/lit/ - Literature

>>13003645
so what happens exactly when we *sell things?* are transactions at the level of, say, obtaining a university pedigree - i mean this in a completely cynical way - the same thing as just acquiring any other object? obviously they shouldn't be, but, you know, *should.* and so on.

and i actually think there may at some point be a kind of interesting discussion that will percolate (if it hasn't already) about cybernetics and these kinds of things, the nature of relations and transactions and so on. i don't think it's that i'm so bothered about the concept of identity politics so much as that i think identity is such an extraordinarily difficult think to pin down in a concrete sense that every attempt to do so tends to culminate in disaster, and scapegoating. scapegoats for Girard always serve this function: when the given order breaks down, a new order can be founded based purely on collective opposition to some other, and when the symbol of that is branded it often follows that it is then *destroyed,* and then we tell ourselves a fabulous story about the meaning of this destruction that re-grounds the new order. and this is a very different thing, to my mind, than a purely Derridean reading of events. i understand where Derrida is coming from, and i'm not dismissing him out of hand, but i think that Girard went several miles deeper than he did in trying to work these things out.

and in a cybernetic sense (or in a mechanical/prosthetic sense) i think there are all kinds of interesting questions to be asked here too, about what it is that makes us us in either an individual or collective sense. race and gender are unquestionably powerful signifiers in this way, but it would also be nice to think that they aren't the *only* qualifiers, and that moreover we don't wind up bringing the entire universe to bear on questions like these in such a way that we discover the political equivalent of nuclear fission. the Crucifixion, the French Revolution and i think Moby-Dick - imagine being pursued across the seven seas by a maniacal sea captain hell-bent on revenge, just like all those other other motherfuckers who came to hunt you, and failed - weave a pretty rich portrait of the pathological mind. and yet these are stories and events that create the world...

in the Cosmotech threads i was trying to get at some of related stuff also, the world of artificial memory, YH's 'tertiary protention' - memories written to anticipate you coming to retrieve them later on, things like this. and this is all stuff that i totally think will be a part of our deeper engagement with all things cybernetic yet to come. what is it that makes us us? what is it about copies, doppelgangers and simulacra that bother us (apart from identity theft, counterfeiting and forgery, that is, in an age of electronic money tied to blockchains). i feel very much like some asshole child is trying to force Doom to run on a Gameboy processor sometimes.

>>12921612
i do think a new paradigm of thought is good, it's just that it really wouldn't be all that new, just a synthesis and integration of the old - a reconstruction to follow the deconstruction. progressivism is a unique affliction of the wealthiest and most liberal countries in the world, in which cultural relativism is amplified by wealth and technology to produce mutations in thought that go too quickly - and are too profitable *not* to import and export. that is a unique conundrum! rather like a fisherman who goes fishing and catches a shark - he's in the fish business, after all, it's just that he didn't know there were sharks in those waters...and if his hubris is such that he just can't let that one go, then...and you know, i swear, if somebody could just write a novel about obsessive modernism it would really be good...oh well...

the thing is that - as Lacan says - the people are thirsting for a master, and they will get one. the 20C always delivered the goods on this, and before that also. said Masters only appear when the sociopolitical climate is right for them. me? i would prefer *not* to have a Master appear and rather to withdraw and evaluate not only how it was that we got to this place, but also where This Place is likely to evolve (or regress) in the future. i think it would not only proceed from an analysis of those aspects of both Eastern and Western thought that have a lot of overlap (and you can re-read Aldous Huxley, or Campbell, or Wilber for the Plotinus-Aurobindo connection, or many others) but also from the sense of needing to take a hard look at the technological realities also, namely machines, bots, intelligence, and all the rest. catastrophes are produced by combinations of technological blast-off and cultural relativism, neither of which are bad by themselves, but so too are *renaissances.* history isn't a neat or orderly or in any way progressive phenomenon. and in some sense i would say there has to be some serious re-evaluations of the role of Hegel and many others in our lives. Hegel is awesome, and the Hegel-Lacan bromance too is awesome.

but *after 1990 things change.* after that it's Land's world, for at least a decade, because he asks questions about the Boomers hard to answer. so too does Peterson, and Wilber even before then: 'Boomeritis' or the Mean Green Meme are not altogether terrible ways of understanding what is happening now. Wilber had an absolutely prescient view on the future history of postmodernity in the early 1980s and i think things are playing out pretty much the way he said they would, as intolerance in the guise of plurality. the endgame for that sucks. Land said it also, Peterson is saying it now. these are three different guys all triangulating on the same phenomenon, that Max Relativism ends in disaster. i agree. what the new paradigm will look like, i have no idea, or what the cures are, besides Enlightenment, personal or radical (in the Jonathan Israel sense).

thoughts on ishmael?

>inb4 jaws prequel

SPLIT YOUR LUNGS WITH BLOOD AND THUNDER