The Death of Cool: Silicon Valley and Cultural Capital

 

There is no small irony in the fact that the Communist Manifesto, as text that, as the title suggests, is meant as a political program is read more for its description of the cultural logic of capitalism. "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned," is a line that is remembered cited, made the title of books essays, and panels, long after everyone forgot Marx and Engel's policy on the nationalization of industry. The flowing prose of the first section will always outlast the programatic statements of the latter section (and to be fair even Marx thought that they were dated by 1871, after the Paris Commune).

Nothing Less: On Death, Knowledge, and Affects

 

We all know Spinoza's famous line, "A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death." (EIVP67) I have turned to the line again and again, in graduate school it draw a line of demarcation if not a line in the sand between Heideggerians and neo-Spinozists, and, as I have argued, made possible different ways of thinking of finitude.  It makes for a great slogan, but, as they say in graduate school, let's unpack that.

A Blessing and a Curse: In Memory of my Mom

In loving memory of Debbie Arntz

April 6, 1945-December 21, 2024

The two phrases you hear when you lose someone, at least in the US, are "Sorry for your loss" and "May their memory be a blessing." The two phrases are diametrically and not dialectically opposed. The first emphasizes absence, the living person that is gone, while the second emphasizes presence, the memories that remain. The first of these phrases are more common, more generic, while the second is more often heard from Jewish friends, at least in my experience, and is a translation of the Hebrew "zichrona livricha." The second has begun to be used more widely, either in act of cultural appropriation or cultural tribute.  I have always thought it to be the better of the two phrases.

An (Éminence) Gris Area: Thinking and Acting in Miller's Crossing

 

The one two punch of Miller's Crossing and Barton Fink are probably peak Coen brothers for me. They have other films that are considered classics (No Country for Old Men, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, etc.), but they are two films that typify everything that comes to mind when one thinks of the Coen Brothers, the obsessions with classic Hollywood films and the culture that produced them; the attention to dialogue that turns every line into both an archive and a poem; and a dark sense of humor. A few years ago, thanks to the Maine International Film Festival I got to see the film with Gabriel Byrne speaking afterwards. One of my best movie going experiences.

Who Knows What Evil Lurks in the Hearts of Men...? On Richard Seymour's Disaster Nationalism

Every election generates its questions. Generally these questions are an attempt to answer the question, what happened? The way this question is asked and then answered is often not very helpful. The pundit class have a predilection for framing electoral results as symbols in a broad search for meaning. Such explanations tend towards expressive causality as the entire election expresses a historical moment, and the soul of a nation. Thus we are told that Obama's election was the beginning of a new post-racial America, that Harris' lost is the end of identity politics, and that we are all in Trumpland now. A difference of a few million votes in a few different key states is translated into the expression of a new zeitgeist. Such expressive explanations are generally not very useful, especially when we are talking about voting which is actually the actions of millions of different people across different classes states, classes, races, and so on. If anything is overdetermined (and I would argue that everything is, but that is a different, and more speculative point), then elections definitely are overdetermined. My response to all of the various answers to why Trump beat Harris, everything from Harris' failure to distance herself from Biden's support for genocide in Gaza to Trump's appeal to racism and misogyny is to say "yes" to all of them. They are all factors, and all played a role in different degrees and different places. 

Working Politics: The Divisions and Unity of Labor

Machiavelli argued that a prince must appear to be of the people, must seem to have the same values and morals that they do. For him, writing in the sixteenth century, the most important way to appear to be of the people was to be religious. Christianity as set of ideals is certain doom for any ruler, but a necessary appearance for every ruler. As Louis Althusser sums up this general demand. “The prince must take the reality of popular ideology into account, and inscribe therein his own representation, which is the public face of the state.”

Why We Write: Or, Blogging as a Philosophical Practice

A collection of posts from this blog will be published as a book soon from Mayfly books. 

I am posting the introduction as well as the table of contents below. 

 

Automatic Against the People: Reading, Writing, and AI

Over the summer I posted a rant online (below after the jump), which was circulated enough that I was invited by my university to take the con position in the debate should students be encouraged to use AI in the classroom. This is what I wrote in response to that question. It is an an attempt to think about what is lost when we automate the acts of reading and writing. I am not really sure if what I wrote works, or if anyone will read it, I decided to share it here as well. 

My position is that so-called AI or Large Language Model (LLM) technologies such as ChatGPT should not be used for preparing writing assignments in college classes. There are multiple arguments that one could make against using such technologies. I am not going to address the ecological impact of AI, except to say in passing that it is substantial enough to lead companies like Google to completely reassess or scrap their objectives for lowering carbon emissions. I am also not going to address the ethical and legal issues brought up by the fact that all of these LLMs (and image generating software) are trained on published and copyrighted works. Those issues are best dealt by people who have expertise in that area. What I am going to address is what I know, and what I worry about, and that is what we lose when we automate or outsource reading and writing to technology. I am also not going to address the products of these technologies, the texts, images, and conversations that they can produce. I freely admit that they can be impressive as final products. My concern is not with the product, but with the process—with the process of reading and writing as part of education.

Towards a Genealogy of Right Workerism: Notes on the Origin of Bizarro World

 At the end of a summer with at least a little time to read books not directly connected to teaching or writing I picked up Melinda Cooper's Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance and Stéphane Legrand's Ayn Rand: Femme Capital. The first I had been meaning to get to since it came out, and the second has lingered on my shelf for awhile. I was always curious what a French philosopher who has worked on Marx and Foucault would say about the very American (and anti-Marxist) phenomena of Ayn Rand.

Marx's Basement Demo Tapes: On Monferrand's La Nature du Capital

 

Illustrated with a few pictures of enjoying the weather

As many readers of this blog probably know, there is a new translation of Capital coming out this month. I am sure that this new translation will have a great deal of new revelations drawn from the work of considering the text in light of its multiple variations and Marx's notes.  However, it seems to me that the book that we are in need of reconsidering is not so much Capital but the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.