Whether you like it or not Trump will most probably be the next president of the United States. The big question is: what will the elite do with him and what will he do with the elite. There are three possible Trump-lives: Continue reading →
Category Archives: Circuleer
What can we learn from Austrofascism?
Sunday august 21st Daniel Little (University of Michigan-Dearborn) published The rise of Austrofascism on his blog Understanding Society. A very informative blog on this subject based on Janek Wasserman’s Black Vienna: The Radical Right in the Red City, 1918-1938 (2014). Especially mentioning
“Wasserman emphasizes the importance of ideas and culture within the rise of Austrofascism, and he makes use of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony as a way of understanding the link between philosophy and politics. The pro-fascist right held a dominant role within major Viennese cultural and educational institutions.” Continue reading →
The predictable outcome of yet another symposium on Free Will
Maybe driven by a lack of subjects, attention or funding or the three of these together, a number of organizations have taken the initiative to organize yet another discussion on free will. I would hope this discussion was finalized by the publication of an interview with Daniel Dennett in “de Volkskrant” in 2012 when he was in Amsterdam on the occasion of his acceptance of the Erasmus prize. He then too participated in a number of symposiums and workshops, even one where there was a noted absence of Swaab and Lamme. From the outset I have been critical of the determinism of Lamme and others. Of course, thanks to my insignificance, to no avail.
In the past years every now and then the subject was again presented in the press, in theme publications or symposiums, without ever coming to a conclusion. The outcome of the “discussion” with the arrogant “scientists” Lamme and Swaab is quite predictable: they will not succumb. Mainly because they and their followers can’t comprehend the reality of an illusion or, better, a concept; however commonplace this is these days.
I know Daniel Dennett is a kind and very patient person who is always prepared to give the same answer another time another way in the hope one finally understands. In this case however I am disappointed he has agreed to participate.
Yann Boutang: a pseudo Marxist jester
“Cognitive Capitalism” is an avalanche of words leading to murky marshes of not understanding.
In “Cognitive Capitalism” Yann Boutang tries to show he is a good Marxist fellow, knowing what valorization, surplus value and exploitation means. To understand “cognitive capitalism” he introduces “living labor” that “continues to exist”:
The solution is to split living labor into two, and to assume that — alongside living labor as an expenditure of energy that will be partially consumed and crystallized into new machinery in the following cycle — there is a living labor that continues to exist as a means of production throughout the cycle. In other words, this living labor is not destroyed as an intermediate consumption. It is consumed as bodily energy, certainly, but it also develops as a means of production of living as living labor. It builds itself as a skill, as a know-how resistant to its reduction to pure human capital that can be objectified.
How very strange. I understood that next to labor that went into machines (“dead labor” represented by fixed capital) there always was living labor consumed in the manufacture of goods or services for the consumer, represented by variable capital. So Boutang really proposes a third category: living labor that is not “destroyed” (=consumed) in the goods or services but which continues to be there as a kind of perpetuum mobile “a know-how resistant to its reduction to pure human capital that can be objectified” How very nice! A workforce with built-in resistance! Continue reading →
Why are there no borders on the internet?
(J’accuse)
Almost every week now there are reports of major hacks and other cybercrimes, mostly committed from or by the usual suspicious countries. The hack of the personnel database of the US government, the German parliament, the kaspersky hack to name the most recent. Reports of the inherent unsafety and possible instability of the internet are also quite frequent. On the other hand it turns out that China is quite capable of censoring. So one begins to wonder why the common opinion among experts is that nothing structural can be done about it. Continue reading →
A scary view on the roots of anti-Semitism
From the excellent exposé on Hannah Arendt by Corey Robin I extract this long citation about a theory on the roots of anti-Semitism (p10):
| There’s an old theory about anti-Semitism that goes something like this: The reason so much of the world hates the Jew is that the Jew asks so much of the world. From Sinai to the soviets, from Moses to Marx, the Jew has sat in judgment, insisting that the world be other, better, than it is, and always for the sake of an ideal so remote—a God who cannot be represented, a utopia that cannot be sketched out—that it requires a hallucinatory zeal to sustain it. The “blackmail of transcendence” is what the literary critic George Steiner calls it: the insistence that the world take a leap into the void in the name of a God who cannot be named. |
Drunk driving with Twitters hive mind
@Twitters boss, @jack (>2M followers) shared some wisdom on jan 19th, 2015. I would specially focus on
I agree! Continue reading →
Capital should be in solid hands
It doesn’t matter if capital is concentrated in a few hands, as long as these are the right hands. 
This is my answer to the outcry of Mr Piketty in his monumental study about the growing inequality in the possession of capital. As others have signaled Pikettys’ study misses the central idea of Marx: that capital is a social relation. As long as the character of this relation is not altered, the redistribution of capital over more people or even acquisition of it by the state will not help us one bit. If possible at all.
This fundamental relation is, as is well known, the exploitation of labor to extract profit, and using this profit for accumulating capital. Hence growth and concentration are inevitable in this system. Continue reading →
Unsettling the soul
Yesterday, I experienced the new pictorial poem by Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass titled “Visitors” (2013). To call it “viewing a movie” would be a vast understatement. As was the case with Koyaanisqatsi (1982) it left me more or less stunned and at some moments moved me to tears. Afterwards Glass and Reggio were present in a very sober setting to answer questions from the public. Of course there were some questions about the intention of “Visitors”. The answer was a bit too postmodern: there were no intentions, every observer could make up his own mind… I would be surprised if interpretations do not point in one direction: the loosening or relativization of the “self”. Though not a word is spoken, “Visitors” shows the machinery at work producing the self, the personality accurately. It does so by contrasting changes in human facial and bodily expression with that of an animal (I won’t spoil which), the emotional content of decaying human artifacts (building, attraction park, rubbish) and the flow of nature, dead and alive, triggering all kinds of “meaning” and so effectively setting the spectators meaning-producing machinery at work while at the same time unsettling it. This deconstruction -to use a postmodern term- of the soul, leaving it speechless, cannot be praised enough these days, where all egos are pumped up to the max. Maybe it wasn’t the intention of the makers. It certainly was the result. Reggio answered on a question about what words or phrases had inspired him when making “Visitors” that he had the intention to name the work “The holy see”. He refrained from it fearing it would produce too much misunderstanding. Well, not for me. “Visitors”, although expressing fleetingness, does not directly reference personality or the soul. Continue reading →
The Bloody Honor
Banaz’ sister (still from movie).
Yesterday (Februari 16) I saw Banaz: a love story and attended the discussion of the documentary in “de Balie” (Amsterdam) with creator Deeyah, host Eddy Terstall and the public.
It’s a remarkable and moving documentary about the vicious murder in 2006 by her own family of 20 year old Banaz, daughter of a strictly traditional Kurdish Muslim family escaping Saddam Hussein’s regime and granted asylum in the UK. This murder was arranged by the father and uncle because of the loss of (male) family honor inflicted by her running away from the arranged marriage with a cruel husband and a subsequent love affair with a man of her own choice. Continue reading →