/lit/ - Literature

whitehead is *stupidly* awesome gents. he may have indeed Nailed It as far as speculative philosophy goes in the 21C. ANW doesn’t talk about technology, true, or economics, or aesthetics, for that matter, and at least for me those three things play no small role in why i wound up reading Uncle Nick in the first place: a totalizing Economic-Aesthetic-Technical thing-in-itself is what we call the Spectacle. it *is* the Matrix, the machine that lives on your dreams, the Computer That Processes Desire and which may be writing its own code as teleoplexy. it is to Whitehead’s enduring credit that he decided that there were still other things more interesting to think about. Whitehead is an absolute boss.

you might feel tempted to ask: if Whitehead is such a big deal, why haven’t you made him one of your Seven Wise Men of Cosmotech? clearly he fits in there. and this would be a good question! i guess my answer for now would be that a lot of what prompts me to write and think has to do with a kind of a discourse on time and modernity as it relates to culture, and in that realm the three great Masters of Suspicion dominate the landscape completely: Marx, Freud, Nietzsche. in some order. right-socialism or left-socialism. and because in that mix Speedy Nick Land basically oscillated from end of the spectrum to the other during the course of his intellectual career, and found astonishingly interesting things at both poles. so inasmuch as i am kind of hoping for a *transcendence* or sort of critical mass-point from which to describe these phenomena, the story does have a continual cathectic obsession with politics, culture, mimesis and so on.

and Whitehead doesn’t belong to that. maybe this is the point. the place where we switch from Acceleration to Cosmotech is like a hinge, and perhaps that is where Whitehead’s role is found: because either we *are* talking about Time and History in a sense where the Masters of Suspicion are predominant, *or we aren’t,* and in which case we can begin to take our cues from a different kind of thinker and different kinds of questions. and because somewhere in there we go from thinking about Revolution (and Exit) to a different kind of perspective.

i personally cannot find a flaw in Whitehead and i don’t really want to. i can’t really find a flaw in a lot of these guys; however, *a lot of these guys found flaws in each other,* and they did that because *they were a lot smarter than me!* so by presenting the story in a certain light, i feel like that is a kind of a useful contribution that doesn’t really take anything away from what these guys are saying about themselves or about each other.