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.

A Time and a Place for Abstraction, Research Time, 12/06/2018

Over the last few years, I’ve read a decent chunk of marxist theory. I’ve read the good stuff – some of the original, a lot of Gramsci, too much Zizek, Laclau, Mouffe, a little bit of Lenin; the anarchists too, like Bakunin, Goldman, and the uncategorizable Rancière.

I’ve also come across scattered essays of the bad stuff. A lot of it is contemporary – not to say that it’s bad because it’s contemporary. It’s bad because it’s the casually-written stuff.

Even 100 years ago when political revolutionaries really did argue matters of profound philosophy in journals and magazines, most of those essays were kind of shit. We don’t remember the many, many people who filled the pages of those journals every day, the ones who only looked good when Gramsci hadn’t written that week.

The gold-plated promises of wealth and power.

Quality is always rare. Make of that what you want.

There’s one trend that I find unfortunate in a lot of the everyday theory writing in the marxist tradition. The word ‘capital’ gets taken for granted. A catchall term whose conception grows more and more vague every time it’s used. Which, in the sloppiest of marxist writing, is an omnipresent and omnipotent force controlling everything.

Anyone who treats the shorthand as anything more than shorthand isn’t worth reading. The point of understanding capital as the basis of a lot of social and economic problems isn’t to blame capital – it’s to understand the machineries of capital.

That’s why you always need to be an empiricist when you’re writing political and economic philosophy. You need to look at real engines of wealth to see what produces all that cash.

In Gilbert’s history of Cultural Studies, he writes that the field pretty accurately identified one serious problem with capital today. The major engines of wealth have become the boardrooms and trading floors of investment companies and stock exchanges.

They move the most money around the world. They power the global movement of money – even though it’s turned out that they can’t control it.

The dystopia is real. The dystopia has always been real.

More than that, the investment industry doesn’t even really create anything, says Gilbert. Not quite true, of course. The investment industry does create analytic, algorithmic, and other mathematical tools to manage and regulate those capital flows. But those are machines to move the money – not what actually powers the movement.

No, the sources of power for the financial industry come from the traditional industries of making things. Laboratories, streets, studios, factories, offices – these are the types of things that the investment industry invests in, speculates on.

As global money and trade flows move faster and faster, they grow fractally complex – new cultural, communication, and technological products develop at faster rates and spread more quickly around the world.

Communications technologies open up more possibilities and diversity in what’s on offer to people. More bandwidth means more niches – for cultural products like movies and television, and for all commodities, as people make themselves increasingly unique as more possibilities for expression become available.

The financial industry provides a massive and powerful flow of money to channel into this increasingly intense production. But the real crisis – corruption, embezzlement, breakdown – comes when the financiers think they’re the creators, not the funders. The money circles through the same few hands, expanding by handshake, while the actual creators of material and conceptual wealth are starved.

Then the collapse comes.

A Refreshing Refusal of Universality, A History Boy, 23/09/2016

Years ago, when I was doing my Master’s degree, my supervisor* was giving a presentation on philosophy of language. This was the first moment in my education when I was just completely confounded by the reaction of a fellow student. 

* His avatar in this post will be Artie Shaw. Similar enough for people who know us to know who he is, but still doing the duty of a pseudonym. Also, he’d find it funny.

Shaking my head thinking, “Why would you even ask that?” Not at anything aggressive or offensive, but at such cross-purposes to the lecture that no one really knew how to react.

A universe of infinite variety and difference.

It was about a conception of counter-factual propositions as a synthetic a priori – knowledge that you learned entirely through thinking, but which involved reasoning beyond just logical implications of definitions. You had to think through imaginary empirical situations, what could have been.

This lecture was ten years ago, and I largely never again touched the Kripke-inspired philosophy of language that Artie Shaw was ploughing through at the time. So I’m probably messing up the substance of the talk entirely. 

But the point is – this use of the term ‘a priori’ referred entirely to counter-factual reasoning and modal logic, the quantification of possibility. In the Q&A, my colleague The Cartesian asked:

“But what about the universal?”

It was a sensible question from his perspective – The Cartesian was literally a Cartesian. He was steeped in terminology and tradition that conceived of the realm of pure thought as where you discover universal truths. And that’s not what philosophy really does anymore.

I mean, I’ve met plenty of working philosophy professors who still think this way about the discipline. But they tend to produce very unremarkable work on topics that are far removed from the concerns or our day. 

Either the write entirely scholarly material on the works of great philosophers from centuries ago. Or they write on the same problems those earlier philosophers did as if they were still vibrant topics whose answers could grip a society.

I had been leaning this way for a while, even at that young age. But that moment very suddenly pushed me to realize something very important. Problems of universal truth don’t really matter very much, aren’t interesting, and aren’t even productive. They just distract you from the really fascinating issues and ideas of the world.

So I had a wonderful chuckle at Anthony Appiah’s casual rejection of any possibility of truly universal knowledge in human societies. Can we say anything universally true of all humans? In the moral or ethical realm? Probably not. At least not in that traditional sense of the universal as essence, as applying without exception.

This does amount to a blanket declaration, but after more than a century of poking gaping materialist holes of contingency in all those old pretensions to the universal, I think it’s safe to declare it simply. Appiah writes from a solidly pragmatist perspective, and so do I.

There is no universal in human nature. 

Where we think there are universals, there are really just tendencies common enough that we haven’t run into any counter-examples. 

What’s more, we don’t even need shared universals to build empathy between different people. We’re used to the appeals to a shared humanity to encourage peace building. At least in the rhetoric. “Ain’t we all kin?” I sometimes think the idea of a humanity bound by what we have in common comes from spending too long swimming in the conformist language of the nation.

Differences are what fascinates us. If we meet people who are exactly the same as we are, they bore us quickly. Variety and surprise is the basis of our strongest relationships – they challenge us as we come to know them, and open our world to new possibilities.

Even in the most tense and violent places, exploring difference is the foundation of real peace. We’re diverse and unique, and that universal of no universality – the singularity of the world – brings us together.

The Force of Becoming Majority, Research Time, 15/08/2016

An important part of Utopias will be my attempt to understand what makes a community – the social body that you want to exist according to a political, moral, and ethical ideal. A community is the thing you want to become a utopia.

As critical as I am of Justin Trudeau and the Liberal
Party, I am proud of the progress Canada has made
since its genesis as an Anglo-white supremacist
dominion of the British Empire to become a country
whose political ideals are omni-inclusion.

I’m a Canadian – my philosophical investigations and research come from that position in the post-imperialist era of the West. So the concept of nation and nationhood is inextricably bound up with our understanding of what a political community is. And that’s really unfortunate. As a wise Canadian once said, it’s just bogus and sad.

I think Canada is a very fortunate place for the new era – it seems to be the one country in the West (maybe even the world!) where the conception of the country has split from any traditional concept of nationhood. 

Generations of an open door to immigration has led to literally hundreds (if not thousands) of ethnicities becoming part of Canadian history and identity. My country is far from perfect, but I think we offer a model for how to build a new kind of civil state.

When I look at the situation in other countries of the West, I see that nationhood – that drive to define your countryman, exclude others (and Others) by any means – is violently reasserting itself. Last week, I picked up a book that I thought would be a useful theoretical exploration of nationhood, Etienne Balibar’s We, the People of Europe.

So far, it’s been remarkably enlightening. The book’s essays were culled from publications and lectures throughout the early 2000s, given in Western Europe and the United States. Balibar’s thinking at this moment takes place at a critical juncture – the nationalist parties of Europe were rising to the point that audiences around the world were taking notice. But Europe didn’t yet face a situation that would let them triumph.

With the refugee crisis from the Syrian civil war, Europe’s nationalists have their moment. Their political ascent in Europe may be unstoppable now – and millions will likely suffer from their policies. 

Marine Le Pen, leader of France's Front National, one
charismatic leader who can put a charming face on the
racial exclusion and nationalism that can destroy the
last, gasping ideals of the European Union.

In the early 2000s, the European Union was seemingly an unstoppable political entity. It would bring together in peace all the nations of Europe, a region that had experienced war for literally centuries. It would require an entirely new concept to justify that political unity, since the concept of the nation had justified the most recent centuries of war, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.

The EU would become a mere bureaucracy without the participation of all its people in creating a new concept to underlie a political and social unity and community that would make a mockery of nationality. Balibar was writing in an era where, referring at least to Europe, that concept was still possible.

The concept of nation merges two social and political phenomena. One is the community itself, usually defined through ethnic commonality, cultural continuity, and a shared language. This ethnically-defined community expresses itself institutionally in the state, a bureaucracy of territorially-bound social control. 

The European tradition of liberal democracy that grew wrapped around the national concept offered a democratic universality. The rights and freedoms of people in a social community were developed and guaranteed through a citizenship contract with the state institution. 

State authority guaranteed your freedom. How democratic your society was depended on how open your institutional authorities were to changing the terms of the citizenship contract.

Etienne Balibar, author of We, The People of Europe, and
theorist of new possibilities for existence.

But this universality was only abstract. Practically, this still amounted to an exclusionary institution and morality. The universality of the rights of the citizens only applied materially to those citizens who could build their own national state. 

The minority could only access those rights by becoming-majority – collapsing their difference – or else carving out their own territorial enclave. But that would be yet another form of becoming-majority – what was once an imperilled minority now becomes an empowered majority enforcing its own social conformity on its own minorities.

Balibar discusses briefly the constitutional tizzy that came up in early republican constitutions in France, as they attempted to recognize the status of Corsica as a nation within France. It reminded me very much of Canada’s recent constitutional crises over the national status of Quebec. 

It amounts to a calamity – nationhood can admit no minority that is not at least in progress to become-majority. And the existing majority must also accept the becoming-majority of the minority. The fate of the Jews and Roma in Europe testify to this calamity in its strongest form.

So as I read and blog about Balibar’s examination of nationhood and the concept of nation, I’ll have this calamity at the forefront of my thoughts. As, I’m pretty sure, did Etienne himself.

The Skeleton of a Performance, Composing, 01/06/2016

A mostly graphic post today, and a late one. I delivered my panel on Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity this morning, to a small but appreciative audience, with the commentary and input of my friends Sanja Dejanovic and Jenn Primmer.

Our discussion departed quite a bit from the slides that I made – which were always more my speaking notes than a strict guide to the performance. But I wanted to post them here, as part of the promotion of the book, and to mark the occasion. Maybe let me know what you think, readers.

Never Give Up and Never Give In, A History Boy, 08/04/2016

Yesterday at Adam Riggio Writes:

Human politics driven by our ideals puts us at war with the cosmos itself. It means that the ideal of human politics is to demand a better world than the universe is able to give you – if I can’t find it in the world as it is, I’ll build it.

It’s the demand to God herself – I won’t submit to your theodicy; I won’t justify the raw deal of human suffering. My ideal is a world where everyone lives in peace and happiness. Where a single crying child is too much pain to be right, to be justified.

For a Dostoyevsky fan, I've never been that into Crime
and Punishment, though I do love it. It's a beautiful
book and a fantastically intense character. But I
found the characters themselves tended to become
ciphers for ideas a little too easily. The Wikipedia
page gives a pretty good sign of how irritatingly
up-front the book is about this breakdown.

Hmmm. Where have I heard that before?

This week’s posts have become a very unexpected series. They aren’t even really a series, as I’ve typically presented these things. Just picking up from the end of one post, moving in a tangent that it suggests, and then repeating the same from another tangent. Today is more of the same. And I hope it’s a little illuminating.

I’ve talked about my love of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novels on the blog before, and how much he’s influenced my political thinking. Today, I want to tease out how it makes sense for a strict Russian Orthodox Christian monarchist to have influenced views and ideas like mine.

Begin with the beginning. Dostoyevsky was a radical anti-monarchist revolutionary and atheist. And he got caught. He expected to be executed, because this was 1840s Russia, of course. But the Czar played kind of a cruel trick on him and his co-conspirators. 

Dostoyevsky was led out to a firing squad field, and the execution was proceeding entirely according to protocol. Then as the guns were about to fire, the squad put down their weapons and the drill sergeant announced that their death sentences were commuted by royal decree to several years in Siberia. This isn’t a myth – it was a real event that happened.

That moment of facing the certainty of his own death, seemingly within minutes and seconds, rekindled Dostoyevsky’s faith in God. And he was a dedicated Orthodox Christian and grumpy royalist for the rest of his life. A life he spent tortured by alcoholism and gambling addiction, as well as building one of humanity’s most legendary writing careers. 

Akira Kurosawa made one of the few attempts to adapt
Dostoyevsky's sprawling epic of our interior lives, the
novel of his that first hit my soul, The Idiot.

Because Dostoyevsky didn’t become one of those unfortunate religious converts whose works become an excuse to spout dogma. This isn’t Kirk Cameron we’re talking about here. 

What was most important to Dostoyevsky were the crises themselves – depicting in his art narrative and mental moments of the same terrifying intensity as he experienced up against that wall as a young man. Characters with the singular uniqueness as he felt in that moment when he knew he was going to die – there was never going to be another like him.

The list of Dostoyevsky characters that affected me over the years began with Prince Lev Myshkin in The Idiot, and Parfyon Rogozhin as well. One was the most beautiful vulnerability I had ever seen in a fictional character, and the other was a remarkable, malevolence that would make a heart burn with blackened flame.

After I read The Idiot, I thought that if I could ever create a character in fiction or film with the same intensity and singularity of Myshkin, even if only once, it would be worth all the work to devote at least a part of my life to make art.

I actually read Ivan Karamazov’s monologue about why he’s an atheist before I read the entire book. It was one of the readings from an undergrad course I took on philosophy of religion, presented as a straightforward argument for atheism. 

A poster for the 1969 Russian film
adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov.
It was co-directed by the actors who
played Dmitri and Ivan after the death of
original director Ivan Pyryev, Mikhail
Ulyanov and Kirill Lavrov.

It’s probably the best argument for atheism that exists – it certainly blows away anything Hitchens or Dawkins may have written. It justifies and contributed to my belief that only someone with a deep and complex relationship with the divine can actually explain the deepest philosophical and ethical meaning of atheism.

Essentially, I hold that atheism. It’s an atheism that still believes in God. If you believe that’s contradictory, then you’ve been reading too much Dawkins and you think all you need to do to be a thorough atheist is not go to church and act like scientific knowledge is absolutely perfect.*

* Let’s not get into the contingency of scientific knowledge existing simultaneously with its systematic reliability, or we’ll be here for a whole damn book. And if you want me to write that book, you can subsidize it directly now.

Simply not believing in God because scientific knowledge can’t prove God’s existence is a kind of alienation from the divine. You’re alienated because you may once have expected something to be there that isn’t and never will be.

Ivan Karamazov’s is the atheism that embodies the most robust alienation from God – the ethical. It refuses to accept the legitimacy of the world’s ultimate goodness in the fact of suffering and destruction. 

Theodicy, traditionally speaking, is the moral justification of God’s existence and goodness. Speaking very simply and quickly, it justifies the order and history of the universe as the overall product of God’s plan. All the suffering, cruelty, and destruction of the world is a function of God’s love.

It’s a refusal that the world could be better than it is. The human dedication to political ideals is a profound engagement with reality – a refusal of reality as it exists and an overwhelming desire to rewrite reality. That reality is the reality of God – Reality is the material expression of God. If you have a problem with reality as it is, then you have a problem with God.

Ivan Karamazov is Dostoyevsky the revolutionary. Learning who really murdered his father is Dostoyevsky’s moment in front of the firing squad. The desire to change the world for the better is real. The rage at the world is real. That rage has to build a new world.

The Diversity of Life Is Difference in Ourselves, Research Time, 04/03/2016

There's a passage in Multitude where Antonio Negri tells the story of two other Italian writers, each writing a book about their travels in India. The story is there to teach us about singularity, what it means to be unique, but also comparable and common.

Monkeys frequently appear in Indian ecosystems. When
an old friend of mine was planning to spend a year
working with a literacy NGO in Sri Lanka, we warned
him to watch out for monkeys who had been trained to
pick pockets. We may have been a little racist.

Alberto Moravia was an anti-fascist writer, atheist, and wrote with a clinical precision in his style. I know him best as the author of the novel The Conformist, which I’ve never read. But I’ve seen the cinematic adaptation of The Conformist many years ago, so long ago that I can barely remember it.

Pier Paolo Pasolini was a provocateur writer and filmmaker, whose political sympathies leaned toward the autonomist movement. He was openly gay in a robustly homophobic Italy. 

His film Salo: 120 Days of Sodom is famous for how its grotesquerie and cruelty shocked Italian society. I haven’t seen that, but I’ve read a small novel he wrote about street gangsters from the slums of Rome, A Violent Life. I found it on a bookshelf in my grandparents’ old house in Montreal; it used to belong to my father.

Pasolini was killed on a mafia hit in 1975, brutally beaten and mutilated, then run over multiple times with his own car.

Moravia wrote An Idea of India. Negri describes it as a story of Moravia’s confusion at this country. He tried to understand it, but constantly found himself utterly and completely alienated from Indian culture and society no matter how many places he visited and how many people he spoke with.

He ended up simply grasping at ideas that barely made sense, and certainly couldn’t cover all of what he found so strange and otherworldly about the country. Moravia thought of India as a pure Other, utterly unlike his own country and social world.

Pasolini had an opposite experience that looks more progressive at the outset, but is actually just as blinkered. He travelled, met people, and saw poor people struggling to get by. He saw people with simple dreams working hard and looking for the opportunities to achieve them. 

There were even street urchins running through the streets of Mumbai, and Pasolini saw that they were exactly the same as Italy’s. 

Everybody has to eat. It's just a matter of what you eat.

Negri’s lesson from this story is that neither Moravia nor Pasolini are right. That’s because they both see the culture of India only in comparison with their own Italian and European culture. They take Europe as the neutral standard of comparison: How different or similar is India to Europe?

In asking that question, no matter what their answer is, they end up missing the point. Because the real question that guides you to find out the nature of a place and a culture you don’t know isn’t, “How does it resemble or differ from my own?” 

It’s “What’s all this? What’s going on here?”

Those kinds of questions take you to the nature of the culture, history, institutions, politics, families, moralities, of the place and people themselves. That’s really all that singularity means, despite some of the talk in academic philosophical circles about how difficult this term is.*

* I think this reputation is just because Gilles Deleuze primarily developed the contemporary concept of singularity, and a lot of people in the academy presume Deleuze’s writing and ideas to be difficult and obtuse. Once you realize that he’s actually writing very clearly and explicitly the entire time, you understand that these terms aren’t difficult at all.

When we understand what’s going on in a place and among a people, we can work out what’s similar and different compared to our own culture. Or what movements exist in common between our cultures, where they can help each other. 

But that kind of solidarity only starts once you approach that culture without preconceptions. Accept what is for the way it is, and you won’t feel lost or deluded at all. You’ll have learned with respect about another’s nature. That’s the beginning of a global movement.

How to End Racism (No, Really), Research Time, 15/02/2016

Something you notice after you live in Toronto, or any city like it, for a while is that you see a lot of interracial couples. And because there are so many ethnic groups around this city, you see pairings from all these different combinations. 

These pairings have been happening for more than a generation already. Enough time has passed that there are already a significant number of people of a mixed-race or mixed-ethnicity background walking around continuing to mix traditionally separate ethnic lineages.

For all the mass racism that's sprung up throughout
America in response to his presidency, the very
existence of Barack Obama and people like him of
mixed ethnic heritage is a sign of humanity's
utopian possibilities.

This is utterly fantastic. Not just in that general warm fuzzy sense of everyone leaving racism behind in a funky spirit of gettin’ it on. But it’s that too. There’s a much more profound social and cultural transformation going on in this generation of ethnic blending and blurring. And it’s awesome.

In the last chapters of Empire, Antonio Negri gets a little utopian about the shape of the more anarchist alternatives to our current global economic order threaded with injustice.* You might think that these kinds of utopias are inconceivable. That we’ll always have a global economy based on exploitation and injustice.

* Though he goes into the real detail in the next two books in his trilogy, Multitude and Commonwealth. That’s coming soon.

Well, I call shenanigans. Because the best way to argue that we can achieve the unimaginable is to remind you of how we very recently achieved something that was culturally unimaginable to the same degree.

Now, I’m not saying racism is over. We no more ended racism with an increased frequency of inter-ethnic marriage and dating than we did when the United States elected a black President.

But people in a society where a significant number of folks come from mixed racial heritages is going to have a very hard time believing in any essentialisms about race. And anyone who knows them is going to have a similarly hard time believing in race essentialism.

Anything beyond amusing stereotypes and cultural jokes will be more easily seen for the divisive, hateful bullshit that it’s always been. Racism has only ever been believed because we’ve chosen to believe it. Throughout most of our modern history, we’ve let our drives to tribalism and division overcome our drive to love and oneness.

That desire for unity in the massive diversity of humanity is more important now than ever. The worst decision we can make in fighting the destructiveness of globalization is embrace localism, national unity, and the purity of social isolation as an antidote. 

Globalization became so powerful because those processes developed the ability to break down nationalisms and state-territorial boundaries. Any attempt to revive nationalism won’t be an antidote to globalization because globalizing forces already have the ability to break national autarkies down incredibly easily.

No, if you want to succeed against globalization, you have to globalize yourself. The utopian movement that works to heal the injustices of global capitalism – the slave labour, exploitation, oligarchical domination, massive ecological destruction – can only work if it exists on the same global plane of activity.

So we have to be individuals living our globalized lives, building relationships and friendships around the world. And procreating. Procreating people whose identities necessarily have to break with the old boundaries of the past. Love itself creates people whose very existence is a slap in the face to racist beliefs. 

Toronto – to take the example physically closest to me at the moment – is becoming a city where ethnicity is no more or less important in drawing one person to another than hair colour or tone of voice. Love now grows between people who, only a few generations ago, would have been considered different species in mainstream popular belief.

That utopian achievement turned out to be perfectly possible. No reason the power of human love and our creativity in building communities together can’t achieve a further utopia.

• • •

I once met somebody who told me that he felt sorry for all the ethnically blurred people in the world, because there was always going to be racism and they could never avoid being the victims of racism. 

People from their mother’s race would hate them, and people from their father’s race would hate them. So it was best to build families only with those who had the same skin colour as you.

Man, fuck that guy.

One and All Flow Together III: Ridiculous Unity, Research Time, 03/01/2016

Continued from last post . . . A person’s fundamental human rights don’t rest on the decision of a state to grant them. All you need is to demand a right, and if that right helps secure your freedom without jeopardizing or harming your community, then you can legitimately claim it.

Our governments should be a tool for the public and all the communities that constitute a wider public to put some teeth behind securing and protecting those rights. But the history of how the state actually developed made government a tool to administer, police, and control its population. 

The modern state arose from the conservative, reactionary movement that grew up in the face of the revolutions against the absolute monarchies. Philosophies that justify the power of the state over the people were developed as the intellectual wing of this reactionary movement. 

From North Korea's Arirang Mass Games, the
coordinated movements of hundreds of people as one
entity that subsumes all their movements into an
organic whole. I wonder if there's any symbolic
meaning here?

That's true for blatantly authoritarian philosophies like Thomas Hobbes’ theory of sovereignty. But it's also true for more subtle philosophies, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theory of the general will. 

In that example, democratic representative institutions like parliaments aggregate and process individual wills to produce the will for what is best for the nation as a whole, at least ideally. 

But the general will doesn’t actually exist any more than the nation actually is some kind of superorganism that all our individual wills jack into like some cybernetic hive mind.* This is true of the nation. Nations aren’t real. They presume uniformity in culture, territory, morals, and history where there's always ever been difference, variety, multiplicity.

* Images from sci-fi are incredibly useful in all kinds of philosophical thinking. Philosophers should be in so much debt to that genre.

Nations. They’re a ridiculous concept. 

But we all believe in them. It’s the work of hundreds of years** of administration, services, symbols, military mobilizations, anthems, history and culture curriculums, media productions, and all the other ways I can't immediately think of right now that a national identity perpetuates itself.

** If not thousands of years if you consider how the Chinese national identity arose from that old empire, a state government and bureaucracy which has been continuous in some form for literally millennia.

Nationhood arises from the unity of government over a long enough time. National unity is imposed on a population with far more differences among each other than there is superficial commonality.

A patriotic symbol that functions to unify a nation.

The unity and uniformity of a population isn't natural. We're all individuals. When we interact, we’re just going to become more different. We should be proud of that creativity, our ability to produce new ways of being.

But so often, we aren’t. We’re told to conform. And so many of the great philosophers, especially in the modern period, have been more concerned with justifying the pressure to conform than encouraging our rebellion, creativity, contrariness, and variety.

Antonio Negri has a very quick argument against Georg Hegel in this regard. I'd like to talk with some of my friends who are still devoted to the study of Hegel about this. Because it's a quick argument. 

So the natural response of a sadly typical Hegel scholar will be to dismiss it, because Negri doesn't reckon with all the details of the Hegelian system and all its possible interpretations. Just the general thrust of the system.

Frankly, why should he play by the rules of traditional, conservative scholars? Traditional, conservative scholarship would never have resulted in a book as remarkable as Empire. 

This is the problem of the academy. It can give you an institutional home from which you can practice your research in peace. But it slows you down, makes you afraid to take anything but the most careful steps. 

So throw caution to the winds! What is the argument? To be continued . . . 

One and All Flow Together I: History Lessons, Research Time, 30/12/2015

Most of my life, I’ve learned about the history of our culture in a particular way. It seems that this way of learning history is pretty common, at least across the West. We learn about the modern world as if it one day just switched on.

The apple hits Newton’s head – the light bulb flicks on in the cartoon – and bam! There’s science and democracy.

There's much more to the medieval peasants than our
stereotypes suggest.

Not quite how it really went down, though. 

The people we think of as exclusively modern grew up in the world that today we call medieval. Popularly, this is the Dark Ages. A time of alchemy instead of chemistry, the Church instead of the state. An uncivilized time.

I sometimes think that our education system makes the medieval West into barbarians to encourage youth to accept uncritically dogmas about our institutions, knowledge traditions, and authorities. But you can’t just critique the mainstream you were spoon fed without a critical eye about where you’ll go. 

That way lies lizard people and the camp-style politics that made left wing democrats love Bashar Assad. So let’s not go there.

But let’s take seriously that medieval Europe is continuous with our own time. In fact, we can understand the real transitions of from medieval to modernity better when we take medieval European culture on its own terms. 

Antonio Negri does that, and finds remarkable things in medieval society, whose disappearance was one of the qualitative transitions that created modernity. 

Peter Kropotkin found such a remarkable thing in the cultures and governance styles of the free towns of Germany. These were crushed by national armies as kings unified territory into large, bureaucratically managed, centralized states.

Negri was probably the first – and only – writer who
showed me how concepts that looked like they had only
to do with abstract matters of the nature of existence had
deep political meanings. For that reason, Ecology,
Ethics, and the Future of Humanity is fundamentally
indebted to Negri, even if he doesn't even show up in
the references.

Negri finds something philosophical. An end of the reliance on a transcendent, eternal, absolute like God as a source of morality and meaning in existence. That’s a weird thing to say was part of the essence of the medieval period. We typically think of medieval Europe as dominated by the Catholic Church and Christianity.

Definitely, those institutions dominated the large-scale politics of the continent. You can make a solid case that the Crusades were the major political event of the medieval period.* But there was an undercurrent of critical thought inside the Church from the beginning of the so-called Dark Ages.

* And the plagues that decimated Europe’s populations were the major biopolitical events of the era. Too soon?

Negri points to the work of Duns Scotus. Scotus was a monk who lived in the 800s and wrote ridiculously complicated books. Well, they weren’t that bad. 

They were just in a professional environment that required a lot of complex technical language that made the ideas very inaccessible to someone who wasn’t already steeped in the culture and discourse of the institution.**

** This sounds familiar to me for some reason . . . 

And Scotus developed a very radical idea. He wrote that a being’s identity depends only on its own nature. For me to be a human didn’t rely on my own existence instantiating some universal that pre-exists and exists on a higher plane than my existence. 

I don’t need an idea of the human in the eternal or in the mind of God*** to be a human. I define what the human is by my own existence, contributing to the real material history of humanity.

*** Same thing. Well, maybe more . . . Same thing? Depends on your own allegiances.

My existence doesn’t just instantiate some universal. My existence really adds something to the world. Same with everything else. Everything adds to the totality of the universe’s actualities and possibilities and potentialities. 

It turned the traditional way of understanding the role of humanity and God in the universe on its head. And it’s a very democratic idea. To be continued. . . .

Gilles in LA I: Philosophy Should Be For Everyone, Jamming, 19/11/2015

I just wrote a review of a book about Plato to appear in the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. I wrote a couple of years ago about how I wanted to explore new ways of writing book reviews, and this is another one of those experiments.

My first encounter with Socrates.

It's written as a Platonic dialogue between me and Socrates. And I'm pretty sure I avoided being a pretentious fuckwad, which is the biggest challenge of all when you approach any kind of writing with “I’m going to write this as a Platonic dialogue between me and Socrates.”

Part of what I talked about in that book review was the legacy of dead philosophers. How we remember them, and what role they play in our larger culture. My generation has seen philosophy losing a lot of its public relevance. It’s another discipline regularly bashed by right-wingers – most recently by Marco Rubio – as useless and worthless for the economy and wider society.

Rachel Lu's article critiquing Rubio's advocacy for ignorance is valuable for several reasons. It contributes to the growing awareness that education in all sectors is growing increasingly inaccessible and produces crippling individual debt levels.

She’s right to emphasize the importance of the soft skills of proper philosophical education. Actually exploring these texts in full is quite difficult cognitive labour. It builds the soft skills of analysis and abstract creativity that will be very useful in whatever future career a person chooses. 

I was talking with a client the other day about how hard it can be to find genuinely creative people in some business-focussed careers like public relations and communications, where I ply my freelance contracts and day jobs. 

American conservatism has long had a strand of anti-
intellectualism, but the growing emphasis on the
virtues of ignorance and hostility to knowledge and
science has grown beyond worrisome. Here's a photo
of Marco Rubio looking smug, continuing my
tradition of posting unflattering images of political
leaders I dislike.

A communicator might advise that you should build your company’s image as a creative force, but not actually know how to communicate that unique personality. I thought of this when I was reading Gregg Lambert’s essay on Gilles Deleuze and his thinking in the LA Review of Books. 

Deleuze was a university professor, and embodied many stereotypes of the profession. Thankfully, it was mostly the positive ones. But Lambert chooses the death of Deleuze to meditate on a notion of the public intellectual that's disappeared in our culture for the most part.

It had to do with, in Deleuze’s words, the difference between the public intellectual as a “private thinker” who speaks her mind on issues and ideas, and a “public professor” who represents a particular dogma or brand.

Here's a really stark example. Jean-Paul Sartre discussed complex issues in public venues and challenged the French public on many problems of justice, especially, later in his life, anti-immigrant racism and post-colonial politics. Contrast Richard Dawkins, who has an impressive pedigree in science, but today mostly writes screeds advocating an aggressive, racist atheism that demonizes religious and ethnic minorities in Britain and Europe.

Deleuze was one of the last “private thinkers” in the academy, even though he had a reputation as a “public professor” because he was such an academic. But his life, work, and ideas were as singular as his concept of singularity.

Lambert doesn’t really explain it well in his essay. He mostly explains an illustration from Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, used in Deleuze’s last essay before his own death. The novel's villain Riderhood nearly drowns in the Thames, and the people of a bar who know the bastard well still work to save his life.

Face it, he's always looked and acted like such a
stereotypical university professor.

The impersonal fire of life itself motivates people. That simple fact of being alive, in its very minimal sense, is the heart of humanity’s ethical call to care for each other. When Riderhood is a barely living corpse, he's precious, a life on the verge of sniffing out. 

As he wakes up, his disgusting nature as an individual is apparent to everyone, and they turn away. Probably with regret.

The singular is the particularity of a process or an existent (really the same thing), but without a fleshed out individuality. It’s unique, but only in its facticity, as the singular alone has no nature. Identity is built on the singular, its a-personal foundation.

Lambert gets the illustration wrong. He talks about the scene as if it happens early in a short story. Really, it's a dramatic scene about 600 pages into a massive tome. He sort of skirts over Deleuze's point too.

We think of individuality as uniqueness, but that’s not quite right. Being an individual means that you have properties that can be described in general terms. Once you have an identity, you're the instantiation of universal properties. You can be subsumed into a category.

The singular, not at all. It’s pure existence, the indexical – this here it. All that it is, is what it can become. It’s pure potential. A process in the instant before it starts moving and roiling along. The ability to change that hasn’t yet changed. The transition between nothingness and the Big Bang.

Wrap your head around that, which even long-experienced academic philosophers have trouble doing, and you can explain the uniqueness of anything.

A Character’s Conceptual Reality, Composing, 29/08/2014

A break from the anarchism, which has been simply depressing, as you could probably tell from my last post, which indicated how little we’ve progressed (and how much we’ve probably backslid, given the bleak, Thatcherian individualism that has permeated our society) in the last hundred years.

I spent a good chunk of today taking care of the bureaucracy for my new retraining plan in Sheridan College’s Corporate Communications program, an opportunity to land a solid, well-paying job with an environmentalist group, or a publisher, or a film company, or a lobby group on behalf of affordable housing in Ontario. I want to use a career that’s typically called public relations to help people and make the world a better place. I think that’s a reasonable request of the universe.

Of course, that career path won’t stop my creative pursuits in philosophy, fiction, and scriptwriting. Basically, it will allow me a virtuous way out of the relative poverty I’ve been stuck in for the past two years while my creative work can continue. I spent this afternoon in a meeting with my director, Mel, about our upcoming play, You Were My Friend.

As I polish the script over the next few days, we’re preparing for the auditions for the two parts, which will take place in a couple of Sundays. I designed the parts so that the actresses will not only have fun doing them, but be challenged and impress their audience. I wanted the characters to be crafted such that they follow an idea which I think is essential to most quality literature and drama.

One of my favourite eras of cinema is the social realist era of
the 1970s, and Five Easy Pieces was one of the best of those
films, easily the most influential on my own work.

First, they have to be neither particularly heroic nor villainous. Both of these women have virtues and flaws. One has a powerful sense of optimism and hope, a basic faith in people to be decent, despite having been kicked around by several people who were very close to her. Yet this is also her flaw, as it leaves her still vulnerable to being manipulated by others, and vulnerable to the harms that the world has in store for us all generally. One is an insightful pragmatist, able to see reality for what it truly is. But she doesn’t have the sense of hope to fight against the foregone conclusion of defeat. If they can combine their virtues properly, they’d be practically unstoppable, friends for life fighting together against a world full of petty micro-injustices. Because I’m a terrible person and I like to make people feel depressed, it doesn’t quite work out that way. They’re both the protagonists, each of their stories illuminating and colliding with the other. In that sense, they’re people.

That’s the essence of what I think of as social realism, art that articulates the singularity of human personalities and the essences of how we live today. The play itself isn’t purely realist in that I never strive for verisimilitude. There are scenes where telephone conversations that happen across town merge into the same apartment, where characters make revealing remarks in Shakespearean (or Underwoodian) asides to the audience. But the people and the world they live in are real, because they’re ours.

The characters also embody so much of the experience of my own generation in the modern world. We work hard and intelligently in difficult circumstances, but too often remain trapped in the bad situations we were in before. And all too often, we don’t really understand how it could be anything but our own fault, unable to perceive the aggregate association of individuals interacting so that so much is ruined, but it’s impossible to apportion intentional blame to anyone, even sometimes when someone actually does commit a terrible act.

But that would be spoilers. You’ll just have to see the play in November. Or audition for it – write me at the Twitter account along the side here, and you’ll get a pm back with the address to apply. I promise you’ll love it.