Real Economic Freedom Is the Self-Organizing Network, Jamming, 09/01/2015

I’ve recently been reading a book called Harperism by Donald Gutstein, an analysis of the different topics of the ideology underlying the Stephen Harper government, and how Canada’s wing of think tanks connected with the Mont Pelerin Society (especially the Fraser and MacDonald-Laurier Institutes) develop and support that ideology. 

Reading Gutstein’s book helped finally get an uncomfortable idea through my head. However much I may have dismissed much of the extreme ranting of my hardcore libertarian former friends G and C as generally crazy, their ideas actually motivate the most influential think tanks in the world whose publications and conferences shape the ideologies of conservative and centrist political parties.

To be utopian is to believe in fundamental human
progress, that humans can change themselves morally
through thinking and acting. Hayek thought this was
impossible except through state mass violence. Relative
access to opportunity through free markets was the best
we could ever do. Nihilism is the refusal to dream that
a better world is possible.

Those ideas are from the works of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, the new liberalism that arose from their critique of the principles of government through central planning which emerged from their confrontation with totalitarianism. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom* features arguments that all forms of government central planning, even something as ordinary as subsidized housing, are part of the same continuum as Stalinist totalitarianism. He argues that any form of collectivism, especially trade unions, were also totalitarian.

* The thing right now is, and I’ll admit this for full disclosure, I’ve never actually read The Road to Serfdom cover to cover, only bits and pieces here and there. As I’ve come to grips with the general political climate in which I’m developing, researching, and eventually composing the Utopias manuscript, I know I’ll have to engage with it. Hayek strikes me as the 21st century’s great political nihilist born 100 years too early.

According to Gutstein, Hayek’s ideas have inspired the neoliberal think tank network’s mission statement, that economic freedom is the essence of political freedom. Such freedom is freedom from state interference in how you produce and trade goods and services. 

Throughout the 20th century, the Western political democratic left was defined by social democracy, governance that sees the primary solutions to social ills in state central planning and large-scale action. These think tanks have been so successful that they’ve pretty much shut most of the old solutions of the social democratic left out of popular consideration. 

Mont Pelerin think tanks have tremendous intellectual and media influence on popular culture, and the ears of transformative conservative governments and political parties. They also have the regular funding of many wealthy and corporate supporters. Economic freedom concepts have appeared in popular culture so frequently and for so long that their ideas, which used to be considered dangerously fringe, are now the new right-leaning consensus of general political morality. 

The political left today can’t respond to the neoliberal challenge with traditional social democratic solutions. Economic freedom’s values of libertarian individualism overcame social democratic values of collective welfare through a fair bureaucracy. What I see in the social movements of the contemporary left are the new values to overcome libertarian individualism.

Network politics literally turns the individualism of liberal and libertarian philosophy against itself. The state and its police powers are villains here too.** But the villains are also the oligarchs who would accumulate so much wealth that they suck enough capital from wider society to send aggregate demand spiralling down.

** Really, network politics has a more complex knowledge of the police powers of the state than the neoliberal and libertarian tradition, thanks to Foucault’s biopolitical analysis of state institutions.

Social democracy was about the state ensuring the collective good of all. Libertarianism is about removing all constraints on individuals to seek their private goods. Network politics is about individuals understanding how all their private goods rely on public processes and self-organizing support and action to grow and protect them. 

Here’s an example of what I’d call network politics operating on the local level. It’s yesterday’s statement of principles from my old friend Chris as he launches his exploratory committee for a Newfoundland NDP leadership run. He has three main points.

1) End all corporate and union donations to political parties, so all donors would be individuals, families, and households. He frames it as a direct assault on cronyism and corruption in government, a clear statement of distrust of the state, especially at the local level where the links between business and political leaders take on the flavour of a small town. It's simultaneously distrust that large corporations will play politics fairly.

2) End NALCOR’s monopoly on power generation in NL. The solution isn’t a state-mandated breakup, but allowing small, independent power generation, like individuals with solar panels or a small community that operates a private wind farm, to contribute to the electricity grid. Chris explicitly frames this principle as diversifying the market. 

So network politics already accepts the importance of markets to empower people, a central argument of economic freedom. But unlike Hayek’s libertarianism, we understand that an oligarch or mega-corp sized market participant can cause equally serious economic distortions and impoverishment as state intervention.

3) Reform income tax on a more progressive continuum that distinguishes categories of the comfortable, the well-off, the wealthy, the rich, the super-rich, the mega-rich, and the people who can buy and sell whole worlds. These are the wealth demographics that matter now, and making your top income bracket start at $200,000 is ridiculous, as if such a person’s economic power were equivalent to a billionaire’s.

Also, Chris’ tax proposal features more emphasis on capital gains, which is how the rich actually earn most of their income. 

Boundless ≠ Infinite, Research Time, 08/01/2015

The other day, I discussed only one kind of abstraction that Marshall and Eric McLuhan explore in the first sections of Laws of Media. The second kind of abstraction regards our experience of space, and the epistemic effects of Euclidean and Pythagorean geometry. These are the concepts that I would say are the most trippy so far in their analysis of how thought became abstract.

When I first read Bertrand Russell’s History of Western

Philosophy, his accounts of ancient Greek thought

continually discussed their moral injunction, apparently

an influence of Pythagoras, against eating beans. I don't

know why they hated beans so much, or why Russell

would make such a big deal over it.

“Trippy. Hm. Is that a technical term?”

Yes, actually, it is. 

The son and father describe how people experienced and thought about space before Euclid as acoustic. The primary objects in the world were physical things flying around us, and space was the product of these interactions. Remember, however, that these concepts of space were explained in philosophical poetry, performed testimonials of logos itself that speaker and audience memorized in the act of recitation and listening. There were no mathematics to accompany these concepts. 

Euclid and Pythagoras changed all this when they started constructing geometric figures and investigating their properties on paper. They conceived what MuLuhan calls the visual model of experiencing space, where figures stand in focus on a featureless ground that extends infinitely in all directions. Space exists as infinite extension that is the theatre on which objects appear.

This concept of infinite extension was very different from what amounts to the previous equivalent conception, that of boundlessness. The sages of recitation understood the world as ultimately finite, but having no boundaries. It used to be easily understood, but we've lived with the concept of space as infinitely extended for so long that now boundlessness is hard to get our heads around.

Boundless finitude goes like this. Travel in your spaceship as far away from everything else as you possibly can. Literally everything else in the entire universe is behind you. You’ve only travelled a finite distance, but your position now constitutes the most distant point in the universe. Now throw a baseball in front of you. 

That's what the boundless finite universe is. It's a bunch of stuff scattered around. There’s no limit to that finitude beyond which you can’t go, as if there was a magic fence around the universe. You’re not throwing that baseball into anything. You’re just throwing it farther away from everything else. The size of the universe is just the distance between stuff and there's no principle that sets any limit on how distant stuff can be from each other.

This is actually really hard to conceive today, because as a culture we’re so accustomed to thinking about the universe as a plane of space, the end of which is literally no-space. If you can throw the baseball, you must be able to throw it into something. This idea that there had to be something that underlay the existence and relationships among objects was weird and difficult to understand in Euclid’s day. His ideas were so innovative that they literally made no sense without long periods of complex study.

Of course, Einstein’s revolution in physics has thrown the Euclidean conception of space into the pile of obsolete ontology. Yet we’ve been thinking according to Euclidean presumptions for so long (or so says the McLuhans) that returning to a conception of space that makes it a function of relative distance from the image of a theatre prior to the objects that appear in it is just as difficult as it was to leave that conception behind in the first place 2500 years ago.

I’m not sure where their conceptual story of how we understand space ends, because I’ve been spending most of my philosophical time editing the manuscript of Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. So I had to put Laws of Media down for a while. Only so many hours in the day.

Chris Bruce for Newfoundland NDP Leader, Advocate, 07/01/2015

I had to introduce a new category of post for this one, because I didn’t think the term “Jamming” was really appropriate for a topic that I think has serious, actual, real-world consequences. The current leader of Newfoundland and Labrador’s New Democratic Party is stepping down from her post. My old friend Chris Bruce is considering running for the leadership. And if he actually files the papers and signs up, I genuinely think he would make an excellent leader.

Newfoundland and Labrador's next leader of the NDP.

Frankly, the NDP in the province where I was born and grew up needs the kind of shakeup that being led by a quick-witted, intelligent, idealistic activist would deliver. The provincial party is in a shambles, broken for the last two years by the incompetence of its elected parliamentarians. 

Some background 

Lorraine Michael has been leader of Newfoundland and Labrador’s provincial NDP since 2006. She has long been an activist for women’s rights and the poor, and stands for the values that continue to animate that political party. In the provincial election of Fall 2011, her party elected five members to Newfoundland’s 48-seat House of Assembly. 

One candidate, Gerry Rogers, defeated a cabinet minister, and the election in one south coast rural district came within less than 50 votes of defeating another. The NDP had more members in the House than in its history, and elected Chris Mitchelmore on the northern peninsula, the party’s first victory outside the capitol city of St. John’s. Michael’s own popularity was eclipsing the Conservative premier and the Liberal opposition leader. The NDP’s fortunes had never looked brighter.

But two years later, everything fell to pieces. Dale Kirby, a member of Michael’s caucus who rose through the provincial NDP from a career in the Canadian Federation of Students,* led the other three MHAs to write a letter calling for a leadership review. Michael responded by airing the entire conflict in the news media. Rogers and George Murphy backed down from the letter’s position (Murphy even cried with remorse in his interview on the subject) after they realized that, according to the rules of the provincial party’s constitution, a leadership review would require Michael to step down.

* Former CFS members are the only people in the NDP that I univocally refuse to trust. The CFS exercises tight top-down control of member unions' messaging, bullies opponents, uses legal action to intimidate local student unions who wish to leave, and has a documented history of corrupt practices to ensure that its loyalists occupy positions of power in member unions. I documented many such instances of CFS bullying and corruption in Newfoundland when I worked for The Muse, and this investigation by University of Toronto’s Varsity revealed current Toronto school board trustee Ausma Malik’s role in rigging a student union election.

I always suspected this letter of being a spectacular failure of a leadership bid from Kirby, that it was his attempt to position himself as the next generation of Newfoundland’s New Democratic leadership, 2013 being Michael’s 70th year. A humiliated Kirby soon left the NDP. He and Mitchelmore sat as independents, then eventually joined the Liberal caucus. 

Newfoundland’s NDP was trounced in a series of by-elections over the following two years, all of which have favoured the Liberal party. The caucus revolt made every elected NDP member look like a fool. Michael was clumsy enough to air her party’s dirty laundry in public. Kirby didn’t even know how to lead a proper caucus uprising, and Mitchelmore acts like his lapdog. Rogers and Murphy looked as if they didn’t even know the rules of their own party. Yesterday, Michael announced her resignation.

The NDP needs a completely new approach and image, and a smart activist dedicated to the ideals of progressive politics can deliver. These ideals have changed considerably over the last generation, and I know Chris Bruce well enough to say that he won’t be the same old fart peddling outdated ideas of statist socialism that have already been thoroughly undermined by the neo-liberal think tank network and the hypocritical corruption of old leftist leaders.

Progressive politics in social movements

Occupy. Growing income inequality on a social scale is the outcome of both Conservative and Liberal policies that, informed by Canada’s neo-liberal intellectual establishment, have cut taxes on the wealthy, assaulted workers’ rights, undermined workers’ abilities to organize themselves, destroyed government powers to gather workable data about our society, and slashed services that help people out of poverty. The shrinking demand of a poorer population is slowly hobbling our economy.

The last four years have seen a movement of people who demand that the government protect its most economically vulnerable citizens. Our leaders must understand that prosperity for all does not come from protecting the interests of wealthy and powerful businessmen in the name of economic freedom. Progressive politics must fashion a new social contract with this principle at the heart of our government’s obligations to its people.

End War and Surveillance. At the same time, the power of the state to control its citizens must be kept on the shortest possible leash. The War on Terror has seen our government’s powers to spy on citizens grow exponentially. Progressive politics must refashion the state as the servant of the people, not their controller.

The surveillance state is just one aspect of a growing set of police and military powers that have grown beyond acceptable limits for a democracy. The Harper government has expanded Canada’s prison system at a pace that outstrips its growth in the United States. That country already imprisons a higher percentage of its citizens than the Soviet Union’s gulags at their height. Progressive politics must work to end this system of incarcerated slave labour.

“I Can’t Breathe.” Related to the growth of institutional police power to control citizens is its disproportionate employment to harass, imprison, and kill people of colour and indigenous people. Police organizations and conservative media depict even the mildest criticism of police institutions and practices as sedition and incitement to violence. Progressive politics must reconcile our law enforcement institutions with all citizens to protect the public peace.

Idle No More. The ongoing uprising of indigenous peoples across Canada has the potential to transform our state and society into a more just form. Genuinely repairing the historical and ongoing harm that the Canadian state and people have done to indigenous people requires more than apologies. It requires the reorientation of Canadian society from levels of constitutional frameworks and governance to our individual attitudes.

The Harper government is right that indigenous women go missing at a similar frequency as white women in Canada. But when a white woman disappears, there is an amber alert and the mass mobilization of police and citizens to find her. When an indigenous woman disappears, she’s just another drunk fucking Native lost in the snow. Progressive politics must not rest until all people are truly treated equally.

Another aspect of Idle No More that often goes unremarked is that it is also an environmentalist movement. Unchecked natural resource development, especially bitumen and minerals, can do massive harm to our ecosystems, the living systems that maintain so many of the processes that we need to survive and thrive. Progressive politics must also be an ecological politics. 

These are how I understand the principles of the modern left, the genuinely progressive edge of social change. And I think my old friend Chris Bruce is the best person to bring these ideas to the forefront of political discourse in Newfoundland and Labrador as leader of that province’s New Democratic Party.

Abstract From the Sound to the Paper, Research Time, 06/01/2015

Marshall McLuhan's career as an
intellectual celebrity is fascinating. I may
pick up Douglas Coupland's book about
him, as it's highly recommended.

Eric and Marshall McLuhan focus a lot of the first chapter in Laws of Media on the importance of abstraction as a form of thinking that transforms how we conceive of and experience the world after we become habituated to it. 

They discuss two kinds of abstraction. The abstraction of alphabetic script is closely attached to the concept of logos as the speech act that makes what is said true that I discussed yesterday. McLuhan understands the alphabet as the first analysis of spoken language that broke from representing its vocal character. 

Western scripts had been syllabaries before the innovations of Greek script, according to McLuhan’s historical analysis,* each character representing a syllable. So there were many characters (usually based on pictographs and hieroglyphs of objects where the syllable was prominent in its name), each of which had a direct relation to a verbal sound.

* This historical analysis utterly sidesteps the fact that the Greek innovations in separating syllabic written characters into vowels and consonants was long pre-dated by Hebrew writing. And several Hebrew letter forms directly influenced the Greek.** I think that for the rest of this post, I’ll remind you in brackets that Hebrew did the same thing after I mention what McLuhan identifies as an innovation in Greek script.

** I bought a book several years ago at a conference, Alpha Beta by John Man, that provides a detailed history of both Mediterranean and Asian scripts.

McLuhan calls attention to an innovation in Greek (and Hebrew) script that also occasioned in innovation in the most intricate conceptual connective tissue of the Mediterranean mind, the breakdown of syllabic letters into vowels and consonants. The consonant especially is a paradigm-shifting innovation because vowels had already been added to several of the region’s syllabic scripts. They fit the voice-centric model of syllabic scripts well; vowels are a kind of pure vocalization.***

*** I admit that I have very little technical knowledge of linguistics and I’m being completely amateurish in my description of the qualities of the various sounds of language.

But consonants can’t really be pronounced at all. They require abstracting from the sound of a word or syllable to a component that can only be understood in writing. Far from returning to voice-centric writing, McLuhan considers the technical linguistic term of the phoneme a further abstraction than the consonant-vowel alphabets because it isolates individual sounds of languages with a specialized technical alphabet.

As I wrote this post, I thought of writing a book about
Derrida's intellectual influence from Heidegger: an Anti-
Semitic would-be sage whose greatest successor was a
Sephardic Jewish master of abstraction. A story of
philosophical gravity transformed into a nerdy joy. I
probably won't have the time or dedication until I'm
extremely old.

It reminds me of another common bugbear that is often made a whipping boy by philosophers hostile to European thought. But in this case, I actually think there’s much productive to learn through reading him. Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (and Speech and Phenomena, but I won’t speak to that book because I haven’t actually read it) discusses how an experience of language that centres on voice and speaking privileges tactility and presence, while a language that requires its script for fundamental understanding prioritizes abstraction.

I always read an undertone of judgment in this transition from a voice to script centricity in Mediterranean languages when I’ve gone through Of Grammatology, as if moving away from the primacy of voice cost us a wonderful element of immediacy and presence in our relationship with our language, words, and expression. Of course, that contrasts with the major themes of Derrida’s early work, his multifaceted critique of presence as it occurs throughout Western metaphysics and life. 

But what impresses me about how McLuhan describes these serious phase transitions, they allow no romanticism in their discussions of either the voice or the script focus in our encounters with language. Often, philosophical discussions of such categorical epistemic shifts grieve for the old model as a lost authenticity or innocence that can never be restored. 

Martin Heidegger certainly talked that way about human life and thought before the advent of abstraction. I find McLuhan quite commendable in simply describing the shift in cultural character so neutrally, as if he is simply describing different ways of encountering the world, each with its benefits and drawbacks. In fact, I think that’s exactly what he’s doing. Excellent.

More True Than Truth, Research Time, 05/01/2015

I decided at the end of last semester at Sheridan College’s Communications post-grad program, that boning up on some media theory would help build my abilities in my new field. The program is very good at teaching the details and techniques of communications in today’s media environment, but I still see some gaps in exploring the details of why those techniques are effective and probing the limits of their effectiveness. 

So I whipped out a book from my shelf that I had ordered a year or so ago, with a vague feeling that I’d need it eventually: The Laws of Media by Marshall McLuhan and his son Eric (although Eric’s role as a ghostwriter for his father, and the book’s publication well after the elder McLuhan’s death is a sign that its author is mostly Eric). 

How we conceive of the world changes
the world itself.

The book starts with very foundational investigations that explore how our cultural presuppositions about the nature of space and expression condition how we experience and think. The central topic in these sections is exploring the differences between how the ancient Greeks conceived of and experienced the world, and how we do. It’s particularly interesting to me, as someone who’s studied a lot of Western philosophy over the last decade and change. 

In my time working as a philosophy teacher, I developed a lot of gripes about the way philosophy was typically taught in universities. Most of my gripes applied to the introductory levels. These should be the most important courses in an entire program, because it’s the first opportunity to sink your disciplinary hooks into new students and attract majors from among the general crowd. 

But because none of the students were all that practiced in reading, discussing, and writing about philosophy (as you’d expect of an introductory class), the material was often simplified to such a degree that it became either boring, irrelevant, or nonsensical. What especially bugged me was the simple way that intro courses typically handled ancient Greek thought.

It wasn’t that the central questions of philosophy, broadly conceived (What is God? What is the good? What is the nature of being?) are all that different. But there are radical differences in the presuppositions and the approaches that we and the ancient Greeks take to those questions. One that has particular relevance for the philosophical issues inherent to a Communications program is the ancient Greek conception of truth and what it means to speak truth.

The key term is logos. McLuhan describes the full connotations of this word for the ancient Greek mind, and it’s a fascinating concept. Forget its contemporary meaning as the root of our words for logic and the scientific disciplines (the various -ologies). 

Someone who speaks logos is literally speaking being. He isn’t just making a claim that he supposes is true, or makes a claim as part of advocating its truth. He isn’t pronouncing his own authority on what is true. To speak logos is literally to become a conduit that expresses existence itself. Logos is a speech act that makes what you say true. 

We don’t really have a concept for this anymore. The closest analogy I can think of in my fairly immediate reaction is the concept of prophecy in Jewish and Muslim theology. Their central presupposition is that prophecy doesn’t happen anymore, and that it was pretty rare to begin with, there being only a handful of genuine prophets over several thousand years. 

I've met many Analytic philosophers
who dismiss all European philosophy
because they consider Heidegger an
obscurantist. But he really did write in
a purposely obscure way, because he
wanted to restore philosophy to be a
discipline of sages, as it was in
ancient Greece.

But sages were everywhere in ancient Greece, and the ones we remember today, we call the pre-Socratic philosophers: Thales, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, Pythagoras, Philolaus, Empedocles, Leucippus, Democritus, and many others. We’re often taught their philosophies as if they were advancing arguments and giving reasons, but this doesn’t accurately reflect how they and their society thought of their work.

Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were the first to conceive of philosophy, the vocation of devotion to wisdom, as making claims, giving reasons for them, and developing techniques to move from one reason to another and ground a reason as such. Martin Heidegger called this the beginning of true philosophy’s decline precisely because it departed from the vocation of sages.

Parmenides writes:
Χρὴ τὸ λέγειν τε νοεῖν τ' ἐὸν ἔμμεναι· ἔστι γὰρ εἶναι, “Chré to legein te noein t’éon emmenai esti gar einai.” It needs must be that what can be spoken of and thought of is. Legein, in its infinitive form logos, is the speech that, in the act of speaking it, must be. 

Philosopher-sages (remember, the original model of philosophy that predates Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the typical Big Three) wrote no arguments, only poems and verses. Their texts were of the same form as epic poetry, performative recitations that expressed the nature of being, which were intended to be memorized in the immediacy of listening itself.

The original model of a philosopher was a prophet of nature.

Our Lord of the Infinitely Revised, A History Boy, 03/01/2015

I had this job last year.

Now that 2015 has seriously started, I’ve begun work revising the chapter of Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity that needs the most work of all (not counting the new introduction, which will start from scratch, or rather blank). Chapter five reunites the concept of autopoiesis (the only kind of body that can literally generate itself) from its foundational role in systems theory with its interpretation as conativity from the cybernetics / cognitive science / philosophy of mind tradition to form the essential core of an ecological conception of subjectivity.

Confused yet? Good. I just summarized a 14,000 word chapter in a single sentence. Of course it’s not going to be easy. When I worked full-time in the university sector, I could always tell that a colleague was going to bug me when he (and it was always he) would say that any complicated idea can be explained in a single sentence. No, the reason I need more than one sentence to explain an idea precisely is because it’s complicated.

One moment of bitterness about the academically closed-minded taken care of, chapter five did need the most work. Really, it’s received the most work already of any chapter in EEFH. 

(§5, the prototype)

The ideas in the chapter began as my master’s thesis, which explored the concept of autopoiesis in theories of mind in analytic philosophy as enactive or embodied. That investigation convinced me that the feedback loop, the essential movement of autopoietic processes, is the foundation of self-consciousness and any kind of subjectivity at all.

(§5, Draft I) 

I started writing the original draft of chapter five of my doctoral dissertation over Xmas of 2010. I tried from then until February 2011 for about 7000 words to connect this theory of subjectivity that I had developed to my chapters on environmental moral thinking and the core concepts of my ecological philosophy. Success was limited. It was basically a condensed version of my old thesis. I wasn’t nearly done, and I wasn’t nearly close to figuring out this connection.

While I was on vacation to my mother’s home in St. John’s, my laptop’s hard drive died and I lost the entire chapter. Every other chapter, already completed, was backed up on a small flash drive. This was actually quite a blessing, as my draft was terrible and deserved to disappear on a fried hard drive disk. 

Jerry Fodor's writing incensed me from
my first encounter, but I wasn't able to
say precisely why until I watched this
dialogue he had with scientist Elliott
Sober in reaction to Fodor's book on the
theory of natural selection. Fodor is the
most skilled craftsman of straw man
arguments in philosophy today. And no
one called him on it until 2010.

(§5, Draft II)

So I wrote a new chapter five in a hurry that combined a few core ideas from my old thesis with a polemic about Jerry Fodor’s compositional theory of mind from a paper I had written for one of my courses at McMaster. My supervisor quickly informed me that most of what I’d written were blind alleys, or diversions so deep into philosophy of mind and cognitive science debates that they were, at the most charitable, tangents distracting from the project’s major plot.

(§5, Draft III) 

Realizing that I actually had quite a lot of time left in my program to write my dissertation, I took my time with the next version of this chapter. By this point, my continuing research had given me a clear idea of where the following two chapters would take the inquiry, so I had a clear destination for the end of chapter five. With a clear endpoint, I had a clear focus. 

The chapter had four movements. First, I’d introduce the concept of the body self-generated from feedback loops in a historical context, describing how it was first developed in the cybernetics community. Then I’d discuss how it was treated in systems theory and my critiques of this conception.* Third, I’d introduce the concept in Arne Næss’ ecological philosophy of the self as a place and the critiques this idea received as being ridiculous.

* Reading I did after I completed the degree made me realize that my critique wasn’t entirely fair. I was criticizing an interpretation of the closure of a body made of feedback loops as being absolute, because it was based on a concept of affect that saw it as incapable of carrying information or meaning. Both I and some major figures in systems theory actually understand affects as able to do pretty much everything we want physical interactions to do. So this aspect of the chapter is getting seriously revised.

The chapter ended, and it will still end, with my interpretation of the autopoiesis concept showing how conceiving the self as a place actually makes sense. It just means you have to understand every body that exists, not as an isolated figure, but as a dynamic field of interactions with surrounding fields. 

What are confusing ideas and apparent contradictions when you conceive of physical bodies as discrete and stable entities make perfect sense when you think of existence as processual. 

(§5, Draft IV)

Really, all that’s left is the editing. A chapter that went through that many different approaches and revisions will still have a lot of detritus from all that change hanging off it. When I look at the manuscript, it really is true. Even aside from softening the tone of my critique of systems theory concepts, I still have a lot of redundant sentences and vague formulations to trash. And I really did write in the passive voice a little too much for comfort back then.

Quality Public Relations Is Literally Being a Company’s Ethical Voice, Jamming, 02/01/2015

Today, we'll learn about my philosophical Jerk Store
Moment.

I often have Jerk Store moments. You know those. When George Costanza came up with what he thought was the perfect thing to say in a conversation long after the conversation is over. I’m sometimes like this with classes that I take. When I was in my undergrad, I took a third-level course on Aristotle in my second year, which focussed on his concepts of technology, purpose, and human nature. But I didn’t figure out the concept Dr. Scott was trying to communicate until I took his second-level course on philosophy of technology more generally the following year.

The same thing happened to me with an idea I had the other day about a discussion that came up in the early days of the PR ethics course of my Communications program. We were talking about the listeriosis contamination of a major Maple Leaf Foods plant, which my program’s coordinator thought was a solid example of counter-intuitively effective approach to public relations. 

The key concept presented to understand the situation was the difference between the company’s actual public response and the advice of its legal advisors. The class itself was designed to teach us the skills of handling a public apology on behalf of your employer. Because while situations of the scale and intensity of the Maple Leaf scandal will probably never happen to us, how to handle the public image of a product recall or similar controversy will be important.

Yet I thought of a more instructive lesson to take from this narrative. And it only came three months after the fact. 

I was thinking about the narrative’s contrast between the Maple Leaf CEO and PR department with its legal advisors. We can always learn positive things about ourselves from our contrast with lawyers.* The law is, in an ethical sense, about settling responsibility and arranging the terms to exercise responsibilities. And the exercise of responsibilities usually comes with a price tag. So the job of a company’s lawyers is to avoid or at least minimize the costs of exercising responsibility. A company lawyer’s purpose is to shift blame and elide responsibility.

* Unless you’re a lawyer. My condolences.

But a public relations person is simply supposed to be the voice of the company itself, literally the corporate communicator. Now, this does mean that a company’s public relations person can end up doing very unethical or slimy things in the course of his job. Corporate culture institutionally tends to maximize profit and profitability in the short term. It’s easy to go along with this flow, instrumentalizing employees in the context of their corporate role alone, and not trying to create a genuine corporate community, or integrate the corporation with the communities that it affects.

We’re moving away from this tendency now. A lot of what I’ve learned about how many of the best companies run today has shown me that they put a lot of emphasis on community-building inside and out. At least this is true for the smaller, more regional businesses, newer corporations, and companies outside sectors that openly involve ethically problematic practices like monoculture mass agriculture, pesticides, mining and oil extraction, or high finance. But hey, progress.

A public relations person need only express the company’s wishes clearly and accurately. It helps to do so in a positive light, but this is a weirdly human aspect of what’s typically thought of as a corporate gig. As individuals, we always try to present ourselves in the best possible light, and no one really considers this in itself an immoral thing as long as we aren’t being hypocritical or covering up a lie or misdeed.

So when we teach public relations practitioners the ethical principles of the profession, all we really need to do is behave just as we do as individuals. Institutionally, a PR person is the vocal organ of a network entity that should behave with transparency, honesty, and fairness externally and internally, presenting that network entity in the best way possible without duplicity. If you're part of a company that can present itself as such without lying, then you won't have to worry about whether your actions are unethical.

The ethics of public relations is essentially the ethics of being a decent individual at a corporate level of existence. Just don’t be a dick.