/lit/ - Literature

>>13111955
basically, his Kantian-Marxian logic (and the link between being Deleuze) is a hard stopper on the endgames at the political extremes, whether they mean blood and soil or anything remotely described as 'emancipation' or 'liberation.' only brains really matter, and the only kind of emancipation he's interested in is the teleoplectic, time-bending kind, which arrives through automation. everything else is so much religious signification, overtly or covertly.

this is the part any future coverage of him is going to miss. i have already seen the earliest pieces coming out that conflate acceleration with the crudest and simplest possible meaning, that somehow it just means 'accelerating' world war three to appease the lunatics on the extremes. Land is an extremist no doubt, and has his moments of lunacy, but it absolutely wasn't what he had in mind. for all the coldness, he would still just call himself the world's most unorthodox liberal economist, provided that the definition of the word liberal is taken in a much more rigorous 18C meaning, rather than the one it has today. with a heavy dose of Malthus on the side.

another way you might look at his work is this way: if the mass market is what truly reflects the unconscious of modern man, Landian stuff is like the Freudian uncanny in the cozy mirage. the Outside haunts the edges of the thing, like a thing that cannot be rationally processed except by the deeper dive. it connotes the sublime and the terrible, the unassimilable part. but this is a Freud uncoupled from Marxism, and a Freud who - like Kant - arrives at the mysterious point beyond which rational inquiry fails, and what lies ahead is a complete void, and bracing cold, and terrifying visions. that's a good thing, by the way, because everything else leads to repression, neurosis, and much else. in its political form, it leads to hysterical reactions.

hence the need for sobriety, no doubt an ironic thing to hear from a guy whose own habits would have impressed Hunter Thompson. but ultimately that was where he got to, i think. certainly changes the way you look at the news, at any rate.