Aesthetic Materialism

    Intellectual Tier List S: Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Euclid, Plato, William Shakespeare, author of Genesis, Franz Kafka A+: Srinivasa Ramanujan, Emmy Noether, David Hilbert, Henri Poincare, Joseph Fourier, William Blake, Hafez, Archimedes, Edith Massey A: James Clark Maxwell, G.W.F. Hegel, Friedrich Schelling, Dante Alighieri, Georg Cantor, Gottfried Leibniz, Siddhartha Gautama, author of proto-Isaiah, Rumi, Leonardo Da Vinci, Mileva Marić A-: Erwin Schrödinger, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Hendrik Lorentz, Johann Sebastian Bach, John von Neumann, Edward Witten, John Coltrane, Michelangelo, Leonhard Euler, Aristarchus of Samos B+: Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, John Milton, Charles Darwin, Guy Debord, author of Kohelet/Ecclesiastes, author of John, author of Matthew, Galileo Galilei, Pythagoras, Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane, Harry Partch, Philolaus of Croton, Orlando Gibbons B: Ernst Mach, Kurt Gödel, Claude Shannon, Niccolo Machiavel...

  At the moment, art is a deep disquiet.  It is a meditation, but not for the purpose of discovering an inner peace, but rather for eliminating distractions and focusing on this fundamental disquietude.  It's also a little drunk. 

Liberalism, no less than socialism, -indeed, perhaps much more so than socialism- is defined by praxis.  And liberalism might be considered dialectical, in that it offers no positive doctrine, but proceeds by a kind of via negativa .  The practice of liberalism is tolerance; the positive program of liberalism is the establishment of social institutions that promote and defend tolerance.  Liberalism does not tell you what to believe.  At most, it tells you what not to believe - that is, not to believe any belief that would cause you to be intolerant towards other people and their beliefs - presumably, "absolute," "dogmatic," "totalitarian" beliefs.  It may not even tell you that much.  It may allow you to believe intolerant beliefs (that is, it may tolerate intolerant beliefs) so long as you do not act on those intolerant beliefs.  Indeed, liberalism developed within the context of the wars between and among Catholics and Protestants.  The p...

    I've asserted before that Lenin's theory of imperialism is outdated (there were also problems with it even in his own time, but that's a topic for another time).  I was once asked (online), what has really changed between Lenin's time, and our own?  Of course, there are many answers to this question.  But perhaps the most important shift is the development and proliferation of nuclear weapons, which utterly changed the game board of geopolitics, in multiple ways.  As Marx once said, "The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist."  But not only did nuclear weaponry change the world directly, but also indirectly by solidifying American hegemony, allowing for the creation of an international culture. Understanding this historical shift allows us to break down our analysis in a more granular way.  A regime that was established entirely before the development of nuclear weaponry (like t...

  Hope #1: I hope that somewhere, in some industry, workers will gain ownership of their own means of production. Hope #2: I hope that these self-owning workplaces, which don't have capitalists parasitically sucking all of the profit and revenue out of them, will out-compete those that do.  And I hope that this will inspire more and more workers to strive to own their own workplaces. Hope #3: I hope that the workers, having attained all this new power, will use that power to make their workplaces into places that respect workers' privacy, maximize our freedom, including freedom of expression, protect our rights, including our right to live however we want when we are not working; and make them into places that are convivial, lewd, silly, and carnivalesque, while at the same time becoming places where we can work together to harness our abilities to realize our deepest desires and our wildest dreams. This threefold hope is not a certainty, only a hope; and yet it is our only ho...

  As I wrote in my previous post, Foucault's main error was his failure to fully think through his "doubts" regarding the repressive hypothesis, resulting his faulty contention that "Where there is power, there is resistance" as if resistance must just always automatically appear, as if by magic.  In other words, Foucault has a dogmatic belief in the automatic spontaneity of resistance, that it always arises "everywhere".  It's not hard to see potential political consequences of this theoretical error: if we are always automatically guaranteed resistance, then it is not necessary to do the work of organizing resistance.  If it is, so to speak, already there - "everywhere" - and so producing it is utterly superfluous, then one might even be led to a kind of suspicion regarding those who are trying to build resistance through too totalizing (rather than local) organization as somehow inauthentic. Thus, quite paradoxically, a theory whose ve...