The Enchanting Falsenesses of True Romance, Jamming, 02/07/2018

When I was researching what would become Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, I found a lot of very frustrating environmentalist literature and philosophy. Not that it was insufficiently environmentalist – oh no.

These were works that romanticized the non-human world. For one thing, such philosophical writing collapsed all the diversity of everything-that-isn’t-human-or-industrial into a single category – Nature.

This Nature had a single essence, which was inevitably described with images of goodness, purity, harmony, and love. Wading through this dreck was intellectual torture.

It's an old trope of dehumanizing indigenous people to consider
them part of a non-human nature. Just because you want to conserve
them instead of raze them like a forest in the way of a condo tower,
doesn't make the concept any less racist.

Worst of all were the works that conceived of the indigenous peoples of Australasia and the Americas as conduits of this pure Nature, vehicles for an ethic of harmony and balance. They perpetuated the same division of the world into cowboys and indians, but made sure the cowboys were evil and the indians were good.

Some of that stuff was so racist, I wanted to puke a little as I read it. The worst racism of all – validation through valorization. You just switch the valuation around on the old racism of colonial genocide.

Virtuous missionaries and brave settlers become the crushers of indigenous spirituality and prosperity, which is a very good first step. But the ignorant indians now become enlightened mystics. Problem is, you still treat them like savages. Now, you just think it’s good to be a savage.

Jussi Parikka does a solid job of quickly and clearly identifying the roots of this angelic racism in the first chapter of The Geology of Media. The central concepts that are used in this destructive, falsifying, idealizing understanding of nature come from the Romantic tradition of literature and philosophy.

I’m not going to go into it. Just read his book. Or mine. Whichever you prefer to buy or steal. If stealing, why not both?

Millions of years lie before your eyes, present for you.

An alternative – and I think the best one – is in materialist thinking. Just remember to be as thorough as you can – a materialism that subtracts nothing from the world. Account for everything that you always felt you needed the non-material for, by material means.

Parikka finds a means for people to engage with profoundly deep times, for example, by a thoroughly materialist analysis.

Romantic dualism about nature and technology can only conceive of nature as eternal, while technology is the force that introduces change and the flow of time into existence. That change is inherently destructive, just as a return to the eternal nature is good, the restoration of harmony.

But an eye on the geological roots of technology show how the material of our civilization has always been part of the Earth. Technology is a product of nature – geological flows lasting millions of years and ecological flows lasting hundreds of thousands. Our technology is the exploration and rearrangement of metals that exist on planetary scales of time.

Nature is a process billions of years long. Our ecological catastrophe of a few centuries is a relative instant.

Ambition to Change the World, Composing, 25/04/2018

So I’m going to take a quick break from going through Paul Patton today. The note that I want to follow up yesterday’s “Mapping Thought” post with, it has a lot to do with the ontology of virtual multiplicities. And I don’t really have the energy tonight to translate that out of mad crazy technical language.

So I thought I’d post a few thoughts about another project I’m working on, which will help me wrap my head around the shape of what I need to write.

This month, I officially joined the team at Ghubril Ltd, a startup think tank specializing in program evaluation for the global NGO and United Nations sector. We produce regular publications – policy papers and white papers – and sell subscriptions to receive them direct.

Explore the website, which I’ll link here again for the second time, and you’ll see the kind of subject matters we work on. We push progressive policy – we do research on different pathways to create a healthier, stronger, freer human civilization that lives in greater harmony with the ecologies of Earth.

This month, our papers all revolve around climate change and related ecological issues. In a way, I have it very easy this month, because I already wrote a book about all this.

My own paper for this month revolves around how you actually make a sustainable society permanent. It needs a complete transformation of the culture. And the best route there is activism. It’s also the slowest-moving of all the methods you could use.

President Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic embraced by
Richard Nixon, who was Vice-President of the United States at the
time. Trujillo was one of the many brutal dictators the US
government supported as part of anti-communist geopolitical
strategy. He was responsible for brutal repression of dissidents, the
mass murder and ethnic cleansing of Haitians and other black
people from Dominican territory, and on a personal level,
regular sexual assaults against young Dominican women as if
the country's population were his own personal harem.
Trujillo was also a dedicated environmentalist, expanding
protected natural lands in his country and ordering a large-scale
reforestation campaign.

You can use the laws of your country, of course. But that runs into the problem that countries only have jurisdiction over limited amounts of territory. If Canada becomes the greenest* country on Earth, we’re still in a lot of trouble if the United States’ government grows more indifferent to ecological sanity.

* Political and economically.

And law is an inherently coercive tool as well. It encourages resistance, as part of the natural human instinct to rebel – against authority, against some perceived popular consensus. We’re all punks at heart. It’s just the content that varies. It’s why Paul Ryan can love Rage Against the Machine, and listen to the songs as if they’re about him.

The only way to guarantee that a society will change in a particular direction is the transformation of people’s very moralities. What Nietzsche called the transvaluation of values.

Now, I’ve known plenty of Nietzsche scholars in my time. And many philosophers who’ve followed in the tradition that Nietzsche began. But it’s very difficult to find concrete policy prescriptions for the transformation of popular morality. So I feel like I’m standing on my own here.

So where I’m still trying to punch through as a writer of a policy paper here is this. How do you explain the difficulty of activism as a strategy, while also making clear that activism is the only strategy that can be genuinely successful at all?

It means explaining the ontology of society. It’s not that sociological-scale events and bodies are entirely determined by the psychological and individual-scale. That would reduce the social causally to functions of the individual, which won’t work at all.

But the social is constituted through the relationships among individuals, across all the channels that humans use to communicate with each other. There’s a constant feedback loop of influence across the two scales, each individual being a quantum constituting the entire social field in action together.

From another angle, the difference between the social and the individual is epistemic, a matter of knowledge and investigation. The specific scientific techniques that investigate individual-scale events can’t work to investigate social-scale events. Same goes for techniques for social investigation and the individual scale.

So here’s where I stand. The concept that I’m working with is explaining how the individual / psychological functions as the quantum constituent of a social field. Meanwhile, the phase difference from individual to social – from quantum to field – requires different sciences to deal with each.

Which is fine. Now how do I explain this as a matter of policy prescriptions for process models?

I’m writing this at 23.00. I need to sleep on this.

To Be Free and Natural, A History Boy, 14/11/2017

I started this blog when I’d already developed quite a lot as a writer – especially in philosophy. A good chunk of that development came from reading Gilles Deleuze and using a bunch of his concepts and ideas in my own projects, particularly in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity.

That book isn’t a book about Deleuze – the book is about what the title says. But I use Deleuze’s concepts often in how I research and explore problems in environmental ethics and activism. Even – especially – when I’m not quoting or referring directly to any of his work.

If you’re going to give me a label based on any legendary philosopher’s name turned into an adjective, you could plausibly call me only a Deleuzian.

Influence is an agony.

Of course, given how most folks in academia use adjectival names, I’d prefer that you didn’t. Because when you’re in an academic context with philosophers and you call yourself a Deleuzian, they think that all your writing is commentary on Deleuze. And that your professional communication is advocating for a single interpretation of Deleuze that you hold to be the true, right one.

Replace the name Deleuze and its adjectives with the name and adjective of any primary material philosopher and you have a significant chunk of the entire field.

This is the closest thing possible to the opposite of what Deleuze would have wanted his follower philosophers to do. The man wrote it himself. If you want to follow in the footsteps of your heroes, don’t just repeat what they said, but do what they did.

What does a philosopher do? In the broadest possible and most essential sense, a philosopher creates concepts. What is a concept? That can take a while to answer. Answering and exploring that question is the major point of Deleuze’s last big book, What Is Philosophy? So you can go into plenty of detail, and discussion too.

But you can also say it very simply, and let the details do the work that details do – get technical, intricate, profound, meaningful in a professional sense. You can understand how a computer works without being a computer scientist. In the same way, you can understand what a philosophical concept is without being a professional philosopher.

Something else that too many academic philosophers tend to forget.

You can make a strong case that we're quite a lot
dumber than some of our ancestors. They lived at
least long enough to become us, and it's become a
conceivable possibility that humanity will end up
cockroach food.

I can give you a really quick and easy-to-remember account of what a concept is. It’s the one I see when I read What Is Philosophy? A concept is a framework for us to understand the world – how we order our thoughts and perceptions from our daily lives to the cosmos.

Here’s what I think is the most important part of how Deleuze understands this – the most important lesson he has for us. It’s why I realized his ideas were so important to building a genuinely progressive environmentalist ethics.

Frameworks to order our thoughts and perceptions is more than just a human thing. All organisms have to make sense of a chaotic world of perception – moving so that they stay alive. Hundreds of millions of years of animal evolution has produced some pretty complex ways to perceive and act. We’re one of those ways.

We can build a tradition – many traditions, actually – of conceptual craftspeople. We develop new abstract frameworks of making sense out of chaos that are much more complex and have many different powers than those of an australopithecus.

Any tradition centred on developing new concepts is properly called philosophical. Plural all the way down. That’s what I love about thinking in a way you could – if you really must – call Deleuzian.

It’s a wonderful framework for environmentalist thinking – a vision of humanity as an expression of nature. No essence. No immutability. No hierarchies. Contingency, change, and diversity. Environmentalist, ecological, and democrat to the core.

No One Expects the End of Everything, Jamming, 04/10/2017

As I was reading through The Human Condition, I made quite a few notes. I always make notes when I read philosophy, of course. Most of the time, they’re pretty trippy reactions to concepts. Elaborations. Arguments. Questions. Comments. Links.

Sometimes, it’s a joke. A meaningful, significant joke. A cruel joke. Definitely a cruel joke. The worst way to have an idea go out of date.

Much of human civilization is passing the point where industrial
life has more benefits than drawbacks.

Hannah Arendt writes, “Mankind as a whole is still very far from having reached the limit of abundance.” Chapter 16, page 124 of my English edition.

This is from the late 1950s, when human industry was kicking into its highest gear yet. This was the decade when we started pumping enough carbon gases into the atmosphere that we were kick-starting the sixth Great Extinction.

Here’s a thought that comes to me when I read this sentence of hers. Here we were, so close as a civilization to reaching the carrying capacity of our planet. Yet no one could see it.

Only 60 years after Arendt wrote The Human Condition, we were pushing up against the carrying capacity of our planet for an industrial civilization of more than seven billion people.

In 1960, the Earth’s human population had only recently passed three billion. The problem wasn’t nearly at the forefront of everyone’s mind. We all knew the danger of nuclear weapons. The Cold War loomed starkly enough that it was called the nuclear age.

Nuclear weapons no longer have that solemn dignity, as if we could control the finger of God with a big red button. Now, they’re the apocalyptic toys wielded by boy-emperors and man-children. What was humanity’s great achievement of divine wrath is now our grotesque stumble into drunken mass suicide.

None of this is predictable. Donald Trump is the President of the
United States of America. What the fuck?

Arendt could never have seen Donald Trump. If she had, she’d probably have dismissed it as a night terror. Even four years ago, the prospect of Donald Trump becoming President of the United States was an unbelievable proposition.

Humanity is dissonant when we try to tell the future. All we can do to anticipate the future is follow present situations and trends along their current dimension of progress. When we believed that every home would have an atomic oven. Or that passenger rockets would take us on trips around the world in less than an hour.

Maybe we can imagine some much more intense version of the present moment. Cyberpunk imagination brought us that.

Even when the predictions are accurate, they’re limited. Elon Musk is talking about doing rocket-based commuter flights from San Francisco to Japan in 25 minutes. But I think he just feels cheated that we never got the moon colony by now, like we all thought 60 years ago.

We’re living in a generally less intense cyberpunk future right now. Yet who in Larry Niven’s generation could have dreamt up cyberpunk? Let alone Jules Verne’s generation.

In this passage of The Human Condition where Arendt drops this line, she’s continuing her long analysis of how Western values have transformed from Polis Greece to the Atomic Age.

She can see some kind of radical transformation ramping into gear because her eye is on industrial production and the processes that enable it. Because she’s tracking the development of Western values, she has her eye on the growing frenzy of consumerism in the United States and the other free market industrialized regions.

Arendt had lived through the Second World War, and catalogued the many thresholds humanity crossed in those years. We know the most about what she wrote about its terror threshold. But she was also watching our economic thresholds.

The Second World War was the period of humanity’s most aggressive, intense, and massive industrial production yet. Fifteen years after its end, none of that industry had scaled back its powers and processes. War wasn’t eating it up – people were.

This was consumerism. The dignity of building goods to last was replaced by the relentless push to consume. Buy, wear out, and replace. That’s why my grandparents’ sewing machine could keep working for decades, but most everyday machines like that now have lifespans of a few years.

We’re supposed to throw them out and replace them. It’s the only way our industry could keep pace with the capacity we developed through total war. At the time, the buildup of consumerism was necessary – only the intense industry of the Second World War could bring human civilization back from the Great Depression.

The price was dignity in so many ways. Arendt follows the grotesquerie of consumerist morality. My work – and that of many others – has followed the grotesquerie of ecological destruction.

Humanity drowns in our own shit, and does so in D&G shades.

Contradictory Heritage, A History Boy, 08/09/2017

I have a pretty stand-offish relationship with Theodor Adorno. I think it’s a result of my first exposure to him. That came through an older university librarian I knew by the philosophy department circles back in my undergrad years at Memorial.

He was the philosophy specialist in the library’s procurement, and his own PhD research focussed on Adorno. CD was a smart guy, and although I found him a little pretentious, he was a good person to hang out with. I have to say, though, he wasn’t very good at selling Adorno to me.

I reconsidered his work as I got older, but never really made the jump to studying his philosophy in full. Mostly, it was because I was working on a totally different tradition and approach in Western philosophy during my doctorate – informing environmentalist ethics through philosophy of biology and ecology, with a leg up from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on the conceptual framework.

Remember, freshmen, there is no art without suffering.
No education without folly.
No philosophy class without a surly smart-ass.

But I think it was also because of his reputation. I’m not usually one to cower in front of a reputation, but with Adorno, I did. His work wasn’t just philosophy to me – it was an edifice. I came to that image through the Adorno specialists and students I knew – they treated him like a figure of awe.

Nein broke that image for me. He injected some levity into Adorno for me, and made him and his work more approachable. I don’t want to read some unapproachable edifice. I want to read a thinker.

So I’ll probably hit up some Adorno soon. I’ll soon be transitioning away from looking at left-wing philosophy as it’s more traditionally defined. But after a walk along the path that I’m heading for, I think I’ll go back to some Adorno, no matter how strange his work might be.

How strange might that work be? Well, here’s Perry Anderson’s take on it. This is probably what I admire most about Anderson’s writing and thought. He’s a historian of ideas who can genuinely grapple with the real strangeness of some ideas and still find witty and concise ways of explaining it.

Maybe it helped that I was already familiar with the context. I mean, I haven’t read much Adorno myself, but I’ve read almost everything else that influenced him. So it’s not like I have no idea what kind of concepts are flying around there.

Here are the concepts that Anderson throws down to explain the underlying ontology of Adorno’s philosophical writing. Same goes for the rest of the Frankfurt School more generally.

He describes Frankfurt School thinking as on the same plane as these following two philosophical frameworks. One is the philosophy of Friedrich Schelling. Anderson describes this as adapting the metaphysics of Christian salvation to the human relationship with the material Earth. So the path to humanity’s redemption from our fundamental corruption is a kind of devotion to harmonious material nature.

Schelling is another German philosopher who I
could just never get into. Everything I heard about
his ideas, even from people who loved his work,
made me think I would hate it all. I haven't heard
anything much different yet.

The City of God becomes the City of Man when it’s no longer a city, but a forest. And we must treat it as such.

Two is Heidegger’s critique of technology, his account of the technological attitude as the rupture of man from nature. This rupture is the ongoing social, cultural, and philosophical goal of dominating the Earth – we dominate Earth to make commodities from it, and we define our lives through our commodities, our stuff.

In the words of the Frankfurt School’s marxist heritage, capitalism is the rupture of humanity from Earth, from nature. So a liberated society, in Adorno’s thinking* is a reconciliation of humanity and Earth.

* According to Perry Anderson.

It’s a beautiful vision. As someone who holds environmentalist political and ethics values, I definitely like it. Despite the way Anderson’s account tends to reify nature. Actually, that’s a serious problem for me. By pulling Schelling’s Christian salvation narrative into an immanent material relationship – humanity and Earth – you turn the planet into God.

Earth isn’t God. It’s Earth. If you believe it’s God, you’re making a serious mistake. God as a Christian concept was designed as the ultimate Other – the Fall means that humanity’s nature is utterly and totally anathema to the Divine. That we’re virtually like poison to divinity.

If this is really the underlying metaphysics of the Frankfurt School, I can’t even say they’re radical left anymore. To make a Christian God of Nature is making an idol out of a word that shouldn’t even be capitalized.

There’s an even deeper conservatism underneath the ideas of what the radical right today call the communist conspiracy of the modern era.

The Abject Humanism of It All II: The Problem With People, Composing, 20/07/2017

You want to know my problem with humanity? The poverty of our vision is the foundation of the poverty of people. Human vision is poor when, in this context, it collapses into a humanism.

Now, you can’t write in a philosophical context that you’re critiquing humanism without someone in the audience mentioning Martin Heidegger.* His “Letter on Humanism,” the most famous text where he engages with this concept. He spent virtually his entire career critiquing humanistic ways of thinking, in different words at different times.

* Usually an academic specializing in writing commentary on Martin Heidegger.

But Heidegger’s thinking can’t go far enough in the critique of humanism. His quietism, piety, and fatalism get in the way of understanding the most profound aspects of what humanistic thinking does in the world.

We consume our whole world as if it were a fancy meal in a restaurant.
This is humanity at its most pathetic – turning the cosmological into
a petty pleasure. Image by Brittany Jackson.

Consider this post a stab at my own critique of humanism. It’ll likely be translated into my full manuscript for Utopias eventually.

Humanism is, quite literally, understanding all experience as ultimately related to human ends. It universalizes human ends to all things.

That’s part of what Heidegger has to say. But his concerns are to restore a proper relationship between humanity and being in a sense very disconnected from the problems of suffering and destruction. Destruction – social and ecological – is for Heidegger a symptom of a greater ontological failure.

For me, the priorities are reversed – Actually no, not reversed. Merged. The Heideggerian way of thinking merges questions of being with social and ecological questions. But it subsumes the social and ecological into questions of being, because for him being is the paramount question of philosophy.

For me, screw that. If I could give my philosophical perspective a label – at least for today – I’d call it a pragmatist anti-humanism. We destroy our societies and our ecologies with self-absorbed humanist ideas that our chauvinist priorities are the only ones that matter for human action.

You want an example? Okay, go back to Friedman’s words about national parks. You can think of many reasons to create national parks and wilderness reserves.

As far as I’m concerned, the best reason to conserve significant tracts of wilderness is to keep complex ecosystems functioning. There’s a humanistic angle to this, because humans need complex ecosystems to maintain all the processes that keep us alive – atmospheric balances, dealing with air pollution, cleaning water, preventing erosion of our land, preserving the processes that keep our soil arable and our food growing.

But there’s also the priority of wanting more complex ecosystems because ecological complexity builds a robust biosphere. The complexity of our ecologies are literally what keeps the Earth alive. Earth is a body that literally dwarfs humanity, no matter how powerful we’ve become.

We’re one recently-evolved, self-destructive species on a remarkable planet 4.5 billion years old. Earth is a body with far greater dignity and majesty than humanity. Humanity are pests compared to the Earth. And we tend to be pests on the Earth as well.

Take seriously the material existence of cosmological majesty. Humans are petty, small creatures. We can do amazing things, and we have a lot of potential. Our science-fiction can be the vehicle of our ambitions to achieve our greatest potential. But we won’t achieve that potential until we understand our pettiness and purge ourselves of it.

Pettiness like Milton Friedman writing that the purpose of national parks and nature reserves is to provide good customer service to campers and hikers.

Out of Many IV: How We Make Ourselves, Composing, 12/12/2016

Continued from previous . . . I have an orientation to political thinking that you could call a little unorthodox.

I’m not talking about my actual personal beliefs about policies and the role of the state. It’s a blend of left-wing welfare progressivism, distrust of government and police, anti-racism, and libertarian love of relative chaos. Not that today.

I’m not talking about my philosophical journey toward being an increasingly strident progressive – seeing militaristic and nationalist reaction grow and grow all over my culture ever since 11 September 2001. Not that today either.

Today, I want to give a direct answer to the problem my friend was banging into through the earliest drafts of his master’s thesis. What is the political? Here’s my weird, but sensible answer.

The domain of the political is the set of projects, processes, thoughts, and forces that shape human character, personality, and culture. When we talk about all these things in the context of how they shape humanity, we’re talking politics.

I came to this conclusion as I was finishing the first draft of Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. That book is an outline of one way* to think ecologically about the whole world. How to foreground relations, flux, and interdependence in how we understand the world.

* Among probably many ways. But this was the way I could best assemble, given my resources at McMaster and the expertise I built from and developed.

My book started as a thesis on environmental philosophy – mostly a bunch of academic quibbling over arguments about rights and moral principles, unfortunately. But the truly great writing in environmental philosophy – people like Val Plumwood, Arne Næss – got into wider investigations about how we fundamentally saw ourselves in the world.

All the way down to the turtle.

You can’t care about the ecological relations of your world if you believe humanity is of a different order of being from nature. So if you were going to have a decent chance of believing in those moral principles about protecting nature and preserving our productive ecologies, you had to think ecologically all the way down.

When you say ‘political philosophy,’ it refers to a fairly clearly defined disciplinary boundary of research and thinking. John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice or Karl Marx’s The German Ideology – definitely yes. Pierre Bourdieu’s critical studies of education and all the concepts of subjecthood he developed along with it – borderline.

Metaphysical arguments about the nature of freedom and determinism? Or how humans are different ontologically from other creatures? Not at all. Or so you’d think. Until you realize that those questions can cause political crises like environmental destruction.

Matter is determined in its motions, but humans are an exception from that order because of their free will. Metaphysicians argue about the existence of that free will and its underlying nature. But if you think nature has no agency but you do, then you don’t need to be all that respectful of nature except as far as your own benefit goes.

That’s a very political attitude in an era of ecological crisis – of global-level pollution, resource depletion, and climate change. Yet what conditions that attitude are deeper concepts that have nothing to do with politics.

So as I research and write Utopias, this realization is at the heart of how I’m building the argument and the research program. There’s a recent tradition in Western philosophy that thinks in basically the same way.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari were the most ambitious recent thinkers – with their works developing enormous repositories of complex, innovative concepts about the ecological nature of existence.

But there’s a strong tradition of political philosophers who think this way too – I could call them the contingent materialists. But that’s a new name for it. They look at society and human subjectivity as a complex assemblage of ecological, technological, cultural, geological, biological, psychological, and artistic processes and forces.

They come from a left-wing political tradition. Sometimes associated with revolutionary politics. Names like Antonio Negri, Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, Jacques Rancière. Their ancestors include names like Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci, and Karl Marx. Their ancient sources are as seemingly distant and dissonant as Niccolo Machiavelli and Benedict Spinoza.

But you can weave a tradition of thought and influence through that chain. And as I continue to work and slowly promote my writing whenever I can, I hope Utopias will contribute even just a little bit to that tradition.

Humanity Is Gone – Here Is Humanity! Composing, 08/09/2016

Etienne Balibar's political philosophy is dense with ideas, and more inventive than he seems to get credit for in some of the discussions that I’ve seen of his work online. Granted, online discussions about political philosophy either get incoherent and horrifying really fast, or else devolve into dogmatic idiocy (read the comment thread) even faster.

From a protest for migrants' rights at the fences of the Calais
border fence of France and Britain, December 2014. News
of a reinforced British border wall has inflamed a lot of
public opinion, both for and against. Looking at the racism
that's consumed Europe in the last few years, it looks as
though there's no hope that any non-white person can
live a peaceful life in Europe anymore.

Thats the tendency anyway.

I hope when I talk about it, I at least seem reasonably intelligent, because a lot of this blog is discussing research for a book that I’m not yet sure how I’m going to publish. Most philosophy books are published through academic presses, given very high prices, and marketed only to university libraries.

That was the case with Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, despite my ambition to craft more accessible prose. That book suffers a little from a tension of style – I wrote it as my doctoral dissertation, but published it to reach a mass market. So its argument is very sequential, but filled with borderline necessary secondary literature citations to have proven my ability to do intense research.

I'm taking a very different approach to Utopias. I described its style to my friend The Mac once as influenced by Walter Benjamin – drawing concepts from primary philosophical, historical, anthropological, and fictional sources to a complex examination of what it really means to change society.

That theme is where Etienne Balibar and I have much in common. The particular purpose of the essays in We, The People of Europe? is examining different aspects of the crossroads European politics and culture faced at the turn of the 21st century. It spoke to the problems and struggles of its time.

Nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and European identity. The problem of refugees, migrants, and the Europeans rejected from Europe like Russians and Serbs. How to understand and adapt to the legacies of the Cold War. The possibilities of a pan-European social movement. All these are the specific philosophical issues facing Europe at the time. 

Nigel Farage, the face of modern British nationalism,
whose campaign helped push British people into voting
for leaving the European Union to keep foreign people out.

As I've written elsewhere, it can be a very depressing experience reading this book. At the time, all the worst tendencies of Europe’s development as a Union – nationalism, the erosion of the social democratic contract, the exclusion of migrants – were all in a very nascent form.

It was possible, when Balibar was writing this book, to stop these destructive movements and build a new model of democracy that can overcome the institutional violence of the nation-state. That’s markedly less likely now.

But Balibar and I share a common conception of what politics can do, when it’s acting at its greatest intensity of power. Throughout these essays, Balibar talks about how Europe of the 21st century needs a social movement that can constitute a new European identity.

This isn't an identity in the sense of a nationhood for all of Europe. I mean a new way for European people to think about who and what they are – a social movement that can constitute a wholly new model of subjectivity. It would transform every aspect of European people’s personalities. Just as the bourgeois revolution did in that continent, as the ongoing democratic revolutions of the United States did for Americans. 

I wrote at the end of Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, long before I had even read Balibar, that the environmentalist movement could only succeed wholly when its society could develop a new way for people to conceive of who and what they were. 

When humanity figured out how to live in the world as an ecological subjectivity, we would think more systematically, better understand how our individual perspective, our ego, fit into the larger systems and processes that we were part of. And how this self-conception and knowledge framework would be just as instinctual and natural to everyday thinking as our ordinary egotism is today.

Lord Alfred Dubs, a child refugee to Britain from the
war-torn lands of continental Europe, has become one
of the few voices of conscience and justice, speaking of
the ethical necessity of providing sanctuary to those
fleeing war across Africa and the Middle East.

I looked at the global ecological crisis and saw that this radical regeneration of human subjectivity was required for the task. Balibar looked at the social conflicts of nascent nationalism and the resurgence of racism that, within two decades, would set Europe into turmoil again. Radical regeneration of human subjectivity is the solution here too.

There are no easy answers. What kind of solidarity could arise that could remain authentic from the UK to Finland to Poland to Germany to Greece to Portugal – and even to Russia? Given the current scale of the migration and refugee crisis, we need to bring Turkey, Libya, and Syria into that fold as well.

No community of solidarity exists across all these cultures and polities. The new subjectivity has to emerge from such a community. But just because the community doesn’t exist, that doesn’t mean it can’t exist. 

Communities are constituted through common life, and the most intense cultural departures are constituted through common struggles. Forging democratic civilization in Europe today means redefining community and sovereignty itself. 

Over the next few posts, I want to explore some of what will be needed for that new vision of humanity to emerge and overcome the horrors we’re inflicting on ourselves.

Dictating Freedom Epilogue: Thought In History, Composing, 01/09/2016

For all the links to the Dictating Freedom series, check these out.

1) Histories of Racism

2) The Apprentice Citizen

3) What So Special About These Shapes?

4) Taking Our Borders for Granted

5) The Image of the Nation

• • •

Call this a concluding note on philosophical method.

I’ll be honest. I actually always found it quite difficult understanding what precisely is going on in Rousseau’s conception of general will when I first read his political philosophy more than a decade ago. Professors have been similarly perplexed. We always read it by looking at the text alone, trying to parse its meaning with close reading.

Balibar is the first I’ve read to have worked out a clear explanation of what’s going on. He did so because he rooted it in the material concerns Rousseau and European intelligentsia were dealing with at the time – a political alternative to the absolute rule of monarchies and the people’s subjection to them, which would enable a freer society.

Knowledge has to be bent and fit into weird and congested
spaces if you want to fit it inside a classroom.

My own first philosophy book was conceived like this. By the time I was ready to write this kind of work, I knew I had to root my thinking in the concerns of my time. That paramount concern was the global destruction of so many of the ecologies that kept humanity alive. 

So Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity was an attempt to help develop the concepts that humanity would have to live by if we were to have a future. And Utopias continues that trend by being an explicitly political philosophical work about the relationship of our social and ethical ideals with our political institutions.

Yet so much of the academy shies away from that kind of engagement. Not completely, of course – it isn’t as if no one writes political theory or no one writes about social issues. But the norms drive academics into insularity instead of engagement.

Tenure and promotion committees look more kindly on publications in heavily paywalled, prestigious professional journals. Sometimes even more than books that are available for public purchase, and typically take far more work to research, develop, and produce.

As well, the style of academic writing turns off intelligent non-academics. It’s not news for me to say that overly-technical writing filled with discipline-specific jargon isn’t exactly casually accessible to readers. 

A magnifying glass and intense,
singular focus isn't always the best
way to see the world. No shit.

Over-saturation by citations doesn’t help matters either. It amounts to a kind of academic pissing contest – writing to demonstrate how much you’re read to the detriment of developing anything interesting or enlightening to say.

Specific to the discipline of philosophy, that problem of narrow focus on texts causes problems too. It’s a problem of relevance, for one. If you focus all your interpretive energy on a text itself, you’ll find yourself straining to show how any of this cognitive gymnastics has anything to do with the life of someone who isn’t directly invested in those texts themselves. 

But there’s another problem in that focus on texts alone, which I sketched at the start of this post. You can actually mystify yourself – you can get lost. 

A friend of mine once attended a conference of Immanuel Kant specialists and had an interesting, but not very productive, time. All the professors has written papers defending their particular technical interpretations against the critiques of all the others. 

Their interpretations had staked out intellectual territory for themselves, but offered nothing more enlightening than sessions of meticulous nitpicking. It’s apparently even worse in studies of ancient Greek philosophy. 

There, the cumulative weight of literally thousands of years of scholarship means that arguments over the particular meaning of a single sentence (or even a piece of a sentence, or even a single word!) will take years or decades to unfold.

The thoughts have lost their connection with the world where they take place. Unrestrained, they collapse in on themselves. 

Definitely not that Napoleon. That's Marlon Brando. It
wasn't a good movie.

When I was a young undergrad of about 18 or 19, a lot of my professors would tell us never to count real historical events in our analyses of philosophical works. They presumed that we’d reduce the complexity of the books and essays we were studying to simple reflections and commentaries on the events that surrounded them.

‘The Phenomenology of Spirit is all about Napoleon.’ Some of us would really think this way about what we were reading. I’d never see them in another philosophy class.

You can’t reduce a complex work of conceptual engineering to some historical event to which it responds. But you also can’t reduce a complex historical event to some simple, dogmatic definition. Philosophical writing is about pushing people to expand and develop their minds, so they can handle more and more complex ideas and methods of thought.

That thinking is powerful when it’s useful thinking – when it engages the problems of the world and history in all their real complexity.

The First “LEAPing Beyond” II: The First Answers, Advocate, 13/07/2016

Continued from last post . . . And you can have a look at the post leading up to the first workshop this weekend to see a little more context if you want. 

It was just a small group in this workshop, which is what I like because it means the conversation can plumb the depths of our topic while everyone has the opportunity to be involved. 

As well as Dynamic and Bauhaus, a couple of NDP activists joined us from up in North Etobicoke. And they were impressed enough that they invited me to do a workshop later on in their region. I just need to get a ride up there because transit from the north to south end of this borough is garbage.

Toronto's drivers are not known for taking friendly
suggestions well.

And transit was a major issue in our discussion. We didn’t even really discuss it that much, because we were all on the same page – improved transit infrastructure would cut down on emissions, pollution, and improve quality of life for many working-class people across the city.

The most enlightening conversation when it came to practical activism was our discussion about affordable, energy-efficient housing. This is an important part of LEAP Manifesto’s anti-poverty ideas, since building homes – apartments, townhouses, and detached houses – that are use energy more wisely also makes them cheaper. 

But the current behaviour and interests of many institutions and actors that govern and influence housing developments in Toronto mitigate this. It’s an effect of short-term greed, the usual reason for destructive human activities.

A property developer can make more money more quickly by building plots of enormously expensive mini-mansion housing as extensions of already-existing suburbs. Investment capital can’t reach the types of projects that we need to build to make our cities ecologically sustainable.

Mini-mansion suburban housing developments strain already-underfunded public transit systems. When public transit can’t reach a new, far-flung neighbourhood, it encourages the residents to drive single-occupant cars everywhere for work, chores, and leisure.

Our workshop walking through Sam Smith Park in
southern Etobicoke.

Urban development has to make a city’s population denser, so that we leave more wild space outside the city or threaded through the city. We have to make more income-accessible housing energy-efficient, while mixing those accessible homes with places pitched to wealthier owners. That way, we build smarter, more vibrant homes, communities, and cities for everyone.

New Lesson #1: Fair and open development of urban real estate, so that energy-efficiency contributes to overall affordability of homes in diverse neighbourhoods. Combining with physical accessibility through public transit and solar panels to contribute to the energy pool instead of only drawing from it, community spirit augments ecological wealth.

One of the biggest rhetorical weapons against any progressive proposal like energy efficiency, public transit, or affordable good-quality housing comes as a dichotomy. If you don’t let self-interested developers have their way, they’ll all walk away; mass poverty will be the only result.

In other words, we face a choice between development and decay. I call shenanigans. In the context of housing, all the reasons I’ve described above constitute the foundation of greater wealth than could ever line the pocket of a housing developer, no matter how many isolated miniature estates he might finance on the outskirts of Oakville and Waterdown.

And this choice occurs in many different contexts, all of which have a common theme running through them. If I can evoke the New Democratic Party’s friendly ghost,* it’s how someone tells you that it can’t be done.

Or maybe Smiling Jack.

* Let’s not call him Christ-like. There was no sacrifice here, only the most cynical gesture of idealism and inspiration. Jack is no redeemer. More like a guardian spirit. Herne the Hunter. Jack-i-the-green.

Affordable energy-efficient housing in financially and culturally diverse communities? Either do exactly what the greediest developer wants or collapse into inescapable poverty. You can either protect the environment or you can grow the economy. Choose one or the other. How often did we hear this during the Harper years?

Even in the rebuilding year of the NDP, we keep hearing the same idea, even from our own quarters. Do we want to hold fast to our principles, or do we want the power of state control? 

All of these are false disjuncts. Making you think there’s a stark choice of one or another, when you can have both if you do things right. 

New Lesson #2: Well, not quite false. But the choice isn't stark, and it isn’t absolute. If you’ll let me riff on Deleuze a little bit, it’s about creating a disjunctive synthesis. Developing a practical logic that brings two sides of an either/or together, and their interaction is more productive than their existence alone ever would have been.

You can hold even the greediest developer’s feet to the fire until they finance a mixed community that continues to create capital and community wealth, like Bernie Sanders did as mayor of Burlington Vermont. You can build an ecologically sustainable and creative economy, as the vision of the LEAP Manifesto sets out.

You can hold on to your principles and still gain power when the people come to share your principles. This is the real victory of any of us who still hold optimistic visions for the future of humanity.

And We Will Transform Our Values – Ourselves Alongside, Composing, 08/07/2016

This weekend, I’m holding the first of what I aim to be several workshops on ecological policy and philosophy. It’s a part of my work with the New Democratic Party in Toronto, the first initiative entirely of my own design.

This is a rebuilding year for the NDP,* and that includes some fundamental discussions about where we’ll go as a political party. But in a broader sense, I think it’s also about what role the NDP will play in the wider progressive social movement to build a society free of racism and oppression of all kinds. 

* Which I hope turns out more like the Blue Jays and less like the Leafs.

That's bigger than any one political party, and a state institution like a political party can only be a powerful ally of such a movement. A means for that movement of universal liberation to achieve its goals of prosperity and freedom. I think the political party in Canada most amenable to that path is the New Democrats. 

One reason for that is how we treated the LEAP Manifesto. Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis’ program is a vague set of imperatives specifically focussed on the environmental, social, and economic impacts of climate change and how to fight it through radical emissions reduction and a rapid changeover to a renewable energy economy.

Toronto is a beautiful blend of green spaces and thick
urbanity. We have a lot of work to do yet if we want to
build a genuinely ecologically thriving city.

My workshops go beyond that because ecological issues in Canada encompass much more than emissions and climate shifts. And the real weight of our global ecological crisis require thinking about more than simply understanding issues and solving problems.

We need a significant transformation of how we think of ourselves, and our place in the world. Humanity has to become ecological in our self-conception, at every aspect of how we understand our lives. 

At a local level in Toronto, that means understanding how our actions constitute our environment, and how our environment structures the possibilities for our actions. Toronto is inescapably urban, though we do a much better job of including non-human spaces than many other comparable cities around the world.

But there are particular issues that Torontonians need to confront if we’re to work through how a Torontonian can conceive of herself as an ecological creature. I want to talk with people about their ideas of how to make urban infrastructure and architecture more green, how to incorporate the buildings, roads, and transit links of a city with the complex ecosystems of our rivers, lakes, and the parks that grow around them.

We have to figure out how we can fund this urban transformation into ecological urbanity. Or rather, how that transformation can fund itself. Because an economically viable program for anything has to generate wealth – no matter what form that wealth may take. 

The most conceptually difficult (and promising) idea in the LEAP Manifesto that I want to work through in these workshops is Klein’s concept of energy democracy. She calls this common ownership of energy resources and infrastructure. 

Now, this is different than public ownership, which is just another word for state ownership. State ownership of energy resources is a government institution that holds and operates our energy infrastructure in trust for the people. But it’s ultimately not accountable to the people. It serves the government, which betrays the people often enough that it can’t be trusted univocally.

Common ownership is the actual ownership of energy resources and infrastructure by the people who use it. How to coordinate that kind of radical energy democracy – the return of the commons in some of the most investment-heavy projects in human history – is one of the major problems that we face.

Antonio Negri, in Commonwealth, developed a detailed theory of this commons, but philosophy as usual falls a little short in figuring out how it would work in practice. Understanding that common ownership, its implications, and its mechanics will take a lot of work. A lot of discussion, probing and exploring all these ideas and their applications. Piece by abstract, difficult piece.

I love a challenge.

• • •

The first LEAPing Beyond workshop will take place this Saturday 9 July, from 12.30 to 2.30 at Colonel Sam Smith Park, by the corner of Kipling and Lakeshore in southeast Etobicoke.

A Land of Multiplicities, Jamming, 30/06/2016

I’m sorry there was no update yesterday, but I was ludicrously sick. Having bludgeoned this cold mostly out of me within a day, however, I’ve gotten back to some work.

My most urgent business is preparing for my workshop that I’m giving for the New Democratic Party next Saturday. The time will be 12.30 in the afternoon, and the place will be under the big tree just a few steps away from the corner of Kipling and Lakeshore, in Colonel Sam Smith park.

It's sort of a coincidence, but there can be quite a
significance for our environmental conscience and
awareness that our national symbol is a tree leaf.

I want to host all of these workshops in parks.

Because I’ve taken a lead in hosting discussions of the LEAP Manifesto. Being Vice-President of my district association, I have a little cachet to do this sort of thing. It’s one way that I can have a direct voice in the environmentalist movement of Canada. 

The LEAPing Beyond* workshops are putting into practice the theory of Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. My ultimate goal is to lead a conversation across several different electoral districts in Toronto, where participants explore together Toronto’s key ecological networks and relationships.

* Is the title a little too much? I feel like it could be a bit much.

As I assembled my notes for the discussion this afternoon, I thought about what workshops like these would produce all across the country. If you described the most important ecological issues of any group of random electoral districts, it would sound as though they were totally different nations.

Canada is large enough that it has an incredible range of diversity – geographical, ecological, and cultural. That wonderful diversity and size** genuinely makes me proud to be a Canadian. As a Canadian citizen, I have a responsibility to do what I can to protect all these physical and cultural ecologies, and help them all thrive.

** I’m about to sound corny as all hell.

Within a single country – with just as contingent a history and creation as any other – we have such a remarkable multiplicity. Maritime, mountains, tundra, the rocky shield, fertile farmland, dense forests, and sublime prairie. 

The most intense multiplicity of the country is cultural, though. There’s so much wealth and beauty in the interaction of literally hundreds of cultures from around the world in our major cities. Unlike in a lot of other multicultural cities, neighbourhoods are less segregated by ethnicity, so we all interact more often than in lands with more stark separations between cultures and ethnicities.

Canadian identity over the last few decades has drifted
away from a ground in ethnic heritage. Right now, what
makes our identity is indeterminate, mostly to do with a
general ethical attitude. It means the time to begin
building a literally new society is now.

I remember a friend of mine once reflecting that Canada wasn’t even really a country, because it didn’t have a single, unified vision of its own nationhood. There was no pure Canadian race.***

*** Before you ask me about indigenous people, how about I remind you that there are more than 100 distinct nations of people indigenous to Canada. And when we heal the damage we've done to our indigenous people in the name of nationalism and racism, we'll have brought real utopia to the country.

But that’s no reason not to call Canada a real country. Maybe by 19th or 20th century concepts of what a country should be. But we know the kind of violence nationalism and visions of racial purity get you.

That comes down to another reason I’m proud to be Canadian. Because we’re a single country that contains such vast multiplicity, and we don’t lie to ourselves about that anymore, we have the remarkable opportunity to build a new conception of country that goes beyond nationalism.

In that sense, Canada can literally become a beacon for a new concept of country. We can be a leader in overcoming the exclusionary nationalism / racism that’s torn our species apart for centuries. 

And we’re still early enough in the process that we’re still figuring out what that new concept will be. A process I’m glad to join, and push in a direction of progress, prosperity, and peace.

Happy Canada Day, everyone.

Vectors of Oppression – Freed in a Wave, Research Time, 06/06/2016

So what does probably the most pretentious title for a post in the entire nearly-three-year history of this blog mean? Other than my getting more pretentious tonight. After a long day at the day-job, I feel like I’ve earned it. And frankly I still feel enough energy as I write to pound this out pretty quickly. 

The last panel I attended at the Canadian Philosophical Association in Calgary was titled “Cultural Racism,” and my favourite paper there was the first one. Alia Al-Saji presented a paper on the process of racialization – the social forces at all scales of oppression and marginalization that constitute people as a race.

I've probably learned most about the everyday experience
of oppression from activists' experiences. Definitely not my
own. And the one that's had the most effect on me has
been Black Lives Matter. Following the feeds of people
like Johnetta Elzie can teach more about real liberation
than a hundred philosophical books. The philosophy can
still be a good hand, though.

I was happy to meet Al-Saji, since she was one of the people whose work I had used in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. In particular, I used some of her work on Maurice Merleau-Ponty in my sections on the nature of perception. And while the paper itself was very insightful, I told her that it had one nagging problem.

Compared to how a lot of other academics were treating the nature of race, it was actually a very forward-thinking argument that races are entirely socially manufactured, with no essential underlying physical substrate. That the marginalization of communities economically and socially goes hand in hand with stigmatizing them with ugly, cruel stereotypes. 

Marginalization and stigmatization equals racialization. If I can put an absurdly and blatantly simple gloss on the concept. 

And I move in a social media world where a ton of people already understand this concept intimately and work against it in their activism and communication. The real world seems to have surpassed the debates of the community of academics. 

Now, I’m not exactly surprised. But I’m saddened that a profession that – on the whole – thinks itself literal thought leaders* is now falling being the times. I used to think a position here could position me in the leading edge of progressive ideas. I no longer think so.

* As in, leaders in thought itself.

Antonio Negri talks about the nature of racialization, specifically intersectionality. It’s a matter of liberation. Intersectionality is, in most discussions, about how different oppression vectors can co-exist in a single person. Like the black lesbian in the wheelchair.

But intersectionality is also – and most importantly – about how all those oppressions are ultimately the same process. Gender oppression, for example, is no different than racial or religious oppression in the social process that actually constitutes it. Successful activism has to accept this.

Now, the reason Black Lives Matter has moved me so
much is that I was probably most ignorant about the
different vectors of racial oppression that black people
in America experience. I used to be one of those people
who complained that protestors never accomplished
anything because they were all so violent, believing
everything I heard in media. Paying attention to
DeRay McKesson, for example, taught me so much
about where all those vectors were. Before online
media let me share their experience, I couldn't have
had any of those brutally educational experiences.

Thankfully, this is another way that real-life activists have progressed beyond the so-called thought leaders of the university system. So many in online communities understand their own struggles as intersecting. That you can’t win against one vector of marginalization without progress against all of them.

Negri notes the example of the American union movement. It was focussed on class marginalization and workers’ rights. Liberation for people alienated because of their wealth and social castes. And it succeeded for a while.

One of the places where the union movement in America foundered was as the Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation movement kicked into gear. Worker activists could never – overall – get behind movements against racism. 

In many cases, too many workers remained hostile to black liberation and entry into the same social circles as whites. The same goes for their attitudes to women. The only thing close to a rational concern – other than falling back into unthinking prejudice (“I won’t work with n___rs!” “We don’t do women’s work!”) – is fear that increased competition will drive down their wages and make jobs more scarce.

Those attitudes completely ignore the macro-scale reasons for liberation. The more people are wealthy and able to produce wealth, the wealthier society will become. More people will spend money and produce things, relationships, and ideas that can grow wealth.

I see the same danger for the union movement and contemporary environmentalist movement. If union leaders and activists stick only to short term thinking and ignore the intersection of economic and environmental violence, they’ll see industrial shifts as risks to their jobs. Too many already think this way.

What makes that a problem is that all oppressions – gender, race, class, religion, ability, culture, sexuality – are the expressions of the same process. Racialization – to marginalize and stigmatize the marginal. So all liberation has to happen at once.