Recent reading
Nov. 17th, 2018 10:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
luzulaThe Progress of this Storm by Andreas Malm (2018)
This is a book about climate change that (surprise!) turns out to be in large part about picking apart and dismissing the philosophies of Bruno Latour and similar scholars. It's actually quite entertaining, in the same way as reading a review of a movie that someone really disliked. Apparently there are people saying things like: "Nature does not actually exist anymore, it's all socially constructed! Therefore we don't have to take it into consideration." Then there's a sort of mirror image of this where people say: "We need to see other things as having agency as well as humans! Actually it's the coal and oil doing the climate change, therefore climate change isn't our responsibility." Obviously neither of these positions are very helpful in the face of what's going on in the world.
Apparently Latour had some kind of moment of doubt when he said: "OMG climate change is really dangerous, how can people deny the science that proves it's happening?? ...oops, I have spent my life spreading the philosophy that scientific truth does not exist and is only determined by power relations." BUT he then went on to urge climate deniers to give up, not because they were actually objectively wrong, but because the climate science establishment was so much more powerful than they were. *headdesk*
Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber (2018)
I thought The Utopia of Rules was a bit disjointed and uneven, but in Bullshit Jobs Graeber is at the top of his form. It's about surveys (done in the UK and the Netherlands) showing that about a third of all workers think their jobs are both meaningless to themselves, have no redeeming social value, and usually don't even serve a useful purpose within the organization they work. Also there are a lot of testimonies and examples. Graeber gives a taxonomy of these jobs (which are overwhelmingly office jobs), talks about why we have them, how they affect the people who have them, and what we can do about it. The existence of these jobs is kind of counterintuitive, since capitalism is supposed to be lean and mean and efficient and lay off workers who don't contribute to profit (and in fact, does lay off blue collar workers, but apparently not white collar workers in the same way). Recommended!
This is a book about climate change that (surprise!) turns out to be in large part about picking apart and dismissing the philosophies of Bruno Latour and similar scholars. It's actually quite entertaining, in the same way as reading a review of a movie that someone really disliked. Apparently there are people saying things like: "Nature does not actually exist anymore, it's all socially constructed! Therefore we don't have to take it into consideration." Then there's a sort of mirror image of this where people say: "We need to see other things as having agency as well as humans! Actually it's the coal and oil doing the climate change, therefore climate change isn't our responsibility." Obviously neither of these positions are very helpful in the face of what's going on in the world.
Apparently Latour had some kind of moment of doubt when he said: "OMG climate change is really dangerous, how can people deny the science that proves it's happening?? ...oops, I have spent my life spreading the philosophy that scientific truth does not exist and is only determined by power relations." BUT he then went on to urge climate deniers to give up, not because they were actually objectively wrong, but because the climate science establishment was so much more powerful than they were. *headdesk*
Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber (2018)
I thought The Utopia of Rules was a bit disjointed and uneven, but in Bullshit Jobs Graeber is at the top of his form. It's about surveys (done in the UK and the Netherlands) showing that about a third of all workers think their jobs are both meaningless to themselves, have no redeeming social value, and usually don't even serve a useful purpose within the organization they work. Also there are a lot of testimonies and examples. Graeber gives a taxonomy of these jobs (which are overwhelmingly office jobs), talks about why we have them, how they affect the people who have them, and what we can do about it. The existence of these jobs is kind of counterintuitive, since capitalism is supposed to be lean and mean and efficient and lay off workers who don't contribute to profit (and in fact, does lay off blue collar workers, but apparently not white collar workers in the same way). Recommended!
(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-17 11:58 am (UTC)I propose putting those people in the middle of, say, a forest in Lapland at this time of the year, without any specific equipment or provisions, and see how they socially construct that. (If we want to be nice, we can rescue them after some suitable amount of time.)
I've got Bullshit Jobs on hold from the library, now I look forward to getting it even more!
(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-17 03:49 pm (UTC)I hope you enjoy Bullshit Jobs!
(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-17 10:54 pm (UTC)THE FUCK
(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-20 07:04 pm (UTC)