robin manley

Species-Being, Metabolism, and Natural Limits, Qui Parle (2025) This essay explores two key concepts in the work of Karl Marx and argues for their essential interconnection: species-being and natural limits. The first section provides a general account of the idea...

My paper, “Species-Being, Metabolism, and Natural Limits” is now out in Qui Parle

an honor to be interviewed by Robin Manley for @jhideas.bsky.social - come for the spicy takes on critical AI and media history, stay for the stuff on Saussure and dialectics

I had the pleasure of interviewing @leifw.bsky.social about his exciting new book, Language Machines! If you’ve ever wondered whether the unconscious is structured like a large language model, you’ll get a lot from Leif’s reflections here — and from the book, out soon from @uminnpress.bsky.social

My pleasure! Thank you for the excellent book to write about!

trying to explain to normies that the state has been captured by a technofascist apocalyptic AI death cult

The Disunity in Genealogy: Foucault’s Anti-Nietzschean Reading of History - Robin Manley, 2025 Contemporary critical scholarship takes Foucault’s genealogical work as a paradigm, and it is widely recognized that Foucault himself took Nietzsche as a method...

available at the link below, open access~

putting this out once more: my attempt to demonstrate that Foucault seriously misrepresents Nietzsche's philosophy of history in his account of the genealogical method. perhaps of interest to Foucault scholars, as well as those in lit/media/science studies thinking about historicism & its limits!

the vice president of research at google citing Jane Bennett to argue that AI systems are alive... who could have possibly seen this coming

second, from Borges

might as well toss in some related ephemera to sweeten the deal. first, from Beatrice Han-Pile's incredible book on Foucault:

The Disunity in Genealogy: Foucault’s Anti-Nietzschean Reading of History - Robin Manley, 2025 Contemporary critical scholarship takes Foucault’s genealogical work as a paradigm, and it is widely recognized that Foucault himself took Nietzsche as a method...

You can find the full piece here!

Article title: The Disunity in Genealogy: Foucault's Anti-Nietzschean Reading of History Abstract: Contemporary critical scholarship takes Foucault’s genealogical work as a paradigm, and it is widely recognized that Foucault himself took Nietzsche as a methodological exemplar. Notably, Foucault’s landmark methodological text – ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ – is framed as a faithful exposition of Nietzsche. Contrary to Foucault’s framing, however, this article argues that his account of genealogy is incompatible with and anathema to Nietzsche’s philosophy of history. Through a close reading of Foucault’s essay alongside Nietzsche’s second Unfashionable Observation, it seeks to demonstrate that Foucault’s account of genealogy is premised on an inadequately one-sided reading of Nietzsche’s more dialectical account of history and the ahistorical. Whereas Foucault presents an anti-metaphysical Nietzsche suspicious of teleological origins and ahistorical forms, Nietzsche’s essay in fact insists on the necessity of such figures as an antidote to historicism. Reading Nietzsche against Foucault, this article investigates the conceptual foundations of the contemporary genealogical method, suggesting that Nietzsche may present an alternative – rather than precursor – to the Foucauldian paradigm.

have you ever thought: I don't know Foucault, maybe knowledge isn't only for cutting? or: I'm not sure it's true that Nietzsche has two different concepts of origin in the preface to the Genealogy of Morals? you might be interested in my new article, open access from @theoryculturesociety.org!

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New as Online First in Theory, Culture & Society: Robin Manley, 'The Disunity in Genealogy: Foucault’s Anti-Nietzschean Reading of History'. (Open Access) journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Look, folks, this is it. The entire ballgame. Either we're a Republic of laws & the Constitution, or we have a dictator. This is fascism, & the impeachment vote should be happening today. Every single university president in the country should be out, in front of microphones, condemning this.

re the previous repost: if they can disappear permanent residents they can disappear citizens

"Aligned to" is a way of saying that they have no proof that he provided anything that could be legally construed as material support to Hamas, or showed allegiance to Hamas in any way, but he said some things they decided are vaguely in alignment with Hamas and they're imprisoning him for it.

My review of the excellent Code: From Information Theory to French Theory by @bernarddionysius.bsky.social is out now in the new and very exciting @histsocialscience.bsky.social! Available open access here~~

muse.jhu.edu/article/952248

i have come to feel that both of them (and 'pundit genre' they are a part of) are eating off of a fundamental revulsion not so much at the technology but the habits of mind of the people pushing them.

The Theory of Immediacy or the Immediacy of Theory? At a crucial juncture in her reconstruction of Marx’s account, Kornbluh claims that “labor makes things useful, while exchange and its hypostasis in the concept of value and the medium of money is …

This is a really specific engagement with @annakornbluh.bsky.social 's work from Jensen. I don't always agree with it, but I found it provocative and enjoyable to read. It's the kind of criticism that makes us all better interlocutors. I hope Anna will respond?
nonsite.org/the-theory-o...

look i know this is not the point but a 90% error rate is sort of impressive? surely it takes some skill to get the numbers that low. plus, just invert your decisions and suddenly you've got a half-decent system

👨‍🍳🤌💋

staring in awe at endnotes from an Eminent Scholar in which the URLs that are provided in place of proper bibliographic reference have been shortened with ellipses

imo it should be illegal for men in their 20s to quote the freakonomics podcast at me

haters will hate but it’s an elegant solution

already prefigured here is late Marcuse’s concept of “New Science” (a communist Scienza Nuova: universal participation in the fusion of natural science & art, conscious membership in the living history of matter) is that it’s an incredible anticipation of degrowth, &, imo, requires nothing less!

Marcuse would like a word with the neo-Luddites

If the question of the proper metaphor for AI circulates around the problem of its relation and proximity to human 'intelligence,' we're caught in a circle unless we take seriously the history of metaphysical accounts of reason and the place of connectionism in that history

This is good — but a key thing to reckon with in this discussion is the way that the neural network model implemented by LLMs has also been used to transform our scientific and even philosophical accounts of human thought in the first place

haven’t posted much here yet but i think i fit 👾

lots of incorrect marx takes flying around over on twitter this morning