Thread by @ZoharAtkins

I never made the connection between autonomy and mon-ocularity, but it’s a fascinating and vivid one. Heteronomy as binocularity. Kafka knew this well.

https://twitter.com/PatrickDeneen/status/1460605886003433479

In Kafka, the human condition is riven by the incommensurate demands of heaven and earth.

Autonomous beings, like Homer’s Cyclopses, feel no rift.

Ironically, this makes them vulnerable when they encounter anything outside themselves.

“Nobody has blinded me”= “Nothing to see here.”

The autonomous are condemned to LARP to protect themselves from the reality principle.

This is Baudrillard’s point: existentialism and subjectivism create a void that must be filled by consumerism.

It also is the thesis of @MacaesBruno that liberalism can only survive if culture becomes a kind of TV melodrama. What binds us? The media narratives we consume? Politics as theater.

We who live in the age of screens have become flattened. We see with one eye. And when the flood waters come we, too, will cry out, “Nobody has blinded me.”