Drifting and Drifting Until . . . What Now, Composing, 26/06/2018

Tomorrow’s post is going to switch gears pretty hard. After going through Jeremy Gilbert’s history of academic Cultural Studies and its place in the anti-capitalist movement, I decided to switch gears in my research.

The ideas for which I came to Gilbert in the first place were locked in my thinking pretty solidly. His book and his bibliography offered me a great outline for some ideas and passages in Utopias. It was just what I wanted from his work. There was just one way where it fell short.

I think a reason why many academics' books peter out so sadly
as they end is because so much training and mentorship in the
humanities accustoms you to staying away from thinking with
the scope needed for a 250-300 page work. You need to think
with ambition to produce a unified work of philosophy or
history with that size. University philosophy especially trains
you to stop well short of that, sticking to smaller and smaller
debates and dialogues.

Anticlimax. Now, a work of philosophy or history doesn’t need to be written with a full narrative arc like the conventions of drama. When I talk about a philosophical or historical work being anticlimactic, I mean that it loses focus as it ends.

Here are a couple of examples. Maybe they’ll illustrate what I mean. Maybe they’ll confuse you more. I honestly don’t know.

In AntiCapitalism and Culture, the core ideas run up against the same wall. Now for him, it probably didn’t seem like a wall. As I said a few days ago, Gilbert was writing ten years ago in a very different time and with very different purposes, than I am. By the end of his book, he’d explored pretty thoroughly the history and ideologies he wanted to explore.

Yet his writing kept running up against the same point at the end, the repetition becoming frustrating. My own notes on the closing chapters are all reiterations of the same question. Exactly the question I wrote about yesterday.

Gilbert isn’t sure what protest can achieve other than simple demonstrating that a different way of living and thinking together is possible. He doesn’t think you can achieve much with that.

He has some good reasons for thinking so, most of which are reasons of strategy. Such a demonstration can’t finish the job. Plus, the globalized nature of 21st century capitalism creates its own problems – if there’s no real keystone to the networks of oligarchy and finance capital, then there’s nothing to attack with revolutionary activity. No palace to storm.

Which is fine, if you think of an economic system and ideology as a state government. That’s slipping into what had been a common tendency on the radical anti-capitalist left – falling under the image of 1917. The shocking attack on the centre of government, the speeches from the leader of the military and intellectual vanguard from the balcony of their deposed royals’ palace.

Seriously, guys. This was 100 years ago. I think at least the internet
and all of our contemporary technology has changed the economic
and military situation of politics from 1917. Yet the only folks I
know who sincerely think you can straight-up replicate Lenin's
revolution in contemporary Washington are underemployed
sessional academics who only talk to other marxist academics.
These people couldn't organize anything outside of a set of
moderators' rules for a Reddit forum.

Protest is the first step, in today’s context, of prompting rebellion everywhere. A system with no centre isn’t stormed – it’s eroded from the inside. Experimental spheres of new economics form, reinforce themselves against attack, grow and connect. But without these ideas, Gilbert’s book just runs over and over against the pessimistic premises.

I’ve even noticed this in other books I’ve been reading. A fascinating book on Martin Heidegger and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge school is drifting into disconnected comparative moments from an earlier clear thematic unity. More thoughts on that will come from the SERRC later this summer.

Even a fiction book ended like this. I picked up Isabelle Allende’s The Infinite Plan at a garage sale I wandered by last year, and finally got around to reading it a month ago. It’s a strong piece at the beginning, depicting the singular protagonist’s bizarre family and the vivid world of his upbringing in the Los Angeles barrio of the 1950s.

But that unique character becomes sadly generic once he leaves his eccentric, colourful world and becomes an ordinary rich white guy with shitty narratives who needs some therapy to deal with his PTSD from the Vietnam War and parental neglect. It drifts through well-written but increasingly boring stereotype after stereotype.

I think I dislike promising books that drift away more than books that are outright terrible from the start.

Anyway, an ecological / geological ontology of contemporary media tomorrow. Switching gears for a little bit.

Protest as the Foundation of Ethics, Research Time, 25/06/2018

Jeremy Gilbert's book on the history of resistance to neoliberal politics and economics in the British academy doesn’t end very hopefully. It was published at the end of the W Bush Presidency, for one.

It was a time when so much of the West’s progressive visions of humanity were destroyed, for one. The deranged patriotism following the Sept 11 attacks and during the Iraq invasion and occupation brought conservative patriotism to a horrifying extreme. The US government was so anemic from austerity that they couldn’t even repair a humanitarian disaster. Unrestrained investment bankers collided with poorly-considered mortgage policy to crash the economy as millions sunk into debt.

That's not what Gilbert was considering when drafting his book, though. How he crafts his history conditions how partial is his view. Because he focusses specifically on explicit resistance to neoliberal economics and politics, he focusses on the protest movement.

Remember how the conditions for the present madness lie in the
madnesses of the past. I'm not talking about learning your history,
just remembering the meaning of the history you actually lived
is hard enough for some people.

The key connection is that of Cultural Studies academe to the protest movement. But it’s primarily about the protest movement. It’s another case where he’s not wrong, but his focus misses so many other important vectors of history.

And I think that narrow vision plays into his pessimism. He asks whether protest against unjust economic systems can work in creating any significant change at all. The best a protest can do, he writes, is express an alternative morality. Such an expression is totally separate from real political organizing against that economic system.

In the decade since he wrote, there’s been plenty of progress in building opposition to that economic system. We don’t always call it neoliberalism every time we talk about it. But we know what’s going on.

I also think Gilbert’s book is wrong to dismiss as politically useless the expression of an alternative morality. The whole reason neoliberal thinking about economics and morality could become a default among many people’s thinking was the popular conclusion that no other way of thinking was genuinely possible as a sustainable system of human life.

Genuinely successful protest actions demonstrate by their existence that there can be sustainable ways of social thought beyond rabid mercenary individualism. Occupy and Standing Rock were events that created such alternative ways of life.

No political movement ends with protest, of course. You have to build alternative institutions, like communication networks, places of trade and exchange, places of education and outreach to bring people a new way of thinking. Work together to develop strategies to create other such places and networks. Finance, build, learn, and grow.

There’s going to be a lot of resistance to this project. Your way of life may seem monstrous or hypocritical to a lot of people who aren’t open-minded. The powerful people in the mainstream system – the oligarchs and the people who make decent livings serving their interests – will fight. And they’ll enlist as many oppressive arms of the state as they can to do it. No outcome is inevitable – not yours nor theirs.

You can create an alternative and change your society for the better. But you can’t put any of that work in when no one believes that it can come to anything at all.

The Inevitability of Nightmares, Research Time, 10/06/2018

I was too busy with the last few days of the provincial election in Ontario to produce any blog posts. I was working on a campaign, and it took up so much of my time and energy in that last push.

Then in the days after the election, I was recovering. A Conservative majority government in Ontario led by Doug Ford will turn a significant chunk of the machinery of the state against vulnerable people. Within the Ontario Conservative party, a key part of Ford’s support base are social conservatives, and outside the official party many bigots and racist extremists are quite happy for his victory.

I’ll be the first to admit that many edgelords across all demographics drank my liberal tears that night.*

The stuff of nightmares. Hidden in the deepest crevices of our homes,
our lands, where the most destructive and cruel tendencies of our
natures are cultivated and so flower. They will eat us alive.

* Even though I’m totally not a liberal. To them, everyone on the left is a liberal. It’s part of the widespread complete misunderstanding among most of the modern conservative scene of how progressive thought actually works.

It’s easy to feel discouraged by elections like Doug Ford’s, Donald Trump’s, Binyamin Netanyahu’s, or Theresa May’s. There are plenty of profound philosophical sources that justify and explore that pessimism about real social and political progress.

As well as the Frankfurt School figures of Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin, there’s the Situationist project. I’m thinking in particular of the project as laid out in Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle.

He developed a union of political demonstration and theatrical exhibition that influenced techniques of protest around the world. But much of the Situationist perspective remained limited by its own pessimism. Protest created a space for the imagination to roam free – it was a space where, for a few moments, a different kind of life was possible.

But that possibility could never become reality. It was always an act of imagination, a performance, an act of refusal to acquiesce facing the inevitability of its own defeat. Protest, on the Situationist model, is a demonstration of a dream from material, but which will always be a dream, a performance, an image. Not a real system of economic, cultural, and ecological activity.

There is no one more fearful than the richest of men. That fear is why
they hate and destroy. And also why they become grotesque neurotics.
Maybe they're absurd germaphobes. Maybe they subsidize an insane
scientist's quack research on human urine as an aid to rejuvenating
us into near-immortality.

It is so difficult to find guides for philosophical creativity that also considers material success possible. Recovering and maintaining optimism is the most difficult task of progressive politics.

The secret to overcoming pessimism is to identify the real material relationships and dynamics that maintain an unjust system and people’s support for it. It’s an inherently empirical act, but it needs the precision of a philosophically-trained mind to identify the keystones – the relationships of a social-moral-economic system without which it will fall to chaos.

Here’s a key idea that Jeremy Gilbert – along with an old influence of mine, Manuel DeLanda – has identified. You can have markets without capitalism. What turns a market system into an exploitive capitalist system is crossing a threshold of accumulation. When your markets have produced oligarchs – the absurdly rich – those central power figures are able to turn the entire system to serve their personal goals.

Markets are places where people experiment with new ideas for economic activity, moral thinking, and ecological development. People have the social and economic space to adapt to changing circumstances. People in markets on fairly equal terms have the power to take risks, knowing that a risk gone sour won’t be a disaster because they can fall back into the community.

An oligarch operates by a selfish fear. They’ve accumulated so much that their kingdom is more important than the prosperity that produced it in the first place. They become risk-averse and greedy. It’s the irony of massive accumulation – the weight of wealth perverts you with paranoia.

When you’ve been taken out of a community, you’re no longer capable of trust, because your wealth has alienated you from those who are different from you in the most important way.

You’ve become an alien to the non-wealthy. You imagine that they hate you, and so you fear them. Your actions from that fear makes them hate you. You’ve fulfilled your own nightmare.

Whither Capital II: The Toughest Reparations, Research Time, 31/05/2018

Here’s something interesting and troubling that Jeremy Gilbert points out in his history of Cultural Studies integrating with anti-capitalist social movements. It starts from the fact that this social movement was against globalization.

From that perspective, you could almost co-opt that branch of the movement into an intense nationalism. After all, when political leaders across many ideologies call for slowing down globalization, or how globalization has hurt us and our industries, the call to build more walls becomes implicit.

Canadians are now rushing to defend NAFTA, but when it was being written, it was protested and mocked just as vigorously as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Those actions against the TPP, by the way, are still going on.

From a protest against the Trans-Pacific Partnership in Santiago, Chile.

See, globalization is a powerful force for improvement in people’s lives across human civilization. Now, there’s plenty of Victorian-style mass poverty and exploitation. But the sweatshops of Bangladesh and Indonesia are a few labour movements away from proper reform. Democracy is a powerful social force – its fuel is human frustration with injustice, and that’s never going to run dry.

Globalization’s harm to the working class populations of the West was a form of reparations. The Western countries no longer had a monopoly on industry. So they were undercut by the competition. We were undercut by the competition.

This was the economic end to colonialism. The countries that European militaries used to occupy, control, and loot were free to become capitalistic themselves. They’d industrialize on their own terms as much as they can. Old-fashioned trade links have taken some time to fray. But many countries now hold economically dominant positions that used to be prostrate.

Ask a Chinese person about the Opium Wars, and you’ll see someone immensely proud of how his country has succeeded after such colonial degradation. Even if in the next breath, they call Xi Jinping a dictatorial megalomaniac and the Communist Party a living disaster area.

So that aspect of globalization is good. It’s the first time the Earth has had a globally integrated economy without the overpowering dominance of a single pole by military domination.

The problem is that it broke the possibility of the 20th century social democratic bargain. The welfare state – especially as it existed in Europe – required high taxes and full employment. Otherwise, it became unsustainable. But people had no problem working good jobs in diverse industrial economies, with generally solid benefits and wages, if that also got them cheap medical and welfare services from their governments.

Statist social democracy, in its traditional form, requires full employment. Otherwise, its tax base disappears. The employment rates of the West took a serious hit as globalization took full effect and local industries were opened to competition with Asian cities for the first time. A lot of those European firms didn’t make it through the heat.

So it had become impossible to return to the old answers. As Gilbert argues, Cultural Studies – those activist university scholars – were one of the few people to see how this would happen in the 1970s and 80s.

It remained an open question what you’d do about it.

You Come to Swell the Numbers, Advocate, 26/02/2018

I’m not going to write about philosophy today. One is that most of the philosophy I read this weekend was for a book review I have to write, so I’m not going to throw it out on the blog.

I started work on a new novel manuscript this weekend too, but I only just finished the prologue. On to page three! Yeah, not much to say here.

But I’m coming to protest on Saturday. It’ll be a good protest, a damn fun protest, a beautiful protest, and a necessary protest. The rage will be necessary, and channelled through the power of a group.

So this Saturday, there’ll be a Justice for Tina Fontaine protest, and yeah of course I’m fucking going.

There are two arguments that I can imagine getting trotted out about this. One is the legalist’s, the other is the quietist’s.

To Mr Legalist

The lawyer’s argument is the most insulting to me, because it’s so reductive. These are the people who say that Jian Ghomeshi deserves his job and office back at CBC because the criminal trial found him not-guilty. Who reduce all truth to the verdict of a jury.

Rather, they expand what was designed to be a narrow, difficult standard of proof to stand for the entire truth of the matter. Yes, a jury decided that Ray Cormier’s drunken ramblings weren’t sufficient grounds for criminal conviction. Would “Justice for Tina Fontaine” really be complete if this one evil jackass went to prison for 25 years?

I don’t even believe in the sufficiency of retributive justice as an individual, and I came to that decision as a Westerner. Indigenous Canadian cultures lived under justice institutions – the customs and methods of redressing crimes – whose grounding principles were restorative, communitarian values. Centuries of cultural continuity.

Do you seriously think Indigenous Canadians would have only the punishment of a perpetrator in mind when they chant “Justice for Tina Fontaine”?

To Ms Quietist

I understand the centrepiece of this argument, I truly do. But you can’t just say that this is only for Indigenous people and cluck sadly as white extremist opposition goes unchallenged.

Remember what I said about the communitarian values at the centre of justice questions larger in scope than “Who did it?”

Tina Fontaine – and everyone else who’s met an untimely death after a life of neglect, suffering, and marginalization – doesn’t achieve justice when a jail cell closes. Because people still live as neglected as Tina Fontaine was.

Many of the causes and conditions of that neglect are the structure and operation of Canada’s government institutions. It may not be the residential schools anymore, but the child welfare agencies in some regions are very effective with the spin they’ve put on the basic process.

As a person who lives in Canada, I’m enmeshed in the same institutions, the same cultural currents as everyone else in this country. If our institutions and cultural beliefs, common sense, and habits are set up in such a way that many people needlessly suffer neglect and indignity, we all have to work together to change them.

When you’re suffering, you need to know that you have friends. That minimal level of friendship – respect and solidarity – is the relationship that constitutes community.

I’m not going to be some presumptuous ass trying to speak for Indigenous people. I haven’t gone through any experience like they have. But if anyone needs to know that they have friends, at least I’ll be there.

Swell the numbers until everyone joins.

Facts – Alternative Facts – Post-Truth – Truth, Composing, 23/01/2017

I’ve kept thinking about that project on the idea of post-truth that we’ve been tossing around the Reply Collective. There’s one approach that I want to explore for this piece – I thought of it over the weekend, and I want to mull it over with some folks to see if it has legs.

Here’s how it came to me, first of all.

Pictured: A collective experience of truth-expression.

So I was at the Toronto Women’s March to protest Donald Trump’s existence Saturday, and I saw plenty of signs mocking the idea of ‘post-truth.’ In a very basic sense, this is the opposition of truth and lies.

* I wish I’d gotten a picture of it. They were good and sarcastic, just like a lot of what I saw during the march.

In one dimension of the ‘post-truth’ problem, that looks like it’s all it comes down to. A trivial assertion of lies by government figures. The press secretary blatantly lies about the facts – how many people attended Trump’s inauguration – and chastises the White House press corps for their outlets’ honesty instead of reporting what they were told to report.

We told you what we wanted you to say, says Sean Spicer, and I paraphrase – and it was your moral failure and your disloyalty to the office of the President for not doing what you were told.

The most popular followup was Chuck Todd’s Meet the Press interview with Kellyanne Conway. Anti-Trump Twitter particularly blew up over Conway’s contention that, “We presented you with alternative facts.”

Orwellian? Most definitely. But ultimately, Orwellian doublespeak is trivial.

Reactionary contempt for critics now has free reign.

Even the typical recourse to postmodernist thinking about the slippery meanings of language is ultimately trivial. It’s a mere stereotype that ‘postmodernist’ attitudes and philosophies imply that there is no truth and there are no facts. Or rather, that facts are defined solely through discourse.

So factuality becomes no longer about what is and isn’t the case. It becomes a matter of duelling visions of the world – a pro-Trump set of facts means enormous inauguration crowds and violent protestors, while an anti-Trump set of facts means anemic attendance and police brutality on the streets of DC. One is an alternative to the other, and you’re free to choose between them as you’re inclined.

So you’re stuck with the oversimplified, misunderstood popular understanding of postmodernism. If you want a philosophical investigation into what post-truth can be to produce something more interesting, more useful than this, you need a different direction.

Inside the volcano.

Here’s that different direction.

Ask yourself: What truth do the women’s marches demonstrate? We are talking about a demonstration, after all.

We have a set of facts that can be described in propositions of language – statements about women’s needs, fears, vulnerabilities, and strengths; statements of political and moral beliefs that oppose them to Trump’s presidency and what it represents in wider society; biographical timelines and events in the lives of the people in the march and the wider anti-Trump movement.

While all those statements may be true, you have to ask whether they’re adequate to the situation. If you were to list all these statements, would they alone suffice to describe – completely – what the marches actually demonstrate.

A set of statements leaves out the visceral power of a person’s experience itself. The emotional and mental impact of material events in your life on your own person, personality, and subjectivity. It leaves out the force of what shapes your character, even as it describes that shape and its changes.

A cinematic philosopher.

The closest I can come to naming this kind of visceral, material, truth-in-unfolding-experience is to riff on a term from Werner Herzog – ecstatic truth. A kind of truth that’s beyond factuality, and communicates a deeper truth than an isolated fact of the matter.

An ecstatic truth communicates the power of forces that shape subjectivities and situations of life. Such a truth is the majesty of an Antarctic mountain range or the peaks of Mount Erebus and its bubbling crater. And such a truth is the terror of being lost in the jungle, with violent armies around every corner.

Such a truth is also the yearning for dignity of a poor immigrant lost in the desolation of his new country. Or the bliss of giving in to evil.

It is the human experience of sublimity, but recognizes that the sublime can appear not only in terrifying or awe-inspiring natural formations and phenomena. Sublimity is also in the daily experiences of human lives.

An incredible power can come from communicating that sublimity.

Politics Without Power II: Changing Societies Is Changing Minds, Research Time, 17/05/2016

Continued from last post . . . I mean, that’s the weird paradox about political organizing, especially around elections. So much of the work of running election campaigns is about getting people to follow orders. 

“This many volunteers to canvass those streets. Leaflet the two blocks adjacent to that zone if you have time, but our polling indicates strong support for The Other Guys among that group, so just make our presence known. 
“The candidate is talking to residents in these two tower blocks and then doing a barbecue at the community centre in the middle of the Tibetan neighbourhood. So I need all the Buddhist volunteers to go there, and bring their freedom flags and the Beastie Boys mixtapes.”

Sir, yes sir. 

I’ve been one of those volunteers. So I know how important discipline and organization is to a campaign. There’s a clear hierarchy – volunteers, organizers, directors, strategists. There’s a clear goal – get our candidate into office. And there’s a clear threshold of victory – win the bloody election.

Bernie Sanders never stopped struggling for a better world.
Neither did a lot of people. But the task is a lot harder
than just changing a bunch of laws. People chafe under
laws they think are unjust. Just as Sanders, King, and
countless others chafed under Jim Crow, countless more
chafe under equal rights and anti-discrimination laws.

Movements like Occupy, Idle No More, and Black Lives Matter never had that. Their goal is an immense transformation of the entire society in which they exist. People say the Occupy protests failed. Do you really think they could have succeeded just with a bunch of people sitting in a park for a few months?

Changing society is a long game. It’s literally reaching into millions of people’s heads and changing their wiring around. Using all platforms of communication, demonstration, journalism, theatre, art. You have to create a whole new way of life and then seduce a country’s entire population into joining you.

A few protest marches won’t do the job. There’s no election day to change society itself. 

An election campaign, in contrast, requires a firm trust in the status quo. No one is after a truly radical change in the direct messaging of an election campaign. The main message of any such campaign is “Our candidate would be better at this job you have to vote for than these candidates. Please vote accordingly.”

I’m being a little sarcastic, of course. 

When I think about the history of liberation movements in North America, I remember the Civil Rights Movement – the time of Martin King, Malcolm, Jesse Jackson, Jon Lewis, and Al Sharpton. With that abrasive little Jewish ally Bernie Something hanging around in the background.

When I learned about the history of the King-era movement, I learned about their cause as a great victory. Jim Crow laws were wiped away, state-enforced segregation was illegal in the South for the first time. The law guaranteed equal treatment for people of all races. It was a win.

But the more I learned about the material inequalities black Americans face, the more I realized what a hollow victory King’s movement was. The law no longer kept black and white people separate, but real estate practices and urban development plans did. 

What would Malcolm think if he could see today's
world?

And the crack epidemic first destroyed families and care networks across America’s black communities. Its eventual alleged solution incarcerated millions, justifying the draconian police force in the name of racialized images of superpredators. Which sounds a lot like certain descriptions of young black teenagers as hulk-like bulletproof animals. 

And Donald Trump could very well become President of the United States on a platform built on racism, the incitement of violence, incredibly shady links with Russian oligarchies and organized crime, and the admiration of authoritarianism.

King, Malcolm, Fred Hampton, Medgar Evers. I feel like all these men died for nothing. 

But I was taught in school and countless history shows on television that these men died for the sake of a victory. Didn’t racism end with Jim Crow?

No, because we didn’t change society. And I think this is what the modern social movements for the rights of marginalized people in North America are really all about. I don’t think anybody really serious at Occupy really thought they’d take down a trillion-dollar industry with a sit-in. 

The goal was to change how people thought about that trillion-dollar industry, to hammer home the pain that industry caused millions of people across the world. The Sanders campaign has been the most visible means to continue that conversation, get people thinking about what our priorities as a society should be. 

Once you get people thinking, that’s the start of the process of change. People have to change their own subjectivities, their own mind-sets, their own character. Your role is as a provocateur. To get people to realize that, actually, something is terribly wrong, and you may have a part to play in that wrongness, and that you can correct it.

But there’s one question left: What would be the answer to that wrong? And how do you get people to agree to that one answer? . . . To be continued. 

Politics Without Power I: What’s Your Program? Research Time, 16/05/2016

My friend DJT worked on the Bernie Sanders campaign this winter, as a political organizer in the early months of American Presidential primary season. Knocking on doors in New Hampshire, Michigan, and Pennsylvania was an incredible experience, and he learned a lot that we’re taking to Toronto to progress the causes and issues we care about.

American election processes are convoluted, over-complicated, and utterly weird pastiches of several different systems that never quite fit together in the end. Essentially, each state and territory of the country has its own vote within each major political party for which candidate will run on that party’s ticket in the country-wide election. 70-odd different local party votes on each team before country votes as a whole, technically for the party, not the candidate. 

In terms of marketing, Clinton has already established too
much support – through years of genuinely hard work at
political organizing – from the steadfast coalition of
Democrats who support Barack Obama for Sanders ever
to take down. But his critique was necessary to change
the policy conversations of America's elites.

Every American election, I feel so much happier to live in Canada where our elections are so much simpler. Even if they get a little more complicated, it’s still simple in comparison.

Where the United States stands on its vote right now is that Donald Trump has defeated all his rivals for the Republican nomination for President, and Hillary Clinton has an undefeatable lead, but Bernie Sanders won’t drop out of the race to hand it to her. This even though he can’t win the nomination anymore. 

It’s a campaign without a purpose. Sanders is just traveling to different states now as they hold their primaries, leading rallies and getting his supporters excited about what’s become a literally lost cause that refuses to die. The USA will either get its first female President or its first President-for-Life. The dream of the first Jewish President in 2017 is impossible now.

So the open question is why he continues to run. In the short form, Sanders has always been running an issues-oriented campaign. He ran to see if he could move the policy platform of the Democratic party along the lines of social democracy. He did this from his lifelong opposition to supply-favouring, new liberal ideas on economics that transformed politics in Europe and North America since the 1980s. 

His message resonated with so many people across the United States that he actually did have a good shot at winning the party nomination. And he adapted as best he could. But for a lot of reasons and causes, Sanders came up short. 

Yet he isn’t going away. This would seem silly in conventional ways of thinking about electoral politics. You run in an election to win an election. So once all possible routes to winning the election can no longer work, you drop out. 

But this reasoning completely misses what politics actually is. It’s not a horse race competing for office. That would just make politics an immensely expensive and complicated crowdsourced job application. 

We tend to think of political and social organizing more generally along the lines of election campaigns. As if you could only kick a real movement into gear if you had a clear, definable objective whose achievement would be an obvious sign of victory. You’d achieve your goal, then the movement would disperse and everyone would go home happy.

Reading Commonwealth, I feel like Antonio Negri was very in step with the times writing it. The book was published in 2009, and he identifies this idea of politics – clear goal, concrete steps to achieve it – as a seriously destructive distortion of reality. 

Why not both? Political activism is meant
to be fun. If it wasn't about joy, you may as
well just join the army.

This kind of mission and firm direction in a political movement implies that there has to be an authority underlying any kind of social action. A handbook from the central authority to explain what you’re doing, how what you’re doing relates to what everyone else is doing, and how what you’re doing contributes to achieving the overall goal.

And that’s a generous amount of shared information. Because the central directors of a political campaign don’t even need to tell their members that much if they can expect unquestioning obedience. Ours is not to reason why, etc, etc.

Just a couple of years after Commonwealth dropped, the Occupy movement blew up. And they faced a lot of the same criticisms. What’s the point of having a political movement if your goals – building a more equal, diverse, ecological sustainable society – were so general and vague that you’ll never know if you’re achieved them?

More than that, Occupy was also criticized for its incredible diversity. It often seemed as though every member of Occupy was part of a protest or its support structure for a different reason, a different purpose or goal. Without firm direction to achieve specific policy points, it was often said, the movement was useless at best, mutual masturbation at worst.

But think about it this way. Don’t you find it weird that people in a democratic society would say that you can only achieve your goals through unquestioning obedience to a small clique of campaign leaders? 

That doesn’t sound very democratic to me. Something else is going on here. . . . To be continued.

Gilles in LA IV: We Are Fluid, Research Time, 26/11/2015

Adrian Parr’s essay about what it means to create and employ concepts cuts to the heart of what makes Gilles Deleuze a brilliant inspiration for our era of political, social, and economic tumult.

The basic idea is that when you do philosophy at its most powerful, you're creating concepts. New ways to think, new ways to understand the world. They let you perceive and activate potential in the world and yourself that you never knew existed before.

Sounds pretty utopian, and a little hippie-dippie. But that’s the idea.

She lists a bunch, and I like lists. Not ranked lists, or ordered lists, just random lists that you can find your own order in.

“Deterritorialization and reterritorialization, smooth space and striated space, the molar and the molecular, majoritarian and minoritarian.”

That’s just a few. If there's a common theme, it's becoming. How what was becomes what we are, and how what we are contains the potential to change completely. And all of that potential for flux is in us, and everything, every day. It’s ordinary.

And if there's a more specific theme to most of Deleuze’s concepts,* at least as it relates to politics, it's that everything about human identity and existence has the potential for complete transformation. That potential is in us every day. It's ordinary.

Reading a good book is like speaking
with a ghost. Sometimes, writing a
good book feels like channelling
ghosts too.

* I’m including, of course, the concepts that he created along with his collaborator, Félix Guattari, because when they worked together, they were practically the same person and a huge crowd all at the same time. One of the sweetest gestures Deleuze ever made in his life was giving Guattari a co-author credit on What Is Philosophy?, when he was too sick from heart disease to take part himself. The freaky thing is, What Is Philosophy? still reads in the style of their actual co-authored books.

That's an idea we should think about in our era of campus and student politics today, especially if you're looking at the American situation. There are many ways to think about today’s campus demonstrations, University of Missouri and Yale being the most notable.

Some of their most visible critics think of these protestors as against liberalism, against free speech. Sympathetic analysts have more complex interpretations, like when Jeet Heer described the rise of trigger warnings as a legitimate politicization of the language of trauma. 

Popular discussion of PTSD, through which psychology developed a new understanding of memory, experience, and trauma, gave us a new political language. Where and when the philosophy happened depends on how you want to trace the concept's history. I don’t really have time for that right now.

But a common critique of the campus protest movement is that it’s a resurgence of political correctness and identity politics. Which is wrong, but interesting.

I own a fantastic biography of Deleuze and Guattari, Intersecting Lives. Among its many wonderful stories about the two men, it includes their fascinating and horrifyingly awkward collision with the feminist activists of American universities in the early 1980s.

This is when identity politics was genuinely huge. Deleuze and Guattari held a panel at a conference in Columbia, and many young feminist scholars and activists were in the audience. They reacted with rage to how they presented their concept of becoming-woman. 

A reality TV star becomes an icon of a new definition
of human existence. That's mass media for you.

In modern language, we'd call it mansplaining, with a concept that seemed to deny the validity of the female experience. But Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas about how gender can fluctuate beyond a binary seems much more ordinary today.

Because we’ve had three decades of development in trans activism since then, an intellectual field where gender and sexuality fluidity is the norm. Binary talk about gender and sex is now understood to be itself discriminatory, violent language. 

Look at the bile about trans people that spews from Germaine Greer's mouth whenever she gets the opportunity to vomit it out. She denounces, for example, trans women as men trying to appropriate women’s experiences and identities. 

When what's really going on is that the conception of gender as fixed is being thrown out the window. Trans activism and philosophy is teaching us that the material reality of gender has so much more potential than a fixed binary framework can make sense of. 

Like all visionaries, the world has caught up to the strange expressions of Deleuze and Guattari. The next step is to push thought forward again into strange new directions. And our reality will follow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Even the Idealists Can’t Get It Right, Jamming, 19/12/2014

I found it very fitting that I was editing the third chapter of my Ecophilosophy manuscript when I read this morning about Greenpeace’s protest stunt at the Nazca Lines. The third chapter revolves around how philosophy can best serve direct political action. I discuss it in the context of the environmentalist movement, but it applies to all political activism generally. 

While Næss’ own articulation of the idea that I trace in the chapter has some troubling implications, there is at heart a promising way that a bunch of professional thinkers can play important roles in political activism. And no, it isn’t a reference to Marx. The Theses on Feuerbach are so well-known* that referring to them for an answer to this problem is almost like a cheat code.

* Well, the only one that ever really gets quoted is the philosophy-interprets-the-world-but-the-point-is-to-change-it one. 

No, the more promising role that philosopher can play in a political movement is the voice of the ideal, the movement’s own self-critic who, as it were, makes sure everyone checks themselves before they wreck themselves. I feel like Greenpeace could have used someone like this.

Huge, theatrical protests are necessary in an era of enormous industry. We’re a world where the Pacific Trash Vortex exists, where the Aral Sea became the Aralkum desert in a generation, and where the largest geographical feature in whole towns are the giant mounds of shattered computer parts. Also, just Google image search open pit mines for some horrifying environmental photography. 

But the irony of this is simply too delicious. Greenpeace, the world’s most famous militant environmentalist organization, is dedicated to protecting the world’s most vulnerable territories and ecosystems. And their message of protest to the international climate summit in Lima consisted in ignorantly damaging a vulnerable territory by hiking through the middle of the night in total darkness all over millennia-old art made by lightly brushing black stones away from light-grey earth, just to unveil a bunch of big yellow letters spelling out a corny slogan to reduce greenhouse emissions.

VICE was nice enough to embed the CBS News report in their post about it yesterday, so I know enough of the Peruvian government’s stance that I thoroughly disagree with their contention that criminal charges against the individual activists will deter people from future protests that interfere with the Lines. Punishing perpetrators never deters crime.

I also don’t want this to be one of those anti-Greenpeace posts, which is close to a universal reaction as I scan through the online reaction. I’m still energized by the punk energy of these hippies as they carelessly trudge through the most fragile art on Earth to lay their protest banner. When I read their just-barely-apology on their Facebook page, I kind of want to slap them for their contemptuous attitude. 

But that’s why we need punks in all their forms, to shake us out of complacency by openly spitting on all our eyes. Even when that energy is so misdirected and stupidly employed that we’re entirely justified in slapping them back as hard as we can. Human society needs punks.