TheLitCritGuy

"Twenty-six books in I’ve reached the beginning of the middle of the journey and so these books reveal a universe in which every attempt at stability, whether that ethical, aesthetic, or theological, collapses under the weight of its own misrelation. The Ultramarines’ sudden confrontation with contingency, the Word Bearers’ catastrophic leap into a malformed absolute, and the Imperium’s refusal to acknowledge the Warp as constitutive of its own being are not discrete narrative beats but a mode of Kierkegaardian despair."

So a good example to understand the importance of cognitive mapping can be through the simple question: where do you work? In an era of gig-economy employment, insecure housing, and a 24/7 “just in time” economy, the answer to that question for many of us might as well be, everywhere and nowhere. So many of us are just like Clark, living and working in the same place—a place which isn’t really suited to either of those things. In the era of Slack and Microsoft Teams, work doesn’t stay “at work,” but follows us wherever we go. For Jameson, culture and art that was conducive to cognitive mapping was an essential part of any socialist or leftist politics, because it allows people to collectively grasp the truth of their political, economic and social situation. As he put it in his famous book Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism: “‘Cognitive mapping’ was nothing but a code word for ‘class consciousness.’” In other words, you can’t participate in a class struggle if you can’t even see the dimensions of the battlefield.

"What would you do if you could get anything that you ever wanted? Not through some act of blood-soaked violence, but simply through the force of your desire. What if you could manifest it, just make a wish for that thing you really wanted more than anything else? What if all you needed to do was tap a button on a screen and any product you could think of would be with you in just a day? What would you rationalize and excuse away? You could do everything and anything you wanted, able to outsource your sense of responsibility or justice to an abstract and impersonal force, able to be a monumental coward and still indulge your own desire."

logging on, to continue being a "freelance writer" of some description.

"The precipitating incident is a crisis of sovereign legitimacy, or in other words, a conflict between the military and political forms of sovereign power.  After the Emperor and his sons secure a great victory at Ullanor, he retreats from military modes of power and retreats to Terra, to take up an at-first-unspecified great work. This can be seen as a move from the material to the Ideal, or, in other words, from the realm of power as immediate force to one in which power is understood as politics. It is this which triggers the inevitable collapse of the Imperium into civil war, and Horus forsaking his father. After all, the Emperor's "Imperial Truth" is an attempt at absolute secular sovereignty: banning religion while claiming god-like authority (the classic Schmittian sovereign who decides on the exception). The Primarchs are his homunculi, designed to be extensions of sovereign will, yet granted semi-autonomous personhood. This creates an immediate legitimation crisis: they are both sons and tools, individuals and gene-wrought weapons. Horus' "abandonment" (the Emperor's secrecy, the withdrawal to Terra) exposes the paternal fiction and their own inherent disposability under the Imperial regime. For these genetically perfected soldiers, the end of the war is the end of meaning itself, an unforgivable subordination of the real to the Ideal."

Driven by some dark, cthonic urge and due to the enabling of @laboring-leon I'm reading all sixty plus novels outlining the Horus Heresy and every ten novels or so I'm going to be writing about the story thus far. The first installment covers transmedia storytelling, a brief mention of Engels Dialectic of Nature and the irrational kernel at the heart of every rationalist project.

Fallon presides over his rituals of play like a vampire, feeding not on blood but on enthusiasm. He doesn’t really converse with any of his guests; they all know what they are there for. Rather, he extracts. He demands “relatability” from them, draining the authenticity from the interaction until only the husk of a “viral moment” remains. The horror lies in the repetition: the feigned shock, the hysterical laughter at unfunny mishaps, the relentless “Golden Retriever energy.”

The good news is that literary criticism does seem to be up to that task, for horror studies at least, though unfortunately not with The Horror Theory Reader. The exciting and generative work of horror theory continues apace, not necessarily within the confines of academia but in books, essays and in my experience, podcasts that are reaching new audiences and raising the quality of critical discourse beyond the tired moralistic question of why people might enjoy horror. In a time of capitalist crises, of rising fascist reaction, and of ecological catastrophe, our fears and nightmares have never had greater political valence or importance. Theory—speculative, political and liberatory thought—can be a tool for understanding these fears, not just exposing the nightmares of history but perhaps even glimpsing, through the dark, a potential future beyond the horror.

"I came to Dark Souls too late. Appropriate really, given the ways in which all the FromSoft games have become synecdoche for a certain kind of games discourse. I mean, am I really trying to write about them now? Trying to squeeze something from this carcass, picked clean. Bones, bleaching under the rays of bright, black sun. What else is there to say?"

On the political theology of AI, over on patreon.

Some thoughts on my moral repugnance towards GenAI

Part Six

In preperation for the next book project, I'm spending a lot of time writing about haunted houses in horror film. Some of this might be background or notes for the final book but if you'd like to read along, or catch up on previous installments you can find them all at thehaunt.blog -- go subscribe or, if you'd like early access to everything and to send me some suggestions, then you can get everything through patreon.com/thelitcritguy