/lit/ - Literature

>>12005223
>there is no ladder
oh man. now here's something to think about.

>>12005226
>People read all this acceleration stuff and they think "all this madness, the incoherence..it must be true" like a Russian serf would regard a holy fool.

less madness than a kind of ingrained sympathy for hysterics.

although this is only my own very small contribution to this stuff, i think one aspect of what you are getting at at least touches on technophobia, or the frustration people have with computers and such when they break down. there is on some deep level something that has to happen to us meatbags in order to actually get the kind of technological civilization that is going to make itself happen, whether we want it to or not.

economically speaking, The Spice Must Flow, and on a psychic level Land ventured himself as a quasi-Nietzschean figure by being an original coal-mine canary. but the industrial revolution has an irreducibly *psychic* dimension also, which is what ruffles so many feathers. the Death of God was one thing, the Death of Marx would be something altogether, especially if huge numbers of the population had moved their soteriological eggs from the Church to socialism (as they did, and i think this explains why so much of postmodernity is reaction, with Trump in turn being reaction to reaction, and so on). that was what Land opened his imagination up to, and it burned him out completely to contemplate.

things don't necessarily have to be always learned so intensely, however. a Simondonian 'mechanological' society may be another episode of culture-wave things that historically have played out in much the same way - mainly fear and reaction. one of the things Land is getting at, to my mind, is that what we are feeling today is the chickens coming home to roost. historically Europeans exported culture and tech worldwide, in a parallel process; now that formerly Europe-exclusive culture is a global one. Capital has transcended any particular geographic locale: you can sell a Coke to anyone, regardless of race, creed, or religion. this is hardly news. what is more radical (and insightful) about Land's thought is that a proto-technical culture was produced in this way through the logic of the market itself: capital as computer, processing Desire.

one fly in the ointment would be, what happens if Desire is withdrawn? we could all stop consuming tomorrow, but the sad thing about this is that it doesn't actually slow down anything. and dialing it back to the various experiments in 20C central planning is also probably not going to work (although Chinese-style Social Credit is going to try, with its newfound technology). i find just thinking about the implications of the Real having become the Symbolic and then the Digital (or, as YH would say, the reverse)..well, it's heady stuff. we're just such *suckers* when it comes to our drives.

https://www.hkw.de/media/texte/pdf/2017_2/2o3tiger/170530_2o3Tiger_PDFs_Yuk_Hui_press_new.pdf