/lit/ - Literature

>>12996373
& others. good stuff here also

https://vastabrupt.com/2018/08/15/ideology-intelligence-and-capital-nick-land/

>We can understand ‘resetting modernity’ by way of a metaphor that Latour himself employs:

>What do you do when you are dis-oriented— for instance, when the digital compass of your mobile phone goes wild? You reset it. You might be in a state of mild panic because you have lost your bearings, but still you have to take your time and follow the instruction to recalibrate the compass and let it be reset.

>The problem with this metaphor is that modernity is not a malfunctioning machine, but rather one that works too well according to the logic embedded in it. Once it is reset, it will restart with the same premises and the same procedure. There is no way in which we can hope that modernity can be reset like pressing a button— or rather, this kairos of the modern may be possible for Europe, although I doubt it, but it certainly will not function like this outside of Europe, as I have tried to show by recounting the failures of China and Japan to overcome modernity: the former ended up amplifying modernity, the latter with fanaticism and war. ‘Disorientation’ does not mean simply that one has lost one’s way and doesn't know which direction to choose; it also means the incompatibility of temporalities, of histories, of metaphysics: it is rather a ‘dis-orient-ation’. In contrast to the appeals to 'return to nature’ or to ‘reset modernity’,what I have tried to propose here is a rediscovery of cosmotechnics as both metaphysical and epistemic project.

>The question that remains to be further formulated is that of the role to be played by modern technologies in this project. It seems to me that this is the fundamental question for overcoming modernity today. China (for example) will reposition itself in relation to the gigantic force of the earth-human time-axis constituted by modern technologies. How is it possible to connect technological consciousness with the cosmotechnics that we have tried to illuminate here? A sinofuturism, as we may call it, is manifesting itself in different domains. However, such a futurism runs in the opposite direction to moral cosmotechnical thinking— ultimately,it is only an acceleration of the European modern project. If we pay attention to what is happening with digitisation in China now, it confirms our view: as Facebook and Youtube arrives, China censors them and builds a Renren or a Youku which look more or less the same: when Uber arrives, China will adopt it and call it Youbu.... As we can understand, there are historical and political reasons for this, yet this is also the moment when such repetition should be suspended, and the question of modernity raised again.

>>11836219
are you the Schelling-anon from the earlier cosmotechnics thread? there was a guy in that thread who was raising some interesting questions about this stuff.

>Yeah my bhole clenches if I see rainbow in the thumbnail but that isn't that bad.
kek. well, thanks for the charitable reading. even i cringe internally when i start to talk about wilber. but the fact is i really like the guy, i just always think i'm over the threshold for how many maverick philosophers i should bring up in a single thread.

>I've always said history is just an individual life stretched out.
seems to have been hegel's intimation also. with the caveat that it was also every individual's life, and god's too. the PoS is quite a book.

>God maybe the Chinese century will really flirt with the limit and we find a beauty that shouldn't be if you don't wanna give the rest of us naturals a serious complex.
this is a thing also. we do not yet know what a communist party Optimized for Intelligence can do either. the chinese are not the soviets, and they're not the germans either. but on the world stage they matter today. and i find myself often realizing how difficult it would be to win a philosophical argument with a sort of high-powered CCP state lawyer dual-wielding Marx in one hand and Confucius in the other. that's a recipe for some serious ideological warfare. add to that the fact that Xi may have a more or less free hand in terms of how long he wants to be there and we may be in for some serious Weltgeist once again. nobody will ever militarily defeat the US, but our own version of the Game of Thrones isn't only military, it's technological, commercial, and cultural as well.

>maybe you're just giving too much agency to what should stay low key, behind the scenes, and you know this is exactly what Schelling says evil is, the center hijacked by the abyss of its power, and Land just sneaks on stage, grabs the mic and screams God wills it
there's no question. generally speaking i tend to start with the hyperbolic and slowly work my way back towards the middle. land is fascinating but there's more to life than him. i just happen to think that his line of inquiry is prescient enough to warrant the extra time and shitposting for consideration, because he opens up a lot of possibilities for the future that were just so completely dead after derrida. land makes marx un-dead, for better or for worse. but where we go from here, if anywhere, is anybody's guess.

i'm just the dorky cub reporter with the bad skin and teeth who covers the beat. i'm waiting for the true Foreign Correspondent who covers these things to arrive, the derrida/foucault/baudrillard-tier writer for this era of capital and tech and so on.