Why Futurism Matters Today I: As Fast As Possible, Composing, 28/07/2015

I first came up with the idea for my Utopias book from reading After the Future, a book about how the way we think of our future and human progress shapes our politics. The trippier concepts in that project will eventually revolve around these ideas of time, and how concepts of time affect what we believe about the inevitability of a better world.

Building a better world is, as far as I’m concerned, the primary goal of philosophical writing. Philosophy develops the ideas and concepts with which we can think about our potentials and ambitions for what our society, civilization, and planet can become.* This is the central mission of my upcoming book, Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity.

* I know a fair number of folks in philosophy who believe that it's about uncovering fundamental truths. Well, that may have been true when philosophy was the discipline that included all the fundamental sciences, but that's not the case anymore. If you want truth, you do some good science or good journalism. Philosophical thinking has been left to its creative possibilities, which I argue is the better for it, because it foregrounds philosophy as an engine of social and planetary progress.

The images of Fritz Lang's Metropolis articulated the desires and fears of all modernity.

Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity builds a conception of what an individual human subject is, which is better suited to living an ecologically sustainable lifestyle. When you think of yourself in the way it describes, your presumptions and instincts about how to live and what’s best will better articulate a more ecologically conscious lifestyle, and you’ll drive yourself harder to fight and change ecologically harmful systems, social & economic structures, and institutions.

Utopias will be a book that grapples with this project through a central question that’s more about method: What’s the precise power of these self-conceptions that open and close so many possibilities without our even needing to be aware of them?

Utopias will also be a very critical book about our current politics. The self-conceptions that drive contemporary Western politics are that we conceive of ourselves as technological and as free individuals in the liberal sense. 

Because it’s a philosophical book, I’m developing a peculiarly philosophical way of criticizing these aspects of current politics. I’m looking for the purest expressions of the self-conception of Technological Man and the self-conception of the Individual. I’ve found those expressions in, respectively, Italian Futurism (particularly the manifestos of Filippo Marinetti) and modern libertarianism (the trifecta of Friedrich Hayek, Robert Nozick, and Ayn Rand). 

These visions are linked in some very complex ways. Untangling them has been the task of many different writers in many different disciplines and subject areas. I’m not about to pretend that my books are the definitive word, or offer a totally comprehensive guide – only that they’re a contribution worth having, and remarkable on their individual insights and merits. 

The modern libertarian movement is based on the idea
that almost all state services, even the ones that bring
direct material benefits to people in need, are
inescapably totalitarian and must be destroyed to
protect our individual freedoms.

I think one of those insights is that my approach to criticizing destructive politics and economics targets one of the most insidious ideas of modern politics: that progressivism in all its stripes is fascist and totalitarian. 

I think it’s important that we take this seriously because millions of people actually believe that simple government-based means of trying to make society more fair – public transit, state health insurance plans, daycare subsidies, restrictions on weapon ownership and trade, regulations on investment banking, legalizing unions, even simply having a public pension fund – brings state control over the lives of free individuals, which is essentially totalitarian.

It sounds ridiculous, but these are the bedrock values of many in the American Tea Party movement, in libertarian-influenced popular thinking across the West, and the official ideology of all the think tanks that grew from the original meetings of the Mt. Pelerin Society. The freaky part is, there is a legitimate truth behind this paranoia.

Marinetti’s writing and political activism provides the clearest expression of that truth, which all progressives have to confront if we’re going to defeat new liberal conservatism for good. Marinetti was a progressive in many ways. 

His manifestos crusaded against injustices that would make him admirable to a modern progressive, and I found myself enthused and amped by his writing, even against my better judgment. 

Marinetti was against Church power and control over people’s lives, against the social infantilization and economic subjection of women, against pre-WWI Italy’s crony politics and servitude of the rich and powerful. He wanted to empower working people to control his country’s industry, largely through trade unions. He advocated for universal education, constant progress and innovation in the arts and sciences.

But Marinetti also wanted Italy to wage colonial wars to conquer huge swaths of Africa in the name of national glory. He was a deep racist who thought lesser people should be crushed under superior Italian culture. His universal education would have included regimented military training – every young boy was a stormtrooper in training. He dreamed of clearing all the forests and swamps in Europe to build superhighways, mega-cities, and factory complexes the size of Naples.

All in the name of progress. And the engine of this change would be the authoritarian hand of the state because only the state could achieve the ends of progress to a perfect society as fast as physically possible, steamrolling all resistance and even mild critics. . . . To be continued.

The Meaning of a Meaningless Coincidence II: Who I Am, Composing, 23/07/2015

Continued from last post . . . One concept, the subject as field. Merleau-Ponty developed this idea through philosophical work on the phenomenology of tactile perception. I picked up this concept and adapted it into my ecological conception of the subject, the heart of Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity's program of philosophical eco-activism. 

Violence was central to so many of the metaphors and
images that Marinetti would use to explain his art,
politics, philosophy, and the whole of existence.

Marinetti developed the concept through his artistic reflections and experiments on tactile sensation. What’s more, he conceived those sensations as playing out in experience through metaphors of fistfighting. Marinetti always comes back to violence.

Writing traditional philosophy, I would have to dismiss this as a simple coincidence. Marinetti had no historical influence on Merleau-Ponty, so there's nothing here to learn about the history of philosophy.

But I’ve given up writing philosophy according to the conventions and rules of academic practice. EEFH was assembled according to the old rules (though I did push them a little), but Utopias will be a much more experimental text. So we can approach these coincidences as something to learn from. What can we learn?

We can learn something about human nature. The same concept of how the world is, the subject as field, arises in two thinkers independently, through two different means. Marinetti was always a fiercely patriotic soldier, he believed in the power of violence as an expression of strength and nobility, and he understood the field in terms of its power for violence.

Merleau-Ponty was a professor, always rather sedate. Much of his career was spent teaching philosophy, researching philosophy in libraries, or investigating neurological and perceptual science with France’s leading medical scientists and doctors. He died of a heart attack after writing only a few chapters of The Visible and the Invisible, the book where he would have explained in detail his concept of the subject as a dynamic field. 

His scattered, yet detailed, notes suggest that he would explain one important aspect of his touch-centric phenomenology as a worldly eros. We experience the world by touching it, commingling with it, everything literally penetrates everything else. 

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was in many ways a
very peaceful man who lived a very peaceful,
contemplative life. Would that we all could.

This integration fuels the dynamic processes of existence. If Husserl’s vision-centric phenomenology was haunted by solipsism, the separation of the subject from the world, then Merleau's focus on touch conceived of the subject as intimately integrated with the world. 

The entire life of existence – its dynamisms, processes, generations, becomings, changes, natality, creativity, whatever you want to call it – is driven by the blending of objects as their fields touch and mingle.

So two very different conceptions of what a subject is sit at the centre of these philosophies, even though they share the same starting concept, that touch is the primary way in which bodies interact. 

Marinetti prioritizes violence and the power of industrial technology to crush all other orders of existence. So he develops an ethical and political philosophy of conquest, empire, and domination. Ecological sustainability and diversity is my priority, so in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, physical contact integrates us with the world, so that we come to love it as we love ourselves. 

We understand and conceive of our desires, hopes, fears, and dreams in universal form by building philosophical systems out of the concepts we use to understand the world. Our individual desires, hopes, fears, and dreams condition what concepts will occur most readily to us. We study the accidental common ground of two unrelated and very different thinkers so that we can better understand the machinery of human thought and ethics. Contrasting the coincidence, we understand better who and what we are.

The Meaning of a Meaningless Coincidence I: Questions, Composing, 22/07/2015

In the early days of Adam Writes Everything, when I was still very uncertain what precisely this blog was going to be, especially its content and tone, I wrote a couple of posts under a category called “Triangulation.” They were essentially comparisons of different thinkers and ideas.

Eventually, I decided not to write these anymore, because they didn’t actually seem very fertile for developing ideas. And they didn't seem all that engaging for readers. These are the two questions that I ask myself about whatever I post here. 1) Will writing a post push a vague idea in a creative direction or otherwise help me figure out something that puzzles me? 2) Would someone actually enjoy reading it?

Those early posts just plunked two coincidentally similar ideas next to each other. Sometimes, two or more writers discussed the same topic, and sometimes, one writer actually influenced the other and I wanted to think about how. But coincidences don’t really make good philosophy.

The influence of Marinetti's Tactilist art appears in a
decadent and depraved American Hollywood film.

Here’s an example. I noticed an odd coincidence reading an old Marinetti essay the other night. He was discussing the framework of a new approach to art that he called Tactilism. It was artwork that you were supposed to experience not by looking at it or listening to it, but by rubbing your hands over it. They were panels whose material was designed to the smallest detail to provoke a particular tactile sensation.

Marinetti described how he first thought of this idea when he was a soldier in the Great War, serving in the battles against Austria. He was stumbling through a trench in total darkness trying to find a place to sleep, his hand passing over dirt, metal, clothing, flesh. He realized that this was a whole new way of seeing the world, through touch. 

We hardly ever think about just how detailed our tactile sensations can be. So he developed a form of art that would emphasize tactility, let us develop our hands to higher capacities of perceptivity than we typically do.

As Marinetti thought about what touch actually was, he came to understand it as the fundamental sense. All other perceptions – visual, auditory, olfactory, proprioception, and so on – were derived from the basic nature of touch. All perception is detection of objects around us and moving through them. Touch and avoidance of touch.

It occurred to me that Marinetti’s insight, which he developed in the context of his artwork, was fundamentally the same as Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s when, in the last years of his life, he developed a philosophy of perception that saw touch and physical contact as foundational to all experience. 

Merleau-Ponty was working in the sub-discipline of phenomenology, particularly the tradition of Edmund Husserl. Merleau’s work during and shortly after the Second World War built on and expanded many of Husserl’s ideas, rooting them in a scientific context as research on brain injuries* discovered the complexity and depth of perception’s interdependence with neural architecture. 

Unfortunately, there are still plenty of opportunities
to study the effects of shrapnel head injuries on
human perception.

* The Second World War, particularly its flying shrapnel, produced many examples of traumatic brain injuries that were quite valuable for the growth of humanity's knowledge, even as their sufferers struggled to return to a worthwhile life.

I remember one professor I had as an undergraduate, who thought Merleau did little beyond expanding Husserl’s yet-unpublished papers. Merleau's mid-career work often ran into the same fundamental problem that Husserl did: how to get out of the subjective perspective. 

Merleau overcame this through a simple shift in focus from analyzing vision as essential perception, to touch. From there, he developed the conception of the subject not as a viewer, but as a field constantly interacting with other fields and bodies around her. This concept of the subject as a field of affects integrated in a huge complex of overlapping fields is the lynchpin for the conception of the subject at the heart of my ecological philosophy writing.**

** I’m in the process of booking my in-person and virtual speaking tour to promote Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. So more details coming to a campus near you.

Marinetti mentions this concept of the subject as a field as a logical derivation from his own reflections on the perceptual primacy of touch and tactility. He arrived at this profound, revolutionary philosophical concept through thinking about art. 

Here, we have two solitary figures with no actual historical relationship where Marinetti could have influenced Merleau philosophically at all. We only have their coincidental development of the same concept. Why bother thinking about it at all? To be continued . . . 

The Intense Political Power of Art, Research Time, 21/07/2015

The content of Italian Futurism’s political philosophy is abhorrent and terrifying. Many people today would consider it obscene. I don’t know how well the average contemporary Western person could understand a style of patriotism that’s so dedicated to freedom while also being so nakedly and proudly militarist and imperialist. Today, we at least lie so well to ourselves that we aren’t our own brand of conquerors.

My greatest hope for the Trump campaign is that it's
actually a brilliant, long-game piece of performance art
that would put Stephen Colbert and Joaquin Phoenix to
shame.

Yet the spirit of Marinetti’s philosophy is the same spirit central to the most inspiring progressive movements throughout the last hundred or so years. I snuck back yesterday afternoon to After the Future, the slim book by Bifo that first drew me to Futurism for philosophical inspiration, and read again his description of their vision.

Futurism is the purest expression of the Modernist era, the faith that the development of human culture, knowledge, and technology brings liberation and freedom, that development was inherently progress. Utopia was coming, and we would build it ourselves.

The particulars change, but the movement remains the same. Bifo wrote that the end of Modernity* came in 1977, when the last breath of a political movement that imagined the future as a brighter place was finally crushed. He saw it simultaneously as the violent government crackdown on the autonomist movement and the cry of England’s punks. A fetish store advertisement in disguise as a rock band screams “No Future!!!!”

* With a capital M, so as not to confuse Modernity the cultural era for modernity the contemporary cultural era of the moment.

This reveals a curious convergence that I see in Bifo and many other cultural theorists, with Marinetti and his noxiously seductive ideology and aesthetic of techno-violence. They all, and increasingly myself, understand art as an inherently political phenomenon.

Now, it’s generally accepted that you can make art with an explicitly political message. In its most sedate form, it can be the simple graphic design of a campaign for state office, or the shining expressiveness of an image like Shepard Fairey’s Barack Obama portrait. Or it can be a more pointed, critical form. Consider Picasso’s Guernica, which depicts the visceral and empathic terror of arial bombardment. Think about the protest song, whether it emerges from Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Reagan Youth, Rage Against the Machine, Run the Jewels, or Buffy Sainte Marie.

For a moment, he was the voice of an entire
continent's culture. But I still prefer the PiL albums.

Or consider what I hope the Donald Trump 2016 Presidential campaign will turn out to be in the United States. A months-long work of performance art that systematically attacks and destroys forever the credibility and collective sanity of the Republican Party, forcing entirely different social forces to come to dominate the American state. 

Art can have a more profound power than this, because of its expressive power. An artist creates a work, whether in collaboration with others (as in film and theatre) or on her own (as in painting, sculpture, or fiction writing) as an expression of will through technical means. The content of this expression comes from the ideas and occupations of the artist, what thoughts and problems she wants her artwork to explore.

An artist who pays attention to the political and social conflicts of her time will express those conflicts in the content of her work. This is true even for oblique forms of art like music or more explicit, conscious forms of art like drama. 

The mood, form, or motivating concepts of an artwork will express a political mood of the entire country, a cultural shift. The nihilism of “No Future” was the culture of Europe itself crashing into dystopia. The aggression of the art that emerged from Italian Futurism was the will to technological power demanding its domination over the Earth. 

Know the Danger of Your Own Times, Research Time, 20/07/2015

You might wonder what exactly I find so interesting in Filippo Marinetti and the Italian Futurists, why I keep writing them, and why I decided that Marinetti’s ideas would make such an interesting focus point for my next book. There are a lot of ways I came to the decision, but here’s one aspect of that, based on what I was reading a little while ago.

Marinetti is describing the sickness of his culture, Italy in the years on either side of the First World War. The moneyed political classes spend most of their time accumulating wealth with little effort, or else arguing in parliament with an insomniac intensity about different versions of laws that all amount to the same oppressive foolishness.

I'm not the first person to say the economic pressures
working people face today are of similar calibre as
during the Great Depression. From a pro-unionization
protest among Walmart employees, December 2014.

The working classes, meanwhile, are put under deeper and heavier stress by an economy where the labour of most people is valued less and less every day. People can’t apply their intelligence to anything creative, socially valuable, or even mentally stimulating and interesting for very long. They have to spend all their energy hustling for enough income that barely covers their basic subsistence. 

His Italy’s mass cultural products are juvenile, pandering entertainment based on cheap jokes and tired stereotypes. So many people’s artistic tastes are decaying into idiocy, while it becomes increasingly difficult to produce and distribute genuinely progressive, radical art. This is despite an explosion of new forms and channels of media.

Described in these terms, the circumstances sound pretty familiar to most of us. Most of us in Western countries find an unstable work environment, where many have to hustle between internships, freelance work, and their actual jobs just to sustain enough income that we can live comfortably. It’s difficult to find the time to contribute to larger projects in society between all the work many of us have to do just to make a decent living.

Marinetti was talking about a society whose unemployment rate was skyrocketing, and where many war veterans returning from the Alpine front found themselves adrift.

Our own cultural products are increasingly fragmented, with many of the most popular things amounting to little more than humour at stereotypes, though I admit I’ve been falling behind some aspects of mainstream entertainment simply because I can’t be bothered to care. Is Duck Dynasty still on TV?

A modern Marinetti, pushing an avant-garde movement across the arts, would probably have a better shot at finding an audience, simply because of the extra reach of the internet. Where the Marinetti of the 1900s wrote plays and manifestos, a Marinetti of the 2010s could write and direct films or web series, and what else is a blog but a space for a constantly updating manifesto.

Political ideas that are not considered absolutely
horrifying were once totally mainstream, to the point
of becoming mundane, so boring that a Royal would
parrot their images.

It’s ridiculous to say that Marinetti’s world is the same as ours. Not only are the actual political systems of the world incredibly different, but even what’s politically conceivable is alien to a 2010s sensibility. I may write tomorrow about some of Marinetti’s Futurist proposals in economics that sound like walking contradictions to a modern ear. But his era and ours share a commonality in important ways.

His people and so many in the modern West face an impasse between a world of conflict, cultural fragmentation, and economic depression, and a world where we’re crawling out of these disasters. The problem is that we can’t tell which path will truly be successful, or which paths will require us to pay prices for our progress that are much too high. 

His was an era of genuine fascism and totalitarianism, after all. Those politics were so mainstream that even royals would play around with the imagery. But we have our own mainstream horrors. It could be the reach of violent religious ideologies so far that people will murder through these imageries in places as random as Chattanooga. Or it’s the sadly successful everyday racism and bigotry of Dylann Roof or the Trump campaign.

There’s a multi-front conflict the size of the First World War ongoing right now, only instead of Europe (for now), it’s across the Middle East. Instead of the French side of the Rhineland, the Italian Alps, the Russian Front, and the Bolshevik-Menshevik civil war, there’s instead the Syrian revolutionary war, the ISIS insurgency, the Houthi uprising, and the Libyan civil war. 

Marinetti is a spectre of that old era that serves as a warning to us. Reading him, you feel his punk spirit. However much he inveighs against his Europe’s radical left for their utopias of perfect equality and material abundance in communist paradise, he’s a utopian with a bizarre vision that can be eerily seductive. A society whose politics and education system are designed to build artistic geniuses who are also heroic warriors dedicated to expand their nation’s empire.

He’s the demonstration that even within the most admirable and exciting ideas, there’s a kernel of political poison that can destroy everything you loved.

The Deepest Politics Is About the Future of Humanity, Research Time, 08/07/2015

Here's another reason I think I had trouble finding a place in the university system. As far as a search committee or a grant committee could see, I often looked like a dilettante. A grad student’s research program typically focusses on contributing to a single sub-discipline of her field, frequently in the same sub-discipline as her supervisor. 

But my strategy for success has never been doing what’s typical. I wanted my research to be publishable as a book that could actually push philosophy of ecology forward. I didn’t want to create one more dissertation that would go unread, but create a book that would have real impact on the field, and even pick up a popular following. 

The dynamism of industrial technologies can overwrite
any more fragile existence. The Futurist movement found
the joy of that destruction. Giacomo Balla's Speed of a
Motorcycle, painted 1913.

I was fortunate to have, in McMaster’s Barry Allen, a supervisor who was cool with my ambition. But because it was so rare to write a dissertation that was actually ambitious, it took a while for me to find a venue for publication whose editors would take it credibly. So I was fortunate to have connected with Steve Fuller at SERRC, who was impressed enough by my discussions of the manuscript on my blog to introduce me to his contacts at Palgrave MacMillan, who are publishing Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity.

Shameless plugging and autobiography aside, I am going to write about some deeper stuff tonight. When I was still looking for work in the university sector, I was in the early stages of developing Utopias, and pitched that as the object of a post-doc research grant I applied for. I didn't get any of those grants.

On the surface, the projects are very different because they cover very different disciplines. EEFH is primarily about the ethical implications of taking ecology seriously. It touches on a few topics in philosophy of science and political activism, but it’s primarily a book about how we should redefine the human identity to understand ourselves ecologically.

Utopias is primarily a work of political philosophy, though it also covers some philosophy of technology and time. But it also includes environmental themes, and how humanity’s conception of itself conditions our social, political, and economic activities.

EEFH revolves around a political and ethical problem. We’re facing a global crisis of climate change, massive ecological destruction and transformation, and ubiquitous, inescapable pollution. One of the conditions of our having created this planet-wide fuck-up is that we considered ourselves separate from the natural order of the world. 

So as we developed industrial technology, we saw nature as a separate order of being – either it was our job to bring it to heel and order, or we could simply overwrite its whole existence, or nature would always remain separate from and larger than us. Nature was beyond us, and we were beyond nature. Val Plumwood called this a state of alienation.

The most fundamental solution to Earth’s ecological crisis is redefining how people understand their place in nature and relationship with it. Understanding ourselves as integrated and interdependent in the ecologies of our world will give a person a better sense that their actions will have consequences, that they’ll be far flung and complicated, and that destructive activities will bite us in the ass. 

Modern humanity has made porous islands of its own
filth. I almost feel as though I should be proud.

Filippo Marinetti’s conception, in his Futurist artistic and political movement, of how industrial technology would transform humanity is the purest version of the anti-ecological, hubristic megalomania that resulted in nuclear weapons and the Pacific Trash Vortex. Marinetti’s own goal was to transform humanity through building a new self-conception. But his vision wasn’t ecological.

The Futurist vision was an embrace of war, a love of speed, a vision of great nations subjugating weaker ones in international imperial conquest. The brave new human he imagined was a hybrid of human organism and industrial mechanism, the product of total sympathy between personality and machine. Transportation and communication systems would extend humanity throughout the planet. 

The human framework of experience itself would change, blur with machinery. Marinetti saw it as a renewal of humanity from the state of decadence into which humanity had fallen through the dullness of its elites. But the spirit of this renewal is humanity’s destructive technological drive taken to its highest intensity. Marinetti’s vision wouldn’t renew humanity, but lead to mass suicide. Perhaps we’re already inexorably on the way.

Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity looks at what humanity will have to become if we’re to survive the Holocene Extinction. Its focus was the highest of human possibilities. Utopias will consider the origins, the purest expressions of our destructive drives. Its focus will be the most horrifying aspects of human nature, in the hope that we’ll be able to articulate a way out of the darkness.

All Humanity Is One Process II: Deliver Me Into This Will, Jamming, 06/07/2015

Continued from Friday . . . When you read Hayek’s ideas, especially the popularly-aimed works like Road to Serfdom that were his main vehicles of direct political influence on people’s minds, you find some interesting paradoxes.* The most interesting one, given the Greek referendum’s uprising against the impositions of austerity, is the tension of individualism and market forces.

At some point, when you can't take it anymore, you just
have to say no.

* I don't like to say contradictions, because I don’t want to sound too Hegelian or Marxist. Talk of contradiction in philosophical discussions of economic and political issues can trap you analyzing a problem as the collision of opposites, and real problems are usually more complex than that.

New liberalism is an individualist doctrine, to its core and essence. It’s the economic and political philosophy that's been promoted through the think tanks who grew from Friedrich Hayek’s first cadre of intellectual activists in the Mt. Pelerin Society. They were fervent anti-communists who understood themselves as fighting social movements around the world and in their own countries, which would push society in totalitarian directions.

Those movements, the push down the slippery slope toward communist totalitarianism, included any style of politics that organized people as collectives, or in which the government controlled an industry either through outright nationalization or a regulatory regime. Collective politics included any union movement. 

Robert Nozick would pick this up in some of his arguments surrounding Anarchy, State, and Utopia. The bond of an employment contract is between two equal people, the employer and the employee. Unions would overpower the employer in that contract. This, however, ignores the material fact that an employer is rarely an equal to each of his workers, especially if they employer is a large, complex corporation with decentralized and bureaucratic authority structures over its human resources concerns.

That workers’ unions and government regulations are the start of a process of building totalitarian politics sounds absolutely ridiculous to write, like some piece of hyperbole that you laugh at when Michael Palin says it in Monty Python’s Flying Circus, or when Dave Foley delivers his classic “Poor Little Russia!” monologue on Kids in the Hall. But Hayek and the others who founded his think tank network lived in an era when totalitarianism was an ordinary political option.

We think of Dave Foley's insane rant about Russia
circa 1991 as a sample of absurd insanity, but fear
of a violent state forcing collective governance on
its entire population was a genuine fear for a long
time, and that fear shaped our modern politics.

Hayek was at the forefront of the new liberal political movement, where all forms of freedom were individual freedom from government control or similar subsumption into a collective. Subsuming all individuality into the development of a collective identity was a vision that many people understood as human progress.

Yet Hayek acknowledged that individuality was dwarfed by forces beyond its control. These weren't the cultural unity of a collectivizing politics, but the impersonal forces of economics. No matter what individual governments did, the tension of supply and demand, playing out among all goods and services, its medium the value of a country's currency itself, were forces to which an individual could only submit.

In Road to Serfdom, Hayek describes how an economic depression will likely follow the government-amped increase in manufacturing during the Second World War. Even though nearly three decades of domestic manufacturing booms followed the war, Hayek said these could not last forever, and some economic slowdown would have to happen simply because a permanent war footing is impossible to maintain. Wages would fall, industries would shutter, and many people would lose their jobs. The population would be in poverty until the cost of goods adjusted again to what people could afford to buy.

What was his solution to this looming economic disaster, the slow stagnation of the Dollarama economy? Deal with it. You can't control economic forces, not as a person and not as a government. Just shut up and starve, because life is hard and unfair.

Filippo Marinetti dreamed that the global-scale forces of an industrializing world would dwarf individuality. He embraced that transformation of humanity from conceiving of themselves as individuals to become parts of a larger machine of the nation. He saw global prosperity in the infinite expansion of military might around the world, a planet whose rule was colonialism and war.

The ideologies that shape our world originated in the global battle for and against state totalitarianism. As we struggle to escape subjugation to the powerful and the impersonal, we yearn for a perfect society where these oppressive forces don't exist. Yet we also yearn for an end to the struggle, even if that end comes in giving yourself over to the forces and institutions that would crush you. At least then, you’re part of something.

That’s what my Utopias project is basically all about. . . . To be continued.

I Can Extend Myself Over the Whole Planet, Research Time, 30/06/2015

Something I’ve always found fascinating about ideas is how they seem to take on a life of their own. I didn’t always believe that ideas could live disconnected from their thinkers, and even now, I’m still very unsure of how the process would work. What is an idea? I can't bring myself to believe in ideas as eternal Platonic Forms. Ideas change, just as matter does.

Venice is loved for its ancient architecture, but
Marinetti hated Venice for the same reason.

Ideas drift around societies of thinkers, and recur in different places. One thinker focusses on an aspect of a particular idea that another may never notice at all. Back when I was working full-time in academic philosophy, I thought I’d research influence: how one set of ideas occurred in the works of another.

But in terms of the evidence I could summon up from research into the social networks, relationships, and what a given writer had actually read and studied, there weren't nearly enough chains of influence to make any direct claims outside established chains – who read whom, who studied under whom and where. So if I’m going to write about the recurrence of ideas among different writers and disciplines, I’ll have to find something more poetic and figurative than direct influence. 

Here's an example that just occurred to me. I’ve been reading some old essays of Filippo Marinetti. Marinetti and his crew of Italian punk artists, poets, and playwrights at the start of the 20th century wanted a revolution in theatre and society. They created art inspired by the lines of machine production, the regimentation and power of industry.

Marinetti wrote about a wonderful dream he once had, that the ancient historic buildings of Venice would be torn to rubble, and that rubble would fill the city’s canals to build roads to factories. The embrace of technology – the economic expression of a cultural embrace of the future – would make Italy a great world power, a centre of manufacturing and military might.

Humanity extends itself over the entire world with its
technology. This is the future, our world.

His central image was the Extended Man. Human ingenuity created technologies that can enormously increase the speed and intensity of material production. We can keep making more stuff, endlessly. All that production was organized in a massive system over the entire world: industrial states built massive armies to conquer foreign territory, enslave or co-opt their residents, and funnel their resources to the homeland, where domestic industries would build equipment to sell to their people and around the world.

I learned how it works in high school. It was called the history of the colonial era. We don't conquer territory with armies anymore – there’s no movement in England to make India British again. But the economic relations are there. We all know that most of our goods are made in overseas factories. Instead of the plantation with its open slavery, we now have Foxconn with its anti-suicide nets between the compound’s buildings to prevent employee turnover.

Technology was the extension of the human will, our thoughts, plans, and dreams extending all over Earth. In Marinetti's time, we did it with armies and navies, openly. In our time, we do it a little more secretly, with free trade agreements negotiated behind closed doors until the final texts hit our legislatures for ratification. At least we’re skeptical that these agreements are always in the best interests of the people, and talk about it on our social networks and in our coffeeshops.

Back when I was still an enthusiastic academic-in-training, I was interested in philosophy of mind.* I discovered a curious idea in the work of a University of Edinburgh professor, Andy Clark: that technology extends the human mind.

* I still am. I just find the ways you can legitimately talk about it in North American philosophy departments to be a little limited.

Andy Clark, I discovered through a friend who went to
school at University of Edinburgh, is notorious for his
loud shirts. This is not Andy Clark, but Colin Baker's
similarly notorious Doctor Who.

Clark's vision was much more modest than Marinetti’s imperial conception of the technological man. Here’s a key example in Clark's work. Normally, we think of one function of the human mind as memory – memory happens inside our brains, where our minds are. But when I use technology to make a list of my day's tasks at work or a grocery list – maybe a pen and paper, maybe my phone – my mind is in the paper and the phone just as much as it’s in my skull. 

Technology extends the human mind and will beyond its body. But there are no political or social implications to this. Clark specializes in philosophy of mind, in cognitive theory. He's only interested in how human thought works. His way of thinking doesn’t have anything to do with politics. Philosophy of mind has nothing to do with political philosophy; they're different disciplines. Ask any professor.

Marinetti and Clark, across generations and countries, share an idea: technology extends the human mind. I doubt Clark ever read Marinetti's work. What would a cognitive theorist have to do with an artist, and an artist who had such repugnant politics as well? Yet the idea connects them, strangely. 

When we’re used to our assumptions about what kind of knowledge our knowledge is, we don't always make the connections that perhaps we should. Maybe we forget what once seemed obvious to us, and that forgetfulness leaves us vulnerable somehow.

Maybe good writing about ideas reminds us of the connections we should see, if we're to understand the real consequences of our thoughts. The full material implications of how creatures with our powers understand what we are.

Can There Be Social Revolution Without Blood? Research Time, 26/06/2015

We live in a violent world. There was a video circulating around my Facebook friends a while ago that analyzed the data of all the killings and deaths during the Second World War, which was making the point that, by economy of scale, we live in a remarkably peaceful world.

But even though we’re far from the constant mass slaughter of the Second World War, we still live in a world where organized crime, civil conflicts, and wars between states kill many every day. I wrote yesterday, in part, about how I think we should all honestly admit that the multi-front war in the Middle East – interconnected conflicts in Libya, Syria and Iraq, and Yemen with participants and bankrollers from overseas – is the Third World War.

Today's American face of conservatism, reaction,
and racism.

Slowly working on a giant book of philosophy about political and social revolution means I have to confront the problem of justifying violence. My ultimate conclusion will be very anti-violence and anti-war, but I know I’ll have to accept that there’ll inevitably be some violence in any serious political change. 

Think about the most obvious example, given events of the last week in Charleston. #BlackLivesMatter and the affiliated mass protests in Ferguson, New York City, Boston, Cleveland, and elsewhere throughout North America, in the most optimistic case, can radically transform society in the United States. 

If American society truly learns the lessons that these demonstrations and conversation offer, then the movement will have produced genuine and transformative social progress. But the cost in murdered people is already so high. One of the major questions underlying my Utopias manuscript is whether social progress is worth that violence and death, and whether a cost-benefit analysis is even appropriate. My thoughts right now on the subject are that it’s more of a perversion.

The problem of violence in social change is why I’m going back to Marinetti and the Italian Futurists as a central philosophical source. They express an admirable energy to smash the conservative, mothballed social structure and elite that hold society back. Read Marinetti’s manifestos, and you can see clearly why I call the Futurists proto-punks.

But their ideology is terrifying. It calls for humanity and the entire Earth to be remade through industrial technology, literally the mechanization of man. It calls for the totalitarian governance of society to mobilize people for constant industrial production. A world without forests; a paved world, every road a highway. His dream of a greater Italy is an Italian colonial empire that stretches farther than the greatest reach of the Caesars’ Rome. 

Marinetti calls for permanent revolution, the constant production and flow of “courage, power, and energy” to overcome the old before they become entrenched in positions of power and calcify a culture. And his revolution is violent: bloodletting and war. It’s a combination of rebellion and patriotism, because the revolution’s purpose would be to inject your society with the courage and energy to make it a great power. 

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, another face
of conservatism, reaction, and repression sitting at
the heart of the Third World War.

Dealing with this contention will require a lot of thought about what violence can achieve, and when it’s unfortunately necessary. The only response to many of the tyrants in the Middle East, the site of the Third World War, is organized violence. Bashar Assad would never leave office through the peaceful demands of demonstrations. Same with the Saudi and Jordanian monarchy, the Hamas government of Gaza, and the repressive military dictatorship of Abdel al-Sisi in Egypt.

Yet the best hope for peace in Israel is the voice of groups like Meretz, who call for reconciliation and sacrifice in the name of building a peaceful nation of two states. They’ve chosen the most difficult path, which is also the most admirable one. 

The central theme of Utopias is the tension between violence and social revolution. How we achieve our dreams of a better world and the substance of those dreams.

• • •

Reading list, to supplement this. Hannah Arendt’s voice will be enormously important to working through this problem. After mulling over Marinetti, I realized I should look into some of the writings of Vladimir Lenin on revolution, and Mao Zedong on the concept of permanent revolution. And Alain Badiou’s elaborations on Mao’s philosophy.

Playing the ideas of Antonio Negri and Etienne Balibar off each other will be very productive too. Negri has already been very influential on my political thinking over the last few years. 

Beyond Futurism to Ecological Humanity, Research Time, 22/06/2015

This weekend, I had a sudden moment where so much of what I hated in university culture became clear, an insight where I realized that I won’t really miss working there. What I loved were the good people in that system, the friendly spirit and inquisitive minds that made them good, and the thick, constant flow of new ideas. But that spirit and atmosphere can continue in my life while I walk away from the sneering classism and hypocrisy.

So I can come back to writing about my research for my next big book, and reading Filippo Marinetti. I’ve rarely read a writer so dense – there’s so much in these quick little essays. I sometimes wonder if social media are the right places to publish incendiary manifestos today, but I feel like there are already so many that they’d be lost in the din.

Giacomo Balla's 1909 depiction
of moonlight's death at human
hands.

Here’s one idea that’s meaningful in the light of this week’s official declaration that we are now living in Earth's sixth Great Extinction. Among Marinetti’s Futurist rhetoric was the phrase “Kill the moonlight!” It referred to fellow Futurist Giacomo Balla’s painting of Alessandro Volta’s first arc lamp, its flickering explosions of electricity a violent rupture in the darkness.*

* Reading Marinetti can sometimes rub off on you, and all of a sudden every sentence you write (and sometimes say) is delivered with this weird tone of apocalyptic intensity.

Every great punk movement has a decadent society to rebel against. The actual London punk scene of the late 1970s had snooty prog rock and the rise of Thatcher. The Italian Futurists had Romantic art. A huge target of their rebellion against Romanticism was the way Romantic poets wrote such rapturous poetry about nature.

Now, this nature fetish — actually, I should say Nature fetish, because their style was so reifying that it deserved a capital letter. This Nature fetish caused enough problems of its own. When I was first researching Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity at McMaster, I discovered some essays that made a solid case that the Romantic love of nature actually helped American deforestation. 

The irony is delightful, if also incredibly depressing. Romantic poetry tended to idolize Nature as a living Eden, and often treated humanity as inherently corrupt and debased. The Christian cultural legacy was all over Romanticism, as they continued to play up the hyper-separated duality of the Fallen humanity and the pure, divine Nature. 

We were so alienated from Nature, so goes the Romantic image, that we needn’t even acknowledge it as anything we owed. So a colonial settler could cut down as much forest as needed to build his new city. Nature exists so far outside our order of being that we don’t even need to acknowledge it, except to exalt it in poetry.

Marinetti and the Futurists rebelled against Romanticism, but not the alienation of humanity from nature. They wished for a world where human technology would completely annihilate nature, like the triangular blades of artificial light pushing against the borders of night-time, overpowering the soft light of the moon. Marinetti wrote the philosophy that accompanied Balla’s painting.

I imagine that if Marinetti could have read Isaac Asimov’s descriptions of Trantor, the world that was entirely encased in an enormous, planet-wide, multi-story city, he would have wept with joy at the image.

The world of nature and humanity’s cultural worship of it, says Marinetti, was growing decadent, putrefying so that it can regenerate into a fully technological world. The triumphal new epoch of Earth would be the anthropocene. Look where that got us.

Marinetti thought that being the vanguard of pushing the world to a total embrace of technological power and innovation would introduce a glorious new era. That unrestrained development seems instead to have put us solidly in a category of greatness: as the creators of a literal planetary catastrophe. 

The real challenge is to adapt our technology so that we can keep the benefits of improved health care and nutrition, scientific investigation, communication, transportation, and media (delivered in as egalitarian a mission as possible), while leaving behind the parts of our civilization that destroy the ecologies we need to survive.

We don’t need the violent, dominating technology that was Marinetti’s reified fetish. We need a technology of negotiation and compromise. If we can even manage it.

Losing Philosophy to History, Research Time, 19/06/2015

One of the pivotal figures in the Utopias project is Filippo Marinetti, an Italian artist, poet, punk provocateur, and dedicated Fascist. Well, he was more of a dedicated fascist than a dedicated Fascist, for reasons I want to talk about today. 

Mussolini's power base wasn't just in the
totalitarian vanguard like the Futurists,
but also the military elite of Italy.

I’ve come across many conflicting accounts of just how much Marinetti supported the actual Fascist party of his country, Italy, and its dictator, Benito Mussolini. Many describe Marinetti as having been a loyal member of the Fascist party until his 1944 death. There are differences between them on the level of his dedication. 

Some describe him as a longtime propagandist, others as a supporter who fell from prominence during the Second World War thanks to his failing health, the failing military campaigns of Fascist Italy, and the paranoia of an authoritarian regime under pressures it couldn’t survive.

Doug Thompson, the translator of my Critical Writings collection of Marinetti’s essays, describes a different story. It’s a more fractious, difficult, relationship of Marinetti and the Futurist art, politics, and culture movement with Mussolini and the Fascist movement. 

It comes down to a single, simple idea. A politician, even such an authoritarian as Mussolini, can only progress through compromise and building difficult alliances. A philosopher need only depend on his own skill as a writer and the power of his concepts.

After the First World War, Marinetti grew involved with Mussolini’s Fascist party as a fellow traveller in building a political culture that would put the entire population of Italy on a constant footing for war and expansion. But for Marinetti, the total mobilization of the population would have a very specific purpose in mind. 

I find it strangely perverse to see the energy for positive social revolution – a vibrant creative spirit in expression, art, and ideas, in revolt against a staid old conservatism – channelled into the totalitarian reorganization of society. The transformative industrial technology emerging at the end of the 19th century – trains, cars, highways, the first airplanes, petroleum’s entire industrial revolution – would forge humanity into its own form. The mass man, person as cog in the machine.

It’s unnerving to understand that this terrifying ideology really existed. But it’s the same revolutionary impulse powering it. It’s a vision of a new kind of society, understanding the social, political, and technological powers that new model of life improves and makes possible. It’s the faith that this vision is superior. 

And the faith is grounded in real, material developments. It isn’t the blind faith of today’s religious right, the faith of the Christian climate change denialist, an assertion of proud ignorance. Rapid transit, mass electrification, the surge in economic productivity that did, in fact, lift literally billions from poverty took place because of the social revolution in thinking that made it possible.

If you ever wondered what punk energy looked like when
it was fascist, it looked like Filippo Marinetti, who
himself looks like a Toronto hipster.

Marinetti’s vision of politics simply said, let’s do it as fast as possible, with a violent wave of conquest that will free all people by mobilizing us as war machines. 

Yet to do it, he had to make allegiances with other powers. With people like Mussolini, whose own allies were old guard nationalists and social conservatives. Even though he adopted the Fascist banner, and Italy incubated the purest ideology of global totalitarianism, Mussolini could never have fully implemented mass mobilization. 

Because Marinetti’s ideas informed the dominant political movement of the time, the new imperialist movement after the First World War was totalitarian. But in the social networks of the Italian elite, not enough people could dig out of their 19th century mind-sets. The old nobility and old bourgeois were too entrenched for Marinetti’s philosophy to uproot. No concept, no matter how terrible, can directly move people who can’t think.

Mussolini built a terrifying authoritarian dictatorship, a military state whose goal was to be the new Rome. Marinetti wanted more than that, a mass mobilization so powerful that Rome itself would have been ruins compared to his triumphant Futurist Italy.

Reading Marinetti can be like staring into an abyss.

Moral Ideology II: Henry Ford, An American Totalitarian, Research Time, 19/06/2014

Continued from previous. A key feature of totalitarian politics is the horizontal enforcement of social control, when your friends, neighbours, co-workers, and family members serve the same function as the police. You can be denounced from anywhere, corrected by anyone. And because enforcement of a moral ideology can come from people in any aspect of your life, it opens up every aspect of your life for scrutiny. Morality is universal, so it should inform all your activity. The greatest sin for a moral person, after all, is hypocrisy.

These passages from The Prison Notebooks find Gramsci discussing the terror of total control rather than horizontal enforcement. I suppose the real horror-show for the latter wouldn’t come until the Cold War, when the secret police would blossom as an institution around the world. 

Until then, we have Antonio Gramsci describing the framework of total social control, particularly how some management techniques developed in the capitalist enterprises and political movements of the 1920s and 30s practice it. A disclaimer first. I do not intend to compare the people I am about to discuss to the Soviet and eastern European secret police institutions. That would be terrifying, even though these people have well-known historical reputations as America’s greatest jackasses. But one can identify the same phenomenon occurring differently in varying political and historical contexts. This is what political philosophy is all about, tracking the commonalities and divergences in human arrangements. 

Gramsci himself was a radical anti-capitalist, and much of his life was taken up with political activism whose goal was bringing about a communist revolution across Europe. Yet the fascist police institutions that ultimately killed him came to define the political movement in which he played such a major philosophical role. With that said . . . 

Henry Ford, forerunner of surveillance in
American private enterprise.

No model displays totalitarianism in private enterprise better than Henry Ford and the business philosophy, appropriately called Fordism, that regimented workers’ activity in the production process more than had ever become necessary. We all learned about the basic idea of Ford’s production model in grade school: concentrate the entire manufacturing process in a single massive plant, arrange the construction of goods on an assembly line where workers would perform a single basic task only. Gramsci correctly and obviously analyses this manufacturing system as making human workers into mechanisms. 

The Fordist model of production makes its workers into elements of the factory itself in ways that would not be acceptable today. Ford and his company’s agents even attempted to police the activities of workers off the job, controlling every aspect of their lives, surveilling them to make sure the only places they ever visited were their homes and the factory. The mechanistic man was to have no respite from surveillance and discipline. Workers would devote themselves to their roles in the machine, because they would be trained to embrace them. 

This is another way in which, without saying their names, Gramsci engages with the contemporaneous political philosophies of Filippo Marinetti and Ernst Jünger. Their ideas emerged in the wake of the destruction of the First World War, a post-humanist philosophy that made mechanized technology the future of humanity, whose ethical goal was purging humanity of empathy, and purging human society of nature and organic existence. This era’s philosophy of Futurism was a vision of the Machine-Man.

At the time, Ford’s control of every aspect of their workers’ lives was interpreted largely as an expression of the puritanism whose most obvious voice was prohibition. But Gramsci sees an economic motivation. Puritan activists like the radical temperance movement, whose greatest success was the nationwide prohibition of alcohol across the United States, were themselves largely motivated by Christian values of extreme moral purity. But the prohibition of alcohol is remarkably useful law for hyper-controlling businesses like Ford.

Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, capturing the essence of
the drive to make machines of men.

Workers, even at the relatively high pay scales of Ford’s plants in the context of a society with no minimum wage, were still relatively poor compared to the upper classes of the American economy. During prohibition, it was largely only these wealthy patricians who could afford black market alcohol. Working people could not gain access to any substances or activities to help them relax. 

An entirely temperate working class could never be free from discipline, and having discipline constantly enforced by the police and corporate moral guardians of your employer would eventually wear down those constraints, and workers in the Fordist system would genuinely become machines. To Be Continued . . .