Teaching Prosperity in the Underground, Composing, 29/07/2018

So it’s been almost a week since the last post. I didn’t mean to do this on purpose – it’s just been a busy week. Thankfully, it’s mostly been busy with some promising business opportunities starting to come together.

And sometimes, just some incredibly long days. So long that I’d run out of energy before getting down to write. At least to write this, as I’ve mostly been working on other things that I actually get paid for. The blog is meta – a writing project about my writing projects – meta takes a back seat to actual.

I'm one person, not a mechanical writing machine. I'm powered by
food, coffee, and serotonin.

I’ve started work on a small media project that will involve interviews, and I’m starting to line those up for later in August. More updates to come.

But there are some other interesting developments in my teaching job as well. As you might remember, I published my review of Raphael Sassower’s book The Quest for Prosperity last week. I read it months ago, and only got around to writing it all now.

But that means I’ve had a few months to stew over its arguments and ideas. I think the book does come up short in some areas. But its critical chapters on the political economy of the 21st century global economy are wonderfully insightful.

There's a lot going on in those early chapters of The Quest for Prosperity that I couldn’t fit in all their detail into the main review. I only had so much space and so much time to write the thing. But in working over the ideas, I've begun incorporating them into my teaching work.

To give you an update, I’m the head of a program in Business Administration at a small private college. We’re using a standard set of textbooks, but I’m working on lecture content that itself goes beyond just those lines.

For example, I’m not about to present uncritically a map from Freedom House ranking the economic freedom of different countries around the world. I’m not going full communism in there. I’m just asking students questions about what economic freedom means to them, whether they ultimately agree with Freedom House’s terms, and how to articulate their differences.

The marketplace should be a friendly place.

Actually criticizing some aspects of business school orthodoxy as part of the program is turning into a pretty effective value proposition for the place. Unfortunately for the rest of North American civilization, this is how we stand out from the crowd.

One idea of Sassower’s that I’ve incorporated into my program’s business lectures is how he distinguishes between markets and capitalism. Markets are a matter of what Adam Smith called “truck and barter,” small exchanges among community members that add up to mutual benefit.

Capitalism as an ethical attitude is a spirit of competition, where you can all too easily see another person’s benefit as a potential loss for you. Worse yet, you expect others to see your benefits the same way you see theirs. So you become paranoid, aggressive, and suspicious.

Solidarity is broken. Friendship is impossible.

Manuel DeLanda covered the differences of markets and capitalism in a book published more than 20 years ago. But he had an ontological focus on the macroeconomics of the massive capital flows that industrialization and colonialism powered.

Sassower’s emphasis on political economy foregrounds moral principles and ethical attitudes, so we can see the transformation of a society’s values along with their economic system. Good is no longer giving benefits to your community, but leading your community as a function of your wealth. You don’t want to be part of a community – you want to own it.

How Hard It Is to Know What You’re Talking About, Composing, 12/05/2016

Back in my academy days, I used to have some really frustrating conversations with other philosophers. In short form, we always used to talk past one another. 

I would use a word one way, and my conversation partner would be used to it meaning something different. We’d get into this ridiculous argument where each of us thinks the other is completely out to lunch. 

Sometimes philosophical arguments end up as intense as
a Klingon bat'leth battle to the death. Then we all have a
laugh about it and have made a bunch of new friends.

One of these conversations was once actually over the meaning of the expression “talking past one another.” And yet the actors I work with keep asking me where I learned to write comedy dialogue so well. Girlfriend, you don’t know shit.

We’re all well-informed intelligent people. So why do we end up in these stupidly counter-productive conversations? I think the answer lies in the nature of disciplines. Every knowledge tradition has its own specialized vocabulary. 

In those vocabs, words that are easily understood in everyday conversations often take on specialized technical meanings. And each disciplinary community is its own diverging path, so the technical meanings of a common word in one community might end up being wildly different than the technical meanings of the same word in another group.

That’s a perfect recipe for misunderstanding, frustration, and the slow-burning resentment of mutual hostility. 

Fairly frequently, I’d find that the most intense and entrenched quarrelling camps in different sub-disciplines of academic philosophy came down to these conflicts of definition. No one in either camp could get to a point of critical distance from their own debates to realize that they were talking about different processes with the same words. 

I feel like philosophy in the universities would be a lot more productive if more people realized that you weren’t supposed to argue over the precise meanings of each aphorism late-period Ludwig Wittgenstein said. You were supposed to read Philosophical Investigations like a guidebook on argumentation styles to avoid.

Wittgenstein is another thinker who I think
people take the wrong messages from.
There's an enormous number of academic
books and articles arguing over the precise
meanings and implications of his work, and
whether his various ideas are right or wrong.
But he wrote guides on how to recognize
whether a problem is real or a result of
confusion. The real dispute comes over
which of those guidelines you think should
apply when.

I discuss one example of these disciplinary wars over nothing for a moment in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. Short version. It’s part of a discussion of very primordial forms of subjectivity. The kinds of perception that single-celled organisms do. 

There's a dispute in philosophy of mind over the nature of cognition, between those who think it’s about forming linguistic propositions and those who think it’s about practical action in the world. Following Manuel DeLanda’s really quite insightful distinction that not enough people take seriously, this dispute comes down to no real difference.

One talks about how to create signification, semantic meaning. One talks about how to create significance in the world, practical value. They’re entirely different processes, but these academics think they have conflicting views of the same process because they call the topic of their study ‘cognition.’ 

I close the argument with a joke that I probably think is a lot funnier than it really is, about two groups of people talking past each other. 

“It’s as if a group of silver miners walked into an office full of statisticians at Google, to tell them they’ll never discover the data they’re mining without proper drilling equipment, while the data miners are incredulous that the silver miners achieve anything without programming skills.”

As I read back through Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity to prepare for my panel on it in Calgary at the end of the month, I’m noticing some of my own argument techniques more explicitly than I used to. And this is a style I use quite a lot. 

Deflating an intense dispute within a discipline by showing that it’s based on a category mistake. That there isn’t really a substantive difference between the two (or more) sides. Just a different set of definitions, people using the same words to refer to different problems and processes, then getting into fights when they talk to each other. 

Or rather, talk past each other. Another thing I noticed over the years is that none of these critiques ever go over that well. And discussions in philosophy can get very intense and heated. But we usually all make up and have a beer afterward. Nobody takes it personally.

Except when I make one of these fundamental criticisms. Saying that the basic foundations of a disciplinary dispute are based on a very simple misunderstanding, and that realizing this makes your debate fade away into utter meaninglessness or trivia?

That seems to upset people quite a bit.

Centralizing vs Network Politics II: All Part of the Plan, Research Time, 09/09/2014

In most workplaces today, the boss tells you what to do. He sits at the centre and his orders reverberate around the periphery. Quite a lot of businesses work well with this model. But they have one important flaw: the boss isn’t perfect, and he’s just one man (and it is still far too often a man).

I don’t have much of a background in business education or theory, and I’m not sure that my readers do either. The problem with being a philosophical writer, which doesn’t occur with my professional and creative writing, is that no one person can know absolutely everything. I’m not totally sure if it was anything other than mythmaking that convinced us that the storehouse of human knowledge was ever so small that a single man could master it. I’ve heard such things said about Aristotle and Gottfried Leibniz, but it all sounds like worshipful hyperbole to me.

So without a strong background in the theory of business, I’m not all that sure whether anyone in that field has theorized much about the problems that can come when a single person has total control over a massively complex corporate empire. But it seems obvious that a single person can’t literally run an entire corporate conglomerate, no matter how Colin Ward’s analysis of the centre-periphery concept of organization contrasts it with the network concept.

Rupert Murdoch, billionaire tyrant. Wait, I think I got this
picture wrong again. Or did I?

We may regard Rupert Murdoch, for example, as an evil mastermind. But if he were actually to start micro-managing every aspect of his businesses, it would be a disaster. Once a body becomes large and complicated enough it will naturally become more of a network. This is something that emerges* from studies of complex systems and the mathematics that describe them.

* What a pun that is.

Manuel DeLanda first exposed me to these ideas in his books, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, A New Philosophy of Society, and Philosophy and Simulation. All of these books are wonderfully illuminating, though Simulation is a little disunified and Intensive Science is pretty dense. An extra advantage is that none of them really top 300 pages, so it’s not like they’re all that long.

The Western conception of rationality, in the tradition, failed to understand this concept of the network, I think because the Enlightenment thinkers of the 1700s in Europe understood reason along the lines of self-conscious attention, perception, and thought. In other words, planning. That makes centre-periphery models of rational order quite appealing: the planner is in the centre, and all the pieces radiating away from it carry out his orders.

But this is totally inadequate to the way that ecological systems, and physical systems generally, organize themselves. The world looks messy because it creates a networked order from the interaction of all the bodies that constitute it. The reason it looks messy to us is because we’re linear thinkers who intuitively believe that the only true form of order is self-conscious planning.

Legendary architect Le Corbusier. Don't you
think he looks like Rupert Murdoch?

Self-conscious planning in a complex system is, however, disastrous. The discipline of city planning is best known for its unmitigated disasters. The centrepiece architect of the era of rational city planning, Le Corbusier, is perhaps best known for his urban catastrophe, when he designed from scratch the entire Indian city of Chandigarh. Its wide streets were built for cars, but offer no shade to pedestrians who use public transport. Its open spaces in the heat of India are utterly inhospitable to inhabitants. The city perfectly executed a concept, but is unable to support a thriving life.

While communities of people who may be disenfranchised by the rational plans of urban architects can organize their opposition, these groups are also just as frequently vilified by the state authorities who make those plans and profit from them. Those profits can come directly from corrupt practices, or in our legitimate sense through property taxes. Ward is also insightful in pointing out that state authorities have no interest to protect the poor through urban planning because the poor pay so few property taxes.

Ward was an early endorser of favela culture, how the self-built shanty communities, while not always being the most aesthetically pleasing in the traditional sense, emancipated the poor from enslavement to rents. It’s the only way that a poor person is ever going to own his own house without a sub-prime mortgage: occupying unclaimed land and building his own place.

Most state authorities, and any kind of authority, are always going to be opposed to that kind of activity. They’re central authorities, and poor people live on the periphery of every society. Good, rational planning just means that the peripheral people follow the orders of those in the centre. But the world doesn’t follow plans. It finds its own orders through the networks its own activities create.

Morphogenesis: The Constitution of Form and Structure, A History Boy, 02/04/2014

We do not honour our heroes and inspirations by worshipping them, but by continuing the tasks through which they inspired you. Do not turn back; go on, despite uncertainty.

Above, I’ve posted a video of Manuel DeLanda discussing the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. If you want to learn a lot and you have about 75 minutes to spare in an evening, you should have a listen.

Deleuze is one of my favourite philosophers, and a thinker who has very much influenced my own thinking and work. DeLanda is, of all the people I know who have engaged with Deleuze’s thought (and DeLanda is a self-declared member of the post-Deleuzian tradition) who takes the most enlightened stance on the matter. Reading various scholars of Deleuze like Daniel Smith, Peter Hallward, Dorothea Olkowski, Jay Lampert, Gary Genosko, and more I'm tired of listing, I noticed a recurring trend in all these essays, books, and talks that I’ve read and seen. Everyone seems to talk as if their account of Deleuze is the right one. This implies that, once all these perspectives of what the ‘right’ Deleuze is get together, conflict is inevitable. I’ve been to gatherings of Deleuze scholars, and they aren’t bitter or bitchy at each other. But as long as the conversation is about interpreting Deleuze, conflict among the university faculties is inevitable. 

DeLanda’s work is entirely focussed not on giving an account of Deleuze better than any other, but in carrying his ideas that he developed in Deleuze’s tradition to other, new problems. His lecture here is about the growth of knowledge as we explore the material nature of the world, and what kind of knowledge is best suited to conduct that exploration. 

The most popular innovators of the scientific revolution like Isaac Newton believed that the growth of science would be a path to unification. Conservative philosophy of science has treated human knowledge this way as well. But the real history of science has been divergence of disciplines, as the world has proven so complex that different venues of knowledge (metallurgy, chemistry, geology, and all their various sub-disciplines) have entirely different frameworks of knowledge and mathematical functions.

Only in the last century was metallurgy taken seriously as a
science, having had to overcome the negative class
heritage of metal smiths, who were, unfortunately for the,
community, social outcasts for hundreds of years.

What is most important for the fidelity, usefulness, and ultimate truth of knowledge is how well we understand the material we are investigating. That understanding comes from experience — no matter how insightful the knowledge of theoretical thinking is, it remains rarefied and abstract until you dive into the details of the material and its structure. Matter and mathematics, the world and its structures. DeLanda talks about, “the magic of the material world,” how matter comes together in mathematically mappable relationships to constitute bodies of such greater complexity. 

He talks about Deleuze developing three kinds of reasoning about the material nature of reality, thinking in terms of populations or variations without pre-determined themes, intensities or relations among dynamisms, and topologies or material shapes and potentials. DeLanda depicts these three as essential to understanding materiality in that magical sense that is necessary for genuine knowledge, the knowledge of the world that can have worldly impact. He introduces the question in this lecture, but presses the question into more difficult territory in his books, some of which succeed better than others. I contrast him with other approaches to Deleuze scholarship because I can even ask the question of whether he succeeds or fails. 

I have seen among communities of X-ian philosophers that I cannot even ask the question of success. All the arguments seem to be about interpretations, but unless you are plain sloppy, all interpretations of a given great philosopher, no matter how divergent they may be, are true. The reason a philosopher is great is because their works have the potential for these multiple, divergent interpretations. Their heritage lies in having inspired those communities of squabbling authors of secondary material. They can encourage all this divergence in interpretation, still standing above the chaos. 

Deleuze is very much one of these figures, which is why, as long as people continue to read his work, will encourage lively debate and inspiration to bring his ideas into new problems. DeLanda is one of those latter kinds of figures, whose philosophical ambition opens the possibility that they can become one of those great figures. I hope my works in philosophy will be of the latter kind as well.