Aesthetic Materialism

  When I speak of the death of the proletariat, I do not mean to imply that the working class has ceased to exist.  There's a difference between the international working class (which definitely still exists) and the proletariat.  What's the difference? As Karl Marx put it, "The proletariat is political, or it is nothing."  Well, then, we have to admit that it is nothing.  The proletariat is nothing. Was it ever something?  What would it mean for it to be something?  That is to say, what would it mean for the proletariat to be political? Rather than speaking of the proletariat simply as a class, technically, we should understand the proletariat as a political movement.   Marx also said that the ruling ideas in every epoch are the ideas of its ruling class.  For the proletariat to exist as a political movement, it would have to be a self-conscious, self-moving movement.  As Guy Debord put it, "The proletariat is the class of consciou...

Begging the Question   I have no problem with structuralism in general - only with a specific, narrow trend within structuralism, which became briefly popular in the 20th century.  Indeed, I would consider myself a structuralist (with a lower case "s"), or at least, in my own naive way, sympathetic to structuralism, in at least two senses: first, mathematico-ontological structuralism, pioneered, in my opinion, by Henri Poincare, and developed more famously by Paul Benacerraf (and in this I am chiefly indebted to my many conversations with the contemporary mathematician, Howard Blair); and secondly, political structuralism - that is, the insistence that the best strategy in politics is not to focus on individual people, but rather to demand nothing less than to change larger, impersonal social structures.  Both of these are called "structuralism," but neither of these are the topic of the current essay.  Instead I want to narrowly discuss the brief fad called ...

  What I would say about Jordan Peterson is that he is confused, and that, because of his attitude, it is unlikely that this confusion will soon end.  He has built very successful defenses preventing any information from getting in. "What is the meaning of life?" This is a question that philosophers have pondered for millennia.  Well, Dr. Peterson wrote a book called "Maps of Meaning."  Dr. Peterson thought that he could answer this question, and not only that, but draw little pictures - charts - maps, as he calls them, just to clear it up once and for all.   But he wasn't done there.  He ventures into all kinds of topics, about which he has no training or education at all, such as global climate change, and dares to pronounce his dictum about what should be believed about these issues - not only to the general public, but to the experts in the field.  Their evidence is worthless, compared with his passionate, emotional appeal.  I recent...