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. 

Indentured Fan Service: On Alien: Romulus

 

I once heard someone remark about Alien that during the Reagan era the capitalist hegemony against workers was so complete that the only way to represent the struggles of working class was to set to set it in space. Such a comment is not entirely accurate about the film, it came out in 1979 after all, but does say something about its place in popular culture. Alien introduced the space worker, worried about the bonus situation and struggle with a company that deemed him or her expendable.  The space worker has appeared again and again in film, in Outland, Moon, and The Expanse. 

How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland: The Mad Max Films as an Introduction to Political Philosophy

 

Years ago I was teaching political philosophy and decided to do something interesting with social contract theory. I made the point that the post-apocalypse is our state of nature. Whereas the seventeenth century contemplated the nature of authority and law from the origins of society we confront the same problem from its collapse. In each case human beings outside of the state, whether prior to or post, became the basis for thinking about both human nature, and the nature of the state. I then showed a bunch of clips from The Road Warrior and other films, all of which illustrated the intersecting problem of social contract theory and post-apocalyptic films: how does one go from disorder to order, from violence to authority?

Just Vibes: A Note on Affect and Politics

 

Anyone interested in the politics of affect or the connection of affect and politics has to confront the fact that affects are not just a way of making sense of politics, but are increasingly the way politics themselves are presented and talked about. This follows a general tendency to frame not just politics, but all of social life according to the pop affect theory of vibes. 

Parallel Lines: Spinoza and Foucault (by way of Deleuze)

 

The pile that I am working through

I think that it is safe to say that Foucault never really got that interested in the revival of Spinoza that took off in France in the late sixties. As far as I can tell the only sustained reference to Spinoza appears in his lectures on the Will to Know, and there in that text, he considers Spinoza much in the same way that Nietzsche did, as someone who named the will to knowledge, but did not criticize or problematize it. As Foucault writes,

Fun with Hegel and Kojève: On Matthieu Renault's Maîtres et Esclaves: Archives du Laboratoire de Mythologiques de la Modernité

 

Perhaps it is time to have fun with Hegel. In the past year I have now read two books that have taken up a relation to Hegel that could be referred to as playful, which is not to say that the stakes or questions of these books are not serious. The first was Gray and Johnson's Phenomenology of Black Spirit, which posed the scandalous, and even heretical question, what if the subject of Hegel's Phenomenology was black. The second is Matthieu Renault's Maîtres et Esclaves: Archives du Laboratoire de Mythologiques de la Modernité. Both books in different ways show how that Hegel's thought can be all the more productive,  and all the more interesting, if one changes from the question what did Hegel mean (admittedly not an easy question) to what does Hegel make it possible to say. (Also oddly enough, both books read Hegel's dialectic against the actual struggle of Frederick Douglass to liberate himself from his master). 

Farce Before Tragedy: The Post-Satire Present

 

I used to listen to a film podcast, I forget the name of it, the worked on the premise that there were certain films, that should be outside of discussion, films so good and revered that it did not make sense to talk about them. They were put in a penalty box of sorts. I often thought the same thing about certain passages that appear again and again in theoretical and philosophical discussions of the present. A few that come to mind are Jameson's often cited remark about it being easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, Benjamin's "There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism," and Marx's first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. 

Zine, Blog, Podcast: A Media History of Self-Indulgence

 

Sometimes I find myself thinking about the sequence, zine, blog, and podcast. I think about this in part because at one time or another I have had, or been involved with all three. In some ways each offers the same promise of DIY, self produced, media. Although I different scales of influence and material investment. 

Draft Translation: For a Systematic Study of the Relation of Marx to Spinoza by André Tosel

 

Draft Translation: Not for Citation

What follows is another attempt at a translation of an important text by André Tosel on the Marx/Spinoza relation. It is not a finished, or polished translation, but a rough sketch put forward to help people get a sense of this overlooked articulation of the relation between Marx and Spinoza.

Witness Me: Intellectual Property and Pleasure in Furiosa and I Saw The TV Glow

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and I Saw the TV Glow

When one looks out at another summer of sequels, reboots, and prequels it is possible to resort to the cliche that "they are out of ideas"--to pose the problem as a crisis of originality. It is for this reason, among many others that it is worth reading Daniel Bessner's piece for Harpers, "The Life and Death of Hollywood: Film and Television Writers Face an Existential Threat" One of the merits of Bessner's piece is that he makes it clear that the crisis Hollywood is facing is not one of ideas, of the imagination, but of capital, of profits. As Bessner writes,

2 Apes 2 Planets: On Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

 

The recent Planet of the Apes films can be defined by two questions: one internal to the films themselves, to their own universe, albeit with allegorical dimensions, and the other external, to their status as commodities in the culture industry. The first question is what is the nature of the conflict between humans and apes? Is it a natural conflict, a conflict between two species for domination, or is it a political conflict, a conflict between different ways of living. The second question is will audiences watch and identify with apes, with CGI characters, rather than humans played by human actors.

The Concept Worker Doesn't Wear a Hardhat: Spinoza, Marx, Nesbitt and Common Notions

 

"They would not agree with one another any more than do the dog that is a heavenly constellation and the dog that is a barking animal." Spinoza

"The concept dog doesn't bark." Louis Althusser 

Ever since reading Margherita Pascucci’s Potentia of Poverty I have been thinking about the relation between Marx’s thought and Spinoza’s common notions. The question I am asking is not did Marx write Capital in and through common notions, as an application of Spinoza’s thought. Although I am not entirely discounting such influence. Rather, what would be at stake in reading Marx through the common notions? 

Two Thesis on the Limits of Philosophy: Marx and Spinoza

 

I once contemplated getting my favorite Spinoza proposition 

as a Vanity Plate 

In the past few months, longer even, but before the recent wave of student occupations (more on that later), I have found myself in the grips of a kind of depression that stems in part from what can only be described as a gap between theory and practice. How this works is like this, all day, or at least part of it, I read books, and get into discussions understanding how the world works, and what could be done to change it and yet the world goes on unchanged, or, more to the point, it just seems to get worse and worse. (I will let the reader fill this in with whatever ecological, political, or economic calamity that comes to mind) The disconnect between the classroom and the world creates not just division but despair.

One, Two, Many Spinozist-Marxisms: A Postscript to The Double Shift

 

This post is illustrated by some of the promo work 

I have done for the book

I have commented before, more than once even, that the intersection of Spinoza and Marx is less a position, something like Spinozist Marxism, than a field of intersecting problems and questions. In some sense it is possible to even map out the way in which different Marxists draw from different elements of Marx (and Spinoza) creating different articulations of the relations which intersect with different problems in the critique of capitalism. 

Leave What World Behind: On Leave the World Behind

Something has changed in watching post-apocalyptic films in recent years. It is hard to pinpoint exactly when, and what exactly the cause might be, but at some point in the last few years the post-apocalypse has gone from an escapist fantasy to a figure of dread. The increasing rate of global warming leading to fires, droughts, and hurricanes; the ongoing Covid pandemic; and the rise of right wing nationalism has transformed the apocalypse from a subgenre of science fiction to a barometer of fears and anxieties. As Robert Tally argues the sense of the future has changed dramatically over the last decade: utopia has been replaced by dystopia in contemporary fiction and film and post-apocalypse has replaced predictions of a miraculous world of tomorrow. This is another way of addressing Fredric Jameson’s old adage that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. To which we could add that this imagination is no longer an idle speculation about the future, but immediately lived, as apocalypse seems to inch closer, moving from the distant horizon to the lived present. 

The Racial Division of Labor: On Sylvie Laurent's Capital et Race

 

In Kathi Weeks' The Problem with Work she makes an argument about the way in which work produces and reproduces gender. As Weeks writes:

"To say that work is organized by gender is to observe that it is a site where, at a minimum, we can find gender enforced, performed, and recreated. Workplaces are often structured in relation to gendered norms and expectations. Waged work and unwaged work alike continue to be structured by the productivity of gender-differentiated labor, including the gender division of both household roles and waged occupations...Gender is put to work when, for example, workers draw upon gendered codes and scripts as a way to negotiate relationships with bosses and co-workers, to personalize impersonal interactions, or to communicate courtesy, care, professionalism, or authority to clients, students, patients or customers."

Lately I have been thinking about the way in which we could also think about the way in which work is also organized by, and organizing of, other social hierarchies including race. How is work organized by race, or how are racialized codes and scripts put to work in the workplace?

Requiem for a Training Montage: Or, Everyone's Crazy for a Self-Made Man

The other day, out of a combination of nostalgia, insomnia, and tribute to Carl Weathers I decide to watch Rocky III. I am not sure why I picked this one. Perhaps because it is one of Weathers' best as he goes from rival to partner, it is also where Rocky goes from scrappy seventies film to full on eighties excess, a process that would be completed in Rocky IV. It also got me thinking of training montages.

The Production of Ignorance: Ideology or Agnotology?

Bento and books

With all of my writing and translating about Spinoza and Marx as of late I am embarrassed to admit that there is a moment of their encounter that I have overlooked. The passage in question is in Chapter Eleven of Volume One of Capital (and I am indebted to Nick Nesbitt for pointing it out). In that passage Marx writes, 

"Vulgar economics, which like the Bourbons 'has really learnt nothing,' relies here as mere semblance as opposed to the law which regulates and determines the phenomena. In anthesis to Spinoza, it believes that 'ignorance is a sufficient reason."

Master and Commander: Or, Must Love Dogs II

 

Commander 

In undergrad I got really into theory, all of it, reading Baudrillard, Deleuze, Debord, Foucault, etc., most definitely etc, all the time. My theory fascination was a byproduct of reading zines and little semiotextes, the more polemical, the more outlandish its claims, the more I loved it. One little book I particularly loved was First and Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot by Kenneth Dean and Brian Massumi. It is an odd little book, a reading of the Reagan/Bush years framed as much by the legalist philosopher Shang Yang's The Book of Lord Shang as it is by the expected references to Deleuze and Guattari. (Brian Massumi of course translated A Thousand Plateaus). That odd idiosyncratic nature is precisely what I loved about it. I dreamt of writing something similar, not on Reagan and legalism but something which brought together a variety of disparate references to think through a specific problem. I guess my book which talks about Spinoza and Marx along with Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, might be an attempt to realize that wish. 

Ahead of its Time: On Clockwatchers

 

Clockwatchers is an underrated film. Perhaps it came out too early, missing the slew of films critical of work and cubicles by at least a year. 1999 was the year of Fight Club, Office Space, American Beauty, and The Matrix, which all dealt with an escape from the confines of the cubicle. Or, and this is probably closer to the point, a film focusing on the working lives of four women would never touch the same points of cultural resonance as Fight Club or Office Space, which were as much about the crisis of masculinity as it was about work. It also never had the same afterlife as those films, which gained most of their audience through fancy boxed DVDs and endless repetitions on cable. Luckily the film was made available through streaming on the Criterion Channel, which makes it possible to rectify its status as an overlooked classic.

Everybody Gets to be a Fascist: Or, What Taylor Swift Taught Me About Fascism

 

The Best Joke in Barbie 

Years ago I remember encountering Félix Guattari's little essay, "Everybody Wants to be a Fascist." At the time its title seemed more clever than prescient. (Although it is worth remembering how much fascism, and the encounter with fascism was integral to Deleuze and Guattari's theorizing, well beyond the reference to Reich). Now that we are living in a different relation to fascism the problem posed by Guattari (and Deleuze) of desire seems all the more pertinent and pressing. 

How to Do Things with Hegel: On Gray and Johnson's Phenomenology of Black Spirit

 

Because actual history is rarely linear, let alone teleological, I read the repudiation of Hegel before I ever read Hegel. I had read arguments and polemics against Hegel in Althusser, Deleuze, and Foucault long before I had every cracked Hegel's books. A funny thing happened once I started reading, writing, and teaching Hegel, is that I started to warm up to him. It was not the idea of spirit that appealed to me, or even the dialectic as some overarching logic, but the more limited, finite dialectics of the different figures and moments of consciousness. 

Our Cultural Revolution: Or, the Enshittification of Culture

Thanks to Ron Schmidt for this image 

In John Maynard Keynes essay "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren" one can find the following formulation of the cultural transformation of post-capitalism:

"I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue-that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin. 

For a least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair, for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight."

It is All Subjective: Marx, Spinoza, and Subjectivity

 

Anyone who has ever taken or taught a philosophy class is familiar with the claim "[Blank] is subjective" in which the [Blank] in question could be anything from literary interpretations to ethical norms. This response effectively ends any and all cultural and philosophical discussion, which is why it is so aggravating. One response is to argue against this claim, to point out that not every interpretation of a poem, novel, or film, is authorized, that there are better or worse interpretations, with respect to cultural version. With respect to the ethical or political arguments it is tempting to point out that the very existence of ethics, of society, presupposes norms that are shared as well as debated and challenged.