PARA-BE

I like the mandolin and DESTROYING CAPITALISM

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Capitalism in the Web of Life 3

More of nature from Moore of this nature book HAHAHAHHA lolol omg. Anyway, this is a really good section that phrases a bunch of stuff that is like, fairly intuitive, but not necessarily put together elegantly very often, super well and accessibly. I feel. Though my boundaries for what is accessible and stuff are weird and informed by CLASS DYNAMICS and whatever.

“The appropriation of unpaid work signifies something beyond the important—but still too partial—notion of environmental costs and externalities as ‘missing’ from the determination of value. For capitalism is not merely a system of unpaid costs (‘externalities’). It is a system of unpaid work (‘invisibilities’). Here we may borrow a core insight from feminist Marxism: the contribution of unpaid work is not ‘just there,’ but actively produced through complex (yet patterned) relations of power, (re)production, and accumulation. I risk pedantry here in saying that the ‘free gifts’ of nature are not ‘low hanging fruit’ that can simply be picked without much time or effort. Cheap Natures are actively produced. All life is actively, creatively, incessantly engaged in environment-making—such that, in the modern world, human ingenuity (such as it is) and human activity (such as it has been) must activate the work of particular natures in order to appropriate particular streams of unpaid work. Such activation is coproduced, bundling the life-activities of human and extra-human nature, in the present and accumulated over time.” (Capitalism in the Web of Life, Jason W. Moore, pg. 64)

Ok SO first off, what he’s talking about when he mentions the “important—but still too partial—notion of environmental costs” is the fairly common and ubiquitous idea that markets cannot capture everything, and that LACUNA in the information able to be taken in to account in any given market exchange tends to skew tons of markets in to inefficient allocations of resources. Very common externalities, which can be both positive and negative, are the drawbacks to extensive pollution (which are shifted away form the party responsible for the pollution, and the costs socialized on to the general population [like in Flint Michigan]) and the benefits of education (which are difficult to quantify and have effects across multiple sets of exchanges and stuff, so the totality of their benefit would be super difficult to work in to any given exchange). So, because there are these externalities, the markets associated with incentivizing or disincintivizing behavior that leads to either environmentally responsible action on the part of corporations or sufficient investment in education on the part of private individuals regularly either over or under encourage their respective behaviors. This is a big old problem!! It is why even Adam Smith, Founding Father of Terrible Economics, was pretty ok with many examples of government spending, and why many economists just clearly understand the necessity for regulation and subsidies in cases of INEVITABLE SYSTEMATIC MARKET FAILURE. Anyway, the idea of externalities basically means that where markets clear very frequently does not take in to account things that would, ideally, be determinants of exchange value if the markets were functioning efficiently.

This is a very central idea in environmental economics (and lots of environment oriented fields, because it basically tells conservative/reactionary economists “fuck you your own dumb theories DESTROY YOUR GROND LIKE HOW YOU DESTROY THE EARTH’S) and does a lot of work, BUT it doesn’t capture the whole thing! There is ALSO this idea of “invisibilities,” which are also not new but ARE kind of new in the way that this guy talks about!

The basic idea is that there are certain factors of the reproduction of labor-power, so certain things that have to happen for people to be able to work for wages, that are not captured in the wage relationship, but are nevertheless necessary for it to keep existing. These factors don’t produce surplus value for capitalists, because they aren’t waged, but they DO underlie the entire system. AS such, capitalist DO have a vested interest in pushing and producing societiy in ways that make it easy for them to keep existing. Moore uses the example of feminist economics because they’ve been saying this for like 50 years at this point and people still don’t get it, BUT there is a lot of labor, principally but not exclusively done by women, that is absolutely necessary for the reproduction of labor power, that is just not accounted for in how we value things. In fact, it is EXTREMELY frequently explicitly dis-valued and divested of symbolic importance, despite the clear necessity of its execution as work. This is why people were so thrilled about housewife narratives in the 50s, and also with keeping black people thought of as less able/less than human. Both phenomena helped keep wages down, because they made sure that at least part of the effort of reproducing the waged worker was done outside the immediate circuit of the production of surplus value by capitalists. Effectively, this constructs a racism and sexism subsidy, rewarding people who more effectively make use of oppressive social structures to make money. A really good more contemporarily apparent version of this (for people that for some reason deny the continued tragically sprawling edifice of racism and sexism) is the exploitation of undocumented labor in fruit, construction, fast food, and like every other industry that society thinks of as less valuable. Those capitalists profit off of our racism and devaluation, so they aim to keep it around by supporting people like every republican and democrat. Ok maybe not every democrat. But like…….. every democrat.

ANYWAY that labor that is structurally FORECLOSED as valuable but is definitely necessary for work getting’ done is termed by him an “invisibility,” and that’s a super good way to think of it!!! BUT IT DOESN’T STOP THERE

BECAUSE THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT HOW HUMANS AND NATURE AREN’T SEPARATE

And THEN goes in to a description of how another invisibility is contained in the production of natures that we then ALSO devalue!!! So despite nature doing like, a ton of work making a forest or ecosystem of deposit of fossil fuels, and the use/detruction of that complex as a definite costs that takes definite time to recuperate, we treat it like some static thing that we can assume is just done for us! Kind of like how people treated slaves. Or their wives. Or like, every colonial subject. The production of colonies, sexist power dynamics, the modern conception of race, AND the production of nature as lacking value or a cost are all examples of the same process, which is say the production of CHEAPS that can be APPROPRIATED! Remember that word from last time?! It’s an important word I guess.

So, when Moore says… Basically the entire rest of the paragraph, he is giving us a pretty neat description of how nature is NOT just a “tap” we can take from, the proverbial “low hanging fruit,” RIPE for the picking, but that the relationship which kind of forces the RELATION to nature where it APPEARS as a costless, very cheap, devalued fruit to be picked is produced. Which is funny cuz of produce, but not funny because of the systematic production of environmental catastrophe that the dominant paradigm of valuation is structurally unable to deal with, because we all think markets clear for some reason, when in reality they almost never do.

Anyway, these ideas are super cool, and go a long way towards trying to understand how humans and nature co-produce an environment with determinate effects. Without nature’s work, humans couldn’t appropriate the Cheaps, and without explicit human action, in the form of commodification, mapping, geography, the construction of various abstractions, etc. humans could not appropriate nature at the scale that we do!!

AND THAT, is vitally important!!! Because!!! And this is a thing he goes in to more later, but I will gesture towards it now: If we do not appropriate at a rate that exceeds the increase of the variable rate of exploitation, the proportion of value that is paid by CAPITAL will increase!!!! Which reduces the marginal production of surplus value!! Which slows growth!! WHICH PRODUCES CRISIS.

And…. As we will also see later…….. The acts of colonization that produce appropriable relationships are not very reproducible. IN the words of capitalism, they don’t scale, we can’t do them more than once. Colonialism is over, at least in its classical mode. There are no more broad swathes of agriculturally productive land, and our current swathes are becoming less efficient. We have mined much of the earth’s natural resources already, and used them in ways that are very difficult to recuperate.

So anyway, the situation is dire etc. etc. We need COMMUNISM

CLASSIC

BOOK

THAT I READ

And also classic reality

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Capitalism in the Web of Life 2

The SECOND chapter in Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life centers around a discussion of value! And, while he is totally on board with the classic advantages of the labor theory of value, he also feels like it is only a PART of the process. A super necessary part, but not the whole story. He frames how we should view value relations as “a systemic phenomenon with a pivotal economic moment.” (p. 54) In other words, while the economic moment of classical exploitation is definitely central, pivotal, and a fulcrum that is necessary to the full function of capitalism, it is not in itself sufficient for the reproduction of capitalist power relations/orders of natures. He contends that there are other, equally terrible/productive moments, which he situates in the context of green and feminist critiques of classic Marxist understandings of political economy. For instance, while domestic labor is not waged and so does not strictly speaking produce surplus value for capitalists, it DEFINITELY underwrites the life of the labor-power “commodity,” which is the foundational construction of modern capital. Similarly, while you don’t ever pay for trees, the metal in the earth, or the stream that powers your water-wheel, you nevertheless rely on their existence for the reproduction of the system that produces capitalist power relationships. Moore calls this relation, because it is not strict classic exploitation, appropriation, which is a pretty good word for it honestly!!! Capitalist don’t exploit nature, women, colonial subjects, much of science and technology, etc. etc., they appropriate it.

WHICH BRINGS ME TO THE FOLLOWING (kind of, it’s not a great transition):

“Money is so important in historical capitalism because it is central to three interconnected processes: 1) the carving out of a part of human activity, paid work, and giving it special value; 2) the de-valuing of the rest of nature, so as to put these natures to work for free, or low cost; 3) governing the evolving boundary between capitalization and appropriation, between ‘economy,’ its constitutive relations, and the web of life.”

While the relationship to money that Moore outlines here is certainly not novel, it did produce an effect on my brain!! Before this passage, I never really got the idea that nature HAD to be devalued in order to exist in the way it does, as a “tap” or resource. Like, if we thought of trees as having some value as trees, we would not be able to view them as naked resource to just be primally accumulated. Same with mines and rivers and animals and whatever!! The colonization of our thinking that capitalism effected by producing and instrumental relationship to objects as commodities is STAGGERING. I mean, you learn about commodity fetishism in school, you learn that exchange value is a pure social phenomenon and that price is nothing other than a social relationship, and certainly not “inside” of things in any way and it all seems obvious, like blah blah blah DUH, but the REAL significance of it, the fundamental violence done to our subjective ability to interact with the world in a way not mediated BY commodities and BY price, is super difficult to see. And very very very pernicious!! Like, nature doesn’t have a price, but it also doesn’t NOT have one. The price phenomenon is a social relationship; a value we place on the objects and environments and factors around us. It says that we think those things are WORTH something, that we should protect them, etc. By failing to see that the operation of money, exchange, and price implicitly values even the things it tries not to touch, we open ourselves up to the colonial violence of basic appropriation. Capitalism ONLY values what is in side of it, and by trying to posit an outside we end up creating a frail exterior basically designed to be dominated as soon as it can be profitably.

This is like the whole gesture of the book!!! Capitalism not only produces surplus value through exploiting wage workers, but ALSO underwrites that surplus value with the systematic eradication of other ways of being. IT’S VERY BAD. It’s like if someone says “this is priceless” capital is like… FOR NOW and then proceeds to spend a long time making sure it can eventually access it when its other inputs have gotten too expensive. Like, when labor is really cheap, sure we’ll rely on that forever, we can get tons of “surplus value” just through PEASANTS!! But then class struggle happens (apparently there was a peasant war in German in the 16th century!??!?!?!) and now it’s too expensive, so instead of working together qualitatively, we PIVOT and decide, hey, this forest, its worthless shite! And then because it’s free to cut down a tree, we can effectively subsidize the whole process, resulting in basically free surplus for whoever can effectively coerce the efficient functioning of appropriating nature. And when that gets too expensive, due to scarcity or whatever, we pivot in to tools. When those are too expensive, we pivot into commodifying basic information (DIGITAL LABOR) etc. etc. etc. OOF.

Anyway I dunno if that trajectory is actually 100%, I’ll have to think about it. But it makes sense for now!!! HOPEFULLY the rest of the chapter talks more about it. I’d be THRILLED about that, fo sho.

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Capitalism in the Web of Life 1

Capitalism in the Web of Life is a cool book where the author, Jason W. Moore, tries invites and attempts to substantiate a new methodological approach to hard and soft science that revolves around a dialectical understanding of nature and humanity, one that takes the two terms not as meaningfully distinct of bound off from each other but as mutually imbricated and constituting. He likes to use words like nature-in-humanity and humanity-in-nature, and pulls a lot of moves where he’s like, “humans do this thing… But it’s always already also being done to them by nature, in a natural environment, and a product of natural processes!! And nature has these traits, but they are way more active and human-like than we traditionally say!! CUZ IN REALITY THERE IS NOT THIS BIG DISTINCTION.” So, while there are things that are unique to humans, they are NOT unique to humans as an entity meaningfully distinct from the totality of nature doing nature stuff, and while there is a nature that is meaningfully distinct from humans, it is not just a neutral field to be worked upon, but also acts and creates and is an agent, much as we implicitly treat humans. He also likes to talk about social structures as having a cool materialist dynamic whereby they are understood as “spaces” and not as these amorphous abstract entities that have only secondary material effects. For that reason he calls capitalism an activity of making spaces and a specific spatial relation, like capitalism makes certain types of spaces, such as factories, farms, offices, etc. and also FOISTS certain RELATIONS to spaces, like taking a forest as primarily a reserve of resources (tap) and relating to it that way. He’ll probably get more in to that later, it has not been elaborated upon as thoroughly as his human/nature dialectical unity.

Anyway so that’s all pretty cool and some good stuff, but as one would expect, there are COMPLICATIONS like THE FOLLOWING:

“Humans simultaneously create and destroy environments (as do all species), and our relations are therefore simultaneously—if differentially through time and across space—being created and destroyed with and by the rest of nature. Through this optic, nature’s status undergoes a radical shift: a transition from nature as resource to nature as matrix. Nature can be neither destroyed nor saved, only reconfigured in ways that are more or less emancipatory, more or less oppressive. But take note: our terms ‘emancipatory’ and ‘oppressive’ are offered not from the standpoint of humans narrowly, but through the oikeios, the pulsing and renewing dialectic of humans and the rest of nature. AT stake now—perhaps in a more salient way than ever before in the history of our species—is exactly this: emancipation or oppression not from the standpoint of humanity and nature, but from the perspective of humanity-in-nature…and nature-in-humanity.” (Capitalism in the Web of Life, Jason W. Moore, p. 48-49)

Kind of obvious caveat: The complications are not insurmountable, just not presently surmounted as of right now in chapter 1 lolol.

Anyway the main GRIPE that’s difficult to come to GRIPS with for me is the idea of how we are to understand this like, pan-active notion of oppression and emancipation. From a human standpoint, it’s kind of easy (though more complex than it seems) and can be stated as something superficial like “people being able to do what they want more than not” or whatever. Obviously that definition could use some nuance and has tons of complications and there are zero-sum-games that make it messy and yada yada, BUT the central intuition that underlies it, where we posit some kind of central agency that has desires that are ascribable to it that power can either enhance or diminish (through emancipation/friendship vs. coercion), holds up ok. However! It is decidedly human centric. It DEFINITELY presupposes these things/entities whose motivations and desires we can communicate in some meaningful way. It ALSO presupposes a somewhat equal playing filed, where all humans are pretty similar to each other, and have reciprocal ethical relationships and stuff. Each human can basically understand each other human (to a degree), and we can say stuff like “that person doesn’t want to die that way” with reasonable certainty. And then, we don’t have to kill them!

Bottom line is, we don’t have to eat each other to live, but we do have to eat nature. And! We have scaled ourselves to such a degree that our eating of nature DEFINITELY entails a forced organization of nature so that it is more useful to us as humanity. This is super clear in like, industrial agriculture and GMOs and stuff, but even goes back to things like corn we can eat and non-poisonous bananas. And dogs. While there is a version of humans-in-nature that, according to contemporary narratives about those two things that we think of as super distinct, is like some kind of primal Eden of inter-species inter-conceptual Good for all parties, it is very difficult to imagine in the present historical circumstances.

When thinking about humans, it’s pretty clear that the past injustices of slavery were wrong, and that we should make some kind of attempt to redress the historical injustice and create some facsimile of a level playing field if we want any HOPE of ending oppression. However, for plants, animals, and minerals, it’s a way more complicated field. There the basic fact that we sometimes destroy individual entities of each of the above classes in the course of our day to day existence. There is the more complicated historical organization of their existence for human ends. And then there is the nigh-impossible question of how to interpret whatever communication we can glean from all these sources.

Potential ways out of this APORIA probably resolve around thinking some kind of state of existence where each of our functioning selves are allowed to FLOURISH and we can exist in a way that is not just using each other for our own ends with no regard for the other. Eating fruit and grains, for instance, is not really a big deal. Also, eating animals to some degree is just kinda how nature is. But, it invites the inevitable question, which doesn’t really get easier to answer, of nature’s desire, nature’s ideal life, the GOOD of nature. It invites the idea of what justice would look like when we can’t communicate with the Other (which is a pretty good question lololol considering the nature of human communication), what justice looks like when we have already been SO thoroughly unjust as to make some kind of originary “just” state purely mythical, and what our responsibility is for literal millennia of exploitative history.

We’ll see how this guy approaches it. But I don’t see a super easy way out of that that in some way does not fall in to the (to a degree inevitable) ABYSS of anthropocentrism and anthropocentric thinking. This is a big issue, and lots of people are trying to find ways out of it (OOO, World Ecology, any left-y anything, I think all science since the beginning of science?), but it has yet to be done! For reasons associated with capitalism, colonialism, and “triablisms” of various sorts for sure, but still!! I HOPE THIS BOOK GETS ME OUT OF THE ABYSS

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PROUST Guermantes Way Sleep

               “Sometimes I heard nothing, having been immersed in the sort of sleep into which we fall as into a pit from which we are more than glad to be dragged a little later, heavy, overfed, digesting all that has been brought to us, like the food brought by the nymphs to the infant Hercules, by those agile vegetative powers whose activity is doubled while we sleep.

               We call that a leaden sleep, and it seems as if, during the few minutes after such a sleep has ended, we have ourselves turned into mere figures of lead. Identity has vanished. So how, then, searching for our thoughts, our identities, as we search for lost objects, do we eventually recover our own self rather than any other? Why, when we regain consciousness, is it not an identity other than the one we had previously that is embodied in us? It is not clear what dictates the choice, or why, among the millions of human beings we might be, it is the being we were the day before that we unerringly grasp. What is it that guides us when there has been a genuine interruption (whether it be that we have been totally taken over by sleep, or that our dreams have been utterly different from ourselves)? What has happened really is a death, as when the heard has ceased to beat and a rhythmical traction of the tongue revives us. No doubt the room, even if we have seen it only once before, awakens memories to which older memories cling; or possibly some of them have been lying dormant inside us and we now become conscious of them. The resurrection that takes place when we wake up—after that beneficent attack of mental derangement we call sleep—must in the end be similar to what happens when we recall a name, a line of poetry, or a refrain we had forgotten. And perhaps the resurrection of the soul after death is to be thought of as a phenomenon of memory.”(The Guermantes Way, Marcel Proust p. 82-83, Treharne translation)

               So Proust is the best, and this passage comes at the end of a really long lingering with various stages and states of sleep. They are all very specific, and, as usual, linked to memory and habit and other such thematic topics for the guy. It is consistently extremely impressive to me how thorough and detailed Proust can be, especially about states that are like, intrinsically elusive. Like the feeling you have in a “leaden sleep,” that is composed both of the lead feeling you currently feel, the position towards the future contained by being “glad to be dragged, a little later, heavy, overfed,” etc., AND the having-fallen in to the “pit.” It is a concept that is only constituted retroactively, like you can only identify it as a thing that you have already come out of, because gladness to be dragged is PART of the concept, and in the MOMENT, before it is a retroactive-thing, the feeling or state of sleep could pivot in to several other feelings or stages of sleep. And yet!! It’s such a specific and nuanced description that can’t help but map on to actual lived life… It’s weirdly abstract but at the same time super particular. THAT’S POETIC LANGUAGE I GUESS. Anyway, the way that Proust consistently balances within the ambiguity of phrases and states and ways of knowing is probably the most affective aspect of his use of language. For me at least. His vocabulary is stunningly huge, blah blah blah, but the REAL thing that gets me is how the future, past and an evoked present are stitched together in ways that tug at my interior life, even across CENTURIES. HE GETS ME (lololololol) That’s incredible. That’s the WORTH OF THE PROUST or whatever.

               AND the fact that these two little paragraphs contain so much specificity-in-abstraction, so many thematic moments and specifically Proust-ian concept constructions are why I like this passage so much!

The first part gets at the interwoven sense of history and life trajectory that is so thoroughly present in Proust with an example, and then the second part just like, leverages it towards these crazy epistemological and ontological possibilities. Like, the dreamy sleep states he’s been describing are both general and specific and necessarily temporal, but then he just goes and totally complicates and problematizes those feelings and states by pointing out that, because they are phenomena of history, with pasts evoked and presents fleetingly passing and futures assumed, the fact that they consistently coalesce in a way that we “recognize” in an identity is like, a super contingent fact, and so loosely tied to our experience of consciousness as the be almost entirely secondary!? Like this is such a prescient deconstruction of mind/body dualism and individuality as the only standard of experience! And it just comes out of left field. If our identity is only created (and created anew every morning) by these involuntary chains of memory associations, what place does the agency we traditionally ascribe to conscious thought really have? That agency dies every time we go to sleep! Every sleep is like, this absolute risk, and the fact that such a quotidian HAPPENSTANCE is in reality, if we look at it and reflect and try to get inside of ourselves, contingent upon being able to latch on to something and evoke a ton of involuntary chains of associations, what if those associations were connected to something else? What if we latch on to an element we never saw before, and we become someone totally different? The idea that our self is in some way static or consistent and under our control in any meaningful is revealed by sleep, for Proust at least, as an ILLUSION!! Or at best only created by Habit. And yet Proust hates Habit! Because it removes all novelty and attention and specificity from experience!!!!!

               Maybe for Proust throwing away our individuality and entering in to some kind of absolute engagement with new things is desirable… but he can’t think that, because he loves the vividness of past associations, and those evocations are also in many ways new things to pay tons of attention to, like how the leaden sleep only exists as a nexus of a particular past/present/future……… SOMEDAY I WILL UNDERSTAND YOU PROUST. SOMEDAY.

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Other things that have happened

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THE WOMAN IN THE DUNES

I read this book a long time ago. Actually like almost exactly a month ago, because afterwards I started Proust and I started Proust on September the 17th!!!!!!! Anyway, Here’re thoughts: 

I JUST READ THE WOMAN IN THE DUNES BY KOBO ABE. A lot of it centered around a fairly problematic sexual relationship (OR LACK THEREOF) and a weird emancipatory sexual assault thwarting, SO IF YOU DON’T WANT TO READ ABOUT THAT DON’T READ THIS. Anyway, pretty solid book, though really sexual in strange ways, and I was definitely frustrated with many aspects of it. It is BASICALLY like, a guy goes to a dune-filled place searching for bugs, but then is trapped in a terrible pit where he has to do repetitive meaningless tasks constantly and is at the absolute mercy of the villagers. Eventually he comes up with an escape plan, escapes, but then falls in to quicksand and is rescued by THOSE SELF SAME villagers. After that, he kind of resigns himself to living in the sand pit, and focuses on building a trap for a crow, which eventually fills with water and gives him like, a project to do. He then settles for having a project to do, and acclimates/assimilates to Dune Living. The whole time he is in a strange relationship with this woman who also is in the sand pit, and they have lots of sex and he looks at her like a sex object all the time. Their relationship kinda culminates in him attempting to rape her in front of the whole village so he can see the ocean, but she beats him up and then they are better at domestic life? It’s a weird book. The role of the woman is also weird!!! Throughout it all she is just like, super passive, not really talking, and her only real active actions are washing his body, which she seems to like, shoveling sand, and eventually physically stopping him from raping her. She seems to gain a lot from the experience, but more importantly (apparently?!?!), the main character seems to only view her as an equal or agent in their situation either when she’s not there, like when he’s running away and keeps thinking about her ability to interact with society without him present, and after she physically dominates him to rebuff his absurdly motivated attempted rape successfully. So she is only “real” as an image in his mind, an explicitly absent image that he created and controls, until she proves her reality by frustrating his already limited exercise of “will,” despite that will being determined by the villagers and the experience of sexual assault having no other impact on their relationship to each other. So he can only respect and recognize people and things that have a physically powerful existence in relationship to him! Actually that’s a pretty consistent theme. I guess his consciousness only reacts to being limited ABSOLUTELY. Like he can’t deal with people just asking him to do things, he has to be FORCED or he’ll keep trying to assert HIS dominance. He’s very hard to empathize with, but an ok like, spectacle of a dumb version of “the masses,” whereby people require physical domination to exist in society without raping and killing each other. It makes one question the politics of the work!!!! WEIRD. SPEAKING OF WHICH, the whole book STARTS OFF implying it’s about a guy trying to get back to society, but you never actually hear of what his life in society was like! It’s all very spectral. It reminds me a lot of like, a fictional utopia where he feels like he’ll be “Free” because the ordering of society is in a way he understands, but doesn’t feel free when he doesn’t like the constraints. Like he wants to feel like crimes are punished, jobs are rewarded, and social structures exist in determinate ways, but in the sand he feels like it’s arbitrary, even though there are still just rules that reward certain behaviors and punish others. The structures are equally determinate and like, rule bound, but he just strives for one he’s accustomed to. Then, by virtue of being in the sand a long time and consistently running in to firm, violent limits to his (also violent and bad?!!) will, he acquiesces to their logic and then can be happy. WELL. Ain’t that a metaphor!!! In reality it seems like the sand dunes and the villagers are the REAL society, an arbitrary, essentially violent repressive apparatus that slowly interpelates its subjects until they WANT to be under its sway. By forcing the main character to find a way to cope with the terrible situation, making sure his only social interactions are people on board with the current regime, and, by the end, giving him a super limited sense of agency by virtue of appreciating his construction of a water capturing machine, they are able to totally flip his way of talking and thinking about the experience!!!! Really wacky. It’s like he has this intense desire to escape the ordering of his life by outside forces, BUT THAT’S ALL SOCIETY EVER WAS. Dun dun dun!!! TWIST. So he’s REALLY got this fixation on an ideal, extra-societal existence where he can live unfrustratedly without incessant repetition, but REALLY he likes the repetition and social reinforcement!!! By the end. UGH!!!!! I dunno I think that is also his relationship to the girl?! Like, she is so simple and capricious and ambiguous because that is the societal version of “womanhood?” It seems like his actual wife had more opinions and thoughts than the woman in the dunes, but “the other woman” (which is how he constantly refers to his wife?) he felt alienated from. But she actually expressed her desires?!?! Whereas the only time the woman in the dunes is given like, the ability to express herself, it is in the super absurd exhibitionist rape scene.  One feels as though if he were transported back to society, instead of being happy like he is with his project and co-worker, he would find mainstream society’s rules frustratingly arbitrary! He’d probably try to rape someone again, to like, get a donut or something. Man that scene was frustrating.  ALSO, and this could be organized better, but I do feel as though his attempted rape and the woman’s physical rebuff (because he would not accept her agency when she only expressed it verbally. Like at all.) was a PRETTY classical master/slave dialectic moment. Like he didn’t REALLY feel like he was “successfully” constrained or that there was “real” order in the society of the dunes until he decided to exert physical domination of another person and was stopped. That’s just... such a frustrating vision of humanity. I get that it’s appealing for various like, reactionary politics, but... Actually no but, that’s just the point I’m making, that vision of humanity is only appealing for a reactionary politics, like Hegel’s insistence on monarchy, or colonialism’s violence-as-man-making wherein conquerors go to earn their glory and masculinity by killing subjugated people. UGH. UGH. Though I guess, interestingly, he gains like, not a full consciousness but more of a respect for the other in the form of the woman through his will being frustrated. So not like, self consciousness, but consciousness of the other’s consciousness?? SO that’s an interesting permutation. Also, gaining respect/cognizance of the other person’s agency and humanity is pretty contemporaneous with his full integration in to Dune Society. So like, because he feels like he does NOT have agency, he just accedes to the (previously seeming) arbitrary and whimsical desires of the village. I dunno. There are both favorable interpretations and negative interpretations to be interpreted from this book, and I guess that makes it a good book?!?!?!?!!?!!? 3/5 stars. 

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DUSSEL is a real cool guy I'm finding out

"This Spanish word desarrollismo, which has no equivalent in other languages (the word entwicklung has a strictly Hegelian philosophical origin), points to the fallacy that claims the same "development" for the center as the periphery, not taking note that the periphery is not backward (see Hinkelammert 1970a and 1970b). In other words, it is not a temporal prius that awaits a development similar to that of Europe or the United States (as a child does an adult); instead, it is the asymetrical position of the dominated, the simultaneous position of the exploited (like the free lord and the slave). The "immature" person (child) could follow the path of the "mature" (adult) and get to "develop" herself, while the "exploited" (slave) no matter how much she works will never be "free" (lord), because her own dominated subjectivity includes her relationship with the dominator. The "modernizers" of the periphery are developmentalists because they do not realize that the relationship of planetary domination has to be overcome as a prerequisite for national development. Globalization has not extinguished, not in the least, the "national" question." footnote 218 in Ethics of LIberation by Enrique Dussel!!! It's pretty BA. I like the turn to relationships and contemporaneity in lots of Latin American thought. I wish I knew a better word for it though. I feel like when thinking from a marginalized position, the turn towards viewing things as a relationship or dynamic is really fruitful for seeing how much is left out by dominant views and perspectives. It also tends to de-naturalize things that have been naturalized. How BASEic of a view!!!! (cuz bases denature proteins?!? get it?!!?!??)  Anyway I also liked how he put Hegel in there to make it easier for us Westerners to understand how secretly relationships are foundational EVEN IN OUR OWN TEXTS such as masters and slaves. I also enjoy his use of female pronouns.  I think that this kind of stuff is often/always (intentionally!?!) left out of economic discourses cuz we do not want to think about or take responsibility for instantiating and supporting a pretty strictly evil world system!!! We need more economics people that are secretly Marxists or, I think this guy calls himself a "liberation theorist" or something? I will probably find out later, but right now I don't know!!!!!

[tabakrules-deactivated20190523]

I'm glad to see Magic will be adopting firmer mathematical foundations! When can we expect a wrath that destroys each creature with CMC closest to the average?

That spell sounds so mean.

[murtachimode]

Best thing I've ever seen

[exgynocraticgrrl-archive-deacti]

At a lecture I was giving in a large West Coast university in the Spring of 2008, the female students talked extensively about how much they preferred to have a completely waxed pubic area as it made them feel “clean,” “hot” and “well groomed.” As they excitedly insisted that they themselves chose to have a Brazilian wax, one student let slip that her boyfriend had complained when she decided to give up on waxing. Then there was silence. I asked the student to say more about her boyfriend’s preferences and how she felt about his criticism. As she started to speak other students joined in, only now the conversation took a very different turn. The excitement in the room gave way to a subdued discussion on how some boyfriends had even refused to have sex with non-waxed girlfriends as they “looked gross.” One student told the group how her boyfriend bought her a waxing kit for Valentine’s Day, while yet another sent out an email to his friends joking about his girlfriend’s “hairy beaver.” No, she did not break up with him, she got waxed instead. Two weeks after the waxing discussion, I was at an East Coast Ivy League school where some female students became increasingly angry. They accused me of denying them free choice in their embracing of our hypersexualized porn culture, and being the next generation’s elite women, this idea was especially repugnant because they saw no limits or constraints on them as women. Literally two minutes later, one of the students made a joke about the “trick” that many of them employ as a way to avoid hookup sex. What is this trick? These women purposely don’t shave or wax as they are getting ready to go out that night so they will feel too embarrassed to participate in hookup sex. As she spoke, I watched as others nodded their heads in agreement. When I asked why they couldn’t just say no to sex, they informed me that once you have a few drinks in you, and are at a party or a bar, it is too hard to say no. I was speechless, not least because they had just been arguing that I had denied them agency in my discussion of porn culture, and yet they saw no contradiction in telling me that they didn’t have the agency to say no to sex. The next day I flew to Utah to give a lecture in a small college, which although not a religious college, had a good percentage of Mormons and Catholics. I told them about the lecture the previous night and asked them if they knew what the trick was. It turns out that trick is everywhere, including Utah. I tell this story because, on many levels, it neatly captures how the porn culture is affecting young women’s lives. The reality is that women don’t need to look at porn to be profoundly affected by it because images, representations, and messages of porn are now delivered to women via pop culture. Women today are still not major consumers of hard-core porn; they are, however, whether they know it or not, internalizing porn ideology, an ideology that often masquerades as advice on how to be hot, rebellious, and cool in order to attract (and hopefully keep) a man. An excellent example is genital waxing, which first became popular in porn (not least because it makes the women look pre-pubescent) and then filtered down into women’s media such as Cosmopolitan, a magazine that regularly features stories and tips on what “grooming” methods women should adopt to attract a man. Sex and the City, that hugely successful show with an almost cult following, also used waxing as a storyline. For instance, in the movie, Miranda is chastised by Samantha for “letting herself go” by having pubic hair.

Visible or Invisible: Growing up Female in a Porn Culture

[murtachimode]

(via exgynocraticgrrl) Neoliberalism has ruined feminism. (via the-uncensored-she)

This, to me, completely sums up choice feminism.  As women, we don’t want to acknowledge that we do things because are told we have to do things.  So we tell ourselves we do things because we want to do them: “I want to shave all the hair below my eyelashes off my body, I want to be a size 0, I want to have anal sex, I want to watch copious amounts of porn, I want I want I want” and all of these wants are things that are actually pushed at us over and over until I would say we are practically brainwashed.  

There is no way to participate in western pop culture without seeing women who are all skinny with no cellulose and no hair on their bodies (even when on, say, deserted islands, on the run from the government, or otherwise deeply engaged in more pressing concerns).  This creates a cultural archetype of a woman and these archetypes are all pretty similar.  Within western mainstream culture: The ideal woman has long straight hair, petite frame, light skin, colorful eyes (blue or green), a tight toned stomach, no cellulose on her legs, no body hair in sight, totally one of the guys but also very feminine, always down to bone but only with the ‘right’ men etc etc. And maybe in some subcultures this is different (highly religious cultures might have women who wear more modest clothes as the archetype, goth culture values dark hair and clothes maybe earplugs and black nails idek, etc)  The result?  Well sure, women start to “choose” to emulate these things.  But is it really a choice when we are told over and over and over again that these are the only ways to be a woman?  I want you to stop and think of the last time you saw a woman on tv with body hair.  I failed this test, by the way, because i honestly can’t think of a single one. I don’t remember the last time i saw a woman who had body hair where it wasn’t the entire topic of conversation surrounding her.  Having body hair is never even presented as an option to “choose”.  The only choice presented by our culture is hairlessness.

And that is only the surface.  Then you start to realize that not only does mainstream culture present this as the way to be, but everyone does.  And if you stray from it you will have people tell you you are gross or unhygenic.  In my own case, I haven’t shaved my legs in over a year.  My brothers and parents like to comment about how gross it is constantly.  Would anyone be surprised if I “Chose” to start shaving again? 

How can we claim choice when we are never presented with alternatives and even with alternatives present there is huge social pressure to change your choice back to the “correct” (by societies standards) one?

(via radscumblr)

This is a lengthy post but an interesting one. I’ve thought about making comics about body hair (and my struggles with it) but I don’t think there is a “right” answer or solution. I do think if being hairless makes YOU feel good, and I mean really honestly, then go for it, but it should be YOUR choice. I never really cared about mine until I dated a guy that believed body hair on women was “gross,” but more than that, he believed that it was an okay thing to think that body hair on women is gross. An acceptable preference. I don’t know about that.

(via kateordie)

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Omg so hotttt

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Teen wolf

[kingsatans]

A comic about visiting my friend

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Forever 21

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ART IS FOREVER

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This is my friend lolololololololol

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I AM A TRUE JOHN DARNIELLE FAN.

[ryannorth]

UNBEATABLE SQUIRREL GIRL

new monthly comic starting in January

me doing words

Erica doing art

and it’s gonna be TOTALLY GREAT

read more in Entertainment Weekly!

[murtachimode]

Woop!

[murtachimode]

FEELINGS ARE HURT WHEN WORDS ARE CARELESS