Andrew Wiese

...Projekte sind, die sich sowohl in epistemologischer als auch materieller Hinsicht der Befreiung widmen. Was wir zunehmend erleben, ist die Erosion der Universitätsautonomie, während Regierungen die Universitäten in Unternehmen verwandeln, die den Interessen multinationaler Konzerne dienen.

Zurück in Cambridge für ein paar Tage und trotz der Proteste am Magdalene ist es immer noch sehr entmutigend zu sehen, wie alle Colleges provisorische Zäune aufgestellt haben, um 'Widerspruch' zu entmutigen.

Vergiss nie, dass studentische Protestierende und das Camp auf dem Universitätsgelände...

www.marxists.org/archive/luna...

'..., but impractical, foreign to all, like a rare metal, unable to enter into any chemical combination with others, Hölderlin perished. But he died a great man. And from his grave grows a living tree, to which many now go to worship.'

'Hölderlin...immediately set himself an absurd task. Being a poet-messiah, a harbinger of peace, a fighter for new paths that seemed clear to him, paths of enthusiastic romanticism, merging with the essence of existence and a culture built on it, not inferior to anyone and anything...'

'...The mistake of these people is that they did not bend, they did not come to terms with reality, that they wanted to move on, but that is also their achievement. They perish, but some bright gleam remains of them, which can show the way to others.'

'Hegel...no doubt had Hölderlin in mind when he spoke of the sacrifices of the great, too uncompromising spirit...such a protester deserved his end, was guilty of it, but to a certain extent, his guilt is at the same time his merit...'

'...taking one or another human organ into its hands, processes them, completes its type, sometimes breaking the person himself.'

In his lecture at the Communist Academy on pathological and social factors in the history of literature Lunacharsky took Hölderlin as example:

'I pointed out in my exposition that the social element (the classes in their struggle)...'

'Hölderlin, a colossally gifted, internally musical man, with lyricism that easily developed into metaphysics, perceiving reality as a chord of cosmic harmony, painfully experienced the fragmentation of the surrounding social life. He lived in a dream of a different world.'

- Anatoly Lunacharsky

Reminder: Next week!

Walter-Benjamin-Lectures

Tommie Shelby (Harvard): Political Ethics of the Oppressed: On Freedom, Solidarity, and Self-Respect

June 18-20, 6-8pm
HKW

all welcome!

criticaltheoryinberlin.de/en/benjamin_...

Registration now open until June 20: On June 27 Tommie Shelby will discuss racism as a form of ideology with us.
More info & registration form on our website: criticaltheoryinberlin.de/event/worksh...

Du weißt doch, was man nie machen sollte…

It’s like Lukács’s early tragic sensibility about alienation grounds his later insistence on dialectical self-transformation in theory, the need for a living, dynamic Marxism that constantly critiques and renews itself to avoid becoming static/ideological to ensure its revolutionary potential.

And without this dialectical rigour, theory risks turning into an ideological apparatus, reproducing the fetishistic immediacy of capitalist social forms, forfeiting its capacity to effect genuine political rupture.

His later Marxist theory moving beyond this metaphysical perspective through a dialectical method offers a way to understand alienation not as a fixed, tragic condition but as a social process that can be critically examined and overcome.

Important bc. the failure to sustain a dialectical consciousness, rooted in the Hegelian logic of mediation and negation, marks the precise moment when Marxist theory risks becoming complicit in the very reification it seeks to dismantle.

Interesting to see how Lukács’s early, pre-Marxist thought is shaped by a romantic anti-capitalism that sees alienation as a deep, almost metaphysical split between the self + world. The irreparable rupture seems to inspire his later interest in social transformation.

Began reading everything György Lukács wrote over the last few days/week to distract myself from the wreckage of my life.

Wann immer ich mich wie ein schlechter Mensch oder Versager fühle, erinnere ich mich daran, dass ich wenigstens nicht in der Tech-Industrie arbeite.

De-individuation isn’t just about automation, it’s about stripping people of the space to think, respond, and transform. When civil servants are replaced by AI, it’s not efficiency, it’s the slow dismantling of human agency in public life. The result isn’t just de-skilling, it’s dehumanising.

The UK government thinks AI can do two-thirds of the most junior civil servants’ work Meanwhile, the most senior civil servants perform zero routine (i.e. automatable) work.

Former civil servant here. As AI automates these roles, what's lost isn't just jobs but relational agency (compassion), ethical agency (value-driven judgment), and technical agency (the ability to shape tools, not just use them). This is exactly what the gov. wants.

www.politico.eu/article/uk-g...

Wenn ich doch nur schon vor vier Jahren mein Leben auf die Reihe bekommen hätte...

This is why we have such a profound loss of human dignity and freedom, disguised as liberation from alienation, deepening our self-alienation under the vast networks of imperial liberal capitalism. The human spirit is no longer essential, just a small function in a much larger system.

Like Babbage’s reduction of spirit to mechanical virtuality, this whole dynamic doesn’t subordinate human freedom to a divine will but instead to to autopoietic cybernetic systems, where the apparent individual control we have is itself pre-programmed within these systems.

one acknowledging how people and culture are produced through technical relations, emerging as virtual effects of machinic processes.

In the sprawling heterarchic cybernetic systems that govern us, humans are no longer the sole controlling agents but one node among many within complex functional networks, pointing to a need for a new general organology to replace traditional metaphysics,

Reading a lot of Simondon + reflections on technics today, thinking about the unsustainable pressures that led me to leave my job and go to grad school. For Simondon the technicization of humans brings about a reciprocal humanisation of machines which is itself grounded in and mediated by technics.

Alles in Ordnung. Not just “everything’s okay,” but everything deliberately placed.

(Also want to emphasise that despite the film's content Hausner's work is funny too. Going to watch Club Zero next.)

Bresson’s order is austere, an ascetic, essentialist formalism seeking transcendence through subtraction. Hausner’s is ornamental, she assembles detail into stillness. But both craft a cinema of control, where nothing escapes the frame’s logic.