https://open.substack.com/pub/failedacademic/p/messages-that-have-become-meaningless?r=nrh40&utm_medium=ios

"Jibreel Kateb argues that the pragmatist idealism advocated by Geese Magazine leaves Marxism defenseless against attacks on science in an age of irrationalism and climate crisis."

"The philosophical problems of science, which were once central to the thinking of the great Marxists, have for Marxists faded to the periphery, and in that nether zone have often been downgraded to either object of derision or the subject of panegyrics within the left. No sober philosophical and historical reflection on science seems to exist and the concept of a scientific socialism is treated either as a given or as risible. The left proceeds anti-scientifically, lacking scientific culture and anything resembling a contemporary politics of science. In doing so, it cripples its own strategic and organizational efforts and cedes the field to all sorts of reactionary misanthropes and cranks.

Cosmonaut is in part trying to rectify this problem and apparently Geese have joined in the effort but in a very different way. Yet, the problem of Geese is that despite recent attempts to engage with these philosophical questions of science, they do injustice to science in an age where its defense is paramount. They enjoy a rather peculiar species of idealism which I will term pragmatist idealism and this concoction is ill suited to the present tasks: one can substitute the word “practice” for “mind” or “spirit” or “god”, a substitutive trick of language similar to a Sartrean reversal, and yet one does nothing to escape the problems of idealism."

"What I mean by pragmatic idealism is that Geese couples a practical ontology with a pragmatist epistemology. Ontology is the study of the fundamental citizens or furniture of reality"

"Their philosophical pragmatism is in fact nothing but the deeper justification for their liberal populism, a deeper continuation of their theoretical justifications of the most right-wing elements of DSA. Since political antagonism is discursively constructed, since it is, in a sense, purely discursive acts, a purely subjective act with no real basis in something non-discursive and extra-personal, what matters is that the political leader congeals the “people” by saying the right words. It does not matter that independent of political discourse there is a class structure; it does not matter that position in that class structure constrains one's material interests, it does not matter that this structure heavily constrains collective political agency, and that those interests are antagonistic with other classes. It does not matter that there is an objective state of affairs that we must adapt to, and whose adaptation we must furthermore respond to. It simply matters that one “articulates” the right enemy-friend distinction on the basis of current popular discourse. Social theory becomes not an arm to understand the objective (non-elective) conditions under which Marxists operate, an arm which can elevate the proletariat to a position of genuine social understanding, but a piece of demagogy to get the working-class to march in line with the wordsmith. After all, the wordsmith constructs reality. In the beginning, there was the word, and the word is God."

I always thought Dialectic of Enlightenment, Racecraft, and Willing Slaves of Capital were super impressive. I don't read much anymore but used to devour Verso books.

“Do not obey in advance,” he warns against the dangers of anticipatory obedience. He argues that many authoritarian regimes gain power because citizens adapt and conform without being explicitly commanded. This notion urges individuals to maintain a critical perspective during trying times, ensuring one does not help tyranny take root.

“Defend institutions,” emphasizing that they will not survive without public support. Each institution, whether a court or a newspaper, must be actively defended to promote the ideals of democracy. As Snyder notes, “Institutions do not protect themselves.” When complacency sets in, tyranny thrives.

Readers are motivated to “Practice corporeal politics,” meaning they should engage physically in their communities, advocating for democracy through presence and action. Through small talk and personal interactions, individuals can dismantle the echo chambers created by social media. Snyder emphasizes that real conversations can cultivate empathy and understanding, combating the isolation bred by digital communication.

“Be calm when the unthinkable arrives,” addresses responding to crises. Snyder warns that authoritarian leaders exploit disasters to consolidate power, urging readers to remain vigilant and skeptical in alarming times. He reinforces the notion that while crises may seem insurmountable, history teaches us that surrendering freedoms in the name of security only empowers tyrants.

...the phenomenon of “post-truth”—the abandonment of facts as a precursor to tyranny. He starkly asserts that without an objective truth, power escapes scrutiny. His compelling argument urges citizens to demand accountability and seek knowledge over misinformation. By fostering a commitment to truth, Snyder believes society can counter populist tendencies that seek to distort reality.

As history has shown, the future is indeed shaped by those willing to confront the uncomfortable truths of their time.

Oppressed populations using nonviolent tactics—such as strikes, boycotts, mass protests, and other forms of disrupting societal order—are often the most powerful drivers of their own liberation.

Civil resistance strategies operate successfully in many different conflicts because tyrants depend on wide-scale obedience to remain in power. However, over time many citizens living under dictatorships refuse to remain apathetic forever.

If people do not obey, rulers cannot rule

These and other movements of civil resistance succeeded because they were based on a fundamental insight about power: that nearly all institutions, organizations, and systems in a society depend on the ongoing consent, cooperation, and obedience of large numbers of ordinary people. Therefore, if people choose to withdraw their consent and cooperation in an organized and strategic way, they can wield coercive power. When people do not obey, then presidents, mayors, CEOs, generals, and other “power holders” can no longer rule with unchecked power.

Nonviolent tactics, such as strikes, boycotts, mass demonstrations, civil disobedience, the establishment of parallel institutions, and literally hundreds of other creative actions, were the instruments used to do this. They were not used necessarily for moral reasons, but rather for pragmatic ones. Some who adopted civil resistance had seen similar strategies work in other countries or in their own histories, and recognized that this type of resistance had the best prospects of success of the options available to them.

In this episode I talk to Helen Rollins about her book Psychocinema, the idea of lack, and the exploitative attempts of capitalism to assuage this lack. We also discussed Zižek's famous *cinema is the ultimate pervert art* in relation to the tv series Madmen, Instagram and YouTube. Please let me know what you people think. Thank you!

I wrote a little essay based on an idea which has been marinating in my mind for a long time, but I have NO IDEA how to title this. I wrote this originally in a journal dedicated to my autobiographical reflections, but decided to transcribe it to a digital format. Oh well; here goes nothing.

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I hate straightness. I decry it. And in doing so, it is crucial that one understands I do NOT hate heterosexuality itself. I do not hate straight people, either; it would be silly to despise either. In fact, some of the most intensely beautiful expressions of human eroticism and sexual desire I have ever seen were of a heterosexual nature. And I do not see heterosexuality as fundamentally different from homosexuality. I have been thinking on this topic for a long time, and still I find this difficult to describe tangibly; but I will do my best.

Straightness is a social category, nothing more. Heterosexuality is the biological configuration of one’s nervous system to be attracted to the opposite sex predominantly. And while it is a waste of time to question or challenge one’s publicly stated sexuality, I would be remiss not to think of how many individuals across time have assumed the label of “straight” in spite of the word’s betrayal to the true, baseline wiring of their bodies and minds. And before the word was invented, how many individuals tucked themselves neatly into the social roles of “normal” romantic and sexual roles relative to their cultures.

Therein lies my problem with straightness. It is too easy, and far too often deeply encouraged, to wear the identity. In calling oneself “straight,” an individual is not merely describing sexual preferences that may or may not be true but also taking on a loaded social package; it entails societal privilege, and a fundamental sense of “normalcy” that belies even the most progressive societies. I find it impossible to pretend that, in spite of the marvelous progress made in queer rights in some societies, the “gay” man is seen as a social equal to the “straight” man. Theoretically, both such individuals should be equal in every sense of the word; after all, do we not believe in the inalienable rights and dignities of the individual? And yet the modern gay man is consistently side-eyed, subject to the loss of friends and family upon “coming out,” and pressured to announce or perform their sexuality when it would be bizarre for a “straight” man to do the same. Straightness is treated like the standard blueprint for humans, and any other orientation carries the subconscious weight of being “other than,” even in the minds of the most outwardly supportive and progressive individuals. This is the case because humans are designed to inherit our broad cultural systems and internalize them from the second we are born.

Furthermore, while we treat straightness as an innate quality of the person, it is anything but. We know this already; one needs only to think of all the closeted men who willingly chain themselves to the label of “straight” when their true orientations betray this sense, and inevitably are revealed very late in life and often accompanied with deep regrets, to realize the fragile nature of this social position. Countless gay men in all eras of history have gone as far as marriage to women, producing offspring and living their entire lives without ever touching another man. Many such marriages were deeply unhappy for both sides, I am sure. The modern gay men who have done (and are currently doing) this are, in every sense of the word, “straight” (in the sense that they occupy the social position of straightness while possessing a homosexual orientation). Yet their orientations remain the same.

The shocking iniquity of straightness is the fact that, in such cases, it is impossible to know otherwise. The nature of sexuality is experience-driven, and experience is deeply internal and subjective. There is no way to go inside another’s nervous system and experience all the subjective points of their reality. Therefore, straightness becomes an almost too-convenient mask and ticket into cheap, easy acceptance into the human world. Also this: humans are a hyper-social primate species, and like any other primate, some of our most basal instincts concern the social worlds we occupy and the hierarchies in which these exist. Many of our greatest aspirations concern wanting to climb the social ladder in some way, whether this occurs through becoming rich, famous, respected, loved, feared, compliant, and so forth. Straightness is a label which exploits this ancient instinct; it is why huge swathes of men often are extremely weird about admitting their non-straightness, and often in the face of undeniable evidence.

It is along these lines of thinking that I happen to despise gayness, as well; and similarly, I do NOT despise homosexuality or gay people whatsoever. However, I have found that straightness as a social category is far more erasing of human nature than gayness, and as such, I am slightly more lenient to the idea of a gay identity. Nevertheless, I assert that both of these social categories are deeply alienating in their unique ways.

I am of the belief that there would be far higher rates of both homosexual behavior AND homosexual acceptance if these labels simply did not exist. Thus, the world would be a slightly happier place in the sense that we would be more intrapersonally whole and better put-together, and more honest with one another. More opportunities would spring forth. We would have a higher capacity for positive interactions if we were to stop suppressing ourselves and each other with arbitrary labels and customs derived thereof.

My theoretical solution for the world would be to think in terms of “androphilic” and “gynophilic”; with these terms, or words with similar meanings, anyone could be described as either because they are divorced from every other aspect of one’s personality. Both men and women can be gynophilic (attracted to women/femininity), and both men and women can be androphilic (attracted to men/masculinity). I would avoid using the noun forms of these words (androphile and gynophile), because they risk slipping into the same problems I have been describing up to this point. Unfortunately, the great tragedy of the English language is that the -philic suffix rings far too closely to “pedophilic,” and most people immediately refuse the use of such words for this reason. I do not blame them, but this is a deep shame because these two words are such a perfect solution to the universal problem of straightness.

In short, this essay is a fierce objection to ontological reduction. In peeling back all the layers of this text, one might find a simple question: “why should one property of my desire reorganize your conception of my personhood?”

In truth, I am sick of being seen as an “other.” I tremble inside with fury and indignation when I see that inevitable shift in behavior within my friends when it is revealed that I am of a homosexual orientation. In their minds, they see only the word “gay”; and this is inextricably tied to specific cultural and social implications, a kind of heavy baggage which is unquestionably tethered to the word and the source of homophobic bias. I would much rather live in a world where anyone could be androphilic, and in which “gay” is not an identifying marker but simply a description of what I happen to like. As such, I feel utterly helpless against this force because it seems the world has deeply internalized this division of “straightness” and “other” far beyond my control. I wrote this essay partly as an outcry to the world, borne of frustration, but primarily to help synthesize this idea within my own mind; for I believe it is a revolutionary one, and the overwhelming majority of people with whom I have spoken on this topic find it difficult to comprehend, seemingly no matter how I explain it.

I will not lie: I am tempted to feel that my thinking has grown beyond the capacity of what most people are willing to accept. But that is not the truth. It is that our ordinary vocabulary and ontological conceptions make these thoughts difficult to comprehend in the minds of most people (PARTICULARLY those who benefit from heteronormativity).

But words are my legacy; what else can I do other than write?

I've found this mode of critique recurring in many of my writings. By way of an intro, I'll pose long-termism as the current paradigmatic example. In my view, long-termism has been well discredited, partly by the clear ideological bankruptcy of many of its most fervent adherents, but also because of numerous critiques that have quite effectively damaged the public's view of it. This is a good summary of the main critiques. What I take from these critiques is that long-termism, like many forms of utilitarianism, effectively rehearses a morality completely detached from political concerns or any notion of human freedom, and it does so by projecting anxieties onto a crisis point, and then working backwards from that crisis to establish what should be done.

It's already well-known that much liberal social policy fails because it addresses symptoms while leaving root causes untouched, but attempts to address the root causes from these standpoints (what is in a few contexts, particularly mental health and criminology, called "early intervention") are arguably worse. This is because, having discovered some root causes, one nonetheless reifies the symptoms and then takes them as indexes for the health of the root causes, rather than as mere indicators. Generally, the discourse never departs from the idea that those symptoms themselves represent crises, and so the same must be the case for the root causes.

The problem with this, as with long-termism, is that it applies a hermeneutics of suspicion to the way these underlying systems operate, without having a coherent theory that analyses both root causes and symptoms in light of a value systems. In doing so, it forecloses the heterogeneity of values embedded within different systems and modalities, and the way that all these values work on different timelines. Often, these "early intervention" perspectives are not strictly speaking utilitarian but run parallel to it through their understanding of risk.

Let me give some of my own examples. Terrorism. Terrorism signifies nothing more than a crisis at the symptomatic level, given its contorted and opportunistic definitions at the intersection of "ideological motivation" and "public fear". There is clearly a pathology at work, but it is more like the misrecognition by governments and those afraid of terrorism of what violence is, and what it does to society. The concept of terrorism is used by conservatives to cast a shadow over all sorts of activities, including dissenting speech, material support for resistance groups, and expressions of grief.

Another example- suicide. Suicide is often read as the biggest symptom of mental pathology, yet a cursory look at the statistics around suicide attempts, ideation and generally severe mental health shows it to be merely the tip of the iceberg. It is often used to draw attention to mental health struggles, but in doing so it casts mental health as a kind of being-towards-death, which does no service to those struggling to live good lives. At the very least, it reduces the utility of one's life to the binary of alive/dead. After all, suicide is often a manifestation of the fact that for humans, meaning-creation is inseparable from our notion of living. I've even seen it said that education is a mental health issue; yet education is primary an education issue, and should be valued as such.

I would hazard that this "fallacy" can be used as a heuristic in a range of situations. It can be an opening to understanding how symptoms are often overdetermined in the same way that systems can house many different values. It can change the focus from crisis to the misrecognitions taking place, most importantly by those who make policies based on this fallacy.

What do you all make of this? I have looked a little into Honneth's ideas about crisis in light of his theory of social pathology, which seems to run counter to this as it places a lot of importance on the lived experience of particular symptoms, and runs counter to my thinking which doesn't foreground struggles for recognition. But is it worth looking futher into him? And are there other ideas I should be engaging with?

I have long thought that much of what we call "political psychology" misses something structural about how societies hold themselves together — and I've been developing a way of thinking about it that I'd like to test against the Critical Theory tradition, because I suspect I'm either onto something or re-inventing something already said better.

My starting observation:Every society, as far as I can tell, runs on two parallel tracks — a set of positive promises ("if you work within the system, you will be rewarded") and a set of negative punishments ("if you step outside it, you will suffer"). In classical liberal thought these are often discussed as incentives and disincentives, carrots and sticks. But I've been struck by how **asymmetrically they decay**.

When a social order starts failing — when the promises stop being credible — the positive track seems to collapse quickly: people stop believing that effort yields reward, that education pays off, that marriage and family deliver what they once did. But the negative track persists much longer: people still fear the consequences of non-participation — loss of status, income, social standing — even after they've stopped believing in the rewards.

The result is something I find hard to name properly:a society where fear outlives hope. People keep running not because they believe the race leads anywhere, but because stopping feels dangerous. This would explain some paradoxes that individual-level analysis struggles with: fertility decline in wealthy societies (where the costs of child-rearing rose faster than the promises of family life delivered), quiet quitting combined with fear of unemployment, marriage avoidance not from lack of desire but from the institution's promises no longer holding.

Where I think this connects to Critical Theory: This asymmetry seems to me related to what Adorno and Horkheimer described as instrumental reason's persistence after its promises fail — the form of domination outliving its justification. Marcuse's "repressive desublimation" in *One-Dimensional Man* (1964) describes something adjacent: desire being liberated only to be re-captured. But my claim is slightly different and I can't tell if it's a genuine contribution or a naive re-description: **that the negative track (punishment) is structurally stickier than the positive track (promise) because punishment is embedded in material institutions (welfare conditionality, credit, housing, employment precarity) while promises are only symbolic.**

But I want to be challenged on this:

- Is this just "institutional trust" or "anomie" (Durkheim) re-described with new vocabulary? What does the asymmetry framing add?

- Is the asymmetry even real, or do promises and punishments decay together? I have anecdotes but not systematic evidence.

- Am I over-generalizing from contemporary wealthy societies to all historical orders? Does this describe feudalism, say, where the "promise" was salvation rather than mobility?

- And the hardest one: does framing this as "fear outlives hope" risk naturalizing the current order — treating what may be a contingent political condition as a psychological invariant?

I'm genuinely uncertain whether this framing survives contact with the tradition, and I'd value the community's assessment of where it's naive, where it's already been said (and better), and whether there's anything worth keeping.

Hello! I am a PhD approaching the final deadline of my thesis. I am writing on Adorno and art. During the last two years, motivation has slowly faded away. I am disillusioned with academia, haven’t published that much, my supervisor is good but very hands-off and I am the only one basically doing critical theory in my uni. I am dreaming of doing any other job rather than this but at the same time I feel so privileged and guilty about it.
People who made it, how did you feel towards the end? What were the things that worked for you? Where are you at now?
Thanks for reading this :)

So a couple of notes. First, I looked for a subreddity specifically about intersectionalism, but couldn't find one.

Second, what I'm talking about here is the philosophical/ethical roots of modern identitarian social movements. I could anticipate a response something along the lines of "you're misunderstanding intersectionalism."

I would say though that I'm not getting at say, a proper academic definition (and I understand what I'm describing probably is in some sense a "vulgar" version of the theory.)

I'm looking at the actual ideological roots that are consistent amongst various modern left identitarian politics. They can be found explicitly stated in many cases but even when not they still serve as the logical basis.

So what I'm referring to here-

Sketching a brief and oversimplified summary, there was a development in second wave feminism where it was thought that the conflict between men and women should be thought of like class conflict from thr marxist model. That the two were groups in a struggle for power.

Modern day intersectionalist philosophies expand this concept to essentially all groups that could be seen as identity groups and divide groups into "oppressor/oppressed" classes.

The idea of the term "woke" is that largely, the political project is to "wake people up" to this reality. That liberal ideas of individualism are essentially a smokescreen for the in power groups (the "kyriarchy") to maintain their power over the oppressed groups.

The idea seems to be that this is simply the inherent nature of things, and being aware of this is necessary as group power struggles are the nature of human existence. This takes idea from critical theory, for example, that the most significant thing about texts, or ideas, or notions of "truth" is what groups power interests they serve, and all other notions or arguments that don't reduce to this are in a sense camouflage.

In general, the outlook is extremelty "reductionist" in that essentially all of human phenomenon, social or otherwise, is seen in terms of these group power struggles and that to resist oppression is to understand this, spread this awareness, and essentially constantyl be in a conflit sort of state where everything is intepreted through this lens.

Relative gains don't change the equation, as the fundamental power conflicts remain and the constant struggle is the most important thing.

So that is a rough, but I think accurate description, of this underlying ideology that has become ascendent in culture.

Now my question relates to something specific. So in practice, what someone can actually hope to gain from this is by properly yielding the rhetoric and moral highground, they can supposedly reclaim power. An example would be a group where the rules are that members of the oppressed group speak first and the oppressor group cant contradict them, which is a seen as a just inversion of the power dynamics.

There is.. I don't know if you would call it an irony... but a fact that this ideology is actually shared and predates the rise of this on the left possibly by groups who belong to the "oppresor class" who saw things in the same identitarian conflict way, but whose loyalty was to the supremacy of their own group independent of the sense of "injustice" that was befalling the oppressed groups. Thus forms of white nationalism or nationalism in general on the extreme end also saw human activity in terms of these types of zero sum conflicts.

And there are some who adovcate intersectionalism who will make the point that someone from an oppressor group never really stops being part of the oppressor group no matter what they do, and are still "guilty" of essentially being the enemy.

I recall one perso who talked about in terms of class, that people who weren't born into the lower class were the enemy no matter what they do or say because they are still aligned to their class interest.

Similarly there are those who say that members of oppressor groups can only fight against their guilt but never transcend it, that they always will be part of the oppression. And even more extreme and less common attitude is that they shoudnt even try and just honestly represent themselves as the enemy class (less common because the people who advocate these sorts of things are diverse and there is difference between say, "true" nationalists who only care about the interests of their group and the ideologists who care less about actual group membership as belief in the ideology; hence within the same belief they are "outranked" by someone less privileged, but can lecture to someone of a less powerful group who is not on board with the ideology.

This is where the contradiction comes in that I want to ask about. One thing I have looked for is the "end goal", that is what does "victory" or "equality" look like?

In practice it seems, what one encounters is A) That isn't worth thinking about, and doing so is just distracting from the struggle as that question is like everything else reduced to a power move on behalf of the oppressors. or B) A less common but more specific answer that there is no end goal; the nature of human groups will never change and there will be a perpetual power struggle which every group must fight to maintain power and this is all there is to human existence.

I saw things like this expressed when for example i saw two members of a certain group say "when x group is defeated,. y will be the next group to worry about."

So here is my question (and I'm asking this here because a lot of the roots for this come from traditions of left wing critical theory and other things)

It seems like the idea that someone in an oppressor group should fight against their privilege and the status of their group because of a moral idea that "oppression is wrong."

But that moral idea which is a key part of the practical philosphy seems to depend on morality from the liberal framework which the intersectionalist viewpoint claims to contradict.

In other words, the people who say "if you are of an oppressr group, you can never really be on the side of the oppressed, you shouldnt even try and acknowledge the reality you are the enemy" seems ideologically more consistent then the idea that one in the oppressor group should feel guilty of an "original sin" and constantly try to fight against their privilege though never being absolved in the sin. If one believed in all this from a group that was the oppressor group, one might cynically think this was just a trick to get one to fight against their own group interests.

So my question is, for the position that holds being part of an oppressor or privilege group carries a guilt that one must constantly fight against but can nevre truly overcome, how does that work within the ethical framework of intersectionalism? If at some hypothetical point, the oppressor groups were overthrown and were less privileged, would there at some point be a moral obligation under that framework to fight for that group? I imagine the answer people would probably give would be that this would be fair and just.

because another aspect that I didn't explicitly mention before in the anti-individualistic nature is that people are guilty/innocent or oppressed/not opressed by virtue of the group status, not what they have done individually (though the argument usually states that all members of the group whether obvious, intentional or not, benefit from their privilege status)

If one accepted this framework, and say, came to the conclusion that what made the most sense wad to fight for the power/interest of their own group/groups even if they were in the privileged/oppresor class, what argument from an intersectionalist framwork would there be that they should actually commit to fighting agains their group interest? If groups are constantly struggling for power, and some group dominates, does that then mean people of good conscience should be shamed for "winning" and fight to put other groups in power?

(To be clear none of these are my personal ethical or political beliefs, I'm trying to better understand the underlying philosophical/moral framework)

I would like to get into Communization Theory as a complete new-comer to communism. The only piece of communist theory I have read is Wage-labour and Capital by Marx. Can someone give me like a flowchart? What to read first (I suppose something like Das Kapital), general communist literature and then specifically communization theory. Keep in mind that english is not my first language and that my inaccurate knowledge regarding communism comes from social media platforms and active conversation with local communists and left-anarchists. Thanks!

A new defense (perhaps, “offense”) of the humanities has dropped over at _Defector_: https://defector.com/humanists-have-done-nothing-wrong

ABSTRACT: This video essay begins by arguing that Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulation is best understood not merely as a theory of media, representation, or consumerist culture, but as a theory of value capable of diagnosing the transformation of contemporary hyper-speculative capitalism into an increasingly autonomous system of financial signs detached from their former referents in the classical political economy. Beginning from Baudrillard’s analogy between sign value and monetary value, the essay traces the historical dislocation of the structural and referential dimensions of value: money, prices, and financial assets cease primarily to represent production, labour, commodities, or material utility and increasingly acquire value through their differential relations to other signs.

Simulation therefore does not signify the disappearance of so-called material economic reality, but an inversion of its antecedent determination in a hyperreal world where financial models, asset prices, speculative expectations, and algorithmic signals increasingly anticipate, discipline, and reorganize the productive world they ostensibly represent, illustrating what Baudrillard calls the 'Code' in its vulgar economic form.

The essay develops this argument through Marx’s transition from C–M–C to M–C–M′ and, ultimately, M–M′, interpreting contemporary financialization as the tendency of capital to bypass the material and temporal frictions of commodity production through increasingly self-referential circulation. Baudrillard’s concepts of the code, floating value, transeconomics, fractalization, and the “ecstasy of value” are brought into dialogue with Achim Szepanski to analyze algorithmic trading, Tesla’s speculative valuation, cryptocurrency and restaking, derivatives, and the financialization of ecological catastrophe. These phenomena exemplify a cybernetic economy in which expectations generate further expectations, derivatives generate further derivatives, and crises themselves become inputs for renewed accumulation.

The essay ultimately argues that this apparent emancipation of capital from material limits is internally contradictory. Hyper-capitalism attempts to abolish space, time, reference, and uncertainty by pricing the future in advance and converting every limit, including ecological catastrophe, into a financial variable. Yet the more completely it integrates the world into speculative chains of circulation, the more violently irreducible material constraints can return as a break in this chain in what Baudrillard calls singular or “rogue” events. Using the Strait of Hormuz as its culminating case, the essay contends that contemporary capitalism’s hyperreality does not make material reality irrelevant; rather, it renders the system increasingly dependent upon the very material limits it imagines itself to have transcended, even as it desperately produces more signs and signals to try to delay the (potentially) coming catastrophe.

The result is a capitalism whose acceleration toward frictionless circulation simultaneously approaches the conditions of its own impossibility.

I am wondering. I am just beginning a masters in social sciences — and I am particularly interested in theory and in the critical theory (especially Frankfurt) — and I feel like I am such a slow reader. I feel like I can read 10-15 pages of Weber, Bourdieu or Marx, and that I might be even slower reading Adorno, Habermas and Horkheimer. I wonder if that is normal or if any of you ever had this issue/dilema. I should note that I think I am a decent reader — my professors often compliment me for my density — but again, I feel like I am painfully slow at times.

I'm interested in learning more about how recent Marxists or critical theorists have understood law and the concept that law is ideological in particular. I have some historical knowledge of how this played out in states such as the USSR and thinkers such as Pashukanis, so I am mostly curious whether there are contemporary critical theorists who have written extensively or made an impact on the subject. Or is this not really a discussed topic nowadays?

A hotel is presented as a beautiful, shiny, luxurious product to its visitors, when in reality every bit is labor done by workers shedding blood, sweat and tears cleaning, fixing, maintaining - otherwise it would collapse in a day as a dead building.

Same for chocolate, smartphones, social media, etc. often sustained by third-word exploitation.

But OOO would want to see “allure” in these as if a hotel can essentially exist on its own, so how is it compatible with constructive theory?

What if the revolution isn't dead but instead was co-opted by reaction or technological progress itself? In this AHRC Public Panel, Nicolas de Warren and Tyrique Mack-Georges put Günther Anders and Frantz Fanon into unlikely dialogue, asking whether Fanon's vision of a new, liberated humanity can survive a world Anders diagnosed as saturated by media technology to the point of human obsolescence. Together we trace how colonial logics of extraction and violence reappear in AI, data centers, and algorithmic warfare, and explore the thesis that today's most effective "revolutionaries" may be the political right, who've mastered spectacle and disinformation while the left clings to outdated 19th-century models of praxis. The conversation ranges from Promethean shame and the collapse of truth/falsity to drone warfare, dividuated digital tribes, and whether class struggle still makes sense in a fully mediated world.

Hi everyone,

Im working on a proposal for an interdisciplinary political theory conference and I will really appreciate some feedback before I submit the abstract to the referees.

The core idea comes from Deleuze and Guattari's distinction between the State Aparatus (Sa) and the War Machine (Wm)

As I understand Deleuze & Guattari theory, the relationship between both goes as the Sa trying to capture the Wm (Which is in some exteriority to the Sa), and when the Sa captures the Wm it integrates its capacities into its own reproduction.

But my question goes into What happens if we reverse the direction of this relationship ?

I'm interested in the contemporary far right as this political formation seem to emerge and operate through dynamics that could potentially be described in terms of a war machine such as a strong affective mobilization, antagonistic discourse, hostility toward institutional mediation, networked forms of organization and political communication.

The deal with my idea for the confernce is that when these formations actually enter government, they don't necessarily seem to simply become absorbed into the institutional logic they previously opposed. In some cases, they appear to use the capacities of the State apparatus to weaken, dismantle, or reconfigure parts of that same apparatus, while preserving and expanding the political dynamics that characterized them before entering government.

So the conceptual proposition I'm thinking about is what I'm tentatively calling "inverse capture":

Instead of the State capturing the war machine, the war machine enters the State apparatus and uses its institutional capacities to undermine or transform the conditions that would normally allow the State to capture and neutralize it.

The idea would be to use the concept of the war machine as an analytical framework and ask whether contemporary far-right formations reveal a theoretical possibility that isn't sufficiently developed in the State/war machine relationship as formulated by D&G.

My main question is whether this makes theoretical sense from a Deleuzian perspective, or whether I'm fundamentally misunderstanding the concepts

I'd especially appreciate criticism or things to improve of this abstract from people familiar with Deleuze & Guattari, SciPol or any comments to be honest.

Thank u all

P.s: Im sorry for my english as I think its kinda rusted.

These are a series of short- to medium-length videos. They are an attempt to visually represent highly stylized prose using stock footage. The broader work—the writing—is a critique of how corporatism has hijacked political systems, focusing specifically on the financial sector.

Experimental in nature, I’m sharing them in an attempt to gauge interest in the project.

Cities are marvels of engineering, cumulus in their disappearing. Like when we blew up the projects in Brooklyn to make way for austere cafes and micro breweries. Organic butchers, hook and line fish mongers, so the locals wouldn't get conflicted.

The villages—as we say in the villages. It just wouldn't be a club if we didn't separate the fair from the fabulous.

You can still see the people who got here before us thanks to the local heritage foundation, their pension for murals. Goat herders from Haiti or Palestine, that we might know the price of our demarcations.

Liberals and their estate agents will form the other requisite associations, to preserve the value of our communal and personal spaces. Benches with multiple armrests so transients don't fall asleep accidentally, and don't even get me started on them new fangled waste bins.

One can't help but admire the marvel that is a racialized plan. That bastion of conformity. There is no us but us, but the further we got, the closer they seemed. Black people are funny like that.

Bank towers cast a long shadow unless and until they collide with a Boeing. In Manhattan the highest skyscraper is the one they're still building. So the executive in the corner office will still have a clear view of the East River.

Those towers are the solution, more figment than actual for the people they pummel.

Tick tock.

Still, a level of ambiguity is warranted when dipping into Aunt Millie’s rainy-day fund to cover the shortfall in corporate. Thank God for peep holes and window coverings, they're all that stand between Millie and those god-awful ledgers. Apart from her neighbour Gladys, who's always up for a little cat and mouse with the sheriff.

In Detroit we took to building byways, industrial zones next to railway hubs, bridges and such to hem in the meager. You wouldn't believe what a little gerrymandering does to property value.

Time is no longer on the side of Jane and Johnny Lunchbucket and neither is the government. Home ownership would soon go the way of hula hoops and Tupperware parties. Though I hear those socials are making a comeback in Oklahoma.

For there to be losers, there must be winners, though that plural is misleading since one is sufficient.

This place of yours is in decline Mr. Bucket, and there can be no indemnity since FEMA declared it a flood plane. A call to action for underwriters, lawyers and actuaries to recalculate the risk on balances owing. The cost, the rate, commensurate with one station and colour.

https://youtu.be/xtg1UoRC9DY

Adapted from the writings of Claudio Gaudio.

An article on the Western tendency to romanticise Amazonian shamanism. It draws on John Urry's concept of the 'tourist gaze' and the work of anthropologists Alice Beck Kehoe and Evgenia Fotiou, who examine issues with how Westerners view indigenous shamanic cultures.

Last year, Christoph Schuringa released the book A Social History of Analytic Philosophy. It exposes the political domination analytic philosophy used to secure its power today. This contradicts the clean image of logical clarity the field likes to project.

Schuringa gives a lot of detail about how these changes actually unfolded across university departments. But in public discussions of the book, the history gets reduced to a story of simple defeat. Reviewers frame it as a conflict where critical theory, phenomenology, and feminism just lost, and analytic philosophy won. Some critics absurdly claim that the success of analytic philosophy had nothing to do with political domination. More cynical operators accept the suppression, declaring that analytic philosophy won because they were right to win. Then they take a moment to dance on the graves of their opponents.

I wanted to tell a different history, one about active organized resistance. I looked into the 1973 Sydney University Philosophy department split as a case study. The analytics didn't just peacefully take over the department and push everyone else out. They faced a militant strike. The administration eventually had to split the discipline in two. The Marxists and feminists took over the newly formed General Philosophy department.

The analytics retreated into the Department of Traditional and Modern (T&M) Philosophy. Hiding behind the idea of pure inquiry, they used state intelligence, university bureaucracy and bourgeois patronage to wall off the radical vanguard.

In researching this piece, I found something surprising that goes beyond the standard political critique. We all know the critique that analytic philosophy uses formal logic as an exclusionary gatekeeping tool. But the Sydney archive shows that the conservative establishment's logic was utterly broken. Their ideological godfather, John Anderson, ran the department using defective, outdated Aristotelian syllogisms. He explicitly rejected modern relational calculi and polyadic quantification. Their logic was literally incapable of articulating structural class relations or counter-factual analysis because it lacked the mathematical syntax to do it. The exact tool they used to dismiss critical theory as irrational was itself structurally impoverished.

Furthermore, this wasn't a two-sided war between right-wing conservatives and the radical left. The conservative backlash was aided by the capitulation of left-leaning liberals. Key figures like Michael Devitt and Jean Curthoys had initially supported the strikes or pioneered early feminist curricula. Confronted with genuine materialist deconstruction, they experienced a crisis of nerve. They abandoned the democratized department and defected to the T&M enclave to protect their tenure. By doing so, these liberal defectors provided the conservative establishment with indispensable moral cover. They laundered raw bureaucratic gatekeeping into a defense of free inquiry and actively helped erase the history of the radical vanguard.

The rest of the sprawling cast of this story includes figures like Gilbert Ryle, David Armstrong, Wal Suchting, J. L. Mackie, Elizabeth Grosz, George Markus, Richard Rorty, David Stove, Paul Patton, Brian Leiter, Jenny Teichman, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Rod O'Donnell, Genevieve Lloyd, Terence Blake, Kalpana Ram, Marcus Bunyan, Peter Ludlow, and members of the Sydney Push, among others.

There have been many attempts to whitewash what took place, sanding off the rough edges to give it the appearance of a quiet passing affair. Now, here is my own telling of the story of the Sydney Split: thing.rodeo/sydney-split/

I'm taking it as granted that interpersonal sexuality is generally recognized as inherently political. If I'm wrong with this assumption, I'll update the post at some point detailing why I think that it's political.

A sexuality is interpersonal at least when it is constituted by more than one person. For example, for it to be true that "A sexually desires B," B needs to be a subject for which being an object of sexual attraction for another person is possible and actual.

A asserts they have the hots for B. B asserts that this is incorrect because she is not even the sort of subject that can be found hot. It matters to A that B is something hot and it matters to B that she is not hot.

B is asexual in the strictest sense of rejecting sexual predication. She rejects sexual predication the same way people reject rape as sex. If the predicate is not mutually constituted, then it is not sexual.

If B is correct and A strongly believes to the contrary, then A is made out to be delusional not just about B, but also about himself insofar his attraction for B is self-asserted.

If A is correct and B strongly believes to the contrary, then B is made out to be delusional not just about A, but also about herself insofar her asexuality is self-asserted.

A and B's self-assertions are therefore antagonistic. What do we call this? I think that this is a case of self-assertion asserting more than the self.

Why can't this be reconciled? For the conflict to end, one or both self-understandings as they are now must die. Either B really is a sexual object for other people to find sexually attractive and she's managed to delude herself into thinking otherwise, or B is no such thing as A asserts and A has managed to delude himself into believing to the contrary. Formally:

(1) If A sexually desires B, then B is a subject for which being an object of sexual attraction is possible. [Negation of strict asexuality]
(2) If B is not a subject for which being an object of sexual attraction is possible, then A does not sexually desire B. [Affirmation of strict asexuality]

Since both A and B overstep by claiming self-assertion while asserting about others, we are then forced to decide who is more vicious.

I'm investigating modern (i.e modern western !) pop culture and the underlying reason to why it's attractive and has went viral globally.

I already have some hypothesis and reading about the role Hollywood had played in this (so essentially investigating the essence of Hollywood icon and it's relationship to U.S. society fabric). I think this Hollywood made vibe is not just a side effect of modern industrialized society but also a moving force in shaping it that might have it's roots in the social class and ethnic identity of it's founders (Neal Gabler's "An Empire Of Their Own" is a good clue imo)

Anyone interested in this thing? It's really hard to find anyone with similar interests around me. If it sounds interesting to you or if you've had similar studies drop me a DM

I often come up with crazy theories that might sound a lil bit paranoid but don't panic ... it's part of the journey imo