An article I wrote on the historical resonances of the present moment and where we could go from here.

I have heard a lot of talk of Deleuze considering Baudrillard to be the "shame" of the profession of philosophy after his publication of "Forget Foucault." I was reading flatline constructs the other day and Fisher's love for both Deleuze and Baudrillard (and also Derrida) seemed so apparent, it seemed like there was no antagonism between the two thinkers. My understanding of the disagreement is that Deleuzians find Baudrillard too nihilistic and Baudrillardians find Deleuze too naive and optimistic (or at least that's what I've gathered from my detailed and rigorous research of browsing reddit comments on this sub and r/deleuze for 30 minutes). Do you guys think there's a way to reconcile these thinkers without strawmanning or doing injustice to either one? And if so, do you think Mark fisher does a good job at it?

Can wasting better solve the biggest planetary challenges?

In his keynote lecture from the two-day event The Excesses of Georges Bataille at Penn State University, Stuart Kendall traces Bataille’s lifelong obsession with time, expenditure, and what he calls “the privileged instant.” The lecture moves from Bataille’s early psychoanalytic writings, through his encounter with the work of Søren Kierkegaard in wartime France, to his late meditations on sustainability and the fate of humanity and all species. Amid his extensive investigations, Bataille reads Nietzsche against Hegel, affirming what the former calls “the ignorance of the future” and transforming that affirmation into the anguished cry that emerges from the abyss of non-knowledge.

This lecture was part of a two-day series of discussions at Penn State featuring other members of the Acid Horizon Research Commons and the broader community of supporters and independent scholars.

This article isn't particularly novel in its ideas, but I like the critique of fantasies of a borderless world that spread on social media, when in reality, migration controls are becoming increasingly strict. For people from rich countries the world does seem truly borderless, since they can easily get visas to travel and stay almost anywhere they like, while for the rest of us, even getting a tourist visa can be extremely difficult.

Lately, I have been reading more of Theodor Adorno, and a particular point has caught my interest.

As I recall, he suggested that in art music, a composition unfolds through a dialectical interplay between the whole and its individual parts.

Are there any of his works in which he applies this perspective to analyze a specific musical score (or several scores)?

I would like to trace, in concrete terms, the landscape of sound and thought that Adorno himself explored and enjoyed.

I wrote this piece as more of a reflection than an analysis. I want to confess my inspiration is Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality. Whitehead's concept of the Lure is a powerful one for me. While not an ontological given (that would be to fall into the fallacy of misplaced concreteness), the "beckonedness" that humans share seems to transcend time and space. But Achille Mbembe challenges a naive optimist's understanding of this, which I hope to explore here.

Also in this piece, I tie it back more overtly to a framework I've been developing, which I call the nos framework. My goal is to give macro level social workers a diagnostic tool to "put the social world on the analysand's couch." It uses Freud by analogy: just as the ego is a dialectical, processual production (I recognize this is my interpretation of Freud) of the id and superego, the nos emerges from the dialectic of Judith Butler's materialization and Berger and Luckmann's reification.

Stated simply, bodies emerge through citational performance toward institutions that have been established over time and regarded as having always been, being, and being evermore. The nos - Latin for "we" next to Freud's translators' Latin "I," ego - is the interpretive mind that makes sense of these social realities through concretization. Inspired by Whitehead (the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, not concrescence) and my work with the disabled community navigating a concrete prison, I set this word next to materialization and reification to name the process of how the social world deceptively hardens into a reality. Concretive protocols such as ontological fixity, epistemological prioritization, linear cause and effect, and subject-object dualism are the ways in which queer people are sorted into damnation, disabled people are sorted into pathology, and Black people are sorted into criminality. And if we are going to effect meaningful social change, I contend that we need to set our interventions upon the disruption of these protocols - and the tenacity with which they are held - as they produce domination and oppression.

If you're still with me, thank you! Here's the piece I'd like to share:

Whence cometh domination?

From failure at the threshold of novelty.

Mbembe continues to challenge me. Making the Lacanian move (though without citing him) and psychoanalyzing the structure of such horrific necropolitical wastelands as Rwanda or Palestine, I am pressed to locate my anti-oppressive, anti-racist social work practice and critical-theory-informed assessments of power and asymmetry somewhere within the psychology of the person. Specifically, the nos has to account for it.

One thing to set down regarding ontology: I argue that these processes of the collective mind are evolutionary, and their function is stabilization. They are pre-moral and virtueless. Like the ego seeks to protect the conscious mind from the unconscious desires that defy the superego’s requirements, the nos seeks to protect the individual from the terrors upon the self as it encounters objects in the social world, that encounter being formed by the performances that produce bodies and the institutions that script the performances.

How do these functional, neutral processes produce such power asymmetry and domination performances?

As Mbembe says, “surprise lies at the origin of the procedures of enchantment without which the world is not the world”(Necropolitics, p. 29). The process of life is not just one of encounters through which subjects and objects emerge in relations. That’s the description. The experience of these encounters is one of novelty. And to a stabilizing engine, novelty disrupts. The nos’s function is nearly mechanistic seeking to produce a sense of equilibrium. Novelty is a possible wrench being thrown into that process.

Novelty has two forms - the new that confirms what we know and the new that disconfirms it. The latter, specifically, is the wrench. The former is the lube. The process of stabilization, then, provides the aqueduct for enchantment and jouissance - what Mbembe refers to - more specifically to his argument - as desire and, when it seeks to dominate, master-desire. (At least on my read of it.)

A quick vocab check: enchantment is the phenomenological experience of that confirmation. It is the glow of “it’s like we’ve always known each other” and “see, I knew it!” It's what the author of the Gospel of Matthew experienced when he turned back to his Jewish Bible and started seeing Jesus in Isaiah as if it were always there. It’s stronger than a confirmation bias because in addition to confirming what was known, it can also create entirely new frames (a la the Gospel of Matthew). Enchantment lubes the machinery of the nos and creates within it a lust or dire need for more.

Jouissance, as discussed in previous reflections on pedagogy, is the excessive enjoyment bound up with repetitive attachment to a mode of satisfaction that can exceed the pleasure principle, seeking to destroy all novelty that disconfirms the interpretation of a self-in-the-world. Again, I don't want to import psychoanalytic homunculi sitting deep down in our psyches, but the Lacanian analysis's explanatory power of what consciousness in humans does when encountering alterity is compelling.

When the novelty disconfirms what is being stabilized, domination is the performance that this drive takes in the social world. Domination’s citational reality is certainly mediated socially. Its form and shape are given to it by the social world at the spaces between the interactions of subjects. But its "why" is tacted (in B.F. Skinner's sense) as this byproduct of novelty not being metabolized. (I will do another article on Hegel and go deeper into this at a later time).

One thing worth mentioning on novelty - it can be astroturfed. The Rwandan genocide wasn’t one group discovering a new group. These people were lifelong neighbors prior. But these neighbors were made new as they were reimagined under narratives like the Hamitic curse, or epithets like cockroaches. And the success of this astroturfing hinges on its power to enchant. It must carry that retrospective certainty that confirms what the nos had been metabolizing all along within the new narrative ecosystem. A dangerous comparison but tentatively true if my assumptions are good: Matthew and Rwanda are the same process, which is what I mean by pre-moral and virtueless.

Transformative social work is not going to be achieved with information. As mentioned before (see: The Third Voice), transformative social work locates the unit of analysis in the encounter. But this framework pushes me further to understand “humankind’s specificity” - as Mbembe calls it - with a precision that informs some of the goals of encounter engineering. One thing that feels apparent: humanity meets disconfirming novelty with domination far too often. How can we disrupt the urges to dominate and destroy? How can we provide spaces for more effectively metabolizing novelty? I don’t yet have the answers, but I’m getting some more precise questions.

- The Social Construction Worker

Gen-z (social) media culture and humor seems to be shaped by increasingly meaningless short-form content, brainrot memes and desensitization to violence (kirkification). It almost seems like we're going through a generational cultural psychosis shaped by algorithms, which are categorically preventing the formation of significant cultural movements with constant streams of meaningless noise. Nothing seems to be real anymore. Could the disintegration of cultural symbols be theorized as the still continuing rise of postmodernity, where the search for stable identities and meanings seems to be a futile pursuit operating in a system of signs which solely refer to each other?

Conversations with LLMs have been shown to affect spoken language. If they can change our language on a lexical level, can they also change it on a semiotic level?

Many philosophers (especially the continental ones) speak about the need for philosophy to not tell us what to do. Zizek often talks about how philosophy shouldn't give us definitive answers, but instead help us ask the right questions; and that a philosopher should not propose solutions to problems, but instead reframe the problems themselves.

Deleuze and Guattari, similarly, in their book on meta-philosophy, argue that good philosophy should not be characterized by describing what is true (answers), but instead what is important or interesting (questions).

But when I look at the way moral philosophy appears in the mainstream (which I admit I am not as familiar with at the deeper, academic level, as I am with other branches), it seems like a type of philosophy that tries to create a system about what to do in various situations. On one hand, philosophy shouldn't tell us what to do or give solutions to problems, while on the other hand, ethics is the philosophy of what to do.

And then it presents us with these ridiculous situations taken out of context that would never appear in real-life, like the trolley problem, or the axe murderer case Kant was ridiculed about, etc.

To me it seems like what most moral philosophers do, especially the ones that try to create some all-encompassing system of rules that covers every moral decision (Kant, the utilitarians, etc.), is retroactively justify the actions and decisions that they already thought were right. So it's not that they come up with a system of how to act based on reason and logic, and then change their behavior based on that system. Instead, they already made a decision about what is moral to do in a situation, and then they create a retroactive rationalization about it based on various factors (utility, consequences, principles, universal maxim, virtues, sin, etc.).

I personally have never heard a story, not even online, of someone who actually changed their behavior and way of life in a drastic manner after reading a long rational argumentation of a moral argument. It's not like someone reads Peter Singer and is overwhelmed by how convincing his arguments are that now they give more of their salary to charity or beggars, with no emotional component attached to their behavior. And it's not like someone was a liar, then read the Critique of Practical Reason, and then was so convinced by the irrefutably of Kant's arguments that now they lie way less, just because of the book. I speculate that what most readers seek in a moral philosophy book is a story that justifies their behavior and that also "feels nice" from the point of view of logical consistency, or consistency with a separate metaphysical/epistemological system, or both.

I think the writings that actually inspire people to change their behavior are precisely the non-philosophical anecdotes and stories. Christian parables, fairy tales and fables, Buddhist stories or Zen koans, or even just experiences from real people who are alive today that shared them online and/or in-person. But what seems to be called moral philosophy or ethics, at least the more 'mainstream' kind (Aristotle, Nietzsche, Kant, utilitarians, trolley problem crap) seems to me like a contradiction with what philosophy is. The only ethics book that seems like an exception to this rule was Alain Badiou's "Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil" - which is why it didn't feel like an ethics book at all when I read it, albeit an interesting book nonetheless.

What do you think of all this, am I missing something?

I've read Acts of Religion and would like some commentary on Derrida's work on religion. I want to compare him to Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean-Luc Marion, and Quentin Meillassoux.

I am trying to understand something that maybe people here can shine light on. So you know those product ads that seem to be purposely trying to bait into the culture war and ends up being discussed by right-wingers and reactionaries for days online?

What is the purpose of that? I heard bad press is good press but I don’t see that it actually raises sales nor does it seem relevant to the target demographic of said product.

This isn’t something that right-wingers do though, even ads can sometimes spark outrage from more progressive people who accuse it of racism etc. my point is what are the actual purposes of this
from a theory and marketing pov?

Hi all,
I am currently doing a high school english course and wanted to purchase a guide to critical theory to aide me. Which book would be best for me?

Specifically I am looking and analysing the text/modules below:

Richard Flanagan's Question7
William Blakes poetry
Drive your plow over the bones of the dead
King heny the fourth part 1

Literary Worlds
Hybrid Worlds - As i lay dying faulker, memento nolan, evelyn araulen - dropbear

Building upon the foundations of Body Hacktivism, the Post Charnel Manifesto marks a new stage in the politicization of the body and its territories.

As our existence increasingly extends into digital environments, the body is no longer the sole site of identity, representation, and resistance.

This manifesto aims to explore how digital identities, avatars, and self-images become new spaces of existential experimentation and political power.

The struggle is no longer confined to the liberation of the body from its norms and constraints. It extends into the realm of the imaginary itself, a new frontier of discipline, control, and self determination.

Caught between the spectacle of the self and the possibility of its own reinvention, the avatar embodies a fundamental tension. It can reproduce the mechanisms of domination that shape us or become a medium through which new forms of subjectivity, autonomy, and collective existence can emerge beyond the logic of extraction and control.

This manifesto marks a passage from the body as a battefield to the avatar as a new territory of becoming, a space in which identity, agency, and collective organization can be reimagined, while remaining conscious of the contradictions and mechanisms of capture that accompany every new form of emancipation

The youth should be revolutionary, but what makes them ready for it? With all the different protests of this age I always ask this, i'm lucky to have a friend group where we all like to discuss and share news about the world, politics, economy and the environment. But outside the comfort of our shared way of thinking i find it quite hard to express what I know or argue about what I believe.

On the other hand in my house its difficult to bring up topics i'm interested in, as my father is very right wing and misogynistic. I've tried to have a few conversations on topics like the women right to vote and he turned it into a complete different topic in which i didn't have much knowledge making me a bit unsure about my initial statement, and honestly i don't want to loose my piece of mind on debating him because I just know i can't change his way of thinking, as he labels everything that doesn't go along his beliefs as 'ideologies' that want to make us think like them and not valid ways of personal thinking. I feel that if he knew my left ideals he'd kick me out or force me to agree with him, like a few years back he noticed how I didn't see lgbt+ as something wrong and he put me in therapy (lol).

I also try to share with my mother what I know, but I feel as if she just goes on with either of our ways of thinking. She neither listens when I comment on something I disagree with my father nor cares to question his way of thinking, and i sometimes find this irritating because she never questions what he stands for. Though perhaps this is just her own way of not bothering to question him because she also knows he won't change.

With all this i find myself thirsty for more ways to expand my views, to both share with my friends and other people information and arguments. I have a hard time putting on words my beliefs or defend what I believe. Recently with the protests in France I have a vague knowledge but i'm kinda scared to point out the inconsistencies or my point of view.

I would like to know different stories on how to improve on debating, how to prepare for different topics and to stay up to date with the news and the theories of the way the world is changing. I'm passionate about learning all of this to make my own values and maybe get enough courage to debate and share with my father what I think of.

(Sorry for any mistakes, english is not my first language)