Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #critical-theory, aggregated by home.social.
RE: https://sciences.social/@NODE801/117282021402650129
Check out this great series of lectures by Ivan Zatz, my friend since CUNY Sociology, now retired office mate at Pratt. the book I always thought he should write. I remember many conversations between him and Stanley Aronowitz about Lefebvre. #CriticalTheory #Sociology #Marx #CulturalStudies
Capitalisme : douze portes d’entrée pour comprendre un mode de reproduction sociale
Le capitalisme ne se réduit ni au marché, ni à la propriété privée, ni à l’exploitation salariale. Il faut l’aborder par plusieurs portes : marchandise, valeur, accumulation, concurrence, État, reproduction sociale, écologie, infrastructures et subjectivité. #Capitalism #Marx #PoliticalEconomy #SocialReproduction #Ecology #CriticalTheory #Degrowth Originally published: Pluto Press on…
Le capitalisme comme puissance sociale mutilée : produire, reproduire, détruire
Le capitalisme a socialisé la production, les infrastructures, les savoirs et jusqu’aux subjectivités. Mais il les soumet à l’accumulation privée, comprime la reproduction sociale et détruit ses propres conditions écologiques. Sa puissance est réelle — et mutilée. #Marx #SocialReproduction #Capitalism #Ecology #Infrastructure #Alienation #Guattari #CriticalTheory #Degrowth Le paradoxe du…
Diogène contre les idoles : du cynisme antique au néocynisme de Walter Benjamin
Antisthène et Diogène ne proposent pas une doctrine abstraite, mais une manière de vivre qui expose les mensonges de la cité. De la parrhèsia cynique au « caractère destructeur » de Benjamin, un même geste : dépouiller le monde de ses faux-semblants pour recommencer avec peu. #Cynicism #Diogenes #Antisthenes #WalterBenjamin #Philosophy #CriticalTheory #AntiCapitalism Diogène contre les…
Because I was recently asked which kind of Frankfurt School Dinosaur I was, to which I answered: "A Marcusesaurus", here is a small Herbert Marcuse moment for the age of AIshittification:
First things first, Herbert Marcuse was a German-American philosopher and social theorist, one of the thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School. He wrote extensively about capitalism, technology, consumer society, and the rather inconvenient possibility that modern societies can make domination feel like freedom.
That last bit feels remarkably contemporary.
Marcuse’s point was not that technology is inherently evil. It was that technology does not exist in a vacuum. The question is who designs it, for what purpose, and within which economic and social structures.
And so, when we are told that AI will make everything faster, cheaper and more efficient, Marcuse gives us a useful little philosophical eyebrow raise.
Faster for whom?
Cheaper for whom?
Efficient towards what end?
Because there is a peculiar kind of technological progress in which everything becomes more efficient except the lives of the people actually doing the work.
Translation without translators. Writing without writers. Art without artists. Customer service without humans. And somehow the promised liberation repeatedly turns into more surveillance, more extraction, more precarious work and more things being optimised that nobody particularly wanted optimised in the first place.
That is where Marcuse meets enshittification.
A service begins by serving human needs. Then it becomes infrastructure. Then it becomes indispensable. And eventually the machine is reorganised around extraction, monetisation and control, while we are politely informed that this is all being done for our convenience.
Marcuse would probably have had some questions.
Not simply:
“What can this technology do?”
But:
“What kind of society does this technology help create?”
And perhaps most importantly:
“What does it make us become?”
That is a much nastier question.
Which is precisely why I like it.
#HerbertMarcuse #FrankfurtSchool #CriticalTheory #AI #AIshittification #Technology #Capitalism #DigitalCapitalism #HumanLabour #Philosophy
Le pluralisme administré : Marx, la réification et les conditions matérielles de la liberté
Le pluralisme libéral accepte plusieurs conceptions du monde, mais dans un cadre présenté comme neutre. Marx demanderait : qui produit ce cadre, quelles classes le rendent dominant et comment des rapports sociaux historiques apparaissent-ils comme des réalités naturelles ? #Marx #Pluralism #Reification #PoliticalTheory #Capitalism #CriticalTheory #Emancipation Un pluralisme sans…
Wagner To Sleaford Mods: The Frankfurt School On Music In 10 Songs
#CriticalTheory #Music #FrankfurtSchool #Adorno
https://thequietus.com/opinion-and-essays/black-sky-thinking/frankfurt-school-adorno-music/
[Archive]
'Continuity and Discontinuity in Aronowitz’s Critiques of Sociology, Science, and Marxism"
for the meeting “Stanley Aronowitz and the Labors of Theory”
CUNY Graduate Center, April 13 and 14, 2017
#HistSTM #CriticalTheory #Sociology #Marxism #CulturalStudies
https://node801.blogspot.com/2017/04/continuity-and-discontinuity-in_17.html
Good morning, lovely people!
I spent my weekend mostly dealing with banks and stuff regarding my finances, but I also got some writing done. Nothing really for publishing, just for myself, but I think I might share. This was first based on a reflection on a quote by Ulrike Meinhof (yes, that Ulrike Meinhof), but it became much more, and much longer. So...
Where do we come from?
We come from cities built out of concrete and anxiety, from streets where thousands of people live stacked beside one another and somehow remain strangers. We come from the capitalist metropolitan machine, from its noise and its loneliness, from the strange modern miracle of being surrounded by humanity and still being told that you are alone.
We come from the war of everyone against everyone else, though it rarely announces itself as war. It comes dressed as competition. As career. As market forces. As personal responsibility. As the cheerful little lie that everyone is free, provided they can afford the price of admission.
We come from a system that teaches us to measure one another before it teaches us to know one another.
Who is productive?
Who is employable?
Who is attractive?
Who is healthy?
Who belongs?
Who is German?
Who is foreign?
Who is respectable?
Who is old enough to matter?
Who is young enough to be ignored?
Who is sick enough to be pitied but not inconvenient enough to require anything?
And somewhere along the way, even our bodies become filing cabinets.
Men and women.
Young and old.
Healthy and sick.
Normal and deviant.
Citizen and foreigner.
Winner and loser.
Little administrative boxes for an animal that was never designed to fit inside one.
We come from the row house, the Plattenbau, the suburb, the commuter train. From bedrooms where teenagers learned to hate themselves quietly. From classrooms where obedience was mistaken for education. From offices where eight hours disappeared beneath fluorescent lights. From hospitals and prisons and psychiatric wards. From waiting rooms where suffering becomes a number on a screen.
We come from the television glowing in the dark.
From the smartphone in our hands.
From advertising whispering that we are incomplete.
From algorithms discovering our weaknesses and selling them back to us.
From consumerism's peculiar promise that loneliness can be purchased in twelve convenient instalments.
We come from being told to work harder when we were already exhausted.
From being told to try harder when the door had been locked from the other side.
From being told that poverty was a personal failure, illness an inconvenience, exhaustion a lack of discipline, and unhappiness a defective attitude.
We come from depression.
From illness.
From degradation.
From humiliation.
From every small cruelty that was called character-building because somebody preferred cruelty to care.
We come from corporal punishment and social punishment, from the raised hand and the raised eyebrow, from the teacher who shamed the child, the parent who frightened the child, the institution that disciplined the inconvenient human being until they became convenient.
We come from the ideology of nonviolence that sometimes asks the wounded to remain polite while the powerful continue doing the wounding.
We come from people who were told to forgive before anyone bothered to stop the harm.
We come from people who survived.
And that word matters.
Because history is full of people who were not supposed to survive it.
We come from workers whose labour became somebody else's profit.
From women whose lives were made smaller by the architecture of gender.
From queer people who learned to make themselves invisible and then, occasionally, decided to become gloriously impossible to ignore.
From migrants and refugees whose humanity was made conditional upon paperwork.
From colonised people whose countries were turned into markets and whose histories were turned into footnotes.
From the people imperialism exploited, displaced, impoverished, disciplined and then blamed for the ruins.
We come from empire's long shadow.
We come from wars remembered in monuments and wars forgotten in mass graves.
We come from children who learned too early that adults can be dangerous.
We come from adults who learned too late that obedience is not the same thing as goodness.
And we come from every person who looked at this enormous machinery of misery and thought:
No.
Not loudly, necessarily.
Sometimes just a tiny, private no.
A refusal to become cruel.
A refusal to believe that another person's suffering is deserved.
A refusal to accept that competition is the natural condition of humanity simply because capitalism has become very good at arranging the furniture that way.
A refusal to become what hurt us.
Because that, too, is part of where we come from.
We come from resistance.
Not always heroic resistance. Mostly not.
We come from small acts.
From sharing food.
From translating a letter for somebody who cannot understand the bureaucracy.
From teaching a child something simply because knowledge ought to belong to them.
From making a home where someone else can finally unclench their shoulders.
From sitting beside the person everybody else has decided is difficult.
From saying I believe you.
From saying you can stay.
From saying this is not your fault.
From saying we can build something else.
Perhaps this is the strange inheritance we carry.
We have inherited a world that tells us human beings are competitors, commodities, categories, consumers, voters, taxpayers, employees, bodies.
And still, somehow, we keep becoming people.
Messy people.
Tender people.
Angry people.
Ridiculous people.
People who make tea for someone who is sad. People who rescue cats. People who write poems at two in the morning. People who teach. People who translate. People who fall in love with inconvenient humans and inconvenient ideas. People who look at a machine built to turn life into profit and insist that life is not raw material.
That is where we come from.
From the concrete.
From the violence.
From the loneliness.
From the history that bruised us.
But also from every hand that reached through it.
Every voice that said another world was possible.
Every person who refused to become indifferent.
And perhaps that is why we are still here.
Not because history has been gentle.
It has not.
But because somewhere beneath all the architecture of fear, beneath the invoices and borders and prisons and rankings and little boxes into which we keep trying to sort one another, there remains this stubborn, inconvenient thing:
a human being looking at another human being and recognising a fellow creature.
No market can quite explain that.
No spreadsheet can measure it.
No empire has ever managed to abolish it completely.
And perhaps, in the end, that is where we begin.
#Capitalism #AntiImperialism #Antifascism #QueerLiberation #HumanDignity #Solidarity #MutualAid #CriticalTheory #AnotherWorldIsPossible #HopeIsPolitical
De la dépossession du savoir à l’émancipation : Simone Weil, Marx et la reconstruction du commun
Le capitalisme ne dépossède pas seulement les travailleurs de leur salaire : il les prive aussi de leurs savoirs, de leur capacité de jugement et de leur puissance collective. De Weil à Stiegler, de Marx à Hegel, comment passer de l’obéissance à l’émancipation ? #Marx #SimoneWeil #Stiegler #Emancipation #CriticalTheory #Common Introduction : une incapacitation systémique…
[Blog Archive]
Theodor Adorno on "...the most compelling of the motivations which induced me to take up sociology."
#CriticalTheory #Sociology
https://node801.blogspot.com/2013/11/theodor-adorno-most-compelling-of.html
Reconnaissance, mépris et immersion critique : de Hegel à Butler, Honneth, Bourdieu et Benjamin
La reconnaissance n’est pas un luxe moral : c’est la condition de la subjectivité, de la justice et du vivre‑ensemble. De Hegel à Butler, en passant par Honneth, Bourdieu, Spivak, Ahmed, Weil, Castel et Benjamin, le fil est le même : pas de liberté sans reconnaissance, pas d’émancipation sans traversée lucide du mépris. #Recognition #CriticalTheory #Hegel #Butler #Honneth…
Errer ensemble : doute, commun et action sans garantie
De James à Nancy, de Serres à Benjamin, du pragmatisme à l’écologie politique : le doute n’est ni renoncement ni alibi. Il devient une force d’enquête, d’invention et de partage. Agir sans fondement ultime, apprendre par essai‑erreur, protéger les vulnérables et construire un commun qui ne cesse de se reformuler. #Pragmatism #Uncertainty #Commons #Ecology #Degrowth #SituatedKnowledge #CriticalTheory #Democracy…
https://homohortus31.wordpress.com/2026/09/19/errer-ensemble-doute-commun-et-action-sans-garantie/
Bataille : la souveraineté contre le pouvoir
Pour Georges Bataille, la souveraineté n’est pas le pouvoir suprême ni la conquête de l’État. Elle désigne une expérience limite, soustraite à l’utilité, au travail, au calcul et à toute finalité. Mais cette liberté ne peut apparaître qu’en se perdant : dès qu’elle devient programme ou institution, elle redevient pouvoir. #Bataille #Philosophy #Sovereignty #CriticalTheory #Hegel #Camus #Surrealism Une notion paradoxale…
https://homohortus31.wordpress.com/2026/09/17/bataille-la-souverainete-contre-le-pouvoir/
The Works of Henri Lefebvre: Four Lectures
Iván Zatz-Díaz
"...the work of French Marxist theorist Henri Lefebvre through four monthly lectures presented by cultural studies scholar Iván Zatz-Díaz"
Lecture 1—October 11
Metaphilosophy
Lecture 2—November 15
Critique of Everyday Life
Lecture 3—December 6
The Production of Space
Lecture 4—January 10
Critique vol. 3 and Rhythmanalysis
#CriticalTheory #Sociology #Marx
Register for these free and virtual talks at:
https://marxedproject.org/event/four-lectures-lefebvre/
(Translated from: Wolfgang Heise, Realistik und Utopie. Aufsätze zur deutschen Literatur zwischen Lessing und Heine, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1982, p. 116-118)
Herein lies, at the same time, the systemic function of his protesting thought. This also explains why the Frankfurt School split apart in the face of the emerging political movement of the 1960s, however limited it may have been in many respects.
A Marxist will read Adorno’s works critically and with benefit: for here he finds a phenomenology of alienation in the realms of art, culture, ideology, and the social psychology of bourgeois society, while Adorno, characteristically, leaves out the economy. The reader will find critical insights and materials on these topics whose substance is not consumed by the ideology of this line of thought. He must simply not expect to find insights into the dialectics of class struggle, into the logic of intra-imperialist contradictions, or even a guide to action; rather, he will find a bourgeois self-criticism and self-negation. Within these limits, the reader encounters a highly sensitive process of reflection—one that often operates and articulates itself in artistic ways—whose experience frequently transcends theory, whose concrete critical insight sometimes surpasses ideological position, whose driving restlessness goes beyond the results, and whose analyses extend beyond or point beyond the conclusions."
[part 3- citation reference in next posting]
This standpoint is not negated by his insights adapted from Marx. Adorno is a characteristic figure of the bourgeois intelligentsia of our era: he has recognized and experienced too much to still be able to affirm or justify capitalism, let alone state-monopolistic capitalism. At the same time, he harbors a panic-stricken fear of any connection to the real, practical movement for its overthrow. Fascinated, he absolutizes the traits of the old within the new. He objectifies and legitimizes this fear in the image of a society petrified in universal alienation. Thrown back upon himself, upon his intellectual existence, he absolutizes the actual experience of powerlessness, depravity, and the objectified situation of the isolated individual in the face of the course of social events—which takes no account of his will—and in the face of the merciless logic of the capitalist economy and the overwhelming power of its state-institutional superstructure. Adorno does not take refuge in the past. He develops an extreme position of contradiction between the ideologue and his class, a contradiction that is so neutralized by the norm of practical hopelessness and the subjectivism of his “negative dialectic” that their convergence is guaranteed in practical conflict.
[part 2 -continued in next posting]
Why one shouldn't mistake Adorno for a Marxist - East German Marxist philosopher Wolfgang Heise nailed it in his 1974 essay "Zehn Paraphrasen zu 'Wandrers Nachtlied":
# Critique of Adorno’s Philosophical-Aesthetic Position
While Theodor Adorno’s philosophy did incorporate Marxist ideas, it integrated them into a theoretically and ideologically opposed framework. It is a protest against the world of capitalism, condemning and negating it theoretically—while at the same time negating any practical revolutionary action aimed at abolishing this society. It was not merely Adorno’s affective and blind anti-communism, which came to the fore in the postwar period, that integrated him into bourgeois society, but rather his fundamental philosophical and ideological approach: the subjectivism of self-reflection, which elevated the standpoint of the isolated self—as a contemplative existence of consciousness—to the status of the ultimate authority.
[part 1 - continued in next posting]
[Archive]
RACE AFTER DARWIN [for Devin Griffiths and Deanna K. Kreisel, eds. 2023. After Darwin: Literature, Theory, and Criticism in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge University Press.]
#HistSTM #HistSci #CriticalTheory
[PDF] https://www.academia.edu/attachments/116926857/download_file
25 years later....
Who are the "Enemies of Civilization"? (October 2001)
Remarks prepared for "09.11.01: Responses and Responsibilities" -Pratt Institute, October, 2001.
#911 #NYC #CriticalTheory #CulturalStudies
https://www.academia.edu/attachments/1163880/download_file
Écrire, travailler, créer : l’inconfort contre le confort capitaliste
Écrire ne doit pas faire souffrir, mais cela peut faire mal : la douleur comme signe de vie, de connexion et d’effort créateur. Contre l’illusion d’une création sans travail, repenser l’écriture, le travail nécessaire et l’IA à partir de Marx, Fromm, Jappe, Barthes, Sollers et Negri. #Writing #AI #Labour #Creativity #Marx #Fromm #Jappe #Barthes #Negri #CriticalTheory John Paul Brammer affirme que…
Contre le fétichisme du concept : Marx, Engels et la critique du matérialisme hégélien
Marx et Engels contre Hegel. La conscience ne détermine pas la vie, c'est la vie qui détermine la conscience. Contre l'idéalisme allemand, pour le matérialisme historique et la pratique révolutionnaire. #Marx #Engels #Hegel #Materialism #HistoricalMaterialism #GermanIdeology #ThesesOnFeuerbach #ClassStruggle #Revolution #Philosophy #CriticalTheory #Ideology #Praxis Si Marx et Engels…
I follow JG Fichte and say that the only true form of engaging with critical theory is to cook and be cooked at the same time and in the same act.
At least according to Heinrich Heine, who says that Fichte's reflective individual is like
"[...] the monkey that sits by the stove and boils its own tail in the copper pot. Why does the monkey do that? Because the true art of cooking consists not just of objectively doing the cooking, but of subjectively experiencing being cooked."
What would we do without classical German philosophy! (And, even more so, without Heinrich Heine.)
#HeinrichHeine #JGFichte #CookAndBeCooked #CriticalTheory
Source: Heinrich Heine, The History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany (1834). Translation my own.
https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/heine/religion/chap04.html
Quand notre valeur mutuelle devient celle de nos objets : la critique marxienne de la réification des rapports humains
“Notre valeur mutuelle est pour nous la valeur de nos objets mutuels. Dès lors, l’homme lui-même n’a mutuellement aucune valeur.” Marx, 1844. Dans le capitalisme, nous ne comptons les uns pour les autres que par ce que nous échangeons, pas par ce que nous sommes. #Marx #alienation #commodityfetishism #capitalism #criticaltheory Dans ses Commentaires…
HydroArts Conference 2027
16-18 June 2027
Le Mans University, France
Deadline: 5 October 2026
Further information: https://www.performing-arts.eu/de/news/newsstream/call-for-papers-hydroarts-conference-2027-le-mans-university-france/
#callforproposals #hydroarts #performancestudies #performanceresearch #performingarts #hydrology #arthistory #criticaltheory #oceonography #philosophy #aquaticturn #environmentalhumanities #bluehumanities
Adorno | Horkheimer | Kogon: The Administered World, or: The Crisis of the Individual
A conversation between Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Eugen Kogon for the Hessischer Rundfunk (Hesse Broadcasting), broadcast September 4th 1950.
Published in print in: Max Horkheimer: Gesammelte Schriften. Band 13.... S. 121–142.
#CriticalTheory
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89o2VYn7MJc
I want to see something more here, something that transcends. But all I see is Yakov Smirnov, and I can't escape the sense that this failure in myself articulates an aporia that the absence of the Zizek of the 1990s would somehow be able to articulate.
Also, Vancouver for the US tour is a fabulous #parapraxis Dare I read it as the #problematic? (if you want to quote Lacan at me, I WILL block you unless Lefebvre makes a quotidian intervention, or better yet, David Gascoyne's very early footnote on Surrealism)
I'll stop now & show myself out. #zizek #lacan #criticaltheory
[Archive] Cultural Studies - Introductory Lectures.
To be added.... eventually, or as they say, "after all due consideration and in the fullness of time...."
#sociology #CulturalStudies #CriticalTheory
https://culturalstudieslectures.blogspot.com/
[Archive] Cultural Studies - Introductory Lectures.
Lecture Eight – The Origins of Cultural Studies in the U.K.
#sociology #CulturalStudies #CriticalTheory
https://culturalstudieslectures.blogspot.com/2012/03/lecture-eight-origins-of-cultural.html
Trois phases d’un libéralisme injustifiable : du keynésianisme à l’illibéralisme
Comment le keynésianisme, le néolibéralisme, le néo-managérialisme et l’illibéralisme peuvent être interprétés comme trois phases successives d’un libéralisme de moins en moins défendable. De la gouvernance technocratique à l’autoritarisme ouvert, les masques tombent. #Marxism #CriticalTheory #PoliticalEconomy #Neoliberalism #Illiberalism #Capitalism #PoliticalPhilosophy Une lecture…
[Archive] Cultural Studies - Introductory Lectures.
Lecture 7: The Frankfurt School and Cultural Studies
(Notes and Slides).
#sociology #CulturalStudies #CriticalTheory
https://culturalstudieslectures.blogspot.com/2012/03/lecture-7-notes-frankfurt-school-and.html
Le commun avant l’incitation
Une enquête peut donner la parole aux acteurs tout en leur imposant les catégories du chercheur. Chez les Hadza, la réciprocité arrive en tête des motivations déclarées du partage ; mais cela suffit-il à prouver que le partage est un échange entre individus plutôt qu’une norme constitutive du commun ? #Anthropology #Commons #HunterGatherers #EconomicAnthropology #Marxism #PoliticalPhilosophy #CriticalTheory…
https://homohortus31.wordpress.com/2026/08/25/le-commun-avant-lincitation/
RE: https://kolektiva.social/@IllWill/117150912498004501
'Deleuze stated without any ambiguity: the Palestinian tragedy is not a conflict but a modular genocide, a permanent technology of evacuation. Elimination is not measured by the number of dead but by a factorylike production of absence — the emptying of villages, topographical erasure, symbolic expulsion. The genocide perpetrated by Israel is not episodic but functional to the reproduction of state power'
[Archive] Cultural Studies - Introductory Lectures.
Lecture Six: Fetishism and Popular Culture: Umberto Eco's Casablanca
#sociology #CulturalStudies #CriticalTheory
https://culturalstudieslectures.blogspot.com/2012/03/fetishism-and-popular-culture-umberto.html
Is participating in capitalism should be freely chosen or driven by compulsion?
#philosophy #economics #capitalism #society #justice #labour #ethics #humanrights #criticaltheory #systemicissues #freedom #reflections #dignity #autonomy
[Archive] Cultural Studies - Introductory Lectures.
Lecture Five: Degeneracy, Culture, and Critique - Part I: Science, Reason, and Knowledge
and Part II (notes)
#sociology #CulturalStudies #CriticalTheory
https://culturalstudieslectures.blogspot.com/2012_02_01_archive.html
https://culturalstudieslectures.blogspot.com/2012/02/lecture-5-notes-degeneracy-culture-and.html
