/lit/ - Literature

>>15982520
im here

>>15982520
Cringe le epic meme complex synthetic-ideology.

>>15982670
hey, would you be willing to give a text interview about how Daoism is useful in the context of the 21st century? I am doing a series, and the interviews are companion pieces from people who I think have interesting perspectives to add in relation to my subject. You were the first that came to mind in relation to daoism.

>>15982786
wait im not a specific girardfag im just someone into rene girard but i have no idea what you're talking about regarding daoism

>>15982670
>>15983302
ha ha

>>15982786
i'm very flattered anon, really. right now i'm in one of those purgatory/projectile-vomiting phases. the whole fucking world is just a ridiculous mess, but it's not an interesting kind of mess, or maybe i just don't have the vision to see the interesting parts through the skein of horribleness. it's all such a fucking catastrophe.

i actually can recommend one wonderful read at the moment tho: the Vegetable Roots Discourse of Hong Zicheng. i enjoyed this quite a lot. whenever you read somebody who seems to be on your wavelength it's kind of beautiful.

in terms of how Daoist thought is useful for the 21st century? well...one thing that comes to mind is how much Western philosophy can be understood through this perspective. whether you are into Deleuze, or Whitehead, or Heidegger, or Spinoza. there is also an interesting question to be asked too about the *usefulness of usefulness* - that is, the doctrine of efficiency. for more on what happens when efficient technique is given the full mastery of the earth, see all Land-related inquiries (and Marx, Heidegger again, Baudrillard, Ellul, Mumford, on and on. acceleration, in a word). but the East has a way of producing semi-enlightened dropouts, or enlightened semi-dropouts too: gentleman scholars who are not strangers to the world of court, but who have also been dragged through the mud a little too, and understand the value of poverty. it's also why i enjoyed Yuk Hui's perspective on these things so much: 'technology' - whatever the fuck we mean by this - skews with our theology in the most spectacular ways.

i have lots of ramble on these themes. i still think Final Fantasy 6+7 are some of the most incredible treatments of these themes: the logically self-destructing corporation, the doomsday figures as an utter disasters (but so beautiful), the new world emerging from the ruins of the old, and whatever else. and i also feel that art is always the more effective conduit for these things than politics, the direct application of philosophy to everyday life: which is a thing that Taoism does only in a very circuitous way. and with (as in the case of Feng Shui) an admirable emphasis on *deliberate slowness* - the value of which you can see in the way Eckhart Tolle speaks, for example, when answering a question. he *waits* before answering, knowing that in that pause the question will answer itself in about 50 different ways, which makes his own take just one take among the others. and what a lovely feeling that would be.

anyways. i can think of few wisdom traditions more enigmatic than this one. that book is on libgen, by the way: search for 'Master of the Three Ways' (or 'Back to Beginnings' - i actually ordered a copy on Amazon before i realized there were not one but two versions available for free. now i have three of them!). the whole three streams/Vinegar Tasters thing has always appealed to me.

>>15983375
oh wait, one other thing. and not just because it's an outrageously awesome 70s sci-fi kind of cover, it relates to a thought i was having about this too.

the idea of the *sage* is something i have been thinking about - the consciously *non-political* philosopher (this is all pure, unadulterated, unprocessed ramble, by the way, so don't take any of it seriously. it's just there because i felt like sharing it.) the difference is that a sage practices a very localized kind of knowledge - which is, perhaps, what separates them from the activist scholar-intellectual. they know some things, but the most valuable thing they know is where their knowledge *stops*. that is to say, some roving wanderer might stumble across a hermit in the woods, or in the mountains, or hills, or swamp somewhere, and that person - in a way not unlike Socrates - will be useful in the sense of directing them where to go, or answering whatever questions they might have about a particular quirk of that region, or biome - or some relation, or the name of some other local hermit, or a house, or anything you please. the sage is a cryptic little encyclopedia relating to a particular place, and in a particular time, but to some degree resists the abstraction of what they know.

and i had this thought while reading some of Bateson's work - Bateson, as you may know, is one of the secret luminaries of cybernetics, but he seemed to be much happier studying Balinese art than developing weapon systems (or, his actual role in WW2, producing counter-propaganda against the Japanese - kind of ironic, given the image you used to create this thread!) anyways, Bateson is a really underrated figure in all of this, and chiefly because of how much his understanding of information flow, of generalized knowledge-traffic, contributes to a theory of semiotics.

worth looking up also is an even lesser-known figure, Anthony Wilden, who brought Lacan to the English-speaking world (go and read Meta-Nomad's twitter for more on this). in one of his books, i forget which one, Wilden actually creates a diagram based on Levi-Strauss' kinship patterns of exchange, and then makes this incredible intuitive leap: i'll post it in a second, just below this. but in it he says something like this: a symbol is a *frozen map of information traffic* - there are always these packets of information being exchanged, all the time, which become encrypted as an icon, as a symbol, 'symbolon, link' - the kind of stuff that just sends goosebumps up my arm. what does all of this mean? that to think is, at least in part, *to overhear Nature having a conversation with itself.*

i'll post those screenshots for you in a sec.

here, this is the screenshot i took. the book is, as you can tell, 'System and Structure.' it's on libgen. Meta-Nomad is doing yeoman's work trying to bring Wilden back to life, he's acquiring the publishing rights to his work. i can see why. apparently he would show up for conferences back in the day in which both Foucault and Derrida were present and stole the show. i love stories like that.

anyways, if i was going to talk at length about the virtues of Taoism today i might come at it from this angle, in part - not only for the concept of *listening* - to nature, to people, to your own self, this overhearing of things that is to me so crucial to all of it, and which was one of the all-time all-time atomic-bomb things to be acquired from a reading of Heidegger - but also *seeing*, seeing the patterns of difference, of interrelation, of cybernetic reciprocity, of all that is going on *in creation* (the Deleuzian stance, as opposed to the Heideggerian stance) - and that we do, we can do, *both* of these things. all of these happening, simultaneously - and in an open-ended, infinitely creative, infinitely generative, mode.

aargh...sorry anon, i'm going to have to cut it there for now. life calls. apparently i have a fucking job now.

>>15982520
https://discord.gg/ZrbQjkH

>>15983514
>have to get out more rambleposting aaaaargh
>the old devil whiskey

in a certain sense, Deleuze can set you free with a single, incredible, spectacular word - *difference*. differences - transcendental movement, the whole Grand Factorio all to the way to the bottom - just like that. i believe this is true, that something of this is just baked fundamentally into both the great cosmic pie and the way we see it. the clinamen, the swerve of atoms, relativism, relativity, and all of it. this done, we are left in stupefying wonder, awe, and majesty at a world endlessly and infinitely in motion. okey-doke.

a Taoist perspective on things is, comparatively, conservative. at least that is how it seems to me. you just become a witness to it all. this is the Buddhist perspective, in some sense also: become the witness of your own thoughts, know that - in the Mahamudra sense - the mind cannot evaluate itself perfectly, because in doing so it takes itself to be objective reality, which is precisely the reason why you have found yourself in the middle of Tibet and staring at the deep blue sky.

but what inevitably happens is that these differences come into relation, organize and co-organize each other - whether we know this as de/re-territorializing, or a Whiteheadian process, or yin/yang dance makes no difference. it *does* make a difference, i think, to split off aesthetics from politics at that point, and to leave them completely separate. that is, to me, the course of real wisdom. but it's not necessary. Land will call it capitalism, and be extremely sulky if it doesn't produce icy-cold cyberpunk corporations and a lot of secure Bitcoin protocol. but that's him. in a way, he has re-Hegelianized things in an incredibly creative fashion, and the whole journey from Hegel to Land is worth anyone's time.

so in a sense, Taoism has that going on too: it is the means by which you can study the history - the incredible adventure story of dynasties, chaos and mercantile glory - without having your face melt completely from staring at it. from the disaster of wanting to *own* it, to *have* it. the ability to appreciate stories without endings...