neckwattle posted:

okay I'm finally reading foucault and you guys need to redpill me on why he's bad because to me so far he's really good.

i read a bunch of foucault in a past life as a student of critical theory and got a lot out of it at the time. i think he does make a lot of useful observations about power generally and his hermeneutic studies of western history are really illuminating, i think his work on madness is vital for example. his weaknesses are clear from a marxist perspective - his approach is only haphazardly materialist, and he is so busy trying to problematise his subjects that he is often ideologically incoherent. but i think as with anything he should be read critically and it would be silly to throw the baby out with the postmodernist bathwater.

Now, would all those who raised their hands please disqualify themselves from further literary judgments. Less than Zero is less than bad. It's tenth-generation derivative California noir by a silly trust-fund amateur with great connections and no talent. In many cases, critics can disagree and still respect each other; but if you liked this book, you're hopeless. From the clumsy allegory of its first line, "Nobody knows how to merge in LA" to its slow, formulaic visits to the most predictable sites of rich-boy decadence (snuff movies! cocaine! Whooooo, scary stuff!), it's Didion writ dumb, Chandler without corpses--unless you count the readers.

American Psycho:

What would you do if you were an empty-headed rich boy facing the second-book dilemma? Why, you'd do what Brett Easton Ellis did: pour two tons of fake blood all over the manuscript so nobody could tell that you never had an ounce of talent and could not write your way out of the proverbial paper bag, even with a big bloody knife in hand.
Just as failed pop musicians migrate to C & W, where dim audiences are pleased by devices grown dull in the faster world, so Brett has taken the cliches of mall gore back to the slowed-down world of the East-Coast publishing world, where the serial-killer schtick, an object of fifth-generation parody for the hip kids at the multiplexes, actually seems "searing" and new. A strange twist on the provincial/urbane distinction: the provinces are now the cutting edge, and the Manhattanites the easily-awed suckers.
Ellis has now written two wholly derivative, inept novels and attained fame. As an entrepreneur he is not without skill. As a novelist....he's just not.

Bret Easton Ellis (age: 55) now has a book coming out complaining about political correctness as embodied in MY MILLENNIAL SOCIALIST BOYFRIEND. Did you know he's my boyfriend? And a millennial? And he whines a lot? But he's, like, really young and really good looking. Try getting a reservation at Dorsia without one you stupid fucking bastards!

kinch posted:

his (ellis') recent interview with the new yorker was wild

It's funnier to read it in the voice of Christian Bale playing Patrick Bateman because that's pretty much who Ellis is. He would form his political opinions by ingesting something from cable T.V. which he watched for five minutes in the morning and say "We may not like Trump, but we need to grapple with how he speaks for the white working class" with a lot of intensity.

I think what happened this week, with Joe Biden, has really alienated my boyfriend from his party, in a way. My boyfriend was extremely upset about how the media was treating Joe Biden and how they were putting that under the umbrella of #MeToo. That can happen, and I think we can all agree on that.

Fayafi posted:

made me fall down a rabbit hole of his pando articles. have never related to anything more than his accounts of being in canada lol. riding around in ambulances like a moron, underestimating how predatory and cold (i dont mean weather) the people can be

apparently he has a book on this, Canada was a Cakewalk. I've been interested in it for a while

and you're right, the people in this country tend to be total bastards hiding behind a thin veil of aloof politeness

But nowhere is the conflation of reason and terror so manifest as during the French Revolution. 25 During the French Revolution, terror is construed as an almost necessary part of politics. An absolute transparency is claimed to exist between the state and the people. As a political category, "the people" is gradually displaced from concrete reality to rhetorical figure. As David Bates has shown, the theorists of terror believe it possible to distinguish between authentic expressions of sovereignty and the actions of the enemy. They also believe it possible to distinguish between the "error" of the citizen and the "crime" of the counterrevolutionary in the political sphere. Terror thus becomes a way of marking aberration in the body politic, and politics is read both as the mobile force of reason and as the errant attempt at creating a space where "error" would be reduced, truth enhanced, and the enemy disposed of. 26

Finally, terror is not linked solely to the utopian belief in the unfettered power of human reason. It is also clearly related to various narratives of mastery and emancipation, most of which are underpinned by Enlightenment understandings of truth and error, the "real" and the symbolic. Marx, for example, conflates labor (the endless cycle of production and consumption required for the maintenance of human life) with work (the creation of lasting artifacts that add to the world of things). Labor is viewed as the vehicle for the historical self-creation of humankind. The historical self-creation of humankind is itself a life-and-death conflict, that is, a conflict over what paths should lead to the truth of history: the overcoming of capitalism and the commodity form and the contradictions associated with both. According to Marx, with the advent of communism and the abolition of exchange relations, things will appear as they really are; the "real" will present itself as it actually is, and the distinction between subject and object or being and consciousness will be transcended. 27 But by making human emancipation dependent upon the abolition of commodity production, Marx blurs the all-important divisions among the man-made realm of freedom, the nature-determined realm of necessity, and the contingent in history.

The commitment to the abolition of commodity production and the dream of direct and unmediated access to the "real" make these processes—the fulfillment of the so-called logic of history and the fabrication of humankind—almost necessarily violent processes. As shown by Stephen Louw, the central tenets of classical Marxism leave no choice but to "try to introduce communism by administrative fiat, which, in practice, means that social relations must be decommodified forcefully." 28 Historically, these attempts have taken such forms as labor militarization, the collapse of the distinction between state and society, and revolutionary terror. 29 It may be argued that they aimed at the eradication of the basic human condition of plurality. Indeed, the overcoming of class divisions, the withering away of the state, the flowering of a truly general will presuppose a view of human plurality as the chief obstacle to the eventual realization of a predetermined telos of history. In other words, the subject of Marxian modernity is, fundamentally, a subject who is intent on proving his or her sovereignty through the staging of a fight to the death. Just as with Hegel, the narrative of mastery and emancipation here is clearly linked to a narrative of truth and death. Terror and killing become the means of realizing the already known telos of history.

Some or all of this may be obvious to you but I like pointing out not only that Marx's defense of the French revolution against the reactionary politics of Kant and Hegel is the starting point in history of this dispute in philosophy between idealism and materialism but that Marxism-Leninism and the "Eastern Marxism" (this is a reference to Losurdo's schematic but useful terminology**) of the Stalin era USSR remains the dividing point between reactionaries and revolutionaries. The strange thing is that reactionaries on the left have attempted to construct out of Heidegger's fascist critique of Hegel (standing in for Marx) a left wing anarchist critique of everything good and progressive in capitalism through a partial reading of the anti-colonial critique of the presumptions of the Enlightenment. I don't like Zizek anymore but he makes the correct argument here

http://www.critical-theory.com/zizek-responds-to-his-critics/

Fuck You Walter Mignolo*
“Okay, fuck you, who are these bloody much more interesting intellectuals…? Let’s say I was not overly impressed.”
*The trolling of Slavoj Zizek is not representative of our views here at Critical-Theory.

He proceeds to go on an extended spiel about his debate with Walter Mignolo, who he respectfully characterized with the quote “Does he sound this stupid in real life?” Mignolo responded to an article on Zizek in Al Jazeera by Santiago Zabala with the challenge that not only was Zizek Eurocentric, but that non-European thought was more valuable in response to the decolonial struggles which are the center of today’s discussion, in Mignolo’s opinion. While he acknowledges the value of Zizek’s Communism, he argues that his philosophical perspective is not relevant to these struggles. Rather, what we should embrace is a multiplicity of local solutions to capitalism rather than treating the communist struggle as an abstract and universal one, which tends to recreate oppression.

He uses his invocation of Franz Fanon as the launching point for continuing his discussion of this topic, particularly Mignolo’s paragraph:

“When one says Eurocentrism, every self-respecting decolonial intellectual has not as violent a reaction as Joseph Goebbels had to culture – to reach for a gun, hurling accusations of proto-fascist Eurocentrist cultural imperialism.

A self-respecting decolonial intellectual will reach instead to Frantz Fanon: “Now, comrades, now is the time to decide to change sides. We must shake off the great mantle of night, which has enveloped us, and reach, for the light. The new day, which is dawning, must find us determined, enlightened and resolute. So, my brothers, how could we fail to understand that we have better things to do than follow that Europe’s footstep?”

Zizek then responds to the valorization of these new thinkers.

“Okay, fuck you, who are these bloody much more interesting intellectuals…? Let’s say I was not overly impressed. “My good friend Wang Hui”, I wouldn’t exactly quote him as a model of non-European authentic tradition because he, I’m on very good terms with him, he recently sent me a text on China and Modernization where he does an operation I find deeply problematic. He tries to be, I am not kidding, what I would have called, who was the bad guy who did free-market economy, Milton Freidman…left Friedman. What he tries to do is oppose real just market exchange and its capitalist distortion through monopoly and so on. There is a true honest market exchange. He explicitly positively quotes Friedman. And then there are distortions which he, in a typical non-Marxist way, he sees the causes of these distortions not in economic relations themselves but in social pathologies.”

Wang Hui, one of the decolonial intellectuals Mignolo specifically valorizes, responds to modernization in China in a way which betrays a social focus which belies the systemic problems of capitalism. Hui defines the problem of capitalism not as a fundamentally exploitative system, but rather a good system perverted by monopolistic activities. This, for Zizek, exemplifies the problematic approach of Mignolo, which, in fragmenting the solution, fragments the problem. Rather, what we require, for Zizek, to respond to Capitalism is an understanding of its universality. He then brings in his own reading of Fanon to demonstrate this point, which is that Fanon embraced the necessary, material violence to engage in the practice of decolonization, using a Lacanian and Hegelian basis for thought, which goes a long way to endear him to Zizek.

“Now let’s go back to Mignolo, what Mignolo proposes is thus a version of Baudrillard’s battle cry…”Forget Foucault”….Forget Europe we have better things to do than deal with European philosophy, better things than endlessly deconstructing. He explicitly includes deconstruction. This is endless narcissistic self-probing, we should simply step out. The irony here is that this battle cry did not hold for Fanon himself, who dealt intensively and was proud of it. The first obscenity seems to me how dare he to quote Fanon! Fanon is my hero, that’s why I defend him against soft guys like Homi Bhabha, who wrote long texts trying to neutralize, normalize Fanon. No, he didn’t really mean it, with killing and violence; he meant some sublime gesture where there is no blood and nobody is really hurt and so on. Let’s face it, Fanon dealt extensively with Hegel, psychoanalysis, Sartre, even Lacan. My third reaction would have been: When I read lines like Mignolo’s, I reach not for the gun but for Fanon.”

He proceeds to then quote Fanon as concluding in favor of reaching towards a European-based philosophical perspective as the basis for universalized action, and leaving behind a specifically African (or decolonial) obligation.

“I am a man and what I have to recapture is the whole past of the world, I am not responsible only for the slavery involved in Santo Domingo, every time man has contributed to the victory of the dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to an attempt to subjugate his fellows, I have felt solidarity with his act. In no way does my basic vocation have to be drawn from the past of peoples of color. In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving some black civilization unjustly ignored. I will not make myself the man of any past. My black skin is not a repository for specific values. Haven’t I got better things to do on this earth than avenge the blacks of the 17th century?

I as a man of color do not have the right to hope that in the white man there will be a crystallization of guilt towards the past of my race. I as a man of color do not have the right of stamping down the pride of my former master. I have neither the right nor the duty to demand reparations for my subjugated ancestors. There is no black mission. There is no white burden. I do not want to be victim to the rules of a black world. Am I going to ask this white man to answer for the slave traders of the 17th century? Am I going to try by every means available to cause guilt to burgeon in their souls? I am not a slave to slavery that dehumanized my ancestors. It would be of enormous interest to discover a black literature or architecture from the 3rd century B.C, we would be overjoyed to learn of the existence of a correspondence between some black philosopher and Plato, but we can absolutely not see how this fact would change the lives of 8 year old kids working the cane fields of Martinique or Guadeloupe. I find myself in the world and I recognize I have one right alone: of demanding human behavior from the other.”

Walter Mignolo is a typical example of this, the only thing notable is I've been told he and the other liberals at Duke have completely isolated Fredric Jameson at Duke who is super old anyway, and once he dies Marxism will die at that university as well. Anyway, Zizek has no courage but we are able to point out what is impossible for third world comprador bourgeois philosophers: the anti-colonial revolution was Marxist-Leninist, led by communist parties and its critique of Stalin and the comintern was a comradely one and had nothing to do with the "totalitarianism" of praxis's presumption to affect the Real. Mao's attitude towards Stalin is the same as Marx's attitude towards Hegel:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p3.htm

The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of “Das Kapital,” it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre Epigonoi who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing’s time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a “dead dog.” I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him.

As should be our attitude towards both. Finally, we can critique Kant who was totally opposed to the French revolution without embracing Hegel, who supported Napoleon as a Bonapartist class compromise, the famous world spirit on a white horse. By that I mean to return to the very first thing I said, which is that Lacan is different than the other poststructuralists because he begins from Hegel's critique of Kant which is why Zizek is a "neo-Hegelian." This is also why Jameson wrote his article on Lacan, because he believes that his explanation of poststructuralism's "prison house of language"is correct except in its analysis of Lacan and the idealist dialectic. That's for another post but here's the essay if you're interested, it's nearly impossible to understand though without a bunch of prior knowledge.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2930443?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

I also like Marx here where he discusses many of these issues

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm

*I like Jameson's comment that existentialism was a progressive reaction to the third world becoming "subjects of history" rather than an undifferentiated mass (undifferentiated refers to the capitalist division of labor) something which can easily be applied to Kant himself and his many comments on colonialism which brings the global proletariat to the center of the capitalist world system reflected in philosophy without falling prey to the partial and local existentialisms of comprador post-colonialism.

**https://stalinsmoustache.org/2017/06/28/losurdos-new-book-on-western-marxism/

Edited by babyhueypnewton (June 9, 2019 21:08:36)

marlax78 posted:

babyhueypnewton posted:

Marx in this sense flips Kant on his head by bringing the transcendental categories back to Earth

It's worth adding that Hegel, following Spinoza who sees thought as a verb and not a noun, criticizes Kant for separating the conditions of the possibility of knowledge from the process of cognition itself

Heidegger of course is an irrationalist who can't get past the opening of the Logic because if pure indeterminate being is the same as Nothingness then how do you get Being from Nothingness and it seems to me that is basically the same misundersting as, to use a metaphor like yourself, those who react to the failure of perfect competition with a theory of imperfect competition

Right, one of the most radical parts of Marx's philosophy is that his object of investigation is not an object at all but a social relation. The logic of the capitalism mode of production has a very different ontological status than the subjective desires of an individual (the inadequacy of the latter even on its own logical terms shows the bankrupcy of analytic philosophy in general which simply takes the existence of the Real outside the prison house of language as given but therefore irrelevant to the internal logical structure of abstract language - I would be happy in that prison house as well if I had a tenured position writing the equivalent of word puzzles) and has only a symptomatic empirical existence: price never exactly expresses price of production which never exactly expresses total surplus value which never exactly reaches the average organic composition and this radical indeterminacy (the social totality of profit and the compulsion of individual capitalists towards profit mirrors in political economy the problem of totality and phenomenology in philosophy and the latter in Kant is precisely the symptom of the former) is itself the motor force of history. Thinking about this in terms of physics or biology you can see how backwards bourgeois philosophy has become with its linear causation and hyper-empiricism (which gets reflected in the "left" reaction of hyper-skepticism and deconstruction of the former's language games).

I like to think Deleuze is different than the other poststructuralists and Jameson at least considers him somewhere between the Marxist problematic and the smuggled far-right anarchist critique I mentioned earlier. But I'm wary, not only because his followers are all reactionary liberals but that it's never clear at various times whether he's critiquing the philosophy of the French communist party, the Althusserian anti-revisionist critique, or Marxism itself, and his political economy is pretty useless. But this is the "rhizzone" so maybe it's worth giving him some benefit of the doubt. Writing this made me read this piece, I'll be back

https://fadingtheaesthetic.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/24411363-fredric-jameson-marxism-and-dualism-in-deleuze.pdf

Edited by babyhueypnewton (June 9, 2019 21:39:26)

Hetherington didn’t just have an Oscar-nominated face, it was a real good-looking face too, which all the tributes to him seem to repeat over and over. Take this one from the editor of Vanity Fair, the magazine that sent him to Libya:

“Devilishly good-looking and impossibly brave, he was both a ladies’ man and a man’s man,” he said. “There were few like Tim, and there will be fewer like him.”

I know people are supposed to say dumb stuff when somebody dies, it’s part of the proof that you’re all discombobulated by the passing of the great one, but god damn, does it have to be THIS stupid? That last sentence is pure comedy, whether it wants to be or not: “There were few like Tim, and there will be fewer like him.”

Yeah, dude. One fewer, by my count. Tim minus Tim equals zero, according to my keyboard calculator here.

It’s kind of hard to get too choked up over killed combat photographers because they’re all like Tim, these dashing throwbacks to colonial-war heroes in the Victorian days.

Back then the cool, handsome Oxford grad would dash off to Waziristan to battle the wily Pashtun. Today they leave that to the working class, but that doesn’t mean they have to settle for dull civilian jobs. They came up with a solution that lets them soak up the blood and the cool of a war zone without getting any of it on their hands: they take pictures of it instead of getting dirty shooting people.

It’s exactly the same pattern with the other shooting game these guys used to play, big-game hunting. A hundred years ago, if they were jilted by whatever horseface damsel they fancied they’d go off to the Rockies to shoot Grizzlies, or to the African savanna to slap lions around. Now they go to the same places, but it’s to coddle those Grizzlies, collar them and encourage them to breed, or back to the savanna to frown disapprovingly at the local farmers for shooting lions in an ungentlemanly fashion, with AK bursts.

If you’ve read Michael Herr’s Nam book Dispatches you know what these guys (and they’re almost all guys) are like. Herr has the same kind of man-crush on one of them, Sean Flynn, Errol Flynn’s son, as the Vanity Fair editor had on Tim.

By the way -- Sean Flynn disappeared in Cambodia in 1970.

There’s an article in that disgusting HuffPo where Steve Kettman, another starry-eyed reporter, talks about his crush on Sean even though Flynn’s kid had been a rotting corpse in the jungles of Cambodia before he ever heard of him.

He quotes Herr talking about Flynn in terms so ridiculous I just have to quote it:

“Sean Flynn could look more incredibly beautiful than even his father, Errol, had thirty years before as Captain Blood, but sometimes he looked more like Artaud coming out of some heavy heart-of-darkness trip, overloaded on the information, the input,” Herr writes. “The input! He’d give off a bad sweat and sit for hours, combing his mustache through with the saw blade of his Swiss Army knife.”

Tim Hetherington was the same breed, a “man’s man”—that’s pretty damn clear—“and a ladies’ man” in an age where most men are nobody’s man, just a scared Dilbert in a cubicle. You can decide that makes them heroes, like most people seem to, or decide they’re just decadent freaks, no-touch perverts who want to roll in the gore without getting dirty. Goddamn aristocrats.

trakfactri posted:

And I see Dolan's writing as about demystifying warfare and just writing about it as a sordid thing for perverts, like politics.

lol yep, this is what i was trying to get at but you have said it much better.

kamelred posted:

is the prescription here to settle down and accept the bland, suburban normality?

it's to realise that becoming a journalist won't make your dick any bigger, it'll just make you a bigger dick

kamelred posted:

is the prescription here to settle down and accept the bland, suburban normality?

No it's to reject idealism

Petrol posted:

lol