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The Fascist Playbook IX: Dissonance or what 'One Battle After Another' Misses that Pynchon gets

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    There is perhaps a strange similarity between Antigone and the fate of the revolutionaries in Thomas Pynchon's Vineland (1990), a novel which recently acquired a second life through Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another (2025). Both works are concerned with the extraordinary difficulty of distinguishing a revolutionary subject from the conditions through which he or she becomes its opposite.  Vineland begins in California in 1984, where a certain Zoyd Wheeler, a former hippie, must perform an annual act of public insanity in order to continue receiving disability benefits. This year he has decided to wear a woman's dress and attack a bar with a chainsaw, a performance which must be witnessed by television cameras if he is to continue being recognised by the welfare state as a lunatic. Unfortunately, the bar has been gentrified, the loggers have developed expensive tastes and his entire performance has been moved by somebody else to another location. Even ...
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The Anti-'Witnessing Consciousness'

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' Is it only you alone who fails to find the self or everyone? You could never be sure about what all others do or do not perceive. As to your own non-perception that is no invariable sign of the self's nonbeing '. Udayana agsint Buddhist arguments for non-perception and non-existence (in Arindam Chakrabarti's ' Realisms Interlinked' pg 17  ' Consciousness, in its observing, learns that what things are in themselves, it itself is .' - Hegel, THe Phenomenology of Consciousness At the start I want to say straight up that Hegelian theme of 'observing reason' which has eastern correlates in the idea of a 'witness' to consciousness is in fact one of the few genuinely productive startegies produced by ancient and medieval philosophy. By anti I don't (obviously) mean a simple negative but rather what my friend D calls a 'retentive negation' : a negation that preserves what it negates.  In fact the theme of 'the witness' in ph...
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The Unseeung Gaze IV: Can an LLM read?

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In Proust's book on Ruskin 'On Reading' he takes on Ruskin's metaphor from the essay 'Seasame' of reading involving both a reading of a book and a reading of a world. While many suggestions in Proust and many descriptions seem to fetishize objects as commodities, his reading of Ruskin remains challenging and fascinating. Ruskin initially suggests the analogy between 'reading a building' and 'reading a book'.  Proust himself was a translator of Ruskin, though he hardly spoke any English, he heard Ruskin as he himself said, he heard his language and meaning emerged secondarily from this process. Again here we see the same contradiction between reading a language and hearing a sound. Here I provide an extensive description from the first part of Recherche du temps... the famous description of 'the three steeples of Martineville': 'They had had me climb up next to the coachman,  we were going like the wind because, before returning to Com...
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The Unseeing Gaze III: Can AI make a friend-enemy distinction?

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 The consequences of an individual human's action are rarely soverign even if in a phenomenological (first person) sense they are made based on an assumption of sovereignty.  Really the Schmittian idea that the Soveriegn decides on the state of exception, on the conditions that merit war in society, itself are undermined when we consider that a lot of decisions today in war or for war are made by automated decision making systems, preciely because the strategy employed in modern warfare exceeds tactical considerations that can be encompassed by human intelligence. Particularly from the point of view of nations with established armies, fighting nations with irregular armies that create asymmetric situations for warfare.  Tim Blackmore in his history of military technology used by tactically advanced military units, describes how the only way to combat asymmetric warfare for a conventional army is through technology that provides a panoptic vision of the landscape. These mi...
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