Poulantzas calls the state “the material condensation of…a relationship among classes and class fractions.” What I think he means by this is something rather complicated and interesting. Poulantzas’s point, as I understand it, is not simply that the state is necessitated by class divisions (which would be functionalism, which he rejects) or that class divisions cause the state (which would require a causal relationship between the base and the superstructure, which he also rejects). Rather, I think Poulantzas sees the state as a real abstraction. Class divisions are reflected at an ideological level, and this ideological reflection itself has a material form: the state.

I’ve been trying to pin down more precisely the logic of this position, because it strikes me as an extremely powerful form of materialism. I’m reminded of Damasio’s attempt to understand the mind as a physical reflection of the state of the body. The advantage of Marxism, though, is that the physical instantiations of the mental are no longer arbitrarily limited to the individual human brain. Here Marxism is also light-years ahead of eliminative materialism, as eliminative materialism is cartesianism in scientistic drag, still looking for mental phenomena somewhere inside the pineal gland. But thought doesn’t happen in brains, it happens in hands and throats, and pots of curry and flywheels.

I haven’t been following the recent blog discussions about speculative realism, but I did happen to see this interesting suggestion on Larval Subjects of an alternative to readings of Deleuze that posit the virtual and actual as opposites:

My strategy, by contrast, is to affirm that there are nothing but actualities and that when we speak of the relation between the virtual and the actual we are not referring to something other than the actual, but rather other actualities, such as genes, as they relate to a different actuality.

This is great, and captures a kind of materialism that also came up in something else I read this week, Poulantzas’s State, Power, Socialism. Read more↴

More on Michael Reiss and creationism. Some of the comments at Crooked Timber are interesting in their unargued assumption that the point of science lessons is to get students to believe certain things. I know it’s annoying when people use the “aah, the scientists are the real religionists” line, but it’s tempting in this case. But obviously one ought to figure out what is similar and what is different between science and religion. Reiss took some heat for calling creationism a “world-view,” but it is, in that it’s connected with a general method of making sense of the world, as science is, and it’s not at all obvious how these different methods could connect with one another. However, while modern science and certain religious positions might both be world-views, there’s still a difference of kind between the two. Read more↴

Via this post on a translating (or transliterating, I guess) the GNOME desktop to Shavian, I’ve been reading this interesting article on spelling reform, and thinking some more about the subject. It’s good to see an article address the most obvious problem with phonetic spelling, the fact that there’s no one mapping from words to pronunciations, because there’s no one accent. Still, I’m not convinced by the argument here. Read more↴

There’s been an absolutely absurd response to Michael Reiss’s eminently sensible suggestion that science teachers could use discussions of creationism to talk about the difference between science and non-science. Reiss said:

If questions or issues about creationism and intelligent design arise during science lessons they can be used to illustrate a number of aspects of how science works.

In response to which the New Scientist compared him to Sarah Palin, and a couple of Nobel laureates are calling for him to be sacked from his position as education director of the Royal Society. And of course Dawkins got involved.

I initially posted this just because I thought it was amusingly stupid. But now I think there may be something a bit more pernicious going on. A number of people objecting to Reiss have said things like “teach creation in religious studies,” or “keep it in philosophy class” (see e.g. the comments on that New Scientist blog post). What’s wrong about this is the suggestion that philosophy of science, or the question of the nature and bounds of science, is irrelevant to science itself. This is a problem because it implies a belief that a scientific worldview is somehow obvious, rather than a particular way of thinking that took a long time and a lot of trouble to develop.

If one takes leave of the book with a cautious reserve about everything that has so far attained honor and even worship under the name of morality, this in no way contradicts the fact that the whole book contains no negative word, no attack, no spite—that it lies in the sun, round, happy, like some sea animal basking among rocks. (Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, III IV, §1)

Infinite Thought has demanded, according to the rules of her new Dogmeme, that I write a post containing no criticism of anything; conveniently, today I have been behaving very much like a Nietzschean sea animal, sitting out on my deck (which is like a balcony but, being American, bigger) on a perfect Berkeley day, reading Etienne Balibar and listening to bassline records. Read more↴