Paul‘s archive

Solanas is best known for the radical feminist text SCUM Manifesto, which presents men as fundamentally defective and advocates (often ambiguously, somewhere between satire, fantasy, and political extremism) their elimination. Solanas’s writing is driven by rage, resentment, and a vision of desire as structured by domination and lack.

Chu’s work, especially in Females, is interested in desire, dependency, passivity, and the way subjects are constituted by wanting things they may not choose to want. She often draws from psychoanalysis rather than feminism in its more conventional political forms.

The strongest link is that both writers reject optimistic accounts of autonomy.

* Solanas portrays human relations as deeply antagonistic.

* Chu portrays desire as something that masters us rather than something we control.

* Both are suspicious of liberal ideas that individuals freely choose their identities and desires.

Chu has written sympathetically about Solanas, not because she endorses Solanas’s politics literally, but because she sees Solanas as an unusually clear thinker about the humiliations and dependencies built into desire. Chu argues that many readers dismiss Solanas as insane or merely provocative, thereby missing the theoretical force of her observations about need, resentment, and power.

One way to put it is:

* Solanas: “The problem is men.”

* Mainstream feminism: “The problem is patriarchy.”

* Chu: “The problem is desire itself.”

That is an oversimplification, but it captures the shift.

Another connection is stylistic. Both write in a deliberately excessive, polemical, and provocative manner. They are not trying to persuade through careful moderation. Instead, they push ideas to extremes in order to reveal assumptions that more conventional writers leave hidden.

There is a recurring design problem in small democratic institutions (student councils, cooperatives, faculty committees): single-winner voting rules do not generalize well to selecting a group that is supposed to represent a heterogeneous membership.

Plurality voting in particular tends to be unstable in multiparty or multi-candidate settings. Votes fragment, minority winners can emerge, and the outcome often depends on strategic consolidation rather than preference structure. Ranked systems (IRV/STV) reduce some of this, but introduce dependence on elimination order and can still produce groups that are not obviously “balanced” in terms of representation.

One alternative studied in social choice theory is Proportional Approval Voting (PAV), which treats the election as a constrained optimization problem.

Voters do not rank candidates. They only submit an approval set: the candidates they find acceptable.

Given:

a set of candidates CCC

voters i=1,…,ni = 1,\dots,ni=1,…,n

approval sets Ai⊆CA_i \subseteq CAi​⊆C

a fixed committee size kkk (e.g. 7)

the rule selects a committee S⊆CS \subseteq CS⊆C, ∣S∣=k|S| = k∣S∣=k, that maximizes: W(S)=∑i=1n(1+12+⋯+1∣Ai∩S∣)W(S) = \sum_{i=1}^{n} \left(1 + \frac{1}{2} + \dots + \frac{1}{|A_i \cap S|}\right)W(S)=i=1∑n​(1+21​+⋯+∣Ai​∩S∣1​)

Interpretation: each voter gains value from multiple elected candidates they approved, but with diminishing returns. The first representative matters most, the second less, and so on. This structure penalizes over-concentration of seats in one faction and tends to produce proportional outcomes without explicitly encoding parties.

More generally, PAV belongs to a family of “committee scoring rules” defined by concave (diminishing returns) utility functions over the number of approved winners per voter.

Computationally, the rule is non-trivial: selecting the optimal committee is NP-hard in general. The search space is (mk)\binom{m}{k}(km​), where mmm is the number of candidates. However, for typical institutional scales (e.g. m≤50m \le 50m≤50, k=5k = 5k=5 to 999), exact optimization via integer programming or fast greedy approximations is feasible in practice. The greedy algorithm (iteratively adding the candidate that maximally increases W(S)W(S)W(S)) gives strong approximations due to submodularity of the objective.

The main trade-off is not computational but institutional: PAV optimizes a notion of proportional representation, not necessarily internal coherence. It can produce a committee that is well-balanced in terms of voter representation but internally heterogeneous in ideology or strategy.

Because of this, systems of this type are typically combined with a second layer: decision rules inside the committee.

For a 7-person executive body, common internal rules would be:

simple majority (4/7) for routine decisions

higher thresholds (5/7 or supermajority) for structural decisions

optional consensus norms for politically sensitive issues

Strict unanimity is sometimes proposed, but tends to reduce decisiveness sharply unless the group is very small or highly aligned.

Where this design space becomes relevant is not national-scale politics, but intermediate institutions: cooperatives (Genossenschaften), student councils (Fachschaften), research groups, or small public boards. In these settings, the goal is often not adversarial victory but stable representation of multiple legitimate perspectives within a bounded decision-making body.

from selecting a winner, to selecting a set that approximately maximizes collective representation under diminishing marginal returns per voter,

The core idea is that injustice does not only happen economically or politically, but also at the level of knowledge itself: who is believed, whose experiences count, whose concepts exist, and who gets excluded from collective understanding.

Hermeneutical injustice

People lack the social concepts or interpretive tools to make sense of their experiences.

Classic example:

Before the term “sexual harassment” became socially available, many women experienced something real but struggled to describe or communicate it publicly. Their suffering existed, but collective language lagged behind.

The concept has become important in:

* feminist theory

* postcolonial studies

* disability studies

* psychiatry

* anthropology

* education

* AI ethics

* journalism and documentary practices

*

debates around Epistemic Hierarchy and Scientism.

Modern societies often grant highest epistemic authority to:

* quantitative knowledge

* predictive models

* technical expertise

* institutional science

* formalized abstraction

That structure has obvious strengths — medicine, engineering, physics, infrastructure — but many thinkers argue that it also produces a narrowing of what counts as “real” knowledge.

Your examples point toward forms of knowledge that are:

* embodied rather than abstract

* tacit rather than explicit

* experiential rather than propositional

* situated rather than universal

* practiced rather than merely stated

For example:

Sport and outdoor activity can generate:

* spatial intelligence

* ecological sensitivity

* risk calibration

* bodily awareness

* temporal judgment

* nonverbal coordination

* resilience under uncertainty

These are real competencies, but they are difficult to formalize into papers, metrics, or standardized credentials. Because institutions tend to reward what can be measured and archived, these forms become epistemically secondary.

Similarly, the arts often produce:

* perceptual refinement

* emotional discrimination

* symbolic interpretation

* attentiveness

* historical memory

* sensitivity to ambiguity

* forms of collective imagination

Those capacities are harder to justify within technocratic systems because their outputs are indirect and not always economically legible.

Thinkers across different traditions make related arguments:

* Michael Polanyi wrote about “tacit knowledge” — we know more than we can explicitly say.

* Maurice Merleau-Ponty emphasized embodied perception as foundational to consciousness.

* John Dewey treated art as a mode of experience and inquiry, not decoration.

* Richard Sennett defended craftsmanship as an intellectual practice.

* Tim Ingold argues that making, walking, and environmental engagement are forms of thinking.

There is also a political dimension: societies often confuse measurability with importance. What can be statistically optimized acquires prestige, funding, and institutional legitimacy. Meanwhile, forms of wisdom tied to care, aesthetics, bodily practice, manual skill, or local ecological experience become culturally invisible despite being essential to human life.

At the same time, the strongest versions of this critique usually avoid simply reversing the hierarchy (“art good, science bad”). The more nuanced claim is that different domains disclose different aspects of reality:

* science excels at abstraction, prediction, and generalization

* art excels at perception, meaning, ambiguity, and lived experience

* embodied practices excel at situated judgment and direct engagement

The only kind of improvement left is Home improvement and Self improvement