/lit/ - Literature

>>12431742
i did, and i'm re-reading it now, ty most kindly for the reminder. it's fucking brilliant, and it's also a wonderful insight into what it was that made Land who he was.

cyberpunk is the *dirty truth,* and that essay really captures it. somewhere along the way - it was the 1980s, and by way of the incredible aesthetic you get from rekall - there was a *divergence* within postmodernity. a lot of theory headed in one direction, for increasingly arcane ivory tower theory. another strain headed directly for the *gutter,*and that is where Land went. in my own experience, what i have learned is to respect the gutter, i think. there is no way of conflating what can be found below with what is at the top. Deleuze cuts both ways, it's true. and Hegel is for the state. but Land went for the darkness, and his torment down there confirmed that it is wise to believe the hype. he followed in many ways a similar trajectory as Baudrillard, and both men crossed paths with one figure: Bataille.

but the dirty truth isn't a thing we can just take souvenirs of. that is what happened. it's always worse than we think. it's like the Titanic, except that it cannot be reduced to a dialectic. to take only one fragment:

>As for Deckard, he initially appears as the equivalent of the private detective with the voice-over of film-noir - very existential, nihilistic and almost apocalyptic - as both a sensitive, messianic - failed messianic - possibly pathological spirit repelled by the state of the world and even while cradling his gun, shouting love at the heart of the world. Contradictions. The Cyber-Punk tag has to clear a path through a deliberately theoretically confused atmosphere of this fictive metropolis and distinguish the real from the irreal even in the most indiscernible cases. At the heart of the city this quest is hindered by the lack of an horizon, everything is Tom Vague, making ambivalent clues and unpredictable danger-cum-behavioural response patterns ever present. The Cyber-Punk cipher therfore must take one step at a time, [pure chess - it always comes down to games, because they always contain the idea of terror], yet allow herself to be swept into the multiple currents that cross the city and beckon at random. The investigation, the inquisition of forms, is no longer the central point, instead, the skidding, the drifting, the wandering the city, the vertigo of the city, the panic become the phenomenological-dialectical focus, as everything starts slipping

when Capital really takes command, the *first* thing it does is exile the only thing that could potentially threaten it: the humans in the control room. the task is likely made easier by the fact that the humans in the control room are *curious,* or perhaps even literary. that's what makes it all so terrible. or why Marxist Grand Inquisitors take over, to supply religious security services for what only works once it is too late to go back.

that whole essay is an absolute treasure.