Tabula Rasa

The Girl from Ipanema Takes On Health-Care Reform

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 17:59:01 GMT

Is there any music more democratically egalitarian than elevator music? It seems to me that any other form of music privileges some at the expense of others--classical music, rap, rock'n'roll, even pop or "top 40," each of these has its demographic, its fan base, to whom it will appeal. The playing of such musics in any space will, then, bring more enjoyment to this demographic, while bringing no pleasure--or even displeasure--to the rest. It would seem that the only way to be genuinely egalitarian, then, would be to play elevator music: the only genre of music that has no demographic, that offends everyone, that is guaranteed to bring no more pleasure to your neighbor than it does to you.

In How to Read Lacan, Slavoj Zizek writes:

Lacan shares with Nietzsche and Freud the idea that justice as equality is founded on envy: our envy of the other who has what we do not have, and who enjoys it. The demand for justice is ultimately the demand that the excessive enjoyment of the other should be curtailed, so that everyone's access to enjoyment will be equal. The necessary outcome of this demand, of course, is asceticism: since it is not possible to impose equal enjoyment, what one can impose is an equally shared prohibition. (37)

Zizek goes on to make a point about our "permissive" postmodern societies, and the forced enjoyment of substances deprived of their true danger--decaf coffee, sugar-free desserts, etc. But this leaves the original point standing: that "justice" is only realizeable under current conditions through the universal prohibition on enjoyment--In other words, that the only truly egalitarian situation would be one in which nobody gets any enjoyment.

...But would this not make our current political system the "best of all possible worlds" after all? The two positions available in American politics today, after all, are partisan deadlock, and bipartisan compromise. Either everyone insists on getting what they want, and nobody gets anything; or everyone makes compromises, and we all get what nobody really wants...Is this not the truest democracy available to us, then? The inverse of Habermas's "consensus politics," this dissensus politics would seem to tuly make all equal in their utter disappointment...

The problem, it seems to me, comes in the way we have implicitly accepted the idea of politics as consumption: just as the passive listener "consumes" the elevator music, we all too often conceive of the political subject as a passive subject, "consuming" politics. And as long as such is the case, then the "real-world compromises" that comprise representational democratic politics are indeed about as "egalitarian" as we're going to get. But we must not lose sight of the fact that this is an illusory egalitarianism, presented as a spectacle for the passive spectator's consumption. To appropriate a phrase, "Politics is not a banana." Democracy is not simply a matter of walking through a salad bar, saying "yes" and "no" to the various, presented options.

Off the Beaten Track

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 08:10:32 GMT

A philosophy comic for you--though I'm afraid the joke is rather Heideggerian, sorry...

Inbetween Days

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 22:30:27 GMT

Goth turned 30 this week--a strange position indeed for the strange subculture. To mark the occasion, I thought I'd try to put down some thoughts I've been having over the last few years about the philosophical significance of goth, a subculture that has been a constant companion over the years of my own philosophical development.

Let us note, to begin with, the major themes that seem to predominate in "goth": death, alienation, romanticism. Obviously, there are certain philosophical contexts for goth already: namely existentialism, the philosophy that seems to dominate the goth subculture. I think that there is more at stake here, however, than the cliche "search for authenticity." Or, that is to say, if all subculture (and, a fortiori, all rock music) is concerned with authenticity, I think that the gothic obsession with death can pull aside a veil and show us some of the deeper issues at stake in this concern. Allow me a little detour through the philosophical context of death, then, before we return to gothic existentialism...

Death.

In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel pauses at one point to consider the role of the family. Love, as a feeling, is too general--and too natural/immediate--to really explain the family, and education would seem to make the family merely a subordinate moment to the state. However, as a natural institution which also founds society, the family seems to mark the boundary between nature and culture; that is, the family serves to separate human life as something significant and meaningful out of nature. How does it do this? Hegel's answer is surprising: by caring for the dead:

Blood-relationship supplements, then, the abstract natural process by adding to it the movement of consciousness, interrupting the work of Nature and rescuing the blood-relation from destruction; or better, because destruction is necessary, the passage of the blood-relation into mere being, it takes on itself the act of destruction. . . . The Family keeps away from the dead this dishonoring of him by unconscious appetites and abstract entities, and puts its own action in their place, and weds the blood-relation to the bosom of the earth, to the elemental imperishable individuality. The Family thereby makes him a member of a community which prevails over and holds under control the forces of particular material elements and the lower forms of life, which sought to unloose themselves against him and destroy him. (Para. 452)

But of course, playing one's role in the family is all about other people dying; thus the importance within the concept of family of heritage, older relatives, previous generations, etc. My death, by contrast, is what individuates me--it is my spearation from my family, even if this then allows the family to do its job and care for my memory, etc. To think about my own death is to think about, not simply being an organic part of the family whole, but about being an individual--someone who has left the family.

There is, of course, another key moment--especially in the modern world--for thinking about my emergence and separation from my family: adolescence. "Teen rebellion" is only the latest form of a moment in the dialectic of the production of adult subjects: in each case, the child, fully dependent, has no being apart from the family whole. The adolescent moment is a sort of Nietszchean "flying over all nets," in which I attempt to establish myself as a completely autonomous individual; thus we think of teenagers as irresponsible (we cannot depend upon them, because they attempt to throw off all relationships of dependence), destructive (absolute subjects, standing over all objects), etc. Eventually--we hope--the teenager learns that he or she cannot function cut off from everyone and everything (better: that he or she is nothing without relationships), and comes to reconnect him- or herself with the community as a "responsible adult." But the point is that there is, philosophically, a natural connection between death and adolescence in the dialectic of family life. Jay Bernstein--in an off-the-cuff answer, but still much more eloquently than I can manage--explains it like this:

I think of the issue of facing death that Heidegger talks about as something that happens when you're 16 years old. [Laughter] No, no, I mean this--it's a serious moment when you're 16 years old, because what you're actually thinking about is how you separate from your family. The reason why every 16 year old is a suicide is because every 16 year old has to imagine their life apart from their place in their family. So of course they become obsessed with their death. And that's necessary for part of taking responsibility for one's own life, but then one realizes that one's own life is not one's own life, but is the life one shares with others, and it's your care for them and so-on and so-forth. So I just think Heidegger got caught in a kind of adolescent moment. (Lectures on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, 2/28/07)

It is this "adolescent moment" that I really want to stress; the obsession with death, the quest for authenticity and individuality, and the feeling of alienation all make sense when linked to the place of adolescence and "teen rebellion" in modern life.

Adolescent Existentialism.

Rock music, of course, has long been linked with teen life and teen rebellion. And it is no mistake that most of us find goth in our teen years. In this sense, goth is the adolescent subculture par excellence; it is the philosophical crossing-point of all of the themes of teenage alienation and desperation. As teens, we want to establish ourselves as individuals, apart from the family. Those of us who feel most alienated by our social roles as adolescents, and by the available roles for individuals in "adult society," become obsessed with "flying over all the nets," maintaining ourselves as completely autonomous individuals. The natural philosophical expression of this desire is existentialism, as we find it in Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus. Is it any wonder that these are the philosophers of choice of the goth subculture? (Remember that the Cure's first single was "Killing An Arab," a song based on Camus's novel The Stranger...)

What I'm suggesting so far--though I realize it's a bit quick, and would need more lengthy explanation to back it up--is that goth emerges in a very natural way from the crossroads of postwar (and especially suburban) life and modern, industrial adolescence. That is, adolescence--the prolonged part of childhood, in which one feels like an adult but is still treated like a child--and the alienating aspects of suburban, postwar industrial society cross to create a sort of "perfect storm," out of which goth is an entirely understandable creation. It contains the rebellion of punk, but turned inward and spiritual as befits its more petty-bourgeois origins. It expresses the alienation of modern life, as felt most keenly by its most alienated and creative members--adolescents, especially the artistic, misfit-types. And it presents the comforts of belonging that come with any subculture, the idea of a free community of like-minded authentics. But like all quests for authenticity, this is essentially an adolescent expression of the desire for self-certainty.

Hence, as I said at the beginning, the very strange position for goth: that of turning 30.

30 is the new 16.

So what does it mean for the quinessential petty-bourgeois adolescent subculture to turn 30?

Two things to pay attention to, so that it doesn't seem like I'm simply playing with words. First, note that goth has an extraordinary longevity for a subculture; along with punk, it is one of the only subcultures to still exist--and, at least in places, in almost identical form--more than five years (let alone 30!) after its emergence. Think, for example, about how quickly music-centric subcultures like glam or rave faded; how little continuity there has been between successive incarnations of subculture groups like the greasers, tommy boys, or skinheads; and how other continuous subcultures like punk, hip-hop, and hipster have completely reinvented themselves with each new generation, leaving little continuity over time. Second, note that the goth subculture has yet continued to attract new members from successive generations--and so has remained "living"--without simultaneously pushing out previous generations. There are goths in the subculture today who have been so since 1979, just as there are goths today who were not yet born in 1979.

When I say that goth has turned 30, then, I don't simply mean that 30 years ago there was a subculture called "goth"; I mean that the subculture itself has lived to see its own 30th birthday, that it has grown and aged. There have been developments during that time--an almost constant influx of new influences, and the development of new "sub-subcultures" (vampire; romantigoth; graver; steampunk; etc.). But there is a constant core to the subculture, which now faces the strange position of being a 30-year-old adolescent.

But then, one might add, this may have been a strange position at one time, but surely not so much anymore? The 60s youth movements bandied about phrases like "Don't trust anyone over 30!" a mindset reflected in movies like Logan's Run. For them, 30 was the pont-of-no-return gateway to adulthood, conformity, participation in The System. But out of the cultural revolutions of the 60s and 70s something strange happened: the youth rebellion attitude, and the "hope I die before I get old" mentality have been incorporated into The System. Boltanski and Chiapello have traced the effects of the "artistic critique" of capitalism as it has been coopted by modern capitalism itself, and we can see on any number of levels the way The System has been changed by its incorporation of the rebels of the 60s and 70s. We can see some unexpected side-effects of this process, though: the phenomenon of "adult children," for example; the "slacker culture" that extends through generation X and into the children of the 90s grunge phenomenon. Where during the 60s and 70s the age of 30 might have marked the irreversable entry into adulthood, by the 80s--and then significantly moreso since then--it was already serving as a sort of "extended adolescence" (see a list of references right off the top of my Google search: here, here, here, and here).

Furthermore, modern culture is still about alienation. And capitalism may have a "New Spirit," but it is still as much as ever about the Cult of the Individual. And so if goth emerged from the "perfect storm" of the last gasp of 70s rebellion, it yet also marks the beginning of extended adolescence, continued alienation, and an ongoing quest for authenticity. Goth subculture, to me, is the location of a question: What does it mean to be an individual without moral compromise in today's world? It is the lived relationship to a certain condition of existence: especially the alienated, petty-bougeois creative-type, who does not feel at home in The System, and does not want to turn away from that discomfort.

This is what it means, I think, to say that goth is now 30. And furthermore, this is what it means to me to be 30 and goth. It is an extended adolescence, an expression of alienation, and the lived expression of all of the questions that come with it.

Like everything on this journal, this is all too quick and right off the top of my head. But these ideas have been kicking around in my head for a while, now, and I'm keen to finally get some form of them out onto the page, and maybe get to working them over. If you've read this far, then, thank you! And please, leave me your $0.02, so that we can continue the conversation...

One last note, speaking of goth: A reminder that I've been doing a comic strip for Morbid Outlook called "Cemetery Polka," and strip #4 should go up online later this month...!

I'm So Bored with the U.S.A.

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 21:36:28 GMT

Now we say that the function of a [kind of thing]--of a harpist, for instance--is the same in kind as the function of an excellent individual of the kind--of an excellent harpist, for instance. And the same is true without qualification in every case, if we add to the function the superior achievement in accord with the virtue; for the function of the harpist is to play the harp, and the function of the good harpist to play it well.
--Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1098a10

One hears the question a lot: Is the President doing a good job?

I recently overheard the following exhange in the faculty lounge at one of the schools where I teach:

Faculty Member #1: ...So what do you actually think of Obama?

Faculty Member #2: I think he's really naive.

FM1: Wha--naive?! The guy is a constitutional law scholar! What more can you ask for in a President's qualifications?!

FM2: Exactly, he's a law scholar; the guy doesn't know anything about economics!

These two gentlemen are, of course, arguing at cross purposes. But regardless of whether either or both of them is correct, it raises an interesting question: What is the President's job?

The Constitution is quite clear and concise on this matter:

Section 2 - Civilian Power over Military, Cabinet, Pardon Power, Appointments
The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.
He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.
The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.
Section 3 - State of the Union, Convening Congress
He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper; he shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers; he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States.

Essentially, the President is the head of the executive branch: s/he ensures that the Laws of the land are "faithfully executed," and is the chief commander of all military forces. S/he takes an oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States" to the best of his/her ability; Faculty Member #1 is correct in assuming that a distinguished constitutional law scholar is unlikely to be "naive" when it comes to this job.

But, for all that, is Faculty Member #2 any less correct? Letter of the law aside, do we not--by common practice, if not by oath or writ--treat the nurturing and protection of the national economy as the President's chief job? Is this not one of the main bases for most approval polls? Is this not one of the key areas of discussion during the election season, and one of the major factors influencing our votes? We in fact take this for granted to the extent that my question here may itself strike some of you as naive. But ask yourself: what is the legal basis for assuming that the President's job has anything to do with economic health?

These questions have come up for me because I've just recently finished reading Foucault's lectures from 1978/79 on the rise of neo-liberalism in Germany and the United States (collected in the misleadingly-titled The Birth of Biopolitics). Neo-liberalism essentially comes down to the idea of using the market as a limit/control on--and a privileged test site for--the power of the state. By opening more and more domains to "market forces," the power of the state is limited. And by using the market as a test of the government, the efficiency/inefficiency of the state can be guaged. The role of the government within neo-liberal ideology is then to act as a supporting framework for the economy, bringing a strong "free market" into being.

What's more interesting still is that ordoliberalism--a strong influence on neo-liberal theory--reverses the classic order of legitimation between government and economy: In a medieval town, for example, the market exchange was conducted under the legal authority of the government. The King basically guaranteed the legitimacy of the market. Within ordoliberal theory, however, this idea is reversed: so now the legitimacy of the government is derived from the market!

The problem was: given a state that does not exist, if I can put it like that, and given the task of giving existence to a state, how can you legitimize this state in advance as it were? How can you make it acceptable on the basis of an economic freedom which will both ensure its limitation and enable it to exist at the same time? This was the problem . . . which constitutes, if you like, the historically and politically first objective of neo-liberalism. (The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 102)

Inasmuch as we take this sort of reasoning for granted, it seems to be (as Foucault suggests at the end of his lectures) that we carry on any political debate in this country always-already within neo-liberal ideology. That is to say, neo-liberalism constitutes the basic field of available debate; within American politics one only takes up positions inside that field. Furthermore, however, unlike Europe--where liberalism, ordoliberalism, and neoliberalism have each been forced to emerge as critical movements against a radically different background of assumptions--in America neo-liberalism has simply further developed the liberalism upon which the country was founded:

That is to say, liberalism played a role in America during the period of the War of Independence somewhat analogous to the role is played in Germany in 1948: liberalism was appealed to as the founding and legitimizing principle of the state. The demand for liberalism founds the state rather than the state limiting itself through liberalism.
Second, for two centuries . . . liberalism has, of course, always been at the heart of all political debate in America. [. . .]
Finally, third, in relation to this permanent ground of liberal debate, non-liberalism--by which I mean interventionist policies, whether in the form of Keynesian style economics, planning, or economic and social programs--appeared, especially from the middle of the twentieth century, as something extraneous and threatening inasmuch as it involved both introducing objectives which could be described as socializing and also as laying the bases of an imperialist military state. . . . Hence the ambiguity, or what appears to be an ambiguity in American neo-liberalism, since it is brought into play and reactivated both by the right and the left. (218-9)

This also goes a long way toward explaining, I think, why Americans tend to think that liberals are leftists (and, occasionally, even that all leftists are liberals!).

All of this, for me at least, builds toward a larger question: What is the role of the state? At least inasmuch as American politics is taking place within a field bounded on all sides by liberalism (even albeit in its various forms), it is crucial to see that all parties are in agreement about most of the essential aspects of this answer. The so-called "big government vs. little government" dispute of the American right versus the American left; the debates over social welfare policies; the ongoing disputes over executive privilege, etc.; all of these are simply matters of working out the details to an answer given in advance: They are disagreements not about the role of the government, but its efficiency. It's a question I'm not going to get further into right now, but expect it to be lurking in the background of some of my posts over the next few months...

Being and Amok Time

Sun, 31 May 2009 03:51:53 GMT

In growing accustomed to the idea of events happening in an ever-continuing present, the reader loses track of the fact that they should develop according to the dictates of time. Losing consciousness of it, he forgets the problems which are at its base, that is, the existence of freedom, the possibility of planning, the necessity of carrying plans out, the sorrow that such planning entails, the responsibility that it implies, and, finally, the existence of an entire human community whose progressiveness is based on making plans.
--Umberto Eco, "The Myth of Superman"

There is a strange theme running through geek culture these days: predestination. It's a perennial theme in fantasy, of course--either a prophecy must be fulfilled (the current example: Harry Potter, whose entire life and seven book series is dominated by a prophecized encounter with running villain Voldemort), or divine intervention guides or influences the protagonist's actions and choices (as with the show Reaper--most notably in the recent season 2 finale, in which Sam's season-long plan is undone by the timely intervention of an angel). But it is a theme cropping up with increasing frequency in both the super-hero and sci-fi genres as well, in the form of the prequel (for lack of a better term--in short, stories designed to show the histories or "back stories" of iconic characters, to show how they got to be who they are, etc.). The recent trend arguably began with Marvel's Ultimate line (relaunches more than prequels, but already with some of the elements we'll be dealing with below), but was certainly carried forward by the early success of the Smallville television series, and more recently the show (tragically cancelled in its prime) Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. (More examples could of course be mentioned; for example, a prequel series in the true sense, Star Trek: Enterprise...)

As far as it goes, this is only moderately interesting: it's one, currently popular, theme among many (or at least several). But what is really striking is that all three major, geek, blockbuster movie releases this summer have been 'prequels': X-Men Origins: Wolverine; Star Trek; and now, finally, Terminator: Salvation.

Of course, you will object: of these three, only Wolverine was a true prequel. Star Trek was officially billed as a series relaunch, and Terminator: Savlation is officially billed as a sequel. Allow me, then, to say a few words about these most recent two--for in doing so, I'll also be able to get to the heart of what I think is at stake in this newly-popular geek theme. What follows, then, will be a (lengthy, sorry!) combination of multi-movie review and rumination on the philosophy of history...

Star Trek

By this point, geeks are well and truly familiar with series relaunches--from the many incarnations of Batman, several incarnations of Superman, etc. A "relaunch" is an odd mixture of predetermination and free action: certain (iconic) things must happen, some major plot-points are pre-set, but otherwise the series and characters are "free" to develop in their own unique ways. And so, for example, we know that Bruce Wayne's parents must die in Crime Alley; Bruce Wayne must vow revenge and become Batman; James Gordon must eventually become police commissioner; etc. But each series is allowed to develop on its own beyond these major plots--and so the Batman of Batman Begins (a relaunch presenting itself as a prequel...) can act independently of the Batman in, say, the Animated Series. They are considered separate worlds, universes, or dimensions.

Presenting Star Trek as a relaunch, then, we are initially presented with this same tension between new plot (action) and iconic plot-points (necessity). James T. Kirk must take over for Christopher Pike at some point as the captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise; Spock must become the chief science officer (while Pike is still captain...); Uhura must become the chief communications officer; Leonard McCoy must take over for Phillip Boyce as the chief medical officer at some point...etc. And so the story moves along, as if it were a new plot in a series relaunch. At the heart of this story, however, is a mystery: who are these angry, technologically-advanced, tattooed Romulans? They have of course come from the future (events in the future always determine the plot of prequels, mind you...), but their quarry, the man they've chased into the past, is a game-changing surprise: Leonard Nimoy, reprising his role as Mr. Spock. In other words, this movie is not happening in a world separate from the first series, it is happening in the past of that same series: it is a prequel. It is, however, a unique sort of a prequel (and therefore still a relaunch, of sorts), for reasons I'll get back into below...

Terminator: Salvation

Okay, the Terminator series has never been brilliant--the harder you look, in fact, the more cracks you see. (Why send only one terminator at a time to kill John? Why not send an army? Why not cover an HK in living tissue, or any number of kickass futuristic weapons?) But James Cameron's contributions to the franchise--despite their flashy, big-buget special effects--always made simplicity, and even restraint, their virtues, which allowed for at least some basic cleverness and credibility. The first two movies built one upon the other very nicely: T1 was about running away from death, and it was about learning to think about the future. T2 was still about running away from death, but it was also about turning to face death when something more important was at stake. Brilliant? No. But clever, and even occasionally thoughtful? Sure.

All the more disappointing, then, for Terminator: Salvation to cast restraint--and with it, credibility--to the wind. The 'cleverness'--in this case, a cyborg who thinks he's human--turns out to simply be a cog in an elaborate (and utterly implausable) James-Bond-villain-style deathtrap for John Connor. In fact, the entire plot of the movie turns out to be an incredibly complex trap, laid out by Skynet--which is apparently omniscient enough to plan for chance encounters (like Marcus meeting up with Kyle Reese, and then also escaping to meet up--and happen to have a conversation about Kyle--with John Connor), and yet not clever enough to simply kill Kyle (before he has the chance to sire John) when he's captured, nor install poison gas for the anticipated infiltration of John. And of course, Kyle is kept alive as bait even when there's no need (how was John to know that Kyle hadn't been killed?); Marcus is given an elaborate amount of freedom and almost goaded into 'betraying' skynet; and, of course, the paper-thin plot is yet made so ridiculously labyrinthine that Helena Bonham Carter must put the movie on hold for five minutes to explain to the audience what the hell is going on. Again, it's a matter of finding more cracks the longer you look--but for what end? Is there a build on the earlier themes of running from death or finding a cause more important? Not exactly. Like all Terminator movies, there's a brief, hamfisted rumination about what it means to be human--though this can hardly be said to be the point, either. What justification can there possibly be for such a tortuous plot, such an unbelievable mousetrap?

It turns out that the entire movie is a way of setting up dominoes for the first few movies: This is the story of how John Connor became the leader of the resistance (i.e., how Michael Ironside and the rest of the superior officers die); This is the story of how Kyle Reese got his green jacket (What is it with prequels and the explanation of jackets? In Wolverine, it's equally ridiculous...); This is the story of how John Connor of the future got the scar on his face; This is the story of how the Arnold Schwarzenegger line of T-800s is unleashed (though, respect where it's due: digital cameos have never looked quite so good...!); This is the story of how John Connor and Kyle Reese first met; Etc. Etc. Etc. The only justification for the painfully stupid plot is to allow for the elaborate setting-up, in excrutiatingly anal retentive detail, of all of the details referenced as future-backstory in the first few movies. In other words: this movie is a prequel, albeit one set in the future.

We have, then, in Star Trek and Terminator: Salvation, two surprise prequels, prequels that present themselves as something other than prequels. However, if you pay attention to how they function as prequels, you'll notice a striking difference: Salvation pretends to be a sequel only in order to perfectly fill in all of the gaps, closing the circuit with the other movies. Star Trek, on the other hand, acts like a prequel and a relaunch: by coming back in time, Spock and the Romulans have changed the past--these changes will then not lead to the same future. The game has been changed; in ways that have thusfar only allowed for minor differences (presumably less than minor for Kirk, who has now never gotten to know his father--despite the fact that this loss seems not to have changed his personality at all, and delayed his ascension to ship captain only but slightly...), but can presumably over time lead to a very different version of the Original Series. This past now leads to a different future, which must be thought of as existing in its own distinct universe: the prequel has effectively become a series relaunch.

Of course, this clever prequel/relaunch hybrid now presents its own little challenges--for example, what to do with Spock Prime? One can imagine that, try as he might to avoid becoming a crutch, there are simply cases where prudence (and logic) dictates giving counsel; Ah, yes--what you'll need to do is slingshot around the sun, so as to travel fast enough to break the time-barrier; once back in the past, scoop up some blue whales and bring 'em back to the future. Oh, and about this fellow, Khan... Of course, this is remedied easily enough by killing off Spock Prime--but obviously the ripple-effect from the altered past isn't going to be enough to alter some of the major "plot points" of future history...

All of this is several steps down the line, however--the simple fact remains that, in creating a prequel, J.J. Abrams and his Star Trek crew have reopened the circuit of the original series, instead of closing it. A new future can now be written--characters can, and will, make different decisions, choose different paths, etc. This is, of course, where the irony should really hit you: can you think of a better motto for the new Star Trek franchise than, "No fate but what we make"? Grandfather paradoxes be damned, the future isn't simply a predestined telos for the past, but in fact both can be freely rewritten! This, of course, was the central theme of James Cameron's Terminator series: hence the oft-repeated (or, at least, oft-quoted) speech, memorized by Kyle, Sarah, and John (a fun mobius strip: who wrote the speech, then?): The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves. In creating a prequel which also functions as a sequel, in closing the circuit with the original films, Terminator: Salvation performatively denies the central theme of the franchise; the future has already been written, it is predestined and will simply unfold mechanically from the past.

This, I think, is what is really at stake in the theme of predestination, expressed recently in various geek-genres as a hyper-anal obsession with insider-referenced prequels. It is a denial of history as a realm of free human action.

There are three basic ways to deny history:

1. History is a long, steady series of improvements; the inevitable tide of progress, the long march toward the Kingdom of God, the unfolding of Reason behind men's backs, etc.
2. History is a long, steady decline; the inevitable tide of entropy, the repercussions of some primordial fall of man, etc.
3. Things are always basically the same; the "natural laws" of capitalist economics, the fixed nature of mankind, the eternal cycle of nature, etc.

In each of these so-called "philosophies of history," "history" is simply another name for necessity. And where all action is necessary, there is no action as such: only reaction, links in a long, causal chain. It is only where there is uncertainty that action is truly possible: contingency, the emergence of the unexpected, the "event" in the French sense...Since the "death of Communism," capitalism has become the "only possibility"--where there is one possibility, of course, you have not possibility but necessity. And in these days of massive crises of capitalism, there is thus no genuine philosophy of history to suggest that anything else is possible; and so how can we be surprised but to see the various basic forms of nihilistic denial offering themselves as false refuge? Either things are always like this, and there's no point in doing anything but riding out the storm; or things inevitably get worse, and there's no point in fighting inevitability; or things have been predestined from the start to turn out okay, and we simply need to batton down the hatches and wait out the storm...Where geek culture has found box-office success, it has long been in the form of blockbuster escapism: a distraction from the troubles of life. This, then, is why I think we are surrounded lately by big, geeky denials of history. It's a way to forget all about our troubles, safe in the knowledge that there's nothing else we could be doing about them anyway...

Starf*ckers (We Are the Dollars & Cents)

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 20:10:23 GMT

Available as of today, at a bookstore near you (or, at least, near your web browser...):

...In which you will find my very first published essay, "Why A Rock Band in a Desolate Time?"

Will this help my career? No, not really. Was it therefore a complete waste of time, a cheap way to see my work in print? Not at all! On the contrary, I set out to write my chapter with three goals in mind:

Find a way to give an introduction to Heidegger's thought that was neither superficially trite, nor bogged down in Heideggerian jargon;

Develop my own reading of Heidegger, one that is both defensible as a reading of Heidegger and still manages to do something interesting with his thought;

Give a philosophical account of the omnipresent cultural theme of alienation--in this case, through an engagement with Radiohead's early (pre-Hail to the Thief) career.

To what extent I was successful...I'll let you be the judge. But suffice it to say, I feel I've gotten something out of the experience--and had a lot of fun in the process. This is actually the first of a string of essays I'd like to write about various rock bands and pop groups--including artists ranging from David Bowie to Yellow Magic Orchestra. For the moment, however, it will have to stand alone; even the briefest glance through the essay, after all, will be enough for you to see, this looks nothing like a dissertation...

Keep an eye out for the book, then: Radiohead and Philosophy: Fitter, Happier, More Deductive. You'll find yours truly buried deep in the second half of the book. If you get a chance to flip back and give it a read, I welcome any and all feedback/thoughts/complaints.

To Have and To Hold

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 22:09:48 GMT

phi-los-o-phy [fi-los-uh-fee] –noun, plural -phies.

the rational investigation of the truths and principles of being, knowledge, or conduct.

any of the three branches, namely natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and metaphysical philosophy, that are accepted as composing this study.

a system of philosophical doctrine: the philosophy of Spinoza.

the critical study of the basic principles and concepts of a particular branch of knowledge, esp. with a view to improving or reconstituting them: the philosophy of science.

a system of principles for guidance in practical affairs.

a philosophical attitude, as one of composure and calm in the presence of troubles or annoyances.

Who knows what dreadfully clever internet denizen first came up with it, but there's a saying that goes around, summing up the 'commonsense' idea of what philosophy (and, for that matter, religion) is: "Philosophy is questions that can't be answered; Religion is answers that can't be questioned." This is, in fact, often the pre-understanding of philosophy my students have when they enter my intro classes as well: Philosophy is about asking a lot of questions, most of which can't be answered. Leaving aside, for the moment, the way this caricature of philosophy works to make the discipline seem so irrelevant, let's instead notice something odd about the other way the word "philosophy" gets used in common parlance: "My philosophy about this is..." "What's your business philosophy?" "I have a philosophy about cooking I'd like to share with you..." Etc. From Suite101.com:

Philosophy is the foundation to preventing mediocrity. Most people consider philosophy useful only in the realm of morals. Is an action right or wrong and how will it affect my eternal soul? The dictionary definition of philosophy is a set of beliefs, principles, or aims, underlying somebody's practice or conduct. A philosophy can be a guide to growing your business. By defining what you consider important, you can decide what projects to tackle and which to leave to others.

Notice how the word "philosophy" is used here to indicate, not a set of questions (answerable or no), but a set of answers. Furthermore, though both 'accepted' definitions of the word "philosophy," these two uses have no relation to each other in common parlance; nobody talks about "doing" business philosophy, any more than they talk about "philosophical answers" to questions. Philosophy as a process is dismissed as irrelevant (questions that can't be answered); philosophy as a result is a dogmatic basis for decision making. Once you have the latter, all the more need to dismiss the former!

This in itself is an interesting topic for discussion...but today I'm actually interested in the above as an example of an even more prevalent tendancy: the crystallization of dynamic processes into fixed objects or results. Terry Eagleton has already noted this same phenomenon with respect to "-ologies":

There is a peculiar feature about words that end in 'ology'; '-ology' means the science or study of some phenomenon; but by a curious process of inversion 'ology' words often end up meaning the phenomenon studied rather than the systematic knowledge of it. Thus 'methodology' means the study of method, but is commonly used nowadays to mean method itself. To say you are examining Max Weber's methodology probably means you are considering the methods he uses, rather than his ideas about them. To say that human biology is not adapted to large doses of carbon monoxide means that our bodies are not so adapted, not the study of them. 'The geology of Peru' can refer to the physical features of that country as much as to the scientific examinations of them. And the American tourist who remarked to a friend of mine on the 'wonderful ecology' of the West of Ireland just meant that the scenery was beautiful. (63)

Furthermore, etymology is helpful here in at least allowing us to see that this is a process of transformation, and not simply a bunch of words that happen to simultaneously mean more than one thing; -ology is from the Greek logos, which--as Eagleton mentions--refers to a study, discourse, or organization of something; hence the process, the discipline of study, is the primary meaning, with the sedimented "object" meaning following sometime after. Similarly, the word philosophy comes from the Greek words philein and sofia, literally meaning "the love or pursuit of wisdom"; philosophy as a pursuit is the primary meaning, to which philosophy as an already-attained 'wisdom' is an appended definition.

This process, at least so far as I can tell, has not been conscious or deliberate; it has happened "behind our backs," so to speak. But why does it happen, and what does it mean? There are, at least so far as I have seen, two major approaches to this topic:

1. The Heideggerian Approach

For Heidegger, the way our meanings have a tendency to crystallize is but one consequence of the general trend of the forgetting of Being, which itself constitutes the history of metaphysics. The reduction of a dynamic process to a finished product stems from a larger bias that Heideggerians--like Derrida--call the "primacy of presence." Heidegger takes up this issue as one of his central concerns from his earliest works on, and it's at least partially what's at stake with his...unconventional use of language in works like Being and Time. Notice Heidegger's tendency to "verb-ize" his nouns: "the world worlds," man is "being-there," language is "saying and talking" (ah, the primacy of speech over writing, Derriday will say!), and saying and talking, of course, is "the letting-lie-together-before of everything which, laid in unconcealment, comes to presence." This is the habit Cambridge philosophers were poking fun at when they used to toss around their "Heideggerian" phrase, "Nothing noths"...

The Heideggerian approach obviously owes a lot to the Husserlian analysis of sedimentation and reactivation, which similarly addresses the crystallization of meaning in ontological terms. And so I might more properly call this the "phenomenological approach," though the Heideggerian version of this approach has been the most widely used.

2. The Marxist Approach

In the Marxist tradition, meanwhile, going back at least as far as Lukacs, the process through which thought processes crystallize as fixed objects of meaning is called "reification." It is usually seen as a side-effect of a more pervasive ideology, through which answers become fixed and eternal, generally undermining our ability to critically reassess things like social hierarchies and economic organization. We 'spontaneously' experience reality as naturally given, often even in eternally-set patterns, rather than as contingent products of social construction.

These are both helpful ways of thinking about the issue, though each of them leave a lot to be explored and accounted for. It's interesting, though, that both versions set this strange tendency within language into a larger framework of history, sociality, and--in some cases--even ontology. At any rate, having just today come across yet another insipid example of the phrase "business philosophy" used to mean "statement of purpose," I couldn't help but throw the question down here.

Knowing is Half the Battle

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 13:59:13 GMT

Men. And how will you enquire, Socrates, into that which you do not know? What will you put forth as the subject of enquiry? And if you find what you want, how will you ever know that this is the thing which you did not know?

Soc. I know, Meno, what you mean; but just see what a tiresome dispute you are introducing. You argue that man cannot enquire either about that which he knows, or about that which he does not know; for if he knows, he has no need to enquire; and if not, he cannot; for he does not know the, very subject about which he is to enquire.
--Plato, Meno

While I have always been among those who thought Socrates' solution to Meno's paradox was unsatisfying (more on this in a moment), I am yet convinced that the paradox itself is essentially correct. That is: when dealing with theoretical knowledge of reality, (a) there is no self-obvious place to begin, nor any "facts" simply waiting to be used; and (b) there is no way of knowing--even should we arrive at "the right" theory--that we have found what we are looking for.

But of course, Meno offers up this paradox in an attempt to bring the conversation to a halt (a Samson strategy; if Meno can't win the conversation, he'll pull down the pillars and take Socrates with him...), and Socrates is right to deny the implications Meno draws from the paradox. We can of course inquire into that which we do not know; indeed, we must. However, the paradox would seem to limit us to only two types of response.

The first response is, of course, the sort Socrates offers. But here pay close attention to the text; what's odd is not simply Socrates' answer (that truth need only be "recollected" from the soul), but also where this answer comes from:

Men. Well, Socrates, and is not the argument sound?

Soc. I think not.

Men. Why not?

Soc. I will tell you why: I have heard from certain wise men and women who spoke of things divine that-

Men. What did they say?

Soc. They spoke of a glorious truth, as I conceive.

Men. What was it? and who were they?

Soc. Some of them were priests and priestesses, who had studied how they might be able to give a reason of their profession: there, have been poets also, who spoke of these things by inspiration, like Pindar, and many others who were inspired. And they say-mark, now, and see whether their words are true-they say that the soul of man is immortal, and at one time has an end, which is termed dying, and at another time is born again, but is never destroyed. And the moral is, that a man ought to live always in perfect holiness. "For in the ninth year Persephone sends the souls of those from whom she has received the penalty of ancient crime back again from beneath into the light of the sun above, and these are they who become noble kings and mighty men and great in wisdom and are called saintly heroes in after ages." The soul, then, as being immortal, and having been born again many times, rand having seen all things that exist, whether in this world or in the world below, has knowledge of them all; and it is no wonder that she should be able to call to remembrance all that she ever knew about virtue, and about everything; for as all nature is akin, and the soul has learned all things; there is no difficulty in her eliciting or as men say learning, out of a single recollection -all the rest, if a man is strenuous and does not faint; for all enquiry and all learning is but recollection. And therefore we ought not to listen to this sophistical argument about the impossibility of enquiry: for it will make us idle; and is sweet only to the sluggard; but the other saying will make us active and inquisitive. In that confiding, I will gladly enquire with you into the nature of virtue.

In order to answer the paradox, Socrates must turn to myth and religion. Andy why? Because this is the only way to guarantee the possibility of certainty: without denying (a) (the lack of self-evidence in both where to begin and the facts to which we can appeal), this allows Socrates to escape (b). Now, he can rest assured that, if we ever find the right answer, we'll be able to recognize it as the right answer. Furthermore, since the right answer already exists in the form of theoretical knowledge in the soul, we are all the more likely to "stumble upon" it--for we'll have a sort of intuition to guide us.

It's interesting to note that this very answer runs through Christian epistemology; obviously, Augustine's dialogue De Magistro springs to mind here, as essentially a straight Christianization of Plato's Meno (with little Jesus in our hearts playing the role of anamnesis). But notice that this same theory forms the basis of Mormon epistemological certainty; for Mormon's, the "light of Christ" is put into our soul by God, and through it we can automatically recognize Truth when we see it. Hence the first question a Mormon will ask you when s/he accosts you on the street or at your house is, "Have you read the book of Mormon?" The assumption being that anybody who actually (and openly/honestly) reads the book of Mormon will recognize it as the truth, and hence convert.

In various ways, however, this type of answer to Meno's paradox has cropped up again and again. While not always simple variations on the theme of anamnesis, the general form of the answer remains the same: a metaphysical postulate that guarantees certainty. Without recourse to religion, however, there can be no guarantee of certainty. This is not--as Meno (and Hume) believes--a denial of the possibility of knowledge, inquiry, or theory. But it does present some insurmountable problems for the notion of absolute Truth and certainty.

Problem (a), the lack of self-evident facts, means that all observation is theory-laden; there is no such thing as a neutral, or completely objective, access to "the data." In fact, facts themselves are in this sense not so much found as constructed. This is not to suggest that "there is nothing outside the text." But it is to assert that experimentation without theory is blind (even if theory without experimentation is emtpy). Certainly, this is what Kuhn has in mind when he talks about paradigms; but in their own ways, Lakatos, Bachelard, and Canguilhem are all saying versions of the same thing.

Likewise, problem (b) means that we can never be sure that our theories are absolutely correct. Without metaphysical confirmation, science can only ever present us theories of the world that are our current best (educated) guesses, based on the available data. Again, Kuhn, Lakatos, Bachelard, and Canguilhem have all offered versions of this idea, though certainly Popper's idea of falsification seems the clearest explicit acceptance of this part of Meno's paradox.

I am certainly not trying to suggest that Kuhn, Lakatos, Bachelard, Canguilhem, and Popper (let alone Musgrave, Foucault, etc.) are equivalent, or saying the same thing. Their many--and intractable--disagreements are actually the important part, here: for all of their differences, they are all ways of accepting--and moving beyond--Meno's paradox without recourse to a metaphysical guarantor of certainty. Accepting Meno's paradox--and refusing the retreat into religion--is not enough to determine a complete theory of scientific theory. But I think it must be the starting place, the foundation from which any non-religious theory of science must begin.

Yogis of the World, Unite!

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 22:34:42 GMT

What we have been seeing for the last thirty years or so, those huge music halls where the music can never be deafening enough, inevitably brings to mind those states of near trance, of loss of identity, a lack of differentiation, attempting to reach beyond signification. People live in the instant, feel penetrated by the music, the sheer amount of decibels is a sort of real violation of one's physical integrity, bodies mix in a diffuse sexual encounter, joints circulate--but that is not important. These are all things on which to lean, through which to return to a situation that seems to achieve a total meaning and at the same time precedes any articulated meaning. . . . [A]ttempts to do Oriental meditation are very much the same thing in indivuduals who despair in this depersonalized, privatized Western world.
--C. Castoriadis, "Psyche and Education," in Figures of the Thinkable (170-1)

In its original form, yoga was developed within Hinduism as a practice directed toward the attainment of Enlightenment; it thus involved a project of self-mastery, surrender to God, and world-withdrawl, directed toward the realization that the world is illusion, and that self and Other (atman and brahman) are ultimately the same. In other words, we can see the basic structure of stoicism, and we can roughly characterize yoga in its original form as a manifestation of what Hegel calls the Unhappy Consciousness. Note that this term need not imply that yoga is--or ever was--a morose or depressed practice; the yogic ideal of transcendence as the dissolution of self within the love of Krishna still amounts to the renounciation of the physical world in favor of an eternal, transcendent, perfect world of spirit. And the renounciation of the world as illusion or "sport" is still a stoic project, no matter how couched in the terms of love, joy, or kundalini.

Thus, in its original form, yoga was essentially an apolitical project--that is, essentially unconcerned with questions of social justice, democracy, economy, etc. This is not to say that yoga--or any apolitical lifestyle--has no political ramifications; quite the opposite! But, while we might characterize the effects of such a practice as politically regressive, we would have to call the project itself apolitical, and even antipolitical.

However, as yoga has migrated to--and gained in popularity within--the Western world, and most especially America, over the last few decades, two major "hybrid" strands of yoga have emerged. The first is what we might call "yoga as exercise routine"; that is, a yogic practice cut away from its metaphysical context, and offered to Westerners as yet another fitness program. This strand preserves the essentially apolitical nature of yoga, but in such a way that it no longer carries with it a message of asceticism. Indeed, within a First World capitalist economy, yoga's original ascetic practice would necessarily take on a politically critical character, and we can understand the "exercise routine" approach as a necessary step to maintain yoga's apolitical orientation. Furthermore, this strand of yoga is not limited to the "yoga light" classes offered at most gyms; the yoga classes we find at many yoga studios, which boil the Hindu philosophy down to empty, warmed-over hippie spiritual expressions ("love for the universe"; "finding your inner goddess"; etc.) are still largely of this kind. The spiritualism-light offered in such contexts is yet another manifestation of Western "apolitical" ideology; a response to modern alienation through regressive withdrawl into the Unhappy Consciousness, albeit in such a way that the capitalist economy of desire can still function.

The second--and more interesting--hybrid form of yoga to emerge, however, is somewhat different. Instead of simply divorcing yoga from any explicit metaphysics, there have been several attempts to essentially recreate yoga within a Western context. The result has tended to change yoga from a practice of world withdrawl into a practice of world engagement.

While not yet automatically of a political nature, many approaches of this type have to necessarily confront questions that lead by very short roads to explicitly political contexts. In particular, I think of such American-born yogic "schools" as Anusara (developed by John Friend) and Forrest Yoga (developed by Ana Forrest). Anusara, it seems to me, has a tendancy to fall back into bourgeois humanism, focusing on the "inherent goodness" of every individual and directing energy toward making the individual feel better about him/herself while turning a blind eye toward structural social problems of dominance and injustice. At its best, however, Anusara is able to call upon these same resources as critical tools of social justice; the philosophy underpinning Anusara is fundamentally not one of world-renounciation, and so the potential--however under-utilized in practice--to engage in more universally liberatory practice is there.

While equally ambiguous in its political orientation (the inheritance of all yogic practices), Forrest Yoga's philosophical focus is at least more politically explicit:

The pillars of Forrest Yoga are Breath, Strength, Integrity and Spirit. Our mission is to create in each of us a sense of freedom, a connection to our spirit and the courage to walk as our spirit dictates; thus, doing our part in "Mending the Hoop of the People". Forrest Yoga will teach you to Go Deeper, find your Truth and encourage you to take these gifts you have earned Beyond the Mat into the rest of your life.

The phrase "mending the hoop of the people"--a Lakota phrase referencing the decimation of the Lakota people culminating at the massacre at Wounded Knee--is an explicit reference to political struggle, the struggle of a dominated group (indeed the "hybrid" in this case seems to largely involve the crossing of the Hindu yoga tradition with Native American spiritualism, albeit filtered through its Anglo-American appropriation). But more importantly, the Forrest Yoga focus on yoga as therapy raises ineluctably political issues.

As Castoriadis explains in "Psychoanalysis: Its Situation and Limits," the very notion of therapy--when it is not strictly biological, at least (and perhaps even then?)--must involve a political stance. If by "therapy" we have a strictly biological (/medical) interpretation in mind, then Forrest Yoga simply falls back into the "yoga as exercise routine" category, or rather a specialized subcategory of the same: "yoga as physical therapy." As soon as yoga therapy is not directed solely at physical well-being, however, Forrest Yoga must confront questions of a normative picture of human mental, emotional, and/or spiritual well-being. For, as Castoriadis writes, "the meaning of therapy is either of the following: somebody is deviating from some kind of norm and has to be 'set straight', or somebody is suffering and asks insistently for relief" (193). Dewey and Freire both have the same questions in mind when they (in different ways) discuss the two possible orientations of education: education (and therapy) can either change the individual to better conform to socio-historic circumstances, or activate the individual to change his or her circumstances. Therapy must either produce individuals who are happy submitting to the conditions of modern capitalist society, or free individuals capable of taking action. This is why Castoriadis groups psychoanalysis, pedagogy, and politics together (Freud's "three impossible occupations"); and Forrest Yoga could thus certainly aspire to this sort of program.

The political orientation of Forrest Yoga would seem to turn around the interpretation of a few key phrases: "a sense of freedom," "mending the hoop," and action "beyond the mat, into the rest of your life." This is why Forrest Yoga strikes me as ineluctably political, for this "sense of freedom" can only be created in one of two ways: either by convincing people that they are already free (returning practitioners to the bourgeois juridical ideology of the free, equal participant in the market), or by developing critical subjects who can act to secure their own real freedom by struggling for the freedom of all; the "hoop" can be "mended" ideologically (bourgeois humanism that turns a blind eye to class struggle), or politically (the struggle for social justice); action can be carried beyond the mat in the sense of the 'yogi' returning to his/her place within the established order, or it can be carried beyond the mat in the struggle for universal liberation.

I see no indication in any of Ana Forrest's published writings as to which of these two interpretations she has in mind. Indeed, this in itself is telling, I suppose; the tradition of yoga carries with it a certain tendency toward passivity, stoicism, and submission. To leave the critical, liberatory potential of Forrest Yoga implicit is largely to slip back into the tradition of apolitical submission. But--as with the best of all of the Western hybrid yogas--this critical potential is there all the same. Socialisme ou Barbarie, yogis? The choice is up to you.

Hackers and Philosophers

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 16:56:47 GMT

Why, anybody can have a brain. That's a very mediocre commodity. Every pusillanimous creature that crawls on the Earth or slinks through slimy seas has a brain. Back where I come from, we have universities, seats of great learning, where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have. But they have one thing you haven't got: a diploma.
--The Wizard of Oz (as portrayed by Frank Morgan)

Our society has very few public intellectuals. I have long lamented this fact, but I should be careful to immediately add that this does not mean that our society has few intellectuals at all; a public intellectual is not simply an intellectual, but an intellectual able to gain public access--an intellectual to whom the public wants (is willing?) to listen.

As a sociological overgeneralization, we could say that, in any society, the public intellectuals tend to come from the dominant intellectual field in that society. And so, in the Enlightenment, the public intellectuals were philosophers, scientists, and authors. ("And" in this case is a true conjunction: Enlightenment public intellectuals tended to be all of the above, not simply any one of the above...) America, over at least the last sixty years, has been a society dominated by the sciences; our public intellectuals--few and far between, to be sure--have thus followed suit. (Noam Chomsky might seem like the obvious counterexample; and yet, remember, his actual "field" is linguistics!) In the mid-twentieth century, physics was the dominant field; and so our public intellectuals were people like Richard P. Feynman, Albert Einstein, and--to a lesser extent--Stephen Hawking. Over the last thirty years or so, physics has been slowly eclipsed by biology within the hard sciences; and so our more recent public intellectuals have been people like Richard Dawkins. (Yes--I know, he's British. And yet his popularity is not constrained to the British Isles; in an age when America is outsourcing so much of its labor, should we be at all surprised that we're outsourcing our public intellectuals as well?)

While biology has certainly not yet been knocked from its position of dominance, especially within the inner circile of "hard sciences," there is a newer trend in America over the last ten years or so: More and more of our (still very few in number!) public intellectuals are hailing from the field(s) of computer science. Witness last year's best-selling "The Last Lecture," a guide to life, the universe, and everything by Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon. The latest--for me, anyway--in this new trend is Paul Graham, programmer/venture capitalist (founder of Viaweb) and essayist-at-large.

I first encountered Graham's writing a year or two ago, when I ran across his excellent essay, "Why Nerds are Unpopular." It is, on the whole, an excellent diagnosis of the labyrinth of hell we've come to affectionately call "middle school" (and, for that matter, "high school" as well). On the strength of this essay, I asked for Graham's book, Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, for Christmas, and my sister was happy to oblige.

An aside--perhaps an obvious one--before I go any further: I tend to operate under the tacit assumption that the role of the philosopher is, or at least ought to be, to act as public intellectual. This is not to say that I feel that scientists are "invading philosophy's turf" when they act as public intellectuals; I am not trying to establish or defend some privileged entitlement of professional philosophers to any sort of limelight. I am, however, saying two things. First, that anyone, regardless of "career"--physicist, computer programmer, unemployed miscreant--necessarily takes on the role of philosopher anytime s/he takes on the role of public intellectual. This is philosophy in its true sense (as opposed to its academic institutional sense), as practiced by old Socrates himself. And second--though it's a discussion for another day--I take it as an explicit failing of professional philosophy--and professional philosophers--that so many who would call themselves 'philosophers' (and be so-called by virtue of their professional positions) make no attempt whatsoever to play the role of public intellectual. That so much of professional philosophy is directed toward arcane debates isolated by jargon and obscurity, that so many professional philosophers sneer at ideas like "engaging with popular culture," or even "writing for the layperson," is a failing of the profession, and one for which these professional so-called 'philosophers' deserve to be ousted from the limelight.

At first glance, then, Paul Graham represents everything that I look for in a public intellectual. He makes no bones about stepping outside of pigeonholing labels like "computer programmer," "startup capitalist," "hacker," or "painter" in order to take on the role of public intellectual. He draws from the strengths of his varied background, but sets his sights on a broad cross-section of contemporary culture. He writes clearly for the layperson, is not afraid to draw from popular culture where it might be of service, and he clearly disdains the pretensions that keep so many academics from participating in a meaningful public dialogue. The essay on nerds is, again, an excellent example of all that is good in Graham's writing.

Alas, there is another aspect of Graham's writing, one which is harder to avoid the more one reads of his essays.

While the public intellectual must necessarily play the role of philosopher, this does not mean that public intellectuals must respect philosophy, its tradition or its history. Certainly Ayn Rand comes immediately to mind, but one even gets the impression sometimes listening to Dawkins that he thinks philosophy is just bad biology. The trick seems to be in drawing from one's background without remaining within one's discipline; to start from biology, or economics, or computer science, one cannot remain within these disciplines and attempt to speak about things like culture, the meaning of life, etc. This is not an invocation of philosophical privilege; this is simply a reminder that every science has a proper object of study. To apply economics to study the meaning of life is not better philosophy, it's bad economics. In many of the scientific public intellectuals, I see a tension between scientific method and structure, and the content proper to the humanities.

Graham has shown himself more than willing to work outside of boxes and disciplines, but this same tension crops up again and again. It comes through most clearly in his contempt for the humanities, and his valorization of the hard sciences. I first encountered it in his essay "What You Can't Say," which is actually an excellent list of exercises for freeing thought from moral compulsion--if you've read Kant's essay, "What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?" you'll know just what I mean. At any rate, Graham's essay is going along really well, until we come--late in the essay--to his one and only explicit example of Graham saying something "you're not supposed to say":

It could be that the scientists are simply smarter; most physicists could, if necessary, make it through a PhD program in French literature, but few professors of French literature could make it through a PhD program in physics. (43)

I am tempted to spend several minutes addressing the factual basis of Graham's claim--on what evidence does he base this "freethinking" declaration? I might point him towards this New York Times article from October, 2007, which mentions the difficulty graduate students across the board seem to have finishing doctoral programs. I might point out the little sentence that jumps out at me from paragraph four: "Most science programs allow students to submit three research papers rather than a single grand work." Oh? Humanities graduate students struggle with writing a dissertation, and so 50% drop out; science graduate students struggle with writing a dissertation, so science programs simply adjust the requirements to make it easier? I could spend my time arguing with Graham's claim. Or, I could simply quote something he wrote in the afforementioned essay on nerds:

In general, people outside some very demanding field don't realize the extent to which success depends on constant (though often unconscious) effort. (3)

My hackles raised by this glancing reference in "What You Can't Say," I jumped online to read the essay "How to Do Philosophy." Here are paragraphs 4-6 of that essay:

The summer before senior year [of high school] I took some college classes. I learned a lot in the calculus class, but I didn't learn much in Philosophy 101. And yet my plan to study philosophy remained intact. It was my fault I hadn't learned anything. I hadn't read the books we were assigned carefully enough. I'd give Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge another shot in college. Anything so admired and so difficult to read must have something in it, if one could only figure out what.

Twenty-six years later, I still don't understand Berkeley. I have a nice edition of his collected works. Will I ever read it? Seems unlikely.

The difference between then and now is that now I understand why Berkeley is probably not worth trying to understand. I think I see now what went wrong with philosophy, and how we might fix it.

In other words, "How to Do Philosophy" is an essay, written by someone who doesn't understand philosophy, about how to fix philosophy. From here, Graham's essay can be broken into two major parts: Part I, in which Graham discusses the problem with "the current philosophical tradition," analyzing it "as an example of reason gone wrong"; and Part II, where Graham makes a proposal for a new philosophy. Part I basically argues that philosophy is a pyramid scheme: philosophers make their living by writing important-sounding nonsense; naive people who want to be smart read this nonsense, and want to know what it means, so they take philosophy classes; the smart people dismiss philosophy and move on to more important things, while some of the remaining people join the game, and learn how to write important-sounding nonsense to dupe the next generation of philosophy students. At best, Graham gives us a grossly uncharitable account of philosophy--at worst, a perniciously ignorant one. Why, asks Graham, do philosophers want to make their living by writing such nonsense? Because this is the easy way to get tenure: "In order to get tenure in any field you must not arrive at conclusions that members of tenure committees can disagree with. . . . In the humanities you can either avoid drawing any definite conclusions (e.g. conclude that an issue is a complex one), or draw conclusions so narrow that no one cares enough to disagree with you." This is, we presume, where the fact that Graham does not work in an academic field simply skews the data from which he's drawing his conclusions. At the very least, it's obvious he has no exposure to the way acadmic philosophy is currently practiced--a discipline, whatever its faults, in which heated debate within departments (even amongst those who want tenure) is very much the norm.

Graham's diagnosis of philosophy's problems leads him, in Part II, to pitch a new, better philosophy. What will be the test of good philosophy? Usefulness: "I propose we try again, but that we use that heretofore despised criterion, applicability, as a guide to keep us from wondering [sic] off into a swamp of abstractions." And what does Graham mean by "useful"? "The test of utility I propose is whether we cause people who read what we've written to do anything differently afterward." For all of Graham's handwaving about good science versus metaphysical nonsense, he seems not to have noticed that the most useful discipline, by his definition, is not science, but religion. Can you name a single book as viciously useful as the Bible?

It might be tempting to abandon Graham right here, as simply one of the "anti-intellectual public intellectuals" who seem to crop up more and more these days. However, taken more charitably, isn't Graham's complaint against philosophy simply another version of Marx's Thesis XI? Which is actually funny, because Graham's writing is peppered with snide comments about Marx and communism! But then, this is perhaps neither a humorous irony, nor a coincidence: Certainly, the plethora of articles on venture capitalism would suggest that Graham is not opposed to capitalism. But above and beyond this, take a look at his essay, "Mind the Gap." Paragraphs 2-4:

Like chess or painting or writing novels, making money is a very specialized skill. But for some reason we treat this skill differently. No one complains when a few people surpass all the rest at playing chess or writing novels, but when a few people make more money than the rest, we get editorials saying this is wrong.

Why? The pattern of variation seems no different than for any other skill. What causes people to react so strongly when the skill is making money?

I think there are three reasons we treat making money as different: the misleading model of wealth we learn as children; the disreputable way in which, till recently, most fortunes were accumulated; and the worry that great variations in income are somehow bad for society. As far as I can tell, the first is mistaken, the second outdated, and the third empirically false. Could it be that, in a modern democracy, variation in income is actually a sign of health?

What follows can only be called an unabashed apology for anarcho-capitalism. Graham manages to sidestep, deny, and/or ignore all exploitative features of free-market capitalism. He argues that making money is a skill which ought to be rewarded (with money, of course; why do I think of a passage from "How to Do Philosophy": "I took several classes in logic. I don't know if I learned anything from them."), and calls this skill "generating wealth." (A neat euphemism: Charles Foster Kane generates wealth. How does he do it? Excellently. Ah! We ought to reward him financially.) And Graham argues that we all benefit by allowing these generators to produce as much wealth as possible (because in order to get rich, they have to create goods to sell, goods which will improve our lives--one can almost imagine Steve Jobs slaving away in his garage every night, creating millions and millions of iPods all by himself...).

I could very easily devote an entire essay to simply answering "Mind the Gap" (Lenin always used to say: for every page of lies, it takes ten pages of truth to answer them). But the fascinating point, for me at least, is how all of the threads tie together here. Graham charges philosophy with not being "useful"--and therefore, falling into nonsense. But he does this by ignoring all "useful" philosophy, quickly dismissing such "lit-crit" ideas as "critical theory." He ignores these because they represent exactly the kind of change he doesn't want to see. And so, instead, Graham substitutes his own account of "usefulness": a pragmatism in which winning is its own reward. He draws his account, ultimately, from free-market ideology--competition as guarantee of truth. You will "win" if you "do what people want." Anyone can succeed; so those who do must have worked harder at it than you (poor people are lazy). What all of this means, in the end, is that Paul Graham's "philosophy" so often comes back to simply echoing the dominant ideology. Far from saying "What You Can't Say," Graham actively aids the censor--partially by taking on the role of philosopher in order to dismiss philosophy. And around, and around...

Perhaps this is still to abandon Graham among America's anti-intellectual public intellectuals. For the dominant ideology is exactly what I see at stake here. But again, this is simply one aspect of Graham's writing (albeit the red thread running throughout). In many ways, the positive aspect can act as a corrective to the negative one--you'll remember how I was able to quote Graham's essay on nerds against his dismissal of philosophy, for example. This goes to a larger point, one on which I ought to spend more explicit time: philosophy is not a Manichean affair. There are no pure heroes, nor any thoroughly evil villains. There are simply admixtures of the two, which tend to fall in either progressive or regressive directions. By exploring the contradictions within an author, we can start to open up breathing space in between the critical and ideological strands. In this way, even an anti-intellectual public intellectual can serve to further the conversation...

Beat on the Brat

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 03:45:01 GMT

There's an old rhetorical trick apologists of capitalism like to use: blame the poor for their own poverty. Poor people are lazy. Poor people are stupid. Or both. This blame-the-victim approach is a perennial favorite, and is constantly cropping up in new forms. Plenty of people have taken it upon themselves to answer this charge, especially in its straightforwardly economic form. But I'd like to take a moment to look at another version of what I think is the same basic argument.

Even those of you who don't believe the statement "poor people are poor because they're lazy" might still believe it in this form: "Poor students are (academically) poor because they are lazy." It will seem that we have slipped into metaphor. It will seem as if I am equivocating. Economic poverty isn't the same thing as academic poverty, after all. But does this make the argument any more valid?

To my mind, one of the best explorations of this issue is also one of the first: Immanuel Kant's 1784 essay, "An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?" Kant declares that enlightenment is a mental maturity; the ability to understand and think critically without guidance. Everyone automatically matures physically; why not mentally as well? Kant pulls no punches, and the second paragraph of his essay begins thus:

Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a proportion of men, long after nature has released them from alien guidance (natura-liter maiorennes), nonetheless gladly remain in lifelong immaturity, and why it is so easy for others to establish themselves as their guardians. It is so easy to be immature.

In reference not just to poor students, but to all those who fail to think for themselves, Kant says, yes: it's an issue of both laziness and cowardice. Thinking for oneself is both difficult and scary. "Ah!" you exclaim. "See? I told you it wasn't just a knee-jerk, blame-the-victim answer! Poor students are lazy students--and in fact, the mentally poor as a whole are simply lazy cowards." Indeed. And yet--not wanting to be lazy ourselves--we cannot help but finish reading this paragraph (it is, after all, only the second paragraph of the essay); and what do we find? Kant's analysis takes a rather important turn:

The guardians who have so benevolently taken over the supervision of men have carefully seen to it that the far greatest part of them (including the entire fair sex) regard taking the step to maturity as very dangerous, not to mention difficult. Having first made their domestic livestock dumb, and having carefully made sure that these docile creatures will not take a single step without the go-cart to which they are harnessed, these guardians then show them the danger that threatens them, should they attempt to walk alone. Now this danger is not actually so great, for after falling a few times they would in the end certainly learn to walk; but an example of this kind makes men timid and usually frightens them out of all further attempts.

Before jumping directly to the tempting conspiracy theory (The government is making us stupid! They're keeping us docile and easily governable! Wake up sheeple!!), let us first take a moment to register what Kant is suggesting: Laziness and cowardice may in fact be the major motivations behind mental laziness. But these are not natural attitudes, some result of an inherently ignorant nature. These are conditioned, nurtured states. The question is not, "Why are some people so lazy and/or cowardly?" Instead, it should be, "Why do laziness and cowardice present themselves as options here in the first place?" That is to say: We are only lazy in the face of things that we regard as difficult. We are only cowardly in the face of things that we regard as intimidating. (When was the last time you said, "I'm too lazy to watch t.v."? Or perhaps, "If I wasn't such a coward, I'd anonymously post my thoughts on the internet!") Why, then, do we regard independent, critical thinking as being scary and hard?

Think about it this way. Almost as soon as children become verbal, one question ranks highest in their minds: Why? The question "why" aims past the empirically observable level of fact (this is "what") toward the deeper level of understanding (this is why Kant defines enlightenment as not simply "thinking for oneself," but instead the ability "to use one's understanding"). For children, thinking critically is neither hard nor scary--quite the opposite. As any exasperated parent of a three year old will tell you, it's not understanding that children seem to find the most infuriating! And yet, by the time these same children are in elementary school, perhaps moving into middle school, most of them will find the pursuit of endless questioning to be tiresome, difficult, and even intimidating (and the rest will be dismissed as "nerds").

With the problem more properly motivated, it's perhaps time to return to those conspiracy theories...Now, I think that Kant only has his tongue half in cheek when he uses the word "benevolent" to describe the "guardians" who cultivate the idea that thinking for oneself is both difficult and dangerous. After all, said guardians include not only "the Man (who Keeps Us Down)," but also good old Mom and Dad. And while no family is free of a certain amount of disfunction, Mom and Dad don't necessarily have to be evil oppressors in order to inculcate a certain attitude of...permanent immaturity. This happens in a variety of ways; an exasperated parent invokes parental authority to circumvent a lengthy debate ("Why do I have to eat my vegetables?" "Because I said so!"); Mom and Dad pass along their own values and prejudices (social conformity; financial security; pragmatism over open-ended inquiry; etc.); or Mom and Dad simply love us enough to step in and do everything for us. Point being: there need be no ominous, shady power working behind the scenes to keep us dumb and docile. We are already doing this to ourselves.

Were this a lengthy academic paper on the subject, this would be precisely the point where I'd transition to an analysis of ideology and ideological state apparatuses. I'd pull in Paolo Freire to give an account of the ways in which the educational institutions work to quash critical thinking--and thus, be able to wrap the analysis back to show that schools help create the very issue of "poor students" which they then use to label and condemn so many students. But this is just a sketch, a place to work out an idea or two. And so instead of working through a thorough analysis here, I want to simply draw a connection between Kant's analysis of mental immaturity and a passage from Duncan-Andrade and Morrell's The Art of Critical Pedagogy:

Students will sometimes find even the most engaging critical pedagogy uninteresting. To stay true to critical pedagogy does not mean that students are permitted to misbehave; instead, educators should engage in a deeper analysis of the source of the students' resistance. Critical pedagogues must resist the temptation to fall back on institutional norms that permit teachers to punish or tolerate student resistance. (33-4)

Though it may in fact be a slight case of equivocation, the linking of the problem of "poor students" to the more general problem of poverty can help us as critical educators to better understand our role. The social activist does nothing to fight poverty when (s)he either blames the poor for their poverty or attempts to make excuses that suggest that poverty is okay. The social activist is not reassured by those who say that "there will always be poverty," or that "someone has to be poor..." or that "anyone can become rich." Social justice is better served by analysis of the ways in which certain groups are kept systematically poor; by understanding the ways in which our actions are sometimes complicitous with the maintanence of inequalities; and by working towards a world without poverty. Mutatis mutandis, why is it any different for teachers?

"Alone in a Darkened Room..."

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 07:18:33 GMT

I saw Twilight today (and my guess was correct: it was me and a bunch of high school girls in the audience...). What follows, by and large, is not a review; I'm rather interested in thinking about the role of the vampire in pop consciousness. By way of review, I will say two things. First, the movie is fun, and not campy/cheesy in the way so many vampire movies are. Second, I find it interesting that the central relationship in an incredibly popular romance story should be so obsessional, even co-dependent. Perhaps an issue for another time.

What is most striking is the very fact of the movie: not a vampire story with a romance in it, but a romance story with a vampire in it. Further, look at the "monsters" themselves: No Buffy-style wumply foreheads here. No, and in fact, Stephenie Meyer's 'creatures of the night' not only get along just fine during the day, they only avoid sunlight because it makes them sparkle like diamonds. Yes: that classic foe of vampires, the sun, simply makes the vampires of Twilight more beautiful. We've come a long way since Bram Stoker's first description of the Count:

His face was a strong, a very strong, aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils, with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth. These protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale, and at the tops extremely pointed. The chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.

Hitherto I had noticed the backs of his hands as they lay on his knees in the firelight, and they had seemed rather white and fine. But seeing them now close to me, I could not but notice that they were rather coarse, broad, with squat fingers. Strange to say, there were hairs in the centre of the palm. The nails were long and fine, and cut to a sharp point. As the Count leaned over me and his hands touched me, I could not repress a shudder. It may have been that his breath was rank, but a horrible feeling of nausea came over me, which, do what I would, I could not conceal.

Stoker's Dracula is strange and nauseating--a tone which carries through all early popular depictions of vampires. Meyer's vampires may be a little more "sparkly" than their contemporaries, but their beauty is by this point nothing out of the ordinary: be it Angel or Spike, Louis or Lestat, Bill or Blade, Dracula or...well...Dracula, today the "sexy vampire" has become the standard. So what happened?

I've had a paper on this very issue kind of kicking around in my head for a couple of years now--and a paper it'll have to eventually be, if I'm to properly substantiate and defend a lot of what I'm going to say here. But, in fairly broad, rough strokes, I think the story can at least be laid out as follows:

1. Fin de Siècle Monsters

The vampire first enters pop media consciousness at the turn of the 20th century, as the monstrous return of the repressed, a fear projected outward in the form of an external threat to the community. Stoker himself calls attention to Dracula's role as the threat from the East ("The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East"), though certainly many critics have redirected our attention inward, identifying Dracula with Stoker's own homosexuality (and, more generally, the persecution of homosexuals in Victorian society). Burton Hatlan seems to summarize Dracula's various roles pretty well:

In the figure of Dracula, Stoker created an image of "otherness". ... Dracula is physically "other": the dark, unconscious, the sexuality that Victorian England denied. ... He is also culturally "other": a revenant from the ages of superstition ... But more significantly he is socially "other": the embodiment of all the social forces that lurked just beneath the frontiers of Victorian middle-class consciousness, everything that was socially "other" to the Victorian bourgeoisie. He represents all dark, foreign (i.e. non-English) races; all 'dark', foreign (i.e. non-bourgeois) classes; and (paradoxically) the 'dark', exotic aristocracy, which, though moribund, might suddenly revive. ... It is 'otherness' itself, all that bourgeois society has repudiated, that Dracula represents - the psychically repressed and the socially oppressed.

The first role of the vampire, then, is that of horrifying otherness which terrorizes bourgeois society. This is society in the age of "rationalization," to use Weber's term--but a rationalization, as Habermas and Marcuse have both argued, which also functions in Freud's sense: the rational ordering of life through science and technology covers over, or acts as a veil for, systematic domination. However, we have to realize that this systematic domination is at the same time the very conditions of possibility for bourgeois society: without it, Victorian (and, more generally, bourgeois) society crumbles. The oppressed Other is the threat to society insofar as the Other's suppression is what unifies society as a given whole. This repressed (yet internal) Other will return in various forms over the following decades, leading up to that most obvious of returns in the antisemitism of the Third Reich. But insofar as those creating vampire media (novels, and then movies) are a part of the bourgeois society, this first arc is marked by the bourgeois viewpoint: Vampire as vile monster, threatening society.

2. The Turn

I've written about this before, but the turning point in vampire pop culture comes in 1954 with the publication of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend. Here the vampires are undergoing a shift: both hideous and alluring, Robert Neville often has a hard time keeping his mind on killing them and away from sleeping with them. But of course, the biggest watershed moment of all is in that last great scene, where Matheson drops his hammer on us: We are the monsters, We are the Other. That this happens in America during the 50s only makes sense. The postwar boom is the apotheosis of the middle classes: the barrier between bourgeois society and its Other is now the protagonist of culture. Furthermore, the emergence during this same period of so-called "genre fiction" as both a branch separate from "mainstream literature" and as a mass-market commodity means that the people who are creating the vampire media are no longer at the center of bourgeois cultural life. Instead, science fiction authors and their like occupy niches, often at the fringes of middle class culture. From this vantage point, the alienating effects of the bourgeois lifestyle can begin to take center stage, and we can begin to see that society for what it is. At the same time, there is a tension here: the push/pull of a lifestyle both alienating and intensely desired. These same themes have always been at the heart of pop culture vampires, but as the vantage point shifts from the center of bourgeois culture to the very fringes of its fringes, the old themes take on new faces...and the lines between hero and villain/monster get a little blurred.

3. Fallout

In the aftermath of Matheson's novel, something remarkable happens: For the first time in history, the vampire becomes both unambiguous sex object and protagonist. 1960's Blood and Roses was the first in a string of movies based on (a sexy interpretation of) le Fanu's Carmilla--"lesbian vampire" movies are now something of a genre of their own!--but which celebrate and/or sexually objectify the homoerotic themes in their source material instead of recoiling from it in any form. Fourteen years later, Andy Warhol's Blood for Dracula cast the Count himself in the protagonist role for what can only be described as a sex comedy. From here, it is but a very short step to the likes of Anne Rice, Poppy Z. Brite, and--yes--Stephenie Meyer. The vampire remains a "romantic" character, but has now become the protagonist, the one with whom we identify ourselves. The vampire is now our own attraction to the status of Other, of outsider. Having realized that we are the monsters, and that alienation is the very fabric of our lives, we want out. Alas, that way lies only death.

More surely remains to be said--most particularly about this most recent stage. But for now, I'm trying to get the broad strokes down, so that later passes can begin to fill in some detail. As Aristotle says, "it would seem that any one is capable of carrying on and articulating what has once been well outlined, and ... time is a good discoverer or partner in such a work."

Teaching Philosophy I: Reading 1.0 vs. Reading 2.0

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 05:46:15 GMT

In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams tells the story of programmers who create an amazing supercomputer, Deep Thought (the second greatest computer of all time and space...), to calculate and reveal to them the "ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything." Deep Thought takes 7.5 million years to calculate the answer, but then finally makes his long-awaited proclaimation: The ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything is...42.

The programmers (well, their distant descendants...) feel--perhaps justly--confused and irate: The answer "42" makes no sense.

Of course not, Deep Thought tells them; they don't have the question for which this "ultimate answer" makes sense. And so, naturally, the programmers ask Deep Thought: Can it reveal to them the question, for which "42" is the answer?

No, Deep Thought declares: it isn't nearly powerful enough. However, it can design a bigger, better computer for them, one which will eventually produce the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.

Those familiar with the five-book-trilogy know where the story goes from here: The supercomputer designed by Deep Thought is the planet Earth, which--after a small setback, and under the watchful eye of the mice--takes 10 million years to run the program which will produce the question, only to be destroyed by the Vogons five minutes before successful completion. But in this story are two aspects which might help us to think about reading philosophy:

1. "The Answer" is no good if you don't know which question it answers.
2. "The Question" can actually be harder to find than "The Answer."

The up-shot of this advice is a distinction between something I like to call "Reading 1.0" and "Reading 2.0": Reading 1.0 is what we usually mean when we say, "I learned how to read when I was 4," or "Why Johnny Can't Read." It's the ability to decode a sentence to find its literal meaning--in other words, the ability to read a text and find "the answers." Most of us mastered Reading 1.0 in grade school, moving up the difficulty levels from Dick and Jane, through The Catcher in the Rye, onto research papers on physics, blogs on economics, history books, whatever. The epitome of Reading 1.0 is seen every time we pick up a newspaper: the article is given a title which summarizes the answers contained therein, and quickly reading the article will allow the reader to find a half-dozen related answers. (For example: An article might be titled, "Money for (almost) nothing: Fat paychecks for very little work." Reading the article, we find a list of "answers": Former WaMu CEO Alan Fisherman spent 17 days in his position and walked away with over $19 million for his troubles; Michael Ovitz, Billy Dee Williams, Carl Pavano, and Edward McSweegan are also people who have made obscene amounts of money for little-to-no work...etc.) This is, in fact, what we mean when we talk about "reading comprehension": Can you read a passage and "comprehend" the "answers" it contains?

Reading 2.0, on the other hand, is an entirely separate skill-set, one which builds on the skills of Reading 1.0 (hence Reading 2.0, and not, say, Hermeneutics 1.0...), but is not always an accompanyment to Reading 1.0. Not only do we not tend to teach our children this skill-set as a necessary part of "reading," but in fact--as the newspaper example shows all too well--it's entirely possible to go through adult life as a "competent reader" without having ever utilized--let alone mastered!--Reading 2.0.

This, I think, is one of the major reasons that perfectly literate students walk into a philosophy class only to discover that the texts they are assigned to read "don't make sense." Nor should we immediately slip into the "wise professor, naive student" diagnosis here: All too frequently, the professor takes on the role of "interpreter" or "explainer," a role designed to transform the text into a set of "answers," which the student can then master using his or her previously-developed Reading 1.0 skills. As Jacques Ranciere has argued, this role has a stultifying effect on the student; it essentially carries the message, "You are not smart enough to understand this on your own; you need a teacher to explain it to you." It is not that students are not capable of reading philosophy unaided; it is rather that Reading 2.0 is a skillset that must be developed, and the professor who chooses to lecture "about" the text ultimately fails his or her students.

A philosophy text can be read as a series of answers; sometimes this is easy and relatively straightforward (I think of the texts of Thomas Aquinas), other times infuriating (those infamously "difficult" philosophers like Derrida, Nietzsche, etc.). Either way, however, this is to dodge the philosophical practice of reading, one which understands the meaning of the answers by seeing how they are shaped and given sense by the question(s) which underlie them.

As an example of Reading 2.0, and a way of hopefully making this 1.0/2.0 distinction clearer, I thought I'd take an example which I have found particularly helpful for demonstrating this method: Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Then, as a wrapup, I thought I'd briefly consider the example of Louis Althusser for a gesture at what Reading 2.5 might entail...

The Nicomachean Ethics and the Question of Happiness

A quick read through the first few books of the Nicomachean Ethics shows that Aristotle covers a lot of ground; purposive action, various popular definitions for happiness, and the functions which separate humans from other types of living things; a general definition for virtue, and then an in-depth consideration of its two major types (intellectual and moral); the role of friendship in life, and the proper definition of true friendship (as distinguished from two lesser types); a consideration of pleasure, and how it both contributes to and differs from happiness; and a running concern with political science as "the science of the highest good for man"--the book is, in fact, a lengthy lead-in to Aristotle's following book, the Politics. The book is full of answers. But is there a central question organizing the text?

Given the title--Nicomachean Ethics--we are tempted to assume that the book is written to teach us the difference between right and wrong. But this is obviously too simple; the discussions of friendship, happiness, and types of life would all seem superfluous--and furthermore, Aristotle's definition of the virtues isn't exactly a rubric for deciding to "do the right thing." Taking "ethics" in a broader sense, though, we might perhaps say that the book is teaching us how to live "correctly"; the right way of making friends, the right way of experiencing pleasure, and the virtues as models for correct behavior...Not only does this reading strip the book of its philosophical character (the book becomes essentially an ancient "Miss Manners" guide...), we are also thereby tempted to mis-place the opening discussion of happiness: is Aristotle merely trying to tell us the correct, "moral" way of pursuing happiness? Such may be a concern of Kant, but it never seems to crop up in Aristotle's discussion; in ten books of Nicomachean Ethics, we find no mention of any situation in which we might have to forsake our own happiness for the sake of what is right, nor any mention of "unethical" pursuits of happiness at all!

If you are familiar with the text, this will already seem like needless jumping-about...but I want to make clear that the typical Reading 1.0 approach to reading "hard texts" still leaves us far short of understanding the book as a whole. Most reading guides will suggest that, with difficult texts, one should try reading once through quickly to get a general sense of "what the text is about," fill in the broad strokes of the argument, and then go back a second time to read for more detail. In other words, get the "big answers" down first, and then fill in with the "smaller answers." If, on the other hand, we start at the beginning of the text and simply follow Aristotle along, asking ourselves, "What is the question he's answering, here?" we will immediately get a better impression of the project as a whole; in fact, we can look solely at book I in this way, and already have a better general sense of "what the book is about":

Book I, chapter 1 (1094a1-18):

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

The book opens with a simple observation: all human activities are done for the sake of some "good." We note first, then, that "good" is here being used in the strictly subjective, pragmatic sense: "seen as good for." Despite the title, Aristotle has not presupposed any moral notion of "goodness." But secondly, and beyond this, the opening sentence points out that humans are purposive creatures: we act for a reason, or we don't act at all. And third, to put the previous two points together: if a human takes action, it is because he/she feels (s)he has a reason to act; and that, further, (s)he views this reason as being a good one. What question has Aristotle just answered? It seems fairly obvious: "Why do people do things?" It's also a fairly broad, imprecise question. But no matter: Aristotle spends the rest of the chapter building the idea of a hierarchy of "goods": If I do X because it's "good for achieving Y," and I want to achieve Y because it's "good for Z," then ultimately I have done X because it's good for Z. For example, I might take notes because they are good for helping me study; but I'm only studying because it's good for helping me pass the test; but I want to pass the test because it's good for helping me pass the class; and I'm trying to pass the class because it's a required course, and therefore good for helping me get my degree. And so I am, essentially, taking notes because it's good to help me get my degree.

Book I, chapters 2 and 3 (1094a19-1095a13):

Aristotle interweaves a discussion of political science as the science studying the "highest good for man" in with a more general discussion of a "highest good" in general. Which is to say: our earlier question about why people act led to the consideration of a sort of "end-point causality"; which is to say, I do something because of the end result I'm looking for, not simply for the immediate result. And so the discussion of a highest good is a way of redirecting our focus: if we take the immediate action X because it's "good for" achieving not only the immediate purpose, but also some further purpose, then what is the ultimate good we act to achieve? This will be the "ultimate reason" people act. Furthermore, we should also immediately realize that if the ultimatereason is removed, the intermediate goals will also disappear: if my school loses its accredidation, and will not be able to grant me a degree, then passing the class will not get me any closer to this goal; and so passing the test will not help me achieve this goal; and so taking notes will not be good for this purpose, either. If this is really the reason I'm taking notes, then as soon as my school loses its accredidation, I should simply be wasting my time to continue to take notes. Or, to put this another way: if I am unable to take notes (a broken wrist, a strange policy of the professor, etc.), I will still come to class; but if I am unable to come to class (an illness, a cancellation, etc.), I will not sit at home and take notes as I watch television. If X is good for Y, and Y is impossible, then X is no longer "good."

Book I, chapter 4 (1095a14-1095b13):

With our somewhat refined question now stated as, "What is the ultimate reason people do anything at all?" we see that Aristotle opens chapter 4 with his own version of the same question: "what is the highest of all goods achievable by action?" Aristotle immediately gives an answer:

Verbally there is very general agreement; for both the general run of men and people of superior refinement say that it is happiness, and identify living well and doing well with being happy; but with regard to what happiness is they differ, and the many do not give the same account as the wise.

The very fact of being purposive creatures, then, means that when we as humans take action, we do so for what we think are "good reasons." And the ultimate reason for which we do anything is: "because I think it will lead to my happiness." Again, we should remember the long-term goal, not simply the immediate one: I don't take notes because "I think taking notes will make me happy." But if I take notes because somewhere down the line it's good for getting my degree, we can still ask, "But why do you want your degree?" A typical answer might run: "Because I want to get a good job." But why? "Because a good job will provide me with financial stability, etc..." And why do you see this as good? "Because that will give me a good life." And why do you want a "good life"? "Because that will make me happy."

Ah: But what happens when we ask you, "But why do you want to be happy?" Now we seem to fall off into nonsense: "I want to be happy because...that's what makes me happy?" Or perhaps, "I want to be happy because...I don't want to be unhappy?" And so it seems for all people: We act--that is to say, we do anything at all--because we think it will ultimately lead closer to our happiness. Happiness is the ultimate reason humans do anything at all.

It might now seem like we have an answer to the initial question we thought Aristotle was answering; and yet we are still at the very beginning of the book. Does he now move on to ask other questions, so that perhaps we were better off simply listing the answers we find, Reading 1.0-style? Not at all: For while "happiness" is indeed an answer of sorts, it is also--or more precisely--a restatement of the question. For as Aristotle points out, everyone seems to agree that the "happiness" for which they do everything basically means "living well and doing well," but it would seem that we get conflicting answers when we ask for anything more specific. Aristotle spends the rest of this chapter and the next examining various simple or "obvious" answers to the question, "What is happiness?" By the end of chapter 5, Aristotle has rejected a number of answers, but the new, refined question still stands: What is happiness?

Notice that it is not a move from one question to another, but instead the slow refinement of one central question that drives the first few chapters. Over the course of chapters 1 through 6, we move with Aristotle from the very general question, "Why do humans act?" to the more refined version, "What is the ultimate reason driving human activity?" until we can give the question its most precise form, "What is true human happiness?" From this point on, each and every new topic for discussion will be dictated by the course we take to answer this one, central question. In chapter 7, when Aristotle turns to consider the "function of man," he does so only insofar as it will provide us a better account of happiness:

Presumably, however, to say that happiness is the chief good seems a platitude, and a clearer account of what it is still desired. This might perhaps be given, if we could first ascertain the function of man.

And again, in chapter 13, when this discussion leads to a consideration of a full account of virtue, it is only because it is the next step in tracing a full account of happiness:

Since happiness is an activity of soul in accordance with perfect virtue, we must consider the nature of virtue; for perhaps we shall thus see better the nature of happiness.

In this way, we can see how the entire book essentially revolves around the question of happiness; and we understand the entire text much more clearly if we can see the way this central question moves the discussion along its path. Insofar as it is a book of "ethics" at all, it is only because Aristotle here has the insight that acting in my own best interest must sometimes entail acting against my immediate inclination. Or, to put it another way: acting for happiness means sometimes acting against immediate pleasure.

Reading 2.0 And Beyond

This is already an epic post, and it's certainly not the place for a full account of the Nicomachean Ethics. But if Reading 1.0 might ask us to start with the answers, and then build from there (toward a Reading 1.5, say...), in the same way one might already see the direction indicated: by identifying the central question in the text, and then critically re-engaging with the text on the basis of that question, certain new anomalies can appear, and new critical paths open. By tracking the path of the central question, "What is happiness?" through the book, we can better engage critically with certain "anomalies" that pop up: the possibility of two competing accounts of happiness, for example, or even the lingering question about the role to be played by the Politics. In other words, as we start to compare the question to its own answers, certain critical spaces can open up within the text.

Perhaps already indicated in this direction, but further along the path, is what Louis Althusser calls a symptomatic reading. As he puts it in Reading Capital, a symptomatic reading consists of "measuring the problematic initially visible in [the text] against the invisible problematic contained in the paradox of an answer which does not correspond to any question posed" (28). Althusser looks at the tension not simply between the central question and its answers, but between the explicit and implicit "central questions" in the text. As we look at the "answers" and try to trace them back to their questions, we occasionally find that we have an answer to a question that the author him/herself does not pose! In opening up a critical space between questions, Althusser is ultimately able to get even deeper into the text. Hence, I think, we have an indication along a road from Reading 2.0 to Reading 2.5, and--possibly--beyond...

Anyway, if you've read this far, I hope it's been of some interest; the above is (as always with this journal!) largely a way of ordering some of my own thoughts on a page, in the interest of better teaching the practice of philosophy. Expect more "Teaching Philosophy" posts to follow in the coming months, as the practice of teaching is very much on my mind these days.

The Hero Takes a Fall

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 05:19:01 GMT

I received my copy of Huston Smith's The World's Religions as a freshman in high school; it was required reading for Flex, the amazing four-year humanities course I took all through high school. I've had that same copy ever since; over the years, it's been a book I've continually come back to--not only to re-read it, but also assigning portions of it to my students (in both Introduction to Philosophy courses and a Philosophy of Religion course I taught). For a while in college, I even made a challenge of working a Huston Smith quote into every paper I wrote, no matter the topic. It's not simply that I enjoyed the book; it was Huston Smith himself, his approach to religions and "our wisdom traditions," that really spoke to me: Here was someone who said, we can approach the various world religions as an area of open, scholarly inquiry, as seekers of truth, without necessarily making religion an object either of scorn or reverance, nor simply reducing it to the status of "literature." At the tender age of fifteen, Smith was a powerful influence to temper my raging, indignant, crusading atheism with the calm voice of rational inquiry, helping in no small part to funnel my knee-jerk skepticism into the critical consciousness of a philosopher.

I was at first delighted, then, to see Smith's name on the cover of a recent issue of Parabola magazine (a special issue on God), sent to me through channels by my grandmother last week. Smith's contribution is a mere two pages long, and is entitled "The God-War." It begins as follows:

God is winning the God-War. He is winning it even though he is playing uphill on an unlevel playing field that the media has tilted sharply upward toward secularism.

After a rather dubious claim for the secular bias of the media (corroborated in the following paragraph by a not-entirely-scrutable anecdote about an op-ed on Intelligent-Design cowritten by Smith and Rustum Roy, which was rejected by eight different publications in 2006), Smith goes on to consider the evidence of "the reign of secularism" in science. He first cites Steven Weinberg, and then "Richard Dawkins [who] asserts that the evidence for evolution as opposed to intelligent design is overwhelming." He rounds out the story by reviewing the "classic case of omitting God": Carl Sagan's "brilliant PBS series The Universe." Smith's big complaint? Sagan promised that the series would be about "everything that is, has been, and will be," but never, in "fifteen programs," mentions God. [Not to nit-pick...but: Sagan never, so far as I can find, hosted a series on PBS called The Universe; instead, he hosted a program called Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which was thirteen episodes long.] Smith doesn't specify which god he's talking about; but by the capitalization, we can only infer that the great scholar of comparative religions has a particular deity in mind to defend from the advancing hordes of science and secularism...

Smith writes that "[t]hese scientist-authors have led me to coin an oxymoron, Brilliant Stupidity. They are brilliant in their fields of expertise, and stupid in the conclusions they draw from them." In the remaining page of the article, Smith trumpets Antony Flew, "as respected a philosopher as any alive today," as a sign of the shifting tide, God's Great Comeback. Smith then writes the following:

This is a substantial straw in the wind, and an important one. However, God's existence must rest on evidence, not human opinions, and the evidence exists.

He follows with a summary of six arguments, taken from William Stoddart's Remembering in a World of Forgetting, which a) accuse science of begging the question (ignoring the obvious tu quoque implications...); b) provide no specific evidence for a specific deity's existence, but at best attempt to cast doubt on scientific explanations; and c) have all been answered, at length, in most of the relevant literature (for example, Smith writes, "Blind, deaf, and dumb evolution could not have given rise to eyes, ears, and voice," showing himself to be either willfully ignorant of evolutionary theory or simply intellectually dishonest). This is how the short article ends.

Having honestly expected a thought-provoking, nuanced take on the faith-reason "debate" going on in our society today, I was honestly taken aback to see Huston Smith so hamfistedly defending Intelligent-Design and rejecting scientific inquiry. That Smith would take up so one-sided a position in the debate is disappointing (this from the man who championed the slogan, "What does he know of England, who only England knows?"); that he would do so in the service of the obscurantist charlatanry of fundamentalist Christianity is unforgivable.

Let me make it clear that I am no uncritical supporter of scientism, and I continue to have serious reservations about the new "popular faces" of atheism in America. I have criticized Sam Harris in the past, and will probably continue to do so; and I am (slowly) working on a critical assessment of Dawkins. But this is actually also part of my point: the task of critically addressing the sciences is made harder by the noncritical rejection of it by religious obscurantists. The fundamentalist knee-jerk rejections of science-as-such have created a swamp in which genuine criticism is lost, and philosophical debate is impossible. What we are left with is not an area of open, scholarly inquiry, which we can occupy as seekers of truth; instead, we are left with a battlefield, across which two dumb, violent, entrenched sides exchange cannon-fire: Welcome to the God-War. Unlike Huston Smith, I'm not sure who's winning...but I'm fairly certain we're all losing.

Change We Can (Make-)Believe In

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 01:21:56 GMT

All that can be said with some certainty is that an arithmetical majority on the Left at the ballot-box and, with it, constitutional legitimacy is no guarantee of either the power or the 'right' to govern--as the murder of Chile yesterday, the agony of Nicaragua today, bear witness.

--Gregory Elliot, Althusser: The Detour of Theory

Obama's response to critics after a recent spate of conservative kow-towing has been interesting: “Look, let me talk about the broader issue, this whole notion that I am shifting to the center. The people who say this apparently haven’t been listening to me.” Of course, Obama follows up truth with half-truth, adding, “I am someone who is no doubt progressive.” The quote comes from a speech intended to defend his 'progressive' status--which reminds me of something Terry Eagleton once wrote about Stanley Fish: "It is one of the minor symptoms of the mental decline of the United States that Stanley Fish [or Barack Obama--or the Democrat party, for that matter] is thought to be on the Left....In a nation so politically addled that 'liberal' can mean 'state-interventionist' and 'libertarianism' letting the poor die on the streets, this is perhaps not wholly unpredictable." Which is to say: Obama is exactly right when he says that anyone who thinks he's "suddenly shifting to the Center" hasn't been listening to him. But it's not--as he himself suggests--because he's still fighting the good, progressive fight. Rather, it's because he's still as progressive as he's ever been; that is to say, he's been in the Center all along.

Certainly though, it's been a hard week or two for Obama's faithful--or at least those among his faithful who harbor dreams of "change," "hope," etc. His support of FISA--which passed in what can only be called a landslide vote in the Democratically-controlled Senate--is hard to defend as anything but a complete volte face. And his positive comments on the recent Supreme Court ruling overturning the DC gun ban, coupled with his public disagreement with the Supreme Court ruling against executing child rapists, both certainly smack of playing to the reactionary Right. (In fairness, however, Obama guards his position on capital punishment with essentially the correct caveat: "At the same time," the above-cited Caucus blog notes, "he said the system of death penalty justice was so flawed that the nation should declare a moratorium on executions, such as that imposed in Illinois by Republican Gov. George Ryan.") So those who feel, in Joan Walsh's words, "betrayed by Obama" are not entirely wrong or naive.

If there is an up-side to this betrayal, however, it might be the beginning of an end to the "Democrat-as-progressive" fantasy that has driven the Democrat-Left electoral alliance since the late 40s. In large part, this fantasy has been strengthened through hypotheticals and missed-encounters: "If only JFK hadn't been assasinated..." "If only Robert Kennedy hadn't been assasinated..." "If only George McGovern hadn't lost to Nixon..." Like Zizek's assessment of the Soviet Invasion and the end of the Hungarian Spring, in each case an outside intervention can be used to sustain the fantasy. I would have gotten away with it, if it weren't for you snooping kids... Already in the Obama disillusionment-fallout, one can sense the sneaking suspicion that Emma Goldman was right: "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." (Or, who was it who put it this way: "No matter who wins, the government gets elected.") An Obama presidency--and the full-scale demonstration of what "Change" really means to the Democrat party--might be exactly what Leftist politics needs...

...That said, there is another fantasy that we ought to be on the lookout for: Ron Paul (who, I note, didn't vote on FISA...). The neo-con "outside intervention" here may serve to preserve the Ron Paul fantasy as an option for disillusioned Obama supporters; already, there have been moves in this direction as part of the Pelosi-disillusionment fallout. And Libertarians like Lew Rockwell are playing right to this crowd: "If only the prophetic and courageous Ron Paul were running as an independent. People are ready for real change. As Tweedledee and Tweedldum struggle for power, with almost exactly the same program, Ron could be making History. It wasn't right for him, he felt, and given his political skills, that has to be determinative. And yet, if only..." Libertarians are slowly positioning themselves as "a not-so-lunatic fringe." My gut feeling here is that the best Leftist strategy over the next few years may amount to the election of Barack Obama, coupled with the engaged struggle against Libertarianism as a viable option for disillusioned progressives as the Obama White House makes one "compromise" after another.

Quick Shot: Undead, Undead, Undead!

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 05:23:28 GMT

We never believe that someone is dead; we know that they are dead...but we do not believe it.

--Jean-Luc Nancy

In September of 1977, Time magazine ran an article on The New Philosophers (la nouveaux philosophes), "a group of young intellectuals, most of them lapsed Marxists." The cover in America for that issue showed a cartoon house suspended in the air, for a cover story on rising housing prices (tagline: "Sky-High Housing: Building Up, Prices Up"), but the European edition made the New Philosophers article the cover story, with the tagline "Marx is Dead." Less than a year later, in-fighting among the groups of France's Union of the Left (along with some good old fashioned sabotage by the leaders of the PCF) saw a landslide--and, for most, unthinkably unexpected--defeat of the left at the polls, and France joined Britain and the United States in the political slide to the far Right leading into the 80s.

It was, to be sure, not the first time Marx had (very publicly) 'died'; nor, certainly, would it be the last. In fact, we can mark the passage of the last half-century of political struggles by the recurrent deaths of Karl Marx--the Kenny McCormick of Leftist politics: 1956; 1968; 1975-1980; 1989-1991; etc. Perhaps Derrida is right to invoke ghosts when talking about Marx; Marx is dead, but keeps returning like the specter haunting Europe that he spent his life championing. Is the Left being haunted? Do we need an exorcism--or the Ghostbusters?

...but could there be another explanation?

Everyone knows some version or another of that famous Mark Twain quote, "Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." Perhaps Marx keeps rising from his grave to haunt us anew...but maybe we keep running into him because reports of his death have also been exaggerated? Recall Althusser's observation about the unique 'history' of philosophy:

New philosophies have appeared in opposition to the older ones: they have prevailed over them in historical struggle. But the characteristic feature of this singular 'history' of philosophy is that the new philosophy that 'prevails over' an older one, which it comes to dominate after a long and difficult struggle, does not destroy the older one, which lives on beneath this domination and thus survives indefinitely, most often in a subordinate role, but sometimes recalled by the conjuncture to the front of the stage. (Althusser, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, pp. 121-2)

Every time Marx gets near the front of the stage, a New Philosophy--in conjunction with a reactionary political struggle--emerges to push him (and, it must be said, the masses along with him) back again; every time the living, breathing Marx is seen in the halls of theory, his death must be staged anew.

A few years ago, Wendy Brown wrote a piece (a really excellent article, actually) called Resisting Left Melancholy. Picking up the term from Benjamin, Brown is concerned to confront the great losses suffered by the Left over the past 40+ years. Failure to do so, she worries, can result in all of the classic Freudian symptoms of melancholia: inability to live in the present; a feeling of hopelessness and helplessness; and the redirection of agression toward substitutes to protect the lost ideal (in this case, the dismissal of identity politics and poststructuralism). She never comes right out and says it, but the Freudian framework makes it clear that what's needed is a Left mourning. But mourning what, exactly? "If Freud is helpful here," she says, "then this condition presumably issues from some unaccountable loss, some unavowably crushed ideal, contemporarily signified by the terms left, socialism, Marx, or movement." Of course, this mourning has already been going on (since at least the mid-70s): it's called--and this should come as no surprise--Post-Marxism.

...But what if we're being asked to mourn a man who hasn't died yet? To mourn Marx is to admit that he's dead; that is to say, to refuse to recognize him as alive. And as any good Hegelian will tell you, if nobody will recognize you as a living being, you cannot be fully alive. To mourn Marx may not be to kill him (this, after all, is what the Right keeps trying--and failing--to do), but it is to reduce him to a sort of...living death: a ghost. A specter.

It is in this precise sense that, on the American political theory scene today, Marx is a specter: a soul without a body. And as a perfect mirror image, Leftist theory in America today is nothing if not a zombie: a body with no soul. Slow-moving, rotting even where it stands, the American Left can provoke horror and fear only as it takes to the street in large numbers, lumbering about in search of brains ("braaaaaains!").

Well: never say I won't take a metaphor and run with it. But I digress.

Perhaps what progressive political theory really needs today, more than anything, is a solid dose of melancholy? Or, I suppose, so it will seem to those who insist that the Object of Attachment really is dead and gone. But to us, this diagnosis should finally seem silly: why are we being asked to mourn those who are still very much alive?

Redemption Song (Or: I Am Not Legend)

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 08:49:51 GMT

The lesson that we should learn--and that the movies try to avoid--is that we ourselves are the aliens.

--Slavoj Zizek, The Pervert's Guide to Cinema

Having eagerly anticipated the release of I Am Legend, I finally got a chance to see it over the holiday week. What disappointed me about the movie (and, specifically, comparing it with the source material) was not so much the way the story has changed in the transition to the screen; rather, it's in the way the meaning of the story has been changed.

Recall the end of Matheson's story; Robert Neville, lone surviving human in a world overrun by vampires, has been hunting the creatures during the day, holing up in his house for protection from them at night. Finally, he has been captured by the vampires, and awaits execution at their hands. In the last scene, after Ruth departs (having given him some pills to ease his suffering), Neville is left alone with his final thoughts:

He fell against the window and looked out.

The street was filled with people. They milled and stirred in the gray light of morning, the sound of their talking like the buzzing of a million insects.

He looked out over the people, his left hand gripping the bars with bloodless fingers, his eyes fever-lit.

Then someone saw him.

For a moment there was an increased babbling of voices, a few startled cries.

The sudden silence, as though a heavy blanket had fallen over their heads. They all stood looking up at him with their white faces. He stared back. And suddenly he thought, I'm the abnormal one now. Normalcy was a majority concept, the standard of many and not the standard of just one man.

Abruptly that realization joined with what he saw on their faces--awe, fear, shrinking horror--and he knew that they were afraid of him. To them he was some terrible scourge they had never seen, a scourge even worse than the disease they had come to live with. He was an invisible specter who had left for evidence of his existence the bloodless bodies of their loved ones. And he understood what they felt and did not hate them. His right hand tightened on the tiny envelope of pills. So long as the end did not come with violence, so long as it did not have to be a butchery before their eyes...

Robert Neville looked out over the new people of the earth. He knew he did not belong to them; he knew that, like the vampires, he was anathema and black terror to be destroyed. And, abruptly, the concept came, amusing to him even in his pain.

A coughing chuckle filled his throat. He turned and leaned against the wall while he swallowed the pills. Full circle, he thought while the final lethargy crept into his limbs. Full circle. A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever.

I am legend.

The title of Matheson's story, then, refers to this "full circle" change of places: we, humans, are now the "monsters." (Matheson's tale thus occupies a key turning point in pop culture consideration of the vampire: this is the moment when the vampire shifts from object to subject. But that's a tale for another time...) The hero of the story is, by the end, the villain; and humanity, the "norm" at the beginning, has become the exception, the "Other."

Meanwhile, this theme is completely absent from the film. Never do we come anywhere close to the idea that humanity might be the "Other." Never is it accepted that the vampire could become the new "norm." And here certain other changes are important: the vampires in Matheson's story are sentient, nay, intelligent, personable. In fact, they in large part resemble the "people" they once were; memories and even personalities are largely intact, albeit "shifted" (and, in many--but not all!--cases, fractured by insanity; recall the vampire who jumps off the lamp post and flaps his arms because he thinks he's a bat...). The film "vampires," by contrast, are rather more akin to zombies (though zombies who combust in sunlight), especially zombies of the 28 Days Later "running, agressive" type. The zombie/vampires are portrayed as mindless, non-communicative, in other words, completely Other. (In this respect, one scene of the movie is particularly stunning: Will "Robert Neville" Smith captures a female vampire from a warehouse, in order to experiment on her. Enraged, a male vampire attempts to run after him, going so far as to briefly run into the sunlight, only to fall back, singed. In the very next segment, we have Smith recording his notes, and he asks himself why the vampire would expose himself to sunlight. "Behavioral note," he says into his tape recorder, "an infected male exposed himself to sunlight today. Now it's possible decreased brain function or growing scarcity of food is causing them to...ignore their basic survival instincts. Social de-evolution appears complete. Typical human behavior is now entirely absent." Smith decides that the vampires have lost all remnants of human intelligence, including instincts to self-preservation. All sociality is gone, he says, "Typical human behavior is now entirely absent." The film never returns to this idea to contradict Smith's character's assesment of the situation, and so we are left to accept his "scientific" judgment [I'll return to this in a moment] as valid. But can we not give the scenario the more obvious interpretation? The male vampire has just seen his female companion--wife, girlfriend, "mate," if you must--captured by Smith, and is willing to risk his life to protect her. Is there a more social, even human gesture? Is Smith's character not the more inhuman, sending away his wife and child to stay behind and calmly battle the "vampire menace" as a scientist fights the spread of a disease? When it almost seems as if the theme of Matheson's book could crop up unannounced, Smith's dictation of notes in the next sequence is placed precisely to innoculate us against such an idea...)

How, then, does the film justify the use of the same title, I Am Legend? Certainly, The Omega Man was made from the same source material, and so it has been proven (as if such proof were needed) that the title can be changed if necessary. Don't be fooled by the banal closing "and we lived happily ever after" monologue; it is not simply that Will Smith's character will become a "legend" to the future humans whose lives he has saved. If such were the case, why use the word "legend" at all? "Legend" misconstrues the meaning, here; a legend is mostly fabrication and exaggeration, after all. Rather, the "Legend" in the movie's title is a reference to the album prominently featured in the movie, Bob Marley's Legend (in fairness, not a true Bob Marley album, but rather the classic "best of" compilation that everybody owns in lieu of an actual Bob Marley album...). Rather than looking for justification for the title at the end of the story, as we did in Matheson's case, Smith gives us the film's justification during his exchange with Anna shortly before the final action sequence: "He [Bob Marley] had this idea. It was kind of a virologist idea. He believed that you could cure racism and hate...literally cure it, by injecting music and love into people's lives. When he was scheduled to perform at a peace rally, a gunman came to his house and shot him down. Two days later he walked out on that stage and sang. When they asked him why--He said, 'The people, who were trying to make this world worse...are not taking a day off. How can I? Light up the darkness'."

In the film, then, violence and agression are attributes of the Other; when they take over, "typical human behavior" disappears. Following the metaphor of the film, these traits of the Other function like a virus; if we can learn to act as virologists, and "inject music and love into people's lives," this agression and violence can be cured. One cannot help but think here of the rather conspicuous shift in locale between book and movie (in fact, both the book and The Omega Man take place in California; the new movie is completely alone in its adoption of New York as a location, a choice which even works against the film's financial interests...); playing upon our fear of a post-apocalyptic New York, torn apart by hate, Smith's character--ironically a military man?--asks, "Can't we all just get along?" It is only when he finally learns to love again, at the end of the film, that Smith quite suddenly develops a cure for the vampire disease, and sacrifices his life so that Anna and her son can safely escape with humanity's salvation...

*****

Here I think I could break off, having (I think) identified the central logic at work in the film. If you've read this far, my thanks, and certainly these last few lines can be skipped if you're short on time. But a few thoughts linger here for me, regarding some of the remaining changes between Matheson and Hollywood. Against this background of the shift in meaning (or rather, the substitution of banal "bleeding-heart-liberal" theme for Matheson's original theme), we can attempt to place the rest of the changes. In Matheson's novel, Robert Neville was nobody special; he's immune to the vampire virus through pure random chance. He is a blue collar factory worker, who loses his wife and child to the vampire disease. Not by any means a trained scientist, he attempts to give himself the sort of science education necessary to cure the disease; this is never anything other than a hopeless endeavor, fueled by sheer optimism. Neville learns enough to identify the disease, but he will never cure it. Will Smith's Neville, by contrast, has to be able to cure the disease: and so instead of a factory worker, we have a world-renowned biologist. He cannot lose his wife and child to the disease--this would be both too great a failure for the hero, and contradict the "hate as virus" theme--and so instead they die in an accident, after he has already sent them away. Why is he military? Matheson's character certainly wasn't. Perhaps only to give the character access to both greater knowledge and allow him to remain in Manhattan during the military lockdown? This doesn't make much sense, it seems unnecessary. And why is he immune? He just happens to fall within the correct "percentage" of humans; on the one hand, this could still be Matheson's "dumb luck." But instead of "some random guy," we are now being asked to believe that the very military scientist working on a cure for the disease is, coincidentally, one of the few humans naturally immune to that disease. The answer finally clicks into place at the end of the film: Anna and Neville have a brief spat over religious faith which reveals that Neville "lost his faith" when the disease killed off so many people. When Smith finds love at the end of the movie, and is ready to sacrifice himself so that Anna and her son can escape, we see that his faith has returned too; he now tells her that this is all "part of God's plan."

Ah. So now the pieces fall into place: Military. Scientist undergoes a conversion. God's plan. Love vs. hate and destruction. New York. Such a constellation of concepts can only place us in a post-9.11 America.

In this respect, the film I Am Legend falls between Matheson's book and The Omega Man. Charleton Heston's Robert Neville was also a military scientist--but it was because he was part of the military's team working on a cure that he became immune. They developed a cure "just in time," but Neville had to use the only existing trial sample himself. Most of the new film's deviations from the book can be traced back to Omega Man, but it veers away from the "Heston-Neville as Christ figure" ending of the earlier film (perhaps, in a post-Mel Gibson world, to avoid conflating the vampires with Jews, allowing them to function instead as secularists and fiundamentalists?). Thus, Smith does not "give us his blood" to save us, dying for us as a messaih. Rather, he does his part and then dies in service of the cause, a martyr for the faith. But he's a martyr for the good guys, and thus not one of the fundamentalists...Could we ask for any clearer an indication that Matheson's original "we are the Other" theme has been avoided?!

[More can obviously be said, especially regarding Anna and her son, who are obviously a very different sort of visitor than Ruth was in the original! But a) I've fallen off into complete off-the-top-of-my-head speculation at this point, and so this entry would only continue to get less organized; and b) one risks giving more space to a mediocre movie than it deserves...]

Quick Shot: The Subject Supposed to Participate

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 16:55:09 GMT

It's time to come clean, American liberals. Or progressives. Or whatever nonthreatening word you've quietly adopted for yourself these days in the vain hope that Ann Coulter will not use it in an emasculating Christmas jingle: You love you some Kucinich.
And so do I.*
*Not that I plan to vote for him. That would be crazy.

--Rebecca Traister, "Stop Lying to Yourself. You love Dennis Kucinich"

The response to an ideological interpellation is also made in the name of a claim of sense: it is this "presupposition of intelligibility" that pushes the interpellated individual towards an identification with the subject supposed to believe. The active part played by the interpellated individual consists precisely in her/his helping to establish a "facade"--an ideological effect of coherence. The interpellated individual does indeed interpret "on the basis of certain anticipatory ideas": but s/he ascribes them to the subject supposed to believe, and thus confers upon them an a priori social status.

--Rastko Mocnik, "From Historical Marxisms to Historical Materialism: Toward the Theory of Ideology"

As an elaboration of Althusser's (Lacanian) theory of ideology (and ideological interpellation), Mocnik discusses the role of the "subject supposed to believe" (an analogue to Lacan's "subject supposed to know") in the interpellation of individuals. The idea being that one does not have to "believe" in the ideology oneself in order to be interpellated by it, one merely need suppose that others might believe. The clear example is the case of a rumor about the banks running out of money. This need in no way be true, and the individual in question need in no way believe it's true. Still, he says to himself, "Others will believe this rumor, and they will go and take their money out of the bank, causing a run on the banks!" And so what does our non-believing individual do? Of course: he goes and tries to take his money out of the bank, "just in case other people cause a run." And in so doing, contributes to the creation of that very phenomena.

The notion of "electability" plays the same role within American politics as the rumor in the above example. It is a function of ideological interpellation which no individual voter need really take seriously; but the very idea that this notion has any sense at all, in other words, the supposition of a subject who does believe, is enough to change voting behavior. The idea that one might "throw away one's vote" or--worse yet (and the 2000 election is constantly evoked here as the story to frighten children into behaving)--"split the vote," thus de facto giving the "other side" the upper hand in the election. We saw this rumor of electability slowly weed out the better of the candidates for the 2004 election, until we were left with the "most electable" John Kerry. Once again, the rumor mill is running high this campaign season, and the place we see this most is in media dealings with Dennis Kucinich. (And if you haven't read Gore Vidal's piece on Kucinich from The Nation, check it out; it's worth the read.)

Kucinich has, of course, been repeatedly asked about this; and his answer is always something along the lines of, "I know I'm a long-shot candidate. But what I stand for is central to the hopes and dreams of the American population." Unfortunately, the very opportunity to answer the charge reinforces the idea of a subject supposed to believe; the very framing of Kucinich as "a long-shot candidate." Kucinich takes the optimistic approach: "This 'electability' issue is something right out of Forrest Gump: 'Electability is as electability does'." He maintains that "people will catch on," and that we'll "see [his] numbers start to rise."

Terry Eagleton has famously defended ideology theory because of the power of the "false consciousness" aspect of the theory. This same aspect of ideology theory has fallen out of favor over the last fifteen or twenty years, due to the paternalistic way of framing political struggle: "I'm engaged politically on behalf of people who are too ideologically blinded to help themselves," and all that. The subject supposed to believe, however, seems to me precisely the way in which ideology theory can recover the power of "false consciousness" without the paternalistic presupposition of anything like "true consciousness" and "blind masses." Instead, election year political struggle should be a more Lacanian exercise: our job is not to convince people about what their "real interests" are; if Kucinich is right (and the entire reason the question of 'electability' is thrown in his face is, as the above articles attest, that he is right), he already represents the interests of Americans, and they already know it. Our job instead is simply to help everyone (including ourselves!) understand that there is no subject who believes. It's not about "throwing away your vote" on the basis of principles; it's about really voting, of choosing not to throw away your vote.

Only When I Lose Myself

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 06:09:11 GMT

It is easy to imagine, too, that certain mystical practices may succeed in upsetting the normal relations between the different regions of the mind, so that, for instance, perception may be able to grasp happenings in the depths of the ego and in the id which were otherwise inaccessible to it. It may be safely doubted, however, whether this road will lead us to the ultimate truths from which salvation is to be expected. Nevertheless it may be admitted that the theraputic efforts of psycho-analysis have chosen a similar line of approach. Its intention is, indeed, to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the super-ego, to widen its field of perception and enlarge its organization, so that it can appropriate fresh portions of the id. Where id was, there ego shall be.

--Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
(Standard Edition, trans. James Strachey, pp. 99-100)

There has been some talk over the years about the ways in which the translations of Freud's works have--intentionally or not--"clinicalized" his theories. And indeed, if we read the New Introductory Lectures as translated above, we get only the 'clinical' (albeit intended) understanding of the goal of Freudian psychoanalysis: "Where the id was, there the ego shall be." Of course, Freud never used the words "ego" or "id." In the German original, this sentence is, "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden"; Where It was, there shall I be. What we have learned to call the "id" is nothing other than the mysterious "It" inside me. As Freud remarks, "This impersonal pronoun seems particularly well suited for expressing the main characteristic of this province of the mind--the fact of its being alien to the ego" (90).

And yes what is the "ego," the "I" for whom this "It" is so alien?

It is the sense-organ of the entire apparatus; moreover it is receptive not only to excitations from the outside but also those arising from the interior of the mind. We need scarcely look for a justification of the view that the ego is that portion of the id which was modified by the proximity and influence of the external world, which is adapted for the reception of stimuli, comparable to the cortical layer by which a small piece of living substance is surrounded. (94)

The ego is just a layer of the id which, through its exposure to the outside world, has become separated, and no longer knows itself to be part of the id. It grows from the id, and then turns to attempt to control the id, which now strikes it as an alien object. The goal of psychoanalysis, as given by Freud, is to "strengthen" the ego, to allow it to expand an reappropriate more of the alien id.

What should strike us is that, if we remove the clinical layer of translation and drop the language back into its everyday German-equivalents, Freud's story bears an uncanny resemblance to the Feuerbachian theory of alienation. The subject--the I--is confronted by an object--the It--which strikes it as exterior, separate, foreign: alien. Hence alienation, for this object is nothing other than the subject's own essence misrecognized. For Feuerbach, the subject and object of essential concern are man and religion; this is the story of alienation he traces in The Essence of Christianity. Man is confronted by an "object," religion (let us note: an internal object), which he does not recognize as his own externalized essence. But through this alienation, man's relationship to his own essential object is flipped: for within religion, man now experiences himself as the object, created by God, the subject. The purpose of philosophy is to force the "confession" of religion, to make it reveal the truth of what it has always been; Subject=Object=Man=Religion.

In the same way, the I, which is only a split-off, if we might say, reified part of the "subject" It, misrecognizes itself as the subject, confronting an alien, (internal) object It. The goal of psychoanalysis is to reveal the truth to the I of what it has always been, to allow a reintegration of subject and object; Subject=Object=I=It(=Ego=Id).

What is interesting here, however, is that for Feuerbach alienation and disalienation are simply a circuit, or a binary relation; we either have one, or we have the other. One is either alienated, or one knows the truth, which can be 'read' off of the situation; as Althusser puts it:

[This] is to say that man does not have to make the detour through the sciences in order to arrive at the knowledge of his essence, but that this knowledge is given to him in actu, in its adequate content, in the form of the specific object known as religion. This calls an end to the infinite programme that the eighteenth century upheld before the sciences of man and the social sciences after the idealism of the Cartesian Cogito had been rejected. Man no longer has to make the long detour through the sciences, the detour of that infinite quest in which the idea of man is, precisely, only an 'idea', serving as a regulatory, not a constitutive principle for empirical research; he possesses his own self-knowledge in the privileged object of religion, because, in religion, he possesses the ontological privilege of standing in immediate, adequate relation to his own species. (The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings, pp. 99-100)

With Freud, however, we have a clear rejection of the possibility Feuerbach offers us of "truth": The I can never fully re-appropriate the It, only "fresh portions of" It. The process of disalienation is never complete, it is--if you'll forgive my borrowing the phrase--"always not-yet." Disalienation is a process either not-yet taken or in process, but never completed. And so instead of a binary, there is a long 'detour': the detour of psychoanalysis as a science (and, I am tempted to say, hence the willful "clinicalization" of Freud's language). Might we even say: the Subject is, for Freud, the "deferred action" (Nachträglichkeit) of disalienation?

There is, of course, much to be said about the transition from Freud into Lacan regarding precisely this viewpoint. Dr. Mary Klages has stated this relationship very helpfully in this respect; Frued is the humanist, and Lacan the post-structuralist (in other words, to read it through Althusser's lens, Freud:Lacan::Feuerbach/Early Marx:Late Marx). Though perhaps we can even take the next step, here; for if Freud is developing a "science" throughout his work which allows him to call the "humanist" assumptions at work here into question, Freud may even be the "Marx" figure, and Lacan now (not surprisingly) the Althusserian. Still, this isn't simply to draw banal similarities; thinking about the way in which Freud questions or makes problematic his own humanist framework ("problematic") might shed some new light on the development of science as a tool; the assumptions at work in humanism; and the way the two are inherently connected. Reading forward, this may even change the way in which we can approach Lacan (especially as it relates to Althusser's reading: "Lacan's first word is to say: in principle, Freud founded a science. A new science which was the science of a new object: the unconscious.").

I should stress--as I already have as a preface to this journal, I know--that all of this is particularly off-the-cuff; I'm thinking "out loud" here, so to speak. I had this intuition about Freud's humanism, which I'm attempting to sort out. You may see another entry on this topic in the near future. Or not. Meantime, at least the first rough thoughts are out of my head and onto a page somewhere. Any thoughts?

President Gas

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 07:42:04 GMT

With Apologies to Plato (by way of Grube and Reeve)...

"Socrates," Glaucon said, "do you want to seem to have persuaded us that democracy is the best form of government, or do you want truly to convince us of this?"

"I truly want to convince you," I said, "if I can."

"Well then, you certainly aren't doing what you want. Tell me, do you recognize that when we say 'best', we sometimes mean this comparatively, that which is better than its alternatives, though not necessarily good in any absolute sense, in itself?"

"Certainly, I recognize this meaning of the term."

"And do you also recognize another meaning of the term 'best', by which we mean that which is inherently good in itself, and thus better than any possible alternative?"

"There is also this meaning. But what of it?"

"Where do you put Democracy?"

"I myself mean that it is good in itself, and thereby the best possible form of government."

"That isn't most people's opinion. They'd say that Democracy belongs to the first kind, the 'lesser of several evils', and is to be supported simply as a way of limiting the power of any one individual to do greater evil."

"I know, that's the general opinion. Thrasymachus faulted Democracy on these grounds just a moment ago, but it seems that I'm a slow learner."

"Come, then, and listen to me as well, and see whether you still have that problem, for I think that Thrasymachus gave up before he had to, charmed by you as if he were a snake. But I'm not yet satisfied by the argument on either side. I want to know what Democracy and its opposite are and what power each itself has when it's by itself in the state. I want to leave out of account their abuses and what comes of each of them. So, if you'll agree, I'll renew the argument of Thrasymachus. First, I'll state what kind of a thing people consider Democracy to be and what its origins are. Second, I'll argue that all who support it do so unwillingly, as simply the lesser of two evils, not as something good in itself. Third, I'll argue that they have good reason to think as they do."

Glaucon presents his challenge, and Socrates is impressed. But then:

When Glaucon had said this, I had it in mind to respond, but his brother Adeimantus intervened: "You surely don't think that the position has been adequately stated?"

"Why not?" I said.

"The most important thing to say hasn't been said yet."

"Well then," I replied, "a man's brother must stand by him, as the saying goes. If Glaucon has omitted something, you must help him. Yet what he said is enough to throw me to the canvas and make me unable to come to the aid of Democracy."

"Nonsense," he said. "Hear what more I have to say, for we should also fully explore the arguments that are opposed to the ones Glaucon gave, the ones that praise Democracy and find fault with Absolute Monarchy, so that what I take to be his intentions may be clearer.

"When fathers speak to their sons, they say that one must support Democracy, as do all the others who have charge of anyone. But they don't praise Democracy itself, only the civil liberties available to individuals within the Democratic state. But they elaborate even further on the consequences of rejecting Democracy. By bringing the specter of Nazism, they are able to talk about the abundant evils that they themselves and historians attribute to Absolute Monarchy; of concentration camps, secret police, and torture. In their stories, Democracy allows for the maximum amount of freedom for each individual, commensurate with justice for all, and that a Democratic regime ensures the pursuit of happiness for its citizens. They bury Absolute Monarchy in the terrors of World War II and Stalinist Russia; call it tyranny where it exists, and all of the negative qualities Glaucon gave to Democracy, they give to Absolute Monarchy. This, then, is the way people praise Democracy and find fault with its opposite.

"Besides this, Socrates, consider another form of the argument about Democracy employed by both private individuals and political theorists. All go on repeating with one voice that Democracy is a fine thing, but difficult and fragile, while Absolute Monarchy is strong and easy to slide into and shameful only in outcome and ideals. They add that Absolute Monarchies are for the most part more decisive and unified than Democracies, and, whether in public or in private, they willingly obey powerful people who act unilaterally. But they dishonor those who seek agreement and compromise, even though they agree that they are better than others.

"But the most wonderful of all these arguments concerns what they have to say about ethics. They say that ethics, too, often find misfortune and disregard in the Democratic state, and its opposite fate within institutions built on the model of Absolutism. They declare god to be an Absolute Monarch, whose law allows no dissent, and truth to be, by its very nature, one-sided.

"When all such sayings about the attitudes of gods and humans to Democracy and Absolute Monarchy are so often repeated, Socrates, what effect do you suppose they have on the souls of young people? I mean those who are clever and are able to flit from one of these sayings to another, so to speak, and gather from them the impression of what sort of politics he should hold and how best to secure political and ethical ideals. He would surely ask himself Lenin's question, 'What is to be done?' And he'll answer himself: 'The various sayings suggest that there is no advantage to Democracy unless it backs the correct ideals, while the problems of Democracy gone astray are apparent. But they tell me that a truly just Monarch, who has secured for himself absolute power, rules the Kingdom of Heaven. Since, then, 'truth forcibly overcomes opinion', I must surely turn entirely to it. I should seek the benevolent dictator, who might force us all to accept Truth, Justice, and the American Way'.

"'But surely', someone will object, 'it isn't easy to maintain the purity of the Uncorrupted Dictator'. We'll reply that nothing is easy. And, in any case, if we're to be happy, we must follow the path indicated in these accounts. To remain on the right path we'll form secret societies and political clubs. And there are teachers of persuasion to make us clever in dealing with assemblies and law courts. Therefore, using persuasion in one place and force in another, we'll keep Democracy at bay without paying a penalty.

"Why, then, should we still choose Democracy over Absolute Monarchy? So, given all that has been said, Socrates, how is it possible for anyone of any idealism--whether of ethics, justice, or national strength--to be willing to honor Democracy and not laugh aloud when he hears it praised? Indeed, if anyone can show that what we've said is false and has adequate knowledge that Democracy is best, he'll surely be full not of anger but of forgiveness for the fascist. He knows that, apart from someone of godlike character who is disgusted by Monarchy or one who has gained knowledge and avoids Dictatorship for that reason, no one is Democratic willingly. Through cowardice or weak stomach or some other weakness, people do indeed object to Fascism. But it's obvious that they do so only because they lack the power to enforce their own Dictatorship, for the first of them to acquire it is the first to wield it as widely as he can.

"And all of this has no other cause than the one that led Glaucon and me to say to you: 'Socrates, of all of you who claim to praise Democracy, from the original idealists of Greece whose writings survive, to the Founding Fathers of our own America, not one has ever blamed Monarchy or praised Democracy except by mentioning the civil rights, prosperity, and individual freedoms that are their consequences. No one has ever adequately described what each itself does of its own power by its presence in the state that possesses it, even if it remains hidden from the various idealists and enemies of the state. No one, whether in theory or in private conversations, has adequately argued that Dictatorship is the worst thing a state can have and that Democracy is the greatest good. If you had treated the subject in this way and persuaded us from youth, we wouldn't now be guarding against one another's political positions, but would each be his own best guardian, afraid that by backing a dictatorship he'd be living with the worst thing possible.

"Thrasymachus or anyone else might have said what we've said, Socrates, or maybe even more, in discussing Democracy and its opposite--crudely inverting their powers, in my opinion. And frankly, it's because I want to hear the opposite from you that I speak with all the force I can muster. So don't merely give us a theoretical argument that Democracy is stronger than Absolute Monarchy, but tell us what each itself does, because of its own powers, to a state that possessses it, that makes Dictatorship bad and Democracy good. Follow Glaucon's advice, and don't take reputations into account, for if you don't deprive Democracy and Dicatorship of their historic results and attach fictitious ones to them, we'll say that you are not praising them but their reputations and that you're encouraging us to be fascists in secret. In that case we'll say that you agree with Thrasymachus that Democracy is only a protection against the Other, while Dictatorship is one's own advantage and profit, though not the advantage of the weaker or wicked.

"You agree that Democracy is good in itself, the best not only in comparison with its alternatives, but an ideal to be pursued of itself. Therefore, praise Democracy as the best in this sense, explaining how--because of its very self--it benefits the possessors and how Dictatorship harms them. Leave concentration camps and civil liberties for others to worry about.

"Others would satisfy me if they praised Democracy and blamed Absolute Monarchy in this way, extolling the wages of one and denigrating those of the other. But you, unless you order me to be satisfied, wouldn't, for you've spent your whole life investigating this and nothing else. Don't, then, give us only a theoretical argument that Democracy is stronger than Dictatorship, but show what effect each has because of itself on the state that wields it--the one for good and the other for bad--whether it remains uncorrupted or not."

The idea hanuting me, then, is the following: those who champion democracy seem only to do so on the principle that "power corrupts; and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Which is to say, the assumption in all cases seems to implicitly be that, if only there were some way to have a truly benevolent dictator, that this would be in all ways superior to democratic process. Is it any wonder, then, that we see people choose security over freedom? Monologue over Polyphony? Conservatism over radicalism? Should we be at all shocked and appalled anymore when we hear it suggested that we might forcibly export democracy?

Thinking About Thinking About Thinking

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 01:35:35 GMT

All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.

--Karl Marx, Eighth Thesis on Feuerbach

Destutt de Tracy coined the term "ideology" in 1796 to describe his new "science of ideas" (the literal meaning of the term). He felt the need to come up with a new word because the terminology already in place for such discussions--metaphysics, or psychology--were too burdened by contentious and discredited concepts (e.g., knowledge of the soul, etc.). "Ideology," however, "was very sensible since it supposes nothing doubtful or unknown; it does not call to mind any idea of cause. . . . Its meaning is very clear to everyone."

Anyone familiar with the term ideology today should find this incredibly entertaining; for what concept in current political theory is more obscure than "ideology"? In May of 1991, Terry Eagleton and Pierre Bourdieu interviewed each other at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Eagleton had just published his book Ideology: An Introduction, which begins as follows:

Nobody has yet come up with a single adequate definition of ideology, and this book will be no exception. This is not because workers in the field are remarkable for their low intelligence, but because the term 'ideology' has a whole range of useful meanings, not all of which are compatible with each other. To try to compress this wealth of meaning into a single comprehensive definition would thus be unhelpful even if it were possible.

Bourdieu, meanwhile, had just published a collection of essays under the title Language and Symbolic Power, in which he consciously avoided using the term "ideology." He tells Eagleton:

I tend to avoid the word 'ideology' because, as your own book shows, it has very often been misused, or used in a very vague manner. It seems to convey a sort of discredit. . . . I have tried to sibstitute concepts like 'symbolic domination' or 'symbolic power' or 'symbolic violence' for the concept of ideology in order to try to control some of the uses, or abuses, to which it is subject. . . . Sometimes we must refurbish concepts--first, to be more precise, and second, to make them more alive. I am sure you would agree that the concept of ideology has been so used and abused that it does not work any more. We no longer believe in it; and it is important, for example, in political uses, to have concepts that are efficient and effective.

Eagleton defends the concept of ideology by pointing to a need within political theory for a way to talk about "false consciousness" (and here I always think of that great line from J.C. Watts, Sr.: "A black man voting for the Republicans makes about as much sense as a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders."), and he mentions a couple of reasons why he feels ideology "is no longer a fashionable concept." However--to take us back to the Marxist roots of this discussion--very little attention is ever paid to the question, "Where do these contradictions in theory come from?" That is to say, why does the theory of ideology seem to invite so many contradictory accounts? What is it we're trying to talk about when we talk about "ideology," and why is that such a difficult thing to do?

This question serves to guide the research I'm going to be doing over the next semester or so. As such, the answer is neither simple enough to fully lay out in this space, nor nearly fully-formed enough in my head to even attempt. However, already the following moments seem to me to be significant:

1. Marx's original use of the term. Marx makes only two brief mentions of "ideology" in his work before 1845: Once in a footnote in his doctoral thesis ("our life has no need now of ideologies and false opinions"), and once in The Holy Family (where it's actually simply a reference to Napoleon's "scorn of ideologists"). When the term shows up in 1845, however (in the title of an unpublished book, The German Ideology), it is neither with fanfare nor (more importantly) explanation. Far from wielding it to build a theory of false consciousness or class struggle, Marx here simply seems to take up the term from de Tracy's self-description, and apply it critically as a word for what Feuerbach and the Young Hegelians (or "Free Ones") were doing wrong. If "ideology" is a science of ideas, in other words, then the problem with the "German Ideologists" is precisely that they take ideas to be the causes of things; they focus their criticism on ideas, either seeking to "understand" the world (through the use of proper concepts) or to change it through changing men's ideas about it. Marx, in short, is taking Feuerbach and the Young Hegelians to task for prioritizing consciousness over sensuous life.

2. The difference between Marx and Engels. By the 1890s, Marx is dead and Engels is acting as if the term ideology has always meant "false consciousness." For Engels, "ideology" is a superstructure, seemingly mechanically determined by the economic "base." Indeed, not only Engels, but most of the Second International had a rather mechanistic view of science, which should only be expected to influence their understanding of historical materialism as "the science of history." All the same, Engels and his followers are moved to speak about ideology in an attempt to talk about social life, civil society, etc.

3. Althusser's critique of Marx. It is well known that Althusser identifies an "epistemological break" in Marx's work, between the "Early Marx" (up to 1844) and the "Mature Marx" (1857 on), with a break (in 1845) and a "transitional period" separating them. The mature writings of Marx fall under the purview of "scientific Marxism," whereas the early Marx is the "ideological Marx." However, less well known is that Althusser identifies the theory of ideology running through Marx's entire corpus (from The German Ideology straight through Capital) as "an ideological theory of ideology." In a classic Althusserian turn of phrase, he declares that the theory of ideology we find in Marx "cannot be the basis for a (Marxist) theory of ideology." In other words: this is a place where Marx gets Marx(ism) wrong. Althusser maintains that Marx's theory of ideology remains fundamentally Feuerbachian, even after his break from Feuerbach. At the heart of this "ideological theory of ideology" is Feuerbach's speculary theory of the object, or the identification of the essential ('objectified') subject.

Without going on to identify other moments, I can already gesture at a common theme: 'ideology' is a category used in (Marxist) political theory to talk about the subject, what it means to be a subject, etc. It seems to be a Marxist version, if you will, of the (largely French, post-structuralist) problematic known as the "metaphysics of the subject." Putting it this way might already (albeit very roughly) help us see where the contradictions in theory keep cropping up: it is the same problem Nietzsche, and then Heidegger faces, when each of them tries to jump "outside" of metaphysics, to something more 'fundamental'. And it is the same problem Derrida seems to face when approaching the critique of metaphysics: how to talk about the fundamental, or the whole, when there is no 'outside' position. In more Marxist language, we might put it this way:

[T]he speculary structure is the effect of a specific absence which makes itself felt, in the field of the ideological itself, in the symptom of the reduplication of the subject and the couple submission/guarantee. This absence is an absence in propria persona in the field of the ideological, but a presence in propria persona outside it. This presence is that of the ideological function of recognition/misrecognition, a function that has to do with what is misrecognized in the form of the speculary relation of recognition: that is, in the last instance, the complex structure of the social whole, and its class structure.

--Althusser, "On Feuerbach,"
in The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings

In the end, the problems of ideology theory are perhaps a nice lesson about ideology: coining a new term to try and avoid the theoretical snares of both metaphysics and psychology is not enough to actually do away with these problems...!

The Week in Logic

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 05:47:25 GMT

A few people have recently pointed out that I never put anything here anymore. And indeed, it's been too long. Alas, today is hardly content-up-to-snuff; just a few brief notes, really. But I'm spending my fall (among other things) working through Marx's The German Ideology, so expect some related posts over the coming weeks. In brief (and this connects with what follows), it's got me thinking a lot about the concept of "science." Positivism, Socialist science, the relationship between science and ideology, etc.

On to a few brief notes, though:

1) The Raven Paradox

Poking around the internet today, I came across Hempel's ravens, a paradox of which I was previously unfamiliar. For those of you unfamiliar with the paradox (or who simply don't feel like clicking the link), it basically goes like this:

If you accept:

P1) that whatever confirms a hypothesis X also confirms any statement logically equivalent to X; and
P2) that a positive instance of any hypothesis X counts as a confirmation of X;

then you are forced to accept that seemingly random, inconsequential things will count as instances of confirmation of X.

For those of you who don't speak logic, the paradox gets its name from the following example:

P1) "All ravens are black" and "All non-black things are non-ravens" are logically equivalent (they say the same thing);
P2) and so a black raven will confirm both statements...

...but then, so will a green parrot. Or a white sneaker. In other words, if I find a white sneaker, it now counts as evidence that all ravens are black!

So what goes wrong, here? Apparently, according to Wikipedia, "No generally accepted solution to the paradox has yet been found." Wikipedia does list the solutions offered by, among others, WVO Quine and P. Lipton. And both are on the right track, inasmuch as both want to deny P2. However, both do it in asinine ways: Quine tries to restrict hypothesis-confirmation to "projectable predicates," meaning that a black raven would confirm "All ravens are black" without confirming "All non-black things are non-ravens." Which just strikes me as silly logical acrobatics. Meanwhile, Lipton goes off in search of alternative models of hypothesis-confirmation, though the jury is apparently still out as to whether or not he's found anything...

For me, the point here is simple: it's the notion of "hypothesis-confirmation" in the first place that gets us into trouble. Didn't we leave this idea behind in 1777? A hypothesis is an interpretation given to explain observations; scientists might then use hypotheses in order to make predictions. If those predictions come true, we are more likely to support the given hypothesis (the obvious example here being Einstein's successful prediction of certain observations before the 1919 eclipse). And, insofar as this goes, we might very well say that the hypothesis "All ravens are black" allows us to predict that anytime we find a non-black object, it will not be a raven. Fair enough; if this suddenly seems trivial, then congratulations: you're still with me. But the important point (and, again, this isn't anything new) is this: a positive instance never counts as a "confirmation" of a hypothesis. A hypothesis gets used to make a prediction; if it predicts incorrectly, then we throw it out as an incorrect hypothesis. If it predicts correctly, then we keep it around to make a new prediction. It is never anything more than a hypothesis, it can be thrown out at any time, and roughly we can think of our current set of scientific theories as being the set of all hypotheses that haven't been wrong yet. In this way science is very much like a neverending reality show: every time there's a challenge, somebody's getting voted off the island.

2) Neuroscience and the American Ideology

Jon Ponder over at the Pensito Review is apparently excited about a recent neuroscience study linking "smart brains" with "a liberal bias." Ponder wastes no time at all in drawing the obvious conclusion:

The study suggests that liberals are more open to new social,
scientific and religious ideas, Sulloway said. He pointed to the
historical record, saying, “There is ample data from the history of
science showing that social and political liberals indeed do tend to
support major revolutions in science.”

Speaking up for conservative brains, study author Amodio said it
would be a mistake to conclude that liberal brains are better than
conservatives’. He suggested that the tendency of conservatives to
block distracting information could be a good thing, depending on the
situation.

Really? That is an interesting assertion because it is impossible to
imagine a situation in which ignoring pertinent information could
produce a useful analysis.

The study seems to verify another assumption many on the left have made about conservatives: They are easily fooled.

Now, much as I do love the idea that leaning politically to the left makes you smarter, one can't help but get a strong odor of "fallacy of the false cause" here. Try this one on for size:

Wealthy people buy BMWs; so if you want to be wealthy, you should buy a BMW.

You see where I'm going with this...

...What does this neuroscience study prove? Does it prove that our political allegiances actually change our brain-functions? Or doesn't it equally--if not even moreso--suggest that political allegiances are simply a natural "reflex" of brain chemistry?! Liberal brains are smarter? Nay! "Smart" brains are liberal! And as nice as even this still sounds, what are the implications? Just this: our politics are not "chosen," rationally or otherwise, but are instead hard-wired into our brain chemistry. That neoconservative you're always arguing with isn't greedy, blinded by economic interest, or soulless, any more than you are altruistic, possessed of clear vision, and high-minded. Slowly, piece by piece, we can collapse all philosophical stances into autmoatic reflexes of brain bio-chemistry. Interested in criticism of this view? We can think back as far as the empiricism/rationalism debates, but why not start with Freud's 1925 paper, "The Resistance to Psycho-Analysis"?

What the two items noted here have in common is this: a mis-understanding of the fundamental role and meaning of science. The nature of scientific truth, the role of scientific theory, and the relationship of science to the other academic disciplines is sorely beset by illusions within the popular understanding (which analytic philosophy is only making worse).

3) A few parting shout-outs...

My most recent SequArt column is here; it's all about the politics of DC's character Green Arrow, and it was a lot of fun to write. Meanwhile, fellow New School philosophy department member Gabe has started a blog about German Idealism (yes, really...) here; he's updating all the time, and has links like you won't believe. So even if you don't share his great love of all things Fichte (and, come on, who doesn't love a little Fichte every now and again...), it's worth the click over and perusal...Finally, for those teachers (and lovers!) out there, this is an excellent article on, and I quote here, "Why we should understand, and even encourage, a certain sort of erotic intensity between student and professor." No, pervert, this isn't my way of telling you that I want to sleep with my students...just click over, and give it a read already.

Stay tuned in the weeks to come for science and Marx! For now, though, it's grading, grading, reading, and grading...!

Quick Shot: Morpheus vs. Marx

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 21:43:49 GMT

I slept fitfully last night; took me forever to get to sleep, and I woke several times in the night. However, somewhere in there, I slept deeply enough to have a dream. And this should tell you a bit about my psyche and preoccupations these days: I dreamt political theory. ::sigh:: So, while not entirely in keeping with the purpose of this journal, I wanted to take a moment to record the content of my dream here, in case I ever--for whatever reason--want to come back to it. Hell, "Yesterday" came to Paul McCartney in a dream...maybe if I can get warmed up, the next great political theory can come to me in my sleep, eh?

The Dream

Capitalism always needs an "outside" to expand into; as Arendt showed in her analysis of imperialism, capitalism functions along the logic of power, expand or die. Now, if there were just One Big System in the world, then--according to the logic of capitalism driving that system--it should slowly expand, until it encompasses the whole, and then self-destruct. This, or something like it, seems to have been the thinking of Marx and so-called "Scientific Socialism" (as Lenin says, Marxism isn't the discovery of class struggle, but instead the idea that the proletariat will eventually win that struggle).

So if there were but one big system, it should be hitting crisis point right about now and disintegrating. However, capitalism survives through the development of a system of systems; capitalism is indeed the ruling force on earth, but there is no One Big System or Market, but instead any number of smaller Systems or Markets, which constantly compete with each other. In this way, each system always has an "outside" to expand into, and the instantiated competition ensures the survival of the whole. We can call this situation "Late Capitalism," as some have done, or we can call it "Post-Modernism" (there is no "fundamental antagonism," no "master narrative," each "outside" is just the "inside" of another, etc.). And this is certainly why insightful critics of post-modernism have seen that, far from a revolutionary theory of emancipation, post-modern theory all too often is simply a retrenching of the conditions of late capitalism (which is why so-called progressive theorists like Baudrillard must either be read as conservatives or nihilists).

If this is the case, must not our task be to fight on the side of the whole? Unity, universality, the One Big System, these can today be progressive, potentially liberating concepts. If we can establish one universal system or market, then we can effectively bring about a situation in which capitalism must finally self-destruct. It is then against such thinkers as Adorno, etc., that we must assert the universal, the same, the homogenous.

In my dream, I explained the above ideas to a group of my peers (I was reading from something; I had written this up in some sort of prospectus form). When I finished, one of them (a fellow I'd rather not have following me into the Land of Nod, thank you very much...) said to me, "It sounds like you've got a dissertation topic there; you should show it to Jay." I awoke excited, only to realize that the meeting had not in fact occurred, and that I do not in fact have a dissertation topic, here.

Which is to say: I'm not really sure what I think of the theory advanced by my dream-self. Certainly, you can see a lot of what I'm reading these days peeking out (Zizek and Badiou, to be sure, but also Fredric Jameson's work on Adorno, which I've only recently started reading...). But--as it all adds up--I don't know that it necessarily escapes the sort of nihilism I accuse people like Baudrillard of falling into. Moreover, there are some really sweeping claims just kind of tossed out there, which would need substantial defense/elaboration.

More concretely, though, the dream certainly tells you where my head is lately. Stress over academic concerns is following me into the Dream Country, and after a week spent hiding in comic books, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and philosophy of art, it's pretty clear that avoidance is not going to work. I can either work on this stuff while I'm awake, or rehearse working on it while I'm asleep...

...As if on cue, my latest box arrived in the mail from Amazon today: Lucaks' History and Class Consciousness, Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future (a book on political theory and science fiction!), and Zizek's The Universal Exception (which contains his very short essay on Laibach, which I've been meaning to read).

Quick Shots: Lit Review

Mon, 09 Apr 2007 01:45:09 GMT

A few little announcements about various and sundry items of interest on your local interweb...

1. Comic Books and Political Theory

So, the fine folks over at SequArt have brought me on staff to contribute columns about political theory and sequential art. My first column is up here, with more soon to follow! Check it out, and feel free to leave a comment over there if the mood strikes you (be warned, though, that the site automatically includes a five-star rating with your comment unless you say otherwise, so if you don't like the column, you'll have to specifically lower the rating...). The column will basically work just like this journal, except that it will only have content relating to comic books and political theory. Unlike this one, which is more like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates...

2. Buying Friends Online

I'm also excited to note that I've been able to pre-order books from not just one, but two friends over at Amazon.com! dratomic's forthcoming book containing interviews with science fiction authors is set to be released this summer. It will be the light at the end of my test-prep tunnel, and a worthy reason to finish up my spring exams as quickly as possible.

Meanwhile, ladyangel is but one of a host of impressive contributors to this forthcoming book on the Goth subculture from Duke University Press. It seems to have a little taste of everything in there (I'm oh-so-curious to see what a scholarly analysis of a Poppy Z. Brite novel looks like...), and will hopefully be the first of many scholarly works on our favorite subculture. Amazon claims that the book has a March '07 release date, but they're telling me that I'm not going to get mine until this summer. Either way, though, it'll be a nice balance to my summer teaching regimen.

3. Why you may have seen me laughing out loud on the train recently...

Finally, I just had to share, this is but one example of why I love Slavoj Zizek:

On the 'Celestial Seasonings' green tea packet there is a short explanation of its benefits: 'Green tea is a natural source of antioxidants, which neutralize harmful molecules in the body known as free radicals. By taming free radicals, antioxidants help the body maintain its natural health.' Mutatis mutandis, is not the notion of totalitarianism one of the main ideological antioxidants, whose function throughout its career was to tame free radicals, and thus to help the social body to maintain its politico-ideological good health?

--Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? p. 1

Needless to say, the book only keeps getting better from there...

Think Again, Stanley Fish!

Tue, 16 Jan 2007 06:30:16 GMT

On the other had (or is it the third hand?), I still feel that affirmative action is a noble endeavor inspired more often than not by the best of motives, and I feel too that many who oppose it are the heirs (metaphorically) of those who have stood in the way of every advance in social justice made in the last 60 years. And there I stand, or rather, wobble. I've been thinking again and not finding it much fun.

--Stanley Fish, "Revisiting Affirmative Action, With Help From Kant"

So, Stanley Fish has a blog at New York Times Online, and in his latest post he's talking about Kant, affirmative action, and Michigan. I would love to link said blog post here, so that you can read it before reading my response. But alas, that's part of the "New York Times Select" section, the part of the website you have to pay to look at. I would, at this point, go into a brief tirade about the supreme stupidity of a blog you cannot read or link to, but Ann Althouse has already done so, and better than I could.

For those of you who have access to this super-secret blog, then, I offer the following response. For those of you who don't, I will try to fill you in on the back-story where necessary...

Fish says, first off, that when he teaches (the political writings of) Kant, he likes to ask the students what they think Kant would have said about affirmative action. He says, "[Kant's] emphasis on freedom and equality has led some of my students to conclude that Kant would have been in favor of affirmative action because, they reasoned, it was the denial of freedom and equality to African Americans that produced the injustices affirmative action is intended to redress." He then goes on to say that this is the wrong answer. The rest of the blog post is, as you may guess, a Kantian justification (and more) for rejecting affirmative action--made oh-so-timely by my homestate's recent decision to get rid of affirmative action. (Yes, this is where Michigan comes in; the Supreme Court said that the University of Michigan affirmative action policies were okay; the state of Michigan said, "Okay, then we'll just pass a law so that it's not okay anymore.")

Fish's post proceeds along a couple of major axes:

1. Ethics v. Politics
After stating up front that this is an issue he brings up whenever he "teach[es] the political writings of Immanuel Kant," Fish immediately moves on to attack affirmative action on the basis of Kantian morality. Now, it must be admitted: Kant's political philosophy is poorly distinguished from his ethical philosophy, even where it's explicitly given (though here, of course, I quickly think of Hannah Arendt, who says, "Kant has no explicit political philosophy; instead, he has an implicit political philosophy, and it's hidden in his aesthetics." But that's a story for another time...). But this means that the argument is immediately divided here. On the one hand, we have a hermeneutical issue: "What would Kant's ethics/politics say about affirmative action?" And on the other: "How relevant is Kant's stance on affirmative action for us?" The first may or may not be a clear-cut issue (I'm not done with Fish, even on that score just yet). The second, however, is less so. There is good reason to separate ethics from politics, and an argument from one does not automatically carry into the other. To his credit, Fish recognizes this; "I do not mean to suggest that because Kant (at least in my account of him) would agree with Justice [Clarence] Thomas [i.e., both opposed to affirmative action], the case against affirmative action has been decisively made," he says. However, raising the issue through Kant frames it in terms of a "principles vs. pragmatism" debate. What's funny here is that, historically, Fish himself comes down against Kant, on the "pragmatic" side of this debate: "I have written a bunch of essays (some in this newspaper [the New York Times]), two books (There's No Such Thing as Free Speech And It's A Good Thing Too; and The Trouble With Principle), done radio and television shows, participated in forums, appeared at city council meetings, and all in support of the position enunciated by Justice Stevens: that so-called principled arguments against affirmative action work by evacuating both history and morality – evacuating history by going to a level of abstraction so high that the difference between acts motivated by beneficence and acts motivated by malice disappear, and evacuating morality on the same reasoning." And this, I think, is pretty right on the money.

"But you said that Fish provides a Kantian justification for rejecting affirmative action?" Oh yes; but I also said, "and more." Fish doesn't spend the necessary time arguing that Kant's (confused) political writings are directly relevant for us; instead, he makes the argument that Kant would reject affirmative action, and then goes on to give us different reasons why he himself now (perhaps) does so. But we'll get to those in a moment...

Before we move on, however, it must be said that Fish's is by no means the only available political interpretation of Kant's ethical philosophy. Indeed, there is a very famous interpretation of Kant's ethics within American political philosophy: I am of course talking about John Rawls. Now, if you know anything about John Rawls, you know exactly where I'm going with this. If not, let me at least pause to catch you up: John Rawls asks the important question, "What is justice?" And his answer is quite simply, "justice is fairness." Of course, the follow-up question immediately presents itself: "Okay smartass, but what's fair? How do I know if I'm being fair?" This is where Rawls pulls in Kant's ethics. Kant's ethics, of course, famously asks us to universalize our maxims; in essence, we ask, "What if everyone always acted this way, in all situations?" It's what Rawls has called, in other places, the "CI Procedure." Rawls applies this Kantian idea in the sphere of politics with what he calls the "original position," or the "veil of ignorance." The veil of ignorance asks us to imagine that we are creating a society. We are asked to distribute the goods in this society however we like; the only trick is, we will then be placed into this society at random; i.e., we can't pick which "role" we will get stuck with. Now, Rawls asks, how are we going to distribute the goods? Well, if I knew that I was going to end up as the King, I'd give him all the toys, right? But if I give the King everything, then the serf gets the shaft. So I'm taking my chances; I could end up very happy, or--more likely--very miserable. But, if I distribute things as fairly as possible, then I minimize my chances of getting the total shaft.

However, before you go thinking Rawls is some sort of socialist, there's an important adjoinder: we're not setting up our society from scratch. We can't forcibly redistribute the goods of our society (Rawls says). So instead, distributive justice asks us to consider how we go about distributing benefits and incentives. And here, out of the veil of ignorance, applied to the concrete realm of real-world politics, Rawls gives us one last concept: the difference principle. And the difference principle says: if you can't make everyone equal, you do everything you can to help the guy with the worst deal. You find the guy who's getting the shaft, and throw him as many incentives and benefits as possible. Two things should now be apparent: first, Rawls' work is a cornerstone in modern American liberal theory (as the title of his 1993 book makes explicitly clear). And second, Rawl's theory--and in particular the difference principle--is the major justification for affirmative action.

To sum things up, then, Fish makes the simple argument that Kant would be against affirmative action. And if you've read Kant's writings on race, you'll certainly not be surprised (nor, probably, will you any longer care about Kant's personal feelings on the issue). But as Rawls makes very clear, a Kantian argument for affirmative action is not only possible, but is actually at the root of the policy! And so Fish actually only shows us that you can pick just about any author and pull your own personal prejudices out of his or her corpus...

2. What is "Descrimination"?
But wait! Fish isn't done. In transitioning between his Kant interpretation and his actual argument against affirmative action, Fish lets the following little nugget of wisdom slip: "If discrimination – the unequal treatment of inherently free and equal citizens – is to be condemned when the motives behind it (to preserve power or maintain a way of life) are suspect, it is also to be condemned when the motives behind it (to redress an historical injustice or have the student body reflect the diversity of America) are benign." And so we have Fish's rather clear-cut definition of descrimination: take two people who are "inherently free and equal," and treat them unequally. What he implies, of course, is that we are all "equal." But what does this mean? Historically? Socioeconomically? Politically? On what grounds are we all equal? The idealist will say: we are all equal before the law. And anyone who knows anything about the American juridical system will ask, "Oh? And which country do you come from?!"

Lest I get sidetracked by cynicism, however, the point is of course this: Rawls' difference principle is invoked specifically because we are not all equal; that's the "difference." And so we must immediately say that affirmative action is never meant to be applied in a situation in which two "inherently free and equal citizens" are being considered. So then, by invoking descrimination to justify his rejection of affirmative action, one cannot help but think that Fish is rather asking us to treat inherently unequal citizens equally. And while this may not be descrimination, it certainly isn't justice, either. But if not in pursuit of justice, on what grounds might we want to treat unequal citizens equally? I can only think of the historical reason: "to preserve power or maintain a way of life." Suspect, indeed...

3. Fish's Two Big Arguments
In the final paragraphs of his post, Fish finally turns from Kant to his own musings on the subject of affirmative action. As we saw above, Fish has historically come down against the side he has placed Kant on, that of "principle over pragmatic needs." And indeed, he suggests that he has historically been supportive of affirmative action. "Now I'm not so sure," he says. "Nor am I sure why I'm no longer so sure, although I expect it has something to do with two arguments I have been making with increasing vigor in the past several years."

Fish's first big argument is that a text means what it's author intended it to mean, and nothing more. I don't have the time or space to rehash eighty years of structuralism, post-structuralism, modernism, and post-modernism here, but needless to say, this position seems a little philosophically indefensible. The quick version: 1) How are we to access this "intention," if not through the text? When your friend writes you an email, and you're not certain what she means, you can call her up on the phone (most of the time). Of course, the many arguments that begin between friends over emails and IMs are testament to just how many lacunae there are in even the simplest of texts. But what's worse, we are unable to call up Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, or John Adams and ask them what they "really meant." Hell, most of the authors of the Constitution don't even have cell phones... 2) Not only do all texts mean more than simply what their authors intended, they also take on a life of their own once sent out into the world. And it is precisely this life which allows us to continue to use the constitution today, over 200 years after it was written.

However, this gives us a better understanding of Fish's use of Kant, at least. Though it seems odd to raise Kant and then fail to make his writings relevant to our current situation, Fish's Kant-interpretation is a warm-up model for what he wants to do with the constitution: by rejecting Kantianism (including Rawls) in favor of what the historical Kant would have said (prejudices and all), Fish is able to find the same rejection of affirmative action in Kant as he suspects he'll find in the Constitution. Would Thomas Jefferson, for instance, have supported a university admissions policy that tried to level the playing field between an inner city black student and a suburban white student? Hell no! All bad faith notwithstanding, he would have duly dragged the black student back onto the plantation. Again, the policy is invoked to maintain a historical distribution of power.

Fish's second argument I really must quote in its entirety:

The second argument I have been making is that institutions of higher education (and their faculty) have only two proper tasks: to introduce students to bodies of material and to equip them with analytical skills. Anything else, in my very strong view, is the job of some other industry or institution, and that includes fashioning character, molding democratic citizens, taking moral or political stands, and performing actions designed to make the world a better place. One reason for supporting affirmative action is that it will make the world a better place, a more democratic place. But from the perspective of my severe notion of what universities should and should not be doing, that is not a good reason.

Here again, I probably don't have the space to really get into it, but Fish and I could not have more disparate views on the aims and aspirations of education. Simply teaching students reading comprehension doesn't begin to cover the point of education. And if my job as a teacher isn't to help students become responsible adults, capable of the demands of true citizenship, then perhaps you ought to let me know where I need to be instead. I take my ideal goal to be "make democracy possible." And--to match "strong view" to "strong view" with Fish here for a moment--to suggest that an educator's only role is "to introduce students to bodies of material and to equip them with analytical skills," and to explicitly state that these analytical skills should not extend into the realm of "molding democratic citizens," is to reduce education to that level it so often serves in modern industrial society: equip workers with just enough skills to serve their purposes. If this is education's only role, then education itself need not be very thorough--indeed, any community college will do. And so the "higher" aims of education become luxuries. And for whom do we have luxuries? Why, the wealthy and powerful, of course. And so these higher institutions, where education's demands are coupled with such superfluous programs as character fashioning and citizen molding, need only be made available to those who can afford luxury goods. In other words, we have a situation in which affirmative action is of course to be rejected: it would only allow the unwashed masses access to programs unfit for their kind. (For more on this idea, and the distinction between vocational schools for the masses and "real" schools for the ruling elite, see this excellent essay by Thom Hartmann.)

It should be clear what I think of Fish's arguments, but a final note: don't worry, I'm not suddenly some Rawlsian liberal. I think that liberalism has its own (fundamental!) problems, and so I certainly don't support a Rawlsian liberal politics as the straightforward answer to racial and socioeconomic inequality in the world. But nor do I cotton to philosophical pedagogy as a disguise for conservatism. You want to talk about Kant? Let's talk about Kant. But you want to use Kant as a thin pretense to espouse your newfound bourgeois elitism on a pay-per-view blog? You'd better believe I'm going to have a few extra thoughts for you...