Aesthetic Materialism

  The problem with Foucault (which is the problem with all philosophers, if you can find it) is that Foucault didn't take his own ideas far enough.  In the introduction to the History of Sexuality, Volume 1, Foucault writes about what he calls "the repressive hypothesis," about which he has "three serious doubts": "First doubt: Is sexual repression truly an established historical fact? Is what first comes into view-and consequently permits one to advance an initial hypothesis-really the accentuation or even the establishment of a regime of sexual repression beginning in the seventeenth century? This is a properly historical question. Second doubt: Do the workings of power, and in particular those mechanisms that are brought into play in societies such as ours, really belong primarily to the category of repression? Are prohibition, censorship, and denial truly the forms through which power is exercised in a general way, if not in every society, most certain...

  Extremism is a symptom of spectacular society .  Far from it being synonymous with radicalism, I would say that people often fall into mere extremism precisely when they fail to be sufficiently radical. Radicalism denotes getting "to the root" of an observed phenomenon, which requires patient theoretical analysis. Extremism is a mere reflex, a reaction against an observed phenomenon, which usually entails an unspoken refusal to consider it. Extremism is easy; radicalism takes more work.  Within a given organization, on any particular issue, several people within the organization will position themselves as the greatest extremists on a given issue - a strategic pose that occasionally brings them some power within the organization.  There are people who are quite skillful at this, and who can make an entire career out of this, doing so in a way that may be, by turns, entertaining, witty, and exhilarating.  These Lord Byrons have their own expertise, specializing...

  In quantum physics, there are mathematical equations, such as Schrödinger's equation, upon which nearly every educated person agrees.  Not only do they agree on the math, they also agree on the evidence.  What they disagree upon is how to interpret this math.  Thus we have De Broglie-Bohm "pilot wave" interpretation, the Copenhagen interpretation, the "Many Worlds" interpretation, QBism (quantum Bayesianism), and so on.  In a sense, we might say that for the varying schools of interpretation, they all agree on the math, but they disagree on how to "put it into words," to translate the truth of the mathematical equations into a natural language such as English.  But this is not merely a linguistic phenomenon, a mere dispute over semantics.  It might be better to say that there's a dispute over how to translate the truth of the math into human intuition.  Each of the different interpretations of quantum physics is nestled into a different set of ...

Romanticism should be distinguished from Romance, which is an earlier form, arising in the medieval period - fanciful stories which usually involve marvelous events.  Romanticism, as opposed to Romance, developed during the bourgeois era. Romanticism has a tangled, complex relation to bourgeois values.  Perhaps strangely, romanticism is used to justify bourgeois values, but at the same time, it transcends bourgeois values, and indeed can be defined by way of that transcendence.  Romanticism is best understood as the sublation of bourgeois values, or, as it is said in German, the Aufhebung (from the verb Aufheben ) of bourgeois values.  Aufheben is sometimes translated as "abolition," but it literally means "to lift up," and this paradoxical ambiguity is the essence of the relation we are attempting to understand here.  We can sum it up by saying that romanticism upholds bourgeois values precisely by violating them, or even by rejecting them altogether.  To...

Nationalism is the ur-romanticism.  It had several offshoots, including internationalism and individualsm, both of which are also mostly forms of romanticism. Of course, religion is even older than nationalism.  But that's a complicated story that I won't get into right now.   

Non-Cartesian Meditations "I think therefore I am"? - not quite.  After one doubts everything, there is indeed one truth remaining, but "I think therefore I am" ain't it.  It is clear that, even if everything is an illusion, nonetheless, this illusion is being perceived.  But this proves nothing that about the perceiver, or even that there is one, and not several.   To update Descartes' metaphors a bit, we could imagine that everything we're aware of is part of a simulation.  To make the metaphors a little too contemporary, we could imagine that everything is part of some kind of virtual reality game.  (I'm sure that vocabulary will sound hokey and old fashioned in a few years.)   But I want to be very clear, up front, and specify: do I think that the universe is an illusion, and we (or rather I) am merely living in a simulation?  No, I do not.  I think the universe is real.  I do not think I'm in a simulation.  All I'm sa...