Green420
Well-Known Member
Thank you. I feel no one should be obliged to agree with what I say, as that would be authoritarian of me. But I do wonder what you disagree with.
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The Bookworm Corner
- Thread starter Grobalot
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florduh
Well-Known Member
Your excellent write-up convinced me to look up this book. The original title is, Capitalisme et schizophrénie. L'anti-Œdipe. Honestly, America should replace "e pluribus unum" on our money with "Capitalism and Schizophrenia". Perfectly explains our country.
Bazinga
Well-Known Member
Who is that in the car?Your excellent write-up convinced me to look up this book. The original title is, Capitalisme et schizophrénie. L'anti-Œdipe. Honestly, America should replace "e pluribus unum" on our money with "Capitalism and Schizophrenia". Perfectly explains our country.
el sargantano
Well-Known Member
I just didn't know about this Galactic Empire prequel written by Isaac Asimov himself.
He didn't add it officially to the main lore of robots, empires & foundations, but it rings some bells on future subjects developed on the next books he wrote:
/)
en.m.wikipedia.org
I'll pick it up from the public library during summertime and review it here soon after.
He didn't add it officially to the main lore of robots, empires & foundations, but it rings some bells on future subjects developed on the next books he wrote:
Nemesis (Asimov novel) - Wikipedia
I'll pick it up from the public library during summertime and review it here soon after.
im not a robot
Well-Known Member
oh i had no idea this thread existed. how nice.
honestly digital media has kept me more from reading than id like to admit. i periodically make resolutions to change this.
few books in recent memory have touched me as much as remainder by tom maccarthy
and annihilation by jeff vandermeer
neither one is exactly a hidden gem, both were turned into movies. but i think they are both brilliant.
oh and in terms of nonfiction, entangled life by merlin sheldrake also a great read. i wonder if this got referenced in the mushroom thread here...
i also really enjoyed the expanse series. however i got distracted midway through babylon's ashes, and now i lost the plot. my memory is terrible. i guess i should rerstart it. in your opinion @florduh - is this worth the effort, does the quality keep up with the earlier volumes?
honestly digital media has kept me more from reading than id like to admit. i periodically make resolutions to change this.
few books in recent memory have touched me as much as remainder by tom maccarthy
and annihilation by jeff vandermeer
neither one is exactly a hidden gem, both were turned into movies. but i think they are both brilliant.
oh and in terms of nonfiction, entangled life by merlin sheldrake also a great read. i wonder if this got referenced in the mushroom thread here...
i also really enjoyed the expanse series. however i got distracted midway through babylon's ashes, and now i lost the plot. my memory is terrible. i guess i should rerstart it. in your opinion @florduh - is this worth the effort, does the quality keep up with the earlier volumes?
Green420
Well-Known Member
Just read around 20 pages of Max Planck's the New Science, chapter 2 of "Where is Science Going" called "Is the External World Real?" It was a fascinating description of logical positivism, basically saying that the positivists do not understand how the works of Faraday and electromagnetism are possible from a positivistic view, seems to imply this and does not elaborate so I don't know why Faraday is not understandable from a purely sensory abstraction point of view. But that is what Planck is trying to say, is that the world breaks down at a quantum level, so the idea that there's just a non contradictory list of facts about the world, which excludes all aesthetic or ethical conclusions, is based on the idea that the external world is simply unknowable. We can make statements about it, but these statements as raw scientific data do not lead to new discoveries. Planck lays a logical contradiction in logical positivist thought out at the end of chapter, which is very clear and does not require background knowledge to understand - it's a contradiction to say that there's both an external world which is real, and an external world which is unknowable. How do you know it's real if it's unknowable is Planck's proposition.
Planck was anti fascist, in a way which he believed was the best he could do. He privately hated Hitler and the Nazis, but he kept his post because he believed it was good to uphold the law, according the introduction. Planck is still the sort of author who seems to separate facts from values, thinks there is a definite external world which has laws "independent" of the instruments of science as he describes, which is why the instruments cannot always be trusted. But he does not believe that ethics plays no role in what we do, he derides the positivists for their view that ethics and aesthetic conclusions are not part of the conclusions of scientific study. He goes through a brief history of modern science in the beginning which is nice if you already know a lot of the stuff like the Michaelson Morley experiment and the workings of Relativity. It's a crash course kind of thing, but when he gets more into the meat of the book later it becomes a real treat to listen to some of his descriptions of positivist, and hearing about the whole history of modern science in brief is not bad, it gives you an idea of some of the names which are worth having in your library, like Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Einstein, Bohr (Bohr I don't have), etc. And Planck doesn't use any logical notation to describe what he has to say, which I think is a mark of someone who understands what they say well enough to explain it simply.
Planck was anti fascist, in a way which he believed was the best he could do. He privately hated Hitler and the Nazis, but he kept his post because he believed it was good to uphold the law, according the introduction. Planck is still the sort of author who seems to separate facts from values, thinks there is a definite external world which has laws "independent" of the instruments of science as he describes, which is why the instruments cannot always be trusted. But he does not believe that ethics plays no role in what we do, he derides the positivists for their view that ethics and aesthetic conclusions are not part of the conclusions of scientific study. He goes through a brief history of modern science in the beginning which is nice if you already know a lot of the stuff like the Michaelson Morley experiment and the workings of Relativity. It's a crash course kind of thing, but when he gets more into the meat of the book later it becomes a real treat to listen to some of his descriptions of positivist, and hearing about the whole history of modern science in brief is not bad, it gives you an idea of some of the names which are worth having in your library, like Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Einstein, Bohr (Bohr I don't have), etc. And Planck doesn't use any logical notation to describe what he has to say, which I think is a mark of someone who understands what they say well enough to explain it simply.
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florduh
Well-Known Member
I'm sorry I just saw this!
I just finished the 8th and penultimate novel, Tiamat's Wrath. It might be the best of the series!
Babylon's Ashes was also a bit tough for me too. I despise Marcos Inaros. But a lot of the plots that begin in the early novels pay off in the final trilogy. I'm starting the final installment, Leviathan Falls, this week and am starting to feel sad about saying goodbye to this universe. I think it's worth giving it another shot from the top.
GetLeft
Well-Known Member
We loved the Expanse tv series. Came across it on Sci Fi and quickly got addicted. The tv story led me to read some of the books. While conceptually the story and characters are compelling, the long, drawn out novels, mostly identical in structure, were tedious to me to the point of making me give up.
florduh
Well-Known Member
It is pretty shocking how closely they were able to follow the books with a limited budget. In part, it's because 90% of the series takes place in a room or hallway ("doors and corners, kid"). There are no windows on any of the spaceships. The first chapter of Leviathan Wakes remarks that the bridge of the Canterbury looks like any accounting office.
I still like the books a lot better, though it might depend on what you encountered first. As mentioned before, there is a 30 year time gap between where the TV series ends and the 7th book begins. You could pick it up there if you want to know how the story ends up
They're putting out a video game that makes me want to see an animated series.
Two things about the TV series drove me crazy. Short Martians and Belters. And gravity. Ceres Station had 1/3 Earth's gravity. But everyone in the show walked normally. It wasn't the show's fault, but it still drove me nuts.
Bakin4Life
Oink
My friend, that is one of the greatest criminal masterminds of the 20th century -- Walter White (played by Bryan Cranston). This particular pic is from near the end of the series (because of course, all criminals are caught, right? At least in TV land ?)
Seriously, though... it's not a book (so slightly off topic here), but it's one of the best written crime series for TV, EVER. I didn't discover it until about 2yrs after the whole thing ended. So now I can carry it forward to someone else who's not familiar with it.
'Breaking Bad' is available on Netflix and AMC's specialized 'rerun channels', and I'm sure other places, too.
im not a robot
Well-Known Member
thanks! i will absolutely put in the effort then. honestly i have not had that much fun reading anything in a good long while, so happy to hear it stays on course. i have not yet watched the series, wanted to finish the books first.
florduh
Well-Known Member
Another Sci-Fi rec from the author of The Martian, Andy Weir. Project Hail Mary. They're making a movie about it next year.
Like The Martian, PHM is a life affirming tale about how a positive mental attitude combined with the problem solving method known as "science" can create seeming miracles. Beautiful book.
Like The Martian, PHM is a life affirming tale about how a positive mental attitude combined with the problem solving method known as "science" can create seeming miracles. Beautiful book.
Green420
Well-Known Member
Have been reading Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. Just finished chapter 1 yesterday. It's basically about how philosophers try to reify their impulses as ontology in Nietzsche's eyes. This author cites Deleuze and Guattari, which is very exciting, writing at the same time as Derrida and Deleuze and Guattari, in the late 60s I think. The book wrestles between spirit, which compels guilt, and Nietzsche, who is a very Stirnerian figure, but goes even further and seems to reject all contemplation about truth and the nature of reality. Klossowski's raises the question of how ethics is possible if this is the case, but doesn't seem to offer a defense of ethics in the first chapter. Klossowski seems to imply that individualism is not possible without society. And that makes sense, as if you're raised in the wilderness there has been documented cases of not even being able to learn a language after you don't generate the neural pathways early in life.
Green420
Well-Known Member
I've read the Bhagavad Gita twice, a beautiful book. Didn't read any of the commentary like the As It Is one, my professor told me to just read the books themselves as opposed to the secondaries at first, but we did read a secondary on it I believe eventually in class. Great to see the origin of the "I am become death, destroyer of worlds" quote from Oppenheimer (a movie I didn't see, but Oppenheimer is recorded saying the words irl). It's also nice to see a positive account of the mind which is pan-psychist, implying an omnipresent mind in my interpretation at least. Brahma creates and is everything, Vishnu preserves, and Shiva is creativity and destruction. Deleuze and Guattari and many continental philosophers have a pan-psychist view of the world, that there is a sort of interpenetrating consciousness that is in all things. Derrida seems to think this. A beautiful book. Not that I like caste systems.
Drsoapp
1008
You should definitely try Gita As it is too. The purports By HG AC Bhaktivedanta Swami Srila Prabhupada are the key to understanding the deep meaning of the verses.
Pistol Pete
Well-Known Member
Wow, I'm glad to see people reading paper books! Especially with the digital world that we live in today. I highly recommend this book, or handbook. Over 600 pages of not only growing but so many other interesting topics imo. This is the latest edition with the newest technology, for example LED lights vs CFL, HPS and CMH.
It starts off with The Cannabis User's Bill Of Rights and The Tomato Model. Any grower needs to educate themselves with this info!!! SERIOUSLY
It starts off with The Cannabis User's Bill Of Rights and The Tomato Model. Any grower needs to educate themselves with this info!!! SERIOUSLY
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Green420
Well-Known Member
Digital is weird, very much the feeling of the tablet gets in the way of the experience. It fatigues the eyes after a long time, it needs to be charged, it's harder to access pages without bookmarks where you can just pick up the bookmark and put it in. Also, screens before bed = shallow sleep. A book for an hour, a few before bed, deep sleep, granted no caffeine or shocking incidents.Wow, I'm glad to see people reading paper books! Especially with the digital world that we live in today. I highly recommend this book, or handbook. Over 600 pages of not only growing but so many other interesting topics imo. This is the latest edition with the newest technology, for example LED lights vs CFL, HPS and CMH.
It starts off with The Cannabis User's Bill Of Rights and The Tomato Model. Any grower needs to educate themselves with this info!!! SERIOUSLY
I have more physical books than I have digital files, I believe; I have not even posted my best ones, only my recent ones. I collect libertarian communist works, various strands of anarchism like the "individualist" proto-post structuralist Max Stirner from the 1800s, America's Mother Earth writers with Emma Goldman, from the turn of/mid century, among other things.
First editions are something I generally tend to favor, in hardcover, the quality and presentation of a book matter, besides the fact that if the content isn't good it won't be in my house in any format. I'm rambling, but books, especially physical ones, are my life, my career, my obsession, and boy is looking profitless XD But it's proven by science, God, the law, and the gods of rock and roll, that one should vape weed and read every day
tasticleeze
Steward of the Garage
Just finished Disclosure by Michael Crichton, devoured it in about a week sitting by a serene lake.
It feels so good to be lost in a gripping story that transports you somewhere exciting and fascinating.
It feels so good to be lost in a gripping story that transports you somewhere exciting and fascinating.
Green420
Well-Known Member
I am writing a book, a sequel to my first book titled Queer Anarcho Communism: An A-Temporal Approach, available for free on the anarchist library, libcom.org, anarchistfederation.net, and anarchist news.
My first book reinterprets Hegel’s idea of world spirit: not as a national, epochal force, but as an intersubjective process that belongs to stateless peoples. I borrow Fredy Perlman’s notion of the Leviathan as a death-machine: a mega-organism that devours environments and imposes internal repression, turning life into waste. The Leviathan is Oedipal; it cuts flows, it inscribes “no” into the body without organs, and becomes the unconscious will of capital.
My goal in my followup book is to show why people do not believe in ethics anymore; because, very simply, ethics demands behavioral change. Deleuze and Guattari say that capitalism loves things that don't change the status quo. The leviathan cannot speak its own name without its entrails losing confidence. An alternative to tyranny, libertarian communists believe, is a bottom-up, non-hierarchical federation. One built around recallable delegates who have no legislative power of their own - only the task of carrying out collective decisions.
I stage this debate through Hegel and Max Stirner. Stirner believed in a wordless unique that constitutes each person and is responsible for all metaphysical phenomena, yet cannot be spoken of; Hegel and Deleuze and Guattari believe in a speakable reality. Deleuze and Guattari only believe in it being speakable to the "nth degree," taking it as close to speakability as possible until it cannot be spoken of anymore. Many assume there is a difference between Hegel's spirit and Stirner's unique which is irreconcilable.
Stirner’s “unique” is usually opposed to Hegel’s “spirit.” But I argue that this conflict is blown out of proportion; both are names for the irreducible forces - uniqueness which is unnamable, and universal intersubjective language and society. Derrida’s différance collapses the binary between the ineffable self and the social totality. The unique and spirit are one in the same, in that every signifier has an infinite unique meaning that leaks out of every self-contained meaning. I will show that while people cling to a sense of individualism that is anti collective, in fact individualism would not be possible without a collective, and a collective would not be possible without an individual. I break down common notions that people have accepted from society, such as the idea of individualism without collectivity, or collectivity that denies the individual.
I hope for the book to be 300 pages long, at this point that's a lofty goal, as it's inching away in its expansion. I am expanding the book to magnify each concept and situate it within the philosophical canon.
My first book reinterprets Hegel’s idea of world spirit: not as a national, epochal force, but as an intersubjective process that belongs to stateless peoples. I borrow Fredy Perlman’s notion of the Leviathan as a death-machine: a mega-organism that devours environments and imposes internal repression, turning life into waste. The Leviathan is Oedipal; it cuts flows, it inscribes “no” into the body without organs, and becomes the unconscious will of capital.
My goal in my followup book is to show why people do not believe in ethics anymore; because, very simply, ethics demands behavioral change. Deleuze and Guattari say that capitalism loves things that don't change the status quo. The leviathan cannot speak its own name without its entrails losing confidence. An alternative to tyranny, libertarian communists believe, is a bottom-up, non-hierarchical federation. One built around recallable delegates who have no legislative power of their own - only the task of carrying out collective decisions.
I stage this debate through Hegel and Max Stirner. Stirner believed in a wordless unique that constitutes each person and is responsible for all metaphysical phenomena, yet cannot be spoken of; Hegel and Deleuze and Guattari believe in a speakable reality. Deleuze and Guattari only believe in it being speakable to the "nth degree," taking it as close to speakability as possible until it cannot be spoken of anymore. Many assume there is a difference between Hegel's spirit and Stirner's unique which is irreconcilable.
Stirner’s “unique” is usually opposed to Hegel’s “spirit.” But I argue that this conflict is blown out of proportion; both are names for the irreducible forces - uniqueness which is unnamable, and universal intersubjective language and society. Derrida’s différance collapses the binary between the ineffable self and the social totality. The unique and spirit are one in the same, in that every signifier has an infinite unique meaning that leaks out of every self-contained meaning. I will show that while people cling to a sense of individualism that is anti collective, in fact individualism would not be possible without a collective, and a collective would not be possible without an individual. I break down common notions that people have accepted from society, such as the idea of individualism without collectivity, or collectivity that denies the individual.
I hope for the book to be 300 pages long, at this point that's a lofty goal, as it's inching away in its expansion. I am expanding the book to magnify each concept and situate it within the philosophical canon.
bellona0544
Well-Known Member
Adding to the list!!
The state reproduces itself in a biological process I call culture, and that represents the sum of ways humans collectively imprison themselves by adhering to the status quo in the modern, post-industrial world. The state creates its own narratives for greatness that allow any within to feel secure in their own greatness so long as they cling to the state's bosom for resources and don't stray too far from the collectively-defined narrative. We all decide in a million ways to perpetuate our state of being (which is currently the modern nation-state), and we all perpetuate ourselves against change and chaos even without deciding to, because the collective systems of the world work to reinforce themselves even as they are threatened. Systems seek stability and homeostasis, even if those systems aren't ultimately sustainable, and it is a collective-intelligence problem that often can't be solved at either the macro or micro level alone. Change can be initiated by a macroorganism that is comprised of constituent agential beings (eg. a human can work to kill cancer cells in their body using medicine, or a human culture can work to kill cancerous ideologies in their society). It can also be initiated by the microorganisms that are similarly agential (individual cells killing off rogue cells or individual humans working to remove other individual humans from power). The combination of a critical mass of agents moving to take action along with the macroorganism's intelligence deciding to change is often needed to restore a system that is no longer sustainable.
Laying the theory groundwork is so necessary. Do you plan on bridging any of the theoretical and practical divides by delving into any forms of fiction? Human intelligence is largely narrative-based and there are a few great fiction stories that have come out recently that can help provide blueprints for possible new lifeways. In my experience talking to folks who aren't the most educated on economics, it is very, very difficult for folks to imagine alternative worlds to the ones they inhabit unless they have examples of stories in which those new systems are already in action. Until they can connect with stories of people living in new ways, it is like the idea that they could possibly escape some constructs is absurd--like, money is here now and so it must always be, and how could peple *ever* do anything without money. They don't have the stories of their own ancestors living without money anymore because their ancestral stories were often stripped away through genocide, and so now there is no alternative even among people who have only been using currencies and market economics as we understand them for a few hundred years.
These forms of society-building are so critical, and finding ways to communicate the means through which we might organize ourselves I think one of the next big steps. And--perhaps most critically--we have to find ways to educate and engage without portraying ourselves as people who have already solved the problems of others. Not everyone thinks the same things are problems, and if we want to build an anti-hierarchical world we absolutely must center the creation of that world around everyone and not just those who can engage in the academic side of revolution. Thankfully, there are some brilliant folks on both the theory and praxis/spec fic sides generating ideas about what we can become!!
Thank you for the new read!!
Edit to add a line from the first chapter of the book:
"The world spirit once again hungers for freedom, it yearns to be released from the bubble under the earth, in the geology of the contradictions of the recording surface, which at every moment burst forth at the seams of capitalism. The time has come not to throw away our books and rally in the streets, but to focus on how to build a new queer communism from the rubble of the tyrannical fascist empire, once it begins to fall"
A-FUCKIN'-MEN
Gonna keep adding relevant lines here that jive with soul:
"Full queerness would be living according to how you want without being inhibited by outside forces which order you in such a way that you cannot order yourself. A communist society would therefore be non-hierarchical, although it would not eliminate hierarchy in the sense that everyone would still have some things that they are better at, or more attracted to, or things of this nature; but the institutional forces under queer communism would be such that they do not do something similar to autistic masking, in that it does not make people obey a hierarchical structure in which they do not organize their own lives."
"This is a society which promotes inauthentic expressions of the capture of psyche to advertisements which entice you to buy things; they stick the tendrils of capital into you, the product to be sold on the market of corpses in the Leviathan’s cities and towns, which are the Leviathan’s entrails, which are the “surplus product” and “material contents, its entrails” (Perlman 29), while the form of capture is the bodily and spiritual condition that people live in under the Leviathan (71)"
--the inherent contradiction in capitalism's perceived law of supply and demand has always been apparent, because they who have supply can artificially generate demand. that the constructed demand works to reinforce the state's cultural adherence is noteworthy.
"The undead consequence of when queerness produces representation can produce more queerness as a consequence, as well as dead consequences. The dead consequences would be representational capture and ready-to-hand connection through machinic tendrils of the Leviathan which order a person against their individualism."
--babe you are speaking my LANGUAGE shit the more queer we are the more we perpetuate queerness as a form of radical self-reconstruction against deeply-entrenched hierarchical status quos but also the more we can get subsumed in a pervasive "queer culture" that is claimed by oppressors as monolithic and which the oppressed will cling to like any identity which can ultimately accidentally strip away the power of that claimed identity holy shit like do i even ACTUALLY like fallout or am i just a tranny
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Green420
Well-Known Member
I agree with you about trying to eliminate cancerous ideologies. I see the way people think as a positive or negative infection, positive infections being what Deleuze and Guattari calls rhizomatic. It is the introduction to an anti-fascist life, Deleuze and Guattari's work. The only way to remove racism is to recognize the racist origins of many of the conceptions we have, which came from white people - this is what Franz Fanon teaches us. Likewise, Deleuze and Guattari look at the ways that we are organized by things like the mega-machine. Mere awareness of the mega-machine cannot undermine the processes of thinking which are cultural, and widespread - hence the macro organism being connected to the micro organism, but the technical machines on the micro level, do not always correspond with the macro machine as one can confuse the two. And I take this all into account that we may be using terms differently, which is what happens in all philosophical discussions, so I apologize if on first read I do not understand the way you use a term. Please expect that.
There are poetic elements in what I am writing, more so than trying to construct a world separate from the one we live in. I have read books like Samuel Delany's Dhalgren with some friends, we got 500 pages in and one of the readers quit so the reading group is on hold. While I believe that fiction and fact are deeply intertwined, in terms of the genre of the book that I'm writing it would probably be better classified as non-fiction, even though I am not trying to uphold that dichotomy as some sort of structure for my book. I plan to dive deeper into the works of David Graeber, ancient societies are something which is not my field - philosophy and literature - but I am making strides to include anti colonial thinkers, along with indigenous thinkers who I have made some headway in reading. The notion of the gift economy, which David Graeber describes, I want to read more of his Debt book, but the notion of an economy based needs and desires, as opposed to what is profitable, seems necessary for undermining the extraction of surplus value, in time and money.
You're welcome! I hope to be open to ways to improve my book always, so I appreciate your feedback. My first book does use Walt Whitman at length and briefly Samuel Beckett, just to recall the first book. That one might have some intrigue in terms of how my literary theory intersects with my writing. But this next book, it was inspired by people online who don't take ethics seriously. I wanted to show that a lot of people simply want to hide the fact that they would need to change their behavior if it meant accepting certain truths, because all behavior has a political implication - neutrality is a form of political communication as well. My goal is to break through that fog, and show truth, as well as goodness, through the eyes of great thinkers from the past, not as dead, but as alive and relevant. Thank you so much for your interest in my book!
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bellona0544
Well-Known Member
Amen to all of the above!! Lots of my terminology is coming from a unified understanding of intelligence that is emerging and is discussed at length by Michael Levin on his YouTube channel, and it reconstitutes an intelligent organism as a pattern that self-perpetuates against entropy and is able to solve problems in its own relative spacetime. It challenges traditional anthropocentric understandings of intelligence and allows for a massive, massive number of "things" in the universe to be understood as intelligent systems even if we have no means of interfacing with those systems. A reframing of the hierarchy of "complex life" also allows for larger, intelligent macro "organism" to be named and provided narrative reality, and maybe the most interesting example to my biased human ass is that human cultures themselves become macroorganisms in a sense that perpetuate the thought and understanding of that group of humans against a universe that doesn't ever fully validate their understanding. What is unique is that human culture has become truly globalized within the past few centuries in a way that it never has been before to our knowledge, meaning we are looking at a larger, more complex, more intelligent culture that becomes even harder for individual agential microorganisms in the structure to liaise with. Human beings are analogous to cells whereas the summation of human knowledge and experience and narrative history and art (or chaos interpretation)--what we collectively deem "culture"--is analogous to the larger animal or plant that those cells comprise. However, the complexity of intelligence goes waaaaaaaay beyond what is a fairly surface-level analogy, and I definitely recommend looking up Levin!
That all makes sense!! As I stated, there is explicit and pervasive need for both new anarchist theory and for folks to convert that theory into story so that it can be interpreted by human brains as possibility. And you are right that the dichotomy is one that doesn't need to exist so clearly. Fundamentally, in a universe without objective reality, non-fiction is just another filter of narrative!
Graeber and Wengrow's "Dawn of Everything" is one of those books that I think every statist would benefit from. I haven't done "Debt" yet but it is also on the list after a friend recommended it. I want a better understanding of the origins of currency and then subsequent debt-based economics, although I understand there are some minor criticisms of some of the research that Graeber tightened up with DOE. Between Graeber and now Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's "An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States" and some Angela Davis, I've had a good crash course in indigenous genocide and--most importantly--how it feels like the genocide may soon lose steam and radical communities are bringing indigenous people and lifeways back as the empire crumbles.
Amen again to all of this!! Ethics becomes difficult when you are constantly fighting for survival and are regularly told that the means to survive is to cast aside ethics rather than to develop a new ethics for a new situation. People are taught that they can be either good or bad, and the idea that there can be nuance beyond that would force people to accept that they aren't all-good as they so want to be thanks to lots of Abrahamic conditioning that set the scene for "objective" reality which capitalism and the nation-state so heavily rely on. Discussing ethics in-person in my neighborhood has proved fruitful because it gets folks to question some of the narratives the state has provided.
Thank YOU again for the book!!!
Green420
Well-Known Member
This post is part 1 of 2 of a post that appears on the next page.
Think Heidegger, Dasein is authentic due to authenticity towards death. But Heidegger has no social critique, he does not take race into account, he does not take capitalism into account. That is the problem with Heidegger, and is why he was able to be in the Nazi party and hide that fact - because his neutrality was a mask which hid the great violence of the nazi party. Not only that, but the mega-machine organizes flows, so there's things which we are not responsible for, because we have not developed the responsibility that anarchism teaches us. Zoe Baker in her book Means and Ends teaches us about the community centers of the Spanish Revolution, of the libertarian communists; the education, physical, mental, and external resources required to build a post-capitalist system. Surplus value, as Deleuze and Guattari say, is the basis of capitalism. Once it begins to be extracted, it begins to work for the mega-machine - it becomes an impersonal mass psychology which operates on primitive accumulation, the continual expansion and extraction of resources and destruction of populations for the profit of the capital and the empire. That is what I mean by the mega-machine, is the flows which are determined inwardly by the inner police officer in the head known as Oedipus, or the superego, that is heteronormativity, and restrictive representational meaning in itself. Microfascisms pertain to technical machines that are what the sign points to, as opposed to what is being said often times. This is when flows are directed towards macro fascism - this could be seen as small acts of discrimination and ignorance.
So it's important, and necessary to believe in some sort of truth, but there's a difference between relativism that is equal validity and non neutral symmetry relativism; equal validity relativism is for instance "we can't judge nazis" that's equal validity relativism and it's a mask to hide a lack of ethics, and it's contradictory because it's an ethics based on saying we can't have an ethics. I believe in non neutral symmetry, a type of relativism where we can still judge things, as better or worse, that's Deleuze and Guattari's notion of good and bad sense. But at the same time, there is true and false, in the sense that within the structures of thought we build that are fungible, and operate on paradigms as Thomas Kuhn shows in science, the paradigms can be replaced, but need something to replace them because scientists can't do science without something to base their science on. That is where anarchism comes in - the practice, the replacement for capitalism, based on order, and rules, but not rulers.
I will look up Levin, thank you for the recommendation. For Deleuze and Guattari, they are rather pan psychist. They have what are called the 3 synthesis, the connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive, which are synthesis 1 (connective) the array of partial objects (or, or, or, as in this one or this one, or this one); synthesis 2 (disjunctive) an emergent singularity body without organs, a surface on which events are inscribed, and re-emerge as singularities of meaning where dualities of meaning break down (and, or, as in this one and this one together, or this one, etc); synthesis 3 (conjunctive) which is emergent properties such as consciousness, the and... so (the and... so being where something concludes as a coherent idea)! Not teleological as in a fourth cause of Aristotle, but rather an emergent property of matter such as coherence, and true and false. Deleuze and Guattari do not reject true and false, it's just not the whole picture - there's also good and bad sense as Deleuze describes in Difference and Repetition. So sense is a-signifying, and operates on flows, and produces everything consciousness experiences in the third synthesis, while the body without organs is the surface on which those flows are organized, and the surface of the body without organs is inscribed through the "nos" of capital. The superego cuts flows - when you do things for the big other, the mega-machine, the socius, a shareholder for instance, you are doing it for the temporal flow of profit.
Think Heidegger, Dasein is authentic due to authenticity towards death. But Heidegger has no social critique, he does not take race into account, he does not take capitalism into account. That is the problem with Heidegger, and is why he was able to be in the Nazi party and hide that fact - because his neutrality was a mask which hid the great violence of the nazi party. Not only that, but the mega-machine organizes flows, so there's things which we are not responsible for, because we have not developed the responsibility that anarchism teaches us. Zoe Baker in her book Means and Ends teaches us about the community centers of the Spanish Revolution, of the libertarian communists; the education, physical, mental, and external resources required to build a post-capitalist system. Surplus value, as Deleuze and Guattari say, is the basis of capitalism. Once it begins to be extracted, it begins to work for the mega-machine - it becomes an impersonal mass psychology which operates on primitive accumulation, the continual expansion and extraction of resources and destruction of populations for the profit of the capital and the empire. That is what I mean by the mega-machine, is the flows which are determined inwardly by the inner police officer in the head known as Oedipus, or the superego, that is heteronormativity, and restrictive representational meaning in itself. Microfascisms pertain to technical machines that are what the sign points to, as opposed to what is being said often times. This is when flows are directed towards macro fascism - this could be seen as small acts of discrimination and ignorance.
Objective reality and subjective reality I believe break down in Derrida's notion of differance, which is much like Deleuze and Guattari's notion of a singularity. All the meaning which is supposedly true or false, on some level breaks down because we structure reality through fiction. But Deleuze and Guattari want to stress that words are meaningful, and in fact their positive view of the real, which means a speakable real, if we recall psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's notion of the real - kind of like Kant's thing in itself, the unspeakable thing which we supposedly know and don't know. This is where the quantum physicists and I'd argue Hegel far before them come in - how does one know something which is supposedly unspeakable? So the idea is we can speak about things, but for Deleuze and Guattari it's to the nth degree, meaning a line that goes up on a chart but never actually reaches the other end, just keeps going up. That's how knowledge works.
So it's important, and necessary to believe in some sort of truth, but there's a difference between relativism that is equal validity and non neutral symmetry relativism; equal validity relativism is for instance "we can't judge nazis" that's equal validity relativism and it's a mask to hide a lack of ethics, and it's contradictory because it's an ethics based on saying we can't have an ethics. I believe in non neutral symmetry, a type of relativism where we can still judge things, as better or worse, that's Deleuze and Guattari's notion of good and bad sense. But at the same time, there is true and false, in the sense that within the structures of thought we build that are fungible, and operate on paradigms as Thomas Kuhn shows in science, the paradigms can be replaced, but need something to replace them because scientists can't do science without something to base their science on. That is where anarchism comes in - the practice, the replacement for capitalism, based on order, and rules, but not rulers.
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