Tim Christiaens
@TimChristiaens5
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Political philosopher working on critical theory and economic thought. Assistant Professor at Tilburg University.
Joined November 2019
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Over the moon that my book 'Digital Working Lives' is now officially out with
@RLPGBooks
🥳🥳. The book discusses the obstacles and opportunities for fostering worker autonomy in the gig economy. Expect lots of criticisms of
#Uber
,
#Amazon
, and
#Deliveroo
. A thread below 🧵
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Started reading Kohei Saito’s Karl Marx’ Ecosocialism over the weekend, and I understand the hype. The book is really brilliant. The first chapter on alienation in the Paris Notebooks is one of the best things I have read about a text that has been commented on ad nauseam.
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I have started reading Kohei Saito's Marx in the Anthropocene and I thought it would be a nice idea to summarize the individual chapters throughout the reading process. First up: the introduction.
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First reading of the winterbreak, The Eye of the Master by
@mattpasquinelli
. Almost finished, but the chapters on Babbage and industralization, the history of cybernetics, and Hayek’s theory of the mind are already particular highlights.
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Been reading Michael Hardt's The Subversive Seventies. After a couple of historical chapters, Hardt comes with a brilliant analysis about how to think about the relations between different forms of domination (capitalism, patriarchy, racism, ableism, etc.). Worth a thread 🧵
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At the suggestion of
@tom_swing
I will be writing summaries of Mute Compulsion by
@sorenmau
over the next few days. Up first: the introduction 🧵
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Feel like I could literally teach a full course on democratic theory with just this book.
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A summary in tweets of chapter 1 of Pasquinelli’s The Eye of the Master, in which he stipulates his historical epistemology 🧵
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Given the apparent interest in The Eye of the Master by
@mattpasquinelli
, I thought I might do another summary-in-tweets of the individual chapters. First up: the introduction 🧵
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Just started reading Double Shift by
@Unemployedneg
. The intro is already very promising. Will be writing a review of the book as well, so keep posted!
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I made some chapter-by-chapter notes on Søren Mau's book Mute Compulsion lately. It is an excellent introduction to Marx but also provides some argued positions for current debates in Marxist theory. To wrap up, I thought it would be nice to gather all summaries in 1 thread. 🧵
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New paper of mine in the latest issue of the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy on the question of Foucault’s conversion to neoliberalism.
New issue of the Journal includes these provocative reflections on Foucault and neoliberalism - great essay by
@TimChristiaens5
. Read and share, really fantastic work here.
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This list shows quite aptly the pro-analytic bias in Anglophone philosophy and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The first somewhat continental philosopher is Habermas on place 103 (!). 1/5
My new analysis of the most-cited philosophers in the Stanford Encyclopedia (as a measure of influence in what I call "mainstream Anglophone philosophy"). I'll follow up later with various demographic analyses.
As usual, David Lewis tops the list:
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Teaching the Fragment on Machines from Marx’ Grundrisse this afternoon. For a lot of students, this will be their first time reading Marx. Consider it a baptism of fire 😅
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Chapter 1 of my tweet summary of Mute Compulsion, in which Søren Mau does a conceptual analysis of "the power of capital" in Marx. 🧵
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Since it's
#RedBooksDay
today to celebrate left-wing books (and since that's basically what I do here every day of the year), I thought I would write about 10 left-wing books that have been very dear to me and to which I still return a lot. Here wo go ... 🧵
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Paper on the political philosophy of platform cooperativism is taking shape.
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My forthcoming book 'Digital Working Lives' has a cover 🥳 Proofs, index, etc. have been approved, so now waiting for the official release next month. Those curious to know more about worker autonomy and the gig economy can read the thread linked below.
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Sadly, Antonio Negri died yesterday😥 Still remember how, as a philosophy BA student only interested in Heidegger, I bought Empire because I couldn't grasp Deleuze&Guattari. It was a revelation. Put me on a track to study political philosophy ever since.
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With the summer break slowly dawning, time to read on classics I hadn’t yet gotten around to reading. Like this one: Veronica Gago’s Neoliberalism from Below, about why we shouldn’t theorize “informal markets and workers” as somehow lacking vis-à-vis formal free markets.
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A summary in tweets of chapter 2 from Matteo Pasquinelli's The Eye of the Master. Here, Pasquinelli relates the prehistory of computational thinking in Babbage and Lovelace to the history of industrialisation. 🧵
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Preparing this week’s lectures about Stuart Hall’s theory of ideology and Marx’ theory of alienation. Students often find Hall incredibly hard to read (these are first-year BAs), but the pay-off is always great once they get his point.
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Once you try to figure out what Negt & Kluge exactly mean by “the public sphere as illusory synthesis of the totality of society”, you know you packed some beach reading material for your holidays.
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A tweet-based summary of chapter 3 in The Eye of the Master, one of my personal favorites on the machinery question in the 19th century 🧵
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The proofs for my upcoming book 'Digital Working Lives' are in! The book explores the meaning of worker autonomy in the gig economy. It will appear with
@RLPGBooks
in November of this year. A small thread below. 1/
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The summary on chapter 2 from Mau’s Mute Compulsion, in which he situates his argument in the history of Marxist theories of power. 🧵
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Just received the paperback copies of my book Digital Working Lives 🥳
You can order the book here:
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Started Toscano’s Late Fascism. First chapter already contains a valuable insight: the ‘abandoned white working class’ explanation of fascism ignores (1) that this group is an atomistic mass and not a class, and (2) the working class really isn’t so homogeneously white.
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Baudrillard’s Beaubourg effect in action: the masses so enthusiastically take up a technology that it collapses under its own weight.
AI researcher James Zou says AI models are getting "substantially worse" in capabilities over time, potentially as a result of interacting with humans
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Nostalgic reading this morning. Still remember 20-year old me who was exclusively into Heideggerian ontology and deconstructive ethics, buying Hardt & Negri’s Empire on a whim and realizing how great contemporary political philosophy was. And 10 years later, here we are.
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A summary in tweets of chapter 3 from Mau’s Mute Compulsion. Here, he assesses Marx’ theory of alienation from the 1844 Manuscripts. 🧵
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Publication alert 🚨 My paper on Platform Cooperativism, workplace democracy, and freedom as non-domination is out in
@EJPTheory
is out 🥳 It defends worker-owned cooperative platforms as an alternative to exploitative practices in the gig economy.
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One risk of having students read Shoshanna Zuboff's Surveillance Capitalism is that they get stuck into identifying tech companies with Bond villain-like manifestations of pure evil and ordinary people with complete innocence. Hard to get them off the moral high horse afterwards.
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Happy to announce I just signed my permanent contract with
@TilburgU
as assistant professor in philosophy 🥳 🎉
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And now the tweeted summary of chapter 4 of Pasquinelli’s The Eye of the Master. This time, a close-reading of Marx on the machinery question and the general intellect. 🧵
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My Political Philosophy students have a very busy day with me with two lectures on a single day! First Saskia Sassen and Wolfgang Streeck on the power of financial markets over governments and companies. Then Gramsci and Negri & Hardt on the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism.
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Got an email from
@RLPGBooks
that my book on the meaning of worker autonomy in platform work will appear in paperback next month 🥳 already available for pre-order. A thread about its contents below.
Link for pre-order:
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Today, a summary of chapter 4 of Mau’s Mute Compulsion, in which he moved from Marx’ theory of alienation to the theory of ‘corporeal organization’. 🧵
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I am shocked with how easily some European governments accept obvious war crimes committed by Israel, and even try to outlaw political opposition. This is not only a sign of Western moral bankruptcy in international relations but also of the decline of internal democratic norms.
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New paper is out 🥳 I argue that the Future of Work literature often presents technological innovation as a given, while reducing public policy to managing the negative side-effects on workers. Basic income to counter technological unemployment e.g. takes automation as a given...
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There's a lot of debate about the op-ed by
@DanielZamoraV
and
@MitchellMDean
on Foucault and the confessional turn in (neo)liberal politics. The quality of the criticisms however is rather disappointing sadly. So here's my take on it in a thread. 1/
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A summary of chapter 3 from Kohei Saito's Marx in the Anthropocene. This time the subject is Georg Lukacs' interpretation of metabolism theory in Marx.
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The defense went great. Lots of good questions and a convivial atmosphere despite the online format. From now on, it will be Dr. Tim Christiaens ;) Thanks to everyone here in the Twitterverse for their encouragement.
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Ultimately, Saito claims that Marx experienced an epistemological break. However, not in 1845 when writing the German Ideology but in 1868, when Marx' interest in the ecological sciences pushed him toward ... degrowth communism.
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That would’ve been an immediate reject, whereas the opposite scenario can easily pass for a “complete overview of the discipline”. The effect is mainly unintended scientific monoculture. Analytic philosophers don’t even realize how narrow the confines of their discipline are. 5/6
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Happy to announce I will be moving to
@TilburgU
next academic year as assistant professor in continental philosophy and economic ethics 🥳
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Chapter 5 of Søren Mau’s Mute Compulsion, the last chapter of part I. It leads to the first key finding of the book: the source of economic power/mute compulsion in the metabolic interaction between man and nature. 🧵
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Chapter 2 of Kohei Saito’s Marx in the Anthropocene on how Engels shifted interpretations of Marx away from ecology 🧵
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First implication imo is that we shouldn’t believe analytic philosophers who claim that the analytic/continental-divide is over. Writing a paper with 50 references to analytic philosophers and one to Habermas or Sartre is not a fruitful integration of both traditions. 2/5
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Just noticed yesterday was Antonio Negri's birthday. He turned 88! A good time to rewatch the documentary on his life, A Revolt that Never Ends.
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New paper coming soon 🙂 if you ever wonder how to discuss social conflict in Future of Work debates, I use Castoriadis’ theory of workplace conflicts and the history of Amazon Mechanical Turk to explain how worker resistance partially shapes technological development.
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Now chapter 5 of Kohei Saito's Marx in the Anthropocene where Saito attacks the automation enthusiasm of techno-optimists like Nick Srnicek and Aaron Bastani. With help from my notes, 30 pages of dense summary that I somehow will have to compress into a 1000-word review 😬
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Just started reading Benjamin Labatut’s The Maniac, a novelization of the life of John von Neumann. Absolutely gripping from the start. This is, for instance, how Labatut introduces us to Neumann.
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The summary continues with chapter 1 on Marx’ theory of metabolism, the chapter closest to Foster and Saito’s previous work.
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The book starts from three things coming to an end today. (1) Fukuyama proclaimed a capitalist end of history and traditional Marxists view historical materialism as a progression toward the end of history, but the ecological crisis puts us for a potential end of *human* history.
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This morning chapter 7 of Mau’s Mute Compulsion, on the relation between class oppression and other forms of difference, mainly gender and race. 🧵
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Just finished reading this article on coloniality and the production and maintenance of AI by
@james_muldoon_
and Boxi Wu in Philosophy & Technology.
Excellent piece for anyone interested in an overview of the post- and decolonial critiques of AI.
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Just finished making slides for a lecture on Charles Mills' critique of Rawlsian theory and moving on to Mouffe's critique of Rawls. So basically I'm going to spend pretty much half of the classes in my Political Philosophy course next semester on why not to trust Rawls.
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Lastly, this is not a criticism of Eric’s citation list. He points out the surprisingly low ranking of non-anglophone philosophers in the blogpost. But analytic philosophers ought to reflect on why so few of their big names have any influence beyond their own journals.6/6
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(3) Also capitalist realism à la Fisher comes at an end. Ecosocialists are actively imagining alternatives to capitalism. Reviving Marx' writings about the ecology of capitalism could help. Marx wrote notebooks about natural science that construct a helpful theory of metabolism.
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Off to a conference in Dublin on labour platforms and collective action in good company.
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Political philosophy or epistemology in English without ever knowing about Foucault. Just imagine if someone would’ve submitted an entry for the Stanford Encyclopedia on political inequality that discusses Foucault, Marx, and Gramsci but never mentions Rawls or Dworkin. 4/6
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(2) The Anthropocene reveals the end of nature as an independent entity distinct from human society. However, while Latourians derive from this an ontological monism that cancels the human/non-human-distinction, Saito defends a dualistic theory of metabolic rifts.
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Nearing the end of my summary of Kohei Saito's Marx in the Anthropocene with now chapter 6 on Marx as a degrowth communist. 🧵
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And now up for the seventh and final chapter of Kohei Saito's book Marx in the Anthropocene. In this chapter, Saito deepens the theory of degrowth communism as a consistent project. 🧵
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Franco Berardi: “If I speak of desertion today,it is because I think that social solidarity is out of the picture. As long as the labor market will be overwhelmed by precariousness, and competition among workers and migrants, no autonomy will be possible.”
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Very true 👇 Henri Lefebvre distinguishes genuine free time from ‘constrained time’, which is officially leisure but swallowed by administrative tasks. We need a similar distinction for work time: time spent on actual labor vs time wasted on admin stuff required to do your job.
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Sunday morning reading. If we’re ever reviving the y2k aesthetic in the humanities, we should bring back some the classics from the 90s.
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The Americans catching up with Poulantzas from the ‘70s?
Prominent political philosopher Philip Pettit has written a new book that explores why the state is the elephant in the room of political theory, too long ignored, & how to put this right. Read the Intro of The State to learn more:
#PoliticalPhilosophy
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Wrote a review of The Double Shift by
@Unemployedneg
(
@VersoBooks
) for Boundary 2 Online. I argue that ideology theories should explain both the defeats and successes of workers against domination. Put briefly, an excellent book you should all read!
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Secondly, I suspect that the bias comes not from actively dismissing continental philosophers (the big names all have pages on the Stanford Encyclopedia), but from ignoring their contributions to the big fields of research. You can read entire libraries of textbooks on … 3/5
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Up for chapter 4 of Kohei Saito's Marx in the Anthropocene, in which Saito takes on posthumanist thinkers like Jason Moore and Bruno Latour.
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Just over half-way with a summary of chapter 5 of The Eye of the Master. This chapter concludes the part on industrial capitalism and the machinery question as the prehistory of AI. 🧵
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Finally got my author copies of Digital Working Lives 🥳 it took a long time to send them over, but now a great early Christmas present 🎅🏻. I have a lot of people to thank for its completion, so rather than a long thread, you can read the acknowledgments below.
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Taught my last class before the Eastern break yesterday on one of my favourite Butler texts. Already in this 1988 article Butler attacks biological essentialism but also the strawman that gender then becomes purely a matter of individual choice or expression.
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New open-access paper out 🚨if you want to have a definitive answer whether
#Foucault
converted to
#neoliberalism
or not, this is the paper for you 😉 the short answer: no, but … 🧵
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Bleak days. Almost any conversations I’ve had lately is about basic social institutions slowly declining. International law, healthcare, public transport, academia. All are getting worse at a pace slow enough to avoid resistance, with some exceptional cases of public anger.
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From chapter 7 onwards, Pasquinelli shifts to documenting particular episodes in the history of AI. Here, he displaces the symbolic AI vs. connectionism to the controversy over image recognition. 🧵
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Sunday reading: chapter 9 of Søren Mau’s Mute Compulsion. 🧵
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On 12 May in Brussels, I will be reflecting on the future of socialism with, among others,
@DanielZamoraV
,
@AntonJaegermm
,
@cacrisalves
and
@dewaremerijn
. My talk will deal with platform cooperativism, but I'm mainly looking forward to the other talks! Really a fantastic line-up.
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Good news: just signed a book contract with
@RLPGBooks
for a book on
#WorkersAutonomy
and
#AlgorithmicControl
in the gig economy 🥳 Expect lots of post-workerism, Hartmut Rosa, and Uber bashing. Expected to appear at the end of 2022, beginning of 2023.
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A new year, a new chapter. Today chapter 6 from The Eye of the Master on the rise of cybernetics 🧵
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And now the final chapter of Søren Mau’s book Mute Compulsion summarized. We end with a discussion of surplus populations and economic crises. 🧵
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A summary of chapter 10 of Søren Mau’s Mute Compulsion. This discusses power in the workplace and will be a treat to fans of labor process theory. 🧵
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Australian universities are replacing professors with online modules that recycle recorded lectures and use untrained gig workers to respond to student e-mails. Sad to say I have stressed this risk for years now, but it was often dismissed.
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I used to make fun of one of my professors for assigning Henri Bergson books to every student who didn’t have a clear thesis topic. But now I’ve been doing exactly the same thing. Only, for me it’s Marcuse.
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Fun anecdote a Lacan scholar once told me: during the protests of Mai 68, Lacan spoke to the crowds saying, "If you are looking for a new master, ... well here I am!"
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Almost halfway in
@simschaupp
‘s book on capitalism and social metabolism. Compared to e.g. Saito it switches from interpreting Marx to detailed histories of the interactions between capital, labor and nature. Learning a lot on the role of mosquitoes in Caribbean slave revolts!
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