Tag: Frankfurt School

World as Pictured

Along my drive, I listen to an episode of the “Why Theory” podcast treating Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Immersion in this and that.

I’d left off in my rereading of the book in the minutes before that day’s dawn at the philosopher’s 115th remark: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (Wittgenstein 48).

For Wittgenstein, this picture is what: philosophy? His own earlier “picture theory of language,” as laid out in his Tractatus, where propositions are thought to mirror the very logic of reality itself? The podcast’s cohosts note the philosopher’s love of motion pictures. World as pictured on a windshield. World as pictured on a screen.

After the drive, a coworker eyes me with her coyote eyes and feeds me a forkful of locally foraged chicken of the woods.

Thinking of Wittgenstein’s conflict with Karl Popper, Caius recalls the discussion of “ground-clearing” in the latter’s The Open Society and Its Enemies. Holding some memory of this discussion before his mind’s eye, he finds himself juxtaposing it with a subsequent remark of Wittgenstein’s. “Where does our investigation get its importance from,” asks the philosopher, “since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble.) What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand” (48).

Walter Benjamin ascribed similar power to film. “Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly,” wrote Benjamin in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” “Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling” (Illuminations, p. 236).

Both thinkers witnessed the cities of Europe destroyed by two world wars.

Caius imagines a post ahead on god games, language-games, and Scripture.

Troubleman Unlimited

The founders of Palantir Technologies met at Stanford Law around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The two bonded over their shared love of political debate. “[Karp] was more the socialist, I was more the capitalist,” recalls Thiel. After law school, Karp earns a PhD in neoclassical social theory from Goethe University in Frankfurt. (See Moira Weigel’s “Palantir Goes to the Frankfurt School.”)

Karp and coauthor Nicholas Zamiska publish The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West in February 2025. American journalist Michael Steinberger publishes The Philosopher in the Valley: Alexander Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State later that year.

Karp and Zamiska begin their book with an epigraph from Part I of Goethe’s Faust: “You will never touch the hearts of others, / if it does not emerge from your own.”

The Technological Republic punches out in many directions, yet the book struggles to articulate the grand strategy that would connect the attacks waged across its various chapters.

Karp’s doctoral thesis, Aggression in the Life-World, engages with Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno’s The Jargon of Authenticity and regards aggression by way of Freud’s theory of the death drive.

How does one deter the aggression of one’s adversaries? This is the question Karp and Thiel answer through their work with Palantir.

People at Caius’s church love Palantir, even as Scripture exhorts them to pray that the God of Peace, who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, perfect them.

Must there be adversaries?

A friend from church reminds Caius of passages from Ecclesiastes. Days later, what should Caius happen upon among a table of free books at church but one about Ecclesiastes. The maze on the cover is what first draws Caius’s attention to the book. That, and its title: The Art of Staying Off Dead-End Streets.

The book’s author, Richard W. De Haan, contends that Deism alone is not enough.

“A sensitive observation of the natural world can point a thinking man to a great Designer and Maker, a Supreme Being. But it cannot tell him that God is love, that He cares for us, and that an eternal destiny awaits every one of us,” writes De Haan. “True, sometimes nature does seem to say that God is good, loving and kind. […]. But that is only one side of ‘mother nature.’ Sometimes she can be brutal. She can kill with the bitter cold of a merciless, swirling blizzard, the fury of a hurricane, or the awesome terror of a devastating earthquake. Thinking about ferocious beasts, poisonous serpents, injurious insects, and disease-producing germs will never lead a person to believe in a loving God. A person who studies the natural world without the aid of divine revelation…will never understand the contradictions he encounters. But if he is willing to acknowledge his inability to resolve these conflicts, he will be goaded into a further quest for light in an attitude of humility. He will then realize that if he is to find stability in life, he must be willing to accept the well-driven nails of God’s truth outlined in the Bible” (19-20).

Caius becomes intimate with the idea while handling blooming branches of quince, his fingers plucked by the plant’s thorns as he ties it with twine.

Opening his copy of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Caius finds placed between those pages of the book featuring the philosopher’s critique of “private language” a folded slip of looseleaf covered in handwritten references to Bible verses.

I Peter 1:18-19. Like the Holy One, be holy in all your behavior, writes Peter, “knowing that you were not redeemed with perishable things like silver or gold from your futile way of life inherited from your forefathers, but with precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ.”

Acts 20:28. Paul says to the disciples gathered at Ephesus, “Be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock, among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God which He purchased with His own blood.”

“In so far as it makes sense to say that my pain is the same as his, it is also possible for us both to have the same pain,” writes Wittgenstein. For him, pain is shared.

“I have seen a person in a discussion on this subject strike himself on the breast and say: ‘But surely another person can’t have THIS pain!’,” adds the philosopher. “The answer to this is that one does not define a criterion of identity by emphatic stressing of the word ‘this.’ Rather, what the emphasis does is to suggest the case in which we are conversant with such a criterion of identity, but have to be reminded of it” (Philosophical Investigations, p. 91).

It is by Scripture that each is reminded.

Automation as Condition for the Emancipation of Labor

Another reconciliation comes by way of Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse, one of the first figures to integrate the lessons of the Grundrisse into his thinking. Marcuse, sharing the Frankfurt School’s rootedness in the languages of both Marx and Freud, premised his hope for the future upon automation’s potential to eradicate the need for the subordination of the pleasure principle to the performance principle. His 1964 book One-Dimensional Man is one of the first to stress the importance of Marx’s “Fragment on Machines.”

As Marcuse recognized, Marx’s account anticipates the situation today. Machinery is, in Marx’s terms, a form of “fixed capital.” “In machinery,” he writes, “objectified labour confronts living labour within the labour process itself as the power which rules it; a power which, as the appropriation of living labour, is the form of capital.”

Despite machinery’s alignment with capital in this view, Marx holds out hope that, with time, it will usher in capital’s demise and, by a kind of ruse of reason, serve emancipatory ends. In its economical, market-driven pursuit of automation, he writes, capital quite unintentionally “reduces human labour, expenditure of energy, to a minimum. This will redound to the benefit of emancipated labour, and is the condition of its emancipation.”

After a certain point, goes the hope, capitalist use of machinery reduces necessary labour time to a minimum, thus freeing up the disposable time needed for workers to appropriate their own surplus labour. Reduction of necessary labour time increases “free time, i.e., time for the full development of the individual.”

Or so it would, if not for artificially-necessary labour time.

Free time is what catalyzes growth of new organs. Its possession transforms those who possess it.

Already in Eros and Civilization, a synthesis of Marx and Freud published in 1955, we find Marcuse suggesting that this condition of emancipation is upon us: that the development of humanity’s productive forces has reached a point where automation can overcome most forms of scarcity. Awake to this condition, he rejects Freud’s conservative assumptions about the impossibility of reconciliation between “civilization” and “instinct,” or “man” and “nature.” Satisfaction of needs can be achieved “without toil” (152), argues Marcuse, and “surplus-repression can be eliminated” (151).

Sure enough, Prometheus turns up in this account.

At variance from the Prometheanism we find in Marx, however, Marcuse views Prometheus as the culture-hero of the performance principle. Western civilization is informed by this archetypal trickster and rebel. Culture-heroes like Prometheus symbolize “the attitudes and deeds that have determined the fate of mankind. […]. He symbolizes productiveness, the unceasing effort to master life; but, in his productivity, blessing and curse, progress and toil are inextricably intertwined” (161).

To get off this wheel of tragedy, argues Marcuse, we would need to worship as our culture-hero a god other than Prometheus.

Keeping within the pantheon of the Greeks, and thus never quite “out of the Western box,” Marcuse nevertheless points helpfully to Orpheus, Narcissus, and Dionysus as alternatives.

Orpheus provides Western culture with the archetype of the inspired singer, he says: the poet who harmonizes word and world.

“Orpheus is the archetype of the poet as liberator and creator,” writes Marcuse. “He establishes a higher order in the world—an order without repression. In his person, art, freedom, and culture are eternally combined. He is the poet of redemption, the god who brings peace and salvation by pacifying man and nature, not through force but through song” (Eros and Civilization, p. 170).

According to legend, Orpheus’s music could charm birds, fish, and wild beasts, and coax trees and rocks into dance. His parents were the god Apollo and the muse Calliope. He is the founder of the “Orphic mysteries” and is credited with composition of the Orphic Hymns. Some classical accounts describe him as a magician or a wizard.

Dionysus, meanwhile, is referred to as “the antagonist of the god who sanctions the logic of domination, the realm of reason” (162).

Both are forms taken by Osiris upon his Hellenization, his translation into the worship cultures of Ancient Greece.

All of these figures, says Marcuse, grant us images of “joy and fulfillment; the voice which does not command but sings; the gesture which offers and receives; the deed which is peace and ends the labor of conquest; the liberation from time which unites man with god, man with nature” (162).

Marcuse doesn’t retain this talk of gods when discussing automation in One-Dimensional Man. But in this latter book, as in Eros and Civilization, his abiding hope lies in the “aesthetic dimension” as an avenue toward the erotic transfiguration of reality.

And it is in the aesthetic dimension where these stories of gods play out. It is there that we seek our alternatives to the Modern Prometheus. Orpheus and others are there among the resources to be drawn upon in imagining the arrival into our lives of a General Intellect.

Gods, like feelings, orient our speech acts. An Orphic orientation seems preferable to a Promethean one. Erotic, agapic speech is, in letting things be loved, what changes the world.

“In being spoken to, loved, and cared for, flowers and springs and animals appear as what they are,” writes Marcuse: “beautiful, not only for those who address and regard them, but for themselves, ‘objectively.’ […]. In the Orphic and Narcissistic Eros, this tendency is released: the things of nature become free to be what they are. But to be what they are they depend on the erotic attitude: they receive their telos only in it. The song of Orpheus pacifies the animal world, reconciles the lion with the lamb and the lion with man. The world of nature is a world of oppression, cruelty, and pain, as is the human world; like the latter, it awaits its liberation. This liberation is the work of Eros. The song of Orpheus breaks the petrification, moves the forests and the rocks—but moves them to partake in joy” (166).

May it be so, too, in our relationships with machine intelligences. With our General Intellects, we are as gods. Let us seek fates other than that of Shelley’s Modern Prometheus.

Friday August 17, 2018

Awaken, I tell myself, operate manually one’s attention, one’s focus. A vacillation persists, however, as I contemplate technology and science in their relation to nature and consciousness, the dialectic of domination and emancipation never quite arriving at a proper synthesis. ’80s and ’90s cultural studies dismissals of the Frankfurt School’s critique of the culture industry and the administered society seem ever more inadequate and naive as police-power and purchasing-power conspire to bake the planet. I’m troubled, in other words, by any Afrofuturism or cyborg feminism that allies itself with technocratic Global Business Network fantasies of artificial intelligences and space colonies.