/lit/ - Literature

>>11118548
>>11120147

so i hope your interest in these things continues to develop. there's definitely no end in sight. for myself i'm just trying to learn to pick battles more carefully and maybe understand that a lot of power politics is more like a kind of deadly poker game, clauswitzian duel, or baroque game of thrones. it's not a game i'm interested in playing myself. pic rel is always ultra-based like that.

and so where does that leave us? if we disengage a little bit, kind of sifting through the various products seems to follow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j28DtHJCamA

in The Wire, there's this famous line: shining up shit and calling it gold. daniels uses it cynically, of course: baltimore is the victim of an erosion of values that is bringing the whole city down. we always have this alchemical dream.

theory really does have a kind of an inbuilt tendency to turn everything to shit. that's what is horrible about the positivism of capital: this pathologically optimizing tendency that land talks about, and which he is mystified by in ways that are worth thinking about. hyper-libertarianism and so on are what lead to burnout, but it's also a gnostic demiurge that nobody really can explain. this puts us today in this fascinating, and terrifying place: what do we do? and even stranger, we can't even understand how some of this works except by reference to our own cultural products, the products that are turned out by this system that seem to variously hide, reveal, and deny understanding of it. it's why literature and film matter in that regard. we are like frankenstein's monster trying to re-assemble the creator.

anyways. it's fascinating stuff. i never intended to wind up spending this much of my time devoted to thinking about it. sometimes i feel utterly fucking depressed, and other times i feel somewhat relieved for those rare few moments when i don't react to things like a bloodthirsty chimpanzee hell-bent on his own paradoxical and mystifying desires. there should be a kind of edification of consciousness along the way; it shouldn't all be the bitterest form of marxist ressentiment imaginable. self-alienation is played, imho: we are all fucking alienated. i wonder about this: i think i'm alienated by your alienation, maybe, than merely by my own. and on social media this just gets magnified and amplified, and alienation wars and spirals ensue. it's a vortex like that. we have become addicted to pain and outrage, because those things, maybe - even more than seduction - attract eyeballs, prompt responses, and foster the metaphysics of production, reaction, ressentiment, and all the things that keeps the great infernal wheels turning.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0HZIuX3L5c&t=126s

*addiction* would be another theme worth exploring. it's a danger for the hedonic/eudaimonic society. especially when we think of capital as a kind of force-fed dopamine drip that we can't turn off. these are human, all-too-human things.