scribblings at the in-laws

[The following is a curry of mistakes written here and there, amidst my in-laws, these past few days. I’ve a great debt to others whose ideas are in sharper relief. I’ve yet to find my quirk, but here’s some reflections while I search.]

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01 – A nice book I read

Kant posed an unthought, one notorious hedge which post-Kantians considered a skill issue. Even if thought’s legitimacy is a front for force, Nietzsche had to hand it to the Königsberger. In this they rhymed, by way of critique.

Late Nietzsche admits that “We behold all things through the human head and cannot cut off this head…”

His critique is, foremost, pedantic: the idea of “in-itself” is (literally) sense-less since “object” and “thing” are relational concepts that imply objectifiers and thingifiers. It’s also Kantian, since Kant’s whole shtick renders meaningless the “thing without properties” he poses. Though to be sure, all them genealogies, for which we know Nietzsche, suggest that a naïve certainty in the truth of the given is what happens when we snub our own history. Immediacy is probably deceptive, yet relationality just is the case.

When indoctrinating undergrads in Luciferian CRT, we spotlight Nietzsche’s suspicion of a categorial immediacy and the ecclesiastical unconscious that is its subject.

In his sights, the dominant form of life, a herd (mentality) shepherded by clergymen, is anti-life: instead of rerouting our somatic appetite, our self-understanding is inherently castration—a making-unthought. The idea that there’s a subject at the helm testifies to this abiding disavowal of our organicity, the ever-ebbing, ever-flowing bedlam of energy prior to the unity we call Homo. So, we behold things through the head, but in so doing, we forget (if not cut off) the organismic body and all its clashing inclinations. You are basically as chaotic as nature is, and to plug up all those divergent drives is not good for You. The hope that kept Nietzsche writing was that we’ve not irrevocably fucked ourselves; we can let our freak flag fly, tap into our polymorphous sensuality, etc. However sacrilegious that sounds now, it didn’t always and didn’t everywhere.

There are two routes to historicize Kant which tend to converge despite their famous hostility. For instance, in his Gay Science, Fred gives this pithy account of reification, second naturalization, and other such ways of saying the same: “what started as appearance in the end nearly always becomes essence and effectively acts as its essence.”

Now I could be (and probably am) wrong, but isn’t this the will to power whittled to a sentence? That will, as I understand it, is the tendency common to all our competing passions: the organismic move to self-perpetuate. To territorialize. To appropriate. To integrate. A singular passion forcibly aligns other passions with itself and hereafter projects that identity as relation proper. Therefore, the mind’s representation is certainly life, but then how is it anti-life?

Illness for Nietzsche is inadaptability, whereby the many remain at the behest of the one [a la Christianity] despite any and all challenges. That is how Nietzsche fashions Kant’s caution against “self-incurred tutelage.” The focus is less individual selves guided by mature others, but individual passions tutored by the intellect. But is health the word for when each aspect (of a totality’s underlying multiplicity) moves in a sovereign, appropriating fashion? Wouldn’t that too be a madness?

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02 – Stuff and Things

I was recently in a Grundrisse reading group which I left after the first meeting (sorry Matt, love u tho).

Also I toe-dipped as CTWG plunged into DoE, left a Cooper (Counterrevolution) group too early. Now I find myself hanging on for dear life as I tarry with Deleuze and Lyotard with comrades. I’ll probably bail at some point as I’ve classes to cook. It’s all been exploratory fun though.

Anyhow, while discussing Marx’s notebooks, somebody asked a great question: what’s materialism actually?

Look I’m no expert. I, like countless others, became an armchair Marxologist because I didn’t have the fortitude to develop a film-guy, Letterbox’d-ass hobby during COVID. I just sweated through books on statistics, read Marx, and watched reality TV to repress the fact that we’ve all become guilty remnant.

My answer for what it’s worth was stuff. Materialism seeks to make sense of the stuff that keeps the whole thing, whatever it is, running. Such constitutive stuff refers back to the relation it constitutes. Materialism then is a micrological perspective on relations that harness and process stuff, stuff that the relations understand to be good. It’s fair polemics to say Marx got Capital wrong in the first sentence, with his appeal to commodities instead of assets as Cooper (or my linked beloveds) might say. Though I wonder if we’re operating at two levels of abstraction.

The individuals that are continuously made by and make a societal whole (named capitalism) do not experience what is good for the whole (so as to reproduce itself and adapt to novel challenges from within [tendency of the rate of profit to fall] and without [natural disasters]) in the shape of filled-out ledgers.

Rather, we individuals experience social wealth in the shape of what we find to be good: enjoyable, usable stuff that can be exchanged for other enjoyable, usable stuff (so as to reproduce ourselves and adapt to novel challenges from within [cravings] and without [responsibilities]). Hence the bourgeois economist (who is the object of critique, by the by), just as the rest of us, sees capitalism as this accumulation of commodities. Though all that is, in truth, the accumulation of capital (the Good or Wealth of Society writ large) which we are all compelled to increase in different manners.

Marx, like Nietzsche, thought that a naïve certainty in the truth of the given is what happens when we snub our own history. It’s unclear to me that either thought the crucial problem with the given was that it was false. They both seem to think that the immediate is life incarnate, i.e., what life apprehends as life-giving. However, they both have different ways of suggesting that such immediate is anti-life, i.e., what is, in the final instance, life-undermining—whether we mean the castration of passions or the production of (paupers’) misery.

“The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and, therefore, also the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army.”

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03 – The Hurt of Misery

What does any of this have to do with technology? Blackness? Much of that I’ll continue to explore in this newsletter, while further substantiating and diverging from the above scribblings. In the interim, here’s a 100-level piece I wrote that poses the stakes of that very question.