Notes on Butler’s Gender Trouble: Discursive Mediation and Transcendental Subjectivity

In the concluding section of Gender Trouble, Butler reflects on some of the broader implications of their critical analysis of gender performativity in the book. What began with a question about who the ‘we’ is in feminist theory opens onto a much broader set of questions about identity and agency, about the nature of the subject, and therefore about the possibility of ethics and political engagement.

Open-World Blues: On Mechanical Dynamism and Difficulty Curves

Paper written for the 2023 American Society for Aesthetics Rocky Mountain Division Meeting.

Following C. Thi Nguyen, games can be understood as a form of artistic expression in which aesthetic effects are produced through player agency.¹ Game designers constrain player agency by imposing structured mechanical rulesets and parameters that enable and reward certain kinds of action while discouraging and disallowing others. In modern action-adventure video games, two major approaches to overall game design have emerged: linear and open-world. In what follows I explore some problems that such open-world design presents for achieving a traditional feature of action-adventure games, namely a consistent difficulty curve. Through an analysis of several recent major video game releases, I argue that much modern open-world design tends to undermine the possibility of satisfying play mechanic progression over the course of the game, leading either to flat difficulty curves or to erratic difficulty spikes. Moreover, I suggest that the open-ended exploratory mode valorized in such design presupposes a merely negative concept of agential autonomy.

Notes on Dialectic of Enlightenment, ch. 1

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944, published 1947) is an account of the endogenous failures of modernity as rooted in the core presuppositions of enlightenment rationality. “Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to myth.” Not a romantic call for a return to myth then; rather an attempt to diagnose the pathologies of the whole complex arising from this abstract opposition and a dialectical progression rooted in fear and a correlative desire for mastery.

In fact what would need to change is the structure of society itself. This is a philosophical analysis of a series of problems that philosophy cannot solve. It calls for the abolition of the principle of exchange and the division of labor predicated on class antagonism.

Maimon’s Essay on Transcendental Philosophy

I’ve started another big horrible project, proceeding step by step through Maimon’s Essay in an attempt to make sense of the thing. So far I’ve covered the Introduction and first chapter, which discusses space and time. Chapter 2 will probably destroy me. But I can’t help myself!

Current version here

Sismondi’s Political Economy

A fair few searches brought me only html pages of J.-L.-C. Sismondi’s Political Economy, but personally I like PDFs. So I compiled one, and here it is, in case this is something you’d want as well.

This might not be the last time I do this sort of thing, whether or not there’s external interest. But if you definitely do want more, please let me know and don’t hesitate to make requests.

Cheers!

Capitalism, or Ecocide

For the past two decades or so, environmental scientists have been referring to the present age as the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch in which, starting in the early 1800s, world ecological systems and environments have been continually shaped and reshaped by human activity. Where previously we were just another species on the planet, if a relatively successful and populous one, today we dominate the planet.

Perhaps ‘capitalocene’ would be the better term. A good number of critical ecologists, economists, and political theorists have come to the conclusion that our present way of organizing society is fundamentally unsustainable in ecological terms. We can’t keep going on the way we have for the past two hundred years or so. In particular, it seems that our basic mode of production, capitalism, is in conflict with the demands of environmental sustainability. They suggest that the contradictions of modern capitalism are expressing themselves in a fundamental disparity between how we organize society, and the ecological basis of life here on earth. What kinds of problems are we dealing with here?

Shareholders and Stakeholders

This is a lecture I wrote for a course on business ethics.

Milton Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is To Increase Its Profits”, New York Times, 1970

David Rönnegard and N. Craig Smith, “Shareholders vs. Stakeholders: How Liberal and Libertarian Political Philosophy Frames the Basic Debate in Business Ethics”, Business and Professional Ethics Journal 32:3-4 (2013): 183-220

This week’s material and lecture have to do with the difference between two broad approaches to corporate governance that are dominant in contemporary management philosophies and theories of business ethics. There is on the one hand what we call shareholder primacy, and on the other hand stakeholder theory. The difference between these two models is what Rönnegard and Smith refer to as ‘the basic debate’ in business ethics, and it has to do with whose interests are held to be of primary significance when making management decisions as a member of a corporation.

The shareholder primacy norm asserts that the first—and, in its strong form, perhaps the only—set of interests that need to be considered by managers when considering different courses of action are the corporate shareholders: that is, people who have invested money in the firm, without whom obviously the corporation would not exist at all, and who presumably only invested their money in the firm with a view toward gaining a positive return on investment. As a result, shareholder primacy is generally interpreted so as to mean that managers should seek to maximize shareholder value or generate the greatest profits possible. Deviating from this protocol means failing to meet one’s responsibilities toward the shareholders whose investments make your job possible in the first place.

By contrast, the stakeholder model asserts that there are other sets of interests that a corporate manager must take into account, beyond simply those of the shareholders or investors. Put simply, other groups of people have a stake in how any given firm is run, and proponents of stakeholder theory argue that it is unethical to disregard their interests just because it may be more profitable for shareholders to do so.

Notes on Joan Martinez-Allier, “Mining Conflicts, Environmental Justice, and Valuation”

In Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World, eds. Julian Agyeman, Robert D. Bullard and Bob Evans (London: Earthscan, 2003)

This article contains some highly detailed accounts of a wide variety of primarily mining conflicts and the environmental movements for social justice that have responded to them. Its sweep is staggering: it discusses mining operations and the protests against their expansion going all the way back to the 1880s, as well as ones that were still ongoing at the time of writing in the early 2000s. I will talk about only a few of them in any detail, because Martinez-Allier’s point concerns what’s common to almost all of them.

The first core idea is that there exists a particular kind of social conflict, which we can call ecological distribution conflicts. These are conflicts over environmental entitlements, the burdens of pollution, the sharing of uncertain environmental risks, and the loss of access to natural resources and environmental services.

Eternity, Memory, and Individuation in Part V of Spinoza’s Ethics

This morning I presented a paper with that title at the Sive Natura International Young Spinoza Scholars’ conference. Many thanks to Filippo Del Lucchese for organizing it. As usual I was very happy to have Eric Aldieri in the Q+A.

The paper is here.

Labor, Gender, and Globalization

This is a lecture I prepared for a course on international business ethics, discussing the gendered division of labor in industrial production in global south countries, which focuses with the authors of Social Justice in the Globalization of Production on the particular case of Bangladesh. I’m sharing it as a break from our regularly-scheduled Spinoza- and Kant-themed programming.

Today’s readings continue to deepen our materialist analysis of the contemporary circuits of globalized commodity production, with chapters 3, 4 and 5 of Islam and Hossain’s Social Justice in the Globalization of Production, subtitled Labor, Gender, and the Environmental Nexus. The chapters we are looking at don’t focus on the environmental aspect, which they deal with in other parts of the book and which we’ll talk about in a few weeks. Instead, they hone in on the relationship between gender and labor rights, especially in the third world or global south, where the effects of globalization have been most significant.