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damashummus.bsky.social
Anatarah عنترة
@damashummus.bsky.social
360 followers 230 following 1K posts
Scientist/Engineer. Very much form-determined. Editor @crittheoryworkgrp.bsky.social. he/him. *All typos are my own*.
CTWGwebsite.github.io
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damashummus.bsky.social
Went to the National library today, and I’m pretty sure I saw every conceivable edition and translation of Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah. The environment and ecology (not included below) section was also sick as hell!
A book that roughly translates to “sustainable agricultural development: active elements” A shelf of Arabic literary analysis English language history books Arabic social science shelf, which includes a beautiful Ibn Khaldun Muqaddimah edition
November 4, 2025 at 12:14 PM
damashummus.bsky.social
Beautiful.
Highlighted section: “Rather, "having history" means being interwoven in the dialectic, in the subject-object relationship. In other words, history consists in the fact that the life of the human being is not simply "his own," but constituted through the extra-human and alienated. To put it more simply: history is not a distinguishing quality of the human being, but rather the epitome of all suffering. True, the human being is conscious of history, as you go on to say, and it would be foolish to deny the distinction therein. But the human being cannot be spun from this knowledge, nor from "having history" as such. Knowing history and having history are not the same, and to date knowledge has changed little enough of what's decisive for history, suffering. On the other hand, however, "having history" extends far beyond consciousness; all of nature, as suffering, has infinite share in it. The proposition that "[i]n knowing history man is above history, although, on the other hand, he is in history," 48 is, in this form, illusory. The assertion that "man is free... from history in so far as he knows history" 49 cannot be maintained, at least not without mediation.”
October 31, 2025 at 11:14 AM
damashummus.bsky.social
Realization baby!
Highlighted section, but the whole paragraph pictured is great. “if there is anything 'bourgeois, and therefore unfit to serve as counter-concept to the bourgeois, it is this idea of catastrophe. Its presupposition is a "normal" functioning of the bourgeois order, for which said catastrophe is supposed to spell the end. However, this is exactly the illusion that bourgeois society has always harbored about itself. In opposition to this, the critique of political economy holds that, though it reproduces life, this mode of reproduction itself is permanent catastrophe, 2 and what we experience today as the fate of the market economy is not its collapse under external powers, but the fulfillment-indeed, the revelation-of its own principle. For it has always contained the threat of catastrophe for anyone "thrown" into it. Revolution is not this catastrophe, nor the ensuing "renewal," but rather: that the permanent catastrophe is brought to a halt. The seeming radicalism that desires catastrophe-assuming it's desired in earnest, and not just diluted into one of sheer interiority-is in fact complete agreement with has always-already been; what this radicalism wants, down in its depths, is for everything to finally reveal its true face. In the time of concentration camps, what is radical is not the desire for catastrophe, but for halting the horror that now freely admits itself to be.”
October 30, 2025 at 8:52 PM
damashummus.bsky.social
Both are fun. The Anthropocene book I am chipping away very slowly tho. Double-checking a lot of its sources as it is quite rich!
A philosophy book titled “Laughing and Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior” by HELMUTH PLESSNER TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY JAMES SPENCER CHURCHILL AND MARJORIE GRENE WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY J M BERNSTEIN THE Evolution OF Knowledge: RETHINKING SCIENCE FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE By Jürgen Renn
October 15, 2025 at 1:32 PM
damashummus.bsky.social
Sellars’ manifest vs scientific image distinction.
A book called “CURRICULUM OF THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF MARXISM-LENINISM” translated from a Vietnamese ML textbook. It shows two contrasting images split in the middle. On the left, a relaxed fisherman with the subtitle “ordinary consciousness,” and on the right, a fisherman who caught a fish, but is deeply inquisitive; asking all sorts of question about it. The subtitle for the left image is “scientific consciousness.” Humorously, the image, more or less, indicates that science is when you cannot relax!
September 18, 2025 at 1:31 PM
damashummus.bsky.social
Tfw the work is both politically correct and scientifically correct
20th century biology legends. From left to right: Richard Lewontin, Stephen Jay Gould, and Richard Levins.
September 17, 2025 at 11:03 AM
damashummus.bsky.social
Pictured: an otherwise smart guy being uncurious and dumb. I hate both fake humility and arrogance, but try to think about politics deeper man. Caring is not a weakness.
@SashaGusevPosts on Twitter: “Huge blow to Marxist theory: a working class voter coalition eagerly exchanges material losses for symbolic victories.” To quoted retweet by Joe Weisenthal on unemployment.
September 5, 2025 at 5:58 PM
damashummus.bsky.social
In fact, I’ll just give you what I think in the words of Deleuze below.
Deleuze: The Party's? No, it never concerned me, something else that saved me, you understand...The discussions about Stalin, what they've discovered recently, the horrors committed by Stalin, I mean, everyone has known this for quite a while. And about the revolution going wrong, [Deleuze laughs] that makes me laugh because, really, who are they trying to kid? (de qui on se moque?) When the "New Philosophers" (nouveaux philosophes) discovered that the revolution turned out badly, you really have to be a bit dimwitted (débile), since we discovered that with Stalin. So henceforth, the road was open, everyone discovered it, for example, quite recently, about the Algerian revolution - "Hey, it turned out badly" because they fired on students!' Who ever thought that a revolution would go well? Who? Who? People say the English could not have a revolution, but that's absolutely false. I mean all that... Today we live with such a mystification... The English had a revolution, they killed their king, etc., and who did they get? They got Cromwell. And English Romanticism, what is it? It's a long meditation on the failure of the revolution. They didn't wait for [André] Glucksmann to reflect on the failure of the Stalinian revolution. They had one, really, they had one. And the Americans never get discussed, but the Americans blew their revolution, as badly as if not worse than the Bolsheviks. Let's not kid about it! People never talk about the Americans when they... even before the War of Independence - and "independence," I say --, they presented themselves worse than... or better than a new nation, they went beyond nations exactly like Marx spoke later of the proletariat: they went beyond nations, nations are finished! They bring forth a new people, they have a true revolution. Just as the Marxists count on universal proletariatization, the Americans counted on universal… That revolution failed (a foiré), all revolutions fail, everybody knows this, and now people are pretending to "rediscover" that. They really have to be dimwitted. As a result, everyone is getting lost in this, this contemporary revisionism. There is [François] Furet who discovered that the French Revolution wasn't as great as had been thought. Well, sure, fine, it failed too, everybody knows that. The French Revolution gave us Napoleon! People are making "discoveries" that to me are not very impressive in their novelty (on fait des découvertes qui ne sont pas très émouvantes par leur nouveauté). The British Revolution resulted in Cromwell, the American Revolution's results were worse, the political parties, Reagan, which does not seem any better to me. So, people are in such a state of confusion... Even if revolutions fail, go badly, that still never stopped people or prevented people from becoming revolutionary. They are confusing two absolutely different things: the situations in which the only outcome for man is to become revolutionary... And yet again, we have been talking about that from the start: it's the confusion between becoming and history, and if people become revolutionary. Deleuze: Yes, this historians' confusion... Historians speak of the future of the revolution, the future of revolutions, but that is not at all the question. They can always go so far back and try to demonstrate that if the future was bad, it's because the bad element (le mauvais) was there right from the start. The concrete problem is how and why do people become revolutionary? And fortunately, historians can't prevent them from doing so. It's obvious that the South Africans are caught up in a becoming-revolutionary, the Palestinians are caught up in a becoming-revolutionary. Then, if someone tells me afterwards, "oh you will see, when they have won, if their revolution succeeds, it will go badly," etc., well, first of all, there will not be the same kinds of problems, and then a new situation will be created, once again becomings-revolutionary will be unleashed. The business of men (des hommes), it's in situations of tyranny, of oppression, effectively it's to enter into becomings-revolutionary because there is nothing else to be done. And when someone tells us afterwards, "oh, it's not working out," we aren't talking about the same thing, it's as if we were speaking two different languages - the future of history and the current becomings of people (les devenirs actuels des gens) are not at all the same things. Parnet: And this respect for the "rights of man" (les droits de l'homme) which is so fashionable these days, but it is not becoming-revolutionary, quite the opposite. Deleuze [wearily]: Listen, this respect for the "rights of man" - this really makes me want to say, almost to make some odious statements. It belongs so much to this weak thinking (pensée molle) of the empty intellectual period that we discussed earlier under "C as in Culture".? It's purely abstract, these "rights of man." What is this? It's purely abstract, completely empty. It's exactly like what I was saying earlier about desire, what I tried to say about desire: desire does not consist of erecting an object, of saying I desire this... We don't desire, for example, freedom, etc. It's zero. Rather, we desire... we find ourselves in situations.
August 26, 2025 at 6:47 PM
damashummus.bsky.social
I was talking to a friend who reminded me of this paragraph from Linguistic Bodies. I still think this is the strongest crit of (early?) Fichte (and a subtle crit of Hegel) following both Schelling and Plessner. The “body” resides *behind* the self-conscious “I”
As we have seen, to be a linguistic body is to incorporate powers and sensitivities to participate in group and community engagements involving the different kinds of social agency described in the dialectical model. But it is also to be part of the ecological relations between the various autonomous patterns at play in the multiple timescales involved. Being a linguistic body means not only having a personal capacity for language but also playing a role in community patterns. Here we have a new kind of closure, as we have described at the end of the model. It is an autonomy that at the same time belongs to the individual and to the community. It is constituted by the encounter between both, and it is granted to the individual almost as an alien presence in her body. This occurs through the incorporation of utterances, which are person-shaping and person-relating acts, unavoidably altering the agency of those who incorporate them through a tendency to incarnate the voices, gestures, opinions, styles, and perspectives of others. Unlike sensorimotor autonomy, which is rooted in the organic body even if it transcends it, linguistic agency does not originate completely "out of" an individual's body, but also comes from her world and moves into the constitution of a "new" body, a linguistic one, that is tethered but displaced, at once distanced from and oriented toward "its" organic and sensorimotor body. If under normal circumstances we don't seem to be aware of this alien presence it is because "we" are it.
August 8, 2025 at 8:25 PM
damashummus.bsky.social
Instead of sleeping, I made this. Yes, I know I’m reifying two domains, which aren’t really separate!
CTWG on execution vs on conception
July 12, 2025 at 7:44 PM
damashummus.bsky.social
I’m going to exaptate a Twitter trend of the 4 most influential books on your worldview, but for the best things I read this year so far. As you can see, I want to revive a philosophical anthropology (theoretical biology) as a moment of a critical theory of society.
LINGUISTIC BODIES: The Continuity between Life and Language by Ezequiel A. Di Paolo, Elena Clare Cuffari, and Hanne De Jaegher THE MECHANIZATION OF THE MIND: ON THE ORIGINS OF COGNITIVE SCIENCE by Jean-Pierre Dupuy Translated by M. B. DeBevoise Levels of Organic Life and the Human by Helmuth Plessner THE HEART OF THE MATTER: Ilyenkov, Vygotsky and the Courage of Thought by David Bakhurst
July 3, 2025 at 2:41 AM
damashummus.bsky.social
Adding to the meme pile. I always liked this one
THIS VALUE SUBSTANCE THAT EXISTS INDEPENDENTLY OF ITS FORM OF APPEARANCE. IS IT IN THE ROOM WITH US RIGHT NOW?
June 27, 2025 at 1:24 AM
damashummus.bsky.social
I’m so bad with music lmao
The multiple intelligences test result
June 16, 2025 at 4:29 PM
damashummus.bsky.social
Every time I return to Illyenkov, my inner-Arab comes back with a vengeance. My head goes “قُم لِلمُعَلِّمِ وَفِّهِ التَبجيلا

كادَ المُعَلِّمُ أَن يَكونَ رَسولا”(first two lines in the picture)
Ahmad Shawqi Poem as translated by Suheil Laher. Stand for the teacher, give him full respect The teacher's rank is close to the prophet'. Can there be any person nobler than The one who builds and nurtures souls and minds? Glory to You God, O best instructor, With the pen You taught the folk of yore. You brought this mind forth from its darknesses, And guided it a way of lucid light. The teacher's hand a crucible you made, Its products ingots rusted or burnished. Moses as a guide You sent with Torah, So too the Virgin's son, who taught Injil. Muhammad's fluent fount You caused to gush, So human souls he quenched with scripture's words.
May 13, 2025 at 8:35 PM
damashummus.bsky.social
I was reading late Varela’s “Organism: a Meshwork of Selfless Selves.” (Banger title) And my guy is so Lewontin-pilled I did not appreciate it the first time. I’ve attached some excerpt from the end of the article.
The key point, then, is that the organism brings forth and specifies its own domain of problems and actions to be "solved"; this cognitive domain does not exist "out there" in an environment that acts as a landing pad for organisms that somehow drops or is parachuted into the world. Instead, living beings and their worlds of meaning stand in relation to each other through mutual specification or co-determination. Thus what we describe as significant environmental regularities are not external features that have been internalized, as the dominant representationalist tradition in cognitive science -and adaptationism in evolutionary biology -assumes. Environmental regularities are the result of a conjoint history, a congruence which unfolds from a long history of co-determination. In Lewontin's [73] words, the organism is both the subject and the object of evolution. Double dialectics: the nature of an identity and the nature of a relation to a world. Double paradoxicality: Self-production by dependent containment; autonomy of knowledge through environmental coupling. Both dialectics give rise to the shifting nature of organism, ineluctably forming itself and informing where it is, and equally ineluctably implicated in the background from whence it springs forth. Organisms, those fascinating meshworks of selfless selves, no more nor less than open-ended, multi-level circular existences, always driven by the lack of significance they engender by asserting their presence.
April 23, 2025 at 6:25 PM
damashummus.bsky.social
The chemical industry as an under-appreciated aspect of the Industrial Revolution. If you want to understand “flows,” you need to understand chemicals.
This is an excerpt from the book A Material World. “The chemicals revolution is perhaps the most-overlooked aspect of the industrial revolution, yet the development of chemical products arguably changed more lives than, for instance, the mass production of steel. It certainly saved more lives, purifying our water and cleansing our homes, saving us from bacteria and germs long before we understood the nature of their threats. Yet while we celebrate the pioneers of steelmaking and steam power, we have mostly forgotten the earliest giants of industrial chemistry, like Leblanc or Ernest Solvay.”
April 21, 2025 at 1:15 AM
damashummus.bsky.social
If anybody want to pursue this, this my thought crystallized in a text
CR&D summary so far: we need an immanent critique of life-cycle assessments. Transform society from machine to organism.
April 10, 2025 at 3:25 AM
damashummus.bsky.social
Glass as an important material for the emergence of modern science. Warfare (optics and binoculars), chemistry (borosilicate glass), and many other applications!
A few years ago two historians, Alan Macfarlane and Gerry Martin, went methodically through 20 of the great experiments that advanced human knowledge - everything from Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke's creation of a vacuum chamber to Isaac Newton's theory of light to Michael Faraday's investigations into electricity - and discovered that all but four of them relied in some way on glass prisms or containers or contraptions. Glass, in other words, was a foundational innovation, a general purpose technology like the wheel or the steam engine or the silicon chip. This magical product was important not just for what it was but for what it enabled us to do - to make further leaps of imagination and feats of invention. Indeed, it continues to play that role even today. The internet is mostly a mesh of information transmitted through glass wires and, as you'll see later on in this section, without glass we would be unable to make the brains of the most advanced computers. Not bad for something that is ultimately just melted sand.
April 8, 2025 at 8:01 PM
damashummus.bsky.social
Hey y’all, this Saturday, I’ll be presenting on Boris Hessen’s Newton piece. We will be discussing the Hessen-Grossmann thesis and what a Marxist historiography of science looks like!
An illustration of the 1931 Boris Hessen’s presentation “the social and economic roots of Newton’s Principia”
April 2, 2025 at 5:17 PM
damashummus.bsky.social
They really got it imo
Chapter 6 of Biology under the Influence. At best, liberal thought attempts to combine the biological and the social in a statistical model that assigns relative weights to the two, allowing for some component of interaction between them. But the division of causality between distinct biological and social causes that then may interact misses the real nature of their code-termination. Like any other species, human beings clearly have certain biological properties of anatomy and physiology that both constrain and enable them, properties that are partly shared with other organisms as a consequence of being living systems, and that are partly unique as a consequence of the particular genes possessed by our species. We all have to eat, drink, and breathe; we are all susceptible to attack by pathogens; there are limits to the external temperatures that our naked bodies can survive; and we will all die. No historical contingency or change in consciousness can remove those necessities. But at the same time, the central nervous system of human beings, combined with their organs of speech and manipulative hands, leads to the formation of social structures that produce the historical forms and transformations of those needs. Whereas human sociality is itself a consequence of our received biolo-gy, human biology is a socialized biology. At the individual level our physiology is a socialized physiology. The time course of blood pressure or serum glucose with age, the integrity of the epithelial interfaces between the insides and outsides of our bodies, the ways in which we perceive distance or pattern, the availability of our immune systems for confronting invasions by other organisms, and the formation and disruption of linkages in our brains- all are variably dependent on class position, the nature of work, the social status of our ethnicity, the commodities that circulate in our society, and the techniques of their production.
March 19, 2025 at 5:36 PM
damashummus.bsky.social
Here’s a better quality pic of the thing on left. It’s from the book called Linguistic Bodies. Afaik, the crown-jewel of enactive cognition literature.
Figure 9.1 The wheel of languaging. A partial representation of the processes and their various enabling relations that describe the activity of languaging (adapted from Cuffari et al. 2015). This figure does not depict temporal scales, asymmetries at the level of interactions, or dynamic processes in the enlanguaged environments. The elements that we will be discussing in this chapter are included in the figure, but our focus will be on their multiple dynamic relations, which cannot easily be shown here. Linguistic bodies are enacted as practices of participatory sense-making, themselves framed within the lifeworld of a given linguistic community that in turn is constituted by the activities of linguistic bodies. This is the main circularity described in the figure. At behavioral timescales, languaging is one form of participatory sense-making that becomes ever more dominant with increasing participation in a linguistic commu-nity. At developmental timescales, through the mediation of interactions with oth ers, linguistic bodies are constituted as an ongoing navigation of the tension between incorporating linguistic skills and incarnating linguistic agencies. At historical times-cales, the circular interplay between actual interactions and sociomaterial constraints and norms of enlanguaged environments sustains the iteworld in a dialectics of critical spontaneity and sedimentation.
March 15, 2025 at 9:41 PM
damashummus.bsky.social
Idk who of my followers will understand this, but I made this shitty meme that I’m quite proud of.
The enactivist languaging wheel vs Hegel’s system of systems in the meme format of “they’re the same picture.” From the Office.
March 15, 2025 at 9:39 PM
damashummus.bsky.social
@levnekov.bsky.social, @reexistentialism.bsky.social, and I all got council communism lol
The silly left-value quiz results. The closest match = council communism.
March 9, 2025 at 4:48 PM
damashummus.bsky.social
The organism between romanticism and German Idealism.
Gusdorf had followed the lead of Ernst Hirschfeld, who in his 1930's study on romantic medicine stressed that: “The notion of organism is the most elevated romantic concept in all domains of knowledge, not only in the natural sciences. It is the concept inaugurated by Herder, defined by Kant, applied by Kielmeyer, sealed by Schelling, and superbly developed by Goethe. Without such a concept it is impossible to understand romanticism itself.” (Hirschefeld, as cited in Gusdorf, 1984, p. 258)
February 27, 2025 at 1:27 AM
damashummus.bsky.social
My condolences. I can only imagine how much you miss them.

I also wish you success with work! I recently started a part-time job, which has been draining me considerably. I also do have a pet! They’re in the picture.
Scottish-fold cat with grayish fur. The cat appears to be amidst grooming when the picture was taken, so appears like he’s sitting funny.
February 24, 2025 at 4:38 PM