Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Teaching Day (Marx)

Today we tackle the phone books Marx left on our shelves. How the last thesis on Feuerbach tried to reorient philosophy and inaugurated critical theory -- why the existence of invocations of God that make a difference is what materialists should care about concerning the question of God's existence -- why Engels thought Marx was "the Darwin of History" -- how the metaphor of reproduction links individual metabolism with collective history in Marx's writing -- why this is seductive but also awfully troubling -- how habituation to buying and selling mediated by the price-form is like learning a language with only a literal and not a figurative dimension -- why there is no Royal Road to Science and why theoryheads, me included, tend to write such dreadfully dense prose -- how a close reading of the text of the present world is dis-alienating and facilitates its re-figuration and change -- why Debord's Spectacle is already right there in Capital -- how Marx wrote the meta-script for every zombie movie worth watching.

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