/lit/ - Literature

>>11839279
yowza, what a great post.

one of the things that i've been reflecting on myself is this need to provisionally separate politics from philosophy for a little while for reasons that you intimate. one of the things that makes deleuze interesting as a thinker, for instance, is that he decouples marx from hegel (as well as the marxist politics of his own day from their association with lacan and freud). the resulting theory is highly original, to say the least.

deleuze is highly alert to what happens to thinking when it becomes *mass* thinking, doxa. what C&S expose - for me, at least - is the metaphysical aspect which exists within consumption, and which is perhaps more fruitfully thought as de/reterritorialization rather than production consumption. and yet D&G remain, for all of this, marxists. it seems to me that they would be highly skeptical of *liberalism* as much as *capitalism.* capitalism you can understand, and they do: they chart it pretty colorfully in C&S. as for land, he takes this, applies it directly to cybernetics, and progressively becomes more and more revolted by the consumer society which gave rise to it.

to connect this to heidegger, i think he is extraordinary insightful also inasmuch as onto-theology becomes a creation of language, and a language wielded by beings perpetually harried by technology and looking for home (a dangerous prospect, but not an incomprehensible one). and within a modern moral capital - the branding of kaepernick is a notorious recent example - there is now this horrible sense of capital supplying itself with its own politics before a captive audience.

so i think we have to introduce a skepticism about the nature of even our apparently all-fulfilling, perfectly harmless mode of even 21C neoliberalism, which of course reveals itself to be as amenable to hegemony as any system which preceded it. but the means of doing this, i think, run through the intersections of technocommerce and intelligence. liberal consumption wants to supply a blessing on its products that always has, i think, subtle ideological dimensions that advertising hides. but eventually these things start to add up. but we can't readily supply an Outside to capital or intelligence in these ways. and even poetic nietzschean ideas about the Great Health &c can't always be guiding stars either (as ofc you know): in the case of deleuze, at least, a rather frail man gave us some of the greatest ideas of the 20C.

>there is something about intelligence and freedom so that I am never sure that giving up individual freedom in the name of the well-being of participating in a superior, better organized system would be entirely worth it.

look no farther than chinese social credit for at least one example of why this isn't necessarily a great idea. in comparison to contemporary far-left virtue signal, a system of national social credit tied directly to the banks warrants the full Vince McMahon Face treatment.

>the mcluhan/whitehead tag-team

gee you don't say

anyways, mcluhan is cool. what would happen if you wrote the society of the spectacle but removed the marxism, added in catholicism, and took it out of Europe? maybe the medium is the message.