Marx's Theses on Feuerbach Revisted

Karl Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach is not a book so much as a detonation. Eleven short fragments, scribbled in 1845, unpublished in his lifetime, and yet—somehow—more decisive than volumes of well-behaved philosophy. If you’ve ever wondered when Marx truly became Marx, this is the moment: the pivot where philosophy stops describing the world and starts demanding its transformation.

The text is ostensibly a critique of Ludwig Feuerbach, the humanist philosopher who famously dethroned God and replaced Him with Man. Feuerbach argued that religion is humanity projecting its own essence outward—God as alienated human nature. Marx accepts this move… and then immediately says it’s not enough. You can’t just interpret alienation. You have to abolish the conditions that produce it.

That’s the thesis of the Theses. And it still slaps.

The Core Idea (Stated Early, Because Marx Would Insist)

Human beings are not defined by abstract “essences” or contemplative consciousness.

They are defined by social, material practice—by what they do, together, under historically specific conditions.

Or, in Marx’s most famous mic-drop (Thesis XI):

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”

This line has been over-quoted, under-thought, meme-ified, and motivational-postered into meaninglessness. But in context, it’s deadly serious. Marx isn’t dunking on philosophy for fun. He’s accusing it of political negligence.

What Marx Is Actually Arguing (Thesis by Thesis, Condensed)

1. Against “Contemplative Materialism”

Feuerbach is a materialist—but a passive one. He treats reality as something to be observed, not produced. Marx insists that humans actively make the world through labor, struggle, and cooperation. Reality isn’t a picture; it’s a process. Knowledge is not neutral. It’s rooted in practice.

2. Practice Comes Before Thought

Truth isn’t verified in the mind—it’s verified in action. Ideas prove themselves in social life, not seminar rooms. This is Marx quietly reprogramming epistemology. Knowledge becomes historical, collective, and embodied.

3. Humans Are Social All the Way Down

Feuerbach talks about “Man” as if he exists outside history. Marx replies: there is no such thing. Individuals are shaped by class, labor, institutions, and power relations.

Your consciousness?

Not downloaded from the cloud.

It’s assembled on the factory floor of history.

4. Religion Is a Social Symptom, Not a Mere Illusion

Feuerbach thought exposing religion as projection would dissolve it. Marx says no: religion persists because real suffering persists.

You don’t critique belief systems in isolation.

You change the world that makes them necessary.

This is Marx’s enduring challenge to liberal critique and contemporary “debunk culture.”

5. Revolution Is Not an Idea — It’s a Practice

The final theses culminate in a demand: philosophy must become practical, collective, and transformative. Thought must enter history not as commentary but as force.

No more armchair radicalism.

No more ethical takes without structural change.

Why Theses on Feuerbach Still Matters (Uncomfortably So)

Here’s the uncomfortable part—for academics, pundits, and Twitter philosophers alike.

Marx is calling out a mode of critique that feels radical but leaves the world untouched. A criticism that circulates endlessly, performs insight, and never risks consequence. Sound familiar?

The Theses haunt:

• performative politics

• aestheticized dissent

• critique without organization

• analysis without commitment

Marx is asking you—not abstractly, but personally—what your ideas do in the world.

Final Take

Theses on Feuerbach is Marx sharpening his knife. It’s the philosophical dress rehearsal for The German Ideology and Capital. Short, sharp, and still quietly indicting anyone who confuses critique with courage.

You finish it feeling slightly accused.

Which, frankly, is the point.

If philosophy doesn’t change how you live, organize, or act—Marx is standing behind you, arms crossed, unimpressed.

And he’s been waiting since 1845.

The New Jim Code: Ruha Benjamin on How Technology Reimagines Race and Justice

In The New Jim Code: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination, scholar Ruha Benjamin asks a deceptively simple question with deep consequences: What happens when the technologies we build reflect the biases we carry? Her answer is both urgent and subtle—technology doesn’t merely automate decisions; it reshapes social hierarchies in ways that often reinforce old injustices under the guise of innovation and neutrality.

Benjamin’s work is situated at the intersection of science and society, a place where assumptions about objectivity often obscure entrenched patterns of inequality. The “New Jim Code” she describes is a play on the infamous Jim Crow laws—legalized systems of racial segregation in the United States—and yet it signals something distinct: a coded, seemingly technical logic that licenses discrimination through data, algorithms, and “smart” systems that quietly perpetuate the biases of their human architects.

When Neutrality Isn’t Neutral

One of the central themes of Benjamin’s analysis is the myth of technological neutrality. We like to think that algorithms are impartial because they run on code, not sentiment. Yet Benjamin shows how data is never raw; it is collected from social contexts already shaped by inequality. Predictive policing tools, for example, use historical crime data to forecast where crimes are likely to occur next. But when that historical data reflects disproportionate policing of Black and brown neighborhoods, the algorithm doesn’t correct for bias—it amplifies it. The result? “Smart” policing that is anything but smart about justice.

Similarly, facial recognition systems are celebrated as tools of security and convenience, yet perform far worse on darker-skinned faces—so much so that error rates can be several times higher compared to lighter-skinned faces. Here, a technology marketed as universally useful betrays deeply racialized assumptions embedded in its training data and design priorities. The problem isn’t just misclassification. It’s a form of exclusion: who counts as legible to the system, and who remains invisible or misrecognized?

Carceral Technoscience: New Tools, Old Patterns

Benjamin uses the term “carceral technoscience” to describe how technology often extends the reach of punitive systems rather than dismantling them. Bail algorithms, risk assessment scores, and court sentencing tools are frequently adopted with promises of efficiency and fairness. But in practice they can harden disparities in the criminal justice system, transforming subjective judgments into “objective” metrics that are harder to contest.

Imagine a bail algorithm that scores a defendant as high-risk based on zip code, employment status, or prior convictions. Though presented as neutral, these factors are inflected with socio-economic and racial biases. The defendant isn’t just judged by their individual circumstances; they are judged by the social history of their community—a history marked by differential policing, economic exclusion, and unequal investment. Technology, in this sense, does not transcend inequality; it entrenches it.

Liberatory Imagination: Beyond Critique

Yet Benjamin’s work is not only diagnostic; it is generative. She insists that understanding the New Jim Code must go hand in hand with imagining alternatives. What would technologies designed not to reinforce carceral logics but to promote justice and equity look like? This is where her idea of liberatory imagination becomes essential.

A liberatory approach doesn’t start with technology as given, but with people and communities. Instead of asking how to make policing more efficient, we might ask how to reduce harm and build safety through investment in housing, education, and health—areas that technology can support rather than replace human judgment and care. Rather than using risk scores to predict “dangerous” individuals, data could be used to identify sites of need and opportunity. The shift is profound: from managing populations to empowering them.

Why it Matters 

In an era increasingly defined by algorithms—from credit scoring to job hiring systems, from predictive policing to educational gatekeeping—The New Jim Code reminds us that we are not passive recipients of technological change. The values and assumptions we embed in systems today will shape social realities tomorrow.

Ruha Benjamin’s book is a call to intellectual vigilance and collective imagination. It asks us not just to critique the technologies that surround us, but to envision technologies—and social orders—that reflect our highest aspirations for justice, dignity, and shared humanity. In doing so, she turns the question back to us: What kind of future are we coding?

See also: 

Yanis Varoufakis’ Technofeudalism

Algorithmic Culture and Surveillance Capitalism: what we’re really selling when we scroll

The Anomie of the Influencer: Selfhood in the Attention Economy

Syntax as Power: Butler, Cixous, and the Politics of Making a Life Legible

A familiar contemporary claim goes like this: gender is socially constructed. The phrase is true in a broad sense, but it often arrives with dulled edges, as if it merely means that stereotypes are bad and we should be nice. Judith Butler and Hélène Cixous restore the danger. For Butler, gender is not a costume put on after the self arrives. It is a repeated performance that helps produce the very effect of a stable self. For Cixous, the problem is not only performance but the language that scripts performance - a symbolic order that sorts bodies and desires into permitted forms, then calls those forms natural.

Together, they suggest a sharper thesis: power does not only operate through laws, institutions, or explicit prohibitions. Power operates through grammar - through what can be said without sounding mad, what can be desired without sounding deviant, what can be lived without requiring constant explanation.

This essay outlines Butler’s account of performativity, Cixous’s argument for écriture féminine, and the way their convergence reframes politics as a struggle over legibility. The central claim is simple and disquieting: if the social world is written, then rewriting is not decoration. It is a mode of resistance. (Sometimes the revolution is a pronoun, sometimes it is the refusal to offer one.)

1. Butler’s Performativity: Gender as Repeated Act, Not Inner Essence

Butler’s theory of gender performativity begins by unsettling the common picture of identity. We tend to imagine an inner core - a true gender - that expression then displays. Butler reverses the direction. There is no guaranteed inner essence prior to the act. Instead, the repeated acts, gestures, styles, and speech patterns produce the appearance of an inner truth.

Performativity is not the claim that gender is fake, or that individuals freely choose it like clothing. It is the claim that gender is real as a social effect, maintained through citation and repetition. Norms precede the individual. They provide the templates by which bodies become intelligible. The performance does not occur in a vacuum. It occurs under constraint, under sanction, and under the constant pressure to appear coherent.

This is why gender is policed not only by institutions but by everyday reactions: laughter, discomfort, refusal, misrecognition. To be gendered is to be interpretable. To be unintelligible is to risk social exclusion.

Butler’s key political insight follows. If gender is sustained by repetition, it can be destabilized by repetition that slips. Parody, drag, or subtle deviations can expose the constructedness of the norm by demonstrating that what looked natural is actually rehearsed. The norm depends on being misperceived as inevitability.

The stakes are therefore practical, not merely theoretical. To contest gender norms is to contest the conditions under which a person can appear as a person.

2. Cixous and Écriture Féminine: Writing Against the Symbolic Order

Cixous approaches the problem through a different door: language, desire, and the body. Her critique targets what psychoanalytic and structuralist traditions often call the symbolic order - the system of meanings, binaries, and hierarchies through which culture organizes experience. In that order, masculinity is treated as central, neutral, and universal, while femininity is cast as deviation, lack, or supplement.

Cixous’s response is not merely to demand inclusion within existing forms. It is to disrupt the forms themselves. Écriture féminine names a mode of writing that refuses the rigid boundaries and linear controls associated with a patriarchal symbolic economy. It emphasizes multiplicity, excess, rhythm, and bodily resonance. It aims to let what is excluded from “proper” discourse find expression without being immediately disciplined into acceptable shapes.

Importantly, this is not a call for a single feminine style. It is a call for writing that breaks the binaries that keep experience governable: mind/body, reason/emotion, active/passive, man/woman. In Cixous, politics happens at the level of form. Syntax is not neutral. It is a device for distributing authority: who speaks, who interrupts, who concludes, who is allowed to be messy.

If Butler shows how gender is performed within norms, Cixous shows how language itself carries those norms into the bloodstream of thought.

3. Convergence: Legibility, Violence, and the Possibility of Sabotage

Placed together, Butler and Cixous produce a focused diagnosis. The social world demands legibility. It demands that bodies and desires present themselves in recognizable formats. These formats are not just descriptive. They are prescriptive. They do not simply name what exists. They decide what can exist without penalty.

This is why misrecognition can be violent even when it appears polite. When someone’s gender is repeatedly denied in language, the harm is not only psychological. It is social: the person is pushed outside the field of intelligibility where rights, care, and ordinary interaction become easier. Language here functions as a gatekeeping mechanism. It is an infrastructure of reality.

The political response, then, cannot rely solely on new policies, though those matter. It also requires interventions at the level of cultural grammar: new ways of speaking, writing, naming, and refusing names. Butler emphasizes the subversive potential of iteration - repeating norms in ways that expose their contingency. Cixous emphasizes the subversive potential of expression - writing in ways that exceed the controlling forms.

Both point toward sabotage as method.

Sabotage is not necessarily loud. Sometimes it is the insistence on a pronoun in a hostile room. Sometimes it is the refusal to narrate oneself in the categories offered. Sometimes it is art that makes the audience feel the inadequacy of the binary without preaching.

This is where politics becomes stylistic in the highest sense: style as a way of reorganizing what can be perceived and therefore what can be lived. (The deepest censorship is not banning speech. It is making certain speech sound impossible.)

Conclusion: Changing the Sentence Changes the Life

The combined lesson is not that language creates reality in a simplistic sense. It is that language organizes reality’s accessibility. It structures what counts as coherent, credible, human. When gender norms embed themselves in grammar and narrative form, they become hard to contest because they appear as common sense.

Butler gives us a tool for seeing gender as a sustained effect of repeated norms, and thus as something that can be disrupted by altered repetition. Cixous gives us a tool for resisting at the level where norms reproduce most quietly: in the shape of sentences, the permitted rhythms of expression, the policing of form.

If the social world is written, then rewriting is an act of power.

Not because it solves everything, but because it changes the conditions of appearance. It expands what can be said without apology and what can be lived without translation.

In the end, the demand is not simply to be included in the old story.

It is to change the grammar in which stories become thinkable - so that a life does not have to beg for legibility in order to deserve being lived.

The Public Sphere as a Feed: Habermas, Adorno, and the Managed Life of Opinion

Modern societies tell themselves a flattering story about speech. The story goes like this: if enough people talk, argue, exchange reasons, and correct one another, a public intelligence emerges. Democracy, on this view, is not merely voting. It is discourse.

Jürgen Habermas is the great theorist of this aspiration. He describes a public sphere in which citizens deliberate, test claims, and form opinions through rational-critical debate. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, by contrast, are the theorists of the sabotage. Their analysis of the culture industry suggests that mass media does not primarily nourish autonomous judgment. It standardizes experience, manufactures needs, and converts culture into a managed commodity.

If Habermas gives us an ideal of communicative reason, Adorno and Horkheimer show us a system of administered consciousness. In the twenty-first century, these two positions collide in a single object: the content feed. The feed promises the public sphere and delivers the culture industry in personalized form. It offers deliberation as a user interface, while monetizing attention as the underlying logic. (You are invited to speak, but the room is owned.)

This essay argues that the feed represents a structural transformation of public discourse: truth becomes a format, discourse becomes content, and participation becomes a measurable behavior.

Habermas and the Dream of Rational-Critical Debate

Habermas’s concept of the public sphere is not naive. It is historical and normative at once. Historically, it describes a space that emerged with modern print culture, salons, and civic associations - contexts in which private individuals could discuss public matters outside direct state control. Normatively, it articulates a standard: legitimate political outcomes should be anchored in processes of public reasoning, where participants can give and demand reasons under relatively non-coercive conditions.

The key is not that people always behave rationally. The key is that institutions can be arranged so that argument, evidence, and critique matter. In Habermas’s language, communicative action aims at mutual understanding rather than strategic advantage. The ideal is a discursive environment where better arguments have a chance to win, where claims are contestable, and where speakers are accountable to reasons rather than to raw power.

Under this model, public discourse is not entertainment. It is civic infrastructure.

The concern is that the infrastructure can be damaged. Habermas himself worries about commercialization and media manipulation, which can turn citizens into consumers and public discussion into spectacle. The feed intensifies precisely this danger because it collapses the distinction between a civic space and an attention market. It makes the forum itself profitable.

Adorno and Horkheimer: Culture Industry as Opinion Factory

Adorno and Horkheimer diagnose a different baseline. For them, mass media in capitalist societies tends to produce conformity, not emancipation. The culture industry standardizes cultural goods and, in doing so, standardizes consciousness. People encounter ready-made meanings, predictable emotional arcs, familiar templates. This fosters passivity and weakens the capacity for critical thought.

Importantly, the culture industry does not need to ban dissent. It can absorb it. Opposition becomes a genre. Critique becomes a style. Even rebellion becomes a market segment.

This is the crucial insight for understanding contemporary discourse. The system does not silence you. It formats you.

The feed extends the culture industry by making it interactive and targeted. Instead of one broadcast schedule, each person receives a customized stream. But customization does not guarantee autonomy. It can simply mean that standardization becomes individualized, like mass production with tailored packaging.

The result is not a lack of information but an overproduction of stimuli, where judgment is constantly interrupted by novelty. The culture industry once delivered the same spectacle to everyone. The feed delivers different spectacles to each person while preserving the same economic function: capture attention, sell it, repeat.

From Discourse to Content: The Feed’s Structural Conversion

The most revealing feature of a feed is that it does not treat speech as speech. It treats speech as content.

A citizen’s claim, a journalist’s investigation, a scholar’s argument, a friend’s grief, a comedian’s riff - all enter the same container, displayed in the same visual logic, competing under the same metrics. This equalization is often mistaken for democratization. It is not. It is a change of regime: discourse is stripped of its institutional distinctions and reorganized as engagement units.

Three transformations follow.

First, visibility replaces validity as the immediate regulator. In a feed, the main question is not “Is this well supported?” but “Will this travel?” The travel criteria are emotional intensity, identity resonance, novelty, and conflict. Argument becomes a kind of performance optimized for spread.

Second, participation becomes behavior. In Habermas, participation means giving reasons, responding to counterarguments, and revising positions under pressure of evidence. In the feed, participation is clicking, sharing, reacting, commenting - actions that produce data. The system can treat these as equivalent signals of involvement even when they have opposite cognitive meanings. Outrage and agreement both register as engagement.

Third, discourse becomes personalized and therefore fragmented. Habermas’s public sphere presupposes a shared space of reference, where claims can be commonly addressed. The feed privatizes the public. People inhabit adjacent realities generated by different streams, with different salient events, different villains, different urgencies. One consequence is that disagreement increasingly takes the form of mutual incomprehension: not “we interpret the same facts differently,” but “we do not share the same objects.”

In this context, the public sphere does not vanish. It is simulated. You can see it on your screen, but its conditions of possibility have changed. It resembles deliberation while running on attention economics.

This is why “more speech” does not necessarily yield more understanding. It may yield more noise, more segmentation, more affective polarization - and thus more profitable engagement.

The Punch: Truth as Format, Not as Claim

At this point Habermas and Adorno converge in an uncomfortable way.

Habermas’s ideal requires a medium in which reasons can matter. Adorno’s critique suggests the medium is already part of domination. The feed resolves their dispute not by choosing one side, but by making the problem visible: when the forum itself is owned and optimized for attention extraction, rationality becomes a niche style rather than a governing norm.

Truth, in such a system, does not disappear. It becomes a format.

It becomes the look of a fact-check. The vibe of authority. The rhetorical posture of neutrality. It becomes a thread, a chart, a debunk, a hot take, a longread. The claim’s fate depends less on its grounding than on its packaging and velocity.

This is not merely a moral complaint about “people these days.” It is a structural condition of a medium that treats discourse as content and content as inventory.

The civic tragedy is subtle: citizens are invited into constant participation, yet that participation is harnessed to a mechanism that rewards strategic speech over communicative action. You can speak, and you should speak, but your speech enters a system that measures it primarily by its capacity to hold attention.

The result resembles a public sphere the way a theme park resembles a city. You can walk the streets, but the streets are designed for spending.

Rebuilding the Conditions of Discourse

A Habermasian response would focus on rebuilding institutions and norms that protect the conditions of rational-critical debate: journalism insulated from click imperatives, forums that privilege sustained argument, transparency about amplification mechanisms, and civic education that treats attention as a political resource.

An Adornian response would add a darker warning: even reforms can be absorbed as style. The system can sell you “quality discourse” as a premium experience while leaving the underlying attention economy intact.

The synthesis, if one is possible, begins with a sober recognition: the crisis of public discourse is not mainly a crisis of opinion. It is a crisis of infrastructure. The feed does not merely host debate. It formats it, monetizes it, and fragments it.

If democracy depends on a public capable of reasoning together, then the question is not only what we think, but where thinking happens - and who profits when it does not.

See also: 

Zizi Papacharissi / The virtual sphere: The internet as a public sphere

From Aura to Screenshot: Benjamin, Baudrillard, and the New Relic of the Digital Age

The screenshot is a strange cultural object. It is banal, effortless, nearly weightless. Yet it carries an outsized authority. A screenshot can end an argument, start a scandal, certify a romance, or function as a tiny archive of something you want to keep from vanishing. It is not simply an image of a screen. It is a claim about reality.

Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard offer a useful tension for thinking about why. Benjamin diagnosed the modern loss of aura under mechanical reproduction. Baudrillard diagnosed a later condition in which images no longer copy reality but replace it. The screenshot sits at the intersection: it emerges from a world where aura has been flattened and where simulacra proliferate, yet it reintroduces a new kind of aura as evidence. Put bluntly: authenticity returns, but only as a forensic trace. (We no longer say, “I was there,” we say, “I have receipts.”)

This essay argues that the screenshot is the digital era’s relic: not sacred because it is unique, but sacred because it can be used to prove that something happened in a reality we no longer trust.

1. Benjamin’s Aura and the Problem of Presence

Benjamin’s concept of aura is often summarized as the unique presence of an artwork in time and space. An original painting has a here-and-now that cannot be duplicated. Mechanical reproduction, through photography and film, disrupts this. It makes copies widely available, and in doing so, it changes how art is experienced, valued, and politicized.

Two implications matter for the screenshot.

First, reproduction does not merely distribute an object. It transforms our relation to it. When images become easily replicable, attention shifts from pilgrimage to access. The question becomes not “Where is it?” but “Can I see it?” That shift is not trivial. It dissolves certain forms of authority and creates others, including the authority of the copy as the main way most people encounter the work.

Second, aura is bound to distance, even when physically close. There is a kind of reverent gap between viewer and object. Mechanical reproduction collapses the gap. It invites possession by sight. It makes the image intimate and portable.

The screenshot inherits this world: a world where experience is increasingly mediated and replayable. Presence becomes difficult to define because the record proliferates. Yet the desire that aura once satisfied does not disappear. It mutates. We still want a sense of the real, the singular, the unrepeatable. We simply seek it in different places, often in the wrong ones. (Nothing says modern longing like trying to feel “the moment” through a camera roll.)

2. Baudrillard’s Simulacra and the Crisis of the Real

Baudrillard’s claim is more disturbing. In late modernity, images no longer function primarily as representations of an underlying reality. Instead, they generate a hyperreality: a world of signs that refer to other signs, where the distinction between real and represented becomes unstable.

In this condition, the image is not a window. It is a habitat.

Social media provides a familiar illustration: events are staged for their postability, emotions are shaped for their legibility, identity becomes a continuous act of sign production. The representation does not follow the event. It precedes it, frames it, and sometimes replaces it.

This is the background against which the screenshot gains its peculiar force. If the environment is saturated with images that are performative, edited, and strategically curated, then credibility becomes scarce. Scarcity produces value. The screenshot becomes valuable not because it is beautiful, but because it appears unfiltered, immediate, uncomposed. It feels like a cutout of the real.

But this is the trap. The screenshot is still a sign. It can be selected, cropped, contextualized, timed, and weaponized. It promises unmediated truth while remaining deeply mediated. Its power lies less in what it shows than in what it implies: that here, finally, is something you cannot talk your way out of.

In a hyperreal environment, the new realism is evidentiary realism: truth as something you can file, forward, and pin to a thread. (The age of metaphysics gives way to the age of metadata.)

3. The Screenshot as Relic: Aura Returns as Evidence

If Benjamin charts aura’s decline and Baudrillard charts reality’s dissolution, the screenshot suggests a third movement: aura’s return, but in a juridical register.

The screenshot functions like a relic in at least three ways.

• It carries contact. Traditional relics mattered because they were believed to have touched the sacred body. The screenshot matters because it is believed to have touched the event: the message, the post, the transaction, the moment before deletion. It is a fragment with a chain of contact, even if the contact is only digital capture.

• It stabilizes memory. In a world of disappearing stories, edited profiles, and endlessly revisable narratives, the screenshot acts as a pinned artifact. It freezes a fluid reality into a stable object. It offers permanence where the platform offers flow.

• It authorizes speech. The screenshot permits accusation, validation, and explanation. It is often the condition for being believed. Without it, you have a story. With it, you have proof.

This is why screenshots proliferate in intimate life. People screenshot flirtations, arguments, apologies, betrayals. They archive their own emotional history because the modern social world teaches them not to trust speech alone. Words can be denied. Screenshots, supposedly, cannot.

Yet this confidence is itself symptomatic. It reveals that the social bond has shifted. Trust no longer rests primarily on character or shared community. It rests on documentation. You do not rely on the other’s integrity. You rely on your ability to record.

Aura thus returns in miniature. Not the aura of the artwork’s uniqueness, but the aura of the captured moment’s undeniability. The screenshot becomes the new “original,” even though it is infinitely reproducible. Its originality is not material. It is rhetorical.

Authenticity After Aura

The slogan “the aura is dead” is only half the story. The deeper story is that aura has migrated. It now clings to what can be used as evidence in a world where reality feels contestable.

Baudrillard would warn that this does not restore the real. It intensifies the regime of signs by giving one kind of sign special authority. Benjamin would note that the politics of reproduction never end. They simply change their objects.

The screenshot is not the cure for hyperreality. It is one of its signature artifacts: a proof fetish born from distrust, a relic manufactured by platforms that make everything shareable and nothing stable.

And that is the punch. We did not stop caring about authenticity. We just stopped believing it could be lived.

So we collect it instead.

Closure, Recognition, and the Dialectic of the Breakup Text

The modern breakup often arrives as a document. A message. A paragraph engineered to appear final. It may include a reason, a softening clause, and a request that both parties “move on.” The recipient, however, typically asks for something the message cannot reliably supply - closure. This word names an aspiration to make an ending complete: to bind the loose threads of feeling into a coherent account and to return to oneself with minimal residue.

A Hegelian lens suggests why this aspiration so often fails. Breakups do not merely terminate attachments. They reorganize the conditions under which a self can feel real. In Hegel’s terms, what is at stake is not only affection but recognition - and recognition is dialectical: it generates conflict, produces transformation, and resists finality.

This essay reconstructs the breakup as a scene in the struggle for recognition, then shows why “closure” is structurally unstable within that struggle.

Recognition as the Hidden Infrastructure of Intimacy

Hegel’s account of self-consciousness insists on an unsettling premise: the self does not become fully itself in isolation. Selfhood requires being acknowledged by another self. The familiar vocabulary of romance - feeling seen, understood, chosen - already gestures toward this requirement. Love does not only provide pleasure or companionship. It offers a particular kind of confirmation: the sense that one’s interior life has met an answering gaze and returned as something publicly valid.

This is why romantic rejection often wounds beyond the practical loss of a relationship. It can feel like a diminution of reality itself. In contemporary digital life this is intensified by the micro-economy of responsiveness: delayed replies, ambiguous “likes,” or being left on read can function as minor acts of non-recognition. These are not merely etiquette violations. They register, at the level of self-experience, as moments in which one’s claim to matter fails to bind.

From a Hegelian standpoint, then, intimacy is not just emotional proximity. It is an arrangement for distributing recognition. It makes a self more coherent by stabilizing how, and by whom, it is acknowledged.

Conflict Built into Recognition

A crucial implication follows. Recognition is not a static gift offered once and then secured. It is contested. Each self desires to be recognized as free, not merely as pleasing, useful, or manageable. Yet two freedoms in contact do not simply harmonize. They collide over terms.

This is the everyday version of Hegel’s master-slave structure, stripped of historical literalism but retaining its logic. In modern relationships it appears as the struggle over definition and control: Who sets the pace? Who determines what the relationship is? Who must explain themselves, and who gets to remain opaque? One partner demands clarity while the other prefers ambiguity. One speaks in paragraphs while the other communicates through minimal signals. Each style implies a claim about authority over the relational reality.

These dynamics are not reducible to personality quirks. They reflect a structural tension: to be recognized is to risk being fixed by another’s categories; to preserve freedom is to resist being fixed, even at the cost of intimacy. Many relational conflicts are variations on this dilemma, and many breakups are simply the moment when the dilemma can no longer be tolerated.

The Breakup as Negation, Not Termination

The breakup message typically presents itself as an ending. But dialectically it functions as negation - the refusal of a prior form. In Hegel, negation does not erase what preceded it. It transforms it. A relationship does not vanish when it ends; it persists as memory, narrative, expectation, and sometimes as a template that silently reappears in later attachments.

This is why breakups often feel temporally strange. One can be “over” someone and still be entangled with the meaning of what happened. The past relationship becomes an object of ongoing interpretation: What was real? What was performance? When did it change? Who knew what first? Each answer generates a further question because the self is not simply recalling events. It is trying to reorganize itself around them.

In that sense, the breakup is not the end of a story but the conversion of a lived relation into a symbolic one - a relation now mediated by explanation, self-description, and retrospective sense-making.

Why Closure Is Structurally Elusive

The desire for closure assumes that a final account is possible - a definitive explanation that neutralizes the remaining emotional charge. A Hegelian account suggests the opposite: meaning is productive. It generates more meaning. Every interpretation becomes new material for interpretation.

Consider the common scenario of the “good breakup talk.” One receives a reason, perhaps an apology, perhaps even an expression of respect. Yet closure still fails to arrive. The reason provokes further inquiry - was it sincere, complete, or defensive? The apology raises questions of timing and motivation. The respect reads, to a wounded mind, as either consolation or insult. Even clarity becomes a stimulus for additional thought because the self is not only trying to understand the other. It is trying to understand itself-in-relation: why it chose, what it tolerated, what it hoped for, what it refused to see.

Closure, then, is not difficult because people communicate poorly, though they often do. It is difficult because the self has changed. The self that seeks closure is not the self that entered the relationship. The relationship reorganized desires, standards, and vulnerabilities. A “final” explanation cannot return you to an earlier stability because that stability no longer exists.

To put it sharply: closure is metaphysically optimistic. It imagines a final synthesis that does not generate new contradiction. Dialectics denies that possibility. Endings are not seals; they are transitions that produce new forms of the same problem under different conditions.

What Replaces Closure: Development and Self-Recognition

If closure is a fragile ideal, what can be reasonably sought? A more Hegelian aim would be development: the integration of the experience into a revised self-understanding. This is less satisfying rhetorically, but it is more accurate psychologically.

One can seek clarity, dignity, and honesty in the breakup process. These matter. But the deeper task is internal: to learn what kind of recognition one was pursuing, what forms of non-recognition one accepted, and what one requires to remain both attached and free. In Hegel’s terms, the point is not to “close” the event but to incorporate its negation into a more articulated sense of self.

This is where the breakup text becomes, paradoxically, an educational object. Its insufficiency teaches something. Its finality is performative, not absolute. It cannot complete the story because the story’s continuation is not in the other’s hands. It is in the ongoing work of self-recognition - the capacity to acknowledge oneself without relying entirely on the other’s gaze to grant reality.

Breakups wound because they do not only remove a person. They unsettle a recognition economy. They force the self to confront the conditions under which it felt authorized, visible, and real. Hegel clarifies why closure so often fails: recognition is dialectical, and dialectics does not end cleanly. It transforms.

The practical implication is sobering but also liberating. The question after a breakup is not simply “How do I close this?” It is “What has this changed in me, and how do I carry that change without outsourcing my reality to another’s reply?”

The door does not shut with a click. It becomes another door. The work is not to find a final line. The work is to learn to live the next form of freedom.

Freud vs. Jung on Meme Culture: Dream-Work for People Who Don’t Sleep

Your thumb scrolls like a nervous rosary bead counter.

It is 1:17 a.m. The room lies flat and black. Your face glows in the phone-light, a little devotional icon of modern fatigue. Then a meme hits - perfectly timed, perfectly cruel - and you laugh once, sharp and involuntary, like somebody flicked a switch behind your ribs.

That laugh is not nothing. It is the psyche taking an exit ramp.

Freud would call the meme a joke with a hidden basement. Jung would call it a mask that remembers the oldest faces. Between them sits the same suspicion: you are not merely consuming content. You are watching the unconscious rehearse in public.

Freud - Meme as Dream-Work in Street Clothes

Freud’s mind is not a calm lake. It is a city at night. Lights on in some windows, lights off in others, strange movements behind curtains. The point is not that you hide things. The point is that hiding things is how the system runs.

Jokes, for Freud, are a legal loophole. They let forbidden material slip through customs. A meme does that faster than a therapist can say, “How does that make you feel?” It takes a shameful feeling - jealousy, resentment, loneliness, dread - and smuggles it into daylight wrapped in a caption and a familiar image.

Look at the mechanics. Condensation: one picture carries ten meanings, like a suitcase overpacked with contraband. Displacement: the emotional charge moves from the real target to a safer substitute. You do not say, “I am terrified I am wasting my life.” You share: “Me on Sunday night when the calendar opens.” The laughter releases pressure. The share recruits allies. The feeling becomes social, which makes it feel survivable.

And the meme’s genius is its alibi. It pretends to be light. It pretends to be nothing. Meanwhile it performs a tiny operation on your nervous system: it turns pain into a shape you can hold without burning your hand. (Freud would call it catharsis; your group chat calls it relatable.)

But the darker insight is this: the meme does not only express the unconscious. It edits it. It trains you to package your own distress as humor. It teaches you which feelings deserve applause and which ones should be hidden behind irony like a bad tattoo.

You laugh, you feel seen, you move on. The symptom keeps its job. The joke keeps its cover.

Jung - Archetypes Wearing Hoodies

Now Jung arrives with a lantern and starts walking deeper into the cave.

Freud’s unconscious is personal history with locks on it. Jung’s unconscious is older. It is communal. It is the warehouse of recurring forms. The Mother. The Hero. The Trickster. The Shadow. Characters that keep returning because they are not characters so much as shapes the human mind keeps pouring itself into.

Memes, under this lens, look like folk mythology with a Wi-Fi signal. The Trickster thrives online because the feed rewards disruption and wit. The Shadow thrives because anonymity loosens restraints and invites projection. The Hero appears as the main character of every thread, righteous and slightly addicted to being righteous.

Even the meme templates feel like mythic vessels. The “starter pack” is a modern taxonomy spell: name the type and it becomes real. The “villain origin story” is an initiation tale with irony armor. The “two buttons” meme is moral conflict drawn as a cartoon altar call.

And because memes circulate, these archetypes become shared dreams you scroll through while awake. You think you are browsing. You are participating in a collective symbolic weather system. Jung would note the excitement in that - and the danger. Symbols do not just represent feelings. They can manufacture them, amplify them, steer them. (The collective unconscious used to whisper; now it posts with notifications on.)

So the meme is not only yours. It belongs to the tribe. It is how the tribe thinks without thinking, remembers without remembering.

The Punch - The Algorithm Picks Your Unconscious for You

So who wins, Freud or Jung?

Both, inconveniently.

Freud explains the meme’s secret pleasure: it lets you say what you cannot say. Jung explains the meme’s strange power: it feels familiar before you understand why. The meme is a compromise formation powered by an archetype, a private pressure released through a communal symbol.

Now add the contemporary twist. The internet does not merely host this psychic theater. It curates it. It selects which jokes survive, which symbols spread, which emotional flavors trend. The algorithm does not care what is true. It cares what grips. And what grips is often what is unresolved.

This is where the meme stops being a mirror and becomes a mold.

You begin to anticipate your life in meme shapes. You feel sadness and immediately reach for a template. You feel anger and already know the caption. You catch yourself translating experience into shareability, shaving off the inconvenient parts so the joke lands clean. The interior world becomes content-ready, which is another way of saying it becomes managed.

The final irony is brutal and almost funny. You share a meme to feel less alone. The platform registers the behavior and offers more of the same emotional frequency. It hands you an endless buffet of jokes that match your wound. The wound stays fed. The engagement stays high.

Freud would ask: what desire are you laundering through humor? Jung would ask: which archetype keeps driving your reactions like a borrowed car? The shared answer is the one you can feel in your thumb: memes do not only express the unconscious. They industrialize it.

So yes, laugh. Share. Let the joke give you air.

Just notice the price of the air.

In the old world, dreams arrived in private and demanded interpretation. In this one, dreams arrive pre-captioned and beg to be reposted. (The unconscious, now with a social media manager.)

And that is the strange new intimacy: your inner life does not only speak. It performs. It trends. It learns its lines.