In his book Vita Contemplativa, Byung-Chul Han views the ability of contemplation as lacking in the our new digital age.

Han constracts the life of in-activity with the life of activity. The digital age is an age of non-stop activity.

Contemplative inactivity, " is alien to the machine. It knows only two states: on and off. Simply deactivating the machine does not bring about a contemplative state."

What distinguishes contemplater from a guardian or observer who always pursues a particular goal. Is that the contemplater, by contrast, lacks all intention, has no goal in sight.

Han’s thesis is not about going back to premodern in-activity, but to not let our glorification of activity takes from us the value of inactivity.

Conetmplation is non-instrumental human experience. Justice and Beauty are not goal oriented, but valuable in themselves.

This reminds of Benjamin's Aura. Which Politics takes its place. Spiritual stability substituted by political recognition.

But what replaces the faculty of contemplation ? What we do when we are inactive ?

Any recommended readings that explore such a question ?

Hello!

[[I originally intended this post for the feminist subreddit, but I wanted to ask here as well, just explaining why it is feminist-focused]]

So something that I have noticed with feminism alongside other ideologies which may fall under critical theory etc., is that the patriarchy and other systems of power seem to act / be considered as the fundamental constituents of social reality \[in order to be more concise and precise I will be referring primarily to the patriarchy from now on, but I do recognize the intersectionality nuance\].

I feel like critical theory/feminism many times is more about criticizing than understanding society. I was watching an interview of a critical theorist which said that “critical theory is not about understanding why like the rest of philosophy, it is about revealing how people are oppressed and has the aim of emancipation”. \[\[https://youtu.be/o5Zap4hTZNw?is=nbYbAjFwmUJX74Lp —- it is around 23:00 if someone is interested\]\]. She talks about how revealing how people are oppressed / systems of power are the link that ties it all together and I think this in a way explains my question.

Analysis seems to position the patriarchy as the root of all \[gender in this case\] injustice. I many times here the argument that “the patriarchy (etc.) is the root of all evil” and I see very little discussion if any when it comes to things like collectivism vs individualism, an extent of inevitable human ignorance and egoism, imperfect knowledge etc. I know that such analyses have some times been used I just don’t see it that much especially in contemporary discourse. Or they are often “absorbed” by an interpretation of them as being used maliciously for the purpose of harm (rather thana mix of the two).

Edit: for example, when you personally start ti try and understand society, how do you start your inquiry? What types of questions do you ask yourself? Where in history do you look?

Also any resources, thinkers, articles etc. are well appreciated!

it becomes quite clear that anti-hauntology shares this underlying logic with solarpunk. After all, what is solarpunk if not a vision for a new beginning; the creation of a new future? In The Future is Not Lost I claim that solarpunk’s aesthetic vision can be seen as an eco-technological projection of a future that could still come to pass. In the terms of the cyberpunk theorists (Fisher, Nick Land, Iain Hamilton Grant etc.) it is a form of hyperstition: the very idea of which has the potential to bring in an influx of investment, both in terms of libidinal energy and capital, that could eventually actualise itself into reality. (See examples of solarpunk inspired building projects in: From Cyberpunk to Solarpunk: Technics and the Cities of the Future.)
But in this article, rather than getting bogged down in the philosophical weeds of how exactly this could take place, I want to instead focus on the music. Despite the fact that there seems to be a very distinct crossover in the underlying logic of anti-hauntology and solarpunk, imagining what might constitute a ‘solarpunk music’ is a question that has not really been addressed in any substantial way. 
To my mind, if we are to take solarpunk seriously, we must move beyond these kinds of retrofuturistic dreamscapes that could have easily been imagined in the 90s. Solarpunk culture can be about more than just utopian cityscapes, it can become the collective embodiment of the future we want to build. Indeed, because solarpunk is at its heart a collective movement, the music and music culture surrounding it must be inherently pluralistic. There is not just one genre that defines solarpunk music, it is a general approach towards cultural production that we can take forward into the future. 

Greetings, everyone!

I published a long essay arguing that Aleksei German's Hard to Be a God (2013) exposes the structure of cyberpunk better than the genre's own megacities do. Central claims first, then the reasoning.

1. Cyberpunk works better as a condition than as a prop list: an interval that has lost its outside. Regimes change, tech updates, chapters of history overlap, none of it leads the world beyond itself.
2. That condition has two asymptotes. The classical megalopolis hits it from above, through maximum exchange speed. Arkanar hits the same limit from below, through zero speed.
3. The meme question "what cyberpunk do we deserve" hides a real claim. To deserve something is to correspond to an instance that isn't you. In cyberpunk that instance is technology itself, grown so far past extending the human that it starts handing the human back distorted. No design behind it, no transcendence. Just accumulated excess.
4. Arkanar runs the same logic through arrest instead of excess. Its tech hasn't disappeared, it's stuck — scaffolding that never finishes, walls patched instead of rebuilt. Stalled tech traps history the same way runaway tech does.
5. Fisher and Varoufakis sit close to this without covering it. Fisher's hauntology needs a corpse, a future once believed in and lost. Arkanar never had one. Varoufakis asks who extracts rent, which assumes politics and economics already split apart enough to extract from each other. Arkanar's haven't finished splitting.

The condition-over-props move only works if it survives losing almost everything the genre is recognized by. German strips out the neon and the implants, and the reading still holds. So the real load-bearing part of the genre isn't the furniture, it's the timing — a present that keeps changing costume without ever turning into history.

The instance claim is the one I'd interrogate first myself. Say "instance" and it sounds like it's smuggling in a judge or a god, though it shouldn't. Technology here never gets outside status, it starts as a plain extension of the body and only picks up authority because there's too much of it now for the feedback loop to stay legible to the person running it. Arkanar tests the same claim with almost no working technology at all — towers and roads still standing, just frozen mid-collapse — and gets the same result, which is either evidence the claim is doing real work or evidence it's vague enough to fit anything.

Full essay linked here. Genuinely curious which of these five you'd push back on first.

There are plenty of sharp analysis on how disavowal functions in the subject in Zupancic's book, but there aren't many talks of how to overcome it. The closest response I found was in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMOh23v38gM where Zupancic hints at denial being slightly more desirable, because the existence of repression in denial generates symptoms that forces the subject to do something, whereas in disavowal one can be completely passive, one is somehow able to fully acknowledge the existence of some terrible truth and experience none of its symbolic effects. However, I don't think Zupancic is suggesting to turn disavowal into denial in some way or another, and I'm interested to see if there is a slight chance one can formulate some kind of position as a way out of disavowal.

In the closing remarks of the book, Zupancic claims that it is quite impossible to confront the traumatic truths, and instead should "pursue the trauma and its consequences in the threads and cracks of our normal, everyday reality." However, I struggle to understand this statement, especially on how it applies concretely to a situation.

I am effectively looking for something like Barthes's analysis of the literary past in Writing Degree Zero, but applied to historiography.

I'm doing an analysis of Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, and one of the sub-arguments I'm trying to make is that the novel is written in a kind of "impossible" present tense (the narrator conveys to us tidy, elegant sentences while being tortured, for instance) in order to specifically distinguish his account from historical discourse (which would conventionally be written in some kind of past tense).

It might seem obvious that history is likely to be written in the past tense, but my suspicion is that theorizations of how history is written nevertheless include some interesting bits. Those discursive conventions we take for granted always end up having some weird qualities the more we pay attention to them (e.g. the famous example of how scholars often speak in the future tense in a preface to describe something they've already written and thought through in the past).

So: if anyone has any kind of source that provides a kind of linguistic or stylistic theory of historiography--especially if it discusses verb tense--I would appreciate it.

I am interested in reading about AI mediated communication though a critical theory lens, specifically about how people communicate with chat bots for therapeutic and personal relationship purposes. Does anyone have any articles they’d reccomend? Thanks!!

Is this a fun idea? I'm trying to balance fun and education, let me know what you think.

This game is played in a small groups or alone. players must prove a ridiculous statement that they get and convince the others that the statement is, in fact, true. They would pick apart the statement and try to reason their way through the assumptions of the statement. The more elaborate and logical the explanation, the better.

Examples:

• "The color blue is older than the color red"
• "gravity pulls harder around a person who is keeping a secret"

This game is not about making up conspiracy theories, but rather building a world in which these statements can be true.

I'm just starting to get into Performance Theory (via Schechner) and really curious to build an understanding of how performance theory applies to social media. Are there any books, papers, essays, etc, which attempt this?

Hi, i am a socialist who wants to expand his knowledge and look into other ideologies, im not searching for an other ideology but i want to know exactly what they are so im educated and can debate about the topic. Im looking for a book that defines the main ideology and ideas of fascism. I’m kinda looking for a “the communist manifesto“ but then for fascism if that makes sense.

can someone help me? thanks

New essay on lacan and baudrillard’s system of objects and a new view of commodities

I often hear the concerns over elements of current core curriculums in American education, whether that be ones that currently exist in secondary schools to teach things like the Federalist Papers or Shakespeare or hypothetical traditionalist desires of teaching the “great books” in university curriculums, as a form of reinforcing a white supremacist bourgeois values. As such, I wanted to pose a hypothetical and am curious to see how critical theorists would consider the question (I promise it is in good faith).

If one were instead to propose that the direct works of Marx were to be THE standard core curriculums in American society that everyone must engage with (including as a mandatory university course or two), would you accept that? I am aware that there would probably be a debate on the subject, as some might lean towards yes because they consider Marx to be basically accurate in his assessment of capitalism while other might lean towards no because many of the problems of Eurocentrism still plague Marx. I am genuinely curious what the responses will be.

In this intellectual biography, critic and philosopher Boris Groys turns to the Arthur Rimbaud of modern bureaucracy, Alexandre Kojève, a philosopher of little-known writings and profound influence. Kojève was fascinated with Hegel’s dialectics and with communism and envisioned a universal empire as the end of history. Kojève drew on Buddhism and also proclaimed himself a Stalinist. At the same time, he was one of the creators of a nascent European Union. His concept of the human as something defined by negation and unique among animals in being separated from nature is highly political. It explains why humans can never be fully satisfied by a political system based on their allegedly ‘natural’ rights.

Groys reveals a Kojève with a unique perspective on our political capacities and human condition.