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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Becoming Memorable by Becoming a Landmark, Research Time, 09/03/2018

There are moments, when you’re researching a big project, when a few key ideas all come together. I’m having a moment like that now, looking back at some notes on an essay about Félix Guattari.

Stephen Zepke wrote it – he’s a scholar of Guattari and Gilles Deleuze’s work, who focusses a lot on their aesthetic theories. It has a mouthful of a title – “From Aesthetic Autonomy to Autonomist Aesthetics: Art and Life in Guattari.” Despite that in-your-face blast of technical vocab, it’s actually quite an interesting study.

Arinze Stanley with my favourite of his drawings.

Zepke talks about how Guattari explored art as a revolutionary process. Start from one key fact – if you want to start a successful art movement, you have to run against the mainstream.

You could bring up lots of examples from history. But most of the historical examples I know are Western, and in the spirit of my iconoclastic colleagues, I want to talk about a more global example.

Contemporary installation art, over the last few decades, has been dominated by the overtly shocking – blasphemous, stomach-churning, deranged. Photographs like Andres Serrano’s Piss-Christ, or installations like Damien Hirst’s famous The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.

Back in the 20th century, this kind of provocative sublime surreality was a sufficient shock to mainstream European visual and installation art that it ushered in a whole new way of thinking about what art was acceptable. It reminded popular culture that art is supposed to push boundaries.

As Zepke follows Guattari – art is a deterritorializing medium. The most remarkable art movements are the ones that forcefully reject the norms of an ossified mainstream. They create a whole new set of common principles for thinking about what art is.

Yes, it's a zebra in formaldehyde. But is it art?

The conceptual and social territory of – in the most extreme cases like Hirst, Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Kenneth Anger, or Henri Matisse – what counts as art at all. In most cases of historically remarkable art, you’ve at least helped create an exciting new movement that sweeps away a redundant mainstream. Or at least gives people the impetus to see how redundant and stale the mainstream had become under their noses.

Here’s the wider lesson for any social revolution. Every deterritorializalization ends up reterritorializing. It’s a fundamental aspect of life. Every departure has to set itself down somewhere, unless it just wants to fly to pieces. Maybe you want to fly to pieces. But you don’t have to.

What was once a provocative new artistic movement becomes a staid, drab mainstream. In the example I’ve been talking about, the once-shocking sculptures and installations of the Young British Artists are now old hat. Damien Hirst was becoming a punchline before the last century was even finished. Now, his new work is dismissed as “a showroom for oligarchs.”

What do I contrast to the bizarre shock of surreal that’s Hirst limping aesthetic? Hyperrealism. Massive canvases of charcoal and pencil still-life drawings with more detail than a photograph.

Chiamonwu Joy and her remarkable images.

Hyperrealism is a global scene as well. Notable figures are Nigeria’s Arinze Stanley and Chiamonwu Joy, Germany’s Dirk Dzimirski, Canada’s Jeannette Sirois, and plenty of others. Hyperrealist images are more emotionally powerful than Hirst-ian provocations could ever be.

The best of them, of which I count Stanley, creates images of faces that tear you from your complacency – human drama rooted in the individuality of real people. An image of reality hand-crafted in such detail that the devotion to completed, perfected art impresses you almost as much as the faces that root you from your self-interested museum-goer’s detachment.

Don’t think hyperrealism developed purely in reaction to the decadent excess and greed of Hirst-ian installation art. I chose those two art movements because I’ve been looking into hyperrealism over the last six months or so. I’m late to the party, but that was only when I discovered Arinze’s work.

Hyperrealism is a global movement, and the artists who are part of it each have their own motivations and techniques. Deterritorialization – ripping a mainstream out of its prominence to pursue utterly different directions in creativity – isn’t about taking the “opposite” of that mainstream.

What would be the opposite of a cow suspended in formaldehyde? Does it even make sense to talk about opposites of artworks? No, only different artworks. If a cultural movement is influential enough to spawn a ton of mediocre imitators, then eventually some other movement will gather enough energy to blast the old corpse out of social prominence.

“You Control Information!” II: What Must Be Said, Research Time, 08/03/2018

Yesterday, I talked about what distinguishes dictatorship from authoritarian government. You can have authoritarian institutions in a democratic government, which I know can seem intuitively weird.

But I came of age through the W Bush Presidency, so I saw this paradox in full force. Elections continued, different old and new media companies warred on each other, congressional majorities were toppled.

One of the (many, many) reasons why Americans don't seem to
understand the complexity and mess of the world today is that
there has been no cultural reckoning with the most uncomfortable
fact of the years between the World Trade Centre attacks and
Hurricane Katrina. Literally millions of Americans were in a
patriotic frenzy of paranoia and fear. Media outlets that today
are dismissed as disloyal fake news, like CNN, were little more
than shills for the Iraq invasion 15 years ago.

At the same time, Bush’s government built massive federal police and surveillance apparatus of the Department of Homeland Security, invaded Iraq and committed massacres and war crimes there. President Bush the Elder began over-arming local police forces with surplus military vehicles and weapons.

So authoritarianism is more than dictatorship. Yet the two share so much in common. Trying to parse the differences that count can be confusing. And in today’s political climate, your opponents often exploit your confusion on some points to delegitimize everything you say. So let’s be careful.

Félix Guattari’s concepts from his philosophical inquiries into politics, communication, and political economy can help us here. It starts with how he developed his concept of semio-capitalism.

It's an annoying word, but it does describe an important current of the global economy today. Individual acts of communication are directly monetized. Because money can be made from acts of communication, we’re encouraged to communicate constantly.

As more information flows through our networks, it generates more capital for the companies that control those networks – the hardware like cables and servers, the software like social networking sites and messaging apps.

A lot of the capital communication generates remains pretty concentrated – compare the fortunes of Mark Zuckerberg or Microsoft to the income of even a pretty top-of-the-heap YouTube celebrity. But this media environment can be a very democratic field. If we understand democracy in its sense of (generally) productive social conflict and chaos.

As most of us know by now, radically anti-democratic forces have had remarkable political success by organizing through high-intensity, decentralized communication networks.

But their success was contingent – a very complicated history that required a lot of luck to unfold as it did. There were some elements in the movement – like the anarchist ideologies of many Anonymous hackers – that could have harnessed themselves in radical democratic fashion.

One depressing story of the 21st century West has been
the increasing nihilism and hopelessness of so many
people. It's a dangerous temptation to give in, and I know
how close I've come, as well as how deep I could have
fallen if it weren't for a few contingent factors. Some
people messaged me at what turned out to be pivotal
times in my life, and some didn't. I held on to my
skepticism of some ideas a little longer than I could
have. If everyone can fall, then everyone can be saved.

Instead, we’re stuck with the irony of the most successful scale-free networked political movement putting its weight behind an authoritarian state.

What makes it ironic? Return to the nature of communication in dictatorial governments. In straight-up dictatorships, as I said yesterday, the directives of the Leader are translated into orders for the relevant institutions, corporations, and citizens. The primary mode of communication is the order.

That’s what brings straightforward dictatorship into the same category as the more insidious form of authoritarian government that can happen in democratically-run institutions. Police and military institutions also issue directives that are to be followed as orders.

The only difference between a dictator and an authoritarian institution is that the orders of a dictator come from a person, and the orders of an institution come from an office. Legitimacy of directives in dictatorship depends on who speaks. Legitimacy of directives in authoritarian institutions depends on what speaks.

Authoritarian communication is inherently about transmitting and following orders. What are the conditions for this kind of political communication to work properly? The most important one is clarity. The directives need to be understood comprehensively, never misunderstood, if the authority of a dictator or an authoritarian institution is to be followed properly.

But the communication networks of semio-capital – of monetized, scale-free, decentralized networks – are purposely chaotic. Control, uniformity, and clarity of messages is damn near impossible in such an environment. Just ask any corporate public relations worker whose branded promotional tweets provoke a firestorm of insults, jokes, and brand failures.

The problems of modern capitalism – at heart – flow from the problems of oligarchy. The concentration of wealth, material power, riches, property of all sorts, and prestige among a small group of people, while the vast majority have to struggle and suffer for ever-more-meagre earnings.

But the capitalization of communications did result in an inoculation against state or corporate authoritarianism. In the productive chaos of modern communication networks, people themselves produce so much noise around authorities’ directives that clarity – and so following orders – becomes practically impossible.

“You Control Information!” I: About Dictatorship, Research Time, 07/03/2018

We in the West are having a moment. It’s not an unusual moment, although we like to think it is. Democracy is a strange form of government. It’s more effective at a lot of what governments are for than dictatorships have traditionally been. But we shouldn’t take democracy for granted.

Donald Trump being the President of the United States has been quite a shock to a lot of people that way. It was a shock to me. I was a teenager when the World Trade Centre was destroyed and the George W Bush Administration went on a media blitz of paranoid jingo to amp public support to invade and occupy Iraq.

I feel like Trump's desire to be President-for-Life is so he can be
at the centre of a national personality cult. It's how he's always
thought of himself.

But even at the height of America’s popular patriotic panic attack,* W didn’t promote the greasy cult of personality that Trump has. Leftish and liberal people like I was at the time called Bush dictatorial at protests and out drinking with our friends.

* I like to date this period in American culture from about Mission Accomplished to You’re Doing a Great Job, Brownie.

His expansion of the federal government’s police forces were horrifyingly authoritarian. Folks like me were pretty pissed that he’d won re-election. But we knew he’d retire in 2009. Under Trump, that reliability is no longer a certainty. Very unlikely, because you’d need a constitutional amendment for it.** But he jokes about it. As the President.

** I hope we never end up seriously saying “Maybe.”

The crowd laughs.

What does dictatorship actually amount to? We know one when we see one. Take the really obvious examples – Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, Augusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad.

What are some common features? Literal one-man rule – the leader’s directions give legislatures, security and military forces, bureaucrats their orders. That leader sits at the top of an organization that controls all other state institutions (and often large corporate institutions). Sometimes it’s a political party – the Bolsheviks, the National Socialists, the Ba’ath. Sometimes it’s the military.

And the cult of personality, the identification of the leader with the people themselves. The leader as the expression of the unified will of the people – his every action and word inspires loyalty and joy in everyone.

The sun around which turn the people of Korea.

It doesn’t matter that this is never actually true. But it’s implied and enforced that this should be – every time you get the chance to say so – what you say about the leader. No exceptions.

There are some weird cases. I think of the Kim dynasty in North Korea. Institutionally, they function like a model dictator – absolutist political party leader promoted by a cult of personality. The cultural imagery surrounding the Kims reflects that of the emperors, who ruled Korea up to the Japanese occupation, just over 100 years ago.

But dictatorship is one species of authoritarianism. Remember all those surveillance and police institutions that became so much more powerful during the George W Bush years? Those institutions are authoritarian infrastructure that can – and do too often – exist alongside smoothly-running civic democratic government.

You know a dictator when you see one. But you might not always know authoritarianism when you see it. Here’s one way of telling the differences – and I do mean differences.

Look at the flow of information.

This prologue turned out to be too long. So I’ll get to the actual argument tomorrow.

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

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

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

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

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

Mirror-skull.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tony on Gil II: How Politics Begins in Thought, Jamming, 05/03/2018

As the principle has been received popularly these days, it’s been kind of a shit show. A disaster. The centrepiece of contemporary reactionary conspiracy. And at the centre of some serious anti-Semitism too.

Yet it is actually true that radical social and political change begins with culture, with how people understand themselves. That includes what resources they have available to understand themselves, whether or not they use them.

Here’s how Antonio Negri put it in his essay on the thought of Félix Guattari – The best way to deal with the death of Man is to celebrate the self-creation of people.

Is nihilism the only response to the impossibility of universal
knowledge?

So what does that actually mean? Let’s unpack it.

The “death of Man” is the old way of thinking about the birth of what’s called postmodernism. There was once, so the story goes, a universal concept of the human that everyone could believe in – the living embodiment of universal reason itself.

Faith in the Man of European culture as the highest yet expression of universal reason peaked in the 19th century, as this image of the universal Man justified the global imperialist occupations of the time. But it was also the heart of Westerners’ conceptions of themselves as individuals and as a culture. Even subordinated people like women, the poor, or well-off members of racialized groups believed it.

But the scientific underpinnings of this self-image – Western Man as the most advanced organism on Earth – began to slip as the implications of the truth of evolution began to be understood in popular culture.

Life developed contingently, and reason was fundamentally instrumental, if not a spandrel. The Western image of Man was teetering from his superiority’s justification. Not only was there no purpose in Nature itself, but such a purpose wasn’t the dominion of Earth and all other peoples.

Frankly, it's easier to think of yourselves as the highest achievement
of the human race when you have everyone who's different from
you treating you like a divinely appointed king.

I’m not going to get into the details of what effects came immediately from this crisis of faith in Western Man. We’ll be here for the length of a thousand* dissertations. I want to get to the last few decades, when the broadly existentialist tradition that flowed from this idea finally started getting creative about how to handle it.

* At least, just to get a vague sense of all that was going on.

Think about the contemporary creative approach in terms of knowledge. What kind of systems of thought and investigations could you use to achieve genuinely universal knowledge?

Here’s the kind that was the only sensible answer to that question during the heyday of that concept of Man – a single, simple field of knowledge that encompassed all the variety of Earth. Lay aside Denis Diderot’s actual thinking, and consider the popular image of the original Encyclopedia – all the facts and truths of the world in a single compendium. One house of knowledge.

If you lose the possibility of that achievement, then you lose your bearings. Compared to that one all-enfolding universality, everything else falls short. I mean, of course it would. Less than perfection can never be perfect. By that standard, no human knowledge can measure up. True may as well be false, good and evil are meaningless, there’s no right or wrong.

But only the fool says in his heart that because there is no universal, there is no truth or good. It only means that there’s no universal, truth, or good.

Jomo Kenyatta in a gathering of Mau Mau liberation fighters. What
was good for Kenya wasn't good for Britain, living demonstration
that not every approach to the world can harmonize together.

This doesn’t reduce to any of this “Good for me and Good for you” relativism that you hear from self-entitled 18-year-old dudes taking their first philosophy course and trying to get the prof to justify their dickishness. At least, that’s where I always heard it.

See, that relativism shut people up in themselves – in their own subjectivity – much deeper than they really are. It ignores the fact that we all share a material world. So our different conceptions of truth and good – as individuals, as cultures, as mass media empires – will overlap and influence each other.

We live in society, in relationships with each other. We all figure out similar problems in the ordinary and profound parts of our lives. We communicate.

We harmonize a whole bunch of different approaches to the world. They overlap and reciprocate ideas, among so many other ways of influencing each other. The best way to organize how to get as many approaches to knowledge as possible working together is so that everyone who has something productive (or at least potentially productive) can contribute to the overall project for knowledge and truth.

The only approaches not permitted are those that denigrate and devalue other approaches. It smacks too much of the false arrogance that there’s one universal truth, and that of course there’s one Man that expresses it.

Tony on Gil I: Anticipating Conspiracies, Research Time, 02/03/2018

Here's a nerdy thing I’m enjoying about all the research of Utopias – a bunch of the key authors knew each other personally and wrote about each other’s work. So when I come across an essay that Antonio Negri wrote about the ideas of Gilles Deleuze, it’s going to have a little more significance than any other category.

Just like the Isabelle Stengers essay I was writing about yesterday, only I’ve read more of Negri’s work so far than Stengers’.

If Deleuze and Guattari had become as
prominent in American humanities
curriculums as the Frankfurt School had,
would Andrew Breitbart even have done
any of the radical anti-progressive activism
that defined his life? A butterfly flaps its
wings and a reactionary movement forms.

So Antonio Negri wrote an essay about Gilles Deleuze. It ranges across their political philosophy in two ways. It discusses Deleuze and Guattari’s own concepts, but it also describes some of the historical factors of how they were received.

In the case Negri discusses, America, it’s how they weren’t received. Because Deleuze and Guattari’s contribution to progressive political philosophy was, for a long time, squeezed out of public prominence by the Frankfurt School.

Historically, it was a matter of contingent historical connection. The Frankfurt School thinkers who survived the Second World War settled in the United States – Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse. Their writing was already prominent enough that they could land professors’ positions at the major elite schools.

Not everybody could do it, but the ones who didn’t seemed to be more effective in inspiring revolution against injustice.

Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse ended up locking down intellectual influence on the university-educated progressive left in America. Their books were the basis of critical political studies in the United States for the rest of the 20th century.

This fact is at the centre of why “cultural marxism” has taken hold as a conspiratorial concept in reactionary circles these days. It began from Andrew Breitbart’s misreading of Adorno – he saw the philosopher’s message as saying that social and political change begins from changing the culture, not from the top-down with state control institutions.

As a result, Breitbart shaped his extremist libertarian media outlet with an ambitious mission – change the culture through media activism. His goal was to counter the influence of Adorno and the Frankfurt School. Brietbart and his followers saw these writers as the communist Jews* who spent decades spreading ideologies of state socialism – cultural marxism – into the young generations through their books and the humanities professors who taught them.

* Because this is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, just so we have that clear. The Elders of Zion are now a bunch of elderly university professors.

Another irony is that Negri, Guattari, Deleuze, and
many others who built the philosophy of radical
democracy like Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe,
and Bifo Berardi were all actual political activists.

Breitbart has, by all accounts, been incredibly successful. His brand of frothing anti-communism consumes conservative circles today. They make monsters out of people who support ordinary welfare state policies like government-provided health insurance.

Negri wrote this essay before Breitbart Media’s brand of extremism – rabidly anti-socialist white nationalism – took hold of American culture. But he provides an ironic point through his spin on the Frankfurt School. Even as Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse identified the only route to change society in cultural change, they also considered liberatory cultural change impossible.

Theo, Max, and Herb analyzed all the vectors of cultural repression – economic, political, psychological, sociological – and found it omnipresent. It’s actually impossible to find any breathing room in cultural repression to start a positive movement that will actually overthrow the repressive relationships themselves.

The most a real revolution in state or economic power can achieve is changing the character of repression. As Marcuse put it, capitalist vectors of repression reduce people to a single dimension of activity and self-conception. It becomes impossible to conceive of any positive alternative.

So all you can do in the face of a capitalist framework of life is critique and question. Negri identifies the quietism and hopelessness at the heart of Frankfurt School philosophy. Writing more than a decade ago, Negri finds an irony for me – Breitbart didn’t realize that, for all the critique and questions, the writers who became his Elders of Zion already considered him the winner.

More next week.