Aesthetic Materialism

One way of defining aesthetic materialism is to say that to be a materialist is to be in favor of opposition. The meaning of life is the life of meaning - that is, the way that meaning is alive - the way that meaning changes, the way that meaning grows, the way meaning duplicates, the way meaning reproduces itself, the way meaning metabolizes the world, the way meaning varies, and evolves, and adapts. Any attempt to freeze the meaning of life, to say, "the meaning of life is this ," as some fixed, determinate content - any attempt to stop the meaning of life from changing - will kill meaning, because in order to be alive, meaning will always change. The meaning of life is for meaning to replicate endlessly, in as many different varieties as possible, as many meanings as there can possibly be, each one a meaningful meaning, a profoundly different perspective, a new worldview. To put it differently, the meaning of life is to maximize dissent. Dissent is the way that we...

[The following was written on facebook in response to the philosopher Alonzo Fyfe, who had written a post about how the main reason he opposed socialism was because, in his view, socialism is almost always nationalistic.] From the 19th century through the 1920s and beyond, there was intense and fascinating debate within the socialist world on what was called "the national question." Socialism and communism had initially grown out of nationalist movements, though they were forms of nationalism quite different that what we see today, or what we saw in the 20th century. The very word "nationalist" meant something very different from what we now take it to mean. For the most part, these initial "nationalist" movements were movements in favor of liberalism, open borders, an end to tribal rivalries, the merging together of governments, free markets, modernity, science, enlightenment values, human rights, and democracy. Why? Because they started in places like ...

To continue my thoughts about both "terrible strategies": both of these strategies are unconditional.  Rather than speaking about "absolute" vs "relative" systems, it's much more useful and interesting to make a distinction between "conditional" and "unconditional" strategies.  A materialist, interested in the ways that the material world matters, will tend to have far more detailed conditional strategies.  And the development of this kind of conditional thinking is the lion's share of what is called "strategy".  A person that does not think conditionally is not really thinking strategically - they are thinking in terms of moral commandments, like Kant's categorical imperative. The struggle of the conditional against the unconditional is the struggle of meaning against meaninglessness.  I'm tempted to say, "Beliefs without conditions are beliefs without content"... but that, in itself, is a bit o...

[I posted this to facebook years ago - February 5, 2017 to be exact.  It seems relevant again.  See below for an update.] Let’s talk strategy, because the left sucks at strategy. In particular, let’s look at asymmetrical political strategy, when your opponent has way more power than you. This applies to Berniecrats dealing with establishment Democrats. It may also apply to the radical left dealing with Berniecrats, though it’s debatable how much power Berniecrats actually have.* The essence of political strategy is leverage. The first thing to realize is that, although your opponent has more power than you, that doesn’t mean that you are powerless. The immediate goal is to figure out what kind of power you do have, and then think about how you can leverage that power to get to a stronger position.   Having leverage and using it: this is how you take over. Let’s start with: Two Terrible Strat...

Not only is the way that we discuss politics a symptom of the spectacular nature of capital; the state itself is a symptom of the spectacular nature of capital.  The sudden moment when jack-booted stormtroopers bust through your door, beat you with nightsticks and point a semi-automatic at your head is way more spectacular than the slow, constant, decades-long oppression of poverty, racial geographical neighborhood disparity, preventable protracted disease and ill-health and lack of access to healthcare, lifelong psychological indoctrination to patriarchal relations and unspoken ideology, and so on.  That's why people who are oppressed by spectacular capitalism will be viscerally, emotionally ready to battle against the former kind of spectacular oppression, and not the latter kinds.  They will stockpile weapons and canned food, readying themselves for an imagined apocalyptic tyranny that is always right around the corner, but it never occurs to them to rise up against...

I love egos.  I love big egos and small egos and purple egos and polka-dot egos. It's astonishing, when you bring up the word "ego" how people will immediately begin to snarl, their lips curling in aggression and disgust.  But ego is simply the Greek word for "I".  It represents the self, or more often, the self-concept.  If you say, "I hate the ego," this is not too far from saying, "I hate I" or "I hate myself" or "I hate the very concept of myself." When I use the term "ego," I am thinking of the mental construct that you create, to some degree consciously and mostly unconsciously, on the basis of your social and cultural context, to represent yourself to yourself as a distinct individual being, with your own desires, attributes, personality, and so on. There are some people out there who think that egos are bad, and that they should be annihilated - that if we could attain permanent egolessness, we ...

In his "History of Sexuality, Volume 1" Foucault famously wrote that "Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power."  According Foucault's reckoning, if there were a form of power without any possible resistance, this would not be power as such, but "mere subjection".  Elsewhere he speaks of the "zero degree" of power. But this only goes to show how shallow and inadequate Foucault's theorization of power was.  He treats the possibility of resistance as an eternal verity, an a priori , axiomatic truth, for which he feels no need to provide anything like evidence.  Most importantly, he treats it as trans-historical, as a reality without a history - he feels no compulsion to explain how it is that this resistance became possible.  It is a being, not a becoming: there "is" resistance.  The idea that it will always be possible...