Losing One of the Family, Advocate, 18/08/2017

I was originally going to write more about the psychology of political consent. But I’ll pick that up on Monday. Instead, I just want to write a short post about a tragedy I read about yesterday.

Gwynevere's Facebook profile is now a memorial.
One of the reasons news of their death stood out to me in the noise
of tragedy in our world lately, is their name. They chose the name
River Song. They was part of my community, of people who
love Doctor Who.

The news showed up on my Twitter feed. It was a link to an article by The Advocate. “Texan is the 17th Transgender American Murdered in 2017.” Transgender people suffer violence at a disproportionately high rate. They face discrimination, severe psychological torture in everyday life from the casual hostility of ordinary prejudice.

Trans people are the targets of discriminatory practices from the sidewalk to the halls of state legislatures. When I read about one who was murdered on Saturday night, it hit a little closer to my heart than a lot of the other sad news I hear about murder and violence.

Their name was Gwynevere River Song.

I’m something of a Doctor Who fan. I haven’t swum the murky depths of dankness that you find on the Gallifrey One forums in a really long time. I visit often enough to get depressed and leave again.

I’ve been involved with the fandom often enough to know the awful dreck of a lot of Doctor Who controversy about gender and sexism issues over the last few years. The Moffat Hate brigade is a prime example that I think is very important for the show (or any show), but is so intense that they drive people away from considering their points.

Yes, there are plenty of mistakes when it comes to gender and sexuality that Steven Moffat has made, in the show and in interviews. He puts his foot in his mouth all too frequently, sometimes so deep that it’s like his skull is dimensionally transcendental. But he’s not evil.

Most inspirational part of the Smith era if you ask me. I'm not the
only one either.

Doctor Who has made more progress in its feminist and liberatory perspective under Steven Moffat than ever before. Short form, his arcs for the female characters built a more complex life and a more powerful agency than a companion character had in the whole history of the show.

Despite all the justified and reaching criticism Moffat’s characters received, they all connected deeply with a female and feminist fandom.

You can see how deeply Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who connected with some of its fans when you hear about a trans person from the heart of Texas and see that they’d chosen to begin their new life by adopting the name of Moffat’s greatest character and Alex Kingston’s most epochal performance.

I wish we could have learned about Gwynevere for some other, non-horrible reason. That Song could have lasted longer.

Lives Deprived of Flesh, Research Time, 25/07/2017

Yesterday, I wrote about an article I’m working on to be published at the Reply Collective. It’s a rather complex study of what philosophical creativity is. It includes an analysis of Rebecca Tuvel’s article on the possibility of transracial human existence.

I read the article, and I didn’t actually think it was very good. I think Tuvel had the right to write the article, contrary to a lot of the more intense opposition to her work. See, Tuvel’s critics made the mistake of thinking that her goal was ever to write anything at all about real transgender people’s experiences.

Tuvel’s article doesn’t ever discuss real experiences, and if her approach there accurately reflects all her work, she never does. She practices an entirely abstract conceptual analysis.

Would you trust anyone who had a simple, clear answer for everything?
That kind of person is usually a con-man, whether he's wearing a
plaid leisure suit or a televangelist's perfect makeup.

She contrasts and analyzes a series of abstract arguments from principles and claims. These arguments are about what it would take to change genders and races. They have nothing to do with the actual experience of real transgender people – if they did, their ideas would be nowhere so clean, orderly, and simple.

Too much of contemporary philosophy mistakes this simplicity and clarity for a superior way of understanding the world because it’s so simple and clear. But the world isn’t easy – it’s a messy, difficult, painful place, and the truths of lived experience are hard to understand in all their curving, multifaceted dimensions.

Any conclusion that you come to easily, you should suspect. Just as you’d suspect a salesman whose pitch is too slick.

When I read Milton Friedman, I feel the same way.

Hell of a record scratch right there. But I see the same kind of reliance on the ease of abstract arguments, turning away from real complexities that would make your conclusions more difficult to hold. A philosophy informed entirely by the most simple, abstract arguments is completely inadequate to understanding any exceptions.

Here’s an example from Capitalism and Freedom that makes for a wonderful illustration of Friedman’s over-abstraction. It’s part of a larger argument about how education should work, and how people’s preferences for their children’s futures affect educational outcomes.

His writing on monetary policy and the role of
currency in national economies is genuinely
enlightening. When he stays in the boundaries of
his scientific discipline, Milton Friedman is a
remarkably insightful thinker.

Friedman considers why wealthy people have fewer children than poor people. His reasons are – what’s the word? – kind of ridiculous. He says that a central reason why wealthy people have fewer children than poor people is because the advanced education that wealthy people often receive is more expensive and requires greater investment.

Poor people, meanwhile, have more children because their education will be paltry. Poor people, after all, will only ever do simple work like manual labour or front-line service work. Since they don’t need as much education and training as the children of wealthy families who become doctors, engineers, and Ivy League university professors, poor families can produce more children at lower cost.

Yes, this is what he says. Capitalism and Freedom, chapter six, pages 86-7 of my edition. This is seriously Friedman’s argument in one of his most popular books. How on Earth did a man who would put this argument to paper win a Nobel Prize?

He abstracts away from the real, complex situation of actual families to focus specifically on his arguments for how to improve America’s education system. In doing so, he turns away from letting messy reality disprove his most infamous premise – that all people act optimally rational all the time and that all families are precisely planned.

Turning away from real complexity toward the simplicity and ease of an abstract argument makes your thoughts into lies of distortion. The simplicity of Friedman’s abstraction in this example erases the real injustices of education access and family planning capacities across wealth levels.

The simplicity of Tuvel’s abstraction in her paper this Spring erases the real injustice and suffering that transgender people face. Worse, it implicitly equates them with the deranged saviour complex of America’s most famous self-alleged transracial person.

The imperative to “Keep it simple, stupid!” does not always apply.

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.