/lit/ - Literature

>>11943642
my CompSci buddy, who i have been subjecting to My Awesome Opinions about things for years (have pity on him), is a huge Peter Watts fan, and Blindsight is his favorite book. i read it on his recommendation and i literally did not understand probably half of what was actually going on. so i "liked" it. i think that's one of those books i am going to have to go back and read again at some point, because i have had this phenomenon before. but he's also recommended me other books on the kinds of high-end math stuff he is into and it it just completely foreign to me. i just can't understand it. at all. i will probably need the movie version.

>Does the whole idea of mega-purchases being used to finance trips to the godhead fit in with this whole thing or nah?
i vote Fits In With This Whole Thing. very much so. i mean i really, really don't think we should bet any longer against the powers of capital and technology - including their abilities to profoundly change the way we view ourselves, the world, time and so on. this is hardly news, but yeah, i am definitely in the Keep A Really Open Mind About It camp. mostly this has come about from trying to understand some of these guys - land, deleuze, spinoza, hegel et al - and now i am just kind of lying here on the floor most days going, okay, what's next. pic rel just about sums up my world view.

so yeah, mega-machines used to finance trips to the godhead sounds about right to me. and this was the plot of Ex Machina, and is kind of a subtext of land's stuff also: imagine if you just took all of the raw data from a century + of what we know about advertising, combined wi the planetary archive of all of our music videos, advertising, literature, all of the rest, and just ploughed into a machine. sort of like the merger with Planet at the end of SMAC. what *wouldn't* that machine know about us afterwards? it has just been given access to the Complete Archive of Dreams. if such a machine then tells us it should probably be understood in quasi-divine terms, it may well be right.

the connection between finance and tech occupies probably 99.9% of nick land's still-functioning CPU brain, and the things he has thought of are outrageous. they *do* walk the line between theory and science-fiction. but really really good science-fiction also tends to give us our cues about reality also!

and as >>11932809 indicates, we shouldn't sleep on the fiction writers. William Gibson matters in his *own* way. Acceleration is a kind of dark and marxist-inspired theory of cyberpunk, but it connects to SF, and literature is anybody's game. so it's the most interesting and nuanced ideas that matter, not just those that can be repeated by legions of angry ideologues looking for a Cure. there is no Cure for the Wild Ride, but there is theory and there is art, there is science and there is mysticism. they all play a role.

>>10233564
summon the black hole and it appears.

please note that i haven't read much for the past couple of months and IRL responsibilities have slowly been sapping the will to live from me. i'm operating at about 38% of optimal girardfagging capacity, as recent posts might indicate.

shitposting on /lit/, as always, is a pleasure.

i'm in a mood to ruminate about the clark/chambers idea of extended cognition also, of which i know very little, save that the idea that
>you think with the world
seems interesting. and maybe it can be tied in fruitfully to concepts of mimesis and rivalry and so on. the other day some anon was wondering how to connect deleuze and girard's concepts of desire and i've been wondering about it ever since, maybe because it's hard to avoid thinking about desire metaphysically and not fall into a kind of a critical stance: you know, desires are good when i share them but not when they aren't. and since it is hard for us to talk detachedly about our desires, things slide into politics before they're halfway out the gate.

what fucks us up as humans is always other people, the incompatibility of desires, almost like we/they were gravitational forces. maybe desires experience a kind of torsion, that is: we really get our minds and bodies and desires stopped, or redirected, or put into acceleration, all at the same time. and neurosis happens when we feel we are being pulled in two different directions.

what happens, for instance, if you are your own rival? wanting one thing, doing another. i would have to go and check the books on this but i'm not even sure he talks about this.
>perhaps because it would probably sound silly to him

or maybe i'm just a fucking lunatic.
>no doubt about that

what role does context play in these kinds of questions also? take last night's epic ufc fights, for instance. is a middleweight fight still a girardian struggle? here is a perfect example of violence on display, honed to its finest edge. afterwards fighters usually hug it out. and the question of escalating violence is sort of a non-issue: fighters aren't permitted to grab a chair, for instance (that has to wait for the wwe). referees, drug-testing boards, and league rules and standards limit and contain violence. do two fighters *really* want to kill each other? if so, they don't really do it in the ring. the young mike tyson seemed halfway apologetic in his earlier matches.

how about capital? can capital and desire be separated? is capital always abstracted desire? don't we desire it because it is abstract, fungible happiness-potential distilled down to its essence?

so, stuff like this. RG is the boy of course and for anthropological stuff he's the champ. i'm just kind of all over the place these days.

>>9763579
>desiring-machines
desiring-machines
>also desiring-machines

it's really worth thinking about. mechanosphere. far and away the most interesting thought i encountered this year. i had to sort my way through land first but w/ev. D&G are infinitely interesting now

>>9763539
>you could probably write a book in prose like this and people would eat it up ironically.

the hilarious thing about this is that i got here by trying to write something extra-polished and refined and deconstructive and so on and it made me so terminally blocked & thwarted that i consequently come on /lit/ and write these demented blogposts instead.

so thx i guess. something to think about, that's for sure. i really would like to write Total Pseud's Guides to various thinkers & ideas. i seem to be able to carry on conversations with a kind of inner gollum who is continually saying
>kys girardfag
as i do this

but honestly /lit/ is just such a cool place. eventually i will move on and get a blog but i have found the conversations here really enlightening and often anons recommend stuff i have never heard of

>or remind me not so be such an attention whore
>but i'm not an attention whore
>that's exactly what an attention whore would say
>tfw
>lacan_btfo_sphinx.jpeg

anyways. back to desiring-machines. because this is where shit really gets interesting. desiring-machines all trapped within a world of consumption which is itself one vast and ecumenical whole, a great network. this scene is must-watch

Network:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxiT30N6ti4

film and storytelling can do incredible things

The next great fantasy series might as well be all about a bank and its loan collections, debts, and futures speculations.

Why not?