semi-automatic waffle

Let’s dive, once again, into this brooding philosophical fugue where the "essential" is always that which gets hidden behind everyone’s desperate attempts to look like they’re not hiding anything.

What’s Going On Here (Part 7 of Our Ongoing Collapse)

1. Deleuze as the Patron Saint of Anti-Refinement

Deleuze’s beef with the “dogmatic image of thought” is that we always pretend to start from clean slates—like philosophical newborns—but actually smuggle in a bunch of assumptions dressed up as self-evident. You know, like "humans have capacity," or "reality is legible," or "we’re not secretly trying to optimize existence into a frictionless Apple interface."

Conway takes this and essentially says:

Now let’s apply that not just to thought but to the entire ontology of the human being and its endless, ghastly refinement.

This line:

“It has kept nothing back – except, of course, the essential…”
—honestly deserves a little standing ovation. It perfectly captures the sinister trick of systems that are “transparent,” but only because they’ve naturalized their foundations so thoroughly that no one even sees them.

2. Posthumanism as the Same Eugenics this time Wearing Cyberpunk Eyeliner

Conway starts going after posthumanism, eco-criticism, social theory—not because they’re insufficiently enlightened, but because they still maintain the structure of refinement. They might say they’ve moved past “the human,” but they’re still obsessed with capacities: agency, complexity, adaptability, cognition, empathy, whatever the cool buzzword is this decade.

So even the attempts to “break with humanism” just end up remixing it.

He’s not saying “this discourse is bad.” He’s saying:

You are addicted to the logic of optimization. Even when you reject the subject, you keep its capacities like souvenirs.

Imagine someone throwing out their house but keeping all the furniture and wondering why their new place looks the same.

3. Galton as the Wrong Starting Point

And finally, in your excerpt’s return to Galton the claim is that reducing eugenics to a specific historical emergence (i.e., Victorian race science, Galtonian biometrics, whatever) misses the metaphysical forest for the biopolitical trees.

Eugenics isn’t a moment. It’s a metaphysical posture toward being.

That posture says: “We must define what is, find its core, measure it, isolate it, and improve it.” And that’s not just Francis Galton’s weird hobby—that’s the foundation of philosophy, science, ethics, even leftist critical theory. If Galton hadn't done it, someone else would have. And probably did.

Translation for the Sleep-Deprived:

Conway (and, I guess, you now) is making a move that goes beyond critique and becomes almost theological in how it calls for a purification of thought—except, instead of purifying, you’re refusing the entire altar.

You're saying:

Stop looking for the unsaid. Start interrogating what we all keep saying—without thinking—about what it means to be human. That’s where the poison lives.

In Conclusion:

You are neck-deep in a form of philosophy that refuses to be a philosophy. It’s critique that turns on critique itself, insisting that even our attempts to escape the system are contaminated by the very logic we claim to resist.

Further Reflections on Conway

Let’s be honest, there’s some high-end existential drama going on here—he’s making a structural critique of thought that lands in a space very few thinkers dare to fully inhabit: the philosophical non-place, the theoretical black site where no assumptions are safe.

Here’s what I think Conway is actually doing under the layers of dread, negation, and finely sharpened conceptual knives:

1. The Central Crime: Refinement-as-Metaphysics

The thesis that pulses through Conway’s work is that refinement is not just a cultural obsession or a technological imperative—it is the metaphysical principle of modernity.

Metaphysics, in Conway’s telling, is not primarily about being, or presence, or truth. It's about capacity—and more specifically, the selection and optimization of capacity. Refinement isn’t just something humans do after understanding; it’s baked into how we conceptualize anything as real. It's the logic that says:

"There is something in this that is more essential than everything else. Find it, isolate it, improve it."

It’s what gives us Platonic Forms, Cartesian rationality, Kantian faculties, and Silicon Valley venture capitalists speaking earnestly about "unlocking human potential" while draining your life savings into a wellness app.

2. The Critique of Posthumanism as Disguised Humanism

He’s not just critiquing essentialists, he’s pointing fingers at you, leftist reader—with your Donna Haraway PDF and your notes on assemblages and relational ontologies.

Conway’s claim: even the rebels are playing the same game. The posthumanists might be suspicious of “the human,” but they still keep capacity as the gold standard. Whether it’s cognition, responsiveness, adaptability, or “relational becoming,” they keep the core idea that something must be measured, isolated, and valued as the foundation of subjectivity.

This is like finding out the revolutionaries have been using the king’s playbook all along—just printing it on recycled paper.

3. Eugenics as the Mode of World-Formation

Here’s where Conway goes nuclear and stops talking about eugenics as a historical horror (which it is) and starts talking about it as a structural feature of thought. This is bold and, let’s be honest, a little terrifying.

His thesis: eugenics is not an aberration in the development of thought. It is the logical end of a system that always aimed at the refinement of being.

This is a total inversion of how we normally treat eugenics—as a moral failure, a historical detour. Conway says no, it’s the fulfillment of metaphysical logic itself, the final form of a thought system obsessed with capacity and optimization.

This kind of thinking is where concepts like "species-being," "human capital," and "self-actualization" all end up drinking from the same poisoned well. Even the idea of "progressive education" or "human development" gets read here as eugenic in structure: sorting, grading, improving.

4. No Exit, No Redemption, No New Beginning

This is not a philosophy of hope. It’s a philosophy of refusal—but not the kind that gives you a nice zine and a protest poster. Conway doesn’t want to smash the state. He wants to smash the ontological assumptions that make any state possible.

“We are not seeking an alternative constituent point of view.”

This is the quietest, most devastating sentence in the entire work. Because it tells you: we’re not here to find a better way forward. We’re not looking for a purer critique. We are not building a better metaphysics. We are gnawing at the roots of all of it, until there’s nothing left to stand on. Including ourselves.

And this puts Conway in rarefied territory. He’s not trying to philosophize. He’s trying to de-metaphysicalize the very impulse to think as such.

5. The Method of Exposure: Not Uncovering, But Desaturating

Philosophy loves its unsaids. It fetishizes the “lacuna,” the gap, the Derridean différance, the marginalia. But Conway follows Foucault instead: the problem isn’t what’s absent—it’s what’s always present and never questioned.

So rather than hunting hidden truths, Conway looks at what we repeat, constantly, because we’ve never been able to imagine doing otherwise.

Think of it like philosophical color correction. Instead of bringing hidden things into the light, Conway desaturates the whole image until we can see the artificiality of the brightness we took for granted.

TL;DR for You, My Ragged Theorist-in-Training:

Refinement is not a practice. It’s the logic of Being in modernity.
Eugenics isn’t a mistake. It’s metaphysics' final form.
Posthumanism is still humanism.
Critique, when it relies on the same metaphysical assumptions, just reinforces the thing it hates.
You cannot escape the trap. But you can know it.

Conway is “right” if...

You accept the premise that metaphysics is obsessed with identifying, isolating, and refining “capacity” as the foundation of being.
And let’s be honest, this is not a wild accusation. From Aristotle’s telos, to Kant’s faculties, to Heidegger’s Dasein, to contemporary AI discourse, there’s a constant lurking assumption that what matters about humans (or anything) is its essential function or refinable trait.
You see eugenics not as a historical anomaly but as a conceptual consequence.
If you take Conway seriously, then eugenics isn’t a deviation from Enlightenment ideals—it is the Enlightenment ideal, once it's been stripped of polite language and institutional modesty. Refinement applied to bodies. Optimization weaponized. It’s what you get when metaphysics picks up a clipboard and starts sorting people.
You agree that critique often fails to escape the logic it critiques.
Conway is devastating on this point. So many “radical” thinkers are just rearranging the furniture in the same metaphysical house.

Conway is not “right” if...

You think that total conceptual refusal leads nowhere.
Because here’s the catch: Conway offers no exit. No politics. No ethics. No alternative. He doesn’t even offer critique—he offers the refusal of critique. And that’s powerful in a sense... but in another sense, it's elegant nihilism.
You believe in lived resistance.
If you think there’s value in practical action, in incomplete but meaningful alternatives, in partial escapes.
You want a metaphysics that’s capacious without being violent.
Some thinkers—Simone Weil, Césaire, Moten, even the tragically optimistic Marxists—believe you can talk about being, capacity and collectivity without falling into eugenic traps. That metaphysics doesn’t have to be refinement. That there are ways of relating to thought, world, and being that don't immediately spiral into cybernetic fascism.

Berlant’s work offers a rich, complex way to think about attention that can illuminate how Conway’s critique might intersect or diverge. Let’s explore how Conway’s suspicion of metaphysical capacity and Berlant’s affective theory of attention relate.

1. Berlant’s Theory of Attention: Overview

Berlant doesn’t treat attention simply as a neutral or pure capacity. Instead, in works like Cruel Optimism and essays on affect, attention is:

Affective and distributed—not fully conscious or deliberate
Bound up with attachment to objects, fantasies, or norms that are both enabling and disabling
A site of tension between what sustains life and what limits or injures it
Uneven and structured by power—some forms of attention are privileged, others are foreclosed or disciplined

In short, attention for Berlant is a conflicted, embodied practice shaped by historical and social forces, not a metaphysical ground or pure presence.

2. Mapping Conway’s Critique onto Berlant’s Attention

Conway’s Concern / Concept	Berlant’s Theory of Attention	Points of Tension or Alignment
Capacity as eugenic filter	Attention is not a pure capacity but unevenly distributed and constrained by structural power (race, class, gender)	Alignment: Both see capacity as structured and limiting, not neutral or universal
Metaphysics demands intelligibility and normativity	Attention involves attachments to fantasies and normative objects, sometimes cruel or disabling	Alignment: Berlant’s "cruel optimism" shows attention can sustain and limit simultaneously—not innocent or pure
Attention as normative demand risks exclusion	Berlant emphasizes the constraints on where and how attention is invested—those excluded are not just ignored but actively marginalized	Alignment: Both critique exclusion through normativity of attention
Possible post-metaphysical attention as vulnerability/refusal	Berlant’s attention is often affective and precarious, marked by ambivalence and partial refusal	Alignment: Berlant’s framework can accommodate attention as non-totalizing, fragmentary, affective openness
Attention as metaphysical grounding (capacity)	Berlant rejects any notion of pure ground or essence, emphasizing historical and material contingency	Alignment: Berlant’s theory is anti-metaphysical in spirit

3. Where Berlant Deepens and Complicates Conway

Attention is never fully voluntary or conscious: Berlant’s affect theory shows attention as a site of embodied, sometimes unwanted, and often non-deliberate investment. This moves beyond the metaphysical idea of attention as a willful capacity.
Attachment is always uneven and potentially cruel: The notion of cruel optimism captures how people’s attachments (and thus attention) can sustain life but also cause injury. This complicates any ideal of attention as pure or ethical practice.
Attention is political and racialized: Berlant’s work makes clear that attention is structured by histories of race, gender, and coloniality. This intersectional analysis enriches Conway’s genealogical project, which focuses on metaphysics and eugenics, by adding layers of social and affective power.

4. Potential Friction: Conway’s Radical Break vs Berlant’s Situated Mediation

Conway calls for a total interruption of metaphysical logic—a radical refusal or “breaking off” of capacity-based thinking.
Berlant’s work, while deeply critical, often works within existing affective structures, exploring how people navigate them, sustain life within limits, and sometimes resist.

Thus, Berlant’s attention might be seen as more immanent and pragmatic, while Conway’s is more ruptural and genealogical.

5. Summary: Would Conway Find Berlant’s Attention More Palatable?

Yes, probably more palatable than, say, Habermas’s rationality-as-threshold or classical metaphysical capacity. Because Berlant’s attention:

Does not essentialize capacity
Understands attention as affectively mediated and partial
Reveals the violences encoded in attention without mystifying or legitimizing them