Status Updates From Topology of Violence

Baudrillard for the win, as always.

I agree with Han and Zizek that the positivist achieving self falls into psychic abreaction as a result of burnout.

I really enjoy many of Han's concepts - the culture of the smooth, positivist societies, the achievement subject, etc- however, he has the tendency to make many overarching general statements that I wish he'd elaborate on more, seeing as they're quite big claims.

Eh.

It's interesting to see the development of his ideas across different eras.

achievement society = doping society. keeping healthy at all costs in order to keep the excessive growth & progress going. ‘They are too alive to die and too dead to live.’ yikes
i disagree w his take on labor camps no longer being located on the ‘outskirts’ of society. yes we’ve brought a lot of those practices into the everyday, but CECOT, prisons, israeli torture camps etc..still hidden in plain sight

‘The only possible way to oppose empire would be to mitigate the process that creates it, eliminating its diabolical sting.’
but what does that even mean?? concretely?
acceleration of empire will lead to total burnout and be catastrophic, he says. lowkey what we’re seeing happen right now i believe.
how do we reverse these processes? what is the alternative?

‘The lack of a counterforce perpetuates the neoliberal economic order. It develops a strong appropriative energy, which absorbs everything and converts it into a capitalist formula.’
ouch

empire is decentralized capitalist regime these days. lack of belonging and community makes class alignment very difficult.
everyone within the capitalist system belongs to it, he says is both victim and perpetrator, which makes resistance nearly impossible.
everyone is hurt and subject to the expectations, but i still see a ruling class that, while also subject to this, are the main arbiters of continuing it all

‘Deficiency naturally comes to an end when the point of saturation is reached, but excess knows no end.’

some forms of negativity, like pausing boredom hesitating etc, can actually be constructive and necessary

i don’t really understand what he defines as ‘diabolical’ and what he thinks is the source of this.

over communication, spamification, once more hyper positivity and acceleration.

‘i am, therefore i shop.’ lol han makes me laugh

transparency of today, the panopticon. obscenity of everything as on display, everything exposed, everything able to be equated to a price, every subject is its own product for sale.
‘The society of achievement reaches maximum efficiency when freedom and self-exploitation are indistinguishable.’ self exposure and self exploitation merge’
transparency as an economic compulsion

‘The more political and action is, the more secrecy it generates.’
oof…i must do more research on this…

he claims the constant demand for transparency is bad. ‘A person’s integrity requires a certain inaccessibility and impermeability.’
in a certain sense i agree, but also don’t want to go fully towards faith based direction where there is no transparency. you need trust for that.
does transparency truly eliminate ‘otherness’??

erosion of the social..scattered, self-focused selves with weak connections to a “we”
excessive growth as major issue-cancerous, becomes destructive at a certain level. and blind to the higher entity which it serves

overwhelming ‘positivity’ of life, congrats and blocks. baudrillard thought on war now is mainly without an enemy, one is at war with oneself.
‘Those who destroy are destroyed…It is a war that no one can win. This war without enmity wouldn’t be ended by the victory of one party over the other but only by global collapse, global burnout.’

wars waged in the name of a nation or a people, rather than for a sovereign, it’s existential, and this increases its range and casualties, unleashed more deadly violence.