/lit/ - Literature

>>12479615
put another way, capitalism *can't miss.* it can't fail. and from a historical perspective it only seems to stack one victory on top of another. and you are told, hey, the game is the game. ruthless exploitation.

but in reality this leads us to a scenario where you are press-ganged into a neverending war between three forms of ruthless exploitation: Unironic Fascism, Unironic Communism, and Unironic Libertarianism. perhaps people wonder why i make such a big deal about FF6 (this is from XIV, but w/ev), the truth is that i keep finding more in that game than i expect. i think even the developers might have been surprised by how enduringly interesting that game becomes. all of these are both cultural attempts to solve material problems, and materialistic attempts to solve cultural problems. all of them fail - Nazism in WW2, Soviet communism after 1990, and the neoliberalism which succeeded it is struggling pretty hard now. as for how it will go in China i have no idea really. i don't know if they do either. if you read Yuk Hui or even Mou Zongsan the general sense there is that they are captivated by the same forces that are now destroying us, maybe they believe that socialism with Chinese Characteristics is the answer. i don't think it will be the answer, any more than Silicon Valley communism or Woke Capital is the answer either .all they do is show up ever more clearly what it is that they are really committed to, which is *money,* and therein lies the rub. the fantasies of money and technocracy have been with us for a long time, and perhaps were helpfully veiled by 90s-style postmodernity for a while, the skein of irony and cynicism, which only turned out to be a way of masking the horror under the guise of difference, and which has now metastasized into an Applied Postmodernity even more ridiculous than anyone could have imagined. and it brought on Trump, and Trump enrages his enemies, and universities get sucked into blizzards of confusion, and wind up churning out garbage.

and the thing is, all i'm saying is that for the time being it is enough to say that maybe there are no answers for this thing, at the moment, and to stop getting sucked into this idea of somehow knowing what the fuck the answer is. i think the best analogy for this is like *heroin withdrawal.* it's not enough to just say, Stop Using Heroin. it's more than that. a lot of other things are required. and it's like refusing to use heroin in a busted city completely controlled by crime lords who make a lot of money dealing heroin, and who are subsidized by CIA or FBI operatives who help them out in exchange for tackling other drug lords, elsewhere...it's an insanely confusing time.

but we know things aren't working. and we can even have some intimation of ourselves - that *we* did this, it wasn't forced on us by any kind of alien entity. capital is our own thing, and in many ways it really does know more about us than we know about ourselves.

>>11867509
2/9

the question is what we are doing with technology, with a technocommercial process that seems to simultaneously require our intelligence, multiply our intelligence, multiply our needs, gratify our needs, and yet always escapes a higher meaning. we can always invoke politics, or we can blame others for why we do not have nice things, but the fact is that we really do not know what it is that we want. we want: that much we do know. and when we are done wanting (this does not happen) we want more. want has always been there, and want will remain. capital multiplies desires like the Ten Thousand Things but cannot eliminate them, because the real grail is the sustaining of want itself, the Spice Which Flows, and which is predicated upon *lack.*

the present age is still ruled by the masters of suspicion: marx, freud, nietzsche. late postmodernism, aka Bloody Neomarxism, attempted to sublimate a great many questions into globalism (read: semio-narco-capitalism), and got permanently into bed with market forces sometime in the 1970s: the uncanny double of 2nd-wave feminism was always neoliberalism. Trump doesn’t so much challenge this as show its contours, but ever since him it has been the Family Feud. analogies to the Thirty Years’ War are appropriate but not perfect: in that case, it was at least catholics against protestants. this is one form of secular protestantism against another, together with a proliferation of new tribes, like the blooming of a hundred shitty flowers.

but it is always more interesting to think about is the golden goose itself, which is capitalism and its metaphysics. hyperstition is the suspicion about suspicion. postmodern critique has long since lost its ability to keep its object in focus, but what happens when you try and catch yourself in the process of analyzing your own dependence on capitalism? you get the back end of Fanged Noumena, which isn’t nearly as good as the front end, but is still relevant.

with acceleration we get a species of marxism fully updated for the 21C: philosophy as anthropotechic engineering rather than critique (unless the critique is of human intelligence). true, this was the original project of postmodernity, the skepticism about metanarrative, the inquest into the coded or tacit rules by which cultures live. of those biggest ones were those related to race and gender, and which form the DNA helix of 21C communism in america. and these were taken to be universally given until 2016 and the blackest of black swans.

but with land you get the anti-anthropocentric turn in postmodernity. Old Nick is DE/NRx and Young Nick is for acceleration. but it’s Old Nick who gives us the concept of teleoplexy, which is arguably his finest hour.