the accursed share

Politics and Ontology - CFP

2011-05-31T10:45:00.000-04:00

MANCHESTER Workshops in Political Theory 2011 - 31 August - 2 September 2011

Call for Papers - Ontology and Politics Workshop

Convenors: Paul Rekret (Queen Mary), Simon Choat (Kingston), Clayton Chin (Queen Mary)

Despite its pervasiveness, the question of the relation between ontology and politics continues to be a crucial one for Continental philosophy. While the place and status of the question of being in the realm of the political has occupied much of social theory in the past twenty or thirty years, we remain no closer to drawing any common ground on these themes. Post-structuralist or post-foundational political thought has insisted on the inherent contingency of any political ontology and has, from this notion, sought to draw out a framework for an emancipatory politics grounded
in the concepts of difference and otherness.

However, such a stance finds itself increasingly challenged today. On the one hand, thinkers such as Alain Badiou and Jacques Ranciere call for the need to think a politics grounded in a conception of universality rather than alterity, while on the other hand, so-called speculative realism more fundamentally challenges the very notion of ontology as it has been conceived by the majority of Continental thinkers in recent decades.

This panel aims to explore the intersections of politics and ontology and the resulting implications for thinking both the political and the philosophical.

We invite papers addressing the following and any other related themes:

-Is there a place for reflection on ontology in the theorisation and study of politics?

-Is there a necessary transitivity between the ontological and the political? How should this relation be conceived?

-Is there a necessarily leftist or emancipatory ontology?

-Should the politics which has generally been thought to follow from post-foundational or post-structuralist ontologies be re-evaluated in light of recent critiques?

-Does a new and different relation between ontology and politics follow from recent speculative materialist ontologies?

If you would like to present a paper at this workshop, please submit an abstract of 300-500 words (or a full paper to p.rekret@qmul.ac.uk or S.Choat@kingston.ac.uk by 15 June 2011.

For more information on the conference see: http://manceptworkshops.wordpress.com

Re-Thinking War in the 21st Century

2010-06-11T18:26:00.005-04:00

The Nietzsche Network has been kind enough to share audio files of the keynote speakers from their recent conference, 'Re-Thinking War in the 21st Century'. The event featured Julian Reid and Manabrata Guha - two preeminent thinkers of the changing nature of warfare. (Note: Manabrata's talk was through a video-link and so the audio quality suffers a bit, but it is still certainly listenable.)

Session #1: [MP3]
a) Keynote: Julian Reid, 'Refusing Peace, Affirming War: On the Importance of Thinking Biopolitics Polemologically'
b) Respondent: Lele Leonardi
c) Discussion

Session #2: [MP3]
a) Keynote: Manabrata Guha, 'Intensive War: ...Not the Beginning, Not the Middle, Not the End...'
b) Respondent: Nandita Biswas Mellamphy
c) Discussion

Both Sessions: [MP3] [Streaming]

(Image shamelessly borrowed from Manabrata!)

CFP: Immigration against the Empire

2010-05-20T08:27:00.002-04:00

Interesting new call for papers from a new journal/magazine. Details below:

about pro/visions
pro/visions is a new magazine/journal (double blind peer-reviewed) that seeks to push critical theory beyond the academy and into the streets. Therefore the content will reflect rigorous (and playful) thought but using language that is accessible to anyone. We seek to create a space for theory to meet praxis (and the ivory tower the people/s). Think Gramsci's "organic intellectual" meets Chuck D and they get into a fist fight--with the world.

"immigration against the Empire"

This issue situates immigration (and other forms of nomadism) as a disruptive event against Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's concept of Empire. Between Arizona's new immigration law in the United States and the French government's response to immigration, it would seem that as the "Third World" pops up in the "First World" neo-liberal policing comes into view of the Global North. In light of the various reactions to these events, responses from the radical Left, in and outside of academia, need to be formulated in order to map resistances and the role of the immigrant and the exile within the Empire.

Articles should be connected to the following suggested topics:
Specific case scenarios of immigration in and between geopolitical regions around the globe.
Legal, ethical and political controvery/ies concerning immigration policy.
The political role of the undocumented worker within U.S. and global paradigms
Underground immigrant support networks and their clashes with the "minutemen"
Conceptions of identity in relation to immigration
Spanglish (or other creoles) as political act
Strategies for immigrant solidarity, locally and globally
Immigration as a response to neo-liberal forces
Illegal immigration as a form of resistance to politics and ideology
Systems of race, gender and other social norms within nomadism

submission guidelines
Submissions are welcome in all languages, with a preference toward English, Spanish and Spanglish.
Articles must be between 2,000 and 3,000 words in length with endnotes and a bibliography. Citations should follow the latest version of MLA.
Abstracts must be between 150 and 300 words.
A short biographical description of 3-5 lines should be included.

contact
If you are interested in submitting to pro/visions, please send an abstract by email to provisions.editors@gmail.com no later than July 1, 2010. Final versions of articles will be due August 1, 2010.

Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze: Re-Thinking War in the 21st Century

2010-03-12T10:40:00.003-05:00

A really interesting call for papers and conference coming up in London, Ontario soon. Absolutely wish I could make it, though with any luck the organizers (hint, hint!) will have some recordings or texts made available after. Featuring two of the most interesting writers on the linkages between modern war and contemporary philosophy: Manav Guha (Reimagining War in the 21st Century: From Clausewitz to Network-Centric Warfare) and Julian Reid (The Biopolitics of the War on Terror: Life Struggles, Liberal Modernity and the Defence of Logistical Societies).

------------

The Nietzsche Workshop @ Western:
"Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze: Re-Thinking War in the 21st Century"

Thursday, May 6, 2010
Faculty of Social Science, Dean’s Boardroom
The University of Western Ontario
9am-5pm

"The present European War is sometimes closely connected with Nietzsche. It is even called Nietzsche in Action, or the Euro-Nietzschean War" (Salter, 1917).

The theme of the second Nietzsche Workshop @ Western brings Salter’s early statement to bear on the (perhaps novel) forms of war characteristic of the 21st century. The aim of this workshop (more specifically) is to investigate the problematic relation between war in the bio-technological era and the critical socio-political insights of Nietzsche and his two most influential successors, the post-Nietzscheans Foucault and Deleuze.

Topics of interest to the conference would include:

• the concept of polemos (war) in Nietzsche, Foucault and/or Deleuze
• the militarization of peace
• war, terror, and bio-politics
• war and/as the ‘becoming’ of life
• the ‘subject’ of war and/or terror
• new tactics of war and/or terror

Keynote Speakers:

Dr. Manabrata Guha, author of Reimagining War in the 21st Century: From Clausewitz to Network-Centric Warfare (Routledge 2010), Assistant Professor of International Security and Strategic Studies at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, India, and
Dr. Julian Reid, author of The Biopolitics of the War on Terror (Manchester University Press, 2007), co-author of The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live (Routledge, 2009), Lecturer in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, UK.

Abstracts of no more than 250 words are to be sent to Nandita Biswas Mellamphy c/o the.nietzsche.network[at]gmail.com no later than April 10, 2010. For more information, visit the Nietzsche Netwørk on facebook, at http://groups.to/nietzsche (where links to the Nietzsche Worskhop @ Western event-page and other pertinent information can be found).

Institutionalizing Revolution

2009-11-03T12:10:00.007-05:00

While I've not always been a fan of Zizek's political analyses, I have to say, his latest book is terrific. There's any number of really great ideas by him in it, but I'll just point out two of them here. First, is the emphasis on the importance of the Included/Excluded division to understanding any political response to the contemporary world's problems:

"[The four antagonisms of modern capitalism:] the looming threat of an ecological catastrophe; the inappropriateness of the notion of private property in relation to so-called 'intellectual property'; the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in biogenetics); and, last but not least, the creation of new forms of apartheid, new Walls and slums." (91)

"In the series of four antagonisms then, that between the Included and the Excluded is the crucial one. Without it, all others lose their subversive edge - ecology turns into a problem of sustainable development, intellectual property into a complex legal challenge, biogenetics into an ethical issue. One can sincerely fight to preserve the environment, defend a broader notion of intellectual property, or oppose the copyrighting of genes, without ever confronting the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded. [...] One can well imagine a society which somehow resolves the first three antagonisms through authoritarian measures which not only maintain but in fact strengthen existing social hierarchies, divisions and exclusions. [...] As this logic reaches its extreme, would it not be reasonable to bring it to its self-negation: is not a system which renders 80 percent of people irrelevant and useless itself irrelevant and of no use?" (98/103)

Second is his move beyond the limitations of 'direct participatory action' and the romanticism given to revolutionary moments, in favour of actively constructing a new order, a new institutionalized order:

"My suggestion is rather this: what if today's global capitalism, precisely insofar as it is 'world-less', involving a constant disruption of all fixed order, opens up the space for a revolution which will break the vicious cycle of revolt and its reinscription, which will, in other words, no longer follow the pattern of an evental explosion followed by a return to normality, but will instead assume the task of a new 'ordering' against the global capitalist disorder? Out of revolt we should shamelessly pass to enforcing a new order." (130)

"The key test of every radical emancipatory movement is [...] to what extent it transforms on a daily basis the practico-inert institutional practices which gain the upper hand once the fervor of the struggle is over and people return to business as usual. The success of a revolution should not be measured by the sublime awe of its ecstatic moments, but by the changes the big Event leaves at the level of the everyday, the day after the insurrection." (154)

To which I say: yes, yes, and yes.

My only real problem with the book is twofold: Zizek explicitly argues that the terrain of politics is ideology, in some parts of the book. (Though this is belied by his comments in other parts of the book.) While ideology is important, too much focus on it leads us to neglect material factors. Secondly, and related, is that the general ideas of 'ideology' and 'capitalism' are far too baggy to grasp onto real concrete political action. This would take a lot of work to demonstrate, but something like actor-network theory is immensely more useful for understanding how to work with the conduits through which ideology passes. As an empirical study of specific political situations, actor-network theory is well-suited to actively working in the world.

New Simondon PDF

2009-10-07T16:36:00.003-04:00

A long while ago on this blog, I posted up a PDF of the only English translation of Gilbert Simondon's On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. But my lack of technical skills meant that the original PDF was an image that readers were unable to copy and paste selections from. However, one intrepid reader, Angelos, undertook the effort to convert it to text, and added an index and clickable footnotes, making it a much more user-friendly PDF. So I'm posting up Angelos' new version, with a sincere thanks for his work on this:

http://nsrnicek.googlepages.com/SimondonGilbert.OnTheModeOfExistence.pdf

Genocide Monitoring and Early Warning

2009-10-05T17:34:00.004-04:00

In light of discussions about militancy, responsibility, activism, and the usefulness (or not) of various academic writing, it seems really appropriate to point to a quick way you can make a significant difference right now.

Google is currently taking votes for Project 10 to the 100, where a number of projects are up for voting, with the winner receiving $10 million of funding and the support of Google's impressive technical team.

Far and away the most important idea is to create a genocide monitoring and alert system, where the entire international community can coordinate and become aware of the potential for genocides before they occur.

From Google:

"Much of the necessary technology and data-gathering methodology already exists both for general crisis mapping and for early warning systems capable of preventing mass atrocities. A key remaining step is to make this data more widely available to strengthen international aid agency coordination, improve resource allocation, develop timely policy and help evaluate current humanitarian practices."

PLEASE VOTE HERE - The deadline for voting is October 8th, so don't put it off; take the 10 seconds to vote.

(h/t Stop Genocide Blog)

Deontologistics

2009-08-06T22:08:00.006-04:00

Just a quick note to highlight a new Deleuze-focused blog, Deontologistics. A few excellent posts up already, with promises of more to come on Badiou and Brandom. He also self-professes that he's "been known to dabble in speculative realism, though [he doesn't] inhale."

Also, it looks as though I will be giving a short talk at Goldsmith's on September 30th, along with some of the brightest people I know. The event will be based around Dominic Fox's fascinating book, Cold World: The Aesthetics of Dejection and the Politics of Militant Dysphoria. I'll have moved to England the day before, so hopefully some fun jetlag-induced hijinks will follow. I'll post up more details as they become finalized.

[UPDATE:]

Militant Dysphoria

Wednesday September 30th, 2009

Room RHB 256, Goldmsiths, University of London 2-6 PM

Facebook Event page

Featuring:

Dominic Fox

Nathan Brown

Mark Fisher

Nick Srnicek

James Trafford

Alex Williams

An event to discuss some of the issues raised by Domininc Fox's Cold World: The aesthetics of dejection and the politics of militant dysphoria, due to be published by zer0 at the end of September. What is meant by 'militant dysphoria', and in what ways can the concept help us move beyond the impasses of contemporary politics? How might disaffection be converted into militancy? What political potentials are there in dysphoric music such as Black Metal? The event will also explore the relationship between politics and Speculative Realism.

This will not be a formal academic conference. Instead, it will follow the pattern set by the Weird events at Goldsmiths and the recent UEL symposium on the hardcore continuum. There will be short semi-formal presentations by speakers, but the emphasis will be on discussion of concepts rather than on presenting of papers etc.

The event is free but anyone interested in attending should register with Mark Fisher (k_punk99[AT]hotmail.com). Places are limited. In addition, if anyone would like to give a semi-formal presentation, please let me know.

Berlusconi in Tehran

2009-07-15T12:50:00.007-04:00

Slavoj Zizek has a new piece up in the London Review of Books, focused on Iran and Berlusconi. Elsewhere, Graham Harman is undertaking a live-blogging of the writing of his new book - an immensely helpful set of posts that help to de-mystify the writing process. And Michael O'Neill Burns has just written on Peter Hallward's latest intriguing piece on 'The Will of the People'. Hallward's project has always been interesting and daring for its breaks with what is currently fashionable in philosophy, and I hope to soon put up a post about this latest essay. And this has been around the politics blogosphere lately, but in case you missed it, Marc Lynch has an international relations reading of the feud between Jay-Z and The Game and its relation to American hegemony - easily one of the best blog posts in the last little while. Finally, I've been having a fascinating and productive online discussion with Nate and Duncan about non-philosophy and Ray Brassier's work. Definitely a lot to think about throughout the discussion, and ideally I'll try to systematize some of the thoughts at some future point. I'm busy with a couple other, off-line, projects right now, so posting will remain unfortunately light for the foreseeable future.

Anarchism and Prefigurative Politics

2009-06-02T13:53:00.004-04:00

At the suggestion of Andrew in the comments to my last post, I took up reading through Richard Day’s Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements in order to come to some understanding of how modern day anarchism is responding to the general malaise of contemporary leftism. (A malaise, I argue, that is most blatantly clear in the absence of any real movement to systematically change the current model of capitalism, despite the biggest crisis of our economic system since the Great Depression. Instead, at best, we have discussions of regulating banks and financial markets, and perhaps reforming the decision-making bodies of the international financial institutions. It’s not even a return to the welfare state, as there is little argument being made for more social provisions or automatic stabilizers.)

While Day’s book is excellent and intriguing on a number of levels (some of which I’ll point out later), it still ultimately fails to get past the problems of modern leftism – in particular, its inability to transform social systems. In Day’s argument, this inability is in fact a benefit – a sign that present leftism is moving beyond the ‘hegemony of hegemony’ and instead working towards the ‘affinity of affinity’. For Day, hegemony refers to the idea that in order to effect change, one must control the levers of power and bring about change in as wide as possible of a way (often through the state). The hegemony of hegemony refers to the notion that this conception of how to bring about change has itself been hegemonic. But as an anarchist that refuses all relations of hierarchy and oppression, there’s a contradiction in trying to impose one’s ideas on another. One can’t subscribe to a vision of an egalitarian society and simultaneously justify using structures of authority to impose this vision on others.

The alternative, then, and one which Day sees as operative throughout modern day anarchism (and in fact, also in Negri and Hardt) is the logic of affinity. In this model, change is not brought about by taking over state power, or by inciting a widespread revolutionary uprising, but rather by operating outside these circuits – through direct action that immediately creates the sort of community being aimed at (a post-capitalist, post-statist society).

As Day states, these types of non-hegemonic tactics can include: “dropping out of existing institutions; subversion of existing institutions, through parody; impeding existing institutions, via property destruction, ‘direct action case work’, blockades, and so on; prefiguring alternatives to existing institutions, often via modes of activity that otherwise fall within the purview of a hegemonic politics, for example protests; and finally, construction of alternatives to existing forms that render redundant, and thereby take power from, the neoliberal project.” (Gramsci is Dead, 19)

The problem with all this, however, is that anarchism has self-consciously withdrawn from all the levers of power that might actually make a significant and concrete difference! The result, I would argue, is that at best, anarchism merely opens up small and often temporary spaces of community that escape the logic of capitalism or the state-form. And at worst, these small and temporary spaces only function to mitigate capitalism’s worst excesses, thereby undermining their own goals by perpetuating capitalist relations even further. There is no way in which anarchism can effect a concrete social change on any significant scale. It is left believing in the power of its ideas and hoping that others will agree and join in.

That being said, there are numerous things that are laudable about anarchism. Most notable is its willingness to grapple with concrete political problems and local situations – something missing from most other ‘radical’ leftisms. Anarchism is effective in the small-scale situations in which it tends to operate; the problem is simply that it willingly refuses any significant method of propagating its form of social organization. (This is a problem for any political theory, but unlike anarchism, most are fighting and scrapping over every available means to spread their ideas.)

Anarchism should also be acknowledged for its creation of prefigurative politics – a form of direct action that works to immediately create a new social organization without waiting for a revolution and without attempting to reform current social institutions. We can think here of how a protest movement may be planned based on universal consensus, or how communities may informally organize together to provide social goods like health care and food for each other. In this, anarchism at least attempts to answer the question of what a new post-capitalist, post-statist society would look like. While I disagree with much of anarchism (in particular, it’s belief that a withering of the state would lead to a better society, or its belief that important state functions can be replaced by communities based on affinity), it’s nevertheless the case that it’s much more relevant to the real world than the abstract ruminations of much of the politics espoused by continental philosophy.

Prefigurative politics, it seems to me, offer important examples of how post-statist, post-capitalist communities can function, and what their own limitations are. Both are worthwhile subjects for theorists to analyze.

Order and Chaos in Society

2009-05-15T14:24:00.021-04:00

Recently, I’ve found myself enveloped within some of the vast literature on conflicts – ranging from a history of genocidal acts, to a genealogy of military theory, to a reconstruction of counterinsurgency tactics within Baghdad, and an analysis of the emerging responsibility to protect (R2P) norm. Given the prevalence of conflict throughout the modern world, and throughout history, it’s somewhat surprising that most political philosophy has avoided any in-depth analysis of what conflict entails in an empirical way – in all its numerous variations. This surprise is compounded by the quality and detail with which much modern conflict is understood, suggesting that it’s certainly worthy of being taken seriously. The obvious rejoinder to this surprise would be that, as good leftists, we oppose conflict in all its forms. But this relies on two presuppositions – one, that all conflict is bad conflict (a somewhat ironic stance for modern philosophies of difference), and two, that the only solution to being mired in a conflict is to end the conflict. While not denying that these presuppositions have their moments, it also seems clear that they don’t hold universally. Moreover, even if both reasons for avoiding studying conflict were true, one would be led to ignore one of the most significant aspects of conflict studies: namely, their intricate balancing act between the complexities of the political world and the abstractions of theory. In distinction from nearly all contemporary continental politics, conflict theories are forced to prove their validity on the battlefields. The abstractions, and groundless and ineffective work of much of what passes for 'radical' continental politics (with the notable exception of some Marxism, some anarchism, and actor-network theory) leaves them content to air their grievances in academic forums without ever taking the effort to explain how a revolution would occur, or even what it would mean. By contrast, conflict theories can’t be content with hand-waving and empty structural analysis. An ineffectual theory is an ineffectual theory, and one that becomes painfully clear on the battlefield.

In this regards, Antoine Bousquet’s analysis of how military order is imposed upon the chaos of the battlefield is a significant step forward. His book, The Scientific Way of Warfare, reads like - at last! - someone went beyond a merely parasitical use of Foucault's historical works, and actually applied Foucault's methodology and historical acumen to an entirely new realm. (A symposium on Bousquet's book can be found here.) In this case, Bousquet analyzes military theory, statements from military officials, and official military doctrines, in order to uncover the different regimes of establishing order. Thus, rather than an endless discussion of biopolitics, sovereignty and disciplinary societies, Bousquet undertakes a novel historical analysis of four different regimes of warfare - the mechanical, the thermodynamic, the cybernetic, and the chaoplexic. Therefore, much like how Foucault uncovers various epistemes within his historical studies, or how Deleuze uncovers abstract machines guiding assemblages of matter and language, so too does Bousquet uncover the metaphors underlying the various regimes of scientific warfare - the clock, the engine, the computer, and the network.

Each of these technological artefacts presents one of the guiding forces for how military planners understood imposing order on a chaotic battlefield. As Bousquet writes at the very beginnings of his book, "Throughout the ages, military leaders have sought to organise and direct their armies so that they can best preserve their order and coherence when faced with the centrifugal forces of chaos unleashed on the battlefield."

The first regime approaches this problem through the mechanistic metaphor of the clock. Such a metaphor led military planners to believe in a world ruled by simple cause and effect relations, and capable of being modelled by universal laws (formulated in mathematical terms). Thus, the geometrical formation of armies was of key concern, as was the disciplinary training necessary to restrain individuals within the group formations. Technological advancements played a key role as well, contributing to the socio-technical assemblage constituted by science, politics, and society. As Bousquet notes, the science of ballistics and projectiles became central to fortification planning – with planners seeking the perfect set of angles and distances to both attack the enemy and defend against them. But crucial to all of this was the sense that conflict was totally manageable in principle. With the right set of mathematical and disciplinary tools, one could outperform any enemy.

With the advent of the second regime, this certainty faltered, as ‘forces’ became a predominant scientific, social and military metaphor. As thermodynamics came under analysis within science (with its focus on entropy and dissipation), so too did the belief in an absolute science of conflict come under scrutiny. The mechanistic universe was disappearing in all aspects of society. Warfare, in this time, increasingly became a matter of increasing the energy involved. Beyond the mercenary and temporary armies of the past, the military now became a matter of mobilizing the entirety of society’s forces in order to throw one’s entire weight against the enemy. Such a new shape of war was only possible with industrialization, as the new transportation systems allowed an entire country to be welded together into the war effort – weapons and ammunition built in one part of the country could be easily and quickly sent to the frontlines in order to sustain the army for months and years at a time. As such, war became ever grander in scale, reaching its culmination in the development of nuclear weapons. New tactics of warfare became available with the creation of mobilized units and aerial attacks. Rather than the rigidity and mathematical planning of the past regime, new value was given to speed and surprise. The past regime’s work co-existed with the new regime, but it now became important as well to allow for individual initiative and a newfound flexibility with regards to tactics. War, in other words, was no longer solely about perfecting the right equations.

The third regime, of cybernetics and the computer, again gave new impetus to the goal of controlling chaos within conflict. The creation of computers, and their abstract representation as Turing machines – basic informational processing systems – led to the idea of cybernetics. These informational systems could respond to their environment, thus allowing a new sort of flexibility to the units of war. The feedback loop between input, processing and output allowed military planners to conceive of all the military units as systems that could control chaos by reacting to their environment in an appropriate manner. These cybernetic systems became theorized as nested – from individual soldiers to battalions and brigades up to entire armies – with each unit acting as a system that responded to its environment and reacted accordingly, with the highest systems constraining the lower ones. These new ideas play themselves out in a number of ways. One of the most important was a result of the inability to use empirical evidence to predict how a nuclear war would proceed. Since any actual nuclear war would risk the total destruction of the USSR and USA, military planners were forced to use computer simulations to determine the best defensive mechanisms and the likely outcomes of any particular offensive action. Such simulations are only possible, of course, with a theoretical model of what each actor’s interests and means of action are. In the bipolar world of the Cold War, these types of simulations led to the policies of mutually assured destruction, with the belief that the most stable balance of power between these two superpowers was one where neither had an interest in initiating a hot war. Such simulations, and the ability to run them thousands of times with different variables and different outcomes, let planners again believe in the possibility of omniscience on the battlefield, banishing chaos and uncertainty to the past. While this removal of chaos was unattained in practice, the principle served as a guiding force for the development of cybernetic warfare.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the proliferation of both non-state actors and internal conflicts, the traditional analysis of war as a war between states became increasingly less relevant. In the face of internal conflict, insurgencies, international crime, and dispersed terrorist networks, the typical, highly hierarchical version of the military organization has become slow and irresponsive to its new enemies. As a result, military doctrine has once again taken up the theme of irreducible (ontological) chaos - this time in the form of 'network-centric warfare'. Building upon the findings of complexity and chaos theory, military theory has come to recognize the powerful self-organizing and fluid aspects of decentralized systems. In conjunction with modern communication technologies, this has allowed for an increasing distribution of power and independence to all aspects of the military. Such an organizational network has also given rise to new tactics, such as swarming (modelled after the biological phenomenon) where individual actors can self-organize into a single attack, then disperse in order to once again return later to attack. (The 9/11 attacks are a prime example of this.) This form offers resiliency and redundancy above and beyond any of the previous military forms analyzed, since any single actor is unnecessary (i.e. there are no irreplaceable leaders), and since each actor operates relatively independently.

The current versions of network-centric warfare, however, oscillate between two poles. On the one hand is the true decentralized vision of warfare, with each unit capable of acting on its own inside of generalized strategic goals. On the other hand is the more centralized version which uses the combined inputs of all the local units to construct a vision, for centralized command, of the entire battlefield. The latter again leads to the false dreams of omniscience, as well as micro-managing, that have always been a part of military theory. But the former is the mode of operation best suited to responding to current conflicts - with assymmetric warfare and guerrilla tactics becoming a mainstay of contemporary fighting.

Colonel Peter Mansoor provides a perfect (non-conflict related) example of the power of truly decentralized control in Baghdad in 2003. In his account of his time commanding there, Baghdad at Sunrise, Mansoor points out how most funding for reconstruction went to large, centrally-determined and internationally-run projects. While these were useful, it would have been far more useful if more funding had been delegated instead to the commanders in the field. He notes that in trying to establish governance within the city, funding for small, local projects could have provided the new local governing councils with the legitimacy, respect and means to solve real problems that were crucial for establishing governance and accountability. Small local projects such as water treatment plants, generators, or repairing bridges to reduce traffic congestion would all have gone a long ways towards having the Iraqi people believe in their own government. Yet upper command refused to delegate enough money, leaving the broken infrastructure as a prime source for insurgency resentment.

The question of imposing order on chaos, however, goes beyond solely conflict issues - as the current Afghanistan-Pakistan situation makes clear. As the military extends its mandate into counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrines focused on "winning hearts and minds," the question of order also extends beyond the standard military focus. Order now becomes a social, cultural, political and economic imperative - with each subject to its own logic. The question of order is also a fundamental social question – whether it be counterinsurgency, nation-building, imperialism, humanitarian intervention, or a post-revolutionary situation. Establishing order and eliminating or adapting to chaos are perpetual social problems. While references to absolute deterritorialization are intriguing, they're ultimately unsustainable, and so order and chaos need to be intimately balanced.

In particular, the significance of instilling order points to some of the major hurdles of R2P situations. The ‘responsibility to protect’ is an emerging international norm which refuses to see state sovereignty as inviolable. In the past – most notably in the Rwandan genocide – external intervention against states’ internal conflicts was deemed a violation of the state’s inalienable right to determine what occurs within their own borders. (This is particularly significant in postcolonial societies which fought dearly for their independent sovereignty.) But with the massive destruction carried out in Rwanda, and the international unwillingness to make any real efforts to stop it, it became clear that the principle of sovereignty needed to be changed. As a result, in 2001 the ad hoc International Commission for Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) constructed the R2P norm which basically stated that sovereignty logically entailed that a state is responsible for protecting its own population. And in cases where a state was either unwilling or unable to carry out that responsibility, the international community had a legal and moral right to intervene to protect the population. Here’s the crucial part overlooked by every single critic of R2P, however: R2P works hard to avoid military intervention as a solution to problems. (That being said, Richard Seymour, aka Lenin's Tomb, has been an excellent analyst of the hypocrisies of humanitarian intervention - it just doesn't apply to R2P is all.) Military intervention has to be held for only the most extreme cases (such as Rwanda), and has to meet an array of criteria, including Security Council authorization, in order for it to occur. In other words, military intervention is an unlikely and rarely used aspect of R2P – not its sole raison d’etre. (See Gareth Evan’s The Responsibility to Protect for the single best work on what R2P actually entails.) Confusing R2P with military or humanitarian intervention is to miss the whole point of it. R2P is rather the institutional creation of a system for preventative action, as well as post-conflict reconstruction – action which can span the entire range from providing aid and training, establishing early-warning systems, restoring governance, imposing sanctions, providing security assistance and eventually military intervention in highly restricted cases. (We can think here of how the USA has blocked an IMF loan to Sri Lanka as a result of the recent fighting there – this is one non-violent way to try and compel a state to protect its own citizens.) So it is possible for one to consistently believe in the power of R2P while also rallying against the use of force in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Sudan. Precisely because the use of force in those situations is or would be counter-productive, they don’t fit within the R2P criteria for the use of force.

Returning to the discussion of order and chaos, however, we can see that counterinsurgency theories provide, despite their militaristic leanings, important insights for the application of R2P. The basic point here, which I believe is incontrovertible, is that in many of the cases handled by R2P, the question is always one of either preventing conflict from erupting, or managing it so that it doesn’t become another Holocaust or Rwanda. In that case, any knowledge we can discover about how best to do this is useful for that project - particularly knowledge established on the ground from those actively involved in these issues. If COIN has an in-depth knowledge of how to manage conflict and how to reconstruct societies so that they can become functional once again, then it would be naive of us to not look there. More extreme commentators will see this as revealing R2P’s hidden agenda of militaristic or imperialistic domination, but the question here is simply one of doing the best possible job of minimizing the frequency and length of extreme cases of conflict. Moreover, as COIN has moved beyond simply militaristic imposition of order, it also reveals the social, cultural, religious and political conditions for stable societies - bringing it even closer with the aims of R2P to use every means possible to prevent mass atrocities. In other words, what COIN has studied is the actual evidence for how best to manage conflict – something which is crucial for understanding both (1) what situations aren’t amenable to what actions, and (2) how best to use the whole array of R2P options. An example of the former is the drone attacks in Pakistan, which are recognized even by many COIN theorists (David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum, for example) as being counterproductive to the larger strategic aims of the war. Thus this action is unsuited for the Af-Pak war and should be stopped.

In the end, then, what is needed is to move beyond stale ideological arguments about imperialism and military intervention, and to recognize that good knowledge is good knowledge no matter what the source. Philosophy and humanitarian work and the responsibility to protect all have important insights to learn from military analysis (and vice versa).

An Invigorating Vector of Intellectual Discovery

2009-04-07T19:43:00.024-04:00

What's that? You create an environment of impunity (see: de Menezes, Jean) and then wonder why things like this happen? While it's certain that the officer responsible for this death didn't intend to kill an innocent bystander, his unprovoked actions are possible solely in a system that habitually turns a blind eye. Let's hope that for once the system of justice puts its full weight on him.

(h/t What in the Hell...)

And it's been fairly well-documented that middle class wages have been forcibly held down for the past 30 years, but even the Economist is noting it now. As they show, the average male worker now makes less than they did in 1978. To offset the imbalances resulting from increased productivity and stagnating wages, families have become reliant on a second income and upon debt. And while it would be wrong to blame the financial crisis solely on this rise in the necessity for debt (as some doctrinaire Marxists have done), it's clear that it played a massive role.

(h/t Global Guerrillas)

On top of that, a new article from Barry Eichengreen and Kevin O'Rourke shows that in terms of the global (rather than American) economic slowdown, the current 'recession' is already worse than the Great Depression. As the following graphs show, the stock markets, industrial output, and world trade have all plummeted quicker than they did during the Great Depression. While the authors note that the policy response has been better, it's still not clear to many that the fundamental remaining problem (namely, the toxic assets the banks own that keeps them from lending money) will be solved by Geithner and Obama's bank plan. In fact, a number of experts are suggesting that it will only make things worse.

World Industrial Output:

World Stock Markets:

World Trade Volume:

Finally, not only is climate change proceeding quicker than scientists expected, but the Bonn negotiations for the upcoming Copenhagen treaty are having to face up to US impediments. To be sure, the Obama administration has at least moved beyond questioning the science of climate change, but there's still major questions over whether their proposed emissions targets (a return to 1990 levels by 2020) are sufficient, and whether more aggressive actions are even possible, considering they're subject to Senate ratification.

And all of this in a context where protests have become spectacle-ularly ineffective. As K-Punk rightly explains,

"Time to withdraw from the feelgood simulation of politics. Time to give up the gratification of displaying wounds inflicted by the police as signs of grace, evidence that we are on the side of the Good. Time to relinquish the easy jouissance of impotent acting-out. Time to face the fact that organising marches isn't the same as political organisation. Neoliberalism didn't protest to achieve its hegemony; it organised and co-ordinated. This is a moment of massive oppurtunity. Neoliberalism is finished, but it survives in an undead form because its assumptions and defaults still condition the political-economic landscape. Capitalist realism is far from dead, however - and it's surely clearly that it certainly won't be destroyed by an 'anti-capitalist' spectacular hysteria (indeed this form of anti-capitalism could be seen as an integral part of the capitalist realist system). It's time to think, not in order to finesse some grand philosophical system, but with the goal of identifying what new forms of organisation can succeed in these conditions. Time to give up on the romance of a politics of failure and plan to win."

The End of Revolutions?

2009-03-30T22:25:00.005-04:00

An interesting discussion by Anodyne Lite, on not only the fact that radically revolutionary philosophies are appropriated by late capitalism (a fairly common thesis by now), but why - namely that the totalizing presuppositions of a politics premised upon radical irruptions is utterly ineffectual within our current situation. Thus, these thinkers of the New (as an ontological category) are not only accepted by our situation, but actively incited as new products for the marketplace of ideas.

In response to this debilitating situation, it seems important to highlight that Latour and actor-network theory offer a vitally different path for politics (one that I think can also be de-coupled from any ontological commitments). Levi has written on this before (here and here, among other places), and I've also highlighted before (here and here) what I think are some of the important implications of ANT for politics.

I want to add to what I've written before though (or differently repeat similar ideas), that one of the key parts of Latour is to grapple with the actual conduits for action in our present situation. As Anodyne Lite suggests, activism needs to be brought into closer relation with political thinkers, and ANT in fact not only dictates that, but explains why it must be so. The level of grand abstractions is not inexistent (or inoperative), but it's only produced through local mechanisms. Therefore capitalism as such does not exist (except as an idea that makes a difference), but what does exist are the computer networks linking banks in New York and London, non-banking financial institutions around the world, centralized settlement systems, off-shore banks, individual investors, neoliberal textbooks, risk management equations, etc. This is not a totalizing picture of capitalism, but rather an assemblage of heterogeneous actors that cohere together to produce our current financial system. An attention to these details provides numerous levers for action and eschews the utopian dream of a radical break. Change does not occur in radical shifts (and it does not in Badiou either, contrary to popular opinion), but rather through the proliferation of subtle innovations, the malfunctioning of incompatible actors, and the creation of (destructive and productive) feedback loops, among other means.

For Speculative Realism, it's all about the Benjamins

2009-03-21T11:58:00.008-04:00

New Scientist has an article on the recent awarding of the $1.4 million Templeton Prize to French physicist and philosopher of science Bernard d'Espagnat for his "studies into the concept of reality".

What thoughts led him to receiving the world's largest annual prize?

"Unlike classical physics, d'Espagnat explained, quantum mechanics cannot describe the world as it really is, it can merely make predictions for the outcomes of our observations. If we want to believe, as Einstein did, that there is a reality independent of our observations, then this reality can either be knowable, unknowable or veiled. D'Espagnat subscribes to the third view. Through science, he says, we can glimpse some basic structures of the reality beneath the veil, but much of it remains an infinite, eternal mystery.

[...]

So what is it, really, that is veiled? At times d'Espagnat calls it a Being or Independent Reality or even "a great, hypercosmic God". It is a holistic, non-material realm that lies outside of space and time, but upon which we impose the categories of space and time and localisation via the mysterious Kantian categories of our minds.

"Independent Reality plays, in a way, the role of God – or 'Substance' – of Spinoza," d'Espagnat writes. Einstein believed in Spinoza's God, which he equated with nature itself, but he always held this "God" to be entirely knowable. D'Espagnat's veiled God, on the other hand, is partially – but still fundamentally – unknowable. And for precisely this reason, it would be nonsensical to paint it with the figure of a personal God or attribute to it specific concerns or commandments."

The religiously minded Templeton Foundation of courses raises different conclusions from the research, highlighting again the need for a rigorous evacuation of any reliance on religious crutches that return humans to the centre of the universe:

"There must exist, beyond mere appearances … a 'veiled reality' that science does not describe but only glimpses uncertainly. In turn, contrary to those who claim that matter is the only reality, the possibility that other means, including spirituality, may also provide a window on ultimate reality cannot be ruled out, even by cogent scientific arguments."

These types of conclusions point to the necessity of further undermining the privileging of the human, as well as further developing the epistemological analysis which allows us to refute such religious impositions. Ontology need not be beholden to epistemology, but epistemology is crucial in refuting the religious desire to impose itself in any gap in human knowledge.

[EDIT: I just recalled where I recognized d'Espagnat's name - I bought his book On Physics and Philosophy a year ago on the basis of some really great recommendations. I still haven't read it yet, but it looks like it'll be moved up on my reading list. Definitely recommended for others as well! And there's a Google books link for a preview here.]

(h/t Chris Blattman)

Mediator

2009-02-27T19:13:00.010-05:00

Apologies for the lack of posting here! As some readers know, I moved to NYC for a few months starting in January. And as I have a relatively limited time here, I've been trying to make the most of it - which means less time for blogging (it's always the first thing to go unfortunately).

That being said, behind the blogging scenes, I've still been hard at work, and NYC has offered me a number of chances to see some incredibly fascinating events. Joseph Stiglitz and Martin Wolf in the past week (both offering rather frightening predictions for the immediate future of the economy), and while I missed Latour's recent appearance, Peter has pointed out that his Harvard talk is available to watch here.

I've also been researching a number of topics - diving into actor-network theory, ecology and philosophy of science, while continuously mulling over the debates that have arisen in the blogosphere over speculative realism. My mind has been pulled in too many directions lately to form any coherent thoughts on these issues, but I hope to return soon with something of substance.

And in order to keep this post from being a totally mundane reflection on my life right now, here's a couple of events coming up in the US that promise to be interesting:

Cornell University's Theory Reading Group - "Particularity, Exemplarity, Singularity"

and

Villanova University - "New French Thought" (which also appears to feature at least one blogger)

Anyways, back soon...

Some Notes on Ontology and Politics

2009-01-11T22:58:00.011-05:00

[UPDATE: Jon, over at Posthegemony, offers some critiques of this position. And Graham, at Object-Oriented Philosophy supplements my post with his own thoughts. I've also posted some thoughts that expand on this issue over at Speculative Heresy.]

[UPDATE #2: Mark from K-Punk offers up some thoughts as well. As is typical of K-Punk, he articulates my own position in a much more eloquent and stark way: "[speculative realism's] role in this respect [is] simply to scorch the earth, to make uninhabitable the ontological territories which continentalists had colonised with their versions of politics."]

[UPDATE #3: Reid responds with his own Laruellean take (one which differs from mine, showing there's hardly any speculative realist consensus even within a leading figure), and Levi responds to both of us with some illuminating thoughts from the perspective of his own object-oriented philosophy. Alex has a related post up that I find myself in complete agreement with, particularly the evacuation of normativity from ontology.]

It seems to me that one of the most contentious and unremarked upon effects of speculative realism has to do with its attack on a piece of continental dogma – namely the presupposition that ontology is necessarily political. This idea is seen in any number of continental works, from Deleuze’s constructivism, to Derrida’s deconstructions of presence, to the social constructivists, gender and identity theorists, among others. The basic idea being that ontology is always constructed through a political battle, a conflict over what exists. In this regards, the contribution of continental work was to undermine the notion that what exists can be definitively determined in an essential way. The problem was that they went too far with this line of thought and tended (I say tended, because there are almost always exceptions) to deny the independence of ontology from politics. In many cases, ontology even became passé, a mere relic of classical philosophy. These ideas, unsurprisingly, came along necessarily with the general acceptance of correlationism – if we can’t speak or know of anything independent of its manifestation to us, then every thing is necessarily already wrapped up in our political relations.

With speculative realism, however, this situation changes. The turn towards objects, towards the absolute, and towards the real as indifferent, all imply that ontology must be independent of politics. We can see this most clearly in Brassier’s work, I believe (although it is implicit in all of them). The relative absence of politics in Nihil Unbound stems partly from the belief that we can study ontology without having to be concerned about its political effects. The results of such a study, as in Brassier’s work, can be rather disconcerting for politics – what if there is no such thing as agency? – but this alone fails to discredit the arguments for such a position. So what does the separation of politics and ontology entail? A few hesitant and suggestive remarks might begin to make clear what precisely is at stake for any speculative realist politics...

The separation entails, first of all, that an ontology cannot be validated in terms of its political effects. Part of Badiou’s greatness is undoubtedly to have rejuvenated the concept of the subject, but when judging his ontology, we have to do so while bracketing these political effects. Similarly, when studying the results of neuroscience and their political implications, we must be careful not to reject them simply because they don't accord with our fundamental beliefs about ourselves. If it turns out that we are no more than patterns of neurons firing, this is a reality whose effective truth holds sway regardless of our political desires. (As an aside, I think that such an idea needs to reject Levi's 'Principle of Irreduction', as there are scientific examples of entities being reduced to other entities. The basic argument against such a principle being that we can be mistaken about how the difference an entity makes, makes that difference.)

The second effect is that we can no longer construct an ontology in order to achieve some political goal. We may wish to privilege difference as a counter to constricting identity formations, but we can not justify this privileging with political arguments. Rather, properly philosophical arguments need to be marshaled in support of these ideas. (This raises the important question of whether philosophy can ever be distinguished from politics completely, but the linguistic intermingling of the two need not entail their necessary correlation outside of language.)

A third and similar point is that an ontology cannot dictate a political program. Difference may be privileged, for example, but this can be taken in the direction of a capitalist individualism or the direction of undermining traditional power relations - a realist ontology will allow for a multitude of political projects to be spawned from it, without necessarily being liberating or progressive (or constraining or conservative).

The fourth effect is a little more radical, I think. This is a renunciation of the tendency among continental theorists to place their political arguments in terms of ontology – I’m thinking here of things like Badiou and the uncounted, Rancière and the people, Deleuze and the minor, etc. The common thread being that the collective agency for political change is always determined in terms of its ontological status – what is inexistent, or uncounted, or unactualized. But political change need not require that something fundamentally new come into being. There can be real political progress made without having to generate ontological novelty. (I’ll also mention too that the faith in the New tends to be another continental political dogma. As though the New was necessarily progressive. While the New may be considered an ontological category, its political content is entirely underdetermined by ontological reasoning.)

The fifth effect is a question of action. It’s the question of the relation between political thought and political action. If ontology is independent of our political projects, at the most basic level there needs to be some account of how one gets effectively translated into the other – how, in other words, does a political program get implemented? Here, what might end up being of crucial use, is Levi’s recent ruminations on what he has called ‘Latour’s principle’ – that there is no transportation without translation. The key here might be in outlining how specifically political projects get translated into specifically political acts with real effects. (Keeping in mind, as Graham has recently emphasized, that the divide between these two is not some paradigmatic relation, but rather only one relation among many. What is required is to underscore the singular relation at any time between a political idea and its concrete implementation - hence the need for continental political theory to be highly knowledgeable about empirical politics.)

Building on that idea, the sixth and last point to make is that the usefulness of ontology for politics would be to come to an understanding of how to leverage effective power. How, that is, to grasp the operations of the independent ontological machine in order to then implement a political project. The study of ontology can show us how causality functions, how ideas are transmitted, how collectivities emerge, etc. - but these in and of themselves have no political leanings. If it turns out that neurology is determining of thought, then political action must be focused on the neurological mechanisms, and not the derivative ideational mechanisms.

Anyways, I’m well aware that these are all pretty underdeveloped thoughts at the moment, but my hope is that they might provide a useful guide for beginning to think through the future of political theory.

The Futility of the Israel-Gaza War

2009-01-10T18:38:00.009-05:00

For anyone wondering about the status of Deleuzian philosophy and the IDF in the current Gaza war, a fascinating New York Times article basically puts it to rest:

"To avoid booby traps, the Israelis say, they enter buildings by breaking through side walls, rather than going in the front. Once inside, they move from room to room, battering holes in interior walls to avoid exposure to snipers and suicide bombers dressed as civilians, with explosive belts hidden beneath winter coats."

These are, of course, some of the same tactics that Eyal Weizman highlighted in his Hollow Land, showing how the stratified architecture of the urban landscape becomes hollowed out. It is the use of the nomadism of the war machine - but a war machine that is, crucially, tied to a State apparatus.

And further on in the NYT article, comes this interesting and rather surprising fact:

"Israeli intelligence officers are telephoning Gazans and, in good Arabic, pretending to be sympathetic Egyptians, Saudis, Jordanians or Libyans, Gazans say and Israel has confirmed. After expressing horror at the Israeli war and asking about the family, the callers ask about local conditions, whether the family supports Hamas and if there are fighters in the building or the neighborhood."

The intriguing/confusing part, however, is that for all the subtlety and intelligence of the tactics outlined in the NYT article (e.g. tiny bombs designed to be pinpoint accurate and minimize collateral damage), the war as a whole has been heavy-handed, rejecting any counterinsurgency emphasis on gaining the support of the civilian population. While it took the US a number of years to figure it out, under the leadership of Petraeus (along with people like John Nagl and bloggers like Abu Muqawama and the Small Wars Journal Blog), they've now begun to make a consistent turn towards counterinsurgency tactics that focus on attaining sustainable peace. These have meant moving away from a sole emphasis on military power, to a recognition of the need for things like the reconstruction of infrastructure, the pacifying of ethnic tensions, the support of the civilian population, the raising of standards of living, and the singular nature of each conflict situation. (Something Petraeus has been explicit in emphasizing against those who believe Iraq's tactics are simply transferable to Afghanistan.)

But whereas counterinsurgency sees the support of the population as one of the key tactics in winning a war, Israel has consistently operated contrary to these principles. The destruction of a UN school, along with 43 civilians who were hiding inside; the killing of 50 new police graduates (importantly, who weren't tied to Hamas); and the apparently intentional attack on a house filled with refugees - refugees Israel had told to go there! - are all blunt instruments in a war that demands nuance to gain any strategic success. (I'll leave aside whether some of these attacks have been war crimes. I'm not an international law scholar, so I'll leave it to the experts.) The question is: why is Israel using these tactics? The IDF is clearly an intelligent body, and they are extremely well-versed in urban combat (I believe they may be the best trained in the world?) - all of which is apparent in the NYT article, as well as in the sophistication of the public relations war they have been carrying on (e.g. the use of Twitter and other new media, the blocking of cell phone transmissions from Gaza, as well as the refusal to let media or NGOs in). Yet they seemed to have learned nothing from the US's quagmire in Iraq, and, indeed, seemed to have learned nothing substantial from the 2006 Lebanon war. The recent UN Security Council resolution for a ceasefire was rejected by both sides - despite offering Israel a viable exit strategy, at a time when most of their military goals had already been met (e.g. tunnels from Egypt destroyed, Hamas' leadership greatly incapacitated, rocket fire capacity limited). The Lebanon war, it will be recalled, was going relatively well for Israel until they stayed too long and international opinion turned against them, as well as beginning to suffer significant casualties. I'm not sure why Israel feels compelled to continue this war even now - what goals are left for them to reach?

But this question really strikes at the main problem with the war. I have not seen, in any commentary I've read (liberal, conservative, Marxist, neoconservative), a justifiable rationale for this war. (In fact, the Israeli Ambassador to the US even says as much!) This war will not destroy Hamas (if anything, it has given them much more international support, despite the loss of physical capabilities), and it will not stop the rocket fire (although it would be surprisingly nice if a ceasefire held, and spurned a significant attempt to reach a lasting peace agreement). [1] It may act as a deterrent for rocket fire in the short-term, but in the long term, the Palestinian people will look at Hamas' middle ground between Fatah and the more radical groups, as unsustainable. When the political avenue has gained nothing (the border crossings remained closed throughout the ceasefire, the settlements continue to be constructed unabated, and now the Palestinian people are being collectively punished), many Palestinians are likely to look to more radical and militant organizations. This isn't even a controversial point - attacking Gaza (and not just Hamas) is only going to lead more Palestinians into violent paths. This is clearly counter-productive and points to the absolute idiocy of the neoconservative position.

There are, of course, domestic reasons for the war (Livni hoping to show her hawkish credentials in order to win the upcoming Israeli elections), as well as foreign reasons for the timing (prior to Obama's inauguration, who is less likely to give unconditional support for Israeli military operations). But both of these are short-term benefits to the war, and, if anything, only show the myopic focus of the relevant actors. This is why regional and international guidance is required for any peace negotiations, as Hamas and much of the Israeli government are too tied to the incentives of a never-ending cycle of violence to ever be able to step out of it. (Hezbullah is another good example, as they have been unwilling to cede any military power to the Lebanese government.) With any luck (although I don't hold much hope), Obama will make the eventual cessation of this war as a sign that significant and early progress needs to be made on the Israel/Palestine situation.

[1] In a recent UNRWA panel on Gaza that I attended, one of the presenters noted that he had heard from high-level Israeli sources that it was likely that Israel would implement a unilateral ceasefire within a few days. While I find it unlikely that Hamas (or other groups) will respond in-kind with their own ceasefire, this effort should be pushed. Despite their justifiable anger at the attacks on Gaza, the Palestinian people should take this moment as revealing the urgent and necessary need for a long-lasting peace agreement. This is an untenable situation on both sides, and in the long-term neither has anything to gain by continuing the cycle of violence.

Scientific-Military-Technological Assemblages

2008-12-02T19:15:00.007-05:00

Courtesy of the Complex Terrain Laboratory, comes an interview with Antoine Bousquet, author of the upcoming book, The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity. The book looks at the reciprocal relations between science, technology, warfare and the larger organization of society in order to understand the dynamics of change in warfare. Drawing on numerous military theorists - as well as blog favourites, Manuel DeLanda and Gilles Deleuze - the book offers an exciting vision of the complexity involved in technological change. Reading this in conjunction with Eyal Weizman's Hollow Land and DeLanda's War in the Age of Intelligent Machines would certainly give one a good Deleuzian understanding of how modern conflict is shifting away from the dominance of great power wars.

From the interview:
"Each regime of the scientific way of warfare produces its own conceptions of space and modes of occupation of military assemblages within it. Mechanistic warfare organised armies in linear geometric patterns and dictated its manoeuvres within a delineated striated space of Cartesian coordinates. Thermodynamic warfare is somewhat more ambiguous since the energies unleashed by it tended at first towards the constitution of large static fronts determined by the availability of railways necessary to satisfy the voracious logistical demands of industrial war but the introduction of motorised land and air vehicles and a generally more dynamic understanding of conflict subsequently restored vectors of speed and flexible operations behind enemy lines. Cybernetic warfare brought all these new dynamic forces under overarching architectures of control which progressively enclosed the entire globe in a mesh of geocentric satellites and command and control structures (a new and even more totalising striation of space - hence Edwards' 'closed world'). In emphasising local and relational situatedness as well as the porousness of boundaries between system and environment, chaoplexity develops a much more fluid and relativistic conception of space as shaped by its occupation rather than as an empty immobile Newtonian canvas within which entities are positioned and displaced."

Moreover, there is a virtual symposium scheduled to be held on Antoine's book on December 5-8.

[UPDATE: Here's a direct link to the symposium.]

Featured contributors include:
Kenneth Anderson – Law (American University)
Josef Ansorge – International Relations (Cambridge University)
John Matthew Barlow – History (Concordia University)
Antoine Bousquet - Politics & Sociology (Birkbeck College)
Martin Coward – International Relations (University of Sussex)
Armando Geller – Conflict Analysis (Manchester Metropolitan University)
James Gibson – Sociology (California State University, Long Beach)
Derek Gregory – Geography (University of British Columbia)
Craig Hayden –International Communications (American University)
Charles Jones –International Relations (Cambridge University)
Jason Ralph – Politics and International Studies (University of Leeds)
Julian Reid – War Studies (King’s College London)
Martin Senn – Political Science (University College London)
Marc Tyrrell – Anthropology (Carleton University)
Tony Waters – Sociology (California State University, Chico)

As for myself, this - along with Graham Harman's recent work on assemblages - is really making me want to dive back into some Deleuze literature. I have a few projects to finish up over the next week or two, but after that I hope to return with something more substantial.

Random Links

2008-11-14T18:13:00.009-05:00

A couple interesting links to make up for the lack of recent posting...

"Melting into Air" - An article from the New Yorker on the financial crisis - interesting not only for its use of deconstruction to analyze the self-referential nature of the financial markets, but also as a sort of intro to the entire mess.

So Many a Second - A unique website that tries to break down incomprehensible numbers into manageable visualizations. Taking a cue from something I read on the Anthem-LSE mailing list, it seems to me that technology like this can have a lot of political value. For example, one of the major problems with getting people to sacrifice to stop climate change is simply the apparently long-term nature of the problem. It's consequences are so far outside our typical frame of experience that it can't be presented with the necessary urgency (or rather, it's very difficult to present it that way). But technology like this takes the immensity of these sorts of changes and statistics and breaks them down into an impressive and intuitive visualization. It brings far-reaching changes into closer proximity with our everyday lives, making them comprehensible - and subsequently, actionable. (And for another example of the political use of technology, see this fascinating lecture at TED.)

And for anyone who hasn't seen it yet, we have a CFP up at Speculative Heresy for work on xenoeconomics and speculative realist politics. At the moment, it's for a virtual conference, but there's a good chance that it will morph into a real conference. See the CFP for more details.

Lastly, as Levi mentioned in his recent post, him and I, along with Graham Harman, have been working on putting together a collection on speculative realism and materialism in continental thought. As it stands, we're going to have contributions from Alain Badiou, Ray Brassier, Manuel DeLanda, Iain Hamilton Grant, Martin Hägglund, Peter Hallward, Graham Harman, Adrian Johnston, Francois Laruelle, Bruno Latour, Catherine Malabou, Quentin Meillassoux, Nicole Pepperell, John Protevi, Isabelle Stengers, Alberto Toscano, and Slavoj Žižek. Needless to say, we're quite excited about this project! If all goes according to plan, it should be out late 2009.

Advice from the Past

2008-10-21T23:11:00.006-04:00

For those of us, like myself, who are too young to have directly experienced a major economic crisis before, it's sometimes hard to remember that this situation isn't particularly novel. As such, this paragraph from David Harvey's 1982 work, The Limits to Capital, seems particularly relevant, both to remind us of that fact, and as advice for the present time:

"The [central bank's] capacity for regulation and control of capital, albeit in the interests of the capitalist class as a whole, necessarily resides within the state apparatus. It then seems as if a working-class movement can dominate capital if it can gain control of the strategic centre within the state apparatus. But then the reverse side of the medal immediately becomes evident. In so far as a part of the state apparatus [i.e. the central bank] is a pure reflection of capital itself, even a socialist government (as many have found to their cost) can do no more than strive for a more effective management of the contradiction-laden flow of interest-bearing capital. To be sure, adjustments here and there in both institutional structures and in the direction and quantity of flows can bring benefit to workers. But the limits to such redistributions are strictly circumscribed by the necessary unity [of industrial capital, financial capital, and the state] that also prevails within the circulation of interest-bearing capital. Only the total abolition of this form of circulation will suffice if the state is to escape from a position of collusion with capital." (322-323)

Destructive Creation

2008-10-16T18:44:00.010-04:00

In line with my recent post, an editorial in today's Financial Times by Jagdish Bhagwati, highlights the role played by financial innovations in the current crisis. Playing on Schumpeter's notion of 'creative destruction', Bhagwati argues that the prime lesson to be learned from this crisis is the role of 'destructive creation' - the unacknowledged negative effects of financial innovations. While these new financial products let banks and the finance sector reap huge profits, it was all founded upon a misguided belief that risk had been managed. The rise of new methods of analysis (and here, one thing I think that has gone widely unacknowledged in this crisis is the role of mathematics and quantification that lent a sense of security to the banks), in conjunction with the housing market boom, created the sort of eternal optimism of capitalism that compelled banks to increase their leverage beyond any reasonable ratio. If housing prices were going up and risk was neutralized, everyone figured it was a safe bet. As Bhagwati argues, this is amplified by "the 'Wall Street-Treasury Complex'. Robert Rubin went from Goldman Sachs to the Treasury and back to Citigroup. Hank Paulson went from Goldman Sachs to the Treasury and will doubtless return also to Wall Street. This network shares the optimistic scenarios that Wall Street spins." This largely self-enclosed network of powerful individuals feeds on each others' optimism, effectively blinding themselves to bubbles as well as potential risks.

What Bhagwati calls for then is "a truly independent commission of experts to look closely at each financial innovation and work out its potential downside." There are a number of problems with this, however. First, risk is inevitable - the very nature of the credit system is such that there is always the possibility of defaulting on loans. So the key question is: what level of risk is acceptable? Moreover, is there even some quantitative way to measure risk? A year ago, and even months ago, it was a "certainty" that risk had been managed and the possibility of systemic failure was nil. Clearly, that wasn't the case - the complex mathematical tools used to mitigate risk have failed. There are two prime reasons that strike me as explaining the inherent limits of mathematical risk analysis. First, is what appeared to have happened in this case: the euphoria of a housing and credit bubble leads people to ignore warning signs and ignore even the obvious. It is not the case, as Bhagwati seems to suggest, that people weren't aware of the risks and inevitable collapse of the housing bubble; rather they ignored all the signs. So, presumably, such optimistic assumptions were built into the mathematical models, which led to a systematic ignorance as to the real risk involved. The second limit to risk analysis is the constant potential for 'black swan' events - events that are virtually statistically impossible, but that nevertheless continually occur. These can be built into mathematical models, but they will continually produce a low risk factor by virtue of their rarity. In addition, there's always the possibility of events that occur that are entirely unpredictable - things like 9/11 to which no statistical probability can be attached, since they are the 'unknown unknowns', to borrow Rumsfeld's phrase. There's always the chance that these types of events will occur, and thus the problem is that with the complexity of the financial system, it's never clear what will set off a cascading effect leading to a systemic breakdown.

Which leads to a second problem with Bhagwati's proposal: the inability of the commission to be able to map out every effect of the financial innovations. Certainly, such a commission would act as a safeguard, helping to regulate the financial system; but as I pointed out in a recent post, the history of finance is filled with examples of financial innovations that exceed all regulation and that are responsible for the credit and commodity bubbles characteristic of pre-crisis phases. This empirical history lends credence to the notion that there is a structural necessity to these financial innovations. Capitalism, as a social system, requires these innovations and requires that they escape (effective) regulation. I haven't yet worked out the details, but one potential line of thought stems from David Harvey's The Limits to Capital. Namely, that the contradictions involved in the production sector (the 'real' economy) ultimately necessitate the creation of the credit and finance sectors. These sectors, however, don't resolve the contradictions, but merely displace them to their own level - contradictions which result in the sort of crisis we're in the midst of. The details, as to what precisely these contradictions are, however, remained to be worked out...

The third, and final, problem is in the global nature of the economy. If Bhagwati's commission is national, then finance - the most deterritorialized aspect of capitalism - will simply shift to an unregulated area in order to produce its innovations. The EU, as well as the rest of the world, are feeling the effects of financial innovations that arose in the United States. Clearly, with the highly interconnected nature of the financial world, there is no national way to truly regulate these innovations. On the other hand, if we go to an international commission, we end up with an institutional structure akin to the one I suggested at the end of my last post. The major problem with such an institution is simply this: if it doesn't have recognized legal authority over nations, there is no reason to expect that a nation will follow its recommendations - recommendations that will inevitably be impediments on bubbles and the expansion of the economy and financial sector. If numerous US commentators and regulators could recognize and warn about the housing bubble, yet still have their warnings go unheeded, there is no reason to believe that an international institution will have any better effect. Unless, that is, it has unprecedented levels of authority over states. That is to say, if it is a truly global authority that supersedes the anarchic international system. In this regards, it will be interesting to see what comes of Gordon Brown's calls to reform the IMF.

In the end then, it seems we are faced with few choices - either (1) we accept the inevitability of booms and crises, or (2) we refuse their necessity and try to produce a new economic system, or (3) we begin the slow process of constructing a global level of governance that can regulate the economy. Each project, of course, has its own major problems, but in times like these, more options are available than ever before.

Repercussions, Part 1

2008-10-10T20:08:00.008-04:00

While forecasting society's future is notoriously imprecise, subject to any number of unexpected contingencies, it's nevertheless possible and useful to try and analyze the present dynamics and tendencies. Particularly in a crisis situation, with a number of other important dynamics in play, it's imperative to understand how various tendencies will interact with each other. In that regards, the financial crisis is only one among a number of other significant events.

The most obvious of these, and one of the most significant in the long-term, is the decline of US hegemony. While its decline has been pronounced for decades now (in one sense, it's been declining since the end of WWII), it's now clear that the US is no longer a dominant actor in the way it has been for so long. That's not to deny that it's still the most powerful actor, but it is no longer capable of dictating the world order - a capacity that defines the hegemon. Militarily, it's spread thin, mired in two insurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Russia feels confident enough to attack Georgia without worrying about NATO or American reprise. Iran continues to diplomatically antagonize America and the EU, knowing full well that a military strike is virtually impossible. And even North Korea has suddenly become uncooperative in its nuclear disarmament. Economically, the US is still the most powerful actor, but with a severe recession on the horizon, China and India are likely to gain ground despite their own relatively minor recessions. Which also leads to an important social aspect - American has lost its status as a model (even if it was an imposed model). The financial crisis has signaled the final death toll on the neoliberal project, and American long ago lost its moral standing. Around the world, American is seen as an imperial aggressor, making cooperation with other governments more difficult.

So one of the prime questions for American leaders, in the near future, will be to choose whether to forcefully retain their hegemonic status, or whether to accept the new multipolar world and aim for cooperation. If McCain should win, there's no doubt what option he would choose. Obama, on the other hand, is an unknown. In the debates and in many discussions, he's come across as a typical liberal hawk, willing to use force for intervention and 'humanitarian' purposes - a stance which lends itself quite easily to forcefully maintaining a hegemonic status. Yet, at the same time, he's made significant overtures to the UN and multilateralism, as well as emphasizing the need to tackle international problems at a non-military level. In addition, the perverse nature of the American system is such that Obama is forced - in order to be electable - to pay dues to America's hawkish attitude. A position that advocated diplomacy, foreign aid, multilateralism, and support for the UN would be portrayed as wildly naive. My personal hope is that Obama is playing the game, and that his liberal hawk position is mostly a structural necessity - one that won't be carried out if he becomes president. Only time will tell though.

The more immediate effect of the decline of America is a domestic issue resulting from its conjunction with two other events - the financial crisis and the election campaign. As is readily apparent, the Republican campaign has decided to whip up whatever racist support it can, in the desperate hope to win the election. The narrative being constructed officially is that Obama pals around with terrorists and supports supposedly radical groups like ACORN. These official narratives, of course, play on the already established viral memes about Obama being a Muslim or having a radical black theology. The one dynamic in play then, is the desperation of the McCain election campaign, pushing subtly racist stories into the mainstream. The other dynamic is the financial crisis, which Republicans are attempting to tie to ACORN, as well as the CRA - which they then associate with Democratic policies. ACORN and CRA, on the other hand, are both closely associated with poverty and minority issues. The end result being that because of the Republican's causal logic for the financial crisis, numerous conservatives are beginning to believe that minorities are ultimately the ones responsible for the current economic turmoil. This explanation of the crisis, widely reported in the conservative media, forms a positive feedback loop with the repeated fears about Obama - basically setting up a framework for minority scapegoating and racist outbursts. The important question will be whether this mobilization of racism is sustained through various mechanisms, or whether it dissipates once the heat of the election campaign has died down. Given that, historically, crises have often instigated the search for a responsible minority, it's quite possible that, given enough repetition and given the right diffusion mechanisms, the generalized scapegoating of minorities will become widespread in America. We're already seeing numerous instances of this at McCain's rallies, and the Republican machine is implicitly supporting it, knowing full well it's their only chance at re-election. The answer here, it seems to me, is for the leftist project to develop a counter-narrative, placing the blame squarely at the feet of another minority group - namely the wealthy, risk-taking individuals actually responsible for the current financial crisis. A scapegoat is almost inevitable, so it's just a matter of what group is popularly selected to flesh out the content. Moreover, this narrative has the added benefit of raising class issues again, as well as tapping into the intuitive anger over things like AIG's $440,000 spa vacation. (Seriously, WTF??) As K-Punk has repeatedly argued, the politics of resentment can be a powerful tool.

Internationally, the effects of the financial crisis play out on a number of important levels, and when all is said and done, it's quite likely that the global order will be radically changed. The first effect I've already alluded to - namely American's declining status simultaneously implies the rise of counter-powers - China being the prime candidate, but the EU (if it survives in any meaningful sense), India, Brazil, and Russia are also likely to play more significant roles. Militarily, it's not clear that the rise of a multipolar world will lead to more conflict, although historically that has typically been the case. China's military has not been focused on offensive capacity, instead preferring to spend a minimal amount necessary to ensure a viable defence. Russia, despite the incident with Georgia, is unlikely to try and exert much force, particularly since the Georgian war spooked investors and contributed to recent economic problems. The wildcard is again the US, and it'll depend on whether they decide to make some last ditch effort to retain hegemonic control, or whether they are capable of being self-aware of their own decreased power.

Besides drastic shifts in the balance of power, the second significant change resulting from the current crisis is a likely re-thinking of global governance structures - particularly the governance of financial flows. The IMF, World Bank and G7 have so far been largely impotent in trying to stop this crisis. As I write this, the G7 meeting has finished and the document produced suggests that it could be a viable plan - although Paul Krugman has some hesitations about it, and even the G7 ministers are unsure whether it will work. The IMF and World Bank, meanwhile, are set to meet this weekend, and will hopefully hammer out a plan of their own to try and deal with the crisis. But the speed is too quick and the size of the crisis just too big for these governance systems to deal with. Global, coordinated action is required, but with the exception of the rate cut, has largely been missing. A new global system will be constructed in the wake of this crisis, but as to what it'll precisely look like, I'll leave to the experts. Along with the financial governance structure, the EU will also likely undergo important changes. The stresses are already being felt, as countries teeter between coordinated action as a single political entity, and reverting to nationalist 'beggar thy neighbour' policies. If the latter occurs, it's almost certain that the EU will dissolve in all important respects. On the other hand, if they can manage to cooperate in the face of this crisis, it could push them towards even further integration, effectively strengthening the EU system. Again, only time will tell.

The third and final international effect of the crisis will be an ideological shift. Free market capitalism is discredited, much in the same way that communism was discredited in the wake of the USSR's collapse. The general effect will be a shift to the left - obviously for leftists, but also for the right, who must now re-construct a viable ideology distinct from neoliberalism and distinct from the leftist position. Strictly speaking, though, it's never been the case that neoliberal proponents believed capitalism could be entirely unregulated; private property rights, basic financial regulations, guarantees of contracts, the securing of cheap labour, etc. have all required heavy government intervention. This means that what we are seeing now is not the downfall of some abstractly pure form of free market capitalism; it's rather the making manifest that intervention is only for a particular group and not for universal benefit. Intervention has always existed, but predominantly in such a way that it disappeared into the background, becoming an always already-given structural feature. We simply exist in a world where property rights and contracts are guaranteed. As Zizek notes, "the real dilemma ... is what kind of State intervention?" Careful observers have always noted that government interventions have sustained the wealthy and powerful, yet at a mass level, this largely went unacknowledged. Besides, so long as my share of the pie is expanding, who wants to rock the boat? What was made blatantly manifest with the bailout plan was that government intervention was primarily there to save the wealthy and elite who were part of entities 'too big to fail'. What the bailout and the current crisis have hopefully killed is any idea of 'unregulated capitalism' - capitalism is and always has been a system formed on the basis of intervention and numerous institutions that regulate the capacities of individuals. The question is not regulation or deregulation, but de/regulation for who? Intervention can be for the benefit of the masses, yet this is only a secondary and derivative capacity - one that only becomes available once intervention has secured the capitalist framework. What is interesting about the past 8 years (and is perhaps unsurprising considering the party in charge) is that this secondary capacity went largely unused in America. Real wages have stagnated, while commodity prices have soared (food and oil, most notably). Consumption has managed to rise, but only through a vast increase in personal debt. In other words, in the midst of a huge economic boom, most Americans were left out. And now, if the crisis is as bad as most commentators seem to believe, these same Americans will be forced to bear the largest portion (if not all) of the burden.

One hypothetical question is whether state intervention is even the right term to use. What is really required is not state intervention, but rather an international intervention - a coordinated effort by multiple states to act as one agent intervening, not in national economies, but precisely in the global economy itself - a global rate cut, or a global capitalization of banks. Perhaps a simple terminological distinction, but also perhaps a sign of what is required for managing global capitalism. This is far more speculative, but if it's true that some truly global institution with real authority (i.e. not subject to member states' whims - a necessity, considering the speed of financial crises) is required, then that is not only a significant step forward for global governance, but also for having effectively installed a political authority with power over the global economy (i.e. something suspiciously like global socialism). It's highly unlikely that such an institution will come about, but then again, a month ago I would never have guessed I'd hear Republicans seeking to nationalize banks... Crises call for responses far outside one's typical ideological comfort level.

The Law and Excess

2008-10-01T19:20:00.010-04:00

One of the central questions that needs to be raised by this crisis is simply this: is it a necessary or accidental problem? Is this crisis, in other words, the result of capitalism being a social structure with inherent dynamics of its own, or is it simply the result of a few contingent mistakes? If the latter, the remedy seems to straightforwardly be - let's learn from our mistakes and not commit them again in the future.

The mainstream opinion invariably sides with the latter - the crisis is the result of a few bad mistakes (deregulation, unchecked greed, etc.). Obama, today, suggested the same thing, saying, "This was not a normal part of the business cycle." Mainstream opinion agrees - providing an explanation through any number of accidental concatenation of causes: these range from the ludicrous (those damn dirty immigrants wanting houses) to the reasonable (financial deregulation). The step that is never taken, however, is to question the structural logic that has led to the current situation. There may be any number of efficient causes responsible, but there's also a teleological cause at work here.

Marxism, on the other hand, makes the claim that it is a necessary part of the structure of capitalism that such crises are continually produced. There are certain systemic pressures that compel individual capitalists to collectively bring about a speculative bubble, and since a bubble is by definition unsustainable, there is inevitably a collapse and crisis. In fact, even in some of the mainstream literature, some sense of these structural pressures can be seen. Barry Eichengreen, for example, points out that the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act - the Act which established a regulatory wall between commercial and investment banks - had significant unintended consequences. Namely, the increased competition resulting from commercial banks infringing on investment banks' turf, forced the investment banks to take on loans they normally would have turned down. The decrease in profits forced them to look to new markets - in this case, markets which ultimately led to a housing bubble, increase in credit availability, and subsequent collapse. Significantly, this is not the fault of any individual bank - it is a result of systemic pressures in which individuals are only its contingent embodiments. Just like how in international relations, the anarchic system compels states to act like power-hungry realists, so too does the capitalist system compel individuals to act like profit-hungry machines.

Similarly, in Charles Kindleberger's classic Manias, Panics, and Crashes, Kindleberger goes through a laundry list of historical examples where a similar pattern repeats itself again and again. First a bubble, then a shock, then a crisis. Kindleberger notes that invariably, in the midst of the bubble, the individuals involved always believe that "this time it's different" - this time the unprecedented growth will continue unabated. Of course it never does, as we're now being reminded. Interestingly, particularly with the current situation, Kindleberger also points out that regulation always lags behind the innovative financial products. In other words, the particular financial products responsible this time for the crisis (derivatives, etc. - I don't claim to be an expert on these!) are only the latest representatives of a long historical tradition that has been repeated numerous times. In the past, financial instruments like bills of exchange and call money were the innovations which escaped regulation. Today, it is any number of other things, but the essential process remains the same. The repetition of this process, despite its inevitable failure, is good evidence that capitalism has always forced individual capitalists to exceed the Law of regulation and create new financial instruments to maintain their productivity.

Significantly, therefore, what this repetition of the bubble/shock/crisis pattern points to is that this is a structural feature of capitalism. It is not a historical accident, nor is it the result of ineffective regulation; is it an invariable characteristic of capitalism that financial bubbles will always exceed the limits placed on them by the Law. The conclusion to be drawn is that more regulation is not the magic bullet that will resolve all our problems. (It may lengthen the time between crises, but they will still occur.)

Therefore, Obama's calls for an updated 'modern system of regulation' that would be capable of monitoring and controlling financial flows is ultimately futile. This regulatory system would quickly become outdated as financial institutions create ever new products to work around the framework.

We can also pose the hypothetical question of what would happen were regulation to be entirely effective? What if it limited the risk and prohibited the creation of new financial instruments? As some have suggested, it is quite likely that capitalism necessarily relies on these new sources of finance in order to sustain its present growth - without them, capitalism would lose its characteristic quality of the never ending expansion of production and consumption. If that's the case, then capitalism is intrinsically a crisis-producing system - either it functions and produces bubbles and crises, or it is regulated and fails to function, leading to its collapse as a viable system.

The question to be raised by all of this then, is whether we want to accept an economic system that necessarily produces such precipitous crises. While, as other commentators have pointed out, there has been a burst of populist discussion on capitalism, there has (to my knowledge) not been a popular discussion truly questioning the foundations of the system. Discussion has been limited to whether fully free-market capitalism is acceptable, or whether it doesn't need to be restrained in some manner. The problem with these alternatives is that regulation has historically not blocked the formation of crises. The question of capitalism as a system can, and should, be pushed into the public debate - even if only to spark thought and creativity towards alternatives.

The more I think about this crisis and read up in an attempt to understand it, the more certain I am that this is a great opportunity for leftist thought. Despite the claims of imminent demise, however, this crisis will take time to fully play out - and as it hits 'Main Street', the sense of anger and confusion it will invoke should be connected with an intellectual framework capable of explaining the situation, and capable of pointing towards the economic system responsible. It is not merely a problem with greedy financial institutions - they are placed into a system over which they have no control. And as in my last post, it may be true that capitalism is a macro-level social system, yet that doesn't entail that its a non-localizable system. The macro is tightly integrated with the micro, and as such there are precise pressure points at which leverage can be applied. The key for the leftist project will be to discern these points, mobilize popular discontent, and - importantly - control the framing of the crisis.

One of the most important parts of this project, as I was briefly trying to get at in my last post, is to also understand the mechanisms through which change is concretely brought about. In this endeavor, the great recent analyses at Understanding Society on continuity, transformation and equilibrium have been invaluable in initiating some lines of thought on this. We can say that capitalism - unlike the equilibrium reasoning that underpins the relation between price, supply and demand - is the paradigmatic example of a disequilibrium-based social system. As many commentators have noted - both opponents and proponents - capitalism is premised upon constant expansion; a process which is carried out by technological, political, cultural and social means. While this has led to unprecedented growth and the mitigation of world poverty in many areas, it also has the effect of being able to outpace any regulatory framework, producing crises as a result. These are two sides of the same coin; we can't have one without the other.

But what appears to have occurred in the present situation (and has occurred in the past too), is that a system founded upon disequilibrium has managed to have the positive feedback mechanisms that sustain it disrupted. The expansion of credit and the confidence in rising commodity prices (which lead to the bubbles typical of financial crises) have faltered and the whole system is close to grinding to a halt. In other words, we might suggest that while disequilibrium is partly what makes capitalism so difficult to resist (it being capable of incorporating any number of revolutionaries into its circuits), there's nevertheless a certain fundamental financial disequilibrium that it must uphold. If that particular disequilibrium freezes up, the system collapses. I don't know whether that's a valid analysis, since finance and economics are hardly my strong point, but it seems intuitively plausible considering the current crisis. The further hypothesis would be that, in the turning point moment at which this essential disequilibrium fails, capitalism as a system has been pushed into a far-from-equilibrium position. (I get into these ideas in more detail in my thesis, particularly Chapter 2.) Suddenly, what were previously ineffective struggles to change the political economy for the better, have become viable tactics. It is possible that our political economic system has reached a point at which even a minor shift in the right direction could have disproportionate effects (some necessarily unintended, though). Which is again to say that this is quite likely a prime moment for the leftist project.

Crisis and Change

2008-09-26T00:13:00.009-04:00

One of the key and long-standing problems in conceptualizing the nature of society has been the relation between the micro and the macro. Recently though, a number of different disciplines have come to very similar conclusions concerning this problem. Represented by the likes of Deleuze, Latour, DeLanda, and network analysis in sociology, the emerging consensus seems to be to take, using DeLanda's apt description, a "flat ontology" wherein the micro and the macro lie on the same ontological plane. The macro, in this model, can be conceived as an extended section of the micro-based networks, or it can be seen as a locally-constructed 'image' that purports to model the macro dynamics of the social. In either case though, the irreconcilable division between the two levels has been effaced, resolving the typical theoretical problems associated with their division.

For all the theoretical interest of these problems, however, the real worth of a social theory needs to be found in its practical efficacy. It seems to me that a real weakness of much leftist thought today lies in its insurmountable distance from real world dynamics - and hence its inability to bring about concrete change in the world. (What we might call the 'problem of means'. The other major problem of leftist thought is clearly the 'problem of ends', i.e. what alternative do we have to capitalist democracies?) The problem of means is perhaps clearest in the utter failure of the mass movements against the Iraq war. But the current financial crisis also seems to be an instance of this problem - rather than using the absolute failure of capitalism as a prime moment to push forward a distinctly leftist vision for the world, Democrats and leftists have largely deferred to Paulson's plan. (Minor concessions such as limits on executive compensation aside, the plan as it stands seems to still be a $700 billion give-away to financial executives. Although as I write this, the plan also appears to have fallen through for the moment.)

Now in part this is a problem of ends - what should we push forward as an alternative to the proposed plan? But the ends needn't be revolutionary - universal health care, an increase in real wages for the lower and middle class, mortgage assistance for those being foreclosed - all these would be real gains for the leftist project. So the ends aren't the major problem, since we at least have some conception of what to aim for. Instead it seems to me to be a problem of means. Specifically, it's a problem of means with the theories that purport to offer a guiding vision for how to change the world. In other words, the problem doesn't lie with the sort of pragmatic, largely atheoretical politics of most politicians. They see an opportunity and they take it, using whatever resources happen to be at hand. But the grand theories of social change seem woefully inadequate to the current crisis - and precisely on a means level. This is a central question because opportunities like the current one are extremely rare - here we have the absolute and undeniable collapse of free market ideas, and a populace that is wildly unhappy with the current course. A sufficient theory of the means for political change would let leftists install their vision, and, as numerous path-dependency studies have shown, basically ensure that this leftist structure would last for another generation. Shock therapy doesn't have to be limited to Milton Friedman.

But looking to continental political thought, what theorist has offered anything capable of using this truly transformational moment for political purposes? Derrida and his ethical stance towards the undecidable seems more suited to trying to install hope in an age devoid of alternatives. When the time comes to implement and push for an alternative though, he has nothing to offer. Lacan and Zizek will talk about "clearing the social field" and revolutionary "Acts" that overthrow currently hegemonic ideologies, but what is to be done when objective dynamics carry out this overthrow themselves? It is apparent to all - even the most ardent free-market supporters - that free market principles have failed, and so the problem is not with ideology covering over the resolute failure of the economic system. (I haven't read Zizek's latest works, though, so perhaps he's offered some alternative? But Bartleby's "I would prefer not to" seems to succumb to all the same problems - again, the problem is not a matter of escaping or collapsing the reigning social system - it's a problem of how to act.)

Even Badiou's work, the current paradigm of decision and action, seems largely futile in the face of the financial crisis - in what way could this historical event be considered an event in Badiou's sense? What sort of universal truth does it reveal? The failure of capitalist policies is, presumably, something already well known by leftists - so what can this crisis add that hasn't already been inscribed in the structures of knowledge? Again, Badiou has an end - an ethics of truth that compels us to investigate evental sites - but the means in the absence of an event are underdeveloped. The problem, ultimately, is that this is a prime moment for political action and none of the continental political theories can take advantage of it.

Marxism, of course, is the major exception to this rule. Financial crises are its bread and butter and were predicted long ago by the analyses of people like David Harvey. But Marxism in its traditional, economically deterministic vision, is discredited. And the more culturally oriented variants seem to have lost precisely that aspect which made them so powerful - the economic questions and the resistance to capitalism as an alternative economic system. It is a common place today to note that capitalism is more than capable of integrating any culturally revolutionary subjects - in many cases, it even produces them, or at least actively incites novelty. So a resistance to capitalism and a viable alternative can't be found on a cultural level - it needs to operate on the economic structures of modern capitalism. (More than likely there is some Marxist theory out there that addresses modern capitalism on an economic level without falling into the problems of traditional Marxism. I'm very far from being an expert on Marxism, though, so I'd be interested to hear of such work...) So in my admittedly limited knowledge of contemporary Marxism, it seems as though the current analyses are inadequate to truly using the current financial crisis to further leftist goals. Again, it seems largely a problem of means - perhaps the traditional reliance on a designated revolutionary subject means that Marxism must be subject to the whims of that group? A vanguard group could of course incite them, but even then it seems as though mass politics has become ineffectual in our present age.

So what's the alternative? Well, returning to the topic I started with, it seems as though these sorts of network/assemblage analyses provide a potentially very productive way of thinking how concrete change is actually carried out. What would such an analysis entail? One of the key factors is to outline the system itself, to map it (and in the process, actually produce it as a concept) and highlight the actual networks and decisional hierarchies that are responsible for change. What is key to this mapping is to discern the precise pressure points that can be exploited for progressive causes. As Latour notes at one point in Re-Assembling the Social, one of the great benefits of this type of analysis is that it takes grand abstract concepts like 'capitalism' and makes them into actual, localizable networks. Contra Negri and Hardt, therefore, political action doesn't require collective subjects to mobilize at a global level equal to capitalism - in fact, capitalism itself is far from being a global monolith. Instead, a tiny handful of elites, a small group of powerful companies, and an even smaller amount of government officials are the key nodes in sustaining capitalism as a system. They are neither abstract nor deterritorialized entities - rather they are embedded within specific networks. What this type of analysis might suggest then, is to focus on one of the key players - Chris Dodd, perhaps - and use the confluence of election and crisis pressures to actively work towards forcing a leftist shift. his could entail multiple tactics - mass movement-type pressure, as well as a concerted blogosphere movement (which to some degree seems to be occurring), and the use of media-friendly individuals and events. To return to the micro/macro distinction I opened with, the strategic aim would be to create a macro-level image of what is required in this crisis situation - one that absolutely refuses to succumb to the pressures of financial lobbyists. But the only way in which this macro-level image becomes effective is for it to be created and diffused throughout the micro-level networks of everyday individuals.

[EDIT: Maybe I was wrong about the specific area to focus on. At least one report suggests a better spot than Dodd or Congressional leaders may be to focus the attention on the average Congress member:

"There is a seriously underestimated gap between the White House and Congressional leadership on one side, and the Congressional rank and file on the other; and that the media reports suggesting a deal was imminent by and large were being informed by the former, who are more committed to a quick deal; while the Congressional rank and file is more informed by being overwhelmed with thousands of calls from screaming constituents who are truly outraged over the prospect of a bailout of Wall Street fat cats. Vulnerable incumbents may not feel they can vote for anything resembling a bailout until after the election."]

Anyways, I didn't intend on writing so much about the financial crisis, particularly with how much (virtual) ink has already been spent on it. I actually wanted to write about how these types of network analyses function in conflict situations, but I'll save that for another post...

Artisanal Development and Institutions

2008-07-16T01:26:00.015-04:00

In the world of development economics, one paradigm has been widely recognized as the model for development – the so-called Washington Consensus. This model operated throughout the 1980s and 90s as the dominant vision of how developing countries could achieve economic growth. It was dominant, however, not because of its intrinsic value as the best model (as I’m sure most readers know, it was and is widely criticized as being biased towards the groups that benefit from neoliberal policies), but rather dominant because it was the paradigm adopted by the institutions with the money – the IMF and the World Bank, most notably. For various reasons (political, theoretical, institutional, etc.) it was believed that the Washington Consensus provided the only model that would achieve economic growth (which would eventually lead, it was argued, to decreased poverty and increased well-being).

The drastic failure of these policies when they were implemented in Latin America and Africa, however, eventually made it clear to all that the Washington Consensus was incapable of living up to its expectations. It couldn’t even achieve the growth levels it promised, let alone the promised derivative rises in the standards of living. Despite some stragglers who retain that their strict neoliberal policies are correct, and it’s merely these “other” cultures who can’t live up to capitalism’s promises, it’s widely recognized today in development economics that the Washington Consensus is a failure (even in its augmented form, which adds institutional reforms to its original trade and financial reforms).

What has become a mystery, then, to development economics is how does development proceed? Now there have been a multitude of answers put forth to this question, but the one I want to focus on here is that voiced by Dani Rodrik (One Economics, Many Recipes; and see here for a Crooked Timber discussion of the book: PDF). To be clear up front, Rodrik’s long-term goal is economic growth, which is itself a debatable aim. Others have suggested a larger set of aspirations such as human development, freedom and overall well-being. For Rodrik, as with most economists, these goals require economic growth to first raise individuals out of absolute poverty, so the goal of growth is simultaneously the aim of providing the necessary conditions for these larger aims. We’ll accept this line of reasoning here, but solely for the purposes of remaining focused on Rodrik’s project, and not because we necessarily agree with it (at least as it's formulated by most economists).

Now, unlike most economists who are well aware of the economy’s influence and power in world affairs, Rodrik explicitly proclaims that economists must become more modest. Despite their usual pretensions to mastery, they don’t, in fact, understand how development occurs and any rigid belief that they do is likely to cause the terrible consequences seen in Latin America and Africa. The first point to be noted with Rodrik’s approach therefore, is that he refuses the position of an authority that would stand outside of the context it’s working with. There is no single universal model of development that must be implemented without regard for the specific circumstances. Or, in more philosophical terms, there is no single form of development that can be forced upon a passive material. Rather each (the development ‘model’ and the country it’s applied to) has its own particular form and substance that must be taken into account.

What can development economists say then? For Rodrik, there are principles that can be followed – such as protection of property rights, guaranteed contracts, competition, appropriate incentives, and sound money. The trick is that these principles don’t map onto a single set of institutions or policies. In certain cases, what may be needed for economic growth is the liberalization of trade, while in other circumstances barriers should be retained (e.g. to protect nascent industries – Rodrik shows that developing countries, contra the principle of comparative advantage, initially diversify their industries rather than focusing on a single competitive industry). In order to implement these economic principles (which form what we might see as a ‘topological essence’ that admits of a multiplicity of actualizations), the individual responsible for development must take into account the singular tendencies involved in the specific situation. In other words, the economist must become an artisan working with the immanent material and its singularities rather than an architect independently modeling and commanding. To bring out the potentials involved in the situation, in line with the economic principles, the economist must have local and contextual knowledge. The artisan must experiment, playing with always uncertain tendencies and their ultimately unpredictable consequences.

One of the concrete examples Rodrik gives of this experimentation is China’s transformation. When globalization proponents speak of its benefits, they often point to the fact that globalization has decreased the number of people living in absolute poverty (less than a dollar a day). While factually true, the vast majority of these people live in India and China, the two most populous countries in the world. India and China, meanwhile, achieved their economic growth not by following the Washington Consensus’ principles, but by creating novel institutions and novel policies. They, in other words, experimented with the immanent conditions posed to them, and directed these tendencies towards the principles which produce sustainable economic growth. In China, therefore, the problem was of shifting from a system without private property to one with. As the experiences in post-communist Eastern Europe and Russia showed, this is not an easy realignment – it’s not at all clear how the previously nationalized industries and land should be delegated to private individuals, leading in Russia’s case to widespread corruption and the creation of numerous oligopolies. In China, on the other hand, land was delegated to families on the basis of their size, and industries were placed under the control of “township and village enterprises” or TVEs. These TVEs generated income directly for the community and so there was an invested interest to keep them profitable and to keep them honest and accountable. These TVEs, therefore, functioned to provide some of the economic principles outlined earlier, yet they operated within a society that found individual property rights to be alien concepts.

In another example, China liberalized its agricultural production, but only at the margins. In other words, the planned quotas were kept intact, but any surplus product could be sold for the benefit of the producer. Again, the ingrained habits and customs of the local population are kept, yet through a novel institutional setup, their potentials are extended into new fields and incited towards economic growth. The key to all of this is that there is not a priori model that could be used to produce these novel institutions, as though it were a matter of adding economic principle A to institutional situation B to get effect C. Each situation is radically singular and requires local knowledge to create novel institutions and policies. They are artisanal rather than architectural.

As a final note of curiosity, I’d add too that these sorts of examples are precisely in line with Deleuze’s thoughts on institutions formulated in his first book, Empiricism & Subjectivity. Contra psychoanalysis’s vision of the Law as limiting, Deleuze sees institutions as providing the positive means for instincts and tendencies to be expressed. They are positive constructions that extend our capacities rather than limiting them. “The institution, unlike the law, is not a limitation but rather a model of action, a veritable enterprise, an invented system of positive means or a positive invention of indirect means.” (46) The TVEs and the marginal liberalization undertaken in China were examples of this sort of positive institution that made possible new habits, new desires, and new material relations – one, moreover, that avoided that dire consequences involved far too often in the economic transitions of developing and post-communist societies.

A Critique of Populist Reason

2008-07-09T00:46:00.021-04:00

Ernesto Laclau’s latest (On Populist Reason) aims to elucidate the workings of populist movements – movements that have traditionally been academically marginalized as incoherent, irrational, and transitory. In these traditional academic studies of populism, the reason of the mass movement has been explained only in terms of what it lacks compared to a archetypal political reason. It has never, in other words, been given its own immanent explanation. As a result, Laclau sees himself setting out to examine this specifically populist form of reason.

As with any study, the first order of business it to ensure a clear definition of one’s object. For Laclau, populism is not defined by the content of its instances – there can be a conservative populism, as well as a leftist populism; a revolutionary populism as well as a reactionary populism. What defines the specificity of the populist movement is rather its form. Following upon his earlier analyses with Chantelle Mouffe in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau will argue that the ‘people’ constitutive of populist movements arises from the establishment of a chain of equivalences. In other words, rather than taking the group as an already-established entity, Laclau wants to explain how groups emerge in the first place. A populist movement, therefore, is a particular way of organizing a group of people. To this end, Laclau takes as his “minimal unit of analysis” (72), the ‘social demand’. This is a simple enough concept – an individual has a particular grievance over some social problem, and s/he demands that the government (or otherwise relevant authority) do something about it. In its individual form, Laclau refers to this as a 'democratic demand' (highlighting the individualism as the center of democracy). But, with the repeated failure of the local authorities to resolve this demand, more and more demands arise. In the beginning, these demands are all separate and individual (say, one for poor schooling, and another for lack of health care access). Yet at a certain threshold, these democratic demands become articulated together through a common equivalence – they become specifically ‘populist demands’, made equivalent through their common antagonist (real or imagined).

Laclau goes on from here to build an entire edifice upon these basic foundations, examining how populist movements congeal into something more than a transitory phenomenon (through master signifiers), and how the purported irrationality of the crowd in fact has its own reason ('irrational' rhetoric is one major way to articulate a group identity and establish a master signifier), among other insights. But for our purposes, I want to raise the issue of whether or not the demand is a viable ontological unit to begin with. The problem here isn’t a theoretical one (although it may be that too), but rather an empirical one – important studies of conflict have found that grievances play a very small role in predicting the likelihood of a mass movement arising and fighting for its demands. If grievances are rarely correlated with the occurrence of conflict, then despite the theoretical elegance of Laclau’s formulation, it seems we must simply declare that it is not validated by the facts.

The acute reader will note an elision in process already – the slight shift from a discussion of populism to a discussion of conflict. Our justification for the combination of these two is that populism is a form of conflict. Either open and violent, or hidden and subtle, populism is a struggle against an antagonistic other. While the conflict in question here focuses on the most openly violent form (namely, civil war), it is nevertheless clear that civil war is the ultimate form of the populist logic that Laclau outlines – namely the antagonistic drawing of a line between two adversaries, formed through an equivalential logic and structured according to a master signifier. If this ultimate form doesn’t adhere to Laclau’s logic, then it can plausibly be argued that the pre-civil war antagonisms won’t be found to adhere to it either.

With that in mind, let’s look at the most notable study to find that conflict isn’t based on grievances or social demands – Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler’s controversial “Greed and Ignorance in Civil War” (for some qualifications of their paper, see Chris Blattman and Edward Miguel's comprehensive review of the civil war literature here - in particular, pages 31-34). Collier and Hoeffler's basic premise is simple: it is not the scarcity of motivations for conflict which accounts for the rarity of civil wars, but rather the infrequency of the opportunities which explains the rarity of civil wars. Looking at the data from 750 five-year samples during the period from 1960-1992 (including both peace and conflict samples), they come to the conclusion that grievance variables have only a minor statistical significance on the likelihood of civil war. It is rather the opportunity variables (defined by the economic costs of starting a rebellion) that are most determinant when it comes to predicting the likelihood of a violent conflict. These include the proportional size of the natural resources extorted (more resources meaning more money for financing a civil war), the proportional size of the diaspora and the capital received from it, the foregone costs of joining a rebellion (e.g. it is cheaper to join a rebellion if one need not give up a well-paying job), and the geographical distribution of the population (with greater dispersion making it easier for a rebellion to mobilize outside the government’s reach). In terms of grievances, an ethnic majority has some significance, but only to a point – past a certain threshold, increased fractionalization appears to make it less profitable for the majority to exploit small minority groups. Without this economic incentive, the chances of violent conflict drop. Notably, grievance variables that Laclau would cite – such as political repression, inequality, ethnic polarization and religious fractionalization – add no significant explanatory value on top of the other variables. Collier and Hoeffler’s controversial conclusion, therefore, is that grievances play only a small part in the genesis of conflicts, relative to the economic costs and opportunities. This being the case, where does it leave Laclau’s analysis?

To be certain, Collier and Hoeffler's study doesn't disprove the validity of grievance-based theories - their results are also consistent with grievances being widespread and long-lasting, with the rare economic opportunities being what allows these base-level grievances to be voiced without necessarily decimating one's financial standing. In this theory, grievances would be a near constant, and opportunities the important variable. If that's the case, however, Laclau's theory of populist movements is underdetermined. While significant for recognizing the need and role for master signifiers in the construction of a 'people' and its continuation throughout a prolonged period of struggle, Laclau's populist reason ultimately is unable to account for the emergence of a populist movement in some situations and not others. Why, for example, do widespread grievances often go uncontested by any group of people? Collier and Hoeffler, while admittedly focused on civil wars, answer by pointing towards the mundane economic costs and opportunities that facilitate protest, rebellion and contention. In a sense, perhaps, what Laclau requires is a more developed theory of how individuals are attached to their everyday lives, prior to becoming involved in a populist movement. He's well aware of the intense attachments that can be sparked in the midst of a populist uprising, but seems to neglect how certain attachments to one's everyday lifestyle can make the cost of rebellion seem prohibitively unattractive. Relatedly, if these attachments shift as a result of material changes (influxes of capital from resources and diasporas, shifting geographical distributions of people, cheaper foregone costs, and even rainfall shortages), it perhaps also points to the ways in which desire is altered as a result of its embeddness in a dynamic socio-economic-natural context.

[UPDATE:] For an alternative perspective on similar issues, see Understanding Society's post, "Moral Economy as a Historical Social Concept".

[UPDATE #2:] And for even more, see Jon's in-depth discussion of populism, Laclau and other topics here.

Speculative Heresy

2008-07-06T17:24:00.005-04:00

I'll return to some more substantial posts soon, but for now I just wanted to point anyone interested in speculative realism over to a new group blog that Ben from Naught Thought, Taylor from Fractal Ontology, and myself have started up: Speculative Heresy.

Our hope for the blog is for it to provide a central English website for resources on speculative realism, non-philosophy and the like. For the moment, the website is still in the construction phase, but it's being added to everyday, and there's already a few posts up to read, including some translations. So with any luck, the blog will rapidly grow and ideally become a great place for the discussion of all the issues surrounding speculative realism.

New Badiou Journal Issue

2008-07-02T12:53:00.012-04:00

The upcoming issue of Symposium promises to be an interesting read, devoted as it is to a look at Badiou's work from multiple angles. It includes a discussion between Badiou and Simon Critchley on ethics and Infinitely Demanding, as well as numerous other intriguing articles from the likes of Alberto Toscano, Gabriel Riera, Todd May and Tzuchien Tho, among others. My own piece managed to find its way in too, and I'm rather honoured to be included among such preeminent Badiou scholars. The whole issue (and indeed, the journal itself, which has been consistently great) comes highly recommended!

[UPDATE: Here's a copy of my own contribution.]

PROPOSED TABLE OF CONTENTS

ALAIN BADIOU: SYMPOSIUM: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy/Revue canadienne de philosophie continentale

Preface: Alain Beaulieu (Laurentian University): A general discussion of who Badiou is and why his work has been so influential in Europe and abroad.

Introduction: Antonio Calcagno (King’s University College): Presentation of the themes, authors and content of the volume.

I. Alain Badiou and Simon Critchley: Alain Badiou on Infinitely Demanding, Slought Foundation, Philadelphia, November 15th, 2007 [A Discussion between Simon Critchley and Alain Badiou on finitude and infinite ethical responsibility]

MATHEMATICAL MULTIPLICITY

II. Tzuchien Tho (University of Hong Kong): The Consistency of Inconsistency: Alain Badiou and the Limits of Mathematical Ontology

POLITICAL MULTIPLICITIES

III. Nick Srnicek: What is to be Done? Alain Badiou and the Pre-Evental

IV. Jeff Love and Todd May, (Clemson University): From Universality to Equality: Badiou’s Critique of Rancière

COUNTING “ONE” ETHICS AND PHENOMENOLOGY

V. Gert-Jan van der Heiden (Radboud University Nijmegen): The Scintillation of the Event: On Badiou’s Phenomenology

VI. Gabriel Riera (University of Illinois at Chicago): “Living with an Idea”: Ethics and Politics in Badiou’s Logiques des mondes

THE TWO AND BEYOND OF RELIGION

VII. Nandita Biswas Mellamphy and Dan Mellamphy (UWO): Paulitics

VIII. William Rowe (University of Scranton): Badiou and the Excluded Sacred

SUBJECTIVITY, LOVE AND MANY HISTORIES

IX. Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths, University of London): Emblems and Cuts: Philosophy In and Against History

Some Random Links

2008-06-21T16:03:00.006-04:00

I haven't seen this book mentioned anywhere else - and as I haven't read it yet, I can't speak to its quality for sure - but a quick glance through it suggests it will be a fascinating work. Both Ray Brassier and Francois Laruelle are featured prominently in the acknowledgments, and the work appears to be a feminist take on Laruelle and subjectivity. Check it out here:

Katerina Kolozova, The Real & "I" (On the Limit & the Self) [PDF file]

And elsewhere on the intertubes, a few new blogs that look great:

Critical Animal - featuring Deleuzian takes on animal studies, affect, and communication

No Useless Leniency - with interesting posts up on correlationism, horror and speculative realism

Stellar Cartographies - with some fascinating stuff on Deleuze, calculus, and general philosophical goodness

Reversing the Critical Turn, Part II: Laruelle

2008-06-16T03:17:00.020-04:00

Continuing with the series I began here: Reversing the Critical Turn, Part I, I want to look now at how Francois Laruelle attempts to move beyond the Kantian critical turn. I'm going to avoid going too deeply into his project, and focus mostly on how he justifies his work.

The Axiomatic Approach:
Laruelle’s general stance towards the critical injunction can be summed up in his claim that, “It is necessary to start from the real, otherwise you will never get to it.” (Derrida & Laruelle, “Controversy over the Possibility of a Science of Philosophy”) This directly opposes the numerous attempts to work within language, discourse, philosophy, culture, consciousness, subjectivity, etc. and discern a way to escape the correlationist circle.

Laruelle describes his approach as somewhat similar to Husserl’s, insofar as the latter seeks to experience the absolutely immanent. The major difference, however, is that Laruelle requires no transcendental reduction – the One (i.e. the real) is always already immanently given. It is science which provides the discourse and access to this real (although I'm not clear yet whether this is natural science or a philosophical science). As such, we can understand his claim to always start from the real and move to philosophy. If we have always already experienced this real, then there’s no need to break out of philosophy – we have already done so. As he says, “I postulate – in reality I do not postulate, since I begin by taking them as indissociably given from the outset, the bloc of real as One and a certain use of language which corresponds to this particular conception of the real.” (Derrida & Laruelle, “Controversy over the Possibility of a Science of Philosophy”)

It is this that constitutes that axiomatic character of Laruelle’s work – it is the axiom that avoids deciding from within philosophy (a space that admits of no escape) on the nature of the real. The non-philosophical axiom empties philosophemes of their philosophical sense (which would return the real to a philosophical discourse) and is taken as a given from which further propositions can be derived. Moreover, rather than being filled in by philosophical content, the axioms are determined by the real. As Brassier explains, “it is the fact that it is effected on the basis of an immanence which has not itself been decided about: an immanence which has not been posited and presupposed as given through a transcendent act of decision, but axiomatically posited as already given, independent of every perceptual or intentional presupposition, as well as every gesture of ontological or phenomenological position. It is posited as already given and as already determining its own positing.” (“Axiomatic Heresy”, 28) The key is this latter claim - the real is already given, prior to us positing it, and as such it determines our positing, rather than our positing determining it. We simply have to realize that we are already in the real, outside of the correlationist circle.

The immediate problem with Laruelle’s account is that it appears premised on a leap of faith. If one is willing to grant his initial postulates, then his non-philosophy can follow from it. But if not, then it can appear as a willful attempt at “philosophical terror” as Derrida claims. The added difficulty is that no amount of argumentation would seem to be capable of providing a rationale for accepting Laruelle’s initial axioms – such moves would remain within philosophical discourse and, as such, necessarily entrap the arguments within philosophy. Laruelle, however, recognizes this criticism and responds by claiming that “it’s precisely not a matter of a leap, but rather the ‘stance’ proper to science” (Derrida & Laruelle, “Controversy over the Possibility of a Science of Philosophy”)

In other works, Laruelle provides a perhaps deeper explanation. We have seen that the real is not argued to exist from within philosophy, as though it needed to be a necessary transcendental condition for philosophy – these moves all remain within philosophy. Rather, it is taken as experienced: “Just as there is a ‘matter’ beyond the Idea and beyond the hyle, there is likewise – insofar as we are beyond the distinction between knowing and the real – a knowing beyond ideal essence. No rational, ratiocinative or merely logical argument will be able to overcome the resistance proper to this knowing (perhaps we should write gnosis?) – a knowing identical to those immediate data belonging to a transcendental experience (of) the One – through which we know that even the light of the Idea is still relative, relative to this gnosis as to an absolute knowing.” (“The Decline of Materialism in the Name of Matter”, 39) The claim here would be not that we need to take a leap of faith to agree with Laruelle, but rather that we are already there and merely need to recognize our situation of “absolute knowing”. In this regards, unlike the leap of faith, there’s an experience and a knowing to support the position. Our problem is that we tend to cover it over with philosophical discourse.

What is required, therefore, is a suspension of philosophy and the decisional structure that it is based upon. This is what constitutes Laruelle’s non-philosophy – it is not an attempt to demarcate the limits of philosophy (something that occurs from within the decisional structure of philosophy), but rather its suspension.

In the end, though, despite the claims of a gnosis, and despite the fact that Laruelle's work is appealing on numerous levels - its rigor, its commitment to immanence, and its realism, for example - it's not clear to me that it can (or would even want to) argue its position against the Kantian critical project. Despite the argument for a form of absolute knowing, it seems more premised upon an acceptance of its initial axioms (which do seem plausible), than on a grappling with the correlationist argument. Unlike Meillassoux, there is no sustained argument for why the correlationist project fails, but rather an axiomatically asserted description of the already-outside. The potential problem then, is that Laruelle's work is premised upon precisely a speculatively undecidable point that can't be judged in terms of arguments - either one believes we are already outside the correlationist circle, or one believes we are stuck within it.

Meillassoux, in Collapse, Vol. III goes further to show that Laruelle even establishes a concept - 'resistance' - that would act as a way to explain any disagreement with his initial axioms concerning the real. In this way, Laruelle seeks to preemptively guard his project against those unwilling to follow his speculative choice. And Meillassoux concisely puts the problem with this pre-emptive attack when he notes that, "I clearly understood the calamitous consequences of the notion of resistance when I heard an astrologer, answering placidly to a sceptic, that the latter's incredulity was predictable since he was a Scorpio!" (426) It's a comment which nearly exactly mirrors a comment made by Laruelle when, responding to Derrida's questions, he declares, "These questions are all indicative of the resistance of the Principle of Sufficient Philosophy." To which Derrida wryly replies, "No surprise there, needless to say..."

In my mind, Meillassoux is right when he argues that the correlationist position is an argument and as such needs to be argued with rather than axiomatically declared untenable. Laruelle's project is undoubtedly a productive venture, but ultimately appears unsustainable on its own terms (terms which could perhaps be supplemented by other thinkers, however).

[Thanks to Fractal Ontology for their translations of Laruelle: here, here, and here, which helped in formulating this post.]

----------------------------------------
Posts in this series:
Reversing the Critical Turn, Part I: Derrida & Lacan
Reversing the Critical Turn, Part II: Laruelle

Agency and Structure in International Relations

2008-06-12T14:47:00.023-04:00

One of the difficulties in thinking the agency/structure problem in international relations is that the “agent” – the state – is clearly not a unified and rational actor in any usual sense. While sociology can (more) plausibly analyze the agency/structure problematic in terms of individuals and society, the agent of IR is itself composed of multiple groups at the domestic level.

This of course immediately reveals the weakness of rational choice theory within IR, since it relies on a unified actor who understands its preferences clearly and acts coherently. In my mind, this is a fatal weakness of rational choice, but its proponents tend to believe the assumption of a unified, rational actor is necessary for the parsimony of the theory. It’s interesting reading through much of the IR literature, for clearly most practitioners want to be taken seriously as a science – one based on the natural sciences, with economics being the closest social science approximation. Yet, despite their explicitly scientific aims, many IR theorists promote their particular theories in terms of theoretical values. In other words, despite the empiricism that lies at the heart of any science, many prominent IR theories wholeheartedly eschew the complexity of the world for the simplifications of theory. Now, clearly, any science has to simplify its object in some manner – but a problem arises when this simplification is taken as a value in itself. So in IR, it's common to see an extensive focus placed on the parsimony of theories, as well as a denunciation of adding in too many variables – despite the fact that it’s these extra variables that are central to the real-world dynamics of the international system. Instead of constantly trying to break the system down into smaller and more manageable component parts, while leaving aside the complexity of the whole, IR should strive precisely to think the whole with full knowledge of its complexity.

Now, some in the field of IR have indeed criticized the focus on the state as a unitary actor, and worked to offer competing views. Some have moved towards opening up the black box of the state and developed theories about how domestic political groups interact to create the state’s foreign policies. Others have focused on individual decision-makers and the role they play in determining international outcomes (an excellent example of this is also portrayed in the film, Fog of War). Lastly, some have looked laterally from the state to other international groups such as formal international organizations and, more generally, international regimes, along with transnational social movements. All of these have contributed to developing a more complex picture of the international world. The problem, as of now, is that there’s no systematic synthesis of all these competing views. So again, we're left with component parts split up into manageable areas, while avoiding the interrelatedness of these pieces.

In part, I believe, the problem is one of ontology - the ontologies of contemporary international relations (and political science, more generally) tend to adhere to classical substantialist ontologies whereby the state or other particular actors (domestic interest groups, NGOs, etc.) are taken to be unproblematic unities upon which a theory can be based. Even the more sophisticated structural theories (most notably Kenneth Waltz's neorealism - which it should be mentioned contains nothing in common with the speculative realism I've been working on lately) are forced to overlook vast tracts of empirical phenomena in order to make their theories function. So in neorealism, like the application of game theory to IR, while useful predictions can be generated as to the formal relations between states, the actual content of the outcomes is left undecidable in principle. More generally, Waltz's theory is forced to avoid domestic politics and avoid the influence of non-state transnational actors in order to produce a parsimonius theory. The problem with the substantialist conceptions is that the relations between actors are then necessarily external, and as such are mere accidents that have no real effect on the essential core of the actor. The problem with the structuralist conceptions (at least the ones developed so far), is that in order to create a structural theory of IR they are forced to ignore everything but power politics. (To be clear, Waltz and neorealists don't deny the power of institutions and domestic politics, but they think putting them into their theories would ruin the parsimony and simplicity of them. Again, it appears that the theory takes precedence over the empirical data.) In either case, though, the insights of the past 100 years of continental philosophy - most notably, the significance of relations in constructing identities - is left out. Even a theory like constructivism, which explicitly focuses on the constitutive sources of identity, remains stuck within a narrow praxiological version of structure, remaining nearly as homogeneous as Waltz's power structures.

One possible solution is to think through the multiple structures involved in modern world politics. Not merely the structures that generate balances of power (as in neorealism), but also the economic structures (as in world-systems theory), the ideational structures (as in constructivism), the domestic structures, and the social structures (as in sociology). Waltz is right to suggest that structuralism is a step beyond simple empiricism, but his version appears too monolithic and too simple - being essentially unchanged except by the demise of individual states, and being too focused on power alone. There are, rather, multiple structures in world politics, all interacting with each other, and all being shifted by their actualization within particular actors. This is a truly dynamic and complex ontology, and one unlikely to be amenable to simple empirical testing, but the push for simple (and thereby easily testable) theories seems fundamentally wrong to me, in a world of increasing interconnectedness.

What importance does this abstract thinking about abstract IR theories have? To my mind, it's clear that such thinking of the complex whole is necessary for grappling with the numerous interdependent relations involved in today's global problems. Even someone with a much better knowledge of the state of contemporary political science than myself argues that, "On neither side [rationalist and culturalist] are systematic explanations for political and economic outcomes being integrated with contextually informed analyses of social relations. Yet we need works of such combinatorial weight more than ever before, in a world where global endeavors cross multiple contexts." (Peter Hall, "The Dilemmas of Contemporary Social Science", 14).

As a simple example of this line of thinking, the Iranian situation is particularly illuminating. Some argue - following those who believe in the importance of individual decision-makers in IR - that Ahmadinejad's bellicose statements are evidence for evil intentions on the part of Iran (they also often disregard the fact that Ahmadinejad is not the ultimate power in Iran). If one truly believes this perspective, then Israel appears in grave and imminent danger and so force is justified.

Others argue, according to a neorealist perspective that focuses on structures of power, that Iran is interested in gaining relative power over the region. As such, their collaborations with Syria, Iraq, and Hezbollah are evidence that they are simply playing power politics, attempting to shift the balance of power in their favour. In this theory, states are not suicidal and therefore, despite Ahmadinejad's crazy statements, they have no intention to attack Israel and spark a war they can't win.

Still others would look at the domestic situation and see how conservative hardliners like Ahmadinejad are struggling to retain power within their country, and using America's aggressive stance against Iran to prop up their own positions. In this case, the role of individuals like Ahmadinejad can be explained by domestic structures that compel him to be externally aggressive in order to maintain the internal necessity for a hardliner.

We could also look at the regional religious structure, and see how Shiite Iran is aiming to bring in Shiite Iraq into a force that could hold its own with the Sunni powers. In this case, Ahmadinejad's actions could be explained as a means to have Shiites overcome their differences and unite against a common "enemy" in Israel (and implicitly the Sunni states).

There's also the economic structure, which sees Iran using its oil to broker significant deals with India and China. Despite the US imposing some of the harshest financial sanctions they can on Iran, the effects of these have been minimal because Iran has numerous backdoors with other countries that are more than willing to take advantage of the US's sanctions. This analysis shows that the economic structure provides an opportunity for Ahmadinejad to be bellicose without fear of any serious economic reprisal (that being said, Iran's economy is not doing well regardless). In other words, while it may not initiate his actions, it does facilitate them.

The point is not that any one of these analyses is right on its own, but rather that each points out some of the different structures that individuals are thrown into. All of these contexts have different and sometimes opposing effects on individuals, and the key to resolving a situation like Iran is to discern the levers which could be used to lessen their apparent aggression. A systematic theory of international relations that took into account the multiple structures in play in a situation (in fact, they would be generative structures along the lines of Deleuze) would give us a much greater understanding of singular instances than overly general formal laws.

Matter & The Syntheses of Time

2008-06-02T02:28:00.020-04:00

Despite the amount of secondary literature on Deleuze, it’s surprising how little of it pays attention to arguably his most important work, Difference & Repetition. While commentary generally alludes to arguments from it, and often borrows concepts from it, there’s been very little discussion of it as a whole – particularly with respect to the difficult later chapters. Hopefully that’s changing though, as Alberto Toscano made the later chapters a key moment in The Theatre of Production, Ray Brassier has devoted an in-depth discussion to them in Nihil Unbound, and Sinthome has an entire book focused on Difference & Repetition (which I highly recommend, as Sinthome maintains his typical clarity, rigor and insight in tackling Deleuze's most difficult work). The focus here will be on Brassier’s account, in which – following his general approach in Nihil Unbound – he’s critical of what he sees as a paradigmatic correlationist move: the privileging of time over the autonomy of objective space-time. This move reaches its apex in the ontologization of time carried out by Heidegger and Deleuze. These moves also function as a defense against Meillassoux’s arche-fossil argument - by making these temporal syntheses absolute, they can encompass the ancestral time of the arche-fossil and deny that it references a world indifferent to ideality. Thus, “the only hope for securing the unequivocal independence of the ‘an sich’ must lie in prizing it free from chronology as well as phenomenology.” (NU, 59)

With regards to Deleuze, Brassier carries out this critique of the ontologization of time by focusing on the three temporal syntheses outlined in Difference & Repetition. In particular, Brassier takes aim at the first synthesis of contraction and the role of thought in the process of individuation.

The first synthesis, in Deleuze, takes the form of a contraction of two bare repetitions, much like Hume’s argument that causality is only a constructed habit of the mind. Now for Deleuze, this contraction of presents into the lived present requires the contemplation of a larval subject. This is the case because habit requires the drawing out of differences between repetitions. This leads him to declare that “a soul must be attributed to the heart, to the muscles, nerves and cells, but a contemplative soul whose entire function is to contract a habit.” (D&R, 74) To be clear, this contemplative soul is not conscious, nor is it representational, nor is it active – rather it is the unconscious, sub-representational, passively synthesized condition for the emergence of subjectivity proper.

The question Brassier poses with regards to this first synthesis is: what is the ontological scope of the passive selves which are required for the contraction of habit that constitutes the lived present? It appears there are two options. Either they only apply to the organic – in which case, Deleuze is unable to account for sub-organic realities indexed by sciences like physics. This option is suggested by quotes like the one above which solely reference hearts, muscles, and other organic material. Or, they apply to everything, in which case Deleuze is left with a panpsychism of larval subjects even at quantum molecular levels. This choice is suggested by moments where Deleuze suggests “everything is contemplation, even rocks and woods, animals and men.” (D&R, 75) These mutually unappealing alternatives – either most of reality is left unaccounted for, or some larval form of consciousness functions throughout reality – stem, Brassier argues, from Deleuze’s “empiricist premise that time implies the psychic registration of difference, and hence that temporal difference is a function of psychic contraction”. (NU, 196) We'll return to this claim later on, but for now we'll merely highlight that temporal syntheses for Brassier seem to necessarily entail the introduction of psychic aspects.

Turning to the issue of individuation, Brassier wants to claim the only psychic individuation is capable of introducing ontological novelty. Only thinking can carry out the act of the caesura. The reason why, however, is not entirely clear to me, although I'll hazard some guesses. First, Brassier is right to highlight that the caesura of time introduced in the third synthesis both splits and relates the other two syntheses of the past and the present. In this way, an a priori relation between the physical (first synthesis) and the psychical (second synthesis) is established. Yet, the fracture in the I that the caesura introduces would seem to prohibit reducing the third synthesis to a psychical individuation. It opens experience onto a transcendental field irreducible to individuated subjects or objects. Insofar as Difference & Repetition is concerned with uncovering the transcendental genesis of experience, there may be a privilege given to the amount written about psychical individuation, but the third synthesis would seem to open up beyond the immanence of a finite subject and lead into the properly ontological groundlessness of the eternal return.

The confusion I have with Brassier’s claim about the centrality of psychic individuation is exemplified in this quote: “Thus the ‘universal ungrounding’ unleashed by the eternal return cannot be confined to the psychic domain as the transfiguration of consciousness wherein mind throws off the shackles of representation; it points to a fundamental metamorphosis in nature whereby the intensive depths rise up to engulf the surface of extensity and dissolve all empirical laws and jurisdictions. However, this claim seems to harbor the fantastic implication that physical qualification and partitioning, as well as biological specification and organization, can simply be eliminated through an act of thinking.” (NU, 188) In the first sentence, Brassier attributes the eternal return to nature itself, to the material world. Yet, in the second sentence, he appears to make it the prerogative of a psychical act.

One reason I can see why Brassier believes this is summed up in his claim that “only consciousness can be folded back into its own pre-individual dimension; only the psychic individual can be come equal to its own intensive individuation.” (NU, 185) Contrary to Brassier, however, I would tend to follow DeLanda’s realist reading of Deleuze and argue that, in fact, material systems can also be folded back onto their own pre-individual dimensions. To put it simply, this is the shift from a stable system to one that is in the process of qualitatively changing.

Pushing a bit deeper though, we can see Brassier arguing that the reason the eternal return is affirmed solely by a psychic individual is that it is initially produced through the encounter with the intensive differences that elude our faculties. It is only when our faculties are pushed to their transcendent exercises that thinking is produced within thought and the eternal return is affirmed. So the act of the caesura is produced by the faculties encounter with intensity. The problem here, I believe, is that Brassier assumes the faculties are solely the prerogative of psychical systems. As such, the eternal return could only be affirmed within a mind, and therefore we can see how he could claim that Deleuze’s philosophy leads to the claim that thought could eliminate the organization of the material world. As Sinthome shows though, the faculties are a misnomer, as they are not the property of a transcendental subject, but rather they “are none other than the tendencies characterizing being. They are the differentials or joints of being itself, and not the faculties of a subject’s mind. It is for this reason that Deleuze qualifies faculties with the genitive ‘of’ when referring to the ‘being of the sensible’, ‘the being of language’, ‘the being of memory’ and so on. In all of these cases, the tendency is not identical to sensibility, language, or memory as we find them in our experience, but rather is that by which sensibility, language, or memory is given. They are the genetic conditions allowing for the givenness of the given.” (D&G, 97-8) I would add too that any interpretation of the faculties as properties of an individual would have difficulty accounting for the faculty of sociability which pertains to society as a whole, or the biological faculty of vitality, or the physical faculty. (D&R, 192) So faculties are themselves tendencies within being. That being the case, the transcendent use of the faculties is not solely limited to the psychic individual, and therefore the eternal return can pertain to physical, biological and psychical systems without being mediated through psychic individuation. Just like thought, these material systems can be plunged back into their preindividual states by encountering an external shock irrecuperable within their present mode of operation.

While that may constitute a reply to Brassier’s specific criticism, the larger point to be made is also important. His general approach throughout the section on Deleuze appears to be arguing that any reduction of space to the ontologization of time, must explain temporal syntheses in terms of psychic qualities. “Thus Deleuze’s account of spatio-temporal synthesis begins by ascribing a privileged role to organic contraction in the first synthesis of the present, proceeds to transcendentalize memory as cosmic unconscious in the second synthesis of the past, and ends by turning a form of psychic individuation which is as yet the exclusive prerogative of homo sapiens into the fundamental generator of ontological novelty in the third synthesis.” (NU, 200-1) As such, there is no room left for a materialism independent of thought. The experience of time in consciousness, Brassier wants to argue, leads to a sense of its irreducibility to brute spatial matter, but such a belief is a correlationist bias. We might say, following Deleuze, that it illegitimately fashions the transcendental in the image of the empirical. In this way, Deleuze’s unique form of correlationism arises, with mind and matter being mutually intertwined in the constitution of reality. “For Deleuze then, being is nothing apart from its expression in thought; indeed, it simply is this expression.” (NU, 203) While I've hopefully mitigated the force of Brassier's specific argument with respect to Deleuze, the general point still stands.

I think Brassier’s general point here is a powerful one, and, in the context of Deleuze's work, finds a lot of textual support. The question is whether a privilege given to time over space necessarily entails a correlationist outcome. My initial reaction is that his criticism can be mitigated by questioning what is meant by passive selves and larval subjects. Are these merely not so subtle reintroductions of mind at the level of matter, or are they rather poorly named ontological operations? In other words, does temporality itself not require some form of synthesis? The question can also be turned around onto Brassier: given that Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stenger’s work on dynamic systems reveals that even physical laws of nature are not reversible (i.e. there is an arrow of time), then how is this formal differentiation of a before, present, and after possible? Or, even more despairingly for Brassier, how can quantum entanglement be accounted for without particles contracting their past in some way? More generally, temporality appears to be a problem for most of the speculative realists at the moment. Harman’s notion of vicarious causality could plausibly be developed into a theory of time, and Meillassoux’s as yet to be published work on how stability emerges from absolute contingency could possibly incorporate time, but these are not yet finished projects. Brassier, moreover, appears to be the worst off, since he argues against any sort of temporal synthesis as being a correlationist move. He speaks approvingly of an identity of space-time, but I’m not yet clear on how this differs from the synthesis of space and time that he criticizes. No doubt, Laruelle has a part...

Reversing the Critical Turn, Part I: Derrida & Lacan

2008-05-23T02:47:00.032-04:00

Given the aim of contemporary materialism - to think reality independently of the existence of thought - perhaps the central obstacle is the famous Kantian prohibition censoring knowledge of reality outside of our own specific mode of access to it. The immediate post-Kantian philosophy was of course driven in large part by the question of how to handle this noumenal excess - the seemingly necessary but non-knowable residue - with the result eventually being a shift in perspectives whereby the noumenal became posited by the subject, instead of being a fundamental limit of the subject (the shift from an epistemological limit to an ontological impasse). However, as Meillassoux notes (Collapse Vol. III, 428), this Hegelian move effects an absolutization of the correlationist approach making any thought or intuition of an independent reality a priori impossible. Distinguishing between this ‘idealist’ approach and the more typical ‘correlationist’ approach is, as we will see, a useful distinction in Meillassoux’s own attempt to break the correlationist circle. But for now, I’d like to lay out some thoughts on the various approaches that have recently been taken towards the possibility of encountering the Real outside of human experience (whether through intuition, conceptualization, reason, sensibility, affect, or some other faculty). Briefly, I’ve categorized them into the deconstructive, psychoanalytic, transcendental materialist, transcendental empiricist, axiomatic, and speculative realist approaches. Some of these areas, while I know their general ideas, I’m hardly an expert in, so comments and criticisms are more than welcome. As will also become apparent, it’s very much a work in progress – with a number of incomplete thoughts, unanswered questions, and (likely) blatantly wrong propositions. (But, hey, that’s what blogs are for! – to provoke discussion, not definitively answer problems.) The first part here focuses on my two least knowledgeable areas - deconstruction and psychoanalysis, with upcoming portions moving more towards my background. Nevertheless, I think it’s a useful exercise to begin detailing past attempts and failures to effectively reverse the Kantian prohibition.

But of course, the reverse in question here can’t be a simple suspension of the critical project. It is impossible to pretend that the turn inaugurated by Kant can simply be rejected as a mistake, and hope to return to a naïve pre-Kantian metaphysics. Rather, the reversing of the Copernican turn must involve a constructive project that builds new concepts that let us emerge from the “ghettos” of language, discourse, culture and subjectivity. (The reference to ‘ghettos’ comes from one of Graham Harman’s evocative terms used to analyze recent continental philosophy, implying that science has accumulated ownership over the majority of reality, leaving philosophy with only a pitiful share of land.) In that respect, no doubt, the problem has been an effective spur for creative thought – as the insights and wealth of conceptual creations over the past century attest to. But there’s also, in my mind at least, a sense that recent approaches have exhausted themselves, leaving no more interesting possibilities to be derived.

This is, in part, why speculative realism is so alluring to me, since it promises not only a new avenue of exploration for thought, but also new potentials for political action, as well as new possibilities for community, and new positive ways to think about our post-modern, post-ideological, post-continental, post-American, post-national world. While these new approaches to philosophy are all fascinating in themselves, they can (and should) also contribute to new political possibilities. It is impossible that a re-thinking of the nature of reality independent of humans won’t reflect back and generate a new perspective on consciousness, the social, and the political. To resituate our human world within a new conception of reality, with whatever philosophical determinations may end up being applied (non-contradictoriness, dynamic forces, tension-ridden drives, etc.), will necessarily shift the parameters within which the realm of consciousness, sociality, community, economics, philosophy and any other distinctly human activity can be conceived in. But that justification for contemporary materialism’s political usefulness is only nascent at this point, needing a lot of patient thought to work out the consequences.

So to set the basic scene, after Kant, it was widely agreed that speaking of reality in-itself (i.e. as it is independently of human experience) was discredited. For Kant, to avoid the dogmatism of prior metaphysics, one must submit philosophy first to the critical task of examining our own mode of access to reality. From within experience, we can establish the necessary transcendental structures that must be required for reality to appear as it does, but to speak of reality outside of this access was speculative metaphysics at its worst. To greatly simplify for the purposes of conciseness, post-Kantians effectively agreed on these terms of the debate and instead argued over where these transcendental structures should be placed – for Kant, the transcendental apperception ultimately synthesized everything into a coherent experience; for Hegel, the transcendental categories became historicized and socialized, developing over time through an internal logic; for Heidegger, this single logic of Hegel is itself historicized as history becomes split into epochs of being, each with its own mode of access to being and its own transcendental structures; lastly, for Derrida, even the sense of being qua presence that underlies Heidegger’s epochs must be seen as a product of the differential, transcendental structures that he refers to as differánce. In each case, though, the transcendental determines the possible experience of the empirical and prohibits access to reality-in-itself outside of this field of experience. With Derrida, however, there comes an attempt to escape from the vicious transcendental circle.

The difficulty of this attempt is made clear by Meillassoux: for the correlationist, any attempt to think the Real is necessarily an attempt to think the Real, and hence it immediately becomes caught up in a correlation with thought. This line of argument appears virtually irrefutable, and hence the common allusions to the outside of language and experience as being ineffable, or subject only to mystical encounters. Whether this is the only possible solution is the aim of the following approaches.

The Deconstructive Approach:
Now, in many ways, deconstruction carries on the typical correlationist approach. Most obviously, this appears in Derrida’s repeated insistence on the inability of philosophy to escape from the closure (not end) of metaphysics. ('Closure' being the double rejection of both remaining within metaphysics and escaping metaphysics, while the 'end' insinuates an already accomplished and surpassed finality.) So for deconstruction, the very attempt to speak of the non-philosophical, the non-linguistic, remains necessarily mired in the metaphysical trappings of language. (Hegel's critique of Sense Certainty is useful here - as any attempt to speak of the immediate and singular sense perception before us is forced to rely on empty universals like "this". There is no knowledge here at this level.) And so the two - language and the non-linguistic - appear to be irreducibly correlated, contaminating the purity of both. The question of an outside to the general text – of a radical alterity - can only be insinuated through language, without ever being grasped as such. As a result, we get the famous linguistic gymnastics of deconstruction, where they attempt to use language itself to reflexively point towards its own blind spots.

As far as I can tell, Derrida gets closest to the Real in his attempt to elucidate the differential transcendental structures that constitute experience. Through a deconstruction of the privileging of presence, Derrida attempts to move beyond the subjective access to reality (presence of a subject to itself and to an object) by outlining the point at which philosophical discourse breaks down and opens up to a radical alterity. The problem is that Derrida is wedded to a phenomenological background which he deconstructs from within. Consequently, the system having already been previously established, Derrida can only work within that framework and attempt to open it up from that position. His statements on ‘matter’ and ‘materialism’ see them as markers for the radically transcendent, but as such, are incapable of any positive determination. He never (to my knowledge) manages to step outside and give an affirmative definition of what would lie outside of conceptual oppositions. At best, differánce becomes an unconditioned affirmation of irreducible alterity - something which actually puts Derrida in proximity with Deleuze.

But Derrida’s ultimate adherence to correlationism can be seen in the way he problematizes oppositions like inside and outside. His general approach is to show the ways in which such oppositions contaminate each other, refuting any purity that is typically ascribed to foundational concepts. The problem (from the perspective of realism) is that the rejection of any purity is consequently a rejection of an absolute outside which would be radically independent of humanity. The mutual contamination of these terms (inside and outside) means that for deconstruction there can never be an independent world. While Derrida shouldn’t be seen as a linguistic idealist where everything reduces to language in the restricted sense, he can be seen as a correlationist that makes the world dependent on man and man dependent on the world.

The Psychoanalytic Approach:
In the psychoanalytic approach, Bruce Fink (The Lacanian Subject) helpfully distinguishes between two senses of the Real within Lacan: first, a real that is presupposed as the non-symbolized material for symbolization, i.e. a Kantian thing-in-itself. But secondly, after the emergence of the linguistic subject within language, there is also the Real as the inherent deadlocks of the linguistic system. To use an oft-cited example, Godel’s incompleteness theorem shows that an axiomatic system sufficiently capable of generating the natural numbers must necessarily also generate statements that are true, yet undecidable from within the system. There is an irreducible excess produced by language, even within rigorously logical language.

Now what is the basis for these conceptions of the Real? In other words, how does Lacan argue he can escape from the correlationist circle? The second aspect is easy enough – one merely needs to point to the existence of these undecidable statements or logical aporias in order to show that not everything is reducible to determination by the Symbolic. (This, it seems to me, is Lacan's major parallel with deconstruction – the search for immanent aporias that reveal the non-completeness of our discursive structures.) The problem with the second definition of the Real remains, as with deconstruction, that in itself, it is largely a negative project that merely highlights gaps within the Symbolic (the big Other is barred or not-All), without ever attempting to give a positive determination of the outside of the Symbolic. This aspect of psychoanalysis may be able to show the necessity of positing something external to Kant’s phenomenal world, but remains silent on its qualities.

So we turn to the first definition of the Real – that which is presupposed as prior to ego formation and the emergence of the speaking subject. The major question here is whether this is solely a retroactive assumption (in which case it remains within the ambits of the Symbolic and hence the correlationist circle), or whether it can be given some positive determination outside the effects of the Imaginary and the Symbolic. Initially, I believe, Lacan saw the Real as something to be simply presupposed - the ego, for example, was simply the result of identifying with an image which tamed the discord of the posited fragmented body. Similarly, the Symbolic was the "murder of the thing" as it replaced the presence of the thing with the absence of the signifying order. If Lacan remains at this conception of the Real, it's clear that it will forever be ineffable and radically transcendent to our necessary embeddedness within the Symbolic; it may need to be presupposed as the material upon which the Symbolic and Imaginary operates, but there is a radical and impassible disjunction between the properly human order and the material realm.

The major caveat here would be that Lacan continually modified his thinking, particularly with respect to the Real in his later seminars. So a more thorough approach would have to take into account these (predominantly untranslated) texts. With that in mind, some hesitant thoughts based on Lorenzo Chiesa's reading of Lacan can be put forward. For Chiesa, outside of the two interpenetrated orders of the Real and the Symbolic (their necessary contamination in deconstruction's terms), lies another sense of the Real - the Real as barred or 'undead'. This sense of the Real refuses the positive substantialist sense of the Real (i.e. the retroactive myth of a complete pre-Symbolic Real-in-itself), but it also appears to refuse deconstruction's view of the Real as simply the gaps within representation. The Real as barred or not-All is instead an initial determination of the absolute alterity of the outside, derived from the fact that - as Chiesa argues - the barring of the Symbolic necessarily effaces any rigid distinction between the Symbolic and its Outside. If the Symbolic cannot be closed in upon itself, then no definitive line can be drawn between it and the Real, and so the Real too must be considered not-All. While in Lacan, I believe, this sense of the Real is still taken as mythical (all we really have are objet a's as the rem(a)inders of the never present Real), when we get to Zizek's transcendental materialism, we will see how this notion of the Real is supplemented and developed by him with the insights of Schelling and Hegel in order to provide a transcendental materialist theory of subjectivity.

In the end, however, it's not clear to me that Lacanian psychoanalysis makes any definitive advance on the issue of the Real beyond what deconstruction does. The barred Symbolic order opens onto the barred Real, entailing a mutual contamination of either, which also seems to entail the same correlationist consequence that deconstruction ends up in. No absolute alterity or independent realism is permitted.

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Posts in this series:
Reversing the Critical Turn, Part I: Derrida & Lacan
Reversing the Critical Turn, Part II: Laruelle

Some Random Links

2008-05-14T18:18:00.009-04:00

Just a short post to point anyone interested over to Metastable Equilibrium, who has graciously provided a in-progress translation of Meillassoux's seminar "History & Event in the Writings of Alain Badiou". I haven't read it yet, but considering Meillassoux was a student of Badiou's, and judging from his exceptional and systematic take on Deleuze in Collapse, I'm sure it'll be an interesting read.

Completely unrelated, but also worthy of being highlighted is this story of diplomats in Zimbabwe. Actually gives one some hope that even without international oversight, maybe the upcoming run-off elections won't be so easily stolen by Mugabe.

And of course, also worth looking at are any of the Recommended Links on the right, which are always being updated.

Complexity and the Food Crisis

2008-05-13T16:30:00.024-04:00

In considering the causes of the recent world food crisis (sparking riots in numerous countries), it’s disconcerting to see how many commentators hold to a rather simple view of the causes and solutions. For instance, while it is widely agreed that the changing diets of Chinese peasants arising out of poverty, rising input prices, agricultural subsidies, droughts, and the rise of biofuel are all contributing to the surge in food prices, most commentators still seem eager to pinpoint the cause down to one dominant aspect. Moreover, once a single cause has been pinpointed, the commentators then offer a simple solution based upon resolving that unique problem. Given that shifting the diets of millions of Chinese, reducing oil and fertilizer prices, and removing first world agricultural subsidies and tariffs are all political non-starters, it is not surprising that biofuel has taken most of the heat for the problems. My aim here obviously isn't to argue for a solution to the crisis - something that will take a lot of highly specialized and technical knowledge - but rather to point out the limitations of thinking along simple cause and effect lines.

As Robert Jervis argues in System Effects, the international system of politics (but also of finance, food, weapons, etc.) is an interdependent system. This interconnectedness entails a major obstacle for thinking in terms of a naive version of cause and effect - namely, that any single cause will have multiple, unintended and sometimes contradictory effects. The food crisis is a major example of this. In reaction to climate change, biofuels were only a few years ago considered to be highly useful tools for reducing reliance on oil and reducing emissions. In the environmental realm, biofuels were thought to be a simple (partial) solution to a major problem. The immediate consequence of the government decision to support biofuels was to make them relatively profitable for agricultural producers. Through subsidies, a significant portion of farmers switched their lands from using one crop to using crops designated for biofuel. The environmental decision therefore had an effect on the economic realm. The secondary effect of the initial decision, however, was to reduce the amount of land reserved for actual, edible food. Hence, as with the current oil situation, once supply went down and demand remained largely inelastic (food and oil being necessities), the prices began to rise rapidly. This is not to suggest that biofuels are the only problem or cause of rising food prices, but they certainly contribute.

As we can see from this example, a simple decision made to resolve an environmental problem leads from the environment to the economy to the world food system to political repercussions including social turmoil and collapse. Moreover, this is only following one single line of causal influence. We could, for example, look at how the subsidies for biofuels have made them profitable in areas such as Brazil, leading to more clear-cutting of the Amazon, thereby effectively countering the ostensible reason for biofuels. These are only large-scale effects too - for example, in times of hardship for developing countries, it is not uncommon for children and women to bear a disproportionate amount of the burden. Hence, at a personal level, many women and children could be feeling the effects of the world food crisis particularly acutely. A similar causal influence could also be drawn for the changing diets of the Chinese people. The inadvertent effect of bringing millions of people out of poverty (an undeniably admirable achievement when considered on its own) has been to raise food prices around the world, contributing not only to poverty in other countries, but also plunging fragile political systems into chaos (see Haiti, most obviously, but also potentially Egypt among other countries). Each aspect of the problem contributes in a non-additive way - we can't simply sum up the effects of each problem independently, because they interact with each other and produce results that are truly emergent.

That the international system is interconnected in such a way is not surprising to most people, I would think. The repeated discussions of globalization have been saying as much for years now. What is surprising is that decision-making and commentary are still routinely focused on a very narrow realm of causes and effects. Much like the academic world is plagued by insular disciplines with little cross-pollination, so too does the decision-making elite (and the media) seem trapped into small boxes. What needs to be done? In my opinion, as in the academic world, there needs to be not only dialogue between different areas (economists speaking with environmentalists speaking with politicians, etc.) but a more concerted effort to understand exactly how each realm (with its own particular logic) interacts. How, in other words, are relations constructed between heterogeneous realms? It is not enough for economists, with a particular style of analysis and specific values, to argue with politicians, with another style of analysis and a different set of values. If the different modes of analysis aren't taken into account, you get situations such as economists' confusion over why every country doesn't submit to the 'laws' of comparative advantage and free trade. This isn't to argue for constructing some overarching framework which would encompass all the modes of analysis, as if the social were reducible to a single approach, but rather to respect the heterogeneity of each area while at the same time building real bridges.

But there's another significant problem for any approach to the world system: because of the complexity of the system, many of the effects are unpredictable, perhaps even in principle and not only in practice (although this gets into the ontological ramifications of complexity). Once a problem has appeared on the global stage, it is of course retroactively clear that certain decisions had significant unintended effects, but there are important limitations on predicting the outcome of any particular decision. As the example of biofuels shows, even seemingly good ideas can have adverse consequences. What is needed, instead of some false sense of certainty about the outcomes of a decision, is a proper respect for the invariably contingent, unpredictable and open nature of decisions. In a certain sense, although perhaps on a different level (revolutionary politics versus bureaucratic administration), this accords with Zizek's notion of the Act and the necessity of taking full responsibility for one's action even and especially in the face of decisions with unpredictable outcomes. It seems to me that something like an ethics of decisions is necessary both for mitigating large-scale mistaken decisions (e.g. the invasion of Iraq), and for taking the proper time to reflect on the potential consequences of any single decision in an interconnected world. In that respect, perhaps the final comments made in Zizek's recent interview at Democracy Now take on a new significance:

AMY GOODMAN: Last words to leave our audience with here in the United States and, well, all over in Latin America, in Europe, Africa, Eastern Europe?

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: From me?

AMY GOODMAN: Yes.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: It will be simply—OK, maybe, the point that I always like to repeat: don’t beat—don’t get caught into a fake discourse of humanitarian emergency. Remember that when somebody is telling you, “You’re doing your theory. You are dreaming. But people are starving out there and so on. Let’s do something,” this is the threat. This is the threat.

Today’s hegemonic ideology is this kind of state of emergency ideology. What we need is to withdraw—don’t be afraid to withdraw and think. You know, Marx thesis eleven: philosophers have only interpreted the world; the time is, we have now to change it. Maybe, as good Marxists, we should turn it around. Maybe we are trying to change it too much. It’s time to redraw and to interpret it again, because do we really know what is going on today?

What is going on today? There are old fashion theories, either Marxist or liberals who claim the same capitalism is going on. Then there is a whole set of fashionable terms like post-industrial society, post-whatever, information society, which I think don’t do the job. We even don’t have what my friend Fred Jameson likes to call “cognitive mapping,” you know, that you get an idea what’s going on. We need theory more than ever. Don’t be—don’t feel guilty for withdrawing from immediate engagement and for trying to understand what’s going on.

(via Daily Humiliation)

Zizek & Materialism

2008-05-05T01:19:00.018-04:00

Adrian Johnston's newest book, Zizek's Ontology, is an impressive attempt at systematizing Zizek's notoriously hyperactive writing style. Focused on developing a "transcendental materialist theory of subjectivity" - i.e. an ontology capable of accounting for how subjectivity can emerge from an asubjective realm of matter - Johnston places Zizek's work squarely in line with the contemporary materialists. As we will see, this perhaps raises some issues about whether Johnston/Zizek can meet the requirements of a truly materialist ontology set out by Ray Brassier (via appropriations of Francois Laruelle and Quentin Meillassoux), but regardless, Johnston's work presents a huge rejoinder to both naive cultural studies proponents of Zizek and overly simply critics of Zizek. Cutting through the myriad of pop culture references and political interventions, Johnston aims at the heart of Zizek's philosophical project - a re-reading of German idealism (specifically, Kant, Schelling & Hegel) through Lacanian psychoanalysis.

A dense book that can hardly be done justice in a blog post, for now I just want to follow a single line of argument that leads to some initial characterizations of matter. The first step in this direction is to shift the focus of Kant away from the epistemological limitations of cognition and to the properly ontological limits. In The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant famously set out to determine the immanent limits within which reason could operate, in an effort to establish the proper boundaries of philosophical thought. Taking experience as a given, Kant deduced what he deemed to be the necessary structure of thought. In order for experience to appear as it does, the mind must organize experience according to some fundamental cognitive structures - the pure forms of intuition, the categories, and the regulative Ideas. These structures produced our phenomenal experience, outside of which we could have no knowledge - they were the rationalist basis from/for empiricism. Outside of experience, however, lay a number of problems for Kant. On the one hand, the sensible intuitions are given their impressions from something outside of experience - what Kant will call the noumena. Any characterization of these, however, was prohibited. In the other direction, reason is led to ask questions that it cannot answer by reference to experience (e.g. is reality finite or infinite?). It is led, through the pure use of reason outside of any application to experience, to establish contradictory propositions concerning these questions. But even more distressing is the fact that we can not even know ourselves outside of how experience phenomenally presents it to us. My knowledge of myself is limited to the empirical presentations that pass before my gaze. What I am - ontologically - remains a gap in knowledge. In Lacanian terms, we are only ever presented with imaginary egos and subjects of statements, but never the subject of enunciation. As Johnston argues, this gap in knowledge leads to an antinomy concerning our own subjectivity: on one level, we are well aware that we are finite beings, subject to mortality. Yet, on another level, we can never experience our own deaths or births, and so we are led to implicitly believe in our immortality. That is to say, my lived existence has no beginning or end for myself (no doubt, this is in part where religious ideas of immortality get some measure of plausibility).

In response to these gaps of the subject, we instead take up various imaginary egos and symbolic identifications in order to try and fill in the empty space at the centre of our beings. This is what accounts for the strength of various identifications (particularly ideological), since to remove these various attachments is to be forced to face up to our own nothingness. Doing so provokes horror and disgust as the framework within which reality is meaningful disappears, and we are instead put before the Lacanian Real. A similar phenomena happens with respect to our birth and our death - since we are incapable of representing them to ourselves as experienced (since there was no 'I' until after our birth, and there will be none at the moment of death), they effectively index our ontological finitude. Reacting against the horrors of mortality and the body, consciousness covers over these ontological gaps in phenomenal reality by constructing what psychoanalysis refers to as fundamental fantasies. These fantasies provide a sort of mythical structure within which we can imagine our own origins and our own demise, thereby removing any sense of our own non-existence. (Take, for example, the thought of being present at our own funeral; of being present without existing.)

The result of these defensive reactions against our ontological finitude is to set out on a path between mind-body dualism and theories of harmonious embodiment or mind-body identity. Instead of a complete separation or a harmonious unity, Johnston argues that while subjectivity originally arises from material reality (presumably through some sort of neurological basis), it then reacts against its own material conditions, aiming to separate itself from the body. As Johnston puts it,

"The subject's anxiety in the face of anything that threatens to strip it of its seemingly transcendent, immaterial status through a reduction to its brute corporeal condition isn't a mysterious, inexplicable phenomenon. Only a form of subjectivity that constitutes itself as inherently incompatible with its own finitude experiences the prospect of being plunged back into its fleshly materiality, the inevitably occluded ground of its mortal being, as a horrible danger to be avoided no matter what." (59)

At this point, however, we have to move to Schelling to further flesh out a transcendental materialism. For while Kant can point towards the gaps within phenomenal experience, he fails to provide us with any genetic account of the subject's emergence. Schelling's contribution is to outline how matter immanently produces the transcendence of subjectivity. Key to his account is the idea that the materialism which underlies subjective experience is, in a sense, pre-ontological. Rather than being a physical substance - complete and deterministic according to physical laws - matter is instead riven with contradictions and conflicts. It is itself not-All, to use Zizek's term. If reality were complete and whole, Zizek argues, then subjectivity and freedom would be impossible and the simplest versions of determinism would hold. In Zizek's reading of Schelling, it is therefore the discord of the psychoanalytic drives (themselves derived from a deeper groundlessness) that causes the emergence of subjectivity as an attempt to domesticate these dueling impulses.

In Schelling's work, this idea of materialism is fleshed out in part by reference to its form of temporality. Curiously, at least as Johnston reads it, Schelling appears to put forth an argument similar to Meillassoux's arche-fossil argument. That is to say, that each aims to point towards an ontological time that is outside the time of phenomena. For Meillassoux, the arche-fossil (any object that indexes a time before life) reveals that schools of thought like idealism, phenomenology, and anti-realism are not closed in and complete ontologies. The arche-fossil shows that not only are there gaps within phenomenal experience and not only are there unperceived phenomena, but that the entire realm of phenomena is itself subject to its own determinate origins and endings. At a certain point in time, the possibility of objects manifesting themselves to consciousness appeared, and at a certain point in time, the possibility will disappear. Reality couldn't care less for consciousness. The difficulty in describing this non-phenomenal realm is that present-day science, relying on empirical objects, is within the field of phenomena that Meillassoux is criticizing. To take empiricism as the definitive basis for ontology is to fall into the correlationist trap that Meillassoux is trying to escape. (I think this also raises the question of the status of scientific discourse in Brassier's Nihil Unbound, but I'll leave that for another post.) Similar to Meillassoux, Schelling argues that matter is never present but is instead situated within a past time before (linear) time.

While explicitly described as a non-conscious mode of time, there is also the question of what precisely initiates the movement whereby subjectivity emerges from matter. Beyond the tensions and contradictions within being, what is it that leads specifically to the emergence of ideality? Why does being not remain within itself, for example? For Schelling, the reason is because proper to natural being there is a "desire" for the ideality of subjectivity, and it is this which ultimately causes transcendence to emerge from immanence. But in answering the problem this way, Schelling reintroduces a form of teleology whereby reality has always been aiming at consciousness, thereby effectively incorporating the "non-conscious" past within the framework of the present conscious moment. The materialism here therefore remains subject to the sort of correlationist approach that Meillassoux more adeptly escapes from. As it stands then (and I'm only part way through the Schelling section of the book), if Zizek's materialism remains grounded upon this immanent desire of reality for the ideality of consciousness, then he still remains stuck with the criticisms of the speculative realists. Following Brassier, a truly speculative materialism must evacuate all ideality, something which he believes can only be achieved through Laruelle's difficult concept of unilateral duality.

[UPDATE: 5/28/08]
For more, see Naught Thought's series of posts on Zizek, materialism and related matters:
(1) Freedom's Fairytale: Pt. 1, or Wrinkly Dialectics
(2) Freedom's Fairytale: Pt. 2, or Love and Temporality
(3) Freedom's Fairytale: Pt. 3, or Narratology, The Ancestral and The Real

Exploring the Global Political Economy

2008-05-01T20:42:00.022-04:00

In Benjamin Cohen's narrative of international political economy's (IPE) development (International Political Economy: An Intellectual History), one of the recurring themes is of the limits of the different methodologies underlying the American and British schools of thought. In the American version, privilege is given to economics as the social science which appears to most closely emulate the natural sciences. Rigor, clarity, parsimony, and verifiability are the supreme virtues, with rational choice theory being the dominant way to model social reality. While undoubtedly useful in many ways (e.g. their focus on concrete occurrences and well-researched data being an important counterweight to the overly abstract theorizing Sinthome has spoken of in a number of places), it also brings with it numerous flaws.

The most obvious is the subtly metaphysical approach that rational choice is forced to employ. By forcing the phenomena of the social world into pre-established and invariant ideas of what constitutes an actor and what causes actions, rational choice theory ends up denying a wide variety of alternative actors and alternative sources of actions. The more sophisticated adherents of rational choice argue that it is only a useful tool to simplify a complex reality, but then the question becomes when do the values of parsimony, clarity and simplicity outweigh the values of empiricism? When, in other words, does rational choices disconnect itself so far from reality that it becomes merely an abstract, metaphysical theory? An illusory sense of clarity and a false certainty of the continuum between natural and social sciences doesn't warrant the dominance of rational choice in American IPE (and political science more generally).

Even if it's granted that the criticism is off-base, another problem arises for IPE. By emulating economics' emulation of natural science, international political economy ends up tossing aside any systemic theorizing, instead preferring to analytically dissect phenomena into ever smaller constituent parts. So, for example, instead of analyzing processes of global economic change, American IPE tends to focus on specific issue-areas like taxation on foreign investment, or trade policy for rice. While not denying the importance of these studies in any way, I merely want to point out the subsequent lack of systemic theorizing. Again, the demand for parsimony and verifiability lead IPE to avoid what they see as overly metaphysical and vague notions of systemic transformation. Certainly, in some cases, IPE's criticisms are on the mark: references to things like 'social forces' or 'national culture' too often function to hide the limits of the theorist's study, substituting the determinate context of a social event with a vaguely specified generic term. But, that doesn't mean there's no value to systemic theorizing, and that doesn't entail that there's only one way to theorize the global context. In a world of increasing interconnectedness on a number of distinct planes, we are becoming more and more subject to systemic processes, and so an understanding of their dynamics has become increasingly important. The current food crisis, along with the fallout from the subprime mortgage debacle are only the most recent examples of such systemic problems requiring systemic responses.

The British school of IPE has attempted to overcome these faults by taking on the responsibility of thinking about large-scale transformations of societies and economies. Taking a cue from Marxist theory, many in the British school focus on outlining various historical periods of large-scale social structures. Without eschewing historical detail, British IPE has managed to avoid the pitfalls of American IPE's endless analysis and instead worked towards synthesizing various insights into a coherent theory of structural change. The problem with much of these theories is that they often end up overly general and overly homogeneous. Eager to examine the large transformations that have affected society, too often these theorists examine solely the generalized processes like modernization, development, or globalization without an eye for the precise detail involved in these transitions. As a result, things like the uneven spread of globalization are often missed, as well as the alternative movements which refuse to be categorized along a globalized/non-globalized basis.

So what's the alternative? Can the benefits of each approach - the detail, clarity and replicability of American IPE findings versus the systemic and historic awareness of British IPE - be combined? One attempt would possibly be the study of mechanisms that sociology has recently taken up. In sociology, and specifically in the study of social movements and contentious politics, the enemy mechanism-theory has reacted against is the structural movement. This movement was characterized by a methodology which drew up generalized and static social categories (mobilizing structures, framing processes, repertoires of contention, etc.) and then proceeded to examine how each aspect functioned in a particular case, seeking to draw out generalizable relations from a variety of cases. The problems with such an approach was that it was largely static, unable to really account for the dynamism of long-term periods of contention, and that it was overly general, forcing a wide variety of empirical phenomena into an a priori framework of understanding. While the framework permitted wide-ranging and disparate periods of contention to be compared against each other, it also tended to neglect the novelties created in periods of unrest. This is not say that these theorists neglected, for example, that petitions were created out of a particular business practice, but novelties were always placed within an already established framework that determined in advance what their possible effects could be.

Mechanism theory, by contrast, prefers to ignore the established structure of social movements studies, and focus on the conjunction of mid-level recurring processes. So, for example, the mechanism of brokerage functions to connect previously unconnected social sites: two Kenyan tribes unite against a colonial power, or neoliberal supporters merge with cultural conservatives to vote in the Republican party. The benefit of mechanisms is apparent - while offering the generalizability demanded by 'scientific' studies (the same mechanisms can be repeated in a variety of circumstances), they are also capable of taking into account contextual variances (different conjunctions and sequences of mechanisms lead to different outcomes), and of including an indefinite number of novelties (mechanisms not being limited a priori). However, the problem noted earlier with American IPE - that it ignores systemic transformations - also seems to apply to mechanisms, albeit not intrinsically. Theoretically, it is possible to map out systemic transformation in terms of a very wide range of concurrent mechanisms, but practically, proponents of mechanisms seem to have stuck to explaining mid-level phenomena. (Although I would be happy to be proven wrong on this account - if anyone knows of more global uses of mechanisms, let me know! As a sidenote, anyone interested in reading more on mechanisms should definitely read Daniel Little's blog Understanding Society.)

If mechanisms aren't enough on their own to meld the benefits of both American and British IPE, then perhaps another theory could supplement it? In this regards, something like Bruno Latour's social theory seems useful to me. His approach to the problem of scale (micro versus macro) manages to deflate the irreducible difference between the two and place them on a single plane. In other words, the systemic can be made contiguous with the local. Latour's key to this notion is the idea that the macro is constructed in a particular localizable place. The "whole" is simply another part, rather than an all-encompassing structure. He provides the useful example of lingustic structure: "The millions of speech acts that make up a dictionary, a grammar, or a language structure in a linguistics department have been extracted from local speech acts, which have been recorded, transcribed, collated, and classified in various ways using many different mediums." (Reassembling the Social, 177) The linguistic structure is not something pre-existing all possible speech acts, but rather something constructed and then reflected upon by linguists. On the level of international political economy, we could see how the structure of, say, capitalism, is not simply some ubiquitous aether in which all social relations are embedded. Rather, it is produced in particular spots (e.g. Wall Street, or Dubai) and it is spread around through specific conduits (e.g. computer networks for financial flows, or small networks of phone contacts). The idea of capitalism's enveloping of all social relations is what Latour calls a panorama - it is a holistic vision of the network constructed as an extra part of the situation itself. The whole itself is constructed, whether through academic literature (e.g. Marx's real subsumption), populist commentary (e.g. Friedman's flat world) or everyday conversation (e.g. 9/11 conspiracy theories). In each case, the macro-level system is reduced to a construction of localizable networks.

Similarly, in the opposite direction, the micro or local is a construction of these networks as transmitted through time and space. So, using the linguistic example, any particular speech act is itself dependent on a long history of speech acts that have coalesced into a widely (implicitly and explicitly) recognized linguistic structure determining the use of words, phrases, intonations, etc. Or, with capitalism, a particular stock trade is itself produced through the prior construction of trading networks on Wall Street, trade regulations constructed in Washington, the education and experience of the particular trader, etc. These aspects are already there, giving us the correct intuition that there's something beyond the local, but the solution isn't to find the supplement in an irreconcilable macro level. Rather, networks of agents (agency widened to include material objects) function to produce both the macro and the micro.

By taking Latour's approach, we can see how specific mechanisms could be acknowledged as responsible for constructing the macro or global level structures. Immanently, from within a particular situation, the analysis could move towards both the micro and the macro by "beginning in the middle" - one of Deleuze's favourite quotes. In this way, perhaps, the benefits of both American and British IPE can be combined in order to deal with the problems of an increasingly interconnected world.

Conceptual Horror

2008-04-10T18:00:00.010-04:00

Readers interested in coming to grips with the cutting edge of contemporary philosophy should welcome the arrival of yet another volume of the Collapse journal. Their consistently high-quality collections touch upon not only novel topics within the philosophical world, but also offer intriguing glimpses into the parallel movements of the art world. They've also provided perhaps the main space from which speculative realism has been quietly undermining the philosophical establishment, with contributions in the past from Badiou, Harman, Meillassoux, Churchland, Grant and Brassier.

Their latest volume focuses on 'Concept Horror' whose "task is not to promote theories of horror, but to uncover the horrors that may lie in wait for those who pursue rational thought beyond the bounds of the reasonable."

Their website ~~will soon be~~ is taking pre-orders, with the book being due out in May.

In their words:

The volume brings to fruition Collapse's vision of a miscegenated text in which contributions interact and produce a series of interzones or objectively-collaborative spaces. Throughout the volume many different styles of philosophical texts and graphic works intermingle, creating unanticipated connections and adding new dimensions to one another.

George Sieg's Infinite Regress into Self-Referential Horror demonstrates the simultaneously cognitive, existential and political nature of Horror, through a conceptual investigation of victimhood.

In weird fiction author Thomas Ligotti's own contribution to the volume, he takes up the work of obscure Norwegian philosopher Peter Zapffe, among others, to take an unflinching journey into the depths of nihilism...

...As a counterpoint to Ligotti's deflation of human hubris, Ukrainian Oleg Kulik, a prominent contemporary artist known for his disturbing investigations into the borders between life and death, human and animal, contributes his photographic series 'Dead Monkeys'.

Eugene Thacker's Nine Disputations on Theology and Horror gives a detailed and penetrating account of the 'teratological noosphere', discussing the ontologies of horror from Aristotle to Lovecraft.

Novelist Michel Houellebecq is well-known for his ability to evoke the horror that dwells within the banalities of contemporary life. His poems, of which a selection are translated into English here for the first time, distil his powerful vision into translucid moments of dread.

Jake Chapman, half of the notorious Brothers Grim of the British artworld, who unveil their infernal new work Fucking Hell in London next month, contributes a set of etchings created exclusively for Collapse in response to the other contributions in the volume.

Quentin Meillassoux's work is familiar to our readers. In the third of a 'trilogy' of essays published in Collapse, Spectral Dilemma, Meillassoux reveals some of the ethical consequences of his deduction of the 'necessity of contingency', through an examination of the problem of 'infinite mourning' for the dead.

Kristen Alvanson's photographs, at once repellent and fascinating, of preserved specimens of deformed and mutated animals and humans, are accompanied by a text which discusses Paré's sixteenth-century treatise which makes of taxonomy itself something monstrous.

German artist Todosch's (Thorsten Schlopsnies) meticulous sketches seem to depict varieties of heterogenous slime in the process either of disintegration or coagulation...

...A perfect companion to Iain Hamilton Grant's Being and Slime. This untimely excavation of the naturephilosophische work of Lorenz Oken - according to whom the generation of the universe from a 'primal zero' corresponds to its coagulation from a 'primaeval mucus' - puts an entirely new slant on Badiou's notion of 'founding on the void'.

Benjamin Noys meditates on Lovecraft and the real, revealing that the most abyssal of Horrors is Horror Temporis.

In Thinking with Nigredo, Reza Negarestani shows how Aristotle and Plotinus both unlock and dissimulate the ontological mechanism expressed by an unspeakable form of Etruscan torture.

A rising star, Canadian artist Steven Shearer, contributes a new series of his Poems - striking graphical pieces created through a manipulation of the nihilistic and extreme titles and lyrics of death-metal bands.

China Miéville, better known for his bestselling weird fiction novels, writes on M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire, introducing us to a new fearsome creature from his arsenal, the Skulltopus!

Czech art collective Rafani present their cycle Czech Forest, an adaptation of folk-tale imagery which presents a very modern tale of warcrime and revenge from the end of WWII.

Graham Harman returns to Collapse with On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl. In a polemical defence of 'weird realism', Harman demonstrates that philosophical thought has more in common with weird and horror fiction than it might like to admit...

...Singular Agitations and a Common Vertigo, Keith Tilford's series of images, deftly disintegrated objects with more than a hint of 'pulp', anticipate and shadow Harman's invocation of the weird inner life of objects.

Collapse Volume IV // Ed. R. Mackay // May 2008 // 330pp[TBC] // ISBN 978-0-9553087-3-4 // £9.99

Reassembling Iraq

2008-04-08T23:16:00.028-04:00

Taking a break from the usual topics of this blog (while not straying too far!), it seems that recent developments in the Iraqi situation offer an interesting example of the sort of materialist analysis that Bruno Latour advocates. In his Reassembling the Social, Latour organizes the first part of the book around 5 uncertainties involved in thinking about the social: (1) the nature of groups, (2) the nature of actions, (3) the nature of objects, (4) the nature of facts, and (5) the type of studies done by sociology. Having only made it partially through the book so far, it is the first uncertainty that interests me here.

If you have read through any Anglo-American social science literature, you'll be familiar with the fact that one of the most common introductory moves is to define the basic unit of the analysis, and to draw limits upon the scope of the study. Thus, international relations theorists commonly emphasize the nation-state as their object of study, and (more often than not) set aside domestic or transnational actors as irrelevant for the purposes of the study. Or economists define a rational individual as their basic ontological entity, and delineate an area of perfect knowledge and frictionless transactions as their space of study. In either case, however, the result is the same – an a priori limitation on the objects of study themselves. As Latour rightly notes, such a move would be denounced as illegitimate for any other science – the power and strength of natural sciences comes precisely from their ability to let the objects speak for themselves without the scientist pre-judging what the observed phenomena is made of (see Isabelle Stengers work on science for some excellent commentary on this view of science). Any attempt to determine in advance what the social is made of (individuals, communities, ethnicities, nations, etc.) is ultimately an idealist conceit.

By contrast, Latour argues that we can replace the setting up of artificial boundaries with the analysis of the elements which always exist in debates over the nature of groups. These elements pertain to the aspects of processes which generate continually evolving and changing groups. So, for example, the first element is “to have spokespersons which ‘speak for’ the group existence.” (31) In the Iraqi situation, this occurs at multiple levels, one which we may call the initial, material level (the level of the Iraqis themselves), and another at the reflective, media/political level (consisting largely of Americans). On the first level, the dynamics can be largely mystifying, particularly for outside observers such as ourselves. There are the 4 major groupings of the Iraqi situation – the Shiite, Sunni, Kurds, and the Americans (and their coalition). (Keeping in mind Latour's arguments against traditional social science, these groupings are used only as a preliminary starting point, since any study must start somewhere.) These groupings are voiced by a variety of different actors, religiously, politically, and militarily. Obviously, these different spokespersons are not working in tandem, which not only leads to a tension-filled and dynamic group of Sunnis, Shiites, or Kurds, but also invites splinter groups and militias to develop their own spokespeople. Thus, to take the most prominent examples of late, the Shiites have come upon a major faultline in the division between the cleric Muqtada al-Sadr who speaks for the nationalist Shiite, and the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki who speaks for the elected government (albeit a government elected with numerous parties sitting out). On the other hand, the Sunnis are organized not only along the more radical al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) lines, but also among numerous militia groups which have been co-opted into the Awakening program initiated by the US military. The Kurds, are perhaps the most successful group in Iraq, and the most cohesive amongst their voices, but there are undoubtedly different voices for the Iraqi Kurds and the nearby Turkish Kurds (which, along with Iran’s Shiite influence and Saudi Arabia’s Sunni influence, shows the futility of any analysis which preemptively attempts to box in Iraq and ignore regional dynamics). Lastly, the Americans reveal in particularly clear fashion how spokespeople can construct groups – prior to the Awakening initiative, Sunnis consisted largely of numerous tribes, each with their own distinctive voice (projected politically and militarily). Each sought not only to ensure their own victory in the power struggles amongst themselves, but also to expel the American occupation and resist Shiite domination (and revenge). With the support of US funds and the declaration of an “Awakening” movement, however, the Americans were able to produce a group largely united against AQI and refraining from attacking Americans. The homogeneity of the group was increased through an influx of money and the American and Iraqi government's public voicing of their unity (albeit not without significant internal fractures remaining).

The Awakening Councils' defining of itself against AQI also shows Latour's 2nd element of group-formation - that of defining alternative groups (which may be opposed to the initial group, or merely indifferent). These groups provide the context within which a social grouping unfolds - a context that is itself continually changing as groups redefine themselves and others. Moreover, this means that the context is not 'discovered' by the impartial observer or social scientist who alone can see the 'whole picture'. Rather, the context is created by the actors themselves, without any necessary regard for social science's clean demarcations. Viewed from a hypothetical (albeit impossible) overarching view, it can also be seen that each group creates its own context (there are similarities here to Luhmann's idea of a system) which need not correspond to the contexts created by others. Rather, there are overlapping and interacting sets of groups and their contexts.

The framing and creating of groups, however, isn’t restricted to the initial level on Iraqi soil. The American media has played a large part in acting as spokespeople for the various groups involved, constructing them in numerous ways. A prime example of this would be the naming of so-called "Special Groups" which the American government created (and the media picked up) to refer to the groups which Maliki was ostensibly targeting in the recent military offensive. These were the supposedly rogue elements of Sadr's group who had refused to follow his declared ceasefire and had been co-opted by Iran against US forces. Despite their declared intentions, it seems clear from the actual military operations that the target was not simply a few Special Groups, but rather Sadr's entire Mahdi Army. The grouping here had been created merely as a political cover for Maliki (with American support) to attack and repress a political (anti-American) rival.

Another example of the media's function in creating groupings (this time, for its American readers) is the seemingly recent revelations by most of the media that the Shiites are not a unitary and homogeneous group, but involve numerous groups competing for power. This simplification is largely a matter of knowledge (how many media outlets had experts on Iraq before the war?), but it’s also a matter of business (with consumers of the media generally preferring simple stories). More importantly, it’s also a matter of the fact that despite the media or academia’s attempts to postulate intrinsic groups (whether as Arabic, Islamic, Sunni, Shiite, Kurdish, Iranian, etc.) and then map out their interactions, the process of group-formation continues regardless. The objects themselves have an agency of their own that is irreducible to any reflective construction by an observer. This, I believe, constitutes a portion of Latour’s unique brand of materialism whereby the objects of study – even ‘social’ objects – have aspects irreducible to any conceptualization.

This process can be seen in the recent (politically genius) move on Sadr’s part to turn to the Grand Ayatollah of Iraq, Ali al-Sistani (i.e. the highest religious Shiite authority in Iraq) for his thoughts on whether Sadr’s militia should be forced to disband under Maliki’s orders. Knowing full well that Sistani would rule in his favour (as he had in the past), Sadr effectively used the appearance of a deference to the Shiites' religious spokesperson to ultimately incorporate Sistani’s approval as a new spokesperson for Sadr’s cause. In other words, Sadr has expanded his group by subtly requesting the approval of the spokesman above both Sadr and Maliki’s in-fighting. In some ways, this can be seen as Sadr's attempt to become the voice of the Iraqi people (as a unified nation, and not merely a heterogeneous conjunction of disparate sects and religions). The extension of Sadr's nationalist leanings via Sistani's tacit approval makes his easily the most politically influential group outside of the government, and the one most agitating for Iraqi nationalism. As is apparent, Sadr’s group is continually in process, and continually open to change. As is Maliki’s however, who recently received the verbal support of the Iranians (Maliki, of course, is also supported by the US, along with having a militia composed largely of ex-Iranian Revolutionary Guards – throwing into complete disarray any narrative which rationalizes staying in Iraq as a means to repel Iranian influence!)

Now as Latour points out, it is fairly common to say that groups must be constructed or changed. Where Latour believes actor-network theory differs, though, is that the classical accounts see what is being changed or constructed as being composed of the same material - the social. Change and innovation are merely transitory expressions of the social substance in this way. For Latour, on the other hand, without the performance and voicing of a group, there simply is nothing. The group has a tendency to dissolve in a sort of social law of entropy. If Sadr's group doesn't continue to pay deference to their leader, if they act against the wishes of Sadr (as some have in their disavowal of the declared ceasefire), then they dissolve into multiple smaller militias or small-scale communities and families.

Beyond the changes though, each grouping must also attempt to stabilize their boundaries (this is Latour's 3rd element). In the Iraqi situation, this has largely occurred via territorial occupation, with Maliki confined to central Baghdad and Sadr dominating southern Basra and the surrounding areas. But with their recent acquisitions of new spokespeople (Maliki with Iran, and Sadr with Sistani), they can also be seen as trying to stabilize their groups via appeals to other authorities, religious and political. As we also mentioned, Sadr may be attempting to invoke Iraq as a territorial and national entity to generate new associations for his group. However, in the highly dynamic setting of Iraq, with elections coming up fairly soon, and violence and its effects a constantly unpredictable factor, the reliance on stabilizing a political grouping appears to be a maladaptive behaviour. The context is continually changing and new associations are continually arising at an abnormally rapid pace, making stability a sure-fire way to be left behind or destroyed.

This dynamism is what gives Iraq the appearance of anarchy or chaos to an outside observer, yet it should be clear from this analysis that even rapid change doesn't entail chaos. There are clear movements (in both its dynamic and group sense) at work in Iraq and the surrounding area. That being said, the study of these movements must, of necessity, be seen as contributing to their very creation. Latour's fourth and final element points out that the study of these groups and their voicing is no different from the mechanisms which construct the groups in the first element. That is to say, both entail using spokespeople to construct a group; the social scientists merely use different tools to delineate them and have the privilege of occupying a 'professional' social position to speak from. Political analysts, media members, and social scientists all function along with the Iraqis and Americans on the ground to assemble the social groups. With this necessary embedding of social science into politics, the question then becomes how can social science be put to a progressive use? Going beyond any attempt to delineate a 'pure' space of disembodied observation which would leave unaffected the object of study, social science must grapple with its necessary involvement in constructing the social.

The Object of Philosophy

2008-03-25T22:21:00.017-04:00

While beginning in a fairly straightforward fashion – through an idiosyncratic, albeit persuasive re-reading of Heidegger’s analysis of tools – Graham Harman’s Tool-Being ultimately takes a turn towards the strange in the final pages. This is not to say that it is unconvincing – far from it, as Harman provides a detailed and dense series of arguments to generate his points – but the final result is certainly a unique system of speculative metaphysics that recalls Leibniz’s system in its aberrance.

The main argument of the work is that Heidegger’s notion of readiness-to-hand and his analysis of tools have been consistently misread in anthropocentric terms. Rather than being merely the practical or useful (for Dasein), or the unconscious, pre-theoretical experience of objects, tools instead index an inaccessible realm of the object itself. Against the common interpretation of Heidegger which sees him moving from the Dasein-centered work of the Being & Time-era into the being-centered later work (reaching its apex in the notions of Ereignis and the fourfold), Harman argues that already in Being & Time (and, in fact, even in a 1919 lecture), Heidegger has already moved beyond any subject-centered perspective into the obscure locus of the objects themselves. It is the tool analysis which accomplishes this by critiquing any form of presence-at-hand in favour of the obscurity of the readiness-to-hand. Moreover, it is not simply a small selection of beings which contain this tool-being (such as only useful items, or productive items); rather, all beings partake in this dual structure of tool-being and presence. Each being can be presented in certain phenomenal aspects, but at the same time it recedes beyond any presence into the depths of tool-being.

One of the central points, however, is that this occurs not merely in the presencing to Dasein, but also in objects presencing to themselves. Thus, causal interactions between even inorganic entities involve the dual structure of tools and presence. To take the classical billiard ball example, when they strike each other they present themselves as objects with a particular density, momentum, and velocity; what recedes in this interaction is any number of other factors, such as the colour of the ball, the number on it, the sub-molecular fluctuations of matter, as well as any number of other aspects. To overcome any subjectivist bias associated with the term ‘presence’, Harman borrows Whitehead’s ‘prehension’ to refer to this encountering of objects – objects prehend each other, while at the same time withdrawing from that prehension. Independent of any subject or meaningful world, objects already take a perspective on each other by only encountering those aspects of another object that concern it. The key is, not only does any relational system between entities (including Dasein) involve an aspect of tool-being, but in principle there will always be some aspect of the object itself that recedes from the relational system it finds itself within.

Here we stumble across one of the major themes of Harman’s work, as well as one of its more interesting points – the polemical argument against the tendency of much contemporary philosophy to reduce entities to being mere effects of all-encompassing relational networks. While acknowledging the profound effects of the context within which an entity is placed, and simultaneously acknowledging the critiques of naïve substance metaphysics, Harman believes neither position gets to the heart of (the) matter. It is only within a relational network that we can have entities presented to us, or have them present themselves to each other, but at the same time, this network fails to exhaust the being of the beings. To my Deleuzian-saturated mind, this comes across sounding much like the concept of assemblages that Deleuze and Guattari develop, particularly in their emphasis on the externality of relations (something Deleuze in fact argued for from his very first book on Hume). The components of an assemblage can be extracted from their situatedness and placed within a new assemblage, entering into novel relations that reveal otherwise unused capacities of the entity in question. Where they differ, I believe, is in Harman’s insistence on the “subterranean” nature of the entity. It is constitutively impossible to exhaust or bring to presence the tool-being of an object, even through (as in Husserl) successive adumbrations of an object. In Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, I would argue that the components of an assemblage are themselves subject to the operations of individuation which, while being incapable of being presented as an object, can still be thought. There is no inherently inaccessible aspect of beings. The caveat here would be that Tool-Being comes across predominantly as an initial arrow shot in the direction of a much larger project. As such, the intricate details of how tool-beings function in their withdrawnness is still underdeveloped and for most of the book they are instead invoked as a “mysterious X”.

Harman does, in the final chapter, turn to a more specific analysis of what tool-being entails. The first aspect to be noted is the not only is each entity disjunctively both present being and tool-being, but each tool-being is impurely both aspects itself. This can be seen in the example of a bridge that Harman refers to throughout the book: the bridge is itself a being, and as such contains some measure of withdrawn tool-being. Thus, for a vehicle travelling over the bridge all that is prehended is what permits it to traverse the bridge. For the human observer, other aspects come into play such as the beauty of the bridge, or the size of the bridge (which may invoke vertigo, for example). Any prehension of the bridge, however, will still entail some withdrawn tool-being of it. So the trestles or cables that compose the bridge are not presented as such in the bridge-being (of course they can be looked at, but this is to move to a different being). But a moment’s reflection suffices to reveal that even for the bridge, its component parts withdraw into their own tool-being. So, for example, the cable-beings of the bridge are only prehended in particular aspects by the bridge, while some immeasurable amount of their tool-being withdraws. The relational network which is unified into the bridge-entity is incapable of exhausting the beings of its own parts, and hence each tool-being has its own tool-beings. Therefore, the first oddity to result from Harman’s work is that there is an in(de)finite regress of tool-beings.

The second oddity is the argument that “if every entity is already made up of a set of relations, the converse is also true: every set of relations is also an entity.” (260) The distinction between substance and accident is dissolved here as any new relation which an entity enters into suffices to produce a new entity. The reason why is that there is no ontological criteria capable of distinguishing between substances and their accidents. Typically, as Harman argues, what is employed to distinguish between “real” entities and their accidents, is some ontic criteria. For example, references to natural kinds rely upon a common sense idea of what constitutes a substance. The ontic is illegitimately deployed to make ontological distinctions. The indistinguishability of substance and accident or entity and relation generates a number of questions though – most importantly, what are the “ontological firewalls” that protect one entity from being affected by another? The risk here is that without some sort of firewall, Harman’s system will simply be dissolved into precisely the relational holism he’s struggling to get out of. Everything will affect everything and the specificity of a particular tool-being will again be lost.

The provisional answer Harman seems to reach is to regard entities as machines. That is to say, each entity is defined by its formal system of relations that it composes across its elements. Using the example of a piece of silver, Harman says it “is a machine, a formal reality by which subsidiary entities are arranged in an efficacious pattern. It is a real unity, and not just an aggregate surface effect at the ontological mercy of its parts. … If these protons were scattered at random across the universe instead of being effectively arranged, the silver-reality would also be hopelessly lost.” (282)

With this idea of an entity, Harman is capable of furnishing a view of the world profoundly at odds with most contemporary philosophy. Strictly speaking (and this would be the 3rd oddity), there are no relations, only entities encompassing machinic relations. (Even human perception is simply the new entity composed by the relation between an object and the perceiving subject – a perception-being.) Reality is therefore composed of entities and solely entities; moreover, these entities exist monadically, independent of each other (yet capable of entering into new relations with each other and creating new entities). Lastly, there is an indefinite regress of tool-beings that forever exceed the relational unity they find themselves within. There is, in other words, infinite levels of different beings interacting in numerous ways, each with its own independent being. Perhaps most oddly, Harman’s definition of entities as machines leads to a radical reformulation of materialism (and perhaps, should more precisely be called a realism): “What separates this model from all materialism is that I am not pampering one level of reality (that of infinitesimal particles) at the expense of all others. What is real in the cosmos are forms wrapped inside of forms, not durable specks of material that reduce everything else to derivative status. If this is ‘materialism’, then it is the first materialism in history to deny the existence of matter.” (293)

With all this in mind, Harman concludes that the objective of philosophy is “a kind of reverse engineering. … In the case of the philosopher, the finished product that must be reverse-engineered is the world as we know it. … Behind every apparently simple object is an infinite legion of further objects that ‘crush, depress, break, and enthrall one another’.” (296) As in my previous post, however, my primary question still remains: in what way can these ontologies critically reflect on contemporary socio-political situations? If the task of philosophy is to reverse-engineer the world, to what end is this undertaken in the name of? In Tool-Being, Harman is almost entirely silent on the ontological nature of ideas or language or culture, instead preferring (justifiably) to focus on inorganic objects themselves, against the typical philosophical focus on language. While the questions go unanswered there, with an upcoming book to be released on Bruno Latour's social theory, it appears Harman also feels compelled to expand beyond the inorganic.

On Contemporary Materialism

2008-03-19T16:55:00.019-04:00

One of the most interesting and engaging trends to emerge in recent contemporary philosophy is the attempt to develop a rigorous materialism - one shorn of any hand-wringing over the inevitable mediation of language, with its endless hermeneutics and language games. Against the interpretation which would see immanence as the common theme of cutting-edge philosophy (and this I take to be one of the claims of John Mullarkey's Post-Continental Philosophy), it is rather materialism which provides the basic framework for much of the more interesting work today. Immanence itself is a fairly common thesis, put forth at least since Kant's rejection of the transcendent uses of reason; materialism, on the other hand, seems to me to be only a fairly minor position (Marx excepted, of course). It is only lately that it has really become a widespread movement. As Lee Braver shows in his excellent A Thing of This World, most of 'continental' philosophy - Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida, along with many, many others - are all idealist in the sense of focusing on the linguistic and representational construction of reality. This idealist tendency has had a number of unfortunate side effects: foremost, in my mind, being the fear of science. This is no doubt thanks in large part to Heidegger's criticisms, but also, I would argue, because the idealist tendency has played into the literature circles who would (obviously) much rather endlessly interpret passages of Joyce, than perform experiments or grapple with mathematical equations. (Not that there's anything wrong with either!)

One of the startling parts of contemporary materialism, on the other hand, is the full-fledged willingness to incorporate scientific discoveries into their philosophical system (without, for all that, making philosophy simply subordinate to science as some analytic philosophy has done). Deleuze, being the devourer of any and all knowledge, makes biology and evolutionary theory one of the central points of his philosophy. He also cites esoteric debates over early calculus interpretations, and references virtually unknown mathematicians like Albert Lautman, along with incorporating Gilbert Simondon's previously unknown work on technology and scientific models of individuation. Alain Badiou, of course, makes the radical (for continental philosophy) claim that mathematics is the discourse of ontology. While set theory provides the basis for his ontology, in Logiques des Mondes, category theory has become the new discourse used to illuminate the relationality of worlds. Ray Brassier, in his work Nihil Unbound (which I aim to read in the next little while) cites Paul Churchland who is famous for his denial of propositional attitudes and his reduction of the mind to neurological functions. Graham Harman, meanwhile, makes the constant polemical plea in Tool-Being to return to the things themselves, against the repetitive movement into deeper and deeper conditions of things. Quentin Meillassoux, lastly, makes his 'correlationist' argument by employing scientific data to show the existence of an item which escapes any idealist tendency to make the world (even an independent one) necessarily correlated to thought. The "arche-fossil" indexes a truly materialist world, one that has only retroactively been discovered by science.

As a result, part of what makes aspects of contemporary materialism (also known as speculative realism) truly exciting is its potential to bridge gaps that have been virtually impassable for 100 years. The gap between analytic and continental philosophy can be decreased since one of the hallmarks of many modern materialists is not only their commitment to scientific insights, but also the clarity of their writings. No longer bound to respect the infinite interpretability of texts, these thinkers often provide some of the clearest arguments for their positions to be found in continental philosophy. This overcomes the immediate hurdle which plagues any reconciliation between analytic and continental camps, namely the difficulty of entering into continental discourse. The respect that the materialists have for science also facilitates this reconciliation, while hopefully giving pause to those analytic philosophers who dogmatically make philosophy secondary to science. Therefore, science, analytic philosophy, and continental philosophy need not be seen as mutually exclusive interpretations of the world, but rather mutually conditioning forces that aim at (perhaps) different levels of reality.

One question that initially arises, though, is the relation of contemporary materialism to the more classical accounts. In particular, the Marxist form of materialism. In what sense can these be productively related to each other? Does the modern form of realism sacrifice all the materialist insights of the Marxist account? I'll leave the details to some one more well-versed in Marx than I, but the questions seem worthwhile.

More generally though, and more importantly, what does contemporary materialism have to say about socio-political issues? In what ways does developing an object-centred ontology change the ways we perceive specifically human issues? This, to me, seems to be one of the major failings of Manuel DeLanda's otherwise excellent work - the negation of any sort of specifically cultural or human aspects. In his rigorously materialist history of societies, there is no question of gender or racial or ethnic identities, or any sort of immaterial power struggles. His reduction is more of a physical reduction than a material reduction, effecting a sort of synthesis of sociobiology and complexity theory. While the complexity theory avoids any strict determinism, the sociobiological aspect seems to leave aside the primary questions about the uniqueness of human societies, instead reducing them to merely plays of physical flows. Is this the necessary endpoint of materialism? Or can there be a materialism that avoids the physicalist bias, and provides a viable explanation of systems like culture, language, religion, and international relations?

Ray Brassier - undoubtedly the theorist pushing the nihilistic implications of speculative realism to its ultimate conclusions - still retains a focus on struggling against capitalism, as attested to in a number of his articles and works. This would suggest that he believes that materialism still has a powerful voice to critique modern socio-political systems. Badiou also believes his form of materialism is capable of introducing revolutionary sequences into politics, in the form of a generic community of equal entities forcing change upon the situation. Gilles Deleuze, too, argues that his transcendental materialism reveals an absolute becoming that escapes even capitalism's destruction of all stable points, effecting a revolutionary change that refuses to be bound by exploitative structures.

Anyways, I'm presently making my way through Graham Harman's Tool-Being, and I'll hopefully put up some thoughts on it when I get inspired to do so. It's fascinating to see the emergence of a new philosophical position, but nearly all of the important issues are missed in summary posts like this one. So I intend on tackling the details in future posts, if I get the chance to. For anyone who's interested though, there's also a discussion going on over at Larval Subjects about very similar issues, including a debate over art's contribution to a meaningless, material world.

Experimenting with Badiou

2008-03-06T23:07:00.011-05:00

Alain Badiou's latest essay, a piece in the New Left Review, has already stirred a number of reactions in the blogosphere (see Poetix and Long Sunday). For myself, the piece resonates with some themes I've covered recently, wherein the question of "what is to be done?" is raised in regards to our event-less times. More specifically, it appears that in this essay we can see Badiou call explicitly for an "experimental" politics:

"[O]ur task is to bring the communist hypothesis into existence in another mode, to help it emerge within new forms of political experience. This is why our work is so complicated, so experimental. ... What might this involve? Experimentally, we might conceive of finding a point that would stand outside the temporality of the dominant order and what Lacan once called ‘the service of wealth’. Any point, so long as it is in formal opposition to such service, and offers the discipline of a universal truth."

In particular, the experiment called for here is to reintroduce the political subject - i.e. the universal and radically egalitarian collective - into the contemporary situation. This present situation, Badiou characterizes in terms of a division into two. Against the false proclamations (by supporters and critics) of the new age of integrated, all-encompassing global capitalism, Badiou points to the fact that most of the world's population remains exterior to the market (being barred from its benefits, but in many cases also being barred from even entering it). As Poetix notes, capitalism presents a false universality - while claiming to incorporate all regardless of their ethnicity, religion, location, gender, class, etc., capitalism in fact installs a particular substantial community (the "West", Badiou says) as the universal.

Instead of this false universality, Badiou proclaims the true universality of the communist subject (defined not as the proletariat, but as the radically generic community devoid of any predicative differences). It is this subject that has emerged in various revolutionary sequences throughout history (Badiou names two in the essay), and it is this subject that Badiou hopes to call forth through his counter-declaration to capitalism's simulacra of universality.

Here, though, we reach the intriguing portion. As Poetix rightly points out, what's conspicuously missing from Badiou's piece is any reference to an event that his declaration would be naming. For the reader used to hearing about Badiou's concept of the event, this is indeed a little mystifying. A declaration without event, however, makes more sense in the context of Badiou's calls for an experimental politics. On some level, in fact, the case could be made that a declaration-without-event is no different from a declaration-with-event. In either case, the event is never to be found, appearing only to disappear. The event, in this sense, is more of an inspiration, or an injunction forcing recognition of something outside established knowledge. What is left after the event's disappearance is but the trace of the event that is constructed by a naming (as in Being & Event), or by a performative statement (as in Logiques des Mondes). The militant truth-procedure then proceeds from these declarations and constructs a generic set by investigating the situation in light of that declaration.

The absence of an event therefore entails that any universal statement be an experimental statement, rather than a statement extracted from an event. In either case, though, the statement is performatively true - in one case, being an unjustifiable decision that the event occured, and in the other case being an experimental declaration. This indeed seems to be suggested by Badiou himself:

"The simple phrase, ‘there is only one world’, is not an objective conclusion. It is performative: we are deciding that this is how it is for us. Faithful to this point, it is then a question of elucidating the consequences that follow from this simple declaration."

The point then is that in our age where we find ourselves devoid of events, activist politics must experiment with declarations concerning the universal political subject in an attempt to see what occurs. To a lesser degree, this seems to be the idea behind Badiou's own explicitly experimental political group, the Organisation Politique, where they have made specific declarations concerning very local situations (most famously, with the status of undocumented immigrants). The novelty of Badiou's latest essay therefore appears to be the grander scale of the declaration. While still specific to our present situation, the declaration 'there is only one world' is irreducibly global in character.

Whether such an experiment will work is obviously debatable. Moreover, the ethics of experimental declarations seems obscure at the moment. What are the limits to performative statements? Granting that they must be universal and addressed to all, can there not still be reactionary and conservative declarations? It seems to me, however, that insofar as Badiou's system privileges moments of unpredictable rupture, experimenting with declarations seems to be one of the most obvious ways to generate a political subject, without having to rely on an event.

Meme Me

2008-02-26T20:48:00.004-05:00

Thanks to Fido the Yak, I've now been involved in my first internet meme. Very exciting!

The steps are:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five bloggers.

I'm going to skip the last step because this meme has been making it's way around for a while now, and I'm sure there's not many bloggers left untouched. Regardless, the book I chose (or rather, was forced to choose) was The Praxis of Alain Badiou, edited by Paul Ashton, A.J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens, and published by re:press (support the independents!). Page 123 happens to open up onto a review essay of Badiou's Logiques des Mondes:

"He gives an excellent account of Hegel, a formal account of what he calls the 'three transcendental operations' (zero, conjunction and the envelope) of appearing, as well as a brilliant demonstration of the superiority of Badiou's own 'Grand Logic' over 'ordinary logic'. This section is a kind of compressed tour de force, in which the familiar operations of ordinary logic (and/or/implication/negation, the quantifiers) are derived from Badiou's new categories of minimum, maximum, conjunction and envelope. The book concludes with a notice: 'What is a classical world?' There we find that such a world has double negation and excluded middle as valid principles, that 'a classical world is a world whose transcendental is Boolean', and that - as Badiou has said elsewhere - ontology is such a classical world."

There we go. Not exactly the sexiest topic (where's my Bataille when I need him?), but such is the way things go.

Forcing the Event

2008-02-19T14:02:00.012-05:00

One of the great advantages of Badiou's work has been to re-think the notion of subjectivity and provide a counter to all those who have dissolved the subject into its surrounding semiotic, political, imaginary, cultural and biological structures. Against the postmodern doxa proclaiming the death of the (unified and active) subject, Badiou instead argues that subjectivity is precisely the link between being and it's evental supplement - it is what recognizes and forces the consequences of the event into a newly re-structured system of knowledge. Moreover, it does so in a militant fashion, rigorously examining the effects of the event's naming on the situation. In these regards, Badiou appears to present a subject that is not only an active agent of change, but also one that appears to present an image of hope for a leftist thought mired in the domination of global capitalism. Yet, it is not clear that Badiou achieves this. Most glaringly, with the absence of a contemporary political event, what are we to do?

There seems to me to be (at least) 3 options. The first is undoubtedly the most foreign and devastating to Badiou's project - namely, to passively wait for an event to occur. Besides consenting to the doctrine according to which 'there is no alternative', it also raises the real spectre of false events being proclaimed out of impatience. As Badiou argues in Ethics, such false events are precisely an instance of Evil. Instead of an event being addressed universally, it is instead addressed to a particular grouping (of race, nation, gender, etc.). Raising this particularity to the formal status of a subject, it's fidelity requires the destruction or subjugation of other particularities. Thus, while sharing all the formal characteristics of an event and its truth procedure, these simulacra of events are concerned only with a substantial particularity, rather than the void of a situation. If this is the only solution to our main question, then Badiou's project seems destined to lead to political passivism, with the rare exception of those true events.

The second option leads us into somewhat more Deleuzian territory: to repeat a past event, or perhaps, to rename a past event in a way suitable for the present. In this way, the event of the French Revolution, for example, and its declaration of the equality of all, could be recuperated in the present moment as an axiomatic decision to counter growing inequality. In Badiou's strict terms, though, what would it mean to repeat an event? For one thing, an event is always the event of a specific situation. There can be no question of exactly repeating the event therefore, since the situation has changed. What is repeated then? The pure multiple? But this is to leave the repeated event and any other event ultimately indistinguishable, since they are all instances of pure multiplicity, or the void of the situation. Moreover, it can't be a matter of repeating some substantial attribute of the French Revolution, since to base the event on an element of the situation is to fall into the Evil of simulacra mentioned earlier. Now, an important distinction needs to be recalled. As Badiou outlines, the event is unpresentable as such in the situation; but what does present itself is the evental site. The evental site, while locatable within a situation and therefore potentially repeatable, is still nevertheless formally defined as a presented multiple whose elements are themselves unpresented. As a formal definition, the evental site can certainly be repeated; but again, this leaves every event indistinguishable by virtue of sharing the same formal/ontological structure. Either every event is a repetition of the exact same event, or, as Badiou argues, each event and its truth is singular.

Perhaps, however, there could be a becoming of the event that allows the power of the past to be re-situated within the present? This again leads us closer to Deleuze, in particular The Logic of Sense. This idea is still vague to me at the moment, but it connects nicely with a comment made by Badiou in an interview, where he speaks of 'obscure events'. Referring to May '68, and whether or not it should be considered an event, Badiou says that "perhaps we [don't] know the name of this event, and that, consequently, it [is] an event-ality still suspended from its name - what Sylvain Lazarus calls an 'obscure eventality'." The possibility here is that not only can an event wait for its proper name, but also that maybe every event contains some measure of obscurity and can therefore be continually rejuvenated through a re-naming. In this way, the obscurity of the event could undergo a becoming, while nevertheless instantiating itself in concrete evental sites. (Whether such a notion could fit into Badiou's mathematics, I don't know. But as Brassier has made clear in his essay, "Presentation as Anti-Phenomenon", the metaontological discourse of philosophy plays the essential, albeit unacknowledged, role in Badiou's system, not mathematics.)

The third possibility of answering our question is alluded to in the title of this post: forcing an event to occur. The idea here would be to actively work towards the emergence of an event. The immediate problem, of course, is that the event is defined as being radically unpredictable from within the situation. How, then, to organize political action towards producing the unpredictable? Here's Badiou's own take on the question:

"None of the little processes that led up to the event was equal to what actually took place. ... There was an extraordinary change of scale, as there always is in every significant event. ... I've never argued that the event, when we examine it in its facticity, presents irrational characteristics. I simply think that none of the calculations internal to the situation can account for its irruption, and cannot, in particular, elucidate this kind of break in scale that happens at a certain moment, such that the actors themselves are seized by something of which they no longer know if they are its actors or its vehicles, or what it carries away." (Ethics, 125)

The problem with this conception of the pre-event, is that it again appears to rely on the intervention of a pseudo-miracle for any real change to occur. The way around this may be to blunt any sharp distinction between being and event, such that the event is always a real potentiality of being. If this can be achieved, then pre-evental political action could be aimed towards shifting appearances (or the sensible, as Ranciere would have it) in order to bring forth the immanent edge-of-the-void (i.e. evental site). To some degree, this blurring of the boundaries between being and event is already set in place by Badiou: on the one hand, a site is always already a part of each and every situation (as per the Axiom of Foundation). Significantly, it is not necessarily an evental site, but rather fulfills the condition for an evental site to potentially occur by placing a limit on the series of multiples of multiples of multiples. In every situation, there is some point at which the multiples presented do not have their own elements presented. As such, every situation contains a multiple on the edge of the void. On the other hand, every situation is characterized by the undecidability of an event's belonging. The event, as described by Badiou, is composed of the unpresented elements of the site (which we just saw are always an aspect of the situation), and the presenting of itself. This secondary aspect of the event is always undecidable from the perspective of the situation, and necessarily so because of its circularity. The question of whether an event has occurred entails deciding whether or not what the signifier of the event (e.g. the "French Revolution") refers to is something that belongs to the situation or not. Either decision, yes or no, retroactively discerns the decision as veridically true. The aspect that makes this undecidability a universal feature of situations is the fact that there are (and can be) no criteria for delimiting an event. Given that the elements of a possible evental site are always existing, the only determination left is to discern whether a given configuration of unpresented elements can be named and decided as an event. As far as I can tell, this is an immanent possibility of every situation. If this is the case, then pre-evental praxis could take as its goal the reconfiguration of the situation in order to structure it in such a way as to produce the space for an event to emerge. Or in other words, a Deleuzian/Guattarian ethics of experimentation could be employed to (unpredictably) discover what a situation is capable of.

Affecting Change

2008-02-07T01:45:00.006-05:00

I've been engaged recently, with a friend of mine, in a debate over the relative merits of the Democratic candidates. She, siding with Clinton, argues that it is only Clinton who has a fully developed policy proposal and a concrete plan to implement that proposal. She (and I hope I'm not mis-characterizing her) believes that a well-run government is the best that can be offered, and as such, Clinton is the best suited candidate. Myself, on the other hand, sees in Obama a true potential for significant change. The policy differences between them, to me, are so minor as to be inconsequential. Of course, our two positions fall neatly into the broad categories that have been used to widely characterize the Democratic race - experience vs. change.

What I have been trying to get at in my conversation with her, however, is something that is more ineffable than policy proposals. It certainly corresponds to some degree with the catchphrases of "hope" and "change" projected by the Obama campaign, but there's also something more there than simply a campaign motif. It's widely agreed that Obama is a fantastic speaker - put next to any of the candidates, he's great; put next to Bush and the difference is rather shocking. But while this ability of his seems to be widely acknowledged, it's also repeatedly downplayed as being of secondary importance. My friend, for instance, believes these are simply empty words and rhetorical gestures that cover over an absence of real substance. The media, as another example, continues to support the narrative mentioned earlier, between experience (i.e. substance) and change (i.e. ineffable hope).

The importance of this rhetoric and the capacity for inspiring otherwise cynical and apathetic citizens (just look at the record turnouts for Democratic primaries), should hardly be underestimated though! I've been trying to draw out the rationale for why this shouldn't be overlooked in my conversation, but I'm not sure how well I've succeeded so far. (She's still a Clinton supporter.)

But then I came across this perceptive take on Obama's effect from Zoepolitics:

"While I agree with those 'uncompromising' radicals (i.e., socialists, anarchists, greens, etc.) who hold that we should be under no illusions as to the capacity of a head of state, particularly within the frames of a liberal 'democratic' republic, to enact the kinds of fundamental transformations that are really needed in our time, there is in fact a place at which I depart from their company. If we live today in what Agamben has called (with a nod to Debord) a 'post-democratic spectacular society' - that is to say, a society in which governance is less about the sharing of decisions than the large-scale management of sensation (which has everything to do, as we learned above, with our collective capacity to act), then perhaps the manner in which we represent 'ourselves to ourselves' within the limited range of possibilities the Spectacle offers us does actually matter. In particular, especially within such a racially-stratified society as the United States, one might say that the 'face' of a nation, determines to a large extent what the multitude of which it is comprised (which is demonstrably more diverse here than amongst any other national population in the world) is capable of being affected by, and therefore capable of acting upon politically.

Whether one considers this question within the current framework, or with respect to a fundamental rupture with it, what it indicates is essentially the same; that by no means is it 'less radical' to vote for Obama just because someone like Kucinich, whose national healthcare plan is far more socialist, i.e. not market-based, is also running (which might be argued by those who believe that America is a 'democracy'). And neither is it a 'compromise' of one's possibly even 'more radical' politics to vote for him, simply because more fundamental transformations are what are 'really' needed - indeed, there is no reason whatsoever to conceive of the variety of possible political moves one might make through the illogic of a zero-sum game. Rather, what voting for Obama actually indicates is precisely a radical understanding of both the genesis through which electability and executability emerges within a neoliberal capitalist society, as well as the conditions of possibility that must be arrived at culturally for the more fundamental transformations we might like to see occur to actually occur.

Perhaps then, just as Baruch [Spinoza] was forced to become a Marrano (i.e., a Jew who pretended to be a Catholic so as to avoid persecution) in his childhood, before, upon reaching maturity, physically moving to other spaces so as to open up other possibilities for self-making, the United States might be said in our time to itself be in such a status collectively, forced to represent 'itself to itself' within the molarities of race (i.e., under the thrall of whiteness), while on the molecular level an entirely other potentiality for collective self-understanding might be lying in wait. If that were the case, the distinction between a purely 'radical' politics and that of a 'liberal' politics would be rendered indistinguishable, so that those forces (which are necessarily comprised of multiply conflicting and converging persuasions) which have always recognized that 'change is the only constant' might then become capable of assembling a political resonance machine upon the plane of immanence - which is to say, within the realm of everyday life, which is necessarily where everything always unfolds anyways." (emphasis added)

This - to me - sums up precisely the reason why I support Obama. Focusing solely on their respective positions on the issues (health care, climate change, the economy, Iraq, etc.) overlooks the extremely important effect that Obama has on the public's affect. Their non-radical positions on policy belie the fact that Obama can effect a sea change in general affect. (As a sidenote, there is a similar problem in traditional social movements studies: most theorists in this area tend to focus on whether or not movements concretely change legislation, completely overlooking the less tangible aspects of cultural and affective change that are also wrought. Alberto Melucci being the important exception to the general trend.)

Moreover, with this conception of public affect, the distinction between radicals and reformists becomes one of degree rather than kind. Through the proper modulation of public affect, subtle changes in political culture can eventually bring about disproportionately large changes in the political system. In other words, substantial change can be brought about incrementally through the actualizing of various potentials already immanent in the population - there is no need for some sort of ontological gap to emerge where an event proclaims itself as breaking radically with all previous knowledge of the situation. As much as Badiou's characterization is suited towards a romantic ideal of militant politics, there seems to me to be little to suggest that that's how change actually comes about. (From the little I know of Logiques des Mondes, this problem is somewhat avoided by virtue of the various ways in which beings can appear. There's an entire range of different appearances, which can appear more or less intensely. This would seem to suggest the possibility of potentials that are less than fully actualized. See Hallward's lecture for more on this: "From Being & Event to Logics of Worlds".)

The last aspect I want to draw out from Zoepolitics' analysis is the idea that the cultural transformations provide the conditions of possibility for significant change. I would add that this isn't a problem limited solely to America - it's fundamentally a problem to do with every country where democracy might be hoped for. Iraq is an obvious example, in so far as the present imposition of democracy there is continually faced with the reality of the socio-cultural situation on the ground. The problem, I would argue, is not that there isn't a desire for democracy (as though Middle Eastern countries naturally required heavy-handed authoritarian regimes); rather, that tendency is itself in competition with alternative tendencies. As in any country, these opposing tendencies include established interests and those seeking greater power for themselves. The key, then, is to balance these tendencies against and with each other, ideal(istical)y towards a worthwhile goal (how about a decrease in violence and refugees for starters??) And while this idea is admittedly schematic and vague, I think to some degree it describes what Petraeus has done to successfully lower violence levels in places like Al Anbar. Recognizing the multiple tendencies inherent to the Iraqi society, Petraeus seems to have skillfully played them off against each other, lending support and resistance (militarily and economically) to key groups when necessary. Whether this is a formula for abiding levels of decreased violence certainly remains to be seen, but it appears to be working for the moment. (This is leaving aside the all-important political issue of reconciliation; decreased violence is only a condition for this political goal.)

Returning to Obama and affect, the final thing to note is that while the change in public affect can be woefully imperceptible at times, it is undeniably powerful. The shift to what has widely been declared a "culture of fear" after 9/11 provided the cultural conditions for the entire Bush administration's ensuing agenda. It is hard to believe that military expenses could reach the levels they have, or that America could ruin its image abroad, or be entrenched in a grinding counterinsurgency, without the affective (albeit usually implicit) support of wide swaths of the population. By the time the population began to escape from the culture of fear, it was already too late as America was knee-deep in foreign countries. With Obama, however, there is the real potential for him to concretely shift the general cultural affect of the United States for the better. And with these transformed cultural conditions, comes the potential for radically new affects, subjectivities, desires and beliefs. There is certainly no guarantee that it will work out for the best (is there ever in politics?), but Obama is the only candidate I can perceive as bringing about real change.

UPDATE (March 5): It seems as though I am in good company, considering Immanuel Wallerstein makes a similar argument for Obama's impact here: "What Can He Change?" The main thrust of the argument is that in the economic and foreign policy spheres, America (and therefore Obama) have much less power to change current trends than is commonly believed by the public. In the "cultural arena", however, Obama has been the source of immense inspiration that can - potentially - be the source of great change. Well worth the read!

Das Ding & Le Petit Objet a (Part 1)

2008-02-01T09:51:00.003-05:00

This post is mostly an expository post, attempting to understand how the petit objet a and das Ding function within the Lacanian system. Over the space of a few posts, I'll try to come to terms with these concepts and outline the various uses and functions that these two (closely related) concepts have, and how they do (or do not) fit together. In part, my interest here is in grasping what appears to be, perhaps, the central concept of the Lacanian system - situated, as it is, in the centre of Lacan's famous Borromean knot. My use of the phrase "grasping" may already be off, insofar as it suggests the ability to substantively grab onto the meaning of these concepts - a notion made problematic by their paradoxical nature and, as we will see, their functions. Caveats aside, though, a methodical look at central concepts such as these is key to judging the worth and value of Lacan, whether it be in its psychoanalytic, philosophical or political use (a point that I believe is central to Lorenza Chiesa's recent in-depth study).

Before beginning, we can provisionally outline the various ways in which objet a and das Ding appear, in order to schematize and later highlight the relations between them:

A) opens up the space for desiring; constitutes the subject as desiring (formula of phantasy)

B) is the object-cause of desire

C) it makes an appearance in the various developmental stages of the child (oral, anal, phallic)

D) it can appear as the gaze (which is not reducible to the eye of the other)

E) it can appear as the voice

F) it is the radical Otherness in the other

G) the virtual unity, or regulative idea, of perceptual objects over time

With these multiple functions accorded to this concept, the question arises as to whether and how they all fit together. Perhaps some functions are apparent only in Lacan's early evocations of these ideas, and are later left aside. Perhaps, rather than being a function of Lacan's development, they are in fact aspects of the subject's own temporal development. Or maybe the concept is meant to be polyvocal, or is just inherently contradictory. (I should mention too, that in Subjectivity & Otherness, Chiesa outlines 5 more functions of the objet a too. I'm purposefully leaving aside his discussion because it is a rich source of ideas that will get its own post in the near future.) This then, is one of the major questions I'm aiming to at least approximately answer.

Das Ding:
Prior to ever naming objet a as such, Lacan first began work on a closely related concept, das Ding (or the Thing). In its original German, das Ding suggests Kant's famous concept of the ding-an-sich or the thing-in-itself - the concept referring to the non-phenomenal source of all intuitions, or the world as it hypothetically existed outside of our particular way of cognizing it. As we will see, retaining the German term helps in reminding us of the similarly non-phenomenal nature of Lacan's das Ding.

In Richard Boothby's discussion of das Ding, he distinguishes between two aspects of it. On the one hand, there is das Ding as the virtual object functioning to unify perceptual images into a single object over a duration of time (G). On the other hand, is das Ding as the radically unknowable aspect of the human other - the truly Other of the other (F). Both ideas, however, point to non-phenomenal aspects that exceed the Imaginary coherence of the world.

In its function as that which unifies a manifold of perceptions, objet a serves to provide the basis for attributing multiple perceptions to a single object. In doing so, Boothby notes that Freud identifies das Ding with both (1) the gap between memory (past perceptions of an object) and perception (present, differing perception of the object), i.e. the ungraspable aspect of novelty, and (2) a constant underlying aspect of the object. The key to uniting these 2 features is to recognize that das Ding is simply the content-less, constant gap between perception and memory: "The Thing is thus a pure posit, an empty and ideal locus of being amid a shifting whirl of other aspects of the perceptual complex that are more familiar to memory." (Boothby, 210) It is this notion of a pure space of absence that Lacan will pick up on. If the Imaginary alone does not provide unity to objects in the world, then this is because they necessarily rely upon and refer to a perpetually absent space which would provide unity to objects over time, i.e. the Real, unknowable aspect of phenomenal reality. In this way, the Imaginary is less the source of unity than it is the imaginary (in its normal sense) filling out of the lack - it works to create the appearance of a substantial reality by veiling the gap of the Real.

This idea is key to the next function of das Ding - as that unknowable aspect of the human Other. In terms of the Imaginary, and the egos that compose this reality, intersubjectivity is based simply upon relations of sameness and difference. Oversimplifying, we identify with images of ourself and attribute images to others, and use these as the framework for various intersubjective relations. But at certain points, something happens that exceeds this framework of difference and identity. These are the situations in which the Other's desire becomes a question - we are incapable (at the time, since it may later be symbolized) of understanding the actions and behaviour of another as their desire escapes our knowledge of how egos are supposed to operate. In psychoanalysis, the prototypical example of this is the confusion the child faces when it realizes its primary caregiver (generally the mother) does not solely direct its desire towards the child. In such cases, the Imaginary coherence of the world is again disrupted - this time, not by an imperceptible locus of unity, but rather by an unknowable desire. In response to this unknown aspect of the Other, the individual (necessarily?) represents its unrepresentability through a privileged image, thereby attempting to cover over the gap. (In the clinical situation, this response can be seen in the way that certain, seemingly neutral, images can provoke distress in the analysand. These images have covered over and are associated with traumatic incidents that have not yet been worked through.)

What then, is the relation between das Ding as the unknowable desire of the Other (F), and objet a, as the cause of desire (B)? Put simply, the unknowable aspect of the Other's desire is what originally causes desire in the subject. For example, faced with an Other who refuses to pay full attention to it, the child is left with the question, what does the Other desire? What could be taking its attention away from the child? "Object a can be understood here as the remainder produced when that hypothetical [identity between the Other's desire and the child's desire] breaks down, as a last trace of that unity, a last reminder of. By cleaving to that rem(a)inder, the split subject, though expulsed from the Other, can sustain the illusion of wholeness; by clinging to object a, the subject is able to ignore his or her division. That is precisely what Lacan means by fantasy, and he formalizes it with the matheme $<>a." (Fink, 59) This idea is still obscure, however, so further explanation is warranted. The idea of a rem(a)inder here seems to suggest some sort of substantial object, but that contradicts everything we've earlier said. Moreover, how does the subject ignore its division from the Other's desire by holding onto the objet a - substantial or not? The way to unravel these questions is to note that the objet a is here an object that is always already lost - in its original situation where it was supposedly possessed (the mythical unity with the mOther), there was no object since there was no subject/object or ego/alter distinction made yet. It is only once the question of the Other's desire arises, when the unity with the mOther is lost, that the child is then forced to recognize external objects and truly Other desires. In making these distinctions, the objet a is formed as the object which (if hypothetically found) would return the subject to that primal unity. Hence, we can see why the objet a in its function as object-cause of desire, is not a substantial object: there simply never was such a thing to begin with. The objet a, therefore, again functions as an perpetually absent space, this time opening up the space for the subject to desire (lack being constitutive of desire in Lacan). We can see here too, the beginnings of how to relate objet a to its function of constituting the subject (A).

So far then, we have seen that das Ding acts as an absent space (which is not nothing) that disrupts the unities formed in the Imaginary. In both the case of an object and the case of the Other, das Ding is that which escapes the normal operations involved in memory and perception (both based on images, or the habit synthesis as in Deleuze). Lastly, these functions, F and G, are related to the object-cause of desire (B) by virtue of acting as the retroactively posited rem(a)inder of the original, mythical wholeness that could hypothetically be attained.

The History of Secularization

2007-11-06T20:38:00.003-05:00

In Charles Taylor’s latest work – the massive A Secular Age – the recent recipient of the $1.4 million US Templeton Prize proposes to look at the history of increasing secularism through a rather unique lens. Secularization, as Taylor sees it, has tended to focus on two aspects. On the one hand, secularization refers to the increasing distance between socio-political institutions and their foundation in a transcendent authority – the secularization of the public sphere, in other words. On the other hand, lies the notion of secularization as the decline of participation in religious ceremonies, rituals and institutions - the secularization of the private realm. It is obvious that the two types of secularism, while capable of being intertwined, need not be. Within the first type of secularism, private beliefs in a transcendent world (which is how Taylor roughly defines religion) can still thrive, but are barred from being the basis of public institutions. The United States, of course, is the most obvious example of a society whose political organizations are ostensibly secular, while still retaining a vast majority of non-secular private individuals. The intermingling of the two (witness the debate over Mitt Romney’s Mormonism, for example) and the indiscernibility between public and private makes the distinction between the two types of secularism only relative, but the point nevertheless stands. The increasing secularization of the Western world has largely been seen in terms of these two meanings.

What Taylor proposes, however, is an alternative view – one that focuses neither on the secularization of public institutions nor on the secularization of private practices. Rather, he takes a Kantian approach and focuses on ‘the conditions of belief’ and how they have changed over history. While in the other approaches, there may still be remnants of the past that have not changed over time (e.g. swearing on a Bible before testimony, or the various religious traditions that have been retained in private), from the perspective of the conditions of belief, nothing is the same, even for the believer. The reason for this, simply put, is that even for the believer, his/her belief in the transcendent is no longer capable of being the “naïve” and certain view point it once was; instead, one’s belief is self-consciously only one viewpoint amongst many. (Of course, there were dissenters from the naïve certainty in transcendence in the past – Taylor mentions Epicureanism as a philosophy that denied the relevance of gods to human life – but it is only in our secular age that such an option has become not only widespread, but in many ways the default position.) Even among devout believers, there are times and spaces in life where they must eschew their belief and take on the perspective of the non-believer; or they must acknowledge that other perspectives are perfectly valid in themselves.

From my perspective, the really interesting point of this work, however, is that Taylor explicitly sets up the argument to examine and answer the question of “how did the alternatives become thinkable?” (25). In other words, how did the conditions of belief shift over time such that new possibilities that were previously impossible become thinkable? Moreover, Taylor notes that it is not a matter of simply removing some sort of religious blinder (as people like Dawkins would have us believe) which would then open our eyes to possibilities which were there all along. Rather, “secularity is the fruit of new inventions, newly constructed self-understandings and related practices” (22). It is the construction of these new practices and self-understandings and the construction of new conditions of belief that produce an assemblage in which new possibilities become thinkable and, indeed, naturalized. In this sense, secularization can even be seen as a revolution in thought, insofar as revolution involves making what was previously deemed impossible into the possible (and even the necessary). Finally, Taylor’s work holds interest to me insofar as he defines religion in terms of a belief in transcendence. The history of secularization, therefore, is the story of the emergence of immanence over time.

A number of questions are left to be answered though, as I make my way through the rest of the text. How exactly were the conditions of belief shifted over time to allow for such a perspective to become commonplace? What sorts of mechanisms does Taylor see contributing to the construction of new possibilities and alternatives for belief? And, finally, what does this analysis of shifting conditions of belief offer for our own situation – e.g. how can we shift contemporary beliefs in global capitalism and the values and social relations it entails, in order to begin thinking of something different? I hope to return to these questions as I go through the book.

UPDATE: In fact, it looks like Taylor is part of a group blog called The Immanent Frame, in which he discusses A Secular Age with a number of other academics (among other things).

Gilbert Simondon, "On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects - Part I"

2007-11-05T18:36:00.001-05:00

To all who have been patiently waiting for Simondon translations to appear, we at The Accursed Share are pleased to offer the first half of Simondon's doctoral dissertation, "On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects". (Cheers to Kieran, for being the first to find it hidden in the university library.) For those who aren't aware, Simondon was a huge influence on Deleuze, particularly in the theme of individuation that would repeat throughout Deleuze's career and in the notion of intensive systems that would be central to Deleuze's magnum opus, Difference & Repetition.

From the Introduction:
"The purpose of this study is to attempt to stimulate awareness of the significance of technical objects. Culture has become a system of defense designed to safeguard man from technics. This is the result of the assumption that technical objects contain no human reality. We should like to show that culture fails to take into account that in technical reality there is a human reality, and that, if it is fully to play its role, culture must come to terms with technical entities as part of its body of knowledge and values. Recognition of the modes of existence of technical objects must be the result of philosophic consideration; what philosophy has to achieve in this respect is analogous to what the abolition of slavery achieved in affirming the worth of the individual human being.

The opposition established between the cultural and the technical and between man and machine is wrong and has no foundation. What underlies it is mere ignorance or resentment. It uses a mask of facile humanism to blind us to a reality that is full of human striving and rich in natural forces. This reality is the world of technical objects, the mediators between man and nature."

Simondon, Gilbert, trans. Ninian Mellamphy, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. London: University of Western Ontario, 1980 [1958].

[3.2 MB PDF file]

"Is Ontology Fundamental?" A Levinasian critique of Heidegger's project of fundamental ontology.

2007-10-18T00:54:00.002-04:00

“Is Ontology Fundamental?”

This is my first blog, so I decided to start with something of special interest to me. I will give a brief exegesis of Emmanuel Levinas’ essay, “Is Ontology Fundamental?”. In this text Levinas outlines his critique of Heidegger’s project of fundamental ontology and introduces in basic terms the concept of the Other. Whereas Levinas worked with Heidegger for a short time, this paper marks Levinas’ shift away from Heidegger’s project. A major concern in Levinas’ critique is the failure to support an ethics. Levinas’ aim in his critique of Heidegger’s project is to show a relation that exceeds the bounds of the science of being (i.e., ontology).

It is perhaps helpful for some who have not had a proper introduction to Heidegger that I give a few words on the theme of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. This is by no means a ‘proper’ introduction, and I recommend you sit down with some Heidegger and try it out to get the best understanding. In Being and Time, Heidegger addresses the question of the meaning of being. In doing so, he argues that Dasein’s (i.e., the human way of being, human being; being there, and there being.) understanding of being (i.e., ontology) is the condition of the possibility of existence.

Through the authentic understanding of being as such and in general on the one hand, and on the other hand the inauthentic understanding that consists primarily in the forgetfulness of the ontological difference (between being as such and in general and beings/’entities’), one always already has a particular understanding of being. Such an understanding is, according to Heidegger, fundamental to experience and even to being itself in the Heideggerian scheme. The ontological difference can be explained by the following two statements: “The being of beings “is” itself not itself a being” (Heidegger 5); but, “being is always the being of a being” (ibid. 7).

A primary characteristic of this understanding of being is that it is not merely intellectual, but rather consists in every facet of human activity. That is, Ontology is not simply about knowing, it is about doing. Such a distinction provides a first step for Levinas’ move towards an ethics, a step that nevertheless requires a refutation of Heidegger’s ontology.

The current discussion turns away from introductory remarks about Heidegger towards Levinas’ critique.

If we think of being as constituted by the comprehension of being, as Heidegger does, then the relation with the Other, which (as it will be shown) always exceeds our comprehension, also exceeds being. Comprehension always moves from the particular to the universal. We move from the particular tree to the idea of the tree, to use the language of Plato, which in its own right does not fully reflect Heidegger’s ontology in that it posits the being of beings as a being, namely an ‘idea’. In more Heideggerian terms, we move from a being/entity to being as such and in general.

As such, comprehension always places the particular in the context and confines of a system: comprehension literally de-fines, in the most etymological sense of this word. This is a move toward totality: it sets out the bounds of experience and assumes the insurpassibility of these bounds. However, our relation with the Other always already exceeds the bounds of our totalizing ‘system’ of knowing. To know the other, distinguished from generally experiencing the other, is to reduce the other to the Same.

What then is the nature of my relation with the Other, if not a relation within my comprehension? Consider the distinction made popular by Derrida: the distinction between the naming (i.e. labeling) of an entity—and the invocation or calling out to an entity. The first assumes the entity as a direct object of my act of comprehension, my placing it within a system of signification and understanding with reference to an overarching arche. Calling out, an invocation, “priere” in French (to pray; to invoke) to some entity does not reduce that entity to a point within a referential totality.

When one names an entity, one defines it; that is, one places it within the confines of a particular definition that gains signification only within a totality of reference. This is the function of comprehension. In contrast, a calling out or invocation does not attempt to ‘possess’ or ‘consume’ the particular (read: the Other) within a totality of reference, but rather lets the entity reveal itself as it is ‘in-itself’. We cannot but have this second type of relation with the Other, since to enframe the Other in a referential totality is to reduce the Other to the Same. It is only in calling-out to the Other that we remain in relation with the Other.

Levinas calls the ‘Self’s’ (this word has its implications, not to be discussed here for the sake of brevity, but merely to be pointed out) relation with the Other “religion” (Levinas 8), which should not be understood merely in the everyday sense. Religion entails a faith in the unidentifiable that does not reduce it to a defined conception, but lets it “be” as it is. Faith is the form of non-knowing. “Religion”, therefore is a fitting term to be borrowed and applied to the Self’s relation with the Other (for more on “religion” in this sense, see Levinas’ Totality and Infinity, n.b. 40 of the cited edition).

Here we have a distinction between on the one hand a comprehension that names the Other and thus places the Other in the context of a totality, and on the other hand a relation with the other that lets the Other reveal itself as it is in-itself, that is, separate from our comprehension. The naming of the Other, insomuch as it limits the particular to a general concept, is “a partial negation that is violence” (Levinas 9). It is at the same time a taking possession of the Other, an enslavement… or at least it would be if such a relation were possible. As I stated before, such a relation is precisely not a relation with the Other, since it reduces the Other to the Same. I am unable to possess the Other in the totality of knowing. The Other infinitely exceeds my grasp.

If I could exercise complete power over the Other, I could fully negate the Other: such a negation would be nothing short of murder. However, even in murder the “Who” of the Other escapes me. The relation is no longer one with the Other in-itself, but rather a relation to an object, a thing in the world, within the horizon of my totality of knowing. Levinas says, “To be in relation with the Other face to face is to be unable to kill. It is also the situation of discourse” (9).

So to address the question that titles the paper: “Is Ontology Fundamental?” No, Levinas contests. Ontology—insofar as it is a science, a knowing, a ‘logy’—is the reduction of the Other to the Same; a reduction that always defines limits to form a referential totality. Since the Other always already exceeds the definite limits of such a totality, we cannot, after all, consider ontology fundamental.

-Joshua Blackmore

Works cited

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: SUNY, 1996.

Levinas, Emmanuel. “Is Ontology Fundamental?”. Basic Philosophical Writings. Ed. Peperzak, Adriaan T., Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996: 1-10.

---. Totality and Infinity: and Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969: n.b., 40.

Apropos John Protevi's review of 'Out of this World'.

2007-10-17T04:01:00.002-04:00

I am not in the custom of publishing my thoughts in blogs. However, since it just so happens that I typed up this semi-long response on a whim to a recent review published by John Protevi, I thought I may as well use it as an opportunity to make good on my promise a while ago to write something for the A.S. blog.
the review I'm referring to is here

below are some of my initial responses. since this is not a prepared paper, i don't provide citations. anyone who wants them, I would be happy to supply page references, let me know.

-I certainly think that the emphasis on intensive individuation contra the weak dualism of virtual/actual is a decisive element in responding to both hallward and badiou's treatment of deleuze. however, i think a potential shortcoming of Protevi's reply here lies in showing how this claim works. It seems he almost always takes the easy way out, which consists in maintaining the 'binary' and just inserting an operator between them. Consequently, this leaves him in the position of comprehending the intensive as a "mediation" (his words) between virtual and actual, or a figure of limitation at best. and that sounds a lot like this one german dude deleuze really despised...doesn't it?
So, if this approach is insufficient, what can we propose to augment it? First of all, it seems to me that showing the primacy of intensity must be carried out from the point of view of time or repetition first and foremost. This approach immediately undercuts the banal understanding of creation as something linear and successive, even if only logically linear. Now, while protevi actually isolates two of the key passages in this regard (e.g. the temporal 'divisions that intensity introduces into the Ideas'), his interpretation of them seems only to work against him, because he maintains the pure coexistence of Ideas 'prior' to their selection by individuation. Thus when he complains that this sounds too Platonic and sues for a 'shifting totality', he only ends up perpetuating the misunderstanding, which concerns the notion of totality to begin with. What do I mean here?
What I mean is that Ideas do not form a totality of coexistence by themselves. There are two claims necessary here:
a) "totality" is not understood by Deleuze as something analogous to a 'collection' or a 'group', a 'set' of some sort, albeit intrinsically defined rather than extrinsically. when deleuze proceeds to demonstrate the functional operations of the 3rd synthesis, the notion of totality has to do with the division or 'caesura' which different/ciates dimensions as such, spatial and temporal. Only within and between such dimensions, i.e. only through individuating processes, can one speak of a totality. in his reading of holderlin in chapter 2 of Diff & Rep for example, the temporal totality concerns not a collection of moments or happenings unfolding one after another and gradually gathering steam (or all coexisting in a single absolute ground or element, for that matter), rather totality is something Formal, i.e. the way in which, in dividing and changing their nature, intensities bring about a difference WITHIN the present through which past and future inhere in it. it is a totality of Dimensions, not elements. Moreover, this means that every 'totality' is finite, and cannot be infinite. (see the series on the Aion in Logic of Sense on this last claim, p.165, and consider this in light of the caesura in D&R). Now, I should also say that a large part of this is caught up in the complicated reasons involved in Deleuze's delimitation and displacement of the 2nd synthesis of time through the account of the 3rd in D&R, where nearly everything functional that was initially ascribed to the 2nd synthesis becomes ultimately carried out only through the 3rd, the latter of which is (i argue) coextensive with the process of individuation. I won't go into detail about this latter claim here, but I have written on this at length elsewhere if anyone is interested.
b) The claim that intensity forms 'one ontological region among others' for Deleuze is something i tend to cringe at. The reason is that this tends to suggest that intensities can somehow be conceived as being a 'stage on the way to being (actual)' or something, and given a respective content which would in a certain respect exist. It is certainly true that intensity bears upon a content - however, considered in itself, intensity refers to nothing other than the pure and empty form of division in nature, change in nature, a change which happens to be selective of the determinate relation between obscure and clear aspects of a multiplicity. Change is not a 'dimension' of reality... it is much more like a modus, a vitus, a power. hence if it is given too exclusive a reality, the problem is then that one has implicitly done the same for Ideas considered apart from intensities, and then no doubt defaulted to the idea of an infinite totality of coexistence again.
Lastly, returning to what I referred to as the 'banal understanding of creation' (as something linear and successive), the ultimate difficulty is that of the 'top-down' metaphors that Deleuze unfortunately used here and there, Badiou emphasized, Hallward picked up from him, and Protevi continues in his review. This always seems to me like a spatialization of a logic that is much more paradoxical in Deleuze than may initially meet the eye. Reading the Structuralism essay in Desert Islands, or certain parts of D&R, it seems occasionally (or one could at least get the impression) that the picture is that there are (virtual) 'terms', then they just get selected and are actualized. However, the meat of the concept of repetition, once brought to bear on the distinction between clear and obscure expression in DR, and carried into the time of the Event in Logic of Sense, always functions to rupture this easy picture, by problematizing the conveniently causal logic of this picture. Indeed, Deleuze even says at some point (Toscano cites this in his book if I recall correctly, see the footnotes) in a seminar on Leibniz that the virtual is not causal. so how can it move from 'pre-actual' to actual? this totally misses the point about quasi-causality, and constitutes the core of the idiocy of Zizek's reading of Deleuze (e.g. Does he fail to notice that deleuze explicitly claims that the Body without Organs is a quasi-cause, and not a cause?) I would even venture the claim that all of production in deleuze needs to be reconsidered, (in my humble opinion), through this logic of a paradoxical or quasi-causal logic. Until this is properly conceived of, the banal distinction between virtual and actual, creating and created, or cause and effect, will haunt Deleuzean studies.

Seeking Potentials

2007-10-16T22:40:00.003-04:00

One of the first and most important questions facing any immanent ontology of politics that aims at being revolutionary is the question of how to discern the potentials that exist immanently within a given situation. Such an analysis precludes all the teleological and transcendent determinations of social movement, since they exist precisely as overarching logics that determine immanence from a distance (remaining themselves untransformed by the vagaries of time). For much of contemporary philosophy, such a transcendent conception is a reversal into traditional metaphysics. Following John Mullarkey’s Post-Continental Philosophy, we can describe Deleuze, Badiou, Henry and Laruelle as thinkers of immanence. To this list we could add Žižek, who, like Badiou, seeks to discern the gaps within immanence. The problem faced by all these thinkers, on a political level, is how to determine the possibility of true revolution without, however, falling into what Daniel Bensaid has called “the miracle of the event” (TA 94). However, the tendency here, on the part of what I’m tempted to term ‘negative immanence’ (meaning those immanent philosophies which seek a disruptive void or gap in the ontological framework), is to proclaim the inauguration of the New as a complete break with the past. One can see this in much of the work surrounding Badiou (I leave it aside for now whether this position can truly be attributed to Badiou himself) and his conception of the event which eschews ‘normal’ time in order to bring about ‘historical’ time via the irruption of the pure indeterminate multiple counted as nothing. Similarly, with Žižek’s work on the radical act, there is the direct privileging of the negative moment that clears the social space as it were (the Symbolic and the Imaginary, along with any fantasies) in order to make way for something novel. (Although I have not yet read it, in the Parallax View, Žižek apparently even privileges the figure of Bartleby and his negative refusal to the point of arguing for a perpetual refusal.) In both Badiou and Žižek, therefore, there seems to be a sense that the only way to account for a truly revolutionary and immanent politics is to put forth some conception of a radical rupture at the heart of being (for Badiou, the event that breaks with the situation; for Žižek, the subject as void being the foundation of any positive order). The problem with such a radical rupture is twofold: one, it can lead to political apathy by avoiding any question of fostering the conditions for a new order to arise. By this I mean that the rupture is determined as essentially aleatory and unpredictable, and therefore incapable of being prepared for. Secondly, it tends to avoid the question of actual politics. Žižek, for his part, makes the useful distinction between the ‘administration’ of the existing order and the properly ‘political’ moment that seeks to disturb the existing framework, but still avoids any question of transforming administration into a disturbance. Badiou too, is largely quiet on the issues of actual politics. As Bensaid notes,

“When [Badiou’s] L’Organisation Politique ventures onto the terrain of practical constitutional proposals, it comes as no surprise that all it has to offer are banal reforms, such as abolishing the office of the President of the Republic (however indispensible this may be), demanding the election of a single assembly, requiring that the Prime Minister be leader of the principal parliamentary party, or recommending an electoral system that guarantees the formation of parliamentary majorities – in other words, as Hallward dryly remarks, ‘something remarkably similar to the British Constitution.’” (TA, 103)

Cheap shot? Sure. But perhaps such a lackluster political program is indicative of the fundamental incapacity of Badiou’s ontology to grasp actual, existing politics (although, Logiques des Mondes attempts to correct this). Insofar as Being & Event, and even the more political works like Metapolitics, present a formal ontological theory, they seem unable to determine how these ontological dynamics are played out in everyday life. Related, therefore, to the two problems we noted, is the fact that it is not clear what we – as theorists or activists – should do to change things. Žižek famously denounces such an idea, claiming that he wishes merely to play the role of the analyst and act, for us, as the subject-supposed-to-know. It is not for him to determine what we should do, but rather for us to use his analyst position to traverse our own fantasies and realize the self-relating negativity that we are (a “mere piece of shit” (TS 157) as Žižek concisely puts it).

The alternative to such a negative immanence is therefore to approach the problem from a more Deleuzian perspective, via a positive immanence that strips negativity of any foundational status. Rather, ontology is immediately a becoming, a constant individuation premised upon intensive systems composed of a continually changing set of heterogeneous elements that differentially determine each other. Beyond the actualized, identifiable elements of our situation there exists unactualized, yet real potentials exerting force on the dynamics of the actual. The problem of revolutionary change becomes not a matter of seeking evental sites and immanent ruptures, but rather of discerning the productivity of the potentials immanent to the real sociohistorical situation we live in. In this regard, Deleuze is more in line with Marx and with Negri and Hardt. In both of those cases, the authors examine their concrete circumstances to discern real tendencies in being in order to make predictions on potential outcomes, and – significantly – to offer real political programs that actually effect change. In his introduction to Capital, Vol 1, Ernest Mandel notes that whatever the validity of any of Marx’s theories, his long-term predictions were amazingly prescient:

“the laws of accumulation of capital, stepped-up technological progress, accelerated increase in the productivity and intensity of labour, growing concentration and centralization of capital, transformation of the great majority of economically active people into sellers of labour-power, declining rate of profit, increased rate of surplus value, periodically recurrent recessions, inevitable class struggle between Capital and Labour, increasing revolutionary attempts to overthrow capitalism – have been so strikingly confirmed by history.” (C 23)

As modern-day Marxists, Negri and Hardt’s work too is essentially a matter of discerning potentials and predicting possible and likely outcomes. “The key is to grasp the direction of the present, to read which seeds will grow and which wither.” (M 141) (And here, I would mention to my friend Kieran, there is perhaps a chance to combine your analysis of the caesura of the present with an explicitly political approach. It seems like an interesting possibility at least.) The oft-cited critique of Negri and Hardt – that they are too optimistic – is (in my mind) correct, but misses the essential method employed by them. Within the given global, biopolitical regime, and the increasingly hegemonic status of immaterial labour, they discern the potentials and the tendencies of an emergent democratic subject in the form of the multitude. The level of the problem is not so much their optimism, since they are careful to qualify their enthusiasm for this potential by repeatedly stating that many factors stand in the way of its actualization. Rather we must critique their method, since it is the method which is responsible for discerning that such a tendency exists. We return, therefore, to our original problem: if Hardt and Negri are wrong in their assessment, it must (in part) be carried out by examining the method they use to extract the various tendencies and potentials in the world. The question is, and I’m left without an answer for the moment, can there be a rigorous method of seeking potentials? It is necessarily an immanent and hence constantly rejuvenated method, but when Deleuze and Guattari speak of ‘indices’ in Anti-Oedipus (e.g. A-O 350-3), it seems that they have in mind precisely such a method. Similarly, Deleuze’s work on Nietzsche brings up the question of a “symptomatology” which sees that a “phenomenon is not an appearance or even an apparition but a [non-representational] sign, a symptom which finds its meaning in an existing force” (N 3). It is such a science of symptoms that seems to me to be key to working out a revolutionary politics that truly faces up to immanence.

References:
Bensaid, Daniel. [TA] “Alain Badiou and the Miracle of the Event.” Think Again. ed. Peter Hallward. Continuum, 2004.

Deleuze, Gilles. [N] Nietzsche and Philosophy. The Athlone Press, 1986.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. [A-O] Anti-Oedipus. The University of Minnesota, 1983.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. [M] Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. Penguin Books, 2004.

Marx, Karl. [C] Capital, Vol. 1. Penguin Books, 1980.

Žižek, Slavoj. [TS] The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. Verso, 2000.

Translations

2007-10-04T21:16:00.000-04:00

Over at the (new-ish?) blog, Fractal Ontology, they have set up the rather immense and ambitious (and much needed) project of translating a number of important French works in to English. As it stands, they have begun work on some of Guattari, Simondon, and Pierre Boudot's texts, with the promise of more to come. Here's hoping that they can keep up with this goal!

I wish I could help with the translations, but my own French is rather poor. However, what I can offer is a translation of the first half of Simondon's "On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects" (1958). Oddly enough, my university has a self-published English translation that was completed by a PhD student in 1980. So sometime soon, I will photocopy, scan, and PDF the text so that it can be made available to more people (complete with proper citation references and all).

Also, it's been mentioned elsewhere, but it's worth repeating that Urbanomic is releasing Vol. III of their fantastic journal Collapse. This one focuses on Deleuze and also includes the transcript for the entire 'Speculative Realism' conference held in London earlier this year. All the relevant info, including short abstracts of the included essays can be found here. Orders can be placed here.

COLLAPSE Volume III
October 2007.
Paperback 115x175mm 515pp (TBC)
Limited Edition of 1000 numbered copies.
ISBN 0-9553087-2-0

THOMAS DUZER
In Memoriam: Gilles Deleuze 1925-1995
GILLES DELEUZE
Responses to a Series of Questions
ARNAUD VILLANI
'I Feel I Am A Pure Metaphysician': The Consequences of Deleuze's Remark
QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX
Subtraction and Contraction: Deleuze, Immanence and Matter and Memory
HASWELL & HECKER
Blackest Ever Black
GILLES DELEUZE
Mathesis, Science and Philosophy
JOHN SELLARS
The Truth about Chronos and Aion
ERIC ALLIEZ & JOHN-CLAUDE BONNE
Matisse-Thought and the Strict Ordering of Fauvism
MEHRDAD IRAVANIAN
Unknown Deleuze
J.-H. ROSNY THE ELDER
Another World
RAY BRASSIER, IAIN HAMILTON GRANT, GRAHAM HARMAN, QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX
Speculative Realism

Assemblage Theory, Complexity and Contentious Politics

2007-08-31T11:13:00.009-04:00

So I have finally finished my thesis for the Master's program! It's been a long time coming, but I now have a finalized copy and have completed my oral defense. I had heard from others' experiences that at a certain point I would have to just let go of it, warts and all, and I'd agree that's the case with mine. There are a few areas I would like to go back and clean up, but I'm largely happy with how it turned out. I have (hopefully!) made a few original suggestions and connections. And since the aim of writing it was to spur different lines of thought in others, I'm making it available online in the hopes that others can gain some benefit from it. So, feel free to download a copy:

"Assemblage Theory, Complexity and Contentious Politics"
[Warning: 354kb PDF file]

If anyone should find something useful in here and wish to use it in their own work, I only ask that you provide a proper reference.

Srnicek, Nick. (2007). Assemblage Theory, Complexity and Contentious Politics: The Political Ontology of Gilles Deleuze. Unpublished master's thesis, University of Western Ontario.

From the abstract:

The purpose of this thesis is to reconsider the nature of ontology in contemporary political science, with the belief that such a move can be of great benefit to understanding changes in our era of globalization and terrorism. This is accomplished by examining the ontologies of both social constructivism and critical realism in order to show their reliance upon illegitimate presuppositions, and then developing a novel ontological position on the basis of these criticisms.

Gilles Deleuze’s concept of assemblages – and his ontology, more generally – are examined as particularly powerful ways to conceptualize the complexity, dynamism and differences that are inherent to the political world. This is brought out concretely in a study of recent academic work on contentious politics in order to show the centrality of conflict and difference to politics, and to show the power of a reconceptualization of ontology.

Marketing Ploy!

2007-07-07T19:05:00.000-04:00

Spurred on by John Protevi's enthusiastic description of an upcoming book, I was struck by the number of intriguing and potentially important books that are coming out in the next little while. Of course, my idea of what's intriguing is centered around ontology, but it's always interesting to see novel positions being developed. Anyways, in no particular order, here's a list of some books I'm excited for (and feel free to add your own in the comments):

Lee Braver, "A Thing of this World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism"

"At a time when the analytic/continental split dominates contemporary philosophy, this ambitious work offers a careful and clear-minded way to bridge that divide. Combining conceptual rigor and clarity of prose with historical erudition, A Thing of This World shows how one of the standard issues of analytic philosophy--realism and anti-realism--has also been at the heart of continental philosophy. Using a framework derived from prominent analytic thinkers, Lee Braver traces the roots of anti-realism to Kant's idea that the mind actively organizes experience. He then shows in depth and in detail how this idea evolves through the works of Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida. This narrative presents an illuminating account of the history of continental philosophy by explaining how these thinkers build on each other's attempts to develop new concepts of reality and truth in the wake of the rejection of realism. Braver demonstrates that the analytic and continental traditions have been discussing the same issues, albeit with different vocabularies, interests, and approaches. By developing a commensurate vocabulary, his book promotes a dialogue between the two branches of philosophy in which each can begin to learn from the other."

Ray Brassier, "Nihil Unbound"

"Where much contemporary philosophy seeks to stave off the "threat" of nihilism by safeguarding the experience of meaning--characterized as the defining feature of human existence--from the Enlightenment logic of disenchantment, this book attempts to push nihilism to its ultimate conclusion by forging a link between revisionary naturalism in Anglo-American philosophy and anti-phenomenological realism in recent French philosophy. Contrary to an emerging "post-analytic" consensus which would bridge the analytic-continental divide by uniting Heidegger and Wittgenstein against the twin perils of scientism and skepticism, this book short-circuits both traditions by plugging eliminative materialism directly into speculative realism."

Levi Bryant, "Difference & Givenness: Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence"

"From one end of his philosophical work to the other, Gilles Deleuze consistently described his position as a transcendental empiricism. But just what is transcendental about Deleuze's transcendental empiricism? And how does his position fit with the traditional empiricism articulated by Hume? In Difference and Givenness, Levi Bryant addresses these long-neglected questions so critical to an understanding of Deleuze's thinking. Through a close examination of Deleuze's independent work--focusing especially on Difference and Repetition--as well as his engagement with thinkers such as Kant, Maimon, Bergson, and Simondon, Bryant sets out to unearth Deleuze's transcendental empiricism and to show how it differs from transcendental idealism, absolute idealism, and traditional empiricism. What emerges from these efforts is a metaphysics that strives to articulate the conditions for real existence, capable of accounting for the individual itself without falling into conceptual or essentialist abstraction. In Bryant's analysis, Deleuze's metaphysics articulates an account of being as process or creative individuation based on difference, as well as a challenging critique--and explanation--of essentialist substance ontologies. A clear and powerful discussion of how Deleuze's project relates to two of the most influential strains in the history of philosophy, this book will prove essential to anyone seeking to understand Deleuze's thought and its specific contribution to metaphysics and epistemology."

Adrian Johnston, "Zizek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity"

"Slavoj Zizek is one of the most interesting and important philosophers working today, known chiefly for his theoretical explorations of popular culture and contemporary politics. This book focuses on the generally neglected and often overshadowed philosophical core of Zizek's work--an essential component in any true appreciation of this unique thinker's accomplishment. His central concern, Zizek has proclaimed, is to use psychoanalysis (especially the teachings of Jacques Lacan) to redeploy the insights of late-modern German philosophy, in particular, the thought of Kant, Schelling, and Hegel. By taking this avowal seriously, Adrian Johnston finally clarifies the philosophical project underlying Zizek's efforts. His book charts the interlinked ontology and theory of subjectivity constructed by Zizek at the intersection of German idealism and Lacanian theory. Johnston also uses Zizek's combination of philosophy and psychoanalysis to address two perennial philosophical problems: the relationship of mind and body, and the nature of human freedom. By bringing together the past two centuries of European philosophy, psychoanalytic metapsychology, and cutting-edge work in the natural sciences, Johnston develops a transcendental materialist theory of subjectivity--in short, an account of how more-than-material forms of subjectivity can emerge from a corporeal being. His work shows how an engagement with Zizek's philosophy can produce compelling answers to today's most vexing and urgent questions as inherited from the history of ideas."

Keith Robinson, "Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson: Rhizomatic Connections"

Unfortunately, no info on this one yet...