/lit/ - Literature

>>12655731
so yeah. i don't really know Where We Go From Here or anything. the story of the Wild Ride has to end at some point, and i think it would probably end on a kind of a mysterious note, like this: an aporia, a kind of enlightened, but shared, confusion. the story i tell is pretty much always the same one, and i think i'm more or less abandoning any kind of a hope for Star Trek or otherwise utopian worlds, because something always goes screwy along the way that fucks it all up. there are i think lots of ways through or around Land that may be uncovered as time goes on - Yuk Hui has a few good ideas, and i'm sure even Land himself would not want to be regarded as a kind of bitter Sphinx just shitting on everyone's hopes and dreams. his own perspective is as much of an indictment of capital as it is a valorization of it. everything he writes about the relationship of capital/macro and mind-control is absolutely spot-on, and there's no better theoretician of time-travel to be found anywhere, imho, or at least within the Marxist canon.

if the French Revolution tells you anything, it's that Freedom Gonna Free, and there's absolutely fucking nothing anybody can do about that. we will almost certainly get a lot more upheaval and unrest and revolution and so on in years and decades to come. that appears to be the way us meatbags operate. i don't know if it's a good idea to think in terms of Utopia at the end of it, however seductive that may be, we've basically got Utopia now in many ways (at least, in the more fortunate parts of the world). a sobering reminder of how actually rare this is is what Land gives you, and a horrifyingly up-close look at the conditions required for it.

i also think that the worst thing anyone can do is posit the end - as Barthes says, 'above all, do not attempt to be exhaustive.' that is a good piece of advice also. there's always more to come, whether we want there to be or not. maybe philosophy is something we have unleashed on the world that is well and truly beyond our control, and if so, wat do? what if things really *aren't* Up To Us to decide? such was Laozi's feel also, and Zhuangzi's. the metaphysics of CTRL just fuck with us.