/lit/ - Literature

>>12407923
so now, a personal admission: there are days (like this one) when i find myself wondering if arguing for Land is not like rooting for the house in blackjack. people have been arguing about Marx for a hundred and fifty years, and Hegel for two centuries. Land is eminently a devotee of that tradition, with the surprising caveat that unlike the usual cadre, he is actually arguing *for* capital supremacy, rather than against it. this is what gives his writing a kind of obscene dimension: he's finding the grotesque core of what what would otherwise be bog-standard neoliberalism. the Surprising Plot Twist that he is contributing to one of the oldest and most venerable conversations on in philosophy - Unironic Communism, wat do? - is that he argues that neither the academic Marxists nor their doppelgangers, the insufferably lightweight postmodernists, are taking capitalism *seriously enough.* and so he is adding a futurist/horrorcore twist to the plot.

in many ways, this kind of sets us up for a kind of Grand Inquisitor scenario. as much as once upon a time, in Soviet Russia, nobody was *ever* committed enough to the Revolution save Stalin himself, it is entirely possible that nobody will ever be committed enough to Synthetic Kantian Time as the algorithms. the future will always be deferred, in that way. the upside, however, if there is one, is the exposure of a monumental black hole at the core of postmodernity: capital itself, which launches a great many postmodern ships. the thing that i find myself agreeing with Land on lies in the nature of these ships *never being intended to reach their destination,* because they ultimately fall back on something more like a *confession* than a critique. down these roads lie precisely the virtue-signaling black holes we are becoming accustomed to today.

this is why i think the strengths of Land's work lie in reading them as theories rather than as action plans (even if, as action plans, i don't really see contemporary hardware limitations et al as being problems). like Negarestani, Land is carving out a *theory of modernity* which is far more interesting than critiques of the same which are by 2019 inseparable from a kind of intense, and compulsive, narcissistic personality disorder. that perhaps a compulsively narcissistic shitposting gimmickposter like myself would be attracted to them may not seem all that surprising as a result. but Land is who he is because, sort of like Spengler's last soldier, alone at his post, he has refused to give up the economic analysis, which he brings back with a vengeance. ultimately, however, it is i think an argument against decadence, or a kind of inflation spiral no less philosophical than economic. arguing for Bitcoin as the truth of modernity is simply the logical result for him of three decades of grappling with semiotic inflation.