Letting the Resentment Settle In, Research Time, 09/05/2018

So I mentioned the other day that Paul Patton established his professional reputation by shifting a lot of folks in the North American academy’s community of Continentalists.*

* These are the researchers who specialize in pretty much any philosophical writer from the European continent from Hegel onward. This is the slightly disdainful label they’re given in the North American mainstream of university philosophy. In Cultural Studies departments, they’re just called profs.

There's no need to take affront on his behalf.
Deleuze never took affront at anyone, as far as
I know. The occasional awkward moment, but
never affront. He was very consistent that way.

Patton was trying to shift the whole field’s centre of gravity – from Jacques Derrida and deconstruction to Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of becoming and production. That’s great. But there are some passages of Deleuzian Concepts that make me cringe – the tone of his writing makes his critique feel uncomfortably personal.

Not personal in the sense that it involves a particular person in Patton’s circle, about which he has biases or excess sympathy. Aside from Gilles Deleuze, of course.

See, there was one event that kind of dropped the ball on Deleuze and Félix Guattari's international public relations. It was a conference at Columbia University in 1975.

Total disaster. There was a group of radical feminist activists who were so essentialist about the nature of gender that hearing Félix Guattari give a talk about how any essentialism would send them into a frenzy.

Up next, Félix Guattari discussing how all forms of essentialism are utter failures as theories because they include no possibility for change. A man will always be phallocentric in all aspects of his existence – ridiculous, when we are all processes, changing all the time.

Really, gender is changeable as both a social and physical construct, so there can be as many genders as our ingenuity and self-discipline can successfully create.** They refused to hear it and heckled him all lecture.

** TERFs. Félix Guattari was heckled by a bunch of TERFs. You do know, right, that the philosophical basis for all TERF activism and ideology is this utterly obsolete, bumbling theory of gender essentialism? It’s a theory that has failed as knowledge because reality is utterly different from how it says the world should be.

Then a bunch of guys from the local Lyndon LaRouche society started interrupting Michel Foucault’s closer, screaming that he was paid by the CIA. Yeah, that Lyndon LaRouche.

If he's in the CIA, then the Maidan protestors were all gay fascists
working for the Americans, whose government is funded by
George Soros and the Freemasons' cabal whose Grand Wizard
is Barack Obama. Here to our newsdesk at RT to explain why
all this makes sense, aside from government orders to believe it,
is respected American economist, philosopher, and activist
Lyndon LaRouche.

Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault were all so upset at how they were insulted all though the conference, that they all decided they didn’t want to go back to America again. Foucault overcame his initial disgust more quickly.

The next time he did an appearance in New York, another dick from the LaRouche society asked him about the charges that he was CIA. At least he had the decency to wait until question period. But Foucault immediately goes on the warpath.

“Yes! Yes, I am CIA! And she’s CIA! And he’s CIA too! And everyone in this room is CIA except you. You work for the KGB!”***

*** Michel Foucault. You know how to deal with crazy fascist internet trolls when the internet was still secret military tech. We lost you too soon, old man.

But Deleuze and Guattari themselves hardly went back to America. It took that extra generation of mostly Canadian philosophy researchers who first translated and wrote on Deleuze to bring him to the prominence he has in the North American academy today. Paul Patton was part of that generation, even if he does suffer from being Australian.

It was a public relations screw-up. The conference let too many extremists in, when they needed an audience of thoughtful nerds. Like the generation of Patton, Boundas, Genosko, Massumi. But Deleuze and Guattari were too pissed off about it to bother going back to America. They presumed they’d get the same reception.

That is painful in so many ways, paths, vectors. Sports teams need
therapists to help players deal with their own-goals.

Own goal, guys.

Yet when Patton writes his remarks about the feminist and postcolonial misinterpretation of Gilles Deleuze, including the 1975 conference, a bitterness seeps into his tone. And it isn’t necessary.

He’s trying to make an important point – don’t take Deleuze’s words like ‘becoming-woman’ or ‘nomadism’ as metaphors, but as literal descriptions of thought processes in the most abstract language he and Guattari could muster.

Patton seems bitter at the misinterpretation, as if it was an affront to be misunderstood. That somehow these feminists and these post-colonial writers were foolish, inadequate thinkers for taking Deleuze to be writing metaphors, saying that disruptive thought is merely “like” a bedouin nomad.

He strings well-meaning, professional, thoughtful theorists with extremist radical TERFs. I don’t think Patton would like it if I said explicitly what I don’t like about this part of his book.

Don’t make me say it. I don’t want to say it.

Will I Follow or Will I Be? When the Truth Is Clear, Composing, 04/05/2016

Continued from last post . . . Okay. I’m finally going to do this. Break open my brain a little bit and talk about people's immanent power to shape their own lives and produce new ways of life. And this is going to get deeper than some smooth-talking Tony Robbins shit here.

When I first came across this idea, I felt like the
experience of September 11 was such a pivotal event in
shaping my personality. The surreal weirdness made such
an impact on me that I felt as though how I understood
the world was profoundly different than how I did before.

Profound truths can emerge from an event. The world unfolds at a particular place and time in such a way that it produces a deeply meaningful and complex insight about the nature of existence. It could be the nature of your existence as a person, maybe the nature of human existence generally. Maybe your own understanding of the nature of human existence. It takes a lot to unpack that.

Sometimes, that’s what I think philosophical thought really amounts to. Unpacking the more profound meanings and truths of our lives so we can see all the details splayed out before us. 

How is an insight complex? Most of the time, we describe insights as simple, don’t we? An insight is the “Ah-ha!” moment. It’s where everything makes sense, and everything is clear. That’s supposed to make the world simple. 

Well, there’s nothing about being true or making sense that implies that what you newly understand is simple at all. Plenty of us understand a lot of different aspects of the world that are incredibly complex. You can have an insight about any part of reality that illuminates a pretty complex field. 

You may actually have a hard time explaining precisely what you understand. There’s an old adage in analytic philosophy that if you truly understand something, you can explain it easily. Well, that’s frankly bullshit. 

If you understand something very complicated, you may not be able to explain it easily. Maybe not without a years-long apprenticeship or course program. Maybe it’s more intuitive knowledge that only manifests after years of practice. The point is that what we understand may have many different facets, aspects, perspectives, and interlocking parts.

But that isn't the only single event, or an image of an
event, that can transform a world and how people can
see themselves. In this case, the power of this event
reaffirmed an ethical principle very important to me.
But I was glad that it did so for many others.

Depth of a truth is another matter, but related to its complexity. It’s more about whether some piece of knowledge captures some fundamental or essential aspect of its subject matter. Do you understand what makes a system operate the way it does?

Take away some object or stop some process that’s part of some larger system. Some piece of architecture without which the entire building would come crashing to rubble, or none of the electricity would flow throughout an entire city. You have a deep truth if you know about some piece of the world like that. Knowledge of what’s fundamental.

Knowledge is always produced in someone. It’s a function of a consciousness, of a creature’s awareness of the world. What is known and what can be known depends on what the knowing creature can do. So all of our knowledge is rooted in action – a new piece of knowledge lets you do new things. 

Even if all you’re doing is thinking in a way you’ve never thought before. Each new piece of knowledge – some act of learning – changes us just that little bit. A small difference, but we can never say the world is ever quite the same. In that sense, every change is a radical one. 

A change in the smallest possible quantity is still enough to transform X into Y. Every one of our acts has that power. I mean, all acts and changes have that radically transformative power. But human beings are included in that group – we’re part of the universe, which means we have the power to change it.

And that’s what activism of any kind really is. That’s the point Antonio Negri and Michel Foucault – to talk about the passage of Commonwealth I’ve been discussing since Monday. That’s the profound insight that comes from reflecting on these ideas. 

Not every event in our lives is going to cause a widespread
social and material transformation in the world. But each
of them will have their own significance and beauty. The
world according to each of those moments. 

Understand that every act you make radically transforms the world. Understand the weight of everything you do when even our most insignificant movements have the inherent potential to flip the world around. Not every sneeze is going to change a whole country’s political system or end all war and poverty, or anything like that scale.

But the lesson is that because we can make simple, ordinary changes in the world, we can also make massively important ones. At their most fundamental, every change is radical – the difference between X and Y. Every difference makes a difference. Some bigger than others, but a difference nonetheless.

Understand that we have this power. And then jump for joy that we have it.

• • •

This post is another one of those moments where I basically write philosophy for you. Almost freestyle. A pure cut of conceptual exploration. Maybe you think it’s bunk, maybe I illuminated something for you. I’ve heard people tell me Plato was nonsense. What constitutes peer review in this context? 

Stick it in your pipe and have a think. Let me know what comes out of it.

Will I Follow or Will I Be? Better Than Tragedy, Research Time, 03/05/2016

Continued from last post . . . So where does this idea of fidelity leave us? It’s the romance of the lost cause. Again, this is one part of the many reasons why Alain Badiou chose the Paris riots of summer 1968 as the event to which he was faithful.

The book where Badiou lays all this out, Being and Event, is a big, long, complicated book that relates political principles and activism with deep ontological conceptions, like how set theory is the best way to understand the fundamental nature of the universe. It’s huge and it’s weird. 

The 1960s saw plenty of student activism and riots around
university campuses throughout the West, but the Paris
riots saw true political radicalism (compared to liberal
democracy) in that community for the first time. There
were seriously a lot of genuine Maoists in the French
student community of the time.

But one essential point of his thinking in what I want to think about today is how important that one pivotal event is in each of our lives.* Because that one event literally defines each of our lives. 

* Leave aside all his ontological stuff. One, it’s too complicated to explain as a side point among what I actually want to discuss in this post. Two, it ends up delegitimizing all political positions but a communism so extreme as to deny the singularity of individual people. So yeah. Glad I don’t roll with any of his ontology.

Your pivotal event defines your life because its memory lingers with you, and provides the spark that animates everything you care about. But why does it linger? What is it about human psychology that would make some event linger with us, sticking around in our minds to inspire our political and social lives, and our very identity as people?

Because there’s nothing that lingers in our memories like disappointment. And in a political context, the greatest disappointment is failure. Our fidelity to the event that shaped us is a memoriam to its potential. Because in our real experience, that event petered out into failure and disappointment. 

The ruined potential of our formative event becomes, in our fidelity to its memory, a dream of a perfect future. Utopia in the counterfactual, in the possible world that was denied to us. “What might have been.”

For Badiou, that disappointment was in the reactionary movement that crushed the idealism of the May ’68 demonstrators. I can see that disappointment today when I look at the social media feeds of dedicated Bernie Sanders supporters in the United States, now that he has virtually no path left to the Presidential nomination. 

Yet those radical times are easily romanticized in our
memorials to them. Take Bernardo Bertolucci's The
Dreamers, which understood the riots and their political
radicalism through the symbology of dirty sex.

At least those few – isolated and loud though they are – who believe that the Presidential campaign is really all the movement is about.** The ones who don’t know that Sanders is a lucky ally of the wider social movement that began with Occupy – the actual revolution in Western politics.

** Are there even any of these people?

The problem with this way of thinking about political inspiration is that it presumes idealism to serve only impossibilities. The only events that can inspire us to build a better world are moments when we could have, but which came crashing down. The idealism of the graveyard. 

Why would Antonio Negri contrast this vision with Michel Foucault’s conception of the event in politics? Because it makes the best contrast. However, it doesn’t necessarily make the clearest concept. At least not to me.

Because I’ve been trying to write about this more creative conception of the pivotal event, rooted in present action, for the last two days. And I’ve just ended up waxing poetic about Badiou’s politics of regret for two days in a row. It’s useful, as there will probably be a more poetic passage about this idea of Badiou’s memoriam.

An aspect of their personal lives and positionalities as people will probably play a role in this too. Badiou is a lifelong academic, who was inspired in his aggressive political radicalism through a period in his life when France was almost profoundly changed in an uprising that began on campus.

Pictured: The barest hints of transgression and a vision of
a new kind of humanity.

May 1968 was the only time in European history after the Second World War when a student movement grew truly radical and could have massively changed the country. The rest of his life, Badiou could only talk and write about such change. He could only ever memorialize and remember.

Foucault was himself a gay man, whose writings and everyday life constituted a kind of activism. His ordinary, everyday desires constituted a radical set of new social and political possibilities just by existing. 

I think I’m figuring out how to talk about this. I’ll try again along these lines tomorrow. . . . To be continued

Will I Follow or Will I Be? The Comparison, Research Time, 02/05/2016

When you write something that compares how two thinkers understand a particular idea, you have to be seriously careful how you present the discussion. You can very easily make that discussion about the two thinkers themselves, even though you might have intended to discuss the ideas.

Most of the time, ideas and concepts are more interesting than the people who think them. Even concepts that someone like Michel Foucault thought about, and he was probably one of the most interesting people in the last century of philosophy.

Because I want to talk about a conception of event. There’s a discussion of this in Antonio Negri’s Commonwealth that I find fascinating, and could very well become a centrepiece of my own Utopias. And Negri discusses it as a back-and-forth between Foucault’s and Alain Badiou’s conception of the event. 

The last time I talked about Badiou was more than two years ago. He’s another one of those philosophers who, once you mention him or one of his ideas, rapidly makes the conversation all about him. I don’t really like that in philosophy – or any creative field, really – because it takes the emphasis away from the ideas and draws you into arguments about one particular person’s set of ideas. Heidegger’s another one of those people.

So Utopias is a book that explores how we understand our political attitudes and the strength of our dedication to a cause through our relationship with time. The different ways in which we can unfold our lives shape how we engage with our communities, promote social change (or not), and our potential optimism for the future.

That's the guiding idea behind the whole book. Or at least it will be. So it was really interesting for me to have seen Negri write about how these two build their intensely political conceptions of event. And it fits very much with what I’ve read of both those thinkers too. 

It breaks down, basically, like this. 

For Badiou, the politically relevant event is an inspiration. It’s an inspiration so profound that it shapes your entire character and all your moral, political, and ethical beliefs. It’s always in the past. 

You identify the pivotal event retroactively – maybe it first inspired you through your experience of it, but its power over you only ever becomes apparent through your memory. Not just your memory in reflection, but your memory in action. Because you intend every action that you take in the world now to reflect and pay homage to that event and its power over your life from the past. 

The pivotal event is always separate from you, in Badiou’s thinking. It’s not necessarily about striving to re-create the event, because you can never really bring it about again. Nor would you necessarily want to.

I mean, think about how horrifying and violent some of the pivotal events in people’s lives are. Maybe it’s some massacre or attack. I’ve often thought about the September 11 attacks as one of these pivotal events that have shaped my political consciousness. 

You wouldn’t want to re-create that. Not only would it be horrifying, but it would take away from the original event’s power. It had that power to define your personality because of the way the event hit you at that moment. And part of what was special at that moment was that there had never been anything quite like that event before. 

That's why there’s never any true repetition. Whenever something happens again, it’s never quite the same event, even if it unfolds exactly according to the same script. The history is different because the event has precedent. 

Badiou calls this relationship to a pivotal event fidelity. We’re faithful to the event that shaped our lives and personalities. Our relationship with it exerts a powerful force that constitutes a lot of our subjectivities. Our contemporary actions become a tribute to that event’s power.

The pivotal event for Badiou and his philosophy, to which he returns continually in
his own Being and Event, is the time of May 1968, and the riots that convulsed
Paris in dreams of a radically different society.

Foucault’s concept is very different, and I’d say it’s the one that Utopias the book will prefer. Foucault is interested in the event as our own power to create events. The event is the new beginning that we create with our political action, with our daily life working in our society and community. 

One is a past event that inspires our action in the future with our faith and fidelity to it. One is our own power to create change in our world. You can see which one I’d choose. The question is why. . . . To be continued

Grinding Us Into an Essence II: WTF Is Biopolitics Anyway? A History Boy, 15/04/2016

Continued from last post . . . I have a history of being able to explain pretty well terms that people tend to find impenetrable. Biopolitics has been one of those terms. I have a pretty good history of making sense of that idea for people who openly admit that it mystifies the fuck out of them. 

Michel Foucault developed the concept of biopolitics as
it's understood today. But its problem is that it's used in
disciplinary contexts, where if you don't already know
what it means, you shouldn't expect it to be explained.

And unless you’ve already spent a lot of time reading the relevant philosophy, you probably are pretty mystified. This isn’t because the idea is complicated. It isn’t at all.

Biopolitics is simply about understanding that every aspect of material human life is a legitimate area of politics. And concept has a mirror image – politics is about managing the needs, desires, powers, and productivity of material human bodies. The manager can be an authority, a community, or an individual.

So having some particular form or list of rights in your constitution becomes, as far as you need to understand your political situation, a list of your powers that your government officially steps back from standing against. Claims to property or private spheres are only a limited subset of all these powers. 

The concept of biopolitics is a response to understanding that the liberal tradition of political thought – with its focus on rights and claims to privacy and property from government interference – isn’t adequate to all the politically relevant relations of power.

The problem with the language of biopolitics, at least as I’ve heard it spoken about over my old academic career and continued conversations in that world, is that nobody bothers to explain it. The term becomes dogma. 

Questions about what it means are answered with non-explanations. For example, politics as the domain of bare life, which is one thing I’ve heard in conversations that left most everyone more confused. 

Foucault wrote plenty of technical, heavily detailed books,
but he was always at heart about reaching the wider
population. He pitched his books to a general audience
interested in the history of Western institutions. And he
wrote journalism and popular criticism all his life
alongside his more stereotypically intellectual work.

This is a gatekeeping function of academic culture – it shuts people out of the conversation that haven’t wanted to devote themselves to it. It’s a way of making sure that a conversation is dominated only by experts. That’s fine when your goal is to discuss technical refinements and theoretical experiments or explorations. 

But not every conversation about philosophy, theory, and conceptual engineering should be like that. Instead, you have to explain it. 

A concept like biopolitics can have real power in the world, because it can radically change the way you see the world. And so it can change how you act in it. To me, this is the most important power of philosophy, and its essence. Think about the process like this. 

Say you’ve grown up all your life exposed to ordinary liberal sort-of-wishy-washy ideas about the proper subjects of political discussions and activism. The stable management of government. Legal adjudication. Administering property and privacy claims according to particular sets of rights. Arguing over which of those privacy and property rights are most important. 

All this stuff matters, but it leaves you thinking about politics in a very limited way. For one, all politics is about the relationship of people to the institutions that protect their rights and administer their claims and suits. It’s all about the role of people under their state’s regime and its laws.

Fine enough. But that actually sidelines and ignores a lot of what makes people powerful and weak. It ignores a lot of what makes people themselves. What builds their subjectivities.

Foucault and his books could be quite dense, but he was
always fundamentally about encouraging people to live
their own lives and rebel against values that held
themselves universal for their own sake, if your own
desires led you in a different direction.

Remember what I said yesterday about fundamentalisms. Each of them has an intense focus in their practical political programs of controlling what people do with their bodies. Religious observance, ethnic purity in reproduction, production and consumption. 

But none of that is focussed on the body in itself. Controlling what people do with their bodies is more about a means to an end – purifying their souls, purifying their nation, the pure vision of homo economicus. 

The kind of utopia that Antonio Negri thinks we should build using our biopolitical ideas isn’t a literally perfect society. He doesn’t know what that would look like. Neither do I and neither do you. 

We’re talking instead about a utopia of people in charge of creating their own subjectivities. Free from any value system that would use the force of authority and its institutions to impose itself in the name of some ideal that transcends all the messiness of life. 

Pushing Past Neoliberalism, Jamming, 01/02/2016

I used to work in the university sector as a humanities researcher and writer. Now I work in the business sector, mainly in marketing, communications, and the arts. As a career, it looks like a solid break, like the two eras have nothing really to do with each other.

In many circumstances, they don’t. Academics are trained to write in very specific, technical ways whose habits are hard to break, and their only other skills are teaching (though many don’t even have teaching skills). 

But I kept writing in a lot of styles, writing short stories and even publishing a couple during my grad school years. Also, I was lucky to have had a supervisor who helped me develop a non-fiction writing style that combined trippy concepts with accessible prose. Blogging has only helped me improve that style of open, accessible weirdness.

As a result of all this, I’ve fairly easily transitioned between a career in the university sector and a career in the business world. But another kind of convergence between university and business sectors is much more controversial: the influence of corporate money and priorities on universities.

State University of Arizona, flashes of green in a desert.

There are plenty of things to criticize about this relationship. I’ve criticized quite a lot of it myself. But I want to write today about an attempt to situate the university as the forefront of scientific research. In the words of Arizona State University President Michael Crow, such a leadership role is how the modern university can “own the future.”

Take a few minutes and read the article Crow published on LinkedIn about Arizona State’s new Institute and School for the Future of Innovation in Society. I linked it in the quote, so take a moment and read it.

Yeah, I had the same reaction. What the fuck did those 500ish words of buzz-talk and empty PR even mean? Others have explained the basics of the Institute and School’s mission statement to me.

Basically, Crow’s vision is that the research and teaching of Arizona State take a lead in innovation, educating people to innovate, and developing a progressive vision for humanity’s future. Resurrecting the hopefulness of the Jet Age and Atomic Age in the Internet Age and the Holocene Extinction.

My friend, Social Epistemology colleague, and occasional Twitter sparring partner Steve Fuller has expanded on and critiqued aspects of Crow’s vision. Read his response at the SERRC here, because my own critical remarks are about to begin.

The ideological bugbear of the modern left is neoliberalism. And that’s for more than just – in Steve’s words – the left’s focus on the injustice, unfairness, and pain of who loses in a given economic and social framework. 

Neoliberalism is an ideology that praises uprooting, especially uprooting in the name of profit and economic growth, and that can be very dangerous. Communities are disrupted and destroyed, traditional labour arrangements are destroyed and people are left adrift. The extreme individualism of neoliberal ideology can shatter families and starve welfare states. 

Some of the best social media conversations I have are
with Steve Fuller.

Yet Steve sees benefits to neoliberalism as a philosophy of economics and society. And frankly, so do I. The benefits come out when you read authors like Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. 

Some of their clearest political messages are about undermining and critiquing the power of the state. The state can be a terrifyingly powerful agent of control – it enforces nationalistic (and so fundamentally racializing and racist) cultural uniformity, conformity, submission to authority, and the steel fist of the police at their most pervasive and powerful.

All of this must be resisted, and the political philosophy of deterritorialization – Deleuze and Foucault’s – is about tearing down the power of the state to control people’s lives and bodies. Breaking down state power and processes is essentially neoliberal.

This is the heart of Daniel Zamora’s biting critique of Foucault that showed up in Jacobin Magazine just over a year ago. But the solution to the injustices of neoliberalism won’t be found in a return to the state. That just brings back the old authoritarian suppression of universalizing state control.

At the same time, as much as I sympathize with the liberatory aspects of neoliberalism (smash the state, end biopolitical police control), as a political and business philosophy, triumphal individualism has crested and left us with the exploitation of loneliness and despair.

I’d say the most oppressive characteristic of neoliberalism* is its presumption that relations between individuals are always fair, despite vast material differences. This is the sacredness of the contract, the fair agreement between a business owner and a businessman providing a service.

* I may say something else is the most oppressive another day, but this is today.

The caption on this photo literally describes this man as
picking up cupcakes and champagne to bring to a party
to celebrate someone's promotion. His income from a
day as a Tasker will probably work out to less than the
minimum wage in his state. Standard compensation for
workers in the most recent radical business innovation
to emerge from Silicon Valley: how to make millions
skirting laws that protect workers from exploitation.

Preserving the freedom to make contracts is the philosophical heart of neoliberal opposition to unions. A collective agreement is a negotiation that individuals didn’t necessarily sign on to, but that determines the conditions of their labour. They don’t have the freedom to negotiate a deal on their own terms.

The problem is that “freedom to negotiate” in all instances leaves many workers vulnerable to exploitation by their employers. Silicon Valley, and its culture of extreme liberalism, may be as Steve says, the cultural home of the modern business era. 

But its biggest recent innovation – the sharing economy – makes losers out of almost everyone. Exploitation and underpayment of workers is a condition that sharing economy businesses rely on to survive.

Standing against the oppression of authoritarian state power, the deterritorializing philosophy of neoliberalism was a vehicle of liberation. But now we must, as Antonio Negri describes, push through individualist principles to develop a path of liberation from the oligarchic oppression of permanent underemployment.

And I doubt Michael Crow at Arizona State is going to do that with his buzzwords and pitchman’s logic.

Editor's Note. Thanks to Steve Fuller for correcting me that Crow is actually President of Arizona State University, and not University of Arizona, as I originally thought. It's not the first time I've mixed up a state's "University of" with its "State U." Holy hell.

I Seriously Hope the Libertarians Aren’t Right, Composing, 28/01/2015

A review I wrote jointly with some of my colleagues at the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective went up this week, discussing the new book written by Joseph Heath, Enlightenment 2.0. I enjoy writing these joint reviews because each of us can take a partial point of view on the work we’re talking about, and write freely without pressure to be fully comprehensive. We usually each focus on a particular concept or angle, and let each of those different perspectives add up to a multifaceted view of the whole work.

But I also have a few more thoughts about Heath’s book and the political ideas he expresses in it that I eased away from in my review. I had space constraints, and these issues are really more relevant to some of my ongoing political philosophy research for my own projects. 

Even though most of my writing work at the moment is concentrating on Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, the Utopias project is still on my radar as well. It’s why I’m reading Friedrich Hayek and thinking about how his own intellectual confrontation with Nazi and Bolshevik totalitarianism has influenced the contemporary right wing of Western politics and the contemporary right wing view of the left wing.

Inventive businesspeople can monetize anything.

I realized just from reading and thinking about today’s politics, especially today’s conservative movements, that you can’t write a book that deals with the dangers of totalitarianism without engaging with libertarian thinking. It’s not because libertarians are totalitarian – far from it. The reason is that libertarians believe they’re the front line of defence against totalitarian currents in modern politics. They’re people who seriously believe that Barack Obama and Jack Layton represent totalitarian political movements.*

* When the Tea Party first arose, I thought the Obama = Hitler meme was just ignorant racism, like those posters depicting him as a witch doctor with a bone through his nose. But there are people who are genuinely anti-racist who actually believe that Obama wants to make the United States a new Nazi republic. I still find it so depressing that I have to write these sentences seriously.

Joseph Heath co-wrote The Rebel Sell, which made his popular reputation as a critic of consumer and corporate culture. The book analyzed counter-cultural movements as not genuine rebellions against an oppressive mainstream, but equally consumerist tribal identities. It was a popular, but quite controversial account of grassroots political movements as merely alternative brands. 

The impeccable depth of research in Enlightenment 2.0 impressed me. His book journeys through psychological studies of human reasoning abilities. He compiles a mass of evidence to demonstrate pretty conclusively that humans are not as rational as the old faith of the original Enlightenment movement thought we were. 

Here’s an example that I didn’t have space to cite in my review. Heath discusses how detergent companies design their bottlecaps. The caps double as vessels to measure and pour laundry detergent, and they all have markings on the inside to show how much is needed for a single, double, or triple load. 

Even our laundry detergent caps are insidious.

But the markings are all extremely faint, usually written as raised plastic and not as actual marks of contrasting colour with the cap. As a result, most people don’t see them. I see them, but I’m accustomed to looking for them. Most people don’t see them, and fill the detergent cup almost to the brim for every load. Not only does this use unnecessary detergent, making you spend money needlessly on more laundry detergent than you need; you also end up spending more money on clothes because washing them with so much detergent damages the fabric and prematurely ages them.

I cite this example because it’s so ordinary in all our lives, but also a very small detail in most people’s lives. This is a way that unscrupulous companies take advantage of the petty non-rationality of most people. And because his body of psychological evidence suggests how difficult it is for most people to overcome their non-rationality through self-conscious knowledge, Heath recommends a different route.

Heath’s key concept in Enlightenment 2.0 is the kluge. It’s a little modification to your environment that encourages you to think better or discourages a counter-productive thought. It’s easy to do on an individual level. For instance, I have a tendency to forget where I put particular small items that I need every day, like my keys or my phone. My environmental kluge is to keep all those things in the same place on my writing desk as soon as I come home from work. 

The kluge is the engine of the new enlightenment. And Heath entirely lays it on the state to install these kluges throughout our lives to ensure the public’s rationality so that our representative democratic institutions continue to work in the public interest. Even down to the caps on our laundry detergent.

It’s not that I’m against all government regulation.** But a refusal to trust the state is necessary to maintain democratic politics today. We can’t go back to the old era of trusting the state to manage every little aspect of our lives. That minute universality of management is what Michel Foucault called the oppression of biopolitics, and Hayek argued against it too. 

** I admit that I rather sound like Heath when he distinguishes his own distrust of the public’s rationality from that of philosophers like Zhang Weiwei who are open state authoritarians. Heath is unconvincing about his continued faith in democracy, and when I talk as I do here, I sound pretty unconvincing about my continued faith in government.

A thinker as quality as Foucault can't be contained
in the doctrines of a single political movement.

Ultimately, my argument on this problem of public rationality is that if we all work together, we can overcome the dirty tricks of our natural unreason that profiteers use to separate us from our increasingly hard-earned money. That’s just what I said in my section of the book review. 

The message that I want you to take away from this blog post is a lesson about anti-corporate politics. It’s similar to what I wrote about Daniel Zamora’s recent critique of Foucault as a closet neoliberal.*** Fighting the manipulation of oligarchic interests shouldn’t send us back to oppression under a micro-managing state authority, and fighting state authoritarianism shouldn’t send us back to life as corporate playthings, which is the practical endgame of modern libertarian politics. I’m not even any good at playing ping-pong. I don’t want to be a ball.

*** Yes, I’m aware of the irony of the term applied to Foucault. It’s quite a simple piece of wordplay.

Progress in fighting oppression under authorities of all kinds should ultimately free us from oppression from authorities of all kinds, not just trade one for another back and forth. Progress means taking control of our own lives.

The Left in Danger of Its Old Stupid Mistakes Again, Jamming, 13/12/2014

I’ve said before on the blog that I’ve always considered myself a person of the left, and embraced all the conflicts, misunderstandings, paradoxes, and idiosyncrasies. Even though I’ve sometimes been told that I shouldn’t be a leftist, it’s where I always fall when it comes to my political beliefs. Besides, it’s not as though there isn’t plenty of room (and history) of people on the political left wildly disagreeing with each other about incredibly important topics.

I thought about the left’s tendency to internal divisions, critique, and also its short memories when I read this article at Jacobin that a lot of my online friends were linking over the last couple of days. It’s an interview with the scholar Daniel Zamora about Michel Foucault. Zamora has published a book of critical essays on Foucault, and its central angle is that, despite being one of the most popular and influential thinkers on the modern intellectual left, Foucault was actually a free-market neoliberal.

How, I can imagine you asking, does that make any bloody sense at all? Well, it goes something like this.

As a gay man who embraced many of the
(unfortunately for him, quite dangerous)
subversive activities of that culture, he
understood the history of the state's power
to use police and prisons to control a
population's sexualities. A fundamental
aspect of liberation is freeing yourself
from a control apparatus.

Near the end of his life, in the early 1980s, Foucault came to see economic liberalism as a way to overcome the disciplinary social control of state domination of industry, civil life, health, and other essential aspects of human life. This was why he supported many figures in the French Socialist party whose policies embraced a market-liberalized social democracy. There were similar reasons why his contemporary Gilles Deleuze, a man with whom Foucault shared many philosophical ideas, supported François Mitterrand. Deleuze, however, would live long enough to regret this. Foucault was dead in 1984.

Zamora doesn’t denounce Foucault’s work, as such a thing would be too much for a respectful philosopher (though if he were a click-chasing blogger, it would be a different story). Foucault also deserves respect, says Zamora, because he’s one of the few thinkers on the left who actually engaged with the ideas of Hayek, Friedman, and their ilk before summarily dismissing them, as too many everyday leftists often do.

Zamora also makes a very insightful point that the long-term conservative revolution of neoliberal economics shifted the priorities of the welfare state from combatting overall inequality to fighting the most desperate poverty. So the rich could be as rich as possible as long as society maintained a general standard of living that kept people from a totally abject state. 

Zamora correctly describes this as making many of the government institutions that buoyed and supported the working class illegitimate. And slashing the welfare state has resulted in working people drifting closer to the borderline of poverty, living a largely hand-to-mouth existence. We are now the Dollarama generation, and a major intellectual hero of the left, Michel Foucault, endorsed the economic ideas at the heart of this shift.

But I don’t think Zamora is entirely fair to Foucault, and that he doesn’t understand the full depth of the problems with the world neoliberal economics replaced. Zamora expresses too much faith in the state as an institution to restore economic justice and fairness.

Foucault endorsed a vision of economic liberalism that broke down the immense power of the state to monitor and control its population down to each individual’s biological functions. Economic liberalization disconnects people, freeing them from a state apparatus that, while it does provide material services, also controls people.

You can also see this more purely conceptually in the discussions of deterritorialization as liberation in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. Zamora may be nostalgic for the welfare state of old, but that also means being nostalgic for a political principle of governance as population control. For the generation of Europeans whose teenage years were consumed by the war against Nazi totalitarianism (as Foucault’s and Deleuze’s were*), the power of the state to destroy individuality was the ubiquitous issue of politics, a spectre haunting the critical thought of the left.

* Deleuze himself lost his older brother Georges in the war, a French Resistance activist who was captured and disappeared in a Vichy government prison camp.

Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Negri, and the other post-pragmatist philosophers haunted the mainstream left of the 20th century with their more anarchistic visions of a left that didn’t rely on the state. I found one reaction to Zamora’s interview at a Washington Post blog, where Daniel Drezner writes that contemporary libertarians can learn a lot from Foucault. They certainly should learn a lot from Foucault: like how to become anarchists.

Ultimately, libertarian and neoliberal values will be defeated by the one problem that a society which ignores the problems of growing inequality always faces: the mass frustration of a huge majority of allegedly middle class people who can no longer afford any basic goods beyond the Dollarama level of quality. In allowing a collection of small oligarchies to concentrate almost all of Earth’s wealth in a few thousand hands, economic liberalization has failed.

But the vision of the people’s state has also failed. The generations who experienced Western totalitarianism in the Nazi and Stalinist regimes saw that. We see it today when we look at the militarization of the police, the American prison system, and the horrifyingly ubiquitous surveillance state institution we live under. Zamora is right about the bankruptcy of economic liberalism, but if he wants us to restore our faith in the state as the means of our liberation from this new regime, he’s a fool.