Category: Gordon Hull
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By Gordon Hull I’ve been developing (first, second, third, fourth) some reflections on what Foucault means by a reference to “Chardino-Marxism,” a disturbing trend that he credits Althusser with “courageously fighting.” The real opposition point seems to be Roger Garaudy, a PCF intellectual who is a leader in the effort to establish a post-Stalinist humanist…
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By Gordon Hull This one has been percolating a while… Steven Thaler’s AI created a picture (below the fold), and Thaler has been using it to push for the copyrightability of AI-generated material. That endeavor has been getting nowhere, and a DC District Court just ruled on the question of “whether a work generated autonomously…
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By Gordon Hull The last couple of times (here then here), I’ve started trying to work through a disparaging reference in the mid-1960s Foucault to “Chardino-Marxism.” Foucault is associating it with Marxist humanism, and comparing it unfavorably to the Althusserian alternative. As I noted, the name Foucault uses is Teilhard de Chardin, but the consistent…
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By Gordon Hull Last time, I noted that mid-late 1960s Foucault aligned himself in favor of Althusser’s work on Marx, and against what he called “Chardino-Marxism,” which turns out to be a shorthand for humanist Marxism, in particular any efforts to synthesize Marx and Teilhard de Chardin, as well as (or rather, as exemplified by)…
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By Gordon hull In a 1966 interview with Madeline Chapsal, Foucault proposes that “our task currently is to definitively liberate ourselves from humanism” and offers the following example: “Our task is to free ourselves definitively from humanism, and it is in this sense that our work is political work, insofar as all the regimes of…
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By Gordon Hull Last time, I followed up on a reference in Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan’s Code to Foucault’s short text “Message ou bruit” (1966). Here I want to trace out some of the political implications of that text, or at least to suggest a path from it to some of his later work in the…
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By Gordon Hull Last time, I offered a quick synopsis of Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan’s excellent new book Code. Here, I’d like to track one specific Foucault reference in it. Geoghegan takes Lévi-Strauss’s Savage Mind as a central text in the ambivalence French theorists came to feel about American communication theories, and he notes that the…
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By Gordon Hull I made myself wait until I was settled into the summer to read Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan’s Code: From Information Theory to French Theory. It was absolutely worth the wait. Code offers a look into the role of cybernetic theory in the development of postwar French theory, especially structuralism and what Geoghegan calls…
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In the face of the general disaster of the Republican majority on the Supreme Court’s ongoing power grab in the student loan case, I worry that the damage of the LGBTQ Wedding Website decision, Creative LLC v. Elenis, will get overlooked. It seems to me, based mainly on a reading of Justice Sotomayor’s dissent, that…
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Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are well-known to hallucinate – to make up answers that sound pretty plausible, but have no relation to reality. That of course is because they’re designed to produce text that sounds about right given a prompt. What sounds kind of right may or may not be right, however. ChatGPT-3…
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