/lit/ - Literature

>>11867516
4/9

and so, out of no small amount of Last Man/Chimphammer 40k LARPing human beings become interesting once again because we regain the capacity to reflect on our own designs and the products of our imagination. we are not only the programming species, we are also the programmer-programming species. and even within acceleration there are various modes and doors: there’s unconditional/left acceleration (that is to say, old-school marxism, and arguably not all that different from Cathedralism); right acceleration DE/NRx (think moldbug, thiel, seasteading and rand 2.0); zombie acceleration (environmentalism, druidism, all manner of anarcho-primitivism, and kacynski); and [insert here].

land isn’t religious, and my own fondness for girard doesn’t sit too well with any of these processes, but imho he’s not completely unrelated either. the question to be asked is, how does one reflect on culture without endlessly and infinitely repositing the same original point or reality principle that structures the whole thing? this was derrida’s own aporia, and you can read JBP for more on why this is a more complicated process than it looks. land - always good for carving out middlemen - simply asked what would happen if humans were only tangentially required for the higher purposes of capitalism.

again, heidegger got here first. for heidegger technology covers over the world, and becomes the desert of the real. and heidegger died just before D&G opened up their whole new chapter in continental thinking, which is crucial to understanding land, since land is in a sense re-hegelianizing D&G’s mechanosphere by way of teleoplexy (aided in this by his more recent meditations on the nature of bitcoin and artificial time). both land and deleuze dislike hegel, and yet if teleoplexy is this self-assembling intelligenic process, it stands to reason that even if it doesn’t unfold into the world dialectically the PoS is still a riotously interesting book and may help us to understand some of what is going on.

but one key difference between land and hegel (or heidegger) is their differing perspectives on modernity. it has been an old truism of continental theory that modernity (read: technology) has been an alienating phenomenon which leads to the reign of quantity. you can read this same sensibility in spengler, in guenon, in junger, in heidegger, and of course in marx. and guenon excepted these are largely german sensibilities about heimat. the *upshot* of landian thinking is that he actually doesn’t urge anything like fascism: as he noted in one of his blogs, the only people who didn’t think he was a nazi were the nazis. true, he imagines fates and futures which are pretty dark and horrible also. but for myself at least i’m trying to wiggle between some of the dystopian scenarios and not get stuck on fatalism and the sad passions.