/lit/ - Literature

>>11980076
>Since anything easy to grasp and enjoy can be instantly enjoyed by anybody, it is impossible for most things to hold our attention-- anything too accessible bears the stench of the marketing-department capitalization that is trying to enslave the whole capacity we have for thought and understanding. The things that are more compelling are the esoteric, the bizarre, the art and interests which are either so narrow that nobody carers enough to be interested in them, or so couched in requisite knowledge that nobody in their right mind would attempt to make a hobby out of them. Sometimes they actually somehow become popular, and we of course drop them and move on to something else, because as soon as mass culture gets a hold of anything it is completely devoid of the being-there that was the primary draw in the first place. It transitions from the esoteric to the pornographic (and, ironically, pornography itself bears some of the deepest and most representative scars from this process of nested nano-interests).

bloc-quoted for truth. Han writes a lot about pornography also. spoiler alert: it's bad for you.

consider the following: if the steak had been shitty, or badly done, it would have disrupted the illusion. what keeps Cypher coming back for more is not only perfection but infinite perfection, repeatable on demand. this is why, i think, in Japanese wabi-sabi aesthetics there is always the note of *imperfection,* some flaw or mark that preserves in time the note of the human. what is perfect and deathless for the Japanese aesthetes is inhuman; they prefer the thing to be crucially *fucked-up* in some small way. there is a true genius in this. one of the reasons i think the Japanese don't produce so many Giant Philosophers is because their philosophy is inscribed on their aesthetics and vice-versa. Japan has always been ahead of the curve in terms of mimesis. France gives you the critics and Germany the idealists, but the Japanese lead the way in aesthetics, i think, at least as far as the 21C is concerned. Baudrillard always felt at home there, as did Barthes, and Heidegger too. and those guys each had, in their own ways, a pretty elegant touch on why we keep coming back to art for more.

>Which means that no longer does the Net feed only on exhibition and voyeurism, but also on reclusion and the need for privacy. The Net, of course, feeds desire indiscriminately and perfectly.

it does. it is all things to all people. i certainly can't complain about having been gifted All The Books (thanks, libgen, and you too, Internet). it makes being a recluse probably a lot cozier than it has historically been.

>Part of the result of this expository hypermarketization that comes alongside online life is the necessary personal reaction to it, the desire for counterculture and for cult-value, and since anything can be created in a capricious heartbeat in Cyberia, these short-halflife cybercults have become an art form.

this.

we're dyin' yo

>>11867533
6/9

one thing i am wondering about these days is whether in a sort of Grand Historical sense the fourth great epoch - after eras of a master-signifying god, the state, and sexuality, respectively - is technology, the era of intelligence, economics, and code. again, here’s land as Imperial shit-tester: *suspicion about your suspicion about modernity.* what is it that you are really alienated about? from whence does your ressentiment derive? are you angry because you cannot keep up with the machines? because there are in fact remedies for this. you can choose at least from Optimize for Intelligence (land), You Have To Change Your Life (sloterdijk), or Lord Ha’Mercy (girard, or perhaps st augustine).

what we cannot do is continue along the same route of freudo-marxist critique, because these only reproduce their own conditions. there will *always* be misery, there will *always* be ressentiment, there will *always* be sad passions. but it’s like milbank (or was it douglas murray?) says: calling a thing a hate crime is one thing, calling it a *sin* is another. right now Woke Capital is taking one slice of humanity down the garden path in Optimizing For Purity and it will lead to cycles of violence, disappointment, mimetics and feud. and Make America Great Again is pure palingenesis. this will not work either. all of this belongs to spectacle.

what you get with land is not only a theory of capitalism but also a the critique of the critique of capitalism. acceleration radically de-centers the human subject once again but not this time in the direction of an ever-more-militant strain of irony. JBP is saying the same thing: you don’t really hate capitalism, you hate the rich, and you especially hate your own inability to venture anything else that might suggest the heroic, the sacred, the true, the good or the beautiful beyond your own happiness (or, more likely, your own bitterness and ressentiment).

acceleration is like looking into the code, just as the Matrix suggested. of course the Matrix is a meme, but it’s a crucial meme. it really is one of the great cinematic commentaries on the society of the spectacle, with a fairly basic question at the heart of it: what happens when i know this to be the spectacle, and i choose it anyways? this is exactly what generations of freudo-marxist critics ever since Adorno & Horkheimer have been asking. what do you do when people are told it is the illusion, the illusion is death, and yet they choose the illusion anyways? why do people fight for their own servitude as if it were their freedom?

this is a serious problem for the well-intentioned marxist critic, because it prompts the puritan to ask: am i really moralizing for myself or for somebody else here?