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@damashummus.bsky.social

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Scientist/Engineer. Very much form-determined. Editor @crittheoryworkgrp.bsky.social. he/him. *All typos are my own*. CTWGwebsite.github.io

Two branches, one tree Two branches, one tree, in a lush oasis Deep roots, scented twigs, plump fruit Then Time came, and harvested its malice. Time never fails Al-Khansa Translated by James E. Montgomery
Pictured is the cover of “The History and Philosophy of Materialism” Edited by Charles T. Wolfe and John Symons
A YouTube comment from the above linked video that says: “im 2-unemploid”
The most photogenic gray Scottish fold car looking to the light source on his right.
Mental gymnastic meme about dialectics. Top half says “Dialectics is a method, and its end is the Absolute.” And the bottom half says “‘Dialectics is not a method.’ blah blah blah”
Highlighted portion: “Theoretical biology back to ancient authors. Efforts to establish a field of research… Ehrenberg (23) used the term Theoretische Biologie (theoretical biology) explicitly, but with different aims. Often, theoretical biology was associated with philosophy of nature (Naturphilosophie), spistemology and metaphysics rather than with the formation of scientific hypotheses and theories. Reinke's work appears as a vitalistic philosophy of nature. Uexkull's attempts to deduce the phenomena of life from the principle of the necessity of death. All these approaches have their merits, but only a few of them-Schaxel probably being a case in point (ct. science (Bertalanffy, "32:3). Also Adolf Meyer-Abich's goal was to promote theoretical biology. For him, physical theory was a subset of biological theory.” Paper = Drack, Manfred. “Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s Organismic View on the Theory of Evolution.” Journal of Experimental Zoology Part B: Molecular and Developmental Evolution 324, no. 2 (March 2015): 77–90. https://doi.org/10.1002/jez.b.22611.
A single page brochure advertising a small workshop on Adorno titled “Adorno & communism?” tackling new translations of his work. The schedule is: Feb 23: Adorno and Horkheimer's "On the Relation Between Critical Intellectuals, the Proletariat, and the Communist Party" James Crane. Emory University Mar 9: Adornos Philosophical Terminology, Lecture 42 (Jake Orbison, UC Berkeley) Mar 17: Adornos Contra Paulum (James Crane, Emory University) Apr6: Adorno's "Marx and the Basic Concepts of Sociological Theory" Chris O'Kane) All sessions at 5 pm pst. RSVP via the QR code for Zoom link and reading
Merriam-Webster logo top right. Next to it, in the center, is “your 2026 word.” The absolute middle of screenshot, “joyous.”
A book that roughly translates to “sustainable agricultural development: active elements”
Highlighted section: “Rather, "having history" means being interwoven in the dialectic, in the subject-object relationship. In other words, history consists in the fact that the life of the human being is not simply "his own," but constituted through the extra-human and alienated. To put it more simply: history is not a distinguishing quality of the human being, but rather the epitome of all suffering. True, the human being is conscious of history, as you go on to say, and it would be foolish to deny the distinction therein. But the human being cannot be spun from this knowledge, nor from "having history" as such. Knowing history and having history are not the same, and to date knowledge has changed little enough of what's decisive for history, suffering. On the other hand, however, "having history" extends far beyond consciousness; all of nature, as suffering, has infinite share in it. The proposition that "[i]n knowing history man is above history, although, on the other hand, he is in history," 48 is, in this form, illusory. The assertion that "man is free... from history in so far as he knows history" 49 cannot be maintained, at least not without mediation.”
Highlighted section, but the whole paragraph pictured is great. “if there is anything 'bourgeois, and therefore unfit to serve as counter-concept to the bourgeois, it is this idea of catastrophe. Its presupposition is a "normal" functioning of the bourgeois order, for which said catastrophe is supposed to spell the end. However, this is exactly the illusion that bourgeois society has always harbored about itself. In opposition to this, the critique of political economy holds that, though it reproduces life, this mode of reproduction itself is permanent catastrophe, 2 and what we experience today as the fate of the market economy is not its collapse under external powers, but the fulfillment-indeed, the revelation-of its own principle. For it has always contained the threat of catastrophe for anyone "thrown" into it. Revolution is not this catastrophe, nor the ensuing "renewal," but rather: that the permanent catastrophe is brought to a halt. The seeming radicalism that desires catastrophe-assuming it's desired in earnest, and not just diluted into one of sheer interiority-is in fact complete agreement with has always-already been; what this radicalism wants, down in its depths, is for everything to finally reveal its true face. In the time of concentration camps, what is radical is not the desire for catastrophe, but for halting the horror that now freely admits itself to be.”
A philosophy book titled “Laughing and Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior” by HELMUTH PLESSNER TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY JAMES SPENCER CHURCHILL AND MARJORIE GRENE WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY J M BERNSTEIN
A book called “CURRICULUM OF THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF MARXISM-LENINISM” translated from a Vietnamese ML textbook. It shows two contrasting images split in the middle. On the left, a relaxed fisherman with the subtitle “ordinary consciousness,” and on the right, a fisherman who caught a fish, but is deeply inquisitive; asking all sorts of question about it. The subtitle for the left image is “scientific consciousness.” Humorously, the image, more or less, indicates that science is when you cannot relax!
20th century biology legends. From left to right: Richard Lewontin, Stephen Jay Gould, and Richard Levins.
@SashaGusevPosts on Twitter: “Huge blow to Marxist theory: a working class voter coalition eagerly exchanges material losses for symbolic victories.” To quoted retweet by Joe Weisenthal on unemployment.
Deleuze: The Party's? No, it never concerned me, something else that saved me, you understand...The discussions about Stalin, what they've discovered recently, the horrors committed by Stalin, I mean, everyone has known this for quite a while. And about the revolution going wrong, [Deleuze laughs] that makes me laugh because, really, who are they trying to kid? (de qui on se moque?) When the "New Philosophers" (nouveaux philosophes) discovered that the revolution turned out badly, you really have to be a bit dimwitted (débile), since we discovered that with Stalin. So henceforth, the road was open, everyone discovered it, for example, quite recently, about the Algerian revolution - "Hey, it turned out badly" because they fired on students!' Who ever thought that a revolution would go well? Who? Who? People say the English could not have a revolution, but that's absolutely false. I mean all that... Today we live with such a mystification... The English had a revolution, they killed their king, etc., and who did they get? They got Cromwell. And English Romanticism, what is it? It's a long meditation on the failure of the revolution. They didn't wait for [André] Glucksmann to reflect on the failure of the Stalinian revolution. They had one, really, they had one. And the Americans never get discussed, but the Americans blew their revolution, as badly as if not worse than the Bolsheviks. Let's not kid about it! People never talk about the Americans when they... even before the War of Independence - and "independence," I say --, they presented themselves worse than... or better than a new nation, they went beyond nations exactly like Marx spoke later of the proletariat: they went beyond nations, nations are finished! They bring forth a new people, they have a true revolution. Just as the Marxists count on universal proletariatization, the Americans counted on universal…
As we have seen, to be a linguistic body is to incorporate powers and sensitivities to participate in group and community engagements involving the different kinds of social agency described in the dialectical model. But it is also to be part of the ecological relations between the various autonomous patterns at play in the multiple timescales involved. Being a linguistic body means not only having a personal capacity for language but also playing a role in community patterns. Here we have a new kind of closure, as we have described at the end of the model. It is an autonomy that at the same time belongs to the individual and to the community. It is constituted by the encounter between both, and it is granted to the individual almost as an alien presence in her body. This occurs through the incorporation of utterances, which are person-shaping and person-relating acts, unavoidably altering the agency of those who incorporate them through a tendency to incarnate the voices, gestures, opinions, styles, and perspectives of others. Unlike sensorimotor autonomy, which is rooted in the organic body even if it transcends it, linguistic agency does not originate completely "out of" an individual's body, but also comes from her world and moves into the constitution of a "new" body, a linguistic one, that is tethered but displaced, at once distanced from and oriented toward "its" organic and sensorimotor body. If under normal circumstances we don't seem to be aware of this alien presence it is because "we" are it.
CTWG on execution vs on conception
LINGUISTIC BODIES: The Continuity between Life and Language by Ezequiel A. Di Paolo, Elena Clare Cuffari, and Hanne De Jaegher
THIS VALUE SUBSTANCE THAT EXISTS INDEPENDENTLY OF ITS FORM OF APPEARANCE. IS IT IN THE ROOM WITH US RIGHT NOW?
The multiple intelligences test result
Ahmad Shawqi Poem as translated by Suheil Laher. Stand for the teacher, give him full respect The teacher's rank is close to the prophet'. Can there be any person nobler than The one who builds and nurtures souls and minds? Glory to You God, O best instructor, With the pen You taught the folk of yore. You brought this mind forth from its darknesses, And guided it a way of lucid light. The teacher's hand a crucible you made, Its products ingots rusted or burnished. Moses as a guide You sent with Torah, So too the Virgin's son, who taught Injil. Muhammad's fluent fount You caused to gush, So human souls he quenched with scripture's words.
The key point, then, is that the organism brings forth and specifies its own domain of problems and actions to be "solved"; this cognitive domain does not exist "out there" in an environment that acts as a landing pad for organisms that somehow drops or is parachuted into the world. Instead, living beings and their worlds of meaning stand in relation to each other through mutual specification or co-determination. Thus what we describe as significant environmental regularities are not external features that have been internalized, as the dominant representationalist tradition in cognitive science -and adaptationism in evolutionary biology -assumes. Environmental regularities are the result of a conjoint history, a congruence which unfolds from a long history of co-determination. In Lewontin's [73] words, the organism is both the subject and the object of evolution.
This is an excerpt from the book A Material World. “The chemicals revolution is perhaps the most-overlooked aspect of the industrial revolution, yet the development of chemical products arguably changed more lives than, for instance, the mass production of steel. It certainly saved more lives, purifying our water and cleansing our homes, saving us from bacteria and germs long before we understood the nature of their threats. Yet while we celebrate the pioneers of steelmaking and steam power, we have mostly forgotten the earliest giants of industrial chemistry, like Leblanc or Ernest Solvay.”
CR&D summary so far: we need an immanent critique of life-cycle assessments. Transform society from machine to organism.
A few years ago two historians, Alan Macfarlane and Gerry Martin, went methodically through 20 of the great experiments that advanced human knowledge - everything from Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke's creation of a vacuum chamber to Isaac Newton's theory of light to Michael Faraday's investigations into electricity - and discovered that all but four of them relied in some way on glass prisms or containers or contraptions. Glass, in other words, was a foundational innovation, a general purpose technology like the wheel or the steam engine or the silicon chip. This magical product was important not just for what it was but for what it enabled us to do - to make further leaps of imagination and feats of invention. Indeed, it continues to play that role even today. The internet is mostly a mesh of information transmitted through glass wires and, as you'll see later on in this section, without glass we would be unable to make the brains of the most advanced computers. Not bad for something that is ultimately just melted sand.
An illustration of the 1931 Boris Hessen’s presentation “the social and economic roots of Newton’s Principia”
Chapter 6 of Biology under the Influence. At best, liberal thought attempts to combine the biological and the social in a statistical model that assigns relative weights to the two, allowing for some component of interaction between them. But the division of causality between distinct biological and social causes that then may interact misses the real nature of their code-termination. Like any other species, human beings clearly have certain biological properties of anatomy and physiology that both constrain and enable them, properties that are partly shared with other organisms as a consequence of being living systems, and that are partly unique as a consequence of the particular genes possessed by our species. We all have to eat, drink, and breathe; we are all susceptible to attack by pathogens; there are limits to the external temperatures that our naked bodies can survive; and we will all die. No historical contingency or change in consciousness can remove those necessities. But at the same time, the central nervous system of human beings, combined with their organs of speech and manipulative hands, leads to the formation of social structures that produce the historical forms and transformations of those needs. Whereas human sociality is itself a consequence of our received biolo-gy, human biology is a socialized biology. At the individual level our physiology is a socialized physiology. The time course of blood pressure or serum glucose with age, the integrity of the epithelial interfaces between the insides and outsides of our bodies, the ways in which we perceive distance or pattern, the availability of our immune systems for confronting invasions by other organisms, and the formation and disruption of linkages in our brains- all are variably dependent on class position, the nature of work, the social status of our ethnicity, the commodities that circulate in our society, and the techniques of their production.
Figure 9.1 The wheel of languaging. A partial representation of the processes and their various enabling relations that describe the activity of languaging (adapted from Cuffari et al. 2015). This figure does not depict temporal scales, asymmetries at the level of interactions, or dynamic processes in the enlanguaged environments. The elements that we will be discussing in this chapter are included in the figure, but our focus will be on their multiple dynamic relations, which cannot easily be shown here. Linguistic bodies are enacted as practices of participatory sense-making, themselves framed within the lifeworld of a given linguistic community that in turn is constituted by the activities of linguistic bodies. This is the main circularity described in the figure. At behavioral timescales, languaging is one form of participatory sense-making that becomes ever more dominant with increasing participation in a linguistic commu-nity. At developmental timescales, through the mediation of interactions with oth ers, linguistic bodies are constituted as an ongoing navigation of the tension between incorporating linguistic skills and incarnating linguistic agencies. At historical times-cales, the circular interplay between actual interactions and sociomaterial constraints and norms of enlanguaged environments sustains the iteworld in a dialectics of critical spontaneity and sedimentation.
The enactivist languaging wheel vs Hegel’s system of systems in the meme format of “they’re the same picture.” From the Office.
The silly left-value quiz results. The closest match = council communism.
Gusdorf had followed the lead of Ernst Hirschfeld, who in his 1930's study on romantic medicine stressed that: “The notion of organism is the most elevated romantic concept in all domains of knowledge, not only in the natural sciences. It is the concept inaugurated by Herder, defined by Kant, applied by Kielmeyer, sealed by Schelling, and superbly developed by Goethe. Without such a concept it is impossible to understand romanticism itself.” (Hirschefeld, as cited in Gusdorf, 1984, p. 258)
Scottish-fold cat with grayish fur. The cat appears to be amidst grooming when the picture was taken, so appears like he’s sitting funny.
A picture of William Wimsatt
The more the economy is rationalized the more obvious it becomes that the differences of intelligence needed for the various functions could easily be overcome by adequate training. Under such conditions adaptability to the prevailing power relations rather than any other personal trait becomes paramount. It has been the fallacy of technocratic thinking from St. Simon to Veblen to underestimate the similarity of promising character traits in the different branches of production and of business and to confound rational use of the means of production with rational inclinations of certain categories of its agents. 16 The engineer, indeed, embodies progress. He looks at people not exclusively as means of profit-making. His function as commander is more directly linked to the requirements of the work itself; therefore, his orders bear on the signs of greater objectivity. His subordinates recognize at least part of his commands as founded in the nature of things and therefore rational in a universal sense. But even the essence of this rationality is not reason but domination. The engineer's understanding of things regards none of their elements by which they can be handled and transformed - their weakest points, so to speak. He is not interested in things as they really are but as they can be fitted into schema completely alien to their own nature. In fact his methods of thinking. his categories, lead necessarily to the triumph of modern technology: the smashing of atoms. No one is considered as an aim, all are mere tools. His mind is that of class society in its streamlined form, without any ornaments. His purposeful rule would make humanity a mass of utopia without any purpose.
The power of collective patterns of monopolistic society goes far beyond the sphere of conscious influence. From the day of his birth, the individual is made to feel that there is only one way to get along in this world: by resigning his unlimited hope. This he can only achieve by imitation (mimesis. He continuously ruminates what he perceives around him not only consciously - • he acquires judgment and notions much later - but with his whole being. Long before he can even speak, he echoes the gestures of the persons and things around him. Later on, he echoes the traits and attitudes of all the collectives at whose mercy he is: his family, his classmates, his athletic team and all the other teams which enforce a deeper conformity. a more radical surrender by complete assimilation than any father or teacher in the 19th century. By echoing, repeating, imitating the surroundings, by adapting himself to all the powerful groups to which he belongs, by transforming himself from a human being into a member of specific organized bodies, by reducing his potentialities to readiness and ability to conform to, and gain influence in, such bodies, he can finally manage to survive. It is survival by practicing the oldest biological means of survival: mimicry. Modern culture is a resurrection of oppressed mimetic practices. Just as the child repeats the words of his mother and the youngster, the brutality of his elders at whose hands he has suffered much, industrialized culture, the giant loudspeaker voice of monopolism, copies reality endlessly and boringly. All the ingenious devices of the amusement industry serve but to reproduce over and over again, without betraying the slightest.
Brain from the population cartoon series Pinky and the Brain. He’s an anthrmsoprhzied white mouse with a big head, whom I am claiming looks like Kant.
Highlighted in blue. Habermas has also once more emphasized the importance of Plessner's Levels in a recent interview: "You are completely right, I could have made explicit use of Plessner's fundamental anthropological insights, which I've been familiar with since my university studies - and should. I consider The Levels of Organic Life and the Human, alongside Being and Time and History and Class Consciousness, to be the most important work of the 20s, that most philosophically fruitful decade of the 20* century" (Habermas 2016, 812).
Brook Ziporyn’s Evil and/or/as The Good
Vygotsky made his entrance on the Soviet psychological stage in 1924, when he presented his Methods of Reflexological and Psychological Investigation' to the 2nd All-Russian Psychoneurological Congress in Leningrad. In this and other early works, his main concern was to identify what he called the 'crisis in contemporary psychology. Vygotsky argued that, like most young disciplines, psychology was a battleground of warring schools. Gestalt psychology, psycho-analysis, behaviourism and Stern's personalism, for example, all seemed to offer insightful suggestions for a theory of mind. Yet since each school employed an explanatory framework incommensurable with the others, it was impossible to integrate their separate findings. It therefore seemed that psychology would become a unified science only if one of the competing schools defeated its rivals. But, Vygotsky argued, none of the existing frameworks had sufficient explanatory power to ground a science embracing all psychological phenom-ena. Each offered insights in its own limited domain but threatened to become vacuous when its principles were applied more widely. The weakness of the prevailing schools was clearest in their failure to make good sense of consciousness, the phenomenon Vygotsky saw as the principal subject of psychological inquiry. Psychologists, he argued, adopted either one of two strategies to its analysis: either (a) a subjectivism which treated consciousness as a sui generis, non-physical phenomenon occurring in a self. contained, 'inner' world of thought and accessible to the investigator only through 'non-scientific' modes of inquiry (for example, through the introspect. ive reports of the subject or phenomenological analysis); or (b) an objectivism which held that consciousness is reducible to a set of objectively observable
The key point is that laughing and crying have to be understood as emerging from the complex situation of human embodiment. Plessner's central concept here is the border or boundary: all living things have a functional relationship to the borders of their own bodies, while nonliving things do not. Even a single-celled organism has a stake in its own boundary, as that which both separates it from and connects it to its environment. At a level far below and before consciousness, living organisms must necessarily both preserve their boundaries (to remain intact) and transgress them (to eat, to excrete, to breathe, to multiply; to live). Plessner's concept of "positionality" differentiates the ways in which various forms of life relate to their own bodily border. This allows him to think of embodiment at a level of abstraction where something like a self whatever "it" is that has a relationship to its own body can emerge independently of consciousness, mind, or vital spirit. Uniquely in the natural world, humans for Plessner are characterized by their "eccentric" positionality, in the sense that being aware of a center is inherently decentering. Like plants, humans are their bodies; like animals, they are and they have their bodies; and, uniquely, they are their bodies, they have their bodies, and they are aware of this situation. Self-awareness here is a kind of recursive doubling: aware of yourself, you are also necessarily aware of your awareness of this, and thus cannot simply be in your body and its possibility of action in the world, but are always looking over your own shoulder.
A black and white picture of Herbert Marcuse laying down on recliner chair. He appears to be smoking and reading a book!
Ch. 230 of Jujutsu Kaisen. The last page where I take Gojo to represent speculative philosophy and Sukuna to represent skepticism.
Yet, under unequal social conditions, once the machine is created and the knowledge it incorporates is codified, the workers become the machine's object and lose their dignity as subjects of knowledge and action. The cumulative history of knowledge is paired with the cumulative history of machines. The political task, as Marx indicated to the expropriated workers, is to reappropriate both knowledge and means of production, that is, to de-alienate the Gesamtarbeiter of Capital--the "super-organism" or "collective working organism"-which connects workers and machines in the factory and, today, society at large.
Only coldness and warmth of concrete anticipation together therefore ensure that neither the path in itself nor the goal in itself are held apart from one another undialectically and so become reified and isolated. And the conditional analysis on the whole historical-situational stretch emerges both as an unmasking of ideologies and as a disenchantment of metaphysical illusion; precisely this belongs to the most useful cold stream of Marxism. Through it Marxist materialism becomes not only the science of conditions, but at the same time the science of struggle and opposition against all ideological inhibitions and concealments of the ultimately decisive conditions, which are always economic. To the warm stream of Marxism, however, belong liberating intention and materialistically humane, humanely materialistic real tendency, towards whose goal all these disenchantments are undertaken. From here the strong appeal to the debased, enslaved, abandoned, belittled human being, from here the appeal to the proletariat as the turntable towards emancipation. The goal remains the naturalization of man, humanization of nature which is inherent in developing matter.
Page 204 of Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital. “The picture of mechanization and skill cannot be completed without reference to those industries where mechanization has made the process so automatic that the worker takes virtually no physical part in it whatsoever. This theoretical ideal can be but seldom realized, and most plants considered "automatic" still require a great deal of direct labor of all sorts. But in the chemical industry it very often comes closer to realization than elsewhere, because of the nature of the continuous processes employed and the possibility of moving the entire product-in-preparat..”
A screenshot from Wikipedia. It states: “Avicenna often used psychological methods to treat his patients.[7]  One such example is when a Persian prince had melancholia, suffering from the delusion that he was a cow. He would moo and cry out, "Kill me so that a good stew may be made of my flesh," and would never eat anything. Avicenna was persuaded to take the case. Avicenna sent a message to the patient, asking him to be happy as the butcher was coming to slaughter him, and the sick man rejoiced. When Avicenna approached the prince with a knife in his hand, he asked "where is the cow so I may kill it." The patient then mooed like a cow to indicate where he was. The patient was laid on the ground for slaughter. When Avicenna approached the patient, pretending to be ready to slaughter him, he said, "the cow is too lean and not ready to be killed. He must be fed properly and I will kill it when it becomes healthy and fat." The patient was then offered food which he ate eagerly, and…
The sickos meme. A creepy older man with what it seems like vampire teeth enthusiastically gazing via a transparent window going “YES… HA HA. HA… YES!”