I find any TV Shows, literature, movies etc, to work really well when the situation is set in a small, limited space.

Examples include:

Jean Paul Sartre – No Exit
Franz Kafka – The Metamorphosis
Mike Leigh – Abigail’s Party
Sapphire and Steel – 1,2,3rd seasons (the ones I have seen)
Martin Parr’s version of Doctor Faustus starring Christopher Staines at the Rose Theatre, Bankside, London.

It always seems to be a great formula, 1-4 characters, one room, or building and lots of jeopardy, betrayal, tragedy and suspense. The last play, starring Staines, is set at the Rose Theatre (the original site of Shakespeare’s plays) which no matter what play is on, always intensifies the claustrophilia, as the audience sits on the stage with the actor(s).

We live in a Disaster Capitalist state. Naomi Klein pointed out one of Milton Freidman’s tactics of using events of terror and catastrophe- from Earthquakes to Suicide Bombers- to play political spin to the advantage of the neoliberal agenda.

The horrific attack on the Manchester Arena may be used to Theresa May’s advantage – a strong military interventionist attitude will serve as the ‘solution’ to the ‘moment of vertigo’ caused by such shocks.

I just purchased this book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Being-Grabs-Speculative-Anarcheology-Metaphysics/dp/1785420283

Hilan Bensusan – Everything is capital

This is a book on the metaphysics of contingency. It looks at what could be otherwise, at what lacks the weight of necessity, at what is up for grabs. Aristotle maintained that there could be no knowledge of the impermanent. Since then, metaphysics has endeavored to find out what really is permanent, non-accidental and resilient – substances that endure, substrata underneath different qualities, fixed principles, necessary connections. In contrast, Bensusan draws on the growing philosophical attention to the contingent. A speculative and anarcheological effort, Being up for Grabs aims to reach a broad and encompassing view of the sensible world while conceiving it as lacking any arché. The book emerges as a remarkable exercise in speculative anarcheology.

In Salvatore Lupo’s The History of the Mafia he kicks off criticising other historians who devote too much effort digging through etymological records of the term and who manage to find ‘origins’ as far back as say the 13th century. Lupo declares it is the revolutions during the 19th century that are of most importance when talking about mafia. He observes that the eastern part of the island of Sicily did not develop the mafia, it is mainly on the western side of the island that the mafia really took off.

The abolition of the feudal system came with the concept of camorra – a sort of proto-mafia. This is prior to the unification of Italy. During this dismantling of the ancien regimes there began a ‘democratization of violence’. He doesn’t attribute this to property law, as it seems to be exclusively western-Sicily that had the problems of mafia.

A number of reforms were carried out under the Bourbons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Bourbon and so the Napoleonic period began in Sicily. An strange dynamic developed between thieves/bandits, the new police forces and the general citizens, ‘the companies at arms’ seems to have emerged with a prior understanding and rapport with thieves, whereby thefts would involve a negotiation process where some goods were returned, but thieves kept some of the loot and ‘captains’ would be awarded a ‘prize’ for arbitration. 

Lupo makes the point that during these turbulent and violent times, there was a shifting of the wealth in the society. It didn’t matter who took what side, republican, anti-Bourbon, it was those who were most effective and loyal to the liberal aristocracy that became the most respected mafiosi.

The protection of property was secured through patronage of thieves, which started off a form of clientelism. This was mainly to protect livestock, rather than land.

There is a three level system: 
[list=1]
[*]The ones who committed the crimes
[*]The ones who negotiate
[*]The organisers who stayed on their own lands, receiving animals on their lands and deciding who deserves to be killed.
[/list]
Rather than viewing the mafia as a holdover from Feudalism, there is more and more evidence of the mafia being a weapon of an ‘aborted’ bourgeoisie, which utilised intimidation upwards and downwards the social hierarchy.

Here is great lecture about Platform Capitalism, the new cut throat and highly precarious world we live in has lots of ‘gigs’, ‘sharing’ micro-jobs that amount to very little wages and high maintenance costs with no employment rights whatsoever.

Who was John Locke?

Locke was the most important early-modern English philosopher. He was born in 1632 and died in 1704, he was a medical doctor and his political writings are some of the most influential writings for Anglo-American political philosophy to this day.

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

He wrote this essay while on exile in Holland, after a plot to assassinate Charles II was discovered and Locke was a suspect, as he was associated with the assassins. He returned with the soon to be Queen Mary and returned after the Glorious Revolution of 1689.

Locke offered an empiricist counter point  to Descartes. All ideas and knowledge come from experience for Locke. This means in particular, that there can be no innate ideas. For Locke, the mind is an empty cabinet or a blank slate, which is also known as tabula rasa on which experience writes.

The crux of the rationalist and empiricist debate really lies on how we explain our possession of ideas that seemingly could not come from experience. For example – infinity or perfection.

An empiricist will have no problem explaining how we can get the idea of the color grey, or red, or the idea of a chipmunk. These are things that I experience. Some are simple ideas, some are complex ideas, but I can get these from experience.

On the other hand, rationalists like Descartes would point out, there are some ideas in our mind that seem like they could not come from experience. Infinity is one of them. How could we get the idea of infinity from experience? How could we get the idea of perfection from experience?

For example: how many geometrical points lie along a line segment that is six inches long? The answer is that we know there is actually an infinite number, why? The points are infinitely small.

How could that idea come from experience? Rationalists say they couldn’t, hence they must have some other source.

It might be worth mentioning that we could say that the empiricist might declare how we get the notion of infinity from experience as- you get the notion of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and then dot dot dot. What the rationalist says is what does ‘dot dot dot’ mean? 😀 It does mean in fact, ‘go on listing numbers forever’; forever already presumes the idea of infinity.

Like all empiricists, Locke is compelled by his view to a psychological inventory of the ideas of the mind. He starts with essentially, all the ideas in the mind, he’s got to do an inventory, explain them, describe them. Why? Does he want to be a psychologist? No. We have to do an inventory of the mind and then figure out what ideas represent real things in the world. This will then allow us to give a critical analysis of our knowledge.

For Locke, we receive simple, indivisible ideas from sensation and reflection.  
[list]
[*]Sensation: This means whatever I perceive in the world through my five senses, also, although Locke doesn’t say much about this, it also refers to internal physical sensations, i.e. stomach aches.
[*]Reflection: This means my own awareness of my own mental phenomena. It is the fact of how I can reflect on the ideas of my mind.
[/list]
In terms of the basic categories of all types of ideas, we receive either from sensation or reflection, they all divide for Locke into a few basic categories.

Locke’s basic categories 
[list]
[*]Extension
[*]Solidity
[*]Motivity – the ability to affect something else
[*]Mobility – the passive ability to be affected by something
[*]Perceptivity or thinking
[*]Existence
[*]Duration
[*]Number
[/list]
What matters here is these are in effect, the main categories of all possible properties that anything in the world can have. Our mind takes these simple ideas in and the combines them into complex ideas.

For example, the idea of a table has to be a complex idea. It has lots of characteristics, it has mass, color, shape, texture – all of these are simple ideas but combined, form a complex idea of a table.

Ideas received through sensation correspond to qualities in objects having the power to cause the ideas. This is a very simple and straight forward view, my mind is being affected by objects in the world that cause sensations in it.

Here, Locke makes a famous distinction between what he calls primary and secondary qualities.
 
[list]
[*]Primary qualities: in the subject and in the object – size, volume, mass, velocity and number. These are what physical sciences such as Newtonian physics of his day were concerned with. They cause the simple ideas. The property I perceive, that is the property ‘in my mind’ is also ‘in the object’.
[*]Secondary qualities: color, taste and sound. These are different. They are powers of the objects primary qualities to cause ideas in my mind, that do not resemble anything in the object.
[/list]
Let’s see if we can’t break this down. The table for instance, is brown in color, is an idea in my mind, it is being caused by something real in the object, BUT, brown is a secondary quality so Locke is not assuming that ‘brownness’ is not a property of the real ‘object in the world’. It may just be a secondary quality, that is to say he is not assuming that the table really is brown.

If you are wondering why this happening, here is a very simple example. You look up at night at the stars, they appear to twinkle, although it is a real experience we have, but we know that the stars aren’t actually twinkling, it is the result of turbulence in the atmosphere. The twinkling is a secondary quality, it is something real we are experiencing, but it’s not actually true of the star itself.

What lies behind this distinction is that Locke actually assumes the metaphysical truth of the atomic theory or the corpuscular account of matter. This is to say that Locke thought that all these physical substances are composed of tiny, insensible atoms. We can’t experience them, but that’s probably what the material substance is composed of. He is assuming that what the objects are composed of don’t have secondary qualities. Atoms don’t have color, sound, but they cause color and sound to appear in our minds.

Another gift from @”thetrizzard” 

Please feel free to discuss the contents of this PDf here.

This is a book by Paul Mason, I am not familar with this guy and this PDF was kindly shared via email by @”thetrizzard” 

I am sure it will be a valuable source for future discussion, please feel free to comment on it here.

Nick Land is perhaps the most mind-bending philosopher I have ever encountered, with the exception of Deleuze and Guattari. Here is one of his works, ‘Fanged Noumena’.

For anyone willing to tackle Jean Baudrillard, this is the thread for you!

Included are two PDFs, one is the Routledge Critical Thinkers version and the other is some selected writings.