The Affective Constitution of Knowledge: Or, What Bias Feels Like

We are told again and again that institutions like medicine, journalism, and the university have lost the trust of Americans, and must work to regain that trust. Of course the pundits and politicians that tells us this are more often than not the very ones who have undermined this trust. This is definitely the case with RFK, and, more importantly, it allows me to use one of my favorite memes from one of my favorite shows. However, a few weeks ago the New York Times ran a column by Lydia Polgreen, that offers a different account of at least one institution, journalism. 

Help Yourself: Work and Recognition in Send Help

 

As has often been mentioned, on this blog and elsewhere, Hegel's famous section on Lordship and Bondage begins with the assertion that "Self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness." This has often been interpreted to mean that self-consciousness needs to find itself in being recognized by another. We know ourselves by being recognized by others. Despite this assertion, thus familiar with the story, and it is a story, of the master and slave, know that the passage suggests that there is another way to know ourselves, we come to know ourselves through our work. 

Which Way Marxist-Spinozist? On Diefenbach's Spinoza in Post-Marxist Philosophy

 

I have a lot of books from the Spinoza Studies series 

One of the best pieces of advice I got in graduate school came from Warren Montag. He was visiting Binghamton University. We were talking about Spinoza and he said to me to the effect of reading Alexandre Matheron, Pierre Macherey, Pierre François Moreau, etc. was absolutely necessary for understanding Spinoza scholarship, and those books would never be translated into English. They were too big, five volumes in Macherey's case, and too niche of an audience. He told me I needed to get to work learning to read French. So I did.

Untimely Dystopias: On The Long Walk and The Running Man

 

2025 will probably go down in history as a pivotal year in the US's decline into a particular kind of media driven twenty-first century fascism. It is the year that Trump got his paramilitary force, in ICE, it is also the year in which we saw the fourth estate capitulate to the administration, turning over CBS news to a bootlicking blogger, firing comedians, and gutting journalism to pour money into a fawning documentary about the first lady. The times would seem to be ripe for a film dealing with the combination of authoritarian power and media spectacle. We got two, both based on books by Stephen King. Books written over forty years ago. 

The Insomnia of Nostalgia: On Berry Gordy's The Last Dragon

 

As it has often been said, movies teach you how to watch them. This pedagogy can take on almost Pavlovian forms as in the case of horror movies such as Jaws, which teaches you to treat a few notes on a tuba as terrifying. However, every film instructs you how to view it, and a lot of the struggle with watching different kinds of films has to with learning how to see things differently. If you come to a Béla Tarr film with John Woo habits you are going to be bored. Our viewing habits make our viewing practices. A lot of our debates about attention are about this process of learning, of how we have had our capacity for attention reduced. Netflix films made to be watched while doing laundry or scrolling on our phone prepare us to watch other films the same way, and when they cannot be viewed that way we get confused. Every film teaches you how to watch it, but only one film I can think of tells you where you should watch it and  that film is The Last Dragon, or, as we are supposed to call Berry Gordy's The Last Dragon.

The State of Bias: Universality and Particularity in Politics

 

A few weeks ago I was trying to formulate a pithy little formulation for social media. It went something like this, "Political theory is a matter of determining which principle a polity should follow; political practice is a matter of interpreting a principle differently for one's followers." It did not quite work as a post no matter how I reworked it, but what I was trying to get at is the pervasive and unavoidable inconsistency of the relationship between principle and practice in contemporary politics. We have so-called "free speech warriors" who are very worried about  the "chilling effects" on free speech by students who protest speakers, but have nothing at all to say about state governments banning the teaching of Plato, and a federal government that makes education funding contingent on universities promoting their agenda, and, more recently, we have defenders of the right to bear arms arguing that just carrying a gun is enough to justify a summary execution. All of this goes beyond hypocrisy.  Since I could not get it to work in a few characters, I thought that I would reflect on it more here. 

The Tensions of Ideology: Marx and Machiavelli, Althusser and Gramsci

From a presentation I gave at Space Gallery 

on one of the best scenes of ideology in contemporary film

As I said before on this blog, ideology is perhaps better grasped as an intersecting field of problems and questions than a concept or theory. It is a way of thinking together the relation between the question of knowledge, the social order, and political power. Of course, these different aspects are unequally and unevenly applied in different thinkers, a point that I tried to sketch out earlier with Machiavelli, Spinoza, and Marx.