/lit/ - Literature

I've read the following boobs
Burnout society
23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism
Society of the Spectacle
Capitalist Realism
What did you think about these books?
As a depressed and anxious loser it made me feel comforted in the 'my life doesn't matter and knowing how bad it is just makes me feel better cause I can blame my failure on it' way
Any other books that feed a similar reflex?
My other favourite books are notes from the underground, kafka's books and temple of the golden pavilion
Thanks :)

>>15066447
Read it.

>The acceleration of contemporary life also plays a role in this lack of being. The society of laboring and achievement is not a free society. It generates new constraints. Ultimately, the dialectic of master and slave does not yield a society where everyone is free and capable of leisure, too. Rather, it leads to a society of work in which the master himself has become a laboring slave. In this society of compulsion, everyone carries a work camp inside. This labor camp is defined by the fact that one is simultaneously prisoner and guard, victim and perpetrator. One exploits oneself. It means that exploitation is possible even without domination.
Is he right

that Korean man is Byung Chul Han and he is based.

>>12790194

There is no cohesive or coherent group of "postmodern" thinkers that accept and engage in labeling themselves as this. The works of Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, etc. are so different from each other that we can barely conceive of how could someone ever lump them together in a single unity, other than simply not ever reading any of the authors.

With this said, a lot of authors (not only the ones Peterson consider postmodern, and not only the ones I mentioned) came up and develop what they call a "postmodern condition" of the world, which is largely a description of our current state of affairs in the largely de-industrialized developed world (e.g architecture becomes chaotic, contradictions in language and media no longer carry shock value, economy is driven by finance and services/products are left in a second plane, social links become atomized and exchangeable, etc.). You could say that, in view of this, Peterson himself writes *about* postmodernism (as in, the condition and not some philosophical denotation) in his criticisms of his perceived views of it. Actually, think about it: why would you criticize an author that is merely embodying the "spirit" of his times and not the times themselves? Why would Peterson address postmodernists as guilty of spreading something that they contracted by external means to begin with? I find it really odd when people say philosopher X was responsible for Y, this is hardly ever the case: it's much more likely that a philosopher only describes what already is an ongoing trend of his current society.

Lastly but not last, there is a really good lecture by Rick Roderick on all things postmodern, where he also addresses the most common criticism (that Peterson sometimes also tries to employ sometimes), that is, the claim that there is, or there was ever any truly relativist philosopher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvAwoUvXNzU&list=PLA34681B9BE88F5AA&index=7

>>12780097

This is a long topic for me to address the answers, some of which are surely good, but here's my take:

she WAS right. The kind of product-driven commodity fetishism she's criticizing used to be rampant and came to a maximum during sometime in the late 80's. But since long we had a slow yet sure shift into a more subtle version of it. Since it is no longer a surprise that every material thing will be packaged and sold en masse no matter how subjective or unique it might at first look, eventually we had to turn to less tangible things to commodify. I could argue that this coincides with the economical shift from service-driven companies to finance-driven companies but other people make this point more elegantly elsewhere. What I do want to point out is that nowadays buying books is an actual choice - you're gonna eventually read something in digital if you're under 30, much more so if you're under 20 - and the means of getting your way "for free" are absolutely trivial. Libraries are a convenience as much as open frequencies on radio are a convenience next to Youtube.

What we fetishize over today are things like sharing our reading experiences - the "social capital" involved in the act of pursuing any and every hobby, criticizing it (at times not in itself but rather to get the replica, the criticism of the criticism), and overall engaging in it with the added effect that others will indulge in vicariously evaluating our engagement. This goes to gaming streamers in obvious ways but also to people commenting on streams in not so obvious ways, and the list goes on.

She's clinging to a dated model. Libraries ironically do not have the necessary conditions for social capital to spread as much as the internet can do, and this no longer has as much to do with tangible, obvious commodities in the direct way she's thinking.

>>12730177
Forgot img

thoughts?

thoughts?

what we are discussing in these threads would probably make Zizek shit a brick, or at least get his nose running even more than it usually is. countering Land-style acceleration with (Cosmotechnical) practices that are designed to help you function more effectively within a terminally busted system isn't just a failure in one sense, it's a dual failure. Xi-style authoritarian capitalism is arguably as bad if not worse than Clinton-style global capitalism, warrants mentioning. and Zizek loves to shit on Sam Harris or remind his listeners that Gandhi kept a copy of the Bhagavad Gita in his pocket, but so did Himmler.

and yet Zizek is in fact in the same position as we (read: ???) are. there is going to be no communism-to-come, anymore than there is going to be a democracy-to-come. there may not even be an *acceleration* to come, in case anyone was wondering. bloat, chaos, confusion - the Explosive Projectile Vomit phase of capitalism - is just as likely as any other scenario, perhaps more so. being completely swamped in increasingly useless products, consumed in smaller and smaller amounts by an increasingly disaffected and confused population is an entirely possible outcome for all of this. warrants mentioning.

but the point of this is not to try and install a new Imperial OS to Save Western Civilization. the best parts of the West are those syncretic aspects of it espoused by St. Augustine, at least: the incredible blend of religion, philosophy, law and literature that was preseved in monasteries for those four or five centuries when the West was largely ruled by illiterate and highly suggestible barbarians on horseback. Charlemagne was a lucky break, and Alcuin was a cool wingman for him. that kind of sensibility is much more my style. it's pre-post-apoc planning. or, for the meme points, Zen Acceleration. if you are already on track to a happy life as an Oxford grad or a medical practice, none of this may be of much interest to you. i'm more interested in making life hard for NPCs and easier for people who fear angry mobs of any political stripe. Cosmotech (read: one odious namefag on a grenadine soap-carving forum, and a couple of other Good Samaritans) is mostly for Burnouts of the BC Han variety. i'm personally so fucking burned out i've decided to start having public conversations with my inner self. this is not a Healthy or a Sound Philosophy. it's much more like a 12-Step program for people who get in over their heads with continental theory.

in case that needed to be said, also. i have spent way too much time thinking about Nick Land, and he both "saved" and ruined my life. i like Heidegger too, a lot. and now that even Land himself has started to throw some shine Heidegger's way, i find myself getting more intrigued in connecting the dots between two men who on first glance wouldn't appear to have much in common, but the Gestell and Teleoplexy are two wings of one process.

thoughts?

we live in a society

thoughts?

>>11565387
>>11565245

The Greeks seemingly had "clear" answers (or passed it down as if it was all clear at least) to how to embody philosophy though, in the form of whatever Virtue (or lack of Vice thereof) any particular philosophical thought detained. That's very cultural of Ancient Greece too, since as far as we know the same kind of Virtue branding was made in other aspects of their lives, at least in the case of the people considered citizens. In this manner a lot of Greek thought is very prescriptive in itself and very much unlike the kind of abstract reasoning we often attempt today. There are dialogues with actual cases and examples of behaviors and such.

This is indeed not as easy to perform today because we no longer hold any preciosity to the metanarrative of Virtue-signaling (purposely using the confusion in this term here). It's actually a mark of our times to be suspicious at best and denying at worst of every single possible metanarrative and remain in a permanent state of trying not to be in any definite state. This is very prolific to axiomatic thought because we can freely entertain any mental system and take it as far as we want before starting all over again, but perhaps not so good when your day to day life is just as unguided and drifting. A lot of so called self-help attempts to put grips on the abstractions but they don't quite meet the fundamental aspects of previous philosophy because by now you already internalized to not have any compromise: you may very well be a sort-of Buddhist today and return to excessive consumption of life during the weekend, and deep inside you won't really believe this contradicted your life philosophy (because you have no life philosophy or rather, you have all of them!).

>>10992258

I don't know any books other than my diary desu, but oh boy are you in the right place to feel anxious, hopeless and tired all the time

>Also I lied, read pic related

>>10920963

I find it quite interesting that (putting aside the college-tier liberals and their obsession with commodified micro-struggles) contemporary left is usually one of the few collectives to truly bring into question that we may not be able to dissociate the individual freedoms acquired from technology from a kind of globalized system of exploitation of our desires.

Whereas even the most stark defenders of progress for its own sake such as Peter Thiel, would rather end democracy before conceiving that we might have to hold back the evolution of technique (not quite primitivism, but certainly also not the Landian levels of production we have today), we have people like pic related who are more or less fed up with what they perceive as being entrapped inside ourselves. Certainly we are the happiest generation in terms of comfort and luxury, and so much in excess of both, that we are reaching numbing levels of depression and lack of awareness of others.

Discussions on this facet of atomization rarely take part in any liberal circle, no matter if it's Jeff Bezos or Bernie Sanders using the microphone. I am not sure where exactly to pinpoint this, but somewhere along the lines, the reins of critical theory were apparently taken back from people, to the structures that continued to enslave them. On the "right" side you have meaningless talk of money already assumed as a thing-in-itself, rending all criticisms useless because of its self-fulfilling drive (neocons and ancaps alike have no doubts that technology is freeing them from nature, even as it clutches them with more and more strength into a whole new structure). And even to the left side, it sadly appears to me that technique has also won and we are in a redundant fight for micro-struggles, positions we necessarily drop when they endanger our personal comfort.

I don't know quite where I am getting at with this post. I guess it's just a commentary on how "left/right" dichotomies have slowly mingled into the "capital centrism" we can see in all kinds of liberals and libertarians today. The ones who remain further spread from this center are mostly pessimists which looks like really bad news, be it the ultra-progressive and nihilistic right of Nick Land, the mild but still crazy Patchwork of Moldbug, or the anarchist dreams of Chomsky, or the subjective violence revolutionary spirit of Zizek.

Who has read anything by Byung Chul-Han?

Thoughts?

The Burnout Society's first chapter http://www.sup.org/books/extra/?id=25725&i=Chapter%201.html