So hello and welcome to your seventh session of Humanism, It's This Content with Professor Razanegaristani. So please, Razanegaristani. Thank you very much, everyone. Sorry if I am going to be a little bit... I might actually take a couple of rests, like short breaks. not feeling well today at all. But as someone said, you know, none of us actually feel great. In any case, so we are going to do our talks and presentations today and I will mostly concentrate
now on uh uh Ray and Pete uh versions uh on on this whole issue uh and I if I remember correctly I mean we can either do we have two options uh we can just uh dive in into Ray's text today um or uh do it chronologically going with Pete then my two cents on the issue and then ray but i think that let's just go with ray today okay presentations
the victims well today we had the recorded presentation and so yeah i think I think it is on our drive. For some reason I did not receive any sort of Google Drive thingy. Well, that's... Let me just find the link here. I shared it on Discord, but I guess it was also on our drive. Let me just find it here. is the link also for anyone I mean can we can we just uh is it possible to just play it and share
it uh right now I guess we can try the the human one yeah they're each about half an hour oh half an hour my god almighty yeah as i woke up this morning and just watched them in time to have some coffee and then open up this link okay my apologies i did not get uh um the link uh so i had absolutely have no idea what uh the presentation looks like that's uh on me uh complete uh i take take responsibility for this stupid mistake I made. Okay, so those of you who have watched it, start asking questions and then I actually
through responses and answers I start to gather some thoughts. I guess on the on the presentation was yeah I was I was interested in but perhaps you can get to this discussion that if you were already talking about in in the what is what is really the role of this Freudian unconscious or whatever in his final elaboration.
As I remember, and I think Cassia was the one to present this part on the presentation, on the notion of how Brossier mobilizes the spirit from Hegel, and then he goes on to describe the master bondsman dialectics through a notion that we should be, we are the bondsman, and as I got it, and perhaps I'm asking for everyone who watched it or for everyone who presented it in here, but the bondsman is related to this notion that we are, well, constrained by
the unconscious potion and capital and whatever. When we say bondsman, it's that loaded board master, right? Yeah, yeah. And we should sort of elaborate on this self-negativity in order to get it going through the project of rational emancipation. So if that makes any sense, anyone wants to talk about it. For my benefit, because this was the text I wasn't but where in the text are you talking about? Just point me to it so I can No, I was not pointing to a particular part. I was talking on the how I saw
Cassie's interpretation presentation of the final part which she was talking about the Master Bronson and dialectics and how the project of inhuman rationality would be the self-negativity of our bonded condition in order to emancipate the human and then this bonded condition would be equal to well being under capital being under the fear of death being under compotions of the unconscious i i got it like that so i'm just gonna fit doesn't make any sense. Yes, I mean doesn't he actually, Ray, make that sort of move early on in the text. He attacks Rosie Bredotti on the account of that sort of
what you might call to be untenable affirmationist position. and then he uh instead goes for bad use uh subtraction voided animal right uh i just genuinely i'm interested to see this is a question for you how much actually self-negativity in the Hegelian's full sense of what you might call to be concrete, determinate negation, rather than abstract negation, can actually be an engine of an emancipatory project.
I used to think like that, but I think that I have implied that, yes, there should be a sort of affirmation work, affirmative labor in place. Otherwise, I would say nothing of human will remain through a completely negative project. And hence, it is not emancipatory. It should be, you see, the synthesis of affirmation and negation, the two systems, both in concrete and determined sense, I think is absolutely of paramount importance.
I would say that this whole Badiosian heroism is unfortunately a very Salarizian scenario in the sense of scientific image of man. but blow and out of proportion into some sort of ethical mandate where basically you should ultimately ask what of the human will remain if this project is fully initiated so ideas and look this is something that I did not want to say because we are on record
but I think that Ray has not changed that much he has actually gone through a full great circle to come back to the very essay that actually landed him no I'm not talking about Nick Land but yes Landed in a lot of trouble liquidate man once and for all have any of you read that piece it is essentially the fervor of the same text but now through Badiou and the heroism of truth and subtraction Curiel has some.
Hi. So my question for Ray a couple of weeks ago when he spoke was quite similar. I won't recap what was in that talk, but his project right now is very much about countering the kind of Hegelian dimension that you are talking about. talking about. So what I asked him about is, is there still a role in what he's saying about, for Brandon's kind of affirmation as recollective reconstruction, as the sort of narrative we build or in what Rorty would say like an edifying image of ourselves that we create. and Ray is saying that precisely his project is against that because a narrative can't,
is not an intervention in the way that things are, it's kind of apologism for how things are. And the other parts that he disagreed, well, that he corrected me on is that it's not a moralistic claim he's making. he's not talking about things being good or bad. He's talking about what counts as, in terms of his Marxist project, what would count as a rupture or revolution in the way that things are. And it does go beyond the Hegelian into the Marxist. And I think that's what he's trying to do in this chapter. I thought I'd read this chapter actually
without the bit about the unconscious at the end. I think this perhaps is, I don't know, maybe it's later, but I think perhaps it's an earlier draft. I thought he'd moved out the bit at the end. But nonetheless, I do think there's a sense of human as not just what you're talking about as negation and affirmation. He's not talking about that. He is talking about beyond that what we were talking earlier this is called what what kind of materialism can survive through this i see i see uh well my question always would be then uh what what sort of idealism can survive this fine it not being a materialist philosopher uh what sort of idealism can survive this
Armin, you were first. I just want to repeat something Kirill said, I think. the problem as much as I understand it with the recollected narration would be the unavailable I don't want to reform it myself in a better way the problem with the recollected narration about the human the past of the human and affirming a human out of that
narration a new uh maybe human kind of human um the problem with that would be um hegelian problem of or marxist problem of surplus value and the problem of not being totalized to no narrative being totalized being so totalizing that can either put all the negativity or all the the affirmativity in its narrative. How could these two poles of a narration become so distinct that they must be not compatible with each other? I try to say that what is determinative
negation of man, if not affirming another face for man. How could you get rid of the man? The point is not to change the name, in my opinion. The point is the unsurpassable bump that cannot be unnamed. you should take it apart or analyze or see what remains of it through this chain or cycle of history of this concept. And I think he tries to, maybe, maybe I'm wrong, but I think he tries to address this possibility of a part of concept of man being again and again again, recyclized as new kind of faces.
But the part that is actually getting lost is the part that is most difficult to get rid of and has been proved to be most difficult to get rid of. That is the object of man, the object of cultures. And I know that you want to say that there is no, for our concepts, there is no objects of the world. Objects are also functionalized entities of our concepts. But I think the difference, as much as I understand, the difference comes to this point that can we completely get rid of the object of history, regardless, what is the subject of history? Yeah, I mean, there is, I probably have told so many of you in my past sessions,
the greatest story has ever been told about this whole humanism, inhumanism, post-humanism, inhumanism sort of stuff, about really the question of what is human is by none other than Olaf Stapleton. Truly, the fact that the image of man shatters at the ocean of time and it begins to evolve, not naturally but fully as its own self-ideation is a very powerful inhumanist image and yes
I mean both last and first men but also a star maker particularly have that resonance where basically there is a core of the question of the human that is never being answered and hence survives survives and in fact has empirical and scientific manifestations throughout ages uh so if you haven't uh you don't know about these two books these are written by a british philosopher who embarked on a sci-fi writing job. And these are not regular science fiction.
These stories have been written as chronicles of the human from now to, let's say, the time that the positronic field starts to disentangle and there would be no realization of matter as what we know of right so this is such a great timeline for chronicling of what a human will survive you know and obviously I think this is a very Kantian position
that the question of the human survives precisely because it cannot be part of it cannot be succumbed to drive commodification materialism uh forces causality uh naturalization uh and so on so forth and this is there i mean when when can't remember the fourth question what is man And this question should be understood from the point of ignorance, fundamental ignorance.
What actually allows parts of the question of the human to survive is the sort of ignorance that this question carries with it. And that sort of ignorance can be mitigated, but cannot be vanquished. Okay, Aaron. Oh, that last point was very close to the last point I wanted to make as well, but I'll go through a few scattered ideas. The first one was, yeah, about this point about materialism, because I also find myself on team idealism, right?
or finding that adhering to this term materialism is less helpful than... No, absolutely. I am sure there are so many good materialists out there, I respect them, but sorry, no, I am not going to commit to such a position. Well, it obscures what I think is good about it, which is, yes, being committed to some kind of scientific naturalism. That I can do that. It's fine. But that, especially from the perspective of what we're talking about from humanism, that there's this kind of idealistic core to the philosophical positions of Plato on the one hand and Kant and Hegel on the other hand that sort of get lost in the
in the positives, positive story on the one hand or in the materialist story on the other. I think what Peter Wolfendale calls the in principle generality of language is a good way of talking about what the ideal in idealism is or, or the simple claim. I think it's Ian Hamilton Grant who, who makes the defense of idealism just as saying sort of the account of the difference ideas make in the world. It's like a commitment to the re like to the reality of of ideas in the world is what idealism is rather than a rejection of of matter or yes yes or physical uh yes absolutely no absolutely i i think that's uh the more i have actually
um read uh i think that's uh ian is has a very good sort of accounts of idealism It needs to be worked out though. Absolutely. In that sense, idealism is, I mean, but that would be really, I mean, idealism 101 in a sense. The idealism is in fact the truth of materialism at the end of the day. The materialism tries to whitewash what idealism was always was about.
Well, that we continue to keep using the terms materialism and idealism in this narrow sense that they were used by the young Hegelians in the 40s is precisely what I think Kitsch Marxism is, is holding on to this kind of polemical meaning of words that have like, yeah that that really should be confined to that sort of narrow debate about religion in public life between between Feuerbach and Marx um but I should move on to the next point I think but simply saying that what we're trying to do is is sort of show show the like the autonomy and irreducibility of thinking and therefore of ideas uh and so if we're if we're committed to those things we should think of ourselves as committed to idealism. The second is about
psychoanalysis. And what I think the mix-up is here, or what it seems to me, is that in psychoanalysis there's kind of an entangling of the concepts of practical and theoretical reason in the unconscious, that before sort of we have this sort of neo-Hegelian, pragmatist or naturalist account of practical reason as a natural capacity of human being. I want to actually ask someone to explain to me what the unconscious is. I'm not using words such as causes, motivations, or reasons. Right? Do not describe the unconscious without as if you had some idea of drive because drive in a freudian sense is a very very modeled idea
um it is famous that freud just like we were talking about althusser idea of science right you know freud wants psychoanalysis to be a science a new science right but he does not want to actually uh bring in under the dominion of natural empirical sciences such that drive-like behaviors can be explained away by you know physical causes in fact he does not want to have causes at all he wants have he wants to understand drive in terms of drive sorry drive in terms of motivations and reasons for certain sort of neurotic traumatic behaviors
Right. So let me read this book, which I have prepared for you in terms of this whole drive shitting. Mm hmm. Oh, yeah. Yeah. My God. So many things open here. Yes. um my apologies no that is not the one there's not the one okay no no sorry i have so many windows i cannot actually see what is what uh one sec
I lost the... So what we are actually seeing in the entire Freudian or the entire psychoanalytic scenario is a subsumption, particularly the Freudian, because he's not actually making, talking about Lacan's idea of drive or Franz's idea of drive. He specifically goes for Freud, and that's you know classic rainbow you know nil unbound 101. so the the idea is that the scenario of drive and unconscious and of course the thanatos thanotropic death drive
in Freud leads to a certain well-known confusions they have actually been talked about by people like Grunbaum and others. So this Freudian scenario ultimately leads to a confusion between the technical terms causes, motifs, and reasons to the extent that the psychoanalytical explanation now avoids the talk of causes since they give psychoanalysis the wrong impression of being in natural science. Instead, the psychological explanation resorts to the language of reasons and or the motifs behind behaviors, neurotic, derive-like behaviors and actions. But in reality,
these reasons are pseudo-reasons, since they have already been subsumed under the general regime of the compulsive drive-like behaviors as a cause and final cause. To put it differently, the tonotropic subsumption or drive three-block subsumption results in at least six fundamental predicaments for psychoanalysis. One, the confoundment of the distinction between causes, reasons, and motifs in their technical, i.e. explicated sense. Two, the inclination to retain at any cost the status of psychoanalysis as a sovereign scientific discipline not reducible to
natural physical sciences. Three, the ejection of the talk of causes as real conditions from psychoanalysis because in so far as causes are taken to be merely physical and that's freud's main flaw and that's why the whole idea of drives sounds like voodoo to me are taken to be merely physical uh causes are taken to be merely physical they can can endanger the scientific sovereignty of psychoanalysis as a science of motifs or reasons behind neurotic behaviors. But such an assumption is based on a physicalist policy.
The ontological status of causes is neutral. For a cause to be a cause, it does not have to be physical. It can be equally mental or psychophysical. In other words, for X to play a causal relevance for the occurrence of Y, X neither needs to be physical or taken as what singularly brings about the occurrence of Y, but as a what makes a difference in the occurrence of Y or affects the incidents of why. Four, having jettisoned causes, Freud's version of psychoanalysis can now talk about reasons and motifs instead, but only within the dominion of final causal,
which is a subsumption of non-drive-like behaviors under drive-like behaviors. And And drive-like behaviors are actually causes, but are not supposed to be called causes. The whole confusion. Having a tendency to our tamatos. Five, reasons and motives are now, according to four, the one that I just read, are all causes in disguise. them. There are not really reasons in a technical sense or motivations or beliefs, but only in the loose sense that there are generic, compelling manifestations of the final causal,
beckoning us to what is already ordained. Six, having lost the exact distinction between causes, reasons and motifs. Every psychological explanation cannot be either a physical explanation in a psychological disguise or an explanatory gerrymandering in favor of these reasons, quote, causes over other vague reasons. The genericity of thanotropic subsumption, Again, drive-like behaviors affected by drive-like behaviors blinds the psychoanalysis with regard to the actual causal relevancy, a matter of empirical and rational diagnosis of a traumatic episode.
And hence the nature of drive itself. That's from Grunbaum's Foundations of Psychoanalysis? Yes. No, I mean, this text, no, it was by me, but it is putting so many of these people together. Yes, but yeah, mostly Grunbaum. This text was by me. Okay. No, yeah, that's the sort of thing that, thank you for that. that I feel like answers what seems to me to be the issue with bringing in psychoanalytic explanations is that it doesn't make these things amenable either to reason or to a kind
of medical causal response. It's this sort of mixed up. Yes. I mean, the whole idea of drive is really, we should understand that precisely because it completely tries first to eject causes because it actually mistakes causes for being the physicalist sort of causes then it actually then it ends up uh conflating between motifs and reasons in their technical sense but then through this sort of confoundment it becomes a theory of causation in its own sense, which is absolutely so modeled and so imprecise that only a materialist
can enjoy that. yeah you should i don't uh don't know what to say about uh that part of aresa's text but uh about psychoanalysis in general, I regard it as idealist theory through that psychoanalyst Wilfred Beone and
And through understanding of psychoanalysis as a theory, which talks about human thinking through actually three notions, unconscious, unconscious and pre-conscious. I think in Freud there must be those three dimensions, and one of them is a dynamic dimension, one of them is descriptive, and one of them is simultaneously descriptive and dynamic, which is…
Unexplanatory, unexplanatory, yes. Yes, but unconscious in race text, I think we may confuse it with surplus value, but it shouldn't be confused with surplus value or maybe even, yeah, maybe bringing together Marxism and psychoanalysis there is not a good move because surplus value is something which remains. after the whole circle of the process is done, but unconscious is just, is not it. It is just something which is not present in immediate experience that can't be
experienced immediately, but that is something of which we can have some knowledge. And only by virtue of what we might call to be neurotic behaviors, namely the subsumption of of non-drive-like behaviors under drive-like behaviors. And frenzy has this metaphor for it that you can only see unconscious through these sorts of traumas. And traumas are these apertures so tiny
through which the psychoanalyst looks into the abyss. So it's something that is existent behind the phenomenons, you say? There is a thing that I have been, I do not actually want to push this thesis because I think it's wrong, but there is a ring of truth to it. Yes, there is a certain kind of nominal characteristics about the unconscious. Yes, but I think Ray is trying to say that there mustn't be any noumenon dimension to unconscious, because it must be just being pure being without transcendence.
law but but no man on in can't uh or no man on in but that would be just rational metaphysics though isn't it the idea that uh there is a no man on uh that cannot have a transcendence uh pure being this is stuff sound very rational metaphysics to me like christian wolf and classes. Yes, yes, yes. I've been to the last lecture of Ray, and I asked that question, why, why isn't what you're talking about, why isn't it just rational enterprise? And he didn't have an
answer. So maybe. Yeah, he didn't have an answer. But I know, I think I understand why it is a complex question because of the concreteness of abstract determination because of that concrete thing in dialectics. And to be honest, I understand it in a very, not in a philosophical sense, that concrete parts. I've read early works of Hegel and the text, which is called Who Thinks Abstractly, where he just says that
abstract thinking is like some crazy narrations without a true object, but when you are thinking as a philosopher, concretely, you should know what you're talking about. You should have an object, and that is, yeah, that is concreteness. Yeah, but it just looks like there could be another interpretation of that concreteness, for example, the concreteness of the concreteness of that which is
explained through art, which can't be explained through philosophy. Yes, I think there are thinkers, particularly modern thinkers, for them, not abstract in the Hegelian sense, but the act of abstraction itself is purely technological in its nature. It's an artifact of the mind and nothing else. But of course, I know when Hegel or Marx or Marxist, Hegelian Marxists talk about abstraction,
they actually talk about it in a very sort of, you know, not always binary, but yeah. In a way that abstract, the abstract is given an inferior sense, not actually coming to grip with what it really is as a technological artifact of the mind. And I mean, we see it in Plato that that's actually one of, I would say that this is
actually one of the main basically battle fields where philosophical fights are being thought between parochial materialists and parochial idealists and so on and so forth. No, the idea of abstraction and the abstract is something that needs to be absolutely understood as a fundamental labor, a fundamental labor of only life forms. And life forms as witskans line understood are those who have a language because only language allows you
to recognize yourself as a life form kareel oh actually if you allow me let's let's have a like a short break I need to get something for myself. Okay. I just wanted... Sure. You go on, you go on. My apologies. I'm just... Zip it. I'm not going to interrupt you at this point. Well, so I'm completely with you. There's a level of normativity that involves language. There's the domain of the human. But there's also there's lots of people who also talk about a different sense of motivator
people like Mark Cochran and and yet purse sees signs in this kind of way. Well, we're talking about mistakes in a slightly different way, mistakes relative to a purpose that living things have quay living things. But I think the more important thing about thinking about raise motivations in terms of real abstraction. I liked what some people said earlier. it's helpful for me to understand that repression is to do with trauma as well so i really like um one psychoanalyst who i do like who's sort of quite close to people like pippin and brandon is uh jonathan lear and he's got a really nice book called radical hope which is like an anthropological study um he gives an example of when the crow people um had um yeah basically
Europeans came and the life of the Crow people was rotated around Buffalo at the center of it and what happened was the Crow people didn't realize that gradually a buffalo would be made extinct by the western people that had invaded and what happened when the buffalo died is there was no longer any space of giving and asking for reasons the reasons the David Brophy, The things that were reasons for what there were reasons for collapsed, so the whole space of reasons collapse sticking the stick in the ground used to mean something and now because the concrete relations changed. David Brophy, The reason stopped working and it was a kind of a collective trauma that they had to work through to make their reasons stick together again so in a way they had repressed.
what it means for the buffalo to be killed. So yeah, they're just an example of which I think is interesting of both real abstraction kind of intertwine with repression, perhaps. You see, I do not, I do not, I think that Aaron made this point clear that I do not actually deny anything like real abstraction. I think it's absolutely there. But why is it there? And why is it being recognized as such? Right? I think Wittgenstein was into something extremely subtle that made him actually recoil in philosophical fear
to the point that he actually betrays philosophy itself. the form of life what is a life form right it says that for you to think a life form you first need to imagine a language by language we are not talking about ordinary language but the language language then he actually understands it as a web of family resemblances within a tightly knit web and life form is exactly that sort of web so within this sort of
of it's actually quite a hegelian in a sense that the sort of life form that language provides us allows us to understand ourselves recognize ourselves as a social web and within the social web not concepts there are not all concepts which are entangled but also real causal factors that are not conceptual and that's what makes us life forms you see that sort of recognition could not ever happen without
not imagining a tight web created, weaved by the possibilities of what language can do to its users. Otherwise, there is no, I mean, you see, for me, Ray is trying to simply do this sort of prophetic ad eventus move uh like you know what prophets do uh after the fact they say that i told you so right ad eventus prophecy ad eventus prophecy and this is exactly like that so the but what is yet to be
answered what is human what is human as a life for right yeah sure real abstraction materialists all great and good but these are part of the very recognition that is enabled by what makes us human to begin with and they are cannot be ad eventus injected back to the human as if they are answering the most important question of Kant, what is man, which is the question of ultimate ignorance. As the groundwork of all knowledge, the first three questions.
Arman, you have one minute. I thought maybe Kirill wanted to move on, but no, apparently. No, you can. you can just think about life for my man um i understand wasn't there i don't know if you are getting going to get to him but his point is also something of this kind um um his team peter Wolf and there. Yeah. But what I would be glad to understand better is that first, the difficulty of
recognizing culture as the, as I was saying, subject of history, maybe you don't want to say subject of history, you can say the autonomy of rational inhuman. And you see that autonomy and add in the inhuman into, for example, the capacity for creative syntax, monitoring, something like that. This move of, of, of detaching the part of the space of reasons from what has been called animality of man is, is it trying to, I don't want to put it like this, the detachment
of the space of reasons or the detachment of language as a life form, then can we come to this realization that we have been always mistaken to call ourselves man? What we were assuming as man or what we were experiencing as man? Yes, absolutely. Inhumanism, in that very specific sense. Sorry, that's not what I mean. I'm just saying that human has been always this cultural artifact has been always the language. There is no human as if we as the individuals are the tentacles of another being, language.
language that would be still that would be a metaphysical presupposition in my opinion and raise up a raised point and in insisting on practical labor i think is because practical labor you can say you can see you can say like count about understanding that is is of two parts is a conceptual one part and objective on another part and blah blah blah so no i i wouldn't say that look i the point is not about that sort of assumption is metaphysical it is absolutely metaphysical in its nature but the thing is that uh precisely uh it is not really actually
metaphysical in a technical sense it is actually a hypothesis a hypothesis that enables us to look into our metaphysical narratives and deconstruct them in a very laborsome sort of way. But otherwise, I would say that any sort of narrative, any sort of, yeah, great. That word actually makes Ray very, very angry. Any sort of story about human, is going to be just even more metaphysical.
Ray absolutely understands this. Ray does not want to entertain certain sorts of Hegelian story about Geist. Geist is not a story, right? He wants to make sure that this idea of a story about being man will be evaporated into thin air. But I just do not see how the materialist intervention can help it fundamentally. This is my philosophical quib here with Ray. And yes, I hope that Ray manages to come here
after so many years, and we will actually discuss it over a glass of whiskey. If no one else, maybe I'll... Because I made this point actually when I was talking to Armin last week. I feel like the narrative component of, if we're talking about Marxism and of teleology, is actually really key. If you're interested in a project of proletarian revolution and social transformation, having the story that that's possible and inevitable and part of what one ought to do if one considers oneself to be a human being and to be irrational,
person devoted to a certain kind of mastery, having that story is indispensable and was indispensable to a project of convincing people to put their lives on the line for a revolution and an ideal. And we haven't recovered from sort of the historical period of the late 40s when we thought that that was really possible. And when sort of Soviet tanks rolled into Berlin, and the end of the colonial empires was in sight and the sort of, right? I agree with that, truly I agree with that. You see, we, unfortunately, the whole idea of critique
has degenerated into basically finding more holes in narratives and stories. No story is actually going to be accepted ever. Only traumas, accumulation of traumas for us. My God, I'm not sure. Do you really, we as a species can actually survive with just having shit accounts of traumas? It's a dreadful future, but it sort of, it makes sense as the natural response to climate change, right? That we'll just continue to beat ourselves up for the rest of our collective existence. Yeah, I agree. But I mean, the word, there was a cult in Roman Empire.
The word is extremely loaded this time. So do not understand the current use of this word with the ways that Romans used it. It was called the cult of triumph. triumphalism essentially right that's we need to create stories such that we can actually do something positive freedom you cannot simply do something with accumulation of fucking negative freedoms and traumas you absolutely not i mean look at us all of us are bewildered by mental health issues
by capitalism and so on so forth and we cannot even unite i mean that's a travesty yeah no i mean yeah i this is this is what i mean by the Marxism needs to have this teleological element if it if it is to be what it says it is which is a project of social transformation it needs it needs to believe in telling a story about how that transformation is possible and how how we ought to go about doing it and if you can't tell that story you can't be a Marxist yes in that sense of course is in Hegel in a more bolder sort of cosmological way but i think marx actually kind of like tone it down a little bit it's not
teleological per se anymore but nevertheless in the aristotelian sense it needs to be there i mean that is story either can i just say one quick thing sure and then emil is going to talk I think I don't understand completely why we can't regard Ray Bressier as a pure rationalist, because... Because I'm a goddamn pure rationalist, not Ray. I'm joking about this.
I wanted to ask about negativity. His take on negativity is that negativity is actually an affirmative notion, an affirmative way to understand human as something which contains that negativity, and negativity is not something which is somewhere else. It's just a part of human process of understanding itself. And so life is an autonomous thing which contains negativity as its part.
Does he say that? not sure about that not sure i i don't know i don't know i have to think about it uh like a human is um to to understand human human must uh contain something which is not itself it's a simple I mean yes I mean how many of you have read Ray's piece on Pierre Guilatá I've read it's a very good text but it actually distills this very sentence that you just
read but it's very old text no it was like They go to the top? Not really that old. I mean, 2015, 2000, yeah, something like that. 2016. I'm not convinced by such moves. I love it. I love it, though. I mean, the text, everything that he writes, I just want to put my dirty paws on it. but I'm not convinced philosophically unfortunately here now
what is actually inhumanism I say that scratch it out it's just bullshit some of us made a mistake and called it inhumanism no there is no such a thing is only a question of humanism 101 as Kant understood it. Fuck off. Inhumanism just sounds... And people, I mean, the thing is that with Ray and even Pete, even Rosie is getting under the spell of inhumanism. What is inhuman? Inhuman. Inhuman. just really doesn't actually make sense when you think about it.
You see, we are always trying to kind of candy wrap sort of old shit philosophical questions that was at our disposal. I don't like candy wrapping. Look, service shit, don't have candy wrap it. I guess my question following on from teleology, and maybe I'm completely jumbling my philosophical terms, but
I always kind of find myself responding to critics of like, it's the classic postmodern critics of Marxism saying that it's teleological. It's just, isn't, isn't any sort of language or any sort, because it's a meta-narrative. It's like, it's in any sort of language at some sense, like some, some level teleological. You have like the potential of your predicate has to agree with your conclusion to become like meaningful. isn't language at the most basic structure teleological. So any sort of formulation of an argument is going to be teleological because there's the potential of its predicates and it's got like its conclusions. And then I just sort of find that they use it as some sort of abstract like way of.
It depends. It depends on how you see language. So Ray has the moves against humanism from beneath, from the bottom and from the above. so from the above yes it seems to be teleological but there is also a counter narrative to this when you actually see and there are so many people out there who actually endorse such ideas of language being an evolutionary uh symptomatic thingy nothing more I agree. I mean, I'm kind of firmly on board with Pete Wolfendale as saying that are sort
of two things that define the human language and I guess some sort of labour and that's like a practical creativity and our ideational creativity or communicative creativity. Then doesn't in that sort of Bedouin sense just become a negative animal of life what is a negative critique of the voided animal that suddenly gets back to some universal or some subtractive universal that is creativity and we get back to Marx it's like some sort of thing you've got creativity and creativity is syntax of language and you've got creativity and creativity of products and all you can say about humans is kind of what Gramsci said is that we're
is the products we produce or you kind of come back to that for a bakian sense the best you can do is grab she is kind of my sort of look at it i think grab she and he's a very difficult writer is absolutely right you see for gram she it was always the question that look materialism trying too hard here in this in this sort of thing actually let's kind of agree that language is something that creates a social web amongst us a life form
a life form by which we actually understand that we are part of this life form and not others. And then, this is only a platform. Everything else should move beyond this sort of idea. It's just the beginning, right? Gramsci is a very emancipatory thinker in a very heroic sense, right? Okay, I guess, again, I'm sort of wondering what you don't agree that language is comprised
of symbols because I'm with Noam Chomsky on the universal human... Language is not just symbols. That's the whole point. Language is a web. But then that's where I sort of, so earlier didn't you say, weren't you disagreeing with Kirill on the semantic structure of language? No, I mean, look, it would be just like me trying to explain that, oh, well, humans are not animals. Well, of course, there are goddamn fucking animals. But what sort of animals are they? So what sort of system of symbols or signs is language? I'm not saying that it is not. I am saying that it is a system of signs.
through which you can actually create other sort of systems on top of one another by way of simple inferential connections, sometimes holistic, sometimes purely context sensitive. And that actually allows us to recognize ourselves and recognize the world we live in. And that's Witgenstein's idea that actually says, it doesn't actually say it. No, no, sorry. This is not, I'm not going to forge Witgenstein ideas.
ideas uh it's quine who actually says that ultimately in a sense wittgenstein's idea of language is very quite naturalistic in a very modest way because it's a form of behavioralism not in a Skinner sense but language is just like this idea that your words do not matter to me when they do actually matter to me it's precisely because I have observed
your external linguistic behaviors and I have connected with you on a certain nod that someone else also share and the hands they cease to be simple words they become concepts right also sorry everyone that i haven't been active in class and by the way brilliant presentations prior um i've just been having to sleep for work so no these are really good questions and uh i i actually think that uh you know
this brings us to the very understanding that we are endangered species not by climate change or our own vagaries but by language language is what makes us the species that we are oh no no oh come on now and now we're gonna get back to this postmodern like oh we need to mud you know how you wait oh i would say that no i would say that oh you're gonna get so sanitized by post-modernists i'm telling you they're gonna love this they're gonna sit there and go no no no no just the language we use to think about climate change we need to we need to think
about how we define ourselves as humans in relation to other things you you're falling right into the hands you need to make transitional demands your whole new project is predicated on commitment arises i would say that i actually make a carnappian retort that look if you want to actually upgrade yourself upgrade your goddamn fucking language you see we can assign understood it that to on to upgrade the language is to upgrade a platform for new systematicity to think about our position in the world.
You see, and that's Pete Wolfendale's slogan, language is a killer app. It's the Ethereum killer, so to speak. Gorkhan is going to have a fun with that sort of shit, ethereum killer, language being ethereum killer. So, Raza, I was just thinking on this, because people were gathering at the date on the chat on teleology and what is what is teleological or not
what is the telers and and whether we can talk about this in nature or in non-human animals and things like that so I just wanted to flag it around and make a small comment that I think it is very important that we... It belongs to the humans Yeah I think we should make it clear what kind of talus we are criticizing or talking. It does not belong to nature. It only belongs to the humans. Well, yeah, I think there is different concepts of talus. And one, usually when people just talk of it as if it were a really bad thing, they are really talking about some sort of metaphysical,
godlike telos which is the end of all history and when um and when you talk about um telos and teleology in human action it is a whole different thing yes completely different yes i mean as early as a stoic there was a rift already between telus as in nature and telus as the destino program for humans right and that was that's actually i'm really interested in human is a destinal object
I would say. And that's why it requires the stories. It requires narratives, because otherwise you cannot actually move forward. Yeah, I think that was why I brought in this topic, I guess, was the contrast sort of raised, Ray's kind of attempt to deflate the narrative aspect of this and to talk about, I guess, in his foreign object talk from two weeks ago, the subject was progress, was how we got onto this topic. And I was talking about trying sort of the difficulties and specificities of trying to have this Hegelian concept of progress, which I think most often gets dismissed in this, oh, this is just Aristotelianism, this is deterministic, people put these readings on top of Marx, when you try to be a materialist about it.
But yeah, what I was talking about in terms of why we need a narrative of, if we're Marxists, how the proletarian revolution is supposed to happen, what social transformation we're supposed to be a part of and how, is to think about rational necessity and the autonomy of ought in this sort of platonic way or the way that Peter would endorse, right, that what we ought to do as historical actors is determined by simply what we know and who we take ourselves to be and and it has this narrative component that's irreducible and saying that we can we can explain the failure of that by doing some kind of psychoanalytic work yeah it's not
isn't convincing yeah that's i think we should move to peter then on this topic because i think he does a good job of dealing with it. I love Peter. Absolutely, as I said. No, I mean, I wish Peter could actually contribute to this class. But yes, completely agreed. You know, if really the topic here is emancipatory revolution, you're not going to make it. I remember once Ray told me about the faults of communization theory
right that these people do not actually understand the military they do not understand the economy and yet they want to actually cripple capitalism right I would say the same thing to him as long as you do not have a narrative, a story of human to actually back it up and that is the greatest artwork of all time to create a story for us you know of resistance there is no god damn fucking revolution we are going to
fight and fail every turn every goddamn turn. The greatest artwork we could ever make is simply that story about ourselves. Okay. So, Anda? Well, I'm kind of reconsidering my question in light of what you've just said, but maybe it's still valid here, which is, you know, I guess the constant issue for me with this, and maybe it speaks in some way to where Ray is coming from, is, you know, I guess like in a Marxist account,
you would tend towards the construction of subject as the proletarian subject, whereas now we're talking about the use of human subject as the kind of the sort of subject of the narrative. And in a sense, I think there's a bit of slippage that happens between those two, because there's a more specific construction of the proletarian subject, whereas there's always the kind of, I mean, I don't even think we need to go into the problem of liberal humanism, but I think there's still challenges in the construction of the human subject that would be the sort of agent of this narrative, you know. Perhaps that's where Ray is coming from in his avoidance. yes uh i mean uh and did you read uh that short debate that saj and i had on discord
maybe was it the one about the um i buy the goddamn fucking bitcoin fuck off yeah and then was saying that look this is just no liberal and i agree i agree i agree to a certain extent to his thesis. And he was telling me that, look, the Agarian protests in India. So what sort of a story can we make, actually? Look, we have technology at our disposal. We have the greatest gimmicks of narratives and narrative making at our disposal. So why can we make something that actually make people?
And by that, I do not mean proletariat. I do not mean bourgeoisie. I do not mean capitalists. I do not. I mean people. So just simply the understanding that unfortunately, or fortunately, we are on this raft of Medusa altogether. Can't we actually make such a story? As a platform, there is nothing else to it. It's going to be always a platform. It's not going to go anywhere. But certain sort of recognition of elements of oppression, exploitation that everyone has suffered.
You know, I mean, isn't it the whole idea of the myth when Kazirair talks about language and myth? that there is an element in myth that are far more powerful than the unconscious of the man right language can capture that unconscious cannot I mean I agree to some extent I guess the worry the worry that I would always have are the typical the typical political problems that arise around the construction of a political
subject through myth and also the kind of difference between the thickness of the construction of of subject myth as something that has been explicitly constructed or myth as the so-called results of the unconscious of a country or a nation which one i think the first one certainly i think that that definitely has more potential but i would have to think more on on you know whether you can really say that those two are distinct in terms of their effects or whether you know, they might need to, I have to think through that distinction in terms of whether the former still manages to avoid the political problems, but I guess still the issue for me is
in terms of, you know, whether a construction, a subject construction like the proletariat has the same, you know, whether you can make the same move with the human as a kind of concept given its level of generality and its, I guess, lack of sort of unified structural condition in a sense, vis-a-vis political circumstances. Sci-fi rhetoric. Do you know what has happened to those poor aliens who got this bad idea of invading the planet Earth? they all have vanquished there is no alien precisely because we have vanquished them all I mean you see
the idea of human in its fundamentally sordid vagueness is something that everyone can plug something into it right some effort and you then you see these all sci-fi stories where humans are being shown as the most exemplars of badassery right don't fuck us because we are going to know your address right and we are going to invade your goddamn fucking planet
I would say that such things are possible, such narratives are possible, but it is something that should be done collectively, anonymously, perhaps even. I don't know, do we have a certain kind of technology? I actually by technology I mean techniques of of collectivity to create such a narrative perhaps yes perhaps no one of the reasons that I do actually feel not so bad about this whole DAO blockchain stuff
I think that they can be served for leftist causes and not just liberal markets. it would be magnificent to create that sort of art that final narrative you know full of bugs flaws and errors but nevertheless we can patch it up as we move that's what we are nothing else nothing more well i have one small thing to say in in um reply to that and then i will be quiet because i can see
other people want to speak but i guess my misgiving is still the conditions of authorship and construction don't necessarily imply a kind of, you know, there's, there's, I guess, and I guess maybe this is where you're going with this stuff around the DAO and the kind of blockchain things or whatever, but, but what are the kind of political technologies that would enable that to happen in a way that weren't just a kind of imposition of, you know, like, how is this? Oh, yes, we really absolutely are in the dark. The technology is evolving, the politics is The idea of human is evolving. But is it a reason to actually resign on this very task?
No, of course not. At least we should make a try. It might fail and we are going to do better. That's the whole fucking thing. Everything that we are going to do is going to fucking fail. Why? Because we are goddamn fucking humans. But that's the whole point. That through that knowledge of recognizing our own mistakes, we can conquer the geist. And that's the story. Simply, that's the story.
We are our own deeds. Yes. Next question, please. Am I audible? Great. so um so i oh i was the one who was like i was one of the people who was like debating keral in the chat and i listened to what enda said and what you said but um and this is not i'm not formulating it as a disagreement but if you like specifically
go to science fiction isn't it always the case that posadism is at play that that alien entity okay fine like we can go fuck over their planet or whatever but that other is needed in order to in order order for us to collect together and band together against it if you like take um Alan Moore's Watchmen then that other comes from um an evolved version of human which is then a constant uh constant threat uh and then this will hopefully like inspire people to be better and obviously because uh rorschach is in favor of free will he uh dies actually in
order to protect the human fallibility and free will but essentially when i think of these categories the category of human the category of inhuman uh as we've been going along this seminar every category that has come after the human has in some way expanded what it means to be um for the lack of a better term let's say a rational actor and um my concern in these formulations no matter how expansive how inclusive and how generally high-minded they become is that there is still an other uh outside these categories and the relation of those inside this category, even inside the category of inhuman is essentially going to be at odds with those
outside this category. And in fact, it would be intensified by these oppositions. And if the actors outside the category are hostile, maybe it would give more meaning to the term inhuman and like um that's that's what makes the labor of answering kent's question what is the human a labor because you cannot just simply open the door let all non-humans come and say oh we are inclusive now no Now, you actually shut the door. Everyone.
One of the best examples that you could find in mainstream science fiction, as a matter of fact, like we don't even need to go to people like Le Guin. Just take Star Wars or Star Trek and always when there is a Poseidon threat on a planet, various intelligent species combine together in order to combat it. like or maybe even a species of varying intelligence uh so maybe that is no there is there is this uh highline uh story uh there is this chapter called space is deep my excellency magnificent magnificent chapter utterly out of this world yes uh we will always find ourselves
at the brink of the other, right? But that whole thing is premised on the very idea that we have actually understood and recognized ourselves as such and such life form by virtue of the language that we use. Language is not a medium of communication. it is just a web and yes at that point so what are you actually what are we going to do with something that is truly other than us we can't do that much
we can only construct or reconstruct the concept of humanity because it's a concept an idea and the very language that we use as the sign of our life forms this is why I actually do agree with Donna Haraway that sometimes we put too much burden on the idea of human human agency and maybe that is actually wrong we should do the work
but no we are not fucking responsible for any other fucking others in some backwater in the fighting galaxy to use Darth Vader metaphor, right? No, we are not. It's just that we should prepare, we should be vigilant, most importantly, we should understand that the human is nothing but a recognizable, eternally recognizable idea. A recognizable idea. meaning that being at every turn there is nothing to us
i think one of the things that maybe and i guess this is again a very basic thing to say but like oh the question that you asked and and when Inda said that he would have to consider whether human as a category or inhuman as a category, how it would compare to the category of a proletariat in comparison. My first thought was even the proletariat as a category is not the most important category if your country is being invaded. it. Because even according to Marxist logic, if your country is being attacked by an imperial
force, the proletariat should work with the bourgeoisie in order to repel the invaders. And then after they've left, the dialectic can work inside the country. So perhaps in that sense... Yes, yes, no, I understand that. This is exactly... I think it's a very dangerous idea is a good idea though it's a good idea i mean look at iranian revolution right so to the party which is the communist party of iran uh becomes in cahoots with goddamn fucking islamists with khomeini and his cult and look what happened to them
They were all executed. They were all tortured. Absolutely annihilated out of this planet. I think these sorts of stuff need to be thought carefully in terms of strategies of conflict rather than strategies of reason. right we cannot be so we cannot be so naive to actually become the allies of goddamn in Farsi forgive me we cannot be in
with goddamn fucking Islamists they are going to find betrayers And those of you who think that they are not going to betray us, you are so out of this game. They kill. That is the funny thing, right? Because what people who don't realize this threat look at this problem from one perspective, but not from the other one. So the logic of the proletariat is obviously after the revolution, they are going to be antagonistic towards the bourgeoisie and they are going to attack the bourgeoisie. So if the Islamists are looking at the whole spectrum or any religion, it could be Christian
extremists, it could be Hindu extremists, they're looking at the control of their perspective. After the threat has been eliminated, you're the next target. Please come and sit and have your head removed. And I think, and this is like a lot of people are going to hit me for different reasons for making this analogy. I would say Tibet is a good example of, like I can map Tibet onto Watchmen. So let's say if China invaded Tibet in order to end slavery and that it did, but because an external country invaded and then the strategy and conflicts that ensued from it essentially crippled the country's ability to self-determine. And now India hosts a lot of Tibetans and
all of them are obviously going to be reactionaries because it's not even about class. It's not even that they're all the bourgeoisie who were expelled from Tibet. Most of them are going to be actually poor people who just wanted to hold on to their religion. So in that sense, I guess, which is why there is immediate value to what some people pejoratively call socio-imperialism. But in the long term, I think it plays to the negative. very good point I mean you know about the history of Iran revolution it was an honest lot
I mean first of all Islam is who are they bunch of god damn fucking mullahs they get propped up by to the party and to the party which is you know uh give them everything that they wanted and the revolution actually happens and then they take time they take time and they start to create one of the greatest purge of communists on the planet like 7 000 communists per year in prison being strangled to death
simple as that. So, no, I would say that a space of reason should actually mingle with the strategies of the conflict. Truly. If I could like just add one addendum and then I'll mute myself. With respect to Iran, I would say that that the expulsion of the Parsis, which is a very older event with respect to those like the expulsion of the Zoroastrians from the country, I would even say that that was where it all went wrong with respect to history. Because like India is one of the countries like
who has the largest population of Parsis, Persians, expelled Zoroastrians, who all now live in Gujarat. And even during like Sadiq Hidayat came to India in order to publish The Blind Out in Mumbai. So, right. So I would say that the moment you get rid of a minority, there is nothing to hold you very concretely in terms of like your ability to not commit horrors against the other which is just based on an idea. When you get rid of the racial minority, the religious minority, it takes very little for you to attack the
ideological minorities. thank you very good point ah sorry guys uh one second uh two months two months i need to respond to a call my apologies i just wanted to say to akshat um i think we were talking about this maybe just in the chat a week or two before, but Octavia Butler's science fiction trilogy called Lilith's Brood explores similar sort of questions of sort of do unique forms of life always have a right to reproduce themselves? Like does a minority culture always deserve
sovereignty is very good on this because it gives the kind of maximally utopian version of the sort of invading alien race and the sort of reactionary humans who want to sort of preserve a traditional form of humanity rather than interbreed with the kind of gender fluid, ecologically sound sort of genetic engineering race. And it sort of explores the sort of interesting questions about this, the sort of post-ecological collapse, this race of aliens comes in and says, we'll give you a choice, humans, you can die out or you can interbreed with us on our sort of quest
for pursuing cosmic genetic novelty and betterment. They're wonderful stories. um so that that would be an interesting place to look uh in exploring these kind of China Tibet does does a sort of Tibetan culture that's guilty of slavery still deserves some form of of autonomy or whatever anyway right but that is uh like I've not read Octavio Butler yet but one of the examples that Zizek uses is particularly of the Romani people like how if child marriage is not permitted amongst the Romani, Romani culture itself would vanish. Now in me there is like this very quick desire to say if it can't exist without that then it
shouldn't exist which would be like immediately at attack by all leftists also but I think there is Not like a great practice, honestly, to offend all the Jews and Muslims in the world. So the only barrier that is, or the only sense of decency that is stopping me from saying that is obviously because culture and race are at stake. If it were an idea, I would have immediately said if the bourgeoisie cannot exist without private property, then it should not exist. If the fascists cannot exist without X, Y, Z, then they should not exist. So that this thing is obviously a point of contention when it comes to race and culture.
But classes and classes are not cultures or identities. This is a very important confusion. Like the proletariat is not an identity. You don't like the bourgeois, like that's an important line not the cross. I mean, I think that is like, I'm going to say this, but that is a very neoliberal way to look at it. But it is. I will say this, I will say this, because like with respect to my country, let's say, India, the large overlap that exists between a cultural identity and a class identity. There is no difference at that point. Because like the
Dalits constitute the bottom 70% of India economically. So them being Dalit is not really separate from being a proletariat. Right? But then what's funny is, but this is precisely the critique of sort of neoliberal identity politics in America is that we've turned class identities into yeah we've turned class into a form of identity and you can be classist or I mean but that's also precisely how and like this is bringing in the sort of role of race the way race has worked in America is is to link identity categories to class positions and then naturalize those in the same
way that something like uh right i will say this america is not the only country that is guilty of anyway no i mean no i i generally agree with both of you particularly with aaron here i mean people just don't understand with me so much about marxism and stuff my god where is god than fucking marxism there is nothing nowhere to be found the entire working class is fully naturalized at dollars as slaves or called fat
and so on and so forth. And there is, I mean, that sort of naturalization is, in fact, the greatest power of capitalism. I think that... It wasn't like, Emil, just like, I will just say this one sentence and then please go ahead. So in India, it's the fault of the communists and the way that they started communism in India. Because what they did was they preserved the discriminatory aspects of the caste system and they transported that into communism. So the upper castes are supposed to be the thinkers of the revolution, the theory cells
of the revolution and the proletariat is supposed to, the Dalits are supposed to be the proletariat force. So that this fault in logic is what leads to the modern neoliberal Dalit opposition to communism because they're distrustful of it. They see communism as essentially something that is inextricably linked with caste discrimination. So I would, I can't, I mean, you can't ever blame and ideology and always it's uh you always critical members uh recent texts uh about uh the legacy of marxism uh it is as if he has i mean i have huge amount of respect for this man but my god almighty haven't
you read goddamn Marx? He just thinks that Marxism is exactly that sort of communism that our Indian friend is talking about. Look, there is a fundamental paranoia here. And if this paranoia doesn't go away, we are getting get more every day. It is absolutely astonishing to me that a thinker like Achille Mbembe talks about communism in that sort of caste system that is utterly and fundamentally anti-revolutionary.
Yes, of course, we know who Marxists are. We have seen their betrayals to us people. But my God Almighty, you cannot do this sort of stuff. Okay, Sahaj. thanks so uh just in terms of like caste like i mean i'll just give you my example like so uh like my my uh i'm the product of an inter-caste marriage uh my my uh father's caste is actually uh chuda which is like uh i mean the sort of the lowest of the rung of the dalits and like my mom actually comes from a trader caste chattas so it's very very complex like you know so uh it
It doesn't really kind of like that idea of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie doesn't really fit onto caste in a neat way at all. So the comparison doesn't really work. I kind of wanted to actually make a larger point and it's nice that we're I guess talking about caste is because caste actually works on a myth. You know, it's sort of like the fundamental ideology of exclusion that Indian society is sort of based on. and it permeates even through Islam in India, through Christianity in India, you know, because pretty much everyone who stepped out of Hinduism, which is sort of the majoritarian religion, ended up like kind of, you know, bringing caste with them to these other reform, these other options, which are sort of, you know, promising some sort of reform.
Anyway, now the caste system itself is like, you know, it's essentially a fairy tale, like, You know, I mean, there's this idea of a cosmic man. And this is interesting because, like, you know, I mean, you're talking about humanism. So it's the human body and society is defined by the human body. So like the head becomes the higher caste, the feet become the lower caste. And everyone who lies outside. So say, for example, Muslims or Christians find themselves outside of that human body. Right. Like they are sort of like not not included. And this is actually kind of playing out in the bureaucratic apparatus as well. So we have very archaic kind of citizenship laws that are being implemented, where essentially you need to have papers dating back to the 70s, which say that you're a citizen in India, otherwise you're technically not an Indian citizen.
I'll just quickly complete this. So essentially, this led to the citizenship protests, which kind of like, you know, today is actually the second anniversary of the day the protests began. Now just coming back to the idea of the human. So you've got this figure that is essentially because it's constantly being defined by the other, like, you know, and let's be honest, like, you know, I mean, there's no sci-fi scenario that's really going to play out, right? I mean, the human has sort of been a kind of dog whistle to exclude, like, you know, minorities or immigrants, people who are outside. The sort of, like, the figure of the human is essentially what it is not.
And in bringing things back, we're not really going to bring in, like, you know, molasses and things like that. We're just going to bring in, you know, I mean, make sure that, like, other humans have rights. and that kind of project I'm totally on board with but like you know I mean uh like as far as sci-fi is concerned they're all kind of like just doing like you know slightly sugar-coated kind of uh stand-ins for people who've been denied uh I mean fundamental rights and things like that right like I mean uh if not then what are you even talking about uh now no I mean uh sci-fi uh you see we are only using sci-fi as if it was an allegory the vein of kalile what them there animal allegories nothing more nothing less right we are not actually talking about these
other stories of humans it would be just shameful to do so I'm going to quickly jump in and come back to the question of class. It's just the English limitations of the English language is that we don't really have a way of talking about class as a dynamic and a way of talking about class as an affect or class as an identity. They're linked. And because they did have a kind of original unity that's class as a dynamic stratifies people and therefore you get that's why you have people talk about the millionaire class the billionaire class upper middle class lower middle class the underclass
the under underclass and all that sort of thing and the top one percent and all that sort of that's just a strat like a description description of the stratification and it's really kind of talking about its own kind of caste system and that's when people start talking about classism and where people are normatively excluded for blah, blah, blah. But it's also because the verisimilitude, like in Marx's time, there was a direct verisimilitude between people who worked, who were working class and that sort of stratification which came out of feudalism between the nobility, the burgers and the peasantry and whatnot. And that sort of changed. getting back to how it relates to something like the gypsies and zizek's example is like
yeah you get rid of like the word gypsy ml is romana people oh yeah i was talking about the by listening to we don't we don't have um romani people when you're doing so Romana people, not Romani people, Romana people. That's the new word. Roma, yeah sorry my terminology is probably quite out of date, I just haven't. It's so far removed. Racist people I've ever encountered in my fine life. I've had one experience with them where they threw a baby at me to try and like pick my pocket.
but you know like that's my alarm to get going um in the background i've been good to work um look concrete totalities and and the perception of national proletariat and national bourgeoisie is the thing that divides the working class and only by a concrete totality and emancipation of the full class and ender you were right entirely a couple of weeks ago when you were talking about the negative unity of class it doesn't effectively describe like a worker in India and the work either it's linking these things is just wrong but unfortunately if any sort of like that's the problem with classes are dynamic and as a category compared to classes and affect it just
doesn't match up very similar to the problem with commitment to humanism as a project as an inhumanist thing in this sense through the mythos of it becomes precisely that same thing you fall into with like populist Lacroixism where you replace it with an abstract the people it's like okay you've got the people that need to be emancipated from the suppressive system how are we going to do it oh we come kind of back to like Rosie Bredotti's project or something similar where it's like some sort of just fucking sorry i better get going with um love you saying you aaron marcus i'm gonna drop a pdf in the chat sorry i can't talk about the politics of new zealand's um you know environment i really wanted to but this is good thank you just positive
and sort of if you're on discord happy to anytime uh yep definitely um that's what got you guys Yeah, I had a question from something that was talked about a while ago on a different subject. So I didn't know if Akshkot had their hand raised to respond to this and wanted to do that before I changed the subject. I did, but like, it's not all that important. You've been waiting for quite a while. Okay. Yeah, this I had a question a lot earlier when you were, you mentioned something about a disparity between myth and the unconscious and
and saying something how myth can do much more than the unconscious can, but I think there's more of like a correlation between the two where the unconscious understands through stories and emotions in a timeless way. And then whereas like logic correlates with the conscious mind where it rationalizes myth in a way that can then have political implications while there of course needs to be like a focus on the spaces that bridge narrative and commitment. And so I think the unconscious is really significant in this sense. So I also wasn't sure or wasn't clear on like your contention with psychoanalysis
and yeah, in relation to that. Can you tell us what the unconscious is? Oh, sure. Well, I will say that I don't know the context that Ray Brazier is speaking in because I thought we were going to do the presentations in class. So I know that there's like a specific form of that you were talking about that I'm not caught up with. But like for me personally, I just see it as, you know, it's like we like I think the unconscious controls like something like 95 percent of our what we're doing. and we're only aware of like five percent being our conscious mind so the idea of global workspace sorry say that again is it a reiteration of metzingerian
idea of global workspace where metzinger says that humans only do two percent of rationalization the rest is purely decided by global workspace attention system completely can be explained the way by neurophysiological uh incidents So is that unconscious what unconscious is? But obviously it's not unconscious in the Grasierian sense
because that would render it fully to the dominion of natural sciences. I think that Rafe wants to have something that is scientific namely psychoanalysis as a system like Althusser but it's not fully scientific in a physical sense because yes we know for the fact that we can actually rationalize only 5% of our conscious powers.
Yeah. Good. Great. But the question is, is this unconscious? Or is this literally causal loss taking the better of us? I well I also think that normalization often happens like at the level of the unconscious so I think that's a important place to look at it for that too where I don't know like when you're talking about how we are defining the human a lot of times it's like it is through I don't know just
like behavioral patterns that constitute what is normal and what we accept as reality and that often is taking place at the unconscious level. Yes but my question to you is that are you ready to give a full admission? The national sciences are correct and they are the gods for everything that we ever know no um no i didn't think that that was what i was saying at all so then why is that your unconscious holds over us oh i i was just saying like the sign i'm not
um prioritizing like the unconscious over the conscious i was just saying like the significance of like how big of a role that it's playing and interacting um with how I guess like narratives or or things like myths become realities like I'm just saying that it has like a really significant role in that but how do you explain that significant role by what sort of instruments of reason um yeah i guess that would be a psychoanalytical approach of um i don't know about your wouldn't be the fact
that here the the problem is the psychoanalysis at large and you want to actually explain the whole of psychoanalysis to me by the very elipids of psychoanalysis. Okay are you saying that there's a better lens of explaining the unconscious or something? I think that you are trying to explain explaining, you're trying to confound the explanandum with the explanatum, which is
explained and that which explains. I don't know. I don't know. I am not going to go after sort of position but you might actually consider this position that why is that you actually resort to psychoanalysis um what would you propose is a good way to look at the unconscious then like out um not through psychoanalysis i think that the unconscious doesn't exist really yeah interesting because
Well, this is something that I was raising earlier, and it's important to be specific about it, because the Freudian unconscious is like a very specific thesis. Right. It's not just like everything that isn't like all of the processes of the mind that we're unaware of. It's like a specific domain of knowledge of things that we know, but we don't know we know, right, of like echoes and traumas and symbols that are like floating around in this language, like, right, it's not, it's not subconscious, it's not non conscious, right, it's a very specific thesis about these things that we can uncover through dreams or analysis or like reflection with a, with a trained partner.
that is supposed to be unique. And I agree that there's no reason, like, that we can through, like, we can do behavioral psychology, we can do cognitive psychology, like, we can talk about the things that influence our behaviors without believing in this unique realm, right? Like, because it just gets lost because we, like, yeah, to say that 95% of what we do habit or unconscious or like bodily processes that we're not aware of of course that's like empirically verified psychology freudian psychoanalysis is this like historically very specific thing and it seems crazy to me that we still think it can tell us something unique i don't
if i can just come in uh you know rather than like uh you know worrying about psychoanalysis and kind of break uh sorry the unconscious is breaking it down let's look at it in the terms uh in how it plays out in in its effects like you know in in the sort of like in the conscious realm right whether it exists or not like is like maybe we won't get into that uh but let's see how it plays out in like you know something as uh basic as say charisma you know or uh you're sometimes you're just drawn to things or or someone or like you know things that capture the imagination or people that capture the imagination right like i mean in ways that like kind of um music for
example like you know it kind of it it sinks into your skin before you even know what you're feeling uh there is this um no no no the fact that like this can be used manipulated i mean this is the domain of like arts right like where uh and you can reach out to people in this way where you like you know that that's where it needs to be looked at and like i mean this can be an instrument for power for agency like you know uh and uh and we have seen that historically as well uh whether whether it exists or not is a different we don't really need to break it down that there is that outside where it comes into into play in the very real world as well i mean to give you another example just from the Indian state right now. Like you know the Indian state kind of imagines itself
to be Sanatan which basically means the order of time itself right. It wants to kind of project this mythic aura and you know it's sort of building itself up as this like kind of nation for like you know Brahmins and like high caste like Hindus things like that hyper masculine and all that. It's got this aura that it wants to kind of project constantly like you know it's a strong man. People keep going on about how Modi's chest is 56 inches wide, things like that. And that's the thing, it sort of captured the imagination in this really banal way. Now, the fact that this is being done and it works, it's happening, it can be played with as well, is what I'm trying to get at. And that's literally the domain of art. So to kind of
just write it off as saying that it like it you know because we can't like pin it down uh it doesn't exist you know i mean the world is weird right like i mean there's there's weird shit happening all the time so i mean how like and you it doesn't really have to make meaning like i mean the world for sure if anything the pandemic has shown us is like it doesn't need to make sense right like i mean uh this entire idea of like you know i mean how i guess uh was that slr's kind of said that like we need to figure out how the how things hang in the broadest sense they don't like they really don't uh let's be very honest the things don't hang together like you know sometimes we're just the product of dumb luck uh and that's fine that's productive that's radical like you know there's potential for uh things to like kind of move over there uh so yeah like you know i mean i would go with that rather than uh dismissing it entirely
uh just that yeah can i can i just like disagree uh completely and just say something so I'm going to do a very dirty trick here and it's also going to go back to what we were talking about earlier like Kirill and I with respect to language and everything the unconscious has meaning with respect to psychoanalysis as a discipline it's a category that was created by psychoanalysis and it has meaning inside psychoanalysis with respect to language like just taking every field of study mathematics, logic, psychoanalysis, and linguistics, and just applying Godel's incompleteness to all of them.
Right? And we don't need to say that the unconscious is a thing. Does psychoanalysis, which posits unconscious as a category, have any practical utility? if it works then it works if it doesn't work then it doesn't work so i would say that uh like and like with aesthetically speaking i would like completely oppose uh that the pandemic or any uh like crisis uh says uh implies that there is uh no meaning or like no grand meaning i would go back to something like very existentialism 101 to Bernard Ryu's
character in Kamu's plague or even coming to India if you look at Suryakant Tripathi Nirala's A Life Misspent, just this constant endurance of a character with respect to his horrible surroundings but like still holding on to his ideals which is a moralism of sorts but I would much rather have that moralism than be very excited by the fact that chaos implies that there is no such, like there is no meaning to be had. I say that the unconscious has a sort of constraint or hypothesis that we should actually put
against our own conscious actions but it's not a thing it's absolutely not a thing any sort of person who actually sells it as some sort of causal force is a goddamn fucking charlatan It's a hypothesis. Hypothesis that we have invented to create negative constraints on our own conscious actions. I am not fazed by this idea that the unconscious is a necessary thought or necessary thing. I think it's actually a very dangerous idea.
It can only be positive in the sense of constraining the sort of hypothesis that we have about our own consciousness. Right? So it is yet again an object of self-recognition. We have recognized unconscious as such and such. It is an as-if fiction. That's all. Hans Weihinger 101. And through that, we shall explore the depths of the consciousness. But otherwise, it's not interesting.
really it's not really an interesting idea. What I mean to say is like, you know, whether it's interesting or not, it's like, you know, anyone's guess, but what I mean to say is like, it's one fiction among many fictions, right? Like, I mean, I mean... True, true. But the certain fictions that we actually... that we should use, and some we should actually say goodbye. that i think if i can just say i will i i understand why reza has this opinion it's because he said the same thing last week of the subaltern uh that which cannot speak has no case so because
we're treating unconscious as something that is essentially it can't speak because the moment it speaks it becomes either the subconscious or the unconscious or whatever other categories that we've created. So maybe in that case, that which cannot speak does not have a case and should be dismissed as a category. I disagree completely. And I want to say, I just had this idea that it's almost like Ray is trying to leverage this sort of methodological dualism between the conscious and the unconscious. And I think this idea is interesting because I don't think things are reducible to just narrative, as you keep saying, Reza, and that there's something formal
that happens behind the back of sublation. And that there's, he has this line, like there's a philosopher, the philosopher's accomplices in the unconscious. I am, I actually, I would say that the entire edifice of language and sociality is formal. And the thing is that Marxists do not like this idea. I absolutely am for that sort of formality. I have said it in intelligence and spirit that the moment that you confuse the formal and social reality or formal or material reality of the society then you make a huge amount of
mistakes it is not as if i'm going to say that no to the formal no i completely understand what ray is trying to do it's just that i do not know what he can actually achieve by this That's a whole point. So just take this moment of silence, just say that you've got some time. So if anyone wants to ask the contribution. I think we could let Will do a counterattack.
I think he's poised to do a counterattack, and I absolutely would love to hear from him. I don't think I'm so poised, but I guess I'm just... I think there's an underestimation about this idea of real abstraction, I'm interested in this sort of raised maneuver to this kind of more Hegelian, Lucanian, this Samotanchich stuff about constitutive alienation and the role that the unconscious plays in it. Because I don't know, as I see it, I think that I don't care about a story. Who cares about stories?
I care about how a story is told. That's what, like, every great work of art matters because of how it was formally told or made. And I think that the unconscious has to play a part in that. I don't understand how you could dismiss it, but I can understand it's not an ontological thing, you know. This is my, that's really my, you are actually triangulating on a very interesting subject. So it is unconscious. As I asked from everyone, what is actually unconscious?
So how are you actually going to make it look a little bit scientific, such that it wouldn't be totally metaphysical. But scientific is opposed to metaphysical. No, not essentially. No. As I said, Freud actually has a system of science. and Gurunvalli knew that he actually is doing a scientific job as opposed to Popper who called psychoanalysis a pseudoscience. No, I do believe that psychoanalysis is science, but then it should
be taken the responsibility of being a goddamn science meaning that it actually allow us to make a distinction between reason motifs and drives otherwise it will be a science what is exactly that makes psychoanalysis so important as opposed to real subsumption in Marxist communization theory as opposed to any sort of a story
that we have heard from materialists historical dialectic. Right? So what is exactly in this very idea of unconscious that we think that it should be preserved? Can I answer that? My thoughts on it. Go on. When we're constituting it as a category, right? So there's a very famous paper which I think I'm forgetting the name of the guy. It's called the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in describing the physical universe.
and then it is used to sort of prop up logical atomism and a lot of other things I would say the importance of psychoanalysis is particularly in its unreasonable effectiveness to describe culture and society as it does because I'm not going to make any claims with respect to psychoanalysis's use on the individual but with respect to what I've read of the slovenian school i would say that it is a very effective tool that can be used to explain society and culture and with respect to you saying that it's like not a science um i think uh if we take the unconscious um and this is going to be uh please uh no one say
Deepak Chopra or something like that in the chat against me but like if we take the unconscious as analogous to a physical force let's say dark energy or like dark matter then we don't need to define what dark energy or dark matter is like even physics is not able to do that right and it is physics is still a science it is what we need to say is what effects are there that can't be explained by uh existing uh explanations in physics what what can't quantum mechanics define what uh psychoanalysis wants to exactly do the opposite because otherwise it wouldn't be a goddamn
sovereign science beyond natural sciences. You can't even make such a comparison with physical sciences. The talk of causes and the cause in the psychoanalytic sense are fundamentally different. It is not even a matter of comparison. You can't, because otherwise you would absolutely abolish psychoanalysis par excellence psychoanalysis does not want to have such causes it's just literally not on their daily shore all they want to do to preserve certain understanding of reasons and
motives as causes that's all Freud wants but then as I said how are you actually going to pretend that is actually a science it's not precisely because the moment you actually abolish the distinction between motifs reasons and causes you succumb to a pseudoscience and guernbaum was extremely generous to uh freud he always
had this position that Freud actually made a science. But look, now, it didn't. It failed at that project. And that was Groenbaum's point. Unlike Popper, he never actually called psychoanalysis a pseudoscience. No, it was a science. But literally, the moments where you actually confound reason, motifs and reasons as part of drive-like behaviors, which subsume non-drive-like behaviors, you're done. Good. All done.
So I want just to hear for Riyanda, Arman's last contribution to the world, as I said, he would give it to us. Please Arman. I'm actually typing it, but I would give it to you guys. I just wanted to say, let E be an event, let Reza be an individuated event, event, let Reza be an individual if he wants, let B be Reza's central processing system. Now if at time T1 event E happens near Reza and Reza is very of a young and fragile age, that's the event that happens near the spatial presence of Reza as an individual
makes such and such effects on B, his central processing system, that goes beyond the threshold and recorded as such as an event that can be a memory. At the event E2, years later, at time TN, another event happens that has a bare minimum of resemblance to the E1. Reza, without any hesitance, would jump to E1. I say that here something is at work, something is at work that can be called X. Now let's call this X unconscious. If this unconscious happens in the
molecular level of individuals like Reza, it's happening, it's events on the molar level of society that cannot be undone. Only if and only if, and this is my bone with the Volfen data I must pick. And if and only if we get identity as an Aristotelian identity, that is an identity that can build up itself, we come to this idea of a society that can subsume unconscious of its individual under conceptual totality. Only if in that manner we could say that this happens.
but in a new play tonistic manner the problem of one or totality of both individuals and society remains and the problem that remains is called the dark problem maybe but this dark problem like an analytic object my friend you see uh i i had uh this teacher who wants a physics teacher He said, Reza, touch this magnetic field. I touched it. Nothing happened. Then after the class, he told me, touch this magnetic field. I touched it. And my God, almighty Lord, it was a shock. So he told me, look, that is unconscious.
unconscious unfortunately is a problem of human sensory experience and nothing more there is nothing to it there is no metaphysical baggage that you can actually get mileage out of this shit there is nothing to it literally there is nothing to it it's just unconscious Oh, I touched this magnetic field. It's all good. Then an hour later after the class, I touched this charged magnetic field and my God almighty, it gives me a shock.
Now, that's bullshit. can i respond will or no no you can respond of course i can respond what you can respond oh okay i just wanted to say that i didn't mean that you uh encounter your unconscious i mean that i meant that encounter unconscious is something that bill is them is build up in relation between events that that you as an individual unfortunately as an organism individuate between things that happens around you unconsciousness then becomes a relation between
these and these unconscious and messy as long as this these relations cannot be rationalized so i'm not trying to say that unconscious can be rationalized or something like that i'm just trying to say that miss its messiness or its nonsensicality goes against the commands of reason and i understand that but i so i don't think that that means that it is nothing that's my answer to me doesn't actually is on rationality i actually believe in our reason i believe that reason should marry with unreason our reason is the very fact that nature is out there ad hoc ad eventus
but I do not actually understand this fact that the unconscious is real just because we cannot explain it doesn't mean it's there You see, the lack of explanatory power is not tantamount to the existence of unexplained events, namely the unconscious.
It can sure be a series of explanatory events that will be explained through the evolution of science our languages but until then we shouldn't actually valorize the idea of unconscious it's just vulgar to me utterly vulgar okay
I think we are going to get an infinite discussion on the unconscious here. So I guess we should probably wrap up for today and perhaps take it on again on Friday, as well as keeping the discussion on humanism. Pete and my two cents on the human. And look, I'm no longer an inhumanist. Fuck inhuman. i made a mistake name it incorrectly sorry we should go with i think i think you take the right position in labor of the inhuman which is
just to say inhumanism is is the practical elaboration of the human it's a it's a force no one can be an inhumanist you're a humanist and you the inhuman is what is the sort of emergent effects that push you it's a form of rational necessity that that one can't oh if like i just want to offer this one clarification i'm never defending unconsciousness as something very real right so uh with respect to what reza said that uh eventually it will be explained by language science and everything and how it is a vulgar construct well there's a dark energy and dark matter are also vulgar constructs right heisenberg's uncertainty about the fact that we can't measure uh the speed and the momentum and the position of something is also very
like it's an inelegant in some senses but like what my thinking with is that maybe we need this inelegant vulgar construct in place in order for us uh because like because of the our very limitations with respect to science, language, and perception. Like this vulgar construct comes into being by our inability to completely like close field. Yes, as long as we have that thing as a story to be revised, I'm fully for it. I'm fully for it. Every narrative can be revised, can be twisted you see the greatest things about narratives is that they are not totalized
unfortunately they can always take a new tourist right and so as the story of our being human and yes i'm fundamentally uh pro that sort of story uh but yes uh No, inhumanism is not in my blood. It's only the human. So I think today we've created the category of kitsch psychoanalytics. Or kitsch psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis just is kitsch at this point, is the argument, anyway.
I love Freud. I mean, I have read these people all my life, and I love all of them. It's just magnificent. But no, sorry, I cannot accept that sort of philosophical story. it would be a good story to inform us about precisely what makes us inhuman to recognize you see if we were a species at the brink of totalization we wouldn't need to recognize ourselves.
But unfortunately, we are a species and we can only recognize ourselves by cognizing ourselves anew, recognizing ourselves. And that's the most mordid story about the fucking humans when you actually think about it my god do we need more fucking work i think that's um perhaps a good note to to wrap up today and go i'd say sure uh you can you can turn turn the record off and let's say uh that we can actually