Torn Halves

Thoughts on our neo-nihilism

[tornhalves]

Libertarian Critical Pedagogy and Cultural Conservatism as Two Halves of an Integral Whole

The debate in critical pedagogy between the libertarians and the cultural conservatives (e.g. Allan Bloom) looking at the link between liberty and culture.

Teachers, are you really and unequivocally on the side of the students? What kind of monstrous teacher would not be on the side of the students? #pedagogy #education #edtech

[tornhalves]

The Myth of a Radical Digital Connectivity

The myth of the radically horizontal structure of digital connectivity - like a digital rhizome - with a supposedly radical political potential.

“The old motto: “Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains,” is being replaced by: “Digital natives of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your teachers.”“ #pedagogy #education #edtech

[tornhalves]

Paulo Freire: Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Reading Freire as a critic of today's narrow ideas about self-directed learning, the teacher as guide and the edtech-enhanced personalisation of education.

[tornhalves]

Twitter: a gravedigger of the ancien regime?

It is said that the social media – Twitter in particular – have disproved the thesis, hastily propounded in the days before digital, that history had come to an end. A new beginning is now under way. Marx (although his name is now taboo) was right, and the regime has produced its own gravediggers. With Twitter a regime of corporate servitude has unwittingly opened up a space in which people are finding a new-found freedom, cultivating something that may well topple the oppressive social order that produced it.

Writing long before the invention of the technology that would allow everyone to publicly broadcast their complaints against the regime, Simone Weil argued that the historical facts did not support the gravedigger hypothesis, and she suggested an alternative hypothesis: Servitude cannot cultivate the spirit of freedom (Oppression and Liberty. p110). So, do the new technology and the culture that is enthusing about it disprove both the end of history thesis and Weil’s deeper pessimism? ....

[The rest in our critique of hashtag activist and our description of the radically conservative nature of Twitter here: http://www.digitalcounterrevolution.co.uk/2015/twitter-hashtag-activism-a-critique/

[odettecarotte]

"For those who do not play along, there exists the danger of considering themselves better than others and misusing their critique of society as an ideology for their own private interest. While feeling their way towards making their own existence into the flickering picture of the right one, they should remain aware of its insubstantiality and know how little the picture can replace the right life. Such considerations however contradict the gravitational force of what is bourgeois within them. Those who are at a distance are as entangled as those who are actively engaged; the former have nothing over the latter, except the insight into their entanglement and the happiness of the tiny freedom, which lies in the recognition as such. … There is no exit from the entanglement. The only responsible option is to deny oneself the ideological misuse of one’s own existence, and as for the rest, to behave in private as modestly, inconspicuously and unpretentiously as required, not for reasons of good upbringing, but because of the shame that when one is in hell, there is still air to breathe.”

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia.  (via lovedbyapollo)

[adornography]

To the extent that art corresponds to manifest social need it is primarily a profit-driven industry that carries on for as long as it pays, and by its smooth functioning it obscures the fact that it is already dead.

Adorno, Aesthetic Theory p. 18. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. (via adornography)

[forgottenness-deactivated201512]

Ulrike Meinhof, b. October 7, 1934

Abstract from the speech of Ulrike Meinhof on Sept. 13, 1974, in Moabit prison, West Berlin (Translated by Sigrid Huth):

"The metropole individual is discovered. He or she comes from the process of decay, the false, alienated surroundings of living in the system — factory, office, school, university, revisionist groups, apprenticeship and temporary jobs. The results of this separation between professional and private life, the psychic deformation caused by the consumer society begun to show.

"But that is us, that is where we come from: bred by the processes of elimination in metropole society, by the war of all against all, the competition between each and everybody else, the system of fear and pressure for productivity, the game of one at the expense of somebody else, the separation of people into men and women, young and old, healthy and sick, foreigners and natives, the fight for reputation.

"That is where we come from: from the isolation of the suburban home, the desolate concreted public housing, the cellprisons, asylums and special prison sections. We come to the guerrilla organization brain-washed through the media, consumerism, physical punishment and the ideology of non-violence; from depression, sickness, declassification, insult and humiliation of the individual, of all exploited people under imperialism. Eventually we perceive the misery of each of us as constituting the necessity of liberation from imperialism, the necessity of anti-imperialist struggle. We understand there is nothing to lose by destroying this system through armed struggle, but everything to win: our collective liberation, life, humanity, identity."

~ Excerpted in Semiotext(e), Hatred of Capitalism (2001)

[anenglishmajorandcoffee-deactiv]

The method of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit—his first masterpiece and the work of his I will be using more than any other—is to examine an idea on its own terms, letting that idea present its best arguments and develop itself until it unwittingly exposes its own limitations and self-contradictions, thus overcoming itself. Rather than refuting a theory from the outside, employing external criteria it never intended to meet and would not accept, Hegel’s technique is to show how theories fail to meet their own standards, thus begging no questions. “If the refutation is thorough, it is derived and developed from the principle itself, not accomplished by counter-assertions and random thoughts from outside. The refutation would, therefore, properly consist in the further development of the principle, and in thus remedying the defectiveness” (Hegel, PS 13, §24; see also Gadamer 1976a, 5). As with the thought of many of the idealists, much of Hegel’s thought can be viewed as just this kind of internal refutation.through extension of Kant. As Tom Rockmore puts it, “Although he rejects the letter of Kant’s critical philosophy, Hegel participates in the post- Kantian effort … to elaborate its spirit by thinking with Kant against Kant” (Denker and Vater 2003, 339). Hegel starts from Kant’s position, but finds it internally inconsistent as well as unsatisfying for other reasons. He ends up extending it far beyond the limitations Kant imposed, but to where he thinks Kant should have gone had he consistently followed out his own best insights. Hegel’s idealism is less a rejection of Kant’s thought than its completion or fulfillment by working out flaws that even Kant should recognize; in other words, Hegel’s thought is one enormous Aufhebung. According to Merold Westphal, “Hegel’s philosophy [takes] the form of a continuous debate with the critical philosophy; and we should not be too surprised when he defines philosophy as the refutation of Kant.”1 Hegel’s task is to be the Kant that Kant should have been were he sufficiently free of presuppositions to follow his own insights to their proper conclusions. Interestingly, Kant himself once described his own project as just this kind of overcomingthrough- extension of his great predecessor, Hume: “If we start from a wellfounded, but undeveloped, thought which another has bequeathed to us, we may well hope by continued reflection to advance farther than the acute man to whom we owe the first spark of light” (Kant, PFM 8/260).

Lee Braver - A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism  (via anenglishmajorandcoffee)

[guerrillamamamedicine]

If you’re poor, the only way you’re likely to injure someone is the old traditional way: artisanal violence, we could call it – by hands, by knife, by club, or maybe modern hands-on violence, by gun or by car. But if you’re tremendously wealthy, you can practice industrial-scale violence without any manual labor on your own part. You can, say, build a sweatshop factory that will collapse in Bangladesh and kill more people than any hands-on mass murderer ever did, or you can calculate risk and benefit about putting poisons or unsafe machines into the world, as manufacturers do every day. If you’re the leader of a country, you can declare war and kill by the hundreds of thousands or millions. And the nuclear superpowers – the US and Russia – still hold the option of destroying quite a lot of life on Earth. So do the carbon barons. But when we talk about violence, we almost always talk about violence from below, not above.

Let’s Call Climate Change What It Really Is—Violence | Alternet (via guerrillamamamedicine)

[fuckyeahdialectics]

…tolerance in our society can be said to be genuinely repressive, in that it offers a means of defusing the most dangerous and subversive ideas: not censorship, but the transformation into a fad, is the most effective way of destroying a potentially threatening movement or revolutionary personality.

Jameson, Frederic, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1971) p.110 (via fuckyeahdialectics)

[tornhalves]

Frankenstein and the Monstrosity of Edtech

A Luddite reading of monstrosity in the novel "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley, and its relevance to edtech - the Promethean discourse in education.

[tornhalves]

Toward a Luddite Pedagogy - Hybrid Pedagogy

The time has come to take a stand against this thoughtless use of “Luddite” in the pejorative. The historical record needs to be set straight, and it needs to be set straight as a prelude to defending a Luddite approach to education.

[thebookth1ef-deactivated2015030]

[agapinbeing-deactivated20190124]

Disciplinary society. Your only point of existence is to render your labour for the master.

[zealotry]

Just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (via zealotry)

[finslavictoriasempre]

Black Bloc - A Story of Violence and Love.

[tornhalves]

Points for discussion: 1. Poverty is violence. 2. Give violence a chance.

[panda-propaganda-deactivated201]