#kantbot

I was invited on to be a guest for the most recent TekWar podcast for anyone interested!

We talked about animation, NRX magic the gathering and the bullshit around modern disney

I haven't kept up with him in years. A viscerally unpleasant character, smug and nasty. I just checked—he hasn't changed. If I understand the shift in his views correctly, and I'm not sure I do, he's provided a different set of answers, now materialist and information-based where once they were idealist and affect-based, to the same set of questions about how modern power and consciousness operates. He was telling people to read Lukács and Habermas when I stopped reading him; this, too, is completing the system of German Idealism, very explicitly in Lukács's case:

In Section II of this essay we discussed Kant’s view of the ontological proof of God’s existence, of the problem of existence and thought, and we quoted his very logical argument to the effect that if existence were a true predicate, then “I could not say that precisely the object of my concept exists.” Kant was being very consistent when he denied this. At the same time it is clear that from the standpoint of the proletariat the empirically given reality of the objects does dissolve into processes and tendencies; this process is no single, unrepeatable tearing of the veil that masks the process but the unbroken alternation of ossification, contradiction and movement; and thus the proletariat represents the true reality, namely the tendencies of history awakening into consciousness. We must therefore conclude that Kant’s seemingly paradoxical statement is a precise description of what actually follows from every functionally correct action of the proletariat.

But I don't know nearly as much about any of that as he does, and I never could read Kant, even though, from my first semester of college straight through my orals in grad school, they kept making me read Kant. "Who cares?" he always demands, now seeing culture, I gather, as epiphenomenal to esoteric economic manipulation. He seems like a true academic in his soul: a genius-level ability to synthesize extraordinary quantities of information coupled with endless reserves of pettiness and spite rendering this intelligence irrelevant. If you demand of someone who hasn't even addressed you, "Who cares?," then you're the one who cares, perhaps inordinately. I doubt his change of views is cynically motivated, though. You really can work your way honestly through your intellectual concerns and only realize later what your mental traversal implies of a practical political shift. Also, those guys are always darkly hinting at what they saw behind the scenes of the far right, the involvement of big money and intelligence agencies, I assume, and, since you have me re-investigating, he just re-X'd this, for example—

—and has endorsed the lib-media-is-promoting-BAP theory, which I have also come to believe (twice now they've done an "exposé" on him just before he releases a book)—

—and, as I have never succeeded in attracting the support of big money and intelligence agencies myself, I will take their word for it. I'll leave you with a sincerepost in conclusion: