/lit/ - Literature

Here's an interesting one to think about ('Art as Insurrection').

>Doric civilization, the hard Apollonian spine of western culture, vaunting the defiant erectness of its architecture, is fundamentally defensive in nature.

Fundamentally *defensive.* This is a pretty interesting tipping point in terms of where Land's politics turn to the right. Order isn't necessarily something that gets stamped on a positive creativity or imagination, it's a defense mechanism against a devouring chaos that has no end.

The straight line and the curved line. We all know about the horrors of modernity today: in a word, Heidegger. You can extrapolate from this to the possibility of a *neomodernity* that stands as a ward against baked-in chaos. That neomodernity is basically the political aesthetic (and aestheticized politics) of counter-postmodernity. Back to the future.

With, of course, the caveat that that which is *truly* modern is in a sense cybernetic if not fully computerized and in the long run is likely to divest itself fully of the need for any human operators or agents once it comes online.

This is where we've come to today, where culture resembles the later sequences of the Sorcerer's Apprentice and Mickey is swamped by the dancing brooms. Shout-outs to the creators of Fantasia here: the terror of those dancing brooms for Mickey (more Icarus than Prometheus) is *twofold:* it is at once the fascistic rhythm of their march as well as the drowning water they carry in their buckets. The final sequences of the Sorcerer's Apprentice (a favorite of Baudrillard's too, btw) actually describe a double terror and fascination: death by mechanization and death by drowning. Each feeds into the other in an escalating circuit. Which one is ultimately going to kill Mickey? Does it really matter?

Mickey doesn't get killed, of course. Incredibly, he gets rescued by the angry Master of the House...