/lit/ - Literature

>>12400613
i cannot conclude any good schizo-ramble without mentioning Why Uncle Nick Matters, and i will do that here. Land raises a host of fascinating questions about the state of Marxism in the 21C, as well as what it is that liberalism really wants. if we can know things, we know them through Kant. in many ways, Land is to Deleuze what Marx was to Hegel: the Bad (but necessary) News to the Good (and profoundly confusing) News. computers, machines, and Intelligence are for realsies. we ought not to become completely enslaved to our all-too-human bewilderment about the nature of cognition. identity politics - as practiced on the far left or on the far right - are equally disastrous. Unironic Communism and Unironic Fascism are two different forms of the same category error, both of which are fundamentally predicated on the identity as it relates to the polis. postmodernity fuckface-style has a conspicuous relation to both of these. authoritarianism looms like a spectre in every condition of dissolution and disintegration, which is what is effected by the deconstruction of all knowledge.

and this is not limited to the deconstruction of scientific knowledge. and even in this Heidegger has a role to play: he would have said, and accurately, that indeed you cannot do particle physics in your backyard. if you want to do particle physics, you need a particle accelerator, and this too belongs to the structure of enframing. science does not occupy a realm immune to philosophy, or politics. when people today argue for a gender-driven glaciology they cannot be disproved by quoting Heidegger at them: they will be correct in finding Secret Power Structures beneath all forms of cognition. and they will be right.

the problem is with the *suspicion* that lies at the heart of knowledge, and for which there is no cure. there are, however, *examples.* in Whitehead, Spinoza, and Deleuze, one thing you do *not* notice is the sad passions. you don't notice this in Nietzsche, Bergson, or in many others. what you do get is, i think, the mysterious joy of thinking itself, unshackled form the puritanical need to do so for the love of the crowd. Land is a crusty old bastard, but there isn't a day that goes by that i am not glad that he is on the earth being who he is, and concocting his arguments way over in Neo-China. he has taken one of the ugliest periods of thought in human history and built a horrible Lovecraftian machine with it, and it is *fascinating as fuck to read about.* he did this in the very teeth of the ugliest and most insipid forms of intellectual barbarism ever created. but it had to be done. sometimes the most fascinating stuff is found in the dark.

McLuhan knew what he was saying as well, btw.