/lit/ - Literature

>>9630436
First of all, thanks for the contribution based mathposter.

>>9631468
I would agree with this. Although it's also more like a kind of Grail Quest for a cure for excessive hyperenchantment, a kind of hypnotic fascination with what appears to be the Unmoved Mover of contemporary life: desire. The wanting of happiness.

Schopenhauer is right, money is abstract happiness. But Schopenhauer's conclusions seem all wrong to me as well. Even he doesn't believe in them, we know what his private life was like. Nietzsche remains correct about virtually everything and so do a lot of the guys who follow from him. The things we desire today and the ways in which desire them, combined with the consumer culture we have subsequently produced, which is constantly and rapidly updating itself in order to accommodate in this automatic/planetary way to produce and feed these in recursive loops...

You can think your way into these places but you can't as easily think your way out of them. And to my mind urging other people to Do Something reproduces the errors. A kind of enlightened ataraxia is the end goal. Some kind of fiction that articulates, with the right allegory, how this off-road adventure transpired.

>>9631345
Excessive meaning, not a lack of meaning.

>>9631326
That is the goal.

>>9631465
And this is slanderous horseshit.

>>9102205
Here's one way I might connect the dots.

I would say that the logic of technological acceleration driven by the capital accumulation inevitably leads to political crises and corrections. I don’t believe that there are crises of capitalism per se but political events and counter-events which are necessary aspects of the continual growth and development of technology fueled by the mimetic desires of a consumer society. Those events, resolved by political violence, allow the process of capitalization to continue.

Marxist theory formerly might have posited an end to this system but I feel that this is an impossibility today. Like any good postmodern disciple I admire Austrian economics but don’t really believe in marginal utility. People buy things because it makes them feel good, and ultimately because they submit to the irresistable ideological programming inherent to advertising and commodity fetishism. Land understands where all of this is headed, and what underlies it: the will to a totalizing and planetary technological knowledge, which is an extension of the will to power, freedom, enjoyment, and happiness which propels both production and consumption. Girard is the guy who will be found standing at the edges of the smoking ruins where those corrections will perennially be taking place.

I don’t think any of this is a good thing; indeed, it’s more than a little bleak to see it looking like that. I just find myself on the outside of a system looking in.

>>9102186
That's true, but the point that Girard is making here isn't related to whether or not a culture prefers individualism versus collectivism. People can considers themselves to be different in an individualistic culture or in a collectivist one. Superficially there may be differences between how this is expressed, but Girard perceives there to be a more fundamental logic - mimeticism - which is in effect regardless of what context you are in.

Collectivist societies are perhaps better at regulating internal conflicts than individualist ones, but individuals differentiating themselves is going to happen regardless.