When Occupy first blew up, the most tiresome, empty-headed critique was that one question, over and over. “Who are their leaders? What is their concrete agenda?”
Exactly the wrong question, I realized after maybe a week of thinking on it myself. I never participated in an Occupy movement as a member. I was a visitor, happy to see that we still had space for rebellion. And I knew from my experience that the space itself was the point.
It was a movement to bring people together, exchange ideas and philosophies, and make a space where rebellion was possible. The point was to assert the possibility of rebellion in the West.
Never forget what I mean when I talk about the West: the lands and cultures of globalizing colonial empire, that started in the 1500s. It’s an entire set of cultures and institutions that have been shaped by the desire to justify worldwide conquest.
Can you transform a culture so radically in a single generation, a single place, a single organization led by one person? We make statues of individual people – Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, Ho Chi Minh. We celebrate what they achieved, and how they inspired people. We call them leaders.
They changed laws and governments. But it takes more than the organization of just one social movement to transform the moralities of a population of millions. The 1964 Civil Rights Act did not end racism in America.
Imagine the force you'd need to transform a culture that had been developing for hundreds of years, to have a totally different character. Turning a concept of virtue as conquest and superiority all over the West into mutual inclusion and equality. That task is way beyond the work of one generation, let alone one person. One leader.
That was the ontological point of Antonio Negri’s concept of assembly, which he writes about with Michael Hardt in the book called Assembly. An assembly is a social force that can grow in power and longevity enough to transform the morality of an entire culture.
Even when the institutions of that culture – police, security forces, spy agencies, churches, governments, laws, schools – turn against such a social force, that force has the potential to overthrow and revolutionize those institutions.
Does it always, every time? Oh hell no! Individual political movements are crushed, but the force itself can survive as a story, an idea, a few books that still sell really well. The single biggest corporation in the world sees no need to censor Marx from the online store. They sell everything just shy of the Turner Diaries too.
So ideas continue in all directions, in favour of a lot of different moralities. Moralities of conquest and freedom are always in conflict. An assembly, in its loosest form, is a morality – the concepts that channel our desires into action, action that crafts our desires.
One of Negri and Hardt’s tasks in Assembly was working out how to channel that resilient social power of the mass movement in thought and action. Leaders, it’s said, are needed to formulate strategy. Generals overlooking the map. And the ordinary people of their organizations are the soldiers. Leadership meant plotting from a position detached from the action.
That’s a dualist way of thinking about the nature of political and social movements. It separates action from thought.
Assembly merges them. So when you think about social movements as self-directed, leaders aren’t your generals. They become figureheads, spokespeople who follow the moral directions that are developed among the ordinary people.
Regular activists develop strategies for outreach and conversation (and moral conversion) specific to the needs of their own territories. Who knows a place better than the people who live there?
Certainly not some egomaniac game show host. Certainly not some over-insulated multi-millionaire career political party leader.
I’m talking in that last example about Hillary Clinton. I now have one more Festivus grievance against her as a politician, and that’s her new advocacy for caving to the white nationalist movement on immigration in the hopes that they’ll leave the rest of us alone.
Clinton’s 21st century update of appeasement ran in the Guardian last week. It’s appeasement by focus group. Having identified what message encourages the most enthusiasm from the supporters of nationalist parties, she says that we can win their votes by also becoming nationalist parties.
It’s an absurd, ridiculous, and frankly stupid idea. Do you really think that someone who hates Hillary Clinton as much as a dedicated anti-immigration Republican would vote for her? Even if she personally suffocated a four-year-old Honduran girl with tear gas, he’d call it a false flag. Just like the Sandy Hook massacre and the moon landing.
Even beyond this, the real problem with Clinton’s approach in that Guardian article is that she thinks that her DC focus groups can tell people what to think so that they will vote for who they want to. The ones who pay for the focus groups.
That’s not how you lead a democratic movement. Here’s how.
You don’t. The movement is the leader – ordinary people percolating ideas through society that change our culture’s entire morality, one social network node at a time.
Showing posts with label Culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Culture. Show all posts
What You Wish For Might Ruin Your Country, Research Time, 20/06/2018
Life is often ironic. Sometimes, you can laugh at the irony. Sometimes, all you can do is cry.
One thing I cry about, when it comes to folks who self-identify as progressives, is how everyone feels about globalization. In many contexts, most of us think it’s bad.
That’s the simple version. I mean, the modern popular movement against new liberal economic policies and political philosophies began with a demonstration against a World Trade Organization summit. One of the major controversies in Canadian politics right now is the Trudeau government signing the country into the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement among many Pacific Rim countries.
People’s problem is that these trade agreements give too many rights to transnational corporations, which allow for increasingly intense concentrations of wealth among the oligarchs’ class.
Typically, all the major political parties jockeying for electoral control of state government institutions in the West have supported these corporate-driven trade agreements. There have been different emphases in those agreements and treaties.
Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party here in Canada focussed on resource extraction sectors. Typical of a party with a strong support base among Alberta’s petro-industrialists. Jean Chretien’s and Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party encouraged growth in the financial sector. Typical of the party that has represented the interests of Canada’s banking sector since the founding of the current state. Both of those parties doubled down on our continental trade deal, met with opposition from social and economic justice activists around the country.
There has been plenty of resistance to these legalistic acts of corporate piracy: networks among the multitude, groups of radical anarchists who’ve largely dropped out of society, trade union and student movements, progressive electoral political parties, think tanks, and non-governmental organizations.
Then, amazingly, in the heartland of the Washington Consensus, a political movement that put people first ripped apart all the presumptions of one of the most revanchist state parties in the West. The movement against corporate-led globalization had a new champion, and against all expectations, he entered the White House as President of the United States.
You see the problem here now.
Globalization in itself isn’t a bad thing. It’s the intensification of many physical, financial, and communicative processes that have linked different regions of the Earth for centuries already. It’s passed several major thresholds in the last few decades, which is why it feels like an entirely new phenomenon.
Yeah, it’s had plenty of drawbacks. Massive industrial pollution, the exponential growth in the power of global oligarchs to hide from public accountability and to hide their wealth.
But there are also plenty of benefits. Communication among people around the world can happen with incredible speed now, and we can learn about people in all parts of the globe. We can make friends from the other side of the planet. Communication connections can help build camaraderie, friendship, and community among people throughout the Earth.
People can move more freely than they ever have before. The late 20th century’s globalization had an amazing impact on a lot of the West: Asian, African, Pacific, and South American immigrants could come to our countries. If our labour markets throughout the Earth ever become truly open, it would be a genuine revolution of working people.
Imagine the economic and cultural booms that would result if Indian and Pakistani workers could come to the UAE or Saudi Arabia and have full rights, responsibilities, and legal protections of citizens who’ve lived there all their lives. If we had no borders, practically speaking, and everyone could move wherever the work was as long as they could learn the language(s) of the majority.
Globally open labour markets and globally-organizing union movements would take people out of the yoke of corporate wage slavery and state suppression as second or third-class citizens. Or worse.
Globalization can open our society to fantastic, unpredictable new paths of cultural creativity as traditions, languages, ideas, and moralities all merge and interact.
At this point, Earth’s progressives have to accept that globalization is a fact. You can’t turn it back now, without becoming the kind of xenophobic racist you hate. Those among the left who are taking advantage of the current moment to turn back economic globalization are racists and xenophobes. So screw them.
The 21st century left needs to accept that full-on anti-globalization is a failure. It’s been co-opted by some of the West’s most brutal racists and revanchists. The task of progressive politics now is to do globalization right. Globalization for the multitude.
One thing I cry about, when it comes to folks who self-identify as progressives, is how everyone feels about globalization. In many contexts, most of us think it’s bad.
That’s the simple version. I mean, the modern popular movement against new liberal economic policies and political philosophies began with a demonstration against a World Trade Organization summit. One of the major controversies in Canadian politics right now is the Trudeau government signing the country into the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement among many Pacific Rim countries.
 |
| When you demand the return of economic borders, you open yourself to seduction by people who want borders closed overall. When you blame trade with foreigners for the ills of your economy, it's easy to start blaming all the people outside your country, not just the powerful ones. That's how an anti-globalization activist becomes a racist nativist. |
Typically, all the major political parties jockeying for electoral control of state government institutions in the West have supported these corporate-driven trade agreements. There have been different emphases in those agreements and treaties.
Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party here in Canada focussed on resource extraction sectors. Typical of a party with a strong support base among Alberta’s petro-industrialists. Jean Chretien’s and Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party encouraged growth in the financial sector. Typical of the party that has represented the interests of Canada’s banking sector since the founding of the current state. Both of those parties doubled down on our continental trade deal, met with opposition from social and economic justice activists around the country.
There has been plenty of resistance to these legalistic acts of corporate piracy: networks among the multitude, groups of radical anarchists who’ve largely dropped out of society, trade union and student movements, progressive electoral political parties, think tanks, and non-governmental organizations.
Then, amazingly, in the heartland of the Washington Consensus, a political movement that put people first ripped apart all the presumptions of one of the most revanchist state parties in the West. The movement against corporate-led globalization had a new champion, and against all expectations, he entered the White House as President of the United States.
 |
| The politics of rage, demonization, and hatred are all too often depressingly effective. |
Globalization in itself isn’t a bad thing. It’s the intensification of many physical, financial, and communicative processes that have linked different regions of the Earth for centuries already. It’s passed several major thresholds in the last few decades, which is why it feels like an entirely new phenomenon.
Yeah, it’s had plenty of drawbacks. Massive industrial pollution, the exponential growth in the power of global oligarchs to hide from public accountability and to hide their wealth.
But there are also plenty of benefits. Communication among people around the world can happen with incredible speed now, and we can learn about people in all parts of the globe. We can make friends from the other side of the planet. Communication connections can help build camaraderie, friendship, and community among people throughout the Earth.
People can move more freely than they ever have before. The late 20th century’s globalization had an amazing impact on a lot of the West: Asian, African, Pacific, and South American immigrants could come to our countries. If our labour markets throughout the Earth ever become truly open, it would be a genuine revolution of working people.
Imagine the economic and cultural booms that would result if Indian and Pakistani workers could come to the UAE or Saudi Arabia and have full rights, responsibilities, and legal protections of citizens who’ve lived there all their lives. If we had no borders, practically speaking, and everyone could move wherever the work was as long as they could learn the language(s) of the majority.
Globally open labour markets and globally-organizing union movements would take people out of the yoke of corporate wage slavery and state suppression as second or third-class citizens. Or worse.
Globalization can open our society to fantastic, unpredictable new paths of cultural creativity as traditions, languages, ideas, and moralities all merge and interact.
At this point, Earth’s progressives have to accept that globalization is a fact. You can’t turn it back now, without becoming the kind of xenophobic racist you hate. Those among the left who are taking advantage of the current moment to turn back economic globalization are racists and xenophobes. So screw them.
The 21st century left needs to accept that full-on anti-globalization is a failure. It’s been co-opted by some of the West’s most brutal racists and revanchists. The task of progressive politics now is to do globalization right. Globalization for the multitude.
No Simple Victory in a World Such as Ours, Research Time, 18/06/2018
Being a pretty active member – and occasional contractor – for the New Democratic Party in Toronto means I regularly have conversations with lots of different kinds of marxists.
That includes self-identified marxists, and folks who are only considered marxists according to the new popular conception of marxism. You know it – where people who think there should be a state-subsidized pharmacare plan are functionally indistinguishable from Josef Stalin.
See, I don’t really like to call myself a marxist because it always gets people ascribing philosophical views to me that I don’t actually hold. Telling someone that you’re a marxist tends to make a lot of folks think that all your ideas are just regurgitated from the Cliff’s Notes of Kapital. That’s true whether or not you actually want them to think this. Usually, you don’t, but it can’t be helped once you use the m-word.
But it’s a much more complicated tradition that folks in the popular media give it credit for. A lot of that is because of the nuanced analyses of political economy that you find in Marx’s own later works. I was reading about that Sunday morning on a pleasant deck in Riverdale.
Today, I want to go over some of my notes on Gilbert, his take on how Antonio Gramsci transformed the marxist tradition.
As you might remember from my last post, a major task for my district association’s policy work is figuring out the key differences in the drift of working class union folks from the New Democratic Party in Canada. It’s a shift that puts the lie to the Cliff’s Notes version of marxism – class is always the primary vector for social consciousness.
I’ve had self-identified marxists tell me this. They should know better. Don’t act like Antonio Gramsci didn’t exist. His influence remains strong today, in many parts of the world.
Gilbert focusses on what he takes to be a central transformation in how the term ‘hegemony’ was used, giving it an entirely new philosophical spin. He remixed and mangled this old concept from political science – the direct or indirect leadership of a privileged class (inside a state) or a military power (internationally).
He turned this term into a concept that we could use in all vectors of activism that seeks cultural and economic transformation. For a group to have hegemony in a culture means that the group’s mainstream and accepted images, political frameworks, economic systems, moralities, and ethical principles pressure all other such cultural and economic elements around the globe to conform to its own structures.
In other words, the old 19th century political science concept of hegemony: imagine an American fleet pulling into your harbour and forcing you to open up a McDonald’s. Military power backs economic and cultural transformation.
Gramsci’s concept of hegemony: imagine an American businessman flying to your country, co-opting all your local businessmen to open McDonald’s franchises, and then the popularity of their menu causes people to drift away from their more traditional foods. Economic power backs cultural and moral transformation.
Then Gilbert flies through an account of how Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe updated Gramsci’s concepts. They brought research on how the global economy was changing from the era of Western stagflation onward. So from the 1970s.
Laclau and Mouffe – in their joint and solo books – described how cultural power can lead the way in a hegemonic transformation, not only military and economic power. Identity politics like nationalism bind communities together in movements for economic change and even military civil insurrection.
Any aspect of human existence can become the leading edge in a liberating or a revanchist social revolution. It could be violent or peaceful, or a mixture of all degrees of inspiration and blood. What matters is that circumstances align to bring one vector into a hegemonic intensity of influence.
What are those circumstances? How do we manage them? How do we understand them? Change them?
That includes self-identified marxists, and folks who are only considered marxists according to the new popular conception of marxism. You know it – where people who think there should be a state-subsidized pharmacare plan are functionally indistinguishable from Josef Stalin.
 |
| The caption reads, "Study! Because we will need all your intelligence." The painting is by the Italian artist SOLO. Its location is the entrance to Antonio Gramsci Secondary School on Affogalasino Street in Rome. |
But it’s a much more complicated tradition that folks in the popular media give it credit for. A lot of that is because of the nuanced analyses of political economy that you find in Marx’s own later works. I was reading about that Sunday morning on a pleasant deck in Riverdale.
Today, I want to go over some of my notes on Gilbert, his take on how Antonio Gramsci transformed the marxist tradition.
As you might remember from my last post, a major task for my district association’s policy work is figuring out the key differences in the drift of working class union folks from the New Democratic Party in Canada. It’s a shift that puts the lie to the Cliff’s Notes version of marxism – class is always the primary vector for social consciousness.
I’ve had self-identified marxists tell me this. They should know better. Don’t act like Antonio Gramsci didn’t exist. His influence remains strong today, in many parts of the world.
Gilbert focusses on what he takes to be a central transformation in how the term ‘hegemony’ was used, giving it an entirely new philosophical spin. He remixed and mangled this old concept from political science – the direct or indirect leadership of a privileged class (inside a state) or a military power (internationally).
 |
| The slogans of my own country's current leading intellectuals aren't quite so inspiring to me. |
In other words, the old 19th century political science concept of hegemony: imagine an American fleet pulling into your harbour and forcing you to open up a McDonald’s. Military power backs economic and cultural transformation.
Gramsci’s concept of hegemony: imagine an American businessman flying to your country, co-opting all your local businessmen to open McDonald’s franchises, and then the popularity of their menu causes people to drift away from their more traditional foods. Economic power backs cultural and moral transformation.
Then Gilbert flies through an account of how Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe updated Gramsci’s concepts. They brought research on how the global economy was changing from the era of Western stagflation onward. So from the 1970s.
Laclau and Mouffe – in their joint and solo books – described how cultural power can lead the way in a hegemonic transformation, not only military and economic power. Identity politics like nationalism bind communities together in movements for economic change and even military civil insurrection.
Any aspect of human existence can become the leading edge in a liberating or a revanchist social revolution. It could be violent or peaceful, or a mixture of all degrees of inspiration and blood. What matters is that circumstances align to bring one vector into a hegemonic intensity of influence.
What are those circumstances? How do we manage them? How do we understand them? Change them?
A Time and a Place for Abstraction, Research Time, 12/06/2018
Over the last few years, I’ve read a decent chunk of marxist theory. I’ve read the good stuff – some of the original, a lot of Gramsci, too much Zizek, Laclau, Mouffe, a little bit of Lenin; the anarchists too, like Bakunin, Goldman, and the uncategorizable Rancière.
I’ve also come across scattered essays of the bad stuff. A lot of it is contemporary – not to say that it’s bad because it’s contemporary. It’s bad because it’s the casually-written stuff.
Even 100 years ago when political revolutionaries really did argue matters of profound philosophy in journals and magazines, most of those essays were kind of shit. We don’t remember the many, many people who filled the pages of those journals every day, the ones who only looked good when Gramsci hadn’t written that week.
Quality is always rare. Make of that what you want.
There’s one trend that I find unfortunate in a lot of the everyday theory writing in the marxist tradition. The word ‘capital’ gets taken for granted. A catchall term whose conception grows more and more vague every time it’s used. Which, in the sloppiest of marxist writing, is an omnipresent and omnipotent force controlling everything.
Anyone who treats the shorthand as anything more than shorthand isn’t worth reading. The point of understanding capital as the basis of a lot of social and economic problems isn’t to blame capital – it’s to understand the machineries of capital.
That’s why you always need to be an empiricist when you’re writing political and economic philosophy. You need to look at real engines of wealth to see what produces all that cash.
In Gilbert’s history of Cultural Studies, he writes that the field pretty accurately identified one serious problem with capital today. The major engines of wealth have become the boardrooms and trading floors of investment companies and stock exchanges.
They move the most money around the world. They power the global movement of money – even though it’s turned out that they can’t control it.
More than that, the investment industry doesn’t even really create anything, says Gilbert. Not quite true, of course. The investment industry does create analytic, algorithmic, and other mathematical tools to manage and regulate those capital flows. But those are machines to move the money – not what actually powers the movement.
No, the sources of power for the financial industry come from the traditional industries of making things. Laboratories, streets, studios, factories, offices – these are the types of things that the investment industry invests in, speculates on.
As global money and trade flows move faster and faster, they grow fractally complex – new cultural, communication, and technological products develop at faster rates and spread more quickly around the world.
Communications technologies open up more possibilities and diversity in what’s on offer to people. More bandwidth means more niches – for cultural products like movies and television, and for all commodities, as people make themselves increasingly unique as more possibilities for expression become available.
The financial industry provides a massive and powerful flow of money to channel into this increasingly intense production. But the real crisis – corruption, embezzlement, breakdown – comes when the financiers think they’re the creators, not the funders. The money circles through the same few hands, expanding by handshake, while the actual creators of material and conceptual wealth are starved.
Then the collapse comes.
I’ve also come across scattered essays of the bad stuff. A lot of it is contemporary – not to say that it’s bad because it’s contemporary. It’s bad because it’s the casually-written stuff.
Even 100 years ago when political revolutionaries really did argue matters of profound philosophy in journals and magazines, most of those essays were kind of shit. We don’t remember the many, many people who filled the pages of those journals every day, the ones who only looked good when Gramsci hadn’t written that week.
 |
| The gold-plated promises of wealth and power. |
There’s one trend that I find unfortunate in a lot of the everyday theory writing in the marxist tradition. The word ‘capital’ gets taken for granted. A catchall term whose conception grows more and more vague every time it’s used. Which, in the sloppiest of marxist writing, is an omnipresent and omnipotent force controlling everything.
Anyone who treats the shorthand as anything more than shorthand isn’t worth reading. The point of understanding capital as the basis of a lot of social and economic problems isn’t to blame capital – it’s to understand the machineries of capital.
That’s why you always need to be an empiricist when you’re writing political and economic philosophy. You need to look at real engines of wealth to see what produces all that cash.
In Gilbert’s history of Cultural Studies, he writes that the field pretty accurately identified one serious problem with capital today. The major engines of wealth have become the boardrooms and trading floors of investment companies and stock exchanges.
They move the most money around the world. They power the global movement of money – even though it’s turned out that they can’t control it.
 |
| The dystopia is real. The dystopia has always been real. |
No, the sources of power for the financial industry come from the traditional industries of making things. Laboratories, streets, studios, factories, offices – these are the types of things that the investment industry invests in, speculates on.
As global money and trade flows move faster and faster, they grow fractally complex – new cultural, communication, and technological products develop at faster rates and spread more quickly around the world.
Communications technologies open up more possibilities and diversity in what’s on offer to people. More bandwidth means more niches – for cultural products like movies and television, and for all commodities, as people make themselves increasingly unique as more possibilities for expression become available.
The financial industry provides a massive and powerful flow of money to channel into this increasingly intense production. But the real crisis – corruption, embezzlement, breakdown – comes when the financiers think they’re the creators, not the funders. The money circles through the same few hands, expanding by handshake, while the actual creators of material and conceptual wealth are starved.
Then the collapse comes.
Whither Capital III: Troubles With Apu, Research Time, 01/06/2018
What were you going to do about it? What were you going to do to resist the socially and ecologically destructive forces of globalizing industry and finance?
Throughout the 20th century, the default* course for the Western left to take was to look to the Soviet Union. Not the real Soviet Union, of course, which had far too much an excess of gulags, secret police, and general misery. I mean the Soviet Union that existed in its government’s international PR materials, and in the naïve hearts of privileged socialists of the Reagan Years.
* That is, the easiest and laziest.
Then the USSR collapsed. This was no End of History™, no matter how much liberal political tastemakers tried to demonstrate it. The Soviet Union, economically speaking, was the most thoroughly Fordist state that ever existed – the most complete standardization a government had ever attempted. It was a fully state-controlled economy whose purpose was primarily production within its borders.
The forces of globalization raging throughout the rest of the world tore the Soviet economy to pieces like the winds of a hurricane. The USSR’s borders couldn’t maintain their territory – literally. Capitalism destroys institutions of economic control. That’s terrible in some cases, but very beneficial in others.
Here’s where real history dovetails with the flickering shadows of conspiracist thought. Because the academic discipline of Cultural Studies – especially in Britain, where Jeremy Gilbert focusses his analysis – really was a form of cultural marxism.
Broadly speaking, this was a project among politically progressive and radical university professors in a particular discipline to see what cultural fields could promote revolutionary ideas, now that the major state source for socialist inspiration was torn to bits. In this sense, it followed the recommendations of a notorious duo at the forefront of developing revolutionary political philosophy.
No, I’m not talking about Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the devils of the American nationalist conspiracy of cultural marxism. Their actual ideas are remarkably defeatist. Andrew Breitbart just happened to read them, and knew of Adorno because of his friendship with the Black American revolutionary Angela Davis.
Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau are the duo that Jeremy Gilbert – as well as myself – see as the most important in turning marxist thought to issues of culture. But when you read Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, the direction Cultural Studies went in wouldn’t have been quite what they had in mind.
Here are the people I refer to when I write Cultural Studies. University-based cultural theorists writing analyses of popular culture and arts using concepts adapted from and developing the marxist traditions of thinking.
Here’s an example, “Deadpool Playing Myth: An Analysis of the "Secondary Narrative" in Deadpool's Promotional Images,” which is the title of an actual Master’s thesis at the Cultural Studies department of Queen’s University.
Now, that’s not to say that we don’t have plenty to learn from such an analysis in the art of narrative creation using meta-fiction in marketing communication. But it’s difficult to make the jump from here to a new economic system and political morality.
Because Laclau and Mouffe were talking primarily about social movements of the Global South and of different minoritarian and sub-altern populations across the world. Here we see a problem of method – you can’t really participate in such social movements when you live in a tenured professorship at a prestigious university.
So what can you do to build a social movement from a professor’s office?
Throughout the 20th century, the default* course for the Western left to take was to look to the Soviet Union. Not the real Soviet Union, of course, which had far too much an excess of gulags, secret police, and general misery. I mean the Soviet Union that existed in its government’s international PR materials, and in the naïve hearts of privileged socialists of the Reagan Years.
* That is, the easiest and laziest.
 |
| Fighting the cultural and ethnic stereotyping you face in a mainstream is an important element of revolutionizing a people's morality. And the academics of Cultural Studies developed a lot of important concepts for that critique. But is it sufficient to transform an entire culture's morality to the necessary degree? That I don't think so. |
The forces of globalization raging throughout the rest of the world tore the Soviet economy to pieces like the winds of a hurricane. The USSR’s borders couldn’t maintain their territory – literally. Capitalism destroys institutions of economic control. That’s terrible in some cases, but very beneficial in others.
Here’s where real history dovetails with the flickering shadows of conspiracist thought. Because the academic discipline of Cultural Studies – especially in Britain, where Jeremy Gilbert focusses his analysis – really was a form of cultural marxism.
Broadly speaking, this was a project among politically progressive and radical university professors in a particular discipline to see what cultural fields could promote revolutionary ideas, now that the major state source for socialist inspiration was torn to bits. In this sense, it followed the recommendations of a notorious duo at the forefront of developing revolutionary political philosophy.
No, I’m not talking about Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the devils of the American nationalist conspiracy of cultural marxism. Their actual ideas are remarkably defeatist. Andrew Breitbart just happened to read them, and knew of Adorno because of his friendship with the Black American revolutionary Angela Davis.
Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau are the duo that Jeremy Gilbert – as well as myself – see as the most important in turning marxist thought to issues of culture. But when you read Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, the direction Cultural Studies went in wouldn’t have been quite what they had in mind.
Here are the people I refer to when I write Cultural Studies. University-based cultural theorists writing analyses of popular culture and arts using concepts adapted from and developing the marxist traditions of thinking.
Here’s an example, “Deadpool Playing Myth: An Analysis of the "Secondary Narrative" in Deadpool's Promotional Images,” which is the title of an actual Master’s thesis at the Cultural Studies department of Queen’s University.
Now, that’s not to say that we don’t have plenty to learn from such an analysis in the art of narrative creation using meta-fiction in marketing communication. But it’s difficult to make the jump from here to a new economic system and political morality.
Because Laclau and Mouffe were talking primarily about social movements of the Global South and of different minoritarian and sub-altern populations across the world. Here we see a problem of method – you can’t really participate in such social movements when you live in a tenured professorship at a prestigious university.
So what can you do to build a social movement from a professor’s office?
Whither Capital I: The Best Tools, Research Time, 30/05/2018
Gilbert’s book Anticapitalism and Culture digs into the cultural influence of Stuart Hall and the other founders of the Cultural Studies tradition in Britain. I think I’m going to use this shorthand for the rest of this set of posts about Gilbert’s book:
When I write Cultural Studies, I refer to that particular tradition of radical theorists who are based primarily in the university system, who write critiques of cultural objects like artistic works, as well as the institutional and cultural systems whose figures produce art.
The Cultural Studies scholars come in for praise for being ahead of the curve when it comes to other radical left-wingers in the university system. Most of the other marxists were, in the 1970s and 80s, generally too busy rolling with communist guerrilla groups or applying Marx’s own categories and concepts to the Reagan era.
Contrast the Cultural Studies scholars who could leave the most dogmatic marxist concepts behind to understand the character of neoliberalism. Basically, they understood how the intensification of global free trade and financial investment was transforming the industrial processes of human civilization.
The old-school marxists, meanwhile, were trying to figure out who the proletariat was. I’m being glib, but that’s basically the glib version of the mistakes of traditional marxists. They never learned the lessons of Antonio Gramsci.
One – there are many different ways to build destructive industrial economic systems. Two – an economic and political system can change in contingent ways. Your categories won’t help you when the world makes your thought obsolete.
Gramsci smacked pragmatism into the anti-capitalist movements. At least, he does when you take his lessons seriously.
The Cultural Studies concentrated on the cultural aspects of the globalized capitalism that kicked into gear in the 1980s. Maybe today, you could call it that version of capitalism financial sector oligarchy. But it leaves so much else out. Put it to the side for now.
That was one success – a better diagnosis on the largest scale. Now the question would be whether they could give us a set of tools to carve political alternatives. It wasn’t going to turn out well.
When I write Cultural Studies, I refer to that particular tradition of radical theorists who are based primarily in the university system, who write critiques of cultural objects like artistic works, as well as the institutional and cultural systems whose figures produce art.
 |
| Pictured: The end of history. |
Contrast the Cultural Studies scholars who could leave the most dogmatic marxist concepts behind to understand the character of neoliberalism. Basically, they understood how the intensification of global free trade and financial investment was transforming the industrial processes of human civilization.
The old-school marxists, meanwhile, were trying to figure out who the proletariat was. I’m being glib, but that’s basically the glib version of the mistakes of traditional marxists. They never learned the lessons of Antonio Gramsci.
One – there are many different ways to build destructive industrial economic systems. Two – an economic and political system can change in contingent ways. Your categories won’t help you when the world makes your thought obsolete.
Gramsci smacked pragmatism into the anti-capitalist movements. At least, he does when you take his lessons seriously.
The Cultural Studies concentrated on the cultural aspects of the globalized capitalism that kicked into gear in the 1980s. Maybe today, you could call it that version of capitalism financial sector oligarchy. But it leaves so much else out. Put it to the side for now.
That was one success – a better diagnosis on the largest scale. Now the question would be whether they could give us a set of tools to carve political alternatives. It wasn’t going to turn out well.
Wither Universities? Whither Universities, Composing, 29/05/2018
So I ended up taking an extra day off the blog because election campaign season can be pretty draining. I don’t know how Americans live like this nearly every day, with some kind of intense election happening all the time.
But the extra day off marks a decent transition. I’ve finished going through all my most meaningful notes on Paul Patton’s stuff about Gilles Deleuze. At the time, when I finished that book, I wanted to walk away from secondary material on Deleuze.
You could kind of tell that I was getting a bit annoyed at how Patton’s focus on writing secondary material on Deleuze kept him from exploring his most interesting ideas. So I thought I’d pick up a direction that engaged more in political work. Focus on the real world.
There’s one part of the real world that embodies some of the major political problems we face today. Universities have been battlegrounds of radical politics over the last few years. They’re also deeply corrupted spaces – wide-scale underfunding and the growing influence of a culture of greed have made universities into parodies of the values the institution supposedly embodies.
Writing Utopias, I don’t want to focus entirely on the student movement. But I think there should be a passage there that reflects on what the universities of North America are, and the terrible processes that make the institutions fall short of what we tell ourselves we want from them.
There’s an ideal to the university in a democratic context – in our ideals and our political rhetoric* – as a place of impartiality, of the pure pursuit of learning for the sake of knowledge alone.
* Or as I could call it, our ideals turned into soundbites for political parties, business leaders, and TED Talks.
Who’s laughing yet? I know I am.
So I turned to a book that examines how the university system has fostered left-wing radicalism in its faculties, and what that radical thought has done to make real change in the world. Of course, I didn’t go to any of the right-wing works. They tend to be filled too much with stereotypes and cheap character assassination. Or else full on delusional theories about globalist communist conspiracies in our secular education system.
I wasn’t going to go down that road. Conservatives tend to do a terrible job of understanding how left-wing politics actually works. It’s their greatest weakness against the left – the total inability to know their enemy.
No – no one can trace the failure of the left better than a leftist. So a friend told me to get hold of a book by Jeremy Gilbert, called AntiCapitalism and Culture. It’s an insightful study of the role of Cultural Studies as a university-based research discipline in actual agitation against the neoliberal economic system and the institutions that uphold it.
It asks if the core right-wing smear of the university system is really true – Is it really a place that fosters dangerous radicals capable of helping overthrow the state and the industrial capitalist economic system?
Or are they all just jerking off?
But the extra day off marks a decent transition. I’ve finished going through all my most meaningful notes on Paul Patton’s stuff about Gilles Deleuze. At the time, when I finished that book, I wanted to walk away from secondary material on Deleuze.
You could kind of tell that I was getting a bit annoyed at how Patton’s focus on writing secondary material on Deleuze kept him from exploring his most interesting ideas. So I thought I’d pick up a direction that engaged more in political work. Focus on the real world.
There’s one part of the real world that embodies some of the major political problems we face today. Universities have been battlegrounds of radical politics over the last few years. They’re also deeply corrupted spaces – wide-scale underfunding and the growing influence of a culture of greed have made universities into parodies of the values the institution supposedly embodies.
 |
| Apparently, when this comic was first published, it described how the Russian Bolshevik Communist party would infiltrate and overthrow the free society of the United States. But when I see this panel, the first person I think of is Rupert Murdoch. |
There’s an ideal to the university in a democratic context – in our ideals and our political rhetoric* – as a place of impartiality, of the pure pursuit of learning for the sake of knowledge alone.
* Or as I could call it, our ideals turned into soundbites for political parties, business leaders, and TED Talks.
Who’s laughing yet? I know I am.
So I turned to a book that examines how the university system has fostered left-wing radicalism in its faculties, and what that radical thought has done to make real change in the world. Of course, I didn’t go to any of the right-wing works. They tend to be filled too much with stereotypes and cheap character assassination. Or else full on delusional theories about globalist communist conspiracies in our secular education system.
I wasn’t going to go down that road. Conservatives tend to do a terrible job of understanding how left-wing politics actually works. It’s their greatest weakness against the left – the total inability to know their enemy.
No – no one can trace the failure of the left better than a leftist. So a friend told me to get hold of a book by Jeremy Gilbert, called AntiCapitalism and Culture. It’s an insightful study of the role of Cultural Studies as a university-based research discipline in actual agitation against the neoliberal economic system and the institutions that uphold it.
It asks if the core right-wing smear of the university system is really true – Is it really a place that fosters dangerous radicals capable of helping overthrow the state and the industrial capitalist economic system?
Or are they all just jerking off?
Is That a Philosophical Concept or a Doctor Who Story? Research Time, 04/05/2018
As you can tell from how many of his ideas influence my own thinking, Gilles Deleuze is a major touchstone for my own writing and related work. But I’ll always be the first one to tell people that he can be a damn difficult writer in a lot of ways.
For one, he’s prolific, and doesn’t always take the time to re-introduce concepts that he uses in an earlier book before blasting into some wild application. But that’s not really the most frustrating aspect of his style – it’s more of an annoyance.
Today I want to talk about a problem with Deleuze’s approach to philosophy that’s more central to how his ideas get taken up. Paul Patton displays an excellent example in his own account and interpretation of some of Deleuze’s political ideas in his work from the early 2000s.
Patton describes a particular kind of social-political transformation as a metamorphosis machine. The roots are clear in Deleuze’s own works if you look for them, and they’re easy to find. Let’s count those down first.
Kafka is all over mid-period Deleuze. He’s the central case study in his and Guattari’s major book on the concept of the minor. What is the minor or minority? Not a literal minority, but a culture, language, and way of thinking that’s pushed away from public acceptability in its explicit expression. Cultural ideas that have to go underground, or adapt themselves to a mainstream that doesn’t always fit them.
Kafka’s Jewish identity, heritage, and seeking was pushed out of public acceptability in late imperial Austria, and later Czechoslovakia. And the Czech language itself was pushed out of public acceptability – Kafka spoke Czech as his first language, but adapted his writing to German. Those cultural and linguistic schizzes inform his work, and contribute to the subtle ways his writing destabilizes the enforced mainstream of his country.
Patton combines the power of the minor to destabilize and rupture a suppressive mainstream with the concept of the war machine – a physical social assemblage which does the same thing, but more explicitly and violently. War machines are social assemblages and forces that break the strictly policed codes, laws, and institutions of states.
They’re important things / processes to have around, considering all the horrible things state institutions can do to oppress and control people. Every authority needs some kind of check on its power so it doesn’t use all the power it has.
Here’s where we get to the problem. Although Deleuze and Guattari describe the concept of the war machine in a lot of detail in A Thousand Plateaus, the description stays at a very abstract level of thought. So it’s really tough to apply a concept so abstract without twisting it too much.
Sometimes, twisting a concept too much can have really productive results – you end up with an equally interesting and useful concept. But you can just as easily mess up your thinking and end up just plain confused. And I think that’s where Patton’s concept of the metamorphosis machine ends up.
Patton’s concept moves in the same direction as my paper about process models of activist communication. A dispersed, but mutually connected, movement of people demonstrate in their publicly-displayed spectacles and daily conversations with the public that a mainstream way of life is unjust. As people in the mainstream understand it, they change their moralities to stop excusing that injustice and help correct it.
But Patton stays himself in a very specific context, while also speaking abstractly. He frames the metamorphosis machine as an agent of change through micro-movements, like I did. But when he gets specific, he talks about overthrowing the state.
Nothing necessarily wrong with that. But the thinking that made overthrowing the state his priority was off track. See, the war machine concept in A Thousand Plateaus was described using a particular introductory framework – a nomadic army overthrowing the state.
Patton tied himself too much to the application that best suited the political priorities of Deleuze and Guattari’s time and place. In 1970s Paris, anti-capitalism meant aligning yourself, at least in spirit, with the communist urban guerrilla movements out to overthrow the governments of Western Europe.
In late-2010s Canada, putting yourself in the same political spirit as Deleuze and Guattari means embracing and allying yourself with movements of peaceful demonstrations that freer ways of life are possible.
Real freedom of religion, freedom to immigrate wherever you want, freedom from the cultural presumptions and hostility of systematic, atmospheric racism, freedom from the indignity of poverty and vulnerability of addiction. So you look at these oppressive structures that are matters of public belief, culture and enculturation, moralities that encourage hatred and disgust. Morality is today’s target. Maybe it’ll be more effective in building a more just society.
Given how the European communist guerrillas did, I’d say we have a pretty low bar to clear for a grade of "Has Shown Improvement."
For one, he’s prolific, and doesn’t always take the time to re-introduce concepts that he uses in an earlier book before blasting into some wild application. But that’s not really the most frustrating aspect of his style – it’s more of an annoyance.
 |
| There are always more things going on in a creative work than we can say. Good quality communication of any kind that involves ideas absorbs us in a feedback loop of our own creativity in thought and reflection. Attentive thought in that cycle can create some remarkably useful insights. But not all our insights are useful, or even all that reasonable. |
Patton describes a particular kind of social-political transformation as a metamorphosis machine. The roots are clear in Deleuze’s own works if you look for them, and they’re easy to find. Let’s count those down first.
Kafka is all over mid-period Deleuze. He’s the central case study in his and Guattari’s major book on the concept of the minor. What is the minor or minority? Not a literal minority, but a culture, language, and way of thinking that’s pushed away from public acceptability in its explicit expression. Cultural ideas that have to go underground, or adapt themselves to a mainstream that doesn’t always fit them.
Kafka’s Jewish identity, heritage, and seeking was pushed out of public acceptability in late imperial Austria, and later Czechoslovakia. And the Czech language itself was pushed out of public acceptability – Kafka spoke Czech as his first language, but adapted his writing to German. Those cultural and linguistic schizzes inform his work, and contribute to the subtle ways his writing destabilizes the enforced mainstream of his country.
Patton combines the power of the minor to destabilize and rupture a suppressive mainstream with the concept of the war machine – a physical social assemblage which does the same thing, but more explicitly and violently. War machines are social assemblages and forces that break the strictly policed codes, laws, and institutions of states.
They’re important things / processes to have around, considering all the horrible things state institutions can do to oppress and control people. Every authority needs some kind of check on its power so it doesn’t use all the power it has.
 |
| What I immediately thought of when I first read the phrase "metamorphosis machine." I feel like I want to watch some of my favourite stories from the David Tennant years of Doctor Who again. I did enjoy that feeling of exuberance throughout Davies' years making the show, especially in the smaller, mid-season episodes where there was less pressure for spectacle. The story had time to smile for us. |
Sometimes, twisting a concept too much can have really productive results – you end up with an equally interesting and useful concept. But you can just as easily mess up your thinking and end up just plain confused. And I think that’s where Patton’s concept of the metamorphosis machine ends up.
Patton’s concept moves in the same direction as my paper about process models of activist communication. A dispersed, but mutually connected, movement of people demonstrate in their publicly-displayed spectacles and daily conversations with the public that a mainstream way of life is unjust. As people in the mainstream understand it, they change their moralities to stop excusing that injustice and help correct it.
But Patton stays himself in a very specific context, while also speaking abstractly. He frames the metamorphosis machine as an agent of change through micro-movements, like I did. But when he gets specific, he talks about overthrowing the state.
Nothing necessarily wrong with that. But the thinking that made overthrowing the state his priority was off track. See, the war machine concept in A Thousand Plateaus was described using a particular introductory framework – a nomadic army overthrowing the state.
 |
| For all the wide range of ways you can use their concepts, there will always be some aspects of Deleuze and Guattari's work that were very much peculiar to their own specific time and place. Their hair alone should be sign enough of that. |
In late-2010s Canada, putting yourself in the same political spirit as Deleuze and Guattari means embracing and allying yourself with movements of peaceful demonstrations that freer ways of life are possible.
Real freedom of religion, freedom to immigrate wherever you want, freedom from the cultural presumptions and hostility of systematic, atmospheric racism, freedom from the indignity of poverty and vulnerability of addiction. So you look at these oppressive structures that are matters of public belief, culture and enculturation, moralities that encourage hatred and disgust. Morality is today’s target. Maybe it’ll be more effective in building a more just society.
Given how the European communist guerrillas did, I’d say we have a pretty low bar to clear for a grade of "Has Shown Improvement."
Feeding Off Its Own Destruction, Research Time, 19/03/2018
I live in Toronto. It’s a vibrant economy and culture, but there’s plenty of simmering conflict here. The tech, finance, and film/tv industry are the major drivers of the city’s economy, but there are plenty of people left behind.
Rent control and housing affordability is a crushing pressure on people all over the city. There’s pressure on the middle classes. People now able to afford a condo’s mortgage are locked out of a townhouse market with not enough supply, and a detached home market whose value has ballooned ridiculously.
There’s pressure on the lower classes. High demand entices building owners and property managers to raise rents beyond what many in already run-down buildings can afford. Elected political leaders in city and provincial offices are no longer interested in subsidizing low-income housing directly, which pushes more disadvantaged people out of housing and into cars or parking garages with few security cameras.
Both Ford brothers – alive and dead – have given lip service to affordable housing. Former mayor Rob would visit the city’s public housing to highlight its unsavoury character.
For the most part, the Ford brother who has a good chance of becoming Ontario’s next premier has taken a Not-In-My-Neighbourhood attitude toward disadvantaged people.
• • •
Toronto’s housing pressure is a function of a very basic process of capitalism, one Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari explored in Anti-Œdipus. It’s a social / economic system that’s remarkably durable, which is strange.
There have been plenty of economic crises in capitalism – 47 major recessions in the history of the United States alone. The system was unstable enough that a union activist turned social scientist could write an analysis of capitalist economics describing it as a system heading inevitably for self-destruction.
The contemporary left doesn’t take Marx’s ideas at face value anymore. At least the intelligent ones don’t. Anti-Œdipus was another generation’s updating the basic idea of Capital to unexpected, contingent, new conditions.
Capitalism’s promise is prosperity and freedom – growth of the whole economy is good for everyone.* But capitalist economic systems drive these cycles of expansion and collapse. Usually, a key commodity’s value is inflated beyond sustainable price ranges by wider economic conditions, and there’s a lot of direct and collateral financial damage in the crash.
* As long as the size of some people’s shares of the pie grows at a greater rate than the size of the pie. That’s how an oligarch’s class is created.
• • •
Toronto’s high-pressure real estate market is one of those systems squeezed by affordability crunches. Profiteering people and organizations – property owners, investors in new condo developments – build these massive structures for middle class and professional class renters and homeowners.
Protests of these developments happen when people worry that they’ll be squeezed out of their homes – squeezed out of any homes at all – by the pressure of ubiquitous development that leaves them behind. That’s the injustice of property development – growing supply of middle class housing can stabilize the pressurized prices, but force those of more modest means away.
Gentrification’s irony. We all know it. A neighbourhood is filled with people of modest means who are all somehow marginalized from the mainstream. Working class. Artists. New immigrants. Marginalized people, whether by ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or some other racial or caste marker. Home of the minorities of a society.
Minorities in Deleuze and Guattari’s conception. People whose existence, identity, way of life separates them from the mainstream, others them. Their central example was Franz Kafka – a Czech man working and writing in German; an intellectual, curious, deeply spiritual Jew living in a Christian, rather anti-Semitic culture. It often puts them at a disadvantage.
Contemporary Toronto has its equivalents. Refugees from all over the world live in the Toronto area, as well as immigrants who come to Canada having to rebuild their entire lives. They’re the disadvantaged of our economic system, where we most value people who are already rich.
Yet a culture of entirely rich people is boring. It’s dull. It’s creatively dead. All this class knows how to do is commodify – invest for a higher return. But if you need sources outside your own class to invest in, you need to find difference-makers – new trends, new businesses, new ideas.
The minorities of our societies are the creative classes – they’re already mixing and realigning cultural codes and traditions in their own identities as they adapt to their new social worlds. Capitalism as a social system needs such people – hustlers, artists, new people – because the elite of a capitalist system don’t have the capacity to think anymore.
The margins of a society bring the energy to the next growth and creative process in a capitalist economy. Yet the very success of those processes force marginalized people out of a society, since the prosperity of an unrestrained capitalist system tends to cluster in oligarchical shapes.
Oligarchs hate those filthy poor people, and they aren’t smart of worldly enough to know how profoundly they depend on them.
Rent control and housing affordability is a crushing pressure on people all over the city. There’s pressure on the middle classes. People now able to afford a condo’s mortgage are locked out of a townhouse market with not enough supply, and a detached home market whose value has ballooned ridiculously.
 |
| I have plenty of bias – my New Democrat affiliation is in my Twitter bio. What amazed me was, when my part association posted this image, how quickly we got our first racist comment about Muslims. Far from our last, too. The real irony is that, the more shit-posters we get on this image – and the comment thread is ridiculously long without my having to do a thing – the more visible Facebook's algorithm will make it in news feeds all over the networks of the commenters. |
Both Ford brothers – alive and dead – have given lip service to affordable housing. Former mayor Rob would visit the city’s public housing to highlight its unsavoury character.
For the most part, the Ford brother who has a good chance of becoming Ontario’s next premier has taken a Not-In-My-Neighbourhood attitude toward disadvantaged people.
• • •
Toronto’s housing pressure is a function of a very basic process of capitalism, one Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari explored in Anti-Œdipus. It’s a social / economic system that’s remarkably durable, which is strange.
There have been plenty of economic crises in capitalism – 47 major recessions in the history of the United States alone. The system was unstable enough that a union activist turned social scientist could write an analysis of capitalist economics describing it as a system heading inevitably for self-destruction.
The contemporary left doesn’t take Marx’s ideas at face value anymore. At least the intelligent ones don’t. Anti-Œdipus was another generation’s updating the basic idea of Capital to unexpected, contingent, new conditions.
 |
| Parkdale has been a source of artistic creativity in Toronto for a while, and a big part of that was how many affordable – if kind of scuzzy – homes were available in the region. It's been a poor neighbourhood for a while, which means artists and new Canadians often end up living here. The Tibean and Roma communities have made serious impacts here for a while. But they're also squeezed by condo developers putting pressure on property owners to seek bigger profits. All those poor and weird people who made the place interesting and drew people to the area will have to leave so the boring people with fat wallets can live in this interesting place. |
* As long as the size of some people’s shares of the pie grows at a greater rate than the size of the pie. That’s how an oligarch’s class is created.
• • •
Toronto’s high-pressure real estate market is one of those systems squeezed by affordability crunches. Profiteering people and organizations – property owners, investors in new condo developments – build these massive structures for middle class and professional class renters and homeowners.
Protests of these developments happen when people worry that they’ll be squeezed out of their homes – squeezed out of any homes at all – by the pressure of ubiquitous development that leaves them behind. That’s the injustice of property development – growing supply of middle class housing can stabilize the pressurized prices, but force those of more modest means away.
Gentrification’s irony. We all know it. A neighbourhood is filled with people of modest means who are all somehow marginalized from the mainstream. Working class. Artists. New immigrants. Marginalized people, whether by ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or some other racial or caste marker. Home of the minorities of a society.
 |
| Even the far-right nutters who think Trudeau and Bill Morneau are communists just help drive our messaging to more people. Don't tell them that. Hell, even if you do, they'll probably just keep trying to start flame wars to own us socialists and libtards. Resentment and cruelty seem to be the only things keeping North America's conservative coalitions together these days. |
Contemporary Toronto has its equivalents. Refugees from all over the world live in the Toronto area, as well as immigrants who come to Canada having to rebuild their entire lives. They’re the disadvantaged of our economic system, where we most value people who are already rich.
Yet a culture of entirely rich people is boring. It’s dull. It’s creatively dead. All this class knows how to do is commodify – invest for a higher return. But if you need sources outside your own class to invest in, you need to find difference-makers – new trends, new businesses, new ideas.
The minorities of our societies are the creative classes – they’re already mixing and realigning cultural codes and traditions in their own identities as they adapt to their new social worlds. Capitalism as a social system needs such people – hustlers, artists, new people – because the elite of a capitalist system don’t have the capacity to think anymore.
The margins of a society bring the energy to the next growth and creative process in a capitalist economy. Yet the very success of those processes force marginalized people out of a society, since the prosperity of an unrestrained capitalist system tends to cluster in oligarchical shapes.
Oligarchs hate those filthy poor people, and they aren’t smart of worldly enough to know how profoundly they depend on them.
Becoming Memorable by Becoming a Landmark, Research Time, 09/03/2018
There are moments, when you’re researching a big project, when a few key ideas all come together. I’m having a moment like that now, looking back at some notes on an essay about Félix Guattari.
Stephen Zepke wrote it – he’s a scholar of Guattari and Gilles Deleuze’s work, who focusses a lot on their aesthetic theories. It has a mouthful of a title – “From Aesthetic Autonomy to Autonomist Aesthetics: Art and Life in Guattari.” Despite that in-your-face blast of technical vocab, it’s actually quite an interesting study.
Zepke talks about how Guattari explored art as a revolutionary process. Start from one key fact – if you want to start a successful art movement, you have to run against the mainstream.
You could bring up lots of examples from history. But most of the historical examples I know are Western, and in the spirit of my iconoclastic colleagues, I want to talk about a more global example.
Contemporary installation art, over the last few decades, has been dominated by the overtly shocking – blasphemous, stomach-churning, deranged. Photographs like Andres Serrano’s Piss-Christ, or installations like Damien Hirst’s famous The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.
Back in the 20th century, this kind of provocative sublime surreality was a sufficient shock to mainstream European visual and installation art that it ushered in a whole new way of thinking about what art was acceptable. It reminded popular culture that art is supposed to push boundaries.
As Zepke follows Guattari – art is a deterritorializing medium. The most remarkable art movements are the ones that forcefully reject the norms of an ossified mainstream. They create a whole new set of common principles for thinking about what art is.
The conceptual and social territory of – in the most extreme cases like Hirst, Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Kenneth Anger, or Henri Matisse – what counts as art at all. In most cases of historically remarkable art, you’ve at least helped create an exciting new movement that sweeps away a redundant mainstream. Or at least gives people the impetus to see how redundant and stale the mainstream had become under their noses.
Here’s the wider lesson for any social revolution. Every deterritorializalization ends up reterritorializing. It’s a fundamental aspect of life. Every departure has to set itself down somewhere, unless it just wants to fly to pieces. Maybe you want to fly to pieces. But you don’t have to.
What was once a provocative new artistic movement becomes a staid, drab mainstream. In the example I’ve been talking about, the once-shocking sculptures and installations of the Young British Artists are now old hat. Damien Hirst was becoming a punchline before the last century was even finished. Now, his new work is dismissed as “a showroom for oligarchs.”
What do I contrast to the bizarre shock of surreal that’s Hirst limping aesthetic? Hyperrealism. Massive canvases of charcoal and pencil still-life drawings with more detail than a photograph.
Hyperrealism is a global scene as well. Notable figures are Nigeria’s Arinze Stanley and Chiamonwu Joy, Germany’s Dirk Dzimirski, Canada’s Jeannette Sirois, and plenty of others. Hyperrealist images are more emotionally powerful than Hirst-ian provocations could ever be.
The best of them, of which I count Stanley, creates images of faces that tear you from your complacency – human drama rooted in the individuality of real people. An image of reality hand-crafted in such detail that the devotion to completed, perfected art impresses you almost as much as the faces that root you from your self-interested museum-goer’s detachment.
Don’t think hyperrealism developed purely in reaction to the decadent excess and greed of Hirst-ian installation art. I chose those two art movements because I’ve been looking into hyperrealism over the last six months or so. I’m late to the party, but that was only when I discovered Arinze’s work.
Hyperrealism is a global movement, and the artists who are part of it each have their own motivations and techniques. Deterritorialization – ripping a mainstream out of its prominence to pursue utterly different directions in creativity – isn’t about taking the “opposite” of that mainstream.
What would be the opposite of a cow suspended in formaldehyde? Does it even make sense to talk about opposites of artworks? No, only different artworks. If a cultural movement is influential enough to spawn a ton of mediocre imitators, then eventually some other movement will gather enough energy to blast the old corpse out of social prominence.
Stephen Zepke wrote it – he’s a scholar of Guattari and Gilles Deleuze’s work, who focusses a lot on their aesthetic theories. It has a mouthful of a title – “From Aesthetic Autonomy to Autonomist Aesthetics: Art and Life in Guattari.” Despite that in-your-face blast of technical vocab, it’s actually quite an interesting study.
 |
| Arinze Stanley with my favourite of his drawings. |
You could bring up lots of examples from history. But most of the historical examples I know are Western, and in the spirit of my iconoclastic colleagues, I want to talk about a more global example.
Contemporary installation art, over the last few decades, has been dominated by the overtly shocking – blasphemous, stomach-churning, deranged. Photographs like Andres Serrano’s Piss-Christ, or installations like Damien Hirst’s famous The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.
Back in the 20th century, this kind of provocative sublime surreality was a sufficient shock to mainstream European visual and installation art that it ushered in a whole new way of thinking about what art was acceptable. It reminded popular culture that art is supposed to push boundaries.
As Zepke follows Guattari – art is a deterritorializing medium. The most remarkable art movements are the ones that forcefully reject the norms of an ossified mainstream. They create a whole new set of common principles for thinking about what art is.
 |
| Yes, it's a zebra in formaldehyde. But is it art? |
Here’s the wider lesson for any social revolution. Every deterritorializalization ends up reterritorializing. It’s a fundamental aspect of life. Every departure has to set itself down somewhere, unless it just wants to fly to pieces. Maybe you want to fly to pieces. But you don’t have to.
What was once a provocative new artistic movement becomes a staid, drab mainstream. In the example I’ve been talking about, the once-shocking sculptures and installations of the Young British Artists are now old hat. Damien Hirst was becoming a punchline before the last century was even finished. Now, his new work is dismissed as “a showroom for oligarchs.”
What do I contrast to the bizarre shock of surreal that’s Hirst limping aesthetic? Hyperrealism. Massive canvases of charcoal and pencil still-life drawings with more detail than a photograph.
 |
| Chiamonwu Joy and her remarkable images. |
The best of them, of which I count Stanley, creates images of faces that tear you from your complacency – human drama rooted in the individuality of real people. An image of reality hand-crafted in such detail that the devotion to completed, perfected art impresses you almost as much as the faces that root you from your self-interested museum-goer’s detachment.
Don’t think hyperrealism developed purely in reaction to the decadent excess and greed of Hirst-ian installation art. I chose those two art movements because I’ve been looking into hyperrealism over the last six months or so. I’m late to the party, but that was only when I discovered Arinze’s work.
Hyperrealism is a global movement, and the artists who are part of it each have their own motivations and techniques. Deterritorialization – ripping a mainstream out of its prominence to pursue utterly different directions in creativity – isn’t about taking the “opposite” of that mainstream.
What would be the opposite of a cow suspended in formaldehyde? Does it even make sense to talk about opposites of artworks? No, only different artworks. If a cultural movement is influential enough to spawn a ton of mediocre imitators, then eventually some other movement will gather enough energy to blast the old corpse out of social prominence.
Tony on Gil I: Anticipating Conspiracies, Research Time, 02/03/2018
Here's a nerdy thing I’m enjoying about all the research of Utopias – a bunch of the key authors knew each other personally and wrote about each other’s work. So when I come across an essay that Antonio Negri wrote about the ideas of Gilles Deleuze, it’s going to have a little more significance than any other category.
Just like the Isabelle Stengers essay I was writing about yesterday, only I’ve read more of Negri’s work so far than Stengers’.
So Antonio Negri wrote an essay about Gilles Deleuze. It ranges across their political philosophy in two ways. It discusses Deleuze and Guattari’s own concepts, but it also describes some of the historical factors of how they were received.
In the case Negri discusses, America, it’s how they weren’t received. Because Deleuze and Guattari’s contribution to progressive political philosophy was, for a long time, squeezed out of public prominence by the Frankfurt School.
Historically, it was a matter of contingent historical connection. The Frankfurt School thinkers who survived the Second World War settled in the United States – Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse. Their writing was already prominent enough that they could land professors’ positions at the major elite schools.
Not everybody could do it, but the ones who didn’t seemed to be more effective in inspiring revolution against injustice.
Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse ended up locking down intellectual influence on the university-educated progressive left in America. Their books were the basis of critical political studies in the United States for the rest of the 20th century.
This fact is at the centre of why “cultural marxism” has taken hold as a conspiratorial concept in reactionary circles these days. It began from Andrew Breitbart’s misreading of Adorno – he saw the philosopher’s message as saying that social and political change begins from changing the culture, not from the top-down with state control institutions.
As a result, Breitbart shaped his extremist libertarian media outlet with an ambitious mission – change the culture through media activism. His goal was to counter the influence of Adorno and the Frankfurt School. Brietbart and his followers saw these writers as the communist Jews* who spent decades spreading ideologies of state socialism – cultural marxism – into the young generations through their books and the humanities professors who taught them.
* Because this is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, just so we have that clear. The Elders of Zion are now a bunch of elderly university professors.
Breitbart has, by all accounts, been incredibly successful. His brand of frothing anti-communism consumes conservative circles today. They make monsters out of people who support ordinary welfare state policies like government-provided health insurance.
Negri wrote this essay before Breitbart Media’s brand of extremism – rabidly anti-socialist white nationalism – took hold of American culture. But he provides an ironic point through his spin on the Frankfurt School. Even as Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse identified the only route to change society in cultural change, they also considered liberatory cultural change impossible.
Theo, Max, and Herb analyzed all the vectors of cultural repression – economic, political, psychological, sociological – and found it omnipresent. It’s actually impossible to find any breathing room in cultural repression to start a positive movement that will actually overthrow the repressive relationships themselves.
The most a real revolution in state or economic power can achieve is changing the character of repression. As Marcuse put it, capitalist vectors of repression reduce people to a single dimension of activity and self-conception. It becomes impossible to conceive of any positive alternative.
So all you can do in the face of a capitalist framework of life is critique and question. Negri identifies the quietism and hopelessness at the heart of Frankfurt School philosophy. Writing more than a decade ago, Negri finds an irony for me – Breitbart didn’t realize that, for all the critique and questions, the writers who became his Elders of Zion already considered him the winner.
More next week.
Just like the Isabelle Stengers essay I was writing about yesterday, only I’ve read more of Negri’s work so far than Stengers’.
 |
| If Deleuze and Guattari had become as prominent in American humanities curriculums as the Frankfurt School had, would Andrew Breitbart even have done any of the radical anti-progressive activism that defined his life? A butterfly flaps its wings and a reactionary movement forms. |
In the case Negri discusses, America, it’s how they weren’t received. Because Deleuze and Guattari’s contribution to progressive political philosophy was, for a long time, squeezed out of public prominence by the Frankfurt School.
Historically, it was a matter of contingent historical connection. The Frankfurt School thinkers who survived the Second World War settled in the United States – Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse. Their writing was already prominent enough that they could land professors’ positions at the major elite schools.
Not everybody could do it, but the ones who didn’t seemed to be more effective in inspiring revolution against injustice.
Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse ended up locking down intellectual influence on the university-educated progressive left in America. Their books were the basis of critical political studies in the United States for the rest of the 20th century.
This fact is at the centre of why “cultural marxism” has taken hold as a conspiratorial concept in reactionary circles these days. It began from Andrew Breitbart’s misreading of Adorno – he saw the philosopher’s message as saying that social and political change begins from changing the culture, not from the top-down with state control institutions.
As a result, Breitbart shaped his extremist libertarian media outlet with an ambitious mission – change the culture through media activism. His goal was to counter the influence of Adorno and the Frankfurt School. Brietbart and his followers saw these writers as the communist Jews* who spent decades spreading ideologies of state socialism – cultural marxism – into the young generations through their books and the humanities professors who taught them.
* Because this is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, just so we have that clear. The Elders of Zion are now a bunch of elderly university professors.
 |
| Another irony is that Negri, Guattari, Deleuze, and many others who built the philosophy of radical democracy like Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Bifo Berardi were all actual political activists. |
Negri wrote this essay before Breitbart Media’s brand of extremism – rabidly anti-socialist white nationalism – took hold of American culture. But he provides an ironic point through his spin on the Frankfurt School. Even as Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse identified the only route to change society in cultural change, they also considered liberatory cultural change impossible.
Theo, Max, and Herb analyzed all the vectors of cultural repression – economic, political, psychological, sociological – and found it omnipresent. It’s actually impossible to find any breathing room in cultural repression to start a positive movement that will actually overthrow the repressive relationships themselves.
The most a real revolution in state or economic power can achieve is changing the character of repression. As Marcuse put it, capitalist vectors of repression reduce people to a single dimension of activity and self-conception. It becomes impossible to conceive of any positive alternative.
So all you can do in the face of a capitalist framework of life is critique and question. Negri identifies the quietism and hopelessness at the heart of Frankfurt School philosophy. Writing more than a decade ago, Negri finds an irony for me – Breitbart didn’t realize that, for all the critique and questions, the writers who became his Elders of Zion already considered him the winner.
More next week.
What Can Become a Tradition? Research Time, 01/03/2018
The term ‘resurrection’ is loaded, especially to someone who grew up in a historically Christian culture like me. It’s ironic today, because I want to talk about the resurrection of pagan religion in the West.
It was an illuminating example in a densely brilliant essay by Isabelle Stengers in The Guattari Effect. It extends a dialogue she and Guattari had when he was alive, about what it means to continue a tradition.
Question – Does a tradition need unbroken transmission across all generations from origin to now, if it’s going to be a genuine tradition?
It started with an exchange between Stengers and Guattari about the nature of progress in anything’s development. The first context was how to understand the implications of evolution. If you take Darwinism seriously, you actually have to throw out any talk of higher and lower organisms.
The Medieval way of thinking ordered the world into hierarchies. The classification system in the Great Chain of Being may have been getting more complicated, and all the talk of God never needed to be said anymore. But until Darwin, you still ranked them.
And we kept ranking them after Charles Darwin the person wrote. But you now had this thoroughly materialist way of thinking about life. What does that imply for the reality of rank? Of a scale of “higher to lower” organisms by phylum or species? A chain that you moved up as you developed?
It's gone. Start from this fact – All the species that exist today are genuinely contemporary. This includes the bacteria. Folks typically think of bacteria as the lowest form of life, because one-celled organisms were the first to develop and bacteria are one-celled organisms.
But the bacteria that exist today are bacteria that have gone through nearly four billion years of contingent evolution. They’ve had just as much time as us. So if passage through time means advancement up the great chain of evolution, why are they still bacteria?
Because Earth is not the current place in an evolutionary process of creatures growing more advanced. Earth is a highly entropic system of hydrocarbons that’s had energy pumped into it for four billion years. We are the current era in a roiling chaos of highly complex contingent activity.
What the hell does this have to do with neo-paganism?
That conception of existence – roiling chaos of highly complex contingent activity – is an incredibly abstract description. Words heavy with very precise meanings expressed generally enough that many other contexts express it too.
Cultures change over time – contingent development in a chaotic world. The competing, older concept is the chain of being from lower to higher forms – progress as advancement in rank. A tradition consists in a common task developing over time. So you continue a tradition by relaying that task – passing it along.
Pagan religions in Europe – Greek, Roman, Celtic, Norse, and Germanic – flourished two thousand years ago. Christianity wiped out all the theology and absorbed pagan customs into its own practice, now seamlessly. New Pagans build their new tradition from archaeological and anthropological research on those ancient religions. They build their own practices from these fragments.
If you think of tradition as a chain, any temporal break ends the tradition. The reconstructed version developed in the late 20th century isn’t authentic to the organic Pagan religions of ancient Europe because of that break. There were no Pagan Yoda figures in hiding until Christianity let its institutional guard down.
But if you understand development as contingent chaos, then temporal continuity doesn't matter. Recurrence without continuity can happen, if conditions develop that make a tradition’s resurrection possible. So authenticity is a matter only of engagement, care, and a spirit of fidelity. You’re no receptacle. You can learn.
It was an illuminating example in a densely brilliant essay by Isabelle Stengers in The Guattari Effect. It extends a dialogue she and Guattari had when he was alive, about what it means to continue a tradition.
Question – Does a tradition need unbroken transmission across all generations from origin to now, if it’s going to be a genuine tradition?
 |
| The last several decades have seen a revival of Pagan rituals, festivals, and genuine devotional religious ceremonies in the West. Not only in Europe, but among settler cultures in North America as well. But is it an authentic paganism if the tradition of the religion was broken, and broken so long ago? |
The Medieval way of thinking ordered the world into hierarchies. The classification system in the Great Chain of Being may have been getting more complicated, and all the talk of God never needed to be said anymore. But until Darwin, you still ranked them.
And we kept ranking them after Charles Darwin the person wrote. But you now had this thoroughly materialist way of thinking about life. What does that imply for the reality of rank? Of a scale of “higher to lower” organisms by phylum or species? A chain that you moved up as you developed?
It's gone. Start from this fact – All the species that exist today are genuinely contemporary. This includes the bacteria. Folks typically think of bacteria as the lowest form of life, because one-celled organisms were the first to develop and bacteria are one-celled organisms.
But the bacteria that exist today are bacteria that have gone through nearly four billion years of contingent evolution. They’ve had just as much time as us. So if passage through time means advancement up the great chain of evolution, why are they still bacteria?
Because Earth is not the current place in an evolutionary process of creatures growing more advanced. Earth is a highly entropic system of hydrocarbons that’s had energy pumped into it for four billion years. We are the current era in a roiling chaos of highly complex contingent activity.
 |
| Bryozoans have existed for nearly 500 million years. They are literally bags of microorganisms that live as a fist-sized single organism. It moves, perceives, eats, excretes, and reproduces asexually. The Bryozoans of today are utterly different from the ones that lived hundreds of millions of years ago, except that they are still bryozoans. |
That conception of existence – roiling chaos of highly complex contingent activity – is an incredibly abstract description. Words heavy with very precise meanings expressed generally enough that many other contexts express it too.
Cultures change over time – contingent development in a chaotic world. The competing, older concept is the chain of being from lower to higher forms – progress as advancement in rank. A tradition consists in a common task developing over time. So you continue a tradition by relaying that task – passing it along.
Pagan religions in Europe – Greek, Roman, Celtic, Norse, and Germanic – flourished two thousand years ago. Christianity wiped out all the theology and absorbed pagan customs into its own practice, now seamlessly. New Pagans build their new tradition from archaeological and anthropological research on those ancient religions. They build their own practices from these fragments.
If you think of tradition as a chain, any temporal break ends the tradition. The reconstructed version developed in the late 20th century isn’t authentic to the organic Pagan religions of ancient Europe because of that break. There were no Pagan Yoda figures in hiding until Christianity let its institutional guard down.
But if you understand development as contingent chaos, then temporal continuity doesn't matter. Recurrence without continuity can happen, if conditions develop that make a tradition’s resurrection possible. So authenticity is a matter only of engagement, care, and a spirit of fidelity. You’re no receptacle. You can learn.
The Dreamtime Is Real Places After All, Research Time, 27/02/2018
I said I wasn't going to talk much about the review I’m working on – for Bryan Van Norden’s polemic, his gauntlet throw-down, pistol-packing, Crip-walking graffiti on the university walls, Taking Back Philosophy. But I am a little bit.
There's one idea that I don’t quite have the room to fit into my review, but that actually converges with some of the research I was doing on Félix Guattari’s thinking. Barbara Glowczewski, an anthropologist and former colleague of Guattari’s, wrote an essay for The Guattari Effect volume about a disagreement they had over the ontology of the Warlpiri worldview.
Van Norden’s book is a call to globalize university philosophy in a very literal sense – change the curriculum of degree programs to include thinkers in traditions other than the Western. Van Norden writes about the Chinese and Indian traditions in more detail because he knows them best.
But Indigenous philosophy is one – actually very, very many – traditions that need to be at the philosophical table. I feel lucky in Canada that my country’s universities host brilliant Indigenous thinkers – and that many other philosopher-activists thrive outside that system too.
The Warlpiri are an Indigenous Australian people. We often think of Indigenous Australians as all having one culture, or being one people. Generic Aboriginie. Or as they say less formally – Abos. Or the most awful one – Boong. As in, Bung. Australians call their continent’s Indigenous “Shit-people.” As in “people made of shit.” Literally.
So Australia makes me cry a little, but the Warlpiri ontology is very interesting. See, we typically think of Indigenous Australian spirituality as revolving around Dream Time – the entry into an eternal or literally time-less astral world.
The real concept is much more complicated. Not only are there many distinct Indigenous Australian cultures, languages, spiritualities, religions, and philosophies – even the Warlpiri Dream Time concept is different from this simple popular concept.
Dream Time isn’t a no-space, or an eternal reflection of the ordinary world kept mystically separate. Conceive of it more like a collapse of all space and time – past, present, future, everywhere at once – into a single location. It’s a totemic marking of territory. Northern Australia itself becomes a topographical map of totemically staked places.
When Glowczewski shared a concept she’d used to understand the Warlpiri totemic experience space with Guattari, he was less than pleased. Instead of attempting to understand the Warlpiri concepts on its own terms, she’d introduced a Western mathematical concept to them, to explain their totemic spaces.
A hypercube. Guattari was worried that Glowczewski’s topological mathematics was erasing the details of the Warlpiri concept. When they discussed and explored Dream Time, their mysticism was integrated with a complex web of ideas and practices, networked together into a multidimensional multiplicity of meanings and manifestations.
They argued over this for a while. But at the same time, the Warlpiri elders that Glowczewski had come to know had their own answer to the dispute.
That's really the best way to find your answer, honestly. When you’re arguing about some complicated philosophical issue in another culture, a thinker of roughly your own skill from that culture is the best to set you on the right course. At the least, they’ll let you know which of you is the most wrong.
It turned out to be Guattari. The Warlpiri elders and shamans were well ahead of Guattari’s own hesitation. I can see where he was coming from – the white person well aware of the eggshell walkways of post-colonial conversations. You don’t want to risk telling an Indigenous person what their worldview is “really about” because that’s exactly the kind of cultural and philosophical erasure they’ve been dealing with for centuries.
Those Warlpiri philosophers had a surprise for Guattari, at least in Glowczewski’s telling. They liked topological mathematics. They liked the hypercube concept. It worked really well to explain some important aspects of their spiritual thinking and its ontological connection with particular places and place in general.
It wasn’t complete, of course. Topological math couldn’t explain everything, but it was a useful tool to put in their own philosophical bundle. They used it well.
There's one idea that I don’t quite have the room to fit into my review, but that actually converges with some of the research I was doing on Félix Guattari’s thinking. Barbara Glowczewski, an anthropologist and former colleague of Guattari’s, wrote an essay for The Guattari Effect volume about a disagreement they had over the ontology of the Warlpiri worldview.
 |
| The Pleiades, by Alma Nungarrayi |
But Indigenous philosophy is one – actually very, very many – traditions that need to be at the philosophical table. I feel lucky in Canada that my country’s universities host brilliant Indigenous thinkers – and that many other philosopher-activists thrive outside that system too.
The Warlpiri are an Indigenous Australian people. We often think of Indigenous Australians as all having one culture, or being one people. Generic Aboriginie. Or as they say less formally – Abos. Or the most awful one – Boong. As in, Bung. Australians call their continent’s Indigenous “Shit-people.” As in “people made of shit.” Literally.
So Australia makes me cry a little, but the Warlpiri ontology is very interesting. See, we typically think of Indigenous Australian spirituality as revolving around Dream Time – the entry into an eternal or literally time-less astral world.
The real concept is much more complicated. Not only are there many distinct Indigenous Australian cultures, languages, spiritualities, religions, and philosophies – even the Warlpiri Dream Time concept is different from this simple popular concept.
Dream Time isn’t a no-space, or an eternal reflection of the ordinary world kept mystically separate. Conceive of it more like a collapse of all space and time – past, present, future, everywhere at once – into a single location. It’s a totemic marking of territory. Northern Australia itself becomes a topographical map of totemically staked places.
 |
| Dreamtime Sisters, by Colleen Wallace Nungarrayi |
A hypercube. Guattari was worried that Glowczewski’s topological mathematics was erasing the details of the Warlpiri concept. When they discussed and explored Dream Time, their mysticism was integrated with a complex web of ideas and practices, networked together into a multidimensional multiplicity of meanings and manifestations.
They argued over this for a while. But at the same time, the Warlpiri elders that Glowczewski had come to know had their own answer to the dispute.
That's really the best way to find your answer, honestly. When you’re arguing about some complicated philosophical issue in another culture, a thinker of roughly your own skill from that culture is the best to set you on the right course. At the least, they’ll let you know which of you is the most wrong.
It turned out to be Guattari. The Warlpiri elders and shamans were well ahead of Guattari’s own hesitation. I can see where he was coming from – the white person well aware of the eggshell walkways of post-colonial conversations. You don’t want to risk telling an Indigenous person what their worldview is “really about” because that’s exactly the kind of cultural and philosophical erasure they’ve been dealing with for centuries.
Those Warlpiri philosophers had a surprise for Guattari, at least in Glowczewski’s telling. They liked topological mathematics. They liked the hypercube concept. It worked really well to explain some important aspects of their spiritual thinking and its ontological connection with particular places and place in general.
It wasn’t complete, of course. Topological math couldn’t explain everything, but it was a useful tool to put in their own philosophical bundle. They used it well.
You Come to Swell the Numbers, Advocate, 26/02/2018
I’m not going to write about philosophy today. One is that most of the philosophy I read this weekend was for a book review I have to write, so I’m not going to throw it out on the blog.
I started work on a new novel manuscript this weekend too, but I only just finished the prologue. On to page three! Yeah, not much to say here.
But I’m coming to protest on Saturday. It’ll be a good protest, a damn fun protest, a beautiful protest, and a necessary protest. The rage will be necessary, and channelled through the power of a group.
So this Saturday, there’ll be a Justice for Tina Fontaine protest, and yeah of course I’m fucking going.
There are two arguments that I can imagine getting trotted out about this. One is the legalist’s, the other is the quietist’s.
To Mr Legalist
The lawyer’s argument is the most insulting to me, because it’s so reductive. These are the people who say that Jian Ghomeshi deserves his job and office back at CBC because the criminal trial found him not-guilty. Who reduce all truth to the verdict of a jury.
Rather, they expand what was designed to be a narrow, difficult standard of proof to stand for the entire truth of the matter. Yes, a jury decided that Ray Cormier’s drunken ramblings weren’t sufficient grounds for criminal conviction. Would “Justice for Tina Fontaine” really be complete if this one evil jackass went to prison for 25 years?
I don’t even believe in the sufficiency of retributive justice as an individual, and I came to that decision as a Westerner. Indigenous Canadian cultures lived under justice institutions – the customs and methods of redressing crimes – whose grounding principles were restorative, communitarian values. Centuries of cultural continuity.
Do you seriously think Indigenous Canadians would have only the punishment of a perpetrator in mind when they chant “Justice for Tina Fontaine”?
To Ms Quietist
I understand the centrepiece of this argument, I truly do. But you can’t just say that this is only for Indigenous people and cluck sadly as white extremist opposition goes unchallenged.
Remember what I said about the communitarian values at the centre of justice questions larger in scope than “Who did it?”
Tina Fontaine – and everyone else who’s met an untimely death after a life of neglect, suffering, and marginalization – doesn’t achieve justice when a jail cell closes. Because people still live as neglected as Tina Fontaine was.
Many of the causes and conditions of that neglect are the structure and operation of Canada’s government institutions. It may not be the residential schools anymore, but the child welfare agencies in some regions are very effective with the spin they’ve put on the basic process.
As a person who lives in Canada, I’m enmeshed in the same institutions, the same cultural currents as everyone else in this country. If our institutions and cultural beliefs, common sense, and habits are set up in such a way that many people needlessly suffer neglect and indignity, we all have to work together to change them.
When you’re suffering, you need to know that you have friends. That minimal level of friendship – respect and solidarity – is the relationship that constitutes community.
I’m not going to be some presumptuous ass trying to speak for Indigenous people. I haven’t gone through any experience like they have. But if anyone needs to know that they have friends, at least I’ll be there.
Swell the numbers until everyone joins.
I started work on a new novel manuscript this weekend too, but I only just finished the prologue. On to page three! Yeah, not much to say here.
But I’m coming to protest on Saturday. It’ll be a good protest, a damn fun protest, a beautiful protest, and a necessary protest. The rage will be necessary, and channelled through the power of a group.
There are two arguments that I can imagine getting trotted out about this. One is the legalist’s, the other is the quietist’s.
To Mr Legalist
The lawyer’s argument is the most insulting to me, because it’s so reductive. These are the people who say that Jian Ghomeshi deserves his job and office back at CBC because the criminal trial found him not-guilty. Who reduce all truth to the verdict of a jury.
Rather, they expand what was designed to be a narrow, difficult standard of proof to stand for the entire truth of the matter. Yes, a jury decided that Ray Cormier’s drunken ramblings weren’t sufficient grounds for criminal conviction. Would “Justice for Tina Fontaine” really be complete if this one evil jackass went to prison for 25 years?
I don’t even believe in the sufficiency of retributive justice as an individual, and I came to that decision as a Westerner. Indigenous Canadian cultures lived under justice institutions – the customs and methods of redressing crimes – whose grounding principles were restorative, communitarian values. Centuries of cultural continuity.
Do you seriously think Indigenous Canadians would have only the punishment of a perpetrator in mind when they chant “Justice for Tina Fontaine”?
To Ms Quietist
I understand the centrepiece of this argument, I truly do. But you can’t just say that this is only for Indigenous people and cluck sadly as white extremist opposition goes unchallenged.
Remember what I said about the communitarian values at the centre of justice questions larger in scope than “Who did it?”
Tina Fontaine – and everyone else who’s met an untimely death after a life of neglect, suffering, and marginalization – doesn’t achieve justice when a jail cell closes. Because people still live as neglected as Tina Fontaine was.
Many of the causes and conditions of that neglect are the structure and operation of Canada’s government institutions. It may not be the residential schools anymore, but the child welfare agencies in some regions are very effective with the spin they’ve put on the basic process.
As a person who lives in Canada, I’m enmeshed in the same institutions, the same cultural currents as everyone else in this country. If our institutions and cultural beliefs, common sense, and habits are set up in such a way that many people needlessly suffer neglect and indignity, we all have to work together to change them.
When you’re suffering, you need to know that you have friends. That minimal level of friendship – respect and solidarity – is the relationship that constitutes community.
I’m not going to be some presumptuous ass trying to speak for Indigenous people. I haven’t gone through any experience like they have. But if anyone needs to know that they have friends, at least I’ll be there.
Swell the numbers until everyone joins.
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