The Diagonal

Posts

  • Frankfurters: A Promethean Take

    I’ve been catching up a bit on the Frankfurt School (broadly construed) lately. Not just the Institute for Social Research itself, and not just ‘Critical Theory’s’ ‘biggest names’ – Adorno, Benjamin, Fromm, Horkheimer, Marcuse, later on Habermas – but the full array of women and men broadly associated with this remarkably fluid, multidisciplinary, and productive…

  • We Who Live on the Surplus

    A crucial bit of social self-understanding we owe in part to the early Edinburgh school of political economy, especially Steuart and Smith, is that some classes of modern society live on material surplus generated by other classes of society. Smith in particular highlit the landed gentry, royal families, and clerical establishments (vide the Churches of…

  • Platform Herding and ‘Infantile Disorders’

    I hesitate to disturb Lenin’s posthumous sleep, because doing so could elicit exactly the kind of behavior I intend to deplore. But what the hell, an argument that ‘shows’ through its responses what it ‘says’ through its content might just ‘stick’ better than one with just one dimension.  So here’s the behavior in question ……

  • The Social Aggregate Read of Marx’s Kapital: A Glossary

    Introduction      In my recent aggregates-grounded Synopsis of Marx’s ‘project’ in Capital (see previous post), I capitalized (pun foreseen, not intended) certain terms of art, promising a Glossary as sequel. This is that Glossary. Some of the terms are my own, most are Marx’s as glosssd by myself in specific connection with my Synopsis.  …

  • Bataille Through Kapital: The Curse Removed from ‘The Accursed Share’

    ABSTRACT:       I’ll aim here to make Marx’s ‘project’ in the three volumes Capital – and in the crucial but oddly ignored Theories of Surplus Value, sometimes justly called ‘Capital Volume IV’ – accessible to non-‘Marxists’ (a name Marx deplored nearly as much as he did the name’s bearers).       To do this I adopt what should…

  • Getting Over Ourselves

    Increasingly it seems much of both what remains of the self-styled left, and what remains of the self-styled right, have become useless to those on behalves of whom they claim to speak. Both appear largely to have degenerated into little more than performers of self-indulgent, sentimentalist morality-plays unanchored in any historic or species reality. These…

  • Owning Our Enhancements

    For some years I’ve been pushing two ‘prophecies’: The first is the Marxian/Keynesian proposition that production-tech developments will in time make it possible for most ‘work’ to become ‘art’ or ‘play.’  The second is the Federovian proposition that health-tech developments will in time make it possible not simply for lifespans, but indeed ‘healthspans,’ to be lengthened indefinitely…

  • Jazzy Ted Adorno on Art and Capital

    All right. I’ve read some of those ‘controversial’ writings by Teddy on ‘jazz’ now, and I think perhaps what we’ve had here is a simple misunderstanding… If you recall the era and the context in which the old boy was writing, you see at once that what Teddy is on about is the mid-20th century…

  • Zizek Welcome Here

    A lot of fellow lefties seem to loathe Zizek. But I suspect many in whom he arouses antipathy are simply taking him the wrong way – as someone asserting propositions that he intends for his readers and listeners to come to hold as definitively true.  Whether that’s what Z actually intends (I doubt it) or…

  • Bill Told the Kid to Fuck Off

        There are dogs that will cling to you closely and follow you room to room. And there are dogs that aren’t like that at all – dogs that trot straight to a quiet corner where they can keep watch as they leave you to your own proceedings. Many of us seem to be…