Cracking at the Paradox of Fascism, Composing, 29/03/2018

Sorry it's been a while. I was actually in hospital for a few days since the weekend, but I’m back in reasonable health now. And as of yesterday, I have a new position as an instructor at a new college in Toronto. So the past few days have been really disorienting.

So getting back to this blog today is very much an exercise in grounding myself again. Returning to a regular research and writing routine, as a habitual part of my day, making sure that even on the messiest days, I’ve got a calm space.

Ludwig Wittgenstein said that philosophy had a therapeutic purpose – He wasn’t the first one to say so, of course, but he was the first one I happened to come across who did. Therapy wasn’t the only purpose, of course. But it could serve that function if you needed it – a minimum expression.

By Brunhilda

Meditation. Focus the mind. Think. An activity that sometimes is much too difficult.
• • •
Here’s a paradox for you. It’s a political and conceptual paradox. Call it the paradox of totalitarianism. Those who are most afraid of losing their individuality will shed it themselves.

It doesn’t make much sense on the face of it. But it’s an old problem in political philosophy – not always phrased explicitly, but quite old. Spinoza was the first to ask it.

Why would a person fight so strongly for their slavery as if it were their freedom?

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari tackle that problem themselves, thinking of the political context of their own time. It was dominated by the same currents as ours. Globalized liberal capitalism was kicking into gear. Ecological pollution was reaching crisis points. States, corporations, and other institutions were developing far-reaching control into the everyday lives of citizens.

In the 1970s, what did people in the heart of capitalist countries fear? Communism. The creeping embrace of an ideology that fused us into a unified, undifferentiated mass. The state and related institutions had total control over your life, down to the smallest details. Individuality becomes forgotten. Conformity is all that matters.

Not all people, of course. But it was a cultural tendency, which the right-wing politicians of many generations opposed violently and intensely. The North American examples are clearest to me, because this is where I live and this continent is the epicentre of the current movement in this direction.

Joseph McCarthy, William F. Buckley, Andrew Breitbart. These are just a few prominent people who aggressively advocated against any political or social ideas that would reject or curtail our individual freedom.

Above is a perfectly reasoned argument.

Not about individual cases, of course, like criminals.* I mean in the sense of the civic contract, the way all citizens of a community regard each other – as individuals, free to pursue their own lives as they wish.

* Heavens to Betsy, we must never think of treating criminals with dignity! If we did, they wouldn’t be criminals. I kid, but sometimes I hear of something so sickening that sarcasm is my only way to keep from breaking down.

Here’s Ian Buchanan’s take on how Anti-Œdipus expresses the paradox of totalitarianism today. You become so afraid of an authority stripping you of your individuality that you suspect all political, ideological, or moral difference from your own individualist thinking.

If people have communitarian beliefs – like a notion that making a promise binds you to keep it – stamp it out as a betrayal. It’s taking advantage of your freedom to give yourself over to the enemy.

And in enforcing total discipline to defend yourselves against the enemy that would rob you of your individualities? There’s your answer.

Is Freedom Really Free? I: Walking Away, Research Time, 11/07/2017

I’m not going to continue with that last thread of ideas I was writing about Milton Friedman’s writing last week. Two reasons. One, after taking a few days off from writing about it, I realized it wasn’t the best way to start a longer train of thought. So I’m starting from a more fundamental and stimulating angle today.

The second reason? I hated that title I gave it.

Friedman’s insightful introductory remarks about the nature of contracts are a great way to begin. That conception of the freely entered contract between two equals is at the heart of so much new liberal and libertarian rhetoric today.

I’d hear it from my wacky libertarian trolls, my first long-running window into the world of the far-right internet. Reading this passage of Friedman, I remembered what C & G told me, because it seemed to come directly from the big man’s pages.

What people love about America is their freedom!

The fundamental bond of any economic relationship is the contract between two people doing business. It could be between a business owner and a worker, between two or more business owners, between a business and a client or customer. Whatever. All economic activity flows from these relationships.

Those relationships of contract formation are the core bonds of business itself. They come to be, says Friedman, as two private individuals reaching an agreement. Such an agreement is morally right if the contracting individuals are free.

Now, what do we mean by freedom? That’s not just a word you can appeal to without a fair idea of the concept itself.

Friedman uses freedom in the context of the conditions of contract formation. When two individuals are negotiating a contract, at any moment up to the signature that locks them both into their promises, they can walk away.

Freedom is the right to exit. That’s universalized over a lot of moral judgments new liberals and libertarians make about economic and business relationships.

Do you dislike your job? Do you feel that your boss mistreats you? Are you not paid what you think you should be? Do you find the conditions now more dangerous than when you agreed to work there? Then walk away from it.

The right to walk away – for the modern dogmatic libertarian, many new liberals, and quite a few traditional liberals – renders any of the protections that workers’ movements have gained people moot.

More details on the silliness of a frictionless, perfectly logical vision
of the world can be found at the link, on paragraph 107.

You want a minimum standard wage? Health insurance? Safety protections? Reasonable hours? Vacation time? Maternity or paternity leave? Then don’t force your current employer to give them to you if he doesn’t want to provide them. Leave, and try to negotiate it somewhere else. The right of exit trumps all else.

It seems perfectly reasonable when you’re only thinking about it in the abstract, through pure reason alone. But once the messy contingencies of the real world leak into this clean, frictionless vision, its logic begins to break down. This way of thinking faces problems that it actually can’t grapple with, so can only wave them away.

Think about some situations where you can’t really walk away from a job. Most of them amount to not being able to walk straight into an alternative job and risking destitution otherwise.

Maybe there’s a recession and there are far more job-seekers than positions. Maybe you’re in a low-paying sector and you don’t have the savings to support yourself while you look for a better opportunity. Maybe you can’t afford retraining and there are no free or loan-supported avenues for it.

In all those situations and any others along similar lines, the right of exit still exists, but it’s a terrible idea. The material conditions of a contract's writing smashes the balance between signatories for it to be a truly free agreement. If a person has the power to let another starve, then the one with power holds the other in his fist.

Even if you’re starving to death, my old libertarian friends used to tell me, you still have your freedom. But must you accept death as the price of freedom?

The Impotent Liberal VI: Friends and Enemies, Research Time, 04/01/2017

When the influential political figures of your time are sociopathic
provocateurs of political and racist extremism for fun and profit,
a dedication to tolerance for a diversity of viewpoints won't be
quite adequate to deal with this mess.

Continued from last post . . . Like I said when I started this series more than a week ago, liberal democracy has a dangerous vulnerability.

The philosophy’s dedication to total freedom of thought, speech, and expression for all creates a space of tolerance for those who are dedicated to erasing freedom of thought, speech, and expression.

That old question of toleration of the intolerant plagues modern liberalism. I remember it being an issue going back as far as John Stuart Mill. Though I want to revisit his argument itself this year, I remember it basically as being the conviction that self-contradictory stances like arguing for intolerance on an omni-tolerant platform would fail to gain traction in the marketplace of ideas.

About that, John . . .

The free market of ideas was one of the original guiding ideas behind, for example, the founders of Twitter making their platform completely unrestrained. Free speech was sacrosanct, and must be protected at all costs.

The result? Twitter has become a training ground for white nationalists. And the company culture remains completely unwilling, unable, and incompetent at getting rid of them.

The culture of free speech without the restraint of moral respect has made the simple act of telling an obnoxious prick to shut up and go away into a form of censorship and oppression.

Lindy West wrote a deserved lambast of Twitter for its refusal and
inability to curb the Nazis among its user base. But if your approach
to politics is fundamentally about conflict avoidance, someone who
advocates tolerance loudly will be lumped into the same category
as the Nazis – someone who stokes conflict.

The principle of totally free speech rests on a premise that everyone is redeemable by reason and discourse. Reality has convinced me that this premise is not true. We may be able to influence a society as a whole in a progressive, freer direction. But there are many (not a lot, but enough) individuals who are utterly broken beyond repair.

They are racist, sexist conspiracy theorists who believe that the expression of another’s rights and freedoms actually oppress them. For example, men who believe that it is an act of anti-democratic censorship to prevent him from screaming rape threats and ethnic slurs at his family members.

So we have to take a key lesson from Laclau and Mouffe to heart – antagonism is central to politics. Opposition and conflict – rooted in the concepts that define fundamentally our very identities – are the processes that bind our societies together.

Because our societies are constituted through struggles. Human society develops by diversifying – left to our own devices, we create new kinds of identity. We differentiate ourselves.

Sometimes, those struggles are constructive. They build relationships between communities in a society that help inform each other and their wider neighbours about their mutual humanity.

But all these struggles come with conflict. Conflict between systemically or historically disadvantaged groups and a mainstream dominant class – black civil rights activists and whites who don’t even notice that anything is wrong.

"We have got onto slippery ice where there is
no friction and so in a certain sense the
conditions are ideal, but also, just because
of that, we are unable to walk. We want to
walk: so we need friction."
Ludwig Wittgenstein as political philosopher?
Terribly out of context, but maybe needed.

Conflict between different demographics who each have seemingly intractable problems – Christian fundamentalists and reproductive choice activists.

Conflict between groups disadvantaged in different ways as their various members succeed and fail to understand each other – the countless, messy, tense alliances between black, Muslim, gay, women, and trans activists.

Liberalism has an admirable utopian vision because it’s of a world without conflict. Where every fight is settled with calm, friendly, rational reasoning. It’s a beautiful ideal but profoundly realistic.

There’s an intense fear of conflict underlying this vision – the notion that any open antagonism in society will tear our communities apart. It’s not that this can never happen. But conflicts that rip societies to bloody, radioactive messes are rare and especially intense.

Most of the time, we all exasperatedly yell at each other about our differences in how we should live. Most of the time, that’s how we form our different identities. It’s how we each figure out and become who we are. Conflict isn’t just a means of breakdown and collapse – it’s the primal productive force of human thought, society, and morality.

A philosophy that can’t grapple with the reality of conflict will – no matter how many real political parties it inspires – always remain in some fundamental way in an imagined ideal. When the rubber hits the road, those ideals alone can’t go anywhere.

A utopia that can’t honestly and authentically understand the power and necessity of conflict will be as useful as frictionless shoes on ice.

Strict Certainty Will Kill Your Thought, Research Time, 28/01/2014

To start, a note about Graham Priest himself, in addition to the praise I heaped on him yesterday: Having finished Beyond the Limits of Thought, I wish there was more of it. But his point in writing the book was to demonstrate that people have been writing about true contradictions for centuries, and that true contradictions occur when people try to think about the limits of human thought. Because when we conceive of those limits, we face the phenomenon of having to go beyond what we identify as a limit of thought in order to identify that limit.

The most obvious illustration of this idea is in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. All of his work has the common theme of identifying and proving that philosophy has limits. One of the reasons I was drawn to Wittgenstein more than anyone else in the Analytic tradition when I first began learning the history of philosophy. But I was also disturbed by his conclusions, and the conclusions of those like him in identifying the slipperiness of meaning, and therefore the slipperiness of truth.

Priest’s last chapters about Willard Quine and Donald Davidson also describe ideas that I found disturbing when I was young. The idea that the meanings of words couldn’t be fully determined, that there would always be uncertainty in communication and even uncertainty in the meanings of words themselves unsettled me. When I first learned about the inevitably shakiness of language, I thought this was a problem that needed to be solved.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, a very neurotic man
who was a great theorist of knocking
down the pretensions of certainty.

I smile a nostalgic smile when I think of my youthful naiveté. But it seems I’m not the only one who thought of the indeterminacy of language and meaning as a destructive conclusion. I’ve never read Saul Kripke’s book about Wittgenstein,* but Priest describes Kripke’s conclusion that Wittgenstein was a skeptic about meaning. An action can express any rule (linguistically, an utterance could express whatever meaning) that our ingenuity can formulate for it. And the same utterance can have a variety of justifications, some of which are mutually incompatible. Therefore, meaning is not a matter of conforming our utterance to the precise concept underlying it, and understanding is not a matter of knowing a precise meaning. Kripke calls is a “skeptical solution” to the problem of meaning’s indeterminacy, because Wittgenstein has the disappointing conclusion that language and meaning rest on customary practices.

* Here’s a key reason I never went into Wittgenstein studies as a specialty: the field was  so fucking immense with secondary material, it intimidated me away from it. I’m usually not one to become irritated. But when I send articles for review, I often get the response from some reviewer who’s a specialist in a writer I refer to, that I should read X’s book about this writer. I sometimes think they’re talking about their own book. But there was so much secondary material written about Wittgenstein that I didn’t think I’d be able to sort through it all without devoting myself entirely to the exegesis of Wittgenstein for my career. I wanted to do more than that. Sadly, I think the same phenomenon is happening now with Deleuze: so much secondary material is being written about him that its scale would frighten new students away from Deleuze and his ideas.

I now know this to be a better conclusion. If meaning were determinate in the sense of a strong determination of concept to word or proposition, then I can’t see how it would be possible for language to adapt or change. Hell, I can’t see how language would evolve at all. Certainty is the same as freezing, the super-stability that amounts to sterility, the stillness that amounts to being dead.

For Wittgenstein (and David Hume, and Hannah Arendt, and Gilles Deleuze), language is a matter of external action and relation. We know we understand what another person says because our response to their words elicits a happy response from the speaker, or at least the appropriate response. There is vagueness underlying all language, but this vagueness permits creativity in action, adaptability to new circumstances. Utterances and sentences aren’t disconnected from the messiness of worldly action. The drive for certainty always comes at the expense of flexibility. Just look at the certain beliefs of religious or ideological extremists: the American, Islamic, or Buddhist Taliban. Flexibility, adaptability, and change are necessary for the vitality of life, language, and meaning.

I don’t think I’m naive about this question anymore. I think Kripke might have been.