Rolling Philosophy

oops. I am in broad AGREEMENT with Critchely, i meant to say.

(especially since you'd think Zizek would be the first to admit that kind of rhetoric doesn't really escape from the domain of Capitalism anyway. he's got nostalgia for an "outside" that's not really accessible anymore. then again i'll shut up since im dumb about political philosophy.)

yo kant is clarity incarnate. if you're confused it's bc your brain is all twisted up from life + shit.

...

x-post: hence Critchley's point that Z is basically advocating doing nothing...

i don't think Z is advocating doing nothing bc i think he's not an advocate. who said that the role of philosopher is to advocate for political revolutionary? i think he's making an observation tho about the kinds of violence that actually shift hegemonies, and even if Critchley wants to encourage ppl to revolt now and even in minor ways (with the hope that they make gradual shifts), I don't think Zizek is totally off-base to suggest that's itself an apology for the hegemony

advocate for the* political revolutionary

maybe he discusses it further down but where are all these non-ultra-violent revolutions that are seriously challenging capitalism? i don't see them.

yeah i see what you're saying. that's the crux of the problem isn't it? it wouldn't really be hard to turn that whole argument against Z as well (ie, that what he's doing is an "apology" for hegemony. hence Critchley's quote of Lacan telling the Leninists, "What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master.")

but Critchley definitely steps in it when he shifts to being an advocate (even if one for "infinite" demands)...and perhaps what's at stake is a (philosophical) defense of that act.

and that's why his demands have to be "infinite" (or effectively without content).

Though perhaps it'd be fun to read Z as basically posing exactly the "infinite demand" that Critchley wants, just in the form of a nostalgic Leninist mode.

new spivak apparently

http://www.amazon.com/Aesthetic-Education-Era-Globalization/dp/0674051831

ryan, did you finish the critchley book? worth reading?

markers: I thought there was some value in it, and the parts about mysticism were really interesting to me, but overall I'm kinda left wondering why he felt he needed to stage his argument in the way he did, and perhaps his sense of the organizing power of religion is more a holdover from theocratic politics than something that belongs to religion per se. Anyway, I liked it and learned stuff, though I'm not sure it leads anywhere.

I mean "your conflating religion with politics" at once a dumb criticism since thats the argument of the book! But at the same time I think he fails to articulate what the secular meaning of "sacralization" in contemporary politics could be. He wants a positive form of religious feeling that leads to spontaneous political organization where I only see negative theology.

oooh that spivak looks really interesting. was just thinkin about schiller again the other day!

ya i've been reading schiller lately, SHE'S ONTO US.

nick land goes in for the post-austrian paleo-reactionary scene

http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/1880/the-dark-enlightenment-part-1

against democracy! (in a strange coincidence i just brought up "mencius moldbug" yesterday)

this line is particularly glib, considering the blistering pro-rumsfeld/cheney line he took on the old hyperstition blog. he condemns, in a slew of other things, "reckless evangelical ‘wars for democracy’

nobody? jeez, should have gone to the right-wingery thread

nick land goes there

yo nakh let's shmooze about bh

http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/1901/the-dark-enlightenment-part-2
http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/1920/the-dark-enlightenment-part-3

just now reading critchley's "infinitely demanding" really digging it

At the heart of a radical politics there has to be what I
call a meta-political ethical moment that provides the motivational
force or propulsion into political action. If ethics without politics is
empty, then politics without ethics is blind. Taking my cue from a
heterodox reading of Levinas, I claim that this meta-political
moment is anarchic, where ethics is the disturbance of the political
status quo. Ethics is anarchic meta-politics, it is the continual
questioning from below of any attempt to impose order from
above. On this view, politics is the creation of interstitial distance
within the state, the invention of new political subjectivities.
Politics, I argue, cannot be confined to the activity of government
that maintains order, pacification and security while constantly
aiming at consensus. On the contrary, politics is the manifestation
of dissensus, the cultivation of an anarchic multiplicity that calls
into question the authority and legitimacy of the state . It is in
relation to such a multiplicity that we may begin to restore some
dignity to the dreadfully devalued discourse of democracy.

Taking my cue from a heterodox reading of Levinas, I could really go for some fried chicken right now.

lol

that's quite nice tho, I am never sure if I'd get on w/ critchley

finally defended yesterday. now I can read what I want to! think im gonna fill in my two biggest blind spots (relatively speaking): Lacan and Deleuze.

ogmor: I've read a lot of critchley and im still not sure if i get on with him. but his Very Little, Almost Nothing is really lovely and moving and smart.

hey congrats!

thanks man! huge relief. i now have one official life accomplishment i can point to.

hurrah, ryan

well done

Thanks guys!

good work! what was your thesis on?

essentially reading American Pragmatism through systems theory and "second-order" cybernetics. Hopefully I'm able to argue that's not as strange a combination as it sounds!

That sounds like a really cool topic. Systems theory and cybernetics are pretty interesting fields of thought ... like if philosophy actually dealt with the real world.

oh, cool! I know someone working on Peirce and erm computation theory and things like that?, it sounds like a really interesting connection even if I don't quite know enough about either side to see exactly what's going on with it.

That sounds pretty amazing. Feel like there's a lot of untapped potential in Peirce (and lots of new stuff by him still seeing the light of day). I was frequently astonished by his simultaneous total weirdness and prescience.

It was actually a really fun topic for me and I certainly learned a lot writing it. Got to second base with a press so far but we'll see how that goes. In any case I feel lucky. How many people get to read this stuff, let alone write about it?

keep us updated on the press status, would purchase said book.

Will do. That's very kind!

pretty good critchley interview on his new work on love & otherwise

http://www.full-stop.net/2012/04/02/interviews/tyler-malone/simon-critchley/

Tree of Life I couldn’t even get to the position of wanting to like it. It seems to feed that Emersonian, American desire for authenticity, which just fills me with nausea. I’ll go with Lars von Trier and Melancholia. Nature is Satan’s church.

That's kinda funny (also surprising given Critchley's admiration for Stanley Cavell--he should know Emerson better than that). Almost get the sense Critchley finds himself in a weird position, with some vestigial loyalty to some euro-skeptic-hermeneutics-of-suspicion way of thought that seems at odds with the "religious" turn of his work. I'd argue Emerson represents a more rigorous turn away from that stuff than Critchley's own recent work.

on another topic: has anyone read Brian Massumi's "A User's Guide to Capitalism Schizophrena"?

http://www.amazon.com/Users-Guide-Capitalism-Schizophrenia-Deviations/dp/0262631431/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_S_T1?ie=UTF8&coliid=I3A7S5CTE1D9AK&colid=336N6EL0R3GGA

Capitalism AND Schizophrenia obviously.

no, though it sounds extraordinarily useful

curious about yr reading of emerson ryan! that bit of the interview made me laugh.

didnt malick study under cavell?

y, they know each other

What's implicitly at issue, I think, is Cavell's readings of Emerson under the rubric of post-Kantian skepticism. (Emerson as a disappointed Romantic, if you will. See in particular "Experience"--which is absolutely extraordinary and one of the best things written by anyone ever.) So Emerson's big project becomes about "mourning the loss of the world" and that sort of thing. I think there's a better take on Emerson that can do without bringing in the bogeyman of skepticism, but Cavell's readings are pretty indispensable.

And Critchley has written about this! Which is why the idea of "Emersonian authenticity" must be an intentional straw-man version of Emerson.

idk as a nonphilosophe i just read it as a halfassed skein on 'lol americans and their residual calvinism'

yes def that too!

please let this be as hilarious to someone else here as it is to me

So even with two stage review, journal editors are tempted to publish papers with weak methods but positive results. And why not – unless important customers insisted, why would a journal handicap itself by committing itself to not publish such papers, which bring more fame and prestige to the journal.

Journal customers include universities who tenure professors who publish in prestigious journals, and grant givers who prefer grantees who publish similarly. But why should these customers handicap themselves – they also win by affiliating with those who publish papers with weak methods but positive results.

I’ve suggested that academia functions primarily to credential people as impressive and interesting in certain ways, so outsiders, like students and patron, can gain prestige by affiliating with them. If so, and if those who publish weak-method positive-results are in fact more impressive and interesting than those who publish stronger-method negative-results, there is little prospect to get rid of this publication bias.

What is possible is to augment publications with betting market prices estimating the chance each result will be upheld by future research. This would let readers get unbiased estimates on the reliability of research results. Alas, it seems there is no customer willing to pay extra to get such reliability estimates. Most everyone involved in the process mainly cares about signals of impressiveness; few care much about which research results are actually true.