Playing Games in the Street – Free Rider! Jamming, 01/08/2018

Funny little things crop up in the small margins of a book worth reading. Distilling the core arguments of a 300-page book and juxtaposing some critical perspectives in about 3000 words, you lose some details.

Which is why I like to revisit some of those discarded but interesting points on the blog.

One of those casual moments is Sassower’s critique of the free-rider problem, which amounts to a flippant rebuke. At that moment, I cackled.

As someone who was educated for the academy in a philosophy department, such a thing is blasphemy. The Free-Rider Problem is a central example in Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy, and has gone on to become a standard model for pumping intuitions to understand moral truths.

Now that's a fare inspector who takes his job to heart.

Okay, after writing that paragraph, I’m cackling again.

See, the method of pumping hypothetical or artificial scenarios to intuit universal moral principles or foundations is utterly barmy. It presumes that every person is going to think morally in the same way you do. And that’s just not the case.

Maybe Kantian morality conforms to the intuitions of a lot of people raised in an Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture. Maybe Kant derived the principles that his philosophical reasoning justified from the mainstream culture of his time. Maybe Kant’s work was so influential that it affected the popular moral development of European and broader Western culture.

It was probably a combination of all three. But the problem with the Free Rider Problem is that it just isn’t necessarily true that it describes a problem, just because some folks who uncritically absorb individualist Christian-influenced morality or work as Kantian moral philosophers say it is.

So what is it? Someone rides a public bus without paying for a ticket.

Dear God, the terror!

Seriously, though. Analysis of the Free Rider Problem takes up a lot of space in Western moral philosophy, especially in the academy. Conceptual problems like this are a gold mine for academic philosophers – you can change your take only slightly to generate a new article for the paywalled journals with little effort, but great reward. See also, the Trolley Problem, the Gettier Case, and the Hard Problem of Consciousness.

The best buses are the ones for freedom.

The intuitive outrage at the centre of the Free Rider Problem is what you should do with the cheater on the system. As someone who benefits from a common good without directly contributing to it, he’s conceived as a cheater of the system.

A common conclusion to the Free Rider Problem is that only those who can themselves directly contribute to public goods have the right to make use of them. That sounds very fair in the abstract, but in real life, that results in actions that sound morally upright, but are in fact terribly destructive.

So if someone is too destitute to contribute directly to the upkeep of the public good, the typical conclusion to the Free Rider Problem is to deny them the right to use the system. Throw the homeless woman off the bus, even if she’s on his way to an interview about a housing opportunity. She didn’t pay her $3.25.

There’s a mainstream approach to morality that puts all evaluation of praise and blame on the isolated act of an isolated individual. Did you steal that food? Did he skip that line? Did she kill that man?

As for the approach to communitarian moral thinking that Sassower articulates when he wonders if Free Riding is even a problem? It’s empirical – you examine the situation, history, and network of causes that constitute that entire situation. It’s dynamic – you take account of how wider situations and institutions constrain and liberate potential actions.

You were hungry. Everyone was skipping the line. She was 14 years old and that man was sexually assaulting her in their house. Culpability never rests with one.

Not every $3.25 is worth a life.

Whither Capital IV: Sabotage or Complicity, Research Time, 04/06/2018

So Cultural Studies – the academic revolutionaries – knew they had to battle for a kinder world on the field of culture. The question now was how you’d do it.

Well, they had a long-standing channel to communicate with the public. They were researchers, writers, regularly published in respected journals. So they would research, write, and reveal the hidden vectors of oppression and routes to liberation in the most unexpected places.

You probably know where I’m going with this. I know where I’m going with this. And I don’t want to condemn the discipline, I really, sincerely don’t. But the field’s focus on the analysis of pop cultural properties isn’t exactly the most effective form of cultural change.

Now, those analyses really do have the power to change minds. They can help illuminate how subtle moral conditioning and ideas worm themselves into what we typically think are innocuous entertainments. But there are two problems with that.

Is it responsible to rest with merely describing what is wrong with your
society, when you depend on those fundamental wrongnesses to make
your diagnoses? I don't know, actually.

First and most obviously, this can’t be the only technique in the toolbox for social change. Some folks specialize, and that’s great. I work for some other channels of social change right now, and plenty of channels are active. My first critique is an institutional one if nothing else.

You know what I mean. They may have trained themselves writing for paywalled research journals. But the most effective pop cultural criticism projects since the start of the discipline have been in streaming tv and blogging.

The blogging project was explicitly defined as a magical ritual, on top of that. It would have been seriously questionable to a tenure committee.

But Slavoj Zizek’s documentaries about how to understand cinema psychologically and philosophically reached huge numbers of people. Elizabeth Sandifer’s TARDIS Eruditorum has become a leading edge in popular understanding of Doctor Who, and a gathering point for the global sci-fi trans and queer communities.

Cultural Studies as an academic discipline writes powerful critiques of exploitive institutions, institutions that have state, economic, and social components. These are complex institutions like global trade networks, the mining industry, state military colonialism to wipe out indigenous people and cultures. Institutions like universities that perpetuate the financial exploitation of students, and the class stratification of societies.

Now you see the problem, don’t you. Here’s an academic discipline based around developing multi-faceted critiques of exploitive institutions. But its home is in an increasingly exploitive institution – the post-secondary education system.

Culturally, universities foster cultural conservatism by elevating wealthy donors and families in their support networks. Universities force levels of indebtedness on more and more people to the point of macro-economic catastrophe.

Universities protect networks and organizations like nationwide fraternity houses, which foster gendered violence. Researchers who are elevated to high-status positions in universities rapidly become corrupt and hypocritical – imagine a global justice and anti-colonialism advocate who rewards young female scholars from South America with career opportunities in exchange for sex.

Wait, you don’t have to imagine that last one. It’s Thomas Pogge of Yale University.

Cultural Studies was complicit in the institutions it was critiquing, because it could only function in the network of those institutions. Now, this discipline grew from the generation of researchers who grew up in the first period of mass-level university education. For the first time, working class and minority researchers were joining the university sector.

But it was still a sector built for the wealthy, male, and mainstream culture. No matter how much you may criticize the elites, if you have to play by elite rules to do it, your critique will always be incomplete.

Whither Capital III: Troubles With Apu, Research Time, 01/06/2018

What were you going to do about it? What were you going to do to resist the socially and ecologically destructive forces of globalizing industry and finance?

Throughout the 20th century, the default* course for the Western left to take was to look to the Soviet Union. Not the real Soviet Union, of course, which had far too much an excess of gulags, secret police, and general misery. I mean the Soviet Union that existed in its government’s international PR materials, and in the naïve hearts of privileged socialists of the Reagan Years.

* That is, the easiest and laziest.

Fighting the cultural and ethnic stereotyping you face in a mainstream
is an important element of revolutionizing a people's morality. And
the academics of Cultural Studies developed a lot of important
concepts for that critique. But is it sufficient to transform an entire
culture's morality to the necessary degree? That I don't think so.

Then the USSR collapsed. This was no End of History™, no matter how much liberal political tastemakers tried to demonstrate it. The Soviet Union, economically speaking, was the most thoroughly Fordist state that ever existed – the most complete standardization a government had ever attempted. It was a fully state-controlled economy whose purpose was primarily production within its borders.

The forces of globalization raging throughout the rest of the world tore the Soviet economy to pieces like the winds of a hurricane. The USSR’s borders couldn’t maintain their territory – literally. Capitalism destroys institutions of economic control. That’s terrible in some cases, but very beneficial in others.

Here’s where real history dovetails with the flickering shadows of conspiracist thought. Because the academic discipline of Cultural Studies – especially in Britain, where Jeremy Gilbert focusses his analysis – really was a form of cultural marxism.

Broadly speaking, this was a project among politically progressive and radical university professors in a particular discipline to see what cultural fields could promote revolutionary ideas, now that the major state source for socialist inspiration was torn to bits. In this sense, it followed the recommendations of a notorious duo at the forefront of developing revolutionary political philosophy.

No, I’m not talking about Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the devils of the American nationalist conspiracy of cultural marxism. Their actual ideas are remarkably defeatist. Andrew Breitbart just happened to read them, and knew of Adorno because of his friendship with the Black American revolutionary Angela Davis.

Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau are the duo that Jeremy Gilbert – as well as myself – see as the most important in turning marxist thought to issues of culture. But when you read Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, the direction Cultural Studies went in wouldn’t have been quite what they had in mind.

Here are the people I refer to when I write Cultural Studies. University-based cultural theorists writing analyses of popular culture and arts using concepts adapted from and developing the marxist traditions of thinking.

Here’s an example, “Deadpool Playing Myth: An Analysis of the "Secondary Narrative" in Deadpool's Promotional Images,” which is the title of an actual Master’s thesis at the Cultural Studies department of Queen’s University.

Now, that’s not to say that we don’t have plenty to learn from such an analysis in the art of narrative creation using meta-fiction in marketing communication. But it’s difficult to make the jump from here to a new economic system and political morality.

Because Laclau and Mouffe were talking primarily about social movements of the Global South and of different minoritarian and sub-altern populations across the world. Here we see a problem of method – you can’t really participate in such social movements when you live in a tenured professorship at a prestigious university.

So what can you do to build a social movement from a professor’s office?

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

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

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

Pictured: The end of history.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wither Universities? Whither Universities, Composing, 29/05/2018

So I ended up taking an extra day off the blog because election campaign season can be pretty draining. I don’t know how Americans live like this nearly every day, with some kind of intense election happening all the time.

But the extra day off marks a decent transition. I’ve finished going through all my most meaningful notes on Paul Patton’s stuff about Gilles Deleuze. At the time, when I finished that book, I wanted to walk away from secondary material on Deleuze.

You could kind of tell that I was getting a bit annoyed at how Patton’s focus on writing secondary material on Deleuze kept him from exploring his most interesting ideas. So I thought I’d pick up a direction that engaged more in political work. Focus on the real world.

There’s one part of the real world that embodies some of the major political problems we face today. Universities have been battlegrounds of radical politics over the last few years. They’re also deeply corrupted spaces – wide-scale underfunding and the growing influence of a culture of greed have made universities into parodies of the values the institution supposedly embodies.

Apparently, when this comic was first published, it described how
the Russian Bolshevik Communist party would infiltrate and
overthrow the free society of the United States. But when I see this
panel, the first person I think of is Rupert Murdoch.

Writing Utopias, I don’t want to focus entirely on the student movement. But I think there should be a passage there that reflects on what the universities of North America are, and the terrible processes that make the institutions fall short of what we tell ourselves we want from them.

There’s an ideal to the university in a democratic context – in our ideals and our political rhetoric* – as a place of impartiality, of the pure pursuit of learning for the sake of knowledge alone.

* Or as I could call it, our ideals turned into soundbites for political parties, business leaders, and TED Talks.

Who’s laughing yet? I know I am.

So I turned to a book that examines how the university system has fostered left-wing radicalism in its faculties, and what that radical thought has done to make real change in the world. Of course, I didn’t go to any of the right-wing works. They tend to be filled too much with stereotypes and cheap character assassination. Or else full on delusional theories about globalist communist conspiracies in our secular education system.

I wasn’t going to go down that road. Conservatives tend to do a terrible job of understanding how left-wing politics actually works. It’s their greatest weakness against the left – the total inability to know their enemy.

No – no one can trace the failure of the left better than a leftist. So a friend told me to get hold of a book by Jeremy Gilbert, called AntiCapitalism and Culture. It’s an insightful study of the role of Cultural Studies as a university-based research discipline in actual agitation against the neoliberal economic system and the institutions that uphold it.

It asks if the core right-wing smear of the university system is really true – Is it really a place that fosters dangerous radicals capable of helping overthrow the state and the industrial capitalist economic system?

Or are they all just jerking off?

It's Toughest of All to Accept, Research Time, 18/05/2018

A brief few paragraphs to have a go at a quick classification. Following on from what I talked about yesterday, here are some substantive ways that the animating concepts of Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy set them apart from what’s still the mainstream.

I mean, I do consider the academic ghettoization of the many different philosophies smacked with the “Continental” label to be shameful territorial pissing. One of those paths of thought so smacked is Deleuze and Guattari’s. That annoys me, because their ideas include solutions for a lot of the conceptual problems that are roadblocks for mainstream North American university philosophy.

If you follow their ideas all the way to their natural conclusions, they tend to take out the whole road along with the barricades. But aside from a little rubble, the way forward is clear.

You know she won't live. But then again – Who does?

So what are those ideas?

One. Evaluation is always context-dependent. That goes for moral, mathematical, scientific, empirical. Anytime you examine a process, try to make sense of it, identify a value – that assessment is always specific to a contingency, a particular way the world is.

It’s never necessary and universal, because even the existence of the universe it contingent. It need never have been. Period.

Think about this example. You might think that a context-independent, universal, necessary truth is that chattel slavery of humans is wrong. But if there never were humans at all, would this truth have come to exist?

If the Cambrian extinction had never happened and the Earth’s biosphere developed in totally different directions, any question to do with humans wouldn’t make any sense because there’s be no humans. Ever. Not in future, present, or past. They’re inconceivable. Vague fictions at best – certainly not the sort of things you’d expect to find any truth more solid than the canon of a tv franchise.

Two. Nothing has an endpoint that sums up its existence. Processes stop. Death doesn’t bring anything about a life into a neat little bow. Death just ends it. Authors do that, but they do it by stitching events into narratives. That’s not a life – it’s a story.

Three. Anything that can change can blow to pieces and destroy itself. So everything can destroy itself.

It’s not a comforting world, if you need certainties to comfort you. I recommend cultivating strength of character. Not a perfect process, never really complete, always more work to be done. But then that's true of everything.

What Kind of Politics Is This Anyway? Jamming, 17/05/2018

Yesterday, there was no energy at the end of a long – but very pleasant – day for me to blog. Right now, I have barely any energy left, but I want to throw a short reflection together.

I wrote earlier this week about one of the limitations of Paul Patton’s book Deleuzian Concepts – It’s too securely rooted in the academicians’ sub-discipline of ‘Deleuze Studies,’ so he doesn’t explore the most interesting directions that come from what he finds in Deleuze’s work.

He’s writing mostly for an audience of academics who specialize on writing secondary material on Gilles Deleuze’s books and life.

What the conservative disciplines of philosophy call "Continental" is
just the stuff that they reject for challenging their own ways of
thinking too much. If John Searle couldn't understand what Derrida
was on about, we should just dismiss what any of their contemporaries
had to say. Because John Searle is such an admirable guy.

There’s another, wider audience he’s talking to. Unfortunately, it isn’t a wide enough audience to reach that most interesting path of thinking either. There’s a part as well where Patton talks about political theorists throughout North America.

His argument – which did apply quite broadly – was that Deleuze and Guattari should be read as political philosophers. Their major run of joint works were fundamentally political – from the long sections of Anti-Œdipus that were explicitly an analysis of capitalism and statism as a political-economic processes.

And so on for all the other works they made together. Kafka: A Minor Literature was about a mode of cultural resistance to a hostile and racializing mainstream. I feel like calling it multi-vector creole resistance. A Thousand Plateaus contained several different analyses of different dynamics of stability and chaos rooted in human life – psychological, political, economic, cultural, ethical. And beyond.

All of it deals with issues of progressive politics that are quite mainstream now. But in the academy, they aren’t considered political theorists at all. Patton doesn’t say it, but he means that they’re still called “Continental.”

But all the designation really means is that Deleuze and Guattari are rejected by departments across North America because they don’t speak the typical language of liberal philosophy. They don’t talk about rights, principles, and universality.

They come up with entirely different language to talk about things that are much more important for how societies actually work at all. They talk about the material dynamics among institutions and forces that destabilize – maybe it’s a better description to say “deterritorialized” – human societies. Among other things, but that’s a major focus. That’s inherently political – and yet they aren’t political theorists.

So Patton effectively calls out the mainstream of North American philosophy departments. But he does it without saying so. Because no one will read a call-out. A call-out is – from the perspective of the called-out in our university faculty – ‘terribly rude,’ ‘an unnecessary hostility,’ ‘a crude polemic.’

So you trick them. Explain the true nature of Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas in words they’ll understand. Simple language. Basically, it’s just, “Guys, they’re just not liberals, okay?”

I mean, it doesn’t go so far to say that this is a better philosophy than liberalism. Maybe I’ll write about that part tomorrow. Or on the weekend.

Thought Is Never Private, Jamming, 11/05/2018

Just a short one this morning. I’m writing this after a very long day. Another thinker Paul Patton talks about in relation to Deleuze is Richard Rorty.

The very, very, very short version of Rorty is that he takes the contingency of reality very, very, very seriously. But that it results in the most unserious kind of materialism you’ll ever find. One very out of step with the demands we now face.

He’s another thinker who takes atheism all the way to its final logic. But he’s entirely too complacent about the result. So the conclusion of Rorty that gets you in the most trouble is that our moral principles are a product of our social relationships, our discourses. Being contingently developing organisms, our moral principles are arrived at contingently too.

So there’s nothing necessary about any moral system. As long as moralities can be made to work in the world, individuals can hold them. We each develop our own personal kink in the set of moral principles we socialize into as we grow and age. But all of that is a matter of our discourse. There’s no absolute in morality.

A nice young boy from a respectable family is not supposed to grow up
as a hateful, resentful, racist, misogynist jerk. That's why American and
Canadian liberals have been so shocked to see emboldened extremists
come out of the most unexpected places. James Damore was right
when he said that liberals couldn't even see their own echo chamber.
But I'm glad he could puncture it for them. By now, even the most
complacent liberals should know how seriously you have to take
your values, because there are people who hate you for them.

Naturally, this freaks a lot of people out when you think about it. But as I’ve read different works of Rorty over the years, I find it makes what should be an existentially chilling thought sound like a banal fact to deal with.

Part of that is his skill with language, but part of that is also his own personality. I definitely don’t think you can reduce everything someone wrote to the general conditions of their daily lives. But it does play a part, it contributes.

So I think one of the main causes for Rorty’s ability to be so calm about a genuinely troubling idea is that he was born into a genteel upper-middle class life, and stayed comfortably in the Ivy League (or close to it) for pretty much his entire adult life. And he put his head down for a very conventional academic career for his first couple of unremarkable decades in the field. His life embodies the image of middle American security of the 20th century.

No wonder he was content to say that we’d resolve our moral differences through pleasant conversation over dinner. He lived a life without real hardship, without the kinds of deep ethical challenge that many experience. Never faced racism, misogyny, violence, poverty, addiction, injustice.

It’s very different to know that such things happen in the world, and to experience it yourself. It’s much tougher to know the real stakes of the world. Rorty could take the contingency of the world so flippantly because he never experienced himself the most intense suffering the contingencies of life can offer.

He could never conceive of liberal thinking being challenged, especially not by a resurgence of fascist social values and white ethnic nationalism in the West. He could easily conclude that the Civil Rights Movement was all it took to end the "conversation" over universal human rights; that the Second World War concluded with the "permanent defeat" of fascism.

That's what all good little boys were taught at school, after all. And he spent his entire life in a social world of good little boys grown up and growing old. He could take it all for granted, and so concluded that we could all take it for granted. The world remains much more serious than Rorty ever thought, and it always was.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Own goal, guys.

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

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

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

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

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

When a Lost Monk Meets a Happy Wanderer, Research Time, 07/05/2018

Paul Patton wrote another book about Gilles Deleuze that I read as part of my research. It was called Deleuzian Concepts. It’s a more complex study than his earlier Deleuze and the Political, though it deals with many of the same topics.

But a few more years of work and thought have made it a richer book. Let’s have a look through some of its ideas and arguments.
• • •
Early in the book, Patton sees a curious relationship between Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida – they’re mirrors of each other in a particular way. Their different approaches maybe show something intriguing about what philosophy as a tradition can do.

We forget so much of the ones we're certain we
know everything about.
Art by this guy.

The way Derrida thinks philosophically, he always ends up in aporia. He’s illuminated and interrogated a problem from so many different angles that he understands it very deeply. But the key to his understanding is the precise part of the problem that makes it impossible to solve.

What makes it impossible to solve? Applicability. You can understand a philosophical concept in its abstract form very well – almost as a diagram. But now put that concept to work when you design institutions, laws, moralities, economic conventions, religions and so on. Or keep it in thought – use that concept to understand and build a wider framework of other concepts.

It might work fine, but doesn’t unfold precisely as the diagram said. There’s a slippage of the concept with the world and with wider systems when you put it to work. An inconsistency that undercuts the meaning of the concept itself. You’re left with all this work falling into inconstancy, instability.

Aporia – Philosophers sputtering. Very poetically written sputtering, but still sputtering.

Deleuze thinks about philosophy very differently. For him, the slippage is where philosophy actually does its work. He understands concepts themselves totally differently.

The way Deleuze sees it, thought is actually stagnant when you have a perfect idea that never expresses any inconsistency and acts just as you conceived it every time you use it. He thinks of concepts as producers of new concepts. With each use, the concept changes – your job as a philosopher is to trace the continuities and differences. Now you see if the shifted concept can do anything new, or has lost some of what it could do.
• • •
So Deleuze builds on the failure of Derrida. That’s how Patton spins it.

Now, I'm going to be frank here. I don’t actually know what the relationship between Deleuze and Derrida really was. I’m not sure that they were really very close at all. They knew each other, were familiar with each other’s work, but they were both aware that they were each involved in very different projects.

People always associate Derrida with irony, I think because of mediocre
readings of his work. But I see a profound irony in Deleuze – not in
what he wrote or how he lived, but how he's been received. He wanted
his followers to be creative thinkers developing concepts by
schizzing his own, pushing them to reveal inconsistencies or changes
so you could create a new concept from them. Instead, they act like
traditional academics – squabbling with each other over whose
interpretation of their Great Figure is the right one, always certain
that it's theirs.

I know what the relationship between Derrida and Deleuze is now that they’re dead, when you go to the academic departments that study them. When the French theory that we generally call post-modernism or post-structuralism* blew up in North America, Derrida had the best reputation.

* Radical democracy, actually.

Deleuze and Guattari tried one crossover event, a conference in New York that was an unmitigated disaster of mansplaining and misinterpretation. So Deleuze and Guattari’s work took some time before it was noticed on a large scale.

Patton’s book came out in the boom of interest for Deleuze’s work. So he was engaged in a little succession management. Not of Deleuze himself, but for the other academic philosophers called Continental. He had to show them why they should lay down their Jacques and pick up their Gilles.**

** I’m so, so, sorry.

It was based entirely in trying to shift academic territorial claims – who we all in a particular (sub)-sub-discipline going to squawk about now. But I’m not an academic, so I don’t have to squawk secondary material about anyone to any paywalled journals that will only accept writing about someone else.

I keep Derrida and Deleuze on different shelves, but they’re both valuable for me to have as sources of ideas. It’s better to combine them and see what new concepts will result. Which I believe was Deleuze’s point.

Don’t Expect the Writing to Be As Clean As the Written, Composing, 12/04/2018

In his book about Deleuze’s early development as a thinker, Michael Hardt discusses an insightful comment Gilles makes. It’s a notion that a lot of folks in academic university culture need to remember, especially in the humanities where rhetoric and argument is so much a part of our methods.

There's a distinction between inquiry and presentation. Inquiry is the process of conceiving, researching, and composing a project or some other piece of work. Presentation is the finished product.

Preparing a massive research and writing project is, oddly enough, a
difficult task that isn't perfectly conceived at the beginning. You'd
think that would make sense to people. Maybe it does, but they
don't actually care.

Presentation is a polished, detailed, clear expression of a complex research program and argument. The inferences have been ordered so that each step in the argument flows sensibly from what’s come previously. All the empirical studies supplement and ground the more conceptual parts in an elegant structure.

Inquiry is a great bloody chaotic mess. You redefine the scope, aims, and likely conclusions of the project several times over as you do research. Some angles and sources are thrown out entirely as irrelevant in the light of other discoveries. An argument that you think is going to flow in one direction ends up utterly rearranged. Inquiry is a state of flux.

It sounds so sensible. It sounds so obviously true. It makes perfect sense. So why do so many academics, in my experience and in the experience of many other people, ignore it?

I’m speaking to my experience mostly in philosophy circles, where a bit more emphasis is put on argument than in other disciplines. But I move in pretty interdisciplinary circles today, and what I’m about to describe is pretty common across the humanities and social sciences.

A younger student comes to a more experienced professor, or to a group of her peers, for advice about a project in progress. She lays out the skeleton of an argument, what some of her main sources are so far, what empirical content is coming into play. She asks for advice.

Throwing around thousands of ideas – about research, examples,
empirical evidence, inference, argument structure, order of
presentation, concepts themselves – is part of writing. So why don't
people criticize an ongoing project as if it were actually an ongoing
project? Why do people not see the mess?

But she gets hit with verbal axes. Her messy, still-uncertain project that still has plenty of loose ends get hit with ruthless criticism. None of it is helpful. It’s all phrased to make her project seem inadequate, like a waste of her time. Instead of helping her to understand a difficult landscape, her superiors and colleagues berate and belittle her for not understanding her project.

They’re treating an inquiry as if it was the presentation. A messy project in progress as if it was a polished final product. This even though she introduces her material with countless qualifiers – it’s a work in progress, she’s looking for advice, looking for any blind spots she may have, any research directions that may turn out to be blind alleys for her priorities.

Instead, her colleagues and superiors are more concerned with scoring points. Making themselves look good by making her look bad. Feeling better about themselves by cutting someone else down.

All too often, this is how academicians treat each other. I described it in self-consciously gendered terms because it does – on balance – happen to women much more often than to men. But it happens to men too. It happens to anyone who looks vulnerable in a research community where knowledge is seen as a battleground for prestige.

Do you do it for the letters after your name? For the professional designations to list after your email signature? We should be doing it for the progress of human knowledge. Typical humanity, we so often fall short of what we claim we’re doing because we aren’t really doing what we claim.

How Many Ways Are There to Read Someone? Composing, 03/04/2018

Since I was 25, I’ve worked in different capacities – and different pay as well – as a researcher in the humanities. My orientation was always through philosophy, which has been a solid set of frameworks to guide a trip through material from a lot of different domains of human knowledge.

My work has always had that trans-disciplinary, practical orientation from the first time I got seriously serious about it. When I was a much younger person,* I had my problems that interested me most, yes. But it was only ten years ago that I started thinking about philosophical writing as a vocation as well as part of my career.

* And my early 20s feels like I was a very, very much younger person. Not always in a good way, either.

A while ago, I was talking about starting a YouTube project with a
friend of mine whose philosophical perspective is solidly rooted
in the concepts of Georg Hegel, and I know after five years of
friendship that he isn't going to budge. No matter how much I might
try. I haven't been able to put much energy into it because I'm in
the middle of moving apartments, and it's a bit of a mess right now.

I think that orientation, which I found really productive for my creative sensibilities, caused me some problems in the search for work in universities. It was difficult to fit my work in established labels and sub-disciplines.

I’ve seen friends with more conventional research orientations land tenure-track positions that are secure, prestigious, and pretty well-paid. Granted, I’ve also seen those friends find those positions in smaller or more homogeneous cities and towns where I would have been uncomfortable.

My strangeness would have made me very lonely in some of the places where my friends found work.
• • •
These days, I can pretty easily say that most of my philosophical work is in political theory and political economy. My research and concepts stretch across different domains, but that’s their locus.

Bringing different theories and thinkers into a philosophical project means figuring out how the central concepts fit the trajectory of your thinking, and where they stand in the territory of relations among all the other concepts, influences, and empirical research material that make up your own project.

That was a long sentence, but I’m not sure how to split it up just yet to make it more readable. Maybe just read it slowly again if you find it weird. This is a Composing post, so I’m experimenting a little bit more.

Another of the books I read to mine for concepts in the territory of thinkers around Gilles Deleuze was Deleuze’s Philosophical Apprenticeship. Michael Hardt wrote it. While I like his work with Antonio Negri, there’s a reason I never tag him in my posts on the books they wrote together.

Hardt is a keen thinker and a solid writer. But his ideas are too normal. Negri is the strange one, and Hardt keeps him grounded. That’s great for a big, messy project like their Empire quadrilogy, because it needs to stay connected to the gritty reality of political economy.

Just because I think many fundamental elements of the way
we each think are utterly incompatible, that doesn't mean I can't
run a good YouTube show with him. See, I disagree with the
premise of Hardt's book pretty clearly. Yes, you can engage
with a dominant thinker as an antagonist, try to find a model
for your own thinking that doesn't even coincidentally touch
on concepts that are even like his. I'm pretty sure he's right
that Deleuze actually did think this way about Hegel. But I
don't think that "the primary antagonism" is the necessary
seed of great philosophical work.

But he also needs Negri if his work is going to fly in a direction more creative than fairly straightforward scholarship or investigative fact-gathering.

Let me put it to you this way. Hardt opens the book with a description of how he’s going to interpret Deleuze’s development as a philosopher – “recognize the object and terms of the primary antagonism.”

An original thinker develops creatively by starting from reaction – there’s a mainstream set of presumptions or damn-near-omnipresent influence that she rebels against. In Deleuze’s case, so says Hardt, that philosophical enemy is Hegel.

He spends the book exploring many different directions Deleuze tried out in his early career to overcome the pervasive influence of Hegel-inspired thinking in France’s intellectual scene.

While that is one of the many things Deleuze was doing in his earlier, difficult years, that’s only one thing. Yeah, it’s a really important trajectory of Deleuze’s thinking. But it wasn’t the only thing going on. When I read Hardt’s book, it felt reductive – like he was pulling back the curtain to say, “This is what’s been going on all along!”

I'm always hesitant about that method. It smacks of intellectual territorial pissing, of Hardt claiming that this is what the thought of Gilles Deleuze is really all about.

But one of Deleuze’s main messages to philosophers was he wanted his work to contain multiplicities – that there were many, many different strands to analyze and directions to explore along with him, with the concepts he worked on for us. Don’t try to fit his ideas in one definition. Stay strange.

Under the Paving Stones I: Sadly High Probability, A History Boy, 12/03/2018

I’m Canadian, not French. So Utopias isn’t going to wade into all the different interpretations, causes, conditions, effects, and affects of the Paris revolutionary riots of May 1968. But I have to bring in a little history.

Because my own political thinking uses a lot of the concepts that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari developed in the 1970s, May ’68 is a touchstone, a material condition. Anti-Œdipus was a product of the Paris popular uprising, so the social dynamics that brought it about conditioned the creation of the book and its concepts.

Paris’ May uprising was a unique event. Its uniqueness was in how remarkably unlikely the movement’s coalition was – not only the radical communist activists, but also business management students and all the factory workers in the city.

Growing up in Canada, the American narrative of 1960s protests
dominated cultural discussion of that era. The cultures of Europe
were so different that they didn't get much airtime.

That massive improbability was a product of unique and complex conditions that are practically unrepeatable in their exact form. Activists – a primer in two parts on how to learn from history.
• • •
I first learned about May ’68 in an undergraduate political science course – specifically about political behaviour, an introduction to how political scientists investigate how people vote, protest, and get involved with government. It was introduced to me entirely in its dimension as a student movement.

At the time, I worked for a campus newspaper. So part of my job was to report on the activities of the university student union. I found the whole institution* a mess of hypocrisy and self-delusion.

* Yes, that is seriously still their website. It's really sad.

I couldn’t take seriously the idea that a student movement could organize anything sanely, let alone offer up a genuinely inspirational new form of politics. Here was the environment where I was building my first fully self-conscious political conscience, at least regarding student movements.

It’s 2003, 2004. The Iraq War has mobilized a lot of people to fight the myopic imperialism of the W Bush Administration. Among my student union is a sizeable plurality of folks who are dedicated social activists, for whom the campus activists of the 1960s – Abbie Hoffmann, Angela Davis, Daniel Cohn-Bendit – were role models.

Unfortunately, the sudden end of the oil boom three years ago returned
austerity politics to the governance of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Tuition rose again, as rural Newfoundland returned to mass
unemployment, making those CFS messages about increasingly
inaccessible education or unsustainable student debt levels
finally relevant to people's real concerns there. Not exactly how
I would have liked to see the CFS and Newfoundland harmonize.

They worked to put the student union on the progressive side of a revolution against empire and militarism. They did organize some quality anti-war activism. But most of their economic activism was hamstrung by having to stick to a strict script provided by the Canadian Federation of Students – “Students are hurting from high tuition rates! Grants, not loans! Lower tuition!”

Fine for Ontario, reeling from public service cuts after a decade of Mike Harris’ austerity policies. Ridiculous in Newfoundland.

Newfoundland was kicking into an oil-driven economic boom, and Roger Grimes’ governing Liberal Party was reversing its own austerity policies from the Brian Tobin years. My tuition rates went down 25% in the first three years of the century and stayed frozen for a decade.

Social conditions like this couldn’t even unify a students’ union. The dedicated revolutionaries were a vocal minority in a union dominated by residence hall party planners, and middle-of-the-road nerds who wanted to make sure the food court and convenience store kept running smoothly. Plus a couple of man-children and one or two hyper-conservative extremists.

This taught me that there was nothing special about the student movement. So I thought that the paradigm Student Movements™ – France’s May ’68 and the USA’s protests against the Vietnam War – were similar chaotic messes and failures.

The idea of “the student movement” in popular culture is that universities are inherently subversive spaces originates from the Paris Uprising and Antiwar Movement’s model example in Western culture today.

But in real life, the circumstances that made those remarkable movements possible were unique and improbable processes.

The Paris Uprisings of 1968, for example, were made possible by the Algerian War. Ian Buchanan taught me that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow the Causes Not the Office Walls, Research Time, 06/03/2018

There's a particular kind of academic thinker in philosophy departments that holds the discipline back from what it can be. I’m not sure how best to label them.

It would be one of those pithy, insulting but accurate labels. The kind of label that would make you chuckle when you’re reading Nietzsche. In my research circles, there aren’t too many of these people. But if you’ve had any experience in different universities’ philosophy departments, or been to a few disciplinary conferences, you’ll know the type.

The Skull of the Smoking Mirror, representation of the Aztec god
Tezcatlipoca – co-creator of the human world, god of time, and
the embodiment of change through conflict. I suppose you could
call Tezcatlipoca the god of creative destruction.
I could see an eccentric egomaniacal Silicon Valley billionaire
building a shrine to Tezcatlipoca in his home.

I could call them the over-specialist, but it’s connected to a term – specialist – that’s still complimentary. Maybe the disciplinary conservative, but that’s too clunky. Here’s a cheeky word – tell me what you think.

Mirror-skull.

Whenever they think they’re looking outside at the world, they’re actually looking at more of what they already know. Here’s their model action, what best exemplifies the way they think.

A student brings a paper to a Mirror-skull prof for comments. The prof reads it, and among his* comments are stars written next to some footnotes, reference list items, and sources throughout the paper. They’re the places where he’s marked “Not philosophy – Remove”

* While they’re often his, sometimes they’re hers as well. One of the most insufferably (and sadly unexpectedly) such academics I’ve met is a woman.

If a work isn’t part of the academic discipline of philosophy, it isn’t worth including in a philosophy paper. For example. Say I’m writing a paper about Richard Rorty, and I refer to Neil Gross’ excellent philosophical biography of Rorty. It’s a book that threads philosophical exploration of Rorty’s ideas with an argument about how his life circumstances conditioned those ideas.

What would a Mirror-skull say? Cut it all – it isn’t philosophy.

Now, there probably aren’t this many people working in academic philosophy who embody this attitude so intensely. I’ve met a few, but they’re just the purest expression of a tendency that I’m not the only one to highlight. It’s a tendency to fly away from any kind of transversal approach to knowledge.

How can people learn from research when all the new material is
locked away where no one can reach it without paying thousands
in subscriptions or tuition?

The Review and Reply Collective has recently posted some pretty brutal critiques of the state of contemporary university philosophy. Kenneth Westphal has published an artful and artistic fist of rage against a university system that has given itself over to elitism and marginalization.

It’s a complex piece, but if I can summarize the basic message in a sentence or two, it’s like this. It’s utter hypocrisy to position your institutions as the leading edge of human knowledge when original research is so heavily restricted from the general public through the enormous paywalls of academic publishing prices.

Here’s another example. The first in a round of reviews of Taking Back Philosophy by Bryan Van Norden is scheduled to post at the Review and Reply Collective next week. The book is a polemic, following up a gauntlet he threw down in the New York Times a couple of years ago.

Van Norden is an American researcher who specializes in Chinese and Indian philosophy, specifically Confucian and Buddhist strains. He writes comparative philosophy for journals. It’s a very respectable university career.

His book is a call for diversification in philosophy departments, for basically two reasons. The one he concentrates on most is, I think, the least persuasive. That reason: North America is becoming more diverse ethnically and in cultural heritage, so departments must design curriculums to speak to the positions of their students.

I don’t think this is the most persuasive because a major movement of political revanchism in the West today is turning all the power of the state machinery to holding and reversing that diversity growth. There’s nothing inevitable about the diversification and pluralism of Western countries.

Western people can no longer treat the cultures and traditions outside
our lineage as unworthy of attention. Business leaders, politicians,
and activists all understand this. Yet there are still so many in
philosophy departments that remain stuck in their minds that have
become mirror-walled prisons.

His other reason for diversifying the philosophy curriculums of the West is more compelling to me, despite Van Norden’s relative de-emphasis. Our world is globalized. As non-Western economic centres grow in power and influence, we’ll need to study their own philosophical, ideological, moral, and political traditions to deal with people from these regions as competitors, friends, and partners.

Just as a study of Western philosophy can help you understand German, French, English, or US-American cultures, a study of East Asian philosophy can help you understand Chinese, Korean, Cambodian, and Indonesian cultures.

The Review and Reply Collective itself is rooted in the global community of Science and Technology Studies, Social Studies of Science, Social Epistemology and other sub-disciplines that – instead of narrowing their focus – expand and diversify their influences and research bases.

For about a decade now, I’ve understood that breaking through common-sensical disciplinary boundaries improves your knowledge. The causes of real phenomena don’t pay attention to the contingent structures of our university disciplines.

I got to thinking of this reading some old notes on Deleuze and Guattari, about their critique of Jacques Lacan in Anti-Œdipus. They understood how psychological states have their causes and conditions not just in the psychiatric, but in historical, social, and economic processes as well.

It seems common sense to us now, but an academic orthodoxy had fallen across French psychiatry and psychology, stating that mental health had only mental causes. Transversality often breaks with common sense – so much the worse for common sense.

A Thinker Is a Process Because She’s a Person, Jamming, 12/02/2018

Two passes at the mistake of searching for the universal, for the one true truth.
• • •
I pity the fool who had to write the essay on Sigmund Freud in Deleuze’s Philosophical Legacy. It’s because there actually isn’t much to say when a thinker so powerfully rejects a former influence in a fit of rage.

One of the most influential books Gilles Deleuze ever wrote was Anti-Œdipus with Félix Guattari – definitely the most influential among the political thinkers who build on his work. That book was built around a detailed, incisive, forceful, and total rejection of the core dynamics of all Freudian thinking.

Freudian concepts of desire dominated French thought about
psychology early in Deleuze and Guattari's career. They
wrote against it with the fury of a betrayed disciple.

Now, before meeting Guattari, Deleuze did take Freud’s ideas seriously. Many of Freud’s ideas were the core principles of the analysis in Deleuze’s book on Leopold Sacher-Masoch. Several chapters in The Logic of Sense explicitly relied on Freud to build a theory of desire and sexuality.

Nothing reversed so radically in Deleuze’s intellectual life than his belief in Freudian ideas. It took meeting Guattari for him to realize that Freudian psychology was the closest thing possible to an opposite of the direction he wanted to develop – a metaphysical framework based on heterogeneity, variety, difference, becoming.

Working with Guattari helped Deleuze realize that Freud’s entire system was built on a premise that those images – Œdipus in particular – constituted a universal structure to human consciousness.

Guattari – a man who worked all his life with schizophrenics – knew from the examples of his daily professional life that it was far from universal. More than that, the dynamics of Œdipal imagery, concepts, and principles in action on people’s personalities and identities grounds an ethic of unearned submission and servitude to authority of force and might. Father–King–Policeman–Gun–Man.

Fucking patriarchy, man.
• • •
Ronald Bogue ended up writing the most boring kind of history of philosophy paper imaginable – the list. He lists and dispassionately describes the appearances Freud’s ideas made in Deleuze’s work. Doesn’t contribute any more analysis than that.

There's a masterful essay in cultural theory on how Freudian
philosophy of desire and sexuality leads to the ideology of Zardoz.
But I'm not about to write it. That would mean I'd have to watch
Zardoz.

Bogue’s essay expresses a weird kind of regret that Deleuze rejected Freudianism and never relied on Freud’s work again. I can’t quite explain it.

Best I can do is speculate – about the habits and norms of the academics of the global university system. Not what everyone does, of course. I’m just talking about the tendencies people get socialized into as they teach their courses, hunt for research grants and contracts, submit their articles and edit their journals, chase tenure.

There’s a tendency to crave wholeness in a primary material philosopher. At conferences, in classes, and in articles, so many ask questions like, “What was Aristotle’s concept of the soul?” for example. As if there could only be one answer to that question.

Some philosophers are allowed breaks. Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of those, but he was so extreme in declaring it in his life that no one can deny it. Kant was way more professional with his declaration, but it was still pretty extreme.

I was trained to think of such figures as outliers in the broader tradition of philosophy – those were consistent thinkers. Even the two Kants and the two Wittgensteins are each treated as being consistent. The concepts are clear in each one. You’d get weird looks if you suggested that the primary material thinkers were just as uncertain of the ideas they wrote about and the concepts they developed as anyone else.

So much secondary material is scholarship arguing over what a given philosopher really meant by a particular concept. If even the primary material writers didn’t quite know the exact concept – if they were figuring it all out like the rest of us – there isn’t any real hook for why they’re among the ranks of the great philosophers.

Well, there is. It’s the ambition, care, and skill with which they wrote their battles with difficult, vital concepts. Plus, they had the social and institutional connections and reputations to publish their work where it would be widely read and taken seriously.

If you think primary material philosophers reached any truth that make them categorically different from anyone else. We don’t read Aristotle to follow and join along with his concepts about the nature of the soul – We read Aristotle to know Aristotle’s concept of the soul.

Maybe we shouldn’t. You know that everybody shits, right?