/lit/ - Literature

>girl from uni seems interested but, maybe because I'm too autistic or beta, her interest goes away.
>leads me around, like saying we should go out, even setting up the date, and then not returning my texts on the day.
>this happens twice, then I say fuck it and move on.
>she tries to get my attention again but I ignore her
>fast forward a couple months
>I decide to change majors
>girl in my new class is a doppelganger of the old one

Might not seem like much, but it's the fourth absurd event related to my nonexistent love life that happened over these last few weeks. I do believe God is making himself present and helping me better myself during these past few months, but hell if I know what am I supposed to do with these particular signs- Actually, now that I think about it, each of them centers around one of three girls I tried to have something with, maybe he's telling me it's time to let go.

Why does Louise keep alternating between flirting with me and mentioning her boyfriend? Why does she persist with it, even though I do not encourage her and have never done so? Why does catholic guilt keeps assuaging me even after leaving the church during my boyhood? Why do the feeling that, don’t matter what I do, I will end up losing a friend is so sure and persistent? Why do I feel so conflicted, and why do both decisions seem like damnation on my eyes? What is the difference between fondness and love? Why can’t friendship be simple? Why can’t I keep her out of my mind? It’s not love or passion, but lust and confusion. Isn't it? If desire is so pernicious, why is my heart so full of it, and why does it bring me such vivacity?

>>11826990
and there is a fucking humongous shift that happens with foucault and deleuze also, and it's related to land's stuff also: this shift from a kind of power outwardly shown to one internalized, sublimated, automated, and stretched out to infinity. it's why Big Brother as orwell would have conceived him is today completely antiquated. Big Brother isn't an angry guy with a moustache looking at you from the panopticon, it's fucking Alexa and Siri and Cortana becoming your indispensable guides to the world of devices you cannot live without. the psychopolitics of this are all in han (and baudrillard, who basically did the transmigration of souls to live on as a korean emigre in germany).

*power became automatic.* this is all you need to get from land. and again, if you read norbert wiener, or mcluhan, or any of those guys, and then the later generation of poststructuralists, you get where we are now, to stiegler's automatic planet and much more to come. you get to a point where it all sounds so ridiculous it basically has to be true. automation is the dream of capitalism, and liberalism spreads the gospel of consumption worldwide. today the chinese are on a different course than the west is, but the west is now divided into its red and blue wings, so who knows what's coming down the pipe. but whatever it is, it's going to be fast and want to go faster. this much we do know. and that's kind of the amazing irony of it, that even the money guys eventually just have to follow where the science is going...

in the long run, it's not like a return to science and the ascetic virtues will be a bad look for us (those who don't throw themselves off the rooftops thinking about it).

>>11827016
leibniz is cool. i really only have minimal reading with him apart from deleuze's book and a couple of half-hearted attempts at the monadology. but whitehead talks about him a lot too.

>My question is how relevant is that era to you all?
it's thinkers, not eras. read deleuze's book, the fold. he seemed to think the best way to characterize his time - which is quite close to ours - was baroque. it's not about dialling it back to the past politically, it's about borrowing the ideas of people from the past to get a better look at the present and make minimally fuckhead guesses about the future.

>you guys look like your trans humanists or something.
just skeptics about postmodernity, which everybody basically is these days. after 2016 it's a new world, at least in the west, and with xi in china similar stuff. whether it's trans/posthumanity or whatever. it's just skepticism about postmodernity, which was never as skeptical about metanarratives as it claimed to be, or at least showed some unfair preferential treatment that inclines people like me to look elsewhere. the money never changed, it only got faster.

>>11827064
yeah, i understand. the jargon is for me an acquired taste but you won't find any of that in whitehead. check out stengers' book.