A History of Violence: Or A Guy Walks into A Bar...

   

In the past few weeks I have rewatched two of my favorite movies on the Criterion Channel, Odds Against Tomorrow and Bad Day at Black Rock. What struck me in watching them in close succession was the one thing they had in common, besides Robert Ryan excelling at being a racist bastard, is they both introduce elements of martial arts as something new, as something that changes what it means to fight and who could win. 

Interpretation or Innovation: On Macherey's La Chose Philosophique

Photos from Galarie de Paléontologie et d'Anatomie comparée

in Paris

I am going with these pictures in honor of Macherey's Histoires de Dinosaurs 

Last March I visited Paris for the first time in years. I had a great time, presenting my book The Double Shift at Chantal Jaquet's Spinoza Seminar at the Sorbonne, and discussed Marx, Spinoza, and Deleuze with Etienne Balibar at the American University of Paris. I also looked for books, and while I did find a few good ones at Librarie Vrin, I also learned that Pierre Macherey had recently uploaded his recent book La Chose Philosophique to his website, La Philosophie au sens large.  I am a huge fan of Macherey's site; for those who can read French it is the best site for learning about contemporary philosophy, basically the lectures from all from Macherey's classes for free. 

The Work Image II: Three Scenes on their way to a Concept

I recently gave a short presentation at the ACLA on the idea of the work image, a concept that I wrote about on this blog and in my book, The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the Politics of Work. Some of this is just a summation and citation of what I wrote there, but I did manage to say a few things about some other television shows, like The Bear.  Here is most of what I had to say.

Don't Praise the Machine: AI and the Destruction of Three Ecologies

 

I was asked to speak at an AI and Ethics panel at my university. What follows is the outline that I am using for my talk.

The Miasma of Science and Ideology: A Postscript on the New Episteme

 

Of all of the various regressions under Trump 2.0 the anti-vaxx aspect seems to be the most perplexing. As disturbing as Trump's racism, nationalism, and everything else are, at least you can say that they were there since the beginning. Trump's political career began with calling for the death penalty for the "central park five" and his run for President began with nativist hostility to immigrants. The anti-vaccination stance seems new. The initial COVID vaccines were even developed under Trump, and one can imagine that he could take credit for them, since he loves taking credit for things, even for things that he had nothing to do with, or that have not happened. As Plato noticed, however, demagogues find themselves controlled by the same mob that they seem to control. I have not subjected myself to that much of coverage of Trump's rallies, but the only time I have ever seen Trump's mob ever boo him is when he mentioned vaccines.

Under New Management: Capitalism from Utopia to Dystopia

Inspired by this image, I am going with a giant donut theme for this post.

While I do not use the phrase much myself I have always been intrigued by the phrase "take as read" to refer to something that is assumed or taken as axiomatic rather than established. In academic contexts it can sometimes be useful to assume a particular interpretation rather than establish it, to lay out a baseline of understanding in order to move onto other things. In this particular case I am tempted to say, because I do not want to go into it here, that we can take as read that contemporary democratic society gets its image of the good life and its justification from capitalism. Capitalism provides us our image of "freedom, equality, and Bentham," to use Marx's phrase. Freedom is understood primarily as the freedom to purchase what we want; equality, understood as equality in the face of the same commodities, the McDonalds I eat is the same McDonalds that Donald Trump eats, and Bentham because we are all motivated by self interest. 

Do Your Own Damn Research: The New Episteme of Trump 2.0

I have been thinking a lot about the resonance between the current moment and this book

I am going to state this as clearly and as succinctly as possible. This is my thesis: the administration of Trump 2.0 is attempting to institute a new episteme, a new standard and idea of truth. This can be seen in the assaults on the funding and institution of higher education, on the cuts to funding scientific research through NIH and NSF, and in the undermining of vaccines and public health through RFK jr.'s management of Health and Human Services. All of these actions not only undermine the existing episteme, with its layers of expertise and legitimacy, but effectively enshrine a new one, a new practice of what constitutes truth and how it can be found and established. 

Faking it and Making it: On Leigh Claire La Berge's Fake Work

 

This past week I was fortunate to be on a panel at Red May about Leigh Claire La Berge's book Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism is a Joke. I have posted my comments, as well as the whole panel (which included Leigh Claire, Sarah Jaffe, and Madeline Lane-McKinley) below. 

Leigh Claire La Berge and I had a somewhat similar trajectory, we both graduate from Hampshire College, we both studied primarily post-structuralist thinkers there, and we both developed an interest in Marx afterwards in graduate school. I wish I could say that my post-college work had something to do with that interest, but I only worked in the mailroom of a law firm in San Francisco for one summer before going straight to graduate school. 

Logic of Alternation: Spinoza’s Prehistory of Ideology (and its Marxist History)

 

Of all of the different trajectories and intersections that frame the relation of Marx to Spinoza, one recurring motif posits Spinoza as a precursor with respect to a specifically Marxist concept, that of ideology. Spinoza’s investigations of the imagination and superstition, the illusions that people are subject to, and their role in sustaining political authority and power, are the precursors if not the preconditions of Marx’s theory of ideology. If Spinoza is considered a precursor it is an odd one, because many of the thinkers who have turned to Spinoza for a theory of ideology have done so on the basis that as much as Spinoza comes before Marx chronologically, his understanding of ideology goes beyond what Marx wrote, in the way that constructs a theory that encompasses not just ideas, but affects, not just the thoughts of the mind but the striving of the body, and not just knowledge but imagination. The extent to which Spinoza goes beyond Marx has to be combined with the extent to which he falls short. There is nothing like a theory of not only the capitalist mode of production in Spinoza, but, aside from a few suggestive remarks the constitution of political bodies through common affects, there is nothing like a materialist theory of social relations in Spinoza. In some respects Spinoza goes beyond Marx, while in others Marx goes beyond Spinoza, this movement is less a back and forth, a vacillation, than it is a circle in motion because in between the proper names of Spinoza and Marx and their respective histories and conjunctures there is the question of the relation between the social order and the order of thoughts and desires, to put it in Spinoza’s terms, or the mode of production and the production of subjectivity to put it in Marxist terms. This is no stationary object of contemplation, but an ongoing transformation. We are perhaps as far from nineteenth century idea of ideology as the ruling ideas of the ruling class as Marx was from the question of superstition in the seventeenth century, but in the relation between the two we can perhaps make better sense of the world that produces us, and how it can be produced differently.

The World is a Vampire: On Sinners

I am going to get to Sinners but before I get there I need to say a little about my own particular history with the music known as the blues.