On Heroism

So, John McCain is labelled a “war hero” for having been a POW for about five years.
I guess being a POW for a long time is all you need to become a “war hero.”
One would think being tortured for so long would not make one a better candidate to be a President, but then, logic […]

Participatory Culture, or, the Cultural Logic of Prosumer Capitalism

If modernism begins from a criticism of tradition, and postmodernism begins from the tearing of cultural fragments (memes) from their foundations to be used in new, playful, and sometimes ironic contexts (remixing), then what comes next and how does it begin?
(sidenote: If one wants a simple way to understand modernism and postmodernism, one needs only […]

The Autonomy of the Unhuman

The concept of autonomy crops up again and again in political philosophy. Autonomy seems to refer at times to the autonomy of the individual, and at others to the autonomy of peoples, territories, classes or multitudes. One important example includes Autonomism, which is a “bottom up” or “grassroots” theory of Marxism (and the connection between […]

Pinochet and Pokemones: Deleuze and Late Capitalism

When Slavoj Zizek writes that, “There are, effectively, features that justify calling Deleuze the ideologist of late capitalism,” we should take him seriously. Deleuze, much like Marx, wrote against capitalism, but at the same time was fascinated by its ability to blow apart social formations and forge new ones. Deleuze, in his later writing on […]

The Birth of the Security-Information Complex: Beyond Surveillance and Control

The following article is a very rough draft of something that may turn into an actual article, but I decided to go ahead and prematurely publish it anyway in an attempt to get some feedback.
The philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, in which capitalism “con­stantly overcom[es] its own limitations,” has shown itself to be accurate in […]

Monty Python’s Fliegender Zirkus

Archimedes out to Socrates, Socrates back to Archimedes, Archimedes out to Heraclitus, he beats Hegel. Heraclitus a little flick, here he comes on the far post, Socrates is there, Socrates heads it in! Socrates has scored! The Greeks are going mad, the Greeks are going mad. Socrates scores, got a beautiful cross from Archimedes. The Germans are disputing it. Hegel is arguing that the reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics, Kant via the categorical imperative is holding that ontologically it exists only in the imagination, and Marx is claiming it was offside.

“Postscript on the Societies of Control” by Gilles Deleuze

I. Historical

Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first the family; then the school (”you are no longer in your family”); then the barracks (”you are no longer at school”); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment. It’s the prison that serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine of Rossellini’s Europa ‘51 could exclaim, “I thought I was seeing convicts.”

Decoding the Human Social Genome

In “The Selfish Gene” evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins lays out the groundwork for what has become known as Memetics. Dawkins’ “meme,” a mixture of the words “gene” and “mime,” describes the function of ideas and how they are shared in human society. The “gene” part of the word “meme” makes the assumption that ideas propagate […]

Why we should understand, and even encourage, a certain sort of erotic intensity between student and professor

specialization is for insects.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook […]