Resistances and such

In Cultural Studies (a well-meaning Marxian political project that is not really a science, however), resistance has been spotted everywhere: any symbol or purported meaning can be exegisised as such. I too, sometimes try to play Devil's advocate too trying to see cop-outs that people attempt at least as a coping strategy: like people glued to their smartphones might be trying to create a sense of connection and intimacy in the social environment that alienates them from each other. However, I still find this strain of glorifying "resistance" rather flimsy. This kind of "resistance" reminds me of that scene in Precious where the protagonist is imagining herself a star singer on a stage while her stepfather is raping her again. We are getting screwed over big time, the sooner we realise it, the sooner you can do something meaningful about it. Foucalt was right, a shift in knowledge begets a shift in power relationship.

Sad truth for you, earthlings

All human social  systems only produce waste and difference. That's it.

Teeming humanity and hyper-social reality

At times, especially upon a peak into the news, it feels like the world has gone mad. But looking back, it becomes obvious that it has always been the case. However, this time around it's with a difference. I am the last one to bring forward scientism or biologism to explain humanity, but now it seems, to a point, justified. Social facts exist externally, i.e., beyond the control of the society's members. Compared to Durkheim's times, the latter-day rising interconnection of the humanity and its increasing density start bringing about a hyper-social reality: we start living as one global entity with new realities even less within our control than before. There are too many of us now and humanity start behaving like a hyper-chaotic system, acquiring certain characteristics of a physical entity with the critical mass of components having reached a certain saturated level.

With increase in numbers, the quality of the system changes. There are too many of us, the chaos, that has always been there as in any other system, has taken on a different level.  Overall, the interaction is more intense, magnified by technology. Inside, we start feeling crowded, annoyed by our exposure to the different: it particularly comes to head where the population density is high and the influx of foreigners is highly visible. There are more explosions of violence, state-sanctioned and glorified like drone attacks or democracy export wars, or spontaneous and publicly reviled like rape and xenophobia. Perhaps, the only reason keeping it all from building up into another world war is, not Ban Ki-moon benevolent, Mona Lisa-like semi-smile, but another fear, that of the nuclear deterrent. 

Governments and bureaucracies, the supposed rational actors that have never been such, even as far back as in Weber's, are too part of the chaos and subject to it, and also, consisting of live perceiving feeling actors, reacting to it emotionally, psychologically, irrationally. Do we need GM crops to feed all? Do we need mass surveillance to keep it all stable? Will "green technologies" actually save the envrionent from the exponentially growing excreta of the "thinking mold"? What do we need to keep in line with the growing demand for energy to sustain our increasingly unsustainable lifestyles and those aspiring to have those too? Those questions are answered with quick, unreflexive institutional knee jerks, reflexive spasms of bureaucratic systems, rather than any meaningful strategies addressing the underlying causes.

In the meantime, the corporate world and its driving engine, the global financial system, keep growing and operating according to their own logic, largely inconsistent with the highest good of everyone and everything else concerned: people, society, nature. Turning everything into the only language it can understand, that of the bottomline, money. The former "externalities" assumed to be subservient and subdued to the needs of economy -  humans, society and environment - are given a monetary value that can later be traded, exchanged, made into financial derivatives, all to support to the constant expansion of credit, i.e., the fractional reserve banking system clocking up trillions of digital money out of keyboard clicks and electromagnetic signals on server hard drives. 

This drive to monetarise everything, express everything through money, was presciently described in Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1927 novel We, where the entire society works to build a kind of super-spaceship, the Integral, that, when launched, will fly across the universe and calculate it all, "integrate the grandiose cosmic equation".  These days, even human emotions, dutifully recorded by everyone into the various apps of their smartphones, are smartly monetarised to create mega-profits for the likes of Facebook, Amazon and their creditors and investors. Billions of human souls' minutest moves all channeled into one powerful stream to propel the wheels of the world's banking - at least, we have one organised, rational, purposeful response to deal with

Ayn Rand and the spirit of Neo-Liberalism

Ayn Rand's spirit is in everything that people, ranging from her disciple Alan Greenspan to the starry-eyed and bushy-tailed business studies undergrads, do.Hers is the Neo-Liberal motto of the deserving vs. the undeserving, an arbitrary, misanthropic choice to divide the humanity, in this case based on their ability to participate efficiently in the market economy, dehumanising those who can't, none different from any other equally pernicious dividing ideology, we have seen so many of them bringing suffering ad destruction to the world.

The foundation of any ideology/personal belief system is in such pre-logical, emotional choices, arguing rationally with whatever rationalisation is built upon that won't achieve anything, because that logic is a mere projection of the now unconscious, internalised value. For example, the seemingly rational approach of treating the rest of reality - people, society, nature - as "externalities" to economy, rests on the irrational belief that market is a wise force that sorts out everything and is worth sacrificing anything for. As a result, we get a situation where market wins at the expense of  exactly everything else: people, society, nature. This kind of pernicious "truths" are fed to young, unsuspecting minds in university departments as unquestionable axioms by imposingly looking, glib professors, indoctrinating them to become the enthusiastic foot-soldiers of forces that sacrifice entire nations' livelihoods, the cooperative spirit of communities, humaneness, whole ecological systems, physical and emotional health of millions, for the sake of growth, i.e., the constant expansion of credit to sustain the fractional reserve system of making money out of nothing.

Discourse control

Last decade or so, discourse control has become so much more sophisticated, pervasive and cynical since Edward Bernays' times. The ISIS snuff videos aggressively promoted by all media outlets, the Russia-Ukraine rift with its shameless shock-propaganda on both sides, the "je suis Charlie" travesty with staged mass selfies by world's leaders... refined techniques, comprehensive scale, deviously clever use of media technology, globally orchestrated delivery.

Post-modernism and post-structuralism

A lot of contemporary social, literary and cultural theory (Latour a prime example) so obviously comes from white male upper-middle class arm-chair pontificators who have never experienced any kind of discrimination or even material discomfort so they feel free to blabber on how power is everywhere, everyone is an agent and everything in the world boils down to a bunch of abstruse, yet flashy buzzwords.  Argumentum verbosium at its best funded.