/lit/ - Literature

3/4

when nietzsche observes that there are no facts, only interpretations, one wonders if even *he* could have imagined a world in which this idea became the standard operating procedure for social experimentation and reorganization on the present scale and with the present fervor. it seems to me that nietzsche’s idea was always an existentialist one: it was there in order to enable the individual to break free of ressentiment, and not to channel or otherwise wield hermeneutics as a way of controlling or remodelling society itself in one’s own infinitely narcissistic image. but this is what happens: the concept of being an ‘artist of state’ - would he really have approved of how we do this today? if anything, progressive social experiments today simply project ressentiment so vastly and deeply over the entire social field that they become invisible to themselves. but it’s not even an endless creativity abounding, not even remotely ‘revolutionary’…it’s Last Man teleology writ large. too serious to be artistic, and too artless to hide the nakedness of power.

the hardest thing for some people to do is to set their own self-interest aside. maybe we can take things a step further than lyotard here: forget about the libidinal economy, or desire - maybe it’s simply a *narcissistic* economy, and it’s not even that we have desire for others. maybe it’s that we *only ever ultimately desire ourselves*…and require the other to be there as a kind of a surrogate, so that we can see our own faces reflected there.

for myself, my ambivalence towards joining groups proceeds from a kind of unwillingness to surrender my own precious sense of individuality: i have a tendency to futurize everything, look at everything critically. everything is about capital, everything is about power, blah blah. but i *know* i do this because i am ultimately unwilling or resistant to consider, perhaps, the fact that i am simply miserable about having either nothing of substance to contribute, or just *being dissatisfied* with what capital can offer (literally everything…or, at the very least, a temporary exception, or distance, from body-and-soul mechanization). it’s a kind of ressentiment-fueled antipathy towards responsibility, in a way, because to join any group requires you to adopt responsibilities and carry your portion of the weight. it gets *harder* and not easier to do this if you strip all of the illusions away from everything (well, you can *think* this is what you are doing) and abstract everything…because all that happens is that you bleed all of the color out of everything in front of you. but this is a way of simply shutting out what is perhaps an alternate way of viewing things: that order doesn’t have a goal. order’s goal is to continue being orderly: maintaining a sense of coherence, internal and external, through the rotation of the seasons and in the face of the winds of change. same as it ever was. that *is* the reward.