Better to just jump in at something interesting and work back if you need to imo.

This is 100% my approach. Also, I refuse to read anything that bores me. I read for myself and have no issues putting down texts halfway through.

Are Marcuse memes a thing? If not, this one would be a good start.

I’m intrigued by how well our “both meticulously and totally arbitrarily selected” texts keep lining up. We’ve got Emil Cioran this week…

My relation to academia is definitely cynical.

I don’t mean to call out Hartman individually, she’s certainly a fine person and we all have to make a living somehow.

I had been thinking on just what bothers me about texts like these for a while. That is, besides the politicized aspect, which I don’t care for.

/u/_Caspar_ has recently renewed my interest in Viveiros de Castro and his description of the “anthropologist” and “native” (his quotes) seems as near an explanation as I can come up with.

In the investigation (social, anthropological, historical) the academic fixes its subject in the “native” framing. An actor(-ant) immersed in a relationship with its cultural and social environment that is intrinsic, spontaneous, immersive, unconscious, etc. Basically, this amounts to objectification of the subject (“native”) while the academic (“anthropologist”) is free to maintain a level of relational separation from their own cultural milieu and create a portrait of the subject as knowledge, representative of their broader relations through this binding native framing. The “anthropologist” engages in a relational survey but they set its terms and dictate the interpretation.

More broadly, the academy controls the narrative through its approval through funding, publishing, tenure, etc. It controls what discourse is legitimate and what isn’t. What is serious scholarship and what is farce. I can’t get on board with that type of thinking.

The most interesting thing was the discomfort and recognition by the academics that something was indeed “off”. Not in Hartmans work in particular, but in this type of oppressed persons history as political piece. Politicizing the struggles of truly oppressed individuals and the objectification it requires is tough for me to stomach.

This piece was a reading for Quiver. Somehow the discussion turned to academics like Hartman and the commodification of black oppression in academia (she’s a Wesleyan and Yale post grad I think). It was pretty interesting to discuss the industry of oppression-porn with so many tenured academics in the (virtual) room.

Feyerabend’s science critique in Against Method is probably the most enjoyable science critique I’ve encountered. He has some very liberal and positivist personal and social philosophy but the core of the critique is worth the read.

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is excellent as well but not as lively as the style of Feyerabend.

I haven’t read any specific critiques on evo-psych but I’d recommend the above as good starting points. Gould is just critique of a very particular view of one segment of science by an opposing science, so not particularly interesting, for me at least. Feyerabend, Kuhn, Popper all question science in itself.

That’s all you.

Difference is primary, similarity is created in the process of cognition.

Comrade, re-education camps are for soft headed social democrats.

Line those radlibs up against the wall and be done with it. We’ll paint the communal dormitories of our anarcho-communist utopia red with the blood of the fascists and individualists and the skies black with the smoke of their burning corpses.

Hi Tony. Welcome to raddle. I don’t think you are alone in your view, but thus far your contributions have been painfully close minded, reductionist, and (ironically) reactionary.

Given the parodic nature of your posts, it is unclear to me whether or not you are an actual ancom drunk on the strong liquor of the beautiful idea, or an alt account send up of every embarrassing ancom trope that’s ever graced a Reddit sub.

Either way, I invite you to take a page from /u/celebratedrecluse who like you is a communist, albeit one with a far more nuanced approach to politics and social interaction (and easily one of my favorite users on raddle) and engage in good faith conversation on topics of mutual interest rather than addressing our little online space with poorly conceived polemics and absurdist calls to revolution.

Just a thought.

My reading of Anti-Oedipus is going slow, I don't have anything interesting to say about it yet. I'm a little out of my depth here, to make some more of it I will need plenty of context and secondary readings.

Just keep plugging away and keep an open mind. Much of anarchist writing that is widely encountered tends toward the utilitarian and sociopolitical. AO is a different beast and lends well to an “open” reading. I find a great deal of philosophy is best read as poetry.

The biggest benefit I’ve found of joining a group is discovering texts I would never had considered reading myself.

I read a fair bit, but it varies day by day. I typically have quite a few texts going at once, all loosely related to my current interest and discussions.

Joining a reading group is the best thing I’ve done recently. Discussion definitely makes my reading more productive and enjoyable. I take part in a weekly group that’s more like a circle of friends having an ongoing conversation and then another that’s more focused in its scope and attempting to be projectual.

I’m still getting used to the platform. The Twitter style of discourse isn’t my comfort zone. I do enjoy the few people I’ve interacted with.

That’s cool. I do the same.

If you’re ever interested most groups are pretty minimal commitments. Quiver is usually less than a dozen pages and meets every other week. Lots of people jump on the meeting to just listen, most don’t speak up much if at all, and leave video off.

I’m with you. Definitely think more poetic writing, more open writing in general, is more conducive towards anarchic thinking.

I’ve been really scattered lately in my reading. Cioran, Bataille, Barthes, Junger, Serres, Deleuze, and more all while keeping up with reading group(s). Mind’s a bit scattered but in a good way. Like I can pull out my own meaning and process the texts from a less literal and more personal angle. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking of Laura riding and approaching all of my reading as poetry/fiction.

I don't think my reading's compatible with reading groups.

How so?

Got it.

I should probably stay away from the word liminal in general when addressing dualisms because it’s not precise, and commonly used in @ space.

I like the idea of TAZ, but to describe TAZ is to recuperate it, to contextualize it out of existence.

I might change my mind tomorrow, but yes, I see that type of dualism as a trap. We are where, when we are (using a basic conception of linear time) and will never exist anywhere else. I feel that to delineate is to move towards idealism and on to ideology.

I don’t have answers but I’m interested in destroying value and rationality to create possibilities. I actually love Hakim Bey (PLW) for just this reason. He’s very idiosyncratic and self-contradictory, which aren’t bad things. On the contrary, fear of contradiction is just a lack of imagination, a closed mind longing so much for unity and harmony that it finds it everywhere and recoils from difference.

Apologies for rambling. Not sure that makes sense.

It was poor choice of words on my part. I was using liminal as transitional, in the process sense, rather than the state of being inside and outside or on a border as the TAZ can be described. It does imply a transition from something to something, which was not my intent.

I always enjoy PLW’s critique and thought, but he always seems to be swinging back and forth between embracing the possibility of the liminal and then falling into the trap of before/after, inside/outside dualisms. I guess I feel like that’s where much critique of civ and technology fall apart. That manichean pull is very strong.

If your into Andrew’s take on deleuze, you should check out the Quiver project. The next meeting is 5/17 and we’re moving in a new direction with some readings that should appeal to more anarchists. You can find more info here.