Hommes et femmes sont filmés différemment. De ce constat implacable et rigoureusement étayé, Nina Menkes met en évidence la #réification des protagonistes féminines dans le cinéma, message plus ou moins conscient qui aboutit selon elle à un « langage commun de la culture du viol » #sexisme #cinema https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/110260-000-A/brainwashed-le-sexisme-au-cinema

One that allows every citizen of the nation to self-cultivate, self-realize, and self-actualize, and polymorphous perversely self-jolly their way into the Sophianic heights.
Self-improvement that also leads to social improvement is the ultimate form of masturbation.

#gnosticism #reification #Marx #Marcuse #Dasein #ZdzisławBeksiński

@pietercolpaert yes, interesting opinion and surely legit from one particular point of view: Kinda curious (and still not convinced) whether RDF*/SPARQL* will help there ... In some sense being yet-another-reification-mechanism. While others (like #wikidata's namespace-reification, or various other property graph models) have grown to a point to be hard to rollback/capture in a single standard... IMHO, one of the troubles is that RDF1.0 didn't get #reification and the necessity to express *context* usable in the beginning is part of the issue: RDF1.1 didn't really manage to fix this, and not sure yet * will. Opinions welcome!

I have been thinking about how knowledge is socially defined. The schemes through which we interpret our world are themselves built by the structures of our world. The separation between epistemology and the study of social systems is not real, even though they were often conceived as different fields. Specific social structures correlate to specific structures of our knowledge. Even our own feelings and our deepest intimacy are read and constructed by ourselves through socially mediated patterns of comprehension.

This social definition of our understanding also means that all knowledge must be framed in relation to a social system and is always geographically situated. Just imagine the most skillful programmer being transferred to our deepest countrysides where traditional agriculture is still a means for life, to a wooden boat in the middle of the sea, to one of the last remaining mountain settlements of an original tribe in Timor. What knowledge would this programmer have in their new environment? What comprehension of the social order? This also applies to the temporal dimension. What if they went to the Middle Ages?

Against these made-up scenarios, one may argue with more made-up situations. "Ok, but in our daily world there are less and less places that are isolated from our technological world, the programmer in the countriside could become a bridge between the local population and a global economy...". This, far from being a counter-argument, agrees with the social spaciallity of knowledge. The skills of the programmer would become knowledge only from the moment they are able to put them in relation to a social system.

Probably this is a reason why it is so hard to imagine a different world sometimes. This is capitalist realism. There is no nature (nor human nature) that is not socially mediated via our socially situated knowledge. That is also a reason why it is so important to create autonomous spaces here and know. Also a reason why reformist and authoritarian "blueprints" about how society should work will never be more than a fantasy. Any change in society will also change ourselves, if we want to change ourselves we will need to change our material context, by changing society we will also changing ourselves. If we want to prefigurate a new world, we must build these autonomous spaced inside of the old. Non-commodity economies based on solidarity and mutual aid, mutual care networks, pirate libraries and free spaces for sharing learning materials, re-framing the ways in which we relate to others in our daily life...

Nothing of what I said is new. Actually, I am of the oppinion that no one "says" anything new, we are just specific moments in a greater shared discourse. Classic anarchism had already talked much about how the "unavoidable authority of society" shapes us and how we shape others by the mere act of participating in social exchange. That's also a discussion on material liberty and positive freedom, in opposition to burgeoise conceptions of "negative freedom". Malatesta talked about how our individual bolitions are shaped by our material environments in his introductory text "At the Café".

Capitalist relations set what is knowledge and what is not, which interpretations of the world are valid and which are not. And, even when we create alt spaces where to "prefigurate" new relations to ourselves and our surroundings, these spaces would still be placed in a greater capitalist context. That is a limitation to the degree of autonomous organization that can be achieved inside of our spaces, and that's a paramount contradiction that we are forced to manage in our daily struggle. The inner organization of our spaces being limited by capital and contextualized into a capitalist economy, also our schemes of knowledge and the means by which we relate to ourselves and our world would also remain utterly rooted in relations of domination, hierarchy and authority.

This brings to the necessity of constantly destroying and re-creating our spaces and ourselves, in accordance to the urges of our time. I am skeptic of organizations that remain the same for decades without being rebuilt nor assuming inner transformations. For example, for most spaces, it is impossible to survive without accepting, at least circunstamcially, to use money to acquire materials and supplies. But these spaces and organizations should remain cautious in order not to internalize too much the rolle of money and conceiving it as essential. It is not, and that's how we beging reifying capitalist relations inside our very organizations. We must be conscious about how the ways in which we organize influence the ways in which we see and think. By transforming our material contexts, we will also transforming our understanding of the world.

I read some anarchonihilists online saying that also in an anarchist world would be revolutions. And that is true. It *needs* to be true. Anarchism is not a goal, but a means. Or better, it is a means that is also a goal, a process of perpetuate destruction of the old and re-construction of the new in accordance to ourselves. The world will never stop shaping us, but it is in our hands whether to be pasive objects or active subjects in this process.

#epistemology #organization #anarchism #AnarchistOrganizing #ideology #anarchonihilism #liberty #freedom #reification #authority #antiauthority

Thinking about technology and ideology.

I honestly think that an alarming number of recognized marxists such as Zizek maintain a misleadint conception for the concept of "ideology", probably as a heirloom from freudianism and psychoanalysis. Their definition of ideology is much like "a way of thinking", or "a prescription over our forms of desire". And, indeed, ideology is a moulding force over our volition and idiosyncrasy, but it's much more subtle that a "mind-control-like thing". Ideology is the way in which the world is presented to us.

You are not "indoctrinated into an ideology", and, being fair, there is no such a thing as a single coherent ideology. Instead, you are presented "ideological representations" of reality in the form of reified social relations. The commodity is an ideological object that we introduce in our daily lives. Gender is an ideological object securing the social reproduction of labour forces, capital and authority. The point is: social relations, power, modes of production... are all interwoven when it comes to our verily cognitive recognition of the world. We learn as long as we live, we live in the social world, the social world is mediated by ideological objects; therefore, we learn how to interpret the world through ideological representations. Also our conceptions about what "nature" and "objectivity" is are formulated upon an ideological basis.

Now let's transfer this thought to the interpretation of the modes of production under capitalism.

When studying the rise of capitalism, we often read that this new mode of production won over the Ancien Régime because of its "superior productivity" and "eficiency". This isn't accurate. "Eficiency" is a highly ideological category to evaluate a mode of production. Eficient for whom? Even "productivity" is not as objective as it may seem. Reading André Gorz, I found that, at the begining, there was not such as thing like a "higher production" of the manufacture over traditional craftmanship. What was really determinant for the success of manufactures was that the concentration of the work force allowed for a higher level of control and, therefore, higher levels of exploitation. That is to say, the history of manufacture and the factory is a history of the evolution of control over the worker. The higher "eficiency" of capitalism was the eficiency to maximize capital accumulation.

Since then, our technological innovation in the terrain of production was developed under the conditions of exploitation and capitalism. The higher levels of production are not a sign of the superior capacity of capitalism to generate new products and higher numbers of commodities; on the contrary, it is a sign of how capitalism colonized human creativity and innovation and forced us to imagine new technologies of production that need human submission to function. As Marx analyzed in his "Capital", the worker who loses knowledge over the production process is alienated and, instead of being a living user of its means of production, becomes themself into a dead compound of a great machine. The scientific knowledge of the process of production turns itself against the worker and serves as tool for the despotic authority of the capital.

We often think about technology and science as "neutral" and inoffensive by themselves, but this is an ideological representation. Yes, indeed, "technology" and "science" as abstract identities, understood the former as the ideation of tools and processes, and the former as the achievement of "true knowledge" of the world, are not a "capitalist" thing my themselves. BUT technology and science do not exist in a social vacuum, in reality they get realized under the social relations of capitalism and mediated by ideological forms and objects, thus, the products of "technological and scientific innovation" conform themselves to ideological forms, specially when it comes to their implementation to the production process.

Calm down, this post is not a "technology bad, return to monke" thing, all the contrary. What I want to express is that the valorative categories that we use in order to appraise the mode of production are moulded by capitalist representations of reality and, more important, that technological innovation under capitalism obeys to such a representation of reality. Capitalism "productive superiority" is a myth if we understand "productivity" as a measure for the fulfillment of our necessities. The only productive superiority of capitalism stands when it comes to the production of "commodities" as a social relation, which are an ideological representation of the economic production and is founded over the possibility of a market economy.

That's why an "intermediate state capitalism economy before the achievement of communism" like the one defended by many marxists is impossible, as they defend this intermediate stage as a method to the "development of the means of production". Such a development of the means of production would be an illusion, as the means or production that you will be developing would be the capitalist ones: the ones that maximize the reproduction of capital and capital accumulation. You would be appraising "eficiency" and "productivity" with the same measures as the capitalist, insofar as you conceive technology and technological innovation as a neutral thing.

The truth is that, under the conditions of an emancipated society, with an economy of free communities following their self-fulfillment, technology and the means of production would evolve following very different criteria. A specific technology that is "efficient" under certain material conditions may not be efficient when it is transferred to a different social context. The tecnology that is "efficient" under capitalism won't be efficient in communism.

I consider this as an argument against stage/transition authoritarian communism. We should strive for the anarchist prefiguration, here and now, of the society that we want to live in in the future. Only by following this project can we discover which technologies will be functional to our autonomy and our relation to the world.

#Ideology #Technology #Productivity #Communism #Efficiency #Productivism #Scarcity #Post-Scarcity #Anarchism #Alienation #Prefiguration #Marxism #Reification #State #AntiState #AntiStatism

we get many stories on #homeownership decline, death of the #StarterHome, financialized inequality, but rarely on the many initiatives finding new paths (see eg #NewStarterHomes). It's a fine line b/t reporting and #reification, ie naturalizing a problem. @Rondakaysen
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RT @rondakaysen
First-time homebuyers have been shut out of the housing market in numbers not seen in 41 years of tracking. I corresponded with dozens of …
https://twitter.com/rondakaysen/status/1591444780927565825