Posts
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On Fertile Ruins and Remixability
June 10, 2021
Last week I attended Frederico Campagna’s wonderful online talk for Ignota Books, a presentation of his new book Prophetic Culture. I’ve not read it yet, but there were some thought-provoking morsels in the talk which dovetailed with some other things I’ve had on my mind lately. This was a little unexpected, since Campagna’s avenues of approach are somewhat removed from my own interests, but this has only deepened my sense that this particular issue hones in on something worth thinking about.
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Baudrillard Notes: Seduction contra Eros
June 2, 2021
The purpose of this post is to gather a few quotes from Baudrillard’s Fatal Strategies (1983), all taken from a chapter called The Evil Genie of Passion. Here Baudrillard writes about love or Eros, contrasting it with his own prominent model of seduction (a successor concept to symbolic exchange, which featured heavily in his earlier writings). These passages are interesting in giving an uncommonly clear statement of Baudrillard’s views on modern love, and providing a novel entry point to seduction, which is more commonly contrasted with production. I guess this also serves as a supplement to my previous post on antivitalism, which lays some Baudrillard-inspired groundwork for a critique of the metaphysics of Eros.
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Towards Antivitalism
May 31, 2021
Where there is no longer game or rule, a law and affect must be invented, a mode of universal effusion, a form of salvation to overcome the separation of souls and bodies.Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies (1983)
Eros is a topic which has been animating several conversations lately, most recently an exchange I had with Nathan Coffman in the comments of a piece he wrote in response to Zak Stein’s Love in a Time Between Worlds: On the Metamodern Return to a Metaphysics of Eros. In this essay Stein proposes two things: i. that not only is the modern critique of metaphysics answerable, but a return to metaphysics is necessary to provide a unifying social vision, and ii. that the required vision of reality is one which centres Eros as its active principle.
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Sloterdijk on Dalí
April 29, 2021
Here’s a few excerpts from Peter Sloterdijk’s Foams, the third book of the Sphere’s trilogy. These comments concern Dalí’s 1936 performance-lecture at the New Burlington Galleries in London, at which the artist appeared on stage dressed in a deep-sea diving suit to which no-one had thought to attach an air-supply, only to start asphyxiating immediately, to enthusiastic applause from the audience.
It was not for nothing that the Surrealists developed the art of confusing the bourgeois as a form of action sui generis in the early phase of their attack wave—firstly, because it helped the innovators to distinguish between the in-group and the out-group, and secondly, because public protest could be taken as a sign of success in dismantling the traditional system. Whoever scandalizes the bourgeois declares allegiance to progressive iconoclasm.
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Baudrillard and Incompleteness
April 13, 2021
This has provoked some thoughts:
Deleuze and Derrida attempt to draw opposite metaphysical consequences from the metalogical incompleteness results: an immanent system that literally includes even pure nonsense, or an always-unfinished tracing of the undecidable limits of systematicity?
— gil, a finite mode (@gdmorejon) April 20, 2021The “metalogical incompleteness result” is a reference to Gödel’s theorem, which states that any sufficiently expressive formal system is either inconsistent or incomplete. While the significance of this result for philosophical semantics (which typically concerns informal systems) is hardly unambiguous, and has often been disputed, it is certainly suggestive in the logical tension it establishes between completeness and consistency. At the very least it warns us to be careful to separate matters of inconsistency from those of undecidability, and it is along this axis that the comparison between Deleuze and Derrida is being made.
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Consensus, Crypto, and Trust
April 13, 2021
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Many of the most pressing political questions of our time hinge on the difference between trustful and trustless (social and economic) consensus, and on their relative status as mechanisms for coordinating human action. This is a struggle played out foremost in the architectures of technical and institutional systems.
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Isolation Fest DJ Mixes
February 28, 2021
Here’s a some DJ mixes I did for two of Psymusic Radio’s ISO festivals, which have been running throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.
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Common Knowledge, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary
February 4, 2021
It seems Squarespace have upped their cynical advertising game, perhaps surpassing last year’s A Website Makes it Real campaign with a new Super Bowl commercial that overlays a reworked version of Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5 on a horrorshow romanticisation of boundless productivity and eternal work (sorry. . . side-hustle):
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Baudrillard's Real and Brechtian Interruption
February 2, 2021
The symbolic is neither a concept, an agency, a category, nor a 'structure', but an act of symbolic exchange and a social relation which puts an end to the real, which resolves the real, and, at the same time, puts an end to the opposition between the real and the imaginary.Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death
This passage is quoted pretty often in the secondary literature, no doubt because it’s the closest Baudrillard ever seems to get to offering anything like a ‘definition’ of symbolic exchange. That said, it is still somewhat baffling. How can an act which is a social relation put an end to the real?
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Invisible Hand Fail Modes
January 29, 2021
I’ve been browsing through the archives of the newly reanimated Slate Star Codex, and came across a post reviewing Eliezer Yudkowsky’s book Inadequate Equilibria. I have not read it myself, but Scott Alexander’s summary relates a text which (among other things) examines the ways in which free markets can lead to undesirable outcomes. What is interesting about this for me is that it is written by someone who is broadly pro-capitalist and believes in the general benevolence of the Invisible Hand. As Alexander explains, the book is fundamentally a work of theodicy—an attempt to understand how evil can arise in a world ruled by a loving God.
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