Archive for the ‘Critical Theory’ Category

The Ultimate Fighting Championship and Paradigm Change

Monday, June 8th, 2009

On Saturday June 23, Lyoto Machida won the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) light heavyweight championship after stopping champion Rashad Evans in the second round with a flurry of blows that, according to the moment’s conventional wisdom, he should not have been able to throw.

machida knockout

To save you the suspense, let me address right now why philosophers and other such deep thinkers should be drawn to the UFC and mixed martial arts: More than any phenomenon of today’s culture, the UFC provides one of the most direct, immediate and sometimes brutal example of paradigm change. What is accepted practice at one moment can change in a flash. Truths do not gradually blend into new truths. What happens is that old truths are blasted away in the blink of an eye. In the UFC we see this kind of explosive change all the time. In fact, what makes the UFC so interesting is that it has condensed hundreds of years of evolution into two decades. Sometimes, the creature called Mixed Martial Arts changes form perceptibly in the space of one five minute round. (more…)

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Heidegger and Gay Marriage

Friday, March 6th, 2009

What attracts me to philosophy and critical theory is that it answers questions. The answer may not be familiar, and indeed the answer may come with another question, but if philosophy can’t engage the questions that we debate, then it is not worth much. We need philosophy more than ever now. The kinds of ethical questions we must tackle at the beginning of the 21st century demand forms of direct and creative thinking. In fact, we find our conventional truths so often undermined today that the need for theoretical thinking is greater now than it has ever been.

All this is in the way of introduction to one of the more controversial issues the United States faces: the legalization of gay marriage. I don’t offer an answer to the question of whether it should be legalized or not (for me the question is not that interesting: of course it should. Full stop). The more interesting question is the source of the opposition to gay marriage. Why care? Naturally, there is a “moral” answer to this question. Opposition to gay marriage is rooted in intolerance, ignorance, hatred, etc. True enough, as far as it goes, but, like most moral statements, it doesn’t offer much in the way of understanding. We dismiss those who oppose gay marriage without exploring the fertile question of why it is such an issue in the first place. (more…)

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Critical Theory: Passing Thoughts

Saturday, February 28th, 2009

One of my favorite passages from Faulkner, Judith’s monologue upon giving Charles Bon’s letter to Quentin’s Grandmother, passing on something precious to someone she barely knows, strikes me as a weirdly accurate description of what happens on the internet:

 

…and then all of a sudden it’s all over and all you have left is a block of stone with scratches on it provided there was someone to remember to have the marble scratched and set up or had time to, and it rains on it and the sun shines on it and after awhile they don’t even remember the name and what the scratches were trying to tell, and it doesn’t matter. And so maybe if you could go to someone, the stranger the better, and give them something — a scrap of paper — something, anything, it not to mean anything in itself and them not even to read it or keep it, not even bother to throw it away or destroy it, at least it would be something just because it would have happened, be remembered even if only from passing from one hand to another, one mind to another, and it would be at least a scratch, something, something that might make a mark on something that was once for the reason that it can die someday, while the block of stone cant be is because it can never become was because it cant ever die or perish…(Absalom, Absalom!) (more…)

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