‘My claim is that it is only if we think of totality in the sense of a broken whole-in-becoming in which every attempt to signify the whole only produces new symptoms for speculative cognition, which in turn produces new conditions of possibility for sublation’- Way to open with a bang. I’m also a big fan of the Zizek quote (‘The Hegelian totality […] and inconsistencies as integral parts.’), for that captures the case very well. We must indeed start by looking at what most don’t want to look at, and I think that leads into well on studying the failures of Communism.
‘Moreover, when we make the well-known intellectual move from Hegel to Marx, this religious layer of the phenomenal dialectic was replaced by a communitarian secular politics that absolutely failed to engage the work necessary to sublate religion’ – Completely agree. Religion in this sense would for me include the work of Philip Rieff and Peter Berger, which is to say that we have not yet collective thought well the problem of “tragic sociology,” which so far in history only religion has seem capable of sublating (for all its flaws). We indeed find ourselves fragmented, disenfranchised, and disabled today, as you noted, and I’ve been reading through Technofeudalism and thinking more and more how to think the book alongside Adam Smith’s thinking on feudalism. A severe regression is indeed occurring.
‘What disappears is any semblance of an ethical commitment to structures supporting real long-term intimacy, because they are diametrically opposed to the specular imaginary of positive experience’ – Very well put. This is also fire: ‘The result is not a society capable of mediating itself, but a society lost in the immediacy of positive experience structured by auto-erotic loops.’
‘From my perspective, we must think and act in this direction, very practically, very entangled with our actual symbolic relations, inclusive of concrete notions of elders and children, inclusive of friendships that open the conditions of possibility for business alliances.’ – Completely agree. Your article is full of invaluable and useful framings to assist real thinking.
‘If we do not move from a concept of Total Renaissance that privileges positive experience which erases symptoms, antagonisms, and inconsistencies (the perfect symptom of technofeudalism), to a Total Renaissance that confronts symbolic negativity (totality inclusive of symptoms, antagonisms and inconsistencies), then who really knows what nightmare looms on our sociopolitical horizon?’ – Agreed.
I have come to frame this as the Communist Lie, where the people are said to be in charge, but it’s really an elite totalitarian mafia, not some utopia. And the Capitalist Lie that the people are Free, but we are really being trained to be slaves and love it blindly and obediently. In the New World Order both have joined together. Your Techno-Feudalism fueled by drugs and attentionalism (and a comfortable chair). How long does the party last? Cheers
‘My claim is that it is only if we think of totality in the sense of a broken whole-in-becoming in which every attempt to signify the whole only produces new symptoms for speculative cognition, which in turn produces new conditions of possibility for sublation’- Way to open with a bang. I’m also a big fan of the Zizek quote (‘The Hegelian totality […] and inconsistencies as integral parts.’), for that captures the case very well. We must indeed start by looking at what most don’t want to look at, and I think that leads into well on studying the failures of Communism.
‘Moreover, when we make the well-known intellectual move from Hegel to Marx, this religious layer of the phenomenal dialectic was replaced by a communitarian secular politics that absolutely failed to engage the work necessary to sublate religion’ – Completely agree. Religion in this sense would for me include the work of Philip Rieff and Peter Berger, which is to say that we have not yet collective thought well the problem of “tragic sociology,” which so far in history only religion has seem capable of sublating (for all its flaws). We indeed find ourselves fragmented, disenfranchised, and disabled today, as you noted, and I’ve been reading through Technofeudalism and thinking more and more how to think the book alongside Adam Smith’s thinking on feudalism. A severe regression is indeed occurring.
‘What disappears is any semblance of an ethical commitment to structures supporting real long-term intimacy, because they are diametrically opposed to the specular imaginary of positive experience’ – Very well put. This is also fire: ‘The result is not a society capable of mediating itself, but a society lost in the immediacy of positive experience structured by auto-erotic loops.’
‘From my perspective, we must think and act in this direction, very practically, very entangled with our actual symbolic relations, inclusive of concrete notions of elders and children, inclusive of friendships that open the conditions of possibility for business alliances.’ – Completely agree. Your article is full of invaluable and useful framings to assist real thinking.
‘If we do not move from a concept of Total Renaissance that privileges positive experience which erases symptoms, antagonisms, and inconsistencies (the perfect symptom of technofeudalism), to a Total Renaissance that confronts symbolic negativity (totality inclusive of symptoms, antagonisms and inconsistencies), then who really knows what nightmare looms on our sociopolitical horizon?’ – Agreed.
I have come to frame this as the Communist Lie, where the people are said to be in charge, but it’s really an elite totalitarian mafia, not some utopia. And the Capitalist Lie that the people are Free, but we are really being trained to be slaves and love it blindly and obediently. In the New World Order both have joined together. Your Techno-Feudalism fueled by drugs and attentionalism (and a comfortable chair). How long does the party last? Cheers
Yes. The Light is defined by the Shadow, and the Shadow by and of the Light, is our becoming, a mirror to the projection.