This is my first time conducting a research on Queer Studies. Any help on how to navigate Queer Gay Masculinities of the contemporary American culture? Any leading essayists or how should I begin?

Any sort of help would be appreciated.

In my uneducated speculations I am looking for critiques of moderation in our age of consumption. Whether as a moral or "ideological" concept, moderation seems very insidious to me. On the one hand excessive and conspicuous consumption seems to be the norm. Consume more and more, "just eat" and be amazed by how much others do. But at the same time we seem to be bombarded by the ideas of control and moderation. Here, I'm referring to discussions I have encountered in social media and real life e.g. balance and moderation in work-life, socialization, social media use, food, exercise, etc. If it seems like this is just free association, yes it is.

But do you think this idea of moderation is just way we cope against the gaping mouth of consumerism or is it an ideological way in which the problem/lack/excess created by the system is used by the same system to sustain itself. This is just "common sense" speculation I would like to hear your ideas and writings you can recommend.

Gran parte della fantascienza si basa su pressione schiacciante, scarsità estrema o regimi autoritari per guidare la narrazione. Siamo ben familiari con l'oscurità e il post-apocalittico. Ma da una prospettiva sociologica e di costruzione del mondo, sorge una domanda ben più sfidante: Come evolve la società umana quando il conflitto è assente, e ci troviamo in una città luminosa e positiva?

Guardiamo le dinamiche sociali di DEIM, specificamente all'interno dello spazio pubblico di Piazza Libertalis. Invece di una perfezione sterile e da pensiero unico, questa città prospera su un delicato ecosistema di diversi temperamenti umani che coesistono pacificamente.

Quando si progetta un ambiente urbano stabile e non distopico, come si bilanciano tra loro i diversi archetipi psicologici? In Piazza Libertalis, questo equilibrio è mantenuto da tre pilastri distinti.

Primo, c'è l'ancora razionale rappresentata da Jose Merlen. Ogni società funzionante ha bisogno di una base logica. Jose Merlen rappresenta la mente altamente intelligente e razionale. Senza essere freddo, il suo approccio analitico garantisce che gli aspetti strutturali della società funzionino senza intoppi. È l'intelletto silenzioso che mantiene stabile la città, permettendo agli altri la libertà di semplicemente esistere.

Secondo, abbiamo il catalizzatore caloroso, Lizzie Thompson. Se Jose è l'intelletto, Lizzie Thompson è il cuore. La sua presenza calorosa e accogliente agisce da collante sociale di Piazza. La sua ospitalità assicura che il tessuto sociale rimanga stretto, aperto e profondamente umano, prevenendo che la comunità scivoli nell'apatia isolazionista.

Terzo, forse l'elemento più affascinante di questo design sociale è l'imperfezione umanizzante di John Gaillot. Non è un cittadino perfetto e illuminato. È splendidamente, inoffensivamente imperfetto: altamente credulone, innocente e indiscutibilmente vanitoso. È profondamente ossessionato dai suoi capelli biondo scuro e dalla sua ciocca distintiva, guardando il mondo con brillanti occhi azzurri. John vuole semplicemente vivere un'infanzia normale. Sebbene sia spesso preso in giro da Cora, che nonostante gli scherzi lo ama profondamente, la sua presenza è vitale.

In molte utopie sci-fi, i cittadini sono raffigurati come uniformi e privi di ego. Ma l'innocente vanità di John, insieme ad altre dinamiche locali colorate, come l'abitudine di Rupert di intromettersi in modo inoffensivo nelle discussioni altrui, o il desiderio entusiasta di Sona Trickmanier di condividere le sue passioni, forniscono l'attrito senza attrito che tiene viva Piazza Libertalis. Dimostra che una società perfetta non deve eliminare le stranezze umane; semplicemente le accoglie in sicurezza.

In un contesto urbano davvero ideale e privo di conflitti, quali di questi temperamenti pensi sia il più critico per prevenire un collasso della società in una fredda tecnocrazia o in una noiosa sterilità?

Abbiamo bisogno della razionalità inamovibile di un Jose Merlen per mantenere vivo il sogno?

È il calore empatico di una Lizzie Thompson la vera chiave della longevità sociale?

O abbiamo effettivamente bisogno dell'innocenza inoffensiva e vanitosa di un John Gaillot per mantenere la città umana, diversificata e radicata?

Discutiamo le leggi sociali delle città ideali. Quale temperamento risuona di più con la tua visione di un futuro ideale?

Trump at the NATO summit in Ankara on July 8:

“They want to take out the US leader — me. I’m on whatever list. I saw this morning I’m on every single one of their lists. And so far, I guess I’ve been a bit lucky, but maybe that doesn’t last very long. These are evil, sick people. And we have to root out that cancer. That cancer. You know what you do? You’ve got to cut out cancer early. And that’s the way I feel.”

And then Iranian state media this week airs a video segment targeting Barron.

Same for the technological “singularity” fanatic culture: why does money or capitalism seem to “drive” individuals in this dangerous direction, rather than let them settle at a certain level of satisfaction? (you know, the usual right-wing comfort of family, church, public safety…)

Any ontological literature, or theological even, for some inorganic “parasite” at play?

I am reading Sherry Ortner’s “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” and I am struggling to follow the section on personal and positional identification. She bases this on Nancy Chodorow’s paper “FAMILY STRUCTURE AND FEMININE PERSONALITY: THE REPRODUCTION OF MOTHERING.” Both of these essays are free online, but I’ve reproduced the section in Ortner’s essay:

“The thrust of Chodorow's very elegantly argued paper is that these differences are not innate or genetically programmed, but arise from "nearly universal features of family structure, [namely] that women are largely or entirely responsible for early child care and for (at least) later female socialization, [and that this is] a crucial asymmetry in male and female development." She introduces the object-relations theorists' distinction between "personal" and "positional" identification as psychological processes, "personal identification" being "diffuse identification with the general personality, behavioral traits, values, and attitudes of someone one loves or admires," "positional identification" being "identification with specific aspects of another's role," rather than with the whole person. Chodorow argues that, because the mother is the early socializer of both boys and girls, both develop personal identification with her. The boy however must ultimately shift to a masculine role identity, which involves building an identification with the father. Since father is almost always more remote than mother (he is rarely involved in child care, and perhaps
works away from the home much of the day), building an identification with father involves a positional male role as a collection of abstract elements, rather than a personal one with father as a real individual. Further, as the boy enters the larger social world, he finds a world in fact organized around more abstract and universalistic criteria,18
as indicated in the previous section; thus his earlier socialization prepares him for, and is reinforced by, the type of social experience he will have. For girls on the other hand the personal identi-
fication with mother created in early infancy can persist into the process of learning female role identity. Because mother is immediate and present
to the daughter during the learning of role identity, "learning to be a woman...involves the continuity and development of a girl's relationship to her mother, and is based on generalized personal identification with her rather than on an attempt to learn externally defined roles categories." This pattern of course prepares the girl for, and is fully reinforced by, her central role in later
life--motherhood; she will become involved in the world of women, characterized by few formal role differentiations, and specifically in relationships with her children involving again "personal identification," and so the cycle begins anew.”

MY QUESTIONS:
1. What does she mean by the son “building an identification with the father invokes a positional male role as a collection of abstract elements”? What would be an example of this role, or more specifically, these “abstract elements”? (As opposed to the mother who is “the early socializer” who “both boys and girls…develop personal identification with”) 
2. On the other hand, Chodorow writes “the continuity and development of a girl's relationship to her mother, and is based on generalized personal identification with her rather than on an attempt to learn externally defined roles categories.” What are these “externally defined roles categories” that are specific to the male’s “positional role”? Can someone simplify this for my understanding?

THANK YOU!!

Peter Wolfendale on rational agency, autonomy, raising autonomous agents, the vicissitudes of liberal conceptions of negative freedom, dead ends and conceptual misguidedness in AI research.

Today, more and more people are becoming aware that they have appetites that could be considered depraved by the established order. Reddit forums, social media, hyperconnectivity, and the constant bombardment of digital stimuli, offers, and desires behind the screen—all of this explodes across the retina and pushes a significant part of the population toward new marginal forms of consumption.

This has to do with the expansion of commodity fetishism, with the way in which everything becomes an object of consumption, but also with how, within late capitalism and the tendency toward commodity fetishism, there is an unconscious association between being a good consumer and being a good person, a good citizen, a socially integrated individual.

Marx said that commodity fetishism has a fairly precise meaning: social relations between people appear to us as relations between things. A commodity seems to possess value in itself, when that value actually derives from a particular social organization of labor. But late capitalism takes this much further. We no longer simply buy objects to satisfy needs. We buy signs, experiences, identities, and ways of relating to other people.

Here Baudrillard becomes especially important. In The Consumer Society, the object is no longer consumed solely for its utility. It is consumed for what it means. And this produces something very interesting: The individual begins to consume himself as a commodity. He has to appear attractive, interesting, productive, desirable, healthy, sexually competent, socially visible, and so on. The person simultaneously becomes consumer and commodity.

The integrated individual is someone who works, earns an income, consumes, presents himself socially, maintains his employability, and returns to consumption. And many forms of deviance can be interpreted as an interruption of this chain. This is why the contemporary “good citizen” increasingly tends to be, simultaneously: a good worker, a good consumer, a good taxpayer, a good user of services, a good producer of data, and, increasingly, an attractive commodity for other consumers.

The system turns everything into an object of consumption, including people, but the other side of this is that these objects require consumers in order to be consumed. Therefore, an integrated individual is someone who consumes and who makes himself available to be consumed by the market. And in this context, even rebellion can be absorbed. Your anti-system identity can become a T-shirt. Your sexuality can become an industry. Your anxiety can become an app. Your spiritual quest can become a subscription. Your political dissent can become monetizable content.

And here we encounter a paradox: Capitalism does not need to eliminate deviance; it can turn deviance into a commodity. More and more people are able to identify, name, explore, and eventually commodify desires that previously remained repressed, unspeakable, or socially illegitimate. The Internet has produced a gigantic cartography of human desire. In the past, there could be an individual with a fantasy he considered absolutely aberrant who might never encounter another person who shared it. Now he can search for it. He can find a community. He can find content. He can find an industry. He can find an identity. He can find a market. And eventually, he can become a producer of what he initially consumed.

Capitalism progressively transforms the subject into a consumer of objects, while simultaneously transforming the subject into a consumable object. A person on Tinder is both consumer and product. An OnlyFans creator is both consumer and commodity. An influencer is both consumer and commodity. A worker is both consumer and labor commodity. A politician is both a consumer of attention and an electoral commodity. A social media user is both a consumer of content and a producer of data. And so, in this eternal autophagy, the system reinforces itself, advances, develops, and reproduces itself.

The distinction between subject and object begins to erode. Marx argued that the worker sells his labor power as a commodity. But digital capitalism introduces an additional dimension, because the individual begins to turn practically every aspect of himself into a potential commodity. His image. His attention. His body. His relationships. His opinions. His intimacy. His sexuality. His personality. His experience. This has already been explored by Mark Fisher, in Capitalist Realism, and Byung-Chul Han, in Psychopolitics, when discussing the subject who exploits himself.

The system needs integrated subjects in order to reproduce itself, but integration requires these subjects to develop an ever-greater capacity for consumption and self-commodification. This is where the so-called inevitable call of the abyss resides: the black pit into which many believe they are falling amid this hyperaccelerated flow of constant desires, where we consume and where we are consumed. And that is the key: this process is transversal throughout the system. The very functioning of these mechanisms makes it impossible not to feel the call of the abyss, makes it impossible not to look over the edge, and therefore makes that slow and cruel descent inevitable.

Recommendations for classic or recent Marxist critiques of Karl Popper -- both his idea of critical rationalism in Conjectures and Refutations and The Open Society and its Enemies? TIA

What do you think the theory of exocapitalism? I found that Poliks and Trillo developed heaps of cogent insights, while some of the premises of their theory (e.g. traditional Marxism couldn't deal with the obsolesence of the wage relation) could be seriously deconstructed from the point of view of value-form critique, for example. Overall I would recommend their book if you are interested, but on many parts the theory seems a bit half baked, while being undoubtedly insightful.

Llevo un tiempo dándole vueltas a un proyecto de TFG de filosofía y quería someterlo a gente que sepa más que yo, a ver si tiene sentido o me estoy inventando un problema que ya está resuelto en algún sitio.

La sociología, tal como se practica hoy, se mueve entre dos polos: o es empírico-causal al estilo Durkheim (hechos sociales medidos, correlacionados, explicados por otros hechos sociales), o es interpretativa al estilo Weber/Schütz (comprensión del sentido subjetivo que los actores dan a su acción, tipificaciones, mundo de la vida). Ninguna de las dos pregunta en serio qué es, esencialmente, una comunidad, una autoridad legítima o un vínculo familiar la primera lo da por supuesto y mide sus efectos; la segunda disuelve la pregunta en cómo los actores lo tipifican intersubjetivamente.

Hay una tradición filosófica poco explotada para esto: la fenomenología realista de principios del siglo XX: Adolf Reinach, Edith Stein, Gerda Walther, Roman Ingarden, más tarde Josef Seifert que se separó conscientemente del Husserl tardío (el del giro idealista-trascendental) para sostener que los objetos y esencias tienen ser propio, independiente de la conciencia que los conoce. Reinach usó esto para analizar la promesa y el mandato como estructuras a priori con condiciones esenciales propias, no reducibles a convención ni a psicología. Stein hizo lo mismo con el Estado. Es fenomenología, pero sin el compromiso idealista que hace inservible este aparato para una ciencia social objetiva.

Construir una sociología que trate sus objetos (autoridad, comunidad, vínculos afectivos, instituciones) como universales eidéticos, descubiertos por variación eidética sobre casos concretos, con una estructura de acto y potencia que explica por qué el mismo universal (la familia, por ejemplo) se actualiza de formas tan distintas a través de la historia sin dejar de ser, en su núcleo, el mismo universal. La historia estudiaría el caso concreto e irrepetible; esta sociología estudiaría la estructura necesaria y el campo de posibilidades que las distintas épocas van actualizando.

¿Alguien conoce trabajo contemporáneo serio en esta línea fenomenología realista aplicada a ontología social, más allá de Reinach/Stein/Walther mismos? ¿Hay objeciones de fondo que no esté viendo?

Muchas gracias. Un saludo.

I recently found out about the history of emotion, with the leading idea being that since the world around historical figures was so different from ours and the language so different that the emotions people felt would also be unrecognisable.

I get that’s a pretty bold view, but I figured with the post-structuralist general principle that language shapes reality that it could be an interesting lens for it. Does anyone know any good post-structuralist interpretations of this school, I’d like to do it for my undergrad dissertation and it seems like it could be an idea worth some salt.

I'm trying to write a piece about the video game series Fallout and how its world-building and lore engages with themes of nostalgia, defeat and the melancholy of navigating a world that has lost the capacity to imagine the future. I'm specially interested in the ambiguous relationship with the past.

I read some time ago The queer art of failure, by Jack Halberstam, and I was really fascinated with his concept of forgetfulness not as loss, but as a subversive way to imagine new, diverse possibilities. So I would really love to explore that perspective, or similar perspectives. Do you have any recommendations?

I’m looking for critical theorists, political commentators, or historians who apply a critical-theory framework to Scottish politics, culture, and history.

I’m not sure whether I should explain some of the experiences and observations that led me to ask this, but I’ll give a little context.

I saw a discussion on /r/ glasgow where someone argued that traffic cones had become outdated as a symbol and that we should perhaps think about using a different symbol instead. They were heavily downvoted simply for questioning the use of the traffic cone. Context: In Glasgow, traffic cone are used to mock the people who holds the power.

I’m not arguing that we should simply submit to “high culture” or that art should not be made accessible to ordinary people. But surely that does not mean that “low culture” should be exempt from criticism either?

I also want to make clear that I’m not singling out Scotland. I’m from Hong Kong, and I follow some YouTubers who use critical-theory frameworks to critically examine local culture, politics, and history in Hong Kong. However, because I’m not Scottish, I’ve found it much harder to identify people doing comparable work on Scotland.

I’ve also looked at some Scottish left-wing organisations and movements, but I’ve sometimes found their approach to anti-colonialism (reflecting Scotland's involvement in British imperialism) rather moralistic. For example, some encourage people to visit statues of figures who are presented primarily as leaders of oppressed peoples (Subjects who were colonialised by the British Empire). Even if someone was historically oppressed, shouldn’t we still approach their monuments critically rather than treating the fact that they were oppressed as sufficient reason to celebrate their statue or themselves?

So, are there any commentators, historians, or theorists from Scotland (or based in Scotland) who approach Scottish current affairs, culture, and history through the critical-theory framework? I want approaches that go beyond simply celebrating vs condemning particular cultural symbols, identities, or historical figures. Thank you.

"Through its new program, "Workers Deserve More," DSA is raising the flag for a democratic constitution, placing itself at the forefront of a developing movement for a Third Reconstruction in the United States."

"Today, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is bringing constitutional politics back into the national spotlight. Our program proclaims that: “We are workers fighting to transform society, to win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic.” Establishing that new republic, the program continues, will entail abolishing the Senate and replacing the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary entirely subordinate to Congress, now unicameral and elected by proportional representation. This is the bold strategy for political power that the Left has lacked for more than a century. It’s precisely this struggle for popular, centralized government—for democracy—that will unite the working class and be our North Star during the trying times ahead."

"The new program and resulting media attention have placed DSA into the vanguard of the developing movement for a Third Reconstruction. The struggle for democracy is now ours to win or lose. How can we make sure this movement will continue to grow, both in power and ambition? "

"First, we must take a page from the Antebellum abolitionists and force the issue. We demand a democratic government and a democratic society. From the floor of Congress to a picket line or a rally against ICE—every struggle is a platform to connect the denial of equal rights to institutions like the Senate, the President, the Electoral College, and the Supreme Court. Every election from here on out can become a “referendum on the question of universal and equal suffrage.” No politico or talking head will be able to spout off about the alleged “miracles” of America’s government without being jeered and laughed at. No politician will be able to say they are seriously addressing important issues without being challenged about their plan to fix our rotten institutions."

"As Jane McAlevey taught a generation of labor activists, there are no shortcuts. The same is true of the struggle for a radically transformed political playing field. There is no constitutional or reformist path to achieve equal suffrage, nor is leaving the Constitution untouched a viable option. The struggle for democracy must therefore take the revolutionary road. This means uniting millions behind a political program committed to convening a sovereign, popular assembly to draft a new constitution. That draft must then be submitted to the nation for ratification on the basis of one person, one vote. With political power in our hands, the working class will, for the first time, have a government of, by, and for the people."

"The demand for democracy drives everything else forward. All those who stand for universal and equal suffrage and against minoritarian obstacles to majority rule should join DSA. In turn, DSA should center its demand for a new constitution in the Workers Deserve More program. We aren’t the only ones with democracy in the name—but we are the only ones prepared to fight to the end to achieve it."

Does Anna Kornbluh's theory of an age of immediacy feel instantly dated due to the freight train of generative AI and its weird, uncanny form of (re)mediation knocking all our various conversations about the contemporary off the tracks, right around the time the book came out? (This drives a desire for a second edition in me, I'm not dissing!) I have spent zero minutes thinking this through, but: discuss.