Why Does Anyone Do Anything For Anybody? Research Time, 31/07/2018

Here’s the thing about revolutionizing your entire culture’s values. It’s much easy to think about than to achieve. That gap is even more frustrating because so many of those values already exist in society – it’s just that they don’t predominate.

You see, this appears to be a pretty common theme in all my philosophical writing. At least the big projects. Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity started with problems of environmental ethics, moral philosophy, and ontology. It ended with an imperative to develop better methods of changing people’s moralities and self-conceptions.

Knockoffs do have some merits on their own terms.

Utopias is a sequel of sorts, in that it revolves around the methods, tendencies, and directions for revolutions in moralities and self-conceptions throughout a culture. And I think I’m just about ready to start diving into the manuscript now that I know how that book is going to end.

Once you’ve worked out the mechanics of how to revolutionize moralities and ethics, you have to ask what your endpoint is. For me, that endpoint is an anarchist-flavoured communitarianism.

It makes Raphael Sassower something of a fellow traveller, since he's also exploring the potentials of communitarian political economy and morality. His work will probably be quite influential in how I come to think about how communitarian values work in a civilization like ours – industrial, high-technological, in a state of global ecological reorientation (if not outright collapse).

Here's one example of how communitarian values end up creating quite a lot of prosperity. Sassower discusses the knockoff economy, particularly China’s dominance of trade in knockoff goods. He argues that the knockoff business sector offers an empirical rebuke to one of the unquestioned presumptions justifying intellectual property rights.

Not all forms of intellectual property need be respected to encourage innovation. Now, I’m not necessarily talking about art – I’m a writer and I like to be paid for my work. At the same time, I don’t exactly need every payday to be $5-million. It wouldn’t even be all that nice – it’d be too much.

Not this Gucci, no. Although he is my favourite Gucci.

But I’m talking about product designs – fashion products like clothing and handbags, personal appliances like dvd players and watches. Knockoffs don’t detract from the sales of the top label products because of the social status of actually having the proper product.* Knockoff economy businesses, meanwhile, are creating fashionable goods and appliances that working class people can afford.

* It’s a doubly elite status. Not only do you have the status of owning the proper product, but in a knockoff-dominated economy, the only ones who can tell on sight that you have the genuine article are connoisseurs of the product. Cash and hipster cred.

Preventing knockoffs actually harms the prestige of the brand, especially in the fashion retail sector, where the prevalence of knockoffs is a sign of the brand’s prestige. In all these ways, the knockoff and elite markets support each other.

This is a context where a supposedly universal principle – that innovation can only occur when patents and intellectual property amount to a practical monopoly. At least temporarily, to incentivize them with exclusive profit from that property.

Knockoff symbiosis shows how the prestige economy can thrive and fuel popular trends in fashion. It also shows that thirst for the maximum profits is not the only driver of economic activity. A demonstration for communitarian values.

Teaching Prosperity in the Underground, Composing, 29/07/2018

So it’s been almost a week since the last post. I didn’t mean to do this on purpose – it’s just been a busy week. Thankfully, it’s mostly been busy with some promising business opportunities starting to come together.

And sometimes, just some incredibly long days. So long that I’d run out of energy before getting down to write. At least to write this, as I’ve mostly been working on other things that I actually get paid for. The blog is meta – a writing project about my writing projects – meta takes a back seat to actual.

I'm one person, not a mechanical writing machine. I'm powered by
food, coffee, and serotonin.

I’ve started work on a small media project that will involve interviews, and I’m starting to line those up for later in August. More updates to come.

But there are some other interesting developments in my teaching job as well. As you might remember, I published my review of Raphael Sassower’s book The Quest for Prosperity last week. I read it months ago, and only got around to writing it all now.

But that means I’ve had a few months to stew over its arguments and ideas. I think the book does come up short in some areas. But its critical chapters on the political economy of the 21st century global economy are wonderfully insightful.

There's a lot going on in those early chapters of The Quest for Prosperity that I couldn’t fit in all their detail into the main review. I only had so much space and so much time to write the thing. But in working over the ideas, I've begun incorporating them into my teaching work.

To give you an update, I’m the head of a program in Business Administration at a small private college. We’re using a standard set of textbooks, but I’m working on lecture content that itself goes beyond just those lines.

For example, I’m not about to present uncritically a map from Freedom House ranking the economic freedom of different countries around the world. I’m not going full communism in there. I’m just asking students questions about what economic freedom means to them, whether they ultimately agree with Freedom House’s terms, and how to articulate their differences.

The marketplace should be a friendly place.

Actually criticizing some aspects of business school orthodoxy as part of the program is turning into a pretty effective value proposition for the place. Unfortunately for the rest of North American civilization, this is how we stand out from the crowd.

One idea of Sassower’s that I’ve incorporated into my program’s business lectures is how he distinguishes between markets and capitalism. Markets are a matter of what Adam Smith called “truck and barter,” small exchanges among community members that add up to mutual benefit.

Capitalism as an ethical attitude is a spirit of competition, where you can all too easily see another person’s benefit as a potential loss for you. Worse yet, you expect others to see your benefits the same way you see theirs. So you become paranoid, aggressive, and suspicious.

Solidarity is broken. Friendship is impossible.

Manuel DeLanda covered the differences of markets and capitalism in a book published more than 20 years ago. But he had an ontological focus on the macroeconomics of the massive capital flows that industrialization and colonialism powered.

Sassower’s emphasis on political economy foregrounds moral principles and ethical attitudes, so we can see the transformation of a society’s values along with their economic system. Good is no longer giving benefits to your community, but leading your community as a function of your wealth. You don’t want to be part of a community – you want to own it.

Demonstrating Any Alternative At All, Composing, 19/07/2018

Another quick meditation. I polished off about half of my official review of The Quest for Prosperity over the last couple of days (as well as the draft of a policy paper I’m writing for the think tank). That’s why I didn’t have time to write a blog entry for Wednesday.

One of the leftover ideas from Raphael Sassower’s dense yet accessible book regards the different ways we try to create new forms of life. Now, this is a major concept in my own political philosophy – the utopian drive to build a new society.

The Occupation left Wall Street, but it never failed. It's still
succeeding, because Occupy was the uprising that generated the
ethical energy of anti-oligarchical politics in the 2010s.
Art by Eric Drooker

I’ve mostly been concentrating my historical eye on those creative revolutionary processes that have had real success. Maybe they’ve overthrown a government or two, like the Arab Spring or the Maidan protests. Maybe they’ve inspired an entire generation – on average – to reorient their deepest ethical and moral beliefs about what kind of political economy we want in our society.

Sassower, in a few remarks late in chapter one, makes me wonder what I can learn from the unsuccessful cases.

We’ve got to be careful about how we understand success and failure here, though. Remember that success is more complicated than having a succinct list of demands that are fulfilled. That was the complaint I often remember levied at Occupy – how to make change without specific demands.

But we’re talking about a social movement – not an election campaign or a collective bargaining session. So a utopian uprising’s focus must be general as it generates. The uprising is the social movement in embryo – the flurry of energy that focusses people’s thought and minds, and dedicates their lives, to the hard work of actually changing society.

The hard work of transitioning Tunisia to democracy, or overthrowing Bashar Assad. The hard work of restoring social democratic principles to governance in a globalized civilization and economy.

Actual material success in a specific task isn’t necessary to whether a particular utopian impulse is a success. It’s also difficult to tell when such a project is a material success. The Tunisian democratic government, for example, is still only a few years old and still embattled. Is a democratic Tunisia that lasts only a few more years a success?

Let me put this to you, to demonstrate that asking about persistence of an institution isn’t the right question here. Would you consider the Abbasid Caliphate a failure as a pluralistic society because it lasted only 800 years?

The energy of the uprising is not the same as the institutions people create with that energy. What remains when you bracket the material achievements of a social movement is the energy of the movement itself.

From one of the few long-term successful hippie commune farms.
The Stephen Gaskin Farm began as a community of radical utopian
Americans, who moved to Tennessee to drop out of industrialized
society. It still exists today as a scientific and political research
centre and charity. Its energy, creativity, and practical intelligence
continues to renew itself for more than four decades now.

If the energy of the movement, the revolutionary dedication and drive in a society – or at least a fairly significant number of people in it – is what matters, then we know what success and failure of a social movement is.

A social movement succeeds when the energy of its uprising is sustaining and renewing itself – when people join and contribute to its creative processes, as different contexts to do so appear. There is no point when a social movement has succeeded – that would imply that the movement is finished, and so no longer sustaining itself.

So the death of a social movement is its stoppage. Once people’s creative drive dies, the institutions that movement built immediately ossify and become authoritarian. Their only justification is their existence, which is no justification at all.

Now we have a conception of how to know the success or failure of a social movement on any scale. Success is sustaining its vibrance. Failure is dissipation.

I worked this out Wednesday night as I wrote this post, thinking about Sassower’s example of a failed, small-scale social movement – an experimental agrarian community. These are the farming communes to which frustrated Vancouver office workers retreat when the alienation of their corporate lives becomes too much for them.

That they go is a demonstration of their creative drive to develop a new way of life – a living demonstration that their old lives were obsolete. Not many get too far, though.

The utopian energy of their small group’s social uprising against the constraints and blandness of corporate life isn’t strong enough to overcome even their first challenge. When everyone arrives at the experimental farming commune and they realize that none of them know how to grow food.

“He Was the God of Abundance,” Research Time, 16/07/2018

Here’s a really interesting idea about how the concept of prosperity has developed in Western thinking. It’s an idea that I really wanted to work into my review of The Quest For Prosperity,* but that couldn’t quite fit the general direction.

* Forthcoming in about a couple of weeks.

A prominent idea in one concept of prosperity that you can perceive in Western culture over the last few centuries is to define prosperity as abundance.

There's a complex relation of our visions of abundance with our anxieties and fears. To live in abundance is to never want again – more than that, it’s the security of never having to worry that you’ll want again. Not only do you live in a situation where you’ll always have comfort, but you know that this comfort will continue – that it won’t end.

Pictured: A succinct expression of ethical, psychological, and cultural
economic anxiety.

This is the dream of abundance. But it was popularly believed, and as a popular image still exists in our culture.** The image functions as a response to individual anxiety, showing that anxiety is a central component of the concept.

** Probably also in a bunch of other cultures as well. The title is a way-too-layered joke about how abundance imagery operates in many non-Western contexts. Sassower sticks with the Western context, because that’s the tradition he knows best.

The concept of prosperity as abundance expresses anxiety – depending on the context where we analyze how the concept plays out in thought, it’s an individual anxiety, or a cultural anxiety. Anxiety is your motivation to achieve prosperity, and abundance is the dream of an end to the torture of daily life.

The anxiety of poverty – whether you live it or have to avoid it – fuels the intensity of how a person or a public discourse conceives of prosperity’s abundance.

This image of abundance has painted the goals of socialist movements from the 19th century to today. Raphael Sassower draws from the recurring image to understand this driving concept of abundance – prosperity as the achievement of comfort. As a political movement, socialism aims for the basic dignity of comfort for all, that no one need live in poverty, penury, misery.

It’s admirable. But I can’t roll with this concept in my own approaches to progressive activism anymore. Basically, it’s because the concept turns out to be more destructive when it animates our current political priorities. When you make universal prosperity your political goal, and you understand prosperity as abundance, then you presume that your world can be made to create that abundance.

Is this really all that matters to you? The temptations of consumerism are
pretty intense, but the question remains of whether this is even
something you can achieve without facilitating a disaster.

Karl Marx himself thought this way about the ultimate goal of socialism. As he conceived the material achievement of communism, it was a world where technological industry would produce prosperity and comfort for everyone. But we have to move beyond the thought of the 19th century.

Environmentalist political movements being as mainstream and powerful as they are, we largely have. If we think of prosperity as everlasting abundance for all people, then we rapidly run up against the carrying capacity of the Earth.

I don’t mean this in some cheap Malthusian sense – no simple ratio of resources to population to consumption intensity. I mean it in the larger sense that the exploitation of material resources for economic prosperity will destroy the means of physical comfort. We may relieve our monetary anxieties, but our health and quality of life anxieties will be worse.

If the ecological side effects of the technology to create abundance makes life a torture, that’s no prosperity. Just look at the water quality in cities that prosper economically from the high-paying secure jobs of oil or metal extraction, or steel foundries and oil refineries.

This continues to be a conflict in our society. Obviously from the extremist extraction politics of state leaders like Hugo Chavez, Stephen Harper, and Vladimir Putin. These people who’d build an entire economy around spreading the wealth of oil money inevitably and quickly come into conflict with environmentalists.

But the most telling – and depressing – such conflict among priorities of extraction and ecology is among the progressive set. Take the Canadian case.

Right now, the provincial leadership and membership of the New Democratic Party in Alberta and Saskatchewan support prosperity-by-extraction with similar zeal as Chavez. In each case, they’ve come into conflict with Indigenous activists and their settler environmentalist allies, who refuse to accept the bargain of the land’s utter destruction for the economic abundance of consumerist values.

Two Utopian Visions of a 1600 Year Civilization in One Page, Research Time, 13/07/2018

One of the reasons I wanted to review Raphael Sassower’s new book formally* was that it’s relevant to my own major book of political philosophy – the messianically in-progress Utopias.

Few images of Jesus better communicate the essential idea of the
Incarnation better than Buddy Christ – He really is one of us.

* Which these blog posts are most definitely not. I’ve already outlined the review formally speaking, and know which points I’ll be covering. No specific critiques or interpretations that I’ll be throwing down in the review at the end of this month will be included in these blogs. It’s a compliment to Raphael that I consider his book complex enough to sustain more than one take. As all books should if they’re worth the paper or the hard drive space.

Concepts of prosperity all tend to focus on building a more perfect society. This refers at least to concepts in the Western tradition, in which I grew up and which until recently dominated the popular imaginary of most of Earth. To prosper is a joyful wealth, joy in wealth. Prosperity is a wealth about which you need no longer worry, a secure wealth.

How individualistically you read those last couple of sentences tells me a lot about your ethics and personality. The progressive political movements of contemporary Westerners share a common ground in their economic philosophy – we no longer believe that the prosperity of individuals in a community is the same as the community’s prosperity.

We ask how many individuals are prospering. We measure highest achievements, averages, create ranks, tax brackets. But if those prosperous individuals become wealthy from dynamics that keep others poor and suffering – whether intentional, systemic, or both – you don’t have a prosperous community.

Never mistake the prosperous man for a sign of a prosperous
community.

In a single page from his introduction, Sassower lays out the religious and ontological framework that – broadly speaking** – Christian civilization has centred in thinking. Put very broadly, the Christian engagement with time is a sublime and terrifying teleology.

** This is based on a note from page 6. Literally the first chapter of The Quest for Prosperity. We’re still talking in broad strokes before more detailed examinations of the concepts. It always annoys me to meet academics who’d quibble over the details of clearly broad ideas to accuse an author of sloppiness. People with enormous institutional authority acting as if their research was to poke needless holes in the work of their colleagues. It’s called contributing to the current debates.

The Christian Bible is organized as the history of existence, and so conceives of the passage of time itself in human, Biblical terms. Christianity’s foundational and focal idea is the event of the Incarnation – when God literally becomes a creature, and that creature is human. Given that, you conceive all of existence as being for the sake of humanity.

Humanity’s existence and development is the purpose of the universe. How is that purpose framed? By utopias.

When the first skyscrapers of the United States
were built, popular culture conceived them as a
great achievement of human (and Western)
culture – the towers of our living paradise. Now
they're a sign of gentrification, condo crises, the
marginalization of poor people to distant suburbs,
the longest commutes, stress, misery.

Time begins with Eden – the pure presence of God with humanity on Earth. Time ends with Heaven – Earth’s corruption is cleansed and God now lives with humanity on Earth as one of us in this newly pure world. God the Creator is now God the Neighbour.

Jesus built my hot rod. Literally.

It’s not only time that happens in the middle of those two utopias – perfect existence at the beginning and perfected existence at the end. A Christian framework of thinking understands that middle temporality as purposeful suffering. We suffer now so that we can live in the utopia of Heaven.

Time becomes a process toward perfection, and the suffering of the present is an investment in achieving that perfection. You can secularize*** Christian utopian time, ending up with a teleology of technological progress. Human scientific, technological, industrial, and capitalist endeavour end with achieving paradise on Earth.

*** That’s how I want to understand secularity when I’m examining the religious aspects of Utopia’s argument. I may not engage with this too much, but it’ll be in the background. Faith: dogmatic religious belief. Atheism: pushing the logic of materialism to its limit (like Spinoza, or some readings of Kabbalah). Agnostic: Fucked if I know. Secular: retaining the concepts, the frameworks for understanding, of faith, but dropping reference to the dogma.

Heaven.

Becoming Is the Alchemical Ontology, Jamming, 05/07/2018

The other day, I was revisiting a short book by my colleague Elizabeth Sandifer. Recursive Occlusion is a little book about the mysticism of Kabbalah and Tarot, in a framework of exploring the Doctor Who story Logopolis.

Her work has always been a bit strange, which is one of the reasons I like her work.

Anyway, it reminded me of one of the original thematic images of her ongoing epic work of commentary, TARDIS Eruditorum – the solution to alchemy as material social progress.

The vision of progress we’re talking about here is fundamentally rooted in freedom – overcoming the bullying authoritarian attitude of social, political, and moral conservatism. Fundamentally, it’s the freedom to transform – to live differently than others, experiment with different kinds of relationships and identities. A constructively queer identity – opposed to nothing but the refusal to accept difference.

Against the Day is a beautiful book. It
depicts, a tad fancifully, a time in human
history that amounted to a technological
and ethical crossroads. The years between
the 1889 World's Fair and the outbreak of
the First World War was a moment where,
but for a few contingencies, we could
have ended up living in a very different
world. Would it have been better? I
have no idea, and I don't think Pynchon
does either. But given where we've
ended up, any possibility is worth
trying. Or at least imagining.

To jump from this to ontological thinking seems utterly barmy, but it can be done. Jussi Parikka gives it a very good shot when he weaves his concepts for a geological philosophy using, among other tools, artistic criticism and commentary.

Alchemical thinking is an attitude of awe, fascination, and love for the powers of substances to transform into one another.

Parikka illustrates this with images from Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, which is one of my favourite novels. He chooses images that show a transition in society that’s ethical at its core, but also political, moral, economic, and ecological. It’s the transformation of alchemy as our attitude to the world, into chemistry.

He interprets these images to mourn how contemporary attitudes that embrace industrial technology refuse the need for magic. The transformation of one substance into another now requires no mysticism, no ethical consideration at all. You routinize it, regularize it, and industrialize it.

The shorthand that’s often used for this is the transition to full capitalism. But that’s not quite accurate. Parikka describes a transition that I think has already changed by now.

Alchemy was a research discipline that included mysticism and ontological philosophy alongside its empirical studies of how to transform substances. Chemistry – and the capitalist economics that fuelled the institutions of industrial chemistry – stripped the divine and philosophical from its research discipline, replacing it with a techno-industrial framework of understanding and practice.

Parikka gives us a quick description that offers a shade of Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt. As work became labour, alchemy became chemistry, and a practice of mysticism becomes an assembly line.

Yet care wasn’t entirely stripped from chemistry. You could argue that ethics was transformed, but that the ethical still emerged from the practice. We were offered “Better living through chemistry,” after all. The goal of industrial chemistry was to build a better life for people, to build some kind of material social progress.

There are different capitalist economics in place now. Ask the folks who used to work at Dupont Labs, until a few years ago. We might need other concepts.

How to Turn an Image Into a Concept I: Living Earth, Composing, 28/06/2018

Jussi Parikka's book The Geology of Media is one of several books that have come out in the last decade exploring aspects of our global ecological crisis with an old image. The living Earth.

I’ve come across different aspects of this in Tim Morton’s work, as well as others in his broadly-related crew of thinkers – Ray Brassier, Graham Harman, Ian Bogost, a few others falling under the name speculative realists.* A variety of creative – and in Bogost’s case, delightfully bizarre – fundamental pessimists about the future of humanity.

* They all went to the same conference in 2007 that had “speculative realism” in the title, and appeared in an essay collection with that phrase in the title.

I hope the insane billionaires of the world will be happy to invest the
massive fortunes they've squired away in building inter-planetary
mining infrastructure by the end of the century. Because that's when
we're going to run out of all the metals that make computers work.

I mean, the most thoroughly absurd stance in ecological philosophy in the 21st century is optimism. So the image of a brutalized, raging, vengeful Earth – whether radically alien or hauntingly personal – is a constant.

But there are other, more impish, perspectives as well. I remember reading Jane Bennett’s book Vibrant Matter during research for my last big book. She built a curious outline of an ontology she called vital materialism – major components were a return to vitalist biological theories and a quirky extrapolation of metallurgy.

Another book that delivered on almost all its potential, but petered out a little. Still excellent, if not quite great – fascinating ideas that weren’t tied together quite as profoundly as they could have been.

Parikka himself offers another set of sources for this image of the living Earth – an important one for him is the history of geology. Geology is, in the simplest terms, the historical investigation of a planet’s own development and the essential nature of a planet, along with the techniques for doing all that well.

It’s a science that could work on any planet made mostly of rock, but Earth is where we’ve done the most studies so far. Works just as well for other planets, moons, and asteroids – but for now such studies are prohibitively expensive, and getting there is a bit of a commute.

Throughout his book, Parikka turns to media theory and art for the
tools to turn the image of the living Earth into a philosophical
concept you can act on (and through). There are many hitches with
this decision, but one of them is that there have been so many
such images that focussing on a single one requires so much
justification that you spend all your time on it and not the analysis.

A lot of the first people to study geology shared a general, kind of vague image that served as their very rough framework for understanding how Earth worked as a system. Scratch that – it was a framework to understand THAT Earth worked as a system. This was the living Earth – that the generation and dynamic fluxes of Earth’s processes were its life processes.

Not as an organism like us. No one seriously thought they’d find igneous analogous to kidneys or lungs. If you describe these early geologists that way, you’re just doing it to dismiss their ideas from relevance by making their interpretive frameworks sound too plainly ridiculous.

Here’s how they thought, in brief. Having dynamic internal processes that generate themselves – one powers the other, the other powers the first – is a necessary and sufficient condition for being alive. For being a life.

It didn’t imply anything ontologically or physically – it didn’t mean necessarily that a planet would have a geological circulation like an animal’s cardiovascular system. The implication was ethical – that the Earth deserved the respect that you’d accord any living thing.

For example, take my personal favourite utterly barmy image of the
living Earth in popular culture – Mogo! The Green Lantern that's a
sentient planet! Mogo is pretty much the only thing I like about
Green Lantern proper, mainly because of its core premise that our
hero is a narc.

That’s different from the other common idea about respecting the Earth – philosophers use words like alienation and sublimity. Because the Earth is so much more powerful than a person – storms, floods, earthquakes, volcanos, massive mountain chains, vast oceans, etc – we respect it because it dwarfs us. We respect Earth because we’re so insignificant compared to it and casually destroyable in the face of it.

A geologically-inspired philosophy for our current crisis can’t inspire respect for the Earth through fear. Our processes – the grotesque pollution of mining and e-waste, the overflowing dumps of nuclear waste – are enough to strike fear into the Earth. We no longer need to fear the Earth – we need to fear ourselves.

That begins from understanding Earth as something which we harm. Not something we wreck, the way an angry toddler wrecks a plastic toy or a train set. You wreck something, and all that matters is the money to replace it and the mess you made. Earth is something we harm, the way a psychotic toddler yanks a kitten’s tail or pulls her ears to hear it scream.

Harm is to inflict suffering. And we need to learn how to understand the Earth as something we can inflict suffering on. Not suffering like an animal – any more than the Earth has blood and breath. No – There is suffering. Earth suffers.

Nostalgia Feeding Fascist Dreams of Cackling Joy, Research Time, 21/06/2018

We’re in a fascist moment right now. I don’t have to tell you this. Not only is the United States government locking away families seeking asylum from war and violence, but the guards enjoy their jobs, there are already allegations of abuse in the children and infants’ detention camps, and there’s a pretty big minority who doesn’t care or believe any of this is going on.

Maybe they really do think that everyone ICE is arresting and throwing into prison camps are all thousands of MS-13 gang members who constantly stream into the country.

Very little about the Trump family is subtle. The Republican Party
apparatchiks like Stephen Miller and Kirstjen Nielsen may prefer to be
more slippery, cagey about what they're actually doing. They won't
say what they're doing. The Trump family is different. They tell you
what you say, but it's so ridiculous that you know it's a stupid excuse.

Maybe that’s just what they tell people who they suspect would be a little disturbed by their real thoughts. Maybe they’re genuinely happy that thousands of Central American Hispanic and Indigenous people are locked in prison camps, degraded, and beaten. Children and infants included.

Stare at that hatred. It’s a human desire. It is not monstrous. It is not somehow inhuman. It is ordinary.

Different trends of research examines the images that warp a personality to express such intense hatred against the ethnically different. Many of those research trends percolated through the academic discipline of Cultural Studies. Jeremy Gilbert provided a damn good bibliography section for this end of my research.

An important set of fascist concepts is rooted in the appeal to stability. You could call it the desire for freedom from fear. Any change brings risk, and a major shift in the nature and makeup of your society is riskier than if little to nothing changed at all.* Fear is the most intuitive response to the notion that your world is growing riskier, more dangerous.

* This is, of course, not the actual nature of risk, which is way more complicated. The point isn’t about what risk is, but people’s intuitions about risk.

When our world feels more dangerous, we dream of peaceful times. If we associate our feelings of danger with the change happening all around us, we’ll idealize a time in our society before that change began. We’ll want to return to that state.

Make America Great Again.

That’s how nostalgia becomes the driving image of a fascist political movement. When you’re so motivated by a fear growing in the most important desires of your personality, you’ll condone whatever violence needed to make that dream come true.

He gives you permission to use his moronically stupid excuse so that
you have something to say when a less racist person talks to you at
a party. And you can, happily and relatively privately, sit back and
enjoy watching thousands of people you hate suffer and die.

If you fear a society where your ethnicity and cultural heritage will be a minority so much, you’ll be relieved those detention camps are booming. They’ll turn back the desperate civil war refugees by conclusively demonstrating that Central Americans will find no shelter here.

The imagery of nostalgia can turn to better purposes, of course. Nostalgic themes play an important role in the environmental movement. I find it naïve that people would think of a non-technological world as a Garden of Eden.** Simply false when you learn anything about the very turbulent history of Earth.

** As a cultural image of a peaceful, harmonious Nature before human corruption. Not some silly story about a naked couple living in the woods with a talking snake.

If you come from a culture and a community that’s treated ethnic minorities with terrible oppression for centuries, wouldn’t you fear becoming an ethnic minority? You’d associate being a cultural minority with oppression, unable to imagine people of different cultures and ethnicities living together peacefully.

When you’ve grown up hating by instinct, you have an instinctive feel for how terrible it is to be the object of that hatred. When you see yourself in danger of becoming that object, your survival instinct kicks in. Luckily, what you’ll do to survive supports your disgust at having to share space with them. You’ll be relieved that these disgusting creatures won’t come to find you so disgusting.

Reading Gilbert, he brings it back to neoliberalism. How all of this becomes a way to dupe people into supporting an oligarchic economic system. He’s not wrong. But let’s understand this aspect as well – an ethical phenomenology of the racist.

Noble Enough to Fall Short, Research Time, 23/05/2018

The last chapter of Paul Patton’s book about the political aspects of Gilles Deleuze's ideas contains what I think is an exquisitely concise argument about the weaknesses of liberalism.

I mean, aside from the weaknesses we’ve been talking about for the last few days already. But this late passage in Deleuzian Concepts walks through a summary of a very profound problem that I don’t think the liberal approach to politics can handle.

So it goes like this. Because we’re philosophers, Patton focusses his argument on a beautiful summary of what John Rawls was doing in building his reconstructive liberal concepts. We go to the source of the most intense innovation in the concepts themselves – that’s the philosophers. And if you’re talking the 20th century revival of progressive liberal political philosophy in the North American academy, you’re talking about Rawls.

There's a lot to admire in Rawls philosophy, but I've
always found it kind of frustrating. I think it's because,
even before I could fully articulate it, his liberalism felt
inadequate to me, incomplete. As if I could tell he was
leaving out something important, without quite
understanding what it was.
The desire for your own enslavement, your own
disempowerment, your own depression. Politics as
suicide.

Patton teases out four political purposes in Rawls’ liberalism. They’re very noble purposes. But they leave out one important part of human existence. Here’s how it breaks down.

Purpose of Liberalism 1. Discovering the common principles among disputing political factions.

This is a wonderful thing to accomplish – the original position, followed through faithfully, does help you isolate what components of your identity are shared across all people. It helps identify the common ground that can be a slim anchor for peace in an intractable conflict.

Purpose of Liberalism 2. Harmonizing the goals of individuals and communities.

Another product of that original position – where you have to imagine what a community would look like when you have no idea what your place in it would be. So you have to think about the good of your community when you could end up as the lowest of the low in it.

So the original position thought experiment becomes, in this context, an exercise in sympathy with the good of your community – not just of yourself or your family. Not that you’d sacrifice yourself or your family for your community. But you’d be more amenable to helping yourself and your community at once.

Rawls gave us a reminder that there need never be a zero-sum game in life. We need this reminder badly, especially at times like these.

Purpose of Liberalism 3. Demonstrating the limits of conformity possible in a community.

This is a product of the full scope of liberalism, beyond just his original position thought experiment. One of the main goals of liberalism is to allow individual freedom, and so in that simple sense, conformity of culture of any kind is a severe problem.

In that, Rawls comes closest to inching into thinking becoming. But he only ever conceives of being a divergent character – not actually diverging. Oh, well.

Purpose of Liberalism 4. Exploring the limits of possibility for practice social progress in the near-term – a gradual utopian movement of better society.

Because in conceiving of a society where no one is badly off means conceiving of a better society than we live in.

It all sounds great, but there remains one shortcoming. How do we actually get there, once we imagine it? Is that still philosophy? I think so.

Thought Is Never Private, Jamming, 11/05/2018

Just a short one this morning. I’m writing this after a very long day. Another thinker Paul Patton talks about in relation to Deleuze is Richard Rorty.

The very, very, very short version of Rorty is that he takes the contingency of reality very, very, very seriously. But that it results in the most unserious kind of materialism you’ll ever find. One very out of step with the demands we now face.

He’s another thinker who takes atheism all the way to its final logic. But he’s entirely too complacent about the result. So the conclusion of Rorty that gets you in the most trouble is that our moral principles are a product of our social relationships, our discourses. Being contingently developing organisms, our moral principles are arrived at contingently too.

So there’s nothing necessary about any moral system. As long as moralities can be made to work in the world, individuals can hold them. We each develop our own personal kink in the set of moral principles we socialize into as we grow and age. But all of that is a matter of our discourse. There’s no absolute in morality.

A nice young boy from a respectable family is not supposed to grow up
as a hateful, resentful, racist, misogynist jerk. That's why American and
Canadian liberals have been so shocked to see emboldened extremists
come out of the most unexpected places. James Damore was right
when he said that liberals couldn't even see their own echo chamber.
But I'm glad he could puncture it for them. By now, even the most
complacent liberals should know how seriously you have to take
your values, because there are people who hate you for them.

Naturally, this freaks a lot of people out when you think about it. But as I’ve read different works of Rorty over the years, I find it makes what should be an existentially chilling thought sound like a banal fact to deal with.

Part of that is his skill with language, but part of that is also his own personality. I definitely don’t think you can reduce everything someone wrote to the general conditions of their daily lives. But it does play a part, it contributes.

So I think one of the main causes for Rorty’s ability to be so calm about a genuinely troubling idea is that he was born into a genteel upper-middle class life, and stayed comfortably in the Ivy League (or close to it) for pretty much his entire adult life. And he put his head down for a very conventional academic career for his first couple of unremarkable decades in the field. His life embodies the image of middle American security of the 20th century.

No wonder he was content to say that we’d resolve our moral differences through pleasant conversation over dinner. He lived a life without real hardship, without the kinds of deep ethical challenge that many experience. Never faced racism, misogyny, violence, poverty, addiction, injustice.

It’s very different to know that such things happen in the world, and to experience it yourself. It’s much tougher to know the real stakes of the world. Rorty could take the contingency of the world so flippantly because he never experienced himself the most intense suffering the contingencies of life can offer.

He could never conceive of liberal thinking being challenged, especially not by a resurgence of fascist social values and white ethnic nationalism in the West. He could easily conclude that the Civil Rights Movement was all it took to end the "conversation" over universal human rights; that the Second World War concluded with the "permanent defeat" of fascism.

That's what all good little boys were taught at school, after all. And he spent his entire life in a social world of good little boys grown up and growing old. He could take it all for granted, and so concluded that we could all take it for granted. The world remains much more serious than Rorty ever thought, and it always was.

The Whole Point of Politics, Composing, 16/04/2018

I’ve moved. It’s been a huge pain in the ass, but I’ve finally moved apartments. Close to everything I own is still in boxes, but that’s fine. I’ll unfold it all eventually. But I need to get back to writing, because I’ve been all over the place. And I’ll still be all over the place for the next few days.

Things are still being installed in my new place, I have to buy new furniture because this is the first time in ten years that I’ve lived in a place without a closet. It’s all getting to be a bit chaotic. Not in a bad way, because I actually feel more relaxed now than I have in a long while.

Spinoza articulated in the rationalist philosophy of his time
the foundational principle of Kabbalah that all existence is
an expression of God, and ontologically is God itself.

I just really want to be able to hang up my damn clothes.
• • •
Benedict Spinoza’s work had a very profound influence on my own thinking. I rediscovered him through reading Gilles Deleuze, and he supplied a way of reading Spinoza that cut through a lot of the austere worshipfulness that you see in more conventional Spinozists.

I think the most important element of this uptake of Spinoza is reading the Ethics as an ethical and political text. You wouldn’t think this would be difficult, if the title of the book is anything to go by. But because the book starts with a long argument about the existence and nature of God and material reality, the presumption is that it’s primarily about God and reality.

But the Ethics is, frankly, a book about ethics. More than that, it’s a book about the ethics of many bodies interacting together. The Ethics is a book about relationships, how we can manage our relationships with everything in the world around us to live better, more joyfully, without suffering, terror, or pain.

That principle – laid out in books four and five of the Ethics – is the foundation of the most radical Spinozist politics. I’m following Michael Hardt’s book on Deleuze’s early philosophical searching.

Here’s the principle that emerges from the Ethics when you emphasize the end instead of the beginning. The purpose of politics is to arrange our society so that all our encounters with each other and our institutions – or at least as many encounters as possible – are for the mutual benefit of everyone involved.

Universal harmony becomes the foundational principle of political science and practice. That should be the goal of our political work as people, neighbours, and members of communities that stretch across the Earth.
• • •
I’m also looking forward to getting back to work on my novel again, a version of You Were My Friend that I think will have the most legs. It’s interesting how the story is changing.

Madison’s character is, in just the first few sections that I’ve written so far, much more bubbly and energetic than I originally conceived of her. I think that’s going to give her arc – becoming overcome by cynicism – more of a kick than we saw of her in the theatre.

As I add more detail to the story, I think some of the good ideas that emerged when I was planning a You Were My Friend film project will get even more space to explore.

I haven’t gotten to the scenes with Madison's co-worker Jenna Chen, who inadvertently inspires her more mercenary sides. And I think there’s a lot more comedy potential to come out of Madison’s relationship with her on-off boyfriend Wesley the hipster with the stupid moustache.

I want to expand this story, this world, and these people. I think in my new place, I’m going to have more time and energy to do it.

How Do You Stop a Doomsday Machine? Research Time, 01/04/2018

There are a lot of popular misconceptions about progressive politics and generally left-wing people. Most of those misconceptions spread through a feedback loop of edgelord culture with mainstream alt-right and white nationalist press.

This stock image used to represent work in the stock market looks
benevolent on its own, but the practices of the global financial
industry can be terribly dangerous.

One of those stereotypes is that progressive people are anti-market, that we want an entirely centrally-planned economy. Now, that’s ridiculous, but one of the main purposes of far-right messaging is to make everyone who thinks there should be state-provided health insurance out to be a full-on Stalinist out to send us all to labour camps and collective farms.

Look at the contemporary left with a little more focus and forethought, and you’ll see a lot of complexity. For instance, anti-capitalism – broadly speaking – today is a critique of the culture of profiteering. Not any act of commerce for profit – starting a business and using its profit to reinvest in its activities or save for your own retirement is one of the best ways to run a business.

When I say profiteering, I mean outright financial piracy. Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Ian Buchanan spoke in different works about the financial mechanics of profiteering capitalism – in particular, the short sell. An investment fund ploughs a ton of money into share purchases of a company, which inflates its stock price.

Remember, that higher stock price isn't a function of the company's own activity – it’s the effect of a large share purchase. Investing a lot of money in a company’s stock makes the company appear to be worth more than it is. When the fund sells the company’s shares at that higher price, the overall value plummets. The fund’s clients make a huge profits, and the folks still holding the rest of those shares have lost a ton.

Don't blame the retail apocalypse on online sales platforms, which
still only accounted for less than ten percent of all purchases of
goods in the United States for the last couple of years. The
doomsday machine is large-scale financial capitalism.

There are even more insidious methods of profiteering that lays waste to the lives of thousands, even millions of people. The best illustration is the destruction of Sears, but pretty much any of the financial explosions of the retail apocalypse will do.

So Eddie Lampert’s hedge fund buys Sears. He orders the company to accept millions of dollars in loans it doesn’t need. But now Sears has to pay it back, as well as all kinds of interest and service fees that go to Lampert.

He also forces Sears to split its real estate holdings – the physical store locations – with his own real estate company. So now Sears also has massive rent bills of US$200-million to pay to Lampert’s company, which it’s also paying back the loans Lampert forced it to take. Once the company’s debt service overcame its operating costs, bankruptcy and restructuring was the only way to go, and Lampert collected a ton of money from those asset sales.

This is the capitalism folks on the progressive side are talking about when we say we’re anti-capitalism. You want to start an actual business that sells people things they need and want – like everything you could find in department stores like Sears – that’s awesome.

We want you to make profits from your sales. Reinvest them in your company – pay your workers well, open more locations or warehouses, import products from around the world. Take some of that corporate income to save for your retirement. Start another business. Give a starting entrepreneur some seed money to start her own company. Build a charity.

Do something productive with it, that will enrich the communities from which your wealth grows. This is the model of investment banking that a progressive person believes in. The basic philosophy has only been around for a few thousand years.

Stopping the doomsday machine of investment fund piracy – the
machine that powers the life of Eddie Lampert – will take more than
just blowing up a damaged starship inside it. We need a complete
ethical transformation of humanity – a revaluation of values.

What about that destructive profiteering? Frankly, it’s wrong. Each investment firm holds millions and billions of dollars in assets. The entire industry holds trillions in all the stocks, bonds, derivatives, and futures throughout the Earth.

A few people leading all those firms control all those funds. Chance and circumstance alone prevents those investment industry leaders from shorting or bleeding every company on Earth.

The most unscrupulous will destroy whatever they can get their hands on to squirrel away more wealth. Working people from minimum wage earners to upper management will have their careers upended or ended altogether.

Laws can be written to prevent or impede this kind of predatory investment. But ultimately, it’s a matter of ethics.

Do you want to be a pirate leaving economic destruction and the personal misery of thousands as your legacy? Then there are extremely high-paying jobs for you, that will leave you so obscenely wealthy that you’ll have more power over others than ancient emperors could barely imagine.

Do you want to build businesses that uplift thousands of people through their material success? Indirectly and systematically, those successful ventures will contribute to community and global economies that uplift millions and bring them happiness. You probably won’t end up as insanely wealthy as that other guy, but you’ll still do pretty alright.

What kind of person do you want to be?

Searching for Desire on Google, Jamming, 16/03/2018

Don't necessarily take that title as a recommendation. You can probably tell what you’ll probably end up finding within a few minutes – it’s a search on the internet for content related to desire. You’ll inevitably – and sadly faster than you expect – end up with a results page full of what starts with the letter P and rhymes with ‘horn.’

For the past couple of days, I've been trying to figure out a framework for how you’d change a person’s desires – a whole culture’s desires. But I’ve mostly been talking around it.

And I’m going to keep talking around it for a while, because this is frankly a difficult topic to figure out. This is a five-ish times per week blog – I’m going to be taking a lot of passes at this.

Given the motivating example of Noble's inquiry was the awful
search results for phrases like "Black girls," I thought I'd start this
post with an image of Ava Duvernay, one of the best film
directors working in America today.

One of the other projects I’ve been working on is a policy paper for a small think tank about democratic governance and online organizing in social movements. Most of the theoretical material I already had as part of my personal library, but I grabbed some more recent articles and studies too.

There's been some recent sociological work on the feedback loops between different online platforms and the social change it’s set off. The most hype has gone to Facebook, I’d say. Its immensely detailed databases on its users’ activity drives the most powerful advertising outreach engine that’s ever existed.

Without Facebook’s platform – the peculiar and comprehensive data mining its structure makes possible – Donald Trump would probably not be President of the United States. We know this. Nothing more nefarious than his digital campaign manager Brad Parscale negotiating a really shrewd and sweet ad buy.

A much more subtle feedback loop between a web platform and society is Google Search. I got myself a copy of Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble’s look at how the psychology of racism and sexism appears in the complex internal structures of search algorithms.

It’s a book-long analysis, and I’m still going through all the examples and the basic breakdown of them that she offers. But I can see some themes emerge in my own thinking as I go through them.

Pictured is Brad Parscale, Donald Trump's digital chief for his 2016
and 2020 Presidential campaigns. Pictures also is his beard.

Search and PageRank seem to be failures of rationality. The engineers design a search algorithm that responds to the aggregate of all the queries people give it. So of course the top hits for the phrase “Black girls” are all pornographic.

Because when you aggregate all the searches of the most hideous, grotesque people out there, you end up with the dregs of humanity guiding the leading edge of search engine results. Of course you end up with the most racist, hypersexualized, stereotyped images emerging from the top hits of your search.

Humans can be wonderful, and we have a lot of potential. But a lot of us are scum. Search is going to reflect that.

In that, Search achieves its goal perfectly. It’s used the aggregation of knowledge to organize the world for us, optimized perfectly to line the bank accounts of Alphabet Inc. I mean, answer to our every desire. Yes, that’s it.

That's the epitome of rationality – you work out the optimal path to achieve a goal. But rationality falls short of real reason.

The algorithm needs an ad hoc tweak every time someone reminds Google that an image search for “doctors” brings a first page of pictures of men. There’s nothing about the algorithm that can catch itself. There’s no consciousness of the material affects and psychological or emotional effects of its results, how it expresses vile stereotypes and cruel prejudices. Why would it? It’s an algorithm.

Here’s the disaster that Google has put us all in. Our main everyday source of information has no conscience.

Desire Makes Sales and Sales Make Desires, Research Time, 15/03/2018

You can’t understand how capitalism works without understand the economic power and role of desire. It’s an inherently transdisciplinary inquiry.

Your first instinct might be to look to economics for comprehensive analyses of capitalism. It’s an economic system, after all. But economic models have a hard time dealing with desire.

Psychology has a lot to say about desire, but nothing to say about economics. So it’s really hard to wrangle a psychological concept or principle into economics. One route that I think is promising is political economy, the return of economics as a field to its roots in the pre-disciplinary studies of writers like Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill.

Pictured: The Rational Man

The problem is, economics shouldn’t make a straightforward return to its origins. An enormously destructive idea emerged from the origin of economic science. The Rational Man.

The concept has grounded their models and analyses for almost the entire history of the discipline. The idea makes perfect sense on the face of it. It's the presumption that people intrinsically act in their best interest, given their knowledge at the time.

It’s perfectly believable because we all believe this about ourselves, don't we? It’s definitely how most of us portray ourselves to others. If someone interviewing me for a job asks me how I make decisions, I’m going to describe a methodical, rational process. I’m not going to admit that I sometimes act from emotional or unreflective gut reactions. I mean, I could – but not without expecting that I’ll never see that office again.

The field of behavioural economics has overcome the reliance on human rationality. But aside from a Nobel Prize for its innovators, economics as a whole has yet to accept its basic idea – humans are a-rational actors.

We make decisions – including those relevant to economics – by a combination of reason and emotions, as well as cultural, class, and racialized biases. Our entire assembly of desire feeds into our actions. Behavioural economics understands this, but hasn’t yet followed the logic through to its conclusion.

You see this short stop when you look at the proposals for political and institutional change that emerge from behavioural economic analyses. Nudges, they’re called. Small, but consequential changes to people’s physical, social, and media environment that makes the more reasonable choice in different situations appear more sensible or easier. Even if that choice is actually more obscure, complicated, or difficult.

Not that kind of nudge, no. Too bad, really.

It’s a very effective policy approach. The problem is that it’s difficult to reconcile democratic values with a governance style of secretly modifying the physical environment of your entire society to condition people’s choices. I’ve written about the troubling character of government through nudges before.

The most obvious problem with the concept of the nudge is that it’s inevitably anti-democratic. The democratic relationship* depends on transparency and trust – they’re the norms of mutual respect among and across people, families, groups, cultures, companies, governments, institutions.

* Whether that relationship is among individual people, families, groups, cultures, companies, governments, institutions; among and across all those scales.

Here’s a nudge procedure that I read about in Joseph Heath’s Enlightenment 2.0 a few years ago. Detergent caps are designed to deceive you about how much you need – they’re too big, and the volume markers too faint to see. So the solution is a law regulating the size of laundry detergent caps.

Apply this generally, and you have a legal system enforcing fractally detailed rules to condition people to behave rationally without any self-knowledge of it. All transparency between people and their institutions disappears.

That’s one problem with the political economy of some approaches I’ve seen to behavioural economics. I have one more. The nudge goes too far to control humanity, but it was conceived as a way of freeing humanity – free us from our own inadequacies and ways the powerful use those shortcomings against us.

The nudge still manipulates the human power of desire, but real freedom lies in changing the character of that power. Don’t presume our enlightenment – enlighten us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Paris, Ontario.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Thinker Is a Process Because She’s a Person, Jamming, 12/02/2018

Two passes at the mistake of searching for the universal, for the one true truth.
• • •
I pity the fool who had to write the essay on Sigmund Freud in Deleuze’s Philosophical Legacy. It’s because there actually isn’t much to say when a thinker so powerfully rejects a former influence in a fit of rage.

One of the most influential books Gilles Deleuze ever wrote was Anti-Œdipus with Félix Guattari – definitely the most influential among the political thinkers who build on his work. That book was built around a detailed, incisive, forceful, and total rejection of the core dynamics of all Freudian thinking.

Freudian concepts of desire dominated French thought about
psychology early in Deleuze and Guattari's career. They
wrote against it with the fury of a betrayed disciple.

Now, before meeting Guattari, Deleuze did take Freud’s ideas seriously. Many of Freud’s ideas were the core principles of the analysis in Deleuze’s book on Leopold Sacher-Masoch. Several chapters in The Logic of Sense explicitly relied on Freud to build a theory of desire and sexuality.

Nothing reversed so radically in Deleuze’s intellectual life than his belief in Freudian ideas. It took meeting Guattari for him to realize that Freudian psychology was the closest thing possible to an opposite of the direction he wanted to develop – a metaphysical framework based on heterogeneity, variety, difference, becoming.

Working with Guattari helped Deleuze realize that Freud’s entire system was built on a premise that those images – Œdipus in particular – constituted a universal structure to human consciousness.

Guattari – a man who worked all his life with schizophrenics – knew from the examples of his daily professional life that it was far from universal. More than that, the dynamics of Œdipal imagery, concepts, and principles in action on people’s personalities and identities grounds an ethic of unearned submission and servitude to authority of force and might. Father–King–Policeman–Gun–Man.

Fucking patriarchy, man.
• • •
Ronald Bogue ended up writing the most boring kind of history of philosophy paper imaginable – the list. He lists and dispassionately describes the appearances Freud’s ideas made in Deleuze’s work. Doesn’t contribute any more analysis than that.

There's a masterful essay in cultural theory on how Freudian
philosophy of desire and sexuality leads to the ideology of Zardoz.
But I'm not about to write it. That would mean I'd have to watch
Zardoz.

Bogue’s essay expresses a weird kind of regret that Deleuze rejected Freudianism and never relied on Freud’s work again. I can’t quite explain it.

Best I can do is speculate – about the habits and norms of the academics of the global university system. Not what everyone does, of course. I’m just talking about the tendencies people get socialized into as they teach their courses, hunt for research grants and contracts, submit their articles and edit their journals, chase tenure.

There’s a tendency to crave wholeness in a primary material philosopher. At conferences, in classes, and in articles, so many ask questions like, “What was Aristotle’s concept of the soul?” for example. As if there could only be one answer to that question.

Some philosophers are allowed breaks. Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of those, but he was so extreme in declaring it in his life that no one can deny it. Kant was way more professional with his declaration, but it was still pretty extreme.

I was trained to think of such figures as outliers in the broader tradition of philosophy – those were consistent thinkers. Even the two Kants and the two Wittgensteins are each treated as being consistent. The concepts are clear in each one. You’d get weird looks if you suggested that the primary material thinkers were just as uncertain of the ideas they wrote about and the concepts they developed as anyone else.

So much secondary material is scholarship arguing over what a given philosopher really meant by a particular concept. If even the primary material writers didn’t quite know the exact concept – if they were figuring it all out like the rest of us – there isn’t any real hook for why they’re among the ranks of the great philosophers.

Well, there is. It’s the ambition, care, and skill with which they wrote their battles with difficult, vital concepts. Plus, they had the social and institutional connections and reputations to publish their work where it would be widely read and taken seriously.

If you think primary material philosophers reached any truth that make them categorically different from anyone else. We don’t read Aristotle to follow and join along with his concepts about the nature of the soul – We read Aristotle to know Aristotle’s concept of the soul.

Maybe we shouldn’t. You know that everybody shits, right?