you, you're grabbing them and eventually you're going to dig your hands into them and the force of the repulsion of them running away, you're gonna dig into their flesh because they're running. right? That's what

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Hellraiser is, that's what the movie's about, The sadism, the torture, all of that stuff - it's not based on a punishment because you people did something wrong it's based on this struggle between two completely incompatible principles or elements or aspects of being, if you will. And this is what it's exploring. Now here's where it's going to get better, right, here's where it's going to get interesting. Pinhead represents a quintessential ethical figure and a figure of justice, but he also represents a creditor of sorts. And actually my analysis of Hellraiser is that it's about debt, this is my Michael Hudson reading of Hellraiser. If you have a Michael Hudson reading of Hellraiser, the Cenobites are creditors. And Banks in modern societies function in the exact same way with regard to living human beings as creditors do. When you're constantly in debt, you'll never pay off the debt in the same way that the Leviathan will never be satisfied with simply killing you or simply torturing you to the point of death: it's an eternal torment right and debt has the same exact function where it'sa Hegelian bad infinity in modern societies. So debt is a bad infinity and the torture that is being done by the Cenobites in Hellraiser is also a type of bad infinity. So this is the interesting thing you're dealing with in Hellraiser is that the ethical nature of Pinhead and the Cenobites is the same as a bank. Like "okay you're in debt to us now you have to pay your debt," but there's something sadistic about this because you can never fully pay your debt off and the more they insist upon their cold, rational Justice - "okay you owe me" - in the face of the chaos of economic life or of life in general, the more it assumes the function of a kind of sadism. A banker is just in a sense, "okay you owe me this money," it's like Shylock from Shakespeare - I'm not saying this to give an anti-semitic undertone, I'm explaining the strict formalism of a contractual relationship. The problem is that economic life is too chaotic or it's living, which means it exceeds the bounds of formalization, it exceeds the bounds of the terms of this original formal contractual agreement. It's not possible to fully pay off your debt

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necessarily because there are things that happen in the outcome of economic life that cannot be accounted for in the original terms of a formal economic agreement. So Hellraiser is about debt, it's about the way within modern Societies in particular that there's this struggle between Leviathan, which can be represented as - you know a Marxist pseudointellectual would be like "oh that's capital," it's not necessarily capital, but it is the god of capital, that's what Leviathan is. It's the god of Francis Bacon. So it's this god of capital which seeks to not only suck the living essence of humanity like a vampire, the way Marx described. but also annihilates humanity. And that's why even in our societies we're entering this post-human, extremely anti-human future. At the initial level you're dealing with a fundamental incompatibility between living Humanity, as Marx would put it, and the supremely alienated essence or the supremely alienated formalistic state of humanity. So this is what makes Hellraiser so interesting: it's about debt, it's about the way in which life for some reason is indebted, primordially indebted, to this Leviathan and can never really fully pay back its debt, it's always going to be tortured. This is how I read it at least. What's interesting though is that with that bad infinity that the Cenobites represent there's also this cheap dialectic going on - at the same time that Leviathan is at war with life, the Cenobites rely upon pleasure and rely upon life - Elysium if you will, the state of bliss and pleasure - they rely on that existing or else they would have no existence, they couldn't exist. They would just be a geometrical shape like the Leviathan deity. The Cenobites are at war with flesh but without flesh they wouldn't be able to exist, because they're being mutilated, look at them they have pins in their heads and their skin is mutilated and they're a really grotesque, monstrous representation of pain. But without that baseline of flesh, human flesh, that would not be able to be given any expression. So if you want to understand dialectics these Cenobites are in a state of indeterminate negation, and that's also what bad infinity means by the way: it's the moment of negation, there's no resolution though. It's not like they have resolved the contradiction. They haven't. That's why in the same way there's a bad infinity of debt in our societies, especially in America where we're, like, what in 300% debt or some shit? And it's like never ending.

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So at what point do you have to say you're not actually at war with this thing, you rely upon it? In dialectics you have a first element, you have a negation, and then you have the negation of the negation or the sublation. Which is supposed to change the first element, to subsume the moment of negation within it. Now the question I wanted to pose to myself was "how does this happen in Hellraiser?" How can a sublation happen? I was thinking about what kind of story could I write for Hellraiser where there's a negation of the negation, so the Cenobites are not just in this state of torture forever and there's actually a way to change the first premise to arrive at a negation of the negation. So here's my idea, how I got from A to B I'm not going to explain because it's going to take too long. I want - every Hellraiser fan is going to hate this idea, I don't care you're retarded you don't understand anything, and Hellraiser, that franchise has already been defiled, if you don't know there's like 10 of them, so my idea can't do much more harm - I want a Hellraiser movie that is analogous to Terminator Salvation. I want a Hellraiser movie where there's actually a war that happens between humanity and the Cenobites, just like there's a war between the Terminators and the human resistance in Terminator Salvation, I want that for Hellraiser. And this is going to be the idea. It's going to be a religious holy war that Humanity wages against Leviathan where they storm the gates of hell and they are at war with these Cenobites and it's going to be like a Communist movie it's a Michael Hudson Communist movie - where the human army are going to be Michael Hudson Maoists or some shit, they're going to break into hell, and they're going to say "we want to relieve Humanity of its debt, we're gonna wipe Humanity's debt we're gonna forgive" - it's going to be about forgiveness, forgiveness is going be the theme of the movie: that Humanity can be forgiven, despite all of Humanity's flaws, despite that it's chaotic, despite all that Humanity can be forgiven. So a holy army, a jihadi holy army, is raised on Earth and there's actually a human resistance against the Cenobites and they fucking storm the gates of fucking hell. I want a scene where Cenobites are about to torture someone with hooks, and they get a hook and then it's

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like a Neo fucking bullet time dodge, and they're like "what the fuck?" and they have these weapons that fight Cenobites, and there's a fucking guy with a sword who comes behind the Cenobite,and just beheads him. And the Cenobite falls to the floor and dies and they're like "holy shit you can kill these things?" and he's like "yes, I fucking put my blade in holy water and I can actually kill - we can actually kill them." I want to make this movie a religious, fundamentalist, Christian nationalist film for American audiences where there's a Christian Taliban American army that gets raised - because I think this is a Christian movie actually, I don't think you could have a Muslim army. Look, imagine Muslims fighting Cenobites, it sounds retarded, it's stupid. Can't happen. You could have a Christian army fighting the Cenobites because Hellraiser's a Christian story, it's about Christianity if you don't get that you're stupid, it's obviously about Christianity. It would be like a rag tag Christian fundamentalist army. Or maybe Orthodox, I don't know. Either Orthodox or Protestant I don't think it would work with Catholic. I think Leviathan is already the Catholic church in a lot of ways, but don't don't attack me. I'm an artist, I'm speaking as an artist okay? [reading chat comment] Yeah Mormons, let's do Mormons so no one gets mad. It would just be Mormons, Mormons are fighting Cenobites in hell to relieve Humanity of its debt because they're sick of being tortured. [donation] "Still needs a token Muslim dude." Yeah, maybe it could be like that one cool Robin Hood movie. Where they're fighting against this Satanic witch and there's this one black Muslim dude that's just there and he's a foreign traveler. I don't know, I don't think Muslims should be in this movie. Hellraiser is basically trying to explain that all war is from the Leviathan, so the basic idea is like Humanity was in the Garden of Eden and the first moment we took a stick to start attacking other people to have wars, that was the Leviathan waging its war against humanity. So it's very deep, it's this idea that all human alienation from know World War I, and the prison system, all the fucked up things about human history - that's

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based in the Leviathan's war against life itself. And it'd be a Mormon Revolutionary War, a Mormon Michael Hudson Communist Revolutionary War against the Cenobites and against, more importantly, against the Leviathan. It'd be a war against the Leviathan. And maybe it could be modeled after the English Civil War or something. [donation] "Seems interesting but maybe they could start worker co-ops in hell instead of the violence :nerdface:" Literally though. I love using movies as forms of analogy because it helps explain so much. If leftists had anything to say they'd be like "oh well you know what they should just have just like have like self-torture co-ops in hell where people are like sticking hooks in themselves and like you know ripping off their flesh in a democratic way and in a consensual way that's what should really happen" and that's literally some shit they would say. That's literally some shit they would say. So you can understand ideological differences just by posing counterfactuals for a movie. Like where would these people stand in the movie? Like for example, a Centrist lib would probably say something like "well actually um there's nothing wrong with what Leviathan is doing, the Cenobites there's nothing wrong with them because you know we could every once in a while offer like human sacrifices to the Cenobites " and you know they'd say some shit like that. So you can understand political difference through this allegory, through this analogy. It's so interesting. It's so very interesting. Anyway, yeah, that would be the movie for me basically. And I want this to be an action movie. Hellraiser fans would be like "nooo" just FUCK YOU dude I was one of the biggest Hellraiser fans from the very beginning. You cannot redo those original movies, I'm sorry, it's never coming back. Who was that fucking guy who played Pinhead? I forgot who it was, the guy who played Pinhead. He is irreplaceable, you're never gonna get that again. That movie was an 80s movie, you're never going to a remake of that that'll ever work. People have tried so hard to do it, people have tried. Pinhead has been so abused, you can't do it. What do you want? You people just are nostalgic retards and

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they're like "oh I just want a movie where it's like it's just gonna be like just like when Kirsty was running from the Cenobites and Pinhead was like chasing -" no it's stupid dude, we already had that movie just go watch the 80s one. What would work now is a Terminator Salvation-style Hellraiser movie. I also want a 500 million dollar budget, I want a crazy action-packed movie, like three hours long, so much drama, so much - it'd be such a sick movie honestly they should let me make this. Someone should fund this movie, honestly. I don't know who can fund it but let's get it going because this is a winning idea. This would be such a subversive movie too because it's about debt and shit, holy fuck this movie would be BANNED, okay? Promise you. But anyways the retards can't appreciate such a powerful topic. [responding to chat comment] Yeah I want this movie to be 500 billion dollars, and look there's too many homeless shelters so let's just stop funding homeless shelters and let's sell off some homeless shelters, and that's how we're going to fund the movie, okay? Let's have the government cut welfare and cut assistance for the needy. No more homeless shelters, I'm sure the soup kitchens are using too much money, we could take some of that money. There's a lot of ways we could fund this movie. And guys I think art is more important than anything else, I'm sorry. There are too many schools being built and hospitals, we could close down some hospitals, close down some schools. And there's a lot of ways this movie could be filmed, okay? There's a lot of ways it could get funded, There's a lot of ways we can make this happen and we can make this a reality, that's all I'm saying. A lot of people think "oh you're not gonna get the funding for this." Really? If we take all money that is being sent to Children's Hospitals and put it into this movie I guarantee you we would have more than enough to film this, alright? So yeah, we can make it happen. We could definitely make this happen. People need to realize that I am a big Hellraiser fan, I mean I used to be one - I stopped being one because I had a bad dream about it. I always used to kind of like Pinhead too, I thought Pinhead was a supremely - I thought he was a very virtuous man, I thought

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Pinhead was a good guy basically. I always sided with Pinhead, did you know that? I was like "Pinhead's right," because I used to be a rationalist. Honestly, nobody say this, and it's not accurate, it's not technically or philosophically accurate but when I was associated with the the neo-rationalists - who I still hold in very high regard - I don't think they call themselves that anymore, I'm talking about Reza Negarestani and Ray Brassier - that guy's really brilliant too, like he's really underrated - but those guys had this new philosophical current called neo-rationalism. The basic idea is - I'm butchering, I'm just giving you a vulgarized synopsis - the basic idea is there's an equivalence between Communism and Spirit, which is just this abstracted mind, the abstracted mind of collective Humanity. Which is this cold, rational, indifferent structure. And my idea then was that this is the Cenobites, this is Leviathan from the Hellraiser movies. And I actually sided with Pinhead when I used to have those views, I was like "Pinhead's right, Pinhead's a Communist, an agent of Red Terror or something and he's here to fight philosophical vitalism in the form of life and assimilate everything into this cold, mechanical, brutalist world of pure modernism." And I sided with Pinhead and I sided with the Cenobites. Actually I want to talk about one more thing, because this is interesting. Pinhead was a Lacanian, who is this typical Oedipal, masculine father figure. Pinhead is still in the Oedipal complex, or he's not in it but he represents the struggle within it, and Pinhead has his doubts. Pinhead is a typical Lacanian subject, that's Pinhead. He's a Master. Pinhead is a quintessential Lacanian Master. Now if you watch Hellraiser 2, which is, I think, better than the first - I think Hellraiser 2 is the best one, and I think a lot of people agree with me - now if you watched that one - Hellraiser 3 goes full retard, but Hellraiser 2's the best one - now if you watch that one, there's a moment in that movie where this human becomes a Cenobite who's a doctor, and he becomes this guy who's got these tubes attached to his head and he he runs around hell chasing people who are the protagonist of the film, and he has this perverse pleasure and - you know how doctors secretly like what they do they, how doctors are all sadists, and they like their little knives, and they like this kind of cold, rational domineering, you know, doctors love how

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they domineer over a given body and they like cutting things up and they like the exercise of medical tyranny, that's just this perverse underbelly of of every doctor that exists. So they try to represent that, but this guy's like Darth Sidious on methamphetamine or some shit, and he's like "AHHH," he's so ecstatically in a state of pleasure, in a state of Jouissance in the French word, his fingers - medical instruments come out of them, and he's having a great time. And he is opposed to Pinhead. Pinhead is a calm, stoic figure and this guy is a pervert, he's a typical pervert and I thought "what better way to represent the difference between Deleuze and Lacan?" Lacan is like Pinhead, right? Stoic, Oedipal - not necessarily Oedipal, but struggling with the Oedipal complex, so stoic, calm: a modern subject. Who has a distance between them and the object. Pinhead maintains distance between himself and his work. He does the hooks or whatever, but he maintains a distance because he's still a rational figure, a stoic figure and he's just exercising cold justice. That's Pinhead, he's Lacanian. And then, the transition to Deleuze happens with that doctor guy where it's Deleuze's figure of an emancipatory subject or a revolutionary subject - basically like a pervert, someone who is fully, fully given to their drive, to their desires. Fully becomes like desiring machine. I'm not saying that's what Deleuze is saying, but think of the phrase "desiring machine," they're fully, fully given to that process, they become that process, they fully surrender to the process. Kind of like what you hear in accelerationism, that's just Deleuze by the way, So it's a perverted subject who has no boundary between themselves and their objects: they are fully and always in a state of ecstatic pleasure without any distance between them and their libidinal object. They're fully libidinalized. So if you want to understand Lacan and Deleuze, watch Hellraiser 2 because you'll see what the difference is. So that's also something people overlook a lot. Anyway guys, I can't recommend Hellraiser enough. Don't read it ideologically, they're good films, they're interesting films. Now there's one last thing I have to tell you about Hellraiser that I was omitting. I was pretty severely omitting this. The origin of the Lament Configuration - obviously there's an explicit callback in this series to Marquis de Sade and the origin of Lament Configuration lies somewhere around the French

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Revolution or the 17th century during the era of the Enlightenment where this kind of rational - it could it could be like Descartes or Spinoza or someone, it doesn't necessarily have to be around the Revolution - but very clearly saying this is the beginning of modernity. Whether that was intentional or not it's still the case, hyperstitionally it's still the case. That's how the fiction organically - that's organically the direction it went in. So that's also something to bear in mind. This is a story about the origin of modernity, which it's representing in the form of this invasion of the Cenobites onto the world. So that's what I have to say about Hellraiser. And they're very interesting movies. Whenever I see a movie, I always try to ask myself the question "how could I resolve this movie? how could I mold this movie into my understanding of the world?" Or more specifically, "how could I free this movie from its symptom? How could I free Hellraiser from its symptom, which is about this contradiction between rational modernity and Humanity?" And then I said "for this one it would be Michael Hudson it'd be about forgiveness of debt, that's how I would resolve the Hellraiser movies in a final blockbuster action-packed movie of a war of the liberation of humanity from its debt hell has imposed upon it, from the debt of hell," so that would be my solution. Maybe there's a better one, but to me that's how that movie would be resolved, that's how that fiction, that story would be resolved.

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