The Fascist Playbook IX: Dissonance or what 'One Battle After Another' Misses that Pynchon gets

-
Image
    There is perhaps a strange similarity between Antigone and the fate of the revolutionaries in Thomas Pynchon's Vineland (1990), a novel which recently acquired a second life through Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another (2025). Both works are concerned with the extraordinary difficulty of distinguishing a revolutionary subject from the conditions through which he or she becomes its opposite.  Vineland begins in California in 1984, where a certain Zoyd Wheeler, a former hippie, must perform an annual act of public insanity in order to continue receiving disability benefits. This year he has decided to wear a woman's dress and attack a bar with a chainsaw, a performance which must be witnessed by television cameras if he is to continue being recognised by the welfare state as a lunatic. Unfortunately, the bar has been gentrified, the loggers have developed expensive tastes and his entire performance has been moved by somebody else to another location. Even ...
Post a Comment

Starting Out: Philosohical Sociology

-
...to be a log of extractable, scalable ideas drawn from classical and otherwise Sociology texts that I read as I attempt to write out a part of my most recent ethnographic work. 

A short stint of teaching Sociology at University has motivated me to try and return to 101 texts and extract not just their core ideas but also experiment with subsidary ideas. 

I will also attempt to draw from my environs and experiment with the reach and extent of these theories in the everyday. Teaching has helped me see even more clearly that immediate applicability at a variety of scales is crucial as much as interpretation is.

However what I miss the most about Sociology today is the lack of interpretation and speculation. Even well delimited experimental speculation is missing. Thus while I will attempt to be specific and direct with my use of these texts, I want to encourage interpretation.

The limits of this discipline I realize having taught a while are not just that we can give accurate political-economic diagnoses of current realities that sound good, but that we can speculate on the wildest things very seriously. Without this, the hau of the discipline stops returning to its originally designated source. 

Apart from being an incredible critical tool when applied to political science, economics and psychology, Sociology also has its own realm, of magic, ritual and religion which cannot be marked simply as mumbo-jumbo. There is something of child-like wonder still to the discipline, a quasi-scientific wonder at strange objects like boomerangs and cigarette silver foil, a sense of the incipiently experimental, that I want to retain here. 

This does not mean however that I'm abandoning the practical. In fact what is most fascinating about Sociology is not just its ability to create general-universal theories (Primitive Classification, The Savage Mind etc) but also its ability to create specific-universal theories (Grief and Rage, Real and Medicinal Cannibalism). I am primarily interested in the Sociology of the wonderous in terms of these two modes which I find go beyond the sheerly empirical, which really doesn't exist in Sociology: every ethnography is an intervention in the theory of ethnography.

I will also look to query my recent interest in the more quantitative parts of the discipline. So far my training has been close to entirely ethnographic.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Unseeing Gaze I: What kind of 'person' is an LLM?

-
Image
“ Suppose you came as an explorer into an unknown country with a language quite strange to you. In what circumstances would you say that the people there gave orders, understood them, obeyed them, rebelled against them, and so on? The common behaviour of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language. ” "An LLM is not a Subject" Of late I have out of curiosity, been involved in learning about how prompting trains Large Language Models that we use. Having worked in the sector and completed a course on the matter, and also having gone over in some detail documents pertaining to how AI companies see their models, I arrived at a question that I find of some importance in the field.  The question of whether AI has what we in common terms might call 'subjectivity' and if so of what kind has been baffling Mechanisitic Interpretability operators for a while now. In the discourse surrounding AI this question takes on two forms: the first ...
Read more

The stories animals tell us about ourselves

-
Image
The puny mahout, let him pull chains On the pillar like legs and lean his sharp goad. None of these the great tusker considered in the Dark recess of his crazed, loony, majestic brain. This adventurer is travelling in his imagination Waving the great ears of speckled deed of freedom In the playgrounds of his youth, in the valleys Of Sahya ranges, made dense by springtime. - from ‘Son of the Sahyadri’ by Vyloppilli Sreedhara Menon Introduction: Why Animals are ‘good to think’ Vyloppilli Sreedhara Menon a Malayalam poet from the middle of the 20th century wrote in a style that is perhaps best described as hyper-realistic. The details in his poems are very fine-grained. Many of his poems paint vivid pictures of village life through the two world wars, in Kerala, India. In the Malayalam poem quoted above, Sahyaente Makan, (Son of the Sahyadris) Menon tells the story of an elephant having a violent fit (literally going wild or ‘mast’ as the Hindi term has it) and eventually being shot by a ...
Read more

Extimate Sociality I: Disappearance

-
Image
Ghosting, gaslighting, ragebaiting, form a trio of subtle new terms that define the limits of urban, bourgeosie sociality today. For me these form a necessary part of the study of novel political, economic and social configurations that 21st century has brought about.  The extraction of social surplus from various milleus that is them commoditized through apps, like Uber or Hinge, or Facebook are not just symptom of a malady, they represent in many ways an end to simplistic humanism and idealitic romanticism, with their roots in highly fascistic, melancholic and male-subjectivity oriented idealism.  I argue here in a series of articles that what we are witnessing are emerging forms of sociality. While teaching we are often made aware of a 'post-COVID' generation of students, who's sociality switched drastically to more solitary, and alienated exchange. Such generations are seen to have shorter attention spans and are more given to visual learning. However in making such arg...
Read more