Mapping Thought II: Can the Ideal Save Us? Research Time, 24/04/2018

So that's a look at the history of philosophy. What about the philosophy of history? A concept develops in response to a particular, singular problem as it arises in human society. The concept itself then develops historical power.

We don’t often think of concepts as having historical, material power. It’s an unfortunate tendency of the way the Western tradition of thought has separated thinking and the mental from the material, physical world of institutions and acts. But concepts do have material power.

Concepts are the components of people’s education and socialization. Let’s go back to our example from yesterday, the concept of the social contract.* It’s a concept, and so a matter of thought. But it’s thought that guides action in a very complex, profound way.

Does the violence of revolution overcome our ideals of freedom,
even as it overcomes whether we can actually use that revolution
to achieve anything like freedom in our own lives?

* There’s going to be a pretty intense interrogation of the concept of social contract, particularly its authoritarian characters, in Utopias. Not sure where in the book I’ll put it.

As a concept that sits at the heart of so many approaches to political thinking throughout the Western tradition, the different iterations of and approaches to the concept affect how we think about our relations to each other and to our state institutions.

Those thoughts inspire our actions. More than that, they drive our actions from central locations in our understanding of our social world.

Now I want to ask one more question – Do our concepts still have value when the events and movements they inspire become violent, corrupt, or self-destructive?

I’m going to step my example away from the social contract, and toward the more general concept of freedom. Freedom is a concept that means a lot of things to a lot of people, and has over centuries – And I’m just restricting my thinking in this case to my general knowledge of the Western tradition, what I know best.

Horrifying things have been done in the name of freedom. A contemporary example is Operation Iraqi Freedom. A classic example is the French Revolution.

The French Revolution was the subject of speculation by some of the leading philosophers of the time, who became some of the most influential philosophers down to the present day. So those complex examinations and investigations of the French Revolution have incredible influence on the Western tradition of philosophy as it stands today.

Because the truth is, just like the absurdity of a popular heartthrob like
1950s Marlon Brando playing Napoleon, the political events that saw
imperialism and wars of conquest emerge from the French Revolution
were contingent events. It need not have happened that way. Every
material event need not have happened that way, and only did
because of a complex interplay of events and relationships. The
slightest disturbance in this networks can have massive effects. So
should we resign ourselves to the fragility of our ideals? Or hold
onto them because that possibility of real success always remains?

The problem is that the event itself betrayed its motivating concept. The French Revolution was the successful overthrow of an absolutist monarchy in favour of a system of government that was more accountable to ordinary people. But the revolution itself quickly descended into the first major purge of modernism. The Terror was the assembly line of execution that continued for years after the overthrow of the monarchy.

Beyond this, within a decade, France was ruled again by a dictator. Napoleon was something of an improvement over the decadent, incompetent monarchy of Louis XVI, in that he actually introduced a system of law that governed even the practice of the state. Civil law was an improvement. The attempt to conquer Europe and the Mediterranean coast of Africa, not so much.

The same is true for so many other revolutions and revolutionary periods in politics. Civil war and Stalin’s system of governance by secret police destroyed any potential for genuine freedom to come from the Russian revolution, for example.

Same goes for the absolute dictatorship of Fidel Castro, the corruption of the United States with slavery and its cultural legacy, the revolutions of Simón Bolívar, José de San Martin, and Bernardo O’Higgins that descended into squabbles among warlords, and the deranged mass mobilization schemes of Mao Zedong, among many others. Revolutions in the name of freedom either fell into corruption or were quickly overcome by revanchist reactions.

So what’s the good of revolution? Paul Patton’s answer, riffing on the concepts of Gilles Deleuze, was the preservation of the idea of freedom. The total realization of the ideal freedom in the world is impossible, just as no one ever really signs a social contract. But the idea, the concept itself, is its own reason for existing – to inspire us to fight the reactionary forces that would take even our partial freedom away from us.

Is that alone worth it? I don’t know.

What Does It Mean to Be an Anarchist? Research Time, 19/04/2018

When I started the research for Utopias a few years ago, one of the first traditions of political thinking I looked into was anarchism.

I wanted to explore a tradition that I thought was a clear alternative to many of the political systems and concepts we take for granted. You ask what it means to live without a state. You investigate what relationships can constitute a strong community.

Thinking about anarchism also encourages you to rethink how many institutions you need in your society to hold it together. It encourages you to analyze the real powers of brotherhood in a community. You wonder how much we really need coercive authority to keep a community from becoming violent.

Anarchist thinking often works better as a guide for resistance to an
unjust and violent state apparatus than as a concrete political
program. There's just so much work we have to do on ourselves
as people before anarchism can become a viable framework for
organizing our lives as communities.

You wonder if we really need the police? The army? Any institution of the state that we typically think we have a duty to obey. You come to doubt the truth of our entire heritage of political thinking that has an ancestor in Thomas Hobbes.

So you come to doubt pretty much every principle taken for granted in Western political philosophy – the social contract, the authority of the state, the obligations of citizens to police and military authority. That’s the value of looking into thinkers like Peter Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin, and Emma Goldman.

Yet I have my doubts about the power of a straight-ahead anarchism to provide actionable values for human society. Frankly, anarchist values like mutual aid and intuitive social solidarity are too difficult for most humans to live by.

Paul Patton makes this point in one of his books about Gilles Deleuze. He writes about how people often take Deleuze and Guattari to have been anarchists. It’s true that their political thinking was very critical of state authority. And they were involved as thought leaders and activists with real anarchist and communist political movements in Europe during their lives.

But Patton makes one very insightful point in the early stages of that book – anarchism requires an optimism about humanity’s inherent goodness and kindness to each other that Deleuze and Guattari didn’t really share.

Humans are too terrible to each other. We resent each other. We make aliens of each other. We hate each other for no real reason, both as individuals and as groups. We need a long period of education and moral training to be as kind to each other as the mutual aid principles of an anarchist society would require.

And it would be even more difficult to prevent the xenophobia that can so easily arise when we let communitarian values drive our us vs them cultural imagery. Humans are, for the most part, simply not good or kind enough creatures to live according to a thoroughly anarchist political morality.

Anarchism’s most important contribution to practical political thinking in the 21st century, I think, is its spirit. Rebellion against taking coercive authority, the power of the state over society’s development, for granted. Critiquing the institutions that we’ve been taught almost all our lives are beyond reproach.

That spirit – maybe you could call it punk philosophy – should inspire any approach to political thinking that takes seriously the possibility of change. Demands for political, social, moral, and ethical change requires conceiving of the radically different. Maybe it’s achievable. Or maybe we’ll always fall short of our ideal.

What matters is the image of a different path.

Despotism as Over-Writing and Overriding Thought, Jamming, 31/03/2018

A couple of days ago, I finished a white paper for a Toronto-based think tank / consulting firm on democratic governance. I’m not going to get into the details of it right now, because it’s pretty dense.

Happily, the firm’s research supervisor enjoyed what I wrote and had some great recommendations for the second draft. A lot of his suggestions had to do with signposting – letting a reader know explicitly why you’re making a particular inference or reference.

If we understand the world according to only a single set of ideas,
we'll do serious injustice to people who think differently, and
impoverish our thinking and our civilization. Spirits must become
more than ideas and practices.

I always need an editor’s hand with signposting in a lot of my non-fiction work. I immerse myself so deeply in the research material and the concepts that what appears clear to me needs to be made more explicit. The connection is there – I just sometimes have to be reminded to say it blatantly. I can be too subtle for my own good when I write.

The paper explores the chaotic and dangerous nature of online social media platforms. They can encourage democratic movements – the Arab Spring, Idle No More, Stoneman Douglas – or revanchist, reactionary movements among all ideologies – the alt-Right, left-wing Putin boosting.

One of the best comments I got from my editor was that I should add, in the final section of recommendations, a brief response on whether these platforms should be nationalized to control them in the public interest.

I think this would be disastrous. Because while the rapid chaos of barely restrained social media can encourage dangerous extremism, nationalization would put media that can also encourage democratic revolution in the authoritative hands of the state.

In most of our political conversations today, talk about the danger of state authority is a libertarian idea. I take a different tack, following the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari – along with the philosophical current in which they were major players. Their conception of the state’s dangers is rooted in their concept of despotism.

As much as we fear Trumpism – and there's plenty to fear in his regime
of egotism, corruption, and validation of racism – his politics merely
makes explicit the inherent oppressive danger of state institutions.

We associate despotism typically with despots – dictators or authoritarian rulers whose power falls short of the Führer ideal, while still moving along that trajectory. But Deleuze and Guattari talk about the despotic machine – this is the state itself.

When the material power of a state institution is barely or not at all restrained, it overcodes everything in the territory it’s responsible for. What do I mean by overcoding? It’s a technical term, referring to institutions that orient more and more (and eventually all) of people’s activity to the state.

In a despotic machine, if you want to do anything in your life, you have to run that activity through some kind of state machinery. State institutions, regulations, and rules determine every aspect of life. Not simply in terms of conditions – like laws, safety or environmental rules.

I mean state institutions and machinery determine and actively shape cultural and social development. Diversity and indigeneity are wiped away by state mandates for uniformity.

Here’s a simple example. It comes from touchstones in Deleuze and Guattari’s own work. Franz Kafka was a Czech Jew living for most of his life in the Austro-Hungarian empire, whose thinking and work was informed by his sardonic attitude toward the bureaucratic drudgery of his day job, as well as his personal engagement with Jewish mysticism.

As useful as state institutions can be for supplying common goods to
huge populations, the institutions are very dangerous. They can all
too easily be used to oppress people, and force the many ways of
living across a population into a single, uniform character. That's the
power that Deleuze and Guattari called overcoding.

Kafka had a complex identity and set of ideas, whose linguistic influence was Czech, Hebrew, and Yiddish. But the language of his fiction writing and daily business life was German. This was a state imposition on his identity, which was more complex than the monarchist political morality and subtle German supremacism that the Austrian state imposed on all its citizens. It didn’t matter whether you were in Vienna, Prague, Ljubljana, or Timisoara.

Here’s a more complex example. Last year, there was a very strange court decision in British Columbia. The Ktunaxa people sued the provincial government to stop the development of a huge ski resort on their sacred mountain in the Jumbo Valley, where their religion holds that a grizzly bear spirit lives.

The court mandated that an area of the mountain be set aside from development for Ktunaxa worship. According to the laws of the state of Canada, freedom of religion requires that the Ktunaxa have a place set aside on the mountain to practice their faith.

But the Ktunaxa’s ontology of the divine has nothing to do with having a place on the mountain to worship. The mountain itself is the material manifestation of the bear spirit. So any resort development would be an act of violence against their divinity. Full stop.

Ktunaxa thinking sees the mountain as the manifestation of divinity. Canadian law sees the mountain as a place where the Ktunaxa need some accommodation to practice their religious beliefs. What is a matter of existence for the Ktunaxa is a matter of cultural practice for the Canadian state.

The court judgment couldn’t even comprehend Ktunaxa ontology, let alone acknowledge it as valid. Their entire way of existence was invalidated, overcoded by the state’s systems of meaning. That’s the despotic character of even the most democratic states.

“You Control Information!” I: About Dictatorship, Research Time, 07/03/2018

We in the West are having a moment. It’s not an unusual moment, although we like to think it is. Democracy is a strange form of government. It’s more effective at a lot of what governments are for than dictatorships have traditionally been. But we shouldn’t take democracy for granted.

Donald Trump being the President of the United States has been quite a shock to a lot of people that way. It was a shock to me. I was a teenager when the World Trade Centre was destroyed and the George W Bush Administration went on a media blitz of paranoid jingo to amp public support to invade and occupy Iraq.

I feel like Trump's desire to be President-for-Life is so he can be
at the centre of a national personality cult. It's how he's always
thought of himself.

But even at the height of America’s popular patriotic panic attack,* W didn’t promote the greasy cult of personality that Trump has. Leftish and liberal people like I was at the time called Bush dictatorial at protests and out drinking with our friends.

* I like to date this period in American culture from about Mission Accomplished to You’re Doing a Great Job, Brownie.

His expansion of the federal government’s police forces were horrifyingly authoritarian. Folks like me were pretty pissed that he’d won re-election. But we knew he’d retire in 2009. Under Trump, that reliability is no longer a certainty. Very unlikely, because you’d need a constitutional amendment for it.** But he jokes about it. As the President.

** I hope we never end up seriously saying “Maybe.”

The crowd laughs.

What does dictatorship actually amount to? We know one when we see one. Take the really obvious examples – Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, Augusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad.

What are some common features? Literal one-man rule – the leader’s directions give legislatures, security and military forces, bureaucrats their orders. That leader sits at the top of an organization that controls all other state institutions (and often large corporate institutions). Sometimes it’s a political party – the Bolsheviks, the National Socialists, the Ba’ath. Sometimes it’s the military.

And the cult of personality, the identification of the leader with the people themselves. The leader as the expression of the unified will of the people – his every action and word inspires loyalty and joy in everyone.

The sun around which turn the people of Korea.

It doesn’t matter that this is never actually true. But it’s implied and enforced that this should be – every time you get the chance to say so – what you say about the leader. No exceptions.

There are some weird cases. I think of the Kim dynasty in North Korea. Institutionally, they function like a model dictator – absolutist political party leader promoted by a cult of personality. The cultural imagery surrounding the Kims reflects that of the emperors, who ruled Korea up to the Japanese occupation, just over 100 years ago.

But dictatorship is one species of authoritarianism. Remember all those surveillance and police institutions that became so much more powerful during the George W Bush years? Those institutions are authoritarian infrastructure that can – and do too often – exist alongside smoothly-running civic democratic government.

You know a dictator when you see one. But you might not always know authoritarianism when you see it. Here’s one way of telling the differences – and I do mean differences.

Look at the flow of information.

This prologue turned out to be too long. So I’ll get to the actual argument tomorrow.

Knowing the Causes of Power, Research Time, 21/02/2018

There were a lot of reasons Félix Guattari broke with Jacques Lacan and the whole rest of the Freudian-influenced schools of French psychiatry. I talked about a couple last time.

How one point of unquestioned rationalism survived into the science of psychiatry – to understand the causes of the condition is itself part of the cure. How the images arising from singular cases were taken for universal symbol structures of human personalities. Both thanks to the influence of Freud.

Here’s a third issue that constituted such a radical break – the image of the therapist’s authority.

I don’t mean this in the sense of practical, institutional authority. Guattari understood that therapists, clinicians, and those who are responsible for the care and cure of the severely mentally ill required authority to do their jobs. They needed to prescribe drugs, coordinate clinical activities, design a therapy regime.

You don't really want anyone to be authorized only by themselves, do you?

All those required legal authority – the power of a signature. Your decisions had weight, and so needed to be taken with responsibility. That responsibility required thought and devotion, an ethical weight of obligation to act in the patient’s best interest – to let their good guide you.

I read an essay by Guattari a while ago that described the dominant culture of psychiatry and mental health care practice drifting from that ideal. He gives us Lacan’s words, “The analyst is authorized only by himself.”

There are two ways to read this. One is ontologically. The cause of some practicing psychoanalyst in some little town – call him Jack from Paris* – having his authority doesn’t come from Jack himself.

* Paris, Ontario.

Jack has to earn degrees and certifications in the fields you need to be expert as an analyst and therapist. He’s cultivated deep technical and philosophical medical knowledge. His legal powers are enabled by a complex web of institutions, laws, and regulations.

Another way you can read it is ethically. Jack’s authority flows from the trust people put in him – those who hired him, administer his certification renewals, maintain the laws that give him the right to prescribe drugs and therapies, and enforce those laws when they're broken.

Both are correct, of course. And not mutually exclusive. Just looking at different features of the world. The conclusion from both sides of that argument is that the statement “The analyst is authorized only by himself” isn’t adequate to empirical reality. Such an attitude isn’t going to fit properly with the real circumstances of an analyst’s working life.

What happens when a guiding philosophical element of training conflicts so brutally with the reality of practice? Breakdown. You end up with a body of professional analysts who tick the institutional boxes, but practice with none of the respect for the mentally ill that you need to practice properly.

Certainly not enough to transform respect into mutual respect. That’s the authority of expertise, an inescapably ethical relationship. Guattari understood that a philosophical principle of considering the analyst an absolute power – the revealer, prober, curer – undermines the possibility of ethical relationships among therapists and patients.

You can't really hold such a principle and practice medicine at the same time. Thought conditions reality when the reality is our actions and relationships.