/lit/ - Literature

>>13313656
On the contrary, a translation is *always* better than the original

>>12514672
>from what i gathered on him he's just a transhumanist/futurist who understands some philosophical ideas which aren't the usual shitty western anthropocentric crap which assumes humans are magical stemming from crappy theological nonsense
true

>his special flavor is he's got some nonsensical ideas about capital and monetary crap which he says "we'll lose control of"
that happened

>so we should accelerate it?
in 1990 yes. in 2019 it takes care of itself, which is shitty in two ways, because a) it will kill you and b) it will kill you with garbage

>it's just some cope where he wants to find peace in the chaotic world and pretend he influences it towards it destination.
yes

>it's just muh singularity/monism with scifi/faux mystical element along with lots of obscurantism through buzzwords and unnecessarily ideas.
which is to say, it's really fucking interesting

>somebody on /lit/ calls it's space taoism which is the ultimate irony. first, it's dao not tao. second, there's no special variation involving space that separates from dao. in fact, saying "space" in front of dao just demonstrates you don't get what the dao is.
meh it's just fun to talk about. nobody gets what the tao/dao is

>they've got a modestly higher understanding of things than the average joe but really it seems like they're just spinning their wheels cause the core stuff to focus on is very simple and i never saw them articulate it.
the core stuff to focus on actually isn't simple. it is in fact very complex, but not so complex it defies all description. it is Marx, Nietzsche and Freud walking through the 20C and being ripped to pieces by deadly cyborgs and insects which they are in some sense responsible for producing.

it is a *tragedy* my good sir. it is an Unironic Tragedy. made worse by the fact that a whole lot of consumerist bullshit *hides* this, and the more it is hidden the more it is revealed. want to know more? read Baudrillard. and maybe BC Han also. this whole thing is a comic, and diabolical, fucking *nightmare.* people bitch and say oh there's no meaning, there's no literature, eeeeehhhhh. to which i respond, try retracing the voyage of continental theory from 1900 to 1990. you will get your heart ripped out thinking about it. are there other ways to spend your day? there absolutely are. does anyone know how this story ends? they absolutely do not. is that deeply unsettling and confusing af? it absolutely is.

if you like the material, no end of fabulous reading awaits you. if you don't, meh, no sweat. but there's no point in shitting on anything or dismissing what is a genuine no-joke Philosophy Adventure in the highest (and lowest, and most absurd) sense of the word. that it produces burnout trainwrecks...so what? the world has horror novelists too.

on Star Trek: TNG the nemesis of a wonderful space-faring civilization was the Borg. why was that?

>>12374998
>I need more on philosophies of modern negativity. Capitalist Positivism is something that I feel like a raving madman trying to discuss with my friends, because obviously, "why wouldn't we want to be as happy as we can be?" and the like. I need some kind of basis for all of this.
kek, i know that feel very well amigo.

so in terms of crowbarring one's mind out of the Matrix, pic rel worked pretty well for me. i think i've read pretty much everything he's ever written. and the nice thing is that if you start with the early stuff (System of Objects, Mirror of Production) you won't need to do a shitload of other reading as well beforehand. he will get you interested in Marx and Nietzsche, and those two guys will be the enduring terror of any of your friends who ask dumb questions about why We Should All Be So Happy and so on. Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud are the three great masters of modernity, and if you're looking for modern negativity, those guys are like the X-Men. Baudrillard is an apostle of two of them, but disdainful of psychoanalysis; that's fine.

for more contemporary critiques of neoliberalism, Byung-Chul Han is your man. if you have read Baudrillard, you will find him to be in many ways a kind of a kindred spirit, although Han is more into Hegel and Heidegger than Marx and Nietzsche. again, this is fine too. in time, if you are really interested in the Wild Ride, you will read all of these guys, like it's exploring a big Terra Incognita map.

Heidegger is not to be missed, but he can be daunting to just jump into. it is for this reason that i usually shill Zimmerman's intro book on Heidegger ('Heidegger's Confrontration with Modernity') b/c it is absolutely crucial that you understand the 1930s in Germany. the Nazis are the original and prototypical SJWs, but this is coming out of - very much as it is today - economic and psychological dispossession. and this in turn is a story told earlier still by Marx.

once you get a little exposure to the heavies - Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Freud - you're well on your way to schizoposting in Land threads! Deleuze borrows from Nietzsche and Marx, Lacan from from Nietzsche, Heidegger and Hegel, Derrida from Heidegger and Levinas, Foucault from Nietzsche, and Uncle Nick from Deleuze, Marx, and Kant. the poststructuralists and other guys are all worth your time, but ultimately - given time and patience - you will work your way through all of these guys. by which point, of course, your friends will all have gone off and gotten married and had children and moved on with their lives, but...well. you get the idea.

oh yeah and don't forget Adorno.

>Where should I start and what second literature should I read?

like all of continental philosophy in the 20c. it will be a long list. get to know this guy tho

>>9576436
Not much! Baudrillard was not optimistic about the future of culture. He sort of espouses his own aristocratic-Nietzschean sensibility of despair and seduction, I suppose. It helps to be a brilliant literary stylist.

I suspect for Baudrillard there is no 'other side,' just increasing distance from reality. To the point where he says too much meditation on these things can become psychically destabilizing...

So bad scene for Marxists, slightly more interesting/fatalistic/enigmatic for Marxists-turned-Nietzscheans. Sort of a diarist of semiotic apocalypse. Worth reading.

>>9577179
System of Objects is some of his best early work, if you want to see a high-powered cultural critic in action. Around the time of Symbolic Exchange & Death he starts to go in new directions and towards all things simulacral. His later works are enigmatic and fun (and germane) but it's all part of the continuum of the man's thought. He becomes more and more deliberately opaque, hyperbolic and provocative as his career goes on, but it's basically continuous. I guess you could say he was trying in this weird way - it earned him the ire of a lot of other intellectuals - the Marxiest Marxist around, to the point where he was basically on his own planet.

Still tho. All claims of being a deliberately obscurantist writer are misguided, to my mind. He was just seeing this tidal wave of irony and advertisement boiling out of mass culture and having his own prescient thoughts about where it might lead. Hyperreality is a strange kind of term but perhaps it's because we're just using to living with it today in the age of the meme. So I don't know.

But he's worth checking out. Leave Simulacra & Simulation for later, just get down with the Marxist stuff and then watch how that unfolds. And read Seduction too, that's a good one.

Here, and in this sense at least, we have to accept as a fundamental feature of the analysis of
consumption McLuhan's formula that `the medium is the message'. This means that the true
message the media of TV and radio deliver, the one which is decoded and `consumed' deep down
and unconsciously, is not the manifest content of sounds and images, but the constraining pattern
-- linked to the very technical essence of those media -- of the disarticulation of the real into
successive and equivalent signs: it is the normal, programmed, miraculous transition from
Vietnam to variety, on the basis of a total abstraction of both.

This, then, is the truth of the mass media: it is their function to neutralize the lived, unique,
eventual character of the world and substitute for it a multiple universe of media which, as such,
are homogeneous one with another, signifying each other reciprocally and referring back and
forth to each other. In the extreme case, they each become the content of the others -- and that
is the totalitarian `message' of a consumer society.

Thus, on a confused, conflictual, contradictory world, each medium imposes its own more abstract, more coherent logic; it imposes itself -- a medium -- as message, to use McLuhan's expression. And it is the substance of the fragmented, filtered world, the world reinterpreted in terms of this simultaneously technical and `legendary' code, that we `consume' -- the entire material of the world, the whole of culture industrially processed into finished products, into sign material, from which all eventual, cultural or political value has vanished. - The Consumer Society

>Wake me up
>Can't wake up