/lit/ - Literature

>>11855820
and you can kind of see, in interesting places, the intimations of what postmodernity flipped inside-out would look like, the point at which the sense in which we are simulations simulating simulations, copies without originals, would take hold and become something new.

nothing is more stale today to me that irony and critique. it's unimaginative; it's the sad passions, it's 212% *mimetics.* all mimetics upon mimetics upon mimetics. the critic, to me, is like the guy who draws his IRL gun first and fires. deferring the violence, deferring the need to Make It Real and Bring It Down To Reality and all of this, the temptation to be the *judge* of reality - nobody can ever force this upon you. this was, however, the project of psychoanalysis. the analyst *listened* to the analysand, the analyst does not judge or condemn. and in so doing the analysand walks their own symptom out of the darkness and into the light.

there is IRL no state board of psychoanalysis. what we have instead is *critique.* more recently the chinese have come up with their own workaround, which is social credit, and again, i think that is going to work. part of me even thinks that it will be more successful than OBOR or anything else Xi has in mind. i think social credit it is, i think it is there to stay, and it will be around for a long time. it may even become a moderately successful cultural export to the west.

but in terms of culture, consumption and commodification a ludic moment or event would be good for us also, a kind of curious blend of the technological and agrarian sensibilities, perhaps. it's all over this (and, btw, i am too much of a brainlet to play this game): the sense of the machines as needing something from human intelligence, and human intelligence needing something of the formal structure of the machine. alchemy is a beautiful thing, and a kind of science which isn't predicated on either a) capital b) techno-domination of the earth or c) cultural conquest are all beautiful things.

predicting a technical turn following the linguistic turn requires absolutely zero imagination. it's probably a good thing, and it is directly in line with sloterdijkian anthropotechnics. he's interesting because of how complicated he makes the question of mass culture and the role played by late-marxist discourse in creating reality by way of aesthetics they cannot but help to reduce to the level of tired antiquarian critiques or wishes for home. *his* kind of modernism is way cool. but there are lots of ways to begin breaking out of the life-support dome that is our version of the Matrix. intelligence and automation don't have to be scary. but in many ways we are still trying to balance out Galileo and Robert Bellarmine, the chinese emperor and the flying machine. leibniz's perspective is germane.