/lit/ - Literature

>>12867842
no, of course not.

how awesome is this picture? it's very awesome. never fails to bring a smile to my face.

>>12485783
postmodernity never got past these guys, it only told itself that it did. perhaps, if we want to be ultra-cynical, we can say that God died, and we made War god, and that then became our god. the easy workaround for this was of course the division between the Imperial War and the Revolutionary War, because the Revolutionary War - on screen, purest ideology - became even better than the cure. it was a way of doing the wrong thing while telling yourself it was the right one. but there is no end to the Revolution once the Revolution becomes sublated into a theory of economics. Class War never ends.

and if such a thought experiment managed to show up not Star Wars but Class Wars, and the contradictions therein, now that would really be something. there is no *cure* for economics, for industrialization, for capitalism, but there is something mysteriously pathological about the means by which we *forget ourselves* in participating in this process - you could do worse than to call this thing, The Force.

and this is where i would permit myself to get extra-preachy in the final scenes. the real Force is Being, and *Being Undivided.* the Jedi and the Sith are failed forms of this, just as Laozi always said:

>When the great Tao is forgotten,
>goodness and piety appear.
>When the body's intelligence declines,
>cleverness and knowledge step forth.
>When there is no peace in the family,
>filial piety begins.
>When the country falls into chaos,
>patriotism is born.

the way i would express isn't through Yoda, but i would actually do it through Jabba - or Jabba Junior, or whatever. that's the point. my female equivalent of Darth Maul gets to go back to a violent and fiery life doing whatever she does; she can walk on the Empire. a lot of people can walk on the Empire. and if the Empire decides that No One Walks On The Empire, well - so much for the Empire, which was never beyond good and evil so much as it was before it, or beneath it.

and life goes on. the universe does what it does, because mercifully it's not in anyone's *control* anymore. and who knows what can happen after that. maybe nothing. maybe everything. you don't know. and that's fucking perfect. maybe you don't need Jedi. you don't want them.

anyways. 'twas a thing i needed to ramble out.

what's happening with BTC and Philosophy will take a while before it makes sense. but if there is one thing that Land is doing, it is fundamentally re-orienting a few axes in terms of the way that we think about things, in particular, the role of Marxist critique in the academy.

here's a question for you: what is the relationship of philosophy to money? the current desolation of the academy today follows entirely from the history of Marxist critique, which - folded up in the parallel and overlapping histories of the 4 Grandes Cavalaeiros do Ateismo - is precisely what leads you to postmodernity, in which we are completely entangled, Matrix-style, and with no way out. there is no Outside of money itself, and if there is anyone to ask about why that is so, it is Uncle Nick. money for him stands ultimately for Temporalization, perhaps as much for Heidegger Time meant Being, and vice versa.

but as Cold as all of this is...i can't help but think that in some deep way, this is actually a really good thing. not because it means Defenestration, Yes! but precisely because it *doesn't* mean that. it means that the cynicism inherent to the fundamental, and tragic, ethos of The Wire -

>it's all in the game yo, it's all in the game

The Wire: The Shotgun and the Briefcase
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yu3qIakos9k

becomes *properly* tragic (which it always was). irony depends upon a fundamental reversibility of signs, but only a complete cynic would simply laugh at this, mainly because they haven't quite understood how far down the rabbit hole actually goes. with Uncle Nick you (read: me) get the sense that if money stands for something *genuinely* transcendental (in a philosophical sense) then our human responses to this might also undergo a slight reconstruction as well, and not take all of their cues from the bitterness and ressentment inherent to not having more of what money promises: that is, pleasure. or, as the Merovingian says, Causality.

i don't want to abuse the image cap, but i think it's warranted. modernity, like Capital, is a heartbreaker. but the question to my mind is, doesn't this trend towards people actually deriving a deeper understanding about What Philosophy Means By This? i think it does. for all of the Coldness in Land's work, i can't see a reason why this isn't in some sense a good look, to cool out things that in civic life have gotten a little too Hot. they got Hot in the Cold War and in the Thirty Years' War, and in many other places also. Heat, like anger, is beyond good and evil. it lacks form and shape. it leads to Burnout, and Meltdown. letting Colder heads prevail is not necessary. being Cool, as absurd as it sounds, and as cringe, is kind of welcome.

>>12014283
i'll put a couple of other Feels of my own in here as well. here's one:

Politics A Shit

Uncle Nick invented horrorcore Marxism and he is the Coldest motherfucker alive. the point of horror, however, is not to produce Defenestration, Yes! the point of horror is to flush out the politics, all the way. Unironic Fascism is not the answer, any more than Unironic Communism. if there is a name for this form of acceleration, it would be called Zen Acceleration, and if Zen Acceleration has any sort of goal or telos of its own, it trends towards Fuck Yeah Space Taoism, for which no flaws can be found. the reason no flaws can be found is because it represents a genuine *post-atheist phenomenology* that squeezes past the Masters of Suspicion (or, more poetically, Los 4 Grandes Cavaleiros do Ateismo!) and into something more befitting the 21C. and for that one of the few - very few - metaphysicians who actually *could* take on Das Neetch in a mano-a-mano kung-fu battle would be the one, and only, Alfred North Whitehead.

we love Nietzsche, as we love all the Masters. they matter. Modernity is for realsies. unfortunately, they also lead to complete deadlock in the modern world, and a round of cyclical mimetic triggering with absolutely no future. and this is a *problem,* because Uncle Nick says - and rightly - that Optimize for Intelligence is the required protocol, and yet *in the absence of anything like a world worth optimizing for* this is not going to happen. it is as such the position of Cosmotech that once the full horror of capitalism has been digested, in all its galactic mind-splitting cruelty and power, that something like hope must once again be put on the table, but it is of a very measured kind, and which has no political referent whatsoever. we all have to clean our own rooms, in that sense.

and yet this is also not a purely solitary or existential journey. Gilbert Simondon has already asked for something like a mechanological culture, simondon is YH's boy, and YH is our boy. in the next OP i will be including a link to one of YH's most important texts, which contains an entry called Thinking After Meltdown, and which is obviously relevant to our interests here.

Whitehead is one of a very few thinkers who actually has the chops and the sensibilities to move the plot past the Warring Triad (or Warring Quartet, however you like). the two big guys, imho, are Marx and Nietzsche. that which follows from Marx goes Left, that which follows from Nietzsche goes Right, although it is also possible to fruitfully Cross the Streams, as Uncle Nick does (and so did Foucault). Deleuze, for his part, seems to have been somewhere in the middle.

>>11996929
these threads are really only for a) getting interested in acceleration or b) being so terminally bored with it that you want to Advance The Narrative, which is an incredibly silly idea, tho some (read: me) are stupid enough to flirt with the idea.

Space Taoism anon called it, far better than i eve could have: it's a post-atheistic phenomenology. as such i recommend starting with the OGs of the 19C.
>Los Grandes Cavaleiros do Ateismo!
>foda-se sim
>que soa muito melhor que os Mestres da Suspeita