The Sheer Stultifying Weight of Our Traditions, Composing, 09/04/2014

Most of my philosophical activity today was spent working on a review/reply for Social Epistemology’s dialogical website. So I don’t really want to discuss in detail that issue, because it’ll be up next week on a site that’s far more official and gets much more visibility. However, I do have some more thoughts on Graham Priest’s old book, Beyond the Limits of Thought, that I figured were worth throwing online.

I’m extremely happy that Dr Arthur examined this book in his graduate seminar this semester, because I wasn’t familiar with it, and I’m glad it’s given me the opportunity. Priest’s book examined various thinkers throughout the history of Western philosophy (and the afterword to the second edition even included an engagement with the Indian philosopher Nagarjuna’s conception of nothingness) in terms of how they conceived of the limits of thought. One issue that I had with Priest’s book was that he skipped over many philosophers too quickly, and as a result badly misrepresented their own thoughts. 

No, philosophy isn't that kind of blood
sport. But we'd probably make more
money if it were that entertaining for
spectators.

Now, Priest wasn’t going for complete or comprehensive pictures of these philosophers, only how a particular problem appeared in some of their key writings. But because he couldn’t fill out the full conceptual contexts of their work, it constitutes a vulnerability. Philosophy can become a bloodsport, especially when you express controversial ideas as bluntly as Priest does.* I discussed this winter how Priest’s account of Immanuel Kant includes fundamental mischaracterizations because it only refers to The Critique of Pure Reason and not the positive aspect of that broad argument in The Critique of Practical Reason. As well, his account of Georg Hegel refers only to the Logic, and not the Phenomenology of Spirit, which is the project that links the abstract conceptual framework of the Logic to a practical account of politics and history, the articulation of Hegel’s aufheben movement in real life. 

* Honestly, I kind of want to study the early history of Priest’s career just to figure out how he wasn’t completely marginalized out of the university system because of his radical and unintuitive innovations in logic.

However, here’s a list of the philosophers Priest covers in his exploration of the nature of the limits of thought and how the idea arises in various contexts and thinkers. In historically chronological order, including the afterword to the second edition:

Cratylus

Plato

Protagoras

Aristotle

Nagarjuna

Sextus Empiricus

Anselm of Canterbury

Thomas Aquinas

Nicholas of Cusa

Gottfried Leibniz

Bishop George Berkeley

Immanuel Kant

Georg Hegel

Georg Cantor

Gottlob Frege

Bertrand Russell

Frank Ramsey

Martin Heidegger

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Willard Quine

Jacques Derrida

Donald Davidson

That’s 22 of the most diverse and individually complicated philosophers who have ever lived. The most sustained treatment they ever get from Priest is when he gives two chapters over the Kant and a chapter and a half to Wittgenstein. And when each philosopher is treated separately, introduced with his own chapter and section headings, it looks as though you’ve mastered them, or that you’re at least giving what aims to be a definitive account. 

It doesn’t matter if you admit your partiality or the limits of your project; if you present “The philosophy of X with regard to A,” you’re expected to have the whole system entirely in the bag. You look as though you’re writing secondary material, even if, in Priest’s case, you’re writing primary material with a pile of historical references. You’ll be held to the standards of secondary material (which weirdly, are higher with regard to philological accuracy than primary material). So his incompleteness leaves him vulnerable.

The only way to engage this many ideas from this many philosophers constituting such a diverse set of perspectives is not even to mention the other philosophers, aside from footnotes. Don’t present your own work as giving an account of these other historical figures; just adapt the ideas into your argument, indicate their source, and concentrate on the ideas free from historical context. It will keep you out of the distracting argument about whether you got the figures “right,” and let you develop your new ideas in peace. That’s how you keep yourself rooted in the broad tradition without getting your progressive ideas bogged down in debates about historical accuracy.

The only philosophical writer I’ve seen do this successfully is Gilles Deleuze. Ironically, he’s one of the few figures who would have written a book with his historical influences as chapter headings and still gotten them right, so comprehensive and detailed was his knowledge of philosophy’s history. Read What Is Philosophy? if you want to see precisely what I mean.

All for the Sake of an Experiment, Research Time, 08/04/2014

I returned to my Facebook account last night to find a wonderful comment by my friend D: “If these were shorter, I’d read every one.” With this in mind, just a few short reflections. And they actually will be short this time.

I didn’t get many chances to visit Dr Arthur’s seminar on Graham Priest at McMaster this semester, even though I wanted to attend more often. But I got to the last session yesterday, and it was a wonderful class to take part in. If you remember my various discussions of Priest’s book, Beyond the Limits of Thought when I was reading it last semester, I have a very positive attitude toward his general philosophy, though I have some criticisms of his particular inquiries.

The fascinating and contrarian Graham Priest.

A quick refresher for those who don’t want to follow the links. Graham Priest is a logician who has developed dialetheic logic, a form of symbolic logic that allows for the truth of some contradictions. Beyond the Limits of Thought is a survey of huge swaths of the history of Western philosophy for examples of such true contradictions. Priest’s mission statement is that one kind of true contradiction is the attempt to think the limit of thought. It isn’t that tough to conceive: try to think what cannot be thought, or say what cannot be said. Every time we attempt to think through the limits of human language and thought, we always have to straddle this weird borderline position where we can actually articulate what kind of thing would lie outside the limit. So we delineate a limit of thought by being able to point just beyond it. And in pointing, we think what we’ve just declared unthinkable.

It’s a trippy concept, and I quite enjoy it. One point we discussed in the last class, however, was precisely what was the upshot of true contradictions existing other than simply marvelling or meditating upon them. After all, progress in thought often arises from thinking through contradictions that arise in thinking and trying to resolve them. But even if you accept a contradiction as true, its structure is usually remarkably complex. If the limits of thought are any indication, when a true contradiction arises, it already results from an amazingly complicated philosophical investigation. Discovering a true contradiction would, for me, add a further dynamic tension to an already-roiling conceptual mix. 

I’d be comfortable with that, but I fully understand that I’m not like most people. Whether or not you agree that true contradictions are possible, at the very least, Priest's work constitutes a complicated and remarkable philosophical experiment that can push the discipline into strange new directions. It's at least worth testing thought's limits in case it turns out we can step beyond them.

The Future As a Means of Oppression, Research Time, 07/04/2014

The central notion of the Utopias project is exploring the injustice of prioritizing a political ideal over the lives of actual people. This is why so much of my research for it revolves around the nature of ideology: ideological thinking is itself the willingness to sacrifice those around you in the present to realize a future perfection. This was the justification of Stalinist purges: that millions needed to be sacrificed to preserve the integrity of social progress. 

This kind of justification of large-scale destruction for the sake of a larger ideal was also a key factor in Invisible Man. The narrator spends a healthy chunk of Ellison’s book involved with a communist (clearly they are, though the word itself is never said) organization that constantly promotes the brotherhood and equality of all people. But they neglect the black communities of Harlem, ignoring their concerns, and let an extremist black nationalist group spark a destructive, violent riot in the community for their own hazy purposes of motivating wider popular opposition to the capitalist regime.

Opposing such thinking is important to create a genuinely peaceful social order. But I’m not comfortable with all such oppositions. It might sound as if I’m doing some tourism of marginalized peoples, but the other day, I started reading Lee Edelman’s No Future, which is the first queer theory I’ve ever encountered as a researcher. Why I haven't encountered queer theory has a similar type of reason that I described the other day regarding Ralph Ellison, and a few months ago regarding Margaret Urban Walker; critical voices stereotypically associated with identity politics are marginalized out of philosophy departments. Even though I never limited the range of my reading to the specific course material of my programs, I did limit myself to the tradition. It’s quite a mistake, as by the time I felt like I should have done so, it was too late. I felt like coming to feminist or queer theory so late in my philosophical education stripped any legitimacy I could have had to speak about it, or even ask about it.

Regular readers might be growing tired of my continued expressions of my debt to Phil Sandifer and the TARDIS Eruditorum, but I’m going to thank him again for exposing me to Edelman and his concept of reproductive futurism. Edelman uses it to diagnose a prevalent notion in popular culture, that the well-being of children is an unequivocal good. From a perspective that makes heavy use of Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts for political purposes, he identifies how the uncritical acceptance that ensuring the continuation of the human race (through heterosexual reproduction) is a good can oppress people. Just think about all the socially conservative, oppressive measures that essentially marginalize and criminalize non-heterosexuals/ity in the name of ‘protecting the children.’ 

Phil Sandifer interprets Torchwood: Children of Earth in
terms of a critique of reproductive futurism, the most
profoundly aggressive statement of his ethical philosophy
that Russell T. Davies ever put on screen.

Take one of Edelman’s examples through popular culture: Philadelphia. At the time, this was interpreted as director Jonathan Demme’s response and attrition for the homophobic elements of Silence of the Lambs. Even though the film contains a positive and nuanced depiction of a gay man (Tom Hanks, whose public image Edelman sarcastically describes as saintly), and its narrative is how Denzel Washington’s character overcomes his homophobia, there is an oppressive undercurrent. Hanks is depicted as contracting HIV in a gay porn cinema, a seedy, immoral environment. The beatified conditions of his passing find him surrounded not only by his gay lover, but his straight and normal extended family, including children and pregnant women. The memorial montage that plays at the end of the film focusses on Hanks’ character as a child, contrasting his pure innocent state with his sinful adulthood that led to his death. Even in this redemptive arc, a gay man is only morally worthy as a child or an innocent. The morality of homosexuality as a lifestyle remains repugnant because it has no future, leading only to death.

If you have more time after reading my own brief, initial, and still inconclusive take on the concept of reproductive futurism (I’ve only finished about one-third of No Future), you should read Phil’s long, involved, detailed, provocative, and fascinating analysis of Torchwood: Children of Earth (in five parts) for a far better account of this concept and all the disturbing implications of it and its opposition. 

Oh yes, because I find Edelman’s opposition to reproductive futurism equally disturbing. No matter how sympathetic I am with the idea that idealizations of amorphous futurity can be a condition to oppress people, I’m hesitant to accept Edelman’s own ideas uncritically. He valorizes investment in the present moment in response to this oppressive idea of reproductive futurism, turning away from an investment in a future that you will never see to live in the now. I'm very much in favour of this notion, as it essentially is my position in the Utopias project. Phil’s essay communicates the social problems of Edelman’s perspective, but I want to concentrate on one particular conceptual alliance he makes.

Edelman considers, in terms of what queerness (non-heterosexuality in general) figures and signifies the end of the future: a society without reproduction, and so will have no future. The liberal consensus, which Edelman identifies, as an example, with the movement to legalize gay marriage, is actually a denial of the true nature of queerness. The marriage movement is an attempt to neuter the social challenge of queerness by assimilating it into the basic social norms of heterosexual life. In the words of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, which Edelman also quotes in his first chapter, "What you get married for if you don't want children?" 

So he actually declares that radical social conservatives who consider the very existence of queerness to be an existential threat and a fundamental affront to their God are actually correct: because queerness signifies a society without necessary investment in the future, it actually is a threat to existing social orders that privilege reproduction and the maintenance of the future. 

This makes me uncomfortable. It’s a confrontational stance that is healthy and refreshing in its radicality, but dangerous in that it gives a remarkable amount of ground to devoted Christians who would prefer a society where homosexuality is punishable by death. Essentially, Edelman says the radical Christians are right in that queerness challenges the fundamental moral aspect of organizing society. It potentially opens up a fascinating new vision of progress, progress without a future. But Edelman also defines this vision in entirely negative terms, describing queerness and the queer as precisely the assault that the most violent Christians say it is. 

My interpretation is tentative, of course, because I haven’t finished the book. And I do want to clarify that this makes for my first steps into queer theory, so I’m thinking entirely in terms of questions that I want to ponder rather than tight declarations that I want to make. But I’m hesitant about the practical political effects of any philosophy of liberation and freedom that gives so much ground in its very premises to the thankfully deceased Fred Phelps.

Why Would He Speak for Me? A History Boy, 05/04/2014

It took me a while, as I’ve been working on several other things, but I finally finished Invisible Man the other day, and I have some closing thoughts on the book. I hope they’re more enlightening than the last post I wrote about the book and Ralph Ellison a month ago, which mostly just revealed my own ignorance about the reception and interpretation of his work. So with the full knowledge that my thoughts will be little more than amateurish in their expression, I’ll set them down here for the weekend.

If anything can be judged from my own
ignorance, it seems that black literature is
too often relegated only to black markets.

The last line of the novel is probably the most famous, apart from the obviously famous opening line, “I am an invisible man.”* It goes, “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” Whether he speaks for me may be up for debate if you’re being extremely charitable. But as you might have been able to tell from that very naive post last month, Ellison hasn’t ever really spoken to me.

* It sort of bugs me that the first lines and last lines of great novels often become their most famous calling cards. The same suspicion applies to how early scenes are the most famous, as in Don Quixote’s windmill scene, and the madeleine sequence at the start of In Search of Lost Time. Is this just a sign that most popularizers of great literature don’t expect readers to actually get that far in the books?

I’ve only read the book now that I’m 31 years old. I grew up in a Canadian province where the Indian and Chinese populations were higher than the African-descended. My school curricula before university concentrated on Canadian literature, with a healthy dose of works from and about Newfoundland. None of the American literature on the program touched black life. When I got to university, I left the formal study of literature for philosophy, and didn’t even think to ask questions of the value of diversity for the tradition until long after my undergraduate years were over.

So does Ellison’s invisible man speak to me? I had certainly never heard his voice or read his words. Apart from sometimes seeing him in documentaries and general articles about the history of American literature or black culture, I was exposed to nothing of him. Ellison’s work was worse than invisible to me; it was simply absent.

Black perspectives in politics remain very foreign to me, although I still try to sympathize. I consider myself to have achieved some small progress in understanding because I can no longer believe in the validity of any of the old arguments I hear too often in the media (and occasionally from some folks around me) that justified the unequal social arrangements between white and black neighbourhoods and people. I got into quite a few arguments over the George Zimmerman trial last year. Such quibbles as I heard over whether he was technically guilty under Florida’s criminal law, for me, threatened to erase the genuine cultural impact of Martin’s killing, and belittle the profound social symbolism so many people expressed, instead writing it off as mere popular ignorance of the law’s details. 

But the book was beautiful, and presented the figure of someone who, because of how everyone around him perceived him, was essentially invisible. The agency of his personality and his entire community was discounted for the sake of a purpose that had nothing to do with them. People were treated as instruments. That, if anything, speaks to the universal character of his problem.

Invisible Man strikes me as a better novel than Camus’ The Stranger to deal with the complex individual and social dimensions of existential questions, matters of who and what I am and we are. Existential problems all too often focus solely on an isolated individual personality; but their subject matter, our self-conceptions and individual natures, are deeply integrated with processes of social, historical, and political genesis. Camus offered only one dimension of this problem. Ellison touches on almost all of it. There is truly no reason not to teach Ellison as an example of how literature can best examine problems in existentialism and exploitation.

At least, I can’t think of a good one.

Did Enlightenment Legitimize Aggression? Research Time, 03/04/2014

Some of my posts about Karl Mannheim have discussed how he critiqued philosophy, but his historical origin story for what he calls the modern concept of ideology constitutes a critique at the core of the cornerstone of philosophy as a tradition and discipline.

That modern concept of ideology Mannheim considers has an accusative sense. When one says someone acts out of an ideology, it’s an accusation that he has a false perspective on the world. He tells his own disguised state of nature story with this concept, where he locates a primal form of this accusation in the opposition among individuals and societies. One simply, from a partisan perspective in any conflict, whether violent or trivial, believes that one’s opponent acts from false beliefs. When one considers one’s enemies, they’re always thought to act from malice. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be your enemies, would they?

Mannheim then levels an accusation of his own at Enlightenment-period philosophy, clearly implying Kant in particular, but implicating the entire movement. As a revolution in thinking, the Enlightenment put the activity of the subject as the unifying activity of the entire world. Whether this is expressed in a literal metaphysical sense of ontological idealist philosophy, or the ethical model of philosophical thought as self-guided or self-legislating maturity, it still measures the world by man. Under this philosophical circumstance, ideology is not a problem, but its expression simply a mark of immaturity.

Until Hegel’s philosophy took this model of a subject as the unifying action of the world and historicized it. In Mannheim’s interpretation of this philosophy, to slam the world-unifying subject into the history of that world marginalizes the individual and cuts it off from any central metaphysical role. The development of subjects only happens through the development of cultures through historical processes, whether those cultures are delineated according to class, ethnicity, or state. So individuals have lost their place in the original Enlightenment model to become expressions of collective identities. When we accuse someone of acting according to some demented ideology in this context, we accuse that person of, in the structure of their very existence, being incapable of seeing the world aright.

Underpinning Mannheim's writing seems to me like an
investigation into improving the world.

But none of this would have happened if the contingent social world had not been stripped away from mainstream philosophical conceptions of the world in the first place. Understand the world as the collision and bonding of a complicated aggregate of singular individuals in deep and multifaceted relationships, in terms of population thinking, in other words. How would you consider an enemy who was thinking through an ideology? As someone who grew up with a bad education system and still believes too much of it. Thinking this way, we can be opposed to someone without seeing that opposition as essential. Our opposition can be understood as contingent, and so solvable, or at least tractable. Peace is conceivable. 

Under the conception of individuals as expressions of their cultures? These people are inseparable from their ideology. Barely worth calling people. Here is Mannheim’s profound accusation of philosophy: in forgetting the contingent social world to replace the essence of man with a transcendental subject, we have come to forget the ethical force of an existing individual life. Essential demonization becomes possible when the singular individual is subsumed into a collective identity of any kind. 

Remember that Mannheim was a German exile in Britain writing my edition of Ideology and Utopia in the years leading up to the Second World War.

Morphogenesis: The Constitution of Form and Structure, A History Boy, 02/04/2014

We do not honour our heroes and inspirations by worshipping them, but by continuing the tasks through which they inspired you. Do not turn back; go on, despite uncertainty.

Above, I’ve posted a video of Manuel DeLanda discussing the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. If you want to learn a lot and you have about 75 minutes to spare in an evening, you should have a listen.

Deleuze is one of my favourite philosophers, and a thinker who has very much influenced my own thinking and work. DeLanda is, of all the people I know who have engaged with Deleuze’s thought (and DeLanda is a self-declared member of the post-Deleuzian tradition) who takes the most enlightened stance on the matter. Reading various scholars of Deleuze like Daniel Smith, Peter Hallward, Dorothea Olkowski, Jay Lampert, Gary Genosko, and more I'm tired of listing, I noticed a recurring trend in all these essays, books, and talks that I’ve read and seen. Everyone seems to talk as if their account of Deleuze is the right one. This implies that, once all these perspectives of what the ‘right’ Deleuze is get together, conflict is inevitable. I’ve been to gatherings of Deleuze scholars, and they aren’t bitter or bitchy at each other. But as long as the conversation is about interpreting Deleuze, conflict among the university faculties is inevitable. 

DeLanda’s work is entirely focussed not on giving an account of Deleuze better than any other, but in carrying his ideas that he developed in Deleuze’s tradition to other, new problems. His lecture here is about the growth of knowledge as we explore the material nature of the world, and what kind of knowledge is best suited to conduct that exploration. 

The most popular innovators of the scientific revolution like Isaac Newton believed that the growth of science would be a path to unification. Conservative philosophy of science has treated human knowledge this way as well. But the real history of science has been divergence of disciplines, as the world has proven so complex that different venues of knowledge (metallurgy, chemistry, geology, and all their various sub-disciplines) have entirely different frameworks of knowledge and mathematical functions.

Only in the last century was metallurgy taken seriously as a
science, having had to overcome the negative class
heritage of metal smiths, who were, unfortunately for the,
community, social outcasts for hundreds of years.

What is most important for the fidelity, usefulness, and ultimate truth of knowledge is how well we understand the material we are investigating. That understanding comes from experience — no matter how insightful the knowledge of theoretical thinking is, it remains rarefied and abstract until you dive into the details of the material and its structure. Matter and mathematics, the world and its structures. DeLanda talks about, “the magic of the material world,” how matter comes together in mathematically mappable relationships to constitute bodies of such greater complexity. 

He talks about Deleuze developing three kinds of reasoning about the material nature of reality, thinking in terms of populations or variations without pre-determined themes, intensities or relations among dynamisms, and topologies or material shapes and potentials. DeLanda depicts these three as essential to understanding materiality in that magical sense that is necessary for genuine knowledge, the knowledge of the world that can have worldly impact. He introduces the question in this lecture, but presses the question into more difficult territory in his books, some of which succeed better than others. I contrast him with other approaches to Deleuze scholarship because I can even ask the question of whether he succeeds or fails. 

I have seen among communities of X-ian philosophers that I cannot even ask the question of success. All the arguments seem to be about interpretations, but unless you are plain sloppy, all interpretations of a given great philosopher, no matter how divergent they may be, are true. The reason a philosopher is great is because their works have the potential for these multiple, divergent interpretations. Their heritage lies in having inspired those communities of squabbling authors of secondary material. They can encourage all this divergence in interpretation, still standing above the chaos. 

Deleuze is very much one of these figures, which is why, as long as people continue to read his work, will encourage lively debate and inspiration to bring his ideas into new problems. DeLanda is one of those latter kinds of figures, whose philosophical ambition opens the possibility that they can become one of those great figures. I hope my works in philosophy will be of the latter kind as well.

Kraftwerkdenken 2: We Used to Have a Remarkable Future, Jamming, 01/04/2014

Yesterday’s post about the thoughts Kraftwerk’s 3D show inspired in me may have considered the ontological and existential question of what we would be if we conceived of ourselves as machines. A different aspect of this is inherently political. And I’m not just talking about the songs Kraftwerk writes and performs, like “Computer World” and “Radio-Activity,” that are explicitly political anthems, though I can rock to the principle of each. After all, I regularly rock out while working to Rage Against the Machine. So I’m well okay with music that incorporates blatant political sloganeering. 

Marinetti's art was a collision of energy and motion. He
painted the explosion of humanity itself.

But this post is about more profound politics, the orientation of humanity itself, how our technology and our dreams of its potential shapes our society and our yearnings. One figure who first inspired my Utopias project was Filippo Marinetti, the Italian poet, artist, and philosopher who articulated one of the earliest visions of futurity in philosophy.* It isn’t a futurity I think anyone would actually like or want to live. Intrigued by the potential of the automobile for social transformation, he saw the car as a means of emancipation from the constraints of culture or traditional morality. It was a means of total freedom.

* Literature had included plenty of visions of the future, thanks to authors like Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. But these weren’t about futurity. Essentially, they depicted and critiqued the cultures and problems of their own era, the Victorian Age of Western Europe, using imagery of advanced technology. A standard, and important, practice of science-fiction. This should be distinguished from futurity, which actually imagines wholly different cultures and ways of life, without necessarily having any relation, critical or otherwise, to the current era. The only two authors I’ve come across who have done this are Iain M. Banks and Patrick White. And White wasn’t even a sci-fi writer; I just consider the ethics of his novel Voss so utterly strange to modernity that it seems innovative in its own right.

And this total freedom was the freedom of a people without personality in the conventional sense. Marinetti was was poor students of Nietzsche believe him to be: the glorifier of speed, aggression, and war. The man of Marinetti’s Futurist vision was the embodiment of a lone car (without seatbelts, of course) flying down a highway at absurd speeds. Urban technology would not only master nature, but annihilate it under a superior order. The Futurist man would literally be a machine man. The highways of modern, urban Europe would combine with the wars of mass destruction and death to forge a superior man that would remake the Earth in his image.

But Marinetti passed in the last years of the Second World War, and his dream of a factory-made future lay fallow and disregarded for decades. And then, the industrial heartland of Europe, Germany itself, produced a group of men whose name was the literal expression of the worldly striving (Werk) for power (Kraft), making art entirely using electronic machines synthesizing sounds that heralded waveforms themselves that had never been heard on Earth, expressing images and songs of men literally becoming machines, robots, men who were no longer even human. These men sang of the highways, the concrete streets that would transform man into pure motion, the fires of destruction. They sang of the Autobahn.

That really is the narrative of the 21st century. Do you see why I’m so interested in the Italian Futurists for the Utopias project? They express the dreams of progress that drove the 19th and 20th centuries to create the absolutely mad and self-destructive worlds we live in today. They embody more purely than any other group of artists and theorists I know of the profound hubris of humanity that’s landed us in this ecological/nomic pickle.

Marinetti dreamed of a new kind of man forged by the
speed of the highway and the grind of war. He got traffic
jams and Jeremy Clarkson.

Introducing the culture of the year 2010 to the TARDIS Eruditorum, Phil Sandifer wrote about the initial dreams of the internet. He knows it from the inside, as one of the earliest editors of Wikipedia, the dream that the internet would usher in a new era of super-fast communication, a kind of universal education and enlightenment through the exchange of knowledge faster than any mere state could regulate. The internet was supposed to be the vehicle of an anarchistic utopia. Instead, we got Facebook, cat photos, and the collective ignorance of believing you could fight breast cancer by posting a selfie without your eyeshadow on. The Venture Bros. has a similar aesthetic, as the fantastic dreams of animated adventure sci-fi in the 1970s give way to the creep of bureaucracy and middling performance of a generation that has run out of steam. 

Likewise, Marinetti dreamed of a human race that would transform its very nature technologically. He romanticized the highway into the blood vessels of a mechanized continent, with cars speeding around, experiencing life at its fullest and purest as we become machines of pure motion. Today, we’re stuck in traffic jams choking on our own exhaust fumes.