We Prohibited It Because It’s Illegal!, Research Time, 23/03/2018

I haven’t been in the best headspace this week. All I’ve managed to do is get myself together enough to work on my paying gig at the moment, that think tank paper. Even the last few blog entries were exercises in getting through a conceptual block in the paper’s main argument.

It’s been difficult for me to summon energy beyond that, which has caused me to fall behind on some other commitments. And I’m sorry – but depression can be a pain in the ass. A pain in everything else too, which is why they call it depression.

This weekend will be catchup weekend, I’m just going to get tonight’s post finished – actually a short one this time – get a solid night’s sleep, and get back on track.

A long and unnerving shadow.
Art by Marcelo Neira

My thoughts about the nature of law are kind of funny and sometimes too simple. I knew a lot of legal theorists at McMaster, but I shared very different premises about the nature of law than a lot of that research community.

I don’t see law as something you have a moral obligation to obey. I think the law done right encourages ethical activity, encourages people to treat each other with kindness as individuals and with justice through institutions.

Now, that hardly ever happens in real life, so I actually don’t think we have much obligation beyond fear of punishment to follow the law – insofar as it’s the law. If the law happens to coincide with what’s ethically right, we’re obligated morally to follow it – not because it’s the law, but because the law actually encourages justice.

Examples of laws that encourage justice – laws against theft, assault, killing, fraud; regulating acceptable practices for health care, education delivery, utilities provision, record-keeping, ecological protection.

Still rolling through some of my notes on Ian Buchanan’s book about Anti-Œdipus. Bringing Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concepts into my projects that involve politics, law, and the institutions of the state means understanding the conceptions of law that they reacted against in their own theoretical development.

What were the concepts that cast the longest shadow?

The Freudian and Lacanian models that dominated French psychiatry around the time of the Paris Uprising was probably the biggest single shadow. Except probably for Marx. That way of thinking had a disturbing concept of law.

Law, on this model, is prohibition. Law exists as one side of a yin-yang complex with desire – each can’t exist without the other. The manifestation of desire simultaneously manifests the law prohibiting it.

Desire can only develop through being continually stamped down.
What kind of political and social philosophy can come from a
premise like this?
Art by Ashley Montague

That law could be institutional if you live in a bureaucratic state, or cultural if you live in what Lacan and the mainstream Parisian intellectual community called a primitive society. But the law is the prohibition of desire which develops along with and in dialectic with that desire.

Deleuze and Guattari’s solution to this was surprisingly practical. You can’t argue against the concept on its own terms, because the concept rests at the premise of the whole discourse. You can’t talk a Freudian out of Freudian thinking by arguing entirely on Freudian terms.

So you stake out an entirely different way of thinking, and show how well those concepts deal with real-life problems the mainstream can’t handle. Psychiatrically, Freudian rationality can’t deal with schizophrenics.

In the legal-institutional context, Freudian rationality understands desire as something that needs its own prohibition to develop at all. It legitimates law as a necessary repression. Law is legitimate because it represses. Politics that considers repression necessary is fascism.*

* Thinking back to Snyder’s essay again. He also lists Freud as a major influence on Ivan Ilyin, the Russian fascist. Ilyin's conclusion that a civilization develops through the collective suppression of our drives as individuals. He seems to be a profound thinker against democracy. Terrifying.

Paradoxes of Democracy II: Deeper Truths than Facts, Research Time, 22/03/2018

The research I’ve been doing this month for the democratic governance white paper dovetails with interests for my larger projects on political philosophy. I’m also writing today’s post to get through a sharp turn in my paper’s argument.

Let’s start with my example from yesterday – the dedicated movement Trumpist. Let’s call him TD. He watches FOX, reads Breitbart, listens to talk radio no his commute, enthusiastically follows The Donald’s Twitter feed.

How dare you, TJ? How very dare you?! Do not use the Satan image
from a much under-appreciated but a personal favourite Doctor Who
story of mine from the Russell T Davies era. This is not for you!

TD considers Barack Obama an authoritarian socialist, the climate justice movement a hoax to enrich Al Gore and other investors connected to the Democratic Party, and the Clinton Global Initiative a money laundering and influence peddling scheme for Democratic Party interests around the world.

Given all this, TD is actually a very virtuous person. He believes that a culture of corruption and kleptocracy has grown around the Democratic Party, and that Donald Trump’s Republicans are the crew to drain the swamp.

The problem is, these are conspiracy theories, propaganda, and extremist lies. They have just enough basis in reality to be believable, or at least plausible, even though it’s become nearly impossible to tell whether the suspicion of corruption or actual corruption came first to justify the investigation.

TD lives in a media ecology in which these ideas about the moneyed progressive left are explored and repeated regularly as if they were true. The ethical centre of his heart isn’t the problem – it’s the input he uses to guide it.

The question becomes how you orient a person to recognize the greater corruption – that Trump’s family and administration is the real kleptocracy. TD’s entire thinking is informed by messaging that constructs a pretty comprehensive understanding of the world. It’s just that they’re based on alternative facts – alternative facts with enough rootedness in real history to be plausible.

I think I've found my new favourite image of Vladimir
Putin. Art by Pete Kirill

I'm not sure how to break into the worldview of people like TD. A basic principle of TD’s political thinking is that any progressive message is the idiocy of liberals or the lies of the corrupt (or communist) Democratic Party.

One article I found in my research helped me situate where such people sit as ideological objects. Timothy Snyder is a historian/philosopher of the culture and politics of eastern Europe and Russia. He wrote about Ivan Ilyin, one of the most innovative and complete fascist political philosophers.

Ilyin was a new name to me, and one I’d like to explore more of. Especially since several of his principles of governance have become explicit policies and approaches of Vladimir Putin’s government.

What stood out to me was Ilyin’s idea of how a fascist leader treats history. I think I’m safe saying that folks with progressive politics have a specific understanding of history. Orienting politics toward justice means identifying, understanding, and healing after old crimes.

So the past is a field for investigation, exploring all the gritty detail of history as you can. You must understand precisely what was done and how if any of us can have a profound enough cultural conversation to overcome our mutual hatreds, break the social/racial castes that make global human civilization so hateful.

But if you don’t want to do any of that awesome shit, then history becomes something else. You don’t have to investigate the real unfolding of history – if anything, you want to obscure, bury, and deny it. Repackage history as a lost golden age that only our fearless leader’s will and power can restore.

An image to illuminate your ideal. A utopia.
• • •
Ilyin’s work seems like the most multidimensional exploration of fascism as a political philosophy – in Snyder’s telling, makes me want to get hold of Snyder’s new book to ground myself in Ilyin’s thought before seeing if I want to engage it in any detail for Utopias.

Maybe a more sustained engagement with Russian fascism is for another project. I’m doing enough with Utopias already. I don’t want to add more and more to it.