Aesthetic Materialism

The 20th century was a calamity for philosophy.  It's hard not to have the feeling that there were no great philosophers in the 20th century.  There are, to be sure, great minds: Einstein, in my opinion, was the greatest genius of the 20th century, and John Von Neumann is fairly distant second.  I revere A. Emmy Noether, David Hilbert, Max Planck, Claude Shannon, Alan Turing, Kurt Gödel, Erwin Schrödinger, Edward Witten, Richard Feynman, Srinivasa Ramanujan, Juan Maldacena, Rosalind Franklin, Jane Goodall, Frans De Waal, Samuel Beckett, Oliver Sacks, Franz Kafka, William S. Burroughs, Hans Bellmer, Kobo Abe, Iggy Pop, Larry David, and many, many others. But none of of these people are usually classified as philosophers.  Perhaps they should be.  Perhaps this is only a problem of classification.  If we were to classify these people as philosophers, then there would be no doubt in my mind that they are all far superior philosophers to any of the people who ...

In 1945, Friedrich Hayek wrote "The Use of Knowledge in Society." Here he argued that knowledge is unevenly dispersed throughout society, that often people at the bottom of hierarchies, who are dealing hands-on with problems on an everyday basis, have more of a specific kind of information, including specifically acquired skills, than their "superiors" - what he calls "the knowledge of particular circumstances of time and place." It is impossible for any central authority to have all of the information at the "local" level, and for this reason, Hayek thought that central planning was effectively impossible, doomed forever to make fatal mistakes based on incomplete information. But all was not lost. Hayek's answer to this problem was free trade. He saw free trade as a means for information to flow freely throughout society. Fluctuations in price would reflect changes in supply and demand too subtle for the pollsters of central-command economie...

If you managed to avoid watching the "Avengers: Infinity War" movies, first of all, good job.  They're about a big purple Grimace-looking guy named Thanos, who gradually acquires enough magical powers to be able to wipe out exactly one half of all life in the universe, with a snap of his fingers.  Why?  Apparently in the comic books, it's because he's in love with death, which sounds a lot cooler, and appropriate for his name, which sounds a lot like Thanatos, Freud's theory of the death drive.  In the movies, it's because of some cockamamie plot device about him caring about living things wasting our natural resources, or something. This caused more than one pundit to compare Thanos to an environmentalist.  (Where oh where are the superheroes that will save us from these terrifying, extremely powerful environmentalists?) Have you heard about the Fermi Paradox?  It's not really a paradox.  It's just a puzzling fact, which we don't know h...

Not long ago, I was lurking on social media and - as always - a "political" argument started - but these arguments are never really political, are they?  Anyway, somebody said, "That's stupid," to which somebody else said that to use the term "stupid" is ableist.  So I guess nothing is stupid.  Cool.  Fine. But... what if we were to define stupidity as any avoidable thing which inhibits one's ability to work with - and, therefore, gain skill and experience and knowedge of - the material world?  And, what if we, in turn, understood the material world to be that which exists beyond one's symbolic constructs, including that specific construct known as language?   In that case, stupidity is not a matter of a person having a low I.Q. - it's not really primarily about a person at all.  It's, if you like, about something happening to that person.  Any avoidable obstacle for dealing with the material world would then be stupid - and al...

Pastiche - which, as Jameson notes, is characteristic of postmodernism - is difficult to overcome.  It is difficult even to imagine overcoming it.  This is one aspect of the larger problem that it is less difficult to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. How can one overcome pastiche?  Only through immanent critique.  (The immanent critique of pastiche itself - that is a fascinating and provocative proposition.) It is an understandable misunderstanding to assume that immanent critique is characterized by a sarcastic attitude. Might one provisionally accept the methodological presuppositions of that which one is critiquing?  Perhaps.  Does this necessarily entail some amount of irony?  Maybe.  But for immanent critique to work, it demands a profound seriousness and dedication taken all the way to the end and beyond.  One must "play it straight." For that reason, the danger of miscommunication lies in the opp...

[note: This 41 page paper was originally submitted for a lecture I gave at the International Journal of Zizek Studies Conference in 2012, of which I cannot help thinking as a more innocent time. It served as my lecture notes, even though I did not have anywhere near enough time to go through even a small portion of it.  Actually, this version was edited down considerably from a much, much longer, even more wandering, unfinished version - one that I cannot seem to locate .  There were extensive revisions, with paragraphs re-ordered and large sections deleted entirely.  Also, to the dismay of the editors of the journal, it had relatively few direct references to Slavoj Zizek.  Ultimately I abandoned this project and wrote an entirely different essay, which was published here: The International Journal of Zizek Studies Looking back at this essay, I am dismayed at its many failings.  The editors may have found it insufficiently Zizekian, but I find it way too Z...