👉🎯"Intellectual history has long suffered from a materialist deficit. The discipline, as Samuel Moyn argues, is in sore need of “a theory of ideology” that conceptualizes ideas as not merely intellectual but also material forces. Absent an awareness of the social dimension of ideas, Moyn contends, intellectual history risks sliding into idealism, substituting a theory of discursive context for what should be one of social relations.

In Moyn’s work, intellectual history stands accused of operating on an “implausible” theory of historical agency and change. It imagines ideas to arise at the point where historical context meets writerly intention but, in doing so, fails to acknowledge that both history and intention are themselves socially and materially conditioned. This leaves it generally ill equipped to confront the role ideas play in perpetuating and justifying material inequalities or relations of dominance.

We are seeing the effects of this analytical deficit today. As we bear witness to far-reaching shifts in not only the political economy but the intellectual life of advanced capitalist societies, our capacity to interpret how we got here appears pallid and incomplete." 🎯👈

https://www.jhiblog.org/2026/02/02/stuart-hall-ideology-and-neoliberalisms-reactionary-drift/

#Neoliberalism #Ideology #Idealism #Materialism #PoliticalEconomy #IntellectualHistory

Book Club: Steven Pinker’s When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows

https://boffosocko.com/2026/01/04/book-club-steven-pinkers-when-everyone-knows-that-everyone-knows/

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/susan-sontag-a-critic-at-the-crossroads-of-culture

I haven't read enough Sontag, and that reading took place years ago, so perhaps I should return and make my own evaluation. I suspect that I will think of her being more than the "transitional' figure described in this piece from twenty years ago.

That suspicion might arise from my not sharing the author's esteem for Derrida and Lacan, an esteem which in its turn now seems to belong to a fashion now faded.

#Criticism #SusanSontag #IntellectualHistory #USHistory

You might have the impression from the thread I've just posted on Emily Herring's "Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People" that I neither enjoyed nor profited from the book.

That impression would be mistaken, because I both learned from it and thoroughly enjoyed it as a well written work of history, even if I do not share Herring's esteem for Bergson as a philosopher.

She is especially strong on showing how the Belle Epoque acclaim for Bergson represented a yearning for the re-enchantment of a world now mechanized and soulless. She is also acute in her observation of the split between Bergson the solitary philosopher and Bergson the academic networker, the misogyny in his contemporaries' accounts of his popularity, and the gap that opened between Bergson the man and Bergsonism the movement.

So I would recommend "Herald of a Restless World", not for what it might provide for the future of philosophy, but for what it tells us of the past of modernity.

#Philosophy #IntellectualHistory #History #HenriBergson #EmilyHerring #HeraldOfARestlessWorld #Modernity #France #Books

🧵 1/3

https://wellreadherring.substack.com/p/herald-of-a-restless-world-out-now

I've just finished Emily Herring's "Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People", which the author hopes will inspire a Bergson revival.

I doubt that any such revival is in the offing. Consider the three most important terms of Bergson's philosophy:

-- Élan vital. Bergson came up with this in his 1907 "Creative Evolution" to name a force that he thought of as driving evolution forward. In spite of Herring's claims to the contrary, I find little significant difference between Bergson's notion and the life forces posited by Bergson's vitalist contemporaries. Bergson published his work during late C19/ early C20 "eclipse of Darwinism", and his views on biology are of the same vintage and degree of relevance to today's concerns as disagreements over home rule for Ireland, prohibition, or the dangers posed by bicycling to women's health.

Follow the thread for the other two!

#Philosophy #IntellectualHistory #History #HenriBergson #EmilyHerring #HeraldOfaRestlessWorld #Modernity #France

The Architecture of Resistance

The seventeenth-century Hague, the mid-twentieth-century Levant, and the digital terraforming of 2025 have a shared preoccupation with the “Average.” Whether it is the theologian’s way or predictive stats, control begins by smoothing out the landscape. The project of power is a project of cartography and illumination—an attempt to banish the dark corners where the unmapped might grow. Thus, the history of resistance, of being “against the world”, is less a history of rebellion than a history of seeking cover.

In Spinoza’a world, legibility was the cosmos in an ordered hierarchy. Meaning descended from an external judge and was mirrored by the terrestrial proxy of the King and more often the priest. Behavior was aligned to the “Scriptural Average.” A pre-written behavioral code that transformed the conatus—that primal drive to persist and expand—into the passive states of hope and fear. By removing the external judge, Spinoza suggested that freedom is found in the intellectual mastery of the causes that move us. A pushback against the “average pious subject,” asserting that every individual is a necessary, logical expression of an infinite substance. There is no error in the world, only the lack of a thick enough understanding to perceive the necessity of one’s own outlier status. 

With this position, and self assurance, Spinoza became illegible to his friends, his doting teacher, and his community. He was cast out, but his thoughts are the seeds of today’s world. 

In the Beirut and Damascus of the mid-twentieth century, the imposition of legibility took the form of the “Citizen-as-Monument.” It was a world of endings, where identity was a frozen artifact of nationalist scripts and religious orthodoxies. The poet Adonis, through Mihyar, pushes against this world not by asserting a new identity, but through a “movement of erasure.” If a stable interior is to form, it is to be quickly discarded. A stable interior is merely another coordinate, a dependable predictor, for the state to map. Mihyar becomes a “knight of strange words,” defined by the iltifat—the sudden turn away. By peeling back the layers of the social mask and embracing a radical anonymity, he counters the stagnant city. He exists as a hot wind, something that is felt through its movement and friction, yet remains entirely unsearchable by the collective grammar.

We have entered a third world, a digital landscape that functions as a terraformed plain. It is, in a sense, a Spinozan monism—all data is one substance—but it is a substance managed by a Leibnizian bureaucracy of optimization. The mechanism of control is no longer the scripture or the state monument, but the “Mechanical Harmony” of the statistical mean. A decade ago this was social media shaping votes. Today’s AI tools, perhaps inadvertently and perhaps not,  impose an “averageness” on thought itself, by providing the next likely response and hiding the outlier. This is a form of disindividuation disguised as efficiency, a smoothing of the world’s texture until it becomes a frictionless surface for the sake of searchability.

What emerges as a necessary response is the logic of the thicket. If the terraformed plain is the habitat of the tourist—where everything is predicted, optimized, and known—the thicket is the habitat of the explorer. It is a deliberate architecture of complexity, an insistence on terroir and the messy, non-replicable context of the local. To build a thicket is to re-introduce friction into a world too smooth. We are apes inhabiting the long tail. Like Spinoza, our conatus withers under the umbrella the statistical mean. If every response is predicted, the individual ceases to be a cause and becomes merely a consequence of the architecture.

To emerge, life itself needed discontinuities. The thicket provides the opacity necessary for the transforming process of the self to occur. It honors the uneven distribution of the world, providing a high-density environment of unique, complex encounters impossible in a flat plain. In this 2025 context, to be “against the world” is perhaps better understood as being a cultivator of these unsearchable spaces. The Dark Forest of the internet has created literal operating systems, habitats for our interconnected selves. Away from the violent imposition of the center, things can still happen by surprise. We seek cover in the thicket as a primal way of being where the emergent world remains deep enough to inhabit.

#Adonis #AI #AlgorithmicFlattening #AliAhmadSaidEsber #ArchitectureOfResistance #artificialIntelligence #Conatus #CulturalCritique #DigitalTerraforming #history #Iltifat #IntellectualHistory #LLMs #LogicOfTheThicket #MechanicalHarmony #MihyarTheDamascene #Monism #Noodiversity #OntologicalResistance #philosophy #philosophyOfTechnology #RadicalImmanence #Spinoza #StatisticalAverage #TheThicket #writing