What’s the Point If We Can’t Be Perfect? Research Time, 10/05/2018

I want to pick up on the point I was talking about on Monday’s post. Aporias – the endpoint of Jacques Derrida’s greatest works. Those moments where, as you examine a concept or work through an argument, the idea itself escapes from you. And it escapes because you know it so well.

It’s a very profound idea. Paul Patton writes about aporia very well, delivering a critique of the idea that equally implicates the main trend among Jacques Derrida’s work. In the words of Canada’s most famous and equally annoying scholar, post-modernism.

A lot about Derrida was erased in his popular
uptake. His most famous books are his early ones,
the ones that made the biggest shocks when they
dropped. I've met a few Derrida fans who don't
know what to make of his later work, who don't
understand why he would have made such a
puzzling turn to ethics. They're always the
ones who have to be reminded where Derrida
came from – that he was a black Algerian Jew.

I mean post-modernism in its popular reception – among barely original academics, and many in areas of real life who were familiar with only a vague outline of the major messages of Derrida’s work. It was the notion that we aren’t even able to express truth in language.

This is the general reception of the aporia in Derrida’s work. He took many different approaches to the same concept throughout his career – absolute truth. Derrida followed through on one of Nietzsche’s central projects – he wanted to develop a way of thinking that followed atheism to its logical endpoint.

No matter how limited human reason might be in the world – goes the traditional Western idea – there still is an absolute truth about the nature and order of the world. That’s God’s truth, the word that expresses being itself.

So here’s Derrida thinking through whether truth is possible when God is truly dead to you. When there is no Word. His later work considered that idea in an ethical context – How does absolute truth emerge from our ordinary experience with other people?* From our ordinary experience with other people – love, friendship, being asked for help.

* And the answer was already in ancient Jewish teachings. Please never forget that Derrida was Jewish, a religion with a long-running culture of mystical scholarship that is both pantheist, atheist, and monotheist.

I think the philosophical tradition among its keepers in the university sector – at least that sub-section called Continentals – would have been better off if this end of Derrida’s career came first. As it is, it was his nature as an academic – a historian of philosophy as well as a philosopher – messed with the reception of his idea.

The first half of Derrida’s career focussed on the history of philosophy – so he was examining all the traditional arguments and works where the godly concept of absolute truth appeared as a serious aim. He brought those concepts to aporia to demonstrate the real untenability of absolute truth without some point in your thinking where you take it as given.

So you made all the traditional arguments trying to arrive at the truth of some philosophical concept like justice or knowledge as going nowhere by their nature. Derrida wasn’t a nihilist – he was a phenomenologist, an atheist, a Jew, a historian, and a deeply ethical person.

But when you reveal the emptiness of absolute truth without also giving people at least a clue to where it actually occurs in the material world, you end up with nihilists. Your sequel came too late.

That’s the heart of Paul Patton’s critique of Derrida – his big argument at the start of his most purely philosophical book. It was the interpretation that he used to shock other academic philosophers out of their thrall to Derrida and onto Deleuze.

Deleuze makes aporia – the most unsettled but most profound state of philosophical thinking – into his starting point. Aporia is a particularly solemn way of catching hold of that total chaos where there’s no reliable truth or fact – chaos.

Derrida’s early philosophy was about revealing how our comforting and dogmatic truths reduce themselves to chaos. Deleuze starts his philosophy crafting order from chaos.

A very oversimplified story. But all polemics are.

When a Lost Monk Meets a Happy Wanderer, Research Time, 07/05/2018

Paul Patton wrote another book about Gilles Deleuze that I read as part of my research. It was called Deleuzian Concepts. It’s a more complex study than his earlier Deleuze and the Political, though it deals with many of the same topics.

But a few more years of work and thought have made it a richer book. Let’s have a look through some of its ideas and arguments.
• • •
Early in the book, Patton sees a curious relationship between Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida – they’re mirrors of each other in a particular way. Their different approaches maybe show something intriguing about what philosophy as a tradition can do.

We forget so much of the ones we're certain we
know everything about.
Art by this guy.

The way Derrida thinks philosophically, he always ends up in aporia. He’s illuminated and interrogated a problem from so many different angles that he understands it very deeply. But the key to his understanding is the precise part of the problem that makes it impossible to solve.

What makes it impossible to solve? Applicability. You can understand a philosophical concept in its abstract form very well – almost as a diagram. But now put that concept to work when you design institutions, laws, moralities, economic conventions, religions and so on. Or keep it in thought – use that concept to understand and build a wider framework of other concepts.

It might work fine, but doesn’t unfold precisely as the diagram said. There’s a slippage of the concept with the world and with wider systems when you put it to work. An inconsistency that undercuts the meaning of the concept itself. You’re left with all this work falling into inconstancy, instability.

Aporia – Philosophers sputtering. Very poetically written sputtering, but still sputtering.

Deleuze thinks about philosophy very differently. For him, the slippage is where philosophy actually does its work. He understands concepts themselves totally differently.

The way Deleuze sees it, thought is actually stagnant when you have a perfect idea that never expresses any inconsistency and acts just as you conceived it every time you use it. He thinks of concepts as producers of new concepts. With each use, the concept changes – your job as a philosopher is to trace the continuities and differences. Now you see if the shifted concept can do anything new, or has lost some of what it could do.
• • •
So Deleuze builds on the failure of Derrida. That’s how Patton spins it.

Now, I'm going to be frank here. I don’t actually know what the relationship between Deleuze and Derrida really was. I’m not sure that they were really very close at all. They knew each other, were familiar with each other’s work, but they were both aware that they were each involved in very different projects.

People always associate Derrida with irony, I think because of mediocre
readings of his work. But I see a profound irony in Deleuze – not in
what he wrote or how he lived, but how he's been received. He wanted
his followers to be creative thinkers developing concepts by
schizzing his own, pushing them to reveal inconsistencies or changes
so you could create a new concept from them. Instead, they act like
traditional academics – squabbling with each other over whose
interpretation of their Great Figure is the right one, always certain
that it's theirs.

I know what the relationship between Derrida and Deleuze is now that they’re dead, when you go to the academic departments that study them. When the French theory that we generally call post-modernism or post-structuralism* blew up in North America, Derrida had the best reputation.

* Radical democracy, actually.

Deleuze and Guattari tried one crossover event, a conference in New York that was an unmitigated disaster of mansplaining and misinterpretation. So Deleuze and Guattari’s work took some time before it was noticed on a large scale.

Patton’s book came out in the boom of interest for Deleuze’s work. So he was engaged in a little succession management. Not of Deleuze himself, but for the other academic philosophers called Continental. He had to show them why they should lay down their Jacques and pick up their Gilles.**

** I’m so, so, sorry.

It was based entirely in trying to shift academic territorial claims – who we all in a particular (sub)-sub-discipline going to squawk about now. But I’m not an academic, so I don’t have to squawk secondary material about anyone to any paywalled journals that will only accept writing about someone else.

I keep Derrida and Deleuze on different shelves, but they’re both valuable for me to have as sources of ideas. It’s better to combine them and see what new concepts will result. Which I believe was Deleuze’s point.

The Full Implications of Empiricism, Research Time, 08/04/2018

Follow the logic of a position through to its natural conclusion. This isn’t always done. Usually, when you’re talking to other philosophers, it never gets done because someone sidetracks the story with a question, interrupts, and swings things in a totally different direction.

Usually the direction of their own work. I’ve been there. I’ve done it before, unfortunately for my trying to avoid hypocrisy. But I don’t want to do it anymore.

What seems like ordinary beauty in art to us today, was a revolution
that enraged people with its provocative smashing of aesthetic rules
taught as universals. Could art be beautiful if it wasn't faithfully
realistic? We don't ask that question now.
Henri Matisse, Still Life With Lemons

So the other day, I wrote a few quick remarks about Gilles Deleuze’s critique of Hegel. Well, not Hegel per se. But the idea that was at the core of Hegel’s work, and which so profoundly influenced so many thinkers in the society where Deleuze lived – mid-20th century France.

The real is the rational. Reality has the same fundamental structure as human rationality. Begin by understanding the simple and arrive at the complex, until at last you’re able to comprehend all the complexity the world can possibly offer you.

There’s another aspect of this way of thinking as well – your attitude to universal knowledge. When I say universal knowledge, I mean questions, answers, and inquiries to questions like “What is beauty?”

Plato’s most famous dialogues are prime examples. I’ve met enough students and professors who see philosophy as a discipline to be about discovering the answers to the questions that Plato never could discover.

Let’s leave aside the most obvious critique of this idea – that aporia was the point of any inquiry into a universal question like “What is beauty?” and “What is justice?” Questions that aren’t supposed to have answers, that aren’t built to be answers, but to encourage thinking.

So that's aporia. You want to explore more of that, go read some Jacques Derrida. I’d recommend starting with a really short book he wrote called Aporias. Surprise surprise.

Deleuze explores a different aspect of these universal questions. Universal questions are fundamentally general – You search for a concept that holds across all cases. The problem with such a project is that it presumes the structure of human rationality as it is will extend legitimately over all of existence.

You want to buy Plato to wear on your chest?

If I can use some insider’s imagery to describe the attitude – you presume that a thinker doesn’t have to leave his armchair to figure out all the great truths of existence.

What does that presumption mean? That the powers of human rationality are already complete. And that’s a very presumptuous presumption.

Empiricism is a perspective of epistemic humility – we’re humble about the powers of human knowledge. Acknowledge that we’re contingent creatures whose power to think is pretty remarkable and kind of amazing, but that arose from conditions that resulted in some biases and blindnesses.

Humans aren’t perfect. Humans have a lot to learn about how our knowledge can develop, a lot of new powers that can help us live better in our world. What are those powers? I have a few ideas, and I’ve talked about them before. But you can only figure out what those powers are or can be if you investigate the world.

I’m going to go back to Plato for this illustration, because of the power Plato holds over philosophical thought for the Western tradition. I mean, Plato is the only person of whom the entire tradition has been described as a series of footnotes to his work. I love a lot of the ideas of Alfred North Whitehead, but I think his Oxbridge cultural conservatism was showing a little too much here.

A lot of Plato’s dialogues start with Socrates challenging the adequacy of everyday thinking about complex concepts – beauty, justice, piety, love, etc. Somebody frames their thinking in terms of asking, for example, what things are beautiful.

Socrates’ character is right to call these questions inadequate to the task. The question “What things are beautiful?” doesn’t explore why we think those things are beautiful in the first place. So you have to explore “What is beauty?” before you can figure out what things truly are beautiful. You have to understand the general categories before you can start building your taxonomy.

Marcel Duchamp was one of the most progressive
artists of the last century because of how he
purposely challenged the notion of what could
even count as art, let alone what counts as
beautiful. His work didn't even try to be beautiful,
and so ended up redefining whole new ways to
think about art and beauty.

This aspect of Plato’s influence has severely limited how empiricism could develop in the Western tradition, because it frames any investigation of the world as requiring complete general knowledge to get off the ground and guide itself.

But this critique doesn’t kill empiricism, as too many over the last 2500 years have thought. It forces empiricism to get serious. Let’s lay out how the model questions should go.

Uncritical Empiricism: “What things are beautiful?”
General Questions: “What is beauty?”
Contingent Empiricism: “What can this show me about beauty?”

The general question is how rationalism can inform empiricism. But having been so informed, an empiricism that follows this more nuanced logic to its endpoint will understand the contingency of its questions.

Ask what the world can show you about your concepts, your terms, your categories. A contingent approach to empiricism is how knowledge can progress. Our knowledge can become more complete, can approach completeness.

But total completeness isn’t an achievable goal – it’s an asymptote, an attractor. We improve by using progress toward completion as our guide, but understand that only God can ever be complete. We, in contrast, can be better.

Getting Old and Feeling Surly, Research Time, 25/11/2017

Right now, I’m working on a short article for the Reply Collective. If I’m going to solicit contributors as Digital Editor, I may as well contribute some content myself. Especially since I’ve been a regular contributor since the place started up.

Recently, we published two articles that pick up a conversation which began last summer. I mean, there was a pretty big gap between instalments, but the conversation was pretty linear. It’s a discussion of John Searle’s theories of human rights.

John Searle's aggressive, unsubtle style of writing
turned out to be very influential throughout
analytic philosophy during the 1980s, and continues
to shape the approach of many philosophers in North
America. I consider that a damn shame, because
Searle first became prominent as one of the thinkers
bringing metaphysical and ontological issues back
into the analytic tradition.

I’m not going to link every single one individually, but you can start from the most recent two, by Gregory Lobo and J Angelo Corlett. You can also look through Raimo Tuomela’s recent piece, because the whole chain started from a review of his book Social Ontology, that SERRC published last year.

That’s what I love about this platform.

Anyway, there are some ideas in this debate that are good food for thought in my own research on utopian drives and concepts in contemporary ideologies. Now that I had the chance to engage with the exchange a little more closely, I could see some interesting convergences with my own work.

So this week, I’m drafting a more formally-written contribution to the discussion. And I’m going to sort out some of the ideas in it here.

Here’s what I latched onto in the discussion. The ideas and concepts floating around make for good elements in a non-reductive materialist conception of how human society works. Let me lay that out for you.

Materialist – Generally,* you don't think any supernatural substance or being is needed to explain things like life, consciousness, human intelligence, or the conditions of the universe’s existence (questions like, ‘What caused the beginning of the universe?’).

* And I’m talking extremely generally.

Non-reductive – You don’t think being a materialist about reality means you have to explain away some aspect of human experience, ability, spirituality, or identity.

As I looked into Searle's late-period social-political thinking, I saw what was in many ways kind of an inadequate system. A few years after Searle’s first book on this project, The Construction of Social Reality, Neil Gross wrote a pretty solid essay showing how wrong-headed the project was because of what it ignored.

I think Gross’ conclusion can apply to the later Searle material that focusses more directly on questions of human rights as well. It’s because Searle’s major creative philosophical works all fit together as a continuous development of a single grand theory.

The return of metaphysics to analytic philosophy had the potential
to create beautifully weird and creative ways of thinking and
writing in that tradition. Instead, such  fantastically strange thinkers
as Saul Kripke and David Lewis became outliers in an increasingly
stagnant stylistic field.

The concepts he developed during his first creative works carrying forward John Austin’s analyses of speech acts were a foundation for his arguments about the nature of mind and intentionality, how people direct their action in the world.

The decades he spent developing those theories laid a groundwork for his account of the social world as shaped by collective and shared intentions. The conception of shared intentions as the atoms of society became the basis for his theory of human rights.

Here are the problems I have with this, which Gross helped me put a finger on.

Problem one – Searle’s insularity. Remember, Searle developed all this theoretical machinery largely as building blocks from his own older work. He’d established his theoretical system, and like the old system-builders, he expanded those concepts and theories to apply to new areas, eventually to give an account of all human phenomena.

So he didn’t think he had an incentive to read the works of other authors as equals. In response to critics – well-versed in social and sociological theory – who said Searle’s ideas didn’t go much beyond what Emile Durkheim developed a century ago, Searle said that he didn’t really read much of Durkheim.

Why? Because what little he’d read of Durkheim convinced him that one of the founders of the entire discipline of sociology didn’t make much sense. No attempt to understand Durkheim’s very different intellectual world or priorities. No attempt to understand why he wrote the way he did. Because Durkheim didn’t write like a doctrinaire analytic philosopher, he didn’t make sense. That’s it.

Which brings me to problem two – Searle’s arrogance and hypocrisy. Searle is infamous for having convinced pretty much everyone in analytic philosophy that everything influenced by Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, or any other philosopher from continental Europe’s traditions is empty charlatanism.

Because those ideas, even though they were sometimes
written in very strange ways, turned out to be very
useful to the social sciences. It was almost as if the
hermeneutic and post/structuralist theories were
philosophies of the social sciences, waiting for the
social scientists to catch up a bit. Just a thought.

The obvious arrogance is in the conclusion that, because I don’t understand something, it’s nonsense. In his exchange with Jacques Derrida, they both talked past each other to epic intensities.

Searle was convinced that Derrida spoke nothing but nonsense. Derrida was convinced that Searle was an arrogant hypocrite who made no effort to understand the vulnerabilities and blindnesses of his own position and thought.

When I read Gross’ critique of Searle’s social theory, I understood how these two threads – his insularity in his own corpus, and his arrogant, dismissive attitude to ideas and styles he didn’t immediately understand – connected.

The ideas that were at the forefront of social theory for sociologists come from hermeneutics, structuralism, post-structuralism, and philosophy of the intensive sciences. The schools of philosophy that Searle has aggressively dismissed as nonsense and fraud for literally decades.

By this late state in his career – when he had also become more untouchable than Harvey Weinstein for his sexual exploitation of young, female students – Searle had become incapable of the humility required to catch up on social theory. He would have likely seen what trends had influenced contemporary sociology and dismissed it all as nonsense without bothering to read any of it.

So he’s a fellow traveller in giving a materialist theory of human thought, society, and institutions. But his arrogance and self-certainty keeps Searle from having anything useful to say to anyone else.

I doubt he’d care. If they think differently from him, he’d likely say they were all simply wrong.

Don’t Forget the Black Jew III: Looking Back, Research Time, 19/05/2017

The last two posts have been cracks at figuring out how to relate what I want to do with Jacques Derrida’s ideas to what I want to do with Machiavelli’s. Derrida developed destructive powers for philosophy, but their aim wasn’t the indiscriminate violence that deconstructionists apply them.

Derrida wanted to destroy, in the most profound way possible, the mainstream tradition of philosophy as the only set of ideas that mattered. He fundamentally concentrated, in the early years of his career, on those destructive powers. This was deconstruction.

He wanted to replace the metaphysics of presence, being, and the sovereign subject with a philosophy focussed around differentiation, change, and becoming. That’s why he developed the concept of differance.

If you know anything about the general shape of Derrida scholarship, then you know that differance was largely a failure as a positive philosophy. Derrida scholars spend their major debates over their complicated and divergent conceptions of what differance could be.

If Derrida could have known how he'd be
received and remembered, would he have
written what he did, the way he did?

Truth is, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari were best of that whole school of thinkers surrounding Paris VIII University in the 1970s, when it came to building a positive, complex, useful metaphysics of becoming.

When I read Mercier’s paper, an interesting line stuck out for me (among many). He referred to the recent radical democrats (Antonio Negri, among other lower-profile scholars) creating a tradition of radical materialist politics in the modern period.

That tradition starts with Machiavelli and Spinoza, picks up steam with Marx and Nietzsche, then continues in the explosion of radical democrat ideas among Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, Sartre, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Negri, and others in their crew.

Mercier seems to think that the Machiavellian roots of this tradition were a bit of a reach – Niccolò never described himself as an ontologist. But his critique forgets that a tradition is created retroactively. So what does this retroactive tradition achieve?

Here’s the point as I’ve been able to distill it so far. It follows from some of the reflections about subjectivity in the last post.

The politics of sovereignty conceives political activity as a matter of battling subjectivities. You can’t have sovereignty without a sovereign, of course, a law-giving voice. Humanity’s world is a matter of these voices fighting to dominate over each other.

The radical democrat philosophers of the last 60 or so years have picked out Machiavelli as a thinker of the earliest time of modernity, who articulated an alternative.

Machiavelli found a vision of democracy that conceived of politics as a collision of forces. People come together in communities driven by their desires – and those desires are shaped by the moral beliefs flowing around their families and societies.

Human society is fundamentally a product whose shapes emerge from countless collisions and conflicts among people, organizations, institutions, and ecologies. That’s what an ontology of forces is – to answer Mercier’s question in that paper about a complex and concrete concept of force.

More about this next week.

Don’t Forget the Black Jew II: But Why Go to Jacques? Research Time, 18/05/2017

Because Mercier is following a Derrida-inspired track, he ends up with an aporia. Surrounded by conceptual ruins, he’s left the core of IR theory a collection of posits and presumptions that have lost their justifications. The negative, destructive power of Derrida’s concepts have worked their magic.

It’s an interesting essay, and I may use some of his ideas in one part of the argument in Utopias. But I’m going in a different direction, of course, because I’m not satisfied with aporia.

Funnily enough, there’s one quick moment in his essay when Mercier comments how similar an ontology of force is to the ideas of Gilles Deleuze. But then he jumps back to a discussion of Derrida, saying that he’s simply not here to talk about Deleuze. And that’s a shame, because Deleuze (and Félix Guattari, and Deleuze and Guattari) developed a lot of positive content for an ontology of force.

But Derrida constitutes a weirdly special case that I think might be worth meditating on. His popular reception – and the most basic power his own concepts of deconstruction have – is as a destroyer.

He leaves ruin in his wake, as the contradictions of core concepts destroy any capacity you might have had to take those concepts seriously. Any kind of presence, of solidly defined certainty that you were able to stand on is destroyed. This can happen to anything.

But he never wanted to destroy.

All you need to do to let deconstruction destroy something is to turn it loose. It’s a universal solvent – all certainty dissolves. Sometimes, we want this. Sometimes, we don’t. But it can always happen.

Mercier seems happy to land in a relative aporia – the conceptual confusion of a broken system. System relies on certainty, and Mercier is out to break down a certainty that’s growing increasingly problematic in the violence of our crumbling civilization. He wants to throw International Relations theory out of its easy reliance on a transparent concept of power.

Derrida’s early work revolves around a foundational concept of his own:* The metaphysics of presence.

* Because no one, even the master of deconstruction is ultimately immune to it. What would a deconstruction of deconstruction itself look like? Maybe we can ask the older Jacques Derrida.

Lots of people have written a ridiculous amount about what the metaphysics of presence is. But I don’t want to touch on it because I’m coming to dismiss a lot of interpretive academic discourses as nitpicking chatter for the sake of careerism.

As far as I take this concept of the metaphysics of presence, it’s the need to rest your life – and all the meanings that give significance to your life – on a firm foundation. And Derrida was the one source in our era of the blasting caps.

IR Theory fundamentally relies on the concept of power – the play of subjects. It used to be that the key political subjects were states in most mainstream political theory. When Michel Foucault blew up, political philosophy understands institutions, social networks, sexualities, individual and group identity of any kind as power.

Forces of subjectivity, impositions of code. Overwriting differences with similarity to itself. Or at least trying to.

Power is fundamentally a model of force as subjectivity. Even in the very decentralized subjectivity of Foucault’s sociologies. Now think of what alternative it could have. . . . To be continued

Don’t Forget the Black Jew I: When Power Turns Into Force, Research Time, 17/05/2017

I could get really deep and trippy with this post, because it’s about an essay I came across a little while ago about Niccolò Machiavelli and Jacques Derrida, “Political Ontology and the Problem of Force.” Yes, the essay is just as dense as it sounds.

There are a few reasons why I won’t go into much detail tonight. One is that I’ve been super busy this week with my new teaching job, and I don’t have a lot of time to devote to long, involved blog posts during the week. So I’m just tracking some immediate reactions and some broad reflections.

Two is that this essay by Thomas Mercier is an interesting example of a tedious phenomenon in academic philosophy – the bog-standard Derrida.

He was always a little to the side of my research interests, despite my
thinking his work was fascinating. I think because I found so much of
the work written about Derrida completely insufferable.

Mercier’s argument follows a simple Derrida-style line, deconstructing his topic concept in what’s become a pretty standard way in the line of cultural studies he’s influenced. Now, one of the things that Mercier does that’s genuinely interesting is that he’s bringing this critical technique from cultural studies to his background in political science and international relations theory.

That alone is pretty cool, because he’s bringing a purposely destabilizing model of criticism to bear on some of the foundational concepts of a very socially conservative discipline. Remember, IR theory is the discipline where places like the RAND Corporation and the Cato Institute recruits their researchers.

We aren’t dealing with bastions of radical democracy here. If anything, the premises and core concepts of IR theory conform to the traditional uptake of Machiavelli as the proto-cynic of global politics. So the world of IR theory could use a good blast of Derrida-inspired deconstruction.

My only problem with Mercier’s paper is that I’m way ahead of the audience it’s meant to provoke. Straightforward deconstruction is understanding a concept in such a way that your thinking is adequate to it, but that shows its internal paradoxes. And your argument strains those internal paradoxes until it breaks the concept itself.

Using Machiavelli’s work as a springboard, Mercier applies Derrida-style deconstruction to the familiar and ubiquitous IR concept of power. He makes the concept of power’s potential legitimacy collapse under its own contradiction until we’re left with collisions of forces.

That’s ultimately the ontology underlying Machiavelli’s own analyses of politics in the ancient Mediterranean and his contemporary Italy. The ontology of force. It’s his foundational contribution to the retroactively constituted tradition of materialist radical democracy.

And I’m going to leave this here, because I want to keep this blog short today. Plus, I think I’m on an interesting idea, and I want the ability to go long. . . . To be continued

What Haunts Us I: A Legacy Is a Trail of Ghosts, Research Time, 06/11/2015

I mentioned a few days ago that I’d finished reading Spectres of Marx. Whenever I discussed this book, I risked sounding like a crazy person because I suggested that its writer, Jacques Derrida, was actually pretty easy to follow here.

Reading Derrida can be unbelievably intense. Not
Spectres of Marx, though.

Derrida has a reputation as a purposefully obscurantist writer. Someone whose experiments with the format of writing philosophy lead him into impossible corners where people can’t follow him simply because it’s tough to know what he’s talking about. I understand where they’re coming from. I’ve looked through his The Post Card. It’s fucked.

Absolutely fucked. Just fucked. Fucked.

I’m also an experimental writer in philosophy, but my current projects are about how to make conceptually intense philosophy more accessible. Derrida in the 1970s, not so much.

Derrida in the 1980s, however, was much more direct. Especially in Spectres of Marx, a book which had the benefit of beginning its life as a public lecture series. 

The last chapter of the book still revolves around a difficult concept, though. He investigates a chain of hauntings in Karl Marx’s own heritage. The first chapter laid out the problem of how Marx haunts us today: there are many different visions of Marx, Marxisms, ways for Marx to have influenced us. 

He was a writer and activist who contained multitudes. No, that’s not quite right. He and his heritage in politics, philosophy, and social science has given birth to countless multitudes that are still multiplying. 

Being dead, Marx can no longer explain to us what he means when he writes. We can only take his writings into new contexts and modern challenges, whether as an inspiration or an enemy. Either way, we can’t dismiss his relevance. That inability to leave him behind is how Marx haunts us, his ghost or spectre.

And Marx had his own spectres. One of them, the subject of the last chapter of Spectres of Marx, was Max Stirner.* Stirner was a radical egoist, probably the most radical of them all. His central work, The Ego and His Own, is on my list to read, so I can see how Stirner’s ideas bounce with modern libertarianism to create any illuminating insights.

No, not this kind of haunting. Though I am looking
forward to the new movie.

* Stirner’s real name was Johann Kaspar Schmidt. Max Stirner was a pen name, based on a German idiom so that his name would translate, roughly, to Max Power. Yes, that does mean I can no longer take him seriously. Stirner is retroactively haunted by Homer Simpson.

Derrida makes some serious hay about how much Max Stirner haunts Marx. Stirner was ridiculously influential in German culture during Marx’s day. So The German Ideology contains a sustained critique of Stirner, essentially that Stirner’s philosophy erases the world and society in favour of a radical subjectivity, and that just won’t work for humans. 

I’m not sure how this angle will ultimately pan out. So far, I’ve only read Spectres of Marx on the idea. I haven’t yet gotten to reading The German Ideology or The Ego and His Own with this in mind.

But it got me thinking a lot about how haunting works in writing. Every writer has her bugbears, the topics to which she returns, about which he’s never quite finished. Every writer has something in his past which calls to her, compelling her like a hypnotized person or an obsessive to find new angles and perspectives to explore it.

To be haunted is to have a personal demon, a mystery to which you keep returning because you can never solve it or bring yourself to walk away.

I’ve identified two ghosts in my own writing and thinking. One of those is libertarianism, an ideology that holds freedom paramount but refuses to acknowledge so many vectors that limit real human freedom. 

The other is anti-feminism, for much more personal reasons, reasons that can motivate a terrible shame in me. Ghosts that I try to exorcise, like a Scientologist driving his thetans away. But they’ll always come back.

More on these next week.

We’ve Built a World Beyond Humanity, Research Time, 03/11/2015

That’s a portentous and a pretentious title if I ever wrote one. Today, I want to talk a little about Marx, one last argument that I read as I finished Spectres of Marx last week. 

From the time I first thought of the Utopias project a few years back, I knew I'd have to deal with Marx in some fashion. And I knew it would be a world of pain. 

This is what I see when I close my eyes and think
about studying the sum total of Marx and Marxism.

Not just the depth and breadth of Marx scholarship and successor theory out there, but the maze of modern left-wing politics alongside the minefield of the last century of totalitarian inspiration and general chaos. I had to choose which Marxisms and Marxes were appropriate for the philosophical story I wanted to tell.

Derrida’s last few arguments illuminated why I needn’t lean on Marx to talk about political utopian politics. There's a fundamental sense in which how we each understand the world oppose each other. And it’s not even political. At least not directly.

This is going to get weird.

So Derrida gives an account of Marx’s concept of exchange value. One of the basic facts about Marxist economic theory that you learn in Marx 1000 is the difference between use value and exchange value.

They’re what they say on the tin. One is the material usefulness of a product. The other is whatever price you can talk someone into paying for a product. It’s based on a lie. Use value is the authentic value of a product, what material difference it can make to someone's life. 

One facet of Marx's critique of 19th century international capitalism was that its trade and production regimes were based on inauthentic exchange value. There’s some value to this idea. One of the reasons behind Iceland's financial sector crash in 2007 was that traders exponentially inflated the value of a stock just on the force of a handshake.

His concept of exchange value is also part of his critique of the science of economics. This argument goes like so.

The global economy is dominated by relations of exchange value. Each exchange value relation is based on a specific and conscious human act: a lie that obscures the genuine worth of a product. 

The image comes from this story at
Bloomberg news from 2013, about
the revelation of the lies at the heart of
hedge fund culture which unravelled
during the 2008 financial crisis. I
suspect that Marx's critique of
economic science as a whole, when
restricted to apply only to hedge funds
and similar business models that
manipulate the stock market, will
be pretty accurate.

But economics takes these relations as the real constituents of a system. And it takes those relations to exist beyond the actions of humans. Exchange value is the bedrock of the impersonal systematic forces that economic science considers the driving force of commerce and productivity.

Market forces.

A proper economics, says Marx,* would understand the falsity of these emergent relations, and understand that the only real economy was authentic human trades and negotiations based on the use value of objects. 

* According to Derrida, at least in that chapter. This is one interpretation of Marx I’m rolling with here, one ghost among many. Even in just the one book about him, there are a ton. That’s Jacques for you.

And this is where I depart from this Marx. It’s a humanist Marx, who turns away from the material reality of properties, relations, and flows that emerge from aggregates. The economy is a realm where activities that humans generate grow beyond the powers of human intention and control.

Economic flows are dynamic systems, huge material flows of money and goods that – once they reach a particular size – behave systematically. They’re not intentional and directed anymore, but an autonomous movement from human activity, even though human actions constitute them at their cellular level.

This is my place in the theoretical tradition that comes out of Gilles Deleuze, Manuel Delanda, and chaos mathematics. Pure Marxist visions are trapped in a humanism that keeps them from facing their most profound difficulty.

Once they get big enough, the material forces and flows of the global economy overwhelm the perception, intentions, and purposes of the individual humans who make it up. What Marx thought was a fiction becomes more real than we are.

A Poetry of Ideas, Composing, 30/10/2015

Lately, I’ve been writing a lot of posts about increasingly odd philosophy. Well, and Doctor Who reviews. But most of my posts are about odd philosophy. 

The last few weeks of posts sort through ideas I had while reading Natural Right and History by Leo Strauss, Spectres of Marx by Jacques Derrida, and relating many of the ideas in Derrida's book to the philosophical meaning of the Arab Spring. This is all reading related to my Utopias manuscript, and this book is going to be weird.

Why I'm writing a book so weird has to do with my position as a writer right now. Since I no longer work in the academy, I have nothing to lose. No tenure & promotion committee to disappoint, no editors forcing my work to fit a dull style for publication in locked-access journals.

My personal assistant Philthy
helps me write the blog.

I can do whatever I want. And I want to push philosophy as a writing style in new directions. There are two dominant styles of writing philosophy, generally speaking. 1) The academic style of the university-based research discipline. 2) The accessible but lightweight style of pop philosophy books.

If you see some of my work at the Review and Reply Collective, you can see that I'm working on a style that fits neither of these categories. Utopias is going to be a heavy book, dense with ideas. It’ll build those ideas from detailed arguments and illustrate them with allusions to historical events, political movements and events, works of philosophy, art, literature, television, cinema. 

At the same time, it’ll be written in a tone that invites the reader along for a strange ride. In a style that any reasonably intelligent person can follow. Kind of what I try to do on the blog.*

* I know I don't always succeed. That's the nice thing about a blog. You can try one style, it doesn't work, and then move on to another.

So what will these ideas turn into once they end up in the Utopias manuscript? The third and final part of the book will apply the first two sections’ trippy ideas about time, progress, revolution, and political ideals to several major problems in Western thinking today. 

A major task of this last third will be a critique of neoliberalism, liberal political philosophy more generally, modern Marxism, the injustices of capitalism, inequality, and libertarianism. And from that critique, it’ll build a positive program for social progrss. Needless to say, the style I’m working on for this book will do a lot of things at once.

For instance, here’s one chain of that critique of libertarianism that is springing from my reading these Derrida lectures. 

Derrida often writes creative philosophy around interpretive riffs several layers deep. In chapter five of Spectres of Marx, he builds a philosophical engine around Marx’s critique in The German Ideology of Max Stirner’s masterwork The Ego and His Own. Stirner’s philosophy revolves around the power of self-assertion. The force of the individual’s egoistic influence on the world is the essence of the human.

Marx offers a political critique of this hardcore individualism, a twisted reflection of the modern libertarian’s individualism. The assertion of irreducible selfhood as the primary force of meaning in the universe isn’t enough to get rid of the ghosts.

Ghosts, spectres. These are the primary forces in political activity. This is how Derrida reads Marx.** They’re the ghosts of the dead, lingering traces of injustice. In societies that haven’t known political violence on a mass scale in a while, these traces may be hard to understand.

** One of the many spectres of Marx, and one which is important to what I want to write.

That’s where the Arab Spring comes in. Not because it’s the central people’s revolution of my generation of humans, though that’s one reason why I’m including it in the book. 

The struggles of people rising up against their autocratic rulers. Those traces are the screams that will always escape the prison walls, that filter through cracks in the doors to become louder than ever.

Always Coming So Never Shows Up, Research Time, 21/10/2015

These disconnected posts about Canada's federal election on Monday ended up having a pretty clear common theme. Catch up on what I hate essentially about Harper, and my biggest disappointment in #elxn42.
• • •
Coming out of the Canadian election that saw Stephen Harper kicked out of the Prime Minister’s Office* is an appropriate time to write a book about the utopian in politics. The way I saw people celebrating the end of Harper – if only through online communities – it was as though we emerged from a long, national nightmare.

* I only hope that all the juiciest evidence of misconduct avoided the shredder on the way out. M. Trudeau II, I expect a full inventory of Harper regime archaeology of how our now-ex-PM ran his government. 

This man is now Canada's Prime Minister.

In a way, we did. In a way, that nightmare is inescapable. Even though the biggest and most obvious symbol of the world’s iniquities in my country is gone, it’s not like everything is roses and daisies. We all have a lot more work to do.

The global economy is still frighteningly fragile, wealth is still concentrated in the hands of the super-elite, we still face serious climate changes and ecological destruction, and Syria has undeniably grown into the Third World War.

I don’t think this statement is all that radical. I’m not saying anything that Bernie Sanders isn’t. Then again, some even suggest that Bernie Sanders is no radical. That he uses inspiring words to round people up so they’ll vote for the same old corrupt leaders.

We all want someone who can save us. We love heroes. My favourite show is Doctor Who. I love stories about an awesome hero who inspires people to transform their world for the better. So many of us are waiting for that hero to lead us to a world that, compared to what we have now, is utopia.

But I know it’s a story. Stories aren’t about telling us explicitly what the world is really like. The value of Doctor Who is as a model for each of us to be ourselves. Each of us – privately and publicly – we work and figure out individually and together how to live better lives.

Don’t wait for someone to lead you to utopia. Figure out how to make one yourself. All of us. 

That’s how I think when I look at TrudeauMania 2015, unfolding in all those shirtless pics of Canada’s new PM. Yes, Harper is gone and Justin Trudeau has a level of sexiness that has approached the apex of Ghost-Swayze.

One election doesn’t make a perfectly just world. Let’s not kid ourselves. 

Other sexiness vectors include Vampire-
Pitt, Jurassic-Pratt, Hamm-hock, and 
Channing-Your-Tatum.

That’s the problem with real politics. You can set concrete goals – enact this policy, redistribute this oligarchical wealth, pass this law, elect this leader – but there’s always more to do after each act. There remains injustice that we have to work against. No matter how much we succeed, the world isn’t quite perfect.

We want the struggle to end, but in the end, there’s always the next struggle. Our visions of a utopia inspire us to act, but even success leaves the need for more action.

This is the messianic experience of time. It’s an idea that I’d never really understood until I read it in a bus stop. I know his books from the 1970s are absolutely ape-shit, but by 1992, Jacques Derrida wrote pretty clearly. Even if he still had sentences that were half a page long. They actually had rhythm.

The messianic is when we experience our lives as though we were marching toward some radical transformation. Some of us think we’ll be led there no matter what we do individually. Some thing we’ll only achieve it if we actively work together. That’s the difference between a follower and a social movement.

Earlier this week, I said that politics at its purest is people organizing themselves to change their world. Even in the everyday moments of kindness we show to each other. These small acts still have some small role in making humanity better. We all contribute to each other’s lives every moment of every day.

If these times are teaching me – and all of us – anything about the perfect worlds we dream of, it’s that they won’t be achieved with a big event that everyone sees. It’s achieved in the small moments of life, one act of kindness at a time. So it can eventually scale up to the level of nations.

Get Real II: Real Progress Comes From Movement & Agitation, Research Time, 15/10/2015

Continued from last post . . . There's a unique conservative world-view that’s coalesced as its mainstream since the Thatcher and Reagan eras. Its attitude is a tense, dynamic mixture of brutality, the cruelty of indifference, and naïveté. 

Because jail isn't just about free meals, a decent gym,
and good-quality dope. It's also about poverty and the
daily indignities of the social causes of incarceration.

Of the Big Four thinkers of modern conservatism, Francis Fukuyama is the most openly naïve. His The End of History will probably become (if it hasn't already) the first of new conservatism’s landmark works to be buried. The first one to start digging the grave was Jacques Derrida at the conference whose keynote became Spectres of Marx.

He starts with a point that a lot of academics see. For someone who depends so much on Hegel for how he understands history, Fukuyama has a ridiculously oversimplified version of Hegel. He sees certainty where the text is enigmatic. Clear pronouncements where Hegel himself was extremely ambiguous.

Those philosophical enigmas are why Hegel became a legend in the tradition. The ideas are clearly significant, but there are so many ways to understand him.

But Fukuyama's missteps (mis-thoughts?) are much more profound than this. His whole point is a terribly naïve conclusion that we’ve achieved the perfect form for human society. And it's the capitalist liberal democratic state. 

Why is it perfect? Because human nature is essentially to seek status and dignity among people. Capitalist liberal democracy ends conflict over social status by enshrining each of us as having the highest, equal dignity before the law in our civil rights.

These words feel like nonsense to me. I may as well have written “Staple booger quack-quack cauterizes flagellum footstool Doctor Tulip O’Snap.” 

Because when Jacky from Algeria starts shit with you,
you better look out.

Fukuyama completely ignores that the dignity of equal standing in civil rights isn't enough to preserve you against the material indignity of extreme poverty. It isn't even enough to secure you the material defence of your civil rights if you can't afford to hire a competent lawyer to defend you from a crown prosecutor.

Derrida says it himself, that people's material indignities are intolerable. They're only worse now than two decades ago.

“Never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of Earth and humanity.”

Yet there’s an even deeper, more profound oversight here. One that shows what a clear eye Derrida had, despite his (sometimes deserved) reputation for obscurity in his writing.

It's an obvious fact today. So obvious that it's hard to think of this as having been news in 1992. But it was. 

Fukuyama's most naïve, blind mistake was to take for granted that the whole of people's political lives was their relationship to their state and its laws. This way of thinking doesn’t understand that the political actions that most speak to people's hearts lie beyond the relationship of an individual with her institutions.

There's a giant social field whose movements stretch beyond the boundaries of states. Even international institutions can get at best a limited grasp on this field. It’s the whole of humanity.

Most protest movements are, in some very important dimensions, about the relationship of people to their state, laws, government, and institutions. But the need for such a movement has other roots. Take an example. 

Black Lives Matter has a comprehensive political program to change the policies, rules, techniques, and daily habits of police officers so they genuinely serve citizens and protect their civil rights.

But talk of civil rights and institutions doesn’t capture everything that happens in a social movement. It doesn’t capture their actual drive – the reasons, causes, and motives that lie deep within each activist’s character and soul, which all move them to take part. 

The politics of the state and its institutions isn't enough to meet all the challenges of human ethics.

Another one of Fukuyama's major concepts is the essential role the human drive for recognition – for status, for dignity – has in our nature. But running your state institutions on the ideal of equal civil rights isn’t enough to secure human dignity against all possible violations.

Unseen Theology II: The Ghost of an Image, Research Time, 07/10/2015

Continued from last post . . . So what does this mean? That the animating spirit of W-era neoconservatism was Christian supremacy in disguise?

It's a pretty heavy and simple statement to say about a writer whose ideas and works are as complex as Georg Hegel's. But because Fukuyama takes up an oversimplified version of his ideas, I suppose that can be my playing field.

You could say that this is the most powerful face in the
Arab world: Saudi Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, who's
become the de-factor ruler of Saudi Arabia, thanks to
the dementia and possible Alzheimer's of King Salman.

Fukuyama pitches his idea – history bends toward capitalist liberal democracy – as having universal scope. He gives a brief dismissal of Muslim cultures from being part of this trajectory. Oil wealth, he says, perverts the natural character of their societies so much that the supposedly universal yearning for democracy and freedom fades away.

Fukuyama dismisses the Muslim world too quickly. Quickly enough that probing why can reveal a very deep problem with his program.

His philosophical roots in Hegel inadvertently – and invisibly, even to Fukuyama himself – cut not only the Muslim world, but the entire non-Western or non-Christian world out of consideration. 

When I read Philosophy of History, I found an important limitation of the book was that the progress of human history culminated in Europe, in the West. Typical for the early 19th century in Europe. But that story of humanity can't work in an era after colonialism, when we can't really hide anymore from what European colonialism really was.

Any philosophical conception of humanity's history has to account for our plurality, our diversity. Go ahead and think messianically about the history and development of human civilization. The notion that human freedom will have a single, unified form is a deservedly tough sell these days.

You know what’s an even tougher sell? That the single, unified form of human freedom is fundamentally Christian. In the peculiarly Christian idea of the Kingdom of Heaven, Hegel saw the culmination of human politics. It’s the restoration of paradise, where everyone is equal in status and lives in harmony.

When I worked full-time in academia, I rarely found
authors or colleagues who took Fukuyama seriously
as a political philosopher. We really should, if only
because of how effective his ideas were.

European humanity becomes God by building a system of civil government where everyone in society perfectly and mutually recognizes each other’s equal dignity and rights. 

When I think about how Derrida described Hegel, I see parallels to my discussions over this Winter with Steve Fuller about his book Knowledge. 

There, we talked about how a very peculiar theological conception of humanity as being "in the image of God” sparked a revolution in our knowledge institutions. We started learning about the world because that knowledge brought us in tune with God, more like God. For Christians, humanity and God share a common nature.

God and Christianity doesn't figure in Fukuyama’s messianic vision of a planet full of capitalist liberal democratic regimes. Globally omnipresent democracy would be the paradise in which everyone recognized each other's inherent dignity and inalienable rights. 

These dignity and rights are grounded in human nature alone. Nothing about the image of God here. Fukuyama has, to his credit, learned the post-colonial lesson: We shouldn’t fit all peoples into a world-view that’s the product of only one culture.

But his break isn’t clean enough. Fukuyama still relies on Hegel for the framework of his political thinking. And Hegel's philosophy is so firmly rooted in Christian culture that, long after the ideology of Man as the Image of God faded from Europe’s scientific culture, he’s still riffing on it. 

You could also say that this dead fruit salesman is
the most powerful face in the Arab world. It's
a case I could certainly feel safe making.

Fukuyama’s entire conception of this universal yearning of humanity as human bends all the peoples of the world to a Western cultural narrative. His supposed liberation in Western democracy is an imperialist ideology in its heart.

This is Jacques Derrida's basic criticism of The End of History in chapter two of Spectres of Marx.

And you think it’s over. You think Derrida, the established philosophical genius so famous as to have an adjective made of his name, would have schooled this right-wing upstart. Fukuyama's just a booster for capitalism, after all.

Then came Bouazizi and the revolution.

Unseen Theology I: The Only Outcome, Research Time, 06/10/2015

You see, sometimes, my voracious and borderline psychotic reading habits end up striking some really cool, productive synergies. 

Late last month, I began diving into Francis Fukuyama, the last of the Big Four thinkers that define modern conservatism that I have to explore for what I want to do in my Utopias manuscript. He’s also the weirdest of the Big Four, for reasons I've gone into before, and will again.

I also discarded the second-hand biography of David Foster Wallace I had been reading, for reasons I've also explained on the blog. Instead, I picked up Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx from my shelf. An old friend from McMaster gave me a pile of Derrida books when he was cleaning out his bookshelves a few years ago. And I finally got around to this one.

Because that "invading a country into democracy" plan
worked out really well, didn't it?

I thought it would be a little useful to the project, but I didn't realize just how much. Spectres of Marx is an extended response to the popular impact of Fukuyama’s End of History. 

Derrida takes End of History to task for all kinds of flaws, all the flaws that made it so seductive to the movement in the Washington elite that would found Project for a New American Century. 

The idea that, as soon as oppressive or autocratic state machinery was destroyed, its population would naturally form a peaceful, fully functional liberal democracy, because this was the universal endpoint of the human struggle for freedom. This is the notion behind the W. Bush Administration's ideology that the people of Iraq would welcome the invading American army as liberators.

Fukuyama’s revival of Hegel as a prophet of capitalist liberal democracy is the unexpected philosophical centre of this notion that’s led to more than a decade of brutal war in Arabia, the Maghreb, and the Fertile Crescent already. 

Fukuyama essentially pitched liberal democracy as the only possible outcome of the inherent human drive for freedom because it’s the only kind of state through which everyone recognizes each other as having equal civil rights before the law. 

I’d venture that Derrida is probably best at poking holes in other people's supposedly iron-clad ideas and ventures by hauling their blind spots into the light. An example is one jab at Fukuyama that appears in Spectres of Marx. 

Fukuyama considers his conception of freedom ideologically neutral when it comes to religion. Freedom in liberal democracy is entirely secular because liberal democracy enshrines your freedom to worship as you wish among your civil rights to freedom of thought. As long as your religious practice doesn't infringe on the rights of another, you’re cool. 

Fukuyama was also wrong about the Middle East's
Muslim population having no desire for freedom from
their autocratic regimes, as we could see in the
revolutions of 2011-12. Bouazizi lives.

Then he does something very weird, not only for a supposedly secular thinker, but for one who'd have such a deep influence on people who believed they could democratize the entire Middle East by invading Iraq and installing a parliamentary government.

He says the Muslim world of the Persian Gulf and the Maghreb are exceptions from this universal drive. Ostensibly, this is because their governments satiate their populations with handouts from their states' massive oil wealth. 

But this is a poor excuse, making no allowance for autocratic regimes in Muslim states without oil wealth, like Egypt and Jordan. It makes no allowance for there having been no successful revolution against Saddam Hussein during the international sanctions regime, when oil wealth couldn’t reach the populace anymore. It makes no allowance for why there hasn’t been a mass uprising among the enslaved populations in Saudi Arabia and the small, oil-rich emirates.

There's something more going on here, and Derrida identifies it as rooted in the parts of Hegel’s philosophy that Fukuyama wants to ignore when he adapts the German's system to justify the perfect character of liberal democratic ideals. 

It's a philosophy that holds Christianity to be the one true religion. . . . To be continued