Text of the Matter

In this episode of Text of the Matter we continue through Capital Vol I, Book 2, going into detail on how Marx conceives Capital as a thing different from money, commodities, and their circulation. Through human labor, technology, materials, spaced, etc. are transformed into some sellable; just as human labor itself becomes the proletariats only means of earning their keep. Within this industrial context, is it possible to harness these technologies in a different way? As technology increasingly removes human intervention from production has the character of Capital changed? And how do we imagine revolutionary politics after these major shifts?

Today we divert from Capital to set the stage for what was to come. The Communist Manifesto, unlike Marx's later work, was a polemic that contains many seeds of method that Marx would use later in his life. Coinciding with European revolution across the continent, we give a bit of historical context to expand the reasons that led to the writing of Capital and the explosion of revolutionary thought and action in the 19th and early 20th century.

We begin our dive into Karl Marx's masterwork Capital I. In this episode we analyze his concepts of labor, commodities, fetishism, circulation, and hoarding as we work toward his central concept of Capital itself. Alongside our past work on dialectics, we may now elaborate and demonstrate what Marx means by dialectical materialism and how it is a unique contribution to the history of philosophical, political, and historical analysis. Unlike our previous analyses, Marx engages with a world of history and events that does not treat the mind as form in itself, but rather an element of human existence embedded in a world of economy.

We begin our dive into Karl Marx's masterwork Capital I. In this episode we analyze his concepts of labor, commodities, fetishism, circulation, and hoarding as we work toward his central concept of Capital itself. Alongside our past work on dialectics, we may now elaborate and demonstrate what Marx means by dialectical materialism and how it is a unique contribution to the history of philosophical, political, and historical analysis. Unlike our previous analyses, Marx engages with a world of history and events that does not treat the mind as form in itself, but rather an element of human existence embedded in a world of economy. We apologize for some sound issues and will post the second episode soon.

Today we continue our conversation on how the idealist dialectic transitions from a form of idealist rationalism to a materialist theory of history and economy. To understand Marx, it is important to grasp the important tool that generated his form of thinking, on contradiction, on labor, and on alienation. While this own't be the last you hear about Hegel, it is our last direct confrontation in this series. Marx transforms Hegel's abstract and speculative drives into direct analysis of real economy and history. Thank you for joining us.

Today we begin a transition, from the deeply philosophical and idealist dialectics of W.F.Hegel to the historical, economic, and materialist dialectics of Karl Marx. To begin this transition, we must in someway produce a closure of our analysis of Hegel, however difficult that may be. To do so we will move through multiple concepts at the heart of Hegel's analysis of the human subject and society: the family, the community, the nation, and the Absolute. With the grounds that we have lain, beginning with Kant, we are now prepared to enter the political and economic field and the contemporary problems that populate it.

When reading Hegel, we find points of both complex logical reasoning and a mad production of language and concepts. This dynamism between points of strange speculation and orgiastic representations of culture as a whole, creates two Hegels that are often difficult to reconcile. The work of Robert Brandom attempts to remove the wild layer of idealization to produce a consistent theory of human rationality and the process by which that rationality forms consistent mores, laws, and structures of meaning. Ray Brassier uses this analysis to delineate the power of dialectics as a means to transcend classical philosophy, while Slavoj Zizek sees Brandom's work as reducing Hegel to a logical form that cannot recognize the radical power of negativity. Egon and Misha work through this series of texts on Hegel to understand how genealogy relates to Kant and Hegel's philosophical inventions, what differentiates classical philosophy from theory, how do dialectics model the way in which we develop norms and values, to define what Zizek believes is the radical character of negativity that makes Hegel central to all philosophy, as well as many other fascinating ideas.

Text of the Matter begins a series explaining and investigating the concept of problematics and what it means in relation to politics, aesthetics, and thinking. This series will closely follow Misha's writings in his papers "One or Several Materialisms" and "Problematic Matters".

In a new series for Text of the Matter, Egon takes a look at Hegel's philosophy through the writings of "philosophical entertainer" Alan Watts, analyzing how the two strangely overlap and using Watt's thinking on nonduality to expand our thinking about the dialectic.

We return to Hegel confronting Hegel's unique perspective on freedom and its entanglement with processes of recognition and self-consciousness. We not only review his famous section on Lordship and Bondage (the master-slave dialectic), but also contextualize it in terms of his reading of the form of consciousness contemporary to him (modernity). In concepts such as the Unhappy Consciousness we chart the function of negativity and identity as they transform, deny, and recapitulate the self into an increasingly complex whole. Introduction 0:00-2:19 Sense Certainty and Life 2:20-6:59 The Mediation of Self-Consciousness 7:00-12:33 The Production of the I and the Other 12:34-18:25 The Three Aspects of Negativity and Self-Consciousness Desire 18:26-21:49 External Force and Life 21:50-23:00 Double Consciousness and Dubois, Cesaire, and Fanon 23:01-25:00 Moments of Self-Consciousness 25:01-29:12 The Lord and The Bondsman 29:13- 36:48 Concepts of Freedom 36:49-38:52 Stoic Consciousness 38:53-39:40 Skepticism 39:41-42:31 The Unhappy Consciousness 42:32-47:38 The Christian Tension in Hegel 47:39-52:15 Conclusion 52:16-55:00

This week we confront the master of dialectics, Hegel, through one of his seminal works, Phenomenology of the Spirit. We begin with his famous prologue, which upends the Kantian distinction between phenomena and noumena for the concept of a human subject and culture in constant movement and transformation. What is the mechanism of this transformation? It is the resolution of contradiction between affirmative and negative propositions, as the mind processes history, reality, and language. The episode dives into the ideal categories that mediate Hegel's analysis of knowledge, being, and human development. Join us as we begin our journey into one of history's greatest philosophical minds.

In our last episode on Kant we engage with a critical question, in what way does Kant's philosophy precipitate the State? Through this question we are able to engage two of the most untimely (become timely) philosophers of the 20th century, Gilles Deleuze and Theodor Adorno. We engage with the nature of doubling that still confounds thinkers to this day (i.e. simulation theory), the atomized form of subjectivity, and the problems within Kant's moral thought.

Virtual Matter is A New Brand's second podcast series. Where Text of the Matter will look at written works, philosophical concepts, and how they function within society; Virtual Matter will take up media in all its forms--Sports, Film, Literature, Music, and today Video Games. In our first episode we interview an incisive editorialist of contemporary culture, Jeremy Gordon--who has written for The New York Times, GQ, Pitchfork, and The Ringer, for whom he wrote a recent piece "Don't You Dare Go Hollow" on Dark Souls in the isolation of Covid-19 and the community he discovered therein. We also talk about the meaning and scope of the genre, its affect on video games in general, and the meaning of and trends within video game communities. Find his article at the Ringer below: https://www.theringer.com/2021/5/13/2...

In our second episode of the 'Dialectics Reader' Egon and Misha dive into the German revival of the dialectic, from its Aristotelian and Scholastic (via Islamic) interpretation. We begin with the major concepts and works of the thinkers that follow Kant's Transcendental Dialectic--Fichte and his idea of Absolute Ego, Schelling and his naturalist critiques of Hegel and Fichte's rejection of natural reality, and then finally into Hegel and Marx, the canonical philosophers of contemporary dialectics. We will explain the differences between the various idealistic systems and their points of interest, as well as the distinctive characteristics of Hegel's idealist dialectic, moving from thought to absolute knowledge in society; to Marx's materialist dialectic, moving from the internal contradictions of commodities to a human revolution of economic and political organization. We thank all viewers for their patience with our recent technical issues and are excited to use our expanded equipment in future episodes. So join us in our deep dive into the torrents and whirlpools of the dialectic.

Have you ever wondered what the hell is a dialectic? We have and we study this crap. So often we see it used as a label but with no attempt at engaging with the actual transformative process it represents. Join us to learn a bit about where the word comes from, how cultures throughout the globe and history have utilized its basic premise, and finally — in pt. 2 — what in the hell the process actually is... HINT: it's not thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

Critical Conversations is an exercise in applied philosophy, hosts Misha Duluoz and Egon Schiele tackle crypto currencies, their political ramifications, and a broader inspection of how we ascribe value and what worth this value actually brings. NFTs, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the Doge all get dissected under our microscope.

In episode 2 of Text of the Matter, Egon and Misha (and Doug the star of Doug) get into the Transcendental Analytic, Kant's system for describing the rules, behaviors, and functions of the categories and judgments we covered in episode 1.1. Follow us into some of the most exciting and complex concepts within Critique of Pure Reason, such as his notions of phenomena and noumena, and his metaphysics of nothingness.

Did Immanuel Kant create his table of categories just because he thought his book would sell better with pictures? And what does it all mean anyway? A supplemental episode discussing Kant's categories and how they function in his epistemology, we answer these questions and more.

WE GOT DIAMOND HANDS!

For our first episode, we're digging in to Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. The first of four part series, we introduce Kant and his epistemology; dealing with a priori synthetic knowledge (and if it is possible) and the importance of the faculty of imagination.