I’m a big fan of thinkers such as Foucault and Marx, and whilst I don’t necessarily agree with all their points, their analyses and dissections of society etc are outstanding to me. I’m relatively new to the realm of critical theory, with more of a background in traditional western philosophy, and I also haven’t engaged with many female authors, which I’d like to.

My concern with getting into feminism is that I really have no idea what’s up. The internet seems to be a complete mess, full of over-the-top and divisive rhetoric from all sides, and I rarely get to hear an academic, nuanced, measured discussion and analysis of the female condition within society (i.e feminism). I’m obviously an advocate for feminism in the basic sense, but I’d like to actually dig deeper, avoiding overly-radical or superficial perspectives so that I may develop a genuine understanding. Given the nature of the discussion, feminism, I think it goes without saying that I’d love to engage with some female writers.

Also, since I am a young male, and therefore lack the firsthand experience of the female experience, it might be beneficial to my understanding for books specifically engaging with the side of gender inequality that may be more foreign to men.

Cheers! ☺️

I'm reading Frederic Jamesons Postmodernism book atm and would be interested in contemporary texts (preferably written from a Marxist perspective) that deal with the question if we still live in the era of postmodernism, or if we have already left it behind.

Any suggestions?

New essay on freuds mass psychology. Part of a 4 part series exploring psychoanalytic accounts of mass psychology! Let mw know what you think to this

Lessons from Scandinavia

Here I am with one of many threads asking for reading suggestions! I’m working on what I guess is a research project proposal of some kind, although I’m not sure quite what its final form will be yet, but I know at the core of it is the question of failure, and how failure as a space can be transformative or generative (mostly through like a comp-lit perspective: Beckett, autotheory, etc).

And I know that something that’s inevitably foundational here is Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure! But I’m not really sure where else to look from there — mostly I’ve been looking at academic work and journal articles; but I feel like some like, book-length stuff or the work of specific theorists might be helpful to like, hang some of these disparate authors together! I know that Critical Failure Studies is an emerging field (Routledge did a handbook a few years back) but I’m not sure how much of it exists in the space of critical theory vs more academic/journal-led writing

Any suggestions very welcome!

Thanks so much

So I got served up a reel by the algorithm and didnt like it, it wasn't in my watch history either and the vague specifics I remember brings up Ted kaczynski.

It was about a professor from I think an English University, who had written essays and a few books (possibly) about how the integration of technology would negatively effect social cohesion.

That increased technological communication and socialising would create a panopticon of self discipline.

He was active in the 90s but moved to the wilderness and went completely off grid (you can see why kaxzynski is coming up). Seemed like he was still in contact with people today but when colleagues of hes wanted to out together a collection of his works (some unpublished) he said no and just did not want to be engaged in the contemporary discourse at all.

His work sounded very interesting and its funny that I found out about him from a medium it sounds like he would hate.

If anyone knows who this professor is I would be so greatful for the information and soon hope to move away to the wilderness myself, promise not to do any big post runs.

SOLVED It was Philip Agre

Everyone argued over whether Wenders was right or a coward for saying filmmakers should "stay out of politics" after being confronted about Berlinale's silence on Palestine. This piece skips that fight and goes after something both sides assumed: that self-expression through art is political action.

The argument: the Western left has spent 60 years substituting actual political organizing for cultural self-expression... first cinema and music, then social media. We got "woke," we protested, we posted. Fascism's still rising and nothing's fundamentally changed. The piece traces this back to Marcuse's 1968-era idea that artists/outsiders should catalyze a "new sensibility" since the working class was too pacified to revolt...except capitalism just absorbed that critique instead of resisting it. We got representation and inclusion; we lost unions and the welfare state.

There's also a solid detour into Third Cinema (Solanas/Getino, Sembène, Sanjinés) as a real counterexample — films embedded in actual political movements instead of standing in for one.

Full piece: https://filmunderground.substack.com/p/the-berlinale-and-modernitys-marcusian

Curious if this lets Wenders off too easy by making it structural, or if it's the sharper read.

Albert Memmi grew up in Tunis, a colonized, but French-educated enough to know the colonizer almost as well as he knew himself. He was in a position to draw both portraits from the inside.

The colonizer: In his own words, the colonizer "is a privileged being and an illegitimately privileged one; that is, a usurper." Skin color and passport hand you the privilege whether you asked for it or not. This sounds very familiar nowadays. According to Memmi, the colonizer has three options: leave the colony, stay silent, or stay and fight the system. He argues that few would opt for the third option with success. He has a term for the second one though: "humanitarian romanticism”. Again another very contemporary dynamic; think about aid workers today, who draw hardship pay and a security detail while ostensibly there to fight poverty.

The Colonized: Memmi wrote in 1957 that a qualified worker among the colonizers earned three or four times more than the colonized worker, without producing three or four times as much. He presents an economic argument that the colonized had no incentive to be more productive with such an imbalance. Memmi described colonized women who tried desperately to uncurl their hair and lighten their skin, chasing an acceptance that never actually occurred. No matter how fluent or how polished a colonized became, he argued they would still be met with disdain.

In commenting liberation movements, Memmi rejected half-measures like a negotiated "French Union" outright. His final word was that the colonized refusal "cannot be anything but absolute" Not just revolt, but revolution, breaking what he called an iron collar.

We discuss the book at length in our podcast Threads of Ifriqiya, and we try to draw parallels to contemporary times of which we identify many. I will link the podcast in the comments.

I am new to marxism and except for Marx himself my introduction has been This Life by Martin Hägglund and Mute Compulsion by Sören Mau (also Postone but I won't mention it here). I am currently comparing Hägglunds and Maus interpretation of the law of the tendential of the rate of profit to fall. Mau claims that this law cannot be found within a single capitalists production itself but is located as a contradiction between what is rational for the capitalists and what is rational for Capital:

Since the 1970s, most Marxist theories of crisis have taken as their point of departure the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. This law hinges on the assumption that in the long run, the organic composition of capital will rise rapidly enough to outpace its countervailing force, namely a rise in the rate of surplus value. But, as Heinrich has demonstrated, there are some serious problems with this assumption.38 Boiled down to its essentials, the problem can be stated this way: Regardless of how we express the rate of profit, it is always a relation between two quantities. The direction of movement for these two quantities (or parts of these two quantities) is known. That, however, is not sufficient; the point is, which of the two quantities changes more rapidly – and we do not know that.39

What is at stake here is, once again, what we can and what we cannot conclude on certain levels of abstraction. What Heinrich argues – convincingly, in my view – is that we cannot demonstrate the existence of a necessary tendency of the rate of profit to fall on the basis of an analysis of the ideal average of the capitalist mode of production. This conclusion does not imply the denial of the possibility that the profit rate might fall precisely in the manner predicted by the ‘law’. Nor does it even imply the denial that such a tendential fall of rate of profit has taken place throughout the history of capitalism.40 It merely implies that the long-term tendencies of the profit rate is an empirical question which cannot be deduced from the analysis of the core structure of capitalism.41

Where does this leave us? The good news is that we do not need the law of tendency of the rate of profit to fall in order to have a coherent Marxist theory of crisis, or to derive the necessary tendency to overproduction. In order to see why, it is necessary to recall that the aim of capitalist production is profit – an aim which is forced upon individual capitals by competition. For any individual capital, the possibilities for making a profit are not restricted by the size of the market, since individual capitals always have the possibility of capturing market shares from their competitors. In other words, from the perspective of the individual capital, the expansion of production, insofar as it allows this individual capital to undercut its competitors, is immediately also an expansion of the market. On the level of the totality, however, this leads to a general overproduction. A crisis therefore arises from the contradiction between what is rational from the point of view of the individual capital and what is rational from the point of view of the capitalist system as a whole. Clarke sums up this dynamic well:

Once the capitalist has taken command of production, the characteristic way in which the capitalist appropriates a profit is not by responding to fluctuations in demand for the product, but by introducing new and more productive methods of production in order to reduce his costs below those of his competitors. The capitalist who is able to reduce his costs is not confined by the limits of his share of the market, but can expand his production without limit in the anticipation of undercutting his competitors.42

For this reason, capitalist production necessarily results in crises of overproduction. This is a mode of explanation firmly rooted in the fundamental contradiction of capitalism, namely the contradiction between use value and value. In the capitalist mode of production, the production of useful things is subordinated not only to the production of value, but to the valorisation of value, and the mute compulsion of competition forces individual capitals to produce without regard for the limits of the market, like a stuck gas pedal in a car heading towards a cliff.

I accept that this necessarily leads to overproduction, and I think I understand that it leads to crises because all capitalists will increase their productivity, and eventually they will not make a profit because they are unable to sell a larger and larger part of their products, reducing the rate of profit. Intensifying the exploitation of workers to extract relative surplus value has a limit and cannot counteract the reduction in the rate of profit.

Hägglund however seem to believe that the contradiction can be located in the production itself:

Striving to make the rate of profit rise is intrinsic to any capitalist enterprise. In order to sustain my water business, I have to keep making a profit from the production and distribution of water. Such profit depends on converting the surplus time of living labor into surplus value for my capitalist enterprise. Given the limits of the workday and legal constraints on labor conditions, however, there are restrictions on how much I can exploit the lifetime of my workers. The major method for making my business profitable and staying competitive is rather to extract relative surplus value from my workers by making the technological means of production more efficient. This is why I built a hyper-well in the middle of our village when I sought to increase the rate of profit for my water business. The hyper-well makes it possible for my workers to produce more water in the same amount of time and thereby increases the relative surplus value I can extract from their labor.

Striving to make the rate of profit rise is thus inseparable from pursuing a technological development that reduces the socially necessary labor time for a given commodity. If I seek to make the production of a commodity more profitable, I seek to make the production of the commodity more efficient, which is to say less time consuming.

By the same token, however, I am caught in the contradiction that characterizes the capitalist mode of production. As a capitalist, I can extract surplus value only from living labor time. Yet, in seeking to extract more surplus value from my workers, I am led to develop technologies that increasingly replace living labor time (from which I can extract surplus value) with nonliving production time (from which I cannot extract any surplus value).

As a result of such technological development, the rate of profit for my water business has an inherent tendency to fall. When my production of water becomes more efficient, there is a shift in what Marx calls “the organic composition of capital.”32 The ratio of living labor time (from which I can make a profit) decreases, while the ratio of nonliving production time (from which I cannot make a profit) increases. Thus, even if the mass of surplus value and profit increases due to the efficiency of the hyper-well as a means of production, the rate of profit for my water business will tend to fall for the same reason.

Hence, we can specify the dynamic of the contradiction in the capitalist mode of production. On the one hand, in striving to make a profit, I develop ever more efficient technological means of production. On the other hand, the more efficient my technological means of production become, the more my rate of profit tends to fall.

To sustain a rate of profit, the capitalist mode of production must inhibit its own drive toward increased technological productivity. If the proportion of nonliving production time is allowed to increase indefinitely, the proportion of living labor time will decrease indefinitely and the possibility of making a profit will diminish. When I have perfected my hyper-well to such a degree that it barely requires any living labor time to operate, I am left with almost nothing from which I can extract surplus value in order to make a profit.

The law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit is not a prediction but a structural dynamic that renders intelligible the counteracting tendencies under capitalism. It is because the rate of profit tends to fall that capitalist employers must intensify the exploitation of living labor and/or export the production facilities to locations where labor is cheaper to buy. Given the reduction of socially necessary labor time, the only way to increase the extraction of relative surplus value—on which profit depends—is to intensify the exploitation of workers by lowering the relative value of their wages. Unemployment and the exportation of jobs are not something that can be removed under capitalism, but a necessary condition for the production of capital wealth. Lowering the relative value of wages and sustaining a rate of profit depends on a surplus population of the unemployed who are willing to work for less, either domestically or in poorer countries to which production is moved.

Most importantly, the law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit renders intelligible the tendency toward crises under capitalism. A continuously increasing technological productivity leads to crises under capitalism, since the replacement of living labor time with nonliving production time makes the rate of profit fall. The falling rate of profit can be counteracted through numerous strategies, but ultimately it requires the destruction of large amounts of capital, either through crises of devaluation or through full-on destruction of existing capital in war or through other means.

Are these two interpretations reconcilable? Hägglund says that the capitalist mode of production must inhibit its own drive towards increased technological productivity which does not seem proper to me because they could then be out-competed by the capitalists that do increase their technological productivity. Or is hägglund talking about the capitalist system overall here? If that is the case, how can we be sure that the expansion of production requiring living labor does not "out-pace" the dead labor caused by technological productivity? (e.g. "bullshit jobs" as postone writes or just more service work/engineering/etc)

At the same time, I am wondering why the capitalist wouldn't hire less workers as productivity increases to reduce expenses in an attempt to actually adjust to market demands by predictions which Mau denies is possible. This would argue in favor of Hägglund if that is the case and perhaps this is what Hägglunds mean with "In order to sustain my water business, I have to keep making a profit from the production and distribution(!!) of water.".

I feel like I am stuck here and am unable to compare these two interpretations. Could someone aid me in a direction from here?

I’m finally getting curious about the world again post-graduation from my MSW and am starting through my book pile, beginning with Kenneth Gergen’s Relational Being. I would love any discussion!

One thing I’m really enjoying is the fruitfulness of measuring Gergen and my ideas against one another. Here at the beginning, Gergen and I are having some hefty ontological disagreements. He rightfully advocates for a model of self that serves as an alternative to traditional Western conceptualizations of an individualistic, bounded self. I join him in this project, and propose the Greek middle voice as the structure of an "agent-in-the-world." I'll spare the lengthy explanation to summarize this as: I produce the action in the social world that returns to produce me.

Where I first diverge with Gergen is his notion that the bounded self is the problem - he calls it a prison - and relational being is the solution. We are both lovers of Buddhist thought and many of these ideas infuse our scholarship. But taking dense religious concepts like nonduality and emptiness, which he expresses by locating the self as a wave that recedes back into the water and then putting them to sociological and psychological work doesn’t hold for me.

Firstly, I don’t see bounded self as pathology to which relational being is the cure. I admit, he may have a more nuanced position behind relational being, but it looks a lot like a less structured version of how Chinese sociologist Fei Xiaotong (From the Soil, 1947) talks about differential modes of association. For Fei, Chinese identity is construed relationally, though a self is still present. Instead of Gergen’s dance or duet metaphor that entirely disappears the self, Fei posits a social structure like concentric ripples formed by throwing a stone into a lake with a self at the center.

If this is not a picture of relational being, then I may have misread Gergen. But with Fei’s model, the pathology diagnosis cuts both ways. Let’s take the idea of narcissism, something that Gergen specifically pointed to as evidence of pathology of a bounded self. Chinese culture has this, too, from what I observed when I was over there. They call it zilian, or self love. But when I pressed the idea in my conversations, as opposed to a bounded self’s hyperinflation of it’s own ego, zilian looked more like a relational self’s hyperinflation of others’ estimation of the relational self’s ego. Relational constructions of being seem to suffer pathology as much as bounded self constructions of being do. The diagnostic tool is capturing the wrong thing as far as I can see here at the onset.

My counter is that this is a both-and situation. The self is just as ontologically significant as the thing to which the self is relating. While Gergen only talks about relations among selves as of chapter 2, I would extend relata to not just include other bodies but also matter and environment, and samskara (a Buddhist term for mental constructs).

Nonduality and emptiness are still relevant to me because even though there is actual hardware with bodies and matter, our interpretation of that hardware is effectively the only thing we have access to. So in that sense, yes, subject-object relations is empty. And, as Thich Nhat Hanh once said, I fully agree that with this ultimate view in mind that “if the wave is capable of touching himself and the other waves very deeply, he will realize that he is made of water. Being aware that he is water, he transcends all discrimination, sorrows, and fears.” It’s a powerful image.

But my picture of self-within-reality, at least while we are all out here relating to one another, would not be the wave and the ocean. It would be the jewel net of Indra. Here, a 3D positioned net has a jewel on each knot. And each jewel is cut in such a way that it reflects every other jewel on the net. It preserves the interdependence that Gergen is gesturing to as well as the self represented at each knot. Whether or not this all recedes into an ocean at the end is not in my purview. But I am a social worker who wants to do transformative social work, and I think we need a both-and picture of subject-object relations.

- The Social Construction Worker

Thucydides’ historiography has something quite distinctive about it. What interests me most is not that he was one of the first historians, but that he is often considered the first historian in a methodological sense. He was quite skeptical of Herodotus as a historian and stressed how difficult it is to know much about the distant past with any certainty. In a way, this can even remind us of the much later postmodern idea that understanding the past is, to some extent, impossible. He was a really interesting man.

Dedicated to Sterling and Tallulah

As I understand it, Critical Theory seems to be focused on how worldviews, ideological frameworks and psychology reflect power dynamics, along with a focus on social/group/cultural dynamics as determining belief systems, and belief systems determining lived experiences.

Does Critical Theory have opportunities to offer for someone who is concerned with enhancing their abilities to alter the course of events and improving their material condition and that of their friends and family? Or, to put it another way, what does Critical Theory offer for those whose problems ate practical rather than psychological, is it possible for such people to adopt Critical Theory and thereby better their condition?

either substackers/tweeters/freelancers or published authors.

wondering who to look out for + to solicit articles from + to read.

I liked Alyssa Battistoni's book this year, I like Chris O'Kane though wish he wrote more clearly, and I find most twitter accounts to be horrible.

I just recently finished my MA degree in theology. My thesis compared Rudolf Otto with H P Lovecraft. Essentially I argued that whereas Otto is duplicitous about the numinous and its connection to evil, Lovecraft was potentially influenced by him and as an atheist he doesn't have the theological restraint Otto did and explores the connection in a much bigger way (Otto talks about the mysterium horrendum, but only in a footnote, and outright states he isn't looking into it).

In my thesis I cited Haunted Presence: The Numinous in Gothic Fiction by S L Varnado. I loved this book. It applies Otto's theory to horror fiction (it's also influenced by Mircea Eliade). One of the really compelling things it draws out of Otto's work is that the numinous (a word for holiness characterized by its spectrality and spookiness) in literature be it a ghost or whatever is not an imaginary concept like a flying carpet but has higher stakes; they need to realize themselves and convince the reader that it is traces of a real outside spiritual presence.

In the case of H P Lovecraft, this is taken from S T Joshi's biography I Am Providence, for example it could be this testimony from his neighbour,

"I remember that Mrs. Lovecraft spoke to me about weird and fantastic creatures that rushed out from behind buildings and from corners at dark, and that she shivered and looked about apprehensively as she told her story. The last time I saw Mrs. Lovecraft we were both going “down street” on the Butler Avenue car. She was excited and apparently did not know where she was. She attracted the attention of everyone. I was greatly embarrassed, as I was the object of all her attention"

even if H P Lovecraft himself was pretty normal, his family was not. And this sensitivity to illness and the spectral runs right through his work.. especially prominent in The Shadow Over Innsmouth. In other words, the spectral presences in Lovecraft's writing correspond to real ones. Sorry edit for clarity.. the person who is speaking is someone named Clara Hess, and her testimony about "Mrs Lovecraft" is H P's mother.

In trying to find literary criticism that fits Otto I've come up with this,

Northrop Frye - His division of archetypes and genre seems really basic and dated.

the Geneva School - this is intriguing but they dislike anything outside the text so they wouldn't be reading Otto for instance into any literature. What intrigues me is they figure reading to be a form of communion and a kind of spiritual journey for the reader. Literature is sacred to them in a sense, and a book is not an object of study but I guess a subject between author and reader. I think overall they go a bit too far.

Ideally I get recommended something really modern. Like theory after all the theory that is in conversation with the theory from the past all the way up to post structuralism, eco criticism, and so on. I tried exhaustively googling but feel really lost. And yes I've discussed this in the past with my supervisor. A friend of mine who is a retired english professor has been telling me to read Frye.

//

I want to continue publishing articles on literature with Otto as a lens but I took 1 theory course as an english undergrad then went into theology so I skipped much of that and struggled with coming up with methodology and theory in my MA thesis. I disliked my theory class. We were given the raw theory in a compilation for our textbook and I don't feel like anything was explained much. So consider me new to theory in general.

I'm writing this primarily to help me think and more fully realize my ideas. This is not homework. I'd greatly appreciate any help.

Disturbingly and ironically, he was on both sides of the wall. He openly supported the Palestinian cause and wrote on dispossession, [colonialism.](https://illwill.com/forbidden-deleuze?fbclid=IwY2xjawT75SBwZG9mBWV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkEDIyMjAzOTE3ODgyMDA4OTIAAR5WfYfN9m4Zt0h7eo2FkOEnwVLGOOKwL8Nxm3Iu82d0dLyNPlbZyOBfX9hoTQ_aem_ABPY_Ze7bzvUSWNrEbFvgQ)

Decades later, Israeli military theorist Shimon Naveh introduced Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts such as *smooth and striated space*, the *war machine*, deterritorialization into IDF operational [thinking](https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/walking-through-walls).

Could it be because he has provided ultimate concepts for the future thinkers, who might be working for both sides, colonizer and colonized?

Is there a consensus on engaging with AI content for critical theory and/or history?

I'm pretty new to this space and critical theory in general and I would assume you guys prioritize primary sources for serious studying of these topics over any AI stuff.

That said, I can be pretty busy and a big way I ingest content like this is to listen to it on youtube while I'm working, and inevitably I'll find content which is very likely AI generated or at least AI "assisted".

For example, this channel here:

https://m.youtube.com/@historyafterdarkfilms

I've listened to a couple of their videos, pretty decent videos I'd say, but, there's an AI voice narrator, the thumbnails seem to be generated, and the writing itself sounds at least AI assisted (flowery language, kinda grandiose tone throughout much of the video).

So would you guys turn your noses up to this? I won't lie, I would prefer if a human wrote the script (I felt genuine dissapointment once it clicked to me that the channel could be purely AI) but would it really be better if this channel didnt exist? The videos seem to at least provide a pretty decent summary of their topic.

A little aside but I've seen it happens here as well, I'll browse the subreddit and see some kind of post that's like, very obviously an AI generated post, and it'll be debating some specific aspect of critical theory, and it's just confusing? Why do you feel the need to larp as a critical theorist??

Were the philosophers of the Kyoto School fascist collaborators, or were they meeting in secret with the Imperial Navy to try to stop a war? Fernando Wirtz and Takeshi Morisato join Craig for a primer on Japan's most influential and most contested philosophical tradition, from Nishida and Tanabe through Miki Kiyoshi and Tosaka Jun. The conversation covers what "nothingness" actually means in Japanese thought and why it isn't Heidegger's, how Miki tried to collapse reason and unreason into a logic of imagination, and what tenkō, or forced ideological conversion, did to a generation of Marxist intellectuals. It closes on the newly surfaced Ōshima Memo and the question of what it costs to think under fascism.

Books mentioned in this episode

Miki Kiyoshi, The Logic of Imagination, translated by John W. M. Krummel (Bloomsbury Studies in World Philosophies)

Itabashi Yūjin, Nishitani's Philosophy of the Body (Bloomsbury Studies in World Philosophies)

Nishida Kitarō, An Inquiry into the Good (Zen no Kenkyū)

By our guests

Ōhashi Ryōsuke, The Kyoto School and the Japanese Navy, translated by Takeshi Morisato (Bloomsbury Studies in World Philosophies, forthcoming)

Fernando Wirtz, Myth and Ideology: An Essay on Philosophy of Political Action in Japan (2023)