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.

New Boss and New Boss and New Boss, Research Time, 14/03/2018

In these days of Jordan Peterson’s ascent into his popular campaign to save Western civilization from ourselves, I miss Zizek.

Slavoj Zizek was a ton of fun. I disagree with a ton of his philosophical ideas – the vanguard-style Leninist (or Lenin-ish) political philosophy, his more faithful Freudian heritage, the Hegelian framework of all his thinking.

Some of his ideas I can’t really be bothered with – like his returns to the ethical and political meanings of Jesus and Christ. Just not my thing.

Let's take that philosophical riff on "Won't Get Fooled Again" a little
literally. When Roger sings that we won't be fooled once more by a
hypocritical leader promising revolution but delivering more of the
same injustice, it could mean two things. The hopeful reading is
that he's dedicating himself to getting revolution right next time.
The pessimistic reading is that he'll no longer believe that real
change is possible – he won't let a leader fool him into believing
that genuine revolution is really here.

His ideas about the possibility of building a perfect, or at least progressing-toward-perfect society are generally fascinating. He explores those issues explicitly from a lot of angles in a lot of different books – Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, In Defence of Lost Causes, Living in the End Times.

He has great concepts on the utopian issue. So his works can help people understand the issue and explore it. That’s what philosophy is for.

But he hates Anti-Œdipus. I can understand, because he’s so much a Lacanian, and that book pretty much trashes a lot of the fundamental concepts of Lacan’s psychological, psychiatric, and social-political thought. That’s a shame. Because I’m on Deleuze and Guattari’s side in this.

I’m not going to get into the full purpose of Anti-Œdipus. For that, you can read Ian Buchanan’s book on it, which walks you through the core background context and the most straightforward account of their ideas.

Today, I just want to talk about one key argument of Anti-Œdipus, one that I’ve discussed in different contexts before, but which I want to focus on again now. What would a genuine political revolution be?

We all know the jaded attitude toward political leaders describing themselves as an agent of change. “You gotta have hope!” “This will be Our Revolution™,” “I’m gonna drain the swamp!” The answer is in the lyrics to the greatest Who song ever – “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

What does that lyric mean? A leader is always embedded in a huge network of institutions and relationships. Those are the relationships that give him power over others. State military, police, and bureaucratic institutions, of course, are an incredible form of legal and sometimes potentially violent control.

Because Presidents have to do President shit. Wisdom from a brave voice.

The absurdly rich are immensely powerful too, especially if they control corporations or large investment funds – their decisions can plunge the livelihood of many thousands of people into despair. Or they can become horrifying predators.

One of the stereotypical rallying cries of democracy is “Throw the bums out!” When you’re sick of how the current group of powerful people is handling things, you can rise up and fire them. Democratic institutions are about building peaceful procedures for doing this so you don’t have to risk death to help overthrow a government – you just leave work early to vote or volunteer on a campaign.

But throwing the bums out a few years isn’t how you build virtuous institutions. You make the institutions virtuous for another while. But eventually, the corruption of access to huge amounts of material power and control over others sets in. And you have to throw them out too.

Frantz Fanon warned of these problems in The Wretched of the Earth when he described the dimensions of liberation needed for a genuinely free society. Simply occupying the same institutional place as a corrupt autocrat doesn’t restore virtue to those institutions. It just changes who sits in the positions that have the power to dominate people.

Real revolution changes all the institutions of domination – military, police, law, riches, racism – so that they no longer dominate. But Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Œdipus look past institutions to an even deeper ground for the will to dominate.

As long as the desires to dominate, control, and oppress others still exists, we’ll never be able to build institutions that can’t be corrupted to become oppressive. We literally have to destroy our desire to have power over others at all. Free your mind, your heart, your spirit – and your ass will follow.

Graphs of Our Ignorance, Jamming, 05/12/2017

I had a really nice moment with my students yesterday – I don’t often talk about my teaching here, for confidentiality reasons. But this was different.

We’re in a unit about how to write research reports of different lengths and formats for professional reasons and purposes. I’m teaching a class full of engineers, so I’m concentrating my supplementary comments on writing techniques and how to synthesize a big pile of ideas into a coherent, accessible picture.

If you're carrying out some work of research for your company, it’s going to have a purpose. You’re going to have to recommend actions, goals, and define some strategies for your company going forward.

I think of the subject matter as a practical epistemology class – how to gather and organize knowledge in the best way for action.

The most important part of any research is understanding what you actually have to learn before you know it. Let me explain that in a way that I tried for my class, in a way that gave me a little nostalgia.

You see, there are known knowns. . . . Yeah, I’m going there. Because it sounded ridiculous but was actually remarkably insightful and useful, like the most profoundly pregnant Bushism.

Known Knowns. You already know the answers. This is your starting point for any investigation – what you have actually learned, discovered, made sense of, and put to use already.

Known Unknowns. Your immediate targets for research and investigation. You’ve learned enough about your subject matter that you’ve formulated specific research questions. Your first major task in this project is to answer these questions.

You can’t always answer those questions univocally. But you at least have a research question in mind – you can understand how different variations in conditions can affect this aspect of your work going forward. You may not know how to handle it in advance, but you know enough about a problem to prepare.

Unknown Unknowns. You don’t even know how to ask the question. The notion isn’t anywhere in your thinking at all. You can’t prepare for it – You don’t even have any idea it could happen or exist.

What this amounts to is that the world tends to be more complex than we know. The invasion of Iraq itself, from the American perspective at least, is a really good example, unfortunately. The entire US military was, practically speaking, built for state-on-state combat. Total war, just like back in the Second World War.

Their ability to deal with a guerrilla movement was so pathetic for that exact reason. When you don’t even consider guerrilla movements a possible thing you could deal with, you won’t be able to fight them.

It’s a dramatic example for a business class, but the concept still works for more typical corporate priorities. For example, it’s difficult to prepare for your business model being disrupted by a wholly new technological development, or the law being changed to undercut your business practice or allow for more competitors.

You can’t ask people to prepare for future events which have literally no signs in the present. How can you plan for what you don’t understand?

Zizek hit the last category, in his depressingly Freudian style. Unknown Knowns. His example was the return of the repressed – the best example being Abu Ghraib.

We now know that it was much worse, the head of Blackwater being a radical Christian extremist. It’s a much better example of the Unknown Known – our blindnesses to how our own nature corrupts us. In the example of the war, it’s the American exceptionalist presumption that their military power brings good, that it liberates.

But that triumphalist vision of America ignores the horrors of slavery and religious extremism that were just as much parts of America’s origins as their heritage of liberal democracy.

Of course, I didn’t really discuss it that way in class. Instead, I talked about corporate issues – blindness to your own flaws, weaknesses that you don’t discuss or confront in the name of, maybe, maintaining company morale. Or just plain hubris.

Practical epistemology. A study of human stupidity.

Fear of the Future, Research Time, 20/02/2014

While I was publishing my extended riff on the institutionalization of creative writing, I was securing a couple of journalistic publications, working on a new theatre script, preparing some promotion for Under the Trees, Eaten, continuing some research for the Utopias project, and preparing to move apartments. Among a few other things. 

But my Utopias research discovered another interesting take on the nature of authority that could either be useful for the analysis, or a head-scratching anomaly for it. I still haven’t quite figured that out. Part of Zizek’s analysis of authoritarianism involved the example of Josef Fritzl. This was the case of an Austrian man who, in August 2008, was discovered to have spent the previous 24 years holding his now-middle-aged daughter captive in a cellar under his house. He had frequently raped her and bore seven children with her, though one died shortly after childbirth. Three of them were raised entirely in the cellar, and another three were raised by the elderly Josef and his wife, the latter children regarded as foundlings they had adopted.

The immensely creepy Josef Fritzl is led into court.

Zizek examines Fritzl’s behaviour toward his daughter and incestuous grand/children over those 24 years to reach a more disturbing conclusion than even the popular reporting did. I remember it being widely regarded at the time as a case of a twisted, deranged sex criminal. Something like the Ariel Castro case today.* Reports in the media at the time were also flabbergasted at how such a thing could go unnoticed for 24 years by neighbours, and even Fritzl’s wife. News reporters often ran analysis pieces discussing the excessive politeness of Austrians, their tendency (almost pathological in this case) to leave others to their own business without interference. Zizek interprets Fritzl in an even stranger and horrifying light. 

* Castro began kidnapping women in 2002, while Fritzl was only discovered in 2008, so there is no way we can consider Castro to be a Fritzl copycat. I wonder how many other such crimes over the years have gone undiscovered, and how many women who are simply not prioritized in missing persons investigations are actually in cellars and attics, unseen outside for years or decades.

Zizek describes Fritzl’s behaviour toward his grand/children in the cellar as mimicking a strange kind of normalcy: visiting them regularly, playing with the small ones, and watching television with them. No matter how much he may have been a horrifying spectre to his daughter, who was his imprisoned incestuous rape victim for over two decades, his day-to-day interaction with this hidden family followed all the trappings of an ordinary family man. Zizek refers to Fritzl’s own accounts of himself where he speaks of his love for his children and grand/children, his desire to protect them from the evils of the wider world. Paternal care is perverted to justify torture.

This is how Zizek finds the political content of Fritzl’s pathology: he is the paradigm case, on a micro scale, of the paternalistic authoritarian, for whom oppression and control is an expression of love. He interprets the same pattern in Nicolae Ceausescu’s dictatorship of Romania: the tight social controls of his government over the behaviour of the people is for their own good, to protect them from the dangers of the wider world for which they lack the fortitude to handle. 

Fear of the future, of the development of a people, is the driving force of the temporal relationship and conception here. The most deluded parent is the one who has become incapable of understanding the experience, maturity, and adulthood of their children. They universalize the present moment of childhood and immaturity to all times, never understanding that such states of being change. 

This political pathology reveals the temporal dimension of a central element of democracy: that no matter how good a government may be, it must at some point leave power and change itself. The movement of time brings flux, and the imposition of stability over that flux will inevitably become repression. We must not ignore the reality of the yet-to-exist future for the sake of constructing an infinitely enduring present.

Trapped in a Dualism, Research Time, 14/02/2014

After meeting so many people who do not take Freud
seriously, I also have trouble taking Freud seriously.
The huge number of critiques of his ideas, as well as the
huge number of penis jokes that can be so easily made
at his expense, offer me no help in this.

If there is one figure in the history of philosophy who I have never much wanted to delve into, it’s Sigmund Freud. Yet he is also a fascinating liminal point where philosophy, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and medicine all blur together. As well, Félix Guattari once called Freud a brilliant literary thinker because of the evocative power of the images with which he described subjectivity and states of mind. But there was simply so much Freud that, as an academic researcher, I could not specialize in his work without the study of Freud monopolizing all my time. Freud’s work can be interesting, but finding the interesting parts under all of everything else there is more work than a single person can handle if he wants to do something else early in his career.

It’s why I’m glad I have theorists like Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, and Zizek to rely on, to bring Freud’s ideas in various forms to philosophical conversations that touch on wider issues: the nature of subjectivity, the psychological dimensions of political philosophy, and so on. 

But in one chapter of Living in the End Times, Zizek points to a single issue in Freud’s work that I find very illuminating of a particular way of thinking about the human mind. This isn’t so prevalent anymore, ironically enough thanks to the psychological and neurological science that developed after Freud’s remarkable epoch of a career. One chapter of this book is an exploration of the nature of trauma, particularly the impact of trauma on the subject, and what that impact reveals about the nature of the subject. Trauma, says Zizek (following an argument from philosopher Catharine Malabou) is the blunt force of an explosion that literally shocks the subject into a catastrophic state. A traumatized person is utterly transformed, a character that cannot return to the state of existence before that shattering act. Malabou offers a vision of subjectivity that understands trauma as a wound with an external cause.

And this conception of trauma wouldn’t be so strange were it not for the ideas of Freud, who saw trauma as an internal breakdown that could be healed by uncovering the meaning that the damage to your personality is hiding. This is terribly contrary to how we understand trauma today, and how Zizek and Malabou conceive of trauma in their books. Talk therapy for victims of PTSD is not about revealing any hidden childhood scars that are the true roots of their traumas. Modern trauma has real, obvious causes: soldiers watched their friends die horribly, children see their parents and siblings immolated in white phosphorus, whole towns of women are gang raped and mutilated. There is no secret meaning here to uncover, only wounds that must be somehow healed.

A wild speculation occurs to me as to why Freud may have thought this way. I’ve done no scholarship on the matter, or much else in terms of research. I am only wondering. Perhaps Freud still clung onto a shade of the old-fashioned dualism that saw mind as a separate substance from matter, obeying its own rules of causality. If the physical was the realm of affects, then the mental would be the realm of meanings. Since trauma is a mental occurrence, so goes this dualistic reasoning, it would have to operate according to the causality of meanings and associations. That was David Hume’s idea as well, that the mind worked not by efficient causality, but by the association of ideas. If trauma is mental, and the mental is a realm of meanings, then trauma is a matter of hidden meanings. A sad, misdirected idea, but fascinating in its own right.

The Inescapable Conundrum of a Revolutionary: Action, Research Time, 07/02/2014

You could say this is an idea where it all comes together. Or where it all falls apart. Zizek returns to this notion at various points throughout Living in the End Times, throughout a bunch of his recent web videos, and it’s a fundamental conundrum of the Utopias project. The separation of the ideal — the dream of a perfect society — from the possibility of its realization.

This harkens back to a conversation I had with my friendly antagonist C over the impossibility of a truly balanced market. After the decades of catastrophe that we call the 20th century, no one who is angry at the injustices of capitalism can seriously advocate a return to a state-controlled socialist economy. Any who would are either not serious, or know nothing about the Kafkaesque ridiculousness of living in a society permeated by bureaucratic management, either regarding its corruption or its existential absurdity. 

But for quite a lot of people, the current global arrangement of planetary-scale capitalism is not good enough. The disparity between the rich and poor remains too wide, and in many countries, rigid oligarchical class systems either maintain themselves or are coming into existence. There is an almost instinctual rage in many people when they see so much owned by so few people. 

A lot of the contemporary concepts in radical criticisms of
capitalism, even the populist ones like Naomi Klein,
grow from ideas in Guattari's short solo books of the 1980s.

Yet capitalism remains a brilliant system for being able to include revolution in its very framework. The drive to produce is a drive to overthrow old orders of social life, a process that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call deterritorialization. Literally, the strict strata of a society is swept away and the social ground flattened as some new process of material production renders the old codes and hierarchies of a society obsolete. The nouveau riche destroy an aristocracy precisely because their power grows greater than theirs, and they are not themselves part of a landed aristocracy. 

Zizek and Deleuze both admit that, for all its flaws, capitalism is a liberating form of social organization. It’s the ultimate large-scale deterritorializer, the force that can bring down any tradition or social structure, no matter how ossified it’s become. What’s more, the fluctuation of a global market and its massive capital flows prevents the new structures that develop in the wake of its levelling from ossifying themselves. Changes are always incoming, and you must adapt to them or die (or at least find yourself put out to pasture). 

But that change isn’t necessarily the change you want to see, especially if it’s you working to change the world. If the history of revolution shows us anything, it’s that the utopian dreams tend to fail, replaced with a different kind of power imbalance and oppression. Who is oppressed, and the language and concepts with which they speak, can change. But social stratification always sets in.

Guevara fought for a global communist revolution,
but he could never have foreseen becoming the
global left's most famous brand name.

And the revolutionaries themselves are often the harbingers of a new stratification. The ability to imagine the future and plan for possibilities brings an epistemic dimension to the ontological structure of temporality. Actions based on predictions of the future invalidate those predictions because a prediction can’t include an action that is based on the prediction. Self-reference, even in practical action, creates paradoxes that ruin the consistency in reality required for a consistent plan for action to work as it should. Through all the theoretical argument and historical investigation that the Utopias project will require, this is the ultimate core of my idea.

Zizek paints a final irony for any dream of a revolution early in this book in a brief description that I find hilarious, as I find all propositions that are profoundly true. Even if we do change reality in such a way that it realizes all of our dreams, we will find this new reality haunted by new dreams of a different world. New dreams of a revolution. What we have is never what we want. 

From the Inside Out and From the Outside In, Research Time, 06/02/2014

I wrote yesterday about how our actions can destabilize and damage the very systems that are operating optimally for us before we act. In a way, this is also an example of how ontological phenomena can become epistemic, or at least be so deeply affected by epistemic actions that it becomes a hybrid of both. Philosophical conceptions of truth have been dealing with these ideas for some time, but I find that popular conceptions of truth are still basically correspondence: there is a world, about which we can learn, and we know the world truthfully when our representations mirror that world precisely.

Zizek’s concept of parallax is one critique of this terribly simple idea, though I have yet to explore it in detail. It appears in Living in the End Times as a brief note in a chapter about the ideological dimensions of architecture. Parallax is the simple phenomenon of the differences in the appearance of an object when viewed from multiple perspectives or directions. Zizek refers to a concept (which he develops in more detail in The Parallax View, which I have yet to read) of an object that includes its own multiplicity of perspectives.

A Zizek book is like a single conceptual lens through
which you can see (or perhaps smell) the world, one of
many possible lenses.

The arc of a Zizek book is composed with a structure of parallelisms: understanding disparate social phenomena with the same ordering concepts lets one experience the world according to those concepts. Thinking with parallelisms gives one practice in noticing parallels. It’s not so much that a parallelism appearing between different phenomena is the only correct way to understand it, to the exclusion of all others. But you are more enlightened about the nature of the phenomena when you apply the conceptual parallelism to it.

My approach to the revisions of the Ecophilosophy project proceed similarly, asking you to think about environmental issues and various physical processes underlying subjectivity in terms of a parallelism of process. And Zizek offers some lovely ideas about the nature of process. Essentially, understanding reality as process means that nothing can ever be complete and that’s okay. 

Now, this can be unsettling, because one of the profundities that a lot of people crave is completion, the feeling that everything in the world fits together as a harmonious whole. This is the feeling that underlies the belief of many religious people in God’s divine plan, that no matter what horrible things happen in the world, it’s all justified in God’s vision of the complete universe.

But if reality is process, then there is no completion because there is no point at which change is impossible. The world is always becoming, and so are we. And our actions affect how the world becomes. As I wrote yesterday, human actions in attempting to predict the future actions of a marketplace (or any future actions, really) affect the processes that will constitute that future such that my predictions are falsified by my own actions to adapt to those predictions. 

If you ever read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books, this conceit is central to some of his core ideas there. The science of psychohistory could predict with relative certainty the future development of the world. But those predictions only held if the actors themselves had no idea what those predictions would be and how they would develop in the future. To act on knowledge of the future changes the future.

Now, because Zizek is speaking in the context of a discussion about Hegel and the nature of subjectivity, he frames the contingency of process in terms of how “the subject is the failure of its signifying representation.” In other words, subjectivity emerges from the inability of a human to reconcile all the contradictions and paradoxes of its existence. But my Ecophilosophy project examines the contingency of existence that process implies from a global perspective. Instead of simply thinking through the necessary incompleteness of the subject alone, I examine the necessary incompleteness of the world that constitutes the subject. 

Ultimately, I think this is the major difference between my own and Zizek’s approach to process thinking. Much of Zizek’s thinking concerns the subject and the processes that subjectivity generates. Where my Ecophilosophy project (and possibly my Utopias project, depending on what will eventually be emphasizes) starts from the world itself, and the ecological processes from which subjects are generated. He moves from the inside out, and I move from the outside in.

The Harsh Reality of a World That Changes, Research Time, 05/02/2014

I’m running behind on some of my projects, but I got some work done on my formal publishing proposal for my Ecophilosophy manuscript yesterday. I’d say the pivotal chapter in that manuscript is the fourth, which comes in the middle, which develops my conception of the reality of change, that idea that there is nothing eternally stable in the universe and only processes exist. When you consider it in a purely abstract sense, it sounds just fine. But I’ve noticed that in its more concrete versions, it can be very frightening. 

Here’s one example. In my conversations with my libertarian friends over the last few years, and in a lot of the economic policy points of conservative politicians, there’s a lot of talk about the ability of market processes to arrive at optimal conclusions. But I think faith in market processes are misplaced. It’s not because the basic idea is wrong; I think that a market process will tend to an optimal relationship. But the relationships among consumers, prices, and the supply-demand dynamics of production and consumption of different goods don’t guarantee that optimality will be stable. 

There's a long tradition of conservative politics that
advocates faith in market processes. They may work better
than state-run economies, but a lot of people still get hurt.

Here’s the basic framework of Zizek’s discussion on this idea. Imagine an ideal market situation that has reached its optimal point: supply and demand perfectly balance each other and hold the price of a product at a stable and broadly affordable level. The way we typically think about the nature of balance implies that a balanced relationship will exist in equilibrium. Having found the optimal relationship of supply and demand for a product, that optimality should settle into an equilibrium.* 

* I should make clear that I’m not talking about the concepts of economic science itself here, but my sense of the popular perception of economic relationships. We associate balance, conceptually, with stability and equilibrium. Economists themselves understand that these relationships are dynamic, and an optimal relationship won’t stay optimal for long. But the public rhetoric about markets being the best systems treat all results of supply-demand relationships as optimal and any instability as a temporary correction on the way to the next stability. This, I think, is why many people who aren’t economists and don’t know much about that science so easily parrot Republican and Conservative talking points about the just nature of markets. 

But arriving at this point doesn’t create stability. There is never stability in market relationships; the field is so complex, so full of colliding forces, that it’s always in flux, always dynamic. An optimal point in some supply-demand relationship may act as an attractor drawing price to this point of balance. But the location of that attractor can change radically.

Zizek himself doesn’t go into the details of how the dynamic processes of markets work, probably because he’s more deeply trained in the Marxist tradition of economic theory-making instead of the mathematical science of economics. But he concentrates on a temporal dimension of how markets destabilize themselves. 

Humans interact with markets (we’re the one’s building the supplies and making all those demands), and our planning for the future is one of the forces that determine market fluctuations. However, because we can’t know the future for certain, our uncertain predictions about future demands (if we’re suppliers) and future supplies (if we’re demanders) will change the point of optimal market balance when we act on them. In preparing for the fluctuations of the market, we destabilize the very optimal market whose future we were trying to predict.

Preparation for the future itself destabilizes the future for which you’re preparing, invalidating your preparations. I think Nikolai Gogol wrote a story about this.

Of course, it's not as though I'd advocate state intervention to stabilize markets. That only results in a stultifying inability to adapt to changing situations. Living in flux is frightening precisely because all your plans for the future are uncertain. Everyone thought owning a home was a surefire route to financial security until about 2007. And states often are too draconian to intervene in any way that doesn't cause destructive distortions, not just of markets, but of people's lives. Short of the I-know-not-what that would emerge from the utopian revolution Zizek dreams about in Living in the End Times, I don't know what would actually provide the stability people crave. Honestly, I don't think there is a solution.

Far More Than a Mere Instrument, Research Time, 04/02/2014

One chapter of Living in the End Times demonstrates the problem that the Utopias project faces: the gravity of Marxism. The chapter is a comprehensive critique of traditional Marxist perspectives and the engagement with traditional Marxist perspectives of Alain Badiou and the Frankfurt School. 

The extremely intense Max Horkheimer

Zizek’s basic idea is that the concept of instrumental reason is an incomplete critique of how our society works. The legacy of Martin Heidegger is the problem here. For all of Heidegger’s reputation for difficulty and complexity, when you look past all the possibilities for purely technical/historical criticism regarding his appropriations and interpretations of various philosophers,* his philosophy amounts to a critique of the vision of the world as existing as a potential resource. When we look at the world today, says Heidegger, we understand it only in terms of things that we can use. The Frankfurt School writers like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse, understood this in terms of humanity’s one-dimensionality. We were no longer even able to critique ourselves, because instrumentality, use-value, was our only framework left for understanding the world.**

* The academic paper of the form “X’s understanding of Y” is very easy to write and publish in a contemporary specialist journal. All you have to do is compare and contrast X’s interpretation of Y with that of several prominent contemporary specialized scholars of Y. I’ve read these papers, and they tend to amount to quibbling, with very little philosophical creativity. The prevalence of this attitude among so many journal reviewers I’ve encountered over the last few years is why I want to concentrate on writing books for my philosophical work instead.

** If our supposed one-dimensionality makes critique impossible, then why were Horkheimer and friends able to write their critical books? A cheap shot, but a fun shot to make.

My own perspective on the Frankfurt School authors is complicated. I’ve explored a little Marcuse and the basics of Adorno, but I’ve largely kept my distance in the past. I think this is because I’ve met too many people who worship Adorno, and slavishly parrot his views, ideas, and terminology without fully understanding them. As well, the amount of secondary material that has been produced about them is so massive that it’s become intimidating. I feel as though the only way I’d be able to speak with legitimacy about them is to study them and the works about them to the exclusion of everything else. If the Utopias project will require any one skill, it’ll be learning how to take in a wide scope of philosophical ideas and texts while maintaining the credibility for my discussion to be taken seriously.

Zizek’s critique is that conceiving of humanity as one-dimensional is too one-dimensional, putting the blame for the inevitable collapse of the Enlightenment dream and social revolution on a fundamental and inescapable feature of human nature. Even Heidegger himself didn’t think instrumental reason was necessary to humanity, just an enormously dominant feature of thought in our civilization. The real phenomena of totalitarianism, the exploitive features of mass-scale capitalism, and the injustices of colonial military-economic expansion are too complicated to reduce to a single cause or underlying framework of thought. And because the phenomena of oppression are so complicated in their generation, structure, and development, they can also be sabotaged, critiqued, and fought in equally complicated ways. 

For someone who describes himself as a pessimist, Zizek is very good at arguing against pessimism. 

Cult of Personality, Research Time, 31/01/2014

Zizek has given me another reason to distrust and dislike the philosophy and politics of Alain Badiou. I say this in the knowledge that Zizek is probably twisting some more subtle point of Badiou’s into fodder for his own arguments, as he is wont to do. But given some of my knowledge of Badiou’s thought already, the following idea makes sense. 

Alain Badiou will tell you what to do.

According to Zizek at least, Badiou has endorsed the cult of personality in social revolutions against capitalist systems. That is, a revolutionary no longer justifies his actions in terms of the universal principles — escaping a hardscrabble existence in the name of human dignity, overthrowing social structures of stratification and servitude in the name of freedom. Instead, a revolutionary commits the acts he does in the name of his loyalty to the Leader. I do what I do because it is the will of the Leader.

Holy fuck. I have yet to check this, as I haven’t had time to track down a copy of the conference presentation where Badiou presented this idea. But the conference was called “On the Idea of Communism,” it was organized by the School of Law at Birkbeck College in London, and the conference took place over 13-15 March 2009. If this is at all accurate, then the Utopias project would have few enemies bigger than Alain Badiou. It advocates a politics in which you surrender your will to a movement and its Leader in the name of freedom. Well, no, actually, it goes beyond that. You don’t even surrender your will in the name of freedom, but only because the Leader demands that you surrender your will.

This makes sense in the light of some of Badiou’s writings which advocate that philosophy can only occur in the structure of the master-disciple relationship: Alain is the master, who develops new revolutionary thoughts, and you rabble are the disciples who absorb those words and act according to the master’s guidance and orders. 

Badiou used to send his dedicated students to shout down his colleague Gilles Deleuze in the middle of his lectures, accusing him of cultural conservatism, hatred of the people, and similarly awful things. The point was only to assault and humiliate a fellow professor, and not even to do so to his face. Why would a student agree to act as Badiou’s proxy, spewing hatred at a professor when his own master did not have the guts to behave so anti-socially? Because Alain is the master, and you are the disciple.

As it is in philosophy, so it is in politics, a fundamental parallelism in Badiou’s thinking. The reasoning goes that the universal or universalizing concepts to which we currently have reference to justify our actions can’t be genuinely universal. They’re products of the current regime of thought and life, a regime that the revolutionary (following from the conclusions about the nature of the revolutionary in yesterday’s post) seeks to overthrow completely. In a genuine revolution, nothing of the old order remains. There is a total ontological change, no continuity between this world and the next. So to usher in the next world, a political movement must have no reference to the concepts that were created to deal with this world. It must be the product of an idiosyncrasy, a singular presence.

Such a singular presence is not a concept, but a person or a leader. Sorry, a Leader, or specifically, his proper name. The proper name escapes the context of contemporary universals precisely because it is a singularity, both in terms of its uniqueness and its nature as a limit concept, that which we approach and transcend.

A nice goal, certainly. But its possibility is doubtful. More thoughts as I think of them, I think.

The Violent Love of a Revolutionary, Research Time, 30/01/2014

Returning to political philosophy, Zizek’s Living in the End Times discusses an idea, which I discovered in the writings of Ché Guevara, that lies at the centre of the problematic in the Utopias project.

“The true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality. Perhaps it is one of the great dramas of the leader that he or she must combine a passionate spirit with a cold intelligence and make painful decisions without flinching. Our vanguard revolutionaries must idealize this love of the people, of the most sacred causes, and make it one and indivisible. They cannot descend, with small doses of daily affection, to the level where ordinary people put their love into practice.”

Think of this as a true contradiction. A revolutionary becomes a murderer, but in the name of love for the people he’s murdering. And this isn’t just PR, but the actual motives of the revolutionary. And Zizek’s analysis, complicated and integrated with an analysis of Hollywood movies as it is, helps explain one aspect of how this works. 

The contradiction lies in the methods to produce a utopia, a society of perfect relations among people where love is the law of the land (and so it is a land where law is unnecessary) brought into existence through violence and terror. But this goes beyond the violence of the revolutionaries themselves, revolutionaries who attack and kill agents of the oppressive regime. The violence which must be encouraged to bring about utopia is even violence against the oppressed themselves. 

Consider the notion that the most virtuous slaveowner is
the one whose horrifying violence toward his slaves best
demonstrates the inevitable injustice of slavery.

Zizek considers this example, which illuminates the horror of the concept of transformative violence. In a regime of slavery, the truly horrible people are the humane slaveowners who treat their charges with dignity. The slaveowner we should praise, goes this perspective, is the sadist who whips his male slaves to death, works them until they crash, and regularly rapes the women and children of his workforce. The humane slaveowner (in Zizek’s eyes, the humane liberal democrat) lets us live with an oppressive system by toning down its most intense features, trying to legislate against mistreatment of slaves. But a slave with rights against mistreatment is still a slave. The most violent, vile slaveowner is the true ally of an anti-slavery revolutionary because he articulates the full might of this oppressive structure openly and honestly.

When a culture has developed in the context of a particular political structure, there is a corresponding sense of what it is to be reasonable. The analysis above, that the actions of a sadistic, rapist slaveowner are more in line with a movement to overturn slavery than a humane, respectful slaveowner, does not sound reasonable. But a total revolution would overturn every aspect of a political culture and the social contexts of people’s meetings. A genuine revolutionary movement changes the standard of what is considered reasonable. To appear reasonable in the regime you wish to change is a compromise that prevents you from changing that regime. 

My own take on the idea introduces a temporal dimension to this analysis, a framework for introducing a process of change into the system. At the least, there must be continuity of action through a transformative political process. Zizek seems to have struck the essential element of how deep into thought and ethics a cultural change must go to be complete. Yet at least so far in Living in the End Times, he seems to have missed the process by which this happens, focussing only on the before and after, but not the transformation itself.

The Barbarism of Liberalism: Utopian Ideals, Research Time, 29/12/2013

You don’t name a project Utopias without considering how people think about their political, social, and personal ideals and dreams. Zizek and I agree about many aspects of modern utopian thinking, but I’m not sure that he contributes much to my own work. We seem to be thinking along the same lines, fellow-travelers nodding in agreement. 

Here’s a place where our thoughts are in tandem: the modern conservative utopia. This is based on the imagined ideal past that must be resurrected. The past is conceived as a perfect society, a pure state from which we have fallen thanks to modern secularism, technology, or other forces that destroy the human relationship with supposedly authentic religion, morals, and family values. Whether I talk about the Islamic fundamentalists (particularly radicals like Abu Hamza in Britain, the hook-handed imam), Christian fundamentalists (take your pick among the hypocritical evangelists and Catholics of the American Republican party), the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish leaders campaigning to drive Arabs out of Israel and the West Bank, or the most extreme Hindu nationalists of India’s Bharatiya Janata Party, their utopian drive is the same. All are essentially elites to convert an extreme ideology into political programs that sound as if they are in people’s best interests. 

There was once a time when our society was pure, right, and upstanding; that time must be restored by whatever force is necessary or moral. So many of these movements also have an important goal of restraining, controlling, and possessing women. Slut-shaming, forced illiteracy, the legalization of or indifference to rape; all of these are the weapons of culturally conservative utopians against the freedom of women. Zizek so far in my reading of Living in the End Times does not mention this violent social drive against women in his analysis of conservative utopianism, and that is not cool to me.

One of the best examples of political/religious extremism in
contemporary American democracy is Rick Santorum.

But Zizek’s central idea in his analysis of the conservative utopian vision is that their glorified ideal past is a lie. If today a Rick Santorum looks around at his society and sees decadence, depravity, and a fall from grace, he imagines that state of grace as a time when his god gloried in human virtue. That such imagery is connected to the Christian myth of the Fall seems obvious. What better image for the idealized past than Eden? But any philosophy with moral ideals could become perverted in this way. 

I found the same ideas all over the most repugnant environmentalist philosophies, the radical anti-humanists, anti-technology agrarian utopians. The most disgusting were the philosophies that made indigenous peoples into idealized creatures of pure nature. These supposed progressive environmentalists regarded the indigenous peoples of the world as worse than noble savages: they were animals, and so were treated as heavenly.

This kind of ideal society never existed and never could. A destructive political ideology can be very effective in the world by seducing people into the idea that they can resurrect the pure world of the past to overcome the moral compromises and challenges of the present. A political ideology, in Zizek’s sense, is an absolute principle, a moral categorical imperative expressing itself in political contexts. Many discussions in moral philosophy are about uncovering moral truths, categorical imperatives of this type, an absolute obligation for action. But when such absolute principles and ideals are put into political practice, oppression is the only real result.

The Barbarism of Liberalism: The Morality of Self Doubt, Research Time, 27/12/2013

The ever-intense Walter Benjamin.

Part of what I love about Zizek’s ideas lies in a quote from Walter Benjamin he gives in Living in the End Times. “To be civilized means to know one is potentially a barbarian.”* This is the central idea behind so much of Zizek’s cultural criticism, his critique of liberal values and politics, the hypocrisy of liberal multiculturalism regarding its values for toleration and acceptance.

* This is also a central element of how I try to approach moral behaviour in my own life. I’ve noticed the people who take the most morally horrible actions are those who believe themselves incapable of being terrible to people. And the actions I most regret are those when I’ve believed myself incapable of saying or doing regrettable things. 

A central element of his critique is that the contemporary ideology of equal rights for all actually enables terrible physical harms, and dehumanizes its ethnic and cultural minority communities. Zizek follows in the wake of an earlier critique of liberal society, that of Louis Althusser. Althusser’s idea was that Western social structures (particularly the role of the police) determines individual identities, the calls and surveillance of authority figures defining people, oppressing their ability to define themselves. He called it interpellation.

Zizek’s idea is that, despite the oppressive nature of interpellation, it did serve a positive function in guiding people into a social role. Typical liberal values (my posts on Luc Ferry’s critique of environmentalism show him to be a model for these ideas) stand for individual determination against interpellation into society. Emphasis on the individual guards against social oppression, but also breaks social solidarity. Society consists entirely of individuals who are disconnected from each other. 

And when such a regime of liberal values tries to incorporate foreign cultures, Zizek sees a new kind of discrimination developing. A minority culture is today treated as an individual, able to determine its own social norms. But such a culture is not an individual. It’s a society consisting of individuals. Conforming to the rules and moral norms of a culture, says Zizek, can only be legitimized in a wider liberal society as an individual decision. 

Yet he considers this tolerance to end in a cultural apartheid. It isn’t enforced through brutal police structures, but moral values that go against liberal individualism aren’t allowed to have a true dialogue with the broader community. People just turn away from them, and leave them to themselves. Communities where anti-individualist values percolate and thrive are tolerated in the name of cultural tolerance. But they aren’t really welcomed or taken seriously because their anti-individualist values may threaten the majority. The result is a cultural segregation. The liberal majority doesn’t want their individualist values challenged, and the less tolerant minorities only grow in their extremity as no critique arrives from the majority culture. The society as a whole is stuck in a stalemate between tolerance and disdain.

Zizek’s critique applies, I think, to the current situation in Europe, where ostensibly liberal societies separate cultural minorities in ghettos. The majority then grows intolerant of the anti-individualist societies they’ve let grow in their midst and refused to engage in a serious conversation about philosophical moral value. This is how tolerance grows into open racism, as in the anti-immigrant political parties of contemporary Europe who justify their racism as a defence of liberal values, defending liberal culture from the attack of fundamentalism.

I’m not sure how applicable the idea is to all versions of liberalism. But it’s an important critique to consider. Ostensibly liberal, progressive people allow themselves to become racists in the name of anti-racism when they accept new cultures into their communities without allowing either side to critique each other’s values and learn from each other.

Zizek, A History Boy, 14/12/2013

Before you lies one person. Who is this?

I don’t really think a lot about Zizek. His work isn’t a major influence on my thought. The post-Lacanian style of writing is not something I want my philosophical work to pursue. A central animating idea of this thought is that all phenomena in our experience have a psychological/cultural element as a mediator. I believe that’s basically true, but I think that there are other ways of using philosophy to understand society than probing the nature of that mediation. There are forces in the world beyond mediation itself, and mediation doesn’t falsify what we come to know through it. My sight can never escape the architecture of my eyes, because my eyes are the means of my sight. But I still see the world.

That was a brief denunciation of Zizek, done so briefly that it would never pass muster as a scholarly publication, at least not as that paragraph. A flicker of what, in the university community is called impostor syndrome, the psycho-pathology that nothing you write will be of an acceptable standard to establish anything like a respectable career. Yet I have also found the perfect cure for impostor syndrome. Whenever you find yourself thinking this way, interrupt yourself with the declaration, held with absolute conviction, that you are having an episode of impostor syndrome and you really don’t have the time to be messing around with psycho-pathologies. I sometimes think, for a joke, if that’s really all psychoanalysis is: simply convincing someone that you don’t have to think in the destructive way you have been. “Seriously? You’re on about this again? Didn’t you listen to me last time when I said these were bad thoughts?” 

Sometimes, we do our best thinking

where we are most comfortable.

I began to doubt myself as I described how I composed the first paragraph of this post. Perhaps all self-consciousness comes to us as a moment of doubt, a moment (maybe spontaneous?) where we stop taking our experience for granted. That was Descartes’ insight, and the content of the first philosophy class I ever had. Over that term, I became enthused enough about philosophy to spend my own money on philosophy books. That was how I came to own my first book by Zizek.

I didn’t do much research before buying it, as I do today when every book of philosophy is a potential element for one of my own creative projects. Then, I just wanted to read more philosophy, and was plucking things at random. I bought my first Zizek book because the cover design was brilliant, a bright red painting of Josef Stalin relaxing in a comfy chair, a red square on a grey background. Also in that grey background in a thin, impactful, dignified serif, was the title, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, and the author’s name. I liked it.

That’s actually all I can remember. Such was my philosophical immaturity, I don’t even think I took notes. I can’t even reflect today on my first ever thoughts on reading Zizek. They’re lost to my memory, the most terrible mediator of our knowledge because it’s the most horrifying experience as it breaks down. Bergson wrote that our entire history remains a part of us, so my past (including my first thoughts reading that book) is just as much a part of me as my skeleton. Memory is the faculty of sorting through our pasts for the background knowledge we subconsciously need for practical action in the present world. So Alzheimer’s disease would in a literal sense be losing knowledge of oneself. Unable to sort through your history, your history would no longer practically exist.

And sometimes, I can understand why

anyone would rather not be themselves.

Thankfully, I am no longer writing like myself, despite that unfortunate break discussing a trip to the Chapters philosophy section. It’s a serious problem incorporating that into this experimental rabbit hole of self-reflection, this momentary artistic ejaculation (What parody of the Freudian tradition refuses to include a dick joke? Certainly not this one) making myself into a funhouse mirror Zizek in this free jam of a weekend blog entry. Perhaps if I include a discussion of my own careful reflection on what I have written, skills that I have already noticed improving as I ease into my part-time job as an editor. The composition of a blog, even one with a relatively small readership like this, should basically be careful. It is, after all, a public space with a long memory named Google that will not fail anytime soon. Everything I write here is part of my public image as a writer. If the growing media literacy of my culture is worth anything, I am glad we can all understand the degree to which all of our identities have always included a little PR. If he teaches us anything, it’s this. 

He has had a remarkably successful career as an intellectual celebrity. Zizek may not be everyone’s favourite (I know some achingly dull Richard Dawkins fans), but he’s certainly the most vigorously entertaining. For all that he may be denounced as a philosophy clown,* we should still give him respect as someone who is popularizing a discipline that isn’t always seen as the most worldly or relevant. Michèle Lamont, the Harvard sociologist, has studied philosophy’s growing intellectual isolation from other disciplines. Intellectual isolation is already too close to public irrelevance for my liking.

However remarkable he may like to make himself appear,

he is still in many ways an all-too-typical old man with

money and a prestigious office.

* This is an actual phrase I have heard used to describe him. Three years ago, I was at a conference in Switzerland, where I met the only Slovene academic I have yet known personally. When I asked him his opinion of Zizek, he laughed, and ultimately said that few in Slovenia took him seriously, especially after his cartoonish run for President of that nation. I don’t think I was the first to ask him that question.

Yet I can understand the public distaste for him. He clearly is, in many ways, a dirty old man with money. But he has become a world-famous author, and for all the ridiculousness of his character, he is a highly respected scholar, still taken seriously in academic circles. He is an expert in his field who writes books that appeal to a wide audience. For the sheer sake of there being variety in the world, I am glad he exists. There is no one like Zizek. I hope there never will be again.

Because the pressure of mediation is endless, its presence inescapable. Zizek does the detail work on the process of mediation. I know enough about its basic framework to get other projects done. There is nothing inherently political about the study of mediation, no matter how much Marxism appears in his writings, or how inherently political the concepts of an ideology are. No matter the substance of the ideology that mediates our knowledge of the world, we all know where interests lie in a capitalist system: with the desire not to starve. This is different from the motivation of socialist stereotypes: the desire for no one to starve. The latter is focussed on the group, and the former on the individual. No modern liberal would dispute that capitalist democracy is founded on enlightened self-interest.

A former friend once told me that he had written insightfully
on several topics in Christian thought. I have not sought them

out. My philosophy is entirely materialist so I  deal with the 

spiritual as a social and ethical matter.

Perhaps this is why there is such popular distaste for rhetoric, at least among the community of young philosophers, which was my community ten years ago when I bought a book of Zizek’s because I liked the cover. It carries with it the contemporary stink of PR. It would take an immense task of rhetoric to convince an entire culture that it thinks according to timeless virtues of universal growth and flourishing through enlightened self-interest. To remind people that you can reduce hundreds of years of philosophical development and discourse to a single aphorism as “Self-interest is the simple desire not to starve to death!” reminds them of a sort of hypocrisy. If humanity is a creature that can create itself, then we will always be hypocrites covering up the emptiness inside ourselves. Our very cultures and identities are acts of PR that we can’t help but believe in. And we wouldn’t even notice this emptiness if we just focussed on our daily tasks of avoiding starvation, as so many animals do.

Our self-consciousness, the structure of which is the central question of Zizek’s philosophy, makes us very different from most other animals, but it is a natural property. Besides many other species being able to think self-consciously, the simple fact that we are products of organic evolution makes us natural. This is at the heart of my ecophilosophy project, the notion that humanity is entirely natural, including our uncanny ability to build technology, culture, and art, phenomena that are like nothing in nature. Until now, of course, that we have built them. 

Zizek doesn’t believe that humans are inherently and completely a creation of nature, and this is where we part company. But there are other aspects of his thought that will be important to me again. After all, the utopias project will involve a philosophical analysis of totalitarian concepts and political cultures. It will also explore, obviously, ideas of an ideal future to create or past to resurrect, and of the total revolution in thinking and living required to perfect society. 

Not only do I do an excellent impression,

I think I may even resemble him once 

I reach my 50s.

Well, he just released a book last year on how we think about world-shattering transformations, the kind of transformations that are often mythologized to bring about a utopia. I already have an epub version. He could be important to the project, but I don’t think he’ll be foundational. Zizek and I disagree on too many other fundamental philosophical issues. Not that I think he’s ever wrong to focus on them; we just want to explore in different directions. I’ll say hi now and then. Maybe one day, he’ll notice me enough to wave. That would be nice.

So the post ends with another moment of excessive self-consciousness and sincerity. The meta-commentary is decades old, a basic trope of a postmodernism that’s already out of date. But the sincerity is, I think, a new innovation in my culture. You see, I can do a killer impression of Zizek’s voice and mannerisms. I even thought of preparing an entire talk that I would deliver as a parody figure, Slovaj Zezzik, to lampoon the locquatious Lacanian excesses of his language, the wormholes of his ironies, and the funhouse mirrors of his own self-conscious reflections of ideology on man (must it always be man?) and man on ideology.

But I don't want to give that talk anymore, because I think it would be cruel. Words are powerful things, almost magic. At least the power of contemporary public relations can make them seem like magic, appear to do what magic claimed, change the world by thoughts alone. I am even careful with my words in this blog post, only mentioning Zizek’s name once in every paragraph. It is almost an incantation. There is an old myth in Judaism that a person’s name works something like an incantation, a GPS tag broadcasting your location to God. That’s why Jews consider it bad luck to name a landmark after someone while they’re still alive. It messes up the signal.

Zizek is many things, and he’s certainly fun. I look forward to reading him again soon.