/lit/ - Literature

>>12922011
for me at least i obsessed about Land as much as he did not only because he was anathema to the 90s-style deconstruction that gives you everything that drives you nuts about Woke stuff today, but also because he's really writing about some of the stuff that actually is going to matter going forward: AI, for instance, and finance, and much else. end of the world scenarios and collapse don't interest me so much: i'm not *rooting* for the apocalypse in a literal, Mad Max sense. i would much prefer people just get the message and optimize for intelligence as he suggests. the picture thus painted is more of a transition period, a kind of leap to another dimension of experience and existence. how vigorously anyone wants to take it or how much they want to risk is up to them. the other thing about Land is that he's theorizing automation in a way that presents a pretty good picture of what happens if people *don't* do this either, like the world's most passive Hegel: what if the Spirit of the Future just takes care of itself? and perhaps in a way Hegel too had some sense of this.

so it's not like i think the aftermath of a collapse will be good. the collapse as it happens isn't good, and frankly the reasons for the collapse happening in the first place aren't good either. very little of any of it is actually good! philosophy can be a pretty grim and gloomy business. but this too comes as a result, and perhaps a necessary one, of the fallout from idealism, and the fallout from the romanticism that followed it: capitalism for Land *is* nihilism, nihilism in the 21C isn't quoting Kierkegaard and staring at stars, it's Instagram and complete self-absorption into the algorithms. Baudrillard saw this too.

i think on some level there is a kind of politics that has always been a shield or mask for existential dread, for people who need meaning and find it in those ways. Land is basically diagnosing a lot of all-too-human problems with this approach and finding new configurations for nihilism that people didn't even know they had. in the age of the computer protocol it makes way too much sense. but it is my sense these are things that have to be engaged with on their terms rather than our own. humans are up to this challenge, i think.

>>12444332
>My idea of a cure, which I have come across while making my own autotherapy for OCD is, ironically, to "out-iron" the irony.
well, you're in the right thread for that, anyways. feel free to share your workarounds and ideas to your heart's content. that is in many ways my own project as well, and Aminom's, and many others' too, i suspect. that is what we do here.

in the fallout from the decline of Christianity, Marx and Nietzsche represent alternatives to What We Should Do Now. Fascism is the phenomenon that it is because it is an intoxicating mashup of *both* - again, Aryan Socialism is highly appealing to both Aryans and Socialists, and especially to Aryan Socialists. it represents a genuine conundrum for many, and Deleuze went directly in there to see what was going on. his conclusion was that *it really was what people wanted.* of course, when people are coerced, or frightened, or vengeful, they do tend to want things...and in many ways, the corollaries between that phenomenon and the current one are not that hard to understand. because everybody today relies on the market - and not only the market, but the entire world-view that allows for them (social democracies + free markets) - when there are big rumbles from the underworld, or intimations that the ride may be coming to an end, people will talk themselves, or allow themselves to be talked into, moral cures for material problems, and vice-versa. but it is a *doomed* scenario at that point. the only people who will be consistently right will be the fanatics and the cynics.

as for placebo-universe...it's really not that complicated. Baudrillard spent his entire career writing about exactly this, about how the simulacrum becomes preferable to the real. Deleuze also: the model devours its copy. Deleuze was a lot more open to the chaos of difference than Baudrillard was, JB was a sociologist and clung ferociously to the subject-object distinction all the way to the end. my sense of him is always that he remained a committed Marxist in a world that yearly talked itself ever-more disastrously into a delirious fantasy that said 'well, because we are so happy, Marx was wrong.' Marx was wrong about *some* things, perhaps. but JB was a close observer of the cultural implications of what Real Neoliberalism would mean, in the long run, and he would not have been surprised that we have ended up where we have ended up, which is to not only be unable to distinguish reality from fiction, but even to go a step further and weaponize the fictions against the Real.

this is what gives the disaster of postmodernity its grandeur. we have gone full circle: from skepticism towards metanarratives back to a demand for unconditional fidelity to *given* metanarratives, precisely because all metanarratives are equally open to question. and the battle-lines are drawn up over the idea of happiness itself, which becomes increasingly paranoid, and as it does, brings out the very worst in people.

>>11877480
kek. me? i wouldn't have much to say, really, except a small tag that says 'don't start with this one.'

he was a pretty based guy tho. i would have liked it if sloterdijk had included a chapter about him in Philosophical Temperaments, i feel like those guys would have been duelling kindred spirits. two contrarian continental aesthetes with strong feels about nietzsche and modernity. JB even gives him a couple of shout-outs in one of his later books:

>Hence Sloterdijk's hypothesis that 'the reality of reality is the eternal return of violence' To which he opposes a 'pacifism that is in keeping with our most advanced theoretical intuitions, a deep-level pacifism, based on a radical analysis of the circularity of violence, deciphering the forces that determine its eternal return.' A radical analysis, then, to remedy the radical evil. But can a 'radical' analysis have a finality of whatever kind? Is it not itself part of the process of evil?

>But if we move from potential mutation to real projection (as Peter Sloterdijk does in his Menschenpark project), we lose all philosophical distance; and thought, in mingling with the real course of things, offers merely a false alternative to the operation of the system. Thought must refrain from instructing, or being instructed by, a future reality, for, in that game, it will always fall into the trap of a system that holds the monopoly of reality.

if i was to write a longer intro on The Meaning of Baudrillard it would probably begin with the need to take one of france's most arcane prophet-seers and ask him how he felt about the world in 2018. i would be very grateful if he deflated a few of my suspicions about acceleration, for one thing, by gracefully and wisely reminding us that hyperstitional speculation on the nature of capital still remains, perhaps, within one of the orders of simulation, and probably warrants a well-deserved kick in the pants accordingly. we kind of miss him now, as we miss most of these guys. even if in some sense the sheer potency of their thought got us into this mess in the first place.

i was also thinking about him today in another way, about the remark on the back of Agony of Power:

>Power itself must be abolished—and not solely because of a refusal to be dominated, which is at the heart of all traditional struggles—but also, just as violently, in the refusal to dominate. Intelligence cannot, can never be in power because intelligence consists of this double refusal.

the abolishment of power, the refusal to dominate: now there's a pretty fine message for you. i'll co-sign that one. that intelligence consists in the double refusal. i like that.

>>11714474
that's a good one. one of baudrillard's best books, imho.

>>11714553
nice, i've seen this one on libgen. reading norbert wiener has made even young nick slightly less radical, in a way (which is a good thing). cybernetics doesn't necessarily mean Schizolupic Turing Cops &c, unless you insist on taking it mashed it up with marx, deleuze, methamphetamine and jungle music. young nick was a wild guy but in many ways he's really just looking at what much more sober guys before him were studying. kind of a relief, actually.

>undermines the conception of cybernetics as top down science of authoritarian control positing instead a cybernetics as performative-revealing ontology

no doubt how it should be. oh those nomadic war-machines.

we have no fucking idea what we're doing with the internet, do we? if somebody had told you, however many years ago, that someday you would just get All The Books, Free. also All The Movies, and All The Games too. just for free. all of it. doesn't that blow your mind sometimes? it does to me.

>>11714660
i read that one a few years ago, i think. iirc it was the section called Pathologies of Epistemology that i really liked. i should give that another look. bateson is a cool guy.

>>11715070
>In the same way, people can't allow themselves to see that Psychoanalysis, Catholicism and Scientology are all functionally the same Schema.

have you read this guy? he's an ex-scientologist who also has a lot to say about land and acceleration. i kind of think having been seriously into scientology at one point actually would give you a pretty unique perspective on how these things work.

http://theanti-puritan.blogspot.com/2018/08/exposition-on-landian-accelerationism.html

>You tell your Priest/Therapist/Auditor your Sins/Behaviors/Abberations so you can get the Demon/Trauma/Engrams out and be Absolved/Healthy/Clear

this was deleuze's thing too. i'm still kind of attached to the idea of psychotherapy, but it definitely can fringe into exactly what you're talking about. it surely must have agitated the shit out of lacan.

i do kind of like the idea, though, of analysis, psychological transference. that in a sense you walk out of your own symptom and sort of initiate yourself along the way into becoming a sort of journeyman analyst yourself. no doubt this has enormous potential for abuse and intellectual fraud. but analysts see other analysts, and so on, and so on. you join this folding circle, trading a symptom for a kind of therapeutic and mildly cultish literary conspiracy.

>On a different tangent, our world is a soup of ancient viral, bacterial, fungal, botanical chemical propaganda, and so much of our mind is influenced by the underlying architecture of the mollusk-CNS, the reptile-Autonomic, and the Mammalian-emotional foundation under our human brain that we can completely understand our socioeconomic and ecological crises and be totally powerless to act.

this is a pretty great post anon.

Any fans of Baudrillard around today?

Recent events have me returning to his essay, "The Spirit of Terrorism".
>Terrorism is immoral. The World Trade Center event, that symbolic challenge, is immoral, and it is a response to a globalization which is itself immoral. So, let us be immoral; and if we want to have some understanding of all this, let us go and take a little look beyond Good and Evil. When, for once, we have an event that defies not just morality, but any form of interpretation, let us try to approach it with an understanding of Evil.

>This is precisely where the crucial point lies — in the total misunderstanding on the part of Western philosophy, on the part of the Enlightenment, of the relation between Good and Evil. We believe naively that the progress of Good, its advance in all fields (the sciences, technology, democracy, human rights), corresponds to a defeat of Evil. No one seems to have understood that Good and Evil advance together, as part of the same movement. The triumph of the one does not eclipse the other — far from it. In metaphysical terms, Evil is regarded as an accidental mishap, but this axiom, from which all the Manichaean forms of the struggle of Good against Evil derive, is illusory. Good does not conquer Evil, nor indeed does the reverse happen: they are at once both irreducible to each other and inextricably interrelated. Ultimately, Good could thwart Evil only by ceasing to be Good since, by seizing for itself a global monopoly of power, it gives rise, by that very act, to a blowback of a proportionate violence.

I can't help but compare this kind of thinking to Landian Accelerationism. As the 'good' grows, so to does the 'evil'. Technology allows for spectacular things, maybe even immortality, but also full on global extinction. Anyone know of writers trying to fuse or contrast Baudrillard and Accelerationism?

>>9645458
I don't know but it's pure class. This was my wallpaper for the longest time.

>>9645461
*teleports behind Jean*
Stop fucking each other, obviously...

>>8845668

3/4
>Baudrillard made a career writing about the consumerist society, yet I can’t help but think about how he cultivated a consumerist following of his own. Blatant obscurantism, needless coining of buzzwords, tons repetition in the latter half of his oeuvre, and he never actually endorsed any course of action.

Absolutely not. The enormous and terrible irony about Jean Baudrillard is that he is held up as the poster-boy for obscurantist rhetoric when he was - I will say this until I am blue in the face - its most tortured and prescient observer. He wound up becoming a *scapegoat* for the system that nobody - *nobody* - had a sharper critical eye for. There are no buzzwords going on there, and he was *mortified* by what he was witness to. As for course of action: this is to be super-unfair. It’s totally impossible to privilege Nietzsche’s response (in a word: tragedy) and then criticize Baudrillard for recognizing this *without endorsing it*. It wasn’t that he *couldn’t* prescribe a course of action, he knew that *prescribing programmatic courses of action for the masses would be *hypocritical.* He knew this all too well, which is why he *refrained from doing so* - but rather than accept what that meant, he tried to leave the door open for people to follow him down the rabbit hole and find answers of their own. He knew all too well the problem was offering a platform for mass action. There isn’t one. And it’s why it makes no sense at all that he is basically excoriated for refusing to do what he absolutely knew was wrong: propose an ideology. Nietzsche didn’t, but Baudrillard in his heart never agreed all the way with Nietzsche. And neither do I.

>>8757834
I mean I can't lie, anon. It's not like I haven't read Nietzsche up and down and I understand the heroic-tragic perception. Truth, illusion and fiction form a very complicated, and seductive, knot. Maybe I'm just trying to move on to something else at the moment. Not sure why, tbqh.

>Why we should overcome commodity fetishism?

This is by no means a crazy question. There is, no doubt, not going to be any abolishment of capital. I certainly don't want this, since it's giving us the internet, among much else. As a friend of mine was saying just the other day, it's unbridled violence and desire that will eventually get us into space. Quite a thought. I guess I kind of thought that, for some reason, going to space meant post-scarcity thought as well. Not sure about this anymore.

I guess my own sense now is of the larger consequences of this: ecological, for instance, or political. We would, and should, all like to live and consume like affluent first-worlders. But I am not sure if the planet itself can support this, and even before that there is the ever-fragile international political order of things, which may get a little more complicated as resources like oil, water, food and so on become scarce. At some point that's going to to happen. As Frank Herbert says, The Spice Must Flow.

So it's that I am both disappointed and resigned, is what I mean to say. By the time world leaders are on the news telling us that We Must All X, it's because the economic/global pinball was set in motion a long time ago, and now it has guttered out, and this is why they have appeared to tell us what to do. That's all. Politics strikes me as simply being the media form of economic determinism, and after a while you just tend to acquire a jaded sort of perspective on this stuff. I'm starting to feel as though I am spamming this image, but hey. There are worse memes out there.

>Finding the true is just a fiction you tell yourself.

True enough, but I'll go a step farther as well: the truth itself is a fiction, but fictions are what construct our reality. And that's arguably as good as I'm going to get. Being a failed fiction writer - surely this is no surprise! - has actually taught me quite a lot about this stuff.

>Your hero is already capitalist safety stamp approved

Would you mind explaining this further? I'm not sure what you mean, but you might be on to something interesting here and I'd like to know more. You're right, I also don't think there is any other mode either. It's just that sometimes capitalism *itself* just still feels very much like instinctual survival, except in a fancier context. Nature and culture really aren't so different, and, well, I'm not as all-in on Nietzsche as I used to be. As the above post indicates, I'm finding a lot in Eastern stuff these days, but it doesn't make the world beyond any less sunny. Anyways.

>>8733595
I think it's worth bearing in mind also how much Z's perceptions are shaped by his experience with Stalinism, because Stalin was this cynic supreme who knew all the dirty little tricks about imagery and propaganda that Z now finds - admittedly, in a much more subtle and possibly even naive way - in Western/postmodern consumer culture. It reminds me of the Frankfurt School coming to America and asking themselves, Why do people want this? If it's so obvious that commercialism and media are manipulating them, why do they submit to it? Why do they endorse it? Do they want this? Is it just all ironic? Theodore Adorno would never have understood Hollywood, but at the same time, since he's Adorno, we read him and immediately feel his mind at work. The Frankfurt School is enormously important today, but one gets the feeling that the zeitgeist has shifted because we are all aware that the thing is wrong, and yet equally so is the Marxist solution, because consumer capitalism is also giving us, among other things, the Internet, and we don't want to give that up. So it's really a pretty astonishing world we are living in. I love me some Baudrillard, but his whole corpus is a lament for modernity and at some point I think we are required to understand that the mourning period is over and we have to try and live in this place somehow without completely selling our souls. The problem with reading Baudrillard is that his criticism is so fucking on-point that you want to think like that too, and yet, maybe something else is called for.

To get back to your question, I do think that Z is trying to raise people's consciousness with regards to how much ideology is a *voluntary* project, rather than one aggressively imposed on you from without. That is how ideology works for Z: you already have it within you, and then you find a seductive sort of confirmation of that in the world beyond, and before you know it you are off to the races. But just look at how tortured Z is when he tries to come up with some kind of alternative. He endorsed Trump, for instance, but only ironically, that is, in order to engender "real" change later on, because he thought Clinton was the truly dangerous one. I can sort of see where he's coming from, but I also feel that beyond a certain horizon what is being called Marxism has gone through so many wormholes as to no longer be recognizable. I'm glad Z is out there cranking out books, but I think what we need is a new set of ideas and concepts for looking at capitalism that really reflect the conditions of reality and thought in the 21C.

Having said all that...posting quite possibly my favourite desktop wallpaper of all time.

>>8713274
confirmed baudrillardfag here.

For me you can divide his work into roughly two halves, the Marxist phase and the Nietzschean phase. Political Economy of the Sign is his last big Marxian book, and then he moves ever further into his more arcane territory: SE&D and Seduction are sort of the bridge books imho.

S&S and Simulations can be tough going at first but it's only because he's developing the social consequences of his thesis of the precession of the model in an increasingly complicated form. If you read his early work, like System of Objects - and nobody on earth could describe a fucking kitchen better than him - he's really just doing this awesomely on-point literary criticism.

It's important to remember I think that Baudrillard never really thought of himself as a philosopher, but as a sociologist. He doesn't think systemically or structurally. Even at his time he was regarded as the scourge of the profession. So he doesn't really set down these axiomatic programs for what he's going to do. He just puts himself about six inches away from the screen and stares into it and writes.

For me SE&D and Seduction are the ones to read to see how he is thinking in his later work, because he's abandoned any boilerplate sense of there being a correspondence between use and exchange value (remember these?) and has just gone full-on into the free play of the signifier. S&S is undeniably tough going but it's never really necessary to slog through this stuff, I think. Just pack up and move on to the next cool gnostic insight and eventually you'll start to see where he was at.

>>8688667
Co-sign.

This was my wallpaper for the longest time.