Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“Chomsky and his coauthors argue that machine learning  — the discipline behind generative AI and other powerful algorithms — will ‘degrade our science and debase our ethics by incorporating into our technology a fundamentally flawed conception of language and knowledge.’ Chomsky has been fighting against this particular conception since the 1950s, so it’s not a surprise that he thinks it’s problematic for it to be released commercially. It’s less clear that his particular blend of cognitive science and politics can truly account for what ChatGPT and similar systems are up to . A competing  op-ed  from the  Wall Street Journal  penned by now deceased Henry Kissinger — a generational Chomsky nemesis — and coauthors argued that ChatGPT was as important a step as the printing press, with similarly wide-ranging implications for policy, foreign and domestic, and the status of knowledge. In a weird way, Chomsky actually agrees with t...

Although Challand is right to address the use of cultural activities in supporting political messages and mentions some of the positive achievements of the period, he is insufficiently critical of the weaknesses of the programs and policies militants proposed for the future. Revolutionary leadership was missing: the negative slogan of getting rid of the existing political system required a positive vision about the kind of society and polity with which demonstrators wanted to replace it. As many of Challand’s ideological references are Marxist, the absence of any discussion of the major issue of the movements’ lack of alternative economic programs, and in particular the fact that there was no explicit challenge to dominant neoliberal economic policies, is surprising. In other words, there is little reference to the economic structures that determine political choices and constrain outcomes. Helen Lackner reviews Violence and Representation in the Arab Uprising Related The Arab Thermido...

So what if Putin likes Dostoyevsky? Related “ Lithuania - together with Latvia, Estonia and Poland - banned all Russian tourists , arguing they should not be enjoying democracy and freedom in Europe while their government attacks those very values in Ukraine.”

I highly recommend Sami Zubaida’s book Beyond Islam from which I have chosen these passages: Islamism, the cosmopolitan and the transnational We have seen how the leading Muslim modernist reformers were in many senses ‘cosmopolitan’. They formed part of the elite circles of intellectuals, aristocrats and politicians, and focused their efforts mostly within these elites. A subsequent generation of Muslim leaders turned to populism and mass mobilization, deploying a much more puritanical and nativist Islam – notably the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt under Hassan al-Banna, which emerged in 1928; these were the ‘fundamentalists’. Their ideology was one of a return to the purity of early Islam and the first generations – hence ‘Salafi’ ( salaf means ‘ancestors’); but their politics were essentially those of modern populist mass mobilization. Their appeal was largely that of national liberation from foreign rule, but also, essentially, from foreign customs and lifestyles; they rejected not o...

  “The essential dominance of a particular class in society is maintained not only, although if necessary, by power, and not only, although always, by property. It is maintained also and inevitably by a lived culture: that saturation of habit, of experience, of outlook.”          Raymond Williams He made his mission to reclaim culture from the literary elite

The new political cleavage doesn’t, as many suggest, reflect the distinction between the “elite” and the “masses”. It obscures it, helping conceal the fact that the political interests of the cleaner and the steelworker are far more similar than of either to Cleese or Bilimoria. Whether in south Wales or south London, workers suffer from the casualisation of work, the stagnation of wages, the imposition of austerity. Class is still the defining force shaping British lives The Frost Report

Before the next attack Once examined, the terms 'British values' and 'Western values' unspool into a sequence of connotative links connecting territory, birth and culture in a roughly 'historicist' manner.  It is a given that 'the West', for example, is not a geographical entity so much as a historically produced caste of national states comprising Europe and its colonies, from North America to Australasia.  This white West is connected to its supposed values through the crucial vector of culture.  Thus, it just so happens that white people are the legatees of a particular level of civilizational and cultural development that give them these unique, priceless assets such as democracy.  This necessitates forgetting how passionately and often violently democracy was resisted within the social formations of 'the West', as well as how much modern democratic revolutions owed to the decidedly 'non-Western' Haiti.  But the link between terri...

 "the militants of political Islam are not truly interested in discussing the dogmas that form religion. The ritual assertion of membership in the community is their exclusive preoccupation. Such a vision of the reality of the modern world is not only distressing because of the immense emptiness of thought that it conceals, but it also justifies imperialism’s strategy of substituting a so-called conflict of cultures for the one between imperialist centers and dominated peripheries. The exclusive emphasis on culture allows political Islam to eliminate from every sphere of life the real social confrontations between the popular classes and the globalized capitalist system that oppresses and exploits them. The militants of political Islam have no real presence in the areas where actual social conflicts take place and their leaders repeat incessantly that such conflicts are unimportant. Islamists are only present in these areas to open schools and health clinics. But these are nothi...

"In East-Central Europe, and especially in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, an anti-immigrant left has formed that is conscious and proud of how it departs from received images (allegedly received from the West) of the left as the defender of marginalized peoples and cultures. In attacking the “multiculturalism” that liberal elites have championed, this anti-multicultural left positions itself as the defender of the hard-working nation against dangerous outsiders, both rich and poor. [T]he anti-multicultural left accepts, once again, the terms set by that liberalism which it sees as its chief competitor. The central principle of liberalism is the principle of separation—the insistence on looking only at one sphere of social reality at a time, and on looking at entities within these spheres as separate entities pursuing separate interests. The anti-multicultural left likewise takes each aspect of the system separately, rejecting out of hand internationalist talk of interconnecti...

What kind of political discourse, with what social and po­ litical effects, is contemporary tolerance talk in the United States? What readings of the discourses of liberalism, colonialism, and impe­rialism circulating through Western democracies can analytical scru­ tiny of this talk provide? The following chapters aim to track the so­ cial and political work of tolerance discourse by comprehending how this discourse constructs and positions liberal and nonliberal subjects, cultures, and regimes; how it figures conflict, stratification, and dif­ ference; how it operates normatively; and how its normativity is ren­dered oblique almost to the point of invisibility. Part of the project of this book, then, is to analyze tolerance, espe­ cially in its recently resurgent form, as a strand of depoliticization in liberal democracies. Depoliticization involves construing inequality, subordination, marginalization, and social conflict, which all require political analysis and...

"Whoever until this day emerges victorious, marches in the triumphal procession in which today’s rulers tread over those who are sprawled underfoot. The spoils are, as was ever the case, carried along in the triumphal procession. They are known as the cultural heritage. In the historical materialist they have to reckon with a distanced observer. For what he surveys as the cultural heritage is part and parcel of a lineage [ Abkunft : descent] which he cannot contemplate without horror. It owes its existence not only to the toil of the great geniuses, who created it, but also to the nameless drudgery of its contemporaries. There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism. And just as it is itself not free from barbarism, neither is it free from the process of transmission, in which it falls from one set of hands into another. The historical materialist thus moves as far away from this as measurably possible. He regards it as his task to brush...

"Anglo-Saxon anthropologists who with good reason translated moral idea into social fact, reserved ‘culture’ for primitive societies and ‘civilization’ for modern societies. So there is a good deal of  interference on the line and fog on the road. Let us try a clarification."   Civilisation, a Grammar

How Global Entertainment Killed Culture  From Notes on the Death of Culture by Mario Vargas Llosa Llosa is one of Latin America's best novelists, who moved from the left to become an advocate and enforcer of neoliberal policies in Peru.

London's exodus

" The essay seems to vacillate between the urge to expose the hypocrisy or mendacity of power in its use of humanitarianism as char- ter for invasion and domination, a critique that might still leave a (liberal) concept of the human intact, and a drive to expose a deeper, constitutive, and unredeemable involvement of the very concept of the human (and in particular, the suffering human) in the violence of geopolitical power. Repeatedly, though not consistently, Asad’s essay reaches for this sense of a deeper crisis of the modern concept of the human and its wider constellation rather than its (cynical, partial, and hypocritical) manipulation by power. But whether or not he subscribes to any version of the posthuman paradigm currently in vogue remains utterly unclear... Throughout the essay, as in much of Asad’s writing, one gets the sense that there are only these two sociocultural realities (and modes of thinking) in the world: the liberal-secular-modern (which is im...

" [T]here are tricks as to how to study “gender” in the Muslim world. If analysts attend to the social and economic factors, to the geographic and historical factors and actors, to culture as a dynamic entity that produces and is produced by social, economic, historic and geographic factors and actors, analysts, whether Asian or African or European or American, will be able to begin to understand and analyse social phenomena based on terms and methods that the local situation on hand itself determines, rather than script them  a priori  with research agendas that are connected to imperial policies, namely developmentalism and orientalist methodologies of culturalism, comparatism and assimilationism.” — Joseph Massad, Islam in Liberalism , pp. 211–12

"In opposition to the vulgar evolutionist brand of Marxism, Benjamin does not conceive the proletarian revolution as the natural or inevitable result of economic and technical progress, but as the critical interruption of an evolution leading to catastrophe."  — Michael Löwy “One can perceive as one of the methodological aims of this work to demonstrate the possibility of a historical materialism, that has annihilated in itself the idea of progress. Here is precisely where historical materialism has to dissociate itself from the bourgeois habits of thought."  — Walter Benjamin

Culture and Imperialism

"It is a peculiarity of capitalists and the bourgeoisie to think that we workers have no culture," adds the novelist, whose many tattoos include one of Karl Marx on his left arm. Argentine cleaner's double life as prize-winning novelist

" What a miserably grey one-dimensional place it would be if the dominant model of middle-of-the-road liberal secular capitalism became the only acceptable way of living." Assimilate now. Or else. See also "don't get too comfortable. Your existence here is conditional"