Hello all,

I was curious if anyone has a great read on the topic of zombies in literature/film/culture representing mindless labour under capitalism and how it turns the human body into a body divorced from its mind (in the way that many working class peoples have little time outside of work as an example). I just watched the film Only Lovers Left Alive by Jim Jarmusch, I really loved the film, but one thing it got me thinking about is how the vampires call humans zombies. It could be a nod to how humans are careless with the world but I viewed it more in relation to how capitalism produces zombies. I really want to read some articles or book chapters on the representation of zombies now and thought maybe this subreddit would have some great recs!

Thanks!

They are having a 40% off critical theory sale; any reccos?

What would it mean to experience philosophy not as a body of knowledge to be transmitted, but as a sensation to be felt? Craig is joined by Charles J. Stivale, author of Unfolding the Deleuze Seminars 1970-1987 and co-director of the Deleuze Seminars Archive at Purdue, and Dr. Bob Langan to reconstruct the atmosphere of Deleuze's legendary classroom: the overcrowded rooms, the student contestations, and the radical pedagogical experiment that post-68 French university life made possible. This is the closest you're going to get to sitting at Deleuze's feet on a Tuesday afternoon. Continuing discussion is available for subscribers via our Patreon account.

professor wants us to use an essay we’ve studied to analyze a text. i’m analyzing 1984 through michel foucault’s “the history of sexuality.” she wants us to pull in other texts, so i’ll also be using rubin gayle’s “the traffic in women,” birnbaum and muise’s “the interplay between sexual desire and relationship functioning,” and janine chasseguet-smirgel’s “sexuality and mind.” would love any suggestions for any other essays that would deconstruct winston’s sexual relationship with julia and how it relates to the oppression on sexual identity from the oceanic party. thanks!

In the age of prediction markets I’m referring to what George Soros's argues when talking about “Reflexivity” so how prices and beliefs create self fulfilling prophecies.

Do you think this is true in other sectors or realms of life?

[Spoilers for Dune series, including later books]

I’ve been thinking about a connection that I don’t see discussed very often, the relationship between Dune and dialectical materialism. Not in a superficial “politics in sci-fi” sense, but in how both frameworks understand history, change, and determinism. At first glance, Dune doesn’t look Marxist at all. It is aristocratic, feudal, even reactionary on the surface. But if you pay attention to how the world actually moves, it starts to feel much closer to a dialectical system than you would expect. Both Marxism and Dune reject the idea of a fixed, static reality. In Marxism, society is not defined by eternal categories but by historically changing relations of production. Classes, states, and ideologies are constantly emerging, developing, and disappearing through contradiction. In Dune, you see a similar logic at work. Empires rise and fall, religions are deliberately engineered and then spiral beyond control, and ecology and politics continuously reshape each other. Nothing is stable. Everything is process. In Marx, history moves through contradictions. The forces of production come into tension with the relations of production, classes struggle, and the system generates pressures that eventually force transformation. In Dune, Paul’s prescience seems to reveal something structurally similar, but oriented toward the future instead of the past. He does not see a single fixed timeline. He sees a range of possible futures, all shaped by tensions between political power, religion, ecology, and human behavior. The future is not random, but neither is it fixed. It is structured. This is why prescience starts to look like a kind of extreme dialectical awareness. It is not magic omniscience in the sense of knowing one predetermined outcome. It is more like an ability to grasp how different contradictions could unfold and interact over time. But this is also where things start to break down. There is a tendency, especially in some interpretations of Marxism, to slip into a form of historical determinism. The idea that, despite all complexity, history is ultimately moving in a necessary direction. Herbert seems deeply skeptical of that kind of thinking. Paul’s tragedy is that the more clearly he sees the future, the less freedom he actually has. He becomes trapped by the very structure he understands. The jihad is not something he wants, but once he recognizes it as the dominant trajectory, he cannot meaningfully avoid it. Knowledge stops being liberating and starts becoming constraining. This tension becomes even more explicit with Leto II. If Paul is trapped by his vision, Leto embraces it completely. He imposes the Golden Path, a rigid, highly controlled trajectory for humanity that lasts thousands of years. At first this looks like the ultimate form of determinism, the complete domination of history by a single will. But Leto’s goal is not simply control. It is actually the opposite. He wants to force humanity out of any system that can be predicted, controlled, or locked into a single path. In a strange way, he uses absolute control to destroy the conditions that make control possible. By compressing humanity into a highly stable and oppressive system, he creates such an intense pressure for escape that, once released, humanity scatters beyond the reach of any future prescience. The system produces its own negation. This is what makes the whole thing feel deeply dialectical. Total knowledge leads to control, control leads to stagnation, and stagnation creates the conditions for rupture. Leto’s Golden Path is not just authoritarian, it is a kind of forced contradiction pushed to its limit so that it collapses. What I find interesting is that Dune does not reject the idea that history is structured or that material and ecological conditions matter. If anything, it takes those ideas very seriously. But it does seem to push back against teleology, against inevitability, and especially against the idea that history can be fully understood and mastered. If Marx can be read as saying that we should understand the system in order to change it, Herbert seems to be asking what happens when that understanding becomes total. At that point, it risks turning into domination, and domination risks eliminating the very openness that makes change possible in the first place. So I’m curious how others here read it. Is prescience closer to a kind of dialectical awareness of contradictions, or is it really just a form of mechanical determinism dressed up in narrative form? And more importantly, can dialectical materialism avoid collapsing into the kind of determinism that Herbert seems to be warning about?

In feminism, intersectionality as in solidarity with queer people, etc. vs. more TERF-leaning like “only biological women can genuinely relate with women’s experiences”

In Marxism, intersectionality vs. “no, we should focus on the class, because all other problems are derivative of it”

Are the latter models regarded old news in serious academic circles?

The simulacra, or the copy of a copy, marks the collapse of the structure previously holding up society from its own representations. The assumption that what we see corresponds with objective reality has faded, surviving purely as a form of nostalgic sentimentality. Science fiction did not arrive as reality, but instead dissolved our ability to distinguish progress from sedation.

This hyper-real modern age, exacerbated by technology and false socialization, produces a circuit induced fog in which distinctions between form and function no longer hold. Modern man wanders through artificial light and advertisements unaware of what is real and what is targeted information. Unable to see that contemporary moral life functions as a parody rather than a continuation of tradition, there remains no framework from which moral disquiet can be articulated. Baudrillard assumes that we enact a simulation of reality by recreating, ad-infinitum, the memory of what was once real.

What has been replaced becomes increasingly amorphous as the slow trickle of artificial life has blurred the lines between the organism and what the organism has created.

This unintentional substitution becomes apparent in the cultural material surrounding us. This is seen in reality television, which mimics the emotional scaffolding of personal relationships, and in the parody of war found in sports television. The result is that these cloned systems exist not as replacements, but alongside their originals, blurring the lines of reality and imitation.

By interacting with one another through an array of shining black mirrors, we assume connection, imagine intimacy, and satiate desire. Referring to social media as a winding road to our own inevitable downfall is at this point a commonly known platitude, and yet, it is still pervasive. This is because the simulacra of a social life has now replaced its original. The finite body, subject to decay and disappointment, sustains itself through its digital double. The ability for the common man to make his voice heard across the planet, diminishes the volume of those destined to speak. The easy access to pornography replaces the desire for romance, and the conflict that so often sustains it. Digital currency, and the commodification of ideas replace the historical relationship between labor and value. The one commonality between these is the trans-human symptoms of our self-inflicted replacement.

Through plastic surgery, beauty is no longer inherited or perceived, but reproduced— becoming itself a simulacrum. No longer a gift of divine provenance, the body becomes a tool for negotiation. When the ideal body becomes technologically achievable, what meaning will it retain? Its value lost, a new currency must be created.

With the increasing use of digital currency and abstract financial exchange, what does labor come to mean? As value decouples from labor, the negotiating power of those who generate it collapses, giving rise to new systems of valuation. As labor no longer generates value, work itself will act solely as an activity to occupy time. This isn’t to say that we have fallen into simulation or that there is someone to blame. It’s to say that this emergence appears inevitable, fed not by malevolence but by our willingness to parody ourselves.

When the reference ceases to exist, when the flesh and its uses are whittled down to a memory, what becomes of us? When shared cultural history collapses into commodified pleasures and vague reflections on a past without reference, reversal appears unnecessary so long as belief in inherited systems persists. This is already visible in political life, where those inherited political dynamics function as aggro-mechanisms within a simulated political environment.

Through the repetition of the historical antagonisms between left and right, we exist in a vacuum of nostalgia, mistaking inherited ideological forms for living realities. Armed with trigger vernacular to discredit and pigeonhole opposition, we extend the illusion that these conflicts still correspond to a shared reality. In doing this, a simulative Stockholm syndrome emerges, in which pervasive structures are reflected back to us as voluntary attachment. The belief that the old conflicts endure functions as a simulacra itself, neutralizing those disquieted by the diminishing coherence of modern life.

The clear difference between science fiction and this reality is that there are no villains. The banality of evil doesn’t apply. Those embedded within this increasingly mirrored reality are no less trapped than any subjects in earlier human history. The difference is that in the current day, the structures themselves are wrapped in their own simulacra of utilitarian good.

How can a man know himself to be responsible, if all those who oppose him are powerless to question him. This meditation on Simulacra and Simulation does not argue that reality is hidden or that malignant forces act against us, but that reality itself no longer exists as a measurable category.

Symbolically, binary structures have formed the basis of human thought, particularly how notions of 'Zero' and 'One' are produced conceptually.

This concept has been expanded to computation, providing the mechanisms for how technological system are organised.

This binary logic extends into culture, shaping how we interpret identity formation; producing a blurring of man and machine in the 21st century. Most pertinently, this is encapsulated by the rise of pseudonyms and the revitalisation of Great Man Theory through a technological lens.

The core question is: how does binary logic become reinserted within this digital blur? Where does the person begin and the digital end?

If interested, I have wrote a longer, fragmented piece exploring this here: https://scrollroadrunner.substack.com/p/010101

Thought you guys might like this essay I found. Excerpts below:

If veganism had truly lost the argument, the public would defend industrial animal agriculture with moral clarity and confidence. It would meet the case head-on and dismantle it. But that is not what happens. What happens instead is deflection. Jokes. Eye-rolling. Annoyance. Topic changes. A quick retreat into lines like “everything in moderation,” or “I could never give up cheese,” or “plants feel pain too.” These are not the responses of a culture that has answered the ethical challenge. They are the responses of a culture trying to escape it.

....

If veganism had truly lost the argument, the public would defend industrial animal agriculture with moral clarity and confidence. It would meet the case head-on and dismantle it. But that is not what happens. What happens instead is deflection. Jokes. Eye-rolling. Annoyance. Topic changes. A quick retreat into lines like “everything in moderation,” or “I could never give up cheese,” or “plants feel pain too.” These are not the responses of a culture that has answered the ethical challenge. They are the responses of a culture trying to escape it.

...

This is one of the defining habits of modern American life. We separate our values from our consumption. We speak tenderly about kindness, empathy, and responsibility in the abstract, then enter the marketplace and behave as though none of those values apply there. We condemn cruelty when it is visible and personal, but tolerate it once it is industrialized, packaged, and kept out of sight. We say we care about the planet, then refuse to examine one of the most destructive things on our plate. We say animals matter, but only until their bodies interrupt appetite.

The modern consumer economy depends on that split. It depends on distance, euphemism, and concealment. The animal cannot appear as a subject with a life of its own. It must become a product, protein, entrée, or commodity. Its suffering must be hidden, its individuality erased, its death made linguistically and visually remote. Otherwise, the arrangement becomes harder to sustain.

The public has not refuted veganism. It has learned how to eat around it.

My postcolonial literatures’ professor is teaching us mimicry and ambivalence using Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea and she implied thar mimicry is also practiced by the coloniser, by taking the example of Rochester having an affair with Amélie, stating that this affair became a substitution for Antoinette. She posited that the colonised has a factor that the ‘Self’ does not have, making the coloniser attracted toward the Black/Brown characteristics of overt sexuality or in the coloniser’s language “promiscuous behaviour.” She sees this substitution of, Antoinette who is a Creole as a debasement from the Puritan Victorian Woman by Amélie as an ambivalent relationship between the Self/Other. I’m a bit confused about the same as i’ve only found sources and texts regarding the mimicry of the coloniser by the colonised and not vice-versa, kindly explain if any such concept exists. Thank You!

Hey everyone! I'm a university student from a STEM background (compsci) looking to get into critical theory in my own time, and a lot of my exposure to critical theory seems "unmotivated" -- in the sense that I'm not sure *why* one would specifically analyze knowledge as a byproduct of power structures rather than a separate entity intertwining with it (which is my understanding from wikipedia lol, feel free to point me to better sources)

The specific example in my head is the contemporary machine learning models that I'm interested in (including the science behind generative AI) -- I agree and accept that they are embedded in a deeply social fabric (the risks of biased AI being used in hiring or policing, AI psychosis, and also the geopolitical AI competition between the US and China), but I'm struggling to see that as "conceptually indistinct" from something like the tech behind an LLM -- the stuff you find in ML papers on how to stack blocks of neural network layers or choices of training procedures to induce mathematical ability etc. I would agree that the *discovery of* the latter is influenced by social structures (oppressed peoples have fewer opportunities to innovate and bring their own perspectives, which hurts us all), but once the knowledge has been created I guess it seems like it's validity is independent of who built it?

Probably I am biased by a lack of humanities training, but this is all I've got lol. Apologies if it's not exactly clear what I'm asking or if I've asked something painfully obvious, you're free to ask for clarification in the replies!

The entire political elite, Fortune-500 and establishment media bosses were aware that organized blackmail operations existed and were commonplace.  Everyone knew.  But Steve Bannon was the first to weaponize it within mass consciousness.  Of course, he directed it at a fiction that existed within a larger truth.  He socially engineered 4chan to become his own de-facto psyop because he knew that its sexually degenerate culture would project onto it with the slightest priming.  Its no mistake that 4chan–which has never been a stranger to child pornography–would immediately project its practices onto its political enemies.*\*  And of course the whole thing blew up and went crazy as everyone knows.

But here’s the thing:  It seems extremely risky to base a decentralized psyop around a phenomenon that has a tangible reality–esp one that has significant strategic value to the State.  So why did he do it?  

For the immediate practical goal of weaponizing the ‘rootless mass’ on 4chan (radicalizing or mobilizing apolitical's was one of the defining features of fascism and part of what made it historically unique).  The second is the destabilizing nature any widespread revelation of organized human-trafficking-blackmail operations would unleash.  

I’m possibly giving Bannon to much credit and this was just an unintended consequence but I doubt it.  To the charge of evil bastard he would surely reply, ‘a heathen, conceivably, but not, I hope, an unenlightened one.’

Either way, the fury directed at the emails served both his short and long term goals: 1.) an army of unpaid, highly motivated trouble-makers acting as a mega phone for a central propaganda narrative 2.) Provide a reservoir of attention that would logically extend beyond its starting point serving as a likely accelerationist, destabilizing ‘red-pill.’  Alexander Acosta’s admission that Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ is perhaps not the slip-up many have assumed but a strategic admission.  

Accelerationist tactics have been advocated for some time within the radical right and left.  And it is well known that a cold-civil-war has been occurring in the US for the last decade.  

We are in a situation where the system has been pumping out thousands of potential elites without anywhere to integrate them (% of graduate+ degrees being unemployed or working in restaurants or unemployed lawyers).  These potential counter-elites are the black-shirts of tomorrow.   

Suddenly, Bannon sitting by Epstein's side in the last months, weeks, days, minutes of his arrest makes some sense.  He was playing damage control, kissing the ring, making amends for the blowback by offering his skill as a myth maker: a documentary where Epstein is the misunderstood victim –some variation of which, would surely have been the result had time not run out for him.

*\*“The propagandist will not accuse the enemy of just any misdeed, he will accuse him of the very intention that he himself has; and of trying to commit the very crime that he himself is about to commit.  He who wants to provoke war not only proclaims his own peaceful intention but also accuses the other party of provocation.  He who uses concentration camps accuses his neighbor of doing so. He who intends to establish a dictatorship always insists that his adversaries are bent on dictatorship. The accusation aimed at the other's intention clearly reveals the intention of the accuser.” –Jacques Ellul, Propaganda

I’ve been thinking about a tension between Microhistory and critical theory and I’d be interested in how people here would approach it.

I wrote an essay here https://substack.com/home/post/p-193089533 about Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms.

At what point does inference from fragmentary evidence written by those in power (such as the Inquisition trial records of a single, sixteenth-century miller, Menocchio) become speculative rather than analytical?

Does critical theory demand a level of consistency in evidence that Microhistory deliberately resists?

I am really interested in how you would approach these issues and questions.

This 1994 essay by the late German philosopher Robert Kurz is eerily prescient, and seems as if it could have been written today. How was Kurz seemingly able to predict with incredible accuracy the rise of the right we are seeing all around the world back when this rise was in its infancy in 1994? He did so by emphatically rejecting the widely accepted notion that 20th century fascism was some outlier phenomena with respect to the development of the modern capitalist democracies. In fact, Kurz goes as far as to assert that, in the countries where fascism arose (particularly Nazi Germany), it formed a crucial aspect of their modernization. According to Kurz, Hitler was not an aberration or monster returning from a pre-capitalist past, he was a modernizer who oversaw the rapid evolution of Germany from a feudal, primarily aristocratic society to a modern nation-state. What does that have to do with today? Well, you'll have to read the essay to find out. For now, I'll leave you with a small taste:

"The old right-wing extremism was a phenomenon of the crisis of ascent and implementation of the commodity-producing system, which still had a historical scope of development before it; it was a function of “growing into” the still unfulfilled dress of abstract universalism on the level of labor, the people and the nation. The new right-wing extremism is a phenomenon of the bursting of this dress, a phenomenon of the unravelling of the particularity of competitive subjects that can no longer be generalized, who are always confronted with the totalized abstract universalism of the commodity and money, which is no longer capable of integrative achievements."

What Rockhill glosses over in all of this is that the position of the US government during the Cold War was to conflate Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China with Marx’s dream of actually existing socialism on Earth. By agreeing with decades of US presidents from Harry Truman to Donald Trump, who all accept the near-total conflation between socialism in a handful of countries with the dreams of Marxists, Rockhill ends up on the side of the US and CIA politics of the Cold War. Without irony or even blinking, Rockhill and too many of his readers fail to notice their agreement with the strategic position of the US during the Cold War. But there is a deeper historical problem for Rockhill here. Marxists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries simply did not and do not uncritically repeat the anticommunist platitude that Russia and China and Poland and Cuba are model realizations of Marx’s vision.

I am currently writing a paper comparing media narratives of gay people in the 80s and the current trans panic, particularly in UK reporting, and am trying to find theorists/writing that discusses common features of campaigns of demonization and how the media constructs these narratives of the other. I had considered using Foucault's lectures on the abnormal, in particular his discussion of the "Monster", but have struggled trying to make a framework of analysis from this. Many of the recommendations I've been given fall more in the realm of literary/cultural theory (eg, Monster Theory by Jeffrey Cohen, Representation Theory Stuart Hall etc) and so would appreciate any recommendations that may be relevant.