How Could We Have Missed It? Research Time, 02/05/2018

You know, I want to be a little careful about how I write this post, given how Kanye West’s publicity for his latest single seems to have taken an unexpected turn.

Through some of my notes from a while ago, I’m having another look at a recurring problem in my own political thinking – Why do people desire their slavery? I’m not at all talking about what Kanye’s talking about, and I’m rather glad I never have.*

* My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is still a masterpiece, and I’m going to keep listening to it. Though I will never do so in a way that will ever give Kanye West money again. He’s had enough of mine.

If you don't understand its danger, you can't protect yourself.

No, I’m talking about the slavery of fascist ideas – embracing the leadership of an increasingly authoritarian state as long as it acts in the name of your resentments.

I started reading the latest book by Timothy Snyder this week, The Road to Unfreedom. It's a fascinating analysis of the ideas, ideologies, imagery, and marketing communications techniques at the heart of modern fascism’s resurgence. Some thoughts on that one directly are coming eventually.

I’m still looking through this idea with Gilles Deleuze’s concepts themselves, for now. Paul Patton’s book on his political concepts reveal a few useful aspects of our return to fascism.

For one thing, he helps explain how so many mainstream leaders in governments, political parties, businesses, and international institutions didn’t really see this anti-democratic movement coming. There were troubling developments in places like Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Hungary.

Awful parties with policies built around racism were terribly successful in local elections. But those were in backward countries, the excuses went, where democratic thinking was still under-developed.

Billionaires and former spies kept dying rather violently. Some words were definitely said along diplomatic channels, but it was surely a simple matter of a heavy hand from an old-fashioned leader. Nothing to be concerned about. Nothing to see here, folks.

Why did so many liberal democrats not see the danger of fascism’s comeback? I think Deleuze, Patton, and Snyder are all onto something, though they all describe the same phenomenon a bit differently.

Picture: A kindly old man.

Democrats tend to feel like the principles of democracy make so much sense, that it’s intuitive that it’s the best life. The problem is, they’ve been raised in a democratic country with democratic values baked into almost every aspect of the culture. Or at least enough for it to be really significant.

Most liberal democrats are ordinary folks for whom this society is just how government, law, business works. When you take something for granted so intuitively as most liberal democrats take democracy, you’re unable to conceive of a different way of life. Once people understand democracy, you think, of course they’ll want to embrace it.

That’s dangerous thinking, because it means you no longer know how to argue for the greatness of democracy. You never learned what democracy’s real virtues were. You only know the call-and-response.

What’s great about democracy? “Freedom!” What keeps us free? “Democracy!” Isn’t it great to be free? “Yeah!”

If you can’t even conceive why people would reject your values, then how can you even start figuring out how to protect them from attack. It's difficult enough for you to understand why anyone would want to attack democracy in the first place.

George W. Bush said “they hate our freedom.” Which sounds amazing. But what does it mean? It’s been nearly two decades since I first asked that question. Since we all should have been asking that question. But so few of our leaders – whether politicians, writers, or business leaders – can even take a decent shot at answering.

Mapping Thought I: Evolution of Political Concepts, Research Time, 23/04/2018

Now that’s definitely the weirdest title I’ve written in a while. I want to get back to weirdness in the philosophical entries on this blog.

My new apartment has come together, finally. What needed to be built is built. What needed to be unpacked is unpacked. I’m not sure where my iPad charger went, but I’ll figure it out.

But the weirdness. So I made some really complicated notes as I was going through Paul Patton’s books on Gilles Deleuze’s works and ideas. Patton has a pretty good rep among the Deleuze scene in academia. He’s co-translated key works, and has been a main figure among the secondary material for a long time.

It isn't just "the" political theory. For every concept, there can be many
theories. And there are plenty of concepts too.

His book Deleuze and the Political begins in a place appropriately strange for a book about someone whose ideas were as strange as Gilles’. He starts by talking about the nature of the concept, in a philosophical sense.

Deleuze himself developed a complex concept of the concept, and wrote about it in detail in his last major book What Is Philosophy?. I wrote about that theory of how philosophy worked when I was going through that book myself, and over the next few posts, I want to talk about some of the ways Patton explores that theory.

It’s called meta-philosophy in the field, literally asking “What is philosophy?”. Of all the writing I’ve come across openly discussing meta-philosophy, only Deleuze really grappled with the ideas in a genuinely thorough and deep sense. I sometimes think that most philosophers are afraid to talk about the real conceptual foundations of philosophy.

Maybe they really are afraid. Do they worry that there’s nothing behind the curtain? Or are they afraid of just seeing a man behind the curtain?

The world doesn’t need gods. Reality does a good enough job.

Anyway, back to the nature of philosophical concepts. So every philosophical concept has its own logic. By this, I mean that when you’re guided by a particular concept in your thinking, some possibilities and potentials are more easily understood than others. That’s pretty simple to start with.

Now think about how concepts change over time. Concerns shift, historical contexts change. All the reasons why people think with that concept change. Patton mentions the concept of the social contract as an example, and I think it’s a great one.

For me, Hobbes as a person and a philosopher embodies
the uncomfortable tension that's always existed in
Western political thought between the belief in freedom
of democratic thinking, and the authoritarianism of the
institutions of the modern state, colonial imperialism,
and police institutions.

The concept of the social contract, in Western philosophy, began in its modern form with Thomas Hobbes. The social contract in this original form is resolutely authoritarian.

It’s the expression of someone whose life was upended by a civil war and military government that executed a king. That revolutionary government plunged his country England into political and economic instability for twenty years, until the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II.

So stability and the sanctity of authority was of central importance to Hobbes as he was developing this concept of the social contract. It was a concept that saw freedom as utterly secondary to stability and peace – a concept that saw freedom as practically indistinguishable from chaotic civil war.

Is Hobbes concept of the social contract the same as contemporary Western theories of it? Patton is, in particular, thinking of John Rawls. Rawls was the paradigm liberal democrat of 20th century American philosophy.

His concept of the social contract was a careful balance of freedom and individual desire. It’s a balance of freedom and commitment to the general welfare. Peace is a part of that welfare, but only a small part. Hobbes’ Leviathan put little thought into economic matters like social welfare, which was at the centre of Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, as well as many of his other major works.

So the concepts differ in many ways. Yet we understand more about both concepts by exploring the subtle and massive differences between them, as well as the points where these concepts converge despite their differences. Tracing continuity and change in the development of concepts is how the history of philosophy should be done.

Thought: An Uncanny Precision, Research Time, 21/11/2017

Gilles Deleuze has an awful reputation as an impenetrable writer. And I mean fucking impenetrable. Not like it isn’t his fault. Some of Deleuze’s sentences – especially in his super-dense late 1960s works – are the kind of language you grind your teeth on.

Working with Félix Guattari made his words more poetic, more like a teacher than a researcher. But the flow of this jazz was sometimes a little too out-there. Deleuze’s language was looser in his solo works during his last decade alive, though he never met the fever pitches of those collaborative works again.

I do sometimes think of their collaborative style like jazz musicians
riffing on each other's improvisations, or rappers freestyling in tandem.
Deleuze and Guattari's collaborations do have a very musical feeling
to their language.

But he doesn’t have a reputation for precision. Mostly stereotypes about being either immensely difficult or bizarrely weird. Which is too bad, because he’s actually a very precise writer.

When you read What Is Philosophy?, it isn’t just a book of philosophy – it’s also a look at Deleuze’s own method of philosophical thought.* Start by describing what it is he makes. Concepts.

* Why not Guattari too, even though his name is on the cover? A reference to the history. Their collaboration was pretty light on this one, nowhere near the intensity of their work in the 1970s. They were old by then, Guattari deep in a years-long depression. He’d die of a heart attack at 62 the year after it was published. Félix didn’t do too much.

A philosophical concept is an account – in thought and as best you can in words – of the full range of possible variations when several different processes collide and interact. It’s like a mathematical description, but without variables or constants, using only the ranges of all the relevant vectors.

A concept has no X, Y, and Z; no e or π. A concept has maximum and minimum ranges of development from a decisive, transformative point. There’s a collision of forces, a moment of change constitutes from its complex dynamics and turbulence a new system of those forces. The range of possibilities that event sets in motion is its concept.

Let's be honest with ourselves, however. They'd never be as cool as
actual jazz musicians.

A concept is an expression of this knowledge of the ranges of potentials, but in thought. When you ask what these thoughts make possible, you’re doing practical philosophy. Exploring what a particular way of thinking – a framework for understanding the world – enables you to do.

What does such a framework – the ability to understand the world using these ranges – open our minds toward? Practical philosophy – philosophical thinking and analysis going to work in the world.

But in this book, Deleuze is thinking only of the nature of concepts. He’d written enough about their development and use. What Is Philosophy? is Deleuze doing meta-philosophy. Trying to describe what philosophical thinking actually is, and what philosophers do when they’re actually doing philosophy and not just writing about it.**

** The occupation of way too many people who call themselves philosophers.

Studying a concept means examining how that concept is expressed, how it’s written, other explorations of it in different philosophical (or philosophically-inclined) literature.

Once you understand the writing, you can mull over its mechanics – its processes, the activities it suits, what it makes visible and invisible, the relationships and dynamics of all its components, how its structure can affect how someone would think through it.

You survey it, like a drone flight over a mountain range. It has to be a very careful survey, because of its complexity. Incredibly precise knowledge, but only after careful, attentive study. A survey to map thoughts themselves.