the alt-right

It's a small world after all.

By far the most surprising guest here at the @Cernovich event: Chelsea Manning!

— Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) January 21, 2018

“I was standing outside MERGE looking through the photos I’d taken, when a young woman in a blue hoodie came up to me,” Sarsfield said. “She asked if I’d taken photos of her boyfriend. I asked her if her boyfriend was the one putting up the white supremacist stickers.”

“She said, ‘Yes,’ and that he’d called her saying he was in MERGE. She said she wanted me to delete the photos, because this whole thing was traumatic for them,” Sarsfield recalled. “She said he’s not a racist, he just likes to do these things to get a rise out of people.”

Sure. The Pepe hoodie is a nice touch.

http://littlevillagemag.com/man-puts-up-pro-white-stickers-on-the-ped-mall-during-the-womens-march-then-tries-to-hide-in-merge/

spending money to own the libs!!!!

Cathy Newman of Channel 4 is apparently being targeted by a bunch of alt-right dorks after her 30-minute interview with Jordan Peterson.

My first thought was why are Channel 4 running a half hour interview with some American dickhead I've never heard of?

he’s canadian

Well, there you go.

I'd never heard of peterson before but I'm sure he will get more coverage in the uk on the back of that interview, ppl were pretty angry at how badly newman handled him

Speaking of, here’s Shuja Haider trying to figure WTF is up with Peterson and why he’s banging on about postmodernism alla time.

Peterson is showing himself to be an opportunist with no principles willing to cater to whatever crowd or denominator will pledge money to his Patreon. He's not an ideologue, but when your audience is sending death threats to your 'enemies' and you turn your head, what's the difference? I think maybe a year ago, the average Peterson follower had a much more open mind. Now it's just a joke.

― flappy bird, Saturday, January 20, 2018 3:33 PM (three days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he literally started his media appearances, public events, and patreon as a result of becoming widely known for a video of him telling trans students that he wouldn't use gender neutral pronouns. he has only ever had one very specific, very white, very male, and very young crowd

This seems to be his response to the attacks on Newman:

Peterson, who is interviewed in today’s Observer magazine, said that when he became aware of the abuse allegations he “immediately tweeted ‘if you’re one of those people doing that, back off’, there’s no excuse for that, no utility’.”

He said the experience had left him trying to put himself in Newman’s position. “There is no doubt that Cathy has been subjected to a withering barrage of criticism online. One of the things I’ve been trying to do is to try to imagine what I’d do if I found myself in her situation and how I would react to it and understand how it was happening. But they’ve provided no evidence that the criticisms constituted threats. There are some nasty cracks online but the idea that this is somehow reflective of a fundamental misogyny and that’s what’s driving this is ridiculous.”

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/jan/21/no-excuse-for-online-abuse-says-professor-in-tv-misogyny-row

Peterson is a bigot, a con artist, and a clown but that Viewpoint magazine article is basicslly gaslighting him about Derrida. Deconstruction was most certainly not based on some neutral phenomenological observation about how meaning is generated. By positing marginalization at the center of his model of language Derrida was making a political statement. Not a Marxist one or even a progressive one, but definitely casting his lot on the side of the marginalized, and claiming marginalization was necessary to all semantic and/or sociopolitical strucutres, and trying to enact through his critical pracis a return of the repressed (cf. “Archive Fever” his book on Freud). This kind of logic totally lies at the root of contemporary social justice discourse, whatever you tjink of it.

*think

*praxis

So many typos

I think Derrida is an extremely interesting theorist but in studying him I did come to think his work pointed ultimately to a kind of nihilism — albeit one that has an egalitarian core. People who want to defend lofty ideals like democracy or liberalism are right to be wary of him. Chait and Chomsky are not unconsciously repeating some ignorant trope about “cultural marxism” or whatever when they complain about the impact of french theory in the academy. It’s not a misunderstanding.

In actual fact, Derrida’s work was rooted in constant dialogue with the history of Western philosophy. He was a classical philosophical scholar, often presenting detailed and rigorous research on figures like Plato, Hegel, and Rousseau. His conversance with European thought extended into the 20th century as well.

This makes Derrida sound like a 7th grader.

Some of us went to shitty schools but I get yr point

"Derrida drew on a wide range of influences, especially Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud, both thinkers Peterson deems acceptable, as well as Martin Heidegger. Applying their skeptical outlook to the phenomenology and structuralism in which he had achieved mastery, Derrida was able to interrogate these methods from within."

Yeah, he “interrogated” the canon the way Nietzsche did—pointing his crtical guns as what he saw as its most vulnerable points. And no one would write an article claiming that people who have a serious problem with Nietzsche are just crazy and reading dark implications into texts that are really quite reasonable and not trying to fuck with your deepest convictions at all actually.

Besides, it’s inaccurate to say that Derrida “engaged” with all the texts he deconstructed. His critical method was more oblique. He’d focus on seemingly incidental features of the text to demonstrate that their rhetoric was really quite fragile—that even the most complex philosophical argument hinged on a series of prejudices. This is why he was so maddening to argue with. (Foucualt’s “obscurantism terrorism” line.)

I don’t think Derrida is evil and I don’t agree with Peterson but I do think he was a radical thinker and that his influence has been considerable and that his work invites/demands a atrong counteratgument and these are things the article seemed to want to sidestep. Instead of mounting a defense of the critical tradition represented by Derrida they try to defend Derrida’s respectability.

I've liked what I read of Derrida, in part because of it's radicality, and I would quite honestly love to revive the Derrida-thread and have that discussion with you in more detail. I just don't think it has that much to do with the article and Jordan Peterson. I'm not sure how respectable Derrida looks in that article, or if it's even the aim, the aim is to show he was not a cultural marxist, and not even really a postmodernist either. Derrida himself said it was born to a large extent out of 68. And the thing with Petersons bullshit is that it mixes all the radicalness into a scary whole - with an antisemitic past - without bothering to search for the historical situation he wrote against. And that kinda goes for Chait and Chomsky as well, though not to the same extent. It's easy to say it goes against 'democracy' and 'liberalism', but it is to a large extent born from very real failures of those two ideals.

I know this is reductive but I take vague complaints about "postmodernism" to just be the new "corrupting the youth of Athens" and leave it at that.

I don’t think Derrida is evil and I don’t agree with Peterson but I do think he was a radical thinker and that his influence has been considerable and that his work invites/demands a atrong counteratgument and these are things the article seemed to want to sidestep. Instead of mounting a defense of the critical tradition represented by Derrida they try to defend Derrida’s respectability.

― treeship 2, Wednesday, January 24, 2018 4:36 AM (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think you're nitpicking a little, the salient point is that derrida is not an anti-western philosophy guy, he's actually more engaged with and more well-versed in the western canon than just about anyone you might care to claim, including peterson himself, or any of the pseudo intellectuals of the alt-right!

also while he's influential in academia, more literature than philosophy no? the idea that his ideas are literally the motivating factor behind the chaos of the world, as peterson sees it, i.e. transgenderism, feminism, socialism, is ludicrous. just ime most of the woke social justice warrior types i know personally are generally against "postmodernist" thought or completely ignorant of it.

(more likely to be marxists, anarchists, etc.)

Yeah, the dumbest bits of this is just his received conspiracy theory conflating “post-modernism” and “(((Cultural Marxism)))” together

just ime most of the woke social justice warrior types i know personally are generally against "postmodernist" thought or completely ignorant of it.

(more likely to be marxists, anarchists, etc.)

I'm not a humanities or social science scholar but it does seem to me that the people who are really into things like contemporary critical race theory, post-colonial cultural criticism, or queer musicology are working from a pov that's fairly different from (and in some ways opposed to) a classical Marxist analysis, right?

I'm not a humanities or social science scholar

Unless music theory counts as "humanities or social sciences". It probably does.

Derrida wasn't really interesting in founding a prescriptive political program so much as describing the sort of "abyssal decision" that goes into the founding of such political (or ethical) programs. He wants to hold them open, accountable. Kinda of Weberian insistence on the fundamental irrationality of all value judgements--not in the service of nihilism but a kind futurity or fundamental openness.

Foucault fits better with the SJW ethos, particularly his late work on subjectivity (I think?), but he'd be resistant to any consistent political program as well due to the aforementioned insistence on radical subjectivity.

If I had to try to give maximum generosity to Peterson here, the idea of "intersectionality" might seem to inherently require a quasi-postmodern rejection of the Marxist metanarrative focused on economic class struggle as the chief determinant of historical development, treating it instead as one micronarrative of oppression and liberation, alongside race, oppression of women, gender identity, disability, etc., and re-centring subjective experience. xp

(Just brainstorming; again, not an expert with this)

(I sometimes think one useful way to think about Derrida is that he accomplished a final split between Reason as foundational or as a grounding of value judgments as and Reason as a endless critical process. Foucault points out something similar in his "What is Enlightenment?" essay. If postmodernism means anything with these two it might refer to their acceptance of that split.)

I'm not a humanities or social science scholar but it does seem to me that the people who are really into things like contemporary critical race theory, post-colonial cultural criticism, or queer musicology are working from a pov that's fairly different from (and in some ways opposed to) a classical Marxist analysis, right?

― No purposes. Sounds. (Sund4r), Wednesday, January 24, 2018 1:44 PM (fourteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes, this is true, they are often also epistemologically indebted to post-structuralism. but if i were to take e.g. post-colonial studies (the only one of these you've mentioned that I've read much of) there's a lot of ink been shed from that field distancing itself from these other, prior post-isms

Foucault fits better with the SJW ethos, particularly his late work on subjectivity (I think?), but he'd be resistant to any consistent political program as well due to the aforementioned insistence on radical subjectivity.

this is something i'm interested in bc when i was reading foucault back in the day i thought that his points were generally that power is bidirectional and that power is many things (knowledge, sex, discipline), but it seems like he has become somehow metonymic for a critique that often unidirectional and i wonder to what extent does he truly resist that description or is that the inevitable conclusion from his work. i just don't know his entire oeuvre well enough to say but i suspect he's mostly being misused?

I don't know what it is but I've always had a hard time getting a handle on Foucault's overall project. Lee Braver's "A Thing of This World" I remember being very enlightening but I've forgotten it mostly lol.

in my experience on the ground the use of any of these philosophers tends to be ad hoc and used as shorthand background authority rather than explicit engagement w/ whatever political project is claiming the thinker. so figuring out whether foucault's ideas are truly buttressing the cause is maybe a waste of time from the get go and anyway if you've read enough derrida hopefully you can simultaneously aver the thesis + antithesis in the text.

Trolling r/philosophy for replies:

my work here is done pic.twitter.com/tzqxL50DFc

— Shuja Haider (@shujaxhaider) January 24, 2018

less flattering reddit comment that does accurately summarize my feelings on jung pic.twitter.com/Rat75uvp4j

— Shuja Haider (@shujaxhaider) January 24, 2018

I'm also enjoying that pretty much the whole thread for it on the philosophy subreddit looks like this pic.twitter.com/mfdi7cNDWI

— Shuja Haider (@shujaxhaider) January 24, 2018

If I had to try to give maximum generosity to Peterson here, the idea of "intersectionality" might seem to inherently require a quasi-postmodern rejection of the Marxist metanarrative focused on economic class struggle as the chief determinant of historical development, treating it instead as one micronarrative of oppression and liberation, alongside race, oppression of women, gender identity, disability, etc., and re-centring subjective experience. xp

― No purposes. Sounds. (Sund4r), 24. januar 2018 22:59 (nineteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I mean, as the article says, the foundational text about 'The Postmodern Condition' is all about the lack of metanarratives, so yeah.

I did know that; I was just trying to see a way in which "postmodern neo-Marxism" could make some kind of sense as a description for what I think JP is trying to describe.

Jack Posobiec tells me the Bumble account purporting to be him that got some attention today is fake: "Everyone knows I have a hot Eastern European wife and we just got married."

— Will Sommer (@willsommer) January 24, 2018

yesssssssss

i.e. the contemporary intersectional/identity-oriented left, esp in academia, which applies a sort of 'class struggle' model but thinks it is wrong to look one single type of class, or apply a single overarching objective analytical pov, to the exclusion of others. (That said, Peterson still casts his net far too wide.)

it's really not these thinker's fault if activists decide their work is useful to their project. it's like political claims on the bible - you see what you want to see esp when writers are intentionally layering meaning, obscuring, contradicting, etc.

I did know that; I was just trying to see a way in which "postmodern neo-Marxism" could make some kind of sense as a description for what I think JP is trying to describe.

― No purposes. Sounds. (Sund4r), 24. januar 2018 23:38 (twelve minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

And you're otm :) A lot again has to do with 68, imo. The idea that this narrative of French Revolutions, from 1789 onwards, has been thwarted, and everyone needs to figure out what to do next. Seven different types of maoists shouting at each other at the exact same time Mao was at his most murderous. A need to look elsewhere all of a sudden, be it to the third world or back in the past, or to marginalized groups.

this Twitter thread confirms what I kinda figured was true - these guys and gals are massive shitheads but they're more driven by fame than dreams of a white ethnostate

Thread on the @xychelsea shitstorm. First, read this: https://t.co/noDse7rPU3

— Contra 🌸 (@ContraPoints) January 24, 2018

Peterson doesn't appear to be very well read. His entire shtick consists of strawmanning the shit out of the left from the vantage point of his media-fueled position as a learnèd, heroic scholar who dares shake academia's ivory foundations by telling it like it is, thus submitting his ideas to the democratic court of populist opinion rather than that of his elitist peers. This is not a bad thing in and of itself, but it requires an acute sense of responsibility, one that is conspicuously lacking in his case, since he systematically paints his adversaries as dangerous obfuscators – an easy charge in a playing field defined by its carnivalesque 'gotcha' moments and worship of 'common sense'. Steven Pinker tends to do this as well so it may just be a common trait among so-called 'public' intellectuals.

Derrida does have a lot to do with contemporary social justice discourse though. Way more than Marx does. Derrida’s “big idea,” putting it as crudely as possible, is that identity is constituted in difference, that the process of differing/deferring proceeds by acts of violence and exclusion as one term becomes dominant and the other subordinate, and that therefore the critical examination of any concept should begin with an attempt to uncover this originaty moment of violence. This seems really similar to, say, microaggression theory—this hyperattentiveness to language that carried within itself the stain of history, which it reproduces unconsciously as it continually remakes the world. I can’t say for sure but I think Derrida’s work probably had a lot to do with the way progressives think about language and history today even if they don’t know it.

There are typos and tense errors in there but still. Derrida’s work is as powerful as Nietzsche’s or Marx’s in that it demands a kind of reckoning — once you “see things” as he saw them it’s hard for a while to unsee it. As a meme I think the kind of structure of his thought had a big impact. And he’s an unnerving writer to read too because if you think like he does you can never “affirm” anything, because concepts are in flux, and they are always already in the process of becoming their opposite. (I can’t really describe how this works, but it is one of his big ideas. Martin Hagglund is good on this — the co-implication of opposites, death is constitutive of life, etc.) All of this presents challenges to the western project of trying to ground beliefs in something solid, human freedom or reason or earlier on God or whatever.

He deserves a better class of critic than Peterson thouh.

I guess my main issue is like, duh, the idea of a postmodern neo-marxist cabal is conspiratorial and idiotic. But I also think ideas matter and when people say that the radical skepticism of Derrida can be corrosive to institutions, even if only humanities departments, I don’t think they’re necessarily being “crazy.” I don’t think Derrida would find them crazy either. As Frederik said, Derrida’s thought came out of a crisis.

otm

Also the alt right thread is the perfect forum for this discussion. The left should try to understand its own intellectual genealogy if they want to refute the fake versions the alt right proffers.

Undecidability, aporia, the pharmakon: all of these 'concepts' (barely concepts, if we go by his philosophy) are frankly disquieting when taken seriously (which they should be). This undermines both Peterson and his nemeses, which is why very few are willing to take up Derrida's mantle today.

There's nothing angelically ethical about his take on difference, either, which is shot through with strangeness and uncanniness (see his beef with Levinas, re: violence). And yet, in spite of that, he advocates hospitality. Ethics for with the acknowledgment that it is grounded on groundlessness, that if there is no risk gestures of welcome are meaningless.