Notes from ‘The Communist Manifesto’ by Marx and Engels

‘The working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes’. The fundamental structure of the state machinery is arranged to perpetuate answering to authority.

Communism’s main argument is the following: that economic production and the structure of society of every historical epoch necessarily arising there from constitute the foundation for the political and intellectual history of that epoch. Since dissolution of communal land ownership, all history is the history of class struggle, between the exploited and the exploiters. Only a total emancipation of the whole of society from exploitation can work. The aim is to ‘proclaim the inevitable impending downfall of present day bourgeois property’. It is not socialism.

Book review challenge

I have before me a dense collection of thin philosophy books. This is a box-set by Penguin books that features titles by St.Augustine, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Paine and Seneca. I’ve already read, from the same series, Nietzsche’s ‘Why I am so wise’, Marx and Engles ‘Communist Manifesto’, Schopenhauer’s ‘On the suffering of the world’ and Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’, but I feel that I can benefit from reading them again. My plan is to read one book from this collection a week, give or take a day or two, and post a short review.

I tend to read set books at one time until completion, intermixed with lots of blog and article reading, so reading these smaller books by very different authors should prove fruitful, as I do tend to focus my attention on a particular area of philosophy (namely psychoanalytically oriented Continental philosophy and Speculative realism/materialism) and neglect a lot of older canonical works.

Next week, as  will be attending the Historical Materialism conference as SOAS in London, I’m going to again read ‘The Communist Manifesto’, followed the week after by ‘Confessions of a sinner’ by St.Augustine, just because I like the juxtaposition.

Heating up: the transmutations of media-beings: Part 2

In my previous post I experimented with a tetrad-fourfold hybrid analysis of media and discovered that the tetrad could be used to look at non-human specific media. Laws of Media (LOM) was a fascinating read that has encouraged me to seek out some more McLuhan. This post brings together insights from The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media, of which I can report that there is a lot more to  them than this simple tetrad. This article aims to outline many of the arguments from LOM towards a questioning consideration of Heidegger and technology.

Alien Phenomenology

This diagram demonstrates the weaving of differences any robust theory needs to act on simultaneously, if it wants to harness some real explanatory power and not fall victim to the ‘hegemonic fallacy’ of one difference that makes all the difference. A recent post by Levi Bryant has emphasized the need for theory not to abandon philosophies and theories because they under perform their explanatory function, but to combine and translate these theories into an ‘alien phenomenology’, a term coined by Ian Bogost’, which looks to open theory to all types of different actors whilst not “reducing any one of these domains to the other”. To have an ‘alien phenomenology’ is to abandon human centered perspectives and open theory up to nom-human actors which will give greater yield to the claims made into the working of actors and networks (or objectiles and assemblages, as Bryant’s OOP would phrase it).

The question marked ovals in the diagram represent the unknown strengths of relations between each distinction and other non-identified actors which may also be generating differences in the network which remain withdrawn or barred from access. This approach to philosophy, as bricolage, is one reason I am so drawn to OOO and OOP, as it opens up dialogue with the sciences and any discipline whatsoever that may have some explanatory power.

[20th November 2009: ADDENDUM]

Certainly not everyone agrees with my enthusiasm for Bryant’s bicolage of theory, as this one comment by Bryank, from ‘The Velvet Howler’ blog, testifies to:

from what I can tell, Levi’s work amounts largely to a kind of pick-and-choose, Frankenstein patch-work of limbs and organs robbed from the graveyard of philosophers’s corpses. “Flat ontology” and “all difference makes a difference” are basically just haphazard modes of legitimating his a priori right to incorporate every idea under the sun that he fancies—even if they make no sense when placed together. This makes his theory, to some extent, critique-proof, since it includes the entire pedagogically-narrativized history of philosophy immanently in it already (no wonder it’s a realism, since ‘realism’ amounts to having the least amount of commitments possible—it’s like a cheap buffet at the Harmanian Circus Philosophicus booth in Coney Island, step right up, step right up!). Yet that’s its critical downfall: it can’t really ever say anything since it tries to say everything at once.

The charity pharmakon

“The Plumpy’nut product is a high protein and high energy peanut-based paste in a foil wrapper. It tastes slightly sweeter than peanut butter. It is categorized by the WHO as a Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF). Plumpy’nut requires no water preparation or refrigeration and has a 2 year shelf life making it easy to deploy in difficult conditions to treat severe acute malnutrition. It is distributed under medical supervision, predominantly to parents of malnourished children where the nutritional status of the children has been assessed by a doctor or a nutritionist. The product was inspired by the popular Nutella spread” (from Wikipedia)

Regimes of signs: the marked body

In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari (D&G) propose society to be defined by the mode of representation given by its machine of expression or ‘regime of signs’, not its material relations of economic production and exchange. Society is not based just on a system of exchange, as thought by Levi-Strauss, but ‘a socius of inscription where the essential thing is to mark and be marked’ (Anti-Oedipus: p.142). The first form of inscription is territorial machine of primitive inscription. This involves tattooing, carving, sacrificing, mutilating, and so on: to inscribe the body or organs into the collective investment of desire of the whole tribe. Within late capitalism, the flows of decoded social inscription operate fast enough to destabilize such ‘primitive’ means of tribe identification. Yet, this process of performance and inscription has not ceased but expanded at an ever faster rate. Attempts to follow the territories of social identity and behavioral complexities as they emerge end in farce, leaping from one new haircut, tattoo design, clothing fashion to the next. Within modern capitalism, we promote the total inscription of the body into regimes of signs dictated by capitalist modes of production, i.e. the commodification of the body.

The justice of object-oriented philosophy

Graham Harman’s work overflows with metaphor. Never have I read so many metaphors used with such enthusiasm and lack of economy in philosophy since reading Nietzsche and Derrida. The use of metaphor is essential for Harman, stylistically and philosophically. As I commented in my last post, I see Harman’s appropriation of the McLuhan tetrad as the explanatory mechanism for change between media-beings, i.e. objects. The influence of the McLuhan’s does not end here, as metaphor as described in the ‘Media poetics’ section of Laws of Media, “presents one thing or situation dressed as or seen through another. A leap has to be made, across the interval between the two situations, each composed of a figure and ground” (p. 231). Figure is the message and ground is the medium, or in Harmanian, the eidos and essence. Thus metaphor reveals the transforming interplay between the essence and eidos of objects, which Harman’s work playfully encapsulates. The use of metaphor is a rhetorical strategy and for Harman it is the “presence of a surplus-jouissance animating the thought of a thinker that functions as the real aim of this thought” (Levi Bryant, larvalsubjects sept 18th).

Heating up: the transmutations of media-beings: Part 1

Graham Harman’s fourfold is very different to the tetrad of McLuhan, but there is a firm link between the two: each has fours poles intersected by two dualisms; the poles interrelate and transform each other; each part exists together simultaneously; they could be universal. Thus, Harman’s fourfold, which is largely inspired by Heidegger’s fourfold [das geviert] needs supplementing with McLuhan’s tetrad. As he explains, “All that is lacking is a detailed account of the mechanics of how the four poles [gods, mortals, earth, sky] interact with one another. Such an account is found only in ‘Laws of Media’. I believe that Harman will cross-pollinate these two fourfolds in his upcoming ‘The Quadruple Object’ and which is already hinted at in his articles ‘The McLuhans and Metaphysics’ and ‘The Tetrad and Phenomenology’.

Notes from ‘Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation’ by Gilles Deleuze

These are my reading notes from this excellent book. I would recommend reading the book while looking at each picture he expands upon   HERE This book works not only as a piece of art commentary but as a practical and highly readable introduction to Deleuze’s anti-representational philosophy.

More audio/video lectures and audio books

A huge number of Wittgenstein and philosophy of mind and language lectures can be found  HERE

Loads of Zizek audio and video lectures  HERE

Audio lectures by Lingis, Gilgen and others   HERE

Political philosophy audio lectures  HERE

Free literature audio books   HERE &  HERE &  HERE & HERE

Free philosophy audio books  HERE

Nietzsche audio books   HERE

Kant audio books   HERE

Communist manifesto audio book   HERE

A collection of audio lectures on the classic phenomenologists (Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Fink) and the Frankfurt School of critical theorists (Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse).     HERE

Here is a link to an older post of mine with lots of video and audio links   HERE