/lit/ - Literature

>>13035647
random thought #3: just treat all political movements as being fundamentally aesthetic in nature. try to realize that aesthetics really is ethics on the moral plane, and if you understand what it is that you feel about a given work of art it may well be possible to figure out how a lot of other things are likely to make you feel. nobody's *immune* to aesthetics, it's just that we prefer some things over others, but on Planet Meme representation basically is reality anyways. music makes you feel the way that music makes everybody feel. maybe Bach isn't your cup of tea or whatever, but omega waves will work on you and if you stand six inches back from a Rothko and just stare into it you will probably eventually start to feel something there also. the world is not a matter of indifference to us.

but what if we could just recognize how much of this really is a desire and a search for beauty? so much of it is. discordant modernist works produce discordant modernist feels in us, but there is no right or wrong way to have the feels about the feels, and no way to put into words the feeling we have about a given piece of music. the right thing to do would be to just make more of the music that communicates the feels we have about that - which is more often than not going to lead us to complete failure, and embarrassment, and bewilderment about how difficult it in fact is to make *anything* beautiful at all, which would be a very very good look for us, b/c the sheer power of technological simulation in 2019 is so powerful and omnipresent we tend to forget that none of it came with the creation of the universe. we did this on our own.

Benjamin has written some brilliant stuff about this, about how the journey to see a given work back in the day was also a part of the encounter with the thing itself: you had to *go* there, and that was what produced the effect of anything having an *aura.* in an age of hyper-media aura-cultivation itself is politicized up the ass, since we are constantly needing to curate our own feelings about everything we see, which is reported to us by people who have already done aura-cultivation on our behalf, and so on, and so on, and so on. reality vanishes behind its signs, just as Baudrillard said. and McLuhan. and Heidegger ('The Age of the World Picture' is a good one, read that along with your Benjamin before you get stuck into the French of the 50s and 60s). and so maybe that is why i feel the ascetic pull these days, because it's aesthetic starvation. together with a thorough rinsing-out of all of these meme sensibilities i have developed under the impression that somehow they would be useful someday. turns out they are basically useful for knowing what to bring to the bonfire of the vanities.

this is Kwok Hon-Sum, btw. he seems quite cozy. also i'm going to bed.