Capitalist Dogs II: Or, What Habit Makes in Smith and Marx

 I remember a friend in graduate school saying that our task, at least when it came to writing dissertations, was to write something that a database could not produce. He was a bit ahead of the curve, this was sometime around the late nineties early two thousands. Databases could not write books then, but they are getting closer to it. Or, more to the point, a particular kind of academic monographic, the sort the traces the development of a concept in a single author oeuvre or a comparison of two thinkers, seems to be increasingly the kind of thing that a machine could write. That is the bad news. The good news, is that such monographs seemed useful to write, but never that fun to read in the first place. What if we could leave such books to the machines that generate them and consume them. What kind of writing should we do in the age of (seemingly) intelligent machines?

Demarcations and Determinations: on Hijacked by Elizabeth Anderson

 

Elizabeth Anderson is always an interesting author for me to read because as much as we are both concerned with the same issues, namely,  the politics of work, and the domination of the work ethic over our lives, we approach these issues from fundamentally different philosophical perspectives. Anderson is for the most part working on these issues from within the liberal tradition, construed broadly, while my approach is framed in large part by the traditions of Marxism and Marxist Spinozism. Determination is negation, as Marx cited Spinoza as saying, and it is through reading Anderson that I get a deeper sense of my own philosophical commitments and perspective.

Althusser Effects: Philosophical Practices

 

I have more copies of Reading Capital than any other book

One of the most damming things anyone has ever said to me, at least about academic philosophy was something like the following, "philosophy at universities today is to doing philosophy what art history is to making art." The implication being that emphasis in the modern university is on following different philosophers; tracing their influences and transformations the way that a historian my trace the different periods of an artist. It seemed damming, but not inaccurate, especially with respect to the way that there seems to be a trajectory, at least in continental programs of setting oneself up as [blank] guy, following a philosopher, interpreting, commenting and translating. There are a lot of questions that can be posed about this model, especially now, as philosophy continues to be pushed outside of the university, and forced to reinvent itself in new spaces and publications.