Monday, December 12, 2016


Here is the abstract of paper, posing as a learned article, in the "Journal of the Theoretical Humanities". Its title is "LOSING STEAM AFTER MARX AND FREUD".  This gobbledygook is virtually unintelligible to even a well educated American.  It is an example of the crap you have purchased with the hundreds of billions of dollars you have forked over providing yourselves or your offspring what is called "a college education". Even if you have not spent a dime on college tuition for anyone, you can bet your bippy the tax dollars you have paid have supported this crap.   [clipper]

"This essay undertakes a critique of recent trends in affect theory from the standpoint of the “human motor”: a trope that presupposes a thermodynamic psychophysiology distended between energy conservation and entropy. In the course of reanimating thermodynamic motifs in Marx's labor power metabolics and Freud's trauma energetics, the essay broaches entropics as a poetics of depletion that offsets affect theories promoting open-system metaphors. Open-system affect theory sometimes amalgamates emancipatory post-humanist gestures inherited from Gilles Deleuze and FĂ©lix Guattari with neuroscientific terms. In the course of “liberating” affect from subject-oriented topoi, this “liberation-scientistic” admixture expropriates organic matter's degeneration over time. An “entropical” perspective also challenges Antonio Negri's Spinozaist affect conceived as a capacitating power that encounters obstacles but never limits. Both “liberation scientism” and “capacitation rhetoric” mimic capital's abstraction in infinitely expanding its potential to extract surplus value from finitely embodied labor. With enervation and deterioration at its crux, entropics illuminates how people might feel individuated by their respective struggles to safeguard scarce energy and forestall “heat death” while navigating simultaneous demands. The question is whether or not open-system motifs in affect theory can effectively register the political force of this struggle with depletion and present or imminent debilitation as its common ground.  [Journal of the Theoretical Humanities]

If you can explain in words of normal American (or British)  English conversation what is meant by:  "In the course of “liberating” affect from subject-oriented topoi, this “liberation-scientistic” admixture expropriates organic matter's degeneration over time."  I did understand the first four words and the last two, but I lost the meaning of everything else in between. Perhaps our new Secretary of Education will get this derailed train back on its track and bring REAL education to our young. [clipper]

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