Jamais Cascio has published an enormously disturbing post on his blog Open the Future in which he indicates that he is becoming "increasingly convinced that, whether we like it or not, geoengineering is going to become a leading arena of environmental research and development in the coming decade."
"Geoengineering" is rather like the process of terraforming one encounters in science fiction novels that describe the process of re-engineering human-hostile alien planets into hospitable ones, but applied to the earth itself... on an earth that has been made inhospitable through human carelessness and greed. More specifically, geoengineering would involve deliberate, presumably megascale, interventions into geophysical systems intended to produce beneficial or remedial changes in climate and the terrestrial environment as a whole.
We are all aware that the practices of extractive petrochemical industry have produced planet-scaled environmental changes already -- namely, global warming, aquifer depletion, topsoil loss, species loss, cancer epidemics, and so on.
The idea of geoengineering is enormously attractive rhetorically and psychologically because it represents a would-be redemptive face of this human caused environmental catastrophe: proposing the application of industry to the wounds wrought by industry, proposing the progressive redirection of human ingenuity from the short-sighted personal pursuit of greed to the foresighted collective pursuit of a sustainable and resilient technoscientific human civilization.
But as Cascio together with many other environmental scientists and activists have repeatedly pointed out, the "technofixes" inspired by the geoengineering imaginary tend to be simplistic in the extreme, tend to ignore the underlying structural and social problems that keep producing environmental catastrophes in the first place, tend to involve hyperbolic and overoptimistic claims amounting to matters of public relations rather than consensus science, and tend to inspire interventions that would almost inevitably prove later to be far more limited in their actual beneficial impacts than promised, sometimes would prove unfounded altogether in their assumptions, and all too often would end up making matters worse rather than better.
Cascio points out we cannot altogether "rule out a breakthrough discovery making this [geoengineering] strategy safer," and concludes that, hence, "for now, its only environmental value appears to be as a desperate, last-ditch effort to head off catastrophe."
I agree with Cascio here, but I will admit that I am incredibly reluctant to voice even this highly qualified and circumscribed support for any expression of the geoengineering imaginary. The reason I say this is because I am so keenly aware (as is Cascio, by the way, I doubt this is a disagreement between us) of the way incumbent interests have demonstrated themselves to be all too capable and even eager to manufacture the false apocalyptic scene of just such a final "catastrophe" demanding just such a "last ditch effort" when it suits their interests in maintaining and consolidating their hold on unjustified authority and unearned privilege.
I speak here not only of the obvious apocalyptic conjuration of a "Clash of Civilizations" and "Global War on Terror" whomped up by neoconservatives (not to mention neoliberals) in an effort to maintain US hegemony and the supremacy of corporate-militarist elites in the context of planetary energy and resource descent, but more specifically of arguments like that of James Lovelock who proposes that we have crossed an environmental "tipping point" to justify his recommendation that we immediately start building many more dangerous, unhealthy, expensive, politically Pharaonic nuclear power plants.
What Cascio isn't emphasizing quite enough in his account of the politics of geoengineering (this is, by the way, entirely a matter of emphasis in my view, since Cascio is definitely aware of the issues, does not neglect them in his arguments, and holds positions on these questions with which I generally sympathize) is that the geoengineering imaginary is suffused with the assumptions, interests, and habits of what Yochai Benkler calls The Industrial Model.
The Industrial Model is in its particulars both literally and figuratively monolithic, centralized, and hierarchical, whether applied to traditional industries like steel, transportation, broadcast media, print publication, or imposed (usually catastrophically) onto more traditionally peer-to-peer practices like agriculture, healing, research, or mentorship. As Benkler points out, the particulars of The Industrial Model derive historically from the inter-implicated exigencies of risky capital-intensive investment (in the means of production, public infrastructure, and the like) taken on by moneyed and authoritative elites and by the distribution and application of limited but generally usefully knowledge by credentialed experts and professionals from core to periphery.
The contemporary face of democratic politics in my view consists primarily of the resistance of elite incumbent interests that have long preferentially benefited from social and cultural formations defined by The Industrial Model to the radically democratizing forces unleashed by peer-to-peer planetary networks and the collaborative practices they facilitate. As a practical matter, environmental politics represent the most urgent problems with which we are grappling collectively in this historical moment, but as a conceptual matter, these environmental politics politics represent one among a number of skirmishes across a technodevelopmental terrain undergoing the fraught transformation from industrial-elitist to p2p-democratic assumptions, institutions, practices, norms, and ends.
To clarify what I mean by this, let me point out that I read Cascio's comment on the rise of the geoengineering imaginary in light of Naomi Klein's equally disturbing recent piece in The Nation, Guns Beat Green, in which she shows that investment in general and venture capitalists in particular are throwing enormous amounts of money at the moment into military r & d, surveillance, privatized security, gated community services for the rich and so on, rather than into the enormously promising avenues for solar, wind, desalination, and other renewable technologies that one would expect -- especially given the Greenwashed public face corporate-militarism likes to show the world via the bought and paid for corporate media at every opportunity these days.
Although I would not want to deny the force of straightforward head-in-the-sand climate-change denialism and the usual Ugly American Exceptionalism in play in much of the skewed monetary investment and attention Klein is documenting in her piece, what seems to me most chilling in the story she is telling is that beneath the surface of much of the public cheerfulness and denialism of our corporate-militarists in the face of human-wrought environmental catastrophe is some serious behind-the-scenes plotting and planning that is clearly premised on an awareness of the scale, scope, and pace of climate disaster quite as keen and shrill as that which one might hear from the keenest and shrillest environmental scientists and advocates incumbents are so quick publicly to disdain.
This is because the actual environmental politics of incumbent interests is not so much Denialist as Escapist on Klein's account here.
Ultimately, I think the escapist fantasies of moneyed and war-criminal corporate-militarist elites is just that: facile fantasies.
Whether they hope to abscond with their ill-gotten loot and sex-slaves to Dubai or some tropical tax-haven or beneath a bubble-dome on Mars or in the asteroid belt (as one finds seriously discussed by more "futurologically" inclined corporate-militarists, typically the ones who really fancy themselves the smartest guys in the room wherever they go, poor things), the greedy bloodyminded would-be aristocrats who have been cheerleading humanity largely against our regular and loudly expressed will through the interminable unnecessary murderous vulgar and gross chapters of their "Great Game" and war adventuring will surely discover to their cost that they are finally no more secure atop their piles of treasure and skull-heads than anybody else is from environmental devastation and violent social unrest.
And so, it is probably right to say, when all is said and done, that while the Escapists are not Climate-Change Denialists in stricto senso, theirs is still a Denialist position… It is the usual denialism of people attracted to the reactionary rightwing politics of incumbents and self-appointed elites, the denial of the facts of the dependence of all individuals, however momentarily august and glorious they may be, on the collective inheritance of history and on the ongoing collaboration of their fellows for their survival and flourishing.
What Klein and Cascio are documenting, then, in my view, are two different but importantly complementary faces of the anti-democratizing politics occasioned by the growing planetary awareness of and increasing impacts of environmental catastrophes:
The "Geoengineering" Imaginary, on the one hand, represents the efforts of incumbent interests to divert as much energy, investment, intelligence, and attention to Industrial Model solutions to environmental problems, not because these are the best solutions to the problems but because these are solutions least likely to challenge their authority and privileges -- as authors and facilitators of these very problems -- but more likely in fact, obscenely enough, to represent opportunities for the further consolidation of their authority and further accumulation of their privileges.
The "Escapist" Imaginary, on the other hand, represents the desires and efforts of incumbent interests to insulate themselves from the adverse, unsustainable, socially destabilizing impacts of the of their irresponsible profit-taking enterprises (no doubt soon enough to include their opportunistic embrace of geoengineering strategies), primarily through an ultimately doomed fantasy of perfect physical sequestration and perfect military supremacy.
And so, one encounters yet again in the industrial and incumbent-elitist confrontation with environmental catastrophe a deeply conservative (however "futurological") politics conjoining a selective fetishistic embrace of the technoscientific toypile to a selective hysterical disdain of the open secular democratic technoscientific multiculture on which scientific discovery and progress actually depend to produce the usual idiotic feudalist retro-futurism.
Monday, December 31, 2007
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Scattered Speculations on Secularism, Atheism, and Anticlericalism
The noisier advocates of organized authoritarian religiosity -- and especially troubling to pervy atheistical folks like me, Christianism in America -- seem enormously eager to collapse the notion of secularism with that of atheism, and I worry somewhat that some of the more careless advocates of the "new militant atheism" (so called) are abetting the theocrats in this facile identification.
In my view, it is crucial to distinguish secularism, atheism, and anticlericalism as stances -- all three of which I happen myself to advocate, but separately and each for different reasons -- else real mischief can result. This is especially so in a fraught era when, on the one hand, there is conspicuous contestation around issues of the proper relations of public citizenship and private faithfulness, as well as, on the other hand, at once reductive and expansive attitudes toward scientific rationality are apt to take on some of the historical coloration of organized religiosity (and no doubt the latter contributes to the former, and vice versa).
First off, for me the essence of secularity is the demarcation of private from public life as represented not by the ancient separation of oikos and polis (a problematically feminized and subordinated household economy as against a masculinized and valorized civic sphere), but by the more modern separation of Church and State. As it happens, I actually have a much more elaborated and idiosyncratic view of secularity (I'm a theoryhead, you have to expect these sorts of things from me) involving the demarcation of scientific, moral, aesthetic, ethical, and political practices of warranted belief, but one doesn't have to follow me down that path to get the substance of my argument here.
Be all that as it may, the iconic scene that captures secularity most essentially for me is the one in which the practitioner of some marginal religious practice or an atheist testifies in a court of law without calling the scene of civic adjudication into question.
The secular is sometimes taken as synonymous with the worldly and distinguished from the otherworldly, and on this basis some describe as secular only those societies in which there is no prominent role for religious belief or practice -- but it seems to me that the substantial content of religious belief and practice is in fact perfectly worldly and so this does not seem to me to be a useful characterization.
Now, atheism, for me, is a matter -- and quite true to what one should rightly expect from the term itself, actually, a-theist -- of doing "without god" in my personal life. I can't honestly say that I think there is much that is particularly positive or substantial entailed by this doing without god that I seem to have been doing cheerfully for a quarter century now, any more than there would be in pointing out that I do without phlogiston or heroin in my personal life.
Since the various characterizations and proofs of the existence of god I have stumbled on in my philosophical travels have never seemed to me particularly coherent, and certainly not to pass muster in the face of the standards of warranted assertability that apply in other circumstances when a person is offering up a candidate description as more useful than others in the way of prediction and control of the my environment, I must admit I have for the most part come to assume that people making what appear to be such assertions are really testifying to profound aesthetic experiences of the sublime and beautiful of a kind that make much more sense to me, whether from hikers recounting their encounters in wilderness, sensualists recounting their encounters in orgies, English majors recounting their encounters with Burroughs or Blake, esoteric mystics recounting their encounters in meditation or whirling, cognitive dissidents recounting their encounters with acid or mushrooms, and so on.
I will say that it seems to me to do equal disservice to the varieties of both mystical and magickal lifeways as well as to the variety of lifeways that do without god to shoehorn them into bland idiotic generalities like "people of faith" or "atheists" neither of which capture any of the worldly differences in practices or perspectives that constitute the substance of whatever is likely to matter most in the lives of all these variously believing folks.
As you can see, I'll admit that I think most of the attention atheism gets both from those who vilify and valorize "it" is wildly overwrought. Now, anticlericalism is another matter altogether.
It seems to me if the militant atheists were clearer about what really bothers them about organized religiosity they would shunt aside all the self-serving generalities about epistemology and irrationality and focus on the priestly patriarchal hierarchies that have captured especially the judeochrislamic monotheisms of the Book. I get especially annoyed when so-called "Champions of Science" (so much of whose "championing of science" seems to involve anti-intellectual diatribes by social scientists and culture warriors against effete elite humanities scholars in a sad and doomed effort to consolidate their own credibility as solid stolid He Men of Hard Science) claim to be carrying the torch of what they monolithically oversimplify as "the" Enlightenment Project.
For one thing, although it is clearly true that there were some atheists (or at any rate, close enough) among many of the key figures in especially the French and Scottish moments of the Enlightenment, the truth is that the overabundant majority of those figures were not, and indeed no small part of the various movements of European Enlightenment consisted of ferocious anticlerical interventions organized to faciliate more personal understandings of proper Christian faithfulness. Pesky facts like these should presumably matter to so-called "champions of science," especially given their endless harping on how devoted to truth they are compared to the rampant relativists and irrationalists they seem all too eager to dismiss everybody else as.
It is especially troubling to notice how often those who would claim to take up the torch of Enlightenment in historically insensitive ways coupled to militant enthusiasm go on to use this rhetoric to demand deference to authoritative would be elites and incumbent interests, precisely to the contrary of the anti-incumbency, anti-authoritarianism, anti-literalism that seem to me more properly to characterize the ethos of Enlightenment if one really must try to distill its complexities into a useful generalization.
This weirdly authoritarian commandeering of Enlightenment discourse seems to me to be afoot when militant would-be champions of Enlightenment mobilize racist construals of a hysterically monolithic Clash of Civilizations demanding we all do what the nice reasonable grown up executives and experts of white racist patriarchal capitalism tell us to do else be bulldozed by skeery highly sexed brown skinned irrationalists with guns who hate our freedom. (It is of course easily possible to criticize fundamentalist social formations without making recourse to such pathologizing and racist overgeneralizatoins and such are the criticisms I personally strongly prefer.)
This commandeering of Enlightenment also seems to me too often to be happening when militant would-be champions of Enlightenment mobilize anti-intellectual construals of a Fashionably Nonsensical Relativist Menace in the Elite Effete Humanities Academy among what are in fact mostly just sensible scholarly advocates of pragmatist, pluralist, social constructivist accounts of prevailing factual and normative descriptions soliciting belief, and propose instead that we defer to expert pronouncements (often by self-appointed "experts" without recognized qualifications in the actual fields under discussion) concerning vital technoscience questions rather than demanding a say in public decisions about the distributions of technodevelopmental costs, risks, and benefits that conspicuously affect us.
In such cases, it seems to me that these militant atheists, especially in their anti-political or presumably neutrally apolitical scientistic reductionist moods end up endorsing dangerously error-prone and parochially-minded authoritarian forms of technocratic clericalism in ways that endanger indispensable secular commitments. And despite the fact that I share their atheism (and am therefore very likely able enjoy a good joke and a drink at the bar with them whenever their talk turns to Festivus Poles, Flying Spaghetti Monsters, or similar trivia), I must say that my own anti-authoritarian anti-clericalism and pluralist secularism in many cases seems to trump my capacity to endorse much in the way of their programmatic attitudes and commitments when all is said and done.
In my view, it is crucial to distinguish secularism, atheism, and anticlericalism as stances -- all three of which I happen myself to advocate, but separately and each for different reasons -- else real mischief can result. This is especially so in a fraught era when, on the one hand, there is conspicuous contestation around issues of the proper relations of public citizenship and private faithfulness, as well as, on the other hand, at once reductive and expansive attitudes toward scientific rationality are apt to take on some of the historical coloration of organized religiosity (and no doubt the latter contributes to the former, and vice versa).
First off, for me the essence of secularity is the demarcation of private from public life as represented not by the ancient separation of oikos and polis (a problematically feminized and subordinated household economy as against a masculinized and valorized civic sphere), but by the more modern separation of Church and State. As it happens, I actually have a much more elaborated and idiosyncratic view of secularity (I'm a theoryhead, you have to expect these sorts of things from me) involving the demarcation of scientific, moral, aesthetic, ethical, and political practices of warranted belief, but one doesn't have to follow me down that path to get the substance of my argument here.
Be all that as it may, the iconic scene that captures secularity most essentially for me is the one in which the practitioner of some marginal religious practice or an atheist testifies in a court of law without calling the scene of civic adjudication into question.
The secular is sometimes taken as synonymous with the worldly and distinguished from the otherworldly, and on this basis some describe as secular only those societies in which there is no prominent role for religious belief or practice -- but it seems to me that the substantial content of religious belief and practice is in fact perfectly worldly and so this does not seem to me to be a useful characterization.
Now, atheism, for me, is a matter -- and quite true to what one should rightly expect from the term itself, actually, a-theist -- of doing "without god" in my personal life. I can't honestly say that I think there is much that is particularly positive or substantial entailed by this doing without god that I seem to have been doing cheerfully for a quarter century now, any more than there would be in pointing out that I do without phlogiston or heroin in my personal life.
Since the various characterizations and proofs of the existence of god I have stumbled on in my philosophical travels have never seemed to me particularly coherent, and certainly not to pass muster in the face of the standards of warranted assertability that apply in other circumstances when a person is offering up a candidate description as more useful than others in the way of prediction and control of the my environment, I must admit I have for the most part come to assume that people making what appear to be such assertions are really testifying to profound aesthetic experiences of the sublime and beautiful of a kind that make much more sense to me, whether from hikers recounting their encounters in wilderness, sensualists recounting their encounters in orgies, English majors recounting their encounters with Burroughs or Blake, esoteric mystics recounting their encounters in meditation or whirling, cognitive dissidents recounting their encounters with acid or mushrooms, and so on.
I will say that it seems to me to do equal disservice to the varieties of both mystical and magickal lifeways as well as to the variety of lifeways that do without god to shoehorn them into bland idiotic generalities like "people of faith" or "atheists" neither of which capture any of the worldly differences in practices or perspectives that constitute the substance of whatever is likely to matter most in the lives of all these variously believing folks.
As you can see, I'll admit that I think most of the attention atheism gets both from those who vilify and valorize "it" is wildly overwrought. Now, anticlericalism is another matter altogether.
It seems to me if the militant atheists were clearer about what really bothers them about organized religiosity they would shunt aside all the self-serving generalities about epistemology and irrationality and focus on the priestly patriarchal hierarchies that have captured especially the judeochrislamic monotheisms of the Book. I get especially annoyed when so-called "Champions of Science" (so much of whose "championing of science" seems to involve anti-intellectual diatribes by social scientists and culture warriors against effete elite humanities scholars in a sad and doomed effort to consolidate their own credibility as solid stolid He Men of Hard Science) claim to be carrying the torch of what they monolithically oversimplify as "the" Enlightenment Project.
For one thing, although it is clearly true that there were some atheists (or at any rate, close enough) among many of the key figures in especially the French and Scottish moments of the Enlightenment, the truth is that the overabundant majority of those figures were not, and indeed no small part of the various movements of European Enlightenment consisted of ferocious anticlerical interventions organized to faciliate more personal understandings of proper Christian faithfulness. Pesky facts like these should presumably matter to so-called "champions of science," especially given their endless harping on how devoted to truth they are compared to the rampant relativists and irrationalists they seem all too eager to dismiss everybody else as.
It is especially troubling to notice how often those who would claim to take up the torch of Enlightenment in historically insensitive ways coupled to militant enthusiasm go on to use this rhetoric to demand deference to authoritative would be elites and incumbent interests, precisely to the contrary of the anti-incumbency, anti-authoritarianism, anti-literalism that seem to me more properly to characterize the ethos of Enlightenment if one really must try to distill its complexities into a useful generalization.
This weirdly authoritarian commandeering of Enlightenment discourse seems to me to be afoot when militant would-be champions of Enlightenment mobilize racist construals of a hysterically monolithic Clash of Civilizations demanding we all do what the nice reasonable grown up executives and experts of white racist patriarchal capitalism tell us to do else be bulldozed by skeery highly sexed brown skinned irrationalists with guns who hate our freedom. (It is of course easily possible to criticize fundamentalist social formations without making recourse to such pathologizing and racist overgeneralizatoins and such are the criticisms I personally strongly prefer.)
This commandeering of Enlightenment also seems to me too often to be happening when militant would-be champions of Enlightenment mobilize anti-intellectual construals of a Fashionably Nonsensical Relativist Menace in the Elite Effete Humanities Academy among what are in fact mostly just sensible scholarly advocates of pragmatist, pluralist, social constructivist accounts of prevailing factual and normative descriptions soliciting belief, and propose instead that we defer to expert pronouncements (often by self-appointed "experts" without recognized qualifications in the actual fields under discussion) concerning vital technoscience questions rather than demanding a say in public decisions about the distributions of technodevelopmental costs, risks, and benefits that conspicuously affect us.
In such cases, it seems to me that these militant atheists, especially in their anti-political or presumably neutrally apolitical scientistic reductionist moods end up endorsing dangerously error-prone and parochially-minded authoritarian forms of technocratic clericalism in ways that endanger indispensable secular commitments. And despite the fact that I share their atheism (and am therefore very likely able enjoy a good joke and a drink at the bar with them whenever their talk turns to Festivus Poles, Flying Spaghetti Monsters, or similar trivia), I must say that my own anti-authoritarian anti-clericalism and pluralist secularism in many cases seems to trump my capacity to endorse much in the way of their programmatic attitudes and commitments when all is said and done.
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Left and Right, Back to Basics
It doesn't matter what you are called or flatter to call yourself politically (I'm beyond left and right! I'm fiscally conservative and socially liberal! I'm a conformist independent! I'm the mushy middle!) -- it doesn't matter what neologistic tag you've glommed onto online (Constitutionalist! Upwinger! Dynamist!) -- it doesn't matter what political party you belong to… the fact is that you are perfectly intelligible as a person of the progressive democratic Left if you affirm or feel inspired by the following basic ideas, just as you are perfectly intelligible as a person of the conservative incumbent-interested Right if you feel indifference, skepticism, or even hostility to the basic ideas that
[1] All people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them;
[2] People who are not misinformed or under duress tend, in general, to be capable of articulating their own interests, of testifying to their personal knowledge, and of contributing a worthy measure to the collaborative solution of shared problems;
[3] It is always possible and desirable, however costly and difficult it may be, to reconcile differences and conflicts between people in nonviolent ways -- and this includes disputes over questions of what constitutes violence;
[4] The act of informed, nonduressed consent is a foundation both of democracy and nonviolence;
[5] The public provision and administration of civil rights, basic income, healthcare, general welfare, and common goods facilitates a scene of consent that is nonduressed, while the public provision of the widest possible access to education and reliable knowledge facilitates a scene of consent that is informed, and acts of consent are legible and legitimate as such only to the extent that they are so informed and nonduressed;
[6] Progressive taxation of property and income provides a means to meet the basic conditions on which the doubly foundational scene of consent depends, while at once providing a popular check (no taxation without representation) on the dangerous policing authority of government as well as a check on the tendency of individual stakeholders -- especially those who happen to be momentarily invested with conspicuous wealth, authority, reputation, or attention -- to forget or disavow their ineradicable social and historical inter-dependence in the always collaborative project of creative expressivity and collective problem solving.
"Beyond Left and Right"
It is one of the occupational hazards of seeking to clarify one's views online in particular that one is constantly confronting befuddling cut-and-pasted worldviews articulating what amount to rather straightforward left or right political propositions in fact, but tangled up in a thicket of superfluous neologisms, undigested notions, conventions, terms, and frames deployed without much sense of their discursive, figurative, generic, or etymological entailments, or sometimes even their basic definitions.
I can't tell you how many times I've been caught up in arguments with right-wing corporate-militarists who deny that their political viewpoint is authoritarian or conservative at all, all evidence to the contrary, but constitutes some newfangled perspective "off the traditional political map," "Beyond Left and Right."
And once one has followed one of these dot-eyed reactionaries off the cliff-face of that traditional left-right map one is inevitably inducted into a bewildering labyrinth in which the often dime-thin differences that distinguish libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, crypto-anarchists, Randians, minarchists, agorists, dynamists, extropians, upwingers, classical liberals, neoliberals, neoconservatives and so on get invested with epic significance demanding endless hair-splitting analysis and inspiring endless claims of unsubstantiated confidence and originality.
Meanwhile, all this endless slogging through the swamp of reactionary right-wing bullshit, this swamp of proliferating neologisms and public relations spinning to keep thought off-kilter and profit on-target, has always obscured or altogether obliterated our devoting any attention at all to or attributing any significance at all to the crucial difference that makes a difference distinguishing all this right wing crapola from basic democratic left attitudes that represent the real living alternative to the whole dumb debased range of these right wing "ideas."
My whole adult life since high school I have been constantly sermonized that "all the new ideas are on the right," that all "the excitement and revolutionary fervor has shifted away from the left to the right," and so on. Usually it seemed to me upon actually listening to all these "new ideas" and "excited revolutionaries" that this was mostly a bunch of stupid white assholes saying fairly obviously trite and idiotic things, not to mention rather ugly usually racist things, and in general confusing theory with something like used car salesmanship. And while it is true that there often was a real excitement on display among the Movement Conservatives, the Ayn Randians, the libertarians (you know, people who vote Republican but who are personally cool with pot and hookers and, sometimes, atheists), the extropian libertopian techno-utopians, and so on, this excitement always seemed more to do with pulling off a heist or a scam or otherwise getting away with something naughty than the excitement of being undone and remade in the confrontation with new ideas or engaging in anything like real revolutionary struggle.
Cutting through all the bogus novelty, empty neologisms, and faux innovation, it seems to me that there remains in force a basic distinction between the left and the right, between conservative politics organized by incumbent interests and progressive politics organized by the diverse dynamic demands of the plurality of actual stakeholders to historical change in the world. And, no, it doesn't matter, hot shot, that these designations derive superficially from the placement in the congressional chamber of partisans of conservative against progressive politics during the French Revolution, any more than it matters that Red and Blue have acquired a comparably accidental association with conservatism and democracy through the mass broadcast mediation of election coverage in the United States, the underlying and in my view abiding countervailing political orientations captured in these various accidental formalisms are what matters here.
I know that many of my colleagues (especially those who share my own focus on the politics of disruptive technoscientific change) find this to be a real blind spot in my thinking, but I honestly think all the overheated re-mappings of the political terrain one stumbles onto in popular political prognostication (especially online) tend to be faddish distractions from the enduring analytic utility of distinguishing elitist from democratic political ends.
I don't deny that disruptive technodevelopments, for example, can scramble and befuddle customary left-right constituencies, formations, and so on. But it seems to me that a clear grasp of the traditional distinction of left from right, democratic from elitist politics, provides indispensable guidance in such moments of befuddlement, reminds us that traditional allies -- whatever our basic political orientation -- may not yet have found their way to a politically consistent accommodation of novelty (as neither yet might we ourselves), and so it is a useful thing to provisionally reorient ourselves by way of our basic principles.
If nothing else, in moments like those, especially democratically minded folks of the left know to set aside their comfortable allegiances and formulations and remember to actually pay attention to just who is profiting and who is bearing the costs of some novel development, who is doing all the talking and who is getting ignored, who is holding the guns and where are they pointed, and so on.
I have yet to confront a situation, however otherwise unprecedented, that ultimately seemed to me "Beyond Left and Right" in any significant sense, once I had devoted time to understanding it properly in those terms. Neither do I know of any progressive or democratic outcome that has been facilitated by an analysis that flattered itself that it was "Beyond Left and Right" in this way.
Given the special predilection of market libertarians (most of whom are, face it, perfectly intelligible as right wing reactionaries in most of their desired outcomes and many of their deepest assumptions) for the claim that they are "Beyond Left and Right," and given indispensability of the "Beyond Left and Right" formulations to the neoliberal corporate-militarist hijackings of the Democratic Party in the USA by the DLC in the Clinton Administration and of Labor in the UK in the Blairite era of the so-called "Third Way," one would expect especially democratically minded people to be leery by now of expressions of the desire to get "Beyond Left and Right." Too often that desire seems upon close scrutiny to amount to a rather facile, however effective, effort to get the people of the democratic left to take their eyes off the ball and so abet the Right in their ugly awful Business As Usual.
I can't tell you how many times I've been caught up in arguments with right-wing corporate-militarists who deny that their political viewpoint is authoritarian or conservative at all, all evidence to the contrary, but constitutes some newfangled perspective "off the traditional political map," "Beyond Left and Right."
And once one has followed one of these dot-eyed reactionaries off the cliff-face of that traditional left-right map one is inevitably inducted into a bewildering labyrinth in which the often dime-thin differences that distinguish libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, crypto-anarchists, Randians, minarchists, agorists, dynamists, extropians, upwingers, classical liberals, neoliberals, neoconservatives and so on get invested with epic significance demanding endless hair-splitting analysis and inspiring endless claims of unsubstantiated confidence and originality.
Meanwhile, all this endless slogging through the swamp of reactionary right-wing bullshit, this swamp of proliferating neologisms and public relations spinning to keep thought off-kilter and profit on-target, has always obscured or altogether obliterated our devoting any attention at all to or attributing any significance at all to the crucial difference that makes a difference distinguishing all this right wing crapola from basic democratic left attitudes that represent the real living alternative to the whole dumb debased range of these right wing "ideas."
My whole adult life since high school I have been constantly sermonized that "all the new ideas are on the right," that all "the excitement and revolutionary fervor has shifted away from the left to the right," and so on. Usually it seemed to me upon actually listening to all these "new ideas" and "excited revolutionaries" that this was mostly a bunch of stupid white assholes saying fairly obviously trite and idiotic things, not to mention rather ugly usually racist things, and in general confusing theory with something like used car salesmanship. And while it is true that there often was a real excitement on display among the Movement Conservatives, the Ayn Randians, the libertarians (you know, people who vote Republican but who are personally cool with pot and hookers and, sometimes, atheists), the extropian libertopian techno-utopians, and so on, this excitement always seemed more to do with pulling off a heist or a scam or otherwise getting away with something naughty than the excitement of being undone and remade in the confrontation with new ideas or engaging in anything like real revolutionary struggle.
Cutting through all the bogus novelty, empty neologisms, and faux innovation, it seems to me that there remains in force a basic distinction between the left and the right, between conservative politics organized by incumbent interests and progressive politics organized by the diverse dynamic demands of the plurality of actual stakeholders to historical change in the world. And, no, it doesn't matter, hot shot, that these designations derive superficially from the placement in the congressional chamber of partisans of conservative against progressive politics during the French Revolution, any more than it matters that Red and Blue have acquired a comparably accidental association with conservatism and democracy through the mass broadcast mediation of election coverage in the United States, the underlying and in my view abiding countervailing political orientations captured in these various accidental formalisms are what matters here.
I know that many of my colleagues (especially those who share my own focus on the politics of disruptive technoscientific change) find this to be a real blind spot in my thinking, but I honestly think all the overheated re-mappings of the political terrain one stumbles onto in popular political prognostication (especially online) tend to be faddish distractions from the enduring analytic utility of distinguishing elitist from democratic political ends.
I don't deny that disruptive technodevelopments, for example, can scramble and befuddle customary left-right constituencies, formations, and so on. But it seems to me that a clear grasp of the traditional distinction of left from right, democratic from elitist politics, provides indispensable guidance in such moments of befuddlement, reminds us that traditional allies -- whatever our basic political orientation -- may not yet have found their way to a politically consistent accommodation of novelty (as neither yet might we ourselves), and so it is a useful thing to provisionally reorient ourselves by way of our basic principles.
If nothing else, in moments like those, especially democratically minded folks of the left know to set aside their comfortable allegiances and formulations and remember to actually pay attention to just who is profiting and who is bearing the costs of some novel development, who is doing all the talking and who is getting ignored, who is holding the guns and where are they pointed, and so on.
I have yet to confront a situation, however otherwise unprecedented, that ultimately seemed to me "Beyond Left and Right" in any significant sense, once I had devoted time to understanding it properly in those terms. Neither do I know of any progressive or democratic outcome that has been facilitated by an analysis that flattered itself that it was "Beyond Left and Right" in this way.
Given the special predilection of market libertarians (most of whom are, face it, perfectly intelligible as right wing reactionaries in most of their desired outcomes and many of their deepest assumptions) for the claim that they are "Beyond Left and Right," and given indispensability of the "Beyond Left and Right" formulations to the neoliberal corporate-militarist hijackings of the Democratic Party in the USA by the DLC in the Clinton Administration and of Labor in the UK in the Blairite era of the so-called "Third Way," one would expect especially democratically minded people to be leery by now of expressions of the desire to get "Beyond Left and Right." Too often that desire seems upon close scrutiny to amount to a rather facile, however effective, effort to get the people of the democratic left to take their eyes off the ball and so abet the Right in their ugly awful Business As Usual.
Monday, December 24, 2007
Thinking About the Politics of "Design"
Over the last couple of years I've taught a few courses at Berkeley and at the San Francisco Art Institute exploring the interactions of "design" with "politics," especially in the contexts of "Green" design and social software/p2p coding for democracy, and so on.
"Design" discourses turn out to be really double edged for democratically minded people, since they can easily be either profoundly democratizing or profoundly anti-democratizing in their assumptions and effects and the popular forms of design discourse don't seem particularly well-equipped or even always particularly interested in distinguishing these assumptions and effects.
It is amazing how often those who emphasize questions of design and who "value design" really mean by this to denigrate democratic processes or to express a desire to circumvent politics altogether through elite decision making processes and what gets portrayed as politically-"neutral" engineering processes.
Those who would employ, educate, and implement sound design principles to democratic ends (many permaculture advocates, for example, as well as many social software coders) have always to pay close attention to the question of who gets designated as the designers in these design discourses, just where their powers come from, where their money comes from, whether or not they are accountable for the actual impacts of their designs in any way, whether those who are affected by design decisions have a say in the design process and in its outcomes, whether design functions (usually obliquely) to facilitate elite control/exploitation, whether what is marketed as the "introduction" of design into some chaotic state of affairs actually represents the imposition of a new and particular design vocabulary onto indigenous/local lifeways and vocabularies already in use and capable of emancipatory elaboration or reform rather than replacement, and so on. The politics of design is in the details.
This circles me right back around to a point that I really find myself hammering at incessantly among technocentric folks (of whom I too am one, so this is also a self-criticism): "Design" is a word like "technology" -- there is absolutely no conservative or progressive politics inhering in the affirmation or repudiation of "design" as such, at that level of generality.
In fact, the very idea of the blanket repudiation or affirmation of all design, just as with the idea of such a blanket repudiation or affirmation of all technology is literally incoherent: we are ineradicably socialized, acculturated, linguistic, historical beings, there is no human outside of selective attention, public testimony, applied technique. And so there can be no politics organized by the distinction of a "pro" versus "anti" design viewpoint, nor by the distinction of a "pro" versus "anti" technology viewpoint.
Actually, interestingly enough, the rhetoric of proposing otherwise here, of obfuscating technodevelopmental deliberation at the relevant level of concrete decisions, actual stakeholders, and discernible impacts for an abstract affirmation of "design" or "technology" conceived as bland generalities does often have a politics -- and usually it is a de facto conservative politics, even when it exhibits the superficial trappings of radical futurology. This is because taking things off the table, engaging in efforts at de-politicization, is inherently anti-democratizing, and hence inherently conservative.
Technodevelopmental politics look to me to be pretty conventional in fact: either people have a say in the decisions that affect them or "elites" make the decisions because they should for whatever reasons elitists care to supply. Democracy versus tyranny, collaboration versus control, left versus right, exactly as usual.
It is true that the speed, scope, and intensity of technodevelopmental change can sometimes introduce structurally coherent clusters of issues into the political scene that introduce problems into conventional left-right mappings, scramble conventional left-right formations, and so on. Technodevelopmental change isn't the only thing that does this, by the way, but it must be conspicuous in our thinking of the political today.
But I think it is mistaken to claim that these key but momentary complications redefine politics in a truly fundamental way. Given the conspicuously provisional character of analysis and the "strange bedfellow" alliances fears and fantasies around such issues seem to inspire it is easy to imagine there is a kind of unprecedented "third axis" (beyond familiar left-right concerns of democracy/anti-democracy) introduced by the politics of reproductive technologies (abortion, ARTs, contraception, sex education politics, and so on), environmental politics (resource/energy descent, pollution, monoculture, etc.), p2p politics (copyfight, a2k, Net Neutrality, sousveillance, etc.), non-normalizing medical technique (struggles of the differently enabled, the "drug war," transex/intersex politics, consensual mod-med, etc.). But it is my view that each of these fraught and contested edge-cities on the left-right terrain will eventually settle back into familiar democratic/anti-democratic terms -- indeed, in my view, already they are doing so -- as unfamiliar and unknown capacities, problems, costs, risks, and benefits are refamiliarized through the testimony of the relevant stakeholders to their impacts.
I agree that it is important to know when a disruptive development causes familiar mappings and organizing to go a bit haywire for a time, so as to understand better what the dangers and opportunities available in an historical moment consist of. But it is crucial to keep one's touchstone intact even so: The left-right map will eventually restabilize to accommodate the disruptive development. (Even if it is also true that there will always be emerging local disruptions, thank heavens, keeping the political terrain dynamic and futurity open, however intelligible it remains in terms of the basic left-right antagonism of democracy/anti-democracy.) The dangers and opportunities that matter most even in the moments of instability are still defined by the democratic/anti-democratic values onto which the map will re-stabilize soon enough. The politics are prior to the toypile.
It will always be possible to re-orientate the problems and promises inhering in concrete technodevelopments according to democratic versus anti-democratic politics, and to the extent that it is the politics that are being foregrounded presumably in one's analysis, then the values, alliances, and details that are relevant to that analysis will remain the ones that are democratizing or anti-democratizing. The utility of a distinction of pro- vs anti- "design" or pro- vs anti- "technology" as the lens through which to analyze technodevelopmental politics is, to my way of thinking, entirely a matter of observing the impact of these distinctions on and translating them back into terms of whether or not they conduce to greater democratization of deliberation and distribution of technoscientific costs, risks, and benefits to the actual stakeholders to those developments. As a person of the democratic left, I've come to be rather skeptical about both moves myself.
"Design" discourses turn out to be really double edged for democratically minded people, since they can easily be either profoundly democratizing or profoundly anti-democratizing in their assumptions and effects and the popular forms of design discourse don't seem particularly well-equipped or even always particularly interested in distinguishing these assumptions and effects.
It is amazing how often those who emphasize questions of design and who "value design" really mean by this to denigrate democratic processes or to express a desire to circumvent politics altogether through elite decision making processes and what gets portrayed as politically-"neutral" engineering processes.
Those who would employ, educate, and implement sound design principles to democratic ends (many permaculture advocates, for example, as well as many social software coders) have always to pay close attention to the question of who gets designated as the designers in these design discourses, just where their powers come from, where their money comes from, whether or not they are accountable for the actual impacts of their designs in any way, whether those who are affected by design decisions have a say in the design process and in its outcomes, whether design functions (usually obliquely) to facilitate elite control/exploitation, whether what is marketed as the "introduction" of design into some chaotic state of affairs actually represents the imposition of a new and particular design vocabulary onto indigenous/local lifeways and vocabularies already in use and capable of emancipatory elaboration or reform rather than replacement, and so on. The politics of design is in the details.
This circles me right back around to a point that I really find myself hammering at incessantly among technocentric folks (of whom I too am one, so this is also a self-criticism): "Design" is a word like "technology" -- there is absolutely no conservative or progressive politics inhering in the affirmation or repudiation of "design" as such, at that level of generality.
In fact, the very idea of the blanket repudiation or affirmation of all design, just as with the idea of such a blanket repudiation or affirmation of all technology is literally incoherent: we are ineradicably socialized, acculturated, linguistic, historical beings, there is no human outside of selective attention, public testimony, applied technique. And so there can be no politics organized by the distinction of a "pro" versus "anti" design viewpoint, nor by the distinction of a "pro" versus "anti" technology viewpoint.
Actually, interestingly enough, the rhetoric of proposing otherwise here, of obfuscating technodevelopmental deliberation at the relevant level of concrete decisions, actual stakeholders, and discernible impacts for an abstract affirmation of "design" or "technology" conceived as bland generalities does often have a politics -- and usually it is a de facto conservative politics, even when it exhibits the superficial trappings of radical futurology. This is because taking things off the table, engaging in efforts at de-politicization, is inherently anti-democratizing, and hence inherently conservative.
Technodevelopmental politics look to me to be pretty conventional in fact: either people have a say in the decisions that affect them or "elites" make the decisions because they should for whatever reasons elitists care to supply. Democracy versus tyranny, collaboration versus control, left versus right, exactly as usual.
It is true that the speed, scope, and intensity of technodevelopmental change can sometimes introduce structurally coherent clusters of issues into the political scene that introduce problems into conventional left-right mappings, scramble conventional left-right formations, and so on. Technodevelopmental change isn't the only thing that does this, by the way, but it must be conspicuous in our thinking of the political today.
But I think it is mistaken to claim that these key but momentary complications redefine politics in a truly fundamental way. Given the conspicuously provisional character of analysis and the "strange bedfellow" alliances fears and fantasies around such issues seem to inspire it is easy to imagine there is a kind of unprecedented "third axis" (beyond familiar left-right concerns of democracy/anti-democracy) introduced by the politics of reproductive technologies (abortion, ARTs, contraception, sex education politics, and so on), environmental politics (resource/energy descent, pollution, monoculture, etc.), p2p politics (copyfight, a2k, Net Neutrality, sousveillance, etc.), non-normalizing medical technique (struggles of the differently enabled, the "drug war," transex/intersex politics, consensual mod-med, etc.). But it is my view that each of these fraught and contested edge-cities on the left-right terrain will eventually settle back into familiar democratic/anti-democratic terms -- indeed, in my view, already they are doing so -- as unfamiliar and unknown capacities, problems, costs, risks, and benefits are refamiliarized through the testimony of the relevant stakeholders to their impacts.
I agree that it is important to know when a disruptive development causes familiar mappings and organizing to go a bit haywire for a time, so as to understand better what the dangers and opportunities available in an historical moment consist of. But it is crucial to keep one's touchstone intact even so: The left-right map will eventually restabilize to accommodate the disruptive development. (Even if it is also true that there will always be emerging local disruptions, thank heavens, keeping the political terrain dynamic and futurity open, however intelligible it remains in terms of the basic left-right antagonism of democracy/anti-democracy.) The dangers and opportunities that matter most even in the moments of instability are still defined by the democratic/anti-democratic values onto which the map will re-stabilize soon enough. The politics are prior to the toypile.
It will always be possible to re-orientate the problems and promises inhering in concrete technodevelopments according to democratic versus anti-democratic politics, and to the extent that it is the politics that are being foregrounded presumably in one's analysis, then the values, alliances, and details that are relevant to that analysis will remain the ones that are democratizing or anti-democratizing. The utility of a distinction of pro- vs anti- "design" or pro- vs anti- "technology" as the lens through which to analyze technodevelopmental politics is, to my way of thinking, entirely a matter of observing the impact of these distinctions on and translating them back into terms of whether or not they conduce to greater democratization of deliberation and distribution of technoscientific costs, risks, and benefits to the actual stakeholders to those developments. As a person of the democratic left, I've come to be rather skeptical about both moves myself.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Many of the Faithful Are Really Just Aesthetes
Upgraded and adapted from Comments:
In my last post I proposed "that scientific, moral, aesthetic, ethical, and political modes of belief-ascription are all warranted as reasonable according to different criteria, [and] that these are not reducible to one another in their proper work, their proper forms, their practices, [or] their histories. But since I do believe one can warrant one's beliefs in any of these modes with good reasons it isn't really right to say that I am a relativist in the sense Americans tend to mean [by that charge.]" This is a proposal I have expanded on in many places, but especially here.
My friend (and Friend of Blog!) Robin responded with the following question:
When people start making religious claims that might otherwise sound questionable to a longstanding atheist, secularist, and appalling voluptuary like me I find that if I adjust my Universal Translator a bit and hear them making aesthetic claims ("I am following my bliss"), or moral claims ("I try to be a decent person according the norms of my community") instead of making troubling onto-theological claims in the philosophical sense, I have discovered to my delight that the overabundant majority of religious discourse becomes pretty unobjectionable even to crusty atheistical ears like mine.
Not only that, but I have found that I can carry on quite sustained and detailed conversations with people who locate their religiosity pretty close to the center of their selfhood in ways that seem completely mutually respectful and intelligible so long as I keep these mental translations to myself. That makes me think these translations are probably capturing the substance of what is really at stake in much of the discourse that passes for "religious."
From all this I conclude that
(1) my sense that the United States is pretty much a secular country despite the megaphone organized religion has got is still perfectly sensible,
(2) my Deweyan faith that Americans, like everybody else, are critical enough to sustain democratic institutions and intelligent enough to collectively solve shared problems is still perfectly sensible,
(3) my belief that most people really are mostly right about most things most of the time isn't ruled out by some prevalence of rampant irrationalism after all, and that
(4) too many of the new "militant atheists," so-called, are mistaking as terrifying irrationality what is often little more than a rather glib usage of superficially theological vocabularies to express aesthetic and moral beliefs, and this mistake of theirs makes these militants feel more alienated, scared, and desperate about the state of the world than they need be, attesting to what I have long suspected has as much of a reductionist failure of imagination and an anti-democratizing failure of nerve in it as it has good sense.
All that said, when a fundamentalist champions patriarchy, when an evangelical jackhole champions genocide or theocracy, when a Robot Cultist muddies the distinction between policy discourse and flim-flam artistry and fraud, when people uncritically substitute the dictates of priestly authorities (religious or otherwise) for critical engagement, well, you can be sure I do call them on it for dangerous nonsense.
In answer to your specific question, then, I don't finally think "religious" is properly added to my list of modes of warranted belief, but mostly because the bits of religiosity that do seem to me to be warrantable are already subsumed under the aesthetic and moral categories.
If it hurts the feelings of an otherwise unobjectionably religious person to put that point so baldly, I'll just do the mental translation in my head and go ahead with dinner.
Does that answer your question? I didn't take it as a hostile provocation or challenge at all! I like answering this question. I tend to think my approach on this subject could be much more widely applied to good result.
In my last post I proposed "that scientific, moral, aesthetic, ethical, and political modes of belief-ascription are all warranted as reasonable according to different criteria, [and] that these are not reducible to one another in their proper work, their proper forms, their practices, [or] their histories. But since I do believe one can warrant one's beliefs in any of these modes with good reasons it isn't really right to say that I am a relativist in the sense Americans tend to mean [by that charge.]" This is a proposal I have expanded on in many places, but especially here.
My friend (and Friend of Blog!) Robin responded with the following question:
What would you say to someone who puts "religious" just as comfortably in your list that includes "scientific, moral, aesthetic, ethical, and political"?
(This isn't a challenge, by the way. I'm just genuinely curious!)
When people start making religious claims that might otherwise sound questionable to a longstanding atheist, secularist, and appalling voluptuary like me I find that if I adjust my Universal Translator a bit and hear them making aesthetic claims ("I am following my bliss"), or moral claims ("I try to be a decent person according the norms of my community") instead of making troubling onto-theological claims in the philosophical sense, I have discovered to my delight that the overabundant majority of religious discourse becomes pretty unobjectionable even to crusty atheistical ears like mine.
Not only that, but I have found that I can carry on quite sustained and detailed conversations with people who locate their religiosity pretty close to the center of their selfhood in ways that seem completely mutually respectful and intelligible so long as I keep these mental translations to myself. That makes me think these translations are probably capturing the substance of what is really at stake in much of the discourse that passes for "religious."
From all this I conclude that
(1) my sense that the United States is pretty much a secular country despite the megaphone organized religion has got is still perfectly sensible,
(2) my Deweyan faith that Americans, like everybody else, are critical enough to sustain democratic institutions and intelligent enough to collectively solve shared problems is still perfectly sensible,
(3) my belief that most people really are mostly right about most things most of the time isn't ruled out by some prevalence of rampant irrationalism after all, and that
(4) too many of the new "militant atheists," so-called, are mistaking as terrifying irrationality what is often little more than a rather glib usage of superficially theological vocabularies to express aesthetic and moral beliefs, and this mistake of theirs makes these militants feel more alienated, scared, and desperate about the state of the world than they need be, attesting to what I have long suspected has as much of a reductionist failure of imagination and an anti-democratizing failure of nerve in it as it has good sense.
All that said, when a fundamentalist champions patriarchy, when an evangelical jackhole champions genocide or theocracy, when a Robot Cultist muddies the distinction between policy discourse and flim-flam artistry and fraud, when people uncritically substitute the dictates of priestly authorities (religious or otherwise) for critical engagement, well, you can be sure I do call them on it for dangerous nonsense.
In answer to your specific question, then, I don't finally think "religious" is properly added to my list of modes of warranted belief, but mostly because the bits of religiosity that do seem to me to be warrantable are already subsumed under the aesthetic and moral categories.
If it hurts the feelings of an otherwise unobjectionably religious person to put that point so baldly, I'll just do the mental translation in my head and go ahead with dinner.
Does that answer your question? I didn't take it as a hostile provocation or challenge at all! I like answering this question. I tend to think my approach on this subject could be much more widely applied to good result.
But I'm Not a Relativist
An e-mail interlocutor has patiently explained to me why he thinks I protest too much when I insist that I am not an effete postmodern relativist to the solid stolid champions of He-Man science who sometimes like to criticize me online. He then proudly affirms his own relativism. I appreciate his support, of course, and the fact is that this particular interlocutor is a European with an actual background in philosophy and so he doesn't mean by these terms quite the same thing that people tend to do who excoriate my muzzy relativism in online debates as a way of assuming their Priestly vestaments in the defense of dumb death-dealing scientism.
In a nutshell, the key philosophical figures for me are Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, and Judith Butler. I'll probably spend the rest of my life struggling to find the language in which to express intelligibly to others how these four weirdly incompatible figures in some ways have come -- probably in no small part completely accidentally -- to crystallize a harmonious perspective from which I understand the world.
Philosophically, I am most legible as coming out of the tradition of American pragmatism (James, Dewey, Rorty) and working today in the discourse of queer theory in Butler's practice of it (which seems to me to mean something more like the delineation of non-sovereign performative/prosthetic self-determination in planetary multiculture these days). All of these figures are post-Nietzschean and one finds in all of them an expression of something like his perspectivalism.
In online anti-intellectual discourse in America "relativism" is defined as something like the belief that any belief is as good as any other. I don't believe that and it isn't really worth the time to walk Americans all the way through to the place in which they can better understand what the actual claims involved are. I do believe that one can warrant one's beliefs with good reasons, and understanding that point gets most folks close enough to what I really mean that there doesn't seem much point in going further into the matter, unless they indicate a real sympathy and talent for the nuances involved.
I propose that scientific, moral, aesthetic, ethical, and political modes of belief-ascription are all warranted as reasonable according to different criteria, that these are not reducible to one another in their proper work, their proper forms, their practices, their histories. But since I do believe one can warrant one's beliefs in any of these modes with good reasons it isn't really right to say that I am a relativist in the sense Americans tend to mean, and probably not according to the sense in which many Continental philosophers use the term either.
In a nutshell, the key philosophical figures for me are Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, and Judith Butler. I'll probably spend the rest of my life struggling to find the language in which to express intelligibly to others how these four weirdly incompatible figures in some ways have come -- probably in no small part completely accidentally -- to crystallize a harmonious perspective from which I understand the world.
Philosophically, I am most legible as coming out of the tradition of American pragmatism (James, Dewey, Rorty) and working today in the discourse of queer theory in Butler's practice of it (which seems to me to mean something more like the delineation of non-sovereign performative/prosthetic self-determination in planetary multiculture these days). All of these figures are post-Nietzschean and one finds in all of them an expression of something like his perspectivalism.
In online anti-intellectual discourse in America "relativism" is defined as something like the belief that any belief is as good as any other. I don't believe that and it isn't really worth the time to walk Americans all the way through to the place in which they can better understand what the actual claims involved are. I do believe that one can warrant one's beliefs with good reasons, and understanding that point gets most folks close enough to what I really mean that there doesn't seem much point in going further into the matter, unless they indicate a real sympathy and talent for the nuances involved.
I propose that scientific, moral, aesthetic, ethical, and political modes of belief-ascription are all warranted as reasonable according to different criteria, that these are not reducible to one another in their proper work, their proper forms, their practices, their histories. But since I do believe one can warrant one's beliefs in any of these modes with good reasons it isn't really right to say that I am a relativist in the sense Americans tend to mean, and probably not according to the sense in which many Continental philosophers use the term either.
Monday, December 03, 2007
Cranks
Superlative technocentrics who fervently believe in the imminent arrival of a postbiological superintelligent Robot God who will end human history, or in the imminent arrival of precisely controlled self-replicating nanoscale robots who will deliver a superabundance that will end human stakeholder politics, or in the imminent arrival of genetic and prosthetic medical techniques or brain scanning and modeling techniques that will transform some of us into imperishable robots and end human mortality always want to make you believe (and indulge themselves in the make believe) that they are the Wright Brothers or Thomas Edison. However all appearances are to the contrary.
What they are far more likely to be instead is the dot-eyed crank in the basement who thinks he’s got a swell idea for a perpetual motion machine or a scheme to square the circle.
Those who imagine they have demolished the critique of Superlativity simply by noting that vaccinations and moonshots and so on had naysayers would do well to peruse the incomparably larger archive of technoscientific hype and fraud and unintended consequences rather than dwell on the same handful of success stories they inevitably fetishize before trying to imply that all you have to do to be visionary is aspire to the incoherence of theological omni-predicates.
Superlative aspirations to Singularitarian superintelligence fail to grasp the inter-implication of mind and embodiment, superlative aspirations to Nanosantalogical superabundance fail to grasp the inter-implication of plurality and politics, superlative aspirations to Technological Immortalist superlongevity fail to grasp the inter-implication of life and vulnerability.
Superlative Technocentric hopes are essentially faithful and not scientific and the hysteria and false certainties Superlativity mistakes and peddles as hope are worse, essentially fundamentalist. One need not, and indeed should not, join a Robot Cult if what is wanted is to participate in technoprogressive education, agitation, and organizing to democratize technodevelopmental social struggle and so better assure that the costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific change reflect the interests of the diversity of stakeholders to that change by their lights.
What they are far more likely to be instead is the dot-eyed crank in the basement who thinks he’s got a swell idea for a perpetual motion machine or a scheme to square the circle.
Those who imagine they have demolished the critique of Superlativity simply by noting that vaccinations and moonshots and so on had naysayers would do well to peruse the incomparably larger archive of technoscientific hype and fraud and unintended consequences rather than dwell on the same handful of success stories they inevitably fetishize before trying to imply that all you have to do to be visionary is aspire to the incoherence of theological omni-predicates.
Superlative aspirations to Singularitarian superintelligence fail to grasp the inter-implication of mind and embodiment, superlative aspirations to Nanosantalogical superabundance fail to grasp the inter-implication of plurality and politics, superlative aspirations to Technological Immortalist superlongevity fail to grasp the inter-implication of life and vulnerability.
Superlative Technocentric hopes are essentially faithful and not scientific and the hysteria and false certainties Superlativity mistakes and peddles as hope are worse, essentially fundamentalist. One need not, and indeed should not, join a Robot Cult if what is wanted is to participate in technoprogressive education, agitation, and organizing to democratize technodevelopmental social struggle and so better assure that the costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific change reflect the interests of the diversity of stakeholders to that change by their lights.
Sunday, December 02, 2007
Glands and Computers
Curiously enough, it seems that Giulio Prisco really objects to my claim that “the brain is more gland than computer.”
Note that it is "e)" that bears all the weight of superlative hope and conviction in this formulation, and that all the rest are just initial throat clearing gestures in a more or less conventional materialist mode, although, granted, skewed in a rather "cybernetic totalist" way.
Presumably, once something is "fully understood" (notice that "fully"), then it is "possible" (remember, as always, the difference that makes a difference betweem "possible" and "likely") to design "another mechanical device" (somehow once a thing is "understood" it becomes through that understanding a devised thing, perhaps Prisco is a closeted advocate of "Intelligent Design" or something since he keeps flogging this point so interminably -- and, yes, I'm joking), and once one can replace an understood thing one is also assured that it can be replaced with a better thing (no reason why is offered), although "better" is thankfully qualified at least with "according to appropriate criteria" (who specifies and polices these criteria is left as an exercise for the reader).
Hey, far be it from me to deny that when scientists understand stuff they enable greater powers of prediction and control, (some of) which palpably improve our capacities and enrich (some of) our lives.
But I still don't see how any of this justifies going off on a Robot Cultist tear handwaving about imminent superintelligent post-biological Robot Gods ending human history, imminent precisely-controlled self-replicating nanoscale robots delivering superabundance and ending human stakeholder politics, or imminent genetic and prosthetic medical techniques or brain-scanning techniques delivering superlongevity and ending human mortality.
Let's keep our eyes on the ball here. One can easily admit the world is susceptible of scientific analysis, and admit that warranted scientific belief delivers powers of prediction and control, and admit that fantastic capacities are at any rate compatible with logic whatever their remoteness from practical realization all without ever once feeling the slightest transcendental temptation to embrace Singularitarian, Nanosantalogical, or Technological Immortalist nonsense.
Be that as it may, Prisco continues:
Quite apart from my utter bewilderment at Prisco's apparent perception that saying something as simple and obvious as "the brain is more gland than computer" is some kind of effort at woo-woo mystical pseudo-profundity (I would class it with statements like "dirt is more brown than purple," frankly), I can't for the life of me understand why this observation launches him into a diatribe about "vital spirits" and so on. What's so mystical about a gland? It seems to me that glands are perfectly concrete, technoscientifically intelligible sorts of things. So, I really am curious about Prisco's attribution of this kind of statement to religious fundamentalists.
My challenge? Name one. Name one single religious fundamentalist who has said “the brain is more gland than computer” to make some kind of anti-science point. Name just one, how hard can that be, since you claim it is so frequent?
As for Prisco insisting that glands are computers, that everything caught up in intelligible causality is a computer… I can follow this move easily enough, as it happens. Prisco wants to describe as a “computer” any complex system susceptible of scientific analysis. OK. I think it probably is more useful to distinguish computers from non-computers, inasmuch as it seems to me in common parlance there are plenty of intelligible non-computers in the world, but, hey, I get functionalism, I’m down with it.
I don’t honestly think that's what Prisco is really up to here, though. I think he's just uncritically flinging fetishized terms around and not getting my critique particularly. For Plato the mind was a mirror, for Nietzsche it was a stylus inscribing a surface, for Freud it was a steamworks, now people fetishize the computer as our quintessential tech and now inevitably enough the mind is computer, or more of a neurocomputational network as the popular focus nudges that way.
But all that, I suppose, is neither here nor there.
Am I the only one for whom this latest exchange really seems weird?
Now Dale, I don’t know on which New Age book you found this apparently profound statement, but it is just nonsense because:
A gland is a computer
A gland is a computer because it:a) Is a physical object that obeys the laws of physics;
b) Reacts to inputs generated from its environment and produces a corresponding output;
c) Stores and executes electro-chemically coded programs that determine its dynamical responses to its inputs;
d) Its behavior can be fully understood in terms of physical laws;
e) Once its behavior is fully understood, it is possible to design another mechanical device to reproduce the same behavior, or a different behavior considered “better” according to appropriate criteria.
Note that it is "e)" that bears all the weight of superlative hope and conviction in this formulation, and that all the rest are just initial throat clearing gestures in a more or less conventional materialist mode, although, granted, skewed in a rather "cybernetic totalist" way.
Presumably, once something is "fully understood" (notice that "fully"), then it is "possible" (remember, as always, the difference that makes a difference betweem "possible" and "likely") to design "another mechanical device" (somehow once a thing is "understood" it becomes through that understanding a devised thing, perhaps Prisco is a closeted advocate of "Intelligent Design" or something since he keeps flogging this point so interminably -- and, yes, I'm joking), and once one can replace an understood thing one is also assured that it can be replaced with a better thing (no reason why is offered), although "better" is thankfully qualified at least with "according to appropriate criteria" (who specifies and polices these criteria is left as an exercise for the reader).
Hey, far be it from me to deny that when scientists understand stuff they enable greater powers of prediction and control, (some of) which palpably improve our capacities and enrich (some of) our lives.
But I still don't see how any of this justifies going off on a Robot Cultist tear handwaving about imminent superintelligent post-biological Robot Gods ending human history, imminent precisely-controlled self-replicating nanoscale robots delivering superabundance and ending human stakeholder politics, or imminent genetic and prosthetic medical techniques or brain-scanning techniques delivering superlongevity and ending human mortality.
Let's keep our eyes on the ball here. One can easily admit the world is susceptible of scientific analysis, and admit that warranted scientific belief delivers powers of prediction and control, and admit that fantastic capacities are at any rate compatible with logic whatever their remoteness from practical realization all without ever once feeling the slightest transcendental temptation to embrace Singularitarian, Nanosantalogical, or Technological Immortalist nonsense.
Be that as it may, Prisco continues:
Apparently profound but actually nonsensical statements like “the brain is more gland than computer” are frequently used by religious fundamentalists in support of their delusional belief that living organisms are characterized by some nebulous, ineffable “vital spirit” forever beyond the domain of science.
Quite apart from my utter bewilderment at Prisco's apparent perception that saying something as simple and obvious as "the brain is more gland than computer" is some kind of effort at woo-woo mystical pseudo-profundity (I would class it with statements like "dirt is more brown than purple," frankly), I can't for the life of me understand why this observation launches him into a diatribe about "vital spirits" and so on. What's so mystical about a gland? It seems to me that glands are perfectly concrete, technoscientifically intelligible sorts of things. So, I really am curious about Prisco's attribution of this kind of statement to religious fundamentalists.
My challenge? Name one. Name one single religious fundamentalist who has said “the brain is more gland than computer” to make some kind of anti-science point. Name just one, how hard can that be, since you claim it is so frequent?
As for Prisco insisting that glands are computers, that everything caught up in intelligible causality is a computer… I can follow this move easily enough, as it happens. Prisco wants to describe as a “computer” any complex system susceptible of scientific analysis. OK. I think it probably is more useful to distinguish computers from non-computers, inasmuch as it seems to me in common parlance there are plenty of intelligible non-computers in the world, but, hey, I get functionalism, I’m down with it.
I don’t honestly think that's what Prisco is really up to here, though. I think he's just uncritically flinging fetishized terms around and not getting my critique particularly. For Plato the mind was a mirror, for Nietzsche it was a stylus inscribing a surface, for Freud it was a steamworks, now people fetishize the computer as our quintessential tech and now inevitably enough the mind is computer, or more of a neurocomputational network as the popular focus nudges that way.
But all that, I suppose, is neither here nor there.
Am I the only one for whom this latest exchange really seems weird?
Saturday, November 24, 2007
The Technodevelopmental Quartet
Those who read Amor Mundi because they approve of my commitments to p2p democratization and permaculture advocacy may be perplexed by my interest in non-normativizing prostheses and therapies. Let me just say, very briefly, that I am especially fascinated by a few broad concurrent openings or agon, in terms of which I tend to articulate my sense of the politics of ongoing and proximately upcoming transformative technoscientific change, and that non-normativing "therapeutic" prostheses are among these, and in ways that seem to me especially salient precisely in relation to my preoccupations with p2p-democratization a2k-consensualization and permaculture practices.
One quick way to see what I mean by this salience is for me to note again that I regard the prosthetic as co-extensive with the cultural, and hence prosthetic proliferation is for me of a piece with the multi-cultural, which in turn connects to sustainable permaculture through its repudiation of industrial monoculture and embrace of experimental polyculture (agroforestry, companion planting, integrated pest management, and so on). Indeed, I personally like to use the word polyculture to denote this provocative, promising, perplexing convergence-site of convivial consensual multicultural, permacultural, and pro-choice politics.
Before I elaborate these preoccupations further, I do want to digress a bit, and say what I am especially trying to resist in offering up any technodevelopmental mapping of this kind. When I refer to inter-implicated technodevelopmental "openings" like this, part of what I am trying insistently to circumvent is the futurological terminology of the "trend," the "trend-spotter," the "trend-surfer," the "trend-speculator." I believe that like the debased and debasing term "meme" and the related reduction of discourse to the "viral," the "circulatory," the indifferently aggregative or repetitive (which is not to deny the empirical relevance of such descriptions to many network-dynamisms so much as what is analytically and critically available in them) framing technodevelopmental social struggles in terms of "trends" disastrously drains them of their substantial history, the contestatory/collaboratory agon of an ineradicable plurality of differently situated, enabled, aspiring stakeholders to a shared present-world futurally opening onto next-presence.
This de-historicizing disaster seems to me very much the point, especially to the extent that the language of "trends" "memes" and "evolutions" is opportunistically taken up in the justificatory and forecasting discourses of the elite-incumbent corporate-militarist Futurological Congress, who like to assume the guise of priests, gurus, whiz-kid elites channeling the otherwise unavailable voice of god, the whirlwind, the bleeding edge to the faithful rather than participants engaging in deliberation about relative values, costs, risks, benefits of historical and developmental vicissitudes, peer to peer.
Closely connected to the effort to circumvent the futurological "trend" I also struggle to resist complementary futurological insinuations of technological determinism (as if certain techniques or artifacts, once available, assure emancipatory or exploitative outcomes) by referring instead to "articulations," futurological insinuations of autonomous technology (as if progress were a matter of an indifferent accumulation of a technical toypile, rather than an equitable distribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of the toys in the toypile and in the processes through which they are piled) by referring instead to "prosthetic cultures" and technology as "technodevelopmental social struggle," and futurological delineations of historical drivers (as if there were no discourse in history, only brute force) as collective agon and citational (including subversive citation) and appropriative practices, and so on.
All that said, the Technodevelopmental Quartet names four broad, promisingly threateningly inter-implicated technodevelopmental openings/agon surveying landmarks of most versions of the historical terrain on which I expect technodevelopmental social struggle to play out in what remains of my own lifetime.
The first of these openings/agon is Resource Descent, which encompasses "Peak Oil" as well as the diminishing returns of input-infrastructure intensive extractive-petrochemical industrialism more generally, including input-intensive industrial agriculture (the mirage of the Green Revolution and Biotechnology hype), soil depletion (connected to industrial agriculture), fresh water depletion (aquifer depletion and irrigation diversion associated with over-urbanization and industrial agriculture, but also problems of pollution and salinization associated with these), the over-application and diminishing effectiveness of anti-biotics, and also, of course, global warming which is, in my view, best conceived as a problem of atmospheric pollution yielding the depletion of the resource of a life-sustaining atmosphere. Opportunistic anti-democratizing corporate-militarist frames and strategies like greenwashing PR, massive under-accountable geo-engineering proposals, militarizations and profiteering in the face of climate catastrophes and their concomitant social instabilities are, of course, important facets of this technodevelopmental opening/agon.
The second opening/agon is p2p [peer-to-peer] Democratization, which encompasses the fraught transformation from industrial/central/elite/broadcast formations to the more digital/participatory/distributed forms of what Bauwens, Benkler, Boyle, and Lessig call creative-commons, peer-production, and peer-credentializing formations, as well as a2k [access to knowledge] Consensualization politics which encompass anti-secrecy struggles (against both corporatist proprietary and militarist state secrets), transparency struggles (against secrecy and corruption in authoritative institutions like governments, corporations, universities), and ever greater network-mediated participation, education, agitation, and organization in public life.
I should add that p2p-Democratization and a2k-Consensualization also encompass extensive commitments to general welfare provision and the democratization -- rather than any anarchic "smashing" of the state form -- inasmuch as the scene of legible legitimate consent demands that those who legibly consent do so in proportion to the extent that they are neither under duress (which includes the threat of violence but in my view also the threat of ruin by blackmail, insecurity of status, refusal of treatable dis-ease, or dire poverty) nor unreasonably ignorant nor mis-informed (which includes the threat of fraud, but also the lack of access to reliable knowledge, educational resources, availability of processes of criticism, actually accountable authorities, and equal recourse to the law). Without commitments to the democratically-accountable state form and the legible scene of informed nonduressed consent, p2p and a2k politics always amount to facile spontaneisms and anti-democratic politics. These anti-democratizing framings and forces are, of course, an important facet of this technodevelopmental opening/agon.
The third opening/agon is Prosthetic Proliferation, which encompasses struggles to achieve universal single-payer basic healthcare here in the United States but also provide healthcare, available treatments for neglected diseases, nutritious food, clean water, contraception, shelter in the overexploited regions of the world, as well as the as-yet scarcely defined "pro-choice" politics of prosthetic self-determination, or the informed, nonduressed consensualization and universalization of recourse to non-normalizing genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modifications and treatments, from planetary planned parenthood and access to ARTS, to morphological body-modification rights, to ending the racist war on drugs and embracing objective harm-reduction policies, to disability/differently-enabled rights struggles, to struggles against trafficking in human bodies and body-parts, to struggles for the public regulation, funding, and fair distribution of medical research and development, and also struggles against corporate-militarist strategies of control through the unequal and duressed planetary distribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of medical and monitoring techniques and their development, which risk in the worst case, re-making inequity and injustice at the level of literal speciation.
And the fourth opening/agonis Arms Proliferation, which encompasses obscene and short-sighted state-sponsored trafficking in arms but also illicit global arms trading, the breakdown of multilateral arms treaties, the proliferation of nuclear states, the proliferation of conventional weapons and mines, weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical, biological), and also what Lessig has called insanely destructive devices -- that is to say cheaper, more destructive, more accessible, easier to hide and deploy networked WMDs -- the militarization of space and of environmental catastrophe, and the ever-disavowed but indispensable neoconservative militarist muscular imperialism undergirding neoliberal corporatist "free market" developmentalism: war-profittering, militarization of welfare and public services, a surfeit of surveillance, and the radical demarcation of global space by means of architectural and coded walls and channels.
It seems to me that the first and second of these openings/agon might facilitate together the emergence of an extraordinarily promising (however threatening) planetary political consciousness, one providing a shared set of urgent problems demanding shared efforts and the other providing the material means to collaborate in their solution while at once undermining the politics of incumbent interests that stand as the greatest present hurdle to such solutions.
The third and fourth openings/agon exhibit a comparable complementarity in my view, one amplifying the destructive stakes of ongoing refusals to distribute technodevelopmental costs, risks, and benefits fairly by the lights of the actual diversity of stakeholders to those developments, the other functioning as a kind of magnificent bribe (the facilitation of informed, nonduressed consensual prosthetic/cultural lifeway self-determination in the service of private perfections in a still-shared still responsible responsive world, convivial civitas) eliciting ever wider participation in the project of a sustainable consensual secular democratic planetary polyculture.
I also think the first and third openings/agon exhibit a kind of stick and carrot complementarity for planetary politics, while the second and fourth represent countervailing structural inducements, one possibly facilitating democratization the other probably facilitating anti-democratization.
Of course, all these inter-implications represent just the immediate throat-clearing gestures of any serious critique or programmatic offer taking up these terms, and are propose just a few among many other plausible technodevelopmental relations susceptible to figuration and narrativization at this level of generality, all of them easily capable of provoking who knows what stabilizations, de-stabilizations, campaigns, counter-movements, provisional democratizations, backlashes, and so on. Certainly, there are no guarantees here, just as there is no time to waste on superlative idealizations and distractions or parochial (incumbent, technocratic, sub(cult)ural) techno-political agendas.
Although each of these practical-discursive sites might inspire endless concrete campaigns (progressive and reactionary), it seems to me that whatever the outcomes that elicit my own commitments in these particular campaigns there is nothing more important here than the struggle to democratize technodevelopmental struggle itself, to keep futurity open whatever the futures for which one fights. Whatever one's concrete aspirations for particular technodevelopmental outcomes (about which there will always be plenty to argue about as to which outcome is fairest, safest, most emancipatory), it seems to me that a technoscientifically literate and progressively legible vantage will always also, or even first of all, direct its attention to the dangers to and opportunities for democratization and open futurity that present themselves in each of the technoscientific vicissitudes technodevelopmental social struggle grapples with from moment to moment.
One quick way to see what I mean by this salience is for me to note again that I regard the prosthetic as co-extensive with the cultural, and hence prosthetic proliferation is for me of a piece with the multi-cultural, which in turn connects to sustainable permaculture through its repudiation of industrial monoculture and embrace of experimental polyculture (agroforestry, companion planting, integrated pest management, and so on). Indeed, I personally like to use the word polyculture to denote this provocative, promising, perplexing convergence-site of convivial consensual multicultural, permacultural, and pro-choice politics.
Before I elaborate these preoccupations further, I do want to digress a bit, and say what I am especially trying to resist in offering up any technodevelopmental mapping of this kind. When I refer to inter-implicated technodevelopmental "openings" like this, part of what I am trying insistently to circumvent is the futurological terminology of the "trend," the "trend-spotter," the "trend-surfer," the "trend-speculator." I believe that like the debased and debasing term "meme" and the related reduction of discourse to the "viral," the "circulatory," the indifferently aggregative or repetitive (which is not to deny the empirical relevance of such descriptions to many network-dynamisms so much as what is analytically and critically available in them) framing technodevelopmental social struggles in terms of "trends" disastrously drains them of their substantial history, the contestatory/collaboratory agon of an ineradicable plurality of differently situated, enabled, aspiring stakeholders to a shared present-world futurally opening onto next-presence.
This de-historicizing disaster seems to me very much the point, especially to the extent that the language of "trends" "memes" and "evolutions" is opportunistically taken up in the justificatory and forecasting discourses of the elite-incumbent corporate-militarist Futurological Congress, who like to assume the guise of priests, gurus, whiz-kid elites channeling the otherwise unavailable voice of god, the whirlwind, the bleeding edge to the faithful rather than participants engaging in deliberation about relative values, costs, risks, benefits of historical and developmental vicissitudes, peer to peer.
Closely connected to the effort to circumvent the futurological "trend" I also struggle to resist complementary futurological insinuations of technological determinism (as if certain techniques or artifacts, once available, assure emancipatory or exploitative outcomes) by referring instead to "articulations," futurological insinuations of autonomous technology (as if progress were a matter of an indifferent accumulation of a technical toypile, rather than an equitable distribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of the toys in the toypile and in the processes through which they are piled) by referring instead to "prosthetic cultures" and technology as "technodevelopmental social struggle," and futurological delineations of historical drivers (as if there were no discourse in history, only brute force) as collective agon and citational (including subversive citation) and appropriative practices, and so on.
All that said, the Technodevelopmental Quartet names four broad, promisingly threateningly inter-implicated technodevelopmental openings/agon surveying landmarks of most versions of the historical terrain on which I expect technodevelopmental social struggle to play out in what remains of my own lifetime.
The first of these openings/agon is Resource Descent, which encompasses "Peak Oil" as well as the diminishing returns of input-infrastructure intensive extractive-petrochemical industrialism more generally, including input-intensive industrial agriculture (the mirage of the Green Revolution and Biotechnology hype), soil depletion (connected to industrial agriculture), fresh water depletion (aquifer depletion and irrigation diversion associated with over-urbanization and industrial agriculture, but also problems of pollution and salinization associated with these), the over-application and diminishing effectiveness of anti-biotics, and also, of course, global warming which is, in my view, best conceived as a problem of atmospheric pollution yielding the depletion of the resource of a life-sustaining atmosphere. Opportunistic anti-democratizing corporate-militarist frames and strategies like greenwashing PR, massive under-accountable geo-engineering proposals, militarizations and profiteering in the face of climate catastrophes and their concomitant social instabilities are, of course, important facets of this technodevelopmental opening/agon.
The second opening/agon is p2p [peer-to-peer] Democratization, which encompasses the fraught transformation from industrial/central/elite/broadcast formations to the more digital/participatory/distributed forms of what Bauwens, Benkler, Boyle, and Lessig call creative-commons, peer-production, and peer-credentializing formations, as well as a2k [access to knowledge] Consensualization politics which encompass anti-secrecy struggles (against both corporatist proprietary and militarist state secrets), transparency struggles (against secrecy and corruption in authoritative institutions like governments, corporations, universities), and ever greater network-mediated participation, education, agitation, and organization in public life.
I should add that p2p-Democratization and a2k-Consensualization also encompass extensive commitments to general welfare provision and the democratization -- rather than any anarchic "smashing" of the state form -- inasmuch as the scene of legible legitimate consent demands that those who legibly consent do so in proportion to the extent that they are neither under duress (which includes the threat of violence but in my view also the threat of ruin by blackmail, insecurity of status, refusal of treatable dis-ease, or dire poverty) nor unreasonably ignorant nor mis-informed (which includes the threat of fraud, but also the lack of access to reliable knowledge, educational resources, availability of processes of criticism, actually accountable authorities, and equal recourse to the law). Without commitments to the democratically-accountable state form and the legible scene of informed nonduressed consent, p2p and a2k politics always amount to facile spontaneisms and anti-democratic politics. These anti-democratizing framings and forces are, of course, an important facet of this technodevelopmental opening/agon.
The third opening/agon is Prosthetic Proliferation, which encompasses struggles to achieve universal single-payer basic healthcare here in the United States but also provide healthcare, available treatments for neglected diseases, nutritious food, clean water, contraception, shelter in the overexploited regions of the world, as well as the as-yet scarcely defined "pro-choice" politics of prosthetic self-determination, or the informed, nonduressed consensualization and universalization of recourse to non-normalizing genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modifications and treatments, from planetary planned parenthood and access to ARTS, to morphological body-modification rights, to ending the racist war on drugs and embracing objective harm-reduction policies, to disability/differently-enabled rights struggles, to struggles against trafficking in human bodies and body-parts, to struggles for the public regulation, funding, and fair distribution of medical research and development, and also struggles against corporate-militarist strategies of control through the unequal and duressed planetary distribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of medical and monitoring techniques and their development, which risk in the worst case, re-making inequity and injustice at the level of literal speciation.
And the fourth opening/agonis Arms Proliferation, which encompasses obscene and short-sighted state-sponsored trafficking in arms but also illicit global arms trading, the breakdown of multilateral arms treaties, the proliferation of nuclear states, the proliferation of conventional weapons and mines, weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical, biological), and also what Lessig has called insanely destructive devices -- that is to say cheaper, more destructive, more accessible, easier to hide and deploy networked WMDs -- the militarization of space and of environmental catastrophe, and the ever-disavowed but indispensable neoconservative militarist muscular imperialism undergirding neoliberal corporatist "free market" developmentalism: war-profittering, militarization of welfare and public services, a surfeit of surveillance, and the radical demarcation of global space by means of architectural and coded walls and channels.
It seems to me that the first and second of these openings/agon might facilitate together the emergence of an extraordinarily promising (however threatening) planetary political consciousness, one providing a shared set of urgent problems demanding shared efforts and the other providing the material means to collaborate in their solution while at once undermining the politics of incumbent interests that stand as the greatest present hurdle to such solutions.
The third and fourth openings/agon exhibit a comparable complementarity in my view, one amplifying the destructive stakes of ongoing refusals to distribute technodevelopmental costs, risks, and benefits fairly by the lights of the actual diversity of stakeholders to those developments, the other functioning as a kind of magnificent bribe (the facilitation of informed, nonduressed consensual prosthetic/cultural lifeway self-determination in the service of private perfections in a still-shared still responsible responsive world, convivial civitas) eliciting ever wider participation in the project of a sustainable consensual secular democratic planetary polyculture.
I also think the first and third openings/agon exhibit a kind of stick and carrot complementarity for planetary politics, while the second and fourth represent countervailing structural inducements, one possibly facilitating democratization the other probably facilitating anti-democratization.
Of course, all these inter-implications represent just the immediate throat-clearing gestures of any serious critique or programmatic offer taking up these terms, and are propose just a few among many other plausible technodevelopmental relations susceptible to figuration and narrativization at this level of generality, all of them easily capable of provoking who knows what stabilizations, de-stabilizations, campaigns, counter-movements, provisional democratizations, backlashes, and so on. Certainly, there are no guarantees here, just as there is no time to waste on superlative idealizations and distractions or parochial (incumbent, technocratic, sub(cult)ural) techno-political agendas.
Although each of these practical-discursive sites might inspire endless concrete campaigns (progressive and reactionary), it seems to me that whatever the outcomes that elicit my own commitments in these particular campaigns there is nothing more important here than the struggle to democratize technodevelopmental struggle itself, to keep futurity open whatever the futures for which one fights. Whatever one's concrete aspirations for particular technodevelopmental outcomes (about which there will always be plenty to argue about as to which outcome is fairest, safest, most emancipatory), it seems to me that a technoscientifically literate and progressively legible vantage will always also, or even first of all, direct its attention to the dangers to and opportunities for democratization and open futurity that present themselves in each of the technoscientific vicissitudes technodevelopmental social struggle grapples with from moment to moment.
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Amor Mundi and Technoprogressive Advocacy
I. WHO AM I?
My name is Dale Carrico. I grew up in a town called Floyds Knobs, Indiana, which was pretty much what you are imagining a place called Floyds Knobs, Indiana, would be like. I made money as a kid acting professionally in musicals in the weird archipelago of dinner theaters across Kentuckiana, a region wild for such entertainments you may know, and for about fifteen years now I have been a precarious sort of itinerant, troubadour adjunct lecturer in university settings, which is not so very different from dinner theater when it comes to it. I am presently a member of the visiting faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute as well as a lecturer in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley from which I received my PhD in 2005. I suppose I am a rhetorician, then. I am trained in philosophy, critical theory, and literary and cultural criticism. I live in a rented apartment overstuffed with books in a sprawling warren of mid-century mousetraps on top of a hill in a bucolic neighborhood of Oakland, California, with my partner of many years, Eric, and our unusually dim-witted cat, Sarah. We're all getting old.
My work tends to focus on the politics of science and technology, especially peer-to-peer formations and global development discourse and is informed by my commitment to democratic socialism (or social democracy, if that freaks you out less), environmental justice critique, and queer theory.
I criticize futurological discourses a lot, especially here on the blog. I critique futurology both in its mainstream corporate-militarist forms as a sort of fraudulent, hyperbolic advertising, promotional, justificatory discourse disastrously suffusing our public life today, as well as in its more extreme and clarifying (also: often hi-larious) forms, variations that tend take on the kooky theological coloration of promises of techno-transcendence and which tend to have sub(cult)ural organizations in tow.
The thinker to whom I am probably most indebted is Hannah Arendt (from whose personal motto the name of this blog is taken) and also Judith Butler, who I came to California to study with and under whose direction I wrote my dissertation.
I am a registered Democrat in the United States of America in the brutal and debasing years of its imperial consummation, and I am still a believer with Michael Harrington that "the best liberalism leads toward socialism. I’m a radical, but... I want to be on the left wing of the possible." I was an activist trained in nonviolence at the King Center with Queer Nation Atlanta in the early nineties, I have been an ethical vegetarian and a cheerful atheist for well over half my life, I am a liberal theoryhead academic of the elite effete aesthete sort, am a big fag and an even bigger geek.
Eric and I possess no car, no laptop, no cellphone, no clothes dryer, no marriage license (though we fight to make gay marriage legal so that when we disdain it we do so by choice and not by necessity) and we disapprove of them and also of you, at least a little bit, in a friendly sort of way, for thinking you can't live without them yourself despite the fact that they are destroying the planet, diminishing your liberty, giving you cancer, and confusing you into mistaking possession for love. We are cantankerous and judgmental and are enjoying ourselves immensely.
II. WHAT IS THIS?
The motto that defines the project of Amor Mundi appears at the top of the page, as well as appearing as the first line in most of the profiles I have written that would direct people here: "Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All."
For me, both the words "Technology" and "Democracy" in the motto are much more like verbs than the nouns they appear to be. They are words that denote ongoing collective struggles -- collective in a sense that contains both collaborations and contestations -- and these struggles, these verbs that we stabilize for a time sometimes into nouns become in those moments like hand-holds across the sheer cliff face of social struggle in history.
I'd say that "technology" is the ongoing collective prosthetic re-elaboration of personal and inter-personal agency, while "democracy" is the ongoing collective implementation of the idea that all people should have a real say in the public decisions that affect them.
The thing is, for nearly a century by now we have lived in an epoch for which the seductive, empowering, disruptive, devastating intensity and ubiquity of our technique is such that whatever we mean by "democracy" now or next -- unless it truly understands, actively takes up, responds through, and manages to direct the energies released by that technique -- will surely fail in its emancipatory aspirations, will fail utterly in the face of technocratic tyranny or the mad insensitivity of reductive idealism. And at the same time, for the same reasons, whatever we mean by "technology" now or next -- unless the distribution of its costs, its risks, and its benefits are made to express the aspirations of the actual diversity of stakeholders to its impacts -- will surely destroy the world.
Expressing one another, befuddling one another, enabling one another, inter-implicated in one another, technology and democracy are now caught up in the circuit of interminable technodevelopmental social struggle, and now constitute the ongoing conversation in which humanity continually redetermines the meanings and the movements available to it, and rededicates itself to that futurity the openness of which is itself the space in which humanity knows itself becoming itself.
"Amor Mundi" is the love of the world. It is the love of the worldly. It is the worldly love of that becoming that becomes us. It is the love of the collective struggle of which that becoming consists, and on which that becoming depends for its force, for its serendipities, for its pleasures, and for its dangers.
My project here on Amor Mundi is to understand and to articulate ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle from my own absolutely and fortunately limited perspective and to connect it from here to my aspirations as a person of the emerging sustainable peer-to-peer planetary polycultural democratic convivial consensualist left, as an opponent of corporate-militarism, as a queergeek all the way down, as an intellectual in an anti-intellectual society, as an angry person these days, as a person moved by idiosyncratic efforts to create beauty and reconcile differences.
I can't think of anybody who agrees with everything that I say, thank heavens, and I would never presume to speak for anybody but myself. I do like to figure things out for myself, to provoke thought, to facilitate creative and democratizing projects, to make people laugh, to stop idiocy in its tracks occasionally, to raise hell, to direct people's attention to things I judge to be worthy of it, and so on.
What better place than a blog to do all these sorts of things at once?
That's Amor Mundi.
For a more concrete, more "positive" (for all you naysayers), or at any rate more pragmatic, indication of my present preoccupations, let me describe some of the areas of technoprogressive advocacy that seem to me to matter most at the moment, and then to offer up a few comments about how they hang together (or not) in my view:
III. PREOCCUPATIONS
1. Advocating permaculture (resilient sustainability) -- we should be subsidizing research and practices of agroforestry, polyculture, organic and local agricultures, defending seed saving and seed sharing as basic human rights, regulating nonselective pesticide and high-energy-input, especially petrochemical fertilizer use, encouraging vegetarian, organic, local-food lifeways through accurate nutrition labeling, special taxes on food-corpses and highly salty, fatty, sugary processed foods, incentivizing climate-appropriate and edible landscaping, supporting organic, heirloom, and superorganic cultivation, vastly expanding research and development and infrastructure investment into p2p renewable energy-provision like decentralized solar grids and co-op windmill farms, energy-efficient appliances, desalination techniques, sustainable irrigation practices and biomimetic urban sewage treatment techniques, as well as passenger rail infrastructure across the world and facilitating non-automobile transportation in cities (free or small-fee distributed bike co-ops, for example, and transforming more urban car-lanes into pedestrian malls) -- increasing public awareness of and encouraging collective problem solving in the face of energy descent, overurbanization, species loss, extractive industrial depletion of topsoil and aquifers, toxicity of materials and industrial processes, waste/pollution, catastrophic human-caused climate change, and so on.
2. Advocating p2p (peer-to-peer formations) and a2k (access to knowledge) -- we should be strongly supporting net neutrality, institutionalizing creative commons, subsidizing personal blogging and peer credentialization/production practices, radically restricting global copyright scope and terms, expanding fair use provisions, providing public grants for noncommercial nonproprietary scientific research and access to creative expressivity and public performances, opening access to research and debate in science and the humanities, experimenting with science and public policy juries and networked townhalls, facilitating accessibility of information for differently enabled people (blind, partially blind, deaf, etc.), securing open knowledge transfer to people of the overexploited regions of the world, demanding transparency from authoritative institutions, especially governments, limited liability corporations, public universities, organizations funded by public resources or engaged in public services, strongly opposing institutional secrecy, especially corporatist proprietary secrets or militarist state secrets, ensuring universal free access to networked media, free reliable wifi, supporting community and minority-run radio, demanding corporate media disaggregation, facilitating small campaign donor aggregation and restricting other forms of patronage/lobbying/conflict-of-interest for elected representatives and professional appointees to public service, making access to education universal and free from pre-kindergarten through college, enacting strong whistleblower protections for public officials and corporate employees, introducing labeling standards to distinguish advertising, advocacy, journalism, and strengthening protections for consumers from fraudulent claims, and so on.
3. Advocating prosthetic self-determination (Pro Choice) -- we should be defending absolutely every woman's right to choose safe, free, accessible abortion techniques to end unwanted pregnancies, as well as facilitating wanted pregnancies with alternate reproductive techniques, legalizing and then taxing all informed, nonduressed consensual recreational drug use, redirecting public resources to policing actually dangerous or disorderly public conduct, regulating controlled substances for unnecessary harm, and expanding public education and drug rehabilitation programs, vastly expanding public research into genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification medicine, defending individuals and communities with atypical capacities and morphologies, expanding access (while prohibiting compulsory recourse) both to consensual medical and modification therapies as well as to reliable information about them, providing universal single-payer basic healthcare, planet-wide provision of safe water and nutritious food, and subsidizing access to all wanted therapies that meet basic threshold safety and transparency standards with a stakeholder grant for non-normalizing modifications in exchange for open access to clinical trial data associated with all experimental procedures.
4. Advocating BIG (basic income guarantees) -- we should be providing a universal, non means-tested basic guaranteed income to every person on earth as a foundational right of human civilization -- or at any rate a substantial increase in welfare and public services to bring us closer to BIG or its equivalent, yielding as we approach BIG ever more of its wholesome, emancipatory, consensualizing, and democratizing effects -- not only to complete the traditional progressive project of ending slavery (including still existing wage slavery) and ending military conscription (including still existing conscription through the duress of the vulnerable, through poverty, illiteracy, stigmatized lifeways, and precarious legal status), and supporting collective bargaining (by providing a permanent strike fund for all workers) -- but also to combat contemporary and emerging and conspicuously amplifying forms of technodevelopmental abjection in particular: for example, current confiscatory wealth concentration through automation, outsourcing, and crowdsourcing; protecting vulnerable populations from duress to ensure all experimental medical decisions are truly consensual; and to champion p2p democracy by subsidizing the practices of true citizen participation, peer production of appropriate and appropriable technologies, and free open secular multiculture.
5. Advocating the democratization of global governance (democratic world federalism) -- the institutions of global governance already exists, of course, but in catastrophically non-democratic corporate-militarist forms that are destroying the world, and so the fight for democratic world federalist governance is not properly dismissed as a fanciful or dreadful desire for some ex nihilo planetary state, but in reality the fight to smash the corporate-militarist world state that actually exists and to democratize it as and for the people, peer-to-peer (in democracies, properly so-called, government is the people, and so to express hatred of government is to express hatred of the people and such slogans should be understood with that in mind), all in the face of unprecedented planetary problems and the unprecedented planetary consciousness created by global networked participation and in the light of our emerging awareness of global ecologic and economic interdependence -- and it doesn't matter to me whether this "smashing of the states" and democratization of global governance is implemented through the expansion and democratic reform of the United Nations, or through the creation of alternate or supplementary planetary institutions, or through the proliferation and ramification of multilateral treaties and monitoring and institutions, or what have you, since many pathways are and will continue to present themselves to do this work -- but it will likely eventuate in a federal form, encompassing already existing formations, a form emphasizing subsidiarity (which is a principle directing governance always to the most local layer adequate to a shared problem), and protecting planetary secular multiculture, and directed to the tasks of monitoring global storms, pandemics, weapons, enforcing global environmental, labor, police/military conduct standards, providing institutional recourse for the nonviolent resolution of interpersonal and intergovernmental disputes, and facilitating the universal scene of legible, that is to say, truly informed, nonduressed consent.
IV. ELABORATIONS
1. These five preoccupations look distressingly like a Program, and so I want to begin by pointing out that they are incomplete, that they are a point of departure and not a settlement, and that they are most interesting to me in the provocative and as yet underelaborated connections that obtain among them. How do the politics of p2p democratization change Green politics or the politics of Choice, for example? How do these connections renew or replace old utopian socialist and world government politics? And so, given this incompleteness, this openness, this idiosyncratic partiality, this promising inadequacy it seems to me that anybody who wants to find in these preoccupations the seed for a philosophy to follow, a party platform, an organizational manifesto has really, truly lost their way here. One scarcely glimpses in this delineation even my own preoccupation with anti-racist work, all my feminist commitments, the full scope of my anti-militarism (my insistence that we should make war literally unprofitable, for example), my animal rights work, my interest in all sorts of questions peculiar to my training in rhetoric, in American pragmatist philosophy, or in critical theory, my worries both about judeochrislamic fundamentalisms and the reductive scientisms and militant atheist counter-reactions they have incubated, my ongoing hostility to the Bush Administration, Movement Republicanism in general, Neoliberalism even more generally, and much more. I have just sought in the delineation of these five advocacy areas to provide a sense of what I think technoprogressive advocacy looks like, what sorts of connections and campaigns a technocentric democratic left political perspective like mine might illuminate and contribute to. Other technoprogressive people will surely emphasize things differently, connect issues and campaigns differently, focus their work on just one project or another, and so on. That is exactly as it should be.
2. My point is that technoprogressivisms will never properly crystallize into a tribal designation, an identity movement, a political party machine, a subcultural movement, an army marching in lockstep toward "the future," or any such thing. The future is not a place or a "goal": futurity is the political condition of plurality, democracy, freedom... and it is open, unpredictable, collective, promising, unforgivable or it is nothing at all, whatever it calls itself. Democratic and progressive movements are inherently anti-monolithicizing, inherently pluralizing. It is true that emancipatory politics is forever discovering the connections between oppressions as a way of overcoming them, but finding and untangling these connections is an interminable process, it is not the building of a new Pyramid to survey the scene from, it is not the delusive discovery of the One True Way yet again. Democratic organizing directs itself to proximate, ongoing, and emerging sites of struggle, it is not a matter of the creation of the Truth that Says the Way the World Is, it is not a matter of evangelizing for that Truth that Holds the Keys to History, it is not a matter of becoming part of the Movement that will Sweep the World. These are fundamentalist perspectives, and always utterly anti-democratizing (even when they appropriate the terms and superficial forms of democracy in their public relations).
3. I just want to point out that one doesn't have to join a Robot Cult to devote oneself to any of the campaigns delineated above, and, as I have been explaining here in the aftermath, one can have a tantalizing glimpse of the connections between many of these technoprogressive struggles without imagining thereby that one has become a particular kind of person different from or superior to other people with whom you share the world here and now, however much you may disagree with them on particular questions, or differ from them in your aspirations. I don't think that all progressives are technoprogressives, inasmuch as not all progressives would agree with me or have necessarily given a lot of thought to the specific inter-implication of contemporary democratic struggles and technoscientific change that preoccupies my own attention. But I do think that all technoprogressives are just progressives, and people of the legible democratic left. I think technocentric analyses can provide interesting perspectives, analytic tools, strategic recommendations, creative provocations, and novel sources for solidaity for progressive democratic-left politics in its more conventional guises. But I think all five of my technoprogressive advocacy areas are completely legible in terms of those more conventionally progressive perspective -- permaculture, p2p, a2k, Pro-Choice, basic income, and planetary democracy. There is nothing Superlative to be found here, no promises of transcendence, no One True Heaven to die for (or to live for, and in so living die in one's life).
4. I am often accused of trying to stamp out imagination when I offer up my critiques of Superlative technology discourses and movements, but it is clear that imagination suffuses my moral, aesthetic, and political perspective. It's just that I know that True Belief is not imagination, delusion is not imagination, evangelism is not imagination, anti-democracy is not imagination, finding in "the future" always only a mirror of your heart's desire or secret dread is not imagination. The Superlative super-predicated aspirations to technoscientific superintelligence, superlongevity, and superabundance that define so much technocentric discourse -- functioning as the disavowed regulative ideals articulating prevailing neoliberal "Developmental" and "Progressive" discourses but explicitly avowed in their clearer, more marginal and extreme sub(cult)ural "futurist" variations -- are, as much anything else, symptoms of the fears and fantasies of precarious agency in an era of unprecedented disruptive technodevelopmental change as well as expressions of opportunistic, usually anti-democratizing, will-to-power in the face of that change. Technoprogressive perspectives, to the contrary, seek to democratize ongoing and interminable technodevelopmental social struggle so that the distribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific change better respond to the aspirations of the actual diversity of stakeholders to that change.
5. I am also often accused of excessive "negativity" and I have tried in this post to offer up something conspicuously "positive" instead. But what should emerge from this delineation of what Amor Mundi is for is a sense of the perspective in which my "negative" critiques are lodged as well, a sense of what I am positively defending when I am negatively decrying formulations, tendencies, and attitudes I regard as pernicious. Amor Mundi is love of the world, and the Yes of that worldly love reverberates in the No with which I confront the would-be destroyers of the world, both those who would destroy the living world through reckless extractive industrialism and corporate-militarist competitiveness, as well as those who would destroy the open world of plurality through reactionary politics, technocratic elitism, fundamentalism and True Belief, or moralizing, evangelical movement anti-politics.
My name is Dale Carrico. I grew up in a town called Floyds Knobs, Indiana, which was pretty much what you are imagining a place called Floyds Knobs, Indiana, would be like. I made money as a kid acting professionally in musicals in the weird archipelago of dinner theaters across Kentuckiana, a region wild for such entertainments you may know, and for about fifteen years now I have been a precarious sort of itinerant, troubadour adjunct lecturer in university settings, which is not so very different from dinner theater when it comes to it. I am presently a member of the visiting faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute as well as a lecturer in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley from which I received my PhD in 2005. I suppose I am a rhetorician, then. I am trained in philosophy, critical theory, and literary and cultural criticism. I live in a rented apartment overstuffed with books in a sprawling warren of mid-century mousetraps on top of a hill in a bucolic neighborhood of Oakland, California, with my partner of many years, Eric, and our unusually dim-witted cat, Sarah. We're all getting old.
My work tends to focus on the politics of science and technology, especially peer-to-peer formations and global development discourse and is informed by my commitment to democratic socialism (or social democracy, if that freaks you out less), environmental justice critique, and queer theory.
I criticize futurological discourses a lot, especially here on the blog. I critique futurology both in its mainstream corporate-militarist forms as a sort of fraudulent, hyperbolic advertising, promotional, justificatory discourse disastrously suffusing our public life today, as well as in its more extreme and clarifying (also: often hi-larious) forms, variations that tend take on the kooky theological coloration of promises of techno-transcendence and which tend to have sub(cult)ural organizations in tow.
The thinker to whom I am probably most indebted is Hannah Arendt (from whose personal motto the name of this blog is taken) and also Judith Butler, who I came to California to study with and under whose direction I wrote my dissertation.
I am a registered Democrat in the United States of America in the brutal and debasing years of its imperial consummation, and I am still a believer with Michael Harrington that "the best liberalism leads toward socialism. I’m a radical, but... I want to be on the left wing of the possible." I was an activist trained in nonviolence at the King Center with Queer Nation Atlanta in the early nineties, I have been an ethical vegetarian and a cheerful atheist for well over half my life, I am a liberal theoryhead academic of the elite effete aesthete sort, am a big fag and an even bigger geek.
Eric and I possess no car, no laptop, no cellphone, no clothes dryer, no marriage license (though we fight to make gay marriage legal so that when we disdain it we do so by choice and not by necessity) and we disapprove of them and also of you, at least a little bit, in a friendly sort of way, for thinking you can't live without them yourself despite the fact that they are destroying the planet, diminishing your liberty, giving you cancer, and confusing you into mistaking possession for love. We are cantankerous and judgmental and are enjoying ourselves immensely.
II. WHAT IS THIS?
The motto that defines the project of Amor Mundi appears at the top of the page, as well as appearing as the first line in most of the profiles I have written that would direct people here: "Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All."
For me, both the words "Technology" and "Democracy" in the motto are much more like verbs than the nouns they appear to be. They are words that denote ongoing collective struggles -- collective in a sense that contains both collaborations and contestations -- and these struggles, these verbs that we stabilize for a time sometimes into nouns become in those moments like hand-holds across the sheer cliff face of social struggle in history.
I'd say that "technology" is the ongoing collective prosthetic re-elaboration of personal and inter-personal agency, while "democracy" is the ongoing collective implementation of the idea that all people should have a real say in the public decisions that affect them.
The thing is, for nearly a century by now we have lived in an epoch for which the seductive, empowering, disruptive, devastating intensity and ubiquity of our technique is such that whatever we mean by "democracy" now or next -- unless it truly understands, actively takes up, responds through, and manages to direct the energies released by that technique -- will surely fail in its emancipatory aspirations, will fail utterly in the face of technocratic tyranny or the mad insensitivity of reductive idealism. And at the same time, for the same reasons, whatever we mean by "technology" now or next -- unless the distribution of its costs, its risks, and its benefits are made to express the aspirations of the actual diversity of stakeholders to its impacts -- will surely destroy the world.
Expressing one another, befuddling one another, enabling one another, inter-implicated in one another, technology and democracy are now caught up in the circuit of interminable technodevelopmental social struggle, and now constitute the ongoing conversation in which humanity continually redetermines the meanings and the movements available to it, and rededicates itself to that futurity the openness of which is itself the space in which humanity knows itself becoming itself.
"Amor Mundi" is the love of the world. It is the love of the worldly. It is the worldly love of that becoming that becomes us. It is the love of the collective struggle of which that becoming consists, and on which that becoming depends for its force, for its serendipities, for its pleasures, and for its dangers.
My project here on Amor Mundi is to understand and to articulate ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle from my own absolutely and fortunately limited perspective and to connect it from here to my aspirations as a person of the emerging sustainable peer-to-peer planetary polycultural democratic convivial consensualist left, as an opponent of corporate-militarism, as a queergeek all the way down, as an intellectual in an anti-intellectual society, as an angry person these days, as a person moved by idiosyncratic efforts to create beauty and reconcile differences.
I can't think of anybody who agrees with everything that I say, thank heavens, and I would never presume to speak for anybody but myself. I do like to figure things out for myself, to provoke thought, to facilitate creative and democratizing projects, to make people laugh, to stop idiocy in its tracks occasionally, to raise hell, to direct people's attention to things I judge to be worthy of it, and so on.
What better place than a blog to do all these sorts of things at once?
That's Amor Mundi.
For a more concrete, more "positive" (for all you naysayers), or at any rate more pragmatic, indication of my present preoccupations, let me describe some of the areas of technoprogressive advocacy that seem to me to matter most at the moment, and then to offer up a few comments about how they hang together (or not) in my view:
III. PREOCCUPATIONS
1. Advocating permaculture (resilient sustainability) -- we should be subsidizing research and practices of agroforestry, polyculture, organic and local agricultures, defending seed saving and seed sharing as basic human rights, regulating nonselective pesticide and high-energy-input, especially petrochemical fertilizer use, encouraging vegetarian, organic, local-food lifeways through accurate nutrition labeling, special taxes on food-corpses and highly salty, fatty, sugary processed foods, incentivizing climate-appropriate and edible landscaping, supporting organic, heirloom, and superorganic cultivation, vastly expanding research and development and infrastructure investment into p2p renewable energy-provision like decentralized solar grids and co-op windmill farms, energy-efficient appliances, desalination techniques, sustainable irrigation practices and biomimetic urban sewage treatment techniques, as well as passenger rail infrastructure across the world and facilitating non-automobile transportation in cities (free or small-fee distributed bike co-ops, for example, and transforming more urban car-lanes into pedestrian malls) -- increasing public awareness of and encouraging collective problem solving in the face of energy descent, overurbanization, species loss, extractive industrial depletion of topsoil and aquifers, toxicity of materials and industrial processes, waste/pollution, catastrophic human-caused climate change, and so on.
2. Advocating p2p (peer-to-peer formations) and a2k (access to knowledge) -- we should be strongly supporting net neutrality, institutionalizing creative commons, subsidizing personal blogging and peer credentialization/production practices, radically restricting global copyright scope and terms, expanding fair use provisions, providing public grants for noncommercial nonproprietary scientific research and access to creative expressivity and public performances, opening access to research and debate in science and the humanities, experimenting with science and public policy juries and networked townhalls, facilitating accessibility of information for differently enabled people (blind, partially blind, deaf, etc.), securing open knowledge transfer to people of the overexploited regions of the world, demanding transparency from authoritative institutions, especially governments, limited liability corporations, public universities, organizations funded by public resources or engaged in public services, strongly opposing institutional secrecy, especially corporatist proprietary secrets or militarist state secrets, ensuring universal free access to networked media, free reliable wifi, supporting community and minority-run radio, demanding corporate media disaggregation, facilitating small campaign donor aggregation and restricting other forms of patronage/lobbying/conflict-of-interest for elected representatives and professional appointees to public service, making access to education universal and free from pre-kindergarten through college, enacting strong whistleblower protections for public officials and corporate employees, introducing labeling standards to distinguish advertising, advocacy, journalism, and strengthening protections for consumers from fraudulent claims, and so on.
3. Advocating prosthetic self-determination (Pro Choice) -- we should be defending absolutely every woman's right to choose safe, free, accessible abortion techniques to end unwanted pregnancies, as well as facilitating wanted pregnancies with alternate reproductive techniques, legalizing and then taxing all informed, nonduressed consensual recreational drug use, redirecting public resources to policing actually dangerous or disorderly public conduct, regulating controlled substances for unnecessary harm, and expanding public education and drug rehabilitation programs, vastly expanding public research into genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification medicine, defending individuals and communities with atypical capacities and morphologies, expanding access (while prohibiting compulsory recourse) both to consensual medical and modification therapies as well as to reliable information about them, providing universal single-payer basic healthcare, planet-wide provision of safe water and nutritious food, and subsidizing access to all wanted therapies that meet basic threshold safety and transparency standards with a stakeholder grant for non-normalizing modifications in exchange for open access to clinical trial data associated with all experimental procedures.
4. Advocating BIG (basic income guarantees) -- we should be providing a universal, non means-tested basic guaranteed income to every person on earth as a foundational right of human civilization -- or at any rate a substantial increase in welfare and public services to bring us closer to BIG or its equivalent, yielding as we approach BIG ever more of its wholesome, emancipatory, consensualizing, and democratizing effects -- not only to complete the traditional progressive project of ending slavery (including still existing wage slavery) and ending military conscription (including still existing conscription through the duress of the vulnerable, through poverty, illiteracy, stigmatized lifeways, and precarious legal status), and supporting collective bargaining (by providing a permanent strike fund for all workers) -- but also to combat contemporary and emerging and conspicuously amplifying forms of technodevelopmental abjection in particular: for example, current confiscatory wealth concentration through automation, outsourcing, and crowdsourcing; protecting vulnerable populations from duress to ensure all experimental medical decisions are truly consensual; and to champion p2p democracy by subsidizing the practices of true citizen participation, peer production of appropriate and appropriable technologies, and free open secular multiculture.
5. Advocating the democratization of global governance (democratic world federalism) -- the institutions of global governance already exists, of course, but in catastrophically non-democratic corporate-militarist forms that are destroying the world, and so the fight for democratic world federalist governance is not properly dismissed as a fanciful or dreadful desire for some ex nihilo planetary state, but in reality the fight to smash the corporate-militarist world state that actually exists and to democratize it as and for the people, peer-to-peer (in democracies, properly so-called, government is the people, and so to express hatred of government is to express hatred of the people and such slogans should be understood with that in mind), all in the face of unprecedented planetary problems and the unprecedented planetary consciousness created by global networked participation and in the light of our emerging awareness of global ecologic and economic interdependence -- and it doesn't matter to me whether this "smashing of the states" and democratization of global governance is implemented through the expansion and democratic reform of the United Nations, or through the creation of alternate or supplementary planetary institutions, or through the proliferation and ramification of multilateral treaties and monitoring and institutions, or what have you, since many pathways are and will continue to present themselves to do this work -- but it will likely eventuate in a federal form, encompassing already existing formations, a form emphasizing subsidiarity (which is a principle directing governance always to the most local layer adequate to a shared problem), and protecting planetary secular multiculture, and directed to the tasks of monitoring global storms, pandemics, weapons, enforcing global environmental, labor, police/military conduct standards, providing institutional recourse for the nonviolent resolution of interpersonal and intergovernmental disputes, and facilitating the universal scene of legible, that is to say, truly informed, nonduressed consent.
IV. ELABORATIONS
1. These five preoccupations look distressingly like a Program, and so I want to begin by pointing out that they are incomplete, that they are a point of departure and not a settlement, and that they are most interesting to me in the provocative and as yet underelaborated connections that obtain among them. How do the politics of p2p democratization change Green politics or the politics of Choice, for example? How do these connections renew or replace old utopian socialist and world government politics? And so, given this incompleteness, this openness, this idiosyncratic partiality, this promising inadequacy it seems to me that anybody who wants to find in these preoccupations the seed for a philosophy to follow, a party platform, an organizational manifesto has really, truly lost their way here. One scarcely glimpses in this delineation even my own preoccupation with anti-racist work, all my feminist commitments, the full scope of my anti-militarism (my insistence that we should make war literally unprofitable, for example), my animal rights work, my interest in all sorts of questions peculiar to my training in rhetoric, in American pragmatist philosophy, or in critical theory, my worries both about judeochrislamic fundamentalisms and the reductive scientisms and militant atheist counter-reactions they have incubated, my ongoing hostility to the Bush Administration, Movement Republicanism in general, Neoliberalism even more generally, and much more. I have just sought in the delineation of these five advocacy areas to provide a sense of what I think technoprogressive advocacy looks like, what sorts of connections and campaigns a technocentric democratic left political perspective like mine might illuminate and contribute to. Other technoprogressive people will surely emphasize things differently, connect issues and campaigns differently, focus their work on just one project or another, and so on. That is exactly as it should be.
2. My point is that technoprogressivisms will never properly crystallize into a tribal designation, an identity movement, a political party machine, a subcultural movement, an army marching in lockstep toward "the future," or any such thing. The future is not a place or a "goal": futurity is the political condition of plurality, democracy, freedom... and it is open, unpredictable, collective, promising, unforgivable or it is nothing at all, whatever it calls itself. Democratic and progressive movements are inherently anti-monolithicizing, inherently pluralizing. It is true that emancipatory politics is forever discovering the connections between oppressions as a way of overcoming them, but finding and untangling these connections is an interminable process, it is not the building of a new Pyramid to survey the scene from, it is not the delusive discovery of the One True Way yet again. Democratic organizing directs itself to proximate, ongoing, and emerging sites of struggle, it is not a matter of the creation of the Truth that Says the Way the World Is, it is not a matter of evangelizing for that Truth that Holds the Keys to History, it is not a matter of becoming part of the Movement that will Sweep the World. These are fundamentalist perspectives, and always utterly anti-democratizing (even when they appropriate the terms and superficial forms of democracy in their public relations).
3. I just want to point out that one doesn't have to join a Robot Cult to devote oneself to any of the campaigns delineated above, and, as I have been explaining here in the aftermath, one can have a tantalizing glimpse of the connections between many of these technoprogressive struggles without imagining thereby that one has become a particular kind of person different from or superior to other people with whom you share the world here and now, however much you may disagree with them on particular questions, or differ from them in your aspirations. I don't think that all progressives are technoprogressives, inasmuch as not all progressives would agree with me or have necessarily given a lot of thought to the specific inter-implication of contemporary democratic struggles and technoscientific change that preoccupies my own attention. But I do think that all technoprogressives are just progressives, and people of the legible democratic left. I think technocentric analyses can provide interesting perspectives, analytic tools, strategic recommendations, creative provocations, and novel sources for solidaity for progressive democratic-left politics in its more conventional guises. But I think all five of my technoprogressive advocacy areas are completely legible in terms of those more conventionally progressive perspective -- permaculture, p2p, a2k, Pro-Choice, basic income, and planetary democracy. There is nothing Superlative to be found here, no promises of transcendence, no One True Heaven to die for (or to live for, and in so living die in one's life).
4. I am often accused of trying to stamp out imagination when I offer up my critiques of Superlative technology discourses and movements, but it is clear that imagination suffuses my moral, aesthetic, and political perspective. It's just that I know that True Belief is not imagination, delusion is not imagination, evangelism is not imagination, anti-democracy is not imagination, finding in "the future" always only a mirror of your heart's desire or secret dread is not imagination. The Superlative super-predicated aspirations to technoscientific superintelligence, superlongevity, and superabundance that define so much technocentric discourse -- functioning as the disavowed regulative ideals articulating prevailing neoliberal "Developmental" and "Progressive" discourses but explicitly avowed in their clearer, more marginal and extreme sub(cult)ural "futurist" variations -- are, as much anything else, symptoms of the fears and fantasies of precarious agency in an era of unprecedented disruptive technodevelopmental change as well as expressions of opportunistic, usually anti-democratizing, will-to-power in the face of that change. Technoprogressive perspectives, to the contrary, seek to democratize ongoing and interminable technodevelopmental social struggle so that the distribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific change better respond to the aspirations of the actual diversity of stakeholders to that change.
5. I am also often accused of excessive "negativity" and I have tried in this post to offer up something conspicuously "positive" instead. But what should emerge from this delineation of what Amor Mundi is for is a sense of the perspective in which my "negative" critiques are lodged as well, a sense of what I am positively defending when I am negatively decrying formulations, tendencies, and attitudes I regard as pernicious. Amor Mundi is love of the world, and the Yes of that worldly love reverberates in the No with which I confront the would-be destroyers of the world, both those who would destroy the living world through reckless extractive industrialism and corporate-militarist competitiveness, as well as those who would destroy the open world of plurality through reactionary politics, technocratic elitism, fundamentalism and True Belief, or moralizing, evangelical movement anti-politics.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
More on My Apparent "Deathism"
Transhumanist Giulio Prisco continues to perplex me utterly, writing: "Dale DOES think this [death] is a good thing. Read again the Eganesque ““we people are all of us finite beings, forever prone to disease, accident, violence, betrayal, novelty, and fantasies about shiny robot bodies or angelic digital ones and so on rest on deep confusions about the actually embodied status of mind.”
Maybe there is a language issue here, because it is utterly mystifying to me that anybody would see this as a statement of exaltation on my part.
I honestly don’t know anybody who thinks death is a particularly enticing prospect, and to the extent that so-called "Technological Immortalists" seem to have convinced themselves that the primary barrier standing in the way of their achievement of imperishable techno-bodies or whatever is some prevailing “Deathism” in mainstream culture I must say this seems to me a rather flabbergasting (not to mention ultimately rather elitist) misreading of the world.
Obviously, I don’t think death is a “good thing” so much as, you know, a factual thing... like our social interdependence and the inherent vulnerability of that interdependence is a factual thing, like finitude is a factual thing.
I definitely think consensual healthcare is a good thing in general and I think such healthcare is a matter of providing people longer healthier lives. I have stated this truism so often by now (honestly, this seems to me to be the sort of utter commonplace that should go without saying in the first place, but clearly with Superlative technocentrics certain things must be said over and over and over again) I will admit it has become a bit befuddling at this point to confront stubborn incomprehension about my position at such a basic level still happening even with people with whom I have painstakingly and joylessly danced endless turns of this particular dance already.
I will say that denialism about death is a bad thing, like all forms of irrational denial tend to be. And there is no way for me to sugarcoat my honest judgment that there is a widespread denialism about mortality in much of the techno-immortalist sub(cult)ure or “movement.” My various commenters may indignantly insist that they do not personally suffer from such deranging and diminishing attitudes, and I'll have to just take their words on it, I have no interest in arguing about it at the moment. (These arguments tend to take the form "I know you are, but what am I," and are not necessarily very illuminating after all.)
Prisco says that living 120 years is good but 121 years is better. (No one ever has lived so long and so this is a matter of speculation, as it happens, but we'll just bracket such niceties for the moment.) Be all that as it may, I must admit that I don’t see things quite the way he seems to do. And perhaps this attitude is the one that is getting decried as "deathism" by my critics.
You see, it seems to me that a year well lived is worth a dozen lived in bitterness or regret. It seems to me there are far worse things in the world than dying, chief among which for me would be killing (but there are others). The rather brute organismic prolongation of lifespan that preoccupies no small amount of techno-immortalist discourse ultimately seems to me a rather shallow and fearful business.
No doubt I will be passionately assured by commenters that there are richer variations of techno-immortalist robot cultism available and for all I know these commenters may indeed have found their various ways to such perspectives. Come what may, I do think it is simply weird to attribute a dastardly “deathism” to me simply for my relatively cheerful reconciliation to the fact of my mortality, to the meaningfulness of actually lived mortal lives, and to my judgment that many things are worse than mortality, and so on.
Finally, about the phrases “immortality,” “living forever,” “killing death,” and so on. Giulio Prisco insists that he means by these terms something he is calling "indefinite lifespan." All I will say is that if you don’t actually mean "immortality," "living forever," "killing death," and the rest, then I honestly recommend you stop using those words to say whatever it is that you do mean. If “indefinite lifespan” isn’t supposed to mean immortality (even possibly on the sly) then it is actually utterly bewildering that you would use a word so freighted with transcendental religiosity and irrational passion to describe what you take to be a proximate practically achievable engineering outcome. (An assessment that puts you at odds with scientific consensus.)
I think techno-immortalists should take a hard look at what work their terminological choices are really doing for them psychologically, culturally, and from a promotional standpoint. Believe me, I have taken such a long look, and (obviously!) I don’t like what I see.
Maybe there is a language issue here, because it is utterly mystifying to me that anybody would see this as a statement of exaltation on my part.
I honestly don’t know anybody who thinks death is a particularly enticing prospect, and to the extent that so-called "Technological Immortalists" seem to have convinced themselves that the primary barrier standing in the way of their achievement of imperishable techno-bodies or whatever is some prevailing “Deathism” in mainstream culture I must say this seems to me a rather flabbergasting (not to mention ultimately rather elitist) misreading of the world.
Obviously, I don’t think death is a “good thing” so much as, you know, a factual thing... like our social interdependence and the inherent vulnerability of that interdependence is a factual thing, like finitude is a factual thing.
I definitely think consensual healthcare is a good thing in general and I think such healthcare is a matter of providing people longer healthier lives. I have stated this truism so often by now (honestly, this seems to me to be the sort of utter commonplace that should go without saying in the first place, but clearly with Superlative technocentrics certain things must be said over and over and over again) I will admit it has become a bit befuddling at this point to confront stubborn incomprehension about my position at such a basic level still happening even with people with whom I have painstakingly and joylessly danced endless turns of this particular dance already.
I will say that denialism about death is a bad thing, like all forms of irrational denial tend to be. And there is no way for me to sugarcoat my honest judgment that there is a widespread denialism about mortality in much of the techno-immortalist sub(cult)ure or “movement.” My various commenters may indignantly insist that they do not personally suffer from such deranging and diminishing attitudes, and I'll have to just take their words on it, I have no interest in arguing about it at the moment. (These arguments tend to take the form "I know you are, but what am I," and are not necessarily very illuminating after all.)
Prisco says that living 120 years is good but 121 years is better. (No one ever has lived so long and so this is a matter of speculation, as it happens, but we'll just bracket such niceties for the moment.) Be all that as it may, I must admit that I don’t see things quite the way he seems to do. And perhaps this attitude is the one that is getting decried as "deathism" by my critics.
You see, it seems to me that a year well lived is worth a dozen lived in bitterness or regret. It seems to me there are far worse things in the world than dying, chief among which for me would be killing (but there are others). The rather brute organismic prolongation of lifespan that preoccupies no small amount of techno-immortalist discourse ultimately seems to me a rather shallow and fearful business.
No doubt I will be passionately assured by commenters that there are richer variations of techno-immortalist robot cultism available and for all I know these commenters may indeed have found their various ways to such perspectives. Come what may, I do think it is simply weird to attribute a dastardly “deathism” to me simply for my relatively cheerful reconciliation to the fact of my mortality, to the meaningfulness of actually lived mortal lives, and to my judgment that many things are worse than mortality, and so on.
Finally, about the phrases “immortality,” “living forever,” “killing death,” and so on. Giulio Prisco insists that he means by these terms something he is calling "indefinite lifespan." All I will say is that if you don’t actually mean "immortality," "living forever," "killing death," and the rest, then I honestly recommend you stop using those words to say whatever it is that you do mean. If “indefinite lifespan” isn’t supposed to mean immortality (even possibly on the sly) then it is actually utterly bewildering that you would use a word so freighted with transcendental religiosity and irrational passion to describe what you take to be a proximate practically achievable engineering outcome. (An assessment that puts you at odds with scientific consensus.)
I think techno-immortalists should take a hard look at what work their terminological choices are really doing for them psychologically, culturally, and from a promotional standpoint. Believe me, I have taken such a long look, and (obviously!) I don’t like what I see.
A Question Is Posed
A commenter over at the blog Transumanar has posed a question: I always wonder why those who think Transhumanist technologies are impossible bother to oppose our (clearly impossible) aims.
Well, if one really wants to know (I suspect the question was meant to be read as rhetorical), I can offer up a few reasons why I bother with this sort of thing, right off the top of my head:
[1] Because emerging technoscientific quandaries actually are urgent and dangerous.
[2] Because super-predicated hyperbole activates irrational passions driven by the fears of fantasies of agency customarily associated with technology-talk already, irrational manias for omnipotence and irrational panics at impotence, all to the cost of sense.
[3] Because the last thing an overexploited, militarized, p2p networked and environmentally conscious planetized world needs are more fundamentalisms.
[4] Because uncritical “Development” discourse that comports well with Superlative formulations is the neoliberal point of the spear for so much confiscatory wealth concentration and perilous militarization in the world.
[5] Because Superlative discourse provokes an inappropriate technodevelopmental politics of identification (and, crucially, dis-identification) around idealized outcomes rather than an open ongoing stakeholder politics among a diversity of prostheticized peers who share the world.
[6] Because such identity politics lend themselves to defensive marginal subcultural postures and cult-like organizations that stifle the flourishing of their members and sensationalize public deliberation.
[7] Because in its tendency to endorse technocratic, reductionist, hyperbolic attitudes Superlativity lends itself to the politics of incumbent interests (sometimes unintentionally) and the stifling of desirable planetary secular multiculture.
[8] Because consensual, democratized, and actually accountable ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle truly could be emancipatory for all, and that is what progressive people should be devoting themselves to.
Well, if one really wants to know (I suspect the question was meant to be read as rhetorical), I can offer up a few reasons why I bother with this sort of thing, right off the top of my head:
[1] Because emerging technoscientific quandaries actually are urgent and dangerous.
[2] Because super-predicated hyperbole activates irrational passions driven by the fears of fantasies of agency customarily associated with technology-talk already, irrational manias for omnipotence and irrational panics at impotence, all to the cost of sense.
[3] Because the last thing an overexploited, militarized, p2p networked and environmentally conscious planetized world needs are more fundamentalisms.
[4] Because uncritical “Development” discourse that comports well with Superlative formulations is the neoliberal point of the spear for so much confiscatory wealth concentration and perilous militarization in the world.
[5] Because Superlative discourse provokes an inappropriate technodevelopmental politics of identification (and, crucially, dis-identification) around idealized outcomes rather than an open ongoing stakeholder politics among a diversity of prostheticized peers who share the world.
[6] Because such identity politics lend themselves to defensive marginal subcultural postures and cult-like organizations that stifle the flourishing of their members and sensationalize public deliberation.
[7] Because in its tendency to endorse technocratic, reductionist, hyperbolic attitudes Superlativity lends itself to the politics of incumbent interests (sometimes unintentionally) and the stifling of desirable planetary secular multiculture.
[8] Because consensual, democratized, and actually accountable ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle truly could be emancipatory for all, and that is what progressive people should be devoting themselves to.
My "Deathist" Zealotry
Giulio Prisco alerts his readers to my "narrow minded" views of technology, to my "well known condemnation of imagination," and, of all things, to my "Deathism."
The broad-minded visionaries with whom he would contrast me here are, mind you, the coterie of Superlative technocentrics who think the imminent arrival of a post-biological superintelligent Robot God is a matter of grave concern for all, who think programmable self-replicating nanoscale robots are about to deliver superabundance for all (or, possibly, you know, reduce the world to goo), and who think genetic and prosthetic medicine (or, failing that, "uploading" their disembodied consciousnesses into apparently imperishable digital formats or robot bodies) may deliver superlongevity to some lucky people now living.
My critique of these sorts of flabbergasting Superlative aspirations -- and more to the point, of the prevailing hyperbolic, reductive, elitist techno-utopian discourses for which they provide, in their stark extremity, a particularly clarifying example and symptom -- Prisco derides as a matter on my part of "abstractness" and "vacuity" (one would almost think mortality were some zany fanciful notion I had invented), as "bullshit" and also "chickenshit" (Prisco entertainingly has much to say about my rudeness elsewhere in his piece), as "political correctness" (I have no idea what that one is all about), and, of course, as an expression of my "Deathism."
This "Deathism" seems to involve the fact that I expect to die like everybody else and don't lose sleep over this particularly, even though, again like pretty much everybody else on earth I'm not exactly thrilled at the prospect and think things like universal healthcare is a good thing because longer healthier lives are a good thing. The evidence Prisco offers up of my "Deathism" consists of this comment of mine: "[W]e people are all of us finite beings, forever prone to disease, accident, violence, betrayal, novelty. [A]nd fantasies about shiny robot bodies or angelic digital ones and so on rest on deep confusions about the actually embodied status of mind."
I quite cheerfully stand behind every word there.
I will also cheerfully admit that my “PC zealot thought policing” along these lines also extends to ridiculing self-proclaimed inventors of perpetual motion machines and folks who have convinced themselves they have squared the circle.
Against my "Deathist memes," so-called, the broad minded Guilio Prisco, well-known champion of Imagination against the likes of me, offers up as his contrasting vision: "Aging is like farting, and dying is like diarrhea. Both are unchosen biological accidents waiting for a good engineer with a good screwdriver. The sooner we can live without shitting our pants, the better. This is transhumanism in a nutshell, as I see it." One may as well take his word for it (Prisco until very recently was Director of the World Transhumanist Association, after all).
But I'm here to tell you, anybody who comes at me with a screwdriver claiming to have a miracle cure for diarrhea, I'm calling 9-1-1.
Prisco also quotes this passage of mine:
In that passage I tried to make clear that I do indeed grasp and take enormously seriously the potentially unprecedented nature of modification medicine, and tried to capture in just a few words the difference between superlative as opposed to technoprogressive responses to such techniques. I realize that the sentence is a bit dense -- but it was off the cuff, just a stab at some kind of substance amidst all the snark. To spell out the point a bit:
Already contemporary medicine has called into question a number of conventional expectations concerning when lives can properly be said to begin and to end, the quality of life we can expect as we cope with various medical conditions (among them conditions that were once too simply subsumed under headings like "aging" or "disability"), and so on. Under such circumstances it becomes crucial in my view for democratically minded people to offer up formulations that facilitate values like equity, diversity, and informed, nonduressed consent in the face of these emerging medical interventions rather than hyperbolic formulations that skew our sense of the actual problems and stakes of the technodevelopmental terrain with which we are coping, fraudulent misinformation playing on people's fears and fantasies in the service of profit or political advantage, "well meaning" eugenic impositions of parochial visions of healthy optimality, maldistributions of the costs, risks, and benefits of therapy as an expression and exacerbation of global injustice, and so on. Superlative talk about "living forever" or "uploading selves into computers" fails to contribute to that necessary work and functions instead as a direct barrier to it, no less than does bioconservative fearmongering about "clone armies" and "human-animal hybrids" when the questions at hand actually involve increasing budgets for medical research and providing access to cures for treatable diseases.
Prisco responds: "I am not going to waste too much time trying to understand what all these elegant and big words mean…. I believe I must have said a few times what I think of this nonsense." Quite apart from the patent anti-intellectualism of this response (I feel as though I'm about to be decried as a Hollyweird Leebrul), it is hard to understand how one can dismiss as "nonsense" what one refuses to understand in the first place. I waded through a whole hell of a lot of Superlative Technology discourse before I felt qualified to delineate its tendencies and assess them. Although I am sure that Superlative technocentrics (being, True Believers after all) would insist that the very fact that I have failed to find their vision compelling is proof enough that I have failed to understand their vision in the first place. Is it any wonder that, under such circumstances, I make recourse instead to ridiculing the ridiculous?
The broad-minded visionaries with whom he would contrast me here are, mind you, the coterie of Superlative technocentrics who think the imminent arrival of a post-biological superintelligent Robot God is a matter of grave concern for all, who think programmable self-replicating nanoscale robots are about to deliver superabundance for all (or, possibly, you know, reduce the world to goo), and who think genetic and prosthetic medicine (or, failing that, "uploading" their disembodied consciousnesses into apparently imperishable digital formats or robot bodies) may deliver superlongevity to some lucky people now living.
My critique of these sorts of flabbergasting Superlative aspirations -- and more to the point, of the prevailing hyperbolic, reductive, elitist techno-utopian discourses for which they provide, in their stark extremity, a particularly clarifying example and symptom -- Prisco derides as a matter on my part of "abstractness" and "vacuity" (one would almost think mortality were some zany fanciful notion I had invented), as "bullshit" and also "chickenshit" (Prisco entertainingly has much to say about my rudeness elsewhere in his piece), as "political correctness" (I have no idea what that one is all about), and, of course, as an expression of my "Deathism."
This "Deathism" seems to involve the fact that I expect to die like everybody else and don't lose sleep over this particularly, even though, again like pretty much everybody else on earth I'm not exactly thrilled at the prospect and think things like universal healthcare is a good thing because longer healthier lives are a good thing. The evidence Prisco offers up of my "Deathism" consists of this comment of mine: "[W]e people are all of us finite beings, forever prone to disease, accident, violence, betrayal, novelty. [A]nd fantasies about shiny robot bodies or angelic digital ones and so on rest on deep confusions about the actually embodied status of mind."
I quite cheerfully stand behind every word there.
I will also cheerfully admit that my “PC zealot thought policing” along these lines also extends to ridiculing self-proclaimed inventors of perpetual motion machines and folks who have convinced themselves they have squared the circle.
Against my "Deathist memes," so-called, the broad minded Guilio Prisco, well-known champion of Imagination against the likes of me, offers up as his contrasting vision: "Aging is like farting, and dying is like diarrhea. Both are unchosen biological accidents waiting for a good engineer with a good screwdriver. The sooner we can live without shitting our pants, the better. This is transhumanism in a nutshell, as I see it." One may as well take his word for it (Prisco until very recently was Director of the World Transhumanist Association, after all).
But I'm here to tell you, anybody who comes at me with a screwdriver claiming to have a miracle cure for diarrhea, I'm calling 9-1-1.
Prisco also quotes this passage of mine:
It is crucial to disarticulate the basic irrationality of The Denial of Death for embodied sociable narratively coherent beings in a finite universe from things like informed, non-duressed, non-norma[l]izing consensual healthcare in an era of unprecedented emerging genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive therapy.
In that passage I tried to make clear that I do indeed grasp and take enormously seriously the potentially unprecedented nature of modification medicine, and tried to capture in just a few words the difference between superlative as opposed to technoprogressive responses to such techniques. I realize that the sentence is a bit dense -- but it was off the cuff, just a stab at some kind of substance amidst all the snark. To spell out the point a bit:
Already contemporary medicine has called into question a number of conventional expectations concerning when lives can properly be said to begin and to end, the quality of life we can expect as we cope with various medical conditions (among them conditions that were once too simply subsumed under headings like "aging" or "disability"), and so on. Under such circumstances it becomes crucial in my view for democratically minded people to offer up formulations that facilitate values like equity, diversity, and informed, nonduressed consent in the face of these emerging medical interventions rather than hyperbolic formulations that skew our sense of the actual problems and stakes of the technodevelopmental terrain with which we are coping, fraudulent misinformation playing on people's fears and fantasies in the service of profit or political advantage, "well meaning" eugenic impositions of parochial visions of healthy optimality, maldistributions of the costs, risks, and benefits of therapy as an expression and exacerbation of global injustice, and so on. Superlative talk about "living forever" or "uploading selves into computers" fails to contribute to that necessary work and functions instead as a direct barrier to it, no less than does bioconservative fearmongering about "clone armies" and "human-animal hybrids" when the questions at hand actually involve increasing budgets for medical research and providing access to cures for treatable diseases.
Prisco responds: "I am not going to waste too much time trying to understand what all these elegant and big words mean…. I believe I must have said a few times what I think of this nonsense." Quite apart from the patent anti-intellectualism of this response (I feel as though I'm about to be decried as a Hollyweird Leebrul), it is hard to understand how one can dismiss as "nonsense" what one refuses to understand in the first place. I waded through a whole hell of a lot of Superlative Technology discourse before I felt qualified to delineate its tendencies and assess them. Although I am sure that Superlative technocentrics (being, True Believers after all) would insist that the very fact that I have failed to find their vision compelling is proof enough that I have failed to understand their vision in the first place. Is it any wonder that, under such circumstances, I make recourse instead to ridiculing the ridiculous?
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