Hi,

I’m interested in finding texts which explore the ways datafication affects knowledge-production and whether this could be considered under a neoliberal paradigm, i.e, quantification as a means to commodify everything it touches. I‘ve read some Wendy Brows, and some works in datafication studies, but haven’t found many which specifically consider how such knowledge-production might be ideological.

Thanks

Hello r/criticaltheory members. Due to a recent spate of contentious and non-productive threads regarding the ongoing military conflict and humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the mods have decided to implement an indefinite–but temporary–moratorium on any and all posting regarding Israel-Palestine. This is–to be clear–not meant to indicate a stance, but has solely to do with this topic posing serious issues for us as moderators to maintain a collegial environment which fosters meaningful conversation and not just mudslinging and hostility which does not consist of critical theory. We of course recognize that this is bound to be a contentious decision on our part and do invite feedback or suggestions offered in good faith; however, it should be stated very clearly that recent high-traffic threads regarding this topic have brought in users who do not otherwise engage in/with our community and who engaged in these threads solely to sow polemics, not to engage in honest, forthright, or substantive conversations regarding a topic which demands these qualities of us.

So, i've been wanting to read up on Marx and i would like to ask what books and in what order to read to fully grasp Marxist theory.

I am making my way though the Origins of Totalitarianism. Obviously she was a German-Jewish refugee / emigre herself who moved to the US. Its quite a dense book so forgive me if I get some basic arguments wrong.

I just finished chapter 9. She essentially says how refugeee crisis caused intense political reactions in Europe pre WWII and gave justifications to governments to revoke paths to citizenship. Also refugees refused to integrate a they felt their old nationalities were the last link they had to their overall humanity. Also they gave police forces an independent ability divorced from constitutional rights and political oversight which made it easier to assume a full true police state. As they % of the alien population rose the resulting effect was a strengthening on the police state and a dilution of the Rights of man (secularized human rights)

Also there was no provision for deporting the alien refugees as either the governments who expelled them would actively persecute them (Fascist Spain, Nazi Germany etc) or the people themselves would refuges and dissapear into the population and be totally divorced from the legal system.

She doesn't really explicitly say but she implies refugee crisis are a catastrophe for the "comity of European nations" and simulataneously all efforts should be made to strengthen human rights law and ensure paths to nationalization. She sort of is eating her cake and having it because she implies immigration or accepting refugees is both a moral imperative and also a catastophe in the internal cohesion of the nation state.
Obviously with the Ukranian refugee crisis in Europe and before that the Syrian her arguments raise certain dilemma's. There is a broader debate in restricting asylum seekers to many European nations as they are perceived to be economic migrants in many cases.
I would be interested on your thoughts of her work or my analysis (perhaps I misunderstood it).

If this isn't allowed here, feel free to remove it. So, I recently wrote a paper on Walter Benjamin for a graduate course. I ended up doing very well on it, but my teachers were not specifically Benjamin scholars, so they could not provide me with very significant feedback despite thinking I was correct. Although I am not a Benjamin scholar myself, I did as much research as I could into him these past two months, and it became a paper I'm quite proud of. I'm thinking of submitting this as my sample paper for PHD applications, whereby an actual Benjamin scholar may end up reading it. As such, I was hoping to get more substantive feedback on it from someone here who might be particularly qualified in some way on Benjamin, whether that be a Master's/PHD thesis, postdoctoral research on him, etc. I'd be willing to arrange a payment to those who have proof of their qualifications. It'd probably be easy money for you since it is only a little above 20 pages, although quality feedback would be appreciated. Please comment here or DM me and we can talk further. Thanks!

Hi all! I'm doing research on varying forms of separation and division, including binary thinking, empiricism, enlightenment thinking, othering/ outsider thinking, monotheism, dualism, etc. I'm thinking about these in opposition to more fluid forms of thinking- forms like spectrums, complex systems, more "naturalistic" structures, etc.

Anybody have good recs along these lines?

Some faves:

The Dialectic of Enlightenment

Becoming Animal- David Abram

The Great Derangement- Amitav Ghosh

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

Hi all, are there any other meassures that workers can make in order to protest?

I am asking this as here in Uruguay it seems that strikes are the only way people protest against the goverment. But I find this extreamly inefficient, plus it only get hate from other parts of the society (consider us workers as lazy).

I was thinking that with new tecnologies (social media mainly) other more efficient ways should be possible.

Books and articles are welcome!

i’m trying to find patterns and themes in motherhood from a feminist lens

additionally articles or theorists investigating more of everyday violence in motherhood or womanhood here i’m talking about micro-instances and not global events

Hey guys,

Nietzsche inspired me to compared Judaism, Catholicism and Protestanism.

One thing I've notice was the Judaism unlike Roman Culture had a notion of "God" which transcendented the Visual Image. Based on reading some Roman texts the "visual image" wasn't that important in Judaism. Unlike Romans, who had a much more Iconophilic Culture.

Jewish Religion seems to lean more towards the "Oral Tradition." This tradition evolved to the "Written tradition."

Meanwhile, Roman culture was very different. It seems like Statues and Visuals played more of a role in Roman culture.

I'm not sure about Greek Culture but seems to be both visual and auditory. The fact that the Platonic concept of God is similar to the Jewish hints to an auditory culture.

On the other hand, Aristole criticize too much dependency on the text and both him and Plato exalted the role on Geometry(a very visual endevour) in understanding the world.

Roman Catholic culture and the countries that in evolved in France, Italy and Spain. Seem to have been strongly visual and icon friendly. For instance, they build big Cathedrals with intricate interior design.

Meanwhile, with Protestantism we go back to a more "auditory culture." The fact that many Protestants shunned visuals and icons hints to this rejection of iconophilia.

However, I feel with Protestants there were economic factors at play. For instance, Constructiong of Cathedrals would have been economically unfeasible for many Protestants who tended to have congregate in smaller denominations.

I want something that can help me understand the structure of capitalism within the core western countries in terms of the forms of labor and consumption that predominate as well as the function and form of finance capital and it’s institutions from a critical perspective.

I would also be interested in accounts of merchant and early financial forms of capitalism in places like the Dutch republic and Venice in the early modern period.

I’m working on a research project, and I’m wondering if anyone here could point me in the direction of (non-Freud lol) Western theorists who talk about “child” as an identity, childhood, or cultural and/or political understandings of age, especially in relation to social or bodily autonomy.

Basically, I’m trying to sort my thoughts about “child” as a temporal identity (as in, children are people who haven’t experienced much linear/progressive time), but also as an embodied one (as in, childhood is usually bounded by the physical events of birth and puberty), and I’m just struggling to find resources.

What names or works should I seek out?

Thanks! 🙏🏼

hey everyone,

i’ve been trying to get a foundation in the history of feminist thought and currently understand that the idea of free love seems to have developed alongside the movement to abolish slavery. however, it’s a bit hard to find particular feminist authors in history who have discussed both issues.

does anyone have recommendations? even secondary literature would be helpful at this point!

tysm

Is there a name for the particular phenomenon where someone with a very underdeveloped critique/understanding of an issue/status quo take/borderline right-wing reactionary ideas,etc gets put on a pedestal within the mainstream media and ends up playing an "important" role in shaping the boundaries of public opinion within the media landscape?

I'm sure some of you already have particular journalists, authors, or TV personalities that come to mind (especially within the last few months since October 7th), but to give an example, there's Hamed Abdel-Samad who's made it his career to reaffirm reactionary, islamophobic, and anti-refugee rhetoric in German-speaking media environments. I guess in a sense you could call it a political performance, but the performance more so works to reaffirm dominant ideas while carrying a different (at least on the surface) political persona.

To further illustrate the idea I’m trying to convey here, Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent (still reading) and his explanation of the five filters goes into this sort of territory but I’m kind of at a loss if there’s more writing on this sort of phenomenon

Hi, what's the best overall book (or books) on Nietzsche's uses, appropriations, applications by thinkers on the Left?

“Far from being unitary or monolithic or autonomous things, cultures actually assume more "foreign" elements, al- terities, differences, than they consciously exclude. Who in India or Algeria today can confidently separate out the British or French component of the past from present actualities, and who in Britain or France can draw a clear circle around British London or French Paris that would exclude the impact of India and Algeria upon those two imperial cities?”

What does this mean? Please explain with examples.

Hi looking for some books dissecting yearning for love, loneliness and desire.Some thing like love’s work by gillian rose or bluets by maggie nelson. Thank u!

I ask this particularly in the context of playing a caricature of ones own race vs playing a caricature of another race. Ie, sitcoms, dumb dad tropes, redneck stereotypes, satirical racism meant to be looked down on and laughed at ironically. Does the minstrel show have any bearing on how white people portray themselves in modern media beyond explicit or very obvious callbacks?

Edits:

Beyond explicit or very obvious callbacks.

I'm struggling with the section in Seminar XI, "The Transference And The Drive." Lacan writes, "At this point, I should define unconscious cause, neither as an existent [skipping Greek script] nor as a non-existent -- as, I believe Henri Ey does, a non-existent of possibility. It is a [non-existent?] of the prohibition that brings to being an existent in spite of its non-advent, it is a function of the impossible on which a certainty is based."

Is there any chance you might be able to point me in the right direction to some reading or something that will help me come to grips with this?

Here's me trying:

Previous to this he says, "the unconscious cause is a lost cause..." Is he saying that the effects of the unconscious can only work in the absence of the cause? So the cause is not literally non-existent, but sort of invisible to understanding. But if it is literally non-existent, how can that be? If the unconscious is situated in the locus of the Other, then it translates prohibited desire into the language of The Other, which creeps out as a sort of double-speech... a top meaning and a bottom meaning, causing us to miss it. So is the lost cause the colloquial guise the desire wears to manifest, to slip past the prohibition? That's why it's a "missed encounter"? "The Real" is, like, clothed in the language of something other that seems normal? The "impossible" is the non-realization of the encounter, but the certainty is the fact that it does slip out as something to be interpreted. Still, though, there must be a cause for all of this to occur. Is it that there is a cause, we can just never know the cause because it could be any number of a million occurrences within our constant interaction with the Other? We interact with The Other, define ourselves by its terms, and the unconscious, full of signification as it is, exposes itself in ways that prohibition can't master. The unconscious cause is there,but not there. Like when Casper writes messages in his huantees alphabet soup, and the hauntee goes, “Wow! What a wild coincidence!? Babe, look!” There’s a “cause,” but a spectral one. Then, the effect is the hauntees response. You even say in one episode, “What gets repressed is an absence.” That repressed absence is the cause for the unconscious to speak in its coded tongue? Is the repressed absence the same thing as the lost cause?

I feel like I’m putting pieces together that don’t fit.

I want to read more criticism on the idea of human rights, especially in the sense that we all take it for granted, as the unquestionable foundation of our social and political practices. Such unquestionability seems to be close to how the absoluteness of God is postulated in the pre-modern period. I wonder are there papers/articles/books that address this concern?

I've been reading System of Objects lately, and in the chapter about robots, where he talks about how they symbolise the subjugation of human sexuality, and how their destruction may amount to a symbolic celebration of death, he brings up the following example:

"The current fashion for 'happenings' has brought the great science-fiction event of the 'suicide' a little closer to home. The happening involves an organic destruction and debasement of objects, [...], whereby out culture revels in its own degradation and death. A recent fad in the United States amounts to mass-marketing of novel contraptions [...], whose merit lies in the fact that they fall apart on their own accord, suddenly and irreparably, after a few hours of operation. These objects are exchanged as gifts, and the period during which they duly malfunction, disintegrate and die is the occasion for a social get-together."

What are these "happenings" he describes in concrete terms, and more importantly what are those thingmajings that fall apart on purpose?

In cases where workers aren’t producing commodities and thus vaporizing value and yet still doing wage labor, how do we apply Marx’s labor theory of value? I’m interested in trying to understand and locate these types of fields and professions within capitalism and as part of the reproduction of capital (maybe they aren’t?) because in some of these fields there’s a kind of implicit thinking that somehow this work is not related to the economy.

Hello!

As a new father I've been learning lots about ways that our culture pushes ideologies onto our children from birth. Gender roles and stereotypes are pushed very hard onto children from a market level. Toys for girls are mainly pink, soft, glittery, and gentle... while boys are given trucks, camouflage onesies, and toy representations of weapons as a form of play.

That last point specifically has been interesting to me. Boys are directly handed weaponry in the form of toys. I'm thinking Nerf guns, AirSoft, Toy swords, etc. And then are marketed video games such as call of duty, battlefield, etc. These forms of play make a game system out of the killing of other human beings. Children may not think that deeply about this form of play - but on a subconscious level there has to be some harmful effects of this.

I'm looking for book recommendations that explore this topic, the impact it may have on a culture. Any other resources is welcome too.

Thanks!

I get everything about gender being a social construct and something you do, not something you are. But when it comes to sex as also being a social construct, does Butler mean that we choose to categorize male vs female just because? For example, we could, for some supposed relevant cultural reason have chosen to categorize tall vs short babies or something like that instead of male vs female?

I have recently read recommended literature that analyzes "the orient" -- Said's Orientalism, Anderson's Imagined Communities, Fanon, etc. These works have significantly altered my point of view with respect to east-west (simplification) power structures up until the mid to late 20th century.

However, while I find much of the reading useful and interesting, some of these works definitely feel a bit dated, for example focusing on the direct colonial violence in the "third world". Therefore, I am looking for recommended reading that extends such ideas (or other ideas even) to the contemporary -- an era where such power structures may be far less explicit than they used to be (eg, with a few exceptions of course, no "direct" colonialism a la French Algeria).

I am curious how these developments, and others such as the end of the Cold War, rise of digital technology, etc. affected the analysis of the earlier works I mention above.

Any recommended places to start?

I've read Martin Shuster 'Autonomy After Auschwitz' and in it he talks about what he calls the concept of 'speculative surplus' as outlined in Adorno's text'. I want to write a paper about this idea for school and I am wondering where in Adorno's body of work I can find the most concrete outline of this idea? Shuster seems to quote mostly from 'Negative Dialectics' and 'Lectures on Negative Dialetics', however since these are very difficult and rather large texts I won't have enough time to fully go through them, so hoping someone can pin-point perhaps specific chapters or passages in relation to this concept.

So far my experience is filled with periods of senility mixed with thought provoking ideas- but I find myself being interrupted by my own frustration as this is the first philosophy book I've ever read (i might be lying as i've tried to read Nietzsche before but didn't finish)

As someone who hasn't read Freud or Lacan (I've watched Zizek abunch), or any other philosophy book i realize I'm completely ahh cooked, so I'm interrupting my reading with lectures on the book c:

If anyone want to send articles, videos, or book recs to help me understand it more please do (: