/lit/ - Literature

to continue this schizo-ramble...

the reason why Uncle Nick is the world's most interesting philosopher is because he cracked the Do Not Open boxes on the sociocultural generation ship that postmodernity became. socialism is attractive because it purportedly solves two problems: material inequality, and existential crisis. postmodernity is what it is because it basically eroded the economic structural analysis that socialism depended on, and replaced it with an economics of pure prestige, gesture, and sign ('virtue signal'). in the age of YouTube, the twist in the plot is that you can re-monetize this again, but it leads us into a world where culture becomes inseparable from advertising, and advertising from politics, such that we all wind up in a world where *we know we are being constantly mind controlled,* and yet at the same time knowing there is something wrong about mind-control. the more serious problem is the absence of an alternative.

the Hegel-Marx combination is arguably the most ferocious one-two punch in the history of modern philosophy (before then, it might have been Plato-Christ). Nancy Fraser provides the clearest critique of this: it is feminism which comes to supplant working-class (and class-conscious) communism, but 2nd-wave feminism always ran the risk of becoming indistinguishable from its Evil Dark Twin, that being neoliberalism. once you 'liberate' women, you make critique of capital itself impossible, and you begin down the slippery road towards what we have today: inequality is justified if it improves the lot of women (or minorities), b/c Historical Oppression. Uncle Nick is who he is because he recognizes that capital is well and truly inhuman, and no amount of attempting to domesticate it will work. indeed, doing so only removes the stank from its fastball. the current witch-hunting craze emanating from Silicon Valley only indicates the nature of this conundrum: that there is a horizon beyond which the dream of capitalism becomes communism, and the dream of communism capitalism: hence the rainbow flag atop JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. nothing will ever be more inclusive, or more diverse, that pure speculative capital itself. this is the year 2019 and we are living in it. this is what it feels like to live in the Matrix. and the first rule of Matrix Club is, you do not criticize the Matrix.

nor do i have a raging hate-on for feminism. i don't. what i hate is *institutional feminism,* which is precisely the kind that leads to *the scapegoating of men.* as for where this leads, Amy Ireland said it best: women turning each other on, women turning machines on, machines turning each other on. that is a dark future indeed, but the darkness and the horror, at least, still edges out the anger and the paranoia. which is why i think it is a good thing to read Uncle Nick. we are living in a pinball machine, and teaching it how to care for us. it is one of the reasons i am looking forward to YH's next book.

(cont'd)