#dialectical criticism

[theadaptableeducator]

Beyond Exploitation: A Jamesonian Critique and the Path to Eco-Socialism

Fredric Jameson, a prominent Marxist theorist, offers a profound critique of contemporary society through his analyses of culture, politics, and economics. By drawing on his theories, we can explore the interconnectivity and unsustainability of colonialism, nationalism, imperialism, and capitalism, and then propose a sustainable alternative system. Interconnectivity and…

[utilitycaster]

I am always thinking about Brennan's comment in the latest WBN fireside, about how a lot of GM word choices in their descriptions at least are intended to be evocative and not literal (for more context see Taylor Moore, sound designer and editor, despairing here) and I've made a similar argument in the past about accents - that an RP accent, for example, isn't specifically intended to mean "all people who have this are from the same place" but rather "all people who have this are of a certain class and education level."

With that said, with the names "Caeluma" and "Vaterra" and their clear Latin roots (and, frankly, the use of "Imperium" rather than "Empire") Matt could simply be evoking antiquity and, well, empire; but this could also indicate that at one point the lingua franca of Ruidus was closer to that of Aeorian (Latinate) than Common (modern English), either because of a shared history from when Ruidus was taken from Exandria, or because those were the dreams they were experiencing. (For that matter - was Aeorian, or a precursor, once the equivalent of Common on Exandria?)

[heretherebedork]

The problem with Mut is that he is a MAME seme and that means he is both absolutely perfect (when he is not with his love interest before they get together) and then an absolute ass with his love interest (before they get together). Which creates an unpleasant dichotomy that makes me uncomfortable because it is basically 'people who are good to others but awful to you are just in love with you and will only get better if you trust them!' and like... I hate it.

[leonardalphachurch]

okay last thing i say about this but. i do want to be clear that wash and carolina are not canonically siblings and if you call shipping them incest you are also incredibly fucking annoying and i don’t want you here either.

like honestly i love carwash siblings but i don’t actually see their canon relationship as familial i think they’re just. friends. i think that kind of goes into the whole issue of like… men and women can’t just be friends you need to explain it away in some way. they’re dating or they’re siblings etc etc. i think actually they are platonically best friends and that this is awesome actually.

[aeoris4lovers]

texts from the mighty nein part two: thelyss brothers boogaloo

[more texts from the xhorhoes groupchat]

[thirdity]

The parallel between the abstruseness of contemporary art and that of modern science is too obvious to be missed. Another likeness to the scientific culture is the history-mindedness of contemporary art. The most interesting works of contemporary art are full of references to the history of the medium; so far as they comment on past art, they demand a knowledge of at least the recent past. As Harold Rosenberg has pointed out, contemporary paintings are themselves acts of criticism as much as of creation. The point could be made as well of much recent work in the films, music, the dance, poetry, and (in Europe) literature. Again, a similarity with the style of science — this time, with the accumulative aspect of science — can be discerned.

Susan Sontag, "One Culture and the New Sensibility"

[lesewut]

The "Dialectic of Enlightenment", written by Marx Horkheimer (1895 - 1973) and Theodor W. Adorno (1903 - 1969) and first published by Querido in Amsterdam in 1947, is one of the most important texts of 20th century critical theory. Philosophical criticism, an examination of fascism and the results of many years of empirical research in the USA merge here to form a theory of mass culture that is still astonishingly relevant 75 years later. The authors and scholars of the Frankfurt School draw attention to the flipside of technical and social progress: Enlightenment as the rule of reason and the subjugation of nature for human purposes.

"Dialectic of Enlightenment" was written during World War II, a time of immense social and political upheaval. The authors aimed to understand how the Enlightenment, which was supposed to bring about reason, freedom, and progress, had instead led to new forms of domination, totalitarianism, and barbarism.

The central thesis is that the Enlightenment, while aiming to liberate humanity from myth and superstition through reason, has paradoxically resulted in new forms of oppression and unfreedom. This dialectical process means that progress and regression are intertwined. The authors propose that myth and Enlightenment are not opposites but rather interconnected. The Enlightenment's attempt to demystify the world has resulted in a new form of myth, where science and technology are worshipped without critical reflection, leading to a new form of domination.

Horkheimer and Adorno's work is a powerful critique of modernity and a call to rethink the promises and pitfalls of the Enlightenment.

[blueiight]

Hegel’s [belief that] Africans supposedly exist at the lowest level of consciousness – immediate sensuousness – which is why he claims that Africa lies outside history. According to Hegel, it’s only by encountering the West and enduring slavery that Africa enters into the dialectical process of consciousness and thus world history. Hegel therefore surmises that it is both necessary and just that Africa be subjected to slavery and colonization.[19] Hegel selected and deployed details from Bowditch’s account to fit with his theoretical apriorism of Africa as a place without history. This is representative of Hegel’s academic practice, in that he looked into books written about African societies and found what he was looking for, even when this meant willful misinterpretation to construct an absurdly fictional account of African society that is steeped in popular beliefs of his time about the continent’s supposed backwardness. Hegel’s ludicrous theorizing barred him from ever admitting Africa and its people to ‘history’ as he construed it. For a continent which supposedly has no “historical interest of its own”, Hegel devoted a great deal of attention to it, primarily because Hegel’s glorification of Europe was predicated on his denigration of Africa.[20]

link

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: James Lindsay

Published: Jun 7, 2024

From the woman (pretending to be male) who was the Satanic designer whose work led in part to the gigantic Target boycott last year: "transitioning is alchemy." I would like to discuss this Socially Gnostic/Hermetic statement in some depth to clarify what gender ideology does.

The first thing to understand is the term "alchemy." Alchemy is a magical process with particular metaphysical commitments beneath it. The basic idea is believing that some essential substance can be transmuted into some other essential substance, but it goes deeper than this. 

Alchemy rests on a metaphysical commitment to a kind of Gnostic and Neoplatonic dualism that sees true substances as divine and physical/real substances not just as mundane but as fallen, vulgar, and contaminated. Alchemy is an esoteric process of freeing the divine from the Fall 

"Transitioning is alchemy" is therefore a statement referencing a fundamentally spiritualist belief that there is a true substance to the person that is being liberated from its fallen form, which imprisons it, through a magical process of transmutation. It is (dark) magical. 

Perhaps the greatest contemporary expositor on alchemy is George Soros, who explains that its purpose is "operational success." He claims alchemy doesn't obtain in the physical sciences; only in the social sciences, which should be called "social alchemy."

This point from Soros is incredibly important to understanding the phenomena of "gender transition" and "transgender," thus bearing on all of "gender ideology," which is a shorthand for "a critical constructivist ideology of gender." 

First, note that Soros identifies social alchemy explicitly as a dialectical process, which locates it not only in the same current as Marxism but also in the Hermeticism (Gnostic occult belief) I already suggested. That's a challenging term, but we can make sense of it. 

A good lay definition for "dialectical" would be "blending truths and lies for operational purposes." That is, it's manipulating people's understanding of a circumstance so that they'll adopt actionable beliefs with political consequences. It explicitly relies upon distortions. 

Soros says explicitly that what moves history isn't truth but the difference between truth and what people actually believe (or can be led to believe). That is, he says history moves through "fertile fallacies," i.e., politically productive errors or lies. 

Social alchemy is therefore achieved in the following way: Conditions are set to lead significant numbers of people to believe a politically actionable lie (or set of lies) so that they then act upon them. The lie then becomes consensus or convention, i.e., socially "true." 

You will notice, of course, that this is the same method and purpose of propaganda as infamously explained by Joseph Goebbels. The idea is that a lie repeated often enough gets treated as true. This process has been called "social reification" or "legitimation by paralogy." 

There's a lot here, but what it all tells us is that the point of gender ideology isn't individual transition; it's *social transmutation*. It has little or nothing to do with the individual in question, who is little more than a wedge to transform social beliefs and attitudes. 

Put more plainly: unlike the older practice of transsexualism, which was/is individual, *your participation is required* in transgenderism. In transgenderism, what matters is what people will accept and believe about the "transgender" person. Transmutation is a social thing. 

In other words, just like Soros indicated, the alchemy of gender transition is a social phenomenon. It is not an individual process that obtains in physical reality; it is a social process that obtains in social "reality" through social reification/legitimation by paralogy. 

That means that "gender transition" is a matter of people believing "gender transition" is a real thing, which is to say that it isn't a "transgender" person daring to live in the world but one forcing everyone else to live in a world that doesn't exist. That's a big difference. 

The foundational literature in Queer Theory, (Foucauldian) Sexuality Theory, Feminist Theory, etc., all attests to this understanding. The "soul" (divine part) is not imprisoned by the body so much as the body is imprisoned by the soul. That's Foucault's and Butler's view. 

What it refers to is the idea that one's soul (who you are) is actually a social phenomenon, a constructed part of the broader Geist (dialectical Spirit) of society. Bulter's view (following Foucault) is that the Geist constrains the soul so that it is "scripted" onto the body. 

That is, people do with their bodies what they believe they are supposed to do with their bodies. If they are male, society (Spirit) tells them to present as masculine (soul), so they live and present that way (body). Hence "sex assigned at birth." 

Critical constructivists believe every phenomenon is the result of social reification. A doctor "assigns sex at birth" and then society, "obsessed with genitals," creates conditions that socially reinforce expectations about one's sex/gender in a giant society-wide drag show. 

They also believe that by adopting critical constructivism ("Woke"), a person can see through this imprisoning dynamic and set the divine part of themselves free from the "controlled" set of social expectations (cf. Demiurge and his archons). It's a Gnostic Cult. 

The point isn't to see through it (understand society), though. It's to transmute society (change it!). That is, the point is to use "gender transition" to force society to accept and socially reify the critical constructivist ideology of gender under "gender transition." 

That's the alchemy, and it happens SOCIALLY. Again: your participation is REQUIRED.

Their view is that since all reality is socially reified reality, they should seize the means of production of social reification to maximize spiritual liberation of imprisoned souls. 

"Transitioning is alchemy" is deadly serious, then, as visualized with the skeletal artwork at the top. It is also inherently totalitarian, requiring mass "ideological remolding" to create the social reification necessary for it to be "socially real" ("valid"). 

This is the "gender ideology" (oc)cult religion, which requires universal belief.

Again, it isn't about "transgender" people daring to live in the world. It's about using "transgender" people to force everyone to live in a world that doesn't exist. 

Incidentally, this also explains in part why Leftism always produces radically ugly presentations in people, which is a tragedy. By presenting their fallen, vulgar form as ugly and degenerate, they seek to force you to recognize the divine part within themselves. 

[nullcoast]

Hmm it's almost like gender is a construct so getting into minutia arguments about microlabels is a complete fucking waste of time and an expression of extreme ignorance. almost like the million different ways queerness has been expressed all contradicting eachother for hundreds of years is for a reason and they all equally have important things to say about HUMAN EXPRESSION

[silverity]

read hegel and transition already you broad

Some passages from Marx on idealism and Hegel:

— It is not the consciousness of men that determines their social being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

— It depends not on consciousness, but on being; not on thought, but on life; it depends on the individual's empirical development and manifestation of life, which in turn depends on the conditions existing in the world.

— Since the Young Hegelians consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products of consciousness, to which they attribute an independent existence, as the real chains of men... it is evident that the Young Hegelians have to fight only against these illusions of consciousness. Since, according to their fantasy, the relationships of men, all their doings, their chains and their limitations are products of their consciousness, the Young Hegelians logically put to men the moral postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human, critical or egoistic consciousness, and thus of removing their limitations. This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way, i.e. to recognise it by means of another interpretation. The Young-Hegelian ideologists, in spite of their allegedly “world-shattering" statements, are the staunchest conservatives. The most recent of them have found the correct expression for their activity when they declare they are only fighting against “phrases.” They forget, however, that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world.

— The social structure and the State are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals, but of individuals, not as they may appear in their own or other people’s imagination, but as they really are... The ideas which these individuals form are ideas either about their relation to nature or about their mutual relations or about their own nature. It is evident that in all these cases their ideas are the conscious expression – real or illusory – of their real relations and activities, of their production, of their intercourse, of their social and political conduct. The opposite assumption is only possible if in addition to the spirit of the real, materially evolved individuals a separate spirit is presupposed. If the conscious expression of the real relations of these individuals is illusory, if in their imagination they turn reality upside-down, then this in its turn is the result of their limited material mode of activity and their limited social relations arising from it.

— The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun.

[khizuo]

i feel like i can't yet claim the label marxist bc i haven't read enough theory... but how do i indicate to ppl that i generally agree with decolonial marxism lol

[drpepperisthedarlingofmysoul]

hc that despite being raised in America Ty has a relatively english accent

[theresa-of-liechtenstein]

man i’m still so hung up on the way that this professor handled music in the philippines. there were Choices made and though i agreed with a few of them, i found most of them straight up fucking baffling and it was disheartening to not feel heard or invited to contribute to the discussion despite this subject matter being uhhhhhhh my fucking lived experience just because i didn’t pay a twenty dollar membership fee to the fil-am org

[bellshazes]

this is probably much below you but when i see your posts on narrative as constructed by editing i remember etho's sl episode where he says "i love you" to joel. in any other pov, you get that scott suggested joel as his target; etho edits that bit out, making it look like his (character's) independent decision. the narrative you construct as a viewer is entirely different between those!

gonna be honest man, it's a bit upsetting to think someone could look at what I write and blog about and feel I would think anyone else as being below me. anything engaging in good faith could not be, when i am receiving a gift of being heard and responded to. and if you're saying that because you're just used to putting yourself down, maybe take this as a reminder that other people would have to be cruel to think of you badly by default?

and I wanted to say that specifically because I'm gonna nitpick briefly: the audience doesn't construct narrative; we interpret it, and derive meaning from it. narrative is the substance of a story as well as the manner in which it's told. but you are so right in your general point and sense of joy at this - understanding that there can be multiple contradictory narratives, that a narrative is subjective, that all performance done knowingly is edited in post or in what one chooses to do in the moment, etc. does open up the possibilities of interpretation. & we don't have to pretend our interpretation IS the narrative! They interrelate, but audience interpretation doesn't need to be the unified narrative to be legitimate. It doesn't even need to be static or precise at all.

[grandhotelabyss]

—Masha Tupitsyn, "Recovering the Cosmic: A Conversation Between Masha Tupitsyn and Emmalea Russo"

(For background, please see the last time I cited Tupitsyn on here, in December of 2021.)