/lit/ - Literature

>>11854207
yeah, probably. but perhaps there will be this period of shift first. in a sense we're all postmodernists now, we're all skeptics about the enterprise of civilization. the question is whether we go on building culture on the ruins of critique and revolution or make a turn towards order: r/acc, l/acc, u/acc, or z/acc.

the thing that to me seems irrefutable is that this is an age of technology. three great modes of ontotheological escape: religion, the state, sexuality. and today (for some) all of these are non-options. the church will not reclaim the influence it used to have, the dream of a revolutionary state is either over or can only be a close approximation of some 20C dystopia (see China) and sexuality, irony and semiotic play belongs to the waltz of capital and neomarxism, which are strange bedfellows. i've been walking past a poster for the Rocky Horror Picture Show in the mornings and thinking that it is this and not cybernetics that is truly the completion of metaphysics, the ironic smirk of the time-traveling libertine. sexuality isn't what you think it is, and taking your cues from it often leads to disappointment. especially if you want to wed these to hegelian notions in the PoS.

which is a good thing, in a sense, and yet it belongs to the general disenchantment and the weaponization/commercialization of affect by capital and technology. seduction is a powerful tool and it is possible that in creative normative discourse sadomasochism is the yin and the yang of propriety. scandalizing normies was great fun for a long time, but eventually Spectacle caught on and began reciprocating the signal. the unsurprising result was a culture permanently raised on in-jokes, cues and critique of ideology as baseline condition for aesthesis. the old saw is like a dharma: with fascism, aestheticization of politics, with communism politicization of aesthetics. with neomarxism a hotwire act: the aestheticization of politicization, the politicization of aesthetic fetish, and all of it to keep you too afraid to stop painting by numbers while the machines DL everything they need to know about you. but it flattens everything out into 2D and turns people into neo-victorians. history becomes elevator music.

and so what is perhaps called for now is intelligence and technologization. *intelligence* is still unironically sexy. the technologization of culture to me follows directly from its postmodern plasticization with very little imagination required. the problem for artists is that this culture lacks any kind of horizon besides the eudaimonic, which is bunk if it is just always being harassed by seduction and paranoia.