#postmodern sociology

[frail-simulacra]

“Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more stage, no more theatre, no more illusions, when everything becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication.”

Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication

[omegaphilosophia]

Aspects of the Philosophy of Postmodernism

Postmodernism is a philosophical and cultural movement that emerged in the mid-20th century, characterized by skepticism towards grand narratives, a rejection of absolute truths, and an emphasis on the subjective nature of reality. It challenges traditional notions of truth, reason, and authority, advocating for diversity, inclusivity, and the recognition of multiple perspectives. Postmodernism has had a significant influence on various fields, including literature, art, architecture, sociology, and philosophy, shaping debates on identity, power, and representation.

Some theories in the philosophy of postmodernism include:

Deconstruction: Developed by Jacques Derrida, deconstruction seeks to uncover the inherent contradictions and binary oppositions within texts and discourses, challenging the notion of stable meanings and revealing the fluidity of language.

Cultural Critique: Postmodernism often involves a critical examination of dominant cultural norms and practices, questioning established hierarchies, power structures, and modes of representation.

Relativism: Postmodernism often embraces relativistic perspectives, asserting that truth and meaning are not fixed but are instead contingent upon cultural, historical, and individual contexts.

Social Constructivism: Postmodernism emphasizes the role of social constructs in shaping our understanding of reality, arguing that knowledge and truth are socially constructed rather than objectively given.

Pluralism: Postmodernism advocates for the recognition and celebration of diversity, encouraging openness to multiple perspectives, identities, and experiences.

Skepticism: Postmodernism is characterized by a skeptical attitude towards meta-narratives or grand narratives that claim to provide universal truths or explanations of history and society.

Irony and Playfulness: Postmodernism often employs irony, parody, pastiche, and other playful techniques to subvert traditional forms of representation and challenge established norms.

Hybridity and Fragmentation: Postmodernism acknowledges the fragmentation and hybridity of contemporary culture, embracing the mixing of diverse cultural influences, styles, and forms.

Interdisciplinarity: Postmodernism encourages interdisciplinary approaches to knowledge production, drawing on insights from various fields such as literature, art, philosophy, sociology, and cultural studies.

Postcolonialism: Postmodernism intersects with postcolonial theory, which examines the legacies of colonialism and imperialism, critiquing Eurocentric perspectives and advocating for decolonization and cultural diversity.

[vysokitekhnolohii]

Why you (might) like Baudrillard (ft. GRÆYS)

Almost everything that follows is just a reduced and free interpretation of what Adam said in one of his podcasts on the topic of Core Theory.

GRÆYS mentions that nature constantly challenges us and if we are unable to respond to this challenge we resort to extermination of nature. Lack of knowledge and inability to respond adequately forces us to set ourselves up for extermination, for eradication, for substitution of the natural. And this extrapolates to all scales, not only of the biosphere itself, but also in the perspective of the social. And initially the mass of the social does not know, does not understand the natural, because there is nothing to base it on. All terms, concepts, knowledge, all this must be constantly extracted from discourse. This can be extracted for example from Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Later on, saying, "Hey you, do you know what book I just read? IT'S A WORK OF GENIUS!" As soon as understanding comes, as soon as you manage to climb the next step, it is worthwhile to stay silent about what cannot be said and what can be said. So Baudrillard talks about these things. For example, the extraction of all sorts of terms such as SYMBOLIC and SIMULATION should be done using the terminology of contemporary discourse. Even if only by staying within the binary mindset. Because it is as natural as having everyday concerns. Concerns that require a final decision, like fundamental concepts - definitions. For example, decisions like the ones my grandfather made when he was hungry. Decisions to exterminate animals or other people because he had orders and the map is more important than the territory. It is interesting that the idea of extermination of the other is very similar to the idea of a final solution to our philosophical questions, because, like the idea of extermination, it indicates a potential solution, namely the hypothetical eradication and neutralization of all terms/concepts. Not in the sense of their direct annihilation, which is not even potentially possible, but in the sense of creating more and more complex and sophisticated discursive systems and discrete categories. Which, thank heavens, will use algorithms similar to those we invented for computers or for socially acceptable behavior. But not all algorithms lead us to the right solutions, to neutralization. Sometimes they even harm us, which brings us back to Nietzsche and his hatred of alcohol, which, in his opinion, made people forget about their problems and let them live with them when they should have been solving them. Accepting them is the first step to solving them. There is nothing wrong with deciding to soothe oneself with meditation and prayer, there is no evil in mindfulness and self-soothing as there is in acceptance. All of these things are very important.

GRÆYS goes on to talk about his fundamental decision to use the term challenge instead of need in psychological discourse. When someone hears about social neglect and the needs of clients, GRÆYS tells them that there is no such thing as need/necessity. Although they are sometimes mistakenly accepted as the answer to the challenges of nature, they are still superficial. And the acceptance takes place once because of the impossibility to find an adequate solution to the challenges of nature, and turned into a habit later. In the end it turns out that I am not looking for the final solution-answer to my daily challenges, because it is not about animal satisfaction, not about banal survival. After all, if your ultimate goal is survival, it is equivalent to death. After all, the dead don't let their lives go to waste. And even survival filled with beauty and beauty is like death, if there is not the slightest notion of beauty in favor of superficial repetition of other people's ideas. This superficiality is repeated wherever one hears stories about Darwinism, about popular music, about diets, about politics and the like. By accepting, without checking, such answers to your personal insignificant questions, you from yourself and start to believe that this is reality. A reality where you have an operating system organized around Darwinian evolutionary psychology, structural realism, or some other conflict theory such as Marxist. Then the concepts/terms used in one of the conflict theories to which you have emerged becomes the operating material of your reality in which you have the desire to discuss material conditions, trauma or gestalts, social inequality, national interests, military strategies. Baudrillard calls all those with whom this happens peasants, because it is all extremely stupid.

The symbolic part of the system begins to manifest itself as answers to the questions of what life is. Unfortunately the inability to be in uncertainty for any length of time, and the restless desire to grasp for facts, reason, ordering and exploration, forces us to turn the entire natural world into straight lines. Forcing us to make decisions based primarily on negative potential. Seeing that everything around us is dirty and dangerous, we actualize the ultimate decision to exterminate the natural world, to turn it into a shopping mall where it will be sterile and safe. And this is extrapolated to everything else. For example, profit through human exploitation or the destruction of some societies by others. But the uncertainties that arise from such things are not at all like those caused by a failure to understand nature, but by the resulting sociality. And social uncertainty is uncertainty within something else and so on. It is radical otherness. So even from military theory we can get the idea of asymmetry/dualism/binary oppositions, but not in the sense of a standing army fighting guerrillas, but the asymmetry of social norms. In fact everything that has not been taken from nature under the governance of the Divine has an asymmetry of norms in relation to each other and is nothing but a manifestation of art that speaks to people differently.

And even if I say I like freedom and you say you like freedom, it's silly to think we agree on anything, because I think freedom is directly contradictory to what freedom is for you. This all goes back very deeply, even to Shelley and earlier to epic poetry, in which various people put forward these ideas of freedom and others disagreed with them. But now these ideas are all over the place and they're invoked every day in discussions about the state of the country and it turns out that now we want to fight over who is the true embodiment of freedom or whatever, some people will say science is on their side, others will say beauty and all that.

It's like if you killed your enemy and ate his brain you could master the word "freedom", the word "science", the word "self" and that would give you power. Because now everybody who invests in science will have to go through you because you're the one who protects science, you're the one who protects reason or whatever. But why is it that for you, as an individual, as a person, these things become something whole and real? From that perspective, it's like andrew tate, the mormon church, it's like wokism. It's like all sorts of these bubble communities. They form discourses that have internal consistency and coherence only within themselves. Unfortunately, the original ideas are quickly exterminated, the community is entropized, development stagnates, and the desire to engage with deep symbolic issues goes away. Some do not, and from the very beginning they want to stay at the level of discussing human rights, discussing whether the traditional way is good, and discussing ways to return to it. David Hume argued long before all this that the future is not like the past. But even tradition is a form of modernity in the minds of people comparing it with what has gone before, not the Greek dark ages, but for example with the golden age.

They are just as superficially satisfied with the notion that humans have literally only been breeding for thousands of years, and then they suddenly invented religions and books and everything else. During the Axial Age, there was nothing, n-o-t-h-i-n-g, and that's what modernity is. The traditions invented at that time were mostly about responding to the challenges of the time.

GRÆYS says he would agree that we are in the end times that religions talk about. In Transparency of Evil, Baudrillard argues that in the absence of a new political strategy, we are all screwed, since apocalypse is present in homeopathic doses in all of us. That it's not a matter of group against group. That world war, that crisis, catastrophe, epidemic, cataclysm, this and that goes through the heart of every human being. And this is connected with an inner jihad (as an abstract idea, because Integral Traditionalism is denied in every possible way), this is Gnosis, but know that Baudrillard is anti-mystical. It's nice to agree with Baudrillard when he talks about the beyond, but I'm not sure how he would feel about Neoplatonism or the representatives of Kalam. And it is his non-obviousness that is remarkable. As Baudrillard is for the same reason he is the antidote to Marx, he calls us post-capitalists. In The Mirror of Production, he suggests that we may never have been in the mode of production. Because of our tendency to taxonomize/periodize history we would want to invent categories, we would want to distinguish between things, and we have always done that. It is wrong to create categories about the past, they should be created about the future, but we have this approach because of science, which categorizes everything post facto. If you think about it, science is the most common official position on anything, the universal answer to skepticism. But we have had time to taste the fruit of the solutions science offers us, with an unimaginable amount of care or control of our senses. But that doesn't help the apocalypse in our hearts, driving us even further into fear and uncertainty. Deprives us of the ability to sit for even a moment in the mess, with our intuition, the primal you-know-sensual nature of emotions, the deepest of our intentions. Baudrillard it is as if he is standing over us, with tears in his eyes.

Baudrillard is kind of a prophet of our time. He talks about all this, about trans-economy, about trans-sexuality, talks about trans-history, points out that everything has gone wrong. That all the areas we had/have success in, except for the Divine (where we fucked up even more), that it's not even close to being possible to talk about any success after we fucked up so badly with colonialization, with the world war. He's saying it's as if they never happened at all. Again, though, Baudrillard is multifaceted. He has other places where he says that the fantasy of reality is a historically conditioned thing, like the whole idea of reality is so old, it's like two hundred years old. And now it's going away again.

In places where you can disagree with Baudrillard, you should take things more broadly than he does, like where Baudrillard says NO, CLONING, then expand and say YES, CLONING IS. You can understand him, because he was born in 1920 and he was from the "silent generation" and it was already hard for him to deal with everything that was going on. Since the 60s, Baudrillard has given the best color commentary you will ever see/hear. I love what he says about the need to have some kind of composite perspective, some kind of meta-perspective that may not be universal in itself, but becomes a meta-community of perspectives and worlds that can hold a space hospitable to the different forms that exist in the world. And I was encouraged that it worked out. I am interested in those times when he talked to the Prime Minister of France, I am interested in how much he has learned about the providence of the Almighty, I am interested in whether he has immersed himself in mysticism and occultism. It's a pity it's not talked about more openly, because even in the masses there's so much more going on than we can imagine and that's why I'm interested in following in Baudrillard's footsteps. It is interesting to interact with everything that is hidden and happening, to participate in this syncretism. References and materials:

The original podcast Why I like Baudrillard - https://on.soundcloud.com/n4oh2 The Adam's Project - https://www.thesolutionspaceproject.org/ This text in pdf - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IEOppNI93vU7GMOybA6m5CaGwVpMn9Fd/view?usp=sharing Image from header - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uch9yzR3EhgrNP0Ha1pc256yw6b2Hc_U/view?usp=sharing

[radfem-raccoon]

I forgot to tell y'all this but sociology guy is apparently a feminist fucking scholar??? The fucker also said radical feminism is easier than postmodern feminism and it's like... Are you sure? Are you positive, sir? Are you positive the movement that forces you to critique every aspect of you life if easier than whatever the fuck the postmodern bs is?

[sociologyboom]

Is this of interest? Does this fit in with the postmodern idea of pick n mix culture and the self creation of identity?

[russellmoreton]

Path : Holga 120WPC by Russell Moreton Via Flickr: Postmodern : Ever Changing, Fleeting, Positive, Nihilistic, "There are no simple concepts. Every concept has components and is defined by them. It therefore has a combination [chiffre]. It is a multiplicity, although not every multiplicity is conceptual... Not only do Descartes, Hegel, and Feuerbach not begin with the same concept, they do not have the same concept of beginning... Every concept has an irregular contour defined by the sum of its components, which is why, from Plato to Bergson, we find the idea of the concept being a matter of articulation, of cutting and cross-cutting. The concept is a whole because it totalizes its components, but it is a fragmentary whole. Only on this condition can it escape the mental chaos constantly threatening it, stalking it, trying to reabsorb it." -- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, pp. 15-16.

[formulinos]

HYPERFIXATION CORNER | NOW, THAT'S WHAT I CALL LATE STAGE FORMULA 1!

theydies and gentlemen of f1blr, i regret to inform you guys that the rumours are true: we live in a society. liberty media's tenure with FOM has opened a can of worms that ushered in what i've been calling lately "late stage formula 1". But the thing is, what the fuck would that be, exactly? so, as a good scholar, i took it to myself to study more about late stage capitalism in order to truly understand the term and see if my application made any sense. in today's hyperfixation corner, we'll get deeper than necessary on the microcosm of capitalism that f1 has become. and then we will get depressed. but maybe, just maybe, we can figure this out.

note: this has 7k words AND at times gets quite dense in terms of sociological theory, but i truly did my best to make it palatable. still, this is not going to be everyone's cup of tea and might get boring. if you still believe this is your thing, i just ask you to please hang on tight and see it through to the end as i truly feel everything ties up together rather logically.

PART I: THE DAWN OF LATE STAGE FORMULA 1

the basics of late stage capitalism

the application in late stage formula 1

PART II: YOU CAN'T RUN AWAY - FORMULA 1 AND CAPITALIST REALISM

mark fisher's capitalist realism

the indycar situation

was there ever class consciousness in f1?

the illusion of abu dhabi

THE DAWN OF LATE STAGE FORMULA 1

1. The Basics of Late Stage Capitalism

For a term we see being used daily on several outlets, you'd be surprised to find out that there isn't a rigid definition. In fact, depending on who you talk to, you'll get widely different explanations, since there's basically "academia" late capitalism and "normie" late capitalism. I'll brush up those two for you guys real quick because, at this point, might as well.

The term was coined by a German scholar Werner Sombart. At the time, just at the start of the XX century, he was a HUGE Marx/Engels stan. He had all of their photocards, but beyond that, he also took to himself to write his lifetime's defining work, which is basically an expanded universe fanfic to what Marx and Engels wrote, tbh. In 1902, Sombart started to publish "Der moderne Kapitalismus" (Modern Capitalism), comprised of three volumes in which he discussed four stages of capitalism: proto-capitalism, related to the appearance of capitalist-like tendencies in feudal society until it became proper capitalism + early capitalism, which was basically seen pre-industrial revolution; high capitalism, which came in with the industrial revolution and ended with WWI; and at last, late capitalism, which was what they were living at the time of the third book release (1927), that is, post world wars world. That's all very chill, but given that later on Sombart drank the kool aid and became a Nazi, he can fuck off.

Thank God, two other dudes came in to take the expression from Sombart. Ernest Mandel and Fredric Jameson are two scholars who, although published their works in different times, were responsible for widespreading the term. Mandel published Late Capitalism in 1975, marking it as the era of economic expansion post WWII that, in his view, would reach its peak in the 70s since the economy was starting to have frequent crises. Jameson, however, dropped his book, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 16 years later, talking about the then-current world marked by globalisation and the expansion of capitalism to culture (arts, lifestyle, etc.). 

All of this is to say that, today, if you ask an economist or a political scientist, they will most likely talk to you either about this time progression or straight out use Fredric Jameson's definition. Which, tbh, works, since in a way Jameson touches on the expansion of capitalism to daily life, something that goes in common with the contemporary POV on late capitalism.

We legit live in hell rn, no big deal

If you go on Reddit or watch corecore edits on tiktok, then there is a sense of dread and irony that's unique to the internet's definition of late capitalism. Since it's a relatively recent thing, there isn't a concrete way to define it, so I'll just use the one given by Ian Neves (Brazilian Historian) in his video about Capitalist Realism because I think it's the one that manages to summarise it the best: Late Stage Capitalism is the stage of capitalism in which the contradictions of capitalism are so evident that they become explicit to the population. That is, it is so in your face that it stops being campy. It's just tacky.

In the video, Neves further explains that one of the big deals about capitalism is that it sells itself as a contradiction-free system, but in our current time we aren't quite fooled anymore. A few examples of this would be multinationals like Amazon opening factories in underdeveloped places like Tijuana, under the guise of wanting to "help develop the country" but placing themselves close to a slum, clearly showing their intentions of exploitation; You can also think of the "art" market of NFTs, which are nothing more than numbers stored in a computer - capitalism touts itself as being a creator of value capable of meeting society's needs, yet there is no need met with NFTs besides value generation for the sake of value generation and pure speculation. Anyway, there are several examples and whatever you think is probably Late Stage Capitalism.

2. The Application in Late Stage Formula 1

Having done this deep dive, imagine my face when I realised that it turns out I didn't just pull "Late Stage F1" out of my ass. I was gooped! Gooped, I tell you. See, if late stage capitalism is now defined as the era in which capitalism's contradictions are explicit, then Late Stage F1 can be easily perceived as the stage of the sport in which its contradictions are no longer capable of being ignored by the fans either. In that sense, it does feel that this is the perfect way to synthesise the bitterness that a large part of the fandom tastes in their mouths. 

note: I'm not stating that pre-Liberty Media Formula 1 was perfect. God forbid I become one of the purist fans talking about the good ole days. Bernie Ecclestone wasn't shit and in a way, some of our issues nowadays are inherited from his tenure as the head of FOM. But, at the same time, the sport managed to sell itself as a luxury hobby while still being satisfying and accessible, in a way or another, to the non-wealthy fans. You couldn't see as many contradictions as now because the image of the sport was more or less aligned with what you actually saw, good and bad. 

The same, unfortunately, can't be said nowadays. To illustrate my point, let's take a look at FOM's Corporate Strategic plan, released in 2020. The idea, in their words, is "to deliver a more popular, more exciting, and sustainable sport, which pushes the boundaries whilst protecting our heritage.", supported by six axes:

Race – Increase competitiveness and unpredictability on track

Engage – Produce an amazing spectacle for fans on and off track

Perform – Generate value to our shareholders

Sustain – Deliver sustainable and efficient operations

Collaborate – Create win-win relationships with our partners

Empower – Build an engaged and high-performing workforce

Besides Perform and Collaborate, arguably the two most capitalistic inclined pillars, it's incredibly easy to find counter-arguments to illustrate how this is just corporate talk and doesn't actually reflect on the sport. [cracks fingers] So, let's get it:

✷ Increase competitiveness and unpredictability on track: Ok, sure, they try with this one as it is the core of the sport - after all, this is what the regulations' tweaks are for. But you just need a quick overview of the Andretti situation to see that competitiveness only serves the structure to a certain point. After all, although Andretti managed to get the backing of a manufacturer (General Motors, in the form of Cadillac) which, in theory is enough to make it a more legitimate entry less likely to Caterham levels of bankruptcy, the vibes are still somehow off from camp F1. 

Michael and Mario Andretti on a pit wall during something that WASN'T a Formula 1 race

This all boils down to the revenue split at the end of the season between the teams and FOM: once you remove the bonuses that are thrown around, roughly 50% of what's left goes to FOM, and the other 50% are the championship prize money (don't quote me on these percentages actually, I'm not sure if it's exactly 50/50) . If Andretti gets in, then either the teams' share gets diluted as a consequence of an extra mouth to be fed, either FOM needs to adjust its own reward to increase the total prize money and make sure that all teams still get the same liquid value for positions 1-10. 

Now, Andretti are willing to pay the 200 million dollars "anti-dillution" fee that's to be distributed to the already existing teams as a regulated "sorry we're gonna have to split the prize money in 11 from now on". Yet, instead of welcoming the bid, teams have lobbied for an increase to that fee to 600 millions, a cheap tactic to either get more money or to keep Andretti out. On one hand, Christian Horner has made it clear, from the teams' perspective it is about the money. On the other hand, Stefano Domenecali and FOM are hot and cold, stating that he's happy Andretti are interested but mad that they're calling out the bureaucracy of the process. 

The key aspect here is that F1 no longer needs an American team to reinforce their position in the United States market as they did back in 2014 when Haas formalised their entrance. In fact, they don't even need Haas to assert themselves as American anymore as they have three GPs lined up regardless of the team's national fanbase. This way, in FOM's optics, they have nothing to gain from Andretti. In a way, the teams are basically doing what's expected of them, but bottomline is the fact that FOM is fucking mental in adopting the same perspective instead of planning how an extra entry of such magnitude as Andretti-Cadillac could pay itself with time.

✷ Produce an amazing spectacle for fans on and off track: See, I guess you can call me a bit of an old school fan, because when it comes to Formula 1, I WANT TO SEE THE FUCKING CARS RUN ON THE FUCKING TRACK. I suppose many of you are aligned with me on that one.

Using the 2021 numbers as reference since we didn't get the 2022 report yet, the average global audience is around 70.3 million. Given that the biggest venues can only hold 400k attendants tops, the rest of those 70m fans are watching the GPs from home. They are also most likely having to pay for it, since F1TV's dominion keeps increasing. While, all credit is due, F1TV offers a much better pay-per-view experience than many other sports have, with a very rich archive and incredible coverage of each race weekend, some of these prices per country are a legit effort for a fan to make. 

From the Reddit post, an example of the price disparity between countries. F1TV is priced accordingly to the purchasing power that each country has.

Could be worse as many other fans are held hostage by Sky Sports, which is only available with a much more expensive £34.99 subscription to UK and Ireland fans, who don't even have F1TV as an alternative option. Given that Sky also has the airing rights in Germany and Italy, the fact is that F1's free to air presence has been lowering over the years (a problem that has been discussed in 2016 and represented a decrease in viewership at the time, mitigated by the Liberty Media efforts). But F1 really can't be arsed in considering a full return to free-to-air TV given the current times and so, the idea is to basically adapt to the pay TV market as much as possible and to retain free-to-air positions in specific markets. And if you, individually, don't have the money to pay for it and there is no free-to-air alternative for you, tough titties.

When it comes to actually attending a Grand Prix though, it's becoming equally harder to do it. The F1destinations 2023 rank shows that there has been an average 56% increase on the average 3-day ticket price in relation to 2019, costing roughly 508 dollars. In terms of affordability, these tickets can represent from under 10% to over 50% of the average monthly net wage for the countries hosting the GP. If it was just the tickets that would be easy peasy, but the fact is most of the times attendance includes the need for housing, transportation, food, etc. What this means is that it's fucking expensive, ok? 

The GPs are getting more and more packed, but for how long?

Again, the sport has always been elitist, but there was for a good while a relative balance between your average fan who managed to save up and get a GA ticket with the rich wealthy fans at the paddock drinking their champagne. Nowadays, even people who were regular attendees of their home gps have tapped out due to being priced out. Plus, even the new GPs added to the calendar already come with a big disclaimer "FOR MONEY ONLY" as, for instance, the cheapest tickets for Las Vegas cost 500 bucks but the real average price for the three days is $1,667.

So, if they are in fact producing a great spectacle for fans, it's becoming more and more hard for said fans to actually be able to see it. Whatever.

✷ Deliver sustainable and efficient operations: F1 made a pledge in 2020 to improve their relationship to Mother Nature by 2030, which includes: Net Zero carbon, sustainably-fuelled, hybrid power units, efficient and low/zero carbon logistics & travel, 100% renewably powered facilities and credible carbon sequestration. The whole pdf has a bunch of lovely lines about their grandiose plans, but these are somewhat easily dragged to filth by anyone who understands just a tiny bit of eco-sustainability. One of these people is David Bott, chief innovation officer for the Society of Chemical Industry*. 

Bott explains well the situation with the fuel. F1 cars currently use E10, which is a mix of gasoline (+ the likely additives that gasoline already has) with 10% ethanol, a sustainable fuel. The thing is, gasoline is more popular than ethanol for cars for a reason: if you take 1L of gasoline and 1L of ethanol, when you burn them, gasoline will give you way more energy. According to Bott, this means that the new E10 fuel is not as potent as gasoline would be, so you end up needing to use more of it anyway and in the grand scheme of emissions, that means fuck all.

F1's carbon footprint per sector. Does something feel funny to you?

Still, as F1 itself showed in their sustainability report back in 2020, the power unit emissions are less than 1% of the total emissions during a season. As you'd imagine, the thick of it really lies in logistics (45%, transportation of all equipment) and business travel (27,7%, transportation+hotels of f1 staff). Drivers and TPs carpooling with their private jets might help a little bit, but it's evident that F1 doesn't give a single shit about improving those numbers given that the calendar has expanded to 23 races, three of them in the same country but in completely different times of the year, which means that the back and forth of airplanes between continents will correspond to a 15% increase to emissions in relation to last year. According to Paolo Feser, If they were to at least organise the calendar in a sensible manner, they could cut these emissions by half, but such a calendar would go against their contracts with Bahrain and Abu Dhabi for the season's opener (till 2036) and finale (till 2030), respectively. When you consider the pledge's deadline of 2030, it's pretty evident that they'll say they made it because of the drop-in fuel in development, but logistics are far removed from the rest of it.

✷ Build an engaged, high-performing workforce: TALKING OF THE 23 RACE CALENDAR, the biggest impact is obviously on the workforce. Race weekends are gruelling enough for the drivers, who have stated through the GPDA their concerns of burnout. But then, you also have to consider the garage side, who are used to a minimum of 12-hour shifts during a race weekend, having to adapt to more frequent double and triple headers. As an anonymous mechanic said:

"Then, when you are coming home on a Monday morning or Monday evening, and you haven't slept properly in days, that then affects how you feel in your personal time. It means your relationships can suffer – either because you are agitated with your partners or you've got other things on your mind. And that's not fair on you nor them. You are not just mentally fatigued, you are physically drained as well. As the season wears on, there are a hell of a lot of injuries happening. The teams do have doctors and physios to help look after you, but the easiest solution is to pump you with painkillers to just keep you going. There is no way in a million years that a regular doctor would give you what we are given to keep us going."

The psychological strain adds to the anxiety of creating the perfect car and work culture has become increasingly tense. To add to the tension, the cost cap negatively reflected on the workforce as many teams, including RBR and Mercedes, had to fire people to adapt to it. Those who stay have to be reminded that they are "so lucky" to still have a job and if "they don't like it, they can go" (as Tost said in 2021) but the situation is overall so demotivating that yeah, people are quitting motorsports overall or changing categories. To sum up, the engagement and performance of the workforce isn't out of love for the sport, but fear and pressure.

To wrap this with a golden bow, I could never forget the #WeRaceAsOne initiative, still touted by F1 as a campaign that really wants to bring awareness and impact important problems in our society. When it was created in 2020, the main focuses were COVID-19 and social inequalities, but given that they banned T-shirts in podiums in 2020 after Lewis Hamilton protested the death of Breonna Taylor by the hands of US pigs, they clearly weren't comfortable in really tackling the inequality issue. Therefore, they changed the goals of the campaign for a very corporate "Sustainability, Diversity and Inclusion & Community" axis, whatever the hell they mean with that. It's good that they can focus on it all they want, as the FIA has banned drivers from political statements during race weekend procedures. Moreover, while the boycott of the Russian Grand Prix is completely justifiable, it still feels empty once you consider they raced in Saudi Arabia while a factory mere miles away from the track was bombed, also as an act of war.

To sum up, the fact is that late stage Formula 1 is here to stay and we have to deal with all of the sport's contradictions. The same way that late capitalism does not mean that the end of capitalism is near, late stage f1 means nothing as its popularity has been rising more and more, and at the current rate, the abandonment of the older fans means jackshit as more people show up on social media and are willing to pay what's necessary to either watch it or attend races. The question that might linger, in fact, is if F1 has reached the point of inevitability at last?

----

YOU CAN'T RUN AWAY - FORMULA 1 AND CAPITALIST REALISM

1. Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism

Even when we're faced with the existence of a late stage Formula 1, whether when it's concretely laid down or just a feeling deep down, many of us still continue to engage with it. As much as we complain about it, the current panorama does show an expansion of the sport, which can only happen as well because a good chunk of the old school fans remain. The question is, why do we insist on watching a sport when we know shit is that bad? Is it solely because of affectionate ties to a team, a driver or even f1 itself? Sure, these factors contribute to it, but what if I told you that it is also because current F1 has finally managed to sink into our collective consciousnesses as inevitable?

To understand what I'm trying to say here, we need to look first at the big picture. That is, if we have been treating F1 as a microcosm of capitalism up to this point, it's now necessary to step back and face Capital itself. In order to do this, I want to introduce to you guys the concept of capitalist realism.

Say hello to Mark Fisher (1968-2017), an incredible mind gone too soon

While, just like late stage capitalism, "capitalist realism" was an umbrella term used for a myriad of different meanings, we don't have to contextualise its timeline. Rather than that, we can jump straight to Mark Fisher's defining work, "Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?", published in 2009. In it, Fisher defines it as "the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it". Putting it in simpler terms, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. 

With capital realism, Fisher no longer talks just about the influence of capitalism at a socio-economic level, but also how it bled into the cultural and psychological spheres (scary!!!!!!!). All of this culminates in apolitical attitude towards capitalism: since we can't escape the system because things are like this, all we can do, realistically, is to adapt to it and try to minimise its effects instead of actually fighting them.

Having that in mind, I ask you guys: can you imagine the demise of F1? We often hear about it separating from the FIA, but similarly to capitalist realism, Formula 1 losing its world championship status (as close to its end of the world as it gets) feels more likely that a massive restructuring of the category or it shutting down for good. Similarly, fans have adopted an "it is what it is" point of view towards the sport as we all know what FOM and the FIA are like and we don't have, supposedly, the power to change anything, we just have to suck on whatever they propose to us.

Stefano Domenicali (FOM CEO) and Mohammed bin Sulayem (president of the FIA), joined in unholy matrimony

Now, capitalist realism didn't show up out of the blue. According to Fisher, neoliberalism was the mother of capitalist realism. This is because its campaign in the 80s and 90s with regan and maggie thatcher (names in lowercase because I don't respect them) was successful in gaslighting people into thinking that it wasn't necessarily perfect, but it was the only approach of government rooted in reality. Once it was implemented, the next step was to consolidate it, which happened thanks to two factors: the end of the soviet union and the transition to post-fordism. I know this seems crackheaded and with no relation to F1, but give me a chance pls!

Trigger warning: the many faces of neoliberalism

During the Cold War, there was a concrete antagonist to capitalism in the shape of the USSR*. With its demise, this role of a real opposition to it was completely obliterated, allowing for capitalism to expand however it pleased without anything to contest it. Similarly, maybe F1's biggest triumph in these last two decades - and this is why I said at the top that Bernie wasn't shit and the problem about late stage F1 had its roots further back - is that it successfully managed to free itself from the sole category that threatened its popularity: Indy Car.

*note: by stating this, there is absolutely no value judgement. the statement is not about the ussr being a problematic fave or a communist hell that needed to be abolished. it was just a physical entity that asserted itself as a possible alternative to capitalism. by its physical existence, it allowed for public consciousness to understand that, if the ussr was a possible alternative to capitalism, then there might as well be plenty of others. kindly remember that the ussr was quite oppressive and countless people and countries suffered on their hands, while also understanding that for this particular purpose, it did its job.

2. The IndyCar Situation

The IndyCar World Series as we know it was established in 1979, with CART (Championship Auto Racing Teams) as the governing body behind it. The similarities between F1 and IndyCar went beyond the cars (although the Indys were a tad less sophisticated than F1s): the creation of CART itself was based on Bernie's FOCA model (television rights, sponsorships, etc). 

IndyCar's Indianapolis 500, 1992. Not bad in terms of attendance!

From the 80s, its popularity grew in America, with them even inheriting venues that originally held grand prix, like Long Beach. Still, no one was really intimidated by them as F1's presence in the US, albeit messy with several different events attempted, was constant during that period. However, shit went down in the next decade, when Formula 1 was shut down by the organisers of the US Grand Prix at Phoenix right in 1991. From that point, it would take 9 years for F1 to get back, at the heart of American racing, Indianapolis. Hold this information.

Once F1 disappeared from 'Murica, IndyCar thrived, at least for a while. CART had managed to join ACCUS (Automobile Competition Committee for the United States), who are affiliated to the FIA, which made it possible for drivers to race in Indy without losing their super licenses. Soon, there was a migration from foreign drivers to IndyCar, and that included people from F1, such as Emerson Fittipaldi. Once that happened, the sky became the limit for Indy and they started to race outside of the US. By 1993, Nigel Mansell had dropped F1 after a rift with Williams and decided to go drive for Newman/Haas at IndyCar instead.

Nigel Mansell and teammate Mario Andretti. Oh how I want Nigel, ngl.

note: the motherfucker demolished his competition, won IndyCar and is still the only person to be, technically, F1 and IndyCar champion at the same time.

At this point, some people will say Bernie Ecclestone wasn't bothered, but he hadn't even gotten over losing the Long Beach GP to CART back in 84. You know Bernie, I know Bernie, we all know Bernie. HE WAS MAD!!!! At the same time, NASCAR was rising in popularity like never before, causing a certain rivalry between the categories over who would take over the hearts of all the petrol head americans.  

Enter Tony George, then head of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and chairman at CART. Tony believed that CART was getting lost in the game and ignoring Motorsport Traditions by racing in venues that weren't ovals. Since Georgy was annoying as fuck, CART booted him from the board of directors, which was one of the most stupid decisions given that he owned the track that literally gave the name to their championship. IndyCar's whole thing was the Indianapolis 500, right? "So fuck you too," Tony George cried while being thrown away from the CART offices by security "You don't want me? Then you don't get to race the Indy 500 anymore!".

Well, it didn't happen exactly like that. Instead, Tony George created a separate category called Indy Racing League that would be dedicated exclusively to ovals and get to be the owner of the Indy 500 from 96 onwards. The original IndyCar series changed its name to CART and Indy racing in America became fractured. Just to be clear, IRL did allow an 8 CART car limit to compete at Indy 500, but CART decided to boycott the event instead. This worked for some time, and CART still managed to make do with their reserves (they even offered to buy F1 in 1998) but soon these started to dry out as sponsors dropped the series and teams started breaking the boycott to race in Indy 500, eventually by the 2000s completely defecting to IRL. In 2004, CART filed for bankruptcy and got bought out, living as a zombie series until 2008 when IRL bought it and reunified them. At this point, the damage was done as NASCAR had taken over in popularity and F1 was back since 2000, racing the IMS.

Tony and Bernie, BFFs 5eva

Oh yeah, haven't you heard? 1998 also marked the year where it was announced by Bernie that F1 would come back to the United States, racing at the holy land of Indianapolis herself. Sounds sketchy? You're not the one to think that, as both Jacques Villeneuve (1995 IndyCar champion 1995) and Gordon Kirby (journalist, US correspondent for Autosport 1973-2004) have stated that Bernald, alongside NASCAR boss Bill France, basically whispered sweet nothings in Tony George's ear to get him to act a fool. Although it took several more years for F1 to finally sink its teeth into the United States in an effective manner, the main competition was out before they could even expand further. 

It was up to Formula 1 then to expand without anything to stop it, as we can see in the many calendar changes we've had over the years. Even further, since there is no antagonist, this has also allowed F1 to turn its sights to the feeder system, creating its own "preferred" path that, with the super license points system basically make it harder for drivers who are outside of the F1 feeder series bubble to make it to F1 (as we've even seen recently with Colton Herta). Same thing is happening to the W Series, which for lack of funds wasn't able to finish their 2022 season even though they were promoted to an F1 support championship, racing. While Formula 1 did not offer to help them or tried to integrate them properly in the feeder series ladder, they have just recently announced F1 Academy, their own initiative for female drivers, placed officially just under Formula 3 with a direct link. That's great for the female drivers, but incredibly fucked up at the same time.

3. Was There Ever Class Consciousness in F1?

Yeah, so the whole lack of opposition didn't help on an external basis, but there is also an internal factor that cannot be ignored and it's linked to post-Fordist work structure. In Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher cites a study by Richard Sennett called "The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism". In it, Sennett states:

"Where formerly workers could acquire a single set of skills and expect to progress upwards through a rigid organizational hierarchy, now they are required to periodically re-skill as they move from institution to institution, from role to role. As the organization of work is decentralized, with lateral networks replacing pyramidal hierarchies, a premium is put on ‘flexibility’.[...] This flexibility was defined by a deregulation of Capital and labor, with the workforce being casualized (with an increasing number of workers employed on a temporary basis), and outsourced."

Translating this, instead of becoming a specialist on something, you become a jack of all trades without any job stability. In the F1 world, this is seen not only in drivers changing teams and getting sacked of the category altogether, but also in the poaching of talent between teams and the frequent internal restructurations. Ian Neves says that post-Fordism was key in the establishment of capital realism because its natural consequence is the individualisation of work, which leads to the weakening of trade unions and ultimately, the mining of class consciousness.

As one would expect, there isn't a trade union that looks after all F1 workers. Instead, most of the engineers, mechanics and other staff are subject to the unions of the countries the factories are located at (for instance, Alpine is protected by the "collective convention of metallurgical engineers and workers").Therefore, as much as the personnel is against work conditions and calendar expansion, it's much more difficult for them to unite and rally against it as they have been segmented. 

Ferrari team photo, 2022. Together, but divided nevertheless 

This is particularly fucky when you consider the existence of the GPDA. The Grand Prix Drivers' Association is a trade union that, historically, has made itself heard in delicate situations where drivers needed to claim their rights and fight for their safety. Unfortunately, this comes with a side effect that reinforces a difference between drivers from the rest of the F1 crew. While they are absolutely right and the GPDA should exist as a trade union regardless of the existence of a larger one encompassing all workers, the fact is that the illusion that drivers are in the status quo of the sport, and not subject to it, remains.

Look, as much as they are in a privileged spot and reap all its benefits, the fact is they do not own the cars they run - well, at least not most of the time [stares at the Strolls]. They still rely on the teams that own the structure and the backing of sponsors, that is, the means of production, to work. Most of the time, when they retire from F1, they still tend to race in other categories or find side quests. While I have no doubt that drivers are super passionate for racing and you can't completely quit it, how much are we sure that this is also not partially motivated by the desire to make sure they are still able to afford the lifestyle they had as Formula 1 drivers? Marx was clear, baby, the drivers are as much the proletariat as anyone else. By separating them from the rest of the structure and maintaining the post-fordist work structure for the rest of the teams, class consciousness inside the paddock is close to none and it helps to consolidate F1's status as an almighty being.

4. The Illusion of Abu Dhabi

Here's the thing: if "realism" is used as an argument for maintenance of the current state of affairs, by conforming to what's in theory "realistic", then the best way to threaten it, according to Fisher, is if you manage to expose the cracks of said "realism". This should be able to work because, get this, there is a difference between what's Real and what's reality. 

Again, sorry but I'm gonna get theoretical here. However, when you consider that so much of what we're talking about here directly relates to a psychological sphere, you can't not add some psychiatric theory into this. When you look at it from the point of view of Jacques Lacan (French psychiatrist who spit some bars), reality is constituted not of what's actually Real, but of social conventions and symbolism. The Real itself is unrepresentable and even traumatic at times, and you can only perceive it when you look at the inconsistencies of reality, that aims to suppress it! What the fuck!!!!

It's super easy, you just have to show that the whole framework is inconsistent!

Except it never works that way.

Going back AGAIN to capitalist realism, take a look at the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. I don't understand much about the mechanisms of the economy (and I am right not to, as this is all made up by weird people), but even I know that the Lehman Brothers collapse resulted in a worldwide clusterfuck that saw many lose their lifetime of savings. After that point, the ripple effect was so severe that companies were falling like flies and it was up to State interventions to halt things. Maybe the greatest example of late stage capitalism, this was the key point to explicit the greatest contradiction of neoliberalism: they sell themselves as a system above the State, however they needed the State to save it, which means they don't really want to abolish State, just to occupy it to their own desires.

The absurd numbers of the financial crisis in the US.

So, you have your reality cracked, you can look at the Real and see the inconsistencies of capitalism laid bare in front of all of us. This should have been enough for neoliberalism/capitalism to go out of style completely right? As you can see if you look out the window, however, we're still living in a capitalist society. Then what happened? The crises ended up reinforcing the status of capitalism precisely through the bank bail-outs as the States doubled down on the whole "realistic" thing because they had no alternative and saw these companies as "too big to fail". What we see today, then, is an economical model that clearly fallible, yet remains because it's perceived as a default. Mark's words, not mine. 

But this is in the field of Capital. It's not like, in the F1 bubble, anything of the genre has ever happened.

Yup.

I guess you could say there have been moments in Formula 1 that came close to exposing these inconsistencies but didn't, like crashgate, spygate or the whole 1989 championship debacle. Still, these didn't expose anything because:

1) F1 didn't sell itself at the time of those events the same way it does now

2) All of these could be easily pinned to individuals instead of the whole structure of F1 itself - even Senna put 1989 on the back of Balestre only, instead of the entire FIA.

Abu Dhabi, however, wasn't looked at the same way given that it's still such a controversial topic and was the point of rupture to many fans with the category.This is because the series of events that led to Abu Dhabi, touted as the biggest showdown since 1974 and followed it afterwards managed to create the circumstances to break the veil between the reality (F1 as the greatest, most spontaneous motorsport modality in the world) and showed the Real (the newfound need to push narratives, consequence of the transition from sport to entertainment encouraged by Liberty Media ran-FOM, enabled by the FIA and accelerated by Drive to Survive). 

The animosity between TeamLH and the Orange Army lingers to this day. However, regardless of its peak at the time, the controversy of the actions taken at the Grand Prix did not provoke just an outcry amongst Hamilton fans, but to a good chunk of neutral parties as well. We're still here though, so how did Formula 1 manage to escape from it? Simple, they also reinforced their position by the immediate actions of the FIA, as Jean Todt demanded a review of what happened. In its swiftness to respond, the World Motor Sport Council, that is, the one institution that could bail-out F1, states they would take action to understand what happened and avoid any problems in the next season. 

The bail-out, in this sense, isn't monetary, but institutional as they place their focus on the "relevant parties" instead of the major structure itself. From their side, FOM avoided taking responsibility for their role, as Domenecali said right after that "We have already spoken with the president [Mohammed bin Sulayem, who had just assumed his role] . We talked about the priorities he will have to face, and there are many.". This landed as well, as the common reaction was to demand the FIA changes and penalties, blaming Michael Masi for "trying to balance the need for spectacle with the rulebook" instead of addressing the root causes of the need for spectacle itself. 

Masi had it coming, but he sure made it easy from the FIA and FOM

In that sense, the reinforcement also comes in the sense of self-criticism, since it leads to something called "interpassivity", a concept developed by Robert Pfaller:  when the actors in Formula 1 take it to themselves to discuss and criticise the sport themselves, they are performing our opposite stance for the fans, who then are able to continue to consume it as they please. This is possible as well because we take a "cynical distance" from the sport and thus become passive spectators. This way, as long as we say to ourselves "oh, F1 is rotten nowadays", that's all we need as a cop-out to keep watching it. This is not just us being hypocrites, per se, but legit one of capitalist ideology as Zizek puts it that we overvalue our internal beliefs in detriment of our external actions - literally the "there is no ethical consumption in capitalism" of it all. It's inevitable we replicate this behaviour when it comes to watching Formula 1.

So, once we get all of the way, the question remains: is there anything that can be done to truly change Formula 1? It's not just a matter of direct action, as what we're talking about here is a result of a concealed mulit-layered internal organisation that acts on an abstract level. As much as we can bitch and moan, fan protests and team appeals are direct action and thus, easily countered by the FOM/FIA complex. Hell, these two fight all the time and yet any crisis is easily fixed, as just the mere possibility of F1 separating from the FIA was enough to get bin Sulayem to step away from day to day administration. On one hand, FOM doesn't want to truly separate from the FIA, they just want to occupy the FIA themselves. On the other hand, the FIA needs F1 to stay so that they can continue to assert themselves as the big dawgs in motorsports. This is how they manage to walk hand in hand and compromise over their own interests instead of the interests of the sport itself.

Maybe, this triumph of FOM is directly related to the biggest weapon of capital realism: the individualisation of the being, placing their responsibility and expectations solely on the self instead of the greater structure. This can be seen in situations such as the climate change approach, focused way more on our need to recycle than the large corporations' impact on the environment. Another example is the approach of mental health, that most of the times places on your brain alone the responsibility for your disorders instead of considering as well the influence of social conditions.

In the context of F1, the individualisation is exacerbated by the nature of the competition. Everyone is fighting for their own interests, and in a way, that has always been the goal. Still, the excessive encouragement of rivalries and toxicity - not only in the fandom, but in the paddock itself - serves the role of segmentation very well and helps FOM to continue pushing through F1 as they please. It all boils down to the lack of class consciousness between ALL the personnel, who could adopt strategic approaches that directly affect FOM's directives, turning what was abstract into a concrete issue and thus making it possible to take direct action. (tbh many of these issues can be addressed if capitalism itself is fought but then again, the impact of that on the vroom vrooms can be quite extreme and maybe that's asking too much of a sport dominated by car manufacturers and such).

In the role of fans, we both reflect the inner machinations of Formula 1 and feed it. Thus, the same way that all the staff should unite, so should we. While when it comes to track action many of us are rivals, and some of the drivers legit make it hard to stand with them, fact is the real enemy at the current date is FOM - even if Liberty Media sells it, the next administration will most likely double down on their approach. Our best hope isn't to boycott F1, but to encourage the union of its staff and show that while we welcome the technical evolutions, the main goal must be preserved. Food for thought, really. In the meantime, thank you for surviving till the end! As always, screw you guys, I'm going home!

In the role of fans, we both reflect the inner machinations of Formula 1 and feed it. Thus, the same way that all the staff should unite, so should we. While when it comes to track action many of us are rivals, and some of the drivers legit make it hard to stand with them, fact is the real enemy at the current date is FOM - even if Liberty Media sells it, the next administration will most likely double down on their approach. They were the ones that created the conditions for Abu Dhabi to happen, they are the ones that benefit the most from the rifts. Our best hope isn't to boycott F1, but to encourage the union of its staff and show that while we welcome the technical evolutions, the main goal must be preserved. Food for thought, really. In the meantime, thank you for surviving till the end! As always, screw you guys, I'm going home!

[4eternal-life]

Noriko’s Dinner Table /Directed by Sion Sono, 2005

Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

The self, then, as a performed character, is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, and to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented, and the characteristic issue, the crucial concern, is whether it will be credited or discredited.

[somerabbitholes]

dear miss c! you're doing the lord's work by helping out us less read folks.

would you mind suggesting some works (books/papers/articles /essays) related to the following topics:

1. Poverty (in the Post Pandemic world)

2. Power and Crisis

3. Women in the Workforce

4. State of education in Rural India during Crisis

5. Neo-colonialism

I'm asking a lot, but help a girl out plis 🫶🏼

thankyou. 🕊️💌

Hello! I can't address all of these, but here's what I have:

Poverty

The Roots of the Global South’s New Resentment by Mark Suzman (Foreign Affairs)

COVID 19, Consumption and Inequality by Mudit Kapoor, Shamika Ravi and A. K. Shiva Kumar

Covid-19 and poverty vulnerability by Fabian Mendez Ramos and Jaime Lara

Workforce Participation

Workfare as an Effective Way to Fight Poverty: The Case of India’s NREGS by Shamika Ravi and Monika Engler

Empowerment and Microfinance in India by Shamika Ravi, Ashok Rai

Neocolonialism

The Great Divergence by Kenneth Pomeranz: not neocolonialism per se, but discusses the origins of current global inequality in wealth distribution, and it traces this to colonialism

Conflict, Competition and Cooperation in the Sociology of Development and Social Transformations by Ulrike Schuerkens

An Introduction to World-systems Perspective by Thomas Shannon: the world-systems theory is pretty much the foundation of how neocolonialism is thought about, and this is a good introduction to it

Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games by Eric Walberg: on the long tail of imperialism and colonialism 

Happy reading! Also, I'll update this if I find more resources for you.

[grandhotelabyss]

With all the talk about Post-Modernism, I'm remined of the sadly now infamous Kantbot "trolling" some internet "renegade university" patreon scammer by saying "post modernity began in the 18th century" lol, great podcast, the only good podcast tbh

Yes, and he was right—except that, again, maybe it began with Socrates and Euripides! Certainly it's a pretty empty aesthetic concept, considering that most postmodern aesthetic gestures are ancient, unless defined with some sociological or technological precision as in Lyotard (where it means the dissolution of progressive philosophy in the communications revolution) or Jameson (where it is the cultural corollary of productive labor's disappearance from the metropole). And Jameson focused on postmodern art that really was stylistically novel, e.g., Dick or Doctorow in fiction, rather than writers who were reprising Chaucer or Cervantes or Sterne.

[max1461]

One of my embarrassing fantasies that I sometimes think about is meeting like a postmodern sociology of science academic in the tradition of Bruno Latour etc. and her asking me to like help her with math terminology and stuff because she wants to understand the Ideology embedded in mathematics or whatever and needs someone to give her the internalistic perspective on what things mean but, ya know, in an approachable way because it's difficult technical stuff and she was "never any good at math in school" and I'm so charming and affable about but also she sees my real passion for the material and through our interactions she slowly becomes convinced that there really is a place for the scientific mindset in a just society and comes to appreciate beneath the culturally contingent notation and conventions the real essence of universality that is present in mathematics, not just as an abstract fact but also coming to see the genuine romance in that universality and its power as an expression of the human spirit and by the end her whole thesis project is derailed but maybe she's madly head over heels in love with me or something like that.

[beepbeepdespair]

sociology paper 1: complete

rating of how i think it went: 7/10

comments: i feel like ive been held hostage! the exam finished at 11.42, i got out of the room at 12.12, it took half an hour to print my answers and get outta there. madness. anyway pretty fuckin happy about the questions. clearly the teacher whos been with us cos my other teachers ill is a master at predictions, because she guessed the social roles and ethnicity questions just based on how long ago stuff came up lmao. i didnt revise culture and socialisation anywhere near enough so im very glad they didnt pull anything nasty on me there. the youth culture 15 marker was a bit of a curveball, it was so... easy???? and wide open??? what did i do to deserve this. anyway very pleased to see postmodernism on the 35 mark options again, it was there in my mock and i bossed it lmao. would not have known where to START with economic changes. education 15 marker was alright, if id have tried the marxist 35 marker id have lost my mind i think. and i just like doing the class gender or ethnicity ones lmao. overall pretty damn good. but now i have to cram for greece and UGH

well, here we are. first final a level exam tomorrow. psychology paper one. after tomorrow, i will never have to look at social influence, attachment, memory or psychopathology ever again. im gonna be honest with you all ive felt more than a little sick throughout today and ill probably feel worse tomorrow.

this is actually happening now.

and so it begins

[haneuul-x]

books are cool

I really enjoy reading books, A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images. Modern books are typically in codex format, composed of many pages that are bound together and protected by a cover.A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images. Modern books are typically in codex format, composed of many pages that are bound together and protected by a cover.

The book above was one of the first ever books printed with a printing press. Modern books are usually in codex format, composed of many pages. They are connected together by a cover. One of my favorites was The Great Gatsby, a classic book by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby is widely considered to be a literary masterpiece and a contender for the title of the Great American Novel. As a conceptual object, a book refers to a written work of substantial length, which may be distributed either physically or in digital forms like eBooks. These can be fiction or non-fiction. A physical book may not contain such a work: for example, it may contain only drawings, engravings, photographs, puzzles, or removable content like paper dolls. It may also be left empty for personal use, as in the case of account books, appointment books, autograph books, notebooks, diaries and sketchbooks.

The picture above is a notebook, not all books contain stories in them, they can be used to write stories. Writing stories such as diary entries are so relaxing. Who knows, your diary might become a famous story in the future. Books are sold at different stores, online for delivery, and can be borrowed from libraries.

TYPES OF GENRES, WORDS, ETC. ↓

Literature

Oral literature Folklore-(fable - fairy - tale - folk play - folksong - heroic epic - legend - myth - proverb) Oration - Performance (audiobook - spoken word)- Saying Major written forms Drama- (closet drama) - Poetry-(lyric - narrative) - Prose - Nonsense - (verse) - Ergodic - Electronic Long prose fiction Anthology - Serial - Novel/romance Short prose fiction Novella - Novelette - Short story - Drabble - Sketch - Flash fiction - Parable - Religious - Wisdom Prose genres Fiction Speculative - Realist - Children's - Genre -(adventure - coming-of-age - crime - erotic - fantasy - military - paranormal - romance - science fiction - supernatural - western - horror) - Historical - Encyclopedic Non-fiction Academic - (history - philosophy) - Anecdote - Epistle - Essay - Journalism - Letter - Life - Nature - Persuasive - Travelogue Poetry genres Narrative Children - Epic - Dramatic - Verse novel - National Lyric Ballad - Elegy - Epigram - Ghazal - Haiku - Hymn Limerick - Ode - Qasida - Sonnet - Villanelle Lists Epic - Groups and movements - Poets Dramatic genres Comedy - Libretto - Play - (historical - moral) - Satire - Script - Tragedy - Tragicomedy History Ancient - Classical - Medieval - Modernist - Postmodern Lists and outlines Outline - Glossary - Books - Writers - Movements -Cycles - Literary awards - (poetry) Theory and criticism Sociology - Magazines - Composition - Language - Narrative - Feud - Estate

↓ There are many different genres and type of books, that's why it is cool. ~Information and pictures by Wikipedia and Pinterest~

[chaoticflames]

Dismantling the modern: why can we love postmodernism?

I offer the most general considerations on this issue. Let us structure our analysis as follows: first, we will identify those lines of Postmodernism that are interesting from the point of view of a radical critique of Modernity isolated from postmodern morality, and then we will list those features that, on the contrary, are so imbued with this morality as to be inseparable from it.

Thus, what attracts the radical critic of Western European Modernity to Postmodernism is:

1. Phenomenology and working with the notion of intentionality (Brentano, Husserl, Meinong, Ehrenfels, Fink).

2. Structuralism and the identification of an autonomous ontology of language, text, discourse (Saussure, Trubetskoij, Jakobson, Propp, Greimas, Riker, Dumézil).

3. Cultural pluralism and interest in archaic societies (Boas, Moss, Lévi-Strauss).

4. The discovery of the sacred as the most important factor in existentialism (Durkheim, Eliade, Bataille, Caillois, Gerard, Blanchot).

5. Existentialism and the philosophy of Dasein (Heidegger and his epigones).

6. Acceptance of psychoanalytic themes as a continuous 'dream-work' that subverts the mechanisms of rationality (Freud, Jung, Lacan).

7. Deconstruction as contextualisation (Heidegger).

8. Attention to narration as myth (Bachelard, J. Durand).

9. Critique of racism, ethnocentrism and Western supremacism (Gramsci, Boas - Personality and Culture, New Anthropology).

10. Critique of the scientific image of the world (Newton) and the rationality that justifies it (mainly Cartesian-Lockian) (Foucault, Feyerabend, Latour).

11. Demonstration of the fragility, arbitrariness and falsity of the basic attitudes of Modernity (Cioran, Blaga, Latour).

12. Pessimism towards Western European civilisation, unmasking the utopian mythologies of the 'bright future' and 'progress' (Spengler, Jungers, Choran).

13. Sociology - primarily functionalism (Durkheim, Moss), which shows the illusory nature of the individual's claims to freedom from society and rational-psychological sovereignty.

14. Exposition of the nihilism of the New Age (Nietzsche, Heidegger).

15. Relativeisation of man (Nietzsche, Jünger).

16. The Discovery of Man's Interiority (Mounier, Corbin, Bataille, Jambe).

17. Political theology (Schmitt, Agamben).

— Excerpt: from ALTERNATIVE POSTMODERNISM: AN UNNAMED PHENOMENON by Alexander Dugin

[alexhasalotofthoughts]

Hello there people of the internet. I am bored so here's a few quotes from my Sociology teacher that I have collected over the last (acidemic) year:

“beans are a fact” - 16/11/23

"I'm a pole dancing rainbow coloured horse" - 30/1/24

"I hate men as well" - 1/2/24

"The moral of this story is... go sell drugs!" - 5/3/24

"Postmodernism is like Shrek and an onion" - 12/3/24

"You don't poo in a urinal! ... It's not a poo-inal!" - 14/3/24

"I want everyone to know that I dislike you all." - 14/3/24

These aren't all of them... Just the best ones

[thosearentcrimes]

Foucault's Pendulum is a novel by Umberto Eco, most famous for his excellent novel The Name of the Rose and for his essay Ur-Fascism. I liked it, though I would certainly recommend The Name of the Rose (and possibly The Prague Cemetery, though that one's more a matter of what you're interested in) over it.

I do not think I am spoiling anything when I say that the novel is an exploration of the natural observation a rational person immediately makes when encountering occultist or conspiracy theorist thought. "I could come up with a much more convincing theory than that." These people have extremely low epistemic standards, tend to be basically ignorant about history, and have no sense of chronology. Consequently, it seems trivial to identify spurious connections the way they do and weave them consciously according to the obvious narrative structures that support their beliefs. Now, I don't believe actually doing this is quite as easy as it looks, but it's a tempting notion. I've got one on the back burner revolving around the Ford Motor Company Sociology Department.

The novel makes other observations about occultist/conspiracy theorist thought. The tendency to interpret anachronism as prophecy, the intellectuals who believe under a pose of neutrality, the economics of it, how strange it seems that so many leading men of the Enlightenment were into it, the curious politics and anti-politics of conspiracy theorism. Some of these are handled through digressions, some are integrated into the plot, both are inoffensive to the structure.

The novel is well-executed, though Eco does love to get fancy with it. How willing you are to indulge his references, quotations, layers of narrative and nonlinear timeline will significantly determine whether you enjoy the book, but I don't think the book is really as difficult as I've seen critics suggest. You just need to decide that in-jokes and references you didn't get probably weren't that important, and the details of the plot don't really matter. I've also seen the book described as postmodern. A tempting designation given that Umberto Eco was very literally a postmodernist, but quite frankly by the standards people apply to justify the "postmodern" label you could probably make that case for the Epic of Gilgamesh as well so I don't think that's very meaningful.