Digital Mind 🧠

🪵 The Threshold

Anything can be two contradictory things at once, including social systems

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tagsja-picks, deepthinking, xref, inspiration_and_speculation, trade, singleton, category/inspiration-and-speculation
aliases@varoufakis_technofeudalism_2023, loc. 56

4 min read

Anything can be two contradictory things at once, including social systems

Evidence

For centuries, light had divided the best minds, he said. Some, like Aristotle and James Maxwell, thought of light as a kind of disturbance in the ether, a wave that spreads outwards from an initial source – like sound does. Others, such as Democritus and Isaac Newton pointed out that, unlike sound, light cannot bend round corners – something waves do by their very nature – and thus it must be made of tiny things, or particles, travelling in a straight line before hitting our eye’s retina. Who was right? … My father’s life changed, or so he told me, when he read Albert Einstein’s answer: they were all right! Light is, at once, a stream of particles and a series of waves. But how could that be? Particles differ fundamentally from waves. They are located at only one point at any particular moment in time, they have momentum, and they move only in a straight line unless and until something gets in their way. Waves, by contrast, are oscillations of a medium, which is what allows them to turn corners and transport energy in many different directions at once. To prove, as Einstein had done, that light was both particles and waves was to admit that something can be two utterly contradictory things at once. … For Dad, the dual nature of light was the gateway to recognising the essential dualism underlying all of nature, and also in society. ‘If light could be two very different things at once,’ he wondered in a letter he wrote as a young man to his mother, ‘if matter is energy and energy matter,’ as Einstein had also discovered, ‘why must we cast life either in black-and-white terms or, even worse, in some shade of grey?’ — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 56

Categorization

  • DEEPTHINKING: The author seeds his whole analytical method: like light being wave and particle, capitalism can be simultaneously a market and a hierarchy/feudal order. This dialectical framing is the intellectual template for the entire book.
  • XREF: Connects to James C. Scott’s argument in Seeing Like a State about high-modernist simplification versus irreducible complexity, and to the author’s earlier critique of capitalocentrism. — connects to: Contradictory rationalities can symbiotically combine in one political subjectivity. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 125; Multiple sometimes conflicting identities can coexist in one subject’s politics — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 262; Contradictory perceptions can both be true simultaneously — , A Year of World Stories, 4077 (+11 more)

Broader Connections

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