Notes On Ecology and Philosophy

1) No easy coherence between already-existing philosophies and the ecological question. Marxism and ecology. Ontology and ecology. Psychoanalysis and ecology. Vitalism and ecology. Epistemology and ecology. Theology and ecology. The general trend is to squeeze the latter into the former, show how it’s always been so, etc.

2) Liberationist philosophy (whether Christian theology, Marxism, or neoliberalism) has tended to emphasize what have been called “acts of commission,” as opposed to “acts of omission”: that is, oppression, warfare, sin. The spectre of ecological crisis is one in which, regardless of human goodness or evil, regardless of whether greed is good or bad, things have been pushed too far, and they will snap.

3) Relativism is not an ontology (e.g., “It’s turtles all the way down”). Quantum physics is not social theory.

4) There is stupidity. There are wrong answers. Are there right answers? There are less-wrong answers.

5) Knowledge production is necessary for finding solutions. Knowledge production has (very large) material needs. These two facts will always be in conflict.

6) Scarcity needs to be thought, but we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. This is dangerous ground, though, and rationalization/ideology abounds.

7) There is something important expressed in Kant’s Third Formulation of the Categorical Imperative: “Every rational being must so act as if he were through his maxim always a legislating member in the universal kingdom of ends.” Don’t reify it, though.

8 No matter how bad a problem gets, one can always make things worse. This expression, however, can be formalized, and all iterations are true (No matter how much P, there can always be Q -> not-P, not-Q; P, not-Q; not-P, Q).

9) A theory of hegemony takes precedence over a theory of the State.

10) There are three sins: fraud, cynicism and hypocrisy. Fraud is by far the worst.

11) The weight of sheer numbers.

Mad Men, S4 Ep 12-13 Review

If an office in a TV show has mass layoffs, the actors and many of the support staff for those actors have also just lost their jobs.

Equation

Althusser = (Gramsci + Foucault) – (Historical Research + Nuance)

The cultural turn

Haven’t we had “cultural turns” before? The Renaissance, Romanticism, High Modernism, The Progressive Era, “The 60′s”. Any period in which culture comes to play a direct role in politics and vice versa amounts to a cultural turn. Intellectuals begin imagining a new world replete with new social forms and new ways of thinking. Gaps are bridged between disciplines; confusion about what constitutes what. At the end, there are lamentations about the breaking down of the social order. Reformation, Disraelism/Victorianism, Fascism, McCarthyism, the Reagan Revolution…

Food for thought

I may think about this and respond/comment at some point, but for now I simply want to put it out there:

“Man as individual and man as mass. The Latin proverb ‘Senatores boni viri, senatus mala bestia’ has become a platitude.  What is the meaning of this proverb, and what meaning has it acquired?  That a crowd of people governed by immediate interests or gripped by a passion stirred by the impressions of the moment, acritically transmitted from one person to the next, unites around the worst collective decision, reflecting the lowest animal instincts.  The observation is valid and realistic insofar as it refers to the kind of crowd that forms by chance, such as when a crowd gathers under a roof during a downpour; these are crowds composed of people who are not bound together by a burden of responsibility toward other people or groups of people or toward a concrete economic reality whose collapse would result in disaster for individuals.  One could say, then, that in such crowds individualism is not transcended and, worse, it is exacerbated by the certainty of impunity and the absence of responsibility.

“Nevertheless, it is also commonly observed that an ‘orderly’ assembly of quarrelsome and unruly individuals unites around collective decisions that are superior to those of the average individual: quantity becomes quality.  If it were not so, it would be impossible to have an army, and the same can be said, for example, fo the incredibly sacrifices that well-disciplined groups of people are able to make on certain occasions when their sense of social responsibility is strongly aroused by the immediate sense of common danger and the future seems more important than the present.  One may look, by way of illustration, at an open-air rally which is different from a meeting behind closed doors, or a trade union meeting and so on.  A meeting of the officers of the general staff would be quite different from an assembly of the soldiers of a platoon, etc.

“The tendency toward conformity in the contemporary world is more widespread and deeper than in the past; the standardizaiton of ways of thinking and of behavior extends across nations and even continents.  The economicbase of collective man: big factories, Taylorization, rationalization, etc.  But did collective man exist in the past?  He existed, as Mihcels would say, under the form of charismatic leadership.  In other words, a collective will was attained under the impetus and direct influence of a ‘here,’ of a paradigmatic individual, but this collective will was produced by extraneous factors and once formed would disintegrate, repeatedly.  Today, by contrast, collective man is formed essentially from the bottom up, on the basis of the position that the collectivity occupies in the world of production [this was written in the 1930s; we now have to come to terms with offices, cubicles, apartments, television, the Internet, automobiles...  the machinery of de-socialization or disaggregated socialization].  The paradigmatic individual still has a role in the formation of collective man, but it is a greatly diminished role, so much so that he could disappear without the collective cement disintegrating or the structure collapsing.

“It is said that ‘Western scientists maintain that the psyche of the masses is nothing other than the resurgence of the old instincts of the primordial horde and is therefore a regression to stages of culture that have long been surpassed.’  this must be taken to refer to so-called crowd psychology, that is, the psychology of crowds that are formed by chance; it is a pseudoscientific assertion rooted in positivist sociology.

“Apropos of social ‘conformism,’ it should be noted that the question is not new and that the alarm sounded by certain intellectuals is simply comical.  Conformism has always existed; today, there is a struggle between ‘two conformisms,’ that is, a struggle for hegemony, and a crisis of civil society.  The old intellectual and moral leaders of society feel the ground giving way under tehir feet.  They are aware that their sermons have become, precisely, ‘sermons,’ namely, things that are removed from the real world, pure form devoid of content, hollow shells; hence their despair, their reactionary and conservative tendencies.   Since the particular form of civiliation, culture, morality that they have represented is decomposing, they shriek at the death of all civilizaiton, of all culture, of all morality, and they demand that the state take repressive measures, or, secluded form the real process of history, they constitute themselves into groups of resistance and by so doing prolong the crisis, since the demise of a way of living and thinking cannot take place without a crisis.  On the other hand, the representatives of the new order now in gestation, full of ‘rationalistic’ hatred for the old, are disseminating utopias and crackpot schemes.  What is the reference point of the new world in gestation?  The world of production, labor.  The maximum degree of utilitarianism must inform every analysis of the moral and intellectual institutions to be created and of the principles to be disseminated; collective and individual life must be organized to maximize the yield of the productive apparatus.  The development of economic forces on new foundations and the progressive establishment of the new structure will heal the inevitable contradictions and, having created a new ‘conformism’ from below, will allow new possibilities for self-discipline – that is, new possibilities for freedom, including individual freedom.”

- Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Notebook 7, §12 (Prison Notebooks Volume III, Edited and translated by Joseph A. Buttigieg, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007)

A quick note on the inevitability of the same damn arguments

Reading Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, one comes across the same debates going on in Gramsci’s time as are currently going on today. Not only are the debates identical in theme, they are the same down to the positions taken and the points made. The vocabulary is different, but that’s the extent of it. For example, Gramsci rails against literati who view “the people” as a pure abstraction: “And in the meantime they do nothing but devise tricks for winning the electoral majority.” He discusses the complaints about two cultures in Britain: “Guido Ferrando analyzes the changes that are taking place in British culture: ‘In England there is an increasing swing toward a technical and scientific form of culture to the detriment of humanistic culture. In England, until the last century… the best schools set as their highest educational goal the formation of gentlemen.” Certainly, Gramsci inspired some of these debates, such as those over organic intellectuals, but others, like the anxiety of intellectuals who want to connect to the people, was not Gramsci’s coinage and has been a regular facet of the modern world. That’s not to say that there are no differences between now and then. Just that there aren’t a lot of new ideas.

Political Speech

“Critical” analysis of political speech should always operate under the following assumption: the purpose of all political speech (with the exception of political speeches made when a candidate leaves office, assuming that candidate isn’t trying to obtain a higher office) is to either advance a program or to advance a candidate.  Everything else is subordinate to these two goals.  (We should apply a different principle to demagogues like Glenn Beck.  For them, everything that comes into their heads is rendered into speech.  While they may have certain goals that they don’t explicitly state, it is safe to say that they have no clear plans for the execution of those goals, which are often apocalyptic in nature.  Here, the more important task would be to connect a Glenn Beck to a Rupert Murdoch [Stentorello to Machiavelli, as Gramsci said] and to try to decipher the aims of the latter through the actions of the former.)

This subordination of message to goals renders “deconstruction” of political speech a bit naive.  To show that the principals undergirding a public statement are, in themselves, contradictory or have an irrational core completely ignores why public speeches are made and how they work.  For example, public anger at the failure of Bush’s excuses for the Iraq war should be countered with the self-critical realization that what matters is not Bush’s excuses, but the two facts that 1) we went to war; and 2) if we look for the actual reasons for war, they are under our noses (oil, Iran, bailing out the defense industry).  Smiling smugly and stating, “Bush says that we went to war over WMD’s, but I know he’s lying,” will not do.  After all, this should be our principle assumption, and all of our analysis should follow from this assumption.  Journalists, committees, etc., can help, of course, by unpacking a lie, but by the time they have done so, things have moved far beyond that state of affairs.

We should treat the withdrawal from Iraq and Obama’s accompanying speech according to a similar principle.  Rather than deconstructing the hypocrisy of talk about “freedom,” “American values,” etc., or making that classical deconstructionist move of assuming that the speaker believes in these values and then proceeding to show how they have an irrational core, we should treat such aspects of speech as what they are: formal flourishes that may or may not have any importance for the speaker, but certainly have importance for certain target audiences.  Bush knows perfectly well that we went to war because the Middle East is a central strategic area for world politics at this moment, that oil is the most important resource in the world, that Enron and certain other right-wing entities were desperate to ramp up military spending after a lull in the Clinton years, and that opposition to Iranian regional hegemony has been one of Washington’s number one priorities since the Iranian Revolution.  Anybody who wants to understand what happened should start there, and not with the sounding board of “freedom,” “American values,” and WMDs.  We should deny ourselves the smug satisfaction of pointing to the hypocrisy of using terms like “freedom” to wage a war.  After all, “freedom” was simply a bribe aimed at the more idealistic members of Bush’s audience.  (We could talk about Bush’s Christian anti-Islamism, but I have my doubts about the degree of influence this had on the war, given Bush’s closeness to the Saudi Royal Family.  They probably had more say in this than any Methodist preachers.)  Political speeches may tell us certain things: what kinds of values are operative in a given social moment, how publics are addressed, how political figures secure agreement.  They do not, however, tell us anything important about the motivations behind political actions or the philosophies undergirding an administration, and to treat them as doing so misses the point.

Spam

I was just browsing through my dashboard, and I found out that 87 spam messages have been deleted from my account. I hope these all actually were spam and not real messages. If you tried to post something and it never appeared, I apologize. Unfortunately, these messages are irretrievable because I let them go for too long.

Insurgent Summer Part I, First Letters

I’m participating in the Insurgent Summer project (main website here; discussion board and sign-up here), reading Fredy Perlman’s Letters of Insurgents, his 800-page novel, made up of letters between two anarchist, eastern European workers, Yarostan Vochek and Sophie Nachalo, many years after a failed revolution in which they both took part.  Not being an avowed anarchist, I think this should be an engaging and sometimes frustrating endeavor.

The first thing that I want to talk about is a certain mode of writing, which is not, properly speaking, a genre – it doesn’t garner enough readers – but which has appeared in a number of books, mostly written after 1970, and which we might tentatively call “Resistance Books.”  Resistance Books are books, written after the wave of worldwide insurgency and resistance that took place in the sixties and seventies, reflecting on collectivity, organization, and social utopias.  They tend to have a couple of features in common: melancholic undertones that nevertheless emphasize hope, a focus on collectivity and the workings of groups rather than on individuals and individual suffering, and the staging of encounters (often in the form of heated debates) between people working together or who have worked together toward a common goal, that is, a framing of debates on the left through the form of dialogue (and often a deliberate exclusion of the voices from the right).  I have really only encountered three such books: Peter Weiss’ Aesthetics of Resistance, Albert Meister’s (aka Gustave Affeulpin) The So-Called Utopia of the Centre Beaubourg, and Letters of Insurgents.  I am sure there are many more, but it is not a genre that finds itself readily embraced by a reading public, and the instances of it are difficult to locate (any help on this would be very appreciated).

These books are distinguished from other left-wing novels.  The novels of class suffering (think Theodor Dreiser) tend to be tragedies; the early 20th century paeans to revolution tend to imagine victory at every turn (or victory sublimated through the continuing revolution).  They may include tragedy (the failure of the revolution, the triumph of Fascism in Europe, the disbanding of the collective), and they may include hopeful optimism (the future as utopia), but they do not land squarely in one camp.  The mode of exegesis is not plot development and action, but rather, the continuous questioning of collectives in the form of dialogue.  The revolution is not guaranteed, but it is also not buried.

I hope to say more about the specifics of Letters of Insurgents as the summer progresses, but I will leave you with this for now.  I will perhaps direct some of my other questions to the forum.

A Controversial Post

Now, I know that many of you are going to get angry with me and say that I’m a liar or betraying my ideals, but hear me out.  I know this is not what most people want to hear, but I feel that I should be honest.  I am taking a contrarian position, but doing so in a sensible tone that appears to run a middle ground between two extremes, which I will portray as angry, unthinking emotion-based rants, whereas my rants are rational, calculated, and deliberative.  I am rational.  I think through my arguments, even if I don’t actually test their implications.  They may not have any relation to the outside world, but in and of themselves, they are thoroughly coherent.  I speak a very rational language, the language of,”This is why everyone else is hysterical, and why I’m reasoned and methodical.”  You may not believe me at first, but that is because you’re committed to a delusional, utopian worldview, and you are not grounded in the real world like I am.

Now that I’ve made my controversial statement, I am going to back it up with broad generalizations and veiled attacks on the character of the emotion-based, hysterical people, that is, everybody who is not like me.  I am going to take anecdotes and read them as indicative of a whole swath of ideas and opinions.  I am going to take quotes out of context and cite them as proof that everyone of a certain persuasion feels that way.  I am going to pretend that everyone of sense agrees with the claims that I put forth as self-evident.  All in order to convince you that my controversial idea – which started, I now must admit to you, as a bon mot and then got out of hand, as I tried to prove it – is right, indeed, should not be as controversial as it is.

Is my idea controversial?  Probably not.  In fact, I know it’s not controversial, because it’s the very same idea that has been recycled through the press repeatedly for several months, but I came up with a new metaphor, and so I will parade it as my new and controversial idea.  Is my idea intelligent?  Does it bear any relation to the situation that I am trying to discuss?  Does it matter?

Do I know anything about the subject on which I’m commenting?  Not really.  But I have read a handful of articles on it, and I think that my position offers a way of thinking about it that no one has offered before.  Why do I think this?  Because, in reading a handful of articles on the subject, it is clear to me that I’m the only person who has stated this idea explicitly.  I will give you facts and figures, because I took a statistics class in high school and know how pie charts and tables work.  Are these facts and figures correct?  Who cares, because somebody took the time to collect them and publish them, and I disclaim all responsibility at this point.  Scientists say it is true, and therefore I can claim an authority greater than myself.  Never mind that claims about population or lifespan from two thousand years ago are incredibly difficult to verify, I will treat them as though they are absolutes.  Never mind that two surveys arrive at opposite conclusions, I will take the one that strikes me as most practical.

Now, you may be mad at me at this point, but clearly this is the fault of your ideology.  If only you were objective like myself, you could free yourself of these silly superstitions.  I will now proceed to give broad policy recommendations to activists, because they clearly don’t understand how politics works, unlike myself.  Am I a politician?  No.  Have I worked in politics?  No, although I did do phone banking for a prominent politician in the last elections.  And I have talked to politicians, and they have made broad generalizations that I will here repeat out of context.  This is why you should listen to me; I don’t know what kinds of conversations have gone on in private among your groups, and I don’t care.  I don’t even care if you have already thought through and dismissed the very conclusion that I am offering.  I’m smug and self-righteous, and I don’t need to care.  That’s why you should listen to me.