/lit/ - Literature

>>12724346
"The system" subsists on people trying to fix it. If you stop trying to fix it and just throw yourself into it, it dies faster.

>>12722541

I'm not sure it's a total inversion, but they certainly see it under a different light.

Land's anti-humanist POV anyways is not always "optimistic" about capital's outcome, and even though it might seem like worship due to his very aesthetic style, I think what amuses him (or rather drives his narrative) is the whole delight involved in acknowledging the inevitability of capital deterritorializing human labor and eventually even human consumption away from us and rendering us disposable (rather than delighting in the deterritorialization itself).

Land is not exactly a prophet but more of a herald, of the kind that brings the news when it's already long due also.

>>12353055
this but unironically

>>12151164

I am none of those posters but would like said screens for the purpose of enticing further reading

>>11868034
>>11868015

Capital is not fucking sentient, it's just self propagating and self regulating. Land doesn't subscribe to considering humans particularly special as a complex system or as part of one either - so saying it is sentient "like us" would even be detrimental to its higher structure.

In fact, I'm pretty sure Land's early work is all about taking Weber, Marx and Ellul's critique of Technique and actually siding with Technique instead. Funnily enough it turns out you'll end up sucking Chinese cock if you accelerate too hard into anti-humanism

>>11810818

It's troublesome to ever attempt to use physics to answer that. Fuck, people should stop trying to pretend we can answer "why" the universe is or even "what was there before". These are not questions our current scientific method is set to answer at all. People like Krauss are cheating themselves into fame by misusing their own practice.

Furthermore the OP did not ask how did the universe begin, he asked what constitutes existence. Good luck getting that one in a single sentence br0.

>t. physicist

>>11269591

But electing a metanarrative which attributes value to postmodernism inside a historical context kinda defeats the very point of postmodernism

>>11267622

"meme", online bullying and general banter/teasing has perhaps always been the usual means of communication among peers (specially if they have any level of intimacy which goes beyond being complete strangers). We talk about asinine shit such as the weather with people we don't know and, more often than not, it seems we usually employ humor and such with the people we do know. Philosophical or any other kind of discourse that we would classify as "speaking to friends" is actually not commonplace in day-to-day personal interactions at all. Under this view does social media not mirror this? We are looking at humorous and ironically driven shit all day long, and exposing our opinion to it in most cases, which is just a convenient simulacrum for what we usually do with "actual friends" and during "actual speaking" otherwise. This is neither having friends nor speaking to anyone, but the essential elements that make us recognize the act as so is surprisingly (or not) there.

>>10986792

That's a (natural?) common process of commodification that everything, not only psychology/psychiatry have undergone. Every academic practice (even and specially the "hard" empirical ones such as physics, etc.) have went the way of the market, with professors/thinkers/researchers becoming exchangeable units of intellectual capital inside institutions. The institutions are now instrumental and not terminal, they are there merely to churn out papers for the sake of churning out papers. A dozen of them will be profound in any area while the others are going to be filler to self-justify the existence of such a massive organization. The same logic applies to all industry from where it started to where it is now. Whether or not we are reaching a convergence point of every single aspect of humanity finally being commodified is up for arguing, but you can bet Psychology (as both psychoanalysis and psychiatry) has already reached that point.

>>10871396

This is kind of Zizek's thesis on why we should support most revolution and ruckus even if it's armed and what not (in spite of whether or not I think Zizek is a meme). According to him, Marx's analysis of the working class completely fails to apply today, because the very thing which was considered a condition of exploitation back then (being proletariat) is the dream of dreams nowadays.

The introduction in society of permanently unemployed people, and people that are completely locked out of the concept of "safety net", in massive numbers, has allowed capital to co-opt "being a proletariat" into "having a stable, guaranteed job with security" and subsequently make it a scarce and more desirable outcome for any given person. It would not be an exaggeration (which I claim boldly because I live in a third world country) to say that having a proper job like the previous generations is starting to actually fit the description of the poster you quoted (i.e like trying to become a war hero).

As for the OP himself, academia is only worth it if you are obsessed. Not only the obsession will fulfill your time, it will also help you ascend to at least a position where you can be sure you will get a new shitty position the next day rather than be fired. Actually getting a professorship on the other hand, takes more than obsession and will require you to do so much more than pester enough colleges. You'll need to build up connections and establish these connections, and after that demonstrate to said connections that you are worthy of being more than a connection, a "colleague" which is purposely a vague statement to show just how difficult it might be. I seriously do not recommend joining academia if you're not obsessed with your topic, and I urge you to think very much before diving in that cesspool. I am a physicist and by now (3rd year of PhD) I have already seen a reasonable number of close friends commit suicide (not leave, not drop out, commit suicide) over the woes they faced, most of it arriving from the fact they weren't actually interested in physics (I emphasize, not interested enough to be obsessed, even though they were very good at it).

>>10813022

This is certainly not related to most of the porn industry though. Most moguls also happen to be owners of large prostitution rings (not going to claim child prostitution as well, but it's likely), and inside the rings a myriad of grave sex offenses are perpetuated. This argument, it should kinda be like selling guns to one side in a war while simultaneously defending the borders of the other side.

OP's very example is a testament to this, because the Japanese porn industry is notorious for its ample ties to the Yakuza and also by promoting human trafficking and "legal" enslavement of people through shady contract agreements.

I guess (but very skeptically) the case could be made for amateur stuff with consenting parts to be the only fair game when it comes to actually not involving peripheral sex crime. Even then, is it "good" in any particular sense? >>10813041 for example says it promotes a calm population, which might actually turn out to be a PASSIVE population, not a good thing at all from the point of view of exploitation. Whatever the case is, don't fall for the "porn industry" propaganda, it is never beneficial to the social environment it is put in (e.g California, Hollywood, Japan) and always brings along the very sex crime levels it claims to avoid.

>>10772430

Pedophiles maybe?

>>10770583

I used to date a girl who was older than me (I was about 21 and she was about 27), but she was passive as fuck and basically put herself in a position to be exploited at every possible opportunity. She was a tomboy and acted like something right out of effusive French cinema, always daydreaming about things and completely oblivious to worldly responsibilities. She did not really want to be with me (or with any *man*, taking years to finally get out of the closet), cried about it a lot (but also warmed up to me sometimes, out of Stockholm syndrome perhaps) and I wanted it so bad that I more or less forced her into it for years. In the end we were just fighting and wasting curses on each other so I just left and eliminated all ways of me possibly communicating with her again.

Now none of this happened in a brutish way where it was clear that I was being evil. In fact my friends actually tried to blame her at first for "being a bitch who kept me around for attention while she was a lesbian all along". I was and am the good guy who can talk to anyone and always does his best to help others. But I knew all along she was in doubt of herself, that it had nothing to do with me, and I was just exploiting her vulnerabilities instead of stepping back and allowing her own thoughts to flourish without my input.

This is nothing about being a dick, people are hardly dicks at first in abusive relations. It's about manipulating emotions and betraying the trust of people, by purposely leading them to "choices" that are actually not beneficial to them at all. Humbert is the textbook case of this, he is clearly lying all the time, even going so far as lying to himself until he is able to justify his vile acts. It will of course seem very compelling and convincing to anyone who (like myself) has ever done the same, be it to children or to adults.

>>10735051

Land had a meme period because he was nearly overdosing in drugs and writing for absurdly long periods of time. By the time he left Warwick he was way beyond even the CCRU and his writings until up to the 2010s (of which the OP is an excerpt) are just immense non seqiturs induced by heavy drug abuse.

The writings before that, when he was still working with Brassier, Sadie Plant, etc. and when he wrote Thirst for Annihilation (early 90s), are pretty academically sound and present interesting insight (specially if you read it today, in consideration of what internet culture has become, and how much of it you could already see emerging in Land's writings).

As for his Neo-reactionary views after the 2010s, best thing you can do is read the Dark Enlightenment essay: http://www.thedarkenlightenment.com/the-dark-enlightenment-by-nick-land/

In short, Nick is not reactionary in the sense USA Republicans use it, nor is he reactionary in the totalitarian sense Europeans use it. His stance is more economical (insofar as it is concerned with the capital wheel of production/consumption) with politics derived from the "needs" (as an emergent effect) of capital. You'd notice reading his essay on Dark Enlightenment he's not actually a supporter of the Patchwork (basically, city-states) like Moldbug is, at least as an end-goal for society. He seemed to use to envision a world where capital (again, as emergent effect) would no longer needs us to emerge from and would replace humanity with something far more efficient to satiate its needs of resource transformation (a kind of drive for decreasing local entropy as he would put it, but I don't care for his attempts at physics as a physicist).

That used to be very cool and all but nowadays he seems to be much more apt to shitposting about other writers on twitter. When he does write though he still has entertaining things to say, but I'm not sure he actually cares about developing his thoughts that much anymore. Accelerated his brains into goo perhaps

>>10698353

Shit this is what Hegel was trying to say? I mean just write words man wtf was he on lololo

>>10698247

I think this is always the case for most of [written] history, what with Newton "standing on the shoulder of giants" and Hobbes himself writing in opposition to the metaphysics of his era (which is technically still looking into the past for guidance, if only to choose another way). With that said, I do agree that we are somewhat damping our capacity for insight with overexposure to "fast" media (e.g, if I take a week to write about yesterday's news it's going to be very detailed and throughout, but a week is hardly acceptable for today's standards, and I must deliver a shitty piece of rushed opinion ASAP).

>>10683162

>You will never feel the soft touch of Emma's buttocks on your legs while you penetrate her and come to ecstasy, knowing you have completely dominated a tiny little being who believes itself independent, in exchange of mere favors you don't even have to fulfill

>>10668359
>>10668275

I'm not OP but, well what kind of fallacy is this? We are all drowned in commodity fetishism, that doesn't mean we can't criticize it. Are you gullible about every fucking thing which goes on with your life? Don't answer that, we probably know the answer.

>Implying it's feasible to live without commodity fetishism when born into a community that idolizes commodity fetishism

>>10668042

Capital is so strong that it has twisted our worldview into classifying all human relationship as financial. If you must define that every exchange is an investment, then absolutely everything is goods, and there's no way we can even talk to each other, you removed every other value ad hoc. We can keep living in this world and the people at the top can never worry about it because most of us are actually defending the accumulation of our capital right up their ass.

>>10662918
Yes, but in a fitting way.

At least my interpretation was that he realised you could market hippie shit to hippies and went back to work and made that commercial.

>>10652003

wtf at point 4), it's a travesty of attempting to solve the hard problem of consciousness with meaningless hand waving. You can know all of physics and still know jack shit about complex phenomena because our math is not appropriate to deal with emergence, nor is it good at dealing with critical phenomena at phase transition points. Why do philosophers talk about statistical mechanics that have never actually read about statistical mechanics?