/lit/ - Literature

>>12631202
nobody writes about the implications of capitalism and time-travel better than Nick Land. he's got skills with the quill like that. and i think his contribution to the big story in the long run is one that, however dark, nevertheless deserves its share of praise and celebration. this is my own take, anyways: as the Buddhists say, nothing ever goes away until it teaches us what we need to know.

the most absolutely crushing and depressing-inducing part of the story of the Wild Ride is that terrible sense that all of this has been for *nothing.* i don't mean me personally, i mean the incredible odyssey taken by Western Civilization since the French Revolution to today, all of these terrible devastations, accidents, crusades, developments, inventions, missed opportunities, taken opportunities, and more. everybody feels the terrible enervation of the present year, this combination of absolute irony and absolute despair, the total fucking suicide-inducing ennui that comes with every ad for Facebook and the rest. you can get this with Baudrillard, or with later writers on Hegel, whatever else. again, i like Lacan here precisely because he's a master locksmith when it comes to dealing with guilt and anxiety and neurosis about fears and dreams that - maybe there's a little of Mark Fisher in this also - are *not necessarily yours and yours alone to have.* Fisher would have said this too: hey, guess what, it's not all your fault, it's not all in your head. you should be fucked-out, miserable, and depressed. the story told is fucked-out, miserable, and depression inducing.

when it comes to Land, well, he's found a way of dealing with that too, although only by finding a gear in the box that the developers of the car arguably never intended to put there in the first place. there is something darkly romantic in hyperstition, although it is the romance of horror. for some, that's fine. there has always been something thrilling and emancipating in horror for the Victorian mind - ask Stevenson, or Mary Shelley, or Lovecraft. Land is who he is for folding that into the history of Marxism with a little D&G also. and in this i have likened him to being a kind of defibrillator for continental-postmodern malaise. it's no wonder he liked The Thing (1982) - horror will wake you up, horror will get you to take things seriously. The Thing loves it when you kick back and relax.

but this is not the only way to look at things, and beyond a certain horizon can indeed be counter-productive. Land is 14/10 for Making Philosophy Great Again after a stultifying enervation brought on by the reign of the Ghost Kingdom of Jacques Derrida. and postmodernity is, i guess, really my thing...but cybernetics and a second unironic look at What Did Capital Mean By This puts a little more color and zest back into the story, and for that i am grateful.

but no, you don't need to read everyone else before Land and Land is not The Meaning of Everything.

>>12613320
i don't know if anyone's actually ever posited a Quincey/Land connection - but Opioid Marxism that became Lovecraftian Marxism that in turn became Uncle Nick/Crusty Futurist Sinophile doesn't seem all that crazy.

if he wasn't actually quite skilled with the quill he would have been just another meme. but he was skilled with the quill and he had a bunch of other collaborators too.

here again is the best piece ever written on Land not written by Land himself.
https://www.urbanomic.com/document/poememenon/

here's the Hickman write-up on said write-up
https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2019/02/15/amy-ireland-nick-land-w-b-yeats-and-anastrophic-modernism/

and here's a link to an ungodly collection of other links.
>>/lit/thread/S12056787