All posts filed under: capitalism

Malabou

Friday, April 8, 2016
by Joseph Weissman
comments 7
affect / capitalism / creativity / machine

Catherine Malabou has created a meticulous and profound new concept of the brain. Malabou analyses the functions which neuroscience has discovered, conducting a contemporary synthesis of neuroplasticity, crystallizing a new concept which acts as a curious new abstract machine with many parts. She names this concept plasticity after the plastic multiplicity of the brain; and one component of this concept expresses the brain’s power to learn and to heal, and even to reconfigure itself. Another component is transdifferentiation, or the power of […]

Living

Wednesday, July 11, 2012
by Joseph Weissman
comment 1
becoming / black holes / capitalism / creation / difference / language / metaphysics / ontology / power

What is modern? It can perhaps be discerned in the radical questioning of the status of piety, a questioning which slowly infects every discipline and discourse — a questioning, in other words, coextensive with a generalized instrumentalization, experienced at the psychic level as a new asceticism. Modernity in this sense includes souls no longer living; it embodies achromatically the spirits of wildly disparate eras. In this way we may perhaps be permitted to speak of the […]

Genesis

Thursday, February 3, 2011
by Joseph Weissman
comments 12
capitalism / death / difference / disaster / expressivity / future / health / humanity / language / machine / metaphysics / modernity / nihilism / Politics

Genesis. Enormous psychosocial and political transformations were necessary in order to put into place the global transhistorical capitalist institutions we take for granted. Capitalism is different, genetically as it were, from all previous ways of organizing human society. It dissolves society in favor of the decoded flows of pre-individual traits and elements which will form abstract labor and commodities. This dissolution is what previous forms of society had attempted to prevent. They had precisely developed […]

Firestorm

Thursday, July 2, 2009
by Joseph Weissman
comments 16
automation / capitalism / control / desire / exchange / immanence

Twins. Capitalism is nihilism, an endless betrayal of production in favor of an infinite — imaginary — debt or Void, which implies the transcendental equivalence of all processes, their essential or characteristic meaninglessness. Indeed the hostility towards life evinced in the machinations of capitalism are strictly correlate to the heterogeneous means by which nihilism achieves its destructive victory: through a generalized deterritorialization which can barely halt before its radically external, schizophrenic limit. Firestorm. Heidegger reminds […]

Noises

Friday, March 20, 2009
by Joseph Weissman
comments 9
capitalism / concept / desire / difference / event / language / parasite / problem

    Non-expression. Speaking is a donation of words; but in this donation is dramatized an idea of alterity, an uncanny and infinite Power mysteriously unleashed, and this by a seemingly peaceful sharing of signs.  Is it possible? Ten thousand years of speaking, and still we are waiting for a sign. Problems. We owe to Deleuze the discovery that the difficulty of a problem is not simply the number of differential elements it assembles within […]

Notes to Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle: Chapters 1 and 2

Tuesday, October 23, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
comment 1
capitalism / commodity fetishism / consumption / Debord / image / isolation / marxism / materialism / May 68 / reification / representation / separation / simulacrum / Society of the Spectacle / spectacle / Theory / Philosophy

Separation Perfected But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence…illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness. –Feuerbach, Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity […]

Reconstructing Reality

Monday, October 8, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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capitalism / geometry / God / ideology / power / revolution / simulation / state / subversion / technology / unconscious / war

Just as total war renders ethics derisory, consumer society annihiliates the horizons of authentic experience. God, the State, Father: abysses for the erasure of thought, until the only idea of which we are capable is a permitted one. The unconscious is a battlezone of images, brands, consumption algorithms. Ideology is repetition, a recording surface for lies which grows deeper and more complex with each iteration; the con, however, is always the same: alone we are […]

Debord: Society of the Spectacle Notes (Part 2)

Friday, May 18, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
comment 1
capitalism / consumerism / Debord / marxism / May 68 / Society of the Spectacle

Society of the Spectacle 3. Unity and Division within Appearances A lively new polemic about the concepts ‘one divides into two’ and ‘two fuse into one’ is unfolding on the philosophical front in this country. This debate is a struggle between those who are for and those who are against the materialist dialectic, a struggle between two conceptions of the world: the proletarian conception and the bourgeois conception. Those who maintain that ‘one divides into […]

Socioeconomics and Ideology

Friday, February 2, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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capitalism / exploitation / ideology / Marx / society / surplus value

At first glance, the two spheres of human existence seem hardly even to touch one another. The socioeconomic situation in a given society already seems so material, so concrete, that the lofty abstractions and vainglorious rationalizations of political ideology seem almost as excrement of the functioning of the political economy, culture as mass-produced fractured residue of the production process, as a consumptive afterthought, called in only to justify, explain, speculate about or apologize for the […]