/lit/ - Literature

>>12408184
it is a man suffering an *intense fear of the crowd,* because the mind of the crowd has been co-opted by Big Data. does this really sound so crazy? it honestly doesn't to me. as a thought experiment - instead of Heidegger's Being, substitute Land's Capital: 'above Temporalization there is nothing.' this is existentialism updated for the age of Facebook and data-driven advertisement. or, if you prefer, imagine being trapped in a nightmarish version of the Truman Show, from which you cannot escape. in this version, however, the Director has been fired and the show is now being run - as an experiment - by algorithms. what would happen? we adjust to the programming; shit, maybe we even *go along with it.* why not? maybe it doesn't make a difference. maybe we should go along with it. maybe there is no difference between subversion and fidelity.

now i know i'm not quite saying this right here, but...well, i don't mind leaving that one open-ended for now. there's something in the connection between Heidegger and Land, some point i want to make here. maybe my brain is just getting tired at this point. will revisit this later if it still seems interesting.

>>12408206
this is a very good post, and i agree with a lot of it. what makes Land interesting is this nightmarish thought-experiment he conducts, which results in a theory of modernity about as unshackled from humanism as one could imagine. he not only jettisons the endgame of Marxism (Revolution), he also jettisons Hegel, and then converts Deleuze's attraction to Spinoza into Capital-as-Demiurge. the one thing you can't say about it is that it is boring. it is certainly thought-provoking. and it definitely alters one's perspective on postmodernity, which - for me, at least - is quite refreshing. and if teleoplexy is for realsies, then you need a perspective on that process which is as outside dialectics as can be: for Land, that's Kant.

but it's why i think the comparisons to Heidegger aren't so crazy either. Landian paranoia is like 'Marxist phenomenology of sentient capital waking up.' but really it's no weirder than Heideggerian phenomenology, in some sense: just a lot more spooky, and with less poetry.