Begin the Begin, Research Time, 15/12/2017

Last week, I wrote a bit of a free-wheeling post. I’m writing about Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, so being a little free-wheeling and weird is generally acceptable. One thing I wanted to get off my chest was my frustration that Deleuze considered only the Western tradition to be real philosophy.

I mean, if you have a conception of philosophy as catching hold of chaos in thought, it makes sense that such an activity will take many forms besides this curious Hellenic tradition of writing, discourse, and thought.

That's what I take Western philosophy to be – the tradition of conceptual engineering that began with the sages / educators / scientists / mathematicians of Hellenic Greece.

A reproduction of a painting of Ibn Rushd, one of the
greatest philosophers in the history of Spain.

Now, that means what I count as Western philosophy is a bit larger than a lot of what I was taught in school. I don’t really expand the tradition by much.

I consider the medieval Muslim and Jewish thinkers of the Abbasid Empire the direct successors of Hellenic philosophical and mathematical traditions. More than only following the Greeks, Persia, Syria, and the Maghreb contributed major new creative directions in ontology, mathematics, medicine and the nature of divinity.

Also, I read some very interesting writing about Ethiopians’ contribution to the Western tradition of philosophy in the 1600s and 1700s. So I don’t just stick to Europe and America.*

* What an odd coincidence that these are the two regions at the top of the old global colonial hierarchy. Funny, isn’t it?

I’m not writing to catalogue the world’s traditions, though. I’m writing this to make a more straightforward account of my last problem with Deleuze. It was a vicious tension in this last work that I think he could (and should) have reconciled if he’d had a few more years of productive life after What Is Philosophy?.

As it is, he developed an insightful account of why philosophy developed in Hellenic Greece. Which is really an insightful account of why Western philosophy developed in Hellenic Greece.

That region had a curious and peculiar position in the Mediterranean world when philosophy and geometry developed in communities of sages – the Pythagoreans, Plato’s Academy, and the Lyceum.

Greece had a fluid, plural, and largely non-hierarchical cultural environment – they were close enough to the Persian Empire for maritime trade but, for the most part, were beyond the point where they could be easily conquered.

So Hellenic cities were free of subjugation to a monarch, and had a much more dynamic relationship among themselves than the static role of submission to an imperialist authority.

Being a seafaring society also encouraged a culture of friendliness and openness among cities and trading partners. There was a similar culture of friendly rivalry among the leaders of each individual polis – governed by argument and debate among a local parliament of jovial neighbours.

These were the unique conditions of one of the most philosophically vibrant and creative cultures of human history. They were not inevitable – a few inconvenient famines or a better Persian shipbuilding industry could have destroyed Hellenic philosophy when they were largely still mystics in the woods.

Western philosophy is a unique tradition, with many strange and surprising transformations. But it isn’t the only philosophical tradition. It simply happens to be mine.

Freedom to Be a Villain, Research Time, 26/07/2017

Yesterday evening, the GF and I were talking about the widespread famine and food shortages throughout Africa and the Arabian peninsula right now. Caused by drought crisis and exacerbated by war and less official political violence, there are serious food shortages in Nigeria, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, and Yemen.

The Jewish community of eastern Uganda, the Abayudaya, is currently
at risk from drought and food shortages.

Those are only the countries suffering most from famine – millions across the continent are at risk. The famine doesn’t have much mainstream media attention – Donald Trump succumbing to dementia at a Boy Scout Jamboree seems more important to Jeff Zucker and his ilk than actually informing the public about life-or-death issues.

Now, I want to ask you, reader, a question. If someone asked you to donate some money to a famine relief activity for one of these areas – say, for a community in eastern Uganda – would you do it?

A follow-up. Say you give them a few dollars. Not much, but what you can spare. Would you consider it your free choice? I think so. Someone explains the famine and what their organization was working on to help people, follows it up with a request for a donation, and you give some money. You’ve considered it, and chosen to do so.

But what if you decide not to. Same scenario – explanation of the famine and the organization’s relief work – but you say no. That would also be your free choice.

Now, one last question. Is the person who would help a community in such distress a better person than the one who wouldn’t?

Peter Singer is one philosopher, quite popular in the circles where I did
my doctorate, who has advocated that we have a moral duty to give to
charity and overcome unjust inequalities.

It’s reasonable to say yes. Someone who wants to ease the suffering of others and help people in need where the opportunity presents itself is a decent person. Someone who turns away from others’ pain and cares only about his own desires is, at minimum, a bit of a douche.

Yes, you’re free to be a douche if you wish. But why would you wish it?

I bring up this example because I want to discuss this point from Milton Friedman in its context. Someone who makes even a small gesture to help others in need is a better person than someone who won’t. It makes you a good person to want to improve and heal the world.

Contributing to your society’s overcoming racism is one way to heal the world. Friedman considers free markets themselves to do this, because of the inherently anti-racist character of a totally open economy. This does make sense.

When you open your society and economy to people of all ethnicities, cultures, castes, and religions and refuse to racialize any of them into an underclass, you’ve made a better society and a better market. You don’t cut anyone out of the market for any reason other than incompetence. You’ll become a customer of any business that gives you a fair deal on what you want, regardless of identity. That’s great.

When I grew up, everyone in my education system – formal and
informal – spoke about segregation as a terrible crime against
human dignity. Now, mainstream conservative politicians across
the United States and in Canada want to enshrine the right to
discriminate and economically marginalize others as an
essential human freedom. Fuck you.

Unfortunately for Friedman, his argument about racism in a free society in Capitalism and Freedom doesn’t stop there. He follows up this very insightful point about how economically ridiculous racism is, by defending our right to be racist.

The right to be racist is an aspect of the human right to liberty. Here is Friedman doubling down on the paradox of liberty – if my freedom includes a liberty to reject others from my society, then my inviolable liberty includes the freedom to violate others’ liberty.

If the members of a community all freely choose to run their businesses without hiring or selling to a racialized group, then that is their free choice to do so. The freedom to be racist should be respected as an uncomfortable but necessary element of liberty.

Here’s a paradox that popular libertarians can’t seem to escape. If our freedom includes the liberty to be a racist jackass, then we can freely marginalize and suppress the freedom of others.

Any business owner can choose not to allow someone to be their customer for whatever reason they want. The liberty to force someone else into exile? Into penury? Into poverty? Into the destruction of their dignity? Can liberty without obligation stand?

I don’t think so.

The Frustration of a Blind Audience, A History Boy, 26/09/2016

In the early days of the blog, I wrote a long post about how Edward Said changed my mind radically about the masterwork of one of my favourite authors, Albert Camus. This week, I came across a couple of books that made me reconsider his work again.

Algerian writer Kamel Daoud wrote The Merseault Investigation, retelling the Arab’s side of the story of The Stranger. In short, it’s the narrative of the brother of the man Merseault killed on that beach – his own life as a Muslim African Algerian, marginalized in his own country.

My first exposure to Camus' work was when I bought a copy of The Plague
as a kid, knowing that its author was among my father's favourites.

And Ryu Speath’s piece also reviews Alice Kaplan’s book of literary history Looking for The Stranger, a research work that tries to reconcile the two competing views of Camus’ most legendary achievement.

When I first wrote a long-ish post about Camus, I discussed what Said brought to my understanding of The Stranger that I hadn’t thought of before – Its context as a work by a white Franco-Algerian. 

I’d always dealt with discussions of The Stranger in classrooms, instead of with how any artwork should be read. You should discover a work through a friend’s referral, or your own research because you like affiliated stuff, or it seems interesting when you stumble across it.

The Stranger’s reception when it first dropped was as the narrative statement of French existentialism – the most profound intensities of philosophical confrontation of humanity’s pretences with our finitude, pettiness, and mortality. And that was how its ideas were always discussed when I was in school.

There's "the absurd man" as the universal – reflected and described in the surreal imagery of Franz Kafka, the conceptual profundity of Jean-Paul Sartre, and the stark narrative of Albert Camus. 

One of the reasons my original post got so many pageviews was that I posted a link on a philosophy board at Reddit. This was long before I’d really discovered the depths of Reddit’s white supremacist and misogynist tendencies as a community – I was only ever a casual visitor. 

The Algerian War of Independence saw countless massacres, and was the
first major guerilla-terrorist uprising of a Muslim country against a
Western power. And under Charles DeGaulle's imperialist, nationalist
policies, the French government had it coming.

One commenter told me I simply didn’t understand the concept of the Absurd Man, because I was bringing all this information about real countries, histories, and populations to Camus’ abstract universal. 

So the two receptions of Camus over the 20th century were as a literary prophet of existentialism’s universality, or as a permanently compromised apologist for colonialism whose work continually erased the presence and lives of his Arab neighbours. How would we decide which was the right vision? Did it matter?

Is this basically just restating the basic idea behind “The Death of the Author”? Well, of course it is! But it’s an important enough idea that it still needs to be said. Our reception of Camus literally determines who he is – who he is in the whole world of humanity. How other people receive and understand us is central to all our roles in the wider human world.

It’s especially important for Camus, now that he can’t even get into fights with people over what his work could mean. This author is literally dead.*

* And part of why I find car crashes so interesting as narrative events. 

But just because who an author (or anyone) is depends on how we receive her, that doesn’t make the author entirely passive in this relationship. In this case, we can still uncover elements of Camus’ personality and positionality that can guide us to his intentions. 

And that’s what Kaplan’s book apparently does. When I read Said’s essay – both the general rejection of Camus in post-colonial literary studies and his own more nuanced take on The Stranger and other of the Algerian’s works – Camus was described as a white Algerian. His poverty was acknowledged, but he was still taken as someone who lived separately from the Arab population.

The war of independence brutalized Algerian culture and politics ever
since, with the newly liberated government consolidating a
military dictatorship and the only opposition being radical Islamist.

But that wasn’t actually true – among the very poor, which Camus was, there was a lot more social mixing with the local Arab population. The poor Franco-Algerian communities where Camus was raised suffered most during the war of independence and the ejection of French-speaking white people from free Algeria. They weren’t accepted as legitimate Algerians, despite having lived there for centuries, but they weren’t able to leave the country in mass because they were too poor. 

Said also depicted Camus’ opposition to Algerian independence and the anti-colonial rebellion in simple nationalist-colonial terms. But in Camus’ own correspondence and discussions, he wanted a more utopian achievement for Algeria and France. He wanted the two countries united in a post-national state where Arab Algerians, Franco-Algerians, white Europeans, and French Muslims could live together as neighbours. 

And it becomes clear what Merseault was originally supposed to be. When I finally got around to reading The Stranger, what struck me most – what I was never expecting from all the glowing depictions of the narrator as a literary voice of existentialism – was what an asshole Merseault was. 

Camus made him an asshole from the start. He didn’t want us to sympathize with Merseault – The Stranger’s narrator was a condemnation of French self-absorption and refusal to see people with any sympathy. 

Algeria's political environment today has no place for
secular-leaning, liberal intellectuals like Kamel Daoud,
who's risked his life to criticize the military regime and
Islamist opposition. In The Merseault Investigation he
writes of his country, "the beast fattened on seven years
of war had become voracious and refused to go back
underground."

The problem with its reception was that too many readers bought into Merseault’s self-lionization. They saw all Merseault’s dignity in absurdity, but were blind to the ethical (and political) implications of his actions – the only thing that could get the colonial French authorities to punish a white man for murdering an Arab was if he were already a pariah in the community.

So that’s the most recent serious reconsideration I’ve given to the point of view and ethics of this writer who’s been so important to me since I was a teenager. And this doesn’t diminish him in my eyes, no. 

All this complication, my picture of Camus, his work, all the meanings in his words, only makes the experience of reading him more rich and satisfying than it ever was before. I’m thankful to everyone who’s contributed to the complexity and the strangeness of this legendary writer.

Wondering About African Languages, Literature, and Life, Composing, 16/06/2014

Over the last few years, the political philosophical concepts that I believe are most important have come from reflecting on the cultural and legacy of colonial empires. So many of the stereotypes I encounter about Africa, especially the ones that as a younger person I believed myself, come from a failure to understand the history that bounds my own culture to those of that continent. There is a reason why these countries are so poor, so riven with strife and war, why corruption is so endemic. 

In very short, I’ve come to the conclusion that, respectively, there were huge transfers of material wealth and resources from colonies to Europe enabled by military occupation, colonial administration exacerbated existing tensions among groups and cultures of their possessions to head off organized rebellions, and they enabled a centuries-long culture of bribery in the ruling classes as administrators of colonial enterprises which remained intact after the political independence of the colonized territories.

That was a damn long sentence. I’d only risk writing it on a blog. 

The more typical image of Chinua
Achebe we see is of him as an old man.
So I found a photo of him as a young
person, because I like it when people
look at the world differently than
they may have before.

I’m about two-thirds of the way through Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the first book of African literature that, according to the stereotype, you always read if you’re a white person. It strikes me as very much of a pace with the mythical realism of other writers from outside the North/West in the mid to late 20th century. I’m particularly thinking of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. 

Politically, Things Fall Apart and One Hundred Years of Solitude run parallel purposes, in my estimation. Marquez described the turbulent politics and civil wars of Colombia through mythic language and imagery. Achebe described the collision of rural Igbo culture with the militarized Christianity of the English colonial force in language with the tone of the folk stories, fables, and myths his characters tell. Everyone calls it magical realism, but when I think about the language of those books, especially Achebe’s, I think mythical realism is more appropriate.

But I don’t really consider myself qualified to make any firm comments, literarily speaking, about these books. I know people who have become experts in literary analysis and history, and my own knowledge of African literature is extremely sketchy. Case in point, I’m only reading Chinua Achebe for the first time now. I similarly revealed my ignorance with a post last Winter about my thoughts on reading Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man for the first time. I wondered if anyone had ever considered the book a work of black existentialism, which I later discovered was one of the first reactions to the novel.

One thing I noticed when I was reading about some of the initial reactions to Things Fall Apart was the controversy Achebe first faced for publishing the book in English. Another African writer on my list to read soon, Ngugi wa’Thiong’o, stopped writing in English in his mid-life, deciding to compose all his works in Gikuyu from then on. I found some curious remarks Achebe made to explain his aesthetic decision, which is rooted in the colonial cultural destruction of Nigeria.

Igbo had no widespread formal written language when the region now called Nigeria was first colonized by the British military and government. There was an idiographic writing system, but it was used mostly by elites, and popular communication remained oral. Instead, the language was a complex panoply of dialects, largely mutually intelligible (though sometimes with effort). Igbo speaking peoples were rather like German or Mandarin speaking peoples that way, with a culture just as varied and complicated. 

The English, in their morally enlightened quest to spread true civilization to these ignorant peoples, created a formalized Igbo language itself for popular written communication. However, the English-designed Igbo writing system, using Latin letters, was designed entirely academically, a compromise among many complex grammatical and semantic variations made without any experimentation with practical use. The result was a stilted, fragmented language. In Achebe’s words, this colonially-made written Igbo could never sing. So he composed in the organic written vernacular of Nigeria, English.

Deleuze and Guattari's little book on Kafka is the
most remarkable engagement of philosophy with
fiction that I think I've ever read, and should be a
model for how the two disciplines should engage.

Wondering what a singing version of written Igbo would look like put me in mind of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of minor language and minor literature. This is a creation of language, usually literary but it doesn’t have to be, that is in a language that you use fluently, but is not your vernacular. The writer’s subtle lack of comfort with this tongue results in unorthodox uses that create new modes of expression in that language, that use that language in a way that a native speaker would never be able to. Their central example is Franz Kafka: a Czech Jew (a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) who spoke Czech and German fluently, whose life and career was thoroughly Germanophone, but whose faith and personality was infused with Kabbalistic mysticism.

So an Igbo writing in English with a mythical realist style is writing in a minor language, and Things Fall Apart displays the same kind of productive literary and linguistic experimentation for which Deleuze and Guattari praise this approach. Achebe’s English, and his identity, is a complex blend that can never be pure, a system of dynamic tensions of the fable-like tone of his storytelling with the nature of English itself, a European language at home in Nigeria today because of long-lasting military occupation and cultural imperialism.

Yet I wonder if some Nigerian writer has since taken up Achebe’s gripe with the standardized written Igbo as a challenge. Achebe chose English to write his novels because popular written Igbo was an academic creation of a colonial power who knew nothing of Igbo life, who designed written Igbo as a West African Esperanto, a clunky language made in a laboratory instead of in life. 

I’m not a linguist, and personally know very little about the languages of Nigeria, but I can at least imagine a scenario like this. Today, the Nigerian economy is strong enough and literacy high enough that a book could be composed in Igbo that restores elements of the spoken dialects into the sterile standardized Igbo. Someone could revise written Igbo through the act of literary creation, breathing life from the vibrancy of the spoken dialects to make a literary art object of the language itself. Such an act of linguistic creation would take a concept like minor literature into a whole new territory. The living variations of Igbo dialects could vitalize the hierarchically sterile written Igbo.

Maybe this is happening already. Maybe it’s utter nonsense. But it’s an idea.

The Politics of Names and Singularity, Research Time, 07/03/2014

The concept of singularity is central to the broad conceptual argument of my Ecophilosophy project, essentially a corollary of Leibniz’s Law. If two objects share all the same properties (including spacetime location), thereby becoming completely indiscernible, then they’re actually the same object and there’s only ever been one. The reverse would be true, that the uniqueness of any object is constituted by only the smallest difference. The least variation constitutes absolute uniqueness. Of course, we can map the degrees and kinds of variations and divergences, but from an absolute sense, every body is unique, singular.

One of the central challenges in my composing that manuscript was developing its politically relevant articulations. In that context, the principle of singularity implies the importance of preserving natural diversity, the continual creation of new bodies in ecological processes. But Donna Haraway gave me a spin on the concept that works for feminist politics as well in her essay “Reading Buchi Emecheta.”

I owe Haraway thanks again for revealing Emecheta to me,
another African novelist whose work I should read soon.

Emecheta is a Nigerian novelist and academic who has been publishing since the 1970s. Her biography practically defines human strength. Married at 18, she had five children with a husband from whom she had to hide her writing because he opposed her developing the ability to think for herself. After he left her in England with their children in council housing, she went on assistance while raising them alone and attending school, eventually earning a PhD in sociology. She has since become an internationally successful novelist and has lectured in prestigious universities in Britain, the United States, and Nigeria. Her novels often describe in Nigeria and the West who are beaten down by the injustices of sexism and racism that limit opportunity through prejudice. Haraway describes her as having a sharply critical view of how women are treated and controlled in the institution of marriage. After reading this essay, I’d like to get hold of some of Emecheta’s work.

Haraway’s essay discusses two critical views of Emecheta’s work, as well as her own. Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi reads Emecheta in terms of how well the novelist measures up to her own theory of African liberation through the embrace of traditional lifestyles like plural marriage, conceiving of the solidarity of African women in the diaspora as “amicable co-wives with an invisible husband.” She rejects Emecheta as rejecting her African identity by concentrating on the injustices that follow women after the failure of marriages, and so is incompatible with her vision of African liberation. Barbara Christian’s reading fares little better, although she was friendly to Emecheta’s ideas, incorporating the Nigerian into her own project of tracing articulations of motherhood throughout the history of African and African-American women through slavery and the modern era. In both of these interpretations, no matter how hostile or friendly, Emecheta’s work and life is judged on the basis of their own intellectual priorities.

Haraway’s own reading, which she gave in her class, “Methodological Issues in the Study of Women,” discussed and valorized Emecheta’s “heterogeneous statuses as...

“exile, Nigerian, Ibo, Irish-British feminist, black woman, writer canonized in the African Writers Series, popular writer published in cheap paper back books and children’s literature, librarian, mother on welfare, sociologist, single woman, reinventor of African tradition, deconstructor of African tradition, member of the Advisory Council to the British Home Secretary on race and equality, subject of contention among committed multi-racial womanist and feminist theorists, and international figure.”

This list of attributes is a gesture toward the singularity of Emecheta, and indeed of everyone. Human reason operates by forming general sets of standards for evaluation and judging phenomena by their accordance with those standards. But true respect for people (and for any body) requires recognizing the inability of anyone to be completely encapsulated within a general systematic framework of evaluation. Look hard enough, and you will discover aspects of someone who won’t fit your pre-existing framework of comprehension and value. To know someone, you have to understand them not in terms of your own priorities, but simply know them.

“TO HAVE DONE WITH JUDGMENT” 

— Antonin Artaud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze

Of course, I’m subject to this kind of judgment, even as I write about how I want to have done with judgment. My own philosophical development of the concept of singularity essentially creates my own framework against which to judge something. I can judge a critic by the degree to which they attempt to understand a figure through exploration of their singularity or subsume them within a more general framework. In this sense, judgment is inescapable. But I’m also aware that we can never truly, in the words of the figures I identify with in the philosophical tradition, have done with judgment. It will always be useful. 

The key, I think, that puts my own approach above that of the people I judge is that I don’t absolutize my framework of judgment. One has to remain away that any general framework of comprehension and value is a pragmatic, contingent matter, a tool that’s used for a purpose. To extend such a framework for judgment beyond its pragmatic purpose is the harmful move, boxing the singularity of Emecheta into a cause that she never chose.