Anatarah عنترة

@damashummus

Scientist/Engineer. Very much form-determined. Editor @crittheoryworkgrp.bsky.social. he/him. *All typos are my own*. CTWGwebsite.github.io

248 Following449 Followers1,274 Posts

Bluesky

Is this your profile?Claim it and damashummus.dirty.social is yours.Claim profile

Anatarah عنترة@damashummus· 1d

More teasers! Prepare yourself to read one of the weirdest texts of philbio in the constellation that is CT. You will see bizarre pictures, insane claims about communism, and you might even ignite a love for lichens that you did not know that you had! Stay tuned for MN2!

An excerpt of Schaxel’s biological individual in the forthcoming Margin Notes 2 journal. There is a prominent figure in the middle showing Schaxel’s axolotl research. Text in the page are:
“The stream of life pulses in organic forms, flowing not through a mesh of more or less distinct tubes, but in a broad and wide-branching riverbed, whose branches separate and rejoin one another, now and then branching off in new directions and perhaps even drying up. The individual is only a state, often just an arbitrarily circumscribed cutout, of the formative process. Figure 6: The same axolotl-parabiosis as in Fig. 5; deceased seven years after creation. Wall of the body cavity opened at the site of grafting. The artery (light) and vein (dark) can be seen running from the left-gill area of the smaller animal, which has no circulation of its own, into the spleen of the larger animal. d) The Social Dissolution.
The metabolism of life is a sub-process of the metabolism of the earth. Under the influence of solar energy, autotrophic green plants form organic mass out of simple compounds, which are diluted in water and dispersed in air.
Microbes break down the organic matter to the point of complete disinte-gration. Together, autotrophy and heterotrophy constitute an internal bond between all living beings. Alongside phylogeny and kinship, life-preserving relations find expression in the relativity of bionts.
The Lebensraum of the earth, in which the conditions for life (nourishment,…”

Anatarah عنترة@damashummus· 12d

Below are various variations on how your email is finding me

Figure 6 of Alberch, Pere. “The Logic of Monsters: Evidence for Internal Constraint in Development and Evolution.” Geobios, Ontogenèse Et Évolution, 22 (January 1, 1989): 21–57. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0016-6995(89)80006-3.

The figure demonstrates “Ordered varation and transpecific parallelism in the occurrence or monstrosities.”
There are six figures separated in two columns. Unfortunately, I don’t have the skill to describe the images.

Anatarah عنترة@damashummus· Jul 7

Pictured: me when Schelling talks about the organism purely from his intuition.

Anatarah عنترة@damashummus· May 18

Two branches, one tree
Two branches, one tree, in a lush oasis
Deep roots, scented twigs, plump fruit
Then Time came,
and harvested its malice.
Time never fails
Al-Khansa
Translated by James E. Montgomery

Anatarah عنترة@damashummus· May 8

This is a good book. I’ve been having a bunch of fun reading it. If you want to be a “left-Aristotelian,” it’s a must read!

Pictured is the cover of “The History and Philosophy of Materialism” Edited by Charles T. Wolfe and John Symons

Anatarah عنترة@damashummus· Apr 17

A YouTube comment from the above linked video that says: “im 2-unemploid”

Anatarah عنترة@damashummus· Mar 6

Say happy birthday to Bueno!

The most photogenic gray Scottish fold car looking to the light source on his right.

Anatarah عنترة@damashummus· Feb 25

Due to Twitter discourse, I’ll summarize what dialectics is very curtly in the stupid meme pic below. Much of 20th century French philosophy is precisely on the status of the Absolute.

Mental gymnastic meme about dialectics. Top half says “Dialectics is a method, and its end is the Absolute.” And the bottom half says “‘Dialectics is not a method.’ blah blah blah”

Anatarah عنترة@damashummus· Jan 27

Currently writing a short piece on “dialectical biology” and I need to get some things out of my system as it probably won’t make it. You can really do a longue-durée account of naturphilosophie directly to the various materialisms; what unites all of them is natural history.

Highlighted portion: “Theoretical biology back to ancient authors. Efforts to establish a field of research… Ehrenberg (23) used the term Theoretische Biologie (theoretical biology) explicitly, but with different aims. Often, theoretical biology was associated with philosophy of nature (Naturphilosophie), spistemology and metaphysics rather than with the formation of scientific hypotheses and theories. Reinke's work appears as a vitalistic philosophy of nature. Uexkull's
attempts to deduce the phenomena of life from the principle of the necessity of death. All these approaches have their merits, but only a few of them-Schaxel probably being a case in point (ct.
science (Bertalanffy, "32:3). Also Adolf Meyer-Abich's goal was to promote theoretical biology. For him, physical theory was a subset of biological theory.”

Paper = Drack, Manfred. “Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s Organismic View on the Theory of Evolution.” Journal of Experimental Zoology Part B: Molecular and Developmental Evolution 324, no. 2 (March 2015): 77–90. https://doi.org/10.1002/jez.b.22611.

Anatarah عنترة@damashummus· Jan 23

A single page brochure advertising a small workshop on Adorno titled “Adorno & communism?” tackling new translations of his work. The schedule is: Feb 23: Adorno and Horkheimer's "On the Relation Between Critical
Intellectuals, the Proletariat, and the Communist Party" James Crane. Emory University
Mar 9:
Adornos Philosophical Terminology, Lecture 42
(Jake Orbison, UC Berkeley)
Mar 17: Adornos Contra Paulum (James Crane, Emory University)
Apr6:
Adorno's "Marx and the Basic Concepts of Sociological Theory"
Chris O'Kane)
All sessions at 5 pm pst. RSVP via the QR code for Zoom link and reading

Anatarah عنترة@damashummus· Jan 1

God don’t fail me now

Anatarah عنترة@damashummus· Nov 4

Went to the National library today, and I’m pretty sure I saw every conceivable edition and translation of Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah. The environment and ecology (not included below) section was also sick as hell!

A book that roughly translates to “sustainable agricultural development: active elements”

Arabic social science shelf, which includes a beautiful Ibn Khaldun Muqaddimah edition

Anatarah عنترة@damashummus· Oct 31

Beautiful.

Highlighted section: “Rather, "having history" means being interwoven in the dialectic, in the subject-object relationship. In other words, history consists in the fact that the life of the human being is not simply "his own," but constituted through the extra-human and alienated. To put it more simply: history is not a distinguishing quality of the human being, but rather the epitome of all suffering. True, the human being is conscious of history, as you go on to say, and it would be foolish to deny the distinction therein. But the human being cannot be spun from this knowledge, nor from "having history" as such. Knowing history and having history are not the same, and to date knowledge has changed little enough of what's decisive for history, suffering. On the other hand, however, "having history" extends far beyond consciousness; all of nature, as suffering, has infinite share in it. The proposition that "[i]n knowing history man is above history, although, on the other hand, he is in history," 48 is, in this form, illusory. The assertion that "man is free... from history in so far as he knows history" 49 cannot be maintained, at least not without mediation.”

Anatarah عنترة@damashummus· Oct 30

Realization baby!

Highlighted section, but the whole paragraph pictured is great. “if there is anything 'bourgeois, and therefore unfit to serve as counter-concept to the bourgeois, it is this idea of catastrophe. Its presupposition is a "normal" functioning of the bourgeois order, for which said catastrophe is supposed to spell the end. However, this is exactly the illusion that bourgeois society has always harbored about itself. In opposition to this, the critique of political economy holds that, though it reproduces life, this mode of reproduction itself is permanent catastrophe, 2 and what we experience today as the fate of the market economy is not its collapse under external powers, but the fulfillment-indeed, the revelation-of its own principle. For it has always contained the threat of catastrophe for anyone "thrown" into it. Revolution is not this catastrophe, nor the ensuing "renewal," but rather: that the permanent catastrophe is brought to a halt. The seeming radicalism that desires catastrophe-assuming it's desired in earnest, and not just diluted into one of sheer interiority-is in fact complete agreement with has always-already been; what this radicalism wants, down in its depths, is for everything to finally reveal its true face. In the time of concentration camps, what is radical is not the desire for catastrophe, but for halting the horror that now freely admits itself to be.”

Anatarah عنترة@damashummus· Oct 15

Both are fun. The Anthropocene book I am chipping away very slowly tho. Double-checking a lot of its sources as it is quite rich!

A philosophy book titled “Laughing and
Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior” by HELMUTH PLESSNER TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY JAMES SPENCER CHURCHILL AND MARJORIE GRENE WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY J M BERNSTEIN

THE Evolution OF Knowledge: RETHINKING SCIENCE FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE

By
Jürgen Renn

Anatarah عنترة@damashummus· Sep 18

Sellars’ manifest vs scientific image distinction.

A book called “CURRICULUM OF THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF MARXISM-LENINISM” translated from a Vietnamese ML textbook. It shows two contrasting images split in the middle. On the left, a relaxed fisherman with the subtitle “ordinary consciousness,” and on the right, a fisherman who caught a fish, but is deeply inquisitive; asking all sorts of question about it. The subtitle for the left image is “scientific consciousness.” Humorously, the image, more or less, indicates that science is when you cannot relax!

Anatarah عنترة@damashummus· Sep 17

Tfw the work is both politically correct and scientifically correct

20th century biology legends. From left to right:
Richard Lewontin, Stephen Jay Gould, and Richard Levins.

Anatarah عنترة@damashummus· Sep 5

Pictured: an otherwise smart guy being uncurious and dumb. I hate both fake humility and arrogance, but try to think about politics deeper man. Caring is not a weakness.

@SashaGusevPosts on Twitter: “Huge blow to Marxist theory: a working class voter coalition eagerly exchanges material losses for symbolic victories.” To quoted retweet by Joe Weisenthal on unemployment.

Anatarah عنترة@damashummus· Aug 26

In fact, I’ll just give you what I think in the words of Deleuze below.

Deleuze: The Party's? No, it never concerned me, something else that saved me, you understand...The discussions about Stalin, what they've discovered recently, the horrors committed by Stalin, I mean, everyone has known this for quite a while. And about the revolution going wrong, [Deleuze laughs] that makes me laugh because, really, who are they trying to kid? (de qui on se moque?) When the "New Philosophers" (nouveaux philosophes) discovered that the revolution turned out badly, you really have to be a bit dimwitted (débile), since we discovered that with Stalin. So henceforth, the road was open, everyone discovered it, for example, quite recently, about the Algerian revolution - "Hey, it turned out badly" because they fired on students!' Who ever thought that a revolution would go well?
Who? Who? People say the English could not have a revolution, but that's absolutely false.
I mean all that... Today we live with such a mystification... The English had a revolution, they killed their king, etc., and who did they get? They got Cromwell. And English Romanticism, what is it? It's a long meditation on the failure of the revolution. They didn't wait for [André] Glucksmann to reflect on the failure of the Stalinian revolution. They had one, really, they had one. And the Americans never get discussed, but the Americans blew their revolution, as badly as if not worse than the Bolsheviks. Let's not kid about it! People never talk about the Americans when they... even before the War of Independence - and "independence," I say --, they presented themselves worse than... or better than a new nation, they went beyond nations exactly like Marx spoke later of the proletariat: they went beyond nations, nations are finished! They bring forth a new people, they have a true revolution. Just as the Marxists count on universal proletariatization, the Americans counted on universal…

That revolution failed (a foiré), all revolutions fail, everybody knows this, and now people are pretending to "rediscover" that. They really have to be dimwitted. As a result, everyone is getting lost in this, this contemporary revisionism. There is [François] Furet who discovered that the French Revolution wasn't as great as had been thought. Well, sure, fine, it failed too, everybody knows that.
The French Revolution gave us Napoleon! People are making "discoveries" that to me are not very impressive in their novelty (on fait des découvertes qui ne sont pas très émouvantes par leur nouveauté). The British Revolution resulted in Cromwell, the American Revolution's results were worse, the political parties, Reagan, which does not seem any better to me.
So, people are in such a state of confusion... Even if revolutions fail, go badly, that still never stopped people or prevented people from becoming revolutionary. They are confusing two absolutely different things: the situations in which the only outcome for man is to become revolutionary... And yet again, we have been talking about that from the start: it's the confusion between becoming and history, and if people become revolutionary.

Deleuze: Yes, this historians' confusion... Historians speak of the future of the revolution, the future of revolutions, but that is not at all the question. They can always go so far back and try to demonstrate that if the future was bad, it's because the bad element (le mauvais) was there right from the start.
The concrete problem is how and why do people become revolutionary? And fortunately, historians can't prevent them from doing so. It's obvious that the South Africans are caught up in a becoming-revolutionary, the Palestinians are caught up in a becoming-revolutionary. Then, if someone tells me afterwards, "oh you will see, when they have won, if their revolution succeeds, it will go badly," etc., well, first of all, there will not be the same kinds of problems, and then a new situation will be created, once again becomings-revolutionary will be unleashed. The business of men (des

hommes), it's in situations of tyranny, of oppression, effectively it's to enter into becomings-revolutionary because there is nothing else to be done. And when someone tells us afterwards, "oh, it's not working out," we aren't talking about the same thing, it's as if we were speaking two different languages - the future of history and the current becomings of people (les devenirs actuels des gens) are not at all the same things.
Parnet: And this respect for the "rights of man" (les droits de l'homme) which is so fashionable these days, but it is not becoming-revolutionary, quite the opposite.
Deleuze [wearily]: Listen, this respect for the "rights of man" - this really makes me want to say, almost to make some odious statements. It belongs so much to this weak thinking (pensée molle) of the empty intellectual period that we discussed earlier under "C as in Culture".? It's purely abstract, these "rights of man." What is this? It's purely abstract, completely empty. It's exactly like what I was saying earlier about desire, what I tried to say about desire: desire does not consist of erecting an object, of saying I desire this... We don't desire, for example, freedom, etc. It's zero. Rather, we desire... we find ourselves in situations.

Anatarah عنترة@damashummus· Aug 8

I was talking to a friend who reminded me of this paragraph from Linguistic Bodies. I still think this is the strongest crit of (early?) Fichte (and a subtle crit of Hegel) following both Schelling and Plessner. The “body” resides *behind* the self-conscious “I”

As we have seen, to be a linguistic body is to incorporate powers and sensitivities to participate in group and community engagements involving the different kinds of social agency described in the dialectical model. But it is also to be part of the ecological relations between the various autonomous patterns at play in the multiple timescales involved. Being a linguistic body means not only having a personal capacity for language but also playing a role in community patterns.

Here we have a new kind of closure, as we have described at the end of the model. It is an autonomy that at the same time belongs to the individual and to the community. It is constituted by the encounter between both, and it is granted to the individual almost as an alien presence in her body. This occurs through the incorporation of utterances, which are person-shaping and person-relating acts, unavoidably altering the agency of those who incorporate them through a tendency to incarnate the voices, gestures, opinions, styles, and perspectives of others. Unlike sensorimotor autonomy, which is rooted in the organic body even if it transcends it, linguistic agency does not originate completely "out of" an individual's body, but also comes from her world and moves into the constitution of a "new" body, a linguistic one, that is tethered but displaced, at once distanced from and oriented toward "its" organic and sensorimotor body. If under normal circumstances we don't seem to be aware of this alien presence it is because
"we" are it.

Anatarah عنترة@damashummus· Jul 12

Instead of sleeping, I made this. Yes, I know I’m reifying two domains, which aren’t really separate!

Anatarah عنترة@damashummus· Jul 3

I’m going to exaptate a Twitter trend of the 4 most influential books on your worldview, but for the best things I read this year so far. As you can see, I want to revive a philosophical anthropology (theoretical biology) as a moment of a critical theory of society.

LINGUISTIC BODIES: The Continuity between
Life and Language by Ezequiel A. Di Paolo, Elena Clare Cuffari, and Hanne De Jaegher

THE MECHANIZATION
OF THE MIND: ON THE ORIGINS OF COGNITIVE SCIENCE by Jean-Pierre Dupuy
Translated by M. B. DeBevoise

Levels of Organic Life and the Human by Helmuth Plessner

THE HEART OF THE MATTER: Ilyenkov, Vygotsky and the Courage of Thought by
David Bakhurst

Anatarah عنترة@damashummus· Jun 27

Adding to the meme pile. I always liked this one

THIS VALUE SUBSTANCE THAT EXISTS
INDEPENDENTLY OF ITS FORM OF APPEARANCE.
IS IT IN THE ROOM WITH US RIGHT NOW?

Anatarah عنترة@damashummus· Jun 16

I’m so bad with music lmao

Anatarah عنترة@damashummus· May 13

Every time I return to Illyenkov, my inner-Arab comes back with a vengeance. My head goes “قُم لِلمُعَلِّمِ وَفِّهِ التَبجيلا كادَ المُعَلِّمُ أَن يَكونَ رَسولا”(first two lines in the picture)

Ahmad Shawqi Poem as translated by Suheil Laher.

Stand for the teacher, give him full respect
The teacher's rank is close to the prophet'.
Can there be any person nobler than
The one who builds and nurtures souls and minds?
Glory to You God, O best instructor, With the pen You taught the folk of yore.
You brought this mind forth from its darknesses, And guided it a way of lucid light.
The teacher's hand a crucible you made, Its products ingots rusted or burnished.
Moses as a guide You sent with Torah, So too the Virgin's son, who taught Injil.
Muhammad's fluent fount You caused to gush, So human souls he quenched with scripture's words.

Anatarah عنترة@damashummus· Apr 23

I was reading late Varela’s “Organism: a Meshwork of Selfless Selves.” (Banger title) And my guy is so Lewontin-pilled I did not appreciate it the first time. I’ve attached some excerpt from the end of the article.

The key point, then, is that the organism brings forth and specifies its own domain of problems and actions to be "solved"; this cognitive domain does not exist "out there" in an environment that acts as a landing pad for organisms that somehow drops or is parachuted into the world. Instead, living beings and their worlds of meaning stand in relation to each other through mutual specification or co-determination. Thus what we describe as significant environmental regularities are not external features that have been internalized, as the dominant representationalist tradition in cognitive science
-and adaptationism in evolutionary biology -assumes. Environmental regularities are the result of a conjoint history, a congruence which unfolds from a long history of co-determination. In Lewontin's [73] words, the organism is both the subject and the object of evolution.

Double dialectics: the nature of an identity and the nature of a relation to a world. Double paradoxicality: Self-production by dependent containment; autonomy of knowledge through environmental coupling. Both dialectics give rise to the shifting nature of organism, ineluctably forming itself and informing where it is, and equally ineluctably implicated in the background from whence it springs forth. Organisms, those fascinating meshworks of selfless selves, no more nor less than open-ended, multi-level circular existences, always driven by the lack of significance they engender by asserting their presence.

Anatarah عنترة@damashummus· Apr 21

The chemical industry as an under-appreciated aspect of the Industrial Revolution. If you want to understand “flows,” you need to understand chemicals.

This is an excerpt from the book A Material World.
“The chemicals revolution is perhaps the most-overlooked aspect of the industrial revolution, yet the development of chemical products arguably changed more lives than, for instance, the mass production of steel. It certainly saved more lives, purifying our water and cleansing our homes, saving us from bacteria and germs long before we understood the nature of their threats. Yet while we celebrate the pioneers of steelmaking and steam power, we have mostly forgotten the earliest giants of industrial chemistry, like Leblanc or Ernest Solvay.”

Anatarah عنترة@damashummus· Apr 10

If anybody want to pursue this, this my thought crystallized in a text

CR&D summary so far: we need an immanent critique of life-cycle assessments. Transform society from machine to organism.

Anatarah عنترة@damashummus· Apr 8

Glass as an important material for the emergence of modern science. Warfare (optics and binoculars), chemistry (borosilicate glass), and many other applications!

A few years ago two historians, Alan Macfarlane and Gerry Martin, went methodically through 20 of the great experiments that advanced human knowledge - everything from Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke's creation of a vacuum chamber to Isaac Newton's theory of light to Michael Faraday's investigations into electricity
- and discovered that all but four of them relied in some way on glass prisms or containers or contraptions.
Glass, in other words, was a foundational innovation, a general purpose technology like the wheel or the steam engine or the silicon chip. This magical product was important not just for what it was but for what it enabled us to do - to make further leaps of imagination and feats of invention. Indeed, it continues to play that role even today. The internet is mostly a mesh of information transmitted through glass wires and, as you'll see later on in this section, without glass we would be unable to make the brains of the most advanced computers. Not bad for something that is ultimately just melted sand.

Anatarah عنترة@damashummus· Apr 2

Hey y’all, this Saturday, I’ll be presenting on Boris Hessen’s Newton piece. We will be discussing the Hessen-Grossmann thesis and what a Marxist historiography of science looks like!