/lit/ - Literature

The president of the United States is a simulation.

>Today, Marxism and psychoanalysis try to mix and exchange their concepts. Logically, in fact, if both fell within the province of 'radical' critique, they ought to be able to do this. This is not the case, as the failure of the Freudo-Marxian phantasm in all its forms testifies. But the basic reason for the incessant failure of this conceptual transfer, and why both remain desperate metaphors, is precisely due to the fact that Marxism and psychoanalysis retain their coherence only within their partial definitions (in their ignorance), and cannot therefore be generalised as analytic schemata.

>A radical theory can be based neither on their 'synthesis' nor on their contamination, but only on their respective ex-termination. Marxism and psychoanalysis are in crisis. Rather than supporting one another, their respective crises must be telescoped and speeded up. They may yet do each other great collateral damage. We must not be deprived of this spectacle: they are only critical fields.

-- JB/SE&D

what he was calling out here was the impossibility of Marxist theory to account for the nature of death, desire and cybernetics. people want the consumer society, they just didn’t know why it was bad for them, because they couldn’t see where it would lead (an HR Giger painting that was hidden behind fashion, pleasure, and irony). that’s why JB is the father of the Matrix and there is a copy of S&S in that film. and yet clearly it’s SE&D that should have been in there, maybe it would have been too on the nose. what Uncle Nick contributes to the story is the realization of the telos of that cybernetics: the Matrix was only a proving ground for the refinement of the system itself. it’s why Cypher’s scene with the steak is so crucial: it’s because he can’t tell the difference between pleasure and damnation. and a world of Cyphers, doing this every day, props up the system.

it’s also, needless to say, why blaming white men is kind of a silly idea. the system needs at least women too, to function, and Capital is fabulously non-denominational to boot. wherever there is *pleasure* to be found, whether in conformity or transgression, there too is the spectacle that keeps it all moving. the whole concept of The Other isn’t remotely a challenge to the process, *it is what maintains it.* it’s why the crisis of a radical similarity - expressed by Smith - is so much more interesting than a radical difference. Capital is itself *difference systemized into an operating system based on exchange and reciprocity, mediated through symbolic transfer and money,* and to which the only real monkey-wrench is death.or, at least, it would be, if it weren’t for the plot twist within human biology: humans reproduce. infinitely. if there is one thing we like, it’s to copy ourselves.

and so the Wild Ride continues...