/lit/ - Literature

>>11597090
aaagh, what a fabulous post. gives me the shivers.

so first of all, once we cross over into a domain where we are discussing astrophysics and grand economic theory we have to ask, maybe, if this isn't a fucking beautiful place to be in, philosophically speaking. just for what that's worth. the sense of perspective alone is somewhere between nine and fourteen trillion times better than life as it is reported on by the MSM in 2018. my day is already made on this post alone. so that first of all.

i guess the next thought i have is that, when we do cross this sort of rubicon - and this to walk my earlier post back a few steps - at that point you're absolutely right. the impression i get from bataille is that he's aiming his critique at (largely hegelian) metaphysics of scarcity and negativity, the kind of stuff that animates all of the demented political projects that surrounded him. solar generosity blows the roof off of all of that (and gives lacan some material to work with as well), and the sense of the sacred which utopianism aims at is only produced in pointless expenditure and loss. and this is a kind of inhumanist critique of anthropocentric ideology at about the most minimal (or maximal) sense possible. if we are making the leap to a seriously next-level kind of thinking about economics and our place in the universe, then i'll happily admit that bataille will have fulfilled his intellectual mission in the canon of philosophy. but if what gets us there is Space Fascism or Space Communism (or, as it also the case, we simply get buried under bloat and chaos here on earth)...we have to give the man his due.

but again, what really happens when we leave the earth, or when we start thinking about the relationship of the economic sphere to the astrophysical one? it's not like it's a hot topic in the humanities these days. an interplanetary or extraterrestrial kind of thinking really is...well, what doesn't space signify to us? in part, we can already anticipate that if we do get off the earth, it will be because of capital and economic forces in one way or the other. time will tell, i suppose.

apropos of nothing, but i was watching some TNG clips this afternoon and kind of musing about how much the idea of a starfleet was actually required in that post-scarcity universe we associate with utopia. there still have to be chains of command. we will probably have to hope for heroically lucid corporate CEOs rather than starship captains, but...well, the idea was that even in a super-enlightened starfaring civilization we didn't lose our shit completely over diversity politics since there was a mission to carry out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMKtKNZw4Bo

that's a kind of meh ramble tho. anyways, thanks for the excellent and thought-provoking post, enjoy some appropriate aesthetics.

This might be a long one.

>>9077174
The Accursed Share is one of those concepts that underwrites my worldview. Humans are in some sense excessive beings, but we necessarily have to temper and rationalize this. This is the source of that unstable part that Zizek/Lacan/everyone is always finding, the little dark part that creates ideology. Primitive societies are distinguished from our own by concepts of sacrifice, potlatch, and non-fungible trade goods (read Baudrillard, or Mauss, or Szabo for more on this). Modern capitalism is still ultimately connected to these in an archaic psychological sense. My own feeling is that what is needed is a sense of rehabilitation or rapprochement with some of our modernist thinking vis-a-vis economics and civilization. Marx intuits that the basic process of capital is reproduction, and this is why Freudo-Marxism is such a powerful critique of capital itself. However, as some other wise anon pointed out, today the modern left is more skilled at understanding mechanisms than the right is, particularly once selective interests join in with media and politics to produce massive ideological power structures in a neoliberal sense. To some degree I do think that Fukuyama is right: liberal democracy and free-market capital is, in a sense, the 'end of history.' But only if that order is capable of sustaining a long-term balance of growth. What we are seeing today is their inability to do so. Granted, it's not all the fault of the neoliberals; politics and history and culture also play in a role in this. The Middle East has been fucked over in a great many ways.

>I was so pessimistic that the neoliberal status quo was just it, it was the final slide into the singularity, everything was in place for soulless elites to "discipline" us to our logical conclusion as desire feedback machines hooked into our own assholes. And of course you never know the extent of what's going on BEHIND the scenes, let alone what you can see. The fact that any cracks have appeared in the surface is amazing. It feels palpably like history is still alive.

This was more or less how I felt also, and it was killing me, because the fault lines were so clear and obvious (and being ignored by the cultural elite). Now they are starting to erupt in big, ugly, messy ways.

Planetary neoliberalism is not really such a terrible idea, but it needs to be tempered with a genuine and not a superficial understanding of the concept of difference. On top of that, there also needs to be some kind of regulation that prevents, for example, 1%ers from building doomsday bunkers where they can survive post-apocalyptic collapses that are at least in some part produced by their own economic practices. When the banks collapsed in 2008 I was furious because Dick Fuld or Mozillo or whoever didn't go to jail. But, of course, why should they? They were simply playing by the rules of the game.

(cont'd)