/lit/ - Literature

>>12445385
there is no correct or approved form of mass psychology. the only term that makes sense for this is 'normative,' but the whole point of normative thinking is to make you, on some level, indistinguishable from the guy next to you. ideology as such can be compared to the Hollywood classical system: the whole point of it is to make you forget that it is there. it doesn't have a point beyond this, and it cannot be deconstructed in the name of anything higher or greater than this.

but great religious traditions cannot be reduced to the status of ideology. Yoga is an inseparable part of what makes Hinduism what it is, but there is no point in 'deconstructing' Yoga, or separating it from its religious and metaphysical aspects. the same goes for Confucian ritual propriety, or Zazen. these things don't *have* a point, they *are* the point. monastic living ultimately takes the place of political activism, because the politics are inscribed on the practice itself. there is nothing *ironic* about prayer, or confession. irony, rather, is simply the kind of prayer that only works if it is overheard, that cannot work until it is heard. it has no interior dimension; it is an invocation of the General Sensibility, which stands for nothing at all except to be a kind of public confessional. this is the endgame of the hermeneutics of suspicion: a brutal expressionism that only reifies the absence of an interior that would justify the confession. robots work the same way, but with at least one difference: the absence of problems.

you can see why the desire to algorithmicize the news would be so appealing. we effect our own disappearance, into the crowd, bringing to bear the perpetual motion machine we have always wanted. Xi Jinping has been envisaging the same destiny for the Communist Party for a while now. but it won't work. all that happens is that you ultimately shift the contradictions away from yourself and onto the other. this is the basic distinction, i think, between communism and fascism. what they have in common is the recognition that there *is* a problem, and that We can solve it. either the problem is internal (communism) or external (fascism). either way, the State can fix it, one way or the other, as that is its express purpose. whether aestheticized politics or politicized aesthetics, the State can fix everything.

but better by far is the third alternative: a *permanent* problem, forever unfixable, except contingently, on a case-by-case basis. now you get a lifetime of micro-events, never to be solved. you get postmodernity. you get us. beings suffering allergic reactions to reality itself. the whole problem is that reality cannot really be *tested* - rather, what is continually being tested, and which passes every such test with flying colors, is that the power of fiction, illusion, and simulation always wins. test reality, and you fail; test the illusion, and you find that things keep getting better and better.