autonomystic

[autonomystic]

Despite often being at odds one thing that unites psychoanalysis and many branches of feminism, and which I think is crucial to any serious politics, is an understanding of the absolute centrality of sexual violence to the structure of society

[autonomystic]

I love your takes, but I feel super, super lost with what you were trying to say about the natalism one. I feel like you're saying that there is no contradiction on wanting more babies, a higher population number and punishing mothers, but can you elaborate on that a bit more, because it does seems contradictory. I'm not disagreeing with you, I just want to understand it better.

alright there's a perennial debate (on here but also in a wider cultural sense) that goes on where people start noticing that some of the ways in which we socially and economically de/value children, parenthood, and specifically motherhood are internally contradictory. how can it be that there is immense social and economic pressure to heterosexually partner and reproduce, and yet most public and social infrastructure is also profoundly hostile to children and their guardians? why is it that this person couldn't find a doctor to perform a voluntary hysterectomy because their bodily preferences were subordinated to the medical valorisation of their fertility, and yet this other person was forcibly sterilised or coerced into using contraception because the prospect of them reproducing is framed as socially destabilising and degenerative? how are 'family values' touted by politicians who openly and explicitly also hate real existing families? do they want people to have more children or fewer? is it more counterculture and rebellious to have children or to not have children? to have sex or to not have sex? to partner off? to be polyam or monogamous?

the answer broadly speaking is that the oppositions people see here are only surface-level. the bourgeois state's interest is in biopower, and this produces competing demands: for some people to partner off and reproduce, and for others to be exterminated. the valorisation of the white middle-class nuclear family is the same as the devalorisation of its negations: racialised people, disabled people, family arrangements other than nuclear and heterosexual, etc. you can't understand the demand that people reproduce if you don't understand it is necessarily also accompanied by the demand that other people don't. these aren't actually contradictory once you understand that what the bourgeois state wants has nothing to do with your individual behaviours and everything to do with how many 'desirable' bodies it has at its disposal. that economic consideration is what creates both the natalist policy meant to encourage [some people's] reproduction, and the exterminatory policy meant to suppress and eradicate [other people's] reproduction.

usually this kind of conversation very quickly devolves into a privilege framework argument, where people are trying to find some kind of social hierarchy that is hegemonically applied top-down and that rewards, universally, certain behaviour choices over others. again, the "people who marry and reproduce are privileged and socially rewarded over me #childfree" versus "actually some people still have to fight tooth and nail to even get medical support / approval to have children, let alone actually get access to the kind of economic and social support necessary to raise them" debate. it's smoke and mirrors because there is no universal privileging of the choice to have children or not have children. what there is, is a privileging of certain people on the basis of the economic assessment of them as biological assets, and the inverse (and mutually constitutive) devaluations of everyone else. really over-discussed examples here but to give them anyway: this is why, for example, french natalist policy and the USA's constant efforts to strip back welfare-net policies in order to harm (primarily) black families are both arising from the same basic impulses of two imperialist nation-states. obviously there are different histories and contextual factors that have resulted in france and the US trying to skin the same cat in different ways. but what they share is an underlying interest in trying to shore up their population in both size and 'fitness', understood here in its full racialised and eugenic meaning.

[autonomystic]

“I learned that just beneath the surface there’s another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. I knew it as a kid, but I couldn’t find the proof. It was just a feeling. There is goodness in blue skies and flowers, but another force - a wild pain and decay - also accompanies everything.”

— David Lynch

[autonomystic]

“The natural social form of human existence that Marx wants to free from its subjection to the "tyranny of capital" is itself conflictual, torn apart; both happiness and unhappiness are possible in it. His liberation would not be access to an angelic world, but rather entry into a story in which the human being would live his own drama and not, as now, an alien drama that sacrifices him day by day and leads him, without his being able to intervene at all, to destruction.”

Bolivar Echeverria, “Use Value”: Ontology and Semiotics

[autonomystic]

Deborah Cook, Adorno, Foucault, and the Critique of the West:

Among other things, Adorno took from Hegel the idea that individuals are deeply affected by historical conditions, but he objected that Hegel went too far when he effectively identified individuals with these conditions. To be sure, when Hegel is read as an expression of the Zeitgeist, he was right in one sense – individuals are submerged under what Adorno often calls ‘the universal’: late capitalist society. Hegel’s idea of absolute spirit – a totality that allows nothing to escape – points to an important dimension of our current plight to the extent that it mirrors "the experience of the superior coercive force inherent in everything that exists by virtue of its consolidation under domination." Yet this idea is also untrue because the social integration of human beings is by no means total. Just as things always elude concepts, human beings remain nonidentical with respect to society. Indeed, the idea of nonidentity, derived from Hegel but wielded against his system, lies at the thematic core of Adorno’s work. Adorno insists that the "need to lend a voice to suffering is an expression of all truth." He also charges that Hegel (especially in his later work) tended to legitimate the suffering that our subordination to existing conditions has caused. Criticizing Hegel’s ‘theodicy’, Adorno objects that Hegel apologetically takes the side ‘of what exists’, thereby rationalizing human suffering. Furthermore, he rejects Hegel’s view that ‘failure, death and oppression are the inevitable essence of things’ to which individuals must simply submit. Against Hegel, Adorno argues that experiences like these are not just ‘avoidable’ but ‘criticizable’ because the course that history took was by no means a necessary one. The domination of human beings over the natural world, over other human beings and over themselves was neither inevitable nor predetermined. History’s trajectory could have been changed for the better at any time, and Adorno believes that it can still be changed in such a way that unnecessary suffering is eradicated.

[autonomystic]

“In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.”

—Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Proletarians and Communists,” The Communist Manifesto (1848)

[autonomystic]

“The erosion of communal child-rearing in America in favor of individualistic suburban spaceships means a good American is guaranteed their own miniature human to torture. Me and every child I met in these adjoining cells was their parent’s personal test subject. Rows and rows of artisinal micro-ideologies, waiting to send another fucked-up human into the world. Indeed, it could be posited that this is the true “cracking open a cold one with the boys”.”

— http://slimedaughter.com/games/twine/closest/

[autonomystic]

That the linen exists as value becomes manifest through its being equal to the coat, just like a Christian’s sheep-­like nature becomes manifest through his being equal to the Lamb of God.

Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1 (Reitter)

[autonomystic]

Has there been any interesting theory work by Chinese academics? Hard to know what’s new or rising there because of the language divide + choosiness in what gets translated

Yeah Zhang Yibing is great and unfortunately completely unknown in the West. He was important for introducing poststructuralism to China and now he’s known for his very good Marxology. Back to Marx is a great book for understanding Marx’s intellectual development. His book A Deep Plough is better than almost any Anglophone secondary literature I’ve read explaining authors like Adorno, Debord, or Baudrillard. He also makes an interesting connection of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics to Zhuangzi, especially on the topic of animals and nature.

The other popular stuff is usually just kind of China Can Say No kind of stuff or Hegelianism, sometimes both at the same time. Schmitt is also big in Chinese academia and gets fused with Hegelianism and nationalism which is basically just cooking up a Conservative Revolution for the Chinese setting. Like Jiang Shigong is borderline a fascist, if you’re familiar with Japanese Imperial era intellectual nationalism his way of thinking is almost identical to them. The main difference is they emphasized nature and the Emperor and the Chinese nationalists emphasize bureaucracy and a rules-based order. Wang Huning is the more moderate and mainstream representative of this kind of tendency

[autonomystic]

so are you pro or anti state

Anti state but not an anarchist. In the same way as Marx instead. Also with tithe caveat of how Gustav Landauer talked about the state, which I see as implicit in Marx from 1843 onwards:

A table can be overturned and a window can be smashed. However, those who believe that the state is also a thing or a fetish that can be overturned or smashed are sophists and believers in the Word. The state is a social relationship; a certain way of people relating to one another. It can be destroyed by creating new social relationships; i.e., by people relating to one another differently. The absolute monarch said: I am the state. We, who we have imprisoned ourselves in the absolute state, must realise the truth: we are the state! And we will be the state as long as we are nothing different; as long as we have not yet created the institutions necessary for a true community and a true society of human beings.

I think the overcoming of the state is part of the same process as overcoming capital, because they’re both part of the same process of “people relating to one another differently.” The state is not just a thing, a neutral instrument without any character of its own other than organized force in the abstract that can be passed between hands and used for any ends. Marx responded to this instrumentalist theory of the state by saying that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” Otherwise you end up with a substitutionist strategy, taking the decrees of the state-instrument to be equivalent to the self-activity of the workers in transforming the relations of their everyday lives.

Marx was not a statist, but neither was he an anarchist. Since for him the overcoming of class society was a political process, and in this process there would unavoidably be a role for a governmental force against the political representatives of the old society. But this doesn’t just mean having a professional army and bureaucracy and painting it red. That technique of representation and division of labor is something that fits a society where people just take on their social roles ready-made, passively. It isn’t something that fits a communist revolution, that’s about people collectively taking power over their own lives.

When Marx talked about the revolutionary and transitionary state, he famously said that it can “be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” This doesn’t mean dictatorship in the sense of a party or clique of technicians who do this on behalf of the class, but the rule of the class without the formalization of law or professional bureaucratic procedure. It’s the proletariat as a class organized as the ruling class of society, and their rule is tied to their self-abolition insofar as their goal is not to perfect a state machinery standing above society but to perfect techniques of self governance; “converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it.”

This is also how Lenin understood the dictatorship of the proletariat in The State and Revolution, but his instrumentalist theory of the state also became the justification for identifying a professional bureaucracy, a professional army, and a generalized system of rule of law with the political power of the proletariat. Theoretically, this was a conception of the state that he inherited from Karl Kautsky, and it expressed the continuity with Social-Democracy that practically appeared in the divorce of the republican state from the social content of the proletarian revolution. All while the Soviets as organs of power were marginalized until eventually becoming appendages of the central state machinery.

Because the state is not just an instrument, it’s a machine and way of living with its own autonomy. That’s why it stands above society and seems to stand above class struggle. That’s why in 1843, when Marx critiqued state-worship in the philosophy of Hegel and introduced the concept of the withering away of the state, he also critiqued the idea of the bureaucracy as a “universal” and neutral class. He said instead: “In the bureaucracy the identity of the state's interest and the particular private aim is established such that the state's interest becomes a particular private aim opposed to the other private aims.”

All of this Marx lore is to say that the instrumentalist concept is a theoretical expression stemming from a replication of the bureaucratic perspective, as it takes the state as genuinely universal and superhistorical in its neutrality (even if the instrumentalists claim the state will disappear once the bureaucrats purge enough bourgeoisie). Because the state has its own logical, historical, and social autonomy, the state as a form has to be struggled against actively and practically. This is central to how Marx thought about political strategy, and not exterior to it.

For more detailed critiques of the instrumentalist theory of the state, I would recommend reading State, Power, Socialism by Nicos Poulantzas, The Autonomy of the Political by Mario Tronti, The Marxist Theory of State and Law by Evgeny Pashukanis, and State, Space, World by Henri Lefebvre

[autonomystic]

Is Leibniz worth reading? I'll admit I find his biography fascinating but I can't tell whether or not his philosophy is of great importance.

Yes, he’s neglected too much. Somewhere Nietzsche makes the observation that Leibniz was one of the first to reverse the typical pattern of Western thinking about consciousness, that he distinguished consciousness from experience instead of identifying them and in the Monadology doesn’t assume that experience presupposes consciousness, most experience or perception in fact is unconscious.

This led Leibniz to have a much less dismissive attitude towards animals than the vast majority of Westerners, because he knew that they experience life and have their own perspectives even if some animals can’t be said to be “conscious” in the sense of reflecting on their experience. A jellyfish for example experiences but probably isn’t conscious.

But for Leibniz this came with the assumption that all souls (and for him, all living creatures have souls) are ultimately a multiplicity made from out of the single Mind of God. If you undermine his argument for that single Mind, it’s not hard to reach a kind of animism by means of the thinking Leibniz innovated in the West. This is pretty much what Nietzsche started to do. Interestingly, Marx also admired Leibniz, and you can see him argue for a Leibniz-influenced perspectivism in Notes on Wagner

[autonomystic]

“'The beginning of the slaves' revolt in morality occurs when ressentiment itself turns creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of those beings who, denied the proper response of action, compensate for it only with imaginary revenge. Whereas all noble morality grows out of a triumphant saying 'yes' to itself, slave morality says 'no' on principle to everything that is 'outside', other', 'non-self’: and this 'no' is its creative deed. This reversal of the evaluating glance—this essential orientation to the outside instead of back onto itself—is a feature of ressentiment: in order to come about, slave morality first has to have an opposing, external world, it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all,—its action is basically a reaction. The opposite is the case with the noble method of valuation: this acts and grows spontaneously, seeking out its opposite only so that it can say 'yes' to itself even more thankfully and exultantly,—its negative concept 'low', ‘common', 'bad' is only a pale contrast created after the event compared to its positive basic concept, saturated with life and passion, ‘we the noble, the good, the beautiful and the happy!' When the noble method of valuation makes a mistake and sins against reality, this happens in relation to the sphere with which it is not sufficiently familiar, a true knowledge of which, indeed, it rigidly resists: in some circumstances, it misjudges the sphere it despises, that of the common man, the rabble; on the other hand, we should bear in mind that the distortion which results from the feeling of contempt, disdain and superciliousness, always assuming that the image of the despised person is distorted, remains far behind the distortion with which the entrenched hatred and revenge of the powerless man attacks his opponent—in effigy of course. Indeed, contempt has too much negligence, nonchalance, complacency and impatience, even too much personal cheerfulness mixed into it, for it to be in a position to transform its object into a real caricature and monster.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche, “First Essay: ‘Good and Evil,’ ‘Good and Bad,’” On the Genealogy of Morals (1887)

"We said in our introduction that man was an affirmation. We shall never stop repeating it. Yes to life. Yes to love. Yes to generosity. But man is also a negation. No to man’s contempt. No to the indignity of man. To the exploitation of man. To the massacre of what is most human in man: freedom. Man’s behavior is not only reactional. And there is always ressentiment in reaction. Nietzsche had already said it in The Will to Power. To induce man to be actional, by maintaining in his circularity the respect of the fundamental values that make the world human, that is the task of utmost urgency for he who, after careful reflection, prepares to act."

—Frantz Fanon, "The Black Man and Recognition," Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

[autonomystic]

“Exceptionally gifted as a pedagogue, Kracauer made Kant come alive for me. Under his guidance I experienced the work from the beginning not as mere epistemology, not as an analysis of the conditions of scientifically valid judgments, but as a kind of coded text from which the historical situation of spirit could be read, with the vague expectation that in doing so one could acquire something of truth itself. If in my later reading of traditional philosophical texts I was not so much impressed by their unity and systematic consistency as I was concerned with the play of forces at work under the surface of every closed doctrine and viewed the codified philosophies as force fields in each case, it was certainly Kracauer who impelled me to do so. As he presented it to me, Kant's critical philosophy was not simply a system of transcendental idealism. Rather, he showed me how the objective-ontological and subjective-idealist moments warred within it, how the more eloquent passages in the work are the wounds this conflict has left in the theory. From a certain point of view, the fissures and flaws in a philosophy are more essential to it than the continuity of its meaning, which most philosophies emphasize of their own accord.”

Theodor Adorno, The Curious Realist: On Siegfried Kracauer

[autonomystic]

It would make no sense, then, to define gender as the cultural interpretation of sex, if sex itself is a gendered category. Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pregiven sex (a juridical conception); gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts.

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

[autonomystic]

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, 61. Court of Appeal:

Nietzsche in The Antichrist voiced the strongest argument not merely against theology but against metaphysics, that hope is mistaken for truth; that the impossibility of living happily, or even living at all, without the thought of an absolute, does not vouch for the legitimacy of that thought. He refutes the Christian 'proof by efficacy,' that faith is true because it brings felicity. For "could happiness - or more technically speaking, pleasure - ever be a proof of truth? So far from this, it almost proves the converse, at any rate it gives the strongest grounds for suspecting 'truth' whenever feelings of pleasure have had a say in the matter. The proof of pleasure is proof of: pleasure - nothing more; why in the world should true judgments cause more enjoyment than false ones and, in accordance with a preordained harmony, necessarily bring pleasant feelings in their train?" (Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ). But Nietzsche himself taught amor fati: thou shalt love thy fate. This, he says in the Epilogue to the Twilight of the Idols, was his innermost nature. We might well ask whether we have more reason to love what happens to us, to affirm what is because it is, than to believe true what we hope. Is it not the same false inference that leads from the existence of stubborn facts to their erection as the highest value, as he criticizes in the leap from hope to truth? If he consigns "happiness through an idée fixe" to the lunatic asylum, the origin of amor fati might be sought in a prison. Love of stone walls and barred windows is the last resort of someone who sees and has nothing else to love. Both are cases of the same ignominious adaptation which, in order to endure the world's horror, attributes reality to wishes and meaning to senseless compulsion. No less than in the credo quia absurdum, resignation bows down in the amor fati, the glorification of the absurdest of all things, before the powers that be. In the end hope, wrested from reality by negating it, is the only form in which truth appears. Without hope, the idea of truth would be scarcely even thinkable, and it is the cardinal untruth, having recognized existence to be bad, to present it as truth simply because it has been recognized. Here, rather than in the opposite, lies the crime of theology that Nietzsche arraigned without ever reaching the final court. In one of the most powerful passages of his critique he charges Christianity with mythology: "The guilt sacrifice, in its most repulsive and most barbaric form: the sacrifice of the innocent for the sins of the guilty! What appalling paganism!" Nothing other, however, is love of fate, the absolute sanctioning of an infinity of such sacrifice. Myth debars Nietzsche's critique of myth from truth.

[autonomystic]

lowkey think a lot of us Asians who are so attached to the cultural Christianity idea as like a definitive rejection of atheism—-as though we don’t have strong traditions of rejection of religion & it’s consequences—-have, for all our outrage, fully bought into the Orientalist idea of us (or agreed with it out of our own traditions) and can’t separate our very existence from our religious identity. what would we have to be proud of if we abandon spirituality? sanatan, the creative being is perennial, right? we’ve always been like this, how dare you. “we have nothing else”, and you’re so wrong it’s sad.

[autonomystic]

ok. so. baby's first moral philosophy in war. moral consequentialism apparently demands not fighting any war where you don’t have as many weapons as the other side. but first of all that denies like? actual history especially because we have a history of so called unwinnable wars where under resourced sides beat more powerful ones, specifically in anti colonial contexts vietnam, algeria etc. there is a whole philosophy and history of tactics for the underdog which even dilettantes like me know. like you can do a careful analysis of palestinian firepower and conclude that now was not the right time, but you certainly cannot conclude that the time for palestine is never. if you choose to only fight when you can match in conventional firepower, you also lose the opportunity to economically weaken the powerful state. holding fire till you believe you can win every objective is a very short termist view. war is a long theater.

not all people who recognise the value of anti colonial liberation movements do it bc they're idealists who valorise the power of doing the right thing. conceding the possibility of winning before trying to win is conceding that the powerful only get more powerful and we should just leave them to it. sadly for you nietschzean freaks, history proved you false. why don't you advocate for the rights of kings?