i like listening to your videos while i make coffee, its so calming and enlightening x

The last part of the video is very important for those that believe we simply need a sort of apocalyptic event to destroy the old world and build a new one. Unless you thoroughly abolish and challenge the subjectivities, beliefs, desires etc. created by that old world, people will just reproduce the old world in their attempts to create a new world. Grand-scale macropolitical change alone isn't enough, micropolitical change has to come along with it. To put it in deleuzian terms: We are desiring-machines coded by the relations that created the assemblage that we are, so our desires will reflect those relations unless those very codes that shape us and that become part of our program are subverted in us. Good video David ❤

man you're such a gem

Cat pondering HARD in the back 😻🤔

hi david, I was wondering if you could speak about the theory of solipsism eventually?

Thank you

Hi David. This rings very personal to me. I have had hours of contemplation on this earlier albeit on a superficial sense and in the context of the current cultural industry. The way the States have co-opted with capitalist machines and as a result are somehow driving this fad of pseudo individualism by making citizens believe how they are empowered and that the responsibility of their well being lies upon themselves, the State has notoriously been shunning it's responsibility behind such narratives. Further, pseudo individualism shall also not lead to formation of stronger collectives because people are fragmented. Also, we must understand that pseudo individualism/autonomy etc are all a matter of privilege. Only those that can afford the same, can live with the illusion of having the same. Welcoming thoughts on this

6:00 All I heard when you said "I would get more if it was sold for me" is that it's not necessarily true because it doesn't have the brand recognition, etc. You can't guarantee by yourself the intangibles of a product without the company associated with it.

The Jeep commercial that played before this has me worried…

awesome video very intellect smart man thNk you

Fine presentation! So I get the 'ca plus change' of most political action. But I'm curious whether you believe in the Kantian self-enlightenment per se, amplified as it were by Goethean and Hegelian bildung. My own sense is that modern psychology and in particular the therapy industry has gotten much mileage over the last century in propagating the, I think false, notion that they offer a path to individualism.

thankyou

This is very insightful of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Guignion (the person in the video). My take on this: Today's right-wing is obviously fascist, etc... so obviously so that we need not argue it here. However, today's left-wing, because of its lack of a comprehensive vision of individualistic liberation, packages and even romanticizes an oppressive system as something to which the participation in which the oppressed should aspire and even celebrate. A specific example: Capitalism has oppressed both persons who are considered "men" and persons who are considered "women". Feminists correctly identify the unfairness of the inequality of the particular gender-based roles within that system. Unfortunately, the mainstream of feminists then proceed to pursue equality of treatment of persons not by liberating what they consider to be "men" from their labor for corporations, but rather by enslaving what they consider to be "women" into the same roles that what they consider to be "men" have already been filling. This terrible error serves to portray the oppression of what they consider to be "women" as the liberation of women. Were feminism truly abut the liberation of what feminists consider to be "women", then it would seek to dismantle corporate employment altogether - which is not to say that such dismantling would be sufficient for comprehensive liberation, but that it would be a necessary aspect. Moreover, were feminism truly about liberation from the constructs of gender and from gender-based social roles, then it would seek to deconstruct the very idea of gender identity which it has adopted from the patriarchy, itself - and while I am well aware that some (a small subset of) persons who have been labeled as "feminist" advocate for gender deconstruction, it is simply illogical that an ideology can both advocate a gender-based nationality (which, by definition, is the essence of feminism) and sincerely seek to end the construct of gender, itself. But this is just one example of many! In terms of the politics of the USA, it is not the Republicans, with all of their transparent sexism, etc., whom I fear the most in the long-term, but the Democrats, who package a false alternative, still based in corporate capitalism, gender identity, etc., etc., etc., all whole-heartedly adopted (albeit expanded beyond binary terms) from the patriarchy that they pretend to oppose, and all still regarding persons not as individuals but as social objects whose only significances are their representations of collective identities - just as the patriarchy would have it! To the list of Adorno's and Horkheimer's terms beginning in "psuedo-", I will add "pseudo-liberals"! And, of course, when I try to explain this truth, I am bullied for so-called "mansplaining", etc. There is something truly sick in a culture that packages the oppression of women as the liberation of women and vice-versa... and, again, this is but only one example, for I could just as well cite much more obvious case of Republicans who see Trump as their liberator! Guidnion pointed out (correctly) that eliminating capitalism without eliminating other systems of oppression, such as (and not only) sexism, is insufficient. I completely agree and extend the claim: Eliminating any system of oppression, such as sexism (even if that were the aim of feminism), is insufficient without eliminating all other systems of oppression such as (and not only) capitalism. Any "ism" that is more narrowly targeted becomes an arm of oppression by other means, such as by selling oppression to us under the guise of "inclusion" in other systems of oppression.

Please discuss GIORGIO AGAMBEN's books.

Have you ever heard of ‘Totalitarian Kitsch’?

IMHO artists ( I am thinking visual) have a unique position in this theory as they oft are both laborers and sellers at the same time in 2 divergent ways to support themselves on 2 different levels both physically and psychologically still aimed at one goal - identity.… they rarely produce anything other than simulations of previous production never equal to their perceived identities.

David: *critical theory sounds* Cat: "bwwwwrrrrrr" 10:41 Thank you for your input, beautiful feline.

i didn't come here to be attacked... by those biceps :D

You know this make me think of meme culture way of bashing normies for thinking the same way when they themselves all think and express themselves in the same way.

13:20-13:38 what Adorno and Hork skepticism fails to consider, however, is how it’s political action that shapes thought. Some of the best thinkers are testament to this, Marx, Foucault, Davis, West, Fanon, and of course Marcuse, who Adorno and Horkheimer denounced for supporting the student protest from their lecture halls. They fail to remember Marx’s IV thesis on Feuerbach, that praxis is about ideas being “criticized in theory and revolutionary in practice” Ideas might not always fit the political situation but they can be transformed in political action and then be critiqued to work better. If we take them Adorno and Hork at their word all such skepticism does is envelope a question concerning how much “serious thinking” do we have to do before action, until there’s no action happening at all because we are to busy thinking lol; no praxis happening at all. This has materialized itself in the intellectualism of academy, which has a lot to say no doubt, but never does anything.

I’m about to become a capitalist and Whoa 😮‍💨I love listening to this. I’ll be exploring tacit systems that uphold the structure im trying to innovate around. Thank you!

Perhaps they were describing themselves

going on a run is not punishing!

I often think that notions of there being a choice-less society (wherein differentiation is largely a matter of negative degree without positive attributes) is in and of itself a big lie. In other words I challenge the idea that one's personality can successfully be separated from nature. It seems that the sentient being will always return to the scene of the crime; so to speak, the garden of death and rebirth. All efforts to elude such a simple reality as "act naturally" have produced hybrid and incomplete personality profiles that adorn (NPI) the historical landscapes of existence. I conclude that political action and/or speech does not shape our thoughts or our thinking. Marx may have been wrong to suggest that alienation was a negative capitalist result instead of the normal human reaction to failure. How can communism or democratism or capitalism automatically be negative factors in and of themselves? Isn't this really what Marx meant when he challenged his generation to recreate the good by jettison of the decay. It is our very real actions within those political systems that creates any sense of alienation from our natural selves or not. Yes we yearn for success and voice, but there comes a point in any effort where the win/loss vector becomes clear and the one's internal healthy dialog resumes. Political actions that become negative parts of the landscape never become the landscape itself. Those destructive political actions are merely the jagged edges of the historical page. The culture industry, absent any positive addition to the wellness of sentient beings, wethers. It dies within or out of our sight, but it must die if it is decay.

yuor cat

That cat has absolutely no interest in what you're talking about. Something very interesting on the wall, though, apparently.

CAT

This word "undersold" is to some degree misleading/incorrect.

The irony, he spends his life making videos, explaining philosophic concepts.

Cute Kitty Alert, Philosophy, and Cute Guy? Sign ME UP!!!

Liked the lip service to Capitalism. Disliked the KZfaqr undermining of Capitalism and misrepresentations while holding a "revolution" as some sort of ideal.