/lit/ - Literature

>>11981143
i think too can be seen in this way the real conundrum of the mass age: Barzun calls it, variously, the demotic age, the age of information, and Ortega y Gasset called the phenomenon 'The Revolt of the Masses' (in a book which is worth reading). but it points i think to the real heart of the issue, which today is the paradox of needing to wrench oneself free of the masses and yet at the same time knowing that the Ubermensch is a kind of an optical illusion also.

the 20C is the story of the Mass Age. it is totalizing and it is totalitarian. this is why fascism is *the* political phenomenon par excellence - after all, the Germans wanted it, and moreover, positing the nation as an organic unity "solved" for both Nietzsche and Marx, although in absolutely terrible ways. but what it did not lack for was a participation mystique. You Have A Place in that system after the death of God.

today contemporary postmodernity in its most toxic and corrosive forms is attempting to find a way through this paradox and failing in every sense. the more you try to speak for the Everyman, the more you reveal the nature of this confusion: namely, that a) there is no Everyman and b) you cannot possibly hope to posit a universal norm of Health which at the same time can account for the nature of mental illness (or schizophrenia). this is the problem of the Intractable Minority - who is also the *sovereign,* in a Schmittian sense, although with a substantial twist. nor is this exclusively a new phenomenon: once upon a time, the Christians were just as intractably stubborn about their own preferred brand of transcendentalism and it was the Romans who were asking for peace. history has a sense of humor.

but the point is to channel some of this through the logic of the bullet hell shooter, which i think actually represents some of these themes, although at a very deep level: doing battle against waves of popcorn spaceships, and culminating in a showdown with an overwhelming cybernetic bee, suggests to me this kind of need to *separate from the Hive,* because the Hive stands for Death and Production. Heidegger writes a great deal about Das Man - the They, the Crowd, or in modern parlance, the NPC - and yet here is to my mind the difficulty of the conundrum: the answer is not aesthetic terrorism. it cannot be jihad or modernist reform. none of us are really so different, and we can't claim the moral high ground which ultimately cannot distinguish between terrorism and performance art (which is what makes the Joker, or before him, Kefka Palazzo) what they are.

Hibachi is a different kind of BBEG, it's true. and yet what he represents is the *terror inherent to scale.* and of course the fundamental logic of Production at the bottom, which is what a Hive ultimately is: perpetual growth. and there are no dissenters in a Hive. but this is *not* to say, ergo, Fuck You, I'm An Artist - because this much is to repeat the 20C (and not only the 20C).