/lit/ - Literature

>>12655680
there's even a kind of Back To The Greeks sensibility that doesn't seem out of place to me in all this too: old-fashioned character-building, the ars moriendi and so on. we get to take a pretty wide-angle view of history from the perspective of the early 21C and see that it is mainly a slaughter-bench, and one in which the legacy of political radicalism is kind of a mixed bag. who's *optimistic*? where are the best *people* being produced? how, and why? we have the technology to make posthuman and transhuman bodies, but we are still perhaps a little unsure of how to produce appropriately 21C minds and feels. once upon a time the humanities were supposed to provide an education in this and they have become completely sunk in a quagmire of malaise and necrotic Marxist horseshit. these things were arguably necessary, especially if so much of this was the inevitable fruit of white-collar intellectuals LARPing as the proletariat (i don't know who it was that said 'revolution is the opiate of the intellectuals,' but it's a good line.)

getting too addicted to the darkness leads one to fury, and getting too addicted to the silver lining turns one into a vapid airhead or a cynic. there's a place in between there. Nietzsche still holds up well, he'll haunt the Last Man forever. and Land can haunt the dreams of the idle rich in a different way. i don't think history can be viewed in a linear or a sequential order, even if it is basically what i do, most of the time, as my own thing: trying to figure out where different philosophers link up or break from each other, how they ask the kinds of questions that they ask and get the answers that they get, usually as wild curveballs they could not have predicted or anticipated. Harman says this too: philosophies are not so much refuted as they are abandoned.

so Land unquestionably has a grip on my soul and i find it very hard to abandon him, mostly because i am inclined to see the world in the bleakest possible ways (and also i am learning that Land's darkness is in fact several gears over my threshold). but we have to imagine a better world is possible, even if it's just by seeing how many great plans in the past have fallen into disaster and ruination and a terrible kind of repetition. to posit Capital as Land does as an end-of-the-anthropocene-level event is not all that crazy.

one of the things that i think, however, about viewing the world from a Marxist perspective is that it tends to make it impossible to talk about ideas objectively: you always wind up being unable to talk about a thing separably from what it should or ought to be, we wind up always saying what ideas can or must be, rather than what they are. i think this sucks us into black holes it's very hard to get out of. there's a romance in hyperstition that may actually work against us rather than help us, if it only sets us up for fatalism and disappointment.

>The blockchain is exemplary. A cryptic, or radically non-obvious solution to a problem we will later explore attentively, it is – subsequent to its formalization – culturally indispensable. It ‘cannot be un-invented’. This is true to such an extent that it appears as an eternal mathematical fact, wholly impervious to the ravages of empirical fortuity. To de-realize the blockchain would be to unmake the universe (or at least, to collapse what is – transcendentally or inescapably – for us the universe). What is done transcendentally cannot be undone, without radical time-violation. The crypto-current permits no repudiation. The units of synthetic a priori knowledge production are laws, in the very strongest defensible sense of this term, in which their descent from, and simultaneous irreducibility to, any particular cases is insisted upon. This ratchet-structure makes the synthetic a priori – or some adequate analog – indispensable to any rigorous conceptual decompression of the notion of time.

all that is necessary here is that we return to our senses, i think. that's all. give Kant his due and cease a lot of other silliness. this is really not such a bad thing. stop this ceaseless enfuckening of the mind