/lit/ - Literature

>>10240179
so it's less that he had any big ideas for what society should do, and maybe more was prepared to offer himself up as a test case for what *critics* should do - namely, digest fully the heisenberg principle, and do not pretend that *merely because you are a critic* that you are somehow able to stand away from that which you are observing.

doesn't this actually make a lot of sense today? land makes the point about capital being insufficiently advanced schizophrenia - ok. we know that there is something very, very unusual going on with the libidinal economy, that our desires make us buy and consume and so on, and this gives us the clusterfuck world in which we live.

baudrillard kind of goes this unusual - and not necessarily wrong - road of *not offering any solutions* and just plunging full-on into the weirdness of hyperreality. and lord ha'mercy does he produce some fascinating stuff as a result. but the one thing that he does *not* do, in the end, is *call for anyone else's head to be taken.* unlike so many today, he's not blaming anyone or anything for this process: he's triangulating on an ontohistorical process that is depressing as fuck, but not really all that crazy, once you peel back the layers of jargon: we simulate and we make copies that imply a centre which is not there, but which is sprung into creation by our desire to imitate it. and imitation is everything. put another way, the revolution wouldn't happen because the revolution could *only* be televised: and, as such, it would never be an actual revolution.

primitive societies practice forms of ritual destruction to preserve social coherence, and we moderns break out of all of that - for a *lot* of different reasons. industrialization catapults the west ahead of the rest of the world, and revolutions political and theological continue to produce ever-more individuated, modern, abstracting beings. our problem is accumulation and bloat rather than scarcity. the only thing *we* have an actual deficiency of is what he would call reality. nor as pic rel suggests would he have signed off fully on landian acceleration either.

i think he just fits every definition of what a *writer* is and does, thinks and feels. there's a whole world there in his head. bleak as fuck, but goddamn if he isn't fucking interesting to read. and hey, if you wind up *not* falling for the next peanut advertisement you see - or, maybe even better, becoming utterly spellbound by it - how is that not just a good thing in the long run?

sometimes advocating for no hope is actually the right thing to do, if the alternative is to hope for shit that isn't there or is just going to mean heads have to roll for the Truth to come out in an orgy of blood. maybe we all have inner aztecs within us. maybe the fact that philosophy is *gigantically disappointing* is better than thinking otherwise.

and maybe all of it is an impetus to live beyond the critical, beyond the political, beyond the economic.