/lit/ - Literature

>§ 13. Quasi-finally, the evaluation of teleoplexy is a research program which teleoplexy itself undertakes. The comprehensive value of capital is an emergent estimate, generated automatically by its inherent analytical intelligence, from prices corrected for commercial relativity (in the direction of 'fundamental values') and discounted for historical virtuality (in the direction of reliable risk modelling). The intricacy of these calculations is explosively fractionated by logical problems of self-reference-both familiar and as-yet-unanticipated-as it compounds through dynamics of competitive cognition in artificial time. If modernity has a spontaneous teleoplexic self-awareness, it corresponds to the problem of techonomic naturalism, immanently approached: How much is the world worth? From the perspective of teleoplexic reflexion, there is no final difference between this commercially-formulated question and its technological complement: What can the earth do? There is only self-quantification of teleoplexy or cybernetic intensity, which is what computerized financial markets (in the end) are for. As accelerationism closes upon this circuit of teleoplexic self-evaluation, its theoretical 'position'-or situation relative to its object-becomes increasingly tangled, until it assumes the basic characteristics of a terminal identity crisis.

this is land and not ellul, and this is an ellul thread but still. technique is having an identity crisis about whether or not it needs humankind to continue its self-evolution, and humankind is fatally bound up with its dependence on something that seems to want to shrug itself free of us. after all, no alien force thrust this upon us (well...1992 land would disagree, but w/ev). we do this to ourselves.

but on the subject of eudaimonia, or a technical eudaimonia, this is kind of the paradox of capital: that money is the labyrinth that leads to all of the things that make you materially happy without offering you any escape from material happiness itself. the thing about modern consumption is that it punishes you as much for not desiring as for desiring too much, which is part of what zizek/lacan's thought about 'Enjoy!' means.

we're already getting as much soft communism in the world now, but it's debatable also whether the accelerating hard capitalism land advocates that is the alternative isn't just hyper-protestant miserabilism cranked up to eleven. but it seems like a vain project to try and make nick land happy.

there's got to be a better way. and a better object for philosophy too.

>>9658900
One more thing about that picture: note how much there is incarnated and projected onto the dancing broom.

It has *two* jobs simultaneously: it sweeps and it carries. It reterritorializes by collecting dust and deterritorializes by splashing water. You can't psychoanalyze it, it's performing its function. It's far more dangerous than Frankenstein's Monster, which at least has a head (and a voice with which to ask existential questions of its creator, Shakespeare-style). The Broom is pleasantly indifferent.

Ultimately what makes it so dangerous is its core design: to *serve and facilitate.* It doesn't come equipped with weapons to destroy its enemies, defeat evil cats or mice or whatever. Does it have a gender? Doesn't really matter, it could be male or female. You could believe it as either - a sort of Wittgensteinian duckrabbit. Though of course it is properly neither. How about ethnicity? Broom. All we know is that it is very useful, and that there are millions more just like it ready and waiting. In terms of Heideggerian authenticity, what's more authentic than a peasant broom and buckets of river water? Everything Baudrillard ever said about trans-everythingness is there in the broom. It is all signs of itself and no ultimate or final signifier. And it allows to Mickey basically seduce himself with the promise of happiness. It doesn't need to speak, it incarnates the basically charming and forgivable desires of its creator for prolonged idleness. If the Last Man is the end-product of civilization, the Broom is even more Last than that and perhaps its inevitable cultural achievement. One of the all-time great morality plays.