Kitchen Need to Have Stir Crazy Popcorn Popper

6 Comments

1. SniperUnreal says:

   January 16, 2012 at 8:28 pm

   nice dude ill check it out, you dudes are great live. i saw you at the west bend music academy
2. carefulcarpenter says:

   January 20, 2012 at 9:01 pm

   MOT, just learning how to use my you tube page. I invited you to come on my radio show some time ago but you declined. I understand. In the next 5 months I am putting out a HUGE documentary on real estate market, would you like to in the documentary? I will be in Malibu CA in around Thanksgiving time, Unless you plan on coming to Florida anytime soon. Otherwise it would have to be radio. I hope we have 5 months left. Either way I am prepared for his second coming.
3. pongsapipat3 says:

   January 29, 2012 at 6:05 pm

   Popcorn Popper Machine Mighty Mite 2035bg Gas Popper: This 20,000 btu gas popper will produce twenty 16 oz batch…
4. Ping.fm says:

   January 30, 2012 at 5:54 pm

   West Bend 6-Quart Stir Crazy Popcorn Popper $19.99 Free Shipping at Newegg –
5. says:

   February 12, 2012 at 4:35 pm

   What was being said is the someone first acts and then thinks (and later possibly understands).

   In other words, his basic approach is what I tend to call “practice theoretic”: he argues that we (collectively) do things. Since we don't “do” with part of ourselves, and “think” with another, our actions always already entail dispositions, forms of embodiment, modes of being in the world, habits of perception, etc. – tacit, embedded in the practice itself. Those tacit dispositions form a set of grooves or habits into which it is easier for perceptions and thoughts to fall – thus making it somewhat likely that we may then generate other sorts of practises that utilise, and thus further reinforce, such dispositions – priming us or making us slightly more likely, all other things being equal, to recognise or respond familiarly to opportunities to continue practising what we already know how to do…

   Later, we might look back on what we've done – using, among other things, the same sorts of experiential dispositions cultivated in the process of doing those things – and begin to reflect back on some this. There, perhaps, lies some possibility for conscious decision that can react back on our default practices. Marx would see his theoretical work as a contribution to the process of making possible that sort of conscious decision – he sees this as a conscious decision to appropriate potentials that we have constituted nonconsciously, unintentionally – in “alienated” form.

   Sinthome – This begins to back me into the question of base and superstructure. A couple of meta points. First, Marx says in any number of places that he thinks that the ways in which societies organise their material production provides some sort of Rosetta stone for understanding other sorts of institutions that arise in those societies. I don't think he quite means by all of this what he's generally understood to be saying: material production, for Marx, is an extremely broad category that extends well beyond “economics”; Marx makes very careful observations – when he's not being polemical – about the extent to which the generalisations he makes about materialism only become categories in and for themselves in our society, such that such categories can be read back into time, in his words, “only with a grain of salt”, and “with an essential difference”; and the base-superstructure language – while Marx does use it – appears alongside a large number of other sorts of meta-statements that haven't received equivalent attention, which moderate both the way the base-superstructure language can be read, and also the importance that should be attached to it within Marx's system.

   So I can, so to speak, fancy up what Marx means by this sort of statement, and also suggest that it doesn't provide the “engine” of his analysis in quite the way it's sometimes taken to provide. Nevertheless, even after these sorts of manoeuvres, I'm basically critical of Marx's stance, and I don't think the actual operation of his theoretical work allows him to “cash out” these sorts of claims. I take a great deal of his analysis to be driven by the sort of practice-theoretic approach I've sketched above – and I've said in a number of discussion that I simply don't see any basis for deciding that, say, practices associated with “material reproduction” should have some sort of qualitatively different impact on forms of subjectivity – such that these specific practices should form a “base” – than other sorts of practices.

   What I do think happens, in a capitalist context specifically, is that the sorts of practices associated with the reproduction of capital become global, whereas other forms of practice do not, and that some of the dispositions associated with these practices have qualitative properties that can make their ontological status difficult to grasp, such that there's a sort of structural risk of reading certain kinds of dispositions off into “nature” (human, social, or material) in particular ways that tend to deflect critical reflection away from them – and that both of these things can work in tandem to make dispositions associated with the reproduction of capital appear more fundamental than dispositions incubated through other sorts of practices (and, in a funny way, this can then become its own self-fulfilling prophecy, of course, as what we treat as more fundamental in collective practice, of course becomes more fundamental). This is not for me, however, some sort of “Rosetta Stone” argument – even in relation to capitalist society – but more an attempt to understand why, in practice, priorities that we regard as “economic”, and the discourses through which we articulate such priorities, seem in practice to carry the weight that they do on a global scale.

   In terms of what Marx does in Capital – rather than in terms of his isolated metatheoretical statements about what he takes himself to be doing: he breaks the process of the reproduction of capital down into moments, organises those moments as a “logic” – unfolding more concrete categories by tracing back presuppositions from more abstract categories – and, within the analysis of each category, explores the forms of subjectivity or dispositions associated with the practical enactment of each category. So, for example, the opening chapter of Capital, for example, begins with the commodity as a “thing outside us”. We only learn several chapters in, once Marx has derived the category of wage labour, that this opening always already presupposed the existence of commodities of the human sort – and, therefore, the opening is intended to express forms of subjectivity or modes of being in the world, in a context in which the practice of the sale of our own labour power gives most of us practical experience with treating our capacities, our potential, as an object that we own and can alienate – such that part of ourselves becomes plausibly experienced as a thing outside us. The opening theoretical perspective – the distant objective sociological gaze with which Capital begins – is expressive, in part, of such a disposition (it's more complicated than this, as other categories are also presupposed – I'm abbreviating).

   The chapter then moves into a meta-commentary on Descartes' wax The category of abstract labour is introduced as a category of a supersensible property that lies behind the flux of sense experience. The movement of the chapter thus tracks the movement of, say, Hegel's Phenomenology, in the shift from Perception to Understanding. Once again, we learn in later chapters that we are discussing forms of being in the world, linked back to practical experiences associated with the treatment of ourselves (and other things) as commodities: the value of a commodity is not evident from the amount of labour empirically expended in its production – the value is, in fact, unknown, until established “objectively” through the act of exchange. Marx suggests that this practical experience involves a collective enactment of a supersensible essence – such that, for example, the possibility that humans share some common, qualitatively homogeneous “substance”, in spite of their various empirical differences, is here enacted in social practice – constituting, then, a potential reservoir of critical experience that can potentially be wielded against social institutions and practices predicated on the intrinsic inequality of humans. (Again, the argument is much more complicated than this, and I'm truncating severely.)

   So the argument here involves a kind of (non-functionalist) Durkheimian exploration of the ways in which collective practices constitute certain social properties, substances, entities, etc., which are “real” to the extent that we are collectively behaving as if they exist, and thereby constituting such things in practice.

   The main line of Marx's argument – and this will begin to get back to your questions about coningency – traces what Marx regards as the “necessary” moments in the reproduction of capital: “necessary” moments are those definitive of capital. Forms of being in the world associated with these necessary moments are unfolded as the moments themselves are analysed. Occasionally Marx will also briefly explore possible moments – things that are likely to happen in the right circumstances, etc. He generally reins the text back in quickly when he does this, as his aim is to show what is necessarily constituted. The argument about necessity here does not take the form of a base-superstructure analysis, but is instead practice theoretic: we do certain things, and the process of “doing” already involves practical sensibilities – which might involve, e.g., enactments of a certain kind of social equality, or enactments of a mind/body dualism effected in practice, or enactments of a supersensible world that supervenes on the world of empirical sensibility, etc. These sorts of socially enacted entities are our “fetishes” – socially enacted entities whose connections to our own collective practices have become obscured, and which therefore confront us in “alienated” form.

   Logically – and here speaking in my own voice, not Marx's – an argument that such things arise in the course of practices that reproduce capitalism, does not preclude an argument that such things also arise in other forms, in other sorts of practices. I may learn an ideal of equality, for example, in school, or from my parents, or in some other way, long before I experience the sorts of tacit embodied dynamics that Marx analyses when he looks at value. It is actually important for a critical theory that alternative enactments of these dispositions be possible: otherwise, it wouldn't be possible to separate such things out from capitalism, and use them critically against this social form. The “payoff” to establishing that certain things are also enacted via the practices that reproduce capitalism, is simply that it becomes possible to say that, as long this social form is reproduced, then there is at least one way that certain dispositions will continue to be enacted, whether or not other sorts of social institutions enact those dispositions in other ways. Nevertheless, as a matter of practical political concern, I suspect it would be quite important to expand the ways in which critical dispositions can be enacted and experienced in a wide range of practices in many different kinds of institutional settings, if we want those dispositions to become powerful enough to effect meaningful change across a social context. Many of the dispositions Marx traces via his analysis of the reproduction of capital are deeply tacit, so long as they are expressed only in that one slice of social experience.

   I may not be being direct enough about how I see all this speaking to the question about base/superstructure. Marx tends to mobilise a certain Hegelian vocabulary to treat, say, legal forms or political ideals as “reflections” of the sorts of practices I've been talking about above. This use of the term “reflection” is often translated by other commentators into a sort of sociologised base/superstructure analysis, such that the superstructure becomes a “reflection” of the base in, I suspect, a somewhat different sense than Marx is after. I suspect this introduces a slightly different set of connotations than Marx is after – his language and, I suspect, his intentions here are more Hegelian and, since I hear a great deal of Capital as a sort of critique of a facile essence/appearance distinction, such that the work spends a lot of time talking about the necessary relationship connecting essences and their forms of appearance, I have a sense that much of the translation of this into base/superstructure terms is missing a core element of Marx's argument (Marx himself doesn't use base/superstructure language often, although it is there). To make this argument convincingly, I would need to play off against a specific base-superstructure inflection of Marx's work – I'm not sure that's worthwhile for present purposes. Hopefully this comment provides enough of a sense of where I might go instead.

   In terms of your questions on contingency: I'd be interested in discussing this in relation to Hegel, but I have no real “reading” of Hegel on this issue – as in, I agree with you that it's both extremely interesting and incredibly complex, and I have no resolved positions. On one level, contingency in Marx is fairly simple: since he is tracing only what he regards as “necessary” (definitional) moments in the process of the reproduction of capital, anything else is “contingent” with reference to what can be theorised by his approach. In some cases, this contingency is quite literally aleatory – when illustrating his points, for example, Marx will often talk about things like crop failures, famines, wars, etc. – which are clearly presented as external to what he is theorising. Such aleatory events often play pivotal roles in how things play out on the ground – and this is explicitly acknowledged in the text.

   On another level, there are certain forms of what are essentially “structural contingency” that are to some degree encompassed within the analysis: certain aspects of the reproduction of capital that “necessarily” create certain forms of contingency in the sense that the outcome cannot be predetermined by this theory, but the theory nevertheless provides grounds to expect a recurrence a certain forms of conflict, crisis, etc. The paradigmatic example involves contestations over the length of the working day – where Marx opens both the intrinsic structural possibility for a certain form of dispersed conflict, the sorts of identities and discourses likely to arise in the course of the conflict, restrictions on the form in which such conflicts can be resolved, and the consequences of those sorts of resolutions – but can say nothing about which empirical social actors will participate in or “win” any particular contestation: “between equal rights, force decides” – the story of the “force” used in this chapter, for and against the campaign for the normal working day, is full of aleatory events – a fact underscored by the discussion, after the main narrative which relates to England, about the very different ways such things play out in other countries. In this story, the theoretical approach both is and isn't useful – it can help make sense of aspects of this conflict, but it also leaves a great deal unexplained.

   Marx doesn't seem troubled by this – and this position is, I think, consistent with other comments he makes about on-the-ground assertions of agency: he responds at some point to critics who want him to say more about the revolution and what sort of society should succeed capitalism, by arguing that it's not his intention to make recipes for the cook shops of the future. What he does, instead, in Capital, is draw attention to certain potentials we have constituted unawares, while also trying to make sense of what capitalism is, so that we aren't confusing the sorts of dynamic transformations through which capitalism reproduces itself, with transformations that involve a more emancipatory appropriation of alienated potentials in the construction of new forms of social life.

   Sorry to go on for so long. I suspect you could say much more interesting things than I can in relation to contingency in Hegel – and I would be interested in having that discussion, if you feel like sketching out what you think on the issue. On a more general level, I'd like to hear your criticisms of Hegel – this is one of the things I've tried to work through with Marx, whether he distances himself from Hegel sufficiently in his appropriation, and it would be really useful to me to think through what Hegel himself is doing in a more adequate way. Other things, though, may strike you as more interesting to discuss – that's fine. Not trying to predetermine the lines of conversation, but just to express an interest in further discussion.]]>
6. behrensph says:

   February 17, 2012 at 7:52 pm

   I would enjoy seeing features like this in Skyrim, everything I missed in the game put together So many good functions.