one long token soup

A comparison of Elm and React (in code)

2017-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

A comparison of Elm and React (in code)

Since React’s open source release in 2013, techniques inspired by functional programming have become an integral part of what many consider ‘best practice’ in front-end application development on the web. Functional programming as a concept has been around since the lambda calculus was invented to study computation in the 30s, and it became practicable through Lisp in 1958, and then further through ML in the 70s. Only now, however, is it finding its way into the mainstream. This post investigates functional techniques in contemporary ‘best practice’ front-end development by comparing an application in Elm to its equivalent in React.

Disclaimer: I think Elm is a lot more expressive and robust than the React equivalent.

What follows is a ‘translation’ of Elm’s syntax to its React equivalent, demonstrating what abstractions are shared between the programming dialects. By contextualizing the approach of each framework within the web’s history and the JS ecosystem, I argue that Elm offers a more concise and expressive syntax for than the ‘best practice’ React application, as both frameworks are intended to be used through the same architectural primitives. In addition, I also provide brief reviews of JS frameworks that employ a similar architecture (which I’ll simply refer to as the ‘Elm architecture’ from this point on), comparing them to Elm and pointing at how Elm is more concise and expressive in comparison, in the same way that it is for React.

In order to clearly compare React and Elm, I’ve made a very simple ‘books’ front-end interface that makes an HTTP request, and visualises the returned JSON data (which represents some of the books I’ve read in the last couple of months). The code for these applications, as well as instructions to run them, are available in the folders elm-books and react-books in the following repo:

github.com/breezykermo/react-elm-books

When referencing code in the following post, I’ll refer to a set of line numbers and the file in which the code can be found, implying the appropriate directory through the filetype. For example, the reference [1-12 Main.elm] refers to lines 1 through 12 in the file elm-books/src. Alternatively, [2,6-8 App.js] refers to line 2 and lines 6 through 8 in the file react-books/src. Links to the relevant code in Github will be provided as they are here.

Background: React

The composition of components in a tree is an intuitive architecture for view interfaces, and some variation of it is implemented on almost every modern application platform that supports a UI. The browser, for example, constructs its view through a tree of HTML nodes. The iPhone and Android platforms use tree-based abstractions such as Views and View Managers to handle the pixels they render on-screen. The application as a whole is usually composed as one large ‘layout’ component that nests several child components (e.g. header, body, footer), each of which in turn may nest their own child components, and so on.

In the browser’s case, the tree of HTML nodes is represented as a data structure in the JS runtime. This structure is called the Document Object Model, more commonly referred to by its acronym, the DOM. The HTML view can be adjusted by modifying the DOM in the JS runtime, and these DOM updates are then transmitted to the actual HTML component tree. Modifying the HTML through the DOM is relatively computationally expensive, as the web was built on the premise of serving static documents, with JS and the DOM (i.e., the browsers utilities that allow dynamic updates) only added later. It is much less taxing on the browser to run JS that does not access or modify the DOM.

We have come to expect much more of the web than static documents in 2017. In the popular imagination, many complex websites are conceived as analogues of native application platforms such as iOS and Android, and are expected to provide the same quality of interactivity and interface. This type of interactive web page is now known as a single-page application (SPA). There is an enormous collection of JS libraries that provide developers with utilities to manage DOM updates at higher levels of abstraction, and more intuitively. The most widely used of these is jQuery, which is a flexible collection of functions that access and update DOM nodes with an arguably more intutive syntax than the base DOM API. In many cases, a library will provide both a strongly opinionated toolkit (collection of functions and classes) for managing the DOM, and also one or more practicable development strategies which promote particular abstractions for managing complexity. We may call these strategic libraries frameworks.

A successful framework insulates the developer from the DOM’s technicalities, and allows her to architect an application on higher level primitives than those that the DOM provides. For example, Angular 1.x, maybe the most popular full-bodied framework of the last 5 or 6 years, provides abstractions such as controllers and two-way data binding, along with many others, to allow the developer a Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture for her applications. Controllers manage a certain scope of DOM nodes and their updates, and two-way data binding facilitates connecting one state of the screen to another state, for example the value of an input node to the text in an h3 tag.

There has recently been a revision in the philosophy of DOM access used by many JS frameworks in the ecosystem. In 2013, Facebook open-sourced a JS framework called React, which was being used internally at Facebook. React has since enjoyed widespread adoption as a front-end framework in the tech industry. This crusade is led by its extensive use at well-respected companies like Facebook and Airbnb.

React’s core design principle is stated on its website: “the key feature of React is the composition of components.” While frameworks like Angular 1.x were pitched as a holistic framework for the browser, where almost every conceivable part of the application—view declaration, state management, routing, dependency injection, and much more—is handled in some way by the framework, React declares itself only as a way to “build encapsulated components that manage their own state, then compose them to make complex UIs.” It does not strictly opinionated other essential aspects of the SPA, and this flexibility is one of the reasons for its popularity. As I will make clear in later sections, however, despite its interoperability with many types of development, React is designed with an a particular ‘holistic’ SPA architecture in mind.

The primary way in which React differs from frameworks like Angular 1.x is in the way that it registers and performs updates to the DOM. The SPA is constantly updating different parts of the DOM, handling side effects such as user input and asynchronously delivered data. In a typical SPA, there are thousands of nodes in the DOM tree. When we recall that the DOM is really optimised for one-time render of documents, not an application of changing frames that updates constantly, it is evidently important that a framework for the browser be economical in the way that it performs DOM updates.

As the complexity of applications on the web like Facebook increased, they discovered that “in our sufficiently large codebase, in our sufficiently large company, MVC [gets] really complicated, really quickly [for developers].” The cause of this complexity was the free, decentralised way in which updates to the DOM were being made, and the fact that the application state was distributed across the app in various different sections. As there were a lot of developers working on the codebase, it was very difficult for an individual developer understand exactly what was going on in the part of the application they were working on, because:

The section was able to be modified by other parts of the application.
It was very difficult to identify these modifications statically in the code, and even when they were happening in real time it was not always easy to trace which code or event had triggered the change.

Facebook’s solutions to these problems were:

Enforcing a single direction in which data can conceptually ‘flow’ through components for updates: down through the tree of nodes from the top.
A central location where all actions relevant to a section of the application are registered, so that all events are traceable.

However, unidirectional data flow (Facebook’s first solution) in a browser SPA is not an immediate solution. In unidirectional data flow, all updates exclusively enter from the top node of the DOM tree, and propagate down through child components. By this method, the entire application needs to re-render on every change. Given that it is computationally expensive to access the DOM via JS, this kind of complete re-render is super expensive.

Through what is essentially a very clever hack, React provides developers with the abstraction of unidirectional data and keeps updates performant through the use of a virtual DOM. The virtual DOM is a virtual representation of the actual DOM that is much less expensive to modify, as it does not actually re-render the HTML nodes. With a virtual DOM, React only has to perform its re-render virtually, which is a relatively inexpensive operation. Using a clever diffing algorithm, React then calculates the necessary changes in the real DOM, and then performs those changes without having to re-render the entire real DOM. React’s diffing algorithm is, as it notes in its documentation, “an implementation detail. React could re-render the whole app on every action; the end result would be the same.” React’s performant diffing algorithm is this crucial optimization that allows React to compete in performance with frameworks that directly manipulate the DOM, while mantaining the beneficial abstraction of unidirectional data for the developer’s peace of mind.

At the same time that Facebook released React, they also released Flux, an “application architecture for building user interfaces.” Flux provides state management abstractions that operate well in tandem with React components, as the library is also built around the virtues of functional programming, more specifically immutable data and unidirectional data flow. As John Reppy calls the JS event loop “a poor man’s concurrency” in his book “Concurrent ML”, the Flux architecture might be considered a poor man’s monad. Flux uses stores to represent application state, and flushes this state through a view tree hierarchy (e.g., a network of React components). Modifications to the stores may be made through a set of pre-defined actions, and the stores then emit a change event, to which views (i.e. React components) may subscribe. A library called Redux has become a popular alternative to Flux, as it essentially provided the same beneficial architecture through more powerful functional abstractions. Most notably, it reduces the burden on the developer of managing store subscriptions (a complexity that the developer has to deal with in Flux). In Redux, changes to a store trigger an automatic refresh of the view tree, and the refresh is made efficient by use of the virtual DOM in React.

The creator of Redux, Dan Abramov, was explicitly taking cues from the Elm architecture in order to reduce the conceptual complexity of Flux. I will be using Redux alongside React to express the Elm architecture, as React does not provide sufficient abstractions on its own. I will also be using some additional libraries with React and Redux to more expressively mirror the Elm architecture. Immutable.js allows the creation and management of ‘immutable’ objects in JS, which we will use in order to keep ‘immutable’ state in the Redux store. This allows for a more performant update of a large store. Redux-thunk is a library authored by Dan Abramov himself, which allows controlled dispatch of asynchronous actions to the Redux store. I will explain more about how these libraries work as they are used in the examples below.

Foreground: Elm

Though Facebook popularised the notion of unidirectional data flow in the browser through React, they by no means invented it. Nor were they necessarily the first to apply it to web’s domain through the virtual DOM. The idea of unidirectional data as an effective paradigm for state management is, in fact, an idea taken from the functional programming community. In purely functional programs, unidirectional data flow is implicit. There is no conception of ‘two-way’ data as there is in object-oriented programming; programs declaratively produce a result from a given input. In other words, purely functional programs are nothing more than simply referentially transparent functions that take an input and produce a value deterministically. Reducers, the mechanisms that manage updates in the Redux paradigm, are referentially transparent functions that take an input and produce a value deterministically.

Elm is a functional language written by Evan Czaplicki for his senior thesis at Harvard in 2012 that was designed as a more robust way of developing GUIs for the browser. Programs are written in its own syntax, and the Elm compiler then produces browser-ready HTML, CSS and JS. As Czaplicki explains in his thesis, “the core language of Elm combines a basic functional language with a small set of reactive primitives”, where “reactive primitives” come from the domain of programming known as functional reactive programming (FRP). Inspired by techniques in functional concurrent languages such as CML, Elm provides the programmer with view abstractions directly comparable with those in React (it also uses a virtual DOM), as well as an elegant and robust approach to management in synchronous updates, data validation, and asynchronous requests. Elm has been actively maintained and developed by Czaplicki since 2012, initially at Prezi from 2013, and now at NoRedInk. Both of these companies actively use Elm in production.

Component Tree

As I have noted, both React and Elm make use of a virtual DOM in order to allow the conceptual re-render of the entire application at each change, while remaining performant in the update context of the DOM. One way in which both frameworks do this is by avoiding the re-computation of pure functions with unchanged inputs. Elm’s concurrent runtime system uses memoization to do exactly thiss. React’s ‘reconciliation’ algorithm—the algorithm React uses to diff the virtual DOM with the DOM—employs a similar technique. This is possible because the functions are deterministic: given an input, they always produce the same output. Though the virtual DOM/DOM diff is conceptually the same in both frameworks, Czaplicki demonstrates Elm’s superior performance and ease of optimisation in the elm-lang blog post, “Blazing Fast Html Round Two.”

In terms of their use, ‘components’ in Elm and React are very similar. It is worth nothing that React has three types of components: legacy components, ES6 components, and stateless functional components. The last of these demonstrate the way in which React components can be considered simply as functions [6-17 components / Desk.js]. The most conspicuous difference between Elm and React components is the different syntaxes of HTML markup. React, by convention, uses JSX, a syntactic sugar that allows components to read like HTML elements. Elm, on the other hand, uses a collection of functions, isomorphically named to suit the full set of HTML tags available. Each of these functions takes in two lists as arguments; the first is a list of attributes to be applied to the node, and the second is a list of its nested children. These functions are provided by the elm-lang / html library that ships with Elm. This library also provides similar functions for the relevant attributes that can be applied to each HTML DOM node, such as ‘class’. Both provide a functional map utility for lists of components [30,62 Main.elm][22 components/Desk.js], though React requires an added key attribute that is unique from other keys in the containing list, as a marker for its reconciliation algorithm.

Perhaps the most notable difference in component specification is the way in which view data is validated. React allows the optional specification of propTypes [14-16, 25-27 components/Shelf.js], which will be performed as runtime checks on data that is passed into the components, and which will throw a non-blocking error in the console if the checks fail.

Let me quickly digress to talk about data validation in JS generally; responsible manipulation of data in vanilla JS is largely up to the developer. There are various JS utilities that address this concern in JS, such as Flow and TypeScript. Flow is an optional static type checker that can be inserted incrementally into a codebase, and TypeScript is a Java-like superset of JS that is strongly typed. However, it is difficult to use either of this tools fluidly with Immutable.js objects, as both are designed to type check regular JS types, rather than Immutable’s transformed ones. Certain Immutable types, such as Records, provide partial type checking, in that Records can restrict fields to a certain shape. However they do not enforce strict types for the values contained within the shape.

In order to synthesise complete type checking in React, I am using a combination of Immutable’s shape enforcement, React’s runtime propType checking, and Flow’s static type checking for functions. When data is in the Redux store, it is validated through Immutable’s incomplete type assertions. When it reaches React, it is converted to JS (a relatively expensive operation, it is important to note, especially for large stores), and then validated in React components through PropTypes, and in functions through Flow. Note also that type definitions need to be repeated across Flow and React’s PropTypes API, which violates the ‘Do not Repeat Yourself’ principle of best practice development. If this sounds complicated, it is because it is—type validation is no simply feat in React.

Elm, on the other hand, validates data entirely through its type system. As a strongly typed language, Elm will complain at compile time if the wrong arguments are passed to a function, or if data is used irresponsibly in components or elsewhere. Note that the type alias Book is used in function signatures [29,42,62 Components/Pure.elm]. Type aliases allow the programmer to define their own custom records for elegant function types such as, shelfDisplay : Book -> Html msg. This solution is noticeably both more robust and more elegant than the partial runtime type-checking I have synthesised in React.

Synchronous Updates

In both Elm and Redux, synchronous updates in the view occur reactively. Data expressing the application state is kept in an immutable structure separate from the view tree. Each time the structure is reproduced, the view tree re-renders through a virtual DOM diff. In Elm the structure is called the model, and in Redux it is called the store.

Elm’s update function works by restructuring a Msg that possibly contains data, and produces a new model by addressing the previous model from this Msg [37-43 Main.elm]. Redux sends actions to the store, which are generated by action creator functions [21-25, 27-31 reducers.js]. A delivered action reproduces the store’s structure through a reducer function [33 reducers.js], which combines the action and its associated data and with the previous state, generating a new structure. Note that in Redux’s reducer, immutable data is not enforced by default, only strongly recommended, though I enforce it by only storing data in the store the Immutable library [38,39 reducers.js]. I have chosen to use regular JS objects outside the store, for the reason explained above of using Flow to statically type check function arguments.

Async

Elm’s update function also returns an optional cmd [34-52 Main.elm]. A cmd allows Elm to perform side effects in its otherwise purely functional environment. Side effects include generating random numbers, and making server requests. When creating the model through the init function [15 Main.elm], Elm allows an initial cmd to be executed [22 Main.elm]. Cmds can then send Msgs to the update function after completing a side effect, for example a NewShelf msg after making an HTTPS request. The cmd is not executed when it is created [66-68, Main.elm], it is only executed when it is passed through the update function [34 Main.elm].

Redux-thunk enriches Redux with an analogue of Elm’s cmds, which it calls ‘thunks’. Thunks are action creators that return a curried function (rather than a JS object), which is then applied at the threshold of the store by middleware [11 index.js]. The middleware passes the function a dispatch function, so that the thunk can send its own actions to the store, and a getState function, which returns the store’s state at a given time.

Validating JSON

Because Elm is strongly typed, values that arrive in JSON cannot be used directly. Elm provides a validation library called Json.Decode, and Czaplicki’s current company, NoRedInk, provides syntactic sugar in a library called elm-decode-pipeline. Though this explicit decoding may seem laborious to developers who are used to using JSON directly in JS, it provides a data robustness that JS cannot achieve by itself. Many runtime errors that occur in web applications are the result of dud or mistyped data that the application has received from elsewhere, and thus data validation at its entry point makes for a generally more robust application. The Elm type system requires explicit handling of error scenarios, which results in virtually no runtime errors that are the fault of the front-end. (NoRedInk has been running Elm in production for more than a year, and are yet to find a runtime error that traces back to Elm code.)

Creating a comparable validation mechanism in JS is possible, though it is laborious to make the checking rigorous, and there is an added layer of conceptual complexity. The developer has to handle the possibility of null values, a complexity that Elm’s decode libraries abstract through the Result type. The formulation is decidedly less elegant in JS [decoder.js] [Decoders.elm]. (Note: there is possibly a more robust JS data validation library of this sort out there, please let me know if you know of one!)

Extra Comments

Elm also provides reactive subscriptions to values that vary over time, which are similar to streams in functional programming. These are a very useful higher level abstraction in Elm, and make it easy to create interfaces such as Kris Jenkins’ Rays. I have not implemented subscriptions in JS, though it would be possible to do so through a library such as RxJS, or Ractive.js. This is an interesting project that I haven’t looked at in depth.

Other Libraries

React is largely responsible for popularizing a component architecture with unidirectional data flow, as Facebook’s standing as a prestigious company encouraged many developers to practice web development with the framework (myself included). There are now a range of different libraries that employ this architecture in the JS ecosystem, each of which offers a slightly different angle on the Elm architecture. In this section, I review some of the more interesting libraries in this ecosystem, briefly comparing them to Elm.

Choo

Choo is a framework that provides the Elm architecture in a syntax that much more closely resembles vanilla JS. Choo’s API is almost completely isomorphic with Elm’s. Choo notes its point of difference in its readme: “contrary to elm, choo doesn’t introduce a completely new language to build web applications.” It uses a virtual DOM to perform updates, and employs a component architecture in templated HTML strings, rather than through a custom library (Elm) or JSX (React). It does not provide JSON decoding support.

Vue

Vue provides components to create a view interface, and its own library for unidirectional data flow called Vuex. This is very similar to Redux, though it places a greater emphasis on reactivity. However, Vue does not restrict the developer to this unidirectional data architecture, and it also provides many Angular 1.x features, such as two-way data binding. It provides support for TypeScript, though there are some types that this integration cannot infer. Vue suggests using HTML templates for its view syntax, which look like normal HTML with some extra Vue attributes on certain elements. It also supports JSX. It does not provide JSON decoding support.

Angular 2

Angular 2 is a remake of Angular 1.x using components as the core abstraction. Its API is very similar to React, though it is modelled as an all-purpose framework for creating front-ends, rather than only providing the view, and is a lot bulkier. Angular 2 does not opinionate your state management, much like React. It is possible to implement an application with Elm architecture through ngrx’s ‘store’ library, which is inspired by Redux. Angular 2 enforces use of TypeScript, and as a result is strongly typed. It does provide JSON decoding support, but it is not strictly typed on all values, as Elm is.

Elm as React/Redux generator

I was interested to see if it would be possible to automatically generate a React-Redux application from Elm code, to provide a general solution for creating a React-Redux analogue from an Elm program. This was always going to be mostly an intellectual exercise, as this generator would have dubious utility. As I have shown, Elm applications are more concise, generally more expressive, and more performant than React-Redux applications. Elm enables interop with JS through a language feature called ports, which allow the developer to use external JS libraries by sending necessary values directly to the Elm runtime. Because Elm is interopable with JS, there is no argument for React on the grounds that it has access to a better ecosystem in JS (an argument that often kills web application frameworks that are not written in JS). For me, Elm is an almost categorically better conceptual toolkit for creating robust front-end applications.

An Elm generator would only be usable if your developers already knew Elm, and if that were the case there would be no reason why you wouldn’t just use Elm’s compiled output in production. The only practical way a generator might be useful would be in the context of pedagogy. As more developers are familiar with React and Redux than Elm, a systematic way of mapping between Elm and React-Redux programs might provide a valuable learning resource for developers looking to learn Elm from React-Redux (or vice-versa).

The Elm compiler and most of its associated tooling is written in Haskell, and is available publicly on Github. The compiler operates through the command line tool called elm-make, which takes an Elm file and generates browser-ready JavaScript. Although I was came to understand a lot about the elm-compiler and elm-make codebases, I found it very difficult working efficiently with Haskell’s package and build manager, cabal. Simple modifications to the codebase can take minutes to build, and as Haskell is strongly typed, I found myself running into type errors simply trying to print values and find my bearing. For these reasons, I was not able to successfully modify the compiler to produce a React-Redux application from an Elm source. However, in the following section, I offer what insights and tools I produced through my investigation of Elm’s source code.

Elm Env

In order to get the elm compiler running from source on my computer, I ran the appropriate installations in a Docker container. Docker is a containerisation platform that provides a system of containers, which can be thought of as light-weight virtual machines. Containers are built from images, which are snapshots of a container’s starting state. I have created a public Docker image for a container in which you may develop and build new versions of the Elm source code. See the following repository for details:

[github.com/breezykermo/elm-env]

Elm Compiler Docs

Though I was not able to produce a custom generator for the elm-make interface, I learned a lot about the elm-make and elm-compiler codebases, in particular the means by which it generates JS from an Elm program. I have submitted much of what I learned as a pull request to the elm-compiler-docs repository, a resource for the Elm community that aspires to document the Elm compiler, independent of its creator and maintainer. This is useful for future contributors, as wrapping one’s head around a large codebase is a considerate barrier to entry. It is also useful reference for those looking to create a compiler in Haskell, as the Elm code provides a very good example of how Haskell can be used effectively. The PR can be found at the following repo:

[github.com/elm-community/elm-compiler-docs]

Elm Make Generators

In addition to the above documentation, I have also created a separate repository with preliminary information on how to generate a custom ‘elm-make’ generator. The elm-compiler and elm-make codebases are wonderful resources for learning about Elm and compilers, as they provide a robust demonstration of how one language might compile to another. Further work here might involve coding generators for a range of different JS frameworks that use the Elm architecture—though I suggest this with the same disclaimer as I did the React-Redux generator; its primary use-case would most probably be as a learning resource.

[github.com/breezykermo/elm-make-generator]

Works Cited

Reply, John H. Concurrent Programming in ML. Cambridge: Cambridge U Press, 1999. Print.

Czaplicki, Evan. Elm: Concurrent FRP for Functional GUIs, 30 March 2012. https://www.seas.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/files/archived/Czaplicki.pdf accessed 01/09/17.

Alma Steingart, Axiomatics: Mathematical Thought and High Modernism (introduction)

2025-06-14T00:00:00+00:00

Alma Steingart, Axiomatics: Mathematical Thought and High Modernism (introduction)

I started reading Alma Steingart's 2023 Axiomatics: Mathematical Thought and High Modernism in preparation for a reading group on Math(s), Philosophy, and History that I have been running for almost a year now. (We meet approximately bi-weekly, and wander from text to text based on the group's discussion and shared interest.) Steingart's narrative is deeply relevant to the third stream of my dissertation, the question of mathematics in the 20th century, as it argues that there is an intellectual history of (the rise of) axiomatics in mathematics in the 20th century that corresponds to modernist cultures of art, linguistics, sociology, and other disciplines that became infatuated with mathematical rigor in the ascent of "the postwar abstractionist theory of knowledge" (Steingart 2023, 23). Concretely, Steingart promises (in the introduction) to provide an account of how topology and category theory can be understood as mathematical cultures that represent what she calls "high modernist mathematics" (Steingart 2023, 20), how the utility of mathematics in various disciplines took on a more 'abstract' character after the war in projects such as game theory, and how the abstract character of axiomatic mathematics bears a relation to the "aesthetic autonomy" (Steingart 2023, 22) of artistic formalism and structuralist anthropology, among other disciplines that were coming to be characterized by a flirtation with mathematization, during the Cold War era.

The book's introduction frames this effort in intellectual history through a smattering of terms that constellate the 'bigger picture' which theoretically coheres each individual chapter's analysis of more specific historical actors and moments. It took me a second reading to begin to feel like they were adequately disambiguated, but I now feel that they give a helpful coherence to Steingart's project. The important terms clarified in the book's introduction, which I will develop in pairs in this b/log, are as follows:

Abstraction
Modernism
High Modernism
Axiomatics
Mathematics
Mathematization

Abstraction and Modernism

Abstraction is the principal term that grounds Steingart's inquiry, and thus in the introduction she accordingly gives us two, mutually informing accounts of it: "one following abstraction's history as a mode of thought and the other as a marker of modernism" (Steingart 2023, 6).

The history of abstraction as a mode of thought (pp.6-10) is summarised above. Historically speaking (for Steingart), abstraction originates in a quandary regarding language's apprehension of the physical world. How do apparently universalizing words such as 'color' emerge from the world's particularity? Thought, it seems, must have to take something away from the world, to abstract something from it, in order to produce such concepts.

The pivotal figure in this sketch of a condensed history is George Berkeley. Berkeley is "a staunch idealist" (Steingart 2023, 7); yet he is also the first in Steingart's condensed history to strongly rebuke abstraction. For Berkeley, "reality consists exclusively of minds and their ideas" (Downing 2021); yet Steingart pens Berkeley as notable in the history of abstraction precisely because he refuses to allow a conceptual space of ideas that is not firmly rooted in the phenomenological world of ideas (Steingart 2023, 7).

With Berkeley, the nature of the difference between idealism and materialism is revealed clearly as a contradiction, Steingart seems to suggest. She glosses over the philosophical specificity of Berkeley's claim by lumping him in with the empiricists Locke and Hume: "What Locke, Berkeley, and Hume made clear is that the problem of abstraction as an operative mode of thought touches directly on the foundations of geometry, the signification function of language, and the relation between perception and reason" (Steingart 2023, 8). Fair enough here, perhaps, as Steingart has flagged up front that her concern is not with the nuances of philosophical positions on the matter of abstraction, so much as it is with painting a historical canvas which provides context for what she means when she says 'abstraction' in the rest of the book. The lineage presented does make clear what is at stake in abstraction (notwithstanding its suspiciously British contrivance): namely, the sticky and difficult relationship between mind and matter, subject and object, idealism and materialism. Though this is a strange progression from Aristotle to Marx in some respects, it sets the stage for the way in which abstract mathematics dances around the politicality of its own position, an argument that Steingart will make with respect to concrete actors in the 20th century.

The 'other side' of abstraction's definition, Steingart has told us, is its apparent entanglement with modernism (p.10). There doesn't seem to be any notable distinction between modernity and modernism for Steingart, and this slippage allows Steingart to settle on Fredric Jameson's account in his 2013 book A Singular Modernity as the backstop for the claim that modernism and abstraction are two sides of the same coin. I haven't yet read this book of Jameson's, and so I can't be sure of the following points. But I would hazard a guess that modernity for Jameson is structurally coupled with the problematic of the mangling of subject and object that Marx argues is a symptom ('fetish') of capital's installment as a social relation, and thus bemoans a philosophical history reaching back at least to Descartes if not further; whereas modernism refers instead to an aesthetic category that is historically specific to the 20th century (whence Jameson's infamous critique of postmodernism). Modernism is not unrelated to modernity, which is why Steingart's account that "the association of abstraction and modernism is not a continuation of the long philosophical and political tradition I just outlined, but instead represents a clean break from it" (Steingart 2023, 10) strikes me as a bit suspicious.

Steingart wants to segment (or perhaps we should say 'abstract') 20th-century abstraction from its pre-20th-century forebears by recognizing the newer phenomenon as a "severing of abstraction from the phenomenological world" , a turn away from the "etymological root" of abstraction in its reference to something of the world (Steingart 2023, 11). But isn't something of this operation already at work in the various idealisms that contest the empiricism of Hume, Locke, and Boethius in the 18th and 19th centuries? We could offer the names Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, for example, as a counter-history of Steingart's abstraction, a lineage which also culminates in an important sense in the first master of suspicion, Marx. All three of these thinkers were (it doesn't seem controversial to claim) concerned with the status of thought on its own terms, thought 'for itself' that was ideally purified of phenomenological reference. This German lineage as a counterpoint to the British one Steingart gives at the least proves that the "crisis of referentiality" (Steingart 2023, 12) of the 20th century is not the first such crisis that abstraction suffered in philosophy. The curious triad of "linguistics and scientific philosophy" (Steingart 2023, 12) that is then given to evidence abstraction's reversal of meaning in the 20th century– Ferdinand de Saussure, Albert Einstein, and Alfred North Whitehead– are brought into the historical-philosophical fray almost as if there is no precedent for the problem of the object, the subject, and the sphere of signification that necessarily traverses the two in language. It might be that 'modernism' names a distinct inflection of the constitutive problematic of modernity in the 20th century, but it is not clear to me that this inflection's distinction rests neatly on its reversal of abstraction's etymological root in the phenomenological world.

High Modernism and Axiomatics

High modernism for Steingart is above all associated with David Hilbert and the crisis in foundations of mathematics. In other words, high modernism emerges as a dialect of modernism through the proliferation of the axiomatic method (associated with Hilbert) in mathematics and other disciplines. The Bourbaki group is given as "the most extreme example of mathematical high modernism" (Steingart 2023, 17), as they emblematise a particular configuration of the relationship between mathematical theory and empirical reality. High modernist mathematics sees theory as a practice/process that is constituted as an autonomous aesthetic domain, free from the demanding contrivances of the (material) world. The high modernist attitude is fundamentally idealist in the sense that the domain of thought and theory is not borne of patterns or perceptions in the phenomenological world, but autonomously, on its own terms. Mathematical theory for the high modernist is conceived beyond or besides the world, but is then tested by its applications in the world. This phenomenology of theory in mathematical high modernism is what gives the history of axiomatics' proliferation its seemingly contradictory characters, "denoting the rationalization of social life on the one hand and the promotion of an autonomous aesthetic sphere on the other" (Steingart 2023, 18). For Steingart, game theory, communications theory, operations research, and computing (by which I assume she means the burgeoning discipline of Computer Science) all suffer this kind of speculative pragmatics that is both idealistic and utilitarian (Steingart 2023, 19), and can all thus be united in axiomatics as their common rationale and prehistory.

Grouping these histories under the rubric of high modernism is evocative also, as Steingart notes, due to James Scott's use of the term as "a particularly sweeping vision of how the benefits of technical and scientific progress might be applied" (Steingart 2023, 17). High modernism names a technocratic worldview that parades as thoroughly materialist, but which in fact is built on an unconscious idealist kernel that hazards scientific theory as autonomous (and thus unimpeachable) rather than grounded in the world and our flawed phenomenology of it. Perhaps it is this quality, i.e. the repression of an idealist basis for the claim of scientific validity, that better characterizes high modernism's break from the modernisms (and modernities) before it. Berkeley, Hume, and Burke would then be correctly identified as the prime philosophical actors in mathematical high modernism's prehistory, but for reasons to do with the way that they each repress in their own way the necessary politics of abstraction, enshrining some part of it as independent of the world and thus paving the way for its unimpeachability. (Kant would surely also feature prominently in this historical drama.)

Though the distinction between abstraction, modernism, and high modernism took me a second reading to make out clearly in Steingart's introduction, axiomatics appeared early as a clear intellectual historical object (if such a thing can be thought to exist). Axiomatics are the methods in mathematics based on the spectral objectivity of numbers posited at the turn of the twentieth century, newly realized through the questioning of their basis in physical reality.

What are numbers? Within the new regime of objectivity, neither the empiricist nor the idealist answer was acceptable. Numbers were not arrived at by counting, nor were they synthetic a priori. (Steingart 2023, 13)

Cantor goes curiously unmentioned, but we get the other usual suspects in Dedekind, Peano, Frege, and Hilbert. Steingart's argument is that the proliferation of axiomatics within mathematics and their percolation throughout other disciplines in the humanities and the sciences should be considered a high modernism in the history of abstraction.

Mathematics and Mathematization

The final two terms I wanted to disambiguate are these. While mathematics seems to usually refer to the actual disciplinary practice of professional mathematicians (and thus 'mathematical high modernism' is an appropriate description of axiomatics' preponderance at universities in postwar America), mathematization seems to refer instead to the dissemination of paradigms in mathematics to other disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, and linguistics, as well as how mathematical technique was consciously applied in these other disciplines. To the extent that Steingart's book is a story about mathematization, then, it is in the company of recent books such as Bernard Dionysus Geoghegan's Code: From Information Theory to French Theory in that it accounts for how mathematics became the Hermes of a disciplinary pantheon conceptually divided into the humanities and the sciences. (Along with Computer Science, mathematics is– I think– one of the few undergraduate degrees in America that is offered both as a Bachelor of Arts and as a Bachelor of Science, depending on the granting institution.)

Many now are taking issue with mathematization as a sort of root cause of much that is disagreeable politically about the contemporary world. It seems important to me that we give nuance to the widespread claim that it is the mathematization by Computer Science's dissemination into other disciplines that is the root cause of our moment's political problematic. Throwing out maths and computing tout court is not an option on the table, I would argue, and thus we must reject its easy appearance as the scapegoat of bad epistemology. I intend to proceed with reading the rest of this book because it offers some such nuance in locating axiomatics as a specific culture in mathematics and tracing its social and (perhaps) political effects.

Bibliography

Downing, Lisa. 2021. “George Berkeley.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Fall 2021. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.

Steingart, Alma. 2023. Axiomatics: Mathematical Thought and High Modernism. University of Chicago Press.

Amanda Holmes and Adrian Johnston

2024-04-24T00:00:00+00:00

Amanda Holmes and Adrian Johnston

I have been at the institute (the IWM) for nearly a month now, the first month of three. It is the first time that I have had something close to my own office (I share a room with one other fellow), and the first time that I have had the space and time of mind to attend specifically to the task of my dissertation proper. As a PhD student in Providence, there is a bustle of daily university life - lectures, seminars, meetings - that makes it more difficult to properly think. Perhaps this is because it is the aim of a PhD to find a unique space of thought, and such a pocket (carved out against the majority of opinion, if it is to have any academic value) is necessarily solitary. The PhD project is to design such a space, to educate oneself in how it reflects and refracts existing projects (of existing academics), and to come to some confident enough conclusion in it that one appears salable on the job market.

In the past few weeks I have tracked four contemporary projects that relate to the space I am trying to carve for myself at the intersection of mathematics, Marx, and Lacan. I'll introduce two of them here (Amanda Holmes' and Adrian Johnston's), and defer two of them (Svitlana Matviyenko's and Sarah Pourciau's) to a later log.

Amanda Holmes

Completing her PhD in philosophy at Villanova in 2020, Holmes was advised by Walter Brogan, Gabriel Rockhill, and Alenka Zupančič. Her dissertation was titled Erotology: The Logos of Eros in Lacan's Return to Freud, and its structure is refreshingly un-American in its singular focus on tracking what Holmes calls 'erotology' in Lacan's thought. Erotology is "the logos of eros, the study of desire, the disciplined examination of those gaps in the universe around which desire gathers…. the discipline of identifying and elaborating the philosophical implications of psychoanalysis" (Holmes 2020, 7). Erotology is the fourth term that psychoanalysis, as an inflection point in and critique of the Western (European) philosophical tradition, introduces to the reigning triumvirate of ontology (the science of being), epistemology (the science of thinking), and phenomenology (the science of feeling). Lacan's return to Freud, a project that takes psychoanalysis seriously as a philosophical invention and intervention, is erotological because it is "a discourse that takes desire as its central focus" (Holmes 2020, 8).

Holmes' dissertation does what good dissertations should do, I think: it synthesizes the state of a discursive space, offering the seeds of a 'new' argument only by first demonstrating erudition and pedagogical generosity as a writer. There is an overwhelming sense (in America) that one's dissertation is supposed to operate as a 'scientific' breakthrough, exposing some connection heretofore unseen and unconceptualized. This contributes to the reigning paradigm of paranoiac collaboration and publication, whereby there is an idea that one's academic space or niche can be stolen, as if intellectual specialization were a patented technology that needs regulatory mechanisms to protect its strategic advantage. This framing is not to downplay the very real and common occurrence of more senior scholars taking advantage of younger ones as a fungible labor force, manipulating the cult of authorial singularity in the humanities through their positions of relative power so as to significantly disadvantage and dispossess more junior persons of their due credit and/or acclaim. But it is to suggest that we should consider the limitations of the conceptual treatment of academic ideas as intellectual property, i.e. as salable commodities that should circulate in such a way that the benefit gained thereof warrants a financial or reputational 'interest' that accrues to their authors. Some will say that the commodified condition of the market of ideas is just the way it is, the realpolitik of (American) academia within which one must operate to have any relevance, and/or to feed oneself and one's "family". Perhaps this is the case. But shouldn't we still do our best to imagine it otherwise, and implement this imagination as much as we can, as much as we are allowed to?

It is rich, perhaps the same some will say, to suggest that the dedicated study of an infamously cryptic and white French man's seminars from the 60s and 70s represents a progressive (i.e. less commodified) kind of scholarship. And it is probably true that Lacanians have failed to convincingly articulate why such a thing could really (as I am coming to believe it to be) the case. But I really do digress, here, as the point that I set out to make is that Holmes' dissertation on Lacan is a valuable addition to the available other introductions to the Lacanian ethos of desire (i.e. Zizek's, Gallop's, to name a few that I have discussed on this site), and perhaps one that is the most up-to-date regarding more recent Lacan scholarship, such as Zupančič's What Is Sex?.

Adrian Johnston

I intend to discuss Johnston's most recent book Infinite Greed at more length in future logs on this site, as it is one of the most erudite studies of the relationship between Lacan's and Marx's thought available. In recent weeks I have read a 2017 essay that prefigures the argument in that book, and I am now working through a manuscript of the book itself.

The core argument (of both the essay and the book, as I understand them) is that Marx's critique of political economy in Capital prefigures some of the core psychoanalytic insights, the discourse of which Johnston suggestively refers to as libidinal economy. There are "temporal dialectical dynamics between past and present (as well as future)" (Johnston 2017, 277) that Marx's and the psychoanalytic accounts share, and in articulating this common understanding one can marry metapsychology (psychoanalysis) and historical materialism (Marx). The terminological lodestone of this effort is Trieb [drive], a word used by Freud, Lacan, and Marx alike.

Drive in the Lacano-Freudian sense of the term can be understood through Freud's enigmatic and polarizing suggestion that the human is characterized by her/his death drive. The final chapter of Alenka Zupančič's book What Is Sex? (Zupančič 2017) is a sublime rumination on and interpretation of the death drive as it should be understood: as the name for the object-less affect that emerges from the unknowable contradiction in consciousness called 'sex'. At once aimed at reproduction, as a crude Darwinian imaginary would have it, and paradoxically also at a self-annihilating end in 'death', the death drive is what differentiates a speaking being from an animal in Lacanian thought. Speaking being is characterized by a contradiction in its telos (purpose), whereby there is an element of indetermination in its (life) trajectory that gives rise to a special kind of under-determined drive called desire. Desire has no overdetermined object: it is a subject that strives not for something in particular, but for something 'abstract'. Thus Lacan refers to the object of desire as the objet petit a; for it is not an object in particular, but an absent and negative object that must be 'filled in' in order for the striving to make sense in a causal register. We do not desire because desire can be achieved, fully satisfied and sated. We rather continue to desire exactly because the object of desire (objet petit a) cannot ever properly concretize as something positive (a person, an amount of money); and so once we achieve what we thought we wanted, what it is we want has moved on.

Johnston's project is to put this Lacanian register of desire, understood as the contradiction in the multitude of drives a subject suffers, in touch with the way that Marx talks about Trieb in his theory and system of capital. He sees drive as a commonality between these registers, in that in both "drives are mediated productions instead of immediate givens"- and in that 'drive' is the constitutive terms for the subject in society as such: "The (drive-)object fabricates the subject (of drive)" (Johnston 2017, 280).

For subjects dominated by capital's abstract forms, the range of possible materializations of desire's covering over are reduced to two specific kinds of drive: capitalist drive ( M-C-M' ) and consumerist drive ( C-M-C' ). The capitalist is one who feeds money ( M ) into the economy with the hope and intention of generating a greater quantity of money ( M' ). The consumerist, on the other hand, is one who continues to take their commodities to market ( C ) in order to procure more and more different kinds of commodity ( C' ) in a fashion that is 'plastically' related to their direct, reproductive need for them.

Johnston is careful to distinguish between these two subject positions Marx's theory of capital's contortion of desire, and he is also careful about the specific structure of the relationship that he sees as giving rise to a compatibility between metapsychology and historical materialism:

plastic drive structure, as theorized within a metapsychological qua philosophical/psychoanalytic anthropology, is a necessary condition for capitalism's peculiar libidinal economics as per historical materialism. It becomes a sufficient condition [for one to call it 'capitalism'] when capitalist production, spurred by the pursuit of surplus value, begins exploiting this plasticity for its gains. (Johnston 2017, 283)

Psychoanalysis, in other words, theorizes a "plastic drive structure" in the speaking being (human) in general, i.e. independent of capitalism as a specific configuration of the condition of value's production in society. Historical materialism, complementarily but with a different scope, theorizes the contortion of desire - as reduced to only two dialects of drive - by way of an historically specific mode of production (movement of value) called capital. Johnston's analysis exegetically focuses on the German word for drive that both Marx and Freud use, Trieb, as Marx names the affect resulting from capital's structure eine besondre Form des Triebs [a particular form of the drive]. Capital's particular drive, Johnston suggests in his book, can be understood as infinite greed: as the drive is always towards the possession of some surplus amount, whether it is more money or something more in a different kind of commodity ( M' or C' ).

Bibliography

Holmes, Amanda. 2020. “Erotology: The Logos of Eros in Lacan’s Return to Freud.” PhD thesis, United States – Pennsylvania: Villanova University.

Johnston, Adrian. 2017. “From Closed Need to Infinite Greed: Marx’s Drive Theory.”

Zupančič, Alenka. 2017. What Is Sex? MIT Press.

Birdkeeping

2026-08-03T00:00:00+00:00

Birdkeeping

We need new ways of talking about large language models. The artificial intelligentsia at frontier labs have beguiled us (and themselves) into using an exclusively calamitous tone of voice. If we are to take the Silicon Valley oracles at their word, the latest models are effectively sentient and thus pose existential risk, that open weights models are as or more dangerous than nuclear or biological weapons, and that the best thing we can do for humanity’s and the world’s increasingly unstable climate right now is to concrete over open green space with massive data centre developments.

Even among the more technically astute, something seems to have gone linguistically awry. Machine learning researchers compare their LLM hackery to the life sciences and quantum physics, as if the terabytes (petabytes? exabytes?) of numbers operationalised in unimaginably large data centres bear more than a passing resemblance to the atom bomb or the human body. An agent orchestration system called gastown, a kind of tool that many if not most software developers now use when coding, developed by an industry veteran, likens agential development to the Wild West and rhetorically reduces agents as if they are low cost workers in a factory. (Gastown has more recently been upgraded into gascity, a framework that markets itself through the nauseatingly capitalist byline: “Your software deserves a factory”.) A respected VC investor and market analyst suggests thinking about LLM chatbots as a shortcut to infinite interns.

Let’s take a deep breath, and think sensibly about this language for a moment. If we metaphorically manage LLMs schizophrenically as slaves and masters, workers and managers, interns and bosses all at once, their miraculous but jagged ability to comprehend and produce language is abased and apotheosised, all at once. We end up talking about robot rights and relitigating Pascal’s wager, rather than exploring the real potentiality and potentially ethical possibilities of working with LLMs.

Re-routing the flight path of AI discussion

I can understand why thinking about LLMs simply as machines leaves a little bit wanting. LLMs’ uncanny ability to comprehend written text and execute real virtual tasks on a computer when strapped into a coding harness isn’t something we’re used to thinking about as mechanical. Their actions are often not reproducible, and they can abide by the letter of your law while utterly ignoring its spirit. I recently referred to my ‘agent orchestration workflow’—the going industry jargon to denote a specific configuration of LLM use to assist your digital work—as a toolkit for taming jagged intelligence, because I think there is something animalistic about LLMs. Perhaps this something is that, like animals, we are vain to consider that they are actually ever under our power. As Gerard Wajcman argues, we project a kind of perfect world onto animals of many kinds as an imaginative escape from the travesty of humanity.¹ It is a fantasy to think that LLMs will obey our commands perfectly once models get better, as language is an imprecise instrument. If LLMs exhibit anything that deserves to be called ‘intelligence’, it is of an animalistic variety: effectively opaque, imperfectly captured by anthropomorphised vocabulary.

With this in mind, I want to throw another metaphor experimentally into the oversized soup of AI takes. What if we are better off thinking about LLMs as birds? Birds can do many things that we humans cannot—deliver messages by air, glide for hours by locking their wings, fly, etc. There are also many things that humans can do that birds cannot. We are not, however, imminently at risk of a bird uprising that will result in humanity’s extinction (to the best of my knowledge).

There are many different species of birds. Albatrosses can fly for longer periods than other species, and hummingbirds can hover in place through rapid wing movements. Almost all species of bird in my native country, Aotearoa New Zealand, are flightless, as given the lack of mammalian predators (before the arrival of humans on the island), rooting around with long beaks in the New Zealand bush was a surer-footed way to find food than searching the skies.

Rather than thinking about LLMs through the mythology of ‘one model to rule them all’ (the ideology that frontier labs are pushing), I suggest that we’re better to think about how to cultivate a thriving and diverse model ecosystem in which many species of models coexist. Massive models may be useful and even environmentally justifiable for certain tasks, such as finding security holes in critical infrastructure. But smaller models are already sufficient for many of the use cases for LLMs such as codebase reconnaissance and harness engineering. It doesn’t make sense to use a Harpy eagle to deliver a small note when a carrier pigeon would do.

As this metaphor already begins to suggest, analogising LLMs to birds also makes the art of taming them appear as an activity that could be artful and personal, rather than necessarily industrial. What if working effectively with LLMs in our day-to-day lives is more like falconry than producing pins in a factory? We can send an LLM off to do certain kinds of work that we trust it to do well, while being cognisant that its operation is always subject to its own obscure and animalistic impulses, at least to some degree, no matter how ‘well trained’ it is.

From beads to birds

LLMs are excellent at implementing directed workstreams when strapped into coding harnesses. The issue is working out how to give them a structured set of directives so that they don’t exploit any unspoken ambiguity that might lurk beneath the surface of these directives. It is also important to track the work they complete so that we can both evaluate their work at reasonable intervals, and roll back or redirect them when we notice something amiss.

Sanguine use of a version control system (VCS) such as git or jj smooths over many of these concerns. So long as LLMs can package their work into comprehensible revision sets (‘revsets’), a human can reasonably both follow along and steer its course with a good amount of granularity. In order to queue up new tasks for LLMs to have a go at, some kind of issue tracking system also goes a long way. The hitch is that neither git nor jj provides an integrated issue tracking system. A VCS lets you register work that has already been done, but it doesn’t have an opinion on how you line up work that needs to be done.

Beneath the capitalist tropology of gastown and gascity (the AI orchestration systems built by Steve Yegge that industrially adopt and scale agents to try to build software), there rests the germ of an important idea in beads, the queueing mechanism for those bigger, more chaotic systems. As Yegge correctly notes, sprawling Markdown plans are a terribly unstructured way to keep an LLM on track: it can execute more complex activity in a reasonable fashion when given a dependency tree of atomically specified units of work.

Having worked with beads almost daily since November 2025, it is hard to imagine developing software with an LLM without something like it. Beyond allowing me to queue up work for agents, it also acts as a local issue tracking system across every codebase that I’m working on. The set of open beads across all of my projects represents all of the work that I have set out to do. Beads has almost fully replaced GitHub issues as my per-project issue tracking solution.

But the divergent philosophy of software development that beads was built to support has started to grate on my everyday use of it. Beads are not intended to be read by humans, and the beads CLI is not intended to be used by humans. I have been using the excellently named abacus, but even through this better lens, the experience of inspecting beads with human eyes constantly reminds me that they were designed to have a jagged intelligibility. Beads are supposed to be parcellated directives for a factory line of interned agents.

Birds are a conceptual alernative to beads. Let us think of birds as agent-ready units of work, analogous to beads, but designed with human legibility as a first-class citizen. Birds could therefore be a reconceptualisation of how to solve many of the same problems of keeping state while working effectively with LLMs in the software development lifecycle.

The art of falconry with birds

Let’s recap. Imagine that LLMs are not interns, workers, or superintelligences, but birds. These computational creatures can convincingly, stochastically parrot human language in the form of text and (to some extent) audio. We can also trust them to execute certain kinds of digital actions, just as we can trust pigeons that have been trained accordingly to deliver messages tied to their leg, or falcons to assist with raptor rehabilitation. I do not offer this metaphor to raise concerns about whether we should let the LLMs fly free, nor do I think of domesticating biological birds as a practice free from serious ethical concerns and questions. What I do believe is that an analogy between LLMs and birds captures the spiky capabilities of the former in 2026 (their ‘jagged intelligence’) better than an analogy between LLMs and humans.

As I have already suggested, if LLMs are birds, coordinating them to assist with the labour of software development is something like falconry. Instead of a cyber Charles Babbage, a silicon superintendent of the industrial information factory, as Yegge’s gascity positions her, I propose that we reframe the effective software developer in the age of LLMs as a master falconer, an algebraic austringer.

Bibliography

[1] G. Wajcman, “The Animals That Treat Us Badly,” Lacanian Ink, vol. 33, 2009, Accessed: Aug. 21, 2023. [Online]. Available: https://www.lacan.com/lacinkXXXIII7.html

Cycling typing

2024-11-13T00:00:00+00:00

Cycling typing

Last summer I got into cycling. I've long been a standing desk-er, and going out for long zone 2 rides and wondering what to think about made me wonder: could I work at a desk while I cycle?

I have a stationary bike trainer, so I first tried the obvious thing and just slid it slightly under my standing desk. This made certain kinds of work doable– watching videos and reading articles– but it makes for awkward and uncomfortable keyboard handling. Even reaching up to hit the 'J' key to scroll down on the browser (as I am a vimium user) interrupted the flow of thought and poise. Attempting to engage with content while cycling also made me realise that these small physical interruptions had an outsized impact on my ability to do anything meaningful. Videos and podcasts were doable in this MVP, but it left a lot to be desired.

A perspicacious user on the Acquired Slack noted that my keyboard was from the ZSA ecosystem, and pointed me towards the tripod mount for their Voyager keyboard. These are essentially two magnets that attach to the backs of the sides of the split keyboard, and as such allow you to mount the keyboard to any standard tripod screw. So I bought a couple of basic camera clamps and waited in anxious suspense for the parts to arrive.

After some basic experimentation, I have found that the most comfortable position to type while cycling is with the keyboard angled down at a 45 degree angle, with the orientation pointed slightly inwards (i.e. so that the lines from each side converge at the frontmost point of the front wheel). This allows me to rest my palms on the handlebars and to extend my fingers pretty naturally over the top of them to reach the keys. There is definitely a bit of wrist awkwardness palpable in this position, and I aim to experiment with other angles and positions as I get more comfortable with the set up.

But the basic approach has opened up a range of other work possibilities while slugging away at zone 2. This article, for example, was entirely written, researched, and hyperlinked from my position here on the bike. (The only exception was when I had to stop cycling periodically to reconfigure my webcam to show the full context of my bike– and to take and link a photo below; and to actually upload the video.) I can code with almost the same fluidity of computer navigation as I can when at my standing desk.

Note that I am a 'vim everywhere' user, meaning that I context-switch and browse web pages entirely via the keyboard. I only occasionally have to reach up and use the mouse when stuck in some janky context where I haven't yet figured out how to enable vim shortcuts– as is the case in switching the OBS scene in the recording above.

Deconstructing Urbit: The Politics of Software as Infrastructure

2022-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

Deconstructing Urbit: The Politics of Software as Infrastructure

The following essay was originally written as a contribution intended for the Routledge Handbook of Architecture, Urban Space and Politics. I proposed and drafted it in early 2020, and then submitted it for peer review. I returned to work on the final edit in July 2021, having not thought about the work for some six months, and noticed that a new paper with a very similar thesis (and deeper research regarding the neoreactionary intellectual genealogies) had been published in April 2021 about Urbit. Not feeling equipped to update the paper to adequately reflect and build upon that work, having moved onto other research topics, I withdrew my chapter from the publication.

I make it available here as a 'preprint' in the spirit of sharing unfinished academic work. I am particularly grateful to Nikolina Bobic and Farzaneh Haghighi for their close reading of the work in its draft stages, and their understanding regarding the non-publication at the time. Thank you also to Chiara Ficarelli, Francis Tseng, all those in Brown University's STS reading group for their varied contributions in form and kind. Thank you also to the reviewer two of the first draft of this piece as it was originally submitted to the handbook, who put much needed pressure on the more extensive use of Lefebvre's ideas that existed in early drafts. All editorial and formatting mistakes are mine, as the piece is slightly restructured in comparison to what was originally submitted for the handbook.

Read the essay here.

Associative Archiving with DEVONThink (Part I)

2020-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

Associative Archiving with DEVONThink (Part I)

I've been using DEVONthink (DT) idly for almost two years now. For those who aren't familiar with the application, you can basically think of it as an extra layer on top of the Mac operating system for working with documents (PDF, images, RTF, etc) more effectively. It has inbuilt PDF viewing and annotation, facilities for syncing documents between computers and tablets (iOS only), powerful search capacities, lateral tagging to associate documents with each other, and– most importantly– a scripting API to create custom workflows.

I've recently been ironing my reading, writing, and archiving workflow. It's designed primarily with seminars, essays, and book-length projects in the humanities in mind– but I've tried to make it general and flexible enough to work with other contexts, such as scientific reading, as well.

This is a two-part post. Here in part I, I'll present a specification of how I want to read, write, and archive in abstract terms. In Part II, I'll detail the way that I've configured and customized DT to implement that spec in practice. I hope this can be helpful/instructive for some folks out there who similarly work with networks of citations in reading and writing projects, or who keep a personal archive of PDFs.

A note for readers looking to use the configurations and scripts in Part II: DT is not free, and it's Mac-only. (I'm looking into virtualising it so that I can run it in Linux, but that project is yet to begin.) There is a generous 150-hour free trial, but after that you'll need to make one-off payment of $99 USD for the standard version on desktop. I'm more than willing to pay for good software like DT, and you should be too. Developing and maintaining software takes time and effort. I'm very grateful to the folks at DEVONthink keeping up with the community, and keeping the software feature-rich and flexible.

Projects

My archival philosophy is built on the principle of projects. At any given time, I have a number of projects underway. A project might be an idea for an essay, an essay I'm actively writing, a coding project, a reading group, a talk I'm preparing- essentially any undertaking that collects together relevant links, quotes, notes, texts, and other files.

These projects much more actively organise my archive than perhaps more familiar taxonomic concepts such as author or date. When I'm reading and writing, I store relevant information in my archive according to where it's going in my work– in projects– rather than where it's coming from. Say I'm reading a book, and a particular paragraph sticks out at me as a relevant reference for an essay I'm writing: I want to save that quote (and perhaps some relevant additional thoughts regarding why the quote is relevant) in the essay as a project. Provided I can get back to the correct page in the source document from what I save, I don't need to file the entire book in the project; just the relevant quotes and my additional annotations.

When I go to work on a project, I can bring up its file of quotations, annotations, and my own personal notes. Quotations are hyperlinked to their source text, so that I can go to its origin to cite or further explore, but my main project workspace is a readily-accessible collection of relevant quotes and notes.

A single note/quote could be relevant to arbitrarily many projects. Notes can exist in a project without a source document, thoughts that occur to me in the course of conversations and everyday life. The source documents might be either a PDF or a webpage. (Hardcopy books can't be hyperlinked, so quotes for these are just traditionally referenced by page number).

Project workspaces

When I open up project workspace, I want to be able to easily and immediately view all of the relevant quotes and notes. I want to be able to dynamically search through the workspace in a number of ways: for particular text, filtering to only notes from a particular book, only notes from a particular author, only notes written after a certain date, etc. In other words, the project workspace search is where I need the more traditional taxonomic notions to organise my files. I don't want to have to click through nested file structures to get to relevant notes, but instead be able to flexibly filter and compose notes.

The notes in projects should contain everything I need to use and expand the thought in a project. The project workspace is where I sift through these thoughts, putting them to use in the project, whether that be towards code, writing, conversation, or whatever else.

An associative archive

Projects are the main way to interface the archive for writing. However, I also want to be able to search through the archive as a whole, without limiting search results to the confines of a project. This search should, like the search in project workspaces, be similarly flexible and support search by author, by date added, etc.

Crucially, I also want to be able to add durable filters to the archive's search space. For example, I might want to be able to see all notes and documents from a particular seminar, all those published by University of California Press, or all those that come recommended by a particular person. A document or note can have an arbitrary number of these tags, so that it can be infinitely associated with other items in relevant groupings.

This notion of flexible and associative tagging essentially replaces the need for folders in the archive. Folders seem to tend towards nested hierarchical structures of organisation. I try to keep as few hierarchical layers as possible in my tagging system. This keeps me diligent regarding the tags I add to my archive, encouraging fewer of them and ensuring that the ones I do add are expressive and memorable.

The inbox

The only extra capacity this system needs is a clean, clear workflow for adding new documents to the archive, reading them, and then marking them as 'done'. I work through documents like I work through email. They enter into an inbox, and I read them there, creating new quotes and notes in different projects as I read. When I'm done, I flick them into the archive. Documents either come into my inbox fresh from somewhere else (the web or a hard drive). Or, if I'm returning to a document to read a different chapter, or to read one again, it might come back into my inbox from the archive. In other words, my inbox consists of all the documents I'm actively reading. If I'm adding a bunch of documents to my archive from elsewhere and not immediately planning to read them, they only hang out in my inbox for long enough to be tagged with any relevant filters, and are then filed away.

The idea that a document can be either a PDF or a webpage is crucial to how this inbox works for me. For a long time I kept webpages to read in browser bookmarks, and PDFs elsewhere, which inevitably ended up in never actually reading bookmarked folders. Having a unified inbox for all my documents means that I have to work systematically through them to keep a clean inbox, just like an email inbox.

Another important aspect my inbox is how it works with documents I read elsewhere. I read almost all my PDFs, EPUBs, and MOBIs on my Remarkable, where I underline things and write in the margins. When I've finished with a document on my Remarkable, I bring it into my archive inbox, and browse quickly back through the marginalia. This practice of 'second-reading' my own notes on a text helps to solidify what I took from it, and gives me the opportunity to spin off relevant quotations and marginalia as notes to projects. I have a system for reading with my computer open as well, annotating and typing notes as I go through it, but I largely prefer reading elsewhere (outside, in the sun!) and then second-reading in my archive's inbox, before filing it away. Similarly, if I take notes in notebooks on my remarkable, I second-read them in my archive before filing.

In Part II, I'll explain how I have implemented the archive explained here in practice with DEVONthink.

Associative Archiving with DEVONThink (Part II)

2020-02-29T00:00:00+00:00

Associative Archiving with DEVONThink (Part II)

Following on from Part I, here I'll unpack how I archive in practice using DEVONthink (DT) as a driver. As I noted in part I, DT is a Mac-only application, and so in order to replicate my setup, you unfortunately need to have an Apple device. I'm actively looking for linux software that can simulate or replicate DT's functionality, as my primary workstation is Artix on a modified LARBS, but I currently know of nothing that compares. In fact, it is pretty much solely DT's capabilities as archiving software that ties me to still using a Mac for some kinds of work.

Alongside documents in DT, I also keep a personal database of notes in plain markdown, which I view and edit in a range of ways (Obsidian, vim or emacs in desktop environments, and iWriter on iPad). I call this database my "PKB", which is a shorthand for "personal knowledge base" I picked up somewhere online. My PKB loosely follows Nick Milo's LYT method for note-taking, and contains notes that range from handy bash commands, to lecture notes, to article drafts.

My Obsidian graph. Edges between notes represent lateral links.

I'll unpack my PKB in more detail in a future post. I mention it here because it structures the way that I use DT. DT is where I read and seed ideas; my PKB is where I grow them as research. In other words, my DT archive exists largely to service the development of my PKB.

An associative archive in DT (or another application) can supplement any research output process, whether it takes the form of a PKB like mine, whether it's a Roam Research database, folders in Evernote, or whether it's just a good old blank Word document.

My DT setup involves several customisations. Some of these are straightforward, and I'll do my best to detail those here in such a way that they can be easily reproduced on any DT installation. Others involve custom Python scripts and external services like Dropbox. If you're interested in the detail of these, or have any questions or comments in general, please do feel free to email me. If you've taken the time to read this, I'd love to hear from you! :)

DEVONthink in a nutshell

DT is ultimately a file manager, comparable to Finder in Mac, File Manager in Windows, or Nautilus or PCManFM in Linux. To get started, you create a database, in which you can then store files of various kinds. With DT, you can then effectively browse and modify the contents of your databases.

DT is superior to a traditional file manager in a range of ways. Firstly, it is conceived as a way both to find files, and to view them. The left side of the screenshot above looks much like Finder; the right side looks like Preview, or some other PDF viewer. DT's PDF viewing and editing is slim and straightforward, and much more effective than Finder's 'preview' functionality for basic viewing. I've found it capable of everything I want to do regularly with PDFs, including highlighting, adding notes, and jumping to page numbers. If there's ever anything lacking, you can double-click and open the document in another application, just as you would in Finder.

DT doesn't only support viewing and editing PDFs; it provides similar capabilities for most file types that you can imagine: images, CSVs, markdown, and many more. Crucially for my archiving, it supports both .webloc files (which are basically bookmarks for webpages) and webarchives (offline webpages). This support means that I can view webpages alongside PDFs in the same view, treating them as analogous, rather than having to employ a different storage system (such as browser bookmarks) and set of viewing applications for each distinct file type.

DT also offers fluid conversion between document formats. I can right-click to save a .webloc as a webarchive, or to convert a webpage to a PDF. (Webarchives in particular are a revelatory format: because it's HTML saved locally, you can edit it and add in your own highlights, hyperlinks that point locally to other DT documents, and styles as you might with a PDF document.) DT offers a huge range of useful operations: making a new PDF by excising a range of pages from a larger PDF, wordcounts over documents of various kinds, and many others.

Like Finder, you can toggle through a range of different views on the list of files on the left-hand side. You can even modify its orientation with respect to the document viewing panel (which can sit on the right as pictured above, below the file list, or be hidden).

Organisational concepts in DT

There are two primary organisational concepts in DT: groups and tags*. Groups are essentially folders: nodes that exist as the parent to a collection of children documents. Tags are more flexible, and less hierarchical. They are distinct tokens that can be associated with any document, and subsequently used as composable filters to view associated documents.

If you've read part I, you won't be surprised to hear that I almost never use groups, and use tags extensively. DT's tagging system is what makes it so effective as an engine for associative archiving. You can filter for documents associated with one or more tags in any database:

In addition to basic filters, i.e. for documents that are associated with a particular tag, you can compose arbitrarily sophisticated filters over a database to retrieve matching documents. These filters can make use of document tags; but also all of their other metadata, such as date created, date modified, document kind, to name just a few:

In addition to this metadata query language, DT provides impressively effective full text search. This operates over documents of all kinds: PDFs and webarchives alike, any document that has text that DT's indexing engine can pick up on. (Certain versions of DT also provide support for OCR-ing PDFs that don't explicitly contain textual data.) Combining this with tags, I can query for documents in DT using arbitrarily complex directives, such as "Give me all PDF documents authored by Jodi Dean that contain the word 'manifesto' that have more than 10000 words". Results are ranked using a scoring algorithm, so that most relevant results come to this top. Searches can be done either succinctly via DT's query language in the search bar, or visually using the provided GUI.

Associative archiving in DEVONthink

The three primitives of associative archiving as I outlined them in part I are: projects, associative tagging and an inbox. Here's how I implement each of these using DT.

Projects

For each new project in DT, I simply add a new tag, and start attributing it to documents that exist in that project. Seeing all the documents in a project is then as easy as filtering for a tag.

In addition to working as a filter, tags exist as distinct entities in DT. This means that they can be searched for, added in groups, and so on. One shelf that DT offers in its global sidebar (on the leftmost of the screen below) is a list of 'Favorites', to which you can add any kind of entity. By adding a project tag such as 'computing history' to my Favorites, I create a distinct workspace for that project, which will dynamically show me all documents within that project. From this workspace, I can then further search and filter over tags, metadata, or contents.

Associative tagging

I have a few special categories of tags in order to keep my archive clear and usable. The architecture of my archive's tags is an eternal project: I'm endlessly creating, renaming and consolidating tags together in order to make them more effective as filters and search concepts for my research. This dynamic change is possible in DT, because tags are more flexible than folders: deleting or renaming one won't remove associated documents or break other connections, it will just remove that tag.

Project tags* - correspond to a project as described in the section above.

Author tags* - a tag for the author of a document. This is a bit more robust than relying on DT inferring the appropriate metadata, I've found, as PDFs and webpages sometimes don't contain the information appropriately for DT to pick up. Author tags exist in my archive in the format "lastname, firstname", e.g. "dean, jodi". Any tag that includes a comma I treat as an author tag.

Kind tags* - a tag that marks some quality of a document that I want to track(i.e. it's 'kind'). This ranges from my own interpretations of the document ('interesting', 'difficult'), to its genre ('literature', 'journalism'), to its medium ('podcast', 'video'), to some parenthetical note or impending course of action ('toread', 'reading', 'unread').

Journal tags* - the journal or publication source of documents ('duke university press', 'jacobin', 'verso'). As in the case of author tags, this is more resilient than relying on metadata inference.

Field tags* - disciplinary or otherwise structuring fields in which documents exist. I mainly use these as ways of capturing pockets of technical literature in computer science, i.e. 'databases', 'decentralised', 'p2p'.

Course tags* - tags for seminars that I take or teach. All of the readings are tagged with the course tag ('MCM 2500 2020'). I used to use tags for particular weeks of content as well, but this gets complicated if certain documents are read in multiple courses (as they may be read in week 1 of one course, and week 4 of another). Instead I now rely on the course's syllabus (which can be found using the type tag 'syllabus') to preserve the course's progression.

The basic guiding principle here is that my tag architecture should reflect the way that I conceptually order documents, so that retrieval from the archive is as simple as composing a few tag/concepts together. Search is not the only application though; wandering through my tag architecture can also lead to serendipitous discovery of links between different kinds of content. Keeping the archive 'flat' by default encourages this latter kind of discovery, and keeps categorisation from ossifying and stymieing creativity rather than supporting and structuring it.

The inbox

The final component of the associative archive is an inbox for incoming documents, which are either to be read or simply shelved for later. DT comes natively with the idea of a 'Global Inbox' that represents a holding shelf for documents before they go into whichever database.

It is easy to drag-and-drop files such as PDFs if they're local into the inbox, and DT also provides extensions for Safari, Chrome and Firefox to easily 'clip' webpages into the inbox.

I use DT's inbox as my primary way of keeping track of links and documents to read. Because it exists separately from the rest of my database, I can sync it with the mobile version of DT, DEVONthink To Go, without having to worry about taking up all the space on my tablet with all my PDF documents (which can be stored on the Cloud and synced on demand if you prefer). My DT inbox becomes a 'Read Later' space for everything incoming from either the web or that folks have sent me as PDF.

If I didn't have an e-reader, I would probably read PDFs on my ipad via DT To Go as well: but because I start at a glowing blue screen so much in any case, I make a point of reading everything I can on my e-ink Remarkable tablet. PDFs basically sit in my DT inbox for as long as I'm reading them, as a kind of reminder that I need to, and then once I have finished with them on Remarkable, I export them and replace the placeholder documents in DT with the annotated versions.

To be continued…

I only intended to have two parts, but in Part III I'll explain how I manage annotations on documents in DT. As I'll explain in more depth there, this is slightly beyond the scope of DT as an 'archive' per se, as it gets into how I use my DT archive to write and produce my own research.

There might also be a part IV, in which I'll go into more detail about my PKB and writing process. Both my annotation system and my PKB are more freshly minted than my DT archive, and as such they're still developing and are subject to change and improvement. They work pretty well for me at the moment, though, so I'll write up their processes in the hope they're useful/interesting to some.

Associative Archiving with DEVONThink (Part III)

2020-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

Associative Archiving with DEVONThink (Part III)

Annotations in DT have long been a bit of a brain tangle for me. My spec for annotations (since I didn't go into this in part I) is as follows:

There should be no constraints on how many annotations you can take from a document. You could take none, one or two, or ten thousand.

An annotation should have an inlined quote (whatever text is highlighted when you create the annotation), and should have a one-click reference back to the specific page of the source document from which it's drawn (if it is a PDF- for webarchives and weblocs there is no notion of pages, so a generic reference to the document suffices).

Annotations need to be their own entities in the archive. This has several implications. One of these is that an annotation is not solely or specifically bound to its source document. Annotations can be included in projects without necessarily including the source document itself. Another is that annotations can have their own tags which need not be the same as their source document's.

Annotations should be recognizably distinct from other documents. This is perhaps a personal preference, but I think that it makes sense given that an annotation is part source text, part text that I myself have written (an associated note). In this sense annotations are closer to files in my PKB (explained in brief at the top of this post) than any other content in my archive. They are part source material, part my own creation.

Creating annotations should be possible from anywhere: not just within DEVONthink.

Though it leaves a bit to be desired in my workflow, it does make sense to me why DT does not include support for annotations natively. DT wants to be as general-purpose a file manager as possible, and to not force your hand when it comes to file formats or workflows. The conception of an annotation that I have above is something fairly specific to an academic or otherwise citational workflow, and might not be necessary for many folks' file management philosophies. For many, DT is a starting point: it opens up onto other applications. Having some sort of DT-specific file type for annotations would run against this.

Annotations as RTFs (my old approach)

Though it doesn't support annotations out of the box, many have tried to create an annotation workflow in DT. See here and here for some examples. A common way to manufacture annotations is to create a shortcut that creates a new text file from a template, which includes a link back to the source document via DT's URL schema (which allows you to open up specific documents, at specific page numbers, from anywhere on your Mac).

This works okay, and I used a similar workflow for a long time: Cmd-Option-; to automatically create a new RTF with the highlighted text in a different colour, with a hyperlink at the top that can take me back to the quotes source. (If you're interested to try this approach, my script is available here) Any other notes I wanted to write about the quote just went directly in the RTF document beneath. This approach satisfies at roughly three and arguably four of the conditions outlined above, with the arguable exception being number four: RTF documents are not particularly distinct from other documents, especially if you happen to have word documents and other rich text as source documents in your archive. You can get part of the way there by using a naming schema for RTF annotations, but it was still a bit messy by my measure.

Most importantly, creating annotations from outside DEVONthink gets messy very quickly, meaning that this approach falls flat on condition five. In theory, you can write scripts to generate RTFs on other devices, and then you could work out some syncing mechanism to carry those annotations into your main DT workstation at some point via Dropbox or otherwise: but it's not ideal. Moreover, RTF isn't the most straightfoward format to generate. (Although admittedly you could replace RTFs with Markdown or something similar; it just wouldn't look as nice inside DT.)

Annotations as RSS (my current approach)

A month or so ago, I came across Francis Tseng's wonderful writeup regarding his research tooling. One of the components of his workflow is a super simple HTTP server called hili, which accepts 'clips' at a POST endpoint, and stores them as simple JSON. Clips contain whatever the source quote and images, a reference to the URL where the clip happened, and optional tags that can be used further on to help categorise the clip.

I really liked this idea, as it detaches the idea of taking notes from any application in particular and makes it universally available wherever there's an Internet connection (and the ability to send a simple POST request). I modified hili by adding the ability to take a note associated with each clip, and added scripts for DEVONthink and iOS in addition to Francis' original extension for Firefox.

For a while I clipped away while reading on my various devices, building up a database of clips from both webpages and DT documents. Thanks to DT's URL schema, I can treat DT URLs in the same way that I do HTTP ones: as hyperlinks that can open up the right document in DT from wherever else (i.e. directly from the browser in which the clips are shown. Note that this won't work using my clips, as the DT URLs are local to my computer).

The HTML view of clips pictured above is handy, and is nice to confirm that clips are coming in, or to quickly search for a clip from wherever: I just have to open up a browser from any device to my hili URL and I have them all. I developed a basic way to filter clips by tag- but quickly realised that I would have to build a full frontend interface with full text search to really get the most out of my clips.

Even then, the clips in hili would sit separately from everything else in DT, which is less than ideal. I use the same tag structure with clips as I do with DT documents– some are associated with projects, others by type (see part II for more detail on this structure). Ideally, I would like to filter for a project tag in DT, and see both all DT documents associated with that project, and also all of the hili clips I've tagged as relevant to that project. As per specification #5, I do want annotations to be somewhat separate from source documents: but if they're only available in an entirely different interface, it means that I would basically have to do every search twice; once in DT for documents, and then again in the hili webview for annotations.

While looking through one of Francis' other projects recently, I realised that I could have the best of both worlds using a tried-and-true technology (and perhaps my favourite data format for its collection of curiously coexisting qualities: relative obscurity, ubiquitousness, and decided simplicity): RSS.

RSS is usually used to 'syndicate' news feeds from various sites, making all the content available all from single reader such as Feedly or Newsboat. The format it uses for news items, however, is also almost perfect to represent a document annotation. It contains some header text, a description, a source URL, and a set of tags that can be used to categorise the item.

Moreover, DT supports RSS feeds in such a way that item tags are automatically attributed as DT tags. This means that if I tag a clip as 'infraspace' when reading, when that clip comes into DT as an RSS item, it'll automatically be associated with all of the other content in that project. Making my clips available as an RSS feed gives the best of all worlds: I can clip from anywhere, view clips in HTML at a glance (if I'm not at my Mac), but also keep all clips as integrated and distinct items within my archive.

It also means I get the full power of DT search for my clips, so I don't need to think about developing a new UI to group all those related to a particular document, say, or all those that have a particular tag, or all those that I clipped during a particular time period. They show up beautifully in project workspaces, with a distinct type (HTML text) that doesn't overlap with other documents in my archive (as RTF annotations sometimes did with Word docs), and one click away from their source documents like the HTML view.

More to come…

Francis and I are working on integrating our hilis, which might lead to it becoming a more stable tool for folks not familiar with Python and HTTP requests at some point: but if you're not afraid of Python and want to try it, please do! I'd be very happy to hear about and help anyone who's interested to mess around with it (email me or open an issue on Github if you run into trouble).

Documentary Is/Not A Name

2018-07-29T00:00:00+00:00

Documentary Is/Not A Name

A synopsis of Trinh T. Min-ha's argument in her 1990 essay, "Documentary Is/Not a Name". You can find the essay here.

Erich Hörl: Sacred Channels: The Archaic Illusion of Communication (chapters 1 and 2)

2025-02-10T00:00:00+00:00

Erich Hörl: Sacred Channels: The Archaic Illusion of Communication (chapters 1 and 2)

Last week I read the first two chapters of a book recommended to me quite some time ago by a friend: Sacred Channels: The Archaic Illusion of Communication by Erich Hörl. The book was published in English in 2018, but was defended as a dissertation in 2003, and published in German in 2005. Friedrich Kittler was the dissertation's second reader, and we learn from the introduction that the manuscript was also read by Bernhard Siegert and André Gorz, among others. Some pretty heavy media-theoretical hitters in the German-speaking context!

I am opening this book at last to begin working my way through the history and philosophy of mathematics that is relevant to my dissertation. The lineaments of this relevance are, broadly speaking, those that trace the emergence of set theory around the turn of the 20th century, and its culmination in the crisis of foundations orchestrated by the young Kurt Gödel when he published Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme - 'On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems'. This curious and relatively obscure turn of events in the history of mathematics has been heralded by some, the author of the text under consideration in this b/log included, as the climactic moments in the most fundamental epistemological transition in philosophy and thought at large of the last few centuries; the coming of modernity.

Thinking and so being

What does set theory and formalist mathematics have to do with philosophical modernity? Hörl's claim is that, from as early as the 1830s, a "purely symbolic thinking clearly began to take shape in the sciences" (Hörl 2018, 33) Symbolic thinking is marked in distinction to its precursor, intuitive thinking, which is construed as the reigning and preceding paradigm in mathematical thought writ large.

For Hörl, the "great transformation from the intuitive to the symbolic" (Hörl 2018, 47) is a shift in the relationship between Thinking and Being. I capitalise these two terms here to indicate that they designate presumed universal notions, rather than simply historically contingent activities of thinking and being.

Thinking (with a capital T) is the realm of appearances, the full breadth of what is sensible to the subject. The subject, here, is a human one in the sense that human is the word given to all those entities capable of social life by dint of their capability for language. Language, here, too, is not 'English' or 'Spanish' exclusively, but a more holistic category that gets at the curious phenomenon we often now call communication. Language is not language in the strict linguistic sense of having a grammar, nouns, and verbs, but is rather something more curious and not so easily locatable as a set of articulate rules. Language is the name for the many syntaxes of sociality, the protocol(s) through which subjects cooperate, live together, and are insufficient to be themselves alone. Thinking is the domain of what is cognisable and apparent in and as language, the full sensibility of the world as it can be Thought.

Being, on the other hand, is what the world actually is, what actually exists. It is the tree that falls in the forest without anyone around to hear or think it. It is more durable and persistent than what can be Thought, to some minds, as what exists in the world is not necessarily coincident with what appears to those of us subjects that are thinking within it.

If the distinction between Thinking and Being seems finicky, you are not alone in this complaint. Whether or how Thinking and Being overlap is a core question in philosophy. Ontology is the investigation of what exists, to delimiting the domain of Being. Epistemology is the complementary investigation of what can appear transparently to subjects in the world, of the borders of the domain of Thinking. The articulation of the latter usually (always?) implies the former. Epistemology can really only be defined by nominating whether or not there is anything that exceeds it. The exceptions in Thinking, things which exist but which cannot be Thought, are the stuff of ontology.

Intuition is the key to everything

For Hörl, the ascendance of symbolic reasoning in mathematics in the early 19th century is a feature of a shift in the tectonics of Thinking and Being. Hörl is a media theorist and not an historian, and he does not clearly delimit the spatial parameters of what he sees as the age of symbolic reason. (Is it only or primarily in Europe? Is it as intense in France as it is in Germany? Does it suffuse the intellectual scene in Kenya or Kyoto in an equivalent or noticeable way?) But the general idea is that, before this age, the cutting edge of ontological proposition was secured through an appeal to intuition.

Intuition is a term laden with Kantian suggestion, as it played a complicated role in Kant's philosophical system. The sum of it as relevant to Hörl's argument is as follows. Kant was adamant that there were some aspects of Thinking that we could take to be universal, that is, that we could take to exist not just in particular instantiations, but as general truths for all subjects. The echelon of Thinking that Kant reckons universal is specifically that of Reason, and it is the task of philosophy to shore up the boundaries of Reason so that its factions do not contradict themselves; "to expose the illusions of a reason that forgets its limits, and by sufficiently clarifying our concepts to recall it from its presumptuous speculative pursuits to modest but thorough self-knowledge" (Ewald and Ewald 1999, 1:147). Whatever the specific cartography of this universal Reason's shores, Kant was sure that Thinking could eventually map them. There are some kinds of Thinking, in other words, of which we can be sure. The surety of Reason's forms appear to us through intuition, a capability (of sorts) that allows subjects to make out the shape of structures that undergird the many specific sensualities that appear in the world. Intuition, in other words, is what ensures that the hypothetical play of structures and patterns in logic (Thinking) have something to do with what is actually out there in the world (Being). For Kant there is a necessary overlap between Thinking and Being, albeit probably a 'modest' one, about which 'thorough' thinking is fundamentally able to reason.

As Hörl is working in a media-theoretical paradigm that follows Kittler, he periodises and defines this (Kantian) era in the relationship between Thinking and Being as an "optical-medial paradigm of consciousness" (Hörl 2018, 51). Structures and associations appear in the mind of subject as apparitions of sensual particularities in the world through the lens of intuition, much like the shadows playing on the wall of Plato's cave. Intuition is what secures that there is some reality that can be disambiguated from fantasy in the observance of such shadows. Good, philosophical thinking in Kant's cave is the diligent picking-out of objective patterns, forming a structure in the mind that extracts only what is objectively there in the world, and as such will not be contradicted by any particular play of shadows.

Leibniz leading the blind

The first chapter of Hörl's book wrestles with how one should think about the crisis of intuition and its giving way to a notion of the symbolic that was not secured by the same kind of intuition, or at least not in the same way. He evocatively refers to this new paradigm as blind thinking. The media-theoretical avoidance of any requirement that time be stratified as linear, and thus a period given a specific date to inaugurate it, is clear from the chapter's title; 'Blind thinking around 1900' (my emphasis). Symbolic thinking is blind because Leibniz labeled it as such (cogitatio caece) in his aspiration to designate structures of association that exist in the world without any contingency in Thought:

Leibniz had been working on an autonomous symbolic freed from the fetters of the representation of objects and had philosophically conceptualized the formal use of symbols in algorithmic mathematics in terms of a purely symbolic knowledge…. As the "pioneer of the idea of calculus"– that is of a purely formal manipulation of signs free of all interpretation– he kept to the blindness of using symbols despite all the evidence of immediate, instantaneous viewing…. Because it proceeded nonintuitively and was not founded on the evidence of an insight, Leibniz called symbolic knowledge "blind" (caeca). (Hörl 2018, 58–60)

Leibniz's project of calculus is nominated as a decisive break from Kant's '20/20' vision of philosophical reason. In the symbolic paradigm of Thinking and Being, there was no essential security that structures of Thought had any bearing on entities in the world. One can search for consistency in symbols in thought and in theory (this enterprise has come to be known as pure mathematics), but there was no guarantee that such Thinking had anything to do with Being. Thinking after Leibniz, Hörl contends, is fundamentally detached from Being, as there is no longer much Kantian faith in an intuition that binds them together.

It is interesting to me that Leibniz's calculus becomes an "autonomous symbolic", as I have written elsewhere about the status of capital as an autonomous subject in Marx. How is it that the symbolic is 'autonomous'? The domain of the symbolic is no longer bound to the particularities and peculiarities of subjectivity; it is no longer a domain that exists only 'interiorly' as shadows in the mind. The symbolic now exists for itself, autonomously. We as subjects are simply capable of observing it. No longer shackled as shadows in the cavernous minds of stuck subjects, the symbolic now shares the status of real objects out there in the world. It has been freed, made autonomous, just as Socrates had always hoped might be possible for subjects were we all to become philosophers (such that we might no longer stare only at shadows on the wall).

Kittler in the kitchen

In reading these first few chapters, it seems that Hörl is making use of the Lacanian terms symbolic, imaginary, and the real in a Kittlerian manner. What does it mean to use these terms in a Kittlerian manner, exactly? I admit that I need to return to Kittler's work in order to properly reason through this question, in particular his 1986 book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (translated to English in 1999), as I last looked at his work as an undergraduate (with very different scholarly eyes). This book is a definitional text in German-American media theory, as it makes out three epistemological paradigms in the 20th century– that of the gramophone, of film, and of the typewriter– arguing that each medium represents the conditions of Thinking in its respective historical specificity. Kittler does this using the Lacanian triumvirate, as is summarized by this excerpt from this (curious) wiki:

The gramophone appeals to the real, functions as an analog representation of the voice, and maintains the voice of the dead (the scream of the dying over radio). Film functions as the imaginary, capturing not light waves but the effect of light waves, and reproducing our illusory doppelganger before our eyes at a speed too fast to capture difference. The typewriter corresponds to the symbolic, a symbolic order now stripped of its inherent relationship to male thought as thousands of women enter into the typing fields.

So:

Gramophone	the Real
Film	the Imaginary
Typewriter	the Symbolic

I don't know of work that directly criticizes Kittler for this schematic, though I imagine that there must be some, as (by my very nascent understanding) it seems strange to figure each of Lacan's terms as more active in a particular historical period, at the very least. There is something suspiciously Foucauldian about the attempt, which is not surprising, given that I believe that Kittler explicitly invokes Foucault (and Derrida) in Gramophone as intellectual inspiration. It figures the terms as a set of equivalent intensities in relation to each other, rather than as aspects of the same topological structure. To be sure, I am no expert in either Lacan or Foucault, and so perhaps there is a way hold both conceptions effectively in mind at the same time. This problem inspires me to read Kittler's Gramophone in the coming days, a trial that I may report on here in one form or another.

The reason I will return to Kittler is that I find Hörl's mobilisation of the Lacanian triumvirate compelling; but I am as yet uncertain as to whether it is helpful to frame the history of Thought in such belletristic terms. For Hörl, the Symbolic (Lacanian or otherwise) is evidently associated with the formal-mathematical symbolic of Boole, of imaginary numbers (both discussed in chapter 2), and of the symbolic 'turn' in the history of mathematics. The Imaginary, in contrast, is affiliated with the intuitionist mapping of mathematical structure to the 'real world', as Hörl argues was the case with geometry before its non-Euclidean awakenings (the invasion of the sanctity of Kantian intuition as mathematics' epistemological foundation by the formal modernity of Leibnizian and Boolean symbolic operationalism). The Symbolic, on this view, is constituted by the paradigm of non-contradiction, whereas the Imaginary is an apparent fortress of philosophical reality constructed on the sense that there is some fundamental channel between what one thinks (or can imagine) and what is actually out there in the world, a channel called intuition.

The ascendancy of the symbolic from 1830 through 1850, and whose monarchy of names such as Russell and Hilbert was overthrown by the popular demagogue of reason that goes by Gödel, seems to be Hörl's Kittlerian periodizing of the slow takeover of modernity. Perhaps Hörl is simply tracing the Kittlerian thesis in Gramophone by way of different historical roots?

Bibliography

Ewald, William Bragg, and William Ewald, eds. 1999. From Kant to Hilbert Volume 1: A Source Book in the Foundations of Mathematics. Vol. 1. OUP Oxford.

Hörl, Erich. 2018. “Sacred Channels: The Archaic Illusion of Communication.” Sacred Channels, 1–342.

Fall semester 2024 update

2024-12-27T00:00:00+00:00

Fall semester 2024 update

The pause in proceedings here has been principally due to a (final) semester of coursework and teaching at Brown University; the other side of a PhD in the U.S. I have now advanced to candidacy, which means that I have completed all requirements for my PhD except the submission of the dissertation itself. (This is also known as being ABD, ``all but dissertation".)

I was in Providence for this stint (September through December 2024), and though the period has certainly been generative in terms of meeting milestones and generating sparks for further research, I didn't manage to make any time to write here throughout. So I return with a brief recap of the contours of my past few months.

Teaching CCeAI

One of the features of the PhD program in Modern Culture and Media at Brown is that students are expected to teach an undergraduate seminar of their own design around their fourth year. It is recommended that this seminar trace a student's intellectual fields, as it is ideally taught just after completing the fields examination. (In my case, I sat the fields exam halfway through the same semester in which I was teaching my own course, due mainly to logistical issues with convening my advisors.)

I titled my course 'Capitalism and Computers in the Era of AI', acronymically 'CCeAI'. As expected, about half of my students were majors in Computer Science, interested to relieve their technical coursework with some critical reflection on the economy and politics of computing more generally. The syllabus lays out the course's focus:

What is the relation between capital and the computer? To answer this question, this course attends to the particulars of the computer as a mathematical proposition, to its claim to legitimacy as a logic of superior military and political organization, and to its elaboration as something of a natural philosophy in scientific practice. In doing so, we will formulate a conceptual basis to critically assess the glittery promises of current discourse invoking Artificial Intelligence (A.I), which sees near-total automation as inevitable and the threat of sentient Artificial General Intelligence (A.G.I) as nigh. We will establish a critique of the computer as a structure (i.e. as a philosophical arrangement with a specific and persistent imagination) to think critically about popular ideologies associated with A.I., often put forward by those with capital stake in its commercial success.

All in all, I was pleased with the way that the course turned out. Due to unexpected interruptions in the academic calendar coupled with a sense that we needed to spend more time with the material in the early weeks to properly get a grasp on it, we skipped the week titled 'Ideology' (Zizek), as well as the final week titled 'Psychoanalysis?'. I am still myself working out the appropriate way to cross-pollinate Marxian theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis, I realised as we approached each of these weeks, and so it felt an unreasonably far throw in the course's overall argument to sidestep into Zizek's theory of ideology (which I wrote some about here and here) directly after a tough week attempting to chart Marx's theory of commodity fetishism via Michael Heinrich's (excellent but dense) introduction to it; and while I would estimate the final week's reading as at a slightly more appropriate level for the course, there was a holiday that I had not accounted for throughout the semester (election day).

The texts in this syllabus represent a trajectory of my own thinking regarding the intimate philosophical relation between capital and the computer. The course locates the computer through three supposed inventors of it in the first three weeks: Charles Babbage (1830-70s), Alan Turing (1930-50s), and Norbert Wiener (1920s-60s). Each of these three men is esteemed as a populariser of the computer's concept, and we can glean important characteristics of the imaginaries that proliferate from their writing and writing about them.

The course's core argument is that there is a fundamental relationship between the computer and capital, and so in the weeks following an elaboration of the computer, we looked to firm up a sense of capital's contours and characteristics, particularly the aspects of its theory that have been explicitly employed in critical discussion about cybernetics and the computer. Each of the weeks whose titles end with a question mark are designed to provide texts through which students can observe and practise critical thinking with respect to the computer, capital, and cybernetics, consisting of contemporary attempts to theorise a relationship between these terms, rather than of introductions to a concept as the earlier weeks' texts do. The course culminates in a ten page paper on a topic of students' choosing.

Through teaching the course I have certainly learned that there is a real difference between the way that one reads as an undergraduate, and how one reads as a graduate student. I think I knew this already, but in some sense I have resisted the idea, as I sought to flout the hierarchical distinction as an undergrad, and of course don't believe in any fundamental demarcation. (There are certainly particular undergrads who are smarter / better readers than certain grad students.) But in general, undergrads in US institutions are beset with circumstances that make it difficult to imagine that there is value in reading texts closely, repetitiously. This is not something to hold against undergrads, I don't think, but rather against the regimes of value that flood in and out of (neo)liberal arts institutions. Five courses a semester is both far too much and far too little. One doesn't have to work particularly hard to keep head above water, especially at Brown where grades don't hold much weight; but there is also too much noise in the days and weeks if one were to want to seriously study something particular in the oceany midst of weekly obligations.

The Internet and Datacenter Operating Systems

I decided to take two graduate seminars in computer science to wrap up my masters degree in the department, and I learned a lot about research in the discipline through the experience. The experience of reading four papers a week from operating systems and Internet research was instructive in the sense that I realised how different the work of keeping up with computer science is from keeping up with continental theory. The journals are different, of course. But so is the kind of effort that reading each paper involves, and the time one must set aside in the day to engage with it. I like the difference in the experience between the two disciplines in which I have decided to make an effort to become literate; though it is certainly true that I feel more equipped at this stage to parse papers in continental theory than I do those in computer science.

The work involved in each (systems) paper in computer science is also enormous. It takes at least a year to prototype a system, to run experiments, etc, and it is often a multi-person effort. The scale of the research is still relatively small and individualistic compared to other scientific disciplines, but it is a notably different (and more social) experience of research than reading and writing philosophical papers.

The main thread that emerged from these two courses for me was a burgeoning familiarity with vector databases, which I had decided to try to get a handle on early in the semester so as to be able to code something substantially systems-oriented for my final projects in the courses. The system I have now started working on is currently called OAK, and while I am not yet sure that it offers something distinctively innovative or original in vector databases research, it is at least a very good way for me to practically get a handle on the current state of vector indexes, and to think about what kinds of opportunities there might be for turning research into practice in this domain (i.e. coding up research papers as new components of OAK).

German Idealism and Canguilhem

The other two courses that I either took or audited this semester were respectively about Kant with political theorist Alex Gourevitch, and about Georges Canguilhem with my advisor and chair, Joan Copjec. The first of these will likely see some thematically related posts in the coming weeks, as I am now starting work on a paper about Kant and Marx to submit as the final paper for that course, so I won't discuss it at length here. The second course with Joan, which I audited, was revelatory even though I was not able to complete much of the reading for it in advance. The basic premise was that Canguilhem's ideas bear some relation to Lacan's, and so we sat each week listening to Joan hypothesize connections between the two thinkers.

While it perhaps doesn't come directly on the back of this seminar, and is rather an idea that I have been stewing for some time, I intend to read Joan's work more closely in the new year, and to record the way in which I understand it via video, rather than here in writing. I am not exactly sure how this will work at this stage, so I will not speculate further. But I have resolutely decided that I ought to get deeply familiar with her body of work, for though it is far-reaching, it is relatively short in terms of actual page counts. (A credit to the incredible effort that Joan puts into each paper, not dissimilar to the year-long efforts of systems papers I note above.)

Is psychoanalysis a Science?

2025-04-10T00:00:00+00:00

Is psychoanalysis a Science?

Psychoanalysis was once described as a ‘calling card’ that was to be left at the door of Science. The idea here, I think, was that psychoanalysis should not become (as Freud envisioned it in his first explorations of it) a ‘science’ in the sense of having an answer for everything. If psychoanalysis were to become a theory that accommodated every possible thing, every possible action, to foreclose all possibility of surprise within its framework, then it would be no better than a worldview (or Weltanschauung, in German). Incidentally, Freud dismissed Marxism as too much of just such a worldview, and therefore according to Freud Marx’s account of the world is not something to which psychoanalysis should aspire.

Instead, psychoanalysis– as a truer kind of science than the Science that Freud criticized–the institutionalized Science of physics, chemistry, applied mathematics, and perhaps biology– should be a technique that Science turns to in an idle moment, when one of its formulae fails to produce an adequate account of some happening in the lab; when the scientist is racking her brains, late at work one night, trying to reduce some recalcitrant experiment to an eloquent result. Psychoanalysis, the calling card analogy suggests, is the method that one might turn to in this confounded moment when the structures of organized knowledge seem exhausted, misguided, or just plain wrong. When something (in society) no longer works, and one needs to find the will to try to make something work again, even as it seems that the world has firm ideas otherwise.

The psychoanalytic clinic (the calling card left at each of our aporetic doors) is an institution with a serious kind of humility. In its best form, it doesn’t offer answers, only spaces for its subjects to ask more fundamental questions. As Mladen Dolar puts it, the analyst in the clinic

utters at the most an "Oh!" here and there… he makes himself an automaton in order to give rise to the dimension of the Other, the real interlocutor of the patient's "monologue," and also in order to produce that strange kind of love, perhaps love in its strictest and purest sense, which is transference love. (Dolar 1991, 9)

The proper analyst doesn’t suppose to cure the subject of her ills and maladies, her maladaptations to a broken society, but rather first and foremost seeks to open a space where the subject can start again, where association will no longer be strictly limited by habit, pathology, or unwanted automatisms. Michael Pollan has described the experience of ingesting psychedelic substances as a fresh snowfall on the mountain of one’s mind, where the grooves that have been worn to the earth can be rediscovered or altered– and perhaps this is a kind of description of the successful analytic session, too. Afterwards, the subject can choose the way she thinks, again. When a certain logic of understanding the world has revealed itself as uncertain, incomplete, or unreliable, the clinic should be a calling card. Thought can start again, the suggestion seems to promise, even if we are scientifically sure that it never really can.

The question for analytic bureaucracy is this: if uncertainty is a given, is there anywhere the analysts should stake a claim to certainty? The psychoanalytic philosophical tradition can be read as a kind of reckoning with this epistemological impasse. How does one build an institution when the surety of its foundations are in question? If this question forms the ground of psychoanalysis as a philosophy and as an aspirationally ‘true’ science (instead of yet another Weltanschauung), then perhaps it is to the clinic that we should turn for an institution that will practice restraint when it comes to the inevitable desire to totalize, to be something for everyone, rather than simply everything for someone.

Bibliography

Dolar, Mladen. 1991. “"I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding-Night": Lacan and the Uncanny.” October 58: 5–23.

Jacques Le Goff: Your Money or Your Life

2024-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

Jacques Le Goff: Your Money or Your Life

Today's project was completing Jacques Le Goff's 1990 Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages. This book offers a prehistory of capitalism in the medieval figure of the usurer. The usurer is a person who lends money at interest in order to collect that interest at some point in the future and make a profit. From the 10th through 13th century, the usurer was "a necessary but detested man, powerful but also vulnerable"(Le Goff 1988, 10).

Le Goff sees the prefiguration of capitalism in the (Christian) moralisation of the usurer as a sinner. He also sees "the beginnings of psychological modernity"(Le Goff 1988, 12) in the manner in which usurers, amongst other sinners, were able to perform confession and/or contrition for their sins, often at their deathbed, to escape damnation in Hell or Purgatory. The plausibility of the usurer's escape from damnation despite the Church's condemnation of usury in general as one of the worst kinds of sins is what gives this book its title:

To save himself, must [the usurer] forsake his pouch? Or will he find – or will someone find for him – a way to hang onto both his money and his life, his eternal life? This is the usurer's great struggle, a struggle between wealth and Heaven, between Money and Hell. (Le Goff 1988, 15)

This book is on my list because it paints an important picture of the usurer in medieval (pre-capitalist, feudal) imagination. It avoids economic analysis for the most part, besides remarking in the first chapter that the ecclesiastical status of money is the source of the usurer's fundamental characterisation as a sinner (Le Goff 1988, 18–20), preferring to attempt to understand the Church's condemnation of usury on its own terms. The figure of the usurer is closely linked to the figure of the Jew during the Middle Ages, Le Goff argues, as while the bible more or less unequivocally condemns usury among one's own 'countrymen', lending money to foreigners is permitted as a sort of necessary evil for the functioning of society. Thus the Jew, in its consideration the exhaust of Christian society – not part of its 'whole' but rather its ghostly excess (it is compared with the figure of the mistress, illicitly sought after yet consciously repressed) – is the only societal role for which usury is 'permitted'. This point is important, I think, for understanding Marx's argument in his early essay "On The Jewish Question" (Marx 2014).¹

The status of usury in medieval thought contributes to a prehistory of capitalism in that, in (the transition to) capital, usury is elevated from sinful to almost saintly. Capital's objective is to accumulate value and reproduce itself, and usury (interest-bearing capital) is one way in which it does this.² In the Middle Ages, however: "Usury is the unlawful surplus, the illegitimate excess…. [U]sury is more than a crime, it is a sin…. first and foremost a theft" (Le Goff 1988, 26–27).

The mechanics of usury's condemnation are effectively inverted by capital's emergence as autonomous subject. Whereas in feudalism, "it is against nature for money to be loaned to give birth to more money" (Le Goff 1988, 29), in capitalism the movement of financialised value is fundamentally naturalised. The Church condemns usury because it unceasingly works, offending God by being endless and automatic. Capital, on the other hand, adores it for this very same reason; it displaces the human as subject (and renders God effectively dead, a la Nietzsche).

In further resonance with the role it will play in capitalism, usury is accursed under feudalism because it is a theft of time. (Chapter 3 is titled "The Thief of Time".) Usury does not produce surplus (interest) through any kind of production, i.e. through vegetables sprouting in the land or value added in combining materials. Rather, the cause of its surplus is only the (synthetic) production of time: "the time that elapses between the moment [the usurer] lends the money and the moment he is repaid" (Le Goff 1988, 39). What is the problem here, for the Christian imagination? Le Goff reports:

Time, of course, belongs solely to God. As a thief of time, the usurer steals God's patrimony. (Le Goff 1988, 39)

It would be interesting to think further regarding which qualities of the usurer have carried from the Middle Ages to modernity (its ruling silently from the shadows (Le Goff 1988, 51), for example); and which have been re-moralised as 'saintly', or otherwise un-sinful. Has the shame associated with the money-lender become an artificial pride? The secular nature of capitalism certainly no longer has the guts to denounce working all day and night, instead striving to reproduce this zombie-like existence in its human vassals. More on this secular automatism in future logs.

Bibliography

Carson, Rebecca. 2023. Immanent Externalities: The Reproduction of Life in Capital. Brill.

Heinrich, Michael. 2019. Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society: The Life of Marx and the Development of His Work. Translated by Alex Locascio. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Le Goff, Jacques. 1988. “Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages.”

Marx, Karl. 2014. “On the Jewish Question.” In Nonsense Upon Stilts (Routledge Revivals), 137–50. Routledge.

Jane Gallop: Reading Lacan

2024-04-09T00:00:00+00:00

Jane Gallop: Reading Lacan

Finally returning to the task at hand, I yesterday continued Jane Gallop's companion to Lacan's Ecrits, expressively titled Reading Lacan. This book addresses the problem of reading Lacan; for it is in fact a problem, given how convoluted and arcane his writing can be. Lacan's gnosticism is not an accident of his inability as a teacher, writer, or thinker, but rather a part of the subject of what he has to teach. Gallop's book addresses the immanent obscurity in Lacan's work Ecrits, and (more gently than tackling the text head on, I think) guides the reader to the frames of mind in which Lacan's writing can come to mean something, something important. Important, at least, if you take interest in the limitations of language and thought, or the philosophy of the work of writing and thinking as such.

Gallop's style seems to continuously defer the explicit pedagogical task of explaining what Lacan means, for hers is a guide not of content but of form. If the reader is impatient while reading the first few chapters, it is because, while Gallop's prefatory material seems to avoid the task and/or subject at hand, she comes to it not with the aggression of a tackler but with the tact of a learner less belligerent. The first few chapters cultivate a sense of what Lacan 'means' through showing how what meaning his writing inspires in Gallop as his reader. Lacan himself (the name representing the authorial unity behind his works) is subjected to the analytical lens furnished by the mirror stage, rather than painting a picture of a baby in the abstract who stands up and retroactively establishes that it was a corporeal mess before that moment. Lacan's reception in America is the partial object of Gallop's reading of the Seminar on the 'Purloined Letter', the proof that the evident cause of why (we ought to read Lacan in America) is hiding in plain sight.

Having not yet braved the 'raw' Lacan myself, it is curious to read texts like Gallop's. As she notes herself, if we want to suffer a 'Lacanian' reading, then we would be wrong to enforce a necessary chronology when it comes to what to read:

This book will have been written for people who have read Lacan's texts, and can most fully be understood as a response to Lacan. At the same time, the "present" book is meant to be an enticement and an orientation for a future reading of Lacan. If I were asked to suggest to my reader which should be read first, I would want to reply: both. (Gallop 2018, 92)

The easiest way to understand the suggestion that Gallop's book should be read both before and after Lacan's Ecrits, to which it is both an introduction and a response, is perhaps simply that Gallop wants to suggest that we should read her book multiple times. Thus it becomes both a before and an afterwards, as in the triad of Gallop-Lacan-Gallop her name occupies both positions at the same time. We could also understand the suggestion as meaning that we ought to read Lacan rather than Gallop twice, so as to produce a similarly structured but distinct triad, Lacan-Gallop-Lacan. Gallop's position in both triads satisfies the condition of being both a response and an enticement.

Of course, the two perspectives can be synthesized in a single picture in which the relationship between Gallop and Lacan bends around, rather than running linearly from left-to-right, so that we are left with a loop that holds both texts in equal tension with each other:

┌- Gallop -┐
|          |
└- Lacan --┘

One can sample this loop to produce either of the aforementioned patterns, Gallop-Lacan-Gallop or Lacan-Gallop-Lacan. Simply begin at the preferred of the two names, and follow the loop two steps in either direction.

Though this reframing is more robust in one sense, it also reintroduces the original problem: where does one begin? Gallop's answer ("both") should also be read, I think, as "either, provided you go to the other and then loop back". At least, this is how I seem to be going about approaching the impossible task of grasping a sense of "Lacan".

Gallop, Jane. 2018. Reading Lacan. Cornell University Press.

Jensen Suther: Novel, Organism, Form: Bio-Aesthetics in Hegel and Thomas Mann

2024-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

Jensen Suther: Novel, Organism, Form: Bio-Aesthetics in Hegel and Thomas Mann

There has been an unintentional pause in this "daily" log of almost a month. I caught a head-cold around mid-month, and then traveled from New Zealand to Italy (via Berlin). The bodily strain has basically persisted through until now - which, in partnership with a general lapse in having the diligence to set aside time every day, has seen no logs in the meantime.

I have made some parenthetical progress during this period. During the trans-continental journey, I properly started writing a paper that will occupy me for the better part of the next few weeks. The structure I have planned for it will first work through the three notions of value as subject in Marx, with reference to Rebecca Carson's book (24-01-27), Zizek's Sublime Object of Ideology (24-02-05, 24-02-07), and Moishe Postone's 1994 book Time, Labor, and Social Domination. The main proposition of this essay will be to network these conceptions (which substantiate a conception of the machine as a philosophical structure in Marx) with Alan Turing's 'universal machine' - which I will attempt to wrap together using Mladen Dolar's understanding of the automaton in his 1991 essay, "I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding-Night". I will work through more of Zizek's book as well as Postone's, here, in the coming days towards this.

More directly, I worked through two essays parenthetically related to my lists during the journey. The first, and the subject of this log, was Jensen Suther's "Novel, Organism, Form: Bio-Aesthetics in Hegel and Thomas Mann". Suther is a contemporary young scholar: currently (or recently) a post-doc at Harvard, with a PhD from Yale advised by Martin Hagglund, with an actively academic Twitter presence. I worked through the essay in preparation for a seminar with Suther that a reading group in which I participate (on Marx and alienation); a seminar which I unfortunately missed due to a time-zone miscalculation. (It took place in the middle of the night in Italy on my first night here.) Despite this travel mishap, however, I found the essay very compelling and informative in the course of my project. If I understand correctly, the essay is a preprint (in the way some essays are) of Suther's forthcoming book about what he calls Hegel's "bio-aesthetics".

In theorising Hegel as a bio-aesthetician, Suther is taking issue with the widespread misconception that German Idealism in general and Hegel in particular is guilty of "perpetrating an essentialist conception of organic form - one that is ultimately thought to underwrite a racist ecology" (Suther 2023, 81). The stakes here are higher than just redeeming one supposedly conservative philosopher (Hegel) from cancellation in today's task of formulating progressive politics and philosophy: for Hegel represents the root of a range of radical thinkers since, being the inventor of dialectical thinking.¹ To redeem Hegel is to recover dialectics as a way to think the world politically and progressively, against the ignominy they have suffered at the hands of post-modernism and historicism.²

More critically for my interests, Suther reads Hegel and Marx as productively thought together in pursuit of such a redemption. This is a strategy that (it seems from my very cursory understanding of the space) a new wave of Hegelian scholarship is adopting to 'politicise' Hegel from his colloquial reputation as a Prussian apologist. Marx, both the dialectical and un-dialectical camps agree, offers us an acceptably progressive political theory in his critique of capitalism. And so the stakes of Hegel's progressivism can to some extent be understood in light of the question: what exactly is the relationship between Hegel's and Marx's philosophy (given that the former undeniably had some impact on the latter)?

Marx's project is infamously often depicted as a simple, historicist overturning of Hegel's idealism: Marx's materialism turned it on his head. A user who goes by old-wise-wizard concisely summarises this view in this Reddit thread:

Hegel: ideas shape circumstances.
Marx: economic circumstances shape our ideas.

Whereas Hegel argued that thought is the master of matter, Marx argued that matter is the master of thought - or so goes this reductively simple understanding. If this characterisation isn't complicated, Hegel easily comes to appear as the archetypal White Man's philosopher, whose idealism ultimately amounts to advocacy of a "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" chauvinism: that is, an uncritical supporter of capitalism who ought to then be associated with the likes of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and the other "British political economists" whose viewpoint Marx's Capital decisively critiqued. Of course, Hegel is not this philosopher - not if you read his texts rather than dismissive tweets that reference him, and not in the estimation of his supposed censurer, Karl Marx. Just as there is an exciting wave of Hegel scholarship - like Suther's - that investigates how misguided this head-turning view of Hegel-qua-Marx is by reading Hegel through Marx, there is a complementary effort in Marx scholarship that reads Marx through Hegel. The revival of Hegel's relevance in Marx scholarship is closely allied with a set of contemporary Marxian schools of thought (which interest me), such as the New Reading of Marx (associated principally to Michael Heinrich, a "David Harvey of Europe") and value-theoretical readings such as Moishe Postone's and Rebecca Carson's.

Thus is the substance of my interest in Suther's work, despite not myself being particularly fluent in Hegel's philosophy, nor modernist (or any other kind of) literary criticism. It is also one way of understanding what is at stake in a Hegelian bio-aesthetics "grounded in the logical form of the organism" (Suther 2023, 81). To position Hegel's aesthetics as reliant on a thorough theory of life and nature (the organism) is to render it capable of reckoning with matter more 'material', rather than relegating it to the annals of theories that are too esoteric and idealistic to have any political bearing on the world at hand.

As certain thinkers of Hegel - namely the Ljubljana school and its psychoanalytic associates - have argued for some time now, such a case for Hegel's 'materialism' is both a political redemption of (German) Idealism, as well as the grounds for critique of the mushrooming growth of cruder and cruder materialisms. These multifarious materialisms want to un-think thought as a quality distinct from matter, banishing it from its selfish and self-aggrandising speculation in the figure of the "human", and stuffing it instead inside rocks, flowers, and poisons.³ To insist that Hegel's philosophy - and indeed, his idealism - matters is recognise that we cannot simply think ourselves out of the picture in our experience of the world. As Lacan puts it (in his characteristically opaque and 'punny' way): "the picture is in my eye, but I am also in the picture" (see here). In other words, we cannot simply think the subject (of the sentence, of consciousness) out of existence. We must instead thematise it as carefully as possible, recognising where it is essentially impotent in the face of a state of affairs, and where it just might have an actual freedom to choose, rather than to be externally determined.

Suther's essay articulates a theory of Hegelian bio-aesthetics with an intention "to grasp the stakes of [Thomas] Mann's… modernist revival of the Bildungsroman" in his monumental novel The Magic Mountain, a work begun in 1912 and completed in 1924 (Suther 2023, 81). The Bildungsroman is a literary genre deeply associated with German Idealism, as works of Bildungsroman were directly considered by philosophers in that movement, and also because the genre is a touchstone in the (European) literary landscape of the long 19th century. Though I am not personally particularly well equipped to reckon with what waves Suther is attempting to make in literary theory with this position, the essay does strike me as an impressive and ambitious intervention in the understanding of Bildungsroman. Mann's novel lacks, of course, no depth of criticism; nor does the Bildungsroman genre; nor does Hegel. Thus if Suther's critique does hold together, it is a careful and scholarly work of thought.⁴

While I cannot afford to get into greater detail about Suther's account now, here is the essay's abstract so that I might make some concluding remarks about where I might take gentle issue with one dimension of the argument:

This essay intervenes in the contemporary debate surrounding the Bildungsroman and its roots in German Idealism through a new reading of the idea of "life" in two major modern texts: G. W. F. Hegel's Lectures on Fine Art and the famous "Research" chapter of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. I establish three key points:
Hegel pioneers a bio-aesthetics that grasps the work of art as a distinctly social and historical, reflective manifestation of organic life;
Mann's novel achieves a kind of self-conscious knowledge of the Bildungsroman in particular as such a manifestation; and
Karl Marx's analysis of the alienation of humanity from its "species-being" under capitalism accounts for the opposition between nature and culture, animality and rationality, that drives Mann's modernist experiment with genre: his innovation of what I call "the novel of deformation." (Suther 2023, 80)

While I agree that capitalism exercises a "deformative" effect on the human relation to what (young) Marx calls its "species-being", towards the end of the essay Suther seems to suggest in the essay that a return to Hegel's bio-aesthetics (a thinking 'before' Marx) offers us a way to think life as flourishing in contradistinction to capitalism's capture and obstruction of it. He does this in a final section titled "Beyond the Bildung principle" (Suther 2023, 96), a play on Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920, notably), the text in which Freud most famously theorised the death drive. In marking Mann's novel as a representation of "the novel of deformation", i.e. as an alienation under capitalism of a supposed pre-capitalist flourishing, Suther seems to take Freud's death drive as a symptom of our (unavoidable) alienation under capitalism:

Freud, in reference to Schopenhauer, formulates the idea of the "death drive" (Todestrieb) as the innate tendency of life toward an original state of quiescence…. [The possibility of a formative drive] is diverted by a process of deformation, codified in the idea of a Todestrieb. (Suther 2023, 102)

Taking Freud's theory of the death drive as his recognition of our deformative will-to-power under the condition of capitalist alienation, Suther then suggests that:

Hegel provides a radically different, Aristotelian account of the structure of satisfaction and desire…. Desire, then, is not a stain to be eliminated but the organism's valenced way of responding to the elements of its environment as either means or obstacles to its possible flourishing. Hegel thus gives us a powerful alternative to Schopenhauer and Freud and to Mann's narrator (Suther 2023, 102–3).

This seems to me a misreading of Freud's death drive as a strictly deformative condition of being (under capitalism), rather than as a recognition of the necessary contradiction that undergirds the possibility of freedom in modernity.⁵ The alienation of our species-being is the condition of our domination under capitalism, yes: but it is paradoxically also the prerequisite of our distinctly modern freedom, i.e. a state of being in relation to ourselves in which we can avoid the totalizing effect of that very same domination. Psychoanalysis is the name of the philosophical project to work through this necessary state of alienation (or deformation, in Suther's schema) towards an elusive ideal of freedom, of 'free association' and un-capitalised desire.

The necessity of working through alienation rather than returning to a state before it (or accelerating or otherwise imploding it to get to a post-capitalist state after it) is a point on which Freud and Marx agree, despite the misapprehensions of their projects otherwise. Far from being a further entrapment in alienation by way of a defeatist pessimism, psychoanalysis is paradoxically a project to achieve disalienation without succumbing to the persuasive persistence of desire's and action's wily capture by capital's abstract domination. To laud Hegel as an alternative to the "pessimism" that Suther wants to associate with Freud, then, risks the same misunderstanding of Marx that Moishe Postone critiqued as "traditional Marxism" in his 1994 book, Time, Labor, and Social Domination (Postone 1996).⁶ Marx's project in Capital is not the critique of capitalism from the standpoint of labor (a position that hypostasises labor as a concept that is transhistorical); but rather the critique of labor in capitalism (which sees the particular figuration of labor in the movement of value - and, it is worth noting, in relation to the reproduction of human life - as a form that is historically specific to capitalism) (Postone 1996, chap. 1). Thus, given that our situation of thought is necessarily conditioned by capital as a precondition, we cannot easily think a purely formative flourishing (a Bildungsroman) that is devoid from its deformative negative. We cannot return to a straightforward socialist optimism, even if it is carefully and thoughtfully Hegelian in its composition, to solve capitalism's intrinsic pessimism.

Though Suther's position on this is mostly secondary to his argument in this essay (most of which, as noted above, I find strikingly incisive), he re-articulates his skepticism of the psychoanalytic project in an interview about his work from about a year ago. Lacanianism, Suther argues, by which he means the strand of leftist psychoanalytic philosophy associated with Zizek (and the Ljubljana school by extension), inevitably ends up with a kind of "unhappy consciousness," a term that Suther draws from a progression in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. This is a symptom, Suther continues, of Lacan's reading of Hegel being mostly by way of Alexandre Kojève: and just as the two Hegelian Roberts (Robert Pippin and Robert Brandom) depart from Kojève, so too does Suther.

As I have stated above, I think I would tend to disagree on this point. The psychoanalytic project is only stuck with an unhappy consciousness to the extent that it acknowledges the existence of a structural alienation in capitalism that we can only think through, and not before or after. I don't have the Hegelian or Lacanian chops (at present) to take this issue back through Lacan, Kojève, Brandom, and Pippin. Though I think that Suther's misreading of the Freudian death drive in the essay treated here is an indicative start; and perhaps this is a project that I will pursue at some point in the future.

Bibliography

Cole, Andrew. 2014. The Birth of Theory. University of Chicago Press.

Copjec, Joan. 2015. Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Verso Books.

Dolar, Mladen. 2020. “What’s the Matter? On Matter and Related Matters.” In Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism, edited by Russel Sbriglia and Slavoj Zizek, 31–49. Northwestern University Press.

Johnston, Adrian, Boštjan Nedoh, and Alenka Zupančič. 2022. “Introduction: Beyond the Nominalism-Realism Divide: Objective Fictions from Bentham Through Marx to Lacan.” In Objective Fictions: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Marxism.

Postone, Moishe. 1996. Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge New York Melbourne Madrid Cape Town: Cambridge University Press.

Ruda, Frank. 2015. For Badiou: Idealism Without Idealism. Northwestern University Press.

Suther, Jensen. 2023. “Novel, Organism, Form: Bio-Aesthetics in Hegel and Thomas Mann.” Representations 164 (1): 80–114.

Zupančič, Alenka. 2017. What Is Sex? MIT Press.

Karl Marx: Capital, Volume 1 (chapter 21)

2025-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

Karl Marx: Capital, Volume 1 (chapter 21)

Up first today, some notes from chapter 21 of Marx’s Capital, Volume I, his chapter on Simple Reproduction. I returned to this text (in its new translation) at a writing retreat in Connecticut over the weekend. After sharing a work-in-progress regarding the outline of a theory of a subject in Marx, it was sagely pointed out to me that, in order to really convince a reader that such an outline exists, I should really show its substance in Marx's own writing. Up until this point, my argument has been constructed around instructive 'secondary sources' such as Moishe Postone's Time, Labor and Social Domination and Alfred Sohn-Rethel's Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology, both of which are book-length interpretation of Capital by lifelong scholars of Marx. These two texts will remain key interlocutors in my argument's construction, but I cannot only channel Marx's Geist solely through second-hand accounts of him.

My hesitancy to interpret Marx's text directly comes out of an abiding bias absorbed from the academic atmosphere which suggests that it is 'old news' to retrace interpretative grooves that have already been clearly marked out. I have come to disagree quite strongly with this opinion, as it misses the real value of textual interpretation, which is not primarily to produce new knowledge from undiscovered sources, but to work through language and thought in and against the temper of a new time. But the 'innovation exhortation' nonetheless haunts me, aspiring as I am in part to American academic success, as one is expected in this climate to produce something new and newly useful. It is much easier to argue for the newness in an interpretation of an object not yet interpreted than it is to justify yet another interpretation of well-trodden territory like Marx's Capital. In the latter case, one also has to be sure that one is not offering as 'new' an interpretation that has in fact already been offered in the literature. In Marx's case, there are some two hundred years of interpretation in almost every language imaginable. How can one be sure that yet another interpretation is 'new'?

One can't, in short. It is impossible to read all the relevant literature. It is impossible even to read most or a significant portion of it in the case of Marx-related studies. This is one of the ways in which the vocabulary of scientific discovery falls short in textual interpretation. The value of interpretation is not always surfacing something hitherto unknown to an imaginary readership that has already read everything hitherto published. The fantasy of such an academic production is not only an impossible task, but it also has a fantasmatic audience. No-one is perfectly literate in this exhaustively imagined way! A better objective, I am coming to realize, is to synthesize something for a significant portion of readers that is not yet readily visible. Thus I am turning my attention to re-reading Marx's Capital, as it seems to me that there is much that has been 'lost' to the zeitgeist regarding this text's critical value, even as it is nominally the most common coin in contemporary critical-theoretical projects.

21: Simple Reproduction

(In the older translations, this is chapter 23.)

David Harvey notes that this chapter zooms out from what has preceded it in volume I in terms of analytic perspective:

The analysis so far has been concerned solely with the production of surplus-value as a one-shot event. But things look rather different when examined as a continuous process ongoing over time. (Harvey 2018)

At this stage in Capital, a reader has been made familiar with key concepts such as commodity $𝐶$ , money $𝑀$ , value, labour-time and so on, and the movement of value has been atomistically conceptualised in slices such as $𝑀 - 𝐶$ (a purchase), $𝐶 - 𝑀$ (a sale), $𝑀 - 𝐶 - 𝑀$ (the capitalist equation) and $𝐶 - 𝑀 - 𝐶$ (the consumerist equation). These are all expressions of moments in the entangled processes of the production and circulation of value as analytically captured by Marx. These forms of appearance are critical terms; but they are also "phenomena that conceal the inner working of [capital accumulation's] mechanism" (Marx 2024, 520).

Along with the conditions of production (and circulation) come conditions of re-production. Reproduction is the sphere of activities that are not consciously counted in capital's calculus and as such cannot appear to matter in the context of its logic. Marx's argument in Capital is that capital is a synthetic totality, by which I mean to say that though it is self-consciously totalizing– that is, it appears to itself as fully accountable– in reality it represses a range of moments that are actually the unconscious foundation of its character.

The big elephant in the room here is labour. Capital considers labor as a relatively unremarkable input that contributes to its valorization process in production and circulation. The capitalist starts with some money; he uses it to purchase variable capital (labor-time) and fixed capital (machinery) to kick off the production of some commodities; and when he sells those commodities he skims the surplus value off the top that has naturally been generated by his bringing those pieces of capital together to work in cooperation. Marx's project thus far has been to logically reconstruct and conceptualize the elements of this production process so as to show that there is something problematic about this 'natural' interpretation of the process of accumulation, and that something is the way in which labour gets measured as a contribution to the surplus value returned.

Thus Marx locates the logical beginning of capital's valorization:

The purchase of labor-power for a certain amount of time initiates the production process. The initial moment recurs when the time is up, and a production period of a certain length has come to an end, whether a week, a month, or longer. But the worker isn't paid until after his labor-power has produced its effect, realizing in commodities both its own value and surplus-value…. The labor that the worker performs next week or next month will thus be paid for with the labor he performed the previous week or the previous month. (Marx 2024, 522)

The worker necessarily advances his labor-time as a commodity to the capitalist due to the temporal structure of the wage. This advancement is the logical beginning of the production process, Marx claims, as it is the moment in which capital's particular structure of valorization becomes possible. It is the parceling out of discrete periods in continuous time effected by the structure of a wage that makes valorization possible, as this structure allows some portion of labor-time to subconsciously slip between the contract's positions. The worker appears to be paid fairly for his time at some set rate an hour; yet in the very motion of this apparently free and fair conscience, some labor-time nevertheless slips away from him to the capitalist, unpaid. Thus the unconscious advance of the worker's labor-time to the capitalist that is effected by the structure of the wage is the gap in which surplus value is made to appear.

This apparently fair but structurally imbalanced relationship between the worker and the capitalist is the fundamental false consciousness of capital's logic. It is what produces the gap into which capitalist ideology can pour its misconception of equality into the consciousness of both worker and capitalist, even as the former's condition becomes more and more immiserating, and the latter's more and more lavish. This structural imbalance allows capital to take its place in consciousness and society as 'alien power' that nonetheless also feels natural and fair. Take the following (very difficult) passage:

It is the worker himself, then, who constantly produces objective wealth as capital, an alien power that exploits and rules over him, while the capitalist just as constantly produces labor-power as a subjective, abstract source of wealth that has been separated from its own means of objectification and realization and exists only in the worker's body– in short, the capitalist just as constantly keeps producing the worker as a wage laborer. This constant reproduction or perpetuation of the worker is the sine qua non of capitalist production. (Marx 2024, 525)

Despite appearances, it is the workers themselves who are capital's "most essential means of production" (Marx 2024, 527). The capitalist class cannot produce surplus value through an apparently fair commodity production and circulation process without their mobilization of workers through the structure of a wage. Wages are the 'invisible chains' that reinscribe class distinction in capitalist society, replacing the conspicuous chains that patrolled that border in pre-capitalist society:

The Roman slave was fettered with chains. Invisible ties bind the wage laborer to his owner: he merely seems to be independent. The constant turnover among the worker's individual wage masters and the fictio juris of his contract keep this semblance in place. (Marx 2024, 528)

The wage contract is a fictio juris, a false premise taken as true by capital logic to reach its desired outcome: the accumulation of surplus value. Capital has reinterpreted the master-slave dialectic and transsubstantiated it terms, leading to a situation in which both master (now capitalist) and slave (now worker) have developed a self-consciousness of freedom, yet both remain unconsciously in bondage to the desires of an alien power beyond their control. The capitalist is driven to accumulate, as he occupies the position of $𝑀 - 𝐶 - 𝑀^{'}$ in the movement of value, driven to use his money to produce more than he originally put in, the elusive moving target $'$ that can never be satisfactorily achieved. Even when he has accumulated more money than he knows what to do with, more than he needs to produce a fine quality of life, he is driven towards more money nonetheless. The worker on the other hand is driven differently, but towards a similarly unachievable infinity in the position of $𝐶 - 𝑀 - 𝐶^{'}$ , driven to commoditize herself as labor-power in order to acquire more and more commodities, even at the expense of her (quality of) life.

Thus is humanity made a machinery in service of capital's reproduction rather than its own, caught in:

a self-perpetuating trap, continuously thrusting the one person back into the commodity market as the seller of his labor-power while continuously transforming his product into the other person's means of purchasing…. [I]t also produces and reproduces the capital relation, with the capitalist on one side and the wage laborer on the other. (Marx 2024, 532)

The seemingly benign concept of a commodity (unfolded in the opening chapter Capital) has somehow grown into a monstrous misapprehension of subjectivity, entangled in an external, objective process of accumulation for its own sake. Hegel's subject [Subjekt] has become a substance [Substanz], but not in a way where it can find its way back again to the first term. Subjectivity is instead ensnared as a substance that kicks off and sustains the inorganic motion of the accumulation of value for its own sake, reducing humanity to a shadow of itself in the unthinking conceptualization of labor as nothing more than a replenishable repository of labor-power. Thus is labor the sine qua non of capital.

Harvey, David. 2018. A Companion To Marx’s Capital:The Complete Edition. Verso Books.

Marx, Karl. 2024. Capital: Critique of Political Economy. Edited by Paul North. Translated by Paul Reitter. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Karl Marx: Capital, Volume 1 (chapter 22)

2025-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

Karl Marx: Capital, Volume 1 (chapter 22)

Chapter 22 of Capital Volume I– following the chapter structure in the 2024 English translation - builds on the previous chapter on simple reproduction, which had laid out the impossible position of "economic bondage" (Marx 2024, 532) of the wage laborer in relation to capital. Chapter 22 shifts from outlining the standpoint of the wage laborer to a closer look at the standpoint of the capitalist, detailing how capital works through the reinvestment of surplus value.

When the surplus value produced through the structure of the wage relation is reinvested, it amounts to a process of accumulation: "accumulation is the capitalist process of reproduction on an ever-expanding scale" (Marx 2024, 534). Accumulation is a phenomenon that is produced under the aegis of a free and fair exchange, but which in fact rests in the exploitation of laborers. Though it is the laborer who produces surplus value, it is the capitalist to whom it is owed. This is why Marx calls the capitalist a false "legal representative" (Marx 2024, 535) of workers, as it is through an apparently legitimate process (we might think here of 'democracy') that a figure who represents interests antithetical to the workers' own comes to reside in a seat of power. Unpaid labor, conjured through the reduction of labor to labor-time in the form of a wage ("the invisible magic of the production process" (Marx 2024, 535)), is the common coin of this phony demagoguery.

Accumulation is the name for the reproduction of capital for its own sake. The capitalist is not, according to Marx, a machiavellian villain who selfishly expropriates value from the laborers he employs. (This is one of the core distinctions between expropriation and exploitation for Marx: the latter does not imply strictly overt or conscious violence on the part of the dominating party.) The capitalist is rather a role that is subject to the abstract domination of capital's value forms, just like the wage laborer, though that subjection has a different orientation. The wage laborer, as we saw in chapter 21, is compelled to want more commodities, even at the expense of her own reproduction, an orientation that can be denoted C-M-C'. The capitalist, on the other hand, is compelled to want more money, even at the expense of his own reproduction, an orientation that famously can be denoted M-C-M'. It is these two roles working in tandem that produces accumulation, the movement of value specific to capital, an infinite cycle of M-C-M'-C'-M'. (The formal genesis of this cycle, i.e. whether it is M or C that kicks accumulation off, is the subject of the final chapter in Volume I, The So-Called Original Accumulation.)

The search for surplus (') for its own sake is the driving motor of capital's process, the characterizing feature of its implant in human subjectivity, whether its installation produces a capitalist or consumerist 'affect':

Whether the new capital takes the form of money or the things that make up the means of production and subsistence, its substance is the product of a process that extracts someone else's unpaid labor. Capital has produced capital. (Marx 2024, 536)

Marx's use of the word 'substance' here and elsewhere can be understood to mean something similar to what I propose as a 'characterizing feature' above. It does not refer to a concrete and material thing that can be touched, smelled, or felt that underlies those airy, ideological phenomena that are palpably more conceptual. To render 'substance' in this way is to read Marx against his own method, to assert that there is a 'base' that can be consciously unearthed as a 'thing' that determines the 'superstructure'. Substance rather refers to neither thing nor thought, but the dialectical space where they meet– what Heidegger will later call das Ding. The substance of value in capital, then, needs to be explained by way of the process of its (conceptual and material) movement, from commodity to money to surplus, such that we can see how (a certain conception of) labor is the 'ground' of the abstract domination at work in capital.

The network of notions of commodity, labor, value, and so on is what reveals the notion of bourgeois ownership as one that is turned inside-out. It parades as a transparent principle of 'each to his own', but in fact (in 'substance') rests on the underhanded dispossession of workers of their labor. The law of ownership is, in other words, a law that harbors a contradiction within itself. Though an "exchange of equivalents" is "the original operation", the outcome is constitutively unequal (Marx 2024, 537):

Owning yesterday's unpaid labor now appears as the sole precondition for appropriating today's unpaid living labor on an ever-larger scale. (Marx 2024, 536)

A key point in the first section of this chapter is that the capitalist is not, by definition, a miser. Accumulation can only take place if "yesterday's unpaid labor" is put back into circulation, rather than hoarded by miserly factory owners. This is not to say that those playing the part of the capitalist in accumulation's equation do not spend some of the surplus on themselves, buying commodities that they do not need in pursuit of an ever-elusive total satisfaction. But this drive is not what characterizes him as a capitalist:

insofar as the capitalist is personified capital, his driving motivation is to have more and more exchange-value, not to acquire use-value and experience pleasure. A fanatic when it comes to the valorization of value, he ruthlessly forces human beings to produce for production's sake…. Thus, insofar as the capitalist's behavior is merely a function of the capital that has taken on consciousness and a will in him, he sees his own private consumption as an act of theft committed against the accumulation of his capital. (Marx 2024, 542)

The affect driving the capitalist is a renunciation of private consumption, an obscure and alien selflessness in service of capital's reproduction, not his own.¹ (One cannot help but think here of the numerous reports of investment bankers committing suicide upon hearing about the financial crash in 2008. Agents of capital to the end, life is no longer worth living where accumulation has stalled.) Thus is capital a parasite on modern subjectivity, which since at least the Enlightenment has prided itself on the ability to reason first and foremost for oneself. In capital, this vision of clear-headed reason is compromised. Reason itself is unsound, for conscious abstraction in its own right seems to suffer domination at the hands of the movement of value.

Bibliography

Johnston, Adrian. 2024. Infinite Greed: The Inhuman Selfishness of Capital. New York: Columbia University Press.

Marx, Karl. 2024. Capital: Critique of Political Economy. Edited by Paul North. Translated by Paul Reitter. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Matteo Pasquinelli: Eye of the Master

2024-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

Matteo Pasquinelli: Eye of the Master

Today: finally, I completed Matteo Pasquinelli's new book published in 2023, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence. I've been partway through this book for a month or more, as I could never quite bring myself to finish it off. I have fair investment in Pasquinelli, as I wrote a term paper last year addressing the majority of the essays he published before this book (which I have mentioned in a previous log). This book reworks some of his arguments from those essays, and attempts to bring them together in the agenda of a 'social history of artificial intelligence'.

Pasquinelli is at once a curious and symptomatic scholar. He is part of the new wave of critical A.I. studies, and certainly traffics in distilling citations from there and the history of science into a kind of Foucauldian theoreticism that champions itself as an 'alternative history'. The basis for which we need an alternative here is, one assumes, the whiggish narrative of proliferating industry, total automation, and inevitable progress that is often associated with A.I. in popular media. In addition to this Foucauldian inflection in his partial background as a historian of science, he is distinctly influenced by an operaismo, post-Marxist theoretical tradition when it comes to his understanding of technology. This tradition is sure that the take on technology in Marx's Grundrisse – a set of notebooks written before Capital and not circulated in any language other than German until the 1960s – is more promising as a theory of praxis and political struggle than what Marx lays out in the later and better-known work.

The Eye of the Master (Pasquinelli's first book-length project) reads as half a post-Marxist proposal (Part I), and half a contribution of fragmented episodes in the history of science-qua-A.I. (Part II). There are a wealth of cameo references to contemporary scholarship, footnotes to further reading, and generous citation of other arguments throughout the book: so much so that, at times, I struggled to make the particularity of Pasquinelli's argument in among it all.¹ Pasquinelli is talented as a historian in the sense that he has found a collection of historical scenarios that, while not obviously interconnected at face value, coalesce together as a cabinet of curiosity-piquing moments that all certainly have some bearing on what we refer to today when we say "A.I." It would also be hard to deny that he is well-read/well-networked. The citation-rich text seems almost as though it was written through a series of pseudo-academic call-and-response all-too-familiar to anyone who has been to a lecture in the theory-leaning humanities – Call: "Your talk made me think about author X or book Y, what do you think?" – Response: "Let me read that and get back to you."

The over-arching premise of the book is undeniably correct: the development of A.I. is a 'social' enterprise pace the techno-determinist ("A.I. was invented, and then the world changed") and techno-fatalist ("A.I. was always going to be invented") positions. In Pasquinelli's words: "this book aims at rediscovering the social centrality of the social intelligence that informs and empowers A.I." (Pasquinelli 2023, 12) The attempted drilling down on this "social intelligence" as such through a post-Marxist understanding of labour and a Foucauldian understanding of history, however, is what misses the mark for me.

Take Pasquinelli's explication of his method as historical epistemology:

Where social constructivism generically emphasises the influence of external factors on science and technology, historical epistemology is concerned with the dialectical unfolding of social praxis, instruments of labour, and scientific abstractions within a global economic dynamics. This book attempts to study AI and algorithmic thinking in a similar way that historical and political epistemology has studied, in the modern age, the rise of mechanical thinking and scientific abstractions in relation to socio-economic developments. (Pasquinelli 2023, 13)

Here (and throughout the book), Pasquinelli draws out a distinction between algorithmic operations on the one hand, and mechanical machines on the other. This distinction is further developed in Part II, which narrates the invention of Rosenblatt's perception and the growing practice of computationally understanding images as statistical distributions as a fundamental shift away from Turing's "linear" conception of the computer as a discretely modifiable strip of tape, towards a "spatial" (i.e. multi-dimensional) understanding of data. While Pasquinelli is critical of the cybernetic vantage point in its collapse of any conceptual border between the human and the computer (indeed, this collapse can be considered the heart of the cybernetic project as such), his outlook is fundamentally historicist: he cannot but see the birth of information and the computer as a fundamental development in the structure of capital that requires new eyes, new theories.

The ethics of this cybernetic historicism is deeply ensnared in Pasquinelli's post-Marxist proclivities. Part I of the book amounts to a revisionist understanding of Marxian labour under the aegis of a cybernetic philosophy of the human/machine relation. Pasquinelli's quibble is over the primacy of labour in Marx's thought, a term which he seems to think is too rooted in its 'manual' materialisations, and thus to which he offers knowledge as an alternative. This positing of knowledge as the primate concept in a system of political economy is, in my view, a succumbing to the cybernetic (and capitalist) insistence that surplus value is not solely generated from the figure of the human, but rather can be transferred to and/or additionally cultivated in the machine (or computer).²

To do away with the idea that surplus value comes solely and specifically from the mystification of the worth of human labour by way of its quantification in/as abstract human labour (that fundamental concept in Marx) is to do away with Marx's understanding of how the human (condition) is alienated despite being formally 'free' in capital. Pasquinelli seems to miss what is at stake, in other words, in Marx's critique of the labour theory of value: namely the capacity to distinguish human life from the life of capital, and the ability as a result to consciously value the former in social arrangements of production and circulation. By flattening labour into knowledge, we deliver our thought directly to the fetishism of subject/object misapprehension that capital wants. A social relation between people is confused and projected into the objective quality of a thing – in Pasquinelli's case, the computer – and we remain unable to think the possibility of (human) freedom, as the subject/object dialectic has been collapsed.

If A.I. has "always operated on the side of capital together with a hidden agenda to foster human stupidity" (Pasquinelli 2023, 111) as Pasquinelli suggests, we do ourselves a disservice to disregard Marx's precise philosophical formulation of the structure at work in it by presuming that A.I. is necessarily a phenomenon historically distinct. My fundamental question is: is there really anything about A.I. that distinguishes it from other forms of computing, and is there anything about the computer that distinguishes it from what Marx refers to as the machine? Pasquinelli's book coins a collection of attractive-sounding theoretical terms, but (given the non-starter of substituting labour for knowledge) neglects to tell us much about how we can actually better think about AI, labour, and the relationship between computational automation and the social. It is, however, a great tour of recent scholarship in the space and moments in the history of technology (Von Neumann's critique of cybernetics, Hayek's relationship to connectionism, Babbage's involvement in Marx's thinking) that deserve closer attention.

Bibliography

Pasquinelli, Matteo. 2023. The Eye of the Master. Verso Books.

Mladen Dolar, Rumors

2025-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Mladen Dolar, Rumors

First on the syllabus in Rohit Goel's current BICAR course is Mladen Dolar's 2024 book Rumors. This short book is an extended and adapted version of Dolar's contribution to the 2022 edited volume Objective Fictions: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Marxism, and in its first sentence it lays out the topic at hand:

To take rumors as a serious object of theoretical scrutiny and philosophical reflection seems like a contradiction in terms…. [C]an rumors acquire the dignity of a concept?… If one deals with such an unworthy and undignified subject, isn't this a sure way to ruin one's philosophical reputation? (Dolar 2024, 1)

Dolar has become something of a specialist essayist (in what he writes in English, at least). He published the delectable What's in a Name? (which I wrote about here) in 2014 as an extended essay associated with an art exhibition at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Ljubljana, and there is more than a passing resemblance between this book and Rumors. Both begin by rhetorically turning Western philosophy on its head. The first sentence of What's in a Name? is: "It all began with Plato" (Dolar 2014, 6), and Rumors, after a brief digression through the winning explanation of how quantum physicists understand the eerie materiality of Higgs boson ('the God particle'), takes us to "the Socratic foundations of philosophy" (Dolar 2024, 5) in the distinction between doxa (opinion) and epistēmē (knowledge). Doxa will come to be associated with rumors over the course of the book, although it requires important clarifications. Opinions have a subjective source, someone traceably responsible for their elocution. Rumors, on the other hand, distinguish themselves in that they run on the wind, which is to say autonomously, words that appear through the grapevine without a source. Rumors are a peculiar kind of language that circulate socially without a clear cause. Perhaps this is why, in the part of Vergil's Aeneid that Dolar cites after his Socratic introduction, "they go around like a breeze of air, stemming as if from nowhere" (Dolar 2024, 6). Rumors are a substance that appear materially as an effect in the world, but with an epistemologically (and perhaps ontologically) obscured origin.

So Rumors starts with Socrates, but not directly with his more respectable philosophical ideas (which we might find in The Republic, for example), but with the trial that led to his death. A more serious philosopher might have dismissed this incident as mere historical 'context' that only bears indirectly on what Socrates has to tell us philosophically; but Dolar is no such supercilious simpleton. Following Freud, perhaps– as well as Marx, I can't help but add, another master of suspicion– Dolar's inquiry is motivated by the idea that often the most apparently unimportant aspects of a thing are essential to what is at stake in its essence. Philosophy, Dolar's gesture seems to suggest, cannot be divorced from its historical situation. As Fredric Jameson famously quipped, it behooves philosophy to 'always historicize'.

Crucially, however, philosophy can also not be reduced to a plain and simple historicization of its actors. Whereas the identity-political criticism of Socrates might dismiss him as a White Man philosopher, resultantly disregarding all his ideas as tainted and thus in need of discarding, Dolar's historicizing approach is not quite so crass. The more interesting reading of Socrates in the twenty-first century, Dolar suggests, is not to castigate the man himself but to suggest new ways to read what he stands for. (The real political impact of cancelling dead men, white or otherwise, needs some serious thinking through.) What if Socrates' trial shows us (students of the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history) the 'first' true triumph of doxa over episteme, the opening scene of a history of modernity that can be characterised by the trading of blows between these two sides of the same coin, of speech/language, of the big Other (episteme) and its shadow/symptom (doxa)? The history of Western philosophy does begin with Socrates (we do ourselves worse by denying it), but its beginning there does not necessarily mean that from that day on, only White Men can do philosophy. Dolar's reading suggests something similar to the 'decolonial' reading, i.e. that Socrates inaugurated a particular tradition of knowledge that has egotistically taken centre stage in the history of philosophy. But it responsiblizes Socrates in a very different way, refusing to dismissively cancel him on account of an inexact identity in favor of a more psychoanalytically generous approach which sees him both as a subject capable of his own decisions and as a victim of the times in which he found himself.

Dolar will repeat this gesture throughout the book with a canon of other philosophical and literary greats– Vergil (The Aeneid), Shakespeare (Hamlet, Henry IV, The Comedy of Errors), Mozart (The Marriage of Figaro), Rousseau (Confessions, Rousseau Judge of Jean Jacques), Kafka (/The Trial, The Castle), Cervantes (Novelas Ejemplares), Gogol (Dead Souls), Kierkegaard (the Corsair affair), Heidegger (Sein und Zeit), Balzac (Illusions perdues). The works of each of these figures inflects the inaugural gesture of Socrates' trial. And it is usually the lesser considered works, or the lesser considered aspects of well known works that reveal this inflection. Doxa stalks episteme as its shadow, conceptually inseparable from it. Knowledge does not work if unfounded rumor does not cohere a social setting to aspire to it.

The one great literary and philosophical work that Dolar's book briefly touches on that I want to examine in more detail here, however, is (surprise!) Karl Marx's Das Kapital. Dolar mentions Marx in "a small digression" (Dolar 2024, 16) in the section 'Rumors and Capital', which appears between the classics (Socrates and Vergil) and Shakespeare. Rumor's tempest recalls Marx's account there, Dolar tells us:

An analogy can be drawn with another mighty entity that expands and multiplies seemingly by mere circulation, namely capital. There, too, we encounter the expansion of something that starts modestly, then increases as if through mere circulation, and is amplified into an overwhelming force, gradually engulfing everything as it goes along in a potentially limitless process. (Dolar 2024, 16–17)

It may seem like a sophistic nitpick, but I think it is important to qualify that the homology here should really be between rumors and value in capitalism. Of course, capital is the name Marx gives to value in motion, and so Dolar is not exactly wrong to say that we should see a relation between rumors and capital. But the analogy here risks suggesting that, just as rumors have haunted our pretensions to a clear-headed construction of sociality since at least Socrates, capital too is a sticky symptom that is co-constitutive with sociality rather than a particular form of social (non-)relation that could theoretically be done away with. Put differently, by drawing an analogy between rumors and capital, one risks projecting the apparent trans-historical role of rumor as an excess or surplus of language that nonetheless coheres the social fabric (a role for which Dolar makes a convincing case) onto capital, making it into an essentially trans-historical entity, too.

If we instead refine the analogy that sees rumors ghastly increase via circulation– ghastly, because it appears to contravene the third law of thermodynamics, entropy, whereby a value decreases as it moves– as homologous with value, then capital's stickiness as a symptom in society doesn't appear as inevitably transhistorical. Capital's pernicious philosophical alchemy is to render a historically specific set of social relations based on property rights and the wage relation as transhistorically inevitable, to transmute essentially changeable social customs into apparently natural laws that misrepresent things 'as they actually are'.

The commodity is Marx's paradigmatic example of this alchemy. In his infamous example of the dancing table (in the marvelous new English translation of volume I):

Of course, the table isn't any less made up of wood for having been worked on, and the wood remains an ordinary sensuous thing. But the moment thetable begins to act as a commodity, it metamorphoses into a sensuous supersensuousthing. It doesn't simply stand before us with its feet on the ground; rather, in its relations with all other commodities, it turns upside down and spins bizarre notions out of its blocky head, aperformance far more fantastic than if it were to start dancing of its own accord. (Marx 2024, 47–48)

Objects come to appear imbued with the qualities of subjects (living humans), and contrariwise human laborers appear as if they are just another input feeding the autonomous subject of capital rather than as social ends in their own right. Commodity fetishism naturalizes the historically specific movement of value in capitalism, and makes the entire set of affairs seem the natural state of things. While Adam Smith was convinced that man was naturally selfish and thus capitalism an inevitable social relation, Marx denaturalized both this assumption and the conceptual system built on that premise in capital in Das Kapital.

Though he makes out that he will return to the connection between rumor and capital, Dolar does so only briefly in the final section of the book, 'The demise of the big Other'. There he takes up Zupančič's idea of 'conspiracy without a conspiracy theory' to bring capitalism back into the narrative as "just such a conspiracy without a conspiracy– a conspiracy that imposes the rule of One that subtends all conflicts and diversity, but is not orchestrated from the center by some mastermind?" (Dolar 2024, 111). (Boštjan Nedoh has evocatively called this idea in Marx's theory of capital as 'a theft without a thief.') Indeed, arguably what makes capital so sticky as a social relation is its ever-inventive disavowal of any responsibility for the immiserations that occur and seem to deepen over time according to it. To transpose this into more Marxian language, what is philosophically remarkable about value in capital as an entity is that it structurally covers over its own cause in the sphere of production, namely the wage relation's appropriation of surplus value from the worker under the prentense of a 'free and fair' relation. Like rumors, capital's existence in the world seems to just appear on its own steam, so to speak, "stemming as if from nowhere" (Dolar 2024, 6), as the fetishism at work in its machinations expropriates agency from human subjects and plants the appearance of that power in commodity objects. The process of its circulation covers over its real cause of production (labour) in the wage relation.

Here lies the real tenet of the homology between rumors and value in capitalism, I think. Both exist only and because of a lost cause, in a subject whose ownership of some thing has been disavowed, and so the phenomenon (rumors or value in capitalism) appears as a thing in itself. The subject-object relation is distorted, and the truth of the (human) subject as the object's unconscious cause goes missing.

Bibliography

Dolar, Mladen. 2014. What’s in a Name? Aksioma - Institute for Contemporary Art.

———. 2024. Rumors. John Wiley & Sons.

Marx, Karl. 2024. Capital: Critique of Political Economy. Edited by Paul North. Translated by Paul Reitter. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Mladen Dolar: What's in a Name?

2024-02-29T00:00:00+00:00

Mladen Dolar: What’s in a Name?

Today I'll report on Mladen Dolar's 2014 essay "What's in a Name?" (Dolar 2014). I read this essay recently in preparation for a session in a series on the subject of naming. Earlier in this series, we read the chapter "Che Vuoi?" from Zizek's Sublime Object of Ideology (Zizek 2009); Dolar's essay responds to and develops Zizek's chapter (which I will look to address in a future log), 25 years later.

After the misquoted opening frontispiece of Shakespeare's Juliet, professing from her hypothetical balcony, to one "Janša" rather than the expected "Romeo", the essay opens with a commonplace idea in philosophy: "It all began with Plato" (Dolar 2014, 6). Yet Dolar's Plato is not read principally through his Republic, but rather a relatively obscure dialogue called the Cratylus. As the SEP entry on the latter notes, this lesser known dialogue is vexing in part because "[i]t is not clear how its main topic - the correctness of names - is connected with Plato's other philosophical concerns" (Meißner 2023).

So for Dolar Plato is the beginning (perhaps predictably) of the philosophical question of names - but Dolar's Plato is heterodox, as principally the enigmatic author of the Cratylus, rather than the orthodox investigator of ethics and politics as author of the Republic. Moreover, in Plato there is "[t]he specter of Juliet on the balcony" (Dolar 2014, 7); a stroke painted with a broad brush in that the shadow of a connection across several thousands of years, between Plato and Shakespeare, is tauntingly proposed through the mutual concern for the status of a name ("rose") in relation to the thing, a rose in the flesh.

As it turns out, Dolar's theory of names will propose that there is a necessary shadow of a thing introduced by a name, "an x, which is an ineffable being without properties, a nothing which nevertheless appears as something" (Dolar 2014, 31–32). Such a necessary shadow complicates a theory often misassociated with the orthodox Plato, namely the allegory of the cave. (This is in fact a theory espoused by Socrates in the Republic; Plato is simply playing the stenographer.) In this allegory, Socrates presents the role of the philosopher as one who perceives the higher reality of the objects that motivate the shadows on the wall, shadows that prisoners in the cave do not even necessarily know are shadows. As per Wikipedia: "The shadows represent the fragment of reality that we can normally perceive through our senses, while the objects under the sun represent the true forms of objects that we can only perceive through reason." For the Socrates in this conception, reason is capable of attaining to the forms of things, essentially subtracting the mirage of shadows (our senses) from their indexical source to ultimately apprehend the 'real' reality behind them.

Dolar's approaches the issue with this conception of the philosopher without addressing it directly, through the problem of the origin of names that is thematised in Plato's Cratylus. If there are to be names that we consider 'more true' than others:

there must be an essence which the names must spell out…. Names are like tools that we need to get to this essence, and there can be tools that are more or less appropriate, and hence have a varying degree of truth or falsity. But these tools are not quite freely ours to choose, or to select better ones from, for the names are always given by some Other, the rule-setter, the law-giver, the name-maker. (Dolar 2014, 8)

This problem, of course, could be analogised to the shadows in Socrates' cave. Which shadows (appearances, names) are more proximate to the essence than others? How do we, as prisoners of language and our senses, adjudicate the truth and falsity of each?

If there is to be an essence, argues Dolar, there must be some substance 'beyond' language, an actual 'value' that lies beneath the referential index of the shadow-games of names. In this setup, as Dolar notes in the quote above, one has to chase this value, through index after index, back to some original law-giver, an original Other. The reference to an "Other" here is, of course, an invocation of that term in Lacanian thought, whereby it represents the necessary exception to thought that points to something existing outside it, within it - what Lacan also refers to as its extimate quality. (For an introduction of sorts to the idea of thought's necessary incompleteness in the Lacanian tradition, see 24-02-05 on Zizek.) This originary law-giver also evokes Freud's myth of the primal father in Totem and Taboo (Freud 2001) - a myth that Lacan reinterprets as a structural detail in the logical composition of language as such. See this entry on nosubject.com for an entrypoint into the Father and related Lacanese.

Though I cannot dive deep into the details of this myth and Lacan's presentation of it here, suffice it to say that Dolar's account here of the problem in names evokes a constellation of Lacanian ideas about the structure of language and its relation to the subject as a position within it. (There is, of course, also the section later in Dolar's essay regarding Freud's naming strategy as a father, further evidence of the crypto-Lacanian sense at work here.) Joan Copjec has detailed the way that this problem relates to the Lacanian theory of the subject magnificently in the chapter titled "Cutting Up" in her 1994 book, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Copjec 2015). Copjec shows how Lacan and psychoanalysis offer an answer to a paradox not unrelated to Dolar's problem of a name's first nomination: namely Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise. (Zeno's paradox is a problem preserved, much like Socrates' problem of the cave, through a prominent Greek philosopher - though in this case that philosopher is Aristotle rather than Plato.) From the Atlassian Wikipedia:

In the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, Achilles is in a footrace with the tortoise. Achilles allows the tortoise a head start of 100 meters, for example. Suppose that each racer starts running at some constant speed, one faster than the other. After some finite time, Achilles will have run 100 meters, bringing him to the tortoise's starting point. During this time, the tortoise has run a much shorter distance, say 2 meters. It will then take Achilles some further time to run that distance, by which time the tortoise will have advanced farther; and then more time still to reach this third point, while the tortoise moves ahead. Thus, whenever Achilles arrives somewhere the tortoise has been, he still has some distance to go before he can even reach the tortoise.

The answer that Copjec finds in Lacan to this paradox is ultimately the same answer that Dolar proposes in the infinite regression of name-givers: the perspective on the problem, the "I" in the picture, must produce an x, ineffable and irredicible to any summarisation of properties, a negativity which carves and cuts up the problem's sensibility as straightforward; a contradiction that marks thought's and language's necessary incompleteness. As Copjec argues, it is this "cutting off of the subject from a part of itself… [that] accounts for the cutting up of the subject's movements" in Zeno's paradox (Copjec 2015 p.??). There is always a doubt that is produced by language, for it can never be completely sure of itself, and it is the absence of this surety (not a positive something) that desire perpetually seeks. Dolar's term for this absence that produces desire is ghost, or specter:

It is thus with every name. No name without a specter. Naming is evoking a phantom, conjuring a ghost.

The specter of this essay, as I noted at the top, is Juliet on the balcony, reflecting on her predicament as a Capulet fallen in love with a Montague. What better name for desire than this scene, the substance of a rose's value in question?

Bibliography

Copjec, Joan. 2015. “Cutting Up.” In Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Verso Books.

Dolar, Mladen. 2014. What’s in a Name? Aksioma - Institute for Contemporary Art.

Freud, Sigmund. 2001. “Totem and Taboo.” Routledge, London.

Meißner, David. 2023. “Plato’s Cratylus.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman, Summer 2023. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.

Zizek, Slavoj. 2009. “Che Vuoi?” In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Second Edition, 95–144. London New York: Verso.

Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian: Muskism

2026-04-09T00:00:00+00:00

Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian: Muskism

After buying a hard copy of this book at the RiffRaff launch with Quinn Slobodian—Ben Tarnoff pulled out briefly before on account of illness—it has sat on my bookshelf for a few weeks while I’ve pottered around fulfilling various obligations to others and myself (a conference, a short presentation about my dissertation, a bikepacking route over the alps from Switzerland to Italy).

Muskism reads like a trade book. At least, it reads like it has been edited by an editor who doesn’t trust readers to hold arguments and episodes in their head from one chapter to the next.

I don’t judge this ‘tradey’ nature a bad thing, necessarily. Maybe many readers don’t, and the repetition certainly does give color to the vignette of Musk as a consciously contradicatory and thus psychoanalytically coherent character who represents a distinctive brand of 21^st century capitalism. Tarnoff and Slobodian cast a thread that loops together the parts Musk played/plays in PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla, X (formerly Twitter), Neuralink, and DOGE (both the Department of Government Efficiency, and the memecoin), hemming them together with alliterative seams such as “fortress futurism”, “attention alchemy”, “becoming bot”, “cybernetic collectives”, and “sovereignty as a service”,. The apparent mistrust of the reader’s memory from chapter to chapter does, however, make one think that a more more concrete theoretical position might have been developed had so much time not been spent looping back on previously established episodes.

The book’s subtitle—“A Guide for the Perplexed”—suggests a critical introduction to the life and times of Elon Musk, and it more or less delivers on this suggestion, to my mind. Muskism pieces together Elon’s erratic activities as milestones that mark a kind of progress towards a unified ideological project despite themselves, despite their apparently groundless individual motivations, and in doing so constructs Musk as iconic of his own memetic syntagm of capitalist caprice, ego, and devastation.

I’d recommend the book as a way to get churning on the empirical chaos of America’s catastrophic tech economy. Musk is certainly an important agent of this chaos, and the book covers his most notable shenanigans. In both the RiffRaff discussion and some others with the authors that are circulating online, a fair bit was made of Musk’s upbringing in apartheid South Africa, as Tarnoff and Slobodian present this in the book’s first chapter as the establishing shot of his psyche-qua-politics. Rearing its ugly head in recent years, Musk’s swing to the far-right in recent years, accentuated by his calls for the ‘repatriation’ of immigrants to their home countries across Europe and the United states, cannot but be compared to the racist and segregationist regime of South Africa’s Nationalist party. Tarnoff and Slobodian’s take here is not vulgar psychoanalysis: it is not that Musk’s childhood in South African apartheid represents a totalizing historical explanation for his xenophobic tendencies today. But this history is not unrelated, and nostalgia—the (mis)remembering and (mis)valuation of past events—weighs heavy on our estimates of the present’s psychic composition. The milieu of a billionaire’s troubled childhood is fertile material for a critical snapshot of what motivates the drive for capital, or lies beyond it.

On Gods and Campervans

2018-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

On Gods and Campervans

If we characterize 'culture' as the gestures (rhetorical, occupational, infrastructural) that Man invents to make an environment wholly livable, it is clear that such gestures will be subject to Man's historical particularity at any given moment. One normative gesture in the plans of our present cultural architecture is Science. Science's pragmatism substitutes the need and often desire for other religiosities, as its explanatory thrust is more epistemologically compelling than its misbegotten alternatives: myths, legends, and other fanciful fictions.

We no longer have need of deities to euphemise a complex set of processes. We know how and why the sun rises. We know how and why the monsoons come, I think. In secular society, gods have no currency: science is where people can get funding. Maui, the trickster demigod who fished New Zealand out of the ocean with a magic hook, which his brothers then greedily ate to form the many valleys, mountains, lakes, and rocky coastlines of the North Island, is now only a company that sells and rents camper vans.

There are no longer conflicts amongst the gods. A storm is not Poseidon's anger, nor is winter Persephone's absence. They are processual protuberances whose oracle is data; and preferably big data. Life is a laboratory of uncontrolled experiments—not of the gods' temperaments, but of particles, atoms, and bits.

Yet science, like many other soothsayers, has not yet proven to explain everything. It continues an impressive epistemological career, from its zealous preamble as mechanical philosophy in the 17th century (see Steven Shapin) to its trusted management and regulation of the Earth's sensitivities in the 21st. At times it is egotistical, forecasting more than it has license to understand. At these times we are tasked to note, as Thomas Hardy did for the fishes in poetic eulogy of the Titanic: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?"

Science does not have to be fashioned in opposition to nature, but in its practicalizations it often is. It can be a heady bastard, loathe to accept there are problems it cannot synthesize. Though I trust its good intention, its actions often read as susceptible to the destructive caprices of egocentrism. If it could live with roles that are not so clearly coded 'black,' or 'white,' it might come to the conclusion that the neighborhood does not need saving. Gotham is a fictional city, as is Metropolis. The dichotomy of hero and villain are never so resolutely coded in real life. Gods can be kind and they can be cruel.

On Stranger Things

2022-02-18T00:00:00+00:00

On Stranger Things

The set is small town America, a fictional place nested in real space: Hawkins, Indiana. The animal print clothing, Kate-Bush-heavy soundtrack and over-militarized technological anxiety attest to that space's imagined time: Reagan's 80s, as the Cold War runs out of breath.

Russia is not the only enemy, however. In fact, it is small change in the grand scheme of a larger threat. Creatures and consciousnesses from the 'Upside Down', a dimension that mirrors the world in spatial equivalence, creep in and render life precarious in all its forms through fissures known as gates. These faceless monstrosities are kept at bay only by a young girl with psychic powers named Eleven, who is the product and escapee of a top-secret government experiment that was being conducted in a laboratory close to Hawkins in the years leading up to the show's present. Both the program that produced Eleven and its Soviet analogue, it is eventually revealed, are responsible for incubating ruptures to the Upside Down. They are the structural supports that sanctify the show's bestial bloodbaths, bureaucracies whose ideological contours enable and perpetuate ST's phantasmagoric violence, its psychoanalytic perversion and (thus) its captivating plot points.

This is a picture of Netflix's Stranger Things (hereafter ST), a television series now with four complete seasons as of July 1, when the final two episodes went live. (Television no longer “airs”). Unpacking the entirety of the show's history is a complicated matter for two pages, so I focus on the episodes released July 1 as a relative present; though pasts necessarily seep in. ST in general, and these last two episodes in particular (which together have a running time of almost four hours), televisually details the extent to which this (our 21st century space) is a production of a political unconscious that some would call 'neoliberal'. Whatever we call the zeitgeist, it depends on technologies of global simultaneity.

The plot lines are hard to cold start; but when the curtain raises at our chosen beginning, the unit of fourteen heroes (all American, naturally) is separated into three groups in geographically distinct locations: Hawkins in Indiana, the Kamchatka peninsula in Russia, and somewhere in a desert in Nevada. The unit is, by self-assignment, collectively fighting a monster who used to be a human, Vecna, to keep him from killing a fourth teenager. If he manages to commit the homicide, it will ensure a fundamentally ruptured distinction between the Upside Down and the nostalgic world of an American nuclear family.

The Upside Down is, I think, a conception of the future projected from fragments, flashes of the past. As was realized earlier in the season, the materiality of the Upside Down is locked in a state years earlier than the Right-side Up, the world in which our protagonists primarily live. Vecna's threat to rupture the two worlds is in service of a (rather unimaginative) dream; a dream that he and his monsters might ravage and roam in 80s America. The expansion of his dominion is the future the Upside Down threatens, and in stellar capitalist-qua-colonizer fashion it seems (at this stage) to be only for its own sake. With each new victim, which he consumes as “everything that they are” parasitically becoming stronger himself, Vecna increments towards the vision of a tentacle-and-bat-rich wasteland spatially double to the world he inhabits now.

Vecna weaves his futurity into the present (80s Hawkins, which is naturally also a past) by finding sites where some fragment flash of it already exists. This is in the mental manifestations of teenage suicidal thoughts, material unhappinesses of domestic violence, or lonely White suburbia. Understanding it (his futurity) enough to resist its advancing inevitability requires journeys to the past, journeys which are often traveled by way of the flashback and other filmic techniques. Another way to think of the Upside Down is simply as purgatory. It is a futurity rooted and undetachable from multiple pasts which unrelentingly seep into the present, a Messianic combustion that enacts violence and makes way for more of it.

ST suggests that, in order to keep Vecna's futurity at bay, we are currently relying on ambitious children. More specifically, on the ambitious American children who are top of the class in the national cults of reckless independence, of familial normativity (with just one unconsummated exception to prove the rule), and of freedom enforced by jingoistic heroism.

Now: it is not jingoistic heroism or heroistic jingoism that keeps the world's impending collapse at bay. Nor is it the profits of technological solutionism, whether they are cashed as a psychic superhero girl, as a sentient AI, or as a global carbon sink. Nor is it the serendipitous simultaneity of jingoistic heroism, technological solution, and one or more other Liberal hopes joining forces in conspiratorial reveal, as it does in small town America in the penultimate progression of the final episode of season four. The final scene depicts an environmental line that divides two worlds that are both the Right-side Up; one which houses happy memories, and the other which rains ash, storms and earthquakes. I cannot say what it is, exactly, to progress, but let me say this: human life is not held together cinematically with the charm of second-rate acting from child stars who have grown out of their adorability. We will need a revolution of a different kind.

Rebecca Carson: Immanent Externalities (chapter 2)

2024-01-27T00:00:00+00:00

Rebecca Carson: Immanent Externalities (chapter 2)

Into the deep end: today I prepared a chapter of Rebecca Carson's Immanent Externalities: The Reproduction of Life in Capital. This book emerged through her dissertation work with Etienne Balibar, and it is a work of incredible precision apprehending and extending the conceptual system in Marx's Capital.

One way to understand the book's project is to see it as a response to post-Marxism, a school of thought that posits Marx's critique of political economy in Capital as in need of some kind of fundamental update so as to be relevant to 20th and 21st century social life. Post-Marxism holds that some event (or set of events) has taken place since Marx wrote Capital that jeopardise one or more of the core principles in his system. Financialist post-Marxists, for instance, see the demise of Bretton Woods as a historical moment that effectively uprooted capitalism in some way; and there are doubtless 'crypto post-Marxists' who see/saw the invention of Bitcoin as a similarly disruptive moment. Technological post-Marxists argue that capitalism has transformed into something else (something worse, usually) through a technological 'revolution' of some kind. (This position is nowhere better summed up in the title of Mckenzie Wark's 2019 book Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?. This is a book I have not yet read: but these two [scathing] reviews in partnership with the very expressive title make it hard to imagine that Wark's position is anything other than the picture of technological post-Marxism.)

The post-Marxist position in technology studies is, I would argue, much more mainstream than value-theoretical approaches. This is perhaps an ontological hazard of the disciplinary orientation of 'technology studies' as such, in that 'technology' is assumed to represent a fundamentally distinct consistency in the world (that can be uniquely studied). The assumption that technology 'today' consists of something fundamentally 'modern', i.e. distinct and evolved with respect to its pre-modern counterpart, is commonplace; perhaps because of the widespread belief the electronic computer effected a critical shift in the logic of societal composition at some point in the mid-20th century. The phrase 'information revolution' is not only corporate pamphleteering for senseless restructuring and redistribution of wealth: it also denotes the tacit assumption at work in much 'technology studies' scholarship that the stuff of computers is not the stuff of other things we call technology (such as hand tools, steam-powered machines, etc). Computational sociality is something for which Marx could not have accounted, the common, post-Marxist wisdom asserts: for he was not writing Capital at a keyboard; was not writing Engels email; was not editing his writing with generative language models; and so on.

Carson's book is much more addressed to the financialist post-Marxists, however, than their technological mon frères. Her overall thesis is that fictitious capital (a term she takes from the French post-Marxist critical economist Cédric Durand to refer to the appearance of surplus value that emerges in financialised flows of money traded for other money) is immanent to the production component– that is, his value-theoretical argument– in Marx's Capital. More precisely and poetically, for Carson fictitious capital fills in the gap of dead times in the production process. Unlike the post-Marxist position, which sees in financialised capital a premise for sunsetting Marx's value-theoretical approach, Carson's re-reading and re-theorisation of Marx seeks to systematically link the proliferation of financialised flows to the movement of value that 'originates' in the production process, i.e. in the production of commodities by way of the wage relation between capitalist and worker.

Though I have read sections of the book before (chapter 2, "Money Form", in particular, which I used for a term paper in early 2023 to recognise Matteo Pasquinelli as technological post-Marxist by way of Carson's critique of the Italian Operaismo approach to the gold standard), today's focus was chapter 3, "Fetish Character". Like the rest of the book, this chapter is dense, precise, and difficult. (That this book was essentially Carson's dissertation is humbling and intimidating.) The first section, 2.1, argues that the movement of value in Marx should be understood with reference to its Hegelian foundations, and that "interest-bearing capital" (money breeding money, financialised flows) constitutes a particular value form in capital that is intimately related to the other value forms, namely wage (surplus value from the worker-capitalist relation) and rent (surplus value from land ownership). The second section, 2.2, goes on to clarify (and critique) Marx's use of the terminology 'person', and to recognise a fundamental relationship between capital's impersonal forms of domination (such as the commodity) and its personal forms (such as the contract). Essential to Carson's argument is that while impersonal forms are historically specific to capital(ism), its personal forms of domination are not necessarily, and as such can occur in other modes of production such as feudalism. Seeing personal forms of domination as immanent to their impersonal mirrors is a cornerstone of Carson's argumentation throughout the book, and represents her chief rejoinder to the post-Marxist complaint that 'capital is dead'.

In re-reading this chapter, my project became to draw out the development of three related yet distinct characterisations of capital, all of which figure in my attempt to chart the computer-capital relation.

Capital as abstract subject
Capital as autonomous subject
Capital as automatic subject

These characterisations represent waypoints in Carson's development of her (Hegelian) understanding of the movement of value, as well as her insistence on reading out of Marx a monetary theory of value.¹ Capital operates as an abstract subject because it is independent ('abstract') from the will of those engaged in exchange. It is not a concrete, sensuous object, nor is it an evanescent, fictive ideology in the minds of exchangers.² The status of capital as an abstract subject can be understood with respect to the essential Marxian theory of abstract labour. Abstract labour is a notion that represents the measurement of some kind of concrete, particular labour by way of socially necessary labor time.³ It is because the commodity is valued by way of abstract labour that is a sensuous-nonsensuous thing; a 'notion' that "exists neither at the level of being, nor at the level of immediate objectivity" (Carson 2023, 78). Carson argues that value moves abstractly, i.e. in this reflected/refracted realm of neither objectivity nor subjectivity. The Marxian economist Alfred Sohn-Rethel famously referred to this kind of notion as a real abstraction– and I recommend (Toscano 2008) for a good introduction to the philosophical stakes of this term.

It is value's abstraction in this sense that makes capital also an autonomous subject. As Carson puts it: "Value is a social relation that is 'autonomous and dominant'"(Carson 2023, 79). (Abstract) value moves by itself. Not for the sake of the human subject involved in its exchanges, but for its own sake as subject. When capital is dominant, "accumulation and the reproduction of value are the driving force of the process"(Carson 2023, 80). Human life is nothing but an object instrumentalised to service the life (reproduction) of capital's forms. The movement of its things (commodities) takes place autonomously, on its own, without the (conscious) control of individuals (humans). Capital as autonomous subject, in other words, services its own needs– the accumulation and reproduction of value– not the needs of the humans that happen to be its constituents.⁴

Capital is an automatic subject in a slightly different sense still. Carson has an entry in the Animate Assembly project which goes into the meaning of this term specifically: but the basic idea is hopefully already clear from the previous characterisations. Capital automates out the place of the (human) subject, replacing it with the inhuman drive (greed) for surplus value. Moreover, its autonomous movement takes place 'automatically'; that is, without the trace of its genesis in the measurement of abstract human labour in the sphere of production, exclusively at the apparent level of circulation. It is here that capital's status as automatic subject sheds light on Carson's sophistication of the post-Marxist account: capital wants to appear as no-longer-just capital, as financial flows untethered from its productive underbelly, as this mystification is at the heart of its autonomy and abstraction.

Bibliography

Carson, Rebecca. 2023. Immanent Externalities: The Reproduction of Life in Capital. Brill.

Heinrich, Michael. 2012. An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital. NYU Press.

Johnston, Adrian. 2023. Infinite Greed: Money, Marxism, Psychoanalysis.

Johnston, Adrian, Boštjan Nedoh, and Alenka Zupančič, eds. 2022. Objective Fictions: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Marxism.

Toscano, Alberto. 2008. “The Open Secret of Real Abstraction.” Rethinking Marxism 20 (2): 273–87.

Zizek, Slavoj. 2009. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Second Edition. London New York: Verso.

Streams of thought in my dissertation

2024-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

Streams of thought in my dissertation

The posts on this website have one or more of the following tags:

`CaS`	code and systems
`WiG`	writing in general
`BgS`	before graduate school
`DiH`	the question of dialectics in history
`SiP`	the question of science in psychoanalysis
`MiT`	the question of mathematics in the twentieth century

The first of these is the most generic. 'Writing in general' is how I refer to musings that don't expect any particular interest or specialization of the reader. They are designed to be broadly readable and digestible to anyone.

The remaining tags or 'streams' require a bit more explanation. As a third-year graduate student in MCM at Brown (see here for more context), I have composed and am reading three separate lists of books and articles. Each of these lists represents a field of thought in which I want to participate, giving them the name 'fields lists'. In many graduate degrees, fields lists– and the fields examination that one sits as their culmination– are determined by faculty or the department, as the passing of the exam is supposed to represent a shift in one's status from being a PhD student to being a PhD candidate.

This terminology is somewhat particular, I believe, to the U.S. 5-8 year PhD model. Students entering the U.S. PhD are not generally required to have a Masters degree, as a transitional Masters is achieved in the first 2-3 years of a PhD, during which period the student takes classes and assists in teaching. Around the three-year mark, students properly elect their PhD's focus, select advisors, and move away from taking classes in an exploratory mode toward researching and writing parts of the dissertation proper. Adam Tooze, in an episode somewhere in his Ones and Tooze podcast, describes the difference between the U.S. and the U.K. upper ed model as similar to the distinction between getting street food at a bazaar and fine dining with a multi-course meal. In the U.S., PhD students are expected to select from a smorgasbord of academic possibilities– represented by faculty across different departments– in their first few years; whereas in the U.K., students' work is examined by faculty-qua-food-critics. It is certainly interesting that in one half of this analogy, students are the gastronomers; whereas in the other, they are comestibles themselves.

The graduate program in MCM is built in the image of students as gastronomers par excellence. Not only are we entitled to select our own advisers, we are also given the option to conjure our own fields lists. These two freedoms go hand-in-hand, in a sense, as a major constraint on how one can compose a list is whether or not it will be possible to find a faculty member who will advise on it. The fields examination in MCM is a three-hour affair, interview-like, during which one's advisers 'assess' a student's literacy in the list's contents. The form and intensity of this assessment depends largely on the temperament of one's advisers.

My primary adviser is Joan Copjec, with whom I have a list titled: The Question of Science in Psychoanalysis. Though I have only become seriously interested in psychoanalysis recently– in the last academic year, through the influence of friends and in taking a class with Joan– it is quickly coming to be something of a backbone in my dissertation's inquiry. Whereas it is easy to misrecognize psychoanalysis as a lascivious enterprise bent on locating illicit sexual thoughts as the underbelly of all conscious life, it is in actual fact a rich philosophical tradition that critically inflects a range of staid attempts to reckon with the complexities of human life without accounting for desire in any way. Philosophy from a psychoanalytic standpoint works to think through the world equipped with notions such as the unconscious, drive, desire, and so on; all of which gesture towards the opacity of certain elements in the human subject and its civilizations. More on these particulars later, no doubt.

My first list's project is to study the question of science in psychoanalysis: two terms that have a troubled and intimate relation to each other. Freud infamously thought himself a man of science, and painted psychoanalysis as a scientific enterprise.¹ If this characterisation is curious to the 21st century imagination, it is because "science" has been imagined as an undertaking in cold, hard, objective fact. The psychoanalytic bestiary of dreams, repression, and sexual fantasy is forcibly held at a distance from the safe havens of rationality, logic, and science: because to admit a permeable lining between the two would be to threaten the security of one's conclusions.

My first list is interested in this lining exactly. Jacques Lacan– a philosophical reader of Freud to whom we will certainly return– reportedly designated the psychoanalytic enterprise a calling card at the doorstep of Science, capital S. The premise of psychoanalysis as a philosophical project– that rationality's ghosts cannot simply be banished, but haunt the whole kingdom of thought and action– is a critique of the commonplace scientistic doctrine that everything, in principle, can (eventually) be known.

My second list is with Peter Szendy, and is titled: The Question of Dialectics in History. The scope of this list is, in some ways, much easier to explain than the first: by way of it, I want to cultivate an understanding of Marx's adamantine three-volume book, Capital. My focus in this gargantuan task is on the status in that work of what will come to be theorized (later in the 20th century with Freud, Lacan, etc) as the psychoanalytic subject. In terms more germane to Marxian literature, I am asking about the status of subjective freedom in Marx's thought in general, and in the philosophical project of capital in particular. (There is a dimension of overlap between this list and my first on psychoanalysis which addresses work written at the interface of Marx and Lacan; these two names both acting as stand-ins for the philosophical projects of the critique of political economy and psychoanalysis respectively.)

My third and final list is with Suresh Venkatasubramanian, and is titled: The Question of Mathematics in the 20th Century. It consists chiefly of names such as Alan Turing, Gödel, Von Neumann, and other early 20th century mathematicians who built the conceptual basis for the emergence of the discipline of computer science. This list will be, I think, something of the substance of the main course in my actual dissertation: the expected confection that comes out of all this degustation. The idea is to write some thoughts on the question: what is the relation between computing and capital, in the 20th century and now? Has it changed since the emergence of the computer's concept, or is it structurally the same? What bearings can such an undertaking provide (if any) for the critical apperception of the place of the computer in society today?

Svitlana Matviyenko and Sarah Pourciau

2024-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

Svitlana Matviyenko and Sarah Pourciau

Today's log discusses two projects, Svitlana Matviyenko's and Sarah Pourciau's, as a follow on from the last log.

Svitlana Matviyenko

I came to Matviyenko's work through an event here at the IWM, which took place this past Friday. She is currently an associate professor at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in the School of Communication, and she was previously (I seem to remember, although I cannot now find the Internet proof of this) an assistant professor in NYU's department of Media, Culture and Communication. Both of these departments/institutes are at the forefront of a particular kind of media theoretical critique in the American academy; though like many American things it has something of a European and global reach. Wendy Chun, who used to be a professor in my department, received a big grant to kick-start SFU's Digital Democracy Institute circa 2020, and ever since has surely played some kind of instrumental role in bringing together an impressive range of up-and-coming names in critical accounts of computing (Steph Dick, for example– Alberto Toscano is also currently visiting faculty there).

Matviyenko did her dissertation with Nick Dyer-Witheford, a scholar who is best known for his first book, published in 1999, Cyber Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-technology Capitalism (Dyer-Witheford 1999). Matviyenko's dissertation is titled Lacan's Cybernetics (Matviyenko 2015), and attempts to track the relationship between Lacan's presentation of psychoanalysis across his seminars (which took place annually between 1953 and 1981) and cybernetics, an intellectual movement/field of thought whose first wave is typically traced to circa 1948, the year in which Norbert Wiener published Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Wiener 2019), and which is generally understood to have had a second (1960s), third (1990s), and sometimes even a fourth wave (2010s?) in the ensuing years.

There is no doubt that Lacan knew about cybernetics: he first treats the subject explicitly in his second seminar (1954-55). Though this seminar has come to be known as his cybernetic seminar, Matviyenko makes a convincing case that there is development of the ideas in seminar II, in at least seminars III, XI, and XX. Matviyenko's contextualization of Lacan's position on cybernetics is extremely useful, even if the specificity of an argument beyond contextualization is at times hard to make out. Her dissertation's general task is to "contextualize Lacan's work in the variety of debates on cybernetics" (Matviyenko 2015, 27), and to situate "the cybernetic episteme" as an influential discourse in and on Lacan's thought. This argument consists of what I find a confusing kind of historicism, i.e. through a set of claims that pose cybernetics as a Foucauldian episteme which "serves as the framing for knowledge upon which psychoanalysis operates" (Matviyenko 2015, 43).

I find this confusing as a methodological stipulation in relation to Lacan's seminars because the figure of the Foucauldian episteme seems to me very much in tension with a 'Lacanian' notion of 'discourse', of tracing cause and effect in the language of Lacan's seminars. For example, Matviyenko's summary of her method in chapter 1 is as follows:

To summarize: the cybernetic episteme organizes the subject of science's relation to knowledge as the mechanism of blackboxing maintained by the institutional power formed within certain conditions of mediality. (Matviyenko 2015, 43)

To start, there are a number of terms in this summary that need elucidation. This sentence comes after a section that present the basic context of terms such as communication, control, and homeostasis in their cybernetic formulations, and in the section preceding this summary the Lacanian notion of the "agency of the letter" (Matviyenko 2015, 41) has been mapped. I understand Matviyenko's claim to be meaning to say something to the effect of: cybernetics' presentation of the world as nothing but traceable cause and effect, i.e. its behaviorist and scientistic basis, is an intellectual basis upon which Lacan's idea of the agency of the letter, as well as his related presentation of the notions of 'repetition automatism' and 'the subject of science', can be developed. Yet Matviyenko confuses this point in the quotation above by introducing an idea of 'blackboxing' (a term not properly developed at this stage, nor later in the dissertation) and by suggesting a hazy relation to 'institutional power'.

In other words, Matviyenko's attempt to chart the relationship between cybernetics and psychoanalysis by way of Foucauldian 'archaeology' results in a mystification of the specificity of her historical claim, preferring instead to lean on Latourian/Foucauldian language of mediality and power in a way that I find obscuring rather than enlightening. Throughout the dissertation, she wants to suggest that there is something Lacan's thought shares with/inherits from cybernetics– an unproblematic claim in its generality, given the aforementioned direct treatment Lacan gives to cybernetics– but I have a hard time making out what exactly the substance and consequence of this relationship is in Matviyenko's view. Though ample context is provided about Lacan's views on automatism and cybernetic notions of the subject, the strongest kind of claim Matviyenko herself makes is so generally media-theoretical that it seems barely to be a claim at all: i.e. "psychoanalysis reflects contemporary conditions of mediality" (Matviyenko 2015, 54), or "[Lacan's] thought seems to be caught in the changing condition of mediality" (Matviyenko 2015, 55).

Whatever one can critique in the historicist flattening of argumentation, though, it is undeniably still very rich on context. The dissertation's second chapter, "The Subject of Science", is particularly useful for me in this regard, as it lays out the connections from Norbert Wiener's thought to Leibniz and Pascal, as well as Dutch mathematician and astronomer Christiaan Huygens (working and writing in the 1650s), and putting these references in relation to Lacan's conception of modern science (via Alexandre Koyre) and automatism (via Descartes). Matviyenko convincingly posits both cybernetics and psychoanalysis as taking up the challenge of "the model of the body as a system-coupled-with-the-environment that transcends Cartesian mind-body dualism" (Matviyenko 2015, 78): that is, the problem of the subject in science, of the material/ideal dialectic, of thought's relationship to the world at large (read: ontology, epistemology, phenomenology). It seems clear to me that psychoanalysis should be seen as a critique of cybernetics (rather than, as Matviyenko seems to see it, as a complementary or comparable system of thought, similar in the sense of similarly deficient and perspectival)

Chapter three, "Freud's circuitry", is similarly rich in its presentation of determinism and thermodynamics as influences on Freud's thought. Lacan's notion of structure is then traced as the sublimation (to use Freudian vocabulary, rather than Matviyenko's) of Freud's reckoning, and the apparent allusions to Claude Shannon's concept of error in Lacanian repetition automatism. The relevance of these 19th century discoveries on psychoanalysis is clear and undeniable, and again my main quibble of the dissertation's method would be in that Matviyenko doesn't do much argumentatively with this context other than provide it. Though perhaps I should not be so quick to judge such an argumentative lack, as the text is certainly immensely valuable as a reference for further study (which is perhaps all one should ask of a dissertation).

A slightly more substantive claim is reached by the end of the text; namely that "both psychoanalysis and cybernetics belong to the epoch of graphocentrism, which began in the nineteenth century and extends to the present moment" (Matviyenko 2015, 193). In making this claim, Matviyenko gestures to the ongoing relevance of cybernetics and psychoanalysis to contemporary ideologies and epistemologies of science and the subject, and I certainly agree on this point. Chapters 5 and 6 offer an intriguing tour of more recent theorizations (Kittler, Latour, Foucault, Didi-Huberman, Florian Cramer, Alex Galloway) in an attempt to link graphocentrism with what is seen as its current instantiation as interpassivity. There are many names and theorists in these two chapters (as there are in the earlier ones too, I suppose), and I again find myself somewhat confused by the blur of terms: a "dialectic relation between the modalities of extension and prosthesis" (Matviyenko 2015, 172), "parasitic passivity" (with reference to Michel Serres), and the ultimate argumentation that today's interpassive subject has "lost meanings and practices of solitude, of sensations of mild joy" (Matviyenko 2015, 190).

I don't necessarily dispute these claims, but I am suspicious of the idea that our 'digital condition' is something distinctly different from some previous historical/social condition, when attention was more integral, and desire not quite so distorted. Or at least, I am yet to be properly convinced by an argument in this vein. Perhaps it is just my dormant computer utopianism, instilled in me by a formal education in computer science, which will not allow me to believe that computers render us necessarily more distracted, alienated, or less capable of freedom than what came before. But I still can't quite stomach this media-theoretical kind of thinking that slaps new terms on new conditions and figures it critical. Something I need to work through, I think.

I had wanted to also briefly touch on Matviyenko's most recent book, co-authored with Nick Dyer-Witheford (Dyer-Witheford and Matviyenko 2019); but it will suffice to say at this point that I was similarly underwhelmed by the theoretical effects of this 'psychoanalytic' and Marxist conception of cyberwar. I am not sure that I feel the stakes of the theorization– not in material-political terms, as it is obviously evident that the term 'cyberwar' denotes something perverted and violent going on at global scale– but in the sense that I am not sure what more I understood about it through the reading of this book. Again: perhaps this is a function of a shallow kind of reading on my part, and it might benefit me to work through it again at a later stage.

Sarah Pourciau

I have not considered Pourciau's project as extensively as Matviyenko's, as I have only read one recent essay of hers in Critical Inquiry titled "On the Digital Ocean" (Pourciau 2022). This essay, in contrast to Matviyenko's writing, I found something of a revelation. It sees something problematic in the discourse on 'digitality' in the comparison of data to the ocean, and marks this problem as one that stretches far beyond the historically 'computational' per se into the reaches of philosophy that feminizes and passivizes matter, posing the mind as a master of the seas:

From the book of Genesis through the twentieth century, the oceans of the past figure the feminine matrices of divine and human creation, the wombs and tombs of the earth, the fertile yet deadly milieu of the sirens and the mermaids. They are figures of endless flux and fecund formlessness, and thus of infinitude, in the oldest sense of what cannot be fenced in or finished. (Pourciau 2022, 234)

The problem of the digital ocean, in other words, for Pourciau is an age-old problem of conceptualizing infinity. A certain computerized conception of the world wants to render it totally calculable, atomizably "composed of distinct digits (0s and 1s), which is to say that it is remainderlessly divisible into discreet bits, which is to say that it is per se accessible to the logic of conceptual definition and analysis" (Pourciau 2022, 235). One ideology of digitalization, in other words, is that it flattens ontology into epistemology. Everything is knowable "as a digital sea of quantum bits" (Pourciau 2022, 235), and thus there is no part of the world that is not conceptually, hypothetically, available to know.¹

Pourciau goes on to give, in the course of some thirty pages, an enormously erudite review of set theory's impact on the philosophical conception of infinitude, covering Cantor in the first section and Turing/Gödel in the second. The major consequence of this review is to call into question the ontologizing of a 20th-century mathematical conception of infinity: As the essay concludes:

Turing's implicit thesis is that the countable set of computables is big enough–as big as an ocean, even, albeit not an apeiron–and the question we need to ask and answer in response is: Big enough for what? We will have a better chance of making headway on this problem, I think, if we stop calling on the remainder of Woman to do the work for us. (Pourciau 2022, 261)

There is an explicit thread in this essay from these mathematical notions of infinity to Lacanian and post-Lacanian thought ("the remainder of the Woman"), and thus I believe Pourciau's project will be extremely relevant to mine.

Bibliography

“Devs.” 2020. Drama, {{Mystery}}, {{Sci-Fi}}. DNA Films, FX Productions, Scott Rudin Productions.

Dyer-Witheford, Nick. 1999. Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism. University of Illinois Press.

Dyer-Witheford, Nick, and Svitlana Matviyenko. 2019. Cyberwar and Revolution: Digital Subterfuge in Global Capitalism. University of Minnesota Press.

Matviyenko, Svitlana. 2015. “Lacan’s Cybernetics.” PhD thesis, The University of Western Ontario (Canada).

Pourciau, Sarah. 2022. “On the Digital Ocean.” Critical Inquiry 48 (2): 233–61. https://doi.org/10.1086/717319.

Wiener, Norbert. 2019. Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. MIT press.

Footnotes

Sweet Tooth (for baristas)

2018-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

Sweet Tooth (for baristas)

A collaboration with Michelle Lord Goldman and Cecily Polonsky. Directed by Jhor van der Horst, edited by David Lopera, and featuring Natalie Plonk, Ben Diamond, Raheem Barnett, and Ysa Ayala.

Taming jagged intelligence with beads and jj

2026-07-17T00:00:00+00:00

Taming jagged intelligence with beads and jj

There’s no need for a prelude on how agential harnesses such as Claude Code, Codex, and Opencode are changing the political economy of software engineering. The entry barrier to writing code has never been lower. LLM-enabled agential harnesses won’t replace software engineers wholesale; but their existence and reasonable accessibility (at least while frontier labs maintain monthly subscription pricing) dramatically refactor the economic calculus of building, customizing, and maintaining software. Paraphrasing a comment from Steve Klabnik at a conference I organized earlier this year, the hysteria around the imminent demise of software engineering and (sometimes, even) computer science is an ironic phenomenon with a touch of poetic justice. Software engineers have been threatening to automate humans—and every so often following through successfully on the threat—in other industries out of their jobs for decades. In 2026, our LLM overlords have deigned to descend from on high to give the most talented doctors of 10-times (computerized) capitalism a taste of their own medicine.

I’m lucky to be a graduate student in a humanities program in the midst of this 2026 overture to the great age of gentle singularity. Courtesy of the generalized inexistence of career trajectories in the not-explicitly-scientific academy, I was graciously disabused many years ago of the fanciful notion that I should expect a full-time job (let alone one that pays reasonably) to be waiting for me upon graduation. The economy isn’t structured to prioritize the kinds of work we should care about—but I digress. We are here to walk through what agentic engineering can look like, and how I use the terminal as my daily driver for research and development with LLMs.

For context, I am currently writing and maintaining a CLI tool in Rust, a distributed system in O(x)Caml, an interpretability research harness that is mostly Python, and several full stack platforms (Node, React, Bonsai, etc.). I run NixOS on both my desktop and laptop, and have primarily viewed, edited, and written code in a customized version of Neovim since approximately 2019. Despite this relatively unique personal computing configuration—and intractable codependency on vi shortcuts and text-based user interfaces—I believe that the workflows detailed below are nonetheless fairly general. One could set up similar environments on Mac or Windows, with VSCode or other code editors using analogous plugins.

Planning with `beads`

Beads is “a coding agent memory system” that Steve Yegge built and released in October 2025. It has since become the foundation for two relatedly wild software projects, gastown and gascity. Both of these urgently require critical attention from close readers, if only for the conceptual aesthetics of their documentation. I don’t believe in the full-blown ‘no code’ approach these two latter frameworks incline towards, in part because I don’t trust that AI agents will (always) write better code than I can in a shorter amount of time. The heart of my scepticism, however, lies in the suspicion that refusing to look directly at the code as a matter of (quasi-religious) principle bases itself on a misconception of the value of code in the enterprise of software engineering, whether it is small-scale or industrial.

When I have an idea for a software system, I refine my conception of it through observing the ways in which existing programming languages allow me to realize it. Code is one of the most essential mediums of this conversation between me, the machine, and the material social history of software in public or otherwise accessible libraries. Code is the way in which I ‘see’ the functionality and performance tradeoffs that have been made in every piece of software, including the software that I am actively developing or maintaining. Delegating the art of looking at code to an LLM is like building a house purely in 3D simulation, refusing ever to step foot in the physical space. It might be possible to build a house this way; but why would you not visit the construction site when the option is available to you?

What Yegge has got right, I think, is that LLMs can do better when we package the work we give them more thoughtfully. LLMs exhibit a jagged intelligence (putting to one side the obvious pitfalls of surrealizing a machine’s capabilities as ‘intelligence’). If it is right to think about the ability to set an agent to work through an agential harness as analogous to having infinite interns, then it is clear that we shouldn’t just let them loose on every half-baked thought that crosses the mind as we build out software. The beads CLI is one of the best tools that I know for packaging work in bite-sized pieces, so that an agent can chew through them without choking.

I currently use a fork of Yegge’s original codebase called beads_rust (br) and a TUI to visualize beads in a repo called abacus.¹ Here’s how abacus looks when open in a repo:

Each bead represents one ‘unit’ of work. I create the majority of my beads via a planning process in which I work collaboratively with an agent in order to file features and bug fixes as epics (associated sets of beads), although I also file and refine beads through review as work progresses. My planning process is aided by a global CLAUDE.md detailing codebase-agnostic workflows combining beads and jj. The only general directive I currently give here for beads creation is:

**Bead names:** Keep them as short and simple as possible. Prefer concise 3-4 character identifiers over descriptive hyphenated names. For example, `rwq` is much better than `airborne-splash-rwq`. The bead ID carries the identity; the name is just a local shorthand.

Beads are a useful way of structuring complex work and keeping state as a project progresses in their own right, rather than relying on an agential harness’s in-built memory. If you run out of tokens mid-feature, another agent can always pick up work from where the active bead begins, provided you’ve kept their scope in check. They also shoulder some of the state-keeping burden that agential harnesses do mostly (as far as I can tell) through writing Markdown files to disk. It’s not likely that we’ll get away from Markdown in agential harnesses any time soon, as I suspect that it’s effectively packaged in as part of the reinforcement learning stage of model training. But I’ve found that working first to architect beads epics representing a project’s roadmap seems to free up space for the agential harness to run through tasks more effectively, as it’s common knowledge by now that these models perform more reliably when the scope of the prompt is smaller.

Beads really come into their own, however, when coupled with a version control system like jujutsu or git.

Version control with `jj`

Because LLMs cannot be depended upon to write high quality code, version control (VCS) is an essential part of agential engineering.² Jujutsu is a lighter touch, more powerful, and back-compatible VCS in comparison to git, which is why I use it almost exclusively as my version control system.³ I imagine that the processes explained below, however, are mostly reproducible using git as a substitute for jj if you prefer.

Here are the elementary steps that I define in my CLAUDE.md to harness beads and jj together:

**Per-task sequence:**
1. `br update <id> --status in_progress`
2. `jj log` — if empty unnamed commit below working commit, name it: `jj describe -m "..."`
3. `jj new` — fresh working commit
4. Do the work, run tests
5. `br close <id> --reason "Done"` — close BEFORE squash; this writes `.beads/issues.jsonl` into `@`, which gets included in the next squash
6. `jj squash --use-destination-message` then `jj describe -r @- -m "Present tense description"` — using `--use-destination-message` avoids the interactive editor that pops up when both commits already have descriptions
7. `jj log` — verify history shows correct author on each commit; `@` must be empty and unnamed

As an agential harness is working on a beads issue, it is marked in_progress, so that I can easily locate it in my abacus view. Once it thinks it has completed the work, it squashes it into a distinct revset so that it is packaged and ready to review. I use a combination of neovim and tuicr to review the changes, which gives me a rough equivalent of the GitHub PR feature set, i.e. adding comments to independent lines, blocks of code, or on the changes in general, and seeing everything with syntax highlighting—but all locally on my machine. I’ve also configured my editor with a slightly enhanced form of jj.nvim so that I can easily switch between jj commands, real neovim, and tuicr:

This set of customizations to Neovim makes it my one-stop shop for code review. I ferry reviews from tuicr sessions to my agential harness through the beautiful simplicity of copy-paste: I have a shortcut to :clip the full set of comments (a tuicr feature) to clipboard, and then I navigate into my other tmux pane where Claude Code or similar is running. A screencast of the side-by-side setup of tmux, abacus, neovim with jj.nvim and tuicr, and Claude Code is at the top of this post. I refer the detail-oriented reader to my NixOS config, which contains the mechanisms for neovim customization, versions of software, etc. (If you are part of the lilliputian part of the population who doesn’t use NixOS, point an agent at my post and the repo and ask: “how do I get the same Neovim/tuicr/jj.nvim setup in my terminal given I am not on NixOS?”. Your mileage may vary.)

I generally instruct my agents to package revisions in response to review as new jj revsets. The exception to this is when the work they’ve done is wrongheaded in some fundamental way, in which case I just squash their fresh approach into the revset with their first attempt. In projects where I am making related changes across multiple repos, I generally start an agent at the root and then selectively file and work on beads issues in individual repos.

Reflections on context engineering

The power of automatic interns comes with a kind of responsibility, though one more gentle than the ethical responsibility we should have if the interns were real people. While I don’t have deep blue, I do think that the art of software engineering is changing dramatically. I don’t think that the category of software engineers will be automated out of existence. (This thought suffers from a category error regarding why software engineers exist in the first place.) Engineering is about working with meaningful concepts at the boundary of scientific understanding and machines. Computer engineering is about working with concepts that map scientific understandings of how computers and code work to what concrete computers and code actually do. As long as we want computers to do things for us, some form of computer engineering will exist.

My undergrad advisor Arvind Narayanan recently gave an excellent keynote at ICML puncturing some of the inflated notions about the death of computer science. He grounds a set of his claims in an historical analogy between electrification and LLM-ification. In the same way electricity illuminated (pun intended) an entirely new scope of what was possible in physical space, LLMs and their effective deployment in agential harnesses change the way we (should) think about software production and maintenance.

Maybe now more than ever, we need careful, calculated, and critical thinking about how software works and how it is deployed and maintained. We need to be able to adjudicate when software can help us do something more effectively, and this shouldn’t just mean ‘faster’ or ‘at lower cost’. It is ridiculous to think that LLMs will be ‘better’ at tasks ‘in virtually all domains of interest’ (Nick Bostrom’s definition of superintelligence), as this would require us restricting the domain ‘of interest’ to exclude activities like ‘having sex’, ‘enjoying a meal’, or ‘watching sport’. But LLMs do change the state of the art of software development in a meaningful way, and one ignores shifting goalposts in artistic and scientific arenas such as computing only at one’s own risk. As local models become viable, and as frontier labs stick their heads in the sands of the arid inevitability of climate collapse for the sake of competitive advantage and profit, we ought to take political and social action accordingly. Getting a practical sense of how these jagged creatures do and don’t work is par for the course.

Terry Eagleton: Why Marx Was Right

2025-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

Terry Eagleton: Why Marx Was Right

Over the holiday period (which I count as the entirety of January, as my wedding took place on the 11th January, and I have not seriously returned to work until very recently) I read Why Marx was Right by Terry Eagleton. The book was given to me by my father– over in Italy from New Zealand for the aforementioned wedding– as he had gone out and bought it after I had sent my dissertation prospectus to the family group chat, a document that makes clear that Marx's thought is a very major focus in my current work.

I hadn't heard of the book before, and was delighted to discover what I think is a very accessible introduction to many of the key aspects of Marx's thought that drew and draw me to it. Indeed, I wish that I had known about the book when putting together the syllabus for my class on Marx last semester (discussed in the first section here), as it guides the reader towards the salient aspects of why Marx remains relevant without assuming that they have already laboured through Capital. Now that I have laboured through it, it has become the gateway drug I propose when accosted with the by-now-seemingly-age-old question, dredged up equally often in non-academic and academic discussions; 'but why study Marx'?

Each chapter in Eagleton's delectable little book takes a misconception about Marx head on, explaining why it is unfounded. The wikipedia page does an excellent job of outlining the lines of argumentation in summative depth, so I'll just bullet them here:

Marx's critique has no bearing on 21st century society, as it deals with 19th century concerns such as factories and food riots.
Marxism in theory is for faux-left academics, as in practice it always becomes ``a monstrously oppressive state".
Marx's notion of history was overly deterministic, positing a 'necessary' transition to socialism/communism that never came about.
Humans are inherently selfish, and so the dream of communism is hopelessly utopian and fundamentally unrealistic.
Marx's thought was too invested in economic reduction, and as such is fundamentally less rich as a tradition of thought than more contemporary, more pluralistic alternatives.
Marx's 'materialism' drains humanity of everything spiritual, crudely envisioning the world as nothing but what there is, and as such always ends up in undesirable states of society when applied, as the history of the 20th century proves.
Marx's conception of class is limited to his time, and can't help us to understand the diffuse hierarchies of social standing in today's world.
Marxist revolution is inherently violent.
Marxist revolution can only end in a Foucauldian all-powerful state, and thus the theory is inseparably married to unfreedom at some fundamental level.
The political Left today is not well-explained or supported by Marx or Marxism, and thus we should prefer other theories.

Needless to say, as the sanguinely simple title of Eagleton's book implies, all of these allegations are unfounded at best; and more likely they are just plain wrong. It is, in fact, astonishing how relevant Marx's thought remains today, given how much political and historical distance there is between us and him. Indeed, we live in wake of an executive order given by a popularly elected president of the U.S. to root out 'Marxist equity'; and I will continue to argue that conceiving clearly of what such equity would look like if it were to appear is some of the most important scholarly work one can do. If philosophy and critical thinking are to remain a valued part of organized society, we should carve out space and time for them at universities, even as the capitalist assault on the enduring value of critical thought intensifies (t)here.

Eagleton's book is not just an accessible introduction, however. Its footnotes are concise yet sharp, pointing the more interested reader towards secondary literature and sections of Marx's ouevre that deserve closer attention. The influence of Fourier on Marx's political philosophy of utopia, for example, is a connection that I intend to follow up on in the coming months, having as it may interesting ramifications in the course of my study on what mathematical contours exist in Capital and Marx's other works. Balibar's book Philosophy of Marx– which I had bulleted on my lists, but have still not yet read– is also mentioned for Balibar's characterization of Marx as an antiphilosopher; a nomination that accords with my continually reinforced conception of Marx as one of the great masters of suspicion.

There are also some comments in the book that help me to carve out space to concieve of Marx's system as a philosophy (or anti-philosophy, perhaps) of the subject. (No doubt this is the terrain that Balibar will cover in that book, when I finally come around to reading it.) In the chapter on why Marx is not a crude materialist (chapter 6), for example, Eagleton cleverly shows how it is really capitalist 'philosophy' that is culpable of painting everything simply 'as it is', leaving no space for an imagination otherwise. (This being the source of Fred Jameson's / Mark Fisher's quip that 'it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of capitalism') The unfreedom of imagination otherwise in capitalism, Eagleton argues, is a feature and not a bug for that system's zombified reproduction:

The prejudice that thought is independent of reality is itself shaped by social reality. (Eagleton 2011, 135)

It is not too far to go from this claim to the insight that consumed the working life of Alfred Sohn-Rethel, for which I quote from my prospectus:

Though Sohn-Rethel is best known for coining the phrase 'real abstraction' (principally popularized by way of its mention in Adorno's Negative Dialectics (Adorno 2014)), the radical claim on which his sole philosophical monograph, Intellectual and Manual Labor, rests is this: "Exchange abstraction is not thought, but it has the form of thought" (Sohn-Rethel 1978, 99). The idea that there is a formal relation between the transcendental subject ("thought") and the political economy, i.e. the structure of a set of social relations that cannot necessarily be simply reduced to the sum of conscious operations of its constituents, situates Marx in a mathematical-philosophical lineage with which he is not always directly associated.

Marx's work, as Eagleton recognizes, is not just a sociological, historically-specific treatise on the unjust structure of nascent capitalism in the 19th century; though it is certainly that. It is also ``a theory of how historical animals function" (Eagleton 2011, 158), which is to say, a philosophy of the (human) subject, a serious reckoning with whether or not there is anything philosophical (trans-historical) that can be said about society, or whether we are doomed to never be justified in abstracting from a specific time and a specific place, wherein not only is the map not the territory, but the map is never anything useful or justified at all.

Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor W. 2014. Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course 1965/1966. John Wiley & Sons.

Eagleton, Terry. 2011. Why Marx Was Right. Yale University Press.

Sohn-Rethel, Alfred. 1978. Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology. Humanities Press.

The Towpath to React and Redux

2016-07-28T00:00:00+00:00

The Towpath to React and Redux

When you visit a URL, you are redirected through the internet to a server somewhere in the world, and code is triggered on that server, prompted by your request. Sometimes that code makes requests elsewhere, retrieving other resources from a database or elsewhere before returning files to your browser, which we can call the client, that made the request. This is how the Facebook page that you see when you visit facebook.com is different from your friends’. Even though you could both be at the same URL; the page is customized at the server-side before it is returned to your browser through the login parameters that you sent.

In simpler sites, such as lachlankermode.com¹, when there are no required exterior resources and no customization, the server simply directly returns HTML, CSS and Javascript files to your browser. Browsers have been programmed to interpret these filetypes. They know how to render in color and glory the wonderful web pages that we can browse on the internet. This was really the paradigm in which the web was originally designed; it was built as a forum for the retrieval and consequent display of HTML documents.

However, we have come to expect much more of the web in 2016. Sites ought to be dynamic, viewable and beautiful from many different shapes and sizes of device, and they should interactively update based on where I click, swipe and hover. Back in 1994, Brendan Eich created Javascript at Netscape. Javascript was conceived to run in the browser on the client side to make the experience of the web more dynamic: through Javascript, the browser could partially update and modify HTML documents in response to events, such as clicks and hovers. Event handlers in Javascript could also asynschronously request resources across the web, read and write to the user’s local file system, among many other capabilities.

Javascript’s relationship with the original conception web of documents is really the core of how the web works today. It enables the dynamic experience of data and documents that we expect and encounter every time we open a browser. The web is more than just an organically organized global file cabinet; it is an enormous network of theatrical data exhibitions that personally interact with each visitor, exhibitions that communicate with each other in non-trivial ways.

The web’s origin and history are inscribed in its practice today. The exhibitions we call websites are built on top of original document structure of the web, and the friction between what the web was and what it has become is keenly felt by those of us who develop on its platform. Programming for browsers, which we can more technically call the Document Object Model (or the DOM), is a matter of negotiating many minute updates to an HTML document in response to a range of events, all computed against the dimension of time².

Libraries like jQuery emerged to provide ways of managing these updates and manipulations, and they were soon followed by frameworks like AngularJS and Backbone, which offer extensive suites replete with solutions to the common and immediate complexities of developing with the DOM in Javascript. Equipped with these tools, developers were able to build softer, warmer single-page-application flesh around the web’s document bones. The experience of HTML in the DOM grew into the performative and interactive showcase we know and adore day-to-day in our quotidian rituals.

But as applications like Facebook became larger and larger, and increasingly complex, developers discovered that it was very hard to keep track of everything that was being updated on each event. Developers found that in attempting to change one thing, often something that seemed simple and straightforward, they would routinely break some other part of the system. In more complex applications, it was difficult to know which events were being triggered where, or how exactly data was being fed into the DOM.

In this era of complexity, unidirectional data flow was born, pomaded by a sexy midwife, React. The basic idea of unidirectional data flow is explicitly simple: data should flow in one direction conceptually for the developer, so that it is easy to keep track of. Updates to the DOM ought to be administed one at a time, in a traceable way, and preferably from one single source of truth, so that the range of updates and insertions are transparent to the developer. Parts of the DOM should not be able to reach out to a distant cousin of the DOM and change it without telling anything else. React is a very popular library that breaks up the view layer of an application into citizens that listens for changes from some authority, and it calls these citizens components.

A React component is rendered with a set of input values which are called props. Each time the props for a component changes, the entire component re-renders. In other words, a React component is a UI expression of the data that is passed into it. When the input data changes, the function is called again with the new data. React components can call functions that make or request changes to an external store, from which they then in turn receive their props. Data flows in one direction, and can always be intercepted and explicitly monitored in the application state³.

React’s conceptual simplicity is made performant through some very clever way of hacking the DOM’s core architecture. Because the DOM was designed to render entire documents, it is not really very good at making incremental changes to those documents, and therefore as developers we want to limit DOM updates to those that are necessary; we don’t want to overwrite parts of the DOM with nodes to refresh entire components in the DOM when only a small part of the UI has changed.

React affords developers the conceptual benefit of full component re-rendering, but also only makes necessary changes to the DOM by using a virtual DOM. When a component’s props change, the virtual DOM handles the component re-render in a less computationally expensive virtual arena, and then uses a clever diffing algorithm to determine which specific updates need to be made in the real DOM. This wonderful abstraction mediates between the developer’s experience of application development and the DOM’s anatomical requirements.

A core contributor to React’s popularity in the web development community is the canon of state management solutions that is conceived alongside React itself; architectures for the external store to which React components subscribe and from which they receive their props. The most popular of these at the moment is Redux, a library written by Dan Abramov inspired by techniques in Elm and other functional programming languages. Redux offers a very robust architecture for managing the external store in React applications.

Redux popularity skyrocketed after Dan Abramov demonstrated what was possible in the way of developer tools—explicit changelogs, hot reloading, and even time travel. Redux became the most popular Flux implementation, Facebook’s suggested solution for managing state in React applications. One of the keys to Redux’s popularity is its extensibility. It is an architecture for state management, not an already constructed building you have to drop into your application. Managing updates to the store from asynchronous data sources, for example, is not a prebuilt capability in Redux, it rather has several possible solutions.

React’s ethos of hacking existing anatomy to ease cognitive burden for the developer is unsurprisingly popular in the developer community, as it makes programming applications easier and, more importantly, more fun. This ethos has found its way to mobile development as well, in React Native. React Native allows you to write native mobile applications for iOS and Android in Javascript using React, by running a Javascript thread alongside the native language (Objective C for iOS and Java for Android). These threads communicate with each other through a bridge, over which data and event notifications are passed. This allows React Native to leverage the perfomance of native UI views and code for computationally expensive operations, and to program less expensive application logic on the Javascript thread through React. There are potential benefits here for developer cognitive burden and experience, just as in React for the web.

React and its contingent libraries are most interesting to me not as ways to improve iteration or application stabilty in industry software development (the standard evangelizations of React), but as a robust and elegant philosophy for dealing with complexity. If there is anything I can believe in, any concept of ‘productivity’ that seems worth striving for, it is simplifying complexity. This is one of the reasons I like programming; programming is the practice of using abstraction to manage complex anatomies, often otherwise unassailable. This is possibly the imperative of all thought we inscribe as meaningful—science, philosophy, political science, literature, music—it all looks to ‘explain’: to rethink complex anatomies via ‘simpler’ abstractions, thought configurations that are more sympathetic with the current river of our consciousness⁴.

Using NixOS

2025-01-27T00:00:00+00:00

Using NixOS

My NixOS configuration

For about a year now, the operating system that I use on my daily driver has been NixOS. I moved to the distribution from Arch Linux, as I was sold on the idea of having all my dependencies declaratively specified, and thus no longer having to mess with stateful package management (apt-get update, pacman -Syu, etc). I was one or two years into grad school, and off the back of working professionally with Terraform as declarative infrastructure for cloud systems. How great would it be to have something similar to provision all the software on a desktop machine, I reasoned. The rumours that that Nix and NixOS were useful in theory but prohibitively arcane in practice didn't dissuade me. If anything, I thought, I would be able to learn more about Linux through incorporating the ecosystem in my day-to-day life as a grad student¹.

These visions of perfect declarative management haven't completely come to fruition, but they also haven't been completely blown out of the water. It has taken me a year or so of idly hacking away at my configuration when I have wanted to install something new to finally begin to feel as though I have a handle on the language and the ecosystem. I am still not totally sure what the best resources for learning more are. Mileage varies in the official documentation, and there seem to be both a wide range of use cases of Nix, and a wide range of parenthetical softwares.

This range of parenthetical software made NixOS especially difficult for me to adopt, as I was consistently unsure as to whether the complexity that I was trying to scale was inherent to Nix, or whether it was embedded in additional tooling that I had unknowingly chosen to adopt. Let me count (a few of) the ways that I feel my NixOS journey was made difficult.

NixOS

The first fundamental confusion for me was the boundary between Nix, the language and package management ecosystem, and NixOS, the Linux distribution that is configured by way of Nix. It was the idea of NixOS that drew me to the ecosystem– as I wanted declarative management for my operating system software specifically– but I realise now that I probably would have been better to have started off by understanding pure Nix well and good, and only moving to NixOS once I felt competent there. This is because NixOS works by way of Nix (of course), but there are also peculiarities of NixOS that one should not confuse with the peculiarities of Nix. What arguments are passed down to which files in a modularized NixOS configuration become a lot easier to understand if one has a clear mental model of how NixOS builds upon Nix.

Note to past self: build a good mental model of pure Nix before hacking together your first NixOS configuration.

Home Manager

As I built my NixOS configuration by referencing an active installation of Arch Linux, I made the relatively unconscious decision early on that I should install softwares at a user level, rather than at system level. Relatively unconscious, because I am not sure why exactly I made this decision, and had I thought it through a little more carefully, I would have realised that this decision also brought an unnecessary amount of complexity into the picture.

Home manager is a community package² for NixOS that makes it possible to install software in a configuration on a per-user basis. It also exposes a different and higher level of abstraction through which to install software than the 'standard' approach when working in the Nix ecosystem, which is to reference packages in a repository with Nix-built artifacts, the primary one being Nixpkgs. As an example, with Home manager one can install the fish shell as follows:

programs.fish = {
  enable = true;
  interactiveShellInit = ''
    set fish_greeting # disable greeting
  '';
  plugins = [
    { name = "bass"; src = pkgs.fishPlugins.bass.src; }
  ];
};

In addition to the enable option, programs installed thus also provide a custom set of attributes that are configured via Home Manager through which one can customize the installation.

One could also, however, install the fish shell directly from Nixpkgs (in a configuration.nix file) as follows:

environment.systemPackages = [
  fish
];

The benefit of Home manager's approach here is the configuration optionality. In addition to the basic availability of fish on my system (the result of both approaches), I can also declare a string that will become its basic configuration file (interactiveShellInit) and a list of plugins that will be installed alongside the shell itself.

On one level, this is great: all my configuration is in one place. Home manager has an option search where one can check whether a package exists, and what options it provides. In theory, if the documentation of options isn't clear, one can go to the module declaration to try to reverse engineer which option will result in the desired outcome. In practice, though, I've found it cumbersome to do this effectively, especially if I'm new to the software in question and don't have an intimate understanding of its configuration options.

The main issue is that raw NixOS doesn't provide an obvious way to manage dotfiles. Home manager fills that void by providing a level of abstraction on top of Nixpkgs that incorporates a sense of the current user (and hence paths to the user's configuration files); but this additional level of abstraction is constructed in such a way that it is not always clear how to map 'configuring new software X based on its documentation' to 'configuring new software X declaratively in Home manager'. (This is not even to mention the more complicated case in which new software X is not supported by Home manager, in which case one would have to add the new module to Home manager upstream, or work out a workaround.)

In summary, though Home manager is still useful for me due to its dotfile management utilities, it confused me early on, as I didn't always have a clear notion of whether I was installing modules via Nixpkgs or via Home Manager, and whether a configuration option was provided by Home Manager or by NixOS.

Note to past self: When installing new software, work first with a basic installation from Nixpkgs before trying to find an appropriate module in Home manager.

Nix Flakes

Flakes are kind of like a new version for Nix, much like Python 3 is when compared to Python 2. The overall use case is the same, but the tooling is (arguably) better with Flakes, and there are some features (such as pinned versions in a flake.lock) that you fundamentally don't have in vanilla Nix without flakes. I personally adopted flakes when I first started using NixOS for no particularly good reason; just because they seemed like the 'modern' way to work with Nix, a recipe for getting in over one's head with the Nix ecosystem, as has come to be the central theme of this post. As with Home manager, I don't regret the decision to use Flakes exactly, as I do think that they were and are useful for my use case. Like Home manager, however, choosing to adopt them steepened the learning curve in a way that probably could have been avoided had I had a better sense of why they were useful for me.

I think of flakes as essentially a different and more integrated way to write Nix configurations. They're not actually fundamentally necessary for my NixOS configuration, as it's not primarily a 'library' that is intended to be used by others: it's really just a standalone software that serves a purpose for me. Where flakes come in handy for me is when I am writing Nix files in association with particular coding projects, where I want a development environment, a build process, and some set of artifacts that are produced from the project. For more on how NixOS with Flakes works in this context, I refer the reader to the excellent section of the open source book NixOS in Production, ``The big picture".

Note to past self: don't use flakes with your NixOS configuration; learn about them afterwards and apply it to dev environments.

Using two ReMarkables

2024-11-06T00:00:00+00:00

Using two ReMarkables

I'm a PhD student currently, which means that I spend most of my work life reading, or thinking about what I should read next. The timelines for my reading schedules range from what I need to read before a class or meeting next week, to what I ought to read for a paper or research trajectory that won't have any meaningful check-in until next year.

I bought the reMarkable 1 when it first came out in 2017, and was a pre-order customer of the reMarkable 2 when it dropped in 2020. When reMarkable announced and released the new Paper Pro this September, 2024, I had ordered it within an hour. This is partially due to the undeniable fetish that I have for tech, software and hardware alike, being a tinkerer and early adopter by nature. It is also because I resonate deeply with reMarkable's vision and design ethos, which is to recreate the tactile and organizational experience of paper in an electronic tablet. As I often remark to observers when they ask about my tablet(s), the reMarkable will not replace your iPad, and therein lies its beauty. It is at its best when you are jotting down notes as if it is paper, or reading and annotating a PDF or EPUB in place of having a printed copy in front of you.

ReMarkable's exquisite execution of this design imperative, to keep the thing as 'just' or 'better paper', has consequences in a digital workflow. Switching between a PDF being read/annotated and a notebook in which notes/thoughts are being transcribed is not the smoothest experience. One has to swipe down with two fingers from the top of the device (a somewhat error-prone operation given the e-ink's diminished responsiveness when compared to a touch-screen smart phone), select the notebook to switch to, and then wait a second or so for it to open. This is arguably a software deficiency that could be improved, but the fundamental problem can be articulated in terms of the 'better paper' design ethos: a reMarkable tablet is only one piece of paper at any given time. Switching between a notebook and a book therefore naturally has some overhead.

Given my already admitted fetish for new tech, I therefore use two reMarkable tablets in my current paper- and book-reading setup. The new Paper Pro is the tablet on which I view the paper or book that is being read. The bigger screen makes a huge difference when it comes to double-column papers, and the color display means that I can employ a range of highlighters to give a better map of the document when I return to it. (Yellow is for generally important phrases, blue for definitions of terms or critical concepts, and green for terms or references that I want to look up after reading.)

My reMarkable 2 sits to the right of my Paper Pro, and serves chiefly as a notebook where I write down important points as I read. This notebook is my main 'map' of the paper or book that I return to if I want to understand what I figured as important while I was reading. I employ a similar colorized strategy for notes, where black is my default color, and blue indicates a thought in apostrophe or otherwise adjacent idea. Green is for references or things to look up later, and red is reserved for particularly important ideas or notes to self.

Thoughts about what I should read or do next often occur to me as I read, and so I use a notebook on my reMarkable 2 as an inbox for "todo" items that occur to me throughout the day. In the month or so that I've been using the Paper Pro, I've found that it's not (yet) as responsive as the reMarkable 2, presumably as the team hasn't yet optimized the device's software through bug reports and iteration. So the reMarkable 2 serves as my notebook, but also as the device where I can context-switch to jotting down a TODO.

My one other major nit with the reMarkable is the lack of a fluid way to flick to endnotes or references in a document, especially in PDFs that don't have the relative links embedded. Even where the relative link does exist, meaning that the tablet allows you to click on the endnote or reference and jump directly to the page, the return link disappears after 3 or 4 seconds, which is almost never long enough to read the endnote or scrutinize the bibliography entry. In the event that I go over time, the link back disappears and I need to manually find my way back to the page that I was on.

When the link doesn't exist, the best way to navigate I've found is to swipe up with one finger from the bottom of the screen, and then drag the slider to the approximate point in the document where one understands the relevant endnote to be. Not only is this endnote discovery error-prone and relatively slow; the same issue of returning emerges. The document slider retains a reference to the page that one comes from, but it times out in 3 or 4 seconds just like the backlink for endnotes. Moreover, if one doesn't jump directly to the correct page for the reference (which is almost always the case, given that the slide operation is approximate unless one directly keeps track of page numbers), then one similarly loses the reference to the original page.

Having a second reMarkable gloriously solves some of these problems, as I can use my reMarkable 2 to view the endnotes and references as I read on my Paper Pro. This has the added benefit that, when referencing endnotes, one often wants to retain the last page that one viewed an endnote on, as the next one will follow in sequence.

I am fully aware that having two reMarkables is not a particularly low cost solution to my usability issues. But because of the aforementioned fetish, I had both tablets in any case, and have found that bringing the two of them with me to a cafe greatly enhances my productivity. The experience of reading with one tablet and note-taking with a second has allowed me to conclusively leave my laptop at home in most cases, as I would previously take notes in a text editor on it while reading the text on my reMarkable. Because the full reading/note-taking experience is now all in reMarkable(s), I am much less likely to get distracted and idly open up email or a browser tab, as I disconnect my phone from the Internet when deep concentration is needed.

What is 'modern culture and media'?

2024-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

What is ‘modern culture and media’?

As the new year has now turned around, I am (once again) promising myself that I will write something more regularly. I am entering the latter half of my third year as a PhD student at Brown University in the department of Modern Culture and Media– a department that, unless you happen to be invested in the landscape of a particular kind of institutionalized humanities in the U.S., requires some context.

The department is generally described, and generally describes itself, as a "media studies" program. The discipline of media studies approaches the question of so-called 'media' from a wide berth of lenses. Rather than working in a specifically productivist manner towards improving existing media or imagining new forms of media, media studies is a disciplinarily polyglot designation in which scholars research and theorize the effects of media in society.

Some media studies programs branch off or out from English departments, in that they treat more modern forms of media critically in much the same way a literary theorist or commentator might treat a text. Though departments and scholars will stretch themselves to stress that they work on 'many' or even 'all' forms of media, the moniker 'media studies' is usually a not-so-veiled reference to film. Film studies emerged in the late 20th century, as the medium was popularised and academicized: but as the recognition that it is possible to read more than just film as 'texts', many programs sought to rebrand from 'film studies' to 'media studies'.

Though 'media' originally referred specifically to technological, man-made media (as this was the arguably narrow-sighted focus of the first 'media studies' scholars, i.e. McLuhan and Kittler), in recent years the berth of media's lane has become broader. At least since John Durham Peters' 2015 book The Marvelous Clouds, it has come to be acknowledged that we can sensibly talk about almost anything, material or immaterial, as media: the clouds: the Earth, the Internet, animals, architecture, and so on. This opening from media-as-technology to media-as-everything is not dissimilar to the shift from departments of film studies to departments of media studies: while the former designated a relatively limited field of study, the latter presumes to sidestep those strictures and open out into a more collaborative, more inclusive sense of itself.

This rebranding has opened up a pandora's box of opportunity in media studies departments. Freed from the constraints of any particular methodological or disciplinary backbone, 'media' is now an invertebrate term stretched every which way. Do you write books that interpret TV shows through a Marxist lens? That's media studies. Do you study the political effects of radio broadcasts between U-boats in World War II? That's media studies. Are you working on the multispecies relation between dolphins and kelp? That's media studies.

Though these 'opening outs' almost certainly originate in a motion on the part of many scholars towards a more inclusive academy, they fall somewhat sweetly into the pockets of an administrative desire to collateralize humanities departments under one big roof. The "humanities" are increasingly imagined as one, big department, rather than a collection of atomised disciplinary inquiries. In other words, the utopian rhetoric of the 'collaborative humanities' often effects the defunding and deterioration of humanistic pursuit under the guise of modernizing (and even sometimes 'decolonizing') the academy.¹ Departments were once conceived as shelters from the storms of executive profiteering, from the need to find immediate 'cash value' (i.e. quantifiable according to the wayward metrics of the neoclassical economic imagination) in certain forms of literary, philosophical, or scientific study.

In 1991, a graduate of the Semiotics program at Brown made a significant gift to that program. The Semiotics program was an undergraduate specialization formed in the English department in 1974 in response to student interest.² As such, Semiotics combined with the program of Modern Literature and Society to become the department of Modern Culture and Media, then and now committed specifically to "projects designed to promote and contribute to scholarship and production dealing with theories, practices and histories of modes of representation as they engage mass mediated culture."³

So Modern Culture and Media– or MCM, as it is colloquially known– is something of a typical media studies department in that it originated in the theory of language and literature in an English department; but now encompasses a range of scholarly pursuits related to media of many forms.

I heard about the department as an undergraduate through the work of one its previous faculty members, Wendy Chun, who was a Professor in MCM until 2020. Chun works with the training of a literary theorist (her Ph.D. from the Princeton English department) to theorise and critique digital media. I studied Computer Science in my undergrad (alongside a smattering of seminars in German, where the media philosophy was being taught at my institution), and had come to really enjoy coding and learning about software as an intellectual pursuit. Because Chun was at Brown, MCM had a reputation for literary and philosophical studies about computing in general and software in particular. (Though Chun is no longer at Brown, many current graduate students and faculty still work in the orbit of computing as media in some form.)

I started a PhD program in MCM at Brown in September 2021, and am currently working towards my field examinations; which I will sit in September 2024. Next up: a primer on my fields and current course of study.

Why we should give feedback to students

2024-01-29T00:00:00+00:00

Why we should give feedback to students

Today's work doesn't fit on one of my three tracks, as it consisted of grading papers from a course for which I was a TA (Teaching Assistant) in the Fall semester, MCM 0150: Introduction to Modern Culture and Media. I submitted final grades for these papers for the students in my section in late December, but I had (until today) neglected to return students their final papers, annotated with comments. Though returning these papers is not something that the course's professors nor the University would strictly enforce, as from their perspective a final grade is all that needs to be formally booked, it feels churlish to not do so. As best I can, I am trying to avoid the commonplace duplicity of suggestion in academic life, in which professors consciously or otherwise suggest that they are "always" happy and available to review work, but then rarely actually get back to students when they receive it. I recognize that this attitude is produced by the increasingly neoliberal labour politics of the academy, in which the boundary between work and life is supposed to exist only for those who are not intellectually or emotionally equipped to deal with their collateralising. As an aspiring academic, in other words, one feels one must be open to be intellectually or pedagogically available to all opportunities, especially those that are not obligatory and/or are unpaid. To refuse these would be, to use a phrase from my duologic life as a software engineer, to signal oneself as a bad 'cultural fit' for the academy.

I am against comporting oneself to such suggestions for their own sake, or for the sake of 'staying with the trouble'. But giving time to students is an undertaking that deserves a different category, not least because it can often entail a rejection of the strictures and norms of the academy's labour expectations, rather than succumbing to them. My interest in properly attending to papers students send to me is really more a reflection of the experience that I have had as an undergraduate student, as a working person, and also as a graduate student of struggling to find friends or fellows who will actually read and discuss academic work. There is a lot of posturing regarding interest in reading groups, extensions of seminar, and so on; but very few who want to make good on the promise that they will read something together, or offer comments on a work in progress.

There is of course an element of comfortability and community at play here, and I am not suggesting that everyone ought to be comfortable reading everything with everyone, or that anyone in particular should be comfortable reading any particular text with me, of all people. But it is somewhat surprising that in a graduate body of nearly 3000, at least a third of which are notionally committed to some form of close reading as an occupational hazard, it is not straightforward to find others who want to make time to work through texts. As an undergraduate at Princeton, I felt much the same. (I effectively failed to start an extracurricular book club within a group of people who had 'literary' inclinations.) During a stint working in Silicon Valley, I somewhat hilariously proposed to read Lampedusa's novel Il Gattopardo (in the English translation of course) with aspiring tech aesthetes in an entity titled 'Club Book'. After the first session (7pm after work on a Monday), it was clear that most attendants' idea of a book club was substantiated much more by alcohol consumption than it was reading or discussion. As a researcher working at a human rights research group in London, I semi-successfully initiated an after-work reading group called A.R.G which ran more than 20 sessions; but even here there were really only one or two other regularly committed attendees.

The aesthetic of humanities at universities like Brown tells us that reading, writing, and thinking critically is important; yet the apparatus of attention around those activities (especially when they are not directly legitimised by institutions with names, or professors with titles) is often quite alienating. Perhaps this is a luxury unique to the Ivy Leagues, which are admittedly the only schools at which I have formally pursued courses of study. Indeed, many of my best experiences within these institutions have been with professors or students who have spent significant time at public institutions, in the U.S. or elsewhere.

So I spent three or four hours today annotating papers the grades for which I have already submitted.

Writing Academic Essays

2025-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Writing Academic Essays

As an undergraduate student in the US, I feel like I never properly learned how to structure an academic essay. This was no doubt partially due to my being a bad student who never asked the right questions; but I do think that there is something in the structure of an interdisciplinary liberal arts education in the U.S. in the 21st century that regretfully avoids giving students strong guidelines on how to write a coherently argumentative essay. The following are a set of principles that influence how I have come to write essays– which is to say that they might be totally inadequate for many forms of writing, and don't necessarily stand up as guidelines for getting writing accepted anywhere for publication. They are rather my own reflections on what I have come to see as 'good' academic work, i.e. work that I find valuable and meaningful in its own right, regardless of where/how it is published.

Have a thesis statement

This is an almost brazenly obvious point, but it continues to surprise me how much writing I read where I cannot seem to make a clear argument out. A thesis statement is a sentence that can be formatted as an 'I argue that…' phrase. There are good arguments (defensible, well-evidenced, offers some bearing on something important) and bad arguments (unfalsifiable, shoddily evidenced or under-substantiated, apparently correct but unimportant).

Each section and paragraph of the essay should service your argument

If the relationship between a paragraph or section of your essay to your thesis statement is not clear, then you should provide orienting notes so that the reader can follow along. For example, 'In order to show that [argument], it will be instructive first to look at [content in this section] to establish [the basis for a dimension of the argument that I will go on to outline]'. Tidbits or references that are not directly in service of an essay's argument should either go to a footnote ('Though it does not bear directly on my argument here, …'), or should not be included in the essay.

Start with a clear presentation of one concept or object

A thesis statement is often composed of terms or objects that the essay will mobilize in a particular way. It is important to show your reader how you understand these terms, a demonstration that can but doesn't necessarily need to reference theorists or texts that use the term in similar ways to how you understand them. For example, if your argument is that 'cycling shoes are a commodity that epitomize late capitalism', it is normal and perhaps advisable to structure your essay according to a progressive unpacking of the terms in your argument: 'I first define cycling shoes as a variant of shoe that first appeared in the 60s… I then indicate that a commodity is an exchangeable object by way of Marx's theory of the commodity in Capital… and finally I argue that late capitalism started in the 70s and persists until today'. A writing advisor once told me that all good essays in both undergrad and grad school are simply extended detailings of singularly enigmatic terms ('late capitalism'), and I am not sure that they are wrong.

Don't try to predict the future

I don't know if it is the increasing instrumentalization of the humanities by 'the sciences' in service of solving their ethical conundrums or something else in the academic air, but predictive arguments about the future seem on the rise. Arguments of the structure 'I argue that [X] will happen because [Y]' are generally on shaky ground (I would argue). Even if you are convinced that you know how something will play out, it is almost always better to temper the tone of your argument to something a bit more moderate, i.e. 'I argue that [X historical or philosophical concept] reveals something important about the [current situation of Y]'. Admittedly, this tempered format is less falsifiable, as it doesn't presume to know what will happen next in some area of social life. But if you want to write an essay that will withstand the test of time, you should be very careful about what straightforward predictions you make.

Provide the reader with insight they would not obviously get by reading your essay's sources

This is the difference between an essay that simply represents other arguments and one that makes its own. Representing and interpreting other arguments is an important part of academic writing, and you should not shy away from doing the work of explaining how you understand another text or writer in your essays. Often this is the most important work in an essay, i.e. showing the reader how you understand other texts. But your argument should not be a simple addition of the texts together (argument X + argument Y = my argument). You should rather provide the reader with something that they could not obviously get simply by reading your sources; i.e. to show that a dimension of argument X can be better understood by taking into consideration the claims in argument Y.

Don't assume that the reader is familiar with the texts/sources you are discussing

Good writing does not assume that a reader has read the texts and sources under examination carefully. Rather, it shows the reader the important aspects of these texts through careful interpretation in service of an argument. If my argument is that Freud's method of interpreting dreams allows us to read tweets as emanations of the unconscious (an argument of which I would be highly suspicious), you should not assume that your reader has read Freud or has any clear notion of what he means by the unconscious. You should rather present a reading of what you understand Freud to mean when he talks about the unconscious in service of showing its relevance to tweets.

A greater number of citations doesn't always amount to stronger evidence

Citations are an important part of academic writing, as they show that your argument is situated within a body of work and that you are not writing 'off the cuff' with no idea of what has previously been said about your object or subject. But citations should also be employed judiciously. As a general rule of thumb, if you do not go on to offer a direct interpretation of a sentence in terms of its structure or word choice, then it is almost always better to paraphrase the original point (while still providing the appropriate page reference from which you drew it). Paraphrasing is a form of interpretation; it shows how you understand a text or object, and what you see as important about it for the sake of your argument. You should not drop in extra citations for the sake of it, or simply to show that you know about the existence of a text or book (except occasionally in a footnote, if you want to flag that some text exists but is not being addressed or bears some tangential relevance to your argument).

Writing in Typst | Hacking on Neovim with Claude

2025-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

Writing in Typst | Hacking on Neovim with Claude

What is a ‘good’ writing system?

I have been incrementally hacking on my writing environment for some time now, since at least 2013 when I started seriously using computers in undergrad. A couple of years ago, I migrated to Orgmode as the best markup syntax for my needs, and wrote a post about how Emacs and Orgmode serviced my writing needs.

Here’s a summary of that post and the core tenets of what I consider an acceptable writing environment, parsed out over the five or so years I’ve been experimenting with one through grad school:

Flexible, powerful and distraction-free. In short, this means that the environment needs to be an extension to a modal editor in the terminal. I started using a modal text editor around 2018, and use a range of ergonomic keyboards in funky ways that make using a mouse undesirable in most cases. (The web browser is the one environment where I still get some mileage out of a mouse. I do a lot with keyboard shortcuts via Vimium, but there are still some contexts where it’s just quicker or more comfortable to use a mouse.) One of the main reasons that I settled on Orgmode rather than, say, Markdown at the time was because of its more standardized bibliographic management.
Non-proprietary and sane markup format. Microsoft Word documents and Google Docs are great for a lot of things, but I refuse to rely on either of them as a primary format for all of the writing I do, as their formats are too hard to parse (to write custom software for) and bound to Microsoft’s and Google’s ecosystems respectively. The ability to run Unix-style commands on a simple markup format from a terminal to search and replace, for example, is an essential. Writing documents in a plain-text markup language also gives me the safety of knowing that, if it really came down to it, I could write my own parser and compilers. My writing archive shouldn’t strictly rely on some company’s infrastructure to host, search, or otherwise make use of the thought it contains. Using such a format also means that cross-platform editing is made simpler and possible. (I run linux mostly, but still regrettably use Android as my phone’s operating system.)
Multi-format export. Most of the world’s documents are still PDF. There’s no getting away from needing to export writing as PDF in many cases– for e-readers like the reMarkable that I use, or for submission to conferences. But we increasingly read writing on a web page of some sort, and so I also need a workflow to export fully functional documents to HTML and CSS, too. Other formats that are interesting if not essential include some kind of presentation file (PowerPoint, or better: just a website that has slideshow-like interactions), Markdown for rich formatting to copy somewhere, and plain text.

I have up until very recently used Orgmode as my markup language of choice, exported them to PDF with latex, and exported them to HTML with pandoc. But I am very attached to the Neovim ecosystem for my code editing and writing, and so it was clunky to open up an Emacs installation (that I barely understood) exclusively to edit Orgmode. So I switched to editing Orgmode in Neovim along with everything else, using plugins and custom functions to get towards the writing experience that I wanted.

This has actually worked surprisingly well, but it has some sharp edges. One of the more significant ones is that any time I want to produce anything more complicated than basic, formatted text with citations and footnotes– for all of which pandoc transformations produce reasonable output in both HTML and PDF– I need to start embedding LaTeX into Orgmode, and deal with the LaTeX toolchain / dependency management in order to compile a PDF. Similarly, if I want to produce an interactive HTML document, I need to embed the source code directly in Orgmode and ensure that the export process handles dependencies and the like appropriately.

Some of this is unavoidable. If I want to run custom Javascript in a website that is well beyond the expressive capacities of a markup language, at some point I just want to be able to write Javascript. But what I found frustrating about my Orgmode / LaTeX / HTML workflow is that there wasn’t any reasonable way to work towards extending the markup language in some ways, unless I was willing to start developing my own bespoke flavor of Orgmode plus plus. I also don’t particularly like wrestling with the LaTeX ecosystem, because– and this is hardly controversial to say– LaTeX has a lot of bloat. What I wanted was a more extensible system which had saner defaults.

Enter: Typst

A few months ago, I started seriously considering typst as a potential replacement for LaTeX. At the very least, I thought, it would be more fun to wrestle with a modern ecosystem when struggling to produce some custom table or figure in my output PDF, as typst has a layout system that uses terms that are a lot more intuitive to me than the black magic of laying out LaTeX documents.

It just so happened, however, that I started to follow typst development more closely at a time when the final touches to the basic foundations of HTML export, such as footnotes and bibliography, were just about to be added to the upstream. So I made a few contributions to spirit it along, and started more serious experimentation using typst as a unified way to produce both PDF and HTML in my writing environment. Pandoc can convert to and from typst, so I originally intended to keep writing documents in Orgmode and then transiently convert them to typst in order to produce PDF and HTML both. But I quickly found that the typst syntax natively accommodates all of the features that I make use of regularly in Orgmode such as citations, footnotes, headings, links and text decoration– and then some.

So why not write my blogs, papers, and documents directly in typst? I considered the critical features of my Neovim / Orgmode writing environment that I didn’t want to abandon:

Shortcuts for markup. The nvim-orgmode plugin makes writing Orgmode in Neovim pleasurable, providing shortcuts to insert a link and basic text decoration while composing.
Citation and link picking. Though I’ve gone without it for a few months for reasons that are immaterial here, I used to have a shortcut to bring up a fuzzy finder for all of my bibliography entries to easily insert a citation. The same fuzzy finder would make it easy to link to local files (in a website, for example, to link to other posts).
Document folding. The ability to fold away all of the text beneath a heading is very useful when navigating larger documents, as it helps me to compartmentalize writing tasks and organize longer documents such as a dissertation chapter.
Export shortcuts. I have customized my Neovim editor so that I can easily export the active Orgmode document (through the pandoc and LaTeX processes described above). Personally, I don’t feel that I need a real-time live preview of the document as I type, as I generally just want to check that it looks reasonable at certain junctures in the writing process, rather than continuously.

The one other feature of Orgmode that I have come to rely on heavily is its TODO functionality. I typically only use this in notes related to projects or tasks more generally, however, and not in documents that are intended for publication such as a paper or blog post.

Enter: Claude Code

At this point in the past of a new writing technology’s prospecting, I would go searching for a Neovim plugin for typst and hope that it provides features that satisfy a majority of these requirements. I’ve spent a fair bit of time tinkering with my init.lua, the entrypoint for customizing Neovim, but I’ve never had the time nor interest to sit down and write a plugin from scratch.

LLMs, of course, are at time of writing taking the coding world by storm. I have started moderately relying on Claude Code when writing some– though certainly not all– kinds of code. As is well-known by now, Claude is especially good at scaffolding hacky scripts or modules from scratch, when no large codebase or domain-specific knowledge needs to be kept in context. A Neovim plugin, I realized this morning, is a pretty ideal domain for LLM-assisted coding. The ‘codebase’ is often just a single configuration file, and the domain-specific knowledge is the Neovim editor itself, a well-documented and expansively customized software for which there are many examples on Reddit.¹

So I fired up Claude Code earlier this afternoon, and– fast-forward an hour or two– I have a fully functional writing environment for Typst that essentially has feature-parity with my Orgmode environment. Moreover, my Neovim config is now much more comprehensibly modularized; and I have a tried-and-tested method for extending it without needing to spend days learning the ins-and-outs of Neovim’s API; and some bugbears in my NixOS config were eliminated while I was at it. (If that last bit means nothing to you, count yourself lucky!)

My new writing environment

I use treesitter for syntax highlighting, and Typst already looks pretty good with it. I get function completion by integrating an LSP for the format, for which I’m using tinymist.

As I noted above, I haven’t had dynamic link or citation insertion for some time. It was one of the features that got lost in my move from writing Orgmode in Emacs to writing it in Neovim. I use telescope.nvim for general search and file-picking when coding in Neovim, and I figured that I could use a customized pop-up to dynamically pick available citations from the relevant BibTeX file, too. After a few minutes of vibe-engineering, I have the following:

When I am writing in Typst, and I want to bring in a reference, I can open a panel. Note that the search is full-text, not just using the reference ID. I also have a shortcut to specify which bib file to use through the #bibliography function in Typst. I can insert links in the same way as citations, both references files relative to the current one (blog posts on the same site), and external links. Both the citation and link insertion work either by highlighting text and annotating it, or to insert new links/citations. I also have a similar shortcut to add footnotes.

This is pretty functional now for generic writing!

Future work

Typst isn’t ideal for producing fully-featured websites currently, as HTML export is experimental. Even when it becomes better supported, the project is– understandably, given its priority supporting PDF– taking a relatively conservative approach to HTML generation. Anything that doesn’t have a robust analog in a PDF document, such as videos and hover panels, will have to be ‘embedded’ in Typst with HTML/CSS/JS, rather than being written in Typst syntax. The current experience isn’t much worse than Orgmode with Pandoc, though, and the Typst roadmap promises that it will become much better in the relatively short-term future.

There is a longstanding issue that I’ve had with links in Orgmode that I haven’t yet tackled with Typst. When I’m writing, I like hyperlinked text to appear as it will in the final document, i.e. without the underlying URL on display. When editing any particular line, though, it’s better that all of the links are ‘expanded’ to their full source syntax (#link("...")[...]) so that it’s feasible to edit the markup without requiring any fancy shortcuts. The effective shortening of lines that occurs when hiding these URLs results in different Neovim line-wrapping requirements, with which the Orgmode plugin I have been using does a bad job, giving ugly linebreaks in documents with long links. This link presentation will likely be the next feature I add to my Neovim Typst plugin.

I’ll add to the capabilities in my Neovim config files, and might eventually release a separate plugin if the features become significant/mature enough.

Writing Setup

2024-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

Writing Setup

Introduction

A slight digression from my regular train of thought to put to paper the environment in which I write these logs; which is also the environment in which I have written academic papers for the past year or so.

I write entirely within a terminal-emulated version of Doom Emacs, exporting to either PDF or HTML documents as is necessary. This environment supports all of my writing - papers (single or double column), abstracts, syllabi, blogs, wikis, meeting notes, etc. I even write my slides in Emacs, which I can export as reveal.js presentations¹. The markup language I use (for all of these tasks) is Org Mode; a format that is actually the main reason I started taking notes in Emacs (being a long-time vim user for coding tasks) in the first place.

Org is a plain-text markup language like Markdown, but has extensive capacity in its syntax for things like jotting down "todo" bullets (with dates, deadlines, notes included), and as such works basically as a way to powerfully organize a whole system of notes written in it. Markdown is great as a plain-text markup language for single documents, such as READMEs, but it isn't purpose-built for organizing a whole collection of documents in the way that Org is. Apps like obsidian, roam, and notion have done a great job popularising the idea of note 'vaults' as the best way to organise thought in writing.² These apps/systems strive to serve as good interfaces for a common plain-text markup format such as Markdown; but they inevitably all have their own quirks and costs, financial or in terms of platform support, interoperability, etc. (Not to mention that Markdown itself has many variants that are not always compatible with each other.)

It is true that obsidian has a much lower learning curve that Emacs/Org Mode, as many who want a vault-like note-taking experience are familiar with Markdown (or find it easier to learn if they are not yet familiar with a markup language); but Org Mode in Emacs is a fundamentally more flexible, powerful, and more reliably free³ way to keep notes. Plus - and this is an important point for me - it works seamlessly in a terminal (rather than as an independent GUI or web app) via emacs -nw. And though Org Mode is tightly coupled with Emacs in some ways (it was originally developed as an Emacs extension by Carsten Dominik in 2003, and has been included as a major mode in every Emacs release since 2006⁴), there is nothing in principle to stop me moving to another way of interfacing with my vault of files if a better option appears or something happens to Emacs.⁵

Flexible, powerful, distraction-free

My main editing environment, as I have already noted, is Doom Emacs running in a terminal. Not only is this a distraction-free environment (I have a shortcut to turn off all notifications when I'm in a terminal) over which I have essentially full control in terms of colours, styling, etc; it also requires no context switching to bring up shell to run some basic text analysis commands such as word count, pattern finding, systematic replacement, etc. Both Doom Emacs and tmux - my preferred terminal multiplexer - have tiling window systems that allow me to easily view other notes, shells, or terminal applications for reference while writing.

This is certainly not the right setup for everyone. But for those of us who know and love the terminal, and who have already invested the time in basic proficiency in the shell-as-workstation - why use a specialized GUI app (or browser tab) for note-taking?

One essential feature of Org that I use extensively is its outlining and folding capabilities. Every line starting with one or more * characters becomes part of a tree structure that can easily be expanded and contracted like a shelf. As an example, here is one the "index" (entrypoint) documents I use for my life as a graduate student, first fully 'folded', and then partially expanded:

This folding capability means that I can keep single documents that contain enormous lists (of running meeting notes, for example), yet still fluidly navigate to the section of the document relevant at any given time. I have a general shelving structure for classes, for example, that contains top-level headings such as details, seminar, reading, assignments. Each Org document is a continual work-in-progress that is frequently edited, updated, and re-organised.

Cross-platform editing

It's also a massive boon that all of my notes, for everything, are readable plain text. Even if I am viewing them on an editor or viewer that doesn't support Org Mode, they are still fundamentally understandable, and also effectively editable. The thought occurs to me that I should rephrase the opening sentence of a paper when I'm out for a walk? Bring it up with any basic editor on my phone, retype it out. (I would normally do this in Orgro, a reader/editor that does support Org. But any app that supports viewing and editing plain-text files would work almost as well.)

I use Dropbox to synchronize my vault across devices, so while each device has its own local copy of every note - which also gives me distributed backups - changes are propagated to all other machines so long as the Dropbox daemon is running on it. Conflicts across devices are never really an issue for me, as I am only ever working on one device at a time, and no-one else is editing my note vault.⁶ In the rare case that some device has fallen behind and Dropbox presents a conflicted version, I just take the version of the note from the device that most recently edited it. For example, I just stepped away from writing this post on my desk computer (running NixOS) to my portable laptop (running Arch Linux) to write this section elsewhere; and am now seamlessly picking it up back on my desk.

Multi-format export

This section is the real reason that my system works for all my writing needs. Extensive tooling has been developed over the years that allows one to export Org documents to a range of other formats. The important ones for me are PDF and HTML, though I also occasionally use ODT (to get writing into a Google doc) and Markdown (for a README, say).

I can export any Org document as a PDF directly from Doom Emacs with a simple shortcut. The text goes to an intermediary LaTeX document, and then uses that technology to create the final PDF. Because of this intermediary LaTeX, I can use any LaTeX feature or package to format writing exported this way. Org has all of its basics built-in to the exporter - hyperlinks, bold/italics/underline, images, even its plain-text tables will end up beautiful by way of the LaTeX ecosystem.

The absolutely critical feature for my life as an aspiring academic is the support I have configured for citations. I manage all of my citations with Zotero, clipping books and articles from Google Scholar with its browser extension and then editing entries if needed in the Zotero app itself. (I don't yet manage my Zotero library with a TUI; as I haven't yet found one that works effectively. If you know of one that works well, please let me know!) I have the Better BibTeX extension for Zotero installed, which synchronises whatever I do in the app to a BibTeX file (similarly stored in Dropbox) that represents my library of possible citations when writing.

With all this in place, the magic of Doom Emacs (with the biblio module enabled) is ready to do its work. Perhaps I want to cite the following passage from Joan Copjec's first book, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists, in which she criticizes the misinterpretation of the psychoanalytic notion of 'the gaze' in much of late 20th century film theory:

The gaze is conceived as a point constructed by the textual system of the film from which the subject is obliged to look; it is the condition of the possibility of the viewer's vision. The gaze acts as a kind of key hold, the only opening into the visual pleasure the film affords.

Once I've typed or copied out the quote and noted the page number, I have a shortcut that brings up a shelf at the bottom of Emacs that presents me with all of my Zotero citations, and a fuzzy search bar. Once I've filtered/selected one, I get something like this in the plain-text of my Org document: [cite:@copjecCutting2015]. I then insert the page number so it becomes [cite:@copjecCutting2015 p.41].

When the PDF exporter comes across syntax like this in my Org note, it becomes this: (Copjec 2015, 41). If I add the line:
#+print_bibliography

anywhere in the document (as I have down the bottom of this one), the full listing of this citation will displayed, properly linked to the reference above, deduplicated (if there are multiple references to the same citation), and alphabetically ordered, etc.⁷

My system is configured to interpolate the appropriate bibliographic data for many kinds of export, most notably PDF and HTML. This allows me to seamlessly transfer source text between papers, blogs, notes, slides, and any other kind of document I have in Org. Here's this post as a PDF, generated from exactly the same source text as the document you're reading. (All the bells and whistles of how exactly the PDF looks, how images are formatted, etc are configured using commands similar to #+print_bibliography in Org. Here's the Org plain-text of this post, if you're interested in seeing a full example.)

Conclusion

As you can see from this post's sections, I also make use of Org's sectioning capabilities when writing. This is super handy for compartmentalising writing tasks and organising longer pieces, a method I use that is deeply inspired by John McPhee's plain-text writing method in Kedit.

To see some examples of what I've produced recently using this system, check out some of the entries in my grad log. An example of a PDF product is this abstract that I recently submitted to a conference.

If you're interested to know more about exactly how I set this up, refer to my Doom Emacs configuration. Though I don't actively maintain this any longer (as I now mostly manage my configuration in Nix), it should give a workable example of how to get something similar on your computer, provided you already have Emacs installed. Don't hesitate to reach out to me if you're looking for some pointers.

Bibliography

Copjec, Joan. 2015. “Cutting Up.” In Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Verso Books.

Writing weeknotes

2026-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

Writing weeknotes

These past few days I have been inspired by Anil Madhavapeddy’s and Jon Sterling’s online presence to start a practice of weeknotes. Jon’s weeknotes offer a complete example of what weeknotes are, and I also recommend his post on intellectual junkyards as an overview of how the practice emerged. As he notes in that post, there was a kind of organic friction with the ‘timeless’ design architecture of Zettelkasten note-taking that pushed him towards weeknotes:

Anil’s research group at Cambridge has a practice of internal blogging and weeknotes: pretty much everyone is writing about their work in blogs that are then syndicated into a Matrix channel. Then, discussion proceeds organically in the chat and in person. These blog posts are not the transient/fleeting notes discussed by Matuschak, because they are not scraps—they are evergreen in the ‘free’ sense of being permanent discourses on a moment in time.

I have experimented variously with the practice of academic journaling, a public-facing grad log (which turned into this very-much-not-daily blog site which consists mainly of book reviews), and time-tracking softwares such as bartib to try to organize the grand structurelessness of time that is the making and breaking of the graduate student (in the R1 American institution). These writing exercises have been valuable, and have helped me to crystallize and record aspects of my thought in ways that would have been otherwise lost to the vagaries of individual memory. Reading about Anil’s group, however, reminded me that I still do crave the self-imposed structure of a regular interval through which I can hold myself accountable, given that no-one else will in the ABD (All But Dissertation) period.¹

What I love about the idea of weeknotes and how Anil’s research group seems to work (though note that I have no first-hand experience of it, I have just been browsing their activities online) is how a set of relevant notes can be federated (using RSS, the great untapped potential/protocol on the web) to form a notes network. This network can then serve as the basis for a richer collaborative undertaking, wherein sets and subsets of individuals can follow each other’s research activities without the cumbersome ceremony of video/in-person catchups. Meetings of course still have their place: but there is much than can be shared, refined, and progressed through a practice of sharing regular writing in advance. As Jon Sterling writes, “[j]ournalling in the most progressive sense is simply blogging with a restricted audience”. Federated research journalling, through weeknotes or otherwise, is exactly the kind of collaboration that the Internet makes possible—yet there are too few of us who take advantage of this information highway out in the open, sharing our activities semi-publically online.

Weeknotes also seem to me exactly the kind of structure that could cohere an ABD graduate student’s final few years, especially one in a humanities program, meaning one with an intellectual commitment to the production of writing. As I have noted before, it has often seemed to me—perhaps counterintuitively—that there is greater intellectual generosity on offer in the computer sciences than the humanities: ‘perhaps’, as given the sharply precarious political economy of the latter in 21^st century University, this may come as no surprise to some.² The point of the Research University, to my mind, is to facilitate the production of knowledge that structurally escapes the imagination of the private sector, and to allow this knowledge to be shared in ways that challenge and subvert the vociferous demands of financial and economic reason. While I do not think that making information ‘free’ for all is a wholly sufficient measure to take against capital’s inexhaustible drive for surplus value, privatizing writing and research for the sake of a symbolic hierarchy (so as not to dilute one’s peer-reviewed writings with off-the-cuff thoughts in paltry blog sites, as the standard academic reasoning seems to go) seems a much more suspect route to take.

It also excites me that many in Anil’s group are building their own homebrew infrastructure to host their notes and research. Anil’s website runs on a system called Bushel; Jon Sterling has an impressive tool called Forester; Patrick Ferris uses Forester with a preprocessor he wrote called Graft; Michael Winston Dales has an OCaml static site generator. My weeknotes will of course be written and published using Rheo, the CLI tool I have been working on for a few months now that is part of the document infrastructure for augmented reading we are working on at the Free Computing Lab.

I intend that these weeknotes will allow me to continue developing Rheo not only as a more fully featured static site generator, but also to add a roam-style package for HTML export to allow backlinks, tagging, and many of the other features that exist in Forester and Bushel. One of my complaints about roam-style systems is that they are hard to adopt/navigate unless one is already quite familiar with the architectural ideas that support them. Thus I want to keep ‘vanilla’ Rheo un-roam-like so that it can still be used as the driver for sites like the Language of Language Machines, Screening the Subject, the Digital Theory Lab website, and the Rheo docsite.

And so, announcing my research weeknotes, started the day of this post—June 7th— which you can find publically available at:

https://weeknotes.ohrg.org

Writing with Rheo

2025-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

Writing with Rheo

You’ve no doubt already heard about Rheo, the hot new typesetting and static site engine from the Free Computing Lab (FCL). In the unlikely event that you haven’t, let me clue you in. With Rheo, you can flow a folder of Typst files into various different publishable formats, such as PDF (paged documents), EPUB (reflowable documents), and HTML (websites). It’s developed and maintained by… well, me, with contributions from colleagues at the FCL and beyond.

I’ve written before about what I need in a writing setup, and more recently about how I’ve been experimenting with Neovim and Typst towards a modern implementation of such a setup. I outline in the first post how I’ve hackily realized many aspects of my writing environment with Orgmode, Emacs, Pandoc, and LaTeX over the past few years. I don’t like LaTeX. It’s complicated, labyrinthine, and I don’t understand it. But it has always been necessary to cobble in as part of my writing system, because it is the only reasonable way to produce sophisticated layouts in PDF such as tables, maths, careful image placement, and so on.

The only reasonable way, until Typst. Typst takes the ergonomics of Markdown and combines it with the power of LaTeX, packaging it as a modern programming language with a performant and well-maintained toolchain. (You can read more about why I see Typst as the best foundation on offer for a modern hypertext writing system on the Rheo docs site.) The Typst compiler has excellent support for producing PDFs, and experimental support for producing HTML: but the syntax is designed in a way that it’s not unreasonable to demarcate sections of its syntax and find an appropriate representation in a range of different document formats.

Rheo is my first pass at how this could work. Because EPUB is essentially just HTML in a straitjacket, it wasn’t too difficult to take the HTML that Typst produces and wrap it up nicely as a valid EPUB. There are a few essentials of modern websites such as CSS that Typst isn’t scoped to provide, so Rheo bridges this gap as well. Leveraging this kind of wrapping and a little bit of thinking about how to expose packaging options to the user, Rheo is now basically functional as an open source static site engine for Typst.

In the past couple of days, I’ve ported almost all of my writing projects to Rheo. My most recent projects were already using Typst, and so for these it was as trivial as dropping them into a folder and adding a rheo.toml. A few of the websites I maintain—like this one—were largely written in Orgmode (as per my old/original writing system), so I used pandoc to get Typst from the original source and added a few post-processing steps to the conversion where pandoc wasn’t capable of capturing the syntax.

This means that I now have a writing folder on my machine which contains all of my various blogs, academic papers, my dissertation (in-progress), and job materials. Each document consists chiefly of Typst, and different subfolders contain CSS, Typst templates, and images and other assets as appropriate to the targeted formats. All of the writing in this folder is, in principle, exportable triply as an EPUB, as PDFs (combined or individual), and as webpages.

Besides being consistent, which makes it much easier to copy-and-paste writing between projects among other things, it is also all essentially editable in my text processor of choice, a customized Neovim. It is also highly interpretable by agential LLMs such as Claude Code, a product that has slowly but surely become a key part of my coding workflow. There are many justified concerns about how LLMs will impact writing in the humanities and beyond. But if you wash away the fears AI ideologues are stoking regarding the imminent automation of intelligence, a fear that I believe thoroughly misapprehends how mercurial the notion of ‘intelligence’ really is, LLMs can do amazing things in a writing workflow. In a matter of minutes, for example, I fixed some forty typos in this blog with a prompt to Claude Code as simple as ‘find typos in this blog and fix them’. Some of these typos have been around for years! Furthermore, because Typst encodes formatting in a well-documented and well-structured way, I can let an agent loose on other editorial tasks such as finding incorrect citations, inconsistently formatting book titles, and so on. All of the Typst files in my writing folder are code-like, and so I version-control them using Jujutsu and Github, which means that I can always roll back or discard any reckless changes an LLM agent might suggest.

Rheo is now working smoothly for these personal writing projects. In the coming weeks, I’m excited to attempt to port editions of a major critical journal to Rheo. This will avail the journal’s readership to new formats (webpages and EPUB in addition to the PDF that is already available), and avail the editorial team to LLM-enhanced techniques to correct spelling, formatting, and more. I expect to push a few features and fixes to Rheo through this first real case study in what it offers to the open publishing ecosystem. If you’re interested to follow along or have questions about how to use Rheo in your own projects, please join our Zulip.

Slavoj Žižek: The Sublime Object of Ideology (chapter 1, part 1)

2024-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

Slavoj Žižek: The Sublime Object of Ideology (chapter 1, part 1)

This post continues thinking regarding Zizek's 1989 book The Sublime Object of Ideology. For some thinking on the preface and introduction (in the 2nd edition published by Verso), see 24.02.05.

Here, I want to unfold the thinking in the book's first chapter, titled "How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?". This chapter sets up a constellation of thinkers and theories in connection with each other, the basis of which can be summarised in a diagram as follows:

As shown here, Marx's thought serves as the connecting tissue for Zizek between Kant and Hegel on the one side (of history), and Freud and Lacan on the other. The key term missing from this diagram (but which should be considered to effectively bracket it) is the chapter's titular one, symptom. Zizek's question is essentially this: what understanding of this term, symptom, can be unfolded to make sense of Lacan's statement that Marx invented the idea of it, an unfolding that bridges the apparent gap between Marxian and psychoanalytic thought?

The philosophical stakes of this unfolding are relatively high. Marx is understood to be a thinker first and foremost of capital, of social and political struggle, of the possibilities of collective undertaking. Freud, to the contrary, is a thinker of the individual, the 'self', of psychoses and sexuality. While Lacan is obviously and avowedly a reader of Freud, he is not obviously a reader of Marx. The non-obviousness of his thought's relation to Marx is one of the reasons (among many - including his controversial reaction to the May '68 student protests, and his controversial invention of the 'short session' in clinical work) that Lacan is sometimes regarded as being 'not political enough' for the Left (at best), or even as distinctly conservative (at worst). Zizek is perhaps most famous for introducing his readers and viewers to a Lacan of the Left, pace those who dismiss him as yet another complacent and over-intelligent white man who calls himself a philosopher.

To see the project of (Lacanian) psychoanalysis as bearing a distinct relation to the Marxian critique of political economy is to throw it into relief as a potential philosophy for and of (leftist) liberation, rather than to disregard it as a blimpish ideology that masks and justifies the sexual deprivation of the rich and powerful.¹ Zizek's first task, therefore, is to lay out the "fundamental homology between the interpretive procedure of Marx and Freud - [and] more precisely between their analysis of commodity and of dreams" (Zizek 2009, 3). What Marx sees/theorises in the commodity, Freud does too in dreams.

Freud's work in the interpretation of dreams, Zizek argues, is not to decrypt the hidden content of the unconscious that is masked by their form. The vast majority of people - including me, before I started this PhD - if they have heard about Freudian psychoanalysis at all, will understand its method of interpretation to be exactly this: the gun in my dream that I shot at a duck is actually a penis; and the duck is actually a 'mother hen', which is in fact my mother; and thus the real meaning of the dream is that I have a desire to sleep with my mother that I cannot represent to myself consciously. Freud's method of interpreting dreams, Zizek says, is vastly more sophisticated than this. The dream is not simply a mask (the form) for some body of meaning (of content) that actually resides in the unconscious that is struggling to get out, to express itself. To put it differently, the dream's content cannot be excised (as if it were a tumor) in a singular, scientific, authoritative rationalisation of its form. For Freud, rather, to interpret a dream is to try to understand why the stuff of the unconscious was made to surface as a dream in the first place - and not what this 'stuff' actually is, however juicy those details might seem. The 'secret' of both the commodity and the dream is not revealed by unveiling the content of value or of desire respectively, but rather exists in the way that 'content' is structured through the form itself.

This chapter does the enlightening work of detailing this difficult conception of the interpretation of dreams as a necessary "working through" - and not a functional process of inputs and outputs that could in principle be automated - with respect to Marx's conception of the commodity and its (determinate) relationship with value in his system. This work/connection is enlightening to me precisely because of the 'monetary theory of value' that Rebecca Carson expounds in her 2023 book Immanent Externalities (Carson 2023) (about which I wrote in part in 24-01-27). As implied in the explanation above, as the commodity is to value, the dream is to desire. Both forms - the commodity and the dream - represent a sensuous-nonsensuous thing that bespeaks an entire and hidden system of captivation and capture, of mystification (something appearing formally where it is not), and of fetishism (the subject-object conflation).

The symptom, then, is the name that Zizek gives to the commonality of interpretative method that Freud and Marx share in their (dialectical) treatments of their respective objects of concern. Against Habermas' idea of "inter-subjective communication", there is always a structure at work in the mediation of value/desire:

The structure is always triple; there are always three elements at work: the manifest dream-text [form], the latent dream-content or thought [content], and the unconscious desire articulated in a dream [structure]. (Zizek 2009, 6)

This structure (unconscious desire, or value) is neither strictly objective nor strictly subjective, but rather consists in the impossibility to strictly divide those two domains. It is structure that determines "the real subject matter" (Zizek 2009, 6) of the movement.

Bibliography

Carson, Rebecca. 2023. Immanent Externalities: The Reproduction of Life in Capital. Brill.

Zizek, Slavoj. 2009. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Second Edition. London New York: Verso.

Slavoj Žižek: The Sublime Object of Ideology (chapter 1, part 2)

2024-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

Slavoj Žižek: The Sublime Object of Ideology (chapter 1, part 2)

Introduction

Today I worked properly through the first chapter of Zizek's Sublime Object of Ideology (towards an essay I am currently writing, outlined at the top of this log). I've reported before on the introduction (this log), and the opening of the first chapter (this log) - in the latter of which I outline Zizek's homology between both the (Marxian) critique of political economy and the (Freudian-Lacanian) project of philosophical psychoanalysis, and also the more particular similarity between the commodity and the dream which serves as a starting point for stitching those two projects together. Here I want to work more closely through the rest of the chapter, in which Zizek elaborates from the commodity-dream correspondence to argue for a value-desire correspondence These two 'systems' of Marx and Freud respectively are movements that articulate for Zizek an excess or surplus at work; a surplus that illustrates why Lacan conjures the idea of 'surplus-enjoyment' as an evocation of the Marxian 'surplus-value'. This pedagogical move of explicating Lacan via Marx (as well as some other thinkers, such as Hegel, Sloterdijk, Kafka, Althusser) takes place repeatedly throughout this chapter to introduce the reader to a collection of psychoanalytic concepts - symptom, hysteria, fantasy, transference - that will ultimately service Zizek's grander argument about ideology in the book as a whole. Recall that the pedagogy of Lacan's system and sense is one of the threefold aims of the book that Zizek details in its introduction. In addition to re-actualizing Hegel and contributing a critical theory of ideology, it aims:

to serve as an introduction to some of the fundamental concepts of Lacanian psychoanalysis: against the distorted picture of Lacan as belonging to the field of 'post-structuralism', the book articulates his radical break with 'post-structuralism'; against the distorted picture of Lacan's obscurantism, it locates him in the lineage of rationalism. (Zizek 2009, xxx)

For my part, the homology between psychoanalytic desire and Marxian value is useful, because it lays the foundation of how to think about the capture and closure of desire in capitalism; the condition of unfreedom that its logic of production and circulation engenders; and the structural illusion that this capture generates in the apprehension of computing's artifacts.

Sohn-Rethel as a reader of Marx

Zizek's first move is to read Marx through Alfred Sohn-Rethel in a subsection titled "The unconscious of the commodity form", as Sohn-Rethel is seen as the best theorist of the surplus at stake in the Marxian commodity-form; and thus the best reader of Marx to link his work to Lacan. Sohn-Rethel's theory of real abstraction operates as a critique of the Kantian transcendental subject, in that it undermines the plausibility of an a priori frame of knowledge, an objective gaze through the fantasy of which so-called scientific knowledge (knowledge that straight-forwardly 'exists' without accounting for its subject-position) comes into being. Sohn-Rethel's thesis is that money is the formal 'cause' of transcendental consciousness. This thesis is a "disquieting fact" (Zizek 2009, 11), because it proposes that the foundation of our clear-headed (transcendental) consciousness is the something essentially external; namely the strange social operativity of money. The idea that our internal state of mind is contingent upon something partially external, i.e. socially mediated, is what justifies the name 'real abstraction'. Abstraction - internal thought, which appears to us as transcendent, in the sense that it seems to have no cause but itself - is in fact contingent upon something real - an external consistency not ultimately subject to our will as such. This real consistency, in capitalism, is money: or rather, the exchange relation for which money serves as the embodiment.

Sohn-Rethel's reading of Marx expedites the point that Zizek wants to make regarding the connection between Marx and Lacan, as it sets up the theorisation of value in Marx as akin to Lacanian desire in the critical sense that both operate through an absence / immanent exception in their own logic. The name given to such a structure, which operates through the logic of its own immanent exception, is (and this language is used directly by both Marx and Lacan) surplus.

Marxian surplus

To properly consider the homology that Zizek is proposing, one needs to cultivate both an understanding of the status of surplus in the Marxian philosophy of value on the one hand, and the basis of the relationship between the unconscious and desire in Lacan on the other. Let's return to Marx and Sohn-Rethel - and try to provide a bit more pedagogical context than Zizek does - to work towards the first of these understandings. In volume one of Capital, Marx infamously does not introduce the notion of money until he has first fleshed out a firm concept of the commodity, its value (in both use-value and exchange-value), and the presentation of a relationship between a commodity's value and labour (in both its concrete and abstract modalities). Why? Because money is a commodity whose value resides only in the exchangeability of commodities as such. Without first understanding that a commodity represents a thing, service, or affair that is subject to exchange - and that the value of a commodity as universally exchangeable is measured in the quantity of abstract labour that resides in it - we would have no bearings through which to understand the meaning of money in a capitalist system of exchange. Money materialises this exchange relation in its status as that exceptional commodity whose use-value is as the measure of exchange-value in itself, i.e. as the signature of the exchangeability of all other commodities as such.

Value in Marx is a structure that substantiates the social bond. It is, in other words, the logic that undergirds how humans relate to each other, the very substance of society. Marx's claim in Capital is that society is increasingly configured around a particular movement of value, a movement which he calls capital. In the capitalist interpretation of value, things / services / affairs are commodified - that is, their value is temporarily reduced to just one aspect of itself, exchange-value, in order to circulate on the market as a commodity. The use-value still exists in objects of our consideration; but in its form as a commodity, the gravity of a thing's use-value is wholly overshadowed by the glamour of its exchange-value. Recognising money as the embodiment of exchange-value, we can summarise this point in a much more apparently simple way: 'in capitalism, everything wants to have a price'.

The word 'wants' here is of critical importance. It is not the case, as is often assumed, that we can simplify this summary to state instead: "in capitalism, everything has a price". For it is not true that everything has a price in capitalism, nor that price (exchange-value) is always and everywhere the sole measure of value in the structure of society. This word 'wants' inserts a distance between the appearance of value as exchange-value in the commodity, and the reality of value that saturates the thing, service, or affair. In capitalism, value has an inclination towards being expressed as exchange-value, even though it is in reality a 'quality' more capacious that is not solely reducible to its measurement in money.

Capital as a structure is distinctly characterised by this inclination to reductively render value one-dimensionally in and as just one of its proportions, exchange-value. This reduction should be considered both its means and its ends. Insofar as it takes place, capital has achieved its cardinal 'desire': it has gotten what it 'wants'. Capital strives towards this self-satisfaction, and the more dominant the structure of capital is in society, the more urgent, necessary, and natural this drive appears - even though it is, in reality, a historically contingent kind of social relation.

Capital's drive to render value as exchange-value is the mechanism one must keep in mind to properly understand the Marxian critique of surplus-value Marx wanted to understand: what about capitalism drives us to continually ramp up the production of commodities and to invest in those particular kinds of technological innovation that bolster this phenomenon? How, in the production and circulation of commodities, is an additional amount of exchange-value conjured (as if from nowhere), and how does it come to line the pocket of a particular role in this process - a role Marx will come to call that of the capitalist? Where, in the apparently free exchange of commodities between producer and consumer, does this sleight of hand take place, a sleight that keeps 'the economy' on its ever-upward trajectory?

Surplus-value is the Marxian name for the telos of capital, the object which it lacks, and therefore towards which it must strive in search of satisfaction, the absent cause that it uses to drive its subjects to perpetually produce.

As the end-it-itself of capitalist accumulation, surplus-value acquires a quasi-mystical status. The set of reductions or mischaracterisations that suffuse capital as a mode of production are all oriented towards it - value is but exchange-value, labour is but labour-power, things are but commodities - so that there may be surplus-value. Each of these reductions is the mystification of a subjective measurement so as to appear as an objective principle; a fundamental obscuring in the production of surplus-value that Marx calls fetishism. Surplus-value in Marx, then, is a kind of transcendent quality, something that appears as if from nowhere through the mechanics of fetishistic reduction that take place in the capitalist mode of production.

Lacanian surplus

The quasi-mystical status of surplus-value as the absent yet driving force of capitalist production and accumulation in Marx's analysis is, Zizek suggests, the logic through which the qualifier 'surplus' comes to figure in Lacan's theorisation of surplus-enjoyment. Surplus-value's absence conjures the drive for ever-more of it (effected through the production and circulation of the commodity). Value in its capitalist configuration cannot exist without surplus-value as its absent cause and its telos. Desire, Lacan argues, shares the same structure:

If we subtract the surplus we lose enjoyment itself, just as capitalism, which can survive only by incessantly revolutionizing its own material conditions, ceases to exist if it 'stays the same' (Zizek 2009, 54).

The embodiment of the missing cause and end of desire's system, its surplus-enjoyment, is what Lacan calls the objet petit a - the object-cause of desire. Surplus-value in capital is a 'thing' that can never quite be possessed, and this ever-absence is what drives the movement of value in the production and circulation of commodities. When the immanent limit of value's system is positivised as something to be sought after - when surplus-value is materialised in its 'reality' as more-and-more money - capitalism acquires its drive to permanent development. A similar drive, what we might also call a bad infinity, results when we misapprehend desire as something that can be achieved, or finally satisfied. It is rather something negative, something missing, that drives both desire and value to reproduce themselves.

This negative (absent) cause, the common missing that paradoxically inaugurates the very systems that lack in it, is why Lacan credits Marx for inventing the symptom, in Zizek's reading. The symptom is the name for an effect in which one can interpret something missing, a paradoxical crack in the systematicity (of value or desire) that reveals the system's fetishistic drive towards something outside of itself, its mis-rendering of the subject-object dialectic as something simpler and less entangled than it really is.

Thus it is Sohn-Rethel's reading of Marxian value as a logic of the subject-object dialectic's fetishistic disavowal that makes clearer the connection between psychoanalysis and capitalism. Lacan's evocation of Marx in surplus-enjoyment recognizes that the satisfaction of sexual desire might, like capitalist accumulation, be compromised in the sense that, though it seems to seek an end outside of itself, its teleology is really servicing nothing more than its own reproduction.

For Zizek, this correspondence serves to illuminate Lacan's project as political, for Marx's philosophy has long been the best and most uncontroversial example of a truly political philosophy.¹ Yet it also illuminates something important about Marx's project; namely that while it does an excellent job diagnosing the logic of capital, it does not offer the reader a strategy through which to work from within it to overcome it. Zizek's wager is that psychoanalysis offers us a better version of this roadmap.

Zizek, Slavoj. 2009. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Second Edition. London New York: Verso.

Slavoj Žižek: The Sublime Object of Ideology (introduction)

2024-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

Slavoj Žižek: The Sublime Object of Ideology (introduction)

It's been a few days since I logged; so a couple of thoughts are due today. The first is regarding Zizek's 1989 book The Sublime Object of Ideology, which is one of the "first" in my list on science and psychoanalysis. This book is absolutely essential for a number of reasons. Among the most important is that it represents some of the foundational work in relating Lacan's thought to Hegel, Marx, and Kant. The radical line of argumentation that Lacan's thought represents for Zizek (against postmodernism, historicism, Habermas' "post-structuralism") is integral to a thoughtful understanding of science.

By "thoughtful" here, I mean to take issue with two colloquial and common understandings of science: the first too idealist, and the second too materialist.

The too-idealist understanding of science posits it as a system of thought that ultimately represents a true approximation of the world. Some version of this view is, I would think, the operational view of many scientists and 'scientifically minded' associates. Science is a system of laws, in other words, that resides in thought (epistemology) in such a way that it can fundamentally map onto that which resides in the world (ontology). Epistemology, in this view, is nothing but a lossless compression of ontology. While (some of) science's methods might be flawed or approximate, the collective constellation of mind (ideology) that results from them is plausibly flawless. Because thought's representation of the world has no ontological instability, scientific laws come to be considered essentially objective: they exist independently ('materially') from minds that apprehend them.

The too-materialist view is preponderant in the history of science, humanities, and other disciplines that exclude themselves from scientific requirement (and cachet). It similarly sees the methods of science as approximations of what's at work in the world; but in contradistinction to the too-idealists, it does not recognise epistemology as plausibly lossless to ontological reality. In this view, thought is necessarily an approximation of the world's chaos. It is not the transcription of objective laws, but the translation of them. Indeed, whether such laws exist at all objectively is not up for debate, as thought and language themselves are not thought to be capable of accurately representing them in any case. The too-materialists tend to emphasize the necessary contingency of all knowledge, and react forcefully to all kinds of generalization of thought beyond its situation in a (suitably small) worldly context. Thought here is impotent to apprehend the world. (In extreme cases, the too-materialist malady leads to frightfully confusing arguments that we must let world do more to apprehend itself.)

Zizek takes up the task of "rehabilitating psychoanalysis in its philosophical core" (Zizek 2009, viii) to avoid the indefatigable spells of both the too-idealist and the too-materialist. To do so, he argues that we must re-read Hegel through Lacan, to develop a properly dialectical approach to epistemology and ontology. Hegelian, Marxian, and Lacanian dialectics– all of which Zizek sees as sharing a certain quality of thinking– represent such an attempt to break the spell of an un-dialectical subject-object relation in philosophy.¹ In the book's preface, he develops (in what is now recognised as typically Zizekian fashion) a scatological understanding of Hegelian Aufhebung with respect to the Lacanian notion of non-All. To jump to the case of connecting Lacan's and Hegel's thought (and to tastefully avoid all the other 'shit' in this rather complex beginning):

the externality of Nature with regard to the Idea is not that of the Idea's constitutive exception: it is not that Nature is set free as the exception that guarantees the Wholeness of the Idea's self-mediation. It is not the case that, once this mediation is complete (that is, after the Idea's dialectical progress can no longer be propelled by the Idea's own incompleteness - its failure to correspond to its own notion), the completed Idea needs an external Other (Nature) to sustain the complete and closed circle of its self-mediation. Nature is, rather, the mark of the non-All of the Idea's totality. (Zizek 2009, xxi)

Incompleteness is the essential element of Hegel's/Zizek's thought that mediates between the too-idealist and too-materialist extremes of scientific conception. If one takes 'Nature' in this quotation to represent the too-materialist, and 'Idea' the too-idealist, the relevancy of Hegel's thought to the 'problem' of (thoughtful) science becomes clear. Dialectic is the name given to the quality of method that retains the insights of both materialism and idealism, without subsuming one in favour of the other.² More difficultly, the relationship between Idea and Nature is understood as a mutual incompleteness: "Nature is, rather, the mark of the non-All of the Idea's totality." Epistemology is not sufficient in itself, for there immanently resides a "constitutive exception" in it; i.e. a moment that cannot be (rationally) grasped in its own 'native' terms. This exception is what we call ontology, and the fact of this exception is what makes Idea's totality "non-All".

Identically, (and this I find harder still to properly grasp), the Idea is only and always the constitutive exception of Nature. Thought appears as a "non-natural" thing in this formulation, as the inverse of Nature in one sense; but crucially it is Nature's necessary non-natural inverse. One cannot avoid this non-naturalness of thought by returning it to the land, by giving Nature a greater space in thought, because the two are dialectically entangled and co-constitutive.

Zizek posits psychoanalysis as the philosophical tradition that works against both materialist and idealist essentialism to establish a dialectical logic of the Idea and Nature. The Freudian notion of the death drive (infamously posited, then redeveloped and revised several times throughout Freud's career) is an example of psychoanalysis' dialectical approach, in that it frames the human as "an animal extorted by an insatiable parasite (reason, logos, language)" (Zizek 2009, xxvii); an insolvable paradox of nature and nurture.

Zizek's brilliance in this book is to extend the re-reading of Hegel through Lacan to the problem of democracy. This is evidenced in its title: The Sublime Object of Ideology. Ideology, a term readily associated with Althusser and Habermas, is colloquially understood as a false consciousness that, once identified and recognized, ought to disappear as if mist cleared on a windy day. Viewed dialectically, however, ideology is the (necessary) product of the incompleteness that bridges subjectivity and objectivity, the "Sublime" (a term with Kantian undertones) to the "Object" (a word which in its placement here echoes the Lacanian "objet petit a" or object cause of desire). This position is a redemption of Hegel, a philosopher who is often dismissed too chauvinistically idealist, and his philosophy of the Subject/Substance relation:

far from being a story of its progressive overcoming, dialectics is for Hegel a systematic notation of the failure of all such attempts - 'absolute knowledge' denotes a subjective position which finally accepts 'contradiction' as an internal condition of every identity. In other words, Hegelian 'reconciliation' is not a 'panlogicist' sublation of all reality in the Concept but a final consent to the fact that the Concept itself is 'not-all' (to use this Lacanian term). (Zizek 2009, xxix)

It is striking how relevant this argument remains today in an academic landscape seemingly rife with the "'post-modernist' traps" (Zizek 2009, xxxi) that Hegel/Lacan/Zizek strive to avoid. Moreover, it was slightly surprising to me how much of Marx there is in this book: as it is through Marx that Zizek develops a robust connection between Kant-Hegel (on one side of "history") and Freud-Lacan (on the "other"). (I will develop a better sense of this statement in a forthcoming post regarding the first chapter of Sublime Object, "How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?") Though Zizek doesn't directly deal with Science, the arguments in this masterful work of philosophy are essential for bridging from my list on dialectics in history (Marx) to this list on science in psychoanalysis (Lacan).³

Bibliography

Ruda, Frank. 2015. For Badiou: Idealism Without Idealism. Northwestern University Press.

Zizek, Slavoj. 2009. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Second Edition. London New York: Verso.