Contemporary theory’s nihilisms are algorithmic in structure, not merely philosophical

Evidence

In their fixation on the unanswerability and immutability of eternal forces, or primordially recessive unorganizable chaos, contemporary theory’s many nihilisms have algorithmic underpinnings too. Extreme subtraction into nothing, a negation of the synthetic, affirmative, or normative, nihilism simultaneously aggrandizes theorists and alibizes their own inconsequentiality. Uniting queer anti-social hypotheses, afroand gynopessimism, and primal negativities in idioms of deconstruction, psychoanalysis, biopolitics, and phenomenology, the tenets of contemporary nihilism are so pervasive as to be almost imperceptible: all “ends” are bad, all institutions are oppressive, human history is only the history of domination, values like freedom or responsibility are instruments of these forces of bad oppressive domination, and therefore the only minimally affirmable virtues are ephemerality, hybridity, destabilization, fugitivity. Abjuring positive formulations, nihilism offers subtraction, qualification, dissent, the radicalism of the unspecifiable—immediacy as the planarity of what evades synthesis. It aims at dissolution and dismantling, hypostasizing agency in destruction, freedom in formlessness, and a preferable Eden in anti-mediation. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 306

Categorization

• QUESTION: The reduction of queer anti-social theory, afro-/gynopessimism, and deconstructionist negativity to ‘algorithmic underpinnings’ and ‘nihilism’ is a sweeping, arguably flattening charge — worth interrogating whether she can sustain it against, say, Moten or Muñoz.
• XREF: This is the strongest candidate for the reader’s fight with her ‘antitheory’ chapter — the move to dismiss critical-theory nihilism as complicit with immediacy is precisely the claim to test against Jameson’s account of postmodernism and his more sympathetic reading of the anti-subjective.
• DEEPTHINKING: ‘Immediacy as the planarity of what evades synthesis’ — the claim that nihilistic subtraction and immediacy share a formal structure (refusal of mediation/synthesis) is a genuinely dense, non-obvious synthesis.