/lit/ - Literature

>>12926425
basically what i have learned is the value of not thinking i have new or original ideas to contribute to philosophy itself, let alone politics. i'm pretty sure that if people want to go off the deep end getting tangled up in finger traps they're going to find a way to do it. the best parts of the reading for me are the ones that tell me where to not go any further, to know a dead end when i see one. these days i see a lot of dead ends, but hey, one person's dead end may be another person's royal road.

it's mostly *dis*entangling myself from a whole lot of shit that does not, in fact, belong to me that i have found useful. not playing rigged games and not having pointless arguments and not getting trigged over bullshit that really does not require my hot takes. there are a lot of these things. Heidegger says, and correctly, that we are thrown into existence, but it never really *feels* like what it really is, which is an endless falling. and being Woke or getting in some sense politically activated is i guess for some some kind of moment of awareness but for me what i want to do now is fucking de-Woke myself from a lot of this.

i was thinking of it in kind of a weird way, as though some demiurge were to offer me a deal: 'hey, tell you what - how about i trade you something of inestimable value, that you really want, for all of that horrible toxic garbage you're carrying around with you, that kills you and quietly makes everyone around you feel horrible. how about you give some of that shit to me, and in return, i will exchange it for peace and love and understanding.' obviously i would accept this, but the weird thing is...i find myself refusing to give up ugly shit in exchange for things that are absolutely the things i say that i want. and i know why i do this, too, it's because i somehow want to perform a magical alchemical act on it entirely in my own way and carry on some demented fantasy. but i know it's stupid. i do it anyways. i check Twitter feeds and watch the news and brood on all of this ugly shit as though somehow i think it's going to be something other than what it was today, tomorrow, and get all worked up over it, and i do this over and over again.

i'm reading more of Feuerstein's stuff on yoga and it's vastly preferable to continental stuff these days, it really is. i'm tired of being mad and salty all of the time, it doesn't matter whether you can give a good historical explanation of stuff or not. it's enough to just work on the negative shit that creeps into your brain and that you obsess about all the time. sure, it lines up with Deleuze or whoever else, lots of stuff does. but just kind of staring at the world and wringing my hands over it...it's something i need to stop doing. i believe the hype now about the philosophers, i really do. and if people want to go fucking crazy scapegoating each other they're going to find some way to do it. it galls me, but i'm no fucking saint either.

>>12498259
Space Taoism is a concept worked out in considerable detail by Aminom. if you read these threads or search the Mighty Cruffitan you can read more of his stuff there.

Cosmotech is a kind of a catch-all term i use for talking about what might be called 'post-atheist cyberpunk.' this is where things tend to cross paths with each other. Aminom is working out some of the groundwork for a 'post-atheism,' and i happen to find that particularly interesting because the more i find myself staring into the void of capitalism and catallaxy the more i begin to think that a lot of things we take for granted today are genuine spooks. Marx is for realsies, but by 2019 the question of what constitutes capitalism and what does not becomes very blurry indeed. what is needed is something like a transformation in consciousness, but this isn't a thing that any one individual can simply will into being or force through a kind of political process.

tech isn't going away; tech is pretty fascinating. writers like Stiegler, Simondon, YH, Heidegger et al are right in a space where whatever it is that we are going to learn about the mind going forward is going to happen through tech and in no other way. Land does a lot of conceptual heavy lifting for me in terms of explaining what cyberpunk meant at all, which was a tortuous discourse on the meaning of capital, computers, and postmodernity. but in many ways he is a kind of warning signal as well.

put another way, Cosmotech is a kind of a theme (or theme park) where we can kind of discuss what something like an 'enlightened schizophrenia' might look like. i'm pretty much convinced that Aminom is right about Whitehead and why he matters, and in my own demented laboratory i have come up with approximately 86,734 ways to create hell on earth and very few ways to create something less horrible. and mainly i come to these threads to bitch and complain about that, and show off my collection of battered simulacra. i'm not a philosopher, i'm a failed fiction writer who has become trapped in a diabolical machine i can't seem to get out.

there has to be a break, some kind of epochal shift in the way we are doing things. postmodernism sucks and rage politics sucks. and yet some things, mysteriously, do not suck.

(cont'd)