Whither Capital I: The Best Tools, Research Time, 30/05/2018

Gilbert’s book Anticapitalism and Culture digs into the cultural influence of Stuart Hall and the other founders of the Cultural Studies tradition in Britain. I think I’m going to use this shorthand for the rest of this set of posts about Gilbert’s book:

When I write Cultural Studies, I refer to that particular tradition of radical theorists who are based primarily in the university system, who write critiques of cultural objects like artistic works, as well as the institutional and cultural systems whose figures produce art.

Pictured: The end of history.

The Cultural Studies scholars come in for praise for being ahead of the curve when it comes to other radical left-wingers in the university system. Most of the other marxists were, in the 1970s and 80s, generally too busy rolling with communist guerrilla groups or applying Marx’s own categories and concepts to the Reagan era.

Contrast the Cultural Studies scholars who could leave the most dogmatic marxist concepts behind to understand the character of neoliberalism. Basically, they understood how the intensification of global free trade and financial investment was transforming the industrial processes of human civilization.

The old-school marxists, meanwhile, were trying to figure out who the proletariat was. I’m being glib, but that’s basically the glib version of the mistakes of traditional marxists. They never learned the lessons of Antonio Gramsci.

One – there are many different ways to build destructive industrial economic systems. Two – an economic and political system can change in contingent ways. Your categories won’t help you when the world makes your thought obsolete.

Gramsci smacked pragmatism into the anti-capitalist movements. At least, he does when you take his lessons seriously.

The Cultural Studies concentrated on the cultural aspects of the globalized capitalism that kicked into gear in the 1980s. Maybe today, you could call it that version of capitalism financial sector oligarchy. But it leaves so much else out. Put it to the side for now.

That was one success – a better diagnosis on the largest scale. Now the question would be whether they could give us a set of tools to carve political alternatives. It wasn’t going to turn out well.

Being Is Primary Over Knowledge, Jamming, 10/04/2018

Being is primary over knowledge. That’s the fundamental principle of empiricism, that human knowledge and thinking always has something to learn from the world. The world can surprise a human thinker easily, ordinarily. Or maybe rarely. But it always can.

I’m keeping it short tonight. I’ve had a super-long day. I’m going to have a lot of super-long days moving apartments, and I’m only moving up the road.

Pictured: The logic of colonialism expressed in mass murder.

Knowledge doesn’t exist to determine being. Knowledge is a means of exploring existence. We contribute to building the world, but it’s a dynamic process of feedback – far from the determination of logic.

The refusal to be surprised is a refusal to take what’s different from you as something to learn from. It rejects the dignity of the different. The logic of colonialism is expressed ontologically.

This doesn’t reduce that complex ontology of high modernism – the kind Deleuze found in Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel – to a colonial ideology. One is the expression of the other. Neither is primary absolutely. Ontological vocab works to develop the idea in one context. Political vocab in another.

Michael Hardt’s book about Gilles Deleuze’s early years describes the older man as a young thinker. Not about his daily life, of course, which was unexciting – teaching secondary school, mostly in Lyon, raising his young family, bored out of his mind.

A man who’d lost his brother to a Gestapo prison cell might wish for an unexciting life, I suppose. Though he applied all the time for jobs back in Paris.

Deleuze saw the influence of that ontological chauvinism – that human reason determined the fundamental structure of reality – as something that desperately needed to be overcome. It had led to disaster politically, and increasingly insular navel-gazing among the philosophers of his country.

He sought to overcome it not by arguing against it, but my articulating a philosophical vision so alien to it that it didn’t even need to refer to the hubris and ego of ontological rationalism. In doing so, he set a model for the most thorough empiricism to come yet from the Western tradition.

And he argued for that empiricism by showing all the amazing things you could do with that approach to thinking that you simply couldn’t with hubristic rationalism.

That, to me, is the most interesting part of his career because it’s the most creative part, especially after he junked his Freudian influences through collaborating with Félix Guattari and wrote some explicitly political philosophy.

Having read Hardt’s book, I’m not sure that it really does Deleuze’s thinking justice to frame all of his creative later developments in this early, reactionary phase of his thinking. He’s still running away. Not yet able to stand on his own (and with his friends) to articulate a real philosophical alternative to the modernist model.

What Commentary Is For, Composing, 11/03/2018

When I gave up on a conventional career in the university sector – prof hustling the tenure and paywalled journal circuit – I also realized that I’d have to change how I wrote philosophy.*

* Some of the comments are going to be part of my next book review at the Reply Collective. Still not sure precisely how I’ll lay it out, because it’s my biggest critical point.

When we write our dissertations, they have several different functions. Some of those functions can make you a generally good writer, but others can cause some bad habits.

One of the first people who ever taught me about Jewish philosophy
told me about how Talmud works – commentary upon commentary.
But unlike too many humanities academics, the goal of commentary
isn't to demonstrate who among commentators is perfectly correct.
It's to return again and again to the Torah and commentary to work
out how best to apply the old thoughts to new situations.

An example of a dissertation habit that makes you a good writer – You’re able to analyze, synthesize, and explain with reasonable clarity some incredibly complicated ideas, concepts, and discussions. Transdisciplinary projects like my Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity are especially good for this.

An example of a dissertation habit that makes you a worse writer – You have to demonstrate to a committee of elders how much you know. Doesn’t sound like a problem, but let me explain.

Of course, any big research project, no matter the discipline(s), requires you to learn and come to know a lot. But on the dissertation, you have to put all those references and arguments in detail, as explicitly as possible – because the work itself has to demonstrate to the committee members that you actually did all the research.

They’re obligated to go through your work with a fine tooth comb, if they want, to catch you out. Wider audiences can largely take an author on a bit more faith.

Say you’re a non-fiction author writing a passage that you want to make a specific argument to your audience. You don’t want to fill that passage with so many details that a reader loses track of the point, and so many references that a reader can’t even tell what your own idea is.

A related, but different, example of a dissertation habit that makes you a worse writer – Having to include as much commentary, interpretation, and disputation as you can. This is part of the dissertation’s function to demonstrate a writer’s expertise.

See, there are a lot of side effects to academic overproduction. One, as I’m very familiar with, is creating a class of well-educated researchers and writers who have to hustle their way into second careers in a corporate environment that devalues education.

Talmudic commentary offers a better model for knowledge production
than conventional academic norms in the humanities. Its purpose is
to adapt and update the application of abstract laws and implicit
commandments to the unforeseeable changes of human life as we
create history. Originalism is an obscenity; life is dynamism.

The most important side effect for what I’m writing about today is that commentary proliferates. Because there are so many outlets in academic publishing for historical work and battling interpretations – secondary material – it’s an incentive against an early-career researcher trying for ambitious projects.

By the time you’ve earned an institutional place secure enough for more ambitious work, you’ve been producing commentary for so long that it’s difficult to do new stuff.

This is my long-winded way of talking about why I approach the research for Utopias differently than a standard academician’s project. I’m focussing the manuscript on discussions about ideas and concepts themselves – unpacking the process of engaging ideologies and moralities in our daily lives.

So I don’t need to prove to a reader how much I’ve learned of the proliferating commentary from an always-expanding group of interpreters. I’m not writing a book of commentary myself, so I have no imperative to argue about other people’s commentaries. That’s just not the message or purpose of what I’m writing.

It’s why I chose Ian Buchanan’s book on Anti-Œdipus as one of the few commentaries I’ll rely on. He’s already produced some excellent primary material – a book applying concepts and insights from ethology and animal behaviour to ontological questions about the nature of perception and thought.

Since I’ve already seen him write high-quality primary philosophical work, I know that a commentary he writes won’t get bogged down in interpretive squabbles. Exegetical and practical all at once. That’s the best way to use philosophy – as the explicit raw material to make more philosophy.

Shame to Be So Very Ordinary, Research Time, 01/12/2017

Here’s why I think Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy is ultimately pragmatist – philosophy begins in ordinary life.

It’s not a special communion with being, as the early Greek sages and some modern revanchists saw it. It isn’t a tradition that seeks absolute truths or God’s truths, even though a terrible majority of philosophers in the Western tradition think so.

I'm glad exploring for concepts isn't as dangerous as exploring in
real life. I won't end up like the Franklin Expedition developing
posts for SERRC or book ideas.

When you're trying to say what is philosophy,* Deleuze says you shouldn’t think about the tradition itself and the lofty – sometimes, a little too lofty – pronouncements about philosophy’s purpose. No, look at philosophical thought itself and examine what it’s doing – philosophical thinking creates, analyzes, and maps concepts.

* Narrator: “Hey! That’s the name of this book I’m talking about.”

That makes philosophical thinking ultimately pragmatic – you’re building new concepts, new frameworks for understanding the world. The focus is on navigating problems, and different frameworks for understanding the world make up different ways to make sense of problems, different tools to reveal their complexities from obscurity.

Different substances are visible under different kinds of light. What one lighting condition obscures, another will reveal. Same with concepts. There isn’t one absolutely better set of concepts than another. You get that idea when you think philosophy is about accessing the truth. Because what isn’t true is false.

But when you’re talking about concepts – frameworks for understanding – you have only different models that reveal different aspects of the world. Everything that’s revealed is true, but there won’t be one concept that reveals every truth or all the greatest truths.

That’s why I once said – and still believe – that Deleuze’s thinking carries forward philosophical pragmatism. American pragmatism had a complex account of the production of truths and the plural nature of truth and reason. But the tradition couldn't escape the problems of relativism that kept creeping into John Dewey’s mature thinking.

Don’t think I’m being dismissive of pragmatism. It’s one of the few philosophical -isms with which I self-identify.** The landmark ontological work of his career, Experience and Nature, is a masterpiece that captures the spirit of his whole philosophical movement.

** Even though when I do, I run a decent risk of people thinking I just write commentary and other secondary literature on Dewey.

But that American tradition of pragmatism through its secular trinity of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey could never get through to the other side of that skepticism – how many truths could still be true, even when they weren’t all coherent with each other. Truth is fractured, but no less true for all that.

The Deleuzian idea repairs this issue by showing how you can throw universal mutual coherence among every truth out the window. All you had to do was demonstrate the logic of philosophical thinking is compossibility. Coherence is a framework of logic and thought, not reality itself.

Reality itself is chaos – understood in the abyssal sense – and philosophical thinking is the best set of techniques humanity has developed to try to think chaos. Coherence is how you make maps and draw paths in chaos – plotting the order that does exist in any chaos by investigating what can and cannot fit together.

A small patch of arid desert can’t develop surrounded by a lush rainforest without a mountain range around its rim. That’s a possibility condition for a desert in the centre of a rainforest.

Mapping a plane of immanence is to do the same survey with concepts.

Mathematical Images As Alive As You Are, Research Time, 29/11/2017

So I'm getting back to talking about Gilles Deleuze again – running back over the ideas in What Is Philosophy?. I first read this book about ten years ago. It was the first long book of his or Guattari’s that I’d ever read.

I didn't understand all of it at first. I mean, you’re never supposed to understand a genuinely good book completely – otherwise, there’s no value in returning to it, which means it isn’t genuinely good. One thing that I had trouble wrapping my head around the first time I read it was Deleuze’s concept of the plane of immanence.

From chaos the plane of immanence takes the determinations with
which it makes its infinite movements or its diagrammatic features.
Consequently, we can and must presuppose a multiplicity of planes,
since no one plane could encompass all of chaos without collapsing
back into it; and each retains only movements which can be folded
together. – Gilles Deleuze, What Is Philosophy?, Ch 2, Pg 50.

Reading it again now, my superior knowledge has totally enlightened me – No, that’s a fucking lie. It’s still a super-difficult chapter. I have a better handle on it now that I have an extra decade of experience and practice. But holy hell.

Let’s get one stupid objection to this concept out of the way – Deleuze doesn’t think the plane of immanence is some supernatural field of thought. You call this guy a textbook Platonist, I’ll fight you.

The plane of immanence is an image of thought.

Remember Difference and Repetition, Deleuze’s first big solo book? Remember how the only chapter you didn’t need a pure mathematics degree to follow closely was called “The Image of Thought.” It was a critique of a way of thinking that unifies all worthy thought along a single vector.*

* The chapter did a lot of other things as well – Difference and Repetition was probably the most dense book of Deleuze’s entire career of writing stupendously dense books. But I want to concentrate on this one thing here.

Call it truth, the real, correspondence, the mind of God. The ideal of thinking was to converge on a unified universal. It wasn’t that Deleuze wanted this gone, or thought it was wrong, or had no value. He just didn’t want this image of thought to be the only legitimate one.

Which I guess means he did end up wanting it gone. Someone says they’re the only boss, then if you (and you, and you, and you) want to be the boss too, you’ll have to fight them for it.

Can we say that one plane is 'better' than another? Or at least that it
does or doesn't answer to the requirements of the age? What does
answering to the requirements of the age mean? What relationship
is there between the movements or diagrammatic features of an
image of thought and the movements or socio-historical features
of an age? – Gilles Deleuze, What Is Philosophy?, Ch 2, Pg 58.

Start instead from a plural perspective about thought. You can organize thought in many different legitimate ways, each of which opens some avenues and closes others.

It’s analogous to perception. Bats can experience the world with echolocation, for example, and we can experience the world with words. That doesn’t make either the bat’s perception or the human’s perception better or worse than the other in an absolute sense. Bats are able to do some things and not others. Same goes for humans. We each have our niches in the world.

It works the same way in thought. Let’s explain this starting with concepts. A philosophical concept is created when you snatch an idea from the chaos of life, abstract it enough from your own for pretty much anyone to apply, refine it to mathematical accuracy through careful writing and tough self-interrogation.

Then you have a philosophical concept – a thought that can serve as an interpretive framework for thinking and living – a schemata for your understanding.

Like I said a few days ago, concepts can work together, they can conflict, or they can blatantly contradict each other. The plane of immanence is a map of those concepts – their component ideas, how they’d interact when used in a single subjectivity or a single society, or a whole planet.

A map of compossibility space – of the limits and conditions of how concepts can work together in a single, very complicated, system. You could almost call it a philosophy’s geometry.

An Engineer Has No Use for Relativism, Research Time, 23/11/2017

Back in my academy days, I’d sometimes get into insufferable conversations about the truth. “What is true?” “What does it mean to be true?” “Truth is all important.” “The purpose of philosophy is to find out the truth.”

By the time I started my doctorate, I had about settled into my approach to philosophy – as conceptual engineering, the creation and exploration of frameworks to understand the world. When I’d talk about this approach with people, I’d often – not that often, but often enough – get questions from other scholars about what that had to do with the search for truth.

Well, it has nothing to do with the search for truth. Truth doesn’t really play an essential role in this activity. If you were learning about a philosophical concept – René Descartes’ cogito, for example – accuracy is important.

Accuracy is a kind of truth – you have to make sure that you weren’t making errors, that your interpretation of the relevant words doesn't run roughshod over the page. But if you were to ask me if I thought the cogito was true? Back in 2009, I’d tell you that I didn’t think it mattered.

I’ve met some philosophy scholars who believe that the ideas of their focal primary material are true. I’ve known people who think Descartes was right. Straight-up philosophically correct about the nature of the mind, world, and existence. Same goes for Spinoza, Kant, Hegel – I’ve met people who genuinely believe that these writers were right. Full stop.

I find that attitude tends to get in the way of understanding other thinkers. You always judge them inferior to the object of your faith. And it is faith. Ultimately, we’re not investigating the real world when we study great works of philosophy. We’re reading books.

So that was 2009. These days, I’m even more radical about this. Ask me now about whether the cogito or any other particular philosophical concept is true – in 2017, I’ll tell you that the question isn’t even proper to ask. Like asking a geologist about the diet and exercise habits of sedimentary rock formations.

I've been in some cramped seminar rooms before, but this is ridiculous.

Does this make my way of thinking philosophy relativist? No, because I’m indifferent to truth in philosophical thinking. You don’t ask if a concept is true in the same sense that you don’t ask if a computer program, or a lamp, or an engine, or a shoe is true. You ask what it does and how it works.

Logic – should I say logics? – still applies to concepts. But that’s because logic isn’t about the truth of any of its propositions, only about how to infer among propositions.

Concepts can contradict each other – you can’t include some concepts together in the same big apparatus of understanding. Deleuze gives a beautiful example, the kind of simple yet comprehensive statement about the field that a long-practicing expert can make.

He says that you can’t build a philosophical system that combines a Descartes-style cogito with a Plato-style ontology of Ideas. For the Platonic Form or Idea to exist, being must be primary – but the cogito’s purpose is to provide a foundation for being and exists in each subject.

Ideas – thought comes to be because Ideas exist. Cogito – thought provides the guarantee of existence. They contradict, so they can’t both be part of the same philosophical framework, the same thought machine.

The logic of conceptual engineering is that of conditions and creations. Such logic maps compossibility.

What to Do With a Real Problem, Research Time, 22/11/2017

So yesterday, I was riffing on the nature of the concept. Concept – an expression in thought of a transformative collision of forces and processes. If you think a concept is just another word for a general idea, Gilles Deleuze is very particular to describe the concept in mathematical terms – vectors and relations.

A mathematical formula expresses a relation in thought – we’ve developed a very good notation for writing mathematical formulas, so we can put a very complicated relation in a single line of writing that way.

Concepts have the same precision, but they don’t function mathematically – Concepts are frameworks for everyday human thought, the schema of our how we understand our nature, everyday life, values, and place in the universe. Philosophy is the practice of developing new concepts – new frameworks for understanding experience.

That’s about where we are now. You know, this is why you could plausibly call me a Deleuzian. Because when he explains the nature of concepts and the purpose of philosophy like this, to me, this is incredibly obvious and makes perfect sense.

Storytime. A few years ago, I was at a philosophy conference in Oregon
and many of the attendees were pragmatist thinkers and scholars. In an
off-handed, but very sincere, comment to the conference organizer, I
said that many of the philosophical problems that the pragmatists were
stuck on found their solutions – or at least their next steps – in the
work of Deleuze and Guattari. It's those solutions – about the nature
and purpose of philosophical thinking – that I'm talking about in my
posts about What Is Philosophy?

It’s the only mission statement for “What philosophy is” that doesn’t sound empty, dissatisfying, and ultimately leave you shrugging your shoulders.* It’s the only one that actually can be a mission statement for the discipline going forward.

* The question that I find most insufferably annoying in all the philosophical traditions I've studied has to be, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" My response – Fuck! Who cares?! If there wasn't anything, it wouldn't matter, so neither does the question. There clearly is, so start there.

Given the absurd pressure that exists on humanities and social science departments today, the disciplines should at least fight back instead of retreating inward. Take on an active role in public life – bring your knowledge skills to the problems of our time.

That itself – what research disciplines that have been stuck in ivory towers so long that the disciplines themselves are under attack – is a philosophical problem.

Problem – a situation, whether in thought or practice or more often both, that constitutes obstacles, dangers, puzzles, mysteries to us. A concept is a framework for our understanding that lets us act such that the obstacles aren’t really in our way. Like someone who moves to a cold, wintery region and has to learn to walk well on snowshoes.

Eric Weber is a philosopher I know in the United States, who co-hosts a podcast called Philosophy Bakes Bread. One of the questions he always asks guests is whether philosophy can bake bread – whether and how it has a practical dimension.

As for me, I think it’s only worth calling philosophy if it has a practical dimension. Philosophy creates conceptual tools for solving problems in action with thought. Components of those concepts can include versions of all the traditional topics of philosophy – God, cosmos, being, the good, truth. But those tools are always there.

Conceptual engineers – designers and testers of guides for thinking.

What’s Another Word for Getting Big? Research Time, 20/06/2017

A curious idea came to me as I was reading through some of James Madison’s Federalist Papers. If I were to think about them historically – and this is just a riff, really – I’d see them as a forerunner of the pragmatists.

I don't just mean this in the ordinary sense of the term, that they’ll adapt their thinking to changing situations and generally apply their thought to problems in immediate political and social problems. Of course, they did. But that’s not all that was going on.

Sometimes, I think the only -ism I could ever adopt as a thinker is pragmatist.* Our thinking is rooted in understanding the changeable, contingent, material world. So we strive for our thinking to be as flexible as reality. Not conform to some perfect imagined symmetry.

Just because you wrote more of the papers, that doesn't mean you have
to be the star of the show.

* I just wish academics would stop assuming that all the name means, is that I write commentary on William James, Charles Peirce, and John Dewey.

The world is as it is, and philosophy develops different ways of thinking to deal with that. Philosophy is the craftsmanship of concepts, our mind’s tools. I see that idea in the work of Hamilton and Madison. But it’s especially at the forefront for Madison. If Hamilton is the Federalists’ political scientist and sociologist, Madison is the book’s philosopher.

Hamilton argues for his conclusions through very insightful and philosophically productive analysis of ongoing and oncoming political problems of the post-independence Thirteen Colonies.

Madison will argue for the same conclusions, but through analyzing the possibilities for the structures of communities themselves.

He attacks an argument against large-scale federal government. It has nothing to do with immediate political and military consequences. It’s that the only functional free societies in human history have been the size of small cities. So only small cities can govern themselves democratically.

Madison’s argument was that democratic possibility doesn’t depend on size, but on communication. To deliberate as a public in ancient Greece or medieval Germany and Italy, you had to show up in the same town square and talk to each other.

By the time of revolutionary North America, they’d developed the technology for detailed communication across entire continents. The same public deliberation could carry on through the first continental-scale mass media – printed newspaper and an educated society.**

** Educated among the whole people, at their time; less so among the three-fifths people.

The same media effectively carried out democratic governance in the same way. Election machinery and fast channels of communication between a town and a capital city connected South Carolina to New York, Vermont, and Maryland within a few days.

The mechanisms for representatives to reach a general assembly and communicate with the people for whom they were responsible in government could reach longer than the walk down the road. Detailed communication across continents was possible by the American Revolution.

You could create a public of millions with trains and the postal service. What’s important isn’t size, but the speed and density of communication. Find the difference that makes the difference. You may need new ideas to do it – a butcher can always make a better knife. That’s philosophy.

It's About What Gets the Job Done – And the Job, Research Time, 21/09/2016

When I first read Cosmopolitanism, I wasn't impressed
by its very casual, seemingly superficial treatment of its
concepts. But underneath those long, almost nostalgic
fables of a casually multicultural world are some
very radical conceptual moves.

Despite my problems with Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism, his book is filled with genuinely fascinating and useful ideas. They’re dealt with at a barely introductory level, but they're still very interesting.

One of these is Appiah’s pragmatism. I mean this referring to the tradition of philosophical thinking that began with that usual trinity of William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey.* Appiah applies a pragmatism about the use of knowledge and frameworks of understanding the world to a globalist problem.

* Here’s another issue I have with academic philosophy in the English-speaking West. The widespread presumption that pragmatism isn’t a living tradition of thought, but that if you call yourself a philosophical pragmatist, all it means is that you write secondary material about James, Peirce, and Dewey. This irks me.

That problem is in one of the few directly useful examples in Cosmopolitanism. The encounter of a person familiar with scientific knowledge about infection and disease with a society of people who  believe primarily in witchcraft and evil spirits. 

It's an example that plays to just about every racist stereotype about indigenous people you can think of. That’s why, I think, Appiah chose it. I’ve heard quite a few well-educated, quite wealthy people use just these stereotypes to dismiss the validity of indigenous knowledge. 

Even what we think of as enlightened
progressive corners – like environmental
activists – indulge in such ridiculous
racist stereotypes of indigenous people
as "mystically in touch with the land."
As if they were magical spirit people
instead of people. It erases the real human
complexity of indigenous cultures as
the old horrifying adage about savages.

They say we have nothing to learn, for example, from indigenous medicinal practices because they’re based in oral tradition and inherited folklore instead of “the scientific method.” Of course, any basic reading in the history and philosophy is science shows that there is no such single “scientific method” applying to everything we call science. Apart maybe from “Pay attention!”

I came across this debate pretty frequently when I was researching for Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, because a major eco-activist narrative** is rediscovering indigenous American connections to the land that were overwritten and erased by America’s history of genocide.

** Crass oversimplification that it still is. . . . 

So Appiah’s example sets up a problem – a group of indigenous stereotypes*** believe that illness is caused by spirits and witchcraft. They also live near a polluted water source. They essentially need a boil advisory, but don’t know any of the science behind why you should boil polluted water before using it. So they still get preventable diseases.

*** Seriously, I don't think people like this have ever existed outside thought experiments like these.

Appiah's thoughtful Westerner explains, in as clear a format as he can, the germ theory of disease, and that boiling water can kill the bacteria that causes their sicknesses. None of this fits with any of the framework ideas of the community’s worldview, so they don’t understand it and don’t follow his good advice.

Then the thoughtful Westerner explains that the community’s water source has been infested with evil spirits that cause illness, and that boiling the water sends them away – see, the bubbles of boiling water are the spirits escaping. So the community is healthy again.

Above: The only person who deserves to be called a
savage. Jokes aside, Appiah smuggles into this very
light writing style an argument that makes an
audacious and brazenly unorthodox inference. He
reasons from a fact about the nature of knowledge
to an implication about ethics and politics. In this, he's
a real metaphysician.

You know, Appiah’s example doesn’t sound nearly so racist when he writes it in Cosmopolitanism. Ironic that a book whose purpose is explaining a political philosophy about embracing the infinite variety of humanity could fall into an example that trades in such condescendingly racist imagery.

The conceptual point is sound, though. We can solve most of the problems that constitute human life with a ton of different and incompatible frameworks for understanding the world.

Accept as fact that – following the research and concept-building of Claude Duhem and Willard Quine – reality under-determines how we understand it. It’s not a relativism, where there are many different truths. 

Now let your political and moral stances flow from this truth about reality. Even dealing with the types of people that confirm everyone of your racist stereotypes ignorant savages, they can still be your intellectual equals. They will look at the world differently, but their way of looking remains valid and practically sound.

Recognize as your fellow human even these people you’ve derided as ignorant savages for centuries. That’s the political implication of a pragmatist conception of knowledge. 

Mulcair Became Leader Because We Actually Liked Him, Jamming, 11/04/2016

I couldn’t make it to the New Democratic Party’s biannual policy convention this year. That’s the difference between travelling from Hamilton to Toronto in 2012 for the post-Layton leadership convention, and travelling from Toronto to Edmonton for the post-election leadership downfall.*

* The difference was between a multiple-hundred dollar plane trip and hostel booking versus a ten dollar bus ticket and crashing on my buddies John and Ally’s couch. And the party still spent the next year always calling me for donations because they registered my conference fees as a donation-in-kind. I only did it for the tax refund.

So while I didn’t get a chance to see this weekend’s convention on the ground, I did see it through my public and personal social media accounts. And I’m even deeper in this conversation this year than I was four years ago. 

Back then, I was just a member of the party hoping to get more involved in the rush of optimism after Jack Layton became one with the Force. This year, I'm a riding association vice-president slowly taking part in the creation of policy and philosophy of the party.

It largely amounts to encouraging more people to get on the progress train on the modern left – combining hostility to the military and security functions of the state with the organization of common forms of wealth. Right now, I’m kind of a Negri pusher. Eventually, I’ll push my own books. I kind of already do.

Because the most important part of developing Canada’s social democratic party for the current era of politics is that continued process of change in our activism after the conference. The slow-burning leadership race will let the NDP work out its issues and adapt to where the left has to go.

I’ll talk more about those ideas later this week. What I want to do now is make a single observation about Tom Mulcair himself, since he was the infamous man of the hour this weekend.

The general narrative – in the media and in the party’s own society – is that Mulcair embodied a radical transformation in the NDP to become a centrist party that developed its policy by triangulation. 

That shift failed for a ton of reasons that have already been analyzed to death by any blogger or journalist who's ever farted a mild observation about Canadian politics. And now the NDP will return to their roots, choosing an embrace of their ideals over the cold heart of electability that comes from chasing the Liberals.

Mistake number one in this master narrative is equating “electability” with the smiling conservatism of the political centre’s inoffensive embrace of the status quo. 

Let me tell you about another master narrative. Mulcair was a key organizer of the NDP’s destruction of the separatist banner as the only progressive front in Quebec’s federal politics mobilizes all those enthusiastic new Quebecois members as the largest block of loyalists in the 2012 leadership race.

Mulcair’s francophone newbies were the largest group of New Democrats dedicated to a single leader going into the last leadership vote. They were bigger than Brian Topp’s union men, Nathan Cullen’s west coasters and Occupy gang, Peggy Nash’s Torontonians, Niki Ashton’s Socialist Caucus, and Paul Dewar’s weird singing cult.

After 2011, Quebec was considered the new leading edge for the NDP. Quebec’s embrace of the NDP would win them their first federal election. Mulcair being the most prominent organizer of what was literally the party’s new largest base gave him a visibility that no other leadership contender had. 

It became popularly taken for granted that Mulcair was the frontrunner. Only longtime NDP members and supporters were suspicious of him. Having been an architect of the sweep of Quebec, his NDP bonafides were not questioned at all by any new members. That only occurred with time, as the 2011 generation** grew wary of Mulcair’s tendency to campaign against his ideals.

** The generation that created Occupy and that now has made Bernie Sanders a contender for President.

The social status of the Quebec victory made him the number two of way more people than had him as their number one. We voted by mail on a single-vote-transferable ballot. Only those physically voting at the convention itself could change their minds during that weekend. That’s why SVT won’t work for electoral reform – the second choice of the majority always wins.

Mulcair had the biggest single block of dedicated supporters in 2012, but he was always a compromise candidate among a ton of different perspectives in the NDP. It took him four elimination rounds to whittle the field of seven to the winner. 

Eight and nine, Robert Chisholm and Romeo Saganash, never even had enough support to make it to convention.*** Ashton and Dewar were first to drop out on the day. Then Nash. Then Cullen. Then finally a fourth round of voting and transfers in the final head-to-head between Brian Topp and Tom Mulcair. And he only got 57%!

*** Saganash was always going to be my number one. My ballot would have read 1) Saganash; 2) Cullen 3) Mulcair.

And Tom said he’d only stay on as leader with 70% of the vote this week? He’s never had that much support in the party. 

The NDP never had any major cultural changes or shifts. The most successful organizer in the most recent election made for a good compromise candidate at the time because of that success. 

He had a bad election because he was a good party organizer but a bad campaigner – with his staff, he misread the times with a platform that felt disconnected from people’s real concerns, like the groupthink of a room full of Ottawa nerds. Which is what they were.

I'm not about to advocate that Tom Mulcair should have stayed leader. That would have been disastrous. This election completely ruined his national branding. He will never be able to build himself a new image for the Canadian people. And much else has changed in Canada. 

The NDP needs a leader who is actually in touch with the concerns of real people. As Tom Mulcair was when that concern translated into kicking out Stephen Harper. But once you defeat the enemy, you need to let your idealism guide your actual political program. 

That idealism – the strength of a new vision for your country – is what inspires people to elect you.

Gilles in LA V: Speculate Pragmatically, A History Boy, 27/11/2015

Since this series on the LA Review of Book's essays on Gilles Deleuze is done, I'm going to include all the links to my other posts. Here's Deleuze, Guattari, and the fluidity of identity; the self-destructive habits of academic scholarship today; how philosophy helps us understand our world in ways we've never thought of before; and why everyone should read philosophy, but not the way it's taught in schools.
• • •
Brian Massumi wrote one of those essays in the LA Review of Books about Gilles Deleuze. I remember reading one of his books, Parables of the Virtual, just over three years ago. It was remarkably dense, and a little too long for its purpose, but a wonderful book.

Massumi is one of the most metal philosophers working
in the academy today.

It took me a while to read it because I had just started work at an answering service, and I hadn’t yet adjusted how I scheduled my days around it to get enough reading time in. Reading is part of how I relax. 

Massumi talks about how Deleuze took so long to take off among the American followers of upstart French philosophy. He says a major reason was because there were so many different concepts, ideas, and inquiries threading across Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s works, you couldn’t focus on one single theme that stands out among them and could define the whole.

But there is, says Massumi. I agree with him, even if I think his essay is too long for what it ultimately achieves. I suspect this might be a feature of Massumi’s work.

Anyway, Massumi calls Deleuze’s philosophy, in its buzz-worthy phrase, Speculative Pragmatism. As he unpacks the label, it fits quite well with how I’ve come to understand Deleuze’s ideas and what they can do in the tradition of philosophical writing and discourse. 

Here’s a little story about philosophy. It’s really simple. So simple, it doesn’t really explain anything, except why I think Deleuze was our last real vanguard of thought.

Jean-François Lyotard came up with the term post-
modernism, so blame him if you have a problem.

So post-modernism was a thing that happened in the intellectual scene. The ideas this tradition developed were really useful to understanding the limits of human knowledge and how our knowledge can be manipulated. 

But the philosophy could never quite escape charges of relativism. It was the first school in the Western tradition to go all the way in rejecting transcendent sources or grounds of knowledge (like God, or eternal being, which amount to the same thing). 

Without this, it was left without any hooks to secure our knowledge. No to distinguish the truth from my, your, our, and their truths.

Postmodernism developed through the 1970s into the 2000s. It was largely French, though the German Martin Heidegger was an important influence. It gained a few American adherents, like Richard Rorty in philosophy, and became a standard framework in literature studies. 

Postmodernism makes contemporary meta-textuality in fiction possible. So thank you, or damn you, depending on what you think of that.

The relativism problem had a solution, but it had been developed decades before among the American pragmatists. Charles Sanders Peirce was the first to articulate the problem and engage with it. William James dealt with it as an ethical problem, and came up with the definitive pragmatist solution.

I'm always a little saddened that William James didn't
live longer than Charles Peirce. Peirce was older, and
did much more cocaine.

Stop thinking about knowledge as having the ultimate goal of being true. Knowledge is instead fundamentally about being useful. Knowledge is a tool to work in the world.

After James died, John Dewey expanded and applied this idea in fantastically interesting ways through pretty much every domain of human knowledge. The man’s archives are enormous, and he kept writing steadily until he died in his 90s. 

The Big Three American pragmatists were the only group of historically noteworthy writers in philosophy to solve the postmodern relativism problem. But no one realized it* because they never engaged with it explicitly. How could they? They wrote decades before postmodernism existed.

* Until Larry Hickman, in his book Pragmatism as Post-Postmodernism. In 2007.

Pragmatism had two problems. After Dewey, no one really rose to be his equal, the way he did to James. So by the time we reach today, pragmatism as a sub-discipline in academic philosophy consists of mostly of commentary on Peirce, James, and Dewey. The ambition’s gone out of it.

More than this, pragmatism doesn’t really leave room for philosophy. The project that used to be called metaphysics, thinking about the fundamental structures of reality, gets relegated to science.**

If philosophy can be said to progress, then its greatest
writers push the tradition in new directions. Deleuze
pushed farthest of anyone in the direction he wanted.
Many others had many different directions, but none
pushed harder and farther than Deleuze.

** Like the analytic philosophy school that adopted all the basics of pragmatism while ignoring the Big Three’s names. And frankly, science is more conceptually inventive than a lot of analytic metaphysics, because the metaphysicians rely on our intuitions as a guide to truth. Because quantum physics has made so much progress following our intuitions about reality.

At a conference four years ago on pragmatism and wider American philosophy, I told the organizer, Colin Koopman, that Deleuze clarifies all the mysteries and problems that Dewey’s thinking left behind.

So we’re back to speculative pragmatism, the theme-as-buzzword of Deleuze’s philosophy. He made philosophy itself a practical matter: we create concepts that help us adapt human nature to a changing world. All the metaphysical systems and ideas we develop amount to these profound transformative agents. 

Philosophy as the most powerful conceptual tool in human capacity.