tpaine posted:

tsinava posted:

*takes a tablet of pure MDMA*

We are all merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves.

EnErGy, TeChNoLoGy, PoWeR, & CaPiTaLiSm

*pees pants*

tpaine posted:

i'm not saying it's a good thing, i'm saying it's an undeniable fact. i don't understand how you can say that we aren't the result of generations of the elimination of the weak, even if this did slow down once we became 'civilized' and emerged as thinking beings. you seem to be assuming that i'm arguing that this is good and correct, but i'm not. it didn't have to be this way, groups of people could have gotten together and created a livable world very easily at almost any point in time, but it shouldn't surprise you that we have failed to do this given the nature of our evolution

I know you're not saying its a good thing, I was saying that if anything, this didn't slow down when we became "civilized" but that would be when it started at all and our species wouldn't have developed sufficiently complex arrangements of social relations etc in the first place had we been at each others throats for our entire evolutionary history. anyways I don't think less of or scoff at anyone who thinks differently seeing as that's been the de facto view for a long ass time and the most easily supported by recent history. also im prone to weirdo optimistic sheit like my posts in this here thread

tpaine posted:

i'm not saying it's a good thing, i'm saying it's an undeniable fact. i don't understand how you can say that we aren't the result of generations of the elimination of the weak, even if this did slow down once we became 'civilized' and emerged as thinking beings. you seem to be assuming that i'm arguing that this is good and correct, but i'm not. it didn't have to be this way, groups of people could have gotten together and created a livable world very easily at almost any point in time, but it shouldn't surprise you that we have failed to do this given the nature of our evolution

what do you mean by elimination of the weak

stegosaurus posted:

babyhueypnewton posted:

I agree with C_man, this isn't simply a pedantic point. To say there is nothing outside of nature is to say there is nothing outside of capitalism, and socialism only arrives from the contradictions within that system. Any attempt to create revolution before capitalism or outside it (agricultural communes, lifestyle anarchism, peasant rebellions, worker cooperatives, etc) always ends up subservient to the laws of capital. Only when capitalism has devoured everything before it and finally itself can revolution emerge as the next stage in history. The ideas in this thread that we can open a farm somewhere and not be subject to the accumulation of surplus value on a world scale derive from this confusion.

Famous Marx knowledge:

No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself.

isn't marx saying not that 'capitalism will never be overthrown until socialist society is completed inside of it' but that because that is the case, we need to do things like create cooperatives and vote for communists and fight for unions, to weaken the power of capitalists, enhance the power of workers and so forth? worker owned businesses, or a network of them, could be a part of that. didnt he also say in the critique of the gotha programme that, uh, the transitional stage of socialism will actually still be subject to the accumulation of surplus value i.e. capitalism, and that this is unavoidable? and didn't mao and maybe lenin (havent read this) admit frankly that their respective states were basically state capitalist and that this was ok because it was a concrete improvement and gave working people internationally a tremendous advantage?

i completely agree that utopian stuff like the diggers or the back to the land movement are wrong but only in the sense of immediate tactics, the problem with the diggers was that they couldn't resist being thrown off their land. if they had more resources and more support they would have been a much larger problem, and how would gathering a large number of workers under a 'state capitalist in one county' system of cooperatives, with provision for housing and health care and so forth, decrease the power of workers relative to capitalists?

i thought it was that the diggers were wrong because they grabbed "unused" common lands for inefficient small scale farming and this would actually hurt the communities they were in because they were left open for a reason

Doug posted:

i guess the formation of different hypotheses than would have been had you gone with a more positivist approach and more use of meta-analysis?

i guess? but like, what kind of form would that take? my issue is that it's possible to gain real, testable, empirically correct information about the world by using standard scientific methods, e.g. formulating theories, designing experiments, testing hypotheses, and reformulating theories. unless latour wants to deny that this is effective at doing what it claims to (not really a stretch), i don't see how you can get around doing this in some respect (theorizing, experimenting, re-theorizing, re-experimenting). i dont remember where but im pretty sure he calls for a basically limitless practice of analyzing connections between actors is his super special network and i dont really see this as anything but trying to replace people who design and run physical experiments or develop theories with social philosophers who simply make claims without empirical support but rather via "analysis", if it has any content at all.

daddyholes posted:

haha its fuckin dank when chimps eat each other babies. nice.

talk about chimping out

Doug posted:

well i'm assuming the critical theorists need to learn from scientists about forming testable theories and producing causal models and statistical testing. i'm thinking about things like the spread of specific scientific (and non-scientific) management approaches in organisations, are they implemented because they "work" in increasing output or are they used mainly to reinforce power or are they just products sold to idiot managers.


edit: this might be totally contrary to latour and if so sorry

yeah i was talking more about what's going on in latour and how it's possible to reconcile with the fact that some cultural practices empirically verifiable effects (heat engines, pendulums, etc) that derive directly from the cultural practice (physics) while other cultural practices are much less effective (homeopathy, faith healing) while maintaining a metaphysics/ontology that includes only social relations and relegates any possible extra-social effect to a generic mass of contingency.

i agree completely that critical analysis of science in general is extremely valuable but to approach it from an anti-materialist standpoint seems to me like someone claiming to offer an understanding of some foreign culture or literature without speaking the language or ever having been there.

Doug posted:

i'm randomly skimming through reassembling the social and he seems to say that sociological explanations for science failed miserably? ANT itself might not be that useful analytical (from what i can tell its basically the same stuff that systems theory/"soft" OR/organisational behavioral guys have been saying for a while , good job latour) but i guess he is relying on "plasma" as a pragmatic thing because he has no frigging idea and is trusting scientists a bit.

i guess my issue is that whether or not you "trust" scientists shouldn't matter. if anything, that seems to me to be a problem. if you separate the social from the empirical in a way that doesn't allow you to analyze how one affects the other i dont see how you can be doing the analysis that is extremely important to the mutual understanding of both. like, there are definitely real physical effects to the way in which we organize our social lives, like distribution of natural resources and how these affect politics, which affects the way in which these physical resources are used, using which technologies which each have other physical requirements and so on. at that point you need to be someone who can interpret information and research on what the actual effects are, and even looking into historical records of doing field work to confirm these ideas, to actually interact meaningfully with the scientific information. i'm obviously not saying that this doesn't happen (see archeology) but i think that this is an important avenue that is sort of cut off by putting everything that isn't "made of social stuff" in a box marked "?". maybe he goes into more detail, as i've said i'm no expert in latour.

c_man posted:

Doug posted:

i'm randomly skimming through reassembling the social and he seems to say that sociological explanations for science failed miserably? ANT itself might not be that useful analytical (from what i can tell its basically the same stuff that systems theory/"soft" OR/organisational behavioral guys have been saying for a while , good job latour) but i guess he is relying on "plasma" as a pragmatic thing because he has no frigging idea and is trusting scientists a bit.

i guess my issue is that whether or not you "trust" scientists shouldn't matter. if anything, that seems to me to be a problem. if you separate the social from the empirical in a way that doesn't allow you to analyze how one affects the other i dont see how you can be doing the analysis that is extremely important to the mutual understanding of both. like, there are definitely real physical effects to the way in which we organize our social lives, like distribution of natural resources and how these affect politics, which affects the way in which these physical resources are used, using which technologies which each have other physical requirements and so on. at that point you need to be someone who can interpret information and research on what the actual effects are, and even looking into historical records of doing field work to confirm these ideas, to actually interact meaningfully with the scientific information. i'm obviously not saying that this doesn't happen (see archeology) but i think that this is an important avenue that is sort of cut off by putting everything that isn't "made of social stuff" in a box marked "?". maybe he goes into more detail, as i've said i'm no expert in latour.

Well ANT is apparently a method rather than a theory of everything so it leaves open the possibility that it doesn't explain everything and you have to rely on other methods (I think). Also it relies heavily on case studies and general description (follow the agent and just write down everything) over framework-driven theoretical explanations (which means that people who support other sociological approaches don't like it since ANT "fails" to explain things in terms of race or gender or whatever), so I think you are mixing it up with the guys who try to explain science as just an ideology.

edit: I guess the ANT mouthpiece professor says it best?
P: Excellent, at least they are interested in what you do. It’s a good
beginning. But you are not claiming that in your six months of field-
work, you can by yourself, just by writing a few hundred pages, pro-
duce more knowledge than those 340 engineers and staff that you
have been studying?

Edited by Doug (Feb. 21, 2014 02:11:51)

c_man posted:

.custom215848{}babyhueypnewton posted:acknowledging the existence of an entire nature that encompasses reality outside of our perception but is also not identical to it and not fixed by it.
this is, imo, why latour is garbage and why people like karen barad are at least a step in a direction that makes sense. googleing "latour homeopathy" is great for postmodern ninnys who congratulate themselves on going to homeopaths and wondering why they use "western medicine" at all while doing their damnedest to avoid even considering that it could work better than something else. the idea that we have to get rid of everything that makes up capitalism and/or is subsumed by modern ideology and once we do that we'll be fine is extremely dumb imo because any other thing could just as easily take its place.

this is also the basic reason why i got into an argument about rights with swampman i guess. even if imperialists are using rights-based arguments, that has much less to do with some sort of "inherent essence" of such positions and much more to do with the fact that it was a type of argument that was around at the time. at the same time, a socialist/ecologically sound government wouldn't benefit from simply throwing away things that were produced under capitalism but would certainly have to work (hard!) to re-purpose the existing ideological or technical mechanisms that exist to produce a "better" living situation. lmao long post again

good shit c_man thanks for the backup. i am reading someone influenced heavily by latour ( i will read him at some point) and it's fucking infuriating how insane and stupid the understanding of the world is when you assume away reality.

c_man posted:

specifically i think the ways in which actual physical reality and cultural systems of representation and meaning affect each other in turn is extremely important

this. I'm trying to layer understandings from science, systems theory etc. with phenomenology and other social science/sts stuff on top, whereas latour (i think because they spend so much time reading and writing field notes) is looking at science as a social practice and saying 'it's the same as all these other social practices'.

in the book i'm reading now The Body Multiple, the author argues that pathology, the foundation of modern medicine, does not have much to do with diagnosing artherosclerosis, even though historically I imagine they were very involved with creating/understanding the disease. and she is focusing on how "objects" (what she means by this is beyond me, somehow diseases are objects) are "enacted" rather than "performed" as the old terminology has it, but she never attempts to contract artherosclerosis herself or even follow people around, she just talks to them lol

Edited by NoFreeWill (Feb. 21, 2014 02:36:27)

NoFreeWill posted:

c_man posted:

specifically i think the ways in which actual physical reality and cultural systems of representation and meaning affect each other in turn is extremely important

this. I'm trying to layer understandings from science, systems theory etc. on top of phenomenology and other social science/sts stuff, whereas latour (i think because they spend so much time reading and writing field notes) is looking at science as a social practice and saying 'it's the same as all these other social practices'.

in the book i'm reading now The Body Multiple, the author argues that pathology, the foundation of modern medicine, does not have much to do with diagnosing artherosclerosis, even though historically I imagine they were very involved with creating/understanding the disease. and she is focusing on how "objects" (what she means by this is beyond me, somehow diseases are objects) are "enacted" rather than "performed" as the old terminology has it, but she never attempts to contract artherosclerosis herself or even follow people around, she just talks to them lol

lol