Don’t look at part I, put it aside... Or so goes Louis Althusser’s warning to first-time readers of Marx’s Capital. It is important to skip part I of the treatise, Althusser advised, at least on the first couple of reads. Only when the truth of Capital is fully internalized, its scientific intervention into the “new continent” of history, one may “begin to read Part I (Commodities and Money) with infinite caution, knowing that it will always be extremely difficult to understand, even after several readings of the other Parts, without the help of a certain number of deeper explanations.”

After all, Althusser argued, the same political division between social classes was mirrored within the text as an epistemological division. Part I contains something close to philosophical idealism, followed by the scientific materialism of the rest of the book. Althusser’s advice was thus both practical and political: Part I is not only difficult reading for the young and the uninitiated—Althusser admitted that members of the proletariat would have no problem reading the book because their “class instinct” was already attuned to the quotidian experience of capitalist exploitation—it also risks derailing the reader into dangerously Hegelian and philosophical diversions. “This advice is more than advice,” he whispered. It is “an imperative.” Continue reading →

(Read Melissa Dinsman's interview with me in the Los Angeles Review of Books.)

Q: Do you think full engagement with the digital humanities requires programming skills, and, if so, should programming become a requirement for humanities students?

A: Would you trust a book on the French Revolution written by a scholar who didn’t read French? It’s a legitimate question. I’m sure there are brilliant lunar geologists who have never been to the moon. But I maintain that one must learn one’s materials — including computation and coding — in order to be competent in DH [Digital Humanities]. Computer languages might not have the deep history that natural languages have, and they might not have the same kind of cultural depth that natural languages have. But in terms of relevance in contemporary life, in terms of a rich analytical and critical context, machine languages are just as fascinating as natural languages.

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Introspection is often necessary in academic work, not simply concerning the objects of the mind, but also the actual manner in which intellectual work is done. This typically comes under the heading of methodology. Yet the meaning of methodology is not always clear, particularly within the so-called theory disciplines that span Marxism, feminism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and related fields. Some prefer the self-serving and somewhat vain conviction that theory and methodology are one and the same pursuit. Hence “doing theory” would seem to preempt the thorny exercise of methodological introspection, rendering it moot. Why speak of method, when theory is nothing but method? Why worry about other tasks, when theory is king?

Yet the reality of higher education contradicts such pat conclusions. In fact academic halls are teaming with a vast array of different research methods, from the positivistic expediency of quantitative investigation, to the staging of ethnographic interviews, to the narrative reductions of historiography, to the various instrumentalized strains of hermeneutics such as the Marxist reading, the feminist reading, or the psychoanalytic reading. Continue reading →

Graham Burnett nailed it. More of a tweet than an argument, nevertheless Burnett's observation about cultural theory's current obsession with objects and materiality--that it's like Etsy kissed by philosophy--cuts to the heart of intellectual life today.

Etsy kissed by philosophy. Objects kissed by philosophy. A philosophy of vibrant things. A philosophy of encrusted idols. Philosophy in the age of foodies. Microbrews matter. Baristas matter. Black lives matter--chimes the chirpy white liberal--and thank God they can do the mattering on our behalf, just like all those other vibrant objects. (Mel Chen and Julia Bryan-Wilson both show how such discourse is endemic to whiteness and white privilege.)

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The current issue of October magazine contains several responses to a questionnaire on the nature of materialism today. My response is pasted below. Read the questionnaire prompt and download all responses here.

Not too long ago, being a materialist meant something rather specific, despite the capacious complexity of the term; it meant one was a Marxist. These days materialism generally means non-Marxism, or some variant thereof. What happened?

As it was formulated in France in the eighteenth century and then more broadly across Europe in the nineteenth century, materialism was concerned chiefly with what Marx called the “sensuous activity” of society and politics, an undertaking guided by strict adherence to the modern if not nihilist mantras of secularity and critique. Today’s new materialism means something different. Methodologically speaking, the new materialism is dog-whistle politics for three things: empiricism, pragmatism, and realism. Continue reading →

Like the discourse network of 1900, let us begin in nonsense (so as to end in reason). Consider an image made by Étienne-Jules Marey, not one of the chronophotographic images of decomposed movement that he is known for, but one made as he was playing around in his studio. "I picked up a black stick capped with a white ball at its tip,” he wrote. “By walking and moving it around in front of the black screen I was able to write out my name letter by letter."

The image is weak and grainy. As author of the word, Marey appears simply as a passing ghost, washing out the right side of the photograph with a broad smudge of white. This is not a photograph in any strict sense, at least not technically. As a photographic record of kinetic change through time it might go by a better name: cinema. Digitality has dominated cinema throughout its history -- discrete photographs arranged in corpuscular series -- that it's difficult to see how radical this image really is. Let's call it by its true name, for here is a genuinely analog cinema. Continue reading →

While in France a few weeks ago I had the chance to peruse the local bookstores and noticed some curious turns in French theory. One thing I wouldn't have predicted is an exhumation of the Greek primordial divinities. Meillassoux rediscovered Chaos a few years ago. And now Latour is worshiping Gaia. Stengers has joined the fun as well. In addition to Stengers and Latour, Laruelle also has a new book out in French addressing global warming / climate stuff.

I saw lots of new Badiou books of various shapes and sizes, from short interview books to larger volumes. And I gather he is currently working on part 3 of Being and Event. Achille Mbembe has a relatively new book called Critique de la raison nègre, which I would be eager to see translated. I also noticed a few stores displaying Fréderic Neyrat's Homo labyrinthus, which is on posthumanism and looks quite interesting.

In sad news, La Hune, long a Left Bank institution, closed its doors only to reopen as a soulless purveyor of expensive coffee table books. Other favorite shops are still in business though, including the venerable Vrin. I was also pleasantly surprised to discover that the Gibert Joseph on Boulevard Saint-Michel has a huge selection of philosophy books. And the tiny Librairie Le Point du Jour tucked behind the ENS has probably the best selection of Marxist books I've ever seen (hat tip to David M!), all piled up like a hoarder's apartment in that way that French used bookstores like to do.

My book on Laruelle was recently reviewed by Jay Murphy in Afterimage. While ultimately more descriptive than critical, it's a smart review by someone who obviously knows the literature. Read the whole review here.

Anti-determinism is a common position today, in both popular and academic conversations alike. Redemptive narratives in social and political theory are usually centered around things like contingency or play, or other mechanisms for eluding determination such as escape or accident. Many associate life itself with anti-determinism, suggesting that the very vitality of a living creature is due to its ability to escape the determinations of natural law. Unlike the stone, the living creature need not roll down hill, but rather, against gravity, may peregrinate near and far, beyond the limits of natural law.

In the past I've posted about why I'm a vulgar determinist and tried to elaborate the idea along more philosophical lines. But anti-determinism is also a common position in discussions of technology. At a recent academic conference, someone expressed this sentiment in regard to tools: technologies are neutral, not determining; it's how one uses one's tools that matters. I was particularly struck by this claim, since, in materialist media theory at least, such a position is more or less untenable and has been for some time. Indeed the opposite position tends to hold sway among the authors and colleagues that I find most interesting. (I'll ignore on grounds of irrelevance those old conjurations of a totalitarian techno-state in which all freedom and hope are lost; to suggest that “technological determinism” is invalid because it inaccurately assumes a world that is techno-fascist misunderstands both technology and fascism.) Nevertheless it might be useful to revisit the main points of the argument and add a few details of my own. Continue reading →

As various forms of computationalism continue to influence contemporary writing in theory and philosophy, it seems appropriate to reexamine some of the fundamental assumptions and principles of computation, so that we may identify them more readily. In an earlier, characteristically modernist, phase, media theorists like Lev Manovich and others sought to identify and itemize the unique characteristics of the medium by pursuing the query "what is new media?”

I'll add my own contribution here, by returning to some of the basic observations about data and machines. Still, the label “computational decision” is meant to indicate several positive actions undertaken in order to create and sustain computation in the world. Such actions are not always taken consciously, nevertheless they are taken and must be taken for computation to exist. The notion of a “decision” is meant to highlight the constructed nature of such events. Further, I suspect that anyone promulgating such decisions might also wish to provide sufficient rationale for their naturalization, least risk being accused of dogmatism.

The three basic moments in the computational decision are:

1. “there are data,” or the decision to pursue symbolic representation
2. “there is information,” or the decision to grant a macro structure to data
3. “there are functions,” or the decision to distinguish between two kinds of information, functions and (mere) data

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