Playing Games in the Street – Free Rider! Jamming, 01/08/2018

Funny little things crop up in the small margins of a book worth reading. Distilling the core arguments of a 300-page book and juxtaposing some critical perspectives in about 3000 words, you lose some details.

Which is why I like to revisit some of those discarded but interesting points on the blog.

One of those casual moments is Sassower’s critique of the free-rider problem, which amounts to a flippant rebuke. At that moment, I cackled.

As someone who was educated for the academy in a philosophy department, such a thing is blasphemy. The Free-Rider Problem is a central example in Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy, and has gone on to become a standard model for pumping intuitions to understand moral truths.

Now that's a fare inspector who takes his job to heart.

Okay, after writing that paragraph, I’m cackling again.

See, the method of pumping hypothetical or artificial scenarios to intuit universal moral principles or foundations is utterly barmy. It presumes that every person is going to think morally in the same way you do. And that’s just not the case.

Maybe Kantian morality conforms to the intuitions of a lot of people raised in an Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture. Maybe Kant derived the principles that his philosophical reasoning justified from the mainstream culture of his time. Maybe Kant’s work was so influential that it affected the popular moral development of European and broader Western culture.

It was probably a combination of all three. But the problem with the Free Rider Problem is that it just isn’t necessarily true that it describes a problem, just because some folks who uncritically absorb individualist Christian-influenced morality or work as Kantian moral philosophers say it is.

So what is it? Someone rides a public bus without paying for a ticket.

Dear God, the terror!

Seriously, though. Analysis of the Free Rider Problem takes up a lot of space in Western moral philosophy, especially in the academy. Conceptual problems like this are a gold mine for academic philosophers – you can change your take only slightly to generate a new article for the paywalled journals with little effort, but great reward. See also, the Trolley Problem, the Gettier Case, and the Hard Problem of Consciousness.

The best buses are the ones for freedom.

The intuitive outrage at the centre of the Free Rider Problem is what you should do with the cheater on the system. As someone who benefits from a common good without directly contributing to it, he’s conceived as a cheater of the system.

A common conclusion to the Free Rider Problem is that only those who can themselves directly contribute to public goods have the right to make use of them. That sounds very fair in the abstract, but in real life, that results in actions that sound morally upright, but are in fact terribly destructive.

So if someone is too destitute to contribute directly to the upkeep of the public good, the typical conclusion to the Free Rider Problem is to deny them the right to use the system. Throw the homeless woman off the bus, even if she’s on his way to an interview about a housing opportunity. She didn’t pay her $3.25.

There’s a mainstream approach to morality that puts all evaluation of praise and blame on the isolated act of an isolated individual. Did you steal that food? Did he skip that line? Did she kill that man?

As for the approach to communitarian moral thinking that Sassower articulates when he wonders if Free Riding is even a problem? It’s empirical – you examine the situation, history, and network of causes that constitute that entire situation. It’s dynamic – you take account of how wider situations and institutions constrain and liberate potential actions.

You were hungry. Everyone was skipping the line. She was 14 years old and that man was sexually assaulting her in their house. Culpability never rests with one.

Not every $3.25 is worth a life.

What In the World Will People Think?! Research Time, 04/02/2018

When I was reading through that book of essays on Gilles Deleuze’s influences, one name struck me for an odd reason – it was totally unfamiliar to me.

Who are some of these guys?

Josef-Maria Hoëne-Wronski. Who the hell was this guy? He got a brief mention in a small corner of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze’s most dense book. But I’ve never come across him in all my research into the corners of Napoleonic-period German philosophy.

Here was his major project, in a few paragraphs.

It’s the 1780s. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason drops, and blows a lot of the intellectual scene in Germany away. It broke with long-established ways of thinking about human nature and thought, but did so by explicitly engaging with its major problems and solving them.

Naturally, Kant's solutions set up an entirely new set of problems. Wronski was a major figure in Polish mathematics and physics, so he had the knowledge base to approach many of the problems Kant’s work posed for the foundational principles of physics.

Kant’s first revolutionary book described how the structures of the mind – frameworks as simple and built into our experience as space, time, number, causality – conditioned experience. Human reason alone – as in logical reasoning – had no power to reach any foundational principle for why the frameworks of our mind were as they were.

Now, Kant would ultimately centre those principles in ethics and morality – practical reason. Wronski would move in a totally different direction – physics, particularly calculus.
• • •
Quick jump out of this to talk history. At the undergraduate level, the history of Western philosophy is usually taught as though there are clear boundaries in its development – classical, medieval, modern, critical, contemporary. 

Steve and I disagree on a lot of substantial ontological and
epistemological issues and debates. But we always have very
fruitful – or at least very entertaining – engagements and
conversations.

All too often, those boundaries settle into researchers’ thinking as they progress as a scholar and specialize. That’s why philosophical work that shows the continuity through all these breaks – the little differences and influences across what we think are distinct periods – is the most valuable history of philosophy to me.

I’m indebted to my SERRC colleague Steve Fuller for having written books that taught me so much about those continuities that our oversimplifying undergrad curriculum paints over and erases. Of all the mentors, teachers, and elders I’ve had over the years, he’s taught me the most about this.
• • •
The choice made sense to Wronski. He was a physicist who came from the German-Polish professional world, where you learned Leibniz’s calculus alongside his complex and imaginative ontologies. So intensely creative, ontologically fertile metaphysics was an ordinary part of mathematical thinking for him.

In most of our undergraduate educations in philosophy, we learn that no one thought this way after reading Kant’s Critiques. That was the long-term effect, but just because it’s happened by now, doesn’t mean that it never took a long time anyway.

Wronski may have thought little of bringing Leibniz’s multivector hybrid approaches to physics, mathematics, and ontology. But the presumption got him into trouble, costing him a job at the Marseille Observatory.

It turns out that it isn’t always acceptable to develop a complexly hybrid ontology of the origins of the universe when you’re supposed to be mapping star movements. At least not outside your lunch breaks anyway.

Who are these guys, Kemo Sabe? Another inadvisable direction.

Wronski eventually became most famous in the intellectual circles of his day as a bit of a crank. As people were abandoning the approaches of Leibniz, he was carrying them forward. As it became less acceptable to motivate philosophical and scientific work using religious and theological principles, he was discussing how mystical visions helped inspire his metaphysical work.

The first major product of this exploration was his Introduction to the Philosophy of Mathematics and Algorithmic Science. It was a massive synthesis of Leibnizian ontologies of calculus with Pythagorean numerological mysticism, all tuned to the problems of post-Kantian philosophy.

His correspondences and friendships with major figures in European mathematics like Joseph-Louis Lagrange meant that this first book was reviewed in high-rolling circles. This quickly turned into a problem for Wronski, since IPMAS was universally panned, including in the review by Lagrange.

Eventually, Wronski’s own faith in the universality of algebra and calculus ended up just as limited as the Pythagorean faith in flat-planed geometry. After ambitious mathematical papers were likewise panned, he spent the last 30 years of his life in poverty. Still grinding away at epochally-ambitious philosophy and mathematics. But fruitlessly.

Wronski’s work turned out to be a dead end. So associating him with Deleuze becomes incredibly dangerous. The insults Wronski received on his way out of intellectual prominence – mystic spewing madness and nonsense – sound very similar to the insults academician analytic philosophers spew at post-structuralist thinkers like Deleuze.

So an essay talking about the influence of such a reviled figure as Wronski on Deleuze – who is widely reviled as a charlatan in many university circles – has to be careful not to associate them too much. Lest you justify the haters.

No Rest in This World or the World to Come, Research Time, 25/01/2018

If you're wondering why the puppy is here, it'll
become important later. Right now, the puppy
wants to remind you of an old Talmudic saying
which was the closing sentence of one of
Salomon Maimon's first books.
Scholars of wisdom have no rest in this
world, or in the world to come.

You know what I love about Salomon Maimon? He was a dirty, smelly, drunk who sat in a bar for years, barely employed, pretty damn poor – but he could still get an essay out to one of the leading philosophers of the era to make an incisive critique of his work that still stands up centuries later.

Maimon was a scholar of Torah and Talmud for most of his life – teaching, writing essays on the great Jewish theologians, commentary on Kabbalah, textbooks on the Jewish religion and the Hebrew language, and works of original philosophy.

But Christian-descended people know him best for his critique of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Why his critique became so famous is actually a beautiful story.

Maimon was a fairly minor figure in German intellectual circles of the time, but knew some of the well-connected folks. Maimon knew a guy named Markus Herz, who also knew Immanuel Kant. Maimon read the Critique of Pure Reason shortly after it was published, and had some brilliant critical things of his own to say about it.

He wrote these ideas in a fairly long letter, which Herz passed along to Kant. Kant read it, and it blew him away. He publicly thanked Maimon, and praised him in public appearances as one of the only critics of his new work who was actually picking up what he was throwing down.

That any intellectual at the top of his game in creativity and public profile would do that is remarkable. That Kant would do that to a pretty obscure Jewish person – in 1780s Prussia, where Jews were pretty deeply racialized and persecuted – is a moment of ethical beauty.

I'm not exactly a Kantian, or a devotee of his philosophy. But I have a lot of praise for him as a person.

Maimon is the subject of an essay in Deleuze’s Philosophical Legacy, the book that’s been inspiring my last few posts – even the ones that got more than a little weird and creative. So what was the main idea in Maimon's thinking that could be said to have influenced Deleuze’s thinking most?

After a fashion, we can't see it if it doesn't move either.

It’s an understanding of how perception works that broke radically with what was taken for granted in the intellectual and scientific culture and knowledge base of Maimon’s time, the last decades of the 18th century.

Kant’s discussion of perception – and pretty much every philosophical and scientific discussion of perception – rested on an assumption that appears pretty common sense. Assume that you see things in the world.

I'm not making some kind of skeptical argument. I’m talking about objects. I see a tree. I see a bus. I see a field of grass. I see a fence. I see a puppy. I see a person. When I see a puppy, I immediately experience the puppy as a whole.

Each of these wholes in our perception – the puppy, the fence, the tree, the bus – is a stable identity in our experience.

Here was Maimon’s alternative. We don’t see wholes with stable, unambiguous identities. We perceieve actions, movements, fluctuations of differences, changes, that our perceptual apparatus – the sense organs and nervous system – assembles into what we perceive as objects.

A puppy comes into our room. We first perceive the puppy through changes. Where there was silence, there’s now skittering and yipping. Where there was an empty room, there’s now this beige-and-white speckled vision. A faint odour of dog breath creeps into your nose.

There isn’t just that one change. The whole scene continues to fluctuate. Barks alternate breathing, paws pound the floor in rhythm. The shape of the dog in our field of vision grows larger as it approaches. Its legs and ears flop and fly about. At every instance, we perceive changes.

Our real experience of the material world isn’t the objects in it – it’s the changes in it, the differentials, the fluxes. You look at pretty much all contemporary science of perception – with input from neurology, medicine, biology, robotics – and they’ve pretty much proven Maimon’s argument. At least in a kind of essence.

Our world is material and real, but what’s most material – most easily grasped by an organism in perception – are its changes, its movements.

Creative Energy V: Listing Some Categories, Jamming, 12/12/2017

I think I’ve at last figured out how to talk, in the fairly ordinary language of my blog, about the most intense kind of creativity in philosophical thinking and discourse. I had to talk around it for a while first – getting a sense of what it wasn’t before I could wrap my tongue around the idea.

When I was re-reading What Is Philosophy? I could understand the idea well. But I couldn’t just repeat Deleuze’s lines about catching hold of chaos. I wanted to take what, in his language, remains really weird, and make it more broadly understandable.

To catch hold of chaos and ride it as long as you can. That's what it
means to create at the speed of thought.

So let’s list what we’ve got here.

D) Your work becomes an object of historical study.

C) Other people pick up your concepts and elaborate them into more complex, versatile, multifaceted ideas and problem spaces – or else they devolve into sniping and arguing over each other’s interpretations.

B) Actively applying your novel logic of thought in more specific problems, or to issues in different disciplinary discourses.

A) Developing an entirely new logic of thought in the thinking, blurring the distinction in your thought between your own acts of thinking and the movement of the new logic itself.

Qualifier. When I say the phrase, ‘logic of thought,’ I’m not necessarily talking about a new symbolic logic.* I’m talking about inference in general, how you move from one idea to another. So a new logic of thought is a new way to infer from one idea to another, leading you to construct entirely new concepts to suit those new kinds of inference.

* But developing symbolic logics can be one way, among many, to develop a new logic of thought. Look at Saul Kripke or Graham Priest for examples.

My first education in philosophy, at Memorial
University's philosophy department in the mid-
2000s, had a very Kantian framework, simply
because there were so many Kant specialists
and Kant fans in the department at the time. It
didn't make me a Kantian, but I think the
influence is pretty clear in how I use the word
'understanding' on the blog and in my other
essays.
Also, if you want a print of this cartoon, or
any other funny pictures of great thinkers,
it's by Gary Brown.

Let’s go back to that example of Kant’s thought. After all, he’s a famous thinker in the Western tradition of philosophy, who also embodies very distinctly each category of how creativity begins and is received in philosophy.

Example of (D). Read any essay or book discussing Kant’s development as a thinker, or explaining his philosophical ideas and concepts.

Example of (C) – the bad kind. Go to a conference of tenured or tenure-seeking Kant scholars and listen to them talk to each other. It’s infuriating. “I’m right!” “No, I’m right!” “No, you’re both wrong! But I’m wrong too!”

Example of (C) – the good kind. Books and essays that adapt Kant’s ideas to contemporary problems in morality, politics, and science. They don’t even have to reference or quote Kant in any detailed sense – simply demonstrate your skills at applying the concepts.

Example of (C) – the best kind. Use Kant’s concepts as a launching point or components for your own attempt to build a new logic of thought. Think of the Kantian components of John Rawls’ liberalism, or Hannah Arendt’s fascinating spin on the Critique of Judgement that informs her own departure into a new language of political thinking.

Example of (B). Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals. Kant applies the concepts he developed in the Critique of Practical Reason to pretty much every moral question that mattered to Prussians in the 1790s.

Also, think about the later chapters of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, where he applies the concepts he developed in the first half of the book to the major debates of political and social philosophy in the 1970s.

Example of (A). Kant’s three Critiques. The concepts of empiricism, mind as a framework for understanding experience and empirically limited reason in the Critique of Pure Reason. The postulates and machine of universal moral reasoning in the Critique of Practical Reason. The positive account of empiricism and as-if concepts in the Critique of Judgment.

So we have our examples. Now what is actually happening in the (A) mode of philosophical thinking? This is where things can get super-trippy.

Creative Energy IV: Becoming Thought or Thinking, Research Time, 11/12/2017

I've talked about what it means for a philosopher to become an adjective or a noun. That’s a matter of social reception – how is your work received by those who study and continue your tradition.

That’s one aspect of what Gilles Deleuze calls the conceptual persona – what a thinker becomes in the tradition through his influence. It’s sometimes hard to get past this, because the whole field of influence includes how we’re taught about a thinker.

How they’re presented in class – Analytic or Continental? Rationalist or Empiricist? Liberal or Communitarian? – is part of that influence. But that influence also happens outside universities, through the general influence their ideas have had on everyday discourse.

To be most human, we have to be the most rational. Another twist on the
old definition from Aristotle, the rational animal? Ten Thousand Doctoral
Theses have been written on the subject. Do we need to prove it? Or
simply note the similarity of the ideas, and move on to more
important things.
Image by Renee Bolinger

One of the major ideas in contemporary extreme nationalism, especially its libertarian streak, is cultural marxism. This is their label for the common features of all progressive ideologies. It’s based on Andrew Breitbart having a very strange reading of Theodor Adorno.

That’s how we’re taught. If I want to dig into the heart of Deleuze’s idea – the conceptual persona – here’s a question I should ask. Having figured out their own core concepts, how did a great thinker use them?

Example. When did Kant become a Kantian? When he wrote The Metaphysics of Morals. That’s clear enough to me. The process goes like this.

In 1785, he publishes The Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals. It lays out in really simple language* the basic guiding principles he’ll use to build a comprehensive set of moral laws for his society. The moral imperatives of reason, which we have a duty to follow wherever they lead us in life – because reason is the highest human power.

* Compared to the Critique of Pure Reason anyway.

Three years later, he drops the Critique of Practical Reason, in 1788. It’s the shortest of all the Critiques, but incredibly dense. The entire book is, as far as this example is concerned, a single argument that the basic laws of human reason, expressed in the most abstract moral context,** describes a universal moral imperative.

** Or maybe call it a plane?

What did I just say? The argument is that we know there’s a moral law, and reason is how we deduce it. Reason, like Kant said in 1781’s Critique of Pure Reason, can’t apply to understanding how the world works because the physical world doesn’t run according to laws of logical deduction.***

I don't know how much I'll include of
these examples in the Utopias text. Kant,
for all the solemnity of his style, gets so
many academicians riled up when you talk
about him. It's like the community of
academics can't deal with people
speaking off the cuff about the ideas
you've spent your careers studying.
Now that I put it that way, I think I
finally see where they're coming
from.

*** The most TL;DR sentence I think I’ve ever written.

But morality works according to laws, Kant says. Let’s build a concept of moral law where the logical operations of reason show what actions you should do – show you your duty.

The Metaphysics of Morals is Kant, at extreme length, applying the duty of reason every moral law he could identify – from murder and lying through marriage and masturbation. It takes him nearly a decade to pound this one out.

So the project’s introduction is in 1785, he lays out the key principles in 1788, then spends – on and off – until 1797 on a massive application of those principles.

In 1785, the Groundwork was released to help create a few Kantians in the world. In 1788, Kant releases a work of profound and complex philosophy – Kant the person becoming Kant the philosopher. Then in 1797, Kant becomes a Kantian.

As a Kantian, Kant knew his own concepts better than anyone, so could apply them most faithfully and rigorously. In that, he was speaking through his conceptual persona – he was at the smallest possible remove from Kant as conceptual persona.

Most Kantians – all the ones who weren’t Kant – could be as rigorous as they wanted, but they’d inevitably put their own spin on becoming a Kantian. To be a Kantian is to think with the conceptual persona Kant created.

Hans is becoming a Kantian philosopher. Apply the machinery of Kant’s concepts to your own thinking and investigations – let the concepts he established become the framework of your thought. That’s what it is to adopt a conceptual persona.

How is a conceptual persona created in the first place? My next example will be about what Kant was doing in 1788.

Creative Energy II: When a Voice Speaks You, Research Time, 07/12/2017

Sorry for not having uploaded a post earlier today. I didn’t have time to write one because I was too busy writing. I’m working on my own piece in reply to a debate unfolding at the Reply Collective over the nature of the social. It might provide the discussion a new kick of energy to explore some intriguing theoretical territory.

I’m also fully prepared for my contribution to result in puzzled looks and scratching heads. My philosophical work has inspired both of those reactions in more or less equal proportions for as long as I’ve been in the field.

As it is, some more reflections on Deleuze’s philosophy (and meta-philosophy) today.
• • •
So about those incredibly difficult ideas. Tuesday’s post ended with a description of a type of inadequate philosopher – an inadequate thinker, really.

Call such a person a Master Debater.

There are few things more obnoxious than a self-declared Master
Debater. Yes, I know he'd say that's not an argument. And my response
would be to remind him that I never intended to make an argument.
My intention was to insult him.

I’ve written about these types of people before, in a post that remains one of my most popular. I think it’s because I very accurately described the essence of a specific type of extremely annoying person. These days, such a person can also be quite dangerous politically.

If someone takes to heart that the primary purpose of philosophical reasoning is critiquing and evaluating arguments, then he’s reduced all the world’s traditions of philosophy to a debate club about some of the weirdest ideas in the world.

Example. You ask whether Kant’s arguments for the specific limits he describes on legitimate human thought are logically valid, or look for critical or knockdown counter-arguments.

There are aesthetic aspects of philosophical thinking too, where you study the concepts and ideas of philosophical greats as creative artworks. This is the best approach to being a historian of philosophy – your methods carefully read philosophical texts to understand precisely their concepts.

Problem is, historians of philosophy tend to think that there’s only one true reading of a philosophical text or great figure. Or at least, that’s how much their papers tend to snipe at each other’s interpretations.

Example. Describe in detail the conception of the human mind that Kant develops in his Critical period.

Becoming-Cosmos

Trying to become a primary literature philosopher is a different kind of process entirely. This is where the artistic meets the practical – you’re developing frameworks of thought to interpret and understand the world from mundane human experience to the fundamental nature of the cosmos. What would you call such a person?

Let’s start with that idea, person. A person is an individual sapient creature. Most of the people we know are humans. A historian isn’t a historian all the time – sometimes she’s a cook, an athlete, or a daughter. Likewise, an obnoxious philosophical debater isn’t an obnoxious debater all the time – sometimes, he’s a dog owner, a father, a lawyer.

He’s always obnoxious, but that’s another matter.

When these people start on their historical research projects, or launch into a debate, they’re adopting a persona – the historian of philosophy, the master debater. Likewise, the developer of philosophical concepts adopts a persona too, the philosopher.

Philosophy, says Deleuze, creates a particular kind of persona, though. A feedback loop starts to develop between the philosopher and her concepts. Immanuel Kant the professor and long-distance power-walker were ordinary personae. But philosophically, the concepts Kant later developed would influence his own thinking.

Not necessarily like an inference early in an argument or a logical proof would influence a later conclusion. When you develop a framework for thought, you begin to use that framework in your own thinking, analyzing its details by developing new aspects and applications.

Maybe you begin to see your own framework for thought through that framework itself. Maybe the wider application brings new additions and complexities to the simpler way of thinking that began the whole enterprise.

Example. The average philosophical reader in the 1780s and 90s couldn’t have foreseen a work like the Critique of Judgment coming based on the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant couldn’t either.

But thinking from the new perspective Kant developed, he wasn’t an ordinary philosopher anymore. He’d become the first Kantian too. Think on that for a day (or two).

Making a Tradition of Yourself, Composing, 26/01/2017

There’s plenty I find really fruitful for political and moral philosophy in Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem. I’m not even really sure where to start.

Most obvious at the moment are the political principles. Right now, in my research for Utopias, I’m looking in classical eras for theoretical resources. Drawing an inheritance of concepts for my own work that sits a little to the side of the typical mainstream.

The history of human ideas is a tangled, living library. The artist has
some very nice sci-fi landscapes.

A typical approach that a lot of philosophers have when they tackle current political problems, is to draw on the concepts of figures from farther back in history.

For instance, you want to understand the roiling, chaotic, frightening political turmoil of contemporary America under the Trump Presidency. Excellent – You’re not the only one. So you go to the source that may inspire your own thinking, or which has an immense influence in the field you work most in.

One of the first go-to figures is Immanuel Kant – alongside Aristotle, probably the most fundamental fulcrum in Western philosophy’s development. Also known for a substantial, and equally influential approach to moral and political thought. Why not start there? It’s obvious, isn’t it?

So you try to understand this intense problem in contemporary politics through the conceptual machinery in this noteworthy philosopher. Excellent – I hope we can learn a lot.

But I have my suspicions. The problem with returning to mainstream texts in the tradition is precisely that they’re mainstream. Now, I’m not about to become some kind of hipster of the history of philosophy.* But a suspicion about the relation between the widely-known ideas of a widely-known text, and the currents of wider culture.

* Not to say that I’ve never been one myself. Even a little.

A philosophical concept doesn’t become massively influential without having touched on some important aspect of its time – culturally and politically. It’s in dialogue with the world around it, influencing that world, and being influenced by it. So a concept that hits it big expresses a cultural theme that many disparate events seem to express as well.

For example, when I went back to Kant, I didn’t necessarily go back to his most typical ideas for moral and ethical thinking – the categorical imperative, what’s broadly called deontology.

For one thing, it might end up being bad history – Kant himself wouldn’t necessarily have been a Kantian, and might not even have considered himself a deontologist about morality.

But as far as I’m concerned, I wanted to find a few different ideas because I wanted to find a counterweight to the mainstream. The problem with concepts that connect sharply with mainstream thinking is this – What if the mainstream is the problem?

If you're wondering whether it's ethically right to punch Nazis, the
answer is a resounding yes. 1) Because alt-right goons threaten and
harass people continually themselves, and 2) Those who want to
destroy democracy must not be given a democratic platform if
that democracy is to survive their assault on it.

What if you’re trying to work out some concepts, ideas, and strategies for critiquing the mainstream? If your point is to find alternatives to a mainstream that isn’t going in good directions. That might be heading for violence on very large scales.

Violence for which concepts of nationhood, belonging, and ethnic-cultural conformity provide very explicit motives. So when I find a lot of the groundwork for this thinking in the presumptions and framework principles of how Kant writes about politics, I’m going to find my inspirations in different places.

The historical aspects of Utopias – at least its explicitly political sections – will go through two parallel routes. On the one hand, there’s sketching the origin of dangerous conceptions of race, ethnicity, state power, and the hierarchy of peoples, which lie at the heart of the terrifying disasters of Western history.

On the other hand, there’s the more important history that I’ll be making. Plucking concepts and thinkers that have offered alternatives to these mainstream ideas. They might not have been picked up at the time, but maybe they can provide some ideas and lessons for the concepts needed for our era.

I’m not making a point that this counter-tradition is an explicit project unfolding throughout history. I don’t know if Antonios Negri or Gramsci drew on Mendelssohn’s thought or Jerusalem in particular. And for how I’m approaching history, I don’t have to care. I’m not doing a scholarly history here. I’m using history to help me through a contemporary problem.

When Utopias gets into history, I won’t be commenting on an already-existing tradition. I’ll be weaving a tradition out of my own inheritance of ideas.

When the Imaginary Is Real, Composing, 18/01/2017

Social contract stuff again today. Because the whole concept of the social contract has been at the centre of Western political theory for literally hundreds of years. As a popular idea, it informs the very act of writing states’ constitutions.

As annoying and constraining the concept can be, it’s not going away, and anyone who wants to write foundational political theory has to grapple with it.

Here’s a common stereotypical way* to describe a social contract: as a thought experiment. “We all know that such a moment could never have existed. But if all the members of a society could have gathered to decide among themselves how they’d live, they would decide that . . .”

* You know where you can find the best examples of sadly common lazy stereotypes about how to describe philosophy? Look up a kind-of-shit Introduction to Philosophy textbook.

But here’s a problem with that image of the social contract concept as a thought experiment. It doesn’t really make clear why we would make the experiment in the first place.

Social contract thought experiments are ostensibly about discovering the fundamental relationships and concerns of society. Depending on the emphasis, it tends either to security (so you lean Hobbes) or productivity in community (so you lean Rousseau).

Yet it rarely works as a means to discover a real essence of politics. It’s an argumentative demonstration, but as an argument, it’s strictly rhetoric. If you’re interested in building a vision of society as fundamentally about mutual security, you’ll work through a social contract experiment that makes it so. Same goes for whatever set of values you want to argue is paramount in society.

That's not to say that social contract thought experiments are useless or poor philosophy. They’re actually great philosophy, but not because they reveal some real essence of society. It’s because thinking through them is an engine of concepts and ideas about fundamental issues of social life and human nature.

You don’t want to get to a right answer that’s so clearly correct that it shuts everyone up and they just memorize it as the perfect answer to the question. You want the best way to encourage thinking.

Now here’s how Immanuel Kant lays it out. He turns it into an example of a technical term in his complex, carefully designed ontology of the human subject – an ideal of pure reason.

How an “ideal of pure reason” works – it’s a framework principle of thought itself. Literally a regulation for our minds. So while it's an imaginary scenario, it's a real part of the human mind and subject.

So what kind of thought does thinking through a social contract argument facilitate? For Kant, it’s the thought of governors themselves – heads of state, politicians, functionaries, legislators, parliamentarians.

By focussing their minds on the fundamental questions of what brings people together in a society, leaders will create laws, regulations, and institutions for their own societies that align with the values and best interests of their own people.

As Kant puts it, they’ll write laws to which every citizen would consent if given the opportunity – just like in the image of writing the social contract in the first place.

There are some limitations to this. But I’ll get into those tomorrow.

Patriotism and the Nation, Composing, 13/01/2017

So here’s a preliminary outline of how the argument I laid out the other day about patriotism will play out in the arguments of Utopias.

This is the conception of patriotism as it was originally developed – a concept of democratic revolution. It’s the notion that ordinary people could mature and progress politically, socially, and morally, enough to take responsibility for running the country.

Patriotic politics was a democratic response to the mainstream of central Europe’s approach to governance in Immanuel Kant’s time – paternalism, where the only bulwark against chaos was the authoritarian rule of a monarch and the noble classes that surrounded him.

It's easy when you're an absolute monarch to think the whole country
revolves around you. Mainly because, institutionally, it does.
Doesn't necessarily make for the most well-rounded people.

The ideal of patriotism was the ideal of the French Revolution, which loomed large in Kant’s political imaginary. This despite Kant arguing explicitly against the overthrow of any constitution, ruler, or sovereign institution in his “Theory and Practice” essay.

Because the core idea of the French Revolution was that the king, despite his position and the ontological conception of the crown as sovereign, was actually immature, self-interested, blinkered, and blind to the real concerns of the country’s people. And the people had a better conception of what their country needed than the king.

For the first time in continental European history since the beginning of the centralized state, a sudden and massive institutional change took place, based on the notion that the people could govern better than the monarch.

And that popular practical knowledge justified the replacement of the monarch. More incredible, that transformation took place in France, which was the largest, most centralized monarchist power in continental Europe.

Kant himself straddled the two eras as a thinker, since he was already an old man when the French Revolution began playing out. But this idea of the people’s maturity to be free was much more influential on German thinkers of the following generation: George Hegel, Johann Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, Novalis, and those who followed them.

But now, a new political problem began playing out in Western society: Who were the people of a country?

In a political context of absolute monarchy, this question makes no sense. The country was defined through the person of the crown – the people of a country were the subjects of the crown.

The only power for which a monarch is fit, is symbolic power. Only
when they have no real material mastery of the government and no
truly absurd or exploitive privileges, can a heredity monarch be more
likely to accept the responsibilities of the throne. Good series, too.

Being its subjects separated them from that crown – not just a difference in social hierarchy, but a difference in being, in essence. The people and the crown were different orders of being. The people’s national revolution in 1789 changed all that.

Popular sovereignty means that the people and the crown are the same. Just like it says on the tin, the people are sovereign. But now you have to figure out who the people are.

Kant’s political writings refer to the citizens as the sovereign people. But citizenship alone is more than just a matter of who holds papers for the state – who’s registered with the passports, the birth certificates, and other citizenship documents at the relevant government ministry. That’s the factual question of citizenship.

It isn’t the moral question of citizenship. That’s not just about who happens to have citizenship of a country, but who should have citizenship of a country. Not the citizens as they are, but the body of rightful citizens. The people who can unify their political and social desires into a popular general will that shapes institutional structures and governmental norms.

There can be many possible answers to this. But the answer that quickly came to predominate in European philosophy was the nation – that concept unified ethnicity, linguistic community, cultural mores, and religious heritage into a single, unified essence for each state.

This is the philosophical and political moment when the concept of nationalism came to dominate Western thought. It would not end well.

When Patriotism Was Liberation, Research Time, 11/01/2017

If you were to take Immanuel Kant’s political ideas with the spin I put on them yesterday, he’d be a guide to liberation and peace. In many ways, he still is. But there are some important aspects of his thinking the prevent people today from adopting his ideas as if we were simple Kantians.

I don’t just mean the huge number of possible interpretations that the term ‘Kantian’ includes. There’s so much diversity of thought in the umbrella of Kant’s influence – even among the thinkers who consider themselves loyal to him – that the term is at best a general description of a few key tendencies.

No, I’m talking about something less to do with the history of philosophy (or philosophical history) and just plain history.

For all the high-horse talk that academic philosophers can sometimes spout about the universal nature of their questions, how we engage those universal human questions changes with the context of our eras. Kant is no exception.

The best example I can think of right now* is the label he gives to that society of free people. Yesterday, I described Kant’s vision of a free society – a society of people who exercise their freedom by safeguarding and protecting the freedoms of everyone else. But I didn’t give Kant’s name for it.

* Because I literally read it three days ago.

He called it “the patriotic state.”

For someone reading this in 2017, that is a mind-fuck. When I hear the word ‘patriotic,’ I typically conjure up images of incredible conservatism. I remember my first years as a young adult, watching American political leaders and ordinary people quashing dissent and even mild critique of W and his clique in the name of patriotism.

Patriotism – as a word – I hear as a clarion call to conformity, to silence, to obedience. In 2017, the word ‘patriotism’ has more connotations of authoritarianism and even political violence than it does freedom. Think of the right-wing media jerks who laugh with glee when they hear of protestors beaten in the streets. That's what they get for their lack of patriotism.

Yet in 1792, patriotism meant freedom. In fact, it was dangerous. Kant’s own writings faced censorship by the government of his country Prussia. He’d written essays that took years to see the light of day because his state authorities deemed them unsuitable dissent.

When Kant called his vision of a society of universal mutual responsibility the patriotic state, he contrasted it with the paternalistic state. Paternalism was the ideology of central Europe’s kings and princes.

King Frederick Wilhelm II of Prussia, Kant's king.

The royalty that ruled because they saw themselves as the only class of people capable of ruling the disorganized masses. Ordinary people – so says paternalistic, monarchist ideology – are stupid, impulsive, permanent children who need a strong authority to guide them to proper behaviour.

Paternalism is the political order of obedience, hierarchy, and authoritarianism. The King is the stern father, and the police forces are his rod bringing necessary discipline to his children – the subjects – so that they will obey and do right.

Kant’s vision of patriotism reflects the popular understanding of the idea as it arose in the French Revolution of 1789. It was the idea that the ordinary people of a society really could take a leadership position. That they could participate in the institutions of their state in ways other than the chaos of greed and unrestrained desire.

Kant’s entire political philosophy is based on the notion that the masses can become mature, can be masters of their state, government, and society. That they can achieve the maturity to carry their societies along an arc of continuing moral progress. And that they need only the regulation of their own reason and intelligence to do it.

It turns the logic of paternalism on its head, while accepting some of its basic language. If the paternalists believed the people to be continual children, Kant and the patriots would say – No, everyone can grow up.

Everyone can be reasonable. That principle is the foundation of his philosophical commitment to democracy, even as he lived in one of the most strict monarchies of central Europe.

But he spoke language that was very much of his own time, that expressed the conflicts of his own society – between the paternalist authority of monarchy and the universal freedom of patriotic republicanism.

That authoritarian forces could, even after many years, capture the language of patriotism for their own ends speaks to the tenacity of the human lust for power and control. We can never stop being vigilant. No victory is ever permanent or assured.

Rights Are What We Give – Not What We Take, Research Time, 10/01/2017

Been going through an old essay of Immanuel Kant lately that doesn’t get much attention among the basic intros to his work. Like a lot of sentences Kant writes, the title is very long: “On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory, But It Is of No Use in Practice.”

It’s taught enough in introductions to Kant’s political and moral thought that it’s included in the Cambridge Practical Philosophy collection of his work. But it’s definitely outside the usual Kant undergrad canon of the first two Critiques and the Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals.

Part of what inspired me to write this post was reading about the
harassment journalist Lauren Duca recently endured from the famous
pharma troll Martin Shkreli, who plastered his Twitter account with
images like this one – of his head photoshopped onto Duca's husband
– when she told him to get fucked after he asked her to be his date to
Donald Trump's inauguration party. Shkreli ended up banned (at least
for now) from Twitter over what he called "just a collage."

Hell, in my experience, I consider myself lucky to have even been offered to read the Critique of Practical Reason in my own undergrad years.

But “Correct in Theory” has some very useful ideas for today’s increasingly extreme politics. Particularly the contemporary defence of bullying and harassment as free speech.

I'm not going to pussyfoot around my own stance on the issue. The notion that all speech – including harassment mobs, threats, and cyberstalking like doxxing – is protected by our values of free expression is a perversion of the entire liberal tradition.

This concept of freedom of speech as the entitlement to say whatever you want to whoever you want, with any attempt to make you go away as an act of censorship, is a distinctly contemporary creation. And it’s a creation of bubbles of self-entitled jerks in toxic online communities like particular Reddit boards, decent chunks of 4Chan, and pretty much all of 8Chan.

As a concept, it’s the notion that a freedom is a personal empowerment. That a right is a protection for the exercise of your power, whose only restraints are what you choose to impose on yourself. It’s a purely individualist way of thinking about rights – my right to do this.

So here’s an old, authoritative, dead white man for the misogynist mobs of the internet to deal with. Immanuel Kant writes,

“Right is the limitation of the freedom of each to the condition of its harmony with the freedom of everyone.”

Right, in other words, is bound up with limits. Despite the fantasies of the most individualistic minds and philosophies, humans are social creatures.

Once again, I turn to the words of Larry David and the voice of George
Costanza for the wisdom that so many of us so often forget.

We are living in a society. So the freedoms we need also come with obligations. Our freedom to speak our minds and opinions has to be tempered with the need for social harmony – not to harm our fellow people, whether by insult, violation of privacy, or disturbing harassment.

Yet that twinning of right and obligation doesn’t even get Kant’s idea quite right. He doesn’t say our rights should be limited by our obligations to our fellows – he says our rights are those limitations.

Our rights don’t come from our assertion as individuals. They are our stepping back from other individuals so that they have the space to live freely themselves.

We don’t create spheres of personal freedom with loud, bold assertions. We don’t beat on our chests like a stereotypical ape to make our rights clear. Our rights only come into being when we let other exercise their rights.

So the goal of political morality in this perspective isn’t encouraging loud, grandstanding, chest-puffing, “I do this to you because I have the right!” Right is the creation and maintenance of social harmony through each of our conscience and choice.

A society of free people is therefore a society of people who look out for each other, who run our institutions and act in everyday life to safeguard the freedom of everyone else.

I shouldn’t have to argue this like it’s some radical new idea. That quote came from an essay that is literally 224 years old!

Yet in our bubbles of self-entitlement, we’ve forgotten this powerful idea.

Classical Liberal Metaphysics, Research Time, 05/01/2017

So I cracked open the old Kant again. This is what you’ve done to me, Utopias manuscript research.

Not that I don’t enjoy reading it. That old collection of Kant’s moral and political philosophy books and essays is a beautiful mixtape of ideas and arguments.* I don’t really care that the language sounds dry. It’s conceptually rich. Nerd, I know.

* The Cambridge Edition Practical Philosophy, translated and edited by Mary Gregor.

The kind of chemistry that was happening in Kant's age, at least
symbolically speaking.

I just had a brief look today at a small essay that Gregor included at the very start. Just a book review, but it illustrates the intellectual context Kant was writing in. And it gives a clue of how the way people thought about the world in general affected how they thought about morals and politics.

Kant is one of the foundational writers of philosophical liberalism in its classic apex. So the ideas generally in the air of the late 18th century shaped the democratic philosophy that emerged.

A core idea – and one that animated Kant’s entire project in moral philosophy – is that causation is the same as necessity. If there was any cause to an action, then that action was necessary and could not have been otherwise.

For morality to function, human behaviour had to be an exemption from this otherwise universal law of strict causal necessity.

Kant developed the best ontological case for that exemption. One that didn’t rely on postulating a special case like “vital force” or “divine essence.” That just presumed what you were trying to prove, but gave it a different name.

Kant made the exemption from necessity on the terms of causal necessity. He gave in on every conclusion that humanity was a part of nature and that nature moved entirely by causal necessity. He asked what we’d have to do in going about our everyday thinking in our ordinary lives.

The Western image of nature in the time of Europe's industrial
revolution was as a clockwork mechanism – precise and unvarying
in all its movements.

We decide. We consider alternatives. We choose. In the rolling phenomena of everyday life, he found the exemption from nature’s strict causal necessity – regular old thinking.

That’s why we remember him as one of the most creative philosophers in the whole Western tradition.

But he only did it because everyone else writing about nature as strict causal necessity adopted a boring fatalism that not only contradicted the validity of morality, but rendered much of everyday human thought utterly silly. Why bother even thinking as if we had choice? Just accept that our wills are passive mechanisms entirely determined by the causes of our actions.

Liberalism was born in a moment when – speaking of ontology, the nature of the world itself – there was a stark conflict between moral responsibility and the belief in ethical progress on one hand, and on the other, an image of humanity as a clockwork robot with delusions of grandeur.

Freedom was under threat in scientific and metaphysical discourse. The industrial revolution was beginning – a transformative shift in technology made possible in part by our powers to use fairly simple mathematics to engineer complex, precisely moving machines.

Too often, defences of human freedom against allegations of our
necessity just repeated the dogma of belief in a vital force or divine
essence in humanity. The dominant Christian morality of Europe at the
time – believed by the masses and enforced by powerful state
governments – already made humanity a unique exemption from
the world. We were more like God than natural creatures, since God
made us free to choose our actions.

There was no choice in nature, only precise relationships, reactions, and transformations. A particular quantity of water became steam at this exact rate under this particular temperature and pressure. No variance. No exemption.

All signs in biology pointed to the human body having basically the same mechanisms and organs as other natural animals. So if humanity was a natural creation, it would move with this same lack of variance. Pure necessity.

Freedom under threat from a totalitarianism of ontology.

Now, contemporary science accepts way more complexity in the world than these simple relationships you can describe in such simple mathematics as Pressure times Volume over Temperature. PV/T. Most real systems – anything more complex than those 18th century lab conditions – require non-linear mathematics to describe them.

These are mathematics without single solutions – they only give ranges of possibility. The more physical variations possible in a system, the more possible solutions any mathematics describing them will have. And the more sensitive those systems will be to wild transformation from generally innocuous changes.

Freedom is a matter of ranges and limits. We know this now. But the people who were first developing liberal philosophy – the political thought of absolute freedom – did not.

The Copernican Revolution Again, A History Boy, 06/04/2016

Yesterday at Adam Riggio Writes:

Politics can’t be only about each of us and the proper boundaries of our individuality, of the realm proper to ourselves, anymore.
Coming to grips with the nature of globalized society and economy would have the same social shock – and similarly transform how we conceive of ourselves and the world – as the Copernican Revolution. A Copernican Revolution for our entire self-conception.
Where have I heard that before?

What came first – the metaphor or the idea? At minimum, I got a bachelor’s degree in philosophy ten years ago, and I paid enough attention to have read Immanuel Kant. He brought that metaphor of the Copernican Revolution for thought into the tradition. And you can’t make that metaphor anymore without invoking him.

"The spectacle of the Tartuffery of old Kant,
equally stiff and decent, with which he entices
us into the dialectic by-ways that lead (more
correctly mislead) to his "categorical
imperative" – makes us fastidious ones smile,
we who find no small amusement in spying out
the subtle tricks of old moralists and ethical
preachers." – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond
Good and Evil.

Which stinks, because very little about Utopias will have to do with Kant, or pay much fealty to him. It shows how much my own position has changed since my younger days. I first got into philosophy taking courses in a department with a higher concentration and percentage of Kantians than I think exists at any other university in Canada.

If we go by the simple expectation that your first teachers determine your perspective and priorities, I should be a pretty dedicated (if not necessarily very orthodox) Kantian. 

But Utopias is deeply influenced by Antonio Negri and Henri Bergson, and Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity’s main ancestors are Arne Næss, Aldo Leopold, Félix Guattari, and Gilles Deleuze. So you can tell that I’m not all that into Kant anymore. 

So what’s going on? Why would a metaphor so important to the Kantian project arise spontaneously* from my reflecting on the egotism of liberal individualist political thinking?

* And it seriously was spontaneous! I wasn’t even thinking about Kant at all when I described human self-centredness with a metaphor of Ptolemy’s Earth-centric cosmology. I was searching only for a cosmic metaphor for how profound human selfishness and self-centredness has become.

As with any set of works that have made such a powerful break in epochs (and so many epochs) Kant’s ideas are complex as all hell. And their precise meanings are open to literally centuries worth of debates. But here’s my very simplified take on what Kant’s Copernican Revolution was about: the powers of human knowledge.

The fulcrum of Kant’s whole system was a concept that human knowledge was fundamentally limited in its powers. We could never know the true nature of God or the true meaning of the cosmos itself. Those cosmic kinds of knowledge were mediated by humanity’s positionality and the structure of our minds.

Knowing the ordinary stuff of Earth worked fine because it was enough like us, ordinary stuff of Earth that could think about stuff. But God isn’t earthly or ordinary in human experience. So the frameworks of human knowledge perverted and twisted how we understood God until it became nonsensical blend of dogmas and hallucinations. 

Only when reasoning about morality could we actually establish any genuine knowledge of the divine, because our moral reasoning is the only part of human nature that approaches divinity.

Gilles Deleuze's simple diagram of Kant's
image of human nature and knowledge. I
assure you, it's very simple. Extremely.

That's some really fast Kant and I missed a ton of the details. But that doesn’t matter. The question is, why is this nothing like the Copernican Revolution I described yesterday in humanity’s conception of its own politics?

The image of Ptolemy’s cosmology is literally the entire universe revolving around Earth. As the metaphor rolls, liberal individualism sets all of human politics revolving around the freedom of the individual from outside powers. 

But there are so many vectors of oppression that work so differently from centralized authorities trying to assert command and control over individuals.** Dealing with all those vectors in thought means reorienting our politics to view the free individual as just one type of political ideal among many that can guide us along different routes to different kinds of freedom. 

** Though it’s not like those authorities are going away anytime soon.

A map of the universe where Earth is one planet among many is more complicated than the geocentric spheres. But it’s more accurate, and a more diverse and fascinating universe to explore than a geocentric reality could ever have been.

So it goes for the more complicated political universe with many diverse, intersecting, and conflicting axes of freedom and liberation. It’s much more complex to navigate. If you thought easy answers were tough in the liberal individualist model of politics, then this model with so many different axes of freedom is even harder.

But the diversity of that complicated world is amazing. Its freedoms are more rewarding. Its lives are more complex and profound. And it is more true.

Alienating Labour III: The Better Way to Free Yourself, Research Time, 24/08/2015

So getting back to this question of labour, and what it means to be alienated from it. There have been a couple of tangents, one circumstantial, which was that I had to answer Steve’s question about my thoughts on protest politics. The other tangent, about shitty instruction in humanities, was organic to my writing, if aided by circumstance. 

And once again, Zeppo is erased. Still, it was basically
Zeppo's joke to be eraseable. I'm convinced that Zeppo
Marx was the most revolutionary comic genius
of his era. That's a blog post for another day, I think.

I realized that while I was discussing the mediocre accounts of Karl Marx’s philosophy that I learned as an undergraduate, two friends in the international Doctor Who community were having a ridiculous conversation with a Gamergater troll who, in a fit of misplaced spite, wrote them an incoherent account of Hegel’s philosophy, and why that made all left-wing politics idiotic and stupid.

You see, another thing I don’t like about the dumbed-down content of too many undergraduate courses and textbooks in the humanities is that a student doesn’t have room to experiment with the ideas. They have no opportunities to pull something strange from the text, only learn a standard, simplified reading that they can easily recall in a few sentences.

Humanities education is meant to confuse you, and its core skills should be techniques of thought and analysis to understand your way through confusion. 

So a good humanities education will expose you, not just to a single standardized reading of a historically remarkable work, but an idea that emerges from your thinking on it that will, in turn, make you think in a different way.

Frederic Jameson finds one such idea in the work of another Fred, Friedrich Schiller. In particular, Schiller developed a concept of play, from his reading of the major Critique works of Immanuel Kant. Kant developed a very regimented conception of how human faculties of reasoning were divided: there was the cognitive, the moral, and the aesthetic, which was its own category as well as a function which blurred the division of the other two.

Schiller took this a step farther, and conceived of the power of judgment as a kind of creative play. In Kant’s thinking, the cognitive is our power of recognizing the world around us, the moral is our power of knowing what’s right and acting according to it. The aesthetic is our creative faculty, how we’re able to understand the assembly of the world and change how things fit together. 

I haven't really read much of him myself,
but I do get the distinct feeling that
Friedrich Schiller was an extremely
intense person.

Jameson takes this idea as his template for what non-alienated labour would be. The standard textbook version of non-alienated labour remains reactive: workers instead of an investor class in control of production, working conditions that let people relax and breathe instead of working them to death. These are improvements, but they’re essentially the same economic structures as before, just with the beneficiaries flipped.

Instead, Jameson runs with Schiller’s idea: labour that doesn’t alienate us is creative labour, fun labour. Labour that we can own as a singular product unique to ourselves. It’s the labour of art and artisans. 

It’s a brilliant idea. It’s survived in innovative philosophical systems for the next two hundred years. Friedrich Nietzsche’s figure of the creator as a society’s genuinely revolutionary character. Frantz Fanon’s concept of the creative, multifaceted culture as the one that truly overcomes colonialism. Henri Bergson and and Gilles Deleuze’s concept of creativity and the new as progress. 

The idea that progress isn’t about perfecting some program and living in that social template forever, but about constant reinvention, and flexibility of thought and action to become wholly new kinds of being if the world demands it. 

This is the political centrepiece of my own work too, Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. If we have to answer a problem whose causes and conditions lie in our fundamental nature, then the occasion demands that we change our natures, literally change human nature, a directed, creative act of adaptation that practically amounts to revolution.

Jameson, from his Marxist orientation and intellectual history, considers different images of industry transformed into artisanal work, images that depict such a world as perfect, utopian. 

It’s not just some intellectual distraction, the idea does move people in politics. It lies under the environmentalist movement, as I mentioned, as well as Italy’s Autonomia movement, and Occupy. The idea that we could solve many of the world’s problems by reorienting our industrial processes along a model of artisanship.

Well, I’ve heard worse.