/lit/ - Literature

2/6
>>11102115
i feel the same way about that civilization. i don't really want to be a part of it either. ironically iw really would be a kind of hive-mind communism that you can imagine as just being the natural end-goal of a Facebook Universe:

>Like is the digital Amen. When we click Like, we are bowing down to the order of domination. The smartphone is not just an effective surveillance apparatus; it is also a mobile confessional. Facebook is the church – the global synagogue (literally, ‘assembly’) of the Digital.” - bc han

so i do *not* believe that tech is politically neutral, although i recognize in this a totally consistent ideology, but that it can be, like capital, an accelerator of cultural progress. whatever people want, techonomics gives it to them faster. but i'm also not a neoreactionary. the right way for societies to track themselves forward is by avoiding dystopias than by shooting for utopias. dystopias are like black holes, self-positing centers of ideological gravity in this way. totalitarianism takes the paradoxical nature of political life and, by placing it at its core, mobilizes fear and paranoia for ideological action. utopias may really only be just contingent exceptions to dystopia (and, even then, sadly, freedom may only be an illusion).

>deleuze
you're in for a treat if you haven't explored him. he's super fun. especially if you're wont to get hung up on semiotic or other deadlocks, places where you just get stuck. then deleuze comes along: nope. not so much my man. prepare to become transcendental jelly. deleuze is one of those guys that i always have to remind myself will totally persuade me that the world conforms to his vision of things if i read him and so i have to be careful not to deviate too far. and he's a fucking outstanding reader of other philosophers as well. really, really good. recommended.

>schmitt
this quote:
>A grouping which sees on the one side only spirit and life and on the other only death and mechanism signifies nothing more than a renunciation of the struggle and amounts to nothing more than a romantic lament. For life struggles not with death, spirit not with spiritlessness; spirit struggles with spirit, life with life, and out of the power of an integral understanding of this arises the or- der of human things. An order is born from renewal.
that is a mic-drop for the ages right there. carl schmitt was such a fucking heavyweight. maybe we’re going through this paradigm shift. isn’t this the same thing that foucault recognizes in Order of Things? that *truth is paradigmatic* - we can’t really say what Truth is because it’s like the blind spot in the center of the frames that we keep opening up. but it doesn’t mean that we can just fall back into relativism and say, *oh well, here comes another paradigm shift* - because that’s not how paradigm shifts work. you wind up thinking you’re profound when in fact you’ve become absolutely pond-shallow.