p2p-Democratization

Whenever "consent" arises from misinformation or duress it is in my view vacuous, a rationale for exploitation and abuse. The scene of consent is rendered substantial by formal legal-citizenship-status, equal recourse to the law, access to collective bargaining, access to education and reliable information, access to social services, healthcare, housing, income. Declaring market outcomes "consensual" by fiat, whatever the terms of misinformation and inequity that may duress them in fact, as market libertarians tend to do, scarcely does justice to the notion of consent in my view.

The planetary precariat -- illegal immigrants, temporary and informal workers, insecure indebted citizens in neoliberal post-welfare states, dwellers in peri-urban slums and refugee camps are profoundly limited in their capacity to engage in acts of consent.

The struggles for democratization (ensuring that ever more people have ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them) and for consensualization (ensuring that the scene of consent is ever more informed and nonduressed) together drive the interminable struggle for equity-in-diversity on which the figure of the peer, the planetary successor to the nation-state's citizen-subject in my view, depends for her legibility and force in the world.

What I am stressing is that the political legitimacy of the democratic state -- that is to say, the normative-institutional order that justifies its existence by reference to the standard of equity-in-diversity, by providing nonviolent alternatives for the adjudication of disputes (including, crucially, disputes as to what qualifies as violence in the first place) and by providing for a legible scene of reliably informed, nonduressed consent (by means of a suite of legal and welfare administration) -- derives from a profoundly different set of standards than the ones that are typically discussed by p2p-new media theorists, even the ones who focus on questions of governance and impacts of digital networks on state institutions.

I regard as indispensable, say, Clay Shirky's discussion of the way digital networks have flooded subcultures with suboptimal but satisfactory free content and so undermined the gatekeeper-credentializing role through which capital has rationalized hitherto its role as censor, or his discussion of the way digital networks have flooded organizations with amateur innovation and so undermined the investment in professionalism through which capital has rationalized hitherto its central-hierarchical control of institutions. However, I disapprove the way in which such insights are taken up and glibly misapplied via spontaneist-anarchist-market libertarian figurations to political phenomena.

Take the first insight. Subculture is a moral concept (moral, from mores, yields an identification that depends on dis-identification with a constitutive outside for sense, the "they" excluded from the moral "we"), whereas culture is an ethical concept (ethics, from ethos, yields a formal-universality that solicits identification putatively indifferent to differences, substantiated against the grain of moral intuitions, via strategic recourse to, say, posterity, the good opinion of mankind, government of laws and not men, the principle of nonviolence, universal declarations of human rights, and the like): And hence the emancipatory undermining of gatekeeper-censors standing between people and their subcultural enjoyments and parasitically skimming rents for the privilege is a desirable state of affairs. However, it cannot scale from subculture to culture to provide a route through which to "smash the state" tasked with maintaining a democratically accountable rule of law or administering the services on which a legible scene of consent depends. It is usually only a prior investment in the false and facile figure of spontaneous order that provokes such misreadings in the first place.

Similarly, take the second insight. The maintenance of the legal order and administration of services on which the scene of consent depends in democratically-identified societies is legitimated by recourse to equity-in-diversity and not simply to profitability: And hence the emancipatory undermining of investor-professionals limiting consumers in their affordable enjoyments in order to profitably maintain the unwieldy organizations through which such goods are provided is a desirable state of affairs. However, it cannot extend to those governmental organization tasked with establishing justice, ensuring domestic tranquility, providing for common defense, and promoting general welfare not competitively but for all, not in order to return a profit but by the consent of the governed.

Given the vulnerability to abuse that obviously inheres in the investment of any parochial worldly actors or institutions with ethical mandates, endlessly many institutional experiments have been devised to ameliorate these risks, from horizontal separation of powers and vertical subsidiarity, to jury trials, to declarations of inviolable rights, to extensions of the franchise, to extensions of welfare entitlements, to subsidization of citizen participation in government.

I regard the p2p-democratization of broadcast-media, of political parties and of organized labor as extraordinary and encouraging developments, but it is important not to misread these developments as providing a route through which eventually "to smash the state," rather than as experiments like the preceding, to ameliorate vulnerabilities to worldly corruption and abuse inhering in the formal universality of the State, by further democratizing participation in that State and by rendering the State ever more accountable to the substantial consent of the governed. Like the widening of the franchise, like the expansion of access to reliable knowledge and welfare entitlements to better ensure the scene of consent is more informed and less duressed, like the rendering of organized labor and political parties more responsive to their members, none of these efforts are properly understood as a shrinking or limiting of the state but a strengthening of the democratic state of, by, and for the people. These struggles, and the work of p2p-democratization is of a piece with these, indeed p2p-democratization is indispensable to some of these very struggles themselves, is work to democratize the state, not in the least to smash it.

If the rights of minorities can be denied by the vote of a majority, there are no rights. If individuals can consent to violation or enslavement there is no consent. If functionaries can lie or mislead with impunity there is no possibility of contract, promise, or forgiveness. Equity-in-diversity legitimates governments which derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, whereas profitability under conditions of competition simply yields optimal instrumental outcomes. This is not to denigrate improvements arising from competition but just to insist on the actually substantial difference in kind between ethical categories like justice and legitimacy as against categories like profitability, competitiveness, optimization, to insist on the difference in kind between freedom as against the amplification of instrumental capacitation.

Education, agitation, and organization facilitated by p2p-formations are efforts to reform and better administer the apparatus of the democratic state, not intimations of "spontaneous order" except for those who have a prior investment in such figures.

I propose these formulations to encourage a more useful discussion in this moment, one that does not re-enact the usual joyless ritual of arguments with market libertarians who believe it is wholesome to let "markets decide" outcomes despite the fact that markets are artifacts whose historical forms are determined by human decisions, not trans-historical tidal forces of supply and demand which, alas, radically under-determine the contingent legal structure of commerce and production from polity to polity, from epoch to epoch, nor by primordial predilections for barter elevated to the neglect of no less primordial predilections to mutual-aid, fair-dealing, and sharing.

I propose that finding our way to a better understanding of the civitas without which we cannot find our way to justice nor experience true freedom, as well as the possibilities inhering in emerging p2p-formations for the facilitation and frustration of that civitas is a useful thing for at least some of us to be doing right about now, especially those of us whose temperament and training lends itself to this sort of thing.

Consensual Prosthetic Self-Determination and Progressive Democratization

I just want to repeat a paragraph from a recent post of mine decrying the tendencies to eugenicism in too much futurological discourse -- whether the prevailing neoliberal/neoconservative corporate-militarist global developmental discourse of incumbent interests and their technocrats, or the condensed reductio of that mainstream discourse, the superlative futurology of the transhumanists, digital-utopians, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, megascale geoengineers, extropians, and nano-cornucopiasts I deride here so often as Robot Cultists. The paragraph I want to reiterate is a more positive and programmatic one to which I want to append at its end a further rather expansive elaboration concerning the relation of the notion of consent to properly progressive and democratic politics more generally.

As I remarked in the prior post, I advocate a politics of consensual prosthetic self-determination, which I take to be the usual pro-Choice politics, elaborated to include both the right of all women to end their unwanted pregnancies safely as well as to facilitate wanted ones through assistive reproductive techniques, and elaborated further to include a host of familiar civil libertarian positions on biomedical and lifeway issues concerning the self-determination of end-of-life conditions, informed consensual comparatively harmless recreational drug use, consensual body modification (cosmetic procedures, sexual reassignments, body modifications like tattoos and piercings and so on), and elaborated further still in the context of actually emerging genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive interventions to affirm and protect the choices of sane competent adult citizens either to make recourse to or refrain from entering into emerging therapeutic regimes, whether they are normalizing or not, even when their eventual and combinatorial effects are imperfectly understood (as is usually the case after all), so long as participation is not under duress (where "duress" marks force, the threat of force, but also precarity: insecure legal status, the pressure of poverty, and the disruptions of war, pandemic, or catastrophic climate change), the decision to participate is informed (not compromised by fraud, secrecy, or misinformation), and the regime is regulated, transparent, and accountable. To this, let me add that inasmuch as all culture is best-understood as prosthetic in my view, consensual prosthetic self-determination connects up as well to the politics of free expression and association, including deployments of style as performances of subcultural identification, dis-identification, and negotiation.

Just as the scene of consent -- actually informed, actually nonduressed consent, mind you (where "informed" is not measured against the impossibility of omniscience, where "nonduressed" is not measured against the impossibility of omnipotence) -- provides the ground on the basis of which I navigate the interminable (and often productive) tension in democratic politics between the values of equity and diversity, so too consent negotiates the customary tension between individual and collective: Individual self-determination depends on consent, while the achievement and maintenance of the scene of consent is a collective project, peer-to-peer.

Notice that a democratic politics devoted to consent does not properly provoke a commitment to anarchy. This is so since, just as a consistent commitment to nonviolence compels the advocacy of a democratic state tasked with providing institutional alternatives to the violent adjudication of disputes, a consistent commitment to consent compels advocacy of a democratic state tasked with the administration of equitable justice and welfare and access to reliable knowledge to ensure that the scene of consent it actually informed and nonduressed and hence substantiated rather than a vacuous formalism. And of course, to the extent that consent is legible, it enables the "consent of the governed" that legitimates the state as democratic in the first place, as does the (ill-understood, much maligned, but in fact definitive) connection in democratic governance of the taxation without which government cannot function to representation (all citizens can vote for and against current office-holders as well as stand for office themselves).

In my view, consent also provides the key to a progressive politics that is properly compatible with a commitment to democratic politics. To be devoted to democracy is usually to be progressive as well, of course -- since actual democratization remains so partially and imperfectly realized in the present this is only to be expected as an empirical matter -- and yet the usual glib identification of progressive and democratic politics yields much mischief in my view. Democracy is the idea that people should have a real say in the public decisions that affect them, and the progressive politics of democratization is the one in which we work to ensure that ever more people have ever more of a real say in the public decisions that affect them.

The actual play of diverse lifeways and the public reconciliation of the aspirations of the diversity of stakeholders to the costs, risks, and benefits of historical change, peer to peer, that is to say the actual substance of democratic politics is unpredictable, interminable, and, therefore, strictly speaking, non-progressive. That is to say, freedom isn't going anywhere, it isn't progressing toward some destination or end: It is open, promising, threatening, problematic, ideally interminably ongoing.

And so, it seems to me that for democratically-minded people progressive politics, properly understood, should be progressing toward the achievement of an actually-legible actually-substantive scene of consent. Else, all too often, "progress" is either naturalized into a "faith in progress" that tends to function as self-congratulatory apologia for privileges that derive from exploitation, or is superlativized into a denialism about limits couched in terms of endless aspiration that tends to facilitate the deferment and externalization of costs and risks onto the vulnerable to the benefit of the privileged. That is to say, any commitment to progress that is not progress toward the accomplishment of the society of informed, nonduressed consent, will tend to be a conservative retro-futurism figuring "progress" always only as the amplification of the terms of imcumbent privilege.

Why I Am Still Not An Anarchist (Or Am I?)

Another post upgraded and adapted from the Moot. Upon discovering that I am trained in nonviolence and teach courses at Cal on violence and nonviolence, libertopian Kent has declared me possibly "halfway to libertarianism" because of my commitment to the "non-initiation of force" which he presumes he shares with me and which he fancies is somehow expressed in his own devotion to the exploitation, violence, fraud, and environmental destruction of "free market" orders.

This is what I had to say to him about that:

If by "libertarian," Kent, you mean "anarcho-capitalist," you couldn't be more wrong. If you mean by it something more like Ian -- who raised the first objections in this thread -- you probably wouldn't be too far wrong.

I'm a sort of democratic socialist, I guess.

The fact is I have no problem with private ownership or well-regulated market exchange, especially the more this ownership and enterprise occurs [1] in the context of equitable access to institutions for the nonviolent adjudication of disputes, [2] in the context of a scene of consent rendered legible by general welfare affording actually informed actually non-duressed consent, and [3] in the context of the socialization of commons and public goods to ameliorate tendencies to the externalization of cost and risk arising from industrial modes of production. Given all that, frankly, it seems to me I might rightly be called an advocate of a democratic organization of capitalist economy, an advocate of a capitalism made to express the non-violence libertopians incredibly claim to discern in it already in its present plutocratic vestigially feudal form.

Be that as it may, I have no doubt my advocacy of single payer healthcare, public education, and basic income in the service of the scene of consent and socialization of key modes of production prone to externalization amounts to democratic socialism in most construals of it, which is also perfectly fine with me.

I do think radical forms of commitments to democracy and non-violence (and I hold both of these myself) end up meaning something close to what many self-identified anarchists mean by "anarchism." Sometimes the words really do seem to get in the way. Given the plasticity of these terms I can easily think of people who would properly see their own politics in mine but think of themselves as the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, or as radical democrats, or social democrats, democratic socialists, secular democrats, pluralists, multiculturalists, anti-militarists, non-violent activists for social justice, market socialists, environmental justice advocates, Greens, queers, punks, civil libertarians, or, yes, sure, anarchists, too.

And yet I really do think there are problems with too many anarchisms -- and your own, Kent, most of all. Market fundamentalists, market libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, neoliberals too readily disavow the artifice of the so-called natural market as well as the duress, fraud and exploitation that stratifies market transactions you are apt to declare "non-initiation of force" through the facile expedient of pretending "initiation" begins several steps beyond when much of the nasty action actually is taking place.

More generally, I think much that gets declaimed about under the heading of anarchic state-smashing would much better be articulated in more specific and situated ways that end up sounding more like resistance to violence and inequity and unaccountability in existing institutions and practices, and so look to me more as efforts at tinkering, reform, democratization of governance than, you know, Smashing The State.

To be honest, I suspect that in the monolithic characterization conjured up by that very term -- The State -- it may be there is no The State to exist for us to smash any more than there is The God to exist for us to kill. Given regular elections, general enfranchisement, and wide eligibility for office-holding, the separation of powers, the subsidiarity of the federalization of governance, the shifting, competing, co-operating patchwork of jurisdictions, the interplay of private/public/social/cultural/media apparatuses subsumed under and against that heading in any case, it seems a bit of a mystification to pretend a singular concentrated overbearing substance is in play, one to which a monopoly on violence is attributed, a violence that is presumably unaccountable however answerable it actually may turn out to be, however convoluted and ramifying its pathways, a violence which is taken exhaustively to characterize it even if its edicts are backed only in the last instance by such force, and even then hardly always efficaciously and usually only accountably.

If I might be a bit more theoretical about it, I would say, more or less with Arendt, that politics (the encounter with difference) is prior to sociality (sustained association in difference), and that the plurality out of which the political arises is as much about the ineradicable problems of disputation and structural violence as about the real promises of mutual aid and voluntary co-operation, and that this takes us to concerns with the institutionalizations of order before it takes us to the wholesome democratization of government.

And so, all in all, even if it offends my left-anarchist friends sometimes, I still must insist that I do not want to smash the state, but to democratize it.

Why I Am Still Not An Anarchist (Or Am I?) -- Continued

I am not appending to this post, a copy of a second one from a couple days later consisting of reflections continuing on from the first.

I have sometimes thought that my "political orientation" would be better captured with the neologism consensualist, given the centrality of the provision of a substantial scene of consent to my understanding of a democratic and non-violent politics. In our historical moment, however, philosophical neologisms like that render one all too susceptible to the distortions of marketing and self-promotional discourse (advertizing, with all its devastating deception and hyperbole, has come quite close to colonizing public deliberation entirely by now, to the ruin of all), recasting one as another wannabe guru circus-barker with a movement and a manifesto soliciting tax-deductible contributions in exchange for promises of offering a meaning of life package re-conceived as something like the promise of more regular bowel movements and a whiter smile.

Since it is not a substance but a scene, not a faculty but a ritual, there will always be concerns about the profound gameability of consent. The libertopian anarcho-capitalist's whole schtick essentially derives from his pretense that transactions are perfectly consensual and social orders sublimely peaceable even when they are stratified by unequal knowledge and misinformation and driven by what amount in the context of informal and precarious labor to permanent threats of force.

In the typical neoliberal instance, then, I would declare the scene of consent largely vacuous as often as not. But of course there are vulnerabilities on the flip-side as well. I describe a legible scene of consent as one that is both informed and non-duressed, but since "informed" can never arrive at omniscience and since "non-duressed" can never arrive at omnipotence, there will always be a slippage between actual scenes of consent and the ideals at which they might be said logically to aspire, the legibility of the scene will always be a comparative matter. Part of that legibility would have to derive from the susceptibility of the scene of consent itself to interminable re-elaboration by critique. Part of what might be named by "anarchism" is this interminable constitutive dimension of critique to the scene of legible consent, it seems to me.

To the extent that democracy is less an eidos to approximate in our institutions (culminating, presumably, in The Ideal of "direct" democracy, "perfect" consensus, or what have you) than it is an ideal that might wholesomely articulate endlessly many different institutions in endlessly many variations and measures (the notion that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them, as I would put it, probably does not have one best institutional materialization, given the many contexts in which it might make public life better), then another part of what is named by "anarchism" might be this interminable experimentation with and proliferation of institutionalizations of the democratic notion.

Inasmuch as I believe the key values of democracy are equity and diversity, and these values both depend on one another but are in tension with one another (I refer to equity-in-diversity as a single value, but the hyphens denote a dynamism not a stability), their institutionalization again looks to demand an endless re-elaboration through critique, and again "anarchism" seems to me a good name for this interminable constitutive dimension of critique.

Part of the trouble with a commitment to non-violence is that there is always some measure of dispute as to what violence consists of in the first place, and to circumscribe this dispute is itself to do violence. So, too, the constitution of a vocabulary in which it becomes possible legibly to testify to a violence will often (perhaps always) render testimony to another violence illegible. Brecht's question and quip, which violence is worse, to rob a bank or to found one? is provocative not only because one can easily assume a perspective from which either violence can seem worse, but because there is something about assuming the perspective from which either violence becomes clear that renders the other nearly invisible. Again, "anarchism" might name the interminable critique that permits a traffic among perspectives rendering testimonies to violation provisionally legible (even at the cost of rendering others provisionally illegible) to resist a stabilization that amounts to a violent circumscription of the discourse enabling attention and testament to and hence the institutional address of violences in the first place.

Part of what I would insist on, however, is that whether order names the provisional universalization of equity-in-diversity, whether it names the comparative accomplishment of the scene of informed nonduressed consent, whether it names the provision of ever more people with ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect, whether it names the commitment to nonviolence, this order is always institutionalized, and the work of critique is to expose the measure of slippage between the actual and the aspirational not to rationalize renunciation of the institution but to enable its interminable re-elaboration.

There is a tendency and possibly a permanent temptation in the anarchic imaginary that indulges an exposure that yields so all embracing a transparency it amounts finally to indifference rather than insight, that indulges a rebellion that yields so all embracing a rejection it amounts finally to resignation rather than to resistance. It goes without saying that any more pragmatic commitment to resistance, re-elaboration, and reform is no less prone to complacency, parochialism, exhaustion -- and the restlessness and rigor that might be named by "anarchism" can provide an indispensable re-invigoration to those of us whose pragmatism is directed to the service of the ethics of consent, democracy, non-violence, equity-in-diversity. Any anarchist who helps democratize the institutional terrain that besets us is a friend to me. To me, that comrade is democratizing the state, not smashing it -- but I am content to keep quiet on that quibble if that is all that stands in the way of our mutual education, agitation, and organization to materialize liberty and justice for all.

Postscript: More Anarchy from the Moot

Another amendment arising from the conversation occasioned by the first two.

A regular reader asks:

How can there be such a thing as a "left anarchist"? Isn't anarchy just extreme libertarianism? I've never been able to figure them out. Just what exactly is it that they want? And why do they always appear at ANY progressive protest & behave like meth-crazed agent provocateurs? Their over-the-top violence ALWAYS ends up undermining & discrediting these protests. It's a mystery why they get so much sympathy from the left. I find them to be a pointless nuisance, and I just wish they would just fuck off for good.

Definitely anarchism has a richer pedigree on the left than the right, though perhaps not a longer one. Actually, the right-wing libertopians are (depending on your perspective on them) either exposing a deep problem always already inhering in any left-anarchic positioning or are simply misreading and distorting the left-anarchic ethos in their rather facile fashion. I'd say there was some truth in both of those perspectives, actually, but I incline to the second. (I'm giving you a little latitude in your declaration about anarchists always being disruptive and extreme -- I know where you are coming from, since this whole discussion arises from exchanges some of which are of the kind you are responding to, still I don't doubt you know that your statement is an overgeneralization, and that the many sympathetic anarchists in your company at demonstrations and discussions who are not disruptive have likely not attracted your notice precisely because they have not behaved the way you disapprove.)

You know, one of the pre-eminent figures of left-anarchy in the world today is the great Noam Chomsky, and he has said:

[I]t only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life and to challenge them. Unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate and should be dismantled to increase the scope of human freedom. That includes political power, ownership, management, relations among men and women, parents and children, our control over the fate of future generations... I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism[,] the conviction that the burden of proof has to be on authority and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met.

I find it very easy to affirm all of this, but since I think many who would not think of themselves as anarchists at all (and with good reasons) but as liberals, democrats, peace workers, and so on would affirm what Chomsky is saying here as much as I would, I can't say that I see why approval of Chomsky's attitude here, then, makes me someone who wants to "Smash The State" in the least, rather than, say, to liberalize it, or to democratize it, or to deploy it in the service of non-violence (through the institutionalization of successions of leadership via regular election, through the maintenance of alternatives for the non-violent adjudication of disputes like courts, through the re-distribution of plutocratic concentrations of wealth via progressive taxation, through the amelioration of susceptibilities to corruption and abuse via separation of powers, subsidiarity of federalization, accountability to a free press, enumerated rights, elections and juries, through the maintenance of a legible scene of informed nonduressed consent via the provision of general welfare, public education, basic healthcare, basic income guarantees -- at the very least minimum wage guarantees -- paid for by means of taxes and fees, through the circumvention of abusive and fraudulent externalization of costs and risks inhering in mass-industrial production via socialization of commons and public goods, and so on).

It is all very well to say assertions of authority bear a burden of proof -- but what standards define that burden? who agrees to them? what about those who do not? just what is the scene in which this justification is offered up and adjudicated? Surely far too many of the questions that would presumably distinguish the anarchist-left from much of the rest of the left (plenty of it quite as radical as the anarchists are) are circumvented rather than addressed in Chomsky's enormously attractive declaration of anti-authoritarian principle.

Given this, how useful is Chomsky's formulation as a specifically anarchist proposal after all? -- I'm afraid I must say I think it is not very helpful finally at all. And, given this, is it typical in this weakness of other efforts at general anarchist formulations in this vein? -- I'm afraid I must say I think it is indeed rather typical of the problem (and, frankly, Chomsky's formulation is among the clearer ones available). Still, I'm far from denying my sympathy with what Chomsky says -- I daresay I am closely allied to Chomsky in this as in many other political positions -- hence the title of the post (Why I Am Still Not An Anarchist -- Or Am I? Part One and Part Two) and the reflections that accompany it.

Democracy, Consent, and Enterprise (and Their Contraries, Aristocracy, Duress, and Exploitation)

Contrary to the abstract assurances of their ideologues, the systems we denominate as "capitalist" are not in fact direct emanations from eternal, natural, tidal forces of "supply" and "demand," but are instituted through historically specific and contingent treaties, laws, protocols, expectations, norms that articulate these flows of desire and exchange, such as they are. What counts as "free trade" and what registers as a legible "market outcome" has often been radically otherwise than it is today at the level of concrete specificity, could be different in indefinitely many ways here and now, and most assuredly will be endlessly different in epochs to come. These differences will have relative beneficiaries and losers as will the vicissitudes that articulate their many historical changes over time. And so, much of what I decry as cronyism in what currently passes for capitalism is not an aberration from some more "unknown ideal" capitalist eidos, but is ineradicable to it, very much built in from the get-go.

By the way, democratic governance is no less beholden to such parochialisms, of course. Democracy, too, is better understood as an ongoing institutional experimentation rather than some kind of blueprint to which "democrats" are committed in advance and in the abstract.

Democracy really is better thought of as an ongoing process of democratization through which ever more people are enabled to have ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them. And democrats seek to implement ongoing and resilient alternatives to the violent adjudication of disputes among the stakeholders with whom we share the world, peer to peer. Democratization works to accomplish this result through the experimental institutionalization of a scene of ever-better-informed ever-less-duressed consent (the say peers have to register the stakes peers have in public decisions). The institutionalization of responsiveness of the government to the governed and the ongoing creation of nonviolent alternatives for the adjudication of disputes are deeply inter-implicated projects of democracy as the experimental institutionalization of the scene of consent.

Those services will seem the least dispensable -- and so the least properly beholden to the risks of failure in market competition -- that substantiate the scene of consent and protect it from duress. The market is, after all, finally unable to distinguish an outcome duressed by the threat of force, penury, catastrophic risk, or abject humiliation from a genuinely consensual outcome. It is the business of democratic governance precisely to adjudicate such distinctions, checked in its inertial tendency to corruption and prejudice in this task by the periodic election of those who administer government and by the threat of their impeachment and ensured more deeply still by the constitutive impasse instituted into all democratic governance that those whose taxes render government practicable are through taxation guaranteed representation and so a say in the workings of that governance. Needless to say, all of this is fraught with vulnerabilities to abuse and corruption, but there it is.

Whatever its pathologies and frailties we can still generate a fairly forceful principle connecting democratic theory and democratizing practice here, and in a way that relates it to the "market" alternatives of neoliberal ideologues who would either claim to reduce democracy to "market exchanges" or, more honestly, recommend we substitute such commerce for democratization wholesale: Precisely to the extent that government is democratic through the real responsiveness of its institutions to the consent of the governed and to the material substantiation of that very capacity for consent by securing those who consent from misinformation and duress -- and only to the extent that government manages to be more democratic through these means -- can one then go on to say that market competition in matters that do not threaten either this responsiveness of government to the governed nor the capacity of all to engage in informed nonduressed consent yields the efficient outcomes for which markets are celebrated, or that market outcomes are free as their champions declare. Where governance is nonresponsive to the governed it responds instead mostly to parochial elites with which that government is identified at the expense of the governed more generally, and where governance fails to secure the scene of consent it will defend exploitation in the name of liberty and order but truly in the service of parochial beneficiaries at the expense of the exploited more generally. Under such circumstances, any talk of "market efficiencies" and "voluntary contracts" and "free trade" is a straightforward, palpable falsehood and deliberate fraud, and should be treated as such.

I advocate a substantiation of the scene of consent on which a proper peer-to-peer democracy depends that includes, among other less controversial measures, a universal non-means-tested guaranteed basic income, universal single-payer healthcare, unfettered access to the common heritage and collaborative creation of planetary multiculture as well as to reliable consensus scientific information on questions of urgent practical import. You can be sure that my advocacy of these measures would be decried not only by market fundamentalist ideologues but by many common or garden variety conservatives and even self-appointed rightward-skewing "Centrists" as an advocacy of "socialism," "totalitarianism," or who knows what else. (And I haven't even mentioned my championing of binding international regulatory bodies where matters of human rights, arms proliferation, labor standards, global ecosystemic impacts, and so on are concerned or for a democratically-elected planetary assembly!)

But the simple truth of the matter is that it seems to me all the great libertarian and pragmatic competitive advantages free marketeers endlessly promise us while the rubble pile of neoliberal catastrophe rises higher and higher before the eyes of anybody not lucky enough to roost at its summit are actually most likely to find their real fruition precisely when and only when this competition occurs among those who are secure enough in their persons and situations that they can truly consent to its terms.

Else, the competition of the market is a matter of the insulting misattribution of liberty to the injury of exploitation, the individualism of the market a matter of isolation, abandonment, and criminal neglect, the responsibility of the market a matter of austerity for the vulnerable and unearned reward for the privileged, the efficiency of the market a matter of the concentration of wealth as it is seen from the perspective of the beneficiaries of that concentration.

Again, none of this is enterprise properly so-called, and certainly not enterprise as advertised by its champions, but simply the same old brutal ineffectual and presumptuous aristocracy that has been the bane of progressive democratization throughout its long and too-slow world-building course in history.

I think I am a champion of free enterprise, as it can be with its proper support and confined to its proper orbit. I cannot help it if the ideologues who have appropriated the term would mistake me for an apologist of tyranny. It certainly wouldn't be the first time that petulant Royalists would decry as socialism or tyranny the effort of patriotic democrats to save free enterprise from itself.

Balancing the Values of Consent, Diversity, and Universal Standards

So long as a trait does not render the scene of consent illegible -- the expressed need for sexual reassignment, valuing deafness, or the exhibition of mild autism, among countless other things, all seem to me clear examples of such traits -- then it seems to me that advocates of a culture of consent cannot properly deny any citizens who incarnate such a trait as a part of their own personhood either

(a) the validity of any of their performances of consent on that basis or

(b) the consensual recourse to modification medicine to come to exhibit that trait or the consensual restraint from modification so as to maintain the trait.

It is crucial to realize that legibility of consent is a weaker standard than, say, "optimality" (on whatever construal) would be -- and that it is a weaker standard for a reason: Too restrictive a standard will likely skew the difficult balance between the democratic value of informed, nonduressed consent (which, to be substantial rather than vacuous has to be propped up with universal standards on contentious questions of basic health and general welfare), and the no less democratic value of diversity.

People of good will can argue about the extent to which an "optimal" scene of consent might properly be encouraged or discouraged via strategies of subsidization and such, whether in the name of administrative economies, general welfare, or what have you. But the simple fact is that anybody who advocates both a substantive vision of the general welfare as well as for the value of diversity is eventually going to stumble onto fraught moments when they have to figure out how to reconcile these values on the ground.

I do personally think the legible, informed, nonduressed consent of citizens is the key to work through some of these difficulties, but it has to involve a substantive rather than vacuous commitment to consent. That is to say, to be legitimate, the scene of consent needs to be shored up with all sorts of assurances against misinformation, ignorance, force, and duress that don't presently prevail for the most part. Also, the standard of legible consent must be a standard weak enough to incubate a real proliferation of consensual performances rather than a standard so strong that it imposes conformity... and yet the standard must be strong enough to ensure that "consent" doesn't become an alibi for violation, exploitation, or neglect.

I speak, by the way, not as an autistic person, or as a deaf person who wants to raise a nonhearing child, or as the parent of a healthy child with three functional arms or intersex genitals unsure what their obligations are, or what have you... I speak simply as a big fag who knows all too well that had I been born just one generation earlier I might have had to defend my own sane healthy proper personhood in the face of "well-meaning" medical and social administrators who might have thought they had democracy, science, righteousness, and even my own best interests on their side even as they worked to "cure" or otherwise obliterate me.

p2p Democratization

Friend of Blog Martin comments in the Moot:

[E]ve[n] if it is merely an ideal, the actual "capitalist" system that you critique on this blog certainly comes closer to that ideal than the socioeconomic system that you usually defend.

In other words, America leans toward laissez-faire capitalism / libertopianism more than you think his healthy.

Apart from not understanding how a system that one agrees with me doesn't exist actually does exist anyway as "an ideal," I still don't agree with what I think I hear Martin saying here, exactly.

Despite this, I suspect that Martin and I would pick out mostly similar social formations as attractive and unattractive ones on the ground, and so what he has said and what follows is best viewed as a shared effort to find the right words to describe and understand what we find similarly more and less appealing than a disagreement that equity in diversity is appealing in the first place. I mention this up front, because I'm going to disagree with Martin a lot in the specifics here, but it matters that this doesn't necessarily indicate disagreement where things count most on this topic.

Now, in my longer reply to Martin's last comment in the Moot I did actually talk about practices I affirm, Netroots blogging, organizing, donor-aggregation, and so on. Since all that is taking place non-criminally under the auspices of the actually-existing society I wonder does that mean I was defending "actual capitalism" on his terms in doing so?

To be honest, I really don't agree that the American system "comes close" to realizing market libertarian ideology. I think America is a warfare-as-welfare-for-incumbents welfare state organized to preferentially benefit incumbent interests, just open enough to release creative energies to be captured by incumbents but not enough (except occasionally and accidentally) to threaten incumbency itself.

I think "libertarian rhetoric" is a set of figures, frames, and formulations to peddle this unjust state of affairs both to the rationalizing minorities who unjustly benefit by it and to the distracted majorities who are exploited under it, but I do think it is, in essence, a lie. It is the unjust reality and the lie that sells it that I deem unhealthy, not American "proximity" in reality to the market fundamentalist ideal. I think there is no such proximity in evidence.

Martin continues: If money is exchanged more or less evenly between people, that represents a p2p, grassroots topology.

Surely that depends on just what is happening behind the scenes of that "more or less"? How much more evenly, how much less? Why is the state of affairs under which "exchange" takes place in contemporary corporate-militarist crony-capitalist America enough "more" like "even" that one would want to call it a "grassroots topology," rather than enough "less" like "even" that one would want to decry its inhibition of the emergence of such a "grassroots topology"?

If a disproportionate amount of money is taken by one seed or node (the government in this case) and redistributed, that represents a centralized, broadcast topology.

Of course I see why this initially seems attractive as a formulation, but I think the clarity it provides is falsifying. As I said in my last post I think the intuitive force of this framing derives from its incessant reiteration throughout the long neoliberal epoch which has found its consummation (and one hopes, the beginnings of its eclipse) in our current catastrophic moment of planetary distress.

It matters enormously to insist that what governments do isn't a matter of providing "services" like firms do, or at any rate, to realize that when one assumes the vantage from which it appears that this is what they are doing one inevitably loses sight of key ways in which governance differs from other organizations (to recur to the pluralist schema I've been deploying in arguments elsewhere on the blog lately, distinguishing science -- or the efficacious mode in my terms -- from aesthetics with the faithful, or distinguishing morals from ethics with the subcultural, here we have a formulation of mine that relies on a distinction of the efficacious from the political).

One has already found oneself disastrously lodged entirely within the prepolitical "marketeer mindset" if one thinks of governance this way, and this remains true even if one goes on to decide for "pragmatic reasons" that governments are still the best suited organizations to provide some such "services" and then defend them as such.

Legitimacy simply is not a service in this sense. Providing nonviolent alternatives for the resolution of disputes in the scene of nonduressed consent is not a service, it is the establishment of justice, it is the opening of the space of freedom as such.

Treating government as one "seed" or "node" among other organizational forms -- distinguishable from them always in the same ways as they are distinguishable among themselves, through observations of their relative size or influence or what have you -- may be right if one is just reductively charting organizational dynamics (and there are times when this is a valid and useful thing to do, don't get me wrong), but there will be many contexts in which that is a profoundly distortive lens through which to understand what is afoot here.

Once again, I find that this is a discussion that takes us deep into the heart of political theory. Democratized government is not strictly speaking "centralized" even though it still assumes the legitimate monopolistic recourse to force that marketeers identify with repressive "centralization."

The essence of p2p systems is their facilitation of equity in diversity -- which is also precisely the work and effect of democratization.

Most p2p projects are inaugurated by small groups or even single individuals and thereafter the bulk of their work is done by very few -- even if it is true that they "out-compete" non-p2p formations because in their openness they also cheaply solicit the participation of endlessly many other one-time and small-time contributors as well. This could quite superficially be treated as "centralized" in its effects however truly open it remains, if one squints as one looks at it.

Actually-existing democracy functions rather similarly in its solicitation to participation in the actual processes of representation and administration. It is open to the participation of all, but usually attracts only the participation of the interested where they are interested and to the extent that they are interested. What undergirds this participatory expressivity, administration, and oversight, of course, is the democratizing virtuous circle of taking up violence always only to repudiate it, organizing the ineradical capacity for force inhering in plurality always only in the service of the provision of alternatives to the violent resolution of disputes and for the maintenance of the scene of informed, nonduressed consent (the violation of which is always legible as violence: keeping the peace and protecting the scene of consent are essential correlates).

Law is code, code is law. What the architecture that facilitates p2p is to those who experience the emancipatory substance of the p2p ethos, the law that facilitates the scene of informed nonduressed consent is to those who experience the emancipatory substance of the democratic ethos.

The test and the sign of p2p is precisely the same as that of democracy -- whether it actually facilitates equity in diversity.

Martin continues:

Now, obviously, with "run away" capitalism, when money coalesces into the hands of the few and monopolies form, it also becomes a broadcast form of exchange (the difference, of course, for those who support this scenario, is that the market created this outcome. The government is force, but property and the market are not force because those are their Sacred Cows.)

The goal, as I've always said, is to avoid both extremes, both worst-case scenarios. Some combination of free exchange and regulations produces a global maximum of grassroots activity, average quality of life, justice, and all those social indicators that we strive to achieve.

I certainly have no quarrel with the practices of a consensual and nonduressed exchange of goods and services facilitated by money, any more than the practices of the free exchange of testimony and ideas facilitated by words and numbers.

Maybe the real dispute here is just that I assess what Martin would describe as the darker side of money coalescing into the hands of incumbents to recreate a more Broadcast model scenario as pretty straightforwardly the state of affairs with which we are presently living, while he might still think of our circumstances as better described as grassroots exchange? I have to wonder a little just how bad inequality has to get, just how corrupt and unaccountable incumbency has to get before things look less "grassroots" if this is the case!

But there is possibly a more interesting source of disagreement happening here, if I am understanding the stakes in this exchange properly.

You see, I simply don't agree that democracy is a compromise between free markets and totalitarian dictatorship, I don't agree that it represents a moderate middle ground between extremes.

Democracy is for me its own thing, understandable on its own terms, substantiated and struggled for as its own end.

But the dispute at hand may be even more stark than that. Since I think that there is no such thing as a "pure" market order in the sense mobilized by neoliberal and neoconservative market fundamentalist rhetoric and ideology, I actually don't think that constitutes in any intelligible sense an "extreme" that receives partial instantiation in a so-called "mixed economy" in the existing order. I think it is nothing more nor less than a delusive falsification of what is happening in the world -- just as the anti-political fantasy of total omnipotent repressive control over plurality is likewise finally unrealizable (however much damage can be done by the damaged people drawn to that impossible vision).

The task of legitimate democratic governance is to make and then preserve the peace and to produce and then protect the scene of consent (and yes it assumes legitimate recourse to violence in facilitating permanent alternatives to violence in so doing, with all the risks and costs and benefits inhering in this paradoxical gesture).

And as I have said many times, a substantiated as opposed to vacuous scene of consent will be informed and nonduressed.

In a nutshell, democratic government should ensure that consent is informed by providing free life-long education and free universal access to reliable knowledge, and protections against fraud and deception, and that consent is nonduressed by providing universal healthcare and a universal basic income.

This provision produces freedom, it produces peers (social stakeholders with actual equity in their actual diversity), it produces the substance of open collaboration and contestation.

For me, the poles that count are participatory democracy against elite incumbency, not Free Markets against Big Brother. I think these (democracy < -- > incumbency) represent the Left and Right, very straightforwardly.

I see neither pole as an ideal, but both as ongoing processes of interested and interminable struggle, one the struggle to ensure that ever more people have ever more of a say in the public decision that affect them, the other the struggle to ensure that the incumbent interests with whom one most identifies control as much as possible (sometimes, they rationalize, for the good of all).

p2p is democratizing in its effects, which would remain just as true even if these effects were facilitated through the administrative implementation of the scene of informed, nonduressed consent by way of a mandated basic income guarantee and access to reliable knowledge. Crony capitalism as it is practiced under neoliberalism (and its fraternal twin, neoconservatism) is clearly incumbent-supportive in its effects.

Metaphors about Big Brother and Spontaneous Order and all the rest just function to provide false clarity that obscures the obvious truths that actually matter here, in my opinion.

Extremism in the Defense of Diversity Is No Vice

I appreciate the work of the radical advocates for the "disabled" at Not Dead Yet, and I have learned quite a bit about morphological and lifeway diversity from their resources. (If you want to know the reasons why I scare-quote the term "disabled," you can read my piece, Differently Enabled.) I am appalled when such perspectives get dismissed as always-only "disability extremism" or what have you by their opponents, even when I disagree myself with the views being trivialized in this way.

Advocating informed nonduressed consensual projects of individual self-creation as I do -- whether through art, education, personal experimentation (with sex, sprituality, substances, travel, activism), therapeutic and prosthetic practices, what have you -- one soon finds that one is never too far from championing the rights of marginal and vulnerable individual people at the "extremes" of legible human experience.

This is not to say that I agree more than not with the arguments one finds on Not Dead Yet. As I already suggested, quite often I do not.

I affirm the right of the differently enabled (in all our fabulous and devastating diversity) to informed nonduressed consensual therapy and prosthetic practices -- either to render ourselves more or less "conventional" in our appearances, capacities, or lifeways. And as a part of that very same commitment I exactly equally affirm the right of the differently enabled to refrain in an informed nonduressed consensual way from being subjected to unwanted therapy and prosthetic practices, and to demand the standing and dignity of full citizenship, whether or not our choices render us more or less conventional on whatever construal.

This commitment seems to put me at odds plenty often both with some inflexible "disability rights" perspectives and some overconfident bioethical "harm-reduction" perspectives.

Unfortunately, both the inflexibility and the overconfidence of the perspectives I find myself arguing against seem to make for rhetoric that is very readily understandable and very powerfully sloganizable. One side maintains that any intervention, chosen or not, in stigmatized difference constitutes a kind of violence against those living with difference, while the other side maintains that treatable suboptimality left untreated is itself a kind of violence. These compelling formulations permit people to "master" too quickly what is in fact the quite fraught, uncertain, error-prone, painfully intimate, and rapidly transforming moral terrain of morphological and lifeway diversity in an era of deranging medical and technoscientific transformation.

Many seem to worry that perspectives championing morphological and lifeway diversity just amount to a kind of anything-goes vulgar relativism, and hence claims arising from such perspectives often seem to provoke an hysterical chorus of warnings about "willing" narcotized slaves, child-mutilators, clone armies, designer soopergenius babies, and so on. These thought experiments can be as deranging as they are clarifying to technoethical deliberation, especially when they obscure the voices of the actually-existing stakeholders to technoethical dilemmas, testifying to the lived experience of their circumstances, the specific threats they confront, and the actually-available tools and options on hand they seek to make recourse to.

I cannot stress enough how helpful it is, as a kind of rule of thumb, at least from my own perspective, to focus on consent as the foundation for a sensible negotiation of these difficulties. Consent, taken as a substantial rather than merely abstract commitment, to be legible must be both informed and nonduressed and hence must occur in the context of access to knowledge and the security of real social support (basic income, healthcare, home, education, representation). Once one has secured the conditions for a legible scene of informed, nonduressed consent (or, more often, carefully documented the ways in which the failure to achieve such a scene has specifically contributed to the damage and difficulty at hand), one will have likewise diminished the vulnerability that attaches to so many of the stakeholders in technoethical dilemmas and hence the experience of anxiety, indignity, and suffering through which these contests get articulated so often to the cost of sense.

A technoethical perspective that defends the outcomes arising out of performances of informed, nonduressed consent accommodates a spectacular range of morphological and lifeway diversity -- including an enormous range of possibilities that will seem from many perspectives suboptimal or perverse or even immoral. But such a technoethical perspective is not a vulgar relativism. Rather, it seeks to defend the widest possible implementation of the democratic value of diversity still compatible with a strong defense of the democratic value of universal equity.

I insist that a society truly committed to the just and democratizing scene of consent would not tolerate the willed assumption for oneself, or decision on behalf of another to whom one is properly legally responsible, of a morphology, lifeway, or intervention that removed one or another from the possibility of an ongoing participation in the scene of consent legible as such (however unconventional the outcomes of the decisions made in that scene may be) to the peers with whom one shares and makes the world.

Again, I would stress that when it comes to actual technoethical analysis and policy recommendations, consent usually provides just a rule of thumb for me, an analytic point of departure, a benchmark against which to assess competing stakeholder claims broadly, but that it will usually underdetermine the level of concrete detail demanded of workable policy prescriptions and political compromises.

And, by way of a conclusion, let me offer up two more such rules of thumb that I try to keep in mind to keep my feet on the ground in the face of the hopelessly complex and yet urgent demands of contemporary technoethical dilemmas in an era of sometimes radical technoscientific change.

A second rule of thumb applies not only to technoethical dilemmas, but helps me keep my bearings when I'm trying to get a real sense of the issues and stakes in political and social struggles more generally:

Always remember how important it is to ensure that one finds out not only what the people think who have their hands on the trigger, but what the people think who have the guns pointed at them. Always remember to ensure that one knows not only the self-congratulatory stories told by the strong, but the testaments of suffering and alternative possibility told by the vulnerable. Always remember that there will always already be plenty of advocates for the positions of the powerful and the privileged, but an urgent need to question established authorities, make common cause with the vulnerable, and imagine the world otherwise.

This rule of thumb has lead me down many unexpected and demanding paths. It lead me into college, it lead me into atheism, it lead me into vegetarianism, it lead me into feminism, it lead me into nonviolence, it lead me into democratic socialism, and it lead me to read and take seriously the resources available at Not Dead Yet, among other things, to try again and again to weave ever more uncomfortable rich new knowledges into my own partial and provincial worldview -- even when so many of these knowledges keep highlighting for me my own embarrassing deficiencies.

A third rule of thumb I use is more quirky and personal, I suppose. As a queer person aware of the history of the "well-meaning" catastrophic medicalization of homosexuality in the twentieth century, I try never to propose an argument about any lifeway or morphology that would deny consent to the different and vulnerable in a way comparable to what I would likely have suffered in my queerness had I been born as little as one generation earlier than I did.

Arguments that parents who value deafness enough to want a deaf child do violence to the children screened for this outcome seem to me to fall under this category, for example -- since, after all, deafness hardly precludes a person from legible performances of consent. Arguments that such children should be prevented from coming into existence or, once existing, should be therapized into more conventional personhood seem to me to depend on the application of a terribly worrisome too-stringent "optimality" reasoning rather than a more democratic reasoning based in consent. And I have no doubt that such an optimality criterion, applied in the era of widespread irrational homophobia suffered by vulnerable queer people for decades, would have earmarked li'l ol' "suboptimal" me for nonexistence or coercive therapy not too long ago, and to the catastrophic cost of everybody involved, however urgently I sought to communicate my preferences in the matter.

Precarity and Experimental Subjection

Precarity is a word that is coming to be used by more and more people to designate key continuities in the conditions, experiences, and implications of a growing majority of the human population to the characteristic mode of exploitation in the contemporary world.

More specifically, precarity indicates an ongoing casualization of the terms of employment under which ever more people labor to survive in today's world, usually conjoined to an ongoing informalization of the terms under which ever more people struggle to secure the basic conditions of housing, healthcare, access to knowledge, and legitimate legal recourse under which they live.

Precarity or precarization sometimes denotes the dismantlement of established entitlements in relatively democratic North Atlantic societies arising out of the market fundamentalist gospel of an endlessly elaborated and augmented "personal responsibility." Even more often, precarity or precarization denotes the erection of barriers to the achievement of entitlements in the first place for people in the overexploited regions of the so-called "developing world" through the terms of neoliberal corporate-militarist globalization euphemized as "free trade." In both cases precarity or precarization describes a social and cultural inculcation of human insecurity as well as the opportunistic mobilization of that insecurity to maintain and consolidate the complicity, obedience, or at any rate the acquiescence, of the overabundant majority of people on earth to the terms of their own exploitation and to the disproportionate benefit of incumbent elites.

"Casualization" is a term that describes the ever increasing number of people who labor in temporary, part-time, intermittent, "flexible" forms of employment, typically with diminished entitlements, security, occasions for advancement or provision for the future, or institutional recourse in matters of grievance. Usually this tendency is described as a shift away from the expectations of especially the citizens in relatively democratic North Atlantic societies that desirable employment will be permanent or at any rate stable, full-time, skilled, characterized by relatively secure benefits, pensions, underwritten in some cases by professional traditions like tenure but more broadly by the provision of more or less extensive welfare entitlements.

"Informalization" is a term that is often used interchangeably with casualization to describe the same trends in prevailing conditions of employment, but also describes the contemporary proliferation of insecure, "unconventional" (though ever more customary) "off the books" social transactions more broadly: bribery, black-markets, influence peddling, kickbacks, barter, payment in kind, blackmail, unpaid labor, squatting, peer-to-peer production, and so on.

Jacob Hacker's recent book The Great Risk Shift captures this dimension of the casualization thesis very well. In the book, Hacker tells the story of the consolidation of the (mostly white) American middle class in the aftermath of the New Deal. During this era, a majority of Americans grew both steadily richer and steadily more secure as a consequence of health and retirement benefits they received from employers, and welfare entitlements they received from new public programs like Social Security and Medicare, which provided benefits when employers would or could not. But Hacker points out that this framework has been dismantled over the course of the last generation, exposing the majority of Americans to the unprecedented risks of a turbulent market economy. "Increasingly," Hacker suggests, in a fairly typical expression of a precarity thesis, "Americans find themselves on a financial tightrope, without a safety net if they slip." Hacker's narrative of the intensifying precarization of the American lower and middle-classes emphasizes rising bankruptcy rates, falling rates of the insured, growing job insecurity as automation and outsourcing render workers less valuable or altogether dispensable, and a growing volatility of individual fortunes, as family incomes fluctuate in ways that are comparable to the swings of stock values in volatile global markets, but in ways that uniquely threaten the capacity of individuals to survive from day to day or make reasonable plans for the future.


Most accounts of precarity, however, take pains to emphasize the special vulnerability of women, youths, immigrants (legal and especially "illegal"), and refugees (both political and, increasingly, environmental) to the casualization of employment and informalization of general welfare they mean to describe as the current catastrophic precarization of life, especially as these arise from confiscatory neoliberal "development" policies of predatory lending and debt restructuring, corporate deregulation and privatization, and the imposition of "market discipline" and "austerity regimes" always only for the most vulnerable populations. Nevertheless, it is important to grasp that precarity characterizes the social conditions under which an ever growing majority of humanity lives, even those comparatively privileged people (for now) who confront diminished expectations and increased existential volatility. Indeed, part of the special force of the various accounts of the Precarity Thesis will be their facility at connecting up these disparate experiences of increasing insecurity and hence their capacity to provide new grounds for planetary solidarity and efficacious political organizing. Meanwhile, at one and the same time, part of the special vulnerability of many accounts of the Precarity Thesis will be their inadequate sensitivity to the differences between, say, the anxieties of a well-educated white middle-class temp-worker in a North Atlantic suburban enclave, on the one hand, and the imperiled existence of an illiterate undocumented itinerate laborer squatting in a toxic floodplain in some mega-slum in the overexploited South, on the other. The Planetary Precariat, such as it is, remains a complex multiculture, articulated by inter-implicated histories of exploitation, collaboration, and contestation.

According to the International Labor Organization, fully half the workers in the world -- approximately one and a half billion people -- live in families that survive on less than US$2 a day per person. Half a billion working poor live on US$1 or less per day. The overabundant majority of these people work in the sprawling informal workforce, without welfare benefits, secure housing, basic healthcare, or reliable recourse to the law, farming, fishing and otherwise scrambling for subsistence in poor villages and alleys or rooftop garden plots. Outright unemployment rates continue to rise globally, while approximately half of the total of unemployed or underemployed people in the world are young adults, aged 15 to 24.

In his chilling and urgent recent book, Planet of Slums, Mike Davis writes of the plight of this planetary Precariat, of the billions of people living under the precarious conditions of "informal" employment, housing, legality, living out a threatened and precarious personhood. Opening with the description of the historical watershed moment when the urban population outnumbers the rural (an event that has very likely already taken place), he goes on to delineate the monstrous new urbanity of the megacities in which this population dwells: in squalid toxic violent slums without proper services or reliable infrastructure. It is a new planetary polis that better bespeaks the morphology of the refugee camp than that of the splendid historical cynosures of the City, London in the eighteenth century, Paris in the nineteenth, New York in the twentieth.

The vast "surplus populations" driven into cities by the brutal urgencies of neoliberal austerity regimes, by the reorganization of the countryside by agribusiness, by war, by genocide, or by climate change are concentrated into segmented, surveilled, and unsupported spaces, incubators for pandemic disease, disorganized rage, and organized crime. In a ghoulish mimicry of the leisurely volunteerism that produces open source software and peer-to-peer collaborations like Wikipedia and the user-generated promotional verbiage Amazon.com uses to sell books, wherever the informal Precariat manages to sculpt from the dangerously unstable toxic geographies to which they are typically consigned something like a minimally liveable and hence rentable place, they are, you can be sure, unceremoniously displaced as quick as may be, and so function as a kind of unpaid, dispensable collaborative developmental force of last resort. Low-lying and coastal as these megacities usually are, one can scarcely contemplate what is going to happen to some of these "surplus populations" as Greenhouse waters continue to rise.

It is in Chapter 25 of Capital, that Karl Marx argued "capitalistic accumulation itself... constantly produces... a relatively redundant population of workers... a surplus-population." The long-valorized former Chairman of the Federal Reserve (and former inner-circle acolyte of the breathtakingly bad market fundamentalist guru cum crappy romance novelist Ayn Rand), Alan Greenspan provided ample confirmation of Marx's prediction, as throughout his garlanded and prolonged bipartisan tenure he repeatedly expressed the attitude that it was part of his job to keep the economy "healthy" by ensuring that a goodly proportion of people remained unemployed, inasmuch as the job insecurity maintained by an abiding reserve labor force restrains demands for higher pay and benefits, keeps costs down and hence "global competitiveness" up. Here, as elsewhere, public figures paid by public moneys to work in the public interest diligently work in fact to immiserate some substantial portion of that public to the conspicuous benefit of another portion.

For Marx, this is all quite elementary: "It is the absolute interest of every capitalist to press a given quantity of labour out of a smaller, rather than a greater number of labourers, if the cost is about the same." Given the incomparable complexity of the functional division of labor which renders it difficult for anyone to gauge in an objective way just what their indispensable contribution to ongoing production really is and hence demand appropriate compensation for it (call this "alienation"), and given the way our primary focus on the price at which a commodity is available for exchange distracts our attention away from questions of its objective utility or considerations of the conditions under which it is made or concerns about the longer-term impacts it makes on the environment (call this "commodity fetishism"), and given the current globalization of "free trade" under the regime of the multinational corporate form backed by corporate-friendly national militaries (call this "neoliberalism") it is ominous to register Marx's insistence that "[t]he more extended the scale of production, the stronger this motive. Its force increases with the accumulation of capital."

In a usefully complementary formulation, Michel Foucault proposes in his Discipline and Punish, that it is no accident that centuries of reformers have demonstrated through recourse to generations of unchanging evidence of prevailing crime rates and, more to the point, rates of recidivism, that "prison fails to eliminate crime." And hence, against the typical assumption that it is the task of the liberal prison to effect such an elimination, Foucault proposes the substitute hypothesis that the prison is an institution that "has succeeded very well in producing delinquency, a specific type, a politically or economically... usable[,] form of illegality." (p. 277) The prison, and especially (famously) the exemplary prison architecture of the Benthamite Panopticon, becomes a figure that condenses the "discourses and architectures, coercive regulations and scientific propositions, real social effects and invinciple utopias, programmes for correcting delinquents and mechanisms that reinforce delinquency" (p. 271) all of which have their share in the "carceral system" or operation of "disciplinarity" that Foucault finds operating "around, on, within the body by the functioning of a power that is exercised on those [who are] punished -- and, in a more general way, on those one supervises, trains and corrects, over madmen, children at home and at school, the colonized [!], over those who are stuck at a machine and supervised for the rest of their lives." (p. 29)

"[I]n producing delinquents, in an apparently marginal but in fact centrally supervised milieu," the prison -- as one exemplary institution among others in "a carceral archipelago" of supervisory locations including schools, asylums, hospitals, workplaces, and so on -- produces "a pathologized subject" (back to p. 277), one that solicits massive normalizing administration at a moment's notice should the "need" arise, one that is "legitimately" exploitable as a resource should this come to seem desirable, and one that functions as a palpable example of the frightening costs of abnormality for the not-as-yet marginal and, hence, exhibiting through conspicuous contrast, while at once prompting, the exemplary workings of the normative practices that produce "normal," self-regulating, properly economizing subjects in the first place.

Precarity discourses typically take such canonical accounts of modern subjection as a point of departure, but then go on to propose that new institutional conditions, cultural machineries, and normative urgencies have lately been set in motion that need to be taken into account to grapple with novel contemporary circumstances of exploitation and duress. These tend in an altogether unique and unprecedented way [1] to be staged on a self-consciously planetary terrain, [2] to be articulated through rhetorics of corporate-militarist "competitiveness" that bespeak neoliberal globalization as much or more than they do customary (inter)nationalism, and [3] to take the form primarily of technodevelopmental social struggle (and, as I shall elaborate a bit at the end, soon enough, biomedical developments in particular) among a diversity of contending, differently authorized, stakeholders.

Although it is undeniable that an insecure workforce has always existed in industrial societies, it is significant that the demands of so-called "Fordist" production models for stable and skilled workers long ensured that this casual or "flexible" labor-force remained structurally peripheral in North Atlantic industrial societies to a more secure labor-force. Whereas, at the heart of precarity discourse, one will find a special emphasis on the rise and recent hegemony of the contemporary multinational corporate form -- which is structurally compelled to increase shareholder profit, whatever the consequences otherwise, while being simultaneously structurally incapable of distinguishing profits garnered relatively effortlessly through the endless externalization of risks and costs from profits achieved through the difficult enterprise of genuine innovation and superior production -- and the concomitant rise of postwar neoliberal globalization models that systematically prioritize the demands of investors over the needs of individual welfare, and emphasize "deregulation" for incumbent interests while imposing debt, "market discipline," and excessive "personal responsibility" on vulnerable majorities.

(This shift from classical Marxist and Foucauldian formulations is announced already, I would say, in the shift in the work of the later Foucault to extended accounts -- many of them finding their way to publication in English only recently -- of the rise of "biopolitics" and the operations of a "governmentality" through which autonomous and "enterprising" selves enlist themselves in projects of self-control that complement the controlling interests of social incumbents as these are indicated in the operations of formal governance.)

By way of a conclusion of this extended meditation on the promising, if problematic, idea of precarity, I want to propose that there are interesting connections for me between precarity and two other topics with which I am preoccupied here at Amor Mundi. The first connection is to the politics of environmentalism, which, like precarity discourse is at once a source of planetary political consciousness and solidarity (as of course it has to be, inasmuch as the biosphere has no borders) and one that focuses its critical energies very particularly in the direction of neoliberal corporate-militarist globalization (inasmuch as the profit-maximizing corporate form is insensitive to environmental costs and benefits as a matter of law and so inevitably produces such damage, inasmuch as the ethos of endless corporate growth is dangerously oblivious to the actually existing limits of the environment on which it depends for its own maintenance, inasmuch as the abstraction and globality of capital flows objectively derange the integrity of local ecosystems, and so on).

The emergence of planetary consciousness connected with the rise of organized environmentalist political movement promsies (threatens) to displace the internationalist consciousness of corporate-militarist competitiveness. (And, as an aside, it does seem to me that no small part of the energy that drives the so-called Global War on Terror in the present day is that it functions as a direct counterweight to this emerging planetary consciousness: a counterweight that bolsters incumbent interests precisely as environmentalist movement instead threatens them; and which formally mimes environmentalism as it parasitically drains environmentalism's radical force, offering up, ostensively, a response to a global "existential" threat, and one that can displace awareness of a more urgent with the spectacularization of a comparably less threatening one.) An environmentalist discourse of precarity would register (as the work of Mike Davis and Vandana Shiva, among many others, models) the disproportionate distribution of risks and costs associated with climate change, biodiversity diminishment, material toxicities, soil erosion, and so on, while at once testifying to the interdependence of human beings with the planet's dynamic biosphere as well as the human interdependence that both threatens and seeks to remediate the damage of extractive petrochemical industrialization on that biosphere.

There is a second connection, I think, to the politics of prosthetic self-determination, morphological and lifeway diversity, topics about which I talk quite a lot here on Amor Mundi. It seems to me that precarity discourse should address itself to certain so-called "bioethical" quandaries, especially concerning the scene of informed, nonduressed consent, especially as the techno-utopian mode of neoliberal "development" discourse becomes ever more preoccupied in coming years with research, development, marketing, and dsitribution of genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive "enhancement" techniques in a global frame.

I have proposed the phrase experimental subjection to describe the ongoing and upcoming transformation of the historical frame through which agency is coming to be articulated in human societies now under the unprecedented pressures of rapid and radical technodevelopmental changes and social struggles.

So long as you don't push the analogy too hard, it can be helpful to think of this frame shift into experimental subjection as roughly comparable to the classical North Atlantic shift from royal subjection to citizen subjection. Broadly speaking, that involved a shift from an understanding of proper selfhood deriving from one's sense of their location within a "natural order" overseen by god's representatives on earth to a conscientious selfhood invested with "natural rights" and overseen by the exigencies of market exchange.

Under the terms of experimental subjection, to the contrary, proper selfhood derives from one's sense of their location within an intelligible narrative of ongoing self-creation, and this within the larger context not of "natural order" but of a conspicuous and proliferating lifeway diversity. Further, experimental selfhood is not so much conscientious as consensual. Needless to say, the scene of consent will differ radically in its actual force and significance according to the institutional terms that articulate it, and can be either vacuous or substantial depending on the consensual subject's relative access to knowledge, relative security in her healthy personhood, and relative recourse to the equal protections of the law. That said, the experimental self engages in an ongoing negotiation between desire and risk. Her every assertion and self-assertion is an assumption of personal risk and cost as well as an assumption of social responsibilities. This is because, for one thing, the experimental and self-creative subject is a figure in danger as much as in bliss, and bears both the personal scars and skills that testify to the costliness of experimentation for finite, vulnerable beings under conditions of uncertainty.

Precarization is an inextricable dimension in the emergence of experimental from conscientious subjection as it plays out in all its devastating differences in the world. And an emphasis on this precarity undermines the facile voluntarism that will tend to overtake accounts (especially technocentric ones) of self-creation narrated from positions of privilege: So long as prosthetic self-determination is figured through the precarious scene of an expression that is as apt to misfire, provoke, confound, embarrass, or fall on deaf ears as it is to be felicitous, it is less likely to take up instead the commonplace figure, and manic fantasy, of a prosthetic encrustation of the fragile organism in a cyborg shell rendering him immune from harm, from time, from dependency, the man in his castle, an atom in the void.

Biomedicine may well be arriving at a state of something like constant revolution, throwing off so many promising and threatening therapies from moment to moment that one often cannot calculate with ease the impact to one's risk or benefit in embarking on a course of therapy at just what point along the developmental state of the art one happens to be. Nor can one know in advance what the combinatorial effects of proliferating therapies will be. Under such conditions it is difficult to know just what it will mean to say of an act of consent that it is a properly "informed" one. These difficulties become all the more vexed when we turn from the scene of consent to the scene of decision in which parents and guardians embark upon or refrain from therapeutic courses that will articulate (and quite often, you know, irrevocably) the capacities of preconsensual subjects.

Quite as important, and still more relevant to a discourse of precarity, it is especially difficult to think through the ways in which one might be variously positioned as "competent," "knowledgeable," "authorized," or as already "abject," "imperiled," "hopeless," and so on, from the perspective of those likely to profit most from the release of novel medical therapies into the world, and all in ways that will definitively skew the address of therapeutic claims of promise or threat in the first place. It goes without saying that the Marxian accounts of the production of especially vulnerable "surplus populations" are of special concern in the face of biomedical projects that promise such exquisite outcomes (the radical "enhancement" of desired human capacities or the extension of healthy lifespan) that risks and costs imposed or cajoled onto abject populations might acquire a certain allure, especially to those who are likely to profit doubly (to spell it out: both monetarily as well as therapeutically) by them. So, too, Foucauldian accounts of the production of "pathologized subjects," seem especially in point in the face of biomedical projects that would police human bodies into a conformity denoted as "optimal health" for fear of otherwise imposing "unfair costs" on existing citizens or "disadvantaging" future ones.

The emergence of global bioremedial networks, integrating burgeoning clinical trial data, always-on biometric sensing and tracing, complex private and/or public networked medical administration, assessment, disbursal, and record keeping, and all of this supplementing the still ongoing disruptive transformation from a mass-mediated to a peer-to-peer digital networked public sphere, seems to me to be producing a novel and provocative political consciousness -- very much like the impact of accumulating evidence of climate change on a humanity that has recently seen the earth from the perspective of orbit and understands for the first time that the world is indeed a planet likewise has done. We are becoming experimental subjects, inducted in interminable technodevelopmental social struggles, acting on a planetary rather than a national, international, or even global terrain.

The political imagination of medicine is presently transforming under pressure of a collision between a normalizing model of liberal healthcare administration and this “experimental subjection” model of consensual genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification. The liberal model is defined by an ideal of universal “basic” healthcare provision (an ideal at which we never, of course, really arrived in fact, especially in the United States), while the experimental subjection model is defined instead by an ideal of perfect morphological control and of the widest possible lifeway diversity compatible with a perfectly intelligible scene of informed, nonduressed consent (an ideal at which we will just as surely never arrive, either, especially so long as the scene of consent tolerates accepts the duress of precarization and the derangement of misinformation). What remains is likely, as ever, to be a shifting politics of risk, profit, and stress management, but one which will be differently articulated depending on the ideal that drives it, and one that, to be sure, will manage to be more democratic and more fair the more we manage to ensure the scene of consent is as informed and nonduressed as possible by keeping access to knowledge open and poverty at bay for all.

By all means we will want to ensure that just as we must resist the elite insistence that casualization, informalization, and precarization constitute some kind of emancipatory flexibility and loosening of onerous constraint (as indeed it might be were, say, a universal basic income and lifelong basic healthcare and access to education and re-training guaranteed to all as a birthright), so too we must resist the elite insistence that our universal induction into planetary bioremedial networked clinical trials constitute some kind of carefree shopping for elective enhancements when in fact we will be exposed to unprecedented scrutiny and danger (as well, no doubt, as opportunity), and when the distribution of technodevelopmental costs, risks, and benefits is not the least bit likely to be safe, fair, or deliberative unless we make it so.

There are, to be sure, resources for both pernicious mystification as well as for practical hope in the ways these new discourses of precarity variously connect up to the deep awareness -- or, likewise, to the all-too-potent, all-too-common disavowal of awareness -- of the ineradicable finitude or precariousness that definitively articulates the human condition in its environmental vulnerability to suffering and death and in its social vulnerability to misunderstanding, humiliation, and abuse. As Judith Butler has commended to our attention in an important recent essay, this attention to (or disavowal of) our existential precariousness can be mobilized in the service of democratizing projects of empathy, conversation, and solidarity or just as easily to mobilize moral panics, hysterical censorship, or punitive wars without end. It can inspire the necessary planetary consciousness of environmentalist movement or just as easily the crazy rage fueling "our" interminable racist militarist "War on Global Terror." It can drive the consignment of "surplus populations" to deaths-in-life that live only in their trace in the life of privilege, or it can drive the emergence of an era of universal consent and, hence, emancipation.

A Dose of the New Medical Reality

Schiavo as Symptom

On Thursday morning, March 31, 2005, Terri Schiavo died quietly in a Florida hospice. The person who Terri Schiavo had been ceased to exist 15 years before, according to the testimony of her husband and many who knew her, as well as the best determination of credible doctors and scientists. The memory of Schiavo will make its home in the lives of the people who actually knew her for years to come. And no doubt the public figure of Schiavo will likewise continue to resonate into the future, condensing into a few flashes of ineradicable imagery what are in fact the endlessly complex and emotionally fraught quandaries of bodies and lives rendered newly questionable in their limits, capacities and social intelligibility by ongoing and emerging technological developments.

So long as medicine is conceived primarily as a remedial enterprise its recommendations are driven most conspicuously by the straightforward instrumental rationality of what consensus science takes to be relevant causes and effects. What “health” consists of in the first place and what is desirable about the maintenance of that state are to an important extent simply treated as if they are "givens." But as our prosthetic practices proliferate the ways in which people can live "livable" lives, we look less and less to medicine to remedy the ways in which our bodies deviate into pathological difference and more and more to deliver us into differences we desire.

Of course, the goal of producing and maintaining a "healthy body" through medical and hygienic practice has never in fact been the instrumentally neutral ideal painted in such a picture. Our diagnoses of disease, infirmity, fitness, and illness have always been ineradicably freighted with cultural and moral significance. But what I mean to call attention to here is that the scope and force of ongoing and palpably upcoming medical intervention is deranging our sense of the standards against which we would strive to measure the distance of the variety of actually living human bodies from the "normative" body we would traditionally impose and maintain through recourse to that medicine. Already, we cannot be quite sure what we are capable of or what we can rightly expect or demand of our newly queer, prostheticized bodily selves.

Medicine is taking humanity on an unprecedented path from remedy to self-creation. But our assumptions and our language have not yet managed to keep up with this emerging state of affairs. Meanwhile, our hopes and desires and sometimes our demands for medicine often seem to range hyperbolically forward past our present capacities.

The heartbreaking and hysterical public spectacle of the dead but surreally lively prostheticized body of Schiavo attests to our perplexity and our present distress. There are many such spectacles to come.

Human-Racism and the “Bright Line” Between Life and Death

In an influential editorial prompted by the Schiavo case, David Brooks claimed at the time to discern as the main difference between conservative and progressive bioethical discourse that only conservative bioethics is properly moral in its concerns while progressives are somewhat blind to the "values" dimension of policy.

This is, of course, just the sort of dismissive or oblivious attitude we have come to expect public conservative figures to take whenever they encounter values with which they disagree. (One recalls, for example, in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophic 2004 Presidential Election the conjuration by many conservative pundits of a so-called "Values-Voter," which seemed to describe as "moral" only that segment of the American population that hated gay people enough to be mobilized by their pathological homophobia to vote for a second term of America’s most disastrous Administration, quite palpably against their own stated interests on many other social questions.)

But it is worthwhile to set aside our reasonable annoyance at the tired dishonesty and craven partisanship evident in his rhetoric, because Brooks' discussion of the differences in the ways many conservatives and progressives talk about the dilemmas of a case such as Schiavo's does in fact highlight important moral, cultural, temperamental distinctions that illuminate what I have called the emerging terrain of bioconservative and technoprogressive positions on technodevelopmental social struggle as well.

Brooks claims that "[t]he core belief that social conservatives [have]... is that the value of each individual life is intrinsic. The value of a life doesn't depend upon what a person can physically do, experience or achieve. The life of a comatose person or a fetus has the same dignity and worth as the life of a fully functioning adult." Against the social conservatives, he suggests that progressives hold as their own "core belief that... quality of life is a fundamental human value." Progressives don't, Brooks accuses, "emphasize the bright line between life and death; they describe a continuum between a fully lived life and a life that, by the sort of incapacity Terri Schiavo has suffered, is mere existence."

To the extent that this emphasis on the “bright line between life and death” seems not to nudge conservatism into a nonhuman animal rights position, and to the extent that it explicitly refuses elaboration through a discussion of quality of life (which apparently is somehow “relativist” compared to the bright brute line of “life and death” or just plain “liberal” and hence inherently questionable in some unspecified way), it is clear that the foundational gesture of bioconservatism is a straightforward human-racist emphasis on the presumably “intrinsic value” of the process of metabolism when it is incarnated in representatives of only the human species, even if that process itself is indistinguishable, as a process, from the life incarnated in indefinitely many living species.

Of course, there is in fact a progressive moral value quite as luminous as anything he would attribute to conservative human-racist moralists that is rumbling in the background of Brooks’ discussion here, a value he seeks to trivialize through the comparably anemic phrasing of “quality of life.” This value is widely and passionately affirmed, and the recent track record of conservatives in the defense of this value, and of the more “fully-lived” lives that depend on it, is troubling indeed, whatever their occasional lip-service to the contrary.

That value? Consent.

Denigrating Lives by Denigrating Consent

One has to wonder just why it is that conservatives proud to "err on the side of life" seem so regularly impelled in so doing to denigrate consciousness and violate consent.

For progressives, there is indeed a texture in personal life beyond the "mere existence" we share with shrimp and snails, and which demands broad affirmation on its own terms. Personal lives are uniquely lived in the webs of meaning and thought and conversation woven by public beings, lives that reverberate with choices, with desires, with injuries, with deeds.

All the while the armies of the conservative so-called "culture of life" seem to defend life only in some more vegetable or mineral mode always best exemplified by organisms that have not yet arrived among the community of poets and peers, or of those who have already departed from the scene.

Brooks proposes that "[t]he central weakness of the liberal case is that it is morally thin. Once you say that it is up to individuals or families to draw their own lines separating life from existence, and reasonable people will differ, then you are taking a fundamental issue out of the realm of morality and into the realm of relativism and mere taste."

But to denigrate the morality of consent as "the relativism of mere taste" is to confess a complete moral blindness to the way in which we actually want to do morality here in democratic civilizations these days. And it follows as the night does the day that those who denigrate consent will go on then to denigrate the dignity of actual democratic citizens with whom they happen to disagree. Notice how often "erring on the side of life" seems to conservatives to require a violation of the terms in which citizens with whom they disagree actually choose to live their own lives.

I think it is fair in fact to agree with Brooks when he goes on to declare that for the conservatives in Bush's America "[t]he life of a comatose person or a fetus has the same dignity and worth as the life of a fully functioning adult."

That is to say, not very much.

Conservatives really do seem to adore claiming to speak for nonpersons (especially fetal not-quite-yet persons and stubbornly vegetative no-longer-quite persons) who cannot speak for themselves. How dearly they seem to love to put words into the mouths of those who are in no position to protest the imposition. What better way, after all, of multiplying their own voices in a world where sprawling majorities of actual people simply disagree with them, than to claim that their own overpowered voices stand in fact for countless voiceless voices as well as their own?

When conservatives seek to extend the dignity and status of the citizen to nonpersons they inevitably impoverish the exercise of that status for actually-existing citizens. This, of course, is the point of the exercise. Given the contours of Brooks’ argument, what is paradoxical is that in ascribing "dignity" so broadly it is the social conservatives themselves who stretch morality as thin as the skin of a soap bubble -- the better to puncture its fragile skin.

And it matters little to conservatives that their own morality is finally so thin since ultimately they seem to prefer to turn for their moral guidance to the dictates of authorities claiming to speak for God, or Tradition, or Homeland when all is said and done, than to the more contingent contentious verdicts of their own best worldly and reasonable deliberation.

Now, consent is indeed a notoriously thorny value to implement since its exercise, to be legible, demands that it be competent, informed, and nonduressed.

In the absence of competence, adequate and trusted information, and freedom from duress the “scene of consent” is apt to be a scene of violation in which the vulnerable rather than the violators are treated as guilty perpetrators of the violations they themselves suffer: As if a child has somehow “consented” to sexual abuse from a trusted authority figure. As if a consumer has somehow “consented” to the risks of a toxic, addictive product if its makers and marketers have fraudulently declared it healthful and nonaddictive. As if an impoverished or dependent wage-earner freely “consents” to exploitation at the hands of a wealthy or independent employer.

But the difficulty and danger is that securing a scene of legible consent for all citizens requires the formulation and application of the standards through which competence, knowledge, and freedom from duress are recognized as such. And this indispensable project inevitably risks mistaken formulations and misapplications that might actually violate particular performances of consent in their extraordinarily overabundant diversity and dynamic proliferation.

What Brooks mistakes as the “relativism of mere taste” is in fact the fraught and demanding dignity of diversity, the morality of self-creation, and the project of interminable criticism and self-criticism. Progressives know that they must accept a costly measure of abiding doubt and vigilance as the fair price that would help assure that our standards protect the changing life of consent rather than policing difference into conformity in the name of a “dignity” that always speaks in the voice of established authorities or in the easy, nostalgic, but stultifying voice of the past. Since conservatism is at heart a preference for obedience over critical autonomy it is scarcely surprising that conservatives would denigrate consensual self-creation as “mere taste” or mistake confident critical uncertainty as “relativism,” but it is a curiously delusive spectacle when they go on to peddle their obedience as independence, their complacency as dynamism, their faith as knowledge, and their humiliation as dignity.

From “Disability” to Diversity

Technoprogressives maintain that technological development is becoming not just a disruptive but, potentially, a genuinely revolutionary force. Technodevelopmental transformation undercuts the normative weight of claims made in the name of the "natural" in ways that, conjoined to a deepening of democracy and extension of fairness, technoprogressives insist can be made to be ultimately emancipatory for all.

For technoprogressives, the ongoing revolution in reproductive medicine and emerging genetic and neuroceutical medicine opens up consensual prosthetic practices of self-creation that will be this generation's historical contribution to the ongoing conversation of humankind.

I use the term "morphological freedom" to describe the ways in which consensual prosthetic practices are enlarging the scope of personal freedom, even while they derange our expectations, demand new responsibilities, and introduce unprecedented possibilities for injustice, violation and harm against which we must struggle interminably.

Along with many other progressives I felt disgust at the public figures who so loudly and cynically attached themselves to the distress of the family of Schiavo in bids for personal attention. I worried together with other techno-progressives about the widespread American anti-scientific benightedness that blistered yet again to the surface of public discourse in the midst of the media circus, connecting up in the most ominous imaginable ways with conservative hostility to evolutionary science via the rhetoric of "intelligent design," hostility to environmental science via the rhetoric of climate-change denial, hostility to social science via the rhetoric of "abstinence-only education," and hostility to economic science via the rhetoric of market fundamentalism. And of course I shared the concerns of other liberals about legislative efforts to bypass the courts, insinuations of martial law, and all the rest.

But I also share the concerns of many "disability" advocates who found themselves at odds with some of the progressive and most of the technoprogressive consensus in this cultural moment and who worry that there is something quite pernicious in the conventional liberal discourse that claims that if only Schiavo had a real "chance at recovery" then liberals, too, along with social conservatives, would be demanding that her "life" be protected and preserved.

These advocates for the differently enabled are rightly suspicious that the idea of "recovery" in such arguments mobilizes what amounts in fact to a highly restrictive normative concept of the sort of lives that are ultimately "lives worth living." Too often the notion of a properly "livable life" is a concept that denigrates many differently enabled people who, whatever their struggles or sorrows, live lives suffused with dignity, joy and value worth affirming and supporting the same as anyone else's.

Now, I strongly agree with the clinicians and experts whose thorough and repeated examination of the evidence located Schiavo's body in particular decisively with the dead rather than with the disabled. And in any case, I would insist like most progressives do on the absolute moral necessity to respect her own decisions and attitudes in a case like this, however these have been best ascertained by a number of courts, where matters of the care of her own body are concerned.

But it is clear nevertheless that the figure of disability was circulating in the Schiavo case in ways that matter to advocates for the differently enabled as well as to advocates and scholars of morphological freedom.

There are many "disabled" people who will seem superficially similar to Schiavo to an untrained eye, after all, and whose lives are routinely dismissed as "not worth living" in consequence. Advocates for the differently enabled fight heartbreaking, exhilarating battles to champion the rights and standing of these people every single day.

What it must mean to respect the differently enabled as the actually fully real people they are is to respect them and support them in their differences whenever they affirm the value of these differences on their own terms, just as it must likewise require the best provision of prosthetic avenues for rewriting their bodies and lives in the image of their own desires, also on their own terms, to the extent that this is possible and wanted by them.

Consensual Prosthetic Practices

The process of "life" in medical technocultures is one of ongoing practices of genetic, prosthetic and cognitive modification in pursuit of personal meanings, responsibilities, and pleasures that are bound to strain against the imposition of normative conceptions of "wellness," however construed.

From the perspective of morphological freedom it seems to me the standard of "recovery" is always therefore worrisomely conservative, naturalizing some contingent standard of proper health as more desirable than indefinitely many alternate possibilities. Morphological freedom is never properly a matter of any coercive imposition of a normative body in the name of a moral standard of "health," but is an embrace of genetic, prosthetic and cognitive modification practices in the name of a proliferation of ways of being properly and meaningfully in the world.

To the extent that the rhetoric of "recovery" impels us to misrecognize some manifestations of diversity as "disability," technoprogressives seem to me well rid of it. And to the extent that technoprogressives will sometimes affirm the desirability of "better than well" healthcare provision this would seem to encourage a repudiation of the discourse of "recovery" as well.

It is especially interesting for me to note the extent to which so many of the differently enabled depend on ongoing cyborgization and prosthetic practices to find their ways to more enriching lives on their own terms: communicating through computer interfaces, locomoting in motorized conveyances, and engaged in sometimes lifelong medical procedures of extraordinary intimacy and profundity.

Now, these considerations do not nudge us into any kind of blanket morphological relativism, since we will still prefer and testify to our own personal paths of self-determination on the basis of reasons at least intelligible enough to satisfy the conditions of informed, competent, and nonduressed consent. And in any case the proper public provision of the resources that enable prosthetic practices of self-creation also demands the maintenance of intelligible standards to ensure democratic accountability, fairness, security and meaningful deliberation in that provision.

Morphological freedom prevails to the extent to which discernible differences among peers arise from consensual prosthetic practices of self-determination or self-creation, rather than being imposed or unduly duressed by conditions of exploitation, violence or ignorance (any of which might broadly mobilize responsible intervention). What will be key for a properly technoprogressive bioethics that affirms morphological freedom will be a shift in focus from a moral(istic) concern with parochial standards of health, beauty or custom into an ethical concern with the meaningful consent of peers with whom one may or may not identify morally in the slightest.

This essay is a revised and edited version of a column published April 1, 2005 -- the day after Terri Schiavo died -- on Betterhumans.com. That column contained material from a number of shorter texts that I had already published on this blog during the height of the discussion of Schiavo case. All of that material should be accessible through the archives here.