M-L-M Mayhem!

I finally returned to copy-editing the final chapter and epilogue of Torsion & Tension ; this will be the last entry in the series. As noted before, one of the main reasons I did not wish to pursue this project any further was because of my use of simple [propositional] logic symbology to represent some aspects of dialectical logic: not because the symbolization was simple (I wanted it to be as simple as possible so as to avoid obfuscation) but because, since it can be nothing more than an analogy, it doesn't really work. Even though I mentioned this multiple times in the text, the fact that we are dealing with two different logics––and thus two different senses of "contradiction"––means that maybe I should have avoided pseudo-formalizing the unity of opposites rather than just paying lip service to the fact that it was a "model". There are some things in this chapter, though, that I enjoyed rereading and that lurk beneath some of the other things I have b...

Although I still have the final chapter and epilogue of my dialectical materialist draft to post, and should probably copy-edit them sooner rather than later, I've been busy with all of the nitty-gritty of life, my job, and other things in the past two weeks that copy-editing an abandoned project has been my last priority. So here are some general announcements. 1) I'm on Twitter now because I figured (for some reason) it might be worth trying out and, with a new book soon to be released, upping my social media profile might be useful. And I was kind of bored one night and thought it might be interesting to dive into this "tweeting" nonsense. Now I just want to come up with pithy one-liners all the time though I'm not very good at it… perhaps I'm doomed to end up tweeting "cute" things about my kid. In any case, if any MLM Mayhem readers are on the twitters please follow me! At the moment I'm only following a few people I know, some political ...

As I've mentioned before I'm in the process of releasing my next book with Zero Books––the contract has been signed and the latest draft is with the editor––which is both unexpected and exciting. This particular book is one that I've been working on for over three years (off and on alongside other manuscripts, such as the abandoned one I've been serializing on this blog).  The Communist Necessity  actually came about because, while I was working on this longer manuscript, I was thinking about the need for a longer introduction about movementism, a polemical settling of accounts: hence the subtitle of TCN indicating it was a prolegomena. So the book in question is entitled Continuity and Rupture: Philosophy in the Maoist Terrain  and will hopefully be printed and available for purchase in the fall. I've even managed to obtain the endorsements of some pretty cool people, but I'll save the surprise of who read the drafts and agreed to write blurbs for the book...

Okay, back to copy-editing and serializing this aborted project on materialist dialectics of mine. Since copy-editing is boring, and since I've been immersed in the boredom of marking, I temporarily set it aside. (I should mention, here, that I probably shouldn't be using the word "boring" in this context because I'm currently reading Julian Jason Haladyn's excellent book on boredom that is making me reconsider the way in which it is used as a concept.) But now it's ready to go and you can click the link to download Chapter Four of Torsion and Tension  at the bottom of this entry. Again here is the Table of Contents with the entries to date: Introduction Chapter One: The Meaning of Dialectical Materialism Chapter Two: Dialectical Logic Defined Chapter Three: Pseudo-dialectics Chapter Four: Unity of Opposites Chapter Five: The Fundamental Contradiction of Dialectical Materialism Epilogue Download Chapter Four