**meta: I am sorry this is going to probably be pretty hard to read, I will get better at communicating but it is also kinda the point of the email to ask: Why is this so hard to read? How can we make it easier? Why do we need to make it eaiser to read?

From: Stephen Daniel Okita
Sent: Thursday, 15 May 2025 18:07
To: ████ ████ ████-████
Subject: lei ho + 你可唔可以寫一本教科書

I need to fucking study for my math final now, can you help me finish this. This is also a little fucking scitzo I don’t know if it’s wrong. I think this does make me look weird and it’s not really apposite.

I want to incorporate the Rhetoric department who know all this shit but somehow forget their power, that they can do something.

██████ ████@███████.edu

Who I Am and Why I’m Writing

I realise this is a little peculiar to receive a cold email which is simply an introduction. I am a ████████ intending on double majoring in Rhetoric and Philosophy with a minor in Computer Science, this changes week by week and I enjoy the protean quality that not declaring affords me. I am Irish-Japanese but grew up in Hong Kong.

In reading your website I realised that I have already read some of your work in ███ ███████. I really love the way you critique and share an affinity with your subject matter, that being the middle kingdom and its symbolic representations.

I don’t know if this was intentional humour, and I apologise if this is offensive, but I love when you contrast the stated “special interest in fakes, forgeries, and counterfeits” with the localas of Hong Kong (the city with the most Luxury stores in the world) and Shenzhen (the city with the largest “ladies markets” (I am referring to ones like in Mong Kok as a representation of a market that sells counterfeit goods)). I mean so much more imagery there in the finance capital of Asia (fictitious capital) and the underbelly of caged homes and 老頭 s smoking with letting their pregnant belly falling out of their wife beater. It’s really cool to see critque on the city I called home.

If that has not put you off you can find out more about me here, I will be changing this soon to into a page of the self reflecting contingent defracturing of the simulcra of identity (Ardent/Baudrillard/Spinoza for some reason, EDIT: This is going to be called SelfWare I think). I want this to be a mechanism of fighting the hyperreal and the atomized neocolonialism of contempory semoiocapitalism. For now the page is still just a bit embarssing but funny I think, not nearly disclousing enough to consitute ethical revereance of prospirety and the reality I may create and have created.

In this sprawling email, I’ll first explore my understanding of your educational approach - it terrifies (in a PTSD way) and inspires me. Then I’ll examine how mature acdemic disciplines communicate complex ideas, comparing Newton’s and Stewart’s enumeration of calculus. Finally, I’ll argue why critical theory’s accessibility isn’t just an academic concern but a societal imperative as capital a mechanism for giving people the tools to create disituent vanguards and stop capital’ss ravenous consquest of our organs.

The productive goal of writing this email is I would like to help you in any way to create a textbook or alternative education mechanism of sorts for the content of your ███ class.

The reason for me knowing your existence is ████ ████, my friend and a student that is currently studiously revising for your ███ final set to take place this morning. (See img attached for a funny picture of the environment in which I am writing this work, (on the instagram post attached to this blog post)).

Why Your Method of Education Both Terrifies and Inspires Me

From what ████ has shown me, that being the reading list and his notes on the class, I have interacted with most of the ideas and read a lot of the works you teach in your class. For fun, I tried taking one of the practices tests ████ had lying out. I arrogantly thought it would be easy and was very much humbled. I really love being faced material symbols of my own stupidity (not said with any irony) and realised how little I actually know about the works I cite in my works.

As an outsider, the method in which you are teaching the class might be the most important political tool of our epoch. From ████‘s accounts of your teaching and testing style, it feels familiar. It’s the kind of 默背 particular to Chinese education. It gives me PTSD flashbacks to the 聽寫 s I would do in year 3. It is the same feeling I have now, with the knowledge I am expected to reflect in my Maths final in 10 hrs. The obligation to reflect exact information, the mechanistic determination that you the student have stored the information presented in school in your brain.

This method of testing has no poetry. It is unromantic. It strips the affective magic of critique that I love.

My experience in rhetoric has a reduction of collaboration, a place that diminishes the power dynamic of professor and student, allowing room for collaboration in contemporising knowledge through critique. In Rhetoric we make education channels a sort of Jungian collective consuiness (for lack of a better work) this is beautiful. It allows the students to climb Bloom’s Taxonomy and perfect education, given that the student and professor are both in line with the desire to learn and produce knoweldge.

There is so much humanity in it, in impbues the attidue of love into the entire department. It makes me comfortable writing an email to a dignified and accomplished professor, such as yourself, that lacks the pageantry of professionalism. I can drop the artificial formality, that tacit normative demand of 孝順/veneration of those that have power of you. I hope that this tone is not offensive or disrespectful. I write like this as I feel adherence to normativite forms would taint my communication with the reminder of the inherent power dynamic of our identities, rather than human connection.

The Paradoxical Effectiveness of Your Approach

Stripping the collaborative aspect of critque adds a great deal of stress, suppresses creativity and brings the power dynamic to the foreground. However, it is incredibly effective. The volume of epistemic tools imparted on ████ via the rigour of your teaching method is incredible. The level of conversation he can have, the nuance of his conversation and critique. These tools will empower him to fight for humanity for the rest of his life.

I still think the freedom of rhetoric needs to be defended (Foucault Allusion), but for the sake of critique and community, everyone must have the power you have managed force into his cognition. While for ████ this demand is only present because of your power as an educator. That power to immutably stamp your gradation of his effective abilities in the subject you are teaching, it is frankly terrifying. The direct testing apporach “rationally” calculates a number for people attempting to, in an equally inhuman fashion, evaluate his worth. A perfunctory scratch on a transcript can and curtail or expand his space of possible action/life.

This inhumane system of valuing and directing human life is a consequence necessitated by power and capital. It is natural for systems that have to operate on mass to make these at times inhumane judgments, it’s not something we can really change quickly either. So while it stands I agree with your apporach, lets use that streesor to impart methods of thinking, allowing the freedom of the student to use them.

Putting the affective metacommentary aside, I really think that we need your knowledge to be universal.

Your ability to reify the most important, most difficult to understand aspects of contemporary critique is one of the most impressive things I have ever seen. It took me so much labour to extract those ideas from books, articles, videos and lectures as I did not know capital allowed for classes like this to be taught.

I think back to when I first became “conscious” (aware of myself, this was around puberty) and how I would long for a resource written the clarity and tenacity of your lectures. Beyond the desire of a past self of mine, I think everyone should have access to the way you teach. Here are my reasons why.

The Calculus Problem: Why Critical Theory Needs Its James Stewart

It seems to me that as an academic discipline matures, it gets better at presenting the ideas. When Newton and Leibniz first created calculus, they were the sole oracles of that knowledge (ik it was inveted in other cultures before but bare with me). As that knowledge proliferated and it’s productivity was realised, its method of communication expanded/improved out of necessity. In front of me now sits one of the most read books in English speaking universities: James Stewart Calculus.

It has loud yet muted colours, clear diagrams, a legible font and simple yet incredibly effective language that still possesses an air of humour, despite the incredibly boring subject matter (screenshots below). The content is drab, however its presentation insists upon the reader ingesting it.

Newton vs. Stewart: The Evolution of Pedagogical Clarity

In contrast, I have added a screenshot from Newton’s Principia Mathematica. Firstly this is a translated version, the original was published in Latin already barring most people from reading it. Even when it is legible the jargon is dense, typography uncomfortable and lacks the inviting tone of Stewart’s. Netwon and Stewart express the same idea, yet one ventures to educate, holding the reader’s hand as the detached author holds their hand in their quest to understand calculus. The other is an imprinted manifestation of Newton’s misanthropy and arrogance, writing like he was forced to (which he was by the British acdemic elite). It reads like the act of communicating knowledge was a nuisance to Isaac, distracting him from his fetishism of knowledge. This is true for him, he scrambled those pages out years after he wrote it when a rought vistor interpeted his reculsion. He was just doing alchemy then which realled marres his image if you read his notes on it.

The Capital Imperative of Clarity (When Convenient)

While capital necessitaed a legibile communication of calculas it dosen’t think the same for critique, obviously. Palantir needs calculas and workers with it’s epistemic power to feed the IDF bombs, Google to program the velocity of trends/culture, Goldman Sachs to model more economic crisis to profit off of. Its incredible effective educational quality makes sense under the lense of capitalist realism.

The Impenetrable Language of Critical Theory

While critical theory usually makes a genuine attempt to communicate the ideas, they are equally as impenetrable as the writings of the misnthopic boy Issac. I have read Society of The Spectacle many times, I multiple copises of both major translations (some I have lost) and even attempted my own translations with my mediocre French. I have done same similar things with other works presented i your course, however I still don’t really know what they are talking about. I am unable to communicate it with the tenacity you can. I mean it does make sense, taking Debord’s first line:

Red & Black Translation: “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”

I think this is a bad translation here is mine: “All of life in societies where modern conditions of production reign, announce itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles (or shows/pageants the French word for spectacle has many more uses). All that has directly lived has parted in a representation.”

Even with the misrepresntion affored by translation, to even begin to parse that sentence you need to have read Capital V1, be already familiar with critical theory for an external interpreter, then suspend your confusion as you work/kampf (used deliberately to signify the amount of labour required to understand it) through his obsucre aphorism. I have grown to see a beauty in Debord, that might be Stockholm syndrome, but asking a union member with a high school education to understand that is impossible. They may try, but ultimately give up, they are underpaid and have a family to feed. Their kampf is too much already but could be ameliorated with the tools of critcal theory. So Why? Why are the epistemic tools Debord offers taught this way? Where is my Stewart Calculas for materialist asthetic phenomonology.

The Jargon Jungle: Many Names for One Sublime Idea

Beyond just difficult language, we have so much jargon. The idea Debord is describing when he says spectacle can be communicated with 8 different names. The idea in my incorrect interpretation can most plainly be put as: capitalism shapes reality through affective systems of representation, symbols, and images rather than being directly experienced in a “pure” or “natural” state. I like Simone Wade’s way of putting it when talking about tripping with Foucault “knowledge isn’t power, power creates knowledge”, masturbating the mind while leaving the body behind.

While expressing different aspects/consequences of the spectacle, we have

Baudrillard’s simulacra and simulation
Castoriadis’s social imaginary
Anderson’s imagined communities
Taylor’s modern social imaginaries
Foucault’s discursive formations
Lacan’s symbolic order
Jameson’s cultural logic
And my word I have been trying to introduce into academic parlance ontological weight

They all point at the same sublime idea (allusion to Žižek’s book). How do we communicate this idea to the lethargic worker, the radical teen emobided by angst, the first year who took the class because she needed to fill her schedule? How do we do this without driving them away (if your still reading this blog post and are not part of academia I think you understand what the feeling of those three people are)? I don’t know if it’s disrespectful to the ideas presented to ask for standardisation. Or if these these symbols are antithetical too the programmed popular consciousness to not be consumed into the spectacle, and thus stripped of all effective power.

The pretentious jargon of critique feels like a failure of rhetoric to candidly advertise its ideas. Contemporary attempts at this fail to capture the ideas with the clarity I gleamed from your slides (here is an example). All that is left is to turn to the simulacra of critique in b-tec youtubers or shitty bloggers (like myself).

Critique, bound by its own incoherence, cannot be politically or culturally effective. It may be an issue with the state of education in this country, and the Red Scare’s deep seeded claws on moral progress and pulling humanity from the road to extinction. If it simply that education makes is impossible and not any improvements in elocution, I don’t have hope. I really hope it’s not, as critique has more power than calculas, which leads me to my next point.

Accessibility and standardisation isn’t just an academic nicety—it’s becoming existentially necessary.

Capital is Eating Our Organs: The Urgent Need for Accessible Critique

Society is atomised and lonely with no place to put its anger, we really need to teach methods of critique. To give people to tools to understand what it really is that is producing the inhumanity of contemporary humanity.

As said before, capital has an internal volition (a pre-programmed telos) that necessitates effective technology education, the work we do is the only oppositional force against its hunger for our organs (allsion to BwO in D&Gs Anti-Oedipus). Our fetishism for knowledge may seem a futile force in the face of capital, we draw our power from nature and reality which has infinite power. If we don’t fight for it (in both an ecological and spiritual (univocity) lens) nature will eat us along with capital.

The Vanguard’s New Weapons

Labour organisation, mutual aid networks, protest, policy reform etc. are all predicated on critique. Semiocaptalism bars us from blowing it up like the vanguards of old, all that is left is critique, we are now the vanguard (drawing this from Spirit of Terrorism Baudrillard, The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto - Žižek as well as others probably, but they are the ones that pop to mind).

The Atomised Worker: Marx’s Categories Dissolved

A critique against the necessity of the proliferation of the tools for critical analysis of society could be that it over-intellectualises the entire process of class conflict. Did Marx not give us all the architecture we need 200 years ago?

They constitutes the majority in society
They produces the wealth of society
They consists of the of the exploited members of society
Their members are the needy people in society

The working class has nothing to lose as everything has been taken
The working class can and will engage in a revolutionary transformation of society

Let’s re-evaluate those premises in the modern world:

oui, main non

Alienation has atomised them into the gig economy and digitally colonised every waking moment or all modern cybernetic beings (ppl with access to the internet). It hide it’s blatant exploitation of distant and separate competing neo-colonial vessels, with the agents of exploitation too poor or too corrupt to even care they are killing other living beings. The exploited class of individuals are still the majority, just the majority is everyone. And faced with that each individual has to make a decision, if everything is one is every representation of a thing meaningless or as meaningful as it’s collective (that being everything)? People are tacitly choosing the former, or unable to recognise the face of the premise.
non

Fictitious (Finance) capital generates the majority of the wealth now. It’s not commodity production but economic gradations of peoples guesses at how effectively committees will be produced and distributed. This is ironic as it really is the untruth of ideology and enlightenment thinking graduating to the level of hegemonic domination.
oui, main non

In addition commodity fetishism is now the global religion, we live in a shopaholic/influence economy. Money is based on notion with Nixon de-materialising it, even though the Venetians did this back in the 1600s by creating banking. Most importantly however, debt placates the destitution of poverty, in a genius move that forces everyone into slavery to capital.

It still holds in the same atomised sense of premise 1, but it isn’t people exploiting people just an alien ideology that forces it’s subjects consensual exploitation. Exploitation is banal, class deliminator can barley be used to analyse society now making class consciousness a long dead idea.
oui, mais non

Again the debt economy negates this. 20-30 years old’s are now all in serious debt that can maintain their livelihoods while forcing their enslavement to the exploitation of their fellow man. Additional appeasement mechanisms from the state only attacks the symptoms of the issue, giving the veneer (spectacle) of support to “true poverty”. In addition, the domination of spectacular capital makes it so people aren’t really allowed to question if capitalism is actually a good system of resource allocation of not. I can go on but I’ll leave it there.

oui, main non

While in reality they do have nothing to still have nothing to lose but their chains, capital has been baked into all our identities. To be is to be a consumer, capital feeds the dark aspects of our hedonistic nature, that addictive part of our brain that wants security. Beyond the common phrase of “how can you revolt when you can eat “ice cream”, capital has destroyed the “Third Space”, allowed for the destruction of societal orders and accelerated suffering to such a level where seeing organisms in pain is banal. This is a lot like Hitler and while Lenin was right the imperialism follows a declining capital, modern conditions extenuate that to a fascistic feudalism.
non

Where is the working class now? Who are they? Do they even know each other? Do they have the language to speak about exploitation? Has our most basic freedom of having the ability to understand an idea been so curtailed by ideology and capital that they/we can’t even begin to express their internal angst. Pay check to pay check workers (the majority of America now) don’t even have the time to begin to think about “reform” (i know ugly word) never mind Revolution (allusion to Rosa Luxembourg)

So yeah were pretty fucked. In the same vain as Wittgenstein provided the ultimate QED on philosophy by saying language is so fucked that we can’t even know anything, capital has made the knowledge of revolt impossible. We have the knowledge, clearly I am using it, but it’s hidden in jargon and only used in armchairs or empty lecture halls. We need everyone to start speaking like this, to know it’s okay to critique systems. To shift blame from individuals (aesthetic manifestations of ideas/systems) to systems (laws, regulations, institutions, aesthetics, semantics etc…). We need to analyse the base and not superstructure, or we can just let people keep dying.

The Black Book of Communism came up with the 100 million number as the consequence of Leninism, the Black Book of Capitalism shows that in the same time period capitals inadequacies (bad resource allocation) resulted in the death of at least 2 billion. I don’t even the number that a Black Book of Neolibrealism would result in.

Organ Harvest: How Technology Consumes Our Cognitive Capacities

While we struggle to live the machine grows, it grows in hunger ravenously consumes our organs. It has already devoured our muscles (traditional factory labour like in Marx and Engels), lungs (pollution and nicotine), Eyes (image/schema crafting) + Amygdala (emotions via Spectacular media driven by advertising), hippocampus (memory/history revisionist historiography to justify capital), Pituitary gland (sexual drive, porn, over working making sexuality impossible, no community support for child raising, capitals need for homogeneous domesticity suppressing alternative expression of sexuality), Pineal gland (sleep/lethargy and 24/7 markets making sleep a inconvenience and not rejuvenation and processing of memories).

Now the machine now turns its jaws to our juicy Hippocampus (thinking) with LLMs, I mean we already were crutailed in thinking by not being able to accsess the language of critque, but LLMs just make it so much more dystopic. I am sure you are already seeing LLMs enforcing a state of artificial impression as it works to replace us. The LLMs do really scare me here is a good article showing how its effect on education, and a paper from Microsoft showing how it has made their workers more stupid. Before we could still think, not capital doesn’t even want us to think now. If we do eventually merge with machines I just hope we still think they are working for us. Best hope is something like Wall-E, worst cyberpunk, I don’t even want to consider a Fisher-like super nanny deeming humanity or wider organic life unnecessary.

Whether you want to label it a re-enlightenment, class-conscious or my favourite “critique unbound”, critique is a the language which allows us to be able to think of the world and what it is doing to us. These tools need to become viral (bubonic plague style) in order to keep our organs and invalidate the nihilistic eschatological projection of some critical theorists (accelerationist).

These systems of critique need to be available, maybe a textbook isn’t the way but I want a unified and hand-holdie way like your class for everyone. I am making a long winded plea to help me make this email legible to not just people like me and you but everyone.

Refrences

Ya im sorry this is a really long and pretentious list. This is also AI generated list of citations idk if it’s complete.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.

Baudrillard, Jean. The Spirit of Terrorism. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso, 2002.

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Bainbridge, Lisanne. “Ironies of Automation.” Automatica 19, no. 6 (November 1983): 775-779.

Bloom, Benjamin S., Max D. Engelhart, Edward J. Furst, Walker H. Hill, and David R. Krathwohl. Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals. Handbook I: Cognitive Domain. New York: David McKay Company, 1956.

Castoriadis, Cornelius. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1975.

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books, 2009.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.

Lee, Hao-Ping, Advait Sarkar, Lev Tankelevitch, Ian Drosos, Sean Rintel, Richard Banks, and Nicholas Wilson. “The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers.” In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Yokohama, Japan: ACM, 2025.

Luxembourg, Rosa. Reform or Revolution. Translated by Integer. London: Militant Publications, 1986.

Malpas, Simon, and Paul Wake, eds. The Routledge Companion to Critical Theory. London: Routledge, 2006.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Books, 1990.

Newton, Isaac. The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Translated by I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Simkute, Amelija, Richard Banks, Advait Sarkar, and Katja Hofmann. “The Ironies of Generative AI.” Paper presented at the CHI Workshop on Large Language Models and HCI, New Orleans, LA, 2024.

Stewart, James. Calculus. 9th ed. Boston: Cengage Learning, 2021.

Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.

Wade, Simeon. Foucault in California: [A True Story―Wherein the Great French Philosopher Drops Acid in the Valley of Death] Hardcover. 2019.

Walsh, James D. “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College.” New York Magazine, May 7, 2025. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/openai-chatgpt-ai-cheating-education-college-students-school.html.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness. London: Routledge, 2001.

Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.

Žižek, Slavoj. The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019.

CRITQUE UNBOUND?