[The statement of purpose I'm using for my MA Review at UCI. Please leave comments and suggestions, especially before my exam (on 15 Feb)!] My main interest is in political economy. I am interested in the ways in which material scarcity (real and imagined) leads to some kind of system or regime, a certain way…
Category Archives: NaturMensch
will rise when it is realized that man and nature, organism and environment, belong together in a univocal world.
After Marx has laid out the model spatially, he repeats the gesture, as if to say, “Again, again, again . . . Let’s do it again.” But differently, in another way: [Salvador Dali's The Persistence of Memory] Model 2: “Narrative” Human beings, first of all (before they are even “able to ‘make history’”), “live” (the…
I have just passed my comprehensive exam for my MA in Comparative Literature at Louisiana State University. The area of focus is critical theory, specifically Marxism, psychoanalysis, and Foucault and Deleuze. I thought I would pose my responses to the first two parts of the exam (the third and last part being the oral defense).…
Fellows, Friends, and Others, I am sending another one of my reports from the field. As stipulated, I am using the species’ own mode of transmission, their own semiology—what is referred to in these parts as “language” (though, technically speaking, they use many “languages” organized in a similar way as a system (i.e. as “language”),…
I’ve been hiding in the forest, in the woods. Up in the mountains. In the wild. I hadn’t gone back to town for some time now. Ryan, as I see, has taken care of this place. He proves, as always, responsible and competent. Ever mindful of the many unhomes that, fortunately or otherwise, we share.…
[All citations, except the passing one from Brian Massumi, are from Manuel De Landa’s Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. Take note of the terminologies species, which refers to the class or genus that the organism, e.g. a particular animal, belongs to.] Despite Charles Darwin’s break with essentialist thinking–the kind of thinking that takes biological species…
[Image from Alternative Fuel Sources] [Follows "What is Dasein Like?"] [Based on Martin Heidegger’s “Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics” and “The Question Concerning Technology,” as interpreted by Greg Schufreider] We in fact started with Dasein, der Mensch, the human being (but even then not, like Husserl and the rest of the tradition, as a transcendental…
[The Prison-Industrial Complex, a work of "revolutionary art" from the Maoist International Movement] Under capitalism, the laborer, because s/he does not own any means of production other than him/herself, sells his/her labor to the capitalist, for which s/he is paid a certain wage. This is the economic production (of the goods we use everyday) that…
Capitalism (let’s not mystify it) is simply an economic system where a group of people (the capitalists, the bourgeois) owns the means (i.e. the raw materials, the machines, the factories, land, etc., i.e. the investment money used to buy these, i.e. capital) of production (the process by which a society produces its economic goods) while the rest do not. The rest-the workers, the proletariat-have only their skills, their talents, their abilities, i.e. themselves. As such, in order to survive, in order to buy the goods (since they are, after all, also human beings who have needs) produced in the production process (managed, since they own the means of production, by the capitalists), the workers sell their skills, their talents, their abilities-labor (hence the designation laborers)-to the capitalists.
