autonomystic

[autonomystic]

Personally of course I regret everything. Not a word, not a deed, not a thought, not a need, not a grief, not a joy, not a girl, not a boy, not a doubt, not a trust, not a scorn, not a lust, not a hope, not a fear, not a smile, not a tear, not a name, not a face, no time, no place, that I do not regret, exceedingly. An ordure, from beginning to end.

Samuel Beckett, Watt

[autonomystic]

The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately. In short, it reverses the principle of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions - to enclose, to deprive of light, and to hide - it preserves only the first and eliminates the other two. Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap.

Foucault, “Panopticism,” Discipline and Punish

The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves, but rather force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, or ever rarer, the thing that might be worth saying.

Deleuze, “Mediators,” Negotiations

[autonomystic]

something pleasant is that the gospel of judas repeatedly records jesus laughing. i remember being v struck by ishmael reed noting in mumbo jumbo, i think via papa labas but maybe herman, that the canonical jesus never laughs, its hard to even imagine it. the laughing jesus is less significant to me as a more human portrayal (the gospel of judas describes him as “from the deathless realm of the aeon of Barbelo, the holy source of all”) more for the kinda rupture in a spiritual discourse or gnosis it might represent, a sorta glossalia beyond communication

[autonomystic]

Adorno, Minima Moralia

[autonomystic]

Wherever abundant consumption is established, one particular spectacular opposition is always in the forefront of illusory roles: the antagonism between youth and adults. But real adults—people who are masters of their own lives—are in fact nowhere to be found. And a youthful transformation of what exists is in no way characteristic of those who are now young; it is present solely in the economic system, in the dynamism of capitalism. It is things that rule and that are young, vying with each other and constantly replacing each other.

guy debord, the society of the spectacle, translated by ken knabb

[autonomystic]

My point is that there is a teleology—a theory about how intellectual property law must develop historically—hidden inside the argument I call the Internet Threat. The argument, which is touted endlessly by the content industries—and not without reason—can be reduced to this: The strength of intellectual property rights must vary inversely with the cost of copying. With high copying costs, one needs weak intellectual property rights if any at all. To deal with the monk-copyist, we need no copyright because physical control of the manuscript is enough. What does it matter if I say I will copy your manuscript, if I must do it by hand? How will this present a threat to you? There is no need to create a legal right to exclude others from copying, no need for a “copy right.” As copying costs fall, however, the need to exclude increases. To deal with the Gutenberg press, we need the Statute of Anne—the first copyright statute—and the long evolution of copyright it ushered in.

But then comes the Internet. To deal with the Internet, we need the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the No Electronic Theft Act, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, and perhaps even the Collections of Information Antipiracy Act. As copying costs approach zero, intellectual property rights must approach perfect control. We must strengthen the rights, lengthen the term of the rights, increase the penalties, and make noncommercial illicit copying a crime. We must move outside the traditional realm of copyright altogether to regulate the technology around the copyrighted material. Companies are surrounding their digital materials with digital fences. We must make it a violation of the law to cut those digital fences, even if you do so to make a “fair use” of the material on the other side. We must prohibit the making of things that can be used as fence-cutters—a prospect that worries researchers on encryption. In the long run, we must get rid of the troublesome anonymity of the Internet, requiring each computer to have an individual ID. We must make click-wrap contracts enforceable, even on third parties, even when you cannot read them before clicking—so that you never actually buy the software, music, movies, and e-books you download, merely “license” them for a narrowly defined range of uses. We must create interlocking software and hardware systems that monitor and control the material played on those systems—so that songs can be licensed to particular computers at particular times. Uses that the owners wish to forbid will actually be impossible, whether they are legal or not.

In other words, we must make this technology of the Internet, which was hailed as the great “technology of freedom,” into a technology of control and surveillance. The possibility of individuals circulating costless perfect digital copies requires it. It would be facile (if tempting) to say we must remake the Internet to make it safe for Britney Spears. The “Internet Threat” argument is that we must remake the Net if we want digital creativity—whether in music or software or movies or e-texts. And since the strength of the property rights varies inversely with the cost of copying, costless copying means that the remade Net must approach perfect control, both in its legal regime and its technical architecture.

James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, pp. 60-62

[autonomystic]

not really interested in a feminism that cedes the territory of desirability and sex and relationships with heterosexual men. this is the location of violence and abuse, of appropriated labour, of the reproduction of attitudes of social control, of the narrowing of autonomy, of sex work. just because other people have a hard time with sexual liberation and still fantasise about lesbian separatism doesn't mean that a robust feminism is impossible and we should just abandon the sphere. like the simplest and most early of feminist challenges to liberalism was the notion that the private sphere that was exempted from the considerations of freedom and public examination. that we didn't need to talk about the homestead from discussions of and family where the patriarch did and could control and abuse its dependents was worth reexamining materially and morally.

[autonomystic]

The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger's slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use—these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch.

— Edward Hallett Carr, "The Historian and His Facts," in What is History?

[autonomystic]

“You have to be ready for the upheaval, you do not know when the upheaval is coming. The upheaval does not need a party. The upheaval is an eruption of the people. You cannot arrange that. You can make tremendous mistakes. You may think it is twenty years away, as Lenin did. It was only a few days away.”

— C.L.R. James, “Walter Rodney and the Question of Power”

[autonomystic]

“Liberalism…is often successful in preempting the debate by reformulating quarrels and conflicts with liberalism, so that they appear to have become debates within liberalism […] The so-called conservatism and so-called radicalism in these contemporary guises are in general mere stalking-horses for liberalism: the contemporary debates within modern political systems are almost exclusively between conservative liberals, liberal liberals, and radical liberals. There is little place in such political systems for the criticism of the system itself, that is, for putting liberalism in question.” 

— Alasdair MacIntyre: Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

[autonomystic]

As long as there are songs of foolish pleasure, there will be songs of foolish pain.

[autonomystic]

instead of various pamphlets of Engels being annoying, I really highly recommend Paul North's introduction to the new translation of Capital Volume I, I think a new reader would get a lot out of it. it's really nicely written, and it introduces you to a lot of the critical concepts and intellectual background for Marx ("materialism," some discussion of "dialectical method", the role of abstraction, the spiral structure/capital as "motion", Marx's various influences) without being overwhelming or like overreliant on these elements. the intro is always directed at equipping you to engage with the book with a critical eye. good balance of being respectful of the reader's capabilities while also inviting them to learn more.

[autonomystic]

I think people don’t often enough appreciate the development in Marx’s thought away from the theory in the communist manifesto that capitalism is a demystifying force and towards his mature theory of fetishism that sees capitalism as inherently mystifying in its very form/structure

[autonomystic]

❄️entropy

that it’s written into reality, deeper than any physical law, that Darkness and Decay and Death will hold illimitable dominion over all - is incredibly sad. at least no hell can last forever either

[autonomystic]

The Vatican has gotta be like a top 10 most hateable institution on earth

[autonomystic]

The finite, limited human being, the individual of bourgeois society, is disappearing. People are passionately calling for the liberated human being, a being who is at once a social being and a Gemeinwesen. But at present it is capital that is recomposing man, giving him form and matter; communal being comes in the form of collective worker, individuality in the form of consumer of capital. Since capital is indefinite it allows the human being to have access to a state beyond the finite in an infinite becoming of appropriation which is never realized, renewing at every instant the illusion of total blossoming. The human being in the image of capital ceases to consider any event definitive, but as an instant in an infinite process. Enjoyment is allowed but is never possible. Man becomes a sensual and passive voyeur, capital a sensual and suprasensual being. Human life ceases to be a process and becomes linear. Aspired by the process of capital, man can no longer be “himself.” This aspiration evacuates him, creating a vacuum which he must continually satisfy with representations (capital). More generally, capital in process secures its domination by making every process linear. Thus it breaks the movement of nature, and this leads to the destruction of nature. But if this destruction might endanger its own process, capital adapts itself to nature (by anti-pollution, for example). The non-living becomes autonomous — and triumphs. Death in life: Hegel had intuited it, Nietzsche described it, Rainer Maria Rilke sang about it, Freud almost institutionalized it (the death instinct), Dada exhibited it as buffoon art, and the “fascists” exalted it: “Long live death.”

—Jacques Camatte, “Despotism of Capital,” The Wandering of Humanity (1973)

[autonomystic]

I see you talking about the homogenization of people within capitalism a bit and it has been on my mind while reading Capital, and I am trying to connect that to what I know of the marxian critique of political economy so far whilst having only cursory dispositional knowledge on what it is that you mean. Is that ‘homogenization’ by way of a fait accompli of social structure in subordination to producing material wealth for its bearing of exchange-value (as all production is advanced in accordance to that useful quantum of realizable exchange-value and not for the usefulness of the produced articles themselves in their usefulness) that people for their labor-power function are reduced to depositors of abstract labor? And what is it in an ideological sense?

Yeah, and in an ideological sense that typically appears in the concept of legal equality or equality as implying sameness. Before he got into the critique of political economy, Marx had critiques this ideology in his polemics on Jewish emancipation with Bruno Bauer. In the 1844 manuscripts, he also critiques what he calls crude communism for conflating communism with equalization. He continued this critique of equality and moral communism all the way through The Poverty of Philosophy, Capital, Critique of the Gotha Programme etc.

Peter Hudis covers this pretty well in his book Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism. He was not a fan of Christian leveling at all. In fact in the part of Capital discussing religion as the reflection of the world, he says Christianity’s concept of the abstract equality of everyone as a human being (as a human soul specifically) is what made it very well fit for a capitalist society. I think for Marxists who I consider to have picked up this theme and explained it pretty well later, I would recommend Mario Tronti’s Towards a Critique of Political Democracy