/lit/ - Literature

>>12693941
i am actually entertaining a kind of weird notion these days about the return of the divine out of the maximization of the profane, although it's more just in fiction and kind of journal-musings than anything i think is serious. it has something to do with neoliberalism and capitalism opening up something like a perpetual war of difference, a black hole in reality, through which old gods and demons and monsters return. perhaps this is all necessary, such that we return to the more sober values of the Enlightenment afterwards, having learned that...even when the gods return we are not saved? neoliberal capital becomes this kind of insane experiment/science-project with no end in sight...

the Aztecs lived in fear of their gods, and the world was animated by all kinds of powers and forces beyond their control. perhaps it will be the same with us. the Internet kind of forcibly teaches us about empathy and mimetics, money seems to become an extension of languages and control, we all become continually sucked into this virtual life, the time of social media and the internet, the time of business...these are awesome information explosions that are completely changing our view of the mind, time, our selves, others...

as i said, it's not a well-baked theory, but a kind of an oscillating wave between eras of reason and unreason, not necessarily dialectical. but waves in which we seem to be governed by different axioms, different senses of what it means to be at all, individualized or collectivized. i'm quite fond of Wilber's ideas about the development of collective consciousness, the Atman Project and the like; it's sort of like Hegel East. Land has his own dark critique predicated on the jettisoning of humanity; i'm not really for this personally, but i think it does corrode a lot of necrotic bullshit left over from the 1970s and 1980s. the search for consciousness still seems to be a noble goal, the search for meaning.

'tis well and truly an adventure to read the philosophers, anyways. no point in being a cynic, paranoia still rules.

>>12617770
>I will never understand why the people mentioned in these threads like Heidegger and Land treat technology as if it is separate from humanity, or that one must be sacrificed to the other, or that these things grow separately. It's a strange notion to me.
this is exactly why YH is something relatively new, but he would say it's really Gilbert Simondon who is the path-breaker, as well as Stiegler's updating of Heidegger for the computer age (as tertiary retention, recorded memory) and for his own updating of that, tertiary protention (the computer memory which knows and records you in advance, and brings you into the age of recursivity and automation and the rest of Big Data). the questions you have brought up are exactly the things that make YH relatively unique. Heidegger has certain theories of tech that are good, but somewhat antiquated; Marx has all kinds of things to say about industrial tech; Land is Land; but YH thinks there is another way of looking at tech from this Simondonian way, and using terms that are relatively unique - such as individuation and the like.

>How does YH approach this, is it from a similar angle?
i know i did a mini-rundown on Simondonian thought in one of the Cosmotech threads, although i can't remember which one. there was a longer exploration of YH's stuff in this thread tho, perhaps it will be illuminating.

>>/lit/thread/S11931809

>Does he say anything about Nietzsche ever, who bypassed the entire distinction, clumping it all together under will to power?
not really. Heidegger is more interesting to him, and mostly he looks at Nietzschean thought through Heidegger's understanding (again, if you disagree with Heidegger for this, that's fine...just saying that's what YH does and who he takes his cues from). the will-to-power for YH is basically the Gestell of Heidegger, or those are the things he's interested in. if you've had some exposure to Heidegger already it might be easier...but, at the same time, YH's book on China actually works as a pretty good introduction to a lot of these ideas also, both East and West (he's a balanced and insightful scholar of both). i greentexted passages i thought were most interesting and posted some of them to that thread.

so not so much Nietzsche, but Heidegger's version of him, and YH's commentary on that, and in a context related to what Land is saying about these things also, without repeating him.

apropos of nothing i also have this bitchin' tumblr image i was going to use for a Cosmotech but i don't know when i will do that. so i'll stick it here. enjoy