I love my PhD

[tcpip]

In the last three days I have written over 12,000 words on cyberpunk literature with author biographies, plot synopses, conventional literary criticism, social typologies using Jameson's methodology, narrative and thematic deconstruction using Derrida and characterization using Butler's (Judith, not Octavia) theory of performativity. And I've written an evaluation of the literature as whole with a combined methodology including the phenomenology of technology, semiotics and psychoanalysis and neofunctional sociology.

Phew! Those four coffees in the morning really did make a difference after a night on the booze.

A sound bite...

"Genuine science fiction, the mythology of modernity, has hardly had sufficient time to develop many literary classics (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds are two prominent exceptions), yet anyone with a long term view of literary history should realize by now that only science fiction will create new classics in modernity."

Related topic. I did a geek test and scored 63.70809% (Extreme Geek). And I didn't even exaggerate the answers.

Mind you, I did once finish Rubik's cube in under a minute.

Comments

Re: A question

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

In practice, they just didn't believe any more.

I must confess I was being a little wry as I knew that you would bring up the Soviet Union. We'll have different opinions on this because in my opinion the rulers of the Soviet Union weren't an entrenched elite, in the Gorbachev period. Those days were well and truly over. Also, I would suggest that many took their role as "representatives of the people" with some seriousness. When it was evident that they weren't they took upon themselves to resign.

Or, as someone once rather blithely commented to me. "You aren't a real dictator when you give up power just because a 100,000 people turn up at the Presidential power and blow raspberries at you."

But I suspect we're talking cross-purposes here. At the end of a day an entrenched elite proves itself to be one but not letting go of power when legitimately challenged.

sets up misleading simplistic abstractions which are destructive to clear thought and understanding.

I don't have much of a problem with "simplistic abstractions" per se (after all, E=mc^2 is a simplistic abstraction), but rather my concern with is whether the constituent components of the abstraction are sufficiently grounded.

It didn't stop because it got guilty about it

No, but it started getting very secular and humanist in Spain. Until the fanatics from Leon turned up that is...

... a bastardised understanding of his ideas.

My reading of Nietzsche is that is was no bastardization. And, as you know, I disagree with your assesment of Lenin and I've presented the reasons why in the past. The actual written works make it quite clear - Lenin's conviction was for a political party with "iron-clad" discipline but also for a federation of councils based on partipatory democracy. Keep in mind supported the abolition of the state.

thinking 'metaphysical absolutism' covers the Classical world, Christian Europe (Catholic & Orthodox), Islam, Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian and Shinto civilisation is just false.

You left out Ancient Egypt, Judea, Babylon, Sumer, and the Incan and Mayan civilizations ;-)

'Metaphysical absolutism', in my very carefully considered opinion conveys the way that people in all those societies thought about the world. It doesn't mean that they're any less or moral in their judgement, it doesn't mean that they are no more or less capable of thinking. It doesn't mean that their content or character isn't diverse.

But it is the defining orientation of their worldview, it is very different to we moderns and had it evident through analysis of their political and legal systems and moral justifications.

Re: A question

[erudito.livejournal.com]

(1) A key element in the decline of the Soviet Union was precisely that the elite became *more* entrenched over time. Which means that networks of corruption got worse and worse until it sank the entire system.

This did, of course, also undermine belief. If you are a place-server, your willingness to go and out and kill is probably less than if you are a True Believer.

Gorbachev's problem is that he was a civilised true believer. This is incompatible with Leninism. Once he have up the Leninist project, the Soviet Union had no reason to exist, and evaporated. Belief (at least the overt forms of the same) was crucial to keep the thing going.

I will concede that open display of their lack of popular support was undermining, but previously they simply would not have permitted such display. Permitting the display was a sign of the decay. Didn't make the system less dictatorial, merely increasingly non-functional. The form of dictatorship with increasingly less substance.

(2) e = mc2 is hardly an analogous case. An example of what I mean are definitions of capitalism so crude they cannot differentiate between North America, Latin America and the old Soviet Union. (Of course, clearly have some other purpose than analysis. To whit, to justify a sense of belonging to a moral and intellectual elite and actions to put into effect that sense of self-importance.) Hernando de Soto has a great line -- capitalism is a great idea and Latin America should try it some time.

(3) Nietzsche was not an anti-Semite. Makes it hard to claim that Nazism was simply an implementation of his ideas. Which is not to say that there were not elements in Nietzsche that could be used to bolster the jacobinisation of Aryan racism, clearly there were. But that is what bastardisation entails -- taking some elements out of context.

As to Lenin, given Rosa Luxembourg accurately predicted Brezhnev but Lenin's own performance was much worse, I think hanging your analysis on one or two pamphlets but ignoring the awkward bits of his performance in power (essentially all of it, from the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, to the repression of the Kronstadt uprising, to his constant instructions to kill more people) is just wishful thinking way past the sensible.

(4) Not to mention the fanatics from North Africa. The real tragedy of al-Andalus is how it was caught in the middle between a resurgent Christian Spain and a purist North African Islam which had the military vigour it lacked.

(5) It is hard to argue with and about a term which I have no idea what it means.

Re: A question

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

RE 1: As I mentioned I think we're talking cross-purposes here. You'll find no argument from me that Gorbachev was a civilized true believer - a true believer in communism, and social democracy, I may point out as well. This per se isn't incompatiable with Leninism. I have no doubt that Lenin was a true believer as well.

The problem of "Leninism" I think refers to the transfer of his ideas about the party to that of the state.

Re 2: I agree with you entirely on "crude definitions". Definitions can be very general as long as they are precise and not ambigious. As an example I think that capitalism refers to proportional ownership by monetary value. And that's it. I don't think it is necessarily tied to to democracy or to anything else. Once one starts adding other beneficial criteria and excluding distateful one's then the strict definition becomes ideologically ambigious.

I have arguments with members of the International Socialist Organization who claim that the Soviet Union wasn't socialist because it didn't have a workplace method of participatory democracy. They are invariably unhappy when I refer them to The Manifesto of the Communist Party which acknowledges several versions of socialism, many of which don't even have an inkling of democracy.

Re 3: A think a reading of The Geneaology of Morals indicates his racism.

As for Luxembourg vis-a-vis Lenin, you won't get any argument from me on that one. I like Luxembourg's analysis, I just think it was profoundly inappropriate for a political party that was illegal and underground.

Re 4: Yes. They certainly didn't help either.

Re 5: Let's start with Claude Levi-Strauss' The Raw and The Cooked. Are you familiar with that?

Re: A question

[erudito.livejournal.com]

(1) What Lenin did was thinly update Robespierre. The dynamics are essentially the same.

(a) Here is my wonderful good intentions, a vision that profoundly trumps any previous version of the good.
(b) So profoundly is that so that any objection or dissent about this project is completely illegitimate, and a sign of profound wickedness
(c) So profoundly, that any level of concentration of power necessary for its implementation is fine.

The patterns of Leninism, replicating those of Jacobinism, therefore follow (except Lenin learnt from Robespierre's downfall and never permitted any deliberative institution he didn't control). The only difference between Stalin and Lenin is that Stalin applied to Bolsheviks the forms of politics that Lenin applied to everyone else. (Which is, of course, essentially what Khruschev accused Stalin of in the 'Secret Speech'.)

Of course, the 'progressive' intelligentsia loves talking about intentions because, being not responsible for anything, their intentions are clearly more pure than anyone else's. Hence all sorts of dynamics of 'analysis' such as, rightwingers do wicked things because they're rightwingers, leftwingers do wicked things because rightwingers make them do so. Left to themselves, their pure intentions would have been fine.

Obviously, I don't buy this for a second. Yes, of course Lenin was a true believer, that's precisely the problem -- what he was a true believer in and what he believed that warranted.

(2) My working definition of capitalism is quite similar to yours: a system where the creation and transfer of capital assets is dominated by market exchanges. I am not entirely happy with it because I don't think it captures sufficiently explicitly the situation where state regulation of market exchange is so heavy as to massively atrophy it -- the problem in Latin America (Hernando de Soto's famous experiment of it taking 289 days of dealing with bureaucracy to legally open a small garment business in Lima.)

(3) Reading the link, I was too generous to Nietzsche; it is clearly too long since I have read him. I note with interest that the author of the piece has come to similar conclusions about Hitler (and other matters) as I had.

(5) Claude Levi-Strauss has not been part of my reading, so no I am not familiar.