User:MontezumaSleeping/StevenThorkus

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Steven Thorkus was an American Sociologist and UN Development Worker

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Online interest in Anarchism Community (draft)
From a young age, Thorkus ran an anarcho-communist meme page. This was later influential to his thought.

Interest in Anarchism both as a school of thought and a method of understanding the world. Anthropologists like James C Scott and David Graeber.

After, he started reading Bookchin, and became “fully invested in the tension between Anarcho-Primitivism’s impossible dream of return and Anarcho-Transhumanisms vulnerability to neoliberal forces.”

This started a “fall into the Wikipedia wormholes and message board debates of Anarchist Theories, again “fascinate more by the paradoxes and tensions within the theory than the resolutions themselves.” Though drawn to Synthesis Anarchism, he was “forever haunted” by the fact that the Big Tent approach itself could never be compatible with Platformism.

Switch to ML and MLM (draft)
“…driven to MLM more through guilt and online radicalization than his own acceptance of the theories”

Marx’s Labor Theory of Value, Alienation, and Contradictions of Capitalism stayed with him. Marx’s centering of only wage labor was seen as limiting and his teleological view of history was seen as contradictory.

He struggled internally with Lenin’s Vanguard Party and interpretation of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, at times believing it was a necessary evil, other times believing it was inherently contradictory and the key to failure, and still at times believing it was potentially a key if it concluded changes to media and political organization. He similarly struggled with the Trontsky’s and Bolsheviks.

His main draw to Maoism was the focus on the peasantry rather than the working class, and the comparative success of the Maoist State. Favored Mass Line politics and uses of Moa’s philosophy by Anarchists

Tensions with Classical Liberalism (draft)
Engaged in a tension between the Frankfurt School (and a longer held lifelong belief) that the Enlightenment was bad and that  the Enlightenment can bring improvement. This belief was challenged by two forces: 1. Someone called him out for being Alt-Right due to this belief. 2. Chomsky Chomsky’s defense of Anarcho Syndicalism as the validation of Classic  Liberal Political Theory.

Came to believe that… 1. If arguments that use the language of Enlightenment Ideals to return to Keynesian Politics can be  gateways to better immediate policies, we should pursue them. 2. Having “a second Enlightenment” which extended the idea of Individual Rights truly to  all Human and even non-Human agents, we would be better off. He even argued that Marx was a “repressed second Enlightenment”

Theories of History (draft)
Responded to Wright’s criticisms of Marx’s Historical Theory and the Broad Theories of History

Had three Determinisms: Technological, Geographic, and Psychological Shifted towards geographic Determinism And Technological Determinism. Psychological was different because it mixed two different theories: Strause-Howe Generational and Psychohistory with a focus on World Systems Theory

Ultimately believed history was defined by the creation of new subjects, some of which are the proletariat. He believed this allowed for a synthesis of Foucalt and Marx Allowed for the Dialectic of Sex and Inclusion of Climate Concerns

We Are All Media (draft)
The book that made Thurkis famous. Though it is critiqued for it’s lack of power in critical analysis, its overview and synthesis of media theory, feminist theory, pedagogy, etc. makes it successful.

Thurkis takes the question “What is the ontological status of information?” to be the defining question for ontology and epistemology in an increasingly digitized and mediated world. However he also argues that we have always been media.

In an attempt to combine media ecology and situatedness with Science and Technology Studies and Habermass’s theory of the Public Sphere and Bordiue’s habitus, Thurkis argues that being media means that we embody our civil and epistemological debates.

Thurkis attempts to be a radical constructivist with the claim that “ontology is epistemology” while also attempting to incorporate mathematic reasoning and the revival of “truth.” In this effort he argues for a revival of the studies of rhetoric and critical pedagogy as an ethical imperative, while also arguing that for “democracy” to function the “media of democratic communication most be under the most critical review.” However, he fails to offer a convincing argument for what “good” analytical reasoning would be.

The Technology of History and the History of Technology (Draft)
The Technology of History and the History of Technology is a book written by Steven Thorkus in 2XD6. It is largely considered to be his magnum opus, although he would often call it “a failure in the highest sense.” Notable are the concepts of Sociogeographic Media, Subject Craft, and Generative Dialectics.

Thorkus’s The Technology of History and the History of Technology begins with a toure de France of what he labels broadly as the “nautralist” explanations to history- the repetition of archetypes, patterns, and the historical construction of “Human Nature.” He is largely responding to De Leon’s Archetypes and the End of History. A deconstruction of these archetypes follows, with Thorkus introducing his main thesis that Environmental and Technological conditions (what he calls “Media of the Sociogeographical“). Thorkus, however, does not discount the utility of these archetypes, arguing:

We must remember that these archaic archetypes were constructed at the height of European colonialization.

The books following sections cover Thorkus’s themes of Statecraft, Sociogeographical Media,  Subjectcraft, and Living Dialectics.

Part I That “agriculture was a mistake” though reductive when Diamond said it, in Scott’s analysis of the State it is profound. That the State is a dominating and mostly negative force. The State is largely “something other” than human that is largely bad for human individuals.

Part II  Inspired by Kjjj’s synthesis of Foucalt and Marx, history can be understood as the creation of subjects and their subsequent conflict. There will always be the creation of human groups and identities.

Part III: Environmental determinism and technological determinism help this. They do not conflict with point 2 but compliment it- subjects can only be created when they have technologies of the self. Taken together we have cyborg histories, where the history or humans is intertwined with their environment, bodies, and tools. These are also “beyond human”

Part IV: Negative Dialectics explains the process by which Art, Laws, Technology, Identities, ect. seek to overcome the conflicts between subjects, but ultimately create something not unifying but different. The masses fight for a new law or some sort of recognition, but the changes put in place are ultimately put in place by another subject (even when the masses take the State themselves). It’s endless lines of signification and representation. This means that there is constant change. We made UN so that WWII wouldn’t happen again, it didn’t, but now war is different and endless. Dialectics are the other “beyond human” things that exist. For this reason Thurkis calls them “Living Dialectics”

The Impossible Necessity of Human Rights (draft)
Writing of Thurkis’s suicide, P argued that a major factor in Thurkis’s decline was the book’s failure to garner success, even writing “It was like a love letter to de Leon, but de Leon has never commented on it.”

Thurkis argues that there needs to be a “cross-pollination” between anarcho-primitivists and futurists. “Someone who accepts the tennets of anarcho-primitivism but works within the habitus of the futurist is the human of the future.”