Is That a Philosophical Concept or a Doctor Who Story? Research Time, 04/05/2018

As you can tell from how many of his ideas influence my own thinking, Gilles Deleuze is a major touchstone for my own writing and related work. But I’ll always be the first one to tell people that he can be a damn difficult writer in a lot of ways.

For one, he’s prolific, and doesn’t always take the time to re-introduce concepts that he uses in an earlier book before blasting into some wild application. But that’s not really the most frustrating aspect of his style – it’s more of an annoyance.

There are always more things going on in a creative work
than we can say. Good quality communication of any kind
that involves ideas absorbs us in a feedback loop of
our own creativity in thought and reflection. Attentive
thought in that cycle can create some remarkably useful
insights. But not all our insights are useful, or even
all that reasonable.

Today I want to talk about a problem with Deleuze’s approach to philosophy that’s more central to how his ideas get taken up. Paul Patton displays an excellent example in his own account and interpretation of some of Deleuze’s political ideas in his work from the early 2000s.

Patton describes a particular kind of social-political transformation as a metamorphosis machine. The roots are clear in Deleuze’s own works if you look for them, and they’re easy to find. Let’s count those down first.

Kafka is all over mid-period Deleuze. He’s the central case study in his and Guattari’s major book on the concept of the minor. What is the minor or minority? Not a literal minority, but a culture, language, and way of thinking that’s pushed away from public acceptability in its explicit expression. Cultural ideas that have to go underground, or adapt themselves to a mainstream that doesn’t always fit them.

Kafka’s Jewish identity, heritage, and seeking was pushed out of public acceptability in late imperial Austria, and later Czechoslovakia. And the Czech language itself was pushed out of public acceptability – Kafka spoke Czech as his first language, but adapted his writing to German. Those cultural and linguistic schizzes inform his work, and contribute to the subtle ways his writing destabilizes the enforced mainstream of his country.

Patton combines the power of the minor to destabilize and rupture a suppressive mainstream with the concept of the war machine – a physical social assemblage which does the same thing, but more explicitly and violently. War machines are social assemblages and forces that break the strictly policed codes, laws, and institutions of states.

They’re important things / processes to have around, considering all the horrible things state institutions can do to oppress and control people. Every authority needs some kind of check on its power so it doesn’t use all the power it has.

What I immediately thought of when I first read the phrase
"metamorphosis machine." I feel like I want to watch some of my
favourite stories from the David Tennant years of Doctor Who
again. I did enjoy that feeling of exuberance throughout Davies'
years making the show, especially in the smaller, mid-season
episodes where there was less pressure for spectacle. The
story had time to smile for us.

Here’s where we get to the problem. Although Deleuze and Guattari describe the concept of the war machine in a lot of detail in A Thousand Plateaus, the description stays at a very abstract level of thought. So it’s really tough to apply a concept so abstract without twisting it too much.

Sometimes, twisting a concept too much can have really productive results – you end up with an equally interesting and useful concept. But you can just as easily mess up your thinking and end up just plain confused. And I think that’s where Patton’s concept of the metamorphosis machine ends up.

Patton’s concept moves in the same direction as my paper about process models of activist communication. A dispersed, but mutually connected, movement of people demonstrate in their publicly-displayed spectacles and daily conversations with the public that a mainstream way of life is unjust. As people in the mainstream understand it, they change their moralities to stop excusing that injustice and help correct it.

But Patton stays himself in a very specific context, while also speaking abstractly. He frames the metamorphosis machine as an agent of change through micro-movements, like I did. But when he gets specific, he talks about overthrowing the state.

Nothing necessarily wrong with that. But the thinking that made overthrowing the state his priority was off track. See, the war machine concept in A Thousand Plateaus was described using a particular introductory framework – a nomadic army overthrowing the state.

For all the wide range of ways you can use their concepts, there will
always be some aspects of Deleuze and Guattari's work that were
very much peculiar to their own specific time and place. Their hair
alone should be sign enough of that.

Patton tied himself too much to the application that best suited the political priorities of Deleuze and Guattari’s time and place. In 1970s Paris, anti-capitalism meant aligning yourself, at least in spirit, with the communist urban guerrilla movements out to overthrow the governments of Western Europe.

In late-2010s Canada, putting yourself in the same political spirit as Deleuze and Guattari means embracing and allying yourself with movements of peaceful demonstrations that freer ways of life are possible.

Real freedom of religion, freedom to immigrate wherever you want, freedom from the cultural presumptions and hostility of systematic, atmospheric racism, freedom from the indignity of poverty and vulnerability of addiction. So you look at these oppressive structures that are matters of public belief, culture and enculturation, moralities that encourage hatred and disgust. Morality is today’s target. Maybe it’ll be more effective in building a more just society.

Given how the European communist guerrillas did, I’d say we have a pretty low bar to clear for a grade of "Has Shown Improvement."

Despotism as Over-Writing and Overriding Thought, Jamming, 31/03/2018

A couple of days ago, I finished a white paper for a Toronto-based think tank / consulting firm on democratic governance. I’m not going to get into the details of it right now, because it’s pretty dense.

Happily, the firm’s research supervisor enjoyed what I wrote and had some great recommendations for the second draft. A lot of his suggestions had to do with signposting – letting a reader know explicitly why you’re making a particular inference or reference.

If we understand the world according to only a single set of ideas,
we'll do serious injustice to people who think differently, and
impoverish our thinking and our civilization. Spirits must become
more than ideas and practices.

I always need an editor’s hand with signposting in a lot of my non-fiction work. I immerse myself so deeply in the research material and the concepts that what appears clear to me needs to be made more explicit. The connection is there – I just sometimes have to be reminded to say it blatantly. I can be too subtle for my own good when I write.

The paper explores the chaotic and dangerous nature of online social media platforms. They can encourage democratic movements – the Arab Spring, Idle No More, Stoneman Douglas – or revanchist, reactionary movements among all ideologies – the alt-Right, left-wing Putin boosting.

One of the best comments I got from my editor was that I should add, in the final section of recommendations, a brief response on whether these platforms should be nationalized to control them in the public interest.

I think this would be disastrous. Because while the rapid chaos of barely restrained social media can encourage dangerous extremism, nationalization would put media that can also encourage democratic revolution in the authoritative hands of the state.

In most of our political conversations today, talk about the danger of state authority is a libertarian idea. I take a different tack, following the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari – along with the philosophical current in which they were major players. Their conception of the state’s dangers is rooted in their concept of despotism.

As much as we fear Trumpism – and there's plenty to fear in his regime
of egotism, corruption, and validation of racism – his politics merely
makes explicit the inherent oppressive danger of state institutions.

We associate despotism typically with despots – dictators or authoritarian rulers whose power falls short of the Führer ideal, while still moving along that trajectory. But Deleuze and Guattari talk about the despotic machine – this is the state itself.

When the material power of a state institution is barely or not at all restrained, it overcodes everything in the territory it’s responsible for. What do I mean by overcoding? It’s a technical term, referring to institutions that orient more and more (and eventually all) of people’s activity to the state.

In a despotic machine, if you want to do anything in your life, you have to run that activity through some kind of state machinery. State institutions, regulations, and rules determine every aspect of life. Not simply in terms of conditions – like laws, safety or environmental rules.

I mean state institutions and machinery determine and actively shape cultural and social development. Diversity and indigeneity are wiped away by state mandates for uniformity.

Here’s a simple example. It comes from touchstones in Deleuze and Guattari’s own work. Franz Kafka was a Czech Jew living for most of his life in the Austro-Hungarian empire, whose thinking and work was informed by his sardonic attitude toward the bureaucratic drudgery of his day job, as well as his personal engagement with Jewish mysticism.

As useful as state institutions can be for supplying common goods to
huge populations, the institutions are very dangerous. They can all
too easily be used to oppress people, and force the many ways of
living across a population into a single, uniform character. That's the
power that Deleuze and Guattari called overcoding.

Kafka had a complex identity and set of ideas, whose linguistic influence was Czech, Hebrew, and Yiddish. But the language of his fiction writing and daily business life was German. This was a state imposition on his identity, which was more complex than the monarchist political morality and subtle German supremacism that the Austrian state imposed on all its citizens. It didn’t matter whether you were in Vienna, Prague, Ljubljana, or Timisoara.

Here’s a more complex example. Last year, there was a very strange court decision in British Columbia. The Ktunaxa people sued the provincial government to stop the development of a huge ski resort on their sacred mountain in the Jumbo Valley, where their religion holds that a grizzly bear spirit lives.

The court mandated that an area of the mountain be set aside from development for Ktunaxa worship. According to the laws of the state of Canada, freedom of religion requires that the Ktunaxa have a place set aside on the mountain to practice their faith.

But the Ktunaxa’s ontology of the divine has nothing to do with having a place on the mountain to worship. The mountain itself is the material manifestation of the bear spirit. So any resort development would be an act of violence against their divinity. Full stop.

Ktunaxa thinking sees the mountain as the manifestation of divinity. Canadian law sees the mountain as a place where the Ktunaxa need some accommodation to practice their religious beliefs. What is a matter of existence for the Ktunaxa is a matter of cultural practice for the Canadian state.

The court judgment couldn’t even comprehend Ktunaxa ontology, let alone acknowledge it as valid. Their entire way of existence was invalidated, overcoded by the state’s systems of meaning. That’s the despotic character of even the most democratic states.

It Is Accomplished IV: Tying Myself Up in Red Tape, Research Time, 29/09/2015

Continued from last post . . . See, this is what frustrates me about having political conversations sometimes, that a lot of the time, people think I’m one type of person when really I’m another. 

This was clearest in conversations with my old libertarian friends. I would say I’m a person of the left, and they’d talk to me as if I was a doctrinaire, state-centric socialist. But I actually think that kind of government is ridiculous. 

It stifles economic sectors that are more productive and ethical in competition under state ownership. It enables mass corruption, since the state becomes a universal monopoly that people game to advance in society. 

Brazil depicted a central character who was stuck in a
world of bureaucratic conformity, but who dreamed
of being absolutely unique.

The tradition of art from Franz Kafka’s The Castle to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil helped me form a lot of my political sensibility. I saw clear expressions of the economic and political flaws of state socialism when I studied the history of North America and Europe, and clear expressions of state socialism’s ethical flaws in films like Brazil.

So when I say that I think the post-Reagan political order needs some serious structural change if we’re really going to lift millions out of poverty (again) and start repairing our immense ecological harm (for the first time fucking ever), state-centric communism won’t be an answer.

Fukuyama makes that much clear. Mind you, he emphasizes what I think is ridiculous because he believes it and makes it the centrepiece of his conception of economic progress. Fukuyama says that human mastery over nature – his core principle of science’s unity and progress – ensures our prosperity.

This was an important element of Marx’s philosophy too. Science progresses by growing humanity’s mastery over nature, so we produce more and more from the Earth. He just considers communism the best political system for fairly distributing the bounty from our authority and control of nature.

Environmentalism – and ecological thinking more generally – shows us how dunder-headed this way of thinking really is. The last 200 years of humanity understanding “mastery” of nature as our ability to exploit it with increasingly efficient rapaciousness* hasn’t made us more powerful at all. Instead, we’re the engines of Earth’s sixth Great Extinction.

Because humanity-enabled atmospheric changes have
dried out so much of what was once lush land that
huge swaths of forest are burning down and will likely
become desert in decades. I mean, holy fuck.

* My ecological perspective (which you can read about here) is what makes reading about Fukuyama’s virtue of insatiable desire so off-putting. I’m too accustomed to the idea, which should be MORE taken for granted today, that insatiable desire is terribly destructive.

Humans need a government that guards their freedom. Democracy generally does that best. Or at least, it has the best potential. Where I differ from a liberal is how.

Robert Nozick struck such a chord in traditionalist liberal thinking because he situated his philosophy in a long-established liberal premise: people fundamentally need physical security above all else. So the primary (and it turns out, only) legitimate function of the state is to provide physical security: national military defence and domestic police. 

If the politics of my own time, the early 21st century, demonstrate anything on this matter, they at least call it into question. You can’t take seriously mass-scale domestic espionage and the inevitable disaster of anti-terrorist intervention with a military built to fight states, and say there might not be an essential problem with a state monopoly on our physical security.

Folks who worry about state socialism say that a political institution shouldn’t have a monopoly on all industry and employment. This is true. But not enough people worry about the political institutions that hold a monopoly on the use of lethal weapons and the prison system. 

I’m not going full libertarian here, but Latin Americans – even more than the most paranoid North Americans – have lived through generations of military men who think their power over the guns and prisons gives them more right to rule than civil servants and elected officials. 

The scary part for the liberal tradition – from Hobbes to Nozick – is that this conclusion can follow from having made physical security the primary purpose of the state.

Where I fall for an alternative is with social democracy. But it’s a form of social democracy that keeps the state and the military in a very subservient role. It’s my humbly radical utopia. . . . To be continued.

Franz Kafka Was a Realist Author, Research Time, 06/11/2013

One of the social movements Hannah Arendt considers a forerunner of European totalitarianism (at least in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union) was the Pan-Germanic and Pan-Slavic movements that began in the 19th century. Neither of these movements saw their most intense activity in Germany or Russia themselves, although Dostoyevsky’s Demons describes well the cartoonish character of Pan-Slavism in the Russian intelligentsia. No, the main force of these movements, where they became truly violent, was in Austria-Hungary, the central European bureaucratic empire.

One of her central critiques of these movements (aside from her analysis of their anti-Semitism and general racism) was the crudity of their nationalism. She puts this down to context. The societies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had never experienced a genuinely powerful democratic legislature. Their governance had always been through the decrees of bureaucratic state organizations. An order came and you followed it. The order didn’t have to be defended or defined in rational terms. The state and the police gave an order, and the order was carried out. It was that simple.

Arendt explains how this works with reference to Franz Kafka, particularly The Castle. This is always pitched as the story of a man who travels to a small town to be employed as a land-surveyor, but whose employment is never actually acknowledged by the authorities, and he spends the entire novel trying to book a meeting with somebody to figure out what’s going on.

But Arendt doesn’t focus on K the land-surveyor. Her brief account of what’s important in The Castle for her project focusses on the character of Olga and her family. Olga is a beautiful young woman who at one point in the recent past turned down a sexual advance from one of the rarely-seen Castle bureaucrats. As a result, her entire family became persona non grata, a condition that she and her family accepts as part of the natural order of the community. Instead of protesting the system that condemned her for corrupt purposes, Olga spends the story trying to ingratiate herself with the bureaucrats again. Their decrees are the law, simply by the fact of their announcement. 

As Arendt says, in bureaucratic governance (the domestic practice of Czarist Russia and Hapsburg Austro-Hungary, as well as the colonial practice of Britain), legislation and enforcement are the same act. The question of legitimacy doesn’t even occur in the bureaucratic framework of life. Even in our hideously compromised and corrupt governments, we at least have the process of public consideration of laws through open legislative chambers and institutions of accountability for public officials.

But this openness doesn’t exist in the corporate world, where the orders of a company’s leaders aren’t subject to the public scrutiny or consideration of employees. In the corporate framework, the authorship of a rule and the rule’s enforcement practically amount to the same act. This isn’t a problem with most corporations until they become so large as to control so much money and so many lives as to have the same practical power as some states, existing in hazy relationships with the governments of their home offices, sometimes even able to shape state legislation either through lobbying or direct intervention. And now that intelligence and military services are increasingly privatized, the public oversight that we demand of our governments isn’t really demanded of these increasingly powerful companies. At least, the demand isn’t strong enough to change the way they operate anymore.

It’s too bad Blackwater and Endgame Systems don’t have the same frivolity as my personal favourite arbitrarily operating company, A. T. & Love.