First and foremost, my dissertation, for which a full draft of the second chapter is (informally) due as Fall falls. I have a skeletal but solid idea of what this chapter will contain/argue. But, as ever, there are books-and-books to read to flesh it all out in the open space of scholarly discussion. I found some (possibly) important texts that make arguments adjacent to the one I would like to pen regarding Marx’s mathematical manuscripts, and so I lined many of these up on my reMarkables to chew through in the coming weeks.
Some of this is reading in recent Marxist criticism (such as this); but much of it is more general education in the history and philosophy of mathematics, as this is not a domain that I have ever systematically studied. It is unfortunate for me that the “history and philosophy of mathematics” is such a sweeping body of literature that is often dense and particular. I have been reckoning with this wily character of the domain since at least 2024, when we started the Math(s), Philosophy, History reading group, which is roughly also when I started to think seriously about the history and philosophy of mathematics as an important lens for computationally inflected critical theory. The modern academic-historical sensibility—which still struggles under the weight of that ghastly postmodern apothegm; that everything has (nothing if it does not have) a specific time and place—often bristles at the conceptual scope of mathematical undertaking. The context for a proof sometimes swings from a seventeenth century insight (Leibniz, say), through progress made in the twentieth century, only to arrive promptly back in the present wherein some uncharted graduate student has unearthed a new way of looking at dots and lines. It is the broad-shouldered historicity of mathematical culture that makes it such a curious body of work to study in postmodern times: mathematical ideas seem to shrug off contextual particularity like water off a duck’s back.
Zeroing in on the mathematical developments that matter for my argument is the tall order on which I am currently at work. The overall aim is to link Marx’s critique of capital to the origins of computer science in the mid-twentieth century: hence my dissertation’s current working title, Mathematical Materialism: Capital, Calculus, and the Cradle of Computer Science.