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Spectacular Tech Bros
August 19, 2020Last night I encountered this passage while idly rereading the first chapter of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle:
Though separated from what they produce, people nevertheless produce every detail of their world with ever-increasing power. They thus also find themselves increasingly separated from that world. The closer their...
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Note on the Rule Following Paradox
August 18, 2020Here’s a few thoughts about Wittgenstein’s private language argument, or more specifically Saul Kripke’s development of it into a generalised rule-following paradox (Kripke, 1982). This paradox emerges against the background of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy of language, at the heart of which is a pragmatic treatment of meaning. According...
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Counternotes on Subculture
August 7, 2020One potential pitfall I can see in making comparisons between present and 60’s counterculture is that not only are the mainstreams they react against very different, but the present mainstream is in many ways a product of the ideas of selfhood that emerged from the 60’s (or an appropriation of...
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How to Freeze History
August 7, 2020Anger is socially heavy, and so morally unthinkable. Anger must be muted and contained, suspended as contempt. It is required of all affects that they be substituted for their lightest operational equivalent, a least energy principle with minimisation of social noise as its boundary constraint. Relations of interiority are folded...
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Self-Consciousness as Reciprocal Recognition
July 31, 2020At the heart of Hegel’s philosophy of mind is the idea that self-consciousness is essentially mediated: that a self’s recognition of its own selfhood is metaphysically dependent on its recognition of others and the reciprocation of such recognitive attitudes. This is a rejection of the foundational Cartesian doctrine of given...
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Sacrifice, Identification and Self-Constitution
July 30, 2020Brandom begins his exposition of the Self-Consciousness chapter of the Phenomenology by considering “essentially self-conscious beings.” (Brandom, 2019, p. 235) These are beings whose self-conception forms an essential part of what they are in themselves. (Which is not to say that they are whatever they take themselves to...
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Between Fate and Alienation
July 14, 2020Writing in the introduction to his recent book on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Robert Brandom has this to say about the contrast between the modern and premodern experiences of normativity (Brandom, 2019):
The implicit principle of traditional forms of life is the status-dependence of normative attitudes: the...
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Auric Decay and Invisibility (Benjamin to Berghain)
July 10, 2020In 1935 Walter Benjamin compared the performances of the stage actor and the film actor (Benjamin, 1969). He found two differences:
- The screen performance is less unitary than the stage performance. It can be pieced together from different takes and repeat performances, incorporate “real” footage, be altered,...
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Brecht and Chinese Theatre
July 7, 2020Brecht had some fascinating things to say about classical Chinese opera, and found within it many points of contact with his own “epic theatre”. Here are some snippets from his essay Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting (Brecht, 1936).
[T]he Chinese artist never acts as if there a...
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Weir
July 5, 2020Most of these tracks are based on a single sound that has been chopped, looped, distorted and layered in various ways. While it was not a conscious motivation at the time,...
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The Ethical Simulacrum
June 22, 2020One aspect of Baudrillard’s thought rarely emphasised is its empirical content. I find this odd, given that his whole oeuvre is devoted to describing processes that give predictions and explanations of concrete social structures and events. (Where it has received attention, as with his claim that the Gulf War “never...
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Note on Virtue Signalling
June 10, 2020The term “virtue-signalling” first appeared as a way of mocking the perceived insincerity of those who vocally advocate for social justice causes without making any real effort to effect them in practice, or doing so only insofar as they complement their own lifestyle choices. The anti-leftist sentiment baked into the...
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The Unassimilable Difference of Drum and Bass
May 10, 2020A new documentary about the evolution of the drum and bass scene came out last week, and is well worth a watch.
The film tracks the scene...
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Accelerate
May 10, 2020Here I want to gather a few thoughts on accelerationism, a current of thinking with near roots in the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (a sort of experimental theory collective based at Warwick University in the 1990’s), and far roots in Marx’s idea that capitalism would ultimately create the conditions of...
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The Real as an Optics of Value
May 10, 2020In recent months Squarespace has been running an ad campaign riffing off the tagline “a website makes it real”:
The message plays off a tension between two different senses of the “real”. The first refers to how things actually are, in this case the material conditions...
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False Consciousness and the Displaced Subject
May 6, 2020There’s a point Mark Fisher made that has stuck with me (I believe it was in his Anti-Vital lecture). He remarks that one of the biggest challenges faced historically by anti-capitalism is that it has often had difficulty persuading people that their economic system oppresses them. Orthodox Marxism has...
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Capitalist Realism: a Summary
May 2, 2020Here’s my thousandish-word summary of Mark Fisher’s book Capitalist Realism (Fisher, 2009).
TS Eliot first made the point that culture’s ability to produce the new is dependent on its capacity to store and transmit collective memory. Innovation depends on a sense of tradition, otherwise there is nothing...
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Still Thinking About Burial
April 2, 2020A sound system can be understood as a technology for producing space, consolidating and autonomising local time, neutralising it through the cancellation of metronomic difference. Rhythm both dissolves temporality and resolves narrative interiority: a becoming-time of space at its edges. Time is the becoming-extensive of intensive space, the crust that...
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Inertia Live Set
February 2, 2020This is almost a recording of a live set I played at Inertia Beltane Gathering 2016 in Brighton. The set did not actually get recorded. And then my laptop died the next day. And then when I tried to recover it from a backup the external hard drive was partially...
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Brian Massumi on Affect
January 2, 2020This somewhat lazy post stockpiles a load of quotes I’ve pulled out of Brian Massumi’s paper The Autonomy of Affect (Massumi, 1995), which I’ve found extremely helpful for patching up some of the leaks in my own understanding of affect theory. I’ve left these quotes verbose to capture...
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