Aesthetic Materialism

As Karl Marx said, "I am not a Marxist."  Marxism is, simultaneously, the greatest obstacle to any real proletarian movement to overturn the existing order, and the means by which we can overcome this obstacle. I'd even go so far as to say that Marxism is, in its way, a greater obstacle than the bourgeoisie itself (which it serves).  This seems counter-intuitive, and it is - even to me! - because Marxist movements are so small and almost powerless that it seems like they wouldn't make any difference.  Yet, again and again, every time a real proletarian movement arises to overturn the existing order, the Marxists suddenly appear and immediately defeat the real movement, either by destroying it completely, dismissing it as somehow impure or not "true," absorbing it, redirecting it, distracting it, confusing it, dividing it, or some combination of the above.  By neutralizing every potential movement for change, the Marxists always end up serving and reinforcing...

Marx was the greatest theologian of the 19th century, because he was the most subtle, the most nuanced, and he had the best sense of humor.  (Or perhaps Marx was the second greatest theologian of the 19th century, second only to Hegel - but it's very close, and I'm not sure who ultimately wins.  Nietzsche might be third, but it's a distant third.) Wittgenstein famously said, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must pass over in silence."  His comrades initially thought that this made him a logical positivist or even an eliminative materialist.  In reality, Wittgenstein was something more like a mystic, who was deeply invested in poetry.  He identified morality with aesthetics, but not to denigrate either - he thought both were deeply important, but that the truths of morality and aesthetics could not be stated clearly but could only be "shown".  This, to me, is evocative of mystics like Meister Eckhart, for whom God was above all human qualities, incl...

  Start at the Beginning Previous Chapter: Day 1, Part 12 Your eyes open.  You see flies and a small, glowing bug buzzing around.  ...up on the wall, the glimmer of something! You are a girl in a cage.  There's a somewhat older boy with a shaved head, kneeling in a cage next to yours.   "Hey!" you whisper to him, but he sits there, impassively, staring forward. "Hey!" say, still whispering but more loudly and insistently.  You're just staring at the smooth back of his head, in gradually rising frustration. "I can hear you perfectly well," he intones, speaking clearly in a normal tone of voice. The room rocks to the side, and you tumble backwards.  The boy seems poised, utterly unperturbed.  As you regain your balance, up on a nail, sticking into the wall, you see it: a golden key, surrounded by the flies. As the entire room lurches at a nauseating slant, the golden key sways out from the wall, as if stretching towards you, invitingly. Yo...

  In "The Eclipse of Reason," Max Horkheimer writes: "Having given up autonomy, reason has become an instrument." First I would have to believe that reason ever had autonomy - or to even know what autonomous reason would mean - before I could accept the premise that it has "given up" this autonomy. Horkheimer is smuggling a kind of idealism (quasi-Kantian) into his presuppositions. Reason has never been autonomous. As Hume said, reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions. Or, better yet, the material conditions of a society, in the final analysis, determine the ideological superstructure, including that society's reason. At best we might say that our goal is to create - for the first time - an autonomous reason. But that is well outside of the goal of Marxism. As Marx put it, reason has always existed, but not in rational form. The role of the critic is, through dialectic, to discover the rational kernel within the irrational - and ...

Whenever I speak to a Marxist, I feel like a Religious Studies researcher, or an anthropologist of religion, speaking to a Christian.   For me, not only is Marxism a religion - it's the religion.  It's the religion by which all other religions are measured.  Something is a religion if and only if, and to the extent that, it resembles Marxism.  (And that's not a bad thing.  I love religion .  And I also love communists .)  Marxism is the most sophisticated religion, the most subtle and nuanced - after all, Marx was the greatest theologian of the 19th century . I see an unbroken line of tradition from the earliest Hebrew prophets - Amos, for instance - to contemporary communist movements.  From the beginning of this civilizational progression, Marxism was always in a process of becoming, of entelechy.  It always existed as potential; in Marx it reaches its entelechy or fulfillment - or at least until something else supersedes Marxism....

There's something fundamentally unserious about politicians.  When I think of the most important people of the 20th century: Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, John von Neumann, Jane Goodall, Frans de Waal, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett , etc., none of them are politicians.  I just don't think politicians matter that much.  I don't think they've ever accomplished anything particularly noteworthy - and that goes for both positive and negative accomplishments, although they certainly seem much more capable of negative accomplishments - wars, genocides, atrocities, etc. - than positive ones.  The art of being a politician seems to belong to the realm of entertainment and public relations.  (Zappa had that famous phrase, of which there are a few versions: "Politics is the entertainment wing of the military-industrial complex," or the one he explicitly advocated but did not claim to originate, "Politics is the entertainment wing of industry.")  To me, this...