40.
The development of productive forces has been the real unconscious history which built and modified the conditions of existence of human groups as conditions of survival, and extended those conditions: the economic basis of all their undertakings. In a primitive economy, the commodity sector represented a surplus of survival. The production of commodities, which implies the exchange of varied products among independent producers, could for a long time remain craft production, contained within a marginal economic function where its quantitative truth was still masked. However, where commodity production met the social conditions of large scale commerce and of the accumulation of capitals, it seized total domination over the economy. The entire economy then became what the commodity had shown itself to be in the course of this conquest: a process of quantitative development. This incessant expansion of economic power in the form of the commodity, which transformed human labor into commodity-labor, into wage-labor, cumulatively led to an abundance in which the primary question of survival is undoubtedly resolved, but in such a way that it is constantly rediscovered; it is continually posed again each time at a higher level. Economic growth frees societies from the natural pressure which required their direct struggle for survival, but at that point it is from their liberator that they are not liberated. The independence of the commodity is extended to the entire economy over which it rules. The economy transforms the world, but transforms it only into a world of economy. The pseudo-nature within which human labor is alienated demands that it be served ad infinitum, and this service, being judged and absolved only by itself, in fact acquires the totality of socially permissible efforts and projects as its servants. The abundance of commodities, namely, of commodity relations, can be nothing more than increased survival.

I think 'unconscious' there is figurative rather than Freudian, so I'm saved some effort. I think this is just noting the historical progression from commodity capitalism to financial capitalism while noting that the latter was always a real possibility of the former. But the process of transformation from commodity centric to financial centric is irreversible since the economy now is 'a process of quantitative development' - the incessant changes of numbers on screens. But it makes enough food to bring more people as a % out of starvation every year, so there's that. So it'll keep going; and Debord says that since this keeps happening, the accumulation of capital obtains a sufficient rate to vaporise social life into images. So it's characterised as a highly likely development once a capitalist gets going because money makes money. M-C-M' again, but it's decontextualised in the sense that going from M to M' transverses national boundaries. Such boundaries are formally traversed millions of times a second - a long way from merchant caravans and the town market.

I think 'the pseudo-nature' is referring to some conceptual composite of economic relations, the cities which built up around them, and the replacement of nature through grid iron. EG Inner city kids in London need to be told light doesn't come from their eyes, part of introductory science class can be turning the lights off, closing the shutters and allowing them to see darkness for the first time.

Another reference to the commodification of everything in "acquires the totality of socially permissible efforts'. Coding/decoding things from economic analysis to the analysis of corresponding social processes then back again is a usual bit of Marxist methodology.

More negative connotations, the spectacle producing forms of life which are 'nothing more than increased survival'.

This one's big, I probably missed a few things in it.

Oh. There's this thing in dialectical materialism called the dialectic of quality and quantity. It's in Engels and those in Lenin's heritage. Anti-dialectics has a good summary of the dialectic and highlights a lot of problems with it. The entire site is gold, it's written by an incredibly grumpy English analytical marxist postman.

Forgot to say, if you're actually reading my notes, was there anything you want me to throw more words at?

Succinctly put. I appreciated how neatly condensed this is:

Worse, the isolation caused by this process of self-commodification and self-abstraction throws us into further need of the salve the spectacle offers us. Of course, it's not a hole we can dig ourselves out of. "Success" then becomes the exclusive domain of the spectacle, and self-development, except in its terms, the mark of failure, isolation and ridicule.

Just in case, diamat=dialectical materialism or 'materialist dialectics', in my view it's a confused pile of bookum, and the only insights that you get from considering it are much neater to think of in systems theoretic terms. At least, that's how I'm going to interpret them, or try to. Similarly with any Freudianism, I'll do what I can to translate the statements into dual process theory, which I mentioned earlier to @TimeLine.

39.
This development which excludes the qualitative is itself, as development, subject to qualitative change: the spectacle indicates that it has crossed the threshold of its own abundance; this is as yet true only locally at some points, but is already true on the universal scale which is the original context of the commodity, a context which its practical movement, encompassing the Earth as a world market, has verified.

The dialectical contrast of qualitative and quantitative is bollocks of the first degree in my book. Change of forms of energy are far more complicated than can be spanned by these quantities when interpreted as laws of nature as in diamat. Generalising this from nature to society and to the individual is intellectual self flagellation and loses both the specificity of each category and the possibility of novel relational dynamics between them. IE, seeing the qualitative and quantitative as antipodes in an alternating sequence of dynamics doesn't let you see how they smoothly interpenetrate (no diamat leaps with metaphysical necessity here); people leave a surprising amount of themselves on sites through their meta-data and mathematical modelling of what they do on the site, the lossy mapping from expressive activity to database content is an occlusive augmentation of the qualitative aspects of experience that facilitates its control. Similarly motivating differentials of intensity are a mirror of the quantitative in the qualitative. To the extent I can, I'll try to translate things out of diamat categories.

38.
The loss of quality so evident at all levels of spectacular language, from the objects it praises to the behavior it regulates, merely translates the fundamental traits of the real production which brushes reality aside: the commodity-form is through and through equal to itself, the category of the quantitative. The quantitative is what the commodity-form develops, and it can develop only within the quantitative.

The explosive growth of mathematical and computer science in the broad sense goes along with this, and the expansive data gathering and analysis that occurs as a result of the developed technologies from these fields. Perhaps this can be stated as a mathematisation of capital. Debord seems to want to say that there's a profound lack in the social life consisting in the spectacle, but he's not advanced what is lacking as a positive thesis yet. The Partially Examined Life podcast's (@Baden) comment on this was very prescient (paraphrased): "as usual with Marxist critique, the critique is devastating but the positive project sorely lacking".

37.
The world at once present and absent which the spectacle makes visible is the world of the commodity dominating all that is lived. The world of the commodity is thus shown for what it is, because its movement is identical to the estrangement of men among themselves and in relation to their global product.

How does the spectacle render the world absent? The world in terms of its social practices doesn't 'naturally' have to consist predominantly of a discretised tableaux of image objects. I think it might be worthwhile updating this discrete character of the spectacle - probably inspired by the growth of television, popular music and consumer culture more generally consisting of distinct concreta always-already gift-wrapped - to include a continuous element which remains unsuppressed. People can become brands, everyone has a minimal form of self-branding through the generation of credit histories ,work references and the dizzying stream of meta-data generated about us every day. Work references and examination reckon your capacity as a worker and can consist in an extensive psychometric evaluation; not just your capacity for the job but your whole being is probed. The sheer ridiculousness of it produces laughter and tears on a daily basis - eg refusing someone a job as a cleaner because they couldn't complete a fucking magic square.

We have moved on from that point too, the data stream leaves ghostly traces of our soul behind, and the administrators of these technologies can turn this into a modelling of consumer behaviour in general; and thus is a further form of commodification. The consumer as a consumer is also commodified through exchange value of the mathematised propensities of their desires and habits. Significance suffers a constant effacement in its quantification as a set of repeating propensities; every human becomes easily summarised and thus easily encoded. The results of this surface coding (discretisation into commodity-images) and deep-coding (the hidden activity you leave behind through technology like social media) is a transposition of life to what was unlived within it.

Next chapter, I think I won't just restrict myself to schizophrenic ranting, there'll also be some good old fashioned philosophical buggery. I really dislike the Freudian typology of the mind, so as much as I can I'll try and interpret the unconscious as the habituated and reflexive, and the conscious as effortful comportment and cogitation. In this framework, the Id resembles reflexive comportment manifesting a collection of inter-related desires, the Ego resembles the differential weighting of the field of potentials characteristic of this manifestation, and the Superego resembles the historical aggregation-through-distribution of these differential weighting schemes.

35.
In the essential movement of the spectacle, which consists of taking up all that existed in human activity in a fluid state so as to possess it in a congealed state as things which have become the exclusive value by their formulation in negative of lived value, we recognize our old enemy, the commodity, who knows so well how to seem at first glance something trivial and obvious, while on the contrary it is so complex and so full of metaphysical subtleties.

I think this is reasonably transparent, the spectacle is structured like a network of commodities, and we can expect the play of equivalences which expresses the character of the commodity-form to have a strong analogy to the spectacle. I have in mind the good regulator principle, every efficient regulator of a system is also a model of that system. Debord sets the spectacle up as a model of sorts earlier:

Remember 6:

6. The spectacle grasped in its totality is both the result and the project of the existing mode of production. It is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society. In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choice already made in production and its corollary consumption. The spectacle’s form and content are identically the total justification of the existing system’s conditions and goals. The spectacle is also the permanent presence of this justification, since it occupies the main part of the time lived outside of modern production.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

36. This is the principle of commodity fetishism, the domination of society by “intangible as well as tangible things,” which reaches its absolute fulfillment in the spectacle, where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible par excellence.

A reference to the generalisation of commodity fetishism to the constitutive components/processes of culture: {Spectacle <-regulation-> Economy}. We can expect the regulator to be projective in the sense that the spectacle isn't a transliteration (substitution of components) of all economic processes, but I think we can say that the spectacle is a subprocess of the economy. In systems-theoretic terms (not like Debord likes cybernetics), the spectacle is an economic process generated by a novel filtration and representation of the economy as well as an increase in its scope. Note 'selection' of images, not automatic inclusion and representation. In category theoretic terms, the spectacle can probably be thought of as the image of a forgetful functor from the material conditions of the economy to a space of inter-related images with its own governing dynamics.

An exposition of the way these images have come to impose themselves on us can be found in Rick Roderick's lecture series 'The Self Under Seige'. Paraphrased, "what happens if you stop watching TV for a week? You don't know anything! Is the war still on? What the hell happened?'. The same thing can be said if you avoid social media - you lose out on a major region of how sense is negotiated and must wait until its most major events become excessively spectacular to become represented on older forms of media (like the news). The hyper-commodification of engagement (through advertising and data) in social media probably sets up a supervenience relation (at minimum) between the spectacle and its economic base, no S changes without E changes, however minor they may be.

I deleted your most recent attempt Count. Seems I'm the only mod on and active. I'm quoting your OP here so you can work on it some more before broaching the discussion again:

We all know that Matthew made many parallels when writing his Gospel about the Old Testament. But there are a few specific parts where Moses is specifically mentioned. I would like to know the opinions of people on this forum about the different times Matthew had drawn a similarity between Moses and Jesus. For example; Jesus refined on Moses' law (Ten Commandments) during the Sermon on the Mount.

The reason I chose to delete it was because being on the borderline of intelligibility isn't sufficiently intelligible for an opening post.

To my mind it's asking to discuss times in the bible where Matthew compared Jesus to Moses and a comparison of the two as mythical figures; and possibly the significance of that analogy for Christianity. But I do agree it is still written unclearly, and the topic @Count Radetzky von Radetz wishes to speak about isn't described very well.

In the interest of transparency, this is the OP that was deleted a few times:

We all know that Matthew made many parallels when writing his Gospel about the Old Testament. But there are a few specific parts where Moses is specifically mentioned.

That's the entire post. The reason it was deleted wasn't because the ideas contained within were intolerable somehow, or anything against you personally, it was because as an OP it falls short in a few ways which are set out on the site guidelines thread. Firstly, the thread purported to be about a serious issue, and so is moderated in accord with this guideline:

3) Context matters:

The amount of leeway you get on the above depends to a degree on where you post and what the topic under discussion is. You're likely to have more freedom in the Shoutbox or in discussions in the Lounge, for example, than in the philosophical discussions.

so it has to meet a higher standard than things in the less philosophical subforums. Also, the remainder of the guidelines are:

a) Genuinely interested in the topic you've begun and are willing to engage those who engage you.

b) Able to write a thoughtful OP of reasonable length that illustrates this interest, and to provide arguments for any position you intend to advocate.

c) Capable of writing a decent title that accurately and concisely describes the content of your OP.

d) Starting an original topic, i.e. a similar discussion is not already active.

(No bumps allowed. If you want to attract replies, think of a better way).

We can tick (a), you seem interested. (b), not so much, you did not illustrate any idea clearly or advance any argument unambiguously in your post. (c) seemed fine. (d) also fine.

Try to put yourself in your readers' shoes. Do you understand the following:

We all know that Debord made many parallels when writing his Society for the SI. But there are a few specific parts where corporatism is specifically mentioned.

I doubt it. If you are unsure how to write a good starting post for a thread, I advise checking out a few topics to get a feel for what is minimally expected.

Your OP was

We all know that Matthew made many parallels when writing his Gospel about the Old Testament. But there are a few specific parts where Moses is specifically mentioned.

Site guidelines say:

Don't start a new discussion unless you are:

a) Genuinely interested in the topic you've begun and are willing to engage those who engage you.

b) Able to write a thoughtful OP of reasonable length that illustrates this interest, and to provide arguments for any position you intend to advocate.

c) Capable of writing a decent title that accurately and concisely describes the content of your OP.

d) Starting an original topic, i.e. a similar discussion is not already active.

(No bumps allowed. If you want to attract replies, think of a better way).


b/c, more effort, more detail

In case anyone's been reading along and has questions, is there anything any of you would like to talk about?

Chapter 1 Summary.


What is the spectacle? The spectacle is a name of various moments of social processes aggregated into one self sustaining dynamic. It, to a first approximation, has the following features:

(1) The commodification of the commons and of social life.
(2) The discretisation of social life into exchangeable representations.
(3) The replacement of social engagement with the generation of the things.
(4) The structuring of our perceptions and desires in terms of image commodities.
(5) A conceptual scheme defining the limits of social life in terms of its representational commodity-images.

Fundamentally, it is the name for the mediation and structuration of life by commodity-images and the alienation this requires and produces.

31.
The worker does not produce himself; he produces an independent power. The success of this production, its abundance, returns to the producer as an abundance of dispossession. All the time and space of his world become foreign to him with the accumulation of his alienated products. The spectacle is the map of this new world, a map which exactly covers its territory. The very powers which escaped us show themselves to us in all their force.

32.
The spectacle within society corresponds to a concrete manufacture of alienation. Economic expansion is mainly the expansion of this specific industrial production. What grows with the economy in motion for itself can only be the very alienation which was at its origin.

33.
Separated from his product, man himself produces all the details of his world with ever increasing power, and thus finds himself ever more separated from his world. The more his life is now his product, the more he is separated from his life.

34.
The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image

(31->34) part of the negation of 'who am i? i work as x' is done through demanding 'what do i own?' as a response. Consumers as a name of humankind. The 'very alienation' is probably referring to the original Marxist sense of alienation from the products of labour, then that applied to 'social life' (or many facets of it) being transformed into new avenues for the valorisation of capital. More resonances of people as personal brands.

I think these passages are supposed to link more to Marxian categories than the preceding aphorisms. That's the end of chapter 1.

30.
The alienation of the spectator to the profit of the contemplated object (which is the result of his own unconscious activity) is expressed in the following way: the more he contemplates the less he lives; the more he accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires. The externality of the spectacle in relation to the active man appears in the fact that his own gestures are no longer his but those of another who represents them to him. This is why the spectator feels at home nowhere, because the spectacle is everywhere.

Social media again. People put in effort to make stuff on it, but then it becomes owned upon upload (a precondition for public expression) and commodified through advertising, and makes another commodity of the constitutive data. Another resonance here is spending far too much time watching TV, at the movies, on the internet - a means of expression 'submissive to work' (in the sense that we're usually making money for the owner of the site/theatre etc). Another way of saying 'what we do with our time is no longer commodified just as work'. Everyone's an alien in a society of constant, mutual, surveillance where the means of social expression is labour in another form, and even desires are bought and sold. Even the malaise it produces is commodified as potential; for medical treatment.

29.
The spectacle originates in the loss of the unity of the world, and the gigantic expansion of the modern spectacle expresses the totality of this loss: the abstraction of all specific labor and the general abstraction of the entirety of production are perfectly rendered in the spectacle, whose mode of being concrete is precisely abstraction. In the spectacle, one part of the world represents itself to the world and is superior to it. The spectacle is nothing more than the common language of this separation. What binds the spectators together is no more than an irreversible relation at the very center which maintains their isolation. The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate.

The spectacle is a process of abstraction, it can be seen in its ur-form with the fetishism of commodities understood in the precise sense of objects standing in for relations between people. There's probably something in the idea of discretisation as a mode of being of capital, as soon as something is individuated or torn from its context it can be gift-wrapped.

In terms of social media, pictures stand in for the photographer's engagement in a social situation, something interesting happens in the street and someone starts filming it; this re-presentation as discretised representation was made possible by recording technology of all sorts. The spectacle as a motivation towards abstraction, committing life to an invisible social memory, permeates social milieux in a manner similar to the general equivalent becomes embodied in the money commodity - it is as if 'the animal' as a type walked among its brethren (paraphrased from Marx).

Some notes on how I think about the general equivalent: chapter 2 of Capital is a logico-historical progression from simple exchange to money commodities and can be read as adding logical texture to the notion of exchange. Exchange as this for that contains within it the possibility of exchange networks this 1 for this 2 for this 3 for this 4... then these networks of equivalent values become represented in a single commodity - money. Money is then the representative of the equivalence classes of exchange, as well as a commodity within each equivalence class; it has this self reifying character. I think Debord sets up the spectacle in a similar way, it is 'capital accumulated until it becomes images' - the images have a landscape of potential commodifications and are thus always-already commodified through their means of expression; the means of expression being the self reification of the spectacle, as it displaces (abstracts) representations from more analogue contexts to discretised ones (images, sound bites, Tweets etc). The total production of these images is the result and enabling condition of the spectacle.

Should be noted that the Marx also relies on the myth of barter to provide the historical analysis of the value form, but I think the final stage - where money works in the sense of valuation through representation of an equivalence class of commodities of equal worth- is still an ok way of thinking about it.

The spectacle reunites the separate - again eerily true of social media, producing zombie friendships from mere acquaintance -, but it only functions so long as people feed into it and allow it to structure relationships. Also reminiscent of the social unity present in viral retweeting.

28. The economic system founded on isolation is a circular production of isolation. The technology is based on isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn. From the automobile to television, all the goods selected by the spectacular system are also its weapons for a constant reinforcement of the conditions of isolation of “lonely crowds.” The spectacle constantly rediscovers its own assumptions more concretely.

I like to think that Debord would've agreed that social media is a huge concretisation of the spectacle, this makes me think I'm actually understanding it. That social media can be understood as an architecture of persuasion also fits in well with this.

27. Due to the success of separate production as production of the separate, the fundamental experience which in primitive societies is attached to a central task is in the process of being displaced, at the crest of the system’s development. by non-work, by inactivity. But this inactivity is in no way liberated from productive activity: it depends on productive activity and is an uneasy and admiring submission to the necessities and results of production; it is itself a product of its rationality. There can be no freedom outside of activity, and in the context of the spectacle all activity is negated. just as real activity has been captured in its entirety for the global construction of this result. Thus the present “liberation from labor,” the increase of leisure, is in no way a liberation within labor, nor a liberation from the world shaped by this labor. None of the activity lost in labor can be regained in the submission to its result.

'central task' in mine is translated as 'primary work' - less ambiguous, makes it talking about the job that we have. This seems to be suggesting that the answer to 'what are you?' which came before our current climate is 'X is my job', and that 'X is my job' is no longer seen as an answer. More is demanded of our identity than what do with most of our time, and this brings focus on what we do out with our jobs. "Who am I?" can no longer be answered solely with 'what I do for a living" it's also equipped with a negative sense, that a person must be more than this. But I think the suggestion here is that it's a purely negative sense, consider this pair of dialogues:


Mary: "Hey, I'm Mary"
Jane: "What do you do Mary?"
Mary: "I'm a horticulturalist and I like cats"
_____

Mary: "Hey, I'm Mary"
Jane: "What do you do Mary?"
Mary: "I'm a horticulturalist"


"and I like cats" feels like a joke, but ending the conversation about Mary with "I'm a horticulturalist" also seems artificial. Even if "and I volunteer at a homeless shelter" was substituted in for " andI like cats" there's still something missing. I wouldn't feel like I knew much about Mary even if I knew what she did with her work time and her off time. I don't feel like I know much about a friend if I restricted knowledge of them to their job and their major hobby - we're more than that, but I'm not sure that any description would suffice. What about if Mary didn't communicate that she was a horticulturalist...

Mary: "Hey, I'm Mary"
Jane: "What do you do Mary?"
Mary: "I like cats"

Poor Mary, she only likes cats. There's a simultaneous demand for more and a denigration of anything that could be provided. I think "activity lost in labour" is referring to interpenetration of leisure time and work, and also some suggestion that only work could suffice, but it doesn't.

26. With the generalized separation of the worker and his products, every unitary view of accomplished activity and all direct personal communication among producers are lost. Accompanying the progress of accumulation of separate products and the concentration of the productive process, unity and communication become the exclusive attribute of the system’s management. The success of the economic system of separation is the proletarianization of the world.

Social media and internet shopping have created some progress in this regard too. Amazon, Tesco Online etc, you don't have to even see the custodians of the fetishised commodities any more, you can get them delivered directly to your door. The proletarianization of the world I think is best seen through the combination of social media and advertising revenue.

The proletariat in Marx is characterised by a formal relationship to production/circulation and the role money plays in it. Proletariat - C-M-C', where C is the commodity they provide and M is money. Non-proletariat: M-C-M'. I don't think we have much choice but to model engagement with social media on this picture, a user generates content, C, but they don't even receive the goddamn M, that goes to the people who own the site. So, since we don't progress from C-M this probably means that we can't be thought of as owning C, and C should be seen as an emergent property of our actions; a kind of codification characterised by public expression in a pre-owned medium. The site also owns the data we generate by using the site, which can be transformed into a commodity in various ways. It suffers a nascent transformation into a commodity in terms of the commodification of potential discussed above, the data has use-value for marketing, and those who have it are also those that control the functioning of the site (and thus some conditions for possibility of expression)... This is a horrific symbiosis.

I say no tears seen or shed, I remember seeing a grief selfie uploaded to a friend's Facebook tombstone. Because taking a picture of her tears and showing everyone added some reality to it.

25.
Separation is the alpha and omega of the spectacle. The institutionalization of the social division of labor, the formation of classes, had given rise to a first sacred contemplation, the mythical order with which every power shrouds itself from the beginning. The sacred has justified the cosmic and ontological order which corresponded to the interests of the masters; it has explained and embellished that which society could not do. Thus all separate power has been spectacular, but the adherence of all to an immobile image only signified the common acceptance of an imaginary prolongation of the poverty of real social activity, still largely felt as a unitary condition. The modern spectacle, on the contrary, expresses what society can do, but in this expression the permitted is absolutely opposed to the possible. The spectacle is the preservation of unconsciousness within the practical change of the conditions of existence. It is its own product, and it has made its own rules: it is a pseudo-sacred entity. It shows what it is: separate power developing in itself, in the growth of productivity by means of the incessant refinement of the division of labor into a parcellization of gestures which are then dominated by the independent movement of machines; and working for an ever-expanding market. All community and all critical sense are dissolved during this movement in which the forces that could grow by separating are not yet reunited.

There's some prescient news relating to this, the Cambridge Analytics + Facebook thing. Surprising no one, Facebook's data on people was sold and passed around a lot illegally. What is surprising is that the public reaction isn't exactly one of surprise, or rather maybe a moment of surprise then resentful acceptance. To a first approximation, Facebook is the medium of the social, the principle of translation between the internet of things and the relationships between people. Most social relations have become modelled through Facebook, and how you relate to others in general (personality) is quite well modelled by how you move about on Facebook - assuming you use it to socialise. The data about your engagement is regurgitated back at you by tailoring advertisements and what facets of people you can see. In a very real sense Facebook is a highly concentrated form of the spectacle and its dominating powers. Using it allows you to see the discretisation of all social processes into images. At every social gathering there's at least one person engaging in this translation exercise from our analogue sociality to the series of images; taking photos, making you pose, etc; and this is part of what it means to socialise now.

I quit Facebook 3 years ago, the vast majority of my IRL friends/acquaintances have stopped speaking to me since, despite giving them my email and trying to contact some of them. The only ones that still do regularly are, surprising no one, the ones that didn't heavily invest their time and energy in Facebook. By withdrawing from Facebook, I withdrew from the conditions of possibility it placed on my social life; a reflection of how Facebook expresses what society (in terms of its users' sociality) can do, but is opposed to the possibility of circumventing it.

One of the major reasons I quit it was because my sister died and her Facebook page became a digital epitaph. It was constantly updated 2 years after her death; so of course I checked it, and after prolonged exposure I found my memories vandalised. I can't remember her face, I only remember pictures of her taken by people I never met, in places I've never been. It's still there, and people still write on it. There is even an emergent regulation of user content on it; old photos and "I miss you"s-yes, genuine expressions of feeling - any resistance to the ascension of my sister to a series of images (which other friends also protested)-no. How? Upvotes/downvotes as communal consensus representation. No one dared take pictures at the funeral, on some level people understood this would be a gross perversion of something sacred; but there were photos for other social networks subject to the same thing, having a loved one die. Their epitaphs were less epitaphs and more the promise of resurrection; years after the death siblings and friends still pleading for their return - on a yearly deadline of course. A medium of grief in which no tears are seen or shed.

the incessant refinement of the division of labor into a parcellization of gestures which are then dominated by the independent movement of machines;

this is also relevant to the commodification of the commons, people act as Facebook's eyes and ears into the social reality it subsumes and reflects. The 'refinement' occurring manifests in the function of adverts and the commodification of your nascent desires. 'family bereavement' becomes sponsored by the ads in the side reel, suggesting a little retail therapy to fill the hole in your heart; sometimes even of funeral clothing, maybe a new suit to show you loved her.

It's less about whether it's moral in an absolute sense and more about whether and how long you could live with yourself while doing it. If you wouldn't be comfortable doing it, don't do it.

it really does work like that, the pupil stuff.

Touching your partner in some way expresses some thoughts to them. A lot what's expressed has word labels but there isn't a translation between speech/writing and all of these non-verbal aspects of communication.

There's some witticisms expressed in particularly good chess puzzles too. The ideas expressed are a kind of motion and initiative you can then attribute to the involved pieces, and liken current positions on the board to previous games and these motion/initiative corpuscles if you're particularly skilled (which I'm not).

Introspection reveals to someone that some of their thoughts can be expressed in words. Not that all such thoughts can be expressed in words. It isn't as if Mr Chomsky can assess all possible thoughts through introspection, even though he is quite smart.

If you want to dig deeper at a theoretical level, the problem is social constructionism, of the kind that goes back to Rousseau. The fact that our ideas come from our side, or subjectively (as a Kantian might say) as opposed to being directly perceived in the traditional Realist sense, doesn't mean they can't be objective. We bring the tests to the table, we project possible ways of being, sure: but Nature answers yea or nay.

"It's just a social construct" in meme form is sophomoric bollocks. Find me one example of anyone you're throwing under bus trying to say something isn't important or is entirely specified by noting that it is a social construct. I mean the thinkers, not first year first semester social anthropology undergrads speaking to their friends on Facebook.

Find me any example of social constructionism being operative in the day to day lives of people who're supposedly so beleaguered by it.

The problem isn't with the schools of thought in terms of their ideas necessarily - ideas are ideas, you can consider them or not - rather the flaw is in the tic, the automatism, of seeing everything through the lens of "oppressor/oppressed" group analysis. It's the unexamined (un-criticized) water in which the fish of academia swim, and it's polluted.

I'm pretty sure this is less of an all pervading force in culture and academia and more of a ghost conjured by histrionic proclamations.

The problem isn't with the schools of thought in terms of their ideas necessarily - ideas are ideas, you can consider them or not - rather the flaw is in the tic, the automatism, of seeing everything through the lens of "oppressor/oppressed" group analysis. It's the unexamined (un-criticized) water in which the fish of academia swim, and it's polluted.

I thought I did up-thread somewhere, then we went around the houses: I want to see real, verifiable instances of oppression to fight against, I'm not interested in apriori ideological candy floss designed to kafkatrap political opponents.

You mean like... the growing awareness of how horrible clothing supply chains are, anything to do with the TTIP, people starving to death due to austerity measures... How disproportionately violence effects trans people, the growth of racist populist movements in the wake of 2008. There is a lot of housework to be done. In the case of trans people and the growth of racist populist movements there really are disproportionately effected groups. Or is that too close to a typology of oppressors and oppressed for your liking?

Plus also the obfuscatory language - if you need your man Roderick to simplify it, something's gone terribly wrong. Nobody needs to simplify Hume ;) But even that wouldn't be so bad on its own - idiosyncratic language use is kind of charming in the greats, it's like a musical jingle - but when it's garbled third hand and fourth hand in academia so that sons and daughters of the Great & Good can get a high paying job sucking the life out of society by working in an NGO or the Stasi HR department of a big law firm - then you've got trouble.

No. The thing which went terribly wrong was that people saw all this theory coming from the European continent, the states and the academy identified it with Marxism; all under the presumption that just because someone's Marxist means they have nothing important to say; and it became incredibly fashionable to ignore and misrepresent any continental thinker instead of putting in the god damn work to understand technical philosophy translated out of its mother tongue.

Also your idea that no one needs to clarify and reinterpret Hume is ridiculous. Look at all the secondary literature clarifying, reinterpreting, applying ideas etc. Every popular thinker leaves a giant cloud of secondary academic literature.

So social constructionism - what's the motive behind that? Well, in the context of a secular version of Protestantism, with its notion of the equality of souls before God, the general idea is that Man is born innocent (with everyone equal) but corrupted by social structures (particularly property). If you want the real root of the poison, that's it right there, in that Rousseaian idea (or rather the idea that Rousseau made immensely popular).

Do you really think it's surprising that social constructionism is useful methodologically in the humanities? They are literally studying social dynamics. If there's a theory which facilitates the crystallisation of social processes into representative chunks, then looks at those chunks in motion, would you NOT use it? Oh wait, you already are.

The entire argument you're making is a geneological critique! You're taking ideas, interpreting them as social forces, then applying those social forces ceteris paribus to easy, sophomoric epigones who have little to no education in the supposedly 'underlying' theory. You're literally interpreting the production of theory in the humanities as a social construct. There's even a bloomin' Marxian element in what you're doing - you've made a schism between the parasitic elites of this movement, those people in false consciousness who serve them (the SJWs) and regular Joes who are having their freedom (reality itself?) attacked by the canon questioning canons. You even interpret the role of post modernism as the ideology of the fucking ruling class.

hey, uh, are we the postmodern neomarxist academic left dominating courageous intellectual dissent against our pompous and overly verbose whining?

Whether Marx is unfalsifiable depends on how he's interpreted. You can look at things like Andrew Kliman's 'The Failure of Capitalist Production' to find an example of Marx scholarship with an econometric slant. Whether it's right or wrong as an interpretation of Marx; it's still one which is right or wrong.

Can't answer the Freudian side.

Regardless of whether Marx and Freud are unfalsifiable some cursory understanding of both is probably required to understand a lot of the intellectual landscape left in their wake. The intellectual heritage they created, and their methodological innovations, are a good reason to study them still.

Also, and this is a personal bias, Imre Lakatos has a modification of Popper that makes it a better description of scientific praxis. The ideas of hard-core and auxiliary hypotheses. The hard-core of a scientific theory is what is considered and held as refutation resistant, auxiliary hypotheses are those which flesh out the body of the theory. Falsification operates on sets of hypotheses rather than a hypothesis; theoretical implications usually arise out of a composition of ideas that can be distilled to a propositional form, and the falsification of a theoretical implication then refutes the iterated disjunction of the hypotheses and hard-core rather than the any specific hypothesis... Until further testing clears up what is refuted.

I bring this up because I think there's an interesting development of Marxism that shifts its hard-core; the theory of value and the analysis of the value form are often jettisoned despite being foundational to Marx's critique of capital.

I believe something similar happened in Freud's wake, the hard-core is considered refuted but some of the insights generated from psychoanalytic research programs were pretty good; thus psychology. That hard-core containing the partition of the self into a tripartite structure, and the unconscious/conscious distinction; the latter of which is jettisoned through dual process theory (while maintaining the sense of unconscious=automatic|conscious=effortful)

I remember speaking to quite a few psychology students at university, it was quite fashionable to mock pretty much everything about Freud, so I would be surprised if psychology, as a contemporary research program, was still very consistent with ego/super-ego/id and unconscious/conscious typologies.

I'm not one who says that literally everything that's ever come from any of these schools of thought is crap. I understand very well that some things (like Postmodernism) are, or at least see themselves, as evolutions from previous stances, and as part of a continuing tradition, and I think the leading lights (e.g. Derrida, Foucault) have indeed had interesting things to say. It just doesn't translate very well into either (from a critical Left-wing point of view) activism or (from a critical Right-wing point of view) public policy.

Then why elevate criticism of people using bastardisations of theory in incoherent ways to criticisms of the theory? I'm with you insofar as people really are using theory as a cudgel, like 'Oh you wouldn't understand this, you haven't read Negative Dialectics!', but I hardly ever see that.

I've seen more, or used to see more, bastardisations of standpoint theory; I don't agree with it when it's interpreted that I have to put all of my beliefs into suspension because someone I'm reading is a woman, trans, etc - but I rarely saw that too (and it was typically confined to one sort of debate, angry standpoint theorists vs angry marxist radfems). Sometimes I probably should have because all of my beliefs about a topic were bollocks misinformation, and I got my ass handed to me by a few talented interlocutors. In general I think being wrong is ok, but being not even wrong about a topic is shameful.

So I still appreciate this kernel of insight from bastardisations of it: shut up and listen for a bit if you're unfamiliar with the terms of discussion, that's just giving your conversation partners charity and respect. It gives an opportunity to learn new ways to see from people. In my experience if you can make your points in terms of someone else's conceptual apparatus (including standpoints), you conduct yourself with respect and charity, and you don't treat the negation of their standpoint as a condition of possibility for correctness. Remember, if they're wrong, you can explain why in their standpoint*!

edit:* if the terms don't make sense, being socratic and asking for clarification without using it as a rhetorical strategy of undermining their view was generally successful.

So which examples of identity politics do you think of as irredeemable rubbish and why, then? — fdrake

Anything modeled on the Marxist type of societal analysis (of oppressor/oppressed groups, with the groups marked by their closeness to, or distance from, "power", arbitrarily defined). So: anything based on good, old-fashioned Marxism; anything based on analyses derived from Critical Theory, or any other blend of Freudianism and Marxism; anything based on Feminist analyses, or derived therefreom as a template; anything grounded philosophically in Post-modernism or Post-structuralism; anything based on Intersectionality and/or Standpoint Theory. — gurugeorge

All of this is rubbish:

• anything in the intellectual tradition of Marxism in any sense
• any critique which distills oppressors and oppressive groups with differential distances from 'power'
• anything from Critical Theory
• anything feminist
• anything which could be construed as postmodern
• anything which could be construed as post-structural
• anything which makes use of intersectionality
• anything which makes use of standpoint theory

But you namechecked everything in my list except for anarchism and syndicalism. I'm very surprised that you think you successfully conveyed the following idea:

I'm not one who says that literally everything that's ever come from any of these schools of thought is crap. — gurugeorge

How would you tell the difference between that and an actual wolf in sheep's clothing? Or don't the people in your tribe do that kind of thing? Always the good guys, huh?

Hmm... I look for things like mass murder of civilians, enforced curricula, book-burning, the collusion of police and military. Y'know, concrete indicators that everything is going to or has already gone to shit. 'Nother good one is when people are holding AK-47s in-front of schools in Bangla and asking Westerners for money (true story).

It's always a bit tricky dealing with someone who has a measured position that I could probably agree with on some points, but who reflexively stands by the "no enemies to the Left" trope.

I'm not defending the circular firing line of the left. I think there are legitimate criticisms of all the movements and theoretical constructs you have referenced: I just think you think you advanced coherent criticism of the doctrines when you kinda just blah'd generalities and conflations into the comment box.

If any of these ideas are crap, I want them to be shown to be crap, you aren't doing that.

It's more often a rhetorical strategy to delegitimise a movement. Especially since, when taken at face value, it literally makes no sense.

But I respect that you're trying to "clean house." However, I fear that you're the exact kind of hopelessly idealistic "useful idiot" who would be first up against the wall, come the revolution ;)

Yeah. I'm pretty sure that when I get old I'll be one of those grandpas whose grandchildren recognise as prejudiced in ways I can't possibly understand. A life, hopefully, spent being employed to understand stuff ending in a poverty of the intellect.

If you could stop trying to get your black belt in passive aggression that would be swell, thanks.

I probably am taking a lot for granted. Though, I don't see the point in chasing ghosts. You should really check out Roderick's lectures!

22. The fact that the practical power of modern society detached itself and built an independent empire in the spectacle can be explained only by the fact that this practical power continued to lack cohesion and remained in contradiction with itself.

23.The oldest social specialization, the specialization of power, is at the root of the spectacle. The spectacle is thus a specialized activity which speaks for all the others. It is the diplomatic representation of hierarchic society to itself, where all other expression is banned. Here the most modern is also the most archaic.

(22,23) My bolding. I bolded it because I think this is a statement of the nihilating power of the spectacle - that it produces holes in our social fabric and sews them shut with representational echoes of what was lost. It's also a further statement of the spectacle as conceptual scheme; an organiser and predigestion of experience; an interpretive amylase. That it remains in contradiction with itself is a condition of possibility for critique, the spectacle cannot yet be a capitalist totality despite its unifying operation.

24. The spectacle is the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue. It is the self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence. The fetishistic, purely objective appearance of spectacular relations conceals the fact that they are relations among men and classes: a second nature with its fatal laws seems to dominate our environment. But the spectacle is not the necessary product of technical development seen as a natural development. The society of the spectacle is on the contrary the form which chooses its own technical content. If the spectacle, taken in the limited sense of “mass media” which are its most glaring superficial manifestation, seems to invade society as mere equipment, this equipment is in no way neutral but is the very means suited to its total self-movement. If the social needs of the epoch in which such techniques are developed can only be satisfied through their mediation, if the administration of this society and all contact among men can no longer take place except through the intermediary of this power of instantaneous communication, it is because this “communication” is essentially unilateral. The concentration of “communication” is thus an accumulation, in the hands of the existing system’s administration, of the means which allow it to carry on this particular administration. The generalized cleavage of the spectacle is inseparable from the modern State, namely from the general form of cleavage within society, the product of the division of social labor and the organ of class domination.

This contradiction is concentrated through the decontextualisation inherent in the spectacle, as that decontextualisation is also the guarantor of the possibility of immanent critique. The inner separation produced by the spectacle is a mirror of its function in general and allows epistemic access to its action. Thus, critique of it is a social phenomenology - oscillating between how it subjectivises and the material conditions which produce this subjectivisation.

Recall (8)

8. One cannot abstractly contrast the spectacle to actual social activity: such a division is itself divided. The spectacle which inverts the real is in fact produced. Lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle while simultaneously absorbing the spectacular order, giving it positive cohesiveness. Objective reality is present on both sides. Every notion fixed this way has no other basis than its passage into the opposite: reality rises up within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real. This reciprocal alienation is the essence and the support of the existing society.

and from (18)

where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings

A further reference to the reifying function the spectacle has on its mediating images. A familiar Marxist theme where relations become embodied in objects and their objectivity hides the flux of relations underpinning/behind them. The objects here are image objects; social practice is remembered as a show-reel.

The negative character of the spectacle is transformed into the negativity of critique by following the transformations/actions inherent in the concept; the spectacle is treated as a real abstraction. However, the mediation of social practices through images also casts a shadow on critique - to whom is the critique addressed if not the image of man? And images are always just another of their kind; our replaceability is at work in the transformative character of specular representation/negation. How can freedom be conceptualised when even the means of critique is subordinated to the mechanisms of the criticised process? We must take care that critique of the spectacle is not a repetition of its inner workings; that what is said is not another vector of man to his specular image. That we are looking at ourselves in the mirror of the spectacle but not simply reproducing its reflection.

The theological character of the spectacle is present here again, as it transforms the vector of transcendence-towards the other to a generation of mirror images, imaginings and conceptual subtext; a synchronic repetition of the unfolded spectacle - a subtext of constraints in all the varieties of social life.

Hello me.

I'm glad it seems I've generated some interest in it. :)

21. To the extent that necessity is socially dreamed, the dream becomes necessary. The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of sleep.

My book's translation of 21 is a little different in the first sentence, and I believe a good bit clearer:

As long as necessity is socially dreamed, dreaming will remain a social necessity

I think this is a poetic description of false consciousness, but I think you can get some mileage out of approximating the spectacle as as model and as a conceptual scheme. Recall (13)

13. The basically tautological character of the spectacle flows from the simple fact that its means are simultaneously its ends. It is the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the world and bathes endlessly in its own glory.

and note that the spectacle is simultaneously an organising principle of, and constituted by, the social activity of people. Dreaming connotes thinking through the operations of the spectacle (using its conceptual scheme), but since the spectacle is also a reifying process of its generated representations it produces a bait-and-switch between the real and an interminable sequence of mediating images.

Perhaps contrary to the PEL podcast I think it's quite difficult to transcribe the spectacle into the Zizekian (doubled) triad of symbolic/real/imaginary. The spectacle is simultaneously an abstract generator of social order (a symbolic category), a excessive nihilation of our thoughts and feelings (a real category) and an endless series of adequations (an imaginary category). But it may have been they were saying that the imaginary in Zizek functions like the spectacle in Debord.

Time for more schizoid ranting. Word of warning, those who don't already speak Marxist will find these notes more difficult.

20. Philosophy, the power of separate thought and the thought of separate power, could never by itself supersede theology. The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion. Spectacular technology has not dispelled the religious clouds where men had placed their own powers detached from themselves; it has only tied them to an earthly base. The most earthly life thus becomes opaque and unbreathable. It no longer projects into the sky but shelters within itself its absolute denial, its fallacious paradise. The spectacle is the technical realization of the exile of human powers into a beyond; it is separation perfected within the interior of man.

The theological overtones of the spectacle were not lost on the cybernetic utopians of the 1960s->1980s. Cyberspace, as a renderer of all bodies and distinguishing principles as moot; which was interpreted by the cybernetic utopians as a radical generator of equality and freedom; instead obtained sepulchral character; simultaneously a "black hole of affectation" (Carmen Hermosillo) and a timeless yet synchronic expanse of free expression.

It is fashionable to suggest that cyberspace is some kind of _island of the blessed_ where people are free to indulge and express their Individuality...this is not true....i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until...i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories...by workers who were mostly exploited....i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to...and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment... [Cyberspace] is a black hole. It absorbs energy and personality and then re-presents it as an emotional spectacle.

The redemptive character of the internet; a deletion of most prejudicial categories from ready availability; produces a hyper commodification of human expression. Today, the commodification of all internet content can be achieved through marking the page with an advert. In this sense engaging in communities such as this can take the formal character of social labour. IE, human labour in the abstract accrues through engagement on sites which support themselves through advertising but consist entirely of user content. And it does so in a bizarre fashion where the produced 'goods', like posts, are valuable by their mere presence and not through the effort to make them or their quality. This is extremely perverse, as what is valued in that endeavour is the monitoring and creation of nascent desire. When data is collected from those who engage with adverts on sites run as such, the fact that people use the site transforms it and them (as internet personas) into a commodity.

In this regard, use value and exchange value permeate each other in a new way; advertising commodifies the very potential of obtaining the general equivalent - which is a transformation already achieved when installing an advert. I think Marx himself realised that money had this potential:

Since gold does not disclose what has been transformed into it, everything, commodity or not, is convertible into gold. Everything becomes saleable and buyable. The circulation becomes the great social retort into which everything is thrown, to come out again as a gold-crystal. Not even are the bones of saints, and still less are more delicate res sacrosanctae, extra commercium hominum able to withstand this alchemy. — Capital Volume 1

all the while advertising makes a problem for socially necessary labour time - the commodification of the commons, formally speaking 0 socially necessary labour time and no saleable product. I think it requires the interpretation of anything in the commons as already sold when social relation alone suffices for value investment (and reduction in opportunity cost, as per the commodification of potential).

Thanks for keeping this place ad free, @jamalrob.

I think we can agree that someone trying to represent a social movement, in the sense of stealing its voice for their own valorisation, is a bad thing. I very much doubt most instances of people speaking for a whole group of people who're effected by an issue, for example people with fibromyalgia or CFS in the UK struggling to get disability and unemployment benefits complaining about it in public, are doing so out of anything but the best intentions.

Or, if not the best intentions, it might be an example of solidarity becoming a form of viral content. It's worthwhile to ask if, historically, movements have been seen as self aggrandising viral content as soon as they become perceived as a threat to established political organisations and ways of thinking. The best model of this I can think of is the civil rights movement (and its historical predecessors and antecedents) in America.

Here's what a critic has to say about Marcus Garvey:

A Jamaican Negro of unmixed stock, stock, squat, stocky, fat and sleek, with protruding jaws, and heavy jowls, small bright pig-like eyes and rather bull-dog-like face. Boastful, egotistic, tyrannical, intolerant, cunning, shifty, smooth and suave, avaricious; as adroit as a fencer in changing front, as adept as a cuttle-fish in beclouding an issue he cannot meet, prolix to the 'nth degree in devising new schemes to gain the money of poor ignorant Negroes; gifted at self-advertisement, without shame in self-laudation, promising ever, but never fulfilling, without regard for veracity, a lover of pomp and tawdry finery and garish display, a bully with his own folk but servile in the presence of the [Ku Klux] Klan, a sheer opportunist and a demagogic charlatan.

my bolding.

What about MLK? He was obviously a covert Marxist-Leninist, as the FBI believed. Conflating a civil rights movement with Marxism is a very old trick and oft repeated to this day. By people who have demonstrably no understanding of the conceptual distance between, say, King's thought and Maoism, Foucault and Marcus Garvey - these figures would all be contemporaries and ideological allies if your set of distinctions was approximately true.

The 'cliffnotes' of post modernism, and probably 'post modernism' in its current conceptual form wasn't created by the philosophers and socioeconomic theorists who are usually united under the designator. Extreme relativism, naive adherence to equality of outcome, the fetishisation of the role power plays in discourse are histrionic projections which create 'postmodernism' as a intellectual monolith whose real development was never a unified whole or even focussing on the same set of themes. You have to do quite a lot of intellectual gymnastics and speak in extremely broad strokes to unite themes present in larger subsets of postmodern thinkers.

Chomsky was instrumental and very vocal in generating this perception. It's usually rooted in a transparent sleight of hand. If someone's analysing narrative structures, social forces - how things come to be believe and enacted en masse, whether the content of the ideology is true is a largely separate question. How ideas shape movements and how movements shape ideas, these actions operate irrelevant of the truth of the ideas shaping them; of course truth ideally guarantors more difficult refutation. Chomsky does acknowledge this distinction but then pretends it's the incoherent form of moral relativism. The academy in the UK reacted in much the same way. It's very formulaic and is regurgitated every time some self-perceived (rightly or wrongly) outgroup gets too big for their boots.

Rick Roderick has a series of introductory lectures, for a popular audience, about postmodern themes. It does an excellent job of cutting through the bullshit smeared all over post modernism. If a guy can make post modernism accessible (which he very much does), these charges of meaninglessness are more a function of incomprehension or refusal to engage than any dearth of meaning on postmodern thinkers' parts.

The hysterical criticism of social justice movements and the conflation of their ideologies with Neo-Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-EconomicDeterminist-Trotskyist-Foucauldian-Poststructuralist-Derridean-Geneological-Deconstructionist-Syndicalist-Anarchism* is just intellectual laziness with a sprinkle of reactionary zeal. It has a sordid history, and crops up in much the same manner whenever there are popular movements about anything.

This is not to say that if you found a real example of a movement that obeys the ridiculous construction in the previous paragraph that it shouldn't be criticised; or better yet sent to the flames.

*Which I'm sure you can tell is not a thing when it's written like that.

That is the reason why your two systems approach itself will fail to really articulate the dynamism of human agency, which requires a more substantial effort evaluating the authenticity of our will. Perhaps Kant would be a nice addition to the algorithm.

It isn't really my two system approach, it's Daniel Kahnneman's . I prefer it a lot to any analysis of the unconscious for a few reasons:

(1) The unconscious is a permanent, unfalsifiable hard-core of psycboanalytic practice. If it were undermined psychoanalysis would become a degenerate research program - despite that its existence acts as a pivot there is no more evidence for the existence of the unconscious than the idea that the mind 'runs things in the background' with little effort.
(2) Since the mind 'runs things in the background', low effort/high effort allows you to form two categories which would have the same, or almost the same, exemplifying phenomena as 'the unconscious and the conscious' anyway, only now what makes the unconscious unconscious is given a name; the thoughts and actions are well rehearsed or stereotyped.
(3) There's plenty of evidence that Kahnneman's 2 systems approach is accurate in lots of regards. Save for falling prey to the replication crisis a few times (or so I hear).

I am not sure what you mean by this, can you further explain?

Authenticity makes a lot less sense as a concept - or as a possibility of action - in an age where desire itself is created through consumption.

This is very Frommian, whereby this commodification driven by modern culture coverts this feeling of alienation through the unconscious desire that relatedness to others is a type of commodification itself, forming an almost pathological or faux unity to others where friendship and love adheres to inauthentic expressions, detached by this vacuum of abstraction where feelings are no longer rea,l but aligned to this fear and doubt - the condition of modern culture - to what is socially expected. Routine, copying, approval, doing what everyone else is doing saves us from that feeling, it makes reality appear concrete.

I'm not sure the unconscious makes much sense as a critical category when the private/public distinction is being undermined. I think about this in terms of the two systems approach, one of which consists of quickly executed prejudicial habit (mental reflex), the other consists of slow and resistive deliberation (cogitation) - the two are parametrised in terms of effort, and the antipodes of mental reflex and cogitation correspond to the minimum and maximum on the scale.

In terms of mental reflex, we have whatever the fuck advertising is doing to us - a prismatic spray of affectation, presumed general desire. In terms of cogitation, we have the impossible complexity (and generated separation) underlying all aspects of life.

Authenticity is something which can be bought and sold at this point, I don't think it's a useful category of concrete social activity except through its negative - how existential authenticity is subverted and harnessed by the spectacle at every turn.

This disillusionment is filled with abstract concepts or spectacles that are no longer direct but almost sentimental in nature that enables this concrete albeit false reality, where stimuli to any feelings we have or relatedness within ourselves to the world around us is provoked by concepts we think we are supposed to have (Camus, in a way) and not because we actually have those feelings. If I go to Paris and see the Mona Lisa, do I really feel emotional and is there some sort of aesthetic relatedness, or am I emotional only because I am told that seeing the Mona Lisa would do that to me when really, I feel nothing.

This indeterminacy of motive is one of the reasons authenticity is no longer analytically useful for descriptions of social life (in this context anyway), our 'true selves' are analytically indistinguishable from the bricolage of subtext that has built up as detritus on our retinas. Babies know Coke about the same time as they know Home.

I think you're confusing the scope of structural properties. On the level of a society, certain groups will probably have more advantages afforded to them; sometimes this is ok (like citizens), sometimes it's not ok (like citizens being unable to vote), sometimes there's a lot of ambiguity and horrible shit (treatment of asylum seekers).

Insofar as someone is saying people from different categories can never have genuine relations, send them to the Gulag; insofar as they're highlighting that different groups are treated differently in some ways and that maybe this isn't always a good thing -or an acceptable thing- in some instances, don't Gulag them.

On the other hand, suppose there are lingering traces of oppression, cobwebs of it here and there in our institutions and working life, should we do nothing about them at all? Sure, you could have, for example, a "Nightwatchman Feminism" to stick around and tidy up the loose ends. But what we have instead is a Feminism long past its sell-by date trying to justify its keep by proposing ever more absurd, made-up categories of human interaction as "oppression of the wamenz." And it's the same for the race-baiting machine, the Diversity Industry in business, etc.

There's always housework to do. Equating political activism with the worst excesses of social media and the worst bastardisations of Theory is easy to score points with. Just make sure you don't throw the baby out with the bathwater; it's not all pointless because some of it is crap.